ABSTRACT
Native merchants may not have specialized in local goods but they may have had comparative advantages vis-à-vis their foreign counterparts in commerce – both the export of Low Countries products and the distribution of imports. Jessica Goldberg has recently pointed out the regional embeddedness of merchants. Local knowledge, reputation, connections and personal scal privileges allowed eleventh-century Geniza traders – or Maghribi merchants as they are called in the literature – to control the di erent production phases in Fatimid Egypt and cut out costly middlemen. Yet, fostering and maintaining close relations with the production side required time and local presence. Geniza merchants faced a trade-o : to trade in high-volume, low-value regional products and maintain contacts with local producers, or engage in pro table yet insecure long-distance trade in luxury products throughout the Mediterranean . Of course, merchants’ activities ranged within the continuum between localism and ‘internationalism’, two types of trade with very di erent investment requirements, geographies of travel, pro t expectations and risk. Merchant choices were determined by resources, family ties, training and personal preferences.3 Merchants in the sixteenth-century Low Countries faced similar choices and constraints.
