In 1781, Peter Tolson, a merchant in Leeds, wrote a letter responding to his son's proposal to form an import and export partnership with a Mr. Merac: “It is a very weighty affair to form partnerships and requires deliberations and enquirys. As to Mr Merac, he may or he may not be a person of honor and probity and therefore it behoves you to enter into no connections with him but what are mere commissions.”Footnote 1 The father's concerns were natural enough, for to enter into a partnership was to put one's credit—encompassing both assets and reputation—into the hands of another person. As Tolson well knew, however, the prospect of his son's partnership merely magnified the risk inherent in all commercial transactions in the eighteenth century, for even the “mere commissions” he suggested as an alternative carried some risk, not least because they almost invariably involved credit in the strictly economic sense of delayed payment.

While this merchant's advice to his son is worthy of note because it so clearly illustrates how the concepts of “credit” and “risk” were closely entwined in the everyday concerns of middling people engaged in trade, it is all the more so because of the presence of a third concept, “honor.” Normally thought to be central to the social world of the landed elite, or more broadly to personal definitions of sexual reputation and identity, honor functions here almost as an antidote to risk, for it is only the answer to the question about Merac's honor that might transform a foolhardy venture into a potentially sound enterprise. Tolson's reference to honor in this context is thus an example of how an exploration of credit, risk, and honor can illuminate the links between attitudes central to the merchants’ identity and the realities created by the commercial world in which they operated.

Appreciating the significance of these links between economic practice and cultural identity requires moving beyond the conventional approaches to credit in the eighteenth century. There is, of course, little dispute over the importance of credit in this period. Pride of place goes to the financial revolution of the late eighteenth century that fundamentally transformed Britain's financial system by creating a national debt and the financial instruments and institutions that served it.Footnote 2 In addition, studies of capital formation have illuminated the role credit played in allowing the expansion of production during the course of the century, while work on exports has shown how credit facilitated the growth of overseas trade and of empire.Footnote 3 Similarly, studies of home demand and consumption have shown how credit helped to expand the scope and quantity of goods which British men and women purchased during the course of the century, while work on credit systems and crises has illustrated the ways in which the credit markets changed during this period.Footnote 4

Yet if the traditional context for our acknowledgment of the importance of credit is that of an economic analysis, more recent work has begun to make the same case from a broader cultural perspective. John Brewer and Kathleen Wilson, for example, have examined how the creation of the national debt helped to shape political ideology and national identity.Footnote 5 Others, including Margaret Hunt, Toby Ditz, and Margot Finn, have examined how credit and the other uncertainties of the eighteenth-century economy shaped family dynamics and gender identities of men and women.Footnote 6 Finally, literary scholars such as Catherine Ingrassia, Liz Bellamy, and James Raven have explored how credit and the social perceptions of those using it were reflected in literary representations of eighteenth-century society.Footnote 7 The common thrust of this work has been to show that the contingency and contestation inherent in credit was a significant factor shaping politics, society, and culture in eighteenth-century Britain.

However, with the exception of Craig Muldrew's work on credit in the early modern community and some suggestive studies of credit in eighteenth-century France, these insights have not been applied to the credit used in commerce.Footnote 8 This is a mistake, for, given that credit was a pervasive feature of all commercial transactions in the eighteenth century, traders’ experiences with it must have shaped their world view in significant ways. There is, in particular, every reason to assume that the kind of contingency and contest evident in analyses of governmental and familial credit was also at play in the commercial context. To appreciate these aspects of commercial credit, we must stop treating credit as an abstract factor of production (or consumption) and approach it instead as an open-ended and everyday element in the lives of merchants and manufacturers.

Framing the problem in this fashion is to borrow the insights of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, insights that have been taken up and more fully articulated in the work of Anthony Giddens and Marshal Sahlins.Footnote 9 Bourdieu argued that an analysis of the discrepancies between the actual behaviors of informants and the cultural codes by which they claim to live allows the anthropologist to appreciate the role that contingency plays in daily life. Bourdieu developed this approach as a critique of the neat reciprocities of structural anthropology, but his efforts to analytically distinguish “practice” from “culture” are equally applicable to the field of economics. In the case of commercial credit, for example, an economic analysis will ignore the contingent experience of economic actors in the interval between the granting of credit and its repayment and focus instead on the final result. This temptation is particularly strong in the case of eighteenth-century credit because one very important source for such analysis—the ledger—presents credit in terms of figures recorded at the end of the accounting year when the merchant calculated the balance of each account. Such an analysis can tell us about the sources of the credit that made economic expansion or overseas trade possible, but it is incapable of comprehending what this inherent and inevitable contingency meant to traders or how they sought to comprehend and cope with it.Footnote 10

