Mid-atlantic metropolises: From town to city in colonial New York and Philadelphia

Between their dramatically different beginnings in the seventeenth century and the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the cities of New York and Philadelphia grew from small villages on the fringes of empire to substantial imperial metropolises. Over the course of that period traditional European methods of urban governance were consistently challenged by urban inhabitants in a variety of ways. This dissertation argues that a comparative analysis of the complex relationships between legal, labor, and cultural formation in colonial New York City and Philadelphia will illustrate a dialectical historical process in both cities, as official and elite attempts to control subordinate groups reproduced the very problems of control such methods sought to contain. British colonists' desire for labor power resulted in a diversified and informal labor regime in which slavery, indentured servitude, and wage labor regularly produced a variety of conflicts in novel urban societies. The existence of such struggles were reflected in New York and Pennsylvania's legal systems, as laws regulating unfree laborers and increasingly draconian punishments against runaways and property offenders were implemented in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These laws had the effect of creating social groups for whom admittance to the traditional urban civic community became increasingly unlikely. Coinciding with the formation of unique urban subordinate groups was a cultural transformation initiated in the metropolis and imported to the colonies. New ideas concerning gentility and refinement as well as new forms of communication such as newspapers fostered exclusionary practices, while also devising new methods of surveillance. Embedded within this process were methods of resistance, subversion, and protest of the colonial order among the cities' laboring classes, as autonomous urban subcultures took shape. By the 1720s and 1730s and thereafter, such groups came to challenge urban order in historically unprecedented ways. An analysis of colonial New York City and Philadelphia provides both a comparative and regional framework to urban transformation in the Atlantic world, while the utilization of social and cultural historical methodologies demonstrates the complex interaction between material and cultural forces.