Chapter 10

Containing the Marvellous: Instructions to Buyers and Sellers

Phyllis Whitman Hunter

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed a surge in longdistance trade accompanied by the growth of colonial settlements in the new world, and trading posts in the Far East. Trade and travel engendered a world of mobile people and portable property. Imported goods and fashionable display became a commonplace part of many peoples’ everyday lives. In analysing this period, J. G. A. Pocock discerns the rise of a ‘social personality founded upon commerce: upon the exchange of forms of mobile property.’1 Commercial contacts with foreign lands were supplemented by growing numbers of what cultural historian Barbara Stafford calls ‘scientific travellers’ whose accounts became available to a broader reading public. In her study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel accounts, Stafford asserts that there were two contrasting modes of perception that pervaded these works. One, the picaresque, depended on ‘the astonishing, the novel, the unusual, and the extraordinary’ for its allure and could be found in wonder tales, travel literature, and novels. The other mode, used by the scientific traveller, depended on viewing nature as empirical evidence.2

A sense of people and goods in motion called forth what Pocock terms ‘modes of consciousness suited to a world of moving objects’.3 In my analysis, evolving modes of consciousness encompassed two alternative responses to the foreign, the exotic, and the marvellous: ‘excitement’, a desire to experience or imagine; and ‘containment’, a need to confine and control. Excitement and containment appear, I argue, not only in literature and travel journals, but also in the more mundane world of consumption and commerce, shaping the marketing of consumer goods and guiding the development of bookkeeping practices. This essay will explore the evidence for excitement and containment in two related forms of commercial didactic literature – advertisements and merchant guidebooks – and consider the relationship between prescription and practice, particularly in commercial record keeping.

The tensions between excitement and containment in perceiving and interacting with the world were central to the development of the novel, the spread of Enlightenment ideas, and also to the growth of capitalism. Foreign trade and travel stimulated a growing fascination with exotic and unusual imported goods. No longer did objects bearing ancient marks of lineage and patina confer status and prestige. Instead, a bourgeois public clamoured for the new, the novel, and the foreign. Savvy merchants like Sir Joshua Child took advantage of this by instructing their agents overseas to search out fresh designs in flowered silks, knowing that ‘English Ladies … will give twice as much for a new thing not seen in Europe before.’4 Novelty, an essential element of the ‘Consumer Revolution’ as conceived by scholars of material culture, required an intense attention to visual detail. Participation entailed meticulous scrutiny of the ‘flower and figure’ of imported silk, careful management of new products like tea and chocolate, and the practised use of foreign goods in social rituals that conftrmed British identity.5

Forging a consumer society required new forms of education and improved methods of conducting commerce. In the process of creating demand, advertisements for fashionable goods constituted a form of didactic literature for consumers. Like tradesmen’s vade-mecums, and merchants’ accounting practices, advertisements shared a language of excitement and containment that aimed to instruct citizens in a world flooded with new goods from abroad, new ideas about the self, and new conceptions of the universe.

Advertisements for imported goods

Fashionable consumption, like traveller’s accounts, combined empiricism – in the careful attention to changes in the pattern, colour, and texture of materials, with sensibility – in the pleasure and wonder of not just the new, but the novel, that is, ‘a thing not seen in Europe before’. In making Indian calico a marker of elite status, genteel Anglo-Americans appropriated foreign goods much like travellers seek souvenirs ‘in order to transform and collapse distance into proX1m1ty to, or approximation with, the self.’6 According to cultural critic Susan Stewart, ‘the souvenir [or calico] contracts the world in order to expand the personal.’ In collecting artifacts or in buying calico, ‘the self generates a fantasy in which it becomes the producer of these objects’ and arguably the owner of an imaginary experience of trans-oceanic travel and market exchange in ports like Surat and Madras.7

