Historian awarded prestigious Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study

A renowned expert on the social and economic history of Early Modern Europe has been awarded a prestigious fellowship that will enable them to bring together their latest research in a new book.

Maria Fusaro, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, will spend the 2024/25 academic year in the United States of America following the award of the fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS).

Professor Fusaro’s project, Risk Management, Wage Labour and Varieties of Capitalism: Lessons from the Past, represents the culmination of her research over the last decade, which has focused on commercial networks and maritime trade. These include two major European Research Council funded studies, Sailing into Modernity and AveTransRisk.

“I am thrilled to have been awarded this opportunity to spend the next year taking forward my research among an international community of scholars at what is one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry,” says Professor Fusaro, of Exeter’s Department of Archaeology and History. “It is also great recognition of the research we have been conducting in the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies over more than 30 years, research that has positioned us at the forefront of maritime history globally.”

Located in Princeton, New Jersey, IAS was established in 1930, and each year, welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment.

Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions by the permanent Faculty – each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Past IAS Faculty include Albert Einstein, Hetty Goldman, Erwin Panovsky, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Among past and present scholars, there have been 35 Nobel Laureates, 44 of the 62 Fields Medalists, and 23 of the 27 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.

Professor Fusaro – Director of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies at the University – is renowned for her expertise on the history of Italy, particularly the Venetian Republic, and the Mediterranean between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. She has published widely on topics including commercial networks and the role they played in the early phases of globalization; the economic, social and cultural analysis of late medieval and early modern empires and on the early modern development of legal institutions supporting trade; and on commercial litigation and the status of foreigners in civil courts in the medieval and early modern period.

The focus of her next year will be on bringing together her two most recent projects into the form of a book. Sailing into Modernity: Comparative Perspectives on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century European Economic Transition looked at the transition between Mediterranean and Northern European commercial capitalism through the prism of how sailors were treated.

Average-Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries) offered a historical analysis on the legal instrument known as ‘general average’, which was designed to share risk and damages across all interested parties in maritime trade.

Professor Fusaro said: “This Fellowship represents for me the culmination of a long cycle of research at the intersection of labour and entrepreneurial risk management. My research has already shown how Mediterranean pre-modern modalities of wage disbursements and ancient mutual risk management institutions, provided high levels of protection to the workforce, and solutions to equitably taxing profits in relation to investments. This line of analysis is what I want to further develop, thus contributing to the current active academic and policy debate on developing solutions that would allow sharing profits and losses in a way which is not biased towards shareholders and against stakeholders, further facilitating sustainable development solutions within the maritime sector and beyond.”