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Local Merchants And The Regional Economy Of The Connecticut River Valley, Gerald F. Reid

Sociology Faculty Publications

This paper focuses on valley/hill town interactions and regional economic processes in the upper Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Merchants, those individuals involved in the trading and movement of commodities, are an especially useful point of departure for investigating such concerns because they operated in the economic space between communities, towns, and regions. Attention to their activities is likely to tell us a good deal about economic interaction across space and" over long distances in early America and, specifically, about economic interactions between valley towns and hill towns in the Connecticut River …