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The Way to Wealth around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism

Sophus A. Reinert is Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. He is a historian of political economy and author of Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Harvard University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 George L. Mosse Prize, the 2012 EAPE-Myrdal Prize, and the 2012 Joseph J. Spengler Prize, as well as numerous articles, cases, and edited volumes.

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Sophus A. Reinert, The Way to Wealth around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization of American Capitalism, The American Historical Review , Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 61–97, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.61

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“T ime ,” B enjamin F ranklin professed poignantly in his 1748 Advice to a Young Tradesman , “is Money,” an iconic statement that, by commodifying existence itself, helped articulate the emotive core of modern capitalism. 1 Indeed, few historical figures today enjoy a more prominent place in the cultural and intellectual constellation of capitalism than that most elusive of Founding Fathers. 2 His myth uniquely inspires and inflects economic life not only in America but across the world, from the impromptu exhortations of costumed impersonators in Boston to the musings of Bangladeshi bloggers. 3 A seemingly timeless herald and savior of capitalism, hailed as “our global citizen to show the way to the next golden age,” Franklin is frequently approached, caricatured, and interrogated in this ongoing period of economic turmoil for operational advice both personal and political. 4 We can gain a richer and more nuanced sounding board for the preoccupations of our own time by examining how he became such a savant of capitalism in the first place and to what purpose; the extraordinary yet hitherto unknown extent to which his economic ethos was disseminated and acculturated internationally in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and ultimately what perhaps was lost of his wider political economy during the global apotheosis of his writings.

That Franklin's contribution to the development of capitalism has again attracted popular and critical attention should come as no surprise. 5 Perennial crises in, under, and of capitalism—ranging from the bankruptcies of individual actors to systemic global upheavals like the one we are currently experiencing—invariably inspire scholars and laymen alike to search beyond the level of immediate triggers, whether old-fashioned fraudulent bookkeeping or the frenzied securitization of collateralized debt obligations, to consider longer-term imbalances and probe the murky depths of economic “culture” itself. 6 History can be a remarkably potent tool in such circumstances, not as a repertoire of easy remedies but as a source for critical reflection, and the history of capitalism has naturally become a thriving subfield in recent years. 7 Simultaneously, the study of political economy, like intellectual history more generally, has come increasingly to embrace its international—even global—elements to reflect contemporary needs and preoccupations, producing a growing historiography engaged with analyzing and recasting the ways in which economic ideas, practices, and ideologies have been codified, interpreted, translated, institutionalized, and acted upon around the world. 8

E conomic works can of course take many forms across many genres, from the theoretical to the prescriptive, from the hermetic to the popular. 9 And while historians of economic ideas have long favored the technical history of doctrines in their works, what the Austrian Harvard economist Joseph A. Schumpeter referred to as “ the history of economic analysis ,” scholars have recently begun calling for a closer integration of the history of political economy with the wider world of past experience, whether in terms of capitalism, business behavior, and public policy or in relation to cultural and social history more generally. 10 Indeed, drawing on exemplars from antiquity, political economy was long understood to encompass the management both of individuals and of polities, bridging, so to speak, the gulf between Xenophon's Oeconomicus and his Poroi , his manual for gentlemanly household management and his treatise on ways to increase the revenues of Athens. 11 The process of domestic and international emulation on which the development of early modern political economy depended was, for example, hardly limited to theories, policies, and technologies, but came to embrace popular economic modes and behaviors themselves, the very cultures of the competing economies. Emulation was, in short, concerned not merely with “useful knowledge” but also with “useful habits,” if not “useful cultures.” 12 What exactly a “culture” is remains a matter of some contention, though few doubt its explanatory importance. 13 Famously, though probably apocryphally, the great management theorist Peter Drucker claimed that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” a line of argument that has been used to explain the success of individual firms as well as countries and, through monikers such as “Asian Values” and “Killer Apps,” entire world regions. Indeed, the power of culture to stymie and to inspire economic development remains at the forefront of contemporary debates. 14

From these perspectives, Franklin in many ways represents an exceptional historiographical case, globally spanning the emergence of political economy and the codification of a quintessentially capitalist ethos. 15 A writer on economic theory and practice long known as “the apostle of industry and thrift,” he became one of the most influential, if unexpected, vectors of a distinctively “modern” culture of economic life—of the ethos, as so often has been argued, of “capitalism,” though the eighteenth-century idiom “commercial society” might be more appropriate. 16 Franklin was in his own time already a living legend, and doubtless his personal reputation facilitated the dissemination of his writings to an extent hardly matched in the history of political economy. The oldest of the revolutionary generation, and a relentlessly self-fashioning autodidact who grew up in the shadow of Harvard, he had amassed a considerable fortune as a printer before turning his polymath energies to the natural and social sciences, not to mention the realm of political philosophy and professional revolutionizing. Franklin himself preferred to conceptualize his lifelong project through a general vocabulary of “improvement,” a progressive term he employed to justify and encourage worldly melioration across the wide spectrum of human life, from the perfection of individual behavior to the pursuit of useful knowledge, the establishment of more rational institutions, the enhancement of agricultural output, the expansion of infrastructure and industry, and more generally the development of a virtuous and commercial, if parsimonious, society. 17

Works relating to both extremes of the continuum of political economy, the realms of high theory and of economic culture, were increasingly circulated during the eighteenth century, but on vastly different scales and with rather divergent scopes. An increasingly important aspect of this information revolution was certainly the rise of the business press, or “financial journalism,” across the European world, but though it influenced both economic theories and quotidian habits among significant parts of a given population, the quintessential evanescence of its output meant that the institution of news regarding trade mattered far more than the individual news items themselves. 18 Business news certainly conveyed information that contributed to the creation of economic knowledge and the standardization of economic practices in the early modern period, but it was not itself a repertory of codified, durable contributions to political economy, whether in terms of elaborating high theory or of systemizing ideals of individual behavior.

The arguably most widely disseminated eighteenth-century work on the high end of the spectrum, Adam Smith's 1776 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , would see no fewer than 94 editions, 107 if one counts condensed editions, in eight languages by 1850. 19 A similarly careful study has not previously been undertaken with reference to what is arguably the bestselling example of the other end, Franklin's The Way to Wealth (the title under which the piece was known from the 1770s), which first appeared as “Father Abraham's Speech” in the Poor Richard's Almanack for 1758, the last that would ever be published. Long known as Franklin's “most popular piece,” and indeed the work on which “Franklin's currency in American culture has really always rested,” it has been thought that 145 editions of the work appeared in at least seven languages before the end of the eighteenth century, eventually reaching thirteen languages, including modern phonetic writing. 20 To present this work as an effort in “political economy” might seem overly convenient, but Franklin's most succinct statement about “improvement” was indeed presented as the exemplar of precisely the lower end of the “social science” of “political economy” devoted to “a wise economy” well into the second half of the nineteenth century. 21 Smith and Franklin, in short, whose works encapsulated the proverbial high and low of Enlightenment political economy, are thought to have enjoyed similar standings in the constellation of book history.

Yet deeper bibliographical research reveals that Franklin's work was in fact far more widely influential than anyone has realized, indeed suggesting that it can serve as a gauge for the early development of something like a capitalist ethos in the modern world—the empire, so to speak, of capitalism. 22 The result is the most extensive bibliography ever put together of The Way to Wealth , and though the creation of an online interactive database will probably lead to the discovery of even more, the number of editions currently stands at more than 1,100, in twenty-six languages, by 1850. 23 This makes it by far the single most widely printed economic work—that is, a work principally relating to economic practices or ideas—in world history before the 1964 publication of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung , better known as “Mao's Little Red Book .” 24 The British novelist and literary critic D. H. Lawrence famously, and disparagingly, argued that Franklin had “set up … a pattern to America,” and the unprecedented international fame The Way to Wealth enjoyed suggests that he might have done much more than that. 25

I am very sorry, that you intend soon to leave our Hemisphere. America has sent us many good things, Gold, Silver, Sugar, Tobacco, Indigo, &c.: But you are the first Philosopher, and indeed the first Great Man of Letters for whom we are beholden to her: it is our own Fault, that we have not kept him: Whence it appears, that we do not agree with Solomon, that Wisdom is above Gold: For we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter, which we once lay our Fingers upon. 27
I therefore filled all the little Spaces that occur'd between the Remarkable Days in the Calendar, with Proverbial Sentences, chiefly such as inculcated Industry and Frugality, as the Means of procuring Wealth and thereby securing Virtue, it being more difficult for a Man in Want to act always honestly, as (to use here one of those proverbs) it is hard for an empty Sack to stand upright . These Proverbs, which contained the Wisdom of many Ages and Nations, I assembled and form'd into a connected Discourse prefix'd to the Almanack of 1757, as the Harangue of a wise old Man to the People attending an Auction. 33
he adviseth to Circumspection and Care, even in the smallest Matters, because sometimes a little Neglect may breed great Mischief ; adding, For want of a Nail the Shoe was lost; for want of a Shoe the Horse was lost; and for want of a Horse the Rider was lost , being overtaken and slain by the Enemy, all for want of Care about a Horse-shoe Nail. 40
think what you do when you run in Debt; You give to another Power over your Liberty … The Borrower is a Slave to the Lender, and the Debtor to the Creditor , disdain the Chain, preserve your Freedom; and maintain your Independency. Be industrious and free ; be frugal and free . 47

The only outside authority Franklin's system seemed to allow for was in this case divine, as he maintained that all the maxims would be “blasted without the Blessings of Heaven.” This was why people should “be not uncharitable to those that at present seem to want it, but comfort and help them. Remember, Job suffered, and was afterwards prosperous.” 50 But his relationship to biblical wisdom was not always so straightforward. “There are no gains, without pains,” The Way to Wealth preached, adroitly overturning the biblical admonition that “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” And Franklin easily transformed what for millennia had been understood as an exacting divine punishment for original sin into a source of aspiration and a motive for progress. 51 The independence—even salvation—of individuals as well as polities was contingent on a sound, if rather grave, moral and material economy, and all of this amounted, in Richard Saunders's closing words, to nothing less than “the Sense of all Ages and Nations.” The habit of industry and frugality that Franklin sought to inculcate in the working classes, people he later would condescendingly call “ bonnes Creatures ,” was, in short, a timeless ideal, seemingly unbound from the contextual chains to which he tied higher expressions of political economy. 52 And yet, Franklin concluded with oblique but penetrating humor, “People heard it, and approved the Doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary, just as if it had been a common Sermon”—just, one might add, as Franklin himself went off to London to complain about high taxes, ironically the very thing he suggested in the piece was unproblematic. The only exception was Saunders himself, who, taking this aphoristic précis of his own ideology to heart, reneged on buying a new coat and nobly stepped out of Franklin's oeuvre a paladin of capitalist common sense and an enemy of Veblenian conspicuous consumption. 53

W hat exactly F ranklin meant by this particularly popular part of his literary output remains something of a conundrum. 54 Truth be told, he had already expressed the quintessence of The Way to Wealth in the opening line of his 1748 Advice to a Young Tradesman , which began with the statement “Remember that Time is Money,” and ended by maintaining that “the Way to Wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the Way to Market. It depends chiefly on two Words, Industry and Frugality.” Unbeknownst to early readers, Franklin would likewise castigate his children for their extravagant habits in private correspondence, and in his policy proposals he similarly suggested increasing revenues by “rather discouraging luxury, than loading industry with unnecessary burthens.” 55 In short, the economic vision he conveyed through much of his writing both public and private rested on the capitalization of life itself, every moment and every act calculated toward dutiful, virtuous, and meaningful accumulation. 56 Fittingly, he argued as a young man that “Life is a kind of Chess,” and that the beloved game was an “image of human life” in which “skill” and “prudence” were the means of success. 57

For the longest time, Franklin was taken literally. It was in this tradition that Weber famously argued that he encapsulated “the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism” with “almost classical purity.” He had made acquisitiveness “ ethically slanted,” yet “so completely devoid of all eudaemonistic, let alone hedonist, motives … that it appears something wholly transcendent and irrational.” It is certainly true that The Way to Wealth depicted an ideal life that was far from Epicurean, and that it presented “the duty of the individual to work toward the increase of his wealth,” yet it is not entirely clear that Franklin “assumed” this “to be an end in itself.” 58 The entire framework for Abraham's speech, after all, was meant to emphasize the relationship between the industry of individuals, the integrity of their society, and their polity's success in a war-torn world. But the most problematic aspect of the Weberian thesis was the uneasy relationship between Franklin's avowed ideals and his personal habits. And as historical scholarship began to peel back the layers of Franklin's authorship, this discrepancy became untenable to the point where Weber's portrayal came even to be considered “ludicrous.” 59

Franklin became a “prophet of the American Dream” also because he “understood the value of a good hoax,” as Alan Houston recently put it, and historians and laymen alike have certainly confused the historical Franklin with his literary personae to everyone's detriment. 60 Eloquently addressing this problem, Jill Lepore has drawn on the vast corpus of Franklin's writing to recast The Way to Wealth as “a parody, stitched and bound between the covers of a sham.” 61 Was Franklin's caricature of a homo economicus , so distant from his personal demeanor, ultimately a satire? There is indeed something reminiscent of Cervantes's Don Quixote about The Way to Wealth , its ironic layering of personae, of narrators within narratives, not to mention its mesmerizing tangle of understated humor and deadening seriousness. 62 Such historical pranks can hold extraordinary explanatory potential, as Robert Darnton has so brilliantly shown, but “getting the joke” can be remarkably hard. 63 In Franklin's case, it was so hard that nobody, in essence, “got it” until two and a half centuries later, when about forty volumes of his writings had been published. 64 The British political philosopher John Dunn once quipped that the reception of a text usually stands “in a somewhat ironical relation to its author's original intentions,” but it is hard to argue against the notion that Franklin's wildly consequential joke—if a joke it was—fell flat, in our time and his own. 65 The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “joke” as “Something said or done to excite laughter or amusement; a witticism, a jest; jesting, raillery; also, something that causes amusement, a ridiculous circumstance.” If Franklin's Way to Wealth indeed was a joke, it was a deeply tragicomic one with a punchline centuries in the making, and it remains to be seen who will have the last laugh.

