"What cannot be helped must be indured": Coping with Obstacles to Business During the Anglo-Dutch Wars, 1652-1674
"What cannot be helped must be indured": Coping with Obstacles to Business During the Anglo-Dutch Wars, 1652-1674
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“无能为力的必须忍受”：应对英荷战争期间的商业障碍，1652-1674 年
DOI：
10.1017/eso.2021.1
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发表时间：
2021
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
TALBOTT S
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
TALBOTT S
从本质上讲，战争似乎对商业怀有敌意，给国际关系和日常生活带来了破坏。然而，通过关注参与持续商业的个人，越来越多的学术机构已经表明，在许多情况下，商人在战争时期继续成功地经营。这篇文章建立在商业史最近的这些方法论转变的基础上，将它们应用于17世纪的三次英荷战争。尽管这些冲突被描述为对商业有害，但到目前为止还没有人把重点放在商人对这些战争的经历或回应上。本文探讨了这个问题，并在此过程中提出了一种不同的方式来分析和描述英荷战争与商业之间的关系。通过研究在这些战争中经营的商人幸存的信件，我调查了在这些冲突中使用的各种方法--成功的和不成功的--来克服商业障碍。探讨了在更广泛的英国和欧洲背景下考虑这一活动的价值，并分析了商人在这些冲突时期表现出的一系列关切，表明尽管有政治背景，但战争并不是他们最关心的问题。自始至终，我都表明，尽管三次英荷战争都对商业产生了影响，但这并不一定是负面的，最具进取心和最积极主动的商人从冲突创造的商业机会中受益。
By nature, wars appear hostile to commerce, bringing disruption to international relations and to everyday life. By focusing on the individuals involved in continuing commerce, however, an increasing body of scholarship has shown that merchants in a number of contexts continued to operate successfully during periods of war. This article builds on these recent methodological shifts in business history, applying them to the three Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century. Although these conflicts have been described as being harmful to commerce, there has been no focus hitherto on merchants’ experiences of or responses to these wars. This article addresses this problem and, in so doing, proposes a different way of analyzing and thus characterizing the relationship between the Anglo-Dutch Wars and business. Through examining the surviving correspondence of merchants operating during these wars, I investigate the various methods used—both successfully and unsuccessfully—to navigate obstacles to business during these conflicts. The value of considering this activity in broader British and European contexts is explored, and the range of concerns exhibited by merchants during these periods of conflict is analyzed, showing that war was not paramount among their concerns, despite the political context. Throughout, I show that although all three Anglo-Dutch Wars had an impact on commerce, this was not necessarily negative, and that the most enterprising and proactive merchants benefited from commercial opportunities created by the conflicts.