Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

From Westphalia to the Caribbean
Many monographs on the emergence of early modern trade networks
have focused either on one actor or on a group of actors en com -
passing one or two generations. 9 It is often not appreciated that in the
early modern period a far-reaching international trade network did
not develop wholly within the lifetime of one trader, but frequently
had a longer history. It was not unusual for such networks to have a
history dating back several generations and to be built on ex tensive
clusters of kinship networks. The development of individual networks
or certain kinship-based clusters of networks over a period of
several generations is not easy to explore because of the lack of
sources, the mobility of the actors, the changes in surnames, and the
informal nature of such networks. It requires intense prosopographical
research to reveal lines of continuity. Research into the spatial–
temporal dimension may reveal some long-term economic and social
strategies pursued by Continental merchant families and the structural
pattern of the early modern immigrant, or ethnic, trade networks.
This essay will examine the temporal–spatial development of
trade networks set up by merchants from manufacturing areas in the
German hinterlands, in particular, in three of the leading European
port cities of the early modern period: London, Cadiz, and Bordeaux.
The following questions will be discussed. What were the reasons for
expansion? What were the underlying strategies pursued? What
long-term and short-term patterns can be perceived in the expanding
trade networks from the textile hinterlands and other manufacturing
regions?
Kesselring, ‘Topographien mobiler Möglichkeitsräume: Zur sozio-materiel len
Netzwerkanalyse von Mobilitätspionieren’, in Bettina Hollstein and Florian
Strauss (eds.), Qualitative Netzwerkanalyse: Konzepte, Methode, An wen dungen
(Wies baden, 2006), 333–58. See also John Urry, ‘Social Networks, Travel and
Talk’, British Journal of Sociology, 54 (2003), 155–75.
9 e.g. David Hancock on a group of more than twenty English merchants
who traded with the New World between 1735 and 1785. David Hancock,
Citizens of the World (Cambridge, 1995). One of the few exceptions is Steve
Murdoch, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Association in
Northern Europe 1603–1746 (Leiden, 2006). See also David Dickson (ed.) Irish
and Scottish Mercantile Networks in Europe and Overseas in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries (Ghent, 2007); Karina Urbach (ed.) Royal Kinship: Anglo-
German Family Networks 1815–1918 (Munich, 2008); Mike Burkhardt, Der hansische
Bergenhandel im Spätmittelalter: Handel—Kaufleute—Netzwerke (Cologne,
2009).
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