Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism by Emma Hart (review)

Many historians of capitalism are reluctant to identify when it began. Emma Hart makes a valuable contribution to the field by convincingly posing one answer to this elusive question. She argues that America’s “pioneering brand of capitalism” was the product of the friction between the colonial and revolutionary eras (2). Hart painstakingly charts how markets transitioned from physical spaces to ideological abstractions. In addition to using traditional business records, Trading Spaces marshals a wealth of evidence from colonial and state archives, newspapers, family papers, and maps to tell a qualitative and spatial history of economic life. She makes a compelling case for choosing as her main sites Pennsylvania and South Carolina, “which shared chronologies of imagining, making and ordering commercial space,” while differing in forms of labor and production (6). Pennsylvania and South Carolina are popular choices for colonial case studies, but Hart does not base her argument about the development of capitalism solely on these two locations. Because she is interested in getting to the roots of changes in market cultures, she also selects two sites in Britain as points of reference. Her choice here is novel: northeast England (Newcastle) and southwest Scotland (Glasgow), both of which underwent commercialization at a pace more akin to Pennsylvania and South Carolina than London and southeast England. Hart then enriches these spaces with a diversity of actors, from the well-known Whartons of Philadelphia to lesser-known individuals like the Charleston butcher Margaret Oliver. The markets these individuals created in America were hybrids that reflected both the inherited customs of early modern European markets and the continent’s expansive territory and diverse population.

The book is divided into three sections: the first lays out the early modern and imperial contexts, the second covers Americans’ colonial experiences remaking markets, and the third travels through the revolutionary and independence eras. Hart’s first chapter begins by engaging with the endlessly interpretable Adam Smith. Like most historians of capitalism, Hart argues that scholars must understand markets as they existed in their precise historical context, but she is less critical of Smith than many. She seeks to rescue his promotion of markets as places where free individuals could solve the problems of detrimental institutional interests from today’s neoliberal interpretations of Smith’s free markets as being solely about efficiency. She does, however, challenge Smith’s formulation of markets as abstract configurations of global networks. Hart reminds readers that even as markets increasingly became sets of rules, they remained physical spaces. That is precisely what makes the accelerating commercialization of the early modern economic scene so interesting.

To illustrate how new concerns over financial innovations and “prices currents” fused with traditional customs and hierarchies, Hart offers a tour through early modern market spaces: fairs, urban market-places, and shops. She does not limit her discussion of market forms and practices to Europe and America. For example, she highlights the Aro in the Bight of Biafra creating “nimble marketing networks” to deal with the European demand for slaves, and the women in Luanda selling manioc flour to foreign traders (34). Hart recognizes the limitations of archeological evidence, but argues that West African and Native American societies dealt with market changes before Anglo-American settlement in North America, and tended to be more flexible and adaptive than Europeans. Hart’s mining of sources and impressive coverage are a major strength of the book. In the second section, for example, rather than leave Africans out for lack of sources, she asks questions, such as, “Is it really possible that that not a single one of these people, making their way on long journeys from plantations to ferries and towns, took the opportunity to deal in some small goods along the way?” (73).

Hart’s attention to sources and more marginalized figures sharpens her arguments about the nuances of market changes. Many individuals contributed to the creation of new and more...