From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (Early American Studies) - Hardcover

Middleton, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812239156 ISBN 13: 9780812239157

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

From Privileges to Rights connects the changing fortunes of tradesmen in early New York to the emergence of a conception of subjective rights that accompanied the transition to a republican and liberal order in eighteenth-century America.

Tradesmen in New Amsterdam occupied a distinct social position and, with varying levels of success, secured privileges such as a reasonable reward and the exclusion of strangers from their commerce. The struggle to maintain these privileges figured in the transition to English rule as well as Leisler's Rebellion. Using hitherto unexamined records from the New York City Mayor's Court, Simon Middleton also demonstrates that, rather than merely mastering skilled crafts in workshops, artisans participated in whatever enterprises and markets promised profits with a minimum of risk. Bakers, butchers, and carpenters competed in a bustling urban economy knit together by credit that connected their fortunes to the Atlantic trade.

In the early eighteenth century, political and legal changes diminished earlier social distinctions and the grounds for privileges, while an increasing reliance on slave labor stigmatized menial toil. When an economic and a constitutional crisis prompted the importation of radical English republican ideas, artisans were recast artisans as virtuous male property owners whose consent was essential for legitimate government. In this way, an artisanal subject emerged that provided a constituency for the development of a populist and egalitarian republican political culture in New York City.

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Simon Middleton teaches early American history at the University of Sheffield.

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Introduction

When I began the research for this book I had a fairly clear idea about where my project might fit within an established historiography. Three decades of social and labor history had provided a persuasive account of the transformation of colonial American artisans into waged workers during a contested transition to capitalism. Building on the work of European scholars, American historians traced the rise of a market society and the decline of customary practices, craft pride, and workshop traditions that were thought to have once forged a powerful social bond between masters, journeymen, and apprentices. This decline was accompanied by a worsening of artisanal working conditions and material fortunes that fostered novel forms of republican political protest and ultimately class struggle. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this view in labor and social history in the last four decades. However, there were also gaps in the literature and—lacking the late-medieval and early-modern research that underpinned the work of their European peers—the most noticeable gap in colonial American history was the surprising dearth of studies of urban skilled workers in the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries.

With this in mind I set out to examine the artisanal trades in early New York City, suspending my inquiries at 1760 so as to avoid the gravitational pull of the American Revolution that already held so many excellent studies in its orbit. After several, mostly unsuccessful, forays into the archives I began to appreciate why we knew so little about artisanal work in the earlier colonial period: court minutes and published sources frequently mentioned tradesmen who brought disputes before the magistrates, registered as freemen, paid taxes, or served in the militia; these registers and lists provided the raw data for several sociological analyses of the distribution of wealth, ethnic composition, and occupational structure of New York's skilled workforce. But these snapshots revealed a static picture at best, little concerning the ups and downs of daily trade, and still less of the social and political import of artisanal work in the early city. It was then that a chance discovery provided an opportunity to investigate in greater detail the activities of a larger and, I came to believe, more representative sample of city tradesmen. Following a reference to a set of uncatalogued papers, I discovered a substantial collection of miscellaneous legal documents comprising several thousand complaints filed to initiate civil suits in the city's Mayor's Court. The complaints provided a wealth of detail concerning prices, wages, and the exchanges that constituted the everyday concerns of tradesmen and their customers. As luck would have it, the records were particularly rich for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—the period about which so little was known and so much inferred.

The Mayor's Court Papers revealed that city artisans served a local market and that labor shortages made gainful employment generally easy to find. However, the complaints and related documents—bonds, promissory notes, bail agreements, and witness depositions—also disclosed that as early as the third quarter of the seventeenth century the fortunes of ordinary working men and women were intimately bound up with the Atlantic trade and the commercial development of the city's rural hinterland. Tradesmen divided their energies between skilled work and all manner of commercial enterprise, relying on credit to pursue whatever opportunity offered the best return. They participated in the export of furs, tobacco, and plantation supplies, and purchased imported cloth and household goods for resale in the city and its environs. They financed the ventures of others and bought, sold, and rented property; they farmed—raising crops and livestock for local and export markets—and provided food, drink, and lodging for others. In these and their other endeavors, tradesmen were far from independent. They relied on wives, family members, slaves and waged workers for labor and upon partners and patrons for credit, capital, and access to customers for their finished goods and services. Indeed, the closer one looked the more interdependent and impermanent artisans' fortunes appeared. Skilled practitioners working in all areas experienced success and failure and their commercial strategies seemed to be directed more towards the short-term opportunism of the economy of a bazaar, rather than the orderly pace of craft work usually associated with pre-industrial colonial towns. By the early eighteenth century the commercial logic of the city's trading economy encouraged artisans to undertake the reverse of what has previously been considered their usual working practice: rather than mastering one trade in a workshop dedicated to the production of bespoke products for local customers, artisans participated in whatever enterprises and markets promised profits with a minimum of risk.

Reading the Mayor's Court Papers, it seemed increasingly likely that the view of a general and fundamental shift from independent, amenable, and reasonably rewarded craft work to dependent, alienated, and penurious wage work which had long figured so prominently in studies of early industrialization and class formation had mischaracterized the experience of earlier skilled workers and overestimated the transformative effects of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moreover, if the uncertainties of the market—the rise and fall of individual fortunes, subcontracting, wage work, and cyclical debt dependency—were already common in New York in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, then their long-supposed intrusion a generation or two later could not adequately account for the form taken by republican and class protests. Protests that contrasted the harsh and unyielding temper of a "new" market society with a more affable era of craft work: a lost world of customary mores and workshop practices that was memorialized in countless speeches, banners, and songs, but for which there was little or no evidence in the sources. Rather than continuing to take late eighteenth-century tradesmen at their word, giving credence to their representations of a collective past, my task became the recovery of the world of New York City artisans that preceded the association between skilled work, independence, and virtue that informed the small producer, republican tradition in era of the American Revolution and subsequently.

The investigation of this earlier urban scene required that I broaden my focus beyond artisans' commercial activities to consider the relationship between the practice and perception of skilled work, artisanal status, and community rights in New Amsterdam and early New York City. As a wealth of historical and anthropological studies have shown, work has ever been more than a material and technical pursuit bounded by considerations of location and resource. The organization of productive capacities and employment of skills is also a social process that requires the justification of authority and interests in terms of norms and expectations that change over time; norms and expectations that are only fully intelligible when set within the wider context of contemporary political and legal discourses. Moreover, the universality and mundanity of work affords it a particular significance in the determination of social and cultural meanings for ordinary men and women: the daily repetition of simple tasks and replaying of social roles relieves individual doubts and uncertainties regarding the arbitrary assignment of political and cultural meanings by making such meanings appear routine, normal, and even "natural." Above all, the function of work as the source of basic material provision...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812239156
• ISBN 13: 9780812239157
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande