Historians working with business archives are acquainted with the persistent presence of distrust. It runs beneath the surface in moments of dispute or archival silence and emerges more visibly through active strategies such as cautions embedded in terse directives, juridical safeguards, and the calibrated routines of verification and control. Such gestures point to a world in which merchants anticipated failure and deception not as exceptions, but as part of how trade routinely operated. Yet, while distrust is pervasive in the archival record, it has rarely been examined as a social phenomenon in its own right. In his influential account of trust, Luhmann contended that distrust is not merely the absence of trust but a parallel strategy for reducing social complexity, with its own logic and structure.Footnote 1
Nevertheless, across the social sciences and humanities, trust has received far more sustained analytical attention than distrust, particularly as a condition for cooperation under uncertainty, ranging from interpersonal relations to complex institutional systems.Footnote 2 Economic and business historians have contributed to this broader emphasis, particularly in studies of medieval and early modern merchant networks, where trust features centrally in explaining how exchange was sustained across distance and time. As global trade expanded, these networks enabled the circulation of goods, credit, and information and underpinned activities from insurance to war finance.Footnote 3 Their importance in Europe’s economic development prompted inquiry into how trust supported collaboration in the absence of unified legal regimes, territorially consistent enforcement practices, or fully codified infrastructures for managing obligation and risk.Footnote 4 Trust was seen as essential for enabling cooperation through incomplete contracts between individuals who often had never met before.Footnote 5
Understanding the dynamics of trust, however, also necessitates an exploration of distrust, as both are interdependent forces that shape social and economic interactions. The conditions fostering distrust illuminate what is needed to cultivate trust, just as the elements that build trust can reveal the origins of distrust. Despite this interplay, few theorists of trust have thoroughly examined distrust, often treating it as an afterthought or equating it with the absence of trust.Footnote 6 Similarly, economic historians frequently address the construction and management of professional trust among merchants but tend to regard distrust as a more instinctive response to unfamiliarity, competition, or betrayal.Footnote 7 As a result, distrust is often implicitly understood in much the same way as in behavioral economics or game theory—as a given rather than a complex, socially constructed phenomenon.
Such an approach does not elucidate the nuanced ways in which distrust, like trust, was shaped by cultural and institutional practices. Viewing distrust as a means to navigate uncertainty suggests that, much as with trust, it is deeply shaped by prevailing norms and values—which explains, for instance, our varying perceptions of different professions.Footnote 8 As with trust, distrust is profoundly affected by societal shifts from globalization and technological innovation to transformations in governance and economic structures.Footnote 9 Moreover, just as cultural and ritualistic elements are crucial for fostering trust, these dynamics can also shape distrust.Footnote 10 As Luhmann noted long ago, organizations institutionalize distrust by developing standardized responses to potential disappointments.Footnote 11 Research in economic sociology and organizational theory has further shown how institutionalized practices of control can formalize distrust through systems of audit and control.Footnote 12
This research takes a similar approach to understanding distrust within merchant networks of the late medieval and early modern periods, introducing the art of distrust as an analytical framework for examining their governance. The concept encompasses both the management of identifiable, foreseeable risks that could be navigated through documentation, verification, and contractual safeguards, and a deeper attunement to the more radical forms of uncertainty that permeated commercial life. Merchants operated in a world marked by embargoes, wars, adverse weather, and political rupture, all events that could not be forecast, let alone controlled. To give shape to such volatility, they turned to the figure of Fortuna, a language through which the limits of foresight could be acknowledged without relinquishing the possibility of action.Footnote 13 But uncertainty also emerged from closer quarters. Similar to political elites, merchants moved through landscapes structured by shifting allegiances, opaque intentions, and unstable forms of credit and reputation. The art of distrust, as developed here, makes visible the practices through which they navigated both: a repertoire of judgment, dissimulation, and self-presentation attuned to a world thick with ambiguity.
This perspective contributes to ongoing debates on the interplay between private and public governance in the expansion of long-distance trade. It suggests that the prevailing emphasis on trust as an organizing principle has rendered its constitutive counterpart, distrust, analytically marginal. Reorienting the spotlight toward distrust does not negate the importance of trust, but reveals a more complex assemblage in which the two are co-implicated. What comes into view is not a system grounded solely in institutions that foster confidence in future exchanges, but one structured through disciplinary mechanisms that systematically displace the immediacy of sentiment through calibrated procedures of judgment. Distrust, understood this way, was not a problem to be solved but a resource to be cultivated. It generated order, enabled coordination, and furnished the protocols through which commerce could proceed amid irreducible uncertainty. Philosophers have often observed that distrust is cognitively costly, requiring constant vigilance where trust would permit release.Footnote 14 What the mercantile world reveals is a different possibility: that distrust, once institutionalized in documents, procedures, and recursive checks, and cultivated as professional skill through apprenticeship and repetition, could become self-sustaining. It was no longer a burden borne by individuals alone, but a discipline distributed across the network and inscribed in the dispositions of those who operated within it. In such a system, trust and distrust were coexisting logics operating at different registers: trust in the system that institutionalized distrust, distrust embedded in the very practices that made cooperation possible.
To reconstruct the art of distrust as it appears in historical records of merchants, I draw on commercial correspondence from firms throughout Southern and Northern Europe, alongside auxiliary records that capture the documentary infrastructures of mercantile oversight.Footnote 15 I also engage with examples drawn from existing literature where distrust was not the authors’ central concern, but where its logics and practices nonetheless surface. These include cases involving pre-modern Italian, Spanish, French, British, and Geniza merchants. To trace how distrust was codified, taught, and theorized, I turn to early modern merchant manuals.
The next section revisits existing scholarship on merchant networks to show why distrust deserves recognition as a structuring principle of commercial governance, not merely as trust’s shadow or failure. Drawing on sociological and organizational approaches to risk and control, I propose understanding commercial techniques such as record-keeping, reputational monitoring, and conflict management as rituals of distrust that cultivated a distinctive attentiveness to opacity, rather than seeking to dispel it. Beyond revisiting well-known practices, I foreground overlooked techniques, such as the reciprocal verification of account books, rhetorical restraint, and selective visibility, as critical components of this disciplinary logic. I then trace how this disciplinary framework was codified in early merchant manuals, with particular attention to Jacques Savary’s Le Parfait Négociant, where surveillance and dissimulation are presented as civic virtues. Finally, I explore the connections between this mercantile disciplinary framework and early modern political theory and courtly literature. From there, the article considers how mercantile distrust may have informed the comportment and governing rationalities of political elites through intersecting social and institutional channels.
Reframing Distrust in Merchant Networks: Insights from Across the Disciplines
The role of trust in the governance of merchant networks has long been a subject of scholarly inquiry, with researchers emphasizing its significance in facilitating economic exchange across vast and often volatile markets. Historically, two predominant perspectives have shaped this discussion. The first highlights the cultural and social dimensions of trust, emphasizing the role of kinship, shared religious identity, and common ethnic ties, as outlined in Philip Curtin’s pioneering work Cross-cultural Trade in World History (1984). This approach is particularly valuable in explaining the cohesion of trading diasporas such as the Sephardim, Armenians, Huguenots, Quakers, and Hindu merchant groups, as well as the centralized commercial communities of the Italian city-states and northwestern Europe from the seventeenth century onward.Footnote 16 Yet, historians have long recognized that trust, even within culturally cohesive trading communities, was neither automatic nor unassailable.Footnote 17 Close-knit communities were not immune to disputes, misrepresentation, or outright misconduct.Footnote 18 Nor did these social ties preclude the deployment of contracts.Footnote 19 Yet, these observations have seldom prompted a sustained theorization of distrust as a structuring principle in its own right within commercial exchange. Even when its presence is recognized, distrust is seldom granted conceptual depth, cast instead as a reflexive response to betrayal, rivalry, or external threats, or reduced to a by-product of weak institutions.Footnote 20
Given their emphasis on enforcement and formal control, we might expect institutionalist approaches to have paid closer attention to distrust. Yet, they have largely framed governance as a means of fostering trust, not managing its absence. This framework draws attention to legal contracts, state enforcement, and the regulatory power of institutions, alongside more tacit mechanisms such as collective ostracism.Footnote 21 A seminal contribution to this perspective is Avner Greif’s study of the Cairo Geniza documents, which posits that Maghribi traders relied on a sophisticated, reputation-based system as a cost-effective substitute for formal legal enforcement. His model has been influential in highlighting how social mechanisms can sustain cooperation in the absence of state institutions. It has also provoked significant criticism: Scholars have questioned the empirical basis for collective ostracism, pointed to evidence that Maghribis regularly turned to formal courts, and challenged the assumption that group-based norms functioned as stable or exclusive systems of governance.Footnote 22 These critiques have focused on the historical specificity and evidentiary limits of Greif’s claims. What they have not addressed, however, is the conceptual framing shared across much of the institutionalist literature: the assumption that violations are visible, norms are legible, and enforcement mechanisms function within a world structured by clarity.
But historical evidence suggests otherwise. As several scholars have shown, merchant communities frequently tolerated late payments, extended leniency toward debtors, and continued engaging with traders suspected of minor deceit, provided their conduct remained within what was tacitly understood as acceptable bounds, where the costs of enforcement outweighed the benefits of pursuing redress.Footnote 23 This suggests that merchant networks operated not on an assumption of trust, but within a system of calculated scrutiny, where commercial relationships were carefully monitored to assess which infractions required escalation and which could be tolerated.
This paper contends that trust and distrust were not alternatives but inseparable dimensions of mercantile practice. To extend credit was already to anticipate its possible failure, to cooperate was already to prepare for disappointment. While institutionalist scholars have emphasized the role of enforcement mechanisms in sustaining trust, such systems also circulated and codified distrust. Contracts, reputation tracking, and collective sanctions were designed not only to facilitate cooperation but to contain its fallout. Furthermore, enforcement alone could not govern the full spectrum of risks merchants encountered. It addressed breaches that could be named and documented, such as missed payments and unfulfilled obligations, but was less attuned to the subtler dangers posed by ambiguous cues, shifting allegiances, and unreliable signals. Where enforcement presumes clarity, the art of distrust attends to uncertainty in its many forms: from calculable exposure to opaque threat and from systemic volatility to the silent drift of incentives. It was in response to this continuum that distrust emerged not as a reaction to failure, but as a disciplined method anchored in vigilance and discretion, through which merchants acted within, rather than against, the opacity of their world.
In contrast to the historical literature, research on modern organizations has shown how distrust is embedded in the very structures of governance. Scholars such as Susan Shapiro have examined how control mechanisms such as entry barriers, monitoring mechanisms, and insurance-like systems do not simply respond to misconduct but institutionalize a stance of vigilance, structuring relations through anticipation and control.Footnote 24 Michael Power likewise shows how audit cultures, grounded in assumptions of distrust, shape behavior through routinized scrutiny and strategic self-presentation.Footnote 25 Other scholars across organization studies and critical governance research have further examined how institutionalized distrust can erode trust, deepen infrastructures of control, and produce unintended effects across diverse organizational contexts.Footnote 26 As these studies show, once embedded, distrust acquires a momentum of its own, continually expanding and refining its mechanisms as part of a self-sustaining mode of governance.
Such insights on contemporary organizations offer a compelling vantage point from which to explore the institutionalization of distrust in early modern merchant networks. Much like modern governance, premodern commercial systems were structured around intricate mechanisms of vigilance that included an interplay of retrospective oversight and anticipatory risk management. Though few roles were formally dedicated to fraud prevention, a culture of distrust emerged, sustained by meticulous documentation, legal instruments, and a merchant literature that warned against deceit while also treating its strategic use as professional acumen. As in the present day, this apparatus was not centralized but dispersed across intersecting controls: What was checked was checked again, often by different actors and through overlapping registers. Documentary scrutiny was reinforced by reputational checks and peer surveillance. These redundant structures did more than deter opportunism: they embedded distrust as a principle of economic order. As in modern systems, the proliferation of controls did not resolve uncertainty but entrenched it as a permanent condition of commercial life. The following sections trace how distrust shaped, and was shaped by, the practices and norms through which merchants navigated opaque and unstable environments.
Merchant Practices and Rituals of Distrust
Meticulous documentation, reputational surveillance, and, more recently, the management of conflict have long been recognized as essential techniques of early modern commerce. I argue they constituted the three pillars of an art of distrust that governed conduct and shaped sensibility through the cultivation of vigilance, restraint, and recursive scrutiny. This mode of attentiveness did not aim to eliminate opacity but to manage it continuously, acknowledging the persistent potential for breakdown. Alongside familiar mechanisms, I foreground lesser-examined practices: the reciprocal verification of nostro/vostro accounts, the maintenance of auxiliary registers, and the use of rhetorical restraint and selective visibility in structuring oversight. Conflict, in this context, was less a rupture than a structured negotiation, managed through escalation, jurisdictional maneuvering, and, at times, deliberate irresolution. Together, these techniques reveal a world in which distrust was not the antithesis of cooperation, but its foundation.
Inscribing Obligation
In the merchant world, distrust was not merely an attitude or disposition; it was constituted as a practical discipline through the material work of documentation. As expanding trade and proliferating intermediaries made written records indispensable, the density and duplication of paperwork arguably exceeded what was strictly required for immediate practical purposes. I argue that this recursive layering of account books, records, and repeated checks functioned as a practical discipline, rendering uncertainty manageable through continual rehearsal. These practices distributed doubt across documents, deferred closure, and bound obligation through repetition. What might seem excessive or redundant thus emerges as a distinctive commercial rationality attuned to the ongoing possibility of error, evasion, or loss, in which distrust was a condition of doing business.
As trade networks expanded, the volume and complexity of outstanding obligations exceeded what oral promises could sustain or simpler instruments such as tally sticks could track.Footnote 27 Merchants needed records that could carry debts across distances, hold multiple transactions open simultaneously, and net them against each other at settlement.Footnote 28 Documents anchored ephemeral transactions within a new framework of accountability, making obligations legible, enforceable, and, in some cases, transferable across space and time. Commercial dealings were now exposed to continuous evaluation and control. The apparatus of commercial documentation was dense and multilayered, comprising both record-keeping systems and a constellation of transactional instruments. Waste books, journals, and ledgers offered sequential frameworks for inscribing exchanges, while a proliferation of free-floating documents (partnership contracts, charters, IOUs, bills of exchange, invoices, receipts, cargo manifests, and insurance policies) formalized obligations as they circulated through the networks of trade. These instruments were not endpoints. Their contents were routinely extracted, transcribed, and reorganized, first into auxiliary registers and then synthetically into ledgers.
The incremental layering of records characterized not only individual firms but also the great trading companies of the period, such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English East India Company, (EIC) whose bureaucratic structures and specialized staff did not alter the fundamental components of commercial record-keeping.Footnote 29 In both southern and northern Europe, merchants transcribed IOUs, invoices, and receipts into secondary registers.Footnote 30 Dedicated exchange books were crucial to this system, as they allowed merchants to track international fund movements.Footnote 31 In maritime trade, key information drawn from bills of lading, cargo manifests, and customs declarations was transcribed in various specialized registers.Footnote 32 Epistolary exchanges followed the same protocols of duplication and classification. Outgoing letters were systematically transcribed into letter books, ensuring a permanent record of instructions and negotiations, while incoming letters were carefully archived, often categorized by correspondent or region for ease of reference.Footnote 33 In some cases, merchants distilled key details from incoming correspondence into notebooks.Footnote 34 Merchants and trading companies also sometimes maintained registers to record capital subscriptions, ownership stakes, and capital accounts.Footnote 35 Additionally, ledger entries were frequently copied for various purposes. As Yamey discussed, some merchants kept simplified ledgers alongside their main books, omitting narrative details and retaining only account balances for easier review and reconciliation.Footnote 36 In contrast, the VOC appears to have copied entire ledgers, likely to keep originals in trading posts while maintaining full duplicates in Amsterdam and Zeeland for redundancy and oversight.Footnote 37
The continual production and duplication of documents has at times seemed excessive to historians, who have pointed to the inefficiencies it introduced.Footnote 38 The merchant Francesco Datini, whose relentless dedication to documentation bordered on obsession, exemplifies this tendency.Footnote 39 Yet, what may seem like procedural excess reveals, on closer inspection, a calculated response to the uncertainties of distance, delegation, and delay. Through the interplay of distinct documents, each operating at different temporal and spatial scales, merchants were able to scrutinize the particular while also discerning patterns in the whole.Footnote 40 No single record was definitive, but each reinforced or corrected another, distributing the weight of obligation across a system designed to anticipate error, loss, or manipulation.Footnote 41 At the same time, Italian authors such as Pacioli (1494) and Manzoni (1631) warned that maintaining multiple sets of books could itself become a tool for obscuring financial realities and deflecting scrutiny from creditors and tax authorities—a dynamic not unlike that observed in modern organizations, where systems of control generate new opportunities for evasion.Footnote 42
Writing, copying, and rewriting formed not just a technical process but their own discipline, transmitted through the labor of young clerks whose ink-stained fingers, long nights, and meager pay embodied the endurance demanded by this vigilance.Footnote 43 Through repetition, they internalized not only procedural norms but a posture of suspicion. Distrust was embedded in the very routines through which commercial knowledge was produced and mobilized, animating the documents merchants left behind.
Distrust not only animated the production of records but also governed their reception. Once created, they were expected to be questioned. Their accuracy was crucial because it would be tested: legally, in courts where records served as evidence; morally, against standards of Christian virtue and civic responsibility; and practically, by future users who would rely on them for knowledge they could not independently verify.Footnote 44 Anticipating such scrutiny, merchants subjected their accounts to repeated scrutiny, ensuring the authority of their ledgers in a world where error could lead to accusation and omission to dispute. This imperative of exactitude was sustained by the very architecture of double-entry bookkeeping, which functioned as a built-in audit mechanism.Footnote 45 Yet, the coherence of these ledgers was never purely internal; it was constituted through external recognition emerging from the reciprocal practices of verification that bound one ledger to others. A large portion of early modern ledgers consisted of vostro accounts maintained by a firm on behalf of a correspondent, and nostro accounts, which recorded the firm’s own position in the books of others.Footnote 46 Unlike modern accounting systems, which presume clear separations between principal and agent, early modern merchants frequently occupied both roles at once.Footnote 47 This duality meant that distrust was not a one-sided imposition by a principal upon a subordinate, but a structuring principle that governed both parties and demanded shared mechanisms of oversight through which discrepancies could be surfaced and resolved. One such practice was the exchange of agency accounts, which often included both vostro and nostro entries for the same correspondent and allowed merchants to review each other’s records and propose corrections (appendix I, 1). Once discrepancies—often over calculation errors or disagreements about commission (appendix I, 2)—were resolved, they would cross out the relevant entries in both books, marking the restoration of balance. Where mutual checks tested records against one another, third-party audits assessed whether a single set of books held together on its own terms.Footnote 48
Performing Legibility
Alongside records, merchants cultivated distrust through the close observation of conduct and the circulation of intelligence. Information was gathered in marketplaces and inns, in face-to-face encounters, and especially in commission trading, through the steady exchange of business correspondence.Footnote 49 A lesser-known channel for intelligence was the exchange of apprentices between commercial houses. It was common for an apprentice to be the son or nephew of a correspondent sent abroad for training and development.Footnote 50 Letters exchanged between these apprentices and their families provided valuable insights into both their hosts and foreign market conditions.Footnote 51 Principals might also send an employee or agent to accompany their merchandise, supervising its sale on commission by a foreign correspondent, much as company directors dispatched trusted representatives, or travelled themselves, to oversee the operations of distant branches.Footnote 52 The most common form of surveillance was triangulation: principals engaged multiple agents in the same market. By issuing identical instructions and requesting parallel reports, they made agents’ actions comparable, allowing discrepancies to surface.Footnote 53 Accountability thus emerged not through direct oversight, but through a system that made agents commensurable and signaled that their actions were under scrutiny. Merchants also exchanged insights into the character and financial standing of their peers when approached by correspondents seeking new partnerships in foreign markets (Appendix 5). In doing so, they reinforced a network of familiar, closely monitored actors, where reputations were shaped through ongoing circulation of information.Footnote 54 Correspondents were alerted to bankruptcies or signs of distress (appendix 6), though experienced merchants often treated rumors with caution.Footnote 55
Keenly attuned to the constant scrutiny they faced, merchants conducted their trade with great discretion. Central to this discretion was the concealment of principals’ identities from other parties.Footnote 56 The practice served the agent by preserving their role as intermediary and their informational edge; it served the principal by shielding them from liability and exposure. This opacity also shaped competition. Agents could not easily assess the strategic weight behind a rival’s moves, nor always know whether they were competing against their own principal’s other agents. Relationships remained fluid and provisional as the full picture was never visible. The result was a market in which caution was the rational default. The same restraint governed the circulation of intelligence: merchants seldom revealed their source, instead adopting a rhetorical style that conveyed both knowledge and discretion. Phrases such as “we understand that” or “we have heard that” (Appendix I, 3) enabled reports to circulate without direct attribution. In the face of adverse developments, they often responded with carefully framed surprise rather than explicit blame, a tactic that signaled their awareness that a correspondent should have acted differently while avoiding direct confrontation (Appendix I, 4). This careful rhetoric was also necessitated by the pressures of commercial rivalry.Footnote 57 The fear of competitors intercepting and reading letters is apparent in some correspondence. Letters were often intentionally vague, omitting crucial details, and merchants would occasionally state that certain information would be shared only in person or through a trusted intermediary (appendix 7). This deliberate balancing of openness and reserve contributes to the ambiguity and terseness that make these letters, among other factors, challenging for historians to interpret.Footnote 58
The pervasive imperative of discretion extended far beyond rhetorical restraint, informing a broader culture of secrecy that shaped commercial behavior across domains, from the structuring of documents to the management of goods and transactions. Merchants guarded their account books closely and often included anonymous entries for significant and sensitive transactions.Footnote 59 Documents such as society deeds, league statutes, and the books containing partners’ accounts were also kept strictly confidential.Footnote 60 Both exchange and merchandise trade were suffused with practices of secrecy. Merchants disguised interest-bearing loans as exchange transactions, made agreements to manipulate exchange rates, engaged in private deals that could disadvantage their own principals, and withheld or stole information from competitors.Footnote 61 They concealed valuable goods to prevent theft and, at times, to evade taxes or facilitate smuggling.Footnote 62 They hoarded merchandise to sell at higher prices during periods of scarcity.Footnote 63
Given these known deviations from honesty, merchants were quick to suspect ill intent in others and deeply concerned about appearing untrustworthy, malicious, or financially unsound (appendix I, 8). In response, they worked carefully to craft a favorable image of themselves, continually reaffirming their integrity through gestures of transparency and acts of generosity.Footnote 64 For instance, while calculation errors were typically flagged by those adversely affected, even those who stood to benefit sometimes elected to disclose and rectify the mistake (appendix I, 2, f). Typically, agents claimed success as the product of their own skill and diligence while deflecting failure onto external forces, such as inclement weather, political unrest, or the missteps of an unreliable third party, often cast as the antithesis of the “honest merchant.”Footnote 65 While self-praise and justification could help assert one’s integrity to a correspondent, commercial letters were more frequently framed with neutral statements of mutual obligation and reciprocity which reflected economic interdependency.Footnote 66 Beyond rhetorical assurances, acts of generosity and reciprocity reinforced a merchant’s reputation and ensured that favors and support would be returned when required.Footnote 67 Thus, through documents, reports, rhetoric, and restraint, merchants learned to manage what was seen, measure what was shared, and anticipate how they would be read, internalizing the gaze that structured their world.
