Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Images, Maps, and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Keeping Family
- Part 1 Surviving Slavery, Transportation and Forced Labour
- Part 2 On the Road: Mobility, Wellbeing, and Survival
- Part 3 In the Absence of Family, Support in Unfamiliar Environments
- Part 4 Managing Kinship-Based Businesses and Trading Networks
- Part 5 Ensuring the Survival of Maritime Families
- General Index
- Index of Persons
9 - Intimate Affairs: Family and Commerce in a Trans-Mediterranean Jewish Firm, 1776–1790
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Images, Maps, and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Keeping Family
- Part 1 Surviving Slavery, Transportation and Forced Labour
- Part 2 On the Road: Mobility, Wellbeing, and Survival
- Part 3 In the Absence of Family, Support in Unfamiliar Environments
- Part 4 Managing Kinship-Based Businesses and Trading Networks
- Part 5 Ensuring the Survival of Maritime Families
- General Index
- Index of Persons
Summary
Abstract
The chapter investigates processes that allowed Jewish merchants in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean area to sustain familial and commercial obligation over time and space. Primarily based on the correspondence of Tunis-based Joseph Franchetti to his sons and associates in Livorno and Smyrna, this investigation shows that the intersection of family and trade was both a constructed practice and a deeply held moral belief. Strategies employed to preserve a feeling of familial commitment and to educate younger relatives – such as the circulation of gifts, the emphatic identification of love with obligation, and the reliance on surrogate kin – are examined alongside parental fears regarding the risks that young merchants away from home could pose to a family's reputation and credit.
Keywords: Correspondence, Jewish family firms, gift giving, long-distance education, conversions, fictive kinship.
A correlation between shared culture, language, kinship, and trust is still deeply entrenched in the historiography about early modern commerce. Yet, recent studies about trading minorities – such as Sephardic Jews, Portuguese New Christians, or Armenians – have grown skeptical of older notions regarding intra-group ethnic and religious solidarity (as conveyed by Abner Cohen's term ‘trading diaspora’). Today, scholars increasingly emphasize mechanisms of communal control and cohesiveness, and disciplining systems that promoted effective long-distance commercial networks. In doing so, they show that trust – the building block of pre-modern commerce – was not a natural outcome of belonging to the same ethno-religious minority, but a constantly negotiated status.
The importance of kinship practices as a crucial foundation of premodern Jewish trade, however, should not be minimized. The devolution and protection of capital within a family through specific marriage, dowry, and inheritance strategies were essential for its economic success in a competitive market. The family played an especially significant role for Mediterranean Jewish commerce. Jewish merchants in that area continued structuring their business in family firms even in the late eighteenth century, when joint-stock companies had become commonplace in northern Europe. Furthermore, ties maintained by separated relatives from the same household remained key for the functioning of Jewish trade networks: they helped spread out risk, increase potential for success, and expand business to multiple markets.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion, and Exile, 1550–1850 , pp. 213 - 236Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020