The first question to be asked with regard to this book is what it is about. The title suggests that Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg were merchant republics. But two of them were not. All three places were port cities that attracted large degrees of trade in the early modern period, but two did so within larger political constellations (the United Provinces—commonly known as the Dutch Republic—and the southern, or later Austrian, Netherlands). The point is important, not just for factual reasons (the author tries to diffuse the issue on page 2, but unconvincingly). In the case of the United Provinces, the debate was always how the economic and financial interests of Amsterdam could be aligned with the rest of the state. In the case of Antwerp, similar problems manifested themselves within the very different political contexts of the Spanish Empire and the Habsburg monarchy. Given this peculiar mistake, when Lindemann declares that her aims are not in the field of economic history but “political and cultural” (4), one wonders how to understand this.

Lindemann refers to John Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment as arguing that commerce was antithetical to republicanism and virtue (9–11, 311–312). Pocock’s point, a little more precisely, was not that trade and republics could not be found to coexist (whether socially or ideologically/discursively), but that commerce, and particularly credit, were prone to hijack the arms-bearing (possibly with land as the mediating variable) and participatory political fantasia of citizens that was required to preserve virtu within the polity. Lindemann argues that this was not the case in her three merchant cities. “In all three cities, a similar, if not identical mercantile and republic sense pertained” (311) in which “traditional solid … merchant virtues and ethical practices developed new tonalities,” until “a siren-song promising great returns through new financial ventures” (314) announced itself. “It was never commerce … alone” but “novel and potentially harmful business practices that departed from traditional ways—speculation being most obvious among them” (314). Readers might ask, shouldn’t Lindemann have invoked Pocock as a model for her argument, rather than as a strawman?

A second theoretical reference point is the idea that Fernand Braudel and Peter Burke wove a trajectory of (economically) rising and falling cities through European history in which the decline of Amsterdam led to the subsequent rise of “not cities, but national economies.” Lindemann is keen to correct this pattern: “the immediate heirs to Amsterdam … were powerful financial and mercantile centres, like Paris and London” (3). The message is that we have neglected (in economic history, but also from a political and cultural perspective) to research how Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Hamburg were qualitatively different from what followed. So this is the actual aim of the book: to argue that the rot set in when Europe’s last merchant cities transformed into and were succeeded by financial centers, but (crucially!) not before.

What we seem to have here, intentionally or not, is an urban version of world systems theory, in which the “autumn” and “financialization” of urban political cultures is contrasted with the purity of trade itself. This explains why Lindemann is very keen on showing how her early modern cities were pervaded with the same spirit, and how the common good of the “republic” was served by the overlapping categories of merchants, citizens, and governors. In the first part of the book, Lindemann discusses the similarities and differences between the governance cultures of Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. Other reviewers of this book have noted errors and lack of finesse in the author’s understanding of the specific contexts and institutions, but the real point of contention lies in the second part of the book.

This second part is dedicated to virtue, speculation, and bankruptcy. In these chapters Lindemann uses an impressive range of sources, notably literary fiction and spectatorial writings, to show how the commercial cultures of Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Hamburg went through a schematic process. Lindemann’s argument implies an interesting perspective on how cities served as platforms from which new structures of trade as well as forms of business emerged. The development of innovation in business history is nicely contextualized in this way. She shows aspects of how household enterprises based on family capital were modified (219) and notes how currency problems in the tumultuous Seven Years’ War shifted the financial foundations of merchant-city trade (302).

The idea that war and business institutions are related to the life span of the merchant city is, however, a function of Lindemann’s general argument that her merchant cities faced a common threat in the shift from active trade to financial speculation. While globalizing trade had the unfortunate consequence that cities could no longer adequately contain the commercial networks that flourished until the eighteenth century, an implicit opposition is suggested between virtuous trade and dangerous speculation. Lindemann eagerly and unskeptically cites rhetorical flourishes that testify of a mercantile civic sense to promote the common good. This civic sense was the victim of an inevitable and irreversible degenerative process in which “risk seemed ever riskier and attempts to control it more futile” (309). As cities struggled with the ever-expanding moral, legal, and social sides of the compounded problem of risk, speculation, and bankruptcy, this process eventually sealed the fate of the cities themselves. On the last page of the book, Lindemann notes that the revolutionary period left only Hamburg’s “republican” independence intact, while Antwerp and Amsterdam had been swallowed by the Dutch United Kingdom (318).

While this book undoubtedly has it strong sides, its programmatic and schematic logic raise considerable ideological suspicion. Instead of going for big claims (that are often withdrawn, qualified, or contradicted in the following sentence), it would have been more helpful had Lindemann given us an equally detailed, but more balanced and modestly presented cultural-historical analysis of risk and bankruptcy in early modern trade cities.