| Two thousand trees, one ton of iron, miles of rope, yards of canvas, and gallons of naval stores combined to create a New England-built merchant vessel of one hundred tons. Artisans sawed and shaped, heated and hammered, spun and stretched, sheared and sewed these materials into a sea-worthy ship. In the estimation of many historians, colonial ships were emblematic of early capitalism, but attention to the construction of these vessels in colonial New England reveals a much more complex history. Shipwrights participated in primitive and highly personalized markets in timber, iron, and labor, not with cash but through simple barter, bills of exchange, and book debt. Apprentices, journeymen, slaves, and servants traded on their familiar connections, received payment in kind, and followed the irregular clocks and calendars of the early modern world. These varied practices persisted well into the eighteenth century and defined New England's economic culture. Active participants in the dynamic Atlantic world, shipwrights responded as much to the particularities of local economies---a scarcity of cash, immature financial institutions, and the prevalence of small transactions in place of wholesale opportunities---as to the dictates of global commodity chains. At the same time, however, shipwrights participated in the increasing quantification and rationalization of the environment and of business: they surveyed and divided the land, they kept accounts, and they supported various market regulations. Through these efforts to gain greater control over their trade, shipwrights reshaped the region's economic culture and lent credence to ideas that would later be identified with market liberalism and capitalism. The seductive power of these ideas bestowed a semblance of order upon a chaotic economy and helped to obscure competing actors, relationships, and values at play in their marketplaces. The colonial shipwright's world was simultaneously one of mixed realities and market dreams. |
