This paper looks at the response of a particular merchant house to the confessional environment within 18thx-century Amsterdam.
It argues that, if part of the praxis of tolerance in the Republic was tied to local bargaining over the boundary between private and public exercise of religion, the workplace represented another domain where equally important bargains could be worked out. In terms of the customers it served, the training it provided, and the composition of its personnel, a business could send signals as to whether and how religion would influence a person’s chances for success. By the same token, a business could succeed or fail depending on its ability to connect to customers, employees, and potential personnel.
The paper first traces the confessional history of the mercantile partnerships that the members of three British families formed in Amsterdam. Chiefly Reformed in their outlook, the Cruikshanks (from Aberdeen), the Wilkiesons (originally from Edinburgh), and the Pyes (from various parts of England), had associations with Amsterdam’s Dutch Reformed and English Presbyterian congregations. In its third generation the house expanded its confessional breadth to include Anglican and Genevan Huguenot ties. The paper then moves on to consider some of the customer base of this mercantile house, which makes for very interesting reading from a confessional/political standpoint as the Cruikshank/Pye/Wilkieson consortia had no trouble, for example, supporting Catholics and Catholic/Epsicopalians even when that support ran controversially counter to British and Dutch confessional and political norms. Finally, the paper examines the apprenticeship history of Charles Pye and George Cruikshank’s partnership in the middle of the 18th century, focusing on their acceptance of the scion of a prominent Episcopalian/Catholic Jacobite family as an apprentice. The paper concludes with some reflections on the impact of globalization on the place of tolerance in particular confessional regimes.