A Country Storekeeper in Pennsylvania
A Country Storekeeper in Pennsylvania: Creating Economic Networks in Early America, 1790-1807 Diane E. Wenger,
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
ISBN: 0271034122
DDC: 381.1092
Edition: Hardcover; 2008-12-30
Summary:
In early America, traditional commercial interaction revolved around
an entity known as the 'general store.' Unfortunately, most of these
elusive small-town shops disappeared from our society without leaving
business-related documents behind for scholars to analyze. This gap
in the historical knowledge of America has made it difficult to
understand the nature of the networks and trade relationships that
existed between cities and the surrounding countryside at the
time.Samuel Rex, however, left behind a vastly different legacy. A
country storekeeper who operated out of Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania,
during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Rex left
behind a surprising array of documents exposing just how he ran his
business. In this book, Diane Wenger analyzes the part Rex and others
like him played in the overall commercial structure of the Atlantic
region.While Wenger's book has a strong foundation as a work of local
history, it draws conclusions with much broader historical
implications. The rich set of documents that Samuel Rex left behind
provides a means for contesting the established model of how early
American commerce functioned, replacing it with a more fine-grained
picture of a society in which market forces and community interests
could peacefully coexist.
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