Stephen Innes

Stephen Innes studies the relationship between work, land, and community in seventeenth-century Springfield, Massachusetts. Using analytical concepts drawn from anthropology--dependence, mediation, and clientage--he shows that the town was a highly commercialized, developmental community contrasting sharply with the communal, quietistic models that currently form our image of early New England. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Stephen Innes studies the relationship between work, land, and community in seventeenth-century Springfield, Massachusetts. Using analytical concepts drawn from anthropology--dependence, mediation, and clientage--he shows that the town was a highly commercialized, developmental community contrasting sharply with the communal, quietistic models that currently form our image of early New England. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Ever since its publication twenty-five years ago, "Myne Owne Ground" has challenged readers to rethink much of what is taken for granted about American race relations. During the earliest decades of Virginia history, some men and women who arrived in the New World as slaves achieved freedom and formed a stable community on the Eastern shore. Holding their own with white neighbors for much of the 17th century, these free blacks purchased freedom for family members, amassed property, established plantations, and acquired laborers. T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes reconstruct a community in which ownership of property was as significant as skin color in structuring social relations. Why this model of social interaction in race relations did not survive makes this a critical and urgent work of history. In a new foreword, Breen and Innes reflect on the origins of this book, setting it into the context of Atlantic and particularly African history.

Marshaling rich new evidence, Innes focuses on enterprise in early New England and its relation to the prevailing culture of Puritanism. He finds in our beginnings at Massachusetts Bay a fierce devotion to God that fed a social commitment to engage th