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The English Gentleman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley North, 1641-1691. By Richard Grassby * Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. xvi + 390 pp. Illustrations, notes, and bibliography. $69.00 ISBN 0-19-820439-6.
There was perhaps no more important occurrence in 17th-century England than the rise of the merchant from an economically useful, but politically powerless position to a place at the center of economic, political, and social affairs. Central to the growth of American colonies, the dislocations and ultimately transformative consequences of the Civil War, the Protectorate, and the three great revolutions that rocked the end of the age--the Commercial, Glorious, and Financial Revolutions-was the work of the merchant.
As a counter to extensive quantitative or prosopographical studies of this rise (such as those by Gary De Krey and Robert Brenner), Richard Grassby provides a study of the expanded world of one merchant in his biography of Sir Dudley North. A notable and controversial figure during his lifetime, recognized as an architect of trade policy and vilified as the Sheriff of London chosen by Charles II to undermine Whig power in the City of London, yet largely ignored by subsequent generations, North is a canonical example of the new men of action whose work helped carry the British empire to great heights under the Hanoverians.
Through prodigious researches into family archives-atypical ones that contain both personal and business records--Grassby portrays North as a man of many dimensions. Despite Grassby's characterization (p. 283, North was no "outsider." He was born in London in 1641, the third surviving son of the 4th Baron North of Kirtling. At sixteen, he was enrolled in a boarding writing school. The following year, drawing on family networks (which in this period more often than...