Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World 9004689869, 9789004689862

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Figures and Tables
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1 Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Contexts, Connections, and Methodologies
Part 1 Trust, Credit, and Business News Networks
Chapter 2 The Provision and Circulation of Credit in the British Atlantic Trading World, 1739–1775
Chapter 3 Spreading Information in Eighteenth-Century Mercantile Networks: Experiments in Historical Social Network Analysis
Chapter 4 Trust and Credit: Merchants’ Roles in Puritan News Networks
Part 2 Information Flows and Spaces
Chapter 5 Betting on News: (Mis)information and Public Opinion in Early Modern England
Chapter 6 Newspapers, Profit, and Business in Colonial America
Chapter 7 ‘I Should Be Glad of a Little Conversation with Thee’: Business Letters and the Oral Exchange of Information in the Early Modern Atlantic World
Chapter 8 Postmen of the Atlantic World: Captains Transmitting Epistolary Business News
Part 3 Business News beyond the North Atlantic
Chapter 9 Edward Northey and News of Catholic Estate Forfeitures in the Leeward Islands, 1700–1723
Chapter 10 The East India Company in West Africa and Information Networks in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World
Chapter 11 The Atlantic Correspondence of the Royal African Company, 1678–1681
Bibliography of Secondary Works
Index

Citation preview

Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Library of the Written Word volume 121

The Handpress World Editor-in-Chief Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews) Editorial Board Ann Blair (Harvard University) Falk Eisermann (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preuβischer Kulturbesitz) Shanti Graheli (University of Glasgow) Earle Havens ( Johns Hopkins University) Ian Maclean (All Souls College, Oxford) Alicia Montoya (Radboud University) Angela Nuovo (University of Milan) Helen Smith (University of York) Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool) Malcolm Walsby (ENSSIB, Lyon) Arthur der Weduwen (University of St Andrews)

volume 99

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lww

Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World Edited by

Sophie H. Jones Siobhan Talbott

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Interior of a London Coffee House, c.1690–1700. (Unknown artist, Courtesy of The British Museum) The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1874-4834 isbn 978-90-04-68986-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-68987-9 (e-book) DOI 10.1163/9789004689879 Copyright 2024 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements vii List of Figures and Tables viii Abbreviations x Notes on Contributors xii 1

Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Contexts, Connections, and Methodologies 1 Sophie H. Jones and Siobhan Talbott

Part 1 Trust, Credit, and Business News Networks 2

The Provision and Circulation of Credit in the British Atlantic Trading World, 1739–1775 25 Kenneth Morgan

3

Spreading Information in Eighteenth-Century Mercantile Networks: Experiments in Historical Social Network Analysis 48 Peter Buckles

4

Trust and Credit: Merchants’ Roles in Puritan News Networks 82 Sarah Hall

Part 2 Information Flows and Spaces 5

Betting on News: (Mis)information and Public Opinion in Early Modern England 107 Lena Liapi

6

Newspapers, Profit, and Business in Colonial America 127 Jeremy Land

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Contents

7

‘I Should Be Glad of a Little Conversation with Thee’: Business Letters and the Oral Exchange of Information in the Early Modern Atlantic World 152 Siobhan Talbott and Sophie H. Jones

8

Postmen of the Atlantic World: Captains Transmitting Epistolary Business News 183 Hannah Knox Tucker

Part 3 Business News beyond the North Atlantic 9

Edward Northey and News of Catholic Estate Forfeitures in the Leeward Islands, 1700–1723 207 Eilish Gregory

10

The East India Company in West Africa and Information Networks in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World 232 Edmond Smith

11

The Atlantic Correspondence of the Royal African Company, 1678–1681 256 David Brown Bibliography of Secondary Works 277 Index 305

Acknowledgements This collection of essays emerges from an AHRC Leadership Fellowship, Business News in the Atlantic World, 1620–1763, held by Dr Siobhan Talbott from 2018–2022 (reference AH/P009034/1). Dr Sophie H. Jones was the project’s Postdoctoral Research Associate. A symposium was held at Keele University in September 2019 which brought together scholars from a number of disciplines interested in the categorisation, creation, and dissemination of ‘business news’ in the early modern Atlantic world. This volume, which arises from contributions to this event in addition to commissioned chapters, offers perspectives on the ways in which information was produced and used by business agents in the early modern Atlantic world. The editors would like to thank all of the speakers at the symposium (including those not represented here) for their contributions to that event. We are particularly grateful to the AHRC and to Keele University for funding and hosting the symposium, and Siobhan is indebted to Sophie for her organisation of the event, as well as for her work in managing the administration of this collection. We are grateful to Professor Andrew Pettegree and to the team at Brill for their encouragement and assistance in developing this volume for publication, and would like to thank all archives and repositories who granted permission to use their images. Finally, we thank all of our contributors for their hard work in meeting our deadlines, in responding to our many queries, and for helping us both to develop our own understandings of ‘business news’.

Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 3.1 3.2

Edward Ward, Vulgus Britannicus: or the British Hudibras, London, 1710 15 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805 59 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805: number of nodes per two-year period 60 3.3 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805: average weighted degree of select individuals 62 3.4 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805: weighted degree of William Miles and John Gordon Jr 63 3.5 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805: weighted degree of Samuel Span and James Tobin 63 3.6 Sugar imports of leading members of the WIA Network (cwt) 66 3.7 Liverpool Slave Traders Investment Network, 1773–1774 70 3.8 Liverpool Slave Traders Investment Network, 1773–1774 71 3.9 Liverpool Slave Traders Geographical Network, 1774 73 4.1 A force-directed visualisation of the correspondence network, 1630 96 4.2 A force-directed visualisation of the correspondence network, 1630–35 98 6.1 Price current list for New York – 6 December 1756, New York Mercury 133 6.2 Example of entries and clearances – 10 November 1737, Pennsylvania Gazette 136 6.3 Example of news from Lisbon – 11 October 1744, Pennsylvania Gazette 138 6.4 Report from Philadelphia about the post ship going twice weekly – 11 April 1757, New York Mercury 139 7.1 Robert Sayer, View of the Royal Exchange, London, 1751 170 7.2 Simon François Revenant, La Gassette de Londre, 1761 173 9.1 Passport map of part of the Windward Islands, including Barbados, by Jan Luyken (1684–1799), Amsterdam, no date 209 9.2 The Royal Exchange of London, by Wenceslaus Hollar, London, 1644 218 10.1 Map of the Costa da Mina, including European forts, major Akan markets, and the inland locations of gold mining 233 10.2 East India Company letter network in West Africa, including senders and recipients, 1657–63 241 10.3 The Castle Cormantine, by anonymous Dutch print maker, published in London and Amsterdam, 1668–70 243

Figures and Tables 10.4 Actor network related to East India Company in West Africa, visualising interactions described in correspondence 248 10.5 Cape Coast Castle/Cabo Corso in 1682, etching based on drawing by Henry Greenhill 251 10.6 Crown for the King of Ardra, English by anonymous craftsman, c.1664 253

Tables 3.1 8.1

Table showing the number of investors per voyage and the frequency of voyages 69 Average time taken for letters to John Reynell to arrive, by location of departure, 1750–1752 194

ix

Abbreviations AAS ANB APS BA Beinecke BL BL, IRO BLHU Bodleian CALS CHS CJ CSPC CSPD CUL DUL HFBL HL HSP JBC JBTP JCBL LCP LJ LL LoC MHR MHS ML MLHS NEHGS NLS NMM NRO NRS

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA American National Biography American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA Bristol Archives Beinecke Library, Yale University, CT British Library, London British Library, India Office Records Baker Library, Harvard University, MA Bodleian Library, Oxford University Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT Journals of the House of Commons Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the reign of William and Mary, 1689–1702 Cambridge University Library Duke University Library, Durham, NC H. Furlong Baldwin Library, Maryland Center for History and Culture, Baltimore, MD The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA Historical Society of Pennsylvania, PA Jane Bright Collection, Portsea, VI (Private Collection) Journal of the Board of Trade and Plantations John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI Library Company of Philadelphia, PA Journals of the House of Lords Linenhall Library, Belfast Library of Congress, Washington, DC Maryland Hall of Records, Annapolis, MD Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA Mitchell Library, Glasgow Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, MA National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh National Maritime Museum, Greenwich Norfolk Record Office, Norwich National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh

Abbreviations NYHS NYPL ODNB OED SHL TCD TNA UAA UMA WSRO

New-York Historical Society, NY New York Public Library, NY Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Senate House Library, London Trinity College Dublin The National Archives, Kew University of Aberdeen Archives University of Melbourne Archives West Sussex Record Office, Chichester

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Notes on Contributors David Brown graduated with a BA in History from Trinity College Dublin in 1987. After a career in the Irish tech sector he returned to TCD to work on The Down Survey of Ireland project (2011–2013), and completed a PhD exploring networks of early modern English and Irish Atlantic merchants (2016). His monograph Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish land during the British Civil Wars was published in 2020, and he is co-editor, with Professor Micheál Ó’Siochrú, of a five-volume critical edition of The Books of Survey and Distribution (Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2016–18). He is Archival Discovery Lead for Beyond 2022, a project digitally recreating the Public Record Office of Ireland, which was destroyed during the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in 1922. Peter Buckles finished his PhD at the University of Liverpool in 2021 with the support of an ESRC studentship and published his first article on historical social network analysis with Enterprise & Society the following year. His debut monograph, Crisis and Resilience in the Bristol-West India Sugar Trade, 1783–1802, published with Liverpool University Press, offers a close analysis of the British trade in sugar during wartime. Peter’s key research interests include business and economic history and the use of digital tools to answer historical questions. He is especially interested in how businesses navigate periods of crisis and overcome uncertainty. Eilish Gregory is the Little Company of Mary Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. She was awarded her PhD at University College London in 2017. Gregory previously held associate lecturer posts at University of Reading, Anglia Ruskin University, The Open University, and Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. She was also Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Royal Historical Society, a researcher for the History of Parliament, and has held library fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Durham University, Marsh’s Library (Dublin), and the University of Aberdeen. Gregory specialises in the impact of Catholic penal laws and inter-confessional networks between Catholics and Protestants. Her first monograph, Catholics

Notes on Contributors

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during the English Revolution, 1642–1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty, was published in 2021. Sarah Hall is a historian of puritanism in the seventeenth-century transatlantic. Her research focuses on puritan communities and the social networks that underpin them. More widely, this informs a fuller picture of the social ties and also the methods taken by puritans to resist fragmentation and preserve cohesion. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Public History at the University of York. Sophie H. Jones is a Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Liverpool. After receiving her PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2018, she has previously held PDRA positions at the University of Liverpool and at Keele University. An historian of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, Jones has published on a range of topics including early-modern merchant families, eighteenth-century subscription libraries, and early-modern literacy. Her research focuses on the socio-cultural development of the North American colonies, and her first monograph project – Patterns of Loyalism in Revolutionary New York (in preparation for submission to Manchester University Press) – considers how local socio-cultural contexts shaped political identities during the American Revolution. Jeremy Land received his PhD from Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019. He is a postdoctoral researcher in Economic History at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, following postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä in Finland. His research focuses on the economic and business history of the Atlantic World, broadly construed, in the 18th and 19th centuries. He is Meetings Coordinator of the Economic History Association. Lena Liapi is an Honorary Research Fellow in History at Keele University and a CREMS Research Associate at the University of York. Her research focuses on the history of the book, of crime, and of cultures of communication. She has published a monograph, titled Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London (Boydell & Brewer, 2019), as well as other works on print culture and the public sphere. She is particularly interested in the interactions of news media

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in England and France in the seventeenth century and the ways in which new notions of the ‘public’ were constructed oppositionally in the two countries. Kenneth Morgan is Professor of History in the School of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has been a British Academy Research Reader. He has published widely in several fields of History, with the business history of eighteenth-century British merchants (especially those in Bristol and Liverpool) being a longstanding and continuing focal point of his research. Edmond Smith (PhD Cambridge, 2016) is a Senior Lecturer in Economic Cultures at the University of Manchester. Their work, which has been supported by grants from the British Academy, the AHRC, and the ESRC, focuses on commercial communities and the institutions of early modern global trade. Smith’s notable publications include Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire (Yale, 2021, winner of the Ralph Gomory Prize), and articles in the Economic History Review, Journal of British Studies, Historical Journal and Journal of World History. Siobhan Talbott is Reader in Early Modern History at Keele University. She held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Manchester and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London) after receiving her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2010. Talbott has published extensively in the fields of commercial and business history, including her monograph Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (2014, awarded the Senior Hume Brown Prize), her critical edition of The Letter-Book of Thomas Baret (2021), and articles in the Economic History Review, the Scottish Historical Review, and Enterprise & Society. Talbott has held an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2018–22) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2022–23). She is co-editor of the Royal Historical Society’s Camden Series. Hannah Knox Tucker is Assistant Professor of History at the Copenhagen Business School. She is a member of the CBS Centre for Business History and leads a package in the Carlsbergfondet funded project, The Entrepreneurial Age: Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society. The Business History Review has published her work as part of their Business and Slavery special issue. Her first monograph, which is in progress, examines the business of ship captaincy in the British Atlantic.

Chapter 1

Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Contexts, Connections, and Methodologies Sophie H. Jones and Siobhan Talbott In February 1704 Daniel Peck, a merchant in Chester, Northwest England, wrote to Thomas and Michael Carbonnell, merchants in London, to report that ‘I had last post the good news of the Unicorn’. The news in question was the Unicorn’s safe arrival at Lisbon, ‘her corn in good order with lead &c’. Peck’s correspondence with the Carbonnells allows us a glimpse into the vessel’s journey: built in Warrington, the 40-ton burden ship first travelled to Kinsale, County Cork, before setting sail for Lisbon on a voyage which lasted for fifteen days. From his vantage point at Chester, on the banks of the River Dee, Peck was conveniently placed to learn news quickly of the Unicorn’s departure – and its subsequent successful arrival  – from across the Irish Sea. With the Unicorn now ‘being bound home with wine and fruit’, Peck needed to insure the vessel and its cargo; something that he was not able to do without receiving prior approval from the Carbonnells. As Peck explained: [I] have desire to insure £200 on said cargoe from Lisbon to this place [Chester]  – cannot warrant convoy  – because am not advised from thence whether any is there and she is ordered to proceed home without delay therefore must insure without convoy. Unable to secure a convoy, Peck ideally sought permission to insure the cargo for £200, but recognised that the Carbonnells might object to such a high amount. With time being of the essence, Peck outlined his upper and lower limits to his correspondents, noting that ‘if too high will do only £100’, but asking them ‘as you can – if reasonable may direct more’.1 In this correspondence Peck reveals some of the precarities of conducting business in the early modern Atlantic world, as well as some of the strategies employed by merchants to mitigate them. There were practical dangers associated with shipping in the north Atlantic: operating during the War of the 1 CALS, ZCR 352, Daniel Peck, Merchant of Chester, Letterbook, 1702–1704, f.16v, Daniel Peck to Thomas and Michael Carbonnell, 5 February 1703/04, Chester.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689879_002

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Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the merchant vessels carrying the cargo that Peck and his associates were trading were at risk of being seized by the enemy, including French and Spanish privateers. In order to alleviate such concerns, trading vessels were accompanied by convoys where possible to ensure their safety. Despatching the vessel from Kinsale was a shrewd business move: as an important supply base for the Royal Navy there were likely to be several available convoys to accompany the ship across the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, while enemy ships’ captains tended to avoid venturing into the Irish Sea, which was perceived to be dangerous without navigation.2 In instances such as that outlined by Peck, where convoy was not readily available, insurance offered an alternative means of security for merchants, making them eligible to receive financial recompense should their cargoes fail to reach their intended destination (and, subsequently, their intended recipients). Peck’s exchange with the Carbonnells provides us with a glance at how insurance was negotiated between merchants operating at some distance from each other during the early modern period, as demonstrated by Peck’s suggestion of upper and lower limits concerning the cargo’s value. Such sources are therefore useful not only for highlighting merchants’ activities, but for shedding light on mechanisms, like early marine insurance, which we still do not fully understand.3 Significantly for this collection, Peck’s letter repeatedly highlights the importance of receiving accurate and timely information. Despite the inevitable time delays associated with letter-writing, and the perceived importance of printed information, merchants continued to rely on ‘news’ received from trusted associates to make business decisions. Peck emphasised that the news of the Unicorn’s safe arrival in Lisbon was received in the ‘last post’ and 2 Kenneth Morgan, ‘Liverpool’s Dominance in the British Slave Trade, 1740–1807’, in David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony Tibbles (eds.), Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 20. 3 Much work on early marine insurance has focused on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example Christopher Kingston, ‘Marine Insurance in Britain and America, 1720–1844: A Comparative Institutional Analysis’, The Journal of Economic History, 67.2 (2007), pp. 379–409. Work which has explored marine insurance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries includes A. B. Leonard (ed.), Marine Insurance: Origins and Institutions, 1300–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); a further notable, if brief, example is C. Ebert, ‘Early Modern Atlantic Trade and the Development of Maritime Insurance to 1630’, Past and Present, 213 (2011), pp. 102–6. Leonard’s volume contains a helpful bibliography: pp. 298f. Daniel Peck’s letter-book (among many other sources) suggests that there is much more to be said about marine insurance in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, particularly concerning the methods by which merchants navigated and utilised this mechanism: CALS, ZCR 352, Daniel Peck, Merchant of Chester, Letterbook, 1702–1704. An edition of Daniel Peck’s letter-book by the current authors is under contract with The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire.

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immediately conveyed to the Carbonnells. In turn, he urged the Carbonnells to approve both the purchase of insurance and its terms in a timely manner, to enable the vessel to return home ‘without delay’. Importantly, Peck is simultaneously a consumer, disseminator, and creator of business information within this exchange; these are the very themes with which this volume is concerned. 1

Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic

The concept of ‘news’ is a familiar one, and in today’s society it exists in many forms. These include analogue systems, such as printed media, radio, and televised news, as well as (most recently) digital forms of media, including social media. Despite their varying formats and intentions – the latter in particular giving rise to recent concerns regarding the integrity of news, the deliberate proliferation of misinformation, and so-called ‘Fake News’4 – collectively these varied forms of media share a common purpose of reporting or accounting recent events or occurrences, particularly those which are considered to be important or interesting for their respective audiences.5 ‘News’ as we recognise it began to emerge in the early modern period and the growth of ‘news’ and the importance of the spread of information in many early modern spheres is uncontroversial. Inevitably, it has attracted much scholarly attention. Looking first to Europe, Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham’s hefty 2016 collection of essays News Networks in Early Modern Europe (emerging from their Leverhulme-funded research network of the same name) explores the circulation of news through a series of case studies.6 Andrew Pettegree’s The Invention of News (2014) investigates the development of the early modern European news market, while Simon F. Davies and Puck Fletcher’s edited volume News in Early Modern Europe (2012) considers the production and dissemination of news on the same continent.7 The Netherlands were a vibrant centre of printing in early modern Europe and are the focus of both Paul Arblaster’s From Ghent to Aix (2014) and Joop W. Koopmans’s Early Modern Media and the News in Europe (2018), which, respectively, explore the production and 4 See for instance the work of The Trust Project, https://thetrustproject.org/about/. 5 ‘news, n.’, OED Online. December 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.liver pool.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/126615?rskey=9MtQP7&result=3 (accessed January 16, 2023). 6 Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds.), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 7 Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the world came to know about itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Simon F. Davies and Puck Fletcher (eds.), News in Early Modern Europe: Currents and Connections (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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dissemination of printed news in the Habsburg Netherlands and the Dutch Republic.8 Meanwhile, the contributors to Siv Gøril Brandtzæg et al.’s edited collection Travelling Chronicles (2018) consider early modern printed news through a series of case studies spanning from Scandinavia to France.9 Notable works which consider the creation and transmission of news in the early modern period in the British context include Raymond’s edited collections News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (1999) and News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe (2006), which trace the impact of printed periodicals on early modern British culture and society and present a new history of newspapers.10 Shifting our gaze to North America, John J. McCusker’s influential 2005 essay argues the case for an ‘information revolution’ in the newly-independent United States, which he suggests negated the effects of distance in the spreading of information, while his earlier work with Cora Gravesteijn provides evidence of regularly-published printed price currents which were shared within early modern European networks.11 Such studies have been instrumental in expanding our understanding of ‘news’, broadly defined, in the early modern period. Where business and commercial news has been included within these studies, however, it has tended to be examined as part of broader investigations of news, rather than receiving specific focus. One purpose of this volume is to contend that ‘business news’ is significant in its own right, and that its specificities make it worthy of focused research as a specific sub-type of information exchange. This collection of essays expands existing understandings of news in the early modern period in four distinct ways. First, in providing a novel insight into the creation and communication of a specific sub-type of early modern news, this volume both showcases the importance of considering the specificities of ‘business 8

Paul Arblaster, From Ghent to Aix: How They Brought the News in the Habsburg Netherlands, 1550–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Joop W. Koopmans, Early Modern Media and the News in Europe. Perspectives from the Dutch Angle (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 9 Siv Gøril Brandtzæg, Paul Goring, and Christine Watson (eds.), Travelling Chronicles: News and Newspapers from the Early Modern Period to the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 10 Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: F. Cass, 1999); Joad Raymond, (ed.) News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 11 John J. McCusker, ‘The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World’, The American Historical Review, 110.2 (2005), pp. 295–321; John J. McCusker and Cora Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism. The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Nederlandsch Economisch-Historisch Archief, 1991).

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news’ and poses new questions for future investigation. Secondly, with some notable exceptions, scholarship on the spread of news and information in the early modern period has largely focused upon Britain and continental Europe.12 However, the transatlantic expansion of European colonial empires had significant implications for contemporary news practices, as the essays in this collection show. North American and Caribbean mercantile agents were equally as instrumental as their European counterparts in shaping, disseminating, and consuming business information, as is shown in several essays in this collection. The spread of business information across the breadth of the Atlantic world is examined, which allows us to trace the development, maintenance, and operation of commercial news networks from Britain to Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. Thirdly, this volume explicitly considers the methodologies through which we might study this spread of information. In addition to presenting the outcomes of pioneering research, several of these essays provide readers with insights into the methodologies used, strategies that might be adopted, and pitfalls to be aware of. Fourthly, and arguably most pertinent, is this volume’s approach to print and manuscript. Previous studies of the history of news have, understandably, emphasised the ‘print revolution’ – the proliferation, availability, and affordability of print  – as being essential in explaining the emergence of a variety of news conduits.13 Indeed, the spread of print had a significant impact on the development of all kinds of printed information used by commercial agents, including corantos, newspapers, and ephemera such as price currents and exchange rate currents. However, as Paul Dover rightly highlights, printed media did not eclipse manuscript forms of communication, which continued to be of central (and growing) importance to early modern commerce.14 We therefore call for a re-consideration of the type of material that might be considered to be ‘business news’, which was much more wide-ranging. In addition to printed materials, manuscript newsletters continued to dispense business information, manuscript letters remained vital to business activities, and oral conversation remained central to the exchange of business news.15 Further, 12 These notable exceptions include McCusker, ‘The Demise of Distance’, and Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: the business and politics of printing the news, 1763–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 13 See for instance Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 14 Paul Dover, The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), ch. 3. 15 Manuscript newsletters are receiving increased attention, though not yet in relation to business and commerce. See Rachael Scarborough King, ‘All the News that’s Fit to Write:

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emphasis on the role of the ‘print revolution’ in bolstering production of printed news has encouraged focus on institutional issues – printers, licensing, censorship, and governmental control of print (including the Licensing of the Press Act in England, 1662–95) – but the agency of individuals in creating and sharing their own news and information (in both public and personal circles) remained hugely significant. While scholars know that commercial agents took advantage of the increasing availability of printed news to make decisions about their business activities, the circulation of information in manuscript form, in oral conversation, and through informal communications networks remained vital. As many essays in this volume demonstrate, the information that commercial agents relied upon was not created in a separate sphere to be consumed by them: these agents played a central role in the creation and dissemination of business news in a variety of forms. While we assert that ‘business news’ was a significant sub-type of information exchange, it is important to recognise that contemporaries did not separate their news into discrete categories. As the correspondence which informs several essays in this volume indicates, business news was disseminated alongside other types of news: political, familial, or personal. In addition to broadening definitions of what constituted ‘news’ in this period, it is essential to avoid the tendency to delineate ‘business’ and ‘personal’ correspondence. As the editors’ previous work has shown, personal connections were just as influential as business associations for the ways in which early modern commerce was conducted, yet the structure of archival collections encourages focus on only some relevant materials. ‘Business correspondence’ and ‘family papers’ are frequently separated, yet family papers reveal a hidden layer of business activity that is absent from the types of sources that commonly form the basis of business histories. Further, the naming of archival collections emphasises the activities of individual males and obscures the importance of female and junior family members, because trading firms and partnerships, and therefore archival collections, are invariably named for the patriarch. Close reading of these records, however, reveals that many of these networks did not and could

The Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Newsletter’, in Brandtzæg, Goring and Watson (eds.), Travelling Chronicles, pp. 95–118; M. Infelise, ‘Roman Avvisi: Information and Politics in the Seventeenth century’, in G. Signorotto & M. A. Visceglia (eds.), Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 212–28; E. M. Keating, ‘The Role of Manuscript Newsletters in Charles II’s Performance of Power’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 41.2 (2017), pp. 33–52; R. Eagles and M. Schaich (eds.), Scribal News in Politics and Parliament, 1660–1760 (Parliamentary History, special issue, 2022).

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not function in this way. By moving beyond the patriarch’s professional correspondence, personal letters can uncover a wealth of information regarding how business was executed in the early modern Atlantic World.16 The ‘news’ exchanged within personal correspondence should, we argue, be seen as just as, if not more, important to the dissemination of ‘business news’ as ‘business correspondence’ and printed material. This volume develops further the recent upsurge of interest in the history of news by focusing on business news in the Atlantic world as a specific sub-type of the wider news genre. Chronologically, the volume spans the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the earliest contribution coinciding with the first appearance of serial corantos in England, imported from Amsterdam in 1620. Several authors explicitly resist the temptation to move past the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776, recognising that the ‘Atlantic World’  – politically, economically, and culturally  – changed markedly after this date.17 Owing to the volume’s chronological and geographical scope, an ‘Atlantic World’ that is more cosmopolitan in nature than that which typically features in scholarship of the Atlantic is presented here. In providing an insight into the creation and communication of ‘business news’ through a series of discrete case studies, this volume both showcases the importance of considering the specificities of ‘business news’ and poses new questions for future investigation. Bringing together scholars from a range of career stages with disparate scholarly interests and methodological approaches, the following essays employ a series of case studies drawn from across the vast temporal and geographical remit of the early modern Atlantic world to explore the various ways in which business news was created, disseminated, and used. They showcase a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to business and information history, exploring a variety of perspectives on information-sharing practices. Three central themes emerge as being of particular importance: the role of trust and credit in business news networks; information flows and the spaces they emerged from and penetrated; and the importance of considering 16 Sophie H. Jones and Siobhan Talbott, ‘Sole Traders? The role of the extended family in eighteenth-century Atlantic business networks’, Enterprise & Society, 23.4 (2022), pp. 1093–5, 1098. 17 There has been fierce debate about the chronology of studies of the ‘Atlantic World’. Donna Gabaccia calls for ‘a long Atlantic’, and in the introduction to their 2009 collection Jack Greene and Philip Morgan note that ‘the Atlantic world constructed during the early modern era continued to exhibit considerable vitality throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth’: D. Gabaccia, ‘A long Atlantic in a wider world’, Atlantic Studies, 1.1 (2004), pp. 1–27; J. Greene and P. Morgan (eds.), Atlantic History: a critical appraisal (2009), p. 10.

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business news beyond the North Atlantic. The volume is organised around these themes, and the remainder of this introduction will consider the significance of them. 2

Trust, Credit, and Business News Networks

Daniel Peck’s exchange with the Carbonnell brothers alludes to the significant practical challenges faced by businessmen and women operating in the early modern Atlantic World. As European empires – and, subsequently, the range of spaces and locales in which trading could potentially take place – expanded geographically and demographically, correspondents were increasingly separated by large distances, with many merchants maintaining important correspondences with individuals who they never had, and never would, meet. Letters were essential for sustaining mercantile (as well as social and familial) networks,18 yet the logistics involved in shipping handwritten letters across the Atlantic led to inevitable delays in receiving timely information upon which important business decisions rested. Early modern merchants employed a range of strategies to overcome such challenges, including the common practice of despatching junior family members to remote, yet strategic, markets where they provided personal representation for merchants as overseas agents.19 Such roles were especially pursued by younger sons (who did not stand to inherit the family firm) or other opportunists, creating what Jacob Price terms an ‘expatriate subculture’: those who were prepared to consider careers that would take them out of the home country in exchange for a comfortable return in later life.20 While some scholarship has seen partnerships 18 Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), p. 2; for more on letter-writing in the early modern Atlantic, see Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century, Atlantic Families (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 19 Jones and Talbott, ‘Sole Traders?’, pp. 1094, 1107–17. 20 Jacob M. Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615–1753 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 1; Constance Jones Mathers, ‘Family Partnerships and International Trade in Early Modern Europe: merchants from Burgos in England and France, 1450–1570’, The Business History Review, 62.3 (1988), p. 372; David Hancock, ‘The Trouble with Networks: Managing the Scots’ Early-Modern Madeira Trade’, The Business History Review, 79.3 (2005), p. 474; Kenneth Morgan, ‘Forum: Scottish Mercantile Networks in the Early Modern Atlantic’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23.2 (2011), pp. 263–264.

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between family members as safer than forging commercial relationships with new contacts, more recent studies have repeatedly confirmed that they were not always successful.21 As Douglas Hamilton notes, ‘things could still go spectacularly awry’ with family involved: kinship did not necessarily guarantee sufficient commercial acumen, while unscrupulous individuals could exploit the implicit trust placed upon them by their family members.22 Trust – as essential in familial as in non-familial networks – was not simply a matter of moral importance but was vital to the economic viability of early modern businesses. In the absence of large quantities of cash being shipped across the Atlantic to underpin the commercial transactions which occurred between colonial merchants and their suppliers in the British Isles (which carried its own risks), the British North American colonies functioned largely as a credit-based economy. In his chapter exploring the mercantile practices of extending and recalling credit in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, Kenneth Morgan highlights that while credit-based practices solved the problem of conducting business in a largely cashless society, it created additional concerns for merchants regarding the notion of ‘trust’. Specifically, it raises questions regarding the information used by merchants to reasonably assess the ability of their correspondents to repay credit that was extended. Akin to a modern-day credit search, Dover notes how merchants could present their manuscript account books in person as a means of demonstrating their 21 Hannah Barker, Family and Business During the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 97–103; Morgan, ‘Scottish Mercantile Networks’, p. 265. For various views on this debate see: S. Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), p. 42; Yoram Ben-Porath, ‘The F-Connection: Families, Friends, and Firms and the Organisation of Exchange’, Population and Development Review, 6:1 (1980), pp. 1–30; S. Haggerty, ‘“You Promise Well and Perform as Badly”: The Failure of the “Implicit Contract of Family” in the Scottish Atlantic’, International Journal of Maritime History, 33:2 (2011), pp. 267–82; S. Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 1760–1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (Leiden: Brill, 2006), ch. 4, pp. 109–141; P. Mathias, ‘Risk, Credit and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise’, in J. McCusker and K. Morgan (eds.), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 15–35; L. Fontaine, ‘Antonio and Shylock: Credit and Trust in France, c. 1680–c. 1780’, Economic History Review, 54.1 (2001), pp. 39–57; S. Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?: Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool, 2013), pp. 138–9. 22 Douglas Hamilton, ‘Local Connections, Global Ambitions: Creating a Transoceanic Network in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic Empire’, The International Journal of Maritime History, 23.2 (2011), p. 284; Jones and Talbott, ‘Sole Traders?’, pp. 1113–14; Albane Forestier, ‘Risk, Kinship and Personal Relationships in Late Eighteenth-Century West Indian Trade: The Commercial Network of Tobin & Pinney’, Business History, 52.6 (2010), p. 918.

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trustworthiness and ability to settle debts.23 However, such approaches had little use when trading across the vast Atlantic Ocean. The other essays in Part 1 of this volume, by Peter Buckles and Sarah Hall, support David Hancock’s assertion that merchants increasingly relied upon carefully cultivated networks to supply them with reputable and timely business intelligence.24 Historians of early modern trade agree that personal connections were extremely important for forming relationships with new correspondents. As businessmen and women operating in the early modern Atlantic became increasingly unlikely to meet all of their correspondents in person, they relied upon those with whom they did have prior interpersonal relationships to ask for character references regarding potential correspondents’ reputations and trustworthiness.25 It is important to note that while some scholarship holds that networks were cultivated based on a range of criteria held-in-common, including ethnicity, religion, nationality, or even membership of formal associations, several scholars have shown that in many contexts, merchants instead prioritised opportunities for financial gain when choosing who to engage with, and that common beliefs did not necessarily render an individual more trustworthy.26 By extension, decisions regarding what sources of information to trust were also far more complex. Innovative, blended research methodologies are being used to transform business history by illuminating which individual members of a given merchant’s network were of particular importance. Historical social network analysis (HSNA) provides one such methodological approach for scholars of early modern commerce, and has been convincingly used to reconstruct and re-examine early modern commercial networks, for example by John and 23 Dover, Information Revolution, p. 62. 24 Hancock, ‘The Trouble with Networks’, pp. 467–91. 25 Arnaud Bartolomei, Claire Lemercier, Viera Rebolledo-Dhuin & Nadège Sougy, ‘Becoming a Correspondent: The Foundations of New Merchant Relationships in Early Modern French Trade (1730–1820)’, Enterprise & Society, 20.3 (2019), p. 22; Jean Agnew, Belfast Merchant Families in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996), p. 144; Hancock, ‘The Trouble with Networks’, pp. 478–84. 26 The former includes: Haggerty, ‘The Failure of “The Implicit Contract of Family”’, p. 268; Marsha Hamilton, ‘Commerce Around the Edges: Atlantic Trade Networks Among Boston’s Scottish Merchants’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23.2 (2011), p. 306; the latter includes: Talbott, Conflict, Commerce, pp. 141–43; P. Croft, ‘Trading with the Enemy, 1585–1604’, Historical Journal, 32,2 (1989), pp. 297–9, p. 301; L. Cullen, ‘The Smuggling Trade in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 67 (1969), p. 151; Recio Morales, ‘Identity and Loyalty’, p. 201; S. Murdoch, ‘Irish Entrepreneurs and Sweden in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in T. O’Connor and M. Lyons (eds.), Irish Communities in Early Modern Europe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), pp. 358–64.

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Sheryllynne Haggerty.27 In his chapter, Buckles neatly outlines the origins and practices of HSNA, charting the growth of the field since its emergence in the late 1990s, before demonstrating the ways in which HSNA can be used to reconstruct historic business networks and measure the changing influence of individual members of the network within a given network over time. His focus is on two distinct case studies: the Bristol West India Association and a selection of known slave traders in eighteenth-century Liverpool. Buckles includes as an appendix to his chapter an introduction to using HSNA for readers interested in applying this approach to their own fields of research. Despite the benefits of quantitative approaches to business history, however, they do not eliminate the need for effective qualitative analysis. Hall skilfully combines quantitative and qualitative methods to demonstrate the importance of the English merchant William Peirce in maintaining seventeenth-century puritan communications networks in colonial New England, and through this case study explores how the possession of news transferred to social credit. Together, the three essays contained in Part 1 explore the strategies undertaken by communities operating within different areas of the early modern Atlantic to construct their business networks, investigate the circulation of ‘business news’ within those networks, and showcase some of the methodologies that may be used to recover them. 3

Information Flows and Spaces

In addition to highlighting issues of trust and the importance of networks to the circulation of business news, Daniel Peck’s letters to the Carbonells emphasise the precarious nature of conducting trade in the early modern Atlantic World. While the chronological scope of this volume pre-dates the era of the so-called ‘Age of Revolution’, which is concerned with the American, French, and Haitian 27 John Haggerty & Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Visual Analytics of an Eighteenth-Century Business Network’, Enterprise & Society, 11.1 (2010), pp. 1–25; John Haggerty & Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Avoiding “Musty Mutton Chops”: The Network Narrative of an American Merchant in London, 1771–1774’, Essays in Economic & Business History, 37 (2019), pp. 1–42; John Haggerty & Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Networking with a Network: The Liverpool African Committee, 1750–1810’, Enterprise & Society, 18:3 (2017), pp. 566–590; John Haggerty & Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘The Life Cycle of a Metropolitan Business Network: Liverpool 1750–1810’, Explorations in Economic History, 48 (2011), pp. 189–206. See also Emily Buchnea, ‘Transatlantic Transformations: Visualising Change over Time in the Liverpool-New York Trade Network, 1763–1833’, Enterprise & Society, 15.4 (2015), pp. 687–721; E. Smith, ‘The Social Networks of Investment in early modern England’, Historical Journal, 64.4 (2021), pp. 912–939.

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revolutions and the Irish rebellion, through to the Napoleonic Wars, our period was also one of significant political and religious upheaval.28 The early modern world was marked by significant and extended periods of war, including the Thirty Years’ War and related conflicts (1618–48), the Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–54; 1665–67; 1672–74), the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78), the Nine Years’  War (1688–97), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), and the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), as well as civil wars in France and the British Kingdoms. Many conflicts were contested in both European and North American arenas by European colonists as well as indigenous peoples; several were global.29 In addition to having repercussions for international trade, wars threatened the timely transmission of news and information. Peck’s consideration of naval convoys highlights the risk that vessels and their cargoes, including letters and other information, faced from enemy warships and privateers. However, hostilities did not necessarily equate to the cessation of exchange. Both of the editors of this volume have demonstrated in other work that commodity exchange continued during conflict: Siobhan Talbott shows that trade continued in many wartime contexts, including between Scottish and Irish merchants and the French, which flourished during the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession despite its ostensible prohibition.30 Sophie Jones shows that this approach was shared by merchants elsewhere in the Atlantic World, with merchants in colonial North America consistently maintaining trade with French and Canadian merchants during the Seven Years’ War.31 Talbott concludes that ‘commercial concerns were often more important than national divisions’.32 In addition to 28 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1962). While Hobsbawm’s use of the term was confined to Europe and the commencement of the French Revolution, the related term the ‘Revolutionary Atlantic’ has become increasingly popular since the 2000s. See, for instance, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (New York: Verso, 2012); Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus, Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015). 29 In North America, these wars were known as King William’s War (1690–97), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), King George’s War (1744–48) and the ‘French and Indian War’ (1754–63), contested by protagonists from New York, New England, and New France, as well as the Haudenosaunee people whose lands spanned the New York and New France border. 30 Talbott, Conflict, Commerce, esp. ch. 6; Siobhan Talbott, ‘“What cannot be helped must be indured”: Coping with obstacles to business during the Anglo-Dutch Wars, 1652–1674’, Enterprise & Society, 23.3 (2022), pp. 790–824. 31 Sophie H. Jones, ‘From Anglicisation to Loyalism? New York, 1691–1783’ (PhD Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2018), pp. 137–38; NYHS, John Tabor Kemp Papers. 32 Siobhan Talbott, ‘British Commercial Interests on the French Atlantic Coast, c.1560–1713’, Historical Research, 85.229 (2012), p. 402; see also Siobhan Talbott, ‘“Such unjustificable

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the strategies that they adopted to continue commodity exchange, merchants were aware of the threat to communications too, and took steps to ensure that vital business news continued to circulate. During King George’s War (the North American sphere of the War of the Austrian Succession) the Philadelphia merchant Israel Pemberton wrote to John Stedman that ‘at these times the risque being great I desire to have duplicates sent for fear of miscarriage’.33 Although risky, war presented substantial commercial opportunities for savvy merchants through privateering, military contracts, and other forms of associated maritime work. Talbott has shown that some merchants ‘thrived through new opportunities’ during the Anglo-Dutch Wars: during the second war, for example, the Irish merchant George McCartney noted that ‘if the wars with Holland continiew may doe us good’.34 Cathy Matson, Gary Nash, and David Hancock have all argued that merchants in New York became so experienced at capitalising upon government contracts and other commercial opportunities that arose during wartime that, upon hearing the news that ‘war is declared in England’, there was ‘Universal Joy among the merchants’.35 While periods of war presented challenges for trade, merchants were adept at navigating these challenges. Flows of business news were thus shaped – though not stymied – by political contexts. In the opening chapter of Part 2, Lena Liapi shows that merchants and their correspondents scattered across the Atlantic World took practical and deliberate strategies to mitigate the risks associated with war and to ensure the reliability of the information which they received from both their own networks and from unknown sources. Liapi illuminates the creative strategies implemented by merchants in the absence of verified information to assess the validity of news, focusing on the practice of betting on current affairs and political events. As she contends, the very practice of betting on news required accurate and timely information (a commodity continually sought after by

practices?”: Irish trade, settlement and society in France, 1688–1715’, Economic History Review, 67.2 (2014), pp. 556–77. 33 APS, Mss.380.P36, Israel Pemberton Letterbook, 1744–1747, p. 511, Israel Pemberton to John Stedman, 7 March 1747, Philadelphia. 34 Talbott, ‘“What cannot be helped must be indured”’, pp. 805–06; LL, ‘Outletter book of George McCartney’, vol. I, p. 191, George McCartney to John Scouller, 18 November 1665, Belfast. 35 New York Governor Gerard Beekman, quoted in C. Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 267; G. Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 151–56; D. Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 238.

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merchants) while wagers themselves shaped public opinion and, in turn, business decisions. The exchange of commercial information was also moulded by the exceptionally broad array of places, spaces, and institutions in which it was created, circulated, and utilised. These ranged from formal institutions which we traditionally associate with business (such as coffee houses, Exchanges, and professional associations) to informal spaces (such as taverns, marketplaces, and shops) to personal or private spaces (such as the home). While each of these arenas have individually received important scholarly attention, their role in shaping commercial information, rather than acting as a space in which existing information was shared, is surprisingly rarely considered. Of these spaces, the coffee house has arguably received the most attention. Merchants based in towns and cities across the North Atlantic World could meet with associates in coffee houses and access the day’s printed newspapers: often, thanks to the growth of the provincial press in the eighteenth century, both the local papers and international papers.36 As several scholars, including Markman Ellis, John Brewer, and Hannah Barker have shown, coffee houses were sociable spaces, where patrons read printed texts such as newspapers aloud to each other and discussed their contents.37 In Liverpool, the coffee house’s proximity to the town’s dock provided the additional benefit of allowing merchants to watch their ships arrive and depart from the port, the very act of which created new items of important business news. Indeed, Liverpool’s dock-side coffee house was known as ‘the Merchants’, as were several others in the North Atlantic, owing to its popularity and patronage by the merchant classes.38 In Bristol, the ‘Exchange Coffee House’ and ‘American Coffee House’ 36 Sophie H. Jones, ‘Readers and Readerships’, in Nicholas Brownlees (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 1: Beginnings and Consolidation 1640–1800 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), p. 116; Sophie H. Jones, ‘Case Study 2: Readerships in Eighteenth-century Liverpool’, in Brownlees (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, p. 123. 37 M. Ellis, ‘Poetry and Civic Urbanism in the Coffee-House Library in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, in Mark Towsey and Kyle B. Roberts (eds.), Before the Public Library: Reading, Community, and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p. 72; H. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), pp. 54–55; J. Brewer, Party Ideology And Popular Politics At The Accession Of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 156. 38 William Moss, The Liverpool Guide; Including a sketch of the environs: with a map of the town; and directions for sea bathing (Liverpool: J. McCreery, 1799), p. 65; ‘Merchants’ coffee houses could also be found in New York, Philadelphia, Newport (Rhode Island), and Cork. See, respectively, The New-York Weekly Journal, 30 March 1747; The Pennsylvania Packet or the General Advertiser, 15 April 1779; The Newport Mercury, 11 May 1767; The New-London Summary, or, The Weekly Advertiser, 19 June 1761.

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Figure 1.1 Edward Ward, Vulgus Britannicus: or the British Hudibras, London, 1710 Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, CC BY-SA 4.0

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were presumably named both for their situation (the former was close to the Bristol Exchange) and their clientele.39 However, obtaining commercial information was only one act in the flow of business news. Importantly, information flows were not one-way. They were messy, organic, and unstructured, as different methods of communication intersected and overlapped each other.40 Information obtained in formal settings (such as the Royal Exchange) or through printed media (such as the newspaper) was disseminated in a variety of forms throughout business networks, and conversely, printed forms of news gained their information from a variety of sources. The editorial to the first issue of the Exchange Intelligencer, published in 1645, explained the publication’s approach to re-circulating information: ‘the best of the French and Dutch corantos shall be imparted to you, besides many other things out of Marchants and Gentlemens letters’.41 Indeed, the first extant English coranto was a translation of a previously published Dutch coranto, rather than an original publication in its own right.42 As Part 2 continues, Jeremy Land, Siobhan Talbott and Sophie Jones, and Hannah Knox Tucker demonstrate that business news was exchanged through a variety of mediums, including manuscript letters and oral conversations, and was transported by a broader array of people than has been previously considered, with transformative implications for how we define ‘business news’. Land illustrates how commercial information obtained from printed news sources – in this case, North American colonial newspapers  – was shared by North American merchants with their correspondents elsewhere in the Atlantic world through the exchange of handwritten letters. The very act of committing printed information to manuscript form changed its nature and contents, as merchants selected relevant information and included their own opinions and commentary on the intelligence that they were circulating. Through these processes, printed information obtained in (semi-)public spaces was irreversibly altered as it continued its journey in another form. 39 Max Skjönsberg and Mark Towsey (eds.), The Minute Book of the Bristol Library Society, 1772–1801 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 2022), p. 35. 40 See A. Fox, Oral and literate culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2001), p. 5; see also A. Fox and D. Woolf, ‘Introduction’, A. Fox and D. Woolf (eds.), The spoken word: oral culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002), p. 8. 41 Exchange Intelligencer, 1, 15 May 1645, 102, 145.1/E284(12), cited in J. Raymond, The Inven­ tion of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 146. 42 N. Brownlees, ‘Narrating Contemporaneity: Text and Structure in English News’, in B. Dooley (ed.), The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 229.

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Of course, the creation and dissemination of business news was not confined to the physical spaces of coffee houses and Exchanges, nor was it limited by the number of characters that printers could fit on a page. Business news was also not confined solely to wealthy merchants, who could afford to access the formal associations and other semi-private institutions in which it was discussed. Informal, public, open spaces such as quaysides and street corners were important touchpoints for the sharing of business news,43 but the lack of written record to uncover many of these essential exchanges has meant that they have been lost. In addition to business conversation that produced (directly or indirectly) a written record in the form of letters, accounts, commissions, and receipts, a letter from John Clerk to William Rires in May 1645 suggests that merchants expressed verbally matters that they did not want to commit to paper: ‘I will not give trust to peper and ink with that which I wold tell you if I wer as neir you as I wes 6 month ago’.44 With reputation being so important to establishing and sustaining long-distance relationships – as explored in Part 1 – letters from merchants attempting to preserve their reputation provide us with fragmentary glimpses into some of the conversations that circulated rumour or speculation about the character of mutual correspondents. In their co-authored chapter, Talbott and Jones explore these oral exchanges, enhancing our definition of ‘conversation’ in business culture, investigating the spaces in which these conversations took place, and suggesting methodologies that might be used to uncover spoken conversations believed to have been lost. Just as important as those who created and disseminated business news, and the spaces in which this took place, were the actors who facilitated its flow. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra shows the important roles played by sailors, labourers, and indentured servants in disseminating crucial political information from port to port.45 In tracing the role of previously overlooked actors in spreading revolutionary ideas in the Atlantic, Linebaugh and Rediker emphasise the importance of the mobility of such individuals in enabling them to rapidly communicate important information from foreign ports. Much of the political, social, and commercial information that they shared would have had important repercussions for those in business. Ships’ captains, as bearers of transatlantic post, were at 43 F. de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: rethinking early modern politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 94. 44 NRS, GD18/2455, Letterbook of John Clerk, 1644–45, f.15r, Clerk to William Rires, 20 May 1645, Paris. See S. Talbott (ed.), ‘The Letter-book of John Clerk of Penicuik, 1644–45’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, volume 15, Scottish History Society 6th series, 8 (2014), p. 38. 45 Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra.

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the intersection of printed news, epistolary news, and oral information, and Tucker explores the role that these important, yet overlooked, agents played in collecting and delivering letters containing business news. 4

Business News beyond the North Atlantic

The first academic use of the term ‘Atlantic World’ has been variously dated to the late 1960s and 1970s, but it was the 1990s and early 2000s that witnessed an ‘explosion’ of Atlantic scholarship, incorporating the histories of Europe, West Africa, and the Americas.46 It is arguably, however, only in the last two decades that the field has begun to mature, and there are many ways in which it might develop further.47 Many existing studies have focused on political and cultural conceptualisations of the Atlantic World, but there has been little exploration of information exchange or the realities of Atlantic World trade links (with the exception, of course, of the slave trade, which continues to receive a disproportionate amount of attention). As recently as 2022, ‘the history of the circulation of ideas, knowledge and products’ has been described as a ‘niche within current historiographical trends in Atlantic History’.48 In moving this approach from niche to mainstream, this collection responds to recent calls to ‘re-interpret and broaden [Atlantic Studies] in ways that keep it relevant beyond its own cocoon’.49 The third and final part of this collection takes our focus beyond mainland Europe and North America. Atlantic history has increasingly faced criticism for its Anglocentric approach, which, given Britain’s ‘extensive’ geographic reach by the mid-eighteenth century, has at times been synonymous with

46

Jack Greene and Philip Morgan date the first ‘institutional use’ of the term to the late 1960s, when the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University established its programme in Atlantic History and Culture, and Alison Games proposes that Johns Hopkins University Press were the first to use the term in its current context with the launch of its ‘Studies in Atlantic History and Culture’ series in the 1970s: Greene and Morgan (eds.), Atlantic History, p. 3; Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, The American Historical Review, 111.3 (2006), p. 744; Games, ‘Atlantic History’, p. 744. 47 Including expansion of the temporal span of the field, as discussed above: Gabaccia, ‘A long Atlantic’; Greene and Morgan (eds.), Atlantic History, p. 10. 48 M. Barcia, ‘Into the future: a historiographical overview of Atlantic History in the twenty first century’, Atlantic Studies 19.2 (2022), p. 185. 49 Barcia, ‘Into the future’, p. 187.

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‘British-Atlantic’ history.50 David Armitage and Michael Braddick’s seminal collection of essays, The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, with its focus on Britain and its colonies in North America and the Caribbean, provides one example.51 Such approaches have led scholars to ask whether we might talk instead about multiple, overlapping ‘Atlantic worlds’, including John Reid, Huw V. Bowen and Elizabeth Mancke’s call for a ‘Canadian-Atlantic’ World.52 As Robert DuPlessis rightly notes, despite the enduring tendency of Atlantic scholars to depict it as such, the northern Atlantic was not solely Anglophone in nature.53 In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonists lived alongside English (later, British) colonists in vast expanses of land, stretching the entire breadth of the Eastern Atlantic seaboard from present-day Canada (then known as ‘New France’) to Mexico (then ‘New Spain’). Meanwhile in continental Europe, France, Spain, and Portugal all had Atlantic coasts, with other nations (the Netherlands, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire) able to access the Atlantic through well-established trading routes. These heterogeneous, multi-cultural communities of the Atlantic world were not only characterised by the political tensions discussed above, they were also divided by their conflicting religious beliefs. The early modern period was punctuated by substantial religious upheaval, as Europeans continued to navigate the long-reaching socio-cultural and political consequences of the Reformation, often with long term and far-reaching effects on their imperial possessions. In Britain, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 witnessed the restoration of a Protestant monarch to the helm of the British Empire, while multiple Jacobite rebellions (in 1689, 1715, 1719, and 1745) contested the despoliation of the Catholic James II and VII and repeatedly sought to reinstate the Stuart dynasty following the accession of the House of Hanover in 1714. In France, meanwhile, persecution of the Protestant Huguenots endured for much of the seventeenth century, until Louis XIV’s Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 forced either their conversion to Catholicism or their flight (often to 50 Bernard Bailyn, ‘Preface’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. xiv. 51 Armitage and Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World. First published in 2002, the second edition (2009) includes a new essay which considers ‘The British Atlantic World in Global Perspective’. 52 John G. Reid, H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, Is There a “Canadian” Atlantic World? International Journal of Maritime History, 21.1 (2009), pp. 263–95. 53 Robert S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2015), pp. 1–6; John Styles, ‘An Ocean of Textiles’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 73.3 (2016), p. 534.

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the Americas) as refugees.54 Hall has already highlighted the plight of religious exiles to North America in the seventeenth century and the fragile and uncertain status of Puritan communities there in Part 1, but this phenomenon was not distinct to New England. Looking beyond the North Atlantic to the British Caribbean, Eilish Gregory demonstrates in Part 3 that Catholic merchants and planters in the Leeward Islands, many of whom had resettled there to avoid the impact of anti-Catholic legislation passed in England, still found themselves under threat of sequestration. Through the case study of Attorney General Sir Edward Northey, who acted to safeguard Catholic estates from being forfeited, Gregory assesses how news regarding the confiscation of Catholic estates, along with information concerning wider business affairs, was communicated between Britain and the Leeward Islands in the early eighteenth century. A further, and crucial, criticism of Atlantic history is its emphasis on western and European cultures. The trade of enslaved Africans in the seventeenth century brought West African commercial agents into the trading zone of the Atlantic, yet they are frequently absent from historical scholarship on the ‘Atlantic World’. Enslaved Africans, forcibly transported across the Atlantic to provide labour on plantations in mainland North America and the Caribbean, form another crucial Atlantic community, while North America and the Caribbean were home to an important and diverse range of indigenous peoples who played important roles in shaping the nature and character of European settlements. Not all of these communities have left written records and, as such, the nature and arrangement of archival material means that their voices are often structurally excluded from the historical narrative.55 It has not escaped the attention of the editors that many essays in this collection are based upon the surviving letters and correspondence left by male commercial actors, predominantly of European ancestry, and we acknowledge that there is 54 Many French Huguenots settled in Dutch New York (then known as New Netherlands) and elsewhere in North America: Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 61–63; Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 86; Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, ‘Refugiés Or Émigrés? Early Modern French Migrations to British North America and the United States (c.1680–c.1820)’, Itinerario, 30.2 (2006), pp. 16–17. 55 Marisa Fuentes provides a useful framework for considering what she terms the inherent and structural ‘machinations of archival power’: Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 1; Anne Hyde discusses the ‘lost voices’ of native people, women and children. Hyde, Empires, Nations and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), p. 17.

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more to be done to incorporate the full scope of such varied Atlantic communities into scholarship on the early modern Atlantic World. Edmond Smith and David Brown take important steps to situate black voices in this scholarship in Part 3. Through a reconstruction of the mercantile network of the East India Company (EIC) in West Africa, Smith identifies commercial actors including African merchant and leader John Cloyce as being central to the dissemination of business information. Brown’s study of the correspondence of the Royal African Company (RAC), which took over the EIC’s position in West Africa, similarly demonstrates the potential of the Company’s letters for recovering important figures such as Zachary Rogers Jr: a man of mixed European and West African ancestry who assumed the vacant position of RAC factor in Sierra Leone. As well as highlighting the value of inclusive approaches to Atlantic history, these chapters highlight the ways that specific regional and local contexts, rather than national milieus, directly influenced and shaped the manner in which business news was both produced and disseminated. 5 Conclusion ‘News’ as we recognise it today began to be formed in the early modern period and, as early modern business increasingly became a transoceanic affair, the dissemination of news was essential for facilitating commerce. Even the absence of news could be ‘news’ in itself: writing again to Thomas and Michael Carbonell in July 1704, Daniel Peck ‘hope[d] you have account of [the Brotherhood] being well in some port in England … so Insurance will be the more easier. Nevertheless if no news pray give orders for Insurance on her Cargoe for my Account’.56 Our understanding of the phenomenon of the growth of news has been significantly enhanced by a recent upsurge in scholarly attention. To date, however, these studies have had three things in common. One is their consideration of ‘news’ as a homogenous genre; another is a (largely) euro-centric focus on the creation, spread, and utilisation of news; the third is their emphasis on the importance and dominance of print. In this volume, the benefit of considering ‘business news’ as a distinct historical sub-genre of news is posited. By expanding our definition of what constitutes ‘news’ in early modern business, we suggest that the advent of print did not fundamentally alter – or necessarily even enhance – the methods by which 56 CALS, ZCR 352, Daniel Peck, Merchant of Chester, Letterbook, 1702–1704, f.54v, Daniel Peck to Thomas and Michael Carbonnell, 22 July 1704, Chester.

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business news was created and circulated. Of greater influence on methods of information exchange was the increasing distances over which trade was conducted, and thus over which business news travelled. Manuscript and oral circulation remained an essential news conduit for those involved in early modern business. Examining ‘business news’ through a series of case studies which span the breadth of the early modern Atlantic World allows for cultural comparison as well as a re-situation of previously overlooked voices in this story. The themes that this volume highlights  – trust, credit, and risk mitigation; information flows and spaces; and an Atlantic perspective – not only allow us to explore the creation and transmission of business news, but integrate these findings firmly within the context within which this news was being circulated. The early modern Atlantic World was one fraught with risk: frequent wars, inconsistent insurance practices, and an increase in the distance over which ships, cargoes, and correspondence needed to travel all presented challenges for the exchange of business news. The merchants, captains, and other actors that feature in the chapters that follow were adept at navigating these challenges: in many ways a self-selecting group, the very fact that their business papers and correspondence survives at all is testament to their ability to successfully counter the difficulties associated with building and maintaining reliable information networks in the early modern Atlantic. Further, this volume showcases a range of approaches to the broader question of business news, with several chapters specifically highlighting innovative methodological approaches that promise to influence future work. Yet, there is more work to be done. Ground-breaking work on manuscript newsletters, cited above, has not yet penetrated business or commercial history. Much more, still, must be done to amplify oppressed voices and to mine archives more effectively for the stories that remain hidden as, to date, scholars have worked ‘with archival sources mostly produced by dominant western powers and actors’.57 It is our hope that this collection will not only be of use to scholars in its own right, but that the approaches, methodologies, and ideas contained within the following chapters will encourage new avenues of research, extending our understanding of business news, and the early modern Atlantic World, ever further. 57 Barcia asserts that scholars have been ‘forced’ to work with these sources, but greater understanding of the ways that archives have been compiled, and more creative research methods, mean that alternative stories can be told: Barcia, ‘Into the future’, p. 185.

Part 1 Trust, Credit, and Business News Networks

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Chapter 2

The Provision and Circulation of Credit in the British Atlantic Trading World, 1739–1775 Kenneth Morgan References to credit terms and the practices of credit were a pervasive feature of the business news circulating in the British transatlantic trading world of the mid-eighteenth century. Some correspondents dwelt more upon credit than others, but nearly every letter sent from one merchant to another referred to credit because it was the most mobile factor of production in the conduct of trade and purveyance of business news in overseas commerce. In a situation where business news, including credit arrangements, could only travel as quickly as ships could sail and commercial communications were subject to high degrees of risk, establishing firm credit terms was a vital part of the everyday world of mercantile practice.1 Thus one historian has justifiably referred to ‘an empire of credit’ in the eighteenth-century British transatlantic trading world.2 Merchants’ counting houses carried out weekly tasks that noted the main business news, including credit arrangements, that was included in commercial letters and checked the bills receivable in the quantity columns in ledgers.3 In handling credit, merchants focused on vital aspects of business information including the length of credit terms, how these were applied in different lines of trade, the creditworthiness of correspondents, and the connections between credit provision and circulation and commercial networks. Credit provision was by no means a new feature in the period discussed in this chapter, for it had long been an essential component of trading relationships both internally in England and externally via foreign trade.4 It is no 1 Jacob M. Price, ‘What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660–1790’, Journal of Economic History, 49.2 (1989), pp. 278–81. 2 H. V. Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 1688–1775 (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), p. 92. 3 Jacob M. Price, ‘Directions for the Conduct of a Merchant’s Counting House, 1766’, Business History, 28.3 (1986), p. 139. 4 Arthur S. Williamson, ‘Credit Relations between the English Merchants and the Colonial Merchants and Planters in the Eighteenth Century’ (PhD Thesis, University of Iowa, 1927); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); and Margot Finn, The Character of

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exaggeration to state that such trade would have been impossible without the use of credit, which was inextricably linked to cashless forms of making payments found in many economies in Britain, Ireland, continental Europe, North America, and West Africa.5 Faced with a chronic shortage of cash in colonial economies and competing local currencies, credit was the main means through which an expanding transatlantic economy could be supported; it was the bedrock of commercial enterprise.6 The provision of credit was one element among a series of decisions that were closely intertwined with the operation of commercial networks and their circulation of business news.7 Credit, in addition, was not just central to private trade but also to public finance and corporate enterprise, and its forms and development intensified in eighteenth-century Britain.8 Credit was involved in agreements between suppliers of goods and merchants in British and Irish ports, in commercial transactions between those traders and their correspondents in North America and the West Indies, and between merchants and suppliers in ports and hinterlands across the Atlantic.9 Every link in the chain of business transactions handled credit, and some businessmen traded almost exclusively in this manner.10 Merchants trying to establish connections with a new correspondent enquired about the length of credit offered in a particular line of trade.11 One Connecticut merchant emphasised the importance of establishing good credit relations with

Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 5 Markus Denzel, ‘The Transatlantic Cashless Payment System in the Northern Atlantic Zone from the 17th Century to c.1840’ in Horst Pietschmann (ed.), Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System 1580–1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), pp. 263–77. 6 Peter Mathias, ‘Risk, credit and kinship in early modern enterprise’ in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (eds.), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 15–35. 7 Kenneth Morgan, ‘Business Networks in the British Export Trade to North America, 1750–1800’, in McCusker and Morgan (eds.), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, pp. 36–62. 8 Julian Hoppit, ‘Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790’, The Historical Journal, 33.2 (1990), pp. 305–22. 9 For the credit networks of a Philadelphia merchant house in the early 1760s, see Sheryllynne Haggerty, The British Atlantic Trading Community 1760–1810: Men, Women and the Distribution of Goods (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 148–9. 10 John Smail, ‘The Culture of Credit in Eighteenth-Century Commerce’, Enterprise & Society, 4.2 (2003), pp. 299–325. 11 E.g. MHS, Jonathan Jackson to Devonsheir & Reeve, 21 February 1765, Jonathan Jackson letterbook (1765–74).

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London ‘on which our all depends’.12 Successful deployment of credit rested on the assumption that correspondents would make punctual remittances to avoid the spectre of debt. ‘Men in Busyness in this Citty’, a London merchant observed, ‘can never support their credit unless their Returns are made with some degree of punctuality’.13 Credit therefore formed a vital part of overseas trading activities and was a keenly observed part of the flow of business information from one person to another. As a New York merchant noted about businessmen in the 1760s, ‘the greater part live by credit’.14 Emma Hart has succinctly underscored the significance of credit for the North American colonies, but her observation has wider application to the eighteenth-century British Atlantic trading world: ‘with no corporate bodies claiming to work for the common good in the colonial marketplace, individuals’ credit overwhelmingly determined their capacity to function effectively within it’.15 Prudent dispensing of credit was often accompanied by merchants observing careful control over the creditworthiness and reliability of their correspondents. A common business strategy was for merchants, such as Quakers and Jews, to confine trade to co-religionists on the basis that shared religious and cultural values provided the trust necessary for carrying on commerce successfully. Another frequently used strategy was for merchants to conduct trade only with family members, often by sending a junior partner overseas to act as a correspondent for a period of time. But neither strategy was foolproof as co-religionists could quarrel over business consignments and family members could be indifferent businessmen who fell into debt. In most commercial transactions conducted with transatlantic markets, British merchants dealt with businessmen they had never met and were unlikely to meet, and vice-versa, which meant that establishing and maintaining credit relationships was an intricate, risky matter.16 12 CHS, Joseph Trumbull to Trumbull & Fitch, 16 August 1764, Jonathan Trumble, Sr, Papers, box 2. 13 CUL, Robert Plumstead to Judah Foulke, 22 July 1757, Add. MS 2798, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1756–8). For a similar emphasis, see John Norton to John Hatley Norton, 31 March 1769, in Frances Norton Mason (ed.), John Norton & Sons, Merchants of London and Virginia: Being the Papers from their Counting House for the Years 1750 to 1795 (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1937), p. 87. 14 John Watts to James Napier, 1 June 1765, in Dorothy C. Barck (ed.) Letter Book of John Watts: Merchant and Councillor of New York, January 1, 1762–December 22, 1765 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1928), p. 355. 15 Emma Hart, Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), p. 93. Emphasis in original text. 16 Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 69, 125; Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘“You

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Managing credit involved considerations of the business character and reputation of merchants, factors, and agents, their creditworthiness, the adjustments to credit needed in a constantly changing business environment, the shock inflicted by credit crises, and the intangible influence of shifting business opinion and expectations of commercial outcomes. Credit problems were an essential part of eighteenth-century financial crises in England, and historians have identified thirteen years in that century when such crises occurred.17 Merchants and correspondents in Britain and North America were acutely aware of the problems caused by credit fluctuations in relation to market conditions. Thus eighteenth-century North American colonists had been long warned of the fantastical nature of credit and how it ‘hangs on opinion, depends upon our passions of hope and fear; it comes many times unsought for, and often goes away without reason’.18 In a volume focused on the flow of business news in the transatlantic world, credit and its requirements deserves detailed consideration. This chapter accordingly concentrates on mercantile credit practices between 1739 and 1775 for which primary evidence is plentiful.19 Considerations of credit have featured in many publications but no study of this length has analysed mercantile credit practices in a variety of lines of trade from numerous archives and printed editions. There are four parts to this chapter. First, credit terms common to different transatlantic trades and the economic factors influencing them are discussed. Various factors affecting credit provision in the British export trade in dry goods and examples of business advice about how to handle credit are outlined. Second, the deployment of credit in the British slave trade is examined to show its flexible adaptation to particular lines of trade. The provision of credit in the slave trade, it will be argued, was in some respects handled differently than in the export trade. Third, merchant decisions when transacting business are explained in relation to the credit standing of correspondents and their business behaviour. Merchants assessed the information they had about particular business contacts in order to predict Promise Well and Perform as Badly”: The Failure of “The Implicit Contract of Family” in the Scottish Atlantic’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23.2 (2011), pp. 267–82; James Walvin, The Quakers: Money and Morals (London: John Murray, 1998). 17 Julian Hoppit, ‘Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England’, Economic History Review, new series, 39.1 (1986), pp. 39–58. 18 Quoted in Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 66. 19 The time framework has been determined by the greater survival of records post-1739 than beforehand. Many credit practices reported here, of course, would also have been observed before 1739 and after 1775.

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the likely outcome of their handling of credit. Fourth, the consequences of poor attention to credit  – whether missing deadlines, running into debt, or failing to update creditors on changing business circumstances – are analysed in relation to the functioning of the eighteenth-century transatlantic economy. 1

Credit Terms and British Transatlantic Trade

The credit periods offered by British merchants to their American and West Indian correspondents can be traced in different lines of trade, but for reasons of space, and also because the trades concerned were essential for the prosperity of the British Atlantic trading world, the discussion in the first two sections focuses upon two contrasting types of trade: the gathering and despatch of manufactured goods – textiles, metalware, and hardware – to the colonies on bilateral voyages that sailed to and fro across the Atlantic between British and American ports; and the slave sales in the Caribbean that formed an essential part of transatlantic slaving voyages from English ports to seven regions of West Africa and numerous disembarkation areas across the Atlantic. The trades in dry goods and slaves were both underpinned by credit, and they exhibit both similar and different business procedures in relation to credit practices.20 In the mid-eighteenth century, British merchants usually assembled cargoes of manufactured goods for transatlantic shipment through earning a 2.5% commission on sales. Goods were either sold to American merchants at a discount for ready money or, more commonly, on credit for various periods.21 The offer of discounts for remittance on receipt of an invoice helped merchants to settle accounts quickly with suppliers, enabled tradesmen to pay their workers’ wages, and allowed American merchants to sell goods at competitive prices.22 Buying and selling goods on credit, however, was a more common commercial practice for British exporters than paying cash for commodities at discounted prices. Thus much of the Yorkshire cloth supplied to 20

For another commodity trade in which credit was important, see Samuel M. Rosenblatt, ‘The Significance of Credit in the Tobacco Consignment Trade: A Study of John Norton & Sons, 1768–1775’, William and Mary Quarterly, 19.3 (1962), pp. 383–99. 21 Occasionally, North American merchants avoided taking English goods on credit and preferred immediate payment instead: see Thomas M. Truxes (ed.), Letterbook of Greg & Cunningham, 1756–57: Merchants of New York and Belfast (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 80. 22 Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 108–9.

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British merchants for overseas shipment was obtained on credit from inland merchants in Yorkshire.23 Various credit times were specified for different commodity cargoes by inland manufacturers and export merchants. These terms were circulated widely in business correspondence. In some cases the length of credit extended to nine or twelve months, but it was more usually between three and six months.24 Thus in 1762 a Bristol merchant informed a correspondent in New England that his practice was to purchase goods for export to North America on six months’ credit ‘and the People here will be paid Punctuall to the credit they allow’.25 At the American end of commercial transactions, it was usual for merchants to allow at least six months’ credit to purchasers of goods; in some cases this was extended to twelve months.26 Offering commercial credit to colonial merchants and factors enabled correspondents in North America and the West Indies to borrow money rather than rely entirely upon their own financial resources. The longer the credit, the more feasible it became for British and Irish merchants to meet American demands for their goods on a sustained basis.27 British merchants competed with one another to offer the most attractive credit terms to American customers in order to attract business for the sale of their goods. These details were regularly conveyed in mercantile correspondence as an important component in the circulation of business news.28 Receiving credit was of course necessary for American traders with little capital, but larger merchants were just as 23 R. C. Nash, ‘The Organization of Trade and Finance in the British Atlantic Economy, 1660–1830’ in Peter A. Coclanis (ed.), The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice and Personnel (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), p. 126. 24 William I. Roberts III, ‘Samuel Storke: An Eighteenth-Century London Merchant trading to the American Colonies’, The Business History Review, 39.2 (1965), p. 155; NEHGS, Welch, Wilkinson & Startin to Peter Hodgson, [?] 1765, Hancock Collection, box 28, and William Jones to Thomas Fayerweather, 25 April 1762, John Fayerweather Papers; Halliday & Dunbar to James Beekman, 24 September 1757, in Philip L. White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers 1746–1799, vol. 2 (New York: The New-York Historical Society, 1956), p. 597; Jacob M. Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 156. 25 NEHGS, William Jones to Thomas Hubbard, 8 April 1768, Thomas Hubbard Papers. Merchants sometimes purchased goods on credit periods lasting between twelve and eighteen months: see Jacob M. Price, Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Seaborne Frontier, 1615–1753 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 44. 26 Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community, p. 145; WSRO, Robert Raper to Moses Nunes & Son, 17 October 1759, Robert Raper letterbook (1759–70). 27 For examples from the Irish linen trade to North America, see Thomas M. Truxes, IrishAmerican Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 66. 28 T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and their Trading Activities c. 1740–90 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1975), p. 60.

