Urban Crucible

Urban Crucible

Introduction

Gary Nash in his book “Urban Crucible” has explained important facts and events about American history. He has made a significant contribution towards the understanding of prerevolutionary colonial society. Nash presents a powerful argument for a dual revolution thesis. He argues that the War of Independence in the port towns was accompanied by a profound social upheave!'. The upheaval struck all elements of society as even the lower classes were brought into politics. The stresses of revolution erupted along fault lines that had been firmly established in the prerevolutionary urban America. In fact, in many respects the revolution was an effort to meet the problems of an urban society, and particularly those of the port cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Much of the book seeks to compare the responses of the three largest colonial cities. The decline of Boston provided tensions that were not matched elsewhere. The gulf between the top and bottom widened as Bostonians dealt with the implications of military debts, the Great Awakening, economic depression and impressment.

Discussion

The Urban Crucible is an essentially two-dimensional analysis of the comparative development of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston between 1690 and 1776. One dimension considers the "urban, social process" and consists of six chapters comprising roughly 40 percent of the volume. Gary B. Nash's conception of social process is rather narrow: it does not include such topics as social geography, social infrastructures (as manifest in institutions, organizations, and social networks), or, except in a cursory way, material conditions and styles of life. Rather, he focuses very largely upon a single aspect of social development: the changing distribution of wealth and its interrelationship with shifting economic and demographic conditions. Although his data is much fuller for Philadelphia and Boston than for New York, his analysis of this subject makes a highly significant contribution to the re-construction of early American social history and demands the serious attention of all scholars in the field.

At a normal level, the author records an erratic but considerable transformation in the social dynamics of all three towns. In 1690, he argues, they were vertically organized and highly deferential. Elites were still in a formative stage; poverty was rare and confined mostly to widows, orphans, and the disabled; and extremes in wealth were not very great. Communal solidarity was high, and opportunity and economic expectations modest.. Among other results, according to Nash, communal solidarity and habits of deference gradually weakened, competition supplanted consensus, and social consciousness came to be based more "on horizontal rather than vertical divisions in society". Nash is careful to point out that this transformation did not occur according to some "even-paced or linear formula". As he shows in vivid detail, there were significant differences in timing and degree from town to town and from one period to another according to a number of variables, the most important of which seem to have been hinterland productive capacity, degree and nature of war involvement, and character of relationships to external ...