Download PDF | Despina Vlami - Merchants on the Mediterranean_ Ottoman–Dutch Trade in the Eighteenth Century-I.B. Tauris (2023).
233 Pages
Acknowledgements
The study of the letters from the Dutch merchant Thomas De Vogel to his Greek Ottoman clients Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici during their ten-year collaboration will always remain an important moment of my academic career. When read through the magnifying lens of microhistory, De Vogel's letters reveal all the individual characteristics, risks and impasses that Ottoman trade faced as it expanded into Western markets in the long eighteenth century.
They also highlight the everyday anxieties, rewards and worries that accompanied business collaborations at the time: importantly, they show how the pursuit of profit could coexist with a relationship of trust between merchants and in what way a business strategy might include a variety of mechanisms to deal with unpredictable, unfamiliar and threatening situations. Finally, they confirm the imperative significance of timing, climate and geography in long-distance trade. De Vogel’s business transactions emerge as a ‘jeu multiple de la vie’ with ‘tous ses movements, toutes ses durées, toutes ses ruptures, toutes ses variations, to use Fernand Braudel’s metaphor from the distant 1958.
Throughout the writing of the book, I had the warm encouragement of my colleagues in the Research Centre for Medieval and Modern Hellenism of the Academy of Athens, where I have the honour to serve as a senior researcher for the last twenty years. I am also indebted to the Netherlands Institute at Athens for encouraging my research and partly supporting the cost of copy-editing the manuscript. Above all, I would like to express my gratitude to the institute's secretary, Emmy Mestropian-Makri. A special thanks goes to Damian Mac Con Uladh for undertaking the copyediting. My dear colleague Thierry Allain provided me with valuable archival material from the Dutch Consulate of Smyrna, which I had the opportunity to elaborate and incorporate in my research.
He also provided me with important bibliographical material and references: I cannot thank him enough. Through research and writing, my daughters Stefania and Maria have been a constant source of support and delight, reminding me relentlessly of the self-evident truth that love is really what makes life beautiful. It is for their unconditional love, as for so many other reasons, that the book is dedicated to my parents.
Preface
The eighteenth century, mainly characterized as the ‘Age of Enlightenment and Reason, coincided with the final phase of the era of ‘merchant capitalism’: a period of unprecedented growth in the volume, geographical range and value of international trade, which had begun in the sixteenth century.' For at least two centuries, the movement of goods, services and money had a dramatic impact on the development of the world economy, politics and society — an impact which culminated in the eighteenth century, when, according to contemporary historians, international trade developed into a ‘supernatural wheel’ that ‘moved the engine of society.’ And yet the most significant attribute of the eighteenth century, whether it concerned international politics, society or the economy, was its highly transitional character.
As a period of relative stability marked by traditional values and age-old practices, the ancien régime was succeeded by a period of great upheaval, in which society, economy, politics and ideology underwent significant changes. Political and social turmoil was combined with an ideological stir ignited by the European Enlightenment.’ The outbreak of the French and American revolutions had a decisive influence on the balance of international relations, leaving an important imprint on modern Western civilization. Calling into question the legitimacy of monarchical and aristocratic power structures, the two revolutions highlighted new models of political, social and ideological values.* In the field of international relations, important dynastic wars, such as those over succession in Spain, Austria and the Seven Years’ War, underscored geopolitical competition and alliances between European states and challenged regimes that had survived since the ancien régime era. A series of bilateral conflicts, such as the EnglishDutch and Russian-Turkish wars, were economically motivated and led to significant territorial rearrangements.
In the eighteenth century, international trade entered a key period of transition. Change came, above all, with growth. Demographic expansion increased the volume of international trade transactions and their geographical range incorporated new distant areas. European discoveries and the formation of colonial empires had already expanded and boosted the international system of commercial transactions, while at the same time new commodities had been introduced to Europe and the rest of the world through colonial trade. Meanwhile the development of the transport industry and the improvement of financial techniques allowed for long-distance, more efficient and faster deals.
