BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTICES Robert Livingston (1654-1728) and the Politics of Colonial New York. By Lawrence H. Leder. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., 1961. xii -f- 306 pages, frontis., biblio., index. $6.00.) Reviewed by G. M. Waller, Department of History, Butler University. With Dr. Leder's study of Robert Livingston, the Institute of Early American History and Culture fills another gap in the important formative period of provincial America. In addition, as Leder points out in his preface, the over-emphasis on institutional development which has characterized work in this period is corrected in his examination of men and events. Robert Livingston was a leading figure in the colonies from 1674 until his death in 1728. He also deserves notice as the founder of one of America's influential families, and a representative landowner, merchant, and politician who typifies the upper class in the northern colonies. Born in Scotland, Livingston was taken to Holland as a child when his Calvinist-minister father was exiled during the Crown's oppression of the Scottish Presbyterians. After the outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch War, he came to Boston upon finding opportunities limited in his native Scotland. Attracted to Albany and its fur-trade opportunities, he soon received preference there by appointment as town clerk and secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners and by an influential marriage into the Schuyler family, with the attractive young widow of Nicholas Van Rensselaer. Ability and connections insured Livingston a subsequent career as a prosperous merchant and landowner, while his political position as the friend and then, often, as the enemy of Governors Dongan, Fletcher, Bellomont, Cornbury, Hunter, and Burnet, steadily mounted. He was sometime-member of the Governor's Council, and Assemblyman during Hunter's and Burnet's relatively successful administrations. He was successively a leader of the opposition to Leisler's regime, an insider in the disastrous Whig scheme to send Captain Kidd out after pirates, a perennial victualer for the royal companies stationed in New York as well as for the unlucky Palatine settlers, and, finally, a chief mover in Burnet's unpopular policy against the fur trade with Canada. Through his son, John, and son-in-law, Samuel Vetch, he was affected by Bellomont's crusade against illegal trade, and, also, as a large landholder, by Bellomont's attack on extravagant land grants. Through Samuel Vetch he was an interested party during the repeated efforts at the conquest of Canada, in which New York necessarily had an important role as one of the leading royal colonies. It was a goal he had himself urged earlier, as advocate for the Iroquois. 412