City of Corsairs: Elite Cohesion and Privateering in Old Regime Saint-Malo

MORSe seminar given by Henning Hillmann (University of Mannheim)
Date: 21st of May, 12:30-14:00
Location: Room PC04, Lugano campus

Abstract
I examine how the economic and political networks among merchant elites laid the local foundations of overseas trade expansion “on the ground” in their seafaring ports. Historical evidence suggests that local elites used family-based patronage networks to mobilize the necessary resources for their trading ventures. Economic alliances often coupled with strategic investments in political alliances. But such alliances rarely led to a unified elite within merchant communities. We rather find conflicting elite factions with distinct identities and often competing business and political interests.
How, then, can divisions within elite networks be bridged in favor of a cohesive community and a collective identity? I answer this question through a quantitative historical network study of the merchant elite in Saint-Malo, a port city that played a pivotal strategic role in the French Atlantic economy during the Age of Mercantilism. An oligarchy of Malouin merchants organized trading ventures along lineage-based patron-client networks. These merchant family dynasties reinforced their positions through marriage alliances, privileged access to profitable trades and a favorable balance of power in municipal politics. During wartime, these merchants turned Saint-Malo into one of the most vibrant centers of privateering, the raiding of enemy trade ships, licensed by the French government through letters of marque. My argument is that privateering partnerships faced few entry-barriers and were less politically charged than other affiliations. Privateering therefore enabled brokerage and bridging ties across conflicting elite factions. Such brokerage and bridging helped the local merchant elite to unite against external threats imposed by war and to compete successfully with other Atlantic ports for trade privileges. Supporting quantitative evidence comes from archival registers of more than 3,000 privateering and trade partnership contracts, poll tax records, kinship networks and political officeholding among the Saint-Malo merchant elites over a period of one hundred years, from the height of the Ancien Regime to the French Revolution (1689-1789).