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Reviews of Books
the backcountry; although the government was more
responsive after the Revolution, it was generally the
wealthy who got the roads they requested.
The heart of Johnson's economic material about the
settlers is his analysis of 155 inventories, dating from
1750 to 1800. Johnson confirms Klein's conclusion that
backcountry planters were "aggressively acquisitive"
(Klein, p. 3). (Readers would be well advised to pay
less attention to Table 3.1, the quantitative analysis of
the inventories by decade, since it is difficult to
decipher and contains a number of errors, than to the
accompanying text.) Largely on the basis of the inventories and an appreciation of the importance of indigo,
Johnson is convinced that the local economy was
thriving and brisk; still, he has nothing to say about
economic mobility, although he does recognize a growing rift between people on the top and bottom of the
economic scale.
Unfortunately, as interesting as much of the material in this book is, too much is missing. Most grievously, there is hardly any mention of Native Americans. While Johnson could argue that Natives were no
longer a presence in the area, he does not adequately
treat the impact of the Cherokee War or even the
participation of local men in the military operations.
Treatment of the economic plight of backcountry
settlers following the Revolution is inadequate, as is
Johnson's description of the legislature's response to
the crisis, which by and large was more protective of
lowcountry interests than the backcountry's.
This book will not cause scholars to modify their
views about either the colonial or revolutionary period; rather, providing details about a significant area
in South Carolina, it confims what we already knew.
JEROME NADELHAFT,
EMERlTCS
University of Maine
CATHY MATSON. Merchants and Empire: Trading in
Colonial New York. (Early America: History, Context,
Culture.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
1998. Pp. x, 458.
In 1994, Wayne Bodle's William and Mary Quarterly
article surveying the historiography of the Middle
Colonies concluded that the economic history of the
region "remains in much the same tentative state" as it
did in the late 1970s. With the publication of Cathy
Matson's book, one no longer has cause to lament such
a gap in our scholarly knowledge. The book provides a
definitive description of trading in colonial New York
City. It complements Thomas M. Doerflinger's A
Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic
Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (1986),
completing the story of merchants and commercial
development in the two major urban ports of the
Middle Colonies.
Matson's book focuses on economic developments
among city merchants; the experiences of farmers,
craftsmen, consumers, and shopkeepers are mentioned
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
only to the extent that they interacted with or affected
urban exporters, importers, and wholesalers. But she
does not otherwise limit her study: she examines the
roles and perspectives of lesser merchants as well as
the commercial elite, she includes developments of
Dutch New Amsterdam as well as English New York,
and she describes economic discourse as well as commercial practice.
A chapter on the Dutch colony (1620-1664) and a
chapter on the prerevolutionary years (1754-1770)
bracket six chapters covering transatlantic trade, the
West Indian and coastal trade, and regional trade
during Matson's core period, 1664-1760. The transatlantic trade with Britain, southern Europe, and the
Low Countries was dominated by the elite merchants,
who imported manufactured goods and exported such
local New York products as furs, grain, and naval
stores. Such eminent merchants were a small minority
(at times, only ten to twenty percent) of all wholesalers
in New York City, however, and their proportion
declined as the total number of wholesalers increased
from about eighty in 1664 to nearly 400 in the 1750s.
The majority of the city's traders were lesser merchants-also known to the colonists as "middling"
merchants-who traded on a smaller scale than the
great merchants, profited more modestly, often did
business directly with small producers, and rarely
engaged in transatlantic exporting and importing. Middling merchants focused on the less expensive West
Indian and coastal trade, exporting New York wheat,
flour, timber, meat, and other agricultural surpluses,
and importing sugar, molasses, slaves, and tobacco
from the West Indies and the South. Lesser merchants
also engaged in trading relationships with commercial
farmers in New York's agricultural hinterland.
Drawing extensively from primary sources-especially merchants' correspondence, account books, and
hundreds of pamphlets and treatises written by political theorists and merchants on both sides of the
Atlantic-Matson provides a clear explanation of colonial commercial practices and describes in rich detail
the businesses of individual great and middling merchants in New York. But the main analytical theme
carried through the book is the merchants' position on
the issue of economic regulation versus free trade, a
debate that began during the Dutch period and extended throughout the English colonial period to the
American Revolution. Matson is careful to note that
merchants' views on political economy were not always
c1earcut and consistent, but she concludes that as a
general rule elite merchants were more likely than
lesser merchants to support mercantilist regulations.
The middling merchants tended to approve of regulations of regional trade-where they would gain from
quality controls and fixed prices on agricultural
goods-but at the same time they opposed limitations
on free trade with the Caribbean islands and with
other colonies and often used the language of economic freedom to justify various kinds of illicit trade.
Because of their lack of economic and political power,
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Canada and the United States
they were largely unsuccessful in their efforts to eliminate restraints on trade during the colonial period. In
the 1760s and 1770s, however, when lesser merchants
were among the most visible and assertive opponents
of tightened imperial trade legislation, many New
Yorkers came to share their views on economic freedom.
Matson's book not only makes an important contribution to scholarship on the economic history of New
York and the Middle Colonies but also provides a
comprehensive analysis of developments in AngloAmerican economic discourse between 1620 and 1770,
and it therefore will be of interest to a broad range of
scholars of early American history.
DEBORAH A. ROSEN
Lafayette College
DEBORAH A. ROSEN. Courts and Commerce: Gender,
Law, and the Market Economy in Colonial New York.
(Historical Perspectives on Business Enterprise Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1997.
Pp. xvi, 232. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.95.
In this brief book, Deborah A. Rosen argues three
interrelated theses. First, she contends that market
relations existed in New York throughout the eighteenth century. Second, she suggests that, as a result of
an increasingly pervasive market culture, women "became peripheralized from the economy" (p. 1) long
before industrialization. Finally, in her most original
insight, Rosen asserts that New York's colonial courts,
like their early nineteenth-century counterparts, created a legal climate that actively supported and encouraged economic development. All three contentions, in turn, lead her to conclude that "the transition
to capitalism was a lengthy process that began well
before the Revolution ... [and] did not just occur
suddenly in the mid-nineteenth century" (p. 4). Few
colonial historians would dispute this observation.
Rosen uses a wide range of legal and business
records to examine the impact of economic development in both urban and rural areas. Probate records
detail New Yorkers' increasing access to consumer
goods, as well as their growing use of credit, during the
eighteenth century. Rosen argues that commercialization in New York, as elsewhere, resulted in increased
social inequality. She compares tax lists from the 1730s
and 1750s to show growing stratification during that
period. Additional comparisons with seventeenth-century tax lists would have enabled her to chart the
timing of social change more precisely and render
more compelling the link between the rise of market
relations and the growth of inequality.
Rosen then examines market relations among men
in eighteenth-century New York, focusing on New
York City and Dutchess County. She maintains that
the formalization of courts and law supported and
even promoted commercialization in both urban and
rural areas, although economic development and legal
change occurred more quickly in Manhattan than in
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
899
rural Dutchess County. The few cases Rosen cites do
not establish the courts' pervasive influence, but they
do show that the courts' willingness to enforce contracts and a growing preference for settlements over
jury trials in debt cases created a situation whereby law
might supersede trust as the basis for business relationships. Rosen's research in debt litigation records
indicates that growing numbers of white men from a
range of wealth, occupational, and ethnic backgrounds
engaged in market relations as both debtors and
creditors during the eighteenth century. She argues
persuasively that the ability of merchants, shopkeepers, and ultimately farmers to get faster, cheaper legal
redress facilitated the spread of impersonal market
relations among men in New York's urban and rural
communities.
Women, by contrast, had limited access to the courts
and to the commercial economy. The common law
imposed severe disabilities on wives and widows alike,
and those disabilities became increasingly onerous as
courts and law assumed commanding roles in economic life. Because coverture and the rules of inheritance deprived women of legally enforceable rights
and obligations, commercialization and legal formalization resulted in the decline of women's economic
opportunities. Among female New Yorkers, rural
wives, who produced butter and eggs for local sale, and
poor urban widows, who worked for their subsistence,
were most likely to participate in the market economy.
Readers will wonder if women's involvement in the
market also varied by skills or ethnicity, particularly
given the tradition of female autonomy and enterprise
in Dutch colonial communities.
This book addresses a range of issues in the overlapping fields of economic, legal, and women's history,
but most of its author's ideas are not new, despite her
repeated assertions to the contrary. Rosen measures
the supposed novelty of her approach and findings
against a caricature of the existing literature. Rejecting
the "idealized image of a communal colonial society"
(p. 3) that she believes dominates current historiography, she ignores much of the best economic history of
the past decade, which reveals a complex spectrum of
economic attitudes and suggests the frequent coexistence of modernizing economic behavior with traditional beliefs and values. Curiously, Rosen seeks "to
strongly undermine the myths and idealization of
colonial America" (p. 15) by studying New York, a
colony noted for neither its communal ideals nor its
lack of commercial activity. The result is a competent
study based on solid primary research that reinforces,
rather than challenges, much of what we know about
commerce, courts, and gender in early America.
CYNTHIA A. KIERNER
University of North Carolina,
Charlotte
ALLEN JAYNE. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence:
Origins, Philosophy, and Theology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1998. Pp. xiii, 245. $39.95.
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