Journal articles on the topic 'Shipping – Europe – History'

Since direct shipping routes between Europe and Asia opened up at the end of the 15th century, the growing intercontinental and regional shipping connections resulted in increasing entanglements between European and Asian maritime labour markets. This article analyses the long term development of the connections between European and Asian maritime labour markets and its impact on socio-cultural (and labour) relations through three elements: first, the changing connections between European and Asian maritime labour markets; second, the changing nature of European and Asian maritime labour markets and its influence on the positions of sailors; and third, the changing relations between European and Asian sailors and its effects on the reactions and interactions in a globalising maritime labour market. It explores how these changing global connections shaped encounters between European and Asian sailors on (intercontinental) shipping in and from the North Sea region, and how it affected the positions and reactions of its workers.

This article studies the financial market integration in the 1670s by examining the effectiveness of triangular exchange arbitrage. The results suggest that international credit markets based on bills of exchange in northwestern Europe were well integrated and responded to exchange-rate differences quickly. The speed of adjustment, ranging between one and three weeks, accorded with the speed of communication, but the transaction cost associated with exchange arbitrage was much lower than that of shipping bullion. Although warfare had a disruptive effect on exchange arbitrage by increasing transaction cost, markets were resilient in remaining efficient.

In the early twentieth century, transatlantic migration peaked. Transmigrants, i.e. migrants who travelled through third countries on the way to their destination, comprised more than half of all emigrants departing from German, Belgian, Dutch and British ports which together were the most important. The most important countries of origin were Russia and Austria-Hungary, in addition to Italy. Because of this, shipping companies had to deal with networks and manage a transport system extending far beyond their traditional sphere of economic interest. In the process, the companies became ever more dependent on influencing state actors in Europe as well as in North America to keep their long-established business structures going. In many ways, the transatlantic passenger business between the 1890s and 1914 should therefore be viewed more as a transmigrant business rather than an emigrant business, which is the most common understanding of this massive human movement. The article focuses on the transmigration phenomenon from the point of view of three very different shipping companies/initiatives in Norway, Sweden and Denmark respectively. Norway and Sweden had among the highest rates of transatlantic migration, and Norway had the third largest merchant fleet in the word by the turn of the twentieth century. Yet only Denmark provided a direct transatlantic service throughout the most important period for transatlantic migration. What possibilities were there for these three countries to engage in the transatlantic passenger business and what constrained their efforts? By concentrating on the transmigration phenomenon and three countries with differing points of departure, the article provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and dynamics involved in shaping the transatlantic passenger business, of how the business worked, and of how the companies could influence the flow and pattern of migratory movements between Europe and North America.

The argument of this paper is that studies of an earlier world have something to tell modern political economy about the way economies develop and that, while history must draw on economic insights, economics ought not to be a science without time. The paper generalises from one sphere of trade, known from the Berwick ‘particulars of custom’, to national income, which can be estimated (or guessed at) from ecclesiastical taxations. Where studies of medieval Scotland have taken a distinctly theoretical, legal turn, it may do no harm to discuss the practicalities of concrete economic evidence: cargoes, merchants, ships, sailors and so on. The mechanics of customs administration can also be followed in the particulars. The taxations suggest that the immediate demand-side impacts of the export trade had longer-term supply-side effects, as landlords developed their sheep farming interests. The export trade tied in with foreign taxations, generating funds for transmission overseas. The opening of the economy had the potential for the usual multiplier effects but these were counter-balanced by selfish, and hugely damaging, English interference in Scotland's trade in Europe. Fourteenth-century Scots put up stiff resistance but could not entirely escape the tribulations brought on their heads by English decisions.

Governments often respond to crisis situations with radical economic policies. The Shipping Act of 1916 created a government-owned shipping company. This significant departure from prior policy arose in the atmosphere of crisis surrounding the war in Europe. The Wilson Administration was able to use political institutions to its advantage and ensure that alternative, more moderate proposals would not be considered by the legislature. Initially thwarted by a filibuster, the administration was forced to compromise in order to maintain party loyalty and pass the bill in 1916.

Shipping costs between Europe and Asia were reduced by two-thirds between the 1770s and the 1820s. Copper sheathing and other technical improvements which allowed ships to make more frequent voyages over longer lifetimes accounted for part of the cost reduction. British hegemony in the Indian Ocean, which ended an eighteenth-century arms race, accounted for the rest by allowing the substitution of smaller ships which cost less to build and required fewer men per ton. These changes were at least as important as the elimination of monopoly profits in narrowing intercontinental price differentials during the early nineteenth century.

The status of plum breeding around the world is reviewed. Two distinct types of plums are grown: Japanese-type shipping plums (mostly diploid hybrids of Prunus salicina Lindl. with other species) such as are grown in California, and hexaploid or “domestica” plums (P. domestica L.), which have a long history in Europe. In recent years there has been a resurgence of plum breeding outside the United States.

In 2008, Pierre Gervais contended that social and economic developments in the Atlantic were to be ascribed to an overwhelming European intervention in West Africa and the Americas. This article questions Gervais’s assumption by stressing how Europeans, West Africans and Americans – individuals and states – mutually influenced urban hierarchies and distributive hubs across three different continents, while arguing that these interactions and interconnections should be seen within a context of entangled histories. This contribution re-examines the Dutch experience of slave trade and shipping to assess the extent to which slave trading and shipping activities influenced port hierarchies in Europe, determined the organization of port hubs in West Africa and helped develop port structures in the Americas. This assessment is anchored in the data provided by the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, the collections of the Dutch West India Company and the Middleburg Commercial Company, and the notarial archives of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

The complex routes taken by overseas migrants through nineteenth-century Central Europe included Vienna and Budapest as nodal points. In contrast to the ports of departure and arrival, and the role of labour migrants in urbanisation, the place of overseas migrants in larger urban histories of Vienna and Budapest remains largely unexplored. By using two case studies that represent the opposite sides on the spectrum of overseas travellers through Central Europe, this article aims to trace new directions such an exploration might take. Aiming to introduce the ‘spatial turn’ into the subject of overseas migration in Vienna and Budapest, it analyses how, on the local level, railway stations and the neighbouring areas functioned to accommodate shipping agencies, their agents and lodging houses, as well as the police, detention centres, and the local enterprise that helped to direct – facilitate or restrict – traffic through the urban fabric and between cities.

The history of clashes over extraterritorial jurisdiction between the United States of America and other States in the Americas, Europe and elsewhere is a long one. That history is commonly traced back to the antitrust claims arising from the Alcoa case in 1945, in which the “effects” doctrine was advanced in the peculiar and objectionable form in which it is applied, not simply to acts which constitute elements of a single offence but which occur in different jurisdictions but, rather, to the economic repercussions of acts in one State which are felt in another. The conflict persisted into the 1950s, with the clashes over US regulation of the international shipping and paper industries. In the 1960s and 1970s there were further clashes in relation to the extraterritorial application of US competition laws, notably in disputes over shipping regulation and the notorious Uranium Antitrust litigation, in which US laws were applied to penalise the extraterritorial conduct of non-US companies, conducted with the approval of their national governments, at a time when those companies were barred by US law from trading in the United States. It was that litigation which was in large measure responsible for the adoption in the United Kingdom of the Protection of Trading Interests Act 1980, which significantly extended the powers which the British government had asserted in the 1952 Shipping Contracts and Commercial Documents Act to defend British interests against US extraterritorial claims.

Georg von Neumayer (1826-1909) is a major figure in the history of Australian and Antarctic science. He came to Australia twice, in 1852 and 1857–1864, the first time as a sailor and the second as the scientist who established the Flagstaff Observatory in Melbourne. He came here at a time when the scientific tradition was firmly established in Europe (its home) but new to Australia where there was little or no homegrown scientific establishment. His main contributions are in the fields of terrestrial magnetism, the early days of oceanography, and the potential of polar research. He built and managed the Flagstaff Observatory, conducted a magnetic survey of Victoria, visited Tasmania to re-measure the magnetic parameters at Rossbank Observatory, worked to identify the most efficient sailing routes for shipping between Europe and Australia and collaborated with other scientists and artists during his sojourn here. On return to Europe, he became a major influence in the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration.

Britain’s imperial and commercial success rested on maritime links. Whether trading wool across the Channel to Europe, seeking spices in South Asia or importing sugar from the Caribbean, shipping was an essential resource. Yet, to undertake these trades, merchants required naval supplies – finished ships, timber to build them and stores to fill them – that were not always easily accessible. This challenge was particularly apparent in the early seventeenth century for trading corporations whose specific needs demanded innovative approaches to the naval supply problem. This article examines the responses of English corporations to the challenge of supplying its international shipping by focusing on activities on each side of the Atlantic. First, it assesses the development of the East India Company’s docks at Blackwall and Dundaniel, before turning to a detailed study of ship-building and supply in Virginia and New England. In doing so, this article highlights the importance of naval supply to Britain’s north Atlantic empire, both in terms of the rhetorical support for empire and the economic incentives of participants. This reveals how traditional interpretations of Britain’s naval development have too often focused on state-driven activities (particularly from the very end of the seventeenth century) and failed to examine the complex, sometimes chaotic attempts by private individuals and corporations to overcome the naval supply challenges common to this early period of globalisation.

AbstractFor the history connecting East Asia with the West, there is much literature about contact and trade across the Atlantic Ocean from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.1 This paper notes the rapid growth of the Pacific Ocean in linking Asia with the larger world in the early twentieth century by perceiving the economic relationships between Taiwan and Hong Kong while Japan colonized Taiwan. The Pacific route from Taiwan directly to America or through Japan largely replaced the Hong Kong–Atlantic–Europe–USA route to move Taiwan's export products to countries in the West. Other than still using Hong Kong as a trans-shipping point to connect with the world, Japan utilized Taiwan as a trans-shipping point to sell Japanese products to South China, and Taiwan's tea was sold directly to Southeast Asia rather than going through Hong Kong. Taiwan's exports to Japan took the place of its exports to China. Japanese and American goods dominated over European goods or Chinese goods from Hong Kong for Taiwan's import. Japanese and Taiwanese merchants (including some anti-Japanese merchants) overrode the British and Chinese merchants in Hong Kong to carry on the Taiwan–Hong Kong trade. America's westward expansion towards the Pacific, the rise of the Pacific shipping marked by the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, and the rise of Japan relative to China, restructured intra-Asian relations and those between Asia and the rest of the world.

