Heavenly Merchandize offers a critical reexamination of religion's role
in the creation of a market economy in early America. Focusing on the
economic culture of New England, it views commerce through the eyes of
four generations of Boston merchants, drawing upon their personal letters,
diaries, business records, and sermon notes to reveal how merchants built
a modern form of exchange out of profound transitions in the puritan
understanding of discipline, providence, and the meaning of New England.

Mark Valeri traces the careers of men like Robert Keayne, a London
immigrant punished by his church for aggressive business practices; John
Hull, a silversmith-turned-trader who helped to establish commercial
networks in the West Indies; and Hugh Hall, one of New England's first
slave traders. He explores how Boston ministers reconstituted their moral
languages over the course of a century, from a scriptural discourse
against many market practices to a providential worldview that justified
England's commercial hegemony and legitimated the market as a divine
construct. Valeri moves beyond simplistic readings that reduce commercial
activity to secular mind-sets, and refutes the popular notion of an
inherent affinity between puritanism and capitalism. He shows how changing
ideas about what it meant to be pious and puritan informed the business
practices of Boston's merchants, who filled their private notebooks with
meditations on scripture and the natural order, founded and led churches,
and inscribed spiritual reflections in their letters and diaries.

Unprecedented in scope and rich with insights, Heavenly Merchandize
illuminates the history behind the continuing American dilemma over
morality and the marketplace.

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