Staging Disagreement
The art of distrust extended even to the anticipation of its own limits. When disputes arose, merchants entered a world of courts, arbiters, and formal adjudication, a domain we might expect to operate according to its own logic of impartial judgment and definitive settlement. Instead, merchants made this terrain an extension of their vigilance, selecting forums strategically, exploiting jurisdictional ambiguities, leaving conflicts deliberately unresolved. This anticipatory stance reflected an awareness that control could never be absolute, only reiterated. Letters were filled with reminders of the unpredictability of markets, delayed communications, and political volatility (Appendix 10). Even the reliability of commercial partners, though thoroughly tested, was sometimes wrongly assessed (Appendix 11). It was with such failures in view that, much like today’s analysts and auditors, merchants actively contributed to the development of a decentralized conflict management system, even as sovereigns increasingly asserted their influence over commercial jurisdiction.Footnote 68
Recent literature portrays conflict management as a dynamic, multifaceted process that weaves together pressure tactics, dispute resolution strategies, and diverse forums for negotiation.Footnote 69 The choice of strategies and forums not merely was reactive but was a calculated effort to shape how conflict might be contained, leveraged, or resolved. As part of this anticipatory governance, preventative measures such as explicit contractual terms sometimes specified the forums to which merchants should turn in the event of a dispute.Footnote 70 Unresolved disputes could preserve relationships and contain legal costs while creating openings for negotiation or influence in future dealings.Footnote 71 Yet, conflict was not always to be avoided. When merchants required immediate resolution, they sometimes resorted to direct actions, such as engaging in feuds or seizing goods, to enforce their claims and exert pressure.Footnote 72 When time allowed, the possibility of formal adjudication served to establish precedent and discourage future transgressions.Footnote 73 While seasoned peers and respected figures within the community often served as intermediaries, merchants turned to legal mechanisms when disputes demanded enforceable judgments or involved actors beyond their immediate networks.Footnote 74 Courts were selected on the basis of their perceived legitimacy, enforceability, and jurisdictional reach. Specialized courts, such as admiralty and merchant tribunals, offered expertise in commercial custom and expedited procedures, with some of them being governed by merchants and thus inherent to the network.Footnote 75 Though legal experts played an increasing role in certain institutions, this was not a universal trend, as seen in their declining influence in Lyon during the early modern period.Footnote 76 Royal and princely courts, despite their slower pace, provided broader territorial enforceability and were increasingly engaged, sometimes in defiance of corporate prohibitions, as with the Hanseatic League.Footnote 77 When the stakes were high, those with sufficient standing bypassed judicial routes altogether, securing direct intervention from rulers.Footnote 78 Religious jurisdictions, too, offered merchants a distinct set of opportunities. Moral and social pressures surrounding debt gave these courts particular leverage certain contexts.Footnote 79 In regions where multiple religious courts coexisted, merchants selected the jurisdiction that best suited the particulars of their case.Footnote 80 Canon law, for example, provided well-established remedies in disputes over shipwrecked goods.Footnote 81 This tactical engagement extended beyond forum choice: Merchants also exploited the fluidity of jurisdiction itself, registering goods under tax-privileged associates or adapting claims of national allegiance to suit shifting contexts.Footnote 82 In all cases, the selection and use of legal instruments reflected a calculated engagement with a system where enforcement was contingent and distrust was woven into the very operation of justice. Indeed, conflict management was itself an integral element of the art of distrust, not a series of isolated disputes handed over to external authorities, but an ongoing process woven into merchants’ own systems of governance. Decisions about when and how to escalate conflict, which forums to engage, and how to use disputes to test alignments and manage uncertainty were informed by ongoing calculation and suspicion. Far from resolving distrust, these practices deepened and extended it within the institutional structures that underpinned trade.
Overall, rituals of distrust, at once administrative and relational, rendered scrutiny a routine feature of commercial life. Through their repeated performance, merchants absorbed and enacted distrust as a habitual posture. These practices were not primarily intended to foster trust, but to instill the assumption of deception, the testing of appearances against records, and the structuring of interactions around the anticipation of failure. Through acts of recursive documentation, cross-checking of accounts, guarded communication, and strategic handling of conflict, distrust was transformed from a reactive sentiment into an institutionalized mode of governance embedded in the daily operations of trade.
Merchant Ideals and the Pedagogy of Distrust
The practices described above were not isolated expedients, but elements of a broader normative framework that defined what it meant to be a competent and credible merchant. Central to the articulation and transmission of this ideal were manuals and pedagogical texts. Though diverse in form and content, mercantile handbooks consistently promoted a shared ethic of vigilance, restraint, and procedural exactitude.Footnote 83 In contrast with local customs and regulatory codes, whose approaches to contract execution reflected significant regional specificities, these deeply embedded normative habits—reflected in the rhetoric, value systems, and epistolary conventions of European commercial correspondence—helped sustain a transnational commercial culture.Footnote 84 At its core, this culture was not grounded in trust, but in the disciplined management of its absence. The wide translation, adaptation, and circulation of these texts across borders ensured the diffusion of this ethos, embedding distrust as a common commercial sensibility.Footnote 85 These manuals thus served as instruments of a pedagogy of distrust, through which merchants learned to navigate uncertainty not by resolving it but by disciplining their conduct within it.
Distrust in Commercial Handbook
The distrust vividly present in merchants’ letters also lay at the heart of the prudential ethics articulated in commercial treatises.Footnote 86 Manuals typically favored the language of prudence, which encompassed both foresight and ethical discernment, and caution, a deliberate restraint aimed at minimizing unnecessary risk. But this training of anticipation presupposed a disposition of distrust: an acknowledgement that others might deceive, default, or act in self-interest. Already in the late ninth century, Abu al-Fadl Ja’far Ibn Ali’s Book of Knowledge warned merchants to be wary of falsification and deceit in trade.Footnote 87 Giovanni Morelli, a Florentine merchant active between 1393 and 1421, advised against fully trusting even close relations in business, echoing Benedetto Cotrugli’s sentiment that “with an enemy one covenant, four with a friend.” Cotrugli more broadly urged merchants to exercise discernment, to distinguish truth from illusion, and to avoid being misled by apparent advantages.Footnote 88 An anonymous Florentine merchant from the late 1390s advised scrutinizing contractual language for concealed traps. Since “everybody is greedy for money”, counterparties would seek to embed terms serving their own interests.Footnote 89 Giovanni Rucellai, in his Zibaldone Quaresimale (1457–1481), cast the failure to scrutinize as itself a form of risk: “…not to know, not to ask, not to check, and to leave things in the dark is too perilous.”Footnote 90 Even trust required oversight. Alberti’s Libri della famiglia recommended delegating responsibilities only to those who had proved their loyalty, and even then with vigilant monitoring.Footnote 91 Medieval manuals also stressed the importance of discretion and secrecy to shield merchants from the very scrutiny they were trained to apply to others. Paolo di Messer Pace da Certaldo, writing between 1362 and 1364, advised that “the spoken word is like the thrown stone,” urging merchants to guard their secrets or risk losing freedom and competitive edge.Footnote 92 Francesco Guicciardini, writing in 1511–1512, similarly warned against revealing profits, lest competitors use this knowledge to undermine one’s position.Footnote 93
In the early modern period, a more specialized and sophisticated discourse on managing interpersonal risks and regulating one’s conduct emerged, epitomized by the most renowned and widely emulated manual of the time, Savary’s Le Parfait Négociant (1675).Footnote 94 Targeted at the children of merchants, this manual combined moral instruction with commercial guidance, reflecting the early modern effort to codify credible conduct in an age of expanding trade. Part of its civic ambition was to legitimize commerce in a society where aristocratic elites still regarded it with suspicion.Footnote 95 As his predecessors did, Savary recognized commerce as inherently fraught with risk, yet he distinguished himself by his meticulous attention to the perils of long-distance trade and the disciplined self-regulation it demanded, an approach that mirrored both the increasing professionalization of mercantile activity and the expanding role of bureaucratic governance in state and commerce alike. Nowhere was this disciplinary attention more evident than in his treatment of commission trading, which Savary regarded as the cornerstone of long-distance trade.Footnote 96 Appendix II presents a table synthesizing the list of 39 distinct risks identified by Savary in his discussion of trading merchandise and bills of exchange on commission. As expected, the main categories of risk were financial and reputational. A closer look at the specific risks outlined by Savary reveals a combination of typical principal–agent issues—such as client insolvency, a principal’s bankruptcy, third-party defaults, an agent’s failure to follow instructions, and buyers not paying—alongside an exceptionally detailed anticipation of a wide range of other potential harms.
While this exhaustive approach to risk management might seem “modern,” it was deeply rooted in the commercial realities and prevailing ethos of distrust of the period. For instance, Savary highlighted the risk of an agent compensating workers with raw materials while procuring finished goods for the principal, a practice that could artificially inflate prices and allow the agent to profit at the principal’s expense (case 7); the suspicion that a commission agreement was created after a principal’s bankruptcy (case 17); or potential family disputes resulting from the death of either the agent or principal (case 32). These examples shed light on the commercial landscape in which Savary operated, revealing complexities that theoretical models alone may overlook. Notably, some principal–agent problems commonly anticipated in theory—such as direct embezzlement or the manipulation of accounts—are absent from his discussion. Moreover, the risks he identified were not borne by the principal alone; many also had direct consequences for the agents.
The risk cases identified could stem from different—and at times overlapping—factors such as negligence, dishonesty, conflicts of interest, and, more rarely, uncontrollable external events such as those leading to bankruptcies. Examples of negligence included agents submitting incomplete reports (case 9), allowing excessive tare allowances on goods (case 21), or failing to secure timely payments from buyers (case 22). Each of these actions could have significant financial consequences, such as the principal losing money and withdrawing their commission, although this was often left implicit. Financial risks were sometimes borne by agents, for instance when they took excessive responsibility in exchange transactions (cases 16 and 26) or mishandled draft protests (case 36). Another example of negligence was an agent using debt transfers to make payments, which could lead to reputational damage for both the agent and the principal (case 30). Examples of dishonesty included agents delaying payments to use the money for personal advantage (case 23) or principals issuing drafts without providing backing (case 26). Information asymmetry was another critical issue, where agents might withhold crucial information affecting a principal’s decisions (case 9) or provide false details about products and market conditions to inflate commissions (case 27). Principals could also misrepresent their financial stability (case 33). Conflicts of interest could arise from legitimate disagreements, as in disputes over commission fees (case 13), though at times they involved conduct that bordered on dishonesty. Agents might prioritize certain suppliers, drawers, or principals owing to personal loyalties (cases 8, 10, and 38), while maximizing gains could be the motivation for principals to overcommit in transactions or issue bills indiscriminately, exposing agents to undue risks (cases 34 and 35). Savary noted that both dishonesty and conflicting interests were mutual concerns for principals and agents, with each having legitimate reasons to be wary of the other’s potential misconduct, making a certain level of distrust inevitable on both sides. Overall, the risks he identified reflected a commercial system founded on reciprocity, rather than unilateral control by principals, and maintained through ongoing mutual and multilateral oversight.
