The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the
Origins of the Information Revolution in the
Early Modern Atlantic World
JOHN J. McCUSKER
Remember that time is money.
-Benjamin Franklin, 17481
Never was the farmer better paid for the part [of his crops that] he spared for
commerce, as the published prices current abundantly testify.
Benjamin Franklin, 17872
L'espace, ennemi numero 1.
Fernand Braudel>
THE VALUE OF INFORMATION TO THE ECONOMY IS OBVIOUS. The ways in which
information was provided to participants in the economy of the Atlantic World
during the second half of the second millennium of the Christian era changed
significantly, twice. Step one in this transformation engaged the printing press in the
During the time that I was engaged in the researching and writing of this essay, I enjoyed a great deal
of support. I am immensely grateful for the help given me: as a Visiting Senior Me/Ion Scholar in
American History at the University of Cambridge; as a John Adams Fellow of the Institute of United
States Studies, University of London; as a Fellow of the Eccles Centre for American Studies, the British
Library; as a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge; for a Helen Cam
Fellowship at Girton College, University of Cambridge; as a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Great Britain;
as a Scholar in Residence at the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy; for a Fredson Bowers Grant from
the Bibliographical Society of America and the Bibliographical Society of Great Britain; for a Reese
Fellowship from the Bibliographical Society of America; for a Franklin Research Grant from the
American Philosophical Society; and for a fellowship offered by the Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie
van Belgie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, Brussels. I have also benefited from the opportunity to
respond to thoughtful comments on some of the ideas developed herein offered at presentations before
several sets of colleagues: at the Washington Area Economic History Seminar, American University;
at the Seminar on Economic History, Indiana University; at the Conference on "Founding Financier:
Robert Morris," City University of New York Graduate Center, New York City; at the Third
International Congress of Maritime History, Esbjerg, Denmark; at the Graduate School Seminar,
University of Helsinki, Finland; and at the Legal History Colloquium, Harvard University Law School,
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1 Benjamin Franklin, "Advice to a Young Tradesman," as printed in George Fisher, The American
Instructor; or, Young Man's Best Companion . . . ,9th edn. rev. (Philadelphia, 1748), 375. See also
Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., 37 vols. (New Haven,
Conn., 1959-),3: 304-308.
2 Franklin, "Comfort for America, or Remarks on Her Real Situation, Interests, and Policy,"
American Museum 1 (January 1787): 6.
3 Fernand [P.] Braudel, La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen al'epoque de Philippe /1, 4th edn.
rev. and corrected, 2 vols. (Paris, 1979), 1: 326-61, and his extended discussion of "l'espace, ennemi
numero I" (distance, enemy number one).
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service of business. Before the change, sharing information involved direct,
interpersonal communication; after it, information could be broadcast. The second
step began with the telegraph and has progressed to the palm pilot and the mobile
telephone-both, as you read these words, being melded into one, ever-smaller
device combining telephone, personal digital assistant, camera, and portable
scanner. The delivery of information changed at that point from mechanical to
electronic, with consequences yet fully to be fathomed, the progression across the
centuries captured in the mantra of the modern business world: better, faster,
cheaper-an information revolution.
Frances Cairncross has written of the "death of distance," a potent phrase that
vividly evokes the impact of the latest information technologies (IT).4 Yet distance
and its close cousin time did not die suddenly. The death of distance has been a
lingering one, the story of which is only becoming clearer as we learn more about
the onset of its demise over the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. Pivotal for
business in reducing the impact of distance and time were the introduction and
spread of commercial and financial newspapers.>
The publication of business newspapers was the first step in a break with the
past; they became the method of choice for the dissemination of economic news to
our own era. Once introduced into the European economy in the mid-sixteenth
century, business newspapers developed rapidly into several different types and
came quickly to be published in the important European commercial and financial
centers-but not elsewhere, for several centuries." Thus the starting up of
4 I wish to acknowledge as the inspiration for my title the book by Frances Cairncross, The Death
of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives, 2nd edn. (Boston, 2001). See
also John J. McCusker, "Information and Transaction Costs in Early Modern Europe," in
Weltwirtschaft und Wirtschaftsordnung: Festschrift fUr Iurgen Schneider zum 65. Geburtstag, Rainer
Gommel and Markus A. Denzel, eds., Vierteljahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte,
Beihefte, no. 159 (Stuttgart, 2002), 69-83. Compare Richard O'Brien, Global Financial Integration: The
End of Geography (New York, 1992).
5 The story is not well known. For a recent, fine essay on the importance of information to business
firms in the early modern period-but one that, like many others, seems not even aware of the existence
of a business press-see Daniel A. Rabuzzi, "Commercial Intelligence: France and the Baltic Trades,
c. 1750-1815," in Negoce, Ports et Oceans, XVIe_XXe siecles: Melanges offerts a Paul Butel, Silvia
MarzagalIi and Hubert Bonin, eds. (Bordeaux, 2000), 47-59.
6 General purpose newspapers began to appear only later, in the last decades of the sixteenth
century and the first decades of the seventeenth century. D[irk] H. Couvee, "The First CoranteersThe Flow of the News in the 1620's," Gazette: International Journal of the Science of the Press 8, no. 2
(1962): 22-36. It follows, of course, that business newspapers were the first newspapers. Business
newspapers must certainly be considered newspapers if only because they conform reasonably enough
to the standard definition of a newspaper, the seven characteristics of which were out in Otto Groth,
Die Zeitung: Ein System der Zeitungskunde (Journalistik), 4 vols. (Mannheim, 1928-1930), 1: 22-90.
Groth argued that, for a publication to be considered a newspaper, it had to be (1) issued periodically;
(2) duplicated mechanically; (3) available to anyone willing to pay for it; (4) broad in the news that it
reported; (5) general in the audience to which it appealed; (6) timely in its reporting; and (7) produced
by an established, ongoing enterprise. The point is argued in John J. McCusker and Cora Gravensteijn,
The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate
Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modem Europe, Nederlandisch Economisch-Historisch Archief,
ser. 3, no. 11 (Amsterdam, 1991),21-31 andpassim. The commercial and financial newspapers that are
the subject of this article fall short of this definition in several ways. First, and most particularly, they
were not the general kind of newspaper about which Groth wrote. They were narrow, specialized
newspapers, a subset of the genre "newspaper," but newspapers nonetheless in the same way that
financial and commercial newspapers published in our own time are so considered (e.g., the Wall Street
Journal or the Financial Times). Second, while they were for the most part reproduced mechanically,
some were only partly-printed. I would argue that this is an unimportant distinction for the time when
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indigenous business newspapers in the United States only in the 1780s, after the
American Revolution, presents for us a chance to ponder the causes and consequences of the demise of time and the death of distance." That the establishment
of the first business newspaper in the United States was concurrent with the
establishment of the country's political independence underscores the new nation's
emergence as a separate economic entity, too. That both developments were set in
the same city, Philadelphia, suggests a linkage between the developing political and
economic power of the country.
Much was new in these developments in the Western Hemisphere but much was
old, too. Just as the political system installed in the United States was grounded in
Old World ideas and institutions, so also was its economic system. This makes the
earlier absence of a business press all the more curious. The questions are obvious:
Why were no business newspapers published in British America prior to the 1780s?
Why were some fifteen of them suddenly established during the next two decades?
The answer to the questions is to be found in the historical development of business
newspapers in Europe from the 1530s to the 1780s and in the way they finally came
to be established in the United States during the two decades after the Peace of
Paris in 1783.
To explain these developments is the point of this essay, first through an
exploration of what happened in Europe, then of what happened in the new United
States. Reflecting on these developments illuminates some of the fundamental
reasons for the emergence of commercial and financial journalism as the first step
in the demise of distance. I would argue that this account of the information
revolution is best presented as a narrative that pays attention to the timing and
places of its origins. Telling the tale in this manner not only makes it broadly
accessible, but also highlights the chronological sequence of events and ideas so
crucial to the creation of the broader information revolution that the emergence of
the business press launched. I believe this method of presentation is critical as well
because it emphasizes the importance of narrative as a tool of historical analysis
and presentation. In this form, the moral of the story is as much in the telling as in
the subject being explained. For this reason, my chronicle of the expanding
they were being published. Certainly the Venetian exchange rate current did not stop being a
newspaper, which it had been by these criteria for over a century, when it changed from a fully printed
format to a prtly printed one. Finally, some of the newspapers discussed in this article were issued less
frequently than once-a-week, Groth's minimum level of periodicity. Again, for early modern Europe,
this seems less significant. They were certainly regular and periodical. I think that "early business
newspapers" describes them neatly and accurately. Compare Eric W. AlIen, "International Origins of
the Newspapers: The Establishment of Periodicity in Print," Journalism Quarterly 7 (December 1930):
310-11, who also prescribes a less dogmatic, more historical perspective on any such criteria when
discussing early newspapers, as does Covee, cited above. See also Stanley Morison, The English
Newspaper: Some Account of the Physical Development of Journals Printed in London between 1622 and
the Present Day (Cambridge, 1932), 7, 9; K[urt] Baschwitz, De Krant door alle tijden, 2nd edn.
(Amsterdam, 1949), 20-23; and Anthony Smith, The Newspaper: An International History (London,
1979), 9-13 and passim. In the same way that business and financial newspapers published in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were treated as newspapers in law and practice, so also were the
earlier ones, published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, equally newspapers.
7 A wildly enthusiastic editorial in The North American (Philadelphia), January 15, 1846, 2, col. 1,
celebrated the telegraph for effecting a revolution "by the annihilation of time."
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exchange of business information is also a brief for the importance of narrative
analysis."
This initial step in the information revolution triggered developments that
continue to bring changes into our own time. Under the impetus of the business
press, increasingly integrated local, national, and international markets yielded
greater profitability for business firms thanks to better information. Three hundred
years after the introduction of the business press, the steamship and the locomotive,
the telegraph and the telephone added speed to reliability in the delivery of news.
A century and a half later, at the beginning of the third millennium, labor and
commodity markets were increasingly globalized to a degree that amazed all and
disconcerted many.? Information had become practically costless. IT no longer
mattered, the clever conceit of Nicholas Carr.'? The information revolution was
over; distance-the enemy targeted by Fernand Braudel-passed unlamented.