The contingency in question, of course, was risk, for to extend commercial credit in the eighteenth century, most commonly by shipping goods in advance of payment or accepting as payment bills of exchange drawn on a third party, was to risk one's capital in a environment fraught with uncertainty. The analysis of merchants’ correspondence and other discursive sources presented here suggests that commercial actors understood the risks and obligations that defined their relationship in terms of a language of honor. This language of honor encompassed both the ways in which merchants presented themselves in their dealings with others and their attempts to project power in commercial relationships by enforcing those expectations in others. Furthermore, an appreciation of ways in which the merchants’ code of honor was rooted in their experiences with credit offers some insights into the complex history of honor in this period and the particular ways they positioned themselves in the shifting social and cultural environment of eighteenth-century Britain.

The first part of the article sets up the subsequent discussion by outlining the key features of the system of commercial credit within which merchants operated. The second part examines the language of honor associated with credit and the particular characteristics of the merchants’ honor. The third and final section takes up an analysis of the ways in which this language of honor shaped the outlook of commercial folk in this society. The analysis throughout focuses on those tradesmen who engaged in commerce at the wholesale level—buying (or making) goods on a relatively large scale and/or selling them over relatively long distances. For simplicity, I will refer to such individuals as merchants, although I use the term in its broadest sense, including both domestic and overseas merchants and merchant manufacturers.Footnote 11

Before discussing honor, it is necessary to explore the two most important ways in which operation of a merchant's business involved credit during the second half of the eighteenth century. First, and perhaps most obviously, credit was essential as a means for facilitating exchange. Because of the chronic shortage of cash, this statement is something of a truism, but it had particular force for merchants and manufacturers because many, if not most, of their transactions were with individuals who lived outside of their own community, hundreds or even thousands of miles away. By the mid-eighteenth century, such exchanges were usually conducted by means of a credit instrument known as a bill of exchange. Typically a bill involved at least three parties: the drawer (the person issuing the bill), the payer (the person named to pay the sum specified), and the payee (the person being paid).Footnote 12 In these bills, the debt that one merchant owed another for goods was satisfied by a bill drawn on a third party and made payable to the creditor. Thus Samuel Hill of Halifax received a letter from Pieter Kops in Amsterdam enclosing a bill of exchange for £250 that was drawn on Henry Norris of London. Kops owed Hill the money for cloth that Hill had sent to Amsterdam, and he drew a bill on Norris for that amount. The webs of debt handled by this system were very complex and interconnected. The transactions between Norris and Kops that had created the balance on which the latter drew almost certainly involved other parties in both England and Holland. Moreover, although entitled to do so, Hill almost certainly did not go and collect £250 in cash from Norris when the bill came due. Rather he sent it to another merchant who was acting as his banker and drew bills of his own on that balance. He could, however, also have endorsed it over to another party as payment for a completely unrelated debt providing the creditor being paid had confidence in the person on whom it was drawn.

The bill of exchange was more secure and more flexible than other means of making remittances, which is why it came to dominate commercial exchanges after its origins in the late seventeenth century.Footnote 13 The bill, which was payable only to the payee or to his order, avoided the risk of sending cash, a commodity that was often in short supply in any case.Footnote 14 It also freed merchants from the complexity of a trade based on the mutual exchange of cargoes. Trade on that basis was never very popular with producers, for, except in the case of raw materials they used in production, they rarely had the specialized knowledge and the commercial contacts necessary to profit from the return cargos.Footnote 15 Even overseas merchants came to rely on the bill, for, in the complex terrain of interlocking triangular trades which comprised the economy of Britain and its empire, bilateral exchanges of goods increasingly gave way to unilateral shipments that required their use to balance the books.Footnote 16