To manage the risks he identified, Savary distilled long-standing mercantile practices, here defined as rituals of distrust, into an idealized program of commercial self-regulation. His emphasis on documentation, correspondence, contracts, and oversight codified dispersed techniques into a coherent discipline grounded in vigilance and procedural control. While his discussion of commission trading did not explicitly frame network surveillance as a mechanism for enforcing sound practice, its influence is evident in cases concerning reputational risk (cases 4, 25, and 30), where exposure to scrutiny shaped the emergence of best practice. Elsewhere in his manual, surveillance appears both as an essential mercantile skill to be cultivated and as a latent threat, sometimes demanding the artful management of visibility. This dual perspective not only reflected longstanding commercial strategies for risk mitigation but also resonated with contemporary political discourses on secrecy and governance.
The Convergence of Commercial and Courtly Rationalities
As previously noted, managing uncertainty was a networked effort, with triangulation and gossip playing central roles in the mercantile surveillance apparatus. While Savary did not explicitly address these practices in his chapters on commission trading, he incorporated them later when discussing relationships with creditors. Le Parfait Négociant advised merchants on managing fear under peer surveillance during financial distress, offering strategies to minimize the appearance of difficulty. Since retreat was not an option, merchants had to exhibit perfect behavioral control, down to specific facial expressions to adopt or avoid.Footnote 97 Appearing too gloomy would arouse suspicion but so would appearing overly cheerful. Savary advised merchants to assume that others were already aware of their situation, yet also believe that they could still influence how they were perceived. The dissimulator’s goal was to achieve minimal communication—neither mute nor deceitful. When bankruptcy could no longer be avoided and a merchant was compelled to disclose their accounts to peers, even this moment had to be carefully staged: Savary recommended placing the balance sheet openly on the table rather than handing it to a single creditor, to avoid the impression of favoritism and preempt suspicions of collusion.Footnote 98 Such choreographies of conduct vividly illustrate how a merchant should internalize the invisible scrutiny of the network, effectively becoming faceless in the process. Recent research on apprenticeship, which traces how merchants-in-training were circulated, monitored, and informally evaluated, supports the idea that the network functioned as a disciplinary matrix shaping commercial subjects. Early exposure to reputational scrutiny fostered conformity, while those who failed to internalize its gaze were gradually excluded.Footnote 99
This need for secrecy extended to lower-level intermediaries in the commission trade, such as brokers, who facilitated the buying and selling of bills of exchange for merchants. Brokers were encouraged to maintain the same level of secrecy as the merchants they represented and to consider how their actions and words could unpredictably damage a merchant’s reputation.Footnote 100 A brief slackening of attention or a single ill-chosen word could prove fatal and disrupt the balance of engineered trust that underpinned the mercantile community. While Le Parfait Négociant may have suggested that dissimulation was merely about crafting a public image that resembled the ideal merchant, maintaining this facade demanded constant vigilance, extending practices of distrust into the private aspects of life. For instance, because alcohol could loosen tongues and compromise secrecy, it was to be strictly avoided. Any broker known to indulge in drinking would be sidestepped by the watchful merchants.Footnote 101
Savary’s advice coincided with the broader diffusion of a culture of secrecy among Europe’s elite during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discourses on observation and dissimulation flourished in the politico-philosophical writings of the time, aiming to codify and refine the arts of deception.Footnote 102 Italian writers such as Castiglione, Machiavelli, and Accetto were key figures in this movement, which also saw a renewed interest in the ancient art of “physiognomy,” reflected in Savary’s guidance to the struggling merchant. In The Prince, Machiavelli observed that people generally judge “more with their eyes than with their hands,” noting that “everyone may see what you seem to be, but few may understand what you really are.”Footnote 103 Controlling one’s emotions to master one’s appearance was therefore essential. In his Breviarium politicorum (1697), Mazarin advised that only “humaneness and other such feelings” should “walk freely across your face,” with all other desires “strictly shut up [in your heart],” adding that one should, if necessary, “not hesitate to feign opposite ones.”Footnote 104 The Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, who wrote a century earlier to the young nobleman Philippe De Lannoy on April 3, 1578, captured the essence of dissimulation with the phrase: “frons tibi aperta, lingua parca, mens clausa” (“an open face, few words, and a concealed mind”).Footnote 105
Careful attention to physical appearance was used not only to deceive others by controlling facial expressions but also to detect deceit by observing particular gestures, as demonstrated by Savary’s efforts to train merchant apprentices to recognize fraud during transactions. He described two common tricks involving the scales used to weigh merchandise. One involved the buyer subtly pulling down on the ring attached to the scale’s beam, making the goods appear lighter and allowing for underpayment. Conversely, the seller could slightly lift the ring, making the merchandise appear heavier, thus overcharging the buyer.Footnote 106 Keen observation was crucial for avoiding losses, as a sharp eye could detect the tricks of deceivers. This perceptive gaze, attuned to the faintest gestures, was embedded in a broader Renaissance ethos that privileged empirical observation.Footnote 107 The ability to see through deceit by closely observing demeanor and behavior was also promoted in contemporary political thought. For instance, Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano and Gracián’s Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia offered detailed reflections on how outward conduct and bodily demeanor could reveal inner dispositions or be used to conceal them.Footnote 108 The merchant network thus resembled the “courtly continuum, in which the conversation unfolded continuously from one day to the next, involving many pairs of eyes and ears.”Footnote 109 In both settings, success depended on one’s ability to maintain consistency and show no cracks.Footnote 110
I propose that dissimulation became necessary in both courtly and mercantile environments because action unfolded under conditions of structural indeterminacy. In commerce, the dispersion of agents and the lag in communication made behavior hard to confirm and motives harder still to discern. In court, uncertainty stemmed from symbolic mediation: Access to power was filtered through protocol, deference, and coded forms of proximity.Footnote 111 Appearances were endlessly staged, but the stakes behind them remained opaque.Footnote 112 In both domains, advancement depended on the ability to inhabit a role convincingly, within systems where signals were incomplete and where being misread could prove costly. In this context, visibility was never neutral. What one allowed to be seen had to be calibrated as carefully as what one concealed. Merchants restricted access to commercial intelligence such as prices, credit, or potential partners, not only to protect a strategic advantage but also to shape how others assessed their position. Courtiers, in turn, learned to speak by implication, to stage ignorance, and to control the timing and context in which knowledge was revealed.Footnote 113 Attempts to regulate behavior through handbooks, etiquette manuals, and contracts only provided a measure of orientation.Footnote 114 Actors moved between prescription and ambiguity, adjusting their behavior not only to norms but to practical constraints, implicit demands, and the unpredictability of others’ actions.
The pressures that demanded such calibration did not emanate from a singular locus of authority. Power in both domains was enacted from within—less a matter of command than of alignment with structures that enabled and constrained participation. The king did not stand above the courtly order; he moved within it, subject to the same codes of ritual, access, and precedence that organized distinction.Footnote 115 Merchants, too, operated within tightly structured circuits of accountability that regulated conduct through documentation and expectation rather than surveillance from above. Since authority was exercised through shared structures, competition built into the very conditions of participation and one’s standing was defined through comparison and ongoing interaction with others. Maintaining and enhancing one’s position required continual pursuit of relationships and resources. At court, proximity to the sovereign opened informal channels of power that others simultaneously sought; in commerce, merchants competed for advantageous terms, privileged information, or key partners under shifting conditions.Footnote 116 This dynamic was reinforced by the material and symbolic constraints of the system itself: Credit, contracts, and favor were limited and unevenly distributed, while evaluation was continuous but rarely explicit. In both domains, minute distinctions of tone, gesture, or timing could recalibrate one’s standing. This did not mean that actors operated in a state of permanent instability: Reputation, seniority, and established relationships could confer a degree of insulation, but positions were never entirely secure. Advancement was shaped by past performance, but it remained subject to interpretation, comparison, and reversal.
From Commercial Distrust to Impersonal Rule
The structural affinities between court and commerce testify to a long history of interaction. Merchants and financiers routinely passed through courtly spaces to provide loans or advice or to submit petitions. Norbert Elias argues that the ethos of self-restraint and psychological attunement that came to define early modern courtly conduct was shaped above all by the noblesse de robe, a bourgeois stratum composed largely of lawyers and state officials. This group, he contends, displaced older aristocratic norms rooted in immediacy and expressive display, shifting courtly behavior toward regulation and decorum.Footnote 117 Though some of these bureaucratic elites came from families involved in trade or craft, Elias attributes the transformation of courtly behavior to their legal education and administrative roles rather than to mercantile rationality. Yet, the ideals of comportment associated with this shift (discretion and social attentiveness) had long circulated in mercantile contexts shaped by distrust. When reason-of-state theorists such as Botero and Lipsius, writing in the wake of dynastic fragmentation, reframed strategic silence and controlled speech as instruments of effective statecraft, they echoed a logic long rehearsed in the moral grammar of commerce.Footnote 118
Thus, among the bourgeois elites who, in Elias’s account, helped “civilize” the court, merchants appear particularly well positioned to have reshaped its emotional and behavioral repertoire. Their ethos defined by reputational sensitivity and sustained self-management offered a counterpoint to aristocratic immediacy. It cultivated a discipline grounded not in law, but in practiced calibration under conditions of mutual surveillance. Jurists, by contrast, played a foundational role in consolidating the legal and bureaucratic structures of the early modern state. Their authority rested on procedural regularity, institutional continuity, and the interpretive management of precedent and custom. Early modern law was a contested terrain of competing authorities, local customs, and interpretive conflict.Footnote 119 Yet lawyers were trained precisely to work this material toward closure: to produce binding judgments, stabilize meaning, and contain ambiguity through textual and procedural discipline.Footnote 120 Merchants did not seek to master ambiguity but to inhabit it. Uncertainty was the medium of their practice, not an obstacle to be cleared. They turned it to advantage: holding commitments open, probing counterparts through repeated tests, cultivating trust through sustained observation in a world where contracts could not compel performance. As previously suggested, the structural and behavioral demands of courtly life were closely aligned with the dispositions cultivated by mercantile rationality. This raises the question of how such dispositions might have moved beyond commercial settings to reshape the norms and infrastructures of political governance.
