| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780. By Phyllis Whitman Hunter. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. xiv, 224 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-8014-3855-1.)

The merchants of the title were the richest businessmen of Boston and Salem. All were involved in shipping, but they also ran local businesses, loaned money, and underwrote insurance. Many, though not all, served in local or provincial office, patronized local artists and craftsmen, and dispensed charity. In the later colonial period, they belonged to numerous clubs and subscribed to social libraries. The argument of the book, such as it is, is that only Puritan insiders were accepted by the mercantile elite in the seventeenth century, but that by 1730 anybody with sufficient means and "credit" who could dress and act the part of the worldly, educated British gentleman could break into local society, especially after building the proper kind of house. The events leading up to the Revolution undermined their transatlantic community and then fractured it decisively, leading men to substitute homespun apparel and plain republican virtue for the refined, polite, and exquisite life-styles that had come to connote aristocratic corruption. . . .

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