The Power and Pains of Polysemy: General Average, Maritime Trade and Normative Practice in the Southern Low Countries (Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries)

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the development of General Average (GA) and adjacent forms of ‘averages’ in the Southern Netherlands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, mainly in the two commercial cities of Bruges and Antwerp. GA, a technical instrument that already existed in Roman law, redistributes extraordinary, deliberate damages for the common benefit over anyone involved in a maritime venture pro rata. It has been largely disregarded by historians in their study of early modern risk management, in contrast to marine insurance. The dissertation is situated at the intersection of maritime, economic and legal history, whereby the source material is primarily legal in nature. This research aims to contribute to three long-running debates in legal and economic history: first, the assumed existence of an autonomous medieval maritime law (the so-called lex maritima); second, strategies of merchants to manage maritime risk; and third, the effects of averages as an institution on transaction and protection costs. GA was mainly declared for jettison in Roman and medieval law. During the sixteenth century developments in formal legal sources (such as princely legislation and Antwerp municipal law) incorporated new acts from mercantile practice, including costs to avoid greater damages, such as voluntarily running aground during a storm. Two developments were of great importance: the possibility of holding insurers liable to pay for GA payments; and the development of adjacent forms of averages for cost management, such as Common Average for operational costs and the contractualisation of averages before a venture to provide legal security. ‘Spanish’ merchants such as the Castilians and Biscayers, united in so-called nationes, also developed various forms of compulsory contributions, paid ex ante, to share mutual protection costs. The dissertation argues that the development of averages contributed to an operationally efficient combination of different institutions, notwithstanding the complex stakeholder environment of the crucial maritime sector.