David Graeber insightfully links the rise of formal restraint to the cultural logic of private property in capitalism, but his focus remains on symbolic forms of social exclusion rather than the institutional participation of merchants in redefining the norms and infrastructures of governance.Footnote 121 The following hypotheses complement his account by tracing how mercantile rationality entered the administrative core of the state, altering not only how power was exercised but how it had to be embodied and performed. As merchants and commercially trained actors contributed to the design of financial institutions, credit systems, and administrative reforms, they helped reconfigure the material and normative conditions under which political authority was exercised and judged. In late seventeenth-century England, London financiers advanced this transformation by founding the Bank of England and introducing long-term, tax-backed bonds, converting royal debt into a standardized and tradable instrument of public finance.Footnote 122 Arguably, this institutional shift required not only financial restructuring but also a new ethic of political responsibility rooted in creditworthiness, accountability, and long-term coordination. In France, the integration of commercial rationality into state administration took shape across a series of reformist moments. Colbert, the son of a prosperous cloth merchant, advised by Savary, standardized taxation, regulated manufacturing, and centralized economic data, embedding commercial logic into the administrative routines of absolutism. Power became increasingly tied to administrative visibility and the management of economic flows. By the 1750s, the cercle de Gournay, a network of reform-minded administrators and intellectuals, several with mercantile backgrounds, pursued a pragmatic agenda shaped by commercial expertise and close observation of foreign models. They promoted the abolition of certain internal tariffs, the simplification of tax structures, and reforms to enhance the circulation of goods and strengthen France’s position in global trade. They envisioned statecraft as a practice grounded in economic circulation and procedural clarity.Footnote 123 A generation later, Jacques Necker, a banker by training, translated commercial expertise into fiscal reform at the highest levels of government. As Director General of Finance under Louis XVI, he promoted borrowing over taxation, expanded the use of annuities, and made the state’s finances a matter of public record. His most famous gesture was the publication of the Compte rendu au roi (1781), a symbolically powerful public account of royal finances, designed to inspire trust in the monarchy’s creditworthiness.Footnote 124
Taken together, these reforms helped reshape the conditions under which political authority was enacted and evaluated. By embedding principles of fiscal transparency, procedural regularity, and public accountability into the routines of governance, they made authority increasingly legible and credible when expressed through stable procedures rather than personal discretion. Accounting practices played an important role in this transformation. As merchants entered the state administration, they carried with them techniques of systematic documentation and managerial control that became foundational to the emerging logics of fiscal policy and political authority.Footnote 125 These calculative practices not only stabilized administrative operations but also offered new standards for judging the quality and credibility of rule itself.Footnote 126 Where commercially trained actors seemed to deliver such coherence and control, whether through Colbert’s centralized fiscal reforms, Necker’s carefully staged financial reporting, or the disciplined borrowing practices and credit structures advanced by London financiers, their conduct came to suggest an increasingly persuasive model of effective rule. The visible alignment between commercial discipline and administrative effectiveness may have rendered mercantile comportment increasingly legible, and even desirable, within elite settings. Even when practical outcomes remained limited, as in the case of the cercle de Gournay, the ideals these actors embodied helped expand the repertoire of credible political behavior. While older norms of rule persisted, the rise of commercial rationality introduced new expectations for how power should be organized, displayed, and justified.
While the aura of commercially trained actors as reformers positioned them to project their behavioral norms, these norms of discretion and calibrated self-presentation were not framed merely as strategies of self-preservation. As with the institutional reforms it helped promote, such comportment was justified as a contribution to the common good. From Cotrugli’s emphasis on humility and moderation as safeguards of civic harmony to Savary’s portrayal of commercial discipline as essential to trust and economic stability, on which broader social cohesion depended, the art of distrust cultivated in merchant manuals was cast as foundational to the social order.Footnote 127 Contemporary moral and legal writers echoed this civic understanding. Annibale Romei contrasted merchants who pursued only private gain with those acting for the benefit of the republic, while Jean Domat, writing in a juridico-theological vein, argued that even self-interested trade served Providence by reinforcing civil bonds.Footnote 128 Enlightenment thinkers recast these ideas in terms of utility and reason: Saint-Lambert described the pursuit of wealth as a civic contribution, calling the self-enriching individual “useful to the State,” and Turgot grounded economic liberty in public justice.Footnote 129 Echoing the technocratic ethos of reformers such as Colbert and Necker, D’Holbach portrayed the merchant as a “a useful citizen, capable of giving counsel in the councils of a nation whose wealth and power he helps to increase.”Footnote 130 In each of these visions, mercantile discipline, whether moral, juridical, or political, was inseparable from the common good.
In this light, the impersonality that Weber linked to legal rationality and vocational ethics appears less as a rupture with earlier social forms than as a moral disposition forged within commercial life: a posture of principled detachment, where reliability, discretion, and self-restraint were valued not only as means of self-preservation but as contributions to collective order. Because such norms of comportment were explicitly tied to the maintenance of stability, they readily crossed institutional boundaries, acquiring broader cultural currency as templates of disciplined conduct. The auditor exemplifies this transposition: No longer confined to technical verification, he came to embody a moral ideal of governance—methodical, impartial, and able to render scattered transactions into coherent accounts of responsibility. Embedded in civic, ecclesiastical, and political institutions, auditors enacted a mode of observation honed in the world of commerce, projecting exactitude over display and dependability over persuasion as hallmarks of legitimate authority.Footnote 131 These same habits of disciplined record-keeping, verification, and calculative accountability traveled beyond the economic sphere to reshape practices of intellectual labor. Confronted with a growing profusion of books, manuscripts, and excerpts, early modern scholars in fields such as history, rhetoric, and philology adapted the organizational tools of mercantile practice, such as ledgers, journals, and indexes, to manage and classify expanding bodies of knowledge.Footnote 132 At the same time, mercantile disciplines of systematic note-keeping and observation informed the emerging empirical sciences, where methods devised to record transactions were repurposed to accumulate and stabilize knowledge about nature.Footnote 133 From this perspective, the contemporary diffusion of managerial rationality into public administration, the nonprofit sector, and even the intimate spaces of the home appears as a continuation of a dynamic observable in the early modern period, when mercantile practices of calculation, record-keeping, and orderly conduct became widely transferable across domains beyond commerce.Footnote 134
Rethinking Governance through Distrust
This article has argued that distrust was not peripheral to early modern commerce, but a foundational mode of governance rooted in practices of scrutiny, calibrated opacity, and recursive control. Scholars have long recognized that personal trust among merchants was often fragile or absent, as partners could prove unreliable, and much trade was conducted with strangers. To explain how cooperation nonetheless flourished, trust-centric accounts point to the institutional frameworks that underwrote exchange such as community sanctions, or legal mechanisms. These are typically understood as supports for trust, supplying the external guarantees that permitted cooperation to proceed despite the uncertainties of distance, delegation, and delay.
This article has proposed a different reading of what made long-distance trade possible. Drawing on insights from organizational sociology and critical studies of audit, risk, and control, it has sought to demonstrate that documentation, surveillance, and adjudication were not neutral tools but expressions of an institutionalized distrust woven into the very structure of mercantile governance. These practices addressed not only identifiable risks such as theft, default, or breach of contract, but also the more diffuse uncertainties that permeated commercial life: shifting allegiances, opaque intentions, and the silent drift of incentives that no contract could fully anticipate. This attunement to deeper forms of uncertainty justified a system suspicious of everything, including itself, one in which neither people nor procedures were fully trusted, and both required constant scrutiny. In this context, trust was constructed through the recursive work of verification that assumptions of distrust set in motion. Mercantile governance, in short, was the practical realization of what Pio Rossi would later express as a philosophical maxim: that ‘not to trust life’ was what made it possible ‘to trust life.’Footnote 135
This reframing of mercantile cooperation through the art of distrust advances longstanding efforts to complicate Weberian accounts of capitalist development. It suggests that the attributes Weber linked to Protestant ethics and legal rationality, such as procedural formality and self-discipline, also emerged from earlier commercial techniques of self-regulation, which proved readily adaptable to courtly life and the reconfiguration of political power. Crafted in the pragmatic context of commerce, these techniques prioritized flexibility over dogma and adjustment over edification. They held together a language of moral rectitude and Christian virtue alongside the open celebration of cunning, concealment, and strategic self-presentation. Spiritual discipline could not openly accommodate this paradox. The art of distrust made legible, teachable, and respectable what commerce demanded but religion could not sanctify. Its authority, ultimately, lay in its claim to promote not just private interest but the common good. This claim lent it the legitimacy to migrate beyond commerce and take root as a principle of order in state finance, scholarly inquiry, and the empirical sciences.
What migrated was not merely a set of practices but a practical epistemology, complete with its own calibrated modes of attention and judgement that produced the knowledge merchants needed to act. Through its instruments, distrust shaped the field of the knowable, rendering some things legible while producing new zones of opacity, whether by limitation or by design. It determined what could be anticipated, what counted as sufficient grounds for action, and when further scrutiny was required. Seen from this perspective, the history of mercantile distrust forms part of a broader genealogy of the cognitive frameworks through which merchants understood their actions and oriented themselves toward the unknown.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Business History Review, whose insightful comments and suggestions have greatly improved this article. I also wish to thank the participants in the Centre for Urban History lunch seminar at the University of Antwerp, in particular Jeroen Puttevils, Oscar Gelderblom, and Marc Deloof, for their valuable feedback on an earlier draft. Further thanks are due to Lars Boerner and his colleagues at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg for their thoughtful suggestions. I am also grateful to Francesca Trivellato for her careful reading of the manuscript and for pointing out several factual and typographical corrections. I thank all those who provided helpful comments during the 2025 Economic History Society Annual Congress in Glasgow.
Appendices I—Rituals of Distrust
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1. Mutual invitations to check the accuracy of commission accounts
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a. “I am very eager to settle our account and to bring everything to an end with you. So please send me all the things in writing, and I will do the same for you, so that everything can be corrected and reviewed. If anything is missing from my account, please write to me and also include your account, so that, God willing, everything will be cleared up, wherever I have done wrong, which I am ready to rectify.” (Wilhelm Stieda, Hildebrand Veckinchusen: Briefwechsel eines deutschen Kaufmanns im 15. Jahrhundert [Leipzig, 1921], 99).
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b. “You will find the accounts balanced and let us if you find any error, let us know.” Salviati, Lyon, to Sommaia, Florence, September 1544 (Salviati, Lyon, to Sommaia, Florence, September 1544, vol. 565, fol. 4r, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa).
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c. “Herewith is the account of the 40 barrels of tin received with Simon van Houten (…) We have placed it to your current account. Please check it over and if you find no errors, please approve it.” J. & D. van Baerle, Amsterdam, to Charles Marescoe, London (Henry Roseveare’s Markets and Merchants of the Late Seventeenth Century: The Marescoe-David letters, 1668-1680 [Oxford, 1991], 273).
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d. “Your grace be in charge of accepting and paying [the balance] in due time, closing the account with us if you find it correct.” Bonvisi, Antwerp, to Ruiz, July 1570 (Valentín Vázquez de Prada’s Lettres marchandes d’Anvers, 3 vol. [Paris, 1961], II, p. 60).
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e. “Advise us regarding how to adjust the accounts, so that we can make appropriate entries.” Suárez, Florence, to Ruiz, April 1581 (Ruiz Martín, Lettres marchandes échangées entre Florence et Medina del Campo [Paris, 1965] 89).
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f. “As your grace can see we send you our debits and credits [with this letter], and if you find them correct send us your consent.” Bonvisi, Antwerp, to Ruiz, October 1571 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, II, 74).
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g. “We send the relevant account to your grace to be agreed upon so as not to leave any error.” Frías Cevallos, Antwerp, to Ruiz, June 1565 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, II, p. 27).
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h. “When your grace has looked at your current account, advise me if you agree.” Suárez, Florence, to Ruiz, June 1581 (Ruiz Martín, Lettres marchandes, 103).
