Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700-1850.

Abstract

Great merchants, investors, and industrialists have long dominated the historiography of Boston business, but this collection of essays urges a broader definition of the city's business community. Without denying the economic importance of the major traders of colonial Boston, or the merchants of the China trade, or the men who built New England's textile industry, it also finds signs of vigorous entrepreneurial activity in places where previously historians have rarely looked - for instance, among artisans, women, and members of minority communities. The volume comprises fourteen essays which cover a wide range of topics, including: women shopkeepers in eighteenth-century Boston, African-American businessmen and political leadership in antebellum Boston, artisans as entrepreneurs, the decline of Boston's wine trade, forms of business organization, and what merchants did with their money.