Reviewed by Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4

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Reviewed by Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, San Jose State University

The British-Atlantic Trading Community, 1760–1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods. By Sheryllynne Haggerty. The Atlantic World. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. 303 pages. $120.00 (cloth).
If the wheel of Atlantic commerce propelled the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, then this book is about the spokes in the wheel. In this ambitious study, Sheryllynne Haggerty uses comparative profiles of Philadelphia and Liverpool to sketch the complex British-Atlantic trading community in the revolutionary era. The author takes distribution, rather than consumption or importation, as her subject, writing, for example, "the story of the distribution of five shillings worth of sugar and of chintz valued at two dollars rather than high commerce and thousands of pounds worth of credit" (4). Only a deeper understanding of distribution, she argues, will permit scholars to evaluate the reach and significance of consumer goods in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tracing the participation of minor dealers and exploring their methods of "breaking bulk" (196), Haggerty demonstrates how new goods reached far down the social scale, precisely because of these minor dealers and traders. At the same time, she claims significant, though unquantified, economic power for these small traders and their customers.	1
By first expanding the definition of trader and then exploring the diverse functions, merchandise, and clientele of this group, Haggerty aims to replace the iconic international merchant with an entrepreneurial crowd as the centerpiece of trade. Setting elite merchants to the side strengthens the idea of an Atlantic world rather than fragmenting it. Extensive archival digging unearthed no counterculture of petty traders but clear evidence of hagglers and hucksters behaving as much like their wealthier counterparts as circumstances would allow. The Atlantic trading community, Haggerty believes, was as much a product of these commonalities as of trading relationships.	2
Trader was a broad category in the revolutionary era, encompassing not only transatlantic merchants but also brokers, dealers, grocers, shopkeepers, auctioneers, and hucksters, all of whom led lives marked by diversity and change. Margaret Moulder of Philadelphia listed herself as a boardinghouse keeper in the city directory, yet she also took on work as a carter and grocer, bridging the communities of Philadelphia and its hinterlands in multiple ways. Haggerty highlights this prevalent tension between how traders identified themselves and their actual economic activities. Many individuals who chose to call themselves merchants, for example, were really local traders hoping to gain status and customers by declaring a direct connection to the Atlantic world of trade. Rather than view their self-promotion as empty posturing, Haggerty argues that these individuals were as much a part of the merchant community as the established men familiar to readers from the work of Thomas M. Doerflinger and David Hancock, among others.¹	3
Philadelphia's traders were less diverse than Liverpool's. Since merchants, favored by their access to imports and facing little competition from local manufacturers, did everything in the colonial city—from importing to wholesaling to retailing—intermediaries such as brokers, dealers, and warehouse keepers were comparatively few, a trend that continued well into the first decades of independence. It was particularly difficult for women to break into the resulting economy. While Liverpool women found specialized niches, Philadelphia women scraped by with small general shops. Women in Liverpool owned shares in trading vessels; Philadelphia's ships were owned and controlled by a small group of elite male merchants.	. . .

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