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.

XREF: Mirrors Weberian status-group theory and contemporary patterns where elites insulate themselves through intermediaries.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 342