Advertisements in British and colonial American newspapers played a critical role in promoting excitement of the self-produced fantasy and domesticating or containing foreign products. Merchants channelled demand through detailed and enticing advertisements that encouraged buyers to carefully observe visual details in order to discriminate among fashionable wares. Through close description, promotional notices taught consumers about novelty and variation. In studying colonial American papers, Timothy Breen found that in the 1720s ‘merchants seldom mentioned more than 15 different imported items per month … the descriptions were generic: cloth, paper, ceramics.’ By the 1770s New York papers might list over nine thousand items during a month. Breen concludes that one outcome of what Anglo-American scholars call the Consumer Revolution was ‘an impressive new vocabulary’.8 An advertisement in the Pennrylvania Gazette from January 1755, typical of those found in many colonial newspapers, announced an assortment of dry goods for sale in the store of Philadelphia importers Rhea and Wickoff. A long list contained over 55 different types of various fabrics carefully differentiated by various characteristics. Suppliers distinguished cloth by type – lawn, cambric, chintz, crapes, muslins; finishing treatment – harrateen, watered silk; colour – blue, scarlet, purple; weave – three-quarter and seveneighths checks and stripes; and place of origin – Hamburg, Russia, Italy, Ireland, India, and China. In some instances, place of origin came to identify a type of fabric such as ‘Padausoy’ after a region in India, ‘Chainey’, a kind of Chinese silk, and ‘Holland’, a fine linen. The introduction of brand names offered another means of discrimination evident in commercial advertisements; announcements identified goods by the maker, such as Weston’s snuff and Hose’s damask shoes.9 As with novels, travellers’ accounts and guidebooks, the careful description and differentiation found in consumer advertisements communicated a detailed visual, tactile, and social knowledge to the readers.

American shopkeepers selling fashionable goods often became ‘tutors’ to those aspiring to Georgian gentility.10 Notices educated consumers on how to take care of their delicate and expensive imported fabrics. In a 1735 edition of the Pennrylvania Gazette, a shopkeeper touted as just imported’ a ‘Superfine Crown Soap’ that ‘cleanses fme Linens, Muslins, Chines, Cambricks, &c. with Ease and Expedition.’ The purveyor explained that these fine fabrics ‘often suffer more from the long and hard Rubbing of the Washer,’ and ‘through the ill Qualities of the Soap … than the Wearing.’ Superfme crown soap was especially useful for washing ‘Scarlets, or any other bright and curious Colours, that are apt to change by the Use of common Soap.’11 Through advertisements, both merchants and consumers learned to distinguish by sight and touch the value and fashionable connotations of a wide variety of materials and styles, as well as how to care for their prized goods.

Emphasizing novelty created a sense of excitement that promoted consumer culture. In 1733, the Boston Gazette carried the announcement of ‘Mrs. Elizabeth Hatton from London [who] makes Manteaus, Cloaks, Manteels, and all sorts of Women’s Apparel after the newest Mode.’ Mrs. Hatton also had ‘new Patterns of Sieves by the last Ships, from the Queen’s Manteau and ScarfMaker’. The emphasis was on both novelty and knowledge. Mrs. Hatton signalled the importance of keeping up with the rapid changes in fashion by insisting that ‘she’ll constantly be supply’d’ by the Queen’s dressmaker ‘as the mode alters’.12 Like Hatton, a goldsmith in Charleston, South Carolina, made snuffboxes ‘after the newest and neatest fashions’. Artisans advertised their knowledge of the latest fashions, imparting a kind of cultural authority to their finely wrought goods and to those who purchased them.13

Advertisements proclaimed the availability of new kinds of furnishings and products just coming into use during the early eighteenth century like chests of drawers and dressing tables. In Charleston, Henning and Shute sold ‘scriptoires and chests of drawers, pier glasses and sconces’ and Croakatt & Seaman promoted looking glasses and dressing tables ‘just imported in the ship Charles, Capt. Reid from London’. On the same vessel arrived ‘fine plain or gold and silver laced hatts’, and ‘India goods’ such as taffetas, grosgrains, shagreens and calicoes. The valuable cargo included green and bohea tea, along with the chinaware and ‘silver teaspoons, Tongs, and strainers’ necessary for serving hot beverages. Other Charleston merchants offered ‘dressing Tables & card Tables,’ fans, and silver buttons. Selection among these rapidly proliferating choices in fabrics, furniture, and tableware required an attention to detail that functioned as a vital element in domesticating and containing mobile property.14

