Abstract
In a recent article, sociologist Saskia Sassen highlights the analytical benefits of examining globalization through the lens of the city. Such an approach, she claims, reintroduces place into a debate that has a tendency to focus on “broader and more diffuse homogenizing dynamics.” 1 An analysis grounded on place, conversely, “allows us to recapture people, workers, communities, and more specifically, the many different work cultures, besides the corporate culture, involved in the work of globalization.” 2 The city, therefore, emerges in Sassen’s argument as the site of many of the human processes that support the exchanges and interconnectedness that characterize globalization. Whether by housing financial institutions, communication services, and high-tech industries; concentrating a labor force and specialized knowledge; or fostering transnational identities and new material cultures, cities form the backbone of an economic, political, cultural, and material infrastructure that has both promoted and enabled globalization.
Sassen’s work, similar to that of other scholars of the global city, is chronologically focused on modern cities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She specifically notes that her arguments fit the contemporary period, and she distinguishes the global city of our recent and current times from what could be called world cities of previous historical periods. Indeed, by emphasizing the roles that technology, immigration, transnational identities, and other factors play in placing the city at the center of a geography of globalization, she firmly situates her analysis in current realities. Nevertheless, the idea of locating globalizing processes within the physical space of the city offers a parameter of analysis that seems useful to apply to other chronological periods. Should the city as the site of human processes that support global exchanges also be the lens through which one examines, for instance, the emergence of imperial and world systems in the early modern period? Moreover, if, as Carl Abbott has claimed, “to study the history of cities is essentially to study the creation and character of the modern and, perhaps, the post-modern world,” could Sassen’s global city have had its roots in the city of the past? 3 Three recent studies of early modern American cities suggest that emerging patterns of economic, cultural, and material interconnectedness, commonly associated with globalization, can indeed be located within the space of the early modern city. Furthermore, studies of this urban past reveal something about the historical trajectory of the present-day global city.
In Building Charleston, A Town In-Between, and Scraping By, historians Emma Hart, Judith Ridner, and Seth Rockman, respectively, have produced well-researched and insightful stories of urban spaces and experiences that highlight the centrality of cities in shaping and explaining the emergence of an increasingly interconnected modern world. Through her work on eighteenth-century Charleston, Hart explains how a colonial port city became an important node within a complex network of British Atlantic towns that enabled the circulation of goods, tastes, and ideas and the eventual formation of a common urban middling class within the British Empire. Focusing on Carlisle at the time of that town’s creation and early development, Ridner underscores the role that interior towns played in creating an eighteenth-century Atlantic urban network that reached beyond the eastern coast to create sometimes unexpected new geographies of economic, political, and cultural exchanges. Finally, in his powerful portrayal of the economic realities of the laboring poor in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Baltimore, Rockman sheds light on the labor arrangements and working experiences that allowed cities to participate in global economic systems that, in turn, produced the deep inequalities that have plagued modern urban centers ever since. Together, these three works help us think about the ways in which cities, through the development of urban space, economic practices, labor relations, and social identities, tied late-colonial and early-American societies to the broader world and both shaped and were shaped by that interconnection.
The urban space that emerges in these books is the product of a complex exchange between urban agents of various origins and their broader political, economic, and cultural universe. Charleston and Carlisle, for instance, were created to fulfill the vision that the proprietors of South Carolina and Pennsylvania, respectively, had for their domains. A part of the early plans for the development of South Carolina, Charles Towne (as Charleston was called during the colonial period) was designed to bring economic success and civilized development to the region. The town’s port would facilitate the exchange of goods between settlers and metropolitan merchants, promoting a healthy and profitable commerce; the construction of an orderly space, following the latest urban and architectural trends used to rebuild London after the great fire of 1666, would bring civilization to the wilderness. The tendency to associate urbanized space with order and economic prosperity also guided the actions of proprietors and their agents in Maryland, Baltimore being but one example of that colony’s urbanizing efforts. Thomas Penn, William Penn’s heir and one of the proprietors of Pennsylvania, also saw towns as a tool to promote development and, moreover, control in his colony. Based on that premise, Penn spearheaded the effort to create and build Carlisle in the colony’s western interior. He expected the town to bring government and law to a region that had economic potential but too much autonomy, and thus nurture that potential while securing access to its economic promises. The creation histories of Charleston, Baltimore, and Carlisle were, therefore, strongly tied to the economic, political, and cultural interests and visions of colonial proprietors and their agents. This group, while acting on behalf of British imperial expansionism, reinforced what Hart refers to as a British “urban renaissance” and a belief that “society would be successful only with towns at its heart” (37).
