Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CaPANES (Causal Pattern Analysis of Networked Economic Sovereignty)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-01-01 bis 2025-06-30
The legal concept of sovereignty does not capture foreign trade relations, networks or economic clout. This shortcoming has resulted from a historical reduction of its meaning since the 1600s. This project will analyze legal concepts of sovereignty that developed before that time, within six networked cities of commerce (Bruges, Southampton, Rouen, Lübeck, Toulouse and Florence). In the period of 1400-1620 cities were interconnected through trade routes, correspondence and diplomacy. Legal concepts of sovereignty were crafted bottom-up and were more encompassing than the present-day legal concept of sovereignty, also for economic relations. Sovereignty developed in different realms of scholarly writings as well, and bottom-up developments interacted with intellectual traditions. In the process, concepts absorbed changes within the cities and in the economic relations between cities. The dynamism of conceptual change at the level of individual cities related to commercial, political and social developments will be assessed with agent-based modelling. These developments influenced institutional set-ups, constitutional approaches, the organization of trade and policies of access toward foreigners. At the level of networks between cities, dynamics impacting on sovereignty concepts related to foreign relations and yielded features different to developments within cities. Network analysis will make it possible to detect the dispersal and weight of sovereignty concepts and whether some concepts underpinned a transnational field of sovereignty.
A main achievement has been the disentanglement of sovereignty concepts, and their dependent traditions. In the course of the project, a lost ‘scholastic’ tradition of sovereignty thinking that is connected to medieval cities (yet, not exclusively) was detected. Besides that tradition, the municipal traditions (as connected to the terms Bourg and portus) were important. However, the scholastic tradition mentioned proved fundamental. In the late Middle Ages, sovereignty-thinking was connected to a “natural” order. Publications on the topics mentioned are currently being prepared. The development of ‘sovereignty’, both as a legal concept and topos, has been considered as largely congruent with state formation processes; the historical scholastic tradition topples this idea and opens a perspective of competing sovereignty conceptions in the period of c. 1400-c. 1700.
A second main achievement concerns the interconnections between the cities studied as cases, from the angle of merchant networks, and its impact on causes of change in sovereignty-thinking. Networked sovereignty of cities was largely aligned with merchant networks, which had agents and contacts in several commercial cities. One of the findings of the project thus far relates to the involvement of prominent merchants in the Anglo-Dutch and Hanseatic trade, covering the cities of Southampton, Rouen, Bruges and Lübeck. These prominent merchants themselves instrumentally made use of local sovereignty and therefore some of the causes of changes in sovereignty conceptions as referring to commercial cities may have had to with strategies deployed within merchant networks. These networks were largely formed along the lines of nationality and in close connection to expat communities (nationes mercatorum). Sovereignty-related actions were not exclusively steered from within bodies of governance of cities, but also by merchants, in interaction with these bodies, or otherwise.
A second main achievement concerns the interconnections between the cities studied as cases, from the angle of merchant networks, and its impact on causes of change in sovereignty-thinking. Networked sovereignty of cities was largely aligned with merchant networks, which had agents and contacts in several commercial cities. One of the findings of the project thus far relates to the involvement of prominent merchants in the Anglo-Dutch and Hanseatic trade, covering the cities of Southampton, Rouen, Bruges and Lübeck. These prominent merchants themselves instrumentally made use of local sovereignty and therefore some of the causes of changes in sovereignty conceptions as referring to commercial cities may have had to with strategies deployed within merchant networks. These networks were largely formed along the lines of nationality and in close connection to expat communities (nationes mercatorum). Sovereignty-related actions were not exclusively steered from within bodies of governance of cities, but also by merchants, in interaction with these bodies, or otherwise.
In the late Middle Ages and sixteenth century, sovereignies could be split and mirrored each other. It was found out that cities could boast the sovereignty of their overlord, and vice versa. In that regard, ‘autonomy’ was not always an issue and in this regard the project's publications are particularly novel. Sovereignty has typically been connected to exclusive power and jurisdiction. These findings have huge potential, because much of the historical literature and literature of political studies, analyzing state formation, starts from an opposition between local and central levels of authority. Moreover, literature that is critical of top-down and centralization perspectives in the history of sovereignty typically takes non-legal viewpoints, but the scholastic tradition mentioned has the potential to inject legal perspectives into this literature. Furthermore, with the resurgence of mercantilism and power politics since 2017, the findings mentioned have the potential to remodel sovereignty as a combined factual-legal notion in a networked sense (the context now being of central governments venturing into unrealistic power grabs, but which will not end the globalized economy).