Episode 8: The Trade

 Worlds Turned Upside Down

Episode 8: “The Trade”
Published 06/7/2024

Written by Jim Ambuske

JIM AMBUSKE: One day, in February 1774, a woman named Suckey walked into John Hook’s store in the Virginia backcountry. She was in the small village of New London, in Campbell County, about 30 miles west of Appomattox.

AMBUSKE: Hook’s store was barely two years old, but he had been trading in the colonies for over 15 years. The Scottish merchant had his new store built on a two-acre lot in New London, to bring a world of goods from across the Atlantic and far beyond to the settlers who were moving west toward the Appalachian Mountains and the Proclamation Line.

AMBUSKE: Suckey would have entered Hook’s shop on the ground floor. Before her was a long counter, one that marked the divide between customers like her and the goods she admired. Behind it, she might have seen Hook, a clerk, or maybe even one of the merchant’s enslaved servants pulling items off shelves and out of boxes for waiting customers. Things like colorful ribbons, buttons, razors, or tea sets. Things not made in the colonies. Objects both practical and refined.

AMBUSKE: Casks full of nails, and others, filled with brandy, and pepper, sat on the floor.T he storage room was just off the main stage, as was Hook’s counting room, where he brokered deals with his partners and settled debts with delinquents. 

AMBUSKE: As Suckey scanned the shelves behind the counter, she found what she wanted. A bit of ribbon, and a small looking glass. Today, we would call it a mirror.

AMBUSKE: The looking glass was priced at 2 and a half shillings. But Suckey wouldn’t be paying in coin. This was not a world of cash, it was a world of credit and trade. She had brought four pounds of cotton, still with its seed, to purchase her goods. Hook marked her name and her purchase in his ledger.

AMBUSKE: The details of Suckey’s life are in fragments, like a broken mirror. If she had a family name, it’s been lost. Many enslaved people, like her, only appear in records with a first name. She was the legal property of Richard Stith, who in time would become the surveyor of Campbell County, Virginia and a plantation master with over thirteen thousands acres of land and numerous enslaved people.

AMBUSKE: Stith’s will hints that Suckey was probably a house servant. When he died in 1802, she was listed on his estate inventory as “Old Suckey,” with a value at £18, the value of 144 small mirrors nearly thirty years earlier.

AMBUSKE: Suckey probably grew the cotton that she brought to John Hook’s store in February
1774. Like some enslaved people, she may have tended a garden on a small plot of land, in what free time she was allowed. The garden would have provided more food for her and her family, and in a good year, a small surplus to barter. Perhaps she sold some vegetables to Stith. Certainly, she had four pounds of cotton “in ye seed” to bring to Hook’s counter when she bought the ribbon and the small looking glass.

AMBUSKE: What did she see when she peered into that mirror? Herself? An enslaved woman? Her family? The ancestors?

AMBUSKE: We don’t know what Suckey looked like, but she did. The looking glass was both a portal into her inner self, a small measure of a refinement and comfort in a world like hers without freedom, and a reflection of her place in a much larger story of trade and empire in the late eighteenth century.

 AMBUSKE: For as many white British Americans championed their place in an empire they celebrated as “Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free,” Suckey walked into John Hook’s store that February day as both a consumer, and a commodity.

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution. Episode 8: “The Trade.”

AMBUSKE: In the 1760s, as King George III’s cartographers drew new maps and charts of British America, they paid careful attention to the coastlines and rivers of the colonies old and new. Oceans and rivers connected distant ports like Glasgow, Liverpool, and London in Great Britain to Kingston, Charleston, New York, Halifax, and Quebec in the colonies. Mariners and merchants needed precise knowledge of every coastal nook and cranny, the location and depths of harbors, and the distance ships could travel up river into the colonial interior to build a prosperous commercial empire.

AMBUSKE: Successfully navigating such waterways would make it possible for ships to carry manufactured goods from Manchester to Maryland, tobacco from Baltimore to Bristol, and enslaved people from West Africa to West Florida.

AMBUSKE: There was much at stake. In the years just after the Seven Years’ War, many of the king’s subjects and government officials saw trade as central to British power in Europe and throughout the Atlantic world. In their view, commerce and colonies maintained British independence and fed its rising glory.

AMBUSKE: Some subjects described this empire of commerce, with London at its heart, in the grandest of terms. In 1764, Thomas Pownall, the former governor of Massachusetts Bay, envisioned it as:

THOMAS POWNALL:  “A grand Marine dominion consisting of our possessions in the Atlantic and in America united into one empire, in one center, where the seat of government is.”

AMBUSKE: Ten years later, in 1774, another author claimed that the British had woven together an empire that was “a fabric at once the dread and wonder of the world.”

AMBUSKE: That fabric was more than just a metaphor. Trade in items as luxurious as silk and as simple as buttons bound British Americans and Britons together in a shared language of commerce.

AMBUSKE: But this grandeur came at an awful price. To purchase the spoons, portraits, textiles, and books they desired, British Americans had to offer something in return. And often, that came in the form of rice, indigo, sugar, and tobacco, all grown overwhelmingly by enslaved people.

AMBUSKE: So, how did the transatlantic economy bind the empire together in the years before the American Revolution? And what did it take to move goods and commodities made in factories and fields from one British port to another?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll first head into the minds of British officials like Thomas Pownall, to explore their vision for a perfect system that benefited the common good. We’ll then set sail for various ports around the British Atlantic world, to follow the hidden histories of the people, ships, and goods that made this vision possible.

AMBUSKE: In 1764, when Thomas Pownall imagined this “grand Marine dominion,” he did so in the pages of one the most important works published in British American history. In the first edition of his book, The Administration of the Colonies, Pownall cautioned that all the gains the British had made during the Seven Years’ War could be lost unless the government and the crown established wise regulations that kept the colonies dependent on the Mother Country.

AMBUSKE: Pownall understood British Americans and the colonies better than most British officials. During the disastrous early years of the Seven Years’ War, he served first as Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey and then as governor of Massachusetts. While in office he witnessed first hand the tension between British commanders-in-chief and provincial assemblies over allocations of money, men, and supplies. But he also developed a respect for how seriously colonists guarded their rights as British subjects and the importance they placed on consent by the governed.

AMBUSKE: He was also part of a new generation of British politicians who believed that the colonies were central to British power and prosperity. Like the Earl of Halifax, who oversaw British America as Secretary of State for the Southern Department, or Charles Townshend, a member of the Board of Trade who took a bird’s eye view of the empire, Pownall feared that self-interested colonists could wreck the imperial whole. He shared this belief with his brother, John, who was secretary to the Board of Trade, and one of the key architects of Britain’s reform efforts after the Seven Years’ War.

