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The NSA affair has, among other things, shown the dimensions to which commercial espionage and the outsourcing of information gathering have grown. From the early modernist's point of view, this is not as surprising as it might appear - the development seems to have early modern parallels. The article shows how espionage was organized around 1700, discusses the term and argues that informal, commercial actors were highly relevant. This is demonstrated by looking at the English government's initiatives to gain information about France during the War of the Spanish Succession. A striking example for an espionage network working on a commercial basis and cooperating with the English government, is Pierre Jurieu's and Etienne Caillaud's Rotterdam based spy network. It is shown how this network worked in practice and how it gathered political relevant information for the English government. In the conclusion, I try to answer the more general question what the existence of commercial espionage in the early modern as well as in the postmodern period can tell us about the history of espionage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]