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Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776. By Trevor Burnard. (New York: Routledge, 2002. x, 278 pp. Cloth, $85.00, ISBN 0-415-93173-8. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-415-93174-6.)
Professor Trevor Burnard in this study of Maryland's eighteenth-century elite examines the wealthy from four representative Maryland counties on Chesapeake Bay-Anne Arundel and Baltimore on the western shore and Talbot and Somerset on the eastern shore. Relying primarily on probate records from 1691 to 1776, he examines some 461 men who left personal estates of over L650 held at 1700 values. He uses wealth to determine who the elite were because wealth "was the major, but not the sole determinant of status in the colonial Chesapeake" (p. 265). Some of his findings, especially in the first three chapters, are new....