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A Balance of Payments for the Thirteen Colonies, 1768–1772: A Summary*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

James Shepherd
James Shepherd
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

Any advance in our knowledge about the growth and development of the American colonial economy must first start with a balance-of-payments study. The trade of the thirteen colonies with other areas— principally Great Britain, Ireland, southern Europe, the Wine Islands, the West Indies, and Africa—certainly must have formed, together with the coastal trade between the colonies, a large share of the total market activity. My conclusions from such a study are that the description given of commodity trade by colonial historians has been accurate but that once services as well as goods are considered the picture changes to one where there are only small positive or negative balances remaining on current account for the various regions. As a result, I would conclude that long-term capital flows from Great Britain to the colonies were either small or nil during this period.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1965 , pp. 691 - 695
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1965

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References

1 London, Public Record Office, Customs 16/1.

2 These records were a product of the American Board of Customs established in 1767 with headquarters in Boston.

3 Bezanson, Anne, Gray, Robert D., and Hussey, Miriam, Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bezanson, Anne, Daley, Blanch, Denison, Marjorie C., and Hussey, Miriam, Prices and Inflation during the American Revolution, Pennsylvania, 1770–1790 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cole, Arthur H., Wholesale Commodity Prices in the United States: 1700–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 British Museum, Additional Manuscript 15485, and David Macpherson's estimates for exports reprinted in U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, 1960), p. 761Google Scholar.

5 London, Public Record Office, Customs 3/68–72 and Customs 14.

6 For some in print, see White, Philip L., The Beekman Mercantile Papers, 1746–1799, III (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1956), 1395–1421Google Scholar. Others exist in the various collections of colonial merchants' papers in archives on the East Coast.

7 See, for example, Clark, G. N., Guide to English Commercial Statistics, 1696–1782 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1938), pp. 38–39Google Scholar; and Imlah, Albert H., Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica (Cambridge: Harvard Universitv Press, 1958), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Letters written by John Williams, Inspector General of Imports and Exports in the colonies, to the American Board of Customs while visiting the various port districts in Maryland and Virginia in 1770. Public Record Office, Treas. 1/476.

9 See Ostrander, Gilman M., “The Molasses Trade of the Thirteen Colonies” (unpublished M. A. thesis written at the University of California, Berkeley, 1948)Google Scholar.

10 Under the direction of Douglass C. North at the University of Washington, and by Lawrence A. Harper, University of California, Berkeley, and William I. Davisson, Sacramento State College.