AMBUSKE: In 1763, the British had begun taking important steps to reorganize the empire. George III’s Royal Proclamation issued that October established governments in the conquered provinces of Quebec, Grenada, and the two Floridas. It also restricted western settlement beyond a border that British and Indigenous diplomats were in the process of negotiating and surveying.

AMBUSKE: But in Thomas Pownall’s view, commerce – the lifeblood of the empire – could be its undoing. Profit and wealth in the marketplace were seductive creatures that could lead the king’s subjects astray from the common, imperial, good.

EMMA HART: If you're working for the common good, it's the idea that you as an individual, are sacrificing your self interest for the greater good of society. So you're not thinking of yourself in individualistic terms. You're thinking of yourself as working for a greater good. And obviously that functions on a number of levels. It has a religious element to it, because there's this idea of in the 18th century, of self-sacrifice for a godly Commonwealth.

HART: I'm Emma Hart. I'm a Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and also the Richard S Dunn, director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

HART: So the common good is applicable beyond the marketplace. People used it outside of an economic arena

HART: But when it comes to the marketplace, it means that you sacrifice your quest for profit and for individual advantage in the name of giving everybody in the marketplace a fair price, a fair deal quality goods and an equal opportunity to buy those quality goods, even if you're a poorer member of society who is outside of the sort of elites. It's all these ideas of putting your own profits below the greater good of people who are buying in the marketplace, people from all classes and groups of society.

AMBUSKE: Smuggling, as some British colonists and merchants were known to do, and even trading with the enemy during the Seven Years’ War, were decidedly the opposite of the imperial common good. In Pownall’s mind, commerce was a natural force, a kind of gravitational power that operated in all human societies, pulling individuals toward self-interest at the expense of the greater community.

AMBUSKE: Counterbalancing that force required an even greater one. For Pownall, who studied at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where Sir Isaac Newton taught mathematics a century earlier, a Newtonian-like imperial system was in order:

POWNALL: “Great Britain, as the center of this system, must be the center of attraction, to which these colonies, in the administration of every power of their government, in the exercise of their judicial powers, and the execution of their laws, and in every operation of their trade, must tend.”

AMBUSKE: In this ideal universe, the provinces revolved around Great Britain as planets did stars. Benevolent light emanated from London in the form of wise regulations and protection, allowing the colonies to prosper for the common good. Yet, Pownall recognized that in this empire of trade, self-interest, and the colonists' own sense of their rights and their place within the British cosmos, would continue to tug on the center. To ensure prosperity for all British peoples, he argued:

POWNALL: “It becomes the duty of the mother country to nourish and cultivate, to protect and govern the colonies, which nurture and government should precisely direct its care and influence to two essential points. 1st, That all the profits of the produce and manufactures of these colonies center in the mother country: and 2dly, That the colonies continue to be the sole and special proper customers of the mother country.”   

AMBUSKE: The British had been striving for this kind of interdependent system since the mid-seventeenth century.

AMBUSKE: In the 1650s, the English Parliament began passing a series of Navigation Acts designed to regulate imperial trade. These acts required goods shipped from Asia, Africa, or the colonies to be carried in English ships, captained by English men, with the majority of an English crew. Certain colonial-grown commodities like sugar, tobacco, and indigo had to be shipped directly to England before they could be sold on global markets. And these laws required European goods bound for the colonies to be transhipped through England first, where they would be inspected by port officials and assessed a customs duty before they were allowed to cross the Atlantic.

AMBUSKE: In 1707, when Scotland joined with England to create Great Britain, the Navigation Acts applied to Scotland as well, giving Scots unfettered access to English America.

AMBUSKE: By passing such laws, the English and later the British wanted to create and perfect the kind of empire that Thomas Pownall imagined.

SCOTT MILLER: The entire economy revolved around extracting mostly raw materials from the ground and sending them to ports a very long way away.

MILLER: I am Scott C Miller. I am an assistant professor at the Darden School of Business in the University of Virginia, and an assistant professor at the Miller center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

MILLER: Some of these commodities included wheat and lumber and indigo, but also rice, tobacco and other commodities that were mostly in their raw form or in a very low grade of process. This often meant wheat to not flour, and almost certainly not bread. The important element here is these are largely raw commodities that are being pulled out of the ground and set far away. The two major exceptions were pig and bar iron, which were slightly processed but still relatively low on the scale there.

AMBUSKE: As Ann Smart Martin, the Chipstone Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison explains, this extractive imperial economy operated under the principle of mercantilism.

ANN SMART MARTIN: The British Empire was set up under the idea of a mercantilist system. You're moving people and goods to differing, often far flung places, and you discover and establish British power, and make the powerful rich. Natural materials will be going to the cheapest possible cost and we shipped back to the center and a return British people there could make it supply folks on the other end with manufactured or finished goods. In the purest scenario, then the people at the core would make the goods supply their colonists with their everyday needs. People employed factories would eventually boom wealth.

MILLER: The economic model was largely zero sum from the British perspectives, and the goal was to concentrate as much of the wealth in the home island as possible. And they saw the different economic systems of the colonial periphery, whether that be in North America, whether that be in the West, indies, even elsewhere in the world was largely meant to pull all those together into one place, and that was the home island. It's have other people a long way away, pull things out of the ground, send it to you to process into finished goods, and we will sell it back to you for higher prices. That is kind of the definition of this relationship, the idea of dependence is critical to understanding this relationship. The British certainly did not want to impoverish the American colonies because largely they saw the American colonies as a market for their finished products.

 AMBUSKE: What Pownall described in the abstract was based on real world observations of the British Atlantic economy. Behind the trade statistics that men like Charles Townshend poured over during his tenure on the Board of Trade, or the intellectual arguments that officials like Pownall made in their pamphlets and books, were people like Suckey, who made this commercial empire work.

AMBUSKE: Tracing the flow of goods and commodities across the Atlantic can help us understand the people and places who made it possible for an enslaved woman like Suckey to buy a looking glass in John Hook’s backcountry Virginia store. The tobacco trade between Maryland, Virginia, and Great Britain offers us a window into a complicated world with many moving parts. 

AMBUSKE: Here’s Ann Smart Martin:

MARTIN: The system of growing and moving tobacco from the growing point, whether it's Maryland or Virginia, was part of this perfect plan of moving throughout the economic system and building the Empire.

AMBUSKE: John Hook became a part of this economic system when he was still a child in the Lowlands of Scotland.

