22 - British commercial and financial journalism before 1800

Summary

Beginning in the late 1530s, Europe experienced an explosion of business newspapers, but time has muffled the report. Before the end of the sixteenth century – and, therefore, well before the beginnings of what may be called the ‘political newspaper’ – commercial and financial newspapers were being published in more than half a dozen cities. Amsterdam, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, Middelburg and Venice had their commodity price currents; Antwerp, its exchange current; London, its bills of entry. This is an understatement since it is quite likely that additional research will add both to the number of cities and to the variety of newspapers published in each.

Additional research is called for because very few copies of these newspapers survive and there is little contemporary mention of them. So few survive because they were instantly ephemeral; the news in one of them was superseded by the news published in the next number. Thus, there was no reason to keep them; they were quickly discarded. Some of their characteristics – such as the lack of a title – have made it difficult for librarians successfully to incorporate the few copies that have survived into their collections, sometimes treating them instead as curiosities. Contemporaries made little mention of them because they were so common within the circle of those who used them as to be hardly worthy of comment. Everyone who mattered in the financial world knew what a commodity price current was. The lack of surviving copies renders almost unintelligible what little contemporaries did write about them.