152	Perspectives in American History

road that extended from the interior of North Carolina through
the valley of Virginia into Maryland and Pennsylvania. Closer to
gbilarlflphia a large number pf rm'lU wprf ^ np along the streams
flowing into the Delaware to grind the wheat into flour,55 while
the remarkably large number ot bakers in Philadelphia (Appendix
C) is some evidence of the important trade of baking this flour into
biscuit for use on shipboard and in the West Indies. Similarly, the
abnormally large number of butchers also shown in our occupa-
tional data for Philadelphia is evidence of the substantial trade there
in slaughtering and packing beef and pork for exportation.

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an active trade, exporting its flour and provisions to the West
Indies. This appears to have been a rather simple bilateral trade for
the most part, supplemented by occasional shipments of wheat and
flour to southern Europe as market conditions there justified. Al-
though Philadelphia did supply West Indian and European goods
to adjacent parts of New Jersey and Maryland, there is very little
sign of a real entrepot at Philadelphia in the first seventy years or so
of its existence.56 The volume of its imports from England was
quite low57 (Appendix E). This is not simply because Pennsylva-
nia's population was still low (Appendix A), reflecting the later
^ate °^ *K foundation. (Pennsylvania did not passMaxyland in
population until ca. yz6oj Although Pennsylvaniapassed New
York in population in 1730, during the next thirty years New York
regularly imported more goods from Britain than Pennsylvania
did. This left no significant surplus for an entrepot trade in Euro-
pean goods. Rather, Philadelphia appears to have continued to im-
port such goods from Boston and other New England ports in
payment for the provisions sold the New Englanders. This rather
simple pattern of trade seems to have encouraged the development
of a large community of small merchants in Philadelphia, big
enough to trade to the West Indies but not very venturesome -out-

55. Cf. Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, pp. 50-51, 57, 75, 265, :68.

56. W. I. Davisson may not agree. Cf. his "The Philadelphia Trade," Western Eco-
nomic Journal, 3 (1965), 310-311.

57. U. S. Historical Statistics, p. 757.