Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780691143590)

Heavenly Merchandize offers a critical reexamination of religion's role in the creation of a market economy in early America. Focusing on the economic culture of New England, it views commerce through the eyes of four generations of Boston merchants, drawing upon their personal letters, diaries, business records, and sermon notes to reveal how merchants built a modern form of exchange out of profound transitions in the puritan understanding of discipline, providence, and the meaning of New England.

Mark Valeri traces the careers of men like Robert Keayne, a London immigrant punished by his church for aggressive business practices; John Hull, a silversmith-turned-trader who helped to establish commercial networks in the West Indies; and Hugh Hall, one of New England's first slave traders. He explores how Boston ministers reconstituted their moral languages over the course of a century, from a scriptural discourse against many market practices to a providential worldview that justified England's commercial hegemony and legitimated the market as a divine construct. Valeri moves beyond simplistic readings that reduce commercial activity to secular mind-sets, and refutes the popular notion of an inherent affinity between puritanism and capitalism. He shows how changing ideas about what it meant to be pious and puritan informed the business practices of Boston's merchants, who filled their private notebooks with meditations on scripture and the natural order, founded and led churches, and inscribed spiritual reflections in their letters and diaries.

Unprecedented in scope and rich with insights, Heavenly Merchandize illuminates the history behind the continuing American dilemma over morality and the marketplace.

Author: Mark Valeri
ISBN-10: 0691143595
ISBN-13: 9780691143590
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/21/2010
Pages: 360
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Books & Culture 11/01/2010 pg. 27
Choice 12/01/2010
Christian Century 10/17/2012 pg. 34