Reviews of Books

In Washington Irving's classic tale, a Dutch farmer, hunting in the Catskills above the Hudson, falls asleep under a tree just before the Revolution; awakening twenty years later he finds his village world utterly transformed. In Rip Van Winkle's Neighbors, Thomas Wermuth seeks to plumb the scale of this transformation in a close study of Ulster County, and particularly the town of Kingston, situated on the west bank of the Hudson, eighty miles north of New York City. His careful work raises as many questions as it provides answers about what had changed when Rip returned from his long sleep.

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Wermuth's book is arranged in six chapters between introduction and conclusion. Quickly setting the stage in chapter 1 with an evocative account of the late seventeenth-century Dutch settlement of Ulster County, he proceeds in the second and third chapters to describe the region's prerevolutionary political culture and economy. Here Wermuth makes his most valuable contribution in a consideration of markets and their regulation. For decades, historians have been arguing about whether northern farmers were primarily committed to community or to the market. Wermuth is blessed with excellent records for the town of Kingston, and he uses them here to great advantage to cut the Gordian knot. On the one hand, Ulster farmers were certainly directly involved in the market economy, sending wheat and barrel-staves downriver by sloop to New York City from the county's river landings. But conversely, the incorporated towns and villages of Ulster, seen primarily through the lens of the corporation records of Kingston, regulated some of these long-distance market relations, particularly those involving wood taken from the town commons, but occasionally shipments of wheat as well, and it set prices for bread and salt and limited interest rates on loans. Wermuth sensibly proposes that the farmers of colonial Ulster operated in a regulated market economy, in which the risks of the market were contained through moral and civil regulation. Such risks were also circumscribed through individual calculations, which Wermuth measures in an analysis of farmers' credits in merchants' account books: men who risked their farm products on the downriver trade, he finds, were significantly more prosperous and more likely to be using cash than farmers who more cautiously confined themselves to local trade. Chapter 4, "'We Are Daily Alarmed, and Our Streets Filled with Mobs': The Revolution in the Valley, 1775–1785," effectively the hinge of the book, explores the impact of the Revolution on the county economy. Of particular interest is his analysis of the purchasing by the Continental commissioner at the New Windsor encampment, which provides a view of the impact of military expenditure on a local economy. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the county economy during six decades following the Revolution, as Ulster County moved through the putative "market revolution."

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