Business Records

Talbott, Siobhan

Abstract

Once business information had been created and acquired, merchants faced an important question: how to store ever-increasing volumes of information. Records were an essential part of early modern business practices, kept for both short- and long-term use, with their future purposes usually unknown at the time of creation. This chapter explores early modern business records, emphasizing their specificity and exploring the variety of different ways that these records were kept. I suggest that far from being uniform and easily categorized, practices deviated widely from published ‘rules’ of record-keeping, both because of the individual goals and preferences of their keepers and because of the self-fashioning tendencies of businessmen operating in this period. I explore the practices of duplication and the use of these records, including in legal disputes and insurance claims, and discuss how merchants learned to keep records of various types.

Citation

Talbott, S. (2025). Business Records. . Oxford University Press (OUP). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198926825.003.0006

• Acceptance Date: Feb 10, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Feb 10, 2025
• Publication Date: Mar 13, 2025
• Deposit Date: Feb 27, 2025
• Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
• Pages: 157-202
• ISBN: 9780198926795
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198926825.003.0006
• Keywords: education, information, knowledge, news, Atlantic world, print, manuscript, orality, commerce, business
• Public URL: https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/1078495