In charting the lives of three of Antwerp’s most successful businessmen of the sixteenth century, Hugo Soly has produced a book that balances economic and social history with great success. Capital at Work is an eminently readable, informative, at times entertaining, and incisive intervention that will appeal beyond those with specific interests in Antwerp and its ‘Golden Age’. Defining ‘capitalists’ as ‘the non-specialized upper echelons of the business world’ who undertook to use their money to make more money (p. 22), Soly seeks to establish the methods by which such men pursued and achieved their aims, particularly through their development of monopolies and their relationships with political powers. Three well-chosen case studies are deployed to illustrate this phenomenon: Erasmus Schetz (c.1480–1550), Gaspar Ducci (1495–1577) and Gilbert van Schoonbeke (1519–56).
Capital at Work is a triumph of archival research and scholarly synthesis, the fruitful result of decades of work on sixteenth-century Antwerp. The reader is guided by Soly’s expertise, and a rich picture of mercantile life is painted that stretches far beyond individual biographies. The businessmen’s lives are consistently and effectively set against the interplay of political, social, economic, humanist, colonial, military and environmental forces, weaving the strategies employed by these merchants into a wider tapestry. Schetz benefitted from the imperial colonization of South America, employing free Black men at his sugar refineries in Brazil while simultaneously exploiting and enslaving native locals. The perennial shifting of European political alliances and intermittent conflicts (especially between the Netherlands and France) offered opportunities for profit as well as affecting adverse conditions. Looming political figures are afforded prominence, convincingly underlining Soly’s emphasis on the necessity of productive relationships with European rulers. Most important is Mary of Hungary, sister of Emperor Charles V and his regent in the Netherlands from 1530 to 1555. Alongside are her imperial brothers, as well as Francis I, Henry VIII and, in a later generation, Philip II. Antwerp’s town council, by contrast, is characterized by economic impotence. But also included is a whole cast of lesser characters: factors, business partners and family, alongside whom Soly’s capitalists worked – or else manipulated or overcame – in their pursuit of wealth. Schetz, Ducci and Schoonbeke’s own lives, indeed, were intertwined through business and familial relationships.
Soly’s capitalists are characterized by their skill and versatility in navigating these interlocking spheres of influence, human or otherwise. Soly emphasizes their keen eye for innovation and their temerity to embark in new directions. It was the development of monopolies that allowed these men to carve and hold positions of (seemingly) inalienable economic and political power. Schetz’s monopolies were in calamine and the trade of brass, facilitated by a domination of the Netherlandish-Portuguese market, while Ducci controlled the distribution of vital alum (and also grain and herring) while exercising a profitable political influence in taxation. Schoonbeke was innovative in speculative real estate, transforming Antwerp’s built environment and infrastructure. His monopoly on the city’s beer production was engineered by centralizing brewing on land that he had developed. Soly makes a particularly important intervention in arguing that these men (especially Ducci) often flaunted or exploited the norms of trustworthiness, social networks and conformity to expected modes of behaviour so often emphasized in other studies of pre-modern mercantile culture, and that their careers and their successes were at least in part characterized by mistrust, illicit dealings and secrecy. This did not necessarily commend them to their fellow merchants – Ducci in fact orchestrated an attack on Schoonbeke and was himself both arrested and the target of violence – but nevertheless furthered their primary aims as capitalists.
Given the scope of the work, Soly necessarily treats some aspects of the lives and careers of these capitalists only briefly, yet his thesis may have been further enriched by a sustained consideration of two interconnected themes – art and religion. Material culture and visual literacy were powerful tools in a merchant’s repertoire and could be used to great effect, often in a religious setting. How the capitalists spent their amassed riches outside of their business ventures is mentioned on several occasions, for instance in Schetz’s pursuit of magnificentia through the purchase of property and the acquisition of titles. Here Soly makes the important point that such activities did not undermine his status as a merchant and capitalist; if anything, the two were mutually reinforcing. But more could be said: Soly mentions, for example, Schoonbeke’s commissioning of pendant portraits of himself and his new wife in 1544 (although only Schoonbeke’s is illustrated at the head of the section), suggesting that the commission represented an expression of love. But what about the later portrait in the Museum Brouwershuis (a building that owes its existence, indeed, to Schoonbeke) painted in the year of his early death, after claiming his position as one of the city’s leading players? In this an inscription records his post as Clerk of the Council of Finance and his many civic building works (all discussed in the book), and he is depicted clutching a letter inscribed ‘Au Roy’. Much about Schoonbeke’s mentality is revealed in the act of commissioning both images and their clear expression of notions of status and identity. In more overtly religious terms, the illustration on p. 98 shows a stained-glass roundel in the church of San Michele, in Ducci’s native Pescia, representing the merchant as a donor praying before the church’s patron saint, with his merchants’ mark depicted on a shield hanging from a tree. Reference to Schetz naming his three sons after the Magi is made (although could the prevailing devotion to the Three Kings of Cologne among Europe’s merchants be cited as more direct inspiration?), as is Schoonbeke opting for burial before the pulpit in the church of the Antwerp Grey Friars. These examples raise unanswered questions about how religion (especially against the backdrop of the fracturing of European Catholicism) and personal piety (as far as it can be reconstructed) played into the careers of these men, how art might be used as a conduit to express both piety and mercantilism and how the two were intertwined, if only in terms of how the tension generated by the intersection of religious morality and the pursuit of profit was resolved (or not).
But these are presented here not as deficiencies in Capital at Work, rather as additional perspectives that only bolster the arguments of this important work. The use of case studies naturally raises the question of how representative of broader practice these three men and the accounts of their lives and trading activities were, but that is for another study with a different focus. Soly presents three men who, through a judicious combination of talent, innovation, luck and political and economic circumstance, were indeed able to make capital ‘work’ for them, with unparalleled success. They offer a yardstick by which we might measure the activities of other pre-modern merchants and capitalists, not only in Antwerp or the Hapsburg Netherlands, but also across Europe and beyond.
