Description
Book SynopsisValley of Opportunity recreates an age when Indians, colonists, and post-Revolutionary settlers embraced a similar dream: to create a successful economy in the rural hinterland of the middle colonies. Peter C. Mancall draws on abundant evidence from seldom-used archives in the region, as well as from libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, to reconstruct their daily economic life.
The author describes the varied economic transformations that took place in the area, considering these changes from an environmental as well as an economic standpoint. He shows how different groups of people perceived the resources of the region and how their perceptions shaped settlement patterns, land use, and the formation of commercial networks. Ultimately, each of the three peoples looked beyond the mountains that set the boundaries of their physical world and tried to establish ties to the larger commercial network that linked North America to Europe.
Mancall offers connections b
Trade Review
Valley of Opportunity is an important book. Like the region it analyzes, it moves across boundaries, providing new vistas while connecting arbitrarily divided terrains.
* Journal of American History *
Mancall merits commendation for his attention to ecological as well as economic revolutions, his incorporation of Indians into the transition question, and his reminder that conquest left a continental legacy.
* Western Historical Quarterly *
Mancall shows how valley residents tied themselves into the commercial network that linked North America to Europe. Some people prospered in this valley of opportunity, many did not, and their fates often were determined less by their own endeavors than by the forces of the Atlantic economy that reached into their world.
* Ethnohistory *
Mancall's central argument is that the 'economic culture’ of the backcountry was shaped by a complex interaction of physical environ- ments, local societies, and powerful developers—an encounter decided on the terms of the latter group, the agents of the greater Atlantic economy. Mancall’s is a sober and sobering thesis, underscoring the power of capital on the eighteenth-century frontier.
* William and Mary Quarterly *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. The Physical World
2. The Susquehanna Indians
3. Indian-Colonist Trade
4. The Collapse of Intercultural Trade
5. The Colonists' Economy
6. The War in the Valley
7. Postwar Economic Development
Conclusion: The Economic Culture of the Revolutionary BackcountryAppendix
Index
