The Dismal Swamp Company, formed in 1763, was an association of Virginia landowners who proposed to drain the Great Dismal Swamp and turn it into productive farmland. They started with a vast grant of land from the colony's proprietors and bought slaves to clear it. At one time or another most of the key figures of the time, including George Washington, Light Horse Harry Lee, William Byrd, and Patrick Henry, owned shares in the Company (which never, by the way, succeeded in its stated goal; the Dismal Swamp is today protected parkland for the most part). If you're expecting a straightforward linear narrative of this association, though, this is not the book to pick up. The subtitle, "A Story of George Washington's Times", is more indicative of Royster's actual theme in writing this book. He's less interested in the Dismal Swamp Company itself than in the many threads of commerce and history that one can trace from the people who had an interest in the venture.
As a result, the book tends to be sprawling and confusing. (One Amazon reviewer complained, "This book goes nowhere.") It reminds me a bit in texture of Fernand Braudel's classic 3-volume Civilization & Capitalism, a detailed walk through the history of everyday Europe in the 15th through 18th centuries. This sort of contextual history is not for everyone, but many who've thought seriously about historiography appreciate it. Writing history is a balance between presenting raw source material and presenting interpretation. Royster has put the balance of his writing closer to the raw sources than is customary these days, especially in popular works. The result is that you can appreciate more of the interconnections between such disparate subjects as the London stage, Lloyd's coffee house, the Revolutionary War and making shingles from the trees in the Great Dismal Swamp. The downside to this is that the reader has to work harder to perceive any grand themes.
Yet for me, at least, one grand theme shines through: it's a theme of financial troubles and caution that might well apply to the Internet boom of our own time. Reading through Royster's work one finds again and again, of some prominent Virginian, "his bill of exchange was returned protested." Perhaps this requires a few words of explanation. In the days before electronic banking (and remember, in the eighteenth century the speed of communication between the business center of London and the speculative center of the colonies was determined by wind and sail), bills of exchange were the glue of international commerce. A bill of exchange is essentially a letter from a seller to a buyer, directing the latter to pay a third person. Suppose, for example, that you were a Virginia planter expecting a tobacco crop. You might pay for new furniture for your mansion by giving the cabinetmaker a bill of exchange drawn on your tobacco wholesaler back in England. The cabinetmaker in turn would send the bill to his bank in London to be negotiated with the buyer's bank. If the buyer declined to pay for whatever reason (say, he had no intention of laying that much out for the crop), the bill would be returned protested and the cabinetmaker would be left holding worthless paper.
Royster shows the amazing extent to which the American economy around the revolution was driven by land speculation. Not just the Dismal Swamp but the Ohio river valley and even the District of Columbia were the seat of schemes to make money by buying land cheaply and selling it dearly, often on the theory that any land in America was due to become valuable just by its location next to a growing country (dot-com mania, anyone?). Bills of exchange circulated among the founding fathers, their London and continental contacts, based not so much on current products as on promises of fabulous future wealth.
Of course, many of these promises didn't pan out. George Washington died with a solvent estate, and carefully directed its disposition to his heirs. Not so many of the other famous names in our early history. Men like Light-Horse Harry Lee sunk all of their funds into land speculation and were ruined, ending their days in debtors' prison or completely insolvent. Some speculators, like Samuel Gist (prominent in the early days of the Lloyds' insurance syndicate) did well from American investments, but chiefly by choosing their investments carefully, having a profitable sideline, and being willing to sue for payment in the courts of two countries. Gist succeeded by providing one of the essential components of commercial infrastructure (insurance); one could draw a parallel by noting the companies such as Cisco are doing well from the Internet boom.
Royster himself doesn't make the connection between eighteenth-century land mania and twenty-first century virtual space mania; he leaves that to others who ponder his work. What he does do is give us an excellent portrait of a culture fueled by speculation, showing how it dragged down most of its more prominent figures, and giving insight into the part played by British capital in the growth of the early economy of the United States.