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The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution

av Gary B. Nash

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This book boldly reinterprets colonial life and the origins of the American Revolution. While retaining all the main points of analysis and interpretation, the author has reduced the full complement of statistics, sources, and technical data contained in the original edition to serve the needs of general readers and undergraduates.… (mer)
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  AaltoSax | Dec 27, 2021 |
Chapters include "The Web of Seaport Life," "The Port Towns in and Era of War," "Urban Change in an Era of Peace," "War, Religious Revival, and Politics," "The Seven Years' War and Its Aftermath," "The Stamp Act" and "The Onset of Revolution"

The following notes are from the collection "Urban Wealth and Poverty in Pre-Revolutionary America" by Gary B. Nash in Stanley N. Katz and John M. Murrin, eds., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 4th ed. (New York, 1991).

"Historians of the national period have generally portrayed the colonial era as a time of peace and plenty, a golden age against which the conflict and competition of the nineteenth century could be measured. In part, of course, this assumes an American Revolution that was a war of independence from Great Britain, rather than a domestic social conflict. Indeed, one might argue that a comparable notion of declension from consensual, communitarian behavior to conflictual, individualist behavior has ~ been used to describe every transition in American history; seventeenth to eighteenth, eighteenth to nineteenth, nineteenth to twentieth. It is predictable that historians of the mid-twenty-first century will describe our own era in comparatively idealistic terms. But was it ever so?

This is the question raised by Gary Nash in his study of the distribution of wealth in eighteenth-century American cities. Nash finds a growing inequality in the distribution of wealth over the course of the century and a corresponding increase in indices of poverty. Cities like Boston, New York, and hiladelphia are transformed from communities in which economic opportunity was widely available and economic mobility quite general to communities in which the rich (though fewer) grew richer and the poor (though more numerous) grew poorer, in a context of declining opportl;Jnity for the impoverished. By the end of the colonial period, a startling contrast characterizes urban life - an existence of ostentatious luxury for the few and of abject want for quite a few.

Why should this have been so in an age where it is arguable that general levels of economic prosperity were slowly on the rise? Nash believes that the dislocating effects of economic development in the Atlantic economy has a highly differentiated impact upon disparate sectors of the urban population. For one thing, decreasing availability of nearby arable land forced laborers into the city rather than into nearby rural communities; for another, the
cycle of wartime boom and peacetime recession contorted "normal" economic behavior. The eighteenth-century cycle of war and peace (a phenomenon ignored by too many colonial historians) thus had a particularly transforming impact upon urban life and created conditions under which the underclasses might well have nourished resentment against an elite that had fattened itself on imperial trading privileges.