But a second conceptualization, that of excitement, was also at work. Fine detail and concrete depictions of each imported object were mentally projected onto a large geographical landscape by the words printed at the head of the notice, just imported … from London’. The shopkeeper’s collection of Chinese silks, Italian crapes, Irish and Russian sheeting, Hamburg and Holland lawns, and Scotch handkerchiefs presented an assemblage of goods gathered from a global network of commercial exchange.15 The connection of fragments, in this case pieces of material, to the imposing but immaterial representation of transatlantic voyages and worldwide imperial connections gave imported objects their exoticism and novelty and thus their ability to inspire recurring demand. One issue of the Spectator, influential in America as well as England, explained the appeal of imported goods by noting that ‘novelty is a very powerful … most extensive Influence.’ But, the author continued, ‘it is the Source of Admiration, which lessens in proportion to our Familiarity with Objects, and upon thorough Acquaintance is utterly extinguished.’16 The allure faded quickly and could only be rekindled by new and different possessions.

Owning fashionable goods also required knowledge of how to use them. Newspaper notices acquainted families with the kinds of accomplishments suitable for well-bred young men and women. Thomas Ball in Philadelphia offered to teach writing, arithmetic and French to young gentlemen while his wife taught writing and French to the ladies. Ball’s sister, ‘lately arrived from London’, provided instruction in other ‘feminine’ skills such as ‘playing on the Spinet, Dancing, and all sorts of Needle-Work’. Five years later, Jane Voyer of Charleston let it be known that she intended to teach ‘embroidery, tapistry, drawing, French, and all sorts of work fit for young Ladies to learn’. With ‘good Encouragement’ Voyer hoped to establish a boarding school where she could also provide instruction in dancing and music. This kind of advertising alerted the would-be gentry to the skills that would enable them to participate in polite society.17

Announcements also instructed readers on the usefulness of didactic literature. A notice for the manual Every Man his own Doctor: or the poor Planter’s Physician, just published in Philadelphia, promised to teach people to cure themselves by ‘plain and easy Means’. Purchasers would save money in the process because the medicines recommended were ‘chiefly of the Growth and Production of this Country’. Advertised publications like English Uberties, or the Free-born Subject’s Inheritance (first edition, London, 1682; fifth edition, Boston, 1721) aimed to instruct colonists in their legal rights including the Magna Carta and ‘a short history of the Succession, not by any Hereditary Right’. The book placed these abstract rights into the context of daily practice by including explanations of ship money, tonnage and poundage, and duties of various local officials such as justices of the peace and overseers of the poor.18 These works and others like them, promoted the value of self-instruction.

Hallmarks of the emerging world of mobile people and property, advertisements for didactic literature and imported goods shared the empiricist goal of containing movement and change within detailed descriptions and precise prescriptions. But, implicit in their efforts to contain, were the fantasy and excitement of exotic possessions and novel experiences.

Accounting manuals for merchants

Fascination with foreign goods simultaneously called forth an increasingly methodical control over moving and marketing goods. The tension between concrete objects in hand and imaginary voyages abroad created an instability, a constant motion between the here and now and the distant and unknown. That fluctuation may have inspired consumer spending but it threatened commercial profits. Men and women of commerce faced a daunting task in containing their expansive enterprises – ships traversing distant oceans and goods and credit being transferred on their behalf at foreign ports throughout the world. To contain instability and reduce risk, traders continually attempted to methodize business, to record details, to negotiate values, and, at least temporarily, stabilize mobile goods. Keeping accounts provided a means by which merchants could momentarily pause the incessant movement of goods.

