Running on the Exchange

This chapter considers how the Company of Merchant Adventurers and its members responded to the risks inherent to overseas trade in the premodern period. It considers the sources of merchant failure, and how failings unfolded across the social sites that comprised Company trade. A focal point is the mercantile exchange, which was a source of borrowing as well as transferring money across borders, and which was at the heart of most merchant failures. Borrowing on the exchange could lead a merchant’s reputation to come into doubt, and the failure of the Merchant Adventurer Richard Shepherd is used as an example to show how Merchant Adventurers could lose their status within their community. The chapter also considers how this community responded to merchant failure, and the strains it placed on the mercantile social order.

Show Days

This chapter examines how Merchant Adventurers managed their businesses, focusing on the export of cloth. It considers how they constructed those networks necessary to the management of trade, and how this resulted in a densely interrelated community of merchants. It addresses whether membership of the Company precluded participation in some of the newer, import-driven and extra-European trades that emerged in the period. It argues that, although Merchant Adventurers were willing to participate in these trades, they were often not well placed to access networks necessary to do so. However, the business of the export of cloth is shown to be more complex and challenging than usually assumed, as is demonstrated through both qualitative and quantitative evidence, including statistics for the changing structure of cloth exports.

Becoming a Merchant Adventurer

This chapter addresses recruitment to the Company of Merchant Adventurers, focusing on the institution of apprenticeship. As well as being the most common means to join the Company, apprenticeship was used to manage overseas trade, with apprentices commonly deployed as agents overseas. The chapter introduces the social settings of Company trade overseas—the mart towns—and their place in the merchant life-cycle. It considers the opportunities and challenges facing aspiring Merchant Adventurers in the mart towns as they sought to assume the status of independent merchant in their own households. It also identifies significant changes in the social structure of the mart towns, associated with rising numbers of long-term residents, which had the potential to divide the Company’s different residences in England and overseas.

Introduction

The governed trade of the Merchants Adventurers, is kept beyond the Seas and maintayned there by the privelidges of forrayne Princes, and of some one or more certayne Townes, where the said Merchants made their residence; Whereunto all forreyn Merchants desiring to buy English Cloth muste resorte, where they must either buy at such prices as the sellers reasonably impose, or return home unfurnished, loosing their charges; And in the opinyon of best experienced Merchants, there is Five in the hundreth in proffitt difference betwixt will you buy when a marchant offred his comodities to sell, and will you sell? when the Comoditie is sought after to be bought; … For an unskilfull multitude is a disturbance to skilfull traffique, in that an unnecessary multitude of Sellers, doe alwayes abase the price of the wares they sell, and likewise advance the Comodities theye buye....

‘A new & extraordinary service to be done to the state and Comonwealth of England’

This chapter considers the infamous Cokayne Project of 1614–17, whereby the Merchant Adventurers lost their privileges to a new company formed to convert the expert of semi-manufactured cloths with the fully finished product. It focuses on how the project was experienced by the Company and its members, as well as its long-term impact. The Cokayne Project is presented as an experiment in corporate commercial government which attempted to wed governed and free trade. As well as attracting outsiders, many Merchant Adventurers were drawn to its promise of breaking down corporate barriers between different markets. However, the project threatened the dissolution of the social structure of the Merchant Adventurers’ trade, leading to protests from the factors at Hamburg. Although these protests helped to keep alive the Company’s discursive traditions, the Cokayne Project presaged divisions within the Company’s ranks that would grow as the century went on.

‘The odious name of a monopolist’

This chapter addresses contests within the Company of Merchant Adventurers following its expulsion from the Holy Roman Empire, in 1598, as a result of a mandate issued by the emperor declaring the Company to be a monopoly. These are shown to be a consequence of the divisions that had emerged in the Company following its departure from Antwerp in the 1560s, and its subsequent occupation of two different territories—the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire. Although the Company’s governors initially attempted to confine trade to the Netherlands following the mandate, many members insisted on continuing to trade to the Empire. In the ensuing contest, debates about the purposes of Company government were raised by members and non-members, and were advertised to an influential political audience. This debate is shown to have contributed to the bill for free trade that passed the House of Commons in the parliament of 1604.

Conclusion

The Conclusion considers the significance of the decline of the Company of Merchant Adventurers in light of the broader structural changes that English overseas commerce underwent in the early modern period. It argues that, although the Company of Merchant Adventurers can not straightforwardly be associated with a precapitalist commercial order rendered irrelevant by the emergence of capitalism, the story of the Company’s decline does cast light on a process of commercial restructuring which involved the breakdown of certain boundaries, geographical and occupational, and the possibility of new synergies. These changes had implications for the role and career of the overseas merchant, and the place of merchant companies in structuring access to foreign trade. Survival for merchant companies depended on their ability to attract and accommodate new members and retain their loyalty, as well as to survive external attack. Changes within the Merchant Adventurers’ ranks made this increasingly difficult, and the Company’s failure to maintain its privileges was in part a consequence of the dissolution of the social system of its trade.

‘A new spirit of dissention and disturbance’

This chapter considers the involvement of the Merchant Adventurers in the political disputes of mid-seventeenth-century England. It shows that the Company’s overseas residences were deeply divided over questions of religion and political allegiance. These divisions also became bound up with the social changes that were reconfiguring relationships between the different residences of the Company. The chapter surveys three contests which involved questions about the nature of the Merchant Adventurers as a merchant community, and the distribution of power within it. Each centred on a controversial deputy governor—Edward Misselden at Delft in the 1630s, and Joseph Avery and Richard Bradshaw at Hamburg in the 1640s and 1650s respectively. The chapter shows how the changing social structure of the Company’s trade had disturbed corporate politics.

Disorderly Brethren?

This chapter considers how membership of the Company of Merchant Adventurers was experienced. It considers whether Company membership was capable of engendering loyalty and a distinctive mercantile identity. The chapter considers two aspects of membership: participation in Company government, and experience of corporate regulation. The former entailed attendance at Company meetings, including those held for elections, and the chapter assesses the constitutional structure of the Company and the tensions that could exist between different residences. Corporate regulation focused on channelling trade into particular settings—the mart towns—and regulating the market in cloth to limit competition amongst brethren. The chapter considers how compliance with this system was enforced, as well as how it was evaded, noting considerable examples of trade out of the mart towns at certain points in the period. The chapter concludes that, in order to be effective, Company regulations had to accord with the perspectives of members about legitimate conduct.

‘That Trade which their Charter reaches not’

The final chapter considers how the Merchant Adventurers came to lose its domestic privileges following the Glorious Revolution in a way that proved to be lasting. Although usually this has been seen as an inevitable consequence of the long-term decline in the volume of the cloth trade and the political position of the Company, the chapter argues that this was a more contingent process than is usually realized. In fact, the Company had been on the cusp of a political revival as recently as the 1680s. The chapter considers the reasons for this, in terms of the Company’s long-term relationship with the English state, and its struggle to maintain its monopoly against interlopers. The reasons why the Company failed to capitalize on the upturn in its political fortunes are connected to the structural changes in the Company’s trade, which saw its residences in Hamburg and England increasingly at odds over the purposes of the Company, and how it was to be governed. This contest was reflective of broader changes in the position and activities of merchants in a period of growing multilateral trade.