Fellowship and Freedom

Book excerpt: This is the first modern study of the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers - England's most important trading company of the sixteenth century - in its final century of existence as a privileged organisation. Over this period, the Company's main trade, the export of cloth to northwest Europe, was overshadowed by rising traffic with the wider world, whilst its privileges were continually criticised in an era of political revolution. But the Company and its membership were not passive victims of these changes; rather, they were active participants in the commercial and political dramas of the century. Using thousands of neglected private merchant papers, Fellowship and Freedom views the Company from the perspective of its members, in the process bringing to life the complex social worlds of early modern merchants. For members, 'freedom' meant not just the right to access a privileged market, but also to trade independently, which could conflict with the 'fellowship' of corporate affiliation, and the responsibilities to the collective that it entailed. The study's major theme is the challenge of maintaining corporate unity in the face of this and other pressures that the Company faced. It restores the centrality of the Merchant Adventurers within three important historical narratives: England's transition from the margins to the centre of the European, and later global, economy; the rise and fall of the merchant corporation as a major form of commercial government in premodern Europe; and the political history of the corporation in an era of state formation and revolution.