This article investigates the spatial relevance of economic regulation in the principality of Mainz in the second half of the eighteenth century. In that city, the guild of mercers and that of merchants advocated the ideal of an equal spatial distribution of shops within the city limits, an ideal that the authorities of the electorate largely shared, although the presence of peddlers and Jewish retailers somewhat blurred its application.
On a smaller scale, the guild of merchants stressed in its petitions an opposition between the “inside” (the territory of the electorate) and the “outside” (other states within the empire and Europe). While that opposition suited the goals of the government’s economic policy, it was not consistent with the merchants’ actual trade practices, in which territorial distinctions played a minor role. From the merchants’ point of view, borders were an institutional and economic asset that served as a basis for their profits and legitimized a privilege that protected them from the competition of foreign merchants. While the government often granted the requests of Mainz’s merchant guilds, disagreements emerged at the end of the eighteenth century when the authorities began utilizing the privilege not as a tool to protect local merchants but to foster competition. The tensions that arose from those disagreements reveal that, ultimately, the merchant community and the authorities held two—largely antagonistic—conceptions of economic space.