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 seventeenth century.

While telling the story of Massachusetts Bay's transformation from a resource-poor perch on the continent to an active international economy, Innes supplies wonderful detail on the ironworks, the fisheries, and the shipyards that powered this growth. His story features the technology of the early modern world and introduces many of the "Scums and dreggs" who provided the labor for Puritan enterprise as well as the leading figures of the time: John Smith, John Winthrop, Robert Keayne, and others.