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“Your sister growes rich by her great trade”: Catherine Nicks's Intimate Economy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2022
Abstract
“Catherine Nicks's Intimate Economy” introduces an intimate network that spanned Europe and Asia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, underlining how women created opportunities for themselves and their extended network. Using the case study of Catherine Nicks, the article examines how a trading company's network, in spite of the company's desire for impermeable monopolies, lent itself to women and others who could form durable intimate networks underneath the larger corporate umbrella for personal and familial economic gains. It questions how the early modern maritime and global economy worked while also examining the nature of company monopolies.
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Itinerario , Volume 46 , Special Issue 3: Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period , December 2022 , pp. 345 - 355
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University
References
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12 She was baptised Katherine Barker on 24 April 1662, but later in life she would sign letters with “Cat,” so for the purpose of this article, she is referred to as Catherine. For her baptism, see Somerset Heritage Service, Taunton, Somerset [hereafter SHS], D\P\HAM.H/2/1/2, 24 April 1662. Her father John might have held the lease for the mill in town until 1662; see “High Ham,” in A History of the County of Somerset: Volume 8, The Poldens and the Levels, ed. Robert Dunning (London: British History Online, 2004), 70–91, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/som/vol8.
13 Her brother John Barker lived only two months in 1653–54, Elizabeth Barker lived two months in 1668, and Benjamin Barker appears to have had a similar fate: SHS, D\P\HAM.H/2/1/2.
14 For this largely anecdotal claim concerning her education, see Henry Yule, The Diary of William Hedges, Esq. (Afterwards Sir William Hedges), during His Agency in Bengal: As Well as on His Voyage out and Return Overland (1681–1687) (New York: Burt Franklin, 1887), cclx. For arithmetic and bookkeeping, see Froide, Amy M., “Learning to Invest: Women's Education in Arithmetic and Accounting in Early Modern England,” Early Modern Women 10:1 (2015): 3–26, 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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16 For families in commerce during the seventeenth century, see for instance the example of the Lever family in Aske Laursen Brock and Misha Ewen, “Women's Public Lives: Navigating the East India Company, Parliament and Courts in Early Modern England,” Gender & History 33:1 (2020): 3–23.
17 Jedidiah captained at least three slave voyages, according to slavevoyages.org, before he fell out with the RAC; see The National Archives, Kew [hereafter TNA], C 10/230/4, 1688, African Company v Barker. Dionesia's business will be discussed in more detail in the following.
18 Yule, Diary of William Hedges, cclxi. In the transcription of the letter, the brother's name is given as Ted, which is also the name mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. However, the brother was baptised Jedidiah, so the nickname is more likely Jed than Ted.
19 TNA, C 108/299, Dionesia Tombes in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 5 January 1705.
20 Records of Fort St George: Diary and Consultation Book 1678, ed. C. M. Schmidt (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1911), 168. For companies’ discussions concerning women going abroad to the East and West Indies, see Schleck, Julia, “The Marital Problems of the East India Company,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 17:3 (2017): 83–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ransome, David R., “Wives for Virginia, 1621,” William and Mary Quarterly, 48:1 (1991): 3–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 BL-IOR, B/34, Court of Committees, 7 November 1677.
22 Andrew Grout, “Nicks [née Barker], Catherine (d. 1709), merchant,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
23 BL-IOR, E/3/92, The Company at London to the President and Council at Fort St George, 11 September 1689.
24 Dodwell, Diary and Consultation Book 1693, 7–8.
25 They were also fined individually for the part they played in the godown scheme: John was fined 8,000 pagodas and Catherine only 600; Dodwell, Diary and Consultation Book 1693, 64.
26 Paula Watson and Stuart Handley, “Dolben, John (1662–1710), of Epsom, Surrey,” in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1690–1715, ed. D. Hayton, E. Cruickshanks, and S. Handley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For men using the EIC as a last resort, see Olwen Hufton, “Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Family History 9:4 (1984): 355–76.
27 Records of Fort St George: Diary and Consultation Book 1694, ed. H. Dodwell (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1918), 96–7.
28 TNA, C 108/299, Accounts and correspondence. Copy of will of Katherine Nicks, 15 November 1709.
29 Craig Muldrew, “‘A Mutual Assent of Her Mind?’ Women, Debt, Litigation and Contract in Early Modern England,” History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 47–71, 52.
30 Ann M. Carlos and Stephen Nicholas, “Managing the Manager: An Application of the Principal Agent Model to the Hudson's Bay Company,” Oxford Economic Papers 45:2 (1993): 243–56; Julia Adams, “Principals and Agents, Colonialists and Company Men: The Decay of Colonial Control in the Dutch East Indies,” American Sociological Review 61:1 (1996): 12–28.
31 Country trade refers to Europeans’ participation in the existing inter-Asian trade: European merchants sailing between the many ports in Asia made fortunes. Emily Erikson and Peter Bearman, “Malfeasance and the Foundations for Global Trade: The Structure of English Trade in the East Indies, 1601–1833,” American Journal of Sociology 112:1 (2006): 195–230, 201.