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regular in their search for credit. The reasons for this were explained succinctly by Charles Ogilvie of Charleston who wrote to a British merchant as follows: ‘You may be surprised that men who have so considerable a capital should want to borrow money. The Reason of which is the long credit given & the great value of goods always on hand to keep up a proper assortment’.29 Credit terms in mercantile correspondence specified a time period in months before remittances were due. Merchants took careful note of the listing of bills of exchange that followed many commercial letters to check the calendar date when payments had to be settled.30 They expected such transactions to be made on time, and kept a strict watch on the credit periods granted. ‘Remittances must be punctually made’, a London merchant advised a Barbados correspondent in 1756, ‘for we cannot, as gentlemen in Barbados do, let our money lay there at interest’. He added that ‘if a man fails of his promises with us, his credit is blown and his reputation soon follows’.31 The Charleston merchant Henry Laurens noted that, from time to time, he found it necessary to ‘rouse some of the most forgetful’ correspondents to maintain his credit in trade.32 This imperative induced merchants to emphasise when they had been punctual in making remittances. Correspondents thanked merchants who were careful and punctual in dealing with credit.33 Observing the time allowed for settling credit purchases was important for colonial merchants, too, as they needed goods to be despatched at an agreed date so that their credit with customers was not affected, which otherwise might hinder their orders for the future.34 Regular remittances, paying close attention to time limits, reinforced reciprocal relations ‘to make a beneficial 29 Quoted in Huw T. David, Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and Britain’s Atlantic Commerce, 1730–1790 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2018), p. 38. 30 Joshua Johnson to the firm, 2 September 1772, in Jacob M. Price (ed.), Joshua Johnson’s letterbook, 1771–1774: Letters from a Merchant in London to his Partners in Maryland, London Record Society, 15 (London: London Record Society, 1979), p. 48. 31 CUL, Robert Plumstead to William Collier, 22 March 1756, Add. MS 2798, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1756–8). 32 Henry Laurens to Charles Gordon, 6 March 1765, in George C. Rogers, Jr, David R. Chesnutt, Peggy J. Clark and Walter B. Edgar (eds.), The Papers of Henry Laurens: Volume Four, September 1, 1763–August 31, 1765 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1974), p. 48. 33 DUL, Hogg & Clayton to Greenwood & Higginson, 20 June 1765, Hogg & Clayton letter­ book and accounts (1762–71); UAA, Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 9 February 1751, MS 2740, Ogilvie Forbes of Boyndlie Papers. 34 Robert Pringle to Andrew Pringle, 5 July 1743, in Walter B. Edgar (ed.), The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, April 2, 1737–September 25, 1742, 2 vols. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), vol. II, p. 577.

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trade on both sides’.35 Those who made punctual remittances were assured that their business would be transacted with ‘regularity & dispatch’.36 These quotations underscore the attention paid by merchants to strict time observance and emphasise the point that this reflected a merchant’s behaviour in honouring obligations. In addition, the quotations underline the effects that lack of punctual time observance for payments could have on a trader’s reputation and his expectations for future business. Exports from Britain to North America and the West Indies between 1739 and 1775 operated on a biannual cycle, with goods despatched in the autumn and spring.37 British merchants accordingly wanted to receive payment for the manufactured wares sent to American correspondents within a calendar year. Credit times reflected this commercial situation. Thus credit periods allowed by British exporters between 1739 and 1775 fell within a six-to-twelve months’ range. Six or nine months’ credit was extended by many exporters to their American correspondents.38 In the 1760s and 1770s, the credit period was sometimes extended to twelve and fifteen months.39 In exceptional circumstances, 35 CUL, Robert Plumstead to John Prettijohn, 8 November 1757, Add. MS 2798, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1756–8). 36 CUL, Robert Plumstead to Joseph Redman, 23 May 1757, Add. MS 2798, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1756–8). 37 Price (ed.), Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, p. xv. 38 E.g. ‘Testimony of British merchants on Colonial Trade …’ in Merrill Jensen (ed.), English Historical Documents, IX: American Colonial Documents to 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 690; NEHGS, William Jones to Thomas Hancock, 15 March 1764, Thomas Hancock foreign letters (1728–64), box 7, folder 2, Hancock Papers; HSP, Thomas Frank to Joseph Stansbury, 3 February 1773, Coates-Reynell Correspondence (1729–84); LoC, Hayley & Hopkins to William Barrell, 30 January 1772, Stephen Collins Papers, vol. 13; William Stead to Christopher Champlin, 14 July 1764, in Commerce of Rhode Island, 1726– 1800, 2 vols., Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, seventh series, IX (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), vol. II, p. 110; S. D. Smith and T. R. Wheeler, ‘“Requisites of a Considerable Trade”: The Letters of Robert Plumsted, Atlantic Merchant, 1752–58’, The English Historical Review, 124.508 (2009), p. 554. 39 E.g. HSP, James & Drinker to Peach & Pierce, 23 November 1771, James & Drinker letterbook (1769–72); CUL, Robert Plumstead to John Scott, 5 April 1756, Add. MS 2798, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1756–8); BLHU, Harrison’s & Ainsley to Samuel Abbot, 29 May 1769, 26 February 1771, Samuel Abbot Papers; MHS, Jonathan Jackson to George Brown, 27 June 1766, and to Henry Cruger, 23 October 1767, Jonathan Jackson letterbook (1765– 74); Beinecke, entry for 29 September 1753, Robert Plumsted letterbook (1752–6); UMA, Lowbridge Bright to Bright, Milward & Duncombe, 24 September 1773, Lowbridge Bright letterbook (1765–73), Bright Family Papers; Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?, p. 78. In some instances, however, British merchants were wary of extending twelve months’ credit on goods supplied to North America: see Beinecke, Robert Plumsted to Judah Foulke, 5 January 1752, Robert Plumsted letterbook (1752–6).

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two years’ credit was granted for goods despatched to transatlantic markets.40 One London firm offered twelve months’ credit on goods supplied with a discount for prompt payment at the rate of 6% per annum from the day of payment of any bills remitted.41 Longer credits helped to create wealth in the colonies. The visible signs of opulent living among Virginia planters in the mid-1760s resulted ‘in great measure owing to the Credit which the Planters have had from England, & which has enabled them to Improve their Estates to the pitch they are Arrived at’.42 British merchants carefully calibrated the credit periods they offered to transatlantic correspondents to cover their own need for timely repayment of the long credits offered by their suppliers, including clothiers and warehousemen, such as wholesale linendrapers and ironmongers.43 Longer credit terms were usually limited to trusted correspondents.44 Agents in good standing with their merchant principals could arrange to extend their credit with their largest creditors during times of commercial depression.45 The credit period offered was greater than the time in which payment had to be made, however, because it started from the date of the invoice, when goods were supplied to British merchants, and it could be up to ten weeks before the cargo was delivered to an American port.46 British merchants charged interest for late payments and offered discounts for early settlements.47 Until they were in cash, they levied interest at 5% per annum on traders who failed to observe the credit limits specified in commercial letters. The interest was charged to cover the additional time before merchants received payment after the time limit noted in their invoice.48 To hasten payments, British merchants sometimes appended to their credit terms offers 40 CUL, Robert Plumstead to William Collier, 22 March 1756, Add. MS 2798, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1756–8). 41 LoC, Harrison’s & Ainsley to John Glover, Jr, 18 February 1774, Stephen Collins Papers, vol. 17. 42 John Wayles to Farell & Jones, 30 August 1766, in John M. Hemphill, II, ‘John Wayles Rates His Neighbours’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 66.3 (1958), p. 305 (quotation); Marc Egnal, New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Early Canada (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 94. 43 Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade, pp. 102, 104. 44 Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’, p. 75. 45 Price (ed.), Joshua Johnson’s letterbook, p. xix. 46 Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community, p. 152. 47 Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade, p. 100. 48 E.g. NYHS, John Roberts to Reynell & Coates, 6 August 1774, Samuel Coates Papers; BLHU, Harrison & Barnard to Samuel Abbot, 12 April 1766, and invoice from Welch, Wilkinson & Startin via George Watson to Samuel Abbot & Co., 3 March 1772, Samuel Abbot Papers; HSP, Daniel Clark to William Neale, 20 December 1759, Daniel Clark letter and invoice book (1759–63). See also Richard Pares, ‘A London West India Merchant House 1740–69’ in

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of discounts for prompt remittance. For money remitted before the expiration of the credit period, this could take the form of discounts of 6% on an annual basis or 10% for bills sent with an order for goods.49 Inland manufacturers offered substantial discounts of 20% or more on goods supplied via British merchants to New England merchants.50 In all these examples, the credit terms and the specifications associated with the timing of payments were handled in Britain. 2

Credit Terms and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade

In another important line of transatlantic commerce, the slave trade, credit was also extensively used. Slave merchants in British ports relied on a chain of credit for goods intended for sale in West Africa and African dealers relied upon advances of trade goods from ship captains.51 Credit in the slave trade also underpinned the sale of Africans to Caribbean planters, but in this sector of commerce factors and planters had more input into credit arrangements than was the case with transatlantic correspondents in the export trade.52 Because the slave trade was particularly risky and complex, with returns on slave sales taking well in excess of a calendar year, British merchants needed considerable flexibility in the credit terms they offered and sometimes needed to extend credit to cover payment periods in excess of those typical in the dry goods trade. In the 1670s, when the English slave trade was in its infancy, West Indian bills were usually payable by planters at thirty or forty days after sight.53 Such short-dated bills could be found a century later, but longer dated

49 50 51 52

53

R. A. and Elisabeth Humphreys (eds.), The Historian’s Business and other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 206. BLHU, A List of Manufactures exported by Samuel Elam of Leeds, 1 August 1771, Samuel Abbot Papers. CHS, Peter Verstille to John Olds, 18 August 1770, Peter Verstille letterbook (1765–74), and Joseph Trumbull to Jonathan Trumbull, Sr, 17 June 1764, Jonathan Trumbull, Sr, Papers, box 2. Robin Pearson and David Richardson, ‘Social Capital, Institutional Innovation and Atlantic Trade before 1800’, Business History, 50.6 (2008), pp. 769–70. See two studies by Joseph E. Inikori: ‘The Credit Needs of the African Trade and the Development of the Credit Economy in England’, Explorations in Economic History, 27 (1990), pp. 197–231, and Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 314–61. K. G. Davies, ‘The Origins of the Commission System in the West India Trade’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 2 (1952), p. 95.

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bills were then more common. This reflected the greater amount of credit supplied in the trade. Some merchants restricted remittances to bills drawn for three, six, nine, or twelve months, dividing the proceeds equally among the specified periods.54 Keeping credit periods short was preferable because it led to quicker returns, but increasingly longer credits – beyond one year – emerged in the slave trade by the mid-eighteenth century.55 Longer bills were often necessary to attract planters buying slaves out of season when they did not have funds to settle the account until proceeds from the following seasonal sugar harvest were received. Longer credits also allowed slave factors to increase the sale price for Africans.56 This was a frequent occurrence because ‘the great credit offered by the Guinea factors to the Purchaser of Slaves’, it was claimed in relation to Jamaica in 1775, was ‘a bait which few or no Planters can withstand’.57 In addition, in order to sell ‘meaner’ slaves – those older, less physically well-endowed and lacking in vigour – it was customary for factors to offer longer credit for planters to pay.58 Long credit could cause potential problems for factors selling slaves. This was pointed out in mercantile correspondence as an important piece of business news. Thomas Mills, an agent in St. Kitts for a London sugar-commission house, explained some of the problems: The risque we frequently run & the Long Credit we are always obligd to give on the Sale of Negroes renders the business (Even on the footing it now stands) not so advantageous as most people Imagin: The Factors in this Island are obliged to give Long Credit … and we cannot prevail on the purchasers to give us their Bond payable with interest at the time

54 E.g. Edward Grace to Day & Walsh, 22 June 1769, in T. S. Ashton (ed.), Letters of a West African Trader: Edward Grace, 1767–70 (London: Council for the Preservation of Business Archives, 1950), p. 32; NMM, John Chilcott, Thomas Longden & Thomas Deane to Captain William Llewellin, 30 October 1771, Account book of the Hector (1770–3); John Chilcott to Akers & Houston, 6 March 1775, cited in W. E. Minchinton, ‘The Voyage of the Snow Africa’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 37.3 (1951), p. 193. 55 Francis Bright to Bright, Whatley & Co., 15 December 1752, in Kenneth Morgan (ed.), The Bright-Meyler Papers: A Bristol-West India Connection, 1732–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 274. 56 Kenneth Morgan, ‘Remittance Procedures in the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade’, Business History Review, 79.4 (2005), pp. 736–8. 57 TNA, CO 137/70, Sir Basil Keith to ‘My Lord’, 12 June 1775. 58 NYHS, John Thornton to Samuel & William Vernon, 1 May 1771, Samuel and William Vernon Correspondence.

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stipulated for payment which is the practice in some parts of the West Indies.59 The bond referred to here was an instrument of security whereby the purchaser was bound to pay the factor acting as seller. Mills was not implying that selling slaves was unprofitable, for, by extending credit, factors eventually received more money than through cash sales. His point was that credit extension by sellers and interest charges on the sums they advanced took away more of their commission earnings than most contemporaries realised. Large importations of slaves strained the capacity of planters and merchants to pay promptly for the credit they had received in making slave sales.60 Therefore a system had evolved by the 1750s whereby the credit extended on slave sales was secured with bonds and paid for by bills carried ‘in the bottom of the ship’ that had brought the Africans. Under this system, bills were remitted on the same vessel that delivered the slaves, and specific times were established for payment before interest was due. Factors’ bills were issued in ‘sets’ with different dates of maturity. The terms of payment could be three, six, nine, and twelve months or four, eight, twelve, and sixteen months. This method of settling payment for credit extended was sometimes known as ‘the guarantee system’ because factors selling slaves had to name a surety to deal with their letters of credit in England. The guarantor (often a respected West India merchant) expected to receive payment from the factor before these bills became due. The funds came from another set of bills drawn by planters or agents buying staple produce in colonial ports for British principals.61 This method of immediate remittance altered the financial operation of the slave trade. Instead of British merchants supplying credit to planters, colonial factors and their backers (i.e. the guarantors) now supplied the credit. Merchants, factors, and planters all gained from the ‘guarantee’ system. British merchants benefited by having the advance of monies to enable planters to purchase slaves. Planters secured the credit they needed to buy Africans until they were in funds from the proceeds of harvested staple crops. Factors could 59 Thomas Mills to Richard Oswald & Co., 22 December 1752, cited in D. W. Thoms, ‘West India Merchants and Planters in the Mid-Eighteenth Century with Special Reference to St. Kitts’ (M.A. thesis, University of Kent, 1967), no. 69, n.p. 60 DUL, Hogg & Clayton to Alexander Strachan & Co., 6 June 1766, Hogg & Clayton letterbook and account (1762–71). 61 Morgan, ‘Remittance Procedures’, pp. 730–1; B. L. Anderson, ‘The Lancashire Bill System and its Liverpool Practitioners: The Case of a Slave Merchant’ in W. H. Chaloner and Barrie M. Ratcliffe (eds.), Trade and Transport: Essays in Economic History in Honour of T. S. Willan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 59–97.

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be fairly certain that the merchant house offering surety in Britain, if selected wisely according to commercial standing, would clear the funds and provide the backing for future slave sales. The guarantor usually received 0.5% commission on bills he accepted and on bills sent to him for collection. The system had the safeguard of transactions being conducted with sufficient intervals of time to coincide with the lengthy credit periods required in the British slave trade.62 3

Credit Terms and Commercial Correspondence

British merchants moved beyond specifying credit terms in their correspondence to provide business news about the commercial decisions affecting credit provision over time. Mercantile letters drew attention when appropriate to business houses ‘of the greatest Credit & Reputation’.63 Merchants also provided business guidance to explain how the complexities of credit could be handled. The Quaker merchant Robert Plumsted, for instance, thought that neither prudence nor good sense would justify a London merchant sending goods to Barbados during uncertain times at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War because some factors and planters failed to pay up until obliged to do so by law, ‘so that it’s reasonable to suppose that seven years credit would hardly satisfy them’.64 Sometimes this occurred because correspondents had favourable credit terms provided in their colony but British merchants were suffering from credit pressures at home. In such circumstances, the last resort was to sue correspondents to make them pay.65 The only escape route from paying creditors lay in the death of the debtor.66 Merchants on either side of the Atlantic sent details in their letters about the credit terms they offered and expected, but instances occurred where junior partners of North American firms were sent to British ports to find those

62 Morgan, ‘Remittance Procedures’, pp. 731–2; David Richardson, ‘The British Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina’, Slavery and Abolition, 12.3 (1991), pp. 151–60; Jacob M. Price, ‘Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies’, in Barbara L. Solow (ed.), Slavery and the rise of the Atlantic System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 311–15. 63 LoC, John Glover to Stephen Collins, 16 February 1774, Stephen Collins Papers, vol. 17. 64 CUL, Robert Plumstead to William Collier, 22 March 1756 Add. MS 2798, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1756–8). 65 JBC, Richard Meyler to Whatley, Meyler & Co., 22 November 1754, Richard Meyler letterbook (1751–64). My thanks to Charles and Primmy Bright of Melbourne for access to this volume in private hands. 66 JBC, Richard Meyler to Jeremiah Meyler, 16 November 1759, Ibid.

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who would offer the most generous and flexible credit.67 In all cases where credit was likely to be provided, business advice was given to deal only with trusted and careful merchants. It was ill-advised to undertake trade arrangements with people who failed to observe discretion in dealings with their principals. In particular, it was essential to avoid dealing with a merchant who ‘may imprudently sap his credit by foolish or malicious whispers’.68 British merchants advised their correspondents and factors in North America to gather information about the people with whom they entered into business in their localities and to establish secure means for ensuring that defaults were avoided, if at all possible, on credit extended. Sometimes the advice proffered was quite detailed. In one instance a Scottish firm in the Virginia tobacco trade advised their correspondent to: cultivate an acquaintance with the characters and estates of the people in the neighbourhood and with whom you deal. Should you find any of the present debtors dubious … or more in debt than there is a probability of their paying, endeavour to give security by giving long credit and steer clear of such in future  … observe to give no credit to tradesmen or to overseers unless their employers become security for what they deal.69 Merchants were instructed not to advance credit to people about whom warnings had been issued, especially when it was known that unlimited credit had been given to North Americans with no stock which had led to business failures. Selling goods cheaply by North American correspondents in order to support their credit could lead to their ruin and also damage merchants in Britain who had supplied the goods.70 British merchants faced problems in settling their accounts especially when planters and other correspondents piled up 67

For a Maryland firm sending a partner to London with this intention, see Price (ed.), Joshua Johnson’s letterbook, p. xiii. For a Philadelphia Quaker merchant gathering details about British trade practices, including credit terms, during a tour of the British Isles, see Kenneth Morgan (ed.), An American Quaker in the British Isles: The Travel Journals of Jabez Maud Fisher, 1775–1779 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 68 Henry Laurens to Isaac King, 6 September 1764, in Rogers et al. (eds.), The Papers of Henry Laurens. Volume Four, p. 402. See Siobhan Talbott and Sophie Jones’s chapter in this volume. 69 William Cuninghame & Co. to Robert Paton, 8 February 1773, in T. M. Devine (ed.), A Scottish Firm in Virginia 1767–1777: W. Cuninghame & Co., Scottish History Society, fourth series, 20 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1984), p. 66. 70 Henry Laurens to Isaac King, 6 September 1764, in Rogers et al. (eds.), The Papers of Henry Laurens. Volume Four, p. 403; MHS, Jonathan Jackson to Barnards, Harrison & Co., 30 May 1767, Jonathan Jackson letterbook (1765–74).

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large debts and then took on new business before paying off credit already granted.71 Warnings were issued that the long credits offered to Jamaican planters could have a catastrophic impact on a firm’s trade.72 One merchant criticised ‘the pernicious practice of giving … long credit’.73 In times of commercial depression, merchants reminded their correspondents of the need for timely remittances: as the Glasgow merchant James Lawson once put it, ‘several of our Virginia & West India merchants are lately broke here & several more suspected which hurts Credit much and makes People push one another more than they otherwise would’.74 Merchants who had built up an established reputation based upon trust in their commercial dealings and had complied with securing full and prompt payments were in an optimal position to secure credit from suppliers and to extend it to their correspondents.75 They insisted on prudence and care before granting further credit to existing business contacts.76 Merchants were particularly concerned that their credit should not be ruined, for information soon spread about financial difficulties throughout the transatlantic business world and adversely affected their trading situation and opportunities.77 Thus one merchant correspondent in Jamaica asked his merchant principal and relative in Bristol not to mention problems when he was in financial difficulty for ‘it can only stab our credit by which men in business are supported’.78 Loss of credit was strongly associated with business failure. To ruin credit was thus regarded as the equivalent of destroying all aspects of a merchant’s trade relationships.79 Businessmen cast a beady eye over the information they had available on correspondents. The Irish printer Curtis Brett, who lived in Jamaica for some years after 1748, referred to an indiscretion in his firm’s

71 JBC, Richard Meyler to Jeremiah Meyler, 4 January 1755, Richard Meyler letterbook (1751–64). 72 Jeremiah Meyler to Richard Meyler, 1 July 1752, in Morgan (ed.), The Bright-Meyler Papers, p. 260. 73 Quoted in C. A. J. Skeel, ‘The Letter-book of a Quaker Merchant, 1756–8’, The English Historical Review, 31.121 (1916), p. 142. 74 NRS, James Lawson to John Semple, 30 December 1762, James Lawson letterbook (1762– 76), Semple, Jamieson, Lawson Papers. 75 Devine, The Tobacco Lords, p. 90. 76 Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?, p. 112. 77 Meyler, Hall & Torry to Henry Bright, 26 July 1758, in Morgan (ed.), The Bright-Meyler Papers, p. 239. 78 Jeremiah Meyler to Henry Bright, 18 February 1764, in ibid., p. 386. 79 Meyler, Hall & Torry to Henry Bright, 26 July 1758, in ibid., p. 339.

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accounts ‘in suffering some Persons to get deeply in our debt, whom I would not have credited a single Pound’.80 Even seemingly rich clients needed careful scrutiny. Thus Brett singled out Philip Pinnock, a wealthy member of the Jamaica Council, as ‘a Man of considerable Estate, but so much in Debt … that no man’s Credit was more notoriously bad’.81 There were of course more positive aspects of credit provision. Merchants at Charleston, it was claimed in the mid-eighteenth century, began by securing credit to carry out trade and, if they were diligent and industrious and made proper remittances, British merchants would trust them more and enable Charleston merchants to extend their trade further.82 Long credit could be offered on the sale of goods ‘provided the persons were secure’.83 Whatever sale terms for goods were agreed, there was no escaping the fact that vending goods on credit prevailed over cash transactions. Thus, as a correspondent in Westmoreland County, Virginia, noted to a merchant in Glasgow in 1774, ‘Credit is a thing so very common here that there is not one person in a hundred who pays the ready money, for the goods he takes up’.84 Credit crises affecting all branches of trade were an occasional shock to commercial relations in selective years during the eighteenth century.85 The largest such financial crisis in the period covered in this chapter was that which occurred in 1772–3. This stemmed from continued speculation in East India Company shares and bill of exchange flows between England and Scotland, as well as an oversupply of British manufactured goods to North American markets for which it proved difficult to secure prompt remittances. Many traders fell into debt and bankruptcy rates increased rapidly as a result.86 80 NMM, Entry in ‘Autobiography of Curtis Brett Snr, b. 1720 d. 1784 in the form of letters to his son, written 1775–1780’, f. 25. My thanks to Charles Brett for allowing me to consult and quote from this manuscript. 81 Ibid., f. 25. 82 David, Trade, Politics, and Revolution, p. 28. 83 NEHGS, Henry Bromfield to Jonathan Clarke, 20 July 1772, Henry Bromfield letterbook (1771–3). 84 ‘Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Westmoreland County, Virginia, to his friend in Glasgow, dated June 30: from the Glasgow Journal of August 18, 1774’ in American Archives: Fourth Series. Containing a Documentary History of the English Colonies in North America, from the King’s Message to Parliament, of March 7, 1774, to the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Volume 1 (Washington, DC: St Claire Clark and Peter Force, 1837), p. 971. 85 Hoppit, ‘Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England’, pp. 39–58. 86 Richard B. Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, Journal of Economic History, 20.2 (1960), pp. 161–86; Julian Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 105, 131; S. D. Smith, Slavery, Family and

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British merchants swiftly advised their American correspondents of these difficult business circumstances. One London house wrote to a correspondent in Maryland shortly after the financial crisis occurred that ‘these immense failures have given a general alarm to credit even among the most wealthy traders’.87 A Scottish firm trading in manufactured goods and tobacco concluded that the ‘unsettled state of credit’ should encourage Virginia storekeepers to ‘sell only to those whose credit is indisputably good’.88 A London firm in the tobacco trade advised a family correspondent in Virginia that credit was ‘so precarious and Trade so stagnated’.89 Another London merchant firm referred to credit in trade becoming ‘very precarious, and money unusually very scarce’.90 Credit problems were ‘still in a shocking situation’ in 1773.91 Small wonder that British merchants in the tobacco trade urged their correspondents in 1772–3 to liquidate their credit arrangements in the Chesapeake.92 4

Credit, Debt and British Transatlantic Trade

The obverse of credit was debt and merchants were well aware that failure to meet credit payments could seriously affect their own credit with their suppliers. In circumstances where this was not held in check, the result was the piling up of debts and bankruptcy. Falling into debt was stigmatised as a breaking of personal trust and reciprocal business obligations between merchants and their correspondents. It affected suppliers and customers of the merchants concerned, especially those operating on low levels of capital.93 Debtors needed to be chased up to pay remittances ‘without w[hi]ch’, in the words of a large London tobacco merchant, ‘’tis impossible to carry on business with

87 88 89 90 91 92 93

Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 131; Thomas M. Truxes, The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), p. 260. MLHS, Mauduit, Wright & Co. to Stephen West, 6 July 1772, Oden Papers. James Robinson to Francis Hay, 13 October 1772, in Devine (ed.), A Scottish Firm in Virginia, p. 62. John Norton to John Hatley Norton, 6 August 1772, in Mason (ed.), John Norton & Sons, p. 265. Fludyer, Marsh and Hudson to James Beekman, 25 March 1773, in White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers. vol. 2, p. 745. James Robinson to William Cuninghame, 23 June 1773, in Devine (ed.), A Scottish Firm in Virginia, p. 74. Devine, The Tobacco Lords, p. 112. Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community, p. 144.

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Credit & Advantage’.94 Non-payment for credit extended and evidence of debts accumulating usually led to the loss of a merchant’s credit and reputation.95 The scale of debts accumulated in North America and the West Indies was substantial. In 1766 the Jamaican merchant Thomas Collett stated before the House of Commons that planters owed £6 million to Britain, which by the year 2000 was the equivalent of £342 million. The Abbé Raynal in A Philosophical … History … of the East and West Indies (1788) suggested that the British Caribbean islands owed something like £16 million to Britain at the time of the American Revolution – which in 2000 was worth around £976 million.96 The total mercantile debt owed by the North American mainland colonies to London – all based on extension of credit  – peaked at £3 million in 1774.97 For the same year, it has been estimated that around £9 million was the value of commercial credit circulating in the North American-West Indian-West African trading complex.98 The lion’s share of these vast debts were owed to British merchants. It is therefore unsurprising to find that bankruptcies were greater among merchants than among any other occupational category in eighteenth-century England.99 Information concerning bankruptcies was sometimes circulated by British merchants to North American correspondents as a warning to guard about lax business procedures. Thus in 1754 Robert Plumsted of London hoped news of a merchant’s bankruptcy would provide ‘a check to the unreasonable humour which prevails of giving credit to almost any person who calls himself

94 John Norton to John Hatley Norton, April 1768, in Mason (ed.), John Norton & Sons, p. 48. 95 Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?, p. 118. 96 Abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (London: A. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1788); R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas (eds.), Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliament respecting North America, 1754–1783, 6 vols. (New York: Kraus International Publications, 1982–6), vol. II, p. 384; Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 54; Bowen, Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, p. 94; John J. McCusker, How Much is that in Real Money? A Historical Commodity Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2001), pp. 98–9. For detailed discussion of credit lapses and debts piled up among planters and factors in the British Caribbean, see Richard Pares, A West India Fortune (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1950), pp. 267–92; Morgan (ed.), The Bright-Meyler Papers, pp. 100–10; and Smith, Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism, pp. 177–225. 97 Nash, ‘The Organization of Trade and Finance’, p. 124. 98 Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade, p. 123. 99 Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business, p. 96.

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a merchant’, adding that ‘this practice has glutted the markets all over America & Ruin’d many an honest man in this Citty’.100 5

Bills of Exchange

The main paper instrument associated with issuing credit was the post-dated bill of exchange, which could circulate either through banks or between individuals. Passing bills of exchange from hand to hand increased the money supply, allowing scarce money resources to be set aside over a short time period.101 Bills of exchange had formed part of western Europe’s financial transactions since the Middle Ages. They had been used in England since the mid-fifteenth century, following the example of Italian banking houses, but their full utilisation only came in the late seventeenth century for inland transactions and then to support credit provision in overseas trade.102 As Jacob M. Price succinctly explains, ‘the bill of exchange was primarily an instrument to transfer and thus realise credits at a distance’.103 The regular use of bills of exchange to settle accounts for monies extended overcame the practical problems of finding sufficient specie to remit from British America to Britain and the possibility of the loss of metallic currencies during ocean voyages.104 Merchants perused their correspondence for details of bills supplied, and closely followed alterations in the exchange rate that might affect payments owed to them.105 The flow and functioning of bills of exchange was the main commercial instrument through which credit balances were settled. Bills of exchange usually involved four parties – the drawer, who had supplied and written out the bill; the drawee, the person named on the bill to whom it was delivered; the 100 Beinecke, Robert Plumstead to John Vanderspiegle, 19 February 1754, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1752–6). 101 Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade, p. 121. 102 B. L. Anderson, ‘Money and the Structure of Credit in the Eighteenth Century’, Business History, 12.2 (1970), p. 90; W. T. Baxter, The House of Hancock: Business in Boston 1724–1775 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), p. 30; John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). 103 Jacob M. Price, ‘Transaction Costs: A Note on Merchant Credit and the Organization of Private Trade’ in James D. Tracy (ed.), The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 287. 104 Ibid., p. 283; Truxes, Irish-American Trade, p. 64. 105 Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Develop­ ment in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 95.

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payer, who had agreed to pay the bill; and the payee, the person due to receive the money. Trust lay at the heart of operating such bills because the flow of funds only worked if the payee trusted the names of the payer and the drawee. The payee would only accept the bill for payment in these circumstances. If a bill was not accepted, the payee had to keep it until the time specified ended to determine whether the payer would pay or not. At times of high demand during peak payment periods, bills became scarce and those available were snapped up by the highest bidders. A further complication was that the payer could refuse to make payment for the bill if the drawer did not have a credit balance with him. If the payee could not secure payment he ‘protested’ the bill through a legal document drawn up by a public notary, who specified that the bill had not been paid. The case could then end up in court.106 The names of various parties specified on bills of exchange were carefully scrutinised by merchants sending and receiving letters. The exchange rate for bills against British sterling was always included.107 These details were a vital part of the business news circulating in the eighteenth-century transatlantic trading world. British merchants sought to mitigate non-payments for credit transactions by advising their correspondents about the business etiquette to be followed for the circulation of bills of exchange. Information was provided in these circumstances on bills noted, paid, and protested. This could entail charges for the cost of protest, damages, and interest.108 British and North American merchants commonly held the view that inexperienced traders were more likely to default on debt payments than reputable correspondents.109 Receipt of bills for non-payment led one Charleston merchant to note that he would need to replace the amount with his supplier in London to save his credit.110 Correspondents who made a bill payable in a place without mentioning the

106 Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community, pp. 154, 157–8; Edward C. Papenfuse, In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchants in the Era of the American Revolution, 1763–1805 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 37; Price (ed.), Joshua Johnson’s letterbook, p. xviii. 107 Truxes, The Overseas Trade of British America, p. 152. 108 E.g. JBC, Richard Meyler to Meyler & Hall, 5 June 1761, and to Meyler & Hall, 22 November 1763, Richard Meyler letterbook (1751–64); Joshua Johnson to the firm, 7 October 1772, in Price (ed.), Joshua Johnson’s letterbook, p. 49. 109 Matson, Merchants and Empire, p. 66. 110 Henry Laurens to Hugh McKay, 16 June 1748, in Philip M. Hamer and George C. Rogers, Jr (eds.), The Papers of Henry Laurens. Volume One. September 11, 1746–October 31, 1755 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 150–1.

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relevant merchant house acting as payer had their bills returned with additional charges added for the irregularity of the procedure.111 If remittances were insufficient to pay bills, the bills were noted and protested and a declaration made upon each protest specifying how much had been received in part, which then secured the remainder, with the customary damage and interest incurred.112 Curtis Brett stated in his autobiography that remittances in bills of exchange were often returned to Jamaica ‘as Gentlemen there will often draw Bills on Merchants in London who have no Effects in their hands, in order to gain Time, or put off a pressing Dun, tho’ they pay 14 p[er] cent Damages on such returned Bills’.113 Merchants also had a certain amount of legal protection when extending credit: through the Colonial Debts Act of 1732, and through paper instruments such as bonds. In the case of the Colonial Debts Act, the security came though the provision of a uniform system that stipulated that the lands, houses, chattels, and slaves of debtors in the British American colonies were liable for satisfying debts. Bonds required debtors to sign and promise expressly to pay specific sums owed to creditors either on demand or by a specific date. Bonds were enforceable legal instruments and were frequently required for planters buying slaves on credit. Various laws were passed to deal with mounting debts. For instance, an act of 1774 (14 Geo. III c. 28) attempted to regulate the fraudulent passing of bonds, promissory notes, or bills of exchange by requiring a written statement concerning the details of the assignment and a further statement if a court judgement had been obtained against the paper instrument.114 However, the time and costs of pursuing debts worked against the collection of monies owed and it is not known how often, and with what outcomes, the Colonial Debts Act of 1732 was invoked. In North America and the West Indies, as in Britain, many large debts strung out over a lengthy period, often termed desperate debts by contemporaries, were never repaid.115 111 JBC, Thomas Haddock to Richard Meyler, 22 October 1763, Richard Meyler letterbook (1751–64). 112 CUL, Robert Plumstead to Robert Wilson, 15 July 1756, Add. MS 2798, Robert Plumstead letterbook (1756–8); Samuel and Thomas Fludyer to James Beekman, 24 March 1764, in White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers. vol. 2, p. 703. 113 NMM, entry in ‘Autobiography of Curtis Brett, Snr, b. 1720 d. 1784 in the form of letters to his son, written 1775–1780’, f. 22. 114 Morgan (ed.), The Bright-Meyler Papers, p. 101; Price, ‘Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies’, p. 310; Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 288–30. 115 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, p. 175.

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6 Conclusion Merchants perused commercial letters carefully for information about shipping movements, trade commodities, fluctuations in markets, and any alterations to instructions, but they particularly noted information flows containing business news about the provision and level of credit. In the British transatlantic trading world of the eighteenth century, an intricate commercial web was constructed in which credit played a central part. Merchants usually purchased and sold goods on credit rather than relying on cash and so, in nearly all mercantile transactions, this was a major factor in commerce. The provision of credit over long distances involved dealing more often than not with correspondents who had never met merchants supplying goods. This meant that information about the business reputation of merchants, their ability to remit proceeds punctually, and their skill in avoiding defaulting on their financial obligations was scrutinised to determine whether they could be trusted and on what credit terms. As noted above, a vast empire of credit underpinned the business of merchants and their correspondents in the eighteenth-century transatlantic trading world. Successful merchants were able to calculate whom they should trust in setting up trading relationships and what terms they should specify. Close attention was paid to the timing of credit allowed and to the receipt of payments in the expected time framework. Providing credit was thus a flexible means of enabling the wheels of commerce to turn regularly and an important component of the flow of business news across the Atlantic. Lengths of credit were adjusted by merchants, expanding when trade was booming and secure payments were likely to ensue, and contracting in more difficult trading conditions such as in certain war years or when demand for commodities declined and retrenchment was necessary. Consideration of two particular trades – the export trade in dry goods and the slave trade – shows that credit provision was adapted carefully to suit the needs of different lines of commerce. In the case of the export trade, more generous credit terms could be offered to reliable correspondents because there was a strong expectation that payments would be met punctually. In the case of the slave trade, much longer credits were offered to planters to allow them to accrue the proceeds of yearly sales of their staple crops to enable them to have sufficient funds to settle their obligations. An active market in bills of exchange on both sides of the Atlantic provided the paper instruments to settle credit arrangements and the mechanisms of noting and protesting bills, and the use of the guarantee system in the slave trade offered good security against defaults. Additional protection was provided by the provisions of the Colonial Debts Act of 1732.

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Extending credit of course could be a risky matter even in circumstances where merchants had taken all of the necessary steps to ensure they were dealing with reliable agents and correspondents. Bad timing in the sale of goods, extending credit to correspondents without sufficient capital resources, fluctuations in exchange rates, the late arrival of commodities – all these and other business contingencies could affect the security of credit. It was not possible to guard fully against these possibilities. Given the risks of trade, debts could pile up and become quite substantial, as the evidence cited above on the indebtedness of North American and West Indian planters to British merchants on the eve of the American War of Independence shows. Merchants, however, sought to keep trading in such circumstances until a financial crisis caused business failure and bankruptcy. There was generally caution against terminating connections with tardy correspondents unless a dire situation had been reached. Despite the risks associated with extending credit, merchants therefore realised that information flows on credit provision were an essential part of conducting business in the transatlantic economy in the eighteenth century.

Chapter 3

Spreading Information in Eighteenth-Century Mercantile Networks: Experiments in Historical Social Network Analysis Peter Buckles The concept of a ‘network’ has become a familiar feature within socioeconomic and business historiography in recent years. One might be forgiven for thinking that historians’ recent obsession with the concept has had something to do with the rise of social media, and there is no doubt that the increasing ability of social scientists to measure our digital interactions with each other, not to mention the increasing power of computers to handle such large amounts of data, has been instrumental in advancing the discipline. Network analysis as we know it today has a much earlier genesis, beginning in the 1930s with Jacob Moreno, the sociogram, and the foundation of the field of sociometry.1 Markus Gamper traces the origins of network analysis to an even earlier time, arguing that the grounds were laid in the foundation of modern sociology. It was Marx, Durkheim, and von Wiese, amongst others, who showed how the relationships between people could be an object of study in itself, and who showed, further, that these relationships could form the basis for human society – with ‘society’ used, in turn, to explain human behaviour.2 The term ‘network’ was not employed until after World War II, however. With the Cold War came the notion that spies operated within networks, and with this came an increasing number of scholarly outputs that examined how individuals acted as nodes within networks, and how the construction of these networks shaped the behaviour of individuals.3 Historians did not pay too much attention to social network analysis methodologies until late in the twentieth century. The idea of a network – the idea 1 Jacob L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive? A New Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations (Washington, DC: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1934). 2 Markus Gamper, ‘The History of “Relational Science” and Social Network Analysis’, in Andreas Gestrich and Martin Stark (eds.), Debtors, Creditors, and their Networks: Social Dimensions of Monetary Dependence from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London: German Historical Institute London, 2015), pp. 14–15. 3 David Hancock, ‘The Trouble with Networks: Managing the Scots’ Early-Modern Madeira Trade’, The Business History Review, 79.3 (2005), pp. 471–472.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689879_004

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that people have a set of other people that they are connected to, and that these connections influenced their choices  – is hardly new, and many historians have drawn on nineteenth-century social theorists, such as Marx. Yet formalising this – first in drawing explicitly on network theory, and second by quantifying networks in order to measure them and understand them – is a more recent phenomenon.4 Charles Wetherell, in 1998, was among the first to bring ‘historical social network analysis’ (HSNA) to historians’ attention. Wetherell outlined the questions that could be addressed through HSNA and introduced many of its key concepts. He also pointed out some of the problems, including, significantly, the availability of source material.5 HSNA has since evolved as an important branch of the digital humanities and network sciences.6 This chapter explores recent developments in the use of social network analysis in historical research. It begins with a literature review, before exploring two case studies that outline, through experimentation, the possibilities of using the methodology to understand networks as the foundational element of the passage of news, information, goods, credit, and money. These case studies, focused on mercantile operations in the late eighteenth century, demonstrate how the methodology can be used and indicate some future directions for where the field of HSNA is headed. The first explores the institutional networks associated with the Bristol West India Association from the 1780s to the first decade of the 1800s. The second assesses the degree to which location can be used as a predictor for network formation amongst Liverpool’s slave traders before the American Revolution, using coordinate data as the basis for understanding investment networks. These case studies will be of interest to historians and historical social network analysts alike, and both demonstrate how information and news networks might be measured and analysed. Those unfamiliar with HSNA are advised to visit the appendix to this chapter for an introduction to the methodology, especially before reading the case studies (which are quite technical in places); those confident in their understanding of measures of centrality may happily read on. 4 The use of network theory and the visualisation and quantification of networks may go hand in hand, but scholars can draw on the former without using the latter. 5 Charles Wetherell, ‘Historical Social Network Analysis’, International Review of Social History, 43 (1998), pp. 125–144. I use HSNA from hereon to mean a quantitative analysis of social networks – broadly defined – with an explicit application of social network analysis methodology using archival source material. See: Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and recently, John Scott, Social Network Analysis (London: Sage, 2017, 4th ed). 6 See recently: Olivier Le Deuff, Digital Humanities: History and Development (London: ISTE and Wiley, 2018). For his discussion of SNA, see pp. 118–122.

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Movements in the Historiography

The use of social network analysis in fields beyond sociology goes back a long way. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on a selection of more recent works relevant to this volume – and those closer to us in time, given the more recent adoption of the quantitative elements of network analysis that are important to the historiography as it stands. I will focus on four major themes: change over time, gender, big data, and the combination of SNA with other methodologies. 1.1 Change over Time One of the most influential recent papers on HSNA in Business History has been John and Sheryllynne Haggerty’s study of the network of the eighteenth-century slave trader Samuel Rainford.7 The paper is exploratory, showing the ways in which the methodology can be used, and the measures which can be drawn from it (and what these mean for historical interpretation). The issue of change over time is not explored here – this paper, like others that followed, relies on a single snapshot of a particular period.8 Historians have, since, strayed away from using just one snapshot, and have instead employed several to demonstrate changes over time. Haggerty and Haggerty were again influential in moving the discipline forward in this respect. Using a ten-year periodisation, the authors show how the overlapping memberships of Liverpool’s various clubs and institutions grew and developed. They are able to identify movements, not just in the broader network, but at the individual level, seeing how particular actors became more or less influential.9 A similar approach was adopted by Emily Buchnea, who uses a range of sources to reconstruct the New York–Liverpool network in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Buchnea uses three distinct 18–25-year periods, representing different phases in the development of the network.10 While this serves as a natural extension of the single-snapshot approach that enables 7

John Haggerty and Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Visual Analytics of an Eighteenth-Century Business Network’, Enterprise & Society, 11.1 (2010), pp. 1–25. 8 See similarly Pierre Gervais, ‘Mercantile Credit and Trading Rings in the Eighteenth Century’, Annals. History, Social Sciences: English Edition, 67.4 (2012), pp. 693–730; Cheryl S. McWatters and Yannick Lemarchand, ‘Merchant Networks and Accounting Discourse: The Role of Accounting Transactions in Network Relations’, Accounting History Review, 23.1 (2013), pp. 49–83. 9 John Haggerty and Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘The Life Cycle of a Metropolitan Business Network: Liverpool 1750–1810’, Explorations in Economic History, 48 (2011), pp. 189–206. 10 Emily Buchnea, ‘Transatlantic Transformations: Visualizing Change Over Time in the Liverpool–New York Trade Network, 1763–1833’, Enterprise & Society, 15.4 (2014), pp. 687–721.

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historians to compare the same space over different periods, problems with this approach have become apparent. Importantly, making sure that the periodisation is historically meaningful can be difficult. As Kate Davison has noted: The static nature of network visualizations also creates a false sense of stability that could be swiftly undermined by a range of factors, not least sudden death. This can be mitigated by using several visualizations to represent change over time … but even then network graphs are snapshots of an inherently unstable and uncertain reality.11 My own contribution to this literature shows how the measures that can be derived from the networks can be collated over granular periods (as granular as the researcher desires) and represented as time series data. This reveals the myriad ways in which the influence of network actors changes over time and directs researchers’ attention, not just to the actors themselves, but to the specific periods at which they were (and were not) active, challenging the researcher to explain why.12 The first case study that I will explore here showcases one way this can be done, but no doubt I will not have the last word on the subject. Future developments are likely to focus on the ways in which such historical networks can be represented using digital media. Increasingly sophisticated software and programming tools allow researchers to show how networks changed over time with dynamic movie or GIF files.13 The supplementation of print media with moving images in this field will undoubtedly become more common, though this will depend on the ability of journals and traditional academic outlets to accommodate these new forms. 1.2 Gender HSNA is increasingly being recognised, not just for its ability to speak to the structure of communities or identify influential individuals, but also for its ability to identify people whose influence might otherwise go unrecognised. Significantly, this includes women. As Sophie Jones and Siobhan Talbott have argued:

11 Kate Davison, ‘Early Modern Social Networks: Antecedents, Opportunities, and Challenges’, The American Historical Review, 124.2 (2019), pp. 456–482. 12 Peter Buckles, ‘A historical social network analysis of John Pinney’s Nevis–Bristol network: Change over time, the “network memory”, and reading against the grain of historical sources’, Enterprise & Society, 24.3 (2023), pp. 891–922. 13 See, for example: Alex Brey, ‘Temporal Network Analysis with R’, The Programming Historian (2018), available: https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/temporal-net work-analysis-with-r (accessed 23 October 2023).

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Traditionally, scholarship of the eighteenth-century Atlantic has depicted mercantile activity as a solely masculine pursuit. At best, such works ignore the essential work performed by women and their contributions to early-modern commerce completely; at worst, they emphasize the exceptional entrepreneurial vigor of individual males who acted, it would seem, entirely alone.14 Recent works have unveiled a more complex reality. Women fulfilled a range of business functions across the socioeconomic strata. They acted autonomously, pursuing their own interests, or used their particular expertise – expertise that their husbands did not share – to support their husbands’ firms. They therefore acted not just as consumers, but as traders in their own right, as tavern owners, seamstresses, midwives, and as proxy shoppers.15 HSNA has been able to illuminate their activities. In my own research, I have been able to demonstrate that Jane Pinney, wife of Bristol merchant John Pinney, was influential within the business network that was built around John’s plantation on Nevis. Moreover, following this revelation, I have explored what her influence meant in qualitative terms, uncovering her role as a proxy shopper acting on behalf of (female) consumers in the West Indies.16 Yet identifying women with HSNA is not without its problems. As noted by the researchers working on the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) project, women can be underrepresented in the primary and secondary sources that form the basis for network analysis (including, in this case, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)), while the fact that women’s surnames changed makes identification difficult. Recognising this bias in the SDFB project was an important step towards addressing it, though limitations remain.17 Despite this, historical social network analysts are confident in the power of the methodology to lift the women who might otherwise have escaped our attention to the forefront of the analysis. Catherine Medici, who has reviewed numerous projects that use HSNA with a focus on gender, and whose own research has unveiled the women within the political and familial networks surrounding Elizabeth I and the Sidney family, has argued persuasively that, despite issues with source materials: 14

Sophie H. Jones and Siobhan Talbott, ‘Sole Traders? The Role of the Extended Family in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Business Networks’, Enterprise & Society (2022), p. 1093. 15 See works cited in Jones and Talbott, ‘Sole Traders?’; Buckles, ‘A historical social network analysis’; and Catherine Medici, ‘Using Network Analysis to Understand Early Modern Women’, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 13.1 (2018), pp. 153–162. 16 Buckles, ‘A historical social network analysis’. 17 Medici, ‘Using Network Analysis’. See: Francis Bacon Network, ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’, available: http://sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/ (accessed 23 October 2023).

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Network analysis highlights and brings to prominence women who held important structural roles or were central within networks, many of whom other methods of network study have overlooked or obscured. Network analysis shows great promise to being of use to scholars trying to make early modern women more visible.18 It is not just women to whom researchers must pay attention. As I have shown elsewhere, HSNA is a useful tool for identifying enslaved people and people of colour, similarly if not more sorely underrepresented in primary source material, who were nevertheless active within historical trading networks (despite and because of their conditions of enslavement).19 Indeed, as Robert Morrissey points out, HSNA can point to figures that even the researcher compiling the data may not expect to be significant, and future research can and should be directed to using this methodology to uncover who they are.20 1.3 Big Data Earlier, more experimental approaches to HSNA used small datasets to test the approach. Yet researchers, fully realising the potential of SNA, have become increasingly ambitious. Using more data increases the demands not just on computational power, but also on researchers’ time and energy. Compiling a large dataset for network analysis, which involves the transcription of historical sources as well as the usual data cleaning familiar to social network analysts, is incredibly time-consuming. Nevertheless, the results yield significant insights into how large communities functioned. Haggerty and Haggerty followed their early explorations of the methodology with an analysis of several of Liverpool’s trading clubs and institutions. The authors include 1,700 actors over a sixty-year period. They are able to identify important trends, including the changes not just in the number of actors in the networks for each decade, but in the shifting relationships between the actors and the institutions, which affected the structure and density of the overall network. The authors also made significant historical interpretations on the basis of their analysis: Haggerty and Haggerty link the increasing dysfunctionality within the network, for example, with the inability of the Liverpool merchants to properly defend their financial interests against the movement to abolish the slave 18 Medici, ‘Using Network Analysis’, p. 162. See also: Catherine Medici, ‘Visualizing the Sidney Network’, Catherine Medici Ph.D, available: https://catherinemediciphd.org/visua lizing-the-sidney-network/ (accessed 23 October 2023). 19 Buckles, ‘A historical social network analysis’. 20 See Robert Michael Morrissey, ‘Archives of Connection: “Whole Network” Analysis and Social History’, Historical Methods, 48.2 (2015), p. 76.

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trade.21 More recently, Edmond Smith has analysed the structure of investment in the East India Company in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This has involved representing the networks of hundreds of individuals, the visualisation of which immediately reveals the extent of overlapping interests of company directors and investors.22 Other large, collaborative, public-facing projects have also embraced big-data HSNA. The aforementioned SDFB project is a constantly expanding representation of an early modern social network as it was built around Francis Bacon.23 The network was established on the basis of the ODNB, which provided a ready source of digitised information that could be mined. This approach stands in contrast to that referenced earlier, where historians have directly translated archival material into network data. The ODNB is, of course, the result of the labour of tens of thousands of historians and biographers, making the SDFB project intensely collaborative. The need for developing complex algorithms also made this project inherently cross-disciplinary.24 Similarly, the Mapping the Republic of Letters project, based around the correspondence networks of key enlightenment figures, has visualised the intellectual networks that were so significant to the development of politics and economics (and other key areas) from the seventeenth century. Dan Edelstein and the other project coordinators observe, importantly, that, even if new insights are not necessarily generated at each stage, embracing the methodology has allowed the researchers ‘to sort through, refine, confirm, or refute the different insights [previous] historians had, as well as to formulate new ones that emerge when we step back from the details of any particular subset of a correspondence to observe its contours’.25 The use of big data in HSNA is thus likely to become more important, especially as transcription and digitisation projects, not to mention progress with transcription software that is able to ‘read’ handwriting that even seasoned historians struggle with, become an important area of research and development in the humanities.26 21 Haggerty and Haggerty, ‘The Life Cycle of a Metropolitan Business Network’. 22 Edmond Smith, ‘The Social Networks of Investment in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal, 64.4 (2021), pp. 912–939. See also Smith’s chapter in this volume. 23 See: ‘Francis Bacon Network’, Six Degrees of Francis Bacon. 24 Christopher Warren, et al., ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10.3 (2016), available: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/3/000244/000244.html (accessed 23 October 2023). 25 Dan Edelstein et al., ‘Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project’, The American Historical Review, 122.2 (2017), p. 408. 26 For example, see the work of the Marine Lives project: http://www.marinelives.org /wiki/MarineLives (accessed 23 October 2023).

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The move to bigger and bigger data (including the use of data scraping, where a computer programme extracts large amounts of data from digital sources) is, of course, not without its issues. While missing records impact our interpretations of history across the discipline, such issues become more apparent with HSNA given the demanding data requirements of the methodology. This has prompted explorations into the impact of data loss on network measures. Reassuringly, Yann Ryan and Sebastian Ahnert found that the network centrality measures upon which we rely (see appendix to this chapter) were significantly affected only when over 60% of their test dataset was removed, and that individuals identified as significant within the whole dataset were still reliably identified even with a random 50% of the data.27 1.4 HSNA+ The latest development in the field of HSNA is the combination of the approach with other methodologies. Moving beyond the more straightforward iterative use of HSNA, where insights generated by the methodology are followed up with an exploration of the primary sources to confirm or contextualise such insights, historians are combining HSNA with geospatial or textual analysis, or more conventional statistical tools. Edmond Smith routinely combines HSNA with descriptive statistics, providing a range of means through which investment can be understood as not just an economic, but as a social endeavour. This has also been accompanied by an analysis of parish records to show where investors lived, which adds the socio-spatial dimension to the socio-economic.28 Haggerty and Haggerty have built on their earlier analysis of various Liverpool institutions by introducing a regression analysis to test the degree to which ties could be considered affective or instrumental. A distinction was drawn between actors who attended meetings regularly alongside others, whose presence was assumed to be because they valued the ‘social support, pleasure, and identity conferral’ of attending, while those who attended independently of the general membership are assumed to have attended for the ‘access to tangible resources and information’.29 The validity of the model – as with all models – rests on the validity of these assumptions. Yet the conceptualisation, and the ability of the researchers to tease from the data patterns 27 Yann C. Ryan and Sebastian E. Ahnert, ‘The Measure of the Archive: The Robustness of Network Analysis in Early Modern Correspondence’, Journal of Cultural Analytics, 7 (2021), pp. 57–88. 28 Edmond Smith, ‘The Global Interests of London’s Commercial Community, 1599–1625: Investment in the East India Company’, The Economic History Review, 71.4 (2018), pp. 1118–1146; Smith, ‘The Social Networks of Investment’. 29 John Haggerty and Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Networking with a Network: The Liverpool African Committee, 1750–1810’, Enterprise & Society, 18.3 (2017), p. 573.

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of attendance that speak to the motivations of the attendees, shows just how wide a range of interpretable historical insights can be drawn from network data. More recently, Haggerty and Haggerty have combined network analysis with textual analysis in a study of the network of London-based tobacco merchant, Joshua Johnson. This method involved the textual mining of a digitised version of Johnson’s letter book, and raised a range of questions for the researchers that speak not just to relationships, but to sentiment. The combination of questions with a different focus renders a more holistic approach to the ‘network narrative’, while the periodisation utilised allowed these questions to be asked with change over time in mind.30 The range of tools now available to historians, not just those relating to HSNA, but relating to geospatial analysis, textual analysis, statistical analysis, and other subsets of the digital humanities, provides fertile ground for experimentation with combinations thereof. 2

Case Study 1: The Network of the Bristol West India Association

The first of the two case studies that I explore here focuses on eighteenth-century Bristol. I recreate an ex-ante network – i.e., a hypothetical network of people who had access to one another – based on the meeting records of the Bristol West India Association. It is used to understand the changing influence of merchants over time within their community, with the analysis backed up with an examination of other sources of data, notably information on sugar exports. The Bristol West India Association was a club for merchants and planters involved in the West India trade. Its activity was a mixture of business and pleasure. Members would dine together, act collectively to set the standards for how business was conducted, and confront issues that affected their trade. The source material I have used to reconstruct the network of attendees and members is the Association’s minute book, which was kept from 1782, when the Association was re-established at the end of the American Revolutionary War, to 1805, when the book was filled.31 Their meetings concerned a variety of issues, including regulating the process of selling sugar, lobbying the government, especially in relation to taxes and, during wartime, the formation of 30

John Haggerty and Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Avoiding “Musty Mutton Chops”: The Network Narrative of an American Merchant in London, 1771–1774’, Essays in Economic & Business History, 37 (2019), pp. 1–42. 31 BA, MS SMV/8/3/2/1, West India Association Minute Book, 1782–1804 (though it does in fact extend to 1805), from here on BA, ‘WIA Minute Book’. The records of the WIA held by Bristol Archives end in 1857.

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convoys. Significantly, it also provided a space for information-sharing and discussion of the latest business news. As material for constructing networks, the minute book records information that can help infer interaction. The back of the book houses the Association’s accounts, which included the membership fees paid and by whom. The main body of the book notes the names of those in attendance at meetings where ‘business was conducted’  – that is, where votes were taken regarding issues affecting business  – and the dates of meetings. From here, we can identify two forms of relationship between members: the first, when individuals were members at the same time as others; the second, when they attended the same meeting.32 The network has thus been modelled on this basis, with the relationships weighted: for every time two people were members in the same year, and for every meeting they were at together, their relational tie receives plus one to its weight. Relationships are undirected. The model therefore places emphasis on repeat interaction. There are limitations to the source material: significantly, for meetings ‘where no business whatever was conducted’ none of the attendees are listed. On occasion, there are meetings where resolutions were made and the members are not listed, though this is uncommon – the secretaries were, for the most part, careful to list attendance. This means that we cannot necessarily infer social influence or status from this network, but we can identify individuals who had more opportunities for influence over business matters. Therefore, those who subscribed for the most years, and who attended the most meetings where business was conducted, will have interacted with the most people over business matters, and, we can infer, will have built up strong ties with those they attended alongside. Issues with recording may create some imbalance, but this is something that we need to bear in mind, rather than work around. Built into this, the records allow us to adhere some characteristics to the nodes. Significantly, there appear to have been various levels of membership. At the lowest level, there are those who attended some meetings but who did not pay membership fees, so who cannot be considered as members. These were individuals with specific interests in Bristol’s trade who were invited to meetings pertaining to particular business matters. Above these were those who paid their membership fees and were recognised as members. Above these were a select series of members who, from 1786, it was resolved that ‘any three of them be a Quorum to meet & do Business’ – they therefore had significant influence over and within the Association; I have called them ‘quorum members’. As well as the named individuals, this also included the secretary, elected 32 This is similar to: Haggerty and Haggerty, ‘The Life Cycle of a Metropolitan Business Network’.

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each year, who kept a record of each meeting. The secretary is, therefore, considered to be another stage in this hierarchy of membership. Finally, there is the chairman, of which there was only one during this period: William Miles, a longstanding member of the West India community, and one of the wealthiest men in Bristol.33 Miles signed all of the Association’s official correspondence and, when he stopped being a member in 1802, this role was handed over to the secretary. The chairman was not replaced, indicating that this may well have been a ceremonial role for one of the community’s most respected and longstanding merchants. Fig. 3.1 shows an overview of the network as it has been thusly modelled. The relational ties between each node are coloured on a scale of intensity: the lighter yellow represents weaker ties, while the darker red indicates stronger connections. The nodes have been coloured in accordance with their position on the hierarchy that I have inferred from their records. The node sizes have been adjusted for weighted degree, which accounts for not just the number of connections, but their intensity. There are 68 nodes and 912 edges. The network is reasonably small and densely interconnected. High-level measures of the network reveal that network density (actual connections that existed as a proportion of all potential connections) is 0.4, or 40% of all potential connections. The diameter is 3, meaning that the longest direct path (i.e., the longest shortest path, or geodesic) from one person to another is only three steps across the network. Given the nature of the relational ties, which represent the potential for interaction rather than giving evidence of actual interaction, this is unsurprising. This shows who the individuals had access to, rather than the people they accessed, per se. Most people connected to the network had between 7 and 38 connections (inclusive), with a large number concentrated between 19 and 22 (inclusive). There is another group of exceptional members with over 54 connections. Most people had a weighted score of 42 or under, with others going up to 202, and again an exceptional group of members with a weighted degree score of over 402. A visual inspection of the graph reveals who these exceptional central members were. Lowbridge Bright, Evan Baillie, John Maxse, Thomas Daniel Jr, and Richard Bright all appear to be most central, and they are joined by John Gordon Jr, Samuel Span, James Tobin, and the chairman, William Miles. This is confirmed by the data: all have weighted degree scores over 402. All rank highly on other measures of centrality: betweenness centrality, closeness 33

Kenneth Morgan, ‘Bristol West India Merchants in the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3 (1993), pp. 191–192.

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Figure 3.1 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805

centrality, and eigenvector centrality. Those measuring highly in addition to these central members on the other scores include George Gibbs and Philip John Miles. John Gordon Jr, though he is not the best connected in terms of weighted degree, is the best connected in terms of degree, betweenness centrality, and eigenvector centrality, indicating not only that he was connected to lots of other people, but that he was also in a key ‘broker’ role (meaning that he may have been someone to whom others came for information) and that he was well connected to others in positions of influence within the network. Only two of these individuals are normal members: all others are either secretaries or quorum members – or the chairman. There was no guarantee that being in one of those positions would improve centrality: the chairman’s

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30 25 20 15 10 5

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Figure 3.2 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805: number of nodes per two-year period

weighted degree was higher than the average for the secretaries and the quorum members, and a visual inspection of the graph shows that secretaries like Peter Baillie and Ralph Montague, and quorum members John Pinney and William Gordon, were less central to the network. This represents the network in a static form for a 23-year period. This means that influence will be biased towards those who engaged with the Association for a longer period, therefore assuming that influence accumulated without attrition. In other words, it does not represent the shifting influence of members over time. Simply examining the network as it changed year-on-year is unlikely to be satisfactory: it will not account for the memories of individuals, which is important given that this is, after all, a model of potential sources for further interaction – a network that could be used by contemporaries for business reasons, such as seeking out information on reputations, prices, and shipping times. To account for this, the following graphs use a moving total, with overlapping two-year periods. The use of two years is, in this case study, illustrative. This means that, for the latter year that shows the size of the network, the influence of the ‘previous’ year is accounted for. Fig. 3.2 shows the size of the network as it changed over time. The observation that is most immediately obvious is the sudden jump in size from around 1793. This coincides with the start of the wars between Britain and France: the average size from the 1782–1783 period to the 1791–1792 period is 19, and from 1793–1794 to 1804–1805, it is 25. This is due to the persistent issues of warfare that necessitated both more frequent engagement from members and the involvement of others

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as West India merchants attempted to regulate the wages of labourers (who demanded more pay in light of increased living costs), as they sought to ensure that convoys were regular and frequent, and as they shared updates on current affairs.34 Furthermore, there were problems from 1790 to 1792 when two secretaries died in quick succession, and there were fewer meetings – indeed, none were recorded where business was conducted from 1787 to 1792. The density of the network experienced a similar shift from 1793, with the network tightly interconnected from its inception to 1792, indicating little turnover in the membership and fewer people coming and going. There is an inverse relationship between the size of the network and its density: the more people who joined, the less well connected the network became.35 The average weighted degree scores of each member of the network show that the ties were stronger at the inception of the Association, before ties slowly became weaker and weaker. The turning point was again 1793, after which relationships became stronger again over time. This trend was the result of a flurry of meetings as the Association first started, which then trailed off. The wartime needs of trade gave an impetus for more meetings again as trade became threatened, and this resulted in more frequent interactions, which in turn, given how the network has been modelled, resulted in stronger ties between members. As more frequent meetings begat stronger ties, so too did they likely lead to increased information sharing, as news about the war passed eagerly within this increasingly tight-knit group. We can also visualise the changing interaction of different members over time. Given that a number of individuals were identified as particularly influential in the overview, the next step in the iterative process is to see the ways in which their interaction was similar or different. Fig. 3.3 shows seven of these individuals in two groups. The first group is made up of Evan Baillie, John Maxse, Lowbridge Bright, Richard Bright, and Thomas Daniel Jr. Their trajectory was similar, and their weighted degree scores have been averaged together, given that, while there is variation, they all correlate fairly well.36 The weighted degree of these individuals was above the average for the whole network, and they maintained their activity throughout the entire period. The second group is the pairing of George Gibbs and Philip John Miles. Both of these individuals joined the Association late on in 1790 and 1793 respectively.37 Despite both being late to join the association, they both became influential 34 35 36 37

See entries from 1793 onwards in BA, ‘WIA Minute Book’. The correlation coefficient is −0.8, so this relationship is very strong. The average correlation coefficient is 0.73. Their correlation coefficient is 0.88.

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178 2‒ 178 178 3‒ 3 178 178 4‒ 4 178 178 5‒ 5 178 178 6‒ 6 178 178 7 7 178 ‒178 8‒ 8 178 178 9‒ 9 179 179 0‒ 0 179 179 1‒ 1 179 179 2‒ 2 179 179 3‒ 3 179 179 4‒ 4 179 179 5‒ 5 179 179 6‒ 6 179 179 7 7 179 ‒179 8‒ 8 179 179 9 9 18 ‒180 00 0 18 ‒180 01 1 18 ‒180 02 2 18 ‒180 03 3 18 ‒180 04 4 ‒1 80 5

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Average Weighted Degree G. Gibbs and P. J. Miles

Baillie, Maxse, Bright, Bright, and Daniel Jr

Figure 3.3 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805: average weighted degree of select individuals

members, scoring well above the average, and averaging together more than the collective influence of Baillie, Maxse, the Brights, and Daniel Jr. Fig. 3.4 shows William Miles, the chairman, and John Gordon Jr. Both were present and highly influential from the start, but the activity of each was almost the inverse of the other’s. When Miles is highly influential at the start, Gordon Jr is well below the average. Gordon Jr becomes more influential around 1793 and 1794, while Miles’ activity wanes. Both leave the Association at the same time, however, neither engaging with the Association after 1802, with their representation in the network therefore fading by the 1803–1804 period. Fig. 3.5 shows the activity of Samuel Span and James Tobin. Span’s engagement with the Association is high at first, but dwindles, before he disengages altogether by 1798–1799. This behaviour deviates from the average, where members generally became more engaged during the wartime period. He rebounded quickly, however, and returned to his previous level by 1801–1802. Tobin was a latecomer to the Association, like Gibbs and Philip Miles, joining in 1786 and becoming highly engaged almost immediately. He left the Association completely in 1791–1792, before returning with force, becoming one of the most active members of the association in the 1794–1795 period.

178 2‒ 178 178 3‒ 3 178 178 4‒ 4 178 178 5‒ 5 178 178 6‒ 6 178 178 7 7 178 ‒178 8‒ 8 178 178 9‒ 9 179 179 0‒ 0 179 179 1‒ 1 179 179 2‒ 2 179 179 3‒ 3 179 179 4‒ 4 179 179 5‒ 5 179 179 6‒ 6 179 179 7 7 179 ‒179 8‒ 8 179 179 9 9 18 ‒180 00 0 18 ‒180 01 1 18 ‒180 02 2 18 ‒180 03 3 18 ‒180 04 4 ‒1 80 5 178 2‒ 178 178 3‒ 3 178 178 4‒ 4 178 178 5‒ 5 178 178 6‒ 6 178 178 7 7 178 ‒178 8‒ 8 178 178 9‒ 9 179 179 0‒ 0 179 179 1‒ 1 179 179 2‒ 2 179 179 3‒ 3 179 179 4‒ 4 179 179 5‒ 5 179 179 6‒ 6 179 179 7 7 179 ‒179 8‒ 8 179 179 9 9 18 ‒180 00 0 18 ‒180 01 1 18 ‒180 02 2 18 ‒180 03 3 18 ‒180 04 4 ‒1 80 5

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Figure 3.4 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805: weighted degree of William Miles and John Gordon Jr

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Figure 3.5 The West India Association Network, 1782–1805: weighted degree of Samuel Span and James Tobin

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2.1 HSNA as an Iterative Process This investigation of the data marks the start of an iterative process. The representation of the data as both an overview and for selected individuals as their activity changed over time raises some important questions, not least concerning the ways in which these individuals contributed to the circulation of information within their networks. Why did George Gibbs and Philip John Miles join late? Why did William Miles and John Gordon Jr leave? What made Samuel Span and James Tobin leave and come back? How did these individuals use their influence, and how does their standing here reflect their activity in other areas? It is beyond the scope of this case study to deal with all of these questions. However, to illustrate the continuance of an iterative process using questions raised by time series data, we may examine the last of these. The WIA minute book records some of their activity within the West India community.38 They held meetings at Bush Tavern in Bristol, where they would gather to share news and gossip. William Miles, as chairman, or the secretary (changing every one or two years), would sign the letters that they co-wrote. They wrote on a variety of matters, frequently to the Admiralty, the Treasury, or to the chairman of the London West India Society.39 Some of the details recorded in the book are scant. No reasons were given for people withdrawing, for example. Entries simply stated that the person indicated their wish to no longer be considered a member of the society. Likewise, no reasons were given for people joining, only recording that they had been admitted by a unanimous vote. Conversely, even if there was no meeting, the records show that members still engaged in activity. Between 1787 and 1792, for example, no official meeting is recorded where business was conducted. However, outcomes of activities are recorded: Richard Bright, for example, organised amongst the members a charitable subscription to help the ‘Pill Boatmen’, even though a meeting where this was decided was never officially recorded. Petitions were still sent around to be signed by members even though there were no corresponding official record of meetings where this was decided  – a copy of the petition itself served as the record. There is evidence of their activity in other records, however. During this time, the West India community came under pressure from the abolitionist movement. James Tobin, a partner in the firm of Tobin & Pinney, was sent to London in 1789 by the WIA to act as their representative, and gave evidence in Parliament in opposition to the abolition of the slave trade. His authority to do so was based on his heated pamphlet exchange with Revd James Ramsay, 38 BA, ‘WIA Minute Book’. 39 On the London West India Society, see: David Beck Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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in which he disputed Ramsay’s claims about the evils of the slave trade.40 At a special meeting on the matter at Merchants Hall (the home of Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers), most of the individuals who were members of the WIA were listed amongst those to construct a petition for the West India merchants and planters to sign in opposition to abolition. Span, Baillie, and Lowbright Bright – those ranking highly amongst them – also met separately to discuss the matter.41 Evidence of their importance within the West India community can be verified through other means, too. The wharfage books kept by the Society of Merchant Venturers in Bristol recorded all the ships moving in and out of the harbour.42 Importantly, they recorded the goods that were unloaded and the firms who collected them. This allows us to measure how significant particular individuals were by the amount of sugar that was consigned to them. There are gaps in the surviving material, but there is enough to make sufficient inferences. Fig. 3.6 shows their sugar imports compared to one another. The only absence is John Gordon Jr, who is not clearly identifiable within the wharfage books, given the activity of his father, John Gordon: it is not clear whether entries for ‘John Gordon’ refers to the father or the son, and ‘John Gordon Jr’ is only entered once. Father or son, Gordon’s imports, in partnership with William Gordon, and in another partnership with William and Robert Gordon, were substantial. Bright, Baillie & Bright was a small partnership between Lowbridge Bright, Richard Bright, and Evan Baillie: their strong relationship, as implied by the network data, is reaffirmed by the existence of this partnership. They also imported separately, as Lowbridge & Richard Bright and Evan Baillie (later Evan Baillie & Son with Peter Baillie). Pinney & Tobin was made up of John Pinney and James Tobin, later James Tobin and Azariah Pinney, joined in 1796 by Henry Hope Tobin, James’s son. George Gibbs appears in partnership with Samuel Munckley and others; Samuel Span imported individually and with brother John. John Maxse imported substantially on his own. Thomas Daniels Sr and Jr imported in partnership, as did William Miles and Philip John Miles. Interestingly, one partnership who were members of the WIA network, but who were not heavily active therein, were the city’s largest importers in this period (based on the available data): Edward Protheroe and Robert Claxton. It shows that it was not a hard and fast rule that the largest importers were the most active within the network, and it seems that, conversely, individuals such as Lowbridge Bright, Richard Bright, and James Tobin were punching above their weight within the community in proportion to the 40 See: Ryden, West Indian Slavery, pp. 189–91. 41 BA, MS SMV/8/3/2/5, Slave Trade. 42 BA, MS SMV/7/1/1/72–81, Wharfage Books, 1784–1801.

