Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany" (Boydell Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Jake Dyble, "Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany"

Host: Lewis Wade
Guest: Dr. Jacob Dyble
Date: June 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into Dr. Jake Dyble’s new book, Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (Boydell Press, 2025). The conversation explores the legal mechanism of general average, its role in early modern European trade, particularly in the cosmopolitan port of Livorno, and its interaction with other risk-management tools like insurance. Dr. Dyble unpacks both the legal theory and everyday realities of maritime risk, drawing upon rich archival evidence and challenging prevailing historiographical frameworks.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Introduction to Dr. Dyble and His Research (02:11–03:39)

• Dr. Dyble specializes in Mediterranean maritime history, focusing on economic and social aspects, cross-cultural contact, and the fluidity of merchant and mariner identities.
• The book originated in his doctoral research, prompted by the observation that insurance, though crucial, was just one of several tools for managing maritime risk.

2. General Average: Explanation and Significance (03:39–05:45)

• General average (GA) is a centuries-old legal mechanism for distributing losses from sacrifices made for the common good of a maritime voyage (e.g., jettisoning cargo in a storm).
• All stakeholders contribute to the loss incurred by one party for the benefit of the collective.
• “It’s a very ancient...procedure...the principle of shared sacrifice for shared benefit can be found in different normative systems, but the actual rules...have differed quite a lot over place and time.” (Dr. Dyble, 03:59–05:45)

3. Making Legal History Relevant – From Dry Law to Lived Experience (06:09–09:26)

• General average is obscure to many today but was pervasive and generated rich historical records.
• These records—detailed reports of incidents at sea—open windows onto daily life, networks, commodities, and dramatic or mundane incidents.
• “Although today [general average] might be quite obtruse...it has this sort of constancy across time...it’s an amazing window onto maritime networks...and onto basically the lives of individuals at sea.” (Dr. Dyble, 08:12–09:26)

4. Challenging the ‘Evolutionary Story’ in Economic History (09:26–13:12)

• Dr. Dyble critiques the sequential, evolutionist notion (espoused by New Institutional Economics) that risk management progressed linearly from one tool to the next.
• Instead, early modern merchants deployed a range of overlapping risk instruments (insurance, GA, risk-bearing loans), often simultaneously and flexibly, well into the 19th century.
• “A single merchant might sometimes act as an insurer, sometimes insured, sometimes might give a c loan, sometimes might receive it. It’s only really in the 19th century that we see this sort of separation of roles...” (13:12)

5. Working in the Archives: Challenges and Rewards (13:40–18:28)

• Pisa’s archives house one of the richest troves of GA records, thanks to Tuscany’s busy ports and the ancient Consuls of the Sea tribunal.
• The research involved compiling a vast and sometimes repetitive database—a process likened to a “walk up a steep mountainside...the view at the top is amazing, but you really have to work to get there.”
• The hard-won familiarity with the sources yielded fresh insights and enriched the resulting book.

6. Livorno: Tuscany’s Cosmopolitan Free Port (19:06–21:39)

• Livorno’s extraordinary rise in the late 16th/17th century: transformation from a “fortress in a swamp” into the Mediterranean’s boom town, fueled by Medici policies that welcomed diverse nationalities and faiths.
• Its status as a free port fostered “license and liberty” for trade and a vibrant multicultural society.

7. The Consuls of the Sea: Law and Practice at Pisa (21:39–25:09)

• Maritime disputes in Livorno were adjudicated not locally, but by the Consuls of the Sea court in Pisa—20km away.
• The court juxtaposed merchant justice with university-trained jurists, creating an intersection of practical and learned law.
• “Merchants themselves say that they don’t want university trained jurists involved...they use summary justice...a good merchant sort of doesn’t involve himself in all the sort of subtleties of, of learned law.” (Dr. Dyble, 21:58–25:09)
• Private agreements were often rubber-stamped by the consuls to lend legitimacy across jurisdictions, reflecting the pragmatic blend of ‘official’ and negotiated outcomes.

8. The Legal Tradition of General Average (25:09–29:06)

• Dr. Dyble traces the textual lineage from Roman law (notably the Digest and Lex Rhodia) through the Libra de Consolat de Mar to early modern jurists.
• Emphasizes that normative texts and practice were not separate worlds, but in constant dialogue—“the needs of practitioners and the ideas of jurists...are in conversation.” (29:06)

9. The Nuts and Bolts of a General Average Case (29:06–31:50)

• A shipmaster, after a sacrifice at sea (e.g., throwing cargo overboard to survive a storm), files a sea protest upon reaching port (testimoniale or consolato).
• Followed by the calculation phase assessing who owes what, recorded with the court’s judgment—essential for claims in other ports.
• Actual cash transfers remain shadowy: “Once the calculation is signed off, the official part is sort of over.” (31:50)

10. Voluntariness and Conflict of Interest in GA Claims (31:50–35:05)

• To qualify for general average, an act must be a voluntary sacrifice; mere accidents do not qualify.
• Shipmasters often stretch definitions to frame accidents as “intentional” acts to be reimbursed, creating tension and power imbalances vis-à-vis merchants.
• “If there’s an intentional sacrifice made voluntarily to save the common venture, then that is worthy of reimbursement...Philosophically, this is actually quite difficult because intentionality is internal and difficult to prove.” (Dr. Dyble, 32:05–35:05)

