Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life

Abstract

Tamara Plakins Thornton examines the life and influence of the early nineteenth-century financial innovator Nathaniel Bowditch, who guided the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company (MHL) “to become the largest financial institution in New England” (p. 161). Bowditch did so, Thornton argues, by modeling his financial practices on the scientific theories of Pierre-Simon LaPlace, and by instituting uniform systems to organize office practices and the handling of information. This very readable biography argues that under Bowditch's leadership, Boston's financial institutions were characterized by impersonal bureaucratic methods that not only served “the interests of a self-consciously interconnected community” but also helped transform nineteenth-century American financial practices (p. 162). Bowditch was best known to contemporaries as the author of the New American Practical Navigator (1802) a guidebook for seafarers navigating ocean trade routes. Early chapters focus on his youth in Salem, his multiple trading voyages to Europe and Asia, and his early training in the insurance business. Here, Thornton delineates the influence of LaPlacean theories, which detailed the impersonal working of the solar system, on the development of Bowditch's world view, which Bowditch put to work in developing systematic and reliable financial practices.