Regulating Mercantile Probity in the North Sea Zone in the Eighteenth Century

While the East Indies may have offered more unfettered opportunities to Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, the 18th century proved to be a period of intense interest in East Indies commodities and ventures for a broader range of European societies.  Among these latecomers were the Southern Netherlands, Sweden, and Prussia.  Fueled by greater mobility of human and financial capital, these regions threw their collective hat in the East Indies ring, with sometimes dubious results.
Among other outcomes, these freewheeling ventures produced mercantile scandal.  Following on the heels of the South Sea Bubble one might have expected these missteps to have undermined the likes of the Swedish East India Company.  That they did not was owing at least in part to a combination of diplomatic and mercantile networking that distributed crucial information to defuse fallout and undermine perpetrators.
Focusing first on the case of Hissing and Co., this paper will address examples of mercantile scandal and malfeasance, with an initial eye to how societies of the North Sea coped with these problems in the mid-18th-century.  It was the interaction of both official, diplomatic channels and unofficial, mercantile networks that proved to be central in tackling these thorny problems.  After exploring the role of such networks in a few well-known such scandals that crossed mercantile and diplomatic networks around the North Sea in the 18th century, the paper then turns to how North Sea merchants and societies dealt with this problem in earlier periods.  In so doing it underscores the patterns in practices that reached across periods and their ties to the underlying structures of the North Sea zone.