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Credit, Risk, and Honor in Eighteenth-Century Commerce

John Smail

The Journal of British Studies / Volume 44 / Issue 03 / July 2005, pp 439 - 456
DOI: 10.1086/429706, Published online: 21 December 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021937100008054

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John Smail (2005). Credit, Risk, and Honor in Eighteenth-Century Commerce. The Journal of British Studies, 44, pp 439-456
doi:10.1086/429706

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Credit, Risk, and Honor in Eighteenth-Century
Commerce

John Smail

I n 1781, Peter Tolson, a merchant in Leeds, wrote a letter responding to

his son’s proposal to form an import and export partnership with a Mr.
Merac: “It is a very weighty affair to form partnerships and requires delib-
erations and enquirys. As to Mr Merac, he may or he may not be a person of
honor and probity and therefore it behoves you to enter into no connections with
him but what are mere commissions.”1 The father’s concerns were natural enough,
for to enter into a partnership was to put one’s credit—encompassing both assets
and reputation—into the hands of another person. As Tolson well knew, however,
the prospect of his son’s partnership merely magnified the risk inherent in all
commercial transactions in the eighteenth century, for even the “mere commis-
sions” he suggested as an alternative carried some risk, not least because they
almost invariably involved credit in the strictly economic sense of delayed payment.
While this merchant’s advice to his son is worthy of note because it so clearly
illustrates how the concepts of “credit” and “risk” were closely entwined in the
everyday concerns of middling people engaged in trade, it is all the more so because
of the presence of a third concept, “honor.” Normally thought to be central to
the social world of the landed elite, or more broadly to personal definitions of
sexual reputation and identity, honor functions here almost as an antidote to risk,
for it is only the answer to the question about Merac’s honor that might transform
a foolhardy venture into a potentially sound enterprise. Tolson’s reference to honor
in this context is thus an example of how an exploration of credit, risk, and honor

John Smail is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He would like to
thank Christine MacLeod, Evan Jones, and Marilyn Morris, as well as participants at seminars at the
universities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Cambridge and colleagues at UNC Charlotte, for helpful comments
on earlier versions of this article. Comments from the anonymous readers for, and the editors of, the
Journal of British Studies helped improve the final version. Research for this article was made possible
by a grant from the UNC Charlotte Foundation, and it was written while the author enjoyed the
hospitality of the University of Bristol’s Department of Historical Studies and Institute for Advanced
Study.
1
West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS), Kirklees, DD/TO/12, Tolson letters, 27 January 1781.

Journal of British Studies 44 (July 2005): 439–456

䉷 2005 by The North American Conference on British Studies.
All rights reserved. 0021-9371/2005/4403-0002$10.00

439
440 䡵 SMAIL

can illuminate the links between attitudes central to the merchants’ identity and
the realities created by the commercial world in which they operated.
Appreciating the significance of these links between economic practice and cul-
tural identity requires moving beyond the conventional approaches to credit in
the eighteenth century. There is, of course, little dispute over the importance of
credit in this period. Pride of place goes to the financial revolution of the late
eighteenth century that fundamentally transformed Britain’s financial system by
creating a national debt and the financial instruments and institutions that served
it.2 In addition, studies of capital formation have illuminated the role credit played
in allowing the expansion of production during the course of the century, while
work on exports has shown how credit facilitated the growth of overseas trade
and of empire.3 Similarly, studies of home demand and consumption have shown
how credit helped to expand the scope and quantity of goods which British men
and women purchased during the course of the century, while work on credit
systems and crises has illustrated the ways in which the credit markets changed
during this period.4
Yet if the traditional context for our acknowledgment of the importance of
credit is that of an economic analysis, more recent work has begun to make the
same case from a broader cultural perspective. John Brewer and Kathleen Wilson,
for example, have examined how the creation of the national debt helped to shape
political ideology and national identity.5 Others, including Margaret Hunt, Toby
Ditz, and Margot Finn, have examined how credit and the other uncertainties of
the eighteenth-century economy shaped family dynamics and gender identities of
men and women.6 Finally, literary scholars such as Catherine Ingrassia, Liz Bellamy,
and James Raven have explored how credit and the social perceptions of those
using it were reflected in literary representations of eighteenth-century society.7
2
P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public
Credit, 1688–1765 (London, 1967); Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital
Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990).
3
Pat Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital (Cambridge, 1986); D. T. Jenkins, The West Riding
Wool Textile Industry, 1770–1835: A Study of Fixed Capital Formation (Edington, UK, 1975); Jacob
Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade (Cambridge, MA, 1980).
4
N. McKendrick, “Home Demand and Economic Growth,” in Historical Perspectives, ed. N.
McKendrick (London, 1974), 152–210; N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a
Consumer Society (London, 1982); Julian Hoppit, “The Use and Abuse of Credit in Eighteenth-Century
England,” in Business Life and Public Policy, ed. N. McKendrick and R. B. Outhwaite (Cambridge,
1986), 64–78, “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser.,
39 (1986): 39–58, and Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 1987).
5
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1994);
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785
(New York, 1995).
6
Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996); Toby Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile
Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of
American History 81 (1994): 51–80; Margot Finn, “Women, Consumption and Coverture in England,
c. 1760–1860,” Historical Journal 39 (1996): 703–22.
7
Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A
Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge, 1998); Liz Bellamy, Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-
Century Novel (Cambridge, 1998); James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses
to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (New York, 1992). See a recent review of several of these books
 CREDIT, RISK, AND HONOR 䡵 441

The common thrust of this work has been to show that the contingency and
contestation inherent in credit was a significant factor shaping politics, society, and
culture in eighteenth-century Britain.
However, with the exception of Craig Muldrew’s work on credit in the early
modern community and some suggestive studies of credit in eighteenth-century
France, these insights have not been applied to the credit used in commerce.8 This
is a mistake, for, given that credit was a pervasive feature of all commercial trans-
actions in the eighteenth century, traders’ experiences with it must have shaped
their world view in significant ways. There is, in particular, every reason to assume
that the kind of contingency and contest evident in analyses of governmental and
familial credit was also at play in the commercial context. To appreciate these
aspects of commercial credit, we must stop treating credit as an abstract factor of
production (or consumption) and approach it instead as an open-ended and ev-
eryday element in the lives of merchants and manufacturers.
Framing the problem in this fashion is to borrow the insights of Pierre Bour-
dieu’s theory of practice, insights that have been taken up and more fully articulated
in the work of Anthony Giddens and Marshal Sahlins.9 Bourdieu argued that an
analysis of the discrepancies between the actual behaviors of informants and the
cultural codes by which they claim to live allows the anthropologist to appreciate
the role that contingency plays in daily life. Bourdieu developed this approach as
a critique of the neat reciprocities of structural anthropology, but his efforts to
analytically distinguish “practice” from “culture” are equally applicable to the field
of economics. In the case of commercial credit, for example, an economic analysis
will ignore the contingent experience of economic actors in the interval between
the granting of credit and its repayment and focus instead on the final result. This
temptation is particularly strong in the case of eighteenth-century credit because
one very important source for such analysis—the ledger—presents credit in terms
of figures recorded at the end of the accounting year when the merchant calculated
the balance of each account. Such an analysis can tell us about the sources of the
credit that made economic expansion or overseas trade possible, but it is incapable

