Portuguese-Dutch Protection Costs in Sixteenth-Century Maritime Trade

Gijs Dreijer, Leiden University
Rodrigo Dominguez, The University of Utah

This paper analyses a unique source to measure protection costs for trade between Portugal and the Low Countries during the mid-sixteenth century. Trade between Portugal and the Low Countries had been common in sixteenth-century Antwerp, at that time North-Western Europe’s trade metropole, the Portuguese natio (merchant community) played a major role by importing sugar and other commodities. Shipping between Lisbon and Antwerp was therefore a fundamental axis of connection between the South Atlantic and Northern Europe, but how the shipping sector was organised and how risk was managed is not yet known in any detail. This paper seeks to fill part of this gap by analysing the so-called Registo de róis de avarias de navios of the Portuguese natio in detail. As was the case with many foreign merchants, the use of marine insurance to manage maritime risk was common in sixteenth-century Antwerp. Recent literature has however pointed out that merchants used many different and complementary instruments of risk management at the same time. Among other techniques of risk management, one commonly used by merchants and shipmasters were varieties of Averages, of which General Average (GA) is today the best-known. In the Iberian Peninsula, however, forms of Averages were also developed to cover protection costs for ships, such as artillery and convoy ships. Well-known is the so-called avería levied by the Seville Consulado for the fleets sailing to Spanish America. However, both the Portuguese and Castilian nationes based in the Low Countries used similar instruments, allowing us to study protection and transaction costs. The granularity and detail of the data present in the ledgers allows us to estimate the relative efficiency of the shipping sector in Lisbon and Antwerp, as well as to measure protection costs for the trade between Portugal and the Low Countries during the mid-sixteenth century

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 12. Political Economy, Trade, and Development