As the prevalent ideas of mercantilism were slowly replaced by liberalism and laissez-faire, a variety of business associations and partnerships, from regulated and joint stock companies to individual and family firms, appeared in the eighteenth-century international markets. Methods and techniques of the past blended with new strategies and tactics, as commercial firms combined direct trade with various forms of indirect and transit trade while offering commission agency, insurance and financial services to clients. To cope with the ordeals of war, increasing international antagonism and the necessity to achieve a quick turnover, many merchants turned to other merchant houses and brokers to buy information, intermediation and credit. This practice assigned the management and responsibility of different phases of an enterprise to commercial correspondents on commission and created large mercantile networks based on relations of trust and common interest.
The shift from old techniques, strategies and ideas to modern ones was accomplished in different geographical regions to varying degrees. Even though in some European regions new trends and methods appeared quite early, in other parts of western and south-eastern Europe the organization and techniques of international trade remained entrenched in traditional merchant capitalist practices into the nineteenth century. This distinct juncture of the dynamic coexistence of theories, strategies and merchant routines was particularly visible in bilateral economic relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire and the associations between Ottoman and European merchants.°
Levantine trade, although less significant in volume and geopolitical importance than its contemporary Atlantic and South Pacific equivalent, represents an ideal research laboratory for the study of the methods, relationships, ideas and everyday life of the members of an Ottoman merchant milieu who in the eighteenth century expanded their business transactions to the West. This development was closely related to a European penetration of the Ottoman market economy. Trade transactions between Europe and the Ottoman Empire had increased from the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Empire was a natural gate to the East and a huge market for the distribution of European products and colonial goods traded by European merchants. It was also a vast country producing high-quality raw materials and foodstuffs as well as serving as an outlet for Levantine products and goods arriving from the East.
However, from the eighteenth century, and as Europe entered the turmoil of war, there was an intensification of trade flows, accompanied by a significant increase in the number of European and other foreign merchants setting up business in Ottoman markets. The arrival of merchants and factors from England, France and Holland, as well as Italian and German cities, to Ottoman ports and commercial centres enhanced an already intense traffic of people, products and services carried out through various intersecting maritime and land routes. The economic strategy and trade methods of those willing to set up business in the Levant were more complicated and very different than the ‘colonial model’ adopted by Europeans to penetrate and manipulate colonial markets under their rule. Establishing commercial relations with the Ottoman Empire required coming to terms with the organization of the Ottoman economy, its management, infrastructure, resources and market organization. Daily business was determined by the government's strategy and its implementation by the public administration as well as bureaucratic turmoil, organization and the institutions of a complex multi-ethnic society.
Having to deal with a despotic ruler, rigid officialdom and a public administration prone to corruption, European and foreign officials were obliged to adopt discreet and conciliatory ways in approaching the Ottoman authorities with the intention of guaranteeing safety and free enterprise for their subjects. Therefore, since the sixteenth century, many European governments had developed a form of trade diplomacy, using political arguments and diplomatic means, in their dealings with the Ottoman authorities in order to attain trade agreements and special privileges.® For their part, European and foreign merchants hired factors and representatives in Ottoman markets and built partnerships with local trade operators. These alliances between Europeans and Ottomans were based on common interest and led to an exchange of protection, the distribution of special privileges and the delivery of confidential information and services.
They eventually gave to many Ottoman subjects, mostly Christians and Jews, the opportunity, and the incentive, to transfer their business to commercial centres and ports all around the Mediterranean basin, in central and western Europe and later across the Atlantic. As it appears, Ottoman merchants in expanding their trade business outside the Ottoman Empire had to reconsider their strategy and embrace those methods and techniques that would allow them to place themselves within the international business milieu, a setting very different from the cosmopolitan Ottoman markets where they had started out in the first place.