by Randall McGowen, “Credit and Culture in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 41
(2002): 120–31.
8
The political, family, and gender aspects of credit have received the most attention. See Craig
Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern
England (Basingstoke, 1998), “Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations
in Early Modern England,” Social History 18 (1993): 163–83, and “Credit and the Courts: Debt
Litigation in a Seventeenth-Century Urban Community,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 46 (1993):
23–38; Jay Smith, “No More Language Games: Words, Beliefs, and the Political Culture of Early
Modern France,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1413–40; John Brewer and Laurence Fon-
taine, “Homo creditus et construction de la confiance au XVIIIeme siècle,” in La Construction sociale
de la confiance, ed. Philippe Bernoux and Jean-Michel Servet (Paris, 1997), 161–76; Laurence Fontaine,
“Espaces, usages et dynamiques de la dette dans les hautes vallées dauphinoises (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),”
Annales HSS, no. 6 (November–December 1994): 1375–91, and “Antonio and Shylock: Credit and
Trust in France, c. 1680–1780,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 54 (2001): 39–57.
9
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977); Anthony Giddens, Central
Problems of Social Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979); Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History
(Chicago, 1985). For examples of applications of these insights, see William Reddy, Money and Liberty
in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (New York, 1987), and The Invisible Code:
Honor and Sentiment in Postrevolutionary France, 1814–1848 (Berkeley, 1997).
442 䡵 SMAIL

of comprehending what this inherent and inevitable contingency meant to traders

or how they sought to comprehend and cope with it.10
The contingency in question, of course, was risk, for to extend commercial
credit in the eighteenth century, most commonly by shipping goods in advance
of payment or accepting as payment bills of exchange drawn on a third party, was
to risk one’s capital in a environment fraught with uncertainty. The analysis of
merchants’ correspondence and other discursive sources presented here suggests
that commercial actors understood the risks and obligations that defined their
relationship in terms of a language of honor. This language of honor encompassed
both the ways in which merchants presented themselves in their dealings with
others and their attempts to project power in commercial relationships by enforcing
those expectations in others. Furthermore, an appreciation of ways in which the
merchants’ code of honor was rooted in their experiences with credit offers some
insights into the complex history of honor in this period and the particular ways
they positioned themselves in the shifting social and cultural environment of eigh-
teenth-century Britain.
The first part of the article sets up the subsequent discussion by outlining the
key features of the system of commercial credit within which merchants operated.
The second part examines the language of honor associated with credit and the
particular characteristics of the merchants’ honor. The third and final section takes
up an analysis of the ways in which this language of honor shaped the outlook of
commercial folk in this society. The analysis throughout focuses on those tradesmen
who engaged in commerce at the wholesale level—buying (or making) goods on
a relatively large scale and/or selling them over relatively long distances. For
simplicity, I will refer to such individuals as merchants, although I use the term
in its broadest sense, including both domestic and overseas merchants and mer-
chant manufacturers.11
Before discussing honor, it is necessary to explore the two most important ways
in which operation of a merchant’s business involved credit during the second half
of the eighteenth century. First, and perhaps most obviously, credit was essential
as a means for facilitating exchange. Because of the chronic shortage of cash, this
statement is something of a truism, but it had particular force for merchants and
manufacturers because many, if not most, of their transactions were with individuals
who lived outside of their own community, hundreds or even thousands of miles
away. By the mid-eighteenth century, such exchanges were usually conducted by
means of a credit instrument known as a bill of exchange. Typically a bill involved
at least three parties: the drawer (the person issuing the bill), the payer (the person

10
An economic analysis of price, to be sure, does take some cognizance of risk, but only by making
an assumption about the ultimate outcome of a “loan,” at least in a probabilistic sense. For example,
economists quite rightly analyze interest charges as reflecting, in part, the risk of default on loans, but
that cost can only be established with reference to the average outcome of a large number of loans.
11
Strictly speaking, the term “merchant” referred only to those individuals engaged in overseas trade;
see Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (1839; Gloucester, 1987), 7–8. The difference
between merchants proper and those engaged in the domestic trade or manufacturing should not be
minimized; see, e.g., Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society:
1660–1720 (Oxford, 2001).
 CREDIT, RISK, AND HONOR 䡵 443

named to pay the sum specified), and the payee (the person being paid).12 In these
bills, the debt that one merchant owed another for goods was satisfied by a bill
drawn on a third party and made payable to the creditor. Thus Samuel Hill of
Halifax received a letter from Pieter Kops in Amsterdam enclosing a bill of exchange
for £250 that was drawn on Henry Norris of London. Kops owed Hill the money
for cloth that Hill had sent to Amsterdam, and he drew a bill on Norris for that
amount. The webs of debt handled by this system were very complex and inter-
connected. The transactions between Norris and Kops that had created the balance
on which the latter drew almost certainly involved other parties in both England
and Holland. Moreover, although entitled to do so, Hill almost certainly did not
go and collect £250 in cash from Norris when the bill came due. Rather he sent
it to another merchant who was acting as his banker and drew bills of his own on
that balance. He could, however, also have endorsed it over to another party as
payment for a completely unrelated debt providing the creditor being paid had
confidence in the person on whom it was drawn.
The bill of exchange was more secure and more flexible than other means of
making remittances, which is why it came to dominate commercial exchanges after
its origins in the late seventeenth century.13 The bill, which was payable only to
the payee or to his order, avoided the risk of sending cash, a commodity that was
often in short supply in any case.14 It also freed merchants from the complexity
of a trade based on the mutual exchange of cargoes. Trade on that basis was never
very popular with producers, for, except in the case of raw materials they used in
production, they rarely had the specialized knowledge and the commercial contacts
necessary to profit from the return cargos.15 Even overseas merchants came to rely
on the bill, for, in the complex terrain of interlocking triangular trades which

