The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions (review)

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 21, 2001, two generations of historians gathered to consider “The Past and Future of Early American Economic History: Needs and Opportunities.” Papers by many of the cliometricians who invented the “new” economic history of the 1970s provided the sponsor—the Library Company of Philadelphia’s new Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES)—with a historiographical map of the field’s migration out of mainstream historical study and into economics departments. Meanwhile, papers by more recently trained scholars expanded the definition of economic history to include social, political, cultural, and even environmental topics that often elude quantification. In The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, Cathy Matson, PEAES director and professor at the University of Delaware, collects eleven of the original twenty-two papers, adding a historiographical essay of her own. The volume aims to redefine economic history to include both the “new” economic history and the even newer economic history sponsored, in large part, by PEAES. Collectively, the chapters argue for the centrality of economic issues, however defined, to the three centuries following European arrival on North America’s shores.

In the first of two historiographical pieces, Matson provides an overview of economic history scholarship from the 1880s, when the Ameri-can Economic Association “met annually along with the American Historical Association,” to the current chronologically and methodologically fragmented field (1). Focusing on the scholarship since 1985, when John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard’s synthesis, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985) appeared, Matson devotes fifty-seven of her seventy pages to cataloguing recent work, both quantitative and qualitative, in three chronological periods: Colonial North America, the Revolutionary Era, and the Early Republic. In a second historiographical essay, David Hancock compares recent economic history scholarship to the research agenda suggested by McCusker and Menard in 1985 that assumed the questions of classical economics, especially growth and development, as the agenda for the field. With the aid of geographically far-ranging footnotes, Hancock finds that historians’ disenchantment with econometrics left much of this agenda to economists, while most historians “simply ignored it” (91). He argues for a return “to the more inclusive economic history championed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars, a history not defined by the somewhat Whiggish preoccupation with economic growth . . . and not answered primarily by statistical analysis” (96).

The last seven essays in the volume answer Hancock’s call, but they are preceded by three chapters written by scholars who have devoted at least two very productive decades of research to expanding and challenging the statistical data set summarized by The Economy of British America. In their essays, Russell R. Menard and Lorena S. Walsh synthesize quantitative studies that seek to answer questions about growth in terms of agriculture and demography, respectively. Christopher Tom-lins’s essay on indentured servitude moves the book chronologically forward as he marshals demographic data to assert a stronger place for indentured servitude in the era of the American Revolution. Although Walsh refers to some quantitative research as “esoteric number games,” her dissatisfaction with historians’ complacency about McCusker and Menard’s incomplete data drives her to hope “to persuade younger scholars to roll up their sleeves and get on with the important tasks remaining” (132, 145).

Far from illustrating an unwillingness to get their hands dirty, the work of the younger scholars in this volume suggests that they have prioritized a different set of “important tasks.” The last seven essays in this volume not only redefine “early American economic history” but rewrite it with new approaches to language, geography, and chronological boundaries. Although David Waldstreicher, John Majewski, Donna Rilling, and Seth Rockman all present useful chapters, the essays by Terry Bouton, Brooke Hunter, and Daniel Dupre exemplify the disciplinary, methodological, linguistic, geographic, and chronological innovations to the historiography. Challenging early American economic history’s reliance...