On the Urban Crucible

The seaport cities of North America (in this case, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia) were central because they were the incubators of capitalism in the United States. It was in predominantly northern seaports where the people of the Americas transitioned from a traditional, barter economy to an integral part of the global commercial system. While rural areas maintained pre-modern economic institutions, the same was not true of northern seaports, which participated in the cutting-edge of new economic advancements. After their introduction to urban seaports, these innovations gradually radiated outward, eventually pulling even the most isolated territories of British North America into its orbit. This is notable because only one in twelve colonists lived in an urban areas, and the urban areas were little more than settled backwaters in comparison to the cities of the Old World, or even Mexico City. With the introduction of capitalism, Americans transformed their social order from one where status was given at birth to a competitive society. As part of this, British North America’s aristocratic edifice gave way to a civic consciousness led by the people. Ultimately, it was Americans in northern seaports that upset Europe’s early modern equilibrium and propelled at least one-third of British colonists toward revolution (at least, if John Adams’s argument that 1/3 were Tories, 1/3 were on the fence, and 1/3 were “true blue” is to believed).

With the seaports’ transition to capitalism also came a dark side. Boston, for instance, was one of the primary cities in play as the intellectual, cultural, and commercial capital of New England, but, by the mid-18th century, it was also a center of “indebtedness, widowhood, and poverty” (might this also because it was the largest town in all of British North America?). Yet, Nash’s book doesn’t dwell entirely on the urban poor—he puts them in conversation with the wealthy and middle-class, arguing that those living in urban seaport, regardless of wealth, were part of a tightly connected social network, with power and capital so unequally distributed that it is remarkable. This makes sense given the population of these cities, which hardly exceeded 15,000 and inhabitants could generally walk from one side to the other in under 30 minutes. Nevertheless, this is a book about class in urban, colonial North America, and is an example of social history at its best. In spite of placing class at the center of the narrative, Nash does not fall into relying on facile, Marxist generalizations, instead opting to examine the different lived experiences of a variety of people who share the same mode of production. Nevertheless, he does argue that the ideology of a given group of people in these seaport cities were best determined by their class (makes sense, but I wonder if quantitative analysis might be a useful tool here).