London's Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare's City

by Stephen Alford

The dramatic story of the dazzling growth of London in the sixteenth century.For most, England in the sixteenth century was the era of the Tudors, from Henry VII and VIII to Elizabeth I. But as their dramas played out at court, England was being transformed economically by the astonishing discoveries of the New World and of direct sea routes to Asia. At the start of the century, England was hardly involved in the wider world and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. But as the century progressed something extraordinary happened, which placed London at the center of the world stage forever.Stephen Alford's evocative, original new book uses the same skills that made his widely-praised The Watchers so successful, bringing to life the network of merchants, visionaries, crooks, and sailors who changed London and England forever. In a sudden explosion of energy, English ships were suddenly found all over the world--trading with Russia and the Levant, exploring Virginia and the Arctic, and fanning out across the Indian Ocean. The people who made this possible--the families, the guild members, the money-men who were willing to risk huge sums and sometimes their own lives in pursuit of the rare, exotic, and desirable--are as interesting as any of those at court. Their ambitions fueled a new view of the world--initiating a long era of trade and empire, the consequences of which still resonate today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature, London, Tudor Period, Business, Shakespeare

315 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 27, 2017

About the author

Stephen Alford FRHistS (born 1970) is a British historian and academic. He has been professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds since 2012. Educated at the University of St Andrews, he was formerly a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (1997–99) and junior research fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and, between 1999 and 2012, a fellow in history at King's College, Cambridge. He has been a fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2000.

Reviews

[Colin Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

London’s Triumph is a vibrant and nuanced account of the rise of mercantilism in 16th century Elizabethan London. Stephen Alford traces the rise of London from a third tier city in the early 16th century to, as Elizabethan England became Jacobean England, the premiere trade and commerce hub in Europe.

A prominent theme in London’s Triumph is the interplay between money (i.e. trade and commerce) and government. When, for example, Alford writes about The Muscovy Company he argues, “The Muscovy Company was a corporate entity, formally independent of the English Crown…[and] here was the promise of a kind of mercantile operation that was driven by aggressive trading, funded by investors’ money and backed up by the political clout of government” (78). Alford’s larger point, especially when conceptualizing the bourgeoning London of the 16th century, is “it was very difficult to prise apart merchants, investors, and royal government” (78-79). Whether intentional or not, Alford suggests that 16th century London was not, broadly speaking, so different from many contemporary economies. Despite its nominal association with the people, government too often aligns itself with speculative, capitalist markets, and while 16th century London was pre-capitalist in many discernable ways, we clearly see how those points converge. This matters because Alford consistently shows how the mercantilism of 16th century London, while beneficial for many, also exacerbated the city’s longstanding class and economic inequalities. But Alford also explores the rise of parishes as sites of relief for London’s poor, so as governments, merchants, and moneylenders expressed ambivalence or even visible antagonism toward the poor, parishes (and some private charities) made a concerted effort to do the opposite.

Even though London’s Triumph is a slim 260-page volume, the level of detail is impressive. Even though his name appears in the book’s title, Shakespeare does not play a predominant role in the book. There are some interesting references to usury in plays Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote, but London’s Triumph is not necessarily about Shakespeare’s city; it’s about the merchant’s city.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned very little about London from this book. Alford used London just as a stepping stone to other things, particularly voyages of discovery and trade. In truth, I'm not sure why he had to title the book what he did.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"So much of all this moved in fits and starts: some successes, many failures; opportunities and possibilities embraced, others ignored. It was a great jumble of motives and factors. Certainly there was no long-term plan in Elizabeth's reign for seaborne dominion or empire, no easy nineteenth-century narrative of England's world dominance. But there was in Elizabethan London a spark of an ambition to do something - or at least a kind of vocabulary and set of assumptions more or less common to theorists and writers who thought about why it was important to sail off to far parts of the world and what they should do when they go there. What those things were Elizabethan writers articulated in words that would later cause robustly self-confident Victorians to prick up their ears. In 1578 George Best asked Sir Christopher Hatton 'to behold the great industry of our present age, and the invincible minds of our English nation, who have never left any worthy thing unattempted, nor any part of almost the whole world unsearched'. Best really had his eye (like most others writing his kind of book) on Spain and Portugal: if those two global powers could dominate the south-eastern and south-western parts of the world, then it was up to England to discover and hold the north-east and north-west."
- Stephen Alford, London's Triumph: Merchant Adventurers in the Tudor City, pg 174-175

A curious but meandering work of Tudor-to-Elizabethan-to-Jacobean social history describing the growth of 16th century London from the perspective of 'merchant adventurers', a kind of pre-colonial subsector of the early-modern middle class/bourgeois, who sought to build up trade connections around the world in increasingly outlandish ventures that culminated in the rise of the first British Empire.

