| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sean Patrick Adams. Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America. (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 305. $45.00.

Sean Patrick Adams's new book will find a place on my bookshelf alongside such classic studies of American political economy as Oscar and Mary Handlin's Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy; Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (1947) and Louis Hartz's Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (1948), as well as more recent work on the early decades of American industrialization such as L. Ray Gunn's The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (1988). Like the Handlins, Hartz, and Gunn, Adams too examines the role of the "state" in economic life, both as an institutional structure where policy is made and carried out and as an arena of incessant political conflict between rival interests and constituencies. Since policy and politics are at once mutually related and often at odds, this is a complicated story, made more so by a rising market system that created an "economy" outside the formal purview of government altogether.

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