| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750. By Rosalind J. Beiler. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. xvi, 208 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-271-03372-3.)
In Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), Monsieur Jourdain is delighted to discover he has been speaking and writing prose all his life without realizing it. Colonial historians might respond in much the same way to Rosalind J. Beiler's Immigrant and Entrepreneur; we have been writing Atlantic history without realizing it.	1
Beiler uses the story of Caspar Wistar, a glassmaker in Pennsylvania, to highlight "some of the integrative processes at work in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world" (p. x). Wistar's success, she argues, was not just the result of his timely arrival in "the best poor man's country." Rather, "his European background offered new forms of capital—knowledge and ethnic identity—that he invested creatively and effectively" in a new, American environment (p. 5). To show this, Beiler focuses on selected elements of Wistar's life and career: how his Palatinate roots shaped his response to the American environment, how he used his ethnic identity to mediate between German immigrants and the Anglo-Quaker elite of Pennsylvania, and how he employed a German corporate model in the New Jersey glassworks he established.	. . .

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