Looking at the daily functioning of an average business in the XVIIIe century, Francesca Trivellato describes the establishment of intercultural commerce which knows how to use and go beyond community networks according to needs. It thus sheds new light on the age of commerce on which capitalism has long been based.
By exploring inequalities in income and wealth, Thomas Piketty rediscovered the chronology established fifteen years previously by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, in their work on the discourses of capitalism and its criticism. In both cases, the Fordist period appears as a rather short parenthesis, a few decades of “civic-industrial” compromise during the XXe century. A hierarchical organization, planning by engineers, accommodated the need for employee safety: growth was accompanied by a reduction in inequalities. Does the exit from Fordism take us back to its past? Thomas Piketty points out the risk of returning to a society polarized by rent and inheritance by citing the great novels of XIXe century ; according to Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, on the other hand, the dominant discourse since the 1990s appears to be unprecedented: it is that of flexibility, the project and the network, while their pre-Fordism is above all the time of the family business . The imagination of companies of the past seems saturated by the mine of Germinal and the forge masters, or the small-earning shopkeeper, ignorant of consumers, before the Ladies happiness.
An age of trading
However, since Fernand Braudel, many historians have analyzed accounts and correspondence, ship loadings and credit instruments of XVIIe–XIXe centuries. Their work gives a rich and nuanced image of a first spirit of capitalism, that of the “age of commerce”, according to the expression of Pierre Gervais. Extending until the 1870s or 1880s, the period is in no way static: it is a time of constant extension, in quantity and distance, of the movements of goods, accompanying a “revolution in consumption”. In what we often continue to call “industrial revolution” out of habit, the role of engineers and factories continues to be put into perspective, or rather referred to a late period, at the end of the XIXe century. Previously, it was the traders who pulled the strings of the economy, not only by organizing the slave trade and other Atlantic trade, but by circulating goods more widely between continents and to the shops of small towns, by developing systems increasingly sophisticated credit systems, and by placing orders with producers who remained largely subordinate to them.
It is the daily functioning of this trade that Francesca Trivellato brings to life, in a book nourished by multiple research traditions, from the collection “Business and business people” from the editions of theEHESS to neo-institutionalist economics and network sociology, through the micro-history of Giovanni Levi and the connected history of Sanjay Subrahmanyam. His book, which begins with notes on terminology, weights and measures, is invigorating for researchers: any colleague will find to enrich their horizons in the extensive and multilingual bibliography. However, the main text, very alert, remains entirely readable by a wider audience and can thus contribute to better drawing the image, vague or non-existent, of the “age of commerce”, and, by extension, to better ask questions about capitalism today.
Coral versus diamonds (and others)
This is the story of the Ergas & Silvera house that F. Trivellato tells: general traders, who, as the title of the book indicates, export coral from the Italian islands to Asia and import Indian diamonds into Europe . More generally, with their head office in Livorno, Tuscany, their branch in Aleppo and their correspondents from London and Amsterdam to Goa, via Marseille, Cyprus, Genoa or Venice, they control an impressive variety of credit flows and goods, cotton, silks or colonial goods. It is not a leading house, it is not directly involved in the triangular trade: yet the book underlines the global ramifications of the activity of this in many respects average company.
The organization of Ergas & Silvera is also representative of the time: alongside the Indian companies, with their monopolies and their shareholders, capitalism remains essentially organized in partnerships, with a significant family component. The few partners choose correspondents whom, for many, they meet very rarely, if ever, and to whom they nevertheless entrust important and risky operations, with legal support which may seem weak: agents or commission agents are sometimes bearers of a notarial deed, often designated by a simple letter.
An “intercultural trade”
F. Trivellato underlines that these ultra-majoritarian institutional forms until the end of the XIXe century have nothing of archaic survivals: they are indeed what allow the expansion and densification of the flow of goods. If we do not move on to the limited company or the large integrated company, it is because no one expresses the need. The talent of early capitalists is largely that of knowing how to trade with foreigners, and often even entrusting them with carrying out transactions on their behalf. The English title of the book, The familiarity of strangersrefers to this very consciously cultivated skill: relying on family is indeed essential, but staying only with family does not allow you to expand your operations.
The same goes for the larger communities: Ergas & Silvera are in fact part of the Sephardic diaspora, these Jews who left Spain for Portugal then settled in various cities in Europe, including particularly Livorno, a port whose authorities favored their installation. The company relies, in some cities, on religious ties, and tries to strengthen its alliances in the community. But only trading, and even having only Sephardim as agents, would not allow him to carry out his activities in Lisbon or Goa. The book is therefore also a reflection on Jewish identity, and the identities of the modern era in general: F. Trivellato refuses to give in to “groupism”, that is to say to the external assignment of a simple identity; rather, it explores the room for maneuver of the different actors.
Thus dismantling many preconceived ideas, still for the current period, about “family business” or “community commerce”, F. Trivellato shows concretely how success comes, over a century and a half, for Ergas & Silvera, from ability to play on several tables: using Sephardic rules on dowry to collect capital, local tolerance to establish a presence in Livorno, the well-understood interest of the French authorities in Aleppo to mobilize their protection, or even mastery of the game recommendations, to find agents in distant ports, ensure their reliability and obtain their trust in return. Exploring the “variety of possible entanglements between reason of state, commercial imperatives, politics and the spirit of tolerance” (p. 137), F. Trivellato thus prefers to speak of “intercultural commerce” or “community cosmopolitanism”. The borders remain very strict, the Jews, in particular, have a separate status and are the object of contempt, even violence; some know how to cross them, and even play with them, but that in no way erases them.
Commerce as a conversation
In a particularly original passage, the author insists on the fact that writing skills in the strict sense are also necessary: to trade, it is not a question of brutally announcing the quality or price of one’s goods, which, in any case, are generally not in front of the eyes of either the author or the recipient of the letter; if, to remain a correspondent, it is necessary not to demonstrate manifest incompetence in the appreciation of these qualities, it is first necessary, to become a correspondent, to master polite expressions and handle the vocabulary of “friendship”. “Sweet commerce” is not only a political description due to the philosophers of XVIIIe century: it is a vocabulary of civility which constitutes one of the conditions of exchange, and which is found in all its languages. Ergas & Silvera actually correspond in Italian and Portuguese.
What then is the spirit of this first age of capitalism? As today, it emphasizes the connection, between small and flexible entities, for well-defined projects to be carried out together. This is not, of course, the spirit of financialized capitalism of the 2000s. No shareholders on the horizon, in particular: we work for the long term, for the intertwined survival of the company. and family. In the case of Ergas & Silvera, the company succumbed all the same, in the middle of XVIIIe century, in “the affair of the big diamond”, recounted in a tasty manner in the last chapter, and which demonstrates, if it were necessary, that an ability to play for a long time with a wide variety of resources does not prevent one from lose everything on a poorly written contract, misplaced trust. The first spirit of capitalism is not confinement within a narrow circle, but the careful construction and maintenance of “weak ties” beyond. Work on credit and trust therefore, rather than maximizing immediate profit, difficult to imagine in a context where, for example, cargoes, and therefore also letters for India cannot double the Cape of Bonne- Hopefully once a year. Both so far and so close, this description helps us to read, by comparison, today’s globalization.