Still, vision and intent on the part of British urban developers were not enough to ensure actual urban development on the ground. As the histories of Charleston, Carlisle, and Baltimore reveal, urbanization in the early modern British colonies was the result of a series of negotiations among a variety of local, regional, and transatlantic urbanizing agents regarding the meaning and form of the urban space. The site of Carlisle, the town’s urban layout, and the eventual construction of urban buildings and spaces, for instance, were constantly adjusted to meet local realities. As Ridner argues, existing patterns of use of space, mobility, and trade west of the Susquehanna River determined which site would be the most promising for the town. The choice of where to create a city was thus not purely the result of a ruling elite’s arbitrary decision, but one based on local practices. Similarly, Carlisle’s planned grid pattern, main square, public buildings, and streets named after English historical and military figures—an attempt to imprint English civilization on the wilderness—accommodated the local inhabitants’ own priorities, resources, and expectations of urban living. Instead of the central courthouse, jail, market, and Anglican church of the original town plan, the first public buildings erected in Carlisle were meeting houses, taverns, and inns; instead of roads linking the town exclusively to eastern Pennsylvania settlements and Philadelphia, town and local residents built roads connecting Carlisle to its southern interior and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay and Baltimore. If Carlisle was an artifact, as Ridner calls it, of Penn’s imperial project, extending his political reach into the interior while supporting the growth of a regional trade, it was also very much the product of local and regional processes and interests.
Charleston, like Carlisle, was envisioned as a tool for the creation of civilized spaces of trade, which, in turn, could promote the economic and political goals of its creators. The town’s layout, Hart shows, was inspired by urbanizing projects in Britain, particularly the rebuilding of London after the great fire. By placing the early history of Charleston within a broader history of British urban development, she challenges a common narrative that sees colonial southern cities as a by-product of plantation-based societies. Instead, she argues convincingly for an interpretation that situates Charleston’s creation, planning, and development within a broader process of urbanization that was noticeable throughout the British Atlantic. Her analysis, however, does not lose sight of the ways in which local realities and wills intersected with Atlantic processes. While Charleston, as she demonstrates, developed physically, architecturally, and economically in ways that corresponded with the lord proprietors’ plans, much of that development was in response to and an initiative of the different groups of people who settled the town. Thus, French Huguenots, Barbadian migrants, and African slaves, as much as British urban planners, left their own imprint on the town’s landscape as they pursued their distinct goals and lent their labor and resources to the construction of the town’s physical space.
The story of Baltimore told by Rockman does not focus on the origins and beginnings of the city, as is the case in the other two books. Nevertheless, evidence of the ways in which local, national, and Atlantic actors and interests intersected to shape the city’s urban space emerges quite clearly in the discussion of the city’s laboring poor, particularly in the chapter about the mud-machinists in charge of dredging the city’s inner harbor. Here, the city’s involvement in a global trade is revealed to have depended in part on the labor of men who toiled in very poor conditions to ensure that oceangoing vessels were able to dock and load and unload their wares by the city’s commercial center. These men’s desperate need for wages and the city’s merchant and ruling classes’ desire to maintain Baltimore’s inner harbor as commercially active came together to preserve an urban space that in many ways defined the city’s landscape. Similarly, in his discussion of the living conditions and survival routine of the urban poor, Rockman reveals a story of how destitution, caused by converging world and local realities, shaped the urban space. Because national and transnational dynamics (e.g., migration to Baltimore, the commodification of labor through slavery, and the political power of a globally connected financial elite) conspired to keep wages low, denying workers the means to support themselves and their families, Baltimore’s poorest citizens turned to the city to survive. They transformed public spaces, streets, and town lots into spaces of informal or illegal trade, pigpens, makeshift resting grounds for their dead, and sites of collection of discarded goods. In the process, they helped to fashion the urban space, its appearance, uses, and meaning, in much the same way as colonial proprietors, elites, and middling groups, who feature more saliently in Ridner’s and Hart’s narratives, did.
While a discussion of the creation of urban space is important to the analysis developed in these three works, the development of certain economic and labor practices and their impact on the trajectories of these cities and their inhabitants emerge as the more central themes of the books. All three focus extensively on the rise of urban markets, trading networks, manufacturing and service businesses, and the labor relationships that permeated these different elements of the urban economy. They uncover in this manner the connections between the economic choices (or lack of choice) of Charleston’s, Carlisle’s, and Baltimore’s citizens and these cities’ urban character, and, ultimately, their placement within an increasingly interconnected world.
