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The urban crucible: Social change, political consciousness, and the origins of the American revolution
114
REVIEWS
detailed sections on encomiendas, government, church, demographic change and settlement history, and archival as well as secondary sources of additional information. The present work is his second volume, and treats the gobiernos of Tabasco, Laguna de TCrminos, Chiapa, Soconusco and Yucatan, which together formed the southeastern frontier of the viceroyalty of New Spain. The book follows exactly the same format as the first volume, although information is organized by gobiernos rather than by minor civil divisions. The one exception is Yucatan, where Gerhard provides material on partidos, quasi-political military units assigned to deputies of the governor or provincial akaide mayores. A third and final volume of the guide will focus on the gobiernos which comprised the northern frontier provinces of New Spain. Spanish colonial administration was highly complex. The land and its native population represented resources to settlers, crown and church, and each imposed a different geographical pattern of administrative subdivision in order to facilitate the organization and collection of wealth. The result was a geo-political mosaic of considerable confusion. It is the particular contribution of Gerhard’s guide to simplify the history of colonial territorial sub-division. By adopting an organizational format which arranges archival sources in terms of political geographical units, Gerhard was forced to untangle the origin and development of the administrative landscape according to a chronology of encomienda, local government and church office holders. The sources which he provides are useful in themselves but hardly all-inclusive, and in the present volume there are frequently references to familiar secondary works such as those by Scholes, Roys, and West. Their value, however, is in their presentation geographically, rather than in the normal aspatial order characteristic of the archives. While the guide’s geographical organization is its strength, it will also be its principal weakness in the eyes of the broader audience which can reasonably be expected to believe from the book’s title that Gerhard has produced a definitive geographical study of the region. By foIlowing a strict regional format, the book ignores those landscape elements which do not fit neatly within the arrangement of minor civil divisions. Thus, nowhere is there encountered a discussion of trade or production patterns across the entire frontier. One obtains no information about the economic hinterlands which supported the settlements and population clusters described in the book. Indeed, with the exception of a useful but brief institutional introduction to the region as a whole, there is a lack of interpretation and analysis. Gerhard hints at competition among encomenderos, political rivalries among local, regional and distant crown administrators, and economic and demographic forces which caused the expansion and contraction of the frontier and influenced settlement history. Yet he rarely allows such topics to intrude upon his dispassionate, almost mechanical, recounting of property ownership, population distribution and administrative chronology. The book, therefore, is unlikely to be read in its entirety for such an effort will not reward the reader with even an impressionistic sense of the events and forces which shaped this frontier region. Rather, it will remain the important but restricted guide for scholars of particular parts of New Spain which its author intended. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that Gerhard’s obviously detailed knowledge of the region will encourage a future interpretive work which will appeal to a wider audience. University of Defaware
PETERW. REES
GARY B. NASH, The Urban Crucible:
Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University
Press, 1979. Pp. xix + 546. $18.50) This most recent book by Gary B. Nash is both something more and something less than its title promises. Its thesis-that stresses in the economic and political equilibrium and social fabric of colonial urban society provided to a significant degree the shape and
REVIEWS
115
energy of the American Revolution-is based on a comparative study of Boston, New York and Philadelphia during the years between 1690 and 1776. While Nash repeatedly refers, in arguing his thesis, to “eighteenth-century American cities” and colonial “urban societies”, the stated rationale for his exclusive concentration on these three cities suggests rather what was special than what was representative about them. He has chosen Boston, New York and Philadelphia “not only because they were the largest northern maritime centers, as well as the seats of provincial government, but also because their populations differed significantly in racial and ethnic origins, in religious composition, and in the legacies of their founding generations”. Nash sets out to demonstrate that “many urban Americans, living amidst historical forces that were transforming the social landscape, came to perceive antagonistic