The Cozens/Byrnes Merchants Networks Project - Book Section - Updated 14 August 2010

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A project seldom if ever developed for the Internet ... a website to return to regularly ...

THIS WEBSITE is a major excursion beginning with examinations of Merchant Networks in the general context of The British Empire during its first and second foundings. The outlook is international, though not exactly global. Or, more generally, merchants operating in the English-speaking world ... from the 1680s to about 1900 ... All to be seen in a more detailed way than attempted before on the Internet ...

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Introduction (part of)

We knew of Eric Samhaber's unforgettable book, Merchants Make History. (1) Samhaber had treated how merchants can work internationally, their activities straddling the nationalities of economies. This seemed to us a useful theme if we confined ourselves to the British Empire as it changed boundaries, the boundaries presumably being those of any variety of countries. One of Samhaber's sub-themes is how merchants can work surreptitiously, and this dovetailed with a theme we wanted to pursue and discuss – how and why historians distrust bankers. Historians, it seems, across centuries, remain uneasy about what is known popularly as the element of “commercial-in-confidence”. And if Samhaber's style was rather conversational, why should we, using a rather loose definition of a merchant, be otherwise?

We knew from our old reading that treatments of one particular topic run like veins and arteries through the economic history of older days – the ways traffic in silver changed over centuries since say 1492, when Columbus arrived in the New World. (2) Over centuries, the silver-hungriness of the Chinese economy was a notable facet of the behaviour of the world silver market. We found we had one British merchant name to discuss, a man who seemed from the 1780s to have had interesting views on China's silver-hungriness. His name, David Scott Senior, could be attached to a huge merchant network.

We began with a list of the names of 84 of Britain's more notable merchants of the Eighteenth Century. Byrnes had collected these names just as part of his work on Britain's transportation of convicts to North America and then to Australia (which for present purposes can be regarded as a cross-continental topic, and a trade in co-erced labour). It was Cozens from his Londoner perspective who noticed how many of the men named had been contractors to government for provision of services to the British military. So we deliberately expanded our population of contractor names to concentrate on them to provide our book with extra sub-themes.

Our broad themes were: management of commercial activities in a changing Imperial environment, merchant family history, the use of coerced labour (black slaves, white convicts), merchants contracting to assist military activity, the many different varieties of merchant networks and how historians who have treated them.

If we regard slavery and the use of the labour of transported convicts as trades in coerced labour, and in a cross-continental context, North America, with the addition of a “new” continent, Australia, from 1788, we find two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific. At least from a British point of view, the trades became dually oceanic. It was known already that one British slaving firm, Camden, Calvert and King, had provided ships for the Second and Third fleets of convict ships to Australia. (4) But no one had quite pointed out the dually-oceanic role given to the trades in coerced labour. We decided to point it out, and so the British decision to send convicts to eastern Australia is seen as a hinge point for trade in coerced labour, with its own maritime history contrasting with that of the Atlantic Community. And slowly, presenting a quite different population of merchant networks for inspection as Australia's colonial economies were hooked to pre-existing scenarios, especially that of British India.

Wondering about the deeper nature of merchant networks activated the curiosity that produced our chapter devoted to the commercial connections of the Signers of the American Declaration of Independence.

Several topics we ignored, one being developments in military technology. Obviously, war contractors need to take changes in war technology into account, but we wished to point out the war contractors' family histories, and to ask where they fit with other social aspects of Britain's commercial life.

For the period 1680-1880 we have written about “merchants”, then, in terms of loose definitions, and we also cheerfully discuss many merchants – including misbehaving miscreants - who were not at all, strictly speaking, war contractors. In the early chapters, we present what we hope are some methodological refinements for the discussion of merchant networks. “No man is an island”, we will say to anyone who asks about this book, stealing the words of a poet, and remaining un-endowed by the words of any economist or accountant, or government-employed spin doctor. Almost no human being works entirely alone. Hence an emphasis on genealogies and patterns of associations.

And one regularity in human behaviour gained from fresh inspections of many genealogies is what seems to be an unwritten-yet-perfectly-understood social law with the treatment of daughters, which, if possible, is: to never let your daughter marry down. It is impossible to inspect genealogies without noticing this bias in available information.

It is noticeable, for example, that the commercial-minded city fathers, (whom we might term, the mayoral class), of both London and Venice (Venice somewhat earlier), behaved similarly in this respect. If possible, more so if upwardly social mobile in any really ambitious way, they married their daughters off into the lesser aristocracy, or into higher social echelons. Regarding this, it has often been said that Venetians became “obsessed with genealogy”. (5) The same thing is not said of Londoners. But if the social behaviour is quite similar regarding the Doges of Venice, and the Lords Mayor of London, across centuries, why not notice the similarity?

1: Ernest Samhaber, Merchants Make History: How Trade has Influenced the Course of History Throughout the World. London, Harrap, 1963.

2: A good treatment of the impact of Spanish silver on European economies and other useful overviews are given in Fernand Brandel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 1. (Translated by Sian Reynolds) Sydney, Perennial Library, Harper and Row, 1960.

3: Oddly, US historians have still not bothered to fully write up the cessation of the British Convict Service North America to late 1775.

4: This dual-ocean, hinge-point feature became more apparent in 2010 with the appearance of the first book fully devoted to Britain's disastrous attempts to transport convicts to west African locations (1782-1784), noting the role of Camden, Calvert and King -- without seeing them as part of any merchant network. See Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa and How it Led to the Settlement of Australia. Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2010.

5: See for example, Ugo Tucci, (University of Venice), pp. 346-376, 'The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Middle and late Sixteenth Century, in J. R Hale, (Ed.), Renaissance Venice. London, Faber and Faber, 1974.

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