The Burden of Risk: Early Modern Maritime Enterprise and Varieties of Capitalism

Abstract

This article discusses the complex issues behind the relation between national and global economic histories and the challenges of a comparative approach. On examining different national approaches (Italian and English) to the management of the early modern maritime sector, it will argue that this comparison allows a privileged view into different varieties of capitalism, highlighting fundamental differences in attitudes toward wage labor and risk management that still influence different approaches to economic activities today.

An Integrative Institutional Framework of the Canada–US Business Performance Gap

“…It is reasonable to conceptualize this 19 th -century international economic system as a colonial GVC in the merchant shipping industry. As colonial GVC leaders, British shipping entities could accumulate experience-based knowledge and transferable international business skills from performing these and other general functions: integrating the varied upstream and downstream activities among networked British enterprises and their involuntary colonial partners, developing formal and informal institutions to structure and govern colonial and non-colonial trade relations; serving diverse domestic and foreign customers (i.e., British, colonial, and noncolonial merchants in need of transoceanic shipping services); and innovatively managing the elevated risks and uncertainties that emanate from international business operations, especially GVC-structured operations (Fusaro 2020;Reid 2017). On the contrary, their colonial business partners were restricted to incremental refinement or accumulation of upstream-specific knowledge and experience.…”

Introduction: Risk and Uncertainty in the Early Modern World

“…Moreover, as Maria Fusaro has argued, a great deal hinges on who bears the burden of risk and uncertainty in maritime and commercial enterprises. 14 Rather than seeing uncertainty only as something to be avoided, some authors like Jonathan Levy, as well as John Kay and Mervyn King, have more recently argued for the importance of uncertainty: profit and entrepreneurship are premised on the very existence of uncertainty, since uncertainty creates opportunity. 15 Furthermore, uncertainty left an indelible mark on social rituals and material culture, a theme taken up by Jessen Kelly in this forum.…”