The First English Towns of North America

Abstract

LTHOUGH geographers have illuminated the contemporary urban scene in Anglo-America, geographical insights dwindle at an accelerating pace as we move back toward the seventeenth century-the dark ages of American urban geography.1 To insist that geographers redress this imbalance is pointless, given the pressing urban problems of the 1970's, and impractical, owing to the discipline's traditional bias toward present landscapes and spatial patterns. In such an intellectual context, the seventeenth century is remote indeed. Yet neglect of this era places geographers in the curious position of having no satisfactory explanation for the locational origins and early growth of several important cities in the contemporary urban system. New Amsterdam (New York), Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston are just a few of the places that had beginnings on the first European frontier, and their historical durability is reason enough for inquiry and interpretation. A large step in that direction is James E. Vance's mercantile model of urban systems.2 Vance asserts, principally on evidence assembled from the colonial period, that trade and commerce in staple crops regulated the location and early growth of frontier towns. The adequacy of a trade interpretation of urban development on the Atlantic Seaboard is, however, open to question. After a brief review of Vance's model and the historical evidence for and against it, I shall offer an urban model more appropriate to the early English frontier towns. Whereas Vance's model emphasizes trade, the monopolist-migration model presented here stresses the role of political-economic and demographic variables. The generality of both models for other frontiers is discussed in the conclusion.