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Rum and Axes: The Rise of a Connecticut Merchant Family, 1795-1850. By Janet Siskind. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. xii, 191 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8014-3932-9.)
What exactly did New England's merchants and industrialists do? Janet Siskind's book provides an answer to this question by exploring Samuel Watkinson's family and its economic fortunes in early-nineteenth-century Connecticut. But this is no "rags to riches" tale. In 1795, when they arrived in Middletown, Connecticut, from Lavenham, England, the Watkinsons were already millionaires if measured by today's standards. Samuel, his wife, Sarah, and their twelve children networked with the local Middletown elites, positioning themselves for advantageous business partnerships and marriages. They adapted themselves nimbly to the West Indian trade. Siskind's book is especially strong in demonstrating how Connecticut farmers and merchants were tied to distant...