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Book Reviews
From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City.
By Simon Middleton. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. 320. $45.00.)]
Reviewed by Christian J. Koot, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York.
| In From Privileges to Rights, Simon Middleton reconstructs the daily life of New York's artisans through a little-mined but rich source for early New York history, the records of the City's Mayor's Court. These records, which detail the civil complaints of New Yorkers, reveal that "as early as the third quarter of the seventeenth century the fortunes of ordinary working men and women were intimately bound up with" Atlantic trade (p. 2). In the search for profit, workers, from bakers to tailors, "divided their energies between skilled work and all manner of commercial enterprise" as they borrowed and lent money, traded in real estate, and ventured goods to distant markets. As Middleton describes it, this history contradicts the story that historians, and the workers themselves, have told, a narrative that describes how the arrival of "the market" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries destroyed previous, and supposedly more desirable, workshop-based relations of production, eroding customary privileges, and pushing workers to develop a political consciousness—artisanal republicanism—to protect the traditional independence of the workshop. |
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If increased exposure to the vicissitudes of the market in the late eighteenth century did not create political consciousness among previously insulated workers, then what did? Middleton convincingly concludes that artisanal republicanism was the product of a new strategy that working men used as they adapted their customary rights and privileges to a new economic and, after the English conquest, political and legal system. During the seventeenth century, tradesmen in New Netherland based their claims for occupational protections on a Dutch civic tradition that ascribed individual rights and privileges based upon public welfare, not a universal belief in equality. These privileges, in turn, required reciprocity, as they were paired with moral and civic obligations. Bakers, for example, were afforded the monopoly right to resist competition from itinerants. At the same time, however, they were bound by common interest to provide sufficient bread at reasonable rates (pp. 28–30). |
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After establishing this Dutch civic tradition, Middleton explains how the imposition of English legal and political customs, together with economic restructuring between 1680 and 1730, transformed the relationship between the city and its tradesmen, compelling artisans to find a new strategy to preserve their "residential and occupational privileges" (p. 90). In the process they rejected their previous privileged status, enabling them to claim equal rights based not on their occupational role, but instead on "the natural equality of reasonable and self-interested men" (p. 204). What Middleton forces, therefore, is a revaluation of the importance of the late medieval political culture that Dutch peoples brought to the Americas and that clashed with new legal and cultural practice in the eighteenth century. The origins of artisanal republicanism, he argues, lie not in the excitement of the Stamp Act crisis, but rather in workers' "response to conditions left over from the earlier Dutch civic order, to the rise of slavery, and to the importation of radical English political ideas and their adaptation to colonial circumstances" (p. 228). Artisans' claims for equality and working men's virtue that underlay their version of republicanism, therefore, reflect a transition in the very conception of rights in early America. |
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Middleton's account is even richer than this brief summary allows. In the course of describing a change in early New Yorkers' conceptions of rights, he describes the social, political, and economic worlds of tradesmen under Dutch and English rule (chaps. 1, 2, 5, and 6), the interdependent relationships of credit and exchange they constructed (chap. 3), and the impact of slavery upon their privileged position (chap. 4). |
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In arguing for the importance of Dutch civic institutions in the development of working people's history, Middleton joins a growing number of scholars urging students of colonial America not to forget the importance of the Dutch past. At the same time, Middleton leaves unstated the implication of his argument for our understanding of the creation of extended European polities in the early modern Atlantic. New York was not the only Atlantic port in which attempts to create an integrated British empire encountered differing political and cultural structures, and thus we must remain vigilant to how institutions overlaid one another around the Atlantic. Deeply analytical and richly rewarding, From Privileges to Rights should become essential reading for historians of New York and early America as we continue to uncover the origins of our modern language of rights. |
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