John J. Mccusker

The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Remember that time is money.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1748¹

Never was the farmer better paid for the part [of his crops that] he spared for commerce, as the published prices current abundantly testify.

Benjamin Franklin, 1787²

L'espace, ennemi numéro 1.

Fernand Braudel³

The value of information to the economy is obvious. The ways in which information was provided to participants in the economy of the Atlantic World during the second half of the second millennium of the Christian era changed significantly, twice. Step one in this transformation engaged the printing press in the service of business. Before the change, sharing information involved direct, interpersonal communication; after it, information could be broadcast. The second step began with the telegraph and has progressed to the palm pilot and the mobile telephone—both, as you read these words, being melded into one, ever-smaller device combining telephone, personal digital assistant, camera, and portable scanner. The delivery of information changed at that point from mechanical to electronic, with consequences yet fully to be fathomed, the progression across the centuries captured in the mantra of the modern business world: better, faster, cheaper—an information revolution.

Frances Cairncross has written of the "death of distance," a potent phrase that vividly evokes the impact of the latest information technologies (IT).⁴ Yet distance and its close cousin time did not die suddenly. The death of distance has been a lingering one, the story of which is only becoming clearer as we learn more about the onset of its demise over the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. Pivotal for business in reducing the impact of distance and time were the introduction and spread of commercial and financial newspapers.⁵

The publication of business newspapers was the first step in a break with the past; they became the method of choice for the dissemination of economic news to our own era. Once introduced into the European economy in the mid-sixteenth century, business newspapers developed rapidly into several different types and came quickly to be published in the important European commercial and financial centers—but not elsewhere, for several centuries.⁶ Thus the starting up of indigenous business newspapers in the United States only in the 1780s, after the American Revolution, presents for us a chance to ponder the causes and consequences of the demise of time and the death of distance.⁷ That the establishment of the first business newspaper in the United States was concurrent with the establishment of the country's political independence underscores the new nation's emergence as a separate economic entity, too. That both developments were set in the same city, Philadelphia, suggests a linkage between the developing political and economic power of the country.

Much was new in these developments in the Western Hemisphere but much was old, too. Just as the political system installed in the United States was grounded in Old World ideas and institutions, so also was its economic system. This makes the earlier absence of a business press all the more curious. The questions are obvious: Why were no business newspapers published in British America prior to the 1780s? Why were some fifteen of them suddenly established during the next two decades? The answer to the questions is to be found in the historical development of business newspapers in Europe from the 1530s to the 1780s and in the way they finally came to be established in the United States during the two decades after the Peace of Paris in 1783.

To explain these developments is the point of this essay, first through an exploration of what happened in Europe, then of what happened in the new United States. Reflecting on these developments illuminates some of the fundamental reasons for the emergence of commercial and financial journalism as the first step in the demise of distance. I would argue that this account of the information revolution is best presented as a narrative that pays attention to the timing and places of its origins. Telling the tale in this manner not only makes it broadly accessible, but also highlights the chronological sequence of events and ideas so crucial to the creation of the broader information revolution that the emergence of the business press launched. I believe this method of presentation is critical as well because it emphasizes the importance of narrative as a tool of historical analysis and presentation. In this form, the moral of the story is as much in the telling as in the subject being explained. For this reason, my chronicle of the expanding exchange of business information is also a brief for the importance of narrative analysis.⁸

This initial step in the information revolution triggered developments that continue to bring changes into our own time. Under the impetus of the business press, increasingly integrated local, national, and international markets yielded greater profitability for business firms thanks to better information. Three hundred years after the introduction of the business press, the steamship and the locomotive, the telegraph and the telephone added speed to reliability in the delivery of news. A century and a half later, at the beginning of the third millennium, labor and commodity markets were increasingly globalized to a degree that amazed all and disconcerted many.⁹ Information had become practically costless. IT no longer mattered, the clever conceit of Nicholas Carr.¹⁰ The information revolution was over; distance—the enemy targeted by Fernand Braudel—passed unlamented.

Some five centuries ago, the business press came into being when a group of merchants decided that their comparative advantage was significantly improved by the printing and sale of information that they and their colleagues had previously thought more valuable for being kept secret. Up to that point, keeping things a secret, the better to gain the upper hand over one's competitors, was standard business practice. The prices of commodities, the availability of goods, the location of customers, the arrival and departure of cargoes, the sailing of ships, the vagaries of the sea, the winds, and the tides: there was, and is, a great value to all this information. Developing private sources of information to the benefit of one's own firm was fundamental to success. These same notions continue to have currency in the business world today.

Such secrets gathered from trusted sources had always been shared with one's business contacts, of course, particularly within the various branches of a firm.¹¹ Mercantile correspondence from as long ago as the Phoenician traders of the third and second millennia B.C. is rich in such information. The merchants of the Italian city states of the late Middle Ages developed and distributed forms for the collection and circulation of commodity prices among members of the same company. Numbers of these survive in the archives of, for instance, the Datini of fourteenth-century Prato.¹² Practically every letter of every merchant I have ever seen has a postscript telling the recipient the latest price for some commodity and the current rate of exchange, sometimes expressed in a shorthand so cryptic as to seem a code.¹³

Limiting the exchange of business information enhanced its value. The elaboration of a local market and the creation of a community of colleagues perforce opened up the circle a bit as organizations of merchants and guilds of brokers based at one town or fair agreed to gather and in face-to-face conversation share basic information to their mutual benefit. Even still, the clique was closed to all but the trusted few. Reliable intelligence about markets and prices—"the freshest advices"—is what kept business alive. Such information was meant to be private, to the benefit only of those who needed to know.

Then something changed. The printing press made it possible, but an altered attitude made it happen.¹⁴ Perhaps the merchants of Venice were first, but the earliest known instance of the printing and publication of business newspapers occurred at Antwerp. The development was quite dramatic, fortuitously testified to in the letter book of the Antwerp office of a merchant firm, the Van der Molen, that traded Low Country cloth with merchants in Italy. The copybook of the firm's letters to its correspondents covers the period from 1538 through 1544. Into its first many pages, the company's clerk transcribed not only the texts of letters sent but also appended, as usual, prices and exchange rates at the foot of the letter, in a list—"listini" in Italian, the language of the letters. In August 1540, the copy clerk suddenly changed his practice; he stopped transcribing rates and prices. Instead he began noting in the copybook that the recipient would find enclosed with the letter "[listini di] pretio di mercanti"—lists of the prices of goods—"in stampa," that is, printed.¹⁵

It is from this period that we have our first evidence of the publication of two kinds of business newspaper, the one called the commodity price current and the other called the exchange rate current. We date the start of the commercial and financial press to these humble but significant beginnings at Antwerp around 1540—although, given the early and continuing publication of them in the Italian language and recognizing the heavy dependence by Low Country merchants on Italian practices and precedents in matters mercantile, one must reserve the possibility of an even earlier origin in the Italian city states, perhaps, as was said above, Venice.¹⁶

Who published them? And why? We can only speculate in answer to both of these questions. (I am reminded at this point of the cliché about the medieval historian who forges ahead with two documents and lots of imagination.) If, as seems likely, later modes of organizing the publication of these newspapers emulated previous modes, then we can look to what we know about the publication of the Amsterdam business newspapers for an indication of what the Antwerpers had done first. If so, then it was the licensed brokers of the city acting through the famous Antwerp Beurs (or Bourse, the Antwerp Exchange) that organized the publication of these newspapers.

The Antwerp Exchange—the model for the Amsterdam Exchange and the prototype for Thomas Gresham's Royal Exchange in London—played a central role in the business of the city. (See Figure 1). Such exchanges faced in two directions, like the Roman god Janus. Their primary function was to channel business news to their local membership. Members of the exchange met there during business hours and learned the news in a medley of ways: through conversations with other members; through announcements called out to all of them;¹⁷ through the receipt and disbursal of the letter post; and, increasingly after the invention of the printing press, through flyers, broadsides, and, ultimately, newspapers printed and posted on the exchange. Exchanges came to be valued for their libraries; the back issues of the newspapers to which the exchange subscribed were an important part of library holdings.¹⁸ As that suggests, the second function of these exchanges, one that grew to become increasingly important after the 1540s, was to channel local business news abroad. This second impulse originated on the Antwerp Beurs when its brokers decided to publish local business newspapers.

