Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America. By Jennifer J. Baker. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 218. Illustrations. Cloth, $50.00.)Reviewed by Philip GouldSecuring the Commonwealth a historically astute study of the complex relations between economic and literary history in early America. Encompassing the period between the 1690s, when Massachusetts Bay first introduced government-issued bills of into the colonial economy, and the 1790s, when debates about fiscal policy helped to spur the formation of national political parties, this book provides not so much a developmental history as an analytic survey of key moments where economic and literary histories converge. A member of the English Department at Yale, Jennifer Baker announces that her book is not primarily concerned with analogies between money and language but, rather, with a historical reading of literature (10). Her real concern with the changing ideological terrain in which such terms as and value were conducted-and contested. Literature (understood broadly as letters) was an important site where this occurred, as early American writers like Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, and Judith Sargent Murray saw their literary productions as potential economic interventions (5).Drawing on the disciplines of economic history and political theory, Baker's study first argues that traditional cultural suspicions in colonial America about the danger of economies were challenged by an emergent culture of speculation that more optimistically viewed capitalism's promise to promote simultaneously both individual opportunity and communal cohesion (4). Especially by the end of the eighteenth century, when Scottish moral philosophy and economic theory had taken hold in British America, Americans were increasingly persuaded that public actually strengthened ties among citizens. Scholars of the early republic will note that the book's discussion of late eighteenthcentury economic does have a kind of Hamiltonian tenor to it, because personal, commercial, and public contexts for credit all devolved upon psychological dynamics of trust, faith, and potentiality (25). Not only, then, does the book make an argument about what modern about late-colonial and early national America, but it also tries to dismantle the opposition between community and modernity. Paper schemes denned the boundaries of community . . . but they also defined a community by soliciting, and even exacting commitment (17).Whatever questions the book raises about the uneven and highly contextual nature of these historical changes, it does offer intriguing readings of early American literary works with an eye for their economic themes and formal features. Perhaps its greatest strength its ability to show how early American writers adapted and redeployed the language of economies. Readers of the JER may be less interested in the two early chapters on colonial Massachusetts and Virginia, but these early discussions do begin to show the rhetorical complexity and mobility of economic ideas and language. For example, Baker argues that Cotton Mather's writing on Massachusetts Bay's economic woes during the 1690s understood economic and spiritual forms of redemption not merely as tropes, but as sorts of analogous mindsets under providential designs, which demanded New English citizens wait patiently and not panic. (Wise advice to the elect and creditors alike!) Particularly noteworthy her reading of Mather's famous biography of Governor William Phips, which subtly imparts the lesson to creditors and speculators to embrace unpredictability and change. …