Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Early American Studies) Review

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(More customer reviews)"Dangerous Economies" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Zabin's book interview ran here as cover feature on October 2, 2009.

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Before the American Revolution, the people who lived in British North America were not just colonists; they were also imperial subjects. To think of eighteenth-century New Yorkers as Britons rather than incipient Americans allows us fresh investigations into their world. How was the British Empire experienced by those who lived at its margins? How did the mundane affairs of ordinary New Yorkers affect the culture at the center of an enormous commercial empire?Dangerous Economies is a history of New York culture and commerce in the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, when Britain was just beginning to catch up with its imperial rivals, France and Spain. In that sparsely populated city on the fringe of an empire, enslaved Africans rubbed elbows with white indentured servants while the elite strove to maintain ties with European genteel culture. The transience of the city's people, goods, and fortunes created a notably fluid society in which establishing one's own status or verifying another's was a challenge. New York's shifting imperial identity created new avenues for success but also made success harder to define and demonstrate socially.Such a mobile urban milieu was the ideal breeding ground for crime and conspiracy, which became all too evident in 1741, when thirty slaves were executed and more than seventy other people were deported after being found guilty—on dubious evidence—of plotting a revolt. This sort of violent outburst was the unforeseen but unsurprising result of the seething culture that existed at the margins of the British Empire.

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Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century Review

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(More customer reviews)I purchased this book as a reference for my research on early American emigrants, as I am writing a book of my own. The information contained in Atlantic Virginia is great, much of it seems to be original, and it is carefully laid out. That said, I will have to say that I can only get through a few pages at a time, as it is written in a very scholarly manner. Unfortunately, my schedule is such that I have to read at night before bed, and this work does a pretty good job of lulling me to sleep. Still, it does provide detailed and frankly fascinating insight into colonial life (once you get past the dry presentation), and it is the best chronicle I've read on the movement of goods and individuals between the American colonies of the 17th century. I would recommend it to persons interested not only in early Virginia, but to those studying other colonies, especially New England, Maryland, and the Carolinas, and those wanting to learn about New World commerce, shipping, and settlement.

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Through networks of trails and rivers inland and established ocean routes across the seas, seventeenth-century Virginians were connected to a vibrant Atlantic world. They routinely traded with adjacent Native Americans and received ships from England, the Netherlands, and other English and Dutch colonies, while maintaining less direct connections to Africa and to French and Spanish colonies. Their Atlantic world emerged from the movement of goods and services, but trade routes quickly became equally important in the transfer of people and information.Much seventeenth-century historiography, however, still assumes that each North American colony operated as a largely self-contained entity and interacted with other colonies only indirectly, through London. By contrast, in Atlantic Virginia, historian April Lee Hatfield demonstrates that the colonies actually had vibrant interchange with each other and with peoples throughout the hemisphere, as well as with Europeans.

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Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Studies in Comparative World History) Review

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(More customer reviews)I first encountered this book as part of my grandmother's current reading shortly after its publication. I next saw it as part of the required reading for an upper division undergraduate history course. I mention these to note that this book will interest the casual reader of history or the serious student. While it is scholarly, it's subject takes the reader on such a world tour that it practically qualifies as a travelogue. Curtin's accessible presentation makes this is an exciting as well as an informative read.
Curtin describes how the urge to exchange the goods uniquely available to specific areas has encouraged cultures to meet and exchange ideas as well as goods throughout the centuries. His examples of these exchanges, ranging from Greek city states and West African kingdoms, to Portuguese explorers in the interior of Brazil and Indonesian merchants so accustomed to sailing in search of commerce that they have no home on land, demonstrate the effects on individuals and societies of these meetings, and the accomodations neccesary between merchants to negotiate their differences and get the goods they desire. Along the way we see familiar historical characters in a new light, as with Curtin's discussion of the British trade with Russia and a reexamination of British-Indian trade from the Indian perspective, or his consideration of Spanish competition with the Dutch for South East Asian trade. Players one might not have considered emerge as major powers, as with Armenian trade, from their participation in the Silk Road between Ancient Rome and China, to their invaluable role as cross cultural ambassadors for most of Eurasia up to the nineteenth century. Curtin closes with a consideration of the birth of the modern global industrial economy.
This is a valuable book for any serious student of history and an interseting read for the lay reader as well.

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Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (France Overseas: Studies in Empire and D) Review

