Merchants

3 Key excerpts on "Merchants"

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  eBook - ePub

  Commercial Networks and European Cities, 1400–1800

  • Andrea Caracausi, Christof Jeggle, Andrea Caracausi, Christof Jeggle(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  45 The case of the Scerimans during the eighteenth century is emblematic because it shows how movement across cities followed the economic trends of the centres involved and the opportunities that those places offered in terms of economic pursuits.

  Finally, the third point being analysed in the volume is the impact of Merchants on the urban environment and especially the relations between commercial and production networks. Research on trade history has normally underlined the role of Merchants in disseminating merchandise, especially new novelties and fashionable objects. Nevertheless, as many essays demonstrate, the movement of goods was only one side of the story. Commercial networks radically influenced the rise and fall of manufacturing activities as well as the migration of people. Markets emerged as a form of social interaction that is far more complex than simply considering the two parties of supply and demand, without recognizing the dimension of quality in respect of the actors and the products. The production and distribution of goods are closely linked and should be analysed in their interrelations. Distinguishing different kinds of markets allows for a better understanding of business practices and strategies in relation to different kinds of product qualities. In particular, the essays by Caracausi, and Ammannati and González show the predominance of commercial (and financial) capital on production markets. The rise and decline of local industries relied largely on decisions made in terms of investment flows (in the form of raw materials) by those Merchants who controlled the commercial routes. Combining production and distribution markets, merchant-entrepreneurs of the early modern period were able to influence production and urban politics, disseminating human capital as well as product and process innovations across cities. Commercial history should be seen as an element of a comprehensive analysis of historical economies, which comprise agriculture and manufacturing in their entanglement with commerce.

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  eBook - ePub

  The Parables of Jesus the Galilean

  Stories of a Social Prophet

  • van Eck(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  Traders (intercity import-export Merchants), who were often freedmen or urban nonelite persons secretly subsidized by wealthy Roman citizens or other elites, 963 fitted this category. Merchants bought needed commodities in one place and sold them in another at monopoly prices, getting as much as they could regardless of their own costs. All forms of capital accumulation, Malina emphasizes, were perceived to be forms of usury (i.e., making money in using money), and “profit and gain normally refer to something that accrue to a person by fraud or extortion, that is, something other than wages, customary rent, reciprocal lending, or direct sale from producer to customer.” 964 The trader, like the moneylender and the tax collector, was therefore considered dishonorable, immoral, and basically godless. 965 The fact that Merchants had to make use of ships for their import-export trade, and that most shipowners were non-Jewish, 966 added to the negative perception the peasantry had of Merchants. The book of Revelation, especially Rev 18, gives expression to the general attitude towards Merchants in the first-century. In a social-scientific reading of Revelation, Oakman approaches the text of Revelation as a response to a specific socioeconomic system (context). 967 The context of the text, Oakman argues, is the political ancient economy of the first-century Roman Empire. 968 This economy was based on the forced extraction of goods (taxes), cash crops and commercial farming that constantly drained agricultural resources out of the provinces to supply the elite and the city of Rome; an economy that encouraged trade and the movement of goods (commerce). Long-distance trade needed Merchants and shippers, which was organized by Rome by way of organized associations who did the bidding on their behalf. 969 As a result of this political economy, a major transformation of the countryside took place; subsistence farming was replaced by a focus on commerce

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  eBook - ePub

  Trade, Money, and Power in Medieval England

  • Pamela Nightingale(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  They saw the enterprise of a small band of Merchants as the principal means by which a static, subsistence-oriented, and overwhelmingly agrarian and feudal society was set on the path of economic and social change. Henri Pirenne used the example of a twelfth-century Englishman, Godric of Finchale, to show how wandering peddlers could escape from the bonds of feudal society, and by their commercial enterprise could stimulate the growth of fairs and towns and encourage the spread of a moneyed economy into the countryside. 4 Similarly, Robert S. Lopez, in his classic study, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, wrote that commerce became the most dynamic sector of the medieval economy and that Merchants were the main promoters of change. 5 2. Edward A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9. 3. Idem, People, Cities, and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987), 23. 4. Villes et les institutions urbaines (Paris, 1939) 1: 366–8. 5. The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 86. This early emphasis on Merchants, and on international trade, as the key to economic development has been supplemented by a new emphasis on the importance of coin for the growth of specialised production and exchanges leading to the development of a market economy and of towns. Feudalism, in Peter Spufford’s view, had its origin in the lack of coin, which obliged rulers to pay their soldiers and administrators in land. 6 Whereas peasants might survive with little, if any, coin because they could pay their rent in the form of labour services and could exchange commodities through barter, urban economies needed coin as a medium of exchange and measure of value

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