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i. “With regard to the reception and acceptance of the soundness of the account your grace may send me his recommendation.” De Veiga, Lisbon, to Ruiz, October 1598 (José Gentil da Silva’s Stratégie des affaires à Lisbonne entre 1595 et 1607: Lettres marchandes des Rodrigues d’Evora et Veiga [Paris, 1956], 198).
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j. “Send your acceptance of the account if it is found to be in conformity [with yours], ensure payment [of the balances] and inform us.” Bonvisi, Antwerp, to Ruiz, May 1569 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, II, 55–56).
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2. Disagreements about calculations
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a. “…this account (…) seems very wrong to me because he [Hans van Mynden] often claims too much for himself; there’s a shortfall of 400 Lübeck marks accounted for. I have sent this copy back to Hans and have written some of it myself; I believe he will provide you with another full account. He also gave me a separate account, which showed many discrepancies.” Sivert Veckinchusen, Cologne, to Hildebrand Veckinchusen, Bruges, August 1411 (Stieda, Hildebrand, 70).
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b. “Now I have got the copy of three accounts, but in none of the three is the time stated from which you have credited my account. In the one concerning 900 coils I have nothing to say except that you have made an error of 7s 3d in the parcel sold to Elizabeth Packer on the 27th of November—in place of the £158 s.1 which you put it ought to be £158 s.9 d.2. In the other account, of 700 coils, I find the weight is rather less than it ought to be and the time for some parcels should be altered from 1 month to 6 or 7 weeks.” W. Momma, Nyköping, to Leonora Marescoe, London (Roseveare, Markets, 425).
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c. “Your grace has spotted the errors made in the previous fair’s account which is all very well.” De Veiga, Lisbon to Ruiz, Medina del Campo, November 1602 (da Silva, Stratégie, 249).
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d. “We have deducted 1 scudo, 9 soldo and 3 danari in the previous fair’s account because of an error we have found at our disadvantage in our account. Having corrected the error, we send the account back to you so you can check it and let us know.” Salviati, Lyon, to Affaitadi, Antwerp, July 1549 (vol. 579, fol. 186v, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa).
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e. “In the account of my sister Caterina de Veiga, there is an error of 1500 maravedí that were charged in excess in the deal of 143,984 maravedí for 379 ducati, 19 soldi and 2 danari, which in fact are not worth more than 142,481 maravedí. We send it back to your grace to account for the 1500 maravedí.” De Veiga, Lisbon to Ruiz, Medina del Campo, February 1604 (da Silva, Stratégie, 262. Here, De Veiga seems to have “gifted” 3 maravedí to Ruiz to prove his good will/generosity).
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f. “You have debited us for your commission at 2,1/8 ‰, and following the convention we have between us, you should not count more than 1,1/8‰. What you took in excess amounted to 5 scudi and 18 soldi di marcho, and to avoid altering the accounts we debit you this sum in your next fair’s account yet do credit us so that everything is in order and each of us has his due.” Salviati, Pisa, to Salviati, Lyon, August 1549 (vol. 913, unnumbered folio, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa).
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g. “We do not well understand how this entry is made up, as we are unsure whether there is an error to your disadvantage, and because we do not want to give you prejudice, we inform you so that you can review it and acknowledge and amend the error if there is any, and otherwise return [the account] to us.” Salviati, Lyon, to Albertas & Della Seta, Marseille, October 1544 (vol. 565, fol. 3v, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa).
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3. Confidentiality regarding source of information
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a. “…we understand that Your Grace is content for the (…) Dutch cloth to be purchased, which we will try to do when the time comes, as the goods have not yet started arriving this year (…) However, we can tell you now that they will be very expensive (…) and we are certain that a new tax has been imposed on the goods, as we have heard, of about two or three percent, although the exact amount is still unknown.” Nicolau and Simäo Rodrigues, Anvers, to Simón Ruiz, Medina del Campo, May 1578 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, I, 299).
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b. “[regarding] the protests against Mr. Gerónimo de Curiel regarding the bills that Bernuy did not fulfil (…) he declared to those who came to collect that he could not comply because Bernuy still owed him the said amount (…) as far as we understand, he does not owe more than what these protests amount to.” Alessandro Bonvisi, Antwerp, to Simón Ruiz, Medina del Campo, April–May 1570 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, I, 59).
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c. “Here we understand that with the arrival of the galleys and the cash they brought, all those markets in Italy will expand. However, according to what we have seen from the changes at the fair in Placentia and from letters from there and from Genoa, not only had the money not increased, but it had become even tighter.” Simón Ruiz, Valladolid, to Juan de Lago, Florence, August 1584 (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 321).
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d. “I wish, God willing, that I had my goods in hand and could send them through another route, because things are not going well here. The authorities are inspecting the goods, and they no longer want to accept them. The goods should have reached Revel, as I have heard from others.” Gerwin Marschede, Danzig, to Hildebrand Veckinchusen, Lübeck, December 1416 (Stieda, Hildebrand, 156).
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e. “I have heard from others that one will be able to get new Barbados sugar for 23s.” A. Ruland, Hambourg, to Charles Marescoe, London (Roseveare, Markets, 277).
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f. “The three packages you ordered earlier (…) should arrive in London on the 26th of this month. The price is 8 shillings per hundredweight for carriage (…) I suggest you check their weight when they arrive, as I have heard some complaints.” H. Bawden, Exeter, to Jacob David, London (Roseveare, Markets, 422–423).
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4. Blame and disappointment conveyed through expression of surprise
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a. “I well understand from many of your letters and also from your brother Zyverde that I owe you 50 marks Lübeck currency, which I will give to your brother Zyverde on your behalf. In this regard, I am greatly surprised that you write so much about this, as you know well when I handed over the documents to you, regarding the state of our affairs.” H. Hoieman, Lübeck, to H. Veckinchusen, Bruges, February 1422 (Stieda, Hildebrand, 340–341).
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b. “I was truly astonished that you expressed doubt about accepting Francisco de Torrequemada and Juan Bautista Gallo, and even more surprised concerning the bill from sirs Torrequemada and Medina, as you are the debtor in this instance.” Diego Pardo, Antwerp, to Simón Ruiz, Medina del Campo, June 1587 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 164).
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c. “We are surprised that you are considering sending it [the ginger] by sea to Rouen and Marseille as you would by land. We are equally surprised that, having the ginger in Lisbon, you want to wait for winter, when you could navigate in the coming summer with less risk, saving time, and by sending it overland, you incur us so many costs.” Salviati, Lyon, to Del Rio & Paredes, Burgos, August 1547 (vol. 579, fol. 171v, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa).
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d. “We understand from others (…) that the ship Virginia has arrived with a large amount of galls. We are surprised that you made no mention of it.” Andreas Berenberg’s widow, Hamburg, to Charles Marescoe, London, February 1668 (Roseverare, Markets, 223).
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5. Recommendations
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a. In October 1547, the Salviati recommend the Spanish merchants in Nantes to their Italian correspondents in Tours, the Giovanni & Forniconi, on October 1, 1547. The Salviati put forward the main qualities expected from a principal or agent: his wealth and social credit (vol. 579, fol. 20r, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa). This is echoed by the recommendation that Manuel de Veiga of Lisbon makes to Simón Ruiz of Medina del Campo on May 18, 1602, regarding potential correspondents in Antwerp. Francisco Moreno is described “good and rich,” while Veiga’s own correspondents and compatriots on the Antwerp market, the Ximenes, are described as the “cream of the crop” of business. (Da Silva, Lettres, 233–234).
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b. Sometimes the safeness of a merchant was determined because of his position in a network. For example, he could be someone who was himself trading on behalf of safe and rich merchants, as was the case of Juan Román, whom Baltasar Suárez recommended to Simón Ruiz in December 1579, explaining that Román traded for very “secure” people in Segovia and Villacastín (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 30). In August 1585, Ruiz tells Suárez that Bernardo Vizcarreto can be trusted and has nothing in common with the corrupt Sevillan houses (Ruíz Martín, Lettres, 403).
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c. While reliable merchants were praised for their money and their morality, merchants to be avoided were systematically accused of caring “more about themselves than their principals,” thus breaking the reciprocity contract so essential to commission trading. Such was the criticism expressed, for example, by Manuel de Veiga on the Genoese houses of Lisbon, in a letter to Ruiz dated from April 1596 (Da Silva, Stratégie, 158). Lack of consideration for others is also reproached to the Bonvisi and Capponi firms, after they have protested bills drawn on them by Suárez in favor of Ruiz in the last Besançon fair (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 412). The same criticism of the Bonvisi appear in the Salviati archives, where they are described as impetuous and thirsty for immediate profit, rather than prudent and considerate of their principals’ interest. (vol. 565, fol. 172r, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa).
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6. News on bankruptcies
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a. Not appearing at a fair’s payment session was usually considered a bad sign. In Lyon, absentees were treated as absconding debtors (Marc Brésard, Les Foires de Lyon aux XVe et XVIe siècles [Paris, 1914], 265–273; Richard Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses marchands, environs de 1520-environs de 1580, 2 vols. [Paris-La Haye, 1971], 240–248). The tradition apparently continued in Besançon a few decades later. Thus, in March 1583, Suárez mentions banks missing at the last Besancon fair’s payment, saying that they are “probably bankrupt” (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 225).
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b. Correspondents indeed commonly stated whether they were in business or not with the house whose bankruptcy they reported and sometimes asked for the same reassurance from their correspondent. In March 1580, Suárez informs Simón Ruiz that he has heard about the Galiano’s house financial difficulties. “God be blessed,” says Suárez, “I have no interest with him” (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 40). In July 1583, Suárez explains to Ruiz that he is safe from any fallout from the Fornari’s sensational bankruptcy in Florence because he had sensed it coming after the Fornari’s brothers went bankrupt in Madrid (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 243). In May 1584, Juan de Lago tells Simón Ruiz that out of the 300,000 crowns of debt of Andrea de Loste of Venice, only 6,000 are due in Florence and none to him (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 302). In December 1677, A. Van Kuffeler from Amsterdam writes to Jacob David that Jeremias van Raey, a substantial merchant in Amsterdam, has gone bankrupt and that he hopes David is not implicated (Roseveare, Markets, 488). In January 1678, J. A. Fonck of Hamburg writes that he hopes Jacob David is not involved with Octavius Buschman, who has gone bankrupt. Roseveare (Roseveare, Markets, 491). In April 1678, C. Bene of Hamburg writes to Jacob David that the Bellamy of London and Cornelis van Weed of Hamburg have failed and that he is not involved with any of them and is also “free of those who have failed in Amsterdam” (Roseveare, Markets, 504).
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c. News of bankruptcies was widely disseminated, even when there was no immediate concern that a correspondent would be impacted, allowing for the rapid spread of information throughout the network to those who might be affected. In May 1601, De Veiga agrees with Ruiz’s worries regarding the fate of the Gallo bank, saying one always needs to remain alert (Da Silva, Stratégie, 222) In June 1581, Suárez in Lisbon informs Ruiz in Medina del Campo about the fall of the Canigiani house of Pisa after contracting a debt of 12,000 crowns (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 98). On October 13, 1583, Juan de Lago of Florence informs Ruiz that a bank in Naples is said to have fallen, yet the level of the debt is still unknown (Ruiz Martín, 267).
