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Consumer Behavior in Colonial America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Carole Shammas
Carole Shammas*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee
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Extract

A necessary step in any assessment of early national economic growth is a characterization of market development before independence from Great Britain. Drawing up such a characterization, however, presents problems as at least two different pictures of the eighteenth-century economy are currently available. One depicts the intense involvement of early Americans in markets and overseas trade, while another equally powerful image suggests a colonial landscape of sleepy villages inhabited by farmers devoid of a profit orientation and almost entirely dependent upon their own households and neighborhood reciprocity for goods and services.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Winter 1982 , pp. 67 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1982 

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Footnotes

An earlier draft of this article was delivered at the Conference on Economic Growth and Social Change in the Early Republic, Chicago, April 24-26, 1980. I wish to thank Lorena Walsh and Daniel Scott Smith for their comments and criticisms.

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