The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865

by Mark Peterson

A groundbreaking history of early America that shows how Boston built and sustained an independent city-state in New England before being folded into the United States

In the vaunted annals of America's founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary "city upon a hill" and the "cradle of liberty" for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clich�s, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston's overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston's development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain's Stuart monarchs and how--through its bargain with slavery and ratification of the Constitution--it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States.

Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar alongside well-known figures, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston's origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain's empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, "Bostoners" aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston's regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state's vision of a common good for all.

Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America's history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Politics, Audiobook, American, Cities

1 pages, Audio CD

First published April 23, 2019

Reviews

[Jacopo Quercia · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The City-State of Boston' surprised me in the best of ways. While essentially an urban history comparable to 'Gotham' or 'A Shopkeeper's Millennium,' "Boston," writes Yale University professor Mark Peterson, was "a slave society, but one where most of the enslaved labor toiled elsewhere, sustaining the illusion of Boston in New England as an inclusive republic devoted to the common good." If this description reads more like something out of 'The Hunger Games,' then I say: "good." Peterson dramatic retelling of Boston's rise and fall more closely resembles Edward Gibbons' 'History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' than any book I've read this century.

'The City-State of Boston' is a work of extensive research that unfolds like a Greek tragedy about an Atlantic power analogous to the Italian republics of Genoa and Venice. I found this approach to the city's history refreshingly original since it freed both its author and its audience from a more encyclopedic treatment that, in my opinion, would have added hundreds of unnecessary pages to this text. Dr. Peterson's focus is the city-state of Boston, which we examine through the lives and writings of some of its most prominent residents, among them Samuel Sewall, Phillis Wheatley, and John Adams. The result is a masterful reexamination of one of the most influential cities in modern history, a welcome addition to any library, and a work of scholarship that injects some welcome artistry to academia. I'll never look at Boston or the United States the same way again.

Highly recommended. 4.5 stars.

[Lisa Konet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great synopsis of the history and how the state of Massachusetts came to be. This is a great book for any American history fan or someone interested in learning about the history of different cities.

It was well written and I actually like how it was divided up; the different time frames helped to discuss what was happening at the time in the world and what was going on in Boston. I don’t understand the lower ratings because I liked this.

A must read for any fan of Boston.

[Andrew Morin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good, several interesting ideas and a good effort at tying them together. Strays a little from the theme at times and the link with the city-state, which is the most interesting part, idea can feel tenuous at times. I liked the perspective overall.

[Kevin Moynihan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Very original thesis. Phips, Belcher, Mather, Sewall, Hull, Pepperell, Shirley brought to life. Chapter 5 on Acadia heavily reliant on John Mack Faragher’s Great and Noble Scheme which I just happened to have read recently. Other than that chapter, it’s very original...

Hmm. On p.314 (p. 681, note 2.) author relies on John Demos for the Deerfield Raid which gets the Indian tribe wrong. Most of the raiders were Abenaki from what I’ve read...

Page 683 note 4 throws shade at anyone and everyone (McCullough, Ferling, Wood, Ellis) that ever did an Adams biography. Perhaps the author is correct. Pretty funny.

Chapter 11 heavily reliant on Walter Muir Whitehill’s Boston: A Topographical History (p.810 note 19). Was thinking, ‘where have I read this before?’ Sure enough...

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The central thesis of this authoritative and well written study of Boston history is the arc of a tragedy: that Boston's founding and expansive mercantile power were based in Greek ideas of the city-state (and not modern American ideas of states and formal governmental structures) and that the deeper incorporation of Boston within the United States led to its demise as an individually progressive metropolis.

Over half of the book focuses on the colonial history of the greater New England area, of which Boston became the focal point for economic and cultural prosperity. From the initial trade currency of wampum to the expansion of religious liberties and voices and to the establishment of a trans-Atlantic Protestant Empire, Boston's fate took full advantage of the location and progressive identity of the founding of the Commonwealth. Even more than Virginia, Boston settlers exploited their proximity to maritime trade and intertribal diplomacy to emerge transcendent amongst the colonial powers in the 17th century. But as the colonies came closer to breaking free from their colonial chains, the ruptures in Boston life began to doom its development as a city state. Even John Adams, the prime intellectual behind the independence movement, could foresee that the demands of King Cotton and the political power attendant on the slave trade elbowed aside Bostonian ascendancy. By the 1800s, Boston was increasingly subsumed and incorporated within the larger Massachusetts, New England, and ultimately national politic, so that by the end of the Civil War, Boston was just one of many cities that dominated their regional but national politics.

