| Spatial mobility, whether free or coerced, was an increasingly prominent fact of life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America. This dissertation investigates an understudied aspect of that state of affairs by placing mobility infrastructures at the center of early American history. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, it traces the evolution of a complex system of social organization consisting of diverse mechanisms, channels, spaces, and networks of movement and exchange, and argues that that system was an integral component of social, economic and political development.;Challenging standard interpretations of early transportation as static, limited, and inconsequential, this dissertation demonstrates that mobility infrastructures shaped colonial and state development in three fundamental ways. First, networks of improved roads extended European settlement and commerce hundreds of miles inland, altering the ethnic composition of the borderlands and generating diversified internal economies. Second, colonial and imperial infrastructure projects sparked bitter inter-colonial rivalries over land, resources, and trade that would persist into the early national period. Third, disparate European-American and Native Americans understandings of the social function of transport created patterns of structural marginalization, which in turn generated conflict over control of the movement of people, goods, and information.;This dissertation makes several important contributions to the study of Early America. By showing the centrality of infrastructure to the settlement, expansion and integration of early American societies, it demonstrates that meaningful internal improvement began well before the transportation revolution of the nineteenth century. Similarly, it complements the growing body of scholarship on the movement of people, goods, ideas, institutions, and practices in the Atlantic world, showing how patterns of circulation normally associated with Atlantic communities were reproduced within North American colonies. Furthermore, in offering a more nuanced understanding of Native American systems and practices, it accords a meaningful place for Natives as active agents in the evolution of American transportation. Lastly, it contributes to the study of economic development in early North America, showing that infrastructure was critical to the diversification of inland economies and their integration into colonial, regional, and Atlantic markets. |
