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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.3 (2001) 468-469



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Book Review

Inequality in Early America


Inequality in Early America. Edited by Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover, University Press of New England, 1999) 329 pp. $40.00 cloth $19.95 paper

This collection of essays honoring the scholarship of Gary B. Nash was intended as a collaborative inquiry into the nature and scope of inequality in colonial and revolutionary North America. Although composed entirely of historians, the fifteen contributors include specialists in ethnohistory (Neal Salisbury, Peter H. Wood, Nash), gender history (Mary Beth Norton, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich) slavery and race relations (Richard S. Dunn, Sylvia R. Frey, Philip D. Morgan, Sterling Stuckey), and social mobility (Billy G. Smith). For those interested in interdisciplinary approaches, this volume would seem to hold considerable promise. But for the most part, it is only partially realized. Given such an assemblage of talent, as well as the inspiration afforded by the pathbreaking work of Nash, one might have expected better results.

With conspicuous exceptions--Dunn, Salisbury, Morgan, Frey, and Ulrich--all of the contributors subscribe to the newly ascendant "antiexceptionalist" orthodoxy with regard to American history. The central postulate of this orthodoxy, that British and postrevolutionary North America experienced the same patterns of class conflict, social inequality, and uneven economic development as the rest of the early modern world, is the collection's animating premise. That such corrections were needed during the consensus era of American historiography (1945-1965) few could question; but the interpretative pendulum appears to have swung too far in the opposite direction. Once fixated on opportunity, early Americanists are now more likely to be preoccupied with oppression. To interrogate, in an avowedly single-minded fashion, the nature of inequality in colonial and revolutionary America, without once acknowledging this society as the only one of its time to afford work-based mobility to the mass of its free inhabitants (two-thirds of its householders owned and worked their own land by the mid-eighteenth century) amounts to nothing short of a question mal posée. Inequality in America throughout the colonial and revolutionary periods was overwhelmingly [End Page 468] a function of race, not class, as Wood's essay on "slave labor camps" makes chillingly clear.

Those searching for the nuggets in this collection would be well advised to begin with Dunn's wry and illuminating "reminiscences" of his own forty-three-year-long scholarly colloquy with Nash. The marvelous achievements wrought by the new social history in bringing to light the experiences of ordinary colonists, African-Americans, and Indians--as well as the eventual and tragic descent of many of its practitioners into ideologically based pseudo-scholarship--can be glimpsed in this assessment of the field's trajectory.

Also valuable is Salisbury's nuanced examination of the often ironical interplay between Puritan missionaries and Indians in seventeenth-century New England; "Christians" and "heathen" were to be found among the combatants on both sides during King Philip's War (1675/76). Likewise, there is much to be learned from Morgan's rethinking of the contours of early American slavery and Frey's explication of religion's impact on the construction of race and gender in the postrevolutionary South. Frey's demonstration that the postrevolutionary Southern orthodoxy was more racial- and gender-biased than it was during the colonial period is one of the highlights of the collection.

Stephen Innes
University of Virginia

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