Notes The following abbreviations appear in the notes. Charleston CCP Charleston Court of Common Pleas (Judgment Rolls and Petitions and Decrees in Summary Process) NCH Newport Court House, Newport, Rhode Island NHS Newport Historical Society, Newport, Rhode Island NPCCP Newport Court of Common Pleas RIHS Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island RISA Rhode Island State Archives, Providence, Rhode Island SCCCP South Carolina Court of Common Pleas (Judgment Rolls) SCDAH South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, South Carolina SCHM South Carolina Historical Magazine SCHS South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina SCL South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, South Carolina Introduction 1. NPCCP 1770, November term, #97. 2. For an introduction to the social scientific literature on embeddedness, see the introduction to Sharon Zukin and Paul DiMaggio, eds., Structures of Capital : The Social Organization of the Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–36. Toby Ditz, in “Shipwrecked; or Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia ,” Journal of American History 81 (June 1994): 51–80; and David Hancock, in Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), among others, have explored what embeddedness meant for men’s commercial relationships in the colonial period. Deborah Valenze provides a valuable exploration of the embeddedness of money itself in early modern England in The Social Life of Money in the English Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chapter 1; Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), chapter 4. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 30–38, has a useful summary of the intellectual history of market thought. 4. Studies of business and finance have for some time urged us to think in terms of networks, not individuals, and to see financial transactions embedded within social connections and cultural practices. See Grahaeme Thompson et al., Markets, Hierarchies, and Networks: The Coordination of Social Life (London: Sage, 1991); Toshio Yamagishi et al., “Network Connections and the Distribution of Power in Exchange Networks,” American Journal of Sociology 93, no. 4 (January 1988): 833–51; Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Network Analysis, Culture , and the Problem of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 6 (May 1994): 1411–54; Brian Uzzi, “The Sources and Consequences of Embeddedness for the Economic Performance of Organizations: The Network Effect,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 4 (August 1996): 674–98. English historians have begun to explore the importance of intermediaries. See Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Karin Wulf deploys the concept of networks to analyze women in colonial Philadelphia in Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). 5. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, reprinted in Robert L. Heilbroner, ed., The Essential Adam Smith (New York: Norton, 1986), 241. Smith acknowledged the interdependence of men upon each other in a commercial society, particularly as regards the division of labor. The interdependence, he argued, was negotiated through one man’s self-interest appealing to another man’s self-interest in forging exchanges. 6. An extensive literature explores the concept of separate male and female “spheres” of life in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Linda Kerber , “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women ’s History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 9–39. For a recent reconsideration of the analytical utility of the public/private binary in women’s history, and how it intersects with and differs from the idea of “spheres,” see the articles in Journal of Women’s History 15, nos. 1 and 2 (2003). 7. Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 8. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (1982; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 52. See also Jeanne Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Market Labor...