| Project Detail |
Looking to the past to understand the evolution of economic sovereignty
The legal definition of economic sovereignty has changed over time, and it no longer encompasses as much as it once did. In an effort to understand this change, the EU-funded CaPANES project will investigate six European cities that were bustling networked hubs of economic activity between 1400 and 1620. It will utilise agent and network-based modelling to map changes to economic sovereignty within a city and the links between cities. In turn, this will reveal more about the causal patterns of change, which will subsequently be used to overhaul current notions of economic sovereignty from a legal perspective.
The legal concept of sovereignty does not capture foreign trade relations, networks or economic clout. This shortcoming has resulted from a historical reduction of its meaning since the 1600s. This project will analyze legal concepts of sovereignty that developed before that time, within six networked cities of commerce (Bruges, Southampton, Rouen, Lübeck, Toulouse and Florence). In the period of 1400-1620 cities were interconnected through trade routes, correspondence and diplomacy. Legal concepts of sovereignty were crafted bottom-up and were more encompassing than the present-day legal concept of sovereignty, also for economic relations. In the process, these concepts absorbed changes within the cities and in the economic relations between cities. In the project proposed, agent-based and network methods will be used to track down these changes. The dynamism of conceptual change at the level of individual cities related to commercial, political and social developments, which will be assessed with agent-based modelling. These developments influenced institutional set-ups, constitutional approaches, the organization of trade and policies of access toward foreigners. At the level of networks between cities, dynamics impacting on sovereignty concepts related to foreign relations and yielded features different to developments within cities. Network analysis will make it possible to detect the dispersal and weight of sovereignty concepts and whether some concepts underpinned a transnational field of sovereignty. Causal patterns underlying change will be the outcome of this research into the cities and their networks, and these patterns will be used to create an updated legal concept of economic sovereignty. |
