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Networks and Knowledge: The Beginning and End of the Port Commodity Chain, 1703–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Paul Duguid
Paul Duguid
Affiliation:
PAUL DUGUID is Adjunct professor at the School of Information & Management Systems at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.
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Abstract

Diversified trading networks have recently drawn a great deal of attention. In the process, the importance of diversity has perhaps been overemphasized. Using the trade in port wine from Portugal to Britain as an example, this essay attempts to show how a market once dominated by general, diversified traders was taken over by dedicated specialists whose success might almost be measured by the degree to which they rejected diversification to form a dedicated “commodity chain.” The essay suggests that this strategy was better able to handle matters of quality and the specialized knowledge that port wine required. The essay also highlights the question of power in such a chain. Endemic commodity-chain struggles are clearest in the vertical brand war that broke out in the nineteenth century, which, by concentrating power, marked the final stage in the transformation of the trade from network to vertical integration.

Type
Special Section: Networks in the Trade of Alcohol
Information
Business History Review , Volume 79 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2005 , pp. 493 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2005

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References

1 See, for example, Castells, Manuel, The Information Society: Economy, Society, Culture, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1994–1998)Google Scholar. For further discussion of the question of “networks,” see the introduction to this issue.

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3 Podolny and Page are among the few brave enough to try to define a network organization: “any collection of actors (N≤2) that pursue repeated, enduring exchange relations with one another and, at the same time, lack a legitimate organizational authority to arbitrate and resolve disputes that may arise during the exchange.” The stipulation about authority might rule out the family. See Podolny, Joel M. and Page, Karen L., “Network Forms of Organization,” Annual Reviews of Sociology 24 (1998): 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zucherman, Ezra W., “On Networks and Markets by Rauch and Castella,” Journal of Economic Literature 41 (2003): 545–65Google Scholar.

4 Hopkins, Terence K. and Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Commodity Chains in the WorldEconomy Prior to 1800,” Review 10 (1986): 159Google Scholar. A variety of concepts—supply chain, value chain, even filière—offer themselves for this discussion. The literature of the commodity chain seems most apt because Hopkins and Wallerstein developed it to analyze international trade and deployed it historically. Further, as developed by Gary Gereffi, the concept focuses on issues of power, knowledge, and coordination over geographic distances—all issues of interest to the argument offered here. In supply- and value-chain literature, by comparison, such matters tend to be peripheral if considered at all. See Duguid, Paul, “Brands and Supply Chains: Governance before and after Chandler,” in Gouverner les Organisations, ed. Dumez, Hervè (Paris, 2004), 329–69Google Scholar; Gereffi, Gary, “International Trade and Industrial Upgrading in the Apparel Commodity Chain,” Journal of International Economics 48 (June 1999): 37–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gereffi, Gary and Korniewicz, Miguel, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, Conn., 1994)Google Scholar. See also Dicken, Peter et al. , “Chains and Networks, Territories and Scales: Towards a Relational Framework for Analysing the Global Economy,” Global Networks 1 (2001): 89–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raikes, Philip, Jensen, Michael Friis, and Ponte, Stefano, “Global Commodity Chain Analysis and the French Filière Approach: Comparison and Critique,” Economy and Society 3 (2000): 390–417CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an interesting discussion of the filière in the context of the wine trade, see Barker, J., Lewis, N., and Moran, W., “Reregulation and the Development of the New Zealand Wine Industry,” Journal of Wine Research 12 (2001): 199–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Regina Grafe for her helpful comments that pushed me toward the commodity chain. Neither Hopkins and Wallerstein, nor Gereffi, nor this paper restricts the use of commodity to raw materials. The restricted use, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, is fairly recent. See “commodity (6a),” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar. Historically, the wine trade has viewed wine as a raw foodstuff and a manufactured commodity to suit its convenience. See Calmels, Edouard, Des Noms et Marques de Fabrique et de Commerce de la Concurrence Déloyal (Paris, 1858)Google Scholar, especially pp. 80ff. Because of the fortification process by which it is made, port falls into the category of processed wines.

