Preliminary Programme

Wed 12 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 13 April
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    14.00 - 16.00
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Fri 14 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 15 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00

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Friday 14 April 2023 08.30 - 10.30
T-9 CUL09a Past Futures I: an Individual Perspective on Temporality and Future Practice(s), 16th – 20th Centuries
Victoriagatan 13, Victoriasalen
Network: Culture Chair: Jeroen Puttevils
Organizers: Elisabeth Heijmans, Jeroen Puttevils Discussants: -
Sara Budts, Elisabeth Heijmans : Secularization of Future Thinking in Practice: a Comparison between English and French Merchant Letters (16th-18th Century)
/In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the period between 1500 and 1800. The medieval, Christian conception of time was largely cyclical in nature; the future was, ... (Show more)
/In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the period between 1500 and 1800. The medieval, Christian conception of time was largely cyclical in nature; the future was, above all, in the hands of God. By 1800 however, West-European societies had witnessed a series of socio-political changes that had manifested themselves at unprecedented pace. Scientific progress had gained ground at the expense of religion and the enlightenment had installed a firm belief that the condition humaine could be improved: the future had become open, uncertain and constructible; people were left with the feeling that time had not only been accelerating, it had also become secularised.
Recent studies have emphasized the gradual nature of this shift. Scientific innovations of the 18th century did not significantly reduce natural disasters, so statisticians and scientists kept a religious faith in their work (Clark 2006). Similarly, the majority of early modern chronicles reported both natural and divine explanations for epidemics, comfortably mixing religious and non-religious factors until well after the 17th century (Dekker 2021). The co-existence of a secular and religious understanding of the world ties in with Baker’s (2021) analysis of 16th century Italian merchant letters, in which new conceptions of the future co-existed with rather than ousted older types of future thinking. This finding is remarkable, given the importance of rational forecasting for mercantile success.
The present study zooms in on this pluritemporal mindscape of early modern societies by charting secular and religious types of future thought in four French and English merchant communities in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries (Johnson, Jeake, l’Hermite and Gradis). Did 16th century merchants appeal to God more often than their 18th century colleagues did? In which domains of their lives was religious future thinking the strongest? Did the secularization of time proceed at the same pace in England and in France, despite their differences in religious practice?
To ensure comparability across time and space, we collected qualitative and quantitative evidence on the future expectations of our merchants by systematically annotating their correspondences for all future references, both implicit and explicit, keeping track of variables like human and divine agency as well as the domain of life at stake.
Preliminary results indicate that merchants were more likely to appeal to God in situations that they themselves or their trustees had no control over (e.g. epidemics, war, long-distance travel or market fluctuations). This correlation holds for the entire period, despite the steady decline in formulaic appeals to God in opening and closing formulae. Overall, our findings corroborate the hypothesis that the conceptualization of the future that was dominant in early modern mercantile communities was pluritemporal at core: rational foresight and scientific explanations were gaining importance, alongside – but, crucially, not at the expense of – God’s control over the times to come. (Show less)

Sanne Hermans : The Foundation of a Joint Future: the Relation between Trust and Temporality in the Correspondence of the Dutch Merchant Claes van Adrichem, 1585–1597
In the world of premodern trade, trust was key: the glue that held businessmen and their agents together and the groundwork on which commercial success and growth were built – the desired prospects of any serious entrepreneur. The early modern merchant, especially those involved in long-distance trading, needed to fall ... (Show more)
In the world of premodern trade, trust was key: the glue that held businessmen and their agents together and the groundwork on which commercial success and growth were built – the desired prospects of any serious entrepreneur. The early modern merchant, especially those involved in long-distance trading, needed to fall back on people in other places to provide him with the right information and follow his instructions at the precise times in order to gain future profits. So, it is not surprising that historic mercantile networks usually consisted of relatives and friends, people with a close emotional connection. Such familiar links as well as the notion of trust have been well-studied for Western Europe before 1800 via contemporary correspondences. This includes the Low Countries, an economic heavyweight from this period. Jesse Sadler (2015), for instance, has done extensive research on the early modern businesses of the Antwerpian family Van der Meulen and their in-laws Della Faille. Among other things, he examines how these rivalling families, whose members had to live in exile after the Fall of Antwerp (1585), must gain each others’ trust in order to survive in their new existence. Although the future of their companies is implicitly addressed here – as in other research on trade and trust –, it has not previously been investigated what direct effects trust or mistrust had on temporalities in the past. This paper aims to uncover the relationship between trust and the future by centralizing the following question: In what ways was trust deployed to shape future opportunities and expectations within an early modern corporate context? My hypothesis is that merchants provided instructions or goals to their factors, sometimes fixed and other times through a series of possibilities. The latter were then given room (trust) to act within the presented framework, keeping an eye out for the most profitable of outcomes. The correspondence to test this hypothesis derives from the Merchant Archive of Claes van Adrichem (1538–1607). The paper addresses specifically the exchange of letters between the businessman from Delft, specialised, inter alia, in the Baltic Sea trade, and his factors in Gdansk, Poland: Huych Adriaensz. and Aper Jansz. Delft. The corpus, that exists of 96 letters, is written between 1585 and 1597, and will be subjected to a sociolinguistic study, in which future-narratives are traced and examined using the following notions from sociology: (1) Agency, the who – or, in some cases, what – that has the control of a particular future statement; (2) Breadth, the range of future possibilities considered at different points in time; (3) Contingency, the degree to which future trajectories are imagined as fixed and predetermined versus flexible, uncertain, and dependent on local circumstances; and (4) Reach, the degree of extension that imagined futures have into the short, middle, and long term (also known as ‘time horizons’). By examining these concepts within the Van Adrichem correspondence, it should become clear how trust played a role in the creation of a joint and lucrative future. (Show less)



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