12
A more complex version of the bill involved a fourth party, for if the merchant needing to make
the remittance could not draw bills in his own right, he was referred to as the drawee and would
purchase a bill in local currency from the drawer with which to make his remittance. This bill would
have been generated by a completely separate commercial exchange. Although not, technically speaking,
bills of exchange, promissory notes drawn between two individuals could also be endorsed by the payee
and thus come to circulate like a bill. See the chart and explanation of foreign bills in Larry Neal, Rise
of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (New York, 1990), 6.
13
The complex history of the inland bill is traced in Eric Kerridge, Trade and Banking in Early
Modern England (Manchester, 1988).
14
The fact that eighteenth-century Britain was chronically short of cash meant that even face-to-face
transactions often involved recourse to credit in some form or another. In the eighteenth-century wool
textile industry, cash exchanges were limited to the payment of wages and, in Yorkshire, some purchases
in the local cloth markets. Forgery could, of course, undermine the security of the bill of exchange;
for a discussion of its extent in the eighteenth century, see Randall McGowen, “From Pillory to Gallows:
The Punishment of Forgery in the Age of the Financial Revolution,” Past and Present, no. 165 (1999):
107–40.
15
It was quite common for London cloth factors to make remittances to their West Country cor-
respondents in the form of Spanish wool; see Somerset Record Office, DD/X/MSL/C/67, Elderton
letter book, J. Walker, 6 October 1763. Remittances in the form of other kinds of goods, however,
presented more problems. Philip Stannard of Norwich had no interest in taking either wine or iron in
return for his cloth because he did not know the goods; Norwich RO, BR/211/12, Stannard and
Taylor letter book, Carrer and Audenvert and Co. in Oporto, 20 June 1763; and Ursula Priestley, ed.,
The Letters of Philip Stannard, Norwich Textile Manufacturer, 1751–63, Norfolk Record Society, vol.
57 for 1992, (Norwich, 1994), 94. We can only guess what a West Country clothier thought about
receiving remittances from a North American adventure in the form of flax seed; see Public Record
Office, C.110/120, Westley letter book, 22 June 1764.
444 䡵 SMAIL

comprised the economy of Britain and its empire, bilateral exchanges of goods
increasingly gave way to unilateral shipments that required their use to balance
the books.16
A second, quite literal way in which credit was crucial to the workings of the
eighteenth-century economy had to do with its importance for the management
of capital. Eighteenth-century businesses were typically short of capital; hence
merchants sought to exploit their commercial connections in order to expand the
amount of capital available to them, most commonly by buying goods on credit—
a relatively strictly defined grace period of up to twelve months before any re-
mittance was due.17 However, using credit as a way to extend capital was a two-
edged sword, for, while merchants were often able to buy goods on credit, they
were just as often obligated to give credit when they sold in their turn. Indeed,
credit terms were a crucial marketing tool, since offering a longer credit (even at
a proportionally higher price) could make one’s products more attractive than
those of competitors.18 Commercial folk thus had to be very careful to balance
the flow of incoming remittances against their outgoing drafts because, in the
absence of the credit facilities provided by a bank, it was difficult to raise additional
funds at short notice.19 A prudent approach to such calculations is nicely illustrated
in a letter in which Tolson explained to his son how he intended to manage the
firm’s short-term cash reserves: “Your aunt at Otley has wrote she cannot let us
have any money . . . but we are in no want yet and has £300 and upwards in the
bank. B&C does well for us, in always suffering us to draw, and we have got some
wool lately at 6 months credit . . . as we can remit any time and have the discount,
but I thought it would be the best to keep always a reserve of £200 to £300 as

16
This statement oversimplifies a complex set of changes that occurred in different industries at
different rates over the course of the eighteenth century. In broad outline, however, the eighteenth
century saw the decline in systems of marketing based on major entrepots or those that relied on close
personal connections and trust between principals; see David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires:
England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1750 (Cambridge, 2003); Nuala Za-
hedieh, “London and the Colonial Consumer in the late Seventeenth Century,” Economic History
Review, 2nd ser., 47 (1994): 239–61, and “Credit, Risk, and Reputation in Late Seventeenth-Century
Colonial Trade,” in Merchant Organization and Maritime Trade in the North Atlantic, 1660–1815,
ed. O. U. Janzen (St. John’s, 1998), 53–74. For general surveys, see Patrick O’Brien, “Inseparable
Conditions: Trade, Economy, the Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire,” and Jacob Price, “The
Imperial Economy, 1700–1776,” both in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, ed. P. J.
Marshall (Oxford, 1998), 53–77, 78–104.
17
The length of credit granted depended on both the specific bargain that had been struck and the
customary terms for particular commodities in particular markets. Terms in excess of twelve months
were possible, but uncommon, particularly in the inland trade.
18
Yorkshire Archaeological Society, DD80, Lees family papers, letters to John Edwards.
19
B. L. Anderson, “Provincial Aspects of the Financial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century,”
Business History 11 (1969): 11–22. There was a rudimentary money market, but the supply of funds
was not predictable, and it was particularly susceptible to market downturns. Tolson, e.g., remarked
to his son: “I assure you there is no such thing as borrowing a single hundred pound upon bond. Mr
Bolland has tried some time for us, and Mr. Medhurst, [but because of] Mr Tottie and some others
at Halifax breaking nobody will put out money without a mortgage”; WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/11,
Tolson letters, 20 December 1780. One could apply to relatives, but, even here, success often required
that the potential lender had faith in the business’s potential. The Tolsons’ aunt, e.g., refused them a
loan in August of 1780, but she came through for £100 in October when she learned that they had
“done so well in orders”; WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/11, Tolson letters, 19 August and 14 October
1780.
 CREDIT, RISK, AND HONOR 䡵 445

you might send us an order after the fair which might be for coarse cloths and
must be paid for.”20 It was all too easy, however, for merchants to overextend
themselves and come up short when they needed ready money for a purchase or
to pay a bill, a miscalculation that could easily affect the solvency of those with
whom they traded.
Although credit was a pervasive feature of this society, the particular features of
the networks of credit used in wholesale commerce created, if loosely and im-
perfectly, a community of merchants who identified themselves to each other in
terms of their grasp of such technicalities as the bill of exchange or the use of
credit terms to manage capital. It is, for example, significant that one of the red
flags that prevented Samuel Lister from jumping wholeheartedly into a partnership
with his cousin William Fawcett was the knowledge that William, a military man
who had not been brought up in trade, did not fully understand the “the methods
of giving credit, drawing bills etc. etc. which seems to me essential.”21
Within this commercial community, merchants had to extend trust of a very
particular sort. To grant a credit period of six to twelve months when selling goods
required that one trust one’s creditor to remit the bill at the proper time.22 More-
over, one had to trust that the bill itself would be a good one, drawn on the basis
of a balance held in the hands of a sound house that would pay the debt on the
date specified. But to trust was to risk, for with each and every transaction, the
merchant put up a financial stake in an environment in which information was
imperfect and the mechanisms that might have ensured that the other party per-
formed his or her side of the bargain were few and weak. Even in the most extreme
case—an outright refusal to pay an acknowledged debt—the law afforded only
limited protection. Merchants could go to court to secure the repayment of a
specific debt accrued by way of commerce, and, in the event that a firm defaulted
on all of its debts, it was possible to sue for bankruptcy, but both were difficult,
complex, and sometimes expensive processes that often yielded considerably less
than was actually due. Joseph Edwards, for instance, advised one of his corre-
spondents that he should be quite pleased at a proposal presented by the relations
of a Mr. Fletcher for a settlement that would return 10s. on the pound, since a
formal proceeding of bankruptcy looked as if it would only yield 7s. 6d.23 Firms
engaged in the export trade lacked even this flimsy recourse, for a debtor in
Germany or Italy could not easily be pursued in a British court. Against lesser
offenses—delayed payment, unjust claims for abatements—the merchant was vir-
tually powerless.24

