Abstract

This article examines how maritime Averages – legal procedures that were quotidian but multi-centred and potentially complex – were managed in the jurisdictionally crowded Mediterranean. One suggested solution to this difficulty was that procedures were governed by the lex mercatoria, a supposedly universal body of customary merchant law which allowed disputes to be resolved according to a common framework: the debunking of this historical myth demands that legal historians elucidate more clearly how the problem of different maritime customs was resolved in a transnational environment. Evidence from seventeenth-century Livorno suggests that heterogenous maritime Average rules were overcome by mutual recognition of the decisions made in other jurisdictions even when these followed different rules. This was justified with reference to the «disorder» and «confusion» that would otherwise afflict commerce. «Order» here did not mean uniformity and ex-ante certainty of outcomes but rather general expectations that judgements made in other centres would be respected. Attempts by the English and French states to press for consular jurisdiction threatened – mostly unsuccessfully – to disrupt this system. The case buttresses certain lex mercatoria theories only in as far as it demonstrates that early modern state building had the potential to destabilise a functioning international commercial order: yet this order was guaranteed by a legitimating authority that only state-backed institutions could provide.