It's not a history book for the neophyte per se, as the Bostonian history presented here often zooms in microscopically on individuals who represent the predominant cultural forces of the day. If you are reading this for Boston history, it is primarily insightful in the colonial years, with accounts of the revolution and the leadup to the Civil War covered with brevity to serve the larger thesis. I still felt that a chapter or two could have been trimmed or abandoned (German influence on Boston in the late 18th century? It felt ultimately out of place). Nonetheless, I learned a great deal about the development of Boston as a force in American politics and culture. Recommended for the serious history reader and Boston lover.

[Richard Subber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peterson offers an unusually deep dive into the history of Boston, beginning with its founding by Puritan immigrants in 1630.

Boston has been a locus of political and commercial power for about 380 years.

The powerful people who created and sustained the awesome energy of the city are described in detail, and the benign and critical circumstances that shaped its development are convincingly described.

The City-State of Boston is a book for learning.

Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[Jackson Moore-Otto]

Worthwhile analysis of Boston as a largely independent polity, 1630-1865, and how post Civil War this legacy was largely forgotten. The overview of the relationship between German city-states and Boston intellectuals in the early 1800s was particularly interesting.

[Andrew Canfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power 1630-1865 is an exhaustive recounting of how the Bay State's most influential city came to dominate an entire region.

Historian Mark Peterson takes the position that colonial Boston (and New England more generally) was a polity akin to Hamburg within the Hanseatic League, essentially acting as a trade centric city-state within the broader North American sphere.

The initial portion of the book looks at Governor John Winthrop and the early European settlers who populated this city on the Chalmette Peninsula following its foundation by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1630.

The author makes their purpose clear by noting the quotation from the Book of Acts Chapter 16, based on a verse in reference to Philippi, referenced on the first Great Seal of Massachusetts. This underscored their missionary zeal, especially toward the Native Americans they would have to share this New World with.

The early settlers also viewed themselves as putting distance between themselves and their native Great Britain at the time King Charles I granted Massachusetts their charter in 1629. This effort to establish an independence from the old world and, eventually, from the slaveholders of the American South would time and time again be challenged. The City-State of Boston details how the colonists came to view themselves, in the words of Cotton Mather, as a modern day Theopolis alongside other Protestant Atlantic powers. Peterson notes that Parliament initially referred to New England as a “kingdom” in early correspondence with the colony.

This transformative change to becoming a part of an Atlantic Protestant alliance of sorts factored alongside the omnipresence of French Catholics in Quebec and Canada in close proximity to New England to ensure Bostonians would not maintain the freedom of action to the degree they initially desired.

Another factor ensuring Boston would never attain full autonomy dealt with the importance of trade, both overseas and within America, to the New England colony. Since gold and silver were not present, furs from beaver and moose pelts as well as fish (particularly cod and the cheaper mackerel) became staples of colonial New England. Trade would quickly become as crucial to Boston as sugar was for Barbados or tobacco to Virginia. This legacy was taken up brothers Samuel and James Perkins, founders of a trading outfit whose international business was delved into in the richly detailed pages of The City-State of Boston.

Peterson included a section on the use of Wampum for a medium of exchange. Based off shells and beads they received from the local natives, this system of bartering in the early years of Boston’s years makes for some interesting reading when the author focuses on its usefulness in trade.

The personalities of seventeenth through mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts join the political economy of the New England region as the main thrust of the City-State of Boston. Increase Mather and his son Cotton’s contributions to Puritanism in Boston and their ties to the “civilizing” missions the settlers viewed as incumbent on their race are analyzed in the pages of the book. John Hull’s deep involvement in the colony’s seventeenth century merchant dealings are also given ample examination by Peterson.

A century later, the African-born Phillis Wheatley’s poetry is held up as a prime example of the creative abilities of early America’s enslaved persons, with these poems even drawing positive attention from much of the country’s white population. Wheatley’s hopes that egalitarian claims from the colonists in protest to British “enslavement” would be extended to African-American slaves themselves after the Revolutionary War were ultimately dashed.