A second, quite literal way in which credit was crucial to the workings of the eighteenth-century economy had to do with its importance for the management of capital. Eighteenth-century businesses were typically short of capital; hence merchants sought to exploit their commercial connections in order to expand the amount of capital available to them, most commonly by buying goods on credit—a relatively strictly defined grace period of up to twelve months before any remittance was due.Footnote 17 However, using credit as a way to extend capital was a two-edged sword, for, while merchants were often able to buy goods on credit, they were just as often obligated to give credit when they sold in their turn. Indeed, credit terms were a crucial marketing tool, since offering a longer credit (even at a proportionally higher price) could make one's products more attractive than those of competitors.Footnote 18 Commercial folk thus had to be very careful to balance the flow of incoming remittances against their outgoing drafts because, in the absence of the credit facilities provided by a bank, it was difficult to raise additional funds at short notice.Footnote 19 A prudent approach to such calculations is nicely illustrated in a letter in which Tolson explained to his son how he intended to manage the firm's short-term cash reserves: “Your aunt at Otley has wrote she cannot let us have any money … but we are in no want yet and has £300 and upwards in the bank. B&C does well for us, in always suffering us to draw, and we have got some wool lately at 6 months credit … as we can remit any time and have the discount, but I thought it would be the best to keep always a reserve of £200 to £300 as you might send us an order after the fair which might be for coarse cloths and must be paid for.”Footnote 20 It was all too easy, however, for merchants to overextend themselves and come up short when they needed ready money for a purchase or to pay a bill, a miscalculation that could easily affect the solvency of those with whom they traded.

Although credit was a pervasive feature of this society, the particular features of the networks of credit used in wholesale commerce created, if loosely and imperfectly, a community of merchants who identified themselves to each other in terms of their grasp of such technicalities as the bill of exchange or the use of credit terms to manage capital. It is, for example, significant that one of the red flags that prevented Samuel Lister from jumping wholeheartedly into a partnership with his cousin William Fawcett was the knowledge that William, a military man who had not been brought up in trade, did not fully understand the “the methods of giving credit, drawing bills etc. etc. which seems to me essential.”Footnote 21

Within this commercial community, merchants had to extend trust of a very particular sort. To grant a credit period of six to twelve months when selling goods required that one trust one's creditor to remit the bill at the proper time.Footnote 22 Moreover, one had to trust that the bill itself would be a good one, drawn on the basis of a balance held in the hands of a sound house that would pay the debt on the date specified. But to trust was to risk, for with each and every transaction, the merchant put up a financial stake in an environment in which information was imperfect and the mechanisms that might have ensured that the other party performed his or her side of the bargain were few and weak. Even in the most extreme case—an outright refusal to pay an acknowledged debt—the law afforded only limited protection. Merchants could go to court to secure the repayment of a specific debt accrued by way of commerce, and, in the event that a firm defaulted on all of its debts, it was possible to sue for bankruptcy, but both were difficult, complex, and sometimes expensive processes that often yielded considerably less than was actually due. Joseph Edwards, for instance, advised one of his correspondents that he should be quite pleased at a proposal presented by the relations of a Mr. Fletcher for a settlement that would return 10s. on the pound, since a formal proceeding of bankruptcy looked as if it would only yield 7s. 6d.Footnote 23 Firms engaged in the export trade lacked even this flimsy recourse, for a debtor in Germany or Italy could not easily be pursued in a British court. Against lesser offenses—delayed payment, unjust claims for abatements—the merchant was virtually powerless.Footnote 24

Engaging in commerce in the eighteenth century was of course risky in all manner of respects, but it was in the realm of trust or credit that merchants were least able to control for those risks. Losses sustained to goods during transit could be limited by proper packing (a charge most often born by the recipient in any case). Losses from the improper handling of goods by workers or from pilfering could often be limited by supervision. Other kinds of risks, most commonly those of fire or loss at sea, could be controlled by purchasing insurance.Footnote 25 However, the only way a merchant could minimize the risks associated with credit was by dealing with individuals who could be trusted to pay their debts, a proposition whose inherently circular logic is indicative of the problems they faced. Even in an ideal world, when trading with a limited number of houses whose reputation one had established through personal history, risk lurked in the shadows. History could be deceptive, and the complexity of the networks of credit in the eighteenth century meant that an individual's willingness to pay was not a guarantee that the debt would be secured. Moreover, the commercial environment of the mid- and late eighteenth century was anything but an ideal world in this respect, for, broadly speaking, the networks of exchange became more and more complex over the course of the century. Although trade in some commodities became more centralized, the growth of trade from and to the outports and the tendency, in some industries, for manufacturers to develop their own marketing networks suggest that the general trend was in the opposite direction.Footnote 26 The result was that merchants in this period often had to trade with a large number of principals and often had to initiate credit relationships with firms about which they had only limited, often hearsay, evidence.Footnote 27

To engage in wholesale commerce in the eighteenth century was to be enmeshed in a complex and all-encompassing web of credit whose very structure required exposure to particular kinds of risk. Merchants could and did take great pains to limit such risks—inquiring into reputations, building up relationships—but, in the last analysis, there were limits to the control they could exert over the multifaceted system which formed the lifeblood of trade. Yet, as their letters show, merchants did compensate by attempting to project power in commercial exchanges by using the language of honor. Letter books and other similar sources show that, again and again, merchants and manufacturers stressed either their own honorable intentions toward others or their expectation that others should act in an honorable fashion toward them.Footnote 28 Such discursive attempts to project power were most successful when they complemented the practical steps individuals could take in their own interest, but that fact must not obscure the importance of the cultural conceptions underlying the everyday use of credit.

