John J. McCusker

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  John J. McCusker built his career at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely talk to each other: history and economics. For most of the twentieth century, scholars treated these fields as neighboring rooms with a locked door between them. McCusker spent decades kicking that door open. He grew up in upstate New York, pursued graduate work at three universities on two continents, and eventually became the Ewing Halsell Distinguished Professor of American History and Professor of Economics at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. What draws him to this territory? How do you measure the price of rum in 1760, and why would anyone want to? The answers reach into the foundations of how we understand money, trade, and the colonial world that became the United States.

• 2. Three Schools, Three Mentors

  ›

  Robert W. Fogel was at the University of Rochester when McCusker studied there, and Fogel was already the kind of economist who believed historical data could answer questions that conventional economics left untouched. Fogel would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1993. That training pushed McCusker toward quantitative methods early. At University College London, he worked under Harry C. Allen, whose expertise kept McCusker anchored in the transatlantic world connecting Britain and its American colonies. Then at the University of Pittsburgh, Carter Goodrich directed his doctoral dissertation, which McCusker completed in 1970. Three universities, three mentors with three distinct orientations: each one shaped a different facet of the scholar who would eventually catalog how money moved across the early modern Atlantic.

• 3. Twenty-Four Years in Maryland

  ›

  McCusker spent twenty-four years teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park, a tenure long enough to anchor entire research programs. His courses ranged across general US history, US economic and business history, and the particular world of seventeenth and eighteenth century British America. That last category is where his most distinctive work took shape. In 1985 he published two major works in the same year. One, co-authored with Russell Menard, was The Economy of British America, 1607-1789. The other was European Marine Lists and Bills of Entry: Early Commercial Publications and the Origins of the Business Press. That double output in a single year signals something about his pace and his range.

• 4. Prizes and the Price of Rum

  ›

  The Economy of British America earned two honors: Choice named it an Outstanding Academic Book for 1985-1986, and the Society of Colonial Wars gave it a Distinguished Book Award, Honorable Mention. A second edition followed in 1991 with a supplementary bibliography, suggesting the book remained useful enough to warrant revision. McCusker's 1989 work, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies, pressed into territory few historians had mapped with such precision. The balance of payments between colonial economies is not a glamorous subject, but tracking where rum went and what it was worth meant reconstructing trade flows that shaped the political grievances leading up to revolution. The commodity was the lens; the crisis was the subject.

• 5. The Business Press and Price Currents

  ›

  McCusker's 1978 handbook, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600-1775, was reissued with corrections in 1992, a sign that practitioners kept reaching for it. His 1991 book, co-authored with Cora Gravesteijn, traced the origins of financial journalism through what were called commodity price currents, exchange rate currents, and money currents in early modern Europe. These were essentially the newsletters and printed sheets that merchants relied on to know what things cost in distant ports. McCusker argued that this business press was not a minor side development but a foundational one. How prices traveled across distances shaped how commerce happened. His 1992 work, How Much Is That in Real Money?, offered a historical price index designed specifically to help researchers convert old monetary values into comparable figures, and that guide was reprinted in 1993 and revised for a second edition in 2001.

• 6. Trinity and the Atlantic Frame

  ›

  In 1992, McCusker moved to Texas to join Trinity University in San Antonio, where he taught until retiring in 2015. Since 1994 he has also served in an honorary capacity as Adjunct Professor of early American History at the University of Texas in Austin. His later edited collections gathered the threads of his career. Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic World appeared in 1997. Then in 2001, co-edited with Kenneth Morgan, came The Early Modern Atlantic Economy. That volume's framing is worth pausing on: not the economy of Britain, not the economy of colonial America, but the Atlantic economy as a single interlocking system. McCusker had spent decades accumulating the data and the frameworks to argue for exactly that view, and the Morgan collaboration put it in consolidated form as he neared the end of his teaching career.