SOME FIVE CENTURIES AGO, the business press came into being when a group of
merchants decided that their comparative advantage was significantly improved by
the printing and sale of information that they and their colleagues had previously
thought more valuable for being kept secret. Up to that point, keeping things a
secret, the better to gain the upper hand over one's competitors, was standard
business practice. The prices of commodities, the availability of goods, the location
of customers, the arrival and departure of cargoes, the sailing of ships, the vagaries
of the sea, the winds, and the tides: there was, and is, a great value to all this
information. Developing private sources of information to the benefit of one's own
firm was fundamental to success. These same notions continue to have currency in
the business world today.
Such secrets gathered from trusted sources had always been shared with one's
business contacts, of course, particularly within the various branches of a firm. 11
Mercantile correspondence from as long ago as the Phoenician traders of the third
and second millennia RC. is rich in such information. The merchants of the Italian
city states of the late Middle Ages developed and distributed forms for the
collection and circulation of commodity prices among members of the same
8 In this, as in much else, I am indebted to the example of one of my students, Thomas P. Slaughter.
See, for instance, his "Afterword" to Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram (New York,
1996), 267-71. For a powerful critique of the art of historical discourse as practiced over the last
half-century, see Allan Megill, "Coherence and Incoherence in Historical Studies: From the Annales
School to the New Cultural History," New Literary History 35 (Spring 2004): 207-31.
9 Jay R. Mandle, "Globalization: Pro and Con," in The Economic History of World Trade since 1450:
An Encyclopedia, John J. McCusker et al., eds., 2 vols. (forthcoming, New York, 2005). Compare
Mandle, Globalization and the Poor (Cambridge, 2003). See also Lester C. Thurow, "Globalization: The
Product of a Knowledge-Based Economy," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 570 (July 2000): 19-31.
10 Nicholas G. Carr, "IT Doesn't Matter," Harvard Business Review 81 (May 2003): 41-49; Carr,
Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (Boston, 2004).
This essay presents something of a challenge to Carr's thinking in that it suggests that it is not just first
adopters who reap the advantages of innovations; so do ingenious adapters.
11 The Fuggers of Augsburg developed their famous interoffice newsletter network for just such
purposes. See Gotz von Polnitz, Die Fugger, 6th edn. rev. (Tubingen, 1999),293-96. Compare Richard
Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger: Geldkapital und Creditverkehr im 16. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Jena,
1896).
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company. Numbers of these survive in the archives of, for instance, the Datini of
fourteenth-century Prato.P Practically every letter of every merchant I have ever
seen has a postscript telling the recipient the latest price for some commodity and
the current rate of exchange, sometimes expressed in a shorthand so cryptic as to
seem a code.'>
Limiting the exchange of business information enhanced its value. The elaboration of a local market and the creation of a community of colleagues perforce
opened up the circle a bit as organizations of merchants and guilds of brokers based
at one town or fair agreed to gather and in face-to-face conversation share basic
information to their mutual benefit. Even still, the clique was closed to all but the
trusted few. Reliable intelligence about markets and prices-"the freshest advices"-is what kept business alive. Such information was meant to be private, to
the benefit only of those who needed to know.
Then something changed. The printing press made it possible, but an altered
attitude made it happen.> Perhaps the merchants of Venice were first, but the
earliest known instance of the printing and publication of business newspapers
occurred at Antwerp. The development was quite dramatic, fortuitously testified to
in the letter book of the Antwerp office of a merchant firm, the Van der Molen, that
traded Low Country cloth with merchants in Italy. The copybook of the firm's
letters to its correspondents covers the period from 1538 through 1544. Into its first
many pages, the company's clerk transcribed not only the texts of letters sent but
also appended, as usual, prices and exchange rates at the foot of the letter, in a
list-"listini" in Italian, the language of the letters. In August 1540, the copy clerk
12 Federigo Melis, Documenti per la storia economica dei secoli XIII-XVI, Istituto Internazionale di
Storia Economica "F. Datini," Pubblicazioni, serie 1: Documenti, no. 1 (Florence, 1972), 38-39,
298-321, identifies and reproduces fourteen handwritten "listini dei prezzi" dated between 1383 and
1430.See the discussion of them in McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial
Journalism, 22-23.
13 Unfortunately when modern editors prepare such letters for publication, they often fail to
reproduce these addenda either because they do not recognize them for what they were or they
consider the information unimportant. For an example of one who treated the documents properly, see
Henry [G.] Roseveare, ed., Markets and Merchants of the Late Seventeenth Century: The Marescoe-David
Letters, 1668-1680, Records of Social and Economic History, n.s., vo!. 12 (Oxford and London, 1987).
14 "It is abundantly evident ... that the newspapers did not create news, but that news (plus the
printing press) created the newspaper." Matthias A. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in
England, 1476-1622 (Philadelphia, 1929),3. Considerable work has been done over the last few decades
on the impact of the printing press on the history of the Western world. The essence of the discussion
is handily summarized in the forum on "How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?" published in
the AHR 107 (February 2002): 84-128, to which the reader is referred. In the position advanced here,
I suggest that the printing press was a necessary but not sufficient cause of any such revolution: the
important change came with the publication of business news, a development that was merely
facilitated by the printing press. The key was the decision to publish and not the decision to print. In
this emphasis, I am somewhat at odds with the thrust of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's seminal study, The
Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern
Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979), in which she maintains that the printing press was the root cause of
the changes. A similar argument is mounted by Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der fruhen Neuzeit:
Eine historische Fallstudie iiber die Durchsetzung neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien
(Frankfurt am Main, 1998), who compares the impact of the printing press with that of computers in
the late twentieth century. Compare Renate Pieper, Die Vermittlung einer neuen Welt: Amerika im
Nachrichtennetz des Habsburgischen Imperiums, 1493-1598, Veroffentlichungen des Instituts fur
Europaische Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung fur Universalgeschichte, vo!. 163 (Mainz, 2000). By contrast,
see Anthony T. Grafton, "The Importance of Being Printed," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9
(Autumn 1980): 265-86. Compare Adrian [D. S.] Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge
in the Making (Chicago, 1998).
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suddenly changed his practice; he stopped transcribing rates and prices. Instead he
began noting in the copybook that the recipient would find enclosed with the letter
"ilistini di] pretia di mercanti"-lists of the prices of goods-"in stampa," that is,
printed."
It is from this period that we have our first evidence of the publication of two
kinds of business newspaper, the one called the commodity price current and the
other called the exchange rate current. We date the start of the commercial and
financial press to these humble but significant beginnings at Antwerp around
1540-although, given the early and continuing publication of them in the Italian
language and recognizing the heavy dependence by Low Country merchants on
Italian practices and precedents in matters mercantile, one must reserve the
possibility of an even earlier origin in the Italian city states, perhaps, as was said
above, Venice.w
Who published them? And why? We can only speculate in answer to both of
these questions. (I am reminded at this point of the cliche about the medieval
historian who forges ahead with two documents and lots of imagination.) If, as
seems likely, later modes of organizing the publication of these newspapers
emulated previous modes, then we can look to what we know about the publication
of the Amsterdam business newspapers for an indication of what the Antwerpers
had done first. If so, then it was the licensed brokers of the city acting through the
famous Antwerp Beurs (or Bourse, the Antwerp Exchange) that organized the
publication of these newspapers.
The Antwerp Exchange-the model for the Amsterdam Exchange and the
prototype for Thomas Gresham's Royal Exchange in London-played a central role
in the business of the city. (See Figure 1). Such exchanges faced in two directions,
like the Roman god Janus. Their primary function was to channel business news to
their local membership. Members of the exchange met there during business hours
and learned the news in a medley of ways: through conversations with other
15 Pieter van der Molen Brievenkopij, 1538-1544, Insolvente Boedelskamer no. 2898, Stadsarchief,
Antwerp. See, for instance, the letters to sig. Azeretto, at Genoa, August 22 and September 19, 1540,
Van der Molen Brievenkopij, fols. 171v,175r, 175v.Compare ibid., fols.184v, 185v.For more about the
firm and the letter book, see Florence [M.] Edler, "The Van der Molen, Commission Merchants of
Antwerp: Trade with Italy, 1538-44," in Medieval and Historiographical Essays in Honor of James
Westfall Thompson, James Lea Cate and Eugene N. Anderson, eds. (Chicago, 1938), 78-145. John
Munro, in the most recent of his many insightful explorations of the dynamics of this trade, has
established yet another reason for the rise of Antwerp. See his "The Low Countries' Export Trade in
Textiles with the Mediterranean Basin, 1200-1600: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Comparative Advantages in Overland and Maritime Trade Routes," International Journal ofMaritime History 11 (December
1999): 1-30.
16 John J. McCusker, "The Role of Antwerp in the Emergence of Commercial and Financial
Newspapers in Early Modern Europe," in La ville et la transmission des valeurs culturelles au bas Moyen
Age et aux temps modernes-Die Stade und die Ubertragungvon kulturellen Werten im Spiitmittelalter und
in die Neuzeit-Cities and the Transmission of Cultural Values in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modem
Period, Gemeentekrediet van Belgie/Credit Communal de Belgique, Collection Histoire, no. 96
(Brussels, 1996), 303-332. See also Ugo Tucci, "I listini a stampa dei prezzi e dei cambi a Venezia,"
Studi Veneziani, n.s., 25 (1993): 15-33; Peter Burke, "Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information
and Communication," in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State,
1297-1797, John [1.] Martin and Dermis Romano, eds. (Baltimore, 2000), 389-419; and Mario Infelise,
Prima dei giornali: Alle origini della pubblica informazione (secoli XVI e XVII), Quadrante Laterza, vo!.
115 (Rome, 2002).
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members; through announcements called out to all of them;" through the receipt
and disbursal of the letter post; and, increasingly after the invention of the printing
press, through flyers, broadsides, and, ultimately, newspapers printed and posted on
the exchange. Exchanges came to be valued for their libraries; the back issues of the
newspapers to which the exchange subscribed were an important part of library
holdings. IS As that suggests, the second function of these exchanges, one that grew
to become increasingly important after the 1540s, was to channel local business
news abroad. This second impulse originated on the Antwerp Beurs when its
brokers decided to publish local business newspapers.
