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Without New York, which city took up the mantle as the center of commerce and manufacture in the Northeast? Does Boston become the immigrant destination that it would become with the Irish famine to become such a center? Would Philadelphia or Baltimore become great centers of industry and capital? And if not, isn't the balance of power between the slavery-driven economies of the South and the manufacture-driven economies of the North upset?
I'll wrap this up, just wanted to put on the historical hat, especially where counter-factual history is involved. Everyone is so quick to point out Chicago or L.A., but take NYC out of the picture and the country looks a lot different than it does today. For all we know, New Orleans would have developed as the premier port and nation's first city, there would be no Philly, Washington a tidewater rather than a backwater early on, and Boston captured early on in the Revolution, squashing the whole American experiment to begin with. Because, you know, everyone needed more reasons to love New York ;-)
This is a really good post and I'm sorry for singling out only a couple things to comment on do to time/space reasons (I'll still rep you when I'm done posting this).
1. Philadelphia and Boston were manufacturing powerhouses independently of New York. The Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers was a pretty natural base for industrialization. E.I. DuPont picked northern Delaware to start his powder mill. Textile mills followed suit. There was also a natural base for manufacturing in Boston. The best shipbuilders lived in New England, and it was a natural extension from this to manufacturing for the purpose of shipping.
As far as capital goes, Philadelphia was the center of finance in the U.S. until the early 19th century. The Bank of the U.S. was based in Philadelphia, as was the mint. New York passed Philadelphia in two pieces. First, it passed the U.S. as the nation's top port (by the time of the Revolution). This was a natural extension of geography and Baltimore and Boston would have passed Philadelphia in the absence of NYC. But even at this point, Philadelphia had the most sophisticated exchange system in the U.S. and Europeans entered into the American market through Philadelphia. It was the Erie Canal that was the death nail for the Philadelphia financial market. Trade was the most important demand for financing at the time (manufacturing was small). New York was able to trade from the rich agricultural midlands and Baltimore (and New York) became bigger for trade of Southern agricultural products. When New York secured a dominant place in trade and moved to model its financial market after Philadelphia's, it made no sense to stick with Philly.
So, I don't think Philadelphia would have ever risen to the position New York is currently in, I think it would have been the top financial center in the U.S. because no competing city would have been able to take it. I think it's reasonable to believe that someone would have seen a need for a canal and built it in Pennsylvania if there was no suitable location in upstate New York.
Boston would have still been an immigration center without New York (I don't see why it wouldn't have been). That was a strange twist of fate why that happened. Boston had a special deal with a shipping company (for non-immigration purposes). It just happened that that shipping company happened to carry the majority of Irish famine victims. Boston wasn't naturally welcoming of immigrants in the beginning (unlike NYC and Philly), but the Irish came, set up an alternate (Catholic) school system, and other immigrants followed when manufacturing rose.
2. The resistance in Boston was just too great for the British to control it. The British were quite willing to let New England go in order to keep New York, Philadelphia, and the South. If it weren't for all the Scots-Irish from Western PA, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, etc. joining the Revolution, the British may have been able to keep everything but New England.
You mentioned the economics but don't forget the cultural category which LA would win over Chicago. Like you said it depends on what we are talking about.
There are so many categories that I only picked on but with popular culture trends (fashion, tv, movies, music industry etc.) nationally it would be LA.
Apologies if I'm repeating anything pointed out previously and especially for the length, it's an intriguing topic, so I took the historical approach.
I'll make the assumption in this thread that New York never existed. That there is no great deep port harbor at the mouth of the Hudson, no Hudson River to build a center of trade upon, and no Long Island to direct ships toward a protected harbor. For our purposes, the Jersey shore simply folds into the Connecticut coast. There is no conceivable reason to develop a city where New York now sits.
I think most of the replies have assumed Philadelphia, Baltimore or Boston would have naturally developed much larger were there no New York, and others simply pushed for LA or Chicago as they've become large metropolises in their own right, but since this premise is by nature counter-factual, I think we're mistaken to just look at numbers, and are overlooking history and some of the reasons New York developed so much quicker and more successfully than its neighbors. I'm not convinced Boston, Philadelphia or Baltimore would simply have picked up the slack to become greater than they are. I could argue they would be less.
First, we cannot overlook that NYC was unmistakably Dutch - in possession for nearly 60 years, and in character long afterward. This I think important. For one, it focused development on a single city and destination port from the mother country for a lengthy period of time. The English had dozens of ports competing for emigrating attention from Britain and the West Indies. Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, yes, but Newport, and Charles Town were among the five largest cities of the American colonies by 1775 (Baltimore was in the top 10). Plymouth, Salem, New Haven, Wilmington, Portsmouth, Providence and smaller cities were the port of call for dozens of ships from abroad each year. In New Netherlands, all ships made for New York (New Amsterdam). Even the French in New France were not so monolithic in their development of Quebec City. Port Royal and Louisbourg were much closer to New Rochelle, France, and Plaisance and Tadoussac were stops en route to Quebec. In short, New York was THE port.