Figure 1: The Antwerp Exchange (1531–1581). Engraved in 1849 by Jan Theodor Joseph Linnig (1815–1891). The view north along Twaalfmaandenstraat showing the main entrance to the Beurs/Bourse with the bell tower. Notice the booksellers' or stationers' stalls where one might have purchased copies of the Antwerp business newspapers. Reproduced with kind permission of the Stadsarchief, Antwerp.

Based again on what we know to have been the practice later at Antwerp, Amsterdam, and other places, we surmise that from the start the committee of the brokers guild that ran the Antwerp Exchange licensed the publication of their newspapers to one or more members of their guild who then ran the publication as a separate business. At Amsterdam a century later, the members of that subcommittee were called the "prijs courantiers." They hired clerks to do the work of gathering and assembling the information. At the appointed day and hour, the clerks circulated on the trading floor of the bourse, questioning designated brokers at each of their designated trading areas, or "walks," asking them about the latest prices of specific commodities, exchange rates, insurance rates, and the rest.¹⁹ (See Figure 2). Writing on a copy of the previous issue of the newspaper, the clerks penciled in the changes, corrections, and comments. They then met to assemble the data they had gathered and the five prijs courantiers checked it carefully—"ghecorrigeert by ons vyven" the Amsterdam newspaper proclaimed, seeking to reassure its readers—before sending copy to the printer with whom they had contracted to set type and produce the newspaper.²⁰ It was sold by subscription and by individual copy to any who cared to pay the price.

Figure 2: "An Elevation, Plan and History of the Royal Exchange of London" (1761). Drawn by John Donowell (fl. 1753–1786) and engraved by Anthony Walker (1726–1765). Shown are the "walks" of each trading group. Reproduced with permission from a copy in the author's possession.

This manner of operation continued to be carried on rather unchanged into the first half of the twentieth century. A former editor of the Financial Times of London once explained to me that the way of gathering the information and preparing copy that I have just described was how things were done for his newspaper until just before World War II. This was certainly how the first commodity price current was published in Philadelphia in the 1780s.²¹ It is likely that this was how it was done from the start, at Antwerp, in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Why did the brokers of Antwerp break with the past and publish their trade secrets? This is an even trickier question and one for which we have no hard evidence at all to help us find answers, only inferences.²² Nevertheless several things seem obvious.

Probably the most telling reason merchants in a city such as Antwerp agreed to the organization of a business press was that doing so would generate more business for the city. A published list of the prices at which commodities sold on the Antwerp market announced the existence of such a market at Antwerp. It advertised the commodities that could be sold there, thus attracting more sellers. It publicized all the goods that could be purchased there, thus attracting more buyers. So did a similar listing of the rates at which bills of exchange could be negotiated encourage more businesses to consider Antwerp as the place to buy and sell them. Later newspapers touted the costs and availability of money on loan, cargoes just landed, ships about to sail, and the rates at which goods could be freighted. Even a newspaper that appeared only quarterly served the same purposes. Increasing business, of course, quickly turned a quarterly newspaper into a weekly newspaper in the same way that the increased business convinced a city famous for its quarterly fairs that it needed to build an exchange because the fair had become a daily occurrence. The city of Antwerp opened its newly constructed exchange in 1531 to accommodate what had become, according to Florentine merchant and longtime inhabitant of Antwerp, Lodovico Guicciardini, a "continuous fair."²³ Business newspapers, founded there within the decade, helped the expansion of that market.

A second reason for the publication of business newspapers was that publishing them was a profitable business in itself.²⁴ Every one of these newspapers about which there exists relevant information was run as a money-making enterprise. The prijs courantiers contended for the job and paid to the brokers' guild that ran the exchange both an initiation fee and an annual renewel fee for their license to operate. They came to value these licenses more highly over time, to bid their price up fiercely, and to defend them stoutly. They had cause. The broker's guild not only dispensed licenses but also organized the screening of the newspapers to guarantee the accuracy and impartiality of their contents. They withdrew licenses when malfeasance was detected.²⁵ In later times and other places, competitive pressures supplemented and supplanted oversight by authorities to insure honesty and consistency in reporting, the invisible hand of the market replacing the visible hand of government. The publisher contracted with and paid a licensed printer for doing his job. Governments monitored and taxed these enterprises, both the newspapers themselves and the printers thereof.²⁶ But governments also considered business newspapers important enough to promote their publication by granting them various incentives like concessionary postal privileges. The English crown valued one business newspaper so highly that, uniquely, it made the newspaper's printer free of all control by the city and the Stationers' Company.

Most importantly for publishers, there were profits to be made in selling newspapers. They sold them to patrons near and far, hiring young people (called in London "Mercuries"—many of whom were women [See Figure 3]) to deliver them to clients close by, using the mail to speed them to subscribers in the country and abroad.²⁷ Some local customers bought several copies and sent them to their own business contacts, taking advantage of promotive postal rates. To foster this behavior, publishers offered multiple copies to a single purchaser at a reduced price per copy. American merchants and planters insisted that their metropolitan correspondents subscribe in their behalf and forward them regularly and frequently. The publishing of business newspapers was a business like the publication of any other newspaper.

Figure 3: "London's Gazette Here." Ca. 1687–1688. Drawn by Marcellus Laroon the Elder (1653–1702) and engraved by Pierce Tempest (1653–1717). Reproduced from the copy in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge University, with the kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College.

A third reason for the adoption and success of business newspapers was that they increased the efficiency of an economy by enabling individual businesses to work more productively. They delivered important news to contacts near and far in ways that were more regular, more thorough, more comprehensive, more reliable, and more predictable than earlier modes, thereby reducing the risks of carrying on business. They eased the workload within firms that had many correspondents in far away places, cutting the cost of doing business. (Perhaps the clerks in the employ of the Van der Molen noticed that after August 1540 they had extra time to do other tasks for their employer, perhaps to write more letters to new clients. One or more may have lost his job, rendered dispensable by new technology.) Business newspapers served as independent, impartial, and redundant sources of information about conditions in the market, verifying what a correspondent had written, reassuring clients, and confirming customers. They changed the workday of business owners who could choose to attend the exchange less frequently. It became possible to work out of a coffee house or the front office of a company that subscribed to business newspapers.²⁸

All these advantages and others acted to cut a firm's transaction costs and allowed merchants to engage customers more closely, to challenge competitors more successfully.²⁹ By lowering the costs of doing business in any given economy, business newspapers helped increase productivity and profitability and create more business for that economy. Awarding the market that had the best communications a competitive advantage accorded that market a potential for preeminence.³⁰ Business newspapers managed to reinforce the supremacy of pivotal business places, thereby helping to create and to bolster the likes of an Antwerp, an Amsterdam, a London—and, so the story goes, temporarily a Philadelphia, and, ultimately, a New York City.

Indeed one can argue that, in tandem with the profound political and cultural changes that had their beginning in the mid-fifteenth century and that created the early modern world, there was an equally profound set of economic changes that many have called the "commercial revolution." Simply sketched, this revolution ended the domination of the European economy by Mediterranean merchants who, in the late Middle Ages, made their home in the Italian city states. This "commercial revolution" can be defined as the shift in the center of western commerce and finance out of Mediterranean Europe and into North Atlantic Europe.

At first the new locus of power was Antwerp, lasting from the opening of the sixteenth century until the 1570s.³¹ Amsterdam ruled for roughly the next century, the golden age of the Netherlands. Then it was London's turn.³² The core of western—and, increasingly, worldwide—trade and finance was London from the 1690s to World War I. "London has become, what Amsterdam formerly was, the grand emporium of the commercial world—universi orbis terrarum emporium."³³ New York City took over at that point, and it still holds sway into our own day—though, plotting on the global trajectory of the succession thus far, we might expect Tokyo, or Hong Kong, or, perhaps, Shanghai to inherit the mantle of Venice sometime soon in this new millennium.³⁴

What is clear is that developments in business communications accompanied and facilitated each of these shifts from city to city. During the early modern era, this meant an articulation of the business press. The Amsterdam commodity price current ruled the markets of Europe in the seventeenth century, setting the standard for everyone else. The Amsterdamers had taken their example from Antwerp and had become the "Great Staple of News," in the words of English diplomat and writer James Howell, a contemporary observer of many of these developments.³⁵ The first evidence we have of an Amsterdam commodity price current is a rather simple, two-page newspaper from 1585, but within a very few years it had grown in form and size to become the model that all others mimicked.