Abstract Few aspects of Michel Foucault’s seminal study The History of Madness have been more widely derided and debunked than Foucault’s assertion that medieval mad persons sailed the rivers of Europe as a kind of real-world counterpart to the literary and artistic trope of the ship of fools. But while Foucault was not correct in many of his assumptions, he also was not entirely wrong to draw attention to the river. Based on archival research in Nuremberg, Munich, and Frankfurt, this article offers a critical insight into how some medieval cities managed their problematic mad. In particular, it uncovers the widespread and little-understood practice of expelling the mad from late medieval German towns. It argues that the practice of expulsion was multilayered, ranging from relatively benign trips to convey a mad person back home, to official banishments of criminal mad men and women. It finds that most of the expelled mad, however, were simply sent away, out of the city walls and away from municipal responsibility. These expulsions appear frequently in fifteenth-century records and reveal that one particular kind of route was preferred by cities in Southern Germany: the river. In fact, municipal leaders routinely used the Danube, the Isar, and the Main rivers as the best way to rid their towns of difficult or friendless mad persons. While such river journeys did not take place on “ships of fools,” the river was thus a critical and meaningful part of the geographic and cultural landscapes of madness.

By the end of the eighteenth century Britain was a world power on a scale that none of her European rivals could match. Not only did she rule a great empire, but the reach of expeditionary forces from either Britain itself or from British India stretched from the River Plate to the Moluccas in eastern Indonesia. Britain's overseas trade had developed a strongly global orientation: she was die leading distributor of tropical produce diroughout die world and in the last years of the century about four-fifths of her exports were going outside Europe. Britain was at die centre of inter-continental movements of people, not only exporting her own population but shipping almost as many Africans across the Atantic during die eighteenth century as all the other carriers put together. It is not surprising therefore that British historians have searched for the qualities that marked out eighteeth-century Britain's exceptionalism on a world stage. Notable books have stressed, not only the dynamism of die British economy, but developments such as the rise of Britain's ‘fiscal-military state’ or die forging of a sense of British national identity behind war and empire overseas.

French royal officials, speculators such as John Law, and the French Crown itself had placed great hopes in the development of the tobacco industry in French Louisiana. Some officials even anticipated that Louisiana tobacco might someday be grown in sufficient quantities to supply all the needs of the French Tobacco Monopoly. These lofty expectations were never realized although tobacco production did reach 400,000 pounds in 1740.By the time of the transfer of the colony to Spain in 1766 the perils of war and erratic shipping had almost killed the industry. Most planters had switched to the more profitable production of indigo. Historian Jacob Price claims that the failure of the French government's efforts to develop the tobacco trade resulted from a misunderstanding about costs. In Louisiana, he writes, labor was expensive and freight dear, yet French authorities expected Louisiana tobacco to be competitive in price in the French market with Virginia tobacco, grown in an established market, with abundant labor, and much closer to Europe. Fortunately, the Spanish officials had no such illusions.

Abstract. January 2007 was a stormy period in Europe with impacts on societal infrastructure and implications for energy meteorology. A series of cyclones tracked across the North Atlantic and into Europe during the two week period 8–22 January 2007. For many parts of Europe, Storm Kyrill on 18 January 2007 was the most important of these for the infrastructure damage that it caused. It had the highest European storm-related insurance losses in recent history. The storm spawned a high intensity derecho that started in Germany and travelled across eastern Europe into the Black Sea region. It was associated with severe convection, lightning, several tornadoes, and strong wind gusts. The storm caused over 50 fatalities, widespread disruption of transport and power networks, and a lot of forest damage. The highest coastal water levels for the month at many tide gauge stations in northwest Europe (and also for the year, in some cases) were registered during Storm Kyrill. This contribution presents a literature review of the storm characteristics and its impacts. This is followed by an analysis of the North Sea tide gauge data to assess the storm surge, tidal variation, and short-period seiche component around the North Sea. The water level information is compared with shipping accidents and offshore incidents to assess possible links. Unusually large waves had been registered at the FINO1 offshore wind energy research platform and off the northern coast of the Netherlands only a couple of months previously on 1 November 2006. While Storm Kyrill caused a lot of societal damage on land areas, there was comparatively little coastal damage around the North Sea and few reports of offshore infrastructure damage linked to wave strikes.

Abstract A burial of a Turkic (Qıpčaq/Cuman/Polovtsian) prince excavated in the grasslands of southern Ukraine is witness to an exchange in objects and products throughout the Black Sea/Mediterranean littoral, the Middle East, and central and northwest Europe in the Middle Ages. The grave goods, arms and costumes, which are of unprecedented richness for a medieval Turkic burial, are datable to the first three decades of the thirteenth century. They were likely accumulated through trading and raiding or through diplomatic and marriage gifts of this Qıpčaq leader, and his tribal confederation, with the neighboring Rus’, Georgian, Armenian, Hungarian, Byzantine, Crusader and Islamic polities. Among the grave goods excavated in the tumulus/ kurgan are a variety of containers such as two complete and reused amphorae, glazed ceramic albarello and bottle and a gilded silver covered cup. The albarello and bottle could be associated with the Mediterranean pharmacological practice of shipping valuable substances in specialized containers. Other vessels, such as the covered ceremonial cup from northwest Europe, were reused likely in a complex ritual utilizing plants native to these grasslands. This paper will consider the circumstances under which these substances would have been deposited and discuss the origins and uses of the containers.

Since WW II, major US shipbuilders have been unable to compete in price with shipyards in other parts of the world, and often the quality from US yards has been inferior to world standards. Furthermore, the mistaken US government assumption that shipyards and ship owners have a common interest has led to laws to protect American yards from competition. It has also caused commercial shipping to lose out to alternative forms of transportation such as trains, trucks, pipelines, and tug/barge rigs from more efficient smaller yards and crews. The "US built" requirement of the 1920 Jones Act for domestic cargo has been a prime reason for this modal shift. Tragically for coastal shipping, most large US shipyards have failed to adopt the efficient manufacturing lessons of pioneers such as Admiral "Jerry" Land and Henry Kaiser that led to the "WW II shipbuilding miracle," that built nearly 6,000 merchant ships in 5 years, a feat that Winston Churchill said "saved Europe." After WW II, while foreign yards adopted these efficiency measures, that did not happen here, and our yards suffered from few repeat orders because of their high prices. Drawing heavily on SNAME's Journal of Ship Production pioneered by Professors Bunch, Storch, and Lamb, this paper describes not only the history and "secrets" of many successful yards abroad, but also many of the failures in US shipyards during the same Post WW II period. As a result of their failures, and despite "US Friendly" laws, big US yards seldom got multiple repeat orders which they rightly believe might solve their problems. The paper concludes that because of the very serious congestion now occurring on our near-coastal highways, together with major environmental and economic incentives to take cargo "off the roads and rails" should give US shipbuilders a new golden opportunity. Efficient yards should be able to get major repeat orders for a new fleet of fast roll-on/roll-offs (Ro/Ros) and feeder container ships, however, only if they will finally after nearly 60 years adopt the "lean production" principles pioneered in WW II and then exported to Asia and Europe.

In the intellectual construction of empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the principal building blocks was medical geography. A discipline located at the boundary of medicine, ethnography, sociology, and geography, medical geography devoted itself to understanding the social and environmental factors that neo-Hippocratic medicine thought determined public health. Thanks to A History of Medicine and Medical Geography in the Russian Empire, co-written by a team of researchers under the direction of E. Vishlenkova and A. Renner, there exists for the first time a study of the role played by medical geography in the development of the Russian Empire. The book begins by discussing what it calls the infrastructure of Russian medico-geographic research: the top-level medical agencies, the system of Baltic maritime quarantines, the training and career paths of physicians, and the development of medical associations. Then it examines the findings of medico-geographic researchers, discussing the climate theories of early modern European medical thinkers and the development in Russia of the three principal forms of medico-geographic writing — statistics, mapmaking, and narrative “medico-topographical descriptions”. The final section offers a series of casestudies from spaces as diverse as Lithuania, the Kazakh steppe, the Arctic shipping route, and global voyages of the vessels of the imperial Russian navy. Systematically placing Russia in the comparative framework of European empires and alternating in its perspective between St Petersburg and distant frontiers, the book explores how medical geography and its practitioners connected Russia with Europe and helped simultaneously to form the imperial state, the Russian nation, and a nascent civil society.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to recount the history of the marketing of the maritime passenger industry (known today as the cruise industry). This is a unique industry that has survived and thrived for almost 175 years despite dramatic environmental changes. This history focuses on passenger shipping in and out of the USA first from/to European ports, later focusing on cruises from the USA to the Caribbean, today’s most popular cruise destination. Design/methodology/approach – This study adapts the Hollander et al. (2005) approach and incorporates primary data such as fare lists, advertisements and promotional materials, as well as secondary data from a variety of expert works and government reports. Findings – This study finds that the industry’s marketing history can be divided into six periods or phases: immigration and luxury (mid-nineteenth century to 1914); World War I (1914-1918); tourism, alcohol and luxury (1918-1939); World War II (1939-1946); jet age emergence (1946-1970); and cruising for all (1970 to the present day). Continuing industry growth; increasing focus on new geographic, and every-smaller demographic and psychographic markets; promotional emphasis on cuisine and activities; and positioning as a mass-consumed luxury are trends for the future. Research limitations/implications – Space constraints limit the information mostly to Europe-to-North America sailings of British and German transatlantic lines early in the paper, and to USA-to-Caribbean cruises in later phases. Practical implications – This study illustrates how an industry can completely reinvent all elements of its marketing strategy in response to changing social and technological forces. It adds to a growing body of industry marketing histories. Originality/value – Although much has been written about maritime history, no known work has examined the history of the marketing of the maritime passenger industry. It augments the growing body of industry-specific marketing histories.