20
WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/11, from Peter Tolson Jr., 19 August 1780. Tolson was choosing to
keep some cash on hand in case it was needed, despite the fact that he could have saved money by
paying for his wool before the balance was due.
21
WYAS, Calderdale, SH:7/FAW/29, from Fawcett, 18 August 1750.
22
Credit might well be denied to an individual with whom a firm had no history for this reason,
though there was often an implicit promise that a couple of good remittances on ready money terms
would open the door to subsequent exchanges with credit; Somerset RO, DD/S/WT/25, Edwards
letter book, Robert Hayward, 6 October 1768.
23
Somerset RO, DD/S/WT/25, Edwards letter book, Robert Hayward, 28 July 1768.
24
They might, if they chose, pursue a matter in the equity courts. The small but invaluable sample
published by Henry Horwitz and Charles Moreton suggests such actions were rare, not least because
of the cost involved; see Samples of Chancery Pleadings and Suits: 1627, 1685, 1735, 1785, List and
Index Society, vol. 257 (1995). For a detailed look at one merchant’s use of the equity courts, see
446 䡵 SMAIL

Engaging in commerce in the eighteenth century was of course risky in all

manner of respects, but it was in the realm of trust or credit that merchants were
least able to control for those risks. Losses sustained to goods during transit could
be limited by proper packing (a charge most often born by the recipient in any
case). Losses from the improper handling of goods by workers or from pilfering
could often be limited by supervision. Other kinds of risks, most commonly those
of fire or loss at sea, could be controlled by purchasing insurance.25 However, the
only way a merchant could minimize the risks associated with credit was by dealing
with individuals who could be trusted to pay their debts, a proposition whose
inherently circular logic is indicative of the problems they faced. Even in an ideal
world, when trading with a limited number of houses whose reputation one had
established through personal history, risk lurked in the shadows. History could be
deceptive, and the complexity of the networks of credit in the eighteenth century
meant that an individual’s willingness to pay was not a guarantee that the debt
would be secured. Moreover, the commercial environment of the mid- and late
eighteenth century was anything but an ideal world in this respect, for, broadly
speaking, the networks of exchange became more and more complex over the
course of the century. Although trade in some commodities became more cen-
tralized, the growth of trade from and to the outports and the tendency, in some
industries, for manufacturers to develop their own marketing networks suggest
that the general trend was in the opposite direction.26 The result was that merchants
in this period often had to trade with a large number of principals and often had
to initiate credit relationships with firms about which they had only limited, often
hearsay, evidence.27
To engage in wholesale commerce in the eighteenth century was to be enmeshed
in a complex and all-encompassing web of credit whose very structure required
exposure to particular kinds of risk. Merchants could and did take great pains to
limit such risks—inquiring into reputations, building up relationships—but, in the
last analysis, there were limits to the control they could exert over the multifaceted
system which formed the lifeblood of trade. Yet, as their letters show, merchants
did compensate by attempting to project power in commercial exchanges by using
the language of honor. Letter books and other similar sources show that, again
and again, merchants and manufacturers stressed either their own honorable in-
tentions toward others or their expectation that others should act in an honorable

Christine Churches, “Business at Law: Retrieving Commercial Disputes from Eighteenth-Century

Chancery,” Historical Journal 43 (2000): 937–54.
25
Zahedieh, “Credit, Risk, and Reputation.” Perhaps the most important exception to the statement
that credit risks could not be insured was the practice among London factors of selling debt insurance
to the clothiers they represented; see Somerset RO, DD/X/MSL/C/67, Elderton letter book,
1763–69, Read and Wilkins, 3 November 1763.
26
Price, “The Imperial Economy”; Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Econ-
omy, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2000), 84–93, and “Business Networks in the British Export Trade to
North America, 1750–1800,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John McCusker and Kenneth
Morgan (Cambridge, 2000), 36–64; John Styles, “Product Innovation in Early Modern London,” Past
and Present, no. 168 (2000): 124–69; John Smail, Merchants, Markets, and Manufacture: The English
Wool Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1999).
27
The notebook that Richard Tolson took with him when traveling in Holland and Germany while
seeking orders contains a list of houses with notations next to each name concerning their creditwor-
thiness; see WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/3, Richard Tolson account book, c. 1780.
 CREDIT, RISK, AND HONOR 䡵 447

fashion toward them.28 Such discursive attempts to project power were most suc-
cessful when they complemented the practical steps individuals could take in their
own interest, but that fact must not obscure the importance of the cultural con-
ceptions underlying the everyday use of credit.
One manifestation of this discourse was the use of the word “honor” in a
conventional and sometimes almost superficial sense. It was, for example, com-
monplace to inform one’s correspondents that the bills of exchange they had drawn
would be duly honored when presented for acceptance. While refusing to accept
the bill could indeed have implications for the reputation of the drawer, accepting
it was not an act invested with a tremendous meaning, for one was simply ac-
knowledging the obligation to pay a contracted debt. A significant and telling
exception to that statement is the presumably rare instance in which a merchant
might be induced to accept a bill drawn on someone else. The Leeds firm of
Ibbetson and Koster explained to a correspondent that the bill drawn on Henry
Uhthoff that they had presented for acceptance would probably be returned un-
paid; however, they reassured the correspondent that there was a good chance
that someone would “pay it for the honour of the drawer or endorser” who were,
respectively, merchants in Amsterdam and Ghent.29 The implication is that both
the drawer (the person owing the money in the first place) and the endorser (who
by virtue of his endorsement was liable for the bill’s payment) were merchants of
good standing and thus that their compatriots—and national identity is clearly
identified as a motive—would accept the bill in order to save them from
embarrassment.
Similar uses of the word “honor” appear in letters where merchants are making
claims about their reputation as the supplier of goods: “You may, Sirs, depend
entirely upon my honour, and be assured every piece is of the best quality, and I
can assure you upon my credit, I never made a better or completer sortment of
goods in my life.”30 In these instances, the term “honor” should probably be
understood as making reference to the rather generalized expectations about fair-
ness and reputation that characterized eighteenth-century commerce and that lay
at the backbone of the copious advice offered to tradesmen and budding tradesmen
in published literature.31 Such expectations appear both in letters exhorting the
recipient to behave honestly and in letters in which the writers were attempting
to project or protect their own reputations. Around midcentury, a correspondent
told Samuel Hill of Halifax to cut his patterns “fairly from the pieces” when
preparing bales for export to Russia and to be fair or “generous” in setting his

