Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World: Spanish Merchants and their Overseas Networks, by Xabier Lamikiz

Extract

In the eighteenth century, long-distance trade involved a multitude of risks and uncertainties. One of the greatest risks stemmed from unavoidable information asymmetries between parties, the inequality of information that each party possessed. Once merchants had shipped their cargoes to distant markets, they became utterly dependent on their network of correspondents and trade associates, any one of whom had the potential to act fraudulently, perhaps without the merchant ever finding out. As Xabier Lamikiz argues in this excellent book, bonds of trust became critical to the functioning of long-distance trade, and merchants worked incessantly to build and maintain trusted networks of correspondents without whom they would not have felt sufficiently secure to trade. Just like the merchants whom he examines, Lamikiz casts his net widely across the Atlantic world. Part One of the book focuses on trade conducted between the merchants of Bilbao and northern Europe while the final two parts examine commerce between Cadiz and the Spanish colonies, especially Peru.