Thank you for joining us to discuss your new book, Ancient Maritime Loan Contracts. What was your motivation for this research project?
The project originated in my doctoral research, the topic of which was the historical development of Roman ‘maritime law’ during the late Republic and early Principate. In my thesis, I wrote a chapter on the law governing the relationship between merchants and financiers, which focused primarily on maritime loan contracts. In retrospect, I realised that when writing the chapter, I did not properly understand how the system worked, let alone the law behind it. However (it seemed to me) neither did anyone else. This may sound provocative, given that there are already studies of the relevant sources in the literature. However, until now, studies have tended to focus upon only one type of source (for example, the evidence furnished by the papyri, the speeches of the Attic orators, or the Roman juristic texts), without any attempt to integrate them into a single coherent framework. My aim was to draw these sources together and to take a more holistic view of the life of these contracts and their significance in the context of both economic and legal systems. The relationship between economic development and legal change, in the ancient context, is complex and rewarding to study. Maritime loan contracts provide an almost unique window into this relationship.
The book aims to answer two basic questions: first, how did maritime loan contracts function in the context of the ancient economy; and second, how the different legal cultures that flourished during this time dealt with disputes between merchants and financiers? Because the documents themselves were essentially the same standard-form agreements for almost two millennia, we can see how, for example, the Athenians and Romans confronted the common problems arising from litigation in their own distinctive ways. One can then examine how commercial actors and the various legal regimes that they operated in adapted to one another, which is the insight that one needs to acquire a better understanding of the relationship between economic activity and legal innovation.
How interesting! You call these maritime loan contracts the “lifeblood” of maritime trade after the fifth century B.C. Tell us more?
Then, as now, maritime trade depended for its vitality on finance. Around the 8th – 7th centuries BC, there was a sea change in the conduct of trade in the eastern Mediterranean. Whereas previously goods (such as precious metals) had tended to circulate between aristocratic and elite households, a new trade developed in bulk commodities like grain, wine, and olive oil (the so-called Mediterranean triad). This trade was conducted by merchants, who lived predominantly in enclaves in foreign lands and traded their wares ‘internationally’ in a developing system of seaborne commerce. Merchants, however, usually did not have the means to acquire large cargoes, or, even if they did, could not afford to bear the risk that came along with shipping them (the major risks were wrecking, piracy, and enemy action). While there were several different ways in which merchants could obtain credit, one was to borrow money from a financier, who could either be a wealthy individual (normally operating through an intermediary) or a professional moneylender. Basically, merchants would borrow money to finance the acquisition of a cargo, which they would then ship to some other destination. There, they would sell the original goods and purchase a new shipment, which was then transported back to the home port. Crucially, it was a special term of the loan that the merchant would only be liable to repay the debt ‘if the ship arrived back safely’, the purpose of which was to shift the risk for the failure of the enterprise due to an ‘Act of God’ to the financier. In taking out a maritime loan, the merchant therefore not only raised the funds he needed but also ‘insured’ himself against the risk of force majeure, in return for which financiers were entitled to demand a higher yield, consisting of interest on the loan together with a ‘price’ for the risk (the so-called pretium periculi). Altogether, the transaction doubled up as a loan and a crude form of marine insurance.
There are certain challenges inherent in working with ancient sources. How did you experience these, and how did you address them?
The main challenge with the sources is that they are fragmentary, thinly distributed, and diverse. We do not have a single complete original contract (though we do have the terms of a few by report). In the middle of the last century, this led the ancient historian Moses Finley to remark that it was impossible to make a meaningful study of the documents because the evidence was too sparse. However, since the 1950s, several papyri have been discovered which bear upon the subject – most famously the so-called Muziris papyrus, which records a shipment of valuable goods imported to Egypt from India, apparently financed by a maritime loan. (This has been the object of an important and detailed study by F De Romanis, which was a great help to me in writing the book.) But, while the newly discovered evidence helps, it remains the case that, for the most part, we are compelled to view these documents through the prism of other sources.
The primary sources fall into several groups. The first tranche consists of commercial documents connected with maritime loans, usually as part of a loan dossier (2nd century BC – 2nd century AD). These are principally recorded on papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt, with additional insights furnished by the Sulpician tablets (a “‘bankers’” archive of the first century AD discovered near to Pompeii). The second, quite different in content, comprises speeches composed by the Attic orators for delivery in Athenian law courts (4th century BC). Four of these speeches (several of which were by Demosthenes) were intended for trials between merchants and their creditors over the interpretation of maritime loan contracts. Finally, the third group is made up of legal texts from the Roman period, chiefly by the Roman jurists (2nd – 3rd century AD), as well as imperial constitutions ranging from Diocletian to Justinian (4th – 6th century AD).
