A few years ago, during an afternoon’s exploration of Salem, Massachusetts, I stopped by the Orientation Center of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site to ask for a map and a recommendation of what to see. Despite the center’s location at the base of historic Derby Wharf where Salem ships once launched for Asia, South America, and most places in between, the staff member pointed me back up the street for a walking tour of the city’s infamous witch trials. At that moment I pondered the same question that struck author Robert Booth and encouraged his new book: Why do we care so much about Salem’s witchcraft trials and know so little about Salem’s rich maritime past? Booth attempts to answer this question by following two generations of the White, Story, and Crowninshield families in Salem as he traces the port’s commercial history from the closing years of the War of 1812 to the 1840s. This is the story of the lamentable decline of Salem, once one of the richest towns in the United States, under the weight of immense commercial wealth and amidst the growth of a nation whose interests by the mid-nineteenth century seemed to be at odds with Salem’s maritime trade.

At the start of the nineteenth century, Salem had a global empire, as Booth puts it, in which Salem ships traded peaceably and lucratively in distant markets, particularly those in the Indian Ocean and in South Asia. The term empire obscures the more complex and interregional trading networks of which Salem was a part, but nonetheless the port’s trade did spread successfully to points across the globe. But as the United States expanded westward and embraced manufacturing, Salem merchants and seamen found diminishing opportunities to get ahead in maritime commerce, and the wealth from foreign trade that had once “raised up all classes in Salem” (25) gave way to growing poverty and criminality in this port town. As trade faltered, many leading businessmen left Salem to invest in new manufacturing, shipbuilding, and neighborhood development projects in Boston, New York, and points west. At sea, opium trafficking and increased violence toward foreign trading partners replaced the honorable commerce of Salem’s past. Booth recounts the resulting degradation of Salem society that culminated in the 1830 murder of Joseph White, a preeminent Salem merchant of the old guard, whose death came at the hands of a devious group of former ship captains and a wayward son of the famed Crowninshield family in search of a dark thrill and financial gain. Salem was so embarrassed by this internal collapse, Booth concludes, that it suppressed the memory of its former commercial greatness.

Death of an Empire follows in the historical true-crime style of author Erik Larson and presents a vivid description of life in early nineteenth-century Salem and aboard Salem vessels as they traded in distant markets. Using primarily newspaper accounts, published memoirs, and court records, Booth does impressive work to illuminate Salem tableaus that don’t often get recreated in such detail, from the bustle of life along Union Wharf to the seedy rooms of the Mumford bar and brothel on the edge of town. Booth writes with the same ease discussing Salem local politics as he does describing the intricate process of trade between Salem merchants and the rajah Po Adam on the coast of Sumatra. Familiar American characters like Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, Joseph Story, and Nathaniel Hawthorn circulate through the narrative as they move into and out of Salem, and they help flesh out the breadth of Salem life, from law to politics and from business to literature.

Booth’s efforts to bring to life the social and economic networks of Salem residents pay off in the book. When many of Salem’s leading families depart the dwindling port for Josiah Quincy’s Boston, the process of smaller, specialized ports getting subsumed into the commercial orbit of larger ports like Boston that unfolded throughout the nation in the nineteenth century becomes for the reader more than just a statistic of tonnage or ship clearances. Booth shows how a port’s commercial advantage could be significantly diminished with the loss of maritime expertise, political connections, and business that went with every family defection. In spite of Booth’s emphasis on the role of shame in suppressing Salem’s memory of its commercial greatness, the most compelling explanation for how so much first-hand memory of Salem’s commercial past was lost is this migration of trade and merchant families out of Salem by the 1830s and the subsequent loss of community. In a town that as late as 1836 chose the motto “To the farthest port of the rich Indies” (from the Latin DivitisIndiae, usque ad ultimum sinum) for its new city seal, the memory of Salem’s commercial glory was still strong among the remaining community.

Booth has a clear talent for descriptive and captivating writing. Still, Death of an Empire at times reads more as a series of short, engaging stories than as a coherent narrative. The family trees at the beginning of the book become essential tools for reminding the reader how each character fits into the arc of Booth’s story and into Salem’s history, though new characters and episodes still pop up without clear introduction or explanation. Further, although the claims that Booth makes about Salem’s commercial rise may make for a more dramatic fall in this narrative, in glorifying Salem’s commercial success in the early 1800s he also obscures historical reality. Booth characterizes Salem men and merchants of the early nineteenth century as honorable and adventurous, and attributes much of their success to these traits. He writes that Salem “had few resources other than confidence, aggressiveness, and intelligence” (xi) and that the port achieved commercial success “without the arrogance and exploitation that were typical of Europeans” (xii). At other times, Booth contrasts honorable Salem merchants of the early 1800s who helped create “friendship around the globe” (268) with Andrew Jackson, who lived among his slaves and led an administration of “racist militarists” (xv). But the implication that virtue and self-reliance had a causal role in Salem’s early economic success is specious, and this claim is undermined by the fact that the same Salem merchants that Booth praises made large profits carrying and selling the products of slave economies around the world. Elias Hasket Derby, the 18th-century Salem merchant whose story begins Booth’s Preface, owned a slave.

Death of an Empire adds to a growing volume of historical work on early American trade that examines American commerce beyond the Atlantic Ocean, and Booth’s book will have appeal for both the general public and for historical researchers. Booth claims that Salem was without comparison in its connections to overseas trade in the early United States, but his book will nonetheless bring readers to wonder how Salem’s dynamics of downsizing compared to other smaller ports of the early republic. Death of an Empire is a welcome addition to the history of Salem for its detailed synthesis of this important transition period in the port’s life, and his engaging book should suggest many further avenues for others to tap the rich historical resources of Salem’s commercial past and recapture this forgotten history.

Randall Lewis is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examines the expansion of American maritime commerce after the American Revolution with a focus on Salem, Massachusetts.

Every Early American historian must determine the appropriate perspective to frame the story of European settlement of the Americas. For decades, Frederick Turner’s choice of viewing American history by looking west from the Appalachian Mountains dominated the historiography. More recently, Daniel Richter provided a different frame to tell the story of early America by facing east from the Jefferson Memorial Arch in St. Louis. Michael Jarvis’s magisterial In the Eye of All Trade does not place the reader on the solidity of a mountain range or atop a national monument. Nor does he urge us to look in one direction. Instead, readers of In the Eye of All Trade are asked to consider the myriad connections Bermudians created within the Atlantic history from the unsteady wooden deck of a Bermudian sloop. While this may strike some as unorthodox, Jarvis’s choice of perspective is truly inspired. It ensures that even as readers are taken into uncharted waters, they are moored by the book’s two central ideas: that the Atlantic world’s “defining characteristic” was motion, and that Bermuda’s maritime economy was “at the center of England’s emerging Atlantic system” (9, 11).

Jarvis observes that while Bermuda occupies less than twenty-one square miles, its location “along a continuous curving arc of islands and coastline stretching from Newfoundland to Tobago” placed it within relatively short sailing voyages from all points in the western British Atlantic (4-5). When combined with the prevailing currents and trade winds, Bermuda’s location resulted in nine out of every ten ships sailing between the West Indies and Europe or North America to pass the island, placing it “in the eye of all trade.” In emphasizing the centrality of Bermuda in the British Atlantic, Jarvis provides a detailed maritime social history that considers both how the ocean shaped Bermuda and how Bermudian connections throughout the Atlantic basin influenced life on the island.

Jarvis proceeds to use this new perspective to explore six key characteristics of Bermudian life: its transition from a tobacco society to a maritime society; the island’s unique system of slavery; the emphasis placed on kinship connections and communal activities; Bermudian exploitation of the Atlantic’s natural resources; the effect of Bermuda’s maritime economy on its residents; and the impact of the American Revolution on Bermudian society.

In the book’s first two chapters Jarvis considers the initial development of Bermuda, documenting its operation by the Somers Company and transition to a royal colony. Although initially successful as a tobacco colony, Jarvis demonstrates that the collapse of the tobacco market in the 1620s and 1630s was a blessing in disguise that caused Bermudians to diversify their economy. Doing so fostered maritime connections with North American and other West Indies colonies. And because of limited land, many Bermudians moved to other colonies, forming networks of maritime trade that would sustain Bermuda to the end of the eighteenth century. In telling the story of a transition away from tobacco to the sea, Jarvis emphasizes that this took place without “direction, promotion, or supervision” from London (73).

