The New England Merchants In The Seventeenth Century, by Bernard Bailyn
It likely does not need to be said at this point that I love the historiography of Bernard Bailyn and find it both fascinating in its attention to historical detail and context and its unforced and implicit contemporary relevance to contemporary sociopolitical matters. As someone who has read a fair amount of the author’s work before [1], it is pretty easy to appreciate what Bailyn is doing here even if the book is highly technical and (unsurprisingly) quite challenging in that it deals with a subject few people care about–the complexity of business and family relationships among generations of New England merchants, exploring their origins, their integration with the colonial governments as well as the imperial government based on London, and the establishment of local and international trade relationships that provided a high degree of wealth as well as…
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James' Ramblings 