Book Reviews / 810

housing experts who embraced the principle of filtering themselves

came to recognize that preserving if not enhancing value through main-
tenance was an essential feature of the housing market. Through home
“improvements,” consumers became producers of long-term value.
This is a densely researched and densely narrated book that per-
suasively foregrounds the uneven processes through which markets for
the materials and practices of home improvement developed. Harris
leaves it to his reader to draw out the larger social implications, the
neighborhood effects of housing maintenance that underlie abandon-
ment and gentrification, as well as preservation and filtering. But he
makes crystal clear that scholars of the housing market who focus only
on new construction have missed literally half the story.
Elizabeth Blackmar is professor of history at the Columbia University and is
currently working on a book that examines market failure as an integral
feature of changing practices of real estate investment over two centuries.

. . .

Global Trade and Commercial Networks: Eighteenth-Century Diamond

Merchants. By Tijl Vanneste. London: Pickering & Chatto Publishers,
2011. xi + 269 pp. Figures, tables, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth,
$99.00. ISBN: 978-1-84893-087-2.
doi:10.1017/S0007680513001335

Reviewed by Hilde Greefs

Rather than viewing trade as a globalizing force in its own right, Tijl
Vanneste seeks to explain global interconnectedness via a focus on so-
cial interactions between merchants. In line with social economics,
entrepreneurial economic behavior does not stem exclusively from ra-
tional choice and self-interest; rather, businesspeople are considered
social actors whose behaviors are embedded in society and whose inter-
relations include nonrational elements and motives. Vanneste is famil-
iar with the broad historiography on these topics and elucidates his
point of view effectively: Namely, the mercantile community has its
own values, customs, language, and often informal mechanisms of ne-
gotiating relationships. He considers cooperation and interaction as
crucial vehicles for economic agency. Following the example of histori-
ans such as David Hancock (Citizens of the World: London Merchants
and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785,
1995) and Francesca Trivellato (The Familiarity of Strangers: The Se-
phardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early
Modern Period, 2009), Vanneste adopts a microperspective for exam-
ining the organization of international trade in the eighteenth century.
 Book Reviews / 811

Through an in-depth study of a small but transnational network of dia-

mond merchants, he scrutinizes how merchants interacted and linked
communities from several locations around the globe.
Often family ties and networks between merchants that share a
common geographical origin, religious background, and/or language
are considered trustworthy and successful. Vanneste does not exam-
ine such religious diasporas, however, but focuses instead on a cross-
cultural network composed of people who, though from the same
profession (international diamond merchants), came from different
cultural and religious backgrounds (Jews, Catholics, and Protestants).
This network operated in several port cities across Europe (Antwerp,
Amsterdam, London, and Lisbon). James Dormer, a British diversified
merchant who had settled in Antwerp, and Francis Salvador, a Sephar-
dic Jew who lived in London, held central positions in this trading
network. Along with a small group of other merchants, they collabo-
rated between 1744 and 1758; this collaboration was temporary and
non-exclusive, as each trader also engaged in various commercial oper-
ations with other merchants. What bound them together, albeit not ex-
clusively, was their trade in a specific, high-value, luxury commodity—
the selling and buying of Indian and Brazilian diamonds. The merchants
corresponded with each other regularly, in order to facilitate their mu-
tual commercial and financial transactions, to hasten communication
and information exchange, and to enforce relations of trust and friend-
ship. Vanneste uses their commercial correspondence as his main source,
but also draws upon archives in Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, Por-
tugal, and Brazil to scrutinize how this particular informal trade circuit
became established and how it functioned in the broader context of the
diamond trade during the eighteenth century.
For Vanneste, a successful trade network demonstrates routine,
reciprocity, and mutual internal links that, rather than being centered
on one person, reflect the privileged relations between and among the
various partners in the group. However, as Dormer’s records illustrate,
this particular trade network included stronger and weaker partners as
well as a hierarchy of sorts. The availability of source material naturally
biases the information to some degree, leading the author to look be-
yond the network and its partners to other correspondents. Unfortu-
nately, this method undermines and destabilizes the boundaries be-
tween network insiders and outsiders, and thereby introduces questions
about specific features of and hierarchical relations within the network.
Knowing which merchants were contacted most frequently and who
was able to assess the most useful connections is thus crucial for under-
standing power relations within this trading network.
In this respect, Dormer’s involvement in another diamond network,
 Book Reviews / 812