One manifestation of this discourse was the use of the word “honor” in a conventional and sometimes almost superficial sense. It was, for example, commonplace to inform one's correspondents that the bills of exchange they had drawn would be duly honored when presented for acceptance. While refusing to accept the bill could indeed have implications for the reputation of the drawer, accepting it was not an act invested with a tremendous meaning, for one was simply acknowledging the obligation to pay a contracted debt. A significant and telling exception to that statement is the presumably rare instance in which a merchant might be induced to accept a bill drawn on someone else. The Leeds firm of Ibbetson and Koster explained to a correspondent that the bill drawn on Henry Uhthoff that they had presented for acceptance would probably be returned unpaid; however, they reassured the correspondent that there was a good chance that someone would “pay it for the honour of the drawer or endorser” who were, respectively, merchants in Amsterdam and Ghent.Footnote 29 The implication is that both the drawer (the person owing the money in the first place) and the endorser (who by virtue of his endorsement was liable for the bill's payment) were merchants of good standing and thus that their compatriots—and national identity is clearly identified as a motive—would accept the bill in order to save them from embarrassment.

Similar uses of the word “honor” appear in letters where merchants are making claims about their reputation as the supplier of goods: “You may, Sirs, depend entirely upon my honour, and be assured every piece is of the best quality, and I can assure you upon my credit, I never made a better or completer sortment of goods in my life.”Footnote 30 In these instances, the term “honor” should probably be understood as making reference to the rather generalized expectations about fairness and reputation that characterized eighteenth-century commerce and that lay at the backbone of the copious advice offered to tradesmen and budding tradesmen in published literature.Footnote 31 Such expectations appear both in letters exhorting the recipient to behave honestly and in letters in which the writers were attempting to project or protect their own reputations. Around midcentury, a correspondent told Samuel Hill of Halifax to cut his patterns “fairly from the pieces” when preparing bales for export to Russia and to be fair or “generous” in setting his profit margins and credit terms.Footnote 32 Charles Hudson, a Yorkshire merchant, declined to take up a commission because he had already accepted a similar commission from the correspondent's competitor. He therefore felt he could not “do justice to you and myself” in undertaking the work; he did, however, suggest the name of another supplier.Footnote 33

Other uses of the discourse of honor, however, move beyond these conventional banalities to engage more substantive concerns—that is, ones where money was at stake. Such usages appear most commonly when disputes arose, for these were moments when the risks inherent in eighteenth-century commerce became manifest. Thus a London cloth factor berated one of his correspondents for sending poor-quality cloth: “I am afraid I shall lose the best customer I have got for I passed my word of honor they [the cloths] should be good things.”Footnote 34 Similarly, Stannard protested to a firm of yarn merchants that the yarn they had supplied was “short reeled” and that they had sent the invoice before actually shipping the goods—something of a sharp practice, since the credit term began at the date of invoice. Stannard began this diatribe with the words: “You may depend upon the honor and justness of my charge and of my servants, whose fidelity I can depend upon.”Footnote 35 A letter from the Holroyd brothers of Leeds expresses their “surprise” at the discount which a new correspondent expected on the invoices the firm presented for dyeing and finishing his cloth. They explained that they could not in justice grant the discount as it would be unfair to their other customers, and they went on to complain that they felt ill used, as they had purchased some supplies specifically to do this firm's work.Footnote 36

On occasion, these protestations of honor could be quite heated. In September and October of 1760, the Leeds firm of Ibbetson and Koster wrote a series of letters to their most important correspondents in London about a dispute that had arisen between the two parties. At issue was a shipment of cloth sent to Naples on their joint account that the Italian merchant had refused to accept because it had been packed incorrectly. Ibbetson and Koster expected Battiere and Zornlin to absorb their share of the loss that the mistake occasioned. They expressed themselves as being “surprised to find you don’t chuse to have any concern in this affair,” and they went on to say: “for though there is no written contract betwixt us yet we have ever looked upon our obligation on honor as sacred as any contract.”Footnote 37 A similar sentiment is evident in Merac's reaction to the underhanded way in which Richard Tolson attempted to break off the partnership they had formed in 1781: “I Firmly believe that you would not have countenanced or suffered if in your power to prevent any indirect means or unworthyStratagems. honest Men know no such expression have not occasion to advert to it.”Footnote 38

