Letterbook of Greg and Cunningham, 1756-57: Merchants of New York and Belfast
Mary B. Rose, Review of Letterbook of Greg & Cunningham, 1756-57, in Business History, Vol. 45, No. 4 (October 2003), 120-21.
THOMAS M. TRUXES (ed.), Letterbook of Greg & Cunningham, 1756-57 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xxxii + 430. H/back ISBN 19 0 7262198 £50).
There is a tradition of publishing letter books of eighteenth-century merchants and businessmen – Julia de Lacy Mann’s marvelous volume on the Wiltshire woolen trade immediately springs to mind. The current volume is in that tradition, and combines the richness of the original source with an extensive and insightful introduction and footnotes. It is this which really adds value and makes the letter book of interest to eighteenth-century scholars generally. It places it in context and in doing so highlights the general significance of trade between Belfast and New York as well as exploring methods of organizing business. Founded by Thomas Greg and Waddell Cunningham, Greg & Cunningham is described as the most successful Irish-American transatlantic trader, its prime interest being in the flax seed trade with Ireland. Thomas Greg – father of Samuel Greg of Quarry Bank – was a prominent figure in the Belfast business community, while Waddell Cunningham – also Irish – was based in New York. The letter book covers a relatively short period in the firm’s [pp. 120/121] history, but reflects its evolution from a small-scale to a complex enterprise. As a mirror on the eighteenth-century Atlantic trade and business conditions it is intriguing. It is all there, from the deep uncertainty of trade in the constant presence of war, through the importance of personal contact (some openly corrupt) and kinship networks, to the importance of the bill of exchange. This was the period when familiar services – such as marine insurance – were in their infancy and generally offered not by specialists but by mercantile firms such as Greg & Cunningham. It was the era of the Navigation Acts, but Greg & Cunningham’s trade was not entirely ‘legitimate’. The firm was engaged in smuggling and openly ‘advertised contraband goods in newspapers’ in New York – with the apparent collusion of the custom house with which Waddell Cunningham was intimately connected.
It is now 25 years since I completed my research on the Greg family. My focus was on the family cotton business in England, and it focused primarily on the nineteenth-century development and fortunes of both family and firm. I feel privileged to have had the chance to review this volume both for its utility to scholars of the eighteenth-century Irish-American trade and for the insights it gives into the origins and underpinnings of the Greg fortune. Thomas Truxes has undertaken painstaking and revealing research which, not only places the volume in a wider context, but which throws much light on aspects of the Greg family which have been for too long obscure. Not least the volume – by including Waddell Cunningham’s will – demonstrates the origin of the family interest in the West Indies and its land holdings in New York. My own interest in the Gregs was rekindled in reading this letter book. It will be welcomed by scholars of eighteenth-century trade and those interested in gaining insights into the organization of mercantile firms, as well as those interested in tracing the more specific origins of an unusual family firm.
Mary B. Rose, Lancaster University
