What's the difference between merchant and tidewaiter?

Merchant

Definition:

(n.) One who traffics on a large scale, especially with foreign countries; a trafficker; a trader.
(n.) A trading vessel; a merchantman.
(n.) One who keeps a store or shop for the sale of goods; a shopkeeper.
(a.) Of, pertaining to, or employed in, trade or merchandise; as, the merchant service.
(v. i.) To be a merchant; to trade.

Example Sentences:

(1) For example, the Bank of England was nationalised in 1946, but remained in effect the voice of merchant bankers in the City.
(2) A total of 2,208 male subjects, enrolled as merchant marine seamen at the Civitavecchia (Italy) harbor from 1936 to 1975 were followed up through 1989 in order to evaluate their mortality experience.
(3) Among them, tourists, servicemen and merchant seamen are the groups most at risk.
(4) He sold the first Tesco product – Tesco Tea – five years later when he bought a tea shipment from a merchant called TE Stockwell and combined their initials on the packaging.
(5) RAAF aircraft have been joined in the search by six merchant ships, with one Norwegian automobile carrier still in the area, and another on its way.
(6) Born Pauline Crispin in Liverpool, the younger daughter of an insurance company manager, she was educated at Merchant Taylor's Girls school at Great Crosby, Northampton High school, and Sutton High school.
(7) Keating was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, and educated at Merchant Taylors' school in Middlesex and Trinity College Dublin, where he read English and French.
(8) Eight months before the general election, the “shrink the offer” merchants are back in the ascendant.
(9) Command and control servers for Shylock, so named as its code contained quotes from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, were located and seized by international law enforcement bodies, including the FBI, the German Federal Police and Europol.
(10) Inhalation is clearly related to the development of lung cancer in (copper) smelting and arsenical pesticide manufacturing, and also in heavily exposed wine merchants who had an additional source of exposure by ingestion.
(11) Consider it a metaphor: faced with a choice between saving for the future of those who have given years and decades in service to their employers, or handing some money to those who may have taken a paper stake for the most fleeting of moments, big British business favours the fast-buck merchants, every time.
(12) The stylish, varnished wooden interior and whitewashed walls has a slightly Danish feel, but General Merchant’s brunch-y, all-day menu is inspired by Australian cafe culture, where good coffee and pan-global fusion plates are the norm.
(13) "The administration's proposals … will be harmful to our US merchant marine, harmful to our national defence sealift capability, harmful to our farmers and millers and bad for our economy," said chairman James L Henry.
(14) He thinks it's complicated – though in the case of Shylock , his reworking of the Merchant of Venice , he is prepared to be specific.
(15) As Jeffreys says: “Imhotep becomes himself an iconic figure, not only architect – and possibly not one at all in the technical sense – but an early power merchant.
(16) This week a Danish cargo vessel carrying tons of the world's deadliest chemical weapons will sail into an Italian port and carefully begin transferring its lethal cargo to an ageing US merchant ship .
(17) A block north of the waterfront on Merchant Road, workmen up ladders are carefully painting corinthian capitals with yellow limewash and adjusting teak window frames, putting the finishing touches to a restoration project that offers a different model for saving heritage structures, while training local builders in the process.
(18) Lawyer Tony Merchant deposited more than US$800,000 into an offshore trust.
(19) But the rise of Ukip looks to me to be legitimising a very different view, in which the average English person will be characterised as an avowed Eurosceptic, a fierce opponent of immigration, a hang-'em-and-flog-'em merchant, and a hater of government.
(20) James Agate (1877‑1947) started out as a Manchester cotton merchant, moved to London as a shopkeeper, then rose to prominence as the most brilliant theatre critic of his day.