With an increased emphasis on maritime activities, agriculture became marginal, as short trips to North American ports enabled Bermuda to regularly obtain provisions. The switch to a maritime economy also resulted in Bermudians imposing strict conservation measures and cultivating cedar trees for use in the island’s shipbuilding industry. By building distinctive, fast sloops, honing navigational and piloting skills, and keeping costs low by using slave labor aboard their ships, Bermudians flourished and made their island into what Jarvis terms a “great paradox”—an “island that was a vibrant commercial and communications hub and yet virtually invisible and easily missed within Great Britain’s sprawling empire” (183).

In Bermuda’s new maritime economy it was labor, not land, that was key. As the island’s fleet increased, slaves became increasingly critical to the island’s shipbuilding industry and came to comprise a majority of many Bermudian ship crews. Slave hiring was key to the success of this new maritime economy as it provided elasticity to seasonal shifts. Hiring out led many whites to depend upon slave labor for much of their household income, particularly those who did not own land. Smuggling, an important component of the island’s economy, was assisted by the use of all-black crews who could not testify against their ship captain or owner. Thus, Bermuda’s non-agricultural, mobile slave system more closely resembled slavery in ports such as New York than slave societies in the Caribbean.

Jarvis demonstrates that Bermuda’s rise as a maritime hub depended upon extensive kinship networks. Groups of family members built and bought sloops and schooners, raised capital, recruited ship crews and gathered goods to be shipped. In the era before widespread use of insurance by the island’s fleet, these kinship networks helped spread the risk of maritime endeavors. The kinship connections also extended to the ships themselves. Jarvis, through a precise and careful detailing that characterizes his scholarship, provides rich evidence of how almost every Bermudian ship crew came from the same neighborhoods and kinship groups, and frequently from the same households. These connections crossed racial lines as slaves frequently worked alongside their white masters on board Bermudian sloops. Jarvis even shows how kinship networks extended to other colonies, tracing how Bermudians emigrated to the Bahamas, South Carolina, Virginia and St. Eustatius. These commercial and kinship connections enabled this small island to flourish as a maritime economy.

With their maritime skills, unique slave system and extensive kinship connections Bermudians were, as Jarvis convincingly demonstrates, able to exploit maritime hinterlands to supplement their intercolonial trade and shipbuilding. They did so by raking salt from the Turks and Caicos Islands, salvaging shipwrecks, harvesting timber in Central and North America, turtling in the Cayman Islands, as well as privateering and whaling. Such activities, while marginal to many colonial economies, were “absolutely vital” to Bermuda’s maritime economy (250). These Atlantic maritime hinterlands drew large numbers of people together and linked regional economies from which Bermudians greatly benefited.

Jarvis illustrates this well through his discussion of the Bermuda sloop. No single item illustrates so well the importance of the Atlantic Commons to Bermuda’s economy. A critical component of Bermuda’s maritime economy that carried everything from salt to turtles to blubber, these fast and durable sloops contained a variety of elements from Bermuda’s extensive exploitation of the Atlantic: though based on Dutch design, they were built with North American cypress and pine as well as Bermudian cedar, and often contained rigging from shipwrecks, sails made from smuggled Dutch or Russian canvas, and iron from North American furnaces.

In chapters five and six, Jarvis ties together his history of Bermuda by analyzing how its maritime economy shaped its society on shore. Most eighteenth-century ports had skewed gender ratios, but Bermuda’s was particularly high: one-third of its households were headed by women in 1727. With many of the island’s men away at sea, Bermudian women took on considerable responsibilities, creating goods for export that tied them into the Atlantic economies that their husbands knew firsthand. While assuming a number of traditional male roles, Bermudian women, white and black, came to rely upon each other. The irony of this situation was, as Jarvis notes, that maritime activities led the island’s men to neglect traditional male social duties; they did not “protect, regularly provide for, [nor] personally govern their ‘dependent’ wives, children and slaves” (303). At the same time, the connections Bermudians had throughout the Atlantic enabled many islanders to own consumer goods that others in the Atlantic of similar wealth did not.

With the American Revolution significant changes came to Bermuda. The island’s reliance upon trade with North American colonies was disrupted. With the influx of British military forces and Loyalist privateers using the island as a base for operations, the nature of Bermuda’s economy changed dramatically. Jarvis meticulously describes the divisions among the island’s residents, many of whom favored the American cause. As they had earlier in the century in creatively using the Atlantic Commons to craft a dynamic maritime economy, Bermudians responded to the war with inventiveness. They used privateering and sale of goods to the British military to reconstruct their economy. In the years after the Revolution, shipbuilding, military provisioning, cod fishing, and whaling sustained the island.

In the Eye of All Trade is a welcome complement to Dan Vickers’s work in demonstrating the central role small ports on the geographic periphery of the Atlantic had in the development of British America. As Jarvis demonstrates so well, for most Bermudians, and for many other British colonists, the ocean was where they sought sustenance, identity, and a way of life. Having spent twenty years painstakingly researching colonial Bermuda, Jarvis has produced a wonderfully written narrative history worthy of its lengthy gestation. His emphasis on Bermudians’ adaptability to their isolated location stands as a useful reminder of how many early British settlers saw areas often referred to as “frontiers” or “borderlands” as central to their lives and economic well-being.

The African Burial Ground in New York City was the final resting place for both free and enslaved African Americans from the 1690s to 1790s. Since the site’s rediscovery in 1991, the American public has slowly started to question the assumption that slavery in the United States existed only below the Mason-Dixon Line. In Ten Hills Farm, C.S. Manegold elaborates on the “forgotten history” of Northern slavery and argues that Americans need to move faster to “close this gap” in their understandings of slavery. Manegold hopes her work will narrow this void and ensure that textbooks can no longer dismiss “references to slavery in the North with parenthetical acknowledgement” (269).

Manegold is not alone in studying this topic. The last twenty years have seen a significant push toward understanding the role of slavery in the North. Gary Nash, Jean Soderlund, Shane White, Joanne Pope Melish, Graham Hodges, Leslie Harris, Jill Lepore, Ira Berlin, and others have all sought to revive this forgotten history, one that New Englanders, as Joanne Pope Melish argues, rewrote in a fit of historical amnesia in the nineteenth century.

As an awarding-winning journalist, Manegold crafts a narrative not stuffed with jargon but filled with lively prose that not only links the reader to past events but illustrates their connection to modern-day issues. The book follows the story of Ten Hills Farm, a tract of land along the Mystic River near Medford, Massachusetts, from its first European owner, the famous John Winthrop, in 1631 up to the American Revolution. Although the farm plays a role in her narrative, Manegold is far more interested in the dynamic characters who owned, lived on, or otherwise came in contact with the property. Through an exploration of these people, Manegold argues that slavery in the North (though she solely focuses on New England) did not exist as a benign institution. Rather, those who supported slavery in Massachusetts had the same traits and values as those who supported it in the seemingly “harsher” Caribbean; they were one and the same.

Manegold divides her text chronologically into five parts. The first tells how John Winthrop came to Massachusetts, rose to power as governor, and purchased Ten Hills as a country retreat. Only three years after Winthrop acquired his estate, the Pequot War introduced slavery to New England in the form of Indian captives. While some remained as slaves in Massachusetts, the colonists also exported many to the Caribbean. This early link between New England and the Caribbean created an enduring connection that, as Manegold argues, allowed for the importation of the first African slaves to Massachusetts in 1638. This link serves as an important fixture (and rightly so) throughout her narrative (43).

The second part describes the transfer of Ten Hills from an indebted John Winthrop to his son, John Winthrop Jr. Manegold constantly reminds the reader in this section that all actions in New England took place with slavery as a backdrop. For example, John Jr.’s rise to the governorship of Connecticut occurred at the same time he held at least one African slave at Ten Hills. In this section, Manegold also introduces William Ryall who immigrated to Massachusetts in 1629 and eventually settled with his family along the Maine coast. Ryall becomes increasingly important as his grandson Isaac Royall altered the spelling of the family name and bought Ten Hills in 1732.

In the third part, Isaac Royall, like many other New Englanders, established trade links with the larger Atlantic world and in 1700 left Massachusetts for Antigua, where he created a successful sugar plantation. While in Antigua, Royall continued to maintain familial and trade connections in New England and eventually purchased Ten Hills with the intent to become, like most other Antigua sugar planters, an absentee landlord. Royall brought twenty-seven of his slaves from the island to Massachusetts when he and his family finally left Antigua in 1738.