In the seventeenth century, the Amsterdam commodity price current was published weekly in at least four different languages—English, French, and Italian as well as Dutch—and it circulated widely within the orbit of expanding Europe.³⁶ The Amsterdam prijs courantiers published their newspaper in English not out of deference to their linguistically challenged colleagues across the North Sea but because they recognized and sought to reinforce the dominant position of the Amsterdam market in the business world of the seventeenth century. Londoners subscribed to the newspaper in whatever form they could get it for the same reason: Amsterdam set the market for Europe. During its golden age, the price at Amsterdam was the benchmark price, the market maker. One might buy or sell for more or less, but the point of reference was the price at Amsterdam, for commodities, for bills of exchange, for insurance, for money. And the prices for all of them except the last were reported weekly in the Cours van Koopmanschappen tot Amsterdam.³⁷

The same political and cultural factors at work late in the sixteenth century that had caused Antwerp's decline continued to be in play over the next hundred years so that, by the end of the seventeenth century, the curtain was rising on the next act of the commercial revolution. The plot was much the same but the actors different—or at least the setting was different. Depending on one's perspective, either the Dutch conquered England in 1688 or the English staged a Glorious Revolution that year, with considerable Dutch help. In any event, the net result was a new king of England, a Dutchman of Anglo-Dutch ancestry, William of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, King William III.³⁸ In his train came many Dutch merchants and Dutch financiers who served as advisers to his government and who extracted from the shifting political scene multiple business opportunities. A great deal changed in English commerce and finance after 1689, and one of those changes, consequence and cause, was a massively invigorated English business press.

London had had a commodity price current from as early as the first decade of the seventeenth century.³⁹ By the 1640s, it looked very much like a reduced version of the Amsterdam commodity price current upon which it was modeled.⁴⁰ All surviving copies from its first sixty years are in French. There was also a daily bills of entry published from 1619, if not before. By the 1670s, there were two commodity price currents being published weekly, by the 1690s, there were three, and, soon after, a fourth. That same decade witnessed the founding in London of two new and different business newspapers—both of which continue to be published today, a marine list and an exchange rate and stock exchange current. In 1716, a London merchant could subscribe to as many as seven different weekly or daily business newspapers, all of them delivered to his door, at an annual cost of £6.00 sterling, which, when adjusted for nearly three centuries of inflation, is the equivalent in today's money of roughly £630 sterling or nearly $1,200 (€900).⁴¹ London had become the center of the commerce and finance of the Western world and it possessed the commercial and financial press to secure and strengthen its position.

The newspapers to which our London merchant subscribed were essentially four in kind (see Appendix on page 320).⁴² Two of them published prices on the London exchange; the other two dealt with shipping and cargoes. The commodity price current listed the market prices of goods sold. The exchange rate current tracked the local price at which bills of exchange drawn against trading cities abroad could be purchased. The bills of entry recorded the commodities entered into the London Custom House as imported or exported. The marine list specified the arrival and departure of vessels at the port of London. We will recognize that eventually nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century newspapers came to include all of this information in one section of a multisectioned general newspaper. Such a move to consolidate was already underway in London by the end of the seventeenth century, but the overlap was still minimal. Nevertheless, separate and different newspapers with these distinctive characteristics continued to be published in London and elsewhere in the world to the first half of the twentieth century, the United States included.

Two of these London newspapers deserve special mention if only because, founded in the 1690s, they are still both being published today in essentially the same manner, with essentially the same content. Initially issued out of Edward Lloyd's coffee house beginning sometime before January 1692, Lloyd's List is, after the official London Gazette, the second oldest continually published newspaper of any kind still produced in the world today. It is a marine list in that its primary function, then as now, was to trace the arrival and departure of merchant ships.⁴³

The Course of the Exchange, started by John Castaing in March 1697, runs third in the same race. Castaing's was basically an exchange rate current, but, reflecting developments in the London market place in the explosive 1690s, he expanded its coverage beyond just the rates of foreign exchange to include the selling prices of company stock shares, bank shares, and government securities. It continues to be published today as the Stock Exchange Daily Official List.⁴⁴ Reacting to the increasingly competitive nature of London's business press, in 1735 the editor of Lloyd's List, Richard Baker, engaged in a bit of journalistic skullduggery. Baker began to print on the reverse side of his single-sheet newspaper exchange rate tables and stock and securities prices, thereby combining into one newspaper both his own marine list and a twin of Castaing's expanded exchange rate and stock exchange current. Baker's imitation of the Course of the Exchange was flatteringly blatant even down to duplicating its use of different type faces to convey different kinds of information.⁴⁵

Great Britain's colonists were aware of and hungry for the news from London markets and from the earliest days of settlement clamored for these newspapers. Letters from merchants in the colonies—just as much British merchants as the denizens of the city and the businessmen of the outports—entreated their London correspondents to send them copies of all London business newspapers.⁴⁶ Colonial publishers of general newspapers also subscribed to the London business press and advertised the fact as a way of promoting their own publications. In 1705 and 1706, the editor of The Boston News-Letter, John Campbell, noted that he regularly had for sale copies of different London newspapers to which he subscribed and for which he no longer had any use, having first plumbed them for his own publication. The newspapers Campbell offered for sale included London bills of entry and London commodity price currents.⁴⁷

It was the business news from London to which all attended because London was the business center of the Old Empire.⁴⁸ In 1740, The Newcastle Journal expressed what everyone knew to be the case: "London ... which Place governs the Value of all Grain in England."⁴⁹ In the same way that London set the benchmark price "at home," so it did the same thing for the entirety of the empire and beyond. The price at London set the market for colonially produced staple commodities. Chesapeake tobacco planters and West Indian sugar planters made decisions based on the London prices for their commodities. The rate for marine insurance at London was the rate that most concerned colonial shippers, the arrival and departure of ships and cargoes at London, colonial merchants. Certainly local business news was also important, increasingly so over time, but that need was easily satisfied in conversations carried on at the local merchants' exchange, frequently housed in the coffee house.⁵⁰ London made the market that mattered most—and it was London's commercial and financial newspapers that conveyed that market's news.⁵¹ As London merchant Moses Franks declared in a letter to his New York City associate, James Beekman, enclosing promised copies of the London commodity price currents: they are "the Government of our markets."⁵²

Given that the London commodity price current governed London markets and that London markets governed imperial markets, it is easily understood why no business newspapers were published in the colonies before the American Revolutionary War. The colonists got their most significant market news from the London business press. Colonial newspapers served other purposes.⁵³

The New World was not bereft of printers or presses and newspaper publishing in the British colonies had been an active, widespread enterprise for eighty years and more by the time of the War for Independence.⁵⁴ Published business newspapers, so integral to the activities of the early modern Atlantic economy, were known and used from Newfoundland to Barbados in the colonial period. There were none produced in the colonies, it seems clear, because, by the eighteenth century, the publication of business newspapers had come to be concentrated in each trading system's commercial and financial center. British America was part of the British Empire and the commercial and financial center of the Old Empire was London. From London came almost all the business newspapers that the colonists needed to consult.

It was only with the diminution of the relative centrality of London for American business men and business women—or, better put, it was only with the relative increase for them in the importance of American business centers—that a demand arose for the provision of financial and commercial news from those American business centers. It was then that an American business press came into being to satisfy this demand. Not surprisingly, those who set out to publish the first American commercial and financial newspapers followed the European example. The first American business newspaper was a commodity price current published at Philadelphia starting in the middle of 1783.

There had been a lively colonial press in the eighteenth century but newspaper editors, like John Campbell of Boston, published general purpose newspapers. Full of political news from Europe, with stories and datelines from neighboring colonies, and nearly overrun by advertisements, colonial newspapers spared some space for local business news but not much and without much consistency. In the port cities of the Continental Colonies, just as in the "outports" in Great Britain (the word was used at the time to mean all ports other than London), local general newspapers did sometimes include information about shipping, prices, and other business matters, but they did so only inconsistently and incompletely, almost as a filler, never as a matter of first priority. Almost all devoted a few lines to the arrival and departure of ships at the colony's port of entry, but when we can check these reports against official shipping records, it is obvious that such coverage was not a priority because it was neither thorough nor consistent. Eventually many colonial newspapers also printed a limited array of local commodity prices. Again, however, an important news story or a few more advertisements seem easily to have squeezed such sections off the page and out of the newspaper until the next week. It was not that colonial business men and business women were uninterested in local news. They simply had better, more immediate sources for it. Local business news was readily available, all around them.

