Defining the Unknown

A very important process of reform and legislation around 1660 provided the pivotal moments for England and France, when respective shifts occurred, turning economic activities in a state of nescience about “nation” into one where the nationality (of merchants, sailors and ships) became the central specified unknown.

Mercantilist Paradoxes: Known Flags, Unknown Nations

From the point of view of inquiring into the epistemics of nationality, the interdependency between the two-level system and the emerging systems of security production – Ottoman-European and Barbary States-European treaties, sea-passes and armed naval support –Footnote ⁴⁷ created several further administrative procedures. These were in constant interplay with the duty and customs system and the definition of the nationality of a ship, its cargo and its passengers.

National competition did not just need to play the protectionist card. It also pursued an expansionist agenda in terms of its nationality, and both lines of reasoning were partially contradictory. This becomes evident when analyzing the carrying trade and its gradual merging with practices of (ab)using a foreign flag. The carrying trade, the transport of other (“foreign”) merchants’ goods was of importance as was also the practice and possibility for “foreign” merchants to sail under the protection of one of the large naval powers.Footnote ⁴⁸ The English plied the carrying trade in the Western Mediterranean to some extent, mostly along the Italian coast or along routes from Livorno to non-European ports beyond the Mediterranean. The French did both on a much larger scale, as the attractiveness of their protection grew from the late seventeenth century until a period that was once termed the “French reign” of the Mediterranean after 1740.

The traditional sign of being under the protection of a given “nation” was the ship’s flag. The stronger the risk of piracy was, and the more resources that had to be used for the protection of the ships flying one’s flag, the more it was in the interests of a given state to ensure that a ship flying a French flag was also a real French ship – whatever a “real French ship” might be. And as the treaty system between the Barbary states and the European powers had evolved and the corsairs became more or less willing members of an international maritime law system, they became increasingly interested in being certain what was a French or English or Dutch ship and what was not, if they met one at sea. This was a fairly simple logic, but it resulted in continual communication about ignoring, want and the need for knowledge about those criteria.

From the given interdependency between inter-European competition and the parasitic piracy economy, one can derive, grosso modo, a rule that in times of significant pirate activity, when the transaction costs for security were high, it was more advisable to keep the number of those who profit from a given state’s valuable protection small, so as to act in a protectionist manner against the practices of flag borrowing. In times when pirate activity was low, it became profitable instead for the flag of a given state if many merchants from other nations sailed under its protection through increased duty revenues, the concentration and attraction of flows of merchandise and the symbolic “branding” effect of apparent domination at sea. No early modern state and port accounting calculated those relationships in a mathematized form in our period, but the general rules of relationship and interdependency were clearly perceived and explicitly articulated.

The Normative Framework

The first English-Algerian peace treaty that contained detailed provisions concerning encounters between Algerian and English ships at sea and the control of the pass was concluded for the Crown by John Lawson in the same year as the Act of Frauds was issued, on April 23 / May 3, 1662. Under its terms, Algerians were to let every merchant ship whose captain could provide “a pass, under the hand and seal of the lord high admiral of England” sail in peace. If such a pass did not exist, the ship was, nevertheless, supposed to go free if the “major part of the ship’s company be subjects to the King of Great Britain.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Following treaties repeat that latter clause.Footnote ⁵⁰ The first order by which Charles II instructed the Lord High Admiral and the farmers of customs about the procedure is from November 23, 1663.Footnote ⁵¹ Following those orders, when a ship wanted to leave the port of London for a destination in the Mediterranean beyond Malaga, several necessary steps had to be taken: “The Surveyor of the Port where the Ship lies must go on board, and examine and survey her, and muster the Seamen; then he must certify in Writing under his Hand to the Collector of the Port, the Burthen and Built of the Vessel, the Number of Men, distinguishing Natives and Foreigners, the Number of Guns, what sort of Vessel she is, &c.” The Collector then prepared an affidavit in which the Master’s oath to the truth of all noted particulars was testified.Footnote ⁵² This affidavit was next transmitted to the secretary of the Admiralty who checked if the master of the ship had returned all past passes previously granted to him. The secretary had to ensure that the ship was English built or foreign but “made free,” that its master was the king’s “Naturall Subject” or “Forreign Protestant made Denizon,” and that “two thirds of the marriners” were the king’s subjects. The secretary then issued against the payment of a bond – in 1682 that tariff was £50 for ships up to 100 tons, £100 for larger shipsFootnote ⁵³ – the sea-pass which the master had to give back after returning to the port.Footnote ⁵⁴ The first register of sea-passes issued by the Admiralty dates from 1662, but the extant series is interrupted between 1668 and 1683, and again between 1689 and 1729.Footnote ⁵⁵ The first register 1662–1668 and one may probably infer by that also the passes themselves, did not mention the destination of the ship.Footnote ⁵⁶ In 1682, the practice changed; the officers of the Admiralty were now to use a table that contained the same scheme of entries. Still, the destination was not mentioned. Instead, an entry indicated the current location of the ship (“Place shee lyes at”).Footnote ⁵⁷ After July 10, 1683, the alternative that it was sufficient if the “major part” of the men were English – which opened a door to case sensitive consular negotiations in favor of English ships without passports – was made invalid. Indeed, corsairs often rigorously seized ships in the early eighteenth century if they had no “proper Pass … altho she evidently appears to be a British ship” and confiscated their cargos.Footnote ⁵⁸ The pass system had stabilized at least by 1682/83; the passes remained in use until the middle of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁹

In 1717, a typical sea-pass issued by the commissioners of the Lord High Admiral read:

Suffer the Ship Royall George of London John Levett Master, Burthen about Two hundred & fifty Tuns, mounted with Eightin Guns and Nauigated with Twenty two men, seventeen his Majestys subjects, British Built, Bound to Affrica to pass with her Company Passengers, Goods & Merchandizes without any Lett, Hindrance, Seizure, or Molestation, The said Ship appearing unto Us by good Testimony, to belong to the Subjects of His Majestie, and to no Foreigner.Footnote ⁶⁰

This example also shows how the captain respected the rule of at least ¾ English men of the Navigation Act at the lowest possible limit – 16 of 22 would not have been enough – as foreigners were cheaper. The ⅔ rule of the sea-pass issuing instructions was overridden here. The difference between those several quotas remained. It also shows that quite often the ships left England with fewer than two men for each of at least sixteen guns, which would be here thirty-six men. If they entered like that London on the way back, they would have to pay the one percent duty of the Act of Frauds. Often, they hired still more men within the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁶¹ The problem of how to handle “English ships” without passes remained, as is evident already from the later treaties.Footnote ⁶² As those early eighteenth-century passes contain the destination of the ship, so did also the registers restarted in 1730, obeying a different notation system, following an order of December 18, 1729: a first destination (“Whither bound” directly from the place the pass is received at) and a second destination (“Whither bound from thence”) was noted in two columns. So, passes were now issued to ships for instance “of London,” currently lying in the “Thames,” heading for New England by passing the Straights of Gibraltar and then back to Lisbon. Or first to “Lisbon, New England,” counted as one first destination, and then to the West Indies. All ships now enrolled in the London Admiralty registers had to be currently anchoring at a port of the British Isles.Footnote ⁶³

Figure 1.1 and Figure 1.2 Two English Sea-Passes, left of 1717 without the upper part, on the right of 1719 with the upper part still attached (AN MAR B7/473). On the left are visible the two blue 6 pence duty stamps for issuing, which are not the bond to be left, the stamp of the Admiralty on the left and the number of the passport (Nr. 17675) as it was registered in the passport register. The only printed matter is the ship and title in the wreath of leaves; but the text below is nevertheless a form already written by the officers with blanks left to be filled in (names of ship and captain, dates etc.).

One may ask why the northern nations relied on the strongly formalized sea-pass system, while the French congé documents remained far less developed. The higher interpenetration of Atlantic and Mediterranean trade reveals a reason for this. As the Atlantic trade grew, it was first not necessary to demand a sea-pass from the Admiralty in London when coming from the plantations; a certificate from the respective governor or his representatives was considered sufficientFootnote ⁶⁴. This, however, was a simple document written in English like a French congé without the haptic element of two parts that had to fit together. A ship, coming from there “and trading to Portugal, the Canaries, Guinea and the Indies” without any such pass would be taken by the Algerians despite its clear appearance of British property.Footnote ⁶⁵ While the Romance languages were strongly present among the Barbary corsairs – themselves often renegades from Mediterranean countries – and as their lingua franca was itself a fluid mix of Castellan, Catalan, Italian and Arabic elements,Footnote ⁶⁶ documents from Mediterranean countries were more likely to be understood at sea, even if illiteracy was a problem. English was not a frequently spoken or read language on the North African shore. Consul Wisham recommended, in 1714, the issuance of real Mediterranean sea-passes and not only the said certificate to ocean traders coming from the Americas, Asia and Africa, because the Barbary corsairs “being not only entirely ignorant of the English Tongue, but even of the Characters of any Christian Language, can make no Judgment whether such Certificates are true or falses, and that the only mean whereby they can know <a> ship belonging to Her Majestys subject is by comparing the Indent of Passes with the Passes themselves.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The Admiralty and customs officers in British ports not only sought to determine the “Englishness” of the ships and their men, the administration also ensured itself by the typical early modern “last step” of assurance, the ship master’s oath. A promise under oath that the ship was English-built, belonged to the English, and that the necessary amount of men were English, served as a convenient capstone for the construction of the account books’ correctness. To a certain extent, it also replaced reality through its sworn statement. If it later proved to be wrong, the administration could always blame the master, but for the pass registers, the exact number of outgoing English and foreign men was saved. According to those rules, English nationalizing was successful. Nearly all importing and exporting into and from the Mediterranean was conducted by English ships as early as 1615. The English had lobbied with energy against any plan by Italian firms to be established in London.Footnote ⁶⁸ The nationalizing of the ships themselves took longer. Between 1654 and 1675, the share of foreign-built ships was between a third and the half of all ships leaving English ports, a proportion that fell from the 1680s to less than 10 percent.Footnote ⁶⁹ This indicates that the naturalization of ships – or, “making them free” – was of high importance; a large number of ships taken from the Dutch was “freed” in 1668/70.

The elite in Algiers and Tunis, the Dey, Bey, the milice and the Divan, was well aware of the European legislationFootnote ⁷⁰ and knew what the treaties stipulated. When the English government communicated the new rulesFootnote ⁷¹ for granting sea-passes to its consul in Algiers, Samuel Martin, in 1675, he transmitted this information to the Dey, provoking discussion in the Divan. The new Algerian ruler Bobba Hassan complained about the “many forraine shipps sayling under English Collours” but admitted that this could very probably not have been by permission of the English themselves as it was not in their own interest as the “true [sc. English] subiects found the lesse Employment for their shipping.”Footnote ⁷² This was a time when the French were attacking their Northern European rivals – Hamburg, the Dutch – which rendered the British flag especially attractive. Many ships used it even if many of their sailors and even their captains were not English.Footnote ⁷³ Such extensive use of a flag formally protected by the treaty induced the corsairs to bring ships into the Algerian harbor, and to distinguish there by closer scrutiny between “English” and “non-English” passengers. Applying in 1677 the clause of the 1662 treaty requiring a “major part of the ship’s company” to be English, they classified a ship like the English-built Susannah sailing from Livorno to Palermo with its English captain Walther as not English “because his number of passengers, & strangers exceeded the number of the English Men.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The rule that ¾ of the men on board had to be English was apparently quite successfully implemented on vessels arriving in and departing from England. But English ships within the Mediterranean, such as most of the Italian merchants based in Livorno, could and did depart more easily from those rules.Footnote ⁷⁵

The French were affected by the phenomenon of the borrowed or abused flag far more than the British. Before a ship left Marseille, it had to be checked by the commis of the lieutenant de la Marine. At least after 1681, there should have been a rôle d’équipage, a list of all men on board. The French counterpart to the sea-pass was the congé for the ship that was likewise issued against a certain payment according to a fixed tariff. The congé could, in theory, only be issued if two thirds of the men on board were French “currently resident in France.”Footnote ⁷⁶ From 1696, however, because of the system’s frequent abuse by foreigners, a different congé form was distributed with the inscription “Etranger.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The higher frequency of flag abuse was due to several causes: the partial free-port status of Marseille, the effective nationalization of the Levant import and export shipping by the English and their Levant Company’s monopoly, and the more fuzzy French legislation developing in a back-and-forth manner.Footnote ⁷⁸ A 1671 order prevented French merchants and ship owners from lending their name to strangers (“prêter le nom”), an old practice of foreigners using the “Frenchness” of a Marseille merchant for their own purposes. Immigrants to cities often tried to use the names and the signs of the privileged burghers and guild members. This forbidden practice was also called “prêter les noms ou marques.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Between 1671 (Ordinance of May 20) and 1727, this practice, usually exercised by way of counterfeit contracts, was sometimes defended absolutely, sometimes it was allowed again partially as between 1684 and 1717. Other regulations concerned restrictions of naturalization standards. Foreigners who had been granted a letter of naturalization but who had not really abandoned their domicile in their former homeland were deprived of the privilege of naturalization, a rule designed foremost against Genoese merchants who had apparently established a practice of dual nationality and residence, and enjoyed the privileges of flag use, protection and tax reductions of both places, and the ability to flexibly choose the best conditions for each given freight and voyage (royal declarations of August 21, 1718; February 1720).Footnote ⁸⁰ The 1727 declaration linked rules concerning the property of ships and the use of flags with very specific regulations about how to keep a register of the ship lists (“rooles d’equipages”) containing the names and nationalities of all men on board, from the captain to the passengers and every sailor.Footnote ⁸¹

The ways to undermine the rules relating to the distribution of congés were apparently much more multiform and frequently applied in the French case. Deviation from the ideal started right in Marseille, while for the English, it seems to have been more a question of difference between the London homeport and shipping realities in the Mediterranean.

