Reviewed by Donna J. Rilling | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3

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Reviewed by Donna J. Rilling | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Donna J. Rilling, Stony Brook University

From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City. By Simon Middleton. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 316 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
Urban craftsmen in the late eighteenth century spun an idealized tale of earlier economic security, independence, and civic rights, Simon Middleton argues, and historians have been taken in by it. Some scholars have long been suspicious of this romantic cast, but records illuminating the lives of colonial craftsmen are spotty. Middleton has overcome the evidentiary obstacle, drawing on a quarry of underused legal records from the mayor's court to construct a rich and insightful portrait of the economic activities, political ideology, and self-conceptions of New York's craftsmen that will revise our understanding of postrevolutionary artisan republicanism.	1
The rhetoric of a collective craft brotherhood emerged from particular circumstances in colonial New York. In the 1730s the political faction out of power imported English radical ideology. Solicited to serve as emblems of virtuous and legitimate government, New York City's skilled tradesmen endorsed, promoted, and exploited their own importance. In trumpeting their virtue, artisans not only elided the hardships of operating as craftsmen in New York's unforgiving economy but also forsook a conception of rights negotiated in the previous century under Dutch rule. Tradesmen neglected and ultimately abandoned these objective rights based on burgher privileges and reciprocal duties to embrace more subjective claims, among them the political equality of all male voters.	2
The craft economy had emerged slowly in New Amsterdam. The West India Company was ambivalent about encouraging artisans to produce goods that would compete with the merchandise it sold. The flagging colony did not attract immigrant craftsmen, who anticipated little demand for their skills, and those who migrated could not resist the more lucrative work of trading beaver pelts. To put the colony on firmer footing, the company liberalized trade in the 1640s and attracted settlers with promises of privileges consistent with urban rights in Holland. Artisan demands and widespread criticism of company directors general sparked greater municipal political autonomy and the introduction of the burgher right, a complex of privileges and duties that mirrored Holland's republican traditions. The burgher right of freemanship gave residents of mid-seventeenth-century New Amsterdam preference over itinerant traders and other outsiders (including black residents); it was balanced by reciprocal duties, including the obligation to observe commercial regulations, to labor on public works, and to serve in the militia.	3
The initial transition to English rule after 1664 did not impinge dramatically on these rights of resident tradesmen. Cooperation of artisans and deference to the municipal authority of leading burghers were keys to the stability of the city. Dutch legal practices continued to provide a familiar process for protecting rights. By the 1680s, however, conflict arose over the benefits that some tradesmen and merchants, whose interests suited the city's leaders, reaped under English rule. Carters, for example, lost protection from new competitors and were moreover compelled to add to their labors on public works merely to keep their licenses; bakers, by contrast, gained further security as guarantors of the city's bread supply. In Leisler's Rebellion (1689–91), Middleton asserts, carters and other discontented artisans joined merchants from outside the governor's circle to defend their privileges and liberties from encroachment by a tyrannical government. They were trying to protect rights not just sculpted out of Dutch republican ideology but more so those won from their experiences in colonial New Amsterdam.	. . .

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