The book starts with a survey of London in 1500 as small, backward city overrun with poverty, pestilence, crime, and such a high mortality rate that it was only kept afloat through massive domestic migration and international immigration. The book then describes London's growth with new buildings and institutions linked to developments in European trade and geopolitics, particularly the Dutch revolt which undermined Antwerp's competitive advantage as a financial centre of Europe and allowed England to exploit the vacuum. The book hits its stride around the midway point as most of the narrative finally begins talking about merchant adventurers exploring the world, with the story concluding (somewhat abruptly) with the Great Fire of London destroying many of the buildings discussed in the text.

The main gimmick here is that each chapter focuses on a particular geographical site by telling the story of some character related to its establishment, which is used as a tent-pole around which to introduce the reader to various features of Elizabethan social life. This is a fairly clunky method of historical writing in my opinion, since it makes the narrative directionless, meandering, and any general points easy to lose track of as each chapter segues into the next with some tenuously connective theme. For instance, a chapter on Michael Lok's disastrous investments in Northwest Passage voyages is followed by a chapter on Elizabethan England's changing relationship to usury, with this ethical theme used to then jump to moral panics over working class crime, which then leads to a chapter about parish structures for poor law relief. When it's laid out like that you can see a thin connective thread between these chapters, but this arrangement still feels arbitrarily discursive. Facts are thrown in, it seems, because Alford knows them, not because they necessarily connect to the class narrative he is telling.

Of course, I'm not sure Alford would say that he's telling a class narrative. There's an annoying trend in modern historiography where historians, self-conscious about postmodernism's scepticism towards the constructed artifice of historical narrative, have become reluctant to draw clear through-lines in their history. These books are often difficult to focus on as an accumulation of details and events are droningly intoned at you without clearly demarcating what theme or argument connects these details together. History, in all its chaos, just happens, and the reader is invited to critically scrutinise the text looking for whatever bias or models are implicitly steering an interpretation together for you without the historian really making an explicit argument.

For that reason, I have to supply my own interpretation here and say that what Alford is really writing is a story about the invention of early modern capitalism from the perspective of London's middle class. Seen in this light quite a few features of the text make more sense. The elliptical references to the invention of new concepts of stocks and corporate entities that confused and alarmed Elizabethan audiences; the cultural anxiety over new forms of moneymaking that scarcely made sense to a late-medieval mindset; and the book's studiously constructed blank silence over the awkward fact of what, exactly, all the migrants pouring into London were actually fleeing from.

Nevertheless, there's plenty of Elizabethan social histories from below that try to capture those experiences, so having a text written with a more partisan admiration for the Tudor/Elizabethan/Jacobean bourgeois does give Alford's text a refreshing edge, and its better moments really are quite good. The range of written sources he draws on is impressive (particularly in his admirable restraint from quoting Shakespeare any more than absolutely necessary) and helps evoke a model of history in which the chaotic multitude of many thousands of personalities contribute to historical change, rather than mere structural forces. I also loved his analysis of the different portraits that merchant adventurers commissioned for themselves, reading the subtle details into their iconography and dress that reflected the changing social status of merchant families and the unique, idiosyncratic personalities of these characters that Alford brings to life more vividly than prose sources alone could manage. This does mean that some of his character interpretations become a little speculative and interpolative, but it's the good kind of speculative: the human, creative kind. There's a lot of failures in these pages; people whose ventures turned to naught, whose businesses collapsed and who died in obscurity, but who participated in the iterative foundation-building of Britain's eventual mercantile empire in an era before anyone knew that's what they were actually doing. That kind of history is hard to write, and its worth pushing through Alford's desultory wanderings to get at those moments.