5 All three firms now belong to the Portuguese holding company, Sogrape Vinhos. Over two hundred or more years of existence, the names of these firms changed as their partners changed. For simplicity's sake, here they will be referred to by the first name of the most enduring partnership, Hunt, Offley, and Sandeman. The records of the first two firms are in the archives of A. A. Ferreira & Ca., Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal (hereafter AAF), except for one Offley letterbook, which anomalously is with the records of Sandeman & Co., in the archive of the House of Sandeman, Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal (hereafter HoS). Since 2002, all three firms have been owned by Sogrape & Ca. I am grateful to Sogrape & Ca., George Sandeman, António Oliveira Bessa, Luisa Olazábel, and Paula Montes Leal for permission to use and their help in using these records.

6 Chapman, for example, echoes Braudel in seeing “diversification” as a critical characteristic of merchant capitalists. Jones, likewise, sees the “tendency to diversify” as a “distinguishing feature of trading companies” until the mid-twentieth century. Chapman, Stanley, Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge, 1992), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Geoffrey, Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 2000), 1Google Scholar. In the context of this study, it is worth noting that Jones gives port firms as an example of firms that, historically, specialized rather than diversified (ibid., 25). This paper attempts to show why.

7 Traill, H. D., “The Ant's Nest,” Recaptured Rhymes (London, 1882), 156–60Google Scholar.

8 Rauch, James E., “Networks versus Markets in International Trade,” Journal of International Economics 48 (1991): 7–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Richardson, G. B., “The Organisation of Industry,” The Economic Journal 82 (1972): 883–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Martins, Conceição Andrade, A Memória do Vinho do Porto (Lisbon, 1990), quadro 74Google Scholar; Shaw, T. G., Wine, the Vine, and the Cellar, 2nd ed. (London, 1864)Google Scholar, table 10.

11 For the fall in reputation and the recriminations that followed, see English Factory, Novas Instrucoens da Feitoria Ingleza a Respeito dos Vinhos do Douro, Setembro de 1754 (Lisbon, 1754)Google Scholar. The Companhia was founded in 1756. See Instituição da Companhia Geral da Agricultura das Vinhas do Alto Douro (Lisbon, 1756)Google Scholar. The port region was demarcated between 1758 and 1761. Through its control of exports, the Companhia also had a near monopoly over port sales in Brazil, but the Brazilian market lies outside the scope of this paper.

12 The Companhia was resurrected in response to another crisis of the late 1830s but was never quite the force it had been in the late eighteenth century.

* The four illustrations for this article come from the archives of the House of Sandeman, Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, and are used with the permission of George Sandeman. They are from the original illustrations made for the book by Vizetelly, Henry, Facts about Port and Madeira with Notices of the Wines Vintaged around Lisbon, and the Wines of Tenerife (London, 1880)Google Scholar. The titles of the illustrations come from Vizetelly's book. The artist is Ernest Vizetelly, Henry's son (see Vizetelly, Ernest, In Seven Lands: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Spain, Portugal, Italy [London, 1916]Google Scholar, although the illustrations have on occasion been attributed to William Pratter). I am obliged to Ligia Marques, public relations manager of Sogrape Vinhos SA, for providing me with copies.

13 In 1801, 78,606 pipes of port were exported, a figure not surpassed until 1918, when in a postwar boom, 82,914 pipes were exported. See Martins, Memória, quadro 66. A pipe of wine contained 128 imperial gallons.

14 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York, 1937, first published 1776), 156Google Scholar. Despite the variability, customers asked for “similar style,” “same as last,” and even “identically the same as before,” stipulations, which, one letter writer protests, “we cannot after this length of time answer for.” Sandeman & Co to Sandeman (London), 10 Aug. 1824, letterbook, HoS. For the challenge of quality in wine, see Stanziani, Alessandro, “La Construction de la Qualité du Vin, 1880–1914,” in La Qualité des Produits en France (XVIIIe-XXe Siècles), ed. Stanziani, Alessandro (Paris, 2003)Google Scholar.