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7. Implicit writing style
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a. The following example illustrates the difficulty of interpreting commercial letters: “…I see that you have collected the 10,200 maravedís that I sent to you, and that you remitted 9,489 maravedís 13 shillings 2 pence have to Lyon with the money, despite the abundance in the market. The fluctuations between abundance and scarcity of money are beyond our control. You must have ensured that these matters are without suspicion, which is the most important thing, considering the current times.” (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 24–25). In this August 1579 letter to Baltasar Suárez, Simón Ruiz seems to forgive his correspondent for remitting money to Lyon during a period of larguezza (abundance of money), which likely reduced profitability, acknowledging that market fluctuations are beyond their control. He stresses the importance of handling the transaction “without any suspicion” given the current circumstances, which might refer to the economic difficulties Lyon was experiencing, including numerous bankruptcies, which could lead third parties to suspect that either Ruiz or the remittance beneficiary in Lyon faced financial problems (Gascon, Grand commerce). However, without further details, these interpretations remain speculative.
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b. For instance, in April 1581, Baltasar Suárez of Florence writes to Simón Ruiz that the goods of Domenico Justiniano, which were thought to be lost, have arrived in Livorno, and because they “come from suspicious places, they will undergo inspections.” Only after this will Suárez be able to sell the clothing of Morales, which was included in the cargo, on Ruiz’s behalf (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 88).
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c. In March 1545, the Salviati write to the Mendes, a Jewish firm for whom they manage capital under pseudonyms, asking why they wish to change the pseudonym from Averardo Salviati to the Company Pandolfo della Casa, even though the name Averardo seems equally secure. In the letter, they also mention that their agent Tommaso Corbinelli will go to Antwerp to discuss these matters in person: “…we will not prolong this matter further because our Tomaso Corbinelli will soon be there and will discuss this and other matters with you.” (see vol. 565, fol. 74v, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa). In the following letter that the Salviati send to the Mendes in June 1545, they claim to be understanding and approving the Mendes’s reasons for this change, without however mentioning them (vol. 565, fol. 78r, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa).
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d. Similarly, in May 1564, Hernando de Friias Cevallos of Antwerp writes to Simón Ruiz that he understands and finds legitimate the reasons put forward by Francisco de la Presa and Víctor Ruiz to decline entrusting their business to him, without mentioning such reasons (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, I, 14).
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8. Suspicions and fears of being suspected
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a. In October 1585, Manuel Henriques of Antwerp apologizes to Simón Ruiz for accusing him of failing to transfer the 800 ducats that Manuel had previously arranged to be sent to Ruiz in Medina on his behalf: “I must seek forgiveness for what I wrote previously, expressing my surprise that you had not fulfilled the request regarding the value of Juan Marissal’s bill (…) I mistakenly thought I had written about this matter in multiple letters, urging action, but upon reviewing your letters, I see I only mentioned it once. That letter was received by you after the June fair ended, and you acted upon it as requested (…)The key point I wish to make is that I hope you will not hold against me the mistrust that may have been apparent in my letter. This was influenced by the circumstances I am currently under and the urgency of the matter. I hope you will overlook any offense I may have caused.” (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 28).
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b. In a letter sent to Charles Marescoe in June 1669, a merchant from Hull expresses surprise that Marescoe thought the tar might be shipped without being fully filled, as partially filled barrels could easily lead to tampering or deception. For instance, someone could secretly remove some of the tar without it being noticed, which would also result in “charges (…) paid out on goods you had not.” (Roseveare, Markets, 280).
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c. A mid-eleventh-century letter from a Palermo merchant to Yeshu’a ben Isma’il illustrates how the fear of falling under suspicion could determine the course of action chosen by a particular merchant: “I held [the pepper] until the time when the sailing of the ships approached in the hope [the price] would rise. However, the slump got worse. Then I was afraid that suspicion might arise against me and I sold your pepper to Spanish merchants for 133 [quarter dinars].” (Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade [Cambridge, UK, 2005], 68). Joseph ben Yeshua, an eleventh-century agent, wrote to a merchant that he could not act without written instructions because he did not wish that “people will (…) say that I did something that I was not ordered.” (Greif, Institutions, 71). Thus, according to Greif, Geniza merchants were more concerned about the interpretations of their actions by other members than about the outcomes of their actions (Greif, Institutions, 88).
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d. Merchants were also wary of how familial disputes could affect their reputation. In June 1415, Hildebrand Veckinchusen accused his brother-in-law, Engelbrecht Witte the Younger, of having taken 1,000 guilders in bonds that Hildebrand held against their father-in-law, Engelbrecht Witte, a prosperous merchant in Riga, following his death. Hildebrand stated, “You should not have claimed that money as your own, just as I would not have claimed yours. Therefore, dear lady and brother-in-law, I ask you to settle all these matters as I have outlined and send me a clear and swift reply so we may move forward. If things do not proceed as I have written, you should enlist your friends to ensure that my actions are seen as beneficial for myself, my heirs, and my wife. I do not want anyone, nor God, to believe that I am unjustly holding onto your money and possessions without rightful cause.” (Stieda, Hildebrand, 129).
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e. In long-distance trade between Cadiz and Lima in the eighteenth century, the smallest details could arouse distrust (Xabier Lamikiz, Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and Their Overseas Networks [Woodbridge, 2010], 153). In a letter to his Spanish correspondent, a Lima merchant Juan Miguel complained that a local merchant who had agreed to buy a large quantity of merchandise from Cadiz was beginning to distrust him because “he sees that everyone receives letters, and I am the only one who tells him that I have none from you.” Juan Vicente’s letter arrived days later via Cartagena, and similar to Henriques with Ruiz, Juan Miguel apologized for the complaint (Lamikiz, Trade and Trust, 179). Juan Miguel also assured his correspondents that not receiving European merchandise in Lima was bad because the provincial merchants became “suspicious about his inaction,” and the colonial customers were already saying that he was cheating them (Lamikiz, Trade and Trust, 180).
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f. In 1767, a royal investigation into the San Carlos Borromeo’s voyage disrupted the established practices of the Manila–Acapulco trade. Royal officials, led by Teodoro de Croix, scrutinized the merchants’ bills of lading and secret instructions, demanding transparency in a trade characterized by carefully managed information flows (Juan José Rivas Moreno, “An Alternative Model for Early Modern Long-Distance Trade Finance: The Capital Markets of Manila, 1680-1838,” [Ph.D. diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2022], 269). Merchants in Manila protested vehemently, arguing that “if by any chance this information is divulgated, the buyers in the [Acapulco] fair could use these bills with great detriment of our interests.” The Marqués de Montecastro’s secret instructions to his agent in Acapulco, unearthed during the investigation, advised handling sales “with great harmony and caution with all individuals, without declaring quantities or money to any person, for if not, with the slightest hint the buyers will learn about the cargo of the vessel” (Rivas Moreno, Alternative Model, 174).
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9. Standard statements of reciprocity
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a. “I will gladly do my best with the ginger according to your letters, but no one is interested in it yet. The first time God grants that someone takes an interest, I will handle it as if it were my own, which you can believe me on.” Ludwig Buggendal, Danzig, to Hildebrand Veckinchusen, Bruges, March 1412 (Stieda, Hildebrand, 86). In this corpus, Reinhard Noiltgin from Cologne begins his letters with the phrase “Mynen dyenst und wat ich goitz vermach” (“My service and whatever good I can offer”) (pp. 499, 503, 504, 511, 513, 516, 517, 518). Although this phrase does not directly convey reciprocity, it nonetheless signals a readiness to assist, which aligns with the norms of mutual obligation.
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b. “We inform you very diligently and handle your affairs as if they were our own.” Bombergen, Antwerp, to Grimani, Venice, February 1542 (Wilfrid Brulez, “Lettres commerciales de Daniel et Antoine van Bombergen à Antonio Grimani (1532-1543),” Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 31 (1958): 196).
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c. “We hope that you have handled our matters in this situation as your own, ensuring that we remain more protected and better covered than the others.” Manuel de Veiga, Lisbon, to Simón Ruiz, Medina del Campo, November 1596 (da Silva, Stratégie, 171).
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d. “And if you have sent it, it will have been done purposefully to secure it, avoiding the risk of the sea. And of what you have sent, you will have sold the export license we have with all possible advantage. And knowing that you will handle our business as if it were your own, we will say nothing more on this.” Camílo & Cristóbal Balbaní, Antwerp, to Simón Ruiz, Medina del Campo, June 1588 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, IV, 243).
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e. “The court will certainly accept from these merchants (…) with a 4% interest per fair and they offer good guarantees. If you wish to entrust this matter to us, we will take care of it for you as if it were for ourselves.” Salviati, Lyon, to Affaitadi, Antwerp, February 1544 (Archivio Salviati, I, 565 fol. 55r).
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f. “This land has become very agitated, and business has come to a halt because of it. And certainly, this happened at the least expected time. What encourages us greatly is having our matters in the hands of your lordships, whose prudence, great caution, and experience in business, as well as the friendship you have always shown us, give us confidence. We hope that you have handled our matters in this situation as if they were your own, so that we are as protected and better covered than most. And knowing this, we wish to be assured.” Manuel de Veiga & Brothers, Lisbon, to Simón Ruiz, Medina del Campo, November 1596 (da Silva, Stratégie, 171).
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g. “It pains us that the Dutch goods have so little demand there, as you say. Had we thought so, we would have arranged to have them loaded in Bilbao for Lisbon, where we sent two other chests of the same goods at the same time, and they were quickly sold at a profit because they are very white and of very good quality. We ask that you give orders for the sale as if they were your own, and if necessary, to delegate the task to someone who understands it, forgiving us for the trouble.” Ximenes & Nunes, Antwerp, to Simón Ruiz, Medina del Campo, October 1583 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 164).
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h. “Now we inform you, as your servants, that by the grace of God and with a good beginning, we have formed a company under the names of Diego Lopes Alemán and Fernando Mendes de Saa, with the present writer, who will have enough information to notify you about what is accomplished here. We assure you that your matters will be treated as if they were our own, compelled to do so by your great merit, as attested by Mr. Joan Rodrigues León and Felipe Jorge, whose very devoted servants we are, and consequently, your very dedicated servants.” Lopes Aleman & Mendes de Saa, Florence, to Simón Ruiz, Medina del Campo, March 1579. (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 17).
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i. “We cannot congratulate you on the price, so we beg you with this - as we already have before—to let no good opportunity pass by, but dispose of the whole amount, doing our best for me as if it were your own, for I depend upon you.” J. Momma, Stockholm, to Charles Marescoe, London, March 1669 (Roseveare, Markets, 277). “In selling it [bar iron] I urge you to have as much regard for my profit as if it were your own: I depend upon it.” A. Reenstierna, Stockhom to Charles Marescoe, London, August 1669 (Roseveare, Markets, 293). “Be assured that anything further you may be pleased to order will be dealt with as if your, and your friends’, interests were as close to our hearts as our own.” P. Van Teylingen & Co, Venice, to Charles Marescoe, London (Roseveare, Markets, 301). “…please buy nothing other than good quality and look after my interests as if they were your own.” D. Gaymer, Hamburg, to Jacob David, London, September 1679 (Roseveare, Markets, 544).
