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Building the Bay Colony: Local Economy and Culture in Early Massachusetts. By James E. McWilliams. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. xii, 201 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-2636-0.)
Understanding the complex patterns of economic development in colonial English America is a difficult problem that has occupied historians for decades. One issue is the extent to which growth was driven by exports rather than internal expansion. This study of seventeenth-century Massachusetts argues effectively for the latter as the crucial source of the colony's relative prosperity and economic diversity. In fact, the book's central point is that a vibrant, flexible local market in livestock, timber, and fish, facilitated by sustained public and private creation of roads, mills, wharves, together with internal credit and labor exchanges, were preconditions for expansion of export and shipping...