CONTENTS

pp vii-viii

Acknowledgements

pp ix-x

List of Contributors

pp xi-xiv

List of Figures and Tables

pp xv-xvi

Introduction: The Many Scales of Merchant Profit: Accounting for Norms, Practices and Results in the Age of Commerce

pp 1-12

Part I - Understanding Merchant Transactions

1 - The Current Account as Cognitive Artefact: Stories and Accounts of la Maison Chaurand

pp 13-32

2 - Why Profit and Loss Didn't Matter: The Historicized Rationality of Early Modern Merchant Accounting

pp 33-52

Part II - The Credit Nexus and its Pitfalls

3 - Terms of Payment in Retailing: A Tool for Fostering Customer Loyalty or a Form of Managerial Constraint? A Few Observations Based on Accounting from Lorraine in the Eighteenth Century

pp 53-74

4 - The Wings of a Butterfly: Private Creditor Strategies in the ‘Chinese Debts’ Crisis of 1779–80

pp 75-94

Part III - Beyond Price Signals: The Institutional Framework

5 - The Transatlantic Flow of Price Information in the Spanish Colonial Trade, 1680–1820

pp 95-114

6 - Product Quality and Merchant Transactions: Product Lines and Hierarchies in the Accounts and Letters of the Gradis Merchant House

pp 115-132

Part IV - Diversification and Risk Management

7 - The Pinet Family of Gap and their Business Relations, 1785–1816: Official Activities and the Issue of Commercial Risk

pp 133-152

8 - ‘The Way to Make a Huge Fortune, Easily and Without Risk’: Economic Strategy and Tactics among Tobacco-South Planters in the Early National United States

pp 153-170

Conclusion: Reorienting Early Modern Economic History: Merchant Economy, Merchant Capitalism and the Age of Commerce

pp 171-180

Notes

pp 181-218

Index

pp 219-228