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(More customer reviews)So frequently, those who study history think they will not enjoy learning about western Canada's fur trade. Even amongst the folks who specialize in the subfields of the prairies, British North America or indigenous peoples, there often lies an assumption that whatever happened at posts, on the river highways, or in the bush, it will not be particularly compelling.
If any book will change skeptics' beliefs about the relevance of Aboriginal-newcomer relations, economic history or the North West, it is Professor Carolyn Podruchny's effort. When read, it will come as no surprise that _Making the Voyageur World_, Podruchny's very first book, was a finalist for "Best Book in Canadian History" (2007) as awarded by the Canadian Historical Association. For those of us interested in the subfields this work touches on, it contributes to history and historiography immensely.But -as important - Podruchny demonstrates she can preach to those considered very unconvertible. She will reach already-made history buffs and (well-formed) history-haters alike. A scholar could not hope for more.
Podruchny takes the reader on a historical trip to explore how the normative nature of 'voyage' should have a broad definition. Men who decided to be an explorer/trader/New France-representative traveled the land and rivers, but they also entered various circles which introduced different cultures, climates and concepts. Many of their own values were influenced by trade. Yet appreciating Canada's eighteenth and nineteenth centuries using monetary terms alone would be historically incomplete. To illustrate this view, Podruchny explains why someone would become a voyageur in the first place, what cosmologies voyageurs had, how their world-views evolved, how they socialized, how they made money and how they took care of other basic human functions. The roles of sexuality and entertainment in voyageurs' lives, for example, are two subjects Podruchny uses to reveal how journeys are not only measured by the number of miles traveled.
Today, many of those who write about indigenous peoples still underrate or completely ignore events in indigenous cultures' pasts which show the complicated nature of pre-contact trade, personal relationships, and politics. Podruchny confidently assumes that Aboriginals were active agents, and she provides examples all the time about why the rest of us should believe her. By also regularly interweaving remarks about other scholars into the main narrative, Podruchny easily discusses the "history of 'history'" without being boring or sentimental.
Podruchny's writing is punchy, and even funny at times. When she is metaphorical, she is never unbelievable. Like Carlo Ginzburg, she shows how we can notice some moments in the past and then use this information to deduce conclusions about other events previously considered inexplicable. Like the canoes she details in _Making the Voyageur World_, Podruchny takes her reader on a (historical) voyage which is (scholastically) water-tight, full of valuable material and just the right length. And like the voyageurs do, Podruchny entertains, adapts well to (research) conditions in order to achieve her purpose, and leaves us wanting to know more about Canada's pre-confederation times. Her voyageurs make it in the historic world. Podruchny makes it -and splendidly so- in our historical one.

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French Canadian workers who paddled canoes, transported goods, and staffed the interior posts of the northern North American fur trade became popularly known as voyageurs. Scholars and public historians alike have cast them in the romantic role of rugged and merry heroes who paved the way for European civilization in the wild Northwest. Carolyn Podruchny looks beyond the stereotypes and reveals the contours of voyageurs' lives, world views, and values.
Making the Voyageur World shows that the voyageurs created distinct identities shaped by their French-Canadian peasant roots, the Aboriginal peoples they met in the Northwest, and the nature of their employment as indentured servants in diverse environments. Voyageurs' identities were also shaped by their constant travels and by their own masculine ideals that emphasized strength, endurance, and daring. Although voyageurs left few conventional traces of their own voices in the documentary record, an astonishing amount of information can be found in descriptions of them by their masters, explorers, and other travelers. By examining their lives in conjunction with the metaphor of the voyage, Podruchny not only reveals the everyday lives of her subjects—what they ate, their cosmology and rituals of celebration, their families, and, above all, their work—but also underscores their impact on the social and cultural landscape of North America.

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The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (The Lamar Series in Western History) Review

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Jay Gitlin's book, Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion, is excellent. This is from a lay-historian whose interest in French colonial history is primarily in the Lower Mississippi Valley. While familiar with 18th century Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Texas Indian traders, I had not gotten around to studying the French traders in Upper Louisiana. Therefore, the book was a perfect introduction to the fur traders, primarily of St. Louis, who traded to the west of the Mississippi in the late 1800s into the 19th century. But more than just an introduction, it was an interesting study of the rise socially, politically, and economically of a group of rough, smart and capable French frontiersmen who became educated and sophisticated merchants and business leaders and still kept their French character. It is a clear overview of events and important players of that area in that time.
That said, although I thoroughly enjoyed the chapters on the Chouteaus and related trader bourgeois merchants, my favorite chapter was "La Confederation Perdue." This chapter is a very good overview of 19th century Francophone merchants of Louisiana, especially New Orleans, before, during and after the Civil War. It is so clearly the reality of what happened to the non-planter French creoles, black and white, as the war changed everything.
In Bourgeois Frontier, Gitlin pours out facts, well-documented in footnotes, and clearly presented. My only complaint is that at 190 pages (plus 78 pages of excellent footnotes and bibliography, and index), it is too short.


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Histories tend to emphasize conquest by Anglo-Americans as the driving force behind the development of the American West. In this fresh interpretation, Jay Gitlin argues that the activities of the French are crucial to understanding the phenomenon of westward expansion.
The Seven Years War brought an end to the French colonial enterprise in North America, but the French in towns such as New Orleans, St. Louis, and Detroit survived the transition to American rule. French traders from Mid-America such as the Chouteaus and Robidouxs of St. Louis then became agents of change in the West, perfecting a strategy of "middle grounding" by pursuing alliances within Indian and Mexican communities in advance of American settlement and re-investing fur trade profits in land, town sites, banks, and transportation. The Bourgeois Frontier provides the missing French connection between the urban Midwest and western expansion. (20091201)

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