Conference on Colonial Economies

On October 24 and 25, the Library Company will present the 13th Annual Conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES). This year’s topic, “Ligaments: Everyday Connections of Colonial Economies,” focuses on the ways in which ordinary people navigated the economies of local North American places and at the same time traded across the boundaries of empire in the early modern era. Whether a widowed tavernkeeper in Montreal, a merchant in Veracruz, or a stonemason in Charleston, imperial subjects had to know how to make a sale, evaluate forms of money, judge a neighbor’s reliability, and set the value of goods.

Comprising ninety-minute sessions on “Cities on the Rim: Between Oceans and Interiors”; “Commercial Go-Betweens: Captains, Pilots, Chapmen, Outfitters”; “Mitigating Risk, Making the Sale”; “Connective Urban Spaces: Shops, Markets, Streets”; and “Economic Authority of Special Knowledge,” the two-day conference will present work by distinguished scholars, including many past and current PEAES fellows. This year, the conference is being held in conjunction with GlobalPhilly 2013, an exposition celebrating Philadelphia as a world city from September 15 to November 1.

Each year, the Library Company awards post-doctoral, dissertation, and short-term fellowships through its PEAES program.  PEAES promotes scholarship in and public understanding of the origins and development of the early American economy—broadly conceived to encompass business, finance, commerce, manufacturing, labor, political economy, households and gender, and technology—through these fellowships, a monograph publication series with Johns Hopkins University Press, publication of conference proceedings in scholarly journals, seminars, public programs, and the acquisition, cataloging, and conservation of material. Past PEAES conferences have focused on plantation management in the colonial Chesapeake and women’s economies of early America. For more information about the program for this free, public conference go to the PEAES conference page.