Accounting power and market risk: the Briers-Heusch-von Cassel jewelry business (Frankfurt am Main, 1620s)

This study is about Frankfurter jewellers active in the 1620s. Although their activity takes place in a global horizon, renewed by the new connections built by the Dutch East India Company, the study is restricted to Europe in order to focus on the accounting records left by the merchants. Those question immediately the mercantile knowledges of the jewellers, or, more precisely, skills asymmetries within the merchant group. A very striking feature of the seemingly straightforward trade of the group (buying rough stones in Antwerp or Amsterdam, processing it in or around Antwerp or Frankfurt, selling it to the courts of Northern Europe, especially the imperial court) is the risks involved : without extremely high profits, a cash crisis caused by the slow temporality of sales and payment recoveries, as well as by a limited duration of purchase credit, was unavoidable. In this race against time, the demand adjustment variable was not the price, but the circulation of merchandise : jewels were offered in successive princely courses so as to avoid unsold items. The merchant group also managed trade risks by the division of the jewels’ ownership into indefinitely reconfigurable shares. This organization - covering space and dividing risk – was characterized both by its openness to outside investment and by the clear hierarchy within the merchant group. Ultimately, it was based on an bookkeeping system, managed from Frankfurt, that was not only complex, but also hermetically sealed for several merchants of the company - a system of power and control, which existence calls into question the primacy given to concepts such as law or trust in the description of modern trade networks.