ABSTRACT
These reflections on eighteenth-century correspondence as a form of historical evidence have taken shape as part of a larger inquiry that revisits mercantile culture in early America. That inquiry highlights the subjective experience of commerce on the part of men who were themselves market makers, examining commercial culture and identity formation in a specific market milieu: eighteenth-century Philadelphia. My approach is influenced by scholarship loosely affiliated under the rubric 'new cultural studies' and, in particular, new historicist studies of early modern Europe. The cumulative effect of this work is to suggest that a crisis of representation accompanied market development: the experience of market life and its dislocations involved a difficult transformation of ways of imagining the self.' A major motif of my larger study is that the merchants who operated at the fringes of the British Atlantic empire experienced just such a crisis. Their copious correspondence and other writing displays a virtual obsession with identity and reputation.