MARTIN: But you won't find John Hook in the history books, but in the account books, he traveled to Virginia as a 13 year old apprentice clerk and shopkeeper. His father, Henry was likely a small scale manufacturer. He would later open up a silk manufacturing he had seven children, five sons, all scattered to make their fortune. Three went to Jamaica, one to the East India Company, and John. His fourth went to Virginia. And in the phrase of historian Alan Karras, they were all classic sojourners. They were educated 18th century young Scotsman who saw little opportunity for financial success, and their hope was to make a comfortable, respectful existent and head back to Scotland.

AMBUSKE: When John Hook left Scotland in 1758 to work in James and Robert Donald’s store near Petersburg, Virginia, the Chesapeake tobacco trade was changing dramatically.

AMBUSKE: For most of its history, the tobacco trade was concentrated in London and Bristol. Large, wealthy planters like Charles Carroll of Maryland typically sold their tobacco crop on consignment. He owned thousands of acres and over 300 enslaved people, who produced the majority of his crop. After enslaved laborers packed Carroll’s dried tobacco into barrels, they put them aboard ships in a Maryland port for passage to England. In London, an agent took custody of Carroll’s shipment and sold the tobacco on his behalf. The agent in turn then used the proceeds to buy goods Carroll ordered and had these purchases shipped to Maryland.

AMBUSKE: In the mid-eighteenth century, however, Scottish merchant firms based in Glasgow began cornering the trade with smaller planters who grew lesser quality tobacco. This led to surprising results.

MARTIN: By 1769 more tobacco went to Scottish ports than all of England. And why was that? It was because the ships took a few weeks less than time to get there, and it was cheaper for Scottish people to make the textiles or pottery or whatever else.

AMBUSKE: Scottish merchant firms began building local stores along Virginia and Maryland rivers to serve the needs of these smaller planters. Merchants who operated these stores, also known as factors, purchased tobacco directly from the small planters. This store system moved west, as settlers did, toward the fall line, the point at which ocean-going vessels could no longer safely navigate up river. From there, smaller boats or waggons carried goods or tobacco to and from stores that were built deeper in the backcountry.

MARTIN: Now we've got a system in place for going more to Scotland, and that a booming population of Virginia meant that small towns have been established, snaked up the rivers and up towards the Blue Ridge.

AMBUSKE: But a local store manager like John Hook wouldn’t have purchased tobacco or other commodities from small planters with cash or hard money, sometimes called specie. Like most things in the British Atlantic economy, merchants and their customers did business using credit. Here’s Scott Miller:

MILLER: The vast majority of the time they're using credit, and credit is the thing that makes the world go round. And I don't want to say it's the only thing that matters for all practical purposes, but when it comes to everyday transactions, it really kind of does. There are two reasons why credit is so ubiquitous. The first is a very practical sense. Is specie is really heavy, and it's just fundamentally impractical to be able to use for everyday transactions. It's not convenient if you can just have a merchant or a shopkeeper x1 thing out with one stroke of a pen and put a debit in another account. That is much easier than carrying around gold or copper or silver. It's also makes you much safer, because people can't take that from you. So there's the practical reason for that. The second reason people are not using species much is because it's incredibly rare in the North American colonies, you see this again and again and again and again, lamentation after lamentation about the lack of cash or a scarcity of money. So they resorted to credit in many different forms to actually make this kind of commerce work. Very, very few transactions were done outside of the credit system.

AMBUSKE: Credit made everyday transactions possible in a tobacco economy built on the backs of enslaved people. The same was true of the rice and Indigo trades in South Carolina, and the sugar plantations in Jamaica, Barbados, and the Gulf South.

AMBUSKE: By 1770, there were 462,000 enslaved people in British America, nearly one-fifth of the total colonial population. While enslaved people labored in the homes of Quebec merchants, on New York city dockyards, and elsewhere in the northern colonies, slavery and enslaved people were central to the economies and social worlds of the southern colonies.

AMBUSKE: In the early eighteenth century, most enslaved Black people in Virginia had been born in West Africa, in the region known as the Bight of Biafra. They came from the Igbo, Fang, and other peoples in what is now Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guiana, and Gabon. European slavers transported captive Africans aboard ships across the Atlantic, through the waters of the Middle Passage, to ports along the James, Rappahonck, and Potomac Rivers.

AMBUSKE: Between 1750 and 1775, nearly 32,000 enslaved Africans disembarked in ports throughout the Chesapeake Bay. Not every captive survived the journey. Bound in chains and put aboard crowded ships, some captives died at sea from disease and malnourishment. Some were murdered by their enslavers. And sometimes, they died by their own hands.

AMBUSKE: The surviving captive Africans were put up for sale once they arrived in the colonies. In August 1759, the Virginia planter George Washington responded to an advertisement offering 350 “choice healthy Gold Coast SLAVES” for sale in Maryland. He purchased at least two enslaved men for £99. They were given the names “Neptune” and “Cupid.” Washington put them to work in the fields of his Mount Vernon plantation.

AMBUSKE: We know their names in part because when they fled Mount Vernon two years later, Washington placed an advertisement in the Maryland Gazette offering a reward for their capture.

AMBUSKE: By 1770, however, natural reproduction and laws that determined whether a child would be enslaved or free based on the status of their mother had reshaped the landscape of Virginia slavery. By then, 91 percent of the enslaved people in Virginia had been born in the colonies.

AMBUSKE: Odds are that Pedro, Ben, Beck, and Betty were among them. The four enslaved people were the property of Virginia lawyer Patrick Henry. They labored in the tobacco fields of his Scotchtown plantation, about 30 miles north of Richmond.

AMBUSKE: In 1772, Henry recorded the total amount of tobacco produced by each of them.

AMBUSKE: Pedro grew 1,185 pounds; Ben added 1,059; Beck produced slightly less at 1,005 pounds while Betty, who was probably between 12 and 15 years old, produced 991 pounds. All told, they were responsible for 4,240 pounds of tobacco.

AMBUSKE: Tobacco is a labor-intensive crop. During the growing season, it requires almost constant management, which meant that Pedro, Ben, Beck, and Betty worked long, hot Virginia days.

AMBUSKE: Since Henry was a smaller planter, he likely sold his tobacco crop to a factor through the Scottish store trade. Even if he had sold it on consignment to a London merchant, selling his crop was only the first step in getting it across the Atlantic. Planters and merchants alike needed to find a captain with a ship to transport their crop to London or Glasgow. Ideally, a captain with local business savvy and a bit of swagger. A captain they could trust. A captain like William Goosley.

