In a well-known opening passage of his Essay upon Projects (1697) Daniel Defoe rhapsodised upon the ingenuity of merchants, forced by the pressures of recent maritime conflict to devise novel strategies of survival. Living by their wits, every venture they undertake is a project:

It is a romantic, almost Faustian, image this — the merchant as magus, contriving remote lévitations and transmutations from the cloistered privacy of his wharfside offices — and it may seem rather far removed from the prosaic realities conveyed to us by a score of contemporaneous manuals on mercantile practice and brought to life most recently by Jacob Price and David Hancock. In their vivid accounts of eighteenth-century Atlantic-merchant partnerships we are placed in a severely practical world, of disciplined procedures, meticulous record-keeping and cautious calculation. Surrounded by the ordered hierarchies of waste-books, billbooks, letter-books, journals and ledgers we are in an environment of constraints — constraints imposed by time, distance, law and the overriding necessity to reduce risk. It does not seem an environment attuned to strenuous adventure or novel enterprise.

Yet, Defoe was right. Implicit in his characterization is the timeless truism that knowledge is power. The well-ordered merchant-house, sustaining a large correspondence and capable of efficient informationretrieval, was the organization most advantageously placed to conduct its affairs with least risk of disappointment or surprise, and if it could convey a reputation for the reliability of these attributes to its clients and competitors then it stood to gain one of the highest prizes in the game of commerce — sound credit. From this all else could flow — business, profit, confidence, the momentum of self-sustained growth.

Unsurprisingly, the force of these simple truths re-emerges, again and again, from these collected papers. Despite the competing, autarchic statesystem — English, Spanish, Dutch or French — which sought to monopolize the transatlantic trades, the eighteenth-century North Atlantic was a trading environment distinctively exploited by individual initiatives.