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The Making of Commercial Innovations: The Use of Printed Commercial Circular Letters in France and Europe, 1750-1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2021

Arnaud Bartolomei ,
Matthieu de Oliveira ,
Boris Deschanel  and
Thomas Mollanger
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Abstract

Working from a database of over 1,700 printed circulars, this article explores the significance of the commercial innovations that took place during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Studying the chronology of the introduction of printed circulars and their use in mercantile practices, we demonstrate that commercial innovation can be interpreted as the mobilization of new tools and old practices to solve the traditional problems of long-distance trade, in a context where circulars were used to communicate information on trade houses, to search for new commercial partners, and to display one's socioprofessional identity.

Keywords

businesscommercial innovationseighteenth and nineteenth centuriesEuropean tradetrade houses
Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 95 , Issue 1 , Spring 2021 , pp. 33 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2021

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Footnotes

This paper is part of a wider research project, Fiduciae, funded by the French National Agency for Research and led by Arnaud Bartolomei (https://fiduciae.huma-num.fr/). Other members of the Fiduciae team, along with the authors, took part directly in the collection of the data from archival material: the authors thank Thierry Allain, Fabien Eloire, Claire Lemercier, Mathieu Grenet, Viera Rebolledo, and Sylvie Vabre for this contribution. The authors wish to thank the participants of Fiduciae workshops in Paris, Lille, and Nice, in the CSO and LARHRA/Triangle seminars, and especially Veronica Aoki Santarosa, Pierre Gervais, Silvia Marzagalli, and Patrick Verley for helpful comments. Valentine Leys-Legoupil provided excellent English translation and Luis González (Casa de Velázquez) a very careful revision. Finally, we thank the referees for their careful reviewing and their valuable suggestions.

References

1 Morineau, Michel, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux. Les retours des trésors américains d'après les gazettes hollandaises (XVIe–XVIIIe) (Paris, 1984)Google Scholar; McCuscker, John and Gravesteijn, Cora, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism (Amsterdam, 1991)Google Scholar; Godoy, Antonio Checa, Historia de la prensa andaluza (Seville, 1991), 27Google Scholar; Bellanger, Claude, Godechot, Jacques, Guiral, Pierre, and Terrou, Fernand, eds., Histoire Générale de la presse française, vol. 1, Des origines à 1814 (Paris, 1969), 340Google Scholar. On the development of almanacs during the period, see Grand-Carteret, John, Les Almanachs français (Paris, 1896)Google Scholar.

2 Friedman, Walter, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bartolomei, Arnaud, Lemercier, Claire, and Marzagalli, Silvia, eds., “Les commis voyageurs, acteurs et témoins de la grande transformation,” special issue, Entreprise & Histoire 66, no. 1 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rossfeld, Roman, ed., “Handelsreisende—Travelling Salesmen—voyageurs de commerce: eine Einführung,” special issue, Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte (ZUG)/Journal of Business History 59, no. 2 (2014)Google Scholar.

3 Katie Scott, “The Waddesdon Manor Trade Cards: More Than One History,” Journal of Design History 17, no. 1 (2004): 91–104; Ashley Sims, “‘Selling Consumption’: An Examination of Eighteenth-Century English Trade Cards,” Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, no. 5 (2012): 1–21.

4 Lettres d'un négociant à son fils sur les sujets les plus importants du commerce précédées d'Observations sur la manière d’écrire les Lettres de Commerce, de rédiger les contrats, les lettres de change, les obligations, Garanties, procurations, Accords et autres pièces relatives aux affaires du commerce (Strasbourg, 1786), 58–61.

5 Stanley Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain from the Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge, U.K., 1992); Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977); Patrick Verley, L’échelle du monde. Essai sur l'industrialisation de l'Occident (Paris, 1997).

6 We think of, for example, the thesis of William M. Reddy against that of Karl Polanyi, postulating major changes in the first decades of the nineteenth century with the emergence of the self-regulated market. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origin of Our Time (New York, 1944); Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (Cambridge, U.K., 1984).

