The Study

Though this book makes reference to GA laws and practices across Western Europe and the Mediterranean, the case study adopted here will be the port of Livorno in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which allows for a particularly pertinent and detailed engagement with these questions. One reason for this is practical: Tuscany is possessed of an especially rich documentary patrimony regarding GA which allows the operational side – the practice itself – to be illuminated in a way that is not possible for most other jurisdictions. The archive of the Consoli del Mare di Pisa preserves many GA cases in full, including the original calculations. The richness of the available data concerning the actual operation of GA is matched only by surviving Genoese documentation.1 Antonio Iodice, ‘General average in Genoa: between statutes and customs’, in Maria Fusaro, Andrea Addobbati, and Luisa Piccinno (eds), General Average and Risk Management in Medieval and Early Modern Maritime Business (Cham: Springer, 2023), 259–96. Four different years from across the period were examined in full – 1600, 1640, 1670, and 1700 – rendering 50 case studies in total. A number of other archival documents are brought to bear in order to fully contextualise these cases, whilst Chapter 4 presents a microhistorical reconstruction of a case which became the subject of a diplomatic dispute between England and Tuscany, an example of what Edoardo Gredi called an ‘exceptional normal’, whereby exceptionally rich evidence helps us uncover the normal dynamics which structured these institutions.2 Edoardo Grendi, ‘Micro-analisi e storia sociale’, Quaderni Storici 12 (1997), 506–20, at pp. 509, 512.

There is also a compelling methodological case for exploring the Tuscan experience – or more accurately, for exploring the experience of the merchants and shipmasters of many different origins who found themselves at this Mediterranean crossroads. First of all, Italy occupies a special place in the institutional teleology posited by North.3 North, Institutions, p. 127. Italy in the NIE schema is the institutional homo erectus to England’s homo sapiens, furnishing the ‘proto’ institutions later perfected in North-Western Europe. Secondly, the operational reality we encounter in Tuscany was particularly complex since in the ‘free port’ of Livorno a significant proportion of resident merchants – and the overwhelming majority of shipmasters – were foreigners, who might conceivably import, along with their merchandise, their own notions of how GAs should be carried out.4 Albrect Cordes and Stefania Gialdroni, ‘Introduction’, in Stefania Gialdroni, Albrecht Cordes, Serge Dauchy, Dave De ruysscher, and Heikki Pihlajamäki (eds), Migrating Words, Migrating Language, Migrating Law: Trading Routes and the Development of Commercial Law (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 1–9, at p. 2. As well as being home to significant numbers of Sephardic Jewish, Greek, and Armenian merchants, Livorno was particularly important for the English and Dutch, who formed large and influential communities in the seventeenth-century free port.5 Gigliola Pagano De Divitiis (trans. Stephen Parkin), English Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 144–52; Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire, pp. 64–88. Hence the Tuscan context provides a privileged vantage point through which to examine a meeting of GA customs. If the Mediterranean has been described as a ‘laboratory’ of legal history, bringing a number of legal traditions into close contact, Livorno represents a particularly rich petri dish.6 See Guillaume Calafat, Une mer jalousée: contribution à l’histoire de la souveraineté (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2019), back matter; Maria Fusaro, ‘The global relevance of the legal history of the early modern Mediterranean’, Cromohs, Current Debates (2023), <https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/article/view/14575> [12 August 2023]. In short, it is especially germane for studying the meeting of Western Mediterranean and North-Western European traditions, since Livorno was an important player in what Fernand Braudel famously termed the ‘Northern Invasion’ of the Mediterranean trade circuits.7 Colin Heywood, ‘The English in the Mediterranean, 1600–1630: a post-Braudelian perspective on the northern invasion’ in Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, and Mohamed-Salah Omri (eds), Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris & Company, 2010), 23–44.

The first chapter of the work will set the scene by elucidating this context in greater detail. The second will explore the GA that emerges from early modern normative sources, especially those pertinent to the Western Mediterranean, beginning with the Lex Rhodia in Justinian’s Digest. Here we will see not only that GA has been far from stable over the centuries, but even that the animating principle of ‘GA’ before the early modern period was not universally shared. The very idea of a history of GA is in some ways a retrospective framework imposed upon a range of similar practices that were not yet grouped under an agreed typology. The third chapter will compare these written norms with the seventeenth-century practice that emerges from the Pisan archive: GA-as-practised was much more capacious than the normative sources suggest, and merchants held quite different core assumptions to the lawyers about what the institution was for. The fourth chapter uses a microhistorical case study – a diplomatic dispute between the English and Tuscans over GA – in order to demonstrate the extent to which GA rules and procedures were inflected by political economy and contingent upon the balance of economic power, as well as discussing the implications of the procedure’s inherently international nature. The final chapter will discuss the implications for the history of economic institutions, demonstrating how GA was used in concert with a range of other risk-management instruments and exploring the risk-management strategies of individual merchants and shipmasters working in the free port. The concluding remarks will consider the future of GA and the lessons that the GA of the past hold for practioners in the present, as well as for historians of commercial law and early modern trade.