The Jacob Price Collection includes letters written during his military service, extensive correspondence with colleagues and scholars, material on the Francis Lowenheim case involving access to research material, and Price's research files and index cards detailing his research into colonial American and British merchants. The Collection is organized into six series: Correspondence, Dictionary of National Biography, Lowenheim Case, Personal, Research, and Index Cards.
Jacob Myron Price, a pioneer in quantitative methods of historical study, was born on November 8th, 1925, in Worcester, Massachusetts to Oscar and Agnes (Pike) Price. He entered Harvard in 1942 but joined the Air Force in 1944, working as a cryptographic technician then serving as a staff sergeant, and was sent to India until 1946. Following his service, he received his A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947, 1948, and 1954, respectively. He was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1954, he taught at Smith College before coming to the University of Michigan as an instructor in 1956. He became assistant professor in 1958, associate professor in 1961, and professor in 1964. Price served on every major committee within the Department of History, and served twice as its chair (1971-72, 1979-84). Price received the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 1981 and was awarded Professor Emeritus status in 1991 after he retired in December 1990.
Price was known for his lectures on general European history, economic history, and modern British history. One of his early publications was Reading for Life: Developing the College Student's Lifetime Reading Interest (1959, reprinted in 1968). Nationally, he served on the board of editors of four scholarly journals and held a number of positions in the American Historical Association, including chairing the committee on quantitative data from 1967 to 1974 and co-editing Dimensions of the Past (1972). He also led the North American Conference on British Studies and its Midwest conference. He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the British Academy and he was prominent in the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, and in the Economic History Association, which named him its president in 1987-88. He was also a Visiting Fellow at All Soul's College in Oxford.
He is best known for his work on trade between North America and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His initial research concerned the Anglo-American development of the market for tobacco in Russia from 1676 to 1722. His interpretations, based on archival research in France, Britain, and the United States, made his publications landmarks in the understanding of capital formation, economic development, and the role of trade on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. His monumental study of the tobacco trade France and the Chesapeake (1973), was awarded both the University of Michigan Press Book Award and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. Later, he published the highly-influential Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade (1980). He received fellowships from a variety of organizations, and was a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
