‘Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815 by Sheryllynne Haggerty (review)

In this monograph, Sheryllynne Haggerty argues that a distinctive business culture operated in the British transatlantic commercial world in the period 1750–1815 based on interdependent elements of risk, trust, reputation, obligation, and networks. These aspects of commercial behavior are discussed by harnessing modern socio-economic theories to the business history of the period. The theories used are mainly those advanced by sociologists, economists, psychologists, and specialists in modern business behavior and practice. Using such theories has the disadvantage of taking ideas and conclusions about contemporary business practice without the reader of this monograph having ready access to the sources and the context of the original research and thrust of such studies. On the other hand, Haggerty’s approach has the advantage of applying selective insights from interdisciplinary reading and theorizing to illuminate the business world of another era. Occasionally, readers might think the conclusions taken from socio-economic theorists provide obvious generalizations that could have been referred to without reference to the sociological literature cited. Yet, Haggerty uses such literature in an intelligent and controlled way that sharpens her readings of the themes discussed in eighteenth-century business culture.

To make the study manageable, given the vast but uneven array of surviving mercantile records, Haggerty mainly selects Liverpool merchants’ letterbooks and loose correspondence for her primary material. These are documents she knows very well from her first book, The British-Atlantic Trading Community 1760–1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (2006). The mercantile decisions of Liverpool merchants such as Thomas Leyland, William Earle, James Clemens, and others therefore appear frequently in the text. Haggerty casts her net widely to include the business relations of these merchants not just with British colonies in North America and the West Indies but also with the west coast of Africa and French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies in the Americas. In doing so, she reflects the commercial horizons of eighteenth-century overseas merchants who were not bound by mercantilist regulations to trade only with their own colonies. The research underpinning the book is impressive and surefooted, drawing on archival material from Britain, Spain, the United States, Canada, and Jamaica. Networks are illuminated in chapter 6 by intelligent use of the Pajek Windows program to produce diagrams showing the commercial webs within which merchants operated.

Most chapters select relevant modern socio-economic theories which are then applied to selective episodes or quotations from eighteenth-century mercantile records. This mode of presentation and analysis works well except that more contextual historical information would have helped to explain some of the primary evidence. Thus the American merchant Joshua Johnson is cited as stating that he needed extra eyes in London during his stay there in the early 1770s in order to deal with matters of trust (page 67). Fuller citation of material from his letterbook might have helped the reader to understand what exactly he meant. Did he mean that, having arrived from Maryland, he now had a larger group of unknown traders to assess in terms of their business behavior? Or was there something untrustworthy in the practices of the London merchants he had come across? The matter is left dangling. Another instance occurs in a remark that the Liverpool merchant Robert Bostock advised his captains not to trust goods to any nation at Sierra Leone (page 91). This comment merited further explanation about why slave traders had more trust in selling goods at other West African locations. These examples, and several similar instances, do not detract from the academic quality of the book; they merely suggest that further contextualization of the source material could have been achieved.

‘Merely for Money’? is part of Liverpool University Press’s series “Eighteenth-Century Worlds”. It is the best monograph available in print that dissects the business culture and practice of eighteenth-century British transatlantic merchants in a thematic manner. Specialists in international...