Based again on what we know to have been the practice later at Antwerp,
Amsterdam, and other places, we surmise that from the start the committee of the
brokers guild that ran the Antwerp Exchange licensed the publication of their
newspapers to one or more members of their guild who then ran the publication as
a separate business. At Amsterdam a century later, the members of that subcommittee were called the "prijs courantiers." They hired clerks to do the work of
gathering and assembling the information. At the appointed day and hour, the
clerks circulated on the trading floor of the bourse, questioning designated brokers
at each of their designated trading areas, or "walks," asking them about the latest
prices of specific commodities, exchange rates, insurance rates, and the rest.!? (See
Figure 2). Writing on a copy of the previous issue of the newspaper, the clerks
penciled in the changes, corrections, and comments. They then met to assemble the
data they had gathered and the five prijs courantiers checked it carefully"ghecorrigeert by ons ryven" the Amsterdam newspaper proclaimed, seeking to
reassure its readers-before sending copy to the printer with whom they had
17 Perhaps the most famous site for such announcements was the "pulpit" at Lloyd's from which
news was read aloud by one of the coffee-house waiters, as described by Joseph Addison and Richard
Steele. See Charles Wright and Clharles] Ernest Fayle,A History ofLloyd's from the Founding of Lloyd's
Coffee House to the Present Day (London, 1928),26-27, citing the Tatler, December 26,1710, and the
Spectator, April 23, 1711.
18 See the description of the impressive library in the offices of the Frankfurt city agency established
by and for the city's merchants to facilitate the conduct of their affairs. It stocked books, political
newspapers, and both local and foreign exchange rate currents and commodity price currents: "die
Wechsel- und Waaren-PreiB-Couranti nicht allein von hier, sondern auch von Amsterdam, Hamburg,
Bremen, Venedig u.s.w." Frankfurt am Main, Messe, Franckfurter Mej3-Schema, oder Verzeichnij3 aller
nach Franckfurt Kommenden ... in Ansehung der Messe zu wissen nutzlicher Nachrichten (Frankfurt am
Main, 1775), "Vorbericht." Serving the same functions later in the 1840s, the North and South
American Coffee House in Threadneedle Street, London, could boast of having available to its
members back-files of between three and four hundred newspapers. [David Morier Evans], The City; or,
The Physiology of London Business; With Sketches on Change, and at the Coffee Houses [lst edn.]
(London, 1845), 126. Compare the libraries that were a prominent part of the colonial merchant
exchanges like the one established at Boston by the mid-1650s. Josiah Henry Benton, The Story of the
Old Boston Town House, 1658-1711 (Boston, 1908),52 and passim.
19 Thus, in 1659, Amsterdam grain merchant Dirck de Wolff, already a member of the Council of
the Brokers Guild, was appointed overman (overseer) of grain prices. Clarel] H. Jansen, "Geschiedenis
van de familie de Wolff: Sociale en economische facetten van de Republiek der Verenigde
Nederlanden in de zeventiende eeuw," Jaarboek van het Genootschap Amstelodamum 56 (1964):
131-32. In 1810, in his presentation before the famous Bullion Committee, Aaron Asher Goldsmid,
partner in Mocatta and Goldsmid, one of the five legendary London bullion brokerage houses, stated
that since the 1690s his firm had served a similar function on the Royal Exchange as the designated
brokers who reported on gold and silver prices for John Castaing's Course of the Exchange. Great
Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Report, Together with Minutes of Evidence, and Accounts, from
the Select Committee on the High Price of Gold Bullion, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1810, vo!.
3 (Reports), no. 349 (London, 1810), 36.
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FIGURE 2: "An Elevation, Plan and History of the Royal Exchange of London" (1761). Drawn by John
Donowell (fl, 1753-1786) and engraved by Anthony Walker (1726-1765). Shown are the "walks" of each
trading group. Reproduced with permission from a copy in the author's possession.
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contracted to set type and produce the newspaper.v It was sold by subscription and
by individual copy to any who cared to pay the price.
This manner of operation continued to be carried on rather unchanged into the
first half of the twentieth century. A former editor of the Financial Times of London
once explained to me that the way of gathering the information and preparing copy
that I have just described was how things were done for his newspaper until just
before World War n. This was certainly how the first commodity price current was
published in Philadelphia in the 1780s.2 1 It is likely that this was how it was done
from the start, at Antwerp, in the first half of the sixteenth century.
Why did the brokers of Antwerp break with the past and publish their trade
secrets? This is an even trickier question and one for which we have no hard
evidence at all to help us find answers, only inferences.P Nevertheless several things
seem obvious.
Probably the most telling reason merchants in a city such as Antwerp agreed to
the organization of a business press was that doing so would generate more business
for the city. A published list of the prices at which commodities sold on the Antwerp
market announced the existence of such a market at Antwerp. It advertised the
commodities that could be sold there, thus attracting more sellers. It publicized all
the goods that could be purchased there, thus attracting more buyers. So did a
similar listing of the rates at which bills of exchange could be negotiated encourage
more businesses to consider Antwerp as the place to buy and sell them. Later
newspapers touted the costs and availability of money on loan, cargoes just landed,
ships about to sail, and the rates at which goods could be freighted. Even a
newspaper that appeared only quarterly served the same purposes. Increasing
business, of course, quickly turned a quarterly newspaper into a weekly newspaper
in the same way that the increased business convinced a city famous for its quarterly
fairs that it needed to build an exchange because the fair had become a daily
occurrence. The city of Antwerp opened its newly constructed exchange in 1531 to
accommodate what had become, according to Florentine merchant and longtime
20 Early numbers of both the Amsterdam and the Hamburg commodity price currents printed such
pledges by the prijs courantiers making explicit that they had, indeed, carefully checked the contents.
Cours van Negotie (Amsterdam), November 23, 1609 (quotation); Prys Corant (Hamburg), April 14,
1626; Prys Crant (Hamburg), February 12, 1630. See McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of
Commercial and Financial Journalism, 44, 225. There is evidence that printers of commodity price
currents and exchange rate currents did not distribute type back into the type cases between issues of
the newspapers but maintained standing type, parts of which they changed as necessary. E.g., ibid.,
401-402. On the subject of standing type during the hand-press period, see Philip GaskelI, A New
Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, 1972), 116-17; and Clarolyn] Nelson and M[atthew] Seccombe,
Periodical Publications, 1641-1700: A Survey with Illustrations, Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical
Society, no. 2 (London, 1986), 36.
21 See John J. McCusker, "Philadelphia and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the
United States" (forthcoming).
22 Instructive in this context is George J. Stigler, "The Economics of Information," Journal of
Political Economy 69 (June 1961): 213-25. (I thank Jim Simler for this reference.) Compare Stephen
Morris and Hyun Song Shin, "Social Value of Public Information," American Economic Review 92
(December 2002): 1521-534.
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inhabitant of Antwerp, Lodovico Guicciardini, a "continuous fair."23 Business
newspapers, founded there within the decade, helped the expansion of that market.
A second reason for the publication of business newspapers was that publishing
them was a profitable business in itself.24 Every one of these newspapers about
which there exists relevant information was run as a money-making enterprise. The
prijs courantiers contended for the job and paid to the brokers' guild that ran the
exchange both an initiation fee and an annual renewel fee for their license to
operate. They came to value these licenses more highly over time, to bid their price
up fiercely, and to defend them stoutly. They had cause. The broker's guild not only
dispensed licenses but also organized the screening of the newspapers to guarantee
the accuracy and impartiality of their contents. They withdrew licenses when
malfeasance was detected.> In later times and other places, competitive pressures
supplemented and supplanted oversight by authorities to insure honesty and
consistency in reporting, the invisible hand of the market replacing the visible hand
of government. The publisher contracted with and paid a licensed printer for doing
his job. Governments monitored and taxed these enterprises, both the newspapers
themselves and the printers thereof.> But governments also considered business
newspapers important enough to promote their publication by granting them
various incentives like concessionary postal privileges. The English crown valued
one business newspaper so highly that, uniquely, it made the newspaper's printer
free of all control by the city and the Stationers' Company.
Most importantly for publishers, there were profits to be made in selling
newspapers. They sold them to patrons near and far, hiring young people (called in
23 Guicciardini, Descrittione di m. Lodovico Cuicclardini, patritio jiorentino, di tutti i paesi bassi,
altrimenti detti Germania Inferiore (Antwerp, 1567), 117. Compare Raymond Van Uytven, "Antwerpen:
Steuerungszentrum des europaischen Handels und Metropole die Niederlande im 16. Jahrhundert," in
Herrschaft und Verfassungsstrukturen im Nordwesten des Reiches: Beitriige zum Zeitalter Karls V.-Franz
Petri zum Gediichtnis (1903-1993), Bernhard Sicken, ed., Stadteforschungs, Reihe A, Darstellungen,
Vol. 35 (Cologne and Vienna, 1994), I-IS.
24 "The Wall Street Journal does not provide this information [about prices] out of altruism or
because it recognizes how important it is for the economy. Rather, it is led to provide this information
by the very price system whose functioning it facilitates. It has found that it can achieve a larger and
more profitable circulation by publishing these prices." Milton Friedman and Rose [D.] Friedman, Free
to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York, 1980), 16. Compare Michael Harris, London Newspapers
in the Age of Walpole: A Study in the Origins of the Modem English Press (Rutherford, N.J., 1987), 176,
where he notes that such "tabular material" began to be included in general purpose newspapers
beginning in the 1720s because it was "a useful selling point." The front-page headline story in The
London Evening-Post, March 30, 1762, called attention to its newly inclusive publication of business
news.
25 Publishers recognized the necessity of apologizing for mistaken entries and correcting them.
McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, passim. One Hamburg
publisher lost his license because of questionable practices. Ibid., 225-26. In general, I think that the
conclusions reached about the accuracy and reliability of the reporting in later business newspapers
also apply earlier. Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray, and Miriam Hussey, Wholesale Prices in
Philadelphia, 1784-1861,2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1936-1937), 1: 336, reported that "the editors of the
Philadelphia newspapers carefully collected the prices which they published and changed their listed
prices promptly" in response to changes in the marketplace.
