ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an example of how to read business correspondence as a particular type of qualitative source, one that can provide insight not only into the empirical nature of economic transactions but also into the social practices and cultural norms that motivate and explain particular economic decisions. It introduces investor letters as a specific genre of correspondence, and uses a case study of letters from small investors in late-nineteenth-century France to suggest insights into everyday economic life that they can offer historians.