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Figure 3.6 Sugar imports of leading members of the WIA Network (cwt)

amount of sugar they were importing. They were likely motivated by the benefits of being a part of the community to meet regularly and obtain information useful to their trade. A prosopography conducted by Kenneth Morgan shows that many of these individuals were important politically, too. Thomas Daniel Jr., known as the ‘King of Bristol’, served on the Bristol Common Council from 1785 to 1835, and left over £200,000 in his will.43 Several of these individuals spent time in the Caribbean before coming to Bristol; many came from humble backgrounds, and a few ‘were drawn from the ranks of landed gentlemen’, including Lowbridge Bright and Evan Baillie. James Tobin was the son of a plantation owner.44 Miles’ background was said to be particularly impoverished, and he was known for building a substantial fortune from next to nothing.45 Most came from the West Country, though Evan Baillie had a Scottish heritage, migrating to the

43 Morgan, ‘Bristol West India Merchants’, pp. 185–186. 44 Ibid., pp. 189–190. 45 Ibid., pp. 191–192.

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Caribbean during the Seven Years’ War, and moving to Bristol thereafter.46 Richard Bright was involved in the expansion of Bristol’s port from the end of the eighteenth century to the start of the nineteenth century.47 Of key importance here is that the historical social network analysis has given us another means by which to identify influential figures, measure their influence, and see how, when, and why they came into contact with others. The pressure of wartime necessitated more meetings, and while these were held to address particular business concerns (significantly the threat to West India shipping), it also gave these individuals the opportunity to interact, share information, and gossip. Of course, as Haggerty and Haggerty point out, ‘we do not know what was said after the official meetings, in the Exchange, customs house or tavern’.48 The point is not to be all-encompassing, however. The objective is to generate data that a) is evidence in itself from which to draw particular inferences and b) which raises questions that will guide an iterative approach to source material. In this way, measurement of influence within the WIA can sit next to a measurement of influence as sugar importers, the metric used by Kenneth Morgan to identify the merchants for his prosopography.49 3

Case Study 2: Geospatial Proximity and the Formation of Slave Trader Investment Networks in Liverpool

We might assume that living in close proximity to others, given that it allowed opportunities for meeting face-to-face and sharing information, might have led to closer business connections, as discussed by Siobhan Talbott and Sophie Jones in their chapter in this volume. In order to assess the degree to which geographical proximity was a precursor for the formation of investment networks, I have used a case study of Liverpool slave traders in the late-eighteenth century. I first recreated a network of slave traders using data collected from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, selecting a sample of voyages which departed from Liverpool between 1773 and 1774.50 This led to the identification of 163 unique individuals who owned shares in vessels departing 46 See: Douglas Hamilton, ‘Local Connections, Global Ambitions: Creating a Transoceanic Network in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic Empire’, The International Journal of Maritime History, 23.2 (2011), pp. 283–300. 47 See numerous documents from c.1782 to c.1820s in: BA, MS 11168, Records of the Bright family, 1760s–1920s. 48 Haggerty and Haggerty, ‘The Life Cycle of a Metropolitan Business Network’, p. 191. 49 Morgan, ‘Bristol West India Merchants’. 50 ‘Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database’, SlaveVoyages, available: https://slavevoyages.org/ (accessed 23 October 2023).

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Liverpool, which called at Africa to participate in the traffic of human cargo. I then identified as many of these as possible within Gore’s trading directory for the year 1774.51 I was able to locate, with a reasonable amount of certainty, 130 of these individuals (there are some uncertainties which required some data manipulation to account for, which I will come to later). To assess the relationship between the location of slave traders within Liverpool and the formation of investment networks, I recreated two networks from this data. In the first instance, I created an investment network, using the shared ownership of a vessel with others as the relational tie. I then created a geographical network, using a threshold for proximity (distance as the crow flies) as the relational tie; this threshold was determined by the precise distance that resulted in a network that equalled the investment network’s score for the number of edges that existed between the same 130 nodes. The overlap between these edges is used to determine the level to which geographical proximity might have influenced network formation. 3.1 The Investment Network To recreate the investment network, I downloaded a sample of data from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, covering all voyages that departed from Liverpool in 1773 and 1774. These dates were selected because of the complementarity it would offer with Gore’s 1774 trading directory, which would have been constructed and published over that same period. The data outline 186 voyages. The number of individuals involved in each voyage and the number of voyages with that number of investors is outlined in Table 3.1. As Table 3.1 shows, over a third (37.63%) of the total voyages only named one owner, meaning that they implied no relational data, as far as recreating the investment network in this way allows. A similar proportion of the voyages (37.1%) had two to four investors, and the remaining quarter (25.27%) had five to eleven. A disproportionate number of these had seven investors. The data required tidying before they could be turned into relational data (with names misspelt or shortened – e.g., ‘Carruthers, James’ vs ‘Caruthers, James’, or ‘Elworthy, Jno’ vs ‘Elworthy, John’, etc.). After the names were standardised, 163 unique individuals were left. Relational ties were considered to have existed between two or more individuals if they invested alongside each other in the same voyage. This resulted in the creation of a graph with 557 unique relationships. Relationships were not weighted by the number of interactions in order to facilitate initial comparisons 51 E. Cornell, Digital Library of Historical Directories, 1750–1919: Cheshire and Lancashire, 1886–1902 (UK Data Service, 2006). SN: 5106 (accessed 23 October 2023).

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Table showing the number of investors per voyage and the frequency of voyages

Number of investors per voyage

Frequency of voyages

Percentage of voyages (%)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Total

70 32 22 15 6 6 16 8 3 7 1 186

37.63% 17.20% 11.83% 8.06% 3.23% 3.23% 8.60% 4.30% 1.61% 3.76% 0.54% 100%

with the geographical network. Six slave traders were listed only as sole owners of their vessels, and so they had no investing relationships with any other slave traders. The most prolific slave trader, in terms of the number of others he was involved in, was William Earle with thirty-seven connections, followed by William Davenport (thirty) and George Warren Watts (twenty-one). Most slave traders had but a few connections, with ninety-five having from none (six) to six connections. The resulting graph is shown in Fig. 3.7. After the identification of only 130 out of the 163 (79.8%) individuals in Gore’s directory, I remade the investment network with those 130 individuals. This network contained 373 edges – almost 200 less than the original. Earle, Davenport, and Watts remained the best connected, with degrees of thirty, twenty-six, and eighteen, respectively. The six connectionless slave traders remained, having been identified in the directory, and to their number was added another, whose two connections were not in the directory. The graph is shown in Fig. 3.8. The size of this graph (130 nodes and 373 edges, for a graph density of 0.044) was the standard for which the geographical network was to be created. 3.2 The Geographical/Proximity Network Thus, 130 individuals who were present as slave traders in the trans-Atlantic slave trade data for 1773–1774 were identifiable in Gore’s directory for 1774.

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Figure 3.7 Liverpool Slave Traders Investment Network, 1773–1774

Identifying these individuals was not without its difficulties, however. Most individuals were identified with high certainty as the same person without any additional issues or qualifiers (ninety-four of 130, or 72%). The rest come with caveats: thirty-three names were associated with multiple addresses, whether they were under exactly the same name (which the majority were) or whether they had a personal address and the address of a firm (e.g., Samuel Sandys was listed as living on Park Lane, while Sandys & Co. had an address on the east side of the Old Dock). Two cases had four addresses under the same name, seven had three, and twenty-four had two. Others did not distinguish between the senior (father) and the junior (son) in the directory, where that distinction

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Figure 3.8 Liverpool Slave Traders Investment Network, 1773–1774

was made in the trans-Atlantic slave trade data. In order to overcome the latter problem, I assumed that both senior and junior were at the same address. To overcome the former, I assigned an address by random (using a random number generator) to each case with multiple addresses, with the idea that, in order to give the data more veracity should it move beyond the realm of methodological experiment, this process could be repeated, and aggregates of each iteration could be used. I then geolocated each merchant on a georeferenced map. I used an 1836 map of Liverpool, which was georeferenced as part of the David Rumsey Map Collection.52 I used this one rather than John Eyes’ ‘Plan of Liverpool’ (1765) because the 1836 map had been professionally georeferenced. There were 52 T. Starling, ‘Liverpool’, in Maps of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Vol. 1 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1844), p. 184.

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significant changes to the city of Liverpool – notably the destruction of the Old Dock  – which made some locating difficult. However, using John Eyes’ map as a point of reference, this was straightforward to overcome. Streets that had since disappeared were identifiable on one or both maps. Google Maps was used for precise numbers – building numbers may well have changed, but were used anyway for lack of better information, and working on the principle that, as long as I was accurate on the street level and precise at the building level, then that was better than having to aggregate everything at the street level. At times, building numbers were not available (the lack of development of Mount Pleasant in 1774 is evident from the fact that the building number was listed for every individual there as ‘0’). At other points, Gore’s directory was not immediately helpful – two individuals were listed as living in Everton and Kirkdale with little additional information. Finding these individuals might have been simple enough walking to these areas in 1774, but placing them with precision on the map was problematic. Thankfully, these were minorities, and most individuals were straightforward enough to place. Geolocating each individual on the georeferenced map gave me their coordinate data. These data enabled me to create a proximity-based network – the relationship was defined by the distance between each individual. A series of 130 nodes was selected, with one location selected at random, as stated, for those nodes associated with multiple locations. To create the network from these data, I wrote a script in R that would translate the coordinates into a distance matrix, showing estimates for the distance as the crow flies (in metres) between each pair of individuals. This was based around the ‘distGeo’ function, which is part of the ‘geosphere’ package. To convert this distance matrix into relational data, I set a threshold at which the distance would be considered as a binary tie, indicating that a tie existed (1) or did not exist (0). The threshold was adjusted through trial and error until I came up with the same number of ties. This resulted in the creation of an adjacency matrix, rather than a distance matrix. I then converted the adjacency matrix into an edge list that I could feed into Gephi. The resulting graph, generated in Gephi, is presented in Fig. 3.9. 3.3 Comparing the Two Networks The geographical network, like the investment network, has 130 nodes, 373 edges, and a density of 0.044. The degree distribution is slightly more equitable than that of the investment network, though there is still a long right-hand tail. Thomas Tarleton, George Warren Watts, and John Tomlinson are the best connected (closest in proximity to the most people) with a degree score of sixteen each. At the bottom end, like the investment network, there

Figure 3.9 Liverpool Slave Traders Geographical Network, 1774

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are six nodes with a degree of zero. They are, however, not all the same individuals. In fact, Thomas Tarleton, who has a degree of zero in the investment network, is one of the three highest scoring in the proximity network. He may be an outlier, having been involved in only one solo slaving venture in 1773–1774. When the degree scores are compared, it is clear that having a high or low degree score in one network is a poor predictor of having a higher or lower score in the other. The correlation coefficient is 0.07, indicating no relationship. Comparing degree scores is not the object of this analysis, however – of greater interest is the amount of overlap between the two networks. Overlap can be easily assessed by entering both sets of edges into the same Gephi workspace, summing the duplicate edges (which, after careful preparation of the data, will only arise if the same edges appear in both networks). As it happens, from this iteration of the locations, thirty-five edges out of 373 (9.4%) occur in both. These ‘crossover’ edges are accounted for by forty-six individuals (bearing mind that each edge is shared between two nodes), most of whom had one overlapping connection, a minority who had two or three, and two heavily connected individuals – William Davenport and George Warren Watts – who had six and five, respectively. At the most, 27.3% of one slave trader’s investing relationships and geographical connections overlapped (William Rice, with three of his eleven unique relationships occurring in both graphs). All of this suggests that immediate proximity played a very limited role in the formation of investment networks. The limited amount of overlap between these two networks may well be as much as might be expected to occur by coincidence. To test this, I have generated a random network with the same number of nodes and edges, and the same degree distribution as the proximity network. Node ID s have been assigned random labels, and the edges have been randomised. A comparison between the random network degree scores and the investment network degree scores reveals a correlation coefficient that is similar at 0.04. Fifteen of the randomly generated relationships occur also in the investment network (4%), under half of that which occurs in the geographical network. The crossover edges are accounted for by twenty-seven individuals, almost all of whom have one overlapping connection, and three of whom have two. At its most, the overlapping connections account for 22.2% of the total number of one node’s connections. Together, this indicates that proximity might have a limited amount of predictive power after all. While serving as a poor predictor for the number of connections any individual is likely to have, we can observe more overlap between the geographical and investment networks than between the random and investment networks.

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3.4 Limitations and Implications As an experiment, intended to showcase what can be done with HSNA, there are some important limitations to note. Importantly, several of the individuals have multiple locations listed in the trading directory. This needs to be accounted for with multiple iterations of the random allocation of individual locations. Likewise, more randomly generated networks that can be used as a benchmark to test the relevance of the geographical network to investment need to be generated (in a process called bootstrapping). There are other important limitations to note. One is that the distance measured is ‘as the crow flies’, rather than the practical distance of walking through the city. It does not take into account the actual distance walked, nor the hustle and bustle of the streets, the quality of the pavement (if the roads were paved at all), or any other obstacles or barriers. Importantly, it has only tested the impact of proximity on slave trading networks with a limited sample of slave traders at a particular time. The relevance of proximity to other trades and at other times has not been tested. With these limitations in mind, it is worth exploring, as we did in the first case study, how this might be interpreted historically. That most traders did not seem to be overly influenced by their proximity to the counting houses and homes of other traders implies that space did not, in this way, play that significant a role. Yet that does not mean that space was unimportant. Rather than giving one access to reputable neighbours – though it did do this – the location of one’s counting house gave the trader access to the various institutions situated in Liverpool’s centre (the Exchange, the town council, the coffee houses, and clubs), not to mention the docks, quays, and other amenities. All of these were of immense importance to the conduct of trade.53 Indeed, as Sheryllynne Haggerty implies, while traders could gossip and gather information at ‘auctions, warehouses, counting houses, the market, personal friendly and familial visits and even the shop’, these were secondary to ‘the Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the “Change”’ and ‘the tavern, inn or coffee house’, most of which were the preserve of elite men, which most of the slave traders analysed here were.54 Having a counting house close to the city centre meant that other traders could visit, for example when partnerships were dissolved; importantly, it bestowed upon the trader who owned or rented it a particular 53

David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 88–89; Haggerty and Haggerty, ‘The Life Cycle of a Metropolitan Business Network’. See also Siobhan Talbott and Sophie Jones’s chapter in this volume. 54 Sheryllynne Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 1760–1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 134–135.

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reputation for success, implying in the minds of visitors and passers-by the elite status of the occupant.55 What this analysis suggests is that counting houses were spaces of personal business, rather than places for the formation of relationships and the sharing of business information or gathering of news. They were a space for the clerks of the firm to copy letters and balance accounts; to carry entries ‘from the wastebook to the journal to the ledger’.56 Generally speaking, then, living near particular people was not nearly as important as living close enough to the city centre, and not as important as having a reputable space in which to carry on one’s business. More broadly, this represents a further way in which network analysis can be performed. The importance of different, overlapping networks has been recognised before, but analysing them in sufficient depth has so far proven to be elusive.57 That one network (say a corresponding network) has influence over another (a credit network) is reasonably intuitive. These represent two essential types of networks: the ex-ante network – the network of options, the people to whom one had access – and the ex-post facto network – the network that historians can see which emerged as a result of such interactions, repeated and otherwise. Where the first case study has sought to establish how we might model an ex-ante network, this case study has sought to model both ex-ante and ex-post networks, and test the influence of one upon the other. Yet how to properly establish influence remains an open question; it is not a simple matter of performing a regression analysis, for, as we have seen, it is not simply whether the former network can predict the degree scores of the latter, but whether it can accurately predict the formation of specific relationships. The method adopted here has relied on an understanding of the importance of testing empirical evidence against our expectations as defined by randomness, which is drawn from traditional statistical tests, though no particular statistical test has been performed. 4 Conclusion Historical social network analysis, or HSNA, is a familiar feature in the fields of modern and early-modern Business History. Developed with earnest from the 55 Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community, pp. 120, 213. 56 Jacob Price, ‘Directions for the Conduct of a Merchant’s Counting House, 1766’, Business History, 28.3 (1986), p. 137. 57 See, for example: Albane Forestier, ‘Risk, Kinship and Personal Relationships in Late Eighteenth-Century West Indian Trade: The Commercial Network of Tobin & Pinney’, Business History, 52.6 (2010), pp. 912–931.

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early 2000s, the approach has undergone significant developments. Some key developments in the historiography – measuring change over time, identifying women and underrepresented people, scaling up analyses with big data, and using SNA in conjunction with other methods – have been outlined here. I have provided some illustrations of how historical network analysis can be performed, focusing first on a study of changing influence within Bristol’s West India Association from 1782 to 1805, and then performing an experiment to examine how proximity influenced investment in the slave trade, building an ex-ante network, not from institutional records as with the first case, but using locational data. These methods, in turn, can help us identify influential individuals and the routes through which information and news spread. These surveys and experiments indicate that the field of HSNA is still an evolving space within the digital humanities, with scope for further development as historians embrace a greater range of digital technologies. The use of HSNA for longer periods with more granular changes over time to understand the influence of underrepresented people within larger communities, as well as the structure of those communities themselves, with a consideration for space, locality, or sentiment, using moving images alongside print media, will become more common and more widespread. Problems will remain, however, and historical social network analysts will recognise that it will be the particular problems that they face – actor identification and missing sources significant amongst these – that makes this field interesting, challenging, and unique.

Appendix: An Introduction to HSNA

What is HSNA? Put simply, social network analysis (SNA) is a tool used to measure the number of actors in a group, and the relationships between them. HSNA is the use of this methodology with archival source material. What follows is an explanation of some of the concepts and basic mathematics associated with the methodology, with some mathematical notation for those who would find it useful. When network graphs are created, they are interpreted using graph theory. Actors (these might be, say, individuals, firms, or countries) are represented as ‘nodes’ (points on a graph), and the relationships (friendships, familial relations, import/export links, and so on) are represented as ‘edges’ (lines on the graph connecting the nodes). Edges might be directed or undirected. Undirected edges indicate the presence of a relationship, while directed edges represent some form of movement, such as the passage of information, say,

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from one node to another. One node is ‘adjacent’ to another node if they are joined by an edge; an edge connected to a node is ‘incident’ to that node. A ‘path’ is a route that might be taken from one node to any other. A ‘geodesic’ is the shortest path from one node to another. The number of other nodes that a node is adjacent to is called the degree; for instance, a node that is adjacent to five other nodes has a degree of five. Degree centrality calculates the degree as a proportion of all potential connections. Do not be confused by these terms: a node with a degree of one is connected to one other node; a node with a degree centrality of one is connected to all other nodes in the network. Degree centrality is equal to the degree divided by the total number of nodes in the network minus one, or CD ni

D ni G 1



(1)

where CD(ni) is the degree centrality for node i, D(ni) is the degree of node i, and G is the total number of nodes in the network. Taking this measure facilitates comparison of nodes across networks of different sizes. If one is interested in the absolute number of nodes one node is connected to, the degree score on its own would suffice. Both serve as an indicator of influence or importance: a node that is linked to lots of other nodes, or a high proportion of nodes within the network, can be considered to be more significant within that network. If one is interested in understanding positionality within the network, another key measure is betweenness centrality. This is an indicator for influence, which measures the extent to which one node stands between several other nodes, and thus acts as a ‘bridge’ or link between different groups of nodes (i.e., subnetworks). A node that is a bridge for many others could hypothetically influence, say, communications or the flow of goods between two or more groups. This measure considers the geodesic of two nodes that are not directly incident. The betweenness of node i is calculated as the number of geodesics linking two non-incident actors ( j and k) that involve node i, divided by the total number of geodesics linking j and k. This is done for all pairs of actors not including node i and summed, or B ni

j k

g jk ni / g jk

(2)

where B(ni) is the betweenness index for node i, gjk(ni) is the number of geodesics linking j and k through node i, and gjk is the total number of geodesics linking j and k. This is converted into a standardised measure by dividing it

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by the total number of pairs of actors not including i. A value of 1 for node i indicates that i falls on all of the shortest paths between every pair of nodes. Betweenness centrality is therefore calculated as CB ni

B ni G 1 G 2 (3) 2

where CB(ni) is the betweenness centrality for node i, and G is the total number of nodes in the network. It is worth noting that modern network analysis software can calculate this for the user. There are a host of other potential measures that could be used, such as closeness centrality, indegree, and outdegree, which it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss. Degree and betweenness centrality are the two measures used most frequently. They are used as indicators which ‘point’ to particular nodes that can be investigated further. Bear in mind that overuse of multiple measures risks complicating the HSNA procedure. Significantly, it risks tempting the researcher to infer or deduce too much from the graphs at the expense of further research into the primary sources. This is an iterative tool, and the construction of the graphs is an imperfect process, based on imperfect sources. The graphs help raise questions. They do not provide answers. This is a necessarily brief introduction to the methodology; there are more detailed sources available that I would recommend.58 Software and Resources There are numerous tools at the disposal of the historical social network analyst. When conducting a social network analysis, most historians have shown a preference for GUI-based packages, such as Gephi or Pajek. These are purpose-built pieces of software which have properly developed graphical user interfaces. Importantly, they are open source, free, and in continuous development by a community of serious developers from a range of disciplines. Users are supported by discussion boards, forums, blogposts, and tutorials. There are numerous other similar software products available, such as SocNetV and Neo4j. As well as dedicated programmes for SNA, researchers have access to programming languages and the packages they draw upon. Two of the most 58 See: Wasserman and Faust, Social Network Analysis, ch. 2–5. See also: Haggerty and Haggerty, ‘Visual Analytics of an Eighteenth-Century Business Network’; McWatters and Lemarchand, ‘Merchant Networks and Accounting Discourse’, pp. 49–54.

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common of these are R and Python. While a dedicated piece of software will be able to handle almost anything that is network-related that one wants, using a programming language adds a further level of flexibility. The learning curve is arguably steeper, unless one has prior experience with programming, but the rewards may be much greater. From my personal experience, I found trying to do in R what I could achieve in Gephi left me disappointed. Producing something visually appealing that I could manage with relative ease in Gephi was difficult in R, with lots of trial and error, exacerbated by the lack of graphical interfacing. Where R was more useful was in the cleaning and preparation of data, and when I wanted to use a range of measures or algorithms in a way that automated away a lot of the repetition involved in trying to process data through Gephi. Significantly, once one has written a script (or found one online), it can be used repeatedly, built onto, or otherwise repurposed. One is also able to combine within the same script elements from different methodologies. It is possible, for example, to generate a range of measures from network data, and then represent it graphically, perform some form of statistical analysis, or otherwise further transform it – and then do so repeatedly with a variety of datasets. For more information on HSNA, The Historical Network Research Commu­nity (HNRC), an informal organisation of scholars interested in networks, lists an extensive bibliography of works that make use of network analysis, methodologically or conceptually, explicitly and implicitly, in the ‘Historical Sciences’. Historical Sciences is broadly defined  – the earliest work documented here belongs to the field of anthropology, and was published in 1969.59 As well as the HNRC, another fantastic resource is The Programming Historian, which offers a range of lessons on using computers to generate, transform, analyse, and present data, as well as lessons in preserving data for future use (and future users). Lessons relate to particular methods (including network analysis), particular pieces of software (with lots of lessons especially on Python), and various other concerns (such as data management). The lessons have been compiled by experts in the field, and have been peer-reviewed. Moreover, lessons are available in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.60 For a broader understanding of SNA, various textbooks are available. My introduction to 59 See: The Historical Network Research Community, ‘HNR Bibliography: Network Analy­ sis in the Historical Disciplines’, available: http://historicalnetworkresearch.org/biblio graphy/ (accessed 23 October 2023); George M. Foster, ‘Godparents and Social Networks in Tzintzuntzan’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 25.3 (1969), pp. 261–278. 60 See: Programming Historian, available: https://programminghistorian.org/ (accessed 23 October 2023).

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the subject was with Wasserman and Faust’s Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications and John Scott’s Social Network Analysis (now in its fourth edition).61 One might also try a broader introduction to the digital humanities, such as Digital Humanities by Olivier Le Deuff, or Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope by Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and Scott Weingart.62 These books address several of the themes explored in this section in much more detail. Needless to say, they are not the only publications on the topic, but they provide a useful starting point for anyone wishing to explore the subject further. 61 62

Wasserman and Faust, Social Network Analysis; Scott, Social Network Analysis. Le Deuff, Digital Humanities; Shawn Graham, Ian Milligan, and Scott Weingart, Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (London: Imperial College Press, 2015).

Chapter 4

Trust and Credit: Merchants’ Roles in Puritan News Networks Sarah Hall In November 1622, merchant and shipmaster William Peirce was crossing the Atlantic in his ship the Lyon when it hit a reef off the coast of Virginia and sank. Thirteen people died in the wreck, and all goods were reportedly lost. However, John Winthrop, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, noted in his journal that ‘most of the letters were saved’.1 Valuable enough to be noted in Winthrop’s journal, which contained an incredibly detailed record of religious and political events in the 1630s and 1640s, these letters carried news from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to friends, family, and business partners in England. The letters did eventually find their way to their intended recipients, though not in ideal condition: Henry Paynter – for example – reported that his letter ‘was soe washed and the writing scoured oute that the greatest parte of it was soe white and cleane with the salte water (as I supposed) where the lynes had bene, as if it had not bene written upon’. However, Paynter managed to ascertain from ‘some few lynes and endes of lines and words in some places’ that Winthrop Jr. ‘wrote of your good health and your well beinge’.2 Edward Howes, remarked similarly in a letter to his close friend John Winthrop Jr., son of the Governor: ‘the lettre [sic] I receiued by mr. Pierse was so rinsed with sea water I had much adoe to reed it’.3 Howes regularly exchanged news with his friend in the New World, earnestly collecting and evaluating British and European news before sending it on. The value of correspondence is evident. Those in England sought so desperately for news of their brethren in New England that even a letter that was barely legible carried significant weight. Despite the shipwreck and the condition of the letters, Peirce remained a trusted bearer for correspondence, goods, and passengers. He had been accepted as a church member in Boston in October 1632 and was made 1 R. S. Dunn, J. Savage, & L. Yeandle (eds.), The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–49 (Boston, MA, 1996), p. 89. 2 Henry Paynter to John Winthrop Jr., 14 March 1633, A. B. Forbes et al., The Winthrop Papers, 1498–1649 (Boston, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1925–47), vol. 3, pp. 109–110. 3 Edward Howes to John Winthrop Jr., 18 March 1633, Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, pp. 110–114.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689879_005

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freeman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634.4 His trustworthy reputation is further confirmed by a statement from the elder Winthrop’s sister, Lucy Downing, in 1641. Concerned that her son, Joshua Downing, ‘is very eager for sea Imployment’, she sought training and guidance for him. She asked her brother to request Peirce’s help in the matter, writing ‘they saye [he] is the moste able to teach him in this country’.5 Downing’s request not only speaks to her own impression of Peirce, but to the ‘common voice’ in her social network.6 Her reference to ‘they’ as anonymous collective endorsers of Peirce adds credibility and a weight of authority to his reputation. Through his career as a merchant, Peirce established a good level of social credit and he was trusted not only as a merchant, but as a letter bearer. In this role, Peirce was integral to the passage of news across the Atlantic. We know that news was incredibly valuable in transatlantic godly communities, as shown by David Cressy in his seminal work on transatlantic communication, and Lindsay O’Neill, whose more recent monograph provides a significant addition to the field, but we lack a fuller understanding of how that value translated into social credit.7 This chapter breaks new ground by demonstrating how this can be quantified through social network analysis. By mapping correspondence networks in the anxious and tumultuous early years of puritan settlement – where they sought to establish new settlements in the face of opposition from English authorities, in new communities, amongst strange neighbours and in an unfamiliar land – it is possible to quantify trust and social credit. In doing so, this chapter reveals the vital structural role of merchants to puritan news networks as facilitators enabling transatlantic communication. Rather than occupying network clusters that were largely separate from the familiar networks of letter writers, merchants bridged structural gaps, and built social credit as a result of their indispensability to the functioning of those networks. The networks in this chapter are based on social connections, family and friends, and are what O’Neill has called ‘familiar networks’.8 Such networks 4 C. G. Pestana, ‘Peirce, William (1590?–1641)’, ANB. 5 Lucy Downing to John Winthrop, January 1641, Winthrop Papers, vol. 4, pp. 303–4. 6 D. R. Woolf, ‘The “Common Voice”: History, folklore and oral tradition in early modern England’, Past and Present, 120 (1988), pp. 26–52. 7 D. Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); L. O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). See also: A. Stewart and H. Wolfe, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); S. McIntyre, ‘“I heare it so variously reported”: news-letters, newspapers, and the ministerial network in New England, 1670–1730’, The New England Quarterly, 71.4 (1998), p. 613. 8 O’Neill, The Opened Letter, p. 143.

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were voluntary in nature, helping correspondents keep track of their dispersed worlds, and could be put to work when problems arose. They were motivated by a sense of mutual obligation and a desire to keep in touch, creating informal communication networks that took place in correspondence, and which can be recreated from surviving letters.9 James Daybell and Andrew Gordon recognise that ‘the letter is a powerfully evocative form’ which seems ‘to promise a unique kind of access to the lives and thoughts of the past’.10 They have further argued that ‘the letter now emerges as the most vital and wide-ranging sociotext of the early modern period and one whose resources remain largely untapped’.11 Letters were ubiquitous in daily life, and as such remain rich and vibrant sources containing crucial material evidence of social connection. They reveal fluid cultures of communication, often containing evidence of oral patterns of communication that occurred alongside and in connection with the written word.12 Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of mapping these patterns as networks, in order to more fully understand the material lives of letters and subsequently the ‘networks of transmission’ that facilitated communication over long distances.13 News networks, as one particularly noisy form of written communication, have received significant attention of late. Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham’s volume on the subject has demonstrated the importance of understanding the less formal news networks in which news could be ‘more efficiently and speedily transmitted in person than in manuscript and print’.14 However, the volume contains only limited explorations of the role of correspondence in news distribution, and while the volume’s notable contribution to the field provides a much-needed examination of European news networks, surprisingly little work has been done to explore transatlantic news networks.15 Katherine Grandjean 9 O’Neill, The Opened Letter, p. 143. 10 J. Daybell & A. Gordon, ‘The Early Modern Letter Opener’, in J. Daybell & A. Gordon (eds.), Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 1. 11 Daybell and Gordon, ‘Letter Opener’, p. 19. 12 M. Cohen, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 2; see also Siobhan Talbott and Sophie Jones’s chapter in this collection. 13 Daybell and Gordon, ‘Letter Opener’, p. 3; J. Diaz Noci, ‘The Iberian Position in European News Networks: A Methodological Approach’, in J. Raymond & N. Moxham (eds.), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 215. 14 J. Raymond & N. Moxham, ‘News Networks in Early Modern Europe’, in Raymond & Moxham (eds.) News Networks in Early Modern Europe, p. 2. 15 N. Brownlees, ‘“Newes also came by Letters”: Functions and Features of Epistolary News in English News Publications of the Seventeenth Century’, in Raymond & Moxham (eds.), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, p. 394.

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has uncovered the landscape of communication in and between early New England and New York, but it remains a partial picture.16 Grandjean’s focus on colonial America rather than the wider British Atlantic also obscures the vast correspondence, ‘ravenous appetite’ for news, and ‘sustained community of interest’ between provincial England and New England.17 This chapter capitalises on the rich correspondence that sustained puritan communities in the mid-seventeenth century transatlantic world in order to show how news networks functioned. Specifically, it will quantify trust and social credit in these networks, in doing so exposing the critical role of merchants in transatlantic news exchange. This chapter is based on three collections of letters, the Winthrop Papers, Letters of John Davenport, and Correspondence of John Cotton.18 Together, these collections contain 1,523 letters from the period 1625–49, and this archive makes plain the innumerable ways that the exchange of news sustained communities through the early anxiety-ridden years of colonial settlement and the tumult of the English Civil Wars. This period of instability and colonisation lends itself particularly well to the questions surrounding credit and credibility in news exchange. News bolstered feelings of connection with those on the other side of the Atlantic, and others who were dispersed around the colonies. Hearing of the wellbeing of distant friends provided comfort. Those in England sought news of colonial developments, and likewise their New England brethren craved word from English shores. Letters with news were powerful tools, bonding senders, recipients, and their neighbours to brethren an ocean away. Belo has argued that handwritten news carried ‘added value’ and further ‘social importance’ above print news.19 Content could be personalised for the recipient, senders could control the circulation of their news, and letters could generally be sent more quickly than in print.20 O’Neill, focussing on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, found that news exchanged in letters was generally considered to be old news, intended for evaluation and discussion rather than as fresh information.21 But as noted by Andrew Pettegree, the same cannot be said for the rapidly changing and uncertain 16 K. Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 17 Cressy, Coming Over, pp. xiii–ix. 18 A. B. Forbes et al., The Winthrop Papers, 1498–1649, 5 vols; I. M. Calder, Letters of John Davenport, Puritan Divine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937); S. Bush Jr., The Correspondence of John Cotton (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 19 A. Belo, ‘News Exchange and Social Distinction’, in Raymond & Moxham (eds.), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, p. 378. 20 Belo, ‘News Exchange’, pp. 378, 387; Raymond & Moxham, ‘News Networks’, p. 2. 21 L. O’Neill, ‘Dealing with newsmongers: news, trust, and letters in the British world, ca. 1670–1730’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76.2 (2013), p. 220.

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years of the 1640s, where the colonists grasped at any information that crossed the Atlantic.22 This news exchange was of critical importance to the dispersed puritan community, and it would not have been possible for these godly men and women to maintain their correspondence without the people that carried their letters across the ocean. Merchants and their networks have received significant attention from historians, particularly those seeking to understand commerce and business ties.23 Often situated as a group who worked primarily within their own commercial and professional networks, merchants’ roles as members of familiar networks remain largely unexplored.24 Trust and credit in mercantile circles have been used to explain how long distance trade was possible, and how financial information was disseminated to help ensure the ‘creditability’ of corporations and individuals.25 But the trust and credit required for securing investment did not always translate neatly into trust and credit in social networks, like the correspondence networks reconstructed in this chapter, where moral character was as important as ability. Even though, as Robert Brenner has shown, opportunities for merchants to participate in the economic development of Massachusetts were limited, merchants were crucial to the operation of puritan social networks.26 Their involvement and importance, therefore, cannot be solely commercial, and was in large part functional. Many merchants carried letters in their ships from port to port, but even those without ships were well-placed in mercantile centres to hear and share news that came in on ships from elsewhere, or travelled to the ports before being shipped overseas. Brownlees shows that merchants experienced increased 22 A. Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 209, 210, 221–2. 23 See, for example: E. Smith, Merchants: The Community that Shaped England’s Trade and Empire, 1550–1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021); R. Harris, Going the Distance: Eurasian Trade and the Rise of the Business Corporation, 1400–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020); M. Sanchez & K. Kaps (eds.), Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550–1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); J. Haggerty & S. Haggerty, ‘The life cycle of a metropolitan business network: Liverpool 1750–1810’, Explorations in Economic History, 48 (2011), pp. 189–206. 24 O’Neill, The Opened Letter, pp. 141–3. 25 E. Smith, ‘The Social Networks of Investment in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal, 64.4 (2021), pp. 912–939; F. Trivellato, The familiarity of strangers: the Sephardic diaspora, Livorno, and cross-cultural trade in the early modern period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 157. 26 R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 150, 279.

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importance in news exchange in early-modern Britain after 1653–1654, but their prominence in transatlantic news networks emerged much earlier than this, as early as the Winthrop fleet’s departure for New England in 1630.27 Indeed, prior to the creation of a formal ‘arterial’ postal network, the spine of later news communication, merchants were absolutely essential to the transmission of news.28 While Brenner has conducted extensive research on transatlantic merchants, their structural role has not been explored through the means of social network analysis, in terms of their infrastructural role in correspondence networks, or in terms of their social credit.29 This chapter presents merchants as integral members of puritan familiar networks, quantifying trust and credit in different terms to those focused on commercial networks. By turning our attention to these people that bridged structural gaps in the network, we gain a new perspective on credit by evaluating the benefit that these vital links provided to the correspondents that traditionally dominate historical narratives.30 The unique position of merchants in puritan news networks is made clearer with digital methods, which are perfectly suited to understanding patterns of news dissemination and transmission. Social network analysis allows us to look again at the social webs sustained by correspondence news, providing insight into the ways that the network actually functioned.31 Using William Peirce as a case study, this chapter investigates Peirce as a network facilitator: an actor with structural, strategic benefit to the network. Such actors can be easily identified using quantitative methods, but had real-life significance beyond the network.32 Qualitative readings of the letters in which Peirce is mentioned show that he was trusted, so we already have evidence of his real-life status. 27 28 29 30

Brownlees, ‘Functions and Features’, p. 406. Raymond & Moxham, ‘News Networks in Early Modern Europe’, pp. 11–12. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution. Haggerty & Haggerty, ‘The life cycle of a metropolitan business network’, p. 193; Ruth Ahnert & Sebastian E. Ahnert, ‘Protestant letter networks in the reign of Mary I: a quantitative approach’, English Literary History, 82 (2015), pp. 3, 14, 17. 31 For an introduction, see: A. Degenne & M. Forsé, Introducing Social Networks, trans. A. Borges (London: Sage, 1999); S. Yang, F. B. Keller & L. Zheng, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Examples (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2017); J. Scott, Social Network Analysis (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2013); J. Scott, Social Network Analysis: A Handbook (London: Sage, 2000); C. Prell, Social Network Analysis: History, Theory and Methodology (London: Sage, 2012); S. Wasserman & K. Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); B. Wellman & S. D. Berkowitz (eds.), Social Structures: A Network Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 32 D. Watts and S. Strogatz, ‘Collective dynamics of “small-world” networks’, Nature, 393 (1998) pp. 440–42; R. Albert and A. Barabási, ‘Statistical mechanics of complex networks’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 74 (2002) pp. 47–97; M. E. J. Newman, Networks: An

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As such he is perfectly suited to this analysis, which will reveal how network analysis can be used to better understand the roles of actors for whom we have less qualitative data. Setting Peirce in the context of the other members of the network reveals his high status in quantitative terms. In order to create a full picture of Peirce’s place in the network, the data from each letter in the corpus was extracted and turned into meta-data, a process which enables mathematical and visual analysis to be conducted on the correspondence network. This entailed recording from each letter the sender and recipient, date of writing, location of origin and destination (where available or reasonably ascertainable), and the relationships noted within the letter. I worked manually to extract the required data, which also meant that I could achieve greater depth, as I was not confined to recording the sender and recipient of letters alone, but also each connection mentioned within those letters. Daybell and Gordon have argued that any attempt to locate an individual within the cultures of their correspondence ought to encompass not only those letters that he or she or they penned, but also those received, read, endorsed, archived, and carried.33 Reading each letter thoroughly and then manually extracting the data allowed me to consider these extra-textual relationships. This data was run through the social network analysis programme, Gephi, to generate a network graph from which to run various measures of quantitative analysis. For each relationship a line, or edge, was drawn. These edges create the paths in the network, demonstrating connections and the lines along which information could travel. It is important to note that these edges do not have a spatial aspect; rather they are non-physical paths between two nodes in a network. This chapter uses three key analytical methods to set Peirce in the context of the network and identify quantitative patterns of trust and credit: closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, and degree. A network in its most simple form is a collection of links, which can be combined into innumerable possible paths. The measurement of these paths is a fundamental way in which to establish the tiered importance of the people in that network. Closeness centrality provides one such insight, and this does not refer to physical proximity but to the strength of a relationship. Closeness centrality is particularly useful when exploring trust, credit, and credibility, because those ranking highly by this measure can interact quickly with other members of the network and are usually less reliant on others for information. Actors that belong to groupings

33

Introduction (Oxford, 2010). For a general overview, see Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 1–2. Daybell and Gordon, ‘Letter Opener’, p. 9.

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with a high closeness centrality are more likely to have readier access to the latest information, indicating a particular social benefit that often signifies a level of trust.34 This tells us less about the important actors in the network, but more about the way in which information travelled. As such, closeness centrality often reveals network facilitators. Additionally, for any two actors in a network there exists a shortest route between them, and this is the basis of ‘betweenness centrality’.35 Betweenness tells us how many of these shortest paths go through a particular actor, which shows their centrality to the organisation of the network, identifying points of control. Those with high betweenness scores possessed significant real-life influence within the network, acting as ‘chokepoints’, where the actor in question had the choice to retain or share the information that he or she possessed. Finally, degree refers to the number of unique connections of an actor in the network, and weighted degree, the total number of interactions with those connections. This indicates the level of involvement of any actor in the network and provides context on the relative strength of their position. As this chapter considers, William Peirce is unusual as he had a relatively small number of connections, but retained a strong position in the network. He was not a network ‘hub’ in the same fashion as the chief authors of the correspondence collections featured in this chapter – namely, John Winthrop and John Winthrop Jr. – who fit the common pattern in network analysis whereby the most frequent correspondents rank highest in a network in terms of their degree and weighted degree.36 Despite having a relatively low number of connections, Peirce remains close to the centre of a force-directed network (see note), indicating that his prominence originated from something other than simply being well-connected to many other people.37 By conceptualising Peirce as a ‘facilitator’ of the network, this chapter sets out a new method for recognising network and real-world importance that shifts the focus from the chief correspondents to those who made their communication possible. Using the social network analysis methods outlined above, this chapter offers a new 34 K. Okamoto, W. Chen, & X. Li, ‘Ranking of Closeness Centrality for Large-Scale Social Networks’, in. F. P. Preparata, X. Wu, & J. Yin (eds.), Frontiers in Algorithmics (New York, NY, 1998), pp. 186–195; Degenne & Forsé, Introducing Social Networks, pp. 136–136; Wasserman & Faust, Social Network Analysis, chapter five. See the Appendix to Peter Buckles’s chapter in this collection for further information on how to approach HSNA. 35 Wasserman & Faust, Social Network Analysis. 36 In network analysis, a hub is node with an anomalously high number of edges. 37 This chapter utilises force-directed visualisations. This algorithm pulls nodes with more connections to the centre and forces less connected nodes to the periphery, revealing how closely integrated these actors were into the network.

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quantitative framework for identifying and evaluating credibility in correspondence networks. 1

William Peirce

William Peirce, a ship’s captain, was born in England in 1590. Little is known of his early life, and his parentage is unknown.38 From the 1620s he sailed frequently between England and the Anglo-American colonies, and surviving records indicate that he made more journeys to the New England colonies than any other ship’s captain. Peirce held puritan religious beliefs and was highly regarded by puritan colonisers including John Winthrop, who encouraged his family to wait for Peirce to carry them to New England, writing that ‘I would rather you stayed, though it were 2 or 3 months, to come with mr. Peirce … because of his skill and Care of his passingers’.39 Trustworthy, experienced, and well-travelled, Peirce was often recommended as a source of news and information by puritan correspondents in the British Atlantic World. By 1632, Peirce had settled in Massachusetts and was accepted as a member by the Charlestown church in October of that year. Church membership was a formal, mutual recognition of acceptance of an individual by the existing church community, who would collectively assess an applicant’s moral and spiritual character. It reinforced social and spiritual bonds, and acted as a marker of credibility in the congregational organisation of the early New England colonies.40 Peirce’s acceptance is a clear marker of his trustworthy reputation, further consolidated when the colony named him a freeman in 1634, giving him full civil privileges. Peirce died in Providence Island in June or July of 1641, killed by the Spanish who had retaken the Island just before Peirce arrived there with a shipload of settlers. Peirce is an excellent case study for this chapter because his trustworthiness can be established qualitatively, which allows us to test whether this is corroborated quantitatively. Confirming real-life trustworthiness through social network analysis is important as it has wide-reaching methodological implications for broader humanities research, because it provides evidence of what trust and credibility look like in a network. When quantitative analysis proves what we already know, that means that it works, and this means that 38 Pestana, ‘Peirce, William (1590?–1641)’. 39 John Winthrop to John Winthrop Jr., 28 March 1631, Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, pp. 20–2. 40 F. J. Bremer, Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 51; Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 48–9.

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we can put some trust in the method when it draws attention to things we might not have observed before.41 The same is true for patterns discerned in a network. This chapter identifies a framework that confirms quantitatively Peirce’s trusted status, and such a framework can be used to identify other trustworthy individuals. This is particularly important when those individuals might not be identifiable through qualitative analysis alone. Peirce is unusual in the network at the centre of this chapter because he penned only one letter. Others ranking similarly highly by the different quantitative analyses utilised here are frequent writers or recipients of letters. By contrast, Peirce’s position is primarily a result of endorsements from others, which is highly unusual. Most commonly, those drawn to the centre of a force-directed algorithm are letter writers, as these are the actors with the most demonstrable connections evidenced in the correspondence. This is notable because while there are many like Peirce who are often mentioned, it is without such clear endorsements of their character. This method can therefore be used to understand patterns of trust, credit and credibility in social networks more broadly. It will provide a tool to understand others like Peirce who, while infrequent correspondents, remain central figures in their networks due to different network roles. 2

Merchants, Expertise and Trust

The full letter corpus used in this chapter contains mention of 2,118 actors (nodes), and 6,375 interactions between them (edges). Interactions vary, and so I have categorised each type of relationship as follows: correspondence connections (those between sender and recipient); reported connections (where a conversation or other exchange was relayed); implied connections (where the sender appears to assume the recipient’s knowledge of an individual); requested connections (where an endorsement or recommendation encourages a new connection); and kin or spousal connections. This categorisation achieves a multi-layered approach, which makes it possible not only to understand general trends across the full network, but also to see how smaller networks functioned within that whole.42 This combined approach to the data aligns with Martin Mueller’s concept of ‘scalable reading’.43 In this instance, a large quantity of carefully categorised data is made more accessible through

41 Ahnert & Ahnert, ‘Protestant letter networks’, p. 7. 42 R. Ahnert, ‘Maps versus Networks’, in Raymond & Moxham, News Networks in Early Modern Europe, p. 152. 43 M. Mueller: http://scalablereading.northwestern.edu/ (accessed 24 February 2022).

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the process of quantification. In this form, we can switch quickly and effectively between the case study and the context, or use broad trends to identify anomalous or interesting exceptions. This approach is essential to understanding the role of an individual like Peirce in this network. If we were to look only at his appearance in the network as a correspondent, having only written one letter, his significant position would be difficult to understand. But what is interesting about Peirce is his appearance in numerous other letters, as a reported or implied connection. By piecing these together, we can understand how he introduced himself as a trustworthy bearer, and over time consolidated his social credit through structural indispensability to the network. Where others entered and dropped out of the network over the years, Peirce’s position only grew stronger. Peirce first appears in this correspondence network in 1630, when briefly mentioned by Governor John Winthrop in a letter regarding his financial accounts. The letter provides no contextual information about Peirce, other than indicating his role as a merchant supplying the New England colonies with goods.44 In November of that same year, his one surviving letter in this collection hints at a wider correspondence no longer extant, as he wrote to John Winthrop Jr. that he had ‘receyved from you two letters’, and reported on tasks completed on Winthrop Jr.’s behalf.45 Peirce was already an established merchant by this time, and had an existing business relationship with the Winthrop family. However, merchants were a group whose work meant that they needed to gain advantage over their peers for success, competing with their peers for contracts to secure financial security or prosperity.46 Their trustworthiness was fostered largely through expertise, and acquired by practice and exposure.47 But Peirce found an additional method by which to assert his credibility and trustworthiness over one of his peers in 1630, and made a complaint about the shipmaster of the Gift, John Brock, claiming that Brock had broken open private letters from New England. This was a damaging accusation that carried significant weight in the transatlantic puritan community. Already an anxious population, and seeking to consolidate a radical religious position that challenged the Church of England, letters from New England were often closely guarded. Some writers adopted ciphers to protect their letters, others used pseudonyms, but however the letter was written, the bearer was intensely 44 John Winthrop to John Winthrop Jr., 23 July 1630, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, pp. 304–7. 45 William Peirce to John Winthrop Jr., 18 November 1630, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, pp. 317–8. 46 S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England (Chicago, IL, 1994), p. 94. 47 P. Hellawell, ‘“The best and most practical philosophers”: Seamen and the authority of experience in early modern science’, History of science, 58.1 (2020), pp. 28–50.

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valuable and had to be trusted. Bearers gained credit from being a ‘safe hand’, and correspondents might choose bearers based on endorsements.48 Peirce’s belief that ‘it were good that some Course were procecuted against him’ both implied that he would never commit the same offence as Brock, and comparatively elevated his credibility above a rival merchant, who, after Peirce’s accusation, does not appear again in this correspondence network. Looking closely at the connections that Peirce had is an important first step in quantifying his position, because it shows the number of his links in the network and their frequency. Using degree (the number of unique relationships held in a network) and weighted degree (the total number of appearances in a network) it is possible to map, over time, how Peirce became integrated into the structure of the network. Even when his ship was wrecked, and the correspondence he was entrusted with damaged, the puritans on both sides of the Atlantic continued to trust him with their letters and supplies. These measures begin to reveal a picture of Peirce as a network ‘facilitator’, bridging what Ronald Burt has called ‘structural holes’ in the network, by carrying letters across the Atlantic, and sustaining the network through his work as a bearer.49 In 1630, there is evidence of only six unique relationships for Peirce in this network, with a weighted degree of twelve. While this places Peirce in the top 12% of the total network for his degree score and 11% for weighted degree, he remains a peripheral actor at this stage. To set him in the wider context of the network, only 9% of the 168 network actors who were active in 1630 have a degree score of ten or above, and only 4% have a score of twenty or above. Put simply, for an actor with a number of connections, he still ranks fairly low. The vast majority of actors in this 1630 network have only one or two connections. By 1635, his degree score of thirteen places him in the top 7% of a much larger network of 463 actors, and his weighted degree of forty-seven ranks him in the top 3% by that measure. This shows a significant increase in the number of Peirce’s connections in only a short period, and may well be partly attributed to Peirce’s allegations against Brock in 1630. In these years, Peirce traversed the Atlantic many times, carrying people, goods and correspondence between England and New England, and the Caribbean. To conceptualise this in terms of Hellawell’s argument, that expertise or ‘expertness’ demonstrated trustworthiness, Peirce was quite evidently becoming increasingly trusted and ingratiated into the network. Despite the shipwreck of the Lyon in 1632, he 48

Peter Bulkeley to John Cotton, 26 September 1642, S. Bush Jr., The Correspondence of John Cotton (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 365–66. 49 R. S. Burt, Structural Holes: the Social Structure of Competition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), cited in Ahnert, ‘Maps versus Networks’, p. 147.

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continued to rank highly. At the time of his death in 1641, Peirce held a high degree score of twenty-one, ranking him in the top 3% of a network of 758, and in the top 2% of the weighted degree measure. Peirce’s lack of personal correspondence is of particular importance here. The only other individuals scoring more than twenty on the weighted degree measure between 1630–1641 to have appeared so infrequently as a correspondent are kin of the Winthrop family (James Downing, Mary Downing, and Jane Gostlin), and members of the Company of Husbandmen (Grace Hardwin, John Dye, Thomas Juppe, and John Roach), whose names all feature in the few letters they sent collectively, giving a skewed picture of the regularity of their exchanges in the correspondence.50 Their high number of connections is cemented by a significant number of reported connections with one another. Finally, Increase Nowell and Thomas Hewson also feature on this list with only one letter sent each, but they were letters with significant numbers of reported and implied connections, leading to their high ranking.51 Put simply, the critical difference is that some actors, such as those members of the Company of Husbandmen, have a high number of connections from only one or two letters where they mention lots of other names. Peirce is different because his connections in the network are numerous, and can be tracked and mapped over a number of letters. This provides a more holistic picture of the strength of his connections. Understanding Peirce as a facilitator rather than a correspondent develops our understanding of his role in this network. It reinforces the importance of the letter bearer, in a time when transatlantic bearers needed access to a ship, at the very least, to be able to deliver their charges. This requirement contributes to our understanding of social credit and credibility in this period because those actors able to bridge structural gaps were, by definition, of value. As Ruth Ahnert describes it, this benefit can be understood ‘as a form of social capital’, or credit.52 It connects with an idea, prevalent in social science, whereby social capital ‘refers to social contacts and connections as a way to get things accomplished’.53 There was an immense strategic advantage in being one of very few actors through which information could flow, and Peirce was undoubtedly one of them. In theory, if Peirce held a significant amount of social credit 50

Company of Husbandmen to Members in New England, 8 March 1632, Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, pp. 67–71; Company of Husbandmen to John Winthrop, 1 December 1632, Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, pp. 101–3. 51 Daniel Patrick to Increase Nowell, 6 July 1637, Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, pp. 440–441. 52 Ahnert, ‘Maps versus Networks’, p. 147. 53 Smelser & Reed, Usable Social Science, p. 146.

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as a result of his position as a key facilitator for the network, we should be able to see this reflected in a high betweenness ranking. 3

William Peirce and Structural Benefit

It is important to look at how Peirce’s position developed over time in order to show a complete picture of how his credit increased. After being enthusiastically endorsed by John Winthrop in 1630, Peirce ranked in the top 7% of 168 actors for his betweenness measure. This high ranking comes largely from Peirce’s connection to John Brock, who he accused of opening the letters of the New England colonists.54 Because Peirce’s description of Brock contained no indication that John Winthrop Jr., the recipient of the letter, had prior knowledge of Brock, Peirce is Brock’s only known connection in the network at this point (see fig. 4.1). This causes Peirce’s high betweenness ranking, as he exists here as a ‘choke-point’ in the network, the sole actor linking Brock to the ‘giant-component’, the connected component of the network, which contains a significant proportion of the entire nodes in the network.55 By 1635, of the 463 actors active in the network at this time, Peirce’s betweenness ranking places him in the top 7% of the network, maintaining his rank from 1630 but in a much larger network. The people who rank above Peirce on this list fall broadly into three categories: religious and civic leaders (John Winthrop Jr., John Winthrop, Sir Richard Saltonstall, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Sir John Clotworthy, Rev. John Wilson, Rev. Philip Nye, Isaac Johnson, Henry Jacie, Edward Hopkins); merchants, (Francis Kirby, Isaac Allerton, John Humfrey, Richard Dummer, Grace Hardwin, Thomas Juppe, John Roch, John Dye, John Robinson, and Samuel Vassall); and friends and kin of the Winthrop family (Edward Howes, Margaret Winthrop, Emmanuel Downing, Martha Winthrop, Henry Winthrop, Henry Paynter, Thomas Gostlin, John Ponde). The outliers are Thomas Mayhew, an agent in Massachusetts who lay on the shortest path between Richard Dummer and John Winthrop, and Elizabeth Knowles, who wrote to John Winthrop to enquire after her brother’s state in Massachusetts.56 54 55

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William Peirce to John Winthrop Jr., 18 November 1630, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, pp. 317–8. In network theory a giant component is the majority of the complete network, omitting connections between smaller ‘islands’ of nodes otherwise not connected to the main network. In this instance, the giant component omits connections between John and William Pond, who are only connected to one another, and John Davenport and Lady Mary Vere, who again are only sharing news with one another in this network. Their closeness centrality is anomalously high due to the fact that they are unconnected to the main network and they are thus omitted from this analysis. Elizabeth Knowles to John Winthrop, 14 April 1634, Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, p. 164.

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Figure 4.1 A force-directed visualisation of the correspondence network, 1630

Knowles lies on the shortest path between very peripheral actors, Robert Mills and James Davies, each with a degree score of one, and John Winthrop. As we see from Peirce’s position in relation to Brock, above, these connections form bridges between peripheral actors and central figures, or facilitate a more efficient path between two actors, creating each individual’s prominence in the network, despite their low degree scores. There is an obvious trend here. John Winthrop and John Winthrop Jr. predictably rank highest in terms of betweenness. The Winthrop Papers constitute a significant proportion of the letters used in this study, and so we would expect to see the most prolific correspondents in the family as hubs in the network. In network analysis the word ‘hub’ denotes a node with ‘an anomalously high number of edges’.57 They are easy to detect visually and, in the force directed visualisations used in this chapter, will appear closer to the centre of the graph (see fig. 4.2). With so many connections, it is very likely that a shortest path would travel through them. That leading ministers and magistrates have such high betweenness scores in this network is no surprise. It is both a consequence of the source material, they 57 Ahnert, ‘Maps versus Networks’, p. 135.

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would obviously be important hubs in a network constructed from the correspondence of the Winthrop family and two leading New England ministers, but also of the subject matter. Ministers and magistrates held prominence in New England. Likewise, with the friends and relatives of the Winthrops, these are people that we would expect to see ranking highly because of their close relationships with the key hubs. Emmanuel Downing, Edward Howes and Henry Paynter were regular correspondents, and Margaret and Martha Winthrop are recipients of many commendations at the close of letters. That so many merchants have high betweenness rankings in the network reinforces the notion that these facilitators bridged structural gaps, building social credit as a result of their indispensability to the functioning of the network. In the correspondence network examined in this chapter, merchants were vital structural links that carried correspondence, related news, and engaged in colonial business ventures. This adds depth to our understanding of the role of merchants in the network, highlighting Peirce’s infrastructural importance as a member of a group, but on its own the betweenness score does not tell us much about his individual status. However, when we look at Peirce’s prominence as a merchant in terms of his weighted degree score, we can see that only two other merchants, Francis Kirby and John Humfrey, ranked higher than Peirce did in the years 1630–1635. In contrast with Peirce, these three men were regular correspondents, actively participating in commerce with the Winthrop family throughout these years. Peirce’s prominence can be explained by the nature of his connections. With a degree of thirteen and a weighted degree of forty-seven, thirty-four of Peirce’s connections were repeated, suggesting stronger relationships. Returning to the concept of expertise as a marker of trustworthiness, for Peirce to have repeated interactions with key individuals, all of whom engaged with him primarily on a professional level, as a merchant and letter bearer, we can further consolidate our understanding of Peirce as a trusted individual. We can hereby track his social credit in terms of his betweenness, his indispensability to the network, and his trustworthiness in terms of the regularity of his interactions with key network hubs. At the time of his death in 1641, those ranking highly in betweenness are largely the same group as seen from 1630–35, and most of the new additions to this list fall into the same broad categories of: leading magistrates and ministers (Roger Williams, Daniel Patrick, John Endecott, Brampton Gurdon, Hugh Peter, Edward Winslow, Increase Nowell, and John Cotton); merchants (Matthew Craddock, Israel Stoughton); and friends and kin of the Winthrops (Robert Ryece, Lucy Downing, Elizabeth Reade Winthrop, William Dixon, and Mary Dudley). The exceptions are Richard Davenport, who reported on the events of the Pequot War, making him a key facilitator for news, and Thomas James, a Providence minister who features in reports from the

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Pequot War. The final outlier is William Payne, who has few connections in the network, but who connects peripheral nodes to the centre. The evidence in this corpus reveals no new connections for Peirce between 1635 and 1641, so all of his connections in this period were with actors he was already linked to. As a frequently used letter bearer and merchant, Peirce’s integrity to the network is evident. This example shows that we can use social network analysis to deepen our understanding of social capital by evaluating the positions of those that bridged structural gaps in networks. Social network analysis reveals that Peirce carried a level of credit in line with the ‘benefit’ that he provided to the network.

Figure 4.2 A force-directed visualisation of the correspondence network, 1630–35

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Merchants in News Networks

Having used betweenness centrality, degree, and weighted degree to reveal Peirce’s integral position to the full correspondence network constructed from this corpus, we are able not only to understand his role as a facilitator or ‘sustainer’ in the network, but also how social credit and trust can be quantified. In the concluding section of this chapter, I will demonstrate how we can add critical depth to this picture with closeness centrality, using closeness analysis in connection with scalable reading to ‘zoom in’ on the smaller news networks at play within the whole. This approach facilitates an understanding of how network sustainers – those with social capital as a result of the structural ‘benefit’ that they provided the network – translated into news networks. In the following section, closeness centrality reveals Peirce’s position specifically in relation to other merchants active in news networks. Letters in this period varied in content and tone but, of the 1,523 letters considered in this essay, 441 of them explicitly supplied the recipient with news. This constitutes 29% of the letters consulted, and a significant proportion of the correspondence surviving in these collections. For the purposes of this chapter, I have categorised the types, or themes, of news shared and exchanged in the correspondence. Six main categories emerged: business (forty-seven letters), ecclesiastical (forty-seven letters), family (sixty-six letters), local (be it local to the sender, or foreign news relevant to a particular locality – 225 letters), personal (105 letters) and political news (190 letters). Each item of news may have fit more than one category, for example, much political news was also local. The result was six overlapping and interlocking news networks. While news has often previously been conceived of as a single ‘network’, conceptualising news flow as taking place across a more complex pattern of numerous intertwining networks allows us to better understand them.58 There are potential challenges with this methodology. Focussing on any one type of news would be to make a decision about inclusion and exclusion, but contemporaries likely didn’t separate their news into stark categories. And if they did, the process would have been personal, subjective, and would probably elude historians. As categorisation remains difficult and potentially exclusive, I have as far as possible remained cognisant of the relationship between the smaller networks and the wider web of news exchange. Identifying and compartmentalising these networks was an important step in understanding the flow of news networks, as not all prominent news sharers sent the same types of news, and some news was disseminated more widely than others. With this in mind, I have as far as possible allowed 58 Brownlees, ‘Functions and Features’, p. 406.

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the correspondents to construct and define the news shared in their letters. Where I have had to make judgements, I have tended towards explicit news sharing rather than reporting on the health and wellbeing of local family and friends, though such information does often accompany more consciously constructed news reports. To fully understand Peirce’s role as a facilitator, we must understand the geography of news sharing. News did not simply flow between England and its colonies in a two-way exchange across the Atlantic. While London was an unequivocal centre for letters containing news in the 1630s and 1640s, and Boston was New England’s major centre, news was disseminated between English and Dutch colonies, and likewise around Britain and Europe.59 Of the letters with news explored in this chapter, London was the source from which news was sent on 105 occasions. Boston, New England’s major centre, was the target for news on 233 occasions. This is in part due to the centrality of Boston in the Winthrop Papers, as John Winthrop’s area of longest residence, but there is no doubt that Boston was a clear hub for receiving news from England, and that London was key in providing it. As one of the main ports in New England, Boston was also at the centre of news distribution around the colonies, defining it as a ‘hub’ in network terms. Thirty-six of the forty-six letters containing news that were sent from Boston in this period were destined for other locations in the colonies, while six went to London and three to other locations in England. Boston was also the target destination for numerous letters containing news from Providence, Plymouth, Saybrook, and Salem. News did not circulate evenly in New England. Networks were reliant on ships for news exchange; it was often more efficient to send letters by water than across land, and especially over the longer distances stretching between colonies.60 Merchants were therefore vital both for spreading news within New England, as well as across the Atlantic. Peirce’s frequent Atlantic crossings and travel between the different colonies made him the ideal facilitator for news exchange, consolidating his network position as a sustainer. He was particularly prominent in the local news network, and ranks in the top 6% of the full network for his closeness centrality. Where betweenness identifies points of control, closeness reveals actors who were less reliant on a chain of information. Taking together Peirce’s betweenness score, which places him in the top 14% of the news network, his even higher closeness rank demonstrates that he was not only of immense structural benefit to the network, but he was deeply integrated into the flow of 59 Brownlees, ‘Functions and Features’, p. 404; O’Neill, Opened Letter, p. 183. 60 Grandjean, American Passage, pp. 28–30.

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information. Closely and powerfully connected to key network hubs, William Peirce was significantly less reliant on others for information. Quite the opposite: other actors were reliant on him. This analysis shows that Peirce was entrusted with the latest information, and was positioned to interact quickly with other members of the network. The particular social benefit that Peirce provided is seen with other merchants within the news network. Taking the local news network, which contains the most letters of any of the news networks, and was the most widely spread geographically, we can set Peirce in the context of his peers to show that merchants as a group held a particular network significance as facilitators and sustainers, reflecting their social credit. Of the thirty-five actors ranking in the top 25% of the local news network in terms of their closeness centrality, nine were merchants for at least part of their working lives, ten were members of the Winthrop extended family, and ten were ministers. Of the nine merchants, six either lived in, or travelled between, the colonies and England during the course of their lives (John Humfrey, William Peirce, Stephen Winthrop, Edward Gibbons, John Oldham, and Richard Malbon). Two merchants were in contact with the Winthrop family prior to 1630 and were merchants in Europe, but I have not been able to confirm whether they had a transatlantic career (John Freeman and Captain Maplesden). John Freeman only appears in the news network as a news sharer, owing to his friendship with John Winthrop Jr. His high closeness ranking is down to his ties to John Winthrop Jr., a significant hub in the local news network. The final merchant, Francis Kirby, never set foot in the New England colonies, but engaged in the exchange of news on six occasions.61 These merchants, like Peirce, rank highly in terms of their closeness centrality, consolidating the fact that actors of this profession held key positions whereby they could quickly access information – in this instance, news. This also means that they had the capacity to influence news flow, selecting what news to share with which other members of the network. Even Kirby, who did not cross the Atlantic himself, holds a high rank because of his access to mercantile networks. Kirby tapped into his personal and professional network in order to access the latest and most reliable news from London. He summarised published news, local to Europe but received in London, adding extra detail ‘noted in the margin by the Geneva translators’. He commented on the local news he had 61 John Humfrey to Isaac Johnson, 9 December 1630, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, pp. 327–30; John Humfrey to Isaac Allerton, 17 December 1630, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, pp. 334–5; John Humfrey to John Winthrop, 18 December 1630, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, pp. 335–6; John Humfrey to Isaac Johnson, 23 December 1630, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, pp. 338–40.

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received from correspondents in Greenland and from a ship bound for Genoa from Newfoundland. This particular letter contains little other than news, and Kirby’s ‘desire to acquaint you with such occurrents as may be newes to you whether foreine or domesticall’ was his entire purpose for writing to his friend.62 In a letter written the following year, he even noted that ‘I have no newes to write you’, preferring the dissemination of sensitive news concerning ‘the occurrents in Court and Contry’ to be ‘related by those that come to you then to be committed to paper’.63 He was well situated in London to gather and disseminate local news that was both domestic and foreign, and significance in this network corroborates what Peirce’s case study set out. Merchants played vital structural roles in news transmission because of their ability to bridge gaps. While Kirby did not travel himself, he utilised his mercantile connections in order to maintain a good level of social credit by sharing news sourced from those who were travelling around Europe and the early American colonies. These merchants rank similarly highly in betweenness centrality, confirming the structural benefit of the group to the network, as set out with Peirce above. Like Peirce, in the local news network, Kirby and Humfrey both rank in the top 10% for their betweenness centrality. With this smaller network, there are fewer actors with any structural benefit to the network, as the majority of nodes do not exist on any ‘shortest paths’ between two nodes, giving them a betweenness score of zero. Of the 140 actors in the local news network, only twenty-eight have a non-zero betweenness score. This is because local news exchange brought in fewer peripheral actors, and was more frequently recorded in letters as an exchange between two people, and the bearers of these letters are not always noted. These twenty-eight actors, then, are bestowed with a certain level of benefit. It is, then, incredibly revealing that of those actors, at least eight were merchants (John Humfrey, Thomas Hawkins, William Peirce, Francis Kirby, Stephen Winthrop, John Freeman, Benjamin Gostlin). The others fall into the primary categories of ministers and magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or close friends or relatives of the Winthrop family. That almost one third of those with non-zero betweenness scores in the local news network are merchants is important, further confirming that the structural benefit that they held to the network bestowed on them a particular significance. No other single profession or role occupies such a high proportion of both closeness and betweenness ranking. The indispensability of merchants to the infrastructure of transatlantic news networks is clear, providing a new framework for understanding and recognising credit in these networks, as a 62 63

Francis Kirby to John Winthrop Jr., 26 December 1631, Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, pp. 55–7. Francis Kirby to John Winthrop Jr., 26 March 1633, Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, pp. 116–7.

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form of social benefit. The quantification of trust and credit reveals that merchants, far from occupying primarily separate networks built on commerce, were integral to the functioning of familiar correspondence news networks. 5 Conclusion Taken together, this information gives us a new framework for understanding how trust and credit played out in transatlantic news networks, and shows how important merchants were to puritan news networks. There was an immense strategic advantage in being one of very few actors through which information could flow, and mapping these correspondence news networks makes it possible to quantify social credit, as it reveals network structures. By using statistical analysis, the integral nature of William Peirce’s role in the network becomes clear, and that the prominence of other merchants by this same methodology shows that social credit can be quantified by this measure. This is a significant development in identifying patterns of testimony and social credit, lifting the role of those that quietly sustained the network alongside the familiar voices of those who dominate the correspondence and the historiography, and revealing the vital structural role of merchants. Far from solely populating their own separate networks, merchants were trusted and valued members of puritan news networks, bridging structural gaps and forging both social and business ties that developed and consolidated their trusted status. Statistical analysis provides a new way of thinking about credit. By focusing on the structural facilitators that enabled the network to function, we can explore credit by thinking about credibility in terms of an individual’s benefit, and how others valued and utilised them in order to develop and maintain their own news networks. This quantitative approach has wide-reaching methodological implications for humanities research because it provides evidence of what trust and credit look like in networks.

Part 2 Information Flows and Spaces

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Chapter 5

Betting on News: (Mis)information and Public Opinion in Early Modern England Lena Liapi On 12 October 1691, news that Limerick had surrendered, ending the Williamite War in Ireland, was spread through London.1 At noon, ‘the great Guns were fired from the Tower, and in the Evening Bonfires, Illuminations, and Ringing of Bells expressed the publick and general Joy for this happy success of Their Majesties Arms’.2 The description evokes a moment of joy shared by everyone, but, in reality, not everyone was happy. Among those disappointed with this outcome were enemies of the English state who wished to see William III’s army humbled, but also English people who had betted against England’s success in Limerick. Such betting was taken seriously in the late seventeenth century: in December 1692, the corporation of London published a proclamation banning wagers ‘upon the Events of Besieging Forts and Cities, and other the Successes of War’. This was clearly a significant issue and the proclamation warned those who placed or accepted such bets that they would be prosecuted ‘under the utmost penalties of the Laws’.3 However, this did not prove effective, as in 1708 an Act of Parliament was passed ‘to prevent the laying of Wagers relating to the Publick’. This Act attempted to stop any wagers which had to do with ‘the present war and other Matters relating to the government’.4 The need for an Act of Parliament against betting suggested that previous legislation had failed to curb betting on the progress of the war and that such practices were matters of great concern for both the central and civic authorities. 1 This research would not have been possible without a generous Dr and Mrs James C. Caillouette fellowship from the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. I would also like to thank Prof. Mark Jenner and Dr Natasha Glaisyer for discussing the themes of this chapter, as well as audiences at the University of York and at the European University Institute, Florence, for providing useful feedback and encouragement. 2 London Gazette, No. 2705, 15 October 1691. 3 City of London, Jovis Primo die Decembr’ 1692; Annoque Regis & Regine, Willielmi & Marie, Angl (London: Samuel Roycroft, 1692). 4 Rot. Parl. 7 Anne, p. 3. n. 6. See also Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 21.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689879_006

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Wagers grew as a branch of the insurance business in early modern Europe. From the Middle Ages, merchants would insure their ship or cargo in order to mitigate the effects of potential disasters all too likely to happen at sea.5 As Geoffrey Clark has stated ‘For merchants and traders, insurance mediated between the hard-headed realities of the present and the speculative futures into which they daily entrusted their fortunes’.6 Nonetheless, this speculative aspect of insurance also led to betting on contingent events, such as the death of monarchs or the outcome of wars.7 This was not a significant leap of logic, as early probability discourse from the late medieval period considered insurance and gambling as closely related.8 Betting on events was a pan-European phenomenon, with Genoa outlawing gambling on ‘the outcome of battles sieges of cities, marriages, births, elections of the Doge, or outbreaks of the plague’ as early as the fifteenth century.9 At the Antwerp Exchange in the sixteenth century, gambling insurance policies dominated business activities with individuals betting on the safe return of ships, events relating to war, or even the death of significant individuals.10 London did not lag behind Europe when it came to such developments in speculative insurance. In the 1570s and 80s, the Privy Council and the Aldermen’s Court of London collaborated in order to codify insurance customs and establish an insurance registry as well as a specialised insurance court.11 Individuals had to leave a copy of their insurance policy at the Office of Assurance in London in order to get paid in the case of loss.12 The connection between betting on news and insurance policies 5

Cornel Zwierlen, Prometheus Tamed: Fire, Security, and Modernities, 1400 to 1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 24–35. 6 Clark, Betting on Lives, p. 3. 7 Zwierlen, Prometheus Tamed, p. 33. An example is the merchant John Verney who shared in several marine insurance policies but also made bets with other merchants about the date of the French king’s death: Susan E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 75. About gambling on Venetian elections, see also Jonathan Walker, ‘Gambling and Venetian Noblemen c.1500–1700’, Past & Present, 162 (1999), pp. 28–69. 8 Zwierlen, Prometheus Tamed, p. 250. 9 Clark, Betting on Lives, p. 15. 10 Herman Van Der Wee, The growth of the Antwerp market and the European economy: fourteenth-sixteenth centuries (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), pp. 264–5. See also Dave De Ruysscher, ‘Antwerp 1490–1590: Insurance and speculation’ in A. B. Leonard (ed.), Marine Insurance: Origins and Institutions, 1300–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 83. 11 A. B. Leonard, ‘London 1426–1601: Marine Insurance and the Law Merchant’, in Leonard (ed.), Marine Insurance, pp. 151–178. 12 John Vernon, The Compleat compting-house (London: Benjamin Billingsley, 1683), pp. 150–155. Nonetheless, it seems that the Court of Assurance was not active after 1692: Leonard, ‘London 1426–1601’, p. 171.