With the establishment of the new nation and the emergence of Philadelphia as the political and economic hub of that new nation, an interest developed in publishing business newspapers in the United States. Philadelphia's regional and intercolonial significance had grown over the eighteenth century, so much so that by the 1770s it had become the most important of the several port cities of British America.⁵⁵ Its central geographical position helped, of course. Its expanding transatlantic trade reinforced its position among the other colonies, both its near neighbors to the north and east, New Jersey and New York, and to the south, Maryland and Virginia, and also farther away, in British North America and the West Indies, British and otherwise. In 1776, one West Indian observer called Philadelphia "the great mart of America."⁵⁶ Boston's relative standing had declined from its prior eminence. Baltimore and the other ports along Chesapeake Bay had emerged after 1740 as extensions of Philadelphia, Baltimore most particularly as its southern satellite and, later, fierce rival. Charleston, while very important for the rice trade, was simply not as big a player as others in the "coastwise trade," the phrase that described the extensive intercolonial network that linked everywhere from Newfoundland to Barbados. New York City was coming along to challenge Philadelphia, a contest in which it would succeed some fifty years later, but it was not there yet.⁵⁷

On June 13, 1783, John Macpherson published the first number of his Philadelphia Price Current.⁵⁸ (See Figure 4). He described himself as a broker and his endeavor as "the first price current that ever was published in the North America." Macpherson's Philadelphia Price Current was a business newspaper in the same tradition as those published in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. However familiar the European model, North Americans had never had anything like it before from an American press.⁵⁹ The better to reassure his potential clients and to insure their custom, Macpherson patterned his enterprise on what all knew was the case in Europe. He duplicated those publications in almost every aspect of his own endeavor, most especially in the collection of the prices and in their presentation.

Figure 4: The Philadelphia Price Current, December 16, 1783 (recto and verso). Reproduced with kind permission of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

The Philadelphia Price Current continued to appear until the end of 1785, attracting considerable attention from contemporaries—if not from historians.⁶⁰ Other publishers quickly took up Macpherson's example.⁶¹ Competition was keen and the times precarious.⁶² The most successful of the initial group, Mathew Carey's Complete Counting House Companion, which he started up in 1785 and which closely duplicated Macpherson's paper, passed out of Carey's hands in 1788 and out of existence near the end of 1790.⁶³ No more fortunate was Vincent Pelosi whose newspaper, Pelosi's Marine List and Price Current, begun in 1791, folded in less than a year despite his novel attempt to pattern it on Lloyd's List of London. The longest-lived of this first group, The Pennsylvania Mercury and Philadelphia Price-Current, expired in 1792 after eight years. What Macpherson in Philadelphia had started had its grandest claim to fame in the long-running Commercial List and Maritime Register, which began in 1827 and ceased publication only in the Great Depression of the twentieth century.⁶⁴

The subsequently diminished political importance of Philadelphia, with the eventual settling of the national capital at Washington, D.C., and the increasing economic competition offered Philadelphia by Boston, Baltimore, and, especially, eventually, New York City, encouraged the publication of similar newspapers in those cities within a few years of Macpherson's inaugural venture. Before the 1840s, the new United States found itself with several competing seacoast centers of business and many competing business newspapers. When New York finally triumphed as the commercial and financial capital of the country, it became the locus of the business press, too. By the end of World War I, New York had replaced London as the center of world trade and finance and the center of business communications as well.⁶⁵

In 1810 or so, a Philadelphia merchant could subscribe to as many as five different locally published weekly or semiweekly business newspapers, all of them delivered to his door, at an annual cost of $15.00, which, when adjusted for some two centuries of inflation, is roughly equivalent to $230 in today's dollars.⁶⁶ In addition, he or she could also subscribe to perhaps a dozen different English weekly or daily business newspapers, all of them delivered through the mail and after some considerable delay, at an annual cost of some £21 sterling, the equivalent today to roughly £910 sterling or about $1,720—postage not included.⁶⁷ While the North American newspapers sometimes repeated the news from London, to be fully cognizant of all the news that mattered most, American businessmen and businesswomen still needed access to both at a total cost in modern terms of well over $2,000. Such innovations did not come cheaply.⁶⁸

What this all meant is that the business centers of the United States had not yet replaced London on the commercial map.⁶⁹ The likes of Philadelphia had only just started to assume some of the importance in the conduct of American affairs that London had claimed exclusively before the United States attained political independence. The center of trade and finance in the Western world had not yet shifted from London to New York City; that would not happen for another century. Nevertheless, change had begun. Commercial and financial institutions that had been centered in London for the colonists of the First British Empire were now being organized in the United States. A central bank, like the Bank of England, a stock exchange, like the London Stock Exchange, insurance companies, like those of London: all of these forms of enterprise were replicated in the United States in the years after 1783.⁷⁰ To serve them and the expanding agriculture, commerce, and industry of the new country, a business press was a necessity. Its time had come.

Just as had been the case for Antwerp and the other centers of European commercial and financial publishing after the 1540s, so for Philadelphia and the other business centers of the United States after 1783, business newspapers empowered the struggling economy of the young United States in several ways. Organized and supported by the local business community, published as money-making enterprises themselves, they contributed to the efficiency of the markets where they were based. They provided business people in their own cities with news more consistently, reliably, and conveniently than alternative modes of news-gathering. They disseminated news about their own markets widely to others located elsewhere and thereby encouraged them to do business with the merchant community that produced them. Business newspapers helped to perfect the market. As had been the case earlier with London, the rise of ports such as Philadelphia and, later, New York, occurred, in part, because of the articulation of the business press based there. Dependent on the "Freshest Advices," business gloried in better communications. Better communications—if not yet faster and cheaper—changed much in the world of business during the early modern era, diminishing distance and time, while not yet denying them.

In advancing to the next stage in the transformation of communications during the 1780s, the United States reached a point at which Europe had arrived two and a half centuries before. The new nation's center of business played its part in bettering the quality of business news, first mimicking, then usurping the role played by the more senior actors. News may have been better in the early modern world, but it did not move much faster and it certainly was not cheaper than had been the case before the rise of the business press. Faster news transmission came only after the next step, with the telegraph and the radio. Prior to the telegraph, messages traveled only as fast as the horse and rider, the ship at sea—and, only much later, the steamboat and the railway locomotive.⁷¹ By telegraph news arrived instantaneously, if expensively.⁷² Cheaper news required the computer, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, when the marginal cost of the next unit of information approaches zero, finally tolling the death of distance. Better, faster, cheaper—change in the communication of business news happened in that order over the last five centuries.⁷³

With distance no longer a factor, the world of the twenty-first century can with some profit contemplate the implications of the information revolution the origins of which we find revealed in the sixteenth-century records of a small Antwerp firm. Almost five hundred years ago, the businessmen of that city agreed to expand the scope of their affairs by publishing information they had previously kept quiet. Their decision set in motion the series of world-altering changes that have been recounted above. In sum, half a millennium later, what was once undependable, often too late to be useful, and cost a great deal is now available securely, quickly, and nearly without cost. Yet the impact of better, faster, and cheaper information on human society has yet to be completely grasped. The globalization and rationalization of the international economy may be only the most immediate consequence. It is still not clear, for instance, whether the most recent progress in the electronic stage of the demise of time and the death of distance will increase or decrease the impulse to economic centralization and concentration. For the scholarly community, it may mean the end of libraries as we have known them. Already, for some who are reading this article, it may only be available online. Certainly for the average reader, my words are available better, faster, and cheaper than in the past—an observation that may constitute the ultimate act of self-referencing.⁷⁴

Appendix

Catalogue and Description of the Types of Early Commercial and Financial Newspapers Published in Europe Prior to the End of the Eighteenth Century

Catalogue

Publications that reported on the local economy ("currents")
1. Commodity price currents
  (a) General price currents
  (b) Specialized price currents
2. Foreign exchange rate currents
3. Money currents
4. Stock exchange currents
Publications that reported on overseas trade and shipping
1. Bills of entry
  (a) General bills
  (b) Specialized ("small") bills
2. Marine Lists
Publications that combined two or more of the elements from categories A and B
1. Exchange rate current/stock exchange current
2. Exchange rate current/marine list
3. Exchange rate current/stock exchange current/marine list

Description

Local Market Publications or "Currents"
1. Commodity Price Currents
  Published the local currency prices of goods offered for sale in a specific market. The general commodity price currents included the prices of a broad range of goods; the specialized price currents were limited to particular kinds of commodities, e.g., cloth, grain, sugar, imported colonial goods, etc. The general commodity price current also usually listed a few exchange rates and sometimes insurance rates and money rates.
2. Foreign Exchange Rate Currents
  Published the going rates on the local exchange or bourse for bills of exchange against a list of cities in other countries. Bills of exchange are negotiable instruments for the transfer of funds, usually to another country. They were similar to modern bank checks but were drawn on funds held by individuals or businesses rather than on funds held by banks.
3. Money Currents
  Published the value in the local money of account of a variety of foreign and domestic coins and, sometimes, gold and silver bullion. As this implies, even domestically minted coins sometimes fluctuated in value against the local money of account.
4. Stock Exchange Currents
  Published the prices at which shares of stock, bonds, and government securities were traded on the local market.
Overseas Trade and Shipping Publications
1. Bills of Entry
  Published lists of commodities that had been entered into the local customhouse books as being off-loaded and imported or as being loaded on board for export.
2. Marine Lists
  Published lists of ships entering into or clearing from various ports, particularly the port at which the list was published but sometimes other domestic and foreign ports also.
Combined Publications

As economies grew more complex and business publishing became more sophisticated and competitive, some publishers produced newspapers that incorporated more than one of the elements in categories A and B. Modern business newspapers and the business sections of modern political newspapers combine everything distinguished above.

