Readers ought to marvel at this broad synthesis of the early social history of the United States. Christopher Clark presents a wide-angle view of the people of early America, wrestling the changes and divergences of their history into a volume of manageable length. Clark distils extensive quantitative information, digests the massive relevant historiography, and pays attention to regional differences and other complexities. This must have been immensely difficult, but Clark succeeds as only a person of his expertise could have done. The political history of this period touches Clark's narrative only lightly, focussed as he is on tracking a multitude of social developments.

The author explores household production and more intensive production, the ways in which different elites exercised power, the importance of migration, the changing nature of labour (free and coerced), and the effects of economic cycles on class divisions and ideology. Through Clark's lens, the reader tracks northern production and the development of wage labour alongside southerners' commitment to growing staple crops with slave labour. While free workers in the North consumed enough goods to sustain cities, markets, and a large proportion of professionals, the southern economy did not lend itself to such changes to the same degree. Over time, the United States became divided into two theories of economic development and social relations. In the end, Clark argues, the dramatic destruction of slavery led to little change in southern social relations, while in the North the entrenchment of class divisions and corporate power proved more fundamentally revolutionary.

Clark does not develop all his themes as well as he constructs this theme of diverging regional social structures. In other sections of the book, Clark trades away the sharpness of clear arguments or shorthand theories in favour of a scrupulous even-handedness and attention to complexity. This was a worthwhile sacrifice, given that the book is intended as an overview rather than a monograph. Ultimately, Clark's motivations seem to have been egalitarian – he aims at exploring the trends that affected the maximum number of American lives, rather than focussing more narrowly on politicians, warriors, markets, unions, reformers, or divines.

Clark does pepper his narrative with brief vignettes of American individuals: Eleanor Eldridge, struggling as an African American to establish a painting and decorating business in Providence, Rhode Island (159), or the New Englander Henry Watson Jr., settling down as an Alabama plantation owner (234). Such anecdotes alleviate the painstaking documentation that sometimes makes for a dry read.

Social Change in America will prove a tight and useful resource for undergraduate students looking to familiarize themselves with this period. The book's able summary and concise bibliography of the secondary literature will assist further ventures into the subjects that Clark can address only briefly. No programme for a course on American history for this period should do without listing this book.