The acts which fed anti-British sentiment and led to New England signing onto the independence project are an important topic in the book. While no one topic, the Revolutionary War included, receives a disproportionate amount of focus, Boston (and New England's) unique role immediately before and during the Revolutionary War years does have an appropriate amount of paragraph space devoted to it.

The careers of U.S. Representatives Fisher Ames and Josiah Quincy each receive a deep dive, with these individuals (who held office in the early days of the post-independence American republic) struggling to prevent Massachusetts from losing its autonomy and becoming a mere appendage to the other states in the new Union.

President Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807, which was a response to Napoleon’s Berlin Decree and Britain’s Orders of Council, devastated New England shipping and demonstrated the dangers Ames and Quincy had been warning about.

This act was even compared by some in the region to England’s Boston Port Bill which had set the stage for the rebellion that would end in independence. The Virginian president’s embargo act would generate the first post-Revolutionary War whispers of disunion in the region, and these rumblings would become louder when the Hartford Convention met to consider the idea of New England secession during the War of 1812’s lowest point.

Despite the best efforts of men like Samuel Sewall-whose The Selling of Joseph was an attempt to Biblically refute slavery-Boston’s ties to the South’s cotton economy proved too much to overcome. Slaves might not be a fixture of the New England landscape, but it became almost as economically reliant on that system’s continuance as the ports of Liverpool or Charleston. Francis Cabot Lowell’s creation of the Boston Manufacturing Company in the early nineteenth century clinched it: the finished products Boston would export would be reliant on southern plantation labor.

This “lords of the loom” and “lords of the lash” conundrum is an impossible to miss component of The City-State of Boston. This angle was approached several times by Peterson throughout the book, exemplified best by Walt Whitman’s description of New England as reduced to a “northern suburb of Alexandria (Virginia)” thanks to its deal with the slaveocracy devil. It is this element of Boston’s past the author finds most disturbing and unable to be completely undone by the fact that Abraham Lincoln carried every county in New England or the region’s tremendous sacrifice of blood for the Union’s cause in the Civil War.

The strengthening of the fugitive slave law as a result of the Compromise of 1850 only added to the dissension in Boston over their complicated relationship with the southern slave powers. The 1843 rendition of escaped slave George Latimer and the 1854 rendition of the runaway slave Anthony Burns caused unrest in the city; by the time of the latter’s case, the New England abolitionist movement had swelled its support to the point where it could push back against those claiming that slave catchers were merely upholding the Constitution and rule of law (a narrow but technically correct position to take at the time.)

William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips had done mounds of work to grow the anti-slavery movement, and Peterson does what he can to tell their stories without delving into too much biographical background on one New England. David Walker was an African-American leader in the abolitionist movement, giving his approach a different feel than the one engaged in by whites like Garrison and Phillips.

One unexpected portion of the book deals with the influence of ideas originating in Germany (and the filtering of Greek ideals through German thinkers) influencing Boston and its environs. A trip by Jonathan Belcher, Edward Everett, and Francis George Ticknor to Europe resulted in the bringing back to Massachusetts of more humanistic educational ideals which would have been alien to the region’s Puritan founders. This trip was undertaken in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and the New England educators who undertook it felt Harvard specifically and American higher education generally needed to undergo changes in their curriculum and pedagogy.

Another section, dealing with Samuel Gridley Howe and the phrenology movement which ultimately came to failure, is also a diversion which nevertheless gives some compelling side stories with what was viewed by some as quack medicine/science.

And of course the story of Irish immigrants plays a large role in the storyline of Boston. A movement of peoples which began in the 1830s with a small number of Protestant Irish coming to the city became a torrent of immigration in the 1850s with the onslaught of the potato famine.

The latter arrivals were largely poorer and Catholic, and the divisions this caused in the city provide plenty of grist for Peterson to delve into. The segregation of the city, both in terms of its Irish and African-American populations, is not shied away from.

