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This chapter investigates the behaviour and perceptions of the merchant family in north India during the early colonial period. It traces the emergence of some of the key elements which came to make up the middle classes of north India in the later nineteenth century and provides an account of the connection between India's colonial and pre-colonial history. It examines how far the legal and administrative systems erected by the British impinged on the moral community of the merchants and highlights the strains between different elements of the intermediate classes which were reflected in explosions of communal violence and conflicts with the colonial authorities. The reorganisation of tolls, bazaars duties and urban taxation by the colonial authorities posed another subtle threat to merchant status since it overturned local indemnities and privileges.

This chapter considers the merchant family in north India during pre-colonial and early periods as a business enterprise. It suggests that many of the patterns of behaviour which seem to characterise the family firm of nineteenth-century north India can be understood as tactics to avoid the risks of operating in a peculiarly hostile business climate. It explains that from early youth, children in merchant families were taught that good business involved the constant division of capital into small, manageable portfolios. It also discusses business management practices including double entry bookkeeping and the use of a central daily cash book.

This chapter describes the characteristics of the merchant family in the antebellum American South. It explains that the family was the center of southern merchant culture and the ties between husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister provided the ultimate foundation for merchant values. The dynamics of all nineteenth-century white families incorporated varying degrees of affection, materialism, paternalism, and racism, but the peculiar blend of these qualities within the merchant family made it unique. The merchant family not only exhibited characteristics similar to those of both the yeoman and planter classes; its values spanned the growing sectional divide of antebellum America.

This chapter examines the political economy and the merchant families of the antebellum American South. It explores how commerce distinguished southern merchant families and their culture in the antebellum South and describes the various social classes that composed southern society. It explains that credit, debt, trade, and merchant-clerk relations ordered the lives of southern merchant families and the conventions of the retail trade distinguished these Southerners from the majority of their neighbors.

This chapter examines the changes in the lives of merchant families in the American South during the period from 1860 to 1863. The election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 precipitated the initial wave of southern state secessions and the following year eleven southern states declared their secession from the U.S. and formed the Confederate States of America. These events wreaked havoc upon the lives of thousands of southern merchants and their families because the war changed business patterns, threatened the safety of home and called men and merchants to become Confederate soldiers.

This chapter examines the condition of the merchant family in the American South during the period from 1984 to 1985. It suggests that the destruction wrought by the final two years of the American Civil War forced hundreds of merchants and their families to suspend business, relocate, and bury their dead. Many storekeepers lost their business and those who did continue to sell goods came under increased attack from a white southern population exhausted by war and speculation. The financial recovery of the southern merchants after the fall of the Confederacy was facilitated by their business ties with commercial wholesalers in the North and their common views with northern merchants.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the merchant culture in the antebellum American South during the period from 1820 to 1865 and how it was affected by the American Civil War. This book describes the merchant culture and political economy of the Old South and characterizes the antebellum merchant in southern society and the merchant family in the antebellum south. It also discusses the experiences of the merchant-soldiers and the conditions of the merchant family after the fall of the Confederacy.

This chapter is a joint study of the childhood and adolescent experiences of William Wilberforce and Marianne Sykes. Their two families were part of the Hull mercantile elite and their mothers were friends, and their youthful experiences form an instructive comparison and contrast. Wilberforce’s family background, schooling, and university career are described. It is argued that the adult Wilberforce can only by understood in the light of his childhood separation from his uncle and aunt. The discussion of Marianne Sykes focuses on her letters. It introduces one of the major characters in the book and throws light on the Midlands intelligentsia around Anna Seward and Erasmus Darwin.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to explore how the postbellum merchant class used favorable laws and socioeconomic conditions largely to control the petty financing of cotton agriculture and, in the process, rise to the pinnacle of Natchez social, political, and economic power by the turn of the century. At the core of this book are ten merchant family groups. They comprised a total of twenty-eight individual traders over the period 1865–1914. While having much in common in the developing Natchez mercantile arena, they displayed a range of circumstances and had diverse fates.

This chapter, which explores the dynamics of pre-industrial economies in the Alps, examines probate inventories and dowry settlements, and family and business archives of the rural families in Savoy and Dauphiné. First, it examines dowries and probate inventories as indicators of increasing wealth, and then describes the role of merchant families and kinship networks in the expansion of commercial activity in the mountain regions.