Hamilton Unbound: Finance and the Creation of the American Republic. By Robert E. Wright, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 230. Tables and figures. Cloth, $62.95.)This is an interesting book not only in its own right, but also as a sample of a battery of recent and forthcoming works by the author on early American financial history. Alongside the above come The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780-1850 (2002); The History of Corporate Finance (2002), six volumes of economic texts coedited by Richard Sylla; Origins of Commercial Banking in America, 1750-1800 (2001); and Financing Economic Growth: The Philadelphia Story (forthcoming), among others. The Hamilton Unbound and Wealth of Nations books are both quite slim and expensive. However, this is probably rational for the market, and the aggregate effort and contribution are considerable.Wright's general thesis in Hamilton Unbound is that U. S. financial markets were transformed between about 1780 and 1840 by the American Revolution, the Constitution, the mercantile elite, and Hamilton's brilliant financial organization. This is not a biography of Hamilton, but a study of the economic system. Wright claims that British policy, the lack of competent financial intermediaries, and consequent wildly fluctuating interest rates and asset values encouraged the Revolution. He next argues that the early state constitutions, and the U. S. Constitution itself, were products of worldly politicians well attuned to finance. Hence the checks and balances in the state as well as the federal constitutions follow a financial as well as a political model designed to ameliorate the principal-agent and information asymmetry problems. Early American corporate constitutions had similar governance aims. Central is the idea that the establishment of improved institutions and intelligent balancing and monitoring regulations reduced the main and political risks and released entrepreneurial energy-hence the title Hamilton Unbound.Wright next examines the consequent U. S. financial revolution, from 1787 to 1800, and its effects on U. S. economic growth. As earlier in Holland and Britain, political revolution encouraged financial innovation. In the American case, the Constitution and Hamilton's financial innovations created a common market and monetary system, monitored by the First Bank of the United States. By 1800 or so the United States had all the characteristics of a modern financial system-markets, corporations, exchanges, government taxation, funding, etc. -all of which induced rapid economic growth. Wright then discusses three effects of the financial revolution. First he argues that in the presidential election of 1800, the crucial decision in New York was won by commercial Republicans under Aaron Burr. Hamilton's Federalist banks restricted credit to the mercantile elite, and Burr's version of Jeffersonian democracy widened banking access to urban artisans and won the election. Wright hardly mentions the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel, but he does show how the new financial system weakened traditional duelling by placing greater weight on organized financial monitoring and credit referencing than on in assigning value. Absent the former, and economic actors could not ignore dark character assassination and were obliged in economic self defense to call opponents out. Finally, Wright shows how women were often commercially active in the unformed colonial system, but that after the Revolution they were gradually eased into narrowly defined economic roles-owning utility stocks, running milliners' shops, etc. …