Consumers

print shows a ship with many oars below land with people standing and watching — *De insulis nuper in mari Indico repertis.* Summary: Christopher Columbus discovering America. 1494. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.

This section is an attempt to provide introductory sources for those doing research that today would be classified as doing industry research with a particular focus on consumers. While a number of the items in this section are not strictly “business” as we would think of them today, these items were chosen because they covered aspects that would be helpful for those interested in understanding the marketplace and how people bought goods and may include the type of information a modern researcher would need if they were doing research like statistics, analysis, etc. Additional citations can be found in entries from the Oxford Bibliographies database. These include: "Economy and Consumption in the Atlantic World," "British Atlantic World, "Domestic Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World," etc.

The items below are from the Library’s collections. However, there are collections with materials related to these topics scattered throughout the country in historical society collections, state libraries, and other archival collections. Also, other sections of this guide can include sources that may be of interest for the focus of this section and have not been included below. The following materials link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to digital content are provided when available.

Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade by Jacob M. Price
Call Number: HC110.C3 P75
ISBN: 0674094808
Published/Created: 1980-12-02
This book looks at the growth of Britain’s foreign trade in the 18th century looking at the investment patterns and credit institutions concentrating on the trade between Britain and the Chesapeake tobacco colonies of Virginia and Maryland. This title is available on the De Gruyter Online database. The Library of Congress has a subscription but it can only be used on-site.
Consumerism and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Colonial America by Christina J. Hodge
Call Number: HC104 .H63 2014
ISBN: 9781107034396
Published/Created: 2014-07-14
This title has been included as it provides perspective not only on consumers but also on shopkeepers. The focus of the book is Newport shopkeeper Elizabeth Pratt as a way to make the case that consumerism and consumption was not exclusive to elites but was increasingly of interest to those looking to raise their station - later what was called the middle class.
Journal of British Studies
Call Number: DA20 .J6
Published/Created: 1986
Breen, T. H. An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776. Journal of British Studies, vol. 25, no. 4: 467–499.
This is an article that looks at prior efforts to place the Colonial period into a wider discussion of the period that includes McCusker and Menard’s work on trade. It uses that discussion to look at the colonists not just as producers of various agricultural products, but consumers of goods manufactured in England and how consumer demand was driving economic change. Significant mention is made of Charles Maclean Andrews, a noted historian of Colonial American history, and to many of his works.
The Marketplace of Revolution by T. H. Breen
Call Number: E209 .B77 2004
ISBN: 0195063953
Published/Created: 2004-02-26
Table of contents
Publisher description
This book looks at the impact consumer culture had on the timing of the Revolution. The Stamp Act of the 1765 and Townsend duties early in the 1770s didn’t push the colonies into immediate Revolution but how those actions along with ideological motives and the rise of the consumer culture created an environment for Revolution.
Observations on the Commerce of American States by John B. Sheffield
Call Number: HF3025 .S53 1970
ISBN: 0678006121
Published/Created: 1970-09-01
Available online from Hathi Trust External
This is a reprint of a title originally published in 1784 and generally this title looks at the commerce of the colonies. There is information on particular items in titles written closer to the time about linen, books, hats, buttons, stockings, liquors, rice, furs, cotton, rum, salt, etc.. The back of the book includes several tables related to particular commodities and imports/exports. Most of the coverage is in the few years just before the Revolution. Some data is earlier and seems primarily covers the trade to other European powers and other parts of the world but is not limited to just those.
Of Consuming Interests by Cary Carson (Editor); Ronald Hoffman (Editor); Peter J. Albert (Editor)
Call Number: E162 .O3 1994
ISBN: 0813914736
Published/Created: 1994-09-01
This title looks at early consumer culture in America through a series of essays illustrating the consumption of particular goods and services. Essays include: “High-style vernacular: lifestyles of the colonial elite’; “Changing lifestyles and consumer behavior in the colonial Chesapeake”; “Housing a nation: the transformation of living standards in early America”; “Shopping and advertising in colonial America”; “ The function of fashion in eighteenth-century America”; “Painters and their customers: aspects of art and money in eighteenth-century America”; “Music and theatre in the lives of eighteenth-century Americans”; “Books and reading in eighteenth-century America”; “Early American tourists and the commercialization of leisure”; “Sport and the awareness of leisure”; "Baubles of Britain": the American and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth-century” and “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?”.
Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism by Emma Hart
Call Number: HF3025 .H35 2019
ISBN: 9780226659817
Published/Created: 2019-11-28
This book takes in the places of 17th and 18th America where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. It tells the story of how our markets came to be, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.

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This is a brief listing of some of the subjects for the topics covered in this section but does not include subject headings for all the industries and types of businesses. Additional works in the Library of Congress on business, commerce, trade, and the economy in what becomes the United States may be identified by searching the Online Catalog under appropriate Library of Congress subject headings. Choose the topics you wish to search from the following list to link directly to the Catalog and automatically execute a search that will allow you to browse related subject headings. But for additional subject headings broader in nature, see the “Search the Library's Catalog” section of this guide.

Colonies in America: Commerce, Business, and the Economy

Consumers

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