The Merchants Adventurers and the Continental Cloth-trade: 1560s-1620s.

The enormous importance of English exports of semi-finished cloth by the Merchants Adventurers is well known, and the role of the Merchants in shifting their mart from Antwerp to new mart towns in the United Provinces and northwest Germany has been well told by G. D. Ramsay. Wolf-Rudiger Baumann has now tackled the German end of that connection in The Merchants Adventurers and the Continental Cloth-trade, 1560s--1620s (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990; pp. xii + 425. DM176), a meticulously documented study translated by Timothy Slater. The title is slightly misleading: Baumann's concern is almost wholly with the Merchants' trade to what is now Germany, dealing only in …