HANNAH KNOX TUCKER: My favorite captain is William Goosley. He is a captain who trades out of Virginia, and between Virginia and London, but also other parts of the Atlantic world in the late 1760s, and 1770s. And I love William Goosley because he's really a master of manipulating local circumstances. He's very, very good at using this personal relationship and his claim to direct knowledge to his advantage.

TUCKER: I'm Hannah Knox Tucker, Assistant Professor of History at Copenhagen Business School.

TUCKER: Becoming a captain requires two types of knowledge. There's more practical knowledge that captains acquire through experience as sailors and mates and even captains in the early stage of their careers, and also more formalized training that they receive, sometimes in Port, sometimes in a master Mariner's free time. Masters certainly take apprentices. It is highly technical work. Navigating has always had a mathematical basis, but it's certainly becoming more technical over the 18th century, especially with the calculations around longitude that are emerging in the 18th century in a really significant and sustained way. And so the. Captains need training in geometry and trigonometry, and a lot of these more technical mathematical skills, also astronomy.

AMBUSKE: In the 1760s and 1770s, William Goosley applied his practical and formal knowledge in the service of John Norton and Sons, one of the largest tobacco firms in London. Goosley practiced his craft in the waters of the James and York Rivers of Virginia, where he took on shipments of tobacco and returned from Britain loaded with goods.

AMBUSKE: Knowing how to read the stars and maintaining good discipline aboard ship was only part of a captain’s job. 

TUCKER: Training in business matters and rudimentary legal training is also an essential piece of any captain's education. So because captains are often engaged in trade directly on behalf of the merchants who employ them or the ship owners who employ them, they need to know how to keep accounts. They're quite literate, so they write letters to merchants and other people throughout the Atlantic world, keeping them apprised of local conditions, and they also need to have a baseline understanding of the law around ships, because things go wrong all the time in the Atlantic world, privateering and shipwrecks due to storms. These are things that happen all the time, and captains need to know how to register with the Notary Public a report of what happened. For insurance purposes, they need to be able to sue governments to reclaim their vessels if they were improperly seized during times of war. And all of this requires a certain amount of legal knowledge, or at least practical legal knowledge.

AMBUSKE: Much depended on a captain’s reputation for his navigational skill and his business acumen. Planters and merchants wanted reliable, trustworthy captains who could transport cargo efficiently and negotiate fair prices on their behalf. And in William Goosley’s case, he had a not-so-secret weapon: his mother, Martha Goosley. 

TUCKER: His mother actually writes about him all the time. She actually writes directly to British merchants.

AMBUSKE: In August 1770, Martha wrote to John Norton, William’s employer, to highlight her son’s local connections in Virginia.

MARTHA GOOSLEY: “he has got a pretty general acquaintance and Doubt not with your kind assistance he will be able to load a larger ship if you chuse to send one and Sooner in [the York] River than the James.”

TUCKER: She talks about how great her son is and what a diligent ship captain he is, and she's always working in the back for his benefits. So she's always writing these letters saying it would be really great if you would take William under your wing and give him guidance. He's such a great ship captain, but I know he would really flourish under your tutelage. And so William goosley is great, because not only is he a skilled manipulator of local circumstance and his own claim to direct knowledge, but he also has a support system in his mother and his local community that allows him to cultivate a reputation that endures even when rumor questions him and his motivations.

AMBUSKE: Martha Goosley’s promotion of her son’s career highlights the critical role that women played in the British Atlantic economy.

TUCKER: Captains are very reliant on women, and female labor in the Atlantic. One of the things that is true about mariners, and is still true about captains, is that they're absent a lot of the time. As a result, women have to take and get to take a more active role in their family's commercial life, and whether that person be the captain's mother or the captain's sister or the captain's wife, women play a really powerful role in shaping captain's careers for a few reasons. Firstly, captains really deputize their wives to use the language of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who actually referenced a lot of ship captains when she was talking about this notion of Deputy husbands, captains are really active in deputizing their wives to perform commercial functions for them. Women also are really instrumental in selling goods that captains trade on their own accounts, in some cases, and in some cases, they'll even open stores. There's an example of a ship captain whose wife opens a shop on the wharf in Dublin. And in part, she's able to do this because she sells the goods that her husband imports. And so it creates some really elegant synergies. In some cases, a lot of times, women who are wives of captains will open taverns. They're really instrumental in this way, in being at the center of a local economy. So while captains may not know everything that's going on in a town, if their wives are tavern keepers. Their wives know everything that's going on in this town while the captain is abroad. So women tavern keepers keep track of their accounts, and they know who's in debt to the tavern, and they know who's paying their debts frequently. So they have some insight into local creditworthiness. They also hear a lot of the local news that floats through the taverns, and they are able then to share that information. And one final way that I would mention is the women in captain's lives are really important in establishing their local reputations. So a captain is gone for a long period of time, but his reputation is essential if he wants to be hired again when captains are out of contact, and the merchants that are employing them haven't received a letter for a while. What women say about their husbands and their husbands reputations can really influence things in positive and negative ways. Sometimes the women who feel abandoned by their husbands will come to their merchant employers and say really negative things about them. And this kind of undermines the local trust in the captain himself, and paints him as a derelict, no longer the sober and diligent ideal that merchants would desire their captain employees to be.

AMBUSKE: Captains also had to overcome a reputation for being a bit salty.

TUCKER: Saltiness is a term that I used to describe how people thought about captains, just as we do today. Captains. Contemporaries had stereotypes about mariners that definitely extended to the captains themselves. Land dollars tended to think about mariners as the simultaneously genial and generous people, but also as unsophisticated or insensitive or sometimes foolish people. That's what I mean by saltiness. It follows them in Port, whether they like it or not.

AMBUSKE: And yet, saltiness could be a tool, an asset that a captain turned to his advantage.

TUCKER: Saltiness, implies brutishness in some cases, but it also implies skill. So captains are salty because they've spent spent time at sea in open ocean navigation, doing something that's very difficult very technical, and, and that cultural saltiness also demonstrates that they have direct knowledge of foreign spaces that they've seen and experienced a lot of the world that many people have not experienced or seen.

AMBUSKE: Philip Vickers Fithian witnessed firsthand the savvy saltiness of Captain Dobby of the ship Susannah. In the summer of 1774, the New Jersey-born Fithian was living at Nomini Hall, the plantation home of Robert Carter III. It was located in Westmoreland County, on Virginia’s northern neck, between the Rappahnock and the Potomac Rivers. Carter was one of Virginia’s largest landowners, and the owner of hundreds of enslaved people, who produced thousands of pounds of tobacco for Carter each year. The Virginia planter hired Fithian to tutor his children. It was there that he encountered Captain Dobby.

