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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, British colonists found the New World full of resources. With land readily available but workers in short supply, settlers developed coercive forms of labor—indentured servitude and chattel slavery—in order to produce staple export crops like rice, wheat, and tobacco. This brutal labor regime became common throughout most of the colonies. An important exception was New England, where settlers and their descendants did most work themselves. In Town Born, Barry Levy shows that New England's distinctive and far more egalitarian order was due neither to the colonists' peasant traditionalism nor to the region's inhospitable environment. Instead, New England's labor system and relative equality were every bit a consequence of its innovative system of governance, which placed nearly all land under the control of several hundred self-governing town meetings. As Levy shows, these town meetings were not simply sites of empty democratic rituals but were used to organize, force, and reconcile laborers, families, and entrepreneurs into profitable export economies. The town meetings protected the value of local labor by persistently excluding outsiders and privileging the town born. The town-centered political economy of New England created a large region in which labor earned respect, relative equity ruled, workers exercised political power despite doing the most arduous tasks, and the burdens of work were absorbed by citizens themselves. In a closely observed and well-researched narrative, Town Born reveals how this social order helped create the foundation for American society.
This volume is a continuation of the general records of the town and the Selectmen's Day Book. Herein lies a complete transcript of Book Six for the years 1727-1743 and Book Seven for the years 1744-1766. Covers the recorded proceedings and actions taken at Town Meetings, the assemblings and acts of the Selectmen, the reports and returns of Committees, the laying-out of Town ways, annual tax assessments to individual tax payers for the years 1737-1750. Includes a list of taxpayers by precincts.
Seeking to integrate recent literature on community life and on the political ethos in colonial New England, Edward M. Cook, Jr., examines elite recruitment and community structure in the four New England colonies between 1700 and 1785. In a massive sample of seventy widely dispersed towns, lists of towns, lists of town and provincial officeholders, biographical data, church records, town meeting records, and tax lists provide a core of material for analysis.