scholarly journals Sole Traders? The Role of the Extended Family in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Business Networks

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Sophie H. Jones ◽  
Siobhan Talbott

Despite significant developments in understanding the role of women in early-modern business, more is needed to fully understand women’s impact on eighteenth-century trading networks. Further, much less is known about the role of wider family members, especially children, in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. The formal documentation that is privileged in business histories does not tell the whole story, and it frequently represents mercantile activity as a pursuit dominated by a patriarch at the center of a trading network. This article explores eighteenth-century familial commercial networks through extensive use of the personal family correspondence of three merchant families who lived and traded within different locales of the northern Atlantic: Hugh Hall, a merchant and vice judge of the admiralty in Barbados; the Black family, who were wine merchants in Bordeaux; and Joseph Symson, a mercer and shopkeeper from Kendal, England. This article will show that women appear as autonomous players with the power and ability to make informed and independent decisions that directed the business interests of their families. Moreover, it includes an assessment of the ways in which merchants cultivated the expertise of their extended families to enhance their commercial networks and advance their business pursuits. Focusing on children who supported or enhanced the prosperity of the family firm, this article emphasizes that their participation was intentional, not incidental. This article asks questions about the emotional consequences of such activity—which have rarely been considered in any detail—as well as the financial benefit of operating in this manner.

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Grossman ◽  
Allison J. Tracy ◽  
Amanda M. Richer
Keyword(s):  

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisia Snyder

Sarah Scott's eighteenth-century novel Millenium Hall canvasses the role of gift-giving in the dynamics heteronormative-domestic, economic, and spiritual relationships. The pharmakon of the gift plays a central role in Scott's understanding of philanthropy, and the construction of her female-inhabited, female-run utopia. This article's principle occupation is to show that all instances of gift-giving in Millenium Hall create power-imbalances between the superior giver and the inferior receiver; however, Sarah Scott's female utopia constructs the most preferable type of subservience.


Author(s):  
William E. Nelson

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.


Author(s):  
Shaun Blanchard

This book sheds further light on the nature of church reform and the roots of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) through a study of eighteenth-century Catholic reformers who anticipated the Council. The most striking of these examples is the Synod of Pistoia (1786), the high-water mark of late Jansenism. Most of the reforms of the Synod were harshly condemned by Pope Pius VI in the bull Auctorem fidei (1794), and late Jansenism was totally discredited in the ultramontane nineteenth-century Church. Nevertheless, much of the Pistoian agenda—such as an exaltation of the role of bishops, an emphasis on infallibility as a gift to the entire Church, religious liberty, a simpler and more comprehensible liturgy that incorporates the vernacular, and the encouragement of lay Bible reading and Christocentric devotions—was officially promulgated at Vatican II. The career of Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci (1741–1810) and the famous Synod he convened are investigated in detail. The international reception (and rejection) of the Synod sheds light on why these reforms failed, and the criteria of Yves Congar are used to judge the Pistoian Synod as “true or false reform.” This book proves that the Synod was a “ghost” present at Vatican II. The council fathers struggled with, and ultimately enacted, many of the same ideas. This study complexifies the story of the roots of the Council and Pope Benedict XVI’s “hermeneutic of reform,” which seeks to interpret Vatican II as in “continuity and discontinuity on different levels” with past teaching and practice.


Author(s):  
Lucia Dacome

Chapter 7 furthers the analysis of the role of anatomical models as cultural currencies capable of transferring value. It does so by expanding the investigation of the early stages of anatomical modelling to include a new setting. In particular, it follows the journey of the Palermitan anatomist and modeller Giuseppe Salerno and his anatomical ‘skeleton’—a specimen that represented the body’s complex web of blood vessels and was presented as the result of anatomical injections. Although Salerno was headed towards Bologna, a major centre of anatomical modelling, he ended his journey in Naples after the nobleman Raimondo di Sangro purchased the skeleton for his own cabinet of curiosities. This chapter considers the creation and viewing of an anatomical display in di Sangro’s Neapolitan Palace from a comparative perspective that highlights how geography and locality played an important part in shaping the culture of mid-eighteenth-century anatomical modelling.


Author(s):  
Will Smiley

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.


Author(s):  
Henry Fielding

Fielding's comic masterpiece of 1749 was immediately attacked as `A motley history of bastardism, fornication, and adultery'. Indeed, his populous novel overflows with a marvellous assortment of prudes, whores, libertines, bumpkins, misanthropes, hypocrites, scoundrels, virgins, and all too fallible humanitarians. At the centre of one of the most ingenious plots in English fiction stands a hero whose actions were, in 1749, as shocking as they are funny today. Expelled from Mr Allworthy's country estate for his wild temper and sexual conquests, the good-hearted foundling Tom Jones loses his money, joins the army, and pursues his beloved across Britain to London, where he becomes a kept lover and confronts the possibility of incest. Tom Jones is rightly regarded as Fielding's greatest work, and one of the first and most influential of English novels. This carefully modernized edition is based on Fielding's emended fourth edition text and offers the most thorough notes, maps, and bibliography. The introduction uses the latest scholarship to examine how Tom Jones exemplifies the role of the novel in the emerging eighteenth-century public sphere.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2241
Author(s):  
Moritz Ehrtmann ◽  
Lars Holstenkamp ◽  
Timon Becker

Community energy actors play an important role in the energy transition, fostering the diffusion of sustainable innovation in the renewable energy market. Because market conditions for business models in the renewable energy sector are changing and feed-in-tariff (FiT) schemes expiring, community energy companies are in the process of innovating their business models. In recent years, several community energy companies in Germany have entered the electricity retail market selling locally generated electricity from their renewable energy installations to customers in their region. We explore the evolving regional electricity business models for community energy companies in Germany, related governance structures, and the role they play for a sustainable energy transition. In order to implement these complex business models, community energy companies cooperate with professional marketing partners (intermediaries), which are capable of taking over the tasks and obligations of electricity suppliers. Through a series of expert interviews and desk research, we identify three distinctive regional electricity business models and examine opportunities and challenges to their implementation. Results show that there are different forms of cooperation, leading to specific governance structures and creating a set of new value propositions. Through these forms of cooperation, business networks emerge, which can function as incubators for sustainable innovation and learning for the post-FiT era.


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