Counts, cities and commerce: a comparative study of the institutional foundations of international trade in late medieval Flanders, Holland and Zeeland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Over the past few decades, the historiography of international trade in late medieval Europe has been greatly influenced by the New Institutional Economics. Central in this perspective is the claim that economic outcomes were primarily determined by so-called institutions, or the rules of the economic game. The present article contributes to this debate by exploring the explanatory factors that impacted upon the choice of the main commercial markets in the Low Countries between 1384 and 1433. More specifically, it assesses the role of institutional frameworks in the decisions made by three important trading groups, the Hanse, the Genoese and the Portuguese, to base most of their trade either in the county of Flanders or in the competing counties of Holland and Zeeland. The article first compares the commercial privileges in which governments set out many of the rules that shaped the activities of foreign traders in these two areas and then considers the mechanisms that allowed merchants to resolve commercial conflicts. The overall conclusion is that institutions alone cannot explain the choice of markets by foreign merchants in the Low Countries during this period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".