ECONOMIC FUNCTION AND THE

GROWTH OF AMERICAN PORT

TOWNS IN THE EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY

I. Introduction*

URBAN history is very much alive today as a field of
serious research and intellectual interest in Britain and
America. For students of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, however, the results do not seem as impressive as those
for some earlier and later centuries. No city of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries has received the continuing historiographic
attention bestowed upon Renaissance Florence by historians since
the days of Davidsohn.1 Scholars approaching the great towns of
these centuries have most often lacked a synthetic vision or an in-
tegrative model of processed have tended to work in (JolKJepLual
isolation upon one or another aspect of town life: architecture and
town planning; urban political institutions and political life; de-
mography; social structure; economic activity. It is of course all
too easy to criticize: frequently the lack of previous work on the

*This paper was originally presented to the First Soviet-American Historical Collo-
quium held in Moscow in October 1972. With this audience in mind, the author con-
fined his footnote references to the more important and readily available printed materi-
als. He deliberately excluded references to manuscript sources (except for statistics), par-
ticularly eighteenth-century mercantile records which he has been studying for more
than twenty years and which constitute a general background to many of his observations
on mercantile practice. He is particularly indebted to his colleague Professor John Shy for
many helpful suggestions. For a comparable treatment of this subject in a Later period, cf.
David T. Gikhrist, ed., Tlie Growth oftlie Seaport Cities, 1790-1825 (Charlottesville, Va.,
1967).

i. E.g., Robert Davidsohn, Ceschichte van Florenz, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1896-1927); Gene
A. Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, 1343-1378 (Princteon, 1962); Marvin B. Becker,
Florence in Transition, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1967-1968).

123