Seeing Like a Town: Putting the Politics Back into Colonial New England's Economy and Society

To John Adams and other late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century commentators, New England's town meetings, churches, and schools were prominent among the region's virtues. Migrants to the West later cited the contribution of these institutions to stable national expansion. Post-Civil War New Englanders claimed their local democracy, faith, and education as roots of freedom's victory over slavery. "The New England town" became a focus of celebration, sentiment, and nostalgia. The post-World War Two efflorescence of American Studies refreshed this interest. The Puritans, long vilified, were rehabilitated as intellectuals, loving family folk, and architects of enduring traditions. In the late 1960s, when pioneering community studies by John Demos, Kenneth Lockridge, Michael Zuckerman, Philip Greven, and others began to carve out the new field of social history, the New England town once again gripped the attention of historians. But the moment was relatively brief. Social history, though concerned with politics, addressed a wide range of other issues as well: demography; economic development; settlers' encounters with indigenous peoples; mentalités; gender; ecological change. Even as Edward M. Cook published The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth Century New England in 1976, it seemed that the town was becoming marginal to many historians' concerns, more often a backdrop or geographical convenience than the focus of study. As historians paid increasing attention to other regions of early America, the New England town remained peripheral to the main channels of historical enquiry. It is time for a reevaluation, and Barry Levy's new book provides one. Drawing on the insights of a generation's fresh research, Town Born brings New England local institutions back to our notice. But this is New England town history with a twist.

Long gone is the notion that New England towns were the preeminent seeds of national development. Starting with Bernard Bailyn's work in the 1950s on merchants and shipping, there has been growing understanding of New England's place in the vast, complex tapestry of the Atlantic world. In an Atlantic context, early New England was a peculiar place. On the American continent, too, New England offered only one among several patterns that emerged in colonial British America and shaped the United States. Rather than asserting the primacy of a single model—the Mid-Atlantic's traditions of religious and political pluralism, or the South's legacy of slavery and racial division—scholars now accept a historical pluralism that recognizes the significance of different paths from colonial settlement to national development. Recently, however, the emphasis on an Atlantic context and the recognition of regional distinctiveness have helped redirect historians to local dimensions of New England's own development—to an understanding that local circumstances, as well as transnational forces, played their role in shaping New England's economy and society.¹ Barry Levy's Town Born joins this effort. Drawing on insights from fresh work on local government and society in England, Levy reexamines the functions of New England's town institutions and argues for their central place in the region's political economy.

New England's distinctive characteristics, Levy argues, including its economy, its labor system, and its specific roles in the British Atlantic empire, are traceable to the part that town officials played in regulating economic and social activity, to privileges accorded to townspeople, and to the sense of loyalty that these practices engendered. His previous book, Quakers and the American Family (1986) was one of the important works that led social historians to consider the multiplicity of structural and cultural circumstances that the early European settlements in North America nurtured. It remains an indispensable study. Although it is uneven in some respects, Town Born is likely to be at least as influential. No future study of early New England economics, politics, or society will be able to ignore it. Towns, in...