1580-1740. (Woodrow Wilson Center Series.) New. York: Cambridge University Press, and the Woodrow. Wilson Center Press, Washington, D.C. 2001. Pp. xix,.
Europe: Early Modern and Modern 1640s. It is a conscious and highly successful marrying of the micro and macro, relating the struggles of two men, a minister and a sectarian. In the process, Peter Lake engages with the wider story of Puritanism and Arminianism in the early seventeenth century and the highly developed historiography associated with that conflict. Lake's intriguing tale hinges on two intersecting lives, and, like all good micro histories, the story begins dramatically. In this case, the point of departure is the shame punishment inflicted in 1627 upon John Etherington, a London water conduit maker and former boxmaker (strictly speaking, the book should be called The Water Conduit Maker's Revenge). Etherington was made to stand in front of the pulpit at St. Paul's Cross, with a condemnatory paper attached to his chest, while the preacher, Stephen Denison, the minister of St. Katherine Cree, denounced his heretical beliefs. This denunciation was consolidated later that year in a printed tract, The White Wolf. Etherington did not forget. He bided his time, and in the new-found freedom of 1641 he replied in print to his earlier detractor. Meanwhile, Denison himself had fallen foul of the Laudian authorities. Indeed, this scenario, which links Christopher Hill's radical underground with the revolution and traces the disputes and debates of the 1620s and 1630s, is almost good enough to be an invention! There is even a link to early Familism. But there is absolutely no trace of any mechanistic link between Lollards and Levellers in Lake's history. The polemical conflict between the radical Etherington and the moderate Denison-and the paper trail of sermon notes, pamphlets, and state, company, and church records-enables him to explore the intricacies and dynamism of religious interaction in early seventeenth-century London, and to challenge those easy ascriptions, "radical" and "moderate." The book thus makes a range of contributions. The first two chapters on Denison's theology and religious practice are superb examples of Puritanism in action at a parish level. Not since PaulS. Seaver's Nehemiah Wallington have we had such a compelling case study. The conclusion is simply brilliant: a prime demonstration of a historian at the height of his powers as he teases out the implications of his work. Lake has provided a compelling study of the popular dynamics of Puritanism and of the dialectics (it is the most appropriate word) between what are traditionally referred to as Puritanism and nonconformity. He writes of "creative bricolage, kaleidoscopic combinations and recombinations of ideological materials," and of trackings back and forth, rather than "some hermetically sealed" sectarian tradition (p. 400). Whether the religious milieu described by Lake is best described as a Puritan underground or a Puritan public sphere will need to be explored in future work; an underground no longer seems appropriate, but the public sphere argument, while attractive to this reviewer, implies an openness not entirely demonstrated. We still need a word that
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distinguishes interactions of the decades before 1641 from the openness thereafter. While the book has its lighter moments-Denison's thoughts on the perishing of excess hair at the day of judgement-it will be a disappointment to readers expecting the crispness of Seaver's Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (1985), and I think that Lake's own silly dismissal of "short silly book[ s]" (p. ix) may come to haunt him. His book is simply too long, with a coverage not justified by its relatively slender source base. It will appear infuriatingly self-indulgent to some readers, both in the detail of its exposition and its assumption of historiographical knowledge: references to Patrick Collinson marks three and four (p. 12) betray a tendency to communicate with the cognoscenti. Potential student readers will not necessarily share the author's rapture over the finer points of Protestant theological debate. However, readers should persevere. This is one of the most important works on early modern English religion to have appeared for many years. BARRY REAY University of Auckland RICHARD GRASSBY. Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580-1740. (Woodrow Wilson Center Series.) New York: Cambridge University Press, and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press, Washington, D.C. 2001. Pp. xix, 505. $64.95. Refusing to "genuflect to the reigning ideologies," promising an "uncompromisingly empirical" study that will "extirpate error, root, and branch, without regard for the consequences," this work is intended to be an antidote to "the vices of cultural history" (preface). It is not an enticing start. Following his previous work on the London business community, and working from his personal data base (which he will destroy once the final volume is published) supplemented by printed literature and private documents, Richard Grassby examines the families of 28,000 London businessmen between 1580 and 1740. The sample is subdivided into four financial brackets and four generational cohorts. Grassby rectifies what he believes is a lack of knowledge about the world of business by supplying a copious amount of statistical information on family structure such as age at, frequency, and duration of marriage; number of children; age at death, survival rates of brides; duration of widowhood; extent of orphans, and bequests to kin and friends. He also exposes the financial underpinnings of these families by examining charitable donations, origins and training of businessmen, sources of capital, land and property holdings, dowries, occupations of sons, status of spouses, and business assets of widows. The book is conceived as an information-finding project, and Grassby employs the same model in each chapter: he begins with "fact finding questions," sup-