26 Just like exchange brokers, printers were also licensed by the city and organized into a guild or
company. For this subject and for the restrictions imposed on all publishing, including newspapers, see
McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, passim. Compare
Carolyn Nelson and Matthew Seccombe, "The Creation of the Periodical Press, 1620-1695," in The
Cambridge History of the Book in Britain" Vol. 4, 1557-1695, John Barnard, D[onald] F. McKenzie, and
Maureen Bell, eds. (Cambridge, 2002), 535.
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London "Mercuries"-many of whom were women [See Figure 3]) to deliver them
to clients close by, using the mail to speed them to subscribers in the country and
abroad.s? Some local customers bought several copies and sent them to their own
business contacts, taking advantage of promotive postal rates. To foster this
behavior, publishers offered multiple copies to a single purchaser at a reduced price
per copy. American merchants and planters insisted that their metropolitan
correspondents subscribe in their behalf and forward them regularly and frequently.
The publishing of business newspapers was a business like the publication of any
other newspaper.
A third reason for the adoption and success of business newspapers was that
they increased the efficiency of an economy by enabling individual businesses to
work more productively. They delivered important news to contacts near and far in
ways that were more regular, more thorough, more comprehensive, more reliable,
and more predictable than earlier modes, thereby reducing the risks of carrying on
business. They eased the workload within firms that had many correspondents in far
away places, cutting the cost of doing business. (Perhaps the clerks in the employ
of the Van der Molen noticed that after August 1540 they had extra time to do
other tasks for their employer, perhaps to write more letters to new clients. One or
more may have lost his job, rendered dispensable by new technology.) Business
newspapers served as independent, impartial, and redundant sources of information about conditions in the market, verifying what a correspondent had written,
reassuring clients, and confirming customers. They changed the workday of business
owners who could choose to attend the exchange less frequently. It became possible
to work out of a coffee house or the front office of a company that subscribed to
business newspapers."
All these advantages and others acted to cut a firm's transaction costs and
allowed merchants to engage customers more closely, to challenge competitors
more successfully.t? By lowering the costs of doing business in any given economy,
business newspapers helped increase productivity and profitability and create more
business for that economy. Awarding the market that had the best communications
27 For women as Mercuries, see Margaret [R.] Hunt, "Hawkers, Bawlers, and Mercuries: Women
and the London Press in the Early Enlightenment," in Women and the Enlightenment, Hunt et al., eds.
(New York, 1984), 41-68; Marcellus Laroon, The Criers and Hawkers of London: Engraving and
Drawings, Sean Shesgreen, ed. (Aldershot, 1990), 186; [J.] Michael Treadwell, "Anne Dodd (London:
1711-1739)," in The British Literary Book Trade, 1700-1820, James K. Bracken and Joel Silver, eds.,
Dictionary of Literary Biography, vo!. 154 (Detroit, 1995), 103-105; and Helen Berry, "An Early Coffee
House Periodical and Its Readers: The Athenian Mercury, 1691-1697," London Journal: A Review of
Metropolitan Society Past and Present 25, no. 1 (2000): 14-33.
28 "The Royal Exchange ... has no longer the prominence as a place for the meeting of merchants
it once had ... the presence of the commercial man on 'Change is not so imperative." John Weale, ed.,
A New Survey of London: Fully Developing Its Antiquity, History and Architecture . . . , 2 vols. (London,
1853), 1: 377. As a London commentator observed in 1727: "Coffee-Houses were first founded for the
Entertainment of Gentlemen and Merchants; they were the Theatres of News and Politicks." A
Dissertation upon Drunkenness. Shewing to What an Intolerable Pitch that Vice is Arriv'd at in this
Kingdom . . . (London, 1727),4-5. For the mode of operation of a London business firm, see Jacob M.
Price, "Directions for the Conduct of a Merchant's Counting House, 1766," Business History 28 (July
1986): 134-50.
29 See McCusker, "Information and Transaction Costs in Early Modern Europe." Compare
Jonathan Barron Baskin, "The Development of Corporate Financial Markets in Britain and the United
States, 1600-1914: Overcoming Asymmetric Information," Business History Review 62 (Summer 1988):
199-237.
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FIGURE 3: "London's Gazette Here." Ca. 1687-1688. Drawn by Marcellus Laroon the Elder (1653-1702) and
engraved by Pierce Tempest (1653-1717). Reproduced from the copy in the Pepys Library, Magdalene
College, Cambridge University, with the kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College.
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a competitive advantage accorded that market a potential for preeminence."
Business newspapers managed to reinforce the supremacy of pivotal business
places, thereby helping to create and to bolster the likes of an Antwerp, an
Amsterdam, a London-and, so the story goes, temporarily a Philadelphia, and,
ultimately, a New York City.
Indeed one can argue that, in tandem with the profound political and cultural
changes that had their beginning in the mid-fifteenth century and that created the
early modern world, there was an equally profound set of economic changes that
many have called the "commercial revolution." Simply sketched, this revolution
ended the domination of the European economy by Mediterranean merchants who,
in the late Middle Ages, made their home in the Italian city states. This
"commercial revolution" can be defined as the shift in the center of western
commerce and finance out of Mediterranean Europe and into North Atlantic
Europe.
AT FIRST THE NEW LOCUS OF POWER WAS ANTWERP, lasting from the opening of the
sixteenth century until the 1570s.31 Amsterdam ruled for roughly the next century,
the golden age of the Netherlands. Then it was London's tum.v The core of
western-and, increasingly, worldwide-trade and finance was London from the
1690s to World War I. "London has become, what Amsterdam formerly was, the
grand emporium of the commercial world-universi orbis terrarum emporium."33
New York City took over at that point, and it still holds sway into our own
day-though, plotting on the global trajectory of the succession thus far, we might
expect Tokyo, or Hong Kong, or, perhaps, Shanghai to inherit the mantle of Venice
sometime soon in this new millennium.>
30 "The growth of the market to a size sufficiently large to allow the customary contracted terms of
sale for a product of a known quality to account for a large number of transactions was extremely
important. It allowed a freely obtained market price to be determined by the forces of supply and
demand alone. Beginning in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, these prices were periodically
gathered and printed. The Amsterdam 'price current' was widely circulated and provided information
about the terms at which exchanges could be made. These price currents have been found in the
archives of every important European city. They provided a merchant with a starting point to negotiate
trades in local areas in the Low Countries and outside. No merchant would sell locally for less than he
could obtain in Amsterdam, making allowance for the costs ofmoving his goods there." Douglass C. North
and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World:A New Economic History (Cambridge, 1973),
136-37 (emphasis added).
31 For the rise and decline of commercial Antwerp, see Herman van der Wee's magisterial The
Growth of the Antwelp Market and the European Economy (Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries), 3 vols. (The
Hague, 1963).
32 For these three cities and their interconnectedness during this immensely important period, see
the several stellar essays in Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp,
Amsterdam, and London, Patrick [K.] O'Brien et al., eds. (Cambridge, 2001).
33 J[ohn] R. McCulloch, "Navigation Acts," in Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes
of the Wealth of Nations, McCulloch, ed., 4th edn. rev. (London, 1850), 537 (emphasis as in the
original). Compare Philip L. Cottrell, "London as a Centre of Communication: From the Printing Press
to the Travelling Post Office," in Kommunikationsrevoluton: Die neuen Medien des 16. und 19.
lahrhunderts, Michael North, ed., Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Studien, vo!. 3 (Cologne, 1995),
157-78.
34 Time International, September 27, 2004, Asia edition, led with a cover story on "Shanghai: The
New World Capital," celebrating it as "the most happening city on earth," calling special attention to
"Pudong ... the city's new financial district."
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What is clear is that developments in business communications accompanied
and facilitated each of these shifts from city to city. During the early modern era,
this meant an articulation of the business press. The Amsterdam commodity price
current ruled the markets of Europe in the seventeenth century, setting the
standard for everyone else. The Amsterdamers had taken their example from
Antwerp and had become the "Great Staple of News," in the words of English
diplomat and writer lames Howell, a contemporary observer of many of these
developments.v The first evidence we have of an Amsterdam commodity price
current is a rather simple, two-page newspaper from 1585, but within a very few
years it had grown in form and size to become the model that all others mimicked.
In the seventeenth century, the Amsterdam commodity price current was published
weekly in at least four different languages-English, French, and Italian as well as
Dutch-and it circulated widely within the orbit of expanding Europe." The Amsterdam prijs courantiers published their newspaper in English not out of deference to their
linguistically challenged colleagues across the North Sea but because they recognized
and sought to reinforce the dominant position of the Amsterdam market in the
business world of the seventeenth century. Londoners subscribed to the newspaper in
whatever form they could get it for the same reason: Amsterdam set the market for
Europe. During its golden age, the price at Amsterdam was the benchmark price, the
market maker. One might buy or sell for more or less, but the point of reference was
the price at Amsterdam, for commodities, for bills of exchange, for insurance, for
money. And the prices for all of them except the last were reported weekly in the Cours
van Koopmanschappen tot Amsterdam."
The same political and cultural factors at work late in the sixteenth century that had
caused Antwerp's decline continued to be in play over the next hundred years so that,
by the end of the seventeenth century, the curtain was rising on the next act of the
commercial revolution. The plot was much the same but the actors different-or at
least the setting was different. Depending on one's perspective, either the Dutch
conquered England in 1688or the English staged a Glorious Revolution that year, with
considerable Dutch help. In any event, the net result was a new king of England, a
Dutchman of Anglo-Dutch ancestry, William of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, King
35 Letter from James Howell, at Amsterdam, to his brother Thomas, later bishop of Bristol, April
1, 1617, in Howell, Epistolce Ho-Eliarue: Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren; Divided into Six Sections,
Partly Historicall, Political!, Philosophical!, Upon Emergent Occasions (London, 1645), 10.
