‘Varieties of Capitalism in the Americas’ workshop, 4 June 2015
Organised by the Centre for Economic and Business History,
University of Nottingham
------------------------------------Dr Emma Hart (University of St Andrews)
Trading Cattle and the Histories of Early American Capitalism
This paper will consider the colonial cattle trade as a means of locating the origins of
an American market culture in the pre-Revolutionary British Atlantic world.
Highlighting the significance of the physical spaces in which this trade took place, the
discussion draws on the work of those historians and social scientists who have
articulated the centrality of context, individuals, and institutions in the cultural
process. While it is evident that British and American cattle traders were still part of
the same British Atlantic commercializing system, the American market place
nevertheless took on an idiosyncratic quality by the 1760s because of the specific
circumstances in which it had evolved. Understanding these contrasts is crucial to
the way in which we insert the colonial cattle trade into a longer “History of American
Capitalism.” More precisely, this trade departed from the places and institutions that
had long-structured it in metropolitan Britain.
This marginalization of habitual market places is important because it meant that
early Americans had tested to breaking point the links between custom and economy
that still existed in Britain until the early nineteenth century. When market spaces that
had historically stood at the forefront of both commerce and debates about
commerce were demoted to a marginal role, not only the places in which trade took
place shifted, but also the discursive fields in which debates about the domestic
economy were rehearsed.
This shift allowed for the emergence of a particularly American relationship between
the state, the individual, and private property, after the Revolution.