Preliminary Programme

Wed 24 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Thu 25 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Fri 26 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Sat 27 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.00

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Thursday 25 March 2021 16.00 - 17.15
D-8 SPA08 Representing Risk in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Maritime Averages, GIS and the Digital Humanities
D
Network: Spatial and Digital History Chair: Gijs Dreijer
Organizer: Lewis Wade Discussants: -
Jake Dyble : Digitalising Economic Data from the Baroque Age: Maritime Averages in Tuscany
The five-year ERC-funded project AveTransRisk, initiated in September 2017, aimed to create a comparative study of maritime averages across Europe. General average was (and is) a means of redistributing extraordinary costs incurred during a sea voyage across all interested parties. Inherently international in its operation, average cases provide us with ... (Show more)
The five-year ERC-funded project AveTransRisk, initiated in September 2017, aimed to create a comparative study of maritime averages across Europe. General average was (and is) a means of redistributing extraordinary costs incurred during a sea voyage across all interested parties. Inherently international in its operation, average cases provide us with unique insight into historical patterns of trade and finance, as well as trans-national legal practices, and Early-Modern approaches to risk management. My own contribution to the project has centred on the Tuscan free port of Livorno, where the documentation contains accident reports filed in a multitude of legal jurisdictions, damage and expenses receipts, records of sea-loan and premium insurance, as well as calcoli detailing the value of ships and cargo. A key deliverable of the project was the AveTransRisk Database, which would capture this hugely valuable mine of information in an accessible form. The Livornese documentation is of crucial importance to this aspect of the project, yielding significant quantitative and qualitative information. Yet the very abundance and versatility of the data raises difficult questions about how to best represent it in a uniform, accessible manner. In a pre-Enlightenment era which was fundamentally analogue in nature, non-standardised practices abounded, and jurisdictional boundaries were often thoroughly confused. Add to this the fact that the environment in question was a maritime environment, one of the least predictable and heterogeneous spheres of human interaction, and the question becomes even more vexed.

The AveTransRisk project embodies many of the ideals of modern scholarship, so often reduced to glib buzzwords: digital history, transnational approach, interdisciplinarity, impact, legacy. The desirability of such approaches are often discussed but the practical process of implementing them rather less so. As such approaches become more widely diffused, it is important that the scholarly community reflects on the practical side of their realisation, not only so that we can produce even better studies in the future, but so that historians can better parse their polished end-product. The realisation of the AveTransRisk database has been a thoroughly dialectical one: dialogue between scholars of different nationalities, between IT specialists and academics, between practitioners and historians, and between historians and their documents, which rarely present themselves in the way that was expected. This paper, presented in conjunction with other members of the AveTransRisk team, will elucidate the difficulties faced in the process, both linguistic, methodological, and practical, as well as outlining the significant insights that it has yielded.

My contribution will give particular attention to the idiosyncrasies of the Tuscan documentation, and especially to the problem of balancing qualitative and quantitative analysis within the time-frame of a PhD project. (Show less)

Marta Garcia Garralon : Using Digital Technologies in History: the Challenges of a Database about General Average and Historical Research
General Average is a complex institution throughout the different maritime domains of the Spanish Monarchy.

Within the framework of the AveTransRisk Project (an ERC Project under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 reseach and innovation programme –grant agreement n. 724544) and, during the chronological time of the early modern period, I am ... (Show more)
General Average is a complex institution throughout the different maritime domains of the Spanish Monarchy.

Within the framework of the AveTransRisk Project (an ERC Project under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 reseach and innovation programme –grant agreement n. 724544) and, during the chronological time of the early modern period, I am carrying out an investigation that entails two main serial records related to this institution:
1) The first set of information comprises GA trials related to the navigation of the Indies trade, between Spain and its American domains, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This archival set compiles approximately 121 litigations presented before the Real Audiencia de la Casa de la Contratación de las Indias of Seville. This documentation relates to cases which ended in litigation and is therefore offering us rich information, not only about averages, but detailing many other circumstances surrounding the event and the actors (jettison, accident).
2) The second research strand includes GA documentation regarding navigation along the maritime façade of the northern peninsular. I handle a series of relevant records (84) about GA, most of them in the eighteenth century. Such documentation is more diverse and entails litigation, protests of sea and powers of attorneys within GA.