Though engaging with a different problem from that of producing apt agents for commercial society, a letter Franklin wrote from London a few months after completing The Way to Wealth suggests another plausible—and not necessarily substitutive—reading of his essay. He accepted there that an elite interlocutor could “find it easy to live a virtuous Life without the Assistance afforded by Religion,” but feared that “a great Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and ignorant Men and Women … who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual , which is the great Point of its Security.” Trusting the common people to live without religion would be the equivalent of “unchaining the Tyger.” 66 And as Franklin soon would write to Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the most central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, “exhort[ing] People to be good” required “ shewing ” them “ how they shall become so,” an “ Art of Virtue ” aimed at affecting nothing less than their “ Habits .” In the realm of political economy, Franklin's Way to Wealth was addressed not to the minds but to the hearts of men, and his aim was not simply to impact the world of ideas but to influence sentiments, habits, and ultimately culture itself. 67

In this, capitalism was ironically somewhat like deism, best experimented with by mature minds, and just as Franklin worried about what the absence of organized religion might do to the working classes while privately he dabbled with deism, so he enjoyed his luxuries while “ashamed of the Orders of my Countrymen for so much Tea, when necessaries are wanting for Cloathing [ sic ] and defending!” 68 Once virtue had become habitual, individuals would know how to take the next steps, whether in religion or in their personal economy. Franklin himself worked relentlessly the first four decades of his life, after which he retired to pursue a life of leisure and legend. 69 What was deadly serious to one reader could be hilarious to another. Franklin was an inveterate wordsmith, deeply attuned to the colonial publishing culture he had done so much to establish, but he never doubted The Way to Wealth 's principal audience, nor its impact. 70 As he put it in a letter accompanying a copy of the pamphlet he sent to the reformer and former attorney general of Quebec Francis Maseres, “I enclose a little Piece I wrote in America to encourage and strengthen those important Virtues” of “Industry and Frugality among the lower People.” 71

The bringing all these scatter'd Counsels thus into a Focus, enabled them to make [a] greater Impression. The Piece being universally approved was copied in all the Newspapers of the Continent, reprinted in Britain on a Broadside to be stuck up in Houses, two Translations were made of it in French, and great Numbers bought by the Clergy and Gentry to distribute gratis among their poor Parishioners and Tenants. In Penssylvania [ sic ], as it discouraged useless Expense in foreign Superfluities, some thought it had its share of Influence in producing that growing Plenty of Money which was observable for several Years after its Publication. 72

Franklin had written to change the “habits” of the “common People,” rejoiced late in life at the apparent success of his endeavor, and actively worked to get the pamphlet translated. 74 But he could not have known the true extent of its publishing success, as it “passed,” in Carl van Doren's memorable phrase, “from literature into the general human speech.” 75 And it did so not only in English, but also all across the Babel of the European world—which during this period of imperialism came to map ever more neatly onto the world as such—attempting to inflect economic mores precisely in the way Franklin had hoped. The text was sometimes mangled, sometimes stripped of its narrative framework, a few times translated into images, but its core message was so succinct, so aligned with the perceived exigencies of common sense, and, importantly, so eminently readable and marketable that the vast majority of translations were remarkably faithful. In short, they presented no pretense of analytical rigor or coherence, and not a single reasoned argument in the sense that a seasoned reader of Smith's Wealth of Nations would appreciate.

F ranklin's biographers readily admit that he was no “abstract or systematic thinker,” and no less an authority than Schumpeter found “little to commend for purely analytic virtues” in his political economy. 76 Partly, this was a result of Franklin's scholarly profile and his somewhat polymath dilettantism. Partly, however, it also reflected his intended audience, which differed greatly from the more sophisticated readership addressed by works such as Richard Cantillon's near-contemporary Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General , which extolled not only the wealth-creating power of capitalist investments but also the risk-taking role of entrepreneurs in commercial societies. 77 Franklin and Cantillon both engaged with recognizably capitalist problems, but they addressed very different aspects of them with dramatically different styles and degrees of theoretical complexity. And it was not that Franklin could not write more technical treatises in the field. In fact, he often did, but The Way to Wealth partook in a register of political economy that no longer is recognized as such. 78

Yet, at the time, observers felt rather differently about the matter. An 1801 Danish edition of The Way to Wealth aiming to be a “New Year's Gift to Old and Young” claimed that Franklin had produced “the best practical economic system that one so far has seen,” and it was used to teach students political economy in Havana, Cuba, in 1835 in an edition applauded by an economic journal in faraway Italy. 79 Adopting a more historical perspective on political economy, Franklin's Way to Wealth contributed to, and was rapidly absorbed by, this discourse, on all levels, with the aim of addressing poverty and changing habits. In so doing, it very much aligned itself with the seventeenth-century English Society for the Reformation of Manners, itself a darling of economic theorists in the tradition of John Locke and John Cary, and its echoes can perhaps be heard most strongly in the similarly widespread nineteenth-century tradition of combating pauperism through moralizing self-help doctrines and the gradual codification of an “American” work ethic during the following century. 80

But where Locke had argued for the necessity of corporal punishment to instill the proper habits in children, The Way to Wealth took the form of a carrot rather than a stick. 81 It was meant to empower people by changing the way they thought about their current and future welfare. While Smith's Wealth of Nations was read by an educated elite, Franklin's Way to Wealth was included in popular education also as a means of encouraging what Peter Burke has so disparagingly referred to as “the petty-bourgeois ethic,” a culture of industriousness, of honesty, of frugality, of all the virtues thought necessary for individual and aggregate success in a world increasingly characterized by international economic competition. 82 In Carlo Ginzburg's terms, it was certainly an example of “indoctrination of the masses from above,” but it simultaneously harked back to his halcyon age of “hidden but fruitful exchanges, moving in both directions between high and popular culture,” in that Franklin and his subsequent editors put existing “popular” aphorisms and expressions to new, more focalized use. 83

Noble race of my native land, I am as proud of your prowess as of the fact that your blood courses through my veins; and it shall ever be my wish to testify my high admiration. I was the first man to don your manly dress in the Lowlands after the prohibition was revoked, and that in time of snow and storm. When I can discern opportunities where I can render assistance in stimulating professional, fishing, or other employment throughout the country, it will be my pleasure to do so. Meantime, I place within your reach, embodied with the Proverbs, old sayings rich in thought, written by the wise and venerable Franklin, of America. These will be fruitful to you in wisdom in the world's ways; and if you will add these to your faith in Jesus Christ, knowledge of God, His love and obedience in your hearts, in your daily walk and conversation, you will be esteemed by all, and will enjoy peace and happiness within. Farewell. 85

Sometimes consciously, sometimes not, The Way to Wealth was disseminated with the hope of creating better workers throughout the European world, and increasingly so during the systemic transition of “industry” from a moral characteristic to an economic activity based on coal-consuming manufacturing. The local Society of Emulation thought the pamphlet useful to disseminate among “workers” during the early years of industrialization in the Belgian city of Liège, and across France it was translated in the 1820s and 1830s to encourage urban laborers recently arrived from the countryside to trust and utilize savings institutions, which had been largely unfamiliar to them while they were working in the agricultural sector. 89 The raw hoarding of idle wealth depicted in Franklin's original was, finally, turned into fruitful capitalist accumulation, channeled into productive activities through an ever-expanding banking system, by then the default savings mechanism on both sides of the Atlantic. His maxims, rebranded “Advice to Labourers,” were so important to the whole economic system that they “should be hung up in every cottage,” according to the Labourers' Friend Society of London—a relationship between industriousness and industry that found visual expression in a London broadside of 1849, which surrounded Franklin's aphorisms with images of wage-laboring men, industrial tools, and towering views of smokestacks and factory buildings. 90 Franklin's ideas connected earlier conceptions of an Industrious Revolution to the Industrial Revolution as they left their largely agrarian colonial origins, still characterized by Cimmerian institutions of slavery and bound labor, to form nothing less than a catechism of “free” industrial capitalism in the European core. 91 Indeed, his work was one of the primary vehicles of the empire of capitalism itself, understood not simply as the growing and ever more globalized network of economic activity taking shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but as the spatial expansion of an economic ideology.

Throughout the world, The Way to Wealth was seen to teach lessons in individual and political welfare that transcended space, time, and, importantly, class, unifying social ranks around industrious virtues across and inside empires both old and new. 92 Anyone was capable of “making a fortune [ far fortuna ]” by working hard, the text sometimes conveyed explicitly, a far cry from earlier Machiavellian resorts to fortuna -controlling violence and heroism. 93 As a Norwegian edition published in the formerly Hanseatic town of Bergen put it in 1841, The Way to Wealth was “a pocketbook for all classes.” 94 At times it was even hailed, with erudite references to Petrarch and the cyclicality of time, as a means of reversing the relative decline of a polity in the face of international rivalries by rendering subjects more productive and thus competitive. 95 Its most striking manifestation as a vector of sociability might have been in Hungary, where it was translated in the tumultuous revolutionary year of 1848 to show how—on the model of the United States, the preeminent multiethnic polity in the translator's mind—members of a divided political community could come together around a shared economic ethos. 96

Franklin's apothegmatic style was undoubtedly responsible for the work's wide-ranging publishing success across such a broad array of contexts and, though he emulated an ageless European tradition, would help launch what some scholars have identified as a quintessentially American convention of proverbial politics, at home and abroad. 97 The coherence of Abraham's speech resulted rather from the thematic unity of the individual precepts than from their sequential architecture, and the text's episodic nature, seemingly assembled rather than composed, lent itself well to rote memorization, oral recitation, and promulgation in different media such as iconographical broadsides. The near-biblical popularity of The Way to Wealth was, in short, a reflection not merely of the religious veneer that Franklin layered upon it through the device of presenting his maxims in the form of a sermon, but also of his ability to emulate the very techniques of the Scriptures' historical diffusion. 98

Benjamin Franklin, Bowles's Moral Pictures; or, Poor Richard Illustrated: Being Lessons for the Young and the Old, on Industry, Temperance, Frugality, &c. (Manchester: Bancks and Co., 1816). Courtesy of the Kress Collection of Business and Economics, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

Benjamin Franklin, Bowles's Moral Pictures; or, Poor Richard Illustrated: Being Lessons for the Young and the Old, on Industry, Temperance, Frugality, &c. (Manchester: Bancks and Co., 1816). Courtesy of the Kress Collection of Business and Economics, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

Visual depictions of The Way to Wealth in the 1840s had less in common with Smith's Wealth of Nations than with the long tradition of illustrated Gospels stretching from the sixth-century Gospel of Saint Augustine to early-nineteenth-century illustrated broadsides, works that similarly conveyed inspirational stories and maxims to change notions of virtuous behavior in new contexts through the amalgamation of words and images. 99 And, much like the Gospels, Franklin's Way to Wealth strove to proselytize through timeless truths, the “Sense of all Ages and Nations.” Aphorisms were “forms of ‘eternity,’” as Friedrich Nietzsche would put it, “on which time tests its teeth in vain.” 100 Among Franklin's many achievements was abstracting from his far more complicated New World context to render a work ethic based on the self-made embrace of “industry” and “frugality” a sanctified and commonsensical part not only of the bourgeois worldview but of ideal popular culture in the industrializing West. 101

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Way to Wealth [broadside] (London: David Bogue and Henry Vizetelly, 1849). Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Way to Wealth [broadside] (London: David Bogue and Henry Vizetelly, 1849). Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

The Saint Augustine Gospels. Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, Lib. MS. 286, folio 125r. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

The Saint Augustine Gospels . Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, Lib. MS. 286, folio 125r. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Already by 1775, a Milanese publisher had used The Way to Wealth 's popularity as a measurement of modernity, finding no similar publishing successes throughout “ancient history”; another editor claimed that its influence had been so vast as to make it “worth more than a hundred thousand volumes in folio.” 102 Encountered more widely than any comparable text, it was used to teach children of both sexes how to read in cities throughout industrial Europe, from London to Copenhagen and Mainz, and was even taken as the exemplar to demonstrate eighty-four different styles of German calligraphy in a volume published in Karlsruhe in 1846. Not only did people learn to read with Poor Richard, he taught them how to write as well. 103 Of the more than eleven hundred editions that were published before 1851, at least seventy-six were schoolbooks, and another thirty-six can only be classified as children's books, some even taking the form of rebuses and inspirational Staffordshire China. Just between those two categories, in other words, The Way to Wealth saw more appearances than Smith's admittedly vastly more voluminous Wealth of Nations did in total. Yet, proving its bearing on the whole spectrum of political economy, it was also included in a French mélange in the late 1840s, alongside far more theoretically sophisticated essays by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Nicolas de Condorcet, François Véron Duverger de Forbonnais, and David Hume. 104 A Prussian recounting of The Way to Wealth , again published in the notable year 1848, even compared Franklin to Smith, two political economists who ostensibly reached similar conclusions regarding modern economic life from vastly different starting points and by vastly different means. 105

James Catnach, The Prince of Israel: The Most Remarkable Events in the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ (London: J. Catnach, 1824). Courtesy of the Bridwell Library Special Collections, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

James Catnach, The Prince of Israel: The Most Remarkable Events in the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ (London: J. Catnach, 1824). Courtesy of the Bridwell Library Special Collections, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

B ut if F ranklin went viral in the late eighteenth century, the patterns of his contagion are telling, and though decidedly embedded in wider global structures, political economy remained a predominantly European and American phenomenon in the period. 106 The Way to Wealth embraced the world, but though it played a role in the globalizing process of the time, it was far from globalized. 107 Plotting the longitude and latitude of the known editions that came out between 1757 and 1850 and subsequently rendering maps charting the work's diffusion with graduated symbols reveals a web-like pattern that empirically confirms what many might have guessed. The catechism of capitalism remained limited to the European world even as it circumnavigated the globe, from Philadelphia through London to Moscow to Launceston, Tasmania, and on to Natchez, Mississippi, and Bridgetown, Barbados. 108 Only five of those more than eleven hundred editions seem to have been published south of the equator: two in Argentina, two in Brazil, and one in Oceania. The vast majority appeared along a crescent drawn up across the northeast coast of the United States and following the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic littoral, through the British Isles and into Northern Europe. And as demonstrated by a more specialized heat map tallying appearances geographically and normalizing them by area, in this case within a seventy-mile radius of the space of publication, The Way to Wealth 's spatial saturation was greatest on the northeast coast of the U.S. and in the English Midlands, the Low Countries, northern and particularly eastern France, Germany, and northern Italy. Its near-complete absence, even within continental Europe, from the publishing spheres of Portugal, Spain, western France, southern Italy, Greece, and most of Eastern Europe is equally conspicuous.

