From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City

Notes

Introduction 1. Influential studies include Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; reprint, London, 1980); Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976), chs. 2, 5; Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge , Mass., 1979). For New York City, see Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of the Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly (hereafter WMQ), 3d ser., 25 (1968): 381–95; Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1979); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984). 2. The dearth of studies of earlier colonial labor has been noted by Richard S. Dunn, “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor,” in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), 158, and John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 245–47. The only published study dealing with tradesmen in early New York City is Graham Russell Hodges, New York City Carters (New York, 1986). 3. For analysis of tax lists and other civic registers see Bruce Martin Wilkenfeld , The Social and Economic Structure of the City of New York, 1695–1796 (New York, 1975), 17–136; Nash, Urban Crucible, 395; Nan Rothschild, New York City Neighborhoods : The Eighteenth Century (San Diego, 1990), 109–20; Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, N.J., 1992), 65, 71. 4. The reference that led to the Mayor’s Court Papers came from Evarts B. Greene and Richard B. Morris, A Guide to the Principal Sources for Early American History in the City of New York (New York, 1953), 209–11. The full collection of papers is scattered through various New York City archives. There are a handful of documents in the Rare Books and Manuscripts section of the New York Public Library and a few more in the New York Historical Society. However, most are held in the Division of Old Records, County Court, 31 Chambers St., and in a second large collection at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of Columbia University. 5. My thinking here and elsewhere is informed by Michael Sonenscher’s The Hatters of Eighteenth Century France (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), and his Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge, 1989). On the economy of the bazaar, see Clifford Geertz, Peddlers and Princes (Chicago, 1963), 33–47, and “Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou,” in Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, Notes and Lawrence Rosen, eds., Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society (New York, 1979), 124–25, 219. 6. Stephen Innes has also stressed the significance of continuity rather than change—with the exception of the rise of human chattel slavery—in seventeenthand early eighteenth-century work relations; see his “John Smith’s Vision,” in Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988), 43–44. 7. For a discussion of this artisanal republican politics and examples of its iconography, see Paul A. Gilje and Howard B. Rock, Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), introduction, 66–120. 8. This is one of the mechanisms that Pierre Bourdieu identifies as central to the social experience of doxa, in which the naturalization of the arbitrary assignment social meanings and signs serves the production and reproduction of power relations by obscuring the arbitrariness of the sign that assumes the authority of a component within the taken-for-granted or natural world. See his Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (New York, 1977), 164–67, 176–78. Also see Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experience and Ways of Life (Princeton, N.J., 1995), introduction; Harald Dehne, “Have We Come Any Closer to Alltag? Everyday Reality and Workers’ Lives as an Object of Historical Research in the German Democratic Republic,” 116–49; Patrick Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings of Work (New York, 1987), introduction. 9. Alice Kenny, Stubborn for Liberty: The Dutch in New York (Syracuse, N.Y., 1975). For overviews of the flourishing of studies...