Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [142]
Because the prices of imported British manufactures rose more slowly than the value of agricultural exports, the purchasing power of colonial Americans climbed throughout the later 1740s and 1750s, pushing their overall standard of living higher and higher. British exporters encouraged the trend by allowing colonial merchants, vendue houses, and even individuals to buy on credit. Merchants, in turn, extended credit to shopkeepers, who passed it on to artisans and farmers, drawing them as well into the international web of money and commerce. By 1760 or so the mainland colonies had run up some two million pounds in debts to English creditors; in another dozen years they would owe more than four million pounds. The residents of New York, meanwhile, became the leading American consumers of British wares.
Along with easy credit came restrictions aimed at protecting British merchants and manufacturers from colonial competition. In 1732 Parliament outlawed the exportation of American-made hats, and the Molasses Act of 1733 effectively prevented colonial merchants from trading with the French West Indies. In 1750 Parliament likewise prohibited the manufacture of iron products and certain classes of textiles in the colonies. Enforcement of these laws was lax, however, and many otherwise law-abiding colonial businessmen simply ignored them, even—perhaps especially—in time of war.
By 1750 New York was thriving again. The stores and countinghouses of Hanover Square, still the retail center, were stuffed with imported hardware, glassware, furniture, books, and clothing. Along Queen, Dock, Smith (William), Wall, Broad, Duke (Stone), and other nearby streets the houses of leading mercantile families—De Peysters, Beekmans, Livingstons, Philipses, Verplancks, Roosevelts, Crugers—presided over a lively hodgepodge of shops, taverns, and public markets. The Customs House showed 157 vessels registered out of the port, with a combined burden of sixty-four hundred tons; something on the order of twenty-five thousand tons of shipping entered and cleared it every year. A dozen years later, in 1762, the fleet consisted of 477 vessels with a combined burden of 19,500 tons, a threefold increase. Some 33,700 tons of shipping were by then passing through the port, providing employment for some thirty-six hundred seamen, nearly five times the number only fifteen years earlier.
The Rhinelander Sugar House, constructed 1768, photographed c. 1890. This massive stone building on the corner of Rose and Duane streets was one of the largest structures in the pre Revolutionary city and a tangible symbol of its prosperity after 1760. Like other New York “sugar houses,” it was used to refine the sugar produced by West Indian slave labor into the loaves and other products that were in high demand throughout the colonies as well as England. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Overall, the city’s population had now swelled to nearly eighteen thousand—almost twice what it had been in the 1740s. Philadelphia remained the largest North American city, with a population of 23,750. Boston, which actually lost population between 1740 and 1760, had slipped from second to third place with a population of 15,600.
REFINEMENT
When Dr. Alexander Hamilton of Philadelphia came up to New York in 1744, he often dined with the members of the Hungarian Club at Robert Todd’s tavern on Broad Street. It wasn’t, he reported, an easy thing to do. His companions seemed to think that “a man could not have a more sociable quality or