Will Pettigrew has presented a stimulating overview of how overseas trading companies acted as agents in the extension of English presence across the globe during the long seventeenth-century. This paper responds to this agenda with reference to a Company which predated these trans-continental corporations, but which has been overshadowed by their rise: the Merchant Adventurers, a regulated company which formally monopolised England’s cloth trade to northwest Europe. This involves extending the concept of corporate constitutionalism backwards in time, and reconsidering the origins of England’s trading corporations in Anglo-European interactions. As we will see, many of the issues that we associate with corporate contact with the world beyond Europe had been foreshadowed by a corporation operating in less exotic, but still challenging, territories.
Much like the later global trading corporations, the Merchant Adventurers emerged from mercantile efforts to negotiate access to overseas markets, notably a grant of 1296 from the Duke of Brabant which then became the basis for corporate organisation.Footnote 94 Although these initiatives were closely linked to royal diplomacy, it was only later that these merchants secured formal domestic recognition, acquiring charters from the crown recognising them as a self-governing corporation. Because the Low Countries attracted merchants from across England, the constitutional development of the Company was shaped by struggles between merchants of London and towns such as York, Newcastle and Hull, many of which established their own local merchant corporations. By the sixteenth century, the Company had a complex existence with its chief court and governor located overseas, but with its London branch controlling interactions with the English crown, whilst provincial merchants often chafed at regulations which they saw as favouring the Londoners. Coordinating these various locales was the Company’s major challenge.
To the extent that the organisation of the Merchant Adventurers was a product of “constitutional hybridity,” the context was Anglo-European interaction. English merchants operating in the Low Countries traded alongside communities of foreign merchants arranging themselves into “nations” as a means to negotiate with local rulers. Many were from southern Europe, and they in turn transported northwards practices of mercantile association and residence developed in the Mediterranean in context of Christian-Muslim interaction.Footnote 95 The Merchant Adventurers therefore became a key vector in the incorporation of England into a cosmopolitan culture of commerce characterised by shared practices such as double-entry bookkeeping.
When these merchants came to domesticate their constitutional structures, they were bought into closer proximity to England’s own guild-system, as well as the English crown. Negotiation with the latter offered the opportunity to secure exclusive access to the privileges won overseas, but this generated much resentment and charges of monopoly. As with the later global trading corporations, the Merchant Adventurers were critical in structuring English access to foreign markets, but the Company also prompted many of those discussions about “consent, resistance, law, governance, commerce, and political economy” that would later become associated with the great seventeenth-century joint stocks.
Of course the Merchant Adventurers had to bridge a much narrower cultural gulf than these later examples, but this did not lessen its controversial status. The negotiation of English access to European markets was enmeshed with the corresponding issue of foreign access to England, and thus a matter for royal diplomacy, as well as tariff policies, chief way for the crown to regulate access to markets. This in fact afforded the Company with the opportunity to enhance its position in the mid-sixteenth century, asserting its status as the crown’s favoured conduit for Anglo-Dutch commerce at the expense of its foreign rivals, notably the Hanseatic League.Footnote 96 Ironically, just as they were profiting from this nationalistic commercial policy at home, the Merchant Adventurers were able to profit from the willingness of continental cities to compete amongst themselves for merchant custom, by offering lucrative privileges to foreign traders.Footnote 97 Having been forced by political instability in the 1560s to look for alternatives to its seat at Antwerp, the Company was able to relocate to Emden and Hamburg.Footnote 98 Of course the collapse of the Antwerp entrepôt has long been considered a watershed moment in the globalisation of English commerce, as enterprising English merchants travelled further afield to access imports previously sourced via Antwerp.Footnote 99 But Antwerp’s collapse also had the potential to liberate the Merchant Adventurers, allowing them to access the vast central European market more directly. However, this was a challenge to the Company’s corporate ideals. When sales at Emden in 1564 were slack, many members broke ranks with their brethren by travelling to the Frankfurt fair, and restraining this inclination to leave the mart town would be a continual problem.Footnote 100 In this light, critics of the Company could argue that as Germany was clearly “a place of libertie to all nations in Christendome for free dealinges,” corporate regulations were not a necessary prerequisite to trading there.Footnote 101
Following the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt the Company returned to the Low Countries, basing itself in Middelburg, Zeeland. But members were reluctant to abandon their German customers, and from the 1580s onwards the Company had two continental bases. Political rivalry between the Dutch states however hindered the Company’s efforts to restrain trade to Middelburg, and the emerging entrepôt of Amsterdam was much less inclined to grant privileges to particular groups than Antwerp had been.Footnote 102 After Antwerp, defining the boundaries of England’s cloth trade to north-west Europe, and with it the scope of the Company’s privileges, became increasingly difficult, making it much harder for the Company to control the continental side of its trade or prosecute interlopers. The situation was complicated further still when in 1597 the Holy Roman Emperor banished the Company from his territories on grounds of being a monopoly. This episode exposed the fault line in the edifice of corporate unity that the dual-mart system had created. Whereas the Company initially withdrew to Middelburg, many members trading to Germany refused to follow suit. The subsequent contest between rival factions, played out before the Privy Council, brought the Company much negative publicity. As many members appeared to “rather desier to be set at liberty then to contynew in that bondage w[hi]ch is nowe laid on them by the evill governement of the Company,” one commentator raised the possibility of “an absolute dessoluc[i]on of the Company for a tyme.”Footnote 103
Eventually a compromise was brokered whereby the Company nominated Stade as its unofficial German mart town, but at the expense of concealing its corporate status; members were effectively posing as interlopers. But the episode had bought into the question the necessity of corporate government, and likely had some bearing on the famous parliamentary free trade bill of 1604. Certainly one of its supporters cited the “late experience at Stoade, where they have had no Government the 4 or 5 yeares past, the Cloath hath had as good a vent as before, and our Nation better welcome to the people.”Footnote 104 The issues raised in relation to the Merchant Adventurers in 1604, encompassing the rights of Englishmen overseas, the government of trade, and the powers of merchants in relation to the state, framed much of the debate on corporations for the century to come. At least one high profile critic of the Company believed that “what p[re]tences soev[er] the Marchantes make to drawe themselves into companyes, they ev[er] have in yt their privat ends, and all those take their ground from the Marchantes adventurers.”Footnote 105 The lesson was clear: “yt is not Convenient that Marchantes have such power passed ov[er] unto them, as that thereby they may govern the estate of thinges both at home and abroad as they list, and they not to be Curbed therein by the State.”
The Merchant Adventurers had to contend with such arguments until 1689, when the Company lost most of its privileges.Footnote 106 In the meantime, of course, it had ceased to be the most powerful or even controversial merchant company, eclipsed by the great trans-national corporations. But the controversies associated with the Merchant Adventurers continued to shape debates on trading companies, and it would be interesting to consider how organisations like the East India and Royal Africa Companies drew on the experiences of their forbearer in deflecting charges of monopoly. Certainly the merchant company had a history in England that long predated the Elizabethan wave of incorporations that gave rise to England’s first trans-continental companies. Much of the early modern debate about the relationship between states and merchants emerged in this setting. A “fully realised global history of corporate constitutionalism” will surely find room for the Merchant Adventurers, and the Anglo-European context in which they operated.
