Artigos de revistas sobre o tema "Mercantile system – history"

AbstractThis paper had its origins in a study of Benvenuto Stracca's De mercatura. The purpose of the study was to determine whether there was anything in that work that supported the notion that there was a system of customary mercantile law in operation in Italy in Stracca's time. The answer to that question proved to be a rather resounding 'no', and the arguments that lead to that conclusion will be published elsewhere. In the process of examining Stracca's sources, much information appeared about how the jurists of the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries did deal with mercantile matters and, in particular, the way in which they manipulated the concept of equity to achieve what they deemed to be just results in such cases. Limitations of space allowed consideration of only a couple of procedural examples intheprevious paper. The story, it seemed to me, deserved consideration in its own right. What follows, then, is a fuller consideration of the use of equity by the commentators in their handling of mercantile cases, beginning, as the previous paper did, with Stracca's general remarks on the topic.

This paper discusses the origins of rating in the second half of the nineteenth century. We review and criticize existing narratives, which—echoing a story told by lawyers favorable to (or employed by) the agencies—have alleged that a cultural shift in normative views, evidenced in an evolution of court decisions, provided legal protection (against libel) to agencies, and permitted the development of printed credit reports. Such a view is inconsistent with evidence from actual judicial decisions and from our exploration of archival material. Looking at both litigated and settled cases, we show that the rise of mercantile agencies in the late nineteenth century was the product of a farsighted corporate strategy applied ruthlessly to a legal system that was still very reluctant to permit the agencies to “commoditize” credit.

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of the effectiveness of court litigation over private contracts. Through a case study of fourteenth-century Caldes de Malavella, in northeastern Catalonia, it provides an instructive example of contract registration and enforcement. A large peasant clientele made use of the institutional framework provided by a compact jurisdictional estate. We also explore the ways in which the court system within this barony was affected by the demands of external jurisdictions. The article concludes that the whole system was efficient in prosecuting breach of contract, in serving broader mercantile strategies, and even in softening tensions among parties.

AbstractThe Free Port Act of 1766 was an important reform in British political economy during the so-called imperial crisis between the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783). In an explicit break from the letter if not the spirit of the Navigation Acts, the act opened six British ports in the West Indies (two in Dominica and four in Jamaica) to foreign merchants trading in a highly regulated number of goods subject to various duties. Largely understudied, this legislation has been characterized in most previous work on the subject as a fundamental break from British mercantile policies and meant to benefit North American colonial merchants. This article proposes a different interpretation. Based on the wider context of other imperial free port models, the loss of conquests such as French Guadeloupe and Martinique and Spanish Havana in the 1763 Paris Peace Treaty, a postwar downturn in Anglo-Spanish trade, and convincing testimonies by merchants and colonial observers, policy makers in London conceived of free ports primarily as a means of extending Britain's commercial empire. The free port system was designed to ruin the rival Dutch trade economically and shackle Spanish and French colonists to Britain's mercantile, manufacturing, and slaving economies. The reform marks a key moment in the evolution of British free trade imperial designs that became prevalent in the nineteenth century and beyond.

SummaryFor a long time, the concept of barratry (at least in its maritime meaning) was one and the same on both sides of the Channel. The barratry of the shipmaster was part of the mercantile usages, and it identified the intentionally blameworthy conduct of the master. When law courts began to decide on insurance litigation they were confronted with a notion quite alien to them. Broadly speaking, the shipmaster’s barratry could well be considered a fraud of sort. But in order to decide on its occurrence in a specific case, law courts had to analyse it in legal terms, and so according to the specific legal categories of their own system. The point ceases to be trivially obvious if we think that the different legal framework of civil and common law courts progressively led to very different interpretations of the same thing. Thus, with the shift of insurance litigation from mercantile justice to law courts maritime barratry began to acquire increasingly different features in the two legal systems. Very often, the very same conduct of the shipmaster was considered as negligent by civil law courts and barratrous by common law courts. The difference was of great practical importance, for many policies excluded barratry from the risks insured against. So, depending on the kind of law court, an insurer could be charged with full liability for the mishap or walk away without paying anything. If the beginning of the story was the same, its end could not have been more different.

In reconstructing the early business history of black America, Professor Walker emphasizes the diversity and complexity of antebellum black entrepreneurship, both slave and free. With few exceptions, prevailing historical assessments have confined their analyses of pre-Civil War black business participation to marginal enterprises, concentrated primarily in craft and service industries. In America's preindustrial mercantile business community, however, blacks established a wide variety of enterprises, some of them remarkably successful. The business activities of antebellum blacks not only offer insights into the multiplicity of responses to the constraints of racism and slavery, but also highlight relatively unexplored areas in the historical development of the free enterprise system in the United States.

Based on the mercantile model of urban growth, I analyze the formative development of Atlanta during the antebellum period. Located at the intersection of three railroads, Atlanta's early growth and economic structure reflected its nodal position in the transport system. Subsequent railroad construction, however, eroded its initial locational advantage, while creating the opportunity for its emergence as a regional metropolis. This transformation was delayed until after the Civil War because of the marginal political and economic position of Atlanta and the Upcountry region, as a whole, within the state.

It is often claimed that Adam Smith and Edmund Burke held similar views on matters relating to political economy. One area of tension in their thought, however, was the institutional credibility of Britain’s East India Company. They both argued that the Company corrupted market order in India, but while Smith supported the termination of the firm’s charter, Burke aspired to preserve it. This article examines why they arrived at such divergent conclusions. It argues that the source of Burke and Smith’s friction arose from the dissimilar frames of reference through which they assessed the credibility of the Company. Burke examined the corporation’s legitimacy through the lens of British prescriptive, imperial, and constitutional history, yet Smith evaluated it as part of his larger attack on the mercantile system. These different frames of reference were responsible for the further incongruities in their thought on the Company relating to the role of prescription and imperial honor in political communities, the qualifications of traders to rule, and the appropriate tempo of policy reform. This article concludes that, even with such differences, the two thinkers’ respective criticisms of the Company illustrate the threat that monopolies pose to the liberal order.

The subject of the article is the figure of George Joseph Bell — professor of Scottish law at the University of Edinburgh and author of two final Scottish institutional works: Principles of the Law of Scotland and Commentaries on the Law of Scotland and on the Principles of Mercantile Jurisprudence. The publication of both works in the first half of the nineteenth century marks a unique caesura in the history of Scottish law — both the level of complexity of the legal system and the significant convergence of Scottish law and solutions known to English law resulted in a lack of both need and opportunity for a comprehensive treatment of the Scottish law system in the form of a holistic legal treatise. G.J. Bell’s unfulfilled dream of becoming a judge of the Court of Session enabled him to refine his monograph on insolvency law to the level of just such a treatise, which consequently acquired the status of an institutional work and secured for the author a place in the history of Scottish law which is not given to every judge of even the highest of courts.

In Denmark, the first actual towns can be dated to the eighth and ninth centuries. The establishment of towns became more significant in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in connection with the state-building process, and these towns were distinctly consumer towns serving as administrative, religious and military centres. From 1200 to 1350 Denmark, similar to the German area, underwent considerable urbanization; a large number of market towns were created, and in contrast to the older ones they were mercantile towns. Denmark thus clearly became the most urbanized country in Scandinavia. As Copenhagen grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the urban system decisively changed its character in the direction of a primate system. The characteristics of the primate system are particularly distinct within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Denmark, but less pronounced if the entire monarchy is included in the period in which Denmark was a conglomerate state. The institutional conditions must in general be attributed considerable importance in explaining Danish urban development. Thus, Denmark is one of the countries where town privileges were of great significance until the middle of the nineteenth century.

[First paragraph]The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba. The Original English-Language Text of 1876 (Introduction by Denise Helly). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. viii + 160 pp. (Paper US$21.95)Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918. WALTON LOOK LAI. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. xxviii + 370 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.95)The world system formed by European mercantile and industrial capitalism and the history of transcontinental labor migrations from Africa to the Americas have been amply documented. The genesis, evolution, and demise of New World slavery are subjects much scrutinized and debated, particularly since the 1960s. Enjoying a less extensive tradition of historiography are the variously devised alternative labor schemes that came on the heels of emancipation: the colonially-orchestrated efforts to contract free and voluntary workers to take the place of slaves in a system of production theoretically the moral antithesis of that earlier "peculiar institution." Yet scholarship on indentured labor systems has consistently revealed that the "freedom" of immigrant workers was merely nominal, the "voluntary" nature of their commitments arguable, and the indenture projects often only ideally a kinder, gentier form of labor extraction.

