Merchants [ Commerce ]
… saw gentlemen move into business and merchants move into gentry through land acquisition. In his novel Moll Flanders , Daniel Defoe talked of the hybrid figure of the gentleman-tradesman. Moll, who had hidden her own humble background, sought to … periwig […]. Well, at last I found this amphibious creature, this land-water thing called a gentleman tradesman. 4 4 . Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. G.A. Starr and Linda Bree (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 51. Historians …
Commerce | Merchants | Middling sort | North America | Politeness
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