Citizens of the World

"To attempt to combine the methods and the inspirational genius of an Edward S. Morgan, a Bernard Bailyn, a Jacob Price, and a Simon Schama in one work is a daunting if not forbidding challenge, but it is one to which David Hancock rises with distinction. Citizens of the World is not your usual run-of-the-mill collective biography or dry-as-dust statistical analysis of colonial trade patterns. It is an inspired account of the whole lives of men who made a difference in the world of trade by their willingness to challenge the system from within....must reading for anyone interested in the emergence of the American economy in the eighteenth century, just as it stands as must reading for anyone who wishes to understand better the predominant role certain London merchants played in shaping the course of the British Empire in the last decades of the eighteenth century." The Journal of American History

• Part I. The Crucible of Trade: 1. A larger world; 2. Mercantile origins: 'passengers only'; Part II. The Management of Trade: 3. Managing from a 'Merchant's public counting house'; 4. Shipping and trading in an 'empire of the seas'; 5. Planting: 'a great fund of riches and of strength to Great Britain'; 6. Slaving: Bance Island's 'general rendezvous'; 7. Government contracting: 'a work of Hercules'; 8. Financing: 'turning the great wheel of unfathomable commerce round'; Part III. Becoming a Gentleman: 9. The urge to improve; 10. The way to be rich and respectable; Epilogue: mercantile legacies: 'industrious friends'.