The decision by Mark Peterson to ultimately turn his book into a tragedy of sorts was an interesting one. He shows how the city made compromises for the cause of national union and for its economic ties to southern cotton which prevented it from having the independent autonomy of Greek polity or a Hanseatic League Hamburg. But readers are left wondering if there really was any other course available to its leaders given the broader circumstances at work.

As a whole, The City-State of Boston is a really spectacular nonfiction book. It focuses less on culture and more on political economy, but the story places the growth of Boston and the broader New England region within its contemporary content. It deserves praise for introducing readers to the key figures who turned the city into a trading dynamo.

Do not expect a dry rehashing of import/export data or census figures. This work really brings its subject to life and shows a real drive for bringing the story of Boston’s growth to all who open its pages.

-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado

[Pedro Degiovanni · Rating 2 out of 5]

Any history book combines an exposition of the historical events under analysis and the interpretation that the historian makes of them. Rely too much on the former and you get a dry and unreadable chronicle; rely too much on the latter, and the book becomes a pamphlet, or at best a long essay. A good historian finds a balance between the two. Peterson's work sadly fails in this to do so.

He has a thesis to defend: Boston's origins are best understood as a city-state, that was only slowly absorbed by the US, and in doing so lost its essence. The book mostly assumes that the reader is well versed in the history of Boston, and thus only tries to defend the spin that Peterson wants to give it. This is not necessarily bad, but it makes the book less approachable for the general reader who, most likely doesn't remember the vast ramifications of the expulsion of Governor Andros in 1688.

The author decided to present the history of the city by following the lives of some of its citizens that represent general trends in society. This is not a bad approach per see (Gordon Wood mastered it in some chapters of Empire of Liberty) but it definitely requires skill to pull off. The approach works for the first section of the book. Boston was small enough that the life of John Winthrop or Captain Hull suffice to tells us what was happening. This slowly comes apart as the book progresses: as Boston transforms from a small, homogeneous town to a large, divided city, the biographical approach can't cope. The last half of the book reads like a series of loosely knit biographical essays; interesting, for sure, but hardly a history.

It's not a bad book, but it isn't what it portrays to be. If you're familiar with the history of Boston and want to see an original take on it, this is for you. If not, I recommend that you pass.

[Catherine Woodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read about this book in the New Yorker, and for some reason, while I read almost entirely fiction, I feel like I have a non-fiction book a week within my reach for the time being. This was a rough way to start, though, because it is an almost 700 page book that is even denser to read than it is to lift.
Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar figures alongside well-known ones, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston’s origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. The most interesting and unknown to me part was the 1600's when Boston rose to a powerful and rich city-state through Atlantic trade. They even had their own silver currency!
By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain’s empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, the city aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston’s regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state’s vision of a common good for all. A situation that we are still emerging from as a nation.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable, relatively novel work of history that sought to center Boston’s history on Boston and not merely its part in the whole. The work was a little uneven in that it was heavy on the economic history in the colonial period and the early 19th C but a little less so in between. The story of the relation between Boston and Eastern Canada is often told little if at all. The account of the response to the Jeffersonian/Madisonian Era in Boston was much more nuanced than the traditional understanding of Federalist intransigence. It explained the process of transitioning from friction between Boston and the South to the yoking of the city to the slaveholding interests. The final twenty pages did a superb job of explaining how the rise of professional American history occurred during a nationalist moment and so subsumed the strains of a Boston-centric narrative. My one qualm that I had with the book was the ignorance of the relationship between Boston and NYC and Philadelphia, but it didn’t detract much from the quality of the history as a whole.

[Robert Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many histories under US history. This captivating book dives deeply into the history of one very important city. Boston today is mostly known for weird accents and Dunkin' Donuts, but once upon a time the city, along with Virginia, was one of the two most important economic and political centers of the United States. That historical prominence means that Boston shaped much of American Revolutionary identity, and remains a central aspect of the story we tell about ourselves in this country. What this book ingeniously, provocatively highlights, is that for the first couple centuries of European presence in North America, Boston was deeply ambivalent about the idea of a unified English-speaking domain, and was sometimes outright hostile to it.

