Long-distance seaborne trade was fraught with peril in the early modern period. These perils ranged from the more obvious and immediate dangers of storms, sickness, and shipwreck to things associated with logistics and networks such as finding reliable information on ever-changing market conditions, creating networks manned by trustworthy servants, and navigating a variety of jurisdictions. Given the many obstacles to successful trading ventures, why did people do it? Perhaps more importantly, how did thousands of English merchants manage to launch successful ventures between 1550 and 1650 and forever alter both England's relations with the rest of the world and its place in the world? For Edmond Smith, as he explains in Merchants: The Community that Shaped England's Trade and Empire, the answer is the “sense of community” (3) that developed among merchants during a century that fostered a distinct mercantile professional identity including common values, rules, beliefs, norms, and organizational practices. In this way, Smith focuses on merchants as a social group rather than recounting the heroic exploits of specific individuals. With Merchants, Smith makes an important contribution to an ever-growing body of scholarly work on merchants, trading companies, and the origins of empire.
Smith focuses the main body of the book on the ways that merchants and corporations built and sustained the institutional structures necessary to support long-distance trade from 1550 to 1650, a time when England's economic output from trade quadrupled. Smith's goal is to show that this tremendous growth in trade was a cultural and social phenomenon as much as it was economic. While economics does figure into the argument, most of the research on economics comes from secondary sources from the 1950s and 1960s, when economic history was more in vogue in English historiography. Therefore, the bulk of Smith's primary source research comes from records associated with merchants and corporations such as correspondence between merchants, diplomatic correspondence, meeting minutes, and corporate charters. A major strength of the research is the number of local archives that Smith consulted, which provides a broader view of merchant activity in this period than would a focus on one particular merchant corporation or just London.
Smith does an excellent job of showing just how important creditable conduct was in establishing trade networks and protecting against accusation of fraud and misconduct. Trust, it seems, was the key ingredient to the significant changes in England's mercantile fortunes, and trust was something that took time and effort to build. For merchants, the building of networks of trust began at a young age with apprenticeships, during which they gained common education and training and first encountered the traditions and common practices of merchandizing. The education of young merchants culminated with becoming full members of trading corporations, which, unsurprisingly, figure prominently in the narrative. Trading corporations formed the institutional backbone of the English merchant community and created the networks of trust and credit so crucial to long-distance trade. Corporations created their own unique “way of life” (59)—they were social in nature, had their own customs, and had a clear hierarchy that maintained orderly behavior. Smith shows monopoly trading companies, long a target of derision from contemporaries and economic historians alike, to be a logical extension of the need to limit access to trade networks to those who demonstrated that they could follow the rules and build trust and credit, rather than an irrational relic of an era that just did not understand economics. This is a significant and important argument.
Smith's stated goal for Merchants is to “trace the foundations of our modern, capitalist, and global world” (5). While the book may be too short and too focused on England to accomplish that goal completely, it certainly makes an important contribution to a greater understanding of the history of capitalism and globalization. While the main focus of the book is on the social and cultural aspects of merchant life, politics does seem to get short shrift. Merchant corporations were political animals that often had to engage with the state in various political arenas whether it was Parliament or the Privy Council. While Smith's point that institutions merchants created to foster trust and credit were not driven “by the state or a centralised authority” is well taken (13), nevertheless the state was there and merchants had to interact with it in order to maintain the monopolies that Smith argues were so important to creating a sense of community. In the end, Smith makes an important contribution to the field of early modern trade and trading companies, and Merchants should be read by any scholars interested in the history of capitalism, globalization, and corporations.
