ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the survival of a business ledger raises the question of Hyman's identity as an Ashkenazi merchant trading between Paris and London, and one whom Boulton trusted so much that he dealt with him for 10 years. It stresses that this identity mattered and Boulton had reasons to credit Hyman. Matthew Boulton's networks provide an opportunity for reassessing the part of Jewish merchants in the growth of industrialisation: for connecting 'commerce' and 'industrialisation'. Until now Eric Robinson was the only author who had focused on Matthew Boulton's Jewish partners, such as Moses Oppenheim, and Solomon Hyman. Boulton's network of relations with Anglo-French Jews tends to support the secularised Weber thesis proposed by Zahedieh for explaining the prominent place of Quakers and Jews in colonial trade in the seventeenth century. For the Ashkenazim in Paris, linguistic seclusion provoked disdain and hostility from non-Jews.