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was so intimate that in March 1692/3 a bill to ‘prevent wagering on the events of war’ was initially denied a second hearing because it was too general and ‘might be construed to restrain the insurance of merchant ships’.13 This chapter focuses on the last ten years of the seventeenth century, when due to the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) between France and a coalition of England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Austrian Habsburgs, there was a lot of interest in betting on political events. War was actually a great motivator for such gambling practices, as there was increased interest in international developments. Additionally, as normal maritime trade contracted, there was a more pressing need to invent speculative insurances, or, as Andrea Addobbati framed this, in such cases, ‘all that remained was the fuel of pure speculation’.14 Wars also increased the capacity of early modern news networks: getting accurate and fresh news became extremely important and news services appeared to cover this increased need.15 Nonetheless, historians have only briefly examined wagers on war, and for the most part in the context of economic history. This has led Cornel Zwierlein to argue that ‘the exoticism and the cultural-historical interest concerning betting and betting insurance should not obscure the rarity and relative economic irrelevance of this practice’.16 In this chapter, I will examine betting on military developments in the context of the history of news in order to show that this kind of betting is more significant than has been previously suggested because it provides insights on newsgathering, news reception, and public opinion. As we will see, betting on news required accurate and swift information (a difficult combination) while at the same time how bets developed was used as an indication of new developments, thus feeding back into discourses about news. This chapter will focus on three points: first, how wagers on the outcome of sieges or the war were seen as newsworthy themselves and how they seemed to create new opportunities to access information normally reserved for insiders in communication 13 Henry Horwitz (ed.), The Parliamentary Diary of Narcissus Luttrell 1691–1693 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 14 Andrea Addobbati, ‘Italy 1500–1800: Cooperation and Competition’, in Leonard (ed.), Marine Insurance, p. 67. Other scholars have modified this viewpoint, showing that merchants continued to operate effectively during times of war: Siobhan Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014); Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012); Pierre Gervais, ‘Facing and surviving war: merchant strategies, market management and transnational merchant rings’ in Andrea Bonoldi et al. (eds.), Merchants in Times of Crises (16th to Mid–19th Century) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015), pp. 79–94. 15 Joad Raymond, ‘Exporting Impartiality’, in Kathryn Murphy & Anita Traninger (eds.), The Emergence of Impartiality (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 158. 16 Zwierlen, Prometheus Tamed, p. 34.

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networks. At the same time, wagers exacerbated the issues of misinformation or manipulation of information. Finally, this chapter will show how wagers influenced public opinion in ways that could be highly detrimental to the English national interest. 1

The Newsworthiness of Wagers

It is no coincidence that wagers took place in the coffeehouses around the Royal Exchange, a prime spot for speculative financial activities and newsgathering in London. This is where scores of Londoners and visitors flocked together in order to engage in trading activities, buy stocks, and arrange insurance policies. The late seventeenth century also saw a boom in the number of joint-stock companies in this area.17 News arriving at London quickly found its way to the Exchange as well. London itself was an information nexus due to its status as an administrative centre and a port. News was brought to London in various guises: news from ships, letters and express mail from the continent, and foreign newspapers. From there, news was disseminated to the rest of England and Scotland.18 The Exchange was a highly significant hub in this information network: printed pamphlets and newspapers were sold by hawkers there or were available for reading in the coffeehouses in the neighbouring alleys. Notices and advertisements were posted in the courtyard and merchants used the Exchange as their correspondence address. Oral exchange of news was no less important, with discussions of recent developments in trade, politics, and the world at large taking place there.19 In particular the coffeehouses around the Exchange were major sites of newsgathering. Coffeehouses were portrayed as places of public debate open to all who entered the premises. Discussion and opinion-making were facilitated by the existence of printed and manuscript news, which were offered freely for reading to patrons.20 Jürgen Habermas has envisioned coffeehouses as neces17 Natasha Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 2006), p. 33; Anastasia Bogatyreva, ‘England 1660–1720: Corporate or Private?’, in Leonard (ed.), Marine Insurance, p. 186. 18 Brendan Dooley, ‘International News Flows in the Seventeenth Century: Problems and Prospects’, in Joad Raymond & Noah Moxham (eds.), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 158–177. 19 Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce, pp. 33–35. See also Siobhan Talbott and Sophie Jones’s chapter in this collection. 20 Mark Knights, Representation and misrepresentation in later Stuart Britain: partisanship and political culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 250–55; Steve Pincus,

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sary spaces for the emergence of the public sphere. Even though the concept of the public sphere has received serious criticism, Habermas’s emphasis on the significance of coffeehouses in the development of public opinion has been tacitly accepted by most scholars.21 It is no coincidence that Londoners who wished to keep abreast of developments, both domestic and international, made daily visits to the Exchange and the coffeehouses surrounding it, as well as the Court and Parliament (if they had contacts) and St Paul’s church (especially in the early seventeenth century, but this practice seems to not have died down completely).22 The existence of joint-stock companies in this area also increased access to news. Anne Murphy has shown that the flow of information from Court to city was facilitated by the use of lobbyists in Parliament and Court, who then sent information back to joint-stock companies located around the Exchange. She argues that ‘the information found in these places was sometimes more useful than that available through official channels’.23 These practices also allowed a betting culture to flourish. Betting required accurate and early information which could be gained through privileged access to information networks. As Anne Murphy has maintained, the fact that full information was restricted ‘created a two-tiered market in which “insiders” commanded superior access to information and thus were perhaps in a position to manipulate the market to their own ends. “Outsiders” had to be content with acting on older, less reliable information’ which restricted their ability to navigate the market.24 Superior access to information relied on different forms of news – printed formats (such as newspapers) tended to have more ‘“Coffee Politicians Does Create”: Coffee Houses and Restoration Political Culture’, The Journal of Modern History, 67.4 (1995), pp. 807–34. 21 Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). For critiques of Habermas’s concept, see R. W. Jones, Gender and the formation of taste in eighteenth-century Britain: The analysis of beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lawrence Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation, and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England’ in Judith Still & Michael Worton (eds.), Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 100–15; T. Broman, ‘The Habermasian Public Sphere and “Science in the Enlightenment”’, History of Science, 26 (1998), pp. 123–49; Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O’ Gallchoir, Penny Warburton (eds.), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22 Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys & his Books: Reading, Newsgathering, & Sociability, 1660–1703 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late Stuart England, p. 73. 23 Anne Murphy, The origins of the English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation Before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 115, 120. 24 Ibid., p. 136.

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stale news, especially before the advent of daily newspapers in 1702 (and the appearance of the Daily Courant), whereas more up-to-date information could be gained through written news (newsletters or correspondence) or through word of mouth. Such news was not only more recent, but depending on its provenance, it could be more informed. By consequence, for investors as well as gamblers, hearing the news at the Exchange may have allowed for more swift action, which could increase drastically their chances of success in their speculative endeavours.25 Wagers on news depended on up-to-date information, but at the same time provided an illusion of access to privileged information. This was evident in a number of sources which used the wagers in the Exchange as a substitute for news from abroad that had yet to arrive. For example, in a newsletter of 19 March 1691, the writer commented ‘Wee have noe Forraigne post come in but some merchants yesterday at the Exchange offerd 100 guineys to 50 that Mons is taken’.26 The writer does not have verified information about the siege so he substitutes this with information on betting on Mons, suggesting that the behaviour of merchants hints at their having some early intelligence. Even though he qualifies such news by stating that ‘wiser men believe the contrary’, he still uses wagers and rumours to provide illumination on this subject. A few days later, another newsletter writer intimated: ‘We are also told that Nice is taken by Mons. Catinat, but the certainty of all this we have not as yet positively, though many wagers have been laid both ways, and the Court is satisfied of it’.27 Even when wagers provided no conclusive evidence, they were still employed alongside the mood at Court as a means of checking the accuracy of oral reports. The Post Boy of 1697 followed the same tactic, when reporting on news from London: ‘We are in great Expectation of News from Aeth, and there are many Wagers made on that Subject, some Laying that there has been a Battle, and that the Siege is raised; and others, that the Town will be taken by a certain time’.28 These examples suggest that including news about wagers was becoming more common as a way to gauge the developments in the war or at least the public’s reactions and expectations. In 1695, The Post Boy and Historical Account, having no certain news about the siege of Namur, published the following news from London:

25 26 27 28

Murphy, The origins of the English Financial Markets, p. 94. HL, HM 30659, Manuscript Newsletters from London 1689–1710, no. 18, p. 3, 19 March 1691. 31 March 1691, News Letter. CSPD, Vol. 2. The Post Boy, No. 319, 22 May 1697.

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It has been noised about for these three days, that the Castle of Namur was taken by the Confederates; but the Holland Mail of Friday last, nor any Express being not yet arrived, it was believed that the Report was only grounded upon probabilities and conjectures, and spread abroad to favour the Wagers upon the Exchange, where they gave 30, 40, 50 and 60 pounds, to receive 100, if Namur was taken before the 25th instant, but the general Opinion running that way also, few People would take their money.29 In the absence of news from the Netherlands, the newspaper editor could only provide his readers with indications as to how the siege was going: a speculative oral report, the way that wagers run in the Exchange, and public opinion. Even though the editor prudently awaited for confirmation of such news, he had already employed a wide array of sources in order to keep his reader informed. Betting on the wars took other forms as well. Wagers on the health of Louis XIV followed a long tradition of betting on the deaths of crowned heads but also showed an expectation that Louis’s death would bring the Nine Years’ War to an end. In 1696, rumours started to circulate that Louis XIV had died or was at least very gravely ill and betting on his death was employed as corroborating evidence. The Post Boy commented that in London ‘A great many Wagers have been laid within these few days that the French King is dead, but whether it be so or not is uncertain, yet all Letters agree that his life is in danger’.30 The Flying Post also mentioned that there were ‘divers Wagers of 5 to one odds, that [the French King] was dead on Friday Night last; which time must determine’.31 More directly, betting on the conclusion of a peace with France was reported as a clear indication that the war was reaching its end. In one year, from August 1696 to August 1697, newspapers commented 16 times that wagers placed at various European cities suggested that a general peace with France was imminent. An indicative example of this tendency was the 7 May 1697 issue of The Protestant Mercury, which claimed that several individuals in the Exchange ‘are so confident of the near approach of a Peace that Wagers are frequently Laid of Three to One, That by Midsummer-day the Peace will be Concluded, and Trade open’.32 29 30 31 32

The Post Boy and Historical Account, No. 48, 29 Aug 1695. The Post Boy, No. 211, 12 September 1696. The Flying Post, or the Post-Master, No. 209, 15 September 1696. The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, No. 158, 7 May 1697. Betting was also newsworthy enough to be mentioned in correspondence: see John Childs ‘The Fortune of War’, History Today, 53.10 (2003), pp. 52–53.

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Through these examples, we can see that wagers in the Exchange were newsworthy in themselves, as a source about the developments abroad.33 Wagers appeared as a window to privileged networks: the odds given by merchants on the outcome of the war were seen as a more reliable indicator of developments on the war front since merchants could tap into extensive – and often restricted – communication networks. Merchants’ correspondence networks spanned Europe and part of the Atlantic, and were geared towards news that could affect trade, war being one of the most serious such occurrences. As such, the word of merchants when it came to the validation of reports on such subjects carried significant weight.34 Newspapers’ and newsletters’ reportage on the odds merchants accepted, especially in the absence of news mail, suggested that merchants must have been privy to information that had not yet reached other ears. As the odds on wagers fluctuated, so did expectations about the future of the war. 2

Betting and Misinformation

However, accepting the authority of wagers as news gave additional power to merchants and others to ‘game’ the system. Since betting was widespread, a lot of money was riding on the outcome of a battle or siege. Defoe estimated that wagers on the second siege of Limerick in 1691 totalled £200,000.35 In February 1692 a trial was held in Guildhall, in the presence of the Lord Chief Justice, in order to establish the exact date on which Limerick was taken by the English and thus, who would win the wagers in this case. This trial forced the court to establish what was considered a ‘good surrender’ of the city and leading figures of the war effort (such as the Earle of Athlone, Lord Cutts, General Talmash, and Sir David Collier) were called to give their expert opinion.

33 See also Filippo de Vivo, ‘Public Sphere or Communication Triangle? Information and Politics in Early Modern Europe’, in M. Rospocher (ed.), Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe (Bologna and Berlin: Il Mulino and Duncker & Humblot, 2012), pp. 115–36. 34 Michael Harris, ‘Shipwrecks in Print; Representations of Maritime Disaster in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Robin Myers & Michael Harris (eds.), Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers and the Book Trade (Folkestone: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1999), p. 42; Larry Neal & Stephen Quinn ‘Networks of information, markets, and institutions in the rise of London as a financial centre, 1660–1720’, Financial History Review, 8.1 (2001), p. 11. 35 Clark, Betting on Lives, p. 45.

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This indicates the importance afforded to these wagers.36 Such a high-profile case may have accentuated the concerns relating to betting and thus helped bring about the ban on wagers in London in December 1692. The significant sums of money wagered made manipulation and underhanded practices more likely. As we have already seen, news writers cautiously warned readers that news could be exaggerated or that conjecture could be presented as fact in order to influence betting behaviours. More egregiously, others dressed up as bearers of news in order to create false expectations. On 2  April 1691, a ‘sham person’ wearing an officer’s uniform and accompanied by a post boy rode through London ‘crying God bless K[ing] W[illia]m & Q[ueen] Mary – the siege of Mons was raised’. The staging of this news was aimed at persuading the audience that this report was accurate. However, as various newsletter writers commented, since no such person came to Whitehall, ‘the same is lookd upon [as] an Artifice of the Insurers to encourage Wagering’.37 According to the Paris Gazette, a similar event took place in October 1691, when an individual dressed as a courier was arrested in London for spreading the news that Limerick had been captured.38 In these cases, both the attempt to influence betting under false pretences and the discovery that this was disingenuous depended on good knowledge of the ways news travelled and was disseminated. In the late seventeenth century, individuals had developed a better understanding of the movement of news and were able to predict the ways in which news could be transmitted from the theatres of war to their various destinations.39 This allowed individuals to act more convincingly as bearers of news but also made others more sceptical of fake news. Additionally, various private communication networks were set up during the war, creating a multivocal news environment, which made manipulation easier. To ensure that unauthorised news would not reach London, in August 1693, the Secretary of State for the Northern Department, Sir John Trenchard, ordered all passengers and letters travelling to England from Ostend and Nieuport to be searched.40 These restrictions did not hinder individuals from claiming to have advance information in order to influence wagers. In 1696, a newspaper editor 36 HL, mssHA, Hastings Family Papers, no. 45, p. 2, 4 February 1692; no. 47, p. 1, 9 February 1692; no. 48, p. 2, 11 February 1692. 37 HL, HM 30659, Manuscript Newsletters from London 1689–1710, no. 24, pp. 1–2, 2 April 1691. 38 ‘Un particulier, qui s’estant travesty en courier avoit répandu la nouvelle de la prise de Limérik a esté arresté, & mis à la garde d’un Huissier’, Paris Gazette, 45, 20 October 1691, p. 607, Eusèbe Renaudot, Paris. All translations from the Gazette were made by the author. 39 Joad Raymond, ‘News Networks: Putting the “News” and “Networks” Back in’, in Raymond & Moxham (eds.), News Networks in Early Modern Europe, p. 117. 40 Childs ‘The Fortune of War’, p. 54.

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commented ‘We still want four Holland Mails, by reason of the contrary Winds, but some people pretend to have Advice from abroad, insomuch that considerable Wagers are laid, that a General Peace will suddenly be concluded’.41 It was not only outright lying that hurt the credibility of wagers as sources of news. Cases of individuals betting on both outcomes (so as to be certain to receive winnings) brought the newsworthiness of wagers under scrutiny. A newsletter writer reported that a Mr Ralph B___y (the obfuscation of the name was deliberate) gave 300 guineas to receive one per day for as long as Mons remained in confederate hands. He then proceeded to wager elsewhere that if Mons were taken, he would receive 1000 guineas.42 The same practice was satirised in a pamphlet titled The post-boy rob’d of his mail (1692). In a fictitious letter sent to a friend, the writer mentions: I Long to hear how Wagers go about Pignerol, the Descent, the retaking of Namur, or any other public Affair. I have laid Five hundred pound there will be a Descent into France, by the English, before August; and I’ve laid Fifteen hundred pound on the contrary, and if you can get me any more on that account, I’ll make it up Two thousand.43 Nonetheless, there were other instances of manipulation which were not aimed at augmenting the winnings from bets but at influencing trade, diplomacy, or morale.44 In 1697, the newspaper The Protestant Mercury used wagers as proof that Jamaica had not been invaded, claiming that ‘The Discourse of the French being in Possession of Jamaica, vanishes in Smoak; Wagers being laid, Ten to One, on the contrary’.45 However, a week later, the same newspaper was forced to acknowledge that the person who had offered these odds was ‘One of the Jamaica-Masters, and one of the last here in Town which left the Place’.46 Here, it seems likely that the aim was to persuade the English crown and various 41 The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, No. 71, 19 August 1696. 42 HL, HM 30659, Manuscript Newsletters from London 1689–1710, no. 24, p. 2, 2 April 1691. 43 Charles Gildon, The post-boy rob’d of his mail, or, The pacquet broke open consisting of five hundred letters to persons of several qualities and conditions, with observations upon each letter publish’d by a gentleman concern’d in the frolick (London: John Sprint, 1692), p. 198. 44 A similar approach was taken by Antonio de Tassis, the Spanish postmaster in Rome, who in 1588 tried to promote good rumours about the Spanish Armada by wagering heavily. Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (London: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 153. 45 The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, No. 162, 21 May 1697. 46 The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, No. 163, 26 May 1697.

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investors that Jamaica was not lost as a colony and thus still a good investment; the first issue of The Protestant Mercury suggests that this could have been an effective strategy. A similar case cropped up in the Foreign Post of 26 May 1697, which reported that the French king encouraged Monsieur Alvarez (a jeweller) to wager on the French winning in Aeth. According to the newspaper, Louis XIV advised the jeweller: You should take Post to go to the Elector of Bavaria, to know whether His Electoral Highness would give you your revenge of 6000 Pistols in Diamonds, which you lost when the Allies took Namur, by laying that my Armies make themselves Masters of Aeth, and I will be your Guarantee for it. The Jeweler answer’d, That he would not lay a Wager on a thing he was sure of.47 It is possible to assume that this rumour was deliberately publicised in Paris in order to increase expectations of a victory in Aeth; this appears to have been an effective piece of propaganda since it was taken up and presented as news by an English newspaper. The result was that whereas wagers were seen as a different source of credible information, the widespread belief that these were manipulated made them unreliable. This also cast doubt on the accuracy of news more broadly. This was satirised in the pamphlet The art of getting Money by Double-fac’d wagers (1691). The pamphlet presents the dialogue between a Courtier and a Citizen about whether Mons had been captured by the French. The Courtier claims that he has just come from court, where there was news that the Queen had received an express informing of the surrender of Mons. This source of information is rejected as unreliable by the citizen. Various other sources of information are presented to the Citizen (the Gazette, oral reports among gentlemen) but the citizen dismisses them, saying he will not ‘credit every flying idle report’. Nonetheless, even though he does not consider any information as certain, the Citizen keeps placing bets on the outcome of the siege indiscriminately, even betting against total strangers (who are shown to be swindlers). Here, the author pokes fun at various types of investors, who understand that no information is credible when money is part of the equation but are still willing to risk money on uncertain outcomes. The pamphlet casts further doubt on the idea that wagers were useful as news, by stating that belief in any kind of news was contingent on how someone had wagered: ‘the Hopes of Winning, 47 The Foreign Post, No. 5, 26 May 1697. Italics in the original.

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and the fear of Losing, will make any man suspend his belief for some time’.48 More surprisingly perhaps, the Flying Post presented some news from Rome that sounded more like satire than actual report, when it reported that A Coffee-man of this City, who had 1000 Crowns in his hands of Wagers laid Pro and Con, about the taking of Barcelona, run away with the Money as soon as he heard it was taken, and left a Note behind him, importing, That to avoid all disputes among the Wagerers, he was gone to see if it was true.49 This piece of news would fit more easily in a satirical pamphlet but seems to act here as a playful reminder that the newsworthiness of wagers was often only a scam aimed at enriching those who accepted the bets. Consequently, wagers on news presented a paradox: on the one hand, the fact that merchants were willing to accept bets suggested that one outcome was more likely, but on the other hand, the very fact that money was involved made any news from the war front more suspicious, as individuals had not only to account for the likely bias of news which may favour the English side, but also for the possibility that news was circulated with the express aim to influence betting behaviours. Trusting wagers as credible indicators of news was a risky strategy. This exasperated Joseph de la Vega, who, writing about the Amsterdam stock exchange in 1688, complained that because of the gambling of speculators there, it was impossible to credit any news relating to European politics.50 3

Allegiance and Public Opinion

Wagers on news may have increased the scepticism related to the possibility of receiving accurate information, but this was not the only significant problem they caused. When English subjects betted against the success of England in its international engagements, they undermined the allegiance all subjects 48 Anon., The art of getting money by double-fac’d wagers; or, Cross and pile whether Mons be taken, or no? A dialogue between a courtier, a citizen, and a sharper of the town. The scene, Jonathan’s coffe-house (1691), p. 1. No publisher information given. 49 The Flying Post, or the Post-Master, No. 372, 30 September 1697. 50 Murphy, The Origins of English Financial Markets, p. 114. Similarly, in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), Major-General William Cadogan, Quartermaster-General to the Army exploited his privileged access to information in order to bet on the outcome of the war: Childs, ‘The Fortune of War’, p. 54.

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should feel  – and express  – towards the crown. By consequence, wagers on the war showed a concerning lack of faith to the government and could be construed as seditious. The wagers themselves and the reporting of such betting in newspapers of the time could also undermine morale in a highly volatile situation. Newspapers in this period had to tread carefully not to appear offensive to the regime. In February 1689 William and Mary sought to enforce the Licensing Act (which required all publications to be registered with the Stationers Company) through the appointment of a ‘messenger of the press’. Even when the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 allowed private newspapers to circulate, their editors had to be wary of facing censure. Newspapers needed a stable address so that readers would be able to find the next issue, but this made them more vulnerable to punishment, if they publicised information that proved offensive to the regime. This is why many historians have viewed newspapers of this period as politically anodyne.51 This was a period when war was misrepresented by both sides in order to bolster morale. Brendan Dooley has argued that ‘[d]uring the sieges of Namur in 1692 and 1696, gazettes favourable to the League of Augsburg invented so many imaginary assaults, in which the French lost such an infinite number of men, that continuing the attack ought to have been impossible without a miracle’.52 In this environment, the frequent mentions in newspapers that significant numbers of individuals assumed that England would lose was potentially dangerous. One newspaper, however, had no such need to pull their punches. The Paris Gazette, the only newspaper published in France and a major instrument of propaganda for the French Crown, showed extreme interest in the wagers being placed in England and often spelled out exactly what such betting meant for the links of allegiance binding the English state and its subjects.53 51 ‘Charles II, 1662: An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses’, in John Raithby (ed.), Statutes of the Realm: Volume 5, 1628–80 (s.l, 1819), pp. 428–35: British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp428–435 [accessed 27 January 2023]. Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe, ‘The Creation of the Periodical Press 1620–1695’, in John Barnard and Donald F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume IV 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 549; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain, p. 225. 52 Brendan Dooley, ‘News and Doubt in Early Modern Culture’, in Brendan Dooley & Sabrina A. Baron (eds.), The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 280. 53 About the Paris Gazette, see Howard M. Solomon, Public Welfare, Science, And Propaganda in Seventeenth Century France. The Innovations of Théophraste Renaudot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

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A representative example of this tendency is the news from London in the issue of 24 March 1691. This deserves to be quoted in full: Some individuals, notwithstanding the hopes that have been given so many times, of the entire reduction of Ireland, had established a kind of bank: giving five pounds sterling to those who wanted to oblige themselves to pay them a hundred, if at the end of the year, Dublin was handed over to the obedience of the King. They have been arrested: their register has been seized & they must be judged as State criminals at the next term.54 Here, the editor Eusèbe Renaudot reports with relish that individuals are betting against their government. Throughout the war, the Paris Gazette illustrates how the Court of William III tries to influence public opinion (the mention of ‘the hopes that have been given’ implies this) while at the same time it highlights any sign of resistance to this narrative. Similarly, on 5 May 1691, the Paris Gazette mentions that the news that Mons had fallen ‘caused great consternation here [in London], having made known the falsity of all the rumours that had been spread to make believe that the Prince of Orange would raise the siege’.55 For Renaudot, wagers on news were a clear indication that English public opinion did not uniformly accept the narrative of victory put forward by the English Court. It is characteristic that for the whole of 1691, the Paris Gazette mentions almost exclusively wagers taking place in London (the only exception being news from Holland, which again related to betting on William III’s chances of success).56 In 28 April 1691, the Paris Gazette wrote the news that William III would soon raise the siege of Mons were received in London ‘in different ways: each taking part in it as much for the public interest as for the particular interest that several had in it, because of the wagers that were made on the success of this Siege, and which amount to more than hundred thousand pounds 54 ‘Quelques particuliers, non-obstant les espérances qui on este données tant de fois, de l’entiére réduction de l’Irlande, avoient establi une espece de banque: connant cinq livres sterlin à ceux qui vouloient s’ obliger à leur en payer cent, si dans la fin de l’année, Dublin estoit remis à l’ obeisance du Roy. Ils ont esté arrestez: leur register a esté saisi & ils doivent estre jugez comme criminels d’Estat au prochain terme’, Paris Gazette, No. 13, 24 March 1691, pp. 151–52. 55 ‘Elle a causé ici une grande consternation: ayant fait connoitre la faussete de tous les bruits qui avoient esté répandus pour faire croire que le Prince d’Orange en feroit lever la siege’, Paris Gazette, No. 21, 5 May 1691, p. 248. 56 Paris Gazette, No. 22, 12 May 1691, p. 254.

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sterling’.57 Renaudot distinguishes between public and private interest in order to show that not everyone was excited about William III’s potential successes. This becomes more evident in the 12 May 1691 issue of the Paris Gazette, after Mons had been captured by the French, where it is reported from London that For a few days, Comedies and other public entertainments had been forbidden there, because of Holy Week, or perhaps for the capture of Mons. Those who have won large sums by pledging for this prize, go out of town to celebrate, to avoid the incidents which could arise on this occasion.58 Renaudot gleefully insinuates that some of the English king’s subjects are not only disinclined to participate in the displays of public grief elicited both by the Holy Week and the capture of Mons but are actively happy about this failure of English arms. He drives the point home in 26 May, when the Gazette reports from London that it was decided to prosecute those who wagered on Dublin’s siege because, as he explains, ‘the bad successes of the beginning of this campaign have excited great discontent, and given occasion to individuals to bet against the present government with too much freedom’.59 The Paris Gazette focused on news that English men and women betted against their government as a way to puncture the narrative of the successes of the Confederate army and of the widespread support that William III received from the English populace. English commentators also castigated those who betted against their government, betraying an anxiety that wagers could influence and express public opinion, sometimes in highly troubling ways for the regime. In 1691, the newspaper the Athenian Mercury was presented with the question ‘Whether they are not Enemies to the Government, that lay Wagers that Mons is, or will be taken by the French King’. John Dunton, the editor, answered this with another 57 ‘Ces nouvelles avoient esté receues diversement: chacun y prenant part autant par l’interest public, que par l’interest particulier que plusieurs y avoient, à cause des gageures qui se sont faires sur le succez de ce Siége, & qui montent à plus de cent mille livres sterlin’, Paris Gazette, No. 20, 28 April 1691, p. 135. 58 ‘Depuis quelques jours, le Comédies & les autres divertissements publics y avoient esté défendus, à cause de la Semaine Sainte, ou peut estre pour la prise de Mons. Ceux qui ont gagné de grandes sommes en gageant pour cette prise, font allez hors de la ville faire des réjouistances, pour éviter les incidents qui pouvoient naistre à cette occasson’, Paris Gazette, No. 22, 12 May 1691, p. 264. 59 ‘comme les mauvais succez du commencement de cette Campagne ont excite un grand mécontentement, & donné occasion àux particuliers de parier contre le gouvernement present avec trop de liberté, les ordres ont esté expédiez pour en arrester un grande nombre’, Paris Gazette, No. 24, 26 May 1691, pp. 285–6.

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question: ‘Whether he that lays Wagers had rather win or lose? ’Tis Nonsense to pretend the last, and if they say the first, they silently confess the Resolution of the Question must bear an Affirmative’.60 Similarly, the preacher John Shower published a sermon admonishing those who placed such bets that ‘If you pray for Success in these Wagers, you must sometimes contradict another part of your own Prayers, for the Progress of the Reformed Religion, and the Welfare of England’.61 These authors sought to uncover what they viewed as the hypocrisy of those who betted against an English victory. They clarified that such bets betrayed not only disillusionment with the army’s chances of success but also lack of empathic participation in the common struggle. Others went further, insinuating that wagers were purposely placed to sow division among the English and thus likely orchestrated by France or French agents. A pamphlet in 1691 argued that: Wagers on the Success of Companies, taking Cities, and Success of Monarchs, must needs alienate the Affections of the Subject one from the other, and some from the King. This to me seems not an accidental Misfortune, but an Artifice of France, to raise Divisions amongst us, and bring our Trade to Confusion.62 Those who placed bets against the government were accused of being Jacobites, enemies of the Williamite regime. In a pamphlet about the war in Ireland (which was successful for the English) the author attacks ‘brisk Jacobites’ for thinking that ‘a languishing French Cause could be supported by laying malicious and extravagant Wagers’.63 Playwrights also took up this accusation. In the printed play The siege and surrender of Mons a tragi-comedy, exposing the villany of the priests, and the intrigues of the French (1691), the 60 The Athenian Mercury, No. 5, 7 April 1691. See also Murphy, The origins of the English Financial Markets, p. 107. 61 John Shower, A discourse of tempting Christ by John Shower (London: John Lawrence, 1694), pp. 67–68. 62 Anonymous, The linnen and woollen manufactory discoursed: with the nature of companies and trade in general: and particularly, that of the company’s for the linnen manufactory of England and Ireland. With some reflections how the trade of Ireland hath formerly, and may now affect England. Printed at the request of a peer of this realm (London: Thomas Mercer, 1691), p. 14. 63 Anonymous, An exact journal of the victorious progress of their majesties forces under the command of Gen. Ginckle, this summer in Ireland giving a particular account of the several skirmishes, battles, sieges and surrenders of Athlone, Galloway, Slego, &c.: together, with the total defeat of the Irish at Agrim and Thomond-Bridge: and lastly, of the capitulation and surrender of Limerick (1691), sig. A4v.

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fiercely anti-Jacobite Richard Ames implied that those English who wager this way actually wish the French king to win. He has one of his characters say that he received a letter from England which ‘tells me that Gentlemen there lay Wagers like mad that Mons will be in the French hands by such a time’. He then proceeds to comment that ‘you know our wishes generally command our Purses’ associating those who bet against the government with Jacobitism.64 Such comments were not necessarily off-the-mark, since wagers could be employed with the express purpose to show political allegiance, as some cases of individuals who landed in hot water over bets show. In 1697, a ‘Mr Yallop’ from Norwich was examined by the mayor of that city for having placed wagers on the restoration of James II and his son ‘taking a guinea of several persons, to pay them twelve, if they be not restored within a year’.65 In 1699, Sir Rowland Stanley was accused of having asked William Glegg to ‘draw people into wagers, about King James’s being restored’.66 This accusation was taken seriously: not only was Stanley brought in by a messenger and questioned, but a list was also made including the names of all those involved in the wagers and the exact bonds they had entered. The grumblings of discontent against those betting in the failure of English arms were given official recognition when (as was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter) the Corporation of London published a proclamation against such practices. The corporation commented that various tradesmen and others in London have taken up ‘an evil practice’ at the Exchange ‘To foretel and raise Suspicions of Evil Success to Their MAJESTIES in the War against France; And thereupon to Lay Wagers’ on the war’. It also claims that ‘by their false and scandalous Insinuations endeavour to Discourage Their MAJESTIES Subjects in their due Allegiance’ and thus ‘all such Wagers’ ‘are highly to the Prejudice of Their MAJESTIES and of Their Allies’.67 Apparently, London civic authorities were worried about the impact on morale and the exercise of allegiance from having individuals advertise that they did not believe in the success of the English arms.

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Richard Ames, The siege and surrender of Mons a tragi-comedy, exposing the villany of the priests, and the intrigues of the French (London: Randolf Taylor, 1691), pp. 7–8. 65 CSPD, vol. 8, Minutes of the proceedings of the Lords Justices, 21 October 1697, Whitehall. 66 CSPD, vol. 10, Ja. Vernon to Mr. Clayton, 8 August 1699. 67 City of London, Jovis Primo die Decembr’ 1692.

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4 Conclusion William Temple, a former English ambassador to the Netherlands, chose to publish in 1691 a tract titled Memoirs of what past in Christendom, from the war begun 1672 to the peace concluded 1679. His comments about wagers in the Hague in 1678 provide an interesting parallel to the later wagers in England. He states: In this uncertain State all matters continued at the Hague for about Three Weeks, the opinions of most Men running generally against the Peace, as well as the Wagers at Amsterdam, by which People often imagin the Pulse of the State is to be felt and judged; tho’ it indeed be a sort of Trade driven by Men that have little dealing or success in any other, and is managed with more tricks than the rest seems to be in that Scene; not only coyning false News upon the place, but practising Intelligence from remote parts to their purpose, concerting the same Advices from different Countries, and making great Secret and Mystery of Reports that are raised on purpose to be publick, and yet by such devices as these, not only the Wagers at Amsterdam are commonly turning, but the rising and falling of the very Actions of the East-India Company are often, and in a great measure influenced.68 This passage highlights many of the issues touched upon in this chapter. This chapter has shown that even though betting insurance has been considered by scholars such as Cornel Zwierlein as an ‘exotic’ subject (an interesting digression but with no significant historical value), if we adjust the lens of examination and analyse the way such wagers were reported, we can gain interesting insights into seventeenth-century cultures of information and the formation of public opinion. We have seen that betting was newsworthy in itself, as it promised to bypass – to an extent – the problem of securing inside information on the wars. Because of the agents involved and the fact that significant amounts of money was risked, wagers were understood as a means of acquiring information that would have otherwise remained in the hands of a smaller audience. The practice of news writers to accept the authority of wagers – albeit with care – reinforced this tendency. While wagers bolstered the privileged access to information that Londoners had, since most betting took place in London, the reportage of wagers in various media allowed such information to leave 68 William Temple, Memoirs of what past in Christendom, from the war begun 1672 to the peace concluded 1679 (London: Ric. Chiswell, 1691), pp. 498–9.

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the confines of the city, albeit at a slower pace. On another level, betting was predicated on the successes and failures of information networks: up-to-date news was eagerly anticipated and various strategies employed to ensure the accuracy of news received. While wagering required accurate news, it also took place in the gaps between verified news. As Daniel Woold has argued, ‘the advent of constantly arriving news’ caused events to be seen as ‘semifluid’: news alerted readers to potentially occurring events, but readers had to wait until such news was verified.69 In this environment, speculation thrived. In 1700, Richard Gorges wrote to a friend that newspapers are filled ‘with such designed uncertaintys in them as to give occasion to fill the next newspaper with contradicting the former & making of false news to puzzell us’.70 This comment highlights the scepticism against news but presents exactly the context in which wagers thrived: in this liminal time when no one knew exactly what would happen. Secondly, wagering on news provides an avenue of investigating news consumption. Those who engaged in betting on the outcome of the war were not just passive recipients of news: they had to sift through a large amount of information in order to decide the most likely outcome of the war and bet on it. When it comes to accepting the veracity of news, Brendan Dooley distinguishes between readers from the intellectual elite, who had adopted a stance of ‘radical scepticism about political information’ and other readers, who had a ‘more or less complacent utilization of the new medium’.71 Even though we cannot be certain about what readers thought, it seems likely that the reporting of wagers in more broadly accessible news media could have increased scepticism towards news. Readers may have been aware that the different sides misrepresented the wars for political reasons, but newspapers would be hesitant to refute directly anything coming from the English government. However, such restrictions did not apply when it came to wagers: the flurry of publications (especially after the siege of Mons) which stressed how fake news circulated in order to influence betting could have prompted readers to take news with a pinch of salt. At the same time, this put more onus on the reader

69 Daniel Woolf, ‘News, History, and the Construction of the Present in Early Modern England’, in Dooley & Baron (eds.), The Politics of Information, pp. 80–118. Woolf’s argument is about contemporaneity and the creation of a different ‘present’ but my interest is in this idea of the ‘semifluid’ event. 70 Richard Gorges to Christopher Hatton, 7 March 1699/1700; quoted in L. K. Davison, ‘Public Policy in an Age of Economic Expansion: The Search for Commercial Accountability in England, 1690–1750’ (PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 1990), p. 128. 71 Dooley, ‘News and Doubt in Early Modern Culture’, pp. 276–9.

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to follow the news closely and attempt not only to form an opinion as to what had happened, but also to act on such expected news.72 Finally, wagers on news relate also to the formation of public opinion. We can see in the reportage of wagers how public opinion was influenced through competing claims of political allegiance and financial consideration but also through increasing but diverse access to information. As seen in the quotation by William Temple, wagers were a means ‘by which People often imagin [sic] the Pulse of the State is to be felt and judged’.73 This was a significant issue when individuals betted against their government. This chapter has suggested that a spectrum of subject positions on the interpretation of such bets were possible. Obviously, some of those who betted on the outcome of the war were compulsive gamblers, who would be willing to bet on anything. We have examples of various kinds of betting from newspapers and other sources in this period (such as races or friendly bets). For Jacobites and others inimical to the post-1688 regime, however, betting could be seen as an expression of hope, that perhaps the failures of the English arms indicated that the Williamite government was less secure than it seemed. Finally, for some, betting could be feared to be a breaking of loyalty through non-participation in collective expectations of victory. Regardless of their personal feelings, such individuals’ betting against their government was not just an indication that things were not going well in the theatres of war, but also a public gesture of opposition to the regime, even if only through their refusal to participate in public expressions of collective grief or joy. Wagers opened up a space for information and misinformation, but also for judging the strengths and weaknesses of the English state’s war machine and for critically assessing the post–1688 regime. 72

About the role of the reader in finding ‘truth’, see Raymond, ‘Exporting Impartiality’, p. 164. 73 Temple, Memoirs of what past in Christendom, pp. 498–9. This was licensed on 14 November 1691. William Temple was an ambassador to the Netherlands between 1674 and 1679.

Chapter 6

Newspapers, Profit, and Business in Colonial America Jeremy Land Newspapers and commerce have been inseparable since the first newspaper arrived in print in 1605 in Strasbourg, as maritime commerce provided a key source of subscribers for newspapers.1 Merchants also provided access to content and advertising revenue, as they were well connected to the global mercantile networks that defined the eighteenth century. Colonial America was no different, and as one glance at any newspaper from the era would show, British Americans lived in an ever-growing Atlantic and global world, where news from Europe to Asia found its way into the broadsides that were distributed throughout North America.2 Likewise, merchants relied on newspapers for news from the local to the global that would help them make informed business decisions. Newspapers often printed local information including but not limited to prices, ship arrivals and departures, and weather reports. They provided global information on wars, pirate activity, and natural disasters, among other types of news, all of which gave merchants significant insight into the mercantile environment. Colonial merchants subscribed to papers from several ports in the Atlantic World, including ports in Europe and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly then, merchants referred to and frequently shared information found in newspapers with one another in their letters to and from partners in different ports when discussing business opportunities or concerns. This chapter charts the ways in which news found its way between newspapers and merchants, and how merchants used that information to make business decisions. Using both merchant letters and newspapers, I explore the mechanics of information sharing and illustrate how news from around the world factored into the business practices and decision-making processes of 1 This is the Relation, considered to the be first newspaper in the world and published by Johann Carolus in German. 2 Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2019). See also Jeremy Land, Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700–1776) (Leiden: Brill, 2023) for more on the global nature of trade and commercial relationships in colonial America.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689879_007

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colonial American merchants in the eighteenth century, prior to independence from Britain. Many of these same practices continued during and following the American Revolution, but concluding this chapter in 1776 serves as a nice bookend for a story of colonial connections to the global mercantile community. In many ways, the eighteenth century was a golden age of information networks and newspapers, where newspapers (and therefore newspaper printer-editors) had enormous influence on not only the economies of port cities in North America, but also the politics and societies of the cities in which they were consumed. Ultimately, merchants and newspapers became increasingly intertwined and interdependent as the American Revolution arrived, and merchants, in particular, utilized and shared news within their own mercantile networks to reduce risk and enhance profit opportunities. 1

News, Newspapers, and Mercantile Networks

Much has been written on both news and mercantile networks, and scholarship on both are still being published at a seemingly increasing rate (this volume being a perfect example). Still, there remains much to learn from early modern merchants and their information sharing. Newspapers also lack a complete understanding in the historiography of the early modern world, although recent work has started to rectify these shortcomings. One of the most recent and best examinations of newspapers in colonial America is Joseph Adelman’s Revolutionary Networks. Adelman showed how printers in colonial America were extremely influential in the political and social arenas of American cities. Because printers were able to move between artisans and elite society, they were able to curate news that appealed to all social classes. This influence was quite useful in the years leading up to the American Revolution during which printers, on both sides of the debate, practiced their craft with great effect. Adelman suggests, and I agree, that printers played a central role in exacerbating the political turmoil of the 1770s.3 Adelman is hardly the only scholar to write about newspapers and their influence in the early modern world, and his finding that newspapers and their printers held enormous influence in the societies they serviced supports the conclusions of others.4 However, he is 3 Adelman, Revolutionary Networks. 4 Some examples include but are certainly not limited to: Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Rosalind Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: Philadelphia Book Publishers in the new Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Marcus L. Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009);

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one of the first to incorporate the story of political and social influence with the story of how the printing industry worked. Business decisions were just as important as political or social reasons for the content they published, so it is not surprising that those early broadsides catered heavily to people of business in British America. Merchants and mercantile information networks recently have experienced a resurgence in scholarly attention, with information and mercantile networks receiving the lion’s share of that attention. It has long been understood that information flows were a key component of early modern maritime trade, and a merchant that was well connected tended to be profitable. It was not easy. Communication required time, patience, and was not cheap. The paper on which letters were written was likely the most expensive part of the process, and paper was often in short supply, especially in the colonies.5 However, colonies in North America were particularly well-connected to one another, and by the end of the eighteenth century post offices and newspapers were present in nearly every major city along the coastline.6 Central to these networks of exchange were merchants. Merchants shared information with their partners, and their partners shared information with their friends and colleagues. This cycle perpetuated itself throughout the early modern period and in many different merchant communities, where business culture developed to prize constant communication.7 By the early eighteenth century, merchant networks had developed into distinct communities of information flows and networks, with ports serving as the geographical nodes of an ever-growing web of information. These information flows have long held the attention of scholars, but more recently economic and business historians have dived deeper into these networks by incorporating network analysis methods, often employing clever statistical tools and visualizations.8 Understanding the flow of information, rather

5 6 7 8

and Eric Slauter, ‘Reading and Radicalization: Print, Politics, and the American Revolution’, Early American Studies, 8.1 (2010), pp. 5–40. Alejandra Dubcovsky, ‘Communication in Colonial North America’, History Compass, 15.9 (2017). Adelman, Revolutionary Networks, pp. 5–7. Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money?’ Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012); S. Talbott and C. Rosenthal (eds.), A Cultural History of Business in the Age of Enlightenment: 1650–1850 (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2024). Just a few of many examples are Arnaud Barolomei, et al., ‘Becoming a Correspondent: The Foundation of New Merchant Relationships in Early Modern French Trade (1730–1820)’, Enterprise & Society, 20.3 (September 2019), pp. 533–74; Katie McDade, ‘Liverpool Slave Merchant Entrepreneurial Networks, 1725–1807’, Business History, 53.7 (2010), pp. 1092–1109; Emily Buchnea, ‘Bridges and Bonds: The Role of British Merchant Bank Intermediaries in

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than just merely charting the networks of merchants, has received a smattering of attention in the last few decades. In their introduction to an edited volume specifically on new approaches to information flows, Leos Müller and Jari Ojala argue that the distribution of business information became more formalized and affordable by the middle of the eighteenth century with the advent of printed business news and materials, such as Lloyd’s Register which began in 1734. As information flows improved via new technologies, so too did economic performance.9 These flows did not stay within national or imperial borders, nor did they stay within social or cultural communities.10 Rather, transnational and trans-imperial merchant networks and information flows defined the early modern period. Still, merchants remained at the center of these information flows, as they were the key sources and consumers of information. In the past decade, however, new studies on how merchant networks weathered crises, such as wars or natural disasters, have shed even further light into how business networks were increasingly resilient in the early modern world. For example, Siobhan Talbott shows that merchants not only endured the three Anglo-Dutch wars between 1652–1674, but many also found ways to capitalize on the wars for their own benefit.11 This is even more true on the edge of empires, especially in North America, where merchants were not too concerned about whom they traded with during times of war. For instance, in New York City during the many wars between England and France throughout the eighteenth century, local merchants were infamous for trading with the French no matter the risks, as

Latin American Trade and Finance Networks, 1825–1850’, Enterprise & Society, 21.2 (2020), pp. 453–93. See also the chapters by Peter Buckles, Sarah Hall, and Edmond Smith in this collection. 9 Leos Müller and Jari Ojala, ‘Information Flows and Economic Performance over the Long Term: An Introduction’, in Leos Müller and Jari Ojala (eds.), Information Flows: New Approaches in the Historical Study of Business Information (Helsinki: SKS/Finnish Literature Society, 2007), pp. 14–28; Arnaud Bartolomei, ‘The Making of Commercial Innovations: The Use of Printed Commercial Circular Letters in France and Europe’, Business History Review, 95.1 (2021), pp. 33–58. 10 Jari Ojala, ‘Approaching Europe: The Merchant Networks between Finland and Europe during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, European Review of Economic History, 1.3 (December 1997), pp. 323–352; Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, ‘Crossing Empires: Portuguese, Sephardic, and Dutch Business Networks in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1580–1674’, The Americas, 68.1 (July 2011), pp. 7–32. 11 Siobhan Talbott, ‘“What cannot be helped must be indured”: Coping with Obstacles to Business During the Anglo-Dutch Wars, 1652–1674’, Enterprise & Society, 23.3 (2022), pp. 790–824.

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it was both profitable and necessary with disruptions to their normal trade networks.12 Newspapers in colonial America served as a key steppingstone between individual mercantile information networks and the later business-focused publications that became ubiquitous in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.13 The first irregular newspapers and news pamphlets began to appear in the colonies in the late seventeenth century, but the first successful and regularly printed newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, began in 1704. Until 1719 it was the only known newspaper to exist in British North America, but that year began a significant period of growth for newspapers in the colonies. By 1740 sixteen weekly newspapers were in operation, and in 1775 this number had grown to 37 weekly papers.14 These newspapers varied in numbers of subscribers, but demand was strong, especially in port cities. For example, the Pennsylvania Chronicle began printing in Philadelphia in January 1767 and by March the same year had more than a thousand subscribers.15 While the earliest newspapers in colonial America were not exclusively for merchants like some later publications were, they did cater largely to business, especially as they offered a way to reach consumers via advertisements and key information for normal business operations. The earliest titles hint at their main audiences, including The New England Courant (not dissimilar from price currents). The distribution of newspapers into the hinterland provided a key opportunity to both advertise for goods to be sold and for farmers and other producers to sell goods to merchants. Interior parts of the colonies were sparsely populated and could not support their own newspapers, and as a 12 Thomas M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). See also Peter Buckles, ‘Merchants and Crises in Bristol-West India Sugar Trade, 1783–1802’ (PhD Thesis: University of Liverpool, 2020); Sophie H. Jones, ‘From Anglicisation to Loyalism? New York, 1691–1783’ (PhD Thesis: University of Liverpool, 2018), pp. 136–39; Siobhan Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014). 13 For more on the printing of business specific news and publications in the early modern world see John J. McCusker, ‘The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World’, The American Historical Review, 110.2 (2005), pp. 295–321; Arnaud Bartolomei, Matthieu de Oliveira, Boris Deschanel, and Thomas Mollanger, ‘The Making of Commercial Innovations: The Use of Printed Commercial Circular Letters in France and Europe’, Business History Review, 95.1 (2021), pp. 33–58. 14 American Antiquarian Society, ‘Colonial Print Culture’, The News Media and the Making of America, 1730–1865, Online Exhibition, https://americanantiquarian.org/earlyame ricannewsmedia/exhibits/show/news-in-colonial-america/colonial-print-culture. Accessed 5 July 2022. 15 Adelman, Revolutionary Networks, p. 36.

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result, farmers and planters were dependent on access to newspapers centered in port cities for news on prices, weather, and ship arrivals and clearances. Naturally, the newspapers’ reach was as far as the literacy rate would allow, but by the early eighteenth century most landowners, merchants, and shopkeepers were at least able to read at a basic level, as reading became an essential component of both farming and commerce.16 Farmers needed to keep apprised of the market conditions and prices for their crops and products, and merchants and shopkeepers needed to maintain balance books and awareness of the markets. Newspapers provided a medium where producers, merchants, and consumers could find information and news that fit their needs. One such piece of news that newspapers regularly reported were commodity prices, or ‘price current’ lists. These lists recorded wholesale prices, which provided both merchants and producers with an idea as to what to expect from business negotiations. Of course, the prices that were listed were merely recent observations, but they provided some guidelines as to what one could expect to profit from selling a commodity in the area. Each port city tended to have different price lists for the specific goods that were on offer, but there was some overlap especially regarding imports such as tea and sugar. Most price current lists included flour, bread, and basic foodstuffs, but New York and Philadelphia tended to include more complex varieties of flour and bread (or biscuit).17 Rum also was present on most newspapers’ lists of prices, as it was not only a staple of diets in port but was an essential provision for sailors. In Boston’s case, price lists tended to include prices for fish and whale oil in addition to flour and other necessities. Boston was also a major producer of rum, so it was a particularly important component of price lists and exports, being a major port for ship outfitting and maritime commerce.18 Rum produced in Boston 16 F. W. Grubb, ‘Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research’, Social Science History, 14.4 (1990), pp. 451–482. Grubb estimates that 80–90 percent of urban-based adult males in colonial America could read and/or write. But literacy was not limited to males in cities, as Winifred Rothenburg makes clear that farmers of all levels were largely literate due to needing to be aware of prices and accounts with merchants. See Winifred Barr Rothenburg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). Further, literacy was also growing throughout the colonial period among slaves, women, and other disenfranchised people. See Antonio T. Bly, ‘“Pretends he can read”: Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730–1776’, Early American Studies, 6.2 (2008), pp. 261–294 and E. Jennifer Monaghan, ‘Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England’, American Quarterly, 40.1, Special Issue: Reading America (1988), pp. 18–41. 17 See for example: Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 467, 24 November 1737, and New York Mercury, No. 398, 31 March 1760. 18 Boston Gazette, No. 3, 4 January 1720.

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Figure 6.1 Price current list for New York – 6 December 1756, New York Mercury Courtesy of Newsbank/Readex

and the surrounding ports was listed as ‘New England’ rum, to distinguish it from the pricier and better-quality ‘West India’ rum, which was produced on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.19 Price lists were initially quite small, but by the middle of the eighteenth century the numbers of goods that were listed had grown, and most commonly traded goods could be found, including imports that were produced elsewhere such as tea or sugar. Newspapers reported prices so frequently that in the absence of formal, governmental statistics of the colonial period, researchers have been able to reconstruct price series as far back as 1700 using newspapers as the primary source.20 Price current lists from other ports were also printed periodically, especially from nearby or important ports. Philadelphia and New York newspapers were particularly interested in printing the price lists of the other port, as the two ports were of similar size and economy. Both cities were important exporters of wheat and flour.21 Being relatively close geographically, readers from both ports were interested in the business affairs of the other. Since the ports had overlapping hinterlands, farmers and landowners often had the opportunity to decide in which port they wished to sell their goods, especially with access to the river networks that made the region so productive for wheat and made transporting products from the hinterland to the ports much easier.22 It was therefore important to always understand the market conditions in both ports. Prices from other ports, but especially those from Europe, were also printed, albeit less frequently. For example, the American Weekly Mercury in April 1722 provided a list of prices for wheat and other grains in London.23 The Boston Gazette, especially in the earliest decades of the eighteenth century, reported 19 See New York Mercury No. 159, 25 August 1755, for an example of this distinction, which becomes commonplace in many price lists from the mid-eighteenth century on. 20 Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray, and Miriam Hussey, Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935) and Arthur H. Cole, Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States, 1700–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938). 21 Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom and Thomas Weiss, ‘Exports from the Colonies and States of the Middle Atlantic Region 1720–1800’, Research in Economic History, 29 (2013), pp. 257–76. 22 Land, Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution, pp. 25–27. 23 American Weekly Mercury, No. 123, 18 April 1722.

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prices from both New York and Philadelphia as the three cities were intertwined economically via maritime trade.24 Prices were an important component of business decisions, and given the relative abundance of options of where to send ships laden with commodities, understanding at what price one could expect to sell one’s goods avoided the risk of going into a market blind. Newspapers reported on weather or environmental conditions, especially for their own ports and regions. The New York Mercury and the Boston Gazette were two papers that frequently provided the past week’s high-water marks and times which would give captains and merchants some idea as to when they could expect to set sail, as tides were cyclical in nature and tended to be predictable excepting times of harsh weather.25 In the winter the newspapers were critical sources of information about the condition of the harbor, especially for subscribers further inland. While southern ports rarely experienced ice in their harbors, the ports of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were frequently shut by ice. In February 1769 the Boston News-Letter warned that, ‘Our harbor is now almost closed with ice’ and that the ‘Charlestown Ferry is froze over’.26 In Philadelphia it was common that the January and February issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette were smaller than in other months, as the frozen river prevented ships from arriving with not only goods but news as well.27 In February 1737 Philadelphia experienced major floods due to the river ice breaking up at the same time that snow melt was traveling down the river, causing several structures and wharves to be completely destroyed, along with some ships and cargoes.28 It was also common for newspapers to report on the accessibility of other ports. For example, the 25 January 1720 issue of the Boston Gazette reported that Philadelphia’s port remained closed due to ice.29 Snow and tides were not the only weather news that newspapers provided. Regular weather reports or news of hurricanes or significant storms from different ports can be found in many newspapers from the period. News of hurricanes and major sea storms was of particular interest to merchants and captains, and in addition to consuming this information from print, they regularly provided newspaper printers with any such news of storms when they arrived. For instance, in October 1738 Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, published news received from Franklin’s partners in 24 25 26 27

An example of this is Boston Gazette, No. 6, 25 January 1720. New York Mercury, No. 244, 11 April 1757; Boston Gazette, No. 717, 26 December 1768. Boston News-Letter, No. 3,410, 9 February 1769. There are many issues like this, but one such example is Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 423, 20 January 1737, which explicitly refers to ice in the river preventing the arrival or departure of ships. 28 Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 425, 3 February 1737. 29 Boston Gazette, No. 6, 25 January 1720,

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Boston – via a Captain Cowley – about a storm in Antigua. According to the Gazette, Antigua had received enormous rains in the month of July resulting in major losses and damage to crops, and in August, had also suffered a hit from a hurricane, which led to the loss of several ships including one from Piscataqua (in New Hampshire) after it had already been loaded with ‘400 hogsheads of sugar, and just ready to sail’.30 This bit of news would likely have discouraged merchants from Philadelphia as Antigua was a major destination for voyages originating in Philadelphia. News of droughts or famines also found their way into the newspapers. In March 1740 the Gazette reported that a major drought had created a scarcity of provisions for ships that were traveling into the Mediterranean and to various locations along what the English called the Barbary Coast in North Africa. According to the paper, a ‘vast number of people and cattle had been starved to death’.31 It was so bad that England sent supplies to the region, but with little effect. Another common type of news that newspapers printed were the entries and clearances of ships coming into and leaving the port. This information usually came from the British Customs House, so it only included ships that checked in with the customs officials in port, likely excluding those that were conducting illegal or local trade.32 Having knowledge of the ships coming and going from port was essential business news for those involved with Atlantic and global trade. Even for those not directly involved in the shipping of goods, this type of news was important to the residents of ports as between 35–45% of the populations in colonial ports were involved in maritime commerce in one way or another.33 The reports, which were usually printed weekly, recorded the type of ship, the name of the ship, the master, and the origin and destination of the voyage. The reports included two levels of outward entries. One would report the ‘outward bound’ vessels, which meant that they were planning to leave soon, but had not yet left the port or been inspected by the customs office. The other group reported ‘cleared’ vessels or ships that had already left port or were cleared for departure by the customs officials.34 Newspapers also reported on entries and clearances from neighboring ports as it was important 30 Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 513, 12 October 1738. 31 Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 497, 22 June 1738. 32 For much more on the illicit or otherwise hidden trade that occurred in colonial America, see Jeremy Land and Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez, ‘Illicit Affairs: Philadelphia’s Trade with Lisbon before Independence, 1700–1775’, Ler Historia, 75 (2019), pp. 179–204. 33 Land, Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution, pp. 44–45. 34 Again, examples are plentiful, but a good example of this for reference is Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 584, 21 February 1740. Other papers, such as the Boston Gazette, were less consistent with how much information was reported, but in all newspapers the master’s last name and the origins and destinations always were reported assuming the information was provided by the Customs Houses.

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Figure 6.2 Example of entries and clearances – 10 November 1737, Pennsylvania Gazette Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA

to know if one’s or a partner’s cargo had arrived at its expected destination (see Figure 6.2 for an example). The Boston Gazette was particularly faithful in printing the arrivals and departures of other ports in the region. In just one month of issues in 1721, the paper reported the entries and clearances from Piscataqua in New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Salem, and Newport in Rhode Island.35 These entries and clearances reports were useful in disseminating 35 Boston Gazette, Nos. 97–101, 2 October; 9 October; 23 October; 30 October 1721.

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news, especially as advertisements for ships heading for specific destinations were present in nearly every newspaper issue. This provided merchants, especially those who did not own shares in a ship, to send cargoes to their partners and customers without having to outfit a voyage of their own. Not only did newspapers print information that was useful to merchants, they relied on merchants to provide news and updates from around the world. As merchants were the most common readers, advertisers, and subscribers, they were usually quite willing to share news with the newspaper printer that would interest other merchants and readers.36 Much of this news dealt with political or military developments in different parts of the world, but sometimes that news had quite detailed information regarding issues with commerce. During the Seven Years’ War the New York Mercury was filled with reports of the captures of ships and vessels throughout the Atlantic. In April of 1757 the paper reported that, ‘in a letter from St. Christophers, dated March 2’, several vessels had been captured from both New York and Philadelphia among other ports, including a list of ship names, captains, and origins.37 The following week’s issue published a list of vessels brought into New York, which would have been very interesting to the local merchants as the goods that the captured ships carried, many of which were French, would then be made available for purchase as well as the ships themselves.38 In yet another example, a newspaper in Philadelphia reported that in Lisbon in June 1744 English vessels, including those of the British colonies, had been ordered to remain in port due to the fact that several French ships had been captured recently and several remained prowling the sea lanes leading from Lisbon (see Figure 6.3, first paragraph, top left).39 With Philadelphia heavily involved in trade with Lisbon, this appeared at the very front of the newspaper, likely indicating it was vital news for the merchants and consumers of the city. Other times, newspapers printed excerpts from letters that discussed certain economic and/or political issues that readers may have found interesting or perhaps controversial. In 1769 the Boston News-Letter published an excerpt from a letter received by a merchant in Boston from his partner in London. The excerpt discussed the issue of debt and credit between the colonies and England. One line reads, ‘Your traders before were too forward to run deep in debt with our merchants, and thereby involved themselves in great difficulties’. Later the writer went on to say that colonial merchants were becoming more 36 37 38 39

McCusker, ‘Demise of Distance’, pp. 310–14. New York Mercury, No. 2443, 4 April 1757. New York Mercury, No. 244, 11 April 1757. Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 826, 11 October 1744.

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Figure 6.3 Example of news from Lisbon – 11 October 1744, Pennsylvania Gazette Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA

than capable of handling their own affairs but warned colonists to avoid getting too involved with creditors based in London, an issue that was at that moment coming to a head between the colonies and the British government.40 The colonies were growing increasingly frustrated with the renewed efforts to control and tax their trade, especially with the Stamp Act of 1765 and subsequent acts known as the Intolerable and Townshend Acts in the late 1760s and early 1770s. As a result of rioting and protests against imperial policies, the British military and navy occupied Boston starting in late 1768. It was not surprising, then, that public sentiment turned against getting involved in credit markets in England. Newspapers were sold and delivered to subscribers in many ports, not just the local area around a given port. Much of the news that was printed about neighboring ports came from other newspapers, and there was a general informal agreement to share news with one another.41 Still, subscribers generally depended on the delivery of the newspaper for their business decisions as post ships ran regular routes between ports, especially those within the same region. For example, the New York Mercury reported that the post ship would run twice a week between Philadelphia and New York instead of just once (Fig. 6.4). The note reads:

40 Boston News-Letter, No. 3,410, 9 February 1769. 41 Adelman, Revolutionary Networks.

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Figure 6.4 Report from Philadelphia about the post ship going twice weekly – 11 April 1757, New York Mercury Courtesy of Newsbank/Readex

For the quicker dispatch of business between this and New York, the posts will go from hence twice a week throughout the year, viz. on every Monday and Thursday; and as they are to set out precisely at 10 o’clock in the morning on these days, all letters intended to go by them should be brought to the Post Office at least half an hour before that time.42 Demand existed for quicker communication, and the delivery of papers were an important component of that demand. Of course, along with newspapers, merchant letters could also move more quickly between the two ports facilitating an even greater amount of commercial and information exchange. 2

Newspapers, Letters, and Business Decisions

Newspapers served as the public venue for general business news and updates from around the world, and merchants incorporated that news into their business decisions and deliberations. As merchants rarely, if ever, conducted business without partners, letters were filled with references to news just learned via newspapers, and sometimes the newspaper or a physical clip of the broadside was sent as attachments between merchants, as seen in the examples discussed below. As having accurate and up to date information was essential in global maritime trade, the relationship between the newspapers and merchants was reciprocal in that newspapers printed news, merchants consumed that news, sent letters to their partners, agents, and friends, and those letters often included information that was then printed in the newspapers. This relationship was a key component of the business practices of colonial merchants, and as the eighteenth century progressed, the proliferation of newspapers provided merchants with a base-level amount of data that left more room in letters between merchants to discuss strategies and decisions. Though just one aspect of a bigger story, the growth and reach of newspapers served to help expand the amount of trade and commerce that made British American merchants more competitive through the end of colonial rule. 42 New York Mercury, No. 244, 11 April 1757.

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Newspapers served as public forums for larger discussions of business matters and controversies. In one example, the Pennsylvania Gazette published a letter from an anonymous subscriber which went into detail discussing a recent proposal from French buyers to buy tobacco directly from local producers, most of whom resided in Virginia (an example of the reach and importance of newspapers published in major ports). In this proposal, the French merchants had hoped to avoid going through London merchants to access American tobacco. As the original proposal is not printed with this open discussion, it is assumed that there was a debate among merchants and planters about the ‘French proposal’, as it is referred to in the letter. The author also supplied several calculations of earnings on both 900 and 1000 lbs of tobacco and what a planter could expect to earn or lose depending on the price found at London. In short, the potential for loss was much higher when selling directly to the French who, according to the author of the letter, would rarely pay more than the lowest price one would find in London. While the author also pointed out some possible corruption in the scales used in London, it was also clear from the printed calculations that the French proposal was the least profitable for merchants and planters.43 Of course, there is much that could be written about the various concerns and biases that an anonymous writer in 1738 Philadelphia may have. Still, this is indicative of the open and public discussions of business practices and decisions that newspapers helped to facilitate. News of major arrivals and commercial developments around the Atlantic found its way into the broadsides of colonial ports. As Philadelphia’s maritime economy was involved heavily in trade with the Portuguese Empire, the Pennsylvania Gazette frequently reported on the arrival of large shipping convoys in Portugal. In August 1738, in a brief note printed above the week’s list of entries and clearances, the paper reported the arrival in Lisbon of a large fleet carrying significant quantities of commodities that would probably be interesting to merchants who conducted regular trade with Portuguese merchants. The fleet’s cargoes included ‘1,455,257 [crusados] of gold, 7,629 chests of sugar, 697 small chests [of sugar], 908 rolls of trunks [of sugar], 9,640 quintals of Brazil Wood, 60,000 and a half Sole hides, 12,000 hides in the hair, 444 barrels of honey’, and another half dozen commodities in substantial quantities.44 This type of news would have surely sparked interest in continued and new shipments of grain and other products as the merchants in Philadelphia could expect higher prices with an abundance of precious metal and other newly arrived commodities in port. This is a relatively common appearance 43 Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 482, 7 March 1738. 44 Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 508, 24 August 1738.

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in the newspaper, with yet another large treasure fleet reported in July of 1739 in the same publication, this time discussing a fleet arriving in Lisbon from Rio de Janeiro with more than 21,000 pounds (weight) and twelve million crusados of silver, along with another large collection of goods including sugar, hides, and wood, in such large quantities that the paper did not list the amounts for most of them.45 Interestingly, the paper also distinguished how much of the gold would be given to the king, as a portion of the gold that arrived would always go to the Portuguese crown. Just shy of 10,000 pounds and 290,000 crusados of gold was set aside for the king, leaving more than 12,000 pounds and twelve and a half million crusados worth of gold for merchants. Obviously, this inspired some excitement for merchants who conducted business with Portuguese merchants, and that same week, according to the Customs House reports in the same issue, three ships cleared for Lisbon.46 More than just simple weather reports and news of storms as discussed above, natural disasters and general calamities were also of great interests to the merchants and businessmen in ports. In March of 1740, the Pennsylvania Gazette published an extract from a letter, sent by a factor or an agent from Porto in Portugal, which reported that a major storm of wind and rain had devastated the port and caused significant wind damage and flooding to the port and warehouses, including the Customs House. According to the report, the entire kingdom of Portugal was hit by a major storm, perhaps a hurricane based on the amount of damage which included trees being ripped from the ground and several ships being thrown onto land or rocks near shore. The most important concern, however, was the loss of more than 4,000 pipes (a type of barrel) of wine, likely madeira or port wine. Considering the substantial Philadelphia trade to and from Portugal, this report likely meant that prices would be higher for wine as it was usually one of the main cargoes imported from Portugal: cargoes that were necessary to make transoceanic voyages profitable.47 In March 1760, the New York Mercury reported that a major snowstorm off the coast near Cape May in New Jersey caught six ships leaving Philadelphia unaware and they were lost ashore, with several being completely lost while a 45 Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 554, 26 July 1739. The crusados listed are assumed to be the silver variety as that was the more common coin, but the coins could have been gold, considering the major gold rush in Brazil at the time and that the previous example discussed above listed more than a million gold coins, presumably escudos, often called crusados as a holdover from the previous century when crusados had both gold and silver version. In either case, the arrival of the coins would have encouraged at least a temporary period of inflation. 46 Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 554, 26 July 1739. 47 Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 589, 27 March 1740.

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couple of ships and their cargoes were salvaged. One of those ships was heading for New York, another to Lisbon, and several others to the Caribbean.48 The news of the loss of these ships would have been of extreme importance to the merchants of New York, even for those ships that were not heading there. As a large proportion of ships and their cargoes were owned by more than one person, the comings, goings, and losses of ships moving throughout the Atlantic provided key information by which a merchant could make decisions about investments in new ships or cargoes or whether one would have the funds to pay off creditors.49 Epidemics of disease were important events that merchants needed to factor into their business decisions. If a port was suffering an epidemic from smallpox or cholera, it might make sense to wait a few weeks or months before sending a ship or cargo. For example, a yellow fever outbreak in the island of St. Christophers (St. Kitts) was reported in 1739 by the Boston Gazette. The news came directly from merchant letters, and the outbreak was said to be extremely virulent with, ‘some dying in less than 24 hours after they were seized with it’. The newspaper noted that the news came ‘By letters’, but it was printed immediately following the information section that contained news for merchants, which was the location where news from merchants were normally printed.50 Because the news came from multiple letters, the information must have been of importance to many of the merchants in Boston. The paper went on to discuss how many of the wealthiest residents of the port had left for the mountains on the island to avoid the epidemic, even going so far as to build tents. This also meant that little business was going to be conducted in the port, with many sick and dying and the elites entirely out of reach. Other disasters such as fires and ship seizures during wars were commonly reported, and those reports were often found very close to the usual commercial news of ship arrivals and departures and advertisements. One such example is the report in the New York Mercury of a massive and catastrophic fire in Boston in March 1760. According to the report more than 400 households, stores, shops, and ships were consumed by the fire. The newspaper also published a list of people who lost homes and detailed the main areas where shops and stores were destroyed. In one sad case, a man said he lost more than £5,000 in goods and property, an enormous sum in 1760. In total, the losses were said to have exceeded £300,000, losses that most certainly affected merchants and 48 New York Mercury, No. 398, 31 March 1760. 49 Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 184–85. 50 Boston Gazette, No. 992, 22 January 1739.

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business partners in New York.51 During war, there were regular reports of the names and captains of ships that were taken by enemies or privateers. In the same issue of the New York Mercury, letters from merchants in the Caribbean confirmed that at least thirty English ships were captured by the French and carried into Montserrat, and that several vessels from New York were included in that large haul of prizes.52 These reports on vessels being captured proved vital for regular business as insurers demanded proof of the loss of a ship or cargo when a merchant attempted to claim payment. In one example, Benjamin Dolbeare, a merchant based in Boston, wrote to business partners claiming that his schooner Tryal had been captured by pirates. He explained that he was still gathering information and official documents to send to his insurer, some of which he had already sent such as the bill of lading and invoice of the cargo. However, he also made clear that he was aware of the capture primarily from newspaper reports in Spanish and French newspapers which were translated by friends in Bristol. Effectively, he was relying on other merchants and partners to find newspaper reports of the capture, apparently by Spanish privateers or pirates. As a result, there was no formal condemnation or legal procedure which could be provided to the insurer, which made receiving payment for the loss of the ship and cargo uncertain.53 Dolbeare was informing his partners that the cargo and schooner, which these partners had most certainly invested in, were entirely lost and that payment for their own losses would be delayed. Moreover, it appears that newspapers played an important role, at least in some cases, in confirming whether ships were really lost, or whether a merchant was trying to commit insurance fraud (which was certainly a concern in the era).54 Sometimes the news shared between merchants was of a more positive nature. For instance, Gerard Beekman wrote a letter to his friend Thomas Marshall that a privateer in which Beekman was invested had just brought in ‘two fine French ships’ which he hoped to ‘fetch twenty-five thousand pounds’. Beekman even enclosed a newspaper which confirmed the 51 New York Mercury, No. 398, 31 March 1760. 52 New York Mercury, No. 398, 31 March 1760. 53 MHS, Benjamin Dolbeare Letterbook and Invoice Book, 1739–1811, Volume 1, Benjamin Dolbeare to Silwell, Noyes, and Smith, 24 October 1740. 54 Christopher Kingston, ‘Marine Insurance in Britain and America, 1720–1844: A Compa­ rative Institutional Analysis’, The Journal of Economic History, 67.2 (2007), pp. 379–409 and A. Glenn Crothers, ‘Commercial Risk and Capital Formation in Early America: Virginia Merchants and the Rise of American Marine Insurance, 1750–1815’, The Business History Review, 78.4 (2004), pp. 607–633. See also Buckles, ‘Merchants and Crisis in the Bristol-West India Sugar Trade’, pp. 67–81.