A final example comes from the letters that Stannard wrote in attempting to track down the origins of a false rumor that he had stopped payment on his bills. The letters began the moment Stannard heard from his banker, Peter Gaussens, that a rumor was spreading that he was broke. The first letter, demanding the name of the person who had given him this report, was addressed to William Reynolds, from whom Gaussens had the news. In it, Stannard explained that “I would pay no regard to such vile aspersions merely upon my own account, and as I apprehend your author to be a person of consequence, I am called upon by my honour and credit for your explanation.” What Stannard found out was that the report had originated in the unfounded opinion of a journeyman weaver that was overheard at an inn. With this information, Stannard wrote a blistering letter accusing Roger Preston of reporting the hearsay to Reynolds: “Is it, think you, sufficient satisfaction to me, your being concerned you ever mentioned it, or can you suppose any tradesman of honour, or property, will suffer themselves to be treated in such a scandalous manner? You who know trade and the consequences of credit should know better.”Footnote 39 As was true of Merac, Stannard was almost apoplectic in his rage at the individual who had started this rumor that threatened his very livelihood.

While it might be possible to dismiss the use of the term honor in the phrase “honor a bill of exchange,” as trivial, the evidence from commercial disputes suggests that the language of honor was more than mere convention. Confronted with a breakdown in the trust that made commerce possible, merchants articulated their expectations about proper behavior in the commercial world using a language of honor. In doing so, they sought both to compel others to behave according to the accepted standards and to establish that their own actions met such standards. As the examples show, one crucial aspect of the merchants’ code of honor was the expectation that they would present themselves to the world as vigorous and spirited men, quick to rise to their own defense.

The resolutions of such disputes, however, reveal that another crucial aspect of the code of honor to which merchants sought to conform their actions was reason. In part, reason was an important element of the way in which they sought to legitimize the position they were taking. The crucial point that Ibbetson and Koster explained to their correspondents in London was that “by our contract with you [you] have always been intitled to and have always received the half our profits [therefore] we cannot help thinking it reasonable” that you should bear half the risk.Footnote 40 When a Mr. Quin requested that Stannard defer charging him for goods stranded in his warehouse because of the outbreak of war with Spain, Stannard riposted that such an action on his part would be “taking the burden off his [Quin’s] own shoulders and laying it upon ours, which is by no means reasonable, more especially as we were no ways accessary to the misfortune.”Footnote 41

Reason is also evident in the way that merchants were careful to balance such forceful language with protestations of their willingness to compromise. Having rejected Quin's proposals for an indefinite stay, Stannard did offer him an extra three or four months of credit on the bale in view of the circumstances, and his outrage against Preston and Reynolds for their slanders against his character subsided without a trace. The same was true of Merac, for he was doing business with the Tolson family on quite amiable terms within a month.Footnote 42 Ibbetson and Koster took pains to assure their correspondents of their good faith: “It gives us very great pain to think there should arise any cause of dispute betwixt us or that we should differ so much from your opinion.” They were also careful to avoid appearing too dogmatic: “Don’t imagine from the contents of our last letter that we are obstinate in our opinion about [the] affair.”Footnote 43

The importance of reason was raised to the level of philosophical principle in Tolson's advice to his son on handling troublesome correspondents, in this case a Dutch merchant whose petty complaints about the quality of the cloth were compounded by his unwillingness to pay the invoice by its due date: “I would have you to go to him in as genteel a manner as possible and inform him of his mistake, and whatever he says to you be as determined to keep your temper and behave like a Stoic philosopher.” Peter followed these instructions with an outline of the arguments his son should pursue during the interview. First, Richard was to try and convince this “curious Dutchman” that he had agreed to a credit of seven months, a fact reflected in the price the Tolson's put on the invoice. Then, Richard was to attempt to address the various petty abatements the merchant had deducted. However, this second objective was really intended as a temporary bargaining position, for, as he remarked, “if you can make nothing of him about the lengths I would give it up, if you can fix him only to remit punctually in 7 months.”Footnote 44

