Book Review

What exactly did New England's merchants and industrialists do? Janet Siskind's book provides an answer to this question by exploring Samuel Watkinson's family and its economic fortunes in early-nineteenth-century Connecticut. But this is no "rags to riches" tale. In 1795, when they arrived in Middletown, Connecticut, from Lavenham, England, the Watkinsons were already millionaires if measured by today's standards. Samuel, his wife, Sarah, and their twelve children networked with the local Middletown elites, positioning themselves for advantageous business partnerships and marriages. They adapted themselves nimbly to the West Indian trade. Siskind's book is especially strong in demonstrating how Connecticut farmers and merchants were tied to distant Caribbean islands through trading lumber, horses, and foodstuffs for cargoes of rum and sugars. A dense cache of family letters and business records provides Siskind with the opportunity to advance a fascinating analysis of double-entry bookkeeping, a system that was to some degree a work of magic. In their ledgers, the Watkinsons could see their horses transformed into rum without directly confronting the practice of plantation slavery upon which their profits were based.

. . .