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report and the story about how the ship was captured by a Captain Bayard.55 The newspaper he sent was probably the 2 May issue of the New York Mercury, as it includes a long column on how the Hercules, the privateer partially funded by Beekman, captured two of three French sloops not too far from San Domingue (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).56 Of course, this was not good news for the French merchants who owned the cargoes and ships of the three captured sloops. In most cases, however, merchants shared news with one another of a more day-to-day nature. In a letter to his partners in 1766, Thomas Peck indicated that he had received a recent enclosure of a price current list from his partners, and that he was hoping to receive additional information on whether the prices had changed or not. He expressed some doubt that the price current would be accurate by the time he had received it, but he would be happy to hear if prices had improved or not.57 Many times, letters would report on the arrival of ships into port or on weather reports that might cause delays in the departure of ships, information likely gleaned from newspapers. In one example in 1767, the partners Dunlop and Glenholme wrote to one of their clients in New York that certain ships had arrived but had not yet fully come into port, meaning a delay to the arrival of goods that their client had ordered.58 They had learned this via a report in the newspaper and wished to convey their apologies. Later that same year in December, Dunlop and Glenholme again had to send word to the same client that ice had prevented the departure of ships from Philadelphia and that there was uncertainty that the ice would break up enough for them to leave before the end of the winter.59 Often, business decisions were discussed using both publicly available information, such as price currents, and exclusive knowledge shared only between partners. In one letter that Boston merchant Caleb Davis received from a merchant based in Gibraltar, Davis was requested to send a cargo of flour to the region, as war in the area between Spain and the Moors coupled with a recent harvest failure had caused a shortage of the commodity in the Iberian Peninsula. As his partner wrote, ‘The high price of flour in England deprives us of any supplies from thence, therefore our sole dependance is upon those 55 56 57 58 59

Gerard Beekman to Thomas Marshall, 5 May 1757, in Philip L. White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers, Volume 1 (New York: The New York Historical Society, 1956), p. 300. New York Mercury, No. 247, 2 May 1757. MHS, Thomas H. Peck Letterbook, 1763–1776, Thomas Peck to Lane and Booth, 30 May 1766. HSP, Orr, Dunlop, and Glenhope Letterbook, 1767–1769, Dunlop and Glenholme to Dr. Andrew, 11 July 1767. HSP, Orr, Dunlop, and Glenhope Letterbook, 1767–1769, W. Glenholme to Dr. Andrew, 23 December 1767.

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may drop in from your quarter, which enhances the value of that article’.60 As they were using newspapers to guide them on prices from London and other English ports, they did not have the ability to purchase wheat in that market, but Boston’s market was still quite low in price. In effect, Davis’s partner suggested that better-than-usual profits would be earned if flour could be sent to that region. Davis’s partner also included a price current list along with the letter to show the prices he could expect if he sent a ship in that direction. Occasionally, the newspapers that were shared between merchants did not contain the information they were looking for. In a letter from New York to his partner in Philadelphia, Gerard Beekman wrote that he had not received enough information recently, ‘nor does your newspapers give us the price current’. He went on to say that he was informed about the price of flour in Philadelphia via two captains in port and asked his partner in Philadelphia to send 100 barrels if the price remained the same as he had heard. He then sent the price current from New York to his colleague, so that he would not suffer from the same lack of information.61 In another example, a firm in Philadelphia wrote to their partner in Belfast that the exports of flaxseed from Philadelphia and New York were much lower than usual, and that the price they obtained for the shipment that they were sending to their partner was still good, considering the shortage, likely hoping to ensure that their partner remained happy with the shipment headed that way. They also explained that prices of provisions (bread, flour, and other basics) had been high recently in Philadelphia, including a price current list which was no doubt pulled from a recent newspaper. The letter referred to an order from their partner in Belfast, and they continued explaining their decisions and choices for the cargo they were sending, ending by requesting their partner’s thoughts on the matter.62 Letters like these provide significant insight into the everyday business decisions of merchants from the era. Newspapers provided an important basis from which informed business decisions could be made and then explained, and perhaps even help to convince partners that the right decision had been made, as the distance between places often forced merchants to act independently without input from their partners.

60 MHS, Caleb Davis Papers, Box 7, December 1774 Folder, Robert Anderson to Caleb Davis, 15 Dec 1774. 61 Gerard Beekman to Townsend White, 17 December 1753, in White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers, Volume 1, pp. 196–97. 62 HSP, Orr, Dunlop, and Glenhope Letterbook, 1767–1769, Orr, Dunlop, and Glenholme to James Riddle, 25 January 1768.

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News and Risk Mitigation

Awareness of constantly evolving political and social changes throughout the world was of particular importance to merchants, and newspapers provided news that helped to not only inform business decisions but to mitigate the inherent risks of maritime trade. Like much of the news discussed above, merchants required a substantial amount of information to make decisions on when to sail, how much to ship, what cargoes will be in demand, and dozens of other major and minor decisions. Many of these decisions depended on an additional component: risk assessment. Merchants relied on newspapers and their fellow merchants to update them on the many risks, such as war, acts of piracy, and financial fraud. Likely the most constant, yet difficult to predict, risk to maritime commerce was war, especially in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Imperial rivalries and war largely defined the century and the colonial sphere, as nations employed ever-growing navies and enlisted privateers (read: legal pirates) to harass and damage the commercial lifelines of one’s enemies. War, while profitable for some people, generally was not a positive development for maritime commerce, especially if one considers the frequent appearance in newspapers of ships captured by Britain’s enemies. This also explains the ubiquity of political and military updates in almost every single issue of newspapers. For merchants, war was a constant threat in the eighteenth century. During periods of open war, insurance rates tended to be higher, which is not surprising considering the threat that war posed to maritime commerce.63 War was profitable for some merchants. In a 1756 letter to a colleague in Philadelphia about iron manufacturing, William Allen and Joseph Turner, acting as agents for their employers David Barclay and Sons of London, informed their contact that the iron trade had experienced a significant increase recently, especially in New York.64 There, according to news they had received, at least thirty-two ships had been outfitted as privateers in the growing war between France and England, and they reported that iron nails, sheeting, and wrought iron would all be in high demand along the coast of North America.65 The surprising number of privateers notwithstanding, the newspapers from New York in the weeks and months prior are filled with reports on new privateers 63 Buckles, ‘Merchants and Crisis in the Bristol-West India Sugar Trade’, pp. 67–81. 64 For more on the appetite for wartime profits in New York, see Jones, ‘From Anglicisation to Loyalism’, pp. 134–38. 65 HSP, Allen and Turner Letterbook, 1755–1774, William Allen and Joseph Turner to John Perks, 20 December 1756.

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heading out on cruises against French shipping, and these reports may have provided Allen and Turner with the information they perceived as an opportunity to take advantage of the growing demand for iron.66 Beyond the usual risks associated with war such as capture and sinking, war added additional barriers to trade that in peacetime would be of less concern. For example, in 1757 Charles Stewart, a merchant in Philadelphia, wrote to one of his contacts who had requested that Stewart send a cargo of wheat and other foodstuffs. However, his contact had recently move to Sint Eustatius (a Dutch island in the Caribbean), and Parliament, as part of the war efforts during what became known as the Seven Years’ War, passed a law: prohibiting the exportation of provisions from any of the colonies and islands to any foreign port whatsoever under the max penalties viz. forfeiture of vessel and cargo, and besides 20 shilling for every bushel of grain, 1 for every pound of provisions and 3 months imprisonment for the master and crew.67 Stewart wrote that his colleague must not have heard of the recent passing of the act, thus he would, instead, send a cargo of timber which was still allowed by the law.68 Laws such as these were not normally well enforced in peacetime, but during wartime, naval activity was much higher meaning that the odds of avoiding British navy vessels was much lower. Stewart declined to send the requested commodities, but the fact that the law was still fairly new, coupled with the lack of clarity on the level of enforcement at that point, made him content to send something to keep his partner happy. Of course, Stewart still took the opportunity to request that his partner in Sint Eustatius send him rum and molasses, since they were in high demand in Philadelphia. Perhaps just as important as knowing when war was on the horizon, knowing when peace was on its way was of significant interest to merchants. In 1748 New York merchant Gerard Beekman wrote to his colleagues in London that

66

See the 6 December 1756 (No. 226) and 13 December 1756 (No. 227) issues of the New York Mercury for examples of these reports, though the issues before and after those dates also have several examples. In these issues, also, are reports of privateers being outfitted in Boston, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, and several other smaller ports along the coast of North America. All of these reports certainly factored into the agents’ decision to call for more imports of iron products. 67 HSP, Charles Stewart Letterbooks, 1751–1763, Charles Stewart to Benjamin Walker, 21 June 1757. 68 Ibid.

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he had heard word, via newspaper reports from Boston (again illustrating the distribution networks of newspapers in the colonies), that peace talks were underway to formally end the War of Austrian Succession. He expressed to his partners that he wished to get involved in the dry goods business, and the prospects of peace made that kind of investment less risky.69 Again at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Beekman wrote to his colleague in Ireland that the scarcity of flaxseed in New York in conjunction with the news of peace meant that the price of it would be higher. However, he continued to say that: you may depend that not more than 2/3 as much seed will be shipped from America this season than what generally used to be shipped, that together with the low freight and fall of insurance make up and so leave room no doubt but it will answer well this year.70 Thanks to the war ending, the price of shipping and insuring the cargo of flaxseed largely offset the expected increases in cost due to a scarcity of the product. Beekman was attempting to reassure his client that profit would still be possible, thanks to the recent peace between France and England. Risks were always high in maritime trade, and while merchants were voracious consumers of information and news to help legal commerce, merchants involved in illicit trade were even more desperate for news on the comings and goings of the British navy and other government officials. In New York, many merchants were active in trading with Dutch merchants and destinations, largely due to their history of being a former colony of the Netherlands.71 One such merchant, Waddell Cunningham, was a frequent importer of Dutch goods, with surprisingly efficient and well-designed strategies to shield his shipments from British officials. In 1756 for example, Cunningham wrote to his partners Isaac and Zachary Hope who were based in Rotterdam that he had recently heard that the ship and cargo they had sent from Rotterdam had arrived, but that he could not offload the ship right away. Recently, he had heard via both newspaper reports and from his colleagues in New York that so many Dutch goods had appeared in the city that the colonial governor and British customs officials had become suspicious and were increasing surveillance along 69 Gerard Beekman to Robert Shaw and William Snell, 5 July 1748, in White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers, Volume 1, pp. 52–54. 70 Gerard Beekman to Alexander Ogilby, Jr., 22 January 1763, in White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers, Volume 1, p. 426. 71 Matson, Merchants and Empire, pp. 138–41.

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the coast. He advised that he would wait a few days, and even then, he would offload the goods at nighttime so that the ship could return to Rotterdam.72 While there is no explicit reference to the threat of action against trade from the Netherlands, the New York Mercury lists in three weeks of issues prior to Cunningham’s letter a fairly large number of arrivals from Dutch islands and possessions in the Caribbean, including Suriname, St. Kitts, Curacao, and Sint Eustatius  – a particularly infamous island for trans-imperial trade and smuggling.73 It is entirely possible that many of those ships were shielding their true nature and cargo by stopping in the Caribbean before arriving in New York. In any case, Cunningham sought to mitigate risk by being patient and landing goods at night to ensure that they would arrive without being seen by customs officials. As with any business between merchants, the risk of fraud was very real and a constant concern of merchants as they tended to extend credit to one another based on trust. While these networks of credit and trust continued to grow stronger throughout the eighteenth century, as did the legal systems to enforce agreements and debts, the risk was always present, and news provided one way to help mitigate that risk. Illustrating this risk is a case wherein the above-mentioned Gerard Beekman became involved in a case of fraud in Jamaica, some distance from his home in New York. According to a letter to his partners in Lancaster, England, he had signed off on a few bills of exchange for a William Ashburner who had presented himself as a well-connected person in London, even producing people to support his claims and bills of exchange drawn on elite merchants based in London. Ashburner convinced Beekman to give him £400 for bills of exchange worth a total of £1,100, with the expectation that Beekman would send Ashburner the rest once the bills had been accepted. However, those bills for which he advanced £400 were forgeries. In writing the letter, he hoped that his partners would reach out to Ashburner’s father in hopes of getting some of his money paid back. To help his case, he 72 Waddell Cunningham to Isaac and Zachary Hope, Rotterdam, 10 May 1756, printed in Thomas M. Truxes (ed.), Letterbook of Greg and Cunningham, 1756–57: Merchants of New York and Belfast (Oxford: Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Academy, 2001), pp. 98–99. 73 New York Mercury, No. 193, 19 April 1756; No. 194, 26 April 1756; No. 195, 3 May 1756, For more on the ease with which imperial borders were crossed in the Caribbean, see Land, Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution, p. 131; Matson, Merchants and Empire, pp. 271–72; and Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade between North America and the West Indies before the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 48–50.

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‘enclosed one of the Jamaica newspapers by which you see some of the advertisements concerning the bills and at foot is a list of the bills I did endorse for him’.74 For colonial American merchants, newspapers and information networks provided an essential link with the rest of the world, and when the American Revolution began, these connections became even more important for the success of the rebellion. American merchants continued to grow their networks well beyond the confines of the British Empire throughout the eighteenth century, and after 1775, these trans-imperial networks of news and information were crucial to accessing the goods and commodities the fledgling nation needed to continue growing its economy. One example from 1781 illustrates the continued importance of both merchant information networks and newspapers to American merchants. John Bradford, a Boston-based merchant, received a letter in reply to his request for a new shipment of goods and an update on his account status from colleagues in Nantes, France. His colleagues wrote also to congratulate him on the news of Bradford’s son arriving safely in Boston from his voyage in an American naval frigate, the Alliance. Bradford’s son had sailed as a passenger into Nantes and left again with the Alliance. The ship happened to come upon two British sloops of war on its way back to Boston and, according to the newspaper clipping that Bradford’s partners in Nantes included in the letter, captured both which were later sold.75 In a letter a couple of years later, the same partners informed Bradford that they expected a glut of goods in Nantes as a result of the news of the coming peace between Britain, France, and the new United States. Because of this, the time was not right to send a cargo from Boston, but they would see what goods they could get at a low price which they could then send to Bradford.76 These letters at the end of the American Revolution highlight the essential nature of news to merchants based in eighteenth-century North America. 4 Conclusion Of course, business decisions depended on far more than just newspapers and the news they contained, but newspapers provided updates on political, 74

Gerard Beekman to Abraham Rawlinson and William Preston, 6 June 1755, in White (ed.), The Beekman Mercantile Papers, Volume 1, pp. 251–54. 75 MHS, Samuel Bradford Papers, 1760–1818, Wilt and Delmestre, Jr. to John Bradford, 6 October 1781. 76 MHS, Samuel Bradford Papers, 1760–1818, Wilt and Delmestre, Jr. to John Bradford, 4 April 1783.

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military, and market conditions throughout the growing Atlantic and global economies, especially for merchants engaged in maritime trade. Merchants relied on newspapers for news of ship arrivals, commodity prices, and announcements of war and naval activity. Newspapers, in turn, relied on merchants for access to the most up-to-date information from around the world, as merchants were already embedded into multi-imperial, transoceanic, and transcultural networks of exchange, both commercial and informational. Those same networks continued to serve as essential links to the larger world in times of crisis and political revolution, for example providing access to the goods and commodities the United States needed to gain independence. This symbiotic relationship between newspapers and merchants did not stop at merely providing and sharing information on the most important news and market conditions. It provided an avenue for merchants, shopkeepers, and producers to market their goods and services to consumers not just in their home ports and region, but throughout the Atlantic World, especially to all the places that those newspapers were shipped. Newspapers also factored into the political debates surrounding the growing independence movement in the 1760s and 1770s.77 Once independence was achieved, American merchants immediately looked to expand their direct trade networks into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Newspapers, in kind, expanded their size, scope, and geographic footprint to meet the constantly growing demand for information on the ever-smaller world and its citizens. 77

See Adelman, Revolutionary Networks.

Chapter 7

‘I Should Be Glad of a Little Conversation with Thee’: Business Letters and the Oral Exchange of Information in the Early Modern Atlantic World Siobhan Talbott and Sophie H. Jones Oral conversations about business were commonplace in the early modern period.1 They occurred in a range of places, both those specifically oriented towards business, such as the Royal Exchange, the quayside, and in coffee houses, and in more informal spaces, including private homes or on the street.2 Many of these oral exchanges were not committed to paper, and subsequently they have been lost to historians of early modern business. Through references to oral conversations which are contained within merchants’ correspondence and letter-books, however, we can begin to piece together the ways in which oral conversation facilitated commercial transactions, reported business activities, and spread commercial information. Further, through considering the ways in which correspondence was constructed, written language used, and information orally disseminated, our understanding of what business ‘conversations’ were is significantly enhanced. We suggest that letters were not just written words, and that verbal conversation was not just oral discussion, but that all forms of information exchange were part of broader communications circuits that operated within a specific business culture.3 Much of the literature that has examined the oral exchange of information in the early modern period, or the places in which this occurred, has done so 1 The quotation in the title is taken from: Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 54v, Jacob Hagen to Francis Randall, 19 August 1760, London. 2 For an analysis of the ‘marketplace’ in Britain and America see Emma Hart, Trading spaces: the Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2019); for more on the places in which business transactions took place see Stana Nenadic, ‘The rites, rituals and sites of business, 1650–1820’, in Siobhan Talbott and Caitlin Rosenthal (eds.), A Cultural History of Business in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 3 For a discussion of the concept of ‘business culture’ in the early modern period see Siobhan Talbott and Caitlin Rosenthal, ‘Introduction’, in Talbott and Rosenthal (eds.), A Cultural History of Business in the Age of Enlightenment; See also Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?: Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), p. 236.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689879_008

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without defined consideration of the mercantile sphere. Peter Clark’s influential work British Clubs and Societies makes only passing mention of merchants and trade, focusing instead on the social aspects of the establishment and the operation of associations.4 Barbara Shapiro, meanwhile, discusses the importance of coffee houses to the dissemination of political news and polemic, but does not consider the importance of these spaces for the discussion of business information.5 Adam Fox’s Oral and Literate Culture in England has a conspicuous lack of consideration of trade or merchants, as does Fox and Daniel Woolf’s collection The Spoken Word.6 Lloyd Bowen, in his exceptional study of the transmission of oral information in early modern Wales, focuses on politics and society rather than commerce.7 This should not be taken as criticism of these excellent works, which are intended for other specific purposes (Clark, for example, suggests that merchants were less prominent as society founders and that they had only limited participation in voluntary associations; his work focuses on the raison d’être of voluntary associations rather than what went on within them).8 Nonetheless, this trend indicates that there is much more to be said about the ways and places in which business information was exchanged through speech. It has been said that in order to access early modern conversations we are ‘reliant on fragments of speech that have been caught in text … where we can glimpse only moments in the continuous flow of talk’.9 Indeed, the description of conversation in written text is perhaps the most obvious way to access early modern speech. For instance, in 1663 John Packes asked Edward Wood ‘please to understand that I have spoken with Mr Raworth & have acquainted him with your present condition … I have spoken with Mr Phillips & acquainted him with what you writt’. Such conversations frequently took place because one party was not able to be present in person – hence, ‘for want of your beinge 4 Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: the Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 5 Barbara J. Shapiro, Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558–1688 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 48. 6 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds.), The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 7 Lloyd Bowen, ‘Information, Language and Political Culture in Early Modern Wales’, Past & Present, 228.1 (2015), pp. 125–158. 8 Clark, British Clubs and Societies, p. 253. 9 Michael J. Braddick, ‘Afterword’, in Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey (eds.), Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400–1700) (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 447; see also Miles Ogborn, ‘The power of speech: orality, oaths and evidence in the British Atlantic world, 1650–1800’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36.1 (2011), p. 110.

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in town, I have spoken this day with Mr Dunkin’.10 By describing conversation, letters allow the recipient – as well as historians – to reconstruct discussions that had already taken place. Other letters gave rise to future oral exchange, being written with the intention that the contents would be shared: either by being read aloud to a larger group of people, or passed on to one specific person.11 Importantly, thinking about letters not only as a mechanism for identifying conversation but as a crucial part of the conversation itself broadens the ways in which we think about ‘correspondence’ and ‘conversations’ in the early modern Atlantic world. Letters and oral conversations were integrated parts of broader communications circuits and, while not our purview in this chapter, printed works too were part of this phenomenon, as explored by Jeremy Land elsewhere in this volume. The importance of letter-writing to early modern society has generated a wealth of attention.12 However, letters were only one, albeit crucial, form of communication at a merchant’s disposal, and manuscript correspondence was underpinned by a series of personal interactions and informal exchanges. It is impossible to separate the different modes of communication utilised within early modern business networks. As Adam Fox puts it, ‘the three media of speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in myriad ways’.13 The very nature of early modern business culture, with networks spread over increasingly large distances and reliant on precarious trans-oceanic shipping, made a mix of oral and written information a necessity. While it has been contended that early modern society was one ‘where most agreements were arrived at face-to-face’, necessitating ‘little intervening role played by writing’,14 this was not the case in business networks, highlighting their 10 HL, HM 82057, John Packes Newsletters to Thomas Wood, 1642–1695, John Packes to Edward Wood, 10 November 1663, London. Our emphasis. 11 For more on reading aloud, see Sophie H. Jones, ‘Readers and Readerships’, in Nicholas Brownlees (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 1: Beginnings and Consolidation 1640–1800 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), p. 104. 12 For example: James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Konstantin Dierks, In my Power: Letter-Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary selves: letters and letter-writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Gary M. Schneider, The culture of epistolarity: vernacular letters and letter writing in early modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 13 Fox, Oral and literate culture in England, p. 5; see also A. Fox and D. Woolf, ‘Introduction’, in Fox and Woolf (eds.), The spoken word, p. 8. 14 Harold Love, ‘Oral and scribal texts in early modern England’, in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 100.

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specificity. Importantly, while the term ‘network’ is freely used by scholars (including ourselves), it must be noted that this term would not have been familiar to early modern merchants who instead referred to their associates as ‘correspondents’ or ‘friends’: the latter term in particular invoking a personal relationship between correspondents, despite physical distance.15 As the methodologies used to investigate early modern business have evolved, scholars increasingly rely on manuscript correspondence to interrogate interactions of all types.16 This is demonstrated throughout this collection, as well as by an expanding literature.17 However, letters have not yet been used to investigate oral conversations in early modern business. Partly, we seek to identify how and where business conversations took place, but our analysis is also concerned with the links between the written and the oral. We draw on a range of epistles: some are preserved as part of extensive letter-books (or series of letter-books), including those of the Brown family of Providence, Thomas Amory of Boston, and Jacob Hagen & Co, a London timber firm; others survive only as a single volume, such as the letter-books of the Chester merchant Daniel 15 Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 2–3; Lindsay O’Neill, ‘Dealing with Newsmongers: News, Trust, and Letters in the British World, ca. 1670–1730’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76.2 (2013), pp. 215–233; Albane Forestier, ‘Risk, Kinship, and Personal Relationships in Late Eighteenth-Century West Indian Trade: The Commercial Network of Tobin and Pinney’, Business History, 52.6 (2010), p. 918; David Hancock, ‘The Trouble with Networks: Managing the Scots’ Early Modern Madeira Trade’, Business History Review, 79.3 (2005), pp. 472–473; Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: household, kinship, and patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 167. 16 Siobhan Talbott, ‘Trade and Commerce’, in Jonathan Hogg and Laura Balderstone (eds.), Using Primary Sources (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). 17 This has manifested itself both in the methods used by historians and in the proliferation of edited texts of merchants’ letters. Examples of the latter include Siobhan Talbott (ed.), The Letter-book of Thomas Baret, merchant and textile manufacture, 1672–1677 (Lancaster: Norfolk Record Society, 2021); Siobhan Talbott (ed.), ‘The letter-book of John Clerk, 1644–1645’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, Volume 15, Scottish History Society 6th series, 8 (2014), pp. 1–54; Jacob M. Price (ed.), Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook 1771–1774: Letters from a Merchant in London to his partners in Maryland (London: London Record Society, 1979); Margaret Fisher Dalrymple (ed.), The Merchant of Manchac: The Letterbook of John Fitzpatrick, 1768–1790 (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); S. D. Smith (ed.), An Exact and Industrious Tradesman: The Letterbook of Joseph Symson of Kendal, 1711–1720 (Oxford: Published by Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2002); L. M. Cullen, John Shovlin and Thomas M. Truxes (eds.), The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: correspondence of an Irish community abroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Thomas M. Truxes (ed.), Letterbook of Greg & Cunningham, 1756–57: merchants of New York and Belfast (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Anne L. Murphy (ed.), The Worlds of the Jeake Family of Rye, 1640–1763 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Peck, the Norwich textile merchant and manufacturer Thomas Baret, and the Kendal mercer Joseph Symson.18 We first focus on the ways that business took place in person, before thinking about the role that rumour played in establishing (or ruining) merchants’ reputations. We discuss the spaces in which oral conversations took place, and then examine the specific roles played by letters within conversation circuits. Finally, we look at the ways in which letters were constructed, and how their tone, expression and form shaped the way in which their contents were understood. Throughout, we elucidate the role played by oral conversations in facilitating early modern business relationships, arguing that letters were an integral part of these conversations. 1

In-Person Conversation

Merchants valued face-to-face conversations about their business. In November 1644 John Clerk, later of Penicuik, wrote to Sir James Lockhart of his plans to remain in Edinburgh until his business was complete.19 Although he had ‘bein heir long by my expectation’, he believed that he ‘wold get more done then any uther wold doe in my absence’.20 Similarly, in 1663, John Packes, the London agent to the Wood family, advised Edward Wood that, with regards to Mr Raworth, ‘nothinge can be done therein until he speak with you’.21 This desire to conduct business in person stemmed, for some, from a fear of being ostracised from their networks. As Thomas Amory wrote from

18 JCBL, The Records of Nicholas and John Brown, 1746–1763; MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894 (180 volumes); Bodleian, Archive of Jacob Hagen and Sons, Merchants (15 boxes), Ms Eng Misc. B 40–41, B 43, C 250–254, C 283–287, D 270, F 77; CALS, ZCR 352, Daniel Peck, Merchant of Chester, 1703–1704; NRO, MS6360, 6B8, Letter book of Thomas Baret of Norwich and Horstead; HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720. 19 Much of the attention that has been paid to the prominent Clerk family has started from the next generation, with Clerk’s son, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, receiving much attention. It was this John Clerk, however, whose successful business activities allowed him to purchase the barony of Penicuik in 1654 and to establish one of Scotland’s most prominent and cultured landed families. He has been described as ‘the genius behind the eminence of his line’: Iain Gordon Brown, ‘Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (1676–1755): aspects of a virtuoso life’ (PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1980). See Siobhan Talbott, ‘John Clerk (1611–1674)’, ODNB; Talbott, ‘The letter-book of John Clerk’. 20 NRS, GD18/2455, Letterbook of John Clerk, 1644–45, f. 4v, John Clerk to the Right Honou­ rable Sir James Lockhart of Ley, 18 November 1644, Edinburgh. 21 HL, HM 82057, John Packes Newsletters to Thomas Wood, 1642–1695, John Packes to Edward Wood, 10 November 1663, London.

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Boston to Samuel Baker in December 1720, ‘my absence has been so long from London that my name is hardly known there and I know not with whom to take the liberty’.22 Later in the eighteenth century, the London timber merchant Jacob Hagen wrote home from Germany that ‘as to buying staves of the Germans it is attended with so much difficulty, that unless I was always here I can not see it practicable’.23 Fifteen years later Hagen had not altered his view of the value of in-person meetings, writing to William, Josiah & James Kenworthy that ‘as you are on the spott can better judge of the situation of the staff trade at your place’.24 The fear espoused by Clerk, Amory and Hagen that their distance from the arena of business was – or would be – detrimental to their activities explains, at least in part, the importance placed by merchants on establishing and maintaining local contacts. In February 1725 Amory wrote to Thomas Kirby to discuss the possibility of establishing trade links with Antigua, ‘feeling sure that by having friends there to advise the best times and seasons for sale a trade could be carried on to very good profit’.25 Discoursing in person with associates, suppliers, and customers was beneficial, as Hagen wrote to Francis Randall: I apprehend I am as capable of procuring the best on as good terms as any one having been severall times there & am personally acquainted with all the dealers on the other side by which I think I have some advantage for there by a knowledge is gained which cannot be communicated  … I should be glad of a little conversation with thee on the subject as things may be better explained in conversation than writing.26 Establishing suitable local contacts was not always easy. Amory wrote to Mary Clarke that ‘there is no encouragement for trade or new shop keepers without a great acquaintance which is not to be accomplished for many years’.27 One way of overcoming this difficulty was to set up junior family members – brothers, 22 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 4, Thomas Amory to Samuel Baker, 11 December 1720, Boston. 23 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 6v, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., 30 July 1743. 24 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 48v, Jacob Hagen to William, Josiah & James Kenworthy, 15 July 1760, London. 25 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 5, Thomas Amory to Thomas Kirby, 15 February 1725. 26 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 54v, Jacob Hagen to Francis Randall, 19 August 1760, London. 27 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 6, Thomas Amory to Mrs Mary Clarke, 13 June 1726.

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sons or younger cousins – in locations where merchants sought to establish new markets.28 Providing a physical presence allowed families to develop expert local knowledge and contacts, undertaking conversations on behalf of the network and enabling a sense of closeness despite geographical distance.29 Being present in person in a tavern, coffee house, or on the quayside exposed merchants to serendipitous opportunities that would otherwise have been missed. In July 1743, Jacob Hagen reported to J Hagen & Co that: I mentioned the hornes to H M he told me there was none in town & that he had orders from sundry others but could not fulfill them I then asked J E M he said he had agreed with a person for about 3 ton at 24s current which he intended for Hull but were at my service I therefore accepted them.30 That Hagen was present in person meant that he could take advantage of this opportunity, and the absent planned recipient in Hull missed out, perhaps as J E M preferred a local sale with less incurred risk. It is also possible that misinformation was being used to get a sale, with J E  M giving the impression that his commodities were in high demand to secure the sale to Hagen. Two months later, Hagen was ‘on the floats’ with Faber, when: Kruger came to us & among other discourse he dropt that Baarse (whose daughter he is going to marry) was coming down with the P J Staves. After we parted Faber told me he had always endavoured to buy them when they proved nett & had most times succeeded & as he had now advice from above these where the reall P J he hoped to procure them & offered

28

See the examples of the Black and Symson families: Sophie H. Jones and Siobhan Talbott, ‘Sole Traders? The Role of the Extended Family in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Business Networks’, Enterprise & Society, 23.4 (2022), pp. 1107, 1111–1113. 29 Such a strategy did not guarantee business success, and recent scholarship has shown that any assumption that employing family members minimised the risk of failure was misguided: Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘“You Promise Well and Perform as Badly”: The Failure of the “Implicit Contract of Family” in the Scottish Atlantic’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23.2 (2011), pp. 267–282; Douglas Hamilton, ‘Local Connections, Global Ambitions: Creating a Transoceanic Network in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic Empire’, International Journal of Maritime History, 23.2 (2011), p. 284; Talbott, Conflict, Commerce, pp. 41–2. 30 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 3v, Jacob Hagen to J Hagen & Co., 9 July 1743.

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them to me which I accepted on condition they were really the sort & nett & he promised accordingly.31 Hagen may not have gained knowledge of this opportunity had he not been fortuitously present when Kruger arrived, and able to have a conversation with him and with Faber about this matter. Face-to-face conversations thus secured merchants’ associations and exposed them to new opportunities. They also offered additional benefits. Face-to-face conversations avoided the risks associated with long-distance correspondence in terms of letters being lost, delayed, or misplaced. Merchants present in-person could approach associates directly. Isaac Gray ‘cald at my [Hagen’s] house some time since to enquire after some pipe staves’ in December 1760, rather than waiting (sometimes in vain) for replies to letters to materialise.32 The latter was true for Jacob Row, who complained to an unnamed correspondent in England that: I wrote you of ye 11th January [by] Capt. Bruce who we hear was arrived … Expected to hear from you, but find myself Baulk’d which occasions Brevity … Neither has my brother received any from you since … yours of 24th December.33 Doing business face-to-face avoided having to commit delicate business to paper: Clerk’s admission to William Rires in May 1645 that ‘I will not give trust to peper and ink with that which I wold tell you if I wer as neir you as I wes 6 month ago’ suggests that conversations might be stymied by the distance between correspondents and by conducting conversations by letter.34 The extent to which merchants were able to do their business in person depended on many things, including the practicality of travelling and the ability to leave responsibilities (both business and personal) at home. If merchants were not able to travel, they needed to be able to trust others to have conversations on their behalf. Established firms frequently sent junior delegates to speak to associates while the senior partners remained at home. In October 1750, a 31 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 12v–13r, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., September 1743, Hamburg. 32 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 81v, Jacob Hagen to Isaac Gray, 11 December 1760, London. 33 AAS, Mss. Misc. Boxes R, Jacob Rowe Letterbook, 1746–1750, Jacob Rowe to ‘Much Honoured Sir’, 17 May 1748, Boston. 34 NRS, GD18/2455, Letterbook of John Clerk, 1644–45, f. 15r, John Clerk to William Rires, 20 May 1645, Paris.

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letter from the firm Green & Walker was delivered to Jonathan Trumble in Boston ‘by J Green junior who goes on this journey to know what provision our customers are making to discharge their debts’.35 Elsewhere, distance meant that merchants needed people ‘on the ground’ to have conversations for them, such as when Israel Pemberton wrote to John Hunt in 1746 that ‘On the other side [of the letter] is a list of some bills of exchange, which were aboard my Brig Globe when taken; I desire thee to speak to the persons on whom they are drawn not to pay them, till thou received them indorsed by me’.36 Here, Pemberton delegated Hunt to spread this information directly to those concerned, as he was ideally situated to do so, rather than writing to each person in turn. In other cases, specific journeys to conduct an in-person conversation were deemed unnecessary. Pemberton wrote to Stephen Onion that he: had an opportunity of discoursing with Robert Macky who tells me he recovered the insurance & that thy affair likely to turn out much better than I expected … as he will stay sometime thou need not put they self to any great inconvenience about coming up.37 In assessing the importance of face-to-face business, context was king. Early modern merchants do seem to have placed a premium on oral conversation, for good reason, but in certain contexts operating through third parties or by letter was preferable. Merchants operated in a context in which face-to-face conversations were not always possible, recognising themselves that there was not a rigid dichotomy between ‘written’ and ‘oral’ exchange of information in early modern business – something that we explore in detail below. 2

Recommendations, Reputation, and Rumour

Conversations could ruin as well as facilitate business. Jacob Hagen wrote from London to George Standford to alert him to the fact that: some suggestions have been thrown out among some of our customers that I probably could not serve them with the quantity they would want 35 CHS, Mss 04131, Jonathan Trumbell Snr. Papers, 1637–1789, Box 1, folder 11, Green & Walker to Colonel Trumble, 15 October 1750, Boston. 36 APS, Mss.380.P36, Israel Pemberton Letterbook, 1744–1747, p. 276, Israel Pemberton to John Hunt, 21 March 1745/6, Philadelphia. 37 APS, Mss.380.P36, Israel Pemberton Letterbook, 1744–1747, p. 371, Israel Pemberton to Stephen Onion, 24 July 1746, Philadelphia.

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& there by endeavoured to influence them from me, it is likely something of the same sort may be hinted to thee  … and to further importation I believe my self fully as capable of procuring the best & on as good terms as he can having had more knowledge by being oftner abroad on the spott than he has.38 When these conversations came to light Hagen acted to mitigate their potential damage, and in doing so explains to us the benefits of being present to do business in person. On occasion, merchants found themselves defending accusations of leaking privileged information. In April 1711, Joseph Symson wrote from Kendal to Thomas Bayly in London that ‘I do assure you no body ever had the least hint from us of your being the person who gave us orders for that sort so that Mr Robinsons telling you of it was only grounded upon his own conjecture’.39 Merchants’ control over their business was threatened when customers acquired information from third party conversations. In October 1760 Jacob Hagen wrote to John White to address a concern that ‘as to thy neighbours having some by Mr Tizard I could likewise have been thine but the reason was I thought them not good enough for thee & wait only the ship which now expect every day as the wind is fair’.40 Hagen was forced into explaining his decision not to offer White staves from Tizard, after White acquired information regarding local availability of them through an informal discussion with his neighbour. In July 1718, Thomas Amory wrote to John Whitton rejecting the suggestion that he might participate in trade with China with Captain Newton. Amory noted that ‘for my part I have no money nor has Mr Bold, or any one else to lay out in Chine silks or other goods’, but notes also that ‘and all say they sell too slowly and it takes too long to get the money back’.41 Whether this was a substantiated rumour, a verified belief in the risks associated with the China trade, or simply an excuse to avoid participating, we will never know; but this exchange does suggest that knowledge shared informally within mercantile communities played an important role in governing business decisions.

38 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 54r, Jacob Hagen to George Standford, 18 July 1760, St Saviour’s Dock, London. 39 HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720, Joseph Symson to Thomas Bayly, 28 April 1711. 40 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 71r, Jacob Hagen to John White, 30 October 1760, London. 41 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 3, Thomas Amory to John Whitton, 22 July 1718, Terceira.

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Though the term ‘rumour’ usually has negative connotations, talk also served positive purposes, as merchants heard of business opportunities and learned of others’ credentials and characters through hearing them being spoken about by others. In July 1743, Jacob Hagen wrote to J Hagen & Co regarding Faber, a frequent business associate. He noted that ‘This I must however observe he speaks very well of R F’.42 The following month Hagen wrote that: if you have thoughts of contracting above for Selesia staves I think it is to be done best by meanes of S&M with Splittgerber & Daum in Berlin whose names I have often heard mentioned here among the Germans, or elce with G Spatzier, Ebersback acts for P&F.43 Hagen reminded the Company of Spatzier’s reputation a month later, noting that: Spatzier & Co are persons of reputation & by what one may judge from conversation understand trade very well. They promised me to gett all the information they could & write us substantially & I really think by their means we may many times procure a good parcell very reasonable that may be of good advantage.44 Indeed, participating in conversations helped to show that merchants were on top of information flows, particularly when they were absent in person. The Edinburgh merchant Alexander Shairp was keen to prove that he was not shirking his responsibilities, writing to Walter Riddell in November 1714 that ‘I shall offer no advice you being in a better condition to judge what will be for the concerneds intrest, than I can pretend to at this distance, I only give you this trouble leest you shou’d blame of silence’.45 Business historians agree that good credit and reputation played a vital role in merchants’ success, and that recommendations were essential for merchants,

42 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 2v–3r, Jacob Hagen to J Hagen & Co., 2 July 1743. 43 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 7v, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., 6 August 1743. 44 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 13r, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., [no day] September 1743, Hamburg. 45 NLS, MS. 1884, Alexander Shairp Letterbook, 1712–1719, f. 26v, Alexander Shairp to Walter Riddell, [25] November 1714, Edinburgh.

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especially those trying to break into new business circles.46 Scholars have long known that letters of recommendation were commonly used both as a way of recommending a third party, and to announce shared acquaintance as proof of trustworthiness.47 Conversation did not only facilitate business but presented an opportunity to prove abilities and character, and where possible merchants sought to make personal acquaintance of potential new business associates, preferring to speak with them directly. In July 1711, Richard Holt of Cannon Street in London made enquiries to the Kendal mercer Joseph Symson regarding locating a wood supplier in Westmorland. Symson initially took his time in deciding whether or not to engage in business with Holt, acknowledging that ‘I received yours [letter] some time ago’.48 It was only on the recommendation of shared acquaintance ‘Cosen Pool’ that Symson agreed to make ‘very industrious inquiry about what you mention, which requiring sometime in receiving informations from several hands has been the reason why I have not given you an answer before’. The following month, Symson identified fellow Kendal merchant Mr Joseph Dawson as being ‘the most likely person to serve you with wood that I know of and of whose fair dealing I believe you may depend’. Symson and Dawson’s discussions about the opportunity then involved a faceto-face conversation, as underneath Symson’s letter to Holt is a note added in Dawson’s own hand. As Symson explained, ‘I desired him [Dawson] to write to you underneath this to aquaint you how far he can serve you, if you think fitt to correspond with him I hope he will serve you to content’.49 Building relationships in person was a good way of establishing new business. When Thomas Amory settled in Lisbon in 1716, his cousin wrote to him from Limerick that ‘I could get several friends of mine to consign to you and 46

Nuala Zahedieh, ‘Credit, Risk and Reputation in Late Seventeenth-Century Colonial Trade’, in Olaf Uwe Janzen (ed.), Merchant Organization and Maritime Trade in the North Atlantic, 1660–1815, Research in Maritime History, 15 (1998), pp. 53, 63; Henriette de Bruyn Kops, A Spirited Exchange: the wine and brandy trade between France and the Dutch Republic in its Atlantic framework, 1600–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 59–60, 90, 339; Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?; Serena R. Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in British New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Talbott, Conflict, Commerce, p. 50. 47 Arnaud Bartolemi, Claire Lemercier, Viera Rebolledo-Dhuin and Nadège Sougy, ‘Becoming a Correspondent: The Foundations of New Merchant Relationships in Early Modern French Trade (1730–1820)’, Enterprise and Society, 23.3 (2019), p. 537. 48 HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720, Joseph Symson to Richard Holt, 28 July 1711. 49 HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720, Joseph Symson to Richard Holt, 11 August 1711.

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when they had experience of your good management perhaps it may advance your business considerably’, noting that experience of him over time would help him to establish a business.50 Similarly, in September 1760, Providence merchant Moses Brown wrote from New York to inform his brothers (and business partners) Nicholas & John Brown that: my last wass of the 15th per post since which I have enquired and found several gentlemen that does business in the commission way. Mr Lawrence Shead the Gentleman Mr Relfe recommended, I had not opportunity freely to talk with as he wass just agoing to mount for Albany, so I only communicated my intentioned, and from whence his recomindation to us came, he told me as I was a strainger and he in hast he could not give me an answer which he wass sorry for but as he should be back in 15 or 20 days that we might have further conversation at my return from the Jerseys.51 In both of these cases it was clear that this process would be long term. One conversation was not enough to establish a reputation. Indeed, John Snodgrass wrote to Andrew Russell in 1678 of the ‘vain conceit … that it is almost sufficient to obtain employment and credit … that he have lived in France were it but for two days’.52 While rumour might work to enhance reputation, it also allowed merchants to be clear about individuals who might not be trustworthy. Jacob Hagen wrote to J H & Co in July 1743 that ‘I have sundry times spoke with C B (he hasn’t the best caracters) at present he has no very good staves when he has will lett me know’.53 Hagen clearly didn’t feel that he should avoid business with ‘C B’ based on negative character reports, but lays the groundwork for divesting himself of responsibility should these rumours turn out to be true. Perhaps Hagen was on the cautious side, or perhaps poor character could be overcome by high quality goods. In September, Hagen’s response to rumoured bad character had a different outcome: 50 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence vol. 7, Thomas Amory to Thomas Amory, 8 October 1716, Bunratty, Limerick. 51 JCBL, The Records of Nicholas and John Brown, 1746–1763, Box 8, folder 3, number 17, from Moses Brown, 17 September 1760, New York. 52 NRS, RH15/106/285, Papers of Andrew Russell, f. 5, John Snodgrass to Andrew Russell, 10 March 1678, Leiden. 53 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 4v, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., 16 July 1743.

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Ebersbach at Berlin seemed mighty pressing to begin a correspondence with us & altho he is a man of undoubted substances his temper & disposition which is griping & covetuous to a degree & with all quarelsome does not in the least animate me to have any thing to do with him & still further the staves he has hitherto sent are ordinary as you may now judge.54 The same logic caused merchants to report associates’ bad behaviour to third parties to ensure that they would not be held accountable for others’ shortcomings. In December 1675 the merchant and textile manufacturer Thomas Baret wrote to Robert Pease regarding a bill that Rowland Cockey had protested, noting that this ‘truly is like him: for I have feared his honesty a long while … he hath not writt one word to me about it, nor hath any friend spoken to mee in his behalfe, I am angry at it but must show no more than will doe me good’.55 Third parties could also be used to chase missing items, as in the case of Benjamin Gerrish, who wrote to Daniel Henchman that ‘Mr Taysweather tells me he has a Cass for me from your Brother, which I have not as yet receiv’d, pray my Compliments to him & thank him very heartily, that he has not forgot me’.56 In addition to facilitating business and sharing information about individuals, rumours abounded regarding political events, particularly (though not exclusively) when there was a perceived potential impact on business. Such rumours were frequently proved to be unfounded. For instance, in 1745 the Philadelphia merchant Israel Pemberton wrote to John Hunt that he was ‘glad to find the story of the fleets being taken groundless’.57 Just a month later, Pemberton wrote to Charles Alexander that: Captain Dowers is just arrived from Liverpool having made a good voyage for himself as well as his owners; he brings a dismal account of the situation etc of the allies in Flanders & of the success of the French … the story

54 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 13r, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., September 1743, Hamburg. 55 NRO, MS6360, 6B8, Letterbook of Thomas Baret of Norwich and Horstead, p. 188, Thomas Baret to Robert Pease, 3 December 1675, Norwich. 56 AAS, Daniel Henchman Papers, 1712–1762, Benjamin Gerrish to Daniel Henchman, 23 March 1750, Halifax [NS]. 57 APS, Mss.380.P36, Israel Pemberton Letterbook, 1744–1747, p. 105, Israel Pemberton to John Hunt, 3 September 1745, Philadelphia.

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we lately had of the victory obtained by the Duke of Tuscany’s Army over Conti, on the Rhine was not true.58 Rumours regarding the political situation were particularly significant when this was volatile. In mid-1667 merchants involved in Anglo-Dutch trade tried to ascertain whether the peace ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War would be (or had been) signed, and what the implications of this would be for their business. Two days following the signing of the Treaty, Deveraux Parry reported ‘no newes at present’ of the proclamation of peace, but reported nonetheless – a message heard from a friend of a friend  – that Amsterdam merchants were confident of an uplift in trade.59 Similarly, halfway through the Third Anglo-Dutch War Thomas Baret reacted to ‘the present discourse of peace’ by altering his business plans, placing faith in the circulation of political information. It was almost a full year before these rumours came to fruition.60 While it is tempting to assume that rumours were always spread deliberately, in many cases ‘stories were merely the result of speculation and wishful thinking’.61 It has been suggested that the desire for information, to ‘be in the know’, led to a culture where ‘information, true or false, is prized and its credibility and authority is not always examined in a discriminating fashion’.62 On the contrary, despite a plentiful desire for information, merchants took pains to establish the source and, therefore, the veracity of information, even if distinguishing truth from untruth was a perennial problem. In some cases, it was hoped that the origin of information would improve its credibility. Thomas Amory wrote to Colonel Edward Moseley in 1727 that:

58 APS, Mss.380.P36, Israel Pemberton Letterbook, 1744–1747, p. 120, Israel Pemberton to Charles Alexander, 9 October 1745, Philadelphia. 59 NRO, Y/L 13/38, Letters of Thomas Pengelly, Deveraux Parry to Thomas Pengelly, 2 August 1667, London. For more on this particular case and commercial activity during the Anglo-Dutch Wars, see S. Talbott, ‘“What cannot be helped must be indured”: Coping with obstacles to business during the Anglo-Dutch Wars, 1652–1674’, Enterprise & Society, 22.3 (2022), p. 807. 60 NRO, MS6360, 6B8, Letterbook of Thomas Baret of Norwich and Horstead. p. 20, Thomas Baret to Rowland Cockey, 26 March 1673, Norwich; p. 59, same to same, 13 February 1674, Norwich. For more on this see: Talbott, ‘“What cannot be helped must be indured”’, p. 808. 61 David Coast, ‘Misinformation and disinformation in late Jacobean court politics’, Journal of Early Modern History, 16.4–5 (2012), p. 349. 62 Keith M. Botelho, Renaissance earwitness: rumor and early modern masculinity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 13.

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The old commanders who were in the Canaries Trade last war tell me that although there should be a war with Spain there will be free trade there for English vessels which will not be seized as they have no other trade to depend upon to take their wines off.63 Presenting this information as originating from ‘old commanders’ with experience of wartime trade suggested that this information could be trusted. In other cases, merchants emphasised personal relationships with those with whom stories originated, such as when, in December 1720, Thomas Amory wrote to Samuel Baker that ‘while in New York I heard your name mentioned by Dulansee & Co and Mr John Moore my particular friend and old acquaintance with whom I have drank your health and often with friends here’.64 Those on the receiving end of information attempted to ascertain veracity of rumours by confirming information from multiple sources. In July 1760, Hagen wrote to the Kenworthys that: I am informed by divers of my acquaintance here, there are many orders at your place for staves for Portugall & Spain, as well as from hence, I therefore some time ago suggested to your JK that it might perhaps be most adviseable to agree with a person that you could depend upon to get good staves before they come down so that something might thereby be saved in the price.65 The following month, Hagen noted that he ‘cannot help giving these a caution that a remark has been made here by divers that thou given a greater price & higher freights than others’.66 This suggests that more weight was given to rumours that could be consolidated by numerous sources. Indeed, when writing to Lawrence Williams from Philadelphia in April 1745, Israel Pemberton noted that he had ‘endeavoured to convince’ Stephen Boux ‘that he had nothing to apprehend, but he had heard so many false stories to thy disadvantage

63 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 4, Thomas Amory to Colonel Edward Moseley, 16 May 1727, Boston. 64 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 4, Thomas Amory to Samuel Baker, 11 December 1720, Boston. ‘Dulansee’ is possibly intended to be ‘de Lancey’. 65 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 45v, Jacob Hagen to William, Josiah & James Kenworthy, 1 July 1760, London. 66 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 52v, Jacob Hagen to unknown recipient, 15 August 1760, London.

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that I found it to no purpose to insist further at present’.67 While quality and origin of rumours was important in influencing merchants’ decision-making, so too was quantity. Further, by making clear when information originated with others, merchants absolved themselves of the responsibility associated with reporting this information. As Keith Botelho points out, phrases such as ‘it is reported’ or ‘I heard that’ remove the individual – the former is a passive phrase that removes subjectivity; the latter suggests that the author has been privy only to a retelling – thus putting the responsibility for the information onto someone else.68 Importantly, as Botelho asserts, rumours tell us about the society and culture in which they circulated: ‘rumours concern what society would view as important or pressing and not trivial’.69 While political events are mentioned in merchants’ correspondence, such sources are overwhelmingly dominated by business concerns, whatever the political context; discussion of war takes up surprisingly little space, with the vast majority of concerns, and reported rumours, being about unrelated issues.70 Thomas Baret’s letter-book, a significant source for our understanding of Anglo-Dutch trade during the Anglo-Dutch wars, exemplifies this.71 Baret was far more concerned by bureaucratic barriers to trade and by the behaviour of business associates than he was by the political context.72 Similarly, as tensions grew during the outbreak of the American Revolution, New York merchant Frederick Rhinelander was more concerned with the logistical impact of the boycott of British goods upon shipments reaching New York harbour, as well as his own reputation amongst his English suppliers, than he was with the ideological question of American independence.73 Rhinelander took pains to express that he ‘view[ed] the interest of it [America] and Great Britain [as] inseparable’ and that he was

67 APS, Mss.380.P36, Israel Pemberton Letterbook, 1744–1747, pp. 31–2, Israel Pemberton to Lawrence Williams, 16 April 1745, Philadelphia. 68 Botelho, Renaissance earwitness, p. 13. 69 Ibid., p. 11. 70 Talbott, ‘“What cannot be helped must be indured”’, p. 21. 71 An edition of this manuscript was published by Siobhan Talbott in 2021: Talbott, Letterbook of Thomas Baret. 72 Talbott, The Letter-book of Thomas Baret, pp. 14, 18. The same can be seen in the correspondence of John Clerk of Penicuik, a Scottish merchant operating during the British Civil Wars: Talbott, ‘The Letter-Book of John Clerk’, pp. 3–4. 73 With shipments unable to dock in New York, alternative arrangements were made to direct them through Halifax in Nova Scotia. See NYHS, [Rhinelander] Papers 1771–1848, F. Rhinelander to T. Aldersey, February 1775.

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‘exceedingly unhappy to be thought by you to be unfriendly to my [country]’.74 This tells us a lot about what was forefront in merchants’ minds, and what was being discussed within such networks. Thus conversations, either verbal or written, regarding the behaviour or reputation of associates should not be seen as trite gossip, but as essential knowledge needed for the success of business endeavours. 3

Space and Place

The conduct of conversation altered in different spaces and at different times of day; was modified depending on who was present and the existence and nature of prior relationships; and changed depending on whether the conversation was planned or was a chance meeting. In-person conversations were ‘both shaped by and shaped the spaces in which they took place’, and thus these spaces are worthy of discussion.75 A great deal of focus on the ‘spaces’ in which business conversations took place in the early modern period has been on formal, identifiably ‘commercial’ spaces such as the Royal Exchange, which has been described as ‘the most important single gathering place for merchants in early modern London’.76 In his analysis of acoustics in early modern England, Bruce Smith specifically cites Westminster Hall, St Paul’s, the Royal Exchange and the Court as ‘centres of hearing the latest – and spreading it by voicing it’.77 It is certainly true that many London-based merchants conducted business in these formal spaces. In a postscript to a letter sent from Hamburg to J H & Co in July 1743, Jacob Hagen wrote that ‘I had almost forgot Faber told me at the Exchange that a parsell of the P J staves were coming down’.78 Beyond the metropolis, coffee houses have been the subject of a great deal of scholarship, though the specific ways in which such institutions were used 74 NYHS, [Rhinelander] Papers 1771–1848, Frederick Rhinelander to Unnamed Recipient, April 1775. Word is illegible in original text, is most likely to have been either ‘Country’ or ‘Countrymen’. 75 Ogborn, ‘The power of speech’, p. 110. 76 Natasha Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), p. 27; see also pp. 28–31. See also Fox, Oral and literate culture, pp. 346–7. 77 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), pp. 60–2; see also Elizabeth Moran, ‘Invention’s Mint: The Currency of Fashion and (Fake) News in Early Modern London’, Parergon, 37.1 (2020), pp. 182–7. 78 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 6r, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., 26 July 1743, Hamburg.

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Figure 7.1 Robert Sayer, View of the Royal Exchange, London, 1751 Public Domain image, Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

for the oral exchange of business information has rarely been considered, beyond acknowledgement that such spaces were important for business exchange.79 As multifunctional and semi-public spaces, taverns and inns have similarly been highlighted as important meeting places for the exchange of information during the early modern period.80 Certainly it is clear that coffee houses and inns on both sides of the Atlantic acted as ‘provincial post offices

79

See for instance Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘A Link in the Chain: Trade and the Transhipment of Knowledge in the Late Eighteenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime History, 14.1 (2002), pp. 167–8; John Brewer, ‘Commercialisation and politics’, in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of C18th England (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 223. One exception, which discusses activities in Lloyd’s coffee house in more detail, is Christopher Kingston, ‘Marine Insurance in Britain and America 1720–1844: A Comparative Institutional Analysis’, The Journal of Economic History, 67.2 (2007), pp. 385–386. 80 John Chartres, ‘The Eighteenth-Century English Inn: A Transient “Golden Age”?’, in Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty (eds.), The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 205–226; Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty, ‘Introduction’, in Kümin and Tlusty (eds.), The World of the Tavern, pp. 3–11; Jones, ‘Readers and Readerships’, pp. 114–15.

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where mail might be delivered and collected’ for those involved in business.81 In July 1711, the Kendal merchant Joseph Symson wrote to John Barwick ‘at the Peacock Inn, Fyday St London’, and Thomas Bayly requested for his orders from Joseph Symson to be directed to Mr Benjamin Hodges, Dyer at the ‘Old Swan’.82 In 1721 Thomas Amory wrote to his cousin: I doubt not you will have received mine of 16 June last which I sent by Coll C. Bale who uses the South Carolina coffee house in London and is arrived there and who promised to take particular care to forward it to you.83 Individuals’ preferred institutions were circulated among networks, letting others know where to find them: as Thomas Amory wrote to Mr John Moore, ‘Your brother William arrived about a month ago from New York via Long Island by Capt Braddock whom I see daily at Hall’s Coffee House and at night he uses Mr Jackeys club’.84 As well as behaving as ‘provincial post offices’ for the exchange of correspondence, coffee houses and inns were used as settings in which information might be more widely shared, which is discussed in more detail in the following section. In the letter written by Joseph Symson to John Barwick cited above, the Kendal merchant asked: If you at any time have time and opportunity drink a bottle of wine with Mr Atkinson Commissioner of Licence offis Charge it to me, my customer (who buys many of those goods I have from you) will thankfully allow it and if you can prevail with him to order an officer to look after the Offenders both you and I shall sell more goods.85 81 Fox, Oral and literate culture, p. 377. 82 HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720, Joseph Symson to J. Barwick [at the Peacock Inn, Fyday Street, London], 5 July 1711. In the second instance, Symson was required to ask for further detail, writing ‘but you don’t mention the place where the old Swan is’: HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720, Joseph Symson to Thomas Bayly, 8 September 1711. 83 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 4, Thomas Amory to Thomas Amory Esq., 6 March 1721, Boston. 84 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 4, Thomas Amory to Mr John Moore, 1 May 1721, Boston. 85 HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720, Joseph Symson to John Barwick [at the Peacock Inn, Fyday Street, London], 5 July 1711.

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In specifying the setting in which this exchange should take place, the author of the letter acted to control the dissemination of this information, influencing where it was delivered, as well as how it was delivered, who by, and what was said. The nature of business spaces and the ways in which they were used fluctuated, making it difficult to describe any space as wholly ‘public’ or ‘private’. Filippo de Vivo describes ‘semi-public’ spaces in early modern Venice, including shop entrances, professionals’ studios, and warehouses, where people not only conducted business but ‘gathered to discuss news of all kinds’.86 Fiona Williamson, meanwhile, identifies the importance of ‘borderline spaces’  – such as doorways and alehouses – which occupied an ambiguous boundary between domestic and public spaces.87 The quayside may also be described as a ‘semi-public’ space for business, one that allowed merchants to view commodities and conduct business conversations away from the tumult of places like the Exchange.88 Jacob Hagen frequently refers to visiting what he terms ‘the floats’ to view first-hand the commodities coming in. In an early entry in his letter-book, from June 1743, he wrote that ‘this morn Peper sent for me & acquainted me their own float was come down & we have appointed tomorrow to go & see them’.89 Two months later, ‘Sluyter came down … I smoaked a pipe with him on the floats’. However, such activity was not always successful: on this occasion, despite Hagen’s best efforts, he ‘could not persuade him [Sluyter] to take anything less than 320 I offered him 316s but am obliged to leave them’.90 Beyond these public and semi-public spaces, people’s homes and dinner tables provided a further arena for business conversations. In June 1743, Jacob Hagen wrote to J Hagen that ‘I have severall times had some conversation with Faber he has none of his best staves here at present but expects them in a day or two shall break fast with him tomorrow in order to a further

86 87 88 89 90

Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: rethinking early modern politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 94. Fiona Williamson, ‘Space and the City: Gender Identities in Seventeenth-Century Norwich’, Cultural and Social History, 9.2 (2012), p. 169. For evocative descriptions of the hustle and bustle of the Royal Exchange, see Glaisyer, Culture of Commerce, pp. 27–68. Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 1v, Jacob Hagen to J Hagen & Co., 28 June 1743. Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 8r, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., 6 August 1743.

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Figure 7.2 Simon François Revenant, La Gassette de Londre, 1761 Public Domain image, Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

conversation’.91 The following month, he planned to ‘dine with Faber tomorrow & then shall endeavour to procure as many of his best staves as possible’.92 In September of the same year, Hagen ‘dined with M S he now seems rather inclined to correspond on joint account as per inclosed & as he is a man of great repute here & a merchant I can’t think it any ways disadvantageous to keep up a correspondence with him’.93 Hagen thus appeared to particularly value meetings, even if formally arranged, in more informal settings. 91 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 1v, Jacob Hagen to J Hagen & Co., 28 June 1743. 92 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 6v, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., 30 July 1743. 93 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 12v–13r, Jacob Hagen J H [J Hagen] & Co., September 1743, Hamburg.

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Oral Dissemination of Letters

Early modern letters are not easily characterised as ‘public’ or ‘private’: even those that might be considered ‘familiar’ or ‘personal’ were potentially public texts.94 Letters were shared in a number of ways: read out to a group of people in a shared space; discussed among closely formed networks; or physically circulated, with the possibilities of them being discussed or read out to others growing exponentially. Letters were not homogenous: the ways in which the author intended them to be read, the number of people they were intended to reach, and the ways in which the recipient ultimately chose to circulate them were all contingent on specific contexts, intentions and, in some cases, unforeseen circumstances. Authors considered very carefully the ways in which the information contained in letters might be shared with others, with onward conversations being planned and orchestrated by the author. In December 1759 John Thurman Jr., a New York merchant in London, wrote to Henry Ramson in New York and asked him to pass on ‘my compliments to all the Clubb & give them the News as I can write to only one at a time’.95 Sharing information to whole networks in this way not only minimised the numbers of letters that must be written, but ensured that everyone in that group heard the same information at the same time. Authors frequently imposed limitations or instructions on who should be privy to the content, usually identifying a pre-defined circle or specifying individuals with vested interests or reciprocal information. When the firm Green & Walker wrote to Jonathan Trumble in March 1750 that they had received his letter, they noted that they had ‘communicated the same to all the concern’d here save Mr Salter who is out of town & will not be at home till next week’.96 Trumble intended the information in his letter to be shared, but only to ‘concern’d’ parties. Contemporaries recognised that letters had intended recipients, and were not necessarily for public consumption. In November 1716 Daniel Wilson Esq, MP, mistakenly received a letter that was intended for Joseph Symson. The mix-up occurred when Sarah, Joseph’s daughter, forwarded two letters from London to Kendal: one written by herself and intended for Joseph, the other written ‘by some other [hand]’ for Wilson. Both letters were accidentally 94 Elspeth Jajdelska, Silent reading and the birth of the narrator (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 117, 123. 95 CHS, Mss 100790, John Thurman Jnr. Record Book, 1759–1761, p. 19, John Thurman Jr. to Mr Henry Ramson in New York, 11 December 1759, London. 96 CHS, Mss 04131, Jonathan Trumbell Snr. Papers, 1637–1789, Box 1, folder 11, Green & Walker to Jonathan Trumble, 14 March 1749/50, Boston.

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delivered to Wilson, who ‘by inadvertency & being in hast opened your letter & when he found his mistake, put it under a fresh cover & sent it to me with an apology & assured me he did not entirely open your Letter’. Joseph chastised his daughter, writing: I wish you had directed that Letter to me as Mr S_s was named therein but tis no great matter however when you have any thing relating thereto, or any other thing of more than ordinary commerce to wish to me about hereafter, direct your letters solely to me.97 Although early modern letters have been described as ‘quasi-public’,98 access to them was carefully controlled. Unlimited sharing was not the norm, and when this was intended it was specifically stated. Thus, in 1758 Nicholas and John Brown wrote to Mr Paul Tew enclosing ‘instructions to appeal the condemnation of the Brigantine Hannah by the Admiralty Court if necessary but to come to an agreement if possible’, and writing that ‘by our letter of this date we have given you our general instructions, which you may shew to any body’.99 Conversely, even the most private business correspondence might be permitted to be shared with close, carefully considered circles. When John Clerk wrote to William Rires from Paris in May 1645, he asked that Rires always checked that letters’ seals were intact, and that ‘when ye have read them put them in the fyre that no eyes be casten on them bot your own’. Clerk qualifies this, however, permitting Rires to use his discretion to share the letters with ‘those that ye shall think fitting’.100 That ‘private’ letters involved some sharing, and that ‘public’ letters were in some ways limited, complicates definitions of public and private correspondence. It has been argued that who is doing the speaking is crucial to the exchange of oral information: how old, young, experienced, connected, and confident they are, as ‘our ears and eyes are acutely attuned to subtle signals about prestige’.101 Such considerations were also essential to written correspondence. 97 HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720, Joseph Symson to Mrs Sarah Symson, 29 November 1716. Sarah Symson was believed to be involved in a courtship with ‘Mr S_s’: Smith (ed.), An Exact and Industrious Tradesman, p. cxv. 98 Toby Ditz, ‘Formative ventures: eighteenth-century commercial letters and the articulation of experience’, in Earle (ed.), Epistolary selves, p. 59. 99 JCBL, The Records of Nicholas and John Brown, 1746–1763, Box 674, Folder 1, Orders and letter to Paul Tew, 16 September 1758, Providence. 100 NRS, GD18/2455, Letterbook of John Clerk, 1644–45, f. 14v–15v, John Clerk to William Rires, 20 May 1645, Paris. 101 Thomas V. Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey, ‘Introduction’, in Cohen and Twomey (eds.), Spoken word and social practice, p. 14.

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The choice of who to write to, and thus where the letter was likely to be read out and who by, were part of merchants’ decision-making processes as they sought to control the oral delivery of the information within their letters. Far from ‘script tend[ing] to strip most such things away’,102 merchants made active choices about who would orally disseminate information sent in letters, carefully considering the credentials of their conduit, including rhetorical ability, characteristics, and reputation. When merchants specifically asked selected correspondents to ‘speak’ to others, ‘the discourse of the absent’ was made present through the voice of the person reading the letter aloud.103 Letters ignited oral exchange not only by being read aloud or shared, but by individuals being tasked to speak directly to third parties on behalf of the author. As de Vivo puts it, ‘oral communication constantly interacted with literacy, as conversations began with, or revolved around, written information’.104 Following years of increasing tensions between Thomas Baret and Rowland Cockey in the 1670s, Baret asked Robert Pease ‘please to speke with him upon my accompt as persuaded by your friend Mr South I should be thankfull to you that soe I might hear what his ansuer would be’.105 In July 1703, Daniel Peck asked his cousin Charles Peck to ‘please to let my uncle know it is my opinion Coals from us to London can never answer, & there fore I would advise him not to be concerned as to Coal one penny’.106 Daniel preferred to send this information orally via Charles, rather than engaging in written correspondence with his uncle. He perhaps felt that his uncle was more likely to listen to Charles, or be more receptive to information delivered orally rather than by letter. The rationale for this triangular exchange of information  – merchant A writing to merchant B to speak to merchant C, rather than A writing directly to C themselves – may be in part due to efficiency, as it allowed the author to add instructions to a letter already written rather than sending two separate letters, but more likely this reflected decisions made by the author of the letter about the best way of transmitting information. It may also be reflective of a hierarchy within merchants’ networks: as the above examples indicate, correspondents primarily engaged with those of a similar status, with 102 Cohen and Twomey, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. 103 Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘Printed epistolary manuals and the rescripting of manuscript culture’, Studies in eighteenth-century culture, 36 (2007), pp. 26–7. 104 de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice, p. 121. 105 NRO, MS6360, 6B8, Letterbook of Thomas Baret of Norwich and Horstead. pp. 203–4, Thomas Baret to Robert Pease, 7 February 1676, Norwich; see also Talbott (ed.), The Letter-book of Thomas Baret of Norwich, p. 203. 106 CALS, ZCR 352, Daniel Peck, Merchant of Chester, Letterbook, 1702–1704, f. 3v, Daniel Peck to Charles Peck, 19 July 1703, Chester.

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matters being escalated to more senior members of the network when necessary. For instance, although Robert Symson was responsible for managing a relationship with Thomas Bayly, when Bayly failed to pay a bill promptly in December 1711 the matter was escalated to Robert’s father, Joseph.107 Notably, ‘senior’ merchants were invariably male: as Sara Damiano highlights, although women were more than capable of managing the financial affairs of their merchant husbands during extended periods of absence at sea, more complicated instances of disagreement were referred to the patriarch to resolve.108 Thus, when Bostonian Lydia Coleman was owed payment from Mr Bening, the matter was referred back to her son-in-law, Hugh Hall, in Barbados.109 While letters ignited oral exchange the reverse was also true, as in-person conversations set up future correspondences: as described by Eve Tavor Bannet, letters both issued from conversation and returned to it,110 emphasising the degree to which these methods of communication were intertwined. In September 1719, Amory wrote to John Whitton from Boston that ‘this is a really fine place and a noble country of great trade and good conversation. I have made friends with the best merchants in the place, so that if I go abroad again I shall have correspondence with them’.111 In July 1743, Jacob Hagen wrote that ‘in the conversation I had had with Faber he shewed a great inclination to begin a correspondence’.112 Later in the same month, Hagen reported from Bremen that: I have been here near a week in which time I have gott as much knowledge of the wooden trade as I can … I spoke with J Wilkens … He entertained me very kindly & gave me some expectation of a correspondence which I should be glad to do as he is a man of very great credit & reputation here.113

107 HL, HM 50670, Joseph Symson Commercial Letterbook, 1710–1720, Joseph Symson to Thomas Bayly, 1 December 1711. 108 Sara T. Damiano, ‘Agents at Home: Wives, Lawyers, and Financial Competence in Eighteenth-Century New England Port Cities’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 13.4 (2015), pp. 824–827. 109 AAS, Mss. Boxes H, Hugh Hall Papers, 1718–1743, Box 1, Folder 1, Lydia Coleman to Hugh Hall Jr., 7 May 1719. 110 Bannet, ‘Printed epistolary manuals’, p. 27. 111 MHS, Ms. N–2024, Amory Family Papers, 1697–1894, Amory Correspondence, vol. 3, Thomas Amory to John Whitton, 7 September 1719, Boston. 112 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 2v–3r, Jacob Hagen to J Hagen & Co., 2 July 1743. 113 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 4v–5r, Jacob Hagen to J H [J Hagen] & Co., 24 July 1743, Bremen.

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In this way, the written word ‘augment[ed] the spoken’.114 It has been argued that the spoken word has advantage over written communication because face-to-face speech allows both the deliverer and the recipient(s) of information to use body-language and tone of voice to lend additional context to the words used.115 Arguably, spoken voice has a much greater capacity to communicate by tone than text.116 Authors of letters could mitigate this through careful choices about where letters should be disseminated, and who by, recognising that ‘oral repertoire’, including ‘facial expressions, emotive cries and gesture’,117 were added to written information as it was spread by voice. Letters themselves, though, were not devoid of tone and expression. We disagree with the assertion that ‘the letter is patently not conversation on paper’, suggesting instead that letters were active parts of conversation that conveyed much more than disembodied words on a page.118 In some cases, authors of letters left recipients in no doubt as to their feelings. As alluded to earlier in this chapter, the relationship between Thomas Baret, a Norwich textile merchant and manufacturer, and Rowland Cockey, a Norwich merchant living in Amsterdam, became increasingly strained throughout the 1670s, fuelled by Cockey’s failure to provide Baret with regular, up-to-date accounts.119 Baret’s letters to Cockey became increasingly strident, leaving Cockey in no doubt of his feelings. In May 1674, while complaining of not receiving an account for two years, Baret wrote ‘you can not thinke that I can take it well … pardon me if in a litle anger I tell you you deale with me as such as I shall make out to you in sevrall particulers’, going on to describe his interpretation of Cockey’s misdemeanours in detail.120 Four months later, still without an updated account, Baret warned Cockey that if the account was

114 Fox, Oral and literate culture, p. 5. 115 This assumption stems in part from Albert Mehrabian’s Silent Messages (1971), in which he puts forward his 7-38-55 theory: that communication is only 7% the precise words we use, and that tone (38%) and body language (55%) are more important in communicating feeling and attitudes. Albert Mehrabian, Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971). 116 Jennifer Richards, Voices and books in the English Renaissance: A new history of reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 1, 18, 20. 117 Cohen and Twomey, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 118 Susan M. Fitzmaurice, The Familiar letter in early modern English: a pragmatic approach (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002), p. 233. 119 For more on Baret’s relationship with Cockey, and his other business ventures, see: Talbott, The Letter-book of Thomas Baret; Talbott, ‘“What cannot be helped must be indured”’. 120 NRO, MS6360, 6B8, Letterbook of Thomas Baret of Norwich and Horstead. p. 75, Thomas Baret to Rowland Cockey, 13 May 1674, Norwich.

