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CHAPTER 1
A Journey through Early Modern Trading Spaces
According to neoclassical economics, markets share a set of rules regulating their operation irrespective of any particular historical or spatial attributes. The market is imagined to be an autonomous system and an omnipresent organizational principle, structuring our social and economic relationships in an efficient and beneficial manner. The proponents of this point of view draw support from Adam Smith, who explained that traders were "led by an invisible hand" to increase their own wealth and that of their nation. Following this famous characterization of the market, Smith explained how "by pursuing his own interest" man "frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Smith was suspicious of traders who said they gave priority to the common good and claimed he had "never known much good done by those who affected to trade" in its name.
During this era of rapid economic change, the market was certainly becoming less a place and more a set of rules. Among the merchants and manufacturers Smith considered in The Wealth of Nations, the market was often a concept spanning the global trading networks discussed in their correspondence. When they asked about "the state of the market" or requested "the market price," these entrepreneurs were not inquiring after the conditions in a particular place. They might link descriptions to a port city — the "Liverpool market" or the "New York market," for example — but such comments referred not to a fixed location but rather to a system constituted by demand and supply. In its most tangible form, this market was a list of "prices current" in local newspapers, merchant guides, or a fellow trader's letter. This idea of the market is very easy for us to grasp in the twenty-first century, where the market is on the internet, in the stock exchange, and in the algorithms dreamed up by hedge-fund managers to increase their profits and those of their wealthy clientele. The market is most definitely not on the high street, which is constantly in decline.
However, looking at the early modern market in its proper context rather than on the terms refracted through a present-day lens, such interpretations are lacking in two ways. First, Adam Smith did not deploy the phrase "invisible hand" in the way it has been understood by his neoliberal interpreters. Using the term only three times, Smith did not advocate an omnipresent, self-regulating market primarily to promote efficiency; he was offering his ideas as an alternative to the power relationships permeating the markets he observed. To loosen the grip of vested interests, Smith favored a system in which individuals made their own economic choices free from the oppressive hand of regulation. The Wealth of Nations promoted a laissez-faire market as the solution to a problem of self-interested intervention by corrupt governing elites. The market should be free, thought Smith, because that was the only way to stamp out interest groups that so often masqueraded as the "public good." Free markets were the solution to a political issue rather than to a solely economic problem of "optimal allocation." Smith instead offered a vision for an improved market rooted in Britain's emerging commercial scene. He centered this vision on industrialization and the imperial economy, dreaming of the further advantages they could offer if only the shackles of custom, interest, and misconceived support of the "common good" might be thrown off.
Yet, as Smith was only too aware, this was a manifesto for "the market," not an outline of the actual frameworks structuring everyday buying and selling. Ideological agendas aside, therefore, his outlook is helpful precisely because of its focus on the British economy's "problems," namely institutions and their interests. Smith's aspirations nudge us toward a better understanding of the early modern market's particularities. As Keith Wrightson has explained, while this economy "bore the face of a commercial civilisation, it remained still a mixture of forms, structurally, geographically, culturally and in its congeries of social identities, shot through with ambiguities and inconsistencies." All at once people's economic lives embraced new structures and practices while still proceeding within familiar places, hierarchies, and cherished traditions. To explain more fully how this dynamic influenced marketing, we must cast our eye over the changing array of places where Britons went to trade goods. A tableau vivant of the physical spaces where people traded with each other, this outline appraisal of day-to-day marketing will be critical when we shift our attention to America.
The stage for activity was the places hosting early modern commercial exchange. These spaces were critical because fixing commerce in a physical location was one of the primary ways institutions in England and Scotland sought to maintain their "interest" in it. Fairs, provisions markets, and shops were familiar commercial spaces where traders converged and associated social, economic, and political hierarchies were rehearsed. Institutions such as guilds, city corporations, manors, and national governments historically preferred that commerce take place in these locations because it eased the collection of tolls, the enforcement of quality control and price regulations, and the exclusion of people not trading in the interest of such groups. Bound up in these laws and protocols were social and political hierarchies. City corporations, for example, were composed of a town's wealthiest citizens, who expected deference to their authority from the urban population because they regulated marketing for the common good. Individuals who attempted to trade away from these structures, and who seemed to reject the public interest and the hierarchies and institutions embedded within it, still faced censure even in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
Since physical, regulated market spaces remained important, a central strand in the story of eighteenth-century commercialization is the increasing distances and volume of trade that dislodged marketing from them. Given the intimate relationship between the political economy of marketing and its settings, this process was neither straightforward nor undisputed. In addition to challenging the authority of those interests used to overseeing trade, it tested the hierarchies ensconced within them. Thus the second portion of this chapter outlines the new marketing spaces and practices that emerged over the eighteenth century, explaining how they departed from this economy of geographically embedded interests, though they often developed in reference to it.