Benjamin Franklin, The Art of Making Money Plenty in Every Man's Pocket (New York: S. Wood, [1811]), 8. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Benjamin Franklin, The Art of Making Money Plenty in Every Man's Pocket (New York: S. Wood, [1811]), 8. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

One of numerous different children's mugs adorned with illustrations and proverbs drawn from Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth produced in Staffordshire in the early nineteenth century. Mug in author's private collection. Photo courtesy of Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

One of numerous different children's mugs adorned with illustrations and proverbs drawn from Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth produced in Staffordshire in the early nineteenth century. Mug in author's private collection. Photo courtesy of Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.

Strikingly, as the accompanying maps demonstrate, most places in which The Way to Wealth was published saw only one or a handful of editions, and only Edinburgh, London, Paris, Philadelphia, and New York saw more than twenty. Of these, London and Paris were the undisputed centers of dissemination with more than a hundred editions each, which indubitably also reflected their respectively unique roles in the publishing worlds of the English and French languages. Workers in the industrial centers of the European world, and a few of its colonial outposts, were to be taught the virtues of industry—their suppliers of raw materials, cheap labor, and for a long time slaves in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and also most of Australia and Latin America less so. Indeed, appearances of The Way to Wealth coincide almost perfectly—down even to the intensity of territorial saturation—with the first areas of the world to enter the Industrial Revolution. 109 Correlation is, of course, not causation, but the geographical relationship between early industrialization and the proliferation of Franklin's industrial ethos is suggestive enough to invite further, more specific regional studies. What does, however, become clear from mapping the dissemination of this work is that the spatial enculturation of capitalist motives, values, and habits during this first period of globalization diverged markedly from capitalism's worldwide reach as an economic system connecting and harnessing capital, land, resources, commodities, markets, and workers of varying degrees of freedom. 110

Heat Map of the Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth, 1757–1800.

Heat Map of the Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth , 1757–1800.

Not only did Franklin partake in the establishment of a global, if circumscribed and at times thinly stretched, web of commonly accepted ideas regarding ideal economic behavior, but the cumulative dissemination of The Way to Wealth throughout the European world also affected this web's density in the first half of the nineteenth century. 111 Often, the work entered new regions through their central publishing places before further editions were released in minor satellites, whether spatial or linguistic. In Italy, for example, it ventured from major publishing centers such as Milan and Venice to Udine, Lugano, Livorno, Cremona, and Orvieto. 112 In Finland, it first arrived in Swedish translation, before Finnish editions appeared in minor towns from one extreme of the country to the other, from Porvoo (Borgå) to Oulu (Uleåborg). 113 The same, in many ways, was true for the translations from major to minor languages within the countries of Europe. In France, The Way to Wealth came out in French before Breton; in Britain, it was printed in English before Gaelic and Welsh; in Switzerland, there were editions in French, German, and Italian before a Romansch edition at long last appeared in Chur, in mountainous Kanton Graubünden. 114

Heat Map of the Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth, 1757–1850.

Heat Map of the Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth , 1757–1850.

Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth, 1757–1800.

Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth , 1757–1800.

And, not surprisingly, the total number of appearances exploded with the advent of steam printing in the nineteenth century. While fewer than three hundred editions were published before 1800, more than eight hundred appeared between 1800 and 1850. 115 This intensity has so far never been matched in the rest of the world, if only because digital technologies and infrastructure have made such regional publishing projects obsolete; today, The Way to Wealth is permanently at one's fingertips in most languages one can think of, everywhere local by virtue of its very virtuality. Nonetheless, the web of physical publications would become truly global in the second half of the nineteenth century. A Japanese translation appeared at the time of that country's own period of industrialization during the Meiji Restoration, and a dual French-Chinese edition appeared in Beijing in 1884. 116 By the early twenty-first century, Franklin had become one of capitalism's most iconic faces, adorning even the globally revered and reviled U.S. $100 bill. 117

Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth, 1757–1850.

Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth , 1757–1850.

By simple arithmetic, Franklin must have “influenced” millions of readers, but the untold majority left no traces of how they read The Way to Wealth , how they felt about it, and how, or even whether, it ultimately impelled them to change their ways. 118 Intellectual dissemination cannot straightforwardly be equated with cultural impact, and though Franklin unquestionably contributed—perhaps more than any other single author—to the codification of ostensibly bourgeois values in the European world, the extent to which he in effect succeeded in changing habits, let alone among the very lowest classes that so preoccupied him, remains open to debate. Was he, as Franklin himself suggested with regard to the virtue of “ Humility ,” better at securing “ Appearance ” than “ Reality ”? 119 Indeed, American historians have recently undermined one of the nation's most cherished myths by revealing the extent to which dominant practices of capitalism diverged from Poor Richard 's vision of moral accountability and financial scrupulousness during the nineteenth century, and where some scholars find an early embrace of capitalist worldviews among workers and artisans, others emphasize protracted processes of resistance and negotiation. 120 Yet, however fashionable, it would be too facile to dismiss Franklin as a mere mythmaker. Poor Richard's Almanack was second only to the Bible in popularity in the American colonies, and his Way to Wealth was called upon to teach schoolchildren of all backgrounds to read in places with mandatory primary education such as Prussia, and would soon become a mainstay of working-class self-help literature. 121 Perforce he must have influenced not only the ideas but also the habits of popular culture, though in different places at different paces and to different degrees. The global mapping of this process lies beyond the plausible scope of any single article, but the unparalleled dissemination of Franklin's text at the very least invites further, more localized studies to chart its relationship not only to industrialization but also to the global evolution of economic culture. 122

Dissemination of Benjamin Franklin's The Way to Wealth, 1757–1850.

And of those who did put pen to paper to express their thoughts regarding The Way to Wealth , not everyone appreciated its triumphant march across the expanding European world even at the height of its impact. The Presbyterian James Waddel Alexander was so worried about Franklin's influence in this regard in the late 1830s that he warned against this “pecuniary gospel,” which “perhaps” was “as familiar to the minds of the American people, as any human productions.” The “Maxims” it offered were, he thought, “undeniable,” yet, he concluded, “I fear that the boy who is bred upon such diet … will be not merely rich, but miserly.” 123 There was simply something too limiting, too persnickety, about this vision of virtuous economic behavior. It is a criticism that has resurfaced frequently since. For Weber, Franklin's essay was so inhuman as to be “irrational”; Mark Twain considered it “calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages”; and D. H. Lawrence soon followed suit: “the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden.” The Way to Wealth 's ideal citizen, a literary chimera where Benjamin Franklin, Richard Saunders, and Father Abraham intersected, was ostensibly “the Perfect Man of the future, in the Millennium of the world.” Yet he was ultimately “a virtuous little automaton,” the homo economicus “Frankenstein's Monster.” For “the ideal being was man created by man,” but “so was the supreme monster.” 124 Franklin was the Victor Frankenstein of capitalism, The Way to Wealth the Promethean scientist's laboratory notebook. 125

It was a reading that Franklin himself, in many ways, had encouraged. In fact, one of the reasons for the longevity and success of his particular vision of virtuous capitalist behavior was that it escaped the idiosyncrasies of its own context by single-mindedly evading almost all specificity, all nuance. The one instance in which Franklin referred to existing institutions regarding debt slavery as opposed to the liberties of a “free-born Englishman” was, simultaneously, the one passage that most often was changed as the text migrated into other contexts. The Way to Wealth was, in general, no merchant's handbook, with contextually dependent references to existing institutions or commercial practices; nor did it meddle in politics or formal jurisprudence. Even the means of production in the society it depicted, the most prevalent sectors of its economy, and the nature of its labor remained hidden behind its rhetorical strategies to render relentless work and frugality commonsensical. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its ostensibly populist grounding, the text remained doggedly abstract and therefore feasibly universal. From a largely rural mid-eighteenth-century colonial context of agricultural work based in large part on indentured and slave labor, The Way to Wealth lent itself effortlessly to the increasingly industrialized and unfettered labor markets of nineteenth-century metropolitan Europe.

Power, when separate from great Property, and properly restrained by salutary Laws, is so far from being prejudicial to Society, that it cannot well exist or continue without it. But Power united with great Wealth, is all that is necessary to render its Possessor absolute, and every thing, under him, at his own Disposal. Great Riches alone, says a late Writer, in a private Person, are as dangerous to the Prerogatives of the Crown as to the Rights of the Subject … Look through all History, and the Experience of Ages will demonstrate this Truth. 127
The Difference is not so great as may be imagined. Happiness is more generally and equally diffus'd among Savages than in our civiliz'd Societies. No European who has once tasted Savage Life, can afterwards bear to live in our Societies. The Care and Labour of providing for artificial and fashionable Wants, the Sight of so many Rich wallowing in superfluous Plenty, whereby so many are kept poor distress'd by Want. The Insolence of Office, the Snares and Plagues of Law, the Restraints of Custom, all contribute to disgust them with what we call civil Society. 128

That Franklin was not doctrinal should come as no surprise, except, perhaps, to the most fervent originalists. 129 Indeed, as Daniel Libeskind has argued, “the affective state of anxiety is a key component of architecture.” 130 Why should Franklin not at times have doubted the nature of the brave new world he helped construct? His uncertainty regarding commercial society might ultimately reflect back on the protean core of capitalism itself, ever changing and adapting across time and space. We still live in a world in which, as Smith explained, “Every man lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society.” 131 Franklin, too, was engaged in the study and construction of such a society, and his “science” of improvement was deeply preoccupied with what Emma Rothschild has so elegantly called “economic sentiments.” 132 But for all the minute calculations that went into his suggestion for economic behavior, these sentiments were far more attuned to the importance of social and political cohesion, to what his contemporaries knew as “sociability,” than many later readers would assume. As Franklin wrote to the English theologian, natural philosopher, and political theorist Joseph Priestley, he put improvements in “the Power of Man over Matter” resolutely second to the hope “that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another” and learn “Humanity.” 133

Franklin's rhetorical strategy in The Way to Wealth was so successful that this wider set of political and economic proclivities—which he elsewhere thought essential for the development of commercial society—including not only relative economic equality but also comparatively liberal political institutions, fell entirely by the wayside, whether in tsarist Russia or contemporary China. Large parts of the developing world today embrace the capitalist elements of Franklin's writings while paying scant attention to their intended social and political foundations. Indeed, one finds calls to “produce inexpensive, good translations” not of Franklin but of “Burke, Locke and other thinkers, and spread the texts widely” to “counter democracy's global retreat.” 134 This while central facets of capitalism itself, as it has developed in recent decades, are being tested with increasing intensity in the developed world, whether by academics and politicians, through popular protests such as the Occupy Movement, or in mainstream media, precisely for its failure to sustain Franklin's precarious balance between “wealth” and “power.” 135

The Way to Wealth , with its spectacular success in print during the first period of globalization, provides a unique opportunity to meditate on the historical vagaries of capitalism and of commercial society, on New World slaves and Old World factory workers, Scottish Highlanders and Hungarian nation-builders. We could also have added to this story the curious ways by which Franklin's tedious Poor Richard came to be usurped by Ayn Rand's even more dismal John Galt in the phantasmagoria of capitalism, and with what consequences. 136 In his own time, Franklin the deist feared that abolishing traditional religion would “unchain the Tyger.” 137 Similarly, Franklin the spendthrift and bon vivant designed his aphorisms to discipline workers in commercial societies by sublimating their passions into industry, frugality, and the pursuit of profit. With time, and not without irony, the capitalist ethos he helped devise would unchain tigers of its own. Perhaps deservedly, the ahistorical single-mindedness of his Way to Wealth took on a life of its own, further simplified to the point where the proverb that best summarizes the course of global capitalism over the past few decades might very well be chart-topping New York entertainer Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson's rather more accentuated slogan “Get Rich or Die Tryin'.” 138 Hearing his rapper colleague Kimberly “Lil' Kim” Jones wax lyrical about expensive cars and murdering people “for the Benjamins [$100 bills],” we might find ourselves facing Franklin's painful punchline after all. 139

The problem may lie partly with the limited capacity of proverbial arguments to communicate complexity. 140 In reducing wisdom to sound bites, proverbs are by necessity caricatures; trenchant yet necessarily insufficient, they can only ever represent fragments of understanding in any given context. If we are stuck with simple truths, though, we would do well to remember that Franklin's cherished “Way to Improvement” aimed ultimately not at riches but at “Humanity,” that wealth was for him a means and not an end. 141 The early-fifth-century Greek philosopher Synesius of Cyrene reported in his Praise of Baldness that Aristotle, in a lost work On Philosophy , believed that the ancient wisdom of long-gone civilizations, those that had fallen victim to the “immense destructions of mankind,” had survived through the ages only in the form of “clever and concise expressions.” 142 Civilizational and existential threats are always around the corner, but, in a more practical vein, looking over the all too real devastation wrought by the alluringly clever yet naively dogmatic economics of the last decades, we might ask ourselves now what economic wisdom we wish to pass on to future generations, and in what form. 143

The bibliography of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth that informs this essay was compiled by my former research associate Kenneth E. Carpenter, who additionally has long been a close friend and colleague. I would further like to thank my research director, Cynthia Montgomery, for her unparalleled support, and Debra Wallace and Harvard Business School's Knowledge and Information Services for helping bring the project into the twenty-first century. Michael Hemmet masterfully created the affiliated website, http://waytowealth.org /, and I am indebted to Scott Walker of the Harvard Map Department for the maps. I am further thankful to Kaitlyn Tuthill and particularly Lauren Pacifico for their invaluable help at various times, and to Sìm Innes and Sarah Zeiser for their generous assistance with the Gaelic edition. The anonymous readers for the AHR improved the manuscript in countless ways, and audiences in Cambridge, Mass., Cambridge, UK, Helsinki, and Paris gave valuable comments on different aspects of it. I am particularly grateful to Jeremy Adelman, Jesus Astigarraga, Sven Beckert, Loïc Charles, Paul Cheney, Sebastian Conrad, Hugo Drochon, Walter Friedman, Tom Hopkins, Sam James, Diana Kim, Jani Marjanen, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Michael O'Brien, Arnaud Orain, Erik S. Reinert, Daniel Rodgers, Julio J. Rotemberg, Emma Rothschild, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Jacob Soll, Michael Sonenscher, Koen Stapelbroek, Mikko Tolonen, Richard Tuck, Carlo Augusto Viano, Francesca Viano, Carl Wennerlind, and the inimitable Robert Fredona.

