Introduction

As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, Basil Yamey has pointed out that merchants in the early modern period rarely tried to precisely calculate their profits. This may be explained in his view by practical reasons – among shopkeepers, by the hap-hazard character of debtors' payments. Indeed, calculating profit during a given period implied that one take into account immobilization: debts which had not been recovered after several months represented a loss of income for the merchant, since the amount, if it had been paid back quickly, might have been re invested. Since the vast majority of sales were made on credit, and payments were often made in the form of installments rather than in a lump sum, calculating the cost of immobilization on every sales operation was very difficult. Merchants, however, still tried to assess their profits and control their credit flows.

Credit relations are generally studied from the point of view of social history. Very few studies, however, have focused on the role played by credit in merchants' businesses, or in the management practices it induced. Researchers have often been stumped by this question, deemed unsolvable or too difficult to treat given the current state of the record, or else they remained content with a few passing remarks aimed at showing the global level of sales on credit.