The Urban Crucible by Gary Nash

Introduction of Book

This book is a major reinterpretation of urban life in eighteenth-century America. Drawing both on recent scholarship and his own detailed research, Gary B Nash has written a masterful synthesis of the economic, social, and political history of prerevolutionary America's three largest cities—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Conceiving of the colonial cities as “dynamic loci of change,” Nash probes deeply into the sources of economic and social change and carefully identify the political consequences of these changes. The result is a book that far surpasses in insight and analysis the earlier and primarily descriptive studies of the colonial seaports by Carl Bridenbaugh (Gary, 281).

Description

Essentially, The Urban Crucible is an attempt to analyze and understand the “social morphology” of the three seaport cities through an examination of class One of his main tasks, Nash writes, is to demonstrate that many colonial urbanites .came to perceive antagonistic divisions based on economic and social position; that they began to struggle around these conflicting interest;? and that through these struggles they developed a consciousness of class.” Although each city differed from the others in certain respects, most striking is the similar pattern of social change which prevailed in all three (Gary, 281). At the end of the seventeenth century, for instance, colonial urban society was clearly structured and deferential. People at every layer of society generally shared certain assumptions about the need for social harmony, good government, and personal liberty. Yet in each town, when men in authority challenged accepted assumptions and ideals (as in the Dominion of New England), the middle and lower classes overcame deferential attitudes and asserted their collective power in the streets to restore the old order (as in Boston and New York during the Glorious Revolution).

Similarly, the seaport economies were adversely affected by the colonial wars of the eighteenth century, which often brought depression, inflation, unemployment, and poverty Simultaneously, the rise of a market economy undermined previously shared ideals of social order, economic justice, and the mutual obligation of classes Society became more stratified, as some profited at the expense of others. Changing economic conditions and growing economic insecurity led to lower-class discontent, the decline of deference, and the rise of a popular and participatory politics (Gary, 281).

As the artisans and working classes developed an increasingly radical political consciousness, they began to take charge of their lives in new and dramatic ways while Nash ends his book in 1775, the implications of his analysis for understanding the causes of the American Revolution are obvious. The Revolution, Nash contends, “is best understood if ideological principles and economic interests are seen as intimately conjoined “while dramatic events such as the Stamp Act riots, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and armed conflict at Lexington and Concord have captured the attention of historians, Nash argues that underlying social and economic processes were silently at work creating a world in which revolution was possible (Gary, 281).

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