A scarce plenty: Economics, citizenship, and opportunity in revolutionary New Jersey, 1760-1820

My dissertation examines the structure of opportunity and the formation of economic and political status in New Jersey from 1760 to 1820. New Jersey's religious, ethnic, racial, and geographical heterogeneity provides an especially useful setting for studying the varied economic experiences of ordinary people with disparate racial, class, and gender identities. Colonial and early national New Jersey was a hinterland without a western reserve (i.e., the potential to grow territorially); a commercial production zone that was predominantly rural while serving nearby urban centers; a sociological and cultural mixture that was neither typically "Southern" nor typically "Northern;" marginalized, but not isolated. My primary source research has uncovered experiences, behaviors, and ideas about the limits of opportunity that are not readily apparent in the established nationalist histories of the period. By researching the political economy of everyday life in this particular locality, I have found a people of scarcity alongside a "people of plenty." Among revolutionary-era New Jerseyans of virtually all economic classes, aspirations for future prosperity were tempered by fears of loss, failure, and political erasure. Examining this neglected story of the tension between dreams of abundance and anxieties about scarcity provides a needed corrective to the historiography of this period, and is central to understanding the complicated history of American market expansion.;I analyze New Jersey's configuration of economic and cultural elements through several specific, interrelated topics: anxieties about scarcity and abundance; waste law; disputes over commodities; the conflict between public service and private gain; the experiences of marginal economic actors such as women, slaves, servants, and paupers; inheritance practices; debates about suffrage; New Jerseyans' persistent problems with debt; and their increased interest in moving westward after the war to find the fresh economic prospects that seemed to elude them at home. In their struggles to assess and claim opportunities, New Jerseyans often deployed pre-modern legal, economic, and cultural methods to achieve modern, capitalist ends. This paradoxical behavior reveals the complex interplay between privileges and rights, custom and innovation, exclusion and expansion, that characterized everyday life in this marginal colony and state.