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The Business Entrepreneur in a Changing Colonial Economy, 1763–1795

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Robert A. East
Robert A. East
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College
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Extract

To study the role of the entrepreneur is to study the personal factor in economic history, to introduce the problem of what today is called the businessman. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, the expression “businessmap” was apparently not used in late colonial times, although “going into business” or “going into merchandising” was. The distinction is important; the colonial economy was far too general, and its participants too many-sided, to permit the assumption that there was a colonial man of business in the modern business sense.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 6 , supplement S1 , 1946 , pp. 16 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1946

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References

1 Letter Book of John Watts, Merchant and Counsellor of New York (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1928), passimGoogle Scholar.

2 In what must have been his last published review ( The American Historical Review, XX, 859, 860), in 1915, the luminous Guy Stevens Callender warned against an overemphasis upon the merchant's foreign correspondence, just then beginning to make an appearance in American historical scholarship, for an understanding of the colonial economy as a whole. This warning has been largely ignored by theGoogle Scholar“imperialist” school of colonial interpretation in modern times. The most thorough treatment of late colonial commerce is Harrington, Virginia D., The New York Merchant on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935)Google Scholar, which furnishes some factual corrections to the kind of loose thinking that Callender deplored. The only adequate treatment of the late colonial and Revolutionary periods, with a proper perspective oh the merchant, is Greene, Evarts Boutell, The Revolutionary Generation, 1763-1790 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1943)Google Scholar; valuable economic material is also found in Charming, Edward, A History of the United States (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905-1930), Vol. IIIGoogle Scholar.

3 , Harrington, New York Merchant, pp. 229–31Google Scholar.

4 Bezanson, Anne, Gray, Robert D., Hussey, Miriam, Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), pp. 2, 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For statements by merchants about the growth of home textile manufactures, see ibid pp. 267, 288; for shoes, Hazard, Blanche E., Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry in Massachusetts Before 1875 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921), chaps, i, iiGoogle Scholar.

6 Wecden, William B., Economic and Social History of New England, 1620-1780 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1890, 1891), II, 592Google Scholar, speaks of the developing coastal trade of the eighteenth century as laying the basis of a domestic, or national, economy. For facts and figures, see Harrington, New York Merchant, chap, vi; also Crittenden, Charles C., The Commerce of North Carolina, 1763-1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936) chap, viii, esp. pp. 77, 11–15Google Scholar.

7 East, Robert A., Business Enterprise in the American Revolutionary Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), pp. 15–17Google Scholar.

8 Baxter, W. T., The House of Hancock, 1724-1775 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945), p. 235Google Scholar, makes this suggestion (and it is nothing more than a suggestion), speaking of the events of the year 1765: “A stoppage of trade with Britain might be exceedingly convenient. Stocks that had been lying on the shelves for months could then be sold, and there would be no need to pay English creditors.” Business pessimism from 1764 t o 1768 has been well documented (almost too well) by the late Charles M. Andrews in his “Boston Merchants and the Non-Importation Movement,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XIX. This stagnant condition of trade, fostered by excessive English importations, may be imagined from a study of the trade figures and the specific laments of merchants. John Hancock wrote his London agent, on various occasions in 1767, ot the effect that “too great encouragement is given by your gentlemen merchants to persons here of no capital.… such credits, not only hurt your best friends here, but finally yourselves.”-Baxter, Hancock, p. 257. See also, Bezanson et al., Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania, chap, xi, containing ample documentation; for example, the significant complaint of a Philadelphian to a Bristol correspondent in November 1771 that “when the goods cost most with you, they are the lowest with us, occasioned by their great plenty”; and the complaint of another merchant, six months later, that “a great deal of money must be sunk in the trade in this city, there being hundreds more people in this trade, importers and retailers, than can possibly support themselves and families by it.” Andrews has concluded that the effect of nonimportation was to threaten the destruction of retailers and of tradesmen with small capitals.- “Boston Merchants,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XIX, p. 257Google Scholar. Such a stoppage of trade by merchants, ostensibly for reasons of idealism, but actually, through political chicanery, to cut off imports in order to create a better market, was apparently not unknown. Henry Laurens, himself a merchant, thus scornfully explained the “idealism” behind South Carolina's three-year prohibitory tax on imported slaves in 1764.- Wallace, David D., The Life of Henry Laurens (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1915). pp. 83, 86Google Scholar.