It has been claimed that the diversified mercantile capitalist of eighteenth-century Britain was replaced by the specialist industrialist of the nineteenth. This study of Manchester cotton merchants who moved into fire insurance in the 1820s examines the neglected strategy of collective diversification. It argues that the merchants' decision to diversify cannot be explained by short-term financial or economic considerations arising out of the insurance or cotton markets and only partly by long-run issues such as profit maximization and constraints on growth. Collective diversification is best understood as part of a broader attempt to create a system of interlocking services by an urban oligarchy seeking both to improve the economic infrastructure of their region and to consolidate the economic and political power of their group.

In historical writing on the British West Indies, discussion of the transition from slavery to other forms of labour control after emancipation has been largely confined to the plantation colonies. It is usually argued that planters were most successful in controlling former slaves in colonies where they were able to limit the freedman's access to land and thus create a dependent wage-earning proletariat. Such an analysis cannot, however, be readily applied to the Bahamas, where the plantation system based on cotton production had collapsed before emancipation and where the sea provided an important source of subsistence and employment. This article examines the control mechanisms which enabled a white mercantile minority to consolidate its position as a ruling elite in the postemancipation period. Rather than a monopoly of land, the important elements in this elite's economic and social control were a monopoly of the credit available to the majority of the population and the operation of a system of payment in truck. The credit and truck systems frequently left the lower classes in debt and, as a governor of the colony in the late nineteenth century remarked, in a position of “practical slavery. ”

Created in 1984 by the French artists ORLAN, Frédéric Develay and Frédéric Martin and shown for the first time at the Centre Pompidou during the exhibition Les Immatériaux (28 March to 15 July 1985), the telematic magazine Art Accès has marked the history of the art on Minitel, the French Videotex system in use between 1980 and 2012. For ORLAN and Frédéric Develay, Art Accès was a way both to propose an artistic and cultural alternative to a purely utilitarian and mercantile content, but also to explore the possibilities of a ‘poor’ medium. Working within the framework of the magazine, ORLAN and Frédéric Develay invited visual artists, but also poets and musicians to use videotex, to transgress it in all possible ways and thus to make an original work that is made by this medium and for this medium. Although the French Minitel network ended in 2012 and the magazine has long since disappeared, there are still traces, fragments or documents that allow us to reconstruct its history. This essay proposes an initial study of this telematic experience and of some of its most emblematic creations.

Abstract Some nineteenth century writers like the Scottish born poet William Golder, used the term ‘the Great Britain of the south’ as a description of his new home. He was not alone in this characterisation. There were of course other possible perspectives, not least from the Māori point of view, which these British writers inevitably fail to capture. A third reality was more specific to lawyers or at least to those caught up in the legal system. The phrase ‘the Great Britain of the south’ fails to capture the complexity of the way that English law was applied in the early colony. The law administered throughout the British Empire reflected the common law origins of colonial legal systems but did not mean that the law was identical to that in England. Scholars have emphasised the adaptability of English law in various colonial settings. New Zealand contract law of this time did draw on some English precedents. The early lawyers were steeped in the English legal tradition. At the same time, English authorities were used with a light touch. The legal and social framework within which contract law operated was also quite different. This meant, for example, that mercantile juries were important in adapting the law to local conditions. Early New Zealand contract law provides a good example of both the importance of English law in a colonial setting and its adaptability.

Even after the passing of the ‘Free Trade’ acts in Europe and America between 1765 and 1803, colonisation still meant trade for European mercantile and maritime powers which were beginning to think of themselves as liberal in the politico-economic sense. As before, the only suitable way of obtaining profits appeared to be economic exploitation, albeit within a politico-institutional structure. This ideal had inspired the inflexible system that had dominated the relations of both Spain and Portugal with their respective transatlantic colonies. Likewise, ever since their first incursions into the New World, northern Europeans had encouraged the creation of commercial companies dedicated to monopolising any of the goods that colonies might possibly have to offer. Dutch, English and French merchants developed farreaching private and state programmes designed to direct trade and colonisation and to encourage the populating of the new lands. During the seventeenth century, some of these companies achieved considerable success. They were able to settle, with or without permission from the Spanish monarchy, in territories formally under Spanish control, such as Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, coastal Venezuela or Guiana, regarded as areas eminently suited to business projects.

It has been famously argued that Tom Paine was not much of an economic thinker. Indeed, in his published work, we see relatively scarce systematic commentary on the subject. But, as befitting his origins in a mercantile family, Paine as a young man had prepared for a career as an excise officer. He later fully participated in a broader Enlightenment conversation about the new world of credit, trade, commercial and monetary policies, among other fiscal issues of early globalization. In particular, Paine formulated a systematic critique of public debt as a compelling way to discuss political sovereignty, the social contract, and the true wealth of nations – among other issues. In 1796, in France, Paine published a critique of wartime funding of the British economy with the publication of The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance inspired by the title of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Paine’s denunciation of the economic self-mutilation caused by British wartime expansionism focused on a reform by the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, who partially privatized the public debt of Britain. The British pound sterling was henceforth sustained by mysterious private loans whose very terms were obscured from public opinion. This article argues that the pamphlet had many parallels to David Hume’s 1752 essay Of Public Debt which Hume revised after the Seven Years War with a radical critique of public debt. The Humean origins of many of Paine’s arguments are manifest in the corrupting nature of public debt tied to military expenditure. To Hume and Paine, gimmicky forms of state borrowing in times of war lead to the bankruptcy of expansionist absolutism and to the eventual “decline and fall” of belligerent empires.

<p><strong>Resumo:</strong> Ao se pensar a sociedade contemporânea como uma fábrica de indivíduos da era mercantil, ansiados pela troca de produtos gerados pela Indústria Cultural, para os quais as opções de lazer e turismo acabaram se tornando uma necessidade para viver no mundo globalizado e intermediado pela desenfreada mobilização de compra e venda, todo o sistema deve ser repensado. Consumo e a exposição desse consumo, no qual também se incluem a experiência do turismo e do lazer, viraram, quase exclusivamente, o ponto nevrálgico desse processo de querer ser e fazer dos processos que envolvem a formação do indivíduo. Dessa forma, este trabalho busca pensar o contexto contemporâneo do viver na indústria cultural, sendo a sociedade catalisadora e organizadora sem precedentes na formação do indivíduo na história do tempo e espaço presentes, ou na era do vazio , ou ainda na era da sociedade líquida.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave:</strong> Sociedade – Indústria Cultural – Turismo – Espaço – Contemporaneidade.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract:</strong> When we think on contemporary society as a factory of individuals of mercantile age, longed for the exchange of products generated by the culture industry, whose leisure and tourism options has become a requirement to live in a globalized world and intermediated by rampant mobilization of buying and selling, the entire system must be rethought. Consumption and its exposure, which also includes the experience of tourism and leisure, became almost exclusively the core center of this process of willingness to be and to do the processes that involve the formation of the individual. Thus, this paper seeks out to think on the contemporary context of living in the culture industry, where society is the catalyst and the unprecedent organizer in the formation of the individual in the current time and space history, or in the age of emptiness, or even in the liquid society age.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> Society – Cultural Industry – Tourism – Space – Topicality.</p>

This essay investigates the eighteenth-century origins of the federal administrative state through the prism of customs collection. Until recently, historians and legal scholars have not closely studied collection operations in the early federal custom houses. Gautham Rao's National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (2016) offers the most important and thoroughly documented historical analysis to date. Joining a growing historical literature that explains the early development of the US federal political system with reference to imperial models and precedents, Rao shows that the seductive power of commerce over the state within eighteenth-century imperial praxis required the early federal customs officials to “negotiate” their authority with the mercantile community. A paradigm of accommodation dominated American customs collection well into the nineteenth century until Jacksonian centralizers finally began to dismantle it in the 1830s. The book brings welcome light to a long-neglected topic in American history. It offers a nuanced, historiographically attentive interpretation that rests on a broad archival source base. It should command the sustained attention of legal, social, economic, and constitutional historians for it holds the potential to change the way historians think about early federal administration. This essay investigates one of the central questions raised in National Duties: How were the early American custom houses able to successfully administer a comprehensive program of customs duties when their imperial predecessors had proved unable to collect even narrowly tailored ones? Focusing on the Federalist period (1789–1800), I develop an answer that complements Rao's, highlighting administrative change over continuity and finding special significance in the establishment of the first federal judicial system.