1 Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One,” in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin , 41 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1959–2014) [hereafter Papers ], 3: 306–308. Franklin's papers have now been digitized as well. See The Papers of Benjamin Franklin , http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/ ; and Founders Online: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin , http://founders.archives.gov/about/Franklin .

2 For recent biographies, see Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, Conn., 2003); and the unfinished yet exhaustive J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin , 3 vols. to date (Philadelphia, 2005–2008). On Franklin's pantheonization, see also Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (London, 2005); and for the foundational analysis of his relationship to capitalism, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings , ed. and trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (London, 2002).

3 See, for an impressionistic example, usages ranging from those listed in Michael Zuckerman, “Benjamin Franklin at 300: The Show Goes On—A Review of the Reviews,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 131, no. 2 (2007): 177–207; to Julfikar Islam, “Capitalist Ethos of Benjamin Franklin,” June 25, 2013, http://futurestartup.com/2013/06/25/capitalist-ethos-of-benjamin-franklin/ ; and Roy E. Goodman, “Afterword: Benjamin Franklin's Material Presence in a Digital Age and Popular Culture World,” in Paul E. Kerry and Matthew S. Holland, eds., Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World (Madison, Wis., 2012), 167–170.

4 Bruce Piasecki, Doing More with Less: The New Way to Wealth (New York, 2012), 15. See similarly Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo, Benjamin Franklin's Guide to Wealth: Being a 21st Century Treatise on What It Takes to Live a Thrifty Life (York Beach, Maine, 2004); and Steve Shipside, Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth: A 52 Brilliant Ideas Interpretation (Oxford, 2008).

5 For an overview, see David Waldstreicher, “Benjamin Franklin, Capitalism, and Slavery,” in Waldstreicher, ed., A Companion to Benjamin Franklin (London, 2007), 211–236.

6 In the enormous literature on economic crises, see still Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises , 6th ed. (Houndmills, 2011). On the politics of change following such crises, see recently Francis Fukuyama, “What Crisis?,” in Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama, eds., New Ideas on Development after the Financial Crisis (Baltimore, 2011), 311–325; and with respect to the economic ideas underpinning them, see Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London, 2013). For popular examples of “cultural” explanations in the wake of recent financial crises, see Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street (New York, 1989); David Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (New York, 2004); John R. Childress, Leverage: The CEO's Guide to Corporate Culture (London, 2013).

7 Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now (Philadelphia, 2011), 314–335. As Michael Sonenscher put it, “it is almost impossible to associate capitalism with a necessary configuration of production processes, products, markets, or legal and political institutions”; Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (1989; repr., with a new preface, Cambridge, 2011), 375. Its history remains a remarkably torn field along a wide ideological arc, but see for extremes Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (Chicago, 2010); and Bruce R. Scott, Capitalism: Its Origins and Evolution as a System of Governance (Berlin, 2011). For historical reflections, see still Alan Macfarlane, The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford, 1987), 223–227.

8 See for discussion Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, Mass., 2011); David Armitage, “The International Turn in Intellectual History,” in Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn, eds., Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (Oxford, 2014), 232–252; Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013). On the general historiographical phenomenon, see Kenneth Pomeranz, “Histories for a Less National Age,” AHA Presidential Address, American Historical Review 119, no. 1 (February 2014): 1–22.

9 For recent work on more literary genres of early political economy, see among many others Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, N.J., 2008); Richard T. Gray, Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770–1850 (Seattle, 2008); Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, Mass., 2011).

10 Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis , ed. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter (New York, 1954), 38; Emma Rothschild, “Arcs of Ideas: International History and Intellectual History,” in Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz, eds., Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2006), 217–226, here 222; Sophus A. Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (December 2010): 1395–1425, here 1420–1421; Jeffrey Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 1 (2012): 233–248. On Schumpeter, see Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

11 Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary , trans. and ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Oxford, 1995); Xenophon, Poroi: A New Translation , trans. and ed. Ralph E. Doty (Lewiston, N.Y., 2003). On these see Sophus A. Reinert, “Introduction,” in Antonio Serra, A Short Treatise on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations , ed. Sophus A. Reinert, trans. Jonathan Hunt (London, 2011), 1–93, here 29–30. Franklin was, at the very least, familiar with the Oeconomicus through its translation in Robert Vansittart, Certain Ancient Tracts Concerning the Management of Landed Property (London, 1767), 1–82, discussed in Georgiana Shipley to Benjamin Franklin, February 11, 1777, in Papers , 33: 303–306.

12 For a recent study of Europe's rise to prominence in light of the early modern commonplace of “useful knowledge,” see Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2002). This preoccupation is evident from early modern Italian traditions of “ economia civile ” to German Cameralism; for examples, see Reinert, Translating Empire .

13 For what it is worth, I here follow the usage sanctioned by the Oxford English Dictionary , which defines “culture” as “The distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a particular nation, society, people, or period.”

14 On the Drucker quote, see among many others Adam Bryant, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation (New York, 2014), 9; and Curt Coffman and Kathie Sorensen, Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch: The Secret of Extraordinary Results, Igniting the Passion Within (Denver, Colo., 2013). If not this specifically, Drucker certainly said similar things, for a selection of which see Peter Drucker, The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (2001; repr., New York, 2008). For recent cultural arguments, see Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York, 2001); and on the level of organizations, see Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership , 4th ed. (New York, 2010). See also the vast literature vivisecting the problematic business cultures of leading firms, often highly critical of their systemic consequences, including Vijay Prashad, Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism (Monroe, Maine, 2002); and Kate Kelly, Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street (New York, 2010). A key text in this tradition is now Michael A. Santoro and Ronald J. Strauss, Wall Street Values: Business Ethics and the Global Financial Crisis (Cambridge, 2013). On “Asian Values,” see among others Greg Sheridan, Asian Values, Western Values: Understanding the New Asia (Sydney, 2000); for the Protestant work ethic as a cultural “killer app,” see Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London, 2012), particularly 256–294.

15 In Sven Beckert's words, the “point” here is “not [to] seek to illuminate a chapter of U.S. history from a global perspective but rather to see the role of the United States in a larger transformation of global significance”; Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (December 2004): 1405–1438, here 1407. In this case, the “transformation of global significance” is the rise of industrial capitalist culture itself.

16 On Franklin as an “apostle of thrift” and vector of such capitalism, see among numerous others Harold A. Larrabee, “Poor Richard in an Age of Plenty,” Harper's Magazine 212 (January 1956): 64–68. The terms “capitalism” and “commercial society” are in effect frequently used synonymously; e.g., Gregory Blue and Timothy Brook, “Introduction,” in Blue and Brook, eds., China and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge (Cambridge, 1999), 1–9, here 4. As definitions of commercial society go, Antonio Genovesi's description of a society in which everyone considers the world “through the eyes of a merchant” remains evocative; Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna , 3 vols. (Naples, 1757–1758), 1: 11 n.

17 Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (New Haven, Conn., 2008), especially 220; and for similar usages see John Lauritz Larsen, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001). Attempts are sporadically made to make Franklin a Physiocrat—famously by Lewis J. Carey, Franklin's Economic Views (Garden City, N.Y., 1923), 140; and most recently by Manuela Albertone, “Letture fisiocratiche della Rivoluzione americana: Il manosritto de marchese di Mirabeau sulla Dichiarazione dei diritti della Virginia e la risposta di Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours,” in Albertone, ed., Governare il mondo: L'economia come linguaggio della politica nell'Europa del Settecento (Milan, 2009), 171–201, here 174: “Franklin found in Physiocracy the systematization of his economic ideas.” Though he certainly drew inspiration from the French sect, Franklin's thought was far too eclectic, and too pragmatic, to qualify him as a card-carrying member. See for a similar argument Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis , 199 n. 11; and Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006), 258–259. Franklin often voiced a predilection for agriculture over manufacturing, but he also found the protectionist English Navigation Acts to be “ wise with regard to foreigners”; “Marginalia in Protests of the Lords against Repeal of the Stamp Act,” in Papers , 13: 207–232, here 219. The text appears in House of Lords, Protest against the Bill to Repeal the American Stamp Act, of Last Session (Paris [but London], 1766), 11. For one of many examples of Franklin seemingly drawing on Physiocratic arguments regarding the potential of manufactures to create wealth, see Benjamin Franklin to Cadwalader Evans, February 20, 1768, in Papers , 15: 51–53; Franklin, “Remarks on Agriculture and Manufacturing [late 1771?],” ibid., 18: 273–274. For an argument that the colonies should “encourage necessary manufactures,” see, however, among others Benjamin Franklin to Humphry Marshall, March 18, 1770, ibid., 17: 109–110.

18 On the rise of this sort of information, see John J. McCusker and Cora Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam, 1991); John J. McCusker, “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 295–321.

19 Kenneth E. Carpenter, The Economic Bestsellers before 1850 (Boston, 1975), 22; building on Charles J. Bullock, The Vanderblue Memorial Collection of Smithiana: An Essay (Boston, 1939). For further work on the international influence of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations , see Cheung-chung Lai, ed., Adam Smith across Nations: Translations and Receptions of “The Wealth of Nations” (Oxford, 2000); Kenneth E. Carpenter, The Dissemination of the “Wealth of Nations” in French and in France, 1776–1843 (New York, 2002); Keith Tribe, general ed., A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith (London, 2002).

20 On the number of editions and The Way to Wealth being Franklin's most popular piece, see Paul Leicester Ford, Franklin Bibliography: A List of Books Written by, or Relating to Benjamin Franklin (Brooklyn, 1889), xxix–xxxi; see also the editorial introduction to “Poor Richard Improved, 1758,” in Papers , 7: 326–340, here 328–329; as the basis for his fame see Zuckerman, “Benjamin Franklin at 300,” 179. Generally see also Sheldon Garon, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (Princeton, N.J., 2012), 27–30; Jill Lepore, “The Way to Wealth,” in Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins (Princeton, N.J., 2012), 44–58, here 45. The epitome of its fame might have been its mention in Leslie Dunkling and Adrian Room, The Guinness Book of Money (Enfield, 1990), 104, not to mention the fact that it long was taught at Harvard Business School as epitomizing American values and capitalism itself; see Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and Richard S. Tedlow, “Case I: Benjamin Franklin and the Definition of American Values,” in Chandler and Tedlow, eds., The Coming of Managerial Capitalism: A Casebook on the History of American Economic Institutions (Homewood, Ill., 1985), 2–24, The Way to Wealth being republished as “Exhibit I” on 9–14. The title The Way to Wealth could have been inspired by works such as Thomas Tryon's frequently republished The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness; or, A Discourse on Temperance and the Particular Nature of All Things Requisit for the Life of Man (London, 1683), which had inspired Franklin greatly in his youth; see Benjamin Franklin, “The Autobiography,” in Alan Houston, ed., Franklin: “The Autobiography” and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue (Cambridge, 2004), 1–142, here 13, 28; and for other works with similar titles with which he could have been familiar, see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin , 3: 699 n. 23.

21 For example, Ambroise Clément, Essai sur la science sociale: Économie politique—morale éxperimentale—politique théorique , 2 vols. (Paris, 1867), 1: 65.

22 There have, of course, been excellent studies of Franklin's international influence before; see, for example, Louis K. Wechsler, Benjamin Franklin: American and World Educator (Boston, 1976), 106; Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in American Thought and Culture, 1790–1990 (Philadelphia, 1994); Harald Elovson, Amerika i svensk litteratur, 1750–1820: En studie i komparativ litteraturhistoria (Lund, 1930), 191–218; Antonio Pace, Benjamin Franklin and Italy (Philadelphia, 1958), 206–234; and for The Way to Wealth in particular, see James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (London, 2006), 133–143; building on Claire Lienhardt, “‘Le Bonhomme Richard’ de Benjamin Franklin à la conquête de l'Europe: La diffusion d'un best-seller américain en France, en Grande-Bretagne et dans les États allemands des années 1770 à 1830” (Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris I—Sorbonne, 1999).

23 An interactive database of pre-1851 appearances of Franklin's Way to Wealth can now be found at http://waytowealth.org . As C. William Miller once put it, “dealing with books at one remove is certain to make any bibliographer uncomfortable,” but the possible benefits of the digital humanities will hopefully outweigh the risks. Miller, “Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 63, no. 4 (1969): 231–246.

