Ships and port management at Liverpool before the opening of the first dock in 1715

Stammers, Michael

doi:10.3828/transactions.156.3

Cited by 2 publications

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“…23 Belfast was also an important port in the Irish trade, a mainstay of the Liverpool trade at this time. 24 New York, taken from the Dutch in 1664, was a major entrepôt port on the eastern Seaboard. 25 The Leeward Islands, having become independent from Barbados in 1670 were starting to show their potential following years of laggard growth in the seventeenth century.…”

Section: The Providencementioning

confidence: 99%

Structural holes and bad ideas: Liverpool’s Atlantic trade networks in the early-eighteenth century

Haggerty¹

2016

Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550-1800

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Historians have been complicating their understandings of networks, and especially mercantile networks. Moving on from a rather positivistic approach based on family, religion and ethnicity, research has now started to stress the inherent problems inherent in networks. 2 Furthermore, researchers have started to stress the problems in constructing and maintaining networks of whatever type. 3 However, far less work has been conducted on the problems encountered in developing and under-developed networks, where key actors may be unduly influential because they have access to new and/or highly-prized information. Such key actors (often but not always, Mark Granovetter's 'weak ties') can help to bridge what Ronald Burt has called structural holes in networks; that is, 'the separation between non-redundant contacts'. 4 Actors that stand near structural holes are 'at a higher risk of having good ideas' through the ability to better synthesise the various, different, and new information to which they have access. 5 Moreover, that information is likely to be seen as high value and credited because that information is considered rare. Therefore, actors bridging structural holes are often perceived as positive players within a network. 6 However, the very fact that these bridging actors have information arbitrage to their advantage means that they are also in a great position to act against the interests of the principal(s), especially where there is a lack of good governance. 7 These opportunities could be seen as 'bad ideas', the opposite of Burt's good ones. This situation could lead to bad decision making simply due to a lack of competency, through positive adverse selection, or even fraud. 8 Either of these behaviours could be seen as a type of network failure, which Andrew Schrank and Josh Whitford define as 'the failure of a more or less idealized set of relational-network institutions to sustain 'desirable' activities or impede 'undesirable activities'. 9 They posit two types of network failure: absolute and relative -the latter of which is more relevant to the discussion here. 10 They argue that relative failure occurs when networks fail due to a lack of competencies (involuted), or due to opportunism (contested). The first is due to ignorance and a failure to absorb enough information, and the latter occurs where there is sufficient competence, but safeguards against mistrust and opportunism are absent. The colloquial, if clear way they sum

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Section: The Providencementioning

confidence: 99%

Structural holes and bad ideas: Liverpool’s Atlantic trade networks in the early-eighteenth century

Haggerty¹

2016

Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550-1800

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show abstract

“…The coastal trade fostered the first joint‐stock companies in the steamship sector. Armstrong and Williams, meanwhile, continue their exploration of early steamships by assessing their importance as agents of British modernization before the mid‐nineteenth century and Stammers investigates the management of the port of Liverpool leading up to the opening of the first dock in 1715. The British navy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries contained incentive and promotion structures reminiscent of the tournament‐based incentives of many modern corporations, argue Benjamin and Thornberg, and one consequence of this was a highly skewed pay structure in the navy compared with the flatter structures on merchant ships.…”

Section: (Iv) 1700–1850 Peter Kirby University Of Manchestermentioning

confidence: 99%