<i>Dartmouth and the World: Religion and Political Economy circa 1769</i> by Henry C. Clark

This volume originated in a 2019 conference to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of Dartmouth College. It aims to situate Dartmouth's emergence amid broader changes in religion, political economy, and enlightenment in the latter third of the eighteenth century. Each essay grapples with one or more of these broader themes. Only some, though, are fundamentally concerned with Dartmouth qua Dartmouth. The result is a volume in which the parts are greater than the sum.Henry C. Clark's introduction sets out the themes. The first essay is Jack Goldstone's sweeping analysis of global changes that led up to 1769, the year of Dartmouth's founding. The college emerged in a period when “empiricism and rational analysis” influenced political philosophy (30). This way of thinking arrived in North America on the eve of revolution through the Scottish Enlightenment philosophy taught at colonial colleges. Goldstone implies that it reached Dartmouth as well, though his essay is not concerned with the college. Steven Pincus's essay also explores major changes within the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Namely, Pincus summarizes his ongoing work on the Patriot Party's imperial vision, which emphasized colonial consumption, development, and infrastructure. Dartmouth, he argues, emerged from this vision. The college “was founded as part of Governor John Wentworth's Patriot state-building project” (52). Pincus's intervention challenges the longstanding focus on Eleazar Wheelock's role in Dartmouth's founding and the primacy of religious goals.Continuing along themes of political economy, Emma Griffin's essay intervenes into the “standard of living debate.” To make an optimistic case for the early Industrial Revolution's influence on ordinary people, she relies on autobiographies of working-class Britons. Kristen Beales's essay examines commercial changes that more directly influenced Dartmouth. Beale traces the great evangelist George Whitefield's changing fundraising practices, from an emphasis on spontaneous giving to formal subscriptions and long-term financial planning. At Whitefield's urging, Dartmouth's founders adopted his later commercial practices.The next two essays turn to the politics of the impending imperial crisis. Mark Valeri revisits the perennial question of the relationship between religious changes and awakenings and the coming of the Revolution. He argues that the growing emphasis on conversion, choice, and recognition of “dissatisfaction with the status quo” made colonists more likely to challenge British policies. Their religious experience “gave moral sanction” to breaking with Britain (123). J. Patrick Mullins then offers a case study of Mercy Otis Warren's radicalization. He seeks to explain the extreme views—she was way ahead in arguing for a violent overthrow of the British Empire—in her 1772 play, The Adulateur. Mullins argues that Warren's radicalization was gendered. She was influenced by the English writer Catharine Macaulay and the family crisis surrounding her ailing brother, James Otis. These two essays will be of interest to historians of the American Revolution. What they have to do with Dartmouth is unclear.The collection ends with Ivy Schweitzer's essay on the “Native origins” of Dartmouth (154). The essay offers a counterpoint to Pincus’ contribution. If Pincus privileged the New Hampshire royal governor's role over Wheelock's, then Schweitzer offers a different protagonist: Mohegan preacher Samson Occom. Wheelock wanted to educate Native people to “civilize” them and force assimilation. But Occom turned the oppressor's tools against them, “adapting the imperial technologies of knowledge, rhetoric, law, religion, and politics to their own purposes of communal resistance” (162). Occom constantly tried to hold Dartmouth to its mission of educating Indigenous children. Schweitzer's essay highlights The Occom Circle, a digital humanities initiative that she leads at Dartmouth. The project brings together primary sources that privilege Native voices in framing a new origins story for Dartmouth.The essays that have something to say about Dartmouth—especially chapters by Pincus, Beales, and Schweitzer—help us understand anew not just Dartmouth, but colonial higher education in general. Colleges were important. They were on the minds of the most influential figures of the period—colonial officials, imperial agents, prominent clerics, and Native leaders alike. Too often, historians have left the history of education to scholars working in education departments. These essays make clear that without looking at education, scholars cannot fully understand imperial politics, colonial development, religious change and its relationship to commerce, or Native-European encounters.