The European overseas enterprises that began to push into Asian waters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were maritime organisations geared towards commerce and seaborne warfare. As such, they looked very different from the powerful territorial states like Mughal India that traditionally dominated early modern Asia, and they were able to create a new kind of empire consisting of a network of fortified ports and trading centres connected by long sea routes. The construction of these empires was initially driven and subsequently sustained by maritime technology. To borrow Carlo Cipolla's words, guns, sails, and empire were always bound tightly together in this period. European vessels held a significant advantage over local shipping; neither the wealthiest groups of merchants nor the most formidable Asian states were in a position to field maritime forces that could challenge them on the open ocean. In virtually every encounter at sea, ships from Europe were able to inflict overwhelming defeats on the fleets assembled to oppose them. Since it represented their most significant advantage, Europeans made frequent use of maritime violence: against competing merchant groups (in order to disrupt commercial networks and to gain a dominant position), and against Asian states (to pry open port cities and improve trading conditions). This article explores the role played by maritime violence in the relationship between European overseas enterprises and two powerful territorial states, Mughal India (1526-1757) and Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868), in the first half of the seventeenth century.

From August to early November 1914, the effectiveness of a lone German commerce-raider, the light cruiser Emden eventually brought the bulk of Allied cargo-shipping in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean to a virtual halt, thus hampering their war effort in Europe. Although the Emden was finally destroyed at the battle of the Cocos Islands, the press were able to continue the story relating the daring escape of some of her crew. The escapees got away from Direction Island in the Cocos in a requisitioned sailing schooner, the Ayesha. What followed were several months of dangerous and arduous progress first through the Indian Ocean, then through Arabia, finally reaching Constantinople and thence to Germany. Theirs was the only German military unit that returned home from overseas and their story was a gift for German propagandists. Scanning the contemporary German newspapers it becomes clear that they were determined to make the most of this story. It was about German seafarers whose courage and chivalrous attitude towards their enemies should be publicly recognised. It was likewise appreciated by the British. During 1914 and 1915, the German daily press kept the public regularly informed about the Emden whenever there was any news. The legend steadily grew to become a permanent and indisputably positive element of the German collective memory and military tradition. Because the news only came intermittently it became all the more exciting for their readers to follow. The press material is stored as a collection of clippings in the Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) in Berlin, which clearly shows how the narrative unfolded. It was soon taken up by the German propaganda machine to boost the morale of the German people. Reading the articles it is clear that the editors seized upon this as a story of heroic deeds, allowing them to present their countrymen as super-men who proved the superiority of the German fighting man.

There are many models in the entire history of architecture which have travelled across the world, from one to another part of the big world. For various reasons, very frequently not at all scientific or professional, in our part of the world, be it Serbian or Yugoslav, or south Slav, some like to remain silent, when it comes to the transition of a Byzantine model, which by nature is rooted in the Orthodox Christian faith at the south east of Europe and the outmost west of Asia, to their areas, pervaded to a great extent by the Roman Catholic Christian belief, or Islam. There are numerous evidences of the transition of a model, one of many which found their new home on the west-European soil after the fall of Byzantium, mostly after the Crusades, when looters, but also scientists and artists in Italy, came by new wealth, and new knowledge, in the capital of the fallen Empire, observing its magnificent edifices, and taking its parts to their boats and shipping them to Venice and other cities in Italy and placing them on their buildings and squares, as they have done with the columns of the Augusteion of Constantinople, the square dedicated to Justinian's mother Augusta, which now decorate the square near the famous Venetian church of Saint Marco. Some other, also numerous accounts, explain how the Ottoman Turkish architecture in almost the same way, adopted its mosque construction model at the same place, in the same manner, retaining the actual structures but changing the religious insignia, or by copying this Byzantine model in building the new mosques.

The policy of the Cypriot authorities, aimed at attracting foreign capital, is deeply rooted in history. Having created a flexible tax system, since its first years as an independent state Cyprus has managed to attract numerous foreign shipping companies and in the 1970s it turned into a regional financial hub through which economic cooperation between the countries of the West and the Middle East was carried out. The Cypriot economy flourished in the 1990s – 2000s, when thanks to favorable taxation regime, transaction confidentiality, convenient geographical location, eased visa regime and a number of other factors it became the main transit point for capital from Eastern Europe, first of all – from Russia. However, the future of Cyprus as an international financial center is in question. Under the pressure of the EU, OECD and a number of individual countries, the Cypriot authorities are forced to bring their tax legislation in line with international standards. Negative impact on the investment image of the country was rendered by the national 2012-2013 banking crisis, followed by the collapse of the largest national banks, a sharp deterioration in macroeconomic indicators and the implementation by the government of a number of reforms that affected the attractiveness of Cyprus in the eyes of international business companies. In these circumstances, the Cypriot authorities have taken a number of measures aimed at preventing the outflow of foreign capital, including the abolition of the property tax in the housing stock, the extension of benefits for new tax residents and the introduction of a simplified procedure for the granting of Cypriot citizenship for investments. Thanks to these innovations, Cyprus managed not only to retain interest from TNCs of Russian origin, but also to attract investments of small and medium-sized companies, primarily those working in the field of information and communication technologies.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, remarkable developments in the realm of law were witnessed throughout the world. They expressed and paved the way for a new type of dispensation. For those parts of Asia and the Middle East with a substantial European presence, the legitimate rules, principles, and procedures for resolving disputes were progressively assimilated into systems of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. The process—at once gradual, charged, and punctuated—coincided with the initial consolidation of European imperial dominance and the emergence of Europe's modern global empires.Though these changes in the realm of law date from the nineteenth century, the European presence there had long preceded them. This was perhaps most notable in maritime Asia. The Europeans in this region tended to cluster in their factories or in certain quarters of the towns and cities dotting the Indian Ocean rim. Notwithstanding differences between, say, a Mocha and an Aceh in size, location, and form of government, all these settlements had one quality in common: each was able to profit from the traffic conducted along the coast or across the high seas. As for the sovereign justice on offer, the dispensation that governed it in early modern times was far removed from its later analogue. This stemmed in large part from the rationale and basis for the European presence. In particular, Europeans could not dominate maritime Asia's provincial and imperial powers, especially those located inland, and the great majority of those arriving from western Europe intended to return as soon as possible; despite some involvement in racketeering and other forms of surplus extraction—famously in attempts to introduce and enforce a system of passports in maritime transport and travel—their interests were mainly commercial, oriented towards trade and shipping; the indigenous populations remained on the whole large and resilient; and many of the skills and techniques vested in livelihoods long associated with the region retained their primacy. As a result, the only realistic option for Europeans in maritime Asia was to reconcile themselves to the prevailing order. And this they did, with most of the region's fundamentals, not least in the realm of law, continuing to develop along what were essentially indigenous lines.

Stolen Voices is a research enquiry that uses listening as both methodology and material. Stolen Voices develops techniques for ‘listening in’ and eavesdropping to help articulate an epistemology of place through sonic frameworks. A core motivation for the listening is a semi-fictional story we tell ourselves (and anyone else who is listening): an ‘event’ has taken place along the East Coast of the United Kingdom (UK), and we have been tasked with figuring out what has happened. While the specifics of the event might be difficult to pin down, the urgency of the investigation is fuelled by concrete concerns found in the UK edgelands, at the border/margin of the country: the uncertain future of the UK’s relationship with Europe; the effects of climate change on coastal landscapes; the waning of industries like manufacturing and coal extraction; the oil industry in crisis; the rise of global shipping infrastructures. By using a semi-fictional framework, we move away from mapping techniques like data-sonification towards a methodology that embraces gaps and inventive excesses while insisting on the importance of making an account. Through listening, we foster attention to contingencies and indeterminacies and their relationships to prevailing structures and knowledge hierarchies. Stolen Voices asks: what is the relationship between a listener and what is heard? How can listening attune us to the complexities of contemporary political, economic, ecological and social processes? How did we get to where we are now, and how, through listening, can we seek out levers for change? What do the rhythms and atmospheres of specific geographic locations inform or reveal about history? Evolving over several years, in response to what we hear, the investigation necessarily proceeds slowly. In this article, we unfold our methodological processes for the detection of sound, voices, atmosphere and affect. We use creative-critical writing to evidence the construction of a research investigation focused on the act of listening as a spatial practice and necessarily collective endeavour.