36 The largest single survivingcache of Amsterdam commodity price currents can be found in Jakarta,
Indonesia, for just that reason. The Dutch East India Company dispatched multiple copies on board each
of its ships; its Far Eastern headquarters in Batavia (modem Jakarta) preserved them. They are listed in
J[acobus] A. van der Chijs, Inventaris van's Lands Archief te Batavia (1602-1816): Zamengesteld en
Uitgegeven op Last van de Nederlandsch-Indische Regering (Jakarta, 1882), 33-34. The Landsarchief is now
part of the modem Arsip Nasional, Jakarta. There also appear to be some copies among the Dutch Records,
1657-1825, MSS. 137,745,1134, Tamil Nadu Archives, Chennai (formerly Madras), India. See A. Galletti,
A. J. van der Burg, and P. Groot, eds. and trans., The Dutch in Malabar, beinga TranslationofSelectionsNos.
1 and 2, with Introduction and Notes, Selections from the Records of the Madras Government, Dutch
Records, no. 13 (Madras, 1911),35, n. 3. I have yet to examine this collection.
37 For the Amsterdam commodity price current, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of
Commercial and Financial Journalism, 43-66. Compare Cle Lesger, Handel in Amsterdam ten tijde van
de Opstand: Kooplieden, commerciele expansie en verandering in de ruimtelijke economie van de
Nederlanden, ca. 1550-ca. 1630, Amsterdamse Historische Reeks, Grote Serie, vo!. 27 (HiIversum,
2001), chap. 6, "Amsterdam als centrum van informatie voorziening." Compare Lesger, "De mythe van
de Hollandse wereldstapelmarkt in de zeventiende eeuw," NEHA-Jaarboek voor Economische, Bedrijfsen Techniekgeschiedenis 62 (1999): 6-25.
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William IIp8 In his train came many Dutch merchants and Dutch financiers who
served as advisers to his government and who extracted from the shifting political scene
multiple business opportunities. A great deal changed in English commerce and
finance after 1689, and one of those changes, consequence and cause, was a massively
invigorated English business press.
London had had a commodity price current from as early as the first decade of
the seventeenth century.>? By the 1640s, it looked very much like a reduced version
of the Amsterdam commodity price current upon which it was modeled.v All
surviving copies from its first sixty years are in French. There was also a daily bills
of entry published from 1619, if not before. By the 1670s, there were two commodity
price currents being published weekly, by the 1690s, there were three, and, soon
after, a fourth. That same decade witnessed the founding in London of two new and
different business newspapers-both of which continue to be published today, a
marine list and an exchange rate and stock exchange current. In 1716, a London
merchant could subscribe to as many as seven different weekly or daily business
newspapers, all of them delivered to his door, at an annual cost of £6.00 sterling,
which, when adjusted for nearly three centuries of inflation, is the equivalent in
today's money of roughly £630 sterling or nearly $1,200 (€900).41 London had
become the center of the commerce and finance of the Western world and it
possessed the commercial and financial press to secure and strengthen its position.
The newspapers to which our London merchant subscribed were essentially four
in kind (see Appendix on page 320).42 Two of them published prices on the London
exchange; the other two dealt with shipping and cargoes. The commodity price
current listed the market prices of goods sold. The exchange rate current tracked
the local price at which bills of exchange drawn against trading cities abroad could
be purchased. The bills of entry recorded the commodities entered into the London
Custom House as imported or exported. The marine list specified the arrival and
departure of vessels at the port of London. We will recognize that eventually
nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century newspapers came to include all of
this information in one section of a multisectioned general newspaper. Such a move
38 I am very much taken with this more expansive interpretation of the Glorious Revolution,
propounded most recently by Jonathan 1. Israel, "The Dutch Republic and the 'Glorious Revolution'
of 1688/89 in England," in 1688-The Seaborne Alliance and Diplomatic Revolution: Proceedings of an
International Symposium Held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 5-6 October 1988, Charles
H. Wilson and David Proctor, eds. (Greenwich, 1989),31-44.
39 John J. McCusker, "Commercial and Financial Journalism," in The Cambridge History ofthe Book
in Britain, Vo!' 5, 1695-1830, Michael Suarez and Michael Turner, eds. (Cambridge, forthcoming).
40 See the deposition to this effect by the publisher of the London commodity price current, John
Day, June 13, 1637, High Court of Admiralty, Instance and Prize Court Papers, Examinations and
Answers, 1637-1638, HCA 13/53, fols. 191v-192r,Public Record Office, The National Archives London
(hereafter, PROITNA). For Day and his newspaper, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of
Commercial and Financial Iournalism, 291-311; and McCusker, "The Business Press in England before
1775," The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 6th ser., 8 (September 1986): 314-50, as
revised and updated in McCusker, Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World (London, 1997),
155-62.
41 As of March 2005. For the basis of such admittedly crude comparisons across time, see John J.
McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money? A Historical Commodity Price Index for Use as a Deflator
of Money Values in the Economy of the United States, 2nd edn. rev. (Worcester, Mass., 2001).
42 An earlier version of this table appeared in McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial
and Financial Journalism. See also John J. McCusker, European Bills of Entry and Marine Lists: Early
Commercial Publications and the Origins of the Business Press (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 10-12.
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to consolidate was already underway in London by the end of the seventeenth
century, but the overlap was still minimal. Nevertheless, separate and different
newspapers with these distinctive characteristics continued to be published in
London and elsewhere in the world to the first half of the twentieth century, the
United States included.
Two of these London newspapers deserve special mention if only because,
founded in the 1690s, they are still both being published today in essentially the
same manner, with essentially the same content. Initially issued out of Edward
Lloyd's coffee house beginning sometime before January 1692, Lloyd's List is, after
the official London Gazette, the second oldest continually published newspaper of
any kind still produced in the world today. It is a marine list in that its primary
function, then as now, was to trace the arrival and departure of merchant ships."
The Course of the Exchange, started by John Castaing in March 1697, runs third in
the same race. Castaing's was basically an exchange rate current, but, reflecting
developments in the London market place in the explosive 1690s, he expanded its
coverage beyond just the rates of foreign exchange to include the selling prices of
company stock shares, bank shares, and government securities. It continues to be
published today as the Stock Exchange Daily Official Listr" Reacting to the increasingly
competitive nature of London's business press, in 1735 the editor of Lloyd's List,
Richard Baker, engaged in a bit of journalistic skullduggery. Baker began to print on
the reverse side of his single-sheet newspaper exchange rate tables and stock and
securities prices, thereby combining into one newspaper both his own marine list and
a twin of Castaing's expanded exchange rate and stock exchange current. Baker's
imitation of the Course of the Exchange was flatteringly blatant even down to
duplicating its use of different type faces to convey different kinds of information."
Great Britain's colonists were aware of and hungry for the news from London
markets and from the earliest days of settlement clamored for these newspapers.
Letters from merchants in the colonies-just as much British merchants as the
denizens of the city and the businessmen of the outports-entreated their London
correspondents to send them copies of all London business newspapers.w Colonial
43 For Lloyd's List, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial and Financial
Journalism, 323-27; McCusker, "The Business Press in England before 1775"; and McCusker, "The
Early History of 'Lloyd's List,'" Historical Research: The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
64 (October 1991): 427-31.
44 In October 2003, the London Stock Exchange launched an electronic version of the Daily Official
List, abbreviated SEDOL.
45 For John Castaing and his newspaper, see McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings of Commercial
and Financial Journalism, 311-22; and McCusker, "The Business Press in England before 1775." See
also S[idney] R. Cope, "The Stock Exchange Revisited: A New Look at the Market in Securities in
London in the Eighteenth Century," Economica, n.s., 45 (February 1978): 18.
46 See, for instance, Thomas Fitch, at Boston, to Thomas Crouch and Company, at London, March
15,1706/1707, Thomas Fitch Letterbook, 1703-1711, p. 182, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester,
Massachusetts; or James Logan, at Philadelphia, to John Askew, at London, May 28, 1713, James
Logan, Copies of Letters Sent, 1712-1715, 113, Logan Papers, 1664-1871, Collection no. 379,
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter, HSP). Concerning the availability of
English serials generally in the colonies, compare David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and
Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1986),
235-62; Carolyn Nelson, "American Readership of Early British Serials," in Serials and Their Readers,
1620-1914, Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds. (Winchester, 1993), 27-44; and Janice G.
Schimmelman, "Art in the Early English Magazine, 1731-1800: A Checklist of Articles on Drawing,
Painting and Sculpture, from the Gentleman's Magazine, London Magazine, and Universal Magazine,"
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publishers of general newspapers also subscribed to the London business press and
advertised the fact as a way of promoting their own publications. In 1705 and 1706,
the editor of The Boston News-Letter, John Campbell, noted that he regularly had
for sale copies of different London newspapers to which he subscribed and for
which he no longer had any use, having first plumbed them for his own publication.
The newspapers Campbell offered for sale included London bills of entry and
London commodity price currents."
It was the business news from London to which all attended because London
was the business center of the Old Empire.w In 1740, The Newcastle Journal
expressed what everyone knew to be the case: "London ... which Place governs the
Value of all Grain in England."49 In the same way that London set the benchmark
price "at home," so it did the same thing for the entirety of the empire and beyond.
The price at London set the market for colonially produced staple commodities.
Chesapeake tobacco planters and West Indian sugar planters made decisions based
on the London prices for their commodities. The rate for marine insurance at
London was the rate that most concerned colonial shippers, the arrival and
departure of ships and cargoes at London, colonial merchants. Certainly local
business news was also important, increasingly so over time, but that need was easily
satisfied in conversations carried on at the local merchants' exchange, frequently
housed in the coffee house.w London made the market that mattered most-and it
was London's commercial and financial newspapers that conveyed that market's
news.>! As London merchant Moses Franks declared in a letter to his New York
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, n.s., 108 (October 1998): 397-478. Indicating a
knowledge of the existence of and an awareness of the nature of business newspapers, the Charleston
Library Society made it clear from the beginning that it did not want any sent it by its London
bookseller: "you are not to send any News papers, Votes of Parliam[e]nt, Lloyds Lists or Bills of Entry."
Letter from Robert Brisbane, at Charleston, to James Rivington, at London, August 10, 1758, in James
Raven, London Booksellers and their American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the
Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811 (Columbia, S.c., 2002), 237.
