Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

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68 Roshan Allpress ligious associational contexts. It is ahistoriographical commonplace to note that participation in globalizing networks of credit and trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by groups like merchants in the City of London expanded moral geographies, leading to philanthropic and humanitarian activism, such as that on behalf of enslaved Africans or colonized indigenous peoples. 5 Only aminority of those in these networks became philanthropists or reformers, and it is the particularities of their circumstances that shed light on how their distinctive formation occurred. Of the nearly fourteen hundred mercantile houses operating in the City of London in the early 1760s, fewer than 3percent were members of the Russia Company, which oversaw much of Britain’s trade with northern Europe. 6 Yet more than half of the active committee members of London’s philanthropic societies during the 1760s came from that small subset of merchant firms, and Russia Company members were the most prolific set of donors to new philanthropic societies in that decade. Ageneration later, during the upswell of reform societies in Britain in the aftermath of the American Revolution, asimilarly disproportionate number of the leaders of new philanthropic organizations, such as the Abolition Society, had—like Henry Thornton—spent their childhoods and early careers in families and networks that were closely associated with the Russia Company. Unlike their counterparts, these young men participated in adense culture ofsociability, commercial habitus, and intellectual life—increasingly interlaced with the religious innovations of evangelicalism. The distinctive formation that they received shaped their philanthropy—and their characters. The intent of this chapter is to explore how formation actually occurred in these specific historical contexts—with attention to institutional, associational, intellectual, and cultural particularities 7 and aview to identifying potentials for the formation of character and vocation in the late modern context. The Russia Company oversaw British trade throughout the Baltic and North Seas—the third-largest British trading sphere after the trans-Atlantic and East India trades, accounting for roughly eight hundred thousand pounds’ worth of imports ayear duringthe 1760s, and comparableinscale to East India Company 5 6 7 Alan J. Kidd, “Philanthropy and the ‘Social History Paradigm,’” Social history 21, no. 2 (1996): 180–92; and Hugh Cunningham, The Reputation of Philanthropy Since 1750: Britain and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). Thomas Mortimer, The Universal Director (London: Mortimer, 1763), 7–78. See aparallel argument around specificity and causality by Christopher Bayly, “The British and Indigenous Peoples, 1760–1860: Power, Perception and Identity,” in Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 22.
Philanthropic Formation 69 (EIC) imports. 8 British traders to this region inthe mid-eighteenth century enjoyed unusually profitable credit arrangements, thanks to weaknesses in Russia’s domestic credit market and capital outflows from Amsterdam and German cities amid ongoing war and market uncertainties. Further enhancing the profitability of the trade during this period, Russia Company imports of pig iron and lumber were of vital strategic significance to the Royal Navy, especially during the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, and Russia Company merchants became major creditors to naval procurement projects and intermediaries for investment from the Continent in issues of Navy bills. Of the major British chartered companies of the mid-eighteenth century, the Russia Company was unusualinthat it was aregulated company, not ajoint stock company like the EIC. 9 In effect, this meant that rather than being managed by employees, it operated asatrading collective of merchant houses, with its institutional apparatus run by committees of volunteers. Its governing body was not acourt of directors, as in the EIC, comprising established merchants looking to wield patronage, but a court of assistants made up of younger men—the average age of first election during the 1770s was thirty-five years— seeking to build reputation, so as to expand the capital they could borrow on credit for their own trading houses. The context of the Russia Company provided unique circumstances for the establishment of careers, and for formation in commercial habitus. Atypical career path for an ambitious young man in other major British chartered companies, such as the EIC, involved seeking apatron, who could procur aclerkship or other posting. Once established, advancement and wealth could come through promotion or by private trade on the side, with success leading to adirectorship and shareholding returns in London. By contrast, in the Russia Company, an ambitious young merchant would usually take an apprenticeship in amerchant firm, buy membership of the company forthe affordable sum of five pounds, and seek to cultivate areputation for trustworthiness by serving on voluntary committees, such as those coordinating shipping routes or negotiating trade access to Baltic ports. By this kind of voluntary service, younger merchants could work toward becoming trusted to borrow capitalfrom other merchants, by which they might begin to trade on their own account. In this context, RussiaCompany mer- 8 9 Elizabeth B. Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics, 1676–1808 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 18; Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 207–09; and Herbert H. Kaplan, Russian Overseas Commerce with Great Britain during the Reign of Catherine II (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1995), 57–58. See Michael Wagner, “Misunderstood and Unappreciated: The Russia Company in the Eighteenth Century,” Russian History 41 (2014): 393–422.
Page 1: Piet Naudé Michael Welker John Wit
Page 4 and 5: 6 Table of Contents Part Three: Eva
Page 7 and 8: Preface to the Series Five hundred
Page 9 and 10: Preface to the Series 11 are the so
Page 11 and 12: Introduction Piet J. Naudé In the
Page 13 and 14: Introduction 15 personal connection
Page 15 and 16: Introduction 17 contribution by Ros
Page 17 and 18: Neoliberal Political Economy and Va
Page 19 and 20: Neoliberal Political Economy and Va
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Page 26 and 27: 48 Andreas Glaeser from micro ritua
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Page 33 and 34: Philanthropic Formation 71 The conf

Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

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