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Book Review: British Sea Captain Alexander Hamilton's A New Account of the East Indies (17th-18th Century)

to use, test, and build on the hidden core of a study that is otherwise fully documented, including a helpful bibliography. The social profile of the London merchants is the most suggestive contribution of this study. The social origins of English-born London merchants is particularly telling in light of the assumption that many merchants were younger sons of gentry who could serve as social and political brokers between the City and the country elites who dominated Parliament. Gauci found that fully twenty-five percent of English-born merchants in London in the 1690s whose fathers can be identified were sons of baronets, knights, esquires or gentlemen. Admittedly, a number of these fathers were merchants who had "improved" their status, but this group still indicates significant amalgamation of gentry and merchant values. Gauci is more interested in the forty percent of English-born London merchants who were sons of merchants. Although sketching a self-conscious mercantile culture, Gauci also acknowledges that fully one-third of the London merchants whose origins are known came from outside England and Wales, and their associations were often ethnic or religious rather than occupational. Gauci's intriguing central contention is that the merchant community was not seeking to join or challenge the gentry, socially or politically. Although this claim was doubted then, and is hard to prove now, it is particularly tentative given the evidence provided. The life cycle of individuals is considered, but their wives and children are of even less interest than their fathers, and neither their homes nor their belongings are studied as indicators of values, as David Hancock and Peter Earle have done. Nuala Zahedieh, in an article that is cited but underused here, has suggested that almost twothirds of London overseas merchants in this period married women from the city's merchant/tradesmen communities. Such endogomy powerfully reinforced a burgher culture of livery companies, coffee houses, walks on the Exchange and business news-sheets. Social change over time is hard to discern in the topical structure of this work, but this method entirely obscures the shifting merchant political influence throughout this tumultuous period. Alison Olson's Making the Empire Work (1992) rightly provides general guidance for a complicated subject. It is difficult to measure success by petitions that achieved legislation when much success involved the clandestine defeat of proposed legislation. It is even harder to achieve convincing answers from a lone case study, however revealing, of the French commerce bill of 1713. Gauci's conclusion that the merchant community achieved a working social and political relationship with the gentry who dominated Parliament may well be correct, but the matter will need fuller and more systematic investigation.