15 Nineteenth-century oenologists made the claim that brandy stabilized the wine; nineteenth-century port traders contested it. See, for example, Thudichum, J. L. W. and Dupré, August, A Treatise on the Origin, Nature, and Varieties of Wine: Being a Complete Manual of Viticulture and Oenology (London, 1872)Google Scholar; Forrester, Joseph James, Observations on the Attempts Lately Made to Reform the Abuses Practised in Portugal, in the Making and Treatment of Port Wine (Edinburgh, 1845)Google Scholar.

16 Small amounts of brandy had been added to the wine since the sixteenth century. See de Morais, Silvestre Gomes, Agicultura das Vinhas (Lisbon, 1818, first published 1723), 149Google Scholar. (I am grateful to Gaspar Martins Pereira for this reference.) In a note to the Duke of Newcastle in 1725, an agent in Lisbon reported the addition of significant amounts of brandy to white port, as if the practice was new enough to be unfamiliar to the English. SP 389/31105, National Archives, Kew, England. By 1754, however, the practice of adding wine during vinification was well established. In a celebrated exchange of letters, exporters and their agents in the Douro argued over how much brandy to add. That brandy would be added was taken as given. See English Factory, Novas Instrucoens.

17 Offley & Co. to Thomas Harridge, 6 May 1793, letterbook of Offley & Co., HoS. The question of how long to wait could lead to complex legal cases about implied warrants. See the case of Rumens v. Offley reported in the Times, 2 Apr. 1850, 8e.

18 In noting that the commodity played a significant part in shaping the chain, this paper might seem to be reflecting themes made prominent by Actor Network Theory. There is little more than coincidence in this. Indeed, by pointing to the role of international diplomacy and state fiscal regulation in the chain's development, the argument, pace some of that school, suggests that such networks cannot usefully be explained in terms of the microactors in the chain alone.

19 Martins, Conceição Andrade, “Vinha, Vinhoe Política Vinícola em Portugal: Do Pombalismo à Regeneração” (Ph.D. diss., University of Évora, 1998)Google Scholar.

20 For 1770, Gaspar Martins Pereira gives the figure 1,977, Norman Bennet the similar but slightly lower figure of 1,970. See Pereira, Gaspar Martins, “Aspectos Sociais da Viticulture Duriense nos Fins do Século XVIII,” Actas das Primeiras Journadas do CENPA (Porto, 1986)Google Scholar; Bennett, Norman R., “The Golden Age of the Port Wine System, 1781–1807,” International History Review 12 (1990): 221–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The 1821 figure is from the “Arrolomento Mestre do Distrito do Embarque” for 1821, from the archives of the Companhia in possession of the Real Companhia Velha [hereafter RCV], Vila Nova de Gaia. The demarcated area, initially fixed in 1761, was extended in 1791; hence the larger figure reflects in part a larger catchment. Both figures exclude the more numerous wine growers who did not formally fall within the export region but whose wine often seeped in.

21 See Pereira, Gaspar Martins, “As Quintas do Oratório do Porto no Alto Douro,” Revista de História Económicae Social 13 (1984): 13–50Google Scholar; wine accounts, Hunt & Co., AAF; “Livro da Receitae Despeza desta Casa da Congregação do Oratòrio do Porto,” Livro de Mosterios, 2116, Arquivo Distrital do Porto; wine accounts and Livros de Lavradores, HoS.

22 Schneider, Susan Cora, “The General Company of the Cultivation of the Vine of the Upper Douro, 1756–1777: A Case Study of the Marquis of Pombal's Economic Reform” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1970), quotation at 53Google Scholar.

23 Only one supplied in every year; that was Braz Goncalves Pereira, mentioned above.

24 Livros do Arrolomento, 1816 and 1821, RCV.

25 As James Simpson (personal communication, 2 8 Apr. 2005), points out, the very smallest growers can be thought of as the very first link in the chain. They supplied either baskets of grapes (cestos de ouvas) or small amounts of wine (vinhos a bica), and their access to the chain was controlled by the lavradores and comissários (see below).

