Introduction: Questions and sources
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
Summary
Why should not the knowledge, the skill, the expertise, the assiduity, and the spiritual hazards of trade & commerce, when crowned with success, be entitled to give those flattering distinctions by which mankind are so universally captivated. Such are the specious but false arguments for a proposition which always will find numerous advocates in a nation where men are every day starting up from obscurity to wealth.
(James Boswell, Life of Johnson, i. 492, in response to a remark made to Johnson that the English merchant was a new species of gentlemen, a notion borrowed from Steele's Conscious Lovers.)Merchants carry on their trade in all directions gaining several hundred per cent, in spite of difficulties with customs stations and dangers from robbers, they still carry on. The scholar sits in his room and discourses of righteousness; he has no difficulties with customs stations, no danger from robbers, and his gain might be incalculable, yet he does not set about his work. So the scholar does not give as much thought to making progress as does the merchant.
(Meh Tse, The Great Value of the Right, c. 470–390 B.C. trans, by Tompkinson,in The Social Teachings of Meh Tse, Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan, 1927.)Seventeenth-century England generated astonishing commercial energy. Such vitality in what was still a fundamentally agrarian economy was neither sudden nor unique. It had been characteristic of the medieval cities of Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, had sustained the prodigious expansion of Europe across the globe in the sixteenth century and transformed the United Provinces into a world economic power. In comparison England was a late starter, whose maritime and commercial potential developed slowly and unevenly.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995