When we think of secession in US history, we often think about the Southern states that lost the civil war in the 1860s. Boston was a financial and manpower mainstay of the Union effort that crushed the south, but as recently as the 1850s some of the leading lights in Massachusetts (Boston's state) were considering secession themselves. As a reasonably diligent student of American history I was aware of the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812. At that convention, the northern New England states may not have gotten as far as threatening succession, but they certainly talked about its possibility if their demands weren't met. I knew that this had happened, but this book provides the deep, rich history of why that footnote occurred. In the process the book added immeasurably to my understanding of English colonial and early US history.

Peterson makes a persuasive case that colonial Boston was a sort of mildewy Venice, a mercantile city-state of stunning reach. As a New Englander, raised in Connecticut, I am embarrassed by how little I knew about all this. I tend to vaguely think about New England as a region of six states founded by fanatics who like to burn witches, that now have highways that are nice to drive down when the leaves change. Those things are true, but Peterson fleshes out that story. From the moment the Pilgrims landed, well into the 19th century, New England developed as a unit, held together by common religious concerns, a unified policy of dispossessing Native Americans, and very similar resentments against London overreach. As Peterson tells it, this fairly unified New England was led by, and shaped by Boston. So much more of Connecticut makes sense when looked at this way, from its history, to the way that its interstate highways are oriented.

The book is in some ways an intellectual history, going through the ways that Boston's leaders and intellectuals envisioned their place in the world over the course of two centuries. There was a lot more to Boston than I had ever suspected, from running its own currency for a few decades in the 1600s, to the fact that New England provided such important components of the victorious armies in the Seven years and revolutionary wars. The early chapters on the empire Boston built through conquest and astute London lobbying are thrilling. Peterson repeatedly emphasizes that Boston's victory over the British in the 1780s was actually the second time Boston had successfully overthrown London control. They had successfully mutinied against a governor in 1689 as well.

The fact that the United States managed to survive seems all the more impressive in light of this book. Virginia, and a lot of states like it, were content to produce commodities for the broader world. Boston, with fewer supports in the political system of the time, wanted to take the steps necessary to turn the country into a mercantile and industrial powerhouse. The compromises in the Constitution meant that Virginians got to run the country for most of the first half of the 19th century, leaving Boston angry as its city-state empire got chipped away piece by piece.

I felt like the book petered out a bit at the end. It may have been more satisfying to include a chapter on the tremendous reversal of fortune in the 1860s, where Boston soldiers ended up occupying the territory of the Virginians they had come to fear as much as their revolutionary ancestors had feared King George. But the choice to end on the crushing of Boston under the weight of the Fugitive Slave Law, and other federal outrages makes sense. Bostonians may have defeated Virginians in that initial fight for power in the United States, but they ended up almost as submerged in and left behind by the course of US history as the slaveholders were. Nobody sees Boston as a city-state any longer, and civil war victory was a key aspect of that disappearance. Boston's independent power is now such a forgotten aspect of US history that I wasn't even aware of it until I picked up this book.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book very interesting, with a lot of historical information about Boston / Massachusetts that I had heard nothing about before picking it up. It wasn't until the end of the book that I realized that this is intended to be a revisionist history, and that Peterson is trying to make the case for the idea that Boston started its life as a quasi-independent city state in the mold of Hong Kong or Macao (or any number of city-states that existed at the time, before the great consolidation into nation states that has taken place over the last few hundred years). For most of the book, I had the impression that this was a well-known and not-convtroversial position to take. It's not a great sign that Peterson does not make it abundantly clear that this book is an argument in favor of the idea, rather than a presentation of an accepted but not-well-known idea.

That said, the book is very detailed, and has a lot of information in it that seems true, whether or not it serves as good evidence that Boston was effectively its own city-state. For example, I did not realize that for many years Boston / Massachusetts had its own currency. The way Peterson tells it, they were not really supposed to do stuff like that, but the King is far away, and when they would get ambassadors and such coming to tell them to shut down, they would just sort of act like it's no big deal and send the King a bunch of random presents. Kinda sounds like the equivalent of Washington, D.C. telling Boston, "Hey stop doing X" and Boston sending back a Paul Revere statue, some Red Sox merchadise and a bunch of clam chowder.