28
There can be no definitive proof of these arguments, for the evidence, by its very nature, cannot
be comprehensive. It is clear, however, that a code of honor was widely shared within the mercantile
community, not only because it is so common in the detailed evidence that survives about particular
individuals but also because so much of that surviving correspondence is in the form of letters addressed
to other merchants who seem to have been expected to understand the moral framework being projected.
29
It is not clear from this mention whether the person accepting the bill would expect reimbursement
from his compatriot in Amsterdam or Ghent, but it seems likely; see Leeds University Library, Special
Collections, Lupton 1, Ibbetson and Koster letter book, to Battier and Zornlin, 25 April 1761.
30
Priestley, Letters of Philip Stannard, 45.
31
Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman justly deserves its reputation as an important example of this
genre. Another example from later in the century is A Present for an Apprentice, or a sure guide to
gain both esteem and estate with rules for his conduct to his master and in the world, 6th ed., (London,
1754), available in Sheffield Archives, TC/402.
448 䡵 SMAIL

profit margins and credit terms.32 Charles Hudson, a Yorkshire merchant, declined
to take up a commission because he had already accepted a similar commission
from the correspondent’s competitor. He therefore felt he could not “do justice
to you and myself” in undertaking the work; he did, however, suggest the name
of another supplier.33
Other uses of the discourse of honor, however, move beyond these conventional
banalities to engage more substantive concerns—that is, ones where money was
at stake. Such usages appear most commonly when disputes arose, for these were
moments when the risks inherent in eighteenth-century commerce became man-
ifest. Thus a London cloth factor berated one of his correspondents for sending
poor-quality cloth: “I am afraid I shall lose the best customer I have got for I
passed my word of honor they [the cloths] should be good things.”34 Similarly,
Stannard protested to a firm of yarn merchants that the yarn they had supplied
was “short reeled” and that they had sent the invoice before actually shipping the
goods—something of a sharp practice, since the credit term began at the date of
invoice. Stannard began this diatribe with the words: “You may depend upon the
honor and justness of my charge and of my servants, whose fidelity I can depend
upon.”35 A letter from the Holroyd brothers of Leeds expresses their “surprise”
at the discount which a new correspondent expected on the invoices the firm
presented for dyeing and finishing his cloth. They explained that they could not
in justice grant the discount as it would be unfair to their other customers, and
they went on to complain that they felt ill used, as they had purchased some
supplies specifically to do this firm’s work.36
On occasion, these protestations of honor could be quite heated. In September
and October of 1760, the Leeds firm of Ibbetson and Koster wrote a series of
letters to their most important correspondents in London about a dispute that
had arisen between the two parties. At issue was a shipment of cloth sent to Naples
on their joint account that the Italian merchant had refused to accept because it
had been packed incorrectly. Ibbetson and Koster expected Battiere and Zornlin
to absorb their share of the loss that the mistake occasioned. They expressed
themselves as being “surprised to find you don’t chuse to have any concern in
this affair,” and they went on to say: “for though there is no written contract
betwixt us yet we have ever looked upon our obligation on honor as sacred as
any contract.”37 A similar sentiment is evident in Merac’s reaction to the under-

32
WYAS, Calderdale, FH/441, Samuel Hill letters, from Abel Fonnereau, 4 May 1749, FH/442,
Henry Kops, 21 October 1749, Cornelius Van Der Weet, 26 August 1749, and Van Eck and Willink,
21 October 1749.
33
Liverpool University Library, MS 10.53, Charles Hudson letter book, fol. 68v, to Mr. Edwards,
12 June 1798.
34
Somerset RO, DD/X/MSL/C/67, Elderton letter book, to Ben Peach, 4 August 1763. This
same sentiment is implicit in the statement that a clothier would lose his “credit” if he overstretched
his cloth or the comment that a merchant could hurt his “good character” in a market if he overcharged
for his cloth; see “Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Committee to Whom the Bill Respecting
the Laws Relating to the Woollen Trade Is Committed,” testimony of William Henry Awdry, in British
Parliamentary Papers, 1802–3, 7:640.
35
Priestley, Letters of Philip Stannard, 46.
36
WYAS, Leeds, H3, Holroyd brothers letter book, to Messrs. Lees, 2 June 1789.
37
Leeds University Library, Special Collections, Lupton 1, 28 September and 11, 20, and 22 October
1760.
 CREDIT, RISK, AND HONOR 䡵 449

handed way in which Richard Tolson attempted to break off the partnership they
had formed in 1781: “I Firmly believe that you would not have countenanced or
suffered if in your power to prevent any indirect means or UNWORTHY Stratagems.
38
HONEST Men KNOW no such expression have not occasion to advert to it.”
A final example comes from the letters that Stannard wrote in attempting to
track down the origins of a false rumor that he had stopped payment on his bills.
The letters began the moment Stannard heard from his banker, Peter Gaussens,
that a rumor was spreading that he was broke. The first letter, demanding the
name of the person who had given him this report, was addressed to William
Reynolds, from whom Gaussens had the news. In it, Stannard explained that “I
would pay no regard to such vile aspersions merely upon my own account, and
as I apprehend your author to be a person of consequence, I am called upon by
my honour and credit for your explanation.” What Stannard found out was that
the report had originated in the unfounded opinion of a journeyman weaver that
was overheard at an inn. With this information, Stannard wrote a blistering letter
accusing Roger Preston of reporting the hearsay to Reynolds: “Is it, think you,
sufficient satisfaction to me, your being concerned you ever mentioned it, or can
you suppose any tradesman of honour, or property, will suffer themselves to be
treated in such a scandalous manner? You who know trade and the consequences
of credit should know better.”39 As was true of Merac, Stannard was almost apo-
plectic in his rage at the individual who had started this rumor that threatened
his very livelihood.
While it might be possible to dismiss the use of the term honor in the phrase
“honor a bill of exchange,” as trivial, the evidence from commercial disputes
suggests that the language of honor was more than mere convention. Confronted
with a breakdown in the trust that made commerce possible, merchants articulated
their expectations about proper behavior in the commercial world using a language
of honor. In doing so, they sought both to compel others to behave according
to the accepted standards and to establish that their own actions met such stan-
dards. As the examples show, one crucial aspect of the merchants’ code of honor
was the expectation that they would present themselves to the world as vigorous
and spirited men, quick to rise to their own defense.
The resolutions of such disputes, however, reveal that another crucial aspect of
the code of honor to which merchants sought to conform their actions was reason.
In part, reason was an important element of the way in which they sought to
legitimize the position they were taking. The crucial point that Ibbetson and Koster
explained to their correspondents in London was that “by our contract with you
[you] have always been intitled to and have always received the half our profits
[therefore] we cannot help thinking it reasonable” that you should bear half the
risk.40 When a Mr. Quin requested that Stannard defer charging him for goods

