Provincial Merchants in Eighteenth-Century England: The ‘Great Oaks’ of Manchester

The importance of overseas trade to England’s national wealth and international reputation in the eighteenth century amplified the public discourse on the social value of merchants. Contemporary conduct books described a hierarchical occupational structure, where merchants enjoyed the highest prestige within the business community, with tradesmen and manufacturers performing distinct and progressively less valued professional functions. These conduct books focused on London, England’s premier port and the beating heart of Europe’s commodity and financial markets. Historians have also given much attention to London but have equally demonstrated the importance of merchants in the ‘outports’, whose participation in England’s foreign trade engendered significant wealth, status and political influence. This article considers a different type of eighteenth-century merchant, one based within English manufacturing regions, and one that has been largely overlooked in the historiography, not least because their businesses elided the separation of production and mercantile activities espoused by contemporary didacts. Focusing on Manchester, the article demonstrates that the town’s ‘Great Oaks’ challenged London’s commercial hegemony in a distinctive way, seeking not to replicate outport merchants’ entrepreneurial verve in risky, multilateral trades, but specialising, as both manufacturers and merchants, in exporting to commercially developed markets, where the ability to supply a precise assortment of locally produced textiles was more important than the capacity to sell imports or to provide financial services to overseas clients. Although little studied, provincial merchant communities were a general feature of the more dynamic English manufacturing regions in the years immediately before, and during the onset of, industrialisation.