A Comparative Look at the Medieval Conditions

To test the historical specificity and the new character of the 1660s regulations, it will be helpful to have a comparative look at earlier situations in the Mediterranean. As the sixteenth century was, from roughly 1492 (the Christian conquest of Granada) to 1574 (the Ottoman reconquest of Tunis) a period of unsettled circumstances along the North African coast, it is more enlightening to consider the late medieval period, before the Ottomanization of the region. Many caveats of “incomparability” may be brought forward, but on the other hand, the continuities of the corsair activities of the North African cities/kingdoms are striking.Footnote ¹²⁵ The Berber kingdoms of Fez, Tremecén (with Algiers, Oran), Tunis (Bugía), Granada (Almería) and their corsair attacks on European – foremost Aragonese – merchant shipping form the direct precursors of the early modern situation. The sixteenth-century Ottomanization meant mostly the implantation of a Janissary elite in the city states which took over much of the Berber seafaring and corsairing traditions.

The different ways of obtaining ransom from Berber captivity in late medieval times were (a) ransoming through individual friends, merchants, families,Footnote ¹²⁶ (b) ransoming through the religious orders, above all the Trinitarians (founded in 1198) and the Mercedarians (founded in 1218), but also through the military orders, (c) ransoming by help of corporative and municipal institutions, (d) ransoming through a monarch’s direct diplomatic intervention. In Spain, the alfaqueques had been professional ransoming mediators acting on behalf of the crown or of municipalities since the thirteenth century, but they mostly operated on the inner Spanish Christian-Muslim territorial border.Footnote ¹²⁷ Trinitarians and Mercedarians were late order foundations linked to the challenges of the crusades, and their only reason for existence in terms of competing with the established military orders was their specialization in ransoming captives.Footnote ¹²⁸ They were not very active in either the Holy Land or the Eastern Mediterranean, and if so, more as hospitallers than as ransomers.Footnote ¹²⁹ Despite the early foundation of the Trinitarians in Marseille, which is probably attributable to specific Provençal interests,Footnote ¹³⁰ their activity in the late medieval period is scarcely documented in either France or Genoa.Footnote ¹³¹ Consequently, following the spread of their monasteries in Spain, the Trinitarians formed, with the Mercedarians, whose origin and center had been in Aragón, a rather regionalized religious order concentrated on the problems of Aragón/Castellan/Murcia connections with the inner Spanish Arabic and the North African Berber corsair threat.Footnote ¹³² Even in this region of their main activity, we do not possess much certain archival evidence of their ransoming activities, even though largely retrospective, hagiographic and advertising publications of the orders claim that they freed several thousands of captives.Footnote ¹³³ The non-hagiographic documents that we possess from the fourteenth century show that the ransomed persons were in fact all from the dominions of the Aragonese crown in the Mediterranean, from Spain, Sicily and Sardinia.Footnote ¹³⁴ But none of the Trinitarian or Mercedarian sources spoke of their task other than as freeing “Christian captives” (not “Aragonese captives”).Footnote ¹³⁵ Municipal institutions are a different matter.Footnote ¹³⁶ The most famous of these is the Entidad Valenciana en pro de los cautivos, founded in 1323 and active until 1539, which organized the charitable collections from a city’s parishes for ransom in the form of efficient city-state bureaucracy. This became a hybrid between a municipal duty or tax and traditional church collection. Here, the money was reserved only for Christians of Valencia. Only if there were no more Valencian captives could the money be used for Christians from the kingdom of Valencia, preferably from the city’s neighborhood. Here a tiny proto-national element was evident, but in practice it was purely municipal.Footnote ¹³⁷ Diplomatic negotiations between the Aragonese kings and the Muslim kingdoms over peace treaties could seem most similar to early modern realities. The cedulae, the royal instructions to Aragonese ambassadors and the peace treaties themselves, show how the kings focused on the freeing of subjects from their territory as an act of the lord’s duty of protection.Footnote ¹³⁸ The normative form of the peace treaties is very different from the early modern treaties between the Barbary and the European states. The Aragonese treaties were formulated like conclusions of a peace following war. The liberation of captives was conceived in terms approximating the prompt exchange of captured warriors after a decisive battle. There were no precise regulations of future shipping or other exchanges, of ship control, and no pass system was inaugurated. The liberation of captives in those peace negotiations was not accomplished via ransoming either. Only the fact that the Aragonese envoys negotiated the number of freed captives in exchange for a proportional number of years of peace shows that both sides acknowledged a prolonged period of regular corsairing and the taking of captives instead of a situation of discrete war and enduring periods of peace.Footnote ¹³⁹ The selectivity of freeing and protecting just their subjects was therefore not born out of the context of inner-European and inner-Christian economic competition and the captivity market.

With good reason medievalists stress that the practice of mercantilism has its roots not in seventeenth-century England or France, but in twelfth- or thirteenth-century protectionist trade policies, for which not just Aragón but also the French kingdom and the Italian imperial republics Venice and Genoa were spearheads of development.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Aragón’s competition with late medieval Italian merchants is perhaps the most profiled example and anti-Italian Aragonese legislation, culminating in King Martin’s edict of January 15, 1401 can be seen in perfect continuity with the policies and practice of trade of the then leading seventeenth-century states.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Yet the lack of competitive proto-national semantics within ransoming correspondence suggests that the late medieval economic system of the Mediterranean as a whole cannot be understood as an already fully developed two-level system of international trade competition on the one hand and parasitic corsair activity on the other. The smaller naval capacities of both sides meant that exchange between them was more regionalized, and that inter-Christian competition was far less state-defined in the Mediterranean as a whole and in interaction with the Levant and North Africa in particular.Footnote ¹⁴² If Aragonese politics in North Africa has been characterized largely as an imperial economic enterprise,Footnote ¹⁴³ it had not been so in competition with European powers at this point. If, too, Aragonese ships were competing with Castellans and Italians and, from the fifteenth century, with the Portuguese, this competition was not linked in a triangular way to the confrontation with the Berber kingdoms as was the two-level system of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Even in quite similar structural situations and with actors such as Aragón, perhaps the “most modern” of all medieval kingdoms, one still cannot detect real genealogical precursors for the epistemic situation of the seventeenth century. National belonging remained, in medieval times, more in a state of nescience. If the processing of “the national” in all politico-economic communication did not first begin with the standards of the 1660s, this still was a moment of unprecedented enforcement wherefore it can be taken as an epochal turning point.

The Political Arithmetic of the Unknown: The French Nation

Attempts to shape the reified result of the investigation processes into national attributes were a final matter in which ignorance and specification of the unknown national played a crucial role in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mediterranean imperial administration. At first, this concerned the nation in its narrower sense, which derived from the medieval concept of naming a group from a given region or country within a plural, “multinational” context a natio: the nationes of a university, of a military order or, as here, of merchant colonies. By and large this only applied to the French side in our study as there were virtually no traces of the state dirigist organization of the “English nation.”

There are several thorough studies of different French “nations” in the narrower sense for Tripoli in Syria,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Tunis,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ AleppoFootnote ¹⁴⁶ and Constantinople,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ but there is no study of how the Paris/Versailles center tried to organize the nations in the échelles as a whole.

The decisive period of the French state’s empirical investigation into the échelles and of its major regulatory efforts was between 1685 and 1730. Since the late seventeenth century, the ambassador in Constantinople and the consuls regularly reported to the Chambre de commerce in Marseille and also to Versailles about the number and the character of the merchants in each place.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Sometimes a general numeric overview of all the French in the Levant was elaborated, but there was no established administrative practice of annually counting all French subjects.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ But sometimes, as in 1732, the French Ministry tried to obtain a current overview “of all the Frenchmen living in the échelles.” This was linked to the decision to send certificates of residence to all those who had not yet acquired one if they matched the criteria of bon-conduit.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ A constant perception of deception, of not knowing the exact realities is apparent and a continual desire for central control was notable.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Many unforeseen travelers, “vagabonds,” “français oisifs” – as they were called in the sources – were detected.Footnote ¹⁵²

The administration distinguished between several different units within their populationist regulation attempts. These included the number of whole maisons, i.e., firms in a city; the number of merchants; the number of foreign merchants under French protection; the number of craftsmen and servants who performed auxiliary services for the merchants; the dragomen, translators and enfants des langues; relatives and family members of the aforementioned groups; Frenchmen who were censured as not productive. The king and his ministers tried to regulate the number and even the quality of all those groups.

Regarding the most important group (the merchants themselves), after 1685 the Crown developed something like an ideal scheme of the population that it wanted to realize which one can summarize with the following parameters:Footnote ¹⁵³

• The overall number of merchants in each city should be “proportionate” to its economic trade balance.

• The merchants should not be younger than 25.

• They should be unmarried, preferably.

• They should be good Catholics and not Protestants.

• They should stay no longer than ten years abroad.

That implied that the sojourn should be made by a cohort of men aged around thirty, who would then return to France at a time when they were still young enough to marry, yet experienced enough to fill the full position of head of a Marseille firm. Excepted from this scheme were the consuls who were mostly older but who were also no longer real merchants after the arrêt of 1691.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Connected to this was the repeated prohibition against marrying in the Levant, aimed mostly against marriages between French merchants and Christian Ottoman subjects. The French state did not want the uncontrolled establishment and proliferation of a Levantine French population. For the most part, however, the administration feared the uncontrolled dispersion of French property in the case of death and inheritance. This problem found its way to the agenda most prominently during the Regency in 1716. There was first an ordinance of the Conseil de la Marine which decreed that every merchant who married an Ottoman subject would lose all his rights as member of the nation and to attend its assembly (August 11). An ordinance of July 20, 1726 followed that entirely forbade merchants and their family members from marrying any “daughter or widow, stranger or from that country, subject or not subject of the sultan or of the powers of the Barbary regencies, even those of French origin or who are born in the Levant and those regencies” during their Levant stay. Only the king could grant exceptions.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The merchants tried to oppose sections of the rules. Under this regulatory situation, a French merchant had perhaps just five years of productive time in the Levant. Their European rivals, they argued, would gain advantage through the extra time they could devote to gaining additional experience, power, connections and roots in the Ottoman world. As a compromise, the ordinance of 1716 fixed that a French merchant might go to the Levant at the age of 18, but that he would be admitted to the assembly only at the age of 25.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

As a result of all those differentiations, one can distinguish at least five categories of the “national”:

1. (1) Frenchmen who came to the Levant at the age of 25 and left after ten years. These had full access to the merchant nation’s assembly if they were active in commerce.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

2. (2) Frenchmen who arrived in the Levant at the age of 18. No access to the assembly.

3. (3) Frenchmen and women who were born to other Frenchmen in the Levant and had stayed there.

4. (4) Foreign merchants naturalized in France (a) with and (b) without special permission to conduct trade under French protection in the Mediterranean.

