The early modern period plays a minor role in business history discussions today, despite a robust, long-standing literature that points to early modern business practices in early modern north-western Europe as essential to understanding the rise of capitalism. While the Dutch Republic and England are famous for introducing new business practices like state-chartered joint-stock companies, these countries were also at the vanguard of negotiating the public role of business and the role of companies vis-a-vis the public interest. Familiar elements of capitalism’s infrastructure from state-chartered joint-stock companies to longer term public debt originated in the early modern period alongside concerns about the relationship between business and the interests of the public or so-called commonwealth – concerns that resonate with contemporary ones. Some scholars even point to the Early Modern Period, as the era when ideas that companies and states should serve the interests of the public or so-called commonwealth emerged (Murphy, 2013).
This panel highlights the importance of the Early Modern period for Business History by studying emerging private enterprises in relation to the common good. Anna Luna Post offers a study of seventeenth-century Dutch drainage projects. She shows how a private desire for profit was expressed as a public desire for an ordered landscape despite resistance. Joris van den Tol presents a history of the Amsterdam-based, yet Anglo-Dutch, America Company in the 1640s and 1650s that demonstrates how its form was dictated by a belief that it best served the commonwealth in taking over English colonies during the Anglo-Dutch Wars. Ellen Nye examines the relationship between interstate private credit and domestic public finance by tracing the careers of English Levant Company merchants in the Ottoman Empire who returned to London to govern money during the era of the Financial Revolution, pointing to the personal entanglement shaping early modern financial systems. These papers combine an overseas perspective with a public at home, to understand the role of early modern merchants in the construction of durable structures of trade, finance, and wealth accumulation.