Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [7]
Nor would New York become a great governmental hub, with grand baroque avenues radiating out from imposing seats of state power. There was no regal court to dispense largesse to all comers or lure peasants to bask in its splendors. No monarch founded seats of learning so preeminent as to attract truth-seekers from the ends of the earth. Its civic chieftains would be merchants, bankers, landlords, lawyers; its mightiest buildings, office towers.
As the twenty-four-dollar saga suggests, New York would become a city of deal-makers, a city of commerce, a City of Capital. This book will trace the nature and consequences of that development.
POINTS OF VIEW
We are going to present New York’s story as a narrative. Our book will journey along through time, taking each moment on its own terms, respecting its uniqueness. We will adopt the perspective of contemporaries as we relate their experiences, remaining mostly in their “now.” Yet, like all histories, Gotham is not the simple reflection of an underlying reality, but a construction. The narrative embodies our selections, our silences. It is organized around patterns we discern amid the swirl of events.
So what’s our take, our angle, our shtick? Do we concentrate on a particular slice of the city’s story? Is this primarily an economic history? Social? Cultural? Intellectual? Political? In truth it’s all of the above, or, more precisely, it’s about making connections between aspects of municipal life that are usually, of necessity, best studied in isolation. This book is only possible because in recent decades a host of scholars has investigated afresh every imaginable aspect of New York’s history: sex and sewer systems, finance and architecture, immigration and politics, poetry and crime. Our intention is to suture these partial stories together and present a picture of urban life as a rounded whole, something that probably only novelists can really do well but that nevertheless seems a goal worth aspiring to.
Do we then have a central argument that has allowed us to reduce New York’s mammoth story—especially as defined in such an all-encompassing fashion—to manageable (if hefty) proportions? In fact, no overarching plot line or tidy thesis unfolds incrementally throughout this book; the history of New York is not reducible to a sound bite or bumper sticker. Every page, however, does bear the mark of our central conviction: that it is impossible to understand the history of New York City by looking only at the history of New York City, by focusing, that is, exclusively on events that transpired within the boundaries of what are now its five boroughs. It’s hard to understand any place in isolation but utterly hopeless here, because linkages—connections to the wider world—have been key to the city’s development.
We do not believe that municipal history was determined from the outside. Rather our claim is that external events provided the context within which the men and women of New York, in conflict and compromise, repeatedly reshaped their city. It seems useful, however, to summarize at the outset those framing forces we think had the greatest impact on local actors. Those inclined to get on with the narrative can turn immediately to chapter i, which takes up the prehistory of the Primal Deal—recounting Europeans’ expansion into the New York area and chronicling their fateful intersection with local peoples. But for those who would prefer to reconnoiter the vast forest that lies ahead before plunging off into its trees, we offer in the remainder of this introduction a sketch of some of our principal arguments.
EDGE TO CENTER
At our highest level of analysis, we chart the ways New York’s development has been crucially shaped by its shifting position in an evolving global economy.
From its beginnings as a constellation of Indian communities encamped around the mouth of the Hudson River, the area was pulled into the imperial world system Europeans had begun fashioning in the aftermath of Columbus’s voyages. Founded as a trading post on the periphery