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The Coastal Trade of the British North American Colonies, 1768–1772

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

James F. Shepherd  and
Samuel H. Williamson
James F. Shepherd
Affiliation:
Whitman College
Samuel H. Williamson
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Extract

The coastal trade of the British North American colonies, as well as the coastal trade among the American states and the remaining British colonies after the American Revolution and well into the nineteenth century, remains one of those areas in North American economic history about which we know very little. The broad outlines and patterns of this coastal trade, or various segments of it, have been described by others, but as Arthur L. Jensen has put it: “Trade among the continental colonies has been treated as something of a poor relation in many studies of colonial commerce.” The most serious inadequacy is the lack of any overall view of the specific patterns and magnitudes of the coastal trade and its relationship both to the overseas trades and to overall economic activity. Various and strikingly contrasting views have been expressed. One historian of transportation states: “Prior to the Revolution intercolonial commerce was inconsiderable, and intercolonial trade-routes, where they existed, were entirely inadequate.” On the other hand, Innis, in referring to the trade between Newfoundland and New England, states that in 1765 exports from New England to Newfoundland probably exceeded £200,000 sterling (including smuggling), and that by 1774 they had reached £.300,000 or £400,000.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 1972 , pp. 783 - 810
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1972

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References

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on the Application of Economic Theory and Quantitative Techniques to Problems of Economic History, Madison, Wisconsin, April 30, 1971; and at the annual meetings of the Canadian Economics Association, St. Johns, Newfoundland, June 3, 1971. The authors are indebted to Philip Coelho, Paul David, and James Foust, discussants at the conferences; to Joseph A. Swanson and William K. Hutchinson for comments on the earlier draft; and to Shirley Summy for unexcelled research assistance. Any shortcomings, of course, remain die responsibility of the authors.

1 For example, see Innis, Harold A., The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (revised edition; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Jensen, Arthur L., The Maritime Commerce of Colonial Philadelphia (Madison, Wisconsin: The State Historical Society, 1963), Ch. 6Google Scholar; Metre, T. W. Van, “American Coastwise Trade Before 1789,” in Johnson, Emory R., et al. , History of Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1915), Chapter 10Google Scholar; and Klingaman, David C., “The Development of the Coastwise Trade of Virginia in the Late Colonial Period,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXXVII (January 1969), pp. 26–45,Google Scholar and “The Coastwise Trade of Colonial Massachusetts,” Research Paper No. 51, Department of Economics, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.

2 Jensen, Maritime Commerce …. p. 70.

3 MacGill, Caroline E., et al. , History of Transportation in the United States Before 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), p. 4Google Scholar. Later the author states: “As long as settlement was confined to the tidewater district, trade (except such as was purely local) consisted in direct interchange of goods with Europe, traffic between the colonies being inconsiderable” (p. 133).

4 Innis, Cod Fisheries …, p. 195. Such values, especially for just one segment of the coastal trade, would have been large relative to the values of overseas trade (see Table 3).

5 Such evidence comes mainly from the naval office lists and special returns prepared by the colonial customs service. The naval office lists are in the Public Record Office in London and usually classified as C. O. 5. Lawrence A. Harper of the University of California, Berkeley, has prepared abstracts of these records from which one may extract information on the more important commodities in the coastal trade for earlier years of the eighteenth century. See U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington D.C.: G.P.O., 1960), p. 743,Google Scholar for a discussion of these records. For studies based upon these records, see Klingaman, “The Development of the Coastwise Trade of Virginia …” and “The Coastwise Trade of Colonial Massachusetts,” and Jensen, Maritime Commerce ….

6 United States, American State Papers, Class 1, Foreign Relations, II, p. 400. In the south, and especially in the tobacco colonies, British goods were usually imported directly by resident partners or agents of British firms, or by colonial merchants, who operated retail stores selling directly to the consumer.

7 Jensen, Martime Commerce …, pp. 79–81.

8 Formal proof of this assertion is given in Appendix B to an earlier version of this paper of the same title, Working Paper Series No. 71–30 (November 1971), Bureau of Business and Economic Research, College of Business Administration, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

9 A similar and equivalent measure of concentration is developed by Theil, Henri, Economics and Information Theory (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1967), Chapter 10Google Scholar. Theil's measure would be in our notation:

10 In principle there should be no difference between exports and imports for each commodity; see the discussion of this data in the Appendix.

11 As stated above, the NPX-NPM difference is less than or equal to the actual average number of ports past which each commodity was shipped (i.e., its ANP). If the commodity was being shipped both north and south, the NPX-NPM difference is less than the ANP. See footnote 8.

12 This is true because of the nature of the distribution of the CS statistic. For example, if exports were concentrated equally in two regions with nothing being supplied from the other four, the CS statistic would be 0.69. If two thirds were from one region and one sixth from two others, the CS statistic would be 0.87. For ½, ¼, ¼, and nothing from the other three, it would be 1.04, and if equally distributed among three regions and nothing from the other three, it would be 1.10.

