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

Stephen Innes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 1995

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Library Journal

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (March 17, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393035840
• ISBN-13: 978-0393035841
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,167,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Rehabilitating the Puritans, December 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (Hardcover)

The first reviewer for the work gives an admirable and accurate summary of its main theses, so I will cut to the chase and begin my critique. I am one of the undergraduates who had the good fortune to actually read this book for Innes' course in Colonial American history at U.Va. As such, my opinion of the book may be skewed by the context in which I read it. In the book, Innes makes an admirable effort in making the Puritans understandable to the modern reader. He cogently outlines the foundational ethic of Puritans and how its internal paradoxes fostered constant striving for social justice and economic prosperity. The book is useful in dispelling much of the fairy tale images of early American history that popular culture feeds us. Readers shouldn't fear the word "economic" in the subtitle; the text is dense but not inaccessible. Nevertheless, the book IS an undergraduate level textbook, and it is rather substantial. I recommend it only for the reader with a real passion for the subject matter.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great supplier, February 18, 2011

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This review is from: Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (Hardcover)

I believe I have ordered from this supplier before. Textbook was even better than I expected and faster shipment than guaranteed. I will look to you next semester.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Creating the Commonwealth, May 4, 2000

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ggcon (Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (Hardcover)

Innes argues that the economic success of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was due to the Puritans creation of a society in which capitalism, community, and civil society were connected. The Protestant work ethic, which was taught in the household, pulpit, meetinghouse, and assembly, instructed that God provided every man with a calling and it was his duty to work hard at it. This religious-based work ethic coupled with the belief that profit taking was fine as long as the profits were used to help others (the linking of individual and collective well-being) encouraged the development, within the community, of an individual-based capitalism. These two beliefs endorsed "striving" behavior and enterprise which led to the growth of the economy.