Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York by Serena R. Zabin (review)

Serena Zabin’s book examines New York City, 1700–1760, with an eye toward the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741 when thirty slaves were tried and executed. The book consists of six chapters, five covering, in sequence, con artists and the “complex interplay between credit and credibility,” (7) New York’s elite women merchants, the roles of “laboring” women and black men in secondhand markets, “dancing masters,” (8) and “[b]lack sailors captured on Spanish ships.” (8) A sixth chapter covers the alleged rising itself, drawing upon material from the five preceding chapters.

Zabin is at her best in the fine-grained details of this colonial port, where her work admirably contributes to Atlantic, colonial American, and British imperial history. Her use of court records is excellent and in the best traditions of social history. Many of the chapters are excellent on their own and should be assigned to graduate students alongside other studies.

The 1741 slave conspiracy trials sit oddly in this book, which is at once all about and not at all about these trials. Zabin’s first five chapters seem to have been chosen to elucidate issues arising from the trials. And yet the trials are presented as bringing no change in New Yorkers’ social views. If the trials made no difference in how New Yorkers saw captured slaves or female merchants, then why are the trials, the slaves, and the merchants treated together? Aside from incidental inclusion in the trials themselves, Zabin’s chapters have little connection with each other. All speak to New Yorkers’ anxieties about status in the “fluid social world” of the port. But so would chapters on Iroquois or Dutchmen. This book is less a monograph and more as a single-author-edited collection presented as a monograph, the first five chapters of which might have made more sense as free-standing articles.

Chapter one considers credit, counterfeiting, trust, and the link between New York’s “transient” population (20) as well as the counterfeiting of (especially other colonies’) money. New Yorkers used dress, class, and gender status to mark who deserved financial credit and personal trust, but they were sometimes disastrously wrong.

Chapter two considers “webs of dependence” (32), arguing coverture could sometimes give women greater access to trade and finance. Zabin considers New York’s major businesswomen trading abroad—many inheriting the business from husbands or fathers and who may have been “trading all along under their husbands’ names” before trading on their own. The London men with whom they transacted business “never inquired into a woman’s married status” (36), while, somewhat paradoxically, we are told women who were still married used their husband’s good names to obtain business contacts. Although society’s understanding of these women’s business “was always structured through [their] relationships with” men, Zabin suspects the primary sources understates the commercial activity of elite New York women.

Zabin’s third chapter, one of her most insightful, discusses the port’s taverns, often run by women (of a lower class than the merchants of chapter two) and frequented by poorer men—servants and slaves, whites and blacks—who might have pay for their quaff by pawning goods to the tavern keeper. Many such establishments were unlicensed parts of the informal economy. Proprietors could be prosecuted for keeping a “disorderly house” (57), a term that vaguely connoted boozing, whoring, gambling, and fighting among the lower orders (62). Zabin notes that keeping a disorderly house was one of the more-common charges brought against New York women. This charge included a sexual component: women charged with keeping disorderly taverns were accused—implicitly or explicitly—with pimping or prostitution. The illegal “entertaining” of (i.e., sale of liquor to) slaves and, often, the receipt of stolen goods in return was also implied (63).

But what are we to make of this? Is the tavern encouraging riot, as Zabin suggests, or...