Commercial Cosmopolitanism? The Case of the Firm De Bruijn & Cloots (Lisbon) in the 18th Century

Abstract

The Portuguese maritime expansion and consequent empire building is often perceived as the first moment in Early Modern globalization. One would intuitively expect Portugal and its empire then to continue at least actively participating in the globalization wave of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, albeit not necessarily at the forefront. When looking at the outreach, outputs and geographical extent of the Portuguese empire, it can certainly be said to have been a global phenomenon, with that ‘globality’ also being reflected in the international participants involved in exploiting the empire and in redistributing products and rents across differentiated economic and social systems. This chapter uses eighteenth-century sources for Northern European merchant firms (mostly Dutch) established in Lisbon as a stepping stone for analysing how their mercantile knowledge and ways of conducting business adapted to the workings of the Lisbon market. It is in their capacity to adapt to and find solutions for challenges arising from operating in a system with a specific, albeit radically different, socio-economic logic from that of their place of origin that we discuss the cosmopolitan nature of these firms and the cosmopolitan solutions they devised.