Article of the Month - January 2023
“General Average, Human Jettison, and the Status of Slaves in Early Modern Europe,”
(Jake Dyble: Diritto Privato e Critica del Diritto, Università di Padova)
Jake Dyble “General Average, Human Jettison, and the Status of Slaves in Early Modern Europe,”
The Historical Journal 65 (2022): 1197–1220.
Keywords: Early Modern Mediterranean • Mediterranean Slavery • Atlanic Slavery • Race • Capivity • Maritime Law • Commodification • Tuscany • Britain • Livorno • Pisa
Abstract:
This article proposes a transition in Western European thinking on slavery by examining the legality of slave jettison and its indemnification in the seventeenth-century Christian Mediterranean and comparing this with the late eighteenth-century Atlantic. Under the law of general average (GA), a shipmaster may legally sacrifice cargo or parts of a vessel to save a maritime venture from peril. GA then mandates that the costs of this sacrifice be shared proportionally between all interested parties. However, the status of human cargo with respect to pre-modern GA remains unclear, beyond the well-known example of the eighteenth-century British slave ship, the Zong. A jettison, a moment of crisis, forces the slave's dual conception as person and property to be definitively resolved. This article uses historical GA records and early modern jurisprudence on human jettison to shed light on the legal conceptualization of the slave in the two contexts. It finds that seventeenth-century jurisprudence generally ruled against slave jettison and that such a jettison could not be indemnified. In some Mediterranean operational contexts, slaves were excluded from GA altogether. To a certain extent, this finding justifies the conceptual divide historians have placed between Atlantic bondage and earlier forms of slavery.
Nomination Statement:
“General Average, Human Jettison and the Status of Slaves in Early Modern Europe” deals with the practice and theory of the institution of GA (General Average), the jettison of cargo to save a maritime vessel and the proportional division of the losses between the parties invested in the cargo. Based on 17th century cases, Dyble explores the Florentine local variation of GA, shows how that local custom competed with learned theory and law codes on GA (Roman, Medieval, and EM), reconstructs a lay interpretation of these legal theories, and discusses Early Modern legal manuals on GA in order to highlight differences between the GA in the 18th century Atlantic versus the 17th century Mediterranean. “GA” offers an important exploration about European perceptions of slaves, arguing that in the Mediterranean, slaves were not considered commodities. In so doing, the article contribute to a growing body of scholarship on slavery, maritime commerce, and law that seeks to study the slave trade from a regional and comparative perspective.
Authors’ Comment:
This article grew out of my PhD work on early modern maritime law, undertaken while a member of the European research project AveTransRisk. The project was looking at maritime averages, a previously much neglected source for maritime history. The law of averages determines how extraordinary costs incurred during a sea voyage should be split between the interested parties, and we were especially interested in ‘General Average’ (or GA) which stipulates that sacrifices made to save the ship from peril are both licit and liable to be borne collectively. It is a very ancient law, common to Christian and Islamic jurisdictions, but was largely assumed to have been unchanging and uncontentious and thus hadn’t sparked much interest among legal or economic historians. After finding Average documentation concerning slaves in the Pisan archive, I realised that this could provide a new perspective on the question of commodification in slavery, especially given that the infamous legal case concerning the British slaving ship Zong was also a GA - a fact often missed even in specialist literature on the subject. Reflecting on the findings post-publication - that slaves were excluded from GA in the Mediterraean as they were not ‘merchandise’, in contrast to Atlantic practice - made me appreciate anew the fact that law has historically bent itself to suit the economic needs of the politically well-placed, and social categories are often shaped in response to this rather than the other way around: ultimately, excluding enslaved people from GA benefitted influential Tuscan slavers, whilst the opposite was true in late-eighteenth-century Britain.
As I suggest in the article, similar analysis applied in the case of Genoa or Portugal could yield even more interesting and apposite conclusions, as these polities were deeply implicated in both Atlantic and Mediterranean enslavement. I think there is also a lot more to find out about slaves and property relations. Slaves were always property, but the meaning of this certainly changed over time, and comparison of doctrinal and operational sources could be a revealing line of inquiry here too.
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