Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World, 1450–1800

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351918107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Merchant organisation was a global phenomenon in the early modern era, and in the growing contacts between peoples and cultures, merchants may be seen as privileged intermediaries. This collection is unique in essaying a truly global coverage of mercantile activities, from the Wangara of the Central Sudan, Mississippi and Huron Indians, to the role of the Jews, the Muslim merchants of Anatolia, to the social structure of the mercantile classes in early modern England. The histories of merchant communities are not their histories alone, but also the histories of assumptions concerning their contexts. From the comparative perspective adopted here, it emerges that in markets where Western European merchants vied for place with competitors from the Near East, South Asia or East Asia, they were very often unsuccessful.

1
Italian Merchant Organization and Business Relationships in Early Tudor London

M.E. Bratchel

For the eminent Italian historian, Armando Sapori, the closure of the London branch of the Medici Bank in 1478 symbolizes the effective end of Italian mercantile activity in England.² In reality, there was a continued Italian presence, and even a continued Italian importance, which has long been accepted by historians of Tudor trade.³ But whereas recently in France the role of Italian merchants in supplying the expanding markets and in financing the revitalized monarchies of the early sixteenth century has attracted considerable attention,⁴ this interest has produced little response from English scholars. The history of alien involvement in England has remained the peculiar preserve of the medievalist, and the sixteenth century continues to be studied mainly with regard to the development of native talents in both commercial and financial fields.

The emphasis upon the rising importance and developing business techniques of English merchants is very understandable. Clearly the typical Elizabethan merchant must be portrayed as an Englishman, whilst the future was to lie with the English regulated and joint-stock companies of the seventeenth century. At the same time a preoccupation with the future may well have tended to obscure the economic and social realities of the early Tudor period. The first half of the sixteenth century was a period in which aliens came to control an even larger share of England’s cloth exports;⁵ the Italians, for much of Henry VIII’s reign, continued to control the import of fine cloths of silk and gold; German merchants virtually monopolized the importation of wax. Banking was to remain largely an Italian preserve long after the accession of Elizabeth. There can be no doubt of the continued importance of alien communities in English economic life, and that these are documented more richly than the affairs of their earlier and more familiar predecessors. In terms both of importance and of source material alien merchants in early Tudor England offer a fruitful and neglected area of research for the economic historian.⁶

Early Tudor London contained a large but diminishing Italian mercantile community consisting of perhaps seventy individuals. The present paper aims to examine the structure of Italian companies operating in England and to investigate the nexus of business relationships binding together members of the Italian community. Whilst much detailed work has been done on individual medieval Italian firms, the rapid expansion of source material in both Italian and English archives for the early modern period has made it possible to view the Italian community as a whole during the last half-century of their real prominence in English affairs. The focus on London is dictated by that city’s dominance of English overseas trade in the early Tudor period. This ascendancy, accompanied by the decline of the outports, resulted not only in the attraction towards London of the most enterprising among English merchants⁷ but also in a similar movement of Italian merchants from the outports. During the early sixteenth century Italian activity in England is largely embraced by the history of the London communities.

I The Family as a Business Unit

Recent studies of Italian mercantile organization during the Renaissance have centred around the role of the family. Raymond de Roover once contrasted an older form of partnership in which members of the family predominate with the series of partnerships entered into by the fourteenth-century Medici with non-family members.⁸ Frederic C. Lane, writing of Venice, has also noted the growth of non-family partnerships,⁹ and the transition hinted at by de Roover and Lane constitutes the theme of Richard A. Goldthwaite’s Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence with its reverberant thesis that Renaissance Florence witnessed a fragmentation of the family unit and the liberation of Italian commerce from the family connexion.¹⁰ But generally the more extreme expressions of a movement away from a commercial organization governed by familial ties have either been denied or ignored, and the continuing importance of the extended family and of family solidarity is emphasized in much recent work on the leading mercantile families of Genoa, Venice, and even of Tuscany.¹¹

The current debate on the continued cohesion of the family unit is sustained, in part, by differences of perspective and emphasis. Much depends upon whether the family is analysed primarily as a political, a social or an economic force. Much depends also upon differences as to what constitutes family solidarity. But real differences of interpretation remain, and a study of Italian business relationships in early Tudor London serves to clarify the part which ought to be attributed to the family, as a business unit, in the later years of Italian commercial prosperity.

