Despite significant developments in understanding the role of women in early-modern business, more is needed to fully understand women’s impact on eighteenth-century trading networks. Further, much less is known about the role of wider family members, especially children, in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. The formal documentation that is privileged in business histories does not tell the whole story, and it frequently represents mercantile activity as a pursuit dominated by a patriarch at the center of a trading network. This article explores eighteenth-century familial commercial networks through extensive use of the personal family correspondence of three merchant families who lived and traded within different locales of the northern Atlantic: Hugh Hall, a merchant and vice judge of the admiralty in Barbados; the Black family, who were wine merchants in Bordeaux; and Joseph Symson, a mercer and shopkeeper from Kendal, England. This article will show that women appear as autonomous players with the power and ability to make informed and independent decisions that directed the business interests of their families. Moreover, it includes an assessment of the ways in which merchants cultivated the expertise of their extended families to enhance their commercial networks and advance their business pursuits. Focusing on children who supported or enhanced the prosperity of the family firm, this article emphasizes that their participation was intentional, not incidental. This article asks questions about the emotional consequences of such activity—which have rarely been considered in any detail—as well as the financial benefit of operating in this manner.
This paper responds to most recent works on the complexity of loyalist identities during the American Revolution. It forms a close reading of over 400 claims submitted by self-identified loyalist claimants from the former colony of New York to the Loyalist Claims Commission. Through a case study of three New York counties (the city and county of New York, Albany County and Tryon County), the paper demonstrates that the loyalist experience differed greatly between the three distinct geographic regions; different counties entered the war at different stages, while demonstrations of loyalism and the range of services provided by loyalists to advance the British cause varied considerably. The paper also outlines (and justifies the use of) the potential of three broad categories by which to analyze loyalist claimants: namely, ‘active’, ‘reluctant’ and ‘passive’. Ultimately, this paper concludes that the varying nature of loyalism was largely the product of local contextual circumstance.
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