Overview
This chapter completes the picture of GA-as-practice begun in Chapter 3 by arguing for the importance of political economy in GA’s functioning, and for the influence of political economy on commercial justice more broadly.
1 On GA and political economy see also Dyble, ‘Divide and rule’. Pace proponents of a lex mercatoria, GA regulations varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but were generally accepted by players in other jurisdictions as
fait accompli. What is more, regulations were applied differently even within the same jurisdiction in accordance with the dictates of political economy, both that of the home state and that of foreign powers. In making this argument, we will move away from a tight focus on documentation produced by the court to consider dynamics that only evidence from elsewhere can shed light upon.
This chapter is centred on the evidence provided by a single micro-historical case study, a GA which became the object of a complex and high-profile diplomatic dispute between England and Tuscany. The case analysed represents what Edoardo Grendi called an ‘exceptional normal’: ‘exceptional inasmuch as it mirrors a normality, so normal that often it remains silent’.
2 Grendi, ‘Micro-analisi e storia sociale’, p. 512. Here we have an example for which exceptionally rich evidence from across several archival collections can be triangulated in order to establish the normal dynamics which underpinned GA resolution.
3 The case is reconstructed in Addobbati and Dyble, ‘One hundred barrels of gunpowder’ to a different analytical end. As a GA in and of itself, there was nothing overly distinctive about the case. The English ship
Alice and Francis declared a GA in Livorno
in the summer of 1670 after enduring a storm and combat with corsairs.
4 ASP, CM, AC, 321-30 (30 August 1670). The original procedure in Pisa was resolved in a mere ten days. Months later, however, the
Alice and Francis would find itself at the centre of another storm, this one diplomatic in nature, and another combat, as English representatives attempted to wrest GA jurisdiction from the Grand Duke. Diving deep into this single case, at once ordinary and extraordinary, uncovers the dynamics at play beneath the veneer of official form, and provides important insight into the way that GAs were actually resolved behind the scenes. Though the dispute was ostensibly about GA practices, we find that the real issue at stake was jurisdiction. The scrutiny was problematic for the Tuscan authorities, however, because the way that the case had actually been resolved was highly irregular in procedural terms. The important decisions in the
Alice and Francis were not being made in the court, but rather outside of it. While the rhetoric of the dispute was confrontational, and concerned itself with rules and regulations, the resolution of the cases on the ground involved consensus, compromise, and, in this case, collusion. This is an important corrective to the ‘official’ account of GA cases which is presented in the court archive.
None of these dynamics were evident to the English diplomats, who accused the Tuscans of using GA as a political-economic ploy to attract traffic to the port. This accusation was levelled as part of a wider struggle to obtain consular jurisdiction in Livorno. In fact, the Tuscan ‘hands-off’ approach towards the ‘Northern’ merchants and shipping merely reflected the commercial importance of the Northerners to the port and the unwillingness of the Tuscan authorities to alienate this important interest group. While the court’s approach was in many respects irregular, the English diplomats’ failure to obtain their objectives reflected the fact that the state’s desire to control English shipmasters and merchants ultimately did not align with the interests of those same actors.
From a comparison between English and Tuscan GA practices that this analysis requires, the countours of two distinct official attitudes towards maritime capitalism emerge. These two attitudes did not revolve around the question of the security of property rights – a question of particular interest to New Institutionalists.
5 Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (London: Profile Books, 2013), pp. 77–83, 102–3; Douglass North and Barry Weingast, ‘The evolution of institutions governing public choice in seventeenth-century England’, Journal of Economic History 49 (1989), 803–32. Instead, while the Tuscan authorities maintained older regulations that favoured the interests and wellbeing of seamen, the English authorities instead adopted regulations that favoured merchant capital and increased the burden of risk – both financial and personal – upon the maritime labour force.