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not forthcoming, ‘truly I shall wright nothinge but angry letters till I have it’.121 In November 1675 – still lacking his account – Baret reminded Cockey of his long-term displeasure, recounting that ‘in November 1674 & severall monthes foregoing I wrote to you angerly & pressing for my accompt & declared I would send no more goods to you till I received my accompt … since the 5th July you have been totally silent’.122 In describing conversation that had already taken place, business letters offered both explicit and indirect comment on the tone used. That authors took time to describe the tone that had been used suggests that they recognised the importance of the role of tone in oral conversation, and deliberately acted to mitigate the potential limitation of the written word. In describing a meeting with Scurr in Chancery Lane in January 1670, John Packes told Thomas Wood that he ‘asked him why he had not putt in his answer … I had a few words with him … I teld him in plaine tearmes that … I shall produce those clere evidences under his owne hand’.123 What is described here is an antagonistic exchange, which is supported by the subject of the conversation. When Hagen wrote to Brother Sparrow in March 1758 regarding Harry Bridges’s reluctance to settle a bill, Hagen reported that he ‘had severall conferences with him’, suggesting a serious debate as opposed to a convivial conversation.124 At times, the stridency used to convey displease or seek control was seen to be ill-judged. In January 1758, Jacob Hagen admonished Brother Sparrow for being too pushy in asking ‘cous[in] S J’ to pay an invoice, stating that Sparrow ‘needest not to have been so pressing … I have represented it to [sic] often & in such terms as almost to affront him … but hitherto without effect’.125 Three years later, Hagen again bemoaned to Sparrow the tone of a conversation, this time with a ‘C H’, noting that: I hardly ever meet with C H but he ask’s [sic] if I have heard from thee & seems quite uneasy thou art not got more forward with the ship; I now must think it very unpleasant to me to be always thus spoke to or as it 121 NRO, MS6360, 6B8, Letterbook of Thomas Baret of Norwich and Horstead. p. 107, Thomas Baret to Rowland Cockey, 28 August 1674, Norwich. 122 NRO, MS6360, 6B8, Letterbook of Thomas Baret of Norwich and Horstead. p. 187, Thomas Baret to Rowland Cockey, 3 December 1675, Norwich. 123 HL, HM 82070, John Packes Newsletters to Thomas Wood, 1642–1695, John Packes to Thomas Wood, 11 January 1670. 124 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 21r, Jacob Hagen to Brother Sparrow, 4 March 1758. 125 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 20v, Jacob Hagen to Brother Sparrow, 10 January 1758.

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appears to me to be dunned for it is little better to me & spoils some times an agreeable conversation with him.126 Nicholas Brownlees, in his analysis of spoken discourse in early English newspapers, considers the use of ‘features of spoken language to suggest a conversational or oral tone … indicative of a conversational context’.127 While Brownlees considers the printed word, the same approach can be taken to manuscript letters. The suggestion that script ‘has a very narrow bandwith’ and ‘is largely disembodied’128 is not supported by business correspondence. Indeed, it has been recognised elsewhere that ‘epistolary discourse does imitate some of conversation’s characteristics’.129 Thus emotion is assigned to text by the use of apparatus commonly found in speech, acting as a ‘cultural script’ that allows the recipient to ‘make sense of what emotion is being conveyed even when an emotion word is not used’.130 Examining letters not only for what they say but for how they are presented allows us to ‘investigate the lived experience of emotions’, considering these letters as part of a conversation in which attitudes and tone were as important as the words written.131 Thomas Watts, in his 1722 Essay on the proper method for forming the man of business, noted that ‘Whoever would be Man of Business, must be a Man of Correspondence’. He specifically instructs that: the merchant must converse with his distant correspondent with no more stiffness, than if he met him on the Exchange … the style for commerce must be concise, perspicuous, and natural  … expressing the thoughts with the same facility, as if the correspondent were face to face.132

126 Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. c. 253, Letterbook of Jacob Hagen II, 1743–1761, f. 82r, Jacob Hagen to Brother Sparrow, 13 December 1760, London. 127 Nicholas Brownlees, ‘Spoken discourse in early English newspapers’, Media History, 11.1–2 (2005), p. 69. 128 Cohen and Twomey, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 129 Fitzmaurice, The Familiar letter in early modern English, p. 233. 130 Linda A. Pollock, ‘Anger and the negotiation of relationships in early modern England’, Historical Journal, 47.3 (2004), p. 573. See also Laura Wright, ‘Speaking and listening in early modern London’, in Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward (eds.), The city and the senses: urban culture since 1500 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 67. 131 Pollock, ‘Anger and the negotiation of relationships’, p. 571. 132 Thomas Watts, An Essay on the proper method for forming the man of business (4th edition; London: George James, 1722), pp. 16, 42–3.

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In this way, merchants’ letters appear more comparable to the spoken word than to formal text, once again highlighting that letters were an active part of oral communication. In a context of increasingly long-distance trade and expansion of commercial horizons, long-distance associates may have been forced into writing, rather than speaking: the ‘situational demands of the communicative task’ described by Douglas Biber.133 But though it has been suggested that ‘a word without its speaker, or a writer without his or her very human self, lost credit’,134 merchants’ use of correspondence was more sophisticated than this. The content of letters was shared onwardly, usually through verbal communication, both to groups in (semi-) public spaces and to individuals on a more private basis. Letters were not a disembodied form of communication, used in place of face-to-face conversation, but ‘rapidly entered and shaped the face-to-face intercourse of the trading community’.135 Merchants made active decisions about the various methods of communication open to them, using letters as part of broader communications circuits. 5 Conclusion Our reliance on written accounts to access oral exchanges inevitably colours our findings. In addition to the conversations that are accessible through the letters we have examined here, many more would not have been recorded. Some whispers would have been deliberately kept secret and, even when conversations were written down, the accuracy of the account cannot be verified. Nonetheless, we have shown here that merchant correspondence is an important source for identifying and interpreting the ways in which information was orally exchanged in early modern business networks. Letters are one of multiple, complementary methods of communication which early modern merchants had at their disposal. They expose conversations not only about matters directly concerning business, but also regarding reputation (both positive and negative), and rumour. Merchant correspondence further exposes the range of spaces in which these conversations took place: formal and informal, public 133 Douglas Biber, Variation across speech and writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 8. 134 Cohen and Twomey, ‘Introduction’, p. 19. 135 Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 115.

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and private. Importantly, business correspondence shows that letters shared some of the characteristics of the spoken word. It has been said that there was a continued preference for speech in early modern society, because in ‘an oral world where men and women often knew one another, the written word seemed disembodied. Not only did it lack tone and voice; it lacked a speaker’.136 To the first point, in some respects this is true: there were clear pragmatic advantages to conducting business in person, including convenience and matters concerning confidentiality. It is for these reasons that some merchants sought to establish and maintain local agents, often employing junior members of their family, particularly in mercantile networks that spanned increasingly large geographical distances. Regarding the second point, however, we have shown the ways in which authors of letters strove to maintain the ‘speaker’: by the ways in which letters were constructed, by the language and tone used, by their presentation, but also – crucially – by their control of the onward verbal sharing of their contents. Indeed, letters do not serve as the end point of business conversations: we have demonstrated that their contents were disseminated further through specific correspondents. While the early modern world may have remained ‘very oral’ in many respects,137 there are practical reasons that merchants delivered and received much information by letter. Business correspondence and conversation was therefore distinct from everyday conversation, and its specificity should be considered in assessing it. Orality has been described as ‘All communication, between persons in one another’s presence, without the use of script, or, where script is indeed present, communication that goes beyond silent reading’.138 But in commercial circles the written and the oral were not distinct. They influenced each other and interacted as part of broader communication circuits. We have thus not only explored the ways in which business information was orally exchanged in the early modern Atlantic world, but hope that we have encouraged more careful considerations of what ‘conversation’ was, specifically within business culture, and suggested methodologies which can be used to uncover spoken conversations which have otherwise been lost. 136 Cohen and Twomey, ‘Introduction’, p. 18. 137 Ibid., p. 16. 138 Ibid., p. 7.

Chapter 8

Postmen of the Atlantic World: Captains Transmitting Epistolary Business News Hannah Knox Tucker Between the late seventeenth century and the beginning of the American Revolution, the amount of written business news circling the Atlantic world swelled. Newspapers, manuscript newsletters, and letters crisscrossed the Atlantic’s waters with increasing intensity as the populations of the Americas and the merchant vessels servicing their needs proliferated. A formal, statesanctioned postal monopoly emerged, but an informal system administered by transient sojourners like ship captains proceeded alongside it. Although the notion of an ascendant business press that transformed private business information into public (at least, in the long-term) wields significant influence, early modern readers questioned the validity of the news.1 Information proliferated, but reliability and authority did not, so readers sought confirmation from informed correspondents and observers like merchants, captains, and other sojourners. The newspapers and books moving through the Atlantic world gave correspondents a shared starting point for their letters but encouraged the extension of epistolary networks to help interpret the news they conveyed. Similarly, the ‘empire of letters’ stimulated the desire for oral opinion and explanation to further clarify uncertainty and convince skeptics. As common business information grew, demand for complementary interpretive knowledge grew alongside it, rendering letters and the long-distance postmen who delivered them increasingly central to the market in information. In his writings on the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas suggested that the printing press and the newspapers they printed helped forge a new seat of social power in the public sphere. He dated the germination of this transformation to the late seventeenth century.2 Subsequent scholarship has questioned 1 Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World (Phila­ delphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 170–71. 2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1962]), p. 16.

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the timing, intensity, and emphasis on radical transformation of the press, but the overarching idea that printing’s technological development catalyzed the age of bourgeois social power remains influential.3 The view that the business press created a widely disseminated set of public business knowledge as the way of knowing transformed from personal connection to broad impersonal dissemination has remained influential among scholars of the business press. John McCusker argues that the emergence of the business press ushered in a slow ‘demise of time and the death of distance’.4 He argues that the flowering business press ushered in a new era of profitability by enabling firms to know their markets more exactly. As the business press expanded, so too did epistolary networks with the power to form connections, forge or rent asunder partnerships, and renew or betray relationships.5 Epistolary networks nourished trade by stipulating expectations for distant agents and providing them with the necessary information to execute these goals. Eve Tavor Bannet suggests that these epistolary forces relied on the press. As letter manuals proliferated, they codified the business-letter genre. As a result, Bannet refers to Britain’s Atlantic Empire during the long eighteenth century as an ‘empire of letters’.6 Lindsay O’Neill emphasizes the ways ‘speaking letters’ created intimacy over distance, especially among religious and intellectual communities. O’Neill suggests that the

3 Paul N. Edwards, et al., ‘AHR Conversation: Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information’, The American Historical Review 116.5 (2011), pp. 1393–1435; Rachael Scarborough King, ‘The Manuscript Newsletter and the Rise of the Newspaper, 1665–1715’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 79.3 (2016), pp. 411–37. 4 John J. McCusker, ‘The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World’, The American Historical Review, 110.2 (2005), p. 297. 5 Kinship and religious networks have often been seen as positive goods for traders; see Peter Mathias, ‘Risk, Credit and Kinship in Early Modern Enterprise’, in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (eds.), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 15–35; Carolyn Downs, ‘Networks, Trust, and Risk Mitigation during the American Revolutionary War: A Case Study’, The Economic History Review, 70.2 (2017), pp. 509–28. However, some scholarship has demonstrated the costs of networks including the costs to sustain them and the emotional toll of business-motivated distance; see David Hancock, ‘The Trouble with Networks: Managing the Scots’ Early-Modern Madeira Trade’, The Business History Review 79.3 (2005), pp. 467–91; Sophie H. Jones and Siobhan Talbott, ‘Sole Traders? The Role of the Extended Family in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Business Networks’, Enterprise & Society, 23.4 (2022), pp. 1092–1121. 6 Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688– 1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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proliferation of the newspapers reasserted the importance of informal epistolary networks by creating a shared set of information ripe for comment.7 At the heart of these developments rests the notion that business newspapers and letters had lives of their own. While true, this focus on the impact of letters and newspapers deemphasized the people who produced newspapers, wrote letters, and disseminated both for their own reasons. Printers carefully set type and turned the screw press to produce newspapers. Correspondents hunched at desks and scratched their quills across the page to write a letter. Beyond this core of producers, a broad group of postmasters general, captains, sailors, and enslaved people fanned out across the Atlantic world to deliver these letters. While printers’ and letter-writers’ intentions have received recent attention, the relationships between producers and consumers of business news and the post-people who delivered it has received significantly less notice.8 The proliferation of letter-writing has received scholarly attention, but work on the epistolary Atlantic tends to emphasize the rarity of the post and the excitement that accompanied the arrival of a letter. For example, O’Neill describes the excitement in the Byrd household that accompanied postal deliveries.9 This emphasis tends to underestimate the scale of the early modern post but it endures for two reasons. First, a slightly teleological comparison with the speed and minimal costs that accompanied subsequent information revolutions in the form of the telegraph, telephone, and internet often renders the early-modern period a costly prelude in histories of revolutionary transformation.10 Second, the endurance of the informal post has made the scale of epistolary connection in the Atlantic difficult to estimate. By refocusing the frame of analysis on the merchant captains who administered the

7 8

O’Neill, The Opened Letter, pp. 1, 18–19. For printers’ intentions see Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); For writers’ intentions see Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century, Atlantic Families (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Louis Cullen, John Shovlin, and Thomas Truxes (eds.), The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad, Records of Social and Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9 O’Neill, The Opened Letter, p. 186. 10 Edwards, et al., reject this temptation to embrace technological determinism in their ‘AHR Conversation’.

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informal post instead of the postmasters and deputies who directed the formal imperial post office, this study demonstrates the immense scale of illicit mail and the impact of the men who carried it and elaborated on it.11 Captains sat at the helm of the ‘empire of letters’. By the middle of the eighteenth century, captains carried hundreds of thousands of letters in the informal post every year. Awash in this sea of newspapers and post, stationary traders tried to make sense of their world. While post and papers could echo each other to create consensus, they commonly conveyed conflicting reports and left the most pressing issues unaddressed. Forward-looking scholarship often depicts the early modern period as an age of limited information, but early-modern commercial actors often felt like they were drowning in a sea of news. These stationary commercial actors grasped for a lifeline, the clarifying opinion that could call them to action. Often this lifeline came in the form of the captain who delivered their letter. Captains’ claims to direct experience of distant markets and their ability to converse, answering questions the moment they crossed the lips instead of via letter after months of delay, made them an integral part of the commercial world. As the flowing tide of Atlantic information enveloped landed residents, captains’ opinions took on disproportionate power as the clarion call of direct knowledge. Captains’ logistical influence over the quotidian transmission of letters gave them the power to interpret commercial events. Their influence over letters made them attractive allies for landed partners who sought their solicitous care. While members of the gentry might insult captains’ salty language and demeanor among their peers, elites and non-elites alike sought their company. For example, when Capt. Dobby dined with the Carters, an elite planter family from Virginia, their tutor, Phillip Vickers Fithian, described the captain as a ‘Man of much spirit and Humour’ who quickly turned the conversation ‘promiscuous’ and possessed talent as a ‘great Mimick’. Despite these more dubious gifts, he described the captain as an ‘agreeable, sensible, polite Gentlemen’ and the Carters hosted him and many other captains in their home.12 Landed 11 The formal postal system has long been a focus of study for historians. William Smith, The History of the Post Office in British North America, 1639–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920); Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Administrative History (London: Oxford University Press, 1958); Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (New York: New York University Press, 1964); Joseph M. Adelman, ‘“A Constitutional Conveyance of Intelligence, Public and Private”: The Post Office, the Business of Printing, and the American Revolution’, Enterprise & Society, 11.4 (2010), pp. 709–52. 12 Philip Vickers Fithian, ‘June 21’, ‘June 22’, and ‘July 30’, Hannah Knox Tucker, ‘Masters of the Market: Ship Captaincy in the British Atlantic, 1680–1774’ (PhD Thesis, University of Virginia, 2021), pp. 55–65; Hunter Dickinson Farish (ed.), Journal & Letters of Philip Vickers

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agents fought for access to spaces frequented by captains and hosted them in their residences with food and drink. They competed for access, in part, because the proliferation of business news and letters created conflicting reports. Letters created and resolved these disputes. They also provided a pretense for conversation and as the ‘empire of letters’ expanded, the influence postmen had with their points of contact also grew. 1

Circulating Letters

Between the late-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries the scale of the epistolary Atlantic increased significantly. Merchant captains facilitated the epistolary explosion by operating the informal postal system on a massive scale. While the heft of the imperial archive has allowed scholars to examine the formal post office in some depth, the informal post operated in a more decentralized fashion. Thus, the operation of the market for information has remained opaque. Reconstructing the scale and mechanisms of the informal long-distance post reveals captains’ influence over the information economy in the British Atlantic. In the seventeenth century, an informal mail system connected distant parts of the English empire to each other. This informal mail system relied primarily on traveling captains and other sojourners who personally delivered letters for minimal fees. Captains’ mailbags usually cost recipients around one penny and sometimes letters went free of charge for particular friends.13 In the informal mail system, captains commonly deposited their mailbags for collection at central locations and personally collected letters as they conducted their business. When they arrived in their next port of call, these travelers deposited their mailbags at taverns or coffee houses for locals to collect. Captains and other sojourners made some deliveries personally as special favors or as a pretext for an introduction. Captains like Capt. Mitchell who, ‘answered here [York River] and am assured my letter by him went safe to you’ and Capt. Adam Graves who ‘[prom]ised Carefully to deliver’ letters for Robert Carter in York, Virginia, used letters to demonstrate their diligence.14 Fithian, 1773–1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1957), pp. 122–23, 150. 13 TNA, HCA 32/189/22, Sarah Folkes to her child, 1 October 1756; Sheryllynne Haggerty, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2023). 14 Robert Carter to Colonel Mann Page, 2 June 1729 in Edmund Berkeley, Jr; (ed.), The Diary, Correspondence and Papers of Robert ‘King’ Carter, reproduced at http://jti.lib

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These captains did their favors and received appreciation and respect in return.15 Combined, the mail bag and captains’ impromptu visits to inquire if leading merchants had letters to send provisioned much of the Atlantic world’s need for mail. The system operated in an ad hoc fashion and residents in the remotest parts of the Atlantic world longed for more connection. However, over the eighteenth-century the epistolary world accelerated to the point that letters came frequently. More writers deposited their letters for shipment, more ships crossed the Atlantic, and the scale of business increased. Captains managed the transatlantic postal leg but they often relied on an array of stationary residents to complete the delivery. Robert ‘King’ Carter, so dubbed for his immense wealth and influence in early-eighteenth century Virginia, described his own role in the delivery process in a letter to Micajah and Richard Perry, merchants of London. Carter explained the effort that went into colonial letter delivery noting, ‘Yor. box of Lettrs. via Maryland was brought me from McCartys by a man of my own the begining of last week. The Same Day I carri’d them to Mieldlesex Court where I dispers’d most of them. Mr. Pratt took care of those for James rivr & York’. Carter emphasized his personal attention but also described the significant effort required to deliver letters by carriers acting in concert. After describing the effort he exerted on their behalf, Carter assured the Perrys writing, ‘I believe none of them will miscarry’.16 For Carter and the captains who carried letters, epistolary efforts provided an opportunity to prove their solicitousness and boost their reputations. The informal mail system relied not only on willing carriers like captains and planters but also on a group of enslaved carriers. On shorter overland routes, enslaved people often delivered and collected mail. For example, in Henry Hall’s letter to John Hall, he noted that he wrote his letter in response to a letter delivered ‘this evening’ by an enslaved man named London. On the front flap of the letter, he noted that London would deliver his response, implying that London delivered John’s letter, waited for Henry’s response, and delivered it back to John.17 Letter-carrying provided enslaved people like London with an opportunity for movement sanctioned by their enslavers. They often turned this opportunity to their own ends by using letter-delivery as a pretext for news-gathering and dissemination. As Scott has pointed out, enslaved people in the Caribbean exploited any opportunity to participate in the oral .virginia.edu/users/berkeley/; HFBL, MS 191, Caple Letterbook, 1722–1757, Thomas Caple to Jonathan Forward, April 1723. 15 O’Neill, The Opened Letter, pp. 37–41. 16 Robert Carter to Micajah and Richard Perry, 13 July 1720, in Berkeley (ed.), The Diary, Correspondence and Papers of Robert ‘King’ Carter. 17 MHR, Hall Family Papers, Henry Hall to John Hall, n.d.

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news networks that brought them personal, political, and military news.18 Thus, enslaved people used their positions in the informal epistolary system to advance their own interests. Everyone from enslaved laborers to prominent planters carried the post and they used the opportunities that mail-delivery presented to demonstrate their indispensability or gain access to people otherwise beyond their reach. Alongside this informal system, a formal imperial system opened to the broader public. During the eighteenth century, the formal British postal service became more regulated and covered a larger swath of the Americas. While it rarely, if ever, made money for its imperial operators, colonial administrators in the Americas argued that they needed a reliable post to govern the Empire, albeit halfheartedly at times when delay augmented local autonomy for imperial officials. The 1710 Post Office Act affirmed imperial postmasters’ monopoly over the post in North America. This monopoly technically required that all mail sent across the empire flowed through its offices, but like many monopolies of its ilk, limited enforcement mechanisms allowed mail to flow through varied other sources. The Post Office Act tried to channel existing mail flows through official offices by requiring all captains to deliver mail directly to the local post office upon their arrival in port. Captains who failed to meet this obligation suffered a £5 penalty for every undelivered letter. However, beyond the larger hubs like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Charles-town, and Williamsburg, few post offices existed to do the work of holding letters for collection.19 Thus, the passage of the far-reaching, ambitious, technically punitive, and ultimately ineffective 1710 Act operated like many other imperial attempts to concentrate power at the turn of the century. Over the years, formal administrators of the British postal service, including Benjamin Franklin, tried to strengthen the post office in America by deepening its consistency, coverage, and monopoly power. To improve the mail’s operations, Benjamin Franklin and William Hunter, deputy postmasters general for North America, provided detailed instructions to their local deputies. They exhorted deputies to cross-examine lagging postal riders, keep the post office in a separate structure designated for the purpose, charge the proper rates, never leave letters opened where others might peruse the contents, and avoid opening mail bags as they passed through. To routinize mail delivery and fight favoritism, the deputies instructed their deputies writing, ‘You are not, out of Friendship or Compliment to any Person whatsoever, to delay his 18

Julius Sherrard Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London, UK: Verso, 2018). 19 Adelman, ‘A Constitutional Conveyance of Intelligence, Public and Private’.

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Majesty’s Post one Quarter of an Hour beyond the usual and fixed Times of his Departure’. They also charged their deputies with the burden of investigating and reporting any illicit private letter carriers stating, ‘You are to use your best Endeavours to prevent any private Collection of Letters, by any Person whatsoever, within any of the Towns or Places under your Care; and if you find any private Collectors of Letters or Pacquets, you are constantly to return the Names, and Places of Abode, of all such Persons making such Collections, to our Comptroller’.20 Franklin and Hunter hoped policing deputies could help protect the postal monopoly by reporting any private letter collectors whose activities threatened crown revenues. Franklin and Hunter designed these exhortations to differentiate the formal system from the informal system. They deployed the carrot and the stick to achieve their ends. By making the formal system safer and faster than the informal, they hoped to lure business away from the informal system. By exhorting local postmasters to report private postal efforts, they hoped to prosecute illegal postal operators, and thereby reaffirm the crown monopoly while diminishing informal operations. Franklin and Hunter’s letter foreshadowed the Post Office Act of 1765, which reaffirmed the crown’s monopoly but expanded the coverage of the official mail service while lowering the postal rates.21 Despite these reforms, the informal mail system continued to thrive alongside the formal one. The British monopoly simply cost too much for average subjects to avail themselves of its services. While a transatlantic letter cost a minimum of one shilling in the formal imperial post, it cost around a penny in the informal post.22 Captains sometimes also delivered their letters for free as a favor to friends and commercial contacts. Technically, this activity violated the Post Office Act, but a loophole in the law provided them with cover. Like those that came before, the Post Office Act of 1765 affirmed a captain’s ability to deliver letters that accompanied packages on his vessel free of charge. As a result, Hugh Finlay, surveyor of the post office, argued that, ‘the law is so defective that the act can never be put in force’.23 Savannah, Georgia’s postmaster, 20 Benjamin Franklin and William Hunter, ‘Post Office Instructions and Directions’, in Leonard W. Labaree (ed.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 161–68. 21 A Collection of the Statutes Now in Force, Relating to the Post-Office (Hugh Gaine: New York, 1774). 22 Sheryllynne Haggerty, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2023). 23 Hugh Finlay, Journal Kept by Hugh Finlay, Surveyor of the Post Roads on the Continent of North America, during His Survey of the Post Offices between Falmouth and Casco Bay in the Province of Massachusetts, and Savannah in Georgia: Begun the 13th Septr. 1773 and Ended 26th June 1774 (Brooklyn: Frank H. Norton, 1867), p. 17.

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Mr. Thomson, complained, ‘that under the pretence[sic] of letters belonging to the cargo, not one half is ever deliver’d at the office’.24 Another loophole allowed travelers to carry their own letters without using the formal post office. Carriers used this loophole by claiming that any letters in their possession were personal letters of introduction. Eleazer Russell, the deputy postmaster in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, claimed that the travelers who carried these letters, ‘were so artful that the post master cou’d not detect them’.25 These loopholes plagued postmasters, but merchants jealously guarded this right. It saved them significant sums so they lobbied to keep the provision in place. Thus, the informal mail continued operating at significant scale, far exceeding the formal mail’s operation. The ratio of formal to informal mail likely increased by the time Thomson made his 50% estimate in 1773, but evidence from Philadelphia suggests one-half would have been an optimistic estimate for 1750. In 1750, 2,898 letters flowed through the Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia post office. Few would have suggested Benjamin Franklin shirked his postal duties, but this number is remarkably low considering the number of letters in full mail bags intercepted during the Seven Years’ War. Two transatlantic mailbags carried 250 and 302 letters apiece, while an intra-European mailbag carried 125 letters.26 If 125 letters per mailbag provides a reasonable, even conservative, estimate of mailbag averages, that would suggest that the equivalent of only twenty-three ships’ worth of mail arrived at Philadelphia’s formal post office in 1750. Significantly more than twenty-three ships arrived in Philadelphia in 1750. While shipping returns have not survived to report the exact number of entrances in 1750, tonnage duty records of ship entrances in Philadelphia range from 641 to 816 vessels annually between 1766 and 1774.27 This volume of shipping therefore suggests a significant amount of informal correspondence. If, for example, each of the 724 vessels that arrived in Philadelphia in 1766 carried a mailbag with 125 letters, that would imply a volume of 80,125 letters arriving in Philadelphia by sea.28 The number of overall letters entering the city likely numbered even 24 Journal kept by Hugh Finlay, pp. 57–58. 25 Ibid., p. 18. 26 TNA, HCA 30/259, ‘Captured ship: Europa of Dublin’; HCA 30/258/2, Captured ship: Enterprize of Maryland’; Cullen, Shovlin, and Truxes, The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757. 27 Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Develop­ ment in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 373. 28 The legitimacy of this number rests on the accuracy of 125 as an estimate of the volume of letters per vessel. This seems a legitimate middle ground given that intercepted mail bags from ten years prior ranged from 125 to 302 letters. Transatlantic mailbags to Philadelphia likely held more than 125 letters in 1766 while intercolonial mailbags may have held 125 or

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higher given the regular formal and informal overland post. Altogether, these records provide a sense of the significant scale of the informal post’s operations compared with a relatively small-scale formal post. John Reynell’s correspondence makes a strong case for the enduring importance of the informal postal system. Sixty-seven pieces of John Reynell’s incoming correspondence from 1750 survive in the archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.29 Only nine letters addressed to Reynell appear in Benjamin Franklin’s mail ledger for the corresponding year.30 This suggests John Reynell used the formal post office at a maximum rate of approximately 13%, a likely overestimate given that archival collections of loose incoming correspondence rarely survive in their entirety. Furthermore, Philadelphians had a particularly engaged and attentive deputy postmaster in Benjamin Franklin, which may indicate that 13% represents a high estimate for the broader Atlantic world. John Stevens, secretary to the deputy postmaster general of the Southern District of North America, complained that the letters he wrote to his son in Jamaica through the formal post did not reach their intended recipient. He exasperatedly commented on one letter delivered in a bundle by Capt. Todd, observing, ‘I Inclose this to Mr. Cathcart by which means you’ll have it sent you Immediately – I think your post Master might condescend to forward your Letters if he had the least Compliance as he must know you to be my son’.31 As Stevens’ frustration demonstrates, even men with official roles in the mail system could not rely on the formal post for delivery of their vital correspondence. As a result, even this zealous formal post advocate used the informal post for deliveries to certain ports. The formal mail system had the potential to provide correspondents with privacy, but the operation of both formal and informal mail had remained semi-public throughout the eighteenth century. The informal mail operated fewer. Of the 724 entrances, the majority likely came from shorter-distance trips because vessels could make more inter-colonial voyages per year, which suggests embracing a conservative per-ship estimate. If, however, one assumes that 1/3 or 241 entrances came from transatlantic ships with mailbags carrying 250 letters, and 2/3 or 483 entrances came from inter-colonial vessels carrying only 100 letters each, the total letter estimate increases to 108,550 letters. This exercise demonstrates that while the range of possible estimates of letter flows varies significantly, even the most conservative estimates suggest a lively informal postal system. 29 HSP, Coates and Reynell Family Papers, John Reynell, Incoming Correspondence, Box 5. 30 APS, Miscellaneous Benjamin Franklin Collections, Benjamin Franklin, Post Office Book, 1748–1753. The Georgian calendar year of 1750, in which the new year began on 25 March, was used. 31 LCP, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning collection, 1734–1982, John Stevens Letterbook 1, John Stevens to John Stevens Jr., 10 February 1770.

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using mailbags hung in public spaces. This practice allowed any interested and unscrupulous recipient to fish a letter out of the bag, break the seal, and peruse its contents.32 For commercial actors hoping for a private correspondence, the formal post provided certain advantages if the Crown had no interest in the contents of the letter. However, the Crown’s agents who operated an intelligence office through the formal post had significant interest in letters of commercial import. Correspondents in England during the late seventeenth century could easily find their reports splashed on the pages of the government’s newspaper, The London Gazette.33 This practice expanded in the eighteenth century as post offices in more locations came under its direction.34 While Franklin and Hunter directed their staff to keep letters out of sight, writers could not expect their contents to remain private from colonial postal officials. Correspondents gained privacy best when they used the informal system by prevailing on a captain to personally deliver a letter. Thus, the informal post simultaneously provided the least and most private form of correspondence depending on the inclinations of the captain. When the formal system operated at optimal capacity using the packets, it could provide letters much more quickly and reliably than the informal post. The mail packet had operated as a stilted imperial effort since its launch in 1702 when Edmund Dummer received Parliamentary funding to run five vessels between Britain and the West Indies departing at monthly intervals. The initial project faltered after nine years but the British government regularly reprised the effort during war with the intention to serve military purposes by receiving regular ‘Foreign Advice’.35 By the 1770s, regular British packet boats sailed between New York and London and the West Indies and London.36 Operated by the formal post, the packet boats crossed the Atlantic significantly faster than the average merchant vessel and placed their letters directly in the post. Using a sample of fifty-six vessels crossing the Atlantic between 1698 and 1711, Ian Steele suggested that crossing time between the Channel ports and Barbados was about sixty-three days for merchant vessels but only thirty-four days for the packet boats.37 In both cases, the journey length would have been

32 33 34 35

Smith, The History of the Post Office in British North America, 1639–1870, p. 16. Whyman, The Pen and the People, pp. 49–50. Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 60–68. Ian Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740 An Exploration of Communication and Commu­ nity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 10, 168–73. 36 LCP, Miscellaneous Newspapers, 1754–1781, ‘Post Office New York’, New York Gazette, 21 June 1756. 37 Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740, p. 283.

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Table 8.1 Average time taken for letters to John Reynell to arrive, by location of departure, 1750–1752

London Liverpool Bristol Exeter Madeira Antigua Barbados Portsmouth, New  Hampshire

Average days between letters’ written and delivery dates

Number of cases

84.6 84.1 97 84.3 33.7 37.1 31.3 12.8

54 9 5 6 11 21 7 5

significantly longer to Philadelphia by about twenty days.38 Reynell’s letters from 1750 demonstrate that most of his letter delivery times far exceeded those achieved by the packet boats but only slightly exceeded the mean time for merchant-vessel journeys. As fig. 8.1 suggests, transatlantic delivery regularly exceeded eighty days and intercolonial mail regularly exceeded thirty days. Given the significantly lower transit times achieved by the packet boats, some merchants utilized them to transmit information that required timely delivery for effective use.39 While the packets’ formal imperial post provided epistolary contacts with improved speed, reliability, and some degree of privacy, captains and other travelers continued to serve as postmen because their services cost far less than the imperial post. This brought epistolary connection into the reach of ordinary residents. An examination of the mails from the Europa, intercepted as a prize on its journey from Jamaica to London in 1756, reveals a broad writing 38

39

Riggs estimated that journeys between New England and the Caribbean took about twenty to twenty-five days on average by the 1750s. The distance to Philadelphia would have been a few days less, so estimates of merchant vessel journey length in the range of about 83 days seem reasonable. David Riggs, ‘Transportation Efficiency in Eighteenth-Century Merchant Vessels’, International Journal of Maritime History 33.2 (2021), pp. 425–34. Joshua Johnson to the firm, 19 February 1774, in Jacob M. Price (ed.) Joshua Johnson’s letterbook, 1771–1774: Letters from a Merchant in London to his Partners in Maryland, London Record Society, 15 (London: London Record Society, 1979), pp. 119–20.

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base. While male and female merchants and agents penned most of the letters to address quotidian matters of commercial and family business, the letter bag also included letters from sailors, servants, and housewives. Elizabeth Metcalfe of Jamaica wrote to her sister, Ann Chambers, to express her pleasure at hearing all the family news, but also to enclose a bill of exchange to help care for their mother and inform Ann of a recent death from which their mutual acquaintances might benefit.40 In an emotional letter, Edward Magnar wrote to his mother about his illness along the coast of Guinea that brought him near to death and his subsequent success as a sailor on a naval vessel. He hoped to send her prize money but expressed distress noting, ‘my having so often importuned you to answer my letters which as yet not being done gives me room to despair of you being alive’.41 Magnar expressed emotions common among Atlantic correspondents who experienced the trials and triumphs of life without the companionship of family or even the reassurance that they lived. Elizabeth and Edwards’ letters reveal the breadth of people who could afford to send letters in the informal post. Scholarship on colonial mail has legitimately noted the delay and costliness of the colonial mail system, but it has created a problem of emphasis by implicitly comparing it to subsequent periods. Captains and other travelers did take months to deliver letters and commercial papers and news slowed considerably during the winter months. As Jordan Taylor points out, the little ice age created environmental conditions that made communication slow and unreliable in the northern colonies.42 Despite these hindrances, business news arrived promptly and reliably throughout the spring, summer, and fall by the mid-eighteenth century. Port cities, especially, bustled with news. By the 1750s, ships arrived with fresh reports almost every day in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charles-town, Bridgetown, Kingston, and the Chesapeake Bay. When tens of thousands of letters arrived in Atlantic towns and multiple presses churned out bi-weekly papers, residents no longer asked, ‘what is the news?’ Instead, they asked, ‘what news should we believe and how should we use it?’

40 TNA, HCA 30/259, Elizabeth Metcalfe to Mrs. Ann Chambers, 9 October 1756, ‘Captured ship: Europa of Dublin’. 41 TNA, HCA 30/259, Edward Magnar to Mrs. Jane Symes, 10 October 1756. 42 Jordan E. Taylor, ‘Now Is the Winter of Our Dull Content: Seasonality and the Atlantic Communications Frontier in Eighteenth-Century New England’, The New England Quarterly, 95.1 (2022), pp. 8–38.

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Postmen’s Relationship to Business News

Residents of the epistolary Atlantic turned to the ship captains that brought their letters to help them determine what to believe and how to use the regular business news they received. As a close examination of the informal mail system makes clear, captains stood at the helm of a vast news network. Though public print information made certain commercial reports like prices and shipping movements more widely available, commercial actors disagreed on how to make use of this information. To aid them in their decision-making amidst a high volume of commercial information, stationary traders sought informed private opinions. Some came in the form of conversations with mobile traders while others came via private manuscript correspondence. Amidst the acceleration of public information, savvy commercial actors sought out trustworthy sources. Captains claimed situational authority by drawing on their personal experience of distant markets, which gave these postmen of the Atlantic world significant influence over the way stationary traders interpreted and used commercial news. In April of 1769, John Stevens wrote to his son, John Stevens Jr., bragging, ‘since I have been appointed postm[aste]r I have all the early news of the place and am the person applied to on all occasions’. Stevens exaggerated. At the time, he served only as the secretary to the deputy postmaster general for Charles-town, South Carolina, but Stevens could support his claim to early knowledge of affairs. His access to information rested on two crucial factors that supplemented his position as secretary to the deputy post-master general. First, his wife, Mary Ann Stevens, opened and operated the Carolina Coffee House on East Bay Street. John Stevens described it as ‘a kind of Lloyd Coffee House’.43 He bragged that travelers made it one of their first stops in town and prominent members of the South Carolina gentry frequented the coffee house. As proprietress of the coffee house, Mary Ann Stevens had access to the latest news from abroad and shared that access with her husband who spent many hours at the coffee house. Second, John Stevens also carried on a regular correspondence with the ship captains who frequented the coffee shop. Stevens guarded access to these advantages jealously because they made him a more effective and informed secretary to the deputy postmaster and a better commercial actor. Across the Atlantic world, postmasters often developed relationships with print shops and coffee rooms because these venues became hubs for business 43 LCP, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning collection, 1734–1982, John Stevens Letterbook 1, John Stevens to John Stevens Jr., 29 April 1769.

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news in the form of newspapers, letters, and persons of commercial import. John Stevens operated the Charles-town mail in a spare room of his wife’s coffee house. He also wrote regularly to his contacts around the Atlantic world to request regular deliveries of their local papers and received regular supplies from Philadelphia and New York. He entreated his son, a resident of Jamaica, to have the Kingston printer send him papers regularly. He also requested that the printer write to him, ‘that I may keep a correspondence with him’.44 Despite his best efforts, the Jamaica papers never arrived consistently, but Stevens’ attempts to provide regular papers from abroad demonstrate the value he placed on the printed business news. While the business press provided relevant general commercial news, it could not provide opinions about conditions abroad based on private information. To meet his needs for the latter form of business news, Stevens maintained a broad correspondence with distant agents. Frequently, Stevens corresponded with captains whom he built relationships with during their stays in port. These captains visited him in port, kept him apprised of events abroad, and did him favors. From Capt. Harrison he requested letter-carrying services, an in-person report to a friend in Antigua, the favor of collecting Stevens’ belongings, and arranging for his watch repair. From Capt. Ashfield, he requested the news from Madeira and the best cherries in a cask of Brandy. From Capt. Pickles, he requested London’s commercial newspapers including Lloyd’s List, the bills of entry, and any other relevant print news and a loan for the papers’ cost.45 From Capt. John Turner, he requested the captain’s utmost efforts to care for a sixty-pound turtle during the captain’s journey to London. He wrote to the turtle’s recipient requesting reassurance of the captain’s care writing, ‘If it [the turtle] get to you in health & should prove acceptable, it will give me pleasure to send my Old f[rien]d such another … But do let me hear from you that I may be convinced Capt Turner (who has kindly promised his utmost care) delivered it safe’.46 Stevens valued these men’s commercial friendship because their mobility allowed them to perform valuable favors and observe conditions abroad. After working as a merchant in England and failing as a planter in the Caribbean and Georgia before coming to Charles-town, 44 LCP, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning collection, 1734–1982, John Stevens Letterbook 1, John Stevens to John Stevens Jr., 28 October 1769. 45 LCP, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning collection, 1734–1982, John Stevens Letterbook 1, John Stevens to Capt. John Harrison, 4 June 1769; John Stevens to William Savage, 4 June 1769; John Stevens to Capt. V. Pearse Ashfield, 4 August 1770; John Stevens to Capt. Pickles, 3 June 1771. 46 LCP, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning collection, 1734–1982, John Stevens Letterbook 2, John Stevens to Paul Whitehead, 6 September 1771.

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Stevens believed that information held power. He worked to maximize the number of authoritative sources of information under his control. As a part of his crusade to master information, Stevens pursued the position of deputy postmaster general for the Southern District. When the prior occupant of the post, Peter Delancey, died in a duel with John Haley, a local doctor, Stevens began his campaign straightaway. Upon hearing news of the duel at 8 o’clock in the evening on 15 August 1771, Stevens, ‘immediately sent my Son to see whether the wound was Mortal’.47 After learning of Delancey’s death from this ghoulish errand, Stevens immediately reported to the lieutenant governor and began lobbying for an appointment to the position of deputy. In his quest, Stevens solicited assistance from everyone he reasonably could lobby in person and in epistolary form Stevens pled his case in letters to Anthony Todd, secretary of the imperial post office, Richard Oswald, a prominent London trader, Henry Saxby, a customhouse official, Nathaniel Draper of the General Post Office, and Henry Laurens, a leading South Carolina planter absent on a trip to London.48 In these letters, he stressed his support among leading merchants in Charles-town, diligent efforts to assist the former postmaster general, and knowledge of the postal service. Although the post office regularly failed to turn a profit, Stevens assured his potential benefactors that, ‘the Benefitt of the Revenue shall be my whole study’. He hoped these men’s efforts on his behalf in London and his own South Carolina campaign would yield the results he desired. Yet, Stevens’ efforts to win the deputyship for the Southern District of North America came to naught. By December, he had no formal news from London, and six months later on 1 June 1772, Stevens died. Despite his failure to secure the post, Stevens’ use of informal information networks reveals the continued importance of maintaining a varied information base. As a loyal British subject, Stevens believed in his duty to the crown and sought to improve the formal posts’ functionality. Yet, he utilized every other form of information gathering available. He collected printed newspapers and made them accessible at his wife’s coffee house. He maintained a large network of stationary correspondents who updated him on local conditions in their ports. He cultivated friendships with mobile captains, currying favor with them by hosting the captains in his home. These captains observed conditions abroad and reported back to him in epistolary form while abroad 47 LCP, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning collection, 1734–1982, John Stevens Letterbook 2, John Stevens to Anthony Todd, 16 August 1771; John Stevens to Anthony Todd, 25 August 1771. 48 LCP, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning collection, 1734–1982, John Stevens Letterbook 2, John Stevens to Anthony Todd, 16 August 1771; John Stevens to Nathaniel Draper, 20 August 1776; John Stevens to Henry Saxby, 20 August 1771; John Stevens to Richard Oswald, 20 August 1776; John Stevens to Henry Laurens, 20 August 1776.

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and in person when they passed through Charles-town. This broad information network allowed Stevens to become a valued resource for people in Charles-town but it required time to maintain and relied on a large number of mobile captains whom Stevens knew personally. Participants in the informal mail system relied on a highly personal set of connections to captains they knew. Most letter-writers knew or at least met the captains into whose care they entrusted their letters. Examples of captains called by name appear regularly in letters from places across the Atlantic world including Maryland, Charles-town, Kingston, Glasgow, and Paramaribo. Correspondents used simple phrases like, ‘I have received yours by Capt. Grigg’ or ‘I wrote you on the 13 March by Capt. Clarke’ to note the names of the captains who carried their letters.49 Even correspondents who deputized others to put their letters into a captain’s mailbag knew at least which captain carried the letter and his intended voyage.50 Including captain-carriers’ names served a functional purpose for epistolary networks by demarcating which letter a writer responded to or the information from a prior letter that the reply letter would summarize and build on. Calling a captain by name played this practical role but it also demonstrated that writers had a personal connection to the captain in a non-anonymized epistolary empire. This method of demarcation stresses the intimacy of the exchange. When Londoners utilized the penny-post, they demarcated letters by noting their time of arrival and the generic method. In the informal but highly personal Atlantic post, correspondents demarcated letters with a captain’s name. While many Atlantic residents casually scrawled the name of the captain carrier on an external flap, Reynell kept careful track of every letter’s carrier and date of arrival, a meticulous quirk that provides a particularly detailed sample of captain-carriers for review. Reynell’s surviving correspondence from the year 1751/52 includes seventy-seven letters.51 Twenty-nine separate captains carried sixty-nine of those letters, three came via non-captain carriers, one specifies that it came by post, and four have no delivery method listed. 49 LoC, Galloway-Maxie-Maroke Papers, Samuel Galloway to Silas Grove, 16 March 1767; LCP, Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning collection, 1734–1982, John Stevens Letterbook 1, John Stevens to John Stevens Jr., 3 June 1770; NRS, CS96/1197, James Lawson to John Semple, March 18, 1759; JCBL, Brown Family Business Records, Christopher Sheldon to John Brown & Co., 10 October 1768. 50 HSP, Coates and Reynell Family Papers, Incoming Correspondence, Box 1, Samuel Reynell Jr. to John Reynell, 2 December 1729. 51 Here 1751 includes all the letters from 25 March 1751, to 24 March 1752, to account for the change from the Julian to Gregorian calendar. Thus, it is a twelve-month period comparable to the twelve-month periods of the preceding years in the Julian calendar.

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Reynell had direct contact with many of the captains who delivered his letters. Many of them worked for his commercial contacts and called on him for advice or directions.52 As the examination of the informal post makes clear, captains and stationary traders operated amidst a world of increasingly abundant information. In this environment of accelerating communication and proliferating reports, traders increasingly found themselves assessing the trustworthiness of circulating reports. Traders trusted easily some widely circulated market information like price lists. A visit to a local coffee house, tavern or exchange could inform traders what price their goods could reasonably earn locally or in foreign markets. Mass-produced lists of prices, known as price currents, emerged early in the seventeenth century in London and quickly extended to the colonies.53 Though traders easily ascertained and believed local and foreign prices, they could not believe every market report they heard in port. Foreign tastes, market predictions, and their competitors’ behavior circulated more like rumors that required verification. In addition, because merchants strategically tailored their shipments in response to the demand captains reported, they required information on long-distance glut and scarcity.54 To meet these demands for more private information, traders relied on reports from people who could claim first-hand observation of conditions in distant ports. For Atlantic traders, business news provided vital information to exploit commercial opportunities. Printed price currents might provide valuable information, but opinions provided by trusted sources turned it into actionable intelligence. Stationary traders sought captains’ opinions about the value of ships, crop predictions, and local demand.55 Captains preempted and 52 HSP, Coates and Reynell Family Papers, John Reynell, Incoming Correspondence, Box 5, John Stevens to John Reynell, 14 May 1751; Birkett & Booth to John Reynell, 31 May 1751. 53 As early as 1718 the Weekly Jamaica Courant published prices current in Kingston, a process unevenly duplicated across the colonies; ‘Prices Currant of Goods Exported and Imported’ Weekly Jamaica Courant (Kingston, Undefined), 30 July 1718, 3; ‘Prices’. American Weekly Mercury (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), no. 361, 24 November 1726, p. 3; John J. McCusker, ‘The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World’, The American Historical Review 110.2 (2005), pp. 310–13. 54 Robert Pringle to unnamed, 14 February 1743, Walter B. Edgar (ed.), The Letterbook of Robert Pringle, 1st ed. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), p. 509. 55 ML, George Bogle Papers 1696–1777, Matthew Bogle to Capt. Dunlop, Glasgow, 29 January 1730; HSP, Coates and Reynell Family Papers, Box 5, Capt. Thoms Gilbert to John Reynell, 1 January 1750; Bayly Elwothy & Co. to John Reynell, 25 June 1752; NRS, Glasgow and Maryland Letter books, John Semple, John Jamieson, and James Lawson, merchants, James Lawson to John Semple, 23 April 1759.

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corroborated foreign market reports circulating publicly and semi-privately, thereby attesting not only to the accuracy of those reports but also their position as reliable reporters. For example, when Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury reported there was a glut of provisions in Jamaica it only verified what John Reynell already knew. Captain James Shirley had written of the glut in a letter delivered a week earlier.56 Traders used their access to captains to advance not only their commercial interests but also their political interests. In July 1705, Capt. Chartres, a merchant captain from Scotland, informed Robert Carter that the Crown had appointed a new governor. This appointment would bring an end to recent tensions between Carter and Governor Francis Nicholson. Carter wanted to be sure of the intelligence to build his political schemes on firm foundations. To assure him, Chartres relayed that he had the intelligence from multiple sources including print and local reports.57 As the captain assured him, Edward Nott replaced Nicholson one month later to Carter’s delight.58 Similarly, in April of 1712, William Byrd, a Virginia planter, received a captain who informed him that the fleet had arrived with his goods intact. Byrd hastened to Williamsburg and reported the good news of the fleet’s safe arrival directly to the governor. Pleased by the early news, the governor invited Byrd to dine with him. The good news, eagerly reported by Byrd, helped mend relations between Byrd and the governor, which had soured three months earlier when a report reached the governor that Byrd considered him untrustworthy and negligent with money. Byrd’s early access to the captain’s intelligence made a savvy political move possible.59 Letter writing rarely provided a truly private correspondence, which rendered a captain’s conversation valuable to traders willing to bring captains into their confidence. As Bannet points out, no matter the method of correspondence a culture of reading letters aloud persisted during the eighteenth century.60 Given the cultural tendency for letter recipients to read their correspondence aloud, the trust of captains became particularly important for correspondents hoping to transmit private news or transact private business. 56 HSP, Coates and Reynell Family Papers, 1677–1930, Series 1, Box 3, James Shirley to John Reynell, 20 August 1734. 57 Robert Carter to Philip Ludwell, 11 July 1705, in Berkeley (ed.), The Diary, Correspondence and Papers of Robert ‘King’ Carter. 58 Robert Carter to William Robinson, ca. 20 August 1705, in Berkeley (ed.), The Diary, Correspondence and Papers of Robert ‘King’ Carter. 59 Marion Tinling and Louis Booker Wright (ed.), The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712 (Dietz Press, 1941), pp. 467, 470, 473–74, 518–19. 60 Bannet, Empire of Letters, pp. 255–56.

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For example, Benjamin Fuller charged Capt. Thompson with a particularly sensitive matter. He instructed Thompson to, ‘make your self [sic] acquainted (in the most secret manner in your power) whether or no, my late brother Abram Fuller Dye’d possessed of any Real Estate or Leases’. If Thompson learned of a sizable estate, Benjamin Fuller requested that Thompson consult a local lawyer to determine if he might benefit from the estate.61 Merchants relied on captains to act on and convey private reports central to the traders’ strategies.62 While they alluded to their particular instructions, the letters rarely provide details precisely because conversation guaranteed privacy that epistolary correspondence could not. For their part, captains and other letter carriers had their own agendas when carrying letters. Commercial actors considered it a great favor when a captain called on them to inquire if they had any letters to send or personally looked after their correspondence by promising to deliver it ‘with his own hands’.63 A particularly solicitous captain might even wait for a correspondent to pen his letter.64 Correspondents called for letters to demonstrate their loyal service to the writer. This solicitousness influenced captains’ reputations among merchants, of central importance to ambitious commercial men like captains.65 Just as their solicitousness reflected in their reputations, any negligence with mail received a negative comment. Captains had the power to delay or fail to deliver a letter and, while most commercial actors dismissed this as negligence or a mistake, some captains intentionally detained a letter as a calculated decision to disrupt trade. Wiring to a correspondent in the West Indies, John Reynell observed, ‘This comes inclosed [sic] to Another Person for I have so mean an Opinion of Capt. Jones, as to Believe he would not deliver it, in case it went in ye usual Manner. The Last Time since he went from hence to Antego, I sent a Letter by him but it never Came to hand’.66 Reynell accused Jones of acting vindictively with the 61 HSP, Benjamin Fuller records, vol. 1, 1762–1781, Benjamin Fuller to Capt. Thompson, 12 December 1769. 62 HSP, Thomas Riche records, vol. 3, Letterbook 1750–1763, Thomas Richie to Capt. Sarridge, 24 November 1757; HSP, Clifford Family Papers, Volume 2, Richard Hutchinson to Mr. Thomas Clifford, 23 November 1759; HFBL, Ridgely papers, MS 692.1, James Russel & Molleston to Charles Ridgley. 63 TNA, HCA 30/259, Samuel Webb to Walter Webb, 1 October 1756. 64 HFBL, Ridgely papers, MS 692.1, B. Kenton to Charles Ridgely, 21 February 1766; TNA, ADM 1/231, John Campbell to Edward Pratter, 7 September 1730. 65 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). 66 HSP, Coates and Reynell Family Papers, Outgoing Correspondence, May 1737–October 1738, vol. 3, John Reynell to Michael Lowell, 27 April 1738.

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mail, but in the personal epistolary Atlantic, offending captain-postmen had commercial consequences. Writers often dismissed miscarriages as mistakes, a believable assumption given the enduring influence of the informal post.67 However, miscarriages occurred more frequently for more anonymous writers. Thus, commercial writers had to cultivate captains’ good favour, just as captains cultivated theirs. Captains stood at the helm of the sea of market intelligence. They not only delivered letters broadly and strategically, but also used letters to influence market activity. Receiving truly private market reports required their cooperation. Captains also used their situational authority as direct observers of many foreign ports to provide valuable comparative opinions. As the seas of market intelligence rose, providing increasing amounts of intelligence in the form of printed papers and handwritten correspondence, captains elaborated on the news and shaped the ways stationary traders pursued market opportunities. 3 Conclusion As the business press expanded during the eighteenth century, trustworthy opinions from knowledgeable sources took on new degrees of importance. As the volume of epistolary connections ballooned, commercial actors in port cities around the Atlantic received heaps of commercial reports. Even the most skilled traders needed assistance to decipher it. Letters from stationary commercial agents provided a deep view of one market from one situated perspective. These proved valuable, especially when augmented by additional letters from residents of the same port, but they had two flaws. First, letters and printed news provided depth rather than breadth. While they knew one place very well, stationary traders could only report rumor of distant markets, rather than first-hand accounts of other ports. Second, letters could not provide instantaneous answers. They conveyed only the information they contained. Follow up questions took months to receive replies. Captains’ reports mitigated these flaws in ways that shaped the flow of information and, ultimately, colonial commerce. Unlike letters from stationary traders, captains had broad perspectives informed by first-hand experience. They provided a comparative perspective of different markets and, unlike

67 TNA, HCA 30/259, G. Hutton to Mrs. Hutton, 5 October 1756, ‘Captured ship: Europa of Dublin’; NRS, Glasgow and Maryland Letter books, John Semple, John Jamieson, and James Lawson, merchants, James Lawson to John Semple, July 1759.

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stationary agents who sought trading partners, had little incentive to paint an optimistic portrait of any one market. They also could provide instantaneous reports. Commercial letters often created questions. Without the writer present to answer them, stationary agents consulted captains, hoping for any insight to help interpret its contents. Thus, the proliferation and structure of print news and epistolary contacts made captains a valued resource in the Atlantic world. In the early-modern epistolary Atlantic, a familiar pattern emerged in which an increase in commercial information did not create a market with more perfect information broadly shared. Instead, it created a system in which commentary, opinion, and personal trust in the reporter became increasingly important. In this information environment, access to the postmen of the Atlantic world increased the likelihood of commercial success. Clever postmen used their influence to advance their careers and commercial interests.

Part 3 Business News beyond the North Atlantic

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Chapter 9

Edward Northey and News of Catholic Estate Forfeitures in the Leeward Islands, 1700–1723 Eilish Gregory Catholics living and working in the Leeward Islands is still a novel area in the history of early modern British and Irish Catholicism, and indeed in the history of the Atlantic world. The situation for British and Irish Catholics in the early modern period was a complicated one. Since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, Catholics in England and Wales faced penalties and persecution for their nonconformity by refusing to attend services in accordance with the Church of England, including fines, imprisonment, prosecution for refusing to swear proscribed oaths of allegiance – which denounced transubstantiation and papal authority  – as well as the forfeiture of their real and personal estates.1 Irish Catholics faced a far graver situation. Various acts of settlements in the seventeenth century saw Irish Catholics lose their land, while the Cromwellian conquest in the 1650s forced thousands to leave Irish shores to migrate – or be forcibly transported – to the islands of Montserrat, Antigua, Nevis, and St. Kitts (St. Christophers), or to scatter across Europe.2 1 Works that have looked at early modern Catholic communities include: John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975); Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Modern England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (Harlow: Longman Group UK Limited, 1989), pp. 72–106; Alexandra Walsham, Charitable hatred: tolerance and intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009); Eilish Gregory, Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642–1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2021). 2 Patrick Little (ed.), Ireland in Crisis: War, Politics, and Religion, 1641–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Sean O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (Dingle: Brandon, 2000); Coleman Dennehy (ed.), Law and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2020); Jane H. Ohlmeyer and Micheál Ó Siochrú, (eds.), Ireland 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber, 2008); Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002); Nicholas Canny,

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By the early-eighteenth century, British and Irish Catholics who had settled in the Leeward Islands, including St. Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat, provided dissenters and Catholics with a refuge from religious persecution in their homelands, as well as the opportunity to set up and establish businesses, trade, and purchase plantations and land.3 This chapter assesses how information and news regarding the confiscation of Catholic estates in the Leeward Islands was transmitted across the Atlantic in the early-eighteenth century, as well as how colonial affairs regarding religion, business, and trade were communicated between Britain and the islands. As a case study, I examine the role of barrister Sir Edward Northey in safeguarding Catholic estates from being forfeited in the early-eighteenth century Leeward Islands after his appointment as Attorney General for England and Wales in 1701 until his death in 1723.4 In that role, Northey’s legal opinion was sought from various groups in Britain and those with interests in the Atlantic colonies regarding a broad range of topics, including fishing and trade, legal disputes, and litigation.5 Evidence of Northey’s opinions comes primarily from material in the Journals of the Board of Trade and Plantations, Colonial Office Papers, and State Papers. These official records would have shaped the way in which Northey presented his legal opinions to the various committees and boards requesting his advice within Britain and across the world. The legal language Making Ireland English: the Irish Aristocracy in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 3 This includes: K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny and P. E. H. Hair (eds.), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480–1650: Essays for D. B. Quinn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978); Kenneth Mills, ‘Religion in the Atlantic World’, in Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450– 1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 443–48; Jason K. Duncan, Citizens or Papists?: The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685–1821 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Robert E. Curran, Papist Devils: Catholics in British America, 1574–1783 (Washington: Catholic University America Press, 2014); Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Nuala Zahedieh, ‘Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and Atlantic Trade in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9 (1999), pp. 143–58; Crawford Gribben and Scott Spurlock (eds.), Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); John D. Krugler, English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004). 4 Stuart Handley, ‘Northey, Sir Edward (1652–1723)’, ODNB. 5 BL, Hargrave MS 231, Petitions, Memorials, &c. referred to Attorney-General Northey, with his Opinions upon the same. A. D. 1701; BL, Hargrave MS 275, Cases and Opinions relating to the Customs. Many of the Opinions are by Sir Edward Northey; BL, Hargrave MS 293, Cases and Opinions, principally relating to the Customs, by Sir Edward Northey, from 1701 to 1704.

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Figure 9.1 Passport map of part of the Windward Islands, including Barbados, by Jan Luyken (1684–1799), Amsterdam, no date Public Domain image, Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Northey used was neutral in tone, and yet reflects the complex political and religious cases he had to grapple with from petitioners requesting his opinion from thousands of miles away in the Leeward Islands. As such, these documents uncover how Northey was sought for legal advice by various petitioners and the Board of Trade and Plantations over the implementation of anti-Catholic penal laws, the rights for Catholics to possess land and estates in these territories, and whether Catholics could operate or even maintain their own businesses in the Leeward Islands and other British Atlantic colonies. This chapter first deals with the legal and political situation for Catholic settlers in the Leeward Islands in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. It then focuses on how Northey helped to shape colonial policies for Catholics residing there during his time as Attorney General based on his legal opinion

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from news, petitions, and requests received by him from the Board of Trade and Plantations during the reigns of William III, Anne, and George I. Northey’s legal opinions occurred during times of heightened religious and political hostilities, both at home in Britain, and driven by Spanish and Dutch colonists in the Caribbean, particularly during the War of the Spanish Succession, which greatly affected trade.6 Therefore, by examining the role that Sir Edward Northey played in the intervention and provision of legal opinion regarding Catholic estates and business operations in the Leeward Islands, I uncover how business news was communicated, and how Northey based his decisions on the news that reached him back home in Britain from the packets of correspondence sent to the Board of Trade and Plantations. 1

Catholics in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic World

Since the sixteenth century, British and Irish Catholics faced sequestration of their personal and real estates for religious nonconformity. Compounding fines, based on the value of the estates, were levied upon those sequestered, with the estates only discharged once payment had been received by officials. As the sequestration and compounding process was regularly augmented during the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics developed different mechanisms to try and protect the long-term interests of their estates, which included the employment of agents, counsels, and lawyers.7 This was not just to protect their estates at home across Britain and Ireland, but also across the Atlantic on the east coast of North America and in the Caribbean. After the 6 Siobhan Talbott’s work has demonstrated that trade between Scotland, Ireland and France continued to flourish despite the war on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as raising questions about the extent of the Scottish and Irish diasporas: Siobhan Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), esp. ch. 6; Siobhan Talbott, ‘“Such unjustificable practises?”: Irish trade, settlement and society in France, 1688–1715’, Economic History Review, 67.2 (2014), pp. 556–77; and Siobhan Talbott, ‘British and Commercial Interests on the French Atlantic Coast, c. 1560–1713’, Historical Research, 85.229 (2012), pp. 394–409. See also Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, William and Mary Quarterly, 69.1 (2012), pp. 3–34; Giada Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants in the Commercial Age, 1670–1714 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2020), ch. 4. 7 Gregory, Catholics during the English Revolution, esp. ch. 4–5. See also: J. R. Tanner (ed.), Tudor Constitutional Documents, 1485–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 159– 63; J. R. Tanner (ed.), Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I, 1603–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), pp. 86–94; Keith Lindley, ‘The Part Played by Catholics’, in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd, 1973), pp. 126–76.

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restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, anti-recusancy laws were revived, including bills to suppress the growth of popery in March 1663, which reconfirmed recusancy laws that had been previously sanctioned during Elizabeth I’s and James I’s reigns. This was despite Charles II originally advocating for liberty of conscience for his Catholic and dissenting subjects.8 Yet, despite the enforcement of anti-Catholic penal laws across Britain and Ireland, Catholics were not locked out from business enterprises in the British Atlantic colonies. Catholics in Britain and Ireland were barred from public officeholding roles which required them to swear proscribed oaths, including the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, as well as the 1673 Test Act. These oaths expected swearers to denounce transubstantiation, and to concede that the pope had no power or authority to depose monarchs.9 However, Catholics were not barred from becoming enterprising business owners or merchants, and Catholic men and women were able to enjoy more religious freedoms in the Leeward Islands and on the east coast of North America in religiously and socially diverse environments than they did back home in Britain and Ireland.10 In Maryland and the Leeward Islands, Catholic governors introduced alternative oaths of allegiances for Catholics to swear, which enabled Catholics to hold political offices.11 For example, the Irish Catholic landowner William Stapleton settled in the Caribbean during this period and quickly gained the governorship of Montserrat in 1668, a few years later obtaining governing powers for the whole of the Leeward Islands.12 The large Catholic presence in the Leeward Islands did, however, pose some serious problems in the 1660s, not least because of the French invasions of the islands of Montserrat, St. Kitts, Antigua, and Tobago when the French decided to side with the Netherlands in 8

D. T. Witcombe, Charles II and the Cavalier House of Commons 1663–1674 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), pp. 8–9. 9 John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 55–6. 10 Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 3; Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 271–2; J. P. Green, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) might be helpful for North America, as might Ned Landsman, ‘The Episcopate, the British Union, and the Failure of Religious. Settlement in Colonial British America’, in C. Beneke and C. S. Grenda (eds.), the First Prejudice: Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 75–97. 11 Gabriel Glickman, ‘Catholic Interests and the Politics of English Overseas Expansion 1660–1689’, Journal of British Studies, 55.4 (2016), pp. 693–4. 12 Glickman, ‘Catholic Interests and the Politics of English Overseas Expansion’, p. 691.

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the Anglo-Dutch wars.13 Nevertheless, while Catholics on these islands often faced ‘various civic disabilities’, their personal beliefs could be accommodated, especially if they outwardly conformed to Anglicanism.14 What is more, Catholics could obtain positions of prestige and power within communities if they owned property. Montserrat therefore became a popular destination for Catholics seeking to obtain public offices and property that were not restricted to them for confessional reasons.15 While Catholics in Britain and Ireland faced the full brunt of anti-Catholic penal laws and the forfeiture of their estates, it was not so clear-cut for Catholics living in the Leeward Islands, where there was some level of autonomy over the enforcement of anti-Catholic legislation. The forfeiture of estates would have affected Catholic families greatly, as it would have not just been their homes, but also their businesses and plantations that were at risk. Catholic merchants were integral to overseas trade in this period, and any threat towards their ability to work and live in the Caribbean was likely to be injurious to the Atlantic economy. Gabriel Glickman and Giada Pizzoni have demonstrated how Catholic merchants played a major part in global and colonial expansionism in this period.16 Pizzoni has uncovered how Catholic merchants were at a greater advantage when compared to their British Protestant counterparts. She has revealed that the British Catholic Aylward family were enterprising business owners, who carefully weighed up potential risks and opportunities regarding their business operations across Europe and the Americas, based on domestic and international news, which could jeopardise or prosper their businesses.17 Additionally, their faith enabled Anglo-Catholic merchants to broker trade deals in collaboration with Anglo-Protestant merchants, who wanted to

13 Glickman, ‘Catholic Interests and the Politics of English Overseas Expansion’; Zacek, Settler Society, pp. 43–5. 14 Zacek, Settler Society, p. 71. 15 Zacek, Settler Society, pp. 73–4. 16 See particularly Glickman, ‘Catholic Interests’, pp. 680–708; Gabriel Glickman, ‘Protes­ tantism, Colonization, and the New England Company in Restoration Politics’, Historical Journal, 59.2 (2016), pp. 365–91; Gabriel Glickman, ‘Empire, “Popery”, and the Fall of English Tangier, 1662–1684’, Journal of Modern History, 87.2 (2015), pp. 247–80; Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants; Giada Pizzoni, ‘“A Pass  … Is Not Denied to Any Romanist”: Strategies of the Catholic Merchant Community in the Early Atlantic World’, Cultural and Social History, 11.3 (2014), pp. 349–65; Giada Pizzoni, ‘British Catholics’ commercial strategies in times of international warfare (1688–1705)’, Seventeenth Century, 32.1 (2017), pp. 81–102. 17 Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants, see esp. pp. 79–107.

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utilise trade connections with Catholic states.18 At the turn of the eighteenth century, Catholics and Protestants continued to work and trade together during the Glorious Revolution and the Nine Years’ War, revealing that business opportunities transcended religious considerations.19 Likewise, it has been persuasively shown by Glickman that, under the later Stuarts, colonial expansion helped to advance the interests of Catholic subjects. Many Catholics, including Thomas Dongan, William Stapleton, and Henry Hawley, held prominent high-ranking roles in New York, the Leeward Islands, and Tangier.20 Moreover, Irish Catholic mercantile and plantation-owning families  – such as the Talbots, Blakes, and Lynches  – kept an ongoing presence in London which benefitted their own interests on the island of Montserrat. For instance, these Irish Catholic representatives utilised their positions to lobby successfully in 1731 to permit non-enumerated colonial goods to pass through Ireland from the British Atlantic territories that were normally restricted by the Navigation Acts.21 Since the early-seventeenth century, Catholics had been active participants in colonial enterprises, with large numbers of English and Irish Catholics settling in the Chesapeake in Maryland from the 1630s, under the protection and encouragement of the Catholic Lords Baltimore.22 By the late-seventeenth century, colonists across the Leeward Islands, including the islands of St. Kitts, Antigua, and Nevis, allied with colonists in Barbados for more independent freedom to trade on conditions that suited the environment they were in. This included freedom to trade and cross-collaborate with Dutch traders based on their adaptation to the volatile conditions of the Caribbean climate. It has been shown by Glickman that in most of England’s colonies in the late-seventeenth century, a ‘tripartite structure’ existed of governor, council, and assembly, and that English court rulings ‘could be applied only at the discretion of the Crown’.23 At times, colonial governors’ decisions were frustrated by efforts from London politicians and trading companies who wanted to 18 Pizzoni, British Catholic Merchants, pp. 13–14. See also, Pizzoni, ‘A Pass … Is Not Denied to Any Romanist’, pp. 349–65; Pizzoni, ‘British Catholics’ commercial strategies’, pp. 81–102. 19 See Talbott, ‘“Such unjustificable practices?”’, pp. 556–77. For a specifically Jacobite view, see also Siobhan Talbott, ‘Commerce and the Jacobite Court: Scottish Migrants in France, 1688–1718’, in Allan I. Macinnes, Kieran German and Lesley Graham (eds.), Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), pp. 99–110. 20 Glickman, ‘Catholic Interests’, p. 681. 21 Ibid., p. 707. 22 Krugler, English and Catholic, chs. 4–6; Glickman, ‘Catholic Interests’, pp. 683–4. 23 Gabriel Glickman, Making the Imperial Nation: Colonization, Politics, and English Identity, 1660–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 126.

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create a universal colonial policy on Caribbean and Atlantic world enterprises, which threatened to stunt growth in these economic relationships.24 However, the discrepancy in the Atlantic colonies following laws passed in Britain confirmed to some critics that overseas dominions needed to be appropriated so that they could be regulated and controlled from London and cease to operate autonomously.25 Royal governors appointed to the islands, as well as colonial agents, were at the forefront of communications and news that were sent from the Caribbean to their correspondents, companies, and business contacts back home in London. While this placed these men into important political positions by connecting Britain to the Leeward Islands, the increased improvements in communications across the Atlantic also meant that this ‘undercut both governors and agents by allowing opposing interests and alternative versions of events to be heard’, and they did not possess a monopoly over the news sent to Britain.26 The lack of influential intermediaries who could lobby on the behalf of various interest groups in London which benefitted the interests of the colonies – coupled with the potential risk of appealing against the local governor backfiring on the complainant, and the financial costs to send over an appeal – caused governors and communities on the islands to independently sort out matters and disputes between themselves. This included dealing with religious tensions and passing local acts which advanced the interests of the colonies, rather than those in London.27 For decades, business news was integral for communication and for maintaining trading links between Britain and its Atlantic colonies. England’s successful conquest of Jamaica from Spain in 1655, as well as the reports about rebellion in Barbados between 1650 and 1652, sparked interest in how news was circulated and reported back in Britain, influencing how merchants, businessmen, and institutions used news to shape their own political, imperial, and military objectives.28 However, these relative freedoms, which permitted Catholics to conduct business enterprises in the Caribbean, meant that they were equally at risk of their estates and livelihoods being forfeited from them 24 Christian J. Koot, ‘A “Dangerous Principle”: Free Trade Discourses in Barbados and the English Leeward Islands, 1650–1689’, Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5.1 (2007), pp. 134–5. 25 Glickman, Making the Imperial Nation, p. 219. 26 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 229–30. 27 Alison Gilbert Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 40. 28 Nicole Greenspan, ‘Barbados, Jamaica and the development of news culture in the mid seventeenth century’, Historical Research, 94.264 (2021), pp. 324–50.