7 Amalia D. Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven, 2007).

8 Jean-Pierre Hirsch, Les deux rêves du commerce (Paris, 1991).

9 The firm Greffulhe Montz et Cie is a large Parisian bank that took over from Girardot Haller et Cie, a figurehead of Protestant banking in eighteenth-century France. Its archive is kept at the Archives Nationales in Paris (AN, 61AQ); see also Guy Antonetti, Une maison de banque à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Greffulhe Montz et Cie (1789–1793) (Paris, 1963); and Herbert Lüthy, La banque protestante en France (Paris, 1961). Briansiaux and Foache are two merchant houses from the North of France. The former initially specialized in the commerce of local goods, before becoming a generalist firm during the Empire, while the latter developed close connection with overseas regions, particularly the West Indies. Their archives are kept at the Archives nationales du monde du travail (ANMT, 3AQ and 69AQ); see Matthieu de Oliveira, Les routes de l'argent. Réseaux et flux financiers de Paris à Hambourg (1789–1815) (Paris, 2011); and Édouard Delobette, “Ces messieurs du Havre. Négociants, commissionnaires et armateurs de 1680 à 1830” (PhD thesis, Université de Caen, 2005). The Veuve Guérin trading house is representative of the Lyon merchant elite of the eighteenth century: after specializing in the import and spinning of raw silk, it then gradually transformed itself into a banking house for Lyon producers of silk fabrics. Its archive is kept at the Archives départementales du Rhône (ADR 4 J); see also Serge Chassagne, Veuve Guerin et fils, banque et soie, une affaire de famille: Saint-Chamond-Lyon, 1716–1932 (Lyon, 2012). Finally, Roux is a Marseille house that initially specialized in the export of textile to the Levant, before developing its activities by embracing the import of colonial foods from the West Indies or the Spanish empire, via Cadix. This archive is kept at the Archives de la Chambre de commerce et d'industrie de Marseille (ACCIMP, LIX, Roux archive); see also Charles Carrière, Négociants marseillais au XVIIIe siècle (Marseille, 1973); and Sébastien Lupo, “Révolution(s) d’échelles: Le marché levantin et la crise du commerce marseillais au miroir des maisons Roux et de leurs relais à Smyrne (1740–1787)” (PhD thesis, Aix-Marseille Université, 2015).

10 The Jas. Hennessy & Co. archives in Cognac hold nearly 1.5 kilometers of archives covering 1765 to 1965. For the period between 1765 and 1853 we found eighty-one copies of letters registers (500 pages each) representing the copies of the active correspondence, and 554 boxes of received letters (Fonds historique, Archives de la maison Jas. Hennessy & Co., Cognac). The González de la Sierra archival fund comprises two hundred boxes of correspondence from this merchant firm in Cadix for the period between 1677 and 1954, including six boxes containing exclusively printed circular letters (“circulares de casas de comercio,” boxes 1012–17, Fondo Empresa González de la Sierra, Archivo histórico provincial de Cádiz [AHPC]).

11 This study is based on a corpus of twenty-two mercantile guidebooks, selected from the databases Making of the Modern World (Gale) and Gallica using the keywords correspondence (“correspondence”), commerce (“commerce”), négoce (“trade”), épistolaire (“epistolary”), marchand (“merchant”), XVIIIe siècle (“18th century”), and XIXe siècle (“19th century”).

12 Several researchers participating in the same project (including two of the coauthors of this article) had the opportunity to study elsewhere the thesis of a “commercial revolution,” using more varied sources (printed commercial circular letters, handwritten commercial correspondence, notarized power of attorney). This thesis questions the idea that a commercial revolution would have taken place in the world of trading between 1750 and 1850, parallel to the Industrial Revolution and according to similar methods (productivity gains thanks to technological innovations and more rational organization of commercial practices). However, the authors concluded that the changes observed were not really a rupture with previous practices but rather progressive adaptations to the new context. Arnaud Bartolomei, Matthieu de Oliveira, Fabien Eloire, Claire Lemercier, and Nadège Sougy, “L'encastrement des relations entre marchands en France, 1750–1850. Une révolution dans le monde du commerce?,” Annales HSS 72, no. 2 (2017): 425–60; for the English version, see “The Embeddedness of Inter-Merchant Relations in France, 1750–1850: A Revolution in the World of Commerce?,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 72, no. 2 (2017): 317–53. It is precisely this adaptation process—inventing new solutions with old tools—that we wish to study in this article, from the single corpus of printed circular letters. Note that our work on handwritten correspondence (letters of entry into relationships) and on notarized powers of attorney have been published in two articles: Arnaud Bartolomei, Claire Lemercier, Viera Rebolledo-Dhuin, and Nadège Sougy, “Becoming a Correspondent: The Foundations of New Merchant Relationships in Early Modern French Trade (1730–1820),” Enterprise & Society 20, no. 3 (2019): 533–74; and Fabien Eloire, Claire Lemercier, and Veronica Aoki Santarosa, “Beyond the Personal–Anonymous Divide: Agency Relations in Powers of Attorney in France in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Economic History Review 72, no. 4 (2019): 1229–50. All information relating to the ANR Fiduciae program “Pratiques et matérialités des relations marchandes: vers une dépersonnalisation (XVIIIe–XIXe siècles)” [Merchant relationships in practice: From the personal to the impersonal], as well as the complete collection of the 1737 printed circular letters collected within the framework of this project, can be consulted at https://fiduciae.huma-num.fr/.

