ABSTRACT
In 1601 John Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce was published in London by the printer John Harison . As secretary of the English Merchant Adventurers, Wheeler set out to glorify the society and to convince its opponents of the necessity of the society. e treatise depicts merchants from the Low Countries, and in particular those of Antwerp, in a notably poor light; these merchants were allegedly going ‘to eat out the Adventurers out of their trade, as they of Antwerpe therefore did the Merchants of other nations, Portugals, Italians, Dutches or Germans, and others, whereby they greatly enriched themselves, their prince and countrey’. Wheeler goes on to detail how the Antwerp merchants had ousted their competitors from international commerce. ey had bought spices from the Portuguese , sometimes paying beforehand, and managed to establish a ‘plaine Monopoly whereby they only gained, and all other nations lost; for that being in few mens handes, were sold at such a rate, as they li ed to their owne private lucre and gaine, and to the hurt and damage of all others’. A few years before the beginnings of the Dutch Revolt Antwerp merchants had taken over the pro table export of English kerseys to Italy and the Levant from their Italian , English and German colleagues and ‘were to become the greatest dealers in that way … with linen cloth, Worsteds, Sayes, Tapestrie, & other Netherlandish wares, by meanes whereof the said Italians, English and Germanes were forced to leave that trade, or to doe very little’. e German merchants let their Antwerp counterparts ‘eat, as it were, the bread out of their mouth’: Antwerp merchants took over the export of both merchandise from the Low Countries and transit products to the German hinterland. e Hanseatic Easterlings ‘beganne not alitle to be diminished by those of Amsterdam , and other, but new upstarte townes in Holand , with their great number of Hulkes, and other shippes’. e more creditworthy Antwerp merchants were able to indebt Spanish merchants and sell them their worst wares, while exporting the good ones to Spain on their own accounts.
