Economy of Early America

Cathy Matson is Professor of History at the University of Delaware and Director of the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

“Matson’s survey is ideal for graduate students preparing for exams or for more advanced scholars seeking to make a foray into the field. . . . This book is a clarion call for economic historians to go forth and proclaim the good news: economic history still has something to tell us. In its division between historiography and history, it suggests that we need as many evangelists as practitioners if we are to bring economics to history’s masses.”—James Fichter Common-Place

• ContentsPreface  1.A House of Many Mansions: Some Thoughts on the Field of Economic History  Cathy Matson2.Rethinking The Economy of British America  David Hancock3.Colonial America’s Mestizo Agriculture  Russell R. Menard4.Peopling, Producing, and Consuming in EarlyBritish America  Lorena S. Walsh5.Indentured Servitude in Perspective: European Migration into North America and the Composition of the Early American Labor Force, 1600–1775  Christopher Tomlins6.Capitalism, Slavery, and Benjamin Franklin’s American Revolution  David Waldstreicher7.Moneyless in Pennsylvania: Privatization and the Depression of the 1780s Terry Bouton8.Creative Destruction: The Forgotten Legacy of the Hessian Fly Brooke Hunter9.The Panic of 1819 and the Political Economy of Sectionalism Daniel S. Dupre10.Toward a Social History of the Corporation: Shareholding in Pennsylvania, 1800–1840  John Majewski11.Small-Producer Capitalism in Early National Philadelphia  Donna J. Rilling12.The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism  Seth RockmanList of contributors  Index