Overview
It is now time to turn our attention to the operational evidence: the documents, preserved in the state archive in Pisa, produced as part of real risk-sharing procedures carried out in Tuscany from 1600 to 1700. Thanks to Livorno’s status as a particularly cosmopolitan port inserted into international trade networks, these documents bring us into contact with shipmasters and merchants hailing from a wide range of national and religious backgrounds who presented their case to the court of the
Consoli del Mare.
1 Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: un luogo dell’incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Allemandi, 2009).The most striking thing to emerge from this documentation is the sheer range of different types of damages that were shared between merchants, ship-owners, and the master through the use of a single instrument: what we can already call GA. These damages were not just classic cases of jettison and mast cutting that were well embedded in the normative material. These included the deliberate beaching of the vessel, expenses and damages sustained in fighting off corsairs, legal costs for freeing the ship when illegally captured, bribes to local officials, expenses for hiring local assistance of various kinds and in various situations, as well as financial exactions imposed by local and consular authorities. There is no hint in our sources of the separate ‘Common’ or ‘Small’ Average which sometimes appears in the normative sources.
2 See p. 101. This very wide use of GA was in part made possible by a largely unavoidable structural imbalance in the procedure: the strong interest that the shipmaster had in the outcome, and his near-total control over information. Technical personnel of the court aided masters in posing their requests in a legally valent way designed to trigger a GA declaration, but GA-as-practised in some ways contravened juridical stipulations, and there was not even necessarily agreement on the central juridical principle of ‘common benefit, common contribution’.
3 See p. 105. The result of the master’s control of information was that GA was, above all, a tool that benefitted the transport sector, in a way that was generally acceptable and perhaps even desirable at the beginning of our period but became more contentious towards the end of the ancien regime. Some later eighteenth-century Tuscan reformers – not wholly inaccurately – portrayed GA as an inbalanced procedure in which the attorneys and shipmasters colluded to push through spurious claims. The second half of the chapter will thus explore the theme of merchant representation, particularly the progressive ‘streamlining’ of procedures that happened over the century, with less and less material dedicated to the defence of merchant interests. Rather than representing a diminution in the quality of representation, however, it will be shown that this was simply a stripping away of extraneous material, most likely in response to the well-attested growth in commercial-maritime litigation across Europe in the last third of the seventeenth century. The quality of defence, and the procedure more generally, remained largely stable across the century. The changes merely revealed GA cases for what they usually were: not legal investigations or ‘trials’ but rather processes of certification – administration-as-justice – in which the important decisions usually happened outside of the courtroom.