Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

MARGRIT SCHULTE BEERBÜHL and KLAUS WEBER
the ‘pioneer countries’, that is, the Netherlands and England, and the
‘late-comer’, Germany. 4
The Spanish-Dutch and Anglo-Dutch Wars of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries interrupted this well-established route, and
much of the trade shifted to the neutral German North Sea ports of
Bremen and Hamburg. 5 This encouraged entrepreneurial merchants
from some manufacturing areas in the German hinterland to establish
new networks stretching to the major port cities of the western
European sea powers, to Russia, and beyond. These networks will be
the focus of this essay.
The concept of networks has been much used in a variety of academic
disciplines and provides a highly appropriate model for ana -
lys ing the expansion of long-distance trade in early modern times,
and the changes that took place during that period. The commercial
network can be seen as a self-organized coordinating mechanism. 6 It
is a concept that focuses on the actors and relational ties, that is, the
informal practices of coordination. Early modern trade relied essentially
on such informal practices among family, a wider kinship
group, and other trust-based personal relations. In this essay we will
highlight the social and economic aspects of the emerging trade networks
as well as their spatial and temporal dimensions. The spatial
dimension of physical networks has been explicitly analysed in historical
geography and engineering. 7 In social and early modern history,
for example, in migration history, the spatial dimension has
often been referred to only implicitly, although the development of
our modern global world has been a deeply spatial phenomenon,
and a corollary of spatial mobility was social and economic change. 8
4 For a comparative analysis of pioneer and late-comer see the enduring in -
fluence of Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Per -
spec tive (New York, 1965).
5 Carlos Gómez-Cinturión Jimenez, Felipe II, la empresa de Inglaterra y el comercio
septentrional (1566–1609) (Madrid, 1988), 269.
6 See Stanley Wassermann and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis:
Methods and Applications (Cambridge, 1994); Grahame F. Thompson, Between
Hierarchies and Markets: The Logic and Limits of Network Forms of Organization
(Oxford, 2003).
7 See Mark Casson’s essay in this volume.
8 Sven Kesselring has recently pointed out that the spatial and temporal
aspect of networks has been widely neglected in sociological literature. Sven
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