Business as Usual

This PhD project revolves around the business correspondence of early modern merchants in the Low Countries.
Early modern merchants greatly relied on correspondence for building and sustaining reliable business relations and gathering information on markets in long-distance trade. They established relations and even partnerships over vast distances with agents who they usually never met in person. The information they exchanged tells us more than just market prices and whom to trust in trade; the letters are a reflection of the customs, norms and values that guided their decisions.
In early modern trade, and no securities were given; risks and uncertainties abound. Contract enforcement through legal institutions was inefficient, if not impossible in long-distance business relations. Yet through letter writing, merchants tried to build durable and profitable collaborations with agents in distant places, characterized by trust and reciprocity. In this case, it were not the formal institutions but the informal institutions underlying the letter-writing practices, that facilitated commercial exchange. The aim of this project is to identify and define these informal institutions (norms, values) in order to learn more about society at the time and to add them to the ever-growing knowledge on the institutional landscape of the early modern period.
A broad array of letter books, made by known and unknown merchants from the Low Countries, forms the primary source material for this project. By reviewing the informal institutions reflected in the business correspondence, this specific part of the Low Countries’ institutional history can be brought to light and perhaps even compared to the merchants’ customs of other regions.