26 For a similar situation, see Field's account of the beef supply chain in the United States, in which meatpackers, forming something of a monopsony, had little incentive to integrate back into production. Fields, Gary, Territories of Profit: Communications, Capitalist Development, and the Innovative Enterprises of G. W. Swift and Dell Computer (Stanford, 2004), 241n16Google Scholar.

27 As Jones suggests in Merchants, international trading companies survived as much on their access to local knowledge as on their access to local commodities.

28 For brokers in other regions, see, for example, Brennan, Thomas, Burgundy to Champagne: The Wine Trade in Early Modern France (Baltimore, 1997)Google Scholar.

29 In the period 1808 to 1832, purchases by Hunt & Co. reached a high of 1,033 pipes (in 1814) and sank to a low of 78 (1817). Their broker's income would have fluctuated accordingly. Hunt & Co. wine accounts, AAF.

30 For example, Hunt & Co. worked with João Manoel Martins Teixeira from around 1780 until his death in 1835, at which point his son petitioned to take his place. Offley & Co. worked with José Jacinto Henriques da Silva Pereira from before 1780 to 1830. In 1819 he was joined by Lourenço Henrique da Silva Pereira, who may have been his son or grandson. When Sandeman & Co. set up in Porto after the Napoleonic wars, they acquired the services and knowledge of Carlos António Pereira da Silva, whose brother, another José Jacinto, had previously worked with the recently defunct firm of Bartholomew Casey (and was probably preceded by his father in that position). The two brothers worked for Sandeman & Co. until Carlos António's death in the 1830s. Finally, Quarles Harris & Co., another old port firm, worked with what were probably three generations of a family called Borges from before 1790 to after 1825. Data from Hunt & Co. and Offley & Co. wine accounts and letterbooks, AAF; Sandeman & Co. wine accounts and letterbooks, HoS; Governo Civil PRT, Registo de Privilégios, especially vols. 9, 10, 11, 18, and 21, Administração Central, Arquivo Distrital do Porto.

31 See Hunt & Co. to the comissários Manuel Ferreira Romano and José Manuel Martins Teixeira from Nov. 1787 to May 1788, Hunt & Co. letter book, AFF. The specific injunction is from a letter to Romano, 4 Nov. 1787. Following the testimony, the firm's correspondence soon swelled with angry letters from the lavradores who had been turned in for seeking excess payments, but, as we have seen, the loyalty of most lavradores was relatively unimportant to the exporters.

32 The two lavradores who lasted beyond five years with Hunt & Co. were the powerful Oratório (see note 21 above) and Hunt's comissário, José Manuel Martins Teixeira. The phrase “complementary activities” comes from Richardson and strikes me as more apt than Teece's more often used “complementary assets.” Richardson, “The Organisation of Industry,” 889; Teece, David J, “Profiting from Technological Innovation: Implications for Integration, Collaboration, Licensing, and Public Policy,” Research Policy 15 (1986): 285–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 The comissários were subject to formal regulation.

34 Fisher, H. E. S., The Portugal Trade: A Study of Anglo-Portuguese Commerce, 1770–1770 (London, 1971): 77–86Google Scholar. Among these would have been Daniel Defoe, who claimed to have taken 700 pipes to England in one year. See Defoe, Daniel, Review of the State of the British Nation 1 (1704), 193Google Scholar, quoted in Bastian, Frank, Defoe's Early Life (London, 1981), 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Export lists published by the Alfândega do Porto (customs house) for 1809–40 offer totals of 341 Portugueses, 44 estrangeiros, and 96 ingleses. Deciding nationality from the names in the export lists is, inevitably, a highly subjective practice. Assumptions made here differ in some details from those used by the Companhia elsewhere.

36 How the Portuguese managed to capture this large share of a growing market is not clear and needs further investigation. They did not succeed in holding on to it.

37 de Macedo, Jorges Borges, O Bloqueio Continental: Economiae Guerra Peninsular (Lisbon, 1990)Google Scholar.

