The Merchant Republics

The title of this marvellous and important book, as the author states more than once, is both a description and an argument. It describes practical politics in the city-republics of Amsterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg, politics that were dominated by a mercantile elite. It argues that J.G.A. Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moments’, which seemingly exposed the inherent incompatibility between republican virtue and commerce, were products of a moralistic discursive rhetoric and not a reflection of any deep sense of conflict between the two in the minds and actions of the leading burghers of these cities. Despite profound differences among these cities, their merchants all shared an unmovable commitment to the notion that commercial success and the health of the commonweal were indistinguishable. These were, without contradiction, commercial republics. In this engaging and entertainingly written book, the author asserts that it is a political and cultural history. Indeed, it is a political history of the moment. That is, the author examines how contemporaries governed, not according to some political philosophy or economic theory, but how they responded when confronted with novelties thrown at them ‘in particular moments and in particular circumstances’ (p. 72). ‘Political life’, in short, ‘was an intensely practical and circumstantial affair’ (p. 74), and ‘only by probing the day-to-day workings of government do we gain a realistic picture of early modern political life’ (p. 99). Still, those political moments reveal how these merchant republicans ‘coped in a world poised on the threshold of modernity’ (p. 4). And this was a modernity that was, as she readily admits, profoundly restructured over the long eighteenth century by a new ‘interlocked worldwide economy and interlaced financial networks’ (p. 314)

Argument (complex analysis · Contradiction · Economic history · Elite · Epistemology · Modernity · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Virtue · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy