Drawing on an impressive range of archival material, this monograph delves into the careers of two businessmen who worked for Nordic chartered monopoly trading companies to illuminate individual entrepreneurship in the context of seventeenth-century long-distance trade. The study spans the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, examining global entanglements through personal interactions and daily trading activities between Europeans, Asian merchants and African brokers. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of individuals and their networks within the great European trading companies of the early modern period. This unique book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of economic history, business history, early modern global history and entrepreneurship.

The Northern Black Sea in Antiquity brings together the latest research on an important region of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Merchants to Multinationals examines the evolution of multinational trading companies from the eighteenth century to the present day. During the Industrial Revolution, British merchants established overseas branches which became major trade intermediaries and subsequently engaged in foreign direct investment. Complex multinational business groups emerged controlling large investments in natural resources, processing, and services in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While theories of the firm predict the demise over time of merchant firms, this book identifies the continued resilience of British trading companies despite the changing political and business environments of the twentieth century. Like Japanese trading companies, they 're-invented' themselves in successive generations. The competences of the trading companies resided in their information-gathering, relationship-building, human resource, and corporate governance systems. This book provides a new dimension to the literature on international business through the focus on multinational service firms and its evolutionary approach based on confidential business records.

At the start of the fourteenth century, Boston (Lincolnshire), was one of England's largest and wealthiest towns and played a leading role in the country's overseas trade, attracting merchants and commodities from as far afield as Italy, Gascony, the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia and was second only to London in many branches of trade. Yet, two centuries later, as the accounts of the royal customs reveal, Boston's overseas trade was of minor significance, as the capital came to dominate the nation's commerce at the expense of its provincial ports. This book offers a comprehensive guide to the evolution of the medieval English customs system and discusses the reliability of the sources which it generated. It brings together all the statistical data from Boston's enrolled customs accounts for the period from 1279 to 1548 concerning the fluctuations in volume of the port's trade, the transformation in the nature of its imports and exports and the changes in the origins of the merchants, whether English or alien, who traded there. It will be of interest to all scholars and students of medieval English towns and, in particular, to those concerned with Anglo-Hanseatic trade in the later Middle Ages.