38 Warre, James, The Past, Present & Probably the Future State of the Wine Trade: Proving that an Increase of Duty Caused a Decrease of Revenue (London, 1823), 1–2Google Scholar.

39 Hunt & Co. to J. Cutler, 26 Jan. 1788 Hunt & Co. letterbook, AFF.

40 The exchange rate fluctuated around 5s 6d or 66 pence to the milreis, so four milreis came to a little more than one pound. See Fisher, The Portugal Trade, appendix 6. All the Porto houses dealt in bills of exchange to some degree, but this was necessary to deal with fluctuations in exchange rates and shortages in coin and gold as well as the demands of longterm credit. It can hardly be thought of as diversification.

41 Letter from Newman & Co., 13 Mar. 1821, incoming letters, Hunt & Co., AFF.

42 Profit-and-loss account, ledger, 1777, Hunt & Co.; profit-and-loss account, ledger, 1779, Offley & Co., AAF.

43 Whereas in the late eighteenth century, suppliers of Hunt & Co. provided 16 pipes of wine on average—and the median amount was probably much smaller—in 1834, Sandeman & Co. bought 5,000 pipes from a single supplier, Ferreira & Co. (see below). Hunt & Co. wine accounts, AAF; Sandeman & Co. wine accounts, HoS.

44 Guimarães, Gonçalves, Um Português em Londres (Vila Nova de Gaia, 1988)Google Scholar.

45 See Duguid, Paul and Silva Lopes, Teresa da, “Divide and Rule: Regulation and Response in the Port Wine Trade, 1812–1840,” in European Yearbook of Business History, ed. Gourvish, Terence (Aldershot, 2000)Google Scholar. Portugueses suffered under other government regulations. In particular, it was difficult for them to find shipping insurance in the controlled Portuguese market. British companies insured themselves in London, and some even sold insurance in Portugal, often at cost.

46 Fisher, The Portugal Trade, 79.

47 Offley & Co. to Offley Brothers, Forrester, 7 Feb. 1827 and 22 Jan. 1828, Offley & Co. letterbooks, AFF.

48 Shaw, Wine, the Vine, 174, reporting the testimony of a partner of Martinez, Gassiot & Co.

49 The English had been granted privileges since Cromwell's time. Livermore, H. V., “The Privileges of an Englishman in the Kingdoms of Portugal,” Atlante 2 (1954): 55–77Google Scholar. For the difficulties of Portuguese agents, see de Gouvea, Alfredo Ayres, “Apontamentos sobre a Famila de João Allen (1698–1948)”, Boletim Cultural, Camara Municipal do Porto 21 (1958): 390–532Google Scholar; and 22 (1959): 235–320. (I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.)

50 Several of these brokers registered as exporters to gain the preferential access granted to exporters at the wine fair, but then only exported nominal amounts of wine—enough to satisfy the registration requirement.

51 Offley & Co. to Offley Brothers Forrester, London, 29 Mar. 1825, Offley & Co. letterbook, AAF.

52 To some extent, these city brokers—more than their Douro counterparts—resemble Burt's entrepreneurs who exploit “structural holes” in the network. Burt's work suggests that brokers are relatively independent of the network and, by metaphorically rising above the chain, see and enact opportunities to transform it. Circumscribed by regulation in Portugal and informal (xenophobic) institutions in Britain, the city brokers were not so free and acted more to maintain than to transcend the chain. If, however, the brokers were not as free, the chain was not as rigid as Burt's work might suggest. See Burt, Ronald L., Structural Holes (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)Google Scholar.

53 If we recall Smith's account of the “speculative trader,” he was one who “exercises no one regular established or well-known branch of business. He is a corn merchant this year, a wine merchant the next” (Smith, Wealth of Nations, 114). Most Porto brokers were not “speculators” in this sense. They were, indeed, wine merchants from one year to the next. It would seem that the ingleses were evidently using the term primarily as an insult.

