Review essay: Work in the cities of colonial british north america

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 33, Issue 6, 2007, Pages 1021-1032

  Rockman, Seth ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 51249159296     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144207304070     Document Type: Review

References (44)

1. Marcus Rediker, “The Revenge of Crispus Attucks; or, The Atlantic Challenge to American Labor History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1 (Winter 2004): 38.
2. For a review of Bridenbaugh's work, see Benjamin L. Carp, “ Cities in Review,” Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 3 (July 2003).
3. For a very small sampling of this scholarship across several decades, see Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 1976) Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia's Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 (New York, 1993) Howard Rock et al., eds., American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850 (Baltimore, 1995).
4. Simon Middleton, “‘How it came that the bakers bake no bread’: A Struggle for Trade Privileges in Seventeenth-Century New Amsterdam, ” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (April 2001): 347-72; Middleton, “The World Beyond the Workshop: Trading in New York's Artisan Economy, 1680-1740,” New York History, (October, 2000): 378-408; Marla Miller, The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (Amherst, 2006) Miller, “ The Last Mantuamaker: Craft Tradition and Commercial Change in Boston, 1760-1840, Early American Studies 4 (Fall 2006): 372-424” Robert Sweeny, “Artisans and Gender” (paper delivered to the American Historical Association annual meeting, Seattle, January 2005 ).
5. Rediker, “Revenge of Crispus Attucks,” 41.
6. For an excellent overview of the debates pertaining to race, see Eric Arnesen, “ Up from Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History, ” Reviews in American History 26 (March 1998): 146-74; Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination, ” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 3-32; Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89 (June 2002 ): 154-73. On gender, see Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor ( Ithaca, 1991) Alice Kessler-Harris, “ Treating the Male as ‘Other’: Redefining the Parameters of Labor History,” Labor History 34 (1993): 190-204.
7. Christopher Tomlins, “Subordination, Authority, Law: Subjects in Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History 47 (Spring 1995): 56-90; “ Why Wait for Industrialism? Work, Legal Culture, and the Example of Early America—An Historiographical Argument,” Labor History 40 (1999): 5-34.
8. Richard Oestreicher, “The Counted and the Uncounted: The Occupational Structure of Early American Cities,” Journal of Social History 28 (Winter 1994): 351-61.
9. Billy G. Smith, The“Lower Sort”: Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, 1990) W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA, 1997).
10. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic ( Boston, 2000), 332.
11. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 42-49, 332.
12. Linebaugh and Rediker also credit the Atlantic Proletariat for having “reproduced the households, families, and laborers for capitalist work.” see Many-Headed Hydra, 49. The key text in illuminating the unpaid labor of household reproduction is Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Household, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990). Chapter 1 addresses the colonial era.
13. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery ( Philadelphia, 2004).
14. Ruth Wallis Herndon, “ The Domestic Cost of Seafaring: Town Leaders and Seamen's Families in Eighteenth-Century Rhode Island,” in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, eds. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (Baltimore, 1996), 55-69; Elaine Forman Crane, Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630-1800 ( Boston, 1998).
15. Robert Olwell, “‘Loose, Idle and Disorderly’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-Century Charleston Marketplace,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, eds. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, 1996), 97-110; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “ Sheep in the Parlor, Wheels on the Common: Pastoralism and Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Boston,” in Inequality in Early America, eds. Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover, NH, 1999), 182-200; Peter Way, “ Rebellion of the Regulars: Working Soldiers and the Mutiny of 1763-1764,” William and Mary Quarterly 57 (October 2000): 761-92; Sharon Sundue, “ Industrious in their Stations: Young People at Work in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, 1735-1810,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2001) Kirsten Sword, “Wayward Wives, Runaway Slaves, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in Early America,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2002) John E. Murray and Ruth Wallis Herndon, “Markets for Children in Early America: A Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship,” Journal of Economic History 62 (June 2002 ): 356-82. Herndon and Murray are also at work on an anthology comprised of papers delivered to the “Proper and Instructive Education”: Children Bound to Labor in Early America Conference sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, November 2002.
16. Serena Zabin, “Women's Trading Networks and Dangerous Economies in Eighteenth-Century New York City,” Early American Studies 4 (Fall 2006): 291-321. see also Zabin, ed., The New York Conspiracy Trials of 1741: Daniel Horsmanden's Journal of the Proceedings ( Boston, 2004), introduction.
17. Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, “‘She Said She did not Know Money’: Urban Women and Atlantic Markets in the Revolutionary Era,” Early American Studies 4 (Fall 2006): 322-352; Seth Rockman, “Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in the Early Republic City,” manuscript in progress.
18. see, for example, Jacob M. Price, “Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History 8 ( 1974): 123-86.
19. For New World slavery as fundamentally a system of labor extraction, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 5. see also Philip D. Morgan, “ Slaves and Poverty,” in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Billy G. Smith ( University Park, PA, 2004), 93-131.
20. Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York, 1998), 17. In the same vein, see John Bézis-Selfa, Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution (Ithaca, 2003).
21. Rediker, “ Revenge of Crispus Attucks,” 35.
22. Aaron S. Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 85 (June 1998): 43-44. see also Richard Dunn, “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor,” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, eds. Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole (Baltimore, 1984), 157-94.
23. Philip D. Morgan, “Rethinking Early American Slavery,” in Inequality in Early America, 239.
24. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, 1998), xiv, 8. see also Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 47-63, 177-94.
25. Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (New York, 2004), 12; Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 ( Chicago, 2003) Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill, 1999). Shane White carries the story into the early republic in Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, MA, 2002).
26. Christopher Tomlins, “Reconsidering Indentured Servitude: European Migration and the Early American Labor Force, 1600-1775,” Labor History 42 (2001): 19-20. Tomlins relies heavily on data from Sharon V. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 ( New York, 1987).
27. David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), 94-98.
28. Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, 1998 ) Morgan, Laboring Women.
29. Rachel Chernos Lin, “ The Rhode Island Slave-Traders: Butchers, Bakers, and Candlestick-Makers,” Slavery & Abolition 23 (December 2002): 21-38.
30. Seth Rockman, “ The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park, 2006), 335-361. This argument is best associated with Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944).
31. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York, 1990). For another account of an integrated and globalized early modern economy, see Robert B. Marks, Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham, MD, 2002).
32. Stephen Innes, “ Fulfilling John Smith's Vision: Work and Labor in Early America,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Stephen Innes (Chapel Hill, 1988), 3-47.
33. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 7, 14, 40, 286.
34. Seth Rockman, “The Contours of Class in the Early Republic City,” Labor 1 (Winter 2004): 94.
35. Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia ( Philadelphia, 2003).
36. Smith, Down and Out in Early America.
37. Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 55-86; Karin Wulf, “ Gender and the Political Economy of Poor Relief in Colonial Philadelphia,” in Down and Out, 163-88; Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia, 2001) Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon Salinger, “Mapping Migration into Pre-Revolutionary Boston: An Analysis of Robert Love's Warning-out Book,” manuscript in progress.
38. Foote, Black and White Manhattan ; John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore, 2003) Morgan, Laboring Women.
39. Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860 (Cambridge, 1993), 17; Walter Johnson, “ On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (Fall 2003): 113-24.
40. Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution ( Cambridge, MA, 1979). Nash reviews the recent scholarship on working-class politics in Revolutionary America in “Poverty and Politics in Early American History,” in Down and Out in Early America, 21-28.
41. Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2004), xiii. This comports with Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (Chapel Hill, 1994).
42. Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York, 2007) Carp, “Fire of Liberty: Firefighters, Urban Volunteer Culture, and the Revolutionary Movement,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (October 2001): 781-818.
43. Terry Bouton, “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,” Journal of American History 87 (December 2000): 855-87; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999) Thomas J. Humphrey, Land and Liberty: Hudson Valley Riots in the Age of Revolution ( DeKalb, IL, 2004) Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2002) Michael McDonnell, “ Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below,” Journal of American History 85 (December 1998): 946-81.
44. Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham, NC, 1997) R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison, WI, 1994) Ben Vinson III and Stewart R. King, “Introducing the ‘New' African Diasporic Military History in Latin America,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5 (Fall 2004) Juan Pedro Viqueira Alban, Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourdon Mexico, trans. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera Ayala (Wilmington, DE, 1997 ) Silvia Marina Arrom, Containing the Poor: The Mexico City Poor House, 1774-1871 (Durham, NC, 2000). Of course, Camilla Townsend's study of Baltimore and Guayaquil in the early-nineteenth century makes labor in North America look quite appealing in comparison. see Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America (Austin, 2000).