Status Updates From The Rise of Merchant Empire...

Taverniers beskrivning av köpmannaklassen i inden

By 1589, some inhabitants of Vitre, thrown out of their homes by the Huguenots, went to settle in Spain, with which they had long business relations. In the instructions to Sieur de Sancerre, who was going to Spain as the ambassador of France in 1598, Henri IV referred to the "communities of Seville and Saint-Lucca." He also mentioned three merchants from Bayonne, / , who had been established in France.

A historian's assertion that the Venetian merchants did not need guilds "because they all lived in one guild" is certainly an exaggeration, but it reveals one important truth about the Venetian economy. From the beginning Venetian merchants were essentially agents - "brokers" according to MacKenney - engaged in furnishing commercial services. The nature of goods hardly mattered to them.

What strikes him in the case of Venice is the absence of a merchant guild. The arti were simply artisans & did not play any role in overseas commerce. But the economic life of the city revolved around what merchant guilds elsewhere attempted 2 promote and protect: the staple. From the fifteenth century the Rialto received goods coming from both the east & the west and exchanged them; this was the role of merchants.

At the outset of merchant activities, merchants in towns formed a sworn association, or 1 or more guilds, in the same way as artisans or specialists of all kinds. They had nothing in common with a pret ala grosse, a union of at least 2 partners, or a commenda, ancestor of the modern limited partnership company, or even a company of equal partners gathered 4 either a specific trade operation or a series of operations.

Flöjter i regel obestyckade.

Pieter Janszoon Liorno

1. The law of unpredictability of success. Sugar may perhaps not be so much of a surprise, but who could have imagined the success of tobacco, coffee, tea, or even calicoes on the European market?
2. The law of cost-reducing innovations.
3. The law of saturation. When consumption spices had reached a certain level, there was no point in lowering the prices to stimulate demand.
4. The law of geographical transfer.

Possibly the monopoly policy of the VOC was self-defeating in that the very high profits - 300-460 percent - may have prevented an increase in European spice consumption. On the other hand, the saturation of the European pepper market in the period of low prices seems to indicate that the elasticity of demand for this kind of commodity was low.

In Immanuel Wallerstein's terminology, the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth cen- tury was a separate world-system from Europe, uniting an economic and trading network with political authority and distributive power.

financial support. The imports could be found most easily at Antwerp, where merchants from the Aachen area and south Ger- many were selling both metals in increasing quantities. Extra loans could be obtained from Genoese, Flemish, and south German merchants at the money markets in Flanders and Brabant.

Thus was created a Lisbon-Antwerp commercial axis.

The successful re-export trade of West African spices in- duced the king of Portugal to send official agents to Bruges and Ant- werp to represent his interests. These interests suddenly widened in 1498, when Vasco da Gama reached Calicut and returned to Portugal, his ships loaded with Asian spices. But an expansion of the spice trade required increased imports of copper and silver from the north and greater

The sharp increase in European consumption of spices and other luxury goods imported from the Middle East gradually undermined Europe's traditional sur- plus. The deficit became critical about 1400, but its reduction was not possible until the second third of the fifteenth century, when inno- vations in mining techniques stimulated the production of silver in central and southern Europe

Originating in Southeast Asia, produc- tion of cane sugar had been moving slowly westward, reaching Pal- estine in the Middle East about the beginning of the second millen- nium. Venetians started planting it in Cyprus and Crete, and it later reached Sicily and Malta.

industry. Ulm, Augsburg and Niirnberg became leading export centers, selling fustians all over Europe. Italy's role was now to be a center for the reexport of cotton as a raw material from the Levant to south Germany, and Venice was best located to dominate this staple trade.

In the case of cotton the changes went still further. Milan, Cremona, and other towns began to import cotton from the east in order to produce fustian, a mixture of cotton and wool. Their success was so great that Italian production could not satisfy both home demand and the increasing export demand north of the Alps. Italian merchants then introduced production in south Germany, which soon superseded the Italian

Venice's large state-owned commercial fleet was a powerful tool in its diplomatic and political strategy for maritime he- gemony. Strict navigation laws provided that only Venetian fleets could bring spices to the city of the doge. Efficient organization of maritime traffic made Venetian galley convoys regular, fast, and reliable

Venice: instead, industry was based on more stable activities such as artisanal luxury products, with an inelastic export demand, and a large-scale, state-owned shipbuilding and ship-repairing industry.

In Asia the shift was clear-cut and had great importance for the
growth of trade in the ports of the Nile delta and Syria. Transconti- nental trade from the Far and South East, via central Asia and Persia to the Black Sea and Byzantium, was increasingly overshadowed by the expansive, long-distance maritime trade in the Indian Ocean, linking India and East Africa directly with the Red Sea