The Economy of Early America

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.”

—A. Glenn Crothers, Journal of Southern History