47 See The Boston News-Letter, e.g., July 30, 1705, June 10, 1706. "To be Sold at the Post-Office in
Boston" by John Campbell, "London Gazettes, Flying-Posts, Post-Man, Post-Boy, Bills of Entry, Price
Courants, Observations, at Id. [Massachusetts currency) per Piece" (ibid., June 10, 1706). The earlier
advertisement had offered them "either in Setts by the year or single [sic]." Compare the discussion in
Ian K. Steele's The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community
(New York, 1986),213-28 and passim.
48 Cottrell, "London as a Centre of Communication"; D[erek] Keene, "The Financial District of the
City of London: Continuity and Change, 1300-1871," in Cities of Finance, Herman [A.] Diederiks and
David [A.) Reeder, eds., Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen,
Afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, vo!. 165 (Amsterdam, 1996),287-88.
49 The Newcastle Journal, July 19, 1740, 1, co!. 1.
50 Like the "Merchants' Exchange" established at Philadelphia in 1754, for which see McCusker,
"Philadelphia and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the United States." Compare Richard
D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York,
1989), 114-16. See also Brown, "Early American Origins of the Information Age," in A Nation
Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the
Present, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and James W. Cortada, eds. (Oxford, 2000), 39-53.
51 In 1721, Virginia tobacco planter Robert Carter compared the percentage return on Bank of
England stock as reported in "the prints" (quite possibly the Course of the Exchange) with what he knew
he could get investing his money locally. Letter from Carter, at Rappahannock, Virginia, to Micajah
Perry, at London, February 13, 1720/1721, in Letters of Robert Carter, 1720-1727: The Commercial
Interests of a Virginia Gentlemen, Louis B. Wright, ed. (San Marino, Calif., 1940),73.
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City associate, James Beekman, enclosing promised copies of the London commodity price currents: they are "the Government of our markets."52
Given that the London commodity price current governed London markets and
that London markets governed imperial markets, it is easily understood why no
business newspapers were published in the colonies before the American Revolutionary War. The colonists got their most significant market news from the London
business press. Colonial newspapers served other purposes.53
The New World was not bereft of printers or presses and newspaper publishing in
the British colonies had been an active, widespread enterprise for eighty years and
more by the time of the War for Independence.>' Published business newspapers, so
integral to the activities of the early modern Atlantic economy, were known and used
from Newfoundland to Barbados in the colonial period. There were none produced in
the colonies, it seems clear, because, by the eighteenth century, the publication of
business newspapers had come to be concentrated in each trading system's commercial
and financial center. British America was part of the British Empire and the
commercial and financial center of the Old Empire was London. From London came
almost all the business newspapers that the colonists needed to consult.
It was only with the diminution of the relative centrality of London for American
business men and business women-or, better put, it was only with the relative
increase for them in the importance of American business centers-that a demand
arose for the provision of financial and commercial news from those American
business centers. It was then that an American business press came into being to
satisfy this demand. Not surprisingly, those who set out to publish the first
American commercial and financial newspapers followed the European example.
The first American business newspaper was a commodity price current published at
Philadelphia starting in the middle of 1783.
There had been a lively colonial press in the eighteenth century but newspaper
editors, like John Campbell of Boston, published general purpose newspapers. Full
52 See Moses Franks's letters to James Beekman of New York, 1756-1760, in The Beekman
Mercantile Papers, 1746-1799, Philip L. White, ed., 3 vols. (New York, 1956),2: 583-95 (the quote is
from a letter dated April 1, 1760, ibid., 2: 595). See also White's comment, ibid., 1: v. Speaking of
fashions in consumption, Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh maintained: "Urban influences
undoubtedly did affect Chesapeake behavior, but these influences were English not local. London was
the metropolitan center." Carr and Walsh, "The Standard of Living in the Colonial Chesapeake,"
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 45 (January 1988): 139.
53 Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 110-31, fails to distinguish between the kinds of business news
published in London and colonial newspapers and the uses to which colonial business men and business
women put such news.
54 For the beginning of printing in the Western Hemisphere, see Jose Torfbio Medina, La imprenta en
Lima (1584-1824),4 vols. (Santiago, 1904-1907). For newspaper publishing in British America, see Charles
E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740 (New York, 1990); and
Clark, "Early American Journalism: News and Opinion in the Popular Press," in The Colonial Book in the
Atlantic World, Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 1 (Worcester,
Mass. and Cambridge, 2000), 347-66. Clark assiduously avoids any discussion either of commercial and
financial journals per se or of the business content of general newspapers. The same is true of W[illiam]
David Sloan and Julie Hedgepeth Williams, The Early American Press, 1690-1783, The History of American
Journalism, vo!. 1 (Westport, Conn., 1994); and Carol Sue Humphrey, The Press of the Young Republic,
1783-1833 (Westport, Conn., 1996). By contrast, see Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole; and
Karl Tilman Winkler, Handwerk und Markt: Druckerhandwerk, Vertriebswesen und Tagesschrifttum in
London, 1695-1750 (Stuttgart, 1993). For the publication of similar newspapers in the French colonies, see
M[arie]-A[ntoinette] Menier and G[abriel] Debien, "Journaux de Saint-Dominique," Revue d'Histoire des
Colonies 36, nos. 3-4 (1949): 424-75.
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of political news from Europe, with stories and datelines from neighboring colonies,
and nearly overrun by advertisements, colonial newspapers spared some space for
local business news but not much and without much consistency. In the port cities
of the Continental Colonies, just as in the "outports" in Great Britain (the word was
used at the time to mean all ports other than London), local general newspapers did
sometimes include information about shipping, prices, and other business matters, but
they did so only inconsistently and incompletely, almost as a filler, never as a matter of
first priority. Almost all devoted a few lines to the arrival and departure of ships at the
colony's port of entry, but when we can check these reports against official shipping
records, it is obvious that such coverage was not a priority because it was neither
thorough nor consistent. Eventually many colonial newspapers also printed a limited
array of local commodity prices. Again, however, an important news story or a few
more advertisements seem easily to have squeezed such sections off the page and out
of the newspaper until the next week. It was not that colonial business men and
business women were uninterested in local news. They simply had better, more
immediate sources for it. Local business news was readily available, all around them.
With the establishment of the new nation and the emergence of Philadelphia as
the political and economic hub of that new nation, an interest developed in
publishing business newspapers in the United States. Philadelphia's regional and
intercolonial significance had grown over the eighteenth century, so much so that by
the 1770s it had become the most important of the several port cities of British
America.v Its central geographical position helped, of course. Its expanding
transatlantic trade reinforced its position among the other colonies, both its near
neighbors to the north and east, New Jersey and New York, and to the south,
Maryland and Virginia, and also farther away, in British North America and the
West Indies, British and otherwise. In 1776, one West Indian observer called
Philadelphia "the great mart of America."56 Boston's relative standing had declined
from its prior eminence. Baltimore and the other ports along Chesapeake Bay had
emerged after 1740 as extensions of Philadelphia, Baltimore most particularly as its
southern satellite and, later, fierce rival. Charleston, while very important for the
rice trade, was simply not as big a player as others in the "coastwise trade," the
phrase that described the extensive intercolonial network that linked everywhere
from Newfoundland to Barbados. New York City was coming along to challenge
55 The Philadelphia market had become the regional price maker and point of reference well before
the middle of the eighteenth century. See Thomas Ringgold's assertion-reflecting this awarenessthat his flour "is cheap according to Philadel[phi]a Merketts." Ringgold, at Chestertown, Maryland, to
Samuel Galloway, at West River, Maryland, April 25, 1760, in Galloway Family Correspondence, Ill,
no. 8427, Galloway-Maxcy-Markoe Family Papers, 1654-1888, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.e. (hereafter, LC). Compare the advertisement for the lease or sale of a distillery located
at Charlestown, Maryland, a selling point of which was that, because of "its convenient situation, near the
Head of Chesopeak [Bay], ... Rum distilled there, may be vended in said Bay, at a higher Price considerably
than at any Distillery in Philadelphia." Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), December 31, 1767,3, col. 3.
Thus Charles Carroll of Annapolis complained loudly to his son when the latter neglected sending him
copies of the Philadelphia newspapers quickly or regularly enough: "It was impossible ... to determine
trade strategy without the Philadelphia prices." Ronald Hoffman, "Economics, Politics and the Revolution
in Maryland" (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1969), 108. Compare the argument advanced in
McCusker, How Much Is That in Real Money?, 47-48, n. 18.
56 George Cuthbert, at Jamaica, to Lieutenant General John Dalling, Lieutenant Governor of
Jamaica, August 5,1776, CO 137/71, PRO/TNA. Cuthbert was later to become a member of the council
and provost marshall of Jamaica and also judge of the Court of Vice-Admiralty for the island.
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Philadelphia, a contest in which it would succeed some fifty years later, but it was
not there yet.>?
On June 13, 1783, John Macpherson published the first number of his
Philadelphia Price Current/" (See Figure 4). He described himself as a broker and
his endeavor as "the first price current that ever was published in the North
America." Macpherson's Philadelphia Price Current was a business newspaper in the
same tradition as those published in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London. However
familiar the European model, North Americans had never had anything like it
before from an American press." The better to reassure his potential clients and to
insure their custom, Macpherson patterned his enterprise on what all knew was the
57 John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789, 2nd edn.
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), 189-208 and passim. Compare Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of
Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1986). See also James Weston Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 1780-1860
(Harrisburg, Penn., 1947).
58 For the full story of Macpherson and his newspaper, see McCusker, "Philadelphia and the Origins
of the Information Revolution in the United States."