A genre of instructional manuals emerged, during the early modern period, to teach merchants and gendemen of wealth and property the methods of Italian [double-entry] bookkeeping.19 Contemporaries interpreted the increasing emphasis on careful calculation as an outgrowth of the scientific revolution. Roger North, the author of The Gentleman Accomptant published in London in 1714, claimed that the ‘Method is so comprehensive and perfect, as makes it worthy to be put among the Sciences, and to be understood by all Virtuosi’.20 The strict Italian method required three types of account books: a wastebook or daybook, a journal, and a ledger. Conceived as the ‘foundation upon which the whole superstructure of a merchant’s accounts is raised,’ the wastebook required ‘every circumstance of date, conditions, and amount of the transaction’ to be recorded immediately in ‘plain simple language’; the entries must be ‘stricdy made in order of Time, as the Business is done’.21 For commercial accounts, accuracy became dependent on immediacy, ‘at the time of it’.

Again and again, authors in the prescriptive literature stressed the importance of attention to carefully observed and recorded details. William Gordon’s 1765 treatise, The Universal Accountant, insisted that ‘Regular books frequendy examined, will contribute more to prosperity in trade, than great address and abilities without them.’ Careful records allowed a merchant to know ‘at a glance’ or within ‘a few hours’ where he stood. Gordon suggested, ‘[i]n order to give the merchant a constant view of the obligations he comes under, and the means he hath of retiring them, he ought to have a book lying open in his counting-house’. Without the careful bookkeeping plied in these manuals, ‘a person can only be said to deal at random, or at best can be called but guess’d work.’22

In practice, most colonial merchants kept careful records. Since business, even in the most cosmopolitan American ports, relied on exchange of goods and credit, careful records did indeed make the difference from ‘guess’d work’ and potential insolvency. Merchants used account books of all sizes. Samuel Grant, a cloth merchant, tailor and upholsterer in Boston, Massachusetts kept a massive daybook of 922 pages to record his transactions between 1737 and 1758.23 Grant’s account book probably represents the first of three types of accounts that contemporary bookkeeping manuals recommended for the strict ‘Italian’ method. The book records entries by date, includes the name of the customer, a brief description of the item purchased and the unit cost, as well as a total bill, customer by customer. To the left of each name is a carefully inscribed number, which indicates the folio in Grant’s journal (no longer extant), which would have included both debit and credit sides for each customer’s account. His round hand and precisely aligned columns inscribed debits and credits as small as a few shillings or as substantial as £250 with the same attention, demonstrating his commitment to the neatness and accuracy called for in numerous manuals.

In recording both large and small debts in a careful and consistent manner, Grant fulfilled Daniel Defoe’s dictum: ‘he that delights in his trade will delight in his books.’24 In his guide to business, called The Complete English Tradesman and published in London in 1726, Defoe insisted that a tradesman must ‘keep his books always in order; his day-book duly posted, his cash duly balanced, and all people’s accounts always fit for a view.’ The businessman needed to keep ‘an exact account of what goes out and comes in’ because ‘a tradesman’s books should always be kept clean and clear.’ Without this careful stocktaking, recorded in writing and ciphers, the tradesman or merchant, so Defoe concluded, ‘knows nothing of himself, or of his circumstances in the world’. Here we see how exact observation and careful accounting lead from confusion to clarity and become the ground for valuing goods and stabilizing identity. Elsewhere, Defoe reiterated the importance of accounts as a way of reflecting on and knowing the self; a merchant who had not duly posted and balanced his books ‘can give no account of himself to himself, much less to any body else’.25 In a world of mobile property, identity and authenticity could be located in the outward, observable, and recorded details. As an equivalent of fashionable presentation and scientific travel literature, accounting for goods and credit represented the self in a world increasingly understood in terms of property and markets.

