Thomas Leng's new book is a rigorous and detailed look at the Company of Merchant Adventurers during a critical transition in commercial life, from the early modern world of corporate organization to the incipient world of capitalist free trade. The Merchant Adventurers was one of the earliest companies in England and one of the largest and most powerful, with exclusive privileges to trade in broadcloth to the Netherlands. The rise and fall of the company was a major commercial and economic event in and of itself that justifies a full-length treatment, but Leng also uses the company history in a theoretically rich manner that illuminates both important aspects of early modern commercial life and perennial problems of principal agency and social coordination.
Corporate commercial organization is arguably the foundation upon which England's global ascendancy lay. It certainly has had a transformative effect on the world, so much so that it is now often taken for granted. But, as Leng shows, its effectiveness is always achieved through a precarious balance of interests and obligations. Coordinating the activities of a large group of geographically far-flung people with varied experiences, motivations, and personal circumstances is always an achievement. Showing how the Merchant Adventurers succeeded in this endeavor is at the core of the book. The first half of the book is organized by institutional aspects of the company, and the second half takes a more narrative approach.
Leng spends the first chapter showing how individuals are brought into the trade through a model of apprenticeship. In the next chapter, he uses the lens of social networks to describe the informal balance of power and information that knit company and merchant together once they had been initiated. Chapter 3 addresses how merchants exited from the company, through some fairly exciting instances of commercial failure, and chapter 4 digs into the regulatory regime intended to sanction—and thereby control—the behavior of members. We then see these institutional and organizational aspects slowly evolve as they are put to use in specific historical instances. Chapter 5 covers the early free-trade debates and the threat they posed to the company in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Chapter 6 explores the threat posed by the Cokayne Company in the early teens. Chapter 7 describes the religious tensions in the Civil War era, and the final chapter takes us to the Glorious Revolution and beyond. This organizational structure provides a nice solution to the problem of effectively portraying both the continuity and dynamic change that are both so central to the story of the organization.
The analysis is mainly based upon the correspondence of six merchants whose lives span the mid-sixteenth to seventeenth century, but a variety of other documents and archival materials are drawn upon. Though I, admittedly a social scientist, at times felt a little buried under the weight of the level of personal detail, there were also some genuinely gripping narratives of bankruptcy, flight, ruined reputations, high passions, and even forged elections that would not be out of place in the novels of Balzac. Leng does a particularly good and inventive job of using disputes, malfeasance, and untoward events to reveal the actualities of the governance structure of the company as it was practiced in real time.
Leng persuasively challenges existing scholarship that assigned the Merchant Adventurers to the old or premodern—and, therefore, static and stagnant—way of pursuing trade. But the bigger contribution is that by doing so he effectively undermines the larger, often misleading division between premodern and modern commercial organization. Yes, the mart system eventually decayed, but the mart system was just another solution to the problems faced by any type of economic organization. As he argues, all companies have to resolve the balance of interests of their constituent members, and all companies accomplish this with networks of informal relations. In the end, Leng provides us with an incredibly detailed and fascinating account of exactly how these problems were worked out in the context of early modern England. The book is certainly a must read for historians of the company form, but I hope it will also interest those with broader interests in the problems of governance, coordination, and market development.