Marcus Wood; Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Lynn M. Festa)Michèle Praeger; The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary (Celia Britton)Charles V. Carnegie; Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (John Collins)Mervyn C. Alleyne; The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World (Charles V. Carnegy)Jerry Gershenhorn; Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Richard Price)Sally Cooper Coole; Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (Olivia Maria Gomes Da Cunha)Maureen Warner Lewis; Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (Robert W. Slenes)Gert Oostindie (ed.); Facing up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe (Gad Heuman)Gert Oostindie, Inge Klinkers; Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective (Paul Sutton)Kirk Peter Meigho; Politics in a ‘Half-Made Society’: Trinidad and Tobago, 1925-2001 (Douglas Midgett)Linden Lewis (ed.); The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean (David A.B. Murray)Gertrude Aub-Buscher, Beverly Ormerod Noakes (eds.); The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture (Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw)Sally Lloyd-Evans, Robert B. Potter; Gender, Ethnicity and the Iinformal Sector in Trinidad (Katherine E. Browne)STeve Striffler, Mark Moberg (eds.); Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas (Peter Clegg)Johannes Postma, Victor Enthoven (eds.); Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817 (Gert J. Oostindie)Phil Davison; Volcano in Paradise: Death and Survival on the Caribbean Island of Montserrat (Bonham C. Richardson)Ernest Zebrowski jr; The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster that Claimed Thirty Thousand Lives (Bernard Moitt)Beverley A. Steele; Grenada: A History of Its People (Jay R. Mandle)Walter C. Soderlund (ed.); Mass Media and Foreign Policy: Post-Cold War Crises in the Caribbean (Jason Parker)Charlie Whitham; Bitter Rehearsal: British and American Planning for a Post-War West Indies (Jason Parker)Douglas V. Amstrong; Creole Transformation from Slavery to Freedom: Historical Archaeology of the East End Community, St. John, Virgin Islands (Karin Fog Olwig)H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen; Een koloniaal drama: De grote staking van de Marron vrachtvaarders, 1921 (Chris de Beet)Joseph F. Callo; Nelson in the Caribbean: The Hero Emerges, 1784-1787 (Carl E. Swanson)Jorge Duany; The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Juan Flores)Raquel Z. Rivera; New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (Halbert Barton)Alfonso J. García Osuna; The Cuban Filmography, 1897 through 2001 (Ann Marie Stock)Michael Aceto, Jeffrey P. Williams (eds.); Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean (Geneviève Escure)In: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (NWIG) 79 (2005), no. 1 & 2

Marcus Wood; Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Lynn M. Festa)Michèle Praeger; The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary (Celia Britton)Charles V. Carnegie; Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands (John Collins)Mervyn C. Alleyne; The Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World (Charles V. Carnegy)Jerry Gershenhorn; Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Richard Price)Sally Cooper Coole; Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (Olivia Maria Gomes Da Cunha)Maureen Warner Lewis; Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures (Robert W. Slenes)Gert Oostindie (ed.); Facing up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe (Gad Heuman)Gert Oostindie, Inge Klinkers; Decolonising the Caribbean: Dutch Policies in a Comparative Perspective (Paul Sutton)Kirk Peter Meigho; Politics in a ‘Half-Made Society’: Trinidad and Tobago, 1925-2001 (Douglas Midgett)Linden Lewis (ed.); The Culture of Gender and Sexuality in the Caribbean (David A.B. Murray)Gertrude Aub-Buscher, Beverly Ormerod Noakes (eds.); The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture (Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw)Sally Lloyd-Evans, Robert B. Potter; Gender, Ethnicity and the Iinformal Sector in Trinidad (Katherine E. Browne)STeve Striffler, Mark Moberg (eds.); Banana Wars: Power, Production and History in the Americas (Peter Clegg)Johannes Postma, Victor Enthoven (eds.); Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585-1817 (Gert J. Oostindie)Phil Davison; Volcano in Paradise: Death and Survival on the Caribbean Island of Montserrat (Bonham C. Richardson)Ernest Zebrowski jr; The Last Days of St. Pierre: The Volcanic Disaster that Claimed Thirty Thousand Lives (Bernard Moitt)Beverley A. Steele; Grenada: A History of Its People (Jay R. Mandle)Walter C. Soderlund (ed.); Mass Media and Foreign Policy: Post-Cold War Crises in the Caribbean (Jason Parker)Charlie Whitham; Bitter Rehearsal: British and American Planning for a Post-War West Indies (Jason Parker)Douglas V. Amstrong; Creole Transformation from Slavery to Freedom: Historical Archaeology of the East End Community, St. John, Virgin Islands (Karin Fog Olwig)H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen; Een koloniaal drama: De grote staking van de Marron vrachtvaarders, 1921 (Chris de Beet)Joseph F. Callo; Nelson in the Caribbean: The Hero Emerges, 1784-1787 (Carl E. Swanson)Jorge Duany; The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Juan Flores)Raquel Z. Rivera; New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (Halbert Barton)Alfonso J. García Osuna; The Cuban Filmography, 1897 through 2001 (Ann Marie Stock)Michael Aceto, Jeffrey P. Williams (eds.); Contact Englishes of the Eastern Caribbean (Geneviève Escure)In: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (NWIG) 79 (2005), no. 1 & 2

<p class="VARAbstract">Rivers form major traffic arteries in pre-modern Central Europe and accurate regional to supra-regional network models of inland navigation are crucial for economic history. However, navigation distances have hitherto been based on modern flow distances, which could be a significant source of error due to modern changes in flow distance and channel pattern. Here, we use a systematic comparison of vectorized old maps, which enlighten the fluvial landscape before most of the large-scale river engineering took place, and modern opensource geodata to deduce change ratios of flow distance and channel patterns. The river courses have been vectorised, edited and divided into comparable grid units. Based on the thalweg, meandering and braided/anabranching river sections have been identified and various ratios have been calculated in order to detect changes in length and channel patterns. Our large-scale analytical approach and Geographic Information System (GIS) workflow are transferable to other rivers in order to deduce change ratios on a European scale. The 19^th century flow distance is suitable to model pre-modern navigation distances. As a case study, we have used our approach to reconstruct changes of flow pattern, flow distance and subsequent changes in navigation distance and transportation time for the rivers Altmühl, Danube, Main, Regnitz, Rednitz, Franconian and Swabian Rezat (Southern Germany). The change ratio is rather heterogeneous with length and travel time changes of the main channel up to 24% and an extensive transformation of channel morphology in many river sections. Based on published travel time data, we have modelled the effect of our change ratios. Shipping between the commercial hubs Ulm and Regensburg, to give an example, was up to 5 days longer based on pre-modern distances. This is highly significant and underlines the necessity for river-specific correction values to model supra-regional networks of pre-modern inland waterways and navigation with higher precision.</p><p>Highlights:</p><ul><li><p>Systematic comparison of old maps and modern geodata to deduce river-specific length correction values to improve supra-regional network models of pre-modern inland navigation.</p></li><li><p>Large-scale analytical approach and transferable GIS workflow for flow distance reconstruction with case studies in Southern Germany.</p></li><li><p>Length changes of navigated fairways result in pre-modern period travel times up to 24% higher in corrected models.</p></li></ul>

Desde la crisis financiera de 1929, las relaciones económicas entre países vivieron un período de acomodación que afianzó y a la vez generó vínculos bilaterales en la oferta y demanda de mercancías. Simultáneamente al estallido de la crisis, un puerto de ultramar de la región central de la provincia de Buenos Aires en Argentina comenzó a operar como exportador de granos. La pregunta que intentamos responder es cómo interactuaron ambos procesos tanto en la región adyacente al puerto (hinterland) como en el alcance mundial que alcanzaron las exportaciones salidas por él (foreland). Nuestro objetivo es medir y evaluar la adaptación de un puerto y su hinterland a este doble contexto de crisis y apertura internacional. Para alcanzarlo hemos confeccionado una base de datos con los registros del tráfico naviero llevado por la policía portuaria local (la Prefectura Nacional Marítima) y la Aduana de Puerto Quequén, a la que hemos cruzado con otras estadísticas oficiales acerca de la producción en el área y el volumen y tipo de exportaciones extraídas por el puerto. Los resultados obtenidos muestran por un lado una correlación positiva entre la apertura portuaria y el volumen de la producción del hinterland y por otro la conformación de un foreland alternativo al previo a la crisis para la economía del país, el cual implicó un mayor acercamiento a los países de la región. Un foreland segmentado al que remitían con casi exclusividad forrajes (avena y cebada) para los puertos ubicados en Europa y trigo para diversos puertos americanos. La crisis, al menos mirada desde Puerto Quequén, fue oportunidad de redefinición de la producción, de experimentación de circuitos económicos, de integración con la región continental y de reducción de parte de la dependencia tradicional de la demanda europea. Palabras clave: historia, puerto, exportaciones agrícolas, Gran Depresión, Puerto Quequén.Between the Crisis and a New Port: The Agricultural Exports of the Region of Puerto Quequén during the Great Depression (1929-1939)AbstractFrom the financial crisis of 1929, the economic relations between countries lived a period of accommodation that guaranteed and simultaneously it generated bilateral links in the offer and demand of goods. Simultaneously to the start of the crisis, a port of overseas in the central region of the Buenos Aires province in Argentina began to operate as exporter of grains. The question that we try to answer is how both processes interacted in the adjacent region to the port (hinterland) as well as the world scope of the exports (foreland). Our aim is to measure and to evaluate the adjustment of a port and his hinterland to this double context of crisis and international opening. To reach it we have made a database with the records of the shipping traffic taken by the port local police (the National Maritime Prefecture) and the Customs of Port Quequén, to which we have crossed with other official statistics brings over of the production in the area and the volume and type of exports extracted by the port. The obtained results show on the one hand a positive correlation between the port opening and the volume of the production in the hinterland and for other one the conformation of an alternative foreland to the before one the crisis for the economy of the country, which implied a major approximation to the countries of the region. A segmented foreland, from which it was sent almost in exclusivity, forage (oats and barley) for the ports located in Europe and wheat for diverse American ports. The crises −at least looked from Port Quequén- was an opportunity of redefinition of the production, of experimentation of economic circuits, of integration with the continental region and of reduction on behalf of the traditional dependence of the European demand. Keywords: history, port, agricultural exports, Great Depression, Port Quequén.

This study was an attempt to understand how the available alternative source materials, such as oral testimonies can serve as valuable assets to unveiling certain aspects of maritime history in India. A number of themes in maritime history in India failed to get the attention of the generation of historians, because of the paucity of written documents. Unlike in Europe, the penning down of shipping activities was not a concern for the authorities at the port in India. The pamphlets and newsletters declared the scheduled departure of the ship in Europe but, in India, this was done verbally. Therefore, maritime history in India remained marginalised. Hence, in this article, I make an endeavour to perceive how the oral testimonies can help shed some new light on certain aspects of maritime history in India, such as life on the ship, maritime practices, and perceptions among the littoral people in coastal societies. This article also outlines an approach on how the broader question on the transformation of scattered maritime practices among coastal societies can be adapted and transferred into an organised institution of law by the nineteenth century, and how these can be pursued in future. I also suggest in this article that the role of Europeans, especially the British, in the process of transformation, can be investigated further through oral testimonies in corroboration with the colonial archival records.