As for the merchant adventuring portion of the book, a recurring theme throughout is that Elizabethans really had very little idea what the world looked like, and set up voyages on the confident misunderstanding of what kind of routes or landmasses they'd find on the way. This leads to a persistent comedy of errors in doomed voyages seeking the mythic 'Northwest' and 'Northeast' passages that has its most spectacular episode in Richard Chancellor's 1553 crash-landing on the coasts of Northern Russia whilst looking for Cathay. Alford does a good job at capturing the sense of mystery, confusion, and awe these first Englishmen in Russia felt meeting Russian officials and learning about their country, and his detailed account of the subsequent merchant adventurer journeys to Russia and monopolisation of its trade make for an engaging account of corporate espionage, ethnographic cataloguing, and corrupt geopolitical backstabbing. Anthony Jenkins, in particular, stands out as an extraordinary character: a kind of forerunner of the 19th century 'Great Game' spies and colonial agents in an era before there was an empire, who trekked his way across Russia to Persia to the war-torn regions of modern Uzbekistan, braving bandits, drawing maps, cataloguing environments, and negotiating treaties in countries his sovereign didn't even know he had reached. And yet he considered himself a failure, for he still did not reach his actual goal of Cathay!

The knife-edge that Alford tries to walk in describing episodes like this is his uncertainty over how to admire the achievement, at one point remarking on the "formidable ambition and startling ignorance" of these endeavours in which the "calculating, pragmatic, and essentially conservative world" of Elizabethan England was revolutionised by "hare-brained project[s]" of global exploration in the 1550s (pg 70). Though making a few obligatory references to the eventual violence of colonialism (mostly by quoting the naively bizarre advice that pilots were given for communicating with any potential natives), Alford's ultimate admiration is based on his empathy for the English experience. The reader is invited to reimagine the world before the corners were filled in on the maps, to try and imagine what it meant to imagine the globe at a time before satellite imagery, and where most cartography was done by urban academics drawing out maps from a hodgepodge of ancient prose sources, classical poetry, medieval travelogues, garbled pilot's books, and stolen Spanish maps.

To support this effect, the endpaper of my hardback edition includes a 1587 map of the world that I kept returning to with awe. In seeing how Elizabethans mapped out the vague outlines of continents with massive blank white spaces at the centre one can immediately intuit the speculative, excited trepidation they must have felt when trying to structure their geographies (or 'cosmographies') with no idea what they would find inside these spaces. Some continents, like east Eurasia and west North America are simply... blank, the lines trailing off into the unknown as their cartographers quite gleefully admit the limits of their knowledge. I cannot help but be immensely charmed by this, and I don't have it in me to sneer at the details they get wrong (India, for instance, being smaller than Britain!) when I'm so impressed at the bravura with which humans sailing across the world in tiny wooden boats, scanning the shorelines with pen and paper, some novel mathematics and a few metal gadgets, managed to get the general outlines of the world right.

I know that this is probably because I just finished writing a dissertation on early modern piracy, but I will say that I found Alford's references to privateering and piracy weirdly shallow. Much of the exploration and colonial groundwork that he attributes to merchant adventurers was assisted or initiated by people that we would call pirates, and the line between them and merchant adventurers was hardly a meaningful one at the best of times. Likewise, the widespread reliance of south-west British maritime industries in the late 1500-1600s on pirates, and their conflicts with London-based merchants, is notable for its absence in a book about the growth of London's trade and finances in that era.

This book is only 258 pages, though, so there's only so much ground it could cover and this might just be me being petty. For evoking an uncertain world, for grounding us in an era before the British empire was ever even imagined, and for bringing to life a cast of dead wrecks, failures, adventurers, and scholars from the archives, Alford does a pretty good job at writing a history of contingency and polyvalent agency, even if he does so at the cost of too much haphazard wandering.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received London's Triumph as part of a Goodreads giveaway.

London's Triumph explores London's (and England's) enormous growth, both in population and prestige, during Shakespeare's time (broadly, the 16th century and the early decades of the 17th). In particular, it looks at the lives of merchants and those who sought to grow England's economy both domestically and abroad, giving an intimate glance into characters who were neither nobility nor peasant, and whose innovations drove England's rise as a major world power.