11. Microhistory: The Alice and Francis Case (35:05–38:41)

• The 1670 general average claim by the Alice and Francis ship highlights trickery and negotiations: battle with pirates is constructed differently in official reports for strategic advantage.
• The case sparked a diplomatic dispute between England and Tuscany over jurisdiction, but English merchants and shipmaster colluded to defraud customs in exchange for a favorable GA judgment.
• “There’s clearly some fraudulent elements...a deal outside of the courtroom...you’ll get your General Average declaration, you’ll get all your expenses paid, and in return you’re going to help us defraud the Customs House.” (35:24–38:41)

12. Complementarity of GA, Insurance, and Risk-Bearing Loans (38:41–41:58)

• Rather than replace each other, different risk-management tools were used together and for different social and financial functions.
• Example: Merchants might use insurance and c-loans alongside GA, creating an interlocked, flexible system within a tightly-knit merchant community.
• “Rather than seeing these as a series of tools which sort of won a number, new tool displaces another older, outdated tool—actually, it’s cumulative.” (Dr. Dyble, 41:58)

13. The Book’s Journey: Teamwork, Research, and Reflection (41:58–45:31)

• Dr. Dyble’s research was part of a broader, collaborative ERC project; working closely with other scholars inspired new insights, while leaving space for originality across jurisdictions.
• Taking time to let ideas mature post-PhD made the book “clearer and a lot more to the point.” (42:12–45:31)

14. Core Message of the Book (45:31–47:59)

• The complexity of maritime legal and economic history resists simple, linear narratives.
• “Those of us...try to reach too quickly for easy answers...I think what I found researching this book is how much the political economy of a jurisdiction...shapes maritime law in a port, and how much political and economic interests modulate what’s going on.” (Dr. Dyble, 45:48)
• Cautions against flattening periods or leaping to theory without grappling with intricate, messy evidence.

15. Future Research – “Avenir" and Commercial Orientalism (47:59–50:58)

• Dr. Dyble’s new project explores how European merchants used the narrative of avenir—purportedly illicit Ottoman taxes—as a way to manage or misrepresent risks and costs.
• Posits that avenir became a label for delegitimating non-European practices, instrumentalized by Europeans in disputes both within and across empires.
• “This narrative of the avenir is used by Europeans in inter-European disputes...a kind of commercial orientalism...” (Dr. Dyble, 48:11–50:58)

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Notable Quotes

• “General average is a legal procedure which gets called into play when there’s been a sacrifice of property to save a maritime voyage...It’s a principle of shared sacrifice for shared benefit.” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (03:59–05:45)
• “GA is actually this amazing window onto maritime networks, onto commodities and also...the lives of individuals at sea.” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (08:12–09:26)
• “I think there are many reasons why we might want to reduce our reliance on institutions in order to explain economic change...People keep using the old instruments as well, including things like General average.” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (11:23–13:12)
• “...working with quantitative data is a bit like...going on a walk about a steep mountainside in that the view at the top is amazing, but you really have to work to get there...” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (15:28–17:02)
• “Livorno is this particularly fascinating petri dish…a city like Izmir might be another point of comparison...” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (19:06–21:39)
• “The merchants are annoyed because...coming to Pisa is inconvenient. However, what we find...is that...the parties have actually agreed in advance what the outcome should be, and they simply tell the consuls what outcome should be achieved...” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (21:58–25:09)
• “...these [normative] texts are in conversation [with practice].” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (29:06)
• “Once the calculation is signed off, the official part is sort of over.” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (31:50)
• “If there’s an intentional sacrifice made voluntarily to save the common venture, then that is worthy of reimbursement...Philosophically, this is actually quite difficult because intentionality is internal and difficult to prove.” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (32:05–35:05)
• “[General average, insurance, and c-loans]...actually, it’s cumulative. So each new innovation...adds something to the arsenal, but the others keep being used as well...” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (41:58)
• “Our explanations have to take account of the complexity and that things don’t always move in a linear direction and don’t follow the theory.” — Dr. Jacob Dyble (47:59)

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Timestamps of Major Segments

• 02:11–03:39 – Author introduction & book motivation
• 03:39–05:45 – What is general average?
• 06:09–09:26 – Legal boringness vs. human drama, historical value of GA records
• 09:26–13:12 – Challenging institutional evolutionism
• 13:40–18:28 – Working in Pisa’s archives, sources' challenges, and rewards
• 19:06–21:39 – Livorno’s cosmopolitan development and free port status
• 21:58–25:09 – The Consuls of the Sea court, merchant vs. learned law, rubber-stamping
• 25:38–29:06 – Legal texts: Roman law, medieval customs, interaction with practice
• 29:06–31:50 – Practical steps in a general average case
• 31:50–35:05 – Voluntariness, intentionality, and the balance of power
• 35:05–38:41 – The Alice and Francis microhistory and jurisdictional frictions
• 38:41–41:58 – GA’s complementarity with insurance and c-loans
• 41:58–45:31 – Book’s research history and writing process
• 45:31–47:59 – Takeaways: complexity over easy theory
• 47:59–50:58 – ‘Avenir’ and the new project on commercial orientalism

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Conclusion

This episode offers a thorough, engaging overview of Dr. Dyble’s sophisticated history of general average, showing how one “humble” legal instrument can reveal quotidian realities, cosmopolitan encounters, and evolving forms of risk management—and how the historian’s craft lies in teasing out the complex interplay of law, economics, and politics behind the dullest (or most dramatic) archival files.

