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This book began by observing that the view of a general and fundamental shift from independent and amenable craft work to alienated and penurious wage work, and the implied causal relationship between this shift and the formation of a new kind of working-class politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rested on a mischaracterization of the conditions of earlier American artisanal work. This mischaracterization reflected the influence of two assumptions regarding the transformative effects of changes in later eighteenth-century urban artisanal working conditions: first, that the emergence of capitalism and the rise of a dynamic market economy driven by self-interested pursuits, which most agreed were increasingly in evidence after 1750, displaced earlier household and communitarian forms of production; second, that in the course of this change and the struggles it engendered preindustrial artisans and the laboring sort were transformed into a politically conscious working class distinguished by its members’ sense of their shared structural position and their articulation of an alternative social vision. In the last forty years or so, scholarly fascination with the beginnings of the market economy and the “making” of this American working class has inculcated a view of this “transition to capitalism” as the chronological endpoint of early modernity. In the process, earlier American artisans have been marooned in a rose-tinted “precapitalist” world where they await (without ever fully comprehending) the impact of anonymous material forces that will one day deliver them into modernity.1 In the last two decades or so the debate concerning the transition to capitalism has waned, and the concept of class that figured in so many in- fluential interpretive narratives has been the focus of considerable critical scrutiny.2 In addition, early Americanists have begun to investigate assumptions concerning individual motives, business acumen, and the operation of markets, and to subject colonial commerce to the kind of “thick description ” that has long been applied in other early modern contexts.3 The study of popular politics has been slower to follow. In part this has been because Chapter 7 Conclusion of a tendency to employ categories derived from the nineteenth century in analyses of earlier American conditions, for example in the equating of political activity with voting and the distinction drawn between the radicalism of nineteenth-century class conflicts and the localized, conservative, and essentially deferential character of colonial American popular struggles.4 Consequently , the more sophisticated our understanding of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century popular political culture has become, the more keenly one has felt the absence of earlier, colonial roots—especially in politically precocious urban communities such as New York City. Left unchallenged , this gap in our knowledge encourages the depiction of the middling city artisans—who arguably engineered the civil strife that precipitated the crisis of the 1760s and 1770s—as johnny-come-latelies who underwent a crash course in republican education following the Stamp Act Crisis, only realizing the meaning and implications of claims on behalf of equality, rights, and the importance of consent at the moment at which these faculties were most imperiled.5 By adopting a longer-term view of work and politics in colonial New York, this book has aimed to free seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New York City artisans from this unenviable historiographical fate. Artisans were present in the city from its earliest days and pursued their interests as petty dealers, boat owners, farmers, creditors, and practitioners of various skilled occupations. There is little evidence of claims concerning occupational status and rights and the social and political salience of skills outside the specific municipal and legal contexts considered in the previous chapters; there is a similar dearth of documentary sources detailing workshop traditions and craft “mysteries” prior to the development of artisan associations and advertising in the mid-eighteenth century. Instead, earlier artisanal trade was characterized by fleeting connections and multiple dependencies, and the effects of commercial ambition—evident in the success and social mobility of some and failure of others—were clear as early as the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The most significant changes in artisanal working conditions in the city’s first hundred years had less to do with the emergence of a market economy, which was always present, and more to do with the changing priorities of imperial governance and the increasing reliance on slave workers. Slaves supplied the hard labor that underpinned the rise of New York City as a prosperous seaport town...

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