During the time that I was engaged in the researching and writing of this essay, I enjoyed a great deal of support. I am immensely grateful for the help given me: as a Visiting Senior Mellon Scholar in American History at the University of Cambridge; as a John Adams Fellow of the Institute of United States Studies, University of London; as a Fellow of the Eccles Centre for American Studies, the British Library; as a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge; for a Helen Cam Fellowship at Girton College, University of Cambridge; as a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Great Britain; as a Scholar in Residence at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy; for a Fredson Bowers Grant from the Bibliographical Society of America and the Bibliographical Society of Great Britain; for a Reese Fellowship from the Bibliographical Society of America; for a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society; and for a fellowship offered by the Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, Brussels. I have also benefited from the opportunity to respond to thoughtful comments on some of the ideas developed herein offered at presentations before several sets of colleagues: at the Washington Area Economic History Seminar, American University; at the Seminar on Economic History, Indiana University; at the Conference on "Founding Financier: Robert Morris," City University of New York Graduate Center, New York City; at the Third International Congress of Maritime History, Esbjerg, Denmark; at the Graduate School Seminar, University of Helsinki, Finland; and at the Legal History Colloquium, Harvard University Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

John J. McCusker is the Halsell Distinguished Professor of American History and professor of economics at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. He is the author of books and articles on topics relating to the economic history of the early modern Atlantic world, most particularly, with Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789, 2nd edn. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991). Scheduled to be published this year are the chapter on "Colonial Statistics," in Historical Statistics of the United States ... Colonial Times to the Present, Susan B. Carter et al., eds., 4th, Millennial Edition, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 2005), and, as editor, Encyclopedia of World Trade since 1450, 2 vols. (New York, 2005).

Notes

¹ Benjamin Franklin, "Advice to a Young Tradesman," as printed in George Fisher, The American Instructor; or, Young Man's Best Companion ... , 9th edn. rev. (Philadelphia, 1748), 375. See also Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., 37 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1959—), 3: 304–308.

² Franklin, "Comfort for America, or Remarks on Her Real Situation, Interests, and Policy," American Museum 1 (January 1787): 6.

³ Fernand [P.] Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II, 4th edn. rev. and corrected, 2 vols. (Paris, 1979), 1: 326–61, and his extended discussion of "l'espace, ennemi numéro 1" (distance, enemy number one).

⁴ I wish to acknowledge as the inspiration for my title the book by Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives, 2nd edn. (Boston, 2001). See also John J. McCusker, "Information and Transaction Costs in Early Modern Europe," in Weltwirtschaft und Wirtschaftsordnung: Festschrift für Jürgen Schneider zum 65. Geburtstag, Rainer Gömmel and Markus A. Denzel, eds., Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beihefte, no. 159 (Stuttgart, 2002), 69–83. Compare Richard O'Brien, Global Financial Integration: The End of Geography (New York, 1992).

⁵ The story is not well known. For a recent, fine essay on the importance of information to business firms in the early modern period—but one that, like many others, seems not even aware of the existence of a business press—see Daniel A. Rabuzzi, "Commercial Intelligence: France and the Baltic Trades, c. 1750–1815," in Négoce, Ports et Océans, XVI^e-XX^e siècles: Mélanges offerts à Paul Butel, Silvia Marzagalli and Hubert Bonin, eds. (Bordeaux, 2000), 47–59.

⁶ General purpose newspapers began to appear only later, in the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century. D[irk] H. Couvée, "The First Coranteers—The Flow of the News in the 1620's," Gazette: International Journal of the Science of the Press 8, no. 2 (1962): 22–36. It follows, of course, that business newspapers were the first newspapers. Business newspapers must certainly be considered newspapers if only because they conform reasonably enough to the standard definition of a newspaper, the seven characteristics of which were out in Otto Groth, Die Zeitung: Ein System der Zeitungskunde (Journalistik), 4 vols. (Mannheim, 1928–1930), 1: 22–90. Groth argued that, for a publication to be considered a newspaper, it had to be (1) issued periodically; (2) duplicated mechanically; (3) available to anyone willing to pay for it; (4) broad in the news that it reported; (5) general in the audience to which it appealed; (6) timely in its reporting; and (7) produced by an established, ongoing enterprise. The point is argued in John J. McCusker and Cora Gravensteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe, Nederlandisch Economisch-Historisch Archief, ser. 3, no. 11 (Amsterdam, 1991), 21–31 and passim. The commercial and financial newspapers that are the subject of this article fall short of this definition in several ways. First, and most particularly, they were not the general kind of newspaper about which Groth wrote. They were narrow, specialized newspapers, a subset of the genre "newspaper," but newspapers nonetheless in the same way that financial and commercial newspapers published in our own time are so considered (e.g., the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times). Second, while they were for the most part reproduced mechanically, some were only partly-printed. I would argue that this is an unimportant distinction for the time when they were being published. Certainly the Venetian exchange rate current did not stop being a newspaper, which it had been by these criteria for over a century, when it changed from a fully printed format to a prtly printed one. Finally, some of the newspapers discussed in this article were issued less frequently than once-a-week, Groth's minimum level of periodicity. Again, for early modern Europe, this seems less significant. They were certainly regular and periodical. I think that "early business newspapers" describes them neatly and accurately. Compare Eric W. Allen, "International Origins of the Newspapers: The Establishment of Periodicity in Print," Journalism Quarterly 7 (December 1930): 310–11, who also prescribes a less dogmatic, more historical perspective on any such criteria when discussing early newspapers, as does Covée, cited above. See also Stanley Morison, The English Newspaper: Some Account of the Physical Development of Journals Printed in London between 1622 and the Present Day (Cambridge, 1932), 7, 9; K[urt] Baschwitz, De Krant door alle tijden, 2nd edn. (Amsterdam, 1949), 20–23; and Anthony Smith, The Newspaper: An International History (London, 1979), 9–13 and passim. In the same way that business and financial newspapers published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were treated as newspapers in law and practice, so also were the earlier ones, published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, equally newspapers.

⁷ A wildly enthusiastic editorial in The North American (Philadelphia), January 15, 1846, 2, col. 1, celebrated the telegraph for effecting a revolution "by the annihilation of time."

⁸ In this, as in much else, I am indebted to the example of one of my students, Thomas P. Slaughter. See, for instance, his "Afterword" to Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram (New York, 1996), 267–71. For a powerful critique of the art of historical discourse as practiced over the last half-century, see Allan Megill, "Coherence and Incoherence in Historical Studies: From the Annales School to the New Cultural History," New Literary History 35 (Spring 2004): 207–31.

⁹ Jay R. Mandle, "Globalization: Pro and Con," in The Economic History of World Trade since 1450: An Encyclopedia, John J. McCusker et al., eds., 2 vols. (forthcoming, New York, 2005). Compare Mandle, Globalization and the Poor (Cambridge, 2003). See also Lester C. Thurow, "Globalization: The Product of a Knowledge-Based Economy," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 570 (July 2000): 19–31.

¹⁰ Nicholas G. Carr, "IT Doesn't Matter," Harvard Business Review 81 (May 2003): 41–49; Carr, Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Boston, 2004). This essay presents something of a challenge to Carr's thinking in that it suggests that it is not just first adopters who reap the advantages of innovations; so do ingenious adapters.

