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The Burden of Risk: Early Modern Maritime Enterprise and Varieties of Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2020

Maria Fusaro
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Abstract

This article discusses the complex issues behind the relation between national and global economic histories and the challenges of a comparative approach. On examining different national approaches (Italian and English) to the management of the early modern maritime sector, it will argue that this comparison allows a privileged view into different varieties of capitalism, highlighting fundamental differences in attitudes toward wage labor and risk management that still influence different approaches to economic activities today.

Keywords

Italycapitalismearly modernRepublic of VeniceEnglandmaritime labor
Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 94 , Issue 1: Italy and the Origins of Capitalism , Spring 2020 , pp. 179 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Footnotes

The research for this article was conducted thanks to funding from the European Research Council: ERC Grant agreement No. 284340: LUPE – Sailing into Modernity: Comparative Perspectives on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century European Economic Transition; and ERC Grant agreement No. 724544: AveTransRisk – Average – Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries). I would like to thank Sophus Reinert and Bob Fredona for their invitation and the participants and audience of the March 2019 workshop Italy and the Origins of Capitalism at Harvard Business School for stimulating questions and comments. I would also like to thank Reinhold Mueller, Isabella Cecchini, Richard Blakemore, and the anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.

References

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11 Just as an example, see the monumental seven volumes of Rogers, J. E. T., A History of Agriculture and Prices in England from 1259 to 1793 (London, 1866–1902)Google Scholar. In the last twenty years a strong effort has been made, and is ongoing across several countries and research projects, to correct the data of these classic collections. For a list of these datasets see “List of Datafiles,” International Institute of Social History website, n.d., accessed 10 Oct. 2019, http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/data.php.

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25 Maria Fusaro, “The Invasion of Northern Litigants: English and Dutch Seamen in Mediterranean Courts of Law,” in Fusaro et al., Law, Labour, and Empire, 40.

26 Maria Fusaro, The Making of a Global Labour Market, 1573–1729: Maritime Law and the Political Economy of the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cambridge, U.K., forthcoming).

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28 Fusaro, Making of a Global Labour Market.

29 Fusaro, “Invasion of Northern Litigants,” 35–36, bibliography.

30 Fusaro, “Migrating Seamen”; Fusaro, Making of a Global Labour Market, chap. 4.

31 Blakemore, Richard J., “Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight: Seamen's Earnings and the Venture Economy of Early Modern Seafaring,” Economic History Review 70, no. 4 (2017): 1153–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vanneste, Tijl, “Instruments of Trade or Maritime Entrepreneurs? The Economic Agency of Dutch Seamen in the Golden Age,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 4 (2019): 1132–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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33 Fusaro, “Afterword,” 306. See also Fusaro, Making of a Global Labour Market.

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36 Here, again, the literature is massive; a classic starting point is Hilton, Rodney H., ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

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40 Hakluyt, Richard, The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Over-Land to the Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1500 Yeeres (London, 1589–1600; repr., Glasgow, 1903–1905)Google Scholar; Fusaro, Maria, Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, U.K., 2015), 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar, bibliography.

41 On these issues, an extremely enlightening analysis appears in Scott, Jonathan, When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, U.K., 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Another rather large field—best to start at the beginning: Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931)Google Scholar; a useful primer for the debate is Wilson, Adrian and Ashplant, T. G., “Whig History and Present-Centred History,” Historical Journal 31, no. 1 (1988): 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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44 For an analytical synthesis of these issues, see Blakemore, “Pieces of Eight,” including bibliography.

45 See Fusaro, Maria, “Maritime History as Global History? The Methodological Challenges and a Future Research Agenda,” in Maritime History as Global History, ed. Fusaro, Maria and Polónia, Amélia (St. John's, NL, 2010), 267–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A further element needs to be taken into account, the peculiar English cultural phenomenon of sea-blindness. See Redford, Duncan, “The Royal Navy, Sea-Blindness and British National Identity,” in Maritime History and Identity: The Sea and Culture in the Modern World, ed. Redford, Duncan (London, 2014), 61–78Google Scholar.

46 For a detailed explanation of this formula see Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 134.

47 van Rossum, Matthias and Kamp, Jeannette, eds., Desertion in the Early Modern World: A Comparative History (London, 2016)Google Scholar; Fusaro, Making of a Global Labour Market, chap. 2.

48 Ormrod, “Agrarian Capitalism,” including bibliography.

49 With some differences, these points are also elaborated in Rediker, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; and Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

50 Richard J. Blakemore, “The Legal World of English Sailors, c. 1575–1729,” in Fusaro et al., Law, Labour, and Empire, 100–20; Fusaro, Making of a Global Labour Market.

