Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- CONTRIBUTIONS
- “Introduction”
- “The Gaigneur Clan in the Seventeenth-Century Canada Trade”
- “Credit, Risk and Reputation in Late Seventeenth- Century Colonial Trade”
- “The Huguenot Diaspora and the Development of the Atlantic Economy: Huguenots and the Growth of the South Carolina Economy, 1680-1775”
- “Breaching the Mercantile Barriers of the Dutch Colonial Empire: North American Trade with Surinam during the Eighteenth Century”
- “A Scottish Venture in the Newfoundland Fish Trade, 1726-1727”
- “The Consolidation of Bilbao as a Trade Centre in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century”
- “Cutting Out The Middleman? American Trade In Northern Europe, 1783-1815”
- “A Vital Link in Wartime: The Organization of a Trade and Shipping Network Between the United States and Bordeaux, 1793-1815”
- “The Challenge of War on Maritime Trade in the North Atlantic: The Case of the British Trade to Iceland During the Napoleonic Wars”
“Merchant Organization and Maritime Trade in the North Atlantic, 1660-1815: Some Reflections”
from CONTRIBUTIONS
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- CONTRIBUTIONS
- “Introduction”
- “The Gaigneur Clan in the Seventeenth-Century Canada Trade”
- “Credit, Risk and Reputation in Late Seventeenth- Century Colonial Trade”
- “The Huguenot Diaspora and the Development of the Atlantic Economy: Huguenots and the Growth of the South Carolina Economy, 1680-1775”
- “Breaching the Mercantile Barriers of the Dutch Colonial Empire: North American Trade with Surinam during the Eighteenth Century”
- “A Scottish Venture in the Newfoundland Fish Trade, 1726-1727”
- “The Consolidation of Bilbao as a Trade Centre in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century”
- “Cutting Out The Middleman? American Trade In Northern Europe, 1783-1815”
- “A Vital Link in Wartime: The Organization of a Trade and Shipping Network Between the United States and Bordeaux, 1793-1815”
- “The Challenge of War on Maritime Trade in the North Atlantic: The Case of the British Trade to Iceland During the Napoleonic Wars”
Summary
In a well-known opening passage of his Essay upon Projects (1697) Daniel Defoe rhapsodised upon the ingenuity of merchants, forced by the pressures of recent maritime conflict to devise novel strategies of survival. Living by their wits, every venture they undertake is a project:
…ships are sent from Port to Port, as Markets and Merchandizes differ, by the help of strange and universal Intelligence; wherein some are so exquisite, so swift, and so exact, that a Merchant sitting at home in his Countinghouse, at once converses with all Parts of the known world. This, and Travel, makes a True-bred Merchant the most Intelligent Man in the World, and consequently the most capable, when urg'd by necessity, to contrive New ways to live.
It is a romantic, almost Faustian, image this — the merchant as magus, contriving remote lévitations and transmutations from the cloistered privacy of his wharfside offices — and it may seem rather far removed from the prosaic realities conveyed to us by a score of contemporaneous manuals on mercantile practice and brought to life most recently by Jacob Price and David Hancock. In their vivid accounts of eighteenth-century Atlantic-merchant partnerships we are placed in a severely practical world, of disciplined procedures, meticulous record-keeping and cautious calculation. Surrounded by the ordered hierarchies of waste-books, billbooks, letter-books, journals and ledgers we are in an environment of constraints — constraints imposed by time, distance, law and the overriding necessity to reduce risk. It does not seem an environment attuned to strenuous adventure or novel enterprise.
Yet, Defoe was right. Implicit in his characterization is the timeless truism that knowledge is power. The well-ordered merchant-house, sustaining a large correspondence and capable of efficient informationretrieval, was the organization most advantageously placed to conduct its affairs with least risk of disappointment or surprise, and if it could convey a reputation for the reliability of these attributes to its clients and competitors then it stood to gain one of the highest prizes in the game of commerce — sound credit. From this all else could flow — business, profit, confidence, the momentum of self-sustained growth.
Unsurprisingly, the force of these simple truths re-emerges, again and again, from these collected papers. Despite the competing, autarchic statesystem — English, Spanish, Dutch or French — which sought to monopolize the transatlantic trades, the eighteenth-century North Atlantic was a trading environment distinctively exploited by individual initiatives.
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- Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017