TUCKER: Captain Dobby visits this family, and he dines with them over several days. He makes several visits, and Fithian describes him as an agreeable, sensible and polite gentleman. So we get some of that sobriety and diligence, that reputation that people on land really want captains to have. But he also describes the captain as turning conversations promiscuous, and he describes him as a great mimic, and he says he's a man of much spirit and humor, and I think that speaks to the kind of saltiness and the duality of captaincy. Captains are men of great humor. They're men who are great at telling stories, who have had a lot of experiences, and that has a certain cultural value. But that saltiness doesn't prevent them from also being men with cultivated reputations, men worthy of trust in business spaces. So I think this kind of cultural saltiness describes the dual nature of captaincy. Captains are both trusted, and there are also people who quickly turn the conversation promiscuous.

AMBUSKE: Once a planter or merchant managed to find a salty sea captain with a good reputation like Goosley or Dobby, there was still no guarantee that tobacco or trade goods would arrive safely in port. They wanted to protect their investment, to have someone, like a good neighbor, to be there in case something went wrong. And that meant buying an insurance policy.

HANNAH FARBER: Starting in the 18th century, the British insurance business really booms, and it booms at the same time that the British fiscal military state really gets itself together. New forms of state finance are taking shape. Merchant money is being harnessed by the state in a new way. That money is being used to fight wars that expand the Empire and make new business opportunities and make the state more powerful. It's a process that goes through a lot of chaotic fits and starts, but over the 18th century, it's a pattern of growth and insurance grows right along with that British imperial growth.

FARBER: I'm Hannah Farber, Professor of History at Columbia University. There is small scale insurance in the British American colonies, certainly by the mid 1700s insurance on an even smaller and more informal scale probably took place earlier, but it's harder to track. The first real boom in insurance brokerages takes place around the Seven Years War, especially in Philadelphia, at moments when the British Empire is at war. Commerce is particularly risky. There are also new kinds of financial rewards that could come to merchants who are willing to take risks. As the British Empire is growing and fits and starts, there are moments when commerce is particularly high risk and high reward. It's nice during wartime to have compatriots at hand who you're sharing risk with. It's just easier than connecting yourself to London. That said, Americans generally prefer to get their insurance made in Britain when they can insurance is cheaper, as you can imagine. It's a hotter, faster and more efficient financial market in Britain, and most Americans have some business connection in Britain anyway.

AMBUSKE: Whether a merchant worked with an underwriter in Philadelphia, Boston, London, or Glasgow, insurance policies were largely the same.

FARBER: The standard insurance policy is a printed blank form in which you fill in particular details. It seems comprehensive, but it is not. But if you're a merchant, you're supposed to know that already.

FARBER: The standard insurance policy is a printed blank form in which you fill in particular details. It seems comprehensive, but it is not so. One of the really interesting things to me about the marine insurance business is that the standard policy barely changes for about 400 years, and the core text of the policy is this list of things that can go wrong on your voyage, the dangers touching the adventures and perils which the insurers are contented to bear. They are the dangers of the seas, Men of War, fires, enemies, pirates, rovers assailing thieves, jettisons letters of marque and countermarque surprises, takings at sea, arrests, restraints and detainments of all kings, princes or people of what nation, condition or equality so ever and all other perils, losses and misfortunes.

AMBUSKE: On the surface, these policies seemed to cover absolutely everything, but..

FARBER: You would be incorrect. But if you were an experienced merchant in the early modern world, you would know that was incorrect. There were a lot of ways in which your policy might be voided or wouldn't exactly be as comprehensive as you would expect. For example, if you did not follow the route that you laid out when you got your insurance policy. It's a business of pretty rough estimation. In other words, they don't have fancy actuarial tables that say, Well, if it's this kind of sloop, premium should be a little higher, and if it's this kind of scooter, the insurance policy premium should be a little lower. It's not that precise. Insurance premiums are determined by gut knowledge and the latest political news as much as anything else, and the insurer's own experience informing the insurance rate that they suggest.

AMBUSKE: What steps would a tobacco merchant like John Hook, or the merchant firms who employed Captains Goosley and Dobby, take to insure their cargo?

FARBER: If you are a Virginia tobacco merchant and you want to insure your cargo, the first thing that you might do to decide about your insurance is to consult your network, to ask your neighbors where they get their insurance and what their rates have been. If you are in Virginia, you are not necessarily very closely connected to the more developed mercantile port towns like Boston or New York or Philadelphia, so you probably wouldn't go too far out of your way to get insurance from the colonies to the north. Most likely what you would do is get a name from a friend or a neighbor or an in law, and you would write to that contact, and you would tell them how much tobacco that you had and what you were planning to do with it, where you were planning to ship it, and you would say, at what premium would you insure this cargo? And they would likely write back and they would give you a certain number, and if you found that number unsatisfactory, you might ask your correspondent to ask someone else. But time is passing and letters are slow. You don't have a ton of time for comparison shopping, so I don't actually see a lot of haggling about rates in the correspondence. They have a gut sense of what seems reasonable based on their neighbors, or if they're unhappy with. Insurance rate that they're quoted. Sometimes they might say, Well, okay, I'm only going to insure half my cargo, or I'm going to insure the cargo, but not the vessel, or I'm not going to insure my tobacco, but I am going to insure the incoming manufactured goods that I'm going to buy from London with the proceeds. Once you have the goods that are more valuable to you, you may want to insure them more, and then you agree to the deal, and your correspondent signs the insurance policy in London on your behalf. But a lot of this proceeds according to custom, according to expectation, according to reputation. I'm not sure I want to use the word Trust, but it is sort of an expectation that people will behave in good faith, and that's one of the fundamental characteristics of why insurance is such a subtle, supple and powerful business. Once you received word that your stuff had arrived safely, a certain amount of time would pass. Often, your insurance policy would say you had six weeks to pay up in cash or 12 weeks to pay up in cash. But people can also keep accounts with their insurers. They might have all kinds of financial business in London, and what they really need is just for their accounts not to become too on balance, Americans have a lot of debt to their British lenders, and nobody necessarily has a big problem with that. The insurer can just be another person who you owe debt to, as long as the music keeps playing, there's no problem.

