Acknowledgments
First of all, I would like to thank the residents of Europe, who have enabled this research to be carried out through their tax contributions. I hope that those of them who read this book will find it interesting, and that it will prove useful and illuminating to society as a whole in its own very modest way. I hope it will represent the first in a series of dividends rather than a final return on investment. The research for the book was conducted thanks to funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and Innovation Programme ERC Grant agreement No. 724544: AveTransRisk-Average-Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries), and funding from the European Union – NextGenerationEU and the University of Padua under the 2023 STARS Grants@Unipd programme (AvCOL - Avania: Commerce, Orientalism, and Law in Early Modern Europe).
I am in a position to carry out this work thanks to the efforts of many teachers and supervisors over the years. Paul Ponder, David Woodman, and William O’ Reilly are just three of many I could mention. I would like to thank all the members of the ERC research project AveTransRisk for their comments and guidance during our workshops and conferences, especially Sabine Go and Guido Rossi for their advice, and Ian Wellaway for his patience and skill in constructing the AveTransRisk database. I would like to thank Gijs Dreijer, Lewis Wade, and Antonio Iodice for their solidarity, help, and comradeship, and all our friends in the Exeter Digital Humanities Lab for many conversations that had nothing to do with maritime law. I would also like to acknowledge the team behind the ERC project MICOLL, especially Stefania Gialdroni. Francesca Trivellato, Roberto Zaugg, Henry French, and Marcella Aglietti offered thought-provoking and helpful comments on earlier versions of this study, as did several anonymous reviewers. Above all, I would like to acknowledge Professor Maria Fusaro and Professor Andrea Addobbati for all their help and guidance.
It has been a pleasure to work with Peter Sowden, Henry Lafferty and the rest of the team at Boydell & Brewer. Thanks to Joshua Hey for careful copyediting, and to Frances Harty who proofread an earlier draft of the work. Thanks must also go to Massimo Sanacore, the director of the Pisan archive, Sara Caputo and Tom Drury for reading drafts and for continual encouragement, Martina Scattolin, my Italian teacher, and Alice Zanghi, my first Italian teacher. I would like to thank Mirela Balasoiu for her friendship. A big thank you goes to my sister, Lily; you are above average in every way.
My greatest debt of gratitude is owed to my parents – Karen Drury and Mark Dyble – to whom this work is dedicated.