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Transcript

[Lewis Wade]

So good, so good, so good.

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[New Books Network Announcer]

Numbers welcome to the New Books Network

[Lewis Wade]

hello and welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. I'm Lewis Waid, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg and the author of Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France. We're in Insurance War and the Atlantic empire under Louis XIV. It is my pleasure to be speaking today with Dr. Jacob Deibel, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua. We'll be talking about his wonderful recent book, Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe, General Average in Law and Practice in seventeenth Century Tuscany, published by the Boydell Press. Jake, thank you so much for joining us today.

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

It's a pleasure to be here to kick things off.

[Lewis Wade]

Could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your book?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah, of course. So as you said, I'm currently a researcher at the University of Padua. I'm an early modernist and interested in particular in Mediterranean history. Mediterranean maritime history. So looking mostly at merchants, mariners, slaves and other very mobile categories of historical actor. And so I'm particularly interested in economic history and social history and sort of above all cross cultural contact and cooperation and whether I think that how that sort of both how commerce both creates but also transcends sort of cultural boundaries and the book is a monograph based on research I did several years ago as part of my PhD. And the idea of the book was to look at managing maritime risk, which is historically associated with insurance, which developed in the maritime sector. But while insurance is important, it wasn't the only way people managed risk. And so that is what the book is about.

[Lewis Wade]

Fantastic. At this point, I should clarify to listeners that Jake is a good friend of mine. We both studied maritime law and commerce in our doctoral research, so I know firsthand the challenges of studying these sorts of instruments. And so the main instrument you study in the book is general average. Would you be able to give us a quick overview of this instrument?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah, of course. So general average is a legal procedure which gets called into play when there's been a sacrifice of property to save a maritime voyage. So what does that mean in practice? The archetypal example is a jettison of cargo. So if we are both merchants on a ship, we get into difficulty, perhaps in a storm, and I throw my cargo overboard to lighten the ship. It wouldn't be fair if I had to bear that loss alone. So once we're back on land, this general average is declared, and everyone agrees or is compelled to partially reimburse the sacrifice I made because it was made on behalf of the collective. So if the sacrifice is worth, say, 20% of the whole voyage, then all the interested parties have to contribute 20% of their interest in the voyage towards making good my loss. So it's a very ancient or it's often portrayed in the literature as a very ancient procedure. It's a fiction mixture of Roman law and also Islamic law. And then some versions of it are even found in Japan, for example. So we can say at least that this principle of shared sacrifice for shared benefit can be found in different normative systems, but the actual rules about how that should take place have differed quite a lot over place and time.

[Lewis Wade]

I'm really grateful, tj for giving us such a great overview of general average, because it isn't always easy to explain. And I'm sure this was a broader challenge you had to face throughout the research project. How did you overcome the difficulties of working with this quite abstract legal concept and making it relevant to historians with no prior knowledge or even interest in the technicalities of maritime law.

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah. So it's certainly viewed even by maritime lawyers today, as a sort of obscure branch of maritime law, even though the underlying principle is quite intuitive, I think, actually. And the thing is, although today it might be quite obtruse, most people haven't heard of it. The thing is, it's sort of ubiquitous and it's a very humble procedure, but it, but it has this sort of constancy across time which is somewhat illusory. But anyway, that because something like insurance was sort of, is sort of new, is very present, seems to have sort of made the difference. Lots of people have looked insurance, but no one had really looked at average. But as you say, there's a bit of a challenge there because it can sound a bit dry to some, it can sound a bit niche to others. So I think in terms of overcoming that challenge, it's. Well, firstly relating it to a bigger story which is I confront in the book, which is the idea of there being a lex mercatoria, the idea of the there being a sort of universal merchant law invented by merchants, administered by merchants, which is quite a sort of powerful narrative, a powerful myth in legal studies, was one way of drawing people's attention to this instrument. Because of GA's supposed longevity and supposed universality. It's one of the few proofs that we actually have of this concept. I argue in the book that it's not actually a proof of the concept at all, but by relating it to that broader discussion. I think the other thing about ga, sorry, GA is, is general average

[Lewis Wade]

for

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

those in the know. The thing about GA is that in order to carry out this procedure, you have to know what's on the ship, who loaded it, where it was going, what its value was. And in those jurisdictions where GA is administered before, before courts, I. E. Not handled privately in arbitration, that creates amazing historical records of a time that we just don't really have for the early modern period. So GA is actually this amazing window onto maritime networks, onto commodities and also onto basically the lives of. Of individuals at sea. Because when a captain gets into port, shipmaster, I should say, and has to declare a ga, he has to write a fairly detailed report of what's actually happened so that the court can declare him not liable. And so this gives us an insight into life on board these ships and into some quite human stories which I think do really grip people even outside of academia.

