Reviewed by Richard R. John | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3

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Reviewed by Richard R. John | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Richard R. John, University of Illinois at Chicago

The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions. Edited by Cathy Matson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. 388 pages. $55.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper).
On its publication in 1985, early Americanists hailed John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard's Economy of British America, 1607–1789 as a landmark in historical writing on the early American economy. Lavishly praising the book for laying out "guideposts for hundreds of future research projects," one early reviewer confidently predicted that its "unparalleled contribution" would "undoubtedly have a stimulating and long-lasting impact on an entire generation of professional historians and their graduate students."¹ In an effort to survey trends in the field since the publication of McCusker and Menard's magnum opus, Cathy Matson convened a two-day conference in April 2001 on "The Past and Future of Early American Economic History: Needs and Opportunities." The conference featured twenty-two papers, eleven of which found their way into The Economy of Early America. Matson's definition of the temporal boundaries of early American economic history is somewhat more capacious than McCusker and Menard's; four of the eleven essays, for example, focus primarily on the half century from 1790 to 1840.	1
Contributions by Lorena S. Walsh, Christopher Tomlins, David Hancock, and David Waldstreicher directly engage topics that McCusker and Menard surveyed in 1985. So, too, does an essay by Menard himself. Terry Bouton and Brooke Hunter explore topics that McCusker and Menard underplayed; the remaining four essays, by Daniel S. Dupre, John Majewski, Donna J. Rilling, and Seth Rockman, push the chronological ambit beyond 1789. Rounding out the collection is a seventy-page introduction by Matson.	2
Matson's essay is a wide-ranging and judicious overview of recent historical writing on early American economic history that is likely to be much consulted by specialists and nonspecialists alike. Scholarship on the post-1789 decades, she concludes, has been energized by Charles Sellers's market revolution thesis; recent writing on the pre-1789 period, in contrast, lacks a compelling "problématique." In the absence of an organizing theme, the pre-1789 period has fallen into relative neglect, a condition she blames, in part, on the professional bifurcation of economic history between economics and history.	3
Hancock's piece masterfully surveys the legacy of the ambitious research agenda that McCusker and Menard set forth in 1985. He observes that the rising generation of historians is far more likely to draw inspiration from cultural studies than economic theory and, regardless of theoretical orientation, is disinclined to heed McCusker and Menard's call to mold bricks for a scholarly edifice that rests on economic structures so resolutely impersonal as to discourage empathetic engagement with the "people we are writing about" (106). Hancock contends that in the future the economic history of the colonial era should be written with sensitivity to the "colonists' thinking and the extent to which their lives, ideas, and emotions were conditioned by confusion, struggle, vacillation, and doubt" (106).	4
Hancock is by no means an uncritical apologist for the culturalist turn. It is curious indeed, he wryly observes, that in "certain historical circles" Jean-Christophe Agnew's Worlds Apart—that "least economic of books" (92)—is regarded as the definitive overview of the early modern Anglo-American market.² Equally unfortunate, Hancock believes, is T. H. Breen's neglect in his influential consumer revolution essays of the "production, labor, financial, and entrepreneurial structures that facilitated access to consumer goods" (95 n. 46). As an alternative Hancock calls for scholarship that melds economic structures and personal agency and speculates there is room for a reconsideration of classic political-economic topics such as mercantilism and the movement of gold and silver.	. . .

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