Jessica Roney's richly researched study considers the intimate relation between voluntary associations, civic activism, and the founding and development of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. We begin in 1682 with William Penn's plans for a Quaker colony featuring a well-proportioned city of orderly streets, gardens, and elegant squares set back a mile or so from the shore. However, things turn out rather differently. Thousands of settlers drawn by promises of land and religious toleration favoured a mercantile community centred on the waterfront, and over time their wishes prevailed. Philadelphia and Pennsylvania grew quickly and prospered, but governance was unclear and key institutions were difficult to establish and often fragmented. The early Quaker church required congregants to dig deep and establish local meeting houses and an institutional structure which was then rent by schism in the 1690s. By the close of the seventeenth century, political rights, landownership, and the payment of quit rents all required clarification. Under pressure to sail for home, Penn granted charters to the provincial assembly and city, satisfying the narrow concerns of a few at the cost of establishing weak institutions and reducing his own proprietorial authority. These early years also established a pattern of individual and group activism, spawning clashes between competing interest groups who worked through, and often against, provincial and city authorities. Philadelphia evolved as a city that operated not by unity and consensus, but by the negotiation of differences via government and nongovernment bodies that appealed to diverse constituencies. In short, a city born and governed not out of brotherly love, but in the eponymous spirit of opposition.

By 1723, and Benjamin Franklin's arrival in the city (at the start of chapter 3), a key theme in Roney's elegantly constructed and well-argued book is clear: the man who became the most famous colonial American civic activist owed at least as much to the circumstances that he found when arrived as his adopted home would later owe to him.

Philadelphia was a cacophony of lobbies and interests and badly in need of colonists with vision and a sense of the possible, if only order could be established. With a growing and increasingly diverse population and weak municipal and provincial governments, voluntary associations necessarily flourished to fill various gaps and needs. Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists provided for the welfare of impecunious congregants, but left many outside this provision. The latter two congregations also drew on overseas support, establishing financial assistance to enhance their denominational presence and participate in the zeal for voluntary social and civic services, ranging from fire prevention and libraries to poor relief and education. Chapter 4 opens with a brief review of the social and political history that generated the colony's cultural heterogeneity and the dynastic struggle culminating in the installation of Thomas Penn, an Anglican, as proprietor and the ensuing challenge to Quaker political hegemony. Thereafter we continue on the theme of voluntarism and civic activism, ranging from the construction of new meeting houses to the mobilization of a defence association in response to Quaker pacifism and the threat of French and Indian attack.

Roney's analysis emphasizes the importance of political practice over ideals. Focussing on the ways in which residents addressed everyday problems, she offers a modified “bottom-up” view of the political engagement of ordinary men (and few, if any, women) in the century before the Revolution. Her approach is that of a social scientist, asking how politics worked rather than exploring their likely import for her subjects, thereby avoiding the questions of meaning and intention which have concerned a generation and more of contextualist studies investigating the variety and nuances of early modern political language. In this sense her approach is ambitious, seeking to broaden our understanding of political activism, but also maybe a bit self-limiting in its largely functionalist view of how politics did or did not operate. Early Pennsylvanian politics, Roney tells us, cannot be easily characterized as either republican or democratic. In the latter case, even though the franchise was markedly liberal for the time, voter turnout was low and the oligarchy comfortably entrenched. Moreover, too great a focus on formal politics, she argues, risks missing the complicated activism and accommodations which criss-crossed these hackneyed categories. Lacking a unified, governing centre or a uniform and predictable political ideology, pragmatic Philadelphians navigated pluralism and negotiated access to authority. They operated on their own behalf and through intermediaries at public meetings, by signing names to membership lists, pledging subscriptions of money, and giving their time and energy to public works. Philadelphians established at least sixty formal associations before the American Revolution, and by 1770 one white man in five belonged to one or more of these groups. This development of voluntarism and public activity, Roney argues, needs to be considered in the context of the wider British Atlantic world of sociable, charitable, and civic clubs and associations.

This practical and can-do attitude of early Philadelphians underlay their vigorous spirit of opposition from early on in the eighteenth century. By these lights the American Revolution did not effect a radical transformation in civic engagement by ordinary colonists or augur a new spirit of democratic inclusion; rather revolutionary mobilization drew upon a long tradition of earlier civic activism. Early on and in closing, Roney offers a respectful rebuttal to those who see the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s as revolution concerned with class discontent as much as with political liberty. Roney's disinterest in class is clearest in one of her strongest chapters, chapter 5, considering the development of public finance and credit markets as the city grew to be the largest in British America. Unable to charter banks, “Philadelphians found an innovative way around the problem” (105), using small subscriptions collected through voluntary associations to make loans to people needing credit, thereby earning income on contributions which could be used for good causes. Interest costs at half the market rate meant that borrowers also benefited, and if the associations limited their lending to high-value loans to the wealthy and powerful for large-scale projects they nevertheless introduced a multiplier effect that rippled through the wider economy, helping the impoverished recent college graduates and distressed widows that the institutions aimed to serve. Perhaps, but do we not need to square this impression of broadly shared citizen equality and activism and the virtues of eighteenth-century “trickle-down” economics with the work of folks such as Billy Smith and Terry Bouton who have uncovered growing inequalities and developing class discontent, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. That said, the book has been received with glowing reviews, not least for its emphasis on continuity rather than change from the earlier colonial through Revolutionary era. Stressing the deep roots of the civic activism that came to the fore during the era of the imperial crisis, Roney joins other recent work such as Craig Yirush's book on colonial political ideology in drawing our attention to the conditions that prepared the way for the move away from the empire, rather than the controversies and dramas that forced the eventual break.