38
The partnership was intended to take advantage of Ostend’s status as a neutral port after war broke
out between Britain and Holland; see WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/12, Tolson Letters, latter half of 1781,
esp. the letters from Merac of 16 November and 1 December 1781. Tolson first explored the legal
steps he might take to end the partnership before turning to a subterfuge. Merac only discovered the
plans because Tolson’s mail had to be opened when he returned home to Leeds to convalesce after a
severe bout of influenza.
39
Priestley, Letters of Philip Stannard, letters to William Reynolds and Roger Preston, 87–91.
40
Leeds University, Special Collections, Lupton 1, 28 September and 11, 20, and 22 October 1760.
450 䡵 SMAIL

stranded in his warehouse because of the outbreak of war with Spain, Stannard
riposted that such an action on his part would be “taking the burden off his
[Quin’s] own shoulders and laying it upon ours, which is by no means reasonable,
more especially as we were no ways accessary to the misfortune.”41
Reason is also evident in the way that merchants were careful to balance such
forceful language with protestations of their willingness to compromise. Having
rejected Quin’s proposals for an indefinite stay, Stannard did offer him an extra
three or four months of credit on the bale in view of the circumstances, and his
outrage against Preston and Reynolds for their slanders against his character sub-
sided without a trace. The same was true of Merac, for he was doing business
with the Tolson family on quite amiable terms within a month.42 Ibbetson and
Koster took pains to assure their correspondents of their good faith: “It gives us
very great pain to think there should arise any cause of dispute betwixt us or that
we should differ so much from your opinion.” They were also careful to avoid
appearing too dogmatic: “Don’t imagine from the contents of our last letter that
we are obstinate in our opinion about [the] affair.”43
The importance of reason was raised to the level of philosophical principle in
Tolson’s advice to his son on handling troublesome correspondents, in this case
a Dutch merchant whose petty complaints about the quality of the cloth were
compounded by his unwillingness to pay the invoice by its due date: “I would
have you to go to him in as genteel a manner as possible and inform him of his
mistake, and whatever he says to you be as determined to keep your temper and
behave like a Stoic philosopher.” Peter followed these instructions with an outline
of the arguments his son should pursue during the interview. First, Richard was
to try and convince this “curious Dutchman” that he had agreed to a credit of
seven months, a fact reflected in the price the Tolson’s put on the invoice. Then,
Richard was to attempt to address the various petty abatements the merchant had
deducted. However, this second objective was really intended as a temporary
bargaining position, for, as he remarked, “if you can make nothing of him about
the lengths I would give it up, if you can fix him only to remit punctually in 7
months.”44
As the last remark suggests, it is possible to read the merchants’ code of honor
as a hypocritical sham, a language adopted merely out of convenience in the pursuit
of profit. Yet this fact does not gainsay its status as a language of honor, for as
William Reddy has pointed out, honor is not the same as virtue; what matters is
not that one always does the right thing, but that one be seen to be doing the
right thing.45 In the way that avowals of integrity made in advance of a deal might
have been little more than part of the sales pitch, the protestations of foul play
made after a dispute had erupted might have been diplomatic bluster designed to
establish a bargaining position from which to make a more advantageous com-

41
Quin also suggested that Stannard might be willing to take the goods back onto his account, a
proposal he also rejected on grounds of reason. The pieces, he wrote, “consist of different lengths and
colours to our general orders and may keep them 7 years before we could dispose of them, if ever”;
see Priestley, Letters of Philip Stannard, 103.
42
Priestley, Letters of Philip Stannard, 90; WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/13, 6 February 1782.
43
Leeds University, Special Collections, Lupton 1, 28 September and 11, 20, and 22 October 1760.
44
WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/11, Tolson letters, 4 October 1780.
45
Reddy, Invisible Code, 7–8.
 CREDIT, RISK, AND HONOR 䡵 451

promise. Tolson had cause to advise his son to be reasonable, for the goods were
already in the hands of this “curious Dutchman,” and gentle persuasion was about
the only way of inducing him to make a full and prompt payment in return.
The necessity of distinguishing virtue and honor also sheds light on the blatant
casuistry that merchants displayed when justifying their actions with reference to
the code of commercial honor. Criticized for hiring a junior partner away from a
rival firm in Norwich, Stannard defended himself on the grounds that he had acted
honorably—though he added, perhaps aware that his case was weak, that his actions
were within the law.46 Perhaps more revealing is the advice that Tolson gave to
his son Richard on how to approach a firm in Rotterdam in order to get a share
of the orders that this firm normally placed with another Leeds firm, a firm at
which his other son, Peter Tolson Junior, was employed: “and think it would not
be amiss if you was to hint that TG, who is the only person in that house [in
Leeds], being for a year past indisposed and not able to manage any business. But
that as your brother and you are first cousins to Mr. G we earnestly request Mr.
Baartmans not to mention our application when they wrote at any time to said
house as it perhaps might make a family quarrel.” The quotation is doubly inter-
esting. First, the family’s willingness to be flexible in their sense of honor is high-
lighted by the fact that the father had originally written the words “insane and
under the care of Dr. Morro at London and not being soon likely to be better”
but struck them out and inserted the word “indisposed” on the brother’s advice.47
Tolson was perfectly willing to try and use his other son’s privileged, and thus
protected, knowledge of another firm’s correspondents to steal a march on them,
but he apparently had some scruples left. Second, the letter assumes that the Dutch
house that received this solicitation would go along with the subterfuge, presum-
ably in the hopes that the Tolsons would serve them with better cloth at lower
prices.
Yet, to focus on the very real potential for hypocrisy in the merchants’ code of
honor is to overlook the forces which gave it its meaning. As I have suggested,
this discourse of honor was rooted in daily experience with the risks inherent in
eighteenth-century commerce, particularly those associated with credit. Trading
by credit inevitably hinges on reputation, but merchants, who conducted trade
beyond the confines of a physical community, had to be particularly active in
creating and maintaining a reputation, since it existed within a much less tangible
social context. Moreover, despite the potential for hypocrisy, this code of honor
had an intrinsic meaning to the people who espoused it. George Wansey, a clothier
in Wiltshire, described a recently deceased neighbor in terms that suggest that he
placed great value on a man’s reputation as a tradesman, and he held himself to
similar standards.48 William Pollard, struggling to make a his fortune as an import
agent in the colonies, explained in a letter to a friend that he was not convinced
that the riches would bring happiness and therefore hoped, most of all, that he
could “conduct my affairs with satisfaction and approbation to those I am or may
46
Norwich RO, BR/211/12, Stannard and Taylor letter book, to J. and J. Ives, 26 July 1763; they
wrote in similar terms to Edmund Gurney, an important Norwich banker and yarn merchant.
47
WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/11, Tolson letters, 1 November 1780.
48
Wiltshire RO, 314/4/3, George Wansey spiritual notebook, 15 March 1789, 18 June 1783, 10
October 1784.
452 䡵 SMAIL

