Book Reviews and Notices American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., i960, x 4- 311 pages, illus., biblio. note, index. $6.00.) Reviewed by Vincent P. Carosso, Department of History, New York University. This biography is the first full-length study of the many-faceted career of Samuel Vetch (1668-1732), the energetic and ambitious soldier, trader, and imperial promoter, whose activities against the French in Canada eventually led to the downfall of the Bourbon empire in North America. The son of a prominent and persecuted Scottish Covenanter, Samuel Vetch was sent to join his father in The Netherlands when he was fifteen years old, so that he might prepare for the ministry without being harassed by the Scottish and English authorities who had driven his father to Holland. Young Vetch soon discovered that he preferred the army to the church, and in 1688 he sailed for England with William of Orange. After having helped to secure Protestantism there, he returned to The Netherlands where he fought the troops of Louis XIV until 1697. The next year he joined William Paterson's expedition to Panama, where the Company of Scotland tried to establish a colony and trading post at the Isthmus. The venture failed and the following year, along with a group of other survivors, Vetch arrived in New York. From here he launched a new and exciting career in trade and empire-building. In analyzing Vetch's commercial and imperial enterprises, which were greatly facilitated by his marriage to the daughter of the influential Robert Livingston, and the important associations which this marital alliance helped him develop among the leaders of New York's business community, Professor Waller shows how this Scot's activities elucidate the larger imperial themes and developments of the first quarter of the 18th century. Vetch's trade with the northern Indians and his illegal commerce with New France, for example, not only serve to provide new details on this aspect of colonial business, but also to illustrate the several ways in which the various trade regulations of these years affected the individual intercolonial trader. Equally useful is the author's analvsis of the cumbersome workings of the administrative bureaucracy designed to enforce the imperial policies which Vetch and others like him violated. Trade with Canada, for instance, was illegal, and the Massachusetts legislature imprisoned Vetch for engaging in it but, as Waller points out, it was this illegal commerce which provided him with much of his intimate knowledge of French and Indian activity in Canada and which stimulated his ambitious design to conquer New France. The idea of strengthening Britain by removing France from North America did not originate with Vetch. His contribution to this scheme was to present it to the Board of Trade, with a carefully argued paper on the political, economic, and strategic reasons why Canada should be incorporated into the British Empire. In this proposal he included a state- 414