Wealthy merchants delegated market dealings to brokers to avoid the lower classes

Evidence

Even in the preindustrial city, the bourgeois merchants and businessmen had never been very happy about having to rub shoulders with “the common herd.” Because they did so, the elites relegated them to an outcaste status-a status from which great wealth alone could not free them. … The wealthy merchant who acquires prestige and entree into the upper class seeks to insulate himself from the common man. One method is delegating all negotiation in the market place to brokers and middlemen. In this fashion the upper-class merchant is spared from direct contacts with the lower class and outcastes. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 342

Categorization

• XREF: The merchant insulating himself via brokers is an early, pre-industrial example of the segregation and mediated-contact strategies that later develop into the full anonymity-management repertoire of the industrial city.
• SHARE: The Sjoberg observation that poor-but-noble elites relegated even the very rich merchant class to outcaste status because they rubbed shoulders with commoners is a niche class-structure fact.