divisions based on economic and social position; that they began to struggle around these conflicting interests; and that through these struggles they developed a consciousness of class”. He readily concedes, in a disavowal of simple Marxism, that “there was no industrial working class composed of a mass of wage laborers who toiled in factories where a capitalist class wholly owned and controlled the productive machinery”. Indeed, the poor and destitute created by economic fluctuations during the period repeatedly frustrated the efforts of commercial elites in the cities to employ them in workhouses of one variety or other. Rather, Nash’s “labouring classes” refers to “broad groupings of people who worked with their hands but were differentiated by skills and status” and thus included slaves and indentured servants as well as free persons. His definition could apply to the artisans and craftsmen, bound and free, who have populated centuries of European and non-European history. Through an extensive use of tax lists, wills, inventories, poor relief records, deed books, court documents and wage records, among quantitative data, Nash provides a description of the relative and changing material position of these “labouring classes”, by occupational group, and of their betters. But to describe the varying fortunes of some of colonial America’s urban “labouring classes” is only a part of his objective. The historiography of the American Revolution during the past two decades has made it obligatory for historians to come to terms with the substance and role of “ideology” in different aspects of that epochal event, and Nash has aspired to involve his labouring classes in the “ideological origins” of the Revolution as well. “Ideology”, he claims, “in many instances was far more than a reflection of economic interests and acted as a motive force among urban people of all ranks” and was not “the exclusive possession of educated individuals and established groups”. But what more was it? Nash equivocates by maintaining that “ideological principles and economic interests are seen as intimately conjoined”. The analytical problem thus raised, we are to infer, is removed if we agree with him that ideology is not only “ideas systematically [expressed] in forms that are easily recoverable by historians two hundred years later” but may be inferred as well “from lowerclass action, which is justifiable when the action is adequately recorded and is repetitive”. Whether or not one accepts this view, Nash’s lively, thorough and welldocumented description of the increasing popularization and activism of politics in Boston, New York and Philadelphia is richly satisfying. What emerges from this description is solid evidence of an “internal struggle for a new social order that many thought must accompany the severing of ties with England”. Less persuasive is the author’s attempt to place that struggle in the context of an ideological debate. He himself concedes that he has not been able to identify a “series of self-contained, distinctly different ideological outlooks that existed in the cities”, nor has he been able “to demonstrate a perfect correspondence between occupation or wealth and ideological outlook”. This observation might have been the starting point for a provocative foray into the question of the extent to which the American Revolution was ideological in origin-at least in the three cities under study. But Nash attempts instead to sketch “two broad ideologies, which sometimes overlapped”, and “several clusters of ideas that had not yet reached the level of all encompassing world views”. And so we read
116
REVIEWS
that there were Whigs, some of whom were conservative, some whom Nash labels “liberals”. Then there was an ideology that was “Evangelical”, which contained “radicals” as well as “social reformers” who subscribed to “classical republicanism”. Important elements of that republicanism, however, failed to take root among “the urban populace”: priority of the commonweal over the newer notion of a natural harmony of self-interests, the corrupting nature of commerce, and the “emphasis on social equality”. The ideological discussion, appearing in Nash’s last chapter, is the weakest part of the book. It relies on a pastiche of interpretations by Wood, Pocock, Appleby and others rather than the rich primary materials which are used in the preceding chapters and the result is an inchoate effort to translate deep social and political fissures, with their attendant clusters of values, into ideological form and significance. This solid contribution in the social, political and economic history of three important colonial port towns flounders only on the author’s unnecessary effort to add significance to his work by accommodating the intellectual analysis of the American Revolution. Bangor, Maine
SYLVIADOUGHTY FRIES
WILLIAM A. OPPEN, The Riel Rebellion: A Cartographic History
(Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press in association with the Public Archives of Canada and The Canadian Government Publishing Centre, 1979. Pp. x + 109. $20.00) Scholarly and popular interest in Louis Riel shows no signs of slackening. The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s dramatization of his life was followed by Thomas Flanagan’s study of Riel as “prophet of the New World”. Now comes William Oppen’s catalogue of maps pertaining to the Riel Rebellions of 1869-70 and 1885. Most of the cartographic items are drawn from the National Map Collection of the Public Archives of Canada in Ottawa. The cartographic record of the Riel Rebellions, especially that of 1885, is surprisingly rich. Altogether, forty-two maps, plans and landscape sketches are reproduced. A further twenty-one items are listed and briefly described but not reproduced. The text accompanying each item is in English and French. The book is divided into two sections. The first covers the Red River Insurrection of 1869-70, the second that of 1885. In order to set the various items in context, each section is preceded by a concise summary of the major events leading up to the rebellion. Because of the absence of significant military conflict, little of direct cartographic interest was produced to illustrate the rebellion of 1869-70. As a result, the maps chosen illustrate such topics as the Red River Settlement, the creation of the new province of Manitoba, the rectangular surveys in the Red River Valley that triggered the Mttis uprising, and the village of Winnipeg. Most of the items are well known and several of them have been reproduced in other cartographic collections. The contemporary military maps and sketches drawn to illustrate the rebellion of 1885 form the longest and most significant part of the book. In 1885 many of the mixedblood peoples and Indians of Western Canada took up arms to oppose the Canadian government. This rebellion was, in Oppen’s words, “the nearest Canada came to the violent opening of the American West”. Between 26th March 1885 and 3rd June 1885 armed conflict took place at six different locations in what is today the Province of Saskatchewan. The book is worthwhile because it collects for the first time all the maps and panoramic sketches relating to the battle sites at Duck Lake, Fish Creek, Cut Knife Hill, Batoche, Frenchman’s Butte and Loon Lake. Many of the items were drawn on the spot by military officers and surveyors in the thick of the battle. In addition to military information, several of the maps reveal details of local topography, vegetation, transport and settlement. The second section of the book ends with seven general maps of Western Canada, produced to enlighten eastern Canadians about a still little known part of the country which was very much in the news as a result of the rebellion. This collection of maps can be strongly recommended to all who are interested in
REVIEWS
detailed sections on encomiendas, government, church, demographic change and settlement history, and archival as well as secondary sources of additional information. The present work is his second volume, and treats the gobiernos of Tabasco, Laguna de TCrminos, Chiapa, Soconusco and Yucatan, which together formed the southeastern frontier of the viceroyalty of New Spain. The book follows exactly the same format as the first volume, although information is organized by gobiernos rather than by minor civil divisions. The one exception is Yucatan, where Gerhard provides material on partidos, quasi-political military units assigned to deputies of the governor or provincial akaide mayores. A third and final volume of the guide will focus on the gobiernos which comprised the northern frontier provinces of New Spain. Spanish colonial administration was highly complex. The land and its native population represented resources to settlers, crown and church, and each imposed a different geographical pattern of administrative subdivision in order to facilitate the organization and collection of wealth. The result was a geo-political mosaic of considerable confusion. It is the particular contribution of Gerhard’s guide to simplify the history of colonial territorial sub-division. By adopting an organizational format which arranges archival sources in terms of political geographical units, Gerhard was forced to untangle the origin and development of the administrative landscape according to a chronology of encomienda, local government and church office holders. The sources which he provides are useful in themselves but hardly all-inclusive, and in the present volume there are frequently references to familiar secondary works such as those by Scholes, Roys, and West. Their value, however, is in their presentation geographically, rather than in the normal aspatial order characteristic of the archives. While the guide’s geographical organization is its strength, it will also be its principal weakness in the eyes of the broader audience which can reasonably be expected to believe from the book’s title that Gerhard has produced a definitive geographical study of the region. By foIlowing a strict regional format, the book ignores those landscape elements which do not fit neatly within the arrangement of minor civil divisions. Thus, nowhere is there encountered a discussion of trade or production patterns across the entire frontier. One obtains no information about the economic hinterlands