of Ashkenazi merchants, likely proved a more independent position in

the network; Dormer even engaged in business with a rival of one of his
network partners. According to Vanneste, the Ashkenazi merchants
were not especially interested in establishing friendly relations with
other merchants, opting instead to continue relying staunchly on kin-
ship and religious ties. However, the contacts of Dormer with the Ash-
kenazi merchants were not fundamentally different from those between
the partners in the network under study. The available information
even reveals how merchants in the network maintained a delicate bal-
ance between, on the one hand, cooperation and bounding and, on the
other, self-interest and rivalry.
The frequent references to trust and reliability, to friendship, and
to understanding appear to mitigate and even conceal an element of
mistrust and competitiveness among the merchants. As long as they
needed one another to advance their business dealings and so long as
transactions remained profitable, the merchants in the network cooper-
ated with each other. Indeed, their iterative successful joint ventures
even led to a certain relational cohesion. However, the merchants’ re-
spective commitments clearly diverged. Their temporary cooperation
may have been a business strategy by which to avoid long-term connec-
tions; indeed, such cooperation could hinder their pursuing new oppor-
tunities and contacts. These more problematic and even negative effects
of strong ties have been emphasized by several researchers for networks
based upon kinship, ethnicity, or religion and were likely evident in the
cross-cultural network examined by Vanneste, too. Unfortunately, Van-
neste solely focuses on the positive features of networks and cooperation.
Vanneste is clearly sensitive to these ambiguities and seeks to tran-
scend them by focusing on general characteristics of the cosmopolitan
trade community, in which mutual attitudes allowed for people to gain
each other’s trust and acquire respectability. Furthermore, merchants
were not connected solely by commercial activities, as they also inter-
acted with people in the host societies where they had settled. Vanneste
highlights an important paradox between such merchants belonging to
an international community of outward looking cosmopolites versus
their local attachment and sense of belonging to the physical place where
they lived. Especially notable in this part of the book is the Salvador
family of London, who were deeply rooted in the international Sephardic
diaspora yet also strongly embedded in upper-class English society. Van-
neste labels upper-class merchants as “embedded cosmopolites,” in that
they were open to and oriented towards the outside world, even as they
remained strongly attached to where they lived their daily lives (p. 166).
This notion of embedded cosmopolites requires further elaboration, par-
ticularly in relation to how people in host cities perceived the presence
 Book Reviews / 813

of an international commercial community and in reference to different

levels of assimilation and integration, as described by migration his-
tory. Nonetheless, the notion offers significant potential for refining
work on cosmopolitanism. Further study would allow for more precise
analysis of the stronger and weaker positions of international trade
communities of merchants in various European host cities, particularly
as related to the communities’ respective global economic positions.
Vanneste’s undertaking illustrates why, in seeking to understand
global interconnectedness, it is crucial to focus on human interactions,
as opposed to just trade statistics and structural developments, and to
scrutinize tensions between cross-cultural belonging, on one hand, and
local attachment and engagement, on the other. His work argues for a
social approach to international trade, which is considered to be first
and foremost an interaction between people with their own mindsets,
beliefs, and attachments, but who share conventions of professional
logic and rules of conduct. Vanneste’s study, although it focuses on a
rather small community of merchants and thereby illuminates only
a narrow segment of “global trade,” is nonetheless a significant and
positive contribution to the interesting series of “Perspectives in Eco-
nomic and Social History” and, more specifically, to our understanding
of merchant communities during the eighteenth century.
Hilde Greefs is senior lecturer of modern social history at the Centre for
Urban History, University of Antwerp. She works on international trade
networks and migration during the long nineteenth century.

. . .

Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History. By Brian Black. New York:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. x + 276 pp. Illustrations, notes, index.
Cloth, $35.00; electronic, $34.99. ISBN: cloth, 978-0-7425-5654-6;
electronic, 978-1-4422-1611-2.
doi:10.1017/S0007680513001165

Reviewed by Hugh Gorman

Crude Reality by Brian Black tells the story of the world becoming ad-
dicted to petroleum, a resource that will eventually disappear. Over the
course of two hundred years, petroleum went from being a little-used
substance that seeped out of the ground in odd places to the lifeblood of
industrial society. Indeed, by the middle of the twentieth century, na-
tions dependent on this resource, especially the United States, were
willing to do whatever was necessary to secure a steady supply. The
cruel reality, Black notes, is that this resource is finite and will become,
sooner or later, too risky or too expensive, or both, to secure.