The ARTFL Project

The Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce is an influential French dictionary of commerce and trade, first published in 1723. Written by Jacques Savary des Brûlons, the dictionary was an extensive encyclopedic work that provided detailed information on various aspects of commerce, including commodities, manufacturing processes, trading practices, commercial laws and regulations, and geographic information related to trade. It served as an important reference for merchants, economists, and policymakers in 18th-century France and beyond, contributing to the dissemination of economic knowledge and the standardization of commercial practices during the Enlightenment.

Search the Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce

Important notes about this edition:

• This digital edition of the Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce is based on a 1726 edition published in Amsterdam. The extraction of the text from the original pages was accomplished through Optical-Character-Recognition (a process by which text is automatically detected on the page) using the Tesseract OCR engine. This process left numerous errors in the digital transcription of the text. To address these issues, we used a Large-Language Model (GPT4) to automatically correct those errors. This process resulted in a much higher quality transcription of the text, but one unfortunate side-effect of this process was the automatic modernization of the original French (despite our best efforts to prevent GPT4 from modernizing the text).
• Headwords were automatically recognized using typography as our main cue. As a result, we expect a number of issues with regards to article boundaries and detection.
• We also attempted to automatically recognize cross-references, but again, we expect these to be hit and miss.
• Due to the OCR process, page numbers displayed in the digital edition do not match the page numbers on the original print edition. You can get those original page numbers at any time by clicking on the page links which will display the original page image.

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The Dictionnaire de Commerce is widely recognized as an important source for numerous articles, particularly those related to economics, trade and law, in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. To assist in identification of the relationship between the two texts, we have run ARTFL’s TextPair sequence aligner on the two datasets. TextPair identifies similar passages and supports searching on the authors, headwords, and full text of related passages.
Search TextPair Alignments of the Dictionnaire universel de Commerce and the Encyclopédie