Jacob M. Price - Böcker

This is the first of three volumes selected from the papers of Jacob M. Price. Focusing on the Atlantic tobacco trade in the 18th century, these studies illustrate the complex business history of this commercial enterprise and demonstrate its key importance in shaping economic relationships between Britain and the emerging American economy. Detailed studies of individual firms such as Buchanan & Simson and Joshua Johnson are well-known as classics of 18th-century business history, and these studies are placed in broader context by Price's seminal characterisations of the scale and structure of the Chesapeake trade. A previously unpublished paper offers a recent perspective on the market structure of the colonial Chesapeake, the role of the slave economy, and a critique of received historiography.

The external economy of British North America has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the last two generations, and the papers reprinted here, in this second collection from Jacob Price, make important contributions to quantification, conceptualisation and debate. Studies presenting and analysing new statistical material from the English and Scottish customs accounts are supplemented by a general survey of the transatlantic economy in the 18th century which is required reading for all students of the subject. Price's treatment is diversified into financial arrangements and the role of credit in the slave trade and plantation economies. In a provocative chapter "Who cared about the colonies?", concern in Britain for the 13 colonies between 1714 and 1775 is explored in terms of the ability of the colonies to involve the interests and command the attention and concern of people in Britain from the politically eminent to those in trade and to the nation at large.

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.