Transport plays a vital role in the development of state of Australia. Transport can be compared with arteries of different industries of different types of economy. This infrastructure is especially important for Australia which has a great territory and low density of its population. That’s why the development of transport despite the remoteness of the continent from the Old World went parallel but sometimes even ahead of Europe. For the first time in Ukrainian science, an attempt has been made to investigate at the interdisciplinary level the formation of Australian state with the help of transport. Events are presented in chronological order because the very history of the discovery of the continent began from sailboats. Sailboat transport at the time of the discovery of Australia and the transportation of the first convicts, their supervising soldiers and administration together with free settlers from The Great Britain arrived on sailboats. The use of sailboats in transport along the coast of Australia is also clarified as well as hunting for whales, the future visits to the Pacific Islands and transportation from there valuable species of wood. The transition to steam shipping and later to motor shipping is distinguished, subsequently to motor shipping, innovative port changes of the coast of Australia for better floating and for better placement of cargo on steamers and their uploading taking into account the cost of human labour, of appropriate mechanisms and devices. Features of Australian river navigation are also considered. The development of land transport is studied. It is proved that the development of rail transport in the XIX st. became an important link in the transport system of Australia. Its advantages and obstacles which for many years stood in the way of development are allocated. The problems of different gauge in each Australian state are analysed and the difficulties of overcoming them are emphasized. Road transport and road construction have come out in Australia at a rapid space. It was found that road construction for Australian society was not only economic but also of great social importance because the soldiers who returned to their homeland from the First World War had their jobs on road constructions. The origin and development of aviation on the fifth continent are analysed. The figures of aviation designers are singled out. They pioneered aviation industry in Australia. Conclusions are drawn that this industry became dominant in Australia now.

Russia’s Baltic provinces and Finland differed from Russia’s interior areas due to their long coastline. On the one hand, it helped to connect those areas, but on the other hand, the Baltic Sea played a crucial role in connecting Russia to Europe. In 1837–70, 16 passenger steamboat routes had been established that called at Estonian ports. Due to Estonia’s geographical position, entrepreneurs from Turku, Riga and St Petersburg as well as from Tallinn operated those lines. With the exception of studies on migration policies, the roles of institutions and legislation have not been addressed in depth in maritime history studies. Therefore this article focuses on the following questions: how legislation impacted the establishment of steamboat companies, and how the state organised steamboat traffic. Steamship companies were the first transportation organisations to operate as joint-stock enterprises. Joint-stock laws started developing in Russia in the first decades of the 19th century. The first legislation regulating steamship companies that operated between Baltic Sea ports was adopted in 1835. A comprehensive act regulating all joint-stock companies followed in 1836. According to the 1836 law, which was in force until 1917, the establishment of a joint-stock company depended a great deal on the state. Both the tsar and the Ministry of Finance had to approve the company statutes. Both had the right to make changes in the statute’s clauses or in proposals for capital formation. The Grand Duchy of Finland followed its own separate path. Joint-stock companies in Finland were exempted from this legislation until 1864 because Finland adhered to the Swedish Law of Entrepreneurship and Shipping from the 18th century. Due to those circumstances, personal relations and the company’s own contribution played a key role in joint-stock companies. Statutes approved by the Ministry of Finance and the tsar provided companies with the opportunity to apply for benefits and prerogatives like tax relief or monopoly rights for certain routes for fixed time periods. Such various supportive measures were highlighted to foster the development of steamship connections on routes of national importance. The state could take part in the establishment process as well, as the case of the Osilia steamship company demonstrates. In cases where there was insufficient establishing capital, and to encourage the establishment of companies, the state bought a certain number of stocks in the company. Russian merchant shipping legislation and organisation was introduced for the first time in contemporary Estonia at the beginning of the 18th century after the Great Northern War, whereby Estonian territory was incorporated into Russia. The organisation of both merchant and passenger shipping was divided between different authorities in Russia. The aim of establishment ministries in the first decade of the 19th century was to set up a system where tasks were clearly divided and unambiguous. In reality, this goal was not put into practice for the whole system. Hence merchant shipping was still divided between the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of the Navy, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in addition local authorities. Local authorities became the link between the companies and state authorities because they were familiar with local circumstances and could provide consultative information.

The carrera de Indias constitutes the maritime-mercantile system that communicates Spain with his American colonies. The whole Europe takes part in this route under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Monarchy. Up to Mexico, Peru or the Carib there arrives many goods that sell for silver and other precious products. There are many economic activities that give form to this maritime route; but the base of everything is the shipping business. The contract that regulates the relations between merchants and masters of the vessels is the freightment. The present work analyzes the different clauses of the freightments of goods and defends that, in spite of Crown’s interventions, the carrera de Indias was an area of economic freedom, been ruled by the private negotiation and the institutional spontaneity of the maritime law. Key words: Economic history, shipping business, freightments, mercantilism, maritime law. JEL Classification: L260, N010, N730, N830. Resumen: La carrera de Indias constituye el sistema marítimo-mercantil que comunica a España con sus colonias americanas. Toda Europa participa en esa ruta bajo jurisdicción de la Monarquía Católica. Hasta México, Perú o el Caribe se llevan mercancías que se venden por plata y otros productos preciosos. Son muchas las actividades económicas que dan forma a esta ruta marítima; pero la base de todo es el negocio naviero. El contrato que regula las relaciones entre comerciantes y señores de naos es el fletamento. El presente trabajo analiza las diferentes cláusulas de los fletamentos de mercancía y defiende que, a pesar de la intervención de la Corona, la carrera de Indias fue un ámbito de libertad económica, regido por la negociación privada y la espontaneidad institucional propia del derecho marítimo. Palabras clave: Historia económica, negocio naviero, fletamentos, mercan-tilismo, derecho marítimo. Clasificación JEL: L260, N010, N730, N830.

