A social, economic, and political study of Philadelphia merchants, this study presents both the spirit and statistics of merchant life. Doerflinger studies the Philadelphia merchant community from three perspectives: their commercial world, their confrontation with the Revolution and its aftermath, and their role in diversifying the local economy. The analysis of entrepreneurship dominates the study and challenges long-standing assumptions about American economic history.

A social, economic, and political study of Philadelphia merchants, this study presents both the spirit and statistics of merchant life. Doerflinger studies the Philadelphia merchant community from three perspectives: their commercial world, their confrontation with the Revolution and its aftermath, and their role in diversifying the local economy. The analysis of entrepreneurship dominates the study and challenges long-standing assumptions about American economic history.

"The Way of the Ship offers a global perspective and considers both oceanic shipping and domestics shipping along America's coasts and inland waterways, with explanations of the forces that influenced the way of the ship. The result is an eye-opening, authoritative look at American maritime history and the ways it helped shape the nation's history."--BOOK JACKET.

Examining the lives of 460 of the wealthiest men who lived in colonial Maryland, Burnard traces the development of this elite from a hard-living, profit-driven merchant-planter class in the seventeenth century to a more genteel class of plantation owners in the eighteenth century. This study innovatively compares these men to their counterparts elsewhere in the British Empire, including absentee Caribbean landowners and East Indian nabobs, illustrating their place in the Atlantic economic network.

William Cooper and James Fenimore Cooper, a father and son who embodied the contradictions that divided America in the early years of the Republic, are brought to life in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book. William Cooper rose from humble origins to become a wealthy land speculator and U.S. congressman in what had until lately been the wilderness of upstate New York, but his high-handed style of governing resulted in his fall from power and political disgrace. His son James Fenimore Cooper became one of this country’s first popular novelists with a book, The Pioneers, that tried to come to terms with his father’s failure and imaginatively reclaim the estate he had lost. In William Cooper’s Town, Alan Taylor dramatizes the class between gentility and democracy that was one of the principal consequences of the American Revolution, a struggle that was waged both at the polls and on the pages of our national literature. Taylor shows how Americans resolved their revolution through the creation of new social reforms and new stories that evolved with the expansion of our frontier.

American households, businesses, and governments have always used intensive amounts of credit. The Engine of Enterprise traces the story of credit from colonial times to the present, highlighting its productive role in building national prosperity. Rowena Olegario probes enduring questions that have divided Americans: Who should have access to credit? How should creditors assess borrowers’ creditworthiness? How can people accommodate to, rather than just eliminate, the risks of a credit-dependent economy? In the 1790s Alexander Hamilton saw credit as “the invigorating principle” that would spur the growth of America’s young economy. His great rival, Thomas Jefferson, deemed it a grave risk, inviting burdens of debt that would amount to national self-enslavement. Even today, credit lies at the heart of longstanding debates about opportunity, democracy, individual responsibility, and government’s reach. Olegario goes beyond these timeless debates to explain how the institutions and legal frameworks of borrowing and lending evolved and how attitudes about credit both reflected and drove those changes. Properly managed, credit promised to be a powerful tool. Mismanaged, it augured disaster. The Engine of Enterprise demonstrates how this tension led to the creation of bankruptcy laws, credit-reporting agencies, and insurance regimes to harness the power of credit while minimizing its destabilizing effects.

Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.

David Wooster, Revolutionary War General, though woefully understudied, was one of the most influential figures in Colonial Connecticut. A study of his life is a study of the major events that shaped New England. The growth of his military leadership from the 1740s until his death in 1777, was coupled with active civic responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit. While raising a family in New Haven, Wooster sought active involvement in colonial politics and, at the same time, supported and encouraged New Haven's growing influence as a major port city. Tremendously devoted to the ideas of liberty, freedom, equality and the rights to property, David Wooster epitomized the 18th century American republican cause--a cause for which he sacrificed everything to defend and help secure. At the point in life when most people reached the age of retirement, as well as the ease of old age, Wooster, sixty-five years old at the outset of the Revolutionary War, once more donned the uniform of his home colony of Connecticut, and led troops in the field of battle. He had everything to lose, and nothing but liberty and freedom to gain. To him, however, these were more than ample reasons. This first biography of the influential figure is exhaustively researched from primary sources, covering Wooster's entire life and entire military and civic careers.

This book vividly illustrates the history of business in the United States from the point of view of the enterprising men and women who made it happen. Ever since the first colonists landed in the New World, Americans have forged ahead in their quest to make good on promises of capitalism and independence. Weaving stirring narrative with economic analysis, this historical deep dive recounts the successes and failures of some of the most iconic business people to grace our history books--from the founding of our country to the present day. In American Entrepreneur, you’ll learn about how: Eli Whitney changed the shape of the American business landscape; the Civil War impacted the economy, and how it was renewed by the subsequent dominance of Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan; Asa Candler, W. K. Kellogg, Henry Ford, and J.C. Penney led the rise of the consumer marketplace; and Warren Buffett’s, Michael Milken’s, and Martha Stewart’s experience in the “New Economy” in the 1990s--and how that economy continues today. It is an adventure to start a business, and the greatest risk takers in that adventure are entrepreneurs. This is the epic story of America’s entrepreneurs and how they created the economy we enjoy today.