The Self-perception of Early Modern

Labeled as greedy and self-interested, capitalists have often suffered in historians' eyes. This book looks at merchants, entrepreneurs, and other individuals from around 1500 to 1800-with some attention to their medieval roots-and asks how they actually saw themselves. Coming from deeply religious cultures, how did they relate their worldly activities to their beliefs and values? Did they see a conflict, as Weber might have imagined, or did they live at relative ease with the tensions between obedience to faith and the necessities of competition and striving? Drawing on personal letters and diaries as well as handbooks, portraiture, and other pieces of material culture in general, the contributors to this volume each help to reconstruct an understanding of the people who put in place what became the dominant economic system in the Western world. Book jacket.

Margaret Jacob is a Professor of History at UCLA. Catherine Secretan is a Professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France.

List of Illustrations	p. v
Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Prologue
Theological Roots of the Medieval/Modern Merchants' Self-Representation	p. 17
Self-Images
Images and Self-Images of Sephardic Merchants in Early Modern Europe and the Mediterranean	p. 49
Merchants in Charge: The Self-Perception of Amsterdam Merchants, ca. 1550-1700	p. 75
Merchants on the Defensive: National Self-Images in the Dutch Republic of the Late Eighteenth Century	p. 99
Capitalism as Normative
"Merchants" and "Gentlemen" in Eighteenth-Century Sweden: Worlds of Jean Abraham Grill	p. 125
Professional Ethics and Commercial Rationality at the Beginning of the Modern Era	p. 147
The Anxious Merchant, the Bold Speculator, and the Malicious Bankrupt: Doing Business in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg	p. 161
Accounting for War and Revolution: Philadelphia Merchants and Commercial Risk, 1774-1811	p. 183
Individuals and Striving
Accounting for Science: How a Merchant Kept His Books in Elizabethan London	p. 205
Coming of Age in Trade: Masculinity and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England	p. 229
Success and Self-Loathing in the Life of an Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur	p. 253
Index	p. 273
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The Self-perception of Early Modern Capitalists

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