¹¹ The Fuggers of Augsburg developed their famous interoffice newsletter network for just such purposes. See Götz von Pölnitz, Die Fugger, 6th edn. rev. (Tübingen, 1999), 293–96. Compare Richard Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger: Geldkapital und Creditverkehr im 16. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Jena, 1896).

¹² Federigo Melis, Documenti per la storia economica dei secoli XIII-XVI, Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica "F. Datini," Pubblicazioni, serie 1: Documenti, no. 1 (Florence, 1972), 38–39, 298–321, identifies and reproduces fourteen handwritten "listini dei prezzi" dated between 1383 and 1430. See the discussion of them in McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, 22–23.

¹³ Unfortunately when modern editors prepare such letters for publication, they often fail to reproduce these addenda either because they do not recognize them for what they were or they consider the information unimportant. For an example of one who treated the documents properly, see Henry [G.] Roseveare, ed., Markets and Merchants of the Late Seventeenth Century: The Marescoe-David Letters, 1668–1680, Records of Social and Economic History, n.s., vol. 12 (Oxford and London, 1987).

¹⁴ "It is abundantly evident ... that the newspapers did not create news, but that news (plus the printing press) created the newspaper." Matthias A. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England, 1476–1622 (Philadelphia, 1929), 3. Considerable work has been done over the last few decades on the impact of the printing press on the history of the Western world. The essence of the discussion is handily summarized in the forum on "How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?" published in the AHR 107 (February 2002): 84–128, to which the reader is referred. In the position advanced here, I suggest that the printing press was a necessary but not sufficient cause of any such revolution: the important change came with the publication of business news, a development that was merely facilitated by the printing press. The key was the decision to publish and not the decision to print. In this emphasis, I am somewhat at odds with the thrust of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's seminal study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979), in which she maintains that the printing press was the root cause of the changes. A similar argument is mounted by Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie über die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), who compares the impact of the printing press with that of computers in the late twentieth century. Compare Renate Pieper, Die Vermittlung einer neuen Welt: Amerika im Nachrichtennetz des Habsburgischen Imperiums, 1493–1598, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung für Universalgeschichte, vol. 163 (Mainz, 2000). By contrast, see Anthony T. Grafton, "The Importance of Being Printed," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (Autumn 1980): 265–86. Compare Adrian [D. S.] Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998).

¹⁵ Pieter van der Molen Brievenkopij, 1538–1544, Insolvente Boedelskamer no. 2898, Stadsarchief, Antwerp. See, for instance, the letters to sig. Azeretto, at Genoa, August 22 and September 19, 1540, Van der Molen Brievenkopij, fols. 171v, 175r, 175v. Compare ibid., fols. 184v, 185v. For more about the firm and the letter book, see Florence [M.] Edler, "The Van der Molen, Commission Merchants of Antwerp: Trade with Italy, 1538–44," in Medieval and Historiographical Essays in Honor of James Westfall Thompson, James Lea Cate and Eugene N. Anderson, eds. (Chicago, 1938), 78–145. John Munro, in the most recent of his many insightful explorations of the dynamics of this trade, has established yet another reason for the rise of Antwerp. See his "The Low Countries' Export Trade in Textiles with the Mediterranean Basin, 1200–1600: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Comparative Advantages in Overland and Maritime Trade Routes," International Journal of Maritime History 11 (December 1999): 1–30.

¹⁶ John J. McCusker, "The Role of Antwerp in the Emergence of Commercial and Financial Newspapers in Early Modern Europe," in La ville et la transmission des valeurs culturelles au bas Moyen Âge et aux temps modernes—Die Stade und die Übertragung von kulturellen Werten im Spätmittelalter und in die Neuzeit—Cities and the Transmission of Cultural Values in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, Gemeentekrediet van België/Crédit Communal de Belgique, Collection Histoire, no. 96 (Brussels, 1996), 303–332. See also Ugo Tucci, "I listini a stampa dei prezzi e dei cambi a Venezia," Studi Veneziani, n.s., 25 (1993): 15–33; Peter Burke, "Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication," in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297–1797, John [J. ] Martin and Dennis Romano, eds. (Baltimore, 2000), 389–419; and Mario Infelise, Prima dei giornali: Alle origini della pubblica informazione (secoli XVI e XVII), Quadrante Laterza, vol. 115 (Rome, 2002).

¹⁷ Perhaps the most famous site for such announcements was the "pulpit" at Lloyd's from which news was read aloud by one of the coffee-house waiters, as described by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. See Charles Wright and C[harles] Ernest Fayle, A History of Lloyd's from the Founding of Lloyd's Coffee House to the Present Day (London, 1928), 26–27, citing the Tatler, December 26, 1710, and the Spectator, April 23, 1711.

¹⁸ See the description of the impressive library in the offices of the Frankfurt city agency established by and for the city's merchants to facilitate the conduct of their affairs. It stocked books, political newspapers, and both local and foreign exchange rate currents and commodity price currents: "die Wechsel- und Waaren-Preiß-Couranti nicht allein von hier, sondern auch von Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, Venedig u.s.w." Frankfurt am Main, Messe, Franckfurter Meß-Schema, oder Verzeichniß aller nach Franckfurt Kommenden ... in Ansehung der Messe zu wissen nützlicher Nachrichten (Frankfurt am Main, 1775), "Vorbericht." Serving the same functions later in the 1840s, the North and South American Coffee House in Threadneedle Street, London, could boast of having available to its members back-files of between three and four hundred newspapers. [David Morier Evans], The City; or, The Physiology of London Business; With Sketches on Change, and at the Coffee Houses [1st edn.] (London, 1845), 126. Compare the libraries that were a prominent part of the colonial merchant exchanges like the one established at Boston by the mid-1650s. Josiah Henry Benton, The Story of the Old Boston Town House, 1658–1711 (Boston, 1908), 52 and passim.

¹⁹ Thus, in 1659, Amsterdam grain merchant Dirck de Wolff, already a member of the Council of the Brokers Guild, was appointed overman (overseer) of grain prices. C[arel] H. Jansen, "Geschiedenis van de familie de Wolff: Sociale en economische facetten van de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden in de zeventiende eeuw," Jaarboek van het Genootschap Amstelodamum 56 (1964): 131–32. In 1810, in his presentation before the famous Bullion Committee, Aaron Asher Goldsmid, partner in Mocatta and Goldsmid, one of the five legendary London bullion brokerage houses, stated that since the 1690s his firm had served a similar function on the Royal Exchange as the designated brokers who reported on gold and silver prices for John Castaing's Course of the Exchange. Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Report, Together with Minutes of Evidence, and Accounts, from the Select Committee on the High Price of Gold Bullion, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1810, vol. 3 (Reports), no. 349 (London, 1810), 36.

²⁰ Early numbers of both the Amsterdam and the Hamburg commodity price currents printed such pledges by the prijs courantiers making explicit that they had, indeed, carefully checked the contents. Cours van Negotie (Amsterdam), November 23, 1609 (quotation); Prys Corant (Hamburg), April 14, 1626; Prys Crant (Hamburg), February 12, 1630. See McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, 44, 225. There is evidence that printers of commodity price currents and exchange rate currents did not distribute type back into the type cases between issues of the newspapers but maintained standing type, parts of which they changed as necessary. E.g., ibid., 401–402. On the subject of standing type during the hand-press period, see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972), 116–17; and C[arolyn] Nelson and M[atthew] Seccombe, Periodical Publications, 1641–1700: A Survey with Illustrations, Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society, no. 2 (London, 1986), 36.

²¹ See John J. McCusker, "Philadelphia and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the United States" (forthcoming).

²² Instructive in this context is George J. Stigler, "The Economics of Information," Journal of Political Economy 69 (June 1961): 213–25. (I thank Jim Simler for this reference.) Compare Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin, "Social Value of Public Information," American Economic Review 92 (December 2002): 1521–534.

²³ Guicciardini, Descrittione di m. Lodovico Cuicclardini, patritio fiorentino, di tutti i paesi bassi, altrimenti detti Germania Inferiore (Antwerp, 1567), 117. Compare Raymond Van Uytven, "Antwerpen: Steuerungszentrum des europäischen Handels und Metropole die Niederlande im 16. Jahrhundert," in Herrschaft und Verfassungsstrukturen im Nordwesten des Reiches: Beiträge zum Zeitalter Karls V.-Franz Petri zum Gedächtnis (1903–1993), Bernhard Sicken, ed., Stadteforschungs, Reihe A, Darstellungen, Vol. 35 (Cologne and Vienna, 1994), 1–18.

