This first edition of The Order of the Merchant House is based on a manuscript found in the attic of M____, an Editor at the Harvard University Press in the 1920s. The manuscript was found in a box along with the following letter:
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 5, 1928
M.
Editor, Harvard University Press
My dear M.,
My best wishes to you for the New Year. In preparing to move house, I have come upon a packet which has waited nearly sixteen years for a decision I have never quite been able to make. I send it to you now, partly for your judgment and partly because I should like it to become, in some measure, your problem.
The translator was a graduate student of mine, one of the ablest I have taught. In 1910 he went to Italy to study the rise of the mercantile republics of Genoa and Venice. He had a gift for securing introductions, and in Genoa gained admission to the private archives of several old families whose commercial interests had survived, in altered forms, into our own time.
In one of these collections he reported finding a complete treatise, written about the year 1600 by the head of a merchant house for the instruction of his sons. He gave its title in English as The Order of the Merchant House. It was a father’s attempt to transmit, along with his capital, some account of the judgment by which it had been preserved: counsel upon trade, credit, shipping, the choice of agents, and the government of the family enterprise.
The family had, he said, permitted translation and publication upon the strict condition that their identity should remain undisclosed. Names, particular transactions, and other identifying circumstances were therefore to be omitted or disguised. He observed this condition so faithfully that he never told me whose papers he was examining. The discretion is admirable; its consequences for scholarship are less convenient.
He posted the enclosed translation to me early in 1912, intending to submit it, with an historical introduction and commentary, as his doctoral dissertation. That April he took passage home in the Titanic and was lost. I had been looking forward to a long and useful career for him, and still find it difficult to write about the matter.
My subsequent inquiries in Genoa failed to establish which family had admitted him. I have never seen the Italian original, nor have I encountered any independent reference to the treatise. Having no satisfactory means of authenticating it, and no settled view of what ought to be done, I put the translation aside.
There is a further difficulty, which I confess with some reluctance. The young man possessed an imagination almost equal to his learning, and his earlier letters had complained of the difficulty of finding a subject sufficiently original for a dissertation. I cannot altogether exclude the possibility that, having failed to discover the document he required, he proceeded to supply it. It is an unkind suspicion to entertain a pupil for whom I had so much affection; nevertheless, I should be less than candid if I withheld it from you.
Yet, if the work is an invention, it is an unusually well-informed one. Its account of the merchant’s habits of thought, his anxieties, and his obligations accords closely with what I know of the period. Whether these are the counsels of a Genoese father or of a gifted young scholar imagining himself in that position, they seem to me worth reading.
I offer it to you, therefore, for a first opinion as to whether it deserves to be made available to a wider public, with its doubtful history plainly acknowledged. Others may eventually determine whether we have an authentic work stripped of its credentials or a work of fiction furnished with an excellent education. In the meantime, I should be glad to hear what you make of it.
Yours ever,
B.
Professor of European History
Harvard University
