Merchant Adventurers

The origins of the English trading company known as the Fellowship or Company of Merchant Adventurers can be traced back to the late thirteenth century, in the form of privileges secured by English merchants from the Duke of Brabant, recognizing them as a distinct trading community trading in his territories. By the sixteenth century, these grants had become the basis for an organization entrusted with the regulation of the most valuable branch of England’s foreign trade, the export of woolen cloth to the Low Countries. The Company acquired various privileges from successive English monarchs, culminating in letters patent granting legal rights of incorporation by Queen Elizabeth in 1564, at which point its members were at the pinnacle of London’s, and thus the nation’s, commercial elite. The Merchant Adventurers were part of a wave of commercial incorporations in the late Tudor period that sought to bring order to several geographically discrete markets, ranging from Muscovy and the Baltic to Turkey and Morocco, and encompassing the founding of the East India Company in 1600. These companies have long been associated with the globalization of English trade and ultimately the beginnings of empire. In contrast, the Company of Merchant Adventurers has often been interpreted as representing a narrower commercial order that was becoming outdated in the early modern period, focused on bilateral exchanges with England’s nearest continental neighbors. This is also reflected in its corporate form: in contrast to some of the new companies such as the East India Company, which traded under a joint stock, the Merchant Adventurers was what historians describe as a “regulated” company, with members trading independently but according to shared regulations, much like an artisanal guild. The restrictions on mercantile mobility and initiative that membership entailed have been seen by some historians as constraining the Company’s ability to adapt in the seventeenth century, a time when the value of its trade declined precipitously before it lost its privileges following the Glorious Revolution. The history of the Merchant Adventurers in the early modern period thus offers us an opportunity to study the process of institutional decline in a period more often associated with innovation, and more generally commercial growth, a story that is of relevance to the more celebrated new trading companies of the period.