Matthew Boulton’s Jewish Partners between France and England

Whereas we benefit from a large historiography on minorities’ networks like the Huguenots and Jacobites across France and England during the ‘industrial Enlightenment’, Jewish connections at the beginning of industrialisation have seldom been the focus of historical research. Studies of the activities of Jews have tended to focus on overseas trade in the seventeenth century, and on the role of Sephardic merchants as ‘cross-cultural-brokers’.1 But not much attention has been devoted to the role of Jews in the economic growth of the eighteenth century,2 as the age of merchant diasporas was coming to an end.3 In his book on the Prager family, Gedalia Yogev considered that ‘in the eighteenth century, English Jews took almost no part in developments which were to revolutionise economic life in Britain’.4 Thanks to recent studies belonging to the ‘economic turn’ as termed by Gideon Reuveni,5 we are now more aware of the double-sided images of Jews ‘as economically retrograde’ and ‘as economically avant-garde’.6 But whereas1 Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, 1984); Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the World Maritime Empires (1540-1740) (Leiden, 2002); David Cesarani (ed.), Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550-1950 (London, 2002); Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Atlantic Diasporas. Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism 1500-1800 (Baltimore, 2009); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers. The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven and London, 2009)

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