Long regarded as an anomaly among his later works, Louis Sullivan's retail dry goods store for John D. Van Allen and Son of 1913-1915 in Clinton, Iowa, is one of his best documented buildings in surviving drawings and correspondence. Though related to his earlier Schlesinger and Mayer Store in Chicago, the Van Allen Building was Sullivan's only design for a regional adaptation of a metropolitan department store for a smaller city. Often criticized for the ornamental vertical mullions on its main elevation, the Van Allen store's exterior was carefully conceived with respect to its interior plan and its method of construction. Analysis of the design's development reveals that the mullions may have been Sullivan's architectural solution to interrelated questions of the visual rhythm of openings on both street fronts, the expression of the structural system that defined the store's main interior aisles, and the Van Allen Building's height and position in its urban context. The ornamental motifs on the mullions may suggest the relation between mercantile interests and regional agriculture which preoccupied the Van Allens as progressive businessmen who saw Sullivan's building as part of a larger vision for their city's urban development. In its symbolism the Van Allen store is thus related to Sullivan's banks of the same period. The response of Sullivan's design to the particular requirements of the commission makes the Van Allen Building an instructive example of his interest in architectural expression of a building's specific character as one facet of his theoretical ideal that "form follows function."

O artigo é parte constitutiva de minha tese de doutorado que se ocupou em demonstrar que a violência, uma ação exclusivamente humana e tão antiga quanto o ato inaugural da humanidade, representa tão-somente, no sistema do capital, uma entre todos os milhares de mercadorias que se colocam à disposição nas prateleiras do mundo mercantil. Sob intensidade e forma variadas, a violência encontra-se implícita ou categoricamente derramada por sobre as múltiplas manifestações de criação humana, tais como a arte, a religião, a literatura, a política, a história. É um produto que parece contrariar as leis do mercado: quanto mais abundado mais lucrativo!Palavras-chave: Violência, mercadoria, Capital, sistema do capital.WHY NOT VIOLENCE?ABSTRACT: The article is a constitutive part of my doctorate thesis which busied itself in showing that violence, an exclusive human action and as old as the initial act of mankind, represents only, in the capital system, one among thousands of commodities that put themselves disposable on the shelves of the merchant world. Under different intensity and shapes,violence is found implicitly or categorically spilled in multiple human creative expressions, such as art, religion, literature, politics and history. It’s a product that seems to contradict the market laws: the more plentiful it is, the more profitable it seems to be.Keywords: Violence, commodity, Capital, capital system.

La entrada masiva de africanos esclavizados impulsó el boom azucarero de Cuba a finales del siglo XVIII. La implementación de la economía de plantación conllevó a profundas transformaciones en la estructura demográfica y en la dinámica comercial de la Isla. A partir de la década de 1840, en plena consolidación de la Segunda Esclavitud en Cuba, emergió en la bahía habanera un nuevo complejo portuario: los almacenes de depósito. Los almacenes «azucareros» se replicaron en otros enclaves de la isla, cada vez más conectados a la exportación de commodities. El presente trabajo examina cómo se organizó el nuevo sistema logístico del complejo agroindustrial azucarero, cuyo epicentro radicó en el puerto de La Habana. Un sistema logístico que se articuló sobre tres ejes: la expansión del ferrocarril, la navegación a vapor y lo almacenes de depósito. Todo ello permitió el establecimiento de una geografía comercial azucarera en el occidente cubano, cada vez más interconectada con la economía-mundo capitalista. Los almacenes «azucareros» construidos en este periodo emularon el warehousing system, que ya se había implementado con éxito en los puertos noratlánticos de Londres y Liverpool. Solo en la bahía habanera estuvieron operativas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, cinco compañías con sus respectivas infraestructuras portuarias (muelles, almacenes, grúas, etc.), que compitieron por el control del tráfico mercantil. Su evolución posterior estuvo condicionada por los efectos socioeconómicos de las crisis mundiales de 1857 y 1866, así como por la inserción de los intereses monopolistas y los capitales trasnacionales en la economía cubana, en el contexto de agotamiento y disolución de la Segunda Esclavitud.

El presente artículo pretende responder al cuestionamiento de qué hacer para que las monedas alternativas no funcionen bajo el paradigma de las monedas de circulación nacional, de manera profunda lo que se está cuestionando, es cómo hacer para que la moneda sea disruptiva al sistema económico dominante, el de la producción capitalista; para poder responder se toman apuntes desde la antropología económica, la historia y la economía política sobre el mercado y las monedas para encontrar su fundamento y con ello visibilizar cuáles son las pautas para que estos espacios puedan ser disputados y llevarlos a una lógica de la reproducción de la vida. Se puede encontrar dentro del presente texto que los mercados históricamente han sido periféricos dentro de la actividad económica humana y que las lógicas reproductivas están basadas en relaciones recíprocas y redistributivas de carácter no mercantil, no obstante, sostenemos que la constitución de mercados y monedas es un primer paso dentro de la construcción de otras economías. The present article aims to answer the question of what to do so that alternative currencies go outside the paradigm of national currency currencies, what is really being questioned is how to make the currency disruptive to the dominant economic system, the capitalist economy; to be able to respond, we bring notes from economic anthropology, history and political economy on the market and currencies to find their foundation and thereby make visible what are the guidelines for these spaces can be disputed and take them to a logic of reproduction of life. You can find within the present text that markets have historically been peripheral to economic human activity and that reproductive logics are based on reciprocal and redistributive relationships of a non-commercial nature, however, we maintain that the constitution of markets and currencies is a first step within the construction of other economies.

History of Economic Thought is different from Economic History and History of Economics.While History of Economic Thought deals with the development of economic ideas,Economic History is a study of the economic development of a country. On the other hand, History of Economics deals with the science of economics. Even though Economic History and History of Economic Thought constitute separate branches of study, they are closely related. Economic ideas are directly and indirectly motivated by the economic conditions and environment of the country.Physiocracy is also known as the “Agricultural System”. Economic thinkers who contributed to the growth and development of Physiocracy have been called as Physiocrats.The Physiocrats have been regarded as the founders of economic science because they were the first to grasp the general principles under-lying the economic phenomena and to evolve a theoretical system. Physiocracy is also remarked as the first school of economic thought. The term Physiocracy means “Rule of Nature”. Physiocracy may be defined as a reaction against Mercantilism and its concepts. The Physiocrats believed that the mercantile policies instead of doing any good have done great harm to the nations. So they revolved against the mercantile policies.According to Gide and Rist,“Physiocrats must be credited with a foundation of the earliest school of economists in the fullest sense of the term. The entrance of this small group of men into the arena of history is a most th touching one”.The influential French School of thinkers of the early 18 century was led by “Quesnay and Turgot”.They believed in the existence of natural law which governs the universe.Their emphasis on agriculture has earned for their system of thought, the name agricultural school. The present paper deals with evaluation of “History of Economic Thought a Forgotton subject:An Appraisal of Physiocracy with reference to India”keeping in view the agriculture sector contribution towards national income since independence.

This article engages with the matrilineal communities of the Indian Ocean littoral with a focus on the southern Indian context. The matrilineal system was one of the most convenient features in the context of the Indian Ocean trade. In their transregional journeys, maritime itinerants stayed in one place for months or even a year, depending on the variations in monsoon. During this period, they married into the local communities. These marriages were enabled through the existing matrilineal practices, in which men could and should come and go while the women stayed at home and owned the property. From Southeast Asia to Southeast Africa, the matrilineal system has been prevalent in several Islamic communities, but in southern India it historically existed among Hindus and Muslims, and to some extent among Jews and Christians, too. Although the adherence to the system varied historically, we can observe certain features shared among the communities. On the basis of fragmentary but significant evidence between ca. 800 and 1800 CE among Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, I explore the nuances of conversion and incommensurability across religions. I investigate how the system benefited the oceanic mercantile culture in the region as well as the dispersal of Abrahamic religions, which are often interpreted as significant domains of patriarchy and patriliny.

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.

Abstract To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native prisons” in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term “prison of the womb” is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.

The crisis of the market system is highlighted not only by the lag on environmental issues, but also by the lag in responses to repeated social and ethical crises, which are increasingly global. Under scrutiny is the increasingly evident theoretical weakness of the market paradigm and its formally perfect but unrealistic rational model. And it is above all its microeconomic basis that is weak, starting with the theory of behaviour and choice, with the utilitarian Homo Economicus as the only variable, the only key to interpretation. What then are the possible integrations? First of all, the inclusion in economic models of the non-mercantile dimension of exchange, in its various forms: gratuitousness, gift, altruism, relational goods, common goods, reciprocity, promotion of the person. Thus, the recognition of the economic role of non-economic factors, in an interconnected, integral and organic reading of social systems. The response must be systemic, in the various ethical, social and environmental aspects. Economics, natural sciences, anthropology, economic sociology and history of religions can dialogue in the search for a new theoretical paradigm. It is therefore necessary that the ecological transition be followed by a real transformation of the economic model.

Abstract The Carrera de Indias, considered as a set of circuits connecting Hispanic America to world markets, does not appear as a “monopoly” reserved solely for the Spanish merchants of Cadiz, but rather as a complex commercial system, structured into three autonomous segments, each of them dominated by a mercantile corporation, more or less formalized. In the central part, which linked the two shores of the Atlantic, the merchants registered in the Consulado of the Indies of Cadiz (cargadores) obviously dominated the market. However, these were in turn dominated by the merchants from the consulates of Mexico and Lima in the inland trade (comercio de tierra adentro), which linked the great American ports and fairs with the markets of the interior of the continent, and by the foreign merchants of Cadiz, structured into “nations,” in the exchanges that linked the Andalusian port with the rest of Europe and the world. Thus, the beneficiaries of the Spanish colonial trade in the second half of the eighteenth century were neither only cargadores, nor foreign “smugglers” enjoying the weakness of the Spanish empire as the historiography of the Carrera de Indias has traditionally postulated, but those three groups of traders. After highlighting this singular structure of colonial trade in the Spanish Atlantic, we will consider the different institutional and relational factors that could explain it. Obviously, it is because the different groups of actors involved in these exchanges had a specific social, relational, cultural, and institutional capital that they had a comparative advantage over their rivals in certain segments of the Carrera de Indias circuits, and that they were able to obtain the dominant position that we observe.

Precious metals are to mercantile capitalism what paper is to industrial capitalism and what plastic and electronics are to post-industrial capitalism—which is to say, the different materials and their specific textual forms become the dominant, if not always preferred, means of transferring and storing value or wealth in their respective capitalist phases. As a distinct “text,” what separates the precious metals from the materials that follow them is that they are seen as “natural money.” In Capital, for example, Karl Marx endorses Galiani’s view that “although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver”(92-3). Common enough even among contemporary economists, this view relies upon a conception of “Nature” and money that paper began to unsettle and that the new forms of plastic and electronic money altogether erase. Thus Marshall McLuhan early on proclaimed that the new electronic technologies put “the very concept of money [ . . . ] in jeopardy . . .” (138-9). Even if this is in part true—and I think it is—how does one explain the current proliferation of money thanks to plastic cards and electronic money? Georg Simmel, in his monumental The Philosophy of Money, provides one possible answer. Discussing the war between Spain and the Netherlands, Simmel generalizes “ . . . and one might say paradoxically that, the more it is really money in its essential significance, the less need there is for it to be money in a material sense”(171). Plastic and electronic technologies, far from threatening the “very concept of money,” have worked to free the “essential significance” of money from its previous material forms. Certain forms of money may indeed be in jeopardy but, precisely because of this, the concept of money is all the more necessary to the ideological harmony of post-industrial capitalism. It would even be going too far to say that the new plastic and electronic forms of exchange threaten the aura of money. Instead, it is more advantageous to see these differing materials and their textual forms as representing competing mythologies. As a starting point, consider the de a ocho reales (pieces-of-eight) often referred to as the Spanish or pillar dollar. Minted from silver that came from the Spanish Empire’s silver mines in the New World, it represents the peak of mercantile capitalism. On its obverse side is the image of two worlds between two columns, representing the Pillars of Hercules. Winding around the columns is a banner with the inscription “plus ultra” (more beyond). On one level, this promise was frighteningly true—estimates range from a staggering 145,000 to 165,000 tons of silver extracted from the New World by Europeans (Weatherford 100). And yet, the promise of infinite wealth is belied, ultimately, by the finite nature of the material being used to fashion this text. In contrast, consider the inscription found on the first coin minted in 1787 by the newly established United States of America. The one-cent copper coin bears the motto “Fugio MIND YOUR BUSINESS” and shows the sun above a sundial. The references to time (fugio or I fly) are clearly indebted to the axiom “time is money”, which comes from a founding father of the new nation, Benjamin Franklin, who, perhaps more than any other, lived out and popularized its revolutionary ideology. “Mind your business” is equally Franklinesque and equally expressive of the spirit necessary for the emergence of industrial capitalism. Nonetheless, the coin’s advice, like the Spanish dollar’s promise, contains its own instability. The relatively congenial warning that wasting your time will cost you money is undercut by the pugnacious double entendre contained in “mind your business”, which can also mean stay out of other people’s affairs. The double meaning of “mind your business” encapsulates a rationalist utopia of individual citizens who serve the common good simply by tending to their own gardens or minding their own businesses. In less than seventy-five years, America’s Civil War violently exposed the internal contradictions of such an aspiration. Switching the motto of the Spanish silver dollar with that of the American copper penny results in a jarring confusion that illustrates the ideological divide between mercantile and industrial capital that the two coins represent. The Spanish dollar promises infinite wealth based upon trade, an individual’s appetite for “more,” and access to scarce commodities (gold and silver). The American penny promises endless work based upon production, self-interest, and access to cheap commodities, such as copper. This American work ethic fueled a pathological amassing of wealth that is similar to and yet distinct from the mercantile period preceding it. The differences and similarities are like those that Marx finds between the miser and the capitalist: “This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser”(151). Adapting Marx’s comparison, then, it would be more accurate to say the mercantile capitalist is an unfinished capitalist, distracted from his purpose by the maddening allure of the miser’s horde. While the industrial capitalist, on the other hand, may be the truer capitalist, he is still a miser, albeit a rational one. If capitalists are going to realize their full potential as “rational misers” the history of America shows they can only achieve this with a medium of exchange that is cheaper, more accessible, and more disposable than copper or any other metal. Through paper currency, America not only financed its revolution, making it the first nation in the history of the world to do so, it also financed its westward expansion, the North’s victory in the Civil War, and it unleashed the productive capacities necessary for an industrial revolution that would surpass its European rivals. The design found on America’s modern one-dollar bill—which except for minor changes has remained the same since 1935—reveals a textual indeterminacy, like that found in the Spanish dollar and America’s revolutionary copper penny. The first aspect of its indeterminacy is in the nature of all paper currencies. Their cheap materials, relatively easy production, and fiat value make them attractive to counterfeiters as well as governments. To a degree unmatched by coins, paper money’s text is driven by anxieties over counterfeiting. For example, the signatures of the U.S. Treasurer and Secretary of the Treasury on the front of America’s paper currency are motivated in part by this anxiety. But the signing of an official’s name holds a deeper significance, one that separates paper currency from metal. Paper currency seems to call for a signature the way metal coins call for heads in profile. Metal coins, even when machine made, still evoke the artisan and his mode of production—circumscribed, organic, and coherent. The very real artisanship that goes into paper currency is lost in a surreal sea of printed signs—open, fragmented, and dreamlike. The signature, although mechanically reproduced, leaves the trace of a human hand and the individual to which it belongs. In a world where exchange value is created by artificial means that are essentially limitless, the signature is a reassuring reminder of human limits and authority. A different sort of tension is on the back of the dollar bill. Here the front and back of the Great Seal of the United States are on either side of a “ONE” in large letters at the center of the rectangular design. The contraries contained in the Great Seal—war and peace represented by the olive branch and arrows the eagle holds in its talons and the material and the spiritual aspects of life represented by the unfinished pyramid and the eye of the Deity that shines above it—draw the viewer into a web of triangular sight lines. The back of the Seal encircles an apparent triangle formed by the pyramid and the eye above it. The encircled triangle in the Seal’s front is subtler. It is made by the number thirteen which appears in the thirteen stars above the eagle’s head and the thirteen olive leaves and arrows held in the eagle’s talons. This triangular symmetry is reinforced by the four numeral 1s with “one” written across them that appear one in each corner of the bill’s design. These 1s create bisecting diagonal sight lines that connect with and pass through the “ONE” at the center of the rectangle, thereby cutting the rectangle into four symmetrical triangles. At the very least, all this (in)visible triangular symmetry could be called overdetermined—an excessive attempt to impress order on a chaotic world and to naturalize the text’s claim as “legal tender.” If, as Simmel maintains, “all money is credit” (Ingham 24), then by one line of reasoning, it would be easy for credit cards to acknowledge this truth. Instead, like the other monetary forms we have examined, their texts work to obfuscate the social character of exchange value and naturalize or mythologize their authority. Like paper money’s connection to the printing press, credit cards are also connected to a revolutionary technology, the petroleum industry. It is fitting that credit cards are made of plastic, a by-product of oil refineries, since they originated in the 1930s as a convenience to drivers provided by the major oil companies. Even as different businesses extended the use of credit cards, they have retained their early association with the world of travel and the pleasures of mobility—both physical and social. With the company’s origin in the travel business, the American Express credit card is uniquely positioned to exploit the pleasures of mobility, and the history of its credit card designs helps to illustrate some of the ideological shifting required of post-industrial capitalism. As Jack Weatherford points out in his History of Money, American Express made effective use of a card class system. Starting in 1958 with their purple card, the color of royalty, they sought to attract consumers with a feeling of exclusivity. Some years later, they switched to the famous green card, the color of American money. In 1966, they added the distinction of the gold card for elite members. As the numbers of gold card members swelled, they sought further distinctions, such as the black card that was quickly replaced by the platinum card (229). A striking aspect of these textual permutations, given the focus of this paper, is the credit company’s reliance on the security of older monetary forms, such as precious metals and American paper currency, to attract consumers. Now that credit cards rule supreme, it is hard to recall consumers’ earlier antipathy towards them. In 1971, after credit cards were well established, one study found that almost one-third of the families interviewed thought it was “bad business to use credit cards,” and even among credit card users, nearly one-fifth felt it was “bad” (Moore and Russell 78). In contrast, the design of the latest card by American Express, its blue card, boldly proclaims the apotheosis of credit—a blue hologram suspended in transparent plastic. Here is the ultimate medium: a transparency that promises to take its possessor at the speed of light into the depths of hyperspace. Beneath these specific historical texts, lies a deeper and more general ontological association between plastic and movement, which Roland Barthes uncovers in his ruminations upon the substance in Mythologies. In its protean ability to imitate life, plastic is “less a thing than the trace of a movement”(97). And Barthes maintains our new plastic mobility revolutionizes our relationship to life itself. The finite character of metal and paper for storing and transferring wealth were always more or less apparent. Precious metals were limited by the natural laws of scarcity—first come, first served. Paper promised a world of infinite wealth, but it always threatened to hyperinflate, collapsing into worthless piles. Sometimes implicitly or sometimes explicitly, paper still relied on nature’s scarcity in order to justify its claim to value. Plastic needs no such justification. As Barthes puts it, with plastic, “the hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized . . .”(99). In a plastic world, there are no limits on what or how much we can produce. And in such a world, only an abstract and infinite medium of exchange, such as credit, can promise to return our alienated labor to us through the plasticized commodities it purchases. Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Anette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Ingham, Geoffry. “’Babylonian Madness’: On the Historical and Sociological Origins of Money.” What Is Money? Ed. John Smithin. London: Routledge, 2000. 16-41. Marx, Karl. Capital Volume One. Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International, 1987. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995. Moore, Carl H. and Alvin E. Russell. Money: Its Origin, Development and Modern Use. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Ed. David Frisby. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. New York: Routledge, 1990. Weatherford, Jack. The History of Money. New York: Crown, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Rizzo, Sergio. "'Show Me the Money!'" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/09-rizzo.php>. APA Style Rizzo, S. (2004, Jan 12). 'Show Me the Money!'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/09-rizzo.php>