[Lewis Wade]

Besides the lex mercatoria, a big part of your contribution is to push back against the so called evolutionary story of risk told by new institutional economics. What is this story and how do your findings depart from it?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah, so as you say, so the book has a sort of economic history dimension and a legal history dimension. And on the economic side I do engage a lot with this idea of new institutional economics. So Basically, this is a sort of school of thought in economic history, sort of beginning in the 1970s, I would say, with the work of Douglas north, which has been particularly influential. I think proponents of this, of this school, have won, I think, at least four Nobel Prizes. And basically what Douglas north was interested in was how institutions helped to push societies towards or away from growth. So he argued that historians needed to move away from sort of neoclassical models, looking at markets, to look at sort of the constraints which shape economic behavior, particularly sort of political, but also cultural institutions. And it's interesting, so there's a methodological aspect. But he already had a certain idea about how over the long run, institutions had enabled growth. So he sort of saw Italy as being a sort of developing sort of proto. The instruments are sort of a proto capitalism, we might say, which were then sort of perfected in northwestern Europe, in England and in the United Provinces. And this idea has been recently sort of re elaborated in work by Ron Harris in his book Going the Distance, for example, where he argues that there were these sort of endogenous institutions which we find kind of everywhere. Then we find again in northern Italy, sort of more sophisticated instruments being developed which then travel. And then we find instruments like the Joint Stock Company, which he claim can only be created within the sort of institutional matrix of early Bond England and the Netherlands. And the reason I push back against this is because I think there are many reasons why we might want to reduce our reliance on institutions in order to explain economic change. But one of them is that people keep using the old instruments as well, including things like General average, but not only in the risk management field. Ceeloan is another instrument which carries on being used, although it's not studied very much, or mutual indemnity clubs. This idea of a sort of sequential sequence is perhaps not very convincing. And what I find in the book, what I argue in the book, is that actually merchants used all of these instruments at the same time and partially to address slightly different needs. And in fact, a single merchant might sometimes act as an insurer, sometimes insured, sometimes might give a c loan, sometimes might receive it. And it's only really in the 19th century that we see this sort of separation of roles and insurance becoming its sort of own sector. That was quite a long answer, but I hope it's clear.

[Lewis Wade]

Very much so. You conducted much of your research at the State Archives in Pisa, and I remember that the balcony of your apartment had a perfect view of these archives. Some historians would love to be in such close proximity to their sources. While I'M sure others would absolutely hate it and feel like their sources were haunting them at all hours of the day. Could you tell us a bit about your personal relationship with the archives and the sources you drew on there?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Okay, yeah, interesting question. So, yeah, I was using sources in the archives in Pisa. The reason for that, by the way, is that Tuscany has some of the richest GA collections in the world. I think only Genoa could really rival Tuscany, certainly on in terms of quantitative data generated by GA records. And the other really interesting thing about Tuscany is that it has the freeport of Livorno, which is a famously cosmopolitan port. So looking at Livorno allows us, in a way, to also look at other GA practices coming from outside of Tuscany. So why was I in the archive in Pisa? Well, the reason is that jurisdiction over average was in the remit of the Consoli del Mar, the Consuls of the Sea, an ancient maritime tribunal which was housed in Pisa, which is sort of about 20 kilometers away from Livorno. So I was mainly based in the archive in Pisa, as you say. I virtually lived at the archive, not just figuratively, but almost literally. They were my neighbors. And, yeah, I have to say, as I say, this was basically sort of the first research project abroad that I did when I had begun. And so it was very tough at the beginning. Average records can be very exciting, as I said. Perhaps, you know, you get a case where a ship was chased by a corsair or where somebody was a sort of fight on board or, you know, battles with pirates. So you do get this sort of slightly daring do drama on the high seas. But then you get a lot of cases where it's just like, oh, there was a storm, we threw some beans overboard, and now we're. We're coming to port to tell you all about it. And obviously a lot of quantitative data as well. And I feel like working with quantitative data is a bit like. It's a bit like going on a walk about a steep mountainside in that the view at the top is amazing, but you really have to work to get there, and you can't see the view while you're moving through it. So I have to say I found working through the sources quite difficult from that point of view. And I was also committed to, as part of the research project I was working on, to creating a large database which involved transcribing all the cases, which are often very repetitive. You've realized that there's a lot of legal boilerplate in there, that perhaps if you were left to own devices, you may just Skip. However, I must say that that gave me that contact with the sources. Really having to lean into them and learn about them in all their detail proved incredibly useful because you do notice tiny details which could be quite revealing. And you also just gain a real familiarity with that institution and with that source type, which I hope has enriched the book a lot. And given, given a very firm grounding in the, in the sources. It's also been very useful since then when moving on to other sources to have that very solid foundation in a single font.

