Hussey on Glaisyer, _The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660-1720_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (July 2008)

Natasha Glaisyer, _The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660-1720_. 
Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2006. x + 220 pp. $75 
(cloth), ISBN: 0-86193-281-1.

Reviewed for EH.NET by David Hussey, Department of History, 
University of Wolverhampton.


In this persuasively argued and perceptive book, Natasha Glaisyer, 
Lecturer in the Department of History, the University of York, 
emphasizes the importance of the cultural component in economic 
change and the structure of emerging financial markets in late 
seventeenth and early eighteenth century England. To an extent, 
Glaisyer has charted some of this territory before and her work on 
mercantile communities, trading networks, and didactic literature in 
this period is summarized and amplified by this book. Glaisyer's 
starting point is to explore "new directions" in cultural and 
economic history and the possibilities this allows for fruitful 
scholarly interdependency. As such, her interpretation of the 
commercial and financial revolutions of the period is predicated less 
on the mechanics of change or indeed data-driven models of 
development, but more upon how "commerce was portrayed and packaged" 
and thereby rendered more comprehensible to English society (p. 19). 
Glaisyer demonstrates that for knowledgeable merchants, provincial 
traders, gentlemen virtuosi, armchair voyeurs and, moreover, the 
hitherto unlearned, commerce was served up in sophisticated, yet 
digestible ways for palatable consumption. By demystifying commerce, 
novelty and change was legitimated and normalized, and the various 
discourses utilized by merchants and commentators, sifted through a 
range of periodicals, newspapers, sermons and advice literature, 
served to impart the knowledge, practices and syntax of trade to a 
wider audience.

The main body of Glaisyer's work is divided into four discrete case 
studies. In Chapter 1, Glaisyer reprises her earlier analysis of the 
Royal Exchange, arguing that in function and representation, the 
Exchange acted as a "nucleus of various information networks" (p. 
37). Glaisyer subtly teases out this nodal structure by placing the 
Exchange at the center of commercial dialogue and the nascent stock 
market, and indicating its role as a place of fashionable resort and 
elite shopping. To Glaisyer, credit in all its interpretational 
fluidity formed the key mechanism for understanding the Exchange and 
by extension the wider commercial world. The Exchange was a "crucial 
site" (p. 38) wherein reputations could be made and broken, and where 
probity in financial and commercial matters, and indeed personal and 
sexual behavior, were tried. Glaisyer's discussion of these issues is 
comprehensive, and the marshalling of evidence impressive. However, 
in the later sections of the chapter, the argument becomes rather 
more speculative. Glaisyer asserts that through literary and visual 
representation the Exchange can be read as the "microcosm of the 
trading world" (p. 47): a construct in which global commerce was 
collapsed - "packaged" even -- in an ordered, sanitized way for 
consumers of commercial information. In particular, the linkage here 
between the symbolic iconography of the Exchange as a reified image 
of the strength and order of English commerce, a re-born London, and 
a restored monarchy is perhaps testing the elasticity of her sources.

In Chapter 2, Glaisyer departs from the standard bank of sources 
available to economic historians by examining the text of fifteen 
sermons preached before the Levant Company by prospective chaplains. 
Here, Glaisyer's objective is to understand how the tensions between 
the rhetoric of religion and the realities of commerce were resolved. 
It is perhaps unsurprising to find that the chaplains, mostly 
well-connected, ambitious and impeccably orthodox young men intent on 
securing high clerical preferment, should tailor their exhortations 
to meet the mercantile sensibilities of a major trading company. 
Undoubtedly, encomia on morality, honesty and charity chimed well 
with the Company's desire to eradicate trading abuses and maximize 
revenues. However, Glaisyer demonstrates that by situating trade 
within the discourses of religion, individual wealth, mercantile 
profit and piety were reconciled. Just as the representations of the 
Exchange served to decode the complexities of commerce, so the 
sermons subsumed the rationale of trade under an acceptable veneer of 
religious convention.

Glaisyer returns to firmer ground in Chapters 3 and 4, arguably the 
most solid sections of the book. In Chapter 3, Glaisyer analyzes a 
raft of secular advice literature locating its utility in the very 
practical requirements of writing school education and the wider 
state and mercantile bureaucracies the latter serviced. These manuals 
advanced a didactic and improving agenda. They deciphered the 
mercantile arts, explained neologisms and clarified an opaque world 
obfuscated by the proliferation of specialist jargon. They also 
reached beyond a merely technical, commercial audience, permitting 
the casual reader or curious gentleman convenient, if vicarious, 
pathways to the cultural and social worlds of the mercantile other. 
Such "imaginary journeys" (p. 129) were given material solidity by 
the raft of metropolitan and provincial newspapers -- the subject of 
Chapter 4 -- that served to further broaden a market hungry for 
commercial knowledge. Glaisyer demonstrates that, while news sheets 
and serial publications were often "instantly ephemeral" (p. 151) 
relaying generic business information that was quickly outdated, they 
also entertained quasi-Baconian programs of improvement: readers were 
introduced to the intricacies of the stock market; the prices of key 
commodities and stocks were compared; and the qualities of political 
arithmetic were extolled as a form of study fit for the elite and 
middling sort. In these ways Glaisyer argues that the print culture 
of the period served to disseminate the vocabularies and practices of 
trade.

Overall, Glaisyer's monograph is an important and timely addition to 
our understanding of the often heterogeneous and fragmented culture 
of commercial activity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth 
centuries. Her book is researched with rigor and her command of the 
evidence remains comprehensive throughout. The fact that the book is 
primarily located in the crisis years of the 1690s and that the 
terminal dates omit much of interest, not least in the growing 
commercialization and commodification of culture in the later 
eighteenth century, does not detract from what remains an incisive 
and nuanced analysis of the period. For economic historians 
interested in the intersection of commerce and culture in this 
pivotal period, it is an essential text.


Dr. David Hussey is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of 
Wolverhampton. His publications include _Coastal and River Trade in 
Pre-Industrial England_ (Exeter University Press, 2001) and, more 
recently, _Buying for the Home: Shopping for the Domestic from the 
Seventeenth Century to the Present_ (Ashgate, 2008) [with M. Ponsonby]

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