As the last remark suggests, it is possible to read the merchants’ code of honor as a hypocritical sham, a language adopted merely out of convenience in the pursuit of profit. Yet this fact does not gainsay its status as a language of honor, for as William Reddy has pointed out, honor is not the same as virtue; what matters is not that one always does the right thing, but that one be seen to be doing the right thing.Footnote 45 In the way that avowals of integrity made in advance of a deal might have been little more than part of the sales pitch, the protestations of foul play made after a dispute had erupted might have been diplomatic bluster designed to establish a bargaining position from which to make a more advantageous compromise. Tolson had cause to advise his son to be reasonable, for the goods were already in the hands of this “curious Dutchman,” and gentle persuasion was about the only way of inducing him to make a full and prompt payment in return.

The necessity of distinguishing virtue and honor also sheds light on the blatant casuistry that merchants displayed when justifying their actions with reference to the code of commercial honor. Criticized for hiring a junior partner away from a rival firm in Norwich, Stannard defended himself on the grounds that he had acted honorably—though he added, perhaps aware that his case was weak, that his actions were within the law.Footnote 46 Perhaps more revealing is the advice that Tolson gave to his son Richard on how to approach a firm in Rotterdam in order to get a share of the orders that this firm normally placed with another Leeds firm, a firm at which his other son, Peter Tolson Junior, was employed: “and think it would not be amiss if you was to hint that TG, who is the only person in that house [in Leeds], being for a year past indisposed and not able to manage any business. But that as your brother and you are first cousins to Mr. G we earnestly request Mr. Baartmans not to mention our application when they wrote at any time to said house as it perhaps might make a family quarrel.” The quotation is doubly interesting. First, the family's willingness to be flexible in their sense of honor is highlighted by the fact that the father had originally written the words “insane and under the care of Dr. Morro at London and not being soon likely to be better” but struck them out and inserted the word “indisposed” on the brother's advice.Footnote 47 Tolson was perfectly willing to try and use his other son's privileged, and thus protected, knowledge of another firm's correspondents to steal a march on them, but he apparently had some scruples left. Second, the letter assumes that the Dutch house that received this solicitation would go along with the subterfuge, presumably in the hopes that the Tolsons would serve them with better cloth at lower prices.

Yet, to focus on the very real potential for hypocrisy in the merchants’ code of honor is to overlook the forces which gave it its meaning. As I have suggested, this discourse of honor was rooted in daily experience with the risks inherent in eighteenth-century commerce, particularly those associated with credit. Trading by credit inevitably hinges on reputation, but merchants, who conducted trade beyond the confines of a physical community, had to be particularly active in creating and maintaining a reputation, since it existed within a much less tangible social context. Moreover, despite the potential for hypocrisy, this code of honor had an intrinsic meaning to the people who espoused it. George Wansey, a clothier in Wiltshire, described a recently deceased neighbor in terms that suggest that he placed great value on a man's reputation as a tradesman, and he held himself to similar standards.Footnote 48 William Pollard, struggling to make a his fortune as an import agent in the colonies, explained in a letter to a friend that he was not convinced that the riches would bring happiness and therefore hoped, most of all, that he could “conduct my affairs with satisfaction and approbation to those I am or may be connected with and with satisfaction in my own breast.”Footnote 49 A quite similar sentiment can be found in one of the letters Tolson wrote to his son when he was at school in Holland: “I hope Gods grace will always incline you to virtue and happiness that you may pass through life with honor to your self and pleasure to your friends for without goodness there can be no happiness.”Footnote 50

An important part of the project of history should be to examine how the experiences of everyday life shaped the ways in which people construed their world. For the historian interested in the intersection between the economy and culture, this observation is particularly significant, for, as suggested in the introduction, there is an interpretive cost of isolating economic behavior from the broader cultural milieu that it influenced and in which it took place. In this article, I have sought to implement this approach by looking at credit. Credit, of course, was an inescapable element of early modern commerce, as indeed it is of commerce in any era, but the particular characteristics of credit in the mid- and late eighteenth century shaped the commercial environment merchants faced in important ways. Although the change was more a shift in emphasis within the broad continuities of existing credit practices than a dramatic transformation, the increasing dominance of the bill of exchange as the means of making remittances and the increasing complexity and size of the commercial networks in which they traded exposed wholesale merchants more fully to the risks inherent in a commercial system based on personal trust. As well as the risks inherent in the credit instrument itself, the shift toward the bill of exchange meant that more and more of a merchants’ remittances were coming from a larger number of less well-known correspondents whose only direct obligation lay in their expectation of being served well in the next order they placed, for the bill of exchange by which they paid was commercially sterile except insofar as it opened up commercial contacts for exploitation.