AMBUSKE: As a merchant worked out the details of an insurance policy, the ship’s captain was busy making final arrangements to get underway. A captain like Goosley or Dobby would have filed paperwork with port officials, bought spare parts for the ship, got enough food to support the crew on the journey across the Atlantic, and hired sailors. Here’s Hannah Knox Tucker:

TUCKER: Captains employ a broad spectrum of people in those jobs, people who are very experienced, people who are very early stages and have a lot to learn, but the one thing that they often have in common in the British Atlantic is that in many cases, they are British because the Navigation Acts require that a majority of sailors be of British descent, essentially, either from the plantations or from Britain itself. A lot of the crews are made up of men who are young, by virtue of the fact that many sailors either leave the harsh conditions and retire to land or, frankly, die at sea. They're entering a lot of different kind of disease environments, and it's a very high risk occupation, so many of them do die at sea. And this is kind of the tragic reality of shipping. It's a high risk world, and sailors bear the brunt of that risk in a really significant way.

AMBUSKE: But increasingly, captains would also buy or rent part of the crew.

TUCKER: The number of enslaved sailors is significantly increasing over the 18th century. In part, this reflects broader trends in the Atlantic world slavery as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, and also births in the colonial Americas is increasing in this period. But also captains desire control. Captains and merchants want to be able to control their labor force and guarantee their labor force. White free Sailors can seek higher wages elsewhere, could abandon the ship with compelling reasons. They could just say, I am a free mariner. Captains will often buy enslaved people and either employ those people on their own vessels and garnish their wages for their own accounts, and this is a way that captains are exploiting slavery in the Atlantic world for their own benefit. Or they will hire enslaved sailors from other owners, or merchants will own enslaved sailors that they enslave on these vessels.

AMBUSKE: Once the captain had hired his crew, men free and enslaved, he would direct them to load the tobacco aboard the ship.

TUCKER: It is really hard work. We're talking about sailors who are rolling hogsheads filled with 1000 pounds of tobacco from a planter's house, kind of rolling them down the road, putting them on this long boat, and rowing them out to the vessel itself, before hefting them onto the ship and stowing them below deck. Then, once the vessel is stowed, they will again do the logistical work of empire by reporting what they're exiting with, what their cargo is and where their intended next port of call is. They'll sail either to their home port or to their next port of call, and they'll unload the vessel. Again. Sailors are instrumental in this work, but also there are some longshoremen who do this type of labor, people that can be hired for a day at a time, and then eventually. And if that is the final port of call, they will pay the sailors for their journey and send them on their way, and the journey will be over.

AMBUSKE: When the ship reached London, Glasgow, or some other British port, and the crew unloaded the vessel, the captain often took on a cargo of manufactured goods for delivery to customers in the colonies.

AMBUSKE: Merchants like John Hook who purchased tobacco locally from smaller planters and shipped it abroad didn’t always know who made the goods they had ordered, or where they were made. Nor did the larger planters who shipped their tobacco directly to the Mother Country. Instead, they placed orders for certain types of goods and left ship captains or their British partners to find these items at the best prices. Here’s Ann Smart Martin:

MARTIN: It's hard to say where specifically they came from, like a particular store or maker, because the merchants like John hook are middlemen, while John Hook would have an invoice of everything that came he didn't know, necessarily where it came from. I did find one shop note in hook's papers, which was basically a bill, where you'd have a nice drawing at the top, and then you'd have a list of what was for sale, what was bought. And this from a glasswork in southeastern England.

AMBUSKE: Fortunately, other records offer us insight into the world of goods that John Hook and other merchants imported.

MARTIN: One way I could find sort of where exactly these goods came from was through a contemporary merchant in Maryland, and he does list all those details of where they came from textile warehouses in Manchester. They shop at the Delft Field House in Glasgow, which is where they made tin glazed earthenwares. They shopped at the Kilmarnock woolen manufacturing and he went to dozens of craftspeople to buy shoes. And he went to London. So this partner in Scotland is traveling all around England to get these world of goods to send the people in Virginia. And from London came China, silver spices, furred hats, silks and guns. So in one invoice of the Glasgow party, there are 40 different manufacturers, craftsmen and merchants. But there's kind of the rub. I mean, the rub is in the London houses. The rub is that that is the other half of the global trade. The other half of the global trade is stuff that comes from the rest of the globe. From Asia. You get silk and tea, fine porcelains and lacquerware. And here you can see that horrific side tucked into these merchant houses so the sugar from the horrific trade islands like Jamaica, where European demand fueled the need for more men, women and children stolen from Africa and enslaved.

AMBUSKE: British Americans who took passage aboard merchant vessels made purchases in London, Glasgow, and other British cities as well. They often did so on behalf of friends and family back home. And when we combine different pieces of evidence, we sometimes find the people who were really behind those purchases.

ZARA ANISHANSLIN: Often, women, for example, are actually in the documentary archive too, but we don't notice them because they might be listed under, for example, their husband's name.

ANISHANSLIN: I'm Zara Anishanslin, and I'm a Professor of History at the University of Delaware.

ANISHANSLIN: Sometimes, if you look at records in a merchant's account book, for example, underneath a lot of those men's names are actually women making the decision, driving the decision. One member of the Willing family in Philadelphia who went to London was going to buy a garment for his sister on her request, but he said he would not dare do it until she sent him the proper measurements and some details about what she wanted. Now, I guarantee you, when he rolls into the London shop and makes the order, the account book would say, Mr. Thomas Willing purchased material to make a gown, or 20 lengths of silk, or this corset or whatever. However, if you match it with the letter, we know it actually was the woman driving that purchase. It was her request, just as it would be she who would wear it.

AMBUSKE: With the cargo loaded in the ship’s hold, customs duties paid, crew hired, and passengers boarded, a captain like Dobby or Goosley sailed from London down the River Thames, or away from Glasgow out of the River Clyde, and headed west across the Atlantic.

AMBUSKE: Depending on what cargo the ship was carrying, it might have headed first to Jamaica or Barbados to deliver trade goods and take on a load of sugar. After leaving the West Indies and venturing north along the mainland coast, perhaps the ship stopped in the port of Charleston, South Carolina, where some of its cargo would find its way into stores in the city’s main marketplace.

AMBUSKE: If a British subject was visiting the colonies for the first time, they would have encountered a marketplace in Charleston that was somewhat familiar. Emma Hart’s research in Britain and North America helps to explain why:

HART: One of my sort of eureka moments was when I went to the marketplace I visited in Hexham in Northumberland, the market shed, which is just sort of like a roof on pillars, was built in the 1750s about the same time, actually, as marketplaces in Charleston, South Carolina. And when I looked at maps that showed the market buildings in Charleston, it was clear that they were the same style. Of course, the Charleston market buildings from that precise period don't survive anymore. The one that survives in Charleston now is from the early 19th century, but it was clear to me that people on both sides of the Atlantic were putting up similar market buildings in similar spaces at the same time. By the 1770s Charleston has a designated fish market, a beef market and a fruit and vegetable market, and there are also a number of luxury and everyday shops in Charleston. If you wanted to buy luxury goods like fine clothing and silver, you would most likely go to Trad Street, where there was a cluster of luxury goods sellers on that street, so it would be familiar to them.

