Introduction

The thirteenth annual conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES), held October 24 and 25, 2013, brought together a number of presenters and commenters to explore new ways to conceptualize economic arrangements in the eighteenth-century Western Hemisphere, what we called economic “ligaments.” We all readily admitted that organizing scholarly research around this perspective could spin out of control quickly, that the concept itself might be too capacious. We worried that once we started looking at the early modern era’s human and material connections within classes, gender, knowledge, skills, resources, and imperial boundaries, any economic interactions could be conceptualized as ligaments. And as it turned out, the scholarship showcased in the articles for this special issue of Early American Studies, representing some of the research that presenters shared at the conference, varies enormously, as do the scale of its geographies, scope of its human connections, and range of its methodologies. But as readers of the following articles will discover, using the concept of ligaments affords us an opportunity to think in at least two new ways.

First, thinking about ligaments provides a perspective that challenges the overgeneralizations and abstractions of Atlantic and global studies, as well as the limitations of individual biographies or self-contained community studies, even as it adopts the best achievements of both. Between and within the spaces of great oceans or expansive frontiers, there were negotiated and contested relationships that have not been explored adequately; between and within local places, colonial peoples created the sinews linking them to each other and to distant relationships. By framing their research and arguments with respect to ligaments, many of the conference presenters accepted the challenge of creating new contexts, and from them, old questions could be framed in new ways: How did ordinary people accomplish the endless daily chores of buying and selling, producing and exchanging, that sustained eighteenth-century households? How did they forge economic friendships and dispute misunderstandings in their neighborhoods? How did a city’s commercial identity translate into putting a ship of goods to sea? How did early modern peoples communicate effectively across seemingly incompatible imperial and ethnic boundaries? What kinds of skills and resources did colonists need to function in local marketplaces? How did merchants make connections with distant creditors and consumers, and how did they gain the expertise to write business letters, dun their debtors, procure marine insurance, buy and sell bills of exchange? How did people live as neighbors in a jam-packed colonial town? How did they forge connections across very thinly populated interiors? How did merchants, craftsmen, householders, and hucksters negotiate their access to limited resources and information? How did they do this across the ideological lines of race and status?

Second, the articles in this special issue (and the broader spectrum of papers for the conference) explore new archival sources in order to think more creatively about the broadly conceptualized ligaments of the early modern economy. The evidence for their arguments is embedded in new material spaces such as cupboards of ingredients, underground clothing exchanges, street corners featuring public auctions, the back rooms of retail shops, as well as the alleys, waterfronts, and coffeehouses where status, race, mobility, and other constructions of identity were challenged regularly. Scholarship that takes ligaments as its self-conscious starting point also invites readers to consider how paper instruments such as marine insurance premiums, powers of attorney, auction advertisements, and court depositions increasingly supplanted the authority of verbal contracts as the sinews of obligation and opportunity. As two articles in this special issue explain, clothing itself was a ligament, in two important respects; on the one hand, satisfying the necessity of dressing oneself entailed scores of discrete acts of producing, processing, marketing, exchanging, making, and selling in many local places, from Caribbean plantations to Virginia homes; on the other hand, clothing also was a ligament in the social conventions that allowed one to announce or create status. The ligaments of calculating, recording, documenting, and dressing helped eighteenth...