Organization of trade ports activity management in Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

This article presents some arguments for the presence of two different models of organization of sea trade ports management in European countries at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the basis of national regulatory acts analysis. . By studying the main models of the management of trade ports in Europe in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, and in the framework of  main legal systems, we can distinguish, on the one hand, the continental model of the commercial ports management, which is characterized by inclusion of sea trading ports in the state economy with the creation of a developed management apparatus and empowerment of it; and, on the other hand, the Anglo-Saxon model, common in Great Britain and its subordinate territories, in which commercial seaports were in private hands, and the state  is limited only to the control over the execution of basic commercial and maritime rituals. The use of other models of commercial ports management was associated with the specifics of individual regions structure and the presence of institution of "free cities".