Who Should Rule at Home? Confronting the Elite in British New York City

Over one century ago, Carl L. Becker quipped that the years between 1765 and 1776 were characterized by the dual questions of home rule and “who should rule at home” (Carl Lotus Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776, 1909, p. 22). In this elegantly written and exhaustively researched homage to Becker's second question, Joyce D. Goodfriend reveals class conflict in New York City during much of the eighteenth century. Through “oppositional behavior” that ranged from an insistence on Dutch-language sermons to a refusal to observe the Sabbath, non-elite New Yorkers rewrote the cultural script that had been penned by New York City's gentry (p. 214). To what extent the gentry viewed these rebellions as an attack on their authority matters less to Goodfriend than that some poorer New Yorkers felt they could resist elite expectations of behavior. To demonstrate the lack of hegemonic power wielded by elites in the city, Goodfriend explains these constant, small-scale push backs by artisans, slaves, abused wives, and the desperately poor not by a theoretical examination of power but by focusing on the hard work of ordinary people

Class conflict · Elite · Gentry · Hegemony · Home rule · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Ruling class · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law