During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries aspiring Atlantic merchants selectively sought out practical mathematical skills. They did not generally master all aspects of mathematics, or even learn the skills they did acquire in a linear progression. For instance, merchants were likely to learn arithmetic, but not necessarily geometry or trigonometry, while navigators would have some grounding in geometry and trigonometry, but did not necessarily need to know arithmetic. Additionally, Atlantic merchants used counting boards, and tables of interest and currency conversions, to facilitate calculation. I engage with Patricia Cline Cohen’s A Calculating People, and geographically and temporally extend Deborah Harkness’s argument from The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution to argue that having “instrument literacy” could thus compensate for a reduced degree of “mathematical literacy.”
Although instruments allowed individuals in some professions to be simultaneously numerate and illiterate, Atlantic merchants often supplemented their numeracy skills with sophisticated literacy skills. Atlantic merchants needed to employ proxies, manage relationships, secure cargos, convert measurements and currencies, negotiate credit networks, and keep track of a multitude of simultaneous business transactions. Since this trade was done at a distance, it would have been virtually impossible to communicate with their transoceanic business associates without using written language, which required that one stay within the contemporary conventions of polite letter writing. In the complicated world of Atlantic commerce those who could manipulate and record words and numbers were at an advantage. My paper discusses the skills that successful Atlantic merchants needed, how they obtained those skills, and the tools that they used to support and supplement those skills.
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