| 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

Cathy Matson. Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York. (Early America: History, Context, Culture.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998. Pp. x, 458.

In 1994, Wayne Bodle's William and Mary Quarterly article surveying the historiography of the Middle Colonies concluded that the economic history of the region "remains in much the same tentative state" as it did in the late 1970s. With the publication of Cathy Matson's book, one no longer has cause to lament such a gap in our scholarly knowledge. The book provides a definitive description of trading in colonial New York City. It complements Thomas M. Doerflinger's A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (1986), completing the story of merchants and commercial development in the two major urban ports of the Middle Colonies. 1

Matson's book focuses on economic developments among city merchants; the experiences of farmers, craftsmen, consumers, and shopkeepers are mentioned only to the extent that they interacted with or affected urban exporters, importers, and wholesalers. But she does not otherwise limit her study: she examines the roles and perspectives of lesser merchants as well as the commercial elite, she includes developments of Dutch New Amsterdam as well as English New York, and she describes economic discourse as well as commercial practice. . . .

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