Gijs Dreijer
Leiden University, History, Post-Doc
- University of Exeter, Centre for Maritime Historical Studies, Department Memberadd
- noneedit
As the fall-out of the Ever Given Suez canal blockage shows, an ancient instrument like General Average (GA) is still highly relevant in redistributing risks and costs in maritime trade. However, bar marine insurance, not much is known... more
As the fall-out of the Ever Given Suez canal blockage shows, an ancient instrument like General Average (GA) is still highly relevant in redistributing risks and costs in maritime trade. However, bar marine insurance, not much is known about the development of tools of maritime risk management like GA, which redistributes extraordinary costs incurred for the common safety of maritime ventures.
This book investigates the development of General Average and other so-called Averages in the Low Countries on the eve of the early modern period, showing how the various varieties of Averages played a significant role in the development of maritime risk management and the broader institutional development in the Low Countries.
This book investigates the development of General Average and other so-called Averages in the Low Countries on the eve of the early modern period, showing how the various varieties of Averages played a significant role in the development of maritime risk management and the broader institutional development in the Low Countries.
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This coda takes stock of the articles in the forum and subsequently draws some lessons from the articles on the question of how to deal with risk and uncertainty in the present. It argues that looking at how risk and uncertainty were... more
This coda takes stock of the articles in the forum and subsequently draws some lessons from the articles on the question of how to deal with risk and uncertainty in the present. It argues that looking at how risk and uncertainty were perceived and dealt with in the early modern world allows one to envisage new solutions to deal with the major problems facing human society today, such as climate change.
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This article introduces the various articles in this forum. It first sets the scene by showing why the maritime sector forms an excellent case study to investigate risk and uncertainty in the premodern world. Second, it problematises from... more
This article introduces the various articles in this forum. It first sets the scene by showing why the maritime sector forms an excellent case study to investigate risk and uncertainty in the premodern world. Second, it problematises from a historical perspective both Frank Knight's and Douglass North's approaches to risk and uncertainty, arguing that notwithstanding the lack of data, premodern commerce could properly assess both risk and uncertainty. Third, it introduces the various articles in the forum.
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This article aims to explain the hitherto unexplored role of General Average and other forms of maritime averages in risk management in sixteenth-century Antwerp. Whereas most scholarly attention has focused on insurance, this article... more
This article aims to explain the hitherto unexplored role of General Average and other forms of maritime averages in risk management in sixteenth-century Antwerp. Whereas most scholarly attention has focused on insurance, this article makes the case that maritime averages also were an important tool to manage risk. The article
highlights four major developments: first, concrete causes were incorporated under the General Average principle to cover uninsurable expenses and protection costs; second, General Average payments could be recovered via insurance; third, individual merchants sought to assess risk more precisely, developing new varieties of
maritime averages themselves; and fourth, the protective foreign merchant guilds developed compulsory contributions based on General Average. The article alsoadds to related discussions on mercantile conflict resolution and commercial law.
highlights four major developments: first, concrete causes were incorporated under the General Average principle to cover uninsurable expenses and protection costs; second, General Average payments could be recovered via insurance; third, individual merchants sought to assess risk more precisely, developing new varieties of
maritime averages themselves; and fourth, the protective foreign merchant guilds developed compulsory contributions based on General Average. The article alsoadds to related discussions on mercantile conflict resolution and commercial law.
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The Generale Keijzerlijcke Indische Compagnie, known as the Ostend Company or GIC, was a short-lived but very successful chartered company based in the Southern Netherlands between 1722 and 1727. Despite the high profits from the Chinese... more
The Generale Keijzerlijcke Indische Compagnie, known as the Ostend Company or GIC, was a short-lived but very successful chartered company based in the Southern Netherlands between 1722 and 1727. Despite the high profits from the Chinese tea trade, the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI was forced to retract its charter in 1727 under Dutch and English pressure. This article analyses the strategies of the directors of the GIC to continue trading after its charter had been retracted. Partly by circumventing prohibitions, for instance via Cádiz, and partly by investing in new companies such as the Swedish East India Company, the GIC threatened the role of the established Dutch and English monopolistic companies. These initiatives have never before been analysed in a coherent way that connects the activities of the Ostenders in Europe, India and China. This article shows the endurance of the business model of the GIC during the eighteenth century.