The most powerful link between slavery and Ten Hills Farm came during the years of Isaac Royall Jr.’s ownership. As Manegold argues, Isaac Jr. participated in the slave trade and expanded his land holdings throughout New England. Isaac Jr. sought to replicate his childhood home in the Caribbean and built his fortune on the backs of his slaves in the same way that his family had done in Antigua. At his height, Royall owned as many as 138 slaves on his combined New England holdings (192), which he used to partially endow the Royall Professorship of Law at Harvard Law School.

The penultimate part of Manegold’s narrative begins in the years after the French and Indian War when colonists began to protest the “slavery” the British imposed through such regulations as the Stamp Act. Manegold argues that slaves in Massachusetts picked up on the colonists’ rhetorical use of slavery and freedom and used this revolutionary ideology to question their own enslavement. She retells the story of Crispus Attucks as well as the dozens of slaves who filed freedom suits in Massachusetts courts.

While blacks petitioned for freedom in the years before the American Revolution, Isaac Royall Jr. wanted nothing to do with war. By 1775 he had decided to leave Massachusetts and return to Antigua. Before he could leave, the war began and he and his family escaped to Canada and eventually England, where he died in 1781. After the war had displaced the Royalls, Ten Hills Farm became a military camp which hosted New Hampshire troops led by John Stark, George Washington, and others. Although Manegold cannot accurately track the disposition of many of the slaves who worked for Isaac Jr., she does discuss perhaps his most remembered slave, Belinda. An elderly slave manumitted by Royall and promised support in her old age, she successfully forced the state to guarantee that pension from the profits of the confiscated Royall estate.

The final part of Manegold’s work, called “The Legacy,” describes how the Daughters of the American Revolution acquired Ten Hills Farm in 1898, and its eventual transfer to the Royall House Association in 1907. More importantly, Manegold argues that in the future, Americans should remember that Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” was built with slave labor. Just as she hopes to do throughout her book, she argues that Americans must recognize the importance of slavery to colonial New England. Some have begun to do this, such as the current holder of the Royall Professorship at Harvard, Janet Halley, who read all of the names of the Royall’s slaves as part of her acceptance speech to acknowledge this part of New England’s past.

Manegold sets out to show the relationship New England had with slavery and in doing so readily admits that she is not a historian and will “leave the more pointillist detailing to scholars with more training in the field than I, and perhaps more patience for the minutiae upon which the finest scholarship is built” (xv). Although one does not need to be a historian to accomplish this task, Manegold’s lack of engagement with the larger historiography of race and slavery leaves what could be an even more powerful book flat in many places.

For example, she attributes the solidification of slavery in New England to an interest in trade, wealth, and an engagement with the larger Atlantic slave economy. While this is of course true, Manegold’s explanation largely ignores the larger racialized struggles over land, community, and power that whites and Indians fought over for the first eighty years of settlement, which directly related to slavery. While she does acknowledge that Indians became the first New England slaves, her discussion of Indians showcases not a negotiated relationship which evolved over time but one where whites victimized the unsuspecting Indians. Even when she does show Indians as actors in their own right, for instance in King Philip’s War, she portrays a stereotypical portrait of them with “faces painted (and) bodies greased” where they aimed to impose “suffering and chaos” upon the whites in retribution for years of persecution (91). The intertwined and often volatile relationship whites and Indians formed could have been more powerfully developed, allowing the reader to truly understand why both African and Indian slavery became a part of New England life (45-48).

Manegold’s work could have also dealt far more with New England slaves instead of those who owned them. Indeed, the first serious mention of slaves does not appear until page forty-one with the preceding pages devoted almost solely to John Winthrop. Although Manegold runs into some serious source issues in determining how the slaves functioned at Ten Hills, the slaves themselves seemed largely overshadowed by the lives of the white men and women who lived alongside them. Just as the Royall House Association recently received a grant to incorporate more of the African American story into their interpretative mission, it would have served Manegold’s argument well to have tried to more centrally incorporate the slave’s story. In the fourth part of her work, where she does accomplish this to a greater extent, her narrative becomes both more powerful and more applicable to the study of slavery.

In the end, Manegold produces a vivid and compelling case which highlights the need for both academics and the general public to understand not only the role slavery played in the North but its relationship to other American colonies as well as the larger Atlantic world.

In Wandering Souls, S. Scott Rohrer seeks to understand the relationship between Protestantism and migration in America over the course of almost two and a half centuries. His ambitious project spans place as well as time, as he ranges from Puritans in New England, to Anglicans in the South, to Inspirationists and Mormons in the West, among others. In covering such broad swathes of time and space, Rohrer hopes to answer one fundamental question: “what was it about Protestantism and America’s dissenting culture that made Protestants so restless?” (14)

To answer this question, Rohrer uses eight Protestant groups as case studies. His first chapter introduces Thomas Hooker and the Puritans, whose story he uses to illuminate key themes he will return to in later chapters. He divides the other seven Protestant groups into two categories. First, he claims to focus primarily on individuals and families looking for “some kind of spiritual and economic fulfillment” (9). In this section he includes Anglicans, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Moravians, and Methodists. The second category he classifies as group migrations led by a church, congregation, or minister. This section covers Baptists, Inspirationists, and Mormons.

While these categories seem clear in the introduction, in reality there is much overlap. In the section on families and individuals, for example, Rohrer includes the movement of groups of Presbyterians to Maine and Virginia, and a family migration of Moravians that occurred within the context of the establishment of a large new Moravian community in North Carolina. These would, it appears, fit as well in the second category as the first.

It seems that motivations for migration mark the real difference between the two categories in Rohrer’s new migration “model.” The first type of migrants moved for a variety of reasons relating to personal fulfillment: some sought a “new birth,” others wanted to raise their children in godly communities, and still others sought societies bound together by ethnicity as well as religion.

The second type of migration occurred when people moved as part of a group seeking a better environment to practice their religion. Some escaped persecution, as in the case of the Mormons, while others hoped to create godly societies or to mitigate internal conflict, as in the case of Inspirationists and Baptists. All three groups moved for unique reasons, but in a broad sense all three groups sought better living conditions for the religious group as a whole.

Rohrer hopes his book will challenge the traditional migration narrative in which “secularly motivated migrants are lured to the frontier by the promise of cheap and plentiful land” (247). Wandering Souls certainly adds a layer of complexity to this traditional narrative. Some of Rohrer’s wandering souls undoubtedly chose to move for religious reasons. Yet, as Rohrer himself concedes at several points, the lure of land tempted Protestants as much as it did secular settlers. While Protestantism might have informed migrants’ decisions to move, the availability of relatively cheap and fertile land determined where and when they went. In this sense, Rohrer’s new model of migration complements, but does not replace, older ones that emphasize the importance of land.

If all the migrants shared a desire for more or better or cheaper land (or at least expanded economic opportunities promised by the frontier), Rohrer also sees similarities in the otherwise diverse religious motivations for migration. According to Rohrer, the eight case studies in his book provide four related answers to his core question about the relationship between Protestantism and migration. Protestants were “so restless” because they were “searching for salvation, Christian community, or reform—and sometimes for all three” (244). He also argues that America’s “dissenting culture” encouraged Protestant wanderings.

Yet of these four factors, the search for personal salvation through a “new birth” is the only one unique to Protestantism. Jews and Catholics, for example, also sought community and reform. Ethnic groups settled together for the sake of community, and moved together as well. Members of wagon trains heading west often shared language, culture, ethnicity, or religion, all of which undoubtedly enhanced a sense of community. Similarly, Protestants would not have been the only Americans “[i]mbued with republican notions of freedom” (168). The search for community or reform and the influence of a dissenting tradition did not distinguish Protestants from other groups during the period covered by Wandering Souls.

The search for a “new birth” as the path to salvation was a Protestant longing, but Rohrer fails to convincingly link this search to migration. Devereaux Jarratt, the Virginia Anglican Rohrer profiles in chapter two, comes closest to fitting this model, but even his story doesn’t clearly indicate that a desire for salvation led to Protestant migration. In Jarratt’s case, in fact, his desire for salvation was an effect, rather than a cause, of his peregrinations. A relatively poor teenager living in colonial Virginia with his brother, Jarratt first moved in 1752 because he was offered a position as a schoolmaster. In the course of his search for a stable job, he eventually landed in the home of an evangelical Christian and began pondering matters of the soul. After several years of contemplation mixed with backsliding, Jarratt experienced the “new birth” that led him to become an itinerant Anglican preacher. Had he not wandered, he might never have been saved, but he wasn’t searching for salvation when he started. Rohrer also cites the Methodist Alfred Brunson as an example of this motivation. Yet for Brunson as for Devereaux Jarratt, material concerns mixed with spiritual ones in the decision to move. His desire for salvation in Ohio after the War of 1812 was combined with a hope that he could make a better living there as a lawyer or minister because of the opportunities presented by the frontier.

Rohrer does not establish a convincing causal link between a shared set of motives and Protestant “restlessness.” Yet Wandering Souls still achieves a great deal. In particular, Rohrer argues that “religion’s role in migration and the settlement process was far more important than has been recognized” (247). His case studies of Protestant migrants reveal the importance of religion on many levels to people who migrated in the two and a half centuries covered by his book. The availability of land factored into the decision to move but religious motives clearly influenced migrations as well. Rohrer’s serious treatment of religion is a refreshing addition to a body of scholarship that often ignores its powerful psychological and social power.

In a story that covers so much time and space, perhaps it is unfair to ask for more. But Rohrer does leave one wondering how the Indians fit into his story of migration. He mentions Indians at several points—they threaten the Connecticut settlements of Thomas Hooker, for example, and their defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers opens up Ohio territory for eager Methodists. But in a story about migration, where so much depends upon available land, the Indians who lived on much of that land seem unusually absent.

In particular, what role did Protestant Indians play? The literal and figurative migration of the Conestogas in colonial Pennsylvania to a new land and a new culture, for example, failed to protect them from Rohrer’s wandering white Protestants, despite a shared faith. Anglican Joseph Brant also remained true to his Protestant faith in his extensive wanderings as he attempted to form an independent Indian nation in Canada after the Revolution.

Or for that matter, what about Protestant black Americans, who also wandered—some as preachers, some as escaped slaves, others as abolitionists arguing for freedom and equality?

No book can do everything, but Rohrer’s provocative study might have been enriched by including the perspective of other Protestants who also wandered, albeit for very different reasons. Perhaps future studies can take up where Rohrer left off to examine the place of religion in the movements of a more diverse set of individuals and groups. As it stands, Wandering Souls makes an important contribution to the scholarly narrative on migration by insisting that religion plays a role in understanding why people moved so much in America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

When people in the twenty-first century hear the word “pirate” many immediately conjure up images of motley, unruly, ferocious, yet happy-go-lucky, ne’er-do-wells cruising the Spanish Main in search of trouble and adventure. Author Peter T. Leeson looks beyond the rum swilling, keelhauling, and hell raising to show readers a criminal underworld shaped by economic self-interest. The author operates on the principle that economics, rather than history, can bring us closer to the “truth” about pirates and piracy. In this book, covering piracy in the Caribbean from 1670 to 1730, the author argues that pirates were “highly rational” (5) individuals who used cooperation, democratic government, torture, and intimidation in their pursuit of economic gain. An economist by training, Leeson attempts to find order and meaning in the actions of individuals with a wide reputation for lawlessness and impulsiveness. The book contains chapters dealing with “pirate democracy,” pirate codes, the meaning behind the use of the Jolly Roger, the rationale of torture, the conscription and recruitment of pirate crews, and pirate tolerance. Although Leeson perhaps leans too heavily upon the notion of economic self-interest as a way to explain pirate actions, The Invisible Hook raises good questions about a topic worthy of further historical investigation.

Leeson cleverly tweaks Adam Smith’s economic theories in order to demonstrate that piracy was indeed a business, albeit an illegitimate one. Smith argued that humans are rational creatures, intent on doing what is best for themselves; self-interest is the engine driving the capitalist machine. Pirates, the author argues, were rational creatures, intent on serving their self-interest. However, Leeson sees pirate economics directed by an “Invisible Hook,” rather than an “Invisible Hand.” The Invisible Hook guided the ways in which criminal self-interest worked, while the Invisible Hand guided the course of legitimate market transactions. Unlike legitimate businesspeople, pirates sold nothing, and their version of self-interest contributed nothing useful to society. Regardless, Leeson’s pirates are thoroughgoing entrepreneurs, just a bit rougher and swarthier than those who conducted their business from the counting houses of London and Port Royal.

In order to function smoothly and maximize profits, pirate ships needed some semblance of political organization. The author argues that pirate crews did have a rough form of government, characterized by checks and balances and the separation of powers. He goes so far as to imply that “pirate democracy” was superior to that of classical Greece or New England—at least on board a pirate ship everyone could vote. He even writes that, “To look at it, one could easily believe America’s Founding Fathers used the pirates’ system of democratic checks and balances in framing the United States government” (34). Pirates needed effective leadership in order to function efficiently; but the pirate captain could not be a dictator. In effect, a pirate captain was really only “first among equals.” His lodging, provisions, and pay were roughly similar to that of an ordinary crewmember. Furthermore, the captain could not afford to punish arbitrarily. Unfair or excessive punishment could result in his removal from command, either by vote or by mutiny.

In addition to placing effective checks on the power of the captain, pirate government also provided harmony amongst the crewmembers. Harmony was essential to the business of piracy; pirates who got along with one another stood a better chance of success in their ventures. The author writes that, “Contrary to popular wisdom, pirate life was orderly and honest” (45). In order to maintain order and ensure honesty, pirates drew up “Codes,” which outlined shipboard rules and regulations, and provided incentives to maximize individual effort. Each crew drew up its own constitution and ratified it by unanimous consent. Among other things, the Pirate Codes mandated an equal distribution of plunder, prohibited theft, laid out punishments for code breakers including keelhauling and marooning, gave extra incentives for effective job performance, and provided a form of worker’s compensation for “on-the-job injuries.” By eliminating the specter of economic inequality and rewarding good work, the Codes helped create an environment that was better organized and more harmonious than that of the Royal Navy or merchant marine.

Because they were rational, self-interested people intent on maximizing their profits, pirates had little interest in provoking armed confrontation. Rather, Leeson points out, they used intimidation and their bloody reputation to minimize conflict. Piracy was difficult enough without fighting an armed merchantman. The business required not only technical skills such as navigation and gunnery, but also cunning and subterfuge. Pirates used trickery and intimidation in order to avoid conflict. Fighting could mean the loss of crewmembers, damage to the pirate ship, and, perhaps most importantly, damage to the prize. Pirate torture, the author writes, was both heinous and completely rational. Pirates tortured prisoners in order to reveal the location of loot, to punish law enforcement officials for killing or arresting other pirates, and to punish abusive merchant marine captains. By torturing a few people in gruesomely imaginative ways, pirate crews “institutionalized their reputation for ferocity and insanity” (111). Stories of pirate barbarism spread far and wide. By flying the skull-and-bones, pirates identified themselves unmistakably, and woe to the captain and crew that tried to outrun or outfight them. Torture and intimidation, judiciously applied, allowed pirate crews to minimize losses and maximize their profits.

In addition to being cunning and politically savvy, the author writes that pirates were also good employers and quite tolerant folk. Rather than relying on conscription to fill out their crews, pirates often had to choose from a large pool of applicants. Many sailors, Leeson argues, wanted to join pirate crews in order to secure better pay and escape the wretched conditions aboard merchant or naval vessels. Although not always above impressing seamen, pirates generally accepted only skilled sailors into their crews. Furthermore, while not all pirates had enlightened views on race and race-relations, some blacks sailed the Caribbean with all the rights and privileges that pirate “citizenship” provided.

Historians may find Leeson’s economic interpretation too deterministic, his prose too chatty, and his research shoddy. The author does not attempt to hide his view that only the use of economics can truly explain why pirates acted the way they did. He writes, “The power of economics isn’t just that it can be applied so widely. It’s that only with economics can we make sense of a great deal of otherwise unintelligible individual behavior. Without economics, pirates, for example, are a veritable ball of contradictions” (194). Leeson starts with a preexisting interpretation of human behavior and works back into the sources to find support for his thesis; rather than letting the sources guide him to a conclusion, he reads the sources with the conclusion already in mind. Some readers may find the author’s writing style exasperatingly informal and colloquial. At various points, he compares pirate ships to frat houses and condominium associations. Many historians may find Leeson’s research spotty. He relies heavily on only a few published sources. Finally, tracking down sources and documentation in this work is frustrating—there are no numeric notes within the text, nor is there a bibliography or recommended reading list.

Economic models and stylistic quibbles aside, the author offers a fine reevaluation of a group of people too often caricatured in popular culture and overlooked by the academic community. Pirates, Leeson demonstrates, are worthy of study. Although they might not have been as completely rational as the author claims—after all, human beings are contradictory and paradoxical creatures—they were certainly not as irrational as legend would have us believe. Leeson also does an excellent job explaining in non-technical language the economic concepts that inform his interpretation. The Invisible Hook is a fresh, clever, and thought-provoking approach to an old topic that should prompt further scholarly research in the future.

Christian G. Fritz’s American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War poses a series of challenges for historians. Its claims are sweeping and it includes just about every major constitutional controversy in the 150 years from the Glorious Revolution in England to the American Civil War (save one, about which more shortly). It incorporates literature from history, political theory, and law. It is bold, creative, and cannot be ignored, yet its overall methodology is problematic. How can historians trained to analyze texts in their actual historical context and to find the contemporary meanings of terms make sense of an essay filled with such free-floating concepts as “the people” or “American constitutionalism”? How can historians, even those willing to engage such an essay on its own terms, appreciate the leaps and bounds in Fritz’s book?

American Sovereigns is divided into three parts. In the first part, which covers the Revolutionary period, Fritz says that he wants to see the American philosophy of governance in a new light. Fair enough. Historians are not fazed by revisionism. To accomplish his aim, he borrows liberally from more recent law professors’ forays into constitutional history, coming away with a handful of neo-populist and proto-democratic interpretations. If the framers were conservative by our lights (or so the conventional history tells us), one nevertheless can read their words and see in them the seeds of robust democratic egalitarianism. Fritz calls this “American constitutionalism.” Prior studies tie that term to the very scholarship he wants to jettison, but Fritz is undaunted by the conventional accounts of the framers and their work in 1787. His answer to conventional accounts is bold: coin terminology. Dump moldy old language like federalism and concurrent powers and replace it with a shiny new one, “collective sovereignty.”

In a regime of collective sovereignty, power lies with the people, not with officers or royalty. The people rule because they are, together as a group, the sole source for power. New coinage, however, no matter how bravely and insistently introduced, cannot conceal the debates that raged from 1787 to 1860 over the meaning of a sovereign people. Fritz thus finds himself attempting to argue two mutually opposing theses: the triumph of the principle of the people’s collective sovereignty and the persistence of confusion on what those terms meant. If he is right, if he has found the underlying principle in the political thought of the new nation’s leaders, he should also have found evidence of consensus. If there was no consensus, then there were competing principles abroad. It is possible to argue, contrariwise, that pre-Civil War constitutionalism was both more fluid and open, especially considering how easily the sovereign people could change their basic laws; and at the same time more restrictive (than Fritz concedes) regarding who “the people” were and what role they were to play in self-government.

For collective sovereignty is not what Americans sought. They wanted a rule of law that was consistent and fair. That is, they wanted their rulers to play by the rules. Because he insists that collective sovereignty was always democratic in its instincts, Fritz gets basic historical facts wrong. For example, he argues that the American Revolution replaced the idea of the sovereignty of the crown with the sovereignty of the people. Both counts are controversial. Many historians have contended that English constitutionalism had arrived at this conclusion four generations before the Patriots. The settlement of William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 in England was accompanied by the notion that parliament was sovereign and that the people’s rights were the bedrock of all government. While the Revolutionaries cast off imperial rule, they did not throw off the sovereignty of the crown; they rejected a corrupt parliament and an insensitive king. Even the most liberal of the new state constitutions limited the franchise and protected the property of the better sort. Law remained the real measure of collective sovereignty.

Fritz is having none of this. He raises protests, mob action, and contrary-to-law jury findings to the level of law; the more popular the protest, the more it fits his version of the constitutional law canon. Even the people observing these activities at the time did not describe them as altering the fundamental law. They knew better.

But Fritz’s work is not without value. In the second part of the book on the early national period, he does a fine job of problematizing the consensus narrative of constitutional history that dominates law school libraries and curricula. Considered as expressions of American constitutionalism, extra-legal movements like the Regulators in North Carolina and Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts show how rural folks contested the constitutional arrangements of eastern propertied elites. Experiments with constitutionalism in the trans-Appalachian region and in Vermont pre-figured the democratic constitutional reforms of the pre-Civil War era. Though one may quibble with Fritz’s use of Jefferson’s tolerance for a little revolution now and again as a representative thought when it was a minority view, the portrayal of a contentious early national period is evocative of a more open time in American political life.

In subsequent chapters on the Whiskey Rebellion, the contest between the Federalists and the Republicans in the 1790s, and other key passages on conflicts in the story of American constitutional thought, Fritz makes clear that early national Americans advanced two very different, if not quite evenly matched understandings of collective sovereignty. On the one side were those whom we might label as republicans. They believed that the people were sovereign, but had delegated their powers to state and federal elected representatives. On the other side were the democrats who subscribed to a more open form of politics with more opportunities for popular participation. While the democrats eventually predominated, a triumph registered in the rise of the Jacksonian Democratic Party, both sides adopted the language of American constitutionalism.

In this manner Fritz ties the story of American constitutionalism to the nation’s political history. It is good to remember that law and politics then, as now, were bedfellows. Yet even here, one vital aspect of American constitutional life is absent from Fritz’s republican/democrat contest. Slavery does not appear in the book’s index, and that with good reason. Slavery plays no role in his discussion of the debates over the Constitution (either in the Constitutional Convention or during ratification) or over the Bill of Rights in the first Congresses. How can one explain these controversies without ever mentioning slavery? A book aimed at placing “the people” at the center of constitutionalism should come to terms with slavery, not least because African-American slaves constituted approximately nineteen percent of the overall population of the United States according to the first census in 1790.

In the next chapters in part two, Fritz explains the differences and similarities between the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Hartford Convention, and the Nullification Crisis in terms of the doctrine of American constitutionalism known as “interposition,” namely that the people as sovereigns within their states could interpose themselves between their government and themselves. Thus, the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures and the Hartford Convention were not acts of rebellion, but constitutional expression of the people’s sovereignty. In contrast, people like James Madison argued that South Carolina’s reaction to the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were an improper exercise of this authority.

In his final substantive chapter, which constitutes the whole of part three of the book, Fritz examines how the sovereign people exercised their authority over state, and by implication federal, constitutions. Specifically, he reinterprets the Dorr War that fractured Rhode Island during the 1840s and led to the U.S. Supreme Court case of Luther v. Borden (1848). Although the original dispute over representation in the state legislature and the extent of the franchise was nothing new, the People’s Convention that formed a constitution for Rhode Island and elected Thomas Dorr to the governorship without the state legislature’s permission was. The dispute turned violent and sparked a national debate over whether or not unauthorized individuals could meet and form a new government or alter the provisions of a currently existing one. Though Chief Justice Roger B. Taney upheld the governor’s imposition of martial law, and the convictions of Dorr and others, both he and the sole dissenter argued for the doctrine of the people’s sovereignty. But even this apparent triumph of his argument presents a dilemma for Fritz: Everyone may have agreed on the principle of collective sovereignty, but there was no consensus on its enactment or enforcement.

In the epilogue, Fritz reminds the reader of his overall purpose: rewriting the history of Americans’ understanding of their constitutional law into a story that prefigures modern constitutionalism. Here he joins Akhil Reed Amar, Larry Kramer, and other advocates (for this is advocacy as well as analysis) of a “people’s constitution.” This perspective contrasts sharply with a court-centered view, an institutional perspective, and what we may term a more conservative approach, a law and order rendering. From the perspective of Fritz and his allies, Daniel Shays and Thomas Dorr were not rebels, but seers, insofar as they stood for a robust understanding that the people had taken the place of the king after the American Revolution. This reworking of American constitutional history has much to teach us even if its narrow focus misses such substantial issues as the effect of the Glorious Revolution and slavery on American constitutional discourse.

In recent years scholars of cultural history have focused significant attention on a seemingly unlikely protagonist: the nineteenth-century clerk. Readers unfamiliar with this literature might be forgiven for wondering what could be so interesting. After all, the occupational category of clerking evokes neither the swashbuckling boardroom excesses of Gilded Age robber barons nor the heroic physical sufferings of industrial laborers. Yet clerks of the nineteenth century are intriguing not so much for what they did on the job as for the space they occupied in their contemporaries’ thoughts and writings. At the vanguard of social change, the nineteenth-century clerk, like today’s hipster, was a figure equally maligned and emulated.

