What Do Merchants Believe? Trade and Empire in Colonial New York

The merchant communities of colonial America present scholars with a tantalizing dilemma. Their activities generated rich veins of source materials, but the value of those sources is not immediately apparent: like low-grade ore, the account books, customs records, political debates, and correspondence generated by colonial traders need to be refined before they yield up their meanings. And, as anyone who has ever tried to teach economic history to undergraduates must realize, even then they might not seem all that interesting. Appreciation for the drama inherent in patterns of trade, debates over currency policy, or fights for price regulation, like a love of opera or professional wrestling, is an acquired taste—one that students, and even other scholars, do not always share. To bring merchant activities to a larger audience, historians must often resort to some Big Question—usually rooted in the ideas of Adam Smith, Max Weber, or Karl Marx—to unify and enliven their work.

In Merchants and Empire, Cathy Matson traces the development of New York from its origins as a small Dutch trading enclave to its mature status as a leading colonial port. She describes in rich detail the development of the city’s various commercial enterprises; she explicates the tangled history of economic regulation as it affected New York’s trading community; and she traces the careers of individual merchants as they struggled to make a place for themselves in the competitive and uncertain world of colonial commerce. But Matson’s book is framed by its own Big Question which is only loosely tied to its moorings in the quotidian details of trading patterns and career trajectories: were the merchants of colonial New York mercantilists or free traders? In particular, she wonders whether “lesser merchants support[ed] the commercial goals . . . that are closely identified with the commercial elite and political authority?” (p. 5). Matson returns to this question in a variety of contexts throughout the book, but her most general answer is to suggest that England’s mercantilist policies usually benefitted, and were most consistently supported by, the city’s most prominent traders, who dominated the trans-Atlantic trade. Lesser traders, whose livelihoods were much more closely tied, according to Matson, to the coastal and West Indies trades and to regional marketing, were more likely to argue for free trade. These arguments generally failed, since they “came from the lesser merchants, who were most vulnerable in trade and least empowered in politics” (p. 7).

Matson’s interest in theories of political economy and their relationship to merchant practices and government policy was anticipated in her earlier published work. ¹ Merchants and Empire begins with an attempt to articulate this relationship. “Colonial American merchants,” Matson writes, “rarely engaged in consistent, systematic, and self-conscious reflection on their political economy, but patterns of economic thought can nonetheless be discerned. . . . [T]heir calculations with regard to the material comfort and welfare of their people were not ‘merely economic’ and therefore detached from values” (p. 5). Merchants, according to this formulation, began with practical and generally self-interested concerns, but moved gradually toward coherent codes of behavior and belief.

The book consists of eight chapters. The first traces the establishment of New Amsterdam as a port; the last details the effects of the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath. In between, a pair of triptychs constitute the core of the book. Chapters two through four, each of which focuses on the period 1664 to 1700, treat transatlantic trade, the West Indies and coastal trade, and the growth of a regional economy in turn. Chapters five through seven are devoted to the same three topics, this time for the period from 1700 to 1760.

From its earliest days as a remote outpost of the Dutch West India Company, New Amsterdam gave rise to a fractured and competitive community of merchants who fought with the “governor’s camp” to gain more liberal trading privileges...