Early Modern English Traders in International Contexts

In the 1600s, English merchants found themselves facing a literal new world of profitmaking
opportunities. However, it was no simple thing to take advantage of these opportunities,
and the methods English merchants devised to do so in turn had complex effects on themselves, the
society from which they came, and the societies with which they traded. The three papers in this
panel all explore these multifaceted impacts. Ellen Nye’s essay demonstrates how the Ottoman
Empire’s importation of foreign currencies—including those brought by the traders of the English
Levant Company—created chances for profitable arbitrage, but also difficulties in commensurating
values in both the economic and the cultural sense. Jason White’s paper analyzes the language used,
and the emerging capital mindset that underlaid it, in letters between two brothers living and
working in two different nodes of the trade system they were building together, a system that
embraced the Atlantic Basin and several of its tributary seas. Matthew David Mitchell’s contribution
shows how Humphry Morice tapped several social networks in the City of London—networks
among the mercantile community, the landed gentry and aristocracy, and the legal community—in
his ultimately failed attempt to raise subscription capital for his expansive slave-trafficking operation
during the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and the associated backlash against subscription capital. Taken
together, the three papers attend to the multiple social and cultural contexts—contexts that
inevitably leaped over national borders and spanned seas—within which the mercantile way of life
was so deeply embedded during the early modern period.