Brian Luskey adds fresh insight to the existing literature in On the Make, which explores the lives of New York City’s clerks in the mid-1800s. As Luskey nicely puts it in the introduction, it is easy to understand contemporary interest in the figure of the clerk when one recalls that—whether retailing to fashionable ladies or wholesaling to country merchants, frequenting oyster bars or promenading in broadcloth finery—”clerks truly were the faces of capitalist transformation” (2). Contemporaries, therefore, came to describe clerks in a number of ways—mostly negative: as indulgent consumers of fashionable clothing, rowdies frequenting bars and brothels, and obsequious salesmen derided as “counter jumpers.”

The bulk of Luskey’s study concerns the antebellum era, though he reaches back into the 1700s and concludes with intriguing thoughts about the transformation of clerkship after the Civil War. In the years between, the United States experienced rapid urbanization and what many historians designate as a “market revolution,” that is, the transition from small communities defined by networks of personal obligation to a sprawling mass society governed by the impersonal forces of supply and demand. In this often disorienting change, the very visible job of clerking became a focal point of aspiration and disappointment, hope and fear.

Luskey combines the methods of cultural and social history to accomplish a tricky feat: he maps out, on the one hand, the structural impediments to clerks’ quest for “economic capital,” and on the other hand, the hazardous discursive field in which they pursued “cultural capital.” Making use of diaries, credit reports, manuscript census schedules, and a variety of print media, he skillfully documents the clerk’s many travails.

The book presents the basic structural dilemma early on. Encouraged by ideological constructions of clerking as an apprenticeship leading to mercantile proprietorship, clerks often found their hopes frustrated by obstinate realities. Luskey shows that even in the eighteenth century, the apprenticeship model was no longer a sure pathway to economic independence. As a result of the period’s consumer revolution, expanding educational opportunities, and general economic growth, demand for positions in mercantile houses rose rapidly. Indeed, according to Luskey’s figures, New York City’s clerks numbered nearly 14,000 at midcentury, constituting the city’s third largest occupational group. Yet despite the “crumbling edifice” of traditional apprenticeship, those who aspired to mercantile “power and prestige” had little choice but to grasp at apprenticeship’s still “vital ideals” (31). The diary entries of the young William Hoffman, for example, clearly show that he had internalized many of these ideals even as he, in common with his colleagues, struggled through long days that often included physical labor. The basic structural reality, then, was that clerks, ostensibly in training to be independent merchants, were in fact increasingly difficult to distinguish from the emerging proletariat.

Central to the “contradictory messages” clerks encountered was the notion of “character.” Advice manuals urged clerks to cultivate virtues such as diligence, sincerity and humility. For their parts, young clerks understood that character, or rather representations of character, formed the only capital they could muster “in an urban society populated by unknown persons and an economy defined by both thrilling boom times and enervating hard times” (22). Yet character was a concept shot through with ambiguity. Supposedly an inner light illuminating the path to wealth and independence, it paradoxically called for willing submission to low pay and unpleasant work. A similar paradox afflicted clerks whenever they sought employment. On the one hand they had to conform to a vocabulary of generic tropes they shared with employers, while on the other they desired to stand out from the multitudes.

Having thus introduced the basic trajectory of the labor market and the fundamental discourse of character, Luskey constructs the rest of his book as a series of dilemmas. Again and again his clerks attempt to cast themselves as people of consequence, only to fail because their pretensions go unsupported by actual wealth and influence. In chapters covering topics such as race, gender, fashion, leisure, work and citizenship, Luskey explores the tensions between expectation and reality, and the ways in which interested actors bridged the gap in writings both public and private. Newspaper editors, ministers, and other pundits appear on the scene to make weighty public pronouncements, while the clerks themselves offer mostly private reflections in their diaries.

Luskey is particularly compelling in his depiction of how clerks clung to the symbol of the white collar in order to distinguish themselves from both blacks and working-class whites. He notes that whereas white male laborers were increasingly able to demarcate clear racial boundaries simply by excluding blacks from their workplaces, clerks worked side-by-side with their firm’s black porters. In a fascinating discussion, Luskey shows how clerks sometimes joined their white working-class compatriots in asserting their whiteness by attending minstrel shows, yet at other times refined and even domesticated minstrelsy in order to keep themselves apart from and above white laborers. Thus they preferred Edwin Christy’s supposedly more urbane minstrel productions, performed in a theater where the rowdy “pit” had been replaced by comfortable arm chairs. At least one clerk noted in his diary that he had forsaken the theater altogether one evening in order to entertain friends with minstrel sheet music played at home on his piano, perhaps the ultimate symbol of middle-class respectability. Yet if clerks seemed to score a symbolic victory here, they soon found the cultural waters more perilous and complex than they had imagined. In a “producer’s republic,” their attempts to obscure the manual labor that might soil their white collars worked against them in the realm of gender distinctions, opening them up to charges of effeminacy and dandyism.

The book’s final chapter makes some ambitious claims about the transformation of clerkship in the latter nineteenth century. Luskey gets ahead of his evidence here, but his thoughts are intriguing. He argues that as the plausibility of advancement to the status of a merchant faded, many clerks chose to trade in their dreams of independent proprietorship for job security as salaried managers in the emerging bureaucracies of Big Business. In the process, they redefined “what it meant to be a free, respectable, white man” (210). This is a potentially important contribution to our understanding of the consolidation of the middle class. Other significant recent studies of the nineteenth century have illuminated this process for the upper reaches of the industrial bourgeoisie (Sven Beckert’s Monied Metropolis) or the intellectual realm of social theorists (Jeffrey Sklansky’s The Soul’s Economy). Luskey, however, focuses our attention squarely on the lived experiences of respectability’s lower strata.

One important aspect of that experience, Luskey makes clear, was the attempt to acquire and deploy “cultural capital,” a term that he returns to repeatedly. The idea originates, as far as I know, with Pierre Bourdieu, and is sufficiently well established to make explicit discussion of its meaning unnecessary, perhaps. But I still found it an elusive metaphor, and I think that scholars could usefully explicate it more fully. At one point, for example, Luskey refers to the “markers of cultural capital” (179). But I would tend to think that “cultural capital” is itself a marker, presumably of actual capital, or perhaps of “character,” taste or some other quality. In any case, discussion of what precisely is clarified by equating certain visible cultural accomplishments with control of economic resources might be helpful to readers who are not familiar with Bourdieu’s body of work.

Such questions aside, On the Make deserves a wide readership. It is now the go-to work on clerks in the nineteenth century and a good example of how to integrate social and cultural history.

After a journey in 1764 and 1765 that took Lord Adam Gordon through British provinces from Jamaica to Quebec, the 39-year-old army officer wrote that if he ever had to live in colonial America, he would spend his days in Virginia. “[I]n point of Company and Climate,” the ancient colony on the Chesapeake “would be my choice in preference to any, I have yet seen.” Having tarried there for a month in the spring of 1765 to enjoy “an opportunity to see a good deal of the Country, and many of the first people in the Province,” Gordon was particularly impressed with the Virginians themselves. “The Women make excellent wives” and the men “far exceed in good sense, affability, and ease” any others he had encountered in his travels. Even those who had never been outside of the province were “as sensible, conver[s]able and accomplished people, as one would wish to meet with.” These “topping people” of eighteenth-century America enthralled Gordon in ways that “must deeply touch a person of any feeling.”

Two hundred years later, one can find Gordon’s kindred spirit in Emory G. Evans, whose last published work, A “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790, is an accessible, informative, and subtly provocative history of the people Gordon found so congenial and whom Evans spent a career studying. A native Virginian who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1956, Evans was a distinguished professor of colonial America whose early work on the relationship between indebtedness and the coming of the American Revolution in Virginia was followed by a generation’s worth of writing and teaching about the lives of Chesapeake elites. Evans’ intimate knowledge of those people and their world clearly shows in A “Topping People,” the first comprehensive study of Virginia’s governing political community since Charles Sydnor’s Gentleman Freeholders: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia, published more than 50 years ago.

Drawing primarily on personal correspondence and public papers, Evans tells the story of a “representative elite group” of 21 families drawn from those that enjoyed “long-term membership” on the Virginia Council—a peculiar constitutional hybrid of legislative, executive, and judicial authorities that Gordon described as possessing powers “greater than those of any other Province” (1). According to Evans, the combination of “political, social, and economic power” enjoyed by the families made them “the most influential people in the colony” throughout the colonial period; they were, in effect, a super-elite, distinct even from the rest of the free, white, protestant Virginia gentry who more or less ran things in the British Chesapeake, and as such are worthy of study in their own right (3). Evans sympathetically follows them from the last years of the reign of Charles II to the first years of the American republic, tracing along the way their increasingly tenuous claim to prominence in a rapidly changing world. Their rise was built on the close ties they forged with the Chesapeake yeomanry in the early 1700s, while their fall from political, social and economic eminence was tied to rising indebtedness to British merchants. By 1776, most of Evans’ elite families were in “serious financial trouble” (114) and their power and influence faded from the public scene soon thereafter.