5. (5) Foreign merchants not naturalized but enjoying French protection.

The most intensive discussion concerned the actual number of merchants in the Levant. The government’s fear was always about the potential to lose productive subjects into the periphery.

The guiding principle of the French administration was the “proportionality” between the number of different kinds of individual Frenchmen (merchants, craftsmen [artisans et gens de métier]) and of the maisons on a corporate level, which meant the merchant factories and firms on the one hand and the volume of the trade done in a particular port on the other. The idea of proportionality developed from an embryonic stage to a quite elaborate version after the middle of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The process of fixing the number took a great deal of time and apparently remained undecided for decades. Nevertheless, the Ministry had quite concrete conceptions of misbehavior and rule transgression, such as the founding of new firms “directement [ou] indirectement” by splitting up an older one. Maurepas aimed for a “general rule [une règle générale]” regarding that perennial question about population and several times ordered the chamber and the Levantine outposts to refrain from actions that would create unwanted facts before that rule had been established.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The chamber acted with some dilatory tactics on that “projet de la reduction,”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ and Maurepas ordered that the Chambre should at least not distribute any new certificates to merchants other than to those who would join the ones already active in the Levant.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Finally, the inspector of the échelles, Pierre-Jean Pignon,Footnote ¹⁶² was sent to conduct census-like visitations of all the French nations of the Levant in 1740–1742,Footnote ¹⁶³ and to negotiate the question within the Chamber of Marseille.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The “proportionality” of the number of French residents conducting trade or associated with Levantine commerce had its parallel in the French court’s concept of the proportionality of the trade conducted as a whole.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

In 1740, several mémoires addressed this issue. The merchants typically argued against an artificial reduction of houses. They proudly reminded Maurepas and the King in Versailles of the historical process of their installation in the Mediterranean: they had achieved “a revolution” in Mediterranean commerce. While during the seventeenth century, the Dutch, the English and the Venetians had possessed a share of the overall commerce four times larger than the French, now it was precisely vice versa; the French had four times more. The merchants evaluated the overall size of Mediterranean commerce at 18 million livres (the proportion of foreign merchants sailing under French flag not included), and the net gain at 15 to 16 million. This was the result of their labors, and for that, they needed a stable number of merchants.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ One memorialist estimated the number of persons employed in the Mediterranean trade at 100,000. If one sought to reduce that commerce to less than half, it would not only affect the Mediterranean. As the current French commerce with Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the Americas would function only “in relationship and in proportion” to that of the Levant, the implications of reducing the Levant trade would necessarily lead to the stagnation of all French commerce. By “fixing the number of trading houses in the Levant,” he claimed, “one would also fix the [sc. all French] commerce.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The Chambre even evinced a form of self-perception that was similar to present forms of mercantile acuity: for a duration of thirty years it calculated an average of one percent economic growth which shows the use of a long-term memory and a correspondent regulatory idea concerning the amount of commerce as a whole.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Rather than cutting the number of merchants, one of the mémoires authors gave detailed advice about how the organization and the quality of several products of the Levant trade could be improved.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The danger of the planned reduction having deleterious effects was seen first regarding the international competition in the Mediterranean. Markets would be left to France’s competitors. Resulting from the 1740/41 discussion and Pignon’s visit, the number of the maisons was fixed in 1743,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ but still, the rule of “proportionality” behind that limit was disputed and not rationalized in a mathematical way.

Only in a Mémoire sur le commerce de Tunis from 1765 does the mathematical calculation of proportionality become visible. This author implemented the idea of the “normal non-war year” expressed by Maurepas in 1733. First he calculated the overall average import volume for the ten years from 1755 to 1764, at 862,499 piastres per annum. A quarter of this was attributable to four French factories, and the rest to the community of 2,000 Jewish merchants from Spain and Italy. Export revenue was calculated to about 234,187 piastres. For the four years of peace 1754, 1756, 1763, 1764, disregarding the impact of the Seven Years’ War, average annual French import revenues were higher, 359,529 and not 213,348.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The author judged that an increase of the number of merchant houses was advisable but remained undecided between six or eight as the optimal number and he displayed no idea of a formula or equation to decide the matter. In any case, the mémoire shows that the idea of proportionality developed from the early eighteenth century to the last third of the century from a simple wording or phrase into a form that necessitated the precise analyses of the economic past and future prognostics for a given échelle.Footnote ¹⁷²

The general political aim pursued is not surprising. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the usual populationist concepts for metropolitan France centered on increasing the population as far as the agricultural production could allow. After the expulsion of the Huguenots, in France one usually never finds the kind of overpopulation arguments by pro-colonialists that are known to have circulated in England around 1600, when overpopulation and depopulation arguments were in balance. Avoiding the loss of people to the échelles was precisely in line with that general idea.Footnote ¹⁷³ One can practice populationist politics without political arithmetic, even without knowledge about the number of inhabitants.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ It is not that general aim, but the how of administrative practice seen here in the échelles that can be called astonishing at this time (1720/40). What can be witnessed here is an embryonic form of applied quantitative political “laws” of arithmetic combined with an enduring political desire to also shape a given population qualitatively.

Thierry Martin once put forward the question of whether there ever really was French political arithmetic. The usual answer was that it could be found after 1750.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ The findings here presented from the Maurepas administration seem to contradict this claim. Was there an earlier comparable form of applied political arithmetic in Europe? Political arithmetic itself was “invented” and proudly advertised by William Petty and Charles Davenant in England as early as 1690.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ There are some passages in Petty and Davenant that show ideas close to those applied by the Maurepas administration. These concern the delineation of a given population into productive and unproductive sections and the question of how to increase the number of the former and to decrease that of the latter,Footnote ¹⁷⁷ a plan that corresponds with Maurepas’ continual repetition of orders to get rid of the “français oisifs” in the échelles. Generally not much is known about the early reception of the English political arithmetic in France before 1750.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Petty was fascinated by the idea of proportion in the sense that he thought square roots to be inscribed into the nature of things. This was a reasoning not related to practical application.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In the flood of French political economy literature that started to pervade the public sphere after the Montesquieu choc and the year of rupture and takeoff in 1750,Footnote ¹⁸⁰ one only occasionally finds echoes.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Vauban, often mentioned as an appropriate candidate for a real French political arithmetic in parallel to the classical English authors, offered in fact many calculations about the regularities of population growth, and his taxation plans also contained ideas about just proportions. Once again, these calculations did not lead to considerations of practical implementation and there was no combined inductive-deductive generation of populationist laws in relationship to states of a given trade.Footnote ¹⁸² The general enquêtes performed to survey the population, in addition to the natural resources, monuments and curiosities of France in 1716–1718, 1730 and 1745, all with the participation of the country’s intellectual avant-garde and its institutions, mainly the Académie des sciences, cannot be classified as being conducted according to principles of political arithmetic. They were counting the population, but not calculating in the sense that political plans relating to it were guided by certain rules derived mathematically from what had been tallied.Footnote ¹⁸³

Brian distinguished between three steps of development of political arithmetic: (1) Cartesian accounting as present with Vauban around 1700; (2) experimentation present in surveys like the one conducted under the controleur général Orry in 1745; (3) progressive abstraction from the stated facts, an analysis of the causes, the comparison, and finally the identification of regularities and abnormalities which he did not find in France before 1770 with the abbé Terray.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The characteristic feature of political arithmetic in the sense of step three is to consider a “population” as an object of nature that obeys rules similar to those physicists were searching for from the Padovan school to Galileo and Newton.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ This was the case in early forms of probabilistic calculation of life expectancies in given cohorts of populations from Graunt to Huygens and de Moivre. Even there, however, it still took a long time to form mathematical functions that would approximate life expectancies and annuities instead of using and improving life tables. And it still took longer until mathematical laws like that were begun to be implemented in institutional administrative practice.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ But what is visible in the Maurepas administration concerning the Levant trade is just fitting into that step of development: Rules active in the nature of trade and economy were to be found in the periphery. Next, normative rules which had the desired effect had to be formed accordingly.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Finally, the generated rules were supposed to dictate the realities, in movements backwards from the center to the periphery. Those were now half-normative and half-empirical rules, rules fitting the “macroeconomic” framework as one might call it today.

All that said, one would be tempted to depict the Maurepas administration’s efforts to shape the French Nation in the échelles as a small but important “political arithmetic revolution” of French government. This was not just a speculative philosopher’s abstract idea, but a practice. It was not just a rigid normative ruling;Footnote ¹⁸⁸ it not only gathered data through queries, enquêtes, tables and columns of numbers, but it did so with the aim of generating socioeconomic rules like experimentators in the laboratory through empirical investigation and abstraction. It predated Brian’s third step by roughly forty years. This means one may answer Martin’s question in the affirmative. Yes, there was a French political arithmetic, but earlier in practice than in theory. And that happened in France’s periphery or with respect more to the empire than to the core of the country. The tiny size of the population abroad, their high mobility and the absolute dependency of the merchants abroad on the crown’s protection within the Ottoman lands presented a better object for “scientific” populationist experimentation than the homeland itself.

By conceiving of the nations in the échelles as a whole to be organized and shaped by such general rules, they were dismantled of their medieval corporative identity of merchant colonies from a given region (nation in the narrower sense) and transformed into parts of the allegedly well-regulated and controlled body of the nation, of France abroad. This becomes apparent in a late mémoire written by Pignon, who was perhaps the closest collaborator of Maurepas in the Levant. In this text, written during the 1750 grain crisis, Pignon shows that he conceived the work that had to be done from 1720 not only as a technical modeling of numbers. Instead, he now used all that language that is characteristic of the later eighteenth-century construction of modern nations that one usually associates with the times around the Seven Years War.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Political economy had to correspond to the “génie de la Nation” and one had to be careful to utilize commerce to augment the good and suppress the bad parts of “le caractère même de leur Nation.” He reminded his audience about the necessary “union” among the merchants of the French nation, endangered by its own interests.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ The seemingly materialist and technical political arithmetic reduction of merchant families to calculable numbers went now hand in hand with an early enlightened thought that aggregated the merchant nations into the Nation as the newly constructed subject of History.Footnote ¹⁹¹

One can thus see a remarkable development. Around 1650/60, the hitherto nescient concept of nationality was transformed into a conscious specified unknown, in different ways in the English and the French case. It became a question and a matrix against which reality was continually measured and tested. In asking about the unknown nation, the national became more and more reified. It could become, around 1720/40 an object of abstract reasoning. An awareness of its constructedness grew. Finally, the reification of the national could lead, in the French case, to a new quasi-material object of political arithmetical calculation. Paradoxically, the aggregation of autoreferential unknowns could reach such a state of shapable, malleable concreteness. Ab ovo, there is no “nation” of anyone born, but the mercantilist practice of continually asking about and ascribing it started a process of administrative communication, building, in a manner of speaking, on the void. At its end a second level was reached, a second-degree process emerged in which the reified nation, as result of the aggregated results of classification and attribution, could be planned, shaped and calculated regarding its arithmetic, physical and finally even moral character.

From French Grotianism to the Property of the Mediterranean

There are few French theoretical politico-economic texts, however one might define them, before 1750. Some decades ago, Perrot demonstrated how the one important candidate for such an early theory, Montchrestien (published 1615),Footnote ¹⁹⁴ was almost unknown and rarely cited by eighteenth-century bibliographers of the then newly established discipline of political economy. They all started with Melon, Boisguilbert or similar early eighteenth-century authors, while the extension of Bodinian thought into economics by Montchrestien was forgotten.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The one and nearly only author cited in several mémoires right until the times of Gournay is Richelieu.