The flows and traits of Ottoman trade with the West during this turbulent period have been investigated extensively, and many studies have focused on the common strategies and performance of ethnic and religious minorities — Greeks, Armenians and Jews - who led the way. Less common has been an analysis at a microhistory level, to examine how Ottomans and foreigners, strangers and ‘friends; individuals of different faiths and cultural backgrounds, joined forces, worked together or competed within an international business setting. The book attempts to contribute to this end through a study of the collaboration between two Ottoman Greeks, Bartholo Cardamici and his nephew Raphael, and a Dutch merchant, Thomas De Vogel, who, from 1760 to 1771, acted as their commercial correspondent in Amsterdam.
Reconstructing a business relationship
Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici were Ottoman subjects of Greek origin who ran a family trading business in Smyrna and Constantinople. Their association with Thomas De Vogel is revealed in the letters the Dutch merchant addressed to them throughout their collaboration. The content of the letters allows us to discern the main characteristics of an early expansion of Ottoman trade in the West; it shows the means and methods employed by Ottoman merchants to infiltrate Western markets, the responsibilities they assumed to promote their business transactions and, finally, the experts and trusted parties they chose to include in their business networks as consultants, employees and partners. It also reveals through a microhistory lens the operation of European and Levantine trade networks in the Ottoman Empire, as well as the broader Mediterranean area.
The association between Cardamici and De Vogel reveals a type of OttomanEuropean collaboration in the sectors of trade and finance that has not featured in the relevant bibliography. And in doing so it describes a situation that overturns prevalent perceptions of the standard roles and responsibilities assumed by European and Ottoman merchant entrepreneurs in the Levantine import-export business. It shows, in other words, that the renowned eighteenthcentury European infiltration of the Ottoman market economy combined with and complemented an opposite tendency, since Ottoman merchants were already expanding their trade business into Western markets by utilizing similar strategies to their European counterparts. As has already been mentioned, in order to promote their business pursuits in Ottoman markets efficiently, Europeans needed the expertise and connections of local merchants, agents and brokers to serve as local footholds in unknown and hazardous environments.
Their partnership with Greeks, Armenians and Jews was based on a mutual understanding and profit-seeking agreement, leading to an exchange of privileges, confidential information and services. Eventually, it encouraged many Ottoman subjects to exploit European protection and connections and expand their business abroad. This perception of a linear association of events, bringing Ottoman merchants from Ottoman commercial centres, where they successfully acted as agent-intermediaries of Europeans, to the major trading and financial centres of the West, where they followed autonomous careers, has dominated the bibliography at least since the 1960s.”
However, some recent studies have indicated that already from the early eighteenth century, Ottoman commercial firms, like the Cardamici, embarked on autonomous careers in Europe; to realize this project, they collaborated with European commercial firms, which acted as their local agents in European markets. To gain access to Amsterdam’s commercial, mercantile and financial market, Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici did not hire, as anticipated, another Ottoman enterprise from their business and ethnic milieu as their main correspondent on the ground but chose to appoint an experienced insider from the Amsterdam market.
The CardamiciDe Vogel partnership, described in this book, represents therefore an interesting deviation from the ‘European merchant-Ottoman commercial agent’ pattern that dominates the analysis of Levantine trade; instead, it portrays a reverse model, one where the Cardamicis are the principals/clients wishing to expand their business from their operational base in Smyrna and Constantinople to a major Western commercial and financial market. De Vogel is instead their local representative/correspondent, providing various market, maritime, insurance and financial services under commission.
Thomas De Vogel's business letters
The following study is the outcome of an in-depth analysis of De Vogel’s letters addressed to Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici between 1760 and 1771. In the analysis we have also considered and made the most of information coming from De Vogel's letters to other well-known Ottoman merchants of the period, including, most notably, Ambrosio Mavrogordatos and Apostolos Demestikas, Ottoman merchants of Greek origin who were involved in the AmsterdamSmyrna Ottoman trade network of the period. We have also relied upon Ismail Hakki Kadr’s study for an assessment of De Vogel’s extensive correspondence with members of his family and other Dutch merchants established in the major Ottoman commercial centres of the period. Our analysis of De Vogel’s correspondence considers each letter both as the ultimate tool for the achievement of a commercial/financial transaction and as an illustration of an individual conducting a business operation - his behaviour, thoughts and personality.’ Each letter is enlightening and instructive, unveiling the reasoning behind each commercial transaction and the procedure necessary to fulfil it.’
