The self-perception of early modern capitalists / [edited by] Margaret C. Jacob and Catherine Secretan.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Jacob, Margaret C., 1943-

Secretan, Catherine.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Merchants--History.

Merchants.

Commerce--History.

Commerce.

History.

Physical Description:

iv, 279 pages : illustrations, map ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Summary:

Labeled as greedy and self-interested, capitalists have often suffered in historians' eyes. This book looks at merchants, entrepreneurs, and other individuals from around 1500 to 1800-with some attention to their medieval roots-and asks how they actually saw themselves. Coming from deeply religious cultures, how did they relate their worldly activities to their beliefs and values? Did they see a conflict, as Weber might have imagined, or did they live at relative ease with the tensions between obedience to faith and the necessities of competition and striving? Drawing on personal letters and diaries, as well as handbooks, portraiture, and other pieces of material culture in general, the contributors to this volume each help to reconstruct an understanding of the people who put in place what became the dominant economic system in the Western world.

Contents:

1 Theological Roots of the Medieval/Modern Merchants' Self-Representation / Giacomo Todeschini 17

Part II Self-Images

2 Images and Self-Images of Sephardic Merchants in Early Modern Europe and the Mediterranean / Francesca Trivellato 49

3 Merchants in Charge: The Self-Perception of Amsterdam Merchants, ca. 1550-1700 / Cle Lesger 75

4 Merchants on the Defensive: National Self-Images in the Dutch Republic of the Late Eighteenth Century / Dorothee Sturkenboom 99

Part III Capitalism as Normative

5 "Merchants" and "Gentlemen" in Eighteenth-Century Sweden: Worlds of Jean Abraham Grill / Leos Muller 125

6 Professional Ethics and Commercial Rationality at the Beginning of the Modern Era / Jochen Hoock 147

7 The Anxious Merchant, the Bold Speculator, and the Malicious Bankrupt: Doing Business in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg / Mary Lindemann 161

8 Accounting for War and Revolution: Philadelphia Merchants and Commercial Risk, 1774-1811 / Cathy Matson 183

Part IV Individuals and Striving

9 Accounting for Science: How a Merchant Kept His Books in Elizabethan London / Deborah E. Harkness 205

10 Coming of Age in Trade: Masculinity and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England / John Smail 229

11 Success and Self-Loathing in the Life of an Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur / Matthew Kadane 253.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0230604471

9780230604476

OCLC:

176926066

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description