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at times of heightened political tensions, particularly if Britain was at war with, or hostile towards, Catholic states across both sides of the Atlantic. This was not helped by the time it took for petitions, news, and pieces of legislation to reach the hands of the Board of Trade and Plantations, with Catholics and other petitioners at the mercy of communication channels reaching British shores in good time. For instance, Northey’s report regarding several acts passed in the General Assembly for all Leeward Islands, held at Nevis in December 1701, which concerned laws passed during Charles II’s reign to prevent Catholics from settling in the islands was only received on 15 June 1702 before later being read on 8 September that year.29 Likewise, Northey’s report about a Jamaican act passed on 31 July 1711 entitled the ‘Act for the further quieting possessions, & preventing Vexatious Suits at Law’, was addressed on 17 July 1713, almost two years since the laws had been in operation. In this case, he believed that the law was ‘not proper to be approv’d of’, but he did concede that ‘there may be Opportunity of passing & transmitting a Law or Laws for quieting Possessions not liable to these Objections’.30 Such hold-ups, therefore, not only delayed any grievances from being dealt with for Catholics who sought help in the Leeward Islands, but on the other side of the coin, it also meant that those in Westminster were unable to stop any laws being passed with immediate effect, enabling the assemblies and governors in these islands to carry out their own operations independently. Catholic businessmen and plantation owners thus relied on channels of communication from Britain to know what legislation was being read, debated, or passed that could affect their businesses, as well as who could lobby for them on their behalf in London to protect their commercial interests. David Hancock has examined how influential merchants were in promoting colonial interests through the case of the Protestant St. Kitts-raised merchant William Freeman, who later settled in England after the French attacks on the island. From the 1680s, Freeman was invited on a regular basis by the Board of Trade and Plantations to offer his views about any new statutes passed in Nevis and St. Kitts, as well as to comment upon matters relating to the Leeward Islands and which could potentially disturb its overseas trade.31

29 TNA, CO 152/4, no. 103, ff. 287–8, Attorney General’s Report upon the Acts of the General Assembly of all the Leeward Islands held at Nevis in December 1701, 8 September 1702. 30 TNA, CO 138/13, ff. 434–40, Attorney General Sir Edward Northey’s Report to the Commit­ tee for Trade and Plantations, 14 and 17 July 1713. 31 David Hancock, ‘“A World of Business to Do”: William Freeman and the Foundations of England’s Commercial Empire, 1645–1707’, William and Mary Quarterly, 57.1 (2000), pp. 3–34.

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Consequently, this meant that interested businesses, parties, or mercantile groups in London  – as well as Parliament and the Board of Trade and Plantations  – often reacted to news, events, and acts that had already been passed or discussed in the Leeward Islands. The Board of Trade and Plantations was founded by William III in 1696 with a board of seven men appointed by the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, which meant that ‘appointments were both subject to and reflected party divisions’ between Tory and Whig factions.32 The Board was principally responsible for the gathering of information on the colonies, sifting through letters which were to be forwarded to the Privy Council, reporting any matters to the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, and counselling the government on colonial affairs.33 The Board was born as a compromise between William III and Parliament, after a clash between both parties in 1695 and 1696 over the control of trade and colonial affairs. Thus, the king preserved his royal prerogative, and the committee on the Board was made up of former merchants and economists that was tasked to advise the Privy Council over any matters that affected trade and colonial activities, although the Board regularly faced opposition both within and outside government.34 From London, business and trading operations took place which connected the capital to European and American ports.35 Different religious and mercantile interest groups became skilled at lobbying Parliament and the Board of Trade and Plantations. Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Sephardic Jews regularly met in various meeting houses across London with specially designated committees, as well as in coffee houses.36 Olson has revealed that Virginian merchants appointed committees, who among other duties collected dues, drafted petitions, hired legal counsel, and organised meetings with the Board of Trade and Plantations to persuade them to pass or delay legislation that affected certain British Atlantic colonies.37 The coffee houses in Exchange Alley, near Lombard Street in central London, saw much of the exchange of trade and information, including shares that were bought and sold, and commercial information was published in the 32 David Parrish, Jacobitism and Anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World, 1688–1727 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, Boydell, 2017), p. 24. 33 Parrish, Jacobitism and Anti-Jacobitism in the British Atlantic World, pp. 23–4. 34 I. K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 17–18. 35 William Pettigrew and David Veevers (eds.), The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 165–6. 36 Olson, Making the Empire Work, pp. 54–5. 37 Ibid.

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newspapers and through a financial press.38 Groups known as ‘jobbers’ and ‘brokers’ operated within the coffee houses, and traders – working on behalf of the Bank and the East India Company – did business. That the Board of Trade and Plantations met and carried out their trade dealings here emphasises the important location of Exchange Alley in obtaining news and conveying business matters.39 The Royal Exchange was an active hub where merchants, visitors, and captains who had recently arrived from the Americas and the Caribbean could meet with others to discuss the latest news and colonial developments. This focal point was especially important as merchants and interested parties could listen and respond to the latest business news before the Board of Trade and Plantations learned of and acted upon the news that reached their shores through formal channels.40 Aside from the Exchange and the coffee houses, merchants learned about forthcoming meetings, agendas, and measures due to be presented before the Board of Trade and Plantations through a published weekly schedule. This gave merchants and interested parties enough notice to plan ahead and turn up on the day in question to lobby their case or opinions before the Board, as well as to draw up petitions to circulate before they were presented before the Board and also Parliament. In turn, the Board of Trade and Plantations occasionally solicited opinions from merchants before they approved or passed any measures that affected colonial enterprises in the Atlantic, including from the aforementioned William Freeman.41 It has been shown that lobbying in the early-eighteenth century was a long – and sometimes unrewarding  – mission among those seeking to petition for conditions that worked in the favour of colonists, proprietors, and businessmen. Lobbying took careful organisation, with success determined by whether lobbyists had the ability to successfully adapt their activities to British political etiquette.42 Lobbying was not an easy venture for those whose task it was to persuade the Board of Trade and Plantations to approve certain petitions and pieces of legislation from the Leeward Islands. While the Board initially met several times a week at the end of the seventeenth century, with meetings held on Monday afternoons and Wednesday and Friday mornings, meetings became less regular and sporadic after the Whig takeover in 1707. By 1714, the Board 38 Bruce G. Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 5, 13. 39 Carruthers, City of Capital, pp. 169, 178. 40 Alison Gilbert Olson, ‘Coffee House Lobbying’, History Today, 41.1 (1991), p. 38. 41 Ibid., p. 39; Hancock, ‘“A World of Business to Do”’, pp. 3–34. 42 Aaron Graham, ‘The British financial revolution and the empire of credit in St. Kitts and Nevis, 1706–21’, Historical Research, 91.254 (2018), p. 690.

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Figure 9.2 The Royal Exchange of London, by Wenceslaus Hollar, London, 1644 Public Domain image, Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

only dedicated one meeting a week solely to colonial affairs, which meant that there was large backlog of unanswered letters regarding news, business, and colonial matters sent by governors. Moreover, the minimum of a quorum to meet was often not met from 1707 onwards, which added to this backlog.43 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, therefore, the role of advisers, legal counsels, and businessmen had become integral to the protection of business enterprises and interests, as well as for Catholics who were keen to protect their livelihoods in the Leeward Islands. Sir Edward Northey was one such legal counsel who was instrumental in offering legal opinion which not only helped to protect Catholics when the legality of their estates was threatened in the Leeward Islands, but also influenced the legal parameters of governors’ treatment of Catholics on the other side of the Atlantic. 43 Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, pp. 27, 114, 142.

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The Legal Career of Sir Edward Northey

Sir Edward Northey had a long-established legal career which spanned more than half a century. Northey was born in 1652 to Sir William Northey, a barrister of the Middle Temple, and his wife Elizabeth Garrett, in the early years of the Commonwealth regime.44 Following in his father’s footsteps, after Northey was educated at St Paul’s School and matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford, he entered the Middle Temple in 1668, and was called to the bar in 1674. Over the years, Northey developed a well-respected reputation as a barrister. Within a few years of being called to the bar, Northey became a counsel to the House of Lords, and was called upon to represent some of the most religiously and politically contentious cases in later seventeenth century England.45 In 1686, Northey defended Edward Godden in the high-profile and infamous Godden vs. Hales trial, in which Godden, a footman to Sir Edward Hales, had informed the authorities about Hales’s Catholicism that should have disbarred him from the office of colonel in an infantry in accordance with the 1673 Test Act.46 It has been suggested that Northey was appointed to represent Godden in order to present a deliberately weak defence for Parliament, as the Catholic king, James II, had granted Hales a dispensation from swearing the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance.47 While Northey’s legal opinions occasionally proved controversial, he continued to advance up the legal professional ladder. In 1697, Northey became a bencher in the Middle Temple, before he was appointed as Attorney General in June 1701 by William III, who was keen to have moderates in the legal profession. He was re-appointed by Queen Anne upon her accession the following year, and he continued in the role until 1707 when he was replaced by Sir Simon Harcourt. He was reappointed to the post in 1710.48 It was at this time that the Board of Trade and Plantations became increasingly involved in politics, particularly aligned with the Whigs, in part due to the War of the Spanish Succession, which affected the Board’s administrative responsibilities.49 Allegedly, Northey declined to defend Dr Henry Sacheverell during his trial in 1710, after his 5 November 1709 Gunpowder Plot anniversary sermon caused controversy for denouncing the 1689 Toleration Act, which permitted 44 45 46 47

Handley, ‘Northey, Sir Edward’, pp. 150–1. Ibid. Miller, Popery and Politics, pp. 55–6. Dennis Dixon, ‘Godden v Hales revisited – James II and the dispensing power’, Journal of Legal History, 27.2 (2006), pp. 137–8; Handley, ‘Northey, Sir Edward’, p. 150. 48 Handley, ‘Northey, Sir Edward’. 49 Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, p. 109.

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dissenters to worship in conventicles and meeting houses.50 In 1710, Northey was also elected as an MP for the Tiverton constituency in Devon, and he was re-elected as its MP in the 1713 and 1715 general elections.51 Northey continued in the role of Attorney General until he was pensioned off in 1718 during George I’s reign, around the time that he suffered from what appears to have been a stroke before dying in 1723.52 As Attorney General, Northey was often called upon to give his legal opinion concerning colonial affairs, business dealings, and plantations, as well as matters which concerned Catholic estates and Catholic legal rights in Britain’s expanding colonies. Northey’s interest in colonial affairs was probably not solely due to his legal career and role as Attorney General: in 1687, Northey had married Anne Joliffe, the daughter of John Joliffe who was a merchant for the East India Company, and who also served as an MP after the Restoration.53 Although not a merchant himself, Northey’s marriage to the Joliffe family would have undoubtedly given him a window into and an understanding of how the Atlantic and American colonies operated. In June 1698, Northey was appointed by Parliament as one of four counsels in the impeachment trials of the French merchants John Goudet, David Barrau, Nicholas Santiny, Stephen Seignoret, Peter Diharce, and Reney Baudowyn, who stood accused by the Lustring Company of carrying out an illegal ‘traffic with France during the late war’, giving intelligence to that nation, and illegally importing goods from France to the realm.54 As Attorney General, Northey also worked with the East India Company, writing in July 1711 to Secretary of State, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, that he had passed on the Queen’s commands regarding a memorial of the ships Duke and Duchess to the East India Company’s secretary, and that the directors were due to meet soon.55 What is more, Northey’s role as Attorney General, as well as working in collaboration with the Board of Trade and Plantations, gave him a good insight into western colonial trade and business matters. Originally, the Board consisted 50 For more information, see Geoffrey Holmes, ‘The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, Past & Present, 72 (1976), pp. 55–85; Jennifer Farooq, Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), esp. ch. 4 and 7. 51 Handley, ‘Northey, Sir Edward’, p. 151. 52 Ibid. 53 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (London: Verso, 2003), p. 138. Joliffe was also spelled ‘Jolliffe’. 54 LJ, xvi, pp. 289–90, 310; CJ, xii, pp. 208–35. 55 TNA, SP 34/37/61, Attorney General Sir Edward Northey to Secretary of State, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, 21 July 1711.

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of the peers John Egerton, 3rd Earl of Bridgewater, and Forde Grey, Earl of Tankerville, who also served as privy councillors along with William Blathwayt, John Pollexfen, John Locke, Sir Philip Meadows, and Abraham Hill, who undertook more of the colonial administration.56 After 1707, the Board of Trade and Plantations became increasingly involved in political affairs, reflected by Whig appointments to the Board, including Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland; Thomas Grey, 2nd Earl of Stamford; Henry Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury; Sir Philip Meadows; John Pulteney, Lord Dartmouth; and Sir Charles Turner.57 The Board of Trade and Plantations’ main role was to advise merchants about the appointments of colonial governors and routine mercantile business, as well as reviewing colonial laws for allowance and disallowance, which is when merchants lobbied or applied pressure to the Board over certain topics.58 When the Board of Trade and Plantations was founded in 1696, the committee members initially attempted to deal with heavy administrative duties, including reading all correspondence, comprising of petitions, speeches, laws, proclamations, and journals of governors, among other documents.59 Due to the capacious amount of paperwork, the Board decided swiftly that a lawyer was needed and soon afterwards all laws were forwarded to both the Attorney General and Solicitor-General, with most colonial acts before 1700 going through these two officeholders before the laws were passed or vetoed by William III.60 This meant that these men were in a valuable and powerful position to act as mediators between the Caribbean islands and London. Therefore, as Attorney General, Northey had a good comprehension about how business transactions operated in the mercantile world, not only concerning trade in the Americas, but also regarding companies which traded in the east. For instance, in 1715, the East India Company asked Northey for his legal opinion about whether Malagasy slaves from Madagascar were exempted from the East India Act (1698) which restricted commodities, merchandise, and goods on vessels from breaking bulk between the Cape of Good Hope and England.61 In this case, Northey acknowledged that while licences could be granted to trade in Madagascar of specific goods, his opinion was that

56 57 58 59 60 61

Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, pp. 19–23. Ibid., pp. 112–14. Olson, ‘Coffee House Lobbying’, p. 40. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy, p. 27. Ibid., p. 27. 9 William III, c. 44: see Virginia Bever Platt, ‘The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 26.4 (1969), p. 553.

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slaves did not count as goods and merchandise as outlined in the 1698 act.62 Therefore, Northey possessed some personal, as well as legal, understanding of how colonial trade companies operated in the early-eighteenth century, as well as how various businesses and trades were managed from Britain across the Atlantic, based on news that was received back home in London. 3

Northey and Catholic Estate Forfeitures in the Leeward Islands

After he was appointed Attorney General in 1701, Northey’s professional portfolio became vastly diverse, dealing with complicated cases for Parliament, as well as offering legal opinions on colonial and domestic affairs. As a barrister and Attorney General, Northey often dealt with Catholic forfeited estates and individual cases which concerned the enforcement of anti-Catholic penal laws across Britain, Ireland, and the Atlantic world. For instance, in May 1703, Northey offered his legal opinion on an act passed in the first year of Queen Anne’s reign about using forfeited estates in Ireland to pay off soldiers’ arrears and to help fund the Chelsea hospital in London.63 Later that same year, Northey cautioned one Richard Warre that a bill to prevent the growth of popery in Ireland could not be sent until the Queen had given her approval once she returned from her trip to Bath.64 In January 1703, Northey was asked by the secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations, William Popple senior, for his opinion ‘in point of Law’, about the ‘Act for quieting mens Estates and for avoiding litigious Law Suits for Lands and Plantations’ that was passed in Montserrat on 13 June 1702.65 The act centred on quieting the ‘present possessors of Plantations in Mountserrat’ with claims to land to be made by petitioners within three years, which differed from the timeline of seven years in Jamaica and two years in Barbados. In May that year, Northey gave a report regarding the estates. In his judgement, Northey believed that the act was ‘not well penned’, and considered it to be advisable for a new act to be passed ‘which may not be liable to such Objections as are to this And which may limit the time of Suite and Entryes by future as well as present Titles’ on Montserrat.66 62 Platt, ‘The East India Company and the Madagascar Slave Trade’, pp. 555, 575. For more evidence of Northey’s opinion, see TNA, CO 388/23, R. 53, as cited by Platt, p. 575. 63 SHL, MS 73, Legal Opinions of Sir Edward Northey, 1701–1704, ff. 45–6. 64 TCD, MS 9932/58, Edward Northey to Richard Warre, 5 October 1703. 65 TNA, CO 153/8, ff. 136–7, William Popple Senior to Attorney General Sir Edward Northey, 4 February 1703. 66 TNA, CO 153/8, ff. 169–72, Attorney General Sir Edward Northey’s Report to the Committee for Trade and Plantations, 4 May 1703; TNA, CO 152/5, no. 19, ff. 71–2, Attorney General Sir Edward Northey’s Report to the Committee for Trade and Plantations, 4 May 1703.

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Several years later in 1713, Northey gave a report to the commissioners at the Board of Trade and Plantations concerning an act passed in Jamaica for the further quieting of possessions and preventing vexatious suits at law, which gives a sense of how valuable Northey’s opinion was for interpreting information about acts passed in the Caribbean that conflicted with British interests, and which potentially affected Britain’s trade and colonial interests.67 Northey’s legal opinion was also consulted over whether Catholics had the right to purchase land and estates across the Atlantic. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the passing of the Toleration Act in 1689, Catholics continued to face civil restrictions across Britain and Ireland.68 In particular, moves were made in Parliament to prevent Catholics from inheriting or purchasing real and personal estates because of their religious nonconformity, especially during the rise of Jacobitism in support of James II. In January and April 1690, bills were read in the House of Commons which voided settlements made by Catholics – deemed ‘papists’ – from disinheriting Protestant heirs; a bill approved in March 1699 further extended such powers.69 The rise of Jacobitism in the early-eighteenth century caused Catholic estates and anti-Catholic penal laws to be enforced more stringently across Britain and Ireland at its most heated times, including the Lancashire Plot in 1694, the 1696 assassination plot against William III, as well as the famous Jacobite Rebellion in 1715, a year after the accession of the Hanoverian monarch George I.70 Edward Northey regularly offered his legal opinion as Attorney General when dealing with the aftermath of various French raids in the Leeward Islands, as Britain became entangled with European instabilities caused by the War of the Spanish Succession.71 The Leeward Islands were not only vulnerable to plunder from French Catholics: on 3 May 1699, gentleman usher to William III, Jeremiah Chaplain, successfully petitioned the King that, during the ‘late Warr’, several small plantations on the island of St. Kitts had been ‘forfeited by yᵉ Irish Papists’. Reportedly, 610 acres of land had been seized, though all of ‘small value’. Chaplain hoped that a ‘Grant of all the Fines & forfeitures’ 67 TNA, CO 138/13, ff. 434–40, Attorney General Sir Edward Northey’s Report to the Committee for Trade and Plantations, 14 and 17 July 1713. 68 Krugler, English and Catholic, p. 235. 69 CJ, x, pp. 340, 383; CJ, xii, p. 610. 70 For further information on Jacobitism in this period, see Daniel Szechi, The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Paul Monod, Murray Pittock and Daniel Szechi (eds.), Loyalty and Identity: Jacobites at Home and Abroad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Eveline Cruickshanks and Howard Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Kieran German, Lesley Graham and Allan I. Macinnes (eds.), Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014). 71 Zacek, Settler Society, p. 89.

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would be made upon the island, as well as an escheator and receiver to collect these revenues for the king.72 Throughout this period, the Board of Trade and Plantations attempted to take action against Catholics as a repercussion of war and tensions in the Leeward Islands, and as part of their foreign policies. On 8 February 1717, the commissioners considered a letter sent to them from General Walter Hamilton, Governor of the Leeward Islands, that had been sent to them the previous April, concerning the case of one Mrs Renoult, who had recently ‘obtained grants of the late French lands in St. Christophers’. It was suggested by one Mr Nevin that Renoult was ‘reputed a papist, and never had a right to 500 acres’ of land, with Nevin alleging that ‘she pretended to much more’ land. Fellow reporter Mr Duport told the Board that he believed it could be easily proven that Renoult ‘frequented mass, and that her character was not the best’, but he conceded that, despite Renoult’s Catholicism, her four daughters were Protestant and ‘of good reputation’. Therefore, he believed that the ‘sollicitation of that grant to their mother was chiefly in view of the daughters interest, who were very deserving’.73 At the time, Britain had recently experienced a Jacobite Rebellion in 1715, in which rebels had failed to supplant the recently-ascended George I in favour of the Catholic son of the late King James II, James Francis Edward Stuart. Consequently, the Jacobite Rebellion led to the rigorous enforcement of some of the anti-Catholic penal laws, including pressuring Catholics to take an oath of allegiance to George I, which many refused to take on grounds of conscience. This meant that Catholics and those reputed to be ‘papists’ who refused to take the oath had to register any property they owned in accordance with the ‘Act to oblige Papists to register their Names and real estates’. The act was originally printed and published in 1716 for wider circulation detailing what Catholics were required to do as a consequence of their ‘horrid Designs’, plotting the ‘Destruction of this Kingdom’ and the ‘Extirpation of the Protestant Religion’.74 As a result, Catholic estates were often registered or left to Protestant relatives or friends who could inherit the estates instead.75 Renoult’s case in St. Kitts, therefore, shows how Catholics living as far away as the Leeward Islands attempted to circumvent this new anti-Catholic penal law to protect the long-term interests of their family estates and inheritances for 72 TNA, SP 44/238/321. 73 JBTP, iii, pp. 207–14. 74 1 Geo. I. c. 55 (1715), ‘Papists Act’: An Act to Oblige Papists to Register their Names and Real Estates. 75 Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in eighteenth-century England, c. 1714–80: A political and social study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 103–14.

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their children, although the Board of Trade and Plantations and Northey were sought for their advice over such matters. In June 1702, Northey wrote to the Lord Commissioners for the Board of Trade and Plantations concerning an act passed in St. Kitts. This act, passed in 1701, entitled an ‘Act for the settling & strengthening his Majestyes part of this Island’, had stipulated that attainted persons, who had joined the French in the late wars, could be executed without a trial, and that patents belonging to ‘papists’ could be voided by the governors on the island. Northey declared that not only was the law to execute people without a trial ‘of ill consequence’, but that he thought it ‘unreasonable to destroy all Titles in the Crowne or their Grantees of above twelve yeares standing it not being Restrained to such who had not had possession or Commenced their suites within that time’. Furthermore, Northey stated that it was ‘unreasonable to make Patents void that were passed by the Governours without yᵉ Consent of the Councell unless the Law there be soe’. He believed that this was unreasonable because patentees did not have enough time to make the improvements, only being granted three years to do so, and that the patentees had not by any law ‘oblidged them within that time or within any other Lymitted time to Improve them’. Northey added that because ‘it is unreasonable to Declare all Patents made to papists since the beginning of the late Warrs to bee void’, this would make assignments by Protestants ‘for valuable Consideracion’ also void. He concluded, therefore, that he was of the humble opinion that the law was ‘not fitt to bee Approved’ on the island.76 In this context, this meant that Sir Edward Northey’s role as Attorney General enabled him to act as the legal mediator between the Board of Trade and Plantations and interested parties in the Leeward Islands, while also checking the legality of any orders or acts passed against Catholics, their estates, and business enterprises. Northey offered his legal opinion several times on the Calvert family’s right to nominate governors in Maryland. Since the 1630s, successive Calverts, under their titles of Lord Baltimore, had owned the right by royal charter to nominate governors in Maryland which, because of their Catholicism, left the Calverts open to suspicion that their appointments were inclined to those who were known Catholics or sympathetic towards Catholicism.77 After the Glorious Revolution, the right for the Calverts to nominate successors was revoked on the basis of their religion, although Charles Calvert still tried to 76 TNA, CO 152/5, no. 1, ff. 1–1v, ‘Attorny [sic] General’s Report upon the Act of St Christophers for settling and strengthning [sic] his Majesty’s part of that island’, 22 October 1702. 77 Krugler, English and Catholic, ch. 9.

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influence nominations for the governorship of Maryland.78 Consequently, the Baltimores’s right to nominate successive Maryland governors was in dispute among many interested factions.79 The Exeter MP Colonel Edward Seymour sent Northey a letter in July 1706 concerning the validity over English laws in Maryland. Northey claimed that he could not make a decision until he had read Baltimore’s original charter over the province, a copy of which he believed was in the possession of the Council of the Board of Trade and Plantations. However, Northey told Seymour that the plantations were ‘governed by their own Laws’ and that an act made in England ‘doth not Extend to the Plantations’, although governors were supposed to ensure that any laws passed locally in the islands followed laws passed in England.80 Northey conceded that although colonists in Maryland were technically ‘the Subjects of the Crown of England, if the same [laws of England] were received by the Inhabitants and putt in practice there’, by a virtue of general consent ‘they shall be altered by some Act of the Assembly there’.81 Parliament had previously considered an ‘Act for re-uniting to the Crown the Government of several Colonies and Plantations in America’ in 1701 to unite the colonies and plantations across the Atlantic, although Baltimore, Sir Henry Ashurst, and William Penn Jr. successfully presented counsel against the bill during readings of the act in Parliament. No doubt they did this because the bill potentially threatened to reduce the power of local legislatures, infringe on their independence to govern their respective provinces the way they felt best, and bring them directly under the rule of Parliament.82 Northey frequently corresponded with William Popple senior, as well as Popple’s son, William Popple Jr., on news relating to colonial affairs in the latter years of Anne’s reign. This was at a time when news about the Leeward Islands was critical due to the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713)  – caused by fighting between European states about whether a Bourbon or Habsburg heir should succeed the Catholic throne in Spain – which affected trade and business affairs in the Leeward Islands. In the Caribbean, the Leeward Islands 78 Krugler, English and Catholic. 79 TNA, CO 5/717, nos. 42 and 42 (i), ff. 114–122, ‘Letter from Attorny [sic] General, upon the Petition of the Lord Baltemore, [sic] relating to the Nominating of a Governor for Maryland, &c’, 24 July 1711. 80 Owing to the practicalities associated with maintaining a transatlantic empire, laws were first passed locally by colonial assemblies and governors, before being approved by Parliament. See Mary Lou Lustig, Privilege and Prerogative: New York’s Provincial Elite, 1710–1776 (Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995), p. 17. 81 TNA, CO 5/721, ff. 34–5, Sir Edward Northey to Sir Charles Hedges, 27 July 1706. 82 LJ, xvi, pp. 666, 670, 680, 688.

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were repeatedly raided and attacked by the French from their islands during this period, including St. Kitts and Nevis.83 Consequently, communication on acts being passed was key, especially when approving or disapproving acts in quick succession. In June 1703, for example, William Popple senior wrote to Northey requesting his opinion on a collection of acts that had arrived from New Hampshire, which included an act to prevent estates from being concealed from assessors.84 Similarly, in October 1705, Popple wrote to Northey regarding a letter sent by Colonel John Seymour and ‘to Desire Your Opinion [about] whether the laws of England against Romish Priests, are in force in the Plantations; And whether her Majesty may not Direct Jesuits (as Romish Priests) to be turned out of Maryland’.85 Throughout July 1713, William Popple Jr., on behalf of the Lords of the Board of Trade and Plantations, asked Northey for his legal judgement on a recent parcel of acts that were originally passed in Jamaica in 1711 and 1712. These comprised of acts such as the act ‘to prevent any One Person from holding two or more Offices of Profit in this Island’, and the act to disable any member of the Jamaican council or assembly ‘from acting as Commissioner for receiving any Public Mony raised or to be raised by the Governor Council & Assembly of this Island’. This included the provision to disable ‘any such Commissioner to be a Member of the Council or of the present or any future Assembly of this Island’.86 This correspondence reflects just how much the Popples and the Board of Trade and Plantations relied upon Northey’s legal counsel before they made any decisions, especially as whatever ruling was made on acts and colonial affairs could have lasting ramifications, particularly when concerning religion. In his capacity as Attorney General, Northey offered his legal advice on petitions and news relating to religious acts passed under William III’s and Anne’s reigns, including laws which affected Catholics and dissenters. On confessionalism, Northey confirmed some legal rights of Catholics and dissenters living and operating on the islands. On 11 June 1702, Northey affirmed in his report to the Lord Commissioners for the Board of Trade and Plantations that the act to prevent papists settling in the Leeward Islands was problematic. The act required all persons who came to reside in the islands to take the Oaths 83 Zacek, Settler Society, pp. 42, 89, 117. 84 TNA, CO 5/911, ff. 97–103, William Popple senior to Attorney General Sir Edward Northey, 23 June 1703. 85 TNA, CO 5/726, f. 318, William Popple senior to Attorney General Sir Edward Northey, 17 October 1705. 86 TNA, CO 138/14, ff. 13–15, William Popple Jr. to Attorney General Sir Edward Northey, 18 July 1713; CO 138/14, ff. 26–27, William Popple Jr. to Attorney General Sir Edward Northey, 31 July 1713.

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of Allegiance and Supremacy as passed in the reign of Charles II. Northey believed that the Oath of Allegiance was ‘an unlawfull Oath and imposed upon the Subjects of this Realme against the known Laws and Libertyes of this Kingdom’. Consequently, he rendered the act as ‘useless’.87 What is more, Northey pointed out that the wording of the act was ambiguous as ‘it is not certain what Declaration is meant by this Act, there being Two several Declaracions in Two Acts made in the Thirteenth Yeare of the Reigne of King Charles the Second’, the first regarding governing and regulating corporations, while the second was the Act of Uniformity. He judged that the wording of the Act of Uniformity meant that not only were papists to be expelled from the Leeward Islands, but that the act ‘expels aswell Nonconformists as Papists, which is contrary to the Act of Toleration’. Although he believed that the act made in the thirtieth, ‘and not the 13th’ of Charles II’s reign was ‘a Test against Papists only’, for the reasons outlined above, he was of the opinion that the act was ‘not fitt to be Approved’ as it stood.88 Likewise, in October 1702, Northey responded to a report about an act passed in St. Kitts in June earlier that year, ‘for the settling & strengthning his Majestys part of this Island’, based on counsel heard in support of the act, as well as from William Freeman and other unnamed petitioners against it. In his report, Northey agreed that the act was both ‘unreasonable & unjust’ on the grounds that it was ‘unreasonable to make Patents void that were passed by the Governours without the Consent of the Councell unless the Law there be so’, especially as patentees ‘had not within three Years after the making of them Improved what was granted, there not being as appears any Law that obliged them within that time or within any other limited time to Improve them’. Furthermore, he added that it was ‘unreasonable to declare all Patents made to Papists since the begining [sic] of the late Warrs to be void; For That thereby their Assignments even to Protestants for Valluable Considerations will be made void also’.89 Admittedly, Northey reported that the act was ‘not fitt to be approved’ because the legislation voiding patents granted to Catholics also affected dissenting Protestants. Nevertheless, the fact that Northey did not propose that the law be circumvented so that Catholics were still penalised indicates that his previous experience of offering legal opinions on Catholic

87 TNA, CO 152/4, no. 103, ff. 287–8, Attorney General’s Report upon the Acts of the General Assembly of all the Leeward Islands held at Nevis in December 1701, 8 September 1702. 88 Ibid. 89 TNA, CO 153/8, ff. 116–18, Attorney General’s Report upon the Act of St Christophers for settling and strengthning [sic] his Majesty’s part of that Island, 22 October 1702.

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cases enabled him to have a legal and pragmatic view on how to deal with Catholics living in the Leeward Islands.90 In another case, in 1703, Northey intervened in the case of Protestant Daniel MacKenin of Antigua, who was at risk of losing the lease of a plantation called Goldengrove on that island because two of the attorneys who indentured the plantation to him in June 1702 – Thomas Frant and David Rice, both from Montserrat – were papists. MacKenin claimed that he was unaware of the attorneys’ Catholicism, and that by an act passed by the Assembly at Nevis in April 1702, entitled the ‘Act to prevent Papists, & reputed Papists, from settling in any of his Majties Carribee Leward Islands in America’, all those known papists, or those reputed to be papists, were disabled to act as attorneys, agents, or overseers in any of the Leeward Islands. Consequently, the confederates on the island, including the governor of Antigua, Colonel Christopher Codrington, ‘all unanimously, & dayly, threaten to turne the said Lessee [MacKenin] out of his possession by force of the said Act’. Northey moved that, bearing in mind the ‘hardship & surprize’ of the case and situation for MacKenin, as well as the fact that he was a Protestant, the act would be repealed and would prevent the ‘great hindrance of Trade’.91 Considering the time limit for acts from the Leeward Islands to be approved or voided back in Britain, Northey’s advice to repeal this act over Catholic attorneys working on the island suggests that he saw the act as hindering the business and trading prospects for MacKenin and for Antigua, and that, while probably inconvenient, Catholics acting as attorneys, agents, or overseers were probably the least of the problems that they were having to face in the Caribbean at this time. What is interesting in the early-eighteenth century is that, while Catholics faced the brunt of anti-Catholic penal laws across Britain and Ireland, the right for Catholics to own land and businesses seemed much more ambiguous in the Atlantic colonies and in the Caribbean. For instance, on 21 June 1704, Northey gave his legal opinion about whether Catholics were barred from purchasing crown and plantation lands in New England, as stipulated by legislation passed by the Westminster Parliament in the eleventh and twelfth years of William III’s reign, which prevented Catholics from purchasing lands in England, the dominion of Wales, and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. In Northey’s view, he believed that Catholics were not disabled from purchasing lands in the Queen’s plantations, as he was of the opinion that the acts applied only to aforementioned locations, and therefore that ‘the Plantations are not 90 TNA, CO 153/8, f. 118, Attorney General’s Report upon the Act of St Christophers. 91 TNA, CO 152/5, nos. 20–20 (i), ff. 73–75, The Case of Daniel Mackenin a Protestant Inhabitant of the Island of Antigua in America, 16 March 1703.

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affected by that Act’.92 This suggests that while Catholics were prevented from purchasing lands and maintaining businesses in Britain and Ireland, this was not the case in the Leeward Islands or in the North American colonies, thus supporting Pizzoni’s premise that Catholics were allowed to operate in the Atlantic world due to their advantage of being Catholic to trade and carry out their businesses. 4 Conclusion Disseminating business news in the Leeward Islands in the opening decades of the early-eighteenth century took place at a time of great political and religious change. The assemblies on the various islands sought to legislate and pass acts away from the powers back in London which would benefit the island communities, while dealing with a vastly diverse religious culture made up of Anglicans, Catholics, dissenters, and many other faiths. Although a religious minority in some parts of the Leeward Islands, this chapter has shown that Catholics were able to thrive in these islands, play an active part in colonial life, and perform roles that were restricted for their counterparts in Britain and Ireland, including conducting legal affairs and business transactions. The British Atlantic offered godly members of society, including Catholics, a confessional haven, and Catholics were able to practice their religion in relative ease when compared to their counterparts in Britain and Ireland. This chapter has also raised questions about how religious confessionalism was dealt with in the early-eighteenth century, and the extent to which Catholics living on the islands held the right to possess lands and operate businesses despite their religious nonconformity. Sir Edward Northey’s role in advising on the position of Catholics, Catholic landowners, and other petitioners in the Leeward Islands has demonstrated the importance of transatlantic networks for disseminating news regarding anti-Catholic penal laws, the speed with which business news was dealt with, and how legislative powers were implemented in the islands from Britain. His opinions mattered so much that, even after his death, his original decisions were re-consulted in 1731 regarding his opinion against acts passed in St. Kitts in 1712 and 1719 for settling estates, as well as in 1737 over his original 1717 legal opinion regarding land boundary 92 TNA, CO 5/863, no. 103, ff. 96–7, Mr Attorny [sic] Gen:lls Opinon, [sic] about Roman Catholicks being capable of receiving Grants of Lands in the Plantations, 21 June 1704; TNA, CO 5/911, f. 343, Mr Attorney General’s Opinion about Roman Catholicks being capable of Receiving Grants of Lands in the Plantations, 21 June 1704.

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disputes between Pennsylvania and Maryland.93 The turn of the eighteenth century witnessed the development of interests between London and its colonial enterprises, with London one of the key urban centres in western Europe, a place where corporations and mercantile businesses could thrive and exchange news. What has been presented, therefore, is the extent to which anti-Catholic penal laws passed in Britain had any jurisdictional control over Catholic business affairs in the Leeward Islands, and has in turn, disclosed how pivotal figures like Northey were for Catholics when trying to protect their estates and businesses on the other side of the Atlantic. This chapter has charted the diverse international relationships between nation states and their Catholic populations, as well reconstructing longstanding networks between Britain and the Leeward Islands. These transatlantic business networks not only relied on the knowledge of figures such as Northey, Popple senior and junior, and other commissioners: they enabled the dissemination of news through communications networks between petitioners and colonial governors who wrote back home to Britain to report events that had recently occurred to interested parties, including the Board of Trade and Plantations, and to try and maintain their autonomy and control over matters which affected trade, business, and religious affairs in these dominions. By the early-eighteenth century, the Leeward Islands was vastly expanding as a colonial enterprise within the emerging British Empire, and Catholics were a vital part of the story. 93 TNA, CO 153/5, ff. 114–15, Letters from ‘A. P.’ to John Sharpe and Francis Vane, 1 and 2 December 1731; TNA, CO 5/1294, ff. 105–11, Report to the Lords of the Com.ee of Council in relation to the appointing a Deputy Governor of Pennsylvania & the three low Counties, 3 June 1737.

Chapter 10

The East India Company in West Africa and Information Networks in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World Edmond Smith In 1657, the English East India Company (EIC) obtained privileges to exclusive trade in West Africa. Until this point, rights for English traders to operate in the region had been held by the English Guinea Company, privileges that passed to the EIC alongside the goods, fortifications and other infrastructure present, excepting guns. At the same time, the Guinea Company’s agents for the most part remained in West Africa to serve their new employers, the EIC.1 Through this arrangement, which coincided with the EIC’s renewed charter in Asia and the quick re-establishment of its authority there, the corporation sought to integrate the West African trade into its existing trading networks. The company saw the availability of gold, especially, as an attractive trade good that could help support its massive demand for bullion to exchange in markets in India. This aligned with the efforts made previously by the Guinea Company to trade for gold, ivory and various woods used in dyeing, but also butted against the interests of other English merchants who traded to the region seeking enslaved captives to use as labour in England’s growing colonies in the Caribbean, including merchants who were now leading members in the EIC. To further complicate English visions for trade in West Africa, no sooner than the EIC had stabilised its position in this region its own grant was undermined by the establishment of the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1660, a new corporation with support from the newly restored King Charles II. 1 For an overview of English activity in Africa: P. E. H. Hair & Robin Law, ‘The English in Western Africa to 1700’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. I: The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 241–63. Although this episode has received little attention from historians, the Guinea Company and English activity in Africa in the first half of the seventeenth century has recently received considerable attention: L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688 (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Julie Svalastog, Mastering the Worst of Trades: England’s early Africa companies and their traders, 1618–1672 (Leiden: Brill, 2021); Lior Blum, ‘Empire Later: England and West Africa, 1553–1631, and the foundations of English dominance in the region in the late seventeenth century’ (PhD Thesis, University of Southampton, 2019).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689879_011

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Map of the Costa da Mina, including European forts, major Akan markets, and the inland locations of gold mining

This company sought to exclude the EIC from the gold trade and intended to increase the purchase of enslaved African people.2 By 1663, the EIC had mostly withdrawn from its trade in West Africa, and interest in the gold trade was quickly pushed aside in favour of policies seeking to expand the slave trade to help grow England’s growing sugar plantations in the Caribbean.3 2 The Royal Adventurers were re-chartered in 1663, at which point many merchants, including some who led the EIC’s efforts in West Africa, would join the corporation. The company’s activities were subsumed into the newly chartered Royal African Company in 1672. For the classic account of the Royal Adventurers, see George Zook, The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa (Lancaster, PA: Press of the New Era Printing Co., 1919). 3 For the role of sugar and slavery in shaping the Atlantic economy: Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Economy, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Stuart Schwartz (ed.), Tropical Babylons: sugar and the making of the Atlantic world,

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Despite only covering a six-year period, this episode is useful in a number of ways for examining information networks in the early modern Atlantic world. Firstly, the EIC’s archive is largely extant for this period, presenting the opportunity to examine a corpus of letters, reports and other documents produced in West Africa and in England related to the trade.4 This is a unique collection for examining English trade in West Africa, and is also remarkably rich compared to material related to trade in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Atlantic world during this period. In part, this is because comparable corporate or personal archives related to these regions have not survived, but it is also due to the specific circumstances in which the EIC came to manage a West African trade. Taking over from the Guinea Company required that they pay particular attention to how the corporation’s new trade and factories operated, leading to detailed descriptions about who, with, and where trade was taking place along the African coast. Consequently, the richness of this archive enables a quantitative analysis of the information networks as well as a deeper qualitative engagement with the processes by which news and other information passed across them.5 Through the visualisation and analysis of the networks revealed within these documents, a method used at the start of each section in this chapter, it becomes clear that the role of the corporation in shaping information networks needs to be understood as part of a less hierarchical process than might be expected.6 While the EIC did, quite starkly, situate itself at the core of a network exchanging news across the Atlantic world, collecting and examining news transmitted from Africa, it is also evident that this information was

1450–1680 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Simon Newman, A New World of Labour: the development of plantation slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 4 These are held at the British Library in the India Office Records [IOR] as part of the E-series (3/25–29; 3/85–87) and the H-series (H/42). Dr Michael Bennett provided invaluable material from these records during his work as Research Associate at The University of Manchester. 5 For how corporate collections can be used for examining information networks, see: Aske Brock, Guido van Meersbergen and Edmond Smith, ‘An Introduction’ in A. Brock, G. Meersbergen & E. Smith (eds.), Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World, 1550–1650 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), pp. 1–20. 6 For the network methodology employed here and further discussion of how corporate sources are especially valuable for such quantitative work, see Edmond Smith, ‘Networks of the East India Company, c. 1600–1625’ (PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2016), pp. 15–29.

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very much confined to exchanges with the corporation’s own personnel.7 The wider networks of exchange that were utilised within the specific trading context of West Africa went much further, connecting the corporation’s employees within a wide network of agents situated across the region, but also to an array of other European and, vitally, African actors. Thus, by drawing on this exceptionally strong archive of corporate material, it is possible to observe the limits of Atlantic or even global news networks in terms of their impact on the English metropole, even as they reveal further and extensive information networks that invigorated trade in this specific, West African local space. Secondly, this six-year period is useful for understanding how information networks developed alongside and beyond the practice of corporate authority. Common practices across England’s commercial community, reinforced by practices employed by corporations, created standardised ideas about the transmission of information, orders, and authority.8 The corporate structure depended on the ability for an organisation, as much as any private merchant, to reliably trust the factors or servants that it appointed to act on its behalf overseas. In the West African context, this resulted in the EIC delegating considerable authority to its factors, with the expectation that they would operate in the corporation’s best interests.9 Typically, communication between the corporation and its factors, especially in situations like this where there was a considerable time lapse between letters being sent and received, took a fairly broad view of the trade, allowing space for factors to manoeuvre in recognition of their own, more detailed and immediate understanding of local conditions.10 The EIC’s factors, in this way, contributed to the transmission of informal ‘information flows’ through which ‘the actual processes of communication that connected people living’ in cross-cultural trading environments took place.11 In the wider Atlantic world, colonial activities presented similar 7

News and information was exchanged in the early modern world through a variety of different mediums. See: Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (ed.), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 8 For record keeping and letter writing, see Edmond Smith, Merchants: the community that shaped England’s trade and empire, 1550–1650 (London: Yale University Press, 2021), pp. 34–56. 9 Similar challenges faced the EIC regarding their employees in Asia: Emily Erikson and Sampsa Samila, ‘Networks, Institutions, and Uncertainty: Information Exchange in EarlyModern Markets’, Journal of Economic History, 78.4 (2018), pp. 1034–67. 10 For an overview of challenges of maritime communication, see Dimov Stojce Ilcev, ‘From Wooden Pigeons to Telstar: Precursors of Modern Maritime Satellite Communications’, International Journal of Maritime History, 31.1 (2019), pp. 137–44. 11 This concept has been employed fruitful in the Mediterranean context. See: JohnPaul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in

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demands, and commission agents undertook a similar role in organising the Caribbean plantation complex, sometimes relying on their own factors and brokers, by overseeing productive, financial and commercial activity on the part of plantation owners.12 Supplementary relationships including business and family connections facilitated the function of these networks, depending so much on trust to operate effectively.13 In West Africa, the effectiveness of factors to operate effectively on behalf of the company required not just the ability to work effectively among themselves but also the capacity to out-compete other English actors, such as interloping merchants operating without permission of the EIC, and other Europeans, especially the Dutch (this period fell, after all, between the first and second Anglo-Dutch wars). This depended on the development of relationships with African rulers and merchants that often took place beyond the direct orders or understanding of the EIC’s directors in London, sometimes in intervals between the receipt of letters from London that might have offered direction. This generated ‘a transformational process compounded of intensely local and socially defined activities, by a wide range of people who shaped the news as they relayed it through places that were at once specific and connected’.14 However, the enduring limited engagement with specific African actors on the part of the EIC also highlights the challenges of balancing ‘interaction and segregation, co-existence and curiosity, profit and exchange’ even within moments of cross-cultural exchange and engagement as these could represent only moments of encounter between what otherwise might be disconnected information networks.15 By analysing how factors in West Africa participated in local exchanges of news, it is possible to therefore examine both the effect and limits of corporate control of information and the ways in which actors outside these corporate networks were integral for the transmission and reception of news in the Atlantic world. Thirdly, this six-year period presents a useful case study for examining how competition shaped the ways in which information could be transmitted, the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. vii–ix, 6–8. 12 Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, pp. 282–88; David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London merchants and the integration of the British Atlantic community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 123–30. 13 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: the Sephardic diaspora, Livorno, and cross-cultural trade in the early modern period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 157. 14 Filippo de Vivo, ‘Microhistories of Long-Distance Information: Space, Movement and Agency in the Early Modern News’ in Past & Present, 12, Issue Supplement 14 (2019), pp. 179–214. 15 Rosa Salzburg, ‘Mobility, Cohabitation and Cultural Exchange in the Lodging Houses of Early Modern Venice’, Urban History, 46.3 (2019), p. 416.

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understood, and acted upon within England’s international trading community, riven as it was with competing claims and competing demands from different merchants and corporations. The way that England’s Atlantic activities, especially in colonial contexts in North America and the Caribbean, were shaped by conflict and competition brought about by Civil War has received considerable attention.16 After the restoration, too, a changing relationship between a more assertive state and the merchant community continued to influence the structure of English commerce and empire in the Atlantic world.17 In the West African context, this generated potentially competing and overlapping notions about where, when, and with whom to do business, even as English actors collaborated successfully to expand commercial and colonial activities. The English experience in West Africa was also often shaped by demands and networks extending into the Caribbean, especially related to the increasing traffic in enslaved African captives as labour for a growing plantation complex.18 Many of the merchants interested in the gold trade in West Africa, first in the Guinea Company and then the EIC, were also participants in the Caribbean plantation complex in the 1650s, leading to challenging questions about how they understood and connected the trans-cultural array of commercial activities in which they took part.19 Furthermore, in the latter 1650s and into the 1660s, the withdrawal of merchant capital from Barbados coincided with expanding investment by these individuals in other ventures, including in colonisation in Jamaica, London’s growing banking sector, the resurgent EIC, and the newly established Royal African Company.20 Efforts in the 1650s to establish an English West India Company to bring greater stability and corporate organisation to the governance of the Caribbean colonies had 16 17 18

19 20

Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: the overseas merchant in state and society, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: the rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Recently, Michael Bennett has demonstrated a more complex and interconnected relationship between Barbadian colonisation and the wider English commercial community: ‘Merchant Capital and the Origins of the Barbados Sugar Boom, 1627–1672’ (PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2020). Bennett, ‘Merchant Capital’, pp. 78–109, 146–62. Russell Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), pp. 60–7; Bennett, ‘Merchant Capital’, pp. 273–305.

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been unsuccessful, yet help to demonstrate contemporary mercantile ideas about how trade and empire might be more fruitfully managed after the chaos of the previous decade.21 This deep-set, yet increasingly disconnected, relationship between the English merchant community and Caribbean colonisation helps explain the competitive environment between different English actors in West Africa during this period. Encroachment by colonial traders seeking enslaved captives for plantation labour were opposed by traders seeking gold who had or still were part of the very same Caribbean networks. This means that, even as interconnectivity might present a notion of common purpose, the networks that were taking shape in West Africa were deeply contested among this community. A similar dynamic is visible within the EIC’s interest in West Africa. Here too, participating merchants and other investors understood their participation in Atlantic commerce through lenses that were shaped by diverse interests, commercial and otherwise. In this case, the EIC’s interest in the West Africa trade usefully serves to complicate traditional divisions within historiography about the Atlantic or non-Atlantic world, contributing to a growing body of work seeking to highlight and understand connection between different geographies of England’s emerging empire.22 Indeed, it was specifically connections across different trading regions that attracted the company’s interest because it recognised that the region’s gold trade would fruitfully serve its activities elsewhere in the world, especially in India. Importantly, this relationship meant that the majority of EIC voyages to West Africa were not intended to return directly to England, or even to do so via the Caribbean, but instead continued after collecting gold from the EIC’s storehouse to fund the company’s trade in Asia.23 Not only did this alter the way in which profit and thus trading relationships in the region were assessed, but also served to complicate the way information could be received from the corporation’s factors in West Africa.24 Rather than returning on EIC ships, letters were more commonly sent onboard other English ships trading within the Caribbean and Atlantic, 21 The 1650s proposals for a West India Company are discussed in Bennett, ‘Merchant Capital’, pp. 229–31, but typically have received little interest from historians, possibly as the venture failed to obtain significant support. See also, A. Thornton, West-India Policy Under the Restoration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). 22 Huw Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke and John Reid (eds.), Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 23 Margaret Makepeace, ‘English Traders on the Guinea Coast, 1657–1668: an analysis of the East India Company archive’, History in Africa, 16 (1989), pp. 237–84. 24 For the EIC’s use of letters and information exchange: Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: script and print in the making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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or even on Dutch or other European ships, typically in the hands of EIC personnel who were travelling on board. Furthermore, while some members of the company, as discussed above, were connected to colonial activity in the Caribbean and North America, many others were more familiar with and interested in strictly commercial activity in Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa.25 This meant that even as information was returning to England via less familiar routes, it was being shaped and understood by an array of different ideas about how to conceptualise and situate West Africa within England’s global trading and colonial activities. This served to complicate how information was interpreted once reaching England as well as influencing what sort of information might be included in letters from West Africa. Chief factors would select information to send that they deemed most important rather than necessarily a more thorough picture of how trade in West Africa might have been perceived or understood. Furthermore, controlling and curating information through this corporate structure, especially regarding what and how material would be made public, was an important part of how the EIC sought to ensure it maintained a competitive advantage and allowed it to generate specific narratives about trade and empire in particular contexts.26 Overall, then, this complicated and competitive context of English trade in West Africa between 1657 and 1663 presents a useful case study for examining how news was generated, exchanged, disseminated, and utilised in the early modern Atlantic world. In this environment competition and collaboration across corporations generated a dense web of interlinking, but not always aligned, interests within England about the trade in West Africa. One consequence of this was intense efforts on the part of the EIC to quickly integrate its new activities in West Africa into the corporation’s extensive global circuit of information exchange, with letters, reports and other documents carefully exchanged and collected from across its various Asian factories. These practices of corporate oversight of information will be examined in the first section of the chapter below, which will show both how the corporate network 25 For cross-participation in different parts of England’s overseas activities, see Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English cosmopolitanism in an age of expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Aske Brock, ‘The Company Director: commerce, state and society’ (PhD Thesis, University of Kent, 2017); Edmond Smith, ‘The Global Interests of London’s Commercial Community, 1599–1625: investment in the East India Company’, Economic History Review, 71.4 (2018), pp. 1118–46. 26 For instance, controlling information allowed the company to shape contemporary discussions about international law: Edmond Smith, ‘Reporting and Interpreting Legal Violence in Asia: the East India Company’s printed accounts of torture, 1603–1624’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46.4 (2018), pp. 603–26.

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was organised and how this influenced the sort of news that was transmitted through it. The second section of the chapter will consider the limitations of this corporate structure and consider how an analysis of actor interactions within this network reveals a less hierarchical and more complicated array of information networks that shaped how the EIC received news but also how information was created and used beyond this corporate network. Most importantly, this will show how English engagement with African actors was vital for creating local information networks that could support trade in the region. Furthermore, it will show how African conceptions of European competition and the wider Atlantic world shaped how they engaged with the English merchants in the region. Thus, while the precise context of corporate competition in this episode was not typical of the English experience trading in West Africa, or in the wider Atlantic, the challenges of sharing and interpreting news that are presented here were prevalent across different geographies and chronologies: difficulties in communicating with distant agents; the integral role of non-European agency in shaping information networks; and the importance of porous boundaries between news transmitted on a global scale and the information required by actors to function effectively in their local environments. 1

Corporate Information Networks

By analysing the letter network that has survived in the EIC’s archive, in terms of senders and recipients of letters related to West Africa at least, the corporation clearly held a central role in collecting and distributing information about the region. In the network visualised in figure 10.2 the EIC is presented as by far the most dominant node within the network, both in terms of the number of letters that it sent and received, and the number of different people that it corresponded with. The company’s factors at Kormantine (in modern-day Ghana) received the largest number of letters from the corporation, while the company received the majority of letters sent by the chief factors resident in the region: James Congett, Lancelot Stavely, and Roger Chappell. Secondary but much smaller clusters appear around a combined East India and Guinea Company node, who received letters during the transfer of the region as a single entity, and around the corporate director Maurice Thompson, who sent and received letters on both the Guinea and East India Companies’ behalf. Finally, a notable node within the network is John Cloyce (discussed in greater detail below), the lone African actor named as a recipient or sender of any document during this period. This limited non-European participation in an English letter-network

The East India Company in West Africa

Figure 10.2

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East India Company letter network in West Africa, including senders and recipients, 1657–63

would not have been uncommon, and English corporate and mercantile correspondence was often restricted to members of the same community, even as they regularly engaged across cultural and linguistic boundaries during their commercial activities. In this West African case, especially, where the Akan were a non-textual society, correspondence was not a typical form of communication between European and local actors, even when messages and meetings, delivered orally and/or in person (as explored below), were a typical part of the process of trade and diplomatic exchange. What, though, does this network tell us about the shape and structure of the EIC’s information networks in West Africa and the Atlantic world during this period? Firstly, it would seem to reinforce De Vries’s argument that corporations functioned as central hubs in information networks. However, as we will see, this also masks the complexity of interaction and the transfer of information beyond these letters, an aspect of the limits of this network exemplified by

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the limited inclusion of African actors, despite these being the trading partners who made trade in Africa possible. Secondly, there were multiple corporate organisations present: the East India Company, Guinea Company, East India and Guinea Company, and Company of Royal Adventurers. Although some of these letters were sent between these corporations, others were letters sent by factors in Africa confused or unsure about which corporate information network they were meant to function within. This, too, serves to highlight potential limits in the effective function of corporate information networks, a challenge that was exacerbated by issues not presented in this network that contributed to a disconnection between the corporation in London and its factors in West Africa. The letter network presented here was further complicated in practice by the challenges in transmitting news effectively through exchanges of information that were neither instantaneous nor easy to maintain. Letters from West Africa were typically returned to England on ships that left the coast first for Barbados before re-crossing the Atlantic on the northward trade route back to England, typically in the hands of EIC employees but also carried by trusted third parties. Due to this delay, letters often took months to reach the corporation and were typically carried in batches that combined letters from multiple dates that had been kept until a ship departed Africa towards England. For instance, the first letters to reach London and the corporation after it took over the trade did not arrive until October 1658, eight months after their own orders taking control of the trade had reached Africa, and this pack included letters dated between February and May.27 This represents a considerable disconnect both for the exchange of news and for the company to issue orders and directions to manage the trade. The company received its next letters from Africa later the same month but these had been dispatched from Africa the previous July, having been sent via Holland.28 As these examples suggest, the corporate letter network represented an inconsistent and unpredictable means of communicating between England and Africa, a situation that shaped how and what information was exchanged via the company’s network. In Africa, too, aspects of centralisation can be observed in the structure of the network, with letters often sent to the ‘factors at Kormantine’ rather than a single individual, but these too are limited and reveal potential insecurity of the information system as much as its standardisation. To develop its position in Africa, the EIC adopted a number of strategies designed to effectively manage its trade, its military presence, and its people. In each case, these plans 27 BL, IOR E/3/25/2, ff. 243–50. Letters from factors to EIC, February–May 1658. 28 BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 258. James Congett to EIC, July 1658.

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Figure 10.3

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The Castle Cormantine, by anonymous Dutch print maker, published in London and Amsterdam, 1668–70 Public Domain image, Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

were adapted over time in light of ongoing communication between the company and its employees present at Fort Kormantine (fig. 10.3), and they reveal how the company came quickly to see Africa not just as a peripheral part of its operations but a potentially integral node in network of trading sites, factories, and even colonial acquisitions. In August 1658, the factor James Congett wrote to the company once more, offering much greater detail about the state of trade in West Africa. This remained mostly positive, and the factor reported that there had been a quick sale of goods from England that had enabled him to load £10,000 worth of gold onto the Surat Frigate, along with a consignment of ivory, before the ship continued on its voyage to India. However, Congett also warned that the company needed to adjust its planned exports to the region, requesting ‘that not muskets nor powder should come out nor other ammunition of war (except what for our defence)’ and that he had been forced to hide the muskets they had sent already out of concern they would damage relations with local rulers, who would not permit their sale to traders visiting

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from further inland.29 As this suggests, the orders and goods sent by the EIC based on information available in England were interpreted and understood by factors in Africa in light of their more up to date information about local conditions. The arrival of the Samaritan, on the 16 December 1658, led to a similarly quick turnaround, despite Congett’s concern that the ship had not carried enough brandy for paying ‘customs’, and by 22 February 1659 the ship was loaded with 3,200 ounces of gold and sent on its way to Fort St George in India.30 When Congett left Fort Kormantine in October 1659, following an illness, he reported that the majority of the EIC’s goods had sold, that he had ‘left in the castle in pure gold near 500 marks [4,000 ounces of gold]’, and that the site was ready to receive further ships from England.31 This pattern of trade continued, with the unlading and supply of the Trurow between 28 November 1659 and 5 January 1660 supplying 4,000 ounces of gold for transport to Fort St George (despite the loss of some iron goods through the ship’s captain’s illicit trading activities), followed by the Barbados Merchant that arrived on 21 January 1660, carrying high quality brass and cloth goods that sold quickly before it departed for Fort St George on 1 March 1660 carrying 1,600 ounces of ‘rich Guinea gold’.32 Trade was slowing, by this point, due to conflict between two nearby polities, the Accanies and ‘another country (which the gold must pass through)’, encouraging the factors to send goods unloaded from the Blackmore, that arrived 8 March 1660, to Cape Coast Castle, where they petitioned African ruler John Cloyce to obtain warehouse space.33 This was partly successful, and while the factors reported ‘it was impossible for to answer your order in lading so great a parcel of gold for Surat at desired in so short a time’ and were concerned by poor security at Cape Coast Castle, they had still been able to obtain 1,760 ounces that were laded, and the Blackmore sent on its way, by 20 April 1660.34 The arrival of the Castle Frigate on 17 June 1660, however, 29 BL, IOR E/3/25/2, ff. 286–7. James Congett in Kormantine to EIC, 8 October 1658. 30 BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 288. James Congett in Kormantine to EIC, 27 December 1658; BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 337. James Congett in Kormantine to Henry Greenhill and Factors of Fort St George, 22 February 1659; BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 339. Thomas Clark off Kormantine to EIC, 22 February 1659. 31 BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 50. James Congett in Barbados to EIC, 4 February 1660. This value of gold left at Fort Kormantine was later disputed by Congett’s successor. BL, IOR E/3/26, ff. 187–8. Roger Chapell and Factors at Kormantine to EIC, 16 July 1660. 32 BL, IOR E/3/26, ff. 143–4, 146. Roger Chappell at Kormantine to EIC, 1 March 1660. 33 BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 144. Chappell to EIC, 1 March 1660; BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 147. Roger Chappell at Kormantine to EIC, 8 March 1660. 34 BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 186. Agent and Factors at Kormantine to EIC, 1 May 1660.

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meant that more goods had been sold, and the vessel was quickly able to restock supplies in Africa, load 960 ounces of gold, and depart for Bantam less than a month later on 13 July.35 With each ships coming and going, new orders were brought from the EIC, new letters were dispatched back by its factors, and the trade in West Africa was shaped a combination of centralised governance and accepted flexibility on the part of factors in the region. In this environment, it is not surprising that many letters between the corporation and its agents on the African coast related to commercial matters. The transmission of information in the Atlantic world was often economic in focus. Lancelot Staveley, writing from Fort Kormantine in February 1658, asked that the EIC would ‘supply the coast with linen sheets, large brass the lightest that can be gotten, iron, Flemish sayes, rugs, niccanees, brawles, Guinea cloth’ that they could exchange for gold. He also requested ‘two pinnaces that may draw not above six foot water, for the Benin and Gaboone trade and to the Bight for teeth [ivory]’ that should carry ‘cargoes of Coromandel long cloth’ as well as calicos and manillas.36 With news like this, highlighting as it did the possibilities of a connected commercial strategy between West Africa and India, the EIC also took care to capitalise on commercial opportunities stemming from the potential for connecting the African trade with the company’s wider interests. Thus, during discussions about expanding the company’s trade additional commodities were presented as suitable exports (or re-exports) to the region, including beads and coral.37 Enduring, and increasing, demand for pewter and iron, commodities easily obtained in England, were also welcomed by the company and requested in greater volumes by factors in Africa.38 Most attractive still, though, were possibilities to ‘bring to this place of all sorts of East India commodities that are vendible here without paying any customs excise or other charges’. If possible, James Congett suggested, such a trade of Asian goods into Africa could be organised through the company’s colony at St Helena in the southern Atlantic, which likewise could be supplied with slaves from West Africa to provide labour for the new plantation.39 Not only would this increase the effectiveness of East India Company’s possessions as

35 36 37 38

BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 187–8. Chapell to EIC, 16 July 1660. BL, IOR E/3/25/2, ff. 243–4. Lancelot Staveley to EIC, 22 February 1658. BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 262. Congett to EIC, 10 July 1658. BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 146. Chappell to EIC, March 1660. BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 147. List of the Prices of Goods as We Now Sell, 1 March 1660; BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 186. Factors at Kormantine to EIC, 1 May 1660. 39 BL, IOR E/3/26, ff. 48–50. Congett to EIC, 20 June 1659.

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a means of supplying gold for its Asian trade, but it would also help deepen connections across its holdings and help maximise profits. One consequence of the distance between the EIC and its factors in Africa was a requirement for its factors to act and respond to changing conditions without much in the way of corporate direction. Thus, without the possibility of receiving any instructions to the contrary in a timely manner, when a senior factor left Fort Kormantine in 1658 James Congett cheerfully informed the EIC that he had ‘with the consent of the rest of [the] factors’ been chosen to take his place. Placed in this new position of authority, Congett had been delivered ‘all your [the company’s] interest upon the coast, with all gold, merchandises, and household necessaries together with the slaves and pawnes’. Congett, of course, promised that ‘my labour and pains shall not be wanting’ and would ‘endeavour in all things [to] give you a just and faithful account’ of his activities, but as the main conduit for news between Africa and the EIC it would be difficult for the company to independently monitor or direct his activities.40 Although, nominally, the EIC would need to confirm the appointment, the time lag in sending and receiving information, and the immediate departure of his predecessor from the coast, meant that Congett was placed in a position of considerable corporate authority as a consequence of his place within the local English network in Africa. Establishing a corporate information network in West Africa was aided, but also complicated, by the enduring presence of factors who had previously been employed by the Guinea Company. On the one hand, this enabled the EIC to employ individuals who might have specific expertise and experience related to the trade, while on the other, it presented potential challenges regarding the loyalty of factors to the new organisation and difficulties in imposing the EIC’s authority in the region. For instance, three months after his letter to the EIC discussed above, Lancelot Staveley was still corresponding with the Guinea Company. Informing them that he had received the order to ‘deliver up the castle, sub-factories and all things therein … to the EIC’, the factor reported that he intended to return to England at the first possible opportunity.41 Similarly, James Congett sent the Guinea Company letters after the EIC’s takeover of the trade in July 1658, mainly regarding various debts incurred during his time in its employ, but also with a brief note about current conditions on the coast.42

40 BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 258. James Congett to EIC, 3 July 1658. 41 BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 244. Lancelot Staveley to Guinea Company, May 1658. 42 BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 260. James Congett to Guinea Company, 3 July 1658.

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These difficulties were expressed, quite clearly, in a letter from James Congett to the EIC in 1658, where the factor explained that the EIC’s demand that one John Gardiner should be refused employment because he had ‘run out your estate to the account of many hundreds of pounds’ was a mistake. The factors in West Africa together wrote to ‘certify [to] your honours that it is a misinformation and he [was] much wronged’ by the accusation. It seemed, they explained, ‘to be a mistake in the names’ whereby the company were ‘taking John Gardiner instead of Thomas Gardiner, who was much engaged in the worshipful Guinea Company’ as was actually responsible for the debt.43 The following March, John Gardiner sent a further letter explaining that the EIC’s information was incorrect, where he assured them ‘my name is not Thomas Gardiner but John Gardiner’ and that he had been employed in West Africa since 1655 but had never been indebted to either the EIC or the Guinea Company.44 During the process of handing over control of the West African trade, vital details regarding employees and accounts had not been transferred effectively, leading to the EIC relying on its factors’ greater knowledge of earlier English trade in Africa to help it avoid mistakes. 2

Factors and Their Networks in Africa

It was these relationships, of the factors that the EIC depended on so much in West Africa, that show the limits of the corporate network by revealing the scale and structure of networks that lay just beyond it. Considering the relationships between factors in West Africa and the people they were engaging with on a day-to-day basis requires focus not on the senders and recipients of letters in these information networks but instead on the interactions between individuals described within this correspondence. In doing so, the visualisation of the EIC’s network in Africa takes on a very different shape (fig. 10.4). At first glance, and importantly, the information network presented is clearly more complex, involving more people, more distinct clusters, and represents exchanges that passed through multiple individuals, often presenting the passage of information from within the corporate network to spaces beyond it, including numerous African rulers and merchants. Rather than the EIC standing out as a single dominant node within the network, the most important nodes are instead the chief factors employed in West Africa. Information flowed around and through 43 BL, IOR E/3.25, f. 290. Certificate concerning John Gardiner, 1658. 44 BL, IOR E/3.25, f. 301. John Gardiner at Kormantine to the EIC, 28 October 1659.

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Figure 10.4

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Actor network related to East India Company in West Africa, visualising interactions described in correspondence

these individuals before it was passed by them onto the EIC in London, generating a situation whereby local knowledge was more textured, detailed and drawing on multiple sources of information in ways that the information transmitted back to England could never hope to match. This was especially important in relation to how the EIC could respond to the demands and expectations of African participants in the trade, whose relationships were strictly with the company’s factors rather than the corporation itself, and how it could respond to rapidly changing conditions in West Africa. Such dissonance suggests that the company remained highly dependent on traditional practices of overcoming the principal-agent problem: corporate oversight could not ensure good practice alone.

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However, it also highlights how the corporate framework could effectively provide an information framework that could support commercial activities overseas without diminishing the ability of factors to adapt to changing conditions and operate as trusted agents of the corporation. This is notable, especially, in relation to the exchanges between the company’s factors and an array of African merchants and rulers in relation to Cape Coast Castle, where individual factors were able to sustain relationships in ways that were impossible for the corporation in London. First, in the network above, the African merchant John Cloyce is a central figure, with more interactions than any but the five key factors based in West Africa, demonstrating the regular and sustained engagement between the EIC’s factors and this powerful local figure. Secondly, and just as importantly, the network also includes multiple interactions with numerous otherwise unidentified African actors that were important parts of the EIC’s network. These included local African rulers, including the kings of ‘Fetu’, ‘Aguineas’, ‘Fantynes’ and ‘Accanies’, numerous anonymous African traders and ‘great men’ across the region, and the named African actors within this network: ‘Quateen’, ‘Quy’, ‘Noona’, ‘Brassoe’, ‘Cabessa’, ‘Yaco’, ‘Tymm’, and ‘Yankee’. This served to connect ‘local communities and international networks’ of information exchange.45 It is important to acknowledge, though, that while such a visualisation can contribute to ‘an impressionistic picture of a “connected world” in which the distant reaches of the globe were linked through flows of objects, information and people’, these very connections need to be compared with the limited network exhibited above. The corporate structure that defined so much of England’s overseas activity could serve to truncate the same flows of information.46 In one example of the types of relationships presented here, Lancelot Staveley’s correspondence from 1658, discussed above, reveals quite clearly that as well as being a conduit for exchanging information between himself and the EIC, the factor also served as an interlocutor between the company and African commercial networks. Alongside the list of commodities sought after in the region, the factor also informed the EIC about local political and commercial conditions. He noted that ‘the Accanies being all up in the country at wars’ and that he had consequently ‘prevailed with the [EIC’s ship’s] Captain to go up and acquaint the merchants that I have now a ship arrived from our new company and that they should have continued supplies with 45

Filippo de Vivo, ‘Prospect or Refuge? Microhistory, History on the Large Scale’, Cultural and Social History, 7.3 (2010), p. 392. 46 John-Paul Ghobrial, ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Micro­ history’, Past & Present, 222 (2014), p. 56.

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goods’. Travelling personally, Staveley could communicate with local actors beyond the reach of the corporation’s letter network and having ‘used such arguments’ he ‘procured this port of Kormantine only to be opened to trade’, quickly obtaining 140 marks of gold that were shipped onwards to India.47 This episode highlights the vital role played by factors in bridging the gap between the corporation and local networks of exchange and also served to highlight the potential precarity of the EIC’s position. Staveley had no intention of staying in Africa to serve the new corporation and would take his expertise and relationships with him when he left only a few months later.48 Other factors chose to stay in Africa following the EIC’s takeover. James Congett, who was thrust into a senior position on the coast in 1658, had been employed in the region by the Guinea Company for the previous five years. Not only staying on in the employ of the EIC, he likely obtained his promotion in part due to recognition of his experience but also due to existing relationships with other Guinea Company factors.49 Similarly, John Gardner (the same John who was mistaken for Thomas above), writing in May 1658 to the EIC, his new employer, reported that he had worked ‘in the worshipful Guinea Company’s service’ since April 1655. Having ‘served them truly and faithfully’ as accountant at Fort Kormantine, and with the recommendation of Staveley, he hoped that now the EIC would ‘be pleased to grant me such an allowance of salary as the worshipful Guinea Company hath formerly given to several persons in its employ’ and retain him as factor.50 For both Congett and Gardner, their experience working in Africa during the Guinea Company’s command of the trade led to their obtaining and holding positions of some authority. This experience, and the relationships with local actors that it represented, were vital for the EIC to engage effectively with local people and to ensure that they understood and could profit from the conditions around them. This is notable throughout the EIC’s archive in relation to the corporation’s hope to obtain possession of Cape Coast Castle, a site that was larger, more defensible, and more closely integrated with local trading networks (fig. 10.5). The company’s factors hoped that, through positive relations with the African leader ‘John Cloyce’, they might be able to obtain ownership of the fortress. The castle had been built in 1653 by Hendrik Carloff for the Swedish Africa Company, who 47 48 49 50

BL, IOR E/3/25/2, ff. 243–4. Lancelot Staveley to EIC, 22 February 1658. BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 244. Lancelot Staveley to Guinea Company, May 1658. BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 260. James Congett to Guinea Company, 3 July 1658. BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 250. John Gardner to EIC, May 1658.