This article examines the relationship between medicine and the aviamento, a system of debt-peonage that structured exchange along the Brazilian Amazon during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Under the aviamento, merchant elites leveraged control over health resources to broker an unequal exchange between generalized suffering and limited access to care. In the 1980s, health activists mobilized to overturn the aviamento’s care regime and institutionalize health care as a universal right and state obligation. Despite subsequent growth in medical infrastructure, interviews with contemporary health-seekers demonstrate the public system’s increasing susceptibility to private appropriation, as well as the limitations of biopolitics as a framework for understanding medicine’s relationship to power under the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than a diffuse instrument of social control, medicine is conceptualized here as a perpetual interchange, one in which brokers’ ability to direct health-seekers’ pathways from affliction to cure situates day-to-day health struggles within a regional history of social conflict. RESUMO Este artigo aborda a relação entre a saúde e o aviamento: um sistema de servidão por dívida que estruturou a economia mercantil ao longo do rio Amazonas durante os séculos XIX e XX. Sob o aviamento, comerciantes usavam controle sob medicamentos para manter uma troca desigual entre o sofrimento generalizado e o acesso limitado às curas. Durante a década de 1980 militantes da reforma sanitária brasileira se mobilizaram para derrubar o regime curatorial dos comerciantes e instituir a saúde como um direito universal e obrigação do estado. Apesar do crescimento subsequente do sistema sanitário, entrevistas com trabalhadores rurais mostram a crescente susceptibilidade do sistema público aos interesses particulares e as limitações de biopolítica como uma ferramenta analítica para interpretar a relação entre medicina e poder debaixo da pandemia de COVID-19. Mais do que um instrumento difuso de controle social, a medicina é conceituada aqui como um intercâmbio perpétuo, no qual a capacidade dos agentes de direcionar os caminhos dos buscadores de saúde da aflição à cura situa as lutas cotidianas pela saúde dentro de uma história regional de conflito social.

