Migrating Merchants

What impact did the cultural origins and religious backgrounds of the merchants in the early modern period have on their business activities? How did these people manage to integrate themselves into the foreign societies within which they lived and worked? In this book Jorun Poettering examines the circumstances of the merchants who traded between Hamburg and Portugal in the seventeenth century. Her study offers new insights into the history of migration and intercultural encounter as world became more interconnected.

Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law examines the connections that existed between merchants’ journeys, the languages they used and the development of commercial law in the context of late medieval and early modern trade. The book, edited by Stefania Gialdroni, Albrecht Cordes, Serge Dauchy, Dave De ruysscher and Heikki Pihlajamäki, takes advantage of the expertise of leading scholars in different fields of study, in particular historians, legal historians and linguists. Thanks to this transdisciplinary approach, the book offers a fresh point of view on the history of commercial law in different cultural and geographical contexts, including medieval Cairo, Pisa, Novgorod, Lübeck, early modern England, Venice, Bruges, nineteenth century Brazil and many other trading centers. Contributors are Cornelia Aust, Guido Cifoletti, Mark R. Cohen, Albrecht Cordes, Maria Fusaro, Stefania Gialdroni, Mark Häberlein, Uwe Israel, Bart Lambert, David von Mayenburg, Hanna Sonkajärvi, and Catherine Squires.

What impact did the cultural origins and religious backgrounds of the merchants in the early modern period have on their business activities? How did these people manage to integrate themselves into the foreign societies within which they lived and worked? In this book Jorun Poettering examines the circumstances of the merchants who traded between Hamburg and Portugal in the seventeenth century. Her study offers new insights into the history of migration and intercultural encounter as world became more interconnected.

Some 10 million migrant workers cross national borders each year and, if they pay an average $1,000 to recruiters, moving workers over borders is a $10 billion a year business. Merchants of Labor examines the businesses that move low-skilled workers over national borders, asking how much they collect from migrant workers and what can be done to reduce worker-paid migration costs. For-profit recruiters are likely to be an enduring feature of international labor migration, which makes developing tools to improve the management of their activities ever more crucial. The UN recognized in the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 the need to measure what workers pay to get jobs in other countries with the goal of reducing worker-paid costs so that workers and their families can benefit more from international labor migration. Using cost data from over 3,000 workers, Merchants of Labor examines the often murky world of labor brokers, travel agents, and others who move low-skilled workers from one country to another in order to explore lower worker-paid migration costs. It explains the three core functions of labor markets— recruitment, remuneration, and retention— and shows how national borders increase recruitment costs. New data on what workers pay to get jobs in other countries are presented, and incentives to complement enforcement are explored as a way to induce recruiters to protect migrant workers.

This book aims to shed light on a global and complex phenomenon: migration. In order to grasp this vast and ambiguous issue, the book offers ten multi-layered case studies, each focussing on one aspect of migration. With this selection of articles, this collected volume builds a bridge between the past and the present and highlight the many sides of migration. The chapters will demonstrate how the questions of controlled migration, movement of labour, improvement of one’s life, and interaction of people of different origin have puzzled us in the course of the last five hundred years.

The series Prinz-Albert-Forschungen (Prince Albert Research Publications) publishes sources and studies concerning Anglo-German history. It includes outstanding works in German and English which significantly enhance or modify our understanding of Anglo-German relations. These are supplemented by critically edited sources designed to offer access to previously unknown documents of crucial importance to the Anglo-German relationship.

The key role played by indentured servants in the settlement and development of the English colonies in the West Indies and the North American mainland in the first century of English colonization has been overshadowed by interest in the much larger later trade in African slaves. 'There is Great Want of Servants' provides the first full examination of the English trade in indentured servants, which delivered the majority of an estimated 457,000 white people who migrated to the American colonies before 1720. English colonisation intended to create 'new Englands out of England' - to enlarge trade and plantation - but settlement required people to work the land. Labour had to be transported over 4,000 miles of threatening ocean in a new system of indentured servitude, in which people paid for their transportation and keep, with four years of unpaid service for adults, and more for children and adolescents. The system was not benign, neither in the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the tobacco plantations of Maryland and Virginia, nor at the centre of the trade in London and in other ports such as Bristol. Merchants, procurers, and masters of ships often used illicit methods to recruit servants as human cargo. Measures to reduce spiriting by making the offence a felony punishable by hanging, or registering servants in new offices, had little effect. The 1718 Transportation Act eased servant recruitment, but when wars in 1689-1697 and 1702-1713 disrupted the supply of servants, and demand for the addictive products of the sugar and tobacco colonies soared in Britain and Europe, white servants were increasingly substituted by African chattel slaves.

Covering both qualitative and quantitative topics, the expert contributors in this Handbook explore fundamental issues of scientific logic, methodology and methods, through to practical applications of different techniques and approaches in migration research. The chapters of this interdisciplinary Handbook maintain an introductory level of discussion on migration research methods, while providing readers with references necessary for those wishing to go deeper into the topic. Using a combination of concepts and techniques with research experiences from the field, this Handbook will prove to be an invaluable guide. Master-level students and academics in migration-related programs will find this compendium a useful and stimulating resource. It also discusses issues relating to the collection of data on migrants, including topics such as survey designs, interviewing techniques and ethical issues that policymakers and government employees will find informative. Advisory Board: Professor Stephen Castles Professor Robin Cohen Professor Josh DeWind Professor Raoel Delgado Wise