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[Lewis Wade]

I think what you say really will resonate with a lot of historians who are listening. And I think it'll also be very valuable for those who are listening, who are professional historians, because these are the challenges that historians face. Right. Not every source is going to be riveting, but in fact, the seemingly boring sources can be really important for establishing the quotidian reality. And so, yeah, I think this will resonate with a lot of people diving into the book. Then in the first chapter, you introduced the reader to the world of 17th century Livorno. Why was Livorno such a distinctive and as you mentioned before, cosmopolitan port?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah, so Livorno is a really interesting case study. So in the 16th century, it's still virtually nothing more than a fortress in a swamp. It has about 400 inhabitants in about 1560 and 100 years later, it is the boom town of the, of the Mediterranean, basically. So it sort of shoots up out of nowhere. And it's planned in quite a top down way by the Medici family who rule the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, who plan it as a kind of ideal city and deliberately try to attract foreign merchants. They make a couple of very famous declarations in the 1590s inviting all types of merchants, Jews, Turks, Frenchmen, Spaniards, all to come and settle in Livorno, which virtually they do. So it's got very powerful resident foreign nations. The Sephardic nation in Leborno is very notable. There's a very large English community, a Dutch, German community, an Armenian community. So it's even by the standards of port cities, particularly cosmopolitan. It's also a free port, which initially means that people of whatever nationality are free to come and settle and trade later on. It means that goods don't pay import and export taxes or they only pay a single flat tax. And generally the freeport, sort of, the culture of the freeport is one of sort of license and a certain liberty to simply sort of carry out one's business. So that is why Livorno is this particularly fascinating petri dish, if you like, for a Mediterranean historian. And I think it's part of a general 17th century phenomenon. In particular, a city like Izmir might be another point of comparison where you see these, these mediating cities grow up very sort of cosmopolitan, quite free from central control in some ways, and ports of transit which sort of respond to this particular sort of historical moment.

[Lewis Wade]

As you touched on before, Livorno's maritime trade came under the jurisdiction not of a court, Livorno itself, but the court of the cozili del Mare, 20 kilometers away at Pisa. How did the court function? And did the distance between Pisa and Livorno pose any challenges for merchants or for the court itself?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah, so the court was staffed by two Florentine nobles who were meant to have some experience in commerce. The evidence that, that I and other scholars have looked at so far suggests that they, they did. And they, the nobles would not have a formal legal education. At the same time it was staffed by university educated jurists. So the Chancellor would have a university education in law, for example. So that makes it quite an interesting site to study maritime law, where you've got this rhetoric, if you like, of sort of merchant justice. Merchants themselves say that they don't want university trained jurists involved in their justice, that they, they use summary justice and that a good merchant sort of doesn't involve himself in all the sort of subtleties of, of learned law. And so you've got this sort of weather front. If you like actually of sort of supposed merchant justice meeting learned justice. So it's an interesting court. It is in Pisa. This annoys the Florentine nobles. They. It's not necessarily a particularly attractive posting. And in fact, I found a very amusing play from the 1660s in which the main character is this sort of a sort of dirty old man type figure who would have been known to the patrons of the theater from other productions. And in this episode, which is nicknamed the Comedy of the Consul, he becomes a Consula del Mare di Pisa. At a certain point, he's sort of bothered by his official administrative duties and just decides that he's gonna pick the name out, pick the name of the winner out of a hat. So he picks out the name of Meliakim the Armenian. He says, oh, I declare him a just a noble fellow. And one of the other characters says, like, oh, you know, this is no way to conduct justice. And he says, ah, well, this way the loser can only blame his bad luck and never the consulate. So it was a bit of a butt of a joke. At the same time, the merchants are annoyed because they are all in livorno by about 1640 and coming to Pisa is inconvenient. However, what we find when we examine the cases closely, particularly from the second half of the 17th century, is that corporate. Quite often it's very clear that this is what's going on. The parties have actually agreed in advance what the outcome should be, and they simply tell the consuls what outcome should be achieved, what has been agreed between them and the consuls simply rubber stamp it. Why do they want the rubber stamp? Because they want to export the judgment to other centers. They want to be able to present a general average declaration in, say, Messina or Genoa. And say this has already been adjudicated by the consolid del Mare in Pisa. And so actually what we find is that though this is official justice and not arbitration, actually private agreement remains a very important part of what's going on.

[Lewis Wade]