Peterson also makes a big deal out of Boston's sort of separate academic culture, but I'm not really sure how that is especially relevant to the question of whether or not Boston is or was its own city-state. As I was going through the book, I got the impression that at some point between the founding of Massachusetts and the end of the Revolutionary War, the "Boston City-State" kind of merged into Massachusetts proper, but Peterson puts the end of the "Boston City-State" much later, at the beginning (or maybe end?) of the civil war. A huge amount of the book is devoted to the way slavery and abolition affected Boston, and how Boston / Massachusetts saw itself in relation to the other states (particularly the southern states). That is kind of par for the course, though, since that was very much a Big Deal™ in the whole United States for most of the 19th century.

With regards to slavery, there's a whole interesting section of this book that relates to a famous essay about the biblical Joseph, whose brothers sell him into slavery. I had never heard of The Selling of Joseph by Samuel Sewall, but apparently it was the first published attack on the institution of slavery in New England (published in the early 18th century). The pamphlet makes the case that basically Joseph would never had been as successful as he was had he not been sold into slavery and ended up as the dream interpreter to the Pharoah and eventually a highly-placed (second-in-command) ruler in Egypt, where he did an enormous amount of good. Despite the fact that a lot of good resulted, Sewall argues that it was still an evil thing for Joseph's brothers to do. Kind of an interesting line of attack on slavery.

Another interesting part of the slavery debate is that despite the fact that Massachusetts was an early state to abolish slavery, in the 18th and 19th centuries, a huge amount of the textile industry was located in Massachusetts, which meant that one of the Massachusetts economy's biggest products had as an input cotton, which was mostly produced by slave labor in the south. This leads to one of the lesser-highlighted moral quandries of that era.

Overall a very interesting book, particularly if you live in or around the Boston area or are just interested in Boston's history. I'd be love to hear what other historians think of it.

[Lucy Cummin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The premise is that in the wake of the Civil War, the 'new' historians of that era, Parkman et al, smoothed over the reality of the earlier incarnation of Boston as an independent entity, essentially a a city-state, ruled by no one but themselves. The 'end' was begun when the New England states made their Faustian bargain with the Southern states in order to have the might and means to oust British rule. He argues that Boston and New England were not able at that time, to withstand the power of the southern states and the Constitution as first written by allowing slavery and the bizarre and fiendish three-fifths rule which gave the south a population advantage that gave them more power in Congress than the non-slave states.

Peterson examines this earlier independent incarnation of the City that as had roots reaching into the very first moment that the ships bearing the Puritans who would found Boston in 1630-- the Massachusetts Bay Company (not the Plymouth/Mayflower group) dropped anchor. Composed of Puritans, yes, but largely led by hard-headed practical men of the merchant and yeoman class, they had come far better prepared to survive the first hard years and chose the (almost) island they named Boston as their base.

From the beginning these colonists looked across the wide expanse of the Atlantic and inwardly calculated that they could, pretty much, talk nice, then do as they pleased. They also, in order to maintain that independence, would fend for themselves, not asking for help even when times were hard and even though they were oriented economically toward England and Europe (not having a population here to buy their products!).

Peterson builds on this idea, demonstrating the many ways, practical and intellectual, that Boston developed over nearly two hundred and fifty years, in some fundamental way never fully integrating into the United States until after the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery. The period leading up to the Civil War shows a Boston and surround, wracked by the tensions that the conflicting deeply embedded ideas of individual human value and liberty versus the great material wealth and power they had accrued through industrialization (itself dependent on the cotton growing in the south), the influx of Irish famine refugees and the moral agonies of obeying of the federally enacted Fugitive Slave Act.

This is a worthwhile read and a corrective for those interested in US history, especially of New England. ****1/2

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"At the end o the 1630s and beginning of the 1640s, Boston's fate looked bleak. ... By 1645, the outlook was entirely different, and so was Boston's position in within the Atlantic community. ... [I]f we look chronologically at the feverish activity in spring and summer 1643 alone, we gain a visceral sense of this dramatic change. In March 1643, Captain Coytmore and the Trial returned from their successful voyage to the Azores and the Caribbean, spurring on several more hipping ventures. In May 1643, commissioners from Plymouth, New Haven, Connecticut, and Massachusetts met in Boston to form the United Colonies, and then decided on the execution of Miantonomi. In June, La Tour and his 140 men landed on Governor's Island in their quest for assistance against d'Aulnay. At the same time, reports from the three clergymen who had gone from Boston to Virginia the preceding yea, describing the success of their evangelizing ministry in the Chesapeake. Parliament's order exempting New England from customs duties arrived in June as well, along with its implicit recognition of the region as a quasi-independent kingdom. In July 1643, Governor Kieft's letters arrived from New Amsterdam, shifting negotiations with the Dutch to Boston for the first time. ... [I]n September, Winthrop received correspondence from Philip Bell, governor of Barbados, requesting aid from Boston in locating clergymen to gather congregations of the godly on that island." (82-3)