In terms of scope, this book is something along the lines of something you'd read as part of a college-level history class--as a former history major, I loved it, but it has a decidedly academic bent and is probably not a popular history for the casual reader. Each chapter has a theme, and a figure or two as its central player(s). One thing that struck me was how small a world this merchant class was. You see the same names repeated chapter after chapter, connected through marriage, apprenticeship, and partnership. Alford has done a great job of researching his "characters" and giving us a glimpse into what motivated them. Loved this look into one small cross-section of London's great history.

[Elysa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book delves into the history of Elizabethan London by looking at how merchants and their money and trade expeditions shaped the city. It's a very interesting and, I believe, incredibly important perspective. The author used plenty of great sources, including plays, poems, travel journals, church records, art, and many others. I appreciate that because it provides a wide scope. Perhaps the best aspect about this book is that it looks at the city in a broad sense and then on a small scale by looking at individual Londoners. Alford goes back and forth between these two in a way that keeps the book moving and thus engaging. It's a great scholarly text, but it's also entertaining and easily accessible.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book that discusses exactly what is say on the tin - merchants and the city of London from c. 1500 to c. 1620. Alford attempts to tell the story through lesser-known characters, and interweaves stories of the big merchants - the Greshams, the Smythes, etc - with those of the working inhabitants of London. The archival research he has undertaken to do this is exceptional, and he brings it together in a warming, human way. Characters come to life from the pages, as does the city itself - Alford's familiarity and fascination with early modern London is very much apparent, and very much contagious.

[Ned Bartlett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Format is more like a collection of essays, but the chapters do reference each other, so it is difficult to read them in isolation. I learned a lot about London from this book, and pretty cool to see my old school being referenced a number of times (apart from how cruel it was!) Does get a little dry in the middle, but the discoveries of sea routes along the northwest passage, Russia and eventually to the East Indies were fascinating to read about. Now I need to find a book about the great fire, and the plague, which are deliberately omitted from this book.

[mylogicisfuzzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book for someone who wants a snapshot of London over a period between 1500-1620 and featuring some better and lesser known merchant adventurers. Not so good on actual trade. Primary sources, for example, are a number of wills and theatre plays rather than trading accounts.

Alford stresses the importance of the founding of Muscovy Company for example and the monopoly on trade with Russia it was granted but then doesn't really say very much about it - how much was this trade worth? Did it influence London consumers and tastes in any way? Towards the end of the book, Sir Thomas Smythe is made ambassador to Moscow to renew the company's charter and off he goes. And, instead of telling us what Smythe did in Moscow and what happened with the Muscovy Company, Alford tells us about Smythe's portrait and attributes it to Cornelis Ketel (Dutch artist about whom I know nothing but Alford has already told us about his portrait of Martin Frobisher earlier in the book), while illustration credits at the end of the book give a different artists name. Not that it really matters in the context of the book who painted Smythe but what happened to proof readers and editors at Allen Lane? Moving smoothly on, Alford finishes his bit on Smythe as one of the prime movers for colonisation of Virginia. But what happened with the Muscovy Company??

There isn't a huge amount of context or analysis either but there is quite a lot of repetition for a book of only 260 pages. On the plus side, it's an easily readable and well written book on London, it's just too general and short to be anything but a basic, popular history.

[Steele Wotkyns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Notwithstanding that my library's copy of the book was printed upside down and backwards with respect to the cover and the subtitle is different, perhaps as a newer edition: Merchants, Adventurers and Money in Shakespeare's City -- this is really a first-rate, very approachable short history. What makes it stand out is the author brings us a well-rounded look at 16th century London through the lives of these mercantilists, ocean-going and overland explorers and early financiers rather than rulers and the elite. It was fun for me to look up literary figures mentioned throughout, delving a little deeper into the works of those mentioned in my copy of William Rose Benet's The Reader's Encyclopedia. Alford's neat history finishes with strong chapters and it was truly a memorable gem for this amateur history fan. One odd thing: there is no bibliography; nevertheless, London's Triumph is well worth the lesson in reading.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sixteenth-century London was quite an interesting place. Alford does a fine job describing and detailing the ways in which those of various social classes experienced the city that day. He does a rather poor job of giving the wider-angle view of what was going on in the politics and history of the city (and kingdom) at that time. This is not necessarily unintentional; he admits in the introduction that he wants to give a street-eye view of the city. But how do you hardly ever mention Henry III? Edward VI? Mary I? Elizabeth I? I guess he didn't want to write a late Tudor history, that's how. As a result, the work is rather disjointed; little flow from chapter to chapter as he jumps from this merchant to that merchant, this parish to that parish, that oversea endeavor to that one. Fine facts were frequently front and center, but the wider world was weakly welcomed.

