From Privileges to Rights : : Work and Politics in Colonial New York City / / Simon Middleton.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG and UP eBook Package 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Middleton, Simon,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2011]; ©2006
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Language: English
• Series: Early American Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (320 p.) :; 14 illus.

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 "Earning a beaver": Tradesmen in New Amsterdam -- Chapter 2 "Like a child in their debt and consequently their slave": The Transition to English Rule, 1664-1691 -- Chapter 3 "Diverse necessaries and conveniences work found and provided": Trading in a Craft Economy, 1691-1730 -- Chapter 4 "The only obstruction at this present is our want of people": The Labor Problem, 1691-1730 -- Chapter 5 "So much as he should reasonably deserve to have": Tradesmen and the English Common Law -- Chapter 6 "C'mon brave boys let us be brave for liberty and law": Artisans and Politics, 1730-1763 -- Chapter 7 Conclusion -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments