A symptom of change or a remnant of the old world? The use of printed commercial circular letters in France and Europe (18 th -19 th centuries)

Arnaud Bartolomei (1) , Matthieu de Oliveira (2) , Boris Deschanel , Thomas Mollanger

1 CMMC - Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine
2 IRHiS - Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion (IRHiS) - UMR 8529

Working from a database of over 1,700 circulars, this paper challenges the hypothesis according to which a commercial revolution took place during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Were printed circulars a symptom of the transition from markets based on personal networks to extended and impersonal markets? Circulars were used to communicate information on trade houses, to search for new commercial partners and to display one’s socio-professional identity. However, if major commercial innovations took place, these changes were not revolutionary: they borrowed much from former practices and do not attest of a linear evolution towards impersonal markets.

Mots clés: printed circular; trade; trust; commercial relationships

Domaines: Histoire

Arnaud Bartolomei, Matthieu de Oliveira, Boris Deschanel, Thomas Mollanger. A symptom of change or a remnant of the old world? The use of printed commercial circular letters in France and Europe (18 th -19 th centuries). 2018. ⟨hal-01683970⟩