Examining how the actions of individuals come together to create an immense commercial empire, Dangerous Economies is studded with the stories of a diverse array of New Yorkers, from slaves to royal officials.One of the most compelling of these stories is that of a mother and daughter named Elizabeth and Mary Anderson. Elizabeth Anderson, like many widowed women, opened a little shop of imports in New York for which her Boston-based brother supplied the goods. One day, some wealthy young men stopped into the shop and saw Elizabeth’s 14-year-old-daughter. In a drama that seems borrowed from a Samuel Richardson novel, they invent a plan to get Mary alone in a tavern and attempt to rape her. When her mother asks the attorney general to bring charges of attempted rape against the four young men, the perpetrators turn to the risky world of the market to try to entrap and discredit the mother by accusing her of illegal trading, dealing in stolen goods, and trafficking with slaves. Not only do they succeed in having her, in the attorney general’s words, “whipped most inhumanly” until she fainted, but they manage to acquit themselves of the charge of attempted rape. Even the attorney general himself is brought up on charges of maladministration of office—with prosecution basing its case on his championing of the Andersons.Just as the suspected slave conspiracy trials were not solely about race, this attempted gang rape cannot be explained simply as an attempt to solidify early American patriarchy. Although the attempted rape of Mary Anderson is an unambiguous story of an effort to assert power through gendered violence, the attempted destruction of Elizabeth Anderson shows a very different use of power. The physical violence that the gang of men used was only partly successful; they achieved true success by harnessing the power and the system of trade.The tale of Elizabeth and Mary Anderson’s persecution reveals both the potential and the hazards of the corners of the marketplace open to poor women. For although Anderson may have been a legal trader, the court records reveal a flourishing interracial economy in secondhand goods. Goods were acquired (sometimes stolen, sometimes not) by enslaved men and then pawned to female tavern-keepers, who ran pawnshops as side business.In taverns that were often no more than front rooms or in tiny shops “above stairs,” women and men, both free and enslaved, pawned and fenced goods that had little practical value in their hardworking lives. Punch bowls and velvet cloaks became currency in their own economy, to be exchanged for a drink, a room, or even a search warrant. And yet consumer goods represented more than mere cash, for these informal pawnbrokers resold them to customers eager for fashionable wares. Such a desire fueled both firsthand and secondhand production of consumer goods. However, not everyone benefited from this loose and underground economy. The possibilities it offered for improving one’s personal lot could come at a price. Fourteen-year-old Mary Anderson was the victim of an attempted gang rape; her mother, in trying to defend her daughter, was whipped until she lost consciousness. Every attempt the Andersons made to survive in this informal economy was viewed with hostility and suspicion by members of the elite and the courts.There were other, wider implications to the informal economy as well. By redistributing used and stolen goods, making them accessible even to the poorest of New Yorkers, the women and men operating in the informal economy inadvertently undermined the meaning of those consumer goods as indicators of status. As both buyers and sellers, these poor and enslaved New Yorkers entered into a wide world of Atlantic goods and commerce. At the same time, their involvement in this market ended up undercutting exactly the sorts of status divisions that consumer goods were intended to create and support.These men and women rarely intended to create a social revolution, however, and their trading and purchases often came at great personal costs to themselves. Moreover, status distinctions did not disappear with the emergence of a secondhand consumer market. Instead, elite New Yorkers found other ways to turn the presentations of their bodies into markers of distinction.Of papist spies and slave uprisings, these tales carry the marks of long ago, of a time when chattel slavery was normal and people were burned at the stake. But Dangerous Economies tells a story that has a lot to do with today: the book is a study of an economic boom time.As in the Clinton era, economic and imperial expansion happened hand in hand. So it is essential to probe the relationship between the everyday lives of ordinary people, political power, and market-forces most of us can’t quite comprehend.What I found was that the eighteenth-century marketplace could be a place where even the most marginal of actors—poor women, for example, or slaves—really could exploit the market to live in ways that they wanted. Slaves were, of course, legally considered property themselves. But I found an example of a slave who had made so much money on the black market that he himself was able to keep a woman—in fact, a white woman—as a mistress, paying for her room and board, and supporting their child. But it was risky. That same enslaved man was hanged for running a larceny ring in which he and some accomplices stole luxury goods and then fenced them to a dealer who sold them second-hand to other, marginally wealthier New Yorkers who wanted those latest consumer goods without actually paying full price for them.This was not a story that could be explained through the traditional approaches to studying capitalism: it needed a cultural history. And this cultural history reveals that concepts such as money and credit, which economist imagine to be quantitative and objective, have actually been embedded in people’s lives from the very beginning of market capitalisms.Market booms, whether in the 1740s or in the 1990s, are largely imaginary. They are not just based on the exploitation of some people (slaves then, sweatshop workers now) by others but rather on the collective fantasy that financial credit is somehow real and fixed rather than subjective and imaginary. Boomtime New York created a world in which thirty-four people could be judicially murdered—and then forgotten.But just because credit is imaginary does not mean it’s not meaningful. This world did terrify people who wanted to fix people’s status: a slave as property, a woman as a dependent, a well-dressed man as a good financial risk. And so, for those who were killed or banished, the cultural meaning of economics had great, even final meaning.