54 The Companhia discouraged the Porto brokers, probably because it too sold wine to understocked ingleses.

55 Records of these scattered outlets have been hard to find, and what follows comes primarily from the records of those who shipped wine to them or from alternative sources, such as newspapers, advertisements, and novels.

56 Surviving records of Sandeman (London) are in the Guildhall Library, mss. 8642– 8652. These, along with HoS records in Vila Nova de Gaia, provide evidence for the claims made here. The London house was, for most of the period under discussion, a partnership called Sandeman, Gooden, and Forster. George Sandeman, the founder and senior partner, was initially sole owner of the Porto house, though he divided the ownership between himself and his nephews in 1835. See Bennett, Norman R., “Port Wine Merchants: Sandeman in Porto, 1813–1831,” Journal of European Economic History 24 (Fall 1995): 239–69Google Scholar.

57 Offley & Co. (London) to George Sandeman & Co., 22 Feb. 1793; Offley & Co. (London) to Sandeman & Archer, 10 Oct. 1793, Offley & Co. letterbook, HoS.

58 Details of Thomas da Rocha Pinto come primarily from Sandeman's books and from the Arquivo Torre de Tombo, Lisbon, Mesa do Consuladoe Fragatas, Alfândaga do Porto, which lists the consigner, contents, and destination of exports. Other details come from the records of Sandeman (London) noted above.

59 Butel, Paul and de Lemps, Alain Huetz, Histoire de la Société et de la Famille Hennessy (1765–1990) (Cognac, 1999)Google Scholar.

60 While valuably historicizing the commodity chain, Hopkins and Wallerstein suggest that the level of vertical integration reflects a pattern of long economic waves, in which chains become more integrated during phases of expansion, and less so during contractions. As the period under discussion here is longer than the phases of the Kondratieff cycle that they had in mind, this does not seem a particularly apposite explanation.

61 As note 12 indicates, the Portuguese government tried to revive the Companhia, but the old regulatory powers that had been so effective were never fully restored.

62 Matthew Freke Turner, “Wine and Wine Merchants,” New Quarterly Magazine (1874): 598.

63 For the attitudes of young men to port wine, see the distaste of Disraeli's Vivian Grey and Trollope's George Vavaseur. Disraeli, Benjamin, Vivian Grey (London, 1827)Google Scholar; Trollope, Anthony, Can You Forgive Her? (Oxford, 1991Google Scholar, first published 1864). See also the fierce animosity of Redding, Cyrus, A History and Description of Modern Wines, with Considerable Additions and a New Preface Developing the System of the Port Wine Trade (London, 1836)Google Scholar.

64 Oxford English Dictionary, “port” (7a).

65 In 1653, for example, Izaak Walton talks generically of drinking “French-wine.” Walton, Izaak and Cotton, Charles, The Compleat Angler (Oxford, 1983, first published in 1653), 249Google Scholar. A decade later, however, Samuel Pepys names the wine of a particular dinner as “Ho Bryon” [Haut Brion]. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys [first published in London, 1825], 10 Apr. 1663.

66 For example, in Smollett's Humphrey Clinker, in a rare breach of his domestic self-sufficiency, Matthew Bramble gets his wine from “a correspondent on whose integrity I can depend.” Thackeray shows his historical accuracy in Vanity Fair when George Osborne asks whether the claret is “Adamson's or Carbonell's,” using in this scene set before Waterloo, the retailer's name alone, as would have been typical at the time. By contrast, in Trollope's Prime-Minister, set some sixty years later, a character says of his champagne, “It came out of Madame Cliquot's cellars before the war, and I gave Sprott and Burlinghammer 110s for it.” The French négociant as well as the English wine merchant (and the price) are called to endorse the quality of the wine. See Smollett, Tobias, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (London, 1985; first published, 1771), 152Google Scholar; Thackeray, William, Vanity Fair (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1968Google Scholar; first published, 1848), 62; Trollope, Anthony, The Prime-Minister (Oxford, 1975; first published 1876), 103Google Scholar.

67 Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews (London, 1962; first published 1742)Google Scholar.

