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For food and other provisions, New Yorkers shopped at the municipal markets, of which (by 1728) there were five along the East River waterfront—one at the end of each major street (Broad, Coenties Slip, Wall Street, Old Slip, and Maiden Lane). But much of what city households needed was grown and made by its women. Housewives, aided by daughters and perhaps female slaves, produced soap and candles, smoked meats, put up garden fruits and vegetables, spun flax, dyed yarn, wove cloth, and sewed clothes. Governor Cornbury observed in 1705 that New Yorkers made “very good linen” for domestic use as well as “very good serges [and] linsey-woolseys.” Several years later, the Board of Trade was advised to make them stop, because if they began to produce cloth for the market it would be “very much to the prejudice of our manufactures at home.”

Finally, New York’s developing connection to the West Indies brought a sharply higher frequency of epidemic disease. A ship from the islands was blamed for a major outbreak of smallpox in 1690, and after the turn of the century malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical scourges became an all too familiar part of life in the city. In 1702 a visitor informed William Penn that “at York they are visited with a mortal distemper . . . which sweeps off great numbers; tis such a visitation as that place, they say, never knew before, carrying off eight, ten, or twelve in one day.” Over a three-month period, smallpox and “malignant fever” claimed 570 lives—better than 10 percent of the population. Because well-to-do residents “left their usual habitations and Retired into the Country”—Lord Cornbury retreated as far as Albany—the poorer classes suffered a disproportionate share of the fatalities and the immiseration that often followed.

New York had plenty of doctors, among them Cadwallader Golden, who graduated from the University of Edinburgh and studied medicine in London before migrating to Philadelphia. When he moved up to New York in 1718, Golden discovered to his dismay that twenty “Chirurgeons” and two “Barber-Chirurgions” had been admitted into freemanship over the previous two decades. “The practice of Physick being undervalued,” Golden found it necessary to supplement his income by wholesaling imported drugs (and stockings) to local shopkeepers and apothecaries (Mrs. Golden occasionally moved some of his merchandise at retail). Of course it wasn’t only the oversupply of doctors that caused New Yorkers to undervalue “the practice of Physick,” for the current state of medical knowledge still put great stock in such useless practices as purging and bleeding. Colden’s own contribution to the problem was to take an active part in opposing the introduction of inoculation in 1722, although his colleagues eventually accepted the idea in time to minimize fatalities in the epidemic that struck the city in 1731.

CITY OF SLAVES

Nowhere was the impact of the West Indian trade on New York more obvious than in its burgeoning population of African slaves. Stuyvesant, York, Bellomont, and others had dreamed in years past of making the city an entrepot in the slave trade or exploiting slave labor for the production of commodities. Yet despite the best efforts of the Dutch West India Company and York’s Royal African Company, slavery remained a marginal feature of the municipal economy. Decade after decade, New York merchants took only a fitful interest in slaving, and the number of slaves on and around Manhattan rose more slowly than the rest of the population. When Stuyvesant surrendered in 1664, New Amsterdam counted about fifteen hundred whites, three hundred slaves (half the colony-wide total of six hundred), and seventy-five freedmen. Forty years later, the 1703 census found forty-four hundred whites and somewhere between six and seven hundred blacks in New York City alone—more than twice as many, but down from 20 percent to around 12 or 13 percent of the total (enslaved Indians, never common, were exceedingly rare after 1700).

Everything changed during the second and third decades of