Previews

Naomi R. Lamoreaux reopens the debate over the transition to capitalism in the northeastern United States. She argues that the kinds of evidence used by scholars to "prove" that late-eighteenth-century farmers were not capitalists can, ironically, yield the identical conclusion for merchants and manufacturers. To illuminate the transition to capitalism, she turns to recent advances in economic theory that move beyond reductive notions of economic rationality and profit maximization. In the early nineteenth century, farmers, merchants, and manufacturers all became increasingly embedded in a market economy. But unlike farmers, merchants and manufacturers adopted new economic practices, impelled not simply by a drive for profit maximization, but by new cultural imperatives.

In assessing the influence of the Enlightenment in the British American colonies, early American historians have tended to focus on urban elites. John Fea instead explores a parallel rural Enlightenment through a study of the short life of Philip Vickers Fithian, a diarist from southern New Jersey. The complex configuration of Fithian's social world—full of British books and nearby friends—demands that we rethink the distinction between cosmopolitanism and localism on the eve of the American Revolution and consider how cosmopolitan aspirations could be reconciled with local attachments in a rural community.

For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our "Teaching the JAH" Web project at <http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/>.

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