Famous Merchant Of Venice Quotes

Soon after the marriage of Miss Meg, George, the third son, and youngest of the family, was placed in the counting house of one of the most eminent West Indian merchants at that period in Glasgow. This incident was in no other respect important in the history of the Lairds of Grippy, than as serving to open a career to George, that would lead him into a higher class of acquaintance than his elder brothers: for it was about this time that the general merchants began to arrogate to themselves that aristocratic superiority over the shopkeepers, which they have since established into an oligarchy, as proud and sacred, in what respects the reciprocities of society, as the famous Seignories of Venice and Genoa.

One of the key bases for the economic expansion of Venice was a series of contractual innovations making economic institutions much more inclusive. The most famous was the commenda, a rudimentary type of joint stock company, which formed only for the duration of a single trading mission. A commenda involved two partners, a “sedentary” one who stayed in Venice and one who traveled. The sedentary partner put capital into the venture, while the traveling partner accompanied the cargo. Typically, the sedentary partner put in the lion’s share of the capital. Young entrepreneurs who did not have wealth themselves could then get into the trading business by traveling with the merchandise. It was a key channel of upward social mobility. Any losses in the voyage were shared according to the amount of capital the partners had put in. If the voyage made money, profits were based on two types of commenda contracts. If the commenda was unilateral, then the sedentary merchant provided 100 percent of the capital and received 75 percent of the profits. If it was bilateral, the sedentary merchant provided 67 percent of the capital and received 50 percent of the profits. Studying official documents, one sees how powerful a force the commenda was in fostering upward social mobility: these documents are full of new names, people who had previously not been among the Venetian elite. In government documents of AD 960, 971, and 982, the number of new names comprise 69 percent, 81 percent, and 65 percent, respectively, of those recorded.