A “Topping People” could well be considered the definitive insider’s take on the eighteenth-century Virginia elite. In many ways, Evans’ approach mirrors that taken by Gordon in his eighteenth-century journal. Like Gordon, a Scottish aristocrat and member of parliament, Evans’ view of colonial life is decidedly, perhaps even defiantly (as the title coyly suggests), from the top down. Gordon reported that he was “well assured by Gentlemen, whose veracity I can depend on” for information about the things he did not observe firsthand. Evans similarly depends heavily on many of the same gentlemen. Scholars of the colonial Chesapeake will be already familiar with much of his source base, which is dominated by published material from such well-known planters as Robert Carter, William Byrd II, Landon Carter, and John Custis IV, as well as commentators close to their circles, like the New Jersey tutor Philip Fithian. Evans seldom employs sources from beyond that group and almost never in counterpoint to it. But just as a view from the top of a mountain can reveal much about one’s surroundings, so the book covers an impressive amount of topical ground. Again, Gordon appears to have served as something of a model for Evans, as both authors comment upon religion, architecture, horse racing, marriage, tobacco, slavery, politics, and more, all from the perspective of the male super-elites from whom they garnered almost all of their information.

Evans’ treatment of the relevant historiography is similarly focused. There is very little evidence in the book that reflects the contributions of relatively recent titles in the field, such as studies of elite women and families in the Chesapeake, or the broader influence of Atlantic history. Evans reserves his engagement of other historians for those whose work directly relates to his subject group, such as Anthony Parent and Kathleen Brown, both of whom Evans believes went beyond the available evidence in their generally critical characterizations of Virginia’s elites (238). Evans decorously relegates such differences to the endnotes or to indirect references in the text, immediately recognizable only to those familiar with the material. He disagrees with Michael Rozbicki on whether the families were full of anxiety over maintaining their social status (they weren’t, Evans claims) and he takes issue with Rhys Isaac on the extent to which gentry and commons were united as the American Revolution approached (they were but only “to a degree,” he argues) (175).

For scholars of the period, A “Topping People” is perhaps more important for the questions it leaves unanswered than for the answers it provides. Evans has deepened our understanding of Virginia’s political sociology in the eighteenth century by giving us a clearly argued and readable account of an important part of it, but the work raises a question about a core precept of much of colonial Virginia historiography: were its elites as coherent or even as comprehensively dominant a group as Evans presumes? Perhaps not. Doubts are raised when he goes outside his group for evidence, like using Roger Atkinson, a Quaker merchant unconnected to any of the families, to represent the elite point of view, or when he relies too heavily on the accounts of one observer, such as the feckless William Byrd II, to reflect elite opinion throughout the century. Moreover, the sheer size of Evans’ families by the late colonial period complicates any attempt to generalize their experience. For example, by the end of the colonial period one of those families, the descendants of William and Mary Isham Randolph, included more than 200 members who lived on both sides of the Atlantic and could be found up and down the social and economic scale of the British world, from plantation homes to alms houses. They also wound up as both loyalists and patriots when the War of Independence erupted.

To his credit, Evans suggests that his categories may be less static than they first appear: He shows how many of his elites adapted to new interests and ways of thinking that transformed the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, Virginia included. This can be seen most clearly in the distinction he draws between “old elite” and “new men” that emerged in the decades before the American Revolution; this distinction owed less to social standing or generational change than to the highly contingent tides of political economy. Evans points out that many of Virginia’s elite continued to participate in the old metropolitan tobacco trade by consigning their crops to English merchants for sale and consumption on the “home market,” which “brought a better return” (103). At the same time, Scots traders connected to European markets “began to dominate the landscape,” which thereafter developed into a new web of transatlantic commercial and intellectual influences that replaced the metropolitan trade at the center of Virginia’s economy (100). The interplay between old and new political economies also reflected shifting sets of social relationships within the province, which severed some connections between Virginians just as it created others. For example, planters whose tobacco was intended for continental consumers of snuff found common ground as opponents to mercantilist rules and imperial conflicts that inhibited direct trade with European ports, matters of little concern to the shrinking proportion of Chesapeake planters who continued to grow tobacco exclusively for English smokers. Economic allegiance helped shape political allegiance; Evans’ evidence sheds considerable light on the various paths taken by Virginia’s elites in 1776, a large number of whom—many more than Evans finds—either remained loyal to Britain or stayed out of the revolutionary conflict altogether.

Although A “Topping People” does not reflect the insights of newer work in related fields and identifies Virginia elites in ways that might be analytically problematic, it is very useful to have Evans’ mature reflections on a subject that for centuries has been shrouded in the mythology of the so-called First Families of Virginia. In giving readers what should amount to the last word on how Virginia’s elite saw themselves—providing the kind of insight that can come only from a lifetime of work—A “Topping People” has the potential to fuel a generation’s worth of scholarship on the complex political sociology of the largest, most diverse society in the British colonial world. There could be no better memorial to a scholar of Emory Evans’ considerable stature than that.

James Z. Schwartz’ Conflict on the Michigan Frontierpicks up where Richard White’s The Middle Groundleaves off: in 1815. At the close of the War of 1812, White has argued, the “middle ground” (the metaphorical and geographical site of political and cultural mediation between Indians and colonists) disintegrated. Schwartz aims to discover what happened to politics and culture in Michigan in the ensuing decades.

Schwartz’s argument is this: with the influx of unprecedented numbers of Yankees into the Great Lakes Basin after the war (especially after the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825), Michigan’s long-standing “hybrid” or “borderland” traits underwent a systematic “civilizing” process (4, 92-94). East-Coast newcomers waged war on the “savageness” of Indians, the “wildness” of backcountry whites, and the “lawlessness” of the West. They were determined to eradicate “inferior” and “dangerous” cultural practices and political attitudes, and in their stead impose order, restraint, and authority. In other words, Schwartz seems to argue, the machinery that hastened the middle ground’s destruction continued to run through the mid-nineteenth century, concurrently eroding “frontier” politics and culture and inflicting and enforcing northeastern forms. But unlike White, Schwartz is less interested in how long-standing residents of Indian and French extraction responded to these erosions and coercions, and more interested in the actions and successes of the New England and New York transplants who masterminded them.

The Yankees’ war on Michigan was fought, Schwartz argues, with a two-pronged strategy: constructing both “formal” and “informal” boundaries. “Informal” boundaries were “cultural restraints” created by “families, newspapers, public opinion, and churches” to separate Yankees from everyone else (4, 143). Chapter four tells the familiar story of Yankees’ efforts to “tame” the Potawatomi and other Indian groups through mission schools, reservations, and removal to Kansas—which Schwartz tells without benefit of native perspectives (79-80). He is more persuasive and innovative in chapter five, which covers the implementation of social reform movements within white society. He reveals how Yankee evangelicals used Michigan’s new media (newspapers) and new institutions (schools and churches) to impose morality, manners, temperance, and piety on non-Yankee whites (105-106). Such aims were not meant just to fortify Michigan’s moral fiber, but also to instill social and political order (128-129).

“Formal” boundaries—those “enacted by legislatures and administered by law courts and other official institutions” (143)—are the subject of the first half of the book: the campaigns for an elected assembly and voting rights (chapter one), the establishment of Michigan’s southern boundary (chapter two), and the debates over the legitimacy of banks and land speculators (chapter three). In building these boundaries, Yankee transplants may have contained or “civilized” native Michiganians, as Schwartz argues. But their chief foes in these instances—territorial officials, speculators, and bankers—were themselves transplanted Yankees (14-15). What Schwartz actually proves in these chapters is just how complicated it is to sort and generalize about Yankee agendas, strategies, attitudes, and behaviors.