Like the attention of consumers and travellers, that of merchants fluctuated between close detail and imaginary constructs of distant events as they attempted to visualize the other end of market exchange that might take place on a Caribbean island or in an Asian port. Gordon and his colleagues understood that, because ‘Merchants being inured, from their first setting out in the commercial life, to risks and hazards, send their property to foreign countries, and bring home the produce in return’, they must always aim to control risk. ‘In every case’, he remarked, ‘it requires foresight to judge exactly when to launch out, and when to wind up’. To make their decisions, merchants constructed an imaginary landscape of commercial imperialism. ‘For this purpose,’ Gordon explained, ‘it is extremely proper, that a trader should know how the several parts of the world are connected together in their mutual intercourse of commerce, how the redundancies of one country supply the wants of another, in what articles the markets are scarce, and in what they are overstocked’. In this way a trader ‘may at all times be capable of foreseeing, when any branch of trade in which he is concerned is likely to be stagnated, and take his measures for preventing the bad consequences accordingly. ‘26

Meticulous accounts were an integral part of this project as Wardhaugh Thompson, author of the 1777 Accomptant’s Oracle, acknowledged: ‘Thus you see, that when the sum is large, and the distance of time great, between that of the debt and credit sides being due, it then becomes an object of no small importance’.27 An account of a single voyage or ‘adventure’ to the west or the east, displaying debits on the left side and credits on the right, elided vast distances and incorporated multiple exchanges of goods and services. Thus, marks on a page became signs of containment making unknown risks bearable. But the containment was incomplete. Like an advertisement for imported goods, the title at the top of the account page, ‘Adventure to Surinam’ for example, continually animated the details recorded below. The distant site announced potential proftts or catastrophic losses. In each case, the very forms, the rectangular shapes of advertisements and account pages with their symmetrical lines seemed to frame and contain the goods represented within. In contrast, the naming of distant ports moved the reader beyond detailed categories and out of the frame to a broad trans-oceanic space.28

In spite of the pressures toward rationalization in business decisions charted by most economic historians, eighteenth-century merchants participated more in a project of recording details, containing far-flung goods, and accounting for credit; they spent little or no time in calculation of net profits or return on investment. Yet accounting had both practical and metaphysical designs. In transcribing detail, merchants strived to transform mobile property and marvellous experience into stable representations of value. In her study of commercial culture in England, Natasha Glaisyer suggests that the language used in guidebooks for merchants ‘sought to construct stable images’. The specialized terms used in commerce, Glaisyer argues, were ‘pinned down through straightforward definitions, which distanced commerce from instability and so sought to provide a legitimate basis for its operation’.29 The detailed records and particular terms served both practical and cultural ends.

Accounting manuals called for an up-to-the minute record of daily events in the shop and warehouse including purchases and sales whether by credit or cash, the pick up and delivery of goods, loans, and exchanges. As John Mair noted in his very popular manual, Book-Keeping Methodiz’d,’The Waste-book narrates Things in a plain, simple, natural Way, according to the Order of Time in which they were transacted.’ From this wastebook, each entry was then to be transferred to a journal and then to a ledger. The journal was designed to be a more careful, thorough day by day accounting of the business transacted and a sort of way station to the final or ‘principal book’, the ledger. Each of the items entered in the journal should, according to the directions in the guidebooks, also be posted in the ledger as a credit to one account and a debit to another. Hence the term double-entry. This provided a running record of values owed to or due from each person or group of investors with whom the merchant did business.30

The pages of the ledger recorded exchanges under various categories of commodities, cash, and profit and loss statements. The information in the ledger allowed merchants to consider their cost of goods when calculating profits and provided a separate picture of various types of businesses. In The Gentlemen’s Complete Book-keeper of 1741, Richard Hayes recommended balancing ledger accounts on separate sheets of paper. When completed, ‘these Balance Papers are to be carefully laid up in your Escruittore or Desk, to turn to at any Time hereafter, if you should want to know how much your Estate was worth, or in what Posture your Estate lay, in any particular Year.’31 Therefore regular balancing of accounts, using this method of double-entry bookkeeping, was perceived by contemporaries and later historians as critical to the rational calculation of modern capitalism.

