Merchants Revisited: Long-Distance Traders and the World they Made

When faced with Esther Sahle's, Edmond Smith's, and Dane A. Morrison's recent books on English and American merchants, their activities, and their communities, a reader with any level of exposure to the field of early modern and early republic business history might legitimately ask, do we really need more? Historians have so completely associated early modern economic activity with merchant activity that many have deemed the period an era of “merchant capitalism.” The field is full of excellent studies and one might rightfully ask whether historians such as Jacob Price (Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade [1980]), David Hancock (Oceans of Wine [2009]), Cathy Matson (Merchants and Empire [1998]), and Francesca Trivellato (The Familiarity of Strangers [2009]), among many others, have not plumbed the depths of the subject. Scholars of the Black Atlantic have also increasingly questioned the legitimacy of projects that continue to render the violence of slavery ancillary to discussions of business practice. To some extent, genuine historical engagement with merchants must reproduce the views of colonizers and enslavers to make the people whom it studies legible to modern audiences. This reproduction does damage as it illuminates, and business historians must engage this critique directly to maintain the legitimacy of their projects. In a crowded field with foundations that are seriously challenged by an emergent strain in this historical discipline, it is worth skeptically asking what three additional studies can add.