This chapter introduces the merchants who are the principal focus of this study and the sources on which the study is based. It also forecasts the argument that will be made about the class identity these merchants fashioned.

This chapter takes up a theme that has underlain all previous chapters: were these men capitalists or how are they positioned in the history of capitalism? It also explores the question of whether these merchants formed a class and, if so, in what sense. I argue that they did form a class based on their role in the economy, but that their identity was fashioned by drawing on other ideological registers as well. The complex “class identity” they constructed allowed them entry into their period’s moral economy. It also provided later merchants with a model that would enable a narrative about their own self-worth.

This chapter discusses the centuries-old discourses that condemned merchants as greedy, duplicitous, and usurious predators and damned commerce as a threat to the common good. It also, however, introduces the arguments that emerged during the Middle Ages (mostly from Scholastics) in defense of commerce and merchants themselves, and it traces the signs of a lightening of the attacks on merchants as we enter the period of study in this book.

Chapter 8 considers commerce and money management, the largest category of work in the work-task database. This provides a detailed view of petty commerce, the typically small transactions that took place every day across the country, with women and men almost equally involved. Markets remained the most common locations of commerce, but transactions took place everywhere including the home, the street, and occasionally, the specialist retail shop. Evidence of administering debts and pawning goods demonstrates the significant role played by married women in these activities.

This chapter surveys Qiu’s ideas about financial administration, drawing on Section 4, “Administering State Finances” (Chapters 20–35) of the Supplement. The chapter discusses Qiu’s recommendations for regular and light taxation centred on the land tax and how to control government expenditure, before turning to his view of the state’s relationship with the market and merchants. The state must only involve itself in the market in a limited way, with the exception of moderating the supply of grain, since it is a basic necessity for life and the fundamental source of wealth. A brief overview of policies illustrates Qiu’s support for commerce. Throughout, the chapter also considers how Qiu’s ideas might have reflected or influenced actual practice. While there is some indication that his proposals may have been implemented, by the late Ming and especially from the later Wanli era onwards, the prudent financial administration that Qiu advocated did not exist.

The introduction offers an analysis of Edward Penny’s painting A City Shower (1764) and Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” (1710), from which it takes its inspiration, in order to establish the key concerns of the chapters that follow. These include the ways in which an ideal of urban life is so often represented as being embattled or under pressure in representations of walking; the anxieties and concerns about social intermixing in London’s public places; the physical and imaginative ordering and structuring of London’s streets; and the circulation, reworking, and persistence of particular tropes and images that is a hallmark of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts of the city. It also situates the book’s focus within other accounts of the city in this period.

Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.

Follows the further decline of American trade in the Mediterranean and the physical decline and death of the three consuls, all of whom become somewhat disillusioned with the United States and the State Department while unsuccessfully trying to insure that their families can continue to prosper in the Mediterranean.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

This chapter begins Part III of the book which focuses on Anglo-Spanish relations during the Seven Years’ War and focuses particularly on the first two Spanish cases to come before the Court of Prize Appeal. This serves as a contextual chapter for Anglo- Spanish affairs and introduces the specific people and dynamics within the Spanish Court that were critical to negotiations over neutrality. It also introduces the cases of the San Juan Baptista and the Jesús, Maria, y José. The chapter highlights that the political and diplomatic contexts of Anglo-Spanish relations were markedly different from those of Anglo-Dutch relations and that preserving Spanish neutrality was, in many ways, much more fraught and complicated. This was due largely to internal Spanish political events (such as the death of King Ferdinand VI and the death of the British ambassador to Spain) and Anglo-Spanish maritime grievances that went beyond questions of prize-taking but spoke to the core of Spanish fears that British maritime hegemony would drastically alter the power of balance in the Americas and adversely affect neutral nations.

