Alexander Fraser (1816-1904) was a Scots businessman and entrepreneur who operated among international commercial and financial networks in Europe and Southeast Asia (with an excursion into the Antipodes) for virtually half a century between the 1840s and the 1890s. His importance to the historian – and the business historian in particular – stems from a number of factors. Not least, discussion of his career helps fill – in however modest a way – some of the lacunae in business history’s relative neglect (as Cristof Dejung has recently remarked) of ‘economic actors conducting trading operations in everyday business life’. The context in which those operations took place was a rapid expansion of world trade between 1850 and 1914 that has drawn significant attention to macroeconomic issues. Its historiography, however, has paid substantially less heed to the individuals without whom it could scarcely have been possible. Alexander Fraser ‘matters’, moreover, in a broadly cognate fashion. His business career, extending over the better part of half a century, throws light on the relatively little studied and kindred history of the ‘social, cultural and political environments’ of the transnational commercial enterprise which critically underpinned ‘the establishment of global economic relations’ in the period under consideration. Alexander Fraser (1816-1904) was een Schotse zakenman die tussen 1840 en 1890 bijna een halve eeuw internationale commerciële en financiële netwerken in Europa en Zuidoost-Azië onderhield (met een uitstapje naar de Antipodeneilanden). Hij is om verschillende redenen van belang voor historici en voor economische historici in het bijzonder. Ten eerste kan de discussie over zijn loopbaan bepaalde leemtes in de economische geschiedschrijving vullen, vooral (zoals Christof Dejung onlangs opmerkte) wat betreft de ‘het dagelijkse zakenleven van economische actoren op het gebied van handelstransacties’. De context van dergelijke transacties, die binnen een snelle uitbreiding van de wereldhandel ...