Richelieu’s Testament politique was published for the first time in Amsterdam in 1688. It had been known and certainly circulated in manuscript form among the French political elite before.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ The parts of the Testament which go beyond all the political authors writing and publishing in Richelieu’s own circle in the 1620s and 1630s, and even beyond most who wrote later until the times of Louis XIV, are the chapters on Economy, Navigation and Trade (second Part, Chapter 9, 5–7): all other prominent French authors and intellectuals of that time – Guez de Balzac, Boisrobert, Hay du Chastelet, Chapelain, Cardin Le Bret, Philippe de Béthune, Hersent, the anonymous author of the Catholique d’État, Louis Machon and Gabriel Naudé – think in quite purely political terms of reason of state and post-Machiavellian and post-Bodinian discussions of sovereignty; there is no “imperial political economy” to be found with them.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ That is why the 1688 publication of Richelieu’s Testament could make a “fresh” impression at a time when Colbert was already dead and many elements of the Testament had already been realized, and that is why this text could still be a reference in 1750, not only in veneration of the mighty cardinal, but also because it was still functional concerning the political economic foundations of French imperial expansion. There was virtually no other good text at hand.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

Richelieu started the fifth section of his work on “Sea Power” with the question of who possesses the empire of the sea.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Richelieu’s own way of reasoning operated through examples rather than through systematization. The central example came from the times of Henri IV. When Henri IV sent the Duke of Sully to England in 1603 to honor James VI/I’s accession to the throne, a patrolling English rowing barge stopped Sully’s ship in the middle of the Channel and commanded that the French white flag be removed from the top mast in order to honour the English king as “the sovereign of the Sea.” When Sully, who thought as ambassador he was exempt from that sign of humility, refused, the English captain enforced his order with a barrage of cannonballs which “cut through the heart of all good Frenchmen.” Starting with that example, Richelieu then reflected about possible solutions for such situations: French ships close to the English coast having to lower their flag, and vice versa, English ships close to the French coast theirs, or, a rather empiricist-statistical solution, that the ships of a smaller fleet would have to lower their flag upon encountering ships of a larger fleet anywhere at sea. Richelieu finished his discussion of this point by concluding that the king just has to “be strong at sea” regardless. Whatever might be a solution by what was later termed the international maritime law, the political answer had to lay in the expansion of naval armaments.Footnote ²⁰⁰ He proposed maintaining forty ships in the ocean and thirty galleys in the Mediterranean. As it is well known, the actual realization of those navy plans happened under Colbert and Seignelay.Footnote ²⁰¹

Bearing in mind what has been said in an earlier section on flags and signs of nationality, it is remarkable that the ship’s flag was the principal iconic sign chosen by Richelieu to introduce the section of his treatise on international trade and naval competition in the two seas that he suggested considering separately, the Ocean (meaning the Atlantic) and the Mediterranean. In this example, which is followed by an analysis of competition between the English, Spanish, Dutch and French, Richelieu condensed the central distinctions of we/them, of internal/external and of foreign/home. The sixth section addresses “Commerce as depending of the Sea Power.” Through that order, Richelieu made clear that commerce and commercial competition was a filia potestatis, and was subordinated to naval military strength, conceiving commerce as part of state power as was typical in the French tradition.Footnote ²⁰² Following the major division between “Ocean” and “Mediterranean” which would later also be the principal division within the French Ministry of the Marine (Ponant/Levant), Richelieu first dealt with the (possible) colonial Atlantic and North European trade, then the Mediterranean Levant trade:

Richelieu’s views of the Levant has attracted less attention in recent years, but this passage is a clear indicator that the Testament is an Anti-Montchrestien and an Anti-Razilly on what concerns conceptions of imperial outreach into the Mediterranean as Henri Hauser demonstrated in 1944.Footnote ²⁰⁴

Montchrestien had pointed out that the French Levant trade with the Ottoman Empire, Egypt and the Barbary Coast would stimulate the economies of those hostile countries. One could observe, he noted, that when French trade ceased, all the societies of that region always became destabilized, with the outbreak of “brouilleries, seditions, et guerres civiles.” Relying on the basic mercantilist idea that it is detrimental for a country to let money flow out and foreign goods enter, he underlined that, in this particular case, the matter would be even worse as this trade would be “totalement ruineux” for the French and of great advantage for the enemies of Christians.Footnote ²⁰⁵ He then proposed complete European protectionism as a Europe/Orient blockade. French, Italian and Spanish manufacturers should answer the demand for silk, and the wool production of Southern France should be augmented so that France could withdraw completely from the Levant trade. Europe could stay apart from Muslim countries in complete economic autarchy. This done, “those excessive sums of gold and silver which are leaving France will remain there.”Footnote ²⁰⁶ Montchrestien judged the Levant trade therefore to be completely damaging and superfluous for the French economy and, even worse, to Christianity as a whole, because it strengthened the hostile Muslim world.

The Testament developed its concept of the French trade empire in the Mediterranean in a completely opposite way, relying on several manuscript mémoires written for Richelieu on Levant commerce, one of them excerpted at some length. Against the idea of a European anti-Ottoman blockade, Richelieu argued that Levant goods were not luxuries for France but necessities. It followed then, that the import/export balance was positive for France and that the money (or rather literary, the silver) invested into the Levant did not come directly from France, but from Spain. From here French merchants obtained the silver merely through the sale of Levant goods. Marseille had grown with that commerce, Levantine merchandise was re-exported with a 100 percent profit margin, and therefore many craftsmen and sailors were fed by the Levant trade. Thus, Levantine commerce was necessary. While Montchrestien had argued for the complete reorientation of France’s maritime trade to the Atlantic only about two decades after the Dutch and English entry into the Mediterranean, Richelieu’s Testament had reinforced the Mediterranean perspective, a position which would prove to be realist in the long run. Also suggesting the promotion of France’s ship building industry, the final paragraph of that chapter is devoted to the second level of the Mediterranean economy. To “clean” the Mediterranean of the Barbary corsairs, Richelieu argued, it would be sufficient to dispatch a squadron of ten galleys which would start patrolling each April from Gibraltar to Corsica, Sardinia and along the Barbary coast.Footnote ²⁰⁷ The bibliography of French printed works on political economy does not list almost any important work touching on maritime trade between the time of the Testament’s composition and Colbert, with the exception of Jean Éon’s (Mathias de Saint-Jean’s Ord. Carm.) Commerce honorable (1646).Footnote ²⁰⁸ Colbert knew the Cardinal’s TestamentFootnote ²⁰⁹ and his memorialists referred to Richelieu’s Levant politics as exemplary even before the publication of the Testament.Footnote ²¹⁰ But as the Testament itself relied heavily on manuscript mémoires prepared for the Richelieu government, the Colbertian administration can surely not be understood as an “application” of the Testament’s “theory.” It was instead a new osmotic cycle between more “theoretical” works, longer analytical mémoires and avis and everyday correspondence and orders. The many mémoires concerning the reform of the Levant trade written for Colbert’s use from within and outside the first embryonic Conseil de Commerce in 1664 always thought it necessary to stress that the correct organization of commerce would prevent France from losing money and/or silver pouring out of the country.Footnote ²¹¹ The first point of d’Oppède’s central 1662 mémoire for Colbert cited aboveFootnote ²¹² concerned the duties and tolls of Villefranche (Villafranca) requested by the Duke of Savoy and the similar coastal duties for the Grimaldi of Monaco. They hindered the free access of Marseille ships to their home port by forcing them to stay 100 miles off the coast. They were perceived as a sort of “tribute” of the king’s subject to foreign princes and as an insult to the “authority of His Majesty and to the French name.” D’Oppède’s minutes argue:

The sea was free. As a result, the 1662 assembly argued, said princes should not be allowed to levy tolls one hundred miles off the coast. Those formulations, betraying a degree of legal expertise (droit public / droit des gens) were very probably composed by d’Oppède himself.Footnote ²¹⁴ It was, in fact, still the Grotian language of “freedom of the sea” used here as it had been of importance for Richelieu. As Thomson has shown, it was used in the 1620s as a weapon for forcing the strong re-entry of French maritime power and trade into the Mediterranean. Bearing in mind that the 1662 mémoire already incorporated all the measures of the 1669 edict, one may argue with good reason that the main “frame of thought” in which d’Oppède/Colbert acted was still very similar to where the Richelieu administration had left the issue around 1635, when the Thirty Years’ War and the Fronde had interrupted a good deal of commercial politics in general. The combination of the language of the freedom of trade and of protectionism in the 1669 edict proves to be the extension of the Grotian legacy which, itself, embodied that bifurcate and somewhat dialectical framework.

Richelieu’s Testament remained the fundamental reference for a long time. In 1700, Pottier de La Hestroye referred to Richelieu in praise of the Cardinal’s support for the founding of merchant companies in 1642 and his homage to Marseille as where the Phoenicians had established their trading colony and where Caesar had entered France.Footnote ²¹⁵ The donneur d’avis Adrien Cazier used Richelieu’s Testament as his latest reference in his 1710 proposals for reform addressed to the King.Footnote ²¹⁶ The Abbé de St. Pierre wrote a whole commentary on the Testament, albeit not on the Levant trade chapter.Footnote ²¹⁷ Melon referred to the Testament in 1734, commending the Cardinal’s efforts to build up the Navy.Footnote ²¹⁸ And the Cardinal’s legacy was well-remembered by French Levant specialists. When in 1731, the King sent Duguay-Trouin on a military and political-cultural expedition to the Levant, a member of the Lemaire consular dynasty wrote a mémoire (Observations sur le Voyage des Eschelles de Barbarie). Lemaire referred to Richelieu’s Testament Politique, citing the central (hidden anti-Montchrestien) passage:

The chancellor of the Cyprus consulate and the future consul of Algiers, Lemaire, was again referring to competition with the English. The French were eager to achieve superiority over the English in the important drap trade with the Ottomans and North Africans, and Provence had recently surpassed England in terms of production. Following Richelieu, Lemaire stressed the state’s interest in the trade, showing that economic competition was also competition for political predominance. The proximity of Provence to the Turkish lands gave an advantage to the French concerning their knowledge of transport costs and Ottoman tastes. If they proceeded in this manner, Lemaire argued, the French could totally exclude the “draps d’Angleterre en Turquie” and make themselves “masters of the Levant commerce.” Already by 1731, the English were allegedly maintaining their position in the Mediterranean “rather by political reasons to compete over the terrain with us [sc. the French] than for their own utility.” Besides the purely economic advantage gained, the French might also acquire “superiority and almost full ownership of the Mediterranean Sea.” As the British parliament would only accept increased military spending when economic interests had to be defended, according to Lemaire, they would withdraw from the Mediterranean as soon as the French took over the drap trade. “To remain the masters of the Mediterranean Sea seems to be a considerable object for the State.” The French as masters of the sea should remain the only option for trade with the Turks, and the only power to influence the decisions of the Ottoman Porte. As there were ten times more French subjects in the Ottoman Empire than of any other nation, the establishment of French hegemony in the Mediterranean would, Lemaire maintained, be only logical. The English in turn would, perhaps, even give up Gibraltar and Port Mahoney after some time if the costs of maintaining those possessions notably exceeded their commercial profits.Footnote ²²⁰

Lemaire used the Grotian Richelieu to express an absolutely un-Grotian vision of the maritime trade, France’s sovereignty and its imperial growth; there was no use anymore in camouflaging expansion with the language of free trade. It was now primarily a space to be conquered. The idea of “ownership, property” was applied to the whole sea. This explicitly contradicted the Grotian understanding of how the Romans had conceived of the sea: As will be discussed below, Grotius’ central point was the re-enforcement of the original idea of the sea as a res communis, a thing common to all and indivisible, of which no one could claim and acquire as property. Lemaire’s argument even went beyond the British and Iberian seventeenth-century adversaries to Grotius who had never claimed the property of the whole sea for their prince, but only the dominium over some coastal areas. Instead, Lemaire opted for the conquest of the “property” of the whole Mediterranean through commercial, followed by political, domination. This was a clear plea for a French Mediterranean maritime empire.