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10. Unpredictable shifts
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a. Political upheaval: Merchants were affected by sudden political developments whose timing and consequences were difficult to predict. The Portuguese succession crisis (1580–1581), for example, created uncertainty regarding legal authority, commercial policy, and the enforcement of debts (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 6, 8, 11, 26, 39, 47, 119, 120, 134, 159; IV, 21). In Flanders, merchants were caught off guard by the mutinies of unpaid Spanish troops (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, II, 57, 67, 199, 201, 205, 207) and the sacking of Antwerp in 1576 (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, II, 225–27; III, 21, 28, 34; IV, 4, 11, 20). These events disrupted trade routes, compromised physical safety, and invalidated previously secure contracts and jurisdictions. While political instability was a known factor, its specific outcomes—such as which faction would gain control or how military violence would affect trade—remained deeply uncertain (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, II, 24, 57, 67, 368–369, 219–220, 225).
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b. Maritime interventions: Beyond the known risks of storms and piracy, merchants faced catastrophic maritime events that no insurance or navigation skill could have foreseen. A notable example is the arrest of Don Diego Brochero and the confiscation of his ship by Venetian authorities after he sought refuge from a storm in the port of Cerigo (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 437). Despite not violating any Venetian law, he and his crew were detained on the basis of a treaty obligation Venice had with the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, merchants were shocked by the Dutch seizure of Portuguese ships returning from India in 1602—an event that disrupted not only the cargo’s delivery but also Portuguese prestige and morale.
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c. Administrative unpredictability often took the form of abrupt decrees or changes in financial procedures. In a 1596 letter, Lopo Roiz d’Evora expressed surprise when a cédula (royal decree) suddenly suspended payments of large sums (e.g., 100,000 ducats) due in Seville (da Silva, Stratégie, 286). He had received conflicting information from Seville and Madrid about the applicable legal process, indicating the absence of clear institutional coordination. Such bureaucratic changes introduced uncertainty into the enforcement of contracts and financial instruments, even those backed by prior legal guarantees.
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d. Merchants were sometimes caught unaware by the bankruptcy of major firms. The Fornaris’ failure (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 20) surprised creditors such as Ruiz and Echdvarri. More dramatically, the unexpected bankruptcy of Gaspar de Anastro, who fled Antwerp leaving 20,000 pounds of debt (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 83) sent shockwaves through the merchant community. Adding to the turmoil, Anastro’s servant was falsely accused of attempting to assassinate the Prince of Orange. This accusation led to arrests and near-riots in Antwerp, further destabilizing the already anxious merchants (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 59–60).
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e. Merchants frequently suffered from the total or partial failure of communication. Letters were lost, delayed, or intercepted, making it impossible to respond to changing political or market conditions in a timely manner. For example, in a letter from February 27, 1580, amid the Portuguese succession crisis following King Henry’s death, Manuel Henriques highlights the difficulty of obtaining timely information from Lisbon. Due to a lack of recent overland correspondence, he explains that “it is not possible to understand well what is happening there,” despite some older letters arriving by sea (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 10). Another instance includes Baltasar Suárez writing to Simón Ruiz on November 4, 1580, to lament the attack and murder of the ordinary courier carrying letters from Spain to Italy. The courier’s dispatches were burned, depriving merchants, including Suárez, of crucial updates. Suárez specifically mentions needing updates from Seville regarding Francisco Moroveli’s purchase of cochineal (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 64).
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f. Beyond seasonal expectations, merchants were affected by unanticipated environmental events. For example, Estevao Nunes’s letter of March 11, 1585, details the unfortunate impact of storms and consistently unfavorable weather on multiple wheat shipments intended for Spain. Ships carrying grain purchased in England and Holland, and set to sail from Antwerp and nearby ports such as Flushing in Zeeland, experienced significant delays, resulted in some of the wheat spoiling at sea owing to extended voyage times (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, IV, 10–11). In a letter dated July 22, 1420, Gerwin Marschede informs Hildebrand Veckinchusen that many figs, despite being stored in barrels, are spoiled owing to insect infestation. This damage, discovered after 14 days, has resulted in wormy, mushy figs, and a significant loss, as they are now difficult to sell, especially with a recent influx of 600 barrels of Spanish figs (Stieda, Hildebrand, 274–276). Gerwin Marschede writes to Hildebrand Veckinchusen in Brügge on July 16, 1417, informing him that three Tomasche cloths had been returned because they were badly moth-eaten (Stieda, Hildebrand, 150–151). These were not simply quality control issues but disruptions arising from atypical environmental conditions that exceeded normal expectations.
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g. Merchants occasionally observed sudden and extreme changes in commodity prices without identifiable cause. The Ruiz–Suárez correspondence vividly portrays the volatile and unpredictable nature of the sixteenth-century cochineal market. These merchants, despite their experience and networks, grappled with dramatic price swings that often seemed to defy explanation. The lack of rapid communication and reliable information compounded the challenges of navigating this turbulent market. Simón Ruiz, in a letter from January 10, 1581, remarks on a past price increase, stating it was “without foundation,” highlighting the seemingly arbitrary nature of the shifts (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 137). Unpredictable credit fluctuations at international fairs were another key theme in the Ruiz–Suárez correspondence. Ruiz, in Medina del Campo, repeatedly expresses bewilderment at the lack of expected correlation between Spanish and Italian credit markets (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 171, 181, 201, 280), lamenting missed opportunities due to this volatility (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 201). Operating from Florence, Suárez confirms the difficulty in securing rechanges, even at unfavorable rates, citing new fair regulations as a contributing factor (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 199). This unpredictability is further illustrated by contrasting conditions in Florence and other markets (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 289).
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h. Sudden death or illness of key individuals often disrupted commercial plans. Several letters in the Veckinchusen correspondence detail unexpected deaths with specific consequences for trade and family finances. Both Sivert Veckinchusen (Stieda, Hildebrand, 331) and Tideman Brekelvelde (Stieda, Hildebrand, 341) express anxiety over Hildebrand Hoyeman’s capture, worried about his potential death and the significant financial ramifications. Brekelvelde also notes that Rychert van der Linden’s death over one and a half years ago continues to have implications for outstanding debts and trade dealings (Stieda, Hildebrand, 370). Finally, Meister Wilhelm van Bergen reports that the death of Coen van der Eycoren’s wife disrupts his work arrangements in Aken owing to his close relationship with Coen (Stieda, Hildebrand, 396). In the Ruiz–Suárez correspondence, death and illness highlight the fragility of sixteenth-century mercantile networks across Europe and the Americas. Luis Perez’s death in Seville (p. 159) forced Simón Ruiz, who managed Perez’s affairs, to adjust both pearl transactions and their associated accounting (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 159). Francisco Morovelli’s subsequent illness in Seville made Baltasar Suárez, based in Florence, hesitate to purchase American cochineal owing to a lack of market intelligence (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 202, 277–278). This illustrates the difficulties of conducting trade across vast distances while depending on personal connections and timely information. The same observation can be made regarding the Antwerp letters. In letter dated April 17, 1580, Filipe Jorge informs Simón Ruiz of the unexpected death of Conrad Rott, a Lisbon pepper farmer, as he was leaving Augsburg for Portugal. Filipe Jorge expresses surprise at this news and predicts considerable confusion will result from the suspension of payments by Rott’s firm in Augsburg and Antwerp, given the large scale of his business dealings relative to his available capital (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 16). These events were especially disruptive when the affected individuals held unique knowledge or responsibilities, and there were no immediate successors or documentation available.
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i. Merchants of the period readily acknowledged that certain events lay beyond the reach of prediction or control. In a letter dated June 27, 1580, to Simón Ruiz, Filipe Jorge of Antwerp remarked that “no matter what novelty there may be between these two kingdoms,” trade would presumably remain unaffected—yet the very need for this reassurance betrays an underlying awareness of the unpredictable (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 21–22). Frequent invocations of divine will—such as “Dios quiera” or “Dios le comunda”—reveal a widespread acknowledgment that outcomes often hinged on forces beyond human foresight or control (see, for example, Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 167, 169, 191). A similar sensibility emerges in the reflections of Manuel da Veiga, writing amid monetary turbulence, who observed that “when things exit their normal course, all these inventions proceed from the malice of the time” (da Silva, Stratégie, 229). In critiquing the speculative conduct of the Gallo and Veluti houses in Lisbon, da Veiga did not cast blame on individuals, but rather portrayed their actions as manifestations of a larger climate of uncertainty. Such remarks reveal a nuanced awareness among merchants of the epistemic boundaries that shaped their commercial world.
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11. Misplaced trust
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a. In 1581, Andrés Moreno filed a lawsuit against Baltasar Suárez, claiming that Suárez owed him money, which Moreno said he had redirected as a donation to the friars of Segovia. Believing Moreno’s claim to be legitimate, the friars initially pursued the matter, even putting Suárez’s assets at risk. Ruiz denounced Moreno’s actions as outright deceit and worked to uncover the truth, while Suárez expressed deep frustration at Moreno’s ingratitude. He said he had risked “life, honor, and wealth” out of compassion for Moreno, only to be betrayed in return. Suárez bitterly concluded, “There will always be ungrateful people, and I seem particularly vulnerable to them.” (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 245–247).
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b. Although known for his vigilance and instinctive mistrust, Ruiz was not immune to deception. In a July 1585 letter to Baltasar Suárez, he described Francisco Morovelli’s financial misconduct, which impacted multiple parties involved in trade with the Indies, including both himself and Suárez. Ruiz noted that Morovelli “left us all astonished by how poorly and covertly he conducts his affairs,” adding that, if even Morovelli’s “neighbors in Seville” were fooled, it was no surprise he managed to deceive Ruiz in Medina del Campo and Suárez in Florence (Ruiz Martín, Lettres, 391–393).
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12. The role of experienced merchants in arbitration
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a. On March 10, 1595, Lopes d’Evora informs Ruiz that he has consulted all the Castilian and Portuguese “men of good judgement” in Lisbon regarding a disagreement Ruiz is having with another of his agents, Ximenes, another famous merchant of Lisbon, regarding how they are supposed to bear the losses related to a particular arbitrage operation (da Silva, Stratégie, 135).
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b. A December 1589 letter to Simón Ruiz by Nicolau and Simão Rodriguez d’Evora addresses concerns regarding the selection of an appropriate third party in case of a dispute. The senders remind Ruiz of a 700-ducat bill drawn on him five years earlier, which he neither paid nor protested. While they acknowledge that Ruiz fulfilled his duty by involving two independent individuals to examine the matter, they contend that it is essential to have someone who can adequately represent their position. They suggest that the issue be resolved “anywhere else where neither [party] would be bound by statutes.” To support their case, they enclose expert opinions “signed by the principal businessmen of [Lisbon]” and propose that the services of Francisco de Bouadilla in Madrid be engaged (Vázquez de Prada, Lettres, III, 395–396).
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c. In October 1548, the Salviati of Lyon explain to the Strozzi of Medina del Campo that they do not know whether a Lyon businessman who has a son in Spain can open a Spanish branch in his son’s name, because this is a “puntti di dottori” (“matter of experts”), and that they need to contact a third party before getting back to the Strozzi (vol. 579, fol. 84r, series I, Archivio Salviati, Pisa).
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II—The Pedagogy of Distrust
(Based on Savary, Le Parfait Négociant (1675/2011), Book III, 2nd part, chapters 1–4)
Author Biography
Nadia Matringe is Assistant Professor of Accounting at London School of Economics and Political Science Methodology Institute. Her publications include La banque en Renaissance: Les Salviati et la place de Lyon au milieu du XVIe siècle and articles in the Economic History Review and Accounting, Organizations and Society.
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