This valuable study examines partisanship Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York from the early eighteenth century to independence. Using a wide array of quantitative and literary sources, the author persuasively argues that these economically flourishing and culturally diverse colonies exhibited considerably more intense, enduring, and sophisticated forms of partisanship than most earlier scholars have suggested. In five narrative chapters, he traces the process by which political arose from small and limited factions to become large, diverse alliances of both legislators and (7). Before the early I730s, they simple groups with narrow goals. Socially homogeneous, they were led by small cliques, often composed of relatives; employed closed, secretive, and often corrupt methods; and short-lived (7). Only the late I730s, when voters gradually repudiated narrow self-interested elite leaders and coalesced around generally clear principles and positions on vital did these groups start to become with wider appeal and purpose, taking on the character of parties and centering in the elected assemblies, where legislators, united by agreement on policy, began to vote blocs ( 3, 7). These blocs never developed sustained party organizations of the kinds that characterized modern parties, but they did maintain their membership and policy aims for long periods, conducted election campaigns, and thereby created among the electorate (8). A third phase of party development involved realignments around issues of defense, finance, and imperial policy during the Seven Years' War. Although the imperial crisis of the I76os and I770S wreaked havoc upon existing party systems, the author contends, the basic ideas and practices of partisan competition-party alignment the legislature, the involvement of the electorate, canvassing and electioneering, ideological propaganda- so deeply engraved upon middle-colony politics that they survived to flourish after the Revolution (I83). The author's most important contribution is his chapter on the determinants of middle-colony partisanship. On the basis of cluster-bloc analyses of legislative roll calls (routine by the late I730s New York and New Jersey but infrequent Pennsylvania) and quantitative exami-