be connected with and with satisfaction in my own breast.”49 A quite similar

sentiment can be found in one of the letters Tolson wrote to his son when he was
at school in Holland: “I hope Gods grace will always incline you to virtue and
happiness that you may pass through life with honor to your self and pleasure to
your friends for without goodness there can be no happiness.”50
An important part of the project of history should be to examine how the
experiences of everyday life shaped the ways in which people construed their world.
For the historian interested in the intersection between the economy and culture,
this observation is particularly significant, for, as suggested in the introduction,
there is an interpretive cost of isolating economic behavior from the broader
cultural milieu that it influenced and in which it took place. In this article, I have
sought to implement this approach by looking at credit. Credit, of course, was an
inescapable element of early modern commerce, as indeed it is of commerce in
any era, but the particular characteristics of credit in the mid- and late eighteenth
century shaped the commercial environment merchants faced in important ways.
Although the change was more a shift in emphasis within the broad continuities
of existing credit practices than a dramatic transformation, the increasing domi-
nance of the bill of exchange as the means of making remittances and the increasing
complexity and size of the commercial networks in which they traded exposed
wholesale merchants more fully to the risks inherent in a commercial system based
on personal trust. As well as the risks inherent in the credit instrument itself, the
shift toward the bill of exchange meant that more and more of a merchants’
remittances were coming from a larger number of less well-known correspondents
whose only direct obligation lay in their expectation of being served well in the
next order they placed, for the bill of exchange by which they paid was commercially
sterile except insofar as it opened up commercial contacts for exploitation.
Merchants and manufacturers engaged in the wholesale trade in this period
confronted and managed the risks associated with credit by articulating a code of
honor that thus played on the indirect obligation of reputation. This discourse
enjoined them to be vociferous in their claims of their own integrity and quick in
their defense against sharp practice, imposition, and, of course, any challenges to
their character. This same code, however, also expected them to follow the dictates
of reason and to be fair and even generous in their commercial relationships.
Although the nature of the evidence precludes any definitive proof, my impression
is that references to honor—particularly with regard to disputes—become more
common in merchants’ correspondence in the mid- and late eighteenth century,
precisely the period in which the risks of engaging in commerce were becoming
manifest in the rising number of bankruptcies and the increasing scope and severity
of credit crises.51
The particular nature of the link between credit and honor in the merchants’
experience and identity suggests two observations about our understanding of
eighteenth-century society and the place of commercial people, or more specifically,
men, in it. First, understanding the link between credit and honor offers deeper
insights into the transformation in conceptions of honor and masculinity that took

49
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, William Pollard letter book, to Thos. Simpson, 1 July 1772.
50
WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/7, 28 August 1776.
51
Hoppit, Risk and Failure, 47–55.
 CREDIT, RISK, AND HONOR 䡵 453

place during the eighteenth century.52 Between the seventeenth and nineteenth
centuries, the vigorous and violent assertions of personal and group honor char-
acteristic of the early modern era became, according to William Reddy’s suggestive
study of postrevolutionary France, an invisible code, a central fact of social and
gender relations but one that could not be articulated within the prevailing dis-
course of “interest.”53 One important strand of the research on changing con-
ceptions of honor in Britain has been to look at the exhortations of eighteenth-
century conduct books. As several scholars have shown, the authors of this advice
literature sought to redefine masculine honor in such a way as to make an indi-
vidual’s own sense of his self worth more important than public reputation. A
crucial element in the culture of civility was that men should use their superior
reason to control passionate outbursts. Yet at the same time, contemporaries were
anxious that men retain those qualities that were traditionally understood to derive
from a sense of honor, a pair of imperatives that , although almost contradictory,
Stannard followed to the letter on hearing that his solvency was being called into
question.54
Another question the research on honor in Britain has attempted to explore is
the extent to which behaviors actually changed. Robert Shoemaker has shown
how public insults by and against men, and the violence and court proceedings
that they generated, declined during the first part of the eighteenth century. This
decline in public insult, as Shoemaker points out, neatly parallels the expectations
articulated in advice books; thus it seems likely that duelers increasingly chose
pistols over the sword because the necessary delay in the combat and its ritualistic
form emphasized the rationality and deliberation of the participants. However,
Shoemaker is unwilling to identify the advice literature itself as the primary cause
of these changes in behavior. His study of dueling, for example, identifies social
and even technological factors at play.55
52
Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen, introduction to English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (London,
1999), 13–15. These studies take as a starting point the research that has shown that personal and
group honor was vigorously asserted and defended by both men and women of all levels of society in
the early modern period. See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern
London (Oxford, 1996), esp. chap. 4; G. Walker, “Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in
Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996): 235–56; M.
E. James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642 (Oxford, 1978); and Alex Shepard,
“Manhood, Credit, and Patriarchy in Early Modern England, c. 1580–1640,” Past and Present, no.
167 (2000): 75–106.
53
Reddy, Invisible Code; see also Robert Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France
(New York, 1993). France and Britain are of course not directly comparable because the latter lacked
the cataclysmic events of the revolution, but in the early modern era, the codes of honor in each side
were relatively similar; see Nye, Masculinity, 26–27.
54
Elizabeth Foyster, “Boys Will Be Boys? Manhood and Aggression, 1660–1800,” in Hitchcock and
Cohen, English Masculinities, 151–66; Faramerz Dabhoiwala, “The Construction of Honour, Repu-
tation and Status in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996): 201–13. Stannard’s assertion, in the letter to William
Reynolds, that “I would pay no regard to such vile aspersions merely on my own account” is particularly
telling; see Priestley, Letters of Philip Stannard, 87–88, letter to William Reynolds.
55
R. Shoemaker, “Reforming Public Manners: Public Insult and the Decline of Violence in London,
1660–1740,” in Hitchcock and Cohen, English Masculinities 133–50, “The Decline of Public Insult
in London, 1660–1800,” Past and Present, no. 169 (2000): 97–131, “Male Honour and the Decline
of Public Violence in Eighteenth-Century London,” Social History 26 (2001): 190–208, “The Taming
of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour and Ritual Violence in London, 1660–1800,” Historical Journal 45
454 䡵 SMAIL

The language of honor used by men of commerce is suggestive in this regard

because it shows how a reasonable and restrained construction of honor resonated
with the experiences of this particular social group. While merchants needed to
vigorously assert and defend their honor as part of the way in which they coped
with the risks inherent in trade, they had to temper that honor with a healthy
dose of practicality, for the only point of being in trade in the first place was to
make a living, an end not entirely consistent with rigid adherence to principle.
The explicit references that merchants made to their honor also sheds light on
what William Reddy has described as the democratization of honor, the assump-
tion, characteristic of postrevolutionary France, that “every worthy male citizen,
irrespective of birth or rank, could distinguish themselves by bravery . . . or public
service.”56 While the evidence presented here is not a sufficient basis for arguing
that commercial culture caused the democratization of honor in Britain, it indicates
that non-elites were appropriating the forms and language of an aristocratic honor
that was already being rationalized and civilized.
A second aspect of the merchants’ code of honor, however, stood at odds with
this culture of civility. Stannard’s spirited defense of his commercial honor calls to
mind features of the concept that eighteenth-century moralists would have found
less palatable, for his response bears striking parallels with the formal rules asso-
ciated with the duel of honor. The insult made against his honor demanded a
response not on his own account but because of the public scandal it created. He
was, moreover, quite explicit in his demand for “satisfaction,” and he focused his
wrath on those whose stature demanded a response, for it is clear that the jour-
neyman who actually started the rumor was beneath his contempt.57 It is unlikely
that Stannard ever intended to challenge the man who had insulted him, so we
should not imagine that he was aping the manners of the beau monde, but it is
equally unlikely that he was unaware of the extent to which he was adapting that
tradition.
His reaction is thus an important reminder that the merchants’ honor, despite
its apparent congruency with the project of civility, shared elements with what
one might call the unreconstructed honor of the landed elite. Above all, it is quite
clear that, like its elite counterpart, commercial honor was closely linked with
masculinity, both in the sense that it was thought to be a trait belonging to men
and that to fail to maintain one’s honor was to be unmanned. Ditz, for example,
has shown how commercial failure was invariably read as feminine in the corre-
spondence of Philadelphia merchants in the colonial period, and similar assump-