68 T. H. Hunt, Maisonette to Hunt & Co., 25 Oct. 1815, Incoming Letters, AAF.

69 For the celebration see the Spectator 362, Friday, 25 Apr. 1712, 2; for the bankruptcy, see the London Gazette 5054, Tuesday, 23 Sept. to Saturday, 27 Sept. 1712, 4.

70 For example, in 1711, Defoe noted in his Review, “Infinite Frauds and Cheats of the Wine-Trade will be discover'd, and I hope for the future, prevented; for if once we can come to a usage of drinking our Wines neat as they come from the Country where they grow, all the vile Practices of Brewing and Mixing Wines, either by the Vintners or Merchants, will die of Course.” A Review of the State of the British Nation 8 (18 Sept 1711), 207Google Scholar.

71 Adding brandy to French wine was generally denounced as falsification; adding it to Portuguese wine, acclaimed as fortification.

72 Testimony of D. Hart, House of Commons, Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee on Import Duties in Wine (London, 1852), 440Google Scholar.

73 Times (London), 5 Nov. 1856, 14e.

74 Négotiants in the champagne trade similarly overpowered individual vignerons; see Guy, Kolleen, When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity (Baltimore, 2003), 27Google Scholar.

75 For example, in 1821, when some pipes of wine were rejected, Sandeman & Co. defended itself by noting that these were “the genuine wines of Braz Gl'z.” The reference is to Braz Gonçalvez Pereira, Sandeman's long-term supplier mentioned above. Sandeman & Co. to Sandeman, Gooden, and Foster, 2 Jan. 1821, Sandeman & Co. letterbook, HoS.

76 That both the Porto and the London house shared the name “Sandeman” clearly helped avoid a fight between the two. Where the names differed—the firm of Croft, for instance, was handled in Britain by the firm of Lucas, Gonne, & Gribble—the name of the Porto house usually became the brand.

77 See Duguid, Paul, “Developing the Brand; The Case of Alcohol, 1800–1880,” Enterprise & Society 4 (Sept. 2003): 405–41Google Scholar.

78 The Merchandize Marks Act was passed in 1862; equity and common-law courts had shown increasing willingness to acknowledge a right from some forty years before.

79 The development over the century of bottles and labels, of advertisements and marketing campaigns, of crus and vintages and other rituals of classification were all parts of this struggle to accumulate—or to resist—power in wine commodity chains.

80 Because it was individually blended, port was not divided into types of wine as late as the 1850s. See testimony of Joseph James Forrester in House of Commons, Minutes of Evidence. Only by the 1870s do the modern classifications of “vintage” and “tawny” port appear.

81 In the 1830s, Offley & Co. took a lease on the Quinta da Boa Vista, one of the most famous vineyards in the Douro, and managed its operations from Porto. Rental accounts, Offley & Co., AAF. About the same time, Sandeman & Co. took over the lease of the Quinta das Figueiras.

82 This contribution by the telegraph to international trade was well documented by Innis, Harold, The Bias of Communication (Toronto, 1951)Google Scholar. One of the early symptoms in the port trade is probably the disappearance of family members at the head of Porto houses.

83 As this argument suggests, commodity chains may be more capable of transformation than some discussions of network “reproduction” indicate, and participants may be more committed to the survival of the networks than to stability. See Walker, Gordon, Kogut, Bruce, and Shan, Weijian, “Social Capital, Structural Holes, and the Formation of an Industry Network,” Organization Science 8 (1997): 109–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Quoted in Dicken et al., “Chains and Networks,” 98.

85 Neoclassical economics, as Stigler pointed out, has difficulties with questions of quality. Stigler, George J., “The Economics of Information,” Journal of Political Economy 69 (1961): 213–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It also has trouble with questions of knowledge. See Cohendet, Patrick, Kern, Francis, Mehmanpazir, Babak, and Munier, Francis, “Knowledge Coordination, Competence Creation, and Integrated Networks in Globalized Firms,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 23 (Mar. 1999): 225–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on this, see my introduction to this issue.