欧洲史讲座|前现代世界的风险和不确定性

5月13日-7月15日，伦敦大学历史研究院（Institute of Historical Research, IHR）将会于周三17:00-19:00（伦敦时间）举办四场在线讲座，主题是Risk and Uncertainty in the Premodern World。

（https://www.history.ac.uk/partnership-seminars/risk-and-uncertainty-premodern-world）

随着全球经济在COVID-19大流行病爆发后放缓增长，以及气候变化的日益严重，人类正面临着一系列令人难以置信的危险，威胁着生活的各个方面。然而，这种令人不安的时代并非首次出现，在整个历史上，自然和人为的风险一直在威胁着人类的进步。

这个跨学科的系列研讨会主要关注前现代世界的风险和不确定性，调查历史上不同国家和地区的社会如何理解和应对风险及不确定性。

讲座日程

· 时间都为当天的17:00-19:00（伦敦时间）

第一场 5月13日 Pandemics, Rish and Uncertainty

1、“十四世纪意大利的黑死病、暴力和风险”

· William Caferro (Vanderbilt): Black Death, Violence and Risk in Fourteenth-Century Italy
（摘要仍在确认中）

2、“近代早期地中海的隔离和风险”

· Marina Iní (Cambridge): Quarantine and Risk in the Early Modern Mediterranean

In a world where plague was a common occurrence, trade and travelling constituted a risk that nonetheless had to be taken to ensure the survival of the economy and society. This paper investigates the adoption of a transnational quarantine system in the early modern western Mediterranean to mitigate the uncertainties and risk associated with the occurrence of the disease. Plague outbreaks were a terrible occurrence which not only devastated the physical body but also the social body, with great economic repercussions. The threat posed by plague was especially present and dangerous for European states trading with the Ottoman empire and neighbouring territories where plague was considered to be endemic. Thus, from the fifteenth century, Mediterranean cities and states started to adopt preventative quarantine practices when trading with infected and suspected lands. Quarantine progressively became more sophisticated with the establishment of great quarantine complexes (lazzaretto, pl. lazzaretti) in the most important trading hubs of the Italian and Balkan peninsula, Ionian Sea, France and Malta. Quarantine protocols were shared between health boards of western Mediterranean states in a transnational effort against the common enemy. The paper also examines the risk and uncertainties within the system itself. The strict links between health, trade, transnational relations and rivalry complicated the assessment of the risk presented by plague, forcing states to adopt compromises. Quarantine was not a simple and easy solution but presented complications itself. The presence of a lazzaretto increased the possibility of importing the disease; on the other hand, a port city without a proper quarantine station was not viable for transnational trade as the port was not deemed secure by international trading powers. Furthermore, if a lazzaretto was present, its reputation and efficiency played a great role in the system, but at the same time, the construction of a new foreign lazzaretto troubled rival ports and powers.

第二场 5月25日 Chance in Early Modern Literature and Material Culture

1、“论如何推算荷兰的碰运气游戏”

· Jessen Kelly (Utah): On Reckoning with Games of Chance in the Dutch Republic

Risk, probability, and future expectation have often traditionally been viewed in terms of histories of mathematics and quantification. This paper proceeds from the assertion that the history of art and material culture have an important but neglected role in the study of these concepts. Artifacts and images can, broadly speaking, stage varied temporalities for viewers; but they also obviously invoke matters of perception and mediation that are vital to assessing changing constructions of future time. Focusing on the early modern Dutch Republic, my paper examines the category of “breakables” in art and material culture. I concentrate in particular on breakable objects that reflected on their own status as such through their ludic qualities and references to games of chance. I juxtapose my analysis of these objects with a close consideration of Christiaan Huygens’s treatment of dice games in his On Reckoning in Games of Chance (1657), the first published, viable mathematical approach to expectation and a major work in the development of probability calculus. The dice problems in Huygens’s treatise had appeared repeatedly in early modern mathematical discourse. However, these problems can also be seen as part of a range of figurative uses of games of chance to formulate epistemologies of uncertain futures, uses which spanned different media. Comparing Huygens’s text with breakable material culture not only suggests the varied resonance of games of chance as models and analogies for future time; it also points to ways that material culture shaped methods for engaging future uncertainty in the United Provinces.

