Publisher's Synopsis
In Merchants and Revolution Robert Brenner offers a socio-political account of the transformation of English commerce in the century after 1550 and a socio-economic explanation of the political activities and alignments of the London merchant community in the conflicts of the early Stuart period. In a major reinterpretation of long-term commercial change, he shows that new possibilities in the import trades - more so than problems in the traditional cloth trade - were behind the foundation of the long-distance commerce to the south and east. Brenner brings out, in turn, the way in which social groups of great City merchants wielded organizational and political power to exploit the emerging commercial opportunities. The very success of elite merchants in their recently established Levant-East India trades, he argues, opened the way for a whole new social group of entrepreneurial traders, recruited largely from outside the merchant community, to pioneer the development of the plantation trades in America, amassing riches and building their power in the process. Brenner demonstrates the enormous significance of merchant politics for national political development from 1621 to 1653, bringing out, in particular, the decisive roles played from 1640 by London's great company merchants in support of the crown and by the new colonial merchants, who were politically radical and militantly Puritan, in support of the parliamentary leadership. The new colonial merchants, Brenner shows, ultimately asumed great national influence with Cromwell's rise to power, becoming the chief architects of the Commonwealth's dynamic commercial policy.
