Becoming a Correspondent: The Foundations of New Merchant Relationships in Early Modern French Trade (1730–1820)

Abstract

This article discusses the relational and rhetorical foundations of more than 300 first letters sent in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by merchant or banking houses based in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas to two prominent French firms: Roux Brothers and Greffulhe Montz & Cie. We used a quantitative analysis of qualitative aspects of first letters to go beyond the standard opposition between premodern personal exchanges and modern impersonal transactions. The expansion of commercial networks during the period under analysis is often believed to have relied on families and ethnic networks and on explicit recommendations worded in the formulas prescribed in merchant manuals. However, most first letters did not use such resources. In many cases, commercial operations began thanks to a mutual acquaintance but without a formal recommendation. This was in fact the norm in the eighteenth century—and an underestimated foundation of the expansion of European commercial networks. In the early nineteenth century, this norm became less prevalent: it was replaced by diverse relational and rhetorical strategies, from recommendations to prospective letters dispensing with any mention of relationships. Whether before or after 1800, the relational and rhetorical resources displayed in letters did not systematically influence the sender’s chances of becoming a correspondent; instead, they depended on the receiving firm’s commercial strategy.

Expatriate Merchants and Partnership Formation 1840–1920: Danish Merchants in Newcastle-upon-Tyne

“…195 But where this did not occur, the connections of a partner who retired or moved into a different area of business could still serve the interests of the firm they left. 196 In 1875, a Stavanger insurance company, which Thomas Scheen Falck presided over, had Borries, Craig, and Co. and Franz Boldemann and Co. of Hamburg as two of its seven agents. 197 The Norwegian Falck, a former partner in Boldemann, Borries, and Co., thus remained a useful contact of Theodore Borries, and the Boldemann commercial network evidently remained tied into the network of the firm after Frederick had amicably retired.…”

Beyond the personal–anonymous divide: agency relations in powers of attorney in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

“…Those two sources only inform us about relationships among merchants (large‐scale merchants, merchant‐bankers), whereas powers of attorney allow us to compare merchants with other professional groups. For the first results from these other sources, see Bartolomei, de Oliveira, Eloire, Lemercier, and Sougy, ‘L'encastrement’.…”