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The Tempo of Mercantile Life in Colonial America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Arthur H. Cole
Arthur H. Cole
Affiliation:
Professor Emeritus atHarvard University
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Abstract

This study of the working habits of early American businessmen focuses on long-forgotten details that help clarify methods of the day and suggest that business in colonial times had not yet become an end in itself nor a dominant means for self-expression.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1959 , pp. 277 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1959

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References

1 The ensuing article may well be viewed as an extension of the excellent article entitled “Success and Failure Factors: American Merchants in Foreign Trade in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” by Professor Stuart Bruchey, published in the Business History Review, Vol. XXXII (Autumn, 1958), pp. 272–292. It was cast in its present form before I read Professor Bruchey's argument. I should also note that this present article owes much to the affection for statistical measurement that my research assistant, Miss Ruth Crandall, has carried these many years. In connection with an inquiry on a related subject which she undertook a decade ago, she put together several of the series which I have only recently gotten around to examining, and which encouraged me to seek additional ones – and so to prepare this article.

2 Hannah Logan's Courtship, edited by Myers, Albert Cook (Philadelphia, 1904), p. 182.Google Scholar

3 Hanna, Mary Alice, The Trade of the Delaware District before the Revolution (Northampton, 1917), p. 243Google Scholar; Hedges, James B., The Browns of Providence Plantations (Cambridge, 1952), p. 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Price, Jacob M., “The rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade, 1707–1775,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, Vol. 11 (1954), pp. 179–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Letters and Diary of John Rowe, Boston Merchant … edited by Anne Rowe Cunningham, 1903, pp. 80–81.

6 “Journal of Robert Pringle, 1746–1747,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. 26 (1923), pp. 21–30, 93–112.

7 Hannah Logan's Courtship, edited by Myers, Albert Cook (Philadelphia, 1904), pp. 158–159.Google Scholar

Morison, S. E. in his Maritime History of Massachusetts (Boston, 1921), pp. 30–32Google Scholar, gives a picture of leisurely life in Boston in the post-Revolutionary period.