So, while French anti-Habsburg men of politics used the idea of a free sea in the first half of the seventeenth century as they supported the Dutch against the Spanish in the Mediterranean, by the turn of the eighteenth century, they tended to use a diametrically opposite argument stronger than Selden had formulated it. While it is usually acknowledged that the modern “imperialist” vision of foreign trade would, in the long run, follow a successful path from mercantilism to free trade,Footnote ²²¹ one sees here a different intermediate step during the eighteenth century. This was, perhaps, even a more imperialist policy based on a harsh opposition to free trade, and aiming at the monopolist domination of economic space.Footnote ²²² That this vision was re-used during the 1751 crisis is telling, and, unsurprisingly, Gournay himself still referred to Richelieu in his mémoire concerning the rivalry between France, England and the Netherlands, just after citing the Ciceronian locus classicus on maritime empire (“qui mare tene[a]t rerum potiri necesse est,” Cicero: Letters to Atticus X, 8 [Cumae, May 2, BCE 49], translated into French by the abbé Mongault in 1714 as “Celui qui est maître de la mer, le sera tôt ou tard de l’empire”).Footnote ²²³ To those observations, one could add French projects to conquer parts of North Africa and to build colonies during the eighteenth century. There was a long-running discussion about which of the Mediterranean empires would buy the islet of Tabarca from the Lomellini. The small French possessions as the Bastion de France were then usually called “colonie.”Footnote ²²⁴ This markedly imperial self-understanding of France in the Levant even reached, at some particular points, plans for terrestrial conquest of Egypt or the whole Ottoman Empire, as is known from Leibniz’ famous Consilium aegyptiacum. Such grandiose schemes, however, remained unrepresentative for the predominant eighteenth-century imperial thought until 1830.Footnote ²²⁵

This synopsis shows that the everyday cognitive processing of the “national” largely corresponded with the larger mercantilist imperial frameworks. As long as the post-Grotian freedom-of-trade doctrine was endorsed by the French, the external/internal definition of the “national” remained more fluid than in the British case, as the 1669 Marseille edict was also more undecided and bifurcated – protectionism plus freedom. The more the practice developed in the direction of the hegemonic domination of the Mediterranean, the more the general frame of thought changed into opting for establishing the Mediterranean as “imperial property.” As a consequence, the practice of defining and controlling the national increasingly insisted on a populationist modeling of the French nation abroad as has been shown, as if “France” already extended from Versailles to Cairo and Algiers. The national was still an everyday unknown, but its forms of specification changed on the microlevel at the same time as the broader visions of the French nation’s possible empire in the Mediterranean changed on the macrolevel.

From Venetian dominium maris to the Britons’ Empire

Since the 1990s, several studies have examined the development of an ‘Imperial or Empire consciousness’ by the British in the early modern era. Wilson stated in 1995 that “ironically, anti-imperialist attitudes have been ably documented,” while “the meanings and significance of empire in public political consciousness have only begun to be investigated.”Footnote ²²⁶ This gap has been closed to some extent by numerous scholars who, implicitly or explicitly, have mostly focused on imperial consciousness relating to the Atlantic and Pacific dimensions of the growing British Empire.Footnote ²²⁷ Only two political affairs (Admiral Vernon’s victory at Porto Bello over the Spanish in 1739 and Byng’s defeat and the fall of Minorca in 1756) have been depicted as crystallizing moments when the British proto-national and proto-imperial public concentrated on the Mediterranean.Footnote ²²⁸ From a strict 1700-perspective, there is no reason to neglect the question of a “British Mediterranean imperial consciousness.” For many in England, the politico-economic importance of the Mediterranean region was traditionally more evident. Samuel Pepys, the Secretary of the Navy, almost never mentioned the American colonies in his notebooks, but as member of the Tangier Committee he wrote a great deal, even if rather sarcastically, about Tangier and the Mediterranean.Footnote ²²⁹

Moreover, concerning the concepts of maritime empire, for many centuries only one sea had been the reference point for the production of discourses and theoretical reflections by Europeans: the Mediterranean. If one wanted to formulate a theory of maritime imperialism around 1600, the only texts to base it on would have been legal or politico-juridical theories written by authors who thought about the Mediterranean, as opposed to other bodies of water, and problems to solve within it, beginning with antiquity. One ought to be wary of modernizing the mindsets and hierarchy of authors’ priorities. The Mediterranean is significant here on two levels: as a point of reference for the reservoir of past discourses used by seventeenth-century authors to formulate their agendas of “modern” imperialism and as a scope of those agendas’ application for the struggle for power within the present Mediterranean.

In order to understand the French imperial thought between 1615 and 1750, it is much more productive to analyze the huge amount of handwritten mémoires on commerce written for the monarchy, because few texts on political economy and commerce were published. For the British case, however, quite the opposite holds true. Printed texts of various lengths about mercantilist, early populationist and commercial theory abounded, even if mostly in pamphlet size. This reflected the different structure of the relationship between the early modern public sphere and government. Certainly, as in France, many handwritten notes and treatises on political economy were also composed in England. However, it is telling that the transmission of papers from the early precursors of the 1696 (re)founded Board of Trade – the only 17 months active first Council of Trade 1651/52 and Charles II’s Councils of Trade of 1660–1665, 1668–1670, the Council of Plantations, then Council of Lords of Trade from 1670 – is so nugatory. Before 1696, these documents are overwhelmingly dispersed in collections of private papers; they did not belong to the “heart” of the central state administration. The combination of King-plus-Houses as the center of decision-making produced other media for the transmission of ideas than in France. It was a process triangulated by “the public” where technical discussions about trade forms and company structures like that between EIC and Levant Company took place. In France, political economic debate was, at least before 1750, far less an object of the emerging public sphere – as were religious and other political matters.Footnote ²³⁰ This mirrored the structure of the French monarchy’s power relationships, with its mono-centered orbit around the king. Due to this, thoughts circulated through the medium of handwritten mémoires. It made no sense to print them, and often that would not have been allowed in the first place, like Vauban’s Dixme royale. Even if permission to publish was granted, printing did not increase the “power” of a mémoire and the probability of its impact on the final decision, rather the contrary.

Consequently, a comparison is necessarily asymmetrical. While analysis of the French case concentrated on a Richelieu fil rouge webbed through the mémoires, the corresponding sources for the English are printed pamphlets, books and surveys about trade.Footnote ²³¹

Three different ideal types of a politico-economic vision of the English/British Empire or of Imperial political economics emerge regarding the Mediterranean. The first was a traditional, legalist and “Mediterraneanist” vision of England’s imperial dominion of the sea that proved to be the guiding principle for the Mediterranean. The second type was a concept of Britain’s imperial dominion rooted in the colonial settlements, first of all in Northern America, sometimes implicitly or explicitly transferred to the Mediterranean. The third type was a more abstract form of commercial empire based solely on the intrinsic power of economics and spread of values.

1. The legal or legalist concept of the early British empire of the sea was developed by the long renowned anti-Grotian phalanx of Welwood and Selden, in addition to John Davies. The promulgation of the first Act of Navigation in 1651 was soon followed by the publication of the English translation of Selden’s Mare Clausum (1652), the republication of Welwood’s De Dominio Maris (1653), and a treatise that had hitherto remained in manuscript form, John Davies’ The question concerning impositions (1656, new ed. 1659 Jus Imponendi Vectigalia). It is fair to interpret this confluence of publications not as mere coincidence but to conceive of them as the theoretical commentaries and legitimatory background for the Act. To clarify the discursive strata of legal and theoretical thought involved here, I distinguish between five levels:

Grotius’ Mare liberum, published in 1609,Footnote ²³² is a legal treatise asserting and defending the right of the Dutch to navigate and to conduct commerce with the East Indies in the Pacific Ocean.Footnote ²³³ That agenda dominates the text which first, as befits any legal argument, states the grounds and basis for its claim, and then, chapter by chapter, refutes all known or thought to be possible rival rights of dominion of the sea of the opponent in question, the Portuguese. Its argumentative framework is Roman property law, the law of things within the usual division of personae, res, actiones as in Inst. 2.1. Within property law, as established legal practice held, Grotius had to identify the sedes materiae for the larger question of whether the sea could belong to someone and if so, how. And this fragment within the legal texts was by tradition, the Dig. 1.8.2.1. in combination with several other leges in the Corpus iuris civilis (e.g. Inst. 2.1.1., Cod. 6.46). Dig. 1.8.2.1 is a fragment of the Institutes of the Roman school lawyer Marcianus (third century AD) which stated that “some things are, by the law of nature, common [sc. to all: Dig. 1.8.2 pr] which are: the air, the flowing water, the sea and therefore the shores of the sea.” All medieval lawyers treated related issues in commentaries to that fragment. Grotius, as a humanist, certainly did not use the traditional form of the glossa anymore, but his mind still followed the order prescribed by the Roman law “system.” That the res communes omnium are such by law of nature was, in Roman law, simply an extension from the usual distinction between the spheres of law in ius civile, ius gentium, ius naturale. Roman natural law meant merely that there was a sphere of being and communication in the world with possible legal importance which was common to all humans and even animals, like copulation or the familial bonds between parents and children (Dig. 1.1.1.3). As Merio Scattola and others have shown, the merging of this civil law tradition with the different Thomist distinction between lex divina, lex naturalis, lex humana had taken place in the sixteenth century in dialogue between Philippist and later Calvinist jurists and theologians on the one hand and the neo-scholastic school of Salamanca on the other.Footnote ²³⁴ Natural law, which was of little practical legal importance in Roman times, had by then been “sacralized” and lifted to a status of higher importance. In its turn, the theological tradition had been secularized and “juridificated.” With that background behind him, Grotius could now, instead of starting with all the technical problems traditionally discussed concerning the res communes – how a “sea” is different from other waters, what are “shores,” how distant an island can be from a neighboring power, what if two powers are of exact equal distance from an island in the sea – commence with the new platform of establishing legal claims, the early modern law of nature: “the right that we are claiming [for the Dutch and against the Portuguese] … is rooted in nature [jus autem quod petimus … a natura enim oritur].” All the energy employed in the first part of the treatise served to strengthen and to solidify that seat of the claim. It was clearly an incipient form of Grotian modern natural law that would be later developed in De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (first ed. 1625), as he was already stressing the fact that natural law was not just operative and binding between Christian powers, but all people on earth. This problem could not be resolved within the framework of constitutional or public law that could figure in debates between Spain and the Dutch about the struggle between claimed and denied independence. Even if there was a lord/subject relationship, the law of nature as root of the claim could not be derogated by a king versus his subjects.Footnote ²³⁵ Later, this argument led to the formula that the law of nature was valid “etiamsi daremus Deum non esse.”Footnote ²³⁶ The following chapters refute diverse possible claims of entitlement to the dominium maris of the ocean. An entitlement to the dominium is not possible through inventio – one cannot find and appropriate something, where there was no prior owner, Chapter II;Footnote ²³⁷ not from the pope – the bulls Inter caetera – because even if the pope had dominion over the whole globe – which Grotius refuted through several arguments stemming from the Salamancist conception of the division of spiritual/secular power –, in the very end the correct translatio necessary for the completion of a gift (donatio) was missing (Chapter III, arg. from Dig. 39.5; Inst. 2.7; Cod. 8.53); the entitlement cannot come from the laws of war and conquest, the Indians are free and sui juris following the categories of the Roman law of persons (Dig. 50.6.195.2; Dig. 1.6.4). The standards regarding a gift cannot apply to something that is not traded (following Hugues Donneau, Chapters IV, VII). That the entitlement cannot be claimed by occupatioFootnote ²³⁸ took Grotius more efforts to prove in Chapter V. The main point lay in the classification of the ocean as res communis and not as res nullius in the taxonomy of Roman lawFootnote ²³⁹ and in making a sharp distinction between the infinite ocean and any other form of waters, rivers, or even “internal seas” circumscribed by delineable borders and islands. The force of the argument comes from generalizing and clarifying the meaning of communis,Footnote ²⁴⁰ and from denying older ideas. He did not mention his opponents directly in the text, but the marginal allegations show that for some points he was doing what a good humanist mos gallicus author always would do, refuting the late medieval understanding of the Roman law. That is, he was invoking the legitimacy of allegedly pure Roman law and repudiating the validity of the post-Roman Byzantine law, established by Emperor Leo VI. Grotius furthermore rejected the argument that the sea could be the property of “the Roman Empire,”Footnote ²⁴¹ which was an idea expressed more narrowly by Bartolus and some of his followers. They argued that it was the emperor – thinking of their contemporary medieval emperor – who had to be considered as Lord of the Sea of last resort.Footnote ²⁴² He restricted the idea found in Baldus, that there might be lordship over the sea concerning a particular finite zone of the sea, to the question of jurisdiction and protection. Formal agreements between rulers about jurisdictional zones would create international law between and for persons, but not property. As for protection, Grotius defined this as the entitlement to engage against pirates ex communi jure at sea, therefore also not creating an entitlement to property. In Chapter VII he argued against the mos italicus interpretation which had been formulated in the fourteenth century mostly concerning the Thyrennian and the Adriatic Sea. Italian jurists had developed the idea that the Venetians had acquired the dominion over the Adriatic against the Genoese by prescription.Footnote ²⁴³ For Grotius, there could be no acquisition of property through longi temporis praescriptio, meaning through possession, the will of possession and the passage of a long time (Dig. 41.3), as such a way to acquire property was only for things subject to civil law, not for those of the ius gentium or ius naturale.Footnote ²⁴⁴ As a humanist, he simply refuted medieval lawyers whom he believed did not handle the text and ideas of the Roman law properly. The law of nations in the Roman legal sense of ius gentium could not entitle the Portuguese to the property of the sea since the law of nations was relatively permissive and guaranteed freedom of commerce, not privileging one nation over another.

Grotius’ text is to a great extent the typical work of a humanist jurist who was rejecting, on the basis of a proto-historicist understanding of Roman Law, medieval derivations of its interpretation.

William Welwood’s De dominio maris (1616) had a precursor in the English Abridgement of All Sea-Lawes (1613) which included a response to the fifth chapter of Grotius’ Mare liberum, but I concentrate here on the Latin treatise which was republished in 1653.Footnote ²⁴⁵ Welwood’s main point was to rebut Grotius regarding the classification of the sea, in particular that the sea was not a res communis.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Welwood largely did so by reasserting the claim to dominion through occupatio. This was a shrewd move as he did not engage at that point with the text of the Digest itself (1.8.2.1 or Inst. 2.1.1). Instead, Welwood moved directly from the general foundation of the Biblical natural law of property to Baldus’ commentary on Dig. 1.8.2.1. From Baldus he then took the central idea to negate the attribution of the sea to res communes by referring to contrary fragments of the Corpus iuris and to conclude that according to the law of nations, “in the sea there are distinct dominions/realms like in the arid soil.”Footnote ²⁴⁷ While all glossators – Irnerius, Azo, Accursius, Aretinus, even still Bracton – had seen the sea as res communis following Marcian,Footnote ²⁴⁸ at the end of the fourteenth century Baldus broke from this tradition. He did not do so through a general and explicit rejection, but by building a bridge to the applicability of acquisitive prescription. Interestingly, Baldus took the somewhat hidden final stone of that bridge from canon law: during the Council of Lyon in 1274, Pope Gregory X had issued a decree concerning details of papal elections (Liber sextus I.6.3), on which a commentary tradition had developed. The question was how to act if the pope died on a ship at sea with all the cardinals on board. Addressing that problem, not covered by the 1274 decree, Johannes Monachus (Jean Lemoine) advised that one should not give priority to the Lateran for gathering the cardinals together, due to reasons of ceremonial precedence. It was more important to secure the sacral body of the church which would be without a head for an extended period. Accordingly, a papal election should take place immediately in the city to which that part of the sea belonged: “Because it is said that port cities have a district in the sea like one speaks of the Venetian Sea or the Pisan Sea”: This early fourteenth-century verdict therefore provided an early codification of the idea of the divisibility of the sea into districts belonging to adjacent territories.Footnote ²⁴⁹ In his comment on the Digest title on dividing things (de divisione rerum), Baldus had referred to that canon law discussion and had added the argument that the sea was just water in a hollow of the earth. Under the notion of “earth (terra)” one should understand the whole inferior sphere in opposition to the skies, according to the Aristotelian understanding of the world’s structure. And so, prescription would be applicable also to the sea.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Not only did he refer to the fourteenth-century canon law teaching on the pope dying at sea, but the hidden capstone of that argument was also taken from canon law. He found in Liber extra V.40.26 that a right to take duties could be either granted by Imperial or royal concession or by the Lateran Council or could be acquired “from old customary law since time immemorial [vel ex antiqua consuetudine a tempore, cuius non exstat memoria]” – wherefrom he concluded that granted privileges and prescriptions are equal. In this, Baldus’ commentary to the Marcian definition of the sea as res communis stated implicitly the opposite to the text of the Digest fragment itself and allowed the application of prescription to it just as to any item subject to quirite law. The usual sixteenth-century editions of Baldus’ commentaries already contained an additional note on that passage which clarified that Baldean argument relating to the concrete reality of late medieval shipping and sovereignty over parts of the Mediterranean: “Note that the Venetians are Lords of the Adriatic Sea and of its shores, that means, in general, not in particular as each specific shore belongs to the adjacent beaches.”Footnote ²⁵¹

The sentence of Baldus cited by Welwood was a central conclusion within the commentary that legitimated the possibility of the prescription of the sea, as refuted by Grotius. Welwood proceeded to stress that the divisibility of the sea had been already proven “before all the Roman lawyers” and by Aristotle – or rather Pseudo-Aristotle – as he named all the different parts of the Mediterranean according to the peoples residing alongside it.Footnote ²⁵² Welwood’s next step was to simply state that this divisibility was valid for the ocean as well as for the Mediterranean. This contradicted Grotius, who had made a categorical distinction between the infinite ocean and other seas, while not explicitly excluding the Mediterranean. And again, Welwood continued to support Baldus and Bartolus, “that lamp of the law,” and the late medieval lawyer Cipolla, against the literal sense of the Roman fragments of the Digests. Welwood spoke only of adjacent parts of the sea, which usually meant up to one hundred miles away from land. Welwood also remained faithful to Baldus and the Italian tradition of grounding, which is the right to take duties such as anchorage or contributions to finance defense against pirates in the conception of the sea, understood as a res very similar to the soil. Baldus referred in that passage to the feudal law definition of regalia, which linked the levying of duties with public streets and navigable waters.Footnote ²⁵³ The roots for British concepts of protection and security, and for the right to charge subjects and foreigners for those services, became thus deeply entrenched in continental medieval(ist) legal traditions that had been mainly developed regarding Italian territories and city states.Footnote ²⁵⁴

Welwood was himself a professor of civil law, but in Scotland, where the value and applicability of Roman law was more contested than in most other countries in Continental Europe. His reading of Grotius took all alleged leges of the Corpus iuris at hand. But he gave decisive preference to those medieval commentators and transformers of the Roman law that Grotius had refuted. After 150 years of humanist efforts to historicize, to better and edit the Roman law text, a tradition to which Grotius belonged, Welwood’s option for Baldus could not be, in 1615, just a continuation of the mos italicus. Instead, it was an intentional and well-chosen revival of Baldus against the humanist lawyer. In this manner, the late medieval Italian concept of dominion over parts of the Mediterranean was received and generalized in Britain and became the cornerstone of the legal response to the Dutch.

While Welwood argued within a civilist framework, another British lawyer started to add common law elements. This was the king’s serjeant in Ireland, John Davies (1569–1626).Footnote ²⁵⁵ Davies wrote a text in 1625 when Charles I ascended to the throne. He argued therein in favor of the king’s prerogatives to legitimately levy duties and impositions such as the much-discussed ship money. Davies had dominated the “Irish legal world” as the “leading figure in the extension and enforcement of the common law” during the “colonization” of Ireland, as Hart and Pawlisch put it. He was central during the establishment of the king’s customs offices in nine Irish port cities and legitimated those royal taxation prerogatives by turning to civil law and utilizing arguments from comparative natural law when royal claims could not be grounded in common law.Footnote ²⁵⁶ The main purpose of this treatise was to legitimate the levy of duties such as ship money. This had also been an objective of Welwood’s text in 1615, but it was all the more so for the royalist Davies in support of Charles, newly ascended to the throne. For this purpose, Davies did not start from natural law in a wider sense, but from the law of nations. Here, he continued the revival of the post-glossators. After a definition of the law of nations from Dig. 1.1.9 and 1.1.1.4,Footnote ²⁵⁷ the first author Davies cited by name was, once again, Baldus.Footnote ²⁵⁸ Davies picked up from where Welwood finished his De dominio maris, with the right of impositions (vectigalia),Footnote ²⁵⁹ and recapitulated that point with Baldus’ legitimation and foundation of the law of nations.Footnote ²⁶⁰ The following chapters consist of a historical survey, reign by reign, of prior impositions levied by English kings up to the author’s present, with some disappointing results for the period from Edward III to Edward VI.Footnote ²⁶¹ After presenting that historical material, Davies then inquired into the “general reasons whereupon this Prerogative is grounded.” He formulated his central point of legitimation with “the King of England is Dominus Maris, which floweth about the Island … And he is Lord of the Sea, not only concerning protection and jurisdiction, but also concerning the property on it [quoad protectionem & jurisdictionem, sed quoad proprietatem].”Footnote ²⁶² Quite obviously, Davies was copying from Welwood without citing him, in those areas which concern citations from civil law, the post-glossators and other ancient sources. He borrowed the central Baldus position from his comment to Dig. 1.8.2.1 on how dominions in the sea are as distinct as on earth, and he also adopted the argument that, in antiquity, the sea was divided into different “national” parts.Footnote ²⁶³ Likewise, he also used Baldus as a central authority for the legitimation of impositions in general.Footnote ²⁶⁴ Probably also copying from Welwood, he imported the fifteenth-century jus commune theory of customs and duties on merchandise, like the gabella.Footnote ²⁶⁵ Baldus was the only continental legal authority Davies cited here. Moreover Davies, who was significant in strengthening common law “at the expense of Irish customary law,”Footnote ²⁶⁶ now also legitimated the king’s prerogatives to levy impositions and his status as Dominus Maris. Here he used the help of common law sources, an “avowry” case from the times of Edward I given in Fitzherbert’s Grounde Abridgment which expressed the idea that “the king wants the peace to be protected as well on the sea as on land [le roy voit que le pease soit cy auxi bien gard en le mere come en le terre].”Footnote ²⁶⁷ From the Yearbook of Richard II he cited a case, where, in a very circumstantial matter dealing with procedural law, the judge Belknap had formulated that “the sea is within the dominion of England as is the crown of England [la meere est deinz la liegeance Dengleterre come de sa corone Dengleterre].”Footnote ²⁶⁸ This short sentence, also included in Fitzherbert’s Abridgment, became decontextualized during the sixteenth century, and was embedded in Davies’ concept of the king’s dominion and lordship over the sea as founded in international law. The third is an allegation from the Rotuli Scotiae that probably refers to the times of the early English occupation. The lordship of the English king over the sea and the coast was expressed in those times in every charter appointing a new admiral.Footnote ²⁶⁹

What becomes clear in this nascent paralleling civil law with elements from common law is that Davies wanted to show that the position of the English king as dominus maris was already an accepted customary legal tradition. He could not cite an English Baldus for this assertion, because there was no English body of theoretical jurisprudential literature directly comparable to the continental jus commune. But Davies utilized those arguments to transcend the jus commune tradition, and even Welwood at that point, with the specification that the sea belongs to the king not only through “protection,” as common law sources supported, or by “jurisdiction,” as was the usual late medieval Italian solution, but as “property.”Footnote ²⁷⁰ Davies showed, unwillingly, in the first part of the treatise, that the practice of levying impositions on merchandise had in fact not been very common during the Middle Ages.Footnote ²⁷¹ Therefore, his and Welwood’s efforts to legitimate them proved to be a starting point for a new royal self-understanding in those decades, when the first pirate threat appeared on the British coast since 1615/16.

Selden’s famous Mare clausum marked the final stage of this development. The first version was written in 1619, but the only text we know is the revised version of 1635 which includes a great deal of post-1619 work.Footnote ²⁷² What Selden performed was a Grotian refutation of Grotius. He used a method that closely resembled the one that Grotius had developed to generate natural law from historical evidence. The one and only rule or law-like sentence that he produced was that, with all nations in history (book I) and specifically in Britain (book II), there had always been the concept and claim of lordship over a part of the sea. It is worth noting that the first book is almost completely Mediterranean, because the sea in which the people or “nations” of antiquity conducted shipping and trade and whose history Selden was analyzing was the Mediterranean. Likewise, the only medieval seafaring people he discussed, the Byzantines, Venetians and Genoese, were based in the Mediterranean. The Atlantic dimension of the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch merited two mere pages of discussion that went without major theoretical emphasis.Footnote ²⁷³ The second book is devoted completely to the Northern Sea. The referential horizon of the whole treatise has nearly no “global” dimension in our sense, even if the concept gained of maritime lordship could be and was applied later to larger dimensions of global trade.

For most ancient peoples, the Romans and Rhodian’s aside, Selden could derive a “sea property rule” only from narrative and descriptive texts, and for those exceptions no ancient theoretical legal works could serve as palimpsest for his own “theory.” The same is true for many sections of the second book, but now prescriptive common law sources became his major point of reference, including some book-length treatises for more recent times. The somewhat hidden major and central sources of Selden’s overall legal concept are therefore once again the Italian, and mainly Venetian, legal treatises. He indicated that shift himself.Footnote ²⁷⁴ For the first time in chapter XVI, Selden referred to texts which dealt more or less in the same way as he did with the question of “De dominio maris” like the consilium of Angelus de Ubaldis (Baldus’ brother, 1328–1407) or like Giulio Pace’s De dominio maris (1619). Of those, Gentili, Suarez and Angelo Matteacci stressed the pre-Baldus res communis / ius naturale tradition and can be therefore seen as precursors of Grotius, relegated by Selden to marginal notes,Footnote ²⁷⁵ while the Italian authors that supported the Venetian rights upon the Adriatic were all named by their full name in the text, and introduced by a long citation by Baldus’ brother Angelus de Ubaldis.Footnote ²⁷⁶ Thus, despite the equalizing manner of presenting each Oriental people of antiquity, the Romans, Byzantines, the Westerners of his own time and the British in the same way, as following the concept of the property and divisibility of the sea, the only prior systematic work on that question that formed the base of Book I, Chapter XVI was Venetian doctrine. Furthermore, if one checks the works Selden cited, one nearly always finds Baldus as the earliest authority for the precise formulation of the Venetian dominium maris. Consequently, Welwood, Davies and Selden acted very consciously when citing Baldus expressly so often, not just as the usual “Bartolus and Baldus” eponymy of post-glossatorial wisdom and the mos italicus, but as author of an ideological invention, against which the humanist lawyers, not at least Grotius were fighting.

Despite all of Selden’s “modernity,” what he was doing was reviving and universalizing the fourteenth/fifteenth-century Venetian theory of the dominion of the sea. In terms of Roman Law, Selden was quite prudent. In the chapter in which he explicitly refuted Grotius, he only referred to that author’s text and did not precisely discuss the reading of the Roman law fragments in question. His objectives were limited to denying the general assumption of the sea as a res communis, admitting only that concerning the “Free sea … circumscribed by the open Atlantic and Australian Sea … has something of what the old lawyers [sc. have written] about the common good of the sea.”Footnote ²⁷⁷ How did Selden understand the Roman concept of dominion over the sea in the classical era? His main strategy in the respective Chapters XIV, XV was to move the focus away from the traditionally central loci of the Corpus iuris and toward other fragments of the Digest. He also attempted to establish a hierarchy between the Roman lawyers of antiquity by elevating parts of Ulpian’s teaching to the rank of his leading authority, always cited directly in the texts, while authors of the other fragments are made invisible or devalued, among them Marcian, author of the notorious Dig. 1.8.2.1 fragment. The same fragment Dig. 47.10.13.7 that Grotius had held as an exceptionFootnote ²⁷⁸ was taken as the cornerstone of the proof that the sea was treated as a res publica, the private property of the Roman people, not a res communis of all, and that by Ulpian himself. The medieval loci classici for the question Inst 2.1pr and Dig. 1.8.2.1 were relegated to a marginal note and downplayed so that the meaning of the communis was implicitly restricted or tempered as far as the empire and dominion of the Roman people were concerned.Footnote ²⁷⁹

Welwood and Davies did not dare oppose the great civil law scholar Grotius directly on his most familiar ground, they merely relied on Baldus. Only Selden took up that task, and one sees that Selden and Grotius stressed and universalized two opposing tendencies which were already embedded within dissonant textual fragments written by various Roman lawyers, and then compiled in the Corpus iuris civilis. On the one hand, there was the division of the spheres of law into the “sociobiological”Footnote ²⁸⁰ ius naturale next to the ius gentium and ius civile which corresponded to the concept of res communes omnium in a very general way and which could likewise conform to the argument that in addition to the sea, beaches/coasts (litora) were also such free res communes. This is what the third-century authors Marcian and Ulpian maintained.Footnote ²⁸¹ Grotius raised those Roman bases to a new level of generality through the framework of modern natural law.Footnote ²⁸²

On the other hand, there were fragments from other Roman lawyers in the Corpus iuris which consistently presupposed an institutionalized society and which only recognized a distinction between public and private things, refusing to take a more general pre-institutional level of ius naturale into account. Corresponding to this was the contention that at least the coastal zones were also public. This is the tradition from which Selden drew to support his arguments that the sea and the coast were considered as belonging to the populus Romanus (public < populus), and so, in a modern sense, national property. The trick was to hold up Ulpian as a main authority by not really citing all of Ulpian’s fragments and by obscuring and downplaying the Marcian texts. This tactic was congruent with the results of the post-glossators Bartolus and Baldus, but effectuated here in a humanist reading of the Roman law that could conquer Grotius’ method.

Finally, Selden far surpassed Davies in the matter of assembling common law sources to prove from precedents the practice of protection and England’s lordship over the sea. He did a great deal of historical research for that, using the rotuli parliamentorum, but he also worked with archival manuscripts.Footnote ²⁸³ Using these sources, he derived the status of the English king as lord of the sea, a power he delegated to the admirals as “custos quinque portuum et Maris.”Footnote ²⁸⁴ Due to the less consistent terminology of common law language, the concept he created was not “unified,” but it was still a more general idea of dominium maris.

The legal contribution of the troika of Welwood, Davies and Selden to the Mediterraneanist establishment of legitimating ship money, and, in the end, of the horizon of the Navigation Act itself, did not just have an impact on nuanced elements of different text exegesis. At the same time, those different textual interpretations and semantics served to nationalize the concept of sea use and shipping itself. The main subject of Grotian thought was not the nation but the one humankind, the genus humanum, as the root and seat of natural law itself. The sea, at least the infinite ocean, allegedly belonged to this general subject of History and of contemporary activity and politics. The revival and generalization of the Baldean and Venetian concept of their lordship over the sea made use precisely of the latest, most territorialized state of development of medieval Roman law, while the older vision of the emperor’s supreme terrestrial lordship, as still present with Bartolus, was not of help. With Selden, in the end, this methodically Grotian generalization against the Grotian content put the subject “people” or “nation” in the forefront of all arguments. Peoples and nations, he maintained, had a public relationship of ownership to the sea. There had always been a plurality of peoples and nations in the world and so, all of them had, by the law of nations, that public ownership relationship to the sea.Footnote ²⁸⁵ Unity versus plurality of the principal subject of History was, on the higher level of thought that only Grotius and Selden reached, the fundamental distinction in approaching the problem. But in terms of technical argumentation, this led the British authors to strongly dig into those sources in the past that had dealt with the delimitation of that unit “nation” in a very practical sense, juridical treatments of border defense and protection and security, those being the everyday forms of defining and defending the “us” against the other, of distinguishing the internal from the external, and, therefore, the fundamental mercantilist distinction. If both sides, the British and Grotius, were humanists in their own way, the British applied the selective historical horizon of source analysis typical for humanist scholarship, but in targeting the medieval era, while Grotius was simultaneously a universalist and a humanist legal interpreter who used antiquity as his period of reference.

Finally, those texts linked discussions of resource extraction, such as customs, ship money and impositions for the sake of securing the national shipping, to the Navigation Act. The nationalizing of trade therefore has a dimension reaching deeply into the foundations of early modern philosophical and political thought. This was the ceiling and framework for the extremely practical day-to-day decisions of identifying ships, flags, men, of taking legitimate “national” customs or not on goods.

The merchants themselves were not bothered about different concepts of natural law and their deeper roots. However, they still understood that the royalist discourse could work as a somewhat Machiavellian tool to legitimate the extension of impositions. Customs would be:

Lewes Roberts obviously knew how treatises like those of Welwood, Davies, Selden, took arguments from pretended common law traditions and the Mediterraneanist renewal of the Italian gabella legitimation, to produce a genealogy of customs such as the one percent duty from levies in order to finance the war against pirates. Roberts even maliciously noted how kings “forget” the legitimation first grounded in specific temporary contexts.Footnote ²⁸⁷ Still in 1690, Josiah Child, who had used the works of Lewes Roberts,Footnote ²⁸⁸ argued against the charge that the Acts of Navigation would perhaps, at first glance, be only profitable for maritime merchants and shipowners, while complete free trade might be more reasonable for the majority of British producers and consumers. “[T]his Kingdom being an Island, the defence whereof had alwayes been our Shiping and Sea-men it seems to me absolutely necessary that Profit and Power ought joyntly to be considered.”Footnote ²⁸⁹ The military defense of the kingdom and the economic prohibitions of the Navigation Act were intrinsically bound together. In many other texts which analyze Mediterranean trade through the lenses of natural law and the merchant law of nations, the granting of the monopoly charters to companies and the establishment of a peace treaty system is understood to be rooted in the prerogative powers of the King.Footnote ²⁹⁰ The political economic system was regarded here predominantly from the perspective of protection and was conceived of as a system of security production. The notion of “security” as an explicitly considered general guiding principle of politics was a neologism in the Early Modern era, and it is omnipresent in the texts:Footnote ²⁹¹

Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, the organization of navigation and trade, the entire combination of Navigation Acts, and the Act of Frauds,Footnote ²⁹³ the interplay between armed merchant ships, convoy navy ships, and import/export regulation were all seen as an extension of the defense of the realm’s borders. The nationalization of ships was supposed to secure the identification of the moving borders at sea beyond those geographical borders on land. “Defense” was therefore commercialized, the realm’s borders extended into the open space of the sea, and conversely, commerce came under the purview of military defense. This first version of British imperial political economics was, to some extent, conservative, medievalist and Mediterraneanist in both its sources and its application. Using those semantic resources, and by projecting the late medieval Italian as well as common law traditions of maritime dominion and territorial protection into the practice and theory of trade and commerce, all gave a national framework to England’s self-understanding of insularity.

2. The second way of conceiving of the empire was to imagine the foundation of a settler colony like in New England. At least one author of importance, Daniel Defoe, imagined North Africa as such a possible colony just at the same time as one finds a new emphasis on French conquest plans. This is certainly due to the political instability in the regencies during the late 1720s and early 1730s and it echoed the second siege of Gibraltar (1727).Footnote ²⁹⁴ Defoe did not conceive of the European conquest of Africa as an exclusively British project, but as a (non-crusader) joint venture of all major Christian powers. The short chapter in which Defoe discussed this plan compared antiquity to his contemporary times. The Roman Empire, which Defoe styled as rather disinterested in trade, was correlated with the Ottomans, and the trading people of the Carthaginians was implicitly likened to the European trading nations, foremost the British. Indeed, “Defoe insisted that the Phoenicians were the Englishmen “of that Age.” This was an imperial ideology different from the usual Roman classicism that fitted the concepts and realities of a trade empire more exactly.Footnote ²⁹⁵ Clearly, Defoe was alluding to a historical narrative drawn mostly from small passages in Strabo, that the Carthaginians/Phoenicians had traded with Britannia in pre-Roman times, mainly in tin, and that they had established colonies there. Therefore, there was not only a comparative but also a genealogical link between Britain and North Africa. Defoe evoked Carthage as a past golden age of well-functioning trade connections between Europe and Africa. The Ottomans and their piratical economy represented a state of depravation to be overcome. The Barbary nations had to be driven out of the coastal cities, Defoe maintained, and each European nation should obtain “separate Allotments of Territory upon the coast” and those territories should be “peopled with a new Nation, or new Nations made rich by Commerce, and the Country adjacent cultivated and peopled after the Manner of Europe.” European settlers should cultivate the country, and the Barbary people, driven into the hinterland might even transform the desert into farmland, forced by necessity, and to the advantage of the European coastal region. In Defoe’s scheme, this would constitute a successful increase of the “general Product of the Country.” By the establishment of a European Africa trading with Europe, using the Barbary hinterland as second subordinated trading partner, the increase of commerce itself would be achieved.

Clearly, the American experience represents the model for Defoe’s North African conquest plans in quite precise terms of a British style trade-based “settler colony.” Certain elements of this second conception surely had their impact on the Mediterranean, from Tangier to Gibraltar and on what concerns the “colonial culture” performed in the Levant factories in the middle of the eighteenth century. In general, however, it did not have any deeper impact, because it did not fit the Mediterranean circumstances or the Levant Company’s traditions and convictions.

