Valley 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 between the development of a
particular region, previously overlooked by most historians, and
the wide pattern of American economic change. He breaks through old
ethnocentric barriers of settlement history by portraying Indian
people in their full diversity and by including Indians and whites
as actors of comparable significance, and he shows how attitudes
that developed in the colonial period affected economic patterns
well beyond the Revolution. Integrating a range of disciplines,
from anthropology through ecology and geography to zoology, he
seeks to answer the questions: what did different groups of people
make of the natural resources of this river valley and how did they
allocate the rewards? His answers provide a novel overview of the
economic culture of the eighteenth century.
Studded with sharp insights and attention-catching quotations
that mirror everyday life of the times, Valley of Opportunity will
appeal to those interested in the development of the American
economy, the impact of the Revolution on urban Americans, and the
relations between the peoples who together created a vibrant world
along the edges of European settlement in North America.
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