In her elegant analysis of writings by Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown and Judith Sargent Murray, Jennifer Baker homes in on a mode of thinking in eighteenth-century America about debt, credit, speculation and paper money that is quite surprising. In place of the familiar fears about both private and public indebtedness as a form of effeminizing slavery and speculation as a form of irresponsible castle-building, she brilliantly teases out a strand of argument that saw debt (and the paper bills that create it) as a positive social good because it could foster national development, cohesion and trust, all the while reinforcing the bonds of sympathy between individuals. In recovering this Hamiltonian strain of thought in early American letters Baker is expanding the insight of Thomas Haskell's work on capitalism and the humanitarian sensibility, with the suggestion that for some eighteenth-century American thinkers the market revolution did not so much destroy the older bonds of personal sympathy as create them anew by enabling citizens to recognize the connective web of mutual obligation.

Baker locates her chosen texts expertly in the detailed historical context of debates on the public debt and the value of paper money, but she is also alert to the their significance as literature rather than merely as historical documents of a shifting economic sensibility. In addition to her analysis of early American literature's public-minded role in reimagining the nature of debt, Baker explores what she terms the “aesthetics of credit,” the specific uses of economic tropes and narrative/dramatic structures that these writers employed, such as Tyler's equation in his play The Contrast between the performative nature of character on stage and the need for the “performance” of punctuality in redeeming debts, or Brockden Brown's characterization of reading as a kind of investment. Likewise, in the epilogue Baker sketches out how in the nineteenth century writers such as Washington Irving began to reconceive of writing as itself a form of speculation, with romance therefore valued ironically via financial tropes for its resistance to mere monetary values.

The specific interpretations of the chosen works in each of the chapters are consistently insightful, and many of them open up intriguing new lines of thought for scholars in the field. In her analysis of Franklin's autobiography, for example, Baker argues compellingly that the final two parts force us to rethink our traditional interpretation of Franklin as the forerunner of Dale Carnegie, for whom character is depersonalized, merely a projection that is divorced from a true inner self. Instead Baker shows how Franklin, once he had retired from business and professional politics, was on the contrary quite willing to lend his extraordinary personal reputation to projects for the public good, seeing that prominent individuals might well be needed to underwrite public debts to allow the country to get ahead. The combination of historical and literary analysis in Securing the Commonwealth thus sets very high standards for those concerned with researching the intersection of culture and the market, taking the discussion in significant new ways beyond the now familiar post-structuralist focus on the parallels between literature and paper money as forms of symbolic representation.