Uniform seaborne cargo regimes - a historical review

As Benedetto Croce says, ‘Every true history is contemporary history’, since history usually repeats itself. The international conventions that mark the development of the current seaborne cargo regime and their history play a valuable role in the present and potential debates on governmental regulations of transnational shipping. Therefore, anyone who wishes to comprehend, and more importantly play a serious role in determining, the future of the unification of the seaborne cargo regime should understand its history.
The international community has tried to unify the seaborne cargo regime since the late 19th century. Numerous scholars have devoted themselves to the technical aspects of the four related conventions, but there has been little literature scrutinising the dynamics between all the attempts to unify the law. An historical review of the unifying efforts by the international community to date will provide us with the necessary perspective to appreciate the cyclical and interactive processes involved.
This article provides an analysis of the attempts to unify the international seaborne cargo regimes and the background to these attempts over the past one hundred years. Each attempt has been situated in a different political and economic context, with different participants at different negotiating forums.
After examining the four rounds of attempts to unify international seaborne cargo regimes and the background to these attempts over the past one hundred years, this article finds that a repetition of this current mode of negotiating static conventions will not unify these regimes. Moreover, the attempts to unify the international seaborne cargo regime in the past century have been categorised into four stages and become transnational. Active participants have been shifted from private entrepreneurs to government delegates. The shifting also occurred as to negotiating forums. In particular the UN is merely one of many negotiating forums involved in the process of legal uniformity. Therefore, negotiators should stop imitating the current approach to unifying seaborne cargo regimes and pause to work out a dynamic form of self-evolving legal regime, and future effective negotiations are likely to involve other organizations in addition to the UN.