| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Taming Democracy: "The People," the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. By Terry Bouton. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x, 332 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-530665-1.)

Terry Bouton argues for the essential rationality of rural protest before and well after 1776 in this extremely well-written, well-researched, and well-argued study. He starts from the premise that economic distress was widely felt in Pennsylvania after the Seven Years' War. This revival of the economic interpretation of the Revolution, however, attends with particular care to the political economy of taxation and to people's practical as well as ideological responses. The Currency Act and restrictions on banking were less easily blamed than stamp men but in the long run made it logical for Pennsylvania farmers to link their homegrown interests to imperial politics. Cash scarcity damaged the reputations of enough elites to create, eventually, a "broad-based movement to democratize government and society," including, crucially, public control of finance (p. 31).

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