Abstract
Abstract The importance of overseas trade to England’s national wealth and international reputation in the eighteenth century amplified the public discourse on the social value of merchants. Contemporary conduct books described a hierarchical occupational structure, where merchants enjoyed the highest prestige within the business community, with tradesmen and manufacturers performing distinct and progressively less valued professional functions. These conduct books focused on London, England’s premier port and the beating heart of Europe’s commodity and financial markets. Historians have also given much attention to London but have equally demonstrated the importance of merchants in the ‘outports’, whose participation in England’s foreign trade engendered significant wealth, status and political influence. This article considers a different type of eighteenth-century merchant, one based within English manufacturing regions, and one that has been largely overlooked in the historiography, not least because their businesses elided the separation of production and mercantile activities espoused by contemporary didacts. Focusing on Manchester, the article demonstrates that the town’s ‘Great Oaks’ challenged London’s commercial hegemony in a distinctive way, seeking not to replicate outport merchants’ entrepreneurial verve in risky, multilateral trades, but specialising, as both manufacturers and merchants, in exporting to commercially developed markets, where the ability to supply a precise assortment of locally produced textiles was more important than the capacity to sell imports or to provide financial services to overseas clients. Although little studied, provincial merchant communities were a general feature of the more dynamic English manufacturing regions in the years immediately before, and during the onset of, industrialisation.
Highlights
Historians, in contrast, have paid much less attention to merchants in the inland towns of England’s industrial north and midlands.[5]
This article, which offers a new study of merchants and overseas trade in eighteenth-century Manchester, seeks to demonstrate that the focus on London and outport merchants has produced a rather narrow conception of the eighteenth-century merchant community, but has obscured the scale and significance of a major expansion of direct overseas trade radiating from the provincial manufacturing centres in the second half of the century
The Lancashire cotton industry was the most dynamic English manufacturing region in the second half of the eighteenth century, and has been the beneficiary of generations of historical research, it has been mainly studied as a pioneer of mechanised, factory production, with little emphasis placed on the marketing systems or personnel that channelled unprecedented quantities of Englishmanufactured cottons to international consumers
Summary
Sources: Elizabeth Raffald, The Manchester Directory for the Year 1772 (Manchester, 1772); Elizabeth Raffald, The Manchester Directory for the Year 1773 (Manchester, 1773); Elizabeth Raffald, The Manchester and Salford Directory (Manchester, 1781); Edmond Holme, A Directory for the Towns of Manchester and Salford, For the Year 1788 (Manchester, 1788); John Scholes, Scholes’s Manchester and Salford Directory (Manchester, 1794); John Scholes, Scholes’s Manchester and Salford Directory (Manchester, 1797); G. Notes: Consists of firms in the ‘country manufacturers’ section of the Manchester directories, as well as those in the Manchester section but not based in Manchester, Salford, Hulme, Ardwick, Chorlton-on-Medlock or Cheetham, as defined in the notes to Table 1. Given the still-limited importance of Manchester as a factory centre, this was likely to have been more an outcome of Manchester’s growing importance as a centre of marketing than of production.[21] The trade directories of the late 1780s and 1790s, at first look, indicate that Blackburn and Preston manufacturers retained their commercial independence from Manchester, but this is partly illusory: most of the leading north Lancashire cotton firms (including Peel, Yates & Co.; Livesey, Hargreaves & Co.; Howarths & Smith; Watson, Myers & Co.) had established permanent branches in Manchester and are listed as ‘Manchester’ rather than ‘country’ manufacturers in the directories. Kidd, ‘Canals, Rivers, and the Industrial City: Manchester’s Industrial Waterfront’, Economic History Review, lxv (2012), pp. 1,502–3
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