Chapter 1 presents the debate about republicanism before the French Revolution. Montesquieu played an important part in this debate as he formulated the influential “scale thesis” according to which republicanism could not be adequate for a large country. Montesquieu raised a set of challenges to would-be republicans in France (the “motivation,” “unity,” and “epistemic” challenges). The rest of the chapter presents theoretical resources in different republican traditions (notably Italian, English, American) that informed the French republicans on key issues (conquest, freedom, commerce, institutions). This chapter retraces the context in which the myth of outdated republicanism was born, but also how the elitist and martial dimensions of the republican tradition shaped French republicanism.

While her career remains vastly understudied, the Anglo-Italian narrative and portrait painter Maria Cosway (1760–1838) reached rare levels of recognition for an artist of any sex during her life by exhibiting to regular acclaim at London’s Royal Academy from 1781 to 1801. In these same years, and after she ceased exhibiting, Cosway also consistently engaged with print – an aspect of her artistic practice that has yet to be the subject of sustained scholarly work.

This chapter offers an initial foray into understanding Cosway’s relationship with and steady pursuit of the printed medium. Above all, it emphasises the implicitly professional nature of her published endeavours – according to definitions of professionalism at the time – by highlighting her contributions to five artistic, didactic printed series executed in London and Paris. Why print, and why these projects? What did she see in the medium that she may not have found in her painting practice? How might gender have factored into these decisions and, vitally, into her works’ reception? After two decades in the public eye, what was at stake for Cosway – might she have used print to claim a discrete identity as an artistic professional?

This chapter focuses on the development of Iberian Christian societies from 1000 to 1500. It deals with the evolution of output, its composition and how it spread across space. Therefore, the study sets out the main chronological and territorial milestones in the Christian economy: (a) the period of growth and expansion of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and that of the crisis and recovery of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries; and (b) the areas in which economic activities were carried out, taking into account landscape features and different forms of resource used by agricultural, manufacturing and commercial activities. Throughout the text, it is possible to see that the economic model of Iberia in the Middle Ages coincided with some of the European patterns, although it presented original aspects linked, for example, to the Christian war against al-Andalus, to the demands of military supplies and to the role of the spoils of war in the construction of individual and collective fortunes. On the whole, however, the results of economic development were remarkable and do not support the undoubtedly hasty images of Iberia as a peripheral region, located in the extreme south-west of the European continent.

This chapter analyses foreign trade and trade routes in the Iberian Peninsula between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. It overviews the dual circumstances of the Christian kingdoms and of the Muslim al-Andalus over the long term, although it focuses especially on the period between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, and on events taking place in Castile, Aragon and Portugal. The study tries to answer questions like how were the Iberian trade ties forged, how did the Iberian economies integrate with the Mediterranean and north-European markets, and what role did Iberian and foreign traders play in the commercial gamble. For this purpose, the Iberian trade is examined from three different angles. First, from the routes and the goods traded among the Iberian kingdoms as well as outside Iberia. Second, from the role of agents and institutions. This will involve an analysis of the distinction between local and foreign traders, as well as the influence of institutional frameworks on foreign trade. Finally, the chapter clarifies the reasons why Iberia achieved a leading position in European trade during the later middle ages, and why it spearheaded foreign trade at the dawn of the sixteenth century and the so-called “First Global Age”.

This chapter opens with an account of the Bank Restriction Act (1797) as marking a crisis in the British credit system on which the economy depended. It reads Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as investigating the gendered systems of affect, belief, and credit which underwrote both political economy and social relations. Against Adam Smith’s attempt to regulate potentially disruptive forms of affect, including credulity and sensibility, the ‘extreme credulity’ of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, rewrites the usual story of irrational femininity as the binary other to masculine rationality. Demonstrating the mutual imbrication of financial and sexual economies in late eighteenth-century commercial society, Wollstonecraft attempts to mobilise an alternative economy of social feeling to reform a selfish, sexualised world of commerce based on self-interest, and to reformulate the relations between morality and commercial society – between affect and money – by asking what else might circulate to social advantage.