Family cohesion in economic pursuits may find manifestation in several ways. At the simplest level, the sixteenth-century merchant might be expected to equip his sons with the rudiments of a business education. This training might involve voyages to distant markets by the young merchant acting as his father’s agent. A document preserved in the Genoese notarial archives, for example, shows Carruchio Spinola in the later fifteenth century sending his son, Francesco, then aged twenty-two, to England to do his business. Francesco, in return, appointed his father and brother as his procurators whilst he was away.¹² Often the young merchant would be sent to gain business experience in the employ of one of his father’s trusted contacts overseas, who was likely to be a relative. Not only does this occur frequently in the case of the prominent Italian mercantile dynasties of the sixteenth century; there are examples involving lesser individuals as well. Taking illustration again from the Genoese community, Pietro Antonio Ardisono arrived in London by the 1530s to join his uncle, Giorgio, who had settled in England: Later, Pietro Antonio was named heir and executor in Giorgio’s will.¹³ These examples simply show a world in which there was a large measure of occupational stability from one generation to the next, and in which a measure of trust was inspired by blood relationships. In this limited sense family relationships are clearly important. It is not surprising that this should be so, and there is nothing distinctively Italian about such arrangements. Similar examples could be multiplied from among members of other merchant groups established in early Tudor London.

A more pronounced family solidarity than that suggested above is not difficult to find, though again this should not be taken as a specifically Italian phenomenon. A witness before the High Court of Admiralty in 1556 explained that it was common mercantile practice, not only in Italy but in France, the Low Countries, and elsewhere, for brothers to act together in one society, and that in such cases all writings, bills of exchange and transactions were made in the name of the eldest brother and his society.¹⁴ After this fashion, two Florentine merchants, Niccolō Vinacceisi, in London, and Bernardo Vinacceisi, in Florence, acted together in one company for more than ten years, doing everything together and holding all their wares and merchandise in common until Bernardo appointed his son, Pietro Filippo, to wind up the company’s affairs.¹⁵ When the London merchant, Stephen Vaughan, bought goods from the Genoese merchant, Bastiano Salvago, in Bordeaux, he was bound for payment by obligation to Francesco Salvago in London. According to Vaughan’s testimony, the two cousins, Bastiano and Francesco, acted together from their respective abodes in all bargains, promises and contracts to their joint uses.¹⁶

The above examples are important because they offer not merely instances of brother acting for brother, son for father, nephew for uncle, in which the English records of the High Court of Admiralty and the Court of Chancery abound. They show rather a more perfect community of interests and property which modifies the findings of scholars who would stress the diminishing incidence of the common ownership of goods and the more flexible business arrangements of the later Middle Ages.¹⁷

When historians have talked of the role of the family in Italian commercial relationships they have normally sought to portray a network of business connexions of a far more extensive character than the simple filial and fraternal ties which were a commonplace of the medieval and early modern eras. The family partnership has been placed at the very centre of Italian business life, and emphasis given to the way in which the great Italian mercantile dynasties became widely dispersed throughout the commercial and banking centres of Europe by means of overseas branches established and staffed by younger members of the family. There can be no doubt that this traditional picture remains true for the early sixteenth century...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• AN EXPANDING WORLD The European Impact on World History, 1450-1800
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Italian Merchant Organization and Business Relationships in Early Tudor London
• 2 The Role of the Wangara in the Economic Transformation of the Central Sudan in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
• 3 Merchants Without Empire: The Hokkien Sojourning Communities
• 4 Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modem State Formation
• 5 A Death in Venice (1575): Anatolian Muslim Merchants Trading in the Serenissima
• 6 The Ledger of the Merchant Hovhannes Joughayetsi
• 7 The Chulia Muslim Merchants in Southeast Asia, 1650–1800
• 8 Consuls and Nations in the Levant from 1570 to 1650
• 9 The Commerce of the Dubrovnik Republic, 1500-1700
• 10 The Role of the Jews in Commerce in Early Modern Poland-Lithuania
• 11 The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550-1650
• 12 The French Presence in Huronia: The Structure of Franco-Huron Relations in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century
• 13 Bahian Merchants and Planters in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
• 14 American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory
• Index