AMBUSKE: And yet even as Charleston felt familiar, first time visitors quickly realized that this was a world far different than Edinburgh, York, or Dublin.

HART: The main thing that you would notice, particularly if you're a European coming to South Carolina for the first time, would be the presence of enslaved people in these marketplaces, the centrality of slavery would become immediately obvious to you as a visitor when you went into these marketplaces, more so than in Philadelphia, where there would be African American people, but not in such a large number. The Fish Market was almost completely run by enslaved and free African American men who piloted the boats and caught the fish and then sold them on the walls of Charleston. And of course, the other thing that you would notice was that people were being sold in large numbers in many of these marketplaces. So 10s of 1000s of people were being sold at auctions, which often took place at these rural stores, but also on the walls of Charleston, at inns and taverns that were on the edge of Charleston. One of the most fascinating people that I came across in my research on that region was a guy called Thomas Nightingale, who founded the Charleston racecourse, and he was a Saddler and was involved in trading with indigenous people early on in his career, but later in his career, in the 1760s he opened an inn on the outskirts of Charleston, and it became a central point for selling enslaved Africans, both who'd been imported across the Atlantic, but also who were being sold as part of deceased estates as well. So if you went to Thomas Nightingale’s inn as a European, you would be astonished to find that there was a side business in selling enslaved people, that auctions were taking place. And it would be in a very unfamiliar site to Europeans.

AMBUSKE: Charleston’s marketplace reflected South Carolina’s plantation economy and a society intimately intertwined with slavery. In Philadelphia, merchants and visitors might find something decidedly more English. At least at first.

HART: When they got to Philadelphia itself and to various other towns like Lancaster or Carlisle or reading they would find familiar marketplaces to focus on Philadelphia, you would arrive at the wharves on the Delaware River, you would immediately see Market Street with the market stretching down it Before you, and you'd find a very organized marketplace that was segmented according to what kind of things people were selling. There was a specific area for people who come over from New Jersey across the Delaware River. There was a fish market. There was an area where butchers congregated to sell meat, and then there was a Green Market, where fruit and vegetable sellers would congregate.

AMBUSKE: In June 1765, customers visiting Francis Harris’s store on Second Street could buy goods just imported from London, Bristol, and Liverpool, including:

PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE: “Scots carpets..Irish linens…window glass..whips…saffron…quills, ink pots.. Playing cards…fish-hooks .. table knives…guns…frying pans…curtain rings..scythes…Bristol shoes and beer.”

HART: Philadelphia, it also got so big by this point that there was also a south market. So there was two official marketplaces. Most of the shops in Philadelphia were lining Market Street that was the sort of real commercial district.

AMBUSKE: Beyond the city, a British visitor would have seen a different kind of marketplace, where goods from Europe, Asia, and beyond might be on offer.

HART: Pennsylvania had a lot of mills that were along the Brandywine River and out Westwoods from Philadelphia and northwest from Philadelphia as well. These Mills had become like marketplaces in their own right. So mill owners or mill builders would buy land, they'd put a mill on the river in their land, which would be milling either wheat and grain. When you go into the account books of these mill owners, you would discover that there was often a store at the mill that local employees would buy things from, and that farmers would come to deposit their wheat, and then they'd purchase goods in return at the mill. This is also very handy for people who live in this quite large landscape.

AMBUSKE: And yet, even in Philadelphia, in a colony far less reliant on enslaved labor, where grains like wheat were one of its chief exports, free and enslaved people were ever present in the marketplace.

HART: You wouldn't be able to go to a marketplace either in Pennsylvania or South Carolina, in a city and not encounter large numbers of African American men and women, most notably women traders selling prepared goods, prepared foods, but also selling fruit and vegetables. There's a very famous depiction of an African American seller in the Philadelphia marketplace in the later 18th century. She's selling a dish called Pepper pot, which is a sort of hot stew that African American women would sell in the Philadelphia marketplace. The pepper pot seller is an example of how important African American men and women had become to local trade by the mid to late 18th century.

AMBUSKE: Perhaps, though, Captains Goosley or Dobby headed directly for Virginia, carrying goods destined for John Hook’s backcountry store in Campbell County. Textiles, spoons, spices, ribbons, mirrors, and other goods made their way up rivers and overland to a place between worlds. Here’s Ann Smart Martin:

MARTIN: The backcountry is just a great sort of catchphrase, if we think about this nebulous land in between, kind of this established east coast, but also the Blue Ridge Mountains. We've got English settlers, many of them, but not all, are bringing enslaved peoples. Some of them recently came from Africa. But down the Shenandoah Valley comes another group, and these are Germans from Pennsylvania. There's also Scots, Irish native peoples are also mixed in. So we have this really interesting zone of different kinds of people. And there was a sense, really, the back country was something different. I mean, it was poor. There are not as many enslaved people. They were not as market based, and they also seem to be rougher.

AMBUSKE: But John Hook’s account books reveal that the backcountry wasn’t entirely a rough and tumble world.

MARTIN: What they have is this extraordinary quality, variety and fashionability of the items he stocked kind of belie that notion we have about rugged, self sufficient backcountry life, and you could walk in it, and his customers could handle backgammon boards or China teacups and feather plumes, but most of the things that he sold were the necessities of everyday life. He sold assorted nails, crosscut saws, gimlets, chisels, gouges, mortis, tendons, adzes, hinges, locks, paints white, Spanish Brown, Prussian blue and yellow. He offered guns for protection. He had stuff for horses. He had stuff for riding. He had curry combs, but he also had two super fine ladies' hunting saddles with polished arched mouth bits and green sabacclaws embroidered with gold springing costing two pounds each for those who wanted to further display their wealth, he had fine painted teapots, Chinese porcelain cup and saucers, English made cut glass of decanters, enameled wine glass, cut glass, screw it's boxes of books on and on. The world of goods in John Hook store was unexpected to many in. Seemed like these are the things I thought we would find in established towns, and it didn't really fit my expectations. But nonetheless, there they were.

