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Maritime Enterprise in the New Republic: Investment in Baltimore Shipping, 1789–1793

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Geoffrey Gilbert
Geoffrey Gilbert
Affiliation:
Geoffrey Gilbert is associate professor of economics atHobart and William Smith Colleges.
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Abstract

By systematically analyzing ship registry documents it is possible to illuminate shipholding practices at major American ports in the early national era. In this article, Professor Gilbert focuses on shipholding in Baltimore in the period just prior to the late eighteenth century European war-induced shipping boom. He finds the port's foreign trade to be largely controlled by Baltimore residents. Merchants owned by far the largest percentage of the shipping, while mariners constituted an important, albeit secondary, investor group. Sole ownership of vessels was more extensive in Federalist Baltimore than in colonial Boston or Philadelphia. More detailed comparisons of shipowning practices among the major United States ports, Gilbert concludes, await further research.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , Spring 1984 , pp. 14 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1984

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References

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3 United States Statutes at Large (1789), Statute I, Ch. 3, 27–28 on the “Tonnage Act”; Statute I, Ch. 11, 55–65 on registration.

4 These records are filed at the National Archives under “Record Group 36” of the Bureau of Customs (subfile: “Records Used in the Settlement of the French Spoliation Claims”).

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8 The equal-shares assumption underlies Tables 1, 2, 3, and 4. One is forced to proceed on such an assumption by the failure of the certificates of registry to record the actual ownership shares of individuals. McCusker and the Bailyns also make an equal-shares assumption.

9 McCusker, “Pennsylvania Shipping Industry,” 226.

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11 A figure below 10 percent results when mariners are assigned a perhaps more realistic one-eighth share in cases of multiple ownership.

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14 Bailyns, 127; Doerflinger, 130.

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18 McCusker, “Pennsylvania Shipping Industry,” 225.

19 Ibid., 228; Bailyns, 31–32.

20 Williamson, Jeffrey and Lindert, Peter, “Three Centuries of American Inequality,” Research in Economic History 1 (1976): 81–84.Google Scholar The text comparisons of wealth inequality are strictly suggestive, since the wealth-holding populations are in many ways noncomparable.