Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century
by: John Frederick Martin

Hardcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 363 pages. In examining the founding of New England towns during the seventeenth century, John Frederick Martin investigates an old subject with fresh insight. Whereas most historians emphasize communalism and absence of commerce in the seventeenth century, Martin demonstrates that colonists sought profits in town-founding, that town founders used business corporations to organize themselves into landholding bodies, and that multiple and absentee landholding was common.In reviewing some sixty towns and the activities of one hundred town founders, Martin finds that many town residents were excluded from owning common lands and from voting. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century, when proprietors separated from towns, that town institutions emerged as fully public entities for the first time. Name on front endpaper, otherwise clean.