Markets and Morality: Intersections of Economy, Ethics, and Religion in Early North America: Special Issue Introduction

The articles in this special forum of Early American Studies originated as papers presented at the seventh annual conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society in 2008.¹ The conference brought together historians who have been thinking about the connections between markets and morality in a variety of ways, across a variety of cultures and geographies. The conference's theme, "Markets and Morality," was intended to invoke the connections between two broad areas of historical research that often are considered distinct from each other, but which, as the articles in this issue demonstrate, are both enriched and better understood when investigated together.

One of these areas is what may be termed the "economies" of people in the early Americas. More than simply the producing, selling, and consuming of goods, or the price structures and institutional arrangements for market activities, "economy" can (and ought to be) considered as an expansive rubric that encompasses a wide range of early American activities to get and spend, satisfy needs and wants, organize households and work relations in myriad ways, negotiate race and status through the exchange of goods, found empires, exploit environments, and much more. The conference also explored how we might expand our notions of "morality," "ethics," and "religion" to cover not only institutional religion and formal systems of ethics and moral philosophy, but also "lived religion," including such topics as the crossroads of customary and legal expressions of ethics, the range of cultural constructions of values, and the effects of new environments, migration, and slavery on moral teachings.

As discussion at the conference revealed, when terms such as "economy" and "morality" are broadened in these ways there are richer stories to narrate, and deeper analyses emerge. But just how far can we stretch our categories, how much can we encompass within these rubrics, before subjects and their historical contexts are barely visible through a fog of inclusiveness? The essays in this special issue show that the benefits of expanding our definitions and geographies, and of crossing disciplinary and methodological boundaries, probably outweigh the drawbacks. Indeed, although each author begins with somewhat different questions, investigates different eras and historical subjects, and employs different archival sources, they have all benefited collectively from considering "markets" and "morality" together and in very broadly defined ways.

So, when considering the economies of early America, whether understood as transnational or local, rural or urban, emerging or mature, consensual in their producing and exchanging relations or prone to violent conflict, there is agreement in this issue that economies were profoundly affected by the ethical and religious contexts of early America. This is in keeping with the reality of early modern times, when people rarely made an analytical separation between markets and morality—when economics was not considered morally neutral, no matter how loudly writers proclaimed it a "science." Economic thinkers during the period from roughly 1600 to 1830 were concerned not merely with government involvement in the marketplace or the best means to promote personal profits, but also with the moral character of money, debt, and personal conduct in markets. Policy makers lent only one ear to the treatise-writing economists during this era and turned the other ear to pragmatic problem solving in the troubled British Empire. Every wall that imperial authorities put up to contain and channel economic development for the sake of imperial interests in the Atlantic world was drilled full of holes by people and goods flowing inexorably across international boundaries and outside imperial institutional authority. But even at the end of the colonial era and during the early republic, North Americans steeped their discourses about the economic culture of the environment, labor systems, households, and commerce in the language of ethics, morality, and religiosity, even as imperial authorities spent a great deal of time writing laws to regulate economic behavior and fighting wars to defend economic interests with reference to what they recognized as their moral virtues.

By the same token, the authors in this issue show that religious leaders and moral philosophers moved far...