Nash thus describes the era following the Seven Years' War as one of radically diminished expectations for much of urban America. If he is correct in his analysis of urban poverty (and he admits that his conclusions are necessarily speculative), what can we conclude about the large majority of colonial Americans who lived farms, plantations, in villages and on the frontier? What meaning did urban poverty have for them? Where they relatively insulated from the cyclical effects of the Atlantic economy? Or, to put the matter in a very different way, did colonials have egalitarian aspirations; were they less deferential in their expectations than in their behavior? What, in other words, can we infer from demonstrations of economic inequality? Is this the point at which the historian must return to the literary sources Nash rejects at the beginning of his article?" ( )
  mdobe | Jan 14, 2018 |
Quite interesting ( )
  Harrod | Nov 29, 2008 |
Writing in the preface to Urban Crucible nearly twenty-five years ago, Gary Nash charges that very little historical scholarship focuses on colonial American urban centers or the subject of class. Aside from the work of descriptive historian Carl Bridenbaugh, Nash remains baffled at the lack of attention paid to cities during the Revolutionary Era. Moreover, he believes that the subject of class during the Revolutionary era has been unexplored due to “not only an aversion to Marxist conceptualizations of history but also the persistent myth that class relations did not matter in early America because there were no classes” (viii). Urban Crucible demystifies this myth of a classless colonial America through its in-depth comparative analysis of the ways in which a sense of class-consciousness emerged among what he terms “laboring people” in the urban seaport centers of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia from 1690-1776. Shifting the focus from a traditional reading of the American Revolutions’ origins which cites well known events like the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party as its impetus, Nash draws our attention to the smaller-scale and less publicized actions of each urban centers’ population of laboring poor.
Nash is careful to state that he is not anachronistically attempting to locate a unified laboring class that was fully cognizant of itself as occupying a unique class-based identity. Rather, he focuses on a pre-industrial sense of class in which individuals were just beginning to understand themselves in relation to specific groups based on similar economic and social status. His two-part study, Part I Growth and War, 1690-1740 and Part II, Conflict and Revolution, 1740-1776 locates the emergence of a class-consciousness within each city at different historical moments. Events including the Great Awakening, King Williams and Queen Anne’s War, the Stamp Act, and the introduction of paper currency influenced the economic and social structures of each city differently. The wars of King William and Queen Anne best illustrate the ways in which the cities’ internal economic and social structures were uniquely influenced by external events. For example, Boston’s tremendous poverty problem and its large war widow population was directly related to the large amount of laborers who were recruited to these war campaigns as well as to the flood of paper money that entered Massachusetts in an attempt to finance the war debt. In contrast, New York’s population did not participate in actually fighting the wars but participated economically, even engaging in piracy, while Philadelphia refused to participate, leaving that city the least affected.
Urban Crucible successfully demonstrates that laboring people were motivated to act politically and collectively through street demonstrations, mob action, mass meetings, boycotts and intimidation. Skillfully engaging unconventional evidence such as tax lists, probate records, employment inventories, and wage records in addition to traditional primary sources such as newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides enables Nash to reconstruct the lives of laboring groups of people whose culture was largely oral.
He successfully proves that there were in fact multiple layers of social and economic distinction within colonial American society, with poor people often resisting the actions of those above them. A few of his examples include a discussion of the refusal of Philadelphia’s poor to succumb to the strictures and toil of the Quaker’s Bettering House and an account of New York artisans resisting aristocratic government by turning out in droves to vote for men of their own rank. Some of the most vivid and striking portions of the book are the accounts of the ways in which gentry power was challenged in Boston, including the successful defeat of a public market instituted and regulated by the wealthy through boycott and mob action, and an attack on Thomas Hutchinson’s private property during the Stamp Act riots. In fact, Nash’s work on Boston alone would have made both a fascinating and comprehensive study of an unexplored and unique historical phenomenon. Indeed, he argues that due to Boston’s extreme poverty and wider rich vs. poor dichotomy, that city’s laboring classes can at times be characterized as more vocal and participatory than New York’s or Philadelphia’s. Occasionally it seems like Nash’s work on New York and Philadelphia, although well-researched, doesn’t bear enough weight for a comparative study, particularly with sentences like these, “One searches in vain for expressions of such antipathy for the wealthy and for evidence of street politics in New York or Philadelphia during the 1740’s” (227). However, in spite of this shortcoming, Urban Crucible remains a dense and thorough account of an important subject.
Toward the end of Urban Crucible Nash points to an important historical moment when he argues that after 1765 a shift occurred whereby political leaders employed the language of “the people” in order to persuade laboring people to rally in the unified fight for freedom from England. He writes, “Thus the forging of class consciousness and demands for a new social order, which burst forth in 1765 and might have been expected to crystallize in the most turbulent and disordered decade in Boston’s history, were halted in their tracks” (362). This shift to the widening of the category of “the people” is the focus of David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: the Making of American nationalism, 1776-1820. A more recent scholar of Revolutionary America, he begins with a discussion of how Federalists redirected the anti-gentry energies of the anti-Federalists into anti-British and pro-patriotic activities using celebration and street theater to create a language of “the people”. Although Waldstreicher also spends a great deal of time analyzing the ways in which the Federalist’s attempt to shape and define nationalism was challenged by other partisan groups, turning back to Urban Crucible is a powerful reminder to scholars of colonial America of the highly contested and socially divided terrain that defined the Revolutionary Era. ( )
  NomiKay | Apr 27, 2007 |
Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the
Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Must historians always look at history through the eyes of famous political leaders, usually men? What can historians learn from examining the past from the perspective of the “lesser€? members of society? As the New Social History methodology rose to prominence in the 1970s, questions such as these took center stage. Around the same time, New Left historians, such as Jesse Lemisch and Alfred Young, began to focus on the various ways that capitalism affected American society. In The Urban Crucible, Gary Nash works within these two methodologies, assaying the life of the colonies’ lower classes, by continuously tracing the narrowing of opportunities and the rise of poverty within these classes (ix). In his analysis of these themes, Nash argues “that many urban Americans, living amidst historical forces that were transforming the social landscape, came to perceive antagonistic divisions based on economic and social position; that they began to struggle around these conflicting interests; and that through these struggles they developed a consciousness of classâ€? (x). While Nash’s analysis of the colonial worlds of socioeconomics and politics is insightful and compelling, his claims of class consciousness seem a bit overstated.
As he seeks to understand the patterns of development within colonial America’s three largest port cities, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Nash alternately focuses on socioeconomic changes in the respective cities and the evolving political ideologies of the colonials. To accomplish this, he spends the first two chapters addressing the “traditionalâ€? socioeconomic and political climate of these urban centers. Once these “traditionalâ€? norms are established, he then proceeds to show the ways in which they were challenged over the next eighty years culminating in the War for Independence. Actually, in Nash’s opinion, the majority of the challenges to these standards surfaced as a result of the multiple wars that threatened colonial society.
The first of these influential wars were King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War. While these wars had overall positive effects on the economies of these cities, they also prompted a serious poverty problem in Boston, though not in New York and Philadelphia. These wars, however, did facilitate a break with the traditional understanding of politics, pushing the laboring classes to focus more on private interests rather than the public good. Such new spirits of discontent, both socioeconomically and politically, continued throughout the next fifty years, even though at times the discontentment was not as intense.
The period from Queen Anne’s War to the Seven Years War was such a period of lessened discontentment. This is not to say that disapproval did not exist, though. On the contrary, the urban economies suffered in the interwar period. As Nash claims, “peace brought no guarantee of prosperity and stabilityâ€? (102). The one city that clearly shows the difficulties of the period of peace is Boston. From the economic standpoint, Boston’s laboring class suffered due to the cities’ population growth, the effects of epidemic diseases, and the decline of a wartime economy. “These difficulties threw the interests of different social and occupational groups into sharp conflict and set the stage for further mutations in the practice and ideology of politicsâ€? (129). Again, Boston leads the way in this political evolution.
With the new wars of the 1730s, further changes are evident in the colonial seaports. Perhaps the primary change caused by these wars, according to Nash, is the decline of Boston’s importance. As Boston’s colonial significance wanes, the opportunities available to its laboring classes narrow and poverty becomes a greater problem in the city. While Boston was declining in socioeconomic importance, Philadelphia and New York experienced a surge in prosperity. Both the decline and the surge continued the transformation of politics from the public good to private interests. Nash contends that this change was a direct result of the religious revivalism of the First Great Awakening, especially the radical evangelicalism of Gilbert Tennent and James Davenport. In his estimation, the political antiauthoritarianism of this period was an extension of “one of the central social thrusts of evangelicalism’ (223). Again, Philadelphia and New York did not experience the First Great Awakening in the same way. Thus, their political climates were not affected in the same manner as that of Boston.
Up to the point of the Seven Years War, Boston experienced the effects of wars differently than Philadelphia and New York. With the Seven Years War, “all three port towns suffered a general depression of great severityâ€? (233). For this reason, Nash claims this war is the watershed event of the period, “bringing together all the tendencies of the past seven decades and setting the maritime centers on a course from which there would be not return short to revolutionâ€? (234). As each of the cities experienced periods of depression following the Seven Years War, the distinctions between the rich and the poor became more evident, making the new urban elite more obvious to the laboring classes. Nash asserts that as these class distinctions became more apparent the realm of politics became a more tenuous world, with more and more revolutionary protests taking place.
The next “warâ€? Nash treats is the Stamp Act Crisis. Seeing the Stamp Act crisis as “a key to comprehending the course of revolutionary politicsâ€? in the next few years, he focuses out the ways in which the laboring classes in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York responded to the depression and poverty that the revolutionary disturbances of the act caused. As with the other periods of war, the Stamp Act crisis fostered an even greater divide between the various classes in the socioeconomic world of the urban ports. This separation magnified the narrower opportunities and the greater poverty of these cities. Consequently, the laboring classes responded politically by revolting against members of the elite class, such as Thomas Hutchinson. Nash concludes with the claim that this class consciousness proceeded in the only logical direction, that of revolution.
In the end, Nash compellingly demonstrates the types of development likely occurring within the major urban environs of the colonies. He does not clearly prove that these changes, whether socioeconomical or political, prompted the formation of a distinct class consciousness, however. For instance, the First Great Awakening leads people to question specific person in authority, but not necessarily authority in general. Following the Stamp Act, Boston colonials lashed out at Thomas Hutchinson. One may legitimately wonder, however, whether the burning of his home necessarily represented the act of a “class.â€? How defiant were laborers becoming during the colonial period? Did their levels of defiance really change? Such questions are the focus of the Journal of American History’s Roundtable forum, which shows how recent scholarship has qualified some of Nash’s nuanced argument. Also, John Murrin in “Political Developmentsâ€? and Jon Butler in Becoming America help make Nash’s argument concerning the socioeconomical and political developments of the era more acceptable.
  rbailey | Oct 7, 2005 |
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Although eighteenth century America was predominately a rural, agriculltural society, its seaboard commerical cities were he cutting edge of economic, social and political change.
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This book boldly reinterprets colonial life and the origins of the American Revolution. While retaining all the main points of analysis and interpretation, the author has reduced the full complement of statistics, sources, and technical data contained in the original edition to serve the needs of general readers and undergraduates.

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