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(Karel Hruza, Wien) Leukel, Patrick, „all welt wil auf sein wider Burgundi“. Das Reichsheer im Neusser Krieg 1474/75 (Krieg in der Geschichte, 110), Paderborn 2019, Schöningh, XI u. 594 S. / graph. Darst., € 148,00. (Steffen Krieb, Mainz) Zwart, Pim de / Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Origins of Globalization. World Trade in the Making of the Global Economy, 1500 – 1800 (New Approaches to Economic and Social History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2018, Cambridge University Press, XVI u. 338 S. / Abb., £ 20,99. (Angelika Epple, Bielefeld) Veluwenkamp, Jan. W. / Werner Scheltjens (Hrsg.), Early Modern Shipping and Trade. Novel Approaches Using Sound Toll Registers Online (Brill’s Studies in Maritime History, 5), Leiden / Boston 2018, Brill, XII u. 243 S. / Abb., € 110,00. (Patrick Schmidt, Rostock) Pettigrew, William A. / David Veevers (Hrsg.), The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550 – 1750 (Global Economic History Series, 16), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, X u. 332 S., € 130,00. 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(Stefan Hanß, Manchester) Alfani, Guido / Matteo Di Tullio, The Lion’s Share. Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe (Cambridge Studies in Economic History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2019, Cambridge University Press, XII u. 232 S., £ 31,99. (Peer Vries, Amsterdam) Corens, Liesbeth / Kate Peters / Alexandra Walsham (Hrsg.), Archives and Information in the Early Modern World (Proceedings of the British Academy, 212), Oxford 2018, Oxford University Press, XVIII u. 326 S. / Abb., £ 70,00. (Maria Weber, München) Eickmeyer, Jost / Markus Friedrich / Volker Bauer (Hrsg.), Genealogical Knowledge in the Making. Tools, Practices, and Evidence in Early Modern Europe (Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History / Wissenskulturen und ihre Praktiken, 1), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, X u. 349 S. / Abb., € 79,95. 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Winter (Hrsg.), Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, XV u. 317 S. / Abb., € 96,29. (Rainer Walz, Bochum) Kaplan, Yosef (Hrsg.), Religious Changes and Cultural Transformations in the Early Modern Western Sephardic Communities (Studies in Jewish History and Culture, 54), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XXXVIII u. 616 S. / Abb., € 160,00. (Jorun Poettering, Hamburg) Gebke, Julia, (Fremd)‌Körper. Die Stigmatisierung der Neuchristen im Spanien der Frühen Neuzeit, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2020, Böhlau, 343 S., € 45,00. (Joël Graf, Bern) May, Anne Ch., Schwörtage in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ursprünge, Erscheinungsformen und Interpretationen eines Rituals, Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 286 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Graz) Godsey, William D. / Veronika Hyden-Hanscho (Hrsg.), Das Haus Arenberg und die Habsburgermonarchie. Eine transterritoriale Adelsfamilie zwischen Fürstendienst und Eigenständigkeit (16.–20. Jahrhundert), Regensburg 2019, Schnell &amp; Steiner, 496 S. / Abb., € 69,00. (Arndt Schreiber, Freiburg i. Br.) Hübner, Jonas, Gemein und ungleich. Ländliches Gemeingut und ständische Gesellschaft in einem frühneuzeitlichen Markenverband – Die Essener Mark bei Osnabrück (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 307), Göttingen 2020, Wallstein, 402 S. / Abb., € 34,00. (Gerd van den Heuvel, Hannover) Lück, Heiner, Alma Leucorea. Eine Geschichte der Universität Wittenberg 1502 bis 1817, Halle a. d. S. 2020, Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 368 S. / Abb., € 175,00. (Manfred Rudersdorf, Leipzig) Saak, Eric Leland, Luther and the Reformation of the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge [u. a.] 2017, Cambridge University Press, XII u. 399 S., £ 90,00. (Benedikt Brunner, Mainz) Selderhuis, Herman J. / J. Marius J. Lange van Ravenswaay (Hrsg.), Luther and Calvinism. Image and Reception of Martin Luther in the History and Theology of Calvinism (Refo500 Academic Studies, 42), Göttingen / Bristol 2017, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 547 S. / Abb., € 130,00. (Benedikt Brunner, Mainz) Schilling, Heinz, Karl V. Der Kaiser, dem die Welt zerbrach, München 2020, Beck, 457 S. / Abb., € 29,95. (Martina Fuchs, Wien) Jostmann, Christian, Magellan oder Die erste Umsegelung der Erde, München 2019, Beck, 336 S. / Abb., € 24,95. (Jann M. Witt, Laboe) Lang, Heinrich, Wirtschaften als kulturelle Praxis. Die Florentiner Salviati und die Augsburger Welser auf den Märkten in Lyon (1507 – 1559) (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Beihefte, 248), Stuttgart 2020, Steiner, 724 S. / graph. Darst., € 99,00. (Oswald Bauer, Kastelruth) Schmidt, Maike, Jagd und Herrschaft. Praxis, Akteure und Repräsentationen der höfischen „vénerie“ unter Franz I. von Frankreich (1515 – 1547), Trier 2019, Verlag für Geschichte und Kultur, 415 S. / Abb., € 29,90. (Nadir Weber, Berlin) Richter, Angie-Sophia, Das Testament der Apollonia von Wiedebach. Stiftungswesen und Armenfürsorge in Leipzig am Vorabend der Reformation (1526 – 1539) (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der Stadt Leipzig, 18), Leipzig 2019, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 313 S. / Abb., € 34,00. (Martin Dinges, Stuttgart) Faber, Martin, Sarmatismus. Die politische Ideologie des polnischen Adels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau. Quellen und Studien, 35), Wiesbaden 2018, Harrassowitz, 525 S., € 88,00. (Damien Tricoire, Trier) Woodcock, Matthew / Cian O’Mahony (Hrsg.), Early Modern Military Identities, 1560 – 1639. Reality and Representation, Woodbridge / Rochester 2019, D. S. Brewer, VI u. 316 S., £ 60,00. (Florian Schönfuß, Oxford) Henry Pier’s Continental Travels, 1595 – 1598, hrsg. v. Brian Mac Cuarta SJ (Camden Fifth Series, 54), Cambridge [u. a.] 2018, Cambridge University Press, XIII u. 238 S. / Karten, £ 44,99. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Scheck, Friedemann, Interessen und Konflikte. Eine Untersuchung zur politischen Praxis im frühneuzeitlichen Württemberg am Beispiel von Herzog Friedrichs Weberwerk (1598 – 1608). (Schriften zur südwestdeutschen Landeskunde, 81) Ostfildern 2020, Thorbecke, XI u. 292 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Hermann Ehmer, Stuttgart) Scheffknecht, Wolfgang, Kleinterritorium und Heiliges Römisches Reich. Der „Embsische Estat“ und der Schwäbische Reichskreis im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Forschungen zur Geschichte Vorarlbergs. Neue Folge, 13), Konstanz 2018, UVK, 542 S. / Abb., € 59,00. (Jonas Stephan, Bad Sassendorf) Stoldt, Peter H., Diplomatie vor Krieg. Braunschweig-Lüneburg und Schweden im 17. Jahrhundert (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 303), Göttingen 2020, Wallstein, 488 S. / Abb., € 39,90. (Malte de Vries, Göttingen) Bräuer, Helmut, „… angst vnd noth ist vnser täglich brott …“. Sozial- und mentalitätsgeschichtliche Beobachtungen in Chemnitz während der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 2019, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 236 S. / Abb., € 29,00. (Ansgar Schanbacher, Göttingen) Brüser, Joachim, Reichsständische Libertät zwischen kaiserlichem Absolutismus und französischer Hegemonie. Der Rheinbund von 1658, Münster 2020, Aschendorff, XI u. 448 S. / Abb., € 62,00. (Wolfgang Burgdorf, München) Albrecht-Birkner, Veronika / Alexander Schunka (Hrsg.), Pietismus in Thüringen – Pietismus aus Thüringen. Religiöse Reform im Mitteldeutschland des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Gothaer Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 13), Stuttgart 2018, Steiner, 327 S., € 55,00. (Thomas Grunewald, Halle a. d. S.) James, Leonie, The Household Accounts of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1635 – 1642 (Church of England Record Society, 24), Woodbridge / Rochester 2019, The Boydell Press, XLIII u. 277 S., £ 70,00. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal / Potsdam) Southcombe, George, The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England. „The Wonders of the Lord“ (Royal Historical Society Studies in History. New Series), Woodbridge / Rochester 2019, The Royal History Society / The Boydell Press, XII u. 197 S., £ 50,00. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal / Potsdam) McTague, John, Things That Didn’t Happen. Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678 – 1743 (Studies in the Eighteenth Century), Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XI u. 282 S. / Abb., £ 60,00. (Georg Eckert, Wuppertal / Potsdam) McCormack, Matthew, Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688 – 1928, London / New York 2019, Routledge, 194 S. / Abb., € 120,00. (Saskia Lettmaier, Kiel) Paul, Tawny, The Poverty of Disaster. Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2019, Cambridge University Press, XIII u. 285 S. / Abb., £ 75,00. (Martin Dinges, Stuttgart) Fürstabt Celestino Sfondrati von St. Gallen 1696 als Kardinal in Rom, hrsg. v. Peter Erhart, bearb. v. Helena Müller / Christoph Uiting / Federica G. Giordani / Giuanna Beeli / Birgit Heinzle (Itinera Monastica, 2), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 724 S. / Abb., € 75,00. (Volker Reinhardt, Fribourg) Zumhof, Tim, Die Erziehung und Bildung der Schauspieler. Disziplinierung und Moralisierung zwischen 1690 und 1830, Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 586 S. / Abb., € 80,00. (Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Bayreuth) Gelléri, Gábor, Lessons of Travel in Eighteenth-Century France. From Grand Tour to School Trips (Studies in the Eighteenth Century), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press 2020, VIII u. 235 S., £ 75,00. (Michael Maurer, Jena) Beckus, Thomas / Thomas Grunewald / Michael Rocher (Hrsg.), Niederadel im mitteldeutschen Raum (um 1700 – 1806) (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte Sachsen-Anhalts, 17), Halle a. d. S. 2019, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 235 S. / Abb., € 40,00. 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(Simon Karstens, Trier) Kittelmann, Jana / Anne Purschwitz (Hrsg.), Aufklärungsforschung digital. Konzepte, Methoden, Perspektiven (IZEA. Kleine Schriften, 10/2019), Halle a. d. S. 2019, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 116 S. / Abb., € 10,00. (Simon Karstens, Trier) Willkommen, Alexandra, Alternative Lebensformen. Unehelichkeit und Ehescheidung am Beispiel von Goethes Weimar (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Thüringen. Kleine Reihe, 57), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 437 S. / graph. Darst., € 55,00. (Laila Scheuch, Bonn) Reuter, Simon, Revolution und Reaktion im Reich. Die Intervention im Hochstift Lüttich 1789 – 1791 (Verhandeln, Verfahren, Entscheiden, 5), Münster 2019, Aschendorff, VIII u. 444 S., € 62,00. (Horst Carl, Gießen) Eichmann, Flavio, Krieg und Revolution in der Karibik. Die kleinen Antillen, 1789 – 1815 (Pariser Historische Studien, 112), Berlin / Boston 2019, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 553 S., € 54,95. (Damien Tricoire, Trier)