which supported the settlements and population clusters described in the book. Indeed, with the exception of a useful but brief institutional introduction to the region as a whole, there is a lack of interpretation and analysis. Gerhard hints at competition among encomenderos, political rivalries among local, regional and distant crown administrators, and economic and demographic forces which caused the expansion and contraction of the frontier and influenced settlement history. Yet he rarely allows such topics to intrude upon his dispassionate, almost mechanical, recounting of property ownership, population distribution and administrative chronology. The book, therefore, is unlikely to be read in its entirety for such an effort will not reward the reader with even an impressionistic sense of the events and forces which shaped this frontier region. Rather, it will remain the important but restricted guide for scholars of particular parts of New Spain which its author intended. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that Gerhard’s obviously detailed knowledge of the region will encourage a future interpretive work which will appeal to a wider audience. University of Defaware
PETERW. REES
GARY B. NASH, The Urban Crucible:
Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University
Press, 1979. Pp. xix + 546. $18.50) This most recent book by Gary B. Nash is both something more and something less than its title promises. Its thesis-that stresses in the economic and political equilibrium and social fabric of colonial urban society provided to a significant degree the shape and
REVIEWS
115
energy of the American Revolution-is based on a comparative study of Boston, New York and Philadelphia during the years between 1690 and 1776. While Nash repeatedly refers, in arguing his thesis, to “eighteenth-century American cities” and colonial “urban societies”, the stated rationale for his exclusive concentration on these three cities suggests rather what was special than what was representative about them. He has chosen Boston, New York and Philadelphia “not only because they were the largest northern maritime centers, as well as the seats of provincial government, but also because their populations differed significantly in racial and ethnic origins, in religious composition, and in the legacies of their founding generations”. Nash sets out to demonstrate that “many urban Americans, living amidst historical forces that were transforming the social landscape, came to perceive antagonistic divisions based on economic and social position; that they began to struggle around these conflicting interests; and that through these struggles they developed a consciousness of class”. He readily concedes, in a disavowal of simple Marxism, that “there was no industrial working class composed of a mass of wage laborers who toiled in factories where a capitalist class wholly owned and controlled the productive machinery”. Indeed, the poor and destitute created by economic fluctuations during the period repeatedly frustrated the efforts of commercial elites in the cities to employ them in workhouses of one variety or other. Rather, Nash’s “labouring classes” refers to “broad groupings of people who worked with their hands but were differentiated by skills and status” and thus included slaves and indentured servants as well as free persons. His definition could apply to the artisans and craftsmen, bound and free, who have populated centuries of European and non-European history. Through an extensive use of tax lists, wills, inventories, poor relief records, deed books, court documents and wage records, among quantitative data, Nash provides a description of the relative and changing material position of these “labouring classes”, by occupational group, and of their betters. But to describe the varying fortunes of some of colonial America’s urban “labouring classes” is only a part of his objective. The historiography of the American Revolution during the past two decades has made it obligatory for historians to come to terms with the substance and role of “ideology” in different aspects of that epochal event, and Nash has aspired to involve his labouring classes in the “ideological origins” of the Revolution as well. “Ideology”, he claims, “in many instances was far more than a reflection of economic interests and acted as a motive force among urban people of all ranks” and was not “the exclusive possession of educated individuals and established groups”. But what more was it? Nash equivocates by maintaining that “ideological principles and economic interests are seen as intimately conjoined”. The analytical problem thus raised, we are to infer, is removed if we agree with him that ideology is not only “ideas systematically [expressed] in forms that are easily recoverable by historians two hundred years later” but may be inferred as well “from lowerclass action, which is justifiable when the action is adequately recorded and is repetitive”. Whether or not one accepts this view, Nash’s lively, thorough and welldocumented description of the increasing popularization and activism of politics in Boston, New York and Philadelphia is