²⁴ "The Wall Street Journal does not provide this information [about prices] out of altruism or because it recognizes how important it is for the economy. Rather, it is led to provide this information by the very price system whose functioning it facilitates. It has found that it can achieve a larger and more profitable circulation by publishing these prices." Milton Friedman and Rose [D.] Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York, 1980), 16. Compare Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study in the Origins of the Modern English Press (Rutherford, N.J., 1987), 176, where he notes that such "tabular material" began to be included in general purpose newspapers beginning in the 1720s because it was "a useful selling point." The front-page headline story in The London Evening-Post, March 30, 1762, called attention to its newly inclusive publication of business news.

²⁵ Publishers recognized the necessity of apologizing for mistaken entries and correcting them. McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, passim. One Hamburg publisher lost his license because of questionable practices. Ibid., 225–26. In general, I think that the conclusions reached about the accuracy and reliability of the reporting in later business newspapers also apply earlier. Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray, and Miriam Hussey, Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1784–1861, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1936–1937), 1: 336, reported that "the editors of the Philadelphia newspapers carefully collected the prices which they published and changed their listed prices promptly" in response to changes in the marketplace.

²⁶ Just like exchange brokers, printers were also licensed by the city and organized into a guild or company. For this subject and for the restrictions imposed on all publishing, including newspapers, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, passim. Compare Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe, "The Creation of the Periodical Press, 1620–1695," in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain,, Vol. 4, 1557–1695, John Barnard, D[onald] F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell, eds. (Cambridge, 2002), 535.

²⁷ For women as Mercuries, see Margaret [R.] Hunt, "Hawkers, Bawlers, and Mercuries: Women and the London Press in the Early Enlightenment," in Women and the Enlightenment, Hunt et al., eds. (New York, 1984), 41–68; Marcellus Laroon, The Criers and Hawkers of London: Engraving and Drawings, Sean Shesgreen, ed. (Aldershot, 1990), 186; [J.] Michael Treadwell, "Anne Dodd (London: 1711–1739)," in The British Literary Book Trade, 1700–1820, James K. Bracken and Joel Silver, eds., Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 154 (Detroit, 1995), 103–105; and Helen Berry, "An Early Coffee House Periodical and Its Readers: The Athenian Mercury, 1691–1697," London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present 25, no. 1 (2000): 14–33.

²⁸ "The Royal Exchange ... has no longer the prominence as a place for the meeting of merchants it once had ... the presence of the commercial man on 'Change is not so imperative." John Weale, ed., A New Survey of London: Fully Developing Its Antiquity, History and Architecture ... , 2 vols. (London, 1853), 1: 377. As a London commentator observed in 1727: "Coffee-Houses were first founded for the Entertainment of Gentlemen and Merchants; they were the Theatres of News and Politicks." A Dissertation upon Drunkenness. Shewing to What an Intolerable Pitch that Vice is Arriv'd at in this Kingdom ... (London, 1727), 4–5. For the mode of operation of a London business firm, see Jacob M. Price, "Directions for the Conduct of a Merchant's Counting House, 1766," Business History 28 (July 1986): 134–50.

²⁹ See McCusker, "Information and Transaction Costs in Early Modern Europe." Compare Jonathan Barron Baskin, "The Development of Corporate Financial Markets in Britain and the United States, 1600–1914: Overcoming Asymmetric Information," Business History Review 62 (Summer 1988): 199–237.

³⁰ "The growth of the market to a size sufficiently large to allow the customary contracted terms of sale for a product of a known quality to account for a large number of transactions was extremely important. It allowed a freely obtained market price to be determined by the forces of supply and demand alone. Beginning in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, these prices were periodically gathered and printed. The Amsterdam 'price current' was widely circulated and provided information about the terms at which exchanges could be made. These price currents have been found in the archives of every important European city. They provided a merchant with a starting point to negotiate trades in local areas in the Low Countries and outside. No merchant would sell locally for less than he could obtain in Amsterdam, making allowance for the costs of moving his goods there." Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973), 136–37 (emphasis added).

³¹ For the rise and decline of commercial Antwerp, see Herman van der Wee's magisterial The Growth of the Antwerp Market and the European Economy (Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries), 3 vols. (The Hague, 1963).

³² For these three cities and their interconnectedness during this immensely important period, see the several stellar essays in Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London, Patrick [K.] O'Brien et al., eds. (Cambridge, 2001).

³³ J[ohn] R. McCulloch, "Navigation Acts," in Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, McCulloch, ed., 4th edn. rev. (London, 1850), 537 (emphasis as in the original). Compare Philip L. Cottrell, "London as a Centre of Communication: From the Printing Press to the Travelling Post Office," in Kommunikationsrevoluton: Die neuen Medien des 16. und 19. Jahrhunderts, Michael North, ed., Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Studien, vol. 3 (Cologne, 1995), 157–78.

³⁴Time International, September 27, 2004, Asia edition, led with a cover story on "Shanghai: The New World Capital," celebrating it as "the most happening city on earth," calling special attention to "Pudong ... the city's new financial district."

³⁵ Letter from James Howell, at Amsterdam, to his brother Thomas, later bishop of Bristol, April 1, 1617, in Howell, Epistolœ Ho-Elianœ: Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren; Divided into Six Sections, Partly Historicall, Politicall, Philosophicall, Upon Emergent Occasions (London, 1645), 10.

³⁶ The largest single surviving cache of Amsterdam commodity price currents can be found in Jakarta, Indonesia, for just that reason. The Dutch East India Company dispatched multiple copies on board each of its ships; its Far Eastern headquarters in Batavia (modern Jakarta) preserved them. They are listed in J[acobus] A. van der Chijs, Inventaris van 's Lands Archief te Batavia (1602–1816): Zamengesteld en Uitgegeven op Last van de Nederlandsch-Indische Regering (Jakarta, 1882), 33–34. The Landsarchief is now part of the modern Arsip Nasional, Jakarta. There also appear to be some copies among the Dutch Records, 1657–1825, MSS. 137, 745, 1134, Tamil Nadu Archives, Chennai (formerly Madras), India. See A. Galletti, A. J. van der Burg, and P. Groot, eds. and trans., The Dutch in Malabar, being a Translation of Selections Nos. 1 and 2, with Introduction and Notes, Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, Dutch Records, no. 13 (Madras, 1911), 35, n. 3. I have yet to examine this collection.

³⁷ For the Amsterdam commodity price current, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, 43–66. Compare Clé Lesger, Handel in Amsterdam ten tijde van de Opstand: Kooplieden, commerciële expansie en verandering in de ruimtelijke economie van de Nederlanden, ca. 1550-ca. 1630, Amsterdamse Historische Reeks, Grote Serie, vol. 27 (Hilversum, 2001), chap. 6, "Amsterdam als centrum van informatie voorziening." Compare Lesger, "De mythe van de Hollandse wereldstapelmarkt in de zeventiende eeuw," NEHA-Jaarboek voor Economische, Bedrijfsen Techniekgeschiedenis 62 (1999): 6–25.

³⁸ I am very much taken with this more expansive interpretation of the Glorious Revolution, propounded most recently by Jonathan I. Israel, "The Dutch Republic and the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688/89 in England," in 1688—The Seaborne Alliance and Diplomatic Revolution: Proceedings of an International Symposium Held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 5–6 October 1988, Charles H. Wilson and David Proctor, eds. (Greenwich, 1989), 31–44.

³⁹ John J. McCusker, "Commercial and Financial Journalism," in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 5, 1695–1830, Michael Suarez and Michael Turner, eds. (Cambridge, forthcoming).

⁴⁰ See the deposition to this effect by the publisher of the London commodity price current, John Day, June 13, 1637, High Court of Admiralty, Instance and Prize Court Papers, Examinations and Answers, 1637–1638, HCA 13/53, fols. 191v-192r, Public Record Office, The National Archives London (hereafter, PRO/TNA). For Day and his newspaper, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, 291–311; and McCusker, "The Business Press in England before 1775," The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6th ser., 8 (September 1986): 314–50, as revised and updated in McCusker, Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (London, 1997), 155–62.

⁴¹ As of March 2005. For the basis of such admittedly crude comparisons across time, see John J. McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Commodity Price Index for Use as a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States, 2nd edn. rev. (Worcester, Mass., 2001).

