Merchants Traders Entrepreneurs

This book deals with three main aspects of the history of Indian business: The relationship between business and politics, the position of merchants and businessmen in the economy and society of late colonial India, and how particular merchant networks extended the range of their operations to the entire subcontinent and the wider world.

Covering the period c.1200-c.2000, this book provides an innovative investigation of entrepreneurship in a long-run historical perspective, presenting new insights into the personal characteristics of successful business people and deepening our understanding of the roots of industrialization and economic growth.

In The Merchants of Siberia, Erika Monahan reconsiders commerce in early modern Russia by reconstructing the trading world of Siberia and the careers of merchants who traded there. She follows the histories of three merchant families from various social ranks who conducted trade in Siberia for well over a century. These include the Filat'evs, who were among Russia’s most illustrious merchant elite; the Shababins, Muslim immigrants who mastered local and long-distance trade while balancing private endeavors with service to the Russian state; and the Noritsyns, traders of more modest status who worked sometimes for themselves, sometimes for bigger merchants, and participated in the emerging Russia-China trade. Monahan demonstrates that trade was a key component of how the Muscovite state sought to assert its authority in the Siberian periphery. The state’s recognition of the benefits of commerce meant that Russian state- and empire-building in Siberia were characterized by accommodation; in this diverse borderland, instrumentality trumped ideology and the Orthodox state welcomed Central Asian merchants of Islamic faith. This reconsideration of Siberian trade invites us to rethink Russia’s place in the early modern world. The burgeoning market at Lake Yamysh, an inner-Eurasian trading post along the Irtysh River, illuminates a vibrant seventeenth-century Eurasian caravan trade even as Europe-Asia maritime trade increased. By contextualizing merchants and places of Siberian trade in the increasingly connected economies of the early modern period, Monahan argues that, commercially speaking, Russia was not the "outlier" that most twentieth-century characterizations portrayed.

Sixteenth-century Europe was powered by commerce. Whilst mercantile groups from many areas prospered, those from the Low Countries were particularly successful. This study, based on extensive archival research, charts the ascent of the merchants established around Antwerp.

Robert Brenner offers a socio-political account of the transformation of English commerce in the century after 1550 and a socio-economic explanation of the political alignments of the London merchant community in the conflicts of the early Stuart period. In a major reinterpretation of long-term commercial change, he demonstrates that new possibilities in the import trades--more so than problems in the traditional cloth trade--were behind the foundation of the long-distance commerce to the east. He shows, in turn, the way in which social groups of great City merchants wielded organizational and political power to exploit the emerging commercial opportunities. Brenner demonstrates the enormous significance of merchant politics for national political development from 1621 to 1653. He brings out, in particular, the decisive roles played from 1640 by London's great company merchants in support of the crown and by a new social group of entrepreneurs--the politically radical and militantly Puritan traders who developed the colonial plantation commerce--in support of the parliamentary leadership. The new colonial merchants assumed great national influence with Cromwell's victory, becoming the chief architects of the Commonwealth's dynamic commercial policy.

A new history of English trade and empire—revealing how a tightly woven community of merchants was the true origin of globalized Britain In the century following Elizabeth I’s rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin. Edmond Smith traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. Smith unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. He reveals that the origins of "global" Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain’s relationship with the world.