Supporting trust: credit assessment and debt recovery through Trade Protection Societies in Britain and Ireland, 1776–1992

From an initial foundation in London in 1776, Trade Protection Societies grew in numbers to reach a peak of about 120 in 1910. They provided inter-business and some consumer credit assessment, debt management and recovery. From the 1850s they coordinated activities through a national association that covered Britain and Ireland. The societies were processing millions of credit assessments for thousands of members in the 1960s, reaching over 100,000 assessments per day in the 1980s. They provided a voluntary institutional base drawing on networks of mutuality, supplying information between members and societies that was judged privileged by the Courts. This offered transaction costs advantages for the high frequency, short duration activity provided, and hedged against the risks of complex Court actions. They became a large-scale mechanism to encourage honouring of commitments, thus underpinning the trust necessary across an increasingly geographically integrated economy. Their evolution demonstrates the importance of city size and regional centres, with diffusion down the city rank-size distribution. However, some smaller centres, mainly in resorts, also developed TPSs. The spatial process linked individual traders and the smallest places into a national system of credit management. By the 1920s smaller TPSs became difficult to sustain and were taken over or became branches of the larger societies; but overall membership continued to increase. True consolidation occurred after 1971 when demand exploded after the removal of credit controls, with unit costs pressed down, leading to de-mutualisation.     

Managing the risk of climatic variability in late prehistoric northern Chile

The concept of risk management encompasses the diverse strategies employed in preventing and mitigating losses associated with social and environmental calamities. Building on the growing literature on risk, we use archaeological data from the Tarapacá Valley, located in northern Chile, to document the risk-reduction tactics mobilized by the valley’s inhabitants to navigate the increasingly volatile environmental and social conditions of the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1450). With the onset of exceptionally unpredictable environmental conditions after AD 1100, residents of the Tarapacá Valley chose strategies such as increased trade and agricultural diversification and extensification to minimize shortages in staple resources. Threats of raiding and intra-community strife exacerbated the risks associated with subsistence shortfalls. Valley communities elected a number of strategies to curtail conflict-induced risk, including movement of settlements and field systems to defensible locations, construction of walls and other defensive features, and the introduction of plazas. Rock art data suggest that trade was increasingly embedded in ritually sanctioned events involving groups from different ecological zones. While studies of risk have focused disproportionately on environmental hazards, subsistence-related crises are often compounded by social hazards that require their own risk-mitigating strategies, further constraining options for coping with subsistence stress.     

Non-destructive pXRF of mafic stone tools

Archaeological use of non-destructive pXRF has been most systematically applied to the classification and provenancing of volcanic glass (obsidian) artefacts. Comparable work has yet to be developed for non-vitreous artefacts. We report results of pXRF analysis for a sample of grey to black (mafic) aboriginal hatchets from Sydney and adjacent coastal regions to the north and south. The study shows both broad and detailed classification is achievable depending on rock type and degree of elemental depletion or enrichment of the samples. PXRF analysis reveals not only distinct patterns of resource use between the three regions of this study but also enables a high degree of geographic resolution in the case of the basalt artefacts of our sample. We conclude that non-destructive pXRF is effective for reliable characterisation of non-vitreous stone artefacts that have a sufficiently complex and enriched compositional signature (i.e., unaltered basalts); with ∼50% of the basalt hatchets in our sample matched with spatially and geologically specific sources.     

对1689-1727年中俄外交关系的考察

中俄《尼布楚条约》签订后,双方围绕边界、逃人、贸易诸问题展开新一轮的交锋。本文主要针对1689—1727年中俄外交的主题、外交危机的爆发、两国外交举措、外交结果等内容进行较为系统的论述。     

“You Cannot Trade What Is Not Yours”: Indigenous Governance and the NAFTA Negotiations

ABSTRACT

Contemporary International Relations scholars and practitioners generally recognize that substate governments affect the state’s international affairs; however, there is less acceptance of Indigenous governments as global actors that meaningfully impact the state. After all, the expectation would be that central governments, with considerably more resources and power, would be unlikely to face a challenge from an Indigenous government. However, Indigenous governments are negotiating new relationships with foreign and domestic governments, forming economic development corporations, hiring private firms to raise capital, funding trade missions, and even opening offices in key international locales such as Beijing to engage in trade promotion and push investment opportunities in projects such as resource extraction. Applying paradiplomacy theory, which argues that International Relations cannot be properly explained absent the global affairs of substate governments, this article analyzes the effect of Indigenous peoples and governance in the Canada–US trade relationship. It specifically considers how Indigenous engagement in the global economy affects the bilateral trade regime, foreign direct investment, and cross-border trade. The driver for these analysis centers on demands for the inclusion of a so-called “Indigenous chapter” in the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations in 2017 and 2018.     

‘One Chief Letter Office at New-York’: Packet Ships,Imperial Administration,and the Geography of the American Post, 1692–1783

ABSTRACT

The postal system in the American colonies is an understudied arm of the first British Empire. Although outside the main institutions of colonial administration, the post office followed the overall periodisation of imperial affairs, as America waxed and waned in London’s attention. This directly shaped the geography of the post office, because American officials focused on the post’s ability to connect American towns, while British officials emphasised the transatlantic connection of the postal packet ships. The packets, however, were not as important to transatlantic communications as they imagined, which led the American officials to resist when London wanted to make New York City the headquarters of the American post.     

England’s trade with the Continent in the early thirteenth century: customs and the port of Dover

ABSTRACT

This article identifies and prints the earliest detailed customs list from northern Europe, which was prepared for the port of Dover in 1233 or soon after, and it gives fuller and more detailed information about trade than for any other northern European port at this date. The list shows a remarkable diversity of trade, including some of the earliest references to particular goods in English documents, and widespread sources of trade including Flanders, Germany and Italy. The depiction of such trading links prompts questions about the ‘commercial revolution’ and the development of European trade, for it shows how varied trade and consumption could be in the era of the fairs of the Champagne towns, before the establishment of direct maritime links from the Italian cities to northern Europe. The appearance of commodities and trading links in the Dover list suggest that commercial development was earlier and more evolutionary.