‘We are faced today with an entire system of communication technology which is the perfect medium to host and transfer the very programs designed to destroy the functionality of the system.’ (IBM Researcher: Sarah Gordon, 1995) Despite renewed interest in open source code, the openness of the information space is nothing new in terms of the free flow of information. The transitive and nonlinear configuration of data flow has ceaselessly facilitated the sharing of code. The openness of the info-space encourages a free distribution model, which has become central to numerous developments through the abundant supply of freeware, shareware and source code. Key moments in open source history include the release in 1998 of Netscape’s Communicator source code, a clear attempt to stimulate browser development. More recently in February 2004 the ‘partial leaking’ of Microsoft Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 source code demonstrated the often-hostile disposition of open culture and the potential threat it poses to existing corporate business models. However, the leading exponents of the open source ethic predate these events by more than a decade. As an extension of the hacker, the virus writer has managed, since the 1980s, to bend the shape of info-space beyond recognition. By freely spreading viruses, worms and hacker programs across the globe, virus writers have provided researchers with a remarkable set of digital footprints to follow. The virus has, as IBM researcher Sarah Gordon points out, exposed the info-space as a ‘perfect medium’ rife for malicious viral infection. This paper argues that viral technologies can hold info-space hostage to the uncertain undercurrents of information itself. As such, despite mercantile efforts to capture the spirit of openness, the info-space finds itself frequently in a state far-from-equilibrium. It is open to often-unmanageable viral fluctuations, which produce levels of spontaneity, uncertainty and emergent order. So while corporations look to capture the perpetual, flexible and friction-free income streams from centralised information flows, viral code acts as an anarchic, acentred Deleuzian rhizome. It thrives on the openness of info-space, producing a paradoxical counterpoint to a corporatised information society and its attempt to steer the info-machine. The Virus in the Open System Fred Cohen’s 1984 doctoral thesis on the computer virus locates three key features of openness that makes viral propagation possible (see Louw and Duffy, 1992 pp. 13-14) and predicts a condition common to everyday user experience of info-space. Firstly, the virus flourishes because of the computer’s capacity for information sharing_; transitive flows of code between nodes via discs, connected media, network links, user input and software use. In the process of information transfer the ‘witting and unwitting’ cooperation of users and computers is a necessary determinant of viral infection. Secondly, information flow must be _interpreted._ Before execution computers interpret incoming information as a series of instructions (strings of bits). However, before execution, there is no fundamental distinction between information received, and as such, information has no _meaning until it has been executed. Thus, the interpretation of information does not differentiate between a program and a virus. Thirdly, the alterability or manipulability of the information process allows the virus to modify information. For example, advanced polymorphic viruses avoid detection by using non-significant, or redundant code, to randomly encrypt and decrypt themselves. Cohen concludes that the only defence available to combat viral spread is the ‘limited transitivity of information flow’. However, a reduction in flow is contrary to the needs of the system and leads ultimately to the unacceptable limitation of sharing (Cohen, 1991). As Cohen states ‘To be perfectly secure against viral attacks, a system must protect against incoming information flow, while to be secure against leakage of information a system must protect against outgoing information flow. In order for systems to allow sharing, there must be some information flow. It is therefore the major conclusion of this paper that the goals of sharing in a general purpose multilevel security system may be in such direct opposition to the goals of viral security as to make their reconciliation and coexistence impossible.’ Cohen’s research does not simply end with the eradication of the virus via the limitation of openness, but instead leads to a contentious idea concerning the benevolent properties of viral computing and the potential legitimacy of ‘friendly contagion’. Cohen looks beyond the malevolent enemy of the open network to a benevolent solution. The viral ecosystem is an alternative to Turing-von Neumann capability. Key to this system is a benevolent virus,_ which epitomise the ethic of open culture. Drawing upon a biological analogy, benevolent viral computing _reproduces in order to accomplish its goals; the computing environment evolving_ rather than being ‘designed every step of the way’ (see Zetter, 2000). The _viral ecosystem_ demonstrates how the spread of viruses can purposely _evolve through the computational space using the shared processing power of all host machines. Information enters the host machine via infection and a translator program alerts the user. The benevolent virus_ passes through the host machine with any additional modifications made by the _infected_ _user. The End of Empirical Virus Research? Cohen claims that his research into ‘friendly contagion’ has been thwarted by network administrators and policy makers (See Levy, 1992 in Spiller, 2002) whose ‘apparent fear reaction’ to early experiments resulted in trying to solve technical problems with policy solutions. However, following a significant increase in malicious viral attacks, with estimated costs to the IT industry of $13 billion in 2001 (Pipkin, 2003 p. 41), research into legitimate viruses has not surprisingly shifted from the centre to the fringes of the computer science community (see Dibbell, 1995)._ _Current reputable and subsequently funded research tends to focus on efforts by the anti-virus community to develop computer hygiene. Nevertheless, malevolent or benevolent viral technology provides researchers with a valuable recourse. The virus draws analysis towards specific questions concerning the nature of information and the culture of openness. What follows is a delineation of a range of approaches, which endeavour to provide some answers. Virus as a Cultural Metaphor Sean Cubitt (in Dovey, 1996 pp. 31-58) positions the virus as a contradictory cultural element, lodged between the effective management of info-space and the potential for spontaneous transformation. However, distinct from Cohen’s aspectual analogy, Cubitt’s often-frivolous viral metaphor overflows with political meaning. He replaces the concept of information with a space of representation, which elevates the virus from empirical experience to a linguistic construct of reality. The invasive and contagious properties of the biological parasite are metaphorically transferred to viral technology; the computer virus is thus imbued with an alien otherness. Cubitt’s cultural discourse typically reflects humanist fears of being subjected to increasing levels of technological autonomy. The openness of info-space is determined by a managed society aiming to ‘provide the grounds for mutation’ (p. 46) necessary for profitable production. Yet the virus, as a possible consequence of that desire, becomes a potential opposition to ‘ideological formations’. Like Cohen, Cubitt concludes that the virus will always exist if the paths of sharing remain open to information flow. ‘Somehow’, Cubitt argues, ‘the net must be managed in such a way as to be both open and closed. Therefore, openness is obligatory and although, from the point of view of the administrator, it is a recipe for ‘anarchy, for chaos, for breakdown, for abjection’, the ‘closure’ of the network, despite eradicating the virus, ‘means that no benefits can accrue’ (p.55). Virus as a Bodily Extension From a virus writing perspective it is, arguably, the potential for free movement in the openness of info-space that that motivates the spread of viruses. As one writer infamously stated it is ‘the idea of making a program that would travel on its own, and go to places its creator could never go’ that inspires the spreading of viruses (see Gordon, 1993). In a defiant stand against the physical limitations of bodily movement from Eastern Europe to the US, the Bulgarian virus writer, the Dark Avenger, contended that ‘the American government can stop me from going to the US, but they can’t stop my virus’. This McLuhanesque conception of the virus, as a bodily extension (see McLuhan, 1964), is picked up on by Baudrillard in Cool Memories_ _(1990). He considers the computer virus as an ‘ultra-modern form of communication which does not distinguish, according to McLuhan, between the information itself and its carrier.’ To Baudrillard the prosperous proliferation of the virus is the result of its ability to be both the medium and the message. As such the virus is a pure form of information. The Virus as Information Like Cohen, Claude Shannon looks to the biological analogy, but argues that we have the potential to learn more about information transmission in artificial and natural systems by looking at difference rather than resemblance (see Campbell, 1982). One of the key aspects of this approach is the concept of redundancy. The theory of information argues that the patterns produced by the transmission of information are likely to travel in an entropic mode, from the unmixed to the mixed – from information to noise. Shannon’s concept of redundancy ensures that noise is diminished in a system of communication. Redundancy encodes information so that the receiver can successfully decode the message, holding back the entropic tide. Shannon considers the transmission of messages in the brain as highly redundant since it manages to obtain ‘overall reliability using unreliable components’ (in Campbell, 1982 p. 191). While computing uses redundancy to encode messages, compared to transmissions of biological information, it is fairly primitive. Unlike the brain, Turing-von-Neumann computation is inflexible and literal minded. In the brain information transmission relies not only on deterministic external input, but also self-directed spontaneity and uncertain electro-chemical pulses. Nevertheless, while Shannon’s binary code is constrained to a finite set of syntactic rules, it can produce an infinite number of possibilities. Indeed, the virus makes good use of redundancy to ensure its successful propagation. The polymorphic virus is not simply a chaotic, delinquent noise, but a decidedly redundant form of communication, which uses non-significant code to randomly flip itself over to avoid detection. Viral code thrives on the infinite potential of algorithmic computing; the open, flexible and undecidable grammar of the algorithm allows the virus to spread, infect and evolve. The polymorphic virus can encrypt and decrypt itself so as to avoid anti-viral scanners checking for known viral signatures from the phylum of code known to anti-virus researchers. As such, it is a raw form of Artificial Intelligence, relying on redundant inflexible_ _code programmed to act randomly, ignore or even forget information. Towards a Concept of Rhizomatic Viral Computation Using the concept of the rhizome Deleuze and Guattari (1987 p. 79) challenge the relation between noise and pattern established in information theory. They suggest that redundancy is not merely a ‘limitative condition’, but is key to the transmission of the message itself. Measuring up the efficiency of a highly redundant viral transmission against the ‘splendour’ of the short-term memory of a rhizomatic message, it is possible to draw some conclusions from their intervention. On the surface, the entropic tendency appears to be towards the mixed and the running down of the system’s energy. However, entropy is not the answer since information is not energy; it cannot be conserved, it can be created and destroyed. By definition information is something new, something that adds to existing information (see Campbell, 1982 p. 231), yet efficient information transmission creates invariance in a variant environment. In this sense, the pseudo-randomness of viral code, which pre-programs elements of uncertainty and free action into its propagation, challenges the efforts to make information centralised, structured and ordered. It does this by placing redundant noise within its message pattern. The virus readily ruptures the patterned symmetry of info-space and in terms of information produces something new. Viral transmission is pure information as its objective is to replicate itself throughout info-space; it mutates the space as well as itself. In a rhizomatic mode the anarchic virus is without a central agency; it is a profound rejection of all Generals and power centres. Viral infection, like the rhizomatic network, is made up of ‘finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbour to any other’. Viral spread flows along non-pre-existent ‘channels of communication’ (1987 p. 17). Furthermore, while efforts are made to striate the virus using anti-viral techniques, there is growing evidence that viral information not only wants to be free, but is free to do as it likes. About the Author Tony Sampson is a Senior Lecturer and Course Tutor in Multimedia & Digital Culture, School of Cultural and Innovation Studies at the University of East London, UK Email: t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sampson, Tony. "A Virus in Info-Space" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07_Sampson.php>. APA Style Sampson, T. (2004, Jul1). A Virus in Info-Space. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07_Sampson.php>

