Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England

0/5 ( ratings)

This ambitious history offers a sweeping reinterpretation of America's cultural roots in the colonial past. Marshaling rich new evidence, Stephen 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 Puritan commonwealth strengthened this commitment by adopting policies to promote economic growth. The result was a thriving capitalism and the 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 the ironworks, the fisheries, and the shipyards that powered this growth. His story features the technology of the early modern world and introduces many of the "Scums and dreggs" who provided the labor for Puritan enterprise, as well as the leading figures of the time: John Smith, John Winthrop, Robert Keayne, and others.

"…retrieves the concept of capitalism from polemics and abstractions by embedding its practices and values in the cultural milieu of 17th-century New England. A brilliant book for both its insights and the thoroughness with which they are developed. Max Weber has found a worthy interpreter." - Joyce Appleby

"…an extremely important contribution to scholarship on the economy of early America. It offers one surprising insight after another, and describes more thoroughly than any other work not onlly how religious, social, and institutional factors contributed to the impressive economic development of 17th-century Massachusetts, but how the expansion of a market economy went hand-in-hand with efforts to curb socially destructive aspects of 'the spirit of capitalism'." - Pauline Maier