Conveying Certainty: Writing About the Future in French Long-Distance Trade Merchants’ Correspondence in the Eighteenth Century

The uncertain aspects of early modern merchants’ future business activities are often emphasized. However, historians have not yet examined how merchants themselves discursively expressed the future. This paper examines the letters of eighteenth-century French merchants active in long-distance trade to explore how they wrote about future events with their business correspondents. The systematic analysis of merchants’ expressions about the future shows that, while the business context is often described as uncertain, this uncertainty was not prominent in their own writings. The article contributes to our understanding of the early modern future and the role of business correspondence.