24 Mao Tse-tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (San Francisco, 1990); on which see now the essays in Alexander C. Cook, ed., Mao's Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge, 2014).

25 D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin” [final version], in D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, eds., Studies in Classical American Literature (Cambridge, 2003), 20–31, here 30.

26 McCusker, “The Demise of Distance,” 317.

27 David Hume to Benjamin Franklin, May 10, 1762, in Papers , 10: 80–82, particularly 81–82. On Franklin and Hume, see among others Michael Atiyah, “Benjamin Franklin and the Edinburgh Enlightenment,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 150, no. 4 (2006): 591–606.

28 Book of Proverbs, on which see Roger Norman Whybray, The Book of Proverbs (Cambridge, 1972). On their economic dimensions, see Whybray, Wealth and Poverty in the Book of Proverbs (Sheffield, 1990); and now Timothy J. Sandoval, The Discourse of Wealth and Poverty in the Book of Proverbs (Leiden, 2006).

29 On this war, see among others Daniel Baugh, The Global Seven Years War, 1754–1763: Britain and France in a Great Power Contest (London, 2011). On the transformative power of related expenses, see still John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); and Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 340.

30 Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin , 264–268; Lepore, “The Way to Wealth,” 44–45; David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), 117. On the Seven Years' War as a crucial context for Franklin's work, see Douglas Anderson, The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore, 1997), especially 156.

31 Saunder's real identity remained elusive enough to be worth revealing well into the nineteenth century; see, for example, Vincenzo Lancetti, Pseudonimia: Ovvero tavole alfabetiche de' nomi finti o supposti degli scrittori con la contrapposizione de' veri ad uso de' bibliofili, degli amatori della storia letteraria e de' libraj (Milan, 1836), 243. For earlier outings, see Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin , 118–119.

32 Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin , 106–115; John Ross, “The Character of Poor Richard: Its Sources and Alteration,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 55 (1940): 785–794. On the structure of the text, see also Edward J. Gallagher, “The Rhetorical Strategy of Franklin's ‘Way to Wealth,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 6, no. 4 (1973): 475–485. The classic history of the importance of such almanacs in the early modern period remains Geneviève Bollème, Les almanachs populaires aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles: Essai d'histoire sociale (Paris, 1969); for caveats regarding which see Robert Darnton, “The Social History of Ideas,” in Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York, 1990), 219–252, here 240–244.

33 Franklin, “The Autobiography,” 80. Franklin's Way to Wealth remains among the most powerful negations of J. G. A. Pocock's influential thesis that wealth and virtue by necessity were antithetical in the early modern European world. See, for example, his The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition , 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J., 2003). For other critiques from different perspectives, see among others Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 705–736; Mark Jurdjevic, “Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 4 (2001): 721–743; Reinert, Translating Empire , especially 23.

34 The text is reproduced in Papers , 7: 340–350. For a more easily accessible edition, see Benjamin Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved: Father Abraham's Speech (7 July 1757),” in Houston, Franklin , 264–271, here 264–265.

35 Stuart A. Gallacher, “Franklin's ‘Way to Wealth’: A Florilegium of Proverbs and Wise Sayings,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 48, no. 2 (1949): 229–251; Robert Newcomb, “The Sources of Benjamin Franklin's Sayings of Poor Richard” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1957). On the sources of Franklin's aphorisms, see also Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement , 25. On the English context for these proverbs, see Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2002). For a short selection of Erasmus's aphorisms, see Desiderius Erasmus, The Adages of Erasmus , ed. William Barker (Toronto, 2001).

36 Following the thread of Carlo Ginzburg, Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del Sabba (Turin, 1989), they might have harked back to the frozen steppes of Ice Age Eurasia.

37 Mark Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” The Galaxy 10 (July 1870): 138–140.

38 Gallacher, “Franklin's ‘Way to Wealth.’” On the role of proverbs in oral cultures, see Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business , 20th Anniversary Edition (London, 2005), 18–19, building on the work of Walter J. Ong; for a recent example, see Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word , 30th Anniversary Edition (New York, 2012).

39 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved ,” 266.

40 Ibid., 267; George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs (London, 1640), proverb 499; Iona Opie and Peter Opie, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford, 1951), 32.

41 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved ,” 265.

42 Ibid., 268.

43 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Houndmills, 1998), 1–2, 165.

44 Weber, The Protestant Ethic . Franklin's emphasis on the calculated accumulation of wealth, and his consequence-oriented vision, also satisfies Thomas K. McCraw's definition of “the essence of capitalism” as “a psychological orientation toward the pursuit of future wealth and property”; see McCraw, “Introduction,” in McCraw, ed., Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 1–16, here 4.

45 Forgoing consumption for investment is a classic national strategy in the history of development, for recent examples of which see late-twentieth-century China and Singapore in Richard H. K. Vietor, How Countries Compete: Strategy, Structure, and Government in the Global Economy (Boston, 2007). Forgoing consumption for savings that do not turn into investments, on the other hand, remains something of an impossibility given the accounting identity that savings by default equals investments; for an introduction, see N. Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Macroeconomics , 7th ed. (Boston, 2014), 268. Much, of course, depends on how both savings and investments are defined. On the rich history of such theories, see still Paul Studenski, The Income of Nations , 2 vols. (New York, 1961), vol. 1: History .

46 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved ,” 269. On the varieties of early modern credit, however, see Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, N.C., 2013).

47 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved ,” 269–270.

48 See on this the vast arc from Deuteronomy 23:19–20 to Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century , trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 2014).

49 Though he does not make this point, see generally on the obfuscation of slavery in Franklin's writings Waldstreicher, Runaway America . See also Seth Rockman, “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (University Park, Pa., 2006), 335–361.

50 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved ,” 271; the Book of Job, particularly 42:7–17.

51 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved ,” 265; Genesis 3:19.

52 See, for example, Franklin's marginalia in Anonymous, The True Constitutional Means for Putting an End to the Dispute between Great-Britain and the American Colonies (London, 1769), 14, New York Public Library, New York, *KF 1769; as well as his much later letters to Jan Ingenhousz (May 16, 1783), in Papers , 40: 8–13, and to the Duc de Deux-Ponts (on or after June 14, 1783), ibid., 163. On “ bonnes Creatures ” in the context of The Way to Wealth , see Benjamin Franklin, “Dialogue entre La Goute et M.F. [1784],” ibid., 34: 11–20, here 19. On Franklin's attempts to regulate the multifarious category of “the people” as well as elites through his earlier writings, see Waldstreicher, Runaway America , 93–94.

53 Franklin, “Preface to Poor Richard Improved ,” 271. On the conclusion as a call to “action,” see Gallagher, “The Rhetorical Strategy of Franklin's ‘Way to Wealth.’” On conspicuous consumption, see Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York, 1899); on which see the essays in Erik S. Reinert and Francesca Lidia Viano, eds., Thorstein Veblen: Economics for an Age of Crises (London, 2012).

54 The locus classicus of the discussion regarding meaning in intellectual history remains Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Skinner, Visions of Politics , 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2002), vol. 1: Regarding Method , 57–89; on which see recently Georgios Giannakopoulos and Francisco Quijano with Quentin Skinner, “On Politics and History: A Discussion with Quentin Skinner,” Journal of Intellectual History and Political Thought 1, no. 1 (2012): 7–31.

55 Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” 306–308; Benjamin Franklin, “Reasons and Motives for the Albany Plan of Union (July 1754),” in Houston, Franklin , 238–255, here 251; Benjamin Franklin to Sarah Bache, June 3, 1779, in Papers , 29: 612–615; Benjamin Franklin to John Paul Jones, November 25, 1780, ibid., 34: 56–57. This was also the moral impetus behind his oft-quoted invective against certain kinds of poor relief in “‘Arator’: On the Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor,” ibid., 13: 510–516, here 515.

56 On the deeper history of such an ideology, see Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), 142–146.

57 Benjamin Franklin, “The Morals of Chess,” in Papers , 29: 750–757; on which see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin , 2: 126–130.

58 Weber, The Protestant Ethic , 9–12; and similarly Kurt Samuelsson, Ekonomi och religion (Stockholm, [1957]), 69. For a recent critique, see Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement , 225–229. For an overview of the historiography reacting to Weber's thesis in early modern England, see Brodie Waddell, God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge, 2012), particularly 2–20.

59 Thomas L. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago, 1988), 20. See generally Lepore, “The Way to Wealth.”

60 Alan Houston, “Introduction,” in Houston, Franklin , xiii–xxxviii, here xiv.

61 Lepore, “The Way to Wealth,” 45. See also Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, N.J., 2010), 51–52. For other readings of The Way to Wealth through this lens, see Cameron C. Nickels, “Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanacs: ‘The Humblest of His Labors,’” in J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., The Oldest Revolutionary: Essays on Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 1976), 77–89; Paul M. Zall, Benjamin Franklin's Humor (Lexington, Ky., 2005), 76–84; Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin , 125. For thoughtful meditations on the problem, from rather different perspectives, see also Waldstreicher, Runaway America , 266 n. 35, and McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity , 146–150.

62 Miguel de Cervantes, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha , 2 vols. (Madrid, 1605–1615). Franklin was fond of Cervantes (see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin , 2: 111) and knew his work already by the early 1740s, long before the publication date of the beautiful edition in his library; see entry 576, “Cervantes Saaveda, Miguel de,” in Edwin Wolf 2nd and Kevin J. Hayes, The Library of Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 2006), 184.

63 Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin,” in Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 75–106, here 78; drawing on Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1977), 412–453. See on this also Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, “Robert Darnton,” in Pallares-Burke, The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Cambridge, 2002), 158–183, here 159–160, 168. For an example of the chthonic depths that one at times must explore to “get” a historical joke, and of the riches that await down there, see Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 2008), especially ix.

64 Jean-Jacques Rousseau's methodological caveat might be illuminating in this regard: “Cock-fights do not provide a basis for inferences about the human species”; Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men,” in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings , ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), 111–222, here 156.

65 John Dunn, “The History of Political Theory,” in Dunn, The History of Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1996), 11–38, here 24; Reinert, Translating Empire , 10, 232.

66 Benjamin Franklin to Anonymous, December 13, 1757, in Papers , 7: 293–295. Franklin's religiosity remains a matter of some contention. On his youthful, libertine 1725 A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain , see Papers , 1: 57–72; and on his growing metaphysical skepticism, see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin , 1: 270–290. For his religious thought generally, see Kerry S. Walters, Benjamin Franklin and His Gods (Urbana, Ill., 1999). For a relevant discussion of Franklin and duplicity, see David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond (Princeton, N.J., 2008), chap. 3.

67 Benjamin Franklin to Henry Home, Lord Kames, May 3, 1760, in Papers , 9: 103–106. On the two men, see Ian Simpson Ross, Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day (Oxford, 1972), 197–201. On Lord Kames, see also William C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames, and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas (The Hague, 1971).

68 Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Williams, Jr., March 16, 1779, in Papers , 29: 130–132.

69 Larrabee, “Poor Richard in an Age of Plenty,” 65. For a similar argument, see Patrick Sullivan, “Benjamin Franklin, the Inveterate (and Crafty) Public Instructor: Instruction on Two Levels in ‘The Way to Wealth,’” Early American Literature 21, no. 3 (1986/1987): 248–259.

70 On this aspect of Franklin's work, see now Douglas B. Thomas, “Recasting Franklin as Printer: A Note on Recent Historiography,” in Kerry and Holland, Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World , 103–117.

71 Benjamin Franklin to Francis Maseres, June 17, 1772, in Papers , 19: 179–181.

72 Franklin, “The Autobiography,” 80.

73 Horace, Sermones 1.1.24, “ ridentem dicere verum quid vetat ?,” in The Complete Odes and Satires of Horace , trans. Sidney Alexander (Princeton, N.J., 1999), 191.

74 For the case of Italian, see, for example, Papers , 21: 251 n. 7, regarding Franklin's correspondence with Carlo Giuseppe Campi. For French, see among other places ibid., 25: 62–63 n. 2, 158 nn. 1–2; Franklin to Courtney Melmoth (on or after January 28, 1778), ibid., 534–535.

75 Carl van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1938), 268; quoted also in Lepore, “The Way to Wealth,” 45.

76 Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement , 2; Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis , 199 and 199 n. 11. As Paul W. Connor aptly put it, “America's evangel of the Enlightenment has been shredded and dissected until one suspects that whatever intellectual coherence the man retains is due to scholarly oversight”; Connor, Poor Richard's Politicks: Benjamin Franklin and His New American Order (New York, 1965), 3.

77 Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général (London [but Paris], 1755); on which see Antoin E. Murphy, Richard Cantillon, Entrepreneur and Economist (Oxford, 1986).

78 See, for example, his 1751 “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.,” in Papers , 4: 227–234 (introduction on 225–227). Franklin also engaged with some of the greatest theoretical economists of his age. For evidence regarding the reciprocal theoretical exchange between Franklin and Adam Smith, for example, see Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin , 3: 606–609.

79 Benjamin Franklin, Nytaarsgave for Unge og Gamle, eller den Kunst at blive riig og lykkelig , trans. Carl Friedrich Primon (Copenhagen, 1801), 3–8; Franklin, “Camino de la fortuna, ó la ciencia del buen Ricardo,” lesson 8 in Mariano Torrente, ed., Revista general de la economía política , 3 vols. in one (Havana, 1835), 3: 69–76; on which see the review that appeared in Annali universali di statistica, economia pubblica, storia, viaggi e commercio , vol. 50 (Milan, 1836), 207–208.

