Chapter 35 Flow of Cash

[Samuel Moyer]

I should have mentioned the second paragraph of 353 in my last also... I think there might be something uniquely American (perhaps through WWII) in what is written:

Busines then, in this Province, Wagering included, was conducted overwhelmingly by way of Credit, -the Flow of Cash was not as important as Character, Duty, a complex structure of Debt in which Favors, Forgiveness, Ignominy were much more likely than any repayment in Specie.


Unable to find at this moment, but I recently read - I think- in The Gentle Puritan: The life of Ezra Stiles, by E. Morgan (Stiles 1727-1795) a description of his accounts.  My impression was that it was very normal to keep a book of records where one would track traded goods and labor, including the labor of children...  A bushel of mulberries picked, half a days labor in the service of a neighbor, stuff like that... and then eventually a day of reckoning, though this might be years after the first transaction.

I wonder if this sort of thing might have been unique to the colonials?  

Sam
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