The Common Rules Project. Towards a Common Language to Analyse and Interprete Commons' Regulation in Historical Europe

Abstract

"Over the past three years a team of scholars at Utrecht University, the Public University of Navarra (Pamplona), and Lancaster University have been working on the digitization and analysis of the regulation of in total twenty‐six 'historical' commons across England, the Netherlands, and Spain. In this document we first describe our intentions with this project, and how these relate to the wider debate on commons and institutions for collective action. Thereafter we describe the features of the database and the difficulties to compare commons across countries and time and we offer some preliminary analyses of the large database that is now available for other researchers to consult. Considering that we are currently still working on the analysis of all the data it is currently not yet possible to download the data as such. This online tool is intended to allow commons-researchers to use a structured and historically embedded environment to deal with the very interesting and useful but often hard to analyse material the historical commons have left behind. In this paper we describe the content of this database and offer some basic results of the comparative analysis so far. Please do note that this is a very first draft of some preliminary attempts to analyse our data. Of course comments and suggestions are most appreciated."