80 On these societies, see Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge, 1999). On the political economy of this movement, see Reinert, Translating Empire , especially 76. On this vein of nineteenth-century poor relief in America, see Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre–Civil War Reformers (Baltimore, 1995), and on Franklin's role in inspiring it, see particularly p. 19. Similar studies for other regions and periods may help further chart Franklin's impact globally. For an example of such a text, see the manifestly Franklinian broadside by Mathew Carey, Advices and Suggestions to Increase the Comforts of Persons in Humble Circumstances (Philadelphia, 1832). On Carey see Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore, 2007). For context, see also Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002); and for the Franklinian work ethic in the subsequent period, see Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 , 2nd ed. (Chicago, 2014). For even more recent cases of The Way to Wealth influencing the self-help literature, see Zuckerman, “Benjamin Franklin at 300,” 180.

81 Cf. John Locke, “An Essay on the Poor Law,” in Locke, Political Essays , ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1997), 182–198.

82 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe , 3rd ed. (Farnham, 2009), 213. For an ironic take on Franklin's fame as an “oracle of the bourgeoisie,” see Larrabee, “Poor Richard in an Age of Plenty,” 65.

83 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller , trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980), 126. For a similar argument, see William Pencak, “Poor Richard's Almanac,” in Waldstreicher, Companion to Benjamin Franklin , 275–289, here 288.

84 David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchanan, “Address to the Inhabitants of the Highlands of Scotland,” in Donald MacIntosh, A Collection of Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases (Edinburgh, 1785), 73; and Benjamin Franklin, “An t slighe chum sai'-bhris,” trans. Robert Macfarlane, ibid., 74–83. On the Earl of Buchan, see Ronald G. Cant, “David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan: Founder of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland,” in A. S. Bell, ed., The Scottish Antiquarian Tradition: Essays to Mark the Bicentenary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and Its Museum, 1780–1980 (Edinburgh, 1981), 1–30.

85 The letter was translated in Benjamin Franklin, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself , ed. John Bigelow, 4th ed., 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1902), 1: 604 n. On his relationship with Smith, see Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1995), 136–137.

86 Quoted in Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2013), 7. On Wallace see Yoshio Nagai, “Robert Wallace and the Irish and Scottish Enlightenment,” in Tatsuya Sakamoto and Hideo Tanaka, eds., The Rise of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (London, 2003), 55–68.

87 J. G. A. Pocock, “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology,” in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 103–123, here 114.

88 Paul Kléber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1993); Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), 15–42; Malcolm Chapman, “‘Freezing the Frame’: Dress and Ethnicity in Brittany and Gaelic Scotland,” in Joanne B. Eicher, ed., Dress and Ethnicity: Change across Space and Time (Oxford, 1995), 7–28, here 8.

89 Benjamin Franklin, Science du bonhomme Richard (Liege, 1828); on the dissemination of which see Société Libre d'Émulation de Liége, Procès verbal de la séance publique, tenue le douze juin 1828 (Liege, 1828), 102. Franklin, Science du bonhomme Richard, et Conseils pour faire fortune, avec une notice sur Benjamin Franklin et l'ordonnance de Louis XVIII sur la Caisse d'épargne et de prévoyance (Dijon, 1827), 41–53; Franklin, Science du bonhomme Richard et Conseils pour faire une notice sur Benjamin Franklin, avec une notice sur Benjamin Franklin et les statuts de la Caisse d'épargne et de prévoyance de Grenoble (Grenoble, 1834). On this shift from hoarding to investment as being “close to the conceptual heart of capitalism” in the American context, see (surely among others) Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984), 23–24.

90 Labourers' Friend Society, Useful Hints for Labourers (London, 1841), 2; Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Way to Wealth (broadside) (London, 1849).

91 On the “Industrious Revolution” as it compares to the “Industrial Revolution,” see Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008). For a poignant reminder of the unacknowledged importance of slavery in Franklin's world, and his own complicity in it, see Waldstreicher, Runaway America ; and more succinctly David Waldstreicher, “The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 268–278; Rockman, “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism.”

92 See, for example, Benjamin Franklin, Buon uomo Ricciardo e la costituzione di Pensilvania italianizzati per uso della democratica veneta ristaurazione (Venice, 1797), 1.

93 Benjamin Franklin, “La strada di far fortuna o la Scienza del buon'-uomo Riccardo,” in Francesco Soave, Trattato elementare dei doveri dell'uomo … a cui e stata aggiunta La scienza del buon uomo Riccardo di Franklin (Pisa, 1831), 69–84. See also the similar anonymous review of “Saggi di morale e di economia private di Beniamino Franklin …,” Antologia: Giornale di scienze, lettere e arte [Florence], no. 122 (February 1831): 112–118, here 118.

94 Benjamin Franklin, Den gamle Richards Kunst at blive rig og lykkelig: Tilligemed godt raad til en ung Mand (Bergen, 1841), i. On Bergen, and why Franklin's Way to Wealth might have found fertile ground there, see Egil Ertresvaag, Et bysamfunn i utvikling, 1800–1920 (Bergen, 1982); and now Arnved Nedkvitne, The German Hansa and Bergen, 1100–1600 (Cologne, 2014).

95 Benjamin Franklin, Mezzo facile di pagare le imposizioni, ossia, La scienza di Riccardo Saunders (Turin, 1797), 5–6, recalling a Petrarchan discourse of decline and political economy discussed in Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers.” The connection between the economic welfare of individuals and of polities in Franklin's Way to Wealth was, less eruditely, explicitly argued for even in distant Halifax; see Franklin, “The Way to Wealth,” Nova-Scotia Magazine 4, no. 10 (1791): 603–606

96 Benjamin Franklin, Franklin az öreg Rikhárd neve alatt , trans. Lajos Szilágyi (Oradea, 1848); on which see Anna Katona, “The Hungarian Image of Benjamin Franklin,” Canadian-American Review of Hungarian Studies 4, no. 1 (1977): 43–57, here 47. For a readable account of the 1848 revolutions, including the failed one in Hungary, see Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York, 2009), particularly 140–151.

97 Wolfgang Mieder, Proverbs Are the Best Policy: Folk Wisdom and American Politics (Logan, Utah, 2005), 8; Mieder, “Benjamin Franklin's ‘Proverbs,’” in Mieder, American Proverbs: A Study of Texts and Contexts (Bern, 1989), 129–142; Mieder, “‘Early to Bed and Early to Rise’: From Proverb to Benjamin Franklin and Back,” in Mieder, Proverbs Are Never Out of Season: Popular Wisdom in the Modern Age (1993; repr., New York, 2012), 98–134.

98 On the longer history of the Bible's dissemination among the illiterate, see Lucy Grig, “The Bible in Popular and Non-Literary Culture,” in James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper, eds., The New Cambridge History of the Bible , vol. 1: From the Beginnings to 600 (Cambridge, 2013), 843–870; and Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, “Literacy and the Bible,” in Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter, eds., The New Cambridge History of the Bible , vol. 2: From 600 to 1450 (Cambridge, 2013), 704–721. For Franklin's Way to Wealth in this context, see Green and Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin , 135–136.

99 The Saint Augustine Gospels , Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, Lib. MS. 286, f125r; James Catnach, The Prince of Israel: The Most Remarkable Events in the Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ (London, 1824).

100 Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung; oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt (Leipzig, 1889), 103.

101 On the politics of common sense at the time, and Franklin's importance for it, see Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), particularly 179, 184–185.

102 Benjamin Franklin, “La maniera di farsi ricco chiaramente dimostrata nella prefazione di un vecchio Almanacco di Pensilvania, intitolato = Il povero Riccardo fatto benestante del signor Beniamino Franklin,” trans. Carlo Giuseppe Campi, in Scelta di opuscoli interessanti tradotti da varie lingue (Milan, 1775), 81–103, here 81f–82f; Benjamin Franklin, Maniera di farsi ricco (Milan, 1704), v–vi.

103 See among others Benjamin Franklin, “Veien til Rigdom; eller den fattige Jacob, som har nok,” in P. Foersom, ed., Læsebog for døttreskoler (Copenhagen, 1814), 89–99; Benjamin Franklin, “Der Weg zum Wohlstand von Franklin,” in Ch. Th. Roth, ed., Zweites Lehr- und Lesebuch sittlich-religiöses Elementar-Werk für die oberen Abtheilungen der Volksschulen (Mainz, 1839), 330–337; Lesebuch mit 84 verschiedenen Handschriften (Karlsruhe, 1846).

104 Benjamin Franklin, “La science du bonhomme Richard: Ou le chemin de la fortune,” in Eugène Daire and Gustave de Molinari, eds., Mélanges d'économie politique , 2 vols. (Paris, 1847–1848), 1: 631–639. The historiography of eighteenth-century political economy has been remarkably rich in recent years. For highlights, see among others Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Hont, Jealousy of Trade ; John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006); Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 2007); Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass., 2010).

105 W. Dieterici, ed., Über Preußische Zustände, über Arbeit und Kapital: Ein politisches Selbstgespräch (Berlin, 1848), 40–42.

106 E.g., Reinert, Translating Empire ; Andrew Sartori, “Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy,” in Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual History , 110–133.

107 On this heuristically significant difference, see David Armitage, “Is There a Pre-History of Globalization?,” in Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013), 33–45.

108 On the power of circumnavigation, see Joyce E. Chaplin, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (New York, 2012).

109 On the Industrial Revolution in different regional contexts, see still Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The Industrial Revolution in National Context: Europe and the USA (Cambridge, 1996).

110 That large parts of the globe were introduced to capitalism without its ostensibly concomitant values and institutions suggests one of undoubtedly many causes contributing to the uneven economic development observable globally at the time, without the need to resort to the biological determinism of works such as Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, N.J., 2007).

111 On such webs at the time, see J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History (New York, 2003), 214–221.

112 Benjamin Franklin, Il para-miserie di B. Franklin: Consigli per divenir ricchi (Udine, 1825); Franklin, La scienza del buonuomo Riccardo di Beniamino Franklin (Lugano, 1828); Franklin, “La strada di far fortuna,” in Anonymous, ed., Letture elementari pe' fanciulli (Leghorn [Livorno], 1829); Giovanni Tamassia, Ragionamento sulle statistiche ed altri opuscoli di economia politica: Aggiuntovi il volgarizzamento dei mezzi di avere sempre denaro nella borsa, e del Trovato economico di Franklin (Cremona, 1832), 81–89; Benjamin Franklin, La strada di far fortuna: Almanacco per l'anno bisestile 1840 (Orvieto, 1839).

113 Benjamin Franklin, Wanhan Richardin aawe-ja neuwo-kirja opettawa kuinga hänen halullinen Lukiansa taitaa tulla rikkari, onnelliseri ja kunniotettawari (Turku [Åbo], 1826); Franklin, Rikkauden awain ja onnen ohjat, eli Wanhan Richardin keinot kaikkinaiseen menestykseen (Oulu [Uleåborg], 1832); Franklin, Neuwoja kaikille säädyille rikkaaksi ja onnelliseksi päästäksensä (Porvoo [Borgå], 1845).

114 Benjamin Franklin, Guizieguez ar pautr-cos Richard (Morlaix, 1832); Franklin, “An t slighe chum sai'-bhris”; Franklin, Almanac Rhisierdyn, neu gasgliad o ymadroddion doethion (Pont-y-Fon, [1790?]); Franklin, Inschin da vegnir rechs, cun suondar ils cusseigls e proverbis dil vegl Heinrich da Benjamin Franklin, augmentai e dai ora en Romonsch cun la biographia da quest vitier (Chur, 1850).

115 On the coming and consequences of the steam press, see recently Nicole Howard, The Book: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore, 2009); and Aileen Fyfe, Steam-Powered Knowledge: William Chambers and the Business of Publishing, 1820–1860 (Chicago, 2012).

116 Imai Terako, “Nihon ni okeru Furankurin no juyō—Meiji jidai,” Tsudajuku daigaku kiyō , no. 2–4 (1982): 1–39. I am grateful to Garon, Beyond Our Means , 388 n. 30, for this reference; Benjamin Franklin, La science du Bonhomme Richard; ou, Le chemin de la fortune (Beijing, 1884).

117 It is a fitting irony that the world's perhaps most powerful bill, the almighty 1,000 Swiss franc note, is embellished with a portrait of the Basel art historian Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche's friend and professor, for whose decidedly mixed feelings about capitalism see John R. Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity (Montreal, 2000). See also Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago, 2000).

118 As Herbert Applebaum has similarly noted, “It is rare to find writings about work written by people who work for a living.” See his The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Albany, N.Y., 1992), 401. For his reading of Franklin, see especially 400–406.

119 Franklin, “The Autobiography,” 76. For a similarly myth-making text, see his “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America (February 1784),” in Houston, Franklin , 341–348; on which see Waldstreicher, “The Vexed Story of Human Commodification.” On this myth, and Franklin's role in it, see recently also Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009), 259. See more generally also Nian-Sheng Huang and Carla Mulford, “Benjamin Franklin and the American Dream,” in Carla Mulford, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, 2009), 145–158.

120 See, for example, Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); and Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse (New York, 2008), discussed and contextualized in Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign,” 244–245; as well as the essays in Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2012). Compare further Rockman, Scraping By , 141–142, 259, to Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), especially 56. For a critical analysis of the historiography regarding the extent to which capitalist values came to shape workers' behavior in the early republic, see Rockman, “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” particularly 335–346.

121 Esmond Wright, Franklin of Philadelphia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 55. On mandatory schooling in German-speaking Europe, see James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (1988; repr., Cambridge, 2003); for Franklinian themes, see 41. For a contemporary analysis, see also Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation , trans. Béla Kapossy, Isaac Nakhimovsky, and Keith Tribe (Indianapolis, 2013). On Franklin's working-class readers, see among others Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes , 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn., 2001), 64, 69, 407.

122 Franklin's global popularity, in short, adumbrates, yet again, the fruitfulness of a social history of ideas. For a recent ethnography of the relationship between intellectual, social, and cultural history, see Judith Surkis, “Of Scandals and Supplements: Relating Intellectual and Cultural History,” in McMahon and Moyn, Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History , 94–111.

123 Charles Quill [James Waddel Alexander], The Working-Man (Philadelphia, 1839), 56–57.

124 Weber, The Protestant Ethic , 12; Twain, “The Late Benjamin Franklin”; D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin” [first version], in Lawrence, Greenspan, Vasey, and Worthen, Studies in Classical American Literature , 180–190, here 180. For a somewhat different take on these criticisms by “haters of the bourgeoisie,” see Harvey C. Mansfield, “Liberty and Virtue in the American Founding,” in Peter Berkowitz, ed., Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic (Stanford, Calif., 2003), 3–28, here 10 n. 15; Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin , 7–8.

125 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text , ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford, 1998), 105.

126 Benjamin Franklin to Charles-Guillaume-Frédéric Dumas, August 6, 1781, in Papers , 35: 341. Franklin's phrase recalls Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , edited by Edwin Cannan with a preface by George J. Stigler, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1977), 2: 129: “To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”

127 Benjamin Franklin, “Explanatory Remarks on the Assembly's Resolves,” March 29, 1764, in Papers , 11: 134–144, here 143–144. For context, see Nathan Kozuskanich, “‘Falling under the Domination Totally of Presbyterians’: The Paxton Riots and the Coming of the Revolution in Pennsylvania,” in William Pencak, ed., Pennsylvania's Revolution (Philadelphia, 2010), 7–35, here 15.

128 Benjamin Franklin, marginalia in Matthew Wheelock, Reflections Moral and Political on Great Britain and Her Colonies (London, 1770), 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., United States, E187.C72, vol. 26, no. 1, reproduced in Papers , 17: 380–400, here 381–382. See, for a similar argument, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” in Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings , 111–222.

129 The role of the American Founding Fathers in contemporary politics remains incessantly polyvalent, stretching across the spectrum from Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes , to Elizabeth Price Foley, The Tea Party: Three Principles (Cambridge, 2012). On uses of Franklin to negotiate the American Dream in relation to this, see among others Zuckerman, “Benjamin Franklin at 300,” 180.

130 Daniel Libeskind in Eric Kligerman, Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts (Berlin, 2007), 239.

131 Smith, Wealth of Nations , 1: 26.

132 Rothschild, Economic Sentiments .

133 Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, February 8, 1780, in Papers , 31: 455, echoing a classical trope on the need to overcome man's lupine behavior popularized in early modern political philosophy by Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen [ De Cive ], ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 1998), 3. On this see also François Tricaud, ‘“Homo homini Deus,’ 'Homo homini lupus': Recherche des deux formules de Hobbes,” in Reinhart Koselleck and Roman Schnur, eds., Hobbes-Forschungen (Berlin, 1969), 61–70. On the cardinal importance of sociability in eighteenth-century political economy, see again Hont, Jealousy of Trade . On Priestley, see Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1733 to 1773 , 2 vols. (University Park, Pa., 1997, 2004).

134 Walter Russell Mead, “A Strategy to Counter Democracy's Global Retreat,” Wall Street Journal , January 1, 2014, A13. For an upbeat account of such democratic “crises of confidence,” see David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crises from World War I to the Present (Princeton, N.J., 2013).

135 For recent examples see Janet Byrne, ed., The Occupy Handbook (New York, 2012); Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York, 2013), 280–288.

136 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York, 1957), which inspired such jovial works as Donald L. Luskin and Andrew Greta, I Am John Galt: Today's Heroic Innovators Building the World and the Villainous Parasites Destroying It (New York, 2011). On Rand, see now Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford, 2009).

137 See again Franklin to Anonymous, December 13, 1757, in Papers , 7: 293–295.

138 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin' , studio album (Aftermath Entertainment, 2003); Get Rich or Die Tryin' , feature film directed by Jim Sheridan and starring “50 Cent” (Paramount Pictures, 2005). The late Roger Ebert's suggested alternative title for the movie might be an even more accurate, if vexing, summary of currently thriving subcultures of capitalism: “ I Got Rich but Just About Everybody Else Died Tryin', and So Did I, Almost ”; Ebert, review of Get Rich or Die Tryin ' for the Chicago Sun-Times , November 10, 2005, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/get-rich-or-die-tryin-2005 .

139 Puff Daddy, featuring Lil' Kim, the LOX, and the Notorious B.I.G., “It's All about the Benjamins,” on Puff Daddy & the Family, No Way Out (Bad Boy Records, 1997).

140 See, for an illuminating similar argument regarding Powerpoint presentations, Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide (New York, 2005), 56–58.

141 Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, February 8, 1780, in Papers , 31: 455.

142 Synesius, Encomium calvitii , 22. 85 C., in Aristotle, Aristotelis Fragmenta selecta , ed. William David Ross (Oxford, 1955), 75.

143 For a somewhat dated overview of our troubles, see Martin Rees, Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? (London, 2003). On the politics of remembrance, and whether there will be any remembering going on at all, see Reinert, “Conquest, Commerce, and Decline.”

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Benjamin Franklin

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Benjamin Franklin by David Curtis LAST REVIEWED: 16 December 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 27 March 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0141

Benjamin Franklin (b. 1706–d. 1790) was born and raised in colonial Boston, Massachusetts, in the waning years of Puritan hegemony. He was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. The precocious apprentice’s first publication was a broadside ballad on the capture of Blackbeard, but his first lasting literary creation, the character of a Puritan widow turned author named Silence Dogood, appeared in a series of letters surreptitiously submitted to his brother’s newspaper, The New England Courant , in 1722. After several fallings out with his brother, Franklin slipped away to Philadelphia in 1723. In late 1724, he took his first transatlantic trip (out of eight during his lifetime), and he spent most of the next two years learning the printing trade in London. In 1728, Franklin began operating a successful printing business and publishing The Pennsylvania Gazette . From 1733 to 1758 he wrote and published Poor Richard’s Almanack , significant for its hundreds of popular maxims and the creation of Richard Saunders, its fictional author. For the preface to the 1758 edition, Franklin compiled many of the maxims concerned with making and saving money in a humorous and lightly satirical piece that was later titled “The Way to Wealth,” and it became one of the two most widely read of his literary productions. After retiring from day-to-day operations of his printing business in 1748, Franklin spent much of the next three years performing and publishing his Experiments and Observations on electricity in 1751. His contributions earned him recognition by the Royal Society in England and garnered for him an international reputation as a natural philosopher. Active as well in Pennsylvania politics, he was selected in 1757 to represent the colony in England during its dispute with proprietor Thomas Penn. Aside from a brief return to Philadelphia from 1762 to 1764, he remained in England until the eve of the Revolution, eventually representing several colonies and serving as de facto ambassador from British North America. For two weeks in July and August 1771 he wrote the first of four installments of his memoirs, which would be composed over the next nineteen years and be published posthumously as his Autobiography . Franklin returned to Pennsylvania on the eve of the Revolution in the spring of 1775, and he was elected to the Continental Congress. He was selected by Congress to act as emissary to King Louis XVI largely because of his international celebrity, and he acted in that capacity from his base in Passy, France, beginning in early 1777. After concluding the Treaty of Versailles in 1783, he completed the second portion of his memoirs. He completed the two other extant sections of his memoirs between his return to Philadelphia in 1785 and his death in 1790.

Because Franklin achieved so much in so many areas of intellectual, political, and literary life, overviews of Franklin tend to be either biographies or collections of essays such as the ones listed below. A study such as Granger 1964 , which confines itself to literary concerns, seems very narrowly focused when compared to the work of Franklin’s more ambitious biographers, who most often view Franklin’s writing as emerging from, and connected to, his other interests and pursuits. Mulford 2008 is excellent as a work that combines the traditional themes in Franklin studies with the more sophisticated contexts supplied by more contemporary critical approaches. Hayes 2008 points to new and exciting directions in Franklin studies elaborated even more fully in the essays in Waldstreicher 2011 . Lemay 1976 and Lemay 1993 offer the widest and most diverse considerations of Franklin’s interests and influences.

Granger, Bruce Ingham. Benjamin Franklin: An American Man of Letters . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964.

First book-length treatment of Franklin in a specifically belletristic context since the 19th century, and still the most complete discussion of his literary aims and merit. Divided into sections based on genre, Granger’s overall conclusion—that “Franklin is an important man of letters” (p. 92)—is less impressive than the focused readings of individual texts.

Hayes, Kevin J. “Prospects for the Study of Benjamin Franklin.” Resources for American Literary Study 33 (2008): 1–18.

Essential article for those embarking on Franklin studies, as Hayes delineates current opportunities for scholarship in textual studies, bibliography and the sociology of texts, biography, history, and cultural studies.

Lemay, J. A. Leo, ed. The Oldest Revolutionary: Essays on Benjamin Franklin . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976.

Includes discussions of Franklin’s writing, influences, and legacies, “representativeness,” and travel, among other subjects.

Lemay, J. A. Leo, ed. Reappraising Benjamin Franklin . Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993.

Very good collection of essays on Franklin with helpful updates to several avenues of research on Franklin by scholars old and new. Sections include essays on Franklin as a journalist and printer, his role as a revolutionary and founder and as a patron of the arts, his science, his attitudes toward immigration and native populations, and his thought and writing.

Mulford, Carla, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Very helpful starting place for Franklin scholarship, this essay collection economically summarizes current knowledge in the areas of his reading, writing, philosophy, religion, statecraft, printing/engraving, cultural legacy, and the Autobiography , heretofore the primary focus of literary criticism. By including essays on each subject by very recently published scholars, Mulford argues for more expansive, global contexts for future Franklin scholarship.

Waldstreicher, David, ed. A Companion to Benjamin Franklin . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

The best collection of essays on Franklin, completely up-to-date scholarship, and another good starting point for Franklin studies. Biographical overviews precede essays on Franklin and politics, religion, race, women, writing, art, and several other categories of inquiry; many of the authors provide condensed versions of the longer works listed in this article.

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Benjamin Franklin

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Benjamin Franklin.

One of the leading figures of early American history, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a statesman, author, publisher, scientist, inventor and diplomat. Born into a Boston family of modest means, Franklin had little formal education. He went on to start a successful printing business in Philadelphia and grew wealthy. Franklin was deeply active in public affairs in his adopted city, where he helped launch a lending library, hospital and college and garnered acclaim for his experiments with electricity, among other projects. During the American Revolution , he served in the Second Continental Congress and helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He also negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War (1775-83). In 1787, in his final significant act of public service, he was a delegate to the convention that produced the U.S. Constitution .

Benjamin Franklin’s Early Years

Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in colonial Boston. His father, Josiah Franklin (1657-1745), a native of England, was a candle and soap maker who married twice and had 17 children. Franklin’s mother was Abiah Folger (1667-1752) of Nantucket, Massachusetts , Josiah’s second wife. Franklin was the eighth of Abiah and Josiah’s 10 offspring.

Did you know? Benjamin Franklin is the only Founding Father  to have signed all four of the key documents establishing the U.S.: the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Treaty of Alliance with France (1778), the Treaty of Paris establishing peace with Great Britain (1783) and the U.S. Constitution (1787).

Franklin’s formal education was limited and ended when he was 10; however, he was an avid reader and taught himself to become a skilled writer. In 1718, at age 12, he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a Boston printer. By age 16, Franklin was contributing essays (under the pseudonym Silence Dogood) to a newspaper published by his brother. At age 17, Franklin ran away from his apprenticeship to Philadelphia, where he found work as a printer. In late 1724, he traveled to London, England, and again found employment in the printing business.

Benjamin Franklin: Printer and Publisher

Benjamin Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726, and two years later opened a printing shop. The business became highly successful producing a range of materials, including government pamphlets, books and currency. In 1729, Franklin became the owner and publisher of a colonial newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette , which proved popular—and to which he contributed much of the content, often using pseudonyms. Franklin achieved fame and further financial success with “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” which he published every year from 1733 to 1758. The almanac became known for its witty sayings, which often had to do with the importance of diligence and frugality, such as “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

In 1730, Franklin began living with Deborah Read (c. 1705-74), the daughter of his former Philadelphia landlady, as his common-law wife. Read’s first husband had abandoned her; however, due to bigamy laws, she and Franklin could not have an official wedding ceremony. Franklin and Read had a son, Francis Folger Franklin (1732-36), who died of smallpox at age 4, and a daughter, Sarah Franklin Bache (1743-1808). Franklin had another son, William Franklin (c. 1730-1813), who was born out of wedlock. William Franklin served as the last colonial governor of New Jersey , from 1763 to 1776, and remained loyal to the British during the American Revolution . He died in exile in England.

Benjamin Franklin and Philadelphia

As Franklin’s printing business prospered, he became increasingly involved in civic affairs. Starting in the 1730s, he helped establish a number of community organizations in Philadelphia, including a lending library (it was founded in 1731, a time when books weren’t widely available in the colonies, and remained the largest U.S. public library until the 1850s), the city’s first fire company , a police patrol and the American Philosophical Society , a group devoted to the sciences and other scholarly pursuits. 

Franklin also organized the Pennsylvania militia, raised funds to build a city hospital and spearheaded a program to pave and light city streets. Additionally, Franklin was instrumental in the creation of the Academy of Philadelphia, a college which opened in 1751 and became known as the University of Pennsylvania in 1791.

Franklin also was a key figure in the colonial postal system. In 1737, the British appointed him postmaster of Philadelphia, and he went on to become, in 1753, joint postmaster general for all the American colonies. In this role he instituted various measures to improve mail service; however, the British dismissed him from the job in 1774 because he was deemed too sympathetic to colonial interests. In July 1775, the Continental Congress appointed Franklin the first postmaster general of the United States, giving him authority over all post offices from Massachusetts to Georgia . He held this position until November 1776, when he was succeeded by his son-in-law. (The first U.S. postage stamps, issued on July 1, 1847, featured images of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington .)

