The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660–1720 (review)

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the magistrate and novelist Henry Fielding noted that "trade hath indeed given a new face to the whole nation . . . and hath totally changed the manners, customs and habits of the people, more especially of the lower sort." Natasha Glaisyer's book undertakes to offer an explanation of the means by which commerce accomplished this change, which, she argues, took place in the years between the Restoration and the South Sea Bubble. She does so by examining in detail four examples of what she calls "the packaging and portrayal of commerce": the Royal Exchange, the sermons preached before the members of the Levant Company, a group of manuals published for the use of merchants, and, finally, those metropolitan and provincial newspapers that specialized in commercial news or at least carried a substantial amount of it.

In addition, the book attempts to establish the late seventeenth century, and particularly the 1690s, as pivotal in the development of the English economy. Those years saw the establishment of the Bank of England as well as the crisis occasioned by the recoinage of the much-clipped English money. But, more generally, the period also witnessed the continued growth of London (even while English population in general ceased to grow), the expansion of the English export trade and especially of reexports, the development of the insurance industry, and the establishment of London as a major financial center. In her opening chapter, Glaisyer examines these developments in a wide-ranging overview, while at the same time also intervening in a number of ongoing debates within the community of economic historians. Her book, she argues, follows the move away from statistical aggregates to more detailed studies of individuals and institutions — in other words, to seeing economic developments against a more general cultural background. In particular, she intervenes in the debate whether the merchant community was being judged by the ideals of gentility and suggests that a close examination of how commerce was being portrayed provides new evidence on the side of those favoring the idea that merchants were rising in popular estimation independent of any assumed gentility.

Glaisyer has set forth an ambitious program and, as she readily admits, the only way she can fulfill it at a reasonable length is by choosing examples. The examples need to be specific enough to avoid contaminating ideas about the mercantile community with ideas about economics in general: thus she sidesteps analyses of the stop of the Exchequer and the recoinage, which were the result of governmental action. But the examples should not repeat the common error of being limited to a one specific kind of source material. So, the first of these examples, the Royal Exchange, was both an institution and a tourist site, a shopping mall where major business transactions were conducted. It was, in a sense, a visual representation of the London business community — though one wonders to what extent casual visitors really understood all that was going on and how much of what they saw was then repeated to their provincial neighbors. The sermons preached by clerical job-seekers to the members of the Levant Company rather predictably found much to admire in the mercantile mentality, with only a few having nerve enough to raise any question about the potentially hazardous relations between God and Mammon. In any event, the number of surviving sermons seems to me insufficient for any firm conclusions. The last two sections of the book, on manuals for merchants and on newspapers, work better for making Glaisyer's point. The manuals did serve to spread the mercantile ethos, and (as the number of editions indicates) they were widely read. Whether many non-merchants read them in order to gain a kind of vicarious mercantile experience may perhaps be doubted — Lawrence Klein's suggestion to that effect is intriguing but remains unproved. Perhaps more relevantly, an...