"Heavenly Merchandize" offers a critical reexamination of
religion's role in the creation of a market economy in early
America. Focusing on the economic culture of New England, it views
commerce through the eyes of four generations of Boston merchants,
drawing upon their personal letters, diaries, business records, and
sermon notes to reveal how merchants built a modern form of
exchange out of profound transitions in the puritan understanding
of discipline, providence, and the meaning of New England.
Mark Valeri traces the careers of men like Robert Keayne, a
London immigrant punished by his church for aggressive business
practices; John Hull, a silversmith-turned-trader who helped to
establish commercial networks in the West Indies; and Hugh Hall,
one of New England's first slave traders. He explores how Boston
ministers reconstituted their moral languages over the course of a
century, from a scriptural discourse against many market practices
to a providential worldview that justified England's commercial
hegemony and legitimated the market as a divine construct. Valeri
moves beyond simplistic readings that reduce commercial activity to
secular mind-sets, and refutes the popular notion of an inherent
affinity between puritanism and capitalism. He shows how changing
ideas about what it meant to be pious and puritan informed the
business practices of Boston's merchants, who filled their private
notebooks with meditations on scripture and the natural order,
founded and led churches, and inscribed spiritual reflections in
their letters and diaries.
Unprecedented in scope and rich with insights, "Heavenly
Merchandize" illuminates the history behind the continuing American
dilemma over morality and the marketplace.
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