The Projector as a pioneer of global trade. The Augsburg merchant Konrad Rott and his failed pepper monopoly in 1579/80.

• Applicant: Dr. Markus Berger
• Subject Area: Economic and Social History
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442435318

Using the Augsburg merchant Konrad Rot as a case study, this research project aims to investigate which role early modern projectors played in global trade and how their actions influenced the economy. Projectors were a type of entrepreneur who tried to obtain financial and legal support for their elaborated plans, especially at the courts. They did so by means of mostly unrealistic promises about the amount of expected revenues and gains for the common weal. Although they habitually failed in putting their ideas into practice, they were an important source for innovation in early modern economy. Already their contemporaries saw a close link between projectors and the highly speculative long-distance trade. In the sixteenth century, Portugal gradually created a network of outposts and trade branches in the Indian Ocean in order to enforce its claimed monopoly on pepper. Due to its high financial needs, Portugal started to lease out this monopoly to investors in the 1570s. Since 1575, the Augsburg merchant Konrad Rott participated in Portuguese pepper trade. Despite a lack of equity, he initially gained the contract for European pepper distribution and, from 1579 on, also the contract for purchasing pepper in India. He convinced the Saxon elector August to invest huge sums in his project and promised him in return to establisha Leipzig-based pepper monopoly for the German-speaking part of Europe. The project failed already after a year, causing Rott to flee from Augsburg. Although he left his creditors completely in the lurch, Rott succeeded in starting a new life in Lisbon as a German consul. This study sees Konrad Rott as a projector and uses him as a case study for investigating in detail how projectors worked and what role they played in the development of early capitalistic structures. In this context, the global dimension of Rott’s plan is particularly interesting. In order to operationalize the concept of projecting appropriately, Werner Plumpe’s model for investigating historic economic dynamics will be used. This model describes economy as three interacting factors: semantics, institutions, and practices.. The proposed research project thus combines different approaches from economic, social, global, and cultural history to explore early modern economic dynamics. It showcases the importance of projecting at the end of the sixteenth century and reconstructs global economic entanglement. The result of this study will be published as a monograph with an appendix of selected edited sources from Rott’s projects

• DFG Programme: Research Grants