Massachusetts Shipping 1697-1714; A Statistical Study

Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, 1959. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good. xi, [1], 148 pages. Footnotes. Tabular Data. A Note on Procedure. Index. No dust jacket present. Small cuffs inside front cover and on fep. Bernard Bailyn (September 10, 1922 - August 7, 2020) was an American historian, author, and academic specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1953. Bailyn won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice (in 1968 and 1987). In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him for the Jefferson Lecture. He was a recipient of the 2010 National Humanities Medal. He specialized in looking at merchants, demographic trends, Loyalists, international links across the Atlantic, and especially the political ideas that motivated the Patriots. He was best known for studies of republicanism and Atlantic history that transformed the scholarship in those fields. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1971. Bailyn was a major innovator in new research techniques, such as quantification, collective biography, and kinship analysis. Bailyn was married to MIT Professor of Management Lotte Franziska Bailyn (née Lazarsfeld, born July 17, 1930), an American social psychologist. She is the T Wilson Professor of Management, Emerita at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She was the first woman faculty member at MIT Sloan. Bailyn carried out research on structural change in the world of work in industrial projects. This authoritative statistical analysis of a Colonial American shipping register provides revealing information about the magnitude of mercantile life in early New England. In thirty-three tables, the authors present in statistical form one of the few remaining fragments of the contents of the Massachusetts Register for the years 1697-1714. This register of colonial American shipping reveals that the Massachusetts fleet was surprisingly large, "in fact third in size in the English-speaking world, exceeded only by London and Bristol". The tables and their interpretative introduction point out that the Massachusetts fleet was owned almost entirely by Americans; ownership was spread through an extraordinarily wide range of American society; and very little English capital was involved since one out of every three adult males in Boston held some share in a seagoing vessel registered in those years. The book is also notable for the fact that it is one of the first applications of the IBM for historical research.--Harvard University Press.