"To attempt to combine the methods and the inspirational genius of an Edward S. Morgan, a Bernard Bailyn, a Jacob Price, and a Simon Schama in one work is a daunting if not forbidding challenge, but it is one to which David Hancock rises with distinction. Citizens of the World is not your usual run-of-the-mill collective biography or dry-as-dust statistical analysis of colonial trade patterns. It is an inspired account of the whole lives of men who made a difference in the world of trade by their willingness to challenge the system from within....must reading for anyone interested in the emergence of the American economy in the eighteenth century, just as it stands as must reading for anyone who wishes to understand better the predominant role certain London merchants played in shaping the course of the British Empire in the last decades of the eighteenth century." The Journal of American History
