This monograph tracks the development of the socio-economic stance of early Mormonism an
American Millenarian Restorationist movement through the first fourteen years of the church's
existence from its incorporation in the spring of 1830 in New York through Ohio and Missouri
and Illinois up to the lynching of its prophet Joseph Smith Jr in the summer of 1844.
Mormonism used a new revelation the Book of Mormon and a new apostolically inspired church
organization to connect American antiquities to covenant-theological salvation history. The
innovative religious strategy was coupled with a conservative socio-economic stance that was
supportive of technological innovation.This analysis of the early Mormon church uses case
studies focused on socio-economic problems such as wealth distribution the financing of
publication projects land trade and banking and caring for the poor. In order to correct for
the agentive overtones of standard Mormon historiography both in its supportive and in its
detractive stance the explanatory models of social time from Fernand Braudel's classic work on
the Mediterranean are transferred to and applied in the nineteenth-century American context.