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Cape Coast Castle/Cabo Corso in 1682, etching based on drawing by Henry Greenhill Public Domain image, Courtesy of Slaveryimages.org

then seized it from the Swedish company in 1657 in the name of the Danish West India Company, who then lost it to the Dutch in 1659. However, these actions were not well received by local rulers, who insisted that the fort had been granted to Sweden alone, giving the English actors in the region encouragement that they might be granted the fort and its rich trade. As early as August 1658, James Congett had suggested ‘that if it [Cape Coast Castle] was to be sold that they [the EIC] would be pleased to buy it’. He suggested that the site ‘is a very strong place, and Cape Coast is a very good place, the best upon the coast for gold, having more gold brought there than anywhere else’. Not only was gold accessible, but market conditions were also deemed favourable, and he assured the company the main supplier was ‘a black called John Cloyce, who is a great lover of the English nation and would have us take possession of that castle’. If the East India Company did not seek to take control of Cape Coast Castle, Congett warned, then there was a good chance it would pass to the Dutch and the English ‘must expect to be turned out’ and lose access to the trade entirely.51 51 BL, IOR E/3/25/2, f. 286. Congett to EIC, 8 October 1658.

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Congett’s fears about Dutch seizure of Cape Coast Castle turned out to be prescient, and, as noted, in April 1659 the Dutch took ownership of the fortress, either purchasing or taking it from the Danes following its conquest by Henrick Carloff a year earlier. Indeed, Congett suggested that this had been part of a conspiracy between the Dutch and Carloff, and noted that there had been considerable Dutch support for his attack, suggesting that there had been an agreement whereby ‘if they [the Dutch] would further him [Carloff] and not hinder him after he had taken all he would surrender the forts to their hands’. However, despite the strong Dutch presence, Cape Coast Castle soon fell into African hands when it was attacked by John Cloyce and a force of 2000 African musketeers, who held it with the expectation of returning it to the Swedish Africa Company, with the tacit agreement, Congett believed, of handing it to the English if the Swedes had not returned within a year. If this came to pass, or if the EIC could purchase Cape Coast Castle from the Swedish, Congett believed the African trade ‘would prove better and more profitable that the trade to East India’.52 Cloyce was still in possession of the fortress the following September, when he refused to hand it over to the commander of ‘two great Danish ships’ and was reported to ‘stand firm on his resolution to keep the castle for the Swedes’.53 By March 1660, Cloyce informed the EIC’s factor Roger Chappell that ‘he with the rest of the country are resolved to keep it in their possession until they see a man come from the Swedes and bring them an absolute denial that they would not come there again, and more over that he had sent two blacks into Swedeland to the king to know his mind’. Chappell, too, believed the company ‘must buy it’, even as rumours spread that ‘it cannot be done without great expense, the Dutch and Danes proffering vast sums for it’.54 In January 1661, the EIC’s factors received news that the company had, finally, sent orders ‘condescending to the obtaining Cape Coast Castle’ and had promised a ‘large sum [it was] pleased to expend for its procuring’.55 52 BL, IOR E/3/26, ff. 48–50. Congett to EIC, 20 June 1659. Carloff had, previously, been employed by the Dutch West India Company in Brazil and Africa, before serving the Swedish Africa Company and then the Danish Africa Company, for whom he captured Fort Carolusburg (Cape Coast Castle) in 1658. When peace between Denmark and Sweden was agreed in 1660 it was expected the fort would be returned to Swedish hands, at which point it became clear that all of the Danish company’s properties had been sold to the Dutch West India Company on 16 April 1659. 53 BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 50. Congett to EIC, 4 February 1660. 54 BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 146. Chappell to EIC, 1st March 1660; BL, IOR E/3/26, f. 178. John Puleston at Cape Coast to EIC, 10 March 1660. 55 BL, IOR E/3/26, ff. 212–5. Agent and Factors at Kormantine to the EIC in London, 14 January 1661.

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Crown for the King of Ardra, English by anonymous craftsman, c.1664 Public Domain image, Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

With these orders in hand, the EIC’s factors in West Africa continued to report their efforts to obtain the fortress and its associated trade for the company, revealing an array of relationships that show these actors seeking to influence and obtain information from within local networks. This focused on two main strategies: offering continuing commercial advantage to John Cloyce and other African merchants that made them more attractive than the Dutch, and regular diplomatic and personal visits that served to strengthen existing relationships. During these encounters gifts were presented, leading to the ‘greatest charge’ in establishing trade to the rulers and ‘great men’ with whom the

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EIC sought to do business in West Africa.56 Gifts included items like the crown in fig. 10.6, carried by the Royal Adventurers for presentation to the King of Ardra. Despite its impressive form, the crown was made of inexpensive materials such as copper and glass and was likely intended as a symbolic gesture and potentially an intriguing exotic item for the African ruler.57 Yet, despite these efforts, the EIC’s factors complained that ‘for all the presents […] which have been given to John Cloyce, the king, and great men’, they ‘cannot persuade them to yield up the castle’ until news had arrived from the king of Sweden.58 Despite this limited success, the extension of English factor’s networks into local spaces did have some positive repercussions. In November 1660, the EIC received news that ‘John Cloyce with the general consent of the country gave us leave to build a stone house [at Cape Coast, to protect their goods from fire and theft] and that they would give us all assistance possible for the finishing thereof’.59 Over the coming months, the EIC’s factors continued to send news of ongoing negotiations with John Cloyce and other African actors about the company’s proposed takeover of Cape Coast Castle. In July 1661 news was dispatched to England that the King of Accanies had been persuaded to back the English position, and he ‘in our presence’ had informed Cloyce that ‘they [the Accanies] would leave his country for they found that Swedes and Danes had not goods or merchandise to supply their markets’ and that he should have ‘the castle delivered up unto us’ to guarantee the supply of European goods.60 The influence of African demands, it seems, had the desired effect and by the end of the year the factors could write to London that ‘for the further advancement of trade we have procured licence from John Cloyce for the half part of the Castle at Cape Coast’ and that they intended to send ‘our agent speedily’ to meet with him to secure the other half too.61 Soon after, this too looked likely to be achieved and the EIC finally looked set to obtain the fortified position and key market that they hoped would allow them to dominate the gold trade in 56 BL, IOR E/3/26, ff. 212–5. Agent and Factors at Kormantine to the EIC in London, 3 November 1660. 57 The crown is held in the Rijksmuseum collection as it was seized by the Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter before it could reach its African destination: http://hdl.handle .net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.233390. (CCO 1.0 Universal) 58 BL, IOR E/3/26, ff. 186–8. Agent and Factors at Kormantine to the EIC in London, 1 May 1660. 59 BL, IOR E/3/26, ff. 212–5. Agent and Factors at Kormantine to the EIC in London, 3 November 1660. 60 BL, IOR E/3/27, ff. 40–3. Agent and Factors at Kormantine to the EIC in London, 4 July 1661. 61 BL, IOR E/3/27, ff. 101–2. Agent and Factors at Kormantine to the EIC in London, 23 January 1662.

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West Africa. It was, however, not to be, and by December 1662 it was not John Cloyce in Africa but the new Company of Royal Adventurers that the EIC was treating with, and Cape Coast Castle soon passed into the new corporation’s hands without them having any need to build relationships with the African rulers and merchants that the market had been intended to serve. After carefully building networks to share news, information and influence, the network was severed and the EIC would no longer serve as a conduit for news about West Africa. News in West Africa, of course, continued to flow. 3 Conclusion The two sections in this chapter have shown how English actors in West Africa sought to engage in information networks that served to simultaneously provide structure and connection between agents in Africa and the EIC in London while also allowing flexibility for factors to participate in the complex webs of exchanges that made commercial activity in the region possible. Rather than strength in a strictly hierarchical model of information exchanges, the EIC’s organisational structure relied on effective local networks that enabled the exchange of information to take place rapidly and for decisions to be made that could take advantage of the best information available. Thus, when seeking to build relations with African rulers like John Cloyce, EIC factors in West Africa had considerable room to manoeuvre. This is important for understanding the wider dynamics of information exchange across the Atlantic world as it helps highlight the networks and exchanges that took place in spaces beyond the control of English corporate authority. The African actors that made decisions about who to trade with, where to trade, and what goods they wanted were protagonists in shaping commercial activity in the region that the English had to understand and engage with. That being said, the corporate structure also meant that these same actors were kept at a certain distance from the corporation’s leadership, with minimal or no direct interaction that was not managed by the EIC’s factors present in West Africa. From the EIC’s perspective, information was obtained, typically from only a handful of trusted employees within a strictly regulated system of information of exchange that allowed it to collect and respond to news from across the world. In turn, corporate records can do much to help us understand the transmission of information and the role of indigenous people like John Cloyce within these exchanges, but they can only go so far in revealing how news about spaces and societies beyond the corporation might have looked from the perspective of the people on the fringes of the corporate network.

Chapter 11

The Atlantic Correspondence of the Royal African Company, 1678–1681 David Brown At first glance, the Royal African Company (RAC), which invited its first subscribers on 10 November 1671 and began trading in late 1674, appears to be as monolithic as any modern international company. During the second half of the seventeenth century the RAC was headquartered in ‘The African House’, Throgmorton Street, London. From this location, a group of clerks managed a business with outposts throughout the Atlantic world. Although the company’s main activity was the trade in enslaved African people, its activities also included trade in African commodities, principally ivory and gold, and in the products of plantation agriculture that it accepted as payment for the people who survived the crossing from West Africa to the Americas in the company’s ships. The RAC was also a major exporter of English manufactured goods, principally cloth and metal goods but also the building materials and provisions necessary to supply its many outposts. In addition, the company was a major re-exporter of goods that were not available cheaply in Britain, for example the bar and cast iron that was its effective currency in much of West Africa. These complex operations employed many people, from the clerks and senior company assistants at The African House, and involved warehouses, a significant banking function, and the myriad tasks involved in fitting out and crewing the company’s vessels. At the centre, the RAC appears almost modern with its complex operations commanded from a headquarters with a traditional hierarchical structure. At the top of this hierarchy was the Court of Assistants that kept the shareholders’ register, hired staff, chartered ships, and organised the purchase and sale of goods. The RAC’s records, which survive almost intact, exhibit the careful accountancy and record-keeping of a carefully run and successful company.1 The business correspondence presented here, however, was not drafted in The African House, but at the periphery of the company’s own empire, in 1 The main archive of the Royal African Company is in TNA, T 70. This is a division of the main series of Treasury records and covers the entire period of the company’s existence, 1660–1833. The letter books comprise a sub-series within TNA, T 70.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004689879_012

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the early years of the RAC’s development and expansion, where chaos and catastrophe were frequently the order of the day. Preserved in the company’s archives at The National Archives, Kew, these incoming letters that range in date from 1678 to 1681 are the unique testament of the men who founded England’s overseas empire.2 For many, it was their final testament. The letters, always frank and revealing, are a record of the commodification of people for profit as well as a window onto the way in which commercial information was exchanged within the RAC. The writers narrate the lawlessness ever-present in the seventeenth-century slave trade and expose surprising differences towards race in the widely dispersed regions of the emerging English empire. Silent in these letters, however, are the voices of the African people whom these men enslaved.3 The RAC was backed by and received significant funding from the British royal family (King Charles II, his brother James, Duke of York, and their cousin, Prince Rupert), and was the culmination of many years of sustained royal interest in the trade in enslaved Africans. The royals were initially not just passive investors but regularly participated in the running of the company, routinely attending meetings of the Court of Assistants, the company’s senior decision-making body. The Stuarts’ active interest in the African slave trade began within a few months of Charles’s return to England in May 1660. On 18 December 1660, Charles granted the Africa trade to Rupert, James Duke of York, several other family members, some leading courtiers, and forty-six named merchants.4 A similar grant was issued to the Duke of York and a smaller group of merchants on 11 September 1661 to establish the ‘Morocco Company’, intended to commercially exploit the British conquest of Tangier.5 After a sputtering start, the ‘Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa’ received a renewed charter on 20 January 1663 and began to collect subscriptions. By March 1664, the company had commenced regular meetings and made the Duke of York its governor.6 The Royal Adventurers envisaged two arenas of commercial activity. The first was to use the new base at Tangier to service 2 TNA, T 70/1: Royal African Company Letterbook, 1678–1681. 3 An excellent introduction to the African perspective is provided by Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2019). 4 George F. Zook, The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa (Lancaster, PA: New Era Publishing Company, 1919), p. 8. 5 CSPC, vol. 5, p. 55. 6 TNA, T 70/75, f. 7r. I am very grateful to the generosity of Paul Dryburgh of the National Archives, a colleague on the Beyond 2022 project, who photographed and forwarded several volumes of Royal Africa Company records during the 2020 Covid lockdown.

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Spain’s demand for slaves through their outpost in North Africa.7 Their second goal was to reoccupy and rebuild an abandoned English outpost on the River Gambia, in West Africa. The most striking feature of the rolls of attendance for the company’s meetings, however, is the presence at almost all of them of both royal princes, the Duke of York and Prince Rupert. The Company of Royal Adventurers thereby provided a novel opportunity for ordinary merchants to have regular audiences with the royal family, and for commercial information to be exchanged between them. The Royal Adventurers soon lost all of their stock and money, valued together at some £175,000, during the course of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, 1665–67.8 Charles’s solution to this disaster was to establish the RAC to replace his now worthless shares in the old company at a rate of two new shares for three old ones and provide a pool of new investors for his imperial dream.9 The royal family attended their last meeting in December 1671 and the company was, thereafter, managed somewhat more professionally by the bankers and shipping agents who were also at the heart of the Stuarts’ financial and naval administration.10 Although the RAC continued the trade of its predecessors in gold, hardwoods and ivory, the primary goal of the company was to deliver enslaved Africans to the English Caribbean for approximately £17–£19 per person.11 From London, this seemed like a simple business. Although a minority of the investors in the RAC also had interests in Caribbean plantations, most were drawn from a mixed group of courtiers and London financiers who had missed out on the dramatic expansion of England’s Atlantic economy during the 1650s.12 The slave trade offered an opportunity to participate in the still burgeoning Atlantic economy, but with far less capital than the large sums required to establish a plantation on the other side of the Atlantic. In this way, the RAC served the interests of new investors who were hoping to profit from the West Indies sugar boom. Sugar exports from Barbados, England’s 7 8

CSPC, vol. 5, p. 179. See D. R. Hainsworth and C. Churches, The Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars, 1652–1674 (Sutton: Stroud, 1998) and G. Rommelse, The Second Anglo-Dutch War, 1665–1667 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006). 9 TNA, T 70/75, ff. 92–110. 10 For the close links between the RAC and the administration of state finance see David Brown, ‘The great gage: Mortgaging Ireland to finance an empire’ in Gurminder K. Bhambra and Julia McClure (eds.), Imperial Inequalities: The politics of economic governance across European empires (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022). 11 CSPC, vol. 5, p. 119. According to the currency conversion tool available from The National Archives (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/), £18 in the 1670s was equivalent to 200 days wages for a skilled tradesman, or three horses. 12 For an overview of the RAC see K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, 1957).

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most important centre for sugar production in the mid-seventeenth century, increased from 3,750 tons to 10,000 tons between 1652 and 1683, while the island’s population of African origin exploded from 12,000 to 45,000 in the same period, all of whom were enslaved.13 Most incoming RAC letters were addressed to the company’s Court in London.14 The international agents of the RAC were in the uniquely privileged position of having access to their own fleet of ships to maintain communications with home. An English postal service had emerged in the late fifteenth century and was formalised, by means of a monopoly, in 1517.15 A ‘foreign post’ to Europe was licenced in 1617 and a post office was established in Barbados in 1663.16 Throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, however, although a sporadic packet service existed between the colonies and London, there were no regular licenced communications between the colonies of the British Atlantic world or the outposts of the RAC in West Africa. The only comparable service was operated by the RAC’s competitor, the Dutch West India Company, throughout the mid-seventeenth century.17 The RAC correspondence is, therefore, atypical for the period as a fast, reliable and private communications network, and it exposes the ways that business information was exchanged throughout this organisation. Although the royal family had ceased to attend meetings of the RAC’s Court of Assistants in person, digests of the incoming letters from company factors were routinely prepared and passed on to Charles and James Duke of York.18 This business correspondence thereby bypassed the usual court sources for 13 Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), pp. 68, 115. 14 These letters contrast sharply with the contemporaneous business letters of William Freeman, a Caribbean planter turned London financier whose correspondence is devoted to instruments of credit and the completion of contracts. See David Hancock (ed.), William Freeman, ‘Introduction’, in The Letters of William Freeman, London Merchant, 1678–1685 (London: Record Society, 2002). They complement the immensely valuable archive of RAC letters from Africa published by Robin Law that begin immediately after this series ends in 1681 and are confined to Africa only: Robin Law (ed.), The English in West Africa 1681–1699: The Local Correspondence of the Royal Africa Company of England, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997–2007). 15 Duncan Campbell-Smith, Masters of the Post: The Authorized History of the Royal Mail (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 7–9. 16 William Smith, The History of the Post Office in North America, 1639–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1920), p. 4. 17 The majority of the correspondence of the Dutch West Indies Company is lost, but a collection of letters sent to New Netherland (New York) can be consulted at the New York Public Library: MssCol 2131. 18 These instructions appear routinely throughout the minute books of the Court of Assistants.

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external news, be it the Board of Trade or the English state’s network of spies and ambassadors, and gives a unique insight into the detailed information that Charles was receiving from the most far flung corners of his realms. Carried directly on company ships and pre-empting the development of an international postal service to serve the empire, the RAC’s correspondence provided privileged and early information on conditions throughout England’s Atlantic sphere of interest. For many areas, particularly West Africa, the RAC letters were England’s only regular source of direct intelligence as the state lacked a military or diplomatic presence outside of the English Caribbean or North American colonies. Moreover, the letters comprise the written memory of the progenitors of England’s trade in enslaved people on both sides of the Atlantic. This trade became the foundation on which England’s later empire was built. From 1679 to 1682 the RAC had twelve primary places of business, known as ‘factories’, from which these letters were sent. The term ‘factory’ overstates the permanency of some of these locations which could be short-lived installations, amalgamated with their neighbours as the RAC’s business developed. On the West African side of the Atlantic there is correspondence from Alampo, Bence Island, Cape Coast Castle (the RAC’s headquarters in Africa), James Island, Ophra, Sherbro, and Sierra Leone. On the western side of the Atlantic, most letters are from England’s Caribbean Island colonies, Barbados, Jamaica, and Nevis. Only a handful originate from elsewhere, three from Virginia and six from ships in transit on company business. Although the letters are recorded in simple chronological order in the manuscript, here they are organised into two halves to replicate the structure of the RAC’s operations, the ‘supply’ side in West Africa and the ‘delivery’ side in the Caribbean. For each half the letters are further organised chronologically by their place of business and the specific characteristics of each is drawn from these sections. 1

The African Correspondence

Zachary Rogers, the RAC’s chief factor at Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone, was an experienced Africa agent who had worked for the Gambia Company in 1665.19 Following his move to Sherbro in the service of the RAC, Rogers married a relation of the Bulom king of Sherbro, known as ‘the great woman’, and the couple had a son, also named Zachary. Rogers became rich through defrauding the 19 Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (PhD Thesis, University College London, 1966), p. 405.

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company, mainly through monopolising the Camwood trade and selling the timber to interlopers. After his death, Zachary Jr took over his father’s private account and although the RAC tried to remove him in 1692, on account of his mixed race, Rogers Jr was too popular locally to be dislodged, and too well connected on account of his royal lineage.20 During the period of these letters, the Sherbro base was on the mainland but was transferred to a fortified settlement on York Island in 1678.21 The company tried repeatedly to assert its control over the Rogers’s dealings at Sherbro, without any success. Rogers Snr died on 14 February 1680 and Roger Platt was seconded there from Bence Island in 1682 to ingratiate the king with the company, but this attempt appears to have been nearly fruitless.22 In order to take advantage of RAC resources, Rogers Snr wrote to London giving the impression that there was little trade to be had, but suggested that with more supplies he might be able to develop the outpost.23 He maintained this pretence until his death. Uniquely among the RAC’s senior agents, Rogers took no part in the trade of enslaved Africans and his instructions to visiting ships were explicit in their directions to trade for timber and ivory only. His African family undoubtedly influenced his behaviour although his departure from the Gambia heralded the introduction of an agent determined to develop that base as a centre for the slave trade. Rogers Snr’s letters therefore not only reveal his departure from the ways that other senior agents in the RAC operated, but serve as a useful reminder to historians against taking the contents of business correspondence at face value. In this case, our knowledge of the broader context exposes the disingenuous nature of Rogers’s information. The governor of the James Island factory at the mouth of the River Gambia, appointed in January 1677, was Thomas Thurloe. Thomas was the third son of John Thurloe, England’s Secretary of State under the Cromwellian Protectorate. The most striking feature of Thurloe’s letters from James Island in 1678 was the chronic levels of mortality reported among the officers of visiting ships and the difficulties these deaths caused in preventing the factor from embarking the maximum number of enslaved people.24 Thurloe tried to remedy this by hiring a French vessel and crew to make a voyage to Barbados and Virginia, indicating that some cooperation existed between the agents of competing European companies. In his last letters in the autumn of 1679 Thurloe 20 Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, pp. 480–485. 21 Adam Jones, ‘White Roots: Written and Oral Testimony on the “first” Mr Rogers’, History in Africa, 10 (1983), p. 151. 22 Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, p. 355. 23 TNA, T 70/1, f. 32. 24 TNA, T 70/1, ff. 15, 18.

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complained about the poor quality of English ships sent to receive his enslaved captives, ‘not having convenience to let in ayre to them’.25 This reservation did not prevent Thurloe from packing 254 people into the airless hold of one ship or expanding his remit to purchase enslaved people from as far away as Sierra Leone to earn his commission by embarking them at James Island. Disease had claimed Thurloe’s own life by 1680 and the position of factor at James Island was taken over by Thomas Horde who arrived to find Thurloe dead and Thurloe’s assistant, Thomas Phelps, gravely ill.26 James Island had been taken over by an interloper, Captain Charles Plumer, who first agreed with Horde to cooperate with the newly appointed factor, then broke his word and departed with a full complement. While Horde waited for new supplies, more European ships called, and Horde noted that most of the crews of these ships were either dead or dying. A practical if inexperienced manager, Horde sent multiple orders back to the company in London for building materials and artisans, with a request that replacement artisans were sent with every ship as he did not expect these men to live for very long.27 Horde himself died in 1680 and James Island was then managed briefly by the RAC’s ‘old hand’ in the region, Zachary Rogers, who stabilised the outpost. A subsequent investigation by a company investigator, John Kastell, sent out to investigate what had gone wrong under the stewardship of Thurloe and Horde, chronicled both factors’ seemingly unending incompetence.28 Thurloe had provisioned Charles Plumer’s ship but was then paid with a bill of exchange that had no value, while the French ship Thurloe had hired simply sailed away with the RAC’s hoard of iron bars and was later found partially disintegrated on the shoreline. Alexander Cleave took over from Zachary Rogers in August 1680 and remained at the Gambia outpost for many years, at least until 1687. The start of Cleave’s tenure marked the professionalisation of the Gambia base and a major investment in it by the RAC. The men sent out were paid in London, rather than bartering their service for African goods, suitable accommodation was constructed, and medicines were supplied by the company.29 James Island was heavily fortified, and its commander was ready to fire on other European vessels that attempted to encroach on the RAC’s area of operation. Company ships that called at James Island tended to travel directly from England to the 25 26 27 28 29

TNA, T 70/1, f. 30. TNA, T 70/1, f. 57. TNA, T 70/1, f. 59. TNA, T 70/1, f. 81. TNA, T 70/1, ff. 82–4.

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Caribbean and were involved exclusively in the slave trade. There is scant evidence of trade within Africa from the Gambia factory for any commodities.30 The facility at Bence Island, on the mouth of the Sierra Leone River and very close to Sherbro, was purchased by the RAC from the old Gambia company on 31 October 1678.31 The island was named for the Bence brothers, Alexander and James, financiers from Dublin and London who were significant investors in both companies.32 Edmund Pierce, who rose through the ranks of the RAC to become factor in chief before his death in 1683, arrived at Bence Island in December 1678 to inspect the new investment.33 Pierce was instructed to fortify the factory, especially against French interlopers, and make it ready to receive a cargo of goods to trade for the enslaved.34 In his short career, Pierce proposed returning English-speaking enslaved men from Barbados to act as interlocutors for the RAC in Sierra Leone, and in another scheme proposed sending enslaved Africans to England to learn a trade, imagining that he could enhance the value of the enslaved men by educating them with western skills.35 Unusually for senior figures in Protestant-dominated colonial merchant circles, Pierce was a Catholic by faith and left instructions in his will that his son, John Pierce, was to be brought within six months to a Father Anthony de Truxillo who was to educate the boy until the age of eighteen. Pierce’s ten slaves were to be sold to pay for the child’s education. His will suggests that Pierce had either brought his family to Africa with him, or started a family while he was there. Pierce bequeathed a further enslaved woman and her child to ‘Senora Margaret Mitchel’, possibly the mother of Pierce’s own son. He left the remainder of his property to his colleagues at Bence Island. All of Pierce’s property was the currency of the slave trade, enslaved people, and iron bars in complete contrast to Rogers who operated nearby. Pierce appears to have been unaffected by the paradox of recognising that the enslaved under his jurisdiction had skills, or could easily be trained, while at the same time dealing with them as property. While Cleaves was fortifying the factory at James Island, John Mildmay, Cleaves’s counterpart at Allada, Benin, the capital of the Fon kingdom, opted for the European merchants’ method in Africa of making financial arrangements 30 Law, The English in West Africa, vol. 2, pp. 1–2. 31 CSPC, vol. 13, p. 317. 32 David Brown, Empire and Enterprise: Money, power and the Adventurers for Irish land during the British Civil Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), p. 170. 33 TNA, PROB 11/372/101, Will of Edmund Pierce. 34 TNA, T 70/1, f. 13. 35 George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in West Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century (Oxford: James Currey Ltd, 2003), p. 173.

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rather than attempting conquest, in return for trading concessions and access to captives.36 Mildmay’s tactic was recognition that Allada was a far stronger and more organised polity than existed near many of the RAC’s coastal outposts. Located inland, and not on a fortified island like most of his peers, Mildmay’s factory was more commercial than colonial. Payments for trading privileges were commonly made by England’s competitors, a practise normalised by the Dutch West India Company and with which the other European nations had to compete. Mildmay certainly had grand ambitions for his tiny outpost and believed he could load five hundred enslaved people onto company ships every five weeks with sufficient support. A similarly positive assessment arrived from the RAC’s representative at Alampo, James Nightingale, who claimed to merely require cash in the form of cowrie shells to acquire enslaved people at a similar scale.37 These outposts fell within the protective range of Cape Coast Castle, the RAC’s principal fortified trading settlement on the West African coast, and the agents could rely on the force of arms from there if gifts and payment failed to achieve the desired result. The letters from Cape Coast Castle begin on 27 March 1678 with the case of two white mercenaries from Wyamba who had been hired by a recently deceased company factor and were held hostage by African traders over an outstanding debt.38 The new chief factor, Nathaniel Bradley, who had just arrived with 2,530 iron bars to trade, despatched a frigate to sort out the dispute. Bradley was a professional diplomat who had already served for almost two decades as England’s ambassador in Tripoli, where negotiating for the release of captives and arranging ransoms was a regular part of his job.39 Mathias Halstead travelled with Bradley as his deputy and these men joined Maccabeus Hollis who was already in place. Halstead was enduring a period of professional purgatory following his failure to create a silk farm in Carolina for his patron, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftsbury.40 Hollis was following the normal career path of the second son of a prosperous merchant who was rarely chosen to succeed to lead the family business. He had inherited some capital from his father, also called Maccabeus, a stipend of £20 per year, some 36 37 38 39 40

Christiana Blauner, ‘Connecting Things: Trading Companies and Diplomatic Gift-Giving on the Gold and Slave Coasts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Early Modern History, 20 (2016), pp. 408–428. TNA, T 70/1, f. 70. TNA, T 70/1, f. 4. Nabil Matar, British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563–1760 (Brill: Leiden, 2014), pp. 51, 124. Ben Marsh, Unravelled Dreams: Silk and the Atlantic World, 1500–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 237–240.

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land, the public baths and the ferryboat of Stockton-on-Tees in the north of England.41 Hollis thus had enough to set himself up as a factor and develop an independent trade of his own. The three factors at Cape Coast Castle were of more substantial means than the factors in the smaller settlements and drawn from more prosperous stock. For the next three years, Bradley and Hollis were responsible for England’s slave trade in Africa. The duo made appointments, managed the supply of goods to trade, controlled information, and negotiated the delivery of thousands of enslaved people to the company’s ships along the coast. Halstead’s tenure was short-lived, and he was replaced by Arthur Harbin, while Henry Spurway joined an expanding team as their business became larger. Holland died on 24 June 1679 while Harbin resigned and headed back to England.42 Falkiner, the RAC’s bookkeeper at Cape Coast Castle, died in March 1679 leaving the team undermanned. Staffing forced the company to close the Allada base and accommodate John Mildmay at Cape Coast Castle to help service the considerable numbers of ships that were now calling. It was late in June 1680 before the RAC supplied the base with a doctor to slow the mortality rate among the company’s staff.43 This appointment set the stage for Bradley to professionalise his base and create a proto-colony with an assembly, weather-proofed homes, and the regular transfer of personnel in and out of the base. When Henry Greenhill arrived in December 1680 to take overall command of the RAC’s outposts in West Africa, Bradley was able to hand over a reasonably well functioning facility, albeit staffed with a tired, disrespectful, and complaining team. Greenhill was the first chief factor to realise the dreams of his predecessors, returning to England in 1687 as a man of substantial means who rose through society to become first a naval official and eventually an MP for Newport in the Isle of Wight.44 Taken together, the correspondence from Africa illuminates the diversity in background and outlook that were employed by the RAC to manage its affairs. What is remarkable throughout is the seemingly amateurish nature of the management of the company’s affairs on the ground, in complete contrast to the laborious record and bookkeeping that are the hallmark of the company archive in London. Leading RAC shareholders had decades of experience in Africa that contrasted sharply with the inexperienced agents sent to the 41 42 43 44

TNA, PROB 11/226/307, Will of Maccabeus Hollis, Hull, 18 August 1652. TNA, T 70/1, f. 55. TNA, T 70/1, f. 70. David Hayton, Eveline Cruickshanks and Stuart Handley (eds.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1690–1715 (CUP: Cambridge, 2002), pp. 226–7.

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West African coast. News of deaths of agents and artisans, regularly reported throughout the letters, seems to have had little impact at home until the death of Hollis, who was drawn from more bourgeois stock than many of the others. Although it is possible that Charles II read digests of communications from Zachary Rogers or Thomas Thurloe, the king was not sufficiently interested to order any urgent action to protect either his investment or the lives of his subjects. Charles’s return on his African investment in 1678 was modest, a dividend of 300 guineas.45 Anthony Ashley Cooper fared even worse, receiving a mere £100. These low returns are unsurprising considering how poorly the company was run, and the royal family’s absence from meetings of the Court of Assistants from 1678 onwards reflects their disappointment in yet another get-rich-quick scheme that failed to come to fruition. The West Indies, however, were a different matter entirely. 2

The Americas Correspondence

The RAC’s charter envisaged that the company would hold a monopoly over the supply of enslaved people to all of England’s possessions in the Americas. The Northern colonies – New England, recently acquired New York, and Virginia – were traditionally supplied with white indentured servants from England, Ireland, and Scotland, while African slaves were a minority of labourers. The RAC did not bother to appoint an agent either in New England or New York due to a lack of demand, meanwhile at the time of this collection of letters the Virginia colony was recovering from a period of turmoil that a new charter from Charles II sought to draw a line under. On 10 October 1678, Virginia lost its autonomy and all government appointments from then were at the pleasure of the crown. Government officials frequently served simultaneously as RAC officers throughout the Americas. Virginia was but a modest portion of the RAC’s business and there are only three letters recorded, all for 1679.46 The agent, John Seayres, was a Gentleman Justice but lacked the seniority of his peers in the Caribbean.47 Seayres’s relatively lowly status meant that he was unable to prevent more senior officials from dealing directly with the ship’s captain and skimming off part of the cargo of enslaved people for their own private trade. In his letter of 17 February 1679, 45 TNA, T 70/76, f. 87. 46 TNA, T 70/1, pp. 9, 13, 13r. 47 Anon, ‘The Randolph Manuscript. Virginia Seventeenth Century Records (Continued)’, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 18.1 (1910), pp. 14–16.

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Seayes complained that forty-six out of a total of 399 enslaved people had been spirited away by customs officials.48 On 25 March, Seayres wrote again, this time requesting that a royal proclamation be issued to warn customs officials against stealing the RAC’s property.49 By appealing directly to the governor of the RAC, Charles II, who had the power to dismiss and reappoint customs officials at will, Seayres hoped to bring his problems to a swift end. In the event Seayres was replaced by Nathaniel Bacon, whose father had led the rebellion that burned Jamestown to the ground in 1676. Bacon reported on 25 June that the market for enslaved people in Virginia was saturated and there is no further correspondence after this point.50 During the years that followed, the RAC’s trade was focussed entirely on the Caribbean. An agent was sent to Montserrat in 1679 but died during the voyage. Thereafter, all of the RAC’s business in the Antilles, the island colonies of Montserrat, Nevis and St Kitts, was directed from Nevis.51 Nevis had risen from the early 1650s to become an important centre for concentrated sugar production and by 1675 its population of 8,000 included 4,000 enslaved Africans.52 The RAC’s agents in Nevis, Henry Carpenter and Robert Helme, corresponded with the company through William Freeman, a London merchant in the colonial provisioning trade who had helped establish the RAC while residing in Nevis in 1672.53 It was a family business as Helmes, originally from Dorset, married Sarah Freeman, William’s sister, on Nevis.54 Through the family connection Helmes was the senior agent and it was he who appointed both Henry Carpenter and Thomas Belchamber as his assistant in December 1685. The RAC’s business in Nevis was really Freeman’s fiefdom and it was through him that the RAC’s business and correspondence was transacted. Based in London, Freeman was well placed to secure the appointment of friendly officers on the island and to pursue the formulation of favourable policies.55 As the agents were major plantation owners on an island with a voracious requirement for enslaved labour, the letters from Nevis are mainly concerned 48 49 50 51 52

TNA, T 70/1, p. 9. TNA, T 70/1, p. 13. TNA, T 70/1, p. 13. TNA, T 70/1, p. 25. Vincent Hubbard, A History of St Kitts; the sweet trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 10. 53 David Hancock, ‘“A World of Business to Do”: William Freeman and the Foundations of England’s Commercial Empire, 1645–1707’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 57.1 (2000), pp. 3–34. For Freeman’s trade activities see Hancock. 54 Vere Langford Oliver (ed.), Caribbeana, vol. 5 (Mitchell, Hughes and Clarke: London, 1919), pp. 40–43. 55 Hancock, ‘“A World of Business to Do”’, p. 20.

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with maximising supply. The main problem highlighted by the Nevis factors was competition with Caribbean colonies for the RAC’s supplies and the first letter in the series, written on 3 January 1679, complained of enslaved people intended for Nevis being sold in either Barbados or Antigua.56 The Nevis factors attempted to circumvent the RAC, detailed in their next letter sent on 11 March which flaunted the factors’ sale of 147 people acquired from an interloper while complaining of the sick condition of enslaved Africans delivered by company vessels.57 The RAC’s response to this information was to use their direct influence over the Committee for the Colonies in London to order customs officials on Nevis to detain any ships attempting to land enslaved people there until compensation was paid to the company for infringing its monopoly. The chastened agents resolved to uphold the company’s interests with more enthusiasm in the future.58 The factors’ resolve was proven to be weak as their next letter enclosed a direct appeal to Charles II, to be delivered at a company meeting, to intervene on their behalf as they defended themselves against a charge of piracy.59 The factors, or their agents, had fired upon customs agents in Nevis, who were ultimately agents of the king, when these officials attempted to apprehend a ship, the Africa, and her human cargo before Carpenter and Helmes could unload her. Carpenter and Helmes appealed directly to the king again on 16 July 1680. On this occasion the situation was reversed when a group of armed men led by Philip Lee, the speaker of the Nevis assembly, and Thomas Belchamber, supposedly an RAC representative, drew their swords against Carpenter and Helmes when the factors attempted to interrupt the disembarking of eighty enslaved Africans brought to the island by an unlicensed trader.60 The Governor of Nevis, William Stapleton, decided that the colony’s constant requirement for labour outweighed the right the company had to uphold its monopoly. Without local political support, the RAC’s operation in Nevis was entirely dependent on its ability to appeal directly to the king through its correspondence network. By September 1680, RAC ships were avoiding troubled Nevis altogether and sailed directly from West Africa to Barbados and Jamaica, notwithstanding orders to head directly to the Antilles.61 By March 1681, however, intervention from home restored the RAC’s trade and the remaining letters from Nevis consist solely of details about the slave 56 57 58 59 60 61

TNA, T 70/1, p. 28. TNA, T 70/1, p. 24. TNA, T 70/1, p. 26. TNA, T 70/1, p. 37. TNA, T 70/1, p. 54. TNA, T 70/1, p. 72.

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trade; the unloading of hundreds of people in the middle of the night by unnamed and secretive interlopers, quarrels over the value of people in monetary terms and the grading of people according to size, age and gender.62 During the span of the letters, 1678–1681, the RAC had established its foothold on Nevis and swept away competition both from unlicensed traders in enslaved people and competition from other colonies that were prepared to pay higher prices. The RAC’s presence on the island, supported directly by the royal presence as governor of the company, became an institutionalised part of island life despite local opposition to this arrangement. Nevis’s Irish governor, William Stapleton, who endured exile with Charles II during the 1650s, was quite prepared to enforce the RAC’s monopoly against the wishes of the islanders. In Jamaica, the RAC’s officers were at the heart of government. The governor, Sir Thomas Lynch, was one of those old Cromwellian soldiers distrusted by Stapleton. He had taken part in Cromwell’s Wester Design, a naval expedition that seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655 and had since cultivated a network of pirates including the notorious Captain Henry Morgan. Of the RAC’s two principal factors, the most senior was Rowland Powell, the colony’s secretary.63 Although secretary was the most senior administrative position in the colony, Powell had never been formally appointed to the position. He was appointed by his predecessor, George Harris, on 20 July 1678 and held the position until his death in September 1683.64 The second of the RAC’s correspondents in this letter book, Hender Molesworth, replaced Lynch as Jamaica’s acting governor in 1684, immediately after the end of this sequence of letters. Molesworth had emigrated to Jamaica in the 1670s and was a major landowner by 1678. He hosted Sir Thomas Lynch in 1680 when Lynch arrived to take up the governorship and the pair became close friends. Lynch recommended to Charles II that Molesworth be appointed Lieutenant Governor, and Charles was only too pleased to have an RAC man in that position. Soon after, Molesworth made a private contract with a Spanish merchant, James Castillo, that gave Castillo first choice from the enslaved people delivered by the RAC’s ships to Jamaica. Given the interpersonal connections which underpinned mercantile relationships in Jamaica, Molesworth’s contract with Castillo was presumably given in return for an 62 TNA, T 70/1, pp. 79, 80, 105, 115–117. 63 Anon, The Laws of Jamaica … (Alexander Aikman: Santiago de la Vega, Jamaica, 1802), appendix, p. 59. 64 Vere Langford Oliver (ed.), Caribbeana, vol. 1 (Mitchell, Hughes and Clarke: London, 1919), p. 3.

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otherwise undocumented commercial advantage, possibly access to the information circulating around Castillo’s mercantile networks. The third named correspondent in the letters, following the same formula as the Nevis letters, was William Wathing, a London haberdasher who resided in the capital and worked as a private agent for Molesworth and Powell.65 Powell replaced John Gauden, the well-connected son of leading RAC shareholder Sir Denis Gauden, as the RAC’s agent in 1680.66 Powell also served as secretary and deputy governor at various times until his own death in 1683. The RAC letters were therefore written by men at the top of Jamaica’s political and administrative systems respectively, but sent privately through Wathing to the RAC, and not to the councils of trade or the colonies who were presumably paying their salaries. As the company men effectively governed the colony, their letters are far more commercial in character than the frontier lawlessness that comes through in the Nevis letters. For example, the first, sent from Jamaica 14 November 1678, relates a simple matter of conveying Mr Maddock, a debtor to the company, back to England to arrange for the repayment of his debts. Molesworth and Powell had their shares of issues to deal with, however, even if these were not of their own making. On 24 December they reported that Lord Carlisle, the Governor of Jamaica who preceded Lynch, had informed them that a ship fully laden with enslaved men and women had been stolen from Barbados and its human cargo was in the process of being sold at Bluefields Bay, a town on the far side of Jamaica from Kingston, the capital.67 Gauden and Molesworth had one concern: that the healthiest men and women would be sold and ‘all the rest appeared as but refuse’.68 The contrast in attitudes towards race between the Jamaica factors and Zachary Rogers, the experienced factor at Sherbro with his African family, could not be more stark. Molesworth’s letter from Jamaica to London dated 27 May 1679 sheds some light on the RAC’s dubious commercial relations with their slave-owning customers.69 Gauden had fallen ill and thereby became indebted to the company, causing guarantees to be demanded from his wealthy father in London. The factors routinely allowed plantation owners to fall into debt; such as London Alderman John Langley, who fell from Deputy Governor of the Levant Company in 1672 to requiring the charity of London’s Common 65 TNA, PROB 11/394/363, Will of William Wathing, 13 March 1689. 66 TNA, PROB 11/570/310, Will of John Gauden, Innholder of Saint Mary Newington, Surrey, 2 October 1719. 67 TNA, T 70/1, p. 12. 68 TNA, T 70/1, p. 12. 69 TNA, T 70/1, p. 24.

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Council to support him in his old age by the end of 1679 after his debt to the RAC had been called in.70 With their joint roles as colonial administrators and company agents, Gauden and Molesworth were well placed to use Jamaica’s courts, more or less at their will, to enforce contracts in the company’s favour. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Jamaica’s plantation owners opted to trade with French, Dutch or unlicensed English slave traders at the island’s many landing places whenever the opportunity arose.71 The factors, for their part, pretended to their masters in London that although the casual traders were a nuisance, they were probably not making much money from their activities. This is likely bravado on the part of the factors, but the prevalence of this large unregulated trade in people makes it impossible to quantify the amount of African people brought to Jamaica during the short period covered by these letters. The total is certain to be very large and Molesworth and Powell advised their employers that company ships had landed 770 children and adults from two ships during January 1680 alone. These ships had taken their human cargo aboard at Angola and Old Calabar, both Dutch West Indies Company bases used by the RAC when their own factories in West Africa had failed to supply the requisite numbers of people. Molesworth and Powell reported that in two further company ships, that arrived in January 1681, only 220 out of 600 passengers had survived the Middle Crossing in the first, and all 217 in the second were infected with smallpox.72 The factors seemed barely troubled over these shocking rates of mortality. Their business strategy had evolved to flooding the market with as many enslaved people as they could find to drive down the price and force the independent slave traders out of business.73 This strategy, although it was communicated to London, appears to have been a local decision and the local courts were used by the factors to keep their indebted customers in line. As major plantation owners the factors stood to benefit from lower prices, albeit at the company’s expense. The RAC’s largest market by far, however, was Barbados, where the sugar boom had occurred first in the 1640s and was most entrenched. Exports of sugar increased from 3,750 to 10,000 tons per year from 1651 to 1683. The price had fallen over this period, from £20 per tonne to approximately £12 per tonne, but business was very good, and the sugar producers enjoyed a monopoly in England for their produce.74 With much at stake in such a large market, the RAC 70 Alfred P. Beaven, The Aldermen of the City of London Temp. Henry III  – 1912 (London: Corporation of the City of London, 1908), p. 182. 71 TNA, T 70/1, pp. 41, 46. 72 TNA, T 70/1, p. 75. 73 TNA, T 70/1, p. 116. 74 Menard, Sweet Negotiations, pp. 68–9.

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selected as their agents Edwyn Stede, Provost Marshal for Barbados with command of the courts to enforce contracts, and Stephen Gascoigne, a plantation owner who was well respected locally.75 The agents operated in a similar way to their counterparts on Jamaica through a combination of control over the supply of labour and luring the plantation owners into debt. In January 1680, one party of despairing indebted planters smuggled themselves onto a slave ship bound from Barbados to Jamaica to evade the RAC’s clutches.76 With a voracious demand for labour on Barbados, the greed of the RAC’s agents was exceeded only by the captains and owners of the ships used for the Middle Passage. The RAC did not own its own vessels, so every voyage involved negotiating a ship and captain, managed in London through a transport sub-committee. Officially or not, shipowners and captains normally reserved part of the ship for their own use, piggybacking the transport of their own goods onto the shipping that was paid for by their clients. As the complaints made by Gascoigne and Stede testify, people smuggling was rife. Captains would routinely overload their ships and pretend that more people had died on board than was the case, selling additional people clandestinely at the quayside. The ship’s crew would ply customs officials and dockworkers with alcohol until they were incapable of noticing what was happening, or simply pay out bribes. Once any witnesses on shore had been incapacitated or encouraged to turn a blind eye, the poorer plantation owners came to the boats at night to purchase enslaved people directly from the ship’s captains. They were often the healthiest survivors from the Middle Passage.77 In one instance, Stede maintained that the RAC had purchased 293 people in Calabar, and that while the captain complained that only 118 people had survived the journey to Barbados an inspection found there to be 180 on board, and an unknown number had been sold at night since the ship had arrived.78 Information about these practices, reported by the factors back to London, resulted in a range of new measures aimed at controlling the slave trade and making it easier for the RAC to claim compensation from plantation owners who had dealt with night-time traders or other interlopers.79 Despite their influence over Barbados’s judiciary, Gascoigne and Stede made no effort to prevent plantation owners on the island from dealing with 75 76 77 78 79

TNA, CO 1/25, f. 73. TNA, CO 1/25, f. 73. TNA, T 70/1, p. 20. TNA, T 70/1, p. 21. Edward B. Rugemer, ‘The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 70.3 (2013), pp. 429–458.

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the interlopers, such was the demand for labour. Instead, they pursued the captains and officers of ships that had been chartered by the company with constant inspections and demands for customs. The factors, who were trying to fulfil the competing roles of government regulator and company sales representative, could not afford to prosecute, and thereby alienate, their customers. A large unlicensed slave trade was thus allowed to prosper, and the only record of the scale of this trade and the numbers of people involved is in the private letters sent by the RAC’s factors from the Caribbean to their employers in London.80 3 Conclusion The business letters of the RAC break down the myth of a monolithic and organised early modern business empire with a rigid hierarchy that was capable of realising Charles II’s imperialistic vision. In its early years, the RAC consisted of three distinct divisions: London, Africa, and the Caribbean. The London centre with its meetings at Africa House attended by the great and good can be said to resemble a swan: serene on the surface but with its legs in Africa and the Caribbean paddling frantically below the surface, unseen. These business letters, written as the RAC was attempting to establish and then entrench its monopoly, bring these divisions to the surface and reveal two quite different organisations. While the American operations were led by the cream of English colonial society who aimed to further enrich their already comfortable lives through the sale of enslaved Africans, the RAC’s operations in Africa were led by hopeful adventurers, most of whom were destined to have short lives. These letters highlight the different ways in which information was circulated and the different purposes for which it was used even within the same organisation. However, aside from stark numbers and some vivid descriptions of how many Africans under the RAC’s control lived the last days of their lives, these letters reveal little about the people on whom the company’s activities impacted the most. Appendix The following letter has been included as a sample of the information routinely sent from the Caribbean to Africa House in London, where the letters 80 See, for example, TNA, T 70/1, pp. 25, 28, 48, 52 and 63.

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were digested for the Court of Assistants of the Royal African Company, and the court of Charles II. The letter is typical of the collection and is presented in full to offer an authentic sample of the language, interests, and attitudes of the RAC’s correspondents in the late 1670s. The dispatch concerns the arrival of the Marigold at Bridgetown, Barbados, from Calabar, in South-eastern Nigeria with a cargo of enslaved people and ivory. There are terms that today are viewed as offensive throughout the text.81 Stephen Gascoigne and Edwyn Stede, Sent from Barbados to London on 10 June 1679 Wee tooke Seven on shoare wch were not fitt to be sent or being able to stand, all of wch are dead notwithstanding wee used all possible care to preserve & recover them so that the Company may perceive that notwithstanding the 45 Negroes brought on shoare by the Master and Factor & the Mortality which was great among them by reason of their stop here yett at the time of sending those negroes there remained 4 Negroes more than the Capt. & Factor owned to be on board in the whole when they came into the Roade & It doth most certainely appeare to us the great mortality of negroes that was in that shipp from Callabar hither & here was occasioned by the ships being crowded & pestred wth the supernumerary negroes taken into ye ship not having Roome to stow or cleane them for wee never saw soe nasty foule & stincking Ship in our Lives, but wee presume they stood not much upon than resolving if soe many remaind alive in ye Ship as they pretended to they would have noe loss of the Living being still theirs & ye dead the Companys. And as a further testimony of the Factors concurance & Intrest in this cheate the ship came to St Thomas, Wm. Johnston Sailor & some others of the Shipp Company (as they told us) in messing82 them there went to count them which being told Mr Fowler he was very angry with them for soe doing and asked what they had to doe to count the Negroes that was his worke & not theirs and that they had a very unsaieth being on board the shipp from thence hither for accompting to till the slaves there. Nor must wee omitt to acquaint ye Comp with what farther discovery wee have made of private Trade on ye Ruth Capt. Pomery wch wee could formerly only hint to, the Company for now upon examination of the seamen wee are assured both Teeth & Negroes were carryed out of that Ship though some of ye sailors will not speak their knowledge cleare upon pretence of feare of looseing their wages or be ill and from hence to England as perticularly att Johnson’s

81 TNA, T 70/1, p. 23. 82 ‘Messing’ = Mustering.

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Pretence to know much but will not speake with his wages ffirst well secured him. John Roberts declares he dare not say what he heard for feare of ill usage, but all of them say soe many of them as were not concerned & were doubted would tell, soe soone as the ship came to Anchor in this Roade83 were sent some to one ship & some to another were there plyed with wine in which time they understand as they sayd Negroes & teeth84 were carryed out of that ship, which hath been much discoursed about though wee cannot gett proofe thereof, but Mr Wicker a foremast man declares to us that ye mate & Gunner sold 2 Negroes out of the ships & divided the money between them, & John Browne Sailor declared that Mr. Pomeroy the Gunner told him did carry 16 elephants teeth out of that ship on board another in this Roade & that John a Dutchman a Sailor in that ship the Ruth told him it was 17 & John Browne further declares, that Wm. Taylor the cheife mate told him two or three days before they came into this Roade that there were 4 Negroes on board more than Mr. Kingstone knew of and that those 4 Negroes were his & the Masters, But the Master, mate & Gunner denys all, however wee thought it our duty to acquaint the Company & may if they please more fully examine the matter in England. And the said Wicker further added that a day or 2 before they came into this Roade in messing them, he told 46 mates & 60 females whichh [sic] make 106 negroes & when wee came to take account of them wee found only 80 odd of all sorts, wee presume if Mr. Kingstone be not too far intrested in them he will give the Company a full acct of this matter soe that wee have no further to add at present on this subject, But that as farr as wee can desern the Master Peachy, the Factor Mr Fowler, the mate Mr. White & the Gunner John Hunt were the only persons concerned in this cheate on Board of the Marigold. 83 The ‘Roade’ is the safe anchorage outside of the harbour. While in the road the ship was legally at sea and the captain was in full command, but once in the harbour the ship could be boarded by customs officials. 84 ‘teeth’ or ‘elephant’s teeth’ = ivory.

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Index Abolition 53, 64 Act of Uniformity, 1662 228 Admiralty, The 64 Admiralty Court 175 Africa 5, 18, 20, 21, 26, 29, 34, 35, 36, 42, 68, 135, 232–255, 256–275. See also Alampo, Allada, Bence Island, Benin, Cape Coast Castle, Cape of Good Hope, Gambia, Guinea, James Island, Kormantine, Ophra, River Gambia, Sherbro, Sierra Leone, Tangier Africa House 273 agents. See factors Akan 233, 241 Alampo 260, 264 Allada, Benin 263–265 Aldermen’s Court of London 108 alehouse 172. See also tavern allegiance 118–123 American Revolution. See revolution American Revolutionary War, 1775–1783. See war Amsterdam 7, 118, 124, 166, 178, 209, 243 Anglican 212, 216, 230 Anglo-Dutch Wars, 1652–1654, 1665–1667, 1672–1674. See war Anne, Queen of England and Wales, Queen of Scotland, Queen of Great Britain  210, 219 Anti-Catholicism 20, 209–212, 222–224, 229–231 Antigua 135, 157, 194, 197, 207, 208, 211, 213, 229, 268 Antilles 267–268 Antwerp 108 archives 6–7, 22, 28, 234 Asia 127, 232, 235n9, 238, 239 Atlantic Ocean 2, 10, 43, 85–86, 154 ‘Atlantic World’ 18–21, 22 and passim Austrian Succession, War of the, 1740–1748. See war Bacon, Francis 52, 54 Bacon, Nathaniel 267 Bank of England 217

bankruptcy 40, 41, 42, 47 Baptist 216 Barbados 31, 37, 177, 193–194, 209, 213, 214, 222, 237, 242, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 268, 270, 271–273, 274–275 Barcelona 118 Bath 222 Bence Island 260, 261, 263 Benin 263–265 betting 13, 107–126 bill of exchange 40, 43–45, 165, 177, 179, 195, 262 Board of Trade and Plantations 208–210, 215–227, 231, 260 Boston 82, 100, 132, 134–135, 137, 138, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147n66, 148, 150, 155, 157, 160, 177, 189, 195 brandy 197, 244 Bridgetown 195, 274. See also Barbados Bristol 14, 30, 39, 52, 56–67, 76, 143, 194 Bristol Exchange 16 Bristol West India Association 11, 49, 56–67, 77 British Civil Wars, 1638–1652. See war broker 59 Bush Tavern, Bristol 64 Canada. See France: New France Cape Coast Castle 245, 249, 251–255, 260, 264–265 Cape May, New Jersey 141 Cape of Good Hope 221 captains 2, 17, 22, 34, 90, 101, 134, 135, 137, 143, 144, 145, 161, 165, 183–204, 217, 249– 250, 262, 266, 269, 272–273, 275n83 Caribbean 5, 19–20, 29, 34, 42, 42n96, 66, 94, 127, 133, 142–143, 147, 149, 188, 194n38, 197, 207–231, 232–239, 258–260, 263, 266–268, 273. See also Antigua, Antilles, Barbados, Bridgetown, Curacao, Haitian Revolution, Jamaica, Kingston, Leeward Islands, Montserrat, Nevis, Saint-Domingue, Sint Eustatius, St Kitts, Tobago, West Indies

306 Carolina 171, 196, 198, 264 Catholic 19, 20, 207–231, 263 Channel, English 193 character. See reputation Charles II, King of England and Wales, King of Scotland, 211, 215, 228, 232, 257, 259, 260, 266, 267, 268, 269, 273, 274 Charleston 31, 40, 44, 90, 134, 189, 195–199 Chesapeake 41, 213 Chesapeake Bay 195 Chester 1, 155 China 161 clubs 50, 53, 56, 75, 153, 171, 174. See also Bristol West India Association, Bush Tavern coal 176 coffee houses 14–17, 75, 153, 158, 169–171, 187, 196–198, 200, 216–217 naming of 14–16 coins 141n45 Cold War, 1947–1981. See war Colonial Debts Act, 1732 45–46 Committee for the Colonies, London 268 Commons, House of. See Parliament communication circuit 182 Company of Royal Adventurers 232, 233n2, 242, 254, 255, 257–258 Congregationalist 216 Connecticut 26, 100 conversation. See spoken word convoy 1–2, 12, 57, 60, 140 coranto 5, 7, 16 correspondence 1–2, 5–8, 11–12, 16–18, 20–22, 25, 30–32, 35–36, 37–41, 43–44, 46, 54, 58, 64, 76, 82–103, 110–115, 127, 129, 137, 139–145, 150, 152–182, 183–204, 216, 218, 234–247, 256–275 court (law) 44, 45, 108, 114, 117, 188, 213. See also Admiralty Court Court (royal) 102, 111, 112, 120, 169, 274 Court of Assistants 256, 257, 259, 266, 274 credit 7, 8–11, 22, 25–47, 49, 75, 82–103, 137, 138, 149, 162, 164, 177, 181, 259n14 Cromwell, Oliver 207, 261, 269 Curacao 149 Customs House 67, 135, 141 debt 10, 27, 29, 37–47, 137–138, 142, 149, 160, 247, 265, 270, 271, 272

Index Defoe, Daniel 114 disease 142, 262 doorways 172 Duke of Tuscany 166 Duke of York, James 257–259 Dutch Republic. See Netherlands Dutch West India Company. See West India Company (Dutch) dyeing 232 East India Act, 1698 221 East India and Guinea Company 240, 242. See also Guinea Company East India Company (EIC) 21, 40, 54, 124, 217, 220, 221, 232–255 Edinburgh 156, 162 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 52, 211 ‘Empire of Letters’ 183–187 England 1, 6, 7, 11, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 25, 28, 29, 33, 34, 36, 40, 42, 43, 56–74, 82, 83, 85, 90, 93, 94, 100, 101, 107–126, 130, 135, 137, 138, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 159, 167–169, 180, 187, 193, 197, 207, 208, 213–215, 219, 221, 226, 227, 229, 232–255, 256–275 English Civil War, 1642–1651. See war Exchange Alley 216–217 Exchanges Amsterdam Exchange 118 Antwerp Exchange 108 Bristol Exchange 14–16 Royal Exchange, London 16, 67, 75, 110–114, 123, 152, 169–170, 172, 180, 217–218 exchange rate current 5 factors 21, 28, 30, 34–38, 42, 96, 141, 156, 235–252, 255, 259–275 family 6–7, 8–9, 27, 41, 82–3, 90, 99, 100, 157–158, 182, 195, 236, 261, 263, 264, 267 Flanders 165 Fontainebleau, Edict of 19 France 2, 4, 11, 12, 16, 19, 20n54, 60, 108n7, 109, 113, 116–123, 130, 137, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 164, 165, 210n6, 211, 213n19, 215, 220, 223–225, 227, 261, 262, 263, 271. See also Nantes, Nice, Paris New France 19

Index Franklin, Benjamin 134, 189–193 French and Italian War, 1754–1763. See Seven Years’ War French Revolution. See revolution French Revolutionary Wars, 1792–1802. See war fruit 1 Gambia 261–263. See also Gambia Company, River Gambia Gambia Company 260, 263 gambling. See betting gender 50, 51–53, 269 Geneva 102 Genoa 102, 108 George I, King of Great Britain 210, 223, 224 Georgia 197 Germany 157 Gibraltar 144 Glasgow 39, 40, 199 Glorious Revolution, 1688–89. See revolution gold 140–141, 232–233, 237–238, 244–246, 250, 252, 255, 256, 258, 264 Great Britain 4–5, 9, 12, 18–20, 25–47, 59, 82, 85, 87, 90, 100, 127–151, 168, 184, 187, 189–190, 193, 198, 207–217, 220, 222–224, 229–231, 256–257, 259. See also England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales Guildhall 114 Guinea 35, 195, 244, 245 Guinea Company 232, 234, 237, 242, 246–247, 250, 260. See also East India and Guinea Company Haitian Revolution. See revolution Habermas, Jürgen 110–111, 183 Habsburgs 4, 109, 226 Hamburg 169 Haudenosaunee people 12 Historical Social Network Analysis (HSNA). See Social Network Analysis (SNA) Huguenots 19, 20n54 Iberian Peninsular 142 indentured servants 17, 266 Indian Ocean 151 Information Revolution 4, 185–186

307 insurance 1–3, 21–22, 108–110, 124, 143, 146, 148, 160 Ireland 1–2, 12, 13, 26, 30, 39, 107, 120, 122, 148, 207–213, 222–223, 229–230, 266, 269 Irish Revolution. See revolution Irish Sea 1–2 iron 33, 146–147, 244, 245, 256, 262, 263, 264 Italy 19, 43 ivory 232, 244, 245, 256, 258, 261, 274, 275n84 Jacobite 19, 122–123, 125, 213n19, 223 anti-Jacobite 123 Jacobite Rebellion, 1715 223–224 Jamaica 35, 39–40, 42, 45, 116–117, 149–150, 192, 194–195, 197, 201, 214, 215, 222, 223, 227, 237, 260, 268–272 James Island 260–263 James II and VII, King of England and Wales, King of Scotland 19, 123, 219, 223, 224 James, Duke of York 257–259 Jews 27, 216 Sephardic Jews 216 Kendal 156, 161, 163, 171, 174 King George’s War, 1744–1748. See Austrian Succession, War of King William’s War, 1690–1697. See Nine Years’ War Kingston 195, 197, 199, 270. See also Jamaica Kinsale 1–2 Kormantine 240–255 labourers 17, 60, 266 Lancaster, England 149 language 152, 180, 182, 186, 208, 274 League of Augsburg 119 Leeward Islands 20, 207–231 letters. See correspondence letters of recommendation 163 Licensing of the Press Act, 1662 6, 119 lapse of, 1695 6, 119 Limerick 108, 114–115, 163 linen 33, 245 Lisbon 1–2, 137–138, 140–142, 163. See also Portugal

308 Liverpool 11, 14, 49, 50, 53, 55, 67–76, 165, 194 London 1, 26–27, 31, 33, 35, 37, 38n67, 41–2, 44, 45, 56, 64, 100, 102, 107–126, 133, 137–138, 140, 145, 146, 147, 149, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 163, 169, 170, 171, 174, 176, 188, 193, 194, 197, 198, 200, 213–218, 221, 222, 230–231, 236, 242–243, 249, 255, 256–275. See also St Paul’s Lords, House of. See Parliament Louis XIV 19, 113, 117 Lustring Company 220 Lutheran 216 Madagascar 221 Madeira 194, 197 madeira wine. See wine mail. See post Mary II, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland 115, 119 Maryland 41, 188, 199, 211, 213, 225–227, 231 Massachusetts 82–3, 86, 90, 96 Massachusetts Bay Colony 103 Mediterranean 135, 235n11, 239 Merchant Venturers, Bristol, Society of  64–65 Mexico 19 Middle Passage 273 misinformation 3, 110, 114–118, 126, 158, 166, 247. See also rumour, truth Mons 112–123, 125 Montserrat 143, 207–208, 211–213, 222, 229, 267 Morocco Company 257 Namur, siege of, 1695 112–119 Nantes 150 Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815. See war Navigation Acts, 1651, 1660, 1663, 1673, 1696  213 Netherlands 3–4, 16, 19, 20n54, 100, 109, 113, 124, 126n73, 130, 147–149, 166, 168, 210– 213, 236, 239, 243, 251–254, 258–259, 264. See also Anglo-Dutch Wars, Dutch West India Company New Netherlands 20n54, 259n17 Nevis 52, 207–208, 213, 215, 227, 229, 260, 267–270

Index New England 11, 12n29, 20, 30, 34, 35, 82–103, 127–151, 194n38, 229, 266 and passim. See also Boston, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Salem New France. See France New Hampshire 135–136, 191, 227 New Jersey 141 New Netherland. See Netherlands New Spain. See Spain New York 12n29, 13, 14n38, 20n54, 27, 50, 85, 130, 132–149, 164, 167, 168, 171, 174, 189, 193, 195, 197, 213, 260n17, 267 Newfoundland 102 Newport, Isle of Wight 265 Newport, Rhode Island 136 newspapers 4–6, 14, 16, 110–119, 121, 125–126, 127–151, 180, 183–186, 193, 197, 198, 217 American Weekly Mercury 133, 200–201 Athenian Mercury, The 120–122 Boston Gazette 132–136, 142 Boston News-Letter 131, 133, 137, 138 Daily Courant 112 Exchange Intelligencer 16 Flying Post, The 113, 118 Foreign Post, The 117 Lloyd’s List 197 Lloyd’s Register 130 London Gazette, The 173, 193 New England Courant, The 131 New York Mercury 133–139, 141–144, 147n66, 149 New-York Weekly Journal, The Paris Gazette 115–121 Pennsylvania Gazette, The 134–141 Post Boy and Historical Account, The 112 Post Boy, The 112–113 Protestant Mercury, The 113, 116–117 Weekly Jamaica Courant, The 200n53 Nice 112 Nine Years’ War, 1688–1697. See war Northey, Sir Edward 20, 207–231 Norwich 123, 156, 178 Office of Assurance, London 108 Ophra 260 oral. See spoken word

309

Index Ottoman Empire 19 Oxford, Queen’s College 219

public sphere 110–111, 183–192 Puritan 11, 20, 82–103

Pacific Ocean 151 packet boats 193–194, 259 ‘Papists Act’, 1715 224–225 Paramaribo 199. See also Suriname Paris 117, 175. See also Paris Gazette Parliament 64, 107, 111, 147, 216, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 226, 229 House of Commons 42, 223 House of Lords 219 Peck, Daniel, Chester merchant 1–3, 8, 11–12, 21–23, 156, 176 petitions 64, 210, 215–217, 221, 227 Philadelphia 13, 26n9, 38n67, 127–151, 165–168, 189, 191, 194, 195, 197 Peirce, William, English captain and merchant 82–103 Pequot War, 1636–1638. See war Pirates 143, 146, 269. See also privateers Piscataqua, New Hampshire 135–136 plantation 20, 52, 66, 133, 207–231, 233, 236–238, 246, 256–258, 267, 270–272 port wine 141 Porto 141. See also Portugal Portsmouth, New Hampshire 191, 194 Portugal 19, 140–141 post 1, 2, 17–18, 87, 112, 138, 139, 164, 259–260 role of ships’ captains in 183–204 post office 129, 139, 170–171, 186–193, 198, 259 Post Office Act, 1710 189 Post Office Act, 1765 190 Presbyterian 216 price currents 4, 5, 131–133, 144–145, 200 print 2–7, 14, 16, 18, 21–22, 51, 76, 84, 85, 110–111, 122, 127–151, 154, 180, 183, 196, 197, 198, 200, 201, 203, 204, 224 Print Revolution 5–6 privateers 2, 12, 13, 143–144, 146–147 Privy Council 108, 216, 221 profit 127–151, 157, 184, 198, 236, 238, 246, 251, 252, 257, 258–259 Protestant 19, 212, 213, 215, 223–229, 263. See also Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian Providence, Rhode Island 89, 97, 99, 155, 164

Quaker 27, 37, 38n67, 216 quay 17, 75, 152, 158, 172, 272 Queen Anne’s War, 1702–1713. See Spanish Succession, War of recommendation. See letters of recommendation reputation 10, 17, 28, 31–32, 37, 39, 42, 46, 60, 75, 83, 86, 90, 91, 160–169, 176–177, 181, 219, 224 revolution 17, 151 American (1765–1791) 11–12, 42, 49, 56, 128, 150, 168, 183 French (1789–1799) 11–12 Glorious (1688–1689) 19, 213, 223, 225 Haitian (1791–1804) 11–12 Information. See Information Revolution Irish (1798) 11–12 Print. See Print Revolution Rhine 166 Rhode Island 136, 147n66. See also Providence, Rhode Island risk 2, 9, 12–13, 22, 25, 27, 34, 47, 117, 118, 128, 130, 134, 146–150, 158–161, 212, 214, Rio de Janeiro 141 River Gambia 258, 261. See also Gambia Rome 114n44, 118 Rotterdam 148–149 Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, Company of. See Royal African Company Royal African Company (RAC) 21, 232–233, 237, 242, 254–255, 256–275 Royal Exchange, The. See Exchange rumour 17, 112–117, 120, 156, 160–169, 181, 253 Rupert, Prince of the Rhine 257–258 Saint-Domingue 144 sailors 17, 132, 185, 195, 274, 275 Salem 100, 136 Savannah, Georgia 190 Saybrook, Connecticut 100 Scotland 12, 38, 40–41, 66, 110, 156n19, 168n72, 201, 210, 267 sequestration 20, 207–231 Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763. See war

310 Sherbro 260, 261, 263, 270 shop 14, 75, 142, 157, 172, 194, 196 Sierra Leone 21, 260, 262–263 Sint Eustatius 147, 149 slave trade 11, 18, 20, 28, 29, 34–37, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53–54, 64, 67–76, 132n16, 185, 188–189, 221–222, 232–233, 237–238, 246, 256–275 social media 3, 48 Social Network Analysis (SNA) 10, 48–80, 82–103, 234–235, 240–242, 247–249 South Carolina 171, 196, 198 Spain 2, 19, 90, 116n44, 143, 144, 167, 210, 214, 226, 270 New Spain 19 Spanish Succession, War of the, 1702–1714. See war spoken word 5–6, 16–18, 22, 84, 91, 110, 112, 113, 117, 152–182, 183, 186–188, 201–202, 242 St Christophers. See St Kitts St Kitts 35, 142, 149, 207, 208, 211, 213, 215, 223–230, 267 St Paul’s, London 111 St Paul’s School, London 219 Stamp Act, 1765 138 staves 157–159, 161, 162, 164–165, 167, 169, 172–173 Stockton-on-Tees 265 Stuarts, House of 19, 211, 213, 224, 258 sugar 35, 56, 65–67, 132–135, 140–141, 233, 259, 267, 271 Suriname 149 Tangier 213, 257 tavern 14, 52, 67, 75, 158, 170, 187, 200. See also alehouse Test Act, 1673 211, 219 textiles 29, 156, 165, 178 Thurloe, John, Secretary of State 261 Thurloe, Thomas 261–262, 266 Tiverton 220 tobacco 38, 41, 56, 140 Tobago 211 Toleration Act, 1689 219, 223, 228 Treasury, The 64, 256n1 trust 2, 7, 8–11, 22, 27, 33, 38–41, 44, 46, 82– 103, 149, 159, 163, 164, 167, 196, 200–201, 203–204, 235, 236, 242, 249, 255, 269

Index Tuscany, Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, Duke of 166 United Provinces. See Netherlands Venice 170 Virginia 33, 38–41, 82, 140, 186, 187, 188, 201, 260, 261, 266–267 wagers. See betting Wales 153, 207, 208, 229 war 1–2, 11–13, 46, 107–126, 130–131, 143, 144–148, 151, 167, 168, 193, 215, 224, 237, 244 American Revolutionary War, 1775–1783  42, 47, 49, 56, 128, 150, 168, 183 Anglo-Dutch Wars, 1652–1654, 1665–1667, 1672–1674 12, 13, 130, 166, 168, 211–212, 236, 259 Austrian Succession, War of the, 1740–1748 12, 13, 148 Cold War, 1947–1981 48 English Civil War, 1642–1651 85 French Revolutionary Wars, 1792– 1802 56–57, 62–63 Napoleonic Wars, 1803–1815 12 Nine Years’ War, 1688–1697 12, 109, 113, 123, 193, 213, 220 Pequot War, 1636–1638 98 Seven Years’ War, 1756–1763 12, 37, 66, 137, 147–148, 191 Spanish Succession, War of the, 1702– 1714 2, 12, 118n50, 210, 219, 223, 226 Williamite War, 1689–1691 107 World War II, 1939–1945 48 weather 127, 132, 134–135, 141, 144, 265 Westminster 215 Westminster Hall 169 Westminster Parliament 229 West Africa 18, 21, 26, 29, 34, 232–256, 256–275 West Country 66 West India Company (Dutch) 252n52, 259, 264 West India Company (English) 237, 238n21, 251 West India Society, London 64 West Indies 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36, 39, 42, 45, 47, 52, 56–67, 77, 133, 193, 202, 259, 266, 271

311

Index William III, King of England and Wales, of Orange, King of Scotland 107, 120, 121, 210, 216, 219, 221, 223, 227, 229 Williamite War, 1689–1691. See war Williamsburg 189, 201. See also Virginia wine 1, 141, 167, 171, 276 madeira 141 port 141

winter 134, 144, 195 wood 140, 141, 163 World War II, 1939–1945. See war York Island 261 York River 187 York, Virginia 187, 188 Yorkshire 29–30