51 It is worth noting that the early eighteenth century is also the period of a pan-European “second wave of serfdom.” See the classic Kula, Witold, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of the Polish Economy, 1500–1800 (London, 1976)Google Scholar; and the recent Peter S. Jensen, Cristina Victoria Radu, Battista Severgnini, and Paul Sharp, “The Introduction of Serfdom and Labour Markets” (EHES Working Paper No. 140, Nov. 2018), http://www.ehes.org/EHES_140.pdf.

52 Deakin, Simon and Wilkinson, Frank, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment and Legal Evolution (Oxford, 2005), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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54 Couper, Alastair (with Schoenbaum, Thomas and Grime, Robert), “Historical Perspectives on Seafarers and the Law,” in Fitzpatrick, Deirdre and Anderson, Michael, eds., Seafarers’ Rights (Oxford, 2005), 6–7Google Scholar.

55 A copy of the parte is in Archivio di Stato di Venezia (hence ASV), Compilazione delle leggi, seconda serie, busta (hence b.) 23, Codici 241–242, carte (hence cc.) 33r–34r, (31 August 1602). Copies of the 1682 parti are in ASV, Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, seconda serie, b. 91, (9 May 1682) and (8 August 1682). I follow Domenico Sella in discussing this as a clear antecedent, but I add a possibly direct inspiration, behind the English Navigation Acts in Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire, 201, 355, and bibliography therein quoted.

56 “Dovendo essi Patroni, ò Capitanj conrispondergli due mesate anticipatamente al montar in Nave, e per le susseguenti paghe gli siano corrisposti di mese in mese due terzi di esse, cosicchè al ritorno ne’ porti resti la marinarezza creditrice d'un terzo del servizio, onde dessumino [sic] essi Marineri motivo di non abbandonare le Navi, mà debbano ricondurle ne’ porti da dove si saranno partite.” For a copy of the Senate parte issuing the new regulation, see ASV, Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, seconda serie, b. 91, (23 January 1682mv) (Note: in Venice the year started on 1 March; for dates between 1 January and the end of February, the abbreviation mv [more Veneto], shows that it is a date following the Venetian-style calendar, and therefore it is necessary to add a unit to the figure of the year). Its implementation is detailed in ASV, Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia, b. 369, fascicolo 35, (16 February 1682mv), chap. 13 of Capitoli di Regolazione alla Navigazion Mercantile. Discussed in Fusaro, “Invasion of Northern Litigants,” 38.

57 Some preliminary results of investigation into seamen's entrepreneurship on the global scale are in Fusaro, Maria, Blakemore, Richard J., Crivelli, Benedetta, Ekama, Kate J., Vanneste, Tijl, Lucassen, Jan, Rossum, Matthias van, Okabe, Yoshihiko, Hallén, Per, and Kane, Patrick M., “Entrepreneurs at Sea: Trading Practices, Legal Opportunities and Early Modern Globalization,” International Journal of Maritime History 28, no. 4 (2016): 774–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry.

59 On the methodological potential of access to courts by the lower socioeconomic strata of early modern society, with a comparative European perspective, see Vermeesch, Grete, “Reflections on the Relative Accessibility of Law Courts in Early Modern Europe,” Crime, History and Societies 19, no. 2 (2015): 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 On how this affected English seamen on a global scale, see Blakemore, “Pieces of Eight.”

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62 See Sarti, Raffaella, Servo e padrone, o della (in)dipendenza: Un percorso da Aristotele ai nostri giorni (Bologna, 2015)Google Scholar, including bibliography.

63 Todeschini, Ricchezza francescana, 186–87.

64 Which, mutatis mutandis, is also what was behind Frederic Lane's efforts to foster dialogue and debate on these issues, namely the establishment of yearly monographic issues on “the tasks of economic history” during his editorship of the Journal of Economic History; see, particularly, the issue titled “Formation and Development of Capitalism,” Journal of Economic History 29, no. 1 (1969)Google Scholar.

65 A lively analysis of these issues, from a distinctively French perspective, is in Alain Supiot, “Comparative Law between Globalisation and Mondialisation,” in Besson, Urscheler, and Jubé, Comparing Comparative Law, 209–18.

66 As a starting point, see Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar.

67 See, among others, Hall and Soskice, Varieties of Capitalism.

68 Of the simply massive literature, just two classics: Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944)Google Scholar; and Morgan, Kenneth, Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, U.K., 2000)Google Scholar.

69 Gras, Norman S. B., “Capitalism – Concepts and History,” in Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History, ed. Lane, Frederic C. and Riemersma, Jelle C. (London, 1953), 76Google Scholar.

70 See, for example, Stanziani, Alessandro, ed., Labour, Coercion, and Economic Growth in Eurasia (17th–20th Centuries) (Leiden, 2012)Google Scholar.

71 Grenier, Jean-Yves, “Dynamique du capitalisme et inégalités,” in “Lire Le capital de Thomas Piketty,” special issue, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 70, no. 1 (2015): 7–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.