You move on in the book to the heroic task of exploring the various legal works and compilations that governed general average across Europe, starting from Roman law and working up to legal texts from Italian jurists in the early modern period? Of course, you can't cover it all right now on the spot, but could you give us a sense of how legal works across time and space differed in their treatment to general average and which works were especially important for 17th century Livorno?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah. So obviously a bit of a starting point and remaining a point of reference throughout the early modern period is of course Roman law. So the Digest of Justinian, which is basically a compilation of the opinions of some classical Roman jurists, but when they become compiled by Justinian, go from jus to lex, that is, to positive enacted law. So in a way, the Digest flattens these, the sort of temporal aspect of these opinions that they were from different people in different times, and simply makes them one uniform Roman law. So there's a very famous part of the Digest, a chapter known as the Lex rodia, the Rhodian law, because according to this chapter, it actually was Based on the 9th century BC law of the Rhodians. So this remains an important point of reference for general average. Probably what scholars of Roman law think is that general average expanded over time, as much as we can tell in Roman times, so that it gradually became a more capacious instrument. What do I mean by that? I mean more expenses could be shared between participants using the general average mechanism. Then, however, things change. In the Byzantine period, it seems like general average becomes a bit more like mutual insurance, so that any kind of sacrifice can be shared by the participants. But I don't look at that too much. I move straight onto another collection, an important collection of medieval customs. And this is the Libra de Consolat de Mar, which is a collection of Western Mediterranean customs, sort of gradually compiled in the late Middle Ages and which becomes a generally accepted authority in many places. So Giuseppe Casareggi, who's a Genoese jurist from the 17th century, for example, says that the libra was received as lex, as positive law. I think we can take that with a bit of point, a pinch of salt. But anyway, it does underline how important this collection was in the early modern West Mediterranean. At the same time, I don't think that these collections are necessarily. I dedicated a chapter to exploring GA in a normative text, but as I went on to argue, actually there's a dialogue here with practice, and the jurists are sort of struggling to make practice and theory match up. And that process, certainly in Southern Europe, isn't complete. In the 17th century, the period that I'm looking at, I wouldn't say here that sometimes there can be a sort of false dichotomy between the learned law and between practice. Historians, especially in the Anglophone world, love to say, oh, you know, look at the practice. It was totally different from the theory. But I would say that this is more. More of a dialogue. They are in dialogue with each other, sort of the needs of practitioners and the ideas of the jurists, and the texts are in conversation.

[Lewis Wade]

I'M glad you bring up practice, because chapter three of the book shifts the focus to the actual practice of general average in the Vorldone. So let's say that I was a shipmaster on a voyage and to save my vessel from wreck during a storm, I jettisoned some cargo, the beams you referred to earlier. I then docked to the next port, which happened to be Livorno. What would I have had to do then? You've touched on this briefly before, but could you walk us through the process underpinning the general average procedure that would have followed?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

So after the accident, as you said, you needed to put into the first safe port of call to create your accident report. In English this is known as a sea protest. In Italian it's called consolato because it was often made in front of a consul or testimoniale. And there you create. You basically, before a recognized authority, create a document narrating the vicissitudes of the voyage. And often this is witnessed by three members of the crew or passengers on board who attest that this is in fact what's happened. So that first port of call may not be a scheduled point port of call, there may not be interested parties in that port, and it would be highly irregular, not unheard of, but very unusual to carry out the general average there. Usually you then move on to the first port of call and declare general average there. So actually, among the records of the Consigli del Mare, we find lots of consolati, lots of sea protests made in other centres, then presented to the court. The court accepts that this is true and this is an authoritative document, and then proceeds to the second stage, which is the making of the calculation, which is where we find out who are the interested parties are, what they have on board and who owes what to whom. And so these are the two pillars of the procedure, sea protest and calculation. Then when the calculation is done, the receivers, the merchant receivers in the port, pay their contributions and maybe the shit moves on because there are other scheduled ports of call. You present as the shipmaster, you present that calculation and that judgment of the Consid del Mare and other ports to receive other contributions. We don't know too much about exactly how the contributions, how that stage of the process took place, because once the calculation is signed off, the official part is sort of over. So the actual, actually, physically how money ended up changing hands is a bit unclear, but that is basically how the procedure works.

[Lewis Wade]

Something you touch on in the chapter that is very interesting is the issue of whether a given act of sacrifice that theoretically underpins an instance of general average is in fact voluntary. What was at stake in discussions about this?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah, so this is a sort of philosophically quite interesting question. So, as I hinted at the beginning, sort of general averages is conceived of primarily for physical damages. So throwing cargo overboard, cutting a mast, cutting away an anchor. But the logic can be extended to other expenses. Virtually any expense which was made to bring the ship safely into its destination is a sacrifice made for the general benefit. So this is what we see, I think, over the 17th century is that GA is expanded to contain more and more things. And what's difficult is that GA has to be a. An intentional action. If, for example, there's a storm and some of the cargo gets damaged by water, that's a casa scultur. That's virtually, let's say, an accident. And that's just bad luck. You know, the owner of that cargo has to bear that loss. However, if there's an intentional sacrifice made voluntarily to save the common venture, then that is worthy of reimbursement. However, philosophically, if you think about it, this is actually quite difficult because intentionality is internal and difficult to prove. So, for example, and the shipmaster plays on this element because the shipmaster has a lot to lose if they're found liable for those damages. So what we find is that we find a lot of events being described as intentional, which might more naturally be described as simply an accident. So, for example, the captain saw what he thought was a corsair on the horizon, so he set all sail to head for a safe port, and during that maneuver, one of the masts broke. That might more naturally be described as simply an accident, but in this case can be described as an intentional act made to save the ship. And because the shipmaster is a single figure who has such a strong interest in the case, whereas the merchants are many, they're spread out. Their contribution may not end up being that much. There's a power imbalance in the procedure itself, whereby courts tend to favor this very eager party, the shipmaster, against the interests of the merchants. And this is why I argue that GA is a particularly important tool for the transport sector. In the early modern period, we quite often find cargo being insured, but we rarely find ships being insured. And even today actually hull the ship side, the transport side, tends to be protected in ways other than insurance, for example, through mutual indemnity clubs. So I think risk sharing is a particularly important aspect for the transport side. Whereas historians, economic historians tend to focus on merchants as the protagonists Chapter 4