IntroductionCoffee, as a stimulant, and the spaces in which it is has been consumed, have long played a vital role in fostering communication, creativity, and sociality. This article explores the interrelationship of café space, communication, creativity, and materialism. In developing these themes, this article is structured in two parts. The first looks back to the coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a historical context to the contemporary role of the café as a key site of creativity through its facilitation of social interaction, communication and information exchange. The second explores the continuation of the link between cafés, communication and creativity, through an instance from the mid-twentieth century where this process becomes individualised and is tied more intrinsically to the material surroundings of the café itself. From this, we argue that in order to understand the connection between café space and creativity, it is valuable to consider the rich polymorphic material and aesthetic composition of cafés. The Social Life of Coffee: London’s Coffee Houses While the social consumption of coffee has a long history, here we restrict our focus to a discussion of the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was during the seventeenth century that the vogue of these coffee houses reached its zenith when they operated as a vibrant site of mercantile activity, as well as cultural and political exchange (Cowan; Lillywhite; Ellis). Many of these coffee houses were situated close to the places where politicians, merchants, and other significant people congregated and did business, near government buildings such as Parliament, as well as courts, ports and other travel route hubs (Lillywhite 17). A great deal of information was shared within these spaces and, as a result, the coffee house became a key venue for communication, especially the reading and distribution of print and scribal publications (Cowan 85). At this time, “no coffee house worth its name” would be without a ready selection of newspapers for its patrons (Cowan 173). By working to twenty-four hour diurnal cycles and heightening the sense of repetition and regularity, coffee houses also played a crucial role in routinising news as a form of daily consumption alongside other forms of habitual consumption (including that of coffee drinking). In Cowan’s words, “restoration coffee houses soon became known as places ‘dasht with diurnals and books of news’” (172). Among these was the short-lived but nonetheless infamous social gossip publication, The Tatler (1709-10), which was strongly associated with the London coffee houses and, despite its short publication life, offers great insight into the social life and scandals of the time. The coffee house became, in short, “the primary social space in which ‘news’ was both produced and consumed” (Cowan 172). The proprietors of coffee houses were quick to exploit this situation by dealing in “news mongering” and developing their own news publications to supplement their incomes (172). They sometimes printed news, commentary and gossip that other publishers were not willing to print. However, as their reputation as news providers grew, so did the pressure on coffee houses to meet the high cost of continually acquiring or producing journals (Cowan 173; Ellis 185-206). In addition to the provision of news, coffee houses were vital sites for other forms of communication. For example, coffee houses were key venues where “one might deposit and receive one’s mail” (Cowan 175), and the Penny Post used coffeehouses as vital pick-up and delivery centres (Lillywhite 17). As Cowan explains, “Many correspondents [including Jonathan Swift] used a coffeehouse as a convenient place to write their letters as well as to send them” (176). This service was apparently provided gratis for regular patrons, but coffee house owners were less happy to provide this for their more infrequent customers (Cowan 176). London’s coffee houses functioned, in short, as notable sites of sociality that bundled together drinking coffee with news provision and postal and other services to attract customers (Cowan; Ellis). Key to the success of the London coffee house of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the figure of the virtuoso habitué (Cowan 105)—an urbane individual of the middle or upper classes who was skilled in social intercourse, skills that were honed through participation in the highly ritualised and refined forms of interpersonal communication, such as visiting the stately homes of that time. In contrast to such private visits, the coffee house provided a less formalised and more spontaneous space of sociality, but where established social skills were distinctly advantageous. A striking example of the figure of the virtuoso habitué is the philosopher, architect and scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703). Hooke, by all accounts, used the opportunities provided by his regular visits to coffee houses “to draw on the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals, from servants and skilled laborers to aristocrats, as well as to share and display novel scientific instruments” (Cowan 105) in order to explore and develop his virtuoso interests. The coffee house also served Hooke as a place to debate philosophy with cliques of “like-minded virtuosi” and thus formed the “premier locale” through which he could “fulfil his own view of himself as a virtuoso, as a man of business, [and] as a man at the centre of intellectual life in the city” (Cowan 105-06). For Hooke, the coffee house was a space for serious work, and he was known to complain when “little philosophical work” was accomplished (105-06). Sociality operates in this example as a form of creative performance, demonstrating individual skill, and is tied to other forms of creative output. Patronage of a coffee house involved hearing and passing on gossip as news, but also entailed skill in philosophical debate and other intellectual pursuits. It should also be noted that the complex role of the coffee house as a locus of communication, sociality, and creativity was repeated elsewhere. During the 1600s in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), for example, coffee houses served as sites of intensive literary activity as well as the locations for discussions of art, sciences and literature, not to mention also of gambling and drug use (Hattox 101). While the popularity of coffee houses had declined in London by the 1800s, café culture was flowering elsewhere in mainland Europe. In the late 1870s in Paris, Edgar Degas and Edward Manet documented the rich café life of the city in their drawings and paintings (Ellis 216). Meanwhile, in Vienna, “the kaffeehaus offered another evocative model of urban and artistic modernity” (Ellis 217; see also Bollerey 44-81). Serving wine and dinners as well as coffee and pastries, the kaffeehaus was, like cafés elsewhere in Europe, a mecca for writers, artists and intellectuals. The Café Royal in London survived into the twentieth century, mainly through the patronage of European expatriates and local intellectuals such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Elliot, and Henri Bergson (Ellis 220). This pattern of patronage within specific and more isolated cafés was repeated in famous gatherings of literary identities elsewhere in Europe throughout the twentieth century. From this historical perspective, a picture emerges of how the social functions of the coffee house and its successors, the espresso bar and modern café, have shifted over the course of their histories (Bollerey 44-81). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coffee house was an important location for vibrant social interaction and the consumption and distribution of various forms of communication such as gossip, news, and letters. However, in the years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the café was more commonly a site for more restricted social interaction between discrete groups. Studies of cafés and creativity during this era focus on cafés as “factories of literature, inciters to art, and breeding places for new ideas” (Fitch, The Grand 18). Central in these accounts are bohemian artists, their associated social circles, and their preferred cafés de bohème (for detailed discussion, see Wilson; Fitch, Paris Café; Brooker; Grafe and Bollerey 4-41). As much of this literature on café culture details, by the early twentieth century, cafés emerge as places that enable individuals to carve out a space for sociality and creativity which was not possible elsewhere in the modern metropolis. Writing on the modern metropolis, Simmel suggests that the concentration of people and things in cities “stimulate[s] the nervous system of the individual” to such an extent that it prompts a kind of self-preservation that he terms a “blasé attitude” (415). This is a form of “reserve”, he writes, which “grants to the individual a [certain] kind and an amount of personal freedom” that was hitherto unknown (416). Cafés arguably form a key site in feeding this dynamic insofar as they facilitate self-protectionism—Fitch’s “pool of privacy” (The Grand 22)—and, at the same time, produce a sense of individual freedom in Simmel’s sense of the term. That is to say, from the early-to-mid twentieth century, cafés have become complex settings in terms of the relationships they enable or constrain between living in public, privacy, intimacy, and cultural practice. (See Haine for a detailed discussion of how this plays out in relation to working class engagement with Paris cafés, and Wilson as well as White on other cultural contexts, such as Japan.) Threaded throughout this history is a clear celebration of the individual artist as a kind of virtuoso habitué of the contemporary café. Café Jama Michalika The following historical moment, drawn from a powerful point in the mid-twentieth century, illustrates this last stage in the evolution of the relationship between café space, communication, and creativity. This particular historical moment concerns the renowned Polish composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, who is most well-known for his avant-garde piece Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), his Polymorphia (1961), and St Luke Passion (1963-66), all of which entailed new compositional and notation