2、“To 'Give and Hazard all’：莎士比亚《威尼斯商人》中的彩票券、选择和寻求确定性” 

（注：我未查阅《威尼斯商人》中译本‘Give and Hazard all’译文，只能暂且不译，若读者知晓译文，欢迎留言）
· Tom Mortimer (Cambridge): To ‘Give and Hazard all’: Lotteries, Elections and the Search for Certainty in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice

In essence, the key question of my paper is this: how does the ‘risk’ or ‘uncertainty’ of a lottery lend itself to the stability of the state; how does ‘chance’ give rise to ‘certainty’? The 1590s in England were a time of immense social and constitutional uncertainty, driven by a reassertion of monarchical absolutism, a series of economic crises, and the lingering question of Elizabeth’s succession. In response, thinkers increasingly turned to the model republics of Athens and Venice for political inspiration: states which reduced corruption, partisanship and instability by distributing many of their public offices by lot. 

The ‘lottery-trial’ of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (c. 1594–7) has not been placed in this context before. In Shakespeare’s play, Portia’s lottery is a kind of ‘test’ designed by the Lord of Belmont, Portia’s father, to select an appropriate husband for his daughter by making each suitor guess which of three caskets contains her portrait. Scholars who have sought to examine the play’s republican leanings have generally overlooked the scenes, and even general criticism of the play has tended to argue that they rest ‘at the furthest remove from actual social practices’ (Richard A. Levin, 2010). 

Drawing from classical and early modern republicanism, my paper will argue that the play’s casket-trial in fact functions as a kind of election for the new ‘Lord of Belmont’. In particular, it will suggest that the blend of choice and chance displayed in Portia’s lottery, and its pervading interest in sovereignty and government, tie it closely to the electoral processes described by the Venetian nobleman Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542). Examining Shakespeare’s play alongside these ideas reveals that the ‘risks’ and ‘hazards’ intrinsic to lotteries, when applied in controlled circumstances, can give rise to confidence, stability and order. The uncertain, in other words, can assure certainty.

第三场 6月17日 Risk and Uncertainty in Capital Markets

1、“政策的不确定性和资本市场：英属东印度公司的证据”

· Daniel Bogart (UC Irvine) and Marco Del Angel (California State University Los Angeles): Policy Uncertainty and Capital Markets: Evidence from the English East India Company

The goal of this study is to investigate the level of uncertainty facing the English East India Company and the implications of uncertainty for voyage-level investments between 1690 and 1830. During this tumultuous period, there was substantial variation in government policy towards the Company. There were also substantial changes in geo-political risk as England fought numerous wars with a global reach. While the Company’s colonial strategies shaped views of its business activities, our working hypothesis is that policy shocks and warfare increased uncertainty for the Company, as reflected in the pricing of Company stocks. We also hypothesize that policy shocks and warfare ultimately lowered investment through the channel of increased uncertainty. 

The study uses new series of EIC ship-level sailing decisions and published series on stock prices. We examine whether uncertainty, measured by the volatility of stock returns had an effect on EIC’s decision to send trading voyages to Asia. Financing of voyages required irreversible investments to get ships ready to depart, such as purchases of precious metals to settle accounts or funds to buy commodities. Thus, trading voyages provide a useful measure of EIC’s investment. 

Using a discrete time duration model, we find that higher levels of uncertainty decreased the probability of sending trading voyages to Asia.  Also, we examine potential heterogeneous effects and the impact of extreme volatility events, and find that uncertainty had larger negative effects during the optimal sailing season of the Indian Ocean. These findings are consistent with the historical narrative that political and economic uncertainty influenced EIC’s trade environment. The results provide evidence of the effect of political and institutional shocks on stock market valuations and uncertainty that affect economic growth. 

2、“巴黎的劳埃德保险公司？1668-1686年的柯尔贝主义、皇家保险商会和巴黎的资本市场”
· Lewis Wade (Exeter): Lloyd’s of Paris? Colbertianism, the Royal Insurance Chamber and the Parisian Capital Market, 1668-86

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s eminent minister, has long been famous for his commercial and maritime reforms during the grand siècle. Through his reforming agenda, Colbert sought to wield the power of the state to establish French economic hegemony within Europe. But one distinctive reform has been widely ignored up to now: despite targeted interventions into insurance practices by Colbert during his tenure, the French insurance industry never took off before 1750, long after the English and Dutch insurance industries had reached maturity.

