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ABSTRACT
Early eighteenth-century Boston experienced significant population and economic growth as it became fully integrated into Atlantic trade and credit networks. Shipbuilding boomed, and the hundreds of vessels entering the port each year required provisions, supplies, and repairs. Building and outfitting vessels generated well-paying jobs for maritime specialists and laborers. Merchants, however, had no desire to spend scarce silver or gold to pay waterfront tradesmen. Instead, they formed long-term credit arrangements through complex bookkeeping practices that moved food, goods, labor, and debts among multiple parties. They also attempted to protect this system during periods of crisis and strategically employed waterfront tradesmen to build or work on vessels for foreign partners as part of their wider Atlantic ambitions. This article places building and outfitting ships at the center of everyday interactions in colonial Boston and broadens our understanding of credit arrangements, commodity exchange, and capital formation in the Atlantic world.
Boston's waterfront flourished in the early eighteenth century, a scene of busy shipyards, wharves, warehouses, taverns, and shops of maritime specialists. During the final decade of the previous century, city merchants had acquired capital by supplying and repairing Royal Navy vessels, drawing on credit from London contacts, and exploiting frontier and maritime commodities and labor in the Bay of Campeche (Mexico), Saltertuda (in the Caribbean, near Venezuela), Maine, New Hampshire, Newfoundland, and North Carolina. By the early 1700s, they actively invested their capital in the production and maintenance of ships that provided the sinews of extensive trade networks that facilitated the flow of colonial and English commodities through the port city.1
Shipbuilding was the backbone of Boston's early entry into the wider Atlantic world and source of its employment for scores of local tradesmen. From 1697 to 1714, Bostonians constructed 406 vessels amounting to 28,230 tons of shipping capacity. Of these vessels, 70 percent (284) remained in the hands of Boston merchants, representing an impressive expansion in the city's maritime capabilities from the previous twenty-two years (1674-1696), when Bostonians produced only 30 vessels totaling 1,685 tons.2 Meanwhile, vessel entrances more than doubled over a sevenyear period, rising from 251 in 1707 to 525 in 1714. Vessel clearances also increased dramatically, from 298 in 1707 to 550 in 1714. Over thirty years later, in 1745,...