| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860. Ed. by Mark A. Noll. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xii, 313 pp. Cloth, $32.50, ISBN 0-19-514800-2. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-19-514801-0.)

This collection of thirteen essays sets out to narrow the gap between the grandness of key theses about the period (Nathan Hatch's democratization and Charles Sellers's market revolution) and the relative paucity of historiography on actual Protestant economic practices (such as techniques for raising funds under a voluntaristic system). In picturing the interrelationship between Protestants and the market as dynamic and multivalent, Mark A. Noll's introduction moves well beyond "unilinear" perspectives about the evangelical legitimation of free labor, capitalist expansion, and time discipline (p. 22). The sundry American riffs on E. P. Thompson's foundational work on English Methodism are set aside in favor of fuller, more complex reconstructions of the exchange between Protestantism and economic transformation. To that end, the book reuses the right-on-target critiques of Sellers by Daniel Walker Howe and Richard Carwardine that first appeared in Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway's edited collection The Market Revolution in America (1996) and includes a lustrous biographical contextualization of E. P. Thompson's Methodist roots and antipathies by David Hempton and John Walsh. Throughout, the collection emphasizes complexity over uniformity: that is, evangelicalism and the market were entangled in a much more ambiguous dance than is allowed by a neo-Marxist apocalypse of capitalist accommodation and resistance.

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