Although most guidebooks or vade-mecums designed for traders called for double-entry book-keeping ‘in the Italian style’, few merchants practised this recommended method. One important element of double-entry systems required a set of separate merchandise accounts where the cost, of procuring calico for example, was offset by credits for sales of calico. By balancing this type of account periodically a merchant could determine at least the operating profits made on trade in calico. But accounts of merchandise rarely appeared in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century merchants’ records. Noted historian of accounting Basil Yamey concluded that ‘methods in the text-books were more systematic and comprehensive than those used in practice.’32

In a study of extant ledgers and other account books of several leading English merchants covering over a century of enterprise (1655-177 4), Yamey found few of the merchandise accounts deemed necessary by the manuals. In one notable example, Sir John Banks, Governor of the fabled East India Company, who left a fortune of £200,000 at his death in 1699, maintained a separate account of purchase and sales for coffee, calicoes, and pepper. While he did record purchases and sales, the accounts were ‘simply carried forward … without any calculation of profit or loss’. In all three of Bank’s extant ledgers, Yamey found only one entry concerning profit and loss. Like Banks, few of Yamey’s merchants balanced their accounts regularly.33

Instead of following the prescriptive literature, most merchants and shopkeepers in Anglo-America kept only two kinds of accounts: one that represented a wastebook or daily record and the other, a journal that included a running list of debits and credits under individual or finn names. Neither matched receipts with costs, nor demonstrated any attempt to figure return on investment. While most merchants could then determine fairly quickly how they stood in relation to their customers and trading partners, without separate accounts for each commodity or type of business, the original cost of goods disappeared. And with it, the possibility of a careful determination of net profits or return on investment – both now considered essential calculations for rational decision-making – vanished as well. English and American merchants of the period rarely, perhaps never, figured net profit or, in modern parlance, the bottom line.34

A leading merchant of mid-eighteenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, who carried on an extensive trade with Southern Europe, offers an interesting case study of someone we know was trained in double-entry book-keeping, yet chose not to use it once he established himself in business. As a youth, Timothy Orne (1717-67) was apprenticed to a Boston merchant. During this period he kept an immaculate set of records for what must have been a hypothetical business. In these early account books, comprising a matching wastebook, journal, and ledger, he meticulously recorded costs of various barrels of raisins and other imported produce, balancing different cost bases against sales made at different times and prices. Yet when Orne entered his father’s business and began sending cargoes on his own account, the careful consideration of costs versus sales disappeared from his records.35

Like the merchants studied by Yamey and other economic historians, Orne may have tabulated the running account of any individual customer or trading partner and usually sometime during the winter months or upon notice of a credit crisis or death, he determined an overall sum of money due to him or (rarely) funds he owed to the customer. But any effort to determine profit and loss on a type of business or over a measured span of time is absent from the account books. As a managing partner for numerous joint ventures to the West Indies and Spain or Portugal, Orne calculated what he termed ‘neet proceeds’ and the proportion of proceeds due to each partner. To determine this, he deducted sales commissions, customs fees, warehousing and dockage in the foreign ports, but neither estimated nor went back into his records to determine the cost of commodities shipped abroad.36

After extensive research in Orne’s papers, I found a set of four small soft cover memo books, one for each year from 1763 to 1767, the year of Orne’s death, at the age of 51. In these memo books Orne appeared to be calculating his net worth. He added up his stock in fish and English goods, outstanding loans (Orne acted as a private banker for people throughout eastern Massachusetts), real estate holdings, investments in shipping, cargo, and adventuring, and money due from abroad. In 1763 Orne determined that the value of his capital stock amounted to £19,613. By January of 1766 this had risen to £24,890; he had succeeded in increasing his net worth by about 10% per year during this period. His diversified business empire included banking and marine insurance, his own fishing fleet, ‘adventures’ to Southern Europe and the West Indies, and substantial real estate holdings. In these small memo books, Orne gathered together the estimated value of his far-flung enterprises to produce a rough calculation of his own estate. The details were handwritten in a small script on unlined paper. Indeed, the books appear to be private records – kept apart from the more public journals and ledgers.37

