3 - Traders and their tools

Summary

Most of the business occupations described in Chapter 2 are susceptible to easy isolation and identification. But the people who made many of those occupations possible, the merchants, are more difficult to define. They can readily be described as mainly urban-dwelling, profit-seeking traders of goods; but this assessment, although broadly accurate, fails to do justice to the great range of endeavor and status encompassed by this profession. At the local level, some merchants were among the artisans discussed earlier who sold their produce to the public. Others were professional middlemen, buying goods, often at local and regional fairs, for resale; and still others carried merchandise on their backs as peddlers to customers in the countryside. Then there were the long-distance merchants, some of whom shepherded products back and forth along the overland trade routes, while others embraced the extreme financial and physical hazards of maritime ventures; and finally, there were the sedentary merchant-bankers who masterminded a complex flow of goods and money from their headquarters. These various kinds of endeavor entailed differing levels of intelligence, capital investment, and risk management.

THE MERCHANT “CLASSES”

The wealth and status of merchants varied according to these categories and to the status of the products in which they dealt (“noble” or “base”). The international traders in luxury goods were generally at the top of the heap, and the itinerant peddlers of household goods at the bottom. But the culture of the towns in which they lived also mattered.