For much of the sixteenth century, Antwerp held the position as one of the most important commercial cities of Europe. Every product important to Europe's early modern economy was bought and sold in the city. Merchants from all over Europe descended on the city known for its bustling markets and advantageous and open institutions. The city, in a sense, served as a commercial bridge between the Middle Ages and modernity. Foreign merchants dominated the city's long-distance trade; Italian, South German, Hanseatic, Spanish, Portuguese, and English merchants, to name only the most important groups, together conducted the lion's share of the import and export trades. It is, perhaps, no surprise that generations of scholars (including this reviewer) have studied these foreign merchant communities in great detail. The merchants of the city and the surrounding regions, however, is the one group of merchants active in long-distance trade that is much less well understood. The focus of most historical research on Antwerp's foreign merchant communities to the exclusion of the city's native merchants, has, as Puttevils rightly points out, led many to the conclusion that native merchants had almost no role to play in long-distance trade. It is these local merchants that Puttevils has chosen to study.

In this book, which is a lightly revised version of his dissertation, Puttevils proposes some factors that explain the ascent of Antwerp's native merchants; factors that are not too different from those that have been proposed for the success of other early modern merchant groups. For example, he points out that Low Countries merchants enjoyed access to local production, good transportation networks, financial expertise and access to capital, and favorable institutions, to name only a few advantages. Puttevils admits that these are the very kinds of factors that allowed other merchant groups to succeed as well, and while all of these factors had a role to play, his goal is to show that for Low Countries merchants some factors were more important than others.

Following a brief introduction to the Antwerp market, the first chapter presents native merchants as a substantial and growing commercial force in the city's long-distance trade. What is interesting is that Puttevils found little evidence to suggest that native merchants specialized in locally produced goods. Indeed, native merchants were just as active in the trade in so-called transit goods as were foreign merchants. This is not to suggest that merchants eschewed specialization. Native merchants specialized in any number of goods and even in destinations, rather than focusing only on local products. That said, Antwerp merchants were not oblivious to the products of the city's hinterland. The native merchants served an important function as intermediaries between producers in the countryside and the city's markets.

While the first two chapters of the book focus on merchants’ activities and their relationships with Antwerp's hinterland, the third chapter on financing and organizing partnerships and the fourth chapter on the merchants’ debt financing will be of particular interest to business historians. These two chapters discuss the nuts and bolts of business organization in one of early modern Europe's most important commercial cities. Native merchants clearly benefitted from the financing and organizational traditions of the many foreign merchant groups present in Antwerp during the sixteenth century. Puttevils highlights the flexibility in partnership contracts registered with the city (primarily nonkin partnerships) that allowed native merchants considerable discretion in choosing beneficial organizational forms and in partnership capitalization. Flexibility extended into the realm of debt financing as well. Chapter 5 delves into the changes the bill obligatory went through during the sixteenth century as it became one of the native merchants’ preferred forms to transfer sums of money.

But it was Antwerp's favorable and open-access institutions that put Low Countries merchants on a more equal footing with foreign merchants. To be sure, Antwerp's ruling elite was keen on attracting foreign merchants to its markets, often at the expense of native merchants who were not allowed to organize as a guild. The city's institutions, such as its markets and exchanges, court system, and commercial regulations, allowed native merchants to compete alongside the foreigners and even to expand into foreign markets.

Jeroen Puttevils has covered some well-trod ground in this book. His description of the Antwerp market does not deviate much from the historiography, and most of the commercial technique he presents are in line with current knowledge on the subjects. The contribution he makes with this book is to move away from a study that focuses on foreign merchant groups to one that puts Antwerp's native merchants front and center. With this book he certainly reached his goal, which was to describe and explain the rise and successes of the Low Countries’ merchants.