Mary Lindemann. The Merchant Republics

This book takes us right to the heart of three early modern cities. Mary Lindemann successfully evokes the lives of merchants and bankers in Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg with her multifarious and multifaceted stories, revealing fascinating facts and details of urban life and strife. The main thrust of the book critiques the view of the famous historian of political thought, J. G. A. Pocock, that there was a “quarrel” between virtue and commerce within the republicanism of the Atlantic World. According to Pocock, there was a tendency for republican and civic commitment to decline as increasing wealth from commercial ventures corrupted and brought dishonor upon true republicans. Yet Lindemann asserts that “urban republics” did not suffer from such quarrels; that corruption, fraud, embezzlement, and bankruptcies were only temporary hindrances and interruptions; and that merchants and bankers continued to cherish common virtues such as honesty, responsibility, and trust. Starting from the notion that merchants constituted the “pillars of the polity and the vessels of republican virtues” (310), the book addresses the political structures of the three cities, discord over political offices, civic identities, commercial customs, and the trouble caused by bankruptcies. The author rightly observes that the arrangement and maneuverings of “high politics” (i.e., urban government) reverberated in the lower echelons of less “formal” political arenas such as pamphlet literature, Chambers of Rhetoric, guilds, coffeehouses, clubs, and patriotic organizations, and claims that these arenas should be studied in order to understand “the people” (72). Harmony and cooperation might have been guiding principles for many, yet most political debates were driven by incidents and problems such as intra-elite conflicts, noble impostors, scandalous behavior in office, or the misuse of funds or bills of exchange. In finding expression for their discontent, few drew inspiration from well-developed political philosophies. Lindemann is at her best in her descriptions of numerous incidents and problems, above all in relation to the Hamburg case, which was the focus of her earlier work. The case studies on Amsterdam and Antwerp are less novel, however, and often rely on available studies and printed sources that are widely cited among historians of the early modern political economy of these regions.

Estate · Harmony (color) · Honesty · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Virtue · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Philosophy