This call for papers for a conference in Hamburg (Cluster of Excellence: Understanding Written Artefacts) on 8/9 July 2022 has relevance for Jewish Studies as well.
Deadline: 20 February 2022
Agents of merchants were (and still are) a common feature of trade all around the globe. They can be found everywhere and every time trade reached a certain level of complexity. In premodern times, Italian and French merchants sent their agents to outposts all across the Mediterranean, the Maghribi (or “Geniza”) merchants used representatives to manage trade in the Near-East, Spanish and Portuguese merchants were represented across the Atlantic, important trading hubs such as Ayutthaya and Malacca for trade in South-East Asia or Antwerp for trade in Central Europe were buzzing with merchants’ agents.
Agents helped merchants to organize their trade, but they also in turn created new challenges. The fundamental problem of exchange according to Avner Greif lies in how the parties involved could issue a credible pledge that they committed to what they promised. Why should the parties believe each other? Merchants’ agents were part of two such commitment problems: First, a merchant had to see to it that his agent would do as he had been told. This issue is widely discussed in economic theory as the principal-agent- problem. Second, the third party doing business with an agent had to be convinced that he was in fact the agent of the merchant. The agent had to be acknowledged as a legitimate representative.
Written records played a very important part in mitigating both problems. The relationship between a merchant and his agent was negotiated in contracts, letters and accounts, for example. In order to be recognized as a legitimate representative of another person, an agent could carry a formal power of attorney, that is, a document, issued by a princely or urban authorities or by a notary, which stated that person A had authorized person B to act on his behalf; or he could be equipped with a private letter by the merchant saying that this was his appointed agent.
Trade in different regions of the globe thus depended on manuscripts that the merchants produced themselves or got them issued by public authorities such as city councils and notaries. The conference aims at discussing in a comparative perspective how these manuscripts worked in enabling, organizing and facilitating trade. Special attention will be given to the question of authentication: For example, in inter-European trade urban authorities played a crucial role in authenticating records. Letters and charters often carried the seal of a town. In the Mediterranean and Islamic world, notaries were employed to issue official documents, and they proofed their authenticity, for example, by putting their signet at the bottom of the page. In transatlantic trade, private letters could serve as a means of identification as well.
The conference will shed light on these different forms of creating an authorized document by bringing together scholars who work on merchants and their agents in different parts of the premodern world. The conference will be organized in sessions. Each session deals with another region of premodern trade. Thus, we should be able to discuss the interplay of specific writing traditions and common problems of trade and its influence on the specific lookout of the manuscripts.
If you would like to present a paper, please send an abstract of 500 words, accompanied by a short CV by February, 20th to Ulla Kypta: ulla.kypta@uni-hamburg.de.
Travel costs and accommodation for two nights will be covered.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Andreas Lehnertz (January 27, 2022). Merchants’ Manuscript Culture in the Premodern World. Merchants and Their Agents in a Comparative Perspective. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved April 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rhjs