'Ancient customs' of trade: Organizing commerce in colonial Boston and New York City

Studies that examine the colonial economy have long emphasized foreign trade as the impetus behind development. However, as one colonial historian has noted, "not all the farmer's customers lived overseas." While we have learned much in the recent years about the Atlantic economy, there is still much to learn about the internal trading networks that produced goods for trade in the Atlantic economy and for domestic consumption. My dissertation is a broad study of how commerce was organized in the colonial north. It focuses on how Boston and New York City organized and regulated trade and how those two economies, as well as those nearby, were connected through the coastwise trade.;Stark differences emerged after initial settlement in the ways communities conducted their trade and that these differences were the product of path-dependent processes. In Boston, Puritan leaders immigrated to the New World with a vision that government should minimally interact in the economy, only stepping in to protect the poor. More over, Puritan leaders refrained from providing any infrastructure for trade, such as a marketplace, instead allowing buyers and sellers to meet on their own terms. This lack of oversight contributed to the development of a decentralized system of trade in Boston where farmers, merchants, and townsmen traded at a number of places throughout town.;By contrast, officials in New York City organized trade in marketplaces beginning in the decades after English conquest in 1664. At the request of local merchants, crown officials granted New York City a monopoly on the province's flour trade for several years during the 1680s. When the merchants lost the monopoly in 1690, officials responded to the loss by establishing a marketplace system, which included markets, ferries, and cartmen, which they hoped would attract farmers and traders back to the city. In short time, the system expanded and marketplaces in the city remained free of heavy market regulations.;Merchants in Boston observed the success of the marketplace system in New York City and, beginning in 1715, attempted to replicate it in Boston. Merchants in Boston faced increased competition during the early eighteenth century from itinerant traders empowered by easy access to paper money. The merchant's efforts, however, met stiff resistance from townsmen. While merchants succeeded in establishing three marketplaces in 1733, the victory was short lived, beginning a thirty-year tug of war that opened and closed the marketplaces repeatedly. I argue that townsmen resisted the changes because they were reluctant to wholly alter the system of trade that efficiently allocated provisions.;At the heart of merchant's efforts to develop marketplaces in Boston was an acknowledgement that the nature of trade in and around Boston had changed dramatically since the decades after first settlement. In that century, Boston evolved from an agricultural community where local agricultural surpluses were plentiful to a commercial hub where townsmen owned little land, if any. The forth and final chapter of my dissertation examines how Boston's position as a commercial hub in the Atlantic trade network initially enabled entrepreneurial merchants to enter into the coastwise trade of the northern colonies and eventually dominate it. By the early eighteenth century, high demand for provisions in Boston made the city a magnet for provision and drove coastal market integration.