Legal Pluralism: How Normative and Institutional Diversity Supported Early Modern Long-Distance Trade.

The project analyzes the processes of transnational normative production in the context of commercial litigation between merchants involved in the Hispanic colonial trade during the 16th century.

Merchants involved in long-distance commerce needed to foresee failure and optimize indemnification in case of economic damage. This necessarily required the recourse to any jurisdictional mechanism that would be helpful in that task. The project aims to determine how merchants used jurisdictions at a transnational level, to understand why and for what purposes they chose and combined different institutional means. This involves the elaboration of an exhaustive inventory of the institutions participating in conflict management and the implementation of a prosopography approach that leads to an understanding of merchant’s institutional choices under de light of their personal background.

Merchants used various jurisdictions to create parallel forums for negotiation with their merchant partners, forums they employed or discarded according to convenience. Court records refer to multiple jurisdictions all over the world dealing with the same dispute. Forum shopping apparently forced the implementation of legal solutions that stimulated institutional communication, holding back abusive practices from litigants. To demonstrate it, I focus on extra-legal factors involved in the creation of law; that is, the social practices that allowed the interaction of distant jurisdictions and contributed to an effective conflict settlement.