Reviews of Books

Phyllis Whitman Hunter joins the growing ranks of early American historians who assess the effects of "capitalism on the material and social landscape" (p. xi) of the British Atlantic world. Her new monograph Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 is an exciting addition to the field. Hunter sets out to understand how the largest and most successful Boston and Salem merchants transformed seventeenth-century Puritan standards of correct behavior, admission to the cultural and political elite, and perhaps even salvation into the materialistic and commercial standards of the eighteenth century. "Through broad cultural transformations," she maintains, "possessions displaced providence" (p. 118) in the lives of Massachusetts merchants. This interpretation is linked to Hunter's larger mission: reformulating Richard Bushman's famous "From Puritan to Yankee" thesis about the relation between capitalism and culture in early America. While some aspects of her approach are not fully convincing, on the whole Hunter has read the available evidence with intelligence and understanding. Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World offers an intriguing, useful model for the new Atlantic History.

1

Hunter limits her reading to the Boston and Salem overseas merchants who left "the largest caches of extant papers whose documents held out the hope of revealing material about their personal lives and social interactions" and contain "some evidence of their material possessions" (p. 11). Even so restricted, Hunter's rich archival sources provide a trove of material with which to reassess the "transition to capitalism" thesis from Max Weber (and Bushman's "Puritan to Yankee" variation of that theme) and the "consumer revolution" thesis articulated by Bushman, Cary Carson, and others. Through the lives of John Hull and Henry Shrimpton, Hunter demonstrates that "although striving for riches was acceptable" in late seventeenth-century Boston, "riches did not open the door to social or civil leadership" (p. 16). Similarly to the north: Philip English--a Frenchman who came from the Isle of Jersey in the early 1670s and in two decades achieved financial success in Salem--"threatened the Puritan definition of community and glaringly exposed the tension between a fixed social and religious order and a mobile and multicultural economy" (p. 69). Hunter's clear command of primary sources and secondary scholarship and the unusual color and lucidity of her prose help her paint a believable picture of late seventeenth-century New England that few historians have matched.

. . .