| Résumé: | Compelling portraits of merchant networks that knit together far-flung parts of the Atlantic world tell us only part of the story about the central role of commerce in the early modern era. It is also imperative for historians to explore how the far-reaching communications and markets that merchants knit together depended on the local material economies of port cities—the daily, personal, and local exchanges taking place at all social and occupational levels. This article looks at how one merchant in Philadelphia made myriad pragmatic choices that became essential for his rise from a young clerk to a successful merchant. It situates him among the dozens of counting rooms and retail shops nested in the dense crush of properties along the city's waterfront, where face-to-face negotiations of payments due, orders of goods, and deliveries of ship stores provided the sinews connecting merchants to Atlantic peoples near and far. In the intimate local surroundings of Philadelphia, city merchants procured marine insurance, created markets for bills of exchange, shared knowledge about prices and consumer preferences, built ships and outfitted them for distant voyages—in short, their great transatlantic networks of commerce depended on endless acts of pragmatic local negotiation.
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