richly satisfying. What emerges from this description is solid evidence of an “internal struggle for a new social order that many thought must accompany the severing of ties with England”. Less persuasive is the author’s attempt to place that struggle in the context of an ideological debate. He himself concedes that he has not been able to identify a “series of self-contained, distinctly different ideological outlooks that existed in the cities”, nor has he been able “to demonstrate a perfect correspondence between occupation or wealth and ideological outlook”. This observation might have been the starting point for a provocative foray into the question of the extent to which the American Revolution was ideological in origin-at least in the three cities under study. But Nash attempts instead to sketch “two broad ideologies, which sometimes overlapped”, and “several clusters of ideas that had not yet reached the level of all encompassing world views”. And so we read
116
REVIEWS
that there were Whigs, some of whom were conservative, some whom Nash labels “liberals”. Then there was an ideology that was “Evangelical”, which contained “radicals” as well as “social reformers” who subscribed to “classical republicanism”. Important elements of that republicanism, however, failed to take root among “the urban populace”: priority of the commonweal over the newer notion of a natural harmony of self-interests, the corrupting nature of commerce, and the “emphasis on social equality”. The ideological discussion, appearing in Nash’s last chapter, is the weakest part of the book. It relies on a pastiche of interpretations by Wood, Pocock, Appleby and others rather than the rich primary materials which are used in the preceding chapters and the result is an inchoate effort to translate deep social and political fissures, with their attendant clusters of values, into ideological form and significance. This solid contribution in the social, political and economic history of three important colonial port towns flounders only on the author’s unnecessary effort to add significance to his work by accommodating the intellectual analysis of the American Revolution. Bangor, Maine
SYLVIADOUGHTY FRIES
WILLIAM A. OPPEN, The Riel Rebellion: A Cartographic History
(Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press in association with the Public Archives of Canada and The Canadian Government Publishing Centre, 1979. Pp. x + 109. $20.00) Scholarly and popular interest in Louis Riel shows no signs of slackening. The Canadian Broadcasting Company’s dramatization of his life was followed by Thomas Flanagan’s study of Riel as “prophet of the New World”. Now comes William Oppen’s catalogue of maps pertaining to the Riel Rebellions of 1869-70 and 1885. Most of the cartographic items are drawn from the National Map Collection of the Public Archives of Canada in Ottawa. The cartographic record of the Riel Rebellions, especially that of 1885, is surprisingly rich. Altogether, forty-two maps, plans and landscape sketches are reproduced. A further twenty-one items are listed and briefly described but not reproduced. The text accompanying each item is in English and French. The book is divided into two sections. The first covers the Red River Insurrection of 1869-70, the second that of 1885. In order to set the various items in context, each section is preceded by a concise summary of the major events leading up to the rebellion. Because of the absence of significant military conflict, little of direct cartographic interest was produced to illustrate the rebellion of 1869-70. As a result, the maps chosen illustrate such topics as the Red River Settlement, the creation of the new province of Manitoba, the rectangular surveys in the Red River Valley that triggered the Mttis uprising, and the village of Winnipeg. Most of the items are well known and several of them have been reproduced in other cartographic collections. The contemporary military maps and sketches drawn to illustrate the rebellion of 1885 form the longest and most significant part of the book. In 1885 many of the mixedblood peoples and Indians of Western Canada took up arms to oppose the Canadian government. This rebellion was, in Oppen’s words, “the nearest Canada came to the violent opening of the American West”. Between 26th March 1885 and 3rd June 1885 armed conflict took place at six different locations in what is today the Province of Saskatchewan. The book is worthwhile because it collects for the first time all the maps and panoramic sketches relating to the battle sites at Duck Lake, Fish Creek, Cut Knife Hill, Batoche, Frenchman’s Butte and Loon Lake. Many of the items were drawn on the spot by military officers and surveyors in the thick of the battle. In addition to military information, several of the maps reveal details of local topography, vegetation, transport and settlement. The second section of the book ends with seven general maps of Western Canada, produced to enlighten eastern Canadians about a still little known part of the country which was very much in the news as a result of the rebellion. This collection of maps can be strongly recommended to all who are interested in