Description: These travel diaries form an important portrait of Britain at the moment when the dynamic forces of industrialization were surging through the country. In 1775, a young Philadelphia Quaker was sent by his father to gather detailed information on business conditions in the British Isles. Fisher's travels took him throughout Britain and Ireland, even across the English Channel, and the journals that record his observations provide a fascinating and very distinctive commentary on the economic and social life of the time. Detailed and astute descriptions of British manufacturing and trade are balanced by lively comments on landscape gardening and country houses, and there is much material on the transatlantic connections of the Society of Friends during the American Revolution. The travel journals are supplemented by Fisher's cameos of merchants in the major trading centres, with lists of all the goods handled. Dr Morgan's edition makes available a text that adds up to a late 18th-century version of Defoe's famous Tour.

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