The mercantile cities of the late medieval and early modern Low Countries have long provided the genesis for some of the most fruitful work in urban history. Scholars studying cities in other parts of the early modern world often look with envy at the depth of both source material and historiography of cities such as Leiden, Antwerp, Bruges and Amsterdam. It is therefore surprising that the sixteenth-century merchants of this region have been so little studied. The activities of the English Merchant Adventurers in Antwerp are well known, but the role of local merchants in these markets has attracted far less attention. Jeroen Puttevils’ book, which is introduced as a revision of his Ph.D. thesis, addresses this particular area and also provides a useful introduction to wider aspects of the early modern Brabantine economy. A central aim of the book, expressed in economic terms, is to analyse the competitive advantage enjoyed by Antwerp merchants. Indeed, this book is firmly situated in the historiography, and paradigms, of economic history, rather than urban or social history. The introduction is actually rather sparse when it comes to the urban context, and neglects to mention many of the more significant recent works on other early modern mercantile cities.

The main chapters of the book are structured around particular aspects of trade, and equally around different bodies of primary source material. The first chapter attempts to quantify the number of ‘local’ merchants active in sixteenth-century Antwerp and, more interestingly, establishes the profile of their trade, which was almost as diverse as that of foreign merchants in the city. This contradicts the established view that Antwerp merchants would have exploited their advantages of local connections, knowledge and language to export a much higher proportion of local goods, rather than engaging in the ‘transit’ trade of international commodities. The second chapter expands upon this point and provides a very useful summary of local industries, and their connections with the Antwerp market. While local merchants did not confine themselves to local trade, they certainly did exploit their competitive advantages.

Chapters 3 and 4 shift the focus onto the financing of trade. Antwerp's notarial acts provide the basis for a detailed discussion of business partnerships drawn up between merchants. The majority of the small sample that Puttevils examined involved Netherlandish merchants who were not family, perhaps showing the limited circumstances when such documents would be invoked. The material is nonetheless very rich, and it is perhaps disappointing that the analysis is mainly technical, when the material appears to have the potential for a much richer qualitative study of the social and commercial networks behind the partnerships. The fourth chapter addresses the Bill Obligatory (bond), a vital instrument of early modern trade which has nonetheless received far less attention than Bills of Exchange. Crucially, this discussion includes unregistered private bonds evidenced through account books, notarial registers, inventories and court cases, as well as the larger formal registered debts which have dominated many influential accounts of mercantile debt (but which represent only the tip of the iceberg). The chapter analyses the various forms of ‘IOU’, and their differing use by different nations of merchants, in great detail, and clarity, and should prove useful to all historians of medieval and early modern trade.

The fifth chapter addresses the political and legal framework of the city of Antwerp – presented in the language of economics as ‘open access institutions’. Puttevils shows how the urban government, which rather unusually lacked merchant involvement, provided a strong but neutral court system in which neither locals nor foreigners were apparently at an advantage. The absence of a strong mercantile interest on the city council, the author suggests, helped maintain this neutrality and prevented any impulse toward rent seeking, which ultimately benefited trade for all (p. 164). The conclusions of the book are relatively reserved, but emphasize the advantages offered to Netherlandish merchants by their proximity to the qualities of the Antwerp market and its legal infrastructure, rather than their having possessed any overt advantage by virtue of their local origins.

It is perhaps regrettable that the opportunity was not taken to expand more significantly beyond the author's Ph.D. thesis. At several points in the book, the reader is left wanting to know more about the merchants themselves, but their activities tend to be subsumed into economic ideal-types. At several points, the book hints at the networks and connections between merchants, and between merchants and producers, and it would have been wonderful to have seen further and more detailed study and analysis of this aspect. It is also unfortunate that typographical and stylistic errors were not attended to more thoroughly. The publishers’ choice of endnotes rather than footnotes is also regrettable. Nonetheless, this book shows the fruits of detailed, and perhaps most impressively varied, research into the merchants of Antwerp in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. It will undoubtedly serve as an important work of reference on this most important of early modern cities, and as an intriguing point of comparison for scholars of other mercantile cities.