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This article argues that the Ostend Company (Generale Indische Compagnie, GIC , 1722-1727) was a deliberate attempt to challenge the established chartered companies, by simultaneously responding and adapting to the organizational problems... more
This article argues that the Ostend Company (Generale Indische Compagnie, GIC , 1722-1727) was a deliberate attempt to challenge the established chartered companies, by simultaneously responding and adapting to the organizational problems that companies such as the East India Company and the Dutch East India Company faced. As such, the Ostend Company was not a Company-State, as some historians have argued, but a specific new kind of lean organization. Moreover, this article traces the very specific circumstances that led to the establishment of the GIC,: first, the need to limit competition in the profitable tea trade; second, the wishes of foreign investors for a company that was able to trade effectively in the Bengal textile trade and the African slave trade; third, the wishes of the Habsburg authorities to consolidate and expand their authority in the Southern Netherlands; and fourth, the failure of both the Dutch Republic and England to act militarily against the trade in Ostend, against the wishes of the respective chartered companies. The article argues that especially the role of Ghent merchant Jacobus Maelcamp and the high-ranking civil servant Patrice MacNeny should be emphasized, as they were most effective in lobbying the Habsburg administration in Vienna to perform a U-turn on the Ostend Company: only after their work, the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI and the Governor of the Southern Netherlands, Eugène de Savoie, started the process of chartering the company., to the result was a highly successful but short-lived company whose business model would be copied by other chartered companies in eighteenth-century Europe, such as the Swedish East India Company.
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The attention of historians of the Dutch chartered companies has mainly focused on the institutional development in the seventeenth century. Although it is true that both the VOC and WIC had taken their definitive form in the early... more
The attention of historians of the Dutch chartered companies has mainly focused on the institutional development in the seventeenth century. Although it is true that both the VOC and WIC had taken their definitive form in the early seventeenth century, the eighteenth century also saw interesting developments, for instance in the case of the Opium Society (Amfioen Sociëteit). This private company, set up by Governor-General Van Imhoff in 1745, was an effort by the VOC to lower its business risk and combatting private trade by outsourcing the opium trade to a separate company. Although the Opium Society was rather profitable in its ten years, English competition quickly lowered profit margins. Nonetheless, the Opium Society proved to be a profitable venture for its shareholder when the Society was abolished in 1794. This study furthermore points to new approaches to study the decline of the Dutch companies in the eighteenth century.
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Publication in the Brill Legal History Library, published November 2021.
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This is the methodological introduction to an open-access dataset to Dutch-African Shipping (1830-1918), available on DANS via https://doi.org/10.17026/SS/Z84SLW.
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This is the methodological introduction to an open-access dataset to Dutch-African Shipping (1830-1918), available on DANS via https://doi.org/10.17026/SS/JFI20J.
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This is a working paper in the CORE Working Paper Series (2020-01). The CORE Working Papers Series publishes articles or chapters which our Research Group members intend to publish in a definitive form later. Publication is dependent on... more
This is a working paper in the CORE Working Paper Series (2020-01). The CORE Working Papers Series publishes articles or chapters which our Research Group members intend to publish in a definitive form later. Publication is dependent on the assent of the editors or publisher. The paper has been published in November 2021 by Brill, and the definitive version can be found on elsewhere on my Academia page.
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Report on the digitalisation project of the Dutch States General, written by Rik Hoekstra & Ida Nijenhuis (Huygens ING) with my research support.
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Full unpublished MA Thesis on the Ostend Company
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Full unpublished BA Thesis on private trade in the VOC.
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Call for Papers and Panels for the new Institute of Historical Research Partnership Seminar series "Risk and Uncertainty in the Premodern World".
