n

160	Perspectives in American History

^hese diree ports take it for granted that their trade was.
the hands of their own merchants on whose account (i.e., with
whose capital and at whose risk) both exports and imports were
jnade. There is evidence that, during the great-hflorn in the wheat^
ajid flour tiade in the 1760*5 and 1770*5. biflCLondqn gfrain specula-
tors op'TTencnjiteents sent purchase orders to New York, PhiladeP

HQWII

jjhia, aiid pgfnaps Maryland. ThereJsjLLgo b?tfcr-k"
(in standard-accounts and unpublished sources^ of British mer-
chants sending goods to those centers on their own account to be
sold on commission.70 Tjrk^-npan'S fW, f™ -> pir«- nf i-K^ir business,
the" merchants oi JNew York and Philadelphia and perhaps even
Boston were acting as the agents or factors of metropolitan mer-
chants to whom'the risks and rhr prnfin brlnnrrrl If this was true
ic 1760 s and 1770*5, might it not also have been true earlier?
How did all those new houses in New York and Philadelphia get
started between the 1720*5 and the 1760*5? Finally, there is the mat-
ter of auctions. In the years after 1815 one of the characteristic in-
stitutions of British-American trade was the import auction, par-
ticularly at New York. British manufacturers who had surplus
stocks or needed cash in a hurry bypassed the export merchants and
sent their goods directly to New York to be auctioned on arrival,
usually for cash. It is clear, however, from the monographic litera-
ture on the colonial period that similar auctions were being com-
plained of in New York and Philadelphia in the 1760*5 and 1770*5.
But we are told nothing of the persons who sent such goods for
auction—though we get tantalizing hints of direct contact with
Manchester.71 Then too we know all too little about the internal
history of the businesses in these places. We have been told where
the capital tor their ships came from, but not the capital for the
firms themselves. These are some ot the problems that will have to
be solved betore we can understand fully the inner dynamics of the
mercantile communities in those port towns.

70. E.g., Jensen, Philadelphia Commerce, pp. 17-19, 96—97; Horringcon, .Vtiv York Mer-
chant, pp. 67-72.

71. Harrinsjton, .Yetr York Mcrdiant, pp. 92-93; DriJenbaugh, Cities in Rei'iilt, pp.
78-79, 276-277; and, particularly, Jensen, Philadelphia Commerce, pp. 123-124.