The Drummer in Early American Merchandise Distribution

Lee M. Friedman

Business History Review, 1947, vol. 21, issue 2, 39-44

Abstract: After the Revolution merchandise locally manufactured was largely custom-made for the consumer. America's colonial merchants had combined the rôles of importers, exporters, bankers, middlemen, and shopkeepers. Only gradually, in the larger eastern centers, manufacturing other than for direct consumer use developed. It continued as a handicraft, however. The employer disposed of his surplus over local requirements through peddlers who scoured the adjacent countryside on foot or in peddlers' carts. As New England factories and mills developed, shoes, dry goods, tinware, cloth, clocks, firearms, hats, salt, and all the miscellaneous output of its infant industries were peddled throughout the land. Experience as a peddler was the school for the Yankee youth of the day destined for a mercantile career. Out of the towns each spring poured a hoard of young men with flowered carpetbags or with tin trunks strapped to their backs, afoot or with horse and wagon, headed for as distant a point as the Canadian border to the north or as far as Georgia to the south.

Date: 1947
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:buhirw:v:21:y:1947:i:02:p:39-44_02

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business History Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().