⁴² An earlier version of this table appeared in McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism. See also John J. McCusker, European Bills of Entry and Marine Lists: Early Commercial Publications and the Origins of the Business Press (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 10–12.

⁴³ For Lloyd's List, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, 323–27; McCusker, "The Business Press in England before 1775"; and McCusker, "The Early History of 'Lloyd's List,'" Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 64 (October 1991): 427–31.

⁴⁴ In October 2003, the London Stock Exchange launched an electronic version of the Daily Official List, abbreviated SEDOL.

⁴⁵ For John Castaing and his newspaper, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, 311–22; and McCusker, "The Business Press in England before 1775." See also S[idney] R. Cope, "The Stock Exchange Revisited: A New Look at the Market in Securities in London in the Eighteenth Century," Economica, n.s., 45 (February 1978): 18.

⁴⁶ See, for instance, Thomas Fitch, at Boston, to Thomas Crouch and Company, at London, March 15, 1706/1707, Thomas Fitch Letterbook, 1703–1711, p. 182, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts; or James Logan, at Philadelphia, to John Askew, at London, May 28, 1713, James Logan, Copies of Letters Sent, 1712–1715, 113, Logan Papers, 1664–1871, Collection no. 379, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter, HSP). Concerning the availability of English serials generally in the colonies, compare David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1986), 235–62; Carolyn Nelson, "American Readership of Early British Serials," in Serials and Their Readers, 1620–1914, Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds. (Winchester, 1993), 27–44; and Janice G. Schimmelman, "Art in the Early English Magazine, 1731–1800: A Checklist of Articles on Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, from the Gentleman's Magazine, London Magazine, and Universal Magazine," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, n.s., 108 (October 1998): 397–478. Indicating a knowledge of the existence of and an awareness of the nature of business newspapers, the Charleston Library Society made it clear from the beginning that it did not want any sent it by its London bookseller: "you are not to send any News papers, Votes of Parliam[e]nt, Lloyds Lists or Bills of Entry." Letter from Robert Brisbane, at Charleston, to James Rivington, at London, August 10, 1758, in James Raven, London Booksellers and their American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia, S.C., 2002), 237.

⁴⁷ See The Boston News-Letter, e.g., July 30, 1705, June 10, 1706. "To be Sold at the Post-Office in Boston" by John Campbell, "London Gazettes, Flying-Posts, Post-Man, Post-Boy, Bills of Entry, Price Courants, Observations, at 1d. [Massachusetts currency] per Piece" (ibid., June 10, 1706). The earlier advertisement had offered them "either in Setts by the year or single [sic]." Compare the discussion in Ian K. Steele's The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York, 1986), 213–28 and passim.

⁴⁸ Cottrell, "London as a Centre of Communication"; D[erek] Keene, "The Financial District of the City of London: Continuity and Change, 1300–1871," in Cities of Finance, Herman [A.] Diederiks and David [A.] Reeder, eds., Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, vol. 165 (Amsterdam, 1996), 287–88.

⁴⁹The Newcastle Journal, July 19, 1740, 1, col. 1.

⁵⁰ Like the "Merchants' Exchange" established at Philadelphia in 1754, for which see McCusker, "Philadelphia and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the United States." Compare Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York, 1989), 114–16. See also Brown, "Early American Origins of the Information Age," in A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and James W. Cortada, eds. (Oxford, 2000), 39–53.

⁵¹ In 1721, Virginia tobacco planter Robert Carter compared the percentage return on Bank of England stock as reported in "the prints" (quite possibly the Course of the Exchange) with what he knew he could get investing his money locally. Letter from Carter, at Rappahannock, Virginia, to Micajah Perry, at London, February 13, 1720/1721, in Letters of Robert Carter, 1720–1727: The Commercial Interests of a Virginia Gentlemen, Louis B. Wright, ed. (San Marino, Calif., 1940), 73.

⁵² See Moses Franks's letters to James Beekman of New York, 1756–1760, in The Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1746–1799, Philip L. White, ed., 3 vols. (New York, 1956), 2: 583–95 (the quote is from a letter dated April 1, 1760, ibid., 2: 595). See also White's comment, ibid., 1: v. Speaking of fashions in consumption, Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh maintained: "Urban influences undoubtedly did affect Chesapeake behavior, but these influences were English not local. London was the metropolitan center." Carr and Walsh, "The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (January 1988): 139.

⁵³ Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 110–31, fails to distinguish between the kinds of business news published in London and colonial newspapers and the uses to which colonial business men and business women put such news.

⁵⁴ For the beginning of printing in the Western Hemisphere, see José Toríbio Medina, La imprenta en Lima (1584–1824), 4 vols. (Santiago, 1904–1907). For newspaper publishing in British America, see Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York, 1990); and Clark, "Early American Journalism: News and Opinion in the Popular Press," in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 1 (Worcester, Mass. and Cambridge, 2000), 347–66. Clark assiduously avoids any discussion either of commercial and financial journals per se or of the business content of general newspapers. The same is true of W[illiam] David Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams, The Early American Press, 1690–1783, The History of American Journalism, vol. 1 (Westport, Conn., 1994); and Carol Sue Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic, 1783–1833 (Westport, Conn., 1996). By contrast, see Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole; and Karl Tilman Winkler, Handwerk und Markt: Druckerhandwerk, Vertriebswesen und Tagesschrifttum in London, 1695–1750 (Stuttgart, 1993). For the publication of similar newspapers in the French colonies, see M[arie]-A[ntoinette] Ménier and G[abriel] Debien, "Journaux de Saint-Dominique," Revue d'Histoire des Colonies 36, nos. 3–4 (1949): 424–75.

⁵⁵ The Philadelphia market had become the regional price maker and point of reference well before the middle of the eighteenth century. See Thomas Ringgold's assertion—reflecting this awareness—that his flour "is cheap according to Philadel[phi]a Merketts." Ringgold, at Chestertown, Maryland, to Samuel Galloway, at West River, Maryland, April 25, 1760, in Galloway Family Correspondence, III, no. 8427, Galloway-Maxcy-Markoe Family Papers, 1654–1888, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter, LC). Compare the advertisement for the lease or sale of a distillery located at Charlestown, Maryland, a selling point of which was that, because of "its convenient situation, near the Head of Chesopeak [Bay], ... Rum distilled there, may be vended in said Bay, at a higher Price considerably than at any Distillery in Philadelphia." Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), December 31, 1767, 3, col. 3. Thus Charles Carroll of Annapolis complained loudly to his son when the latter neglected sending him copies of the Philadelphia newspapers quickly or regularly enough: "It was impossible ... to determine trade strategy without the Philadelphia prices." Ronald Hoffman, "Economics, Politics and the Revolution in Maryland" (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1969), 108. Compare the argument advanced in McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money?, 47–48, n. 18.

⁵⁶ George Cuthbert, at Jamaica, to Lieutenant General John Dalling, Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, August 5, 1776, CO 137/71, PRO/TNA. Cuthbert was later to become a member of the council and provost marshall of Jamaica and also judge of the Court of Vice-Admiralty for the island.

⁵⁷ John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789, 2nd edn. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 189–208 and passim. Compare Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986). See also James Weston Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 1780–1860 (Harrisburg, Penn., 1947).

⁵⁸ For the full story of Macpherson and his newspaper, see McCusker, "Philadelphia and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the United States."

⁵⁹ The consul from the Austrian Netherlands, Fréderick Eugène Françcois, Baron de Beelen-Bertholff said the same thing: "[les] prix courant des marchandises à Philadelphie ... sont les premières qui ont été publiées." Enclosure "B" in Baron de Beelen, at Philadelphia, to the Ministere Plénipotentiaire, Barbiano de Belgioioso, at Brussels, November 1, 1783, Archives de la Secrétairerie d'État et de Guerre, SEG no. 2163, Algemeen Rijksarchief/Archives Générales du Royaume, Brussels, Belgium. For this collection of documents, see J[oseph]Lefèvre, "La Secrétairerie d'État et de guerre et ses archives," Archives, Bibliothèques et Musées de Belgique 31, no. 2, (1960): 133–48. Some of Beelen's letters and reports have been printed in Die Berichte des ersten Agenten Österreichs in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Baron de Beelen-Bertholff an Die Regierung der Österreichischen Niederlande in Brüssel, 1784–1789, Hanns Schlitter, ed., Fontes Rerum Austriacarum/Œsterreichische Geschichts-Quellen, Zwiete Abteilung: Diplomatari