LE CONNAISSEMENT MARITIME: DU TITRE NÉGOCIABLE À L'OUTIL DE SOUVERAINETÉ LOGISTIQUE ET DE SÛRETÉ GLOBALE

The maritime bill of lading, inherited from medieval practices, remains the central legal institution of international trade in the 21st century, despite the digital acceleration of exchanges. This article advances a dual thesis. Firstly, it demonstrates that the bill of lading is not limited to its three classic functions « a receipt, a contract of carriage, and a document of title ». It constitutes a genuine self-regulated legal ecosystem, whose systemic synergy reduces transaction costs and generates calculable trust among geographically and culturally distant actors. Secondly, it analyzes the crisis of its paper materiality in the face of the digital revolution, while showing that its fundamental function endures and is being reconfigured. Through a comparative and institutional methodology, combining law, neo-institutional economics, and customs policy analysis, we establish that the bill of lading is becoming a strategic tool of logistical sovereignty. It is central to prior control mechanisms such as ICS2 (EU) or ISF (USA) and single windows like PortNet in Morocco, positioning it as a potential node in a future global digital trust infrastructure. However, the adoption of the electronic bill of lading (e-BL) remains marginal (less than 5%), hindered by legal, institutional, and epistemological lock-ins. Nevertheless, the horizon of a "platform bill of lading" is emerging, driven by the normative action of States. This article thus offers a renewed theoretical framework for negotiable instruments and introduces the emerging concept of "global logistics law" to describe this hybridization of legal rules, technical standards, and private norms.