13 Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots françois tant vieux que modernes & les termes des sciences et des arts . . . (La Haye-Rotterdam, 1701), vol. 2, s.v. “lettre.” A similar description appears in Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire françois, contenant généralement tous les mots tant vieux que nouveaux et plusieurs remarques sur la langue françoise, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam, 1706), s.v. “lettre circulaire”: a letter “sent to several various recipients located in various places of a country.” Two centuries later, an almost identical definition can be found in the guidebook by Edmond Degranges, Traité de correspondance commerciale (Paris, 1866), chap. 1, s.v. “circulaires et avis généraux”: “a letter a copy of which is sent to many recipients to communicate one same piece of information,” as well as in Marie Clément's guidebook L'art de la correspondance commerciale, précédé d'un traité de style épistolaire et suivi d'un vocabulaire des termes du commerce (Sens, 1870), chap. 6, s.v. “Circulaires”: “A circular is a letter designed to communicate certain facts or instructions to several persons.”

14 The earliest occurrence of the word “circulaire” found in the Gallica database dates to 1550 and refers to letters sent by Henry II to the Bishops of France. Later occurrences, also found in Gallica, refer to circulars said to have been sent by Grégoire le Grand to the Bishops of Gaul in 567, while other occurrences use the term to describe epistolary practices of Antiquity.

15 Lettres d'un négociant à son fils, 58.

16 Hennessy's register of outgoing correspondence used for this study does not make it possible to distinguish between printed and handwritten letters, but it does record when multiple copies of a letter were sent to various recipients. For instance, Hennessy used circular letters for the first time on December 28, 1765, to announce its establishment to nine companies in London, and then many times over the following years (twelve times in 1766, thirteen in 1767, eleven in 1768, etc.). In total, the firm sent out 551 circular letters between 1765 and 1819, in some instances to communicate administrative information on its associates or its status, but more often to communicate commercial information to its partners on the state of the harvests in the Cognac region, the quality of the brandies offered for sale, and its rates. The firm's owner stated he used circulars in order to “circulariser le trade,” that is, to flood British importers of brandy with commercial offers. During this period, Hennessy thus sent circulars to over 50 addressees on 23 instances, and to over 80 addressees on five instances (15 Aug. 1789, 14 July 1792, 25 July 1805, 1 May 1814, and 28 Oct. 1817).

17 In the Roux archive, we systematically went through either the full correspondence or random samples from approximately thirty locations (the twenty cities listed in Figure 1 and all the locations in the United States and Russia) for the entire period covered by the fonds (1728–1842). We thus collected 39 handwritten and 505 printed commercial circulars. A total of 21 such letters (15 handwritten and 6 printed) were received before 1750 (see Figure 1).

18 Lettres d'un négociant à son fils, 58.

19 Delobette, “Ces messieurs du Havre,” 146.

20 Antonetti, Une maison de banque, 100.

21 The bank Greffulhe Montz received 191 circulars during only four years of activity in Paris (1789–1793); Briansiaux received 209 during its existence (1792–1823). The Foache house, after receiving 157 circulars during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, received 262 between 1814 and 1839. According to the data collected and kindly communicated by historian Serge Chassagne for the period between 1814 and 1850, the firm Veuve Guérin received 1,380 circulars during that time (versus 340 between 1773 and 1814, according to our data). On the Roux house, see figure 1.

