Market Manipulation, the 1780s Way: What a Letter to a Flour Dealer Tells Us About the Early Modern Political Economy

Pierre Gervais (1)

1 CRAN - Centre de Recherche sur l'Amérique du Nord

The article shows how one easily overlooked sentence in a Pennsylvania flour broker’s 1786 correspondence revealed a widespread, organized, and successful effort to manipulate and control access to early American regional markets, in this case the flour market in the Philadelphia hinterland.

Mots clés: Markets; merchant; oligopoly; Philadelphia; Hollingsworth; Early Modern; flour dealers

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Histoire

Pierre Gervais. Market Manipulation, the 1780s Way: What a Letter to a Flour Dealer Tells Us About the Early Modern Political Economy. Common-Place, 2016, 16 (2), http://common-place.org/book/market-manipulation-the-1780s-way-what-a-letter-to-a-flour-dealer-tells-us-about-the-early-modern-political-economy/. ⟨hal-01487669⟩