Merchant Adventurers

by

Tom Leng

• LAST MODIFIED: 23 September 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0536

Introduction

The origins of the English trading company known as the Fellowship or Company of Merchant Adventurers can be traced back to the late thirteenth century, in the form of privileges secured by English merchants from the Duke of Brabant, recognizing them as a distinct trading community trading in his territories. By the sixteenth century, these grants had become the basis for an organization entrusted with the regulation of the most valuable branch of England’s foreign trade, the export of woolen cloth to the Low Countries. The Company acquired various privileges from successive English monarchs, culminating in letters patent granting legal rights of incorporation by Queen Elizabeth in 1564, at which point its members were at the pinnacle of London’s, and thus the nation’s, commercial elite. The Merchant Adventurers were part of a wave of commercial incorporations in the late Tudor period that sought to bring order to several geographically discrete markets, ranging from Muscovy and the Baltic to Turkey and Morocco, and encompassing the founding of the East India Company in 1600. These companies have long been associated with the globalization of English trade and ultimately the beginnings of empire. In contrast, the Company of Merchant Adventurers has often been interpreted as representing a narrower commercial order that was becoming outdated in the early modern period, focused on bilateral exchanges with England’s nearest continental neighbors. This is also reflected in its corporate form: in contrast to some of the new companies such as the East India Company, which traded under a joint stock, the Merchant Adventurers was what historians describe as a “regulated” company, with members trading independently but according to shared regulations, much like an artisanal guild. The restrictions on mercantile mobility and initiative that membership entailed have been seen by some historians as constraining the Company’s ability to adapt in the seventeenth century, a time when the value of its trade declined precipitously before it lost its privileges following the Glorious Revolution. The history of the Merchant Adventurers in the early modern period thus offers us an opportunity to study the process of institutional decline in a period more often associated with innovation, and more generally commercial growth, a story that is of relevance to the more celebrated new trading companies of the period.

General Overviews

The Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers occupied a prominent place in some of the pioneering works of early modern English economic history appearing in the early twentieth century, including the useful summaries in Unwin 1927 and Lipson 1931 and the specialist study in Friis 1927. These accounts subscribed to the notion that the period c. 1540–1640 represented a major turning point in the modernization of the English economy and the beginnings of capitalism, in the face of which the Merchant Adventurers Company was destined to decline (a position essentially taken in Brenner 1993). As economic history became more focused on data in the second half of the twentieth century, continuities in economic structure came to be emphasized over abrupt changes, and the significance of foreign trade tended to be downplayed in favor of factors such as demography. Where interest in foreign trade was retained, focus tended to be on the areas of 17th-century expansion such as the Atlantic, over the declining cloth trade, meaning that the Merchant Adventurers fell out of academic fashion. Exceptions include Supple 1959, which is unusual in focusing on decline as well as growth, and Ramsay 1975 and Ramsay 1986. More recently Ormrod 2003 considers the Company in terms of the evolving relationship between the English and Dutch economies, while Leng 2020 considers the Company as a political organization and community of merchants in response to a resurgence in interest in trading corporations more generally.

• Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, and London Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

  Marxist account connecting the outbreak of the English civil war to changes in the structure of London’s overseas merchant community. Trading companies are represented as dependents of a monarchy that are at odds with a capitalist landed class. The Merchant Adventurers are associated with an obsolete premodern (and anti-capitalist) form of commercial government and opposed to a model of “free trade” represented by the “new merchants” active in the colonial market.

• Friis, Astrid. Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade: The Commercial Policy of England in Its Main Aspects, 1603–1625. London and Copenhagen: Oxford University Press, 1927.

  As well as offering an explanation for the titular project, this was the first detailed account of the structure of the Company’s trade (based on pioneering research in England’s port books recording customs payments) and its manner of regulation, as well as an overview of Jacobean commercial policy more broadly.

• Leng, Thomas. Fellowship and Freedom: The Merchant Adventurers and the Restructuring of English Commerce, 1582–1700. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

  DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198794479.001.0001

  Consideration of the final stage in the Company’s history, focusing on its internal relations. Part 1 considers how membership shaped the business lives of members, identifying structural changes that made it harder to reach collective decisions over the period. Part 2 traces how the challenge of maintaining corporate unity unfolded at the level of Company politics, assessing a series of milestones in the Company’s history, and charting its increasingly incoherent response to criticism.

• Lipson, Ephraim. The Economic History of England. Vol. 2, The Age of Mercantilism. London: A. & C. Black, 1931.

  This textbook survey of the early modern English economy devotes a long section to the fortunes of the Merchant Adventurers. A somewhat more sympathetic account than that of contemporaries like Unwin, seeing some value in the Company’s efforts to regulate trade in the interests of members. Nonetheless, the Company is still represented as destined to be outcompeted by nonmembers unencumbered by its regulations, and thus able to operate more competitively.

• Ormrod, David. The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

  Situates the decline of the Company in context of Anglo-Dutch commercial relations, as London unseated Amsterdam as Europe’s dominant commercial city. Argues that the “national monopoly” that England became following the navigation acts was predicated on a restructured model of commercial engagement with nearby Europe, which opened up foreign access to English export markets, including cloth, and robbed the Merchant Adventurers of its key justification for privilege.

• Ramsay, George D. The City of London in International Politics at the Accession of Elizabeth Tudor. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1975.

  Detailed study of the connected nature of foreign trade and diplomacy in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, when England and Habsburg Spain were beginning their drift to open conflict. Shows how the Habsburg regents exploited England’s dependence on Antwerp for its cloth exports, with Elizabeth’s regime responding by looking for alternative continental outlets, initially Emden in East Friesland. The Merchant Adventurers took advantage of this context by securing a new charter in 1564.

• Ramsay, George D. The Queen’s Merchants and the Revolt of the Netherlands. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1986.

  Continues the account in Ramsay 1975 by showing how the Merchant Adventurers came to finally abandon their continental staple in Antwerp, and extend their territorial foothold into Germany, though ultimately to the detriment of England’s terms of trade.

• Supple, Barry. Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600–40: A Study in the Instability of a Mercantile Economy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1959.

  Represents crown commercial policy as reactive, focused on mitigating against the disruptive effects of commercial depression, particularly in the cloth trade. As continental demand for English broadcloth fell from the 1620s, the Merchant Adventurers were placed under increased pressure. Places this decline in context of the structural change in English foreign trade as its markets diversified.

• Unwin, George. “‘The Merchant Adventurers’ Company in the reign of Elizabeth.” Economic History Review 1 (1927): 35–64.

  DOI: 10.2307/2590669

  Scathing critique of the Merchant Adventurers as passive monopolists. Rather than acting in the interests of the nation in seizing the cloth trade from the hands of the Hanseatic League, the Company appears as self-interested, and less able to support the expansion of trade than its free-trading “interloper” rivals. Reprinted in expanded form in George Unwin, Studies in Economic History: The Collected Papers of George Unwin, ed., Richard H. Tawney, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1958).