Trade across Religious and Confessional Boundaries in Early Modern France
Trade across Religious and Confessional Boundaries in Early Modern France
This chapter suggests that France’s emergence as one of the great early modern European commercial powers was predicated upon daily interactions between merchants of different religions and confessions who lived side by side in many cities of the kingdom. It identifies evidence of cross-cultural and trans-confessional trade in the primary sources and in the existing secondary literature on early modern France, with a particular focus on Bordeaux. In so doing, the chapter questions the conventional assumption that trade networks worked because they were formed by coreligionists. It proposes, instead, that merchants’ propensity to rely on coreligionists varied according to the risk associated with different kinds of economic transactions. In fact, a common legal and jurisdictional system allowed all merchants residing in France and its colonies to contract with one another.
Keywords: trade networks, cross-cultural trade, trans-confessional trade, Bordeaux, France, early modern
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