1,721,207 research outputs found
"The Threat of the ‘Avania’: Financial Risk in European-Ottoman Trade and the Growth of an Orientalist Discourse, 1660-1710" in Un mare connesso. Europa e mondo islamico nel Mediterraneo (secoli XV-XIX)
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"Un mare connesso: introduzione" in Un mare connesso. Europa e mondo islamico nel Mediterraneo (secoli XV-XIX)
No full textGeneral average, human jettison, and the status of slaves in Early Modern Europe
Full text linkThis is the final version. Available from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record. This article proposes a transition in Western European thinking on slavery by examining the legality of slave jettison and its indemnification in the seventeenth-century Christian Mediterranean and comparing this with the late eighteenth-century Atlantic. Under the law of general average (GA), a shipmaster may legally sacrifice cargo or parts of a vessel to save a maritime venture from peril. GA then mandates that the costs of this sacrifice be shared proportionally between all interested parties. However, the status of human cargo with respect to pre-modern GA remains unclear, beyond the well-known example of the eighteenth-century British slave ship, the Zong. A jettison, a moment of crisis, forces the slave's dual conception as person and property to be definitively resolved. This article uses historical GA records and early modern jurisprudence on human jettison to shed light on the legal conceptualization of the slave in the two contexts. It finds that seventeenth-century jurisprudence generally ruled against slave jettison and that such a jettison could not be indemnified. In some Mediterranean operational contexts, slaves were excluded from GA altogether. To a certain extent, this finding justifies the conceptual divide historians have placed between Atlantic bondage and earlier forms of slavery.European Research Council (ERC
‘Avanias, Every Waking Hour’: Entanglement and Othering in Ottoman-Venetian Trade Disputes
Full text linkIn the first decades of this century, historians emphasised cross-cultural commerce in the Mediterranean to refute both the ‘clash of civilisations’ account of Islamic–Christian relations and an equally binary Saidean reading of the early modern past. While such refutations may be sound, the connection between the ‘nuts and bolts of cross-cultural trade’ and the ‘flourishing (or not) of mutual cultural understanding’ often implicit therein remains oblique. Here I examine disputes arising in commercial settings as presented by the dispatches of the Venetian bailo in Constantinople in order to shed further light on this relationship. Specifically, I focus on the decision to describe certain types of (ostensibly) unfair conduct by non-Christians as ‘avanias’, contextualising these episodes using sources produced by Venetian and Ottoman institutions. The immediate purpose of this discursive convention was to delegitimise claims against Venetian subjects and obfuscate compromising details, but its use was shaped above all by idealised notions of Venetian political economy and by a patrician emotional regime of republican service. Despite the entanglement that emerges from the sources – indeed, often because of it – a discourse of religious difference could nevertheless thrive, encouraged by traders who instrumentalised these concerns even if they did not necessarily share them
Histories of trade as histories of civilisation, edited by Antonella Alimento, Aris Della Fontana, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (Switzerland) 2021
Full text linkThe Twentieth-Century Origins of the Medieval Lex Mercatoria Thesis
Full text linkThis article reappraises the early intellectual formation of the medieval "lex mercatoria"thesis: the idea that the international merchants of medieval Europe (or perhaps beyond) enjoyed a universal, autonomous, and customary body of commercial law created and administered by themselves. The debate over its existence, raging for at least 120 years, shows no signs of slowing, in part because the idea is of undoubted usefulness to both proponents (so-called "mercatorists") and critics. The article offers a new account of the origins of this idea and looks to disaggregate different mercatorist conceptions. Revising the conventional genealogy that traces the theory through the work of Berthold Goldman to the nineteenth-century German scholar Levin Goldschmidt, who is much misunderstood in Anglophone scholarship, it argues that the idea's powerful re-emergence in the second half of the twentieth century was mediated through two distinct channels, one centred around the British-German jurist Clive Schmitthoff and the other around the British historian William Mitchell. The latter yoked Goldschmidt's emphasis on the medieval merchant class as a source of legal innovation to a thoroughly Anglophone concept: the "law merchant". Critics, however, have engaged primarily with Schmitthoff's conception, whose "strong"mercatorist argument was not only unusually forthright but reoriented the debate to focus on commercial law's supposed autonomy from the law of territorial states, an even less plausible proposition in historical terms
Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany
No full textDraws on the rich surviving archives of the Tuscan port of Livorno to explore how General Average worked.
Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant’s cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by the shipper and all the cargo-owners. A risk-sharing practice, different from the risk-shifting of marine insurance which became established relatively late, General Average is still in widespread use.
This book explores how General Average worked. It reveals the gap between General Average in law and how it worked on the ground. It shows how General Average partitioned a wide array of business costs, thereby performing a significant role in structuring maritime commerce, managing risk and promoting shipping and trade. In addition, the book discusses how far General Average was a feature of a supposedly ancient, universal, customary maritime law, and contributes to debates about the evolution of institutions in economic development
Mapping trade, risk and extreme weather in the first globalization: The AveTransRisk database
Full text linkThis research note introduces the award-winning AveTransRisk database, the result of an extensive project capturing data on early modern maritime trade, specifically in the Mediterranean region. It focuses on the concept of General Average, where shipmasters voluntarily sacrificed cargo to save their vessels from peril. General Average procedures, including accident reports and damage calculations, provide valuable information for economic and maritime historians. The AveTransRisk database offers detailed insights into routes, cargo, weather conditions, ships, seafarers and transaction costs. It enables scholars to examine broader topics such as comparative maritime economies, the evolution of legal institutions and risk management. Fully relational and equipped with advanced search functions and mapping capabilities, the database facilitates comprehensive analysis. As it expands to include voyages from other European archives, its usability and resilience increase. Supported by the University of Exeter's digital infrastructure, the AveTransRisk database contributes to the sustainability of digital resources in historical research
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