The shop at ‘the head of the Town-Dock, at the Corner of Wing’s Lane’: commercial space in Colonial Boston, 1758–1769

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nearly thirty years ago, Richard Bushman argued that ‘somewhere in their makeup, even small shops bore the seeds of mighty changes.’ In the three decades since Bushman’s claim, historians and material culture scholars have demonstrated that Anglo-American colonists were thoroughly enmeshed in the so-called ‘consumer revolution’ and the importance of consumer spaces to that process. However, because few colonial shops survive, the ‘makeup’ of eighteenth-century retail spaces – their layout and design, and the influence of these on consumer practices – has not been fully understood, particularly for pre-Revolutionary Boston. Weaving together textual fragments and surviving material objects, this article re-materializes and re-populates the shop where the middling merchant-shopkeeper Samuel Abbot worked between 1758 and 1769 and contextualizes it in reference to both colonial and metropolitan British spaces. Taking a micro-history approach, this article contributes to the literature on the physical spaces in which goods changed hands in colonial North America by adding Boston to studies of colonial retail spaces.