Becoming a correspondent - Sciences Po Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Enterprise and Society Année : 2019

Becoming a correspondent

Résumé

This article discusses the relational and rhetorical foundations of more than 300 first letters sent in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by merchant or banking houses based in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas to two prominent French firms: Roux Brothers and Greffulhe Montz & Cie. We used a quantitative analysis of qualitative aspects of first letters to go beyond the standard opposition between premodern personal exchanges and modern impersonal transactions. The expansion of commercial networks during the period under analysis is often believed to have relied on families and ethnic networks and on explicit recommendations worded in the formulas prescribed in merchant manuals. However, most first letters did not use such resources. In many cases, commercial operations began thanks to a mutual acquaintance but without a formal recommendation. This was in fact the norm in the eighteenth century—and an underestimated foundation of the expansion of European commercial networks. In the early nineteenth century, this norm became less prevalent: it was replaced by diverse relational and rhetorical strategies, from recommendations to prospective letters dispensing with any mention of relationships. Whether before or after 1800, the relational and rhetorical resources displayed in letters did not systematically influence the sender’s chances of becoming a correspondent; instead, they depended on the receiving firm’s commercial strategy.

Domaines

Histoire
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
becoming-a-correspondent.pdf (541.54 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
Loading...

Dates et versions

hal-01685251 , version 1 (16-01-2018)
hal-01685251 , version 2 (10-10-2018)

Identifiants

Citer

Arnaud Bartolomei, Claire Lemercier, Viera Rebolledo-Dhuin, Nadège Sougy. Becoming a correspondent: The Foundations of New Merchant Relationships in Early Modern French Trade (1730–1820). Enterprise and Society, 2019, 20 (3), pp.533-577. ⟨10.1017/eso.2018.88⟩. ⟨hal-01685251v2⟩
342 Consultations
381 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More