Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

MARGRIT SCHULTE BEERBÜHL
only cosmopolitans. Given increased mobility and the beginning of
the age of mass migration, the lower classes who settled abroad also
contributed to the entanglement of the world. But we still lack studies
of the cosmopolitan practices of the lower classes in the early
modern period. 27
The essays in this volume focus on cosmopolitan networks of
mer chants for a number of reasons. Early modern merchants who en -
gaged in long-distance trade had usually received a ‘cosmopolitan
education’. 28 They had learned foreign languages. After their apprenticeships
they flung themselves into strange and distant worlds,
either as commercial travellers or supercargos, in order to bring back
new commodities and fashions that would allow them to achieve
commercial success. Long-distance trade allowed merchants to
acquire a cultural understanding of the other, enabling them to conduct
business and develop commercial and social strategies that
allowed them to survive. They organized and financed the flow of
goods, information, and innovations which changed consumption
patterns and perceptions fundamentally. By transporting goods to
Africa or the West Indies they integrated businesses across geographically
dispersed areas, bringing people and products together
in flexible and novel ways and dispersing news about foreign places
and habits.
Another important reason for focusing on the cosmopolitan networks
of merchants is that early modern philosophers such as David
Hume and Rousseau based their ideal of a ‘citizen of the world’ and
a world society on a political economy of commerce that was decidedly
international in outlook and demanded freer market relations.
They regarded the merchant class as the most obvious promoters of
a cosmopolitan outlook and highly valued their activities. David
Hume described merchants as ‘the most useful race of men in the
whole society’. 29 They ‘serve every one and [are] the true citizens of
the world’, for ‘English, Dutch, Russian and Chinese merchants tie all
27 A German baker or pork butcher who introduced German bakery goods
or German sausages into England, or an Italian chocolate-maker who settled
in Germany may have also contributed to the spread of cosmopolitanism.
28 For the recent demand for a cosmopolitan education, see Martha Nuss -
baum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, Boston Review, 19 (1994), 3–34.
29 David Hume, ‘Of Interests’, in id., Essays, i. 324, quoted from Schlereth,
Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought, 205 and 101 n.19.
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