22 The circulars kept in the six boxes of the González de la Sierra archive cover the period from 1847 to 1920.

23 For instance, on Marseille, see Carrière, Négociants marseillais. For an overview, see Guillaume Daudin, Commerce et prospérité: la France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2005).

24 Carrière, Négociants marseillais, 200.

25 Antonetti, Une maison de banque, 100.

26 Gayot Gérard, Les draps de Sedan (Paris, 1998), 403.

27 Lettres d'un négociant à son fils, 58–61.

28 Marie Clément, L'art de la correspondance commerciale (Sens, 1870), 38.

29 These percentages and those that follow were calculated from a representative sample of 347 circulars that were examined in their entirety.

30 Lettres d'un négociant à son fils, 58–61.

31 In the box of circulars sent from Cadiz, 90 percent of documents bear at least one handwritten signature (in the form of a signature sample in 35 percent of documents), while in the box of circulars sent from Europe and the United States this percentage rises to 65 percent of single handwritten signatures, including 45 percent signature samples (“circulares de casas de comercio,” boxes 1012 and 1017, AHPC).

32 While our sample does not contain a single circular carrying a logo, 67 percent of the European and U.S. circulars from the González de la Sierra archive carry one.

33 For example, Abbeville, Amiens, Arras, Antwerp, Boulogne, Brussels, Calais, Dunkirk, Ghent, Honfleur, Liège, Louvain, Ostend, Saint-Omer, and Reims for the former, and Abbeville, Amiens, Antwerp, Arras, Caen, Calais, Cherbourg, Dieppe, Dunkirk, Honfleur, Ingouville, Isigny, Laval, Lisieux, and Rouen for the latter.

34 Autran-Bellier and son of Marseilles, letters, 28 Apr. 1808 and 1 May 1809, Roux archive, LIX375, ACCIMP.

35 Lettres d'un négociant à son fils, 58.

36 The median length of an apostil is nine lines. The first decile is three lines, and the ninth decile is twenty-five lines.

37 “We hope, Sir, that just like our predecessors we will have frequent occasions of corresponding with you. If our services may be agreeable to your personal business, please do dispose of them as you please. D, P & G” (Dubois, Page & Geoffroy, Paris, letter, 1 Jan. 1819, Briansiaux archive, 3AQ309, ANMT).

38 For example, “We owe Mr. R. Bertrand a balance of 101 livres with interest, in payment of which you will find enclosed the sum of 150 livres, with which you will kindly settle this account. Yours sincerely” (François Duclous & Cie, Geneva, letter, 11 July 1795, Greffulhe Montz archive, 61AQ121, AN).

39 Bartolomei et al., “Becoming a Correspondent.”

40 According to our calculations, 20 percent of the seventy circulars written by bankers and agents involved in terrestrial or maritime transport are “prospectuses.” The percentage is perceptibly lower in other social and professional categories (7 percent, N = 988). A chi-squared test invalidated the hypothesis that the two variables are mutually independent, with a p value of under 0.05.

41 Pierre Boulon, letters, 1 July 1813 and 10 Aug. 1813, 3AQ256; Gouy, letter, n.d., 3AQ260; Spyns-L'Hermitte, letter, 1 Sept. 1808, 3AQ272; Test, letters, 22 July 1806, 3AQ272; all in Briansiaux archive, ANMT.

42 North, Douglass C., Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Benause from Marseilles, letter, 1 July 1816, Roux archive, LIX376, ACCIMP.

44 Carrière, Négociants marseillais; Chandler, Visible Hand.

45 Pierre de Larralde et Cie from Madrid, letter, 4 Jan. 1762, Roux archive, LIX866, ACCIMP.

46 Duméril Aîné from Paris, letter 10 Mar. 1845, Foache archive, 69AQ3, ANMT.

47 Kessler, Revolution in Commerce; Margairaz, Dominique, “Qualité et fiscalité dans l’économie d'Ancien Régime,” in Qualitätspolitik. Die Qualität der Produkte in historischer Perspektive, ed. Vögle, Jacob and Salais, Robert (Frankfurt, 2012)Google Scholar.