For merchants in the early modern Atlantic World, the recurrence of war represented both a crisis and an opportunity. While conflict disrupted the typical rhythms of increasingly globalized commodity chains, fiscally strained states came to pursue their imperial ends through the resources and expertise available in booming port cities. As Henning Hillmann shows in this empirically thorough and theoretically ambitious book, few communities benefited more from this conjuncture than the merchant elite of Saint-Malo, who at the turn of the eighteenth century transformed a rocky, isolated outpost on the northern coast of Brittany into a cornerstone of the French global economy. Their success was based on the guerre de course, in which the royal government sanctioned private actors (corsaires, or privateers) to capture enemy ships at sea and to sell the spoils back at port. Hillmann's main achievement is to have laid bare, in granular detail, the mechanisms of this characteristically eighteenth-century combination of war and trade: its social bases, institutional forms, commercial logics, and historical trajectory.

To scholars of old regime France, Hillmann's approach might seem familiar, even antiquated. It was once commonplace for historians to root their analyses of le grand commerce maritime in fine-grained studies of the coastal cities that experienced rapid growth in the eighteenth century: for example, Jean Meyer, L'armement nantais dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle (1969); Charles Carrière, Négociants marseillais au XVIIIe siècle (1973); and Paul Butel, Les négociants bordelais, l'Europe et les îles au XVIIIe siècle (1974). These impressive feats of localized research tended to concern themselves with two master narratives of French commercial capitalism: first, the rise and fall, from around 1720 to the Revolution, of an economy increasingly centered on the Atlantic and on colonial trade with the Caribbean in particular; and second, a story of institutional “modernization,” in which the patrimonial business of commerce gave way to the bureaucratic, anonymous structure of the firm. Hillmann's objective is different. Despite a generous engagement with the political and economic historiography of the old regime, he is less concerned with seeing Saint-Malo as representative of some broader trend—the commercialization of war, for instance, or the rise of the joint-stock company—than he is with understanding, through the application of social network analysis, the business organization of the corsairs. He does so to argue that the guerre de course was a particularly effective “organizational linchpin”: it encouraged and even required merchant elites to do business with one another, facilitating a “social cohesion” that accounted for their city's unlikely prosperity. The corsairs acted as “conduits of economic collaboration”—they “assumed the role of hubs” in partnership networks—and it is in that sense, and not with any particular historical referent, that Hillmann describes the dominant business model of eighteenth-century Saint-Malo as “exemplary” (pp. 184, 231, 3).

Like most ventures in early modern overseas commerce, the course was a high-risk, high-reward affair. Significant capital had to be raised to pay for ship, captain, crew, equipment, and victuals, and there were no guarantees that raids would succeed. When they did, however, they could bring in unparalleled returns; some ventures yielded profit rates of 420 percent (p. 48). As a result, Malouin elites were more than happy to pool their resources behind privateering enterprises, forming partnerships organized as sociétés en commandite—limited liability companies that were “particularly well suited to garner contributions from the largest possible number of investors” (p. 114). Hillmann helpfully places his discussion of the corsairs’ business practices in conversation with the wider institutional history of late-medieval and early modern trade. The most impressive feature of this monograph, however, is its empirical basis. By consulting 3,250 actes de société that were registered for trade and privateering ventures in Saint-Malo between 1681 and 1792, Hillmann reconstructs, over several chapters and in meticulous detail, the typical life cycle of the privateering enterprise, from investment to fitting costs to profits. He shows that the average number of business partners in course ventures was significantly larger than in other traditional sectors of Saint-Malo's maritime trade (such as Newfoundland fishing, colonial trade in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and commerce with Spain); the course thus generated a “wide range of business ties” that “facilitated transitive closure among the Malouin merchant elites” (p. 219). This quantitative analysis is in turn combined with “anecdotal” accounts of individual corsairs, allowing Hillmann to narrate the trajectory of his merchant elite across the long eighteenth century, from its emergence and consolidation before 1720 to its relative decline in the following decades and its rejuvenation with “the rise of new men” (p. 190) in the final decades of the old regime.

This microscopic focus on the course is both a virtue and a vice. Building on the work of historian André Lespagnol (Messieurs de Saint-Malo: Une élite négociante au temps de Louis XIV [1997]), Hillmann is committed to showing that the shifting fortunes of Saint-Malo under the old regime were “endogenous” to the social relations and commercial practices of its merchant elite and not contingent on government policies (i.e., the granting of privileges) or geopolitical developments (i.e., the presence or absence of war). In this case, one wonders how much can be attributed to the course alone. Hillmann acknowledges that this “cohesive” trade took root in Saint-Malo because it was a town—an enclosed, small community of Catholic merchants—already defined by “tightly woven networks,” a “highly cohesive web of social relationships,” and a “dense web of strong social bonds” (pp. 68, 145). The argument thus flirts either with tautology (cohesion breeds cohesion) or with undermining its central claim (that the course was the fundamental basis of cohesion). Having subjected his data to social network analysis (especially chapter 6 and pp. 219–36), Hillmann likens the corsairs with other cases of “upwardly mobile new men” (p. 241) in Renaissance Florence and in Tudor and Stuart England and suggests that we view the course as typical of other “linchpin organizations” (p. 248) that generate social cohesion and, consequently, economic growth. These somewhat abstract and cursory speculations come at the expense of questioning how the peculiar case of Saint-Malo articulated with more immediate historical developments, such as the rise of commercial wealth in France, the volatile relationship between the state and the market in matters of war, and the long-term fate of business organizations based on kinship and familiarity. Given the quality of his research and the scope of his intellectual engagement, Hillmann's relative neglect of these issues feels like a missed opportunity.