32 Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600–1757 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Pres, 2014).
33 Maxine Berg et al., “Private Trade and Monopoly Structures: The East India Companies and the Commodity Trade to Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” in Chartering Capitalism: Organizing Markets, States, and Publics, ed. Emily Erikson, Political Power and Social Theory (Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2015), xxix, 123–45, 135–6.
34 Timothy Davies, “British Private Trade Networks and Metropolitan Connections in the Eighteenth Century,” in Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia, ed. Maxine Berg et al., Europe's Asian Centuries (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 154–67.
35 Mentioned in her will; TNA, PROB 11/598/36, 2 June 1724. Another five of her children—John, Isabella, Sibella, Catherine and Mary—were buried in India before her own demise; see Julian James Cotton, List of Inscriptions on Tombs or Monuments in Madras Possessing Historical or Archaeological Interest, 2 vols. (Madras: Superintendent Government Press, 1945), 1: 13.
36 TNA, C 108/51, Merchant's account books in Fort George. Accounts of the estate of Catherine Nicks.
37 The exceptions being her husband, John, the sons-in-law William Warre and Richard Cary, and William Warre's father.
38 The market encouraged new conversations between strangers and generated new tools with which to curtail the uncertainties; see Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (London: Yale University Press, 2009), 20.
39 Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976); Ian Bruce Watson, Foundation for Empire: English Private Trade in India 1659–1760 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1980).
40 Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 65.
41 TNA, C 108/299, Letter of attorney from Coja Satore to Catherine Nicks, 26 June 1704.
42 Margaret R. Hunt, “The Sailor's Wife, War Finance, and Coverture in Late Seventeenth-Century London,” in Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World, ed. Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring (Montreal: MQUP, 2013), 139–62, 144.
43 For a recent example of sisters’ working businesses over large distance, see Misha Ewen, “At the Edge of Empire? Women's Ceramic Collections in Seventeenth-Century Newfoundland,” Cultural and Social History 18:1 (2021): 23–44.
44 For Dionesia's trading see TNA, C 7/222/45, Philip Margas vs Henry Tombs and Dionesia Tombs, 1698.
45 TNA, C108/299 24, Elihu Yale to Catherine Nicks, 24 February 1703, Elihu Yale in London to Nicks at Fort St George.
46 For women in particular demonstrating against the EIC, see the example concerning the ship Modena, Margaret R. Hunt, “Women and the Fiscal-Imperial State in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29–47, 44–5.
47 Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 130.
48 TNA, C 108/299, Dionesia Tombs in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 25 January 1706.
49 TNA, C 108/299, Elihu Yale in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 28 December 1704; TNA, C 108/299, An account of things delivered to Captain Edward Harrison according to the order of Mrs Catherine Nicks before she dyed being for her children.
50 TNA, C 108/299, Elihu Yale in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 20 October 1702.
51 Ibid.
52 Susanah Shaw Romney, “Intimate Networks and Children's Survival in New Netherland in the Seventeenth Century,” Early American Studies 7:2 (2009): 270–308.
53 TNA, C 108/299, Dionesia Tombs in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 24 January 1704.
54 TNA, C 108/299, Dionesia Tombs in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 25 January 1706.
55 He died age 19, 29 March 1705; see Cotton, List of Inscriptions on Tombs, 1: 11.
56 TNA, C 108/299, Elihu Yale in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 28 December 1705.
57 TNA, C 108/299, Elihu Yale in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 20 October 1702.
58 Ibid.
59 TNA, C 108/299, Elihu Yale in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 28 December 1704.
60 For a discussion of the previous binary perception—Golden age to separate spheres—see Vickery, Amanda, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,” Historical Journal 36:2 (1993): 383–414Google Scholar.
61 TNA, C 108/299, Elihu Yale in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 20 October 1702.
62 Yule, Diary of William Hedges, cclix; Hiram Bingham III, Elihu Yale, the American Nabob of Queen Square . . . With Illustrations [Including Portraits], (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1939), 268–9, 296–7.
63 TNA, C 108/299, Dionesia Tombs in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 1 February 1707.
64 Ibid.
65 TNA, C 108/299, Dionesia Tombs in London to Catherine Nicks at Fort St George, 5 February 1709.
66 TNA, C 108/299, Catherine Nicks at Fort St George to Elihu Yale in London, 6 February 1705.
67 TNA, C 108/299, The will of Catherine Nicks, 15 November 1709.
68 During the eighteenth century, business networks began to change and there was an increasing tendency to employ friends and business partners over kin when conducting long-distance trade; see Forestier, Albane, “Risk, Kinship and Personal Relationships in Late Eighteenth-Century West Indian Trade: The Commercial Network of Tobin & Pinney,” Business History 52:6 (2010): 912–31, 917CrossRefGoogle Scholar.