Merchants & Revolution – Commercial Change, Political Conflict, & London′s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 - Hardcover

Brenner, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691055947 ISBN 13: 9780691055947

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Robert Brenner offers a socio-political account of the transformation of English commerce in the century after 1550 and a socio-economic explanation of the political alignments of the London merchant community in the conflicts of the early Stuart period. In a major reinterpretation of long-term commercial change, he demonstrates that new possibilities in the import trades--more so than problems in the traditional cloth trade--were behind the foundation of the long-distance commerce to the east. He shows, in turn, the way in which social groups of great City merchants wielded organizational and political power to exploit the emerging commercial opportunities. Brenner demonstrates the enormous significance of merchant politics for national political development from 1621 to 1653. He brings out, in particular, the decisive roles played from 1640 by London's great company merchants in support of the crown and by a new social group of entrepreneurs--the politically radical and militantly Puritan traders who developed the colonial plantation commerce--in support of the parliamentary leadership. The new colonial merchants assumed great national influence with Cromwell's victory, becoming the chief architects of the Commonwealth's dynamic commercial policy.

About this title

Review

Winner of the 1993 Forkosch Prize, American Historical Association

About the Author

Robert Brenner is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0691055947
• ISBN 13: 9780691055947
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 754