Precise records did have their public purposes. Manuals cautioned traders and clerks not to erase or scratch out, in part because records might be used in courts of law. There an undisturbed record with corrections added at the end went a long way towards establishing the honesty and credit of the claimant or defendant. In The Universal Accountant, Gordon observed, ‘were merchants to admit of erasings or total cancellings in their books, it would be impossible to trace fraud with any degree of certainty; but when every thing stands fair and naked … it would be impossible … to contrive or carry on a designed fraud’.38 Again, the emphasis was on careful reporting, not on profitable decision-making.

According to the authors of these tracts, careful record keeping had implications beyond any single trader’s profit or loss. Gordon claimed that ‘the want of proper intelligence and precaution’ brought on ‘one half of the failures among considerable merchants, the decay of our manufactures at home, and impunctuality of our correspondents abroad.’ The personal and the imperial were seen by Gordon and others as interchangeable, or at least as interconnected through questions of capital and credit. ‘Credit is the great foundation of commerce, not only between man and man, but likewise between nation and nation.’39 In an era where little was fixed and credit relations could only be grounded upon careful bookkeeping, commercial agents engaged in a daily round of conversation, correspondence, and posting accounts in a constant effort to determine exchange value and transpose moving commodities into flxed notations within the leather-covered pages of daybooks, ledgers, and journals.

Instruction in double-entry bookkeeping methods appeared in more generalized works as well, including the widely popular The Instructor, or Young Man’s Best Companion by George Fisher. According to the original title, the work contained instructions on spelling, reading, writing and arithmetic ‘in an easier way than any yet published’ and also included ‘the Family’s best companion’ with directions for ‘marking on linnen; how to pickle and preserve; to make divers sorts of wine … A compleat treatise of Farriery’ and ‘good advice to gentlemen and farmers’, as well as ‘how to qualify any person for business, without the help of a master’.40

The Preface listed the steps necessary in ‘forming the Young Man’s Mind’ beginning with English, ‘our Mother Tongue’. The list continued: second was ‘a good Hand for Writing’; third, knowledge of ‘some few Epistles … in a familiar Stile, and on sundry Subjects and Occasions’; fourth, ‘the Science of Arithmecick’; and flfth, ‘the ingenious Art of Book-keeping after the Italian Manner’. Fisher extolled the importance of bookkeeping as ‘an Accomplishment that capacitates him[the reader) for business in the highest Degree’.41

In the body of the text, Fisher described ‘the Pleasure that accrues to a Person by seeing what he gains by each Species of Goods he deals in and his whole Profit by a Year’s Trade.’ Like many of the more specialized manuals, The Instructor asserted that this detailed double-entry method of accounting was essential for the man of business to ‘know the true State of his Affairs’, so that ‘he may, according to discretion, retrench or enlarge his Expenses.’ In other words, this kind of informacion was necessary to make rational decisions based on profit or loss. Apparently Fisher had no trouble making profitable decisions; he had a winner in The Instructor, which was reprinted numerous times, continuing its popularity into the early decades of the nineteenth century.42

In the 1740s, the always enterprising Benjamin Franklin, in partnership with bookseller David Hall brought out a colonial edition of Fisher’s work in Philadelphia. Franklin changed the title to The American Instructor and revised, corrected, and added material to the book, rendering ‘the whole better adapted to these American colonies, than any other book of the like kind’. Franklin and Hall reprinted the work several times followed by other printers in Philadelphia, Boston, Worcester, New York, and Burlington, New Jersey. Before 1800 Franklin’s revised edition had been reprinted at least ten times while Fisher’s original The Instructor continued to be reprinted every few years in Britain.43

