Merchants and markets in provincial Boston, 1690--1764

The pursuit of a seaborne carrying trade that extended from the northern Atlantic to the Caribbean and eastward into Europe had positioned Massachusetts and its merchants to take advantage of the unprecedented economic expansion of early modern Europe and the growth of the New World. They had done so effectively and by 1700, their commercial center, Boston, had become the greatest entrepot in North America.;The continued development of the Atlantic trading world thereafter gave rise to competition that forced Boston and Massachusetts onto a course of commercial and pecuniary innovation to sustain economic growth despite their losses of business, population and land to faster-growing neighbors. Local merchants sought new ways to exploit the province's internal trading network in support of overseas commerce. The province at large, led by the House of Representatives, pursued monetary experiments to provide a medium of trade that would foster internal growth while satisfying the demands of the larger commercial world. Their efforts were complicated by perturbations in the form of warfare, epidemic, and drought, but a market economy nevertheless blossomed early in Boston and in much of eastern Massachusetts.