TOTAL COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES Early commerce of the United States, as a sepa rate nation, had its genesis in Colonial trade, of which it was in fact but a continuation under altered political auspices. The early commerce of the United States was largely water-borne and consisted of coastwise traffic and trade with foreign lands. In ternal commerce was decidedly primitive and confined to certain wholesaling activities of importers, the business of fur trading posts, and the distribution of a limited variety of manufactures, often on a barter basis in exchange for the crude produce of the frontier, by general stores or itinerant merchants. There were in existence as late as 1929, according to the Census of Distribution, a half dozen wholesale grocers who could trace the lineage of the businesses they operated back to these early times, one having been established in 1787.
While few statistics are available on the extent of the early commerce of the United States, it appears quite certain that by far the greater portion of the total commerce was foreign trade until well into the 19th century. The transition from a predomi nately foreign trading nation to one in which domestic trade ac counts for gine-tenths or more of the total, as it does today (1940), has been gradual; a transition attuned closely to the waves of westward migration which settled and developed the American continent.
redoubled by 1916, and reached the high point of nearly $98,000, 000,000 in 1920. The first post-war depression brought the total down below $54,000,000,000 in 1921. The 1929 level showed recovery to nearly $84,000,000,000, after which there was a steady drop to $35,000,000,000 in 1932, the low point of the great de pression of the '3os. Recovery carried the total up to more than $72,000,000,000 in 1935 but the following year saw a recession to $6o,000,000,000.
The dollar value figures are somewhat misleading because they conceal the influence of price changes. When allowance is made for the price factor, much of the fluctuation is reduced. An index of the physical volume of goods marketed at wholesale in the United States stood at 32.7 at the turn of the century (1929 = oo). Instead of doubling in ten years as the dollar value figures indicated, the physical volume index did not double until after 1916. The index stood at 69.8, the war-time high, in 1917, dropped to 62.4 in 1921 and rose to the high point of the cen tury thus far when in 1929 it reached 1 oo. The phySical volume of goods marketed fell off during the great depression to 61.9 in 1932 (or to about the same low point reached in 1921). This was a much less serious decline than was recorded by the unadjusted value figures. Since 1932 the index revealed steady progress up wards to 95.5 in 1937, after which it dropped back to 86.8 in 1938. (See Table XII.)