Average-Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries)

Further Activities

Book Prize  awarded to Lewis Wade 

The inaugural Society for the Study of French History First Book Prize has been awarded to Lewis Wade’s monograph Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire under Louis XIV (Boydell Press, 2023). Lewis completed the research for this book as a PhD student at Exeter, working within Prof. Maria Fusaro’s ERC-funded AveTransRisk project. Announcing their decision at the Fifteenth Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture in French History on 13 January 2025, the prize panel remarked that:

This book deploys substantial archival research in a highly technical field – seventeenth-century marine insurance – and clearly demonstrates the significance of the Paris chamber of insurance for Louis XIV’s monarchy and its European rivals. Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France situates its case study within wider historical debates about economic policy, state formation and conflict resolution in the early modern world to make a broader argument about the financial resilience of the absolute monarchy, within the limits of political will. It is beautifully written, and has found some wonderful source material that introduces its characters effectively and makes a book about insurance compelling reading. 

After the announcement, Lewis gave the following statement:

I am stunned and delighted to have been awarded this prestigious prize. The Society for the Study of French History has been instrumental in my intellectual development since I began my PhD, so I am most grateful to the prize panel for recognising my work in this way. This book was only possible because of the support I received from so many people – more than I could possibly name here! Alongside the institutions that funded the research for the book (the European Research Council, the Economic History Society and the Institute of Historical Research), I am especially indebted to the academics who guided me throughout the book’s composition, including Maria Fusaro (and her team on the AveTransRisk project), Nandini Chatterjee, Cátia Antunes, Renaud Morieux and James Davey. As the prize panel hints at, marine insurance is an unusual case study for a book grappling with the nature of absolutism in Old Regime France! Nevertheless, Boydell & Brewer and Peter Sowden, my editor, placed their faith in the book and went above and beyond in bringing it to print. It is a pleasure to be able to reward their faith and hard work with this prize.

The book is available Open Access through Boydell & Brewer, JSTOR and De Gruyter. Lewis is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University, working on a project that examines French participation in global commerce under Louis XIV. 

Lewis Wade’s monograph is also the subject of this interview.

January 2023 Article of the Month: Jake Dyble

The Mediterranean Seminar is proud to announce the January 2023 Article of the Month: Jake Dyble, “General Average, Human Jettison, and the Status of Slaves in Early Modern Europe", more details at this link: 

mediterraneanseminar.squarespace.com/2023-january-article-of-the-month

Jake Dyble, AveTransRisk project members, developed his research on these issues during his time in the project.

Digital Innovation Prize

The AveTransRisk Database has won (ex aequo) the Digital Innovation Prize which was awarded at the 2022 World Economic History Congress which took place in Paris at the end of July. the prize, organised and funded by the Association Française d’Histoire Économique (AFHE) under the patronage of the International Economic History Association, was set up to reward digital humanities projects in the field of economic history and promote ongoing and achieved projects involving new technologies in economic history.

The whole team thanks Antonio Iodice who prepared the material for the submission and successfully presented the Database in a special session during the 2022 WEHC.

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Here follows the transcription of the motivation

The committee has awarded this prize ex aequo to this project because the committee recognizes the ambition of the project making complex premodern data about international trade available online, with all the information necessary for researchers to use them. The data was broken down into relevant categories. We can build queries easily and locate them on a map in a simple, efficient, and robust interface. In particular, lies the fact that the origin of the data was well documented, as the database could be downloaded freely with opened and wide range of analysis for research. The concern for cooperation and integration with other existing projects, like Navigo for example, was also a model for the sustainability of the project in a changing academic world.

Other Activity

Lewis Wade’s PhD thesis - Privilege at a Premium: Insurance, Maritime Law and Political Economy in Early Modern France, 1664-c. 1710 – is the winner of the 2021 British Commission for Maritime Maritime History’s Boydell & Brewer Prize (further details here) and the 2023 Association of Business Historians’ Coleman Prize (further details in his interview for the New Books Network here).

Sabine Go, Giovanni Ceccarelli and Guido Rossi have received a grant from the Cooperating Maritime Funds (Samenwerkende Maritieme Fondsen) to expand their project “Risky Business: pricing, governance, and integration in European insurance markets (c. 1400-1870)”. This projects objective is to advance, through international cooperation, the historical study of marine insurance. A multination, public database of recorded marine insurance prices from the earliest records (15^th century) to the end of the 19^th century database has been designed and created. Simultaneously, the researchers have located and collected existing private databases (data that had already been compiled which otherwise may be lost), and have added new data gathered from primary sources in various archives. The project is also supported by the Dutch government (NWO Internationalisering in de Geesteswetenschappen), by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Universita degli studi di Parma and by the Fondazione Mansutti in Milan. The current funding will be used for data entry, particular data from archives in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, which has not been processed before. The researchers of the project team, which, apart from Go, Ceccarelli and Rossi, includes Adrian Leonard, have met as members of the Average-Transaction Cost and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth- Eighteenth Centuries) to which they remain associated.

Media

Blogs

Gijs Dreijer’s in the Economic and History Society blog (2021).

Gijs Dreijer's in the Maritiem Portal.

Videos

General Average - Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization

A video on the project prepared for the European Humanities Conference (May 5th to 7th, 2021)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-a_cFo0yGc

Communities of Risk: Dealing with the Unpredictable in the Age of Sail (Exeter 3MT Winner 2021)

Jake Dyble's winning 3 minute You Tube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YnPkwxQ_BM

And the explainer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKgSOniwMQw

Marta García Garralón discussed Riesgos y echazón en la Carrera de Indias. La avería gruesa y el principio de equidad (Risk and jettison in the Carrera de Indias. General average and the principle of equity) at the Online Seminar Research Project IBEROT@C (PID2019-111054GBI00)

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EBOwBkkTvg

Interviews

Marta García Garralón is interviewed by Spanish National Radio on the importance of jettison and General Average in the Carrera de Indias:  https://canal.uned.es/video/6343b475b9130f013e3fcef2

Dr. Gijs Dreijer is interviewd by VRT and talks about the 'Ever Given' and the effect of age old maritime law.

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/07/29/ever-given-aangekomen-in-nederland-eeuwenoud-principe-averij-gr/ (original in flemish)

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/07/29/ever-given-aangekomen-in-nederland-eeuwenoud-principe-averij-gr/ (translated into English)

Podcasts

For the podcast series 'What is wrong with maritime trade?' Maria Fusaro discusses the importance of the mutual element underpinning GA in the context of ‘Solidarity in Trade?’, available at https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ylIuGRkOir2u1n8cpLVP1

Gijs Dreijer was interviewed as part of CIMSEC's Sea Control Podcasts to discuss his book on General Averages in the Low Countries, you can access this at: https://cimsec.org/sea-control-454-maritime-trade-averages-and-institutional-development-in-the-low-countries-with-dr-gijs-dreijer/