Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake by Paul Musselwhite

Abstract

Reviewed by: Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake by Paul Musselwhite Patrick D. Hagge Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake. Paul Musselwhite. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xii+341 maps, illustrations, notes. $50.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-226-58528-4. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the wider Chesapeake Bay region was full of plantation landscapes. Few cities, however, dotted [End Page 169] this overwhelmingly rural world. The conventional historiography of the Chesapeake suggests that the dual factors of plantation agriculture and physical geography limited urban growth, as nearby rivers allowed for planters to export their product without the need for city-based economic services. A plantation-dominated Chesapeake was viewed as destined to remain rural, and even Thomas Jefferson argued that nature itself dictated the lack of towns in the region. However, this view erases the historical fact that Chesapeake residents both understood their own region's rurality and anticipated eventual city growth. In Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake, Paul Musselwhite contests the dominant theme of the rural historic Chesapeake Bay region, what Musselwhite calls the "artificial belief in the incompatibility between plantations and cities" (3). Instead, he notes that while ultimately unsuccessful, Chesapeake urbanization incorporated wide-ranging experimentation in city building and deep debates over the very necessity of cities themselves. The book's seven major chapters are arranged chronologically, with each section centering on a particular time period that experienced the possibility of urban growth, such as the early decades of the Virginia Company or the Restoration era. Each chapter addresses the contemporary debates surrounding urbanization, as well as the resulting failures of urban development in that era. An epilogue describes contested urban development in the years immediately aft er the American Revolution. Throughout Urban Dreams, the author delivers an efficient discussion of the rural Chesapeake—a region whose lack of towns differentiated it from other English colonial domains in North America. Multiple parts of this book deserve additional recommendation. Of particular note is Musselwhite's superior quality of research. Part historical narrative, part historical geography, and part historical analysis, Urban Dreams centers on a well-researched argument, drawing from a seemingly endless number of archival sources housed on both sides of the Atlantic. Personal papers, government documents, and business records result in a full sixty pages of footnotes covering nearly two centuries of Chesapeake history. Several maps representing plantation sites are also effective. This well-sourced history gives more credence to Musselwhite's narratives of different key players' motivations in plans for the urban [End Page 170] Chesapeake, including the "intense contemporary concern" of Chesapeake residents over expected urban development (8). To use one chapter as an example, "Towns, Improvements, and the Contest for Authority in the 1680s" weaves a successful treatment of plans for regional reform in the years aft er Bacon's Rebellion. The different points of view in this chapter include the positions of the English Crown and the Stuart court, the Virginia House of Burgesses, local county government officials, and Chesapeake Bay planters. Was a city primarily a civic institution or an economic engine? At times, different regional stakeholders had conflicting answers to that question. Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth is one volume in "American Beginnings, 1500–1900," a series of seventeen books on American history published by the University of Chicago Press. However, this text is important not only to historians but also to urban and economic scholars alike. Urban Dreams appears at the end of a recent period with renewed focus on the historical Chesapeake, in texts such as Jean Russo and J. Elliot Russo's Planting an Empire: The Early Chesapeake in British North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). The rurality of the pre-European Chesapeake was explored in James Rice's 2009 work, Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson (John Hopkins University Press). Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America is a 2019 volume edited by Paul Musselwhite, Peter Mancall, and James Horn exploring society building of the colonial Chesapeake (University of North...