Review Essay: Work in the Cities of Colonial British North America

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.

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).

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).

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 ).

Rediker , “Revenge of Crispus Attucks,” 41.

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.

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.

Richard Oestreicher , “The Counted and the Uncounted: The Occupational Structure of Early American Cities,” Journal of Social History 28 (Winter 1994): 351-61.

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).

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker , The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic ( Boston, 2000), 332.

Linebaugh and Rediker , Many-Headed Hydra , 42-49, 332.

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.

Jennifer L. Morgan , Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery ( Philadelphia, 2004).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Rediker , “ Revenge of Crispus Attucks,” 35.

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.

Philip D. Morgan , “Rethinking Early American Slavery,” in Inequality in Early America, 239.

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.

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).

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).

David Waldstreicher , Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004), 94-98.

Robert Olwell , Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, 1998 ); Morgan , Laboring Women.

Rachel Chernos Lin , “ The Rhode Island Slave-Traders: Butchers, Bakers, and Candlestick-Makers,” Slavery & Abolition 23 (December 2002): 21-38.

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).

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).

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.

Linebaugh and Rediker , Many-Headed Hydra, 7, 14, 40, 286.

Seth Rockman , “The Contours of Class in the Early Republic City,” Labor 1 (Winter 2004): 94.

Simon Newman , Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia ( Philadelphia, 2003).

Smith , Down and Out in Early America.

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.

Foote, Black and White Manhattan ; John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore, 2003); Morgan , Laboring Women.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).