Review of 'Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston'

Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Bostondescribes the efforts of one man on Boston's city payroll who was tasked with locating non-resident transients in the city, inquiring into the origins of hundreds of arriving strangers between 1765 and 1774.The process of 'warning' individuals who arrived in towns or cities where they did not possess legal residency was common in New England during the 18th century.Generally used as a means by which to absolve the town of the responsibility of providing poor relief to persons who had no ties to the town, it has often been described by historians as an attempt by authorities to assert social control over the lower and wandering classes.Dayton and Salinger argue, however, that the process by which their subject, Robert Love, located non-residents in colonial Boston, and read them the official warning which verbalized a requirement for them to depart within 14 days, should not be taken literally.Rather, the authors side with legal historian Lawrence M. Friedman in their analysis of the intent behind the warning scheme, arguing that it was essentially bureaucratic, a legal method that made it possible to determine whether a poor individual's relief ought to be paid for out of the town account or the province account, as the latter was reserved for nonresidents (p.15).It is this perspective that drives the book's analysis of the city's official interactions through the person of Robert Love with the 'strangers' who found themselves in Boston.In its narrative structure, Robert Love's Warnings systematically follows Love on his duties as town warner.This approach is warranted by the subjectivity imbued in the law he carried out, as well as the fact that his perambulations were central to the process of warning.While the purpose of warning was to apprehend all 'strangers,' only those who were deemed to be in 'low circumstances' were to be formally warned (p. 7).In order to contextualize how Love may have defined 'low circumstances,' the authors offer a detailed and impressively reconstructed account of his personal history.The reader gleans insights into the socioeconomic milieu of Boston in the 1760s almost strictly through this lens, with an entire chapter devoted to the man himself.Further contextualization as to the material wealth of colonial Bostonians is woven into the chapter titled 'Lodgings,' which chronicles those who received sojourners into their homes as lodgers or businesses as labourers.Indeed, though general economic discussion in this text is not expansive, readers can infer much from the physical circumstances of the 'sojourners of the respectable sort' and 'travellers in distress' that are described in detail.