“Free Passage” for the “King's True Liegemen”: The Meaning of Free Trade in a Corporate Age, 1555–1624
David Pennington
Abstract:Scholars of late have come to reevaluate and appreciate the achievements of merchant companies that fostered commercial networks and established new global trade routes. This research would seem to lend support to historians who have characterized early seventeenth-century calls for “free trade” as mere sloganeering driven by provincial merchants suspicious of the London-dominated corporations. This article challenges this view and argues that free trade ideas had deep roots in early modern political culture. … Show more
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