THOMAS SHERIDAN'S COMMENT, insinuating that traders acted ‘merely for money’, encapsulates the premise of this book – or rather, the mirror of it. That is, this book argues that the business culture of the British Atlantic was one which was socially embedded and did not allow for pure profit maximising, at least in the short term – hence the question mark. In fact, Sheridan is more likely commenting on the idea that traders did not produce anything per se, but worked for profit from trade. Indeed, many merchants were successful in making money and were well respected for doing so. By the second half of the eighteenth century a merchant was someone who ‘trafficks to remote countries’, a man of ‘genius’, noble and independent, who employed the poor and encouraged the industrious. Their importance to the economic well being of the country led the political œconomist Malachy Postlethwayt to consider the merchant ‘the most useful Member of the Society in which he lives’. Contemporaries clearly held merchants in high regard. Importantly, they enjoyed this approbation because the business culture that facilitated their success was informed, framed and shaped by the wider social, economic, political and cultural milieu in which these merchants operated. Therefore, they were not atomised, profit-maximising, rational economic men. Through self-enforcing behavioural patterns as a community, which were internalized and emotionalized to a large extent, their business culture formed a private-order institution that facilitated trade around the Atlantic during the turbulent period 1750–1815. There was no way they could act ‘merely for money’.

Moreover, these men were extremely sophisticated in their understanding of commerce. Their detailed and nuanced conception of their role demands a more complex approach if we are to understand their motivations for, approach to, and management of, their businesses. This book therefore takes an interdisciplinary approach. Whilst Sheridan's comment mirrors the premise behind this book, the cover image, a bill of exchange, represents the ‘institutional elements’ of their business culture, as informed by socioeconomic literature.