Existing simultaneously within single marketing spaces, therefore, were new marketing habits, existing spaces put to novel purposes, and also novel habits absorbed into traditional patterns of commerce. To obtain an idea of what "the market" meant to ordinary Britons — and what sense of the thing they took with them to Britain's American colonies — our picture must incorporate this complex interplay between the new and the old. We should acknowledge the multiple ways they were layered together, existing in dialogue with one another. These interlocking layers were indeed very complex; framing them as tradition versus novelty, or as a market economy versus a moral economy, drastically oversimplifies the situation. These dynamics were entangled with the local landscape in a process where setting, people, and institutions constantly interacted.
With an understanding of this dynamic in provincial Britain comes a better appreciation of how North American colonization disrupted it. Once in America, colonists encountered a vast landmass devoid of what they defined as marketplaces. Initially they were without the institutions that overlaid those marketplaces, managing interests in the name of the common good. Thus settlers were equally detached from the hierarchies rooted within these structures. Ultimately, the complexity of the British marketplace made remapping it onto a colonial landscape a tricky business.
At the same time, the nature of the colonizing enterprise presented Europeans with unprecedented trading opportunities in Native Americans. Carolinians also had numerous Africans in their midst from the very start of their project. So, while we acknowledge the importance of European market cultures, it is equally necessary to decipher the character of trading places and practices frequented by the people of color so critical to them. As many historians now recognize, in the chaos of early colonial society, Europeans were heavily dependent on the knowledge and labor of Indians and Africans. For a substantial number of decades, therefore, these people's habits and spaces of local market exchange were very influential. Even at the dawn of the eighteenth century, they would continue to hold substantial power over Europeans' ability to profit from market exchange in their colonies. Thus we must be aware of the values driving Indians and Africans as they also sought to sustain themselves in an American landscape that was a New World for all.
THE SPACES OF EARLY MODERN BRITISH TRADE
At the heart of English and Scottish marketing were three fixed commercial locations that had endured for centuries: the fair, the urban marketplace, and the shop. These spaces endured partly because they responded to change. As James Davis has explained in his history of the English marketplace before 1500, it was "an intense and complex arena of cultural negotiation between a variety of forces — ideology, laws, economics, vested interests and social needs." This dynamic endured well into the eighteenth century, and although the field of negotiation shifted with the emergence of new markets, the types of interests involved and the dynamic between them remained familiar. Exploring these interests at work in fairs, in urban marketplaces, and in shops allows us to see how the market, like so many other aspects of early modern society and culture, was still profoundly local. All three of these commercial spaces were embedded in local political economies and institutions and as such were places for rehearsing local power struggles as well as for conducting trade. So it is also essential to grasp the larger political and social environment in which these struggles occurred.
Our tour starts in the marketplace most unfamiliar to the twenty-first-century reader — the fair. In Britain, fairs now conjure up images of gaudy rides, giant plush toys, and cotton candy. In America the state fair also includes craft displays, deep-fried butter, and funnel cakes. All such enticements remained peripheral to the early modern fair, which was a wholesale and retail trading opportunity customarily occurring two times a year on the same piece of ground. Fairs came in many shapes and sizes and also welcomed agricultural laborers looking for an annual contract. Most renowned were the very large events at which international merchants gathered to buy and sell goods wholesale. Such fairs took place all over Europe and in its New World territories too. At Cartagena and Portobello, Spanish creole merchants traded their precious metals for European commodities, with the timing of the event decided by the seasonal visits of the flota, which took colonial treasures safely back to Spain. In the German lands, merchants gathered in Leipzig and Frankfurt. In England, Stourbridge was among the most renowned fairs, Daniel Defoe noting in 1724 that "scarce any trades are omitted — goldsmiths, toyshops, braziers, turners, milliners, haberdashers, hatters, mercers, drapers, pewterers, china-warehouses, and in a word all trades that can be named in London; with coffee-houses, taverns, brandy-shops, and eating houses, ... all in tents, and booths." Defoe's description particularly notes that fairs were not always just wholesale events but also sold retail to visitors from the surrounding areas.
