AN ATTEMPT TO LOCALIZE THE TRADE NETWORK OF THE SCOTTISH MERCHANT ARTHUR FORBES ON THE LANDS OF THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH IN 1685–1692

Abstract

It is noted that there was a group of Scottish merchants in early modern Lviv, which is poorly studied. It is shown that the Scottish emigration to the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ruthenian Voivodeship was a natural, long-term process caused by the difficult situation within Scotland and the British archipelago. It is claimed that upon arrival in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the emigrants integrated well into the new society: one part of the Scots took a place in the middle class, while the other joined the poorer strata of the population.It is indicated that as of the end of the 17th century there were several well-known mer- chant families of Scottish origin in Lviv, among whom the Gordons are the best studied. It has been researched that another emigrant family involved in local trade were the Forbeses, particularly Arthur Forbes, whose correspondence is preserved in the Lviv Central State His- torical Archive of Ukraine. The chronology of the correspondence has been established to be 1678–1699. All of the letters are structured similarly, and the main topics of communication were trade, financial calculations, family correspondence, requests for help, holiday greetings, medical prescriptions and religious messages. It is proved that the most representative years for the study of the trade network of the Forbeses and their fabric trade are 1685, 1686, 1687 and 1692. It is analyzed that with the help of the data obtained from the correspondence, it can be determined that Arthur Forbes was responsible for trade in the Ruthenian Voivodeship, and his approximate trade route in those years was as follows: Lviv–Mostyska–Przemyśl– Jarosław–Rzeszów–Kraków. It is established that the Forbes family had centers in the main Polish trading cities. For example, Patrick Forbes lived in Gdańsk, where he received goods and passed them on to Robert Forbes in Kraków and to Arthur Forbes in Lviv or Jarosław.It is emphasized that, in addition to them, the trade network also included other merchants who were not members of the Forbes family. They lived in the following cities: Gdańsk, Warsaw, Wrocław, Zamość, Jarosław, Lviv, and Rzeszów.It is concluded that the documents available to us make it possible to fully recreate the Forbes trade network only during the aforementioned four years, so it will be promising to search for other parts of their correspondence in foreign archives.