The Spirit of Trafficke: Paper, Semiotics and Finance

• José María Pérez Fernández ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Granada

     Universidad de Granada

     Granada, España

     
• Localización: Journal of European Economic History, ISSN 0391-5115, Vol. 52, Nº. 2, 2023, págs. 114-131
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay will provide a necessarily brief and preliminary survey of certain phenomena involved in the early modern dematerialization of economic exchanges through an approach to Gerard Malynes’ Lex Mercatoria (1622). A comprehensive treatise on international maritime law, trade practices, accounting methods, and above all an essay on financial instruments, Malynes’ work constitutes an ex- cellent case study for the way in which these relatively new phe- nomena were accounted for in the early seventeenth century, when many of the methods and practices that were originally conceived and developed many years before in the Italian Peninsula had al- ready become global. My essay will focus on how Malynes built not just upon long-standing and well-established practices, but also upon a doctrinal tradition represented by authors such as Luca Pa- cioli, and how he turned to concepts from other disciplines and practices to make sense of paper-based semiotic artefacts like the bill of exchange, whose power to convey a significant amount of value on a “small peece of paper of some two fingers broad” he described as “the Spirit or Facultie of the Soule of Trafficke and Com- merce”. As he explained their nature and function, Malynes resorted to the vocabularies of disciplines like rhetoric, theology, and natural philosophy – including geometry, anatomy and what today we would call anthropology – to legitimise these financial semiotic arte- facts and explain their performative power. The result was a combi- nation of pre-existing discourse on money and finance with new ways of accounting for ever more sophisticated and innovative prac- tices which situated them as part of a universal epistemology for the codification and administration of information and knowledge in finance and trade