New World, Inc.
New World, Inc.

Author: John Butman

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 0316307874

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Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive. Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe, and it had begun to face a daunting array of social, commercial, and political problems. Struggling with a single export-woolen cloth-the merchants were forced to seek new markets and trading partners, especially as political discord followed the straitened circumstances in which so many English people found themselves. At first they headed east, and dreamed of Cathay-China, with its silks and exotic luxuries. Eventually, they turned west, and so began a new chapter in world history. The work of reaching the New World required the very latest in navigational science as well as an extraordinary appetite for risk. As this absorbing account shows, innovation and risk-taking were at the heart of the settlement of America, as was the profit motive. Trade and business drove English interest in America, and determined what happened once their ships reached the New World. The result of extensive archival work and a bold interpretation of the historical record, New World, Inc. draws a portrait of life in London, on the Atlantic, and across the New World that offers a fresh analysis of the founding of American history. In the tradition of the best works of history that make us reconsider the past and better understand the present, Butman and Targett examine the enterprising spirit that inspired European settlement of America and established a national culture of entrepreneurship and innovation that continues to this day.

Merchant Adventurers
Merchant Adventurers

Author: James Evans

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Published: 2013-09-12

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0297866893

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A Tudor voyage of exploration - an extraordinary story of daring, discovery, tragedy and pioneering achievement. In the spring of 1553 three ships sailed north-east from London into uncharted waters. The scale of their ambition was breathtaking. Drawing on the latest navigational science and the new spirit of enterprise and discovery sweeping the Tudor capital, they sought a northern passage to Asia and its riches. The success of the expedition depended on its two leaders: Sir Hugh Willoughby, a brave gentleman soldier, and Richard Chancellor, a brilliant young scientist and practical man of the sea. When their ships became separated in a storm, each had to fend for himself. Their fates were sharply divided. One returned to England, to recount extraordinary tales of the imperial court of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. The tragic, mysterious story of the other two ships has to be pieced together through the surviving captain's log book, after he and his crew became lost and trapped by the advancing Arctic winter. This long-neglected endeavour was one of the boldest in British history, and its impact was profound. Although the 'merchant adventurers' failed to reach China as they had hoped, their achievements would lay the foundations for England's expansion on a global stage. As James Evans' vivid account shows, their voyage also makes for a gripping story of daring, discovery, tragedy and adventure.

Merchant Adventurers
Merchant Adventurers

Author: James Evans

Publisher: Phoenix

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781780221021

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'Merchant Adventurers' illuminates wider themes in the history of exploration, trade, science, globalisation, and the making of modern England. In 1553 three ships sailed from London into uncharted waters. They sought a northern passage to Asia and its riches. Although they failed to reach China, their achievements would lay the foundations for England's expansion on a global stage.

London's Triumph
London's Triumph

Author: Stephen Alford

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-12-05

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1620408236

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The dramatic story of the dazzling growth of London in the sixteenth century. For most, England in the sixteenth century was the era of the Tudors, from Henry VII and VIII to Elizabeth I. But as their dramas played out at court, England was being transformed economically by the astonishing discoveries of the New World and of direct sea routes to Asia. At the start of the century, England was hardly involved in the wider world and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. But as the century progressed something extraordinary happened, which placed London at the center of the world stage forever. Stephen Alford's evocative, original new book uses the same skills that made his widely-praised The Watchers so successful, bringing to life the network of merchants, visionaries, crooks, and sailors who changed London and England forever. In a sudden explosion of energy, English ships were suddenly found all over the world--trading with Russia and the Levant, exploring Virginia and the Arctic, and fanning out across the Indian Ocean. The people who made this possible--the families, the guild members, the money-men who were willing to risk huge sums and sometimes their own lives in pursuit of the rare, exotic, and desirable--are as interesting as any of those at court. Their ambitions fueled a new view of the world--initiating a long era of trade and empire, the consequences of which still resonate today.

The Book of Privileges of the Merchant Adventurers of England, 1296-1483
The Book of Privileges of the Merchant Adventurers of England, 1296-1483

Author: Anne F. Sutton

Publisher:

Published: 2009-04-30

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13:

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This edition of the trading privileges granted to the merchants of England by the princes of the Low Countries reveals the increasing value of cross-Channel trade throughout the 14th and 15th centuries. French, Latin, and Dutch texts are accompanied by the 15th century English translations, forming a unique historical and linguistic tool.

The Merchant Adventurers of England
The Merchant Adventurers of England

Author: William E. Lingelbach

Publisher: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1584774428

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Lingelbach, W.E. The Merchant Adventurers of England: Their Laws and Ordinances with Other Documents. Philadelphia: The Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania, [1902]. xxxix, 260 pp. Reprint available October 2004 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN 1-58477-442-8. Cloth. $80. * With detailed notes and an extensive introduction. Chartered by the crown in 1474, the Merchant Adventurers was England's preeminent regulated international trading company until the early nineteenth century. This source book collects eighteen substantial documents written between 1407 and 1805, the most important years of the society's history. This group includes the Charter of 1407, extracts from the Charter of Edward IV (1462) and the Laws and Ordinances of 1608. Taken together, these records form one of the most detailed pictures of business organizations and methods during the later Tudor, the Stuart, and the early Hanoverian eras.

Fellowship and Freedom
Fellowship and Freedom

Author: Thomas Leng

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-04-29

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0192513303

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This is the first modern study of the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers - England's most important trading company of the sixteenth century - in its final century of existence as a privileged organisation. Over this period, the Company's main trade, the export of cloth to northwest Europe, was overshadowed by rising traffic with the wider world, whilst its privileges were continually criticised in an era of political revolution. But the Company and its membership were not passive victims of these changes; rather, they were active participants in the commercial and political dramas of the century. Using thousands of neglected private merchant papers, Fellowship and Freedom views the Company from the perspective of its members, in the process bringing to life the complex social worlds of early modern merchants. For members, 'freedom' meant not just the right to access a privileged market, but also to trade independently, which could conflict with the 'fellowship' of corporate affiliation, and the responsibilities to the collective that it entailed. The study's major theme is the challenge of maintaining corporate unity in the face of this and other pressures that the Company faced. It restores the centrality of the Merchant Adventurers within three important historical narratives: England's transition from the margins to the centre of the European, and later global, economy; the rise and fall of the merchant corporation as a major form of commercial government in premodern Europe; and the political history of the corporation in an era of state formation and revolution.

Peter Mundy
Peter Mundy

Author: R. E. Pritchard

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781851243549

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Peter Mundy was a seventeenth-century merchant trader who spent most of his life travelling the world. Even by the standards of his own day, his journeys to Istanbul, India, China, Danzig (Gdansk), Russia, and the Arctic were remarkable. His account of these travels, illustrated with his own lively drawings of the strange people and animals he met, survives in a single manuscript.This edited selection provides a fascinating, vivid account of early modern lives and times in all their barbarity and brilliance. It includes encounters with the Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese, and Russian empires and Mundy's eyewitness accounts of the first contact between Britain and China, exhausting journeys through India, and events in London following Charles II's coronation in 1661.This edition is from the seventeenth-century manuscript of the Travels of Peter Mundy, first edited by Sir Richard Carnac in five volumes for the Hakluyt Society, 1905-36. Historians and lovers of travel literature alike will find this extraordinary account of one man's adventures across the globe a compelling read and an invaluable resource.