Each of these sources – commercial documents, court speeches, juristic texts, and the imperial constitutions – have very different historical contexts and relate to maritime loan contracts in specific ways. Interpreting them was a significant challenge. My training is in the Roman juristic material, which consists in a variety of genres of texts focusing on legal issues from a lawyer’s perspective. In the main, the jurists were interested in maritime loan contracts for the problems of contractual interpretation that they raised. They then discussed these alongside other standard-form contracts (e.g., arbitration agreements) with a view to formulating rules that could be used to decide future cases. Going beyond the Roman juristic texts to interpret sources with entirely different provenances was necessary but also somewhat daunting. As a historian, one cannot pick and choose from the evidence available and then purport to write comprehensively on a subject. However, I was acutely conscious that I had to be attentive to, and was reliant upon, the work of colleagues in other fields. But this is the nature of scholarship: cross-disciplinary collaboration is not just desirable but essential.
Rather than taking a chronological approach (studying how these contracts worked in classical Athens and then again in the Roman Empire), you have chosen to structure the book thematically. Why?
At first glance, the thematic structure might seem an odd choice. Generally speaking, it makes sense in most cases to treat the history of an artefact chronologically. In this case, that would have meant that the book would have been split into at least two parts, the first treating the contracts as they appeared at Classical Athens and the second during the Classical period of Rome. Of course, if we had the evidence, there would also be sections focusing on the Hellenistic period, Graeco-Roman Egypt, etc. But I was constrained by what we have, which is mainly speeches of the Attic orators and the Roman juridical texts. That being the case, we already have two modern studies of each of these bodies of evidence in isolation: Stephan Schuster’s 2005 study of maritime lending in the speeches of Demosthenes; and Ivano Pontoriero’s 2011 study of the Roman legal sources. These are very good in themselves but are limited by their exclusive focus on one set of evidence.
What I realised in studying both the speeches and the juristic texts was that they each represent the response of a legal culture to the common problems thrown up by disputes over the interpretation of standard clauses in maritime loan contracts. By dealing with the Athenian and Roman responses together, it was therefore possible to draw out broader themes which made it possible to identify not only elements of continuity but also what was distinctive about the handling of these contracts in each of these different historical contexts.
This brings me to a more fundamental point, about the conceptual underpinnings of the overall structure of the book. In the early days of my doctoral research, I read Horden and Purcell’s classic study The Corrupting Sea (2000). One of the inspirations for that work is the French historian Fernand Braudel’s arguments concerning the flow of historical time. The basic idea is that time does not run at the same rate for every historical process: rather, some phenomena (for example, man’s relationship with his environment) change only very slowly, over the longue durée; some in shorter temporalities, such as social change in a given society; and some in very short time-spans, like the course of political events (which Braudel termed histoire événementielle). In The Corrupting Sea, one of the later chapters illustrates what a Braudelian religious history of the ancient Mediterranean might look like. I wanted to ask the same question of legal history.
Maritime loan contracts make the perfect candidate for such a study because they are an aspect of the longue durée. As standard-form contracts they barely changed in their construction over a very long period. The reason for this is that they were an essential feature of maritime trade, facilitating both the acquisition of cargoes by merchants and the distribution of the risk across the actors in a way that was tolerable to everyone involved. In this way they were a stable connective link at the heart of the ancient economy. These, together with the other standard form contracts, make the structure of the ancient system of distribution visible, showing the relationships between the various actors that persisted over c. two millennia.
Just as the contracts are an aspect of the longue durée, so the legal cultures that came into contact with them – Athens and Rome; but also the Hellenistic polities, etc. – are (in Braudel’s language) ‘conjunctural’ phenomena, which is to say cultures that came onto the scene against the backdrop of the ‘long durational’ economic system. Of course, it is also the case that these cultures sustained the economic system, so that both phenomena were mutually dependent upon one another. But while the economic system changed only incrementally over a very long period, the socio-political world transformed with greater rapidity.
Ultimately, this distinction between different currents of historical time provided the conceptual basis for structuring the book as I did, because both the Athenians and the Romans encountered and shaped the world of maritime trade on their own terms, while also adapting themselves to it. The chapters are therefore ordered in a Braudelian format, starting with the long durational aspects (the commercial documents and how they functioned in the economic system), followed by conjunctural phenomena, that is, their contact with the Athenian and Roman legal systems. The middle third chapter therefore functions as a pivot or hinge, showing how traders resolved disputes in the different contexts of classical Athens and Rome. It is my hope that this approach justifies the book as a useful contribution to the subject, to stand alongside the studies which have already enriched our understanding over the last several decades.
Peter Candy is an Assistant Professor in Civil Law at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Join us for Dr. Candy’s book launch at the Centre for Legal History in April to find out more!
Details:
April 22, 2025
16:00 – 18:00
Moot Court Room, Old College
https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/news-events/events/peter-candy-ancient-maritime-loan-contracts-book-launch
