| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Deborah A. Rosen. Courts and Commerce: Gender, Law, and the Market Economy in Colonial New York. (Historical Perspectives on Business Enterprise Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 232. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.95.

In this brief book, Deborah A. Rosen argues three interrelated theses. First, she contends that market relations existed in New York throughout the eighteenth century. Second, she suggests that, as a result of an increasingly pervasive market culture, women "became peripheralized from the economy" (p. 1) long before industrialization. Finally, in her most original insight, Rosen asserts that New York's colonial courts, like their early nineteenth-century counterparts, created a legal climate that actively supported and encouraged economic development. All three contentions, in turn, lead her to conclude that "the transition to capitalism was a lengthy process that began well before the Revolution . . . [and] did not just occur suddenly in the mid-nineteenth century" (p. 4). Few colonial historians would dispute this observation. 1

Rosen uses a wide range of legal and business records to examine the impact of economic development in both urban and rural areas. Probate records detail New Yorkers' increasing access to consumer goods, as well as their growing use of credit, during the eighteenth century. Rosen argues that commercialization in New York, as elsewhere, resulted in increased social inequality. She compares tax lists from the 1730s and 1750s to show growing stratification during that period. Additional comparisons with seventeenth-century tax lists would have enabled her to chart the timing of social change more precisely and render more compelling the link between the rise of market relations and the growth of inequality. . . .

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