Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities
Institute of Historical Research, 2 - 3 July 2009
Shaping British Colonial Cities in an Atlantic World
Chair: Simon Middleton (University of Sheffield)
Abstracts
The politics of building: urban construction and social conflict in the early American town
Emma Hart (St Andrews)
Focusing discussion on Charleston, South Carolina – one of colonial British America’s largest eighteenth-century cities – this paper will explore the ways in which the construction of private homes and public buildings contributed to patterns of social conflict in the British Atlantic town. Concentrating specifically on clashes between the planter-merchant elite and an emerging urban middling sort, I will show how the built environment both reflected and created differences between the two groups.
Following on from the success of South Carolina’s staple rice economy in the early eighteenth century, Charleston experienced spectacular growth between the 1730s and the conclusion of the War of Independence in 1783, its population rising from a couple of thousand to over 10,000. Such increases in wealth and population prompted the construction of many public buildings and many more private homes. Churches, a court house, an Exchange, a State House, a prison, and a free school were all in place by 1770. Meanwhile, contemporary accounts reveal an urban domestic landscape constantly transformed by splendid mansions and more humble tenements alike.
Both domestic and public construction reinforced the supremacy of the local elite. Large brick mansions, with outbuildings that housed enslaved dependents, along with the town’s public buildings, were all conceived in the latest brick-built, classical style. As the highlights of colonial Charleston, these edifices conveyed the elite’s wealth and power to their Carolinian inferiors and to visitors from across the first British Empire. However, the urban built environment also proved to be a power base for the Low Country’s emerging middling sort. Tradespeople invested in urban land, increasing and securing their wealth through its development with homes for sale or rent. At the same time, the deep involvement of this group in the improvement and ordering of Charleston’s public spaces resulted in the creation of a middling civic lobby, which came to blows with the colonial elite over the governing of the town.
Such conflicts, however, were not unique to Charleston, and this paper will also explore how the experience of this New World town was remarkably similar to that of its counterparts in the English-speaking Old World. In Britain and in America, where city life was enjoying a new-found dynamism, building and rebuilding processes played a central role in reshaping the structure of urban society.
Constituting the city: neighbourhoods and networks in eighteenth-century New York City
Julie Atkinson (University of Warwick/IHR)
What kind of place was New York City in the eighteenth century? The urban landscape- the city’s streets, buildings, docks and markets- marked out its physical shape. Government agencies, officeholders, freemen and the legal and administrative systems that ordered urban activities gave the city a political identity. But the city’s identity also had an important social dimension: it was defined as much by the people who lived there and the patterns of relationships that they maintained as by its physical landmarks and boundaries and political structures. Previous interpretations of the urban community have focused on divisions of class, ethnicity, religion and ideology. These studies have suggested that these divisions shaped patterns of political participation until new radical groups swept many previously disengaged New Yorkers into the Revolution in the late 1760’s. Building on New York’s well-known reputation as a city of neighbourhoods, this paper takes a step back from conventional social divisions to suggest that eighteenth-century New Yorkers constituted themselves as neighbourhoods as an expression of corporate urban identity and as a framework for regular participation in local governance.
The paper is based on a larger prosopographical investigation of municipal officeholders in the five decades leading up to the American Revolution. My research has uncovered a previously- neglected set of petitions submitted to the city’s common council between 1731 and 1776. These petitions reveal that groups of residents regularly came together as neighbourhoods and approached the city magistrates with a variety of concerns about urban activities and the development of the city. This paper explores neighbourhood relationships through a close reading of these documents. I argue that New York’s eighteenth-century neighbourhoods can be understood as one peculiar form of the dynamic social networks that shaped cities in both early modern England and the wider Atlantic world. Neighbourhood networks, based on joint residence in the city and relationships of reciprocity and mutual obligation, provided ordinary inhabitants with political agency via a crucial mutual dependency between the city government and neighbourhood groups. Neighbourhood was thus one aspect of urban civic republicanism that was shaping governance in the city in the decades before ordinary New Yorkers got involved in the radical groups and activities associated with the Revolution. Colonial New York City was made up of neighbourhoods, but those neighbourhoods were not simply inert, discrete geographic spaces; they were actively-constructed, overlapping, dynamic human networks.
Political fault lines in late seventeenth-century New York City
(Megan Lindsay, Yale University/IHR)
My paper focuses on the emerging political factionalism in New York City which developed under the reign of the later Stuarts and intensified during Leisler’s Rebellion (1689-1691). During this rebellion, the colony of New York was rent between Leislerian and anti-Leislerian factions, and these political fault lines persisted for decades after Leisler (and his rebellion) died in 1691. Clearly, there was more at stake in this rebellion than ensuring that King William was affirmed as the rightful ruler of the colony.
While the entire colony of New York was divided by the rebellion, no city was more bitterly divided than New York City. Both Leisler and his political adversaries fought to convince the public that they offered the stable solution to the problems facing the city and the wider colony – a weakened economy, a divided society, and the increasing security threat posed by the French.
By examining not only these emerging political divisions in New York City, but also how they responded to political currents in London, Amsterdam, and Albany, my paper will provide a more accurate portrayal of the ideologies that split New Yorkers during Leisler’s Rebellion, and in the decades to come.