This is by no means an innovative method, as historians have made extensive use of business correspondence as a valuable tool for the reconstruction and analysis of international trade in the modern period.'® Despite the fact that business letters do not usually contain quantitative data, as registers and ledgers do for individual enterprises, they nevertheless provide important information, which enables the reconstruction of a fascinating narrative of mercantile trade. The casual, contractual and, at the same time, personal character of the business letters are qualities that establish them as valuable pieces of evidence in the hands of historians. They also distinguish them from other means of information, such as the various types of pamphlets, almanacs and commercial guides and manuals that circulated extensively in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards."
Correspondence by letter remained the fundamental means of communicating and sharing information for merchants throughout the eighteenth century.’ Knowledge of its techniques and a fluency in writing business letters constituted, for all the above reasons, a very important skill.'*
But was there perhaps a more ‘suitable’ way of corresponding through business letters,'* some more appropriate merchant style which corresponded to the different languages spoken by the parties concerned and allowed obligations and contracts to be understood by all?! In their recent study, Bartolomei et al. mention, among others, that the capacity of merchants to compose letters developed and improved substantially during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.'® The style and wording of letters was elaborated through centuries of practice. Each letter retained a very personal form of expression and wording that reflected the distinctive personality and will of its author. It seems that letters retained this particular character despite the fact that until the late eighteenth century, manuals had been published in many different languages throughout Europe, containing models of business letters, together with commercial guides for the profession.’”? These manuals contained methods for keeping accounts, transacting with bills of exchange and money, and also commercial laws.'®
Through their letters, merchants were able to design, organize and advance their business enterprise.’? At the same time each letter depicted and served the character, mentality, strategy and priorities of a specific merchant; as such it represented his personality and also the way he chose to create and develop his personal business network. Business letters responded to vital, everyday necessities and demands and were exchanged within an environment of mutual commitment and trust, familiarity and sentiment, something that rendered the correspondence reliable and trustful.” The form and style of De Vogel's letters to the principals of the firms he collaborated with reflected a savoir faire of the merchant profession and the business correspondence of the period, conveying a sense of mutual trust and respect for associates, collaborators and colleagues. The business-like and, at the same time, intimate character of his correspondence with the Cardamicis reveals their personal liaison and their perpetual discourse, which referred primarily to business and profit, and then also to subjects like trust, skills, efficiency, solidarity and confidence. References to family, religion, social relations, culture and everyday life are also contained in the texts as well.
The control mechanisms to assess a merchant's reliability and the efficiency of a collaboration functioned through repetition — the constant flow of transactions, common projects that were repeated and the confronting and jointly dealing with common crises. Merchants chose eventually to collaborate with those merchants, representatives and agents they considered could help and serve them in the best way possible without being influenced, at least decisively, by references, acquaintances and advice from members of their extended family, social and religious-ethnic environment. This conclusion seems to question the opinion that business enterprises in the eighteenth century were more intrapersonal and less informal than modern enterprises. It also allows us to better understand the way in which eighteenth-century merchants, like the Cardamicis, chose their representatives and shaped business collaboration networks, which were based more on knowledge and instinct and will and less on kinship-social relations and references.
Thomas De Vogel was an eighteenth-century Dutch merchant entrepreneur based in Amsterdam whose international business network allowed him to operate all around the world. By the mid-eighteenth century, De Vogel had already expanded his business to the Ottoman Empire and had an intensive collaboration with Ottoman, Dutch and foreign commercial houses established in Constantinople, Smyrna, Ankara and Aleppo. His business correspondence includes letters addressed to the principals of some of these companies.