AMBUSKE: Hook’s surviving papers tell us that his New London store was 42 by 20 feet, with the longside facing the street. Inside, customers, like the enslaved woman Suckey, would have seen the storage room, the counting room, and most importantly, in the main room, the long counter, with Hook on one side, and Suckey on the other.

MARTIN: These two zones between the merchant on one side the customer on the other really sets up, I think, for us, this dramatic stage for shopping as experience this big, long counter kind of closed off this world of goods between you, because behind the counter stood the merchant, and behind the merchant stood the shelves. There's cubby holes that are built in those little boxes. And in these boxes were ribbons and buttons and razors, all kinds of these smallish consumer goods. Some are wrapped in packages. Some are open. My favorite part is the sensuous world of beautiful textiles, and some of them were probably in brown paper, and that's to protect them from rats and dam but if you think about unwrapping and untying these protective covers was pretty dramatic, dramatic for customers to see this world of color and drama unfolding in front of you in a world that's not as bright and colorful as it is today.

AMBUSKE: Textiles were the most important item that customers purchased. Some silk, some cotton, but nothing as frequent as a coarse fabric made in Scottish mills called osnaburg.

MARTIN: Osnaburg is a kind of inexpensive linen. It was twice as common as any other kind of textile. Osnaburg was the everyday wear of everyday people. We could find it from servants. We can find it from working people, most importantly for us and the tobacco story is they were often used to clothe enslaved people. The lion's share of this textile was probably purchased by planters to provide clothing to be sewn by someone on their plantation and provide clothing for the year.

AMBUSKE: When Suckey visited John Hook’s store in February 1774, she was probably wearing clothing made of osnaburg, when she bought some ribbon and a looking glass for four pounds of cotton in the seed.

MARTIN: Suckey, to me, gave me a chance to think about the ways in which enslaved people could bring alternative understandings and wants to the world of goods. We don't know what Suki did after she made her purchase and left the store. Did she tie her ribbon in a bow in front of her shift she winded around her neck, or in the brim of her hat? Did she lace it through her hair? We don't know. That particular set of goods made me want to think about meaning. Why would she want a mirror and a ribbon? And it took me into the row of the looking glass. And the Looking Glass begins with this idea of magical and mythical mirrors before the 19th century, they are often called Looking Glasses, and they were to look you looked into it. You looked beyond. You could look at your face, but you could also look at other worlds. They told the truth and they predicted the future. So I took that idea of mirror and I traced it culturally and worked closely with the idea of mirrors and their role in Africa, because mirrors were a key item of trade

AMBUSKE: In some West African cultures, like the Bakongo and Igbo peoples, mirrors played a powerful role in warding off evil spirits. They were also windows into the past, and foretold the future. These beliefs often survived the waters of the Middle Passage, even if the freedom of the enslaved did not, and became woven into the fabric of Black culture in British North America. It’s possible, then, that when Suckey looked into her mirror, perhaps as she threaded the ribbon through her hair, she saw more than just herself.

MARTIN: They had duality that only could you look into, but it also flickered and reflected. Suckey stood with one foot in this Anglo, Virginian world and the other in this other African one. And what can we wonder about, about that world of goods?

CODA:

AMBUSKE: John Hose was the kind of merchant that Thomas Pownall had in mind when he imagined the British Empire as a perfect system with the colonies in orbit around an imperial sun.

AMBUSKE: Hose made luxury shoes for women at his shop at the Rose on Cheapside Street, just near Milk Street, in London. With 300 laborers in his employ, Hose could make a lot of footwear, especially shoes made of fine silk, and ship trunk loads of them across the Atlantic to eager colonial customers who could afford them.

AMBUSKE: British American shops in Boston, New York, and Charleston advertised “silk shoes of JOHN HOSE’s make.” Such was his reputation, they needn’t say more.

AMBUSKE: Many pairs of Hose’s shoes still survive. Sometime between 1760 and 1770 someone, possibly a Virginian, purchased a pair of Hose’s cream-color silk pumps. Markings on the tongue suggest the shoes were made to fit a woman who wore a size 4 wide.

AMBUSKE The artistry and craftsmanship is nothing short of amazing. They are brocaded with floral patterns. Green stems and shoots wind their way around each shoe, sprouting leaves here and there, before blooming flowers colored blue and rose.

AMBUSKE: In a province like Virginia, the tobacco grown by enslaved laborers, and then sold to a local merchant or on consignment to London, generated the wealth that made it possible for planters to buy a pair of silk shoes made by John Hose in England.

AMBUSKE: In Thomas Pownall’s universe, a cosmology shared by other Britons, that was how commerce with the colonies ought to work. Colonists sent commodities like tobacco, rice, wheat, timber, and indigo home to Britain, and in return, British manufacturers sent finished goods like shoes to the provinces.

AMBUSKE: But experience had taught the former Massachusetts governor that empires were fragile things, especially when its members did not all share the same idea of the common imperial good.

AMBUSKE: So when rumors began swirling in British America in the early 1760s that Parliament would soon levy new taxes on the provinces, taxes meant to fund the administration of the colonies and alleviate Britain of the enormous debut it had borrowed to win the Seven Years’ War, Pownall may not have been surprised by an advertisement placed by Philadelphia shoemaker Alexander Rutherford in the pages of the Pennsylvania Journal.

AMBUSKE: Rutherford could not match John Hose’s manufacturing output at his shop on Front Street in Philadelphia, but he could appeal to colonists who felt angry about the possibility of taxation without representation. On January 20, 1765, Rutherford advised customers who were:

PENNSYLVANIA JOURNAL: “resolved to distinguish themselves by their patriotism and encouragement of American manufactures, that he makes and sells all sorts of worsted or wool shoes, of all sizes, as neat and cheap as any imported from England.”

AMBUSKE: In a world of goods, where commerce was the lifeblood of the British Empire, shoes could become more than just something to wear. Something more than just  items both practical and refined. They could become weapons.

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

AMBUSKE:  I’m your host, Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE: Head to r2studios.org for a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading.

AMBUSKE:  Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick. Special thanks to Cody Youngblood of Patrick Henry’s Red Hill for contributing additional research to this episode.

AMBUSKE: Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent.

AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor is Curt Dahl of CD Squared.

AMBUSKE:  Rachel Birch, Amber Pelham, and Alexandra Miller are our graduate assistants.

AMBUSKE: Our thanks to Emma Hart, Scott Miller, Ann Smart Martin, Hannah Knox Tucker, Hannah Farber, and Zara Anishanslin for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE: Thanks also to our voice actors Anne Fertig and Adam Smith.

AMBUSKE:  Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.