The Self-Perception of Early Modern Capitalists [Hardcover]

A collection of essays by leading historians of early modern Europe and the U.S., this books explores how merchants, entrepreneurs, and other early modern capitalists viewed themselves.Theological Roots of the Medieval/Modern Merchants' Self-Representation- G. Todeschini PART I: SELF-IMAGES Images and Self-Images of Sephardic Merchants in Early Modern Europe and the Mediterranean- F. Trivellato Merchants in Charge. The Self-Perception of Amsterdam Merchants, ca. 1550-1700- C. Lesger Merchants on the Defensive: National Self-Images in the Dutch Republic of the Late Eighteenth Century- D. Sturkenboom PART II: CAPITALISM AS NORMATIVE Merchants and Gentlemen in Eighteenth-Century Sweden: Worlds of Jean Abraham Grill- L. M?ller Professional Ethics and Commercial Rationality at the Beginning of the Modern Era- J. Hoock The Anxious Merchant, the Bold Speculator, and the Malicious Bankrupt: Doing Business in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg- M. Lindemann Accounting for War and Revolution: Philadelphia Merchants and Commercial Risk, 1774-1811 PART III: INDIVIDUALS AND STRIVING Accounting for Science: How a Merchant Kept His Books in Elizabethan London- D. Harkness Coming of Age in Trade: Masculinity and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England- J. Smail Success and Self-Loathing in the Life of an Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneur- M. Kadane

This collection is highly original and will appeal to all students of early modern Europe. The editors have assembled front-line pieces of scholarship that put European townsmen, and some townswomen, on the verge of the modern in an entirely new light. The new sources revealed here give a tolerant yet precise view of the the early modern middle class that comes out of actually listening to it, and will inspire a new generation of scholars.

- Deirdre McCloskey, author of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006)

Author Margaret C. Jacob: Margaret C. Jacob is Distinguished Professor of Histoló0