Merchants and manufacturers engaged in the wholesale trade in this period confronted and managed the risks associated with credit by articulating a code of honor that thus played on the indirect obligation of reputation. This discourse enjoined them to be vociferous in their claims of their own integrity and quick in their defense against sharp practice, imposition, and, of course, any challenges to their character. This same code, however, also expected them to follow the dictates of reason and to be fair and even generous in their commercial relationships. Although the nature of the evidence precludes any definitive proof, my impression is that references to honor—particularly with regard to disputes—become more common in merchants’ correspondence in the mid- and late eighteenth century, precisely the period in which the risks of engaging in commerce were becoming manifest in the rising number of bankruptcies and the increasing scope and severity of credit crises.Footnote 51

The particular nature of the link between credit and honor in the merchants’ experience and identity suggests two observations about our understanding of eighteenth-century society and the place of commercial people, or more specifically, men, in it. First, understanding the link between credit and honor offers deeper insights into the transformation in conceptions of honor and masculinity that took place during the eighteenth century.Footnote 52 Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the vigorous and violent assertions of personal and group honor characteristic of the early modern era became, according to William Reddy's suggestive study of postrevolutionary France, an invisible code, a central fact of social and gender relations but one that could not be articulated within the prevailing discourse of “interest.”Footnote 53 One important strand of the research on changing conceptions of honor in Britain has been to look at the exhortations of eighteenth-century conduct books. As several scholars have shown, the authors of this advice literature sought to redefine masculine honor in such a way as to make an individual's own sense of his self worth more important than public reputation. A crucial element in the culture of civility was that men should use their superior reason to control passionate outbursts. Yet at the same time, contemporaries were anxious that men retain those qualities that were traditionally understood to derive from a sense of honor, a pair of imperatives that , although almost contradictory, Stannard followed to the letter on hearing that his solvency was being called into question.Footnote 54

Another question the research on honor in Britain has attempted to explore is the extent to which behaviors actually changed. Robert Shoemaker has shown how public insults by and against men, and the violence and court proceedings that they generated, declined during the first part of the eighteenth century. This decline in public insult, as Shoemaker points out, neatly parallels the expectations articulated in advice books; thus it seems likely that duelers increasingly chose pistols over the sword because the necessary delay in the combat and its ritualistic form emphasized the rationality and deliberation of the participants. However, Shoemaker is unwilling to identify the advice literature itself as the primary cause of these changes in behavior. His study of dueling, for example, identifies social and even technological factors at play.Footnote 55

The language of honor used by men of commerce is suggestive in this regard because it shows how a reasonable and restrained construction of honor resonated with the experiences of this particular social group. While merchants needed to vigorously assert and defend their honor as part of the way in which they coped with the risks inherent in trade, they had to temper that honor with a healthy dose of practicality, for the only point of being in trade in the first place was to make a living, an end not entirely consistent with rigid adherence to principle. The explicit references that merchants made to their honor also sheds light on what William Reddy has described as the democratization of honor, the assumption, characteristic of postrevolutionary France, that “every worthy male citizen, irrespective of birth or rank, could distinguish themselves by bravery … or public service.”Footnote 56 While the evidence presented here is not a sufficient basis for arguing that commercial culture caused the democratization of honor in Britain, it indicates that non-elites were appropriating the forms and language of an aristocratic honor that was already being rationalized and civilized.

A second aspect of the merchants’ code of honor, however, stood at odds with this culture of civility. Stannard's spirited defense of his commercial honor calls to mind features of the concept that eighteenth-century moralists would have found less palatable, for his response bears striking parallels with the formal rules associated with the duel of honor. The insult made against his honor demanded a response not on his own account but because of the public scandal it created. He was, moreover, quite explicit in his demand for “satisfaction,” and he focused his wrath on those whose stature demanded a response, for it is clear that the journeyman who actually started the rumor was beneath his contempt.Footnote 57 It is unlikely that Stannard ever intended to challenge the man who had insulted him, so we should not imagine that he was aping the manners of the beau monde, but it is equally unlikely that he was unaware of the extent to which he was adapting that tradition.