Benjamin Franklin's Inventions

In 1748, Franklin, then 42 years old, had expanded his printing business throughout the colonies and become successful enough to stop working. Retirement allowed him to concentrate on public service and also pursue more fully his longtime interest in science. In the 1740s, he conducted experiments that contributed to the understanding of electricity, and invented the lightning rod, which protected buildings from fires caused by lightning. In 1752, he conducted his famous kite experiment and demonstrated that lightning is electricity. Franklin also coined a number of electricity-related terms, including battery, charge and conductor.

In addition to electricity, Franklin studied a number of other topics, including ocean currents, meteorology, causes of the common cold and refrigeration. He developed the Franklin stove, which provided more heat while using less fuel than other stoves, and bifocal eyeglasses, which allow for distance and reading use. In the early 1760s, Franklin invented a musical instrument called the glass armonica. Composers such as Ludwig Beethoven (1770-1827) and Wolfgang Mozart (1756-91) wrote music for Franklin’s armonica; however, by the early part of the 19th century, the once-popular instrument had largely fallen out of use.

READ MORE: 11 Surprising Facts About Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution

In 1754, at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York , Franklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies under a national congress. Although his Albany Plan was rejected, it helped lay the groundwork for the Articles of Confederation , which became the first constitution of the United States when ratified in 1781.

In 1757, Franklin traveled to London as a representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, to which he was elected in 1751. Over several years, he worked to settle a tax dispute and other issues involving descendants of William Penn (1644-1718), the owners of the colony of Pennsylvania. After a brief period back in the U.S., Franklin lived primarily in London until 1775. While he was abroad, the British government began, in the mid-1760s, to impose a series of regulatory measures to assert greater control over its American colonies. In 1766, Franklin testified in the British Parliament against the Stamp Act of 1765, which required that all legal documents, newspapers, books, playing cards and other printed materials in the American colonies carry a tax stamp. Although the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766, additional regulatory measures followed, leading to ever-increasing anti-British sentiment and eventual armed uprising in the American colonies .

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in May 1775, shortly after the Revolutionary War (1775-83) had begun, and was selected to serve as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, America’s governing body at the time. In 1776, he was part of the five-member committee that helped draft the Declaration of Independence , in which the 13 American colonies declared their freedom from British rule. That same year, Congress sent Franklin to France to enlist that nation’s help with the Revolutionary War. In February 1778, the French signed a military alliance with America and went on to provide soldiers, supplies and money that proved critical to America’s victory in the war.

As minister to France starting in 1778, Franklin helped negotiate and draft the 1783  Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War.

Benjamin Franklin’s Later Years

In 1785, Franklin left France and returned once again to Philadelphia. In 1787, he was a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention. (The 81-year-old Franklin was the convention’s oldest delegate.) At the end of the convention, in September 1787, he urged his fellow delegates to support the heavily debated new document. The U.S. Constitution was ratified by the required nine states in June 1788, and George Washington (1732-99) was inaugurated as America’s first president in April 1789.

Franklin died a year later, at age 84, on April 17, 1790, in Philadelphia. Following a funeral that was attended by an estimated 20,000 people, he was buried in Philadelphia’s Christ Church cemetery. In his will, he left money to Boston and Philadelphia, which was later used to establish a trade school and a science museum and fund scholarships and other community projects.

More than 200 years after his death, Franklin remains one of the most celebrated figures in U.S. history. His image appears on the $100 bill, and towns, schools and businesses across America are named for him.

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ben franklin 1748 essay

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  • America 1765 - 1865

Benjamin Franklin: From Printer’s Apprentice to Founding Father

ben franklin 1748 essay

Shannon Callahan

13 jun 2022.

ben franklin 1748 essay

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was one of the United States’ Founding Fathers , and is considered one of the central figures of early American history. The tenth of 17 children, Franklin had limited formal education and began a printer’s apprenticeship with his oldest brother at the age of 12.

In addition to helping to draft the Declaration of Independence and being a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was a printer, publisher, author, inventor and diplomat. Throughout his life, Franklin used prose to influence those around him and was formative in helping to create the foundations of the United States.

Who was Benjamin Franklin, and how did he become a Founding Father of the United States?

Franklin’s first love was writing

Franklin originally enjoyed writing poetry, and built upon his reading and writing knowledge during a printing apprenticeship. However, he soon began writing prose and developed a sophisticated command of written language.

ben franklin 1748 essay

Benjamin Franklin (center) at work on a printing press. Reproduction of a Charles Mills painting by the Detroit Publishing Company, c. 1914.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In 1722, Franklin wrote a series of 14 satirical and witty essays under the pseudonym ‘Silence Dogood’, which he submitted to his brother’s newspaper, The Courant. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. From 1733 to 1758, Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanack under the pseudonym Richard Saunders. The Almanack contained famous phrases such as “early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”.

Franklin travelled between Philadelphia and London for years

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Franklin didn’t enjoy the city. He left to find work elsewhere, stopping in New York City before heading to Philadelphia , where he gained employment as a printer. He had hoped to start his own business, and the Governor of Pennsylvania, William Keith, suggested that he go to London and make connections before opening his own print shop in the States. However, Franklin left Philadelphia for London without receiving the letters of recommendation Keith had promised.

ben franklin 1748 essay

Franklin quickly found employment in London and enjoyed socializing in the city. In 1726, he was offered a clerkship in Philadelphia that promised to earn him high commissions, so he returned home again. 

Franklin retired aged 42

By 1748, Franklin had earned enough money to retire from active business. He continued to be a silent partner in his printing firm, Franklin and Hall, but now focused his time on ‘philosophical students and amusements’. Included in his ‘amusements’ was research into science and electricity, which he published papers on in 1751 to international acclaim.

In 1752, Franklin stood in a thunderstorm with a key attached to a kite to investigate the source of lightning and better understand electricity. He also created the distinction between insulators and conductors, amongst other discoveries. He is also credited with inventing bifocals, the Franklin stove and the glass armonica.

He was a public servant for the city of Philadelphia

In addition to scientific pursuits, Franklin also took to public service in his retirement. He served as a member of the Philadelphia City Council in 1748 and then deputy postmaster general for all of the colonies in 1753. He also spent 18 years in London as an agent of the Pennsylvania Assembly.

ben franklin 1748 essay

In 1751, Franklin co-founded Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, one of the first hospitals in the United States (depicted in this engaving by William Strickland, 1755).

His printing business became increasingly successful throughout the 1730s, and he launched a lending library, the first volunteer fire company, the American Philosophical Society, a hospital and a college that went on to become the University of Pennsylvania.

Who was Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father?

The Stamp Act of 1765 required all printed materials in the American colonies to carry a tax stamp. This frustrated those living in the colonies since they were being taxed without representation. Franklin was living in London at the time the act was passed and testified against it. The Stamp Act was repealed in 1766; however, it had stirred anti-British sentiments that further stoked the flames of the American Revolution .

On his return to Philadelphia in May 1775, Franklin was selected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and helped draft the document that declared the Americas free from British rule . He was then sent to France where he successfully enlisted the government’s help with the Revolutionary War , which proved critical to getting soldiers, supplies and money to the colonies throughout the conflict.

ben franklin 1748 essay

This Join, or Die by Franklin urged the colonies to join the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War). It later served as a symbol of colonial freedom during the American Revolution.

Franklin remained in France for several years and later negotiated the Treaty of Paris to end the war. After the war ended, he served as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention.

What is one thing Benjamin Franklin is famous for?

He is the only Founding Father to have signed all four documents that are considered key to the establishment of the United States in the Revolutionary period: the Declaration of Independence , the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris and the US Constitution .

His motion to approve the US Constitution was critical to its passing

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, there were fierce debates about what should be included in the document that would establish a new county. Though Franklin himself did not approve of everything in the Constitution, he wrote a speech to encourage all of the delegates to ratify it.

The oldest delegate at the convention, Franklin was unable to deliver the speech himself, but his message was nonetheless delivered effectively. After the document was voted on and ratified, Franklin was asked what kind of government the US would have, to which he supposedly replied, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

He continued in service to his community after his death

Benjamin Franklin died in 1790, a year after the US Constitution was ratified, at the age of 84. His funeral was attended by at least 20,000 people, and he was buried in Philadelphia’s Christ Church. In his will, he left a combined total of $4,000 to his hometown of Boston and his adopted home of Philadelphia.

ben franklin 1748 essay

Franklin on the Series 2009 hundred dollar bill.

These gifts were under strict instruction not to be drawn out for 100 years and could not be distributed for 200 years. When the time had passed, the cities decided to use the money in various ways, including giving personal loans to citizens and opening museums in his honour. This last gesture shows how invested Franklin was in the United States and its success for centuries to come.

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COMMENTS

  1. Advice to a Young Tradesman, [21 July 1748]

    Advice to a Young Tradesman Printed in George Fisher, The American Instructor: or Young Man's Best Companion. … The Ninth Edition Revised and Corrected. Philadelphia: Printed by B. Franklin and D. Hall, at the New-Printing-Office, in Market-Street, 1748. Pp. 375-7. (Yale University Library)

  2. Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (21 July 1748

    Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One (21 July 1748) By Alan Houston, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, San Diego Benjamin Franklin; Edited by Alan Houston, University of California, San Diego; Book: Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue

  3. PDF Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748) Benjamin Franklin Historical Background

    Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748) Benjamin Franklin Historical Background Written three years before the publication of Franklin's famed Experiments and Observations on Electricity, this essay originally appeared in a compilation titled The American Instructor.

  4. Way to Wealth around the World: Benjamin Franklin and the Globalization

    "T ime," B enjamin F ranklin professed poignantly in his 1748 Advice to a Young Tradesman, "is Money," an iconic statement that, by commodifying existence itself, helped articulate the emotive core of modern capitalism. 1 Indeed, few historical figures today enjoy a more prominent place in the cultural and intellectual constellation of capitalism than that most elusive of Founding ...

  5. Benjamin Franklin

    Benjamin Franklin (b. 1706-d. 1790) was born and raised in colonial Boston, Massachusetts, in the waning years of Puritan hegemony. He was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer. The precocious apprentice's first publication was a broadside ballad on the capture of Blackbeard, but his first lasting literary creation, the character of a ...

  6. Timeline

    Timeline A chronology of key events in the life of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), statesman, publisher, scientist, and diplomat. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) 1706, Jan. 17 Born, Boston, Massachusetts 1718-1723 Apprenticed as a printer to his brother James Franklin 1723 Moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1724-1726

  7. Benjamin Franklin

    Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, in colonial Boston. His father, Josiah Franklin (1657-1745), a native of England, was a candle and soap maker who married twice and had 17 children.

  8. What Ben Franklin Can Teach Us About Effective Negotiation

    Posted March 23, 2021. Shortly after declaring independence from England, America's first diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, was sent to negotiate an alliance with the French as America was no match ...

  9. Benjamin Franklin: From Printer's Apprentice to Founding Father

    Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was one of the United States' Founding Fathers, and is considered one of the central figures of early American history. The tenth of 17 children, Franklin had limited formal education and began a printer's apprenticeship with his oldest brother at the age of 12. In addition to helping to draft the Declaration ...

  10. Poor Richard Improved, 1748

    With the almanac for 1748 Franklin introduced an important change which he continued in the years that followed: he expanded his pamphlet to thirty-six pages and gave two facing pages to each month.

  11. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

    Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, which he referred to as his Memoirs and wrote in several parts over the course of twenty years, is initially intended as a family history for his son William ...

  12. Benjamin Franklin, the Printer

    The New England Courant. Benjamin Franklin was introduced to the art of printing and journalism by his brother James. He started working with him as an apprentice when he was 12, Benjamin signed an indenture for his apprenticeship which bounded him until he turned 21 and only then he could earn wages. In 1721 James Franklin founded the New ...

  13. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin

    When Franklin learned of Galloway's situation and of the seizure on his estate, he became apprehensive about what had become of his papers and wrote to his son-in-law, Richard Bache, about matters. [9] Bache followed up and discovered the trunk, which had been broke open and with some of its papers scattered about.

  14. ArchiveGrid : Benjamin Franklin Papers, 1748-1790

    Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a printer, author, philanthropist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, and scientist. The collection is open for research use. Benjamin Franklin Papers, 1748-1790, Mss folio volumes / miscellaneous boxes F, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA. Materials in English.

  15. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

    In Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, he places the idea of temperance as the first step to achieving his conception of "moral perfection" (a glaringly ironic goal for a man who owned enslaved ...

  16. Letter from Benjamin Franklin to a Royal Academy About Farting (1781)

    Letter from Benjamin Franklin to a Royal Academy About Farting (1781) I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year, viz. "Une figure quelconque donnee, on demande d'y inscrire le plus grand nombre de fois possible une autre figure plus-petite quelconque, qui est ...

  17. Time is money (aphorism)

    " Time is money " is an aphorism that is claimed to have originated [1] in "Advice to a Young Tradesman", an essay by Benjamin Franklin that appeared in George Fisher's 1748 book, The American Instructor: or Young Man's Best Companion, in which Franklin wrote, "Remember that time is money." [2] "Remember that time is money.

  18. Aphorism from Benjamin Franklin's 1748 essay

    Aphorism from Benjamin Franklin's 1748 essay Posted by craze on 23 December 2020, 2:38 pm In this article we have shared the answer for Aphorism from Benjamin Franklin's 1748 essay. Word Craze is the best version of puzzle word games at the moment. This game presents the best combination of word search, crosswords, and IQ games.

  19. The Call of the Wild Essays for College Students

    417 words. Call of the Wild Character Analysis Essay. Call of the Wild, by Jack London, begins in 1897, at the start of the Klondike gold rush. The discovery of gold in the Klondike region motivated thousands of men to head for the far north, all of them in need of dogs to pull sleds across the frigid arctic trails.