13 See James F. Shepherd, “Commodity Exports from the British North American Colonies to Overseas Areas, 1768–1772: Magnitudes and Patterns of Trade,” and “Commodity Imports into the British North American Colonies from Southern Europe and the West Indies, 1768–1772,” papers numbered 258 and 270, respectively (October 1969, and February 1970), Institute for Research in the Behavioral, Economic, and Management Sciences, Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana. The first paper has been published under the same title in somewhat modified form with an abbreviated appendix in Explorations in Economic History, VIII, 1 (Fall 1970), 5–76Google Scholar.

14 Ibid.

15 In Table 2 the estimated values of exports from, and imports into, each port were simply aggregated according to the regional definitions specified in Table I in the Appendix. As such, it is important to note that the values do not represent the value of exports or imports centered in a region (as defined in Section I and shown in Table 1). It is also important to note that these are not net exports from, or net imports into, each region. Exports and imports that took place within each region, as well as those to or from other regions, are includea in each regional total. Unlike the quantities, the total values of exports and imports in Table 2 need not be equal because they are valued at prices that varied from region to region. The difference between export and import values is probably due to discrepancies in quantities recorded in the customs records, however. See the Appendix.

16 This belief is based upon comparisons with the overseas trade (see Shepherd, “Commodity Exports …” and “Commodity Imports …”), and the fact that quantities of many of the commodities not valued seem relatively small. It should be recalled that imports from Britain that were re-exported in the coastal trade were not recorded in the American customs records.

17 If the tonnage entering and clearing all colonial ports in the overseas trade is compared with tonnage flows in the coastal trade, the comparison seems to indicate that the coastal trade (relative to the overseas trade) might be understated by the values in Table 2. Coastal tonnage flows were about 46 percent of tonnage entering from and clearing to all overseas areas during 1769 and 1770 (Historical Statistics, p. 758). It was probably the case, however, that values of the coastal trade were less than 46 percent of the values of the overseas trade. For one thing, goods of greater bulk (compared to their value) were predominant in the coastal trade. For another, utilization of shipping tonnage in the coastal trade may have been less than in the overseas trade. In part, coastal shipping may have represented empty or partially-laden vessels going from one colonial port to another seeking or collecting cargoes for overseas areas.

18 This is based on the estimates of overseas exports, Table 3, and an estimate of colonial output for 1774 by Gallman, Robert E., “The Pace and Pattern of American Economic Growth,” in Davis, , Easterlin, , Parker, , et al. , American Economic Growth: An Economist's History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 15–60Google Scholar. Gallman estimates total output to have been in the range of $100 to $117 million in current prices in 1774 (he puts per capita output at $60 to $70 in prices of 1840, or about $45 to $52 in prices of 1774). Adjustment for general price level changes between 1774 and 1840 was made by Gallman using.the Warren and Pearson wholesale price index (Historical Statistics, pp. 115–16). Because the Census of 1840 pertained to the crop year 1839, an arithmetic mean of the two years 1839 and 1840 (from the Warren and Pe arson index) was used to represent prices of 1840. We have used an exchange rate of £ 1 = $4.44 to convert to sterling. This rate was the exchange rate between the old Spanish dollar and the pound sterling before the Revolution, and one that prevailed after the creation of the U.S. dollar. This conversion results in a range of total output of £22½-26½% million in 1774. The adjustment made by Gallman for general price level changes differs slightly from the one made in Shepherd, James F. and Walton, Gary M., Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 44Google Scholar. Consequently, the range for trade as a percentage of total output as estimated above is slightly larger than in the latter source.

19 Shepherd and Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade …, pp. 45–48.

20 Ibid., p. 151.

21 Ibid., pp. 42–43, 154–55, and 165–66. It is perhaps surprising to see that the southern colonies as well as New England and the middle colonies achieved surpluses in the coastal trade. One might have expected them to have had trade deficits with their northern neighbors, thereby transferring some of their surpluses earned in overseas trade to New England and the middle colonies. It might be emphasized at this point that the above estimates reflect only commodity trade, and make no allowance for shipping and other invisible earnings that might have accrued to New England and the middle colonies in the coastal trade. Also, with regard to the balances in Table 4, one would expect that most of the payments for slaves imported were made by the southern colonies, and that the bulk of earnings from the sale of ships to overseas buyers and from British defense expenditures in the colonies would have accrued to New England and the middle colonies. None of these items was taken into account in computing the balances in Table 4.

22 Schumacher, Max G., “The Northern Farmer and His Markets During the Late Colonial Period” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley, 1948)Google Scholar; and Klingaman, David, “Food Supluses and Deficits in the American Colonies, 1768–1772,” The Journal Of Economic History, XXXI (September 1971), pp. 553–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See the description of these records in Shepherd, “Commodity Exports …,” Appendix A.

24 The validity of the overseas data is discussed in ibid.

25 Bezanson, Anne, et al. , Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bezanson, Anne, et al. , Prices and Inflation During the American Revolution, Pennsylvania, 1770–1790 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cole, Arthur H., Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700–1861: Statistical Supplement (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1938)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These prices are listed in Shepherd, “Commodity Exports …”and “Commodity Imports ….”

26 London, British Museum, Add. MSS 15485; and Macpherson, David, Annals of Commerce (London, 1805), III, pp. 572–73Google Scholar (reprinted in Historical Statistics, p. 761).