(Source: University of Helsinki)
Via the
University of Helsinki, we learned of a call for papers on the history of free
ports, which might also be of interest to legal historians. Here the call:
A Global History
of Free Ports: The Development of European Political Economy in the Atlantic
and Asia
University of
Helsinki, Centre for Intellectual History, 6-7 June 2019
The free port is
a curious phenomenon. It developed historically in Italy during the waning
years of the Renaissance, when competition to attract trade from the burgeoning
Atlantic sphere prompted some states to open their ports to foreign merchants
and their goods. In time, the free port came to be defined as a territorial
exclave endowed with its own economic policies, often of a liberal (or even
libertine) cast; that is, as a place where merchants could do business with
minimal interference from state authorities. From Italy, the free port spread
to the rest of Europe; in the eighteenth century to the Caribbean; and, in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the rest of the world. But though the
free port is a curious institution, it is not a marginal one. Many of the most
famous ports in history—from Genoa and Hamburg to Singapore and Hong Kong—were
free ports. Such ports were central to the trading systems in which they were
situated, whether in brokering commerce between distant localities, plugging a
host state into the circuits of international exchange, or servicing a network
of more regional ports. And ultimately, the free port is one of the ancestors
of the modern special economic zone, of which there are more than six thousand
in the world today. The history of the free port is global and deserves to be
told as such.
This conference
aims to explore the history of political economy between Europe, the Atlantic
and Asia. How did European geopolitical schemes and visions of commercial
competition and peace spill over to the Atlantic and Asia between the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How did European states model their
national interests by establishing free entrepots or free ports? How was the
reform of European commercial competition theorised by statesmen and political
writers, and how was it operationalised through fiscal mechanisms, legal
constructions, trading institutions, and merchant networks?
We invite
scholars to propose papers dealing with these subjects. Rather than focus on
one single aspect or context, we prefer broadly thematic or comparative
analyses that are of interest to a wider academic audience.
Abstracts (of
ca. 500 words) and titles may be sent by email to koen.stapelbroek@helsinki.fi
and ctazzara@scrippscollege.edu by 31 October 2018. Invited speakers are subsequently
requested to provide short papers that will be pre-circulated among
participants. A selection of revised papers will be included in a book
publication, based on this and related academic conferences.
More info here
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