[Cynthia Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read of the growth of London in the sixteenth century. Alford presents London in 1500 as marginal and underwhelming; Paris had more people, Antwerp had bigger markets, Augsburg had bankers and Florence had art. At the dawn of the 1600s, London had come into its own through global exploration and trade financed by an ambitious merchant class. The book is populated with important players of the time not found in most history books: the guild members, moneymen willing to risk huge sums and writers publishing scholarly editions of voyages and travels. The biographical sketches of individual "merchants" and "adventurers" of the title makes for an enlightening read of an important time in English history.

[Tracey · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Getting my history nerd on. A look at how London merchants and others moved London, and thus England, onto the world stage in the 16th century, with a heavy focus on trade, economics, and exploration. I enjoyed learning the broad strokes, but in some chapters I had trouble staying focused. Readers of history, Anglophiles, people who love London, and fans of the Tudor era are the likely audience for this book.

[Red Dog · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable read, made all the more so by the fact that Alford doesn't steer from his stated aim of looking at things from the street-level view of Tudor merchants in London. I also liked the fact that when it came to the 16th century, the dealings of the Muscovy merchants was everything, and as such Alford sheds light on a piece of British mercantile history that is somewhat overshadowed by the East India Company and the Virginia plantations.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is mistitled as a history of mercantile London during the Tudor era, which while it does lay out the history of the city, it expands to other parts of the world detailing the exploits of explorers, ambassadors, and other cities with economic booms. Still full of good research, but expect the focus to drift to other areas.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was more of a high level look at the changing economics of London through the lives of various specific merchants and traders, rather than a history of London specifically. That said, I found it interesting and engaging as a general reader who knows little about economics, trade, or business in the early modern period.

[Michael Chandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just the right level for me. Not so general as to be only repeating well known superficial facts, nor at the level of an expert's monograph, too specific and requiring too much background knowledge to be correctly appreciated and understood. Worth reading if you are interested in the period.

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Kind of boring but in a comforting way, if that makes any sense. I enjoyed it but wouldn't necessarily include it in any best-of roundups. I honestly thought it would be more about Shakespeare but it's mostly about mercantile trading routes, which is OK because I like that sort of thing.

[Jack Goodstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

16th century London begins its growth spurt.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good detailed review of the economic growth of the English economy in the reign of the Tudor monarchs.

[Carolyn Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not so scholarly as to be unintelligible to the average person. A fascinating read.

[Nick Spencer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thin, bitty, not a patch on Brotton’s Orient Isle which covered broadly same subject

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The history of London’s merchant adventurers who laid the foundations for the British Empire.

[Desirae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a lot of interesting parts here, but I found this too broad. I would have preferred a more insulated approach to the subject matter.

[Lance McNeill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging and well researched

This book was exactly what I was looking for to understand London as the catalyst for England’s rise as a global power.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alford guides us through the bustling city of London in Shakespeare's day via anecdote and vignette. He makes us care about both the city and its inhabitants. While I did not find this book particularly memorable, it will nonetheless aid my teaching of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. I would recommend this book to those who desire a better understand of the economic climate in which Shakespeare lived. 

[Paul Hoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book about this period in British history. London played an important role in developing international trade, and maintains that role. As a regular member of the London Stock Exchange I enjoyed learning more about the first trading venues in London. Sadly the book did not deal with the trade with Asia and Japan that was evolving at this time. But there are other books for that......

[Martine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for anyone who is interested in some of the early London power brokers. I would have personally preferred more information on the day to day lives of city folk of the time period, but it was interesting to learn about how the rich and powerful spent their money, and the importance of church and charity.

[Mimi V]

Review in vol 18, no 4 BBC HIstory magazine