Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in by Mark Valeri

By Mark Valeri

Heavenly Merchandize bargains a severe reexamination of religion's function within the construction of a industry economic system in early the USA. concentrating on the industrial tradition of recent England, it perspectives trade during the eyes of 4 generations of Boston retailers, drawing upon their own letters, diaries, enterprise documents, and sermon notes to bare how retailers outfitted a latest kind of alternate out of profound transitions within the puritan knowing of self-discipline, windfall, and the which means of latest England. Mark Valeri strains the careers of guys like Robert Keayne, a London immigrant punished by way of his church for competitive company practices; John Hull, a silversmith-turned-trader who helped to set up advertisement networks within the West Indies; and Hugh corridor, certainly one of New England's first slave investors. He explores how Boston ministers reconstituted their ethical languages over the process a century, from a scriptural discourse opposed to many industry practices to a providential worldview that justified England's advertisement hegemony and legitimated the industry as a divine build. Valeri strikes past simplistic readings that lessen advertisement job to secular mind-sets, and refutes the preferred concept of an inherent affinity among puritanism and capitalism. He exhibits how altering rules approximately what it intended to be pious and puritan trained the enterprise practices of Boston's retailers, who crammed their deepest notebooks with meditations on scripture and the ordinary order, based and led church buildings, and inscribed non secular reflections of their letters and diaries. exceptional in scope and wealthy with insights, Heavenly Merchandize illuminates the background in the back of the ongoing American quandary over morality and undefined.