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What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660–1790

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Jacob M. Price
Jacob M. Price
Affiliation:
Professor of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ml 48109.
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Extract

The relative dynamism of English and Scottish foreign trade from 1675 to 1775 can largely be explained by the interrelated phenomena of the growing domestic demand for American and Asian consumer goods and North European raw materials; the growing market in northern and western Europe for re-exports of American and Asian consumables; and the growing protected market for British manufactures in the American colonies and Africa. Trade growth depended on development of a wide variety of credit practices, supported primarily by big wholesalers and export merchants. Wholesalers and merchants also accounted for important institutional innovations.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 267 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1989

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References

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6 See in particular McKendrick, Neil, “Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution,” in McKendrick, Neil, ed., Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London, 1974). pp. 152–210;Google Scholaridem, , “The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England,” in McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John and Plumb, J. H., eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), pp. 9–33.Google Scholar It should be noted, however, that recent quantitative work has failed to demonstrate any measurable increase in total consumption per head before 1800. See Feinstein, C. H.. “Capital Accumulation and the Industrial Revolution” in Floud, Roderick and McCloskey, Donald, eds., The Economic History of Britain since 1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1981). p. 136.Google Scholar

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19 Price, Capital and Credit, chap. 6, especially p. 119;Google ScholarHope, John, Letters on Credit (2d edn., London, 1784), pp. 9–10.Google Scholar There were, of course some trades where shorter credits were common and some—for example, guns—where no credit might be offered. See Robinson, Eric, “Boulton and Fothergill, 1762–1782, and the Birmingham export of hardware,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 7 (1959–1960), pp. 60–79;Google ScholarChapman, S. D., “Financial Restraints on the Growth of Firms in the Cotton Industry, 1790–1850,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 32 (02 1979), pp. 51–52.Google Scholar

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27 For English, see fn. 9; for Scottish, see Hamilton, Henry, An Economic History of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1963), pp. 414–15.Google Scholar

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32 Based on “official values” as given in Davis, “English Foreign Trade, 1700–1774,” and Hamilton, An Economic History of Scotland. The figures in Mitchell and Deane, British Historical Statistics, p. 281, give the re-export percentage as 40 percent, using values “adjusted” by Deane and Cole (British Economic Growth, p. 318).Google Scholar

33 Asian trade was, of course, confined exclusively to London because of the monopoly of the East India Company. For port concentration in the sugar and tobacco trades, see Price, Jacob M. and Clemens, Paul G. E., “A Revolution of Scale in Overseas Trade: British Firms in the Chesapeake Trade, 1675–1775,” this JOURNAL, 47 (03 1987), pp. 33, 39–40.Google Scholar

34 For the operation of a counting house, see Price, Jacob M., ed., “Directions for the Conduct of a Merchant's Counting House, 1766,” Business History, 28 (07 1986), pp. 134–50.Google Scholar

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40 The author expects to publish a paper on the credit conventions in the slave trade in 1990 for the W. E. B. DuBois Center of Harvard University.Google Scholar

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52 Crafts, British Economic Growth, p. 131. For other estimates, see Lee, British Economy, p. 109.Google Scholar

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