The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution

Abstract

For purposes of review it is fruitful to examine Gary B. Nash's The Urban Crucible as if it were two books. One is a complex, largely descriptive study of the social, economic, and political history of the key port cities of colonial America--Boston, New York, and Philadelphia--from 1690 to 1776. The other, drawing its energy from the rich detail of the first, is an evolutionary study of the socio-economic origins of the American Revolution. The two are woven together by material, focus, and theme: usually neglected materials, such as wills, inventories of estates, tax rolls, poor relief lists, voting records, shipping logs, and records of construction starts are imaginatively used; the focus is on the 'lower orders' of colonial urban society; and emphasis is placed upon the theme of modernity. This is rendered as a fitful but clear movement in urban society in three possible directions: from corporatism to laissez-faire, from traditional, kinship, deferential society to acquisitive, atomistic, democratic society, or (in an ironic echo of Perry Miller) a declension from organic community to mechanistic, individualistic society. The 'first' book represents a much needed departure from the myriad town and regional studies which for more than a decade have dotted the historiography of early America. For although Nash scrupulously preserves the integrity of each city--making clear, for example, both that ethnic rivalries in Philadelphia were very different from political rivalries in New York and religious