ABSTRACT
Throughout the early modern period, English merchants’ activity in international commerce lagged conspicuously behind their Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch counterparts. At the start of the sixteenth century, at least half of England’s exports (consisting mainly of wool, unfinished cloth, and tin) were shipped and marketed by foreign merchants, primarily German members of the Hanseatic League and Italians.1 English merchants who did trade abroad mostly trafficked through the exchange at Antwerp, rather than attempting direct trade with more distant regions.2 By the early seventeenth century, English merchants had gained control over the majority of English exports and had significantly increased their presence in global commerce with trading ventures to the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Indian Ocean, North Africa, and America.3 This period of commercial expansion was far from painless, however, and, for merchants and non-merchants alike, it was a period of uncertainty and anxiety about England’s place in the global economy.
