The Anxious Merchant, the Bold Speculator, and the Malicious Bankrupt

Abstract

It has often been asserted that eighteenth-century Europeans held an “ambivalent attitude … to the growth of luxury or opulence in their societies … they valued the advantages that the growth of commercial life brought with it … [yet] they were disturbed by the effects of increased material wealth upon moral well-being.” How, then, “could man, as a citizen, enjoy material wealth without losing interest in the commonwealth?”¹ If this debate animated controversy in the Anglo-Saxon context, it assumed a very different character, and was certainly more muted, elsewhere. The influential Dutch polymath, Caspar van Barlaeus, was “bold in his intention to refute the common assumption that commerce stood in opposition to virtue and the pursuit of wisdom” and indeed even referred to God as “the great Factor.” “Ambivalence” seems very much the wrong word for Hamburg, too, where the acquisition of wealth largely (although not solely) qualified men for civic office and underwrote their social position. In such merchant republics, and despite a recurrent moralistic hand-wringing about the evil effects of too much wealth gained too rapidly, ostentatious luxury, or the suspect business practices that made them possible, citizens took commercialism for granted. Indeed, the founding articles of the Hamburg Society for the Promotion of the Arts and Useful Crafts (better known as the Patriotic Society of 1765) recognized that “our republic is nothing more than a simple merchant-city, where … everyone derives his political life, his economy, and his very being from commerce.”