The difficulty of generalizing about Yankees in Michigan is perhaps most evident in Schwartz’s final chapter, on the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1834. The epidemics, and the panic and violence they produced, expose the “mounting discord between urban and rural settlers” (130). Yankee Detroiters contended that cholera was not a contagious but rather a social disease. Instead of establishing quarantines (the prevailing rural strategy for disease-containment), city-dwellers organized “campaigns to police and sanitize the poor” (135 and 137). For those Yankees in rural areas, cholera represented the toxicity and anarchy of the city, transmitted figuratively and literally from Detroit to outlying communities. The rural/urban divide over the epidemiology of cholera, Schwartz shows us, resulted in a heated political battle between Whigs and Democrats over “how far local officials could go in defending borders designed to protect their communities from urban contagion” (131). The value of this kind of study, Schwartz assesses, is to demonstrate just how important the tensions along geographic and social borders were (142). But it also serves to complicate the “conflict” story of the previous chapters. Yankees appear on all sides of the cholera debate, perhaps united in their “abhorrence” of Michigan’s Indian and French populations, but divided by location, disease theories, containment strategies, and opinions about appropriate government intervention (137).

The theme of government intervention is also predominant in chapter two, which traces Michigan and Ohio’s armed conflict over ownership of Toledo (1835-1836). The standoff may have had to do with a territory’s fears of a large state’s unchecked power, as Schwartz contends (32, 51). But Michiganians—Yankees and non-Yankees alike—were also still bruised from Ohio’s 1803 elevation to statehood (despite not having had the 60,000 residents requisite for consideration). Ohio’s successful, if unusual, bid prompted Congress to disband the Northwest Territory and cast Michigan into the newly formed Indiana Territory. The change stripped Michigan of the representation it had previously enjoyed and fostered resentment, both against Ohio for its favored status and against Congress for its injurious disregard. Slighted Michiganians then began a vigorous campaign for their own territory—which they were awarded in 1805. Michigan’s fears of and bitterness toward Ohio, in other words, began at least three decades before 1835.

With the exception of the Toledo War, what is largely absent from Schwartz’s book is a full sense of the “conflict” alluded to in the title. This results from Schwartz’s interest in the actions of the Yankees determined to create an “American” society in Michigan. As such, the sources upon which the argument relies (such as the anonymous letters published in various local papers in support of the boundaries) convey much more consensus and complaisance than existed. In reality, many nineteenth-century Michiganians (particularly in older settlements like Detroit and Monroe) were not Yankees lately arrived from the east. They were descendants of the earlier Indian, French, and British populations—practitioners of what Schwartz calls in his title the “borderland cultures.” These were the peoples whom the Yankees accused and attempted to cure of “wild” and “barbarous” behaviors. Certainly they were not in dazed and grateful support of these “civilizing” and “ordering” efforts. But there is no sense in Schwartz’s book of how Yankees’ actions were perceived or received. Although he submits that “ordinary settlers and Native Peoples tweaked and changed these [Yankee] rules when possible to meet their own needs,” those stories of modification and resistance are not his subject (150).

The East Coast institutions and lifeways that Yankee transplants were determined to graft onto the Michigan landscape mostly, but not entirely, took hold (143). The “legal, ethical, and social boundaries” that newcomers constructed were surprisingly faithful reproductions of East Coast originals (150). Anglo-American cultural boundaries, however, were much more difficult to enforce (149). Indeed, Detroit’s French-language newspapers—evidence of ongoing resistance to Yankee cultural boundaries—endured through the early twentieth century.

The value of Conflict on the Michigan Frontier, Schwartz observes, is its contribution to the ongoing debate about “whether pioneers created a new culture in the West or simply transplanted their traditional Eastern ways to that region.” Schwartz posits that Yankees “inadvertently created a regional culture that was predominantly Eastern, but that also contained Native and French and western elements” (150). Perhaps, and more accurately, Yankees contributed to an already “hybridized” regional culture, layering their own cultural practices over preexisting Indian, French, British, and other forms. As Michigan became increasingly “Americanized,” East Coast forms would ultimately win out. But the deliberate and uneven processes of syncretism and erasure—begun more than a century before the Yankees’ arrival—would continue long after Schwartz’s end-date of 1840.

An odd book is this. Thin and thinly documented, it does not offer anything new to Jefferson scholars or economic historians. The author, intellectual property rights (IPR) attorney Jeffrey Matsuura, wants to make U.S. patent law more “populist” and less “commercial” and finds in Thomas Jefferson a fellow traveler. Connecting one’s policy agenda to the Founding Fathers is sometimes an astute rhetorical maneuver. Leaning on Jefferson for support on economic issues, however, is a bit like Tiger Woods citing Alexander Hamilton on the sanctity of marital vows. It can be done but it isn’t going to be effective.

As Matsuura explains in dry, repetitive prose, Jefferson was a polymath who engaged in basic as well as applied (i.e., inventive) scientific activities. Although he was not a leader in any one area, Jefferson helped scientists in a variety of fields to make incremental improvements in knowledge. Jefferson’s paleontological work and his Notes on Virginia Matsuura particularly praises. The Sage of Monticello never tried to patent any of his inventions, even his “polygraph” letter copying machine, because he believed that all forms of knowledge should be shared widely for the benefit of all mankind. He did not wish to prevent inventors from making a “reasonable” profit on their improvements but sought to limit the state-sanctioned monopoly powers associated with patents.

Under the terms of the Patent Act of 1790, Secretary of State Jefferson was deeply involved in the quotidian duties of patent application screening. Due to his leadership, early U.S. patent policy hinged on the utility and (domestic) novelty of patent applications. According to Matsuura, Jefferson preferred to deny applications rather than extend them too freely. The number and complexity of applications, however, soon overwhelmed patent officials. With Jefferson’s backing, the United States in 1793 changed to a registration system whereby anyone who paid a fee and correctly completed an application received a patent defensible in the nation’s courts. According to economic historians like B. Zorina Khan (The Democratization of Invention, 2005), the new system, while not optimal, helped to drive America’s phenomenal record of economic growth in the nineteenth century. For Jefferson and Matsuura, however, the new system gave too much power to patent holders and commercialized the invention process, leading eventually to the emergence of patent trolls, entities that purchase patents to gain leverage in lucrative but largely frivolous patent infringement suits against deep pocket enterprises.

Patent trolls are of much too recent origin for Jefferson to have ever looked one in the eye, but the Virginian did take on their progenitors, entrepreneurs like Jacob Isaacks and Oliver Evans who tried to profit from their inventiveness via the patent system. (Again, Matsuura’s Jefferson did not disparage profit, just the use of state-sanctioned monopolies to acquire it.) The Evans case was particularly bizarre because Jefferson himself approved the patent for an automated milling process (which included bucket elevators, conveyor belts, and special screws) only later to infringe on it at his own mill! Jefferson infringed, Matsuura explains, because he had seen “firsthand how aggressive enforcement of broad patents can impede integration of innovations into daily personal and commercial activities.” Jefferson’s “motivation for using the proprietary materials was need, not economic gain. The Evans technology provided the most effective mill equipment, which Jefferson, and many other farmers, required” (107).

Jefferson’s argument was absurd, of course. Nobody “needed” to use Evans’s designs but they wanted to because, as Matsuura notes, they were the “most effective” then available. A miller should have been willing to pay to use the new technology at any price up to that which would make it and the old technology equally cost efficient. Diffusion was assured because it was not in Evans’s interest to charge any more than that for a use license.

As economist Ronald Coase showed long ago, assignment of property rights and freedom to trade are sufficient to ensure the most economically efficient result because each asset, regardless of its initial owner, will gravitate via trade to its most highly valued use. Jefferson missed that point (as does Matsuura) because of a mutual fixation on the initial assignment of the right rather than the economics of the subsequent technology diffusion. Demand for an invention did not drop to zero simply because it had a positive price. Moreover, the expectation of receiving payment for inventive activity increased the quantity and quality of inventions produced, a point that the Framers well understood. Some, like Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, gave away inventions, but most people did not own a sufficient number of slaves or ground rents to be able to donate their time and genius to mankind. To take the trouble to invent something—large or small—most people needed incentives. Patents provided them and were directly proportional to the invention’s value to society, rendering them more efficient than the rewards or prizes proffered by some governments and associations.

But isn’t it immoral, as Matsuura suggests, to charge poor people to use a technology that could improve their deplorable conditions? Numerous recent books, none of which Matsuura consulted, suggest not. Poor countries remain so because their highly incompetent or outright predatory governments provide people with few incentives to invest in human or physical capital, not because they suffer from a dearth of technological knowledge, which will diffuse (legally or otherwise) to wherever it can be efficiently employed (vide the early United States and more recently China). If his government is corrupt, unstable, and unable to protect his life, liberty, or property, giving a man an idea will stave off want no more effectively than giving him the proverbial fish will. Weakening intellectual property rights, therefore, will hurt rich and poor alike, not spur economic development. The current system of intellectual property rights needs reform, but not that proposed by Matsuura or his preferred Founding Father.