9 Porter, Kenneth Wiggins, The Jacksons and the Lees, Two Generations of Massachusetts Merchants, 1765-1844 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), I, 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid., I, 88, 93; East, Business Enterprise, pp. 13, 14.

11 Bining, Arthur C., Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1938), p. 144Google Scholar.

12 Cf. , Harrington, New York Merchant, p. 53Google Scholar.

13 For example, Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden said of the New York mercantile group in 1764: “Many of them have rose suddenly from the lowest Rank of the People to considerable Fortunes, & chiefly by illicit Trade in the last War.”-Quoted in Schlesinger, Arthur M., The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1918), p. 60Google Scholar. Colden was, of course, an unfriendly critic. For similar instances during the Revolution, see my Business Enterprise, passim. Many such newcomers, however, were eliminated by the postwar depressions, which tended to benefit those with more adequate reserves and established reputations.

14 A salutary commentary on this subject, in regard to the Boston merchants, is that by Morison, Samuel Eliot, in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series, XXXII, n. 51Google Scholar. See also my Business Enterprise, chap, x, esp. pp. 219-22, and footnotes. The thesis perhaps holds best regarding New York (cf. , Harrington, New York Merchant, pp. 348, 349)Google Scholar, but there, as elsewhere, a definition of “Loyalist” may mean several things: behavior when the British held a port (as in New York City throughout the war), or, actually leaving the country with the British forces, the definition here employed. My principal point here, however, is that the total trading community was much larger everywhere than is generally realized.

15 This discussion is based en Baxter's excellent House of Hancock.

16 Ibid., p. 122.

17 , Wallace, Laurens, pp. 1–50Google Scholar;Sellers, Leila, Charleston Business on the Eve of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), passim. Laurens eventually gave up a direct interest in the slave tradeGoogle Scholar.

18 , Wallace, Laurens, pp. 50–51Google Scholar.

19 There are reproductions of colonial bills of exchange and a discussion of the evolution of colonial credit methods in Foulke, Roy A., The Sinews of American Commerce (New York: Dun and Bradstreet, 1941)Google Scholar.

20 , Bezansonet al., Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania, chap, xiii, esp. p. 310Google Scholar.

21 Quoted in Dorfman, Joseph, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-186; (New York: Viking Press, Inc., 1946), I, 140Google Scholar.

22 , Harrington, New York Merchant, pp. 95–97Google Scholar.

23 , Porter, The Jacksons and the Lees, I, 162Google Scholar, quotes Jonathan Jackson as writing of his new partner, John Bromfield, in 1766: “Mr. Bid confesses an entire Ignorance of Mchts Accts. I have undertaken the care of the Books intirely myself, but find myself a little bewildered how to begin the Co accts-which Mair allows the most difficult part of Bookkeeping.” , Porter explains that Mair, John was the author of Bookkeeping methodiz'd (Edinburgh, 1752)Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., I, 162-63.

25 Davis, Joseph Stancliffe, Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), I, passimGoogle Scholar.

26 , Bezansonet.al., Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania, chap, xiv, esp. p. 340Google Scholar, speaking of successive price cycles say: “To contemporaries, such price changes appeared to be the result of crop conditions at home or unusual demands from abroad. Their recurrence was never noted.”

27 , Harrington, New York Merchant, p. 75Google Scholar.

28 Cf. Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XIX, p. 169. On Boston's particular problems at this time, see Morison, Samuel Eliot, “The Commerce of Boston on the eve of the Revolution,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series, XXXIIGoogle Scholar.

29 The following is based upon my Business Enterprise, and upon Davis, Corporations.

30 I have touched upon this problem in one locality in an essay on “The Massachusetts Conservatives in the Critical Period,” in Era of the American Revolution: Studies Inscribed to Evarts Soutell Greene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939)Google Scholar. A similar conflict between local and national interests, at a later date, is discussed in my “Economic Development and New England Federalism, 1803-1814,” New England Quarterly, Septem-

31 Cf. Gras, N. S. B., The Massachusetts First National Bank, 1784-1934 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), chap. iiGoogle Scholar.