Politics or Profit: New Yorkers Make their Wartime Choices

In Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Milo Minderbinder runs an international business during World War II that controls the market flow of everything from eggs to plum tomatoes to bombing runs. At various points, Minderbinder provides goods to the United States, Italians, and Germans, and negotiates the bombing and defense of an important bridge. The absurd episode reveals Minderbinder as a brilliant, resourceful businessman who brokered trade between nations at war. But he put profit ahead of personal friendships and political loyalties even while he insisted he was a friend and adamantly patriotic. Worse, he expressed outrage when others either questioned his motives or tried to stop him.

The New York City merchants who traded illegally with Britain's enemies in the eighteenth century would have agreed with some of Milo Minderbinder's tactics. Like him, their drive for profit grew out of "naked manifestations of a powerful commercial impulse" that sometimes trumped their political allegiances and their willingness to abide by the law (p. 1). For both Minderbinder and New York merchants, profit was a powerful seduction.

In Defying Empire, Thomas M. Truxes examines how New York merchants chased profit by detailing how they shipped contraband goods in and out of New York City during the Seven Years' War (1754–63). Truxes expertly details the movements of these goods as the colonial merchants conducted their illegal trade; and, while the trade was complicated, this well-written narrative clarifies the complex Atlantic market, legal and illegal, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Truxes is at his best when analyzing disputes between smugglers and the people bent on stopping them. Fortunately for the reader, those contests and the background to understand them dominate the book.

Trading with the enemy was hardly new during the Seven Years' War. The wars between Britain and France that characterized the eighteenth century rarely interrupted trade. During King George's War (1744–48), for example, trade slowed only slightly as European and colonial traders continued to buy and sell goods. Whatever people thought of these practices, by the time George Washington stumbled into war in 1754, British colonial merchants knew how to trade illegally during wartime; and they depended on the links they had established with French, Spanish, Dutch, and Irish colonists and traders throughout the early Americas to do it.

Truxes outlines the illegal trade conducted by New York City merchants in two ways. He starts by following the trials and misfortune of George Spencer, whose story serves as an allegory of sorts. Spencer had immigrated to New York in the 1730s and quickly became a respected merchant, a reputation he bolstered by marrying the sister of one of New York's largest merchants. In the early days of the war, Spencer saw that his rivals gained an edge by trading illegally, so he set out to erase that advantage. In the late 1750s, Spencer took the law into his own hands and began rooting around the city's docks, where he found ships filled with goods bound for neutral ports. He also discovered small piles of goods ready to be brought ashore. Spencer noticed, however, that although all of the goods had been labeled "British," some of them clearly came from French colonies. He decided to turn over that information to local officials. The men Spencer accused of smuggling organized a crowd and assaulted him; only the intervention of the lieutenant governor ended the attack. Spencer's ordeal was not over: shortly after the crowd dispersed, a deputy sheriff arrested Spencer and took him to jail.

Throughout the remainder of the book, Truxes contextualizes Spencer's torment by analyzing how and why New York City merchants traded illegally during the Seven Years' War. In doing so, Truxes depicts New York as a burgeoning cosmopolitan seaport that was rapidly gaining a place as an important Atlantic world entrepôt through which flowed nearly every imaginable...