Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653

by Robert Brenner

In Merchants and Revolution Robert Brenner offers a socio-political account of the transformation of English commerce in the century after 1550 and a socio-economic explanation of the political activities and alignments of the London merchant community in the conflicts of the early Stuart period. In a major reinterpretation of long-term commercial change, he shows that new possibilities in the import trades - more so than problems in the traditional cloth trade - were behind the foundation of the long-distance commerce to the south and east. Brenner brings out, in turn, the way in which social groups of great City merchants wielded organizational and political power to exploit the emerging commercial opportunities. The very success of elite merchants in their recently established Levant-East India trades, he argues, opened the way for a whole new social group of entrepreneurial traders, recruited largely from outside the merchant community, to pioneer the development of the plantation trades in America, amassing riches and building their power in the process. Brenner demonstrates the enormous significance of merchant politics for national political development from 1621 to 1653, bringing out, in particular, the decisive roles played from 1640 by London's great company merchants in support of the crown and by the new colonial merchants, who were politically radical and militantly Puritan, in support of the parliamentary leadership. The new colonial merchants, Brenner shows, ultimately asumed great national influence with Cromwell's rise to power, becoming the chief architects of the Commonwealth's dynamic commercial policy.

Genres: History, Economics, British Literature, Politics, Nonfiction, European History, London

754 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 1993

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Robert P. Brenner is a Professor of History and Director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, editor of the socialist journal Against the Current, and editorial committee member of New Left Review.

He is also Visiting Professor in the Department of Economics at the New School University and author of many books and papers on the early development of capitalism and the current economic crisis. His research interests are Early Modern European History; economic, social and religious history; agrarian history; social theory/Marxism; and Tudor–Stuart England.

Reviews

[involution · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strongly recommend that those not already familiar with Brenner or the historiography of the English Revolution read the "Postscript" and Perry Anderson's LRB review before reading the body text — they give a much clearer sense of the argument and its (surprisingly high) stakes.

[Tiarnán · Rating 5 out of 5]

To quote one academic reviewer: "This is a very good book, and a very long book".

[Gwern · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gave up halfway: too many names, too many details, too long. Brenner deals with the minutiae, which may be admirable but I am not *that* interested in the currant trade or lobbying the king for monopolies.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

What are the relationships between the English merchant community and the revolutionary movements of the Civil War? Turns out that we must speak of merchant communities: two, borne out of privileges conferred by the crown, monopolising trade with, firstly, the German wool market, and secondly, the trade in luxuries with other external markets - East India Company, Muscovy Company, Spanish Trade, etc; a third merchant community (which might tentatively, yet properly, be identified as capitalist) arose from the carrying trade between England and her colonies in the Americas. This latter group of merchants often saw their origins as shopkeepers (who, to protect the interests of the merchant companies, were disallowed from trade within Europe), and sponsored by those among the class of Lords who shared an interest in the development of foreign colonies, antagonism with a Catholic Spain, an intensifying commitment to ~religious~ Puritanism, and the limiting of the prerogative of the Crown. Perhaps, indeed, it is hard to distinguish these interests from each other, converging as they did during the 17th century in antagonism towards the Crown, the establishment (?) of Parliamentary rights to the effect of monetary control over the use of force (development of its own army), the elimination of Catholicising tendencies within the Anglican Church, the refusal of chartered companies, and the expansion of both colonial and piratic activities in the Americas and against Spain. We follow this community (by tracking the relations developed among them in both their activities as merchants, colonists, and revolutionaries) through the developments of the Civil War, where we see their fortunes (!?) wax and wane with the changing circumstances of the war. This story adds much, in a unique way, to analysis formerly argued in essays on the agrarian roots of capitalism, and, alternatively, to the historiography of the so-called bourgeois revolution. Merchant interests diverge according to their relationship to ~production/the crown/feudalism~, and this is given an intensely political/class flavour/dynamic in the lead up to the Civil War, and throughout it.

[Jatin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A singular piece of economic history which is necessarily exhaustive and dense. The relation between specific trades and the merchants jockeying for their monopolies, parliamentary debates, and the religious affiliations of those involved is drawn out by Brenner in a way yet to be reproduced. It's only fitting for the historian who initiated the 'transition to capitalism' agricultural debate to produce the best entry therein.