3. The third way to conceive of the imperial political economics was concentrating in a far more abstract way on the flow of economic values and the forces of trade itself. In one of the leading merchant handbooks that was widely read among the Levant merchants, Lewes Roberts’ the Merchant’s Map (1638), a “geocommercial” cosmography of all four continents is expressed, providing a prototypical analysis of the invisible imperial power of trade and economic expansion.Footnote ²⁹⁷ Roberts was a member of the Merchant Adventurers, the Levant Company – even with the office of Husband from 1633 to 1641, the East India Company – including a stint as Director in 1639/40, and of the French and the Spanish Company in London, and he had conducted trade in the Levant and lived in Constantinople for at least fourteen years (1611 to 1625):

Roberts argued that the small English island, in addition to the small countries of the Portuguese and Dutch, had gained an “over-proportional” renown by means of global commerce. In contrast, he alleged, the “Emperour of Germany, the greatest of our Christian Princes,” was hardly known outside Europe, because his nation did not conduct global trade.Footnote ²⁹⁹ Roberts concluded that “It is not our conquests, but our Commerce, it is not our swords, but our sayls, that first spred the English name in Barbary, and thence came into Turky, Armenia, Moscovia, Arabia, Persia, India, China.”Footnote ³⁰⁰ For Roberts in 1641, “the global” started with the North African Barbary Coast, while India and China formed the end of the enumeration. Roberts’ general remarks can be understood as an attempt to describe something hard to grasp, the proportion and amount of symbolic capital and functions of global trade for the imperial growth of a nation. Like Italian political authors since Machiavelli who reasoned under the locus Della reputazione del principe, Roberts argued that there was a form of power that did not derive from brute military force, but instead from the management of an appearance of splendor and “cultural fashioning,” and from the memory of past deeds and wise counsels.Footnote ³⁰¹ It is as if Roberts – who read Italian and possessed books close to that tradition – transferring those ideas from princes to nations and from military glory to trade, reasoned about the functions of commercial reputation. This is an early original interpretation of how an empire of trade worked while its center was merely a small island off the coast of Northern Europe, so isolated from the resources and markets of the continents. Roberts’ rationale shows that this concept of the flag’s honor identified the deepest fundament of an empire in the knowledge of, and about, the governing nation abroad. Ignorance/knowledge dictated the presence or absence of the imperial power of a nation, long before there might be questions of conquest, settlement and colonies. While Roberts himself belongs more to the traditional Levant and London merchants, his focus on the forces of trade themselves is close to some of the seventeenth-century proponents of free trade. Not every plea for “Free Trade” can be linked to this third type of proto-liberal imperial thought outlined here, as the words themselves did not always correspond to their actual content. In contrast, not every plea for some elements of trade regulation can be understood as safe indicator that a given text would belong to the legal tradition. Nevertheless, this is usually a first indicator. A controversy coterminous with the first Navigation Act was that sparked by the famous Leveller William Walwyn who, in May 1652, addressed a memorandum to the Committee of the Council of State for Trade and Foreign Affairs, the first Council of Trade founded in 1651 which only lasted for seventeen months. He strongly advocated for free trade against what he perceived as the monopoly of the Levant Company. He grounded his arguments in quite general notions of the public good and the Commonwealth, pretending that there was “so antient a continuall claymed Right, as freedome to all English men in all Forraine Trade … an universall freedome in all forraine trades.” Allowing every Englishman to be merchant as he asked for and to conduct foreign trade with his means and wherever he wants to go would provide many advantages, among them the “increase of Shipping … the increase of Marriners … the increase of Wealth and plenty … the increase of Merchants.” Because he favored the increase of the overall number of merchants and the freedom to use whatever means they could afford, he had to admit that the merchant ships that could be used then would hardly be “serviceable … for Warr or for defence and protection, as those that are built purposely for the uses by the State.” He furthermore imagined that, as a result of the freeing of trade, not “so many wealthy men, as [would have been produced] in the same time by Companies, most of them being borne Rich & adding wealth to wealth … yet it will produce Thousands more of able men to beare publique Charges,” thus creating more of a “middle class” type of merchant population than a stratified pyramid of a few rich individuals who could also afford to use extremely costly heavily armed ships versus the many poor who could only serve in subordinate functions.Footnote ³⁰² He also tended to distinguish the tasks and the sphere of merchants from that of the state, those simply conducting trade with their modest private means, with the option for the state to provide security by powerful ships, a proto-liberal division of realms instead of its combination. Those points, touched upon only shortly by Walwyn as they were, from his opponents’ point of view, his weak points, were taken by those who responded for the Levant Company. The Company started with denying Walwyn’s concept of an “original natural state” of universal freedom of all men concerning foreign trade in society, stating that if that had been the case, then “it did precede all Government” and returning to it or the “exercise of it tends to the dissolution of all other Civill Governments whatsoever.”Footnote ³⁰³ This meant that according to the Levant Company, in a constituted civil society no simple complete freedom of trade allowed to all was possible. Instead, the very character of the society to be constituted implied an order according to the laws of rank and specialization.

The link between the economic and military defense of the people, in addition to the capital of the nation, led then to a rebuttal of Walwyn: “The ships at present employed in the Trade of Turky are such, as a free trade could not produce either so many or so good; and the nature of that trade is such, as cannot be maintained without ships of good defence.”Footnote ³⁰⁵ The Company remained with the defensive concept of economics whose legitimation was perfected by Welwood, Davies and Selden, pointing to the strength and war-born character of that concept of trade. Aside from the embryonic ideas of an overall increase and the possible global outreach of every Englishman, Walwyn did not develop a complete positive imperial concept that was connected to what he obstinately and repeatedly called “the free trade.” Forty years later, such a vision became more discernable in Whiston’s 1693 Discourse of the decay of trade. Now, the idea of free trade was in fact the leading element for a purely functional economic empire, maintaining that “Strength or Weakness, Wealth or Poverty of this Kingdom wholly depends upon the Good or Ill Management of Foreign Trade.”Footnote ³⁰⁶ He argued for a more or less complete freeing of commerce, envisioning a global power of Britain in remarkable words. If England could organize its commerce well, the usual opposition between public and private interest would fade away. For that, a military conquest like that of an Alexander or a Caesar would not be necessary, but instead merely the correct management of (free) trade affairs. In so doing, the English would “make our selves in Effect Masters of the Four Quarters of the Earth, and all England become as one City of Trade, and the General Emporie of the World … the Nation will be abundantly Enriched, and Money being the very Life of War, and Sinews of all Publick Action, we shall be enabled to bring the World into a Dependant Awe.”Footnote ³⁰⁷ If English commerce flourished, “People from all parts of the Globe, would resort hither to enjoy themselves, and Improve their Stocks: For Trade is the Life-Blood that runs through the Veins of the Nation, that moves, maintains, and enlivens the whole Body of the People.”Footnote ³⁰⁸ As an appropriate measure for the government of trade affairs, Whiston recommended the establishment of a Council of Trade whose members should all be merchants. He was essentially making a straightforward plea for functional specialization: “If the business of Salvation be in Debate, we apply our selves to some professing the Ministry: If the Dispute be concerning the Title to an Estate, we desire the Judgment of a Lawyer: If Sick, we Consult a Physitian.”Footnote ³⁰⁹ So, in questions of commerce, counsel should be provided by merchants specialized in trade. The committee, he proposed, should consist of members of the trading companies – East India, the African and Turkey Company of the merchants trading with Italy, Spain, Portugal – along with merchants from several other colonies and marketplaces from Barbados to Jamaica, New York and New England, in addition to twelve Masters of Ships to be chosen by Trinity House and representatives of the different English places of production with their respective specific goods (Northumberland for coal, Cornwall for tin, Devonshire and Somerset for clothing, etc.).

In 1696, the more stable Board of Trade was finally constituted, where men of politics were, if not by majority, at least in terms of power, still the leading members.Footnote ³¹⁰ The vision and concept behind a text like Whiston’s was in fact the strong concentration on the economic power of value flows and growth and on a functionally differentiated society in which economics was more or less self-governed by its own experts. As the idea still started with, and aimed at, the establishment of a powerful empire, the envisioned English Council of Trade became akin to a World Government. In this vision of empire the king was mentioned only briefly; the guiding principle was nearly completely transpersonal. The power that was to drive this empire-building was invisible: not the power of arms and steel, but of economic value acquisition.Footnote ³¹¹

As the early opposition between Walwyn and the Levant Company and later quarrels between the East India Company and the Levant Company during the 1670s and 1680s show, although Josiah Child did not advocate a completely free trade like Walwyn and Whiston, but instead a milder version as represented by the joint stock companies, it is clear that the different imperial concepts and forms of economic thought were still in elective affinity with different company structures and trading societies. The regulated trade as conducted by the Levant Company and secured by the security measures of convoy shipping and the defence-born Navigation Acts conformed to the first type.Footnote ³¹² The chartered joint-stock companies, mostly acting on credit stocks, correlated with the second and partially with the third. The Levant Company thought in more bullionist terms, charging that the East India Company always exported bullion and imported only goods, while the Levant Company did just the opposite.Footnote ³¹³ Child and others argued against that simplistic vision by grounding the import/export balance in asset values, not in metal, and asserted that more profit was gained through the re-export to places including the Levant of Indian goods.Footnote ³¹⁴ The discussion of the opening of the Levant Company in 1718–1720,Footnote ³¹⁵ and the decay of British trade in the Levant after the 1730s were an effect not only of external competition with the French, but also of internal negotiations over different forms of political and economic empire in Britain itself. Levant traders, at least in general, remained within the older traditions of economic and political thought.

Comparison

Different imperial visions succeeded each other and competed within both countries. Nevertheless, within these national contexts, there were elements which seem to have transcended the divides. The central point is how one can conceive of the relationship between “economics” and “state/nation” in both cases.Footnote ³¹⁶ While reality will always show ambiguous merged forms and hybrids – French British commercialists and British French statists – in an ideal typological juxtaposition these relationships seem to behave as Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3 British and French Imperial Mercantilism: The relationship between Nation, State and Economy.

In the French case, trade was considered as subordinate to the state’s interests. It was a hypo- or hyper-tactical relationship. An economic historian might argue that this was a misperception of how economics functioned, but that is another argument and not a question about what the actors thought themselves. This fundamental point did not really change during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What changed was the way the state tried to model the trade, from rigid open/closed decisions (Richelieu/Montchrestien options) to Levant commerce regulated by a populationist state through “general laws” empirically derived from the given realities around 1740. The nation was integral to the state, l’état tended to be the global notion. In the British case, in terms of political economy theory, institutional communication and the practice of navigation, the English – or later the British – nation was the general global actor. Trade and state were more connected through parataxis and equal terms, and discussions advocating or disparaging free trade. The development from a legal-defensive concept of merchant empire to a functionally differentiated economic self-government is a question about the shift of dominating parameters on the same level. Only if Defoe’s step had been taken in the direction of a settler colony might one have witnessed British populationist regulation in the Mediterranean similar to that evinced by the French. That the French state applied those concepts to what were, in fact, very small communities of some dozens to, at most, two- to three hundred people as in Constantinople shows how the state perception – incorporating the nations in the échelles as part of the state abroad – dominated trade from a top-down perspective.

The British model was, from the beginning, more open to a more abstract, invisible form of an empire based on network nodes, possibly even founded in knowledge about itself and perceived by others, as Roberts had put it. The French model conceived of the trade empire as an extension of the French state, itself physically and geographically centered within its hexagon borders. This comparison does not lead to an answer for a classic economic history question, why the French achieved a (fragile) domination of Mediterranean commerce during large parts of the eighteenth century while the British Levant trade declined. The reasons for that are probably only slightly connected to the question of whether one of those models was “superior” to the other. The British acted in the Mediterranean only within the first and oldest of the three imperial concepts outlined above. The Levant trade was structurally conservative. It tended to be excluded by competition within the more and more globalized British Empire, governed within the frames of the second and third models outlined. The French restarted their Levant trade with Colbert after a lengthy hiatus, and they concentrated much more on the Mediterranean as their major “home region.” So, the investigation into the differences of general imperial frames of thought is less helpful for explaining what happened in the Mediterranean according to purely economic terms of gain or loss of shares. Nevertheless, those variants are of great importance for analysing the epistemic structures being formed in the bottom-up process of specifying norms of nationality and of non-knowledge communication and also forming the core and the major perceptional framework of both forms of mercantilist empires, of their specific form to define the distinction between internal and external.