One of the main challenges of this research consists in uploading part of the gathered information from the documentary resources to a shared database created for project researches. The database must serve as a comparative analysis tool between the different European territories analysed.

The challenge is formidable. The configuration of the database must be subject to continuous adaptations that handle the need to introduce new data from fields of research that were not initially foreseen during the database design phase.

The Microsoft Access tool shows great flexibility when it comes to implementing such changes that occur while working in the archives. Despite the incalculable support of our technician, it is not always ease to integrate historical realities to databases. (Show less)

Antonio Iodice : The Republic of Accountants: Genoese Trade in the XVII Century Mediterranean
I am part of the European project Average - Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries) (ERC grant agreement number 724544) led by professor Maria Fusaro, Exeter University.
As a team member of AveTransRisk, I will investigate maritime routes, investment and risk management in Genoese seaborne trade ... (Show more)
I am part of the European project Average - Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries) (ERC grant agreement number 724544) led by professor Maria Fusaro, Exeter University.
As a team member of AveTransRisk, I will investigate maritime routes, investment and risk management in Genoese seaborne trade in the XVII century. I work on one of the most ancient legal instrument still in use nowadays, the General Average. This source provides us with an rich amount of details on almost every aspect of a sea venture, from voyage’s report to a calculus of everything on board, ship and crew’s salary included.

More than 40% of the captains declared an average on their arrival in Genoa. We aim to build an online database to make available and compare these data between different seaports and European countries. The AveTransRisk database will be a powerful tool to investigate deeper into maritime entrepreneurship in Genoa and the routes, goods and peoples that stepped by the republic during their journeys.

As pointed out by T.A. Kirk, the XVII century was a challenging period for the republic of Genoa . The Genoese elites, which were also the same people involved in maritime traffics, sought to relaunch trade in response to the so-called “northern invasion” and the growth of new trade centres as the nearby Livorno, Nice and Marseille . Genoa struggled to keep its role as a maritime power and an international entrepôt for goods and finance, a commercial hub in the Western Mediterranean. Maritime transport has been the main driver of trade growth and hence of the emergence and expansion of a global economy. Shipping not only served to integrate world markets. It was the international business par excellence in most national economies and preceded trends that later became visible in many other sectors of international economic activity. (Show less)

Lewis Wade : A Rue with a View? Studying Early Modern French Insurance and Maritime Averages through GIS
Insurance buttressed many global commercial ventures in the early modern period. By shifting risk to third parties, European merchants and mariners were able to mitigate the extensive risks they bore in the course of precarious voyages. But data sets on early modern underwriting practices are scarce, and our knowledge of ... (Show more)
Insurance buttressed many global commercial ventures in the early modern period. By shifting risk to third parties, European merchants and mariners were able to mitigate the extensive risks they bore in the course of precarious voyages. But data sets on early modern underwriting practices are scarce, and our knowledge of French insurance in this period is scarcer still. This paper will discuss my efforts to address both historical lacunae through studying Louis XIV’s insurance institutions, the Chambre (1668-86) and the Compagnie générale des assurances et grosses aventures (1686-c. 1710). Operating from the same Parisian street, rue Quincampoix, these institutions have left us registers with valuable quantitative data: there are over 8000 insurance policies catalogued across the two institutions, alongside a wealth of declarations of maritime averages and abandonment which document the damages and losses incurred by policyholders. These registers are therefore unique in allowing for the quantitative study of the intersection of insurance and maritime averages within the activities of these state-sponsored institutions.

My focus here will be on the distinctive technological and epistemological challenges I face in integrating this data into the AveTransRisk database: how can the peculiarities of the data be best captured, and how can GIS be used to represent voyages whose fates are unclear? Answering these questions will allow for a broader reflection on the unique insights offered by – and the difficulties pertaining to – the digital representation of risk on a pan-European level. (Show less)



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