Books and Manuscripts

London: Printed for J. Stockdale, 1784. First edition. 8vo. (ii), 52 pp. Three-quarter brown morocco over marbled paper-covered boards, stamped in gilt; top edge gilt, other edges trimmed; by Sangorski & Sutcliffe; remnants of now removed book-plate on front paste-down. Sabin 5458; ESTC N19703; Adams 83-7a

A scarce first edition of Philadelphia merchant and land speculator William Bingham's anonymously published pamphlet on British-American commerce, written in response to Lord Sheffield's 1783 Observations on the Commerce of the American States. Following the end of the American Revolution, Bingham was considered one of the richest men in the United States, and after a failed bid to serve in Congress, was then residing in London. While there he lobbied and waged a lettered campaign for the restoration of commercial relations between Great Britain and the United States. Here he challenges Lord Sheffield's arguments against trade with America, and his assertions that Britain was self-sustaining and could therefore impose punishing and retaliatory tariffs on American imports. Writing about this pamphlet, Margaret L. Brown explains, "In it he (Bingham) pointed out that antagonism between England and the United States could do no good. Because of their geographical position, Canada and the British West Indies were quite as dependent on the good offices of the United States as on England; if England refused to take American products freely, she must not be surprised if the United States started manufacturing articles hitherto imported from England; and Americans would never submit to the carrying of their goods in the vessels of a commercially hostile country, but would develop their own merchant marine in competition with England's." (Margaret L. Brown, William Bingham: Eighteenth Century Magnate, in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography; Vol. 61, No. 4, Oct. 1937; p. 398).