In her discussion of the economic pursuits of different urban actors in Charleston, Hart examines the different layers of commercial exchange supported by the town’s merchants, artisans, and slaves. The efforts they made to circulate manufactured goods, refurbish household and personal items, and supply local demands through shops, auction houses, and door-to-door services ensured that urban consumers, from planters to slaves, had access to similar types of goods. This economic behavior transformed Charleston into an important economic hub that, more than serving the proprietors’ early intent of a port of exportation for plantation crops, connected its inhabitants to the vaster economic and commercial world of a British “empire of goods” (40). Charleston’s rising economic prominence in the 1730s and 1740s, moreover, resulted in a changed relationship between the town and its hinterland. While during the town’s early years, residents remained economically afloat by serving the plantation economy, during this period the town offered enough economic opportunities to become itself a source of wealth to urban investors. As Hart skillfully illustrates, the evolution of laws regulating urban development, ownership of land, and mortgage practices within the British Atlantic world sparked speculation in urban property and led to the rise of a profitable construction industry. Responding to a demand for safer and more sophisticated buildings (particularly after Charleston experienced its own fire), and benefitting from easier access to loans and credit that, after being invested in urban improvements, yielded healthy returns, artisans turned building contractors, and the laborers they employed, grew increasingly independent from the economic patronage of planters. Their economic choices and behavior pushed them closer, instead, to their counterparts in other British towns with whom they shared materials, plans, and ideas for the urban space, and thus placed Charleston within a British Atlantic network of urban environments.
The economic behavior of the inhabitants of Carlisle also emerges in Ridner’s analysis as the key to understanding that town’s character as an urban center and its connection with the broader world, or, in her own words, its “in-betweeness.” Carlisle, while not exactly the fulfillment of Thomas Penn’s vision, became an important link between the Atlantic world to the east and the colonial western interior. Thanks to the economic pursuits of its commercial agents, artisans, service providers, and laborers, the town assumed shortly after its creation the role of midway station and supplier of goods and services to those involved in the fur trade. Carlisle also became, for similar reasons, an important base for militiamen, soldiers, and refugees during the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Uprising. Within its first two decades of existence, Carlisle and its citizens thus helped to stretch westward the economic, military, and political interests and reach of eastern traders, investors, and colonial authorities.
The revolutionary and postindependence periods also saw the citizens of Carlisle pursue economic opportunities that reinforced, while also reconfiguring, the town’s in-betweeness. The chosen site for a jail for war prisoners and an armory, Carlisle became an important center of wartime efforts. Carlisle’s inhabitants, moreover, by lending their services, skills, and resources to support these institutions, found themselves fulfilling a more central role in the revolutionary cause than would have otherwise been the case. That role, while at times serving and at others being a sacrifice of their economic interests, tied them more tightly to the broader events and issues that were affecting the colonies and the world beyond them. After the war, as Carlisle rebuilt its economy, town merchants who became involved in the grain trade began distributing flour to cities of the western interior and down the Mississippi River to Natchez and ultimately New Orleans. Artisans and entrepreneurs developed, among other pursuits, a local textile and clothing industry that transformed rural products (cotton, hide, and dye plants) into commodities that could be traded within the region and to other towns. These different economic actors thus contributed to preserving the town’s in-between character, connecting it to a global network of urban sites and helping to disseminate consumer goods and taste throughout the American interior. In the process, these men and women shaped a geography of economic and cultural exchange that far exceeded the town creators’ initial goal of having it connect Philadelphia and its hinterland.
Whereas Hart and Ridner unveil how the economic choices of middling to elite groups supported a rising global interconnectedness, Rockman focuses instead on the lack of economic choices of laboring groups as resulting from and reinforcing global interconnectedness. One of the book’s main premises is that middle- and upper-class prosperity in the post-revolutionary United States was achieved at the expensive of laboring groups. He argues that the fifty-year period between 1790 and 1840 witnessed the rise of an urban class of investors and entrepreneurs who, finding themselves at the mercy of an increasingly globalized capitalist world in which access to credit, commodities, and markets was often beyond their grasp, tried to exercise as much control as possible over the available labor force. Consequently, a diverse group of workers comprising poor whites, European immigrants, and free and enslaved blacks faced a reality in which their lack of education, skills, and connections that might have placed them on the profitable side of global economic activities left them with very little economic choice. Forced to accept the working conditions and low wages that came with whatever form of employment they found, they struggled to survive even as their labor continued to support the industries, commerce, and urban functions that sustained Baltimore’s place within an expanding world system.
