Errors expected: the culture of credit in rural New England, 1750–1800

Abstract

This article uses farm diaries from eighteenth‐century New England recast as account books in order to describe more accurately the rules of exchange and the culture of credit that prevailed in early America. This culture, which was post‐medieval yet pre‐modern, derived its fundamental characteristics from the fact that it connected participants who dealt with one another as formal equals before the law. It employed strategies inside and outside the market, and, rather than embracing or rejecting commercial activity, aimed to use whatever means necessary to achieve for householders the goal of comfortable independence.