Politics or Profit: New Yorkers Make their Wartime Choices

Abstract

In Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Milo Minderbinder runs an international business during World War II that controls the market flow of everything from eggs to plum tomatoes to bombing runs. At various points, Minderbinder provides goods to the United States, Italians, and Germans, and negotiates the bombing and defense of an important bridge. The absurd episode reveals Minderbinder as a brilliant, resourceful businessman who brokered trade between nations at war. But he put profit ahead of personal friendships and political loyalties even while he insisted he was a friend and adamantly patriotic. Worse, he expressed outrage when others either questioned his motives or tried to stop him. The New York City merchants who traded illegally with Britain's enemies in the eighteenth century would have agreed with some of Milo Minderbinder's tactics. Like him, their drive for profit grew out of naked manifestations of a powerful commercial impulse that sometimes trumped their political allegiances and their willingness to abide by the law (p. 1). For both Minderbinder and New York merchants, profit was a powerful seduction. In Defying Empire, Thomas M. Truxes examines how New York merchants chased profit by detailing how they shipped contraband goods in and out of New York City during the Seven Years' War (1754-63). Truxes expertly details the movements of these goods as the colonial merchants conducted their illegal trade; and, while the trade was complicated, this well-written narrative clarifies the complex Atlantic market, legal and illegal, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Truxes is at his best when analyzing disputes between smugglers and the people bent on stopping them. Fortunately for the reader, those contests and the background to understand them dominate the book. Trading with the enemy was hardly new during the Seven Years' War. The wars between Britain and France that characterized the eighteenth century rarely interrupted trade. During King George's War (1744-48), for example,