[Lewis Wade]

of the book builds on this discussion by looking specifically at the case of an English ship called the Alice and Francis, which underwent a general average procedure in Levordo in 1670. What happened, or rather what had happened to the ship? And why did the general average procedure that followed become a diplomatic hot potato?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah, so this is probably the most fun chapter to write, actually. So it's a little micro history of a ship called, as you said, the Alice and Francis, with its shipmaster, Stephen Dring, who seems like a fairly colorful character, and it's what Eduardo Grandi calls an exceptional normal. So basically a case for which exceptionally rich evidence exists which allows us to uncover many of the normal dynamics governing interactions in the port. So the Alice and Francis is coming in convoy from England to Italy and then onwards to Izmir. It gets attacked by seven pirates, or Corsairs rather, coming out of Algiers. It, the convoy successfully fends off the corsairs and then an accident report is made in Alicante, which is a scheduled stop. Then in Livorno, the ship declares a general average. And here it's very interesting because comparing the two reports, we really see how the officials in the court helped the shipmaster to unlock a declaration of ga. So the. The Alicantia report is very tame. It says how the motion of the cannons meant that the ship started taking on water. This was a very old ship, two years later was actually turned into a Royal Navy fireship. Then in the Livorno declaration, all the. The crew heroically fight off the Algerine pirates for two whole days. They use thousands of pounds worth of gunpowder, sustain all kinds of damages in protecting the ship and thereby declare a general average. And what's interesting about this case is that there's clearly some fraudulent elements and ends up becoming. We're not exactly sure why, but the principals in London become aware of what's gone on and complain to Charles ii, who instructs his resident in Florence to complain. And effectively, what I argue in the book, what we discover in the book, is that this is all part of an English attempt to gain consular jurisdiction over maritime cases between Englishmen. So it's an attempt to expand English maritime jurisdiction, which on this occasion is repulsed. But then there's another question which comes up, which is why are the English merchants in the port not outraged about what's going on? And what we discover is that there's been a deal, a deal outside of the courtroom. Because what we find is that a boatman in the port of Livorno is arrested trying to fraudulently smuggle a lot of English merchandise past the Customs House. So effectively what the merchants have said is, we'll do your deal. You'll get a nice General Average declaration out of this, you'll get all your expenses paid, and in return you're going to help us defraud the Customs House. And so that sort of enables us to see the dynamics that are really underlying this case, this struggle over maritime jurisdiction and this collaboration collusion between shipmasters and merchants in the port.

[Lewis Wade]

I must say this was a chapter I especially enjoyed reading. And it leads nicely to the final chapter which zooms out to look at how General Average interacted with other risk management instruments, including marine insurance, which will be probably the most familiar to listeners. You touched on it before, but could you tell us a bit about how these tools could in fact be complementary of one another?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Basically, I find a couple of examples in which linking various court cases allows us to get a better view of the distribution of risk in a voyage. And so quite often. So in one particular case you find two merchants who freight a ship to go to Syria. In this, in, in the case I look at, in that chapter, I look at a few different case studies, but this one particularly stays in my mind as a good example. So they freight a ship, then they go to another merchant and ask for a large C loan. So that's a risk bearing loan, another one of the tools in the arsenal of the merchant. Then that merchant ensures the C loan among another group of merchants who also end up putting cargo on the ship. And so you've got a group of insurers who also overlap with the, with the loading merchants, someone who's given a C loan and then GA is also called into action on behalf by the shipmaster. So you get this interlocking system of GA insurance and C loan working together and they all fulfill slightly different functions. So obviously the C loan gives cash up front. It means that the shipmaster isn't hanging around in port waiting for his GA payments. The person who gave the risk bearing loan simply pays the shipmaster and the shipmaster moves on. And then the person who made the C loan maybe initiates a series of court cases with insurers to try get the money out of those. And in the meantime this is all part of the same community in which sort of I scratch your back and you scratch mine. Sometimes I'll be your insurer, sometimes you'll be my insurer. Maybe I'll already have an interest in the cargo as somebody loading cargo, and I'll also decide to Insure it. So I think this is a good example of the advantages of different systems. So ga, for example, rather than arguing over lots of different extraordinary expenses, they all just get bundled into ga. C loan allows the shipmaster to be paid straight away. That C loan is partially insured in order to spread the risk in the maritime community. So I think rather than seeing these as a series of tools which sort of won a number, new tool displaces another older, outdated tool. Actually, it's cumulative. So each new innovation, if we like to say, if we want to say that adds something to the arsenal, but the others keep being used as well, and some they are both used together, but also have their own specialisms.

