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  • Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America by Mark Valeri
  • Brodie Waddell
Mark Valeri. Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. 354 pp. ISBN 9780691143590, $39.95 (cloth).

In 1639, the puritan pastor John Cotton preached several stinging sermons on proper commercial behavior in which he condemned merchants for aggressively maximizing their profits, charging interest on loans, and committing a variety of other economic sins. In 1731, another Boston minister, Thomas Prince, published a commercial handbook that not only promoted an exacting approach to trade but even taught his readers how to profit from “usury” by taking interest from debtors. These contrasting attitudes were symptomatic of the much wider shift in the intellectual culture of New England that Mark Valeri illuminates in this impressive new book.

Valeri tackles his subject chronologically, moving through the first hundred years of Boston’s trading community in six well-balanced chapters. Chapter 1 begins the story in England by examining the guild-based civic humanism of London and rigorous puritanism of the early Stuart period. There was some conflict between these two cultures, but Valeri argues that many merchants nonetheless embraced both and believed “they could work for profits, the common good, and piety together” (36). When these ideologies arrived in New England in the 1630s, they became the frame through which this first generation of colonial merchants saw their world. The two key themes that emerge from this chapter—the close but ambiguous relationship between religion and commercial life and the influence of metropolitan ideas on colonial practice—recur frequently in the rest of the book. In Chapter 2, Valeri focuses on Boston in the 1630s and 1640s, where unlike in England puritans claimed direct and forceful authority over the market that they asserted through church discipline, including even excommunication. Chapter 3 explores how the power of the congregations diminished in the 1650s–1680s due, in part, to the increasing diversity of what one might call the [End Page 885] “spiritual marketplace” as new churches sprang up across Boston. But, as the author makes clear, this was accompanied by the expansion civic regulation of the market, exemplified in the “Provoking Evils” legislation in 1675, and merchants remained anxious about the potential for sinful behavior in the market. Chapter 4 focuses on the period from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the 1710s, showing how puritan ministers sought “moral reform” and energetically attempted to shape merchants’ personal pieties but no longer showed much concern about specific economic dealings, such as the formerly dreaded sin of usury. Valeri highlights the impact of the ideology and discourse of “political economy,” circulating in London at this time, which stressed the value of scientific expertise rather than scriptural revelation as a guide to commercial behavior. Nonetheless, merchants were still very theologically engaged and supported a program of reform that combined commercial and imperial expansion with religious evangelism, manifested in new organizations such as the Company for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. In Chapter 5, mainly covering the 1710s and 1720s, Valeri claims that this moment witnessed the ascendency of the first “postpuritan” generation, who saw politeness, sociability, and imperial loyalty as measures of virtue rather than visible piety. These merchants were often religiously cosmopolitan and cheerfully launched new ships in “elaborate festivals, sometimes replete with mock baptisms” that “horrified latter-day puritans” (189). Even the slave trade, one of the last legally permissible business practices to be generally regarded as sinful, became broadly acceptable at this time. Finally, the Epilogue discusses the mid-eighteenth-century revivals that are depicted as largely reinforcing previous shifts by prolonging the popularity of the moral discourse of pious “sensibility” in business rather than religious discipline over the market.

The argument that emerges from Valeri’s careful reconstruction is that, taken as a whole, colonial New England witnessed an undeniable transformation in the relationship between commerce and religion, between merchants and their ministers. Many previous historians have discussed this relationship, but this book offers an original analysis of this well-studied topic. Whereas some scholars have claimed that the market was simply “secularized” in the seventeenth-century, Valeri...

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