Creating the Commonwealth

This ambitious history offers a sweeping reinterpretation of America's cultural roots in the colonial past. Marshalling rich new evidence, Stephen 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 the world and prosper. The Puritan commonwealth strengthened this commitment by adopting policies to promote economic growth. The result was a thriving capitalism and the diminishing devotion that alarmed Puritan leaders in the late…