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Reviews of Books
plies the data to answer these, and summarizes the results. This is an astonishingly labor-intensive work that, unfortunately, does not reveal much that is new about the family. Marriages depended on multilateral consent, a husband and wife had mutual duties but not reciprocal rights, parents were invested in their children, women were discouraged rather than excluded from business, and the primary beneficiaries of businessmen were always their widows and children. The final part of the book examines the constituent features of the family business. Early modern businesses were a network of family partnerships, not an accumulation of individual entrepreneurs operating in an impersonal market. English capitalism, Grassby argues, was determined by the attitude of parents towards the endowment and advancement of their children. In practice, kinship and capitalism complemented and reinforced one another. Grassby stresses the importance of the family business: without the capital and flexibility of family firms, there would have been no economic growth in early modern England. Grassby asserts that because of the variety of individual goals and practices, no one model is capable of explaining all diversity in the early modern family and that scholars who have pursued such an agenda are misguided. Grass by is equally dismissive of the concept of mentalities: "It is implausible that huge numbers of people would simultaneously recognize a system of shared meanings" (p. 388), thereby invalidating all communication theories in one fell sweep. Grassby's preferred image of families as being "infinitely diverse aggregations of individuals in motion" rather than "rational structures conforming to rules" (p. 389) is as much a model of interpretation as all the others he rejects, and a model beset with problems. He concludes that because "there was no coherent, universally accepted ideology of the family ... the identity of a family was defined by its distinctiveness not by shared norms" (p. 388). If there were no shared norms, how could an entity be recognized as distinctive? Throughout the book, Grassby oversimplifies debates and caricatures other perspectives. For example, he is surprised that any historian should ever have depicted early modern English society as one "in which randomly associated possessive individuals competed in a disembodied marketplace" (p. 397), a distorted representation of the arguments for English individualism. Too antagonized by the "pretentious rubbish" of much recent work on the family, too defensive about his own place in the profession (independent scholars have "pariah status," a claim undermined by the fact that his research has been funded by several grantgiving bodies), too pessimistic about the current state of history (a "wasteland" of ill-mannered scholars obsessed with theory and jargon), and too convinced of the accuracy of his own position to deconstruct the categories he employs, Grassby turn his empirical
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study into a vehicle for the expression of his own hostility. LINDA A. PoLLOCK Tulane University PERRY GAUCI. The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660-1720. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 302. $65.00.
This book examines the part played in public life by overseas merchants, more particularly those of the City of London. The City merchants, their backgrounds and training, and their participation in parish, municipal, and company affairs are all carefully studied, and illuminating comparisons are made with the merchants of York and Liverpool. Then the City merchants' relations with the mercantile press and with English society as a whole are thoroughly dealt with. A further chapter is devoted to their role as burgesses in the House of Commons. Finally, these avenues of research are all brought together in a detailed treatment of the words and actions of these burgesses in the debates on the Commerce Bill of 1713. Perry Gauci has researched widely in his chosen subject and period. He writes well, and he provides a full critical apparatus of footnotes, list of manuscript sources, and bibliography. His conclusion is reasgned and judicious. ' Yet doubts remain about the depth of his understanding of some aspects of early modern English society. In the course of his period, he says, "The Commons had become the dominant instigator of economic legislation" (p. 210), whereas really it always had been. At the end of a review of their public lives, he remarks that the merchants' "success in business was the immediate and essential objective; such a goal could be facilitated by the close, supportive networks founded on kinship, religious and business ties" (p. 86). This seems to underestimate the extent of genuine Christian belief. It also puts the cart before the horse. A different point of view came from a young draper: "It is likely he that hath done well for himselfe, will know how to do well for the publicke good, being put to it. Wealth being gotten, their minds may with more diligence intende the publicke affaires, having enough to maintaine servants to performe the domestick" (William Scott, An Essay of Drapery [1635]). In his chapter on the Commerce Bill of 1713 and its aftermath, Gauci generously acknowledges that he has drawn heavily on D. C. Coleman's work. Gauci builds on this to deal with the intricacies of the political confrontation that developed in Parliament and in the pamphlets and special journals distributed in the country at large. He does so well, though he would have done better had he explained to his readers that between 1643 and 1667 the French king (Louis XIV) had increased the duties on imports of English textiles fivefold, in 1667 doubled them again, and in 1687 raised them by a third. This was tantamount to a total ban on their import, and Louis's prevarication in 1713
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