Jean Boinebroke of Douai

Modern historians, in the tradition of Karl Marx, have often viewed Boinebroke's business activity as an early example capitalist exploitation of his workers.^[6] However, other historians claim that he was never an industrialist who owned factories or manufactures, but rather a trader whose reputation was built on over the centuries through, sometimes, deliberate meddling by scholars.^[7] In the assessment of John H. Munro,

he was no 'industrial capitalist', a term that is clearly an anachronism for this era. He was instead principally a wool merchant, dealing in English and domestic wools, and his role as a cloth merchant was only secondary ... he owned land, with many properties in Douia itself and a sheep farm outside. As a merchant, he provided wool on credit to industrial drapers, who pledged their cloths, looms and sometimes even their home as security; and some of them also rented their houses from him. But most of his wage-earning employees were those required for the wool trade itself: sorters, beaters, washers and some wool dyers (who worked in his dyehouse). Although Boinebroke did employ a few others in cloth making, chiefly to work some tentering frames that he owned, there is absolutely no evidence that he ever directly supervised the central processes of cloth production.^[1]

• Georges Espinas: Les origines du capitalisme I: Sire Jehan Boinebroke patricien et drapier douaisien. Bibliothèque de la Société d'histoire du droit des pays flamands, picards et wallons 7. Lille 1933.