Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T19:04:23.774Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Maritime Enterprise in the New Republic: Investment in Baltimore Shipping, 1789–1793

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Geoffrey Gilbert
Geoffrey Gilbert
Affiliation:
Geoffrey Gilbert is associate professor of economics atHobart and William Smith Colleges.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

By systematically analyzing ship registry documents it is possible to illuminate shipholding practices at major American ports in the early national era. In this article, Professor Gilbert focuses on shipholding in Baltimore in the period just prior to the late eighteenth century European war-induced shipping boom. He finds the port's foreign trade to be largely controlled by Baltimore residents. Merchants owned by far the largest percentage of the shipping, while mariners constituted an important, albeit secondary, investor group. Sole ownership of vessels was more extensive in Federalist Baltimore than in colonial Boston or Philadelphia. More detailed comparisons of shipowning practices among the major United States ports, Gilbert concludes, await further research.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , Spring 1984 , pp. 14 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1984

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bailyn, Bernard and Lotte, Massachusetts Shipping, 1697–1714: A Statistical Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John McCusker, “The Pennsylvania Shipping Industry in the Eighteenth Century” (1973), unpublished study deposited at Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Doerflinger, Thomas, “Enterprise on the Delaware: Merchants and Economic Development in Philadelphia, 1750–1791” (Ph. D. diss., Harvard University, 1980).Google Scholar

2 Robert C. Hunter, Jr., Quebec to Carolina in 1785–1786, 179–180, quoted in Jensen, Merrill, The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781–1789 (New York, 1950), 116Google Scholar; Gilchrist, David T., ed., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 1790–1825 (Charlottesville, Va., 1967), 34Google Scholar; Gilbert, Geoffrey, “The Role of Breadstuffs in American Trade, 1770–1790,” Explorations in Economic History 14 (1977): 380CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, P. K., “Business and Commerce in Baltimore on the Eve of Independence,” Maryland Historical Magazine 71 (1976): 306–307Google Scholar; Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 1:258.

3 United States Statutes at Large (1789), Statute I, Ch. 3, 27–28 on the “Tonnage Act”; Statute I, Ch. 11, 55–65 on registration.

4 These records are filed at the National Archives under “Record Group 36” of the Bureau of Customs (subfile: “Records Used in the Settlement of the French Spoliation Claims”).

5 “Abstract of the Tonnage of the Shipping of the Several Districts of the United States, and of Recorded Vessels, on the last day of December, 1794,” American State Papers, Commerce and Navigation (Washington, 1832), vol. 1, Table 43A, 386–87Google Scholar.

6 Jensen, ch. 9; North, Douglas C., The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961), 41–42, 54.Google Scholar

7 Johnson, Emory et al., History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States, 2 vols. (Washington, 1915), 2:178–79Google Scholar; Porter, Kenneth, The Jacksons and the Lees: Two Generations of Massachusetts Merchants, 1765–1844, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), 1:86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scharf, J. Thomas, Chronicles of Baltimore (Baltimore, 1874), 483.Google Scholar

8 The equal-shares assumption underlies Tables 1, 2, 3, and 4. One is forced to proceed on such an assumption by the failure of the certificates of registry to record the actual ownership shares of individuals. McCusker and the Bailyns also make an equal-shares assumption.

9 McCusker, “Pennsylvania Shipping Industry,” 226.

10 Garitee, Jerome, The Republic's Private Navy: The American Privateering Business as Practiced by Baltimore During the War of 1812 (Middletown, Conn., 1977), 76.Google Scholar

11 A figure below 10 percent results when mariners are assigned a perhaps more realistic one-eighth share in cases of multiple ownership.

12 Bourne, M. F., “Thomas Kemp, Shipbuilder, and His Home, Wades Point,” Maryland Historical Magazine 49 (1954): 282Google Scholar; Ridgway, Whitman, Community Leadership in Maryland, 1790–1840: A Comparative Analysis of Power in Society (Chapel Hill, 1979), 219, 232, 235Google Scholar; Garitee, 269.

13 Doerflinger, 130; Morison, Samuel Eliot, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 (Boston, 1921), 19–20Google Scholar on maritime insurance; Bailyns, 79; McCusker, , “Sources of Investment Capital in the Colonial Philadelphia Shipping Industry,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1912): 149nGoogle Scholar, Baltimore Certificates of Registry, 1789–93.

14 Bailyns, 127; Doerflinger, 130.

15 Bailyns, 35; Bruchey, Stuart W., Robert Oliver, Merchant of Baltimore, 1783–1819 (Baltimore, 1956), 55–99.Google Scholar

16 McCusker, “Pennsylvania Shipping Industry,” 221a; Pares, Richard, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade Between North America and the West Indies Before the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 8, 16.Google Scholar

17 East, Robert A., Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (New York, 1938), 166Google Scholar; Baltimore: Past and Present, with Biographical Sketches of its Representative Men (Baltimore, 1871), 285–86Google Scholar.

18 McCusker, “Pennsylvania Shipping Industry,” 225.

19 Ibid., 228; Bailyns, 31–32.

20 Williamson, Jeffrey and Lindert, Peter, “Three Centuries of American Inequality,” Research in Economic History 1 (1976): 81–84.Google Scholar The text comparisons of wealth inequality are strictly suggestive, since the wealth-holding populations are in many ways noncomparable.