SAVARY, Jacques.

£9,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Le parfait négociant, First bilingual edition, printed in parallel French and German, of "the most important and famous merchant manual of the Early Modern Period. It was the quintessential merchant manual against which all others were measured" (Haasis, p. 121).Savary made his fortune in trade. Appointed by Jean Colbert to a council to reform commerce, he was "the mastermind behind the 1673 ordonnance de commerce, the first European national code of commercial law. Shortly after its publication, Le parfait négociant was translated into German (1676) and Dutch (1683). By 1800 it had appeared in at least twenty-nine French editions, some of which considerably expanded on the first one. More extensive and accurate than any of its antecedents, Savary's manual walked a merchant through every bit of information he needed to succeed, from weights and measurements to partnership contracts, bookkeeping, and more. It borrowed from previous Italian examples, such as Peri's Il negotiante, from its author's personal experience, and from a wealth of legal documents" (Trivellato, p. 103).The work was first published in French the previous year, and in German earlier in 1676 - the texts follow those editions.

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