(2002): 525–45; Tim Meldrum, “A Woman’s Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London’s
Consistory Court, 1700–45,” London Journal 19 (1994): 1–20.
56
Reddy, Invisible Code, 10.
57
Donna Andrew, “The Code of Honour and Its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England,
1700–1850,” Social History 5 (1980): 409–34; the classic general study of the duel in European society
is Victor Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of the Aristocracy (New York,
1988). An entry in the Tolson letters conveys the same sentiments as those of Stannard; in confirming
his son’s reaction to the way he had been treated by the master at the first Dutch school he had attended,
the father wrote: “his reading your letter publicly in the school was mean and base, as it was done to
put you into confusion, but he is a scoundrel. I am much pleased with your taking no notice of his
behavior—he is below contempt”; WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/7, 3 July 1776.
 CREDIT, RISK, AND HONOR 䡵 455

tions are evident in the correspondence studied here.58 Maintaining honor, then,
was an essential part of men’s ability to maintain their place in a given social
world—polite society on one hand and that of commerce on the other—and it
was largely devoid of any religious or moral overtones. Men’s reputations in both
contexts were quite clearly public, in the sense that members of a given community
traded and spread information about individuals among themselves. Finally, in
both polite society and commerce, men maintained their honor with reference to
risk, for it was in essence the ability to face risk with equanimity that made a man’s
reputation.
In this respect a comparison to gambling—another arena in which the landed
elites expressed their honor—is instructive; indeed in many respects gambling is
an activity more symbolic of honor than the duel, not least because it was much
more common.59 Gambling, like commerce, was inherently risky. The gentlemen
who gambled, however, did so as much for the glory of a spectacular loss as that
of a great win, for honor lay in showing utter disdain of the real financial risks
that their actions entailed. Middling folk, of course, were not immune to the lures
of gambling, hence its prominence among the vices decried in literature directed
at apprentices. Moreover, even when apparently acting with foresight and pru-
dence, middling folk were gambling, for investments in government lottery tickets
and life insurance involved taking risks in the expectation of a greater gain.60
However, in their commercial dealings, merchants conceived and negotiated risk
in quite different terms, only embracing it as a means to profit and establishing
their honor and masculinity by successfully avoiding or at least mitigating those
risks so as to remain in trade. Merchants thus construed honor as productive. As
Merac put it, in writing to Tolson about the failed partnership: “When first I
entered into the plan in which I was connected with Mr R. Tolson your son it
was consistant with every principle of honor, integrity, and mutual interest.”61
This particular take on honor was freighted with meaning in the social and
cultural framework of eighteenth-century society. While it may be the case that
conceptions of honor were changing, public opinion linked the traditional honor
of the duel and the gaming table to elite society and to the social and political
authority its members enjoyed. The code of honor of commercial folk thus pro-
vided the basis on which they could launch into criticism of the social and political
order, for it was no great step to apply the certainties and the values developed
from one’s daily experiences with credit in a commercial setting to issues of public
concern. The surviving correspondence of a Wiltshire clothier records his reaction

58
Ditz, “Shipwrecked.” To give but one example, consider Merac’s reference to “honest men” quoted
above.
59
Phyllis Deutsch, “Moral Trespass in Georgian London: Gaming, Gender, and Electoral Politics in
the Age of George III,” Historical Journal 39 (1996): 637–56; Gillian Russell, “‘Faro’s Daughters’:
Female Gamesters, Politics, and the Discourse of Finance in 1790s Britain,” Eighteenth Century Studies
33 (2000): 481–504; Thomas Kavanagh, “Gambling, Chance, and the Discourse of Power in Ancien
Regime France,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 37 (1994): 31–46; Jonathan Walker, “Gambling and
Venetian Noblemen, c. 1500–1700,” Past and Present, no. 162 (1999): 28–69. As both Deutsch and
Russell make clear, aristocratic women also gambled, so honor in this instance was less exclusively
masculine.
60
Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (Manchester,
1999).
61
WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/12, 1 December 1781.
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to a duel that had been fought in Bath: “How dreadfully must the laws of honour
have prevailed against the dictates of reason to have demanded this decision of
such foolish quarrels.”62 Another of George Wansey’s letters advises a young friend
about the virtues of a rational life and dismisses distinctions of dress and title as
having little to do with the path “to honor, true honor such as a rational and
religious man might consistently aspire to.” He then continues: “I heartily despise
the red coated slaves who, ignorant and careless of the cause in which they fight,
are equally willing to defend their country or to become the tools of knaves or
detestable ambition.” He admits that true military glory of the kind exemplified
by the Greeks and Roman is “deservedly honored” but complains that “alas glory
is now become the servant of interest.”63
Wansey’s comments on the politics of his day were equally critical and were
quite explicitly grounded in his understanding of the honorable conduct required
of the merchant trading on credit: “The gradual abuse of our constitution by the
bad management of the public funds begins now to display its dreadful effects.
Already encumbered with debts beyond the nation’s ability to discharge we are
playing the part of the desperate tradesman who will not break while he can borrow
without the least probability that his debts can ever be discharged.”64 Although
Tolson was as patriotic as the next Briton in his desires for an English victory over
the French, and the rebels, the imminent outbreak of war with Holland in 1780
prompted him to remark that “all persons (in trade) here thinks our ministry has
been too hasty and peremptory in the last manifesto” delivered to the Dutch.65
This was an unabashedly self-interested comment, for his firm, and those of his
neighbors in the city of Leeds, conducted a good deal of their trade with Dutch
firms or through Dutch ports, but he was also asserting that those in government
lacked the judgment to distinguish between those affronts that required a response
and those on which compromise was the wiser course.
Such strands of social and political criticism of course have a rich and complex
pedigree. My point is not to claim any particular primacy for commercial folk in
the origins and ramification of such sentiments. Rather, it is to suggest that we
can better understand how such ideas might have come to have meaning for this
particular social group if we think of them as the application to public issues of
the cultural attitudes, particularly those involving the discourse of honor, that
commercial folk constructed within and around credit.
62
Wiltshire RO, 314/4/2, Draft letter book of George Wansey, to Richard Laurence, December
1778.
63
Wiltshire RO, 314/4/2, Draft letter book of George Wansey, to S. F., n.d.
64
Wiltshire RO, 314/4/2, Draft letter book of George Wansey, to S. F., July 1778.
65
WYAS, Kirklees, DD/TO/11, 30 December 1780.