Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [8]
Once forcibly appended to the rising British Empire, however, New York assumed a more prominent role in the global scheme of things. It became a vital seaport supplying agricultural products to England’s star colonial performers—the Caribbean sugar islands—while also serving the English as a strategic base for hemispheric military operations against the French, the latest entrants in the imperial sweepstakes.
After the American Revolution, New York emerged as the fledgling nation’s premier linkage point between industrializing Europe and its North American agricultural hinterland. The city adroitly positioned itself with respect to three of the most dynamic regions of the nineteenth century global economy—England’s manufacturing midlands, the cotton-producing slave South, and the agricultural Midwest—and it prospered by shipping cotton and wheat east while funneling labor, capital, manufactured and cultural goods west.
After the Civil War, the metropolis became the principal facilitator of America’s own industrialization and imperial (westward) expansion. Capital flowed through and from its great banking houses and stock exchanges to western rails, mines, land, and factories; it became the preeminent portal for immigrant laborers; and it exported the country’s industrial commodities as well as its traditional agricultural ones.
By century’s end, New York had gained the ability to direct, not just channel, America’s industrialization. Financiers like J. P. Morgan established nationwide corporations and housed them in the city, making Manhattan the country’s corporate headquarters. When World War I ended European hegemony, and the United States became a creditor nation, New York began to vie with London as fulcrum of the global economy.
It finally captured that position after World War II when the United States emerged as a superpower. In subsequent decades, when American corporations and banks expanded overseas, New York became headquarters for the new multinational economy; and the arrival of the United Nations made New York a global political capital as well as a financial one. When European and Japanese competitors revived in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the emergence of a more decentered transnational capitalism challenged New York’s former preeminence, but it remained most prominent among the handful of world cities directing the workings of the global capitalist order.
Since its inception, therefore, New York has been a nodal point on the global grid of an international economy, a vital conduit for flows of people, money, commodities, cultures, and information. Its citizens were always well aware of this, and in the intermittent jubilees we call Festivals of Connection, they hailed each development—ratification of the Constitution, opening of the Erie Canal, laying of the Atlantic Cable, Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris—that wove the city tighter into the networks of trade and communication on which its livelihood depended.
More than simply a point of confluence, however, New York was a place of ever-increasing potency in global affairs, and as the United States evolved from colony to empire, the city migrated from the edge to the center of the world.
CITY AND COUNTRY
In its relations with the country, New York traveled a more bell-shaped trajectory.
When still a Dutch town, tiny New Amsterdam was as peripheral to the continent as it was to the planet, and it affected relatively few people beyond the Indians with whom it traded or warred. When integrated into England’s empire, its impact grew as it drew an expanding hinterland into widening networks of regional and international commerce. New York became the political capital of the new nation