Book Review

Canada and the United States

In the past two decades, historians of eighteenth-century Britain and America have delineated a vigorous world of commerce, consumption, and gentility. Phyllis Whitman Hunter explores how people responded to this flood of consumer goods by focusing on some of Massachusetts's most elite merchants in Boston and Salem during the period she refers to as their golden age, from 1660 to 1763, when colonial merchants were able to displace the old Puritan oligarchy, insert themselves in its place, and reconstruct the material world around them. In the seventeenth century, Massachusetts merchants could achieve social and political distinction to rival their economic accomplishments only if they possessed suitable genealogies and Congregational Church membership. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, men previously marginalized from full participation in colonial society were able to move to the center by purchasing the accoutrements of gentility. Hunter suggests that Massachusetts was a place particularly receptive to these changes because of tensions within Puritanism that encouraged individual pursuit of prosperity yet sought an isolated community, two goals that put colonists engaged in an expansive Atlantic economy in a difficult position. Eighteenth-century gentility helped colonists escape these contradictions and define new standards of success and accomplishment.

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