"This dramatic transformation, the most radical change in the city's economic pattern since its initial coalescence in 1643, would have at least two unintended consequences. First, although the shift to textile manufacturing was aimed to preserve Boston's autonomy in the face of national threats, it would also accelerate the separation of Boston and eastern Massachusetts from the rest of New England. ... Second, the demand for cotton as the central factor in production meant that the quest for autonomy from national political control would turn out to be a fool's errand..." (445)

"Even if Boston's new economy imposed new limits on its political autonomy, however, it offered another avenue for sustaining the region's traditional independence, found in the realm of culture." (485)

[Clay Kallam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having never been to Boston, and with a trip planned, I looked for a book about the city's history and stumbled on this one. As it turned out, it took longer than the trip -- by quite a bit -- to finish, but then again, most of its value is in its description of the city's early days.

Those early days are the basis of Mark Peterson's title, and contention that Boston was more than just another colonial city, but was in reality a powerful city-state that combined regional hegemony and trading power to shape the early history of all of New England. And Peterson digs deep into the histories of the individuals involved in Boston's development, and though the digging may be too deep, it does paint a different picture of Boston than most traditional narratives.

In fact, Peterson argues that, rather than being the root of the American Revolution, Boston fought against its integration into what New Englanders called "the Virginia dynasty," and struggled to have its vision of what America should be -- Puritan and egalitarian -- serve as the model for the nation as a whole. But Boston's deep and powerful economic connections to the cotton industry (to supply raw materials for its textile industry) slowly drained any moral high ground, as the city, despite its abolitionist reputation, supported slavery and the slave trade from the beginning.

For this reason, among others, the second half of the book is much less compelling than the first, with long digressions about German connections, obscure individuals and complex city politics that lack the general interest of Boston's early days.

I confess I wound up skimming much of the final pages, and I think many will do the same, but the early parts of the book were much more interesting -- and added much to my appreciation of our visit.

[Doug Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like the book and it had an interesting spin on our history and Boston’s decline. And also have some great information about early commerce the world in a shilling in the use of paper money and and silver and the significance of Peru talked a lot about Samuel sewall and selling of Joseph in Hull talked about the Akkadians situation Phillis Wheatley John Adams and his love of books and history. He talked a little bit about Thomas Hutchinson and the seven years war. And then it filled in the gap in my knowledge around the Boston History right after the revolutionary war and it’s being out maneuver in an out influenced by the southern states. It also talked about Boston’s dependence on the slave trade in the west Indies and king cotton in the south. It had some interesting descriptions of Germany’s influence in Boston in chapter 10 that I found really interesting and racial segregation in the city right before abolition in the Civil War. Interesting book, although I did not like it quite as much as the crucible of war it was a little more theoretical and esoteric, but very good.

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a comprehensive history of Boston but focused on an outward facing Boston as it related to the rest of the world through international trading , rather than inward facing as it pertained to Boston’s role in the developing USA. From its beginning through the American Revolution, Boston set the tone for the colonies both politically and militarily. Once independent of Great Britain, the focus of power shifted to the South with Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe all being Virginians and slaveholder’s. With slaves counting as 3/5 of a person, Southern states soon outnumbered the New England states in population and in control of Congress. New England and Boston in particular, were no longer center stage with national politics. This transitioned into the abolitionist movement in Boston and the pushback from the South. The book was a little long and wordy but it provided a new perspective on how Boston changed from a colonial powerhouse to a less influential regional force within the growing USA.

[Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Firstly, not a book for beginners to boston or new england history. the only reason I could get through this at all is because of having a good grounding in boston history - and to be frank, probably because I took a lot of the *exact same* college classes as the author did.
I definitely liked how the story of Boston was put in a new lense, and particularly the emphasis on slavery in the last third of the book. rarely do new england history discussions include such clear ties to slavery, so this was welcome.
I didn't love the organisation or structure of the book, however. it seemed that the timelines jumped around a lot from chapter to chapter, and this could be hard to tie back together.
overall, not an easy read, but definitely a very good addition to any new england history shelf.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing take on the city of Boston. I brought a good deal of interest to the book, since I live in Boston, but it turns out that just the chronology of the city alone isn't enough of an organizing principle to make the book's narrative structure sufficiently coherent. Peterson tries various approaches -- economic, political, and sociological. He stops talking about the city long enough to tell the stories of several of the more interesting citizens who lived in or near Boston. It all feels a bit like a book in search of an idea, even as he does teach us a good deal about, for example, Boston's early attempts to create economic prosperity for its citizens. (It involves slavery, at first.) Overall, this is brilliant idea that doesn't quite hang together. Or maybe it's just that there is no coherent story to be told about Boston.

[Joshua Horn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read listened half of this book as part of my research into colonial Boston. The author seems to have an innovative thesis and presents solid arguments for it. Sometimes he doubtless takes it too far. By the very nature of this book he is picking and choosing what parts of the story of Massachusetts he is talking about, which leads him to, in my opinion, under emphasize the importance of things like the Plymouth Colony in his quest to prove that Boston was a city-state. Boston was and is the leading city in Massachusetts, but there was more to Massachusetts than Boston.

I did run across what I thought were some minor factual errors, which was a bit concerning. I probably will not be finishing it, as I've read what I need to, and I found it to be a bit dry.

[Laura Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't really understand some of the low (one star!) ratings for this book. It's true that it's not exactly a page-turner and Peterson does at times get caught up in some of the minutiae of the period, but overall, it's an incredibly well-researched book with an interesting thesis about the origins of Boston as a political entity and the ways in which its distinct (and at times separate) identity made it struggle within the bonds of the newly-formed United States, particularly over the question of slavery.

[KS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this book though at times I was a bit lost. Interesting view of Boston in the early years. As a native Bostonian I have always been interested in the history of the city. This book helps the reader understand the profound influence the Puritans had on the development of the city and beyond. Also shed light on how Boston and New England developed so differently from the rest of the country.

Long book and at times a bit of a slog. If you are interested in Boston, Puritanism, pre-revolutionary times, and how the country developed it is worth your time.

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this one for grad school, and I felt oddly emotionally invested in the narrative. I hope I'm ready to talk about this in class because I took plenty of extra notes and like it's a pretty giant book. It also helped me remember how much I love focusing on the 18th century then also reminded me how much more I do love learning about the 19th century. So thanks, Mark Peterson, for the read (maybe).

[Rose Zu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended as an interesting angle from which to understand American history! The thematic and chronological organization helped me keep track of what was going on. The clear language and easy to follow logic made for a surprisingly fast read. The thematic layout also makes it easy for skimming the sections that aren't of personal interest.

[J.D. Brayton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meticulous in every aspect- but a bit of a slog if you aren't deeply invested in the minute details of Boston. There is much here to admire- to begin with, the absolute dedication and research Mark Peterson put into this rather large tome.
It will be impossible not to come away with a few revelations, but be prepared for a generally long, dry, factual read.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction and first few chapters were fascinating -- truly charting the conception of Boston as an independent city-state, with its own foreign policy, currency, everything. But midway through, the narrative really fell apart (here is a lengthy portrait of one individual, here is a long tangent about that) and I gave up.

[Luke Bajana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well researched work that's more like an approachable academic history over a more pop history take that can be more popularly read. If you are someone looking for a historical reading deeper than how the American character grew out of the cradle of liberty of New England, then you will enjoy this deep work.

[Andrew Clough · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would have been better at about half the length, but the perspective of Boston as a city state acting as a vassal rather than subject within the British Empire, rebelling when that status was challenged, and then attempting but failing to carry that status forward through the disastrous Hardford Convention is a compelling and illuminating thesis.

[Nicolas Pratt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A different and very interesting view into the rise and fall of Boston as a city state. Definitely worth reading for anyone interested in the history of Boston from a non American-centric point of view.