[Lewis Wade]

I'm a big believer that every history book has its own history. And I know your book was greatly shaped by the time you spent in Exeter and in PISA for your doctoral research. Could you tell us a bit about the story behind this book and how it came to be?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

So, as I say, the reason I ended up working on averages, I don't think I ever would have found them on my own, was because I was working as part of Maria Fuzzara's project, ERC Consolidator project, which aimed to look at general average in a sort of European comparative perspective. And that brought. Working as part of a team brought a lot of advantages and also challenges. Obviously, what's great is that we had 13 or 14 people who all knew what general average was in the beginning. And we're all working on it in different contexts, sort of feeding information to each other, giving each other different perspectives. It also made it more fun. It also made it more enjoyable than it would have been had it been purely a solo activity. And I think working on that team, year after year, you developed sort of bonds of trust which look stronger than if you just met people at conferences or something. Obviously, there are also challenges, one of which is that you've got several other people who are also publishing books on similar material, albeit in other jurisdictions, other geographical contexts. So obviously I was a little bit worried that the book wouldn't perhaps be contributing something new or would at least be one of many books concentrating on the same topic at about the same time. But in actual fact, that didn't. That didn't prove to be a great disadvantage. Firstly, because each jurisdiction, it was so different that actually these sources were very different and the histories that came out of those sources were very different. And secondly, because actually, I think it can be very fruitful to have people concentrating on the same thing at the Same time, because inevitably they're going to have different perspectives, different interests. And perhaps, obviously we don't tend to replicate studies in history. Perhaps if we disagree, we might study the same thing and argue against one of our colleagues. But once something's been studied, it's sort of been done. And actually you need to justify why what you've looked at is entirely original. Whereas actually, I think in this case, we did develop original work. But it was actually really helpful to all be thinking about the same problem at the same time. So I submitted my PhD in 2021, and then I didn't really feel very much like turning the. The material into a book straight away, even though there was career pressure to do so. I was quite happy in the end to maybe have left things a little bit of time. Not so much that I moved on and forgot about it, but giving things enough time to settle, to clarify in my mind the structure of the book. And I think the book is a lot clearer and a lot more to the point as a result of that. Just a bit of time to take the pedal off the gas and just let the thing sort of compost in the back of my mind.

[Lewis Wade]

I absolutely agree. It's a very concise book. You make a lot of really important arguments and contributions in a remarkably short space. So I can only congratulate and commend you for that. So if readers took away only one thing from the book, what would you want that one thing to be?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Interesting question. I think those of us who are interested in maritime law and in the development of the maritime economy, I think we try to reach too quickly for easy answers. I think that's definitely the case in economic history, particularly people who are perhaps coming from an economics background. But I think because economic history and legal history tend to consider very long periods, we tend to flatten things and we tend to try to leap straight to the theory without letting the evidence get in the way. And I think what I found researching this book is how much the political economy of a jurisdiction or a nation state or a city state, how much political economy shapes maritime law in a port, and how much political and economic interests modulate what's going on. For example, in the fourth chapter with the Alice and Francis, the reason the English are able to get away with this is because of their economic importance in the port, and they don't want necessarily the English state to be monitoring them at all times. And you've got to understand those power dynamics and power imbalances if you're going to understand how maritime Law is working in the port. So I think the. Hopefully what the book contributes towards is we have to be open to a bit more variety. We have to resist linear narratives and basically sort of see how things zigzagged. Obviously we can't just say, throw up our hands and say, oh, it's complicated. You know, people are relying on us to try and give us to try and draw a comprehensible shape out of this material. But our explanations have to take account of the complexity and that things don't always move in a linear direction and don't follow the theory.

[Lewis Wade]

To round things off, let's look briefly to the future. I know you're now working on some exciting research that builds on what you found in the archives on General average. Could you tell us more about this new research project?

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Yeah, of course. So it's something I've been working on for a couple of years now. Had a couple of articles come out and got some more in production. So it's interesting actually, when I was. So the Italian word for average, as in a maritime average, is averia. Incidentally, the English word average, meaning a mathematical average, comes from the maritime context, not the other way around. And sometimes in these averia I would find references to avenir. And at first I thought, is this just the orthography? Someone's not got very neat handwriting or someone's made a mistake. And actually then when I looked it up I discovered that these avenir were apparently sort of illicit taxes gathered by sort of out, supposedly out of control local officials in the Ottoman Empire and that European shipmasters were using general average as a means to defray these expenses. So I started looking further into these avenirs and basically what I'm arguing, this project real time, is that the word avenir is a European rationalization of what's going on in the Ottoman Empire and it's actually a conscious misrepresentation of what's going on. So basically the word avenir was used to cover all kinds of things which the Europeans didn't like in the Ottoman Empire. It's used as a label to delegitimate certain actions and practices made by religious others. So I find the word avenir used to refer to the activities of Ottoman Muslims, but also Jews, whether Ottoman subjects or not. And what I have come to believe is that actually this narrative of the avenir is used by Europeans in inter European disputes, particularly with the authorities at home. And so what I've sort of labeled this as a kind of commercial orientalism where sort of a series of stereotypes about the Ottoman Empire are used instrumentally by European traders to defray costs and manage risks. So the project is called Avenir Commercial Orientalism and Law in Early Modern Europe.

[Lewis Wade]

Well, we greatly look forward to seeing where this project takes you, Jake, and in the meantime, it's been a real pleasure to speak with you today. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Thank you.

[Lewis Wade]

I've been your host, Lewis Wade, and we have been discussing Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern General Average in Law and Practice in seventeenth Century Tuscany, published by the Boydale Press.

[Dr. Jacob Deibel]

Until next time, thank you for listening

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