Franklin and Hall advertised their product in the Pennrylvania Gazette, either in a long list of other works, or sometimes in what might be considered a display advertisement featuring Fisher’s American Instructor and using Fisher’s words to claim that it would ‘qualify any person for business, without the help of a master’. The Philadelphia printers sold their editions to booksellers in many of the colonial cities. Bookseller William Hunter in Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia, received an order of books from Benjamin Franklin that included 45 copies of The American Instructor. An inventory of Jeremy Candy’s shop in Boston from 1768 included three ‘Fishers’ and 20 ‘Fishers Tutor’. Franklin’s version of Fisher’s Instructor was most likely used as a school text as well as a self-help guide for apprentices and businessmen and women.44

The popularity of Fisher’s text and the more focused manuals of accounting in Britain and America suggests that a relatively large number of people, primarily male, were introduced to the virtues of double-entry bookkeeping. But, evidence proffered so far by economic historians reveals that few merchants or retailers followed the prescribed practice.45 They kept careful records of transactions but not the double-entry procedures now considered the basis for ‘rational policy’.

Even though few merchants followed the prescriptions detailed in accounting manuals, the texts continued to be published and reprinted frequently. No doubt they provided a reliable source of income for printer/publishers and, depending on contractual arrangements (where they existed), for the author as well. The producers and sellers of these works clearly managed to convince numerous middling and gentry groups that some knowledge of double-entry bookkeeping was necessary to negotiate the increasingly commercialized world of eighteenth century Anglo-America.

They achieved this by associating bookkeeping with empirical inquiry like that evidenced in the ‘scientific traveller’ and emphasized by the virtuosi of the Royal Society in their instructions to mariners ‘to keep an exact Diary’ for observations abroad.46 John Mair, whose popular works on bookkeeping continued to be reprinted throughout the eighteenth century, claimed to present ‘the principles of the art … clearly and minutely’. In his guides ‘the rules arising from the theory are methodically digested; the several parts are connected in such a manner as to hang firmly together.’47 The manuals stressed an empiricist view – following a strict method would yield visual evidence of truth. The Gentleman Accomptant claimed ‘the Dr. [debit] and Cr. [credit] is pure and perfect right Reason, and contains the whole material Truth and Justice of all the Dealing, and nothing else’.48 Repetitive, daily attention formed an important component of the strict method. Thompson’s text encouraged readers ‘to examine carefully your bill-book every morning, and what bills you find become due that day enter in your Waste-Book … and thereby prevent confusion’.49 In The Universal Accountant, Gordon emphasized that the merchant needed ‘a constant view of the obligations he comes under, and the means he hath of retiring them.’50 Without that access to reliable information, the trader or gentleman risked ‘his capital, or even credit’ in ‘rash and adventurous’ dealings.51 Detailed records aided the merchant in recalling the particular circumstances of each transaction, helping him to visualize, as Yamey puts it, ‘the physical attributes and economic circumstances of any particular asset’ and to ‘reconstruct in some minuteness the course of particular transactions.’52

In both commercial accounts and marketing strategies merchants participated in an effort to reduce to writing the numerous overlapping and complex arrangements involved in trading goods from distant cities and foreign lands. Both the instructions merchants received and the suggestions they issued to consumers called for an attention to detailed description and careful differentiation. Through an effort at precise written description whether in account books or advertisements, merchants attempted to both invoke and simultaneously contain the wonders of exotic goods and distant lands.

Sellers and buyers depended on change and the movement of goods across long distances. Using a form of imaginative labour to represent and contain ‘the marvellous’, accounting manuals and guide books offered a pathway for traders to navigate the system of overseas commerce just as advertisements and periodicals presented a method for buyers to negotiate the corridors of fashionable consumption. In each instance, instructions stressed a careful attention to and recording of perceptible details. If exotic goods could be contained in precise notations within merchants’ account books and advertisements for stylish objects, their potential to disrupt could be channelled into a power to reaffirm individual identity and imperial nnagmmgs.