59 The consul from the Austrian Netherlands, Frederick Eugene Francois, Baron de BeelenBertholff said the same thing: "[les] prix courant des marchandises a Philadelphie ... sont les premieres
qui ont ete publiees." Enclosure "B" in Baron de Beelen, at Philadelphia, to the Ministere
Plenipotentiaire, Barbiano de Belgioioso, at Brussels, November 1, 1783, Archives de la Secretairerie
d'Etat et de Guerre, SEG no. 2163, Algemeen Rijksarchief/Archives Generales du Royaume, Brussels,
Belgium. For this collection of documents, see Jjosephjl.efevre, "La Secretairerie d'Etat et de guerre
et ses archives," Archives, Bibliotheques et Musees de Belgique 31, no. 2, (1960): 133-48. Some of
Beelen's letters and reports have been printed in Die Berichte des ersten Agenten Osterreichs in den
Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, Baron de Beelen-Bertholff an Die Regierung der Osterreichischen
Niederlande in Brussel, 1784-1789, Hanns Schlitter, ed., Fontes Rerum Austriacarum/CEsterreichische
Geschichts-Quellen, Zwiete Abteilung: Diplomataria et Acta, vol. 45, part 2 (Vienna, 1891). Compare
J[ohn] Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884,3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1884), 3: 1958, n. 1: "Through palpable oversight, Hudson's 'Journalism in the United States'
makes the following erroneous statement: 'The Boston Prices Current and Marine Intelligencer,
Commercial and Mercantile, the publication of which was begun on the 5th of September, 1795, was the
first regular and legitimate commercial paper issued in this country.''' Scharf and Westcott claimed the
honor for Macpherson but relegated their rebuttal to a footnote and gave the barest of details. As a
consequence almost no one has paid any attention to their allegation. Their reference was to Frederic
Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 (New York, 1873), 335. Challenges
contradicting Baron de Beelen, Scharf, and Westcott's claims for the primacy of the Philadelphia
commodity price current prove upon investigation to be unfounded. See David P. Forsyth, The Business
Press in America, 1750-1865 (Philadelphia, 1964),20-23. None of the three things he mentioned qualify
as newspapers, each being simply a printed broadside or a privately issued advertising circular. See, for
instance, the June 27, 1775 entry by Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken for printing done for the
Philadelphia mercantile firm of Francis Somerville and George Noble. Aitken recorded the printing of
"2004° [i.e., quarto] Advertis[emen]ts" and "400 Price Curr[en]t[s]" (not 4000) in the very same way that
he had earlier sold other stationery items to Somerville and Noble. This was a one-time occurrence. Aitken
was not printing and Somerville and Noble were not publishing a newspaper. Robert Aitken Waste Book,
1771-1802,pp. 252, 264 (quotations), 268, 275, 306, Robert Aitken Papers, 1771-1802,Library Company of
Philadelphia Collection, HSP. Somerville and Noble's list of prices may have resembled the broadside that
was "Printed for Crouch & Gray, New England Factors" of Charleston and titled the "South-Carolina
Price-Current ... " It was completely printed except for the day, month, and year, which were entered by
hand in pen and ink. All three of the survivingcopies are dated July 30,1774. See Broadsides, vol. 172, no.
3, Division of Rare Books and Special Collections, LC; in Map Drawer 2/9, John Carter Brown Library,
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; and Broadside 1774 .S69, Special Collections, Tracy W.
McGregor Library, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. There are numerous
similar broadside printings of lists of prices and terms and conditions for trade prepared by a variety of
businesses for their customers to be found in these same and other libraries and archives. Especially rich
collections of them are in the John Codman III Papers, Codman Family Manuscripts Collection, Societyfor
the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Boston, Massachusetts; and in the Price Current Bulletins,
1800-1903, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
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FIGURE 4: The Philadelphia Price Current, December 16, 1783 (recto and verso). Reproduced with kind
permission of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.
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John J. McCusker
case in Europe. He duplicated those publications in almost every aspect of his own
endeavor, most especially in the collection of the prices and in their presentation.
The Philadelphia Price Current continued to appear until the end of 1785,
attracting considerable attention from contemporaries-if not from historians/" Other
publishers quickly took up Macpherson's example." Competition was keen and the
times precarious. 62 The most successful of the initial group, Mathew Carey's Complete
Counting House Companion, which he started up in 1785 and which closely duplicated
Macpherson's paper, passed out of Carey's hands in 1788and out of existence near the
end of 1790.63 No more fortunate was Vincent Pelosi whose newspaper, Pelosi's Marine
List and Price Current, begun in 1791, folded in less than a year despite his novel
attempt to pattern it on Lloyd's List of London. The longest-lived of this first group, The
Pennsylvania Mercury and Philadelphia Price-Current, expired in 1792 after eight years.
What Macpherson in Philadelphia had started had its grandest claim to fame in the
long-running Commercial List and Maritime Register, which began in 1827 and ceased
publication only in the Great Depression of the twentieth century.v'
The subsequently diminished political importance of Philadelphia, with the eventual settling of the national capital at Washington, D.e., and the increasing economic
competition offered Philadelphia by Boston, Baltimore, and, especially, eventually,
New York City, encouraged the publication of similar newspapers in those cities within
a few years of Macpherson's inaugural venture. Before the 1840s, the new United
States found itself with several competing seacoast centers of business and many
competing business newspapers. When New York finally triumphed as the commercial
and financial capital of the country, it became the locus of the business press, too. By
the end of World War I, New York had replaced London as the center of world trade
and finance and the center of business communications as well.65
60 Even most students of early newspapers seem not to know about the existence of The Philadelphia
Price Current. See, for instance, United States, Works Progress Administration, Historical Records
Survey, Checklist of Philadelphia Newspapers Available in Philadelphia: Including Files Held by the
Principal Libraries, and by Newspaper Publishers or Their Representatives, 2nd edn. rev. (Philadelphia,
1937); and Ruth Salisbury, Pennsylvania Newspapers: A Bibliography and Union List, Glenora E. Rossell,
ed., 2nd edn. (Pittsburgh, 1978). These omissions are hardly culpable, however, given that so few copies
of the newspaper have survived. It seems the peculiar fate of business newspapers that, despite being
published in reasonable press runs, they appear to have been less likely to have been preserved than
the more general purpose newspapers. This is a constant theme in McCusker and Gravesteijn,
Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, passim. As one example, while we know that the
publishers of the Boston Price-Current; and Marine-Intelligencer printed "nearly 500 at an impression"
(February 29, 1796),4, col. 3, as few as three or four copies of that issue still survive and of other issues
none at all. Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820,2 vols.
(Worcester, Mass., 1947), 1: 339-40, obviously constitutes the exception that proves my rule.
61 Compare Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 128-31.
62 For a recent summary of the scholarship on the state of the economy during this period, see John
J. McCusker, "Estimating Early American Gross Domestic Product," Historical Methods: A Journal of
Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 33 (Summer 2000): 155-62.
63 For Carey, see William Clarkin, Mathew Carey: A Bibliography of His Publications, 1785-1824
(New York, 1984); and James N. Green, Mathew Carey: Publisher and Patriot (Philadelphia, 1985). For
his newspapers, see Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 2: 897, 930-31.
64 The title of the Commercial List and Maritime Register changed several times. For its history, see
Winifred Gregory Gerould, ed., American Newspapers, 1821-1936: A Union List of Files Available in the
United States and Canada (New York, 1937), 611, 616.
65 The story of that transition is begun in Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port
(1815-1890) (New York, 1939); and continued in Jean Heffer, Le port de New York et le commerce
exterieur americain, 1860-1900, Publications de la Sorbonne, Serie Internationale, vol. 25 (Paris, 1986).
For the last chapter in the story of New York City's ascendancy-but without any mention of the
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In 1810 or so, a Philadelphia merchant could subscribe to as many as five
different locally published weekly or semiweekly business newspapers, all of them
delivered to his door, at an annual cost of $15.00, which, when adjusted for some
two centuries of inflation, is roughly equivalent to $230 in today's dollars.v" In
addition, he or she could also subscribe to perhaps a dozen different English weekly
or daily business newspapers, all of them delivered through the mail and after some
considerable delay, at an annual cost of some £21 sterling, the equivalent today to
roughly £910 sterling or about $1,720-postage not included.s? While the North
American newspapers sometimes repeated the news from London, to be fully
cognizant of all the news that mattered most, American businessmen and businesswomen still needed access to both at a total cost in modern terms of well over
$2,000. Such innovations did not come cheaply/"
WHAT THIS ALL MEANT IS THAT THE BUSINESS CENTERS of the United States had not yet
replaced London on the commercial map.s? The likes of Philadelphia had only just
started to assume some of the importance in the conduct of American affairs that
London had claimed exclusively before the United States attained political
independence. The center of trade and finance in the Western world had not yet
shifted from London to New York City; that would not happen for another century.
Nevertheless, change had begun. Commercial and financial institutions that had
importance of business communications-see Mira Wilkins, "Cosmopolitan Finance in the 1920s: New
York's Emergence as an International Financial Centre," in The State, the Financial System and
Economic Modernization, Richard [E.] Sylla, Richard [H.] Tilly, and Gabriel Tortella [Casares], eds.,
(Cambridge, 1999), 271-91. Valuable insights into the early stages of this transformation can be found
in Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities,
1790-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973).
66 These newspapers included the Boston Price-Current; and Marine-Intelligencer, the New York
Prices-Current, Hope's Philadelphia Price-Current, Baltimore Weekly Price Current, and the Telgraphe et
le Commercial Advertiser and New-Orleans Price Current. Subscriptions to the second and third of these
five newspapers cost $3.00 per year; I presume that the other three, the rates of which are not known,
cost the same. Forsyth, Business Press in America, 30, 36, 38.
67 Mathew Carey, as the editor of the new Pennsylvania Evening Herald, and American Monitor
(Philadelphia), February 22,1785,2, col. 1, noted that "the yearly subscription" to the London commodity
price current cost "one guinea, and the postage as much more," thus £2.10 total. By 1797,newspapers were
costing the Philadelphia "Merchants' Exchange" "upwards of £500" ($1,330) annually, the equivalent today
of more than $20,000. Claypoole'sAmerican Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), June 24, 1797,2, col. 4.
