From Privileges to Rights

From Privileges to Rights connects the changing fortunes of tradesmen in early New York to the emergence of a conception of subjective rights that accompanied the transition to a republican and liberal order in eighteenth-century America. Using hitherto unexamined records from the New York City Mayor's Court, Simon Middleton demonstrates that, rather than merely mastering skilled crafts in workshops, artisans participated in whatever enterprises and markets promised profits with a minimum of risk. Bakers, butchers, and carpenters competed in a bustling urban economy knit together by credit that connected their fortunes to the Atlantic trade.In the early eighteenth century, changes in political and legal practices diminished earlier social distinctions and the grounds for residential and trade privileges. When an economic and a constitutional crisis prompted the importation of radical English republican ideas, artisans were recast as virtuous male property owners whose consent was essential for legitimate government. In this way, the 1730s ushered onto the political stage an artisanal subject whose characteristics not only made sense of the transformation of urban working life in the preceding four decades but also provided a constituency for the development of a populist and egalitarian republican political culture in New York City.

Simon Middleton teaches early American history at the University of Sheffield.