I first came across etoy in Linz, Austria in 1995. They turned up at Ars Electronica with their shaved heads, in their matching orange bomber jackets. They were not invited. The next year they would not have to crash the party. In 1996 they were awarded Arts Electronica’s prestigious Golden Nica for web art, and were on their way to fame and bitterness – the just rewards for their art of self-regard. As founding member Agent.ZAI says: “All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.” (Wishart & Boschler: 16) The etoy story starts on the fringes of the squatters’ movement in Zurich. Disenchanted with the hard left rhetorics that permeate the movement in the 1980s, a small group look for another way of existing within a commodified world, without the fantasy of an ‘outside’ from which to critique it. What Antonio Negri and friends call the ‘real subsumption’ of life under the rule of commodification is something etoy grasps intuitively. The group would draw on a number of sources: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Manchester rave scene, European Amiga art, rumors of the historic avant gardes from Dada to Fluxus. They came together in 1994, at a meeting in the Swiss resort town of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. While the staging of the founding meeting looks like a rerun of the origins of the Situationist International, the wording of the invitation might suggest the founding of a pop music boy band: “fun, money and the new world?” One of the – many – stories about the origins of the name Dada has it being chosen at random from a bilingual dictionary. The name etoy, in an update on that procedure, was spat out by a computer program designed to make four letter words at random. Ironically, both Dada and etoy, so casually chosen, would inspire furious struggles over the ownership of these chancey 4-bit words. The group decided to make money by servicing the growing rave scene. Being based in Vienna and Zurich, the group needed a way to communicate, and chose to use the internet. This was a far from obvious thing to do in 1994. Connections were slow and unreliable. Sometimes it was easier to tape a hard drive full of clubland graphics to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zurich to Vienna and simply email instructions to meet the train and retrieve it. The web was a primitive instrument in 1995 when etoy built its first website. They launched it with a party called etoy.FASTLANE, an optimistic title when the web was anything but. Coco, a transsexual model and tabloid sensation, sang a Japanese song while suspended in the air. She brought media interest, and was anointed etoy’s lifestyle angel. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “it was as if the Seven Dwarfs had discovered their Snow White.” (Wishart & Boschler: 33) The launch didn’t lead to much in the way of a music deal or television exposure. The old media were not so keen to validate the etoy dream of lifting themselves into fame and fortune by their bootstraps. And so etoy decided to be stars of the new media. The slogan was suitably revised: “etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 34) The etoy boys were more than net.artists, they were artists of the brand. The brand was achieving a new prominence in the mid-90s. (Klein: 35) This was a time when capitalism was hollowing itself out in the overdeveloped world, shedding parts of its manufacturing base. Control of the circuits of commodification would rest less on the ownership of the means of production and more on maintaining a monopoly on the flows of information. The leading edge of the ruling class was becoming self-consciously vectoral. It controlled the flow of information about what to produce – the details of design, the underlying patents. It controlled the flows of information about what is produced – the brands and logos, the slogans and images. The capitalist class is supplanted by a vectoral class, controlling the commodity circuit through the vectors of information. (Wark) The genius of etoy was to grasp the aesthetic dimension of this new stage of commodification. The etoy boys styled themselves not so much as a parody of corporate branding and management groupthink, but as logical extension of it. They adopted matching uniforms and called themselves agents. In the dada-punk-hiphop tradition, they launched themselves on the world as brand new, self-created, self-named subjects: Agents Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein. The etoy.com website was registered in 1995 with Network Solutions for a $100 fee. The homepage for this etoy.TANKSYSTEM was designed like a flow chart. As Gramazio says: “We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.” (Wishart & Boschler: 51) One tank was a cybermotel, with Coco the first guest. Another tank showed you your IP number, with a big-brother eye looking on. A supermarket tank offered sunglasses and laughing gas for sale, but which may or may not be delivered. The underground tank included hardcore photos of a sensationalist kind. A picture of the Federal Building in Oklamoma City after the bombing was captioned in deadpan post-situ style “such work needs a lot of training.” (Wishart & Boschler: 52) The etoy agents were by now thoroughly invested in the etoy brand and the constellation of images they had built around it, on their website. Their slogan became “etoy: leaving reality behind.” (Wishart & Boschler: 53) They were not the first artists fascinated by commodification. It was Warhol who said “good art is good business.”(Warhol ) But etoy reversed the equation: good business is good art. And good business, in this vectoral age, is in its most desirable form an essentially conceptual matter of creating a brand at the center of a constellation of signifiers. Late in 1995, etoy held another group meeting, at the Zurich youth center Dynamo. The problem was that while they had build a hardcore website, nobody was visiting it. Agents Gooldstein and Udatny thought that there might be a way of using the new search engines to steer visitors to the site. Zai and Brainhard helped secure a place at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts where Udatny could use the computer lab to implement this idea. Udatny’s first step was to create a program that would go out and gather email addresses from the web. These addresses would form the lists for the early examples of art-spam that etoy would perpetrate. Udatny’s second idea was a bit more interesting. He worked out how to get the etoy.TANKSYSTEM page listed in search engines. Most search engines ranked pages by the frequency of the search term in the pages it had indexed, so etoy.TANKSYSTEM would contain pages of selected keywords. Porn sites were also discovering this method of creating free publicity. The difference was that etoy chose a very carefully curated list of 350 search terms, including: art, bondage, cyberspace, Doom, Elvis, Fidel, genx, heroin, internet, jungle and Kant. Users of search engines who searched for these terms would find dummy pages listed prominently in their search results that directed them, unsuspectingly, to etoy.com. They called this project Digital Hijack. To give the project a slightly political aura, the pages the user was directed to contained an appeal for the release of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. This was the project that won them a Golden Nica statuette at Ars Electronica in 1996, which Gramazio allegedly lost the same night playing roulette. It would also, briefly, require that they explain themselves to the police. Digital Hijack also led to the first splits in the group, under the intense pressure of organizing it on a notionally collective basis, but with the zealous Agent Zai acting as de facto leader. When Udatny was expelled, Zai and Brainhard even repossessed his Toshiba laptop, bought with etoy funds. As Udatny recalls, “It was the lowest point in my life ever. There was nothing left; I could not rely on etoy any more. I did not even have clothes, apart from the etoy uniform.” (Wishart & Boschler: 104) Here the etoy story repeats a common theme from the history of the avant gardes as forms of collective subjectivity. After Digital Hijack, etoy went into a bit of a slump. It’s something of a problem for a group so dependent on recognition from the other of the media, that without a buzz around them, etoy would tend to collapse in on itself like a fading supernova. Zai spend the early part of 1997 working up a series of management documents, in which he appeared as the group’s managing director. Zai employed the current management theory rhetoric of employee ‘empowerment’ while centralizing control. Like any other corporate-Trotskyite, his line was that “We have to get used to reworking the company structure constantly.” (Wishart & Boschler: 132) The plan was for each member of etoy to register the etoy trademark in a different territory, linking identity to information via ownership. As Zai wrote “If another company uses our name in a grand way, I’ll probably shoot myself. And that would not be cool.” (Wishart & Boschler:: 132) As it turned out, another company was interested – the company that would become eToys.com. Zai received an email offering “a reasonable sum” for the etoy.com domain name. Zai was not amused. “Damned Americans, they think they can take our hunting grounds for a handful of glass pearls….”. (Wishart & Boschler: 133) On an invitation from Suzy Meszoly of C3, the etoy boys traveled to Budapest to work on “protected by etoy”, a work exploring internet security. They spent most of their time – and C3’s grant money – producing a glossy corporate brochure. The folder sported a blurb from Bjork: “etoy: immature priests from another world” – which was of course completely fabricated. When Artothek, the official art collection of the Austrian Chancellor, approached etoy wanting to buy work, the group had to confront the problem of how to actually turn their brand into a product. The idea was always that the brand was the product, but this doesn’t quite resolve the question of how to produce the kind of unique artifacts that the art world requires. Certainly the old Conceptual Art strategy of selling ‘documentation’ would not do. The solution was as brilliant as it was simple – to sell etoy shares. The ‘works’ would be ‘share certificates’ – unique objects, whose only value, on the face of it, would be that they referred back to the value of the brand. The inspiration, according to Wishart & Boschsler, was David Bowie, ‘the man who sold the world’, who had announced the first rock and roll bond on the London financial markets, backed by future earnings of his back catalogue and publishing rights. Gramazio would end up presenting Chancellor Viktor Klima with the first ‘shares’ at a press conference. “It was a great start for the project”, he said, “A real hack.” (Wishart & Boschler: 142) For this vectoral age, etoy would create the perfect vectoral art. Zai and Brainhard took off next for Pasadena, where they got the idea of reverse-engineering the online etoy.TANKSYSTEM by building an actual tank in an orange shipping container, which would become etoy.TANK 17. This premiered at the San Francisco gallery Blasthaus in June 1998. Instant stars in the small world of San Francisco art, the group began once again to disintegrate. Brainhard and Esposito resigned. Back in Europe in late 1998, Zai was preparing to graduate from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. His final project would recapitulate the life and death of etoy. It would exist from here on only as an online archive, a digital mausoleum. As Kubli says “there was no possibility to earn our living with etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 192) Zai emailed eToys.com and asked them if them if they would like to place a banner ad on etoy.com, to redirect any errant web traffic. Lawyers for eToys.com offered etoy $30,000 for the etoy.com domain name, which the remaining members of etoy – Zai, Gramazio, Kubli – refused. The offer went up to $100,000, which they also refused. Through their lawyer Peter Wild they demanded $750,000. In September 1999, while etoy were making a business presentation as their contribution to Ars Electronica, eToys.com lodged a complaint against etoy in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The company hired Bruce Wessel, of the heavyweight LA law firm Irell & Manella, who specialized in trademark, copyright and other intellectual property litigation. The complaint Wessel drafted alleged that etoy had infringed and diluted the eToys trademark, were practicing unfair competition and had committed “intentional interference with prospective economic damage.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) Wessel demanded an injunction that would oblige etoy to cease using its trademark and take down its etoy.com website. The complaint also sought to prevent etoy from selling shares, and demanded punitive damages. Displaying the aggressive lawyering for which he was so handsomely paid, Wessel invoked the California Unfair Competition Act, which was meant to protect citizens from fraudulent business scams. Meant as a piece of consumer protection legislation, its sweeping scope made it available for inventive suits such as Wessel’s against etoy. Wessel was able to use pretty much everything from the archive etoy built against it. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “The court papers were like a delicately curated catalogue of its practices.