Simon Middleton

History in the UK National Curriculum: A Discussion

ABSTRACT In response to recent discussions in the UK about the history national curriculum in schools, Cultural and Social History invited several historians to comment on the issues. Their responses to our questions have been interleaved and lightly edited.

Politics and Money

“Of all Beings that have Existence only in the Minds of Men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than Credit,” opined Charles Davenant in his Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England (1698); “’Tis never to be forc’d; it hangs upon Opinion; it depends upon our Passions of Hope and Fear; it comes many times unsought for, and often goes away without Reason; and when once lost, is hardly to be quite recover’d.”1 Davenant’s observations may well have reflected bitter personal experience. As a young man he loaned money to the crown, receiving public appointments and a parliamentary seat in Saint Ives as repayment, but no money. In the 1680s he traveled widely across England’s southern and western counties in his capacity as an excise commissioner, developing an interest in the relationship between provincial commerce and the emerging national state. Following the Glorious Revolution he lost this public position and, still deeply in debt, pursued a career writing about politics, economics, and public finance. Davenant contributed to debates urging the expansion of international commerce and the financing of England’s war against France, as well as the recoinage of English currency and establishment of the Board of Trade. His enthusiasm for overseas trade and the imperial state sat uneasily with his Tory associates’ determination to preserve land and agriculture as the foundation of national well-being. Characteristic of the time, some accused him of compromising his principles in pursuit of sinecures under Whig control, while others suspected him of being a Jacobite. The accession of Queen Anne restored Davenant to favor and office. As inspector general of exports and imports he earned £1,000 a year, still not sufficient to save him from falling further in debt. He died a poor and frustrated man. reviews of books 591

Private Credit in Eighteenth-Century New York City: The Mayor’s Court Papers, 1681-1776

This article considers eighteenth-century urban credit and its relationship to social context and commerce from the perspective offered by two thousand private credit agreements preserved in complaints filed to initiate suits in the New York City Mayor’s Court from the late seventeenth century to the eve of the American Revolution. The complaints cover the gamut of urban colonial commerce, from mundane local exchanges to ambitious and high-value ventures aimed at overseas markets. Some of the complaints run to as many as seventeen pages, but many are cast in formulaic terms over two or three manuscript sheets. The loss of most of the city’s eighteenth-century tax records make it difficult to produce a comprehensive assessment of the litigants’ social and economic status. But the patterns that do emerge from the aggregate glimpses of everyday practice give some sense of the city’s distinctive credit market. Previous studies of neighbouring colonies have noted the increasing use of paper instruments and a shift to restrictive common law pleading in debt which, it is argued, provided creditors with greater commercial certainty and confidence and thereby nurtured the expansion of trade. However, in New York the complaints indicate that city traders retained a preference for dealing on account and presented their suits in the more flexible common law form of assumpsit, casting the city’s economic and legal change in a different light. What we can glimpse of the practices and procedures associated with different forms of borrowing, indicate a local market that depended on inter-related household exchange and a commercial rationale that balanced considerations of profit with wider but cautiously-reckoned social obligations. For example, comparing the usual repayment terms available in the city with those offered wealthier borrowers, and the credit agreed between two upriver fur dealers and their Native American partners, reveals the city’s credit market as a relatively conservative provider of support for residents and the able-bodied, thereby ensuring minimal public out-relief, which offered limited opportunities for investment and social mobility, even for those from within local circles.

Deference and Class: A Comment on Michael Zuckerman, Gregory Nobles, and John Smolenski

A proper understanding of the character of deference and its meaning in different historical contexts is indispensable to our understanding of what John Smolenski calls the ‘‘culture of authority’’ in early America. Moreover, and speaking as an English observer of last year’s election, if President Bush’s penchant for dressing up (as a naval aviator, fireman, or what have you) and Senator Kerry’s efforts to look comfortable in a flannel shirt are any indication, some notion of deference remains just as essential to our understanding of contemporary American politics. Clearly, the deference displayed by colonial and modern Americans and by their respective ruling elites of wealthy men (and latterly some women) is not the same thing. As Greg Nobles reminds us, deference has assumed various cultural and linguistic forms in different times and places. Although they differ in other respects, the contributors concur that the long-held view of colonial American deferential attitudes and behavior stands in need of revision. While agreeing that the debate concerning early America has become a little stale, with the kind of fresh thinking on display at the conference from which these papers were drawn it is arguable that a reworked conception of deference can continue to inform our understanding of early American social relations in the future. Michael Zuckerman’s essay revisits an argument first presented in a Journal of American History forum in which he challenged the impressionistic view of colonial acquiescence by ordinary provincial settlers to their so-called social superiors—a mischaracterization of early American society he ascribed to scholars whose focus lay in the revolutionary and early national periods.1 Criticizing these historians for failing to appreciate the simmering discontent felt

THE TRANSFORMATION OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

Contested boundaries: itinerancy and the shaping of the colonial American religious world . By Timothy D. Hall. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Pp. x+196. ISBN 0-8223-1522-X. £10.97. Original meanings: politics and ideas in the making of the Constitution . By Jack N. Rakove. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Pp. xvi.+439. ISBN 0-394-57858-9 £19.26. Parades and the politics of the street: festive culture in the early American republic . By Simon P. Newman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+271. ISBN 0-8122-3399-9. £24.42. Transatlantic radicals and the early American republic . By Michael Durey. Kansas: University of Kansas, 1997. Pp. xi+425. ISBN 0-7006-0823-0 £25.71.