| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 132.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 1760–1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods. By Sheryllyne Haggerty. (Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2006. xiv, 287 pp. Maps, figures, tables, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. $120.)
Sheryllyne Haggery's The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 1760–1810 uses Liverpool and Philadelphia as models for understanding the scope and complexity of the business community before and after American independence. Haggerty deliberately eschews familiar "colonial" and "early national" periodization not only because "historical 'eras' as set out by historians have little meaning" (p. 7) for the people in her analysis but also because the American Revolution was but one of many conflicts in the long eighteenth century that, she concludes, left no unique imprint on how business was done. Instead, commercial change was incremental and steady; some entrepreneurs risked much, but Haggerty finds more evidence of continuity between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trading patterns than rapid transformations.	1
Haggerty offers a two-part analysis. In the first three chapters she explains why she chose Philadelphia and Liverpool, offers her definition of trading, and discusses the roles traders played in the two ports. Her next three chapters explore movements of goods, systems of credit, and risk-management strategies to show how these discrete locales fit within larger regional structures. A final chapter presents microstudies of individual traders, giving faces to some of the phenomena Haggerty outlines in previous chapters.	. . .

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