De Vogel’s association with Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici in the 1760s and 1770s formed part of the wider spectrum of his business activity in the Ottoman Empire. De Vogel’s business correspondence and business archive is part of the De Vogel family’s records conserved in the Amsterdam City Archives.”!
The records comprise personal correspondence, notarial acts, contracts and genealogical trees, business correspondence, ledgers, letterbooks, contracts and agreements concerning the family’s business transactions. As it stands, De Vogel’s business archive has a unique value considering that it appears to be the only personal archive of an eighteenth-century Dutch merchant that has survived in such good condition and can be consulted by researchers.” The letters addressed by De Vogel to his various partners and associates were copied and preserved in large letterbook volumes. In this series, volumes 44-52 contain copies of the letters sent by De Vogel to the principals of foreign commercial houses in Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires from 1760 to 1771. The letters are written in French, Italian or Spanish Ladino. Each volume corresponds to a specific year. The copies of the letters are classified in chronological order, and an alphabetic index of addressees appears at the start of each volume.
From 1760 to 1764 Thomas De Vogel sent letters to both Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici in Smyrna and Constantinople. Bartholo was the director of the Bartholo Cardamici & Co, and his nephew Raphael represented the firm in Constantinople. From 1764, following Bartholos death, Raphael took the reins of the family enterprise and until 1771 collaborated with Thomas De Vogel & Son under the name Raphael Cardamici & Co.
Based on this valuable material of 253 business letters sent to their addressees between 1760 and 1771, we investigate a number of important issues related to Ottoman-Dutch trade of the period. How easy and uncomplicated was it for a medium-sized eighteenth-century Ottoman trade company, such as the Cardamicis, to expand its business to the West? What were the decisions to be made and the setbacks to overcome? Which kind of resources, in terms of knowledge, information, experience, contacts and capital, could guarantee its successful passage from the business environment of a precapitalist oriental market to that of a major western European commercial and financial centre?
Following the venture of the Cardamicis, who in 1760s traded goods between Smyrna, Constantinople and Amsterdam, we investigate various aspects of the organization and strategy necessary for such an important transition. To expand their wholesale trade business to Amsterdam, the Cardamicis chose as their local correspondent the experienced and strong-minded De Vogel. De Vogel's letters to his Ottoman-based clients reveal the course of their business dealings and the making of their personal relationship. At the same time, they are comprehensive and efficient tutorials on the trade business and strategy that guided the Cardamicis in an eighteenth-century international business universe that was unpredictable and mainly unfamiliar to them.
Chapter 1 presents a brief account of Dutch-Ottoman trade relations and sketches the historical context within which the De Vogel-Cardamici association came into being and developed. Chapter 2 describes the organization and strategy of the Dutch and the Ottoman enterprises and depicts the immediate, common, business-social milieu in which their partnership and joint ventures were staged. Chapters 3-5 present the various domains of the De VogelCardamici association, namely the buying and selling of products in various markets, the organization of the Mediterranean passage of the commodities, the procedure for arranging cargo insurance and the foundation of credit and monetary exchange systems that supported the business.
The De Vogel letters to Cardamici reveal all the concrete and psychological tools utilized by the Dutch merchant to establish a relationship of trust with his principals and to overcome the difference of provenance, culture, language and religion and collaborate for the sake of business profit. Chapter 6 analyses De Vogel’s rhetoric on trust and confidence that he used to convince his Ottoman partners. The letters show how this collaboration worked and developed into a personal exchange of information, advice and demands. As De Vogel's archive does not include incoming letters, our picture of this exchange replies on his monologue. However, the wide range of issues addressed in the letters, the detailed narrative and intensity of expression allow us to compose an imaginary dialogue between De Vogel and the recipients of his letters - a synthesis of spoken or unsaid ideas, opinions, instructions and requests, of deeds and delays.
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