The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century

by Bernard Bailyn

Overview

In detail Bailyn here presents the struggle of the merchants to achieve full social recognition as their successes in trade and in such industries as fishing and lumbering offered them avenues to power. Surveying the rise of merchant families, he offers a look in depth of the emergence of a new social group whose interests and changing social position powerfully affected the developing character of American society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781447489146
Publisher:	Read Books Ltd.
Publication date:	03/05/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	266
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Bernard Bailyn was Adams University Professor, Emeritus, and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, Emeritus, at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

1. Origins of Trade


2. Establishment of the Puritan Merchants


3. Adjustments and Early Failures


4. The Legacy of the First Generation


5. Introduction to Empire


6. Elements of Change


7. The Merchant Group at the End of the Seventeenth Century

• Notes


• Bibliographical Note


• Index

Editorial Reviews

This study should be of great interest to sociologists interested in social stratification, religion, and political behavior. The author has analyzed in detail the way in which the growth of trade in seventeenth century New England led to the emergence of an upper class based on mercantile wealth, and the gradual disintegration of the Puritan Commonwealth.

American Sociological Review

In the past, the social history of seventeenth-century New England has been written in terms of the Puritan Zion, not of the marketplace. The interaction of these two forces—meetinghouse and counting-house—is the basic problem to which Mr. Bailyn has devoted this excellent book…It is social history as it has seldom been written and business history as it should be written—a story of people, not of prices and trends; of merchants, not mercantile houses.

American Historical Review