Periodic Reporting for period 4 - AveTransRisk (Average - Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries))
Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2022-12-31
AveTransRisk investigated maritime risk management in late medieval and early modern Europe. It analysed the development of historical institutions, and their impact on economic development, through the comparative investigation of a specific legal instrument – General Average (GA) – which still underpins maritime trade by redistributing damages’ costs across all interested parties. ‘Averages’ are a legal instrument used since Antiquity, and their mutual nature makes their study particularly topical today, as the current crisis of the Anglo-American model of capitalist economic development is fostering interest in different approaches and solutions.
The results of the project have confirmed and strengthened the original hypothesis about the deep roots of intra-European institutional diversity, providing further evidence of the developments of different paths of economic development across Europe, with important contemporary repercussions for both the understanding, and the future developments of European economy/ies. From the scientific perspective the results of the project have confirmed the long-term resilience of alternative credit and risk-management structures and institutions, whose study has been neglected as they are not in line with the standard and classic narrative of economic development, which has been shaped by the Anglo-American experience.
Throughout the project lifespan there have been plenty of opportunity for engagement with civil society and non- academic partners. The most potentially interesting result of this has been to put Maria Fusaro (PI) in collaboration with colleagues working on using the principle of General Average mutual apportioning to devise new solutions that shall provide a more equitable taxation to counteract the planet climate emergency. This being the highest risk to human life, this collaboration has potential for impact truly on the planetary scale.
The results of the project have confirmed and strengthened the original hypothesis about the deep roots of intra-European institutional diversity, providing further evidence of the developments of different paths of economic development across Europe, with important contemporary repercussions for both the understanding, and the future developments of European economy/ies. From the scientific perspective the results of the project have confirmed the long-term resilience of alternative credit and risk-management structures and institutions, whose study has been neglected as they are not in line with the standard and classic narrative of economic development, which has been shaped by the Anglo-American experience.
Throughout the project lifespan there have been plenty of opportunity for engagement with civil society and non- academic partners. The most potentially interesting result of this has been to put Maria Fusaro (PI) in collaboration with colleagues working on using the principle of General Average mutual apportioning to devise new solutions that shall provide a more equitable taxation to counteract the planet climate emergency. This being the highest risk to human life, this collaboration has potential for impact truly on the planetary scale.
Notwithstanding substantial disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and come serious personal and health issues which have befallen members of the team, research was completed along the lines originally envisaged, all PhDs have been completed and all junior members of the team have progressed to prestigious post-docs.
The project team has substantially over-delivered in terms of published outputs, and there are several more works in the pipeline which shall be published during 2023/4.
The Database is a resounding success mongst the project's outputs. Its success was recognised by its winning the prestigious Digital Innovation Prize at the 2022 World Economic History Congress. the Database has been defined as a game changer as it provides a level of granularity and precision of data, and a friendly user-interface which allows for further usage of its data by other projects. It is freely available online through the website of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies (CMHS) at the University of Exeter, and will continue to be updated for the foreseeable future.
We have presented our results at several international conferences, and received excellent feedback throughout. The project exceeded expectations in fulfilling its interdisciplinary engagement as detailed in the original project proposal. Fruitful collaborations have been established with other international teams active both in legal and economic history, which are resulting in further collaborations and outputs by project members.
The project team has substantially over-delivered in terms of published outputs, and there are several more works in the pipeline which shall be published during 2023/4.
The Database is a resounding success mongst the project's outputs. Its success was recognised by its winning the prestigious Digital Innovation Prize at the 2022 World Economic History Congress. the Database has been defined as a game changer as it provides a level of granularity and precision of data, and a friendly user-interface which allows for further usage of its data by other projects. It is freely available online through the website of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies (CMHS) at the University of Exeter, and will continue to be updated for the foreseeable future.
We have presented our results at several international conferences, and received excellent feedback throughout. The project exceeded expectations in fulfilling its interdisciplinary engagement as detailed in the original project proposal. Fruitful collaborations have been established with other international teams active both in legal and economic history, which are resulting in further collaborations and outputs by project members.
The results have been excellent. All original hypothesis are proving correct in terms of the importance and resilience of mutual risk management instruments and their distribution in the maritime sector. The operational convergence between different European regions has been confirmed, and the hypothesized differences in jurisdictional reach of different states have emerged even more powerfully than originally posited.
The issue of ‘translation’ not only between different languages but also between legal systems, was flagged already in the project proposal as another crucial element of our analysis, and was the topic of our second project workshop . The importance of this element has massively increased as the archival data is collected and analysed. For the first time, we are systematically and comparatively analysing a legal instrument – Average – which has been central to maritime trade since Antiquity. Combining the comparative element, with the challenges of translations between both languages and legal systems, and with the complex polysemy of the term ‘average’ itself, has confronted us with a particularly heavy responsibility in careful and stringent internal peer reviewing of all outputs, as our publications have for all intent and purposes established a new field of investigation.
The issue of ‘translation’ not only between different languages but also between legal systems, was flagged already in the project proposal as another crucial element of our analysis, and was the topic of our second project workshop . The importance of this element has massively increased as the archival data is collected and analysed. For the first time, we are systematically and comparatively analysing a legal instrument – Average – which has been central to maritime trade since Antiquity. Combining the comparative element, with the challenges of translations between both languages and legal systems, and with the complex polysemy of the term ‘average’ itself, has confronted us with a particularly heavy responsibility in careful and stringent internal peer reviewing of all outputs, as our publications have for all intent and purposes established a new field of investigation.