Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England - Hardcover

Innes, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393035840 ISBN 13: 9780393035841

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995

Synopsis

This ambitious history offers a sweeping reinterpretation of America's cultural roots in the colonial past.

Marshaling rich new evidence, Innes focuses on enterprise in early New England and its relation to the prevailing culture of Puritanism. He finds in our beginnings at Massachusetts Bay a fierce devotion to God that fed a social commitment to engage the world and prosper. The result was a thriving capitalism and a diminishing devotion which alarmed Puritan leaders in the late seventeenth century. While telling the story of Massachusetts Bay's transformation from a resource-poor perch on the continent to an active international economy, Innes supplies wonderful detail on early New England's ironworks, fisheries, shipyards, and the "Scums and dreggs" who provided the labor for Puritan enterprise.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Innes, professor of history at the University of Virginia, has written extensively on the social history of colonial America.

Reviews

How did the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, within just a generation of its founding in 1630 and against enormous odds, establish a thriving, diversified, family-based economy? In illuminating this phenomenon, Innes's impressive revisionist study sweeps away conventional notions of mercantile New England as a place of rugged individualism and economic backwardness. He shows that individualistic striving was anchored in a communal context whereby family, church, town organizations and commonwealth linked personal to collective well-being, providing a counterweight to unbridled capitalistic behavior. Innes, a University of Virginia history professor, argues persuasively that the Puritans' sustaining myth of redemptive community?their belief that they were a chosen, "convenant people" working out God's designs?imbued economic development with spiritual purpose. Massachusetts, the crucible of America's Puritan work ethic, in Innes's estimate achieved a "moral capitalism" with levels of prosperity, education, family stability and life expectancy unrivaled in British America.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Puritan New England is most often recognized for its cultural, social, and political influences on American life. University of Virginia history professor Innes argues, however, that a Puritan-influenced, communally based individualism allowed Massachusetts Bay colonists to pursue "honest gaine," with a high value placed on "work, enterprise, sacrifice, and deferred gratification," which also fostered a thriving capitalism. It was, though, a capitalism tempered by the realization that there was a link between land ownership and productive labor. Innes goes on to show, providing more than 50 pages of notes, how industrial New England, with its ironworks, shipyards, and fisheries, grew from the Puritans' rocky, brutally cold foothold. David Rouse

The economic success of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was due as much to its strict Puritan society as to any market factors, contends University of Virginia historian Innes (Work and Labor in Early America, Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 1988). Through various institutions in their civil society, Puritan leaders inculcated the Protestant work ethic and linked it with the concept of honest labor leading to private ownership. Civic government substituted for trade guilds by enforcing quality control of the colony's products. The Puritans used the church, the family, and the General Court to create a moral capitalism that enabled the colonists to gain a high standard of living without becoming corrupted by it. Innes examines Puritan economic success in detail and provides extensive bibliographic notes. His verbose style and technical references make this study suitable only for academic libraries serving specialists in Colonial history.?Grant A. Fredericksen, Illinois Prairie Dist. P.L., Metamora
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393035840
• ISBN 13: 9780393035841
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416