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Saving is essential to the health of economies and households, yet relatively little scholarship investigates saving behaviors among the urban working class in the nineteenth century. This chapter uses five surveys of industrial workers in 1880s New Jersey, an analysis of which reveals sophisticated saving behaviors consistent with life-cycle and precautionary theories. The mean saving rate was between 8% and 12% of annual income. Younger households saved less than older households. Householders with longer expected careers, on average, saved less. Life insurance and fraternal societies were the most popular saving vehicles, but workers also used savings banks and building and loan associations, alone and in combination.

This chapter examines the fur trade commodity frontier in northeastern North America as a contested periphery, involving an evolving process of conflict and cooperation between North American indigenous groups and European powers. Native people used European powers for help in their battles with other native groups, and European colonial authorities attempted to use native people as proxies in their attempts to make up for often low European populations in the various North American colonies. Within the colonies there were also splits between commercial/trading interests and more purely geostrategic concerns. This chapter will explore these various conflicts involving the Iroquois, English and French, and will consider how the trade's fundamental material, environmental and geographical structure shaped the evolution of this peripheral extractive political economy and the efforts of those in the core seeking to exploit the area's resources.