What Merchants Did: London Traders in the British Atlantic

Abstract

London-the political, financial, and commercial heart of the British empirehas suffered an odd fate in the historiography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. More colonial trade circulated through London than all other English ports combined during the first three quarters of the century. Yet despite its precedence in the imperial economy, the breadth and complexity of London's Atlantic commerce has failed to receive extended examination. Surveys concerned with British overseas trade accord prominence to the metropolis, and fine studies exist of individual merchants and particular branches of commerce. No published work on Georgian London, however, equals the scholarship on trade through Glasgow or Bristol, cities for which port books and firm records survive in greater quantity.1 For historians of early America, the deficiency is serious. In the absence of a view from London, those seeking a broad perspective on the operation of Britain's commercial empire find themselves with peripheries and no core. David Hancock helps fill the void with an intensive inquiry into the work of twenty-three loosely affiliated merchants active in the five decades before the close of the American Revolution. Six owned and operated a slaving fort on Bance Island in the Sierra Leone river from 1748 to 1784; the remaining seventeen represent all known partners in the other ventures conducted by the six principals-Augustus Boyd, John Boyd, Alexander Grant, John Mill, Richard Oswald, and John Sargent. The associates, as Hancock terms this group, represent the increasingly diverse origins of the London mercantile community. They hailed from the provinces, a majority from Scotland and Ireland, and labored, at first, outside the chartered companies and at the perimeter of established trading networks. In Hancock's words, they were marginal men, opportunistic in seizing new prospects for profit, prepared to direct multiple enterprises on a global scale in ways that integrated