When we speak of markets now, we usually mean the stock market or trade in general. Emma Hart's Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism recalls an earlier period when markets were physical spaces in real locales, populated by traders with specific identities and varied interests. Hart's work is an important contribution to our understanding of how markets functioned in the early modern British Atlantic. Providing detailed examination of evidence from sources such as newspapers, broadsides, court testimonies, maps, and private journals, Hart convincingly recreates what that early modern trading world looked like at the ground level, from the colonial era through the early American republic (1660–1800).

Hart scrutinizes the physical spaces and actual practices of commercial exchange in three areas of the British Atlantic: Britain itself (the northeast of England and the southwest of Scotland), Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Consideration of these distinct areas provides useful comparisons and allows for parallels and contrasts to be drawn between market actors with diverse identities—British traders of varying social rank in Britain, white colonials (indentured and free), Africans (both enslaved and free), and Native Americans—all crucial participants in this British Atlantic trade system.

A central theme is the changing notion of the common (or public) good in the marketplace. Beginning with the British context, Hart delves into Scottish and English fairs, urban markets, and shops to demonstrate that everyone in the social hierarchy had mutual (though unequal) obligations in these market spaces. For example, well-established regulations ensured that organizers of fairs would profit, but also that the common good would be attended to—that “bargains would be honest, prices fair, deals observed, and stolen goods prevented from entering the marketplace” (21). In Britain, corporate authorities were expected to direct the market for the common good.

In colonial America, despite official attempts to replicate the sort of trading structures found in Britain, the colonists began engaging in a fluid, improvised style of exchange that often occurred out of sight of any formal management. “Instead of colonists’ embracing the opportunity to reestablish familiar hierarchies and spaces of trade, officials documented their retreat into remote coves [and] woods . . . to conduct bargains that snubbed the so-called public good while advancing only their private fortunes” (53). In the American colonies, the private property owner was free to engage in commerce without regard to communal interest.

This fascinating documentation of the changing notion of the common good could helpfully be connected to broader considerations of capitalism's transformation in the early modern era. For example, Fred Hirsch (Social Limits to Growth, 1976) and Albert Hirschman (Rival Views of Market Society and other Recent Essays, 1986) have theorized that early capitalism benefited from the sort of moral considerations and social obligations inherited from a preindustrial past that Hart has uncovered. Hirsch contended that over time the market ethos tends to erode social ties in favor of selfish individualism—his notion of a depleting moral legacy. Hart's analysis provides a case study of such theories in historical context, as these very socio-ethical structures appear to be present in her British examples from the period, while almost entirely absent in the new American colonial markets.

By the eighteenth century, “the idea of the public good in the [American] marketplace had become fundamentally racialized” (119). Yet, while colonial legislation through the 1700s was aimed at regulating the trading opportunities of non-whites, Hart underscores the agency of Africans, free and enslaved, in the early trading economy of the colonies, noting that in South Carolina, for instance, “Charles Cattel's enslaved Africans, unaccompanied by whites, crossed at Mary Sureau's ferry on the Ashley River over one hundred times from 1752 to 1755” (73). Such circumstances allowed slaves regular unauthorized trading opportunities. A fruitful connection could be made here to the work of Douglas Egerton and his study of Gabriel, the enslaved blacksmith leader of Gabriel's Rebellion, the Virginia slave conspiracy of 1800 (Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802, 1993). As was the practice in that area, when work on his own plantation was complete, Gabriel was often allowed to contract out to employers on neighboring plantations or in Richmond, providing him a sort of economic “rough freedom” that informed his desire for emancipation and fed his inspiration to rebellion. Julius Scott's work on the role of Africans in shipping and communication networks in the Atlantic (The Common Wind, Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, 2018) could help set Hart's examples in broader context as well. All this would be in keeping with her proposed intention of providing a history that recounts the “bottom-up” market revolution powered by “Indians, Africans, women, and men” (9).

In the final section, Hart documents attempts to construct a functional market suitable for the new republic after the American Revolution. Here Hart arrives at another important theme, outlined in her introduction as the early American attempt to “build a virtuous republic of commercial citizens” (2). In analyzing this problem, engagement with the groundbreaking work of J. G. A. Pocock seems warranted (The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 1975). His analysis speaks to the concern that many in the early republic had with virtue in a commercial society, or the so-called wealth and virtue problem. The ancient republican tradition, well known in early modern Britain and America, posed difficulties in imagining a virtuous citizenry operating with integrity in a modern commercial republic. The consideration of the balance between private interest and the common good is central to this notion of what Pocock called civic virtue, and would greatly enhance Hart's discussion of the struggle over such concerns in the early American republic.

To be sure, Hart points out that hers is “more a history of economic life, its character, and its values than a purely economic history” (7), but inclusion of some of these relevant themes in the broader intellectual history of economics would enhance her study. Her book is a valuable addition to the literature on the early modern Atlantic marketplace, and it will be of interest to scholars and students alike. In the end, Hart's conclusion resonates: notions of public good and private interest were difficult to define and balance in the new republic precisely because there had been no long-term commitment to squaring these concepts in the colonial context. That legacy is one that American society still wrestles with.