68 In an advertisement proposing the reestablishment of the old London Coffee House, Eleazer
Oswald promised as an inducement that "All the various newspapers, magazines, &c. both foreign and
domestic, will be regularly filed in the public room" The Independent Gazetteer; or, The Chronicle of
Freedom (Philadelphia), February 25, 1783, 3, col. 2. In 1790, Edward Moyston, the proprietor of the
City Tavern, the site of "The Merchants Coffee-House and Place of Exchange," pledged a regular,
punctual supply of "the European Publications" of interest to his clientele. The Pennsylvania Packet
(Philadelphia), November 29, 1790. Four years later, he called attention to the availability of "Bound
Books of Public Papers for some years back." The Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser,
January 4, 1794. The publishers of The Boston Price-Current; and Marine Intelligencer, John and Joseph
N. Russell, wanted their readers to know that they "subscribed for all the valuable commercial papers,
printed in Europe ... which will be sent to us by the spring vessels, and thenceforward regularly,"
February 29, 1796,4, col. 3. Well into the nineteenth century, the operators of similar establishments
continued to advertise the availability of such newspapers as a way to draw customers. See Charles G.
Steffen, "Newspapers for Free: The Economies of Newspaper Circulation in the Early Republic,"
Journal of the Early Republic 23 (Fall 2003): 413-17. Compare n. 18, above.
69 Contrast Brown, Knowledge Is Power, 111.
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been centered in London for the colonists of the First British Empire were now
being organized in the United States. A central bank, like the Bank of England, a
stock exchange, like the London Stock Exchange, insurance companies, like those
of London: all of these forms of enterprise were replicated in the United States in
the years after 1783.70 To serve them and the expanding agriculture, commerce, and
industry of the new country, a business press was a necessity. Its time had come.
Just as had been the case for Antwerp and the other centers of European
commercial and financial publishing after the 1540s, so for Philadelphia and the other
business centers of the United States after 1783, business newspapers empowered the
struggling economy of the young United States in several ways. Organized and
supported by the local business community, published as money-making enterprises
themselves, they contributed to the efficiency of the markets where they were based.
They provided business people in their own cities with news more consistently, reliably,
and conveniently than alternative modes of news-gathering. They disseminated news
about their own markets widely to others located elsewhere and thereby encouraged
them to do business with the merchant community that produced them. Business
newspapers helped to perfect the market. As had been the case earlier with London,
the rise of ports such as Philadelphia and, later, New York, occurred, in part, because
of the articulation of the business press based there. Dependent on the "Freshest
Advices," business gloried in better communications. Better communications-if not
yet faster and cheaper-changed much in the world of business during the early
modern era, diminishing distance and time, while not yet denying them.
In advancing to the next stage in the transformation of communications during the
1780s, the United States reached a point at which Europe had arrived two and a half
centuries before. The new nation's center of business played its part in bettering the
quality of business news, first mimicking, then usurping the role played by the more
senior actors. News may have been better in the early modern world, but it did not
move much faster and it certainly was not cheaper than had been the case before the
rise of the business press. Faster news transmission came only after the next step, with
the telegraph and the radio. Prior to the telegraph, messages traveled only as fast as the
horse and rider, the ship at sea-and, only much later, the steamboat and the railway
locomotive." By telegraph news arrived instantaneously, if expensively." Cheaper
70 In this regard, see most particularly Peter L. Rousseau and Richard [E.] Sylla, "Emerging
Financial Markets and Early U.S. Growth," Explorations in Economic History 42 (January 2005), 1-26.
See also Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700-1815 (Columbus,
Ohio, 1994); and Robert E. Wright, The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in
American Financial Markets, 1780-1850 (Cambridge, 2002).
71 "Before the telegraph, information travelled no faster than a horse or sailing ship; afterwards it
moved at the speed of light." David E. Nye, "Shaping Communication Networks: Telegraph,
Telephone, Computer," Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences 64 (Fall 1997):
1073. Kenneth D. Garbade and William L. Silber, "Technology, Communication and the Performance
of Financial Markets, 1840-1975," Journal of Finance 33 (June 1978): 819-32, demonstrate empirically
the rapid narrowing of inter-market price differentials between national and international financial
markets effected by the telegraph. Compare Richard B. Du Boff, "Business Demand and the
Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844-1860," Business History Review 54 (Winter
1980): 459-79; Yrjo Kaukiainen, "Shrinking the World: Improvements in the Speed of Information
Transmission, c. 1820-1870," European Review of Economic History 5 (April 2001): 1-28.
72 Celebrating the advent of the telegraph, The North American (Philadelphia), January 15, 1846,2,
col. 1, proclaimed: "The markets will no longer be dependent upon snail paced mails." Presciently, the
editorial writer also worried that the telegraph "will be expensive to a degree little anticipated." In the
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news required the computer, the Internet, and the World Wide Web, when the
marginal cost of the next unit of information approaches zero, finally tolling the death
of distance. Better, faster, cheaper-change in the communication of business news
happened in that order over the last five centuries."
WITH DISTANCE NO LONGER A FACTOR, the world of the twenty-first century can with
some profit contemplate the implications of the information revolution the origins of
which we find revealed in the sixteenth-century records of a small Antwerp firm.
Almost five hundred years ago, the businessmen of that city agreed to expand the scope
of their affairs by publishing information they had previously kept quiet. Their decision
set in motion the series of world-altering changes that have been recounted above. In
sum, half a millennium later, what was once undependable, often too late to be useful,
and cost a great deal is now available securely, quickly, and nearly without cost. Yet the
impact of better, faster, and cheaper information on human society has yet to be
completely grasped. The globalization and rationalization of the international economy
may be only the most immediate consequence. It is still not clear, for instance, whether
the most recent progress in the electronic stage of the demise of time and the death of
distance will increase or decrease the impulse to economic centralization and concentration. For the scholarly community, it may mean the end of libraries as we have
known them. Already, for some who are reading this article, it may only be available
online. Certainly for the average reader, my words are available better, faster, and
cheaper than in the past-an observation that may constitute the ultimate act of
self-referencing.?'
early 1850s, messages between Philadelphia and Chicago that the post carried for 3 cents the telegraph
charged $1.55 to send (per ten words). Six decades later a ten-word telegram still cost 50 cents. United
States, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States,
Colonial Times to 1970, United States. Congress. 93rd Congress, 1st Session. House Document, no.
93-78, 3rd edn., 2 vols. (Washington, D.e., 1975), 2: 790, 807. Compare [United States, Bureau of
Labor], Investigation of Western Union and Postal Telegraph-Cable Companies: Letter from the Secretary
of the Department of Commerce and Labor, Transmitting, Pursuant to a Senate Resolution of May 28,
1908, a Partial Report Showing the Results of an Investigation Made by the Bureau of Labor into the
Western Union and Postal Telegraph-Cable Companies [United States. Congress. 60th Congress, 2nd
Session. Senate Documents, Vol. 14, No. 725. Serial Set No. 5401] (Washington, D.e., 1909), 23-25.
The owners of telegraph companies believed that the businesses that used their services were more
interested in speed than in lower costs. Richard B. Du Boff, "Business Demand and the Development
of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844-1860," Business History Review 54 (Winter 1980): 462, 466.
73 John J. McCusker, "Better? Faster? Cheaper?-The Transmission of Information and the Costs
of Doing Business in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (unpublished paper presented at the Harvard
Law School, Legal History Colloquium, Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 4, 2002); and McCusker,
"Information and Transaction Costs in Early Modern Europe."
74 Compare Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy
(Princeton, NJ., 2002), 113: "The significance of the information revolution is not that we can read on
a screen things that we previously read in the newspaper or looked up in the library, but that marginal
costs to codified knowledge of every kind have declined dramatically."
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Appendix
Catalogue and Description of the Types of
Early Commercial and Financial Newspapers Published in
Europe Prior to the End of the Eighteenth Century
CATALOGUE
A. Publications that reported on the local economy ("currents")
1. Commodity price currents
(a) General price currents
(b) Specialized price currents
2. Foreign exchange rate currents
3. Money currents
4. Stock exchange currents
B. Publications that reported on overseas trade and shipping
1. Bills of entry
(a) General bills
(b) Specialized ("small") bills
2. Marine Lists
C. Publications that combined two or more of the elements from categories A and B
1. Exchange rate current/stock exchange current
2. Exchange rate current/marine list
3. Exchange rate current/stock exchange current/marine list
DESCRIPTION
A. Local Market Publications or "Currents"
1. Commodity Price Currents
Published the local currency prices of goods offered for sale in a specific
market. The general commodity price currents included the prices of a broad
range of goods; the specialized price currents were limited to particular
kinds of commodities, e.g., cloth, grain, sugar, imported colonial goods, etc.
The general commodity price current also usually listed a few exchange rates
and sometimes insurance rates and money rates.
2. Foreign Exchange Rate Currents
Published the going rates on the local exchange or bourse for bills of
exchange against a list of cities in other countries. Bills of exchange are
negotiable instruments for the transfer of funds, usually to another country.
They were similar to modern bank checks but were drawn on funds held by
individuals or businesses rather than on funds held by banks.
3. Money Currents
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2005
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Published the value in the local money of account of a variety of foreign and
domestic coins and, sometimes, gold and silver bullion. As this implies, even
domestically minted coins sometimes fluctuated in value against the local
money of account.
4. Stock Exchange Currents
Published the prices at which shares of stock, bonds, and government
securities were traded on the local market.
B. Overseas Trade and Shipping Publications
1. Bills of Entry
Published lists of commodities that had been entered into the local
customhouse books as being off-loaded and imported or as being loaded on
board for export.
2. Marine Lists
Published lists of ships entering into or clearing from various ports,
particularly the port at which the list was published but sometimes other
domestic and foreign ports also.
C. Combined Publications
As economies grew more complex and business publishing became more
sophisticated and competitive, some publishers produced newspapers that
incorporated more than one of the elements in categories A and B. Modern
business newspapers and the business sections of modern political newspapers combine everything distinguished above.
John J. McCusker is the Halsell Distinguished Professor of American History
and professor of economics at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. He is the
author of books and articles on topics relating to the economic history of the
early modern Atlantic world, most particularly, with Russell R. Menard, The
Economy of British America, 1607-1789, 2nd edn. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991).
Scheduled to be published this year are the chapter on "Colonial Statistics," in
Historical Statistics of the United States . . . Colonial Times to the Present, Susan
B. Carter et al., eds., 4th, Millennial Edition, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 2005), and, as
editor, Encyclopedia of World Trade since 1450, 2 vols. (New York, 2005).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
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2005