Practical men are not the only people enslaved to defunct economists. In this superb book, Mark Valeri makes the case that the Puritans were as well. Market expansion in New England has been dated at various times between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but Valeri asserts that writings of British “political economists” long before were necessary conditions for these economic developments. One of the many bold and thoroughly supported arguments in this book is that the chain of causation ran through the depuritanization of established New England churches. From the old country came new ideas both Reformed and Anglican that led these churches to become enablers of the market revolution. The transition from preaching against usury and “oppression” (raising of prices above the just level) to genuine enthusiasm for markets as the loci of providential actions occurred very early, having been well under way by the late seventeenth century.

The most influential evolution of moral perspectives on the economy began with the Mercantilists. Their writings on the growth of long-distance international trade emerged in the context of Newtonian mechanics and (implicitly, but not discussed by Valeri) the more optimistic strains of Leibnizian philosophy. Best exemplified by William Petty, these writers cast the growth of the market as a benefit for humanity in general and imperial England in particular. As interpreted by religious writers, the success of the market and its complex operations, hardly less intricate than those of a watch, suggested that the market itself was a gift from God. The proof was in the pudding. Thanks to wealth generated by international trade, Anglicans and Congregationalists alike built prosperous churches for the greater glory of God, and so far England had been able to frustrate the frequent encroachments of Catholic France, which clearly reflected the will of the Almighty. To address how writings on political economy managed to gain such traction in religious circles, Valeri responds that the political economists evinced an attractive certainty about their conclusions, in contrast to the more measured tone of religious writers. From the inside looking out, an economist might consider this faith misplaced.

Valeri refuses to cast this story in terms of decline or secularization, preferring to use more dispassionate language. After all, the successive generations of Boston merchants under scrutiny here were certainly churchgoers. Men whose pastimes included annotating their preachers' sermons and writing their own Biblical commentaries had not become secularized. But the religion that they followed was changing. Anglican bishop John Tillotson and other latitudinarians aimed to infuse Christianity with, or perhaps submerge it under, Enlightenment notions of sociability, reason, and virtue. Their followers in Boston, tellingly denoted by Valeri as “progressives,” allowed their desire to get along with the world to overwhelm their desire to make Christianity speak to the world, and thus did they ultimately hide their light under a bushel basket. The transformation was not edifying. At some intermediate point, Christian moral writers must have reached a maximum of wisdom, perhaps in recognizing that the parable of the talents cut the ground out from under usury prohibitions (p. 154) and that there were good reasons for the general disgust with slave trading. By the end of the tale Boston preachers were defending the availability of cheap liquor (p. 247), applauding the “diligence and acuity” of slave traders (p. 233), and offering an image of the Lord our God as “a polite but strict usurer” (p. 221). Even with the example of decline in liberal Protestantism over the twentieth century before us, it does not seem teleological to connect the loss of Puritan discipline early in the eighteenth century with the decrease in Congregational membership late in the same century.

Valeri draws on several types of evidence to press his case. On the religious side, books and pamphlets by English writers and sermons by Puritan and “postpuritan” clergy in New England illustrate both the old clerical concern for fair dealing and the new approval of every manner of exchange. On the economic side, writings of political economists, associated analyses by historians of economic thought, business records kept by Puritan merchants, and publications by economic historians on the state of the market in early New England document market growth, economic development, and the why and how thereof. Presumably Valeri, as a historian of religion, is more at home in the former sorts of documents, but he gives a clear and respectful reading to the work of economic historians, with only the occasional slipup.

A short review cannot do justice to the complexity of Valeri's argument, his many insights drawn from seemingly unexceptionable statements in the record, or the richness of his documentary base. An important and compelling book, Heavenly Merchandize will spark discussions and debates over early American religion and economic development for years to come.