This book offers a study of so-called ‘Maritime Averages’, a variety of risk management instruments used in maritime trade, in the Low Countries, showing how Averages played a major role in the institutional development of the Low Countries.

This book offers a study of so-called 'Maritime Averages', a variety of risk management instruments used in maritime trade, in the Low Countries, showing how Averages played a major role in the institutional development of the Low Countries.

The articles collected in this volume are examples of the kind of research that can be done with the online database Sound Toll Registers Online (STRO). They show how STRO boosts the writing of the history of European maritime transport and trade, and how its use contributes to our knowledge of that history.

By looking at Dutch and Portuguese systems of settlement and trade in Western Africa, this book sheds new light on the formation of Dutch and Portuguese imperial frames, forms of commercial organisation and their role on the seventeenth-century-Atlantic.

Corruption as an Empty Signifier critically explores the ways in which corruption in Africa has been equated with African politics and political order, and offers a novel approach to understanding corruption as a potentially emancipatory discourse of political transformation.

This Compendium gives an outline of the historical, philosophical and ethical aspects of the return of cultural objects (e.g. cultural objects displaced during war or in colonial contexts), cites past and present cases (Maya Temple Facade, Nigerian Bronzes, United States of America v. Schultz, Parthenon Marbles and many more) and analyses legal issues (bona fide, relevant UNESCO and UNIDROIT Conventions, Supreme Court Decisions, procedure for requests etc.). It is a landmark publication that bears testament to the ways in which peoples have lost their entire cultural heritage and analyses the issue of its return and restitution by providing a wide range of perspectives on this subject. Essential reading for students, specialists, scholars and decision-makers as well as those interested in these topics.