This paper studies these interventions through analysing the Royal Insurance Chamber, established in Paris under the auspices of Colbert in 1668. Drawing on the remarkable records kept by the institution – alongside a dataset of over 4000 of its insurance policies – I explore its rise in 1668 and its activities up to 1673. Colbert established the Chamber with the intention of addressing several market deficiencies – especially in the mobilisation of capital – but ultimately came up short with the onset of the Dutch War in 1672. A jurisdictional war between the city’s admiralty and merchant courts – compounded by the Chamber’s own weaknesses in addressing conflicts – irreparably tarnished the institution’s reputation. The Chamber therefore serves as a valuable case study for analysing institutional ‘efficiency’, vindicating Sheilagh Ogilvie’s insights on the need to study institutions within their broader political and economic context. Moreover, its rise and fall draws attention to the crucial role that the state could play in the making or breaking of early modern insurance markets.

第四场 7月15日 Politics, Risk and Uncertainty

1、“缔造和平的代价：王室的观点”；“金钱、荣誉和政治生涯：担任近代早期威斯特法利亚和平大会外交官的风险”

· Dorothée Goetze (Lund/Bonn): What It Costs to Make Peace: The Princes' Perspectives and Lena Oetzel (Wien/Salzburg): Money, Honour, Career: Of the Risks of being a Diplomat at an Early Modern Peace Congress

In theory, peace was a highly valued norm that early modern rulers had to aspire to. But it was not unchallenged, as it could come into conflict with other norms such as honour and reputation. Therefore, we propose to consider peace-making being a very risky affair on several different levels. Risks could be e.g. existential, political, normative, financial or personal.

Using the Westphalian Peace Congress as a case study we would like to examine the manifold risks of peace-making from two different perspectives: On the one hand, the risks of the rulers and their councillors who decided about war and peace and on the other hand, the risks of the diplomats who were the ones who had to practically negotiate the peace. In a first step, we want to identify and characterise the different forms of risk, before asking which risks were deemed to be worth taking by whom and which risks had to be taken. The perspective of the policy makers at court differed from the perspective of the diplomats, but both need to be considered and related to each other, if we want to approach the central question why peace-making was so difficult – and still is.

2、“I vow that I will make temples and games for you: The evocatio and Risk Management” （注：非常抱歉我不懂拉丁文，只在洛布古典丛书的在线版找到了对应的英译I vow that I will make temples and games for you，来源DOI: 10.4159/DLCL.macrobius-saturnalia.2011。

若有读者知晓中文，欢迎留言。关于evocatio的具体释义，也欢迎留言）

· Emily Hurt (Yale): Voveo vobis templa ludosque facturum: The evocatio and Risk Management

The sacking and destruction of cities was endemic to the ancient world.  Even the strongest cities were sometimes unable to hold back their enemies: Athens was devastated by the Persians, Alexander the Great destroyed Thebes, and the Romans wiped Carthage, a 700-year-old Mediterranean power, off the face of the earth.  However, ancient cities also had an amazing power of survival, their collective memory was held in tradition and rituals that often outlasted the physical cities themselves.  This paper focuses on the destruction of cities under the Roman Republic and argues that the Roman ritual of the evocatio, in which the tutelary god of an enemy city was ritually called out and invited to Rome, was part of a process of risk management.  Symbolically, the bringing of conquered gods back to Rome was a sort of insurance policy, designed to combat the power of the collective memory of ancient cities by stripping away one of the focal points of collective, civic identity and integrating it into the city of Rome.  The paper is a reexamination and reframing of Rome’s famously “tolerant” religious policy, one which incorporated foreign and sometimes hostile gods into the Roman pantheon.  I argue that it was less a policy of “religious toleration” than a strategic move to mitigate the risks inherent with the incorporation of a large number of geographically and culturally diverse cities under a single empire ruled from Rome.

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