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) And indeed, legal documents in copyright and trademark cases may be the most perfect literature of the vectoral age. The Unfair Competition claim was probably aimed at getting the suit heard in a Californian rather than a Federal court in which intellectual property issues were less frequently litigated. The central aim of the eToys suit was the trademark infringement, but on that head their claims were not all that strong. According to the 1946 Lanham Act, similar trademarks do not infringe upon each other if there they are for different kinds of business or in different geographical areas. The Act also says that the right to own a trademark depends on its use. So while etoy had not registered their trademark and eToys had, etoy were actually up and running before eToys, and could base their trademark claim on this fact. The eToys case rested on a somewhat selective reading of the facts. Wessel claimed that etoy was not using its trademark in the US when eToys was registered in 1997. Wessel did not dispute the fact that etoy existed in Europe prior to that time. He asserted that owning the etoy.com domain name was not sufficient to establish a right to the trademark. If the intention of the suit was to bully etoy into giving in, it had quite the opposite effect. It pissed them off. “They felt again like the teenage punks they had once been”, as Wishart & Bochsler put it. Their art imploded in on itself for lack of attention, but called upon by another, it flourished. Wessel and eToys.com unintentionally triggered a dialectic that worked in quite the opposite way to what they intended. The more pressure they put on etoy, the more valued – and valuable – they felt etoy to be. Conceptual business, like conceptual art, is about nothing but the management of signs within the constraints of given institutional forms of market. That this conflict was about nothing made it a conflict about everything. It was a perfectly vectoral struggle. Zai and Gramazio flew to the US to fire up enthusiasm for their cause. They asked Wolfgang Staehle of The Thing to register the domain toywar.com, as a space for anti-eToys activities at some remove from etoy.com, and as a safe haven should eToys prevail with their injunction in having etoy.com taken down. The etoy defense was handled by Marcia Ballard in New York and Robert Freimuth in Los Angeles. In their defense, they argued that etoy had existed since 1994, had registered its globally accessible domain in 1995, and won an international art prize in 1996. To counter a claim by eToys that they had a prior trademark claim because they had bought a trademark from another company that went back to 1990, Ballard and Freimuth argued that this particular trademark only applied to the importation of toys from the previous owner’s New York base and thus had no relevance. They capped their argument by charging that eToys had not shown that its customers were really confused by the existence of etoy. With Christmas looming, eToys wanted a quick settlement, so they offered Zurich-based etoy lawyer Peter Wild $160,000 in shares and cash for the etoy domain. Kubli was prepared to negotiate, but Zai and Gramazio wanted to gamble – and raise the stakes. As Zai recalls: “We did not want to be just the victims; that would have been cheap. We wanted to be giants too.” (Wishart & Boschler: 207) They refused the offer. The case was heard in November 1999 before Judge Rafeedie in the Federal Court. Freimuth, for etoy, argued that federal Court was the right place for what was essentially a trademark matter. Robert Kleiger, for eToys, countered that it should stay where it was because of the claims under the California Unfair Competition act. Judge Rafeedie took little time in agreeing with the eToys lawyer. Wessel’s strategy paid off and eToys won the first skirmish. The first round of a quite different kind of conflict opened when etoy sent out their first ‘toywar’ mass mailing, drawing the attention of the net.art, activism and theory crowd to these events. This drew a report from Felix Stalder in Telepolis: “Fences are going up everywhere, molding what once seemed infinite space into an overcrowded and tightly controlled strip mall.” (Stalder ) The positive feedback from the net only emboldened etoy. For the Los Angeles court, lawyers for etoy filed papers arguing that the sale of ‘shares’ in etoy was not really a stock offering. “The etoy.com website is not about commerce per se, it is about artist and social protest”, they argued. (Wishart & Boschler: 209) They were obliged, in other words, to assert a difference that the art itself had intended to blur in order to escape eToy’s claims under the Unfair Competition Act. Moreover, etoy argued that there was no evidence of a victim. Nobody was claiming to have been fooled by etoy into buying something under false pretences. Ironically enough, art would turn out in hindsight to be a more straightforward transaction here, involving less simulation or dissimulation, than investing in a dot.com. Perhaps we have reached the age when art makes more, not less, claim than business to the rhetorical figure of ‘reality’. Having defended what appeared to be the vulnerable point under the Unfair Competition law, etoy went on the attack. It was the failure of eToys to do a proper search for other trademarks that created the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, in Federal Court, lawyers for etoy launched a counter-suit that reversed the claims against them made by eToys on the trademark question. While the suits and counter suits flew, eToys.com upped their offer to settle to a package of cash and shares worth $400,000. This rather puzzled the etoy lawyers. Those choosing to sue don’t usually try at the same time to settle. Lawyer Peter Wild advised his clients to take the money, but the parallel tactics of eToys.com only encouraged them to dig in their heels. “We felt that this was a tremendous final project for etoy”, says Gramazio. As Zai says, “eToys was our ideal enemy – we were its worst enemy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 210) Zai reported the offer to the net in another mass mail. Most people advised them to take the money, including Doug Rushkoff and Heath Bunting. Paul Garrin counseled fighting on. The etoy agents offered to settle for $750,000. The case came to court in late November 1999 before Judge Shook. The Judge accepted the plausibility of the eToys version of the facts on the trademark issue, which included the purchase of a registered trademark from another company that went back to 1990. He issued an injunction on their behalf, and added in his statement that he was worried about “the great danger of children being exposed to profane and hardcore pornographic issues on the computer.” (Wishart & Boschler: 222) The injunction was all eToys needed to get Network Solutions to shut down the etoy.com domain. Zai sent out a press release in early December, which percolated through Slashdot, rhizome, nettime (Staehle) and many other networks, and catalyzed the net community into action. A debate of sorts started on investor websites such as fool.com. The eToys stock price started to slide, and etoy ‘warriors’ felt free to take the credit for it. The story made the New York Times on 9th December, Washington Post on the 10th, Wired News on the 11th. Network Solutions finally removed the etoy.com domain on the 10th December. Zai responded with a press release: “this is robbery of digital territory, American imperialism, corporate destruction and bulldozing in the way of the 19th century.” (Wishart & Boschler: 237) RTMark set up a campaign fund for toywar, managed by Survival Research Laboratories’ Mark Pauline. The RTMark press release promised a “new internet ‘game’ designed to destroy eToys.com.” (Wishart & Boschler: 239) The RTMark press release grabbed the attention of the Associated Press newswire. The eToys.com share price actually rose on December 13th. Goldman Sachs’ e-commerce analyst Anthony Noto argued that the previous declines in the Etoys share price made it a good buy. Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the eToys IPO. Noto’s writings may have been nothing more than the usual ‘IPOetry’ of the time, but the crash of the internet bubble was some months away yet. The RTMark campaign was called ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It used the Floodnet technique that Ricardo Dominguez used in support of the Zapatistas. As Dominguez said, “this hysterical power-play perfectly demonstrates the intensions of the new net elite; to turn the World Wide Web into their own private home-shopping network.” (Wishart & Boschler: 242) The Floodnet attack may have slowed the eToys.com server down a bit, but it was robust and didn’t crash. Ironically, it ran on open source software. Dominguez claims that the ‘Twelve Days’ campaign, which relied on individuals manually launching Floodnet from their own computers, was not designed to destroy the eToys site, but to make a protest felt. “We had a single-bullet script that could have taken down eToys – a tactical nuke, if you will. But we felt this script did not represent the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.” (Wishart & Boschler: 245) While the eToys engineers did what they could to keep the site going, eToys also approached universities and businesses whose systems were being used to host Floodnet attacks. The Thing, which hosted Dominguez’s eToys Floodnet site was taken offline by The Thing’s ISP, Verio. After taking down the Floodnet scripts, The Thing was back up, restoring service to the 200 odd websites that The Thing hosted besides the offending Floodnet site. About 200 people gathered on December 20th at a demonstration against eToys outside the Museum of Modern Art. Among the crowd were Santas bearing signs that said ‘Coal for eToys’. The rally, inside the Museum, was led by the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping: “We are drowning in a sea of identical details”, he said. (Wishart & Boschler: 249-250) Meanwhile etoy worked on the Toywar Platform, an online agitpop theater spectacle, in which participants could act as soldiers in the toywar. This would take some time to complete – ironically the dispute threatened to end before this last etoy artwork was ready, giving etoy further incentives to keep the dispute alive. The etoy agents had a new lawyer, Chris Truax, who was attracted to the case by the publicity it was generating. Through Truax, etoy offered to sell the etoy domain and trademark for $3.7 million. This may sound like an insane sum, but to put it in perspective, the business.com site changed hands for $7.5 million around this time. On December 29th, Wessel signaled that eToys was prepared to compromise. The problem was, the Toywar Platform was not quite ready, so etoy did what it could to drag out the negotiations. The site went live just before the scheduled court hearings, January 10th 2000. “TOYWAR.com is a place where all servers and all involved people melt and build a living system. In our eyes it is the best way to express and document what’s going on at the moment: people start to about new ways to fight for their ideas, their lifestyle, contemporary culture and power relations.” (Wishart & Boschler: 263) Meanwhile, in a California courtroom, Truax demanded that Network Solutions restore the etoy domain, that eToys pay the etoy legal expenses, and that the case be dropped without prejudice. No settlement was reached. Negotiations dragged on for another two weeks, with the etoy agents’ attention somewhat divided between two horizons – art and law. The dispute was settled on 25th January. Both parties dismissed their complaints without prejudice. The eToys company would pay the etoy artists $40,000 for legal costs, and contact Network Solutions to reinstate the etoy domain. “It was a pleasure doing business with one of the biggest e-commerce giants in the world” ran the etoy press release. (Wishart & Boschler: 265) That would make a charming end to the story. But what goes around comes around. Brainhard, still pissed off with Zai after leaving the group in San Francisco, filed for the etoy trademark in Austria. After that the internal etoy wranglings just gets boring. But it was fun while it lasted. What etoy grasped intuitively was the nexus between the internet as a cultural space and the transformation of the commodity economy in a yet-more abstract direction – its becoming-vectoral. They zeroed in on the heart of the new era of conceptual business – the brand. As Wittgenstein says of language, what gives words meaning is other words, so too for brands. What gives brands meaning is other brands. There is a syntax for brands as there is for words. What etoy discovered is how to insert a new brand into that syntax. The place of eToys as a brand depended on their business competition with other brands – with Toys ‘R’ Us, for example. For etoy, the syntax they discovered for relating their brand to another one was a legal opposition. What made etoy interesting was their lack of moral posturing. Their abandonment of leftist rhetorics opened them up to exploring the territory where media and business meet, but it also made them vulnerable to being consumed by the very dialectic that created the possibility of staging etoy in the first place. By abandoning obsolete political strategies, they discovered a media tactic, which collapsed for want of a new strategy, for the new vectoral terrain on which we find ourselves. Works Cited Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Continuum, London, 2003. Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again. Picador, New York, 1984. Stalder, Felix. ‘Fences in Cyberspace: Recent events in the battle over domain names’. 19 Jun 2003. <http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.php>. Wark, McKenzie. ‘A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]’ 19 Jun 2003. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Harper Collins, London, 2000. Wishart, Adam & Regula Bochsler. Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace Ecco Books, 2003. Staehle, Wolfgang. ‘<nettime> etoy.com shut down by US court.’ 19 Jun 2003. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.html Links http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.htm http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>. APA Style Wark, M. (2003, Jun 19). Toywars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>