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Merchants: The Community That Shaped England's Trade and Empire, 1550-1650
A new history of English trade and empire—revealing how a tightly woven community of merchants was the true origin of globalized Britain
In the century following Elizabeth I’s rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin.
Edmond Smith traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. Smith unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. He reveals that the origins of "global" Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain’s relationship with the world.
In the century following Elizabeth I’s rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin.
Edmond Smith traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. Smith unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. He reveals that the origins of "global" Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain’s relationship with the world.
376 pages, Hardcover
Published October 26, 2021
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July 17, 2023
A key turning point in economic history is the rise of the “Company Trade” in 16th and 17th century medieval Europe when enterprising merchants set off from their homelands to far off places such as the Levant, Americas, India and the Far East in order to bring back goods to their home markets for profit. In finance, this is often seen as the birthplace of the ‘joint stock corporation’ – when a set of investors, come together, pool their resources and capital, and reap dividends in case of a successful expedition. This is a book about these merchants and investors, specifically those in 16th century England, and how they organized and conducted their trade.
Merchants excels in describing this world. The book takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach and is split into five chapters. Each chapter presents a facet of a merchants’ daily life. The book begins with how trainee merchants were subject to a rigorous apprenticeship that could last several years and then describes how these merchants came together to form what would later become ‘trading companies’ such as the East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company. The last three chapters deal with the daily life, disputes and how merchants liaised with the state. While taking such a thematic approach seemingly works, the book unfortunately falls short of its lofty ambitions.
The biggest flaw of the book is that it is purely descriptive with not a whit of analysis in its some 200 pages. Chapters start with an anecdote followed by another and then another until the end of the chapter, with little in the middle to bind them and make them cohere. This makes reading the book a tedious exercise. Furthermore, because of a lack of analysis, the merchant community of 16th century England appears to be a static photograph, immune to the vagaries of time, as if the author was describing a community that still exists somewhere in the 21st century. Except for a single excerpt on the Cloth Trade, the author doesn’t attempt to examine how merchants’ trading activities evolved over the course of the 16th century. Neither is any attempt made to analyse the economic effects of the trade in England either. The book has no graphs, no figures, no charts, no maps – perplexing given that the author in his professional career was a capital markets research analyst.
The other big omission from the book is its singular focus on England and eschewing the effects of the merchants’ activities in the rest of the world. Were this book handed to a naïve reader, one would imagine that the only trading community to exist in 16th century Europe was located exclusively in England or that the English merchant community operated in a vacuum independent of the other trading communities in Netherlands, Italy or Portugal. No mention is made how the merchant community activities contributed to rising tensions between England and the other mercantilist nations such as the Netherlands or France. We, the reader, are not given any clues as to what led to England succeeding in their mercantilist efforts while the Netherlands, Spain and France eventually fell behind. The author also glosses over the involvement of the Merchant Community (such as John Watts) in the slave trade or privateering. Again, the naïve reader would be forgiven for thinking that merchants were simply ambassadors of commerce and came to their host countries as neutral tradespeople. Neither is any attention paid to the establishment of Plantations in Ireland or North America or how merchants were received by the hosts in Africa or Levant or India.
Even when it comes to describing the English merchant companies, the author simply presents the various companies 'as is'. Did the Mercers Company come first or the East India Company? (Mercers) Where did the Eastland company operate? (Present day Poland) Were the Merchant Ventures and the Merchant Adventurers the same? (They're not). The book despite being a treatise on the various companies fails to mentions even such basic things. The reader will need Wikipedia to look these up.
Ultimately, this is confusing book. By not having any analysis or hypothesis to pin the work, the author plays too safe. It feels less like a history of 16th century English mercantilism and more like a meticulously researched PhD dissertation that has been re-packaged into a hagiographic work on English mercantilism. Any reader who wishes to understand the economic or political forces at work behind the working of English mercantilism will come away from this work sorely disappointed.
Merchants excels in describing this world. The book takes a thematic rather than a chronological approach and is split into five chapters. Each chapter presents a facet of a merchants’ daily life. The book begins with how trainee merchants were subject to a rigorous apprenticeship that could last several years and then describes how these merchants came together to form what would later become ‘trading companies’ such as the East India Company and the Hudson Bay Company. The last three chapters deal with the daily life, disputes and how merchants liaised with the state. While taking such a thematic approach seemingly works, the book unfortunately falls short of its lofty ambitions.
The biggest flaw of the book is that it is purely descriptive with not a whit of analysis in its some 200 pages. Chapters start with an anecdote followed by another and then another until the end of the chapter, with little in the middle to bind them and make them cohere. This makes reading the book a tedious exercise. Furthermore, because of a lack of analysis, the merchant community of 16th century England appears to be a static photograph, immune to the vagaries of time, as if the author was describing a community that still exists somewhere in the 21st century. Except for a single excerpt on the Cloth Trade, the author doesn’t attempt to examine how merchants’ trading activities evolved over the course of the 16th century. Neither is any attempt made to analyse the economic effects of the trade in England either. The book has no graphs, no figures, no charts, no maps – perplexing given that the author in his professional career was a capital markets research analyst.
The other big omission from the book is its singular focus on England and eschewing the effects of the merchants’ activities in the rest of the world. Were this book handed to a naïve reader, one would imagine that the only trading community to exist in 16th century Europe was located exclusively in England or that the English merchant community operated in a vacuum independent of the other trading communities in Netherlands, Italy or Portugal. No mention is made how the merchant community activities contributed to rising tensions between England and the other mercantilist nations such as the Netherlands or France. We, the reader, are not given any clues as to what led to England succeeding in their mercantilist efforts while the Netherlands, Spain and France eventually fell behind. The author also glosses over the involvement of the Merchant Community (such as John Watts) in the slave trade or privateering. Again, the naïve reader would be forgiven for thinking that merchants were simply ambassadors of commerce and came to their host countries as neutral tradespeople. Neither is any attention paid to the establishment of Plantations in Ireland or North America or how merchants were received by the hosts in Africa or Levant or India.
Even when it comes to describing the English merchant companies, the author simply presents the various companies 'as is'. Did the Mercers Company come first or the East India Company? (Mercers) Where did the Eastland company operate? (Present day Poland) Were the Merchant Ventures and the Merchant Adventurers the same? (They're not). The book despite being a treatise on the various companies fails to mentions even such basic things. The reader will need Wikipedia to look these up.
Ultimately, this is confusing book. By not having any analysis or hypothesis to pin the work, the author plays too safe. It feels less like a history of 16th century English mercantilism and more like a meticulously researched PhD dissertation that has been re-packaged into a hagiographic work on English mercantilism. Any reader who wishes to understand the economic or political forces at work behind the working of English mercantilism will come away from this work sorely disappointed.
Displaying 1 of 1 review