Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution (Early American Studies) - Hardcover

Levy, Barry

3.94

16 ratings by Goodreads

9780812241778: Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution (Early American Studies)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812241770 ISBN 13: 9780812241778

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor?indentured servitude and chattel slavery?in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves.In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democ

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About the Author:

Barry Levy is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is author of Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley.

Review:

... The work that went into this book is astonishing. There is virtually no aspect of life left unexamined. Agree or disagree, there is no question that this book's conclusions cannot be ignored.
--I. Cohen, Choice

Town Born is an important book that all early American historians need to read soon. --John Brooke, Social History

Revisionist... engaging ... a work of substance and range. It revives, in an enterprising way, the importance of the New England town as one of the wellsprings of American culture --Eric Nellis, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas

Calls attention to what might be called the dark side of early New England culture...Undergraduate students and lay readers will find his portrait of town life accessible and compelling."
--Phyllis Whitman Hunter, American Historical Review

Barry Levy... develops a challenging reinterpretation ... an entirely different approach ... He argues that New England towns created ... regimes that sustained high wages...the town trumped the family.
--T.H. Breen, Journal of American History

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