Reviewed by Gary B. Nash | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3

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Reviewed by Gary B. Nash | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles

After the Siege: A Social History of Boston, 1775–1800. By Jacqueline Barbara Carr. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2005. 318 pages. $40.00 (cloth).
Jacqueline Barbara Carr has added a valuable volume on eighteenth-century American seaboard cities to a shelf that grows longer and longer. Thirty years ago there was little work on the subject besides Carl Bridenbaugh's Cities in the Wilderness (1938) and Cities in Revolt (1955). The number of books, on Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, now exceeds fifty, with almost as many on smaller commercial centers such as Norfolk, Baltimore, Savannah, Wilmington, Lancaster, Albany, New Haven, Salem, Gloucester, Newport, and Portsmouth. New England town studies in the 1970s and 1980s made methodological breakthroughs and commanded scholars' attention; since then, studies of the cities up and down the seaboard have elbowed their way onto center stage.	1
Carr's study of Boston covers only from 1775 to 1800, which is both a strength and a weakness. She begins with the British occupation of New England's commercial capital and the siege of the city by Washington's Continental army, which allows her to establish a baseline from which to trace change during the next quarter century. In the manner of occupying armies, the British used the city harshly, leaving behind not quite the devastation in Fallujah inflicted by American forces two-and-a-quarter centuries later, but nonetheless marching out of a physically ravaged, socially distorted, and emotionally shell-shocked waterside commercial center. In the broadest terms, the book is about how Boston recovered. It took time. The city's population, which peaked at about sixteen thousand before the Revolution, fell to one-third of that during the British occupation. A decade after the British decamped, it could claim only thirteen thousand souls; Boston then rallied from 1784 to 1800, when the population nearly doubled to twenty-five thousand. Still, Boston was by far the smallest of the three major northern seaports at the dawn of the nineteenth century: a medium-size, commercially oriented seaport with its more significant period of growth still awaiting mass immigration and industrialization in the decades ahead.	2
In four additional chapters, Carr describes the town's physical and occupational characteristics district by district (chapter 2), its governance (chapter 3), its economy and occupational structure (chapter 4), and its leisure activities (chapter 5). By patiently combing the tax assessment rolls (called taking books) for 1780, 1784, 1794, 1795, and 1799, along with the federal tax assessment records for 1798, she weaves into these chapters vignettes of individual Bostonians as they strove for material success and community cohesion. This technique works effectively to "provide a social portrait of Boston between 1775 and 1800, focusing on the lives of lower- and middle-income groups" (8). Chapter 3 showcases her skills in studying in-migration, some out-migration, population turnover, household composition, patterns of wealth and land ownership, and the condition of the city's free black population (though her findings need to be understood as a snapshot of these phenomena rather than an indication of change because the analysis is based on the taking books for a single decade from 1784 to 1794).	. . .

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