techniques. Poland, along with other European countries devastated by the Second World War, underwent significant rebuilding after the war, also investing heavily in the arts, musical education, new concert halls, and conservatoria (Monastra). In the immediate post-war period, Poland and Polish culture was under the strong ideological influence exerted by the Soviet Union. However, as Thomas notes, within a year of Stalin’s death in 1953, “there were flickering signs of moderation in Polish culture” (83). With respect to musical creativity, a key turning point was the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival of 1956. “The driving force” behind the first festival (which was to become an annual event), was Polish “composers’ overwhelming sense of cultural isolation and their wish to break the provincial nature of Polish music” at that time (Thomas 85). Penderecki was one of a younger generation of composers who participated in, and benefited from, these early festivals, making his first appearance in 1959 with his composition Strophes, and successive appearances with Dimensions of Time and Silence in 1960, and Threnody in 1961 (Thomas 90). Penderecki married in the 1950s and had a child in 1955. This, in combination with the fact that his wife was a pianist and needed to practice daily, restricted Penderecki’s ability to work in their small Krakow apartment. Nor could he find space at the music school which was free from the intrusion of the sound of other instruments. Instead, he frequented the café Jama Michalika off the central square of Krakow, where he worked most days between nine in the morning and noon, when he would leave as a pianist began to play. Penderecki states that because of the small space of the café table, he had to “invent [a] special kind of notation which allowed me to write the piece which was for 52 instruments, like Threnody, on one small piece of paper” (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). In this, Penderecki created a completely new set of notation symbols, which assisted him in graphically representing tone clustering (Robinson 6) while, in his score for Polymorphia, he implemented “novel graphic notation, comparable with medical temperature charts, or oscillograms” (Schwinger 29) to represent in the most compact way possible the dense layering of sounds and vocal elements that is developed in this particular piece. This historical account is valuable because it contributes to discussions on individual creativity that both depends on, and occurs within, the material space of the café. This relationship is explored in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Polyclinic”, where he develops an extended analogy between the writer and the café and the surgeon and his instruments. As Cohen summarises, “Benjamin constructs the field of writerly operation both in medical terms and as a space dear to Parisian intellectuals, as an operating table that is also the marble-topped table of a café” (179). At this time, the space of the café itself thus becomes a vital site for individual cultural production, putting the artist in touch with the social life of the city, as many accounts of writers and artists in the cafés of Paris, Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe attest. “The attraction of the café for the writer”, Fitch argues, “is that seeming tension between the intimate circle of privacy in a comfortable room, on the one hand, and the flow of (perhaps usable) information all around on the other” (The Grand 11). Penderecki talks about searching for a sound while composing in café Jama Michalika and, hearing the noise of a passing tram, subsequently incorporated it into his famous composition, Threnody (Krzysztof Penderecki, 2000). There is an indirect connection here with the attractions of the seventeenth century coffee houses in London, where news writers drew much of their gossip and news from the talk within the coffee houses. However, the shift is to a more isolated, individualistic habitué. Nonetheless, the aesthetic composition of the café space remains essential to the creative productivity described by Penderecki. A concept that can be used to describe this method of composition is contained within one of Penderecki’s best-known pieces, Polymorphia (1961). The term “polymorphia” refers not to the form of the music itself (which is actually quite conventionally structured) but rather to the multiple blending of sounds. Schwinger defines polymorphia as “many formedness […] which applies not […] to the form of the piece, but to the broadly deployed scale of sound, [the] exchange and simultaneous penetration of sound and noise, the contrast and interflow of soft and hard sounds” (131). This description also reflects the rich material context of the café space as Penderecki describes its role in shaping (both enabling and constraining) his creative output. Creativity, Technology, Materialism The materiality of the café—including the table itself for Penderecki—is crucial in understanding the relationship between the forms of creative output and the material conditions of the spaces that enable them. In Penderecki’s case, to understand the origins of the score and even his innovative forms of musical notation as artefacts of communication, we need to understand the material conditions under which they were created. As a fixture of twentieth and twenty-first century urban environments, the café mediates the private within the public in a way that offers the contemporary virtuoso habitué a rich, polymorphic sensory experience. In a discussion of the indivisibility of sensation and its resistance to language, writer Anna Gibbs describes these rich experiential qualities: sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious aroma of coffee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it, and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café around me and all these things blend into my experience of “being in the café” (201). Gibbs’s point is that the world of the café is highly synaesthetic and infused with sensual interconnections. The din of the café with its white noise of conversation and overlaying sounds of often carefully chosen music illustrates the extension of taste beyond the flavour of the coffee on the palate. In this way, the café space provides the infrastructure for a type of creative output that, in Gibbs’s case, facilitates her explanation of expression and affect. The individualised virtuoso habitué, as characterised by Penderecki’s work within café Jama Michalika, simply describes one (celebrated) form of the material conditions of communication and creativity. An essential factor in creative cultural output is contained in the ways in which material conditions such as these come to be organised. As Elizabeth Grosz expresses it: Art is the regulation and organisation of its materials—paint, canvas, concrete, steel, marble, words, sounds, bodily movements, indeed any materials—according to self-imposed constraints, the creation of forms through which these materials come to generate and intensify sensation and thus directly impact living bodies, organs, nervous systems (4). Materialist and medium-oriented theories of media and communication have emphasised the impact of physical constraints and enablers on the forms produced. McLuhan, for example, famously argued that the typewriter brought writing, speech, and publication into closer association, one effect of which was the tighter regulation of spelling and grammar, a pressure toward precision and uniformity that saw a jump in the sales of dictionaries (279). In the poetry of E. E. Cummings, McLuhan sees the typewriter as enabling a patterned layout of text that functions as “a musical score for choral speech” (278). In the same way, the café in Penderecki’s recollections both constrains his ability to compose freely (a creative activity that normally requires ample flat surface), but also facilitates the invention of a new language for composition, one able to accommodate the small space of the café table. Recent studies that have sought to materialise language and communication point to its physicality and the embodied forms through which communication occurs. As Packer and Crofts Wiley explain, “infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape” (3). The confined and often crowded space of the café and its individual tables shape the form of productive output in Penderecki’s case. Targeting these material constraints and enablers in her discussion of art, creativity and territoriality, Grosz describes the “architectural force of framing” as liberating “the qualities of objects or events that come to constitute the substance, the matter, of the art-work” (11). More broadly, the design features of the café, the form and layout of the tables and the space made available for individual habitation, the din of the social encounters, and even the stimulating influences on the body of the coffee served there, can be seen to act as enablers of communication and creativity. Conclusion The historical examples examined above indicate a material link between cafés and communication. They also suggest a relationship between materialism and creativity, as well as the roots of the romantic association—or mythos—of cafés as a key source of cultural life as they offer a “shared place of composition” and an “environment for creative work” (Fitch, The Grand 11). We have detailed one example pertaining to European coffee consumption, cafés and creativity. While we believe Penderecki’s case is valuable in terms of what it can tell us about forms of communication and creativity, clearly other cultural and historical contexts may reveal additional insights—as may be found in the cases of Middle Eastern cafés (Hattox) or the North American diner (Hurley), and in contemporary developments such as the café as a source of free WiFi and the commodification associated with global coffee chains. Penderecki’s example, we suggest, also sheds light on a longer history of creativity and cultural production that intersects with contemporary work practices in city spaces as well as conceptualisations of the individual’s place within complex urban spaces. References Benjamin, Walter. “Polyclinic” in “One-Way Street.” One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1998: 88-9. 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