Of particular interest in Rockman’s work is his discussion of slavery. He argues that slavery played an important role in this urban order not merely as a labor regime but also as a property regime. Because slaves had value as commodities, they were a source of credit and capital to their owners. Indeed, the economic relationship between Baltimore and the emerging plantation economies reinforced this urban function of slavery: as the demand for slave workers in the South increased, Baltimore slave owners counted on handsome returns for their investment in slave property. Also important to the urban order was the nature of slavery as a social institution predicated on the unequal power relationship between a wealthy, influential white class of employers and a dependent, socially marginal class of workers. The commodification of labor within a deeply unequal social order, which tied the value of labor to market forces and undermined workers’ ability to politicize wages, was both useful and desirable to Baltimore employers. Finally, the fiction that there existed a clear-cut distinction between free and slave labor, common throughout the Atlantic world, entrenched the belief that free persons, who enjoyed the independence and autonomy to participate in the market economy, could successfully pursue their own prosperity. In reality, this belief overshadowed the fact that the urban poor had very little choice when selling their labor in the market. Their lack of choice, however, was often viewed as lack of industriousness or moral fiber. By making slavery, labor exploitation, and social inequality features, rather than temporary imperfections, of capitalism, Rockman demonstrates how manual and unskilled labor supported economic development and increase of wealth in the early republic. He also sheds light on a broader historical process that ties the emergence of global interconnectedness to old and new manifestations of power inequality.
A final contribution of Hart, Ridner, and Rockman is understanding how human processes shaped growing global interconnectedness in the past, and perhaps foreshadowed more recent or present developments. This is particularly true in their discussion of the development of social identities and their political ramifications in early modern cities. In her discussion of the global city, Sassen cogitates that urban populations, whose connection to the city is framed by their participation in transnational economic structures, cultural institutions, and even households, are forging a new geography of politics that radiates from the city itself, rather than the nation. 4 This proposition invites historians to think about the role that urban experiences and relationships played in shaping a group’s sense of identity, interests, and, ultimately, political inclinations in the early modern period.
Hart’s discussion of the rise of a middling class of merchants, artisans, and entrepreneurs, who identified economically, culturally, and socially with their urban counterparts in the British Atlantic, suggests one way in which the city shaped new social and political identities. Informed by their experiences with the city, their unique economic trajectory, and their role in physically transforming the cityscape, this urban elite became increasingly alienated from the nearby planter elite and eventually politically opposed to them. Similarly, middling groups in Carlisle, as they developed their own understanding of the relevance of the town’s economic and political in-betweeness, forged their own ideas about the meaning of the town’s participation in broader commercial and political networks and how it should benefit townspeople. That relationship to the town, and its impact on the formation of their social and political identity, pitted this group against local and state elites at different moments of political tension in the eighteenth century. Finally, Rockman’s discussion of the Baltimore Almshouse reveals how labor and social relations that had their origins in the city contributed to shape middle- and upper-class identity in ways that supported the burgeoning capitalist order. While examples of worker solidarity and political consciousness happened, such as the different strikes of the 1820s and 1830s (including a seamstress strike), poverty often forced Baltimore’s laboring class to rely on charity to survive. Unable to achieve higher recognition of the value of their labor, and having to perform the part of the deserving poor to receive charitable assistance, Baltimore’s laborers reinforced the elite and middling classes’ image of themselves as good citizens whose political responsibility toward the underprivileged did not involve protecting workers’ rights. These and other examples of social interactions examined in the three books reveal the city as a site of origin for so many political ideas and positions that fed political debates and developments of the late colonial and early national periods. Moreover, born of the social experiences of city dwellers, these political views were often the product of peoples’ identification with issues that connected them to a makeshift network of other towns or faraway hinterlands, rather than to the concerns of their more immediate neighbors.As we consider the origins of our current age of globalization, it might seem easier to explain the economic, cultural, and material interconnectedness we experience today as being the product of twentieth-century financial institutions, communication, and technology. Yet, the roots of this global world can be found in the societies and human behaviors of a more distant past. Economic actors of the early modern period, for instance, devised the practices of transforming agricultural production in one part of the world into credit to pursue commercial exchanges in another, of securing cheap labor from halfway across the world to increase margin profits, and of relying on foreign importations to expand a local or regional consumer market. And while the intricacies of today’s global economy are sometimes too complex for some historians of the early modern period to grasp, economic practices and processes that characterize our global economy today bear a strong resemblance to practices and processes that characterized the early modern world. The place of cities and the pursuits of city dwellers in crafting global exchanges and participation in global urban networks is one example.