In recent years, scholars in a number of disciplines have focused their attention on understanding the early American economy. The result has been an outpouring of scholarship, some of it dramatically revising older methodologies and findings, and some of it charting entirely new territory—new subjects, new places, and new arenas of study that might not have been considered “economic” in the past.
The Economy of Early America enters this resurgent discussion of the early American economy by showcasing the work of leading scholars who represent a spectrum of historiographical and methodological viewpoints. Contributors include David Hancock, Russell Menard, Lorena Walsh, Christopher Tomlins, David Waldstreicher, Terry Bouton, Brooke Hunter, Daniel Dupre, John Majewski, Donna Rilling, and Seth Rockman, as well as Cathy Matson.
Contents
Preface
1. A House of Many Mansions: Some Thoughts on the Field of Economic History
Cathy Matson
2. Rethinking The Economy of British America
David Hancock
3. Colonial America’s Mestizo Agriculture
Russell R. Menard
4. Peopling, Producing, and Consuming in EarlyBritish America
Lorena S. Walsh
5. Indentured Servitude in Perspective: European Migration into North America and the Composition of the Early American Labor Force, 1600–1775
Christopher Tomlins
6. Capitalism, Slavery, and Benjamin Franklin’s American Revolution
David Waldstreicher
7. Moneyless in Pennsylvania: Privatization and the Depression of the 1780s
Terry Bouton
8. Creative Destruction: The Forgotten Legacy of the Hessian Fly
Brooke Hunter
9. The Panic of 1819 and the Political Economy of Sectionalism
Daniel S. Dupre
10. Toward a Social History of the Corporation: Shareholding in Pennsylvania, 1800–1840
John Majewski
11. Small-Producer Capitalism in Early National Philadelphia
Donna J. Rilling
12. The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism
Seth Rockman
List of contributors
Index
“The diversity of the contributions and the variety of interpretive and methodological approaches speak to the richness of the work of economic historians since 1985.
Matson’s volume provides a valuable introduction to and survey of the historiography of the early American economy . . . and it reveals a field that has abandoned narrow definitions of economic history in an effort to incorporate the insights of other approaches and disciplines.”