His reaction is thus an important reminder that the merchants’ honor, despite its apparent congruency with the project of civility, shared elements with what one might call the unreconstructed honor of the landed elite. Above all, it is quite clear that, like its elite counterpart, commercial honor was closely linked with masculinity, both in the sense that it was thought to be a trait belonging to men and that to fail to maintain one's honor was to be unmanned. Ditz, for example, has shown how commercial failure was invariably read as feminine in the correspondence of Philadelphia merchants in the colonial period, and similar assumptions are evident in the correspondence studied here.Footnote 58 Maintaining honor, then, was an essential part of men's ability to maintain their place in a given social world—polite society on one hand and that of commerce on the other—and it was largely devoid of any religious or moral overtones. Men's reputations in both contexts were quite clearly public, in the sense that members of a given community traded and spread information about individuals among themselves. Finally, in both polite society and commerce, men maintained their honor with reference to risk, for it was in essence the ability to face risk with equanimity that made a man's reputation.

In this respect a comparison to gambling—another arena in which the landed elites expressed their honor—is instructive; indeed in many respects gambling is an activity more symbolic of honor than the duel, not least because it was much more common.Footnote 59 Gambling, like commerce, was inherently risky. The gentlemen who gambled, however, did so as much for the glory of a spectacular loss as that of a great win, for honor lay in showing utter disdain of the real financial risks that their actions entailed. Middling folk, of course, were not immune to the lures of gambling, hence its prominence among the vices decried in literature directed at apprentices. Moreover, even when apparently acting with foresight and prudence, middling folk were gambling, for investments in government lottery tickets and life insurance involved taking risks in the expectation of a greater gain.Footnote 60 However, in their commercial dealings, merchants conceived and negotiated risk in quite different terms, only embracing it as a means to profit and establishing their honor and masculinity by successfully avoiding or at least mitigating those risks so as to remain in trade. Merchants thus construed honor as productive. As Merac put it, in writing to Tolson about the failed partnership: “When first I entered into the plan in which I was connected with Mr R. Tolson your son it was consistant with every principle of honor, integrity, and mutual interest.”Footnote 61

This particular take on honor was freighted with meaning in the social and cultural framework of eighteenth-century society. While it may be the case that conceptions of honor were changing, public opinion linked the traditional honor of the duel and the gaming table to elite society and to the social and political authority its members enjoyed. The code of honor of commercial folk thus provided the basis on which they could launch into criticism of the social and political order, for it was no great step to apply the certainties and the values developed from one's daily experiences with credit in a commercial setting to issues of public concern. The surviving correspondence of a Wiltshire clothier records his reaction to a duel that had been fought in Bath: “How dreadfully must the laws of honour have prevailed against the dictates of reason to have demanded this decision of such foolish quarrels.”Footnote 62 Another of George Wansey's letters advises a young friend about the virtues of a rational life and dismisses distinctions of dress and title as having little to do with the path “to honor, true honor such as a rational and religious man might consistently aspire to.” He then continues: “I heartily despise the red coated slaves who, ignorant and careless of the cause in which they fight, are equally willing to defend their country or to become the tools of knaves or detestable ambition.” He admits that true military glory of the kind exemplified by the Greeks and Roman is “deservedly honored” but complains that “alas glory is now become the servant of interest.”Footnote 63

Wansey's comments on the politics of his day were equally critical and were quite explicitly grounded in his understanding of the honorable conduct required of the merchant trading on credit: “The gradual abuse of our constitution by the bad management of the public funds begins now to display its dreadful effects. Already encumbered with debts beyond the nation's ability to discharge we are playing the part of the desperate tradesman who will not break while he can borrow without the least probability that his debts can ever be discharged.”Footnote 64 Although Tolson was as patriotic as the next Briton in his desires for an English victory over the French, and the rebels, the imminent outbreak of war with Holland in 1780 prompted him to remark that “all persons (in trade) here thinks our ministry has been too hasty and peremptory in the last manifesto” delivered to the Dutch.Footnote 65 This was an unabashedly self-interested comment, for his firm, and those of his neighbors in the city of Leeds, conducted a good deal of their trade with Dutch firms or through Dutch ports, but he was also asserting that those in government lacked the judgment to distinguish between those affronts that required a response and those on which compromise was the wiser course.

Such strands of social and political criticism of course have a rich and complex pedigree. My point is not to claim any particular primacy for commercial folk in the origins and ramification of such sentiments. Rather, it is to suggest that we can better understand how such ideas might have come to have meaning for this particular social group if we think of them as the application to public issues of the cultural attitudes, particularly those involving the discourse of honor, that commercial folk constructed within and around credit.