As revealed in Owen's Book of Fairs, first published in 1756, Stourbridge was the zenith of a rich provincial British fair culture. Throughout the country, fairs were a major location of trade for all sorts of livestock, foods, labor, and manufactures. They took place at times of the year dictated by customary calendars of church holy days and local cultural activities. Owen's guide, first published to clarify the confusion over dates after the shift to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, was an exhaustive list of county fairs in England and Wales, the 152 printed pages a testimony to the sheer number of such events. The entry for one county — Northumberland — reveals the fairs' common qualities. Twenty fair locations are listed, and since many fairs took place twice a year, this included thirty-five separate events. Because fairs were linked to the high points of the church year or the agricultural year, many were noted as being not on a particular date, but on "Whit-Tuesday," "Whitsun Eve," "Old Michaelmas," or "Palm Sunday Eve." Each fair specialized in a different array of goods, partly dependent on the season. At Allentown buyers would find "horned cattle, horses, linen cloth, green and dry hides"; at Harbottle "great quantities of linen and woolen, and scotch cloth"; at Morpeth "Wed. for horned cattle, Thurs. for sheep, Frid. For horses, &c"; and at Newcastle's nine-day fair livestock for the first three days, then "cloth, woollens, and various other goods to the end."
Mentioned frequently in accounts of trade and of daily life, fairs were embedded in the commercial culture of the nation until the early nineteenth century. Newspapers carried regular reports of fair trade, both locally and farther afield, to give readers a barometer of economic health. Farmers kept timetables of local fairs at hand to know when they might sell their produce or buy additional livestock. Giving accounts of themselves in court, witnesses and the accused used fairs to contextualize their actions, provide a sense of time, or offer a reason for their movements. John Ladler, a Northumberland yeoman, caught his neighbors in the act of slaughtering a stolen sheep because he had come by their house early in the morning on his way to Hexham fair. John Robertson, a Newcastle laborer, found himself the victim of theft on the city's quayside when the perpetrators correctly guessed he had cash on him since he had "been at some Fair or Hopping" selling nuts and gingerbread. In a 1778 accusation of defamation the Wooler fair, scheduled to take place about the time of the incident, was a recurring theme in the testimony of those involved. Two deponents heard about the "ill words" spoken on their way back from the fair, and a third heard while she was selling eggs to a neighbor "one day in the week before Wooller fair."
These testimonies reveal that the fair, as an event and as a marketplace, was part of local economy and society. Often such customs spilled over into popular political culture. In Northumberland, trading cattle at fairs was entangled with the region's border status and with a frontier of English identity in a Britain relatively recently formed. At Newcastle's 1768 Lammas fair, when many of the 10,000 cattle offered for sale were brought south by Scottish drovers, the politics of the day got dragged into the haggling. As the Newcastle Courant reported, "Some English and Scotch Drovers went into a Tent to drink a Glass over a Bargain, when the former calling for a Toast, the latter gave Lord Bute, and went round: After which one of the English Drovers gave Mr Wilkes, but the Scotchman refusing, saying 'Troth he was noa gude Man,' and persisting in it, the Toaster of Mr Wilkes put his Finger in his Mouth, and gave the Scotchman his Wine and his Toast back again on his Breast, which occasioned some confusion among them, but at last they parted good Friends." Drinking, toasting, and bargaining, eventually opposing political views clashed to sully the atmosphere in the fair tent — but at least a cordial deal was achieved in the end.
However, fairs had not emerged as trading places just because people happened to find them useful or especially liked them. Fairs ensured that commerce took place for the benefit of various interest groups in local society looking to take a cut of the proceeds of trade while also expressing their power to govern it. Although anyone was free to come and trade, their dealings were subject to surveillance by these groups, who had created the fair precisely to concentrate deals in a single easily observable place. Watching traders were local elites and corporate bodies aiming to order dealing according to the idea of the common good. Fairs were often held at the behest of a local aristocrat who had been granted a royal charter bestowing the privilege to hold the event on his estate. Groups of local worthies also gathered to run a fair in their joint names. In the Scottish highlands "the principal gentlemen, drovers, and other dealers" of Doun in Perthshire assembled for this purpose. The palatinate of Durham's fair was a privilege granted to the bishop but then conferred by him on the freemen of Durham. The right to run a fair was thus viewed as a valuable privilege to be enjoyed among provincial gentry and better sorts, as individuals and also as a group assembled in a body corporate.
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Excerpted from "Trading Spaces"
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