ABSTRACT
Portuguese maritime expansion and consequent empire building is often perceived as the first moment in early modern globalization. One would intuitively expect that Portugal and its empire would remain, if not at the fore front, then at least actively participating in the globalization waves of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. From a geographical point of view the Portuguese empire was indeed global. That ‘globality’ also holds true when it comes to the international participants in the exploitation of empire and their capacity to redistribute products and rents across differentiated economic and social systems. It is when one zooms in into the business behaviour of international maritime firms operating in Lisbon that one is forced to account for the deviances, asymmetries and resistances that came about with the participation of these firms in the exploitation of Portuguese colonial business. Although these firms were participating in a globalized system of exchanges, the commercial system (as in a set of rules including, but not limited to, the state institutions and the Portuguese merchant community itself) in which they operated remained far from global. Lisbon, as a commercial market place, embodied the extreme trends of eighteenth century globalization, whilst remaining a localized system that resisted change. This paper uses eighteenth-century sources of Northern European, mostly Dutch, merchant firms established in Lisbon as a stepping stone to analyze how their mercantile knowledge and ways of conducting business adapted to the workings of the Lisbon market. This chapter investigates this capacity to adapt, to find solutions to challenges that arose from operating in a system that held a specific, albeit radically different, socio-economic logic of their place of origin. We conclude that cosmopolitan behaviour and business solutions were crucial in shaping notions of ‘merchant’s best practice’.