The Dutch character is important. Plymouth and Boston were religious colonies, the half dozen colonies throughout Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire were escaping Puritan oppression, but not terribly open themselves. I'm well aware of Philadelphia's Quaker roots and Maryland's Catholicism, as well as Peter Stuyvesant's disdain for Quakers in New York - but by and large New York was more multicultural and religiously tolerant than other colonies - and the Remonstrance of 1649 gave New York equal rights as any city in Holland - something no British colony shared. Only Philadelphia had anything like that sense of multiculturalism in the 18th century, both communities hosting nearly two dozen church denominations. New England ports did not attract immigrants as New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had - their (New England cities) growth was mostly through birthrate. Finally it should be said that from the start New York was a port to conduct the vast fur trade, linked upriver to Albany. Philadelphia was not settled as a purely financial endeavor, like the Dutch of the 17th century (who were the economic and maritime power in Europe). I think that set it on a path toward accelerated growth in the mid 18th century that Philadelphia, while growing through German migration, just did not take advantage of. There is a reason NYC was the nation's first capitol and its largest city since 1790.
So in colonial America we'd have two competing British colonial regions - the religious New Englanders in the north and the plantation agriculturalists of Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. New Sweden would not have fallen to the Dutch in the Second Northern War, because there would be no NYC to establish a New Netherlands and no strong Dutch colony at New York for Peter Stuyvesant to sail from. Perhaps no Dutch colony at all if the prospect for an immense fur trade from New York did not exist. Could this colony likely have grown to include much of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania? Would Philadelphia even have developed as anything more than a backwater suburb with the Swede's capitol further down the Delaware at Kristina (Wilmington, DE)? It's likely that William Penn's charter for a colony in the Americas would have been elsewhere, further south in the Carolinas perhaps, though not at a great port location of a defeated advisory. While the Carolinas saw immigration of Germans in the 1700s, it was rather modest. Would Penn's colony there have fared any better, or have been a flash in the pan like the Moravian colonies of North Carolina that came and went with a wimper?
Without New York, French influence would have sure extended further into Upstate New York (missionaries and traders visited Syracuse, the Mohawk River, Niagara and the Finger Lakes) and probably Pennsylvania. Somewhere around the border of New England, New France and New Sweden there surely would have been conflict. I imagine like the Atlantic provinces, any French attempts to settle between New England and Virginia/Maryland would have met with a British attempted takeover, but it is interesting to think what a French and Iroquois New York/Pennsylvania/New Jersey may have looked like, and how it would have isolated expansion from western New England and pushed the frontier much further south. Would New Sweden have lasted much longer than it had? Perhaps, immigration was just starting to pick up when the Dutch captured the colony. But Sweden would have had to avoid conflict with the British and French long enough to establish a greater colony, and while both mediated on Sweden's behalf at the conclusion of the Second Northern War in Europe, the British certainly would have had an eye on the Swedish colony in America were it dividing their coastal colonies, the French probably in supporting it as a buffer between the two largest colonial holdings.
It's harder to envision further into the 19th century without New York. I'm strongly inclined to say there would be no Erie Canal. Without the canal, do Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit or Milwaukee come to be metropolises and urban centers? Is there a canal to link the Eastern seaboard with the interior before the coming of rail at all? Or does New Orleans take a more prominent role as the link to the interior of the continent until rail restores trade to points east? Perhaps the great eastern canal simply cuts across the isthmus of southern-most Ontario, linking Lake Erie to Lake Ontario and thus Montreal or Quebec become the hub of the trans-Atlantic trade.
Do we place the capitol at Washington, D.C. in the absence of such a large city at New York? The placement of D.C. was largely symbolic as a balance between North and South. Geographically, D.C. is still rather central, but population-wise, no New York would be a clear shift toward Virginia as the population center. Perhaps Washington is developed further south, nearer to Hampton Roads?
Without New York, which city took up the mantle as the center of commerce and manufacture in the Northeast? Does Boston become the immigrant destination that it would become with the Irish famine to become such a center? Would Philadelphia or Baltimore become great centers of industry and capital? And if not, isn't the balance of power between the slavery-driven economies of the South and the manufacture-driven economies of the North upset? Does the US take a more agrarian outlook in the signing of the Constitution, and are northern states quite so willing to fight for the sake of Union in 1861? In the Revolution and the War of 1812, we probably wouldn't have a sizable population in Upstate New York (whose development depended on trade with the City) to support large militias, and victories at Oriskany, Plattsburgh, Saratoga and Ticonderoga would be less certain, the war effort totally dependent upon New England. I could imagine the British Expeditionary Force would have made for Boston again, rather than making a base at New York, and the outcome of the War of Independence would have been different.
I'll wrap this up, just wanted to put on the historical hat, especially where counter-factual history is involved. Everyone is so quick to point out Chicago or L.A., but take NYC out of the picture and the country looks a lot different than it does today. For all we know, New Orleans would have developed as the premier port and nation's first city, there would be no Philly, Washington a tidewater rather than a backwater early on, and Boston captured early on in the Revolution, squashing the whole American experiment to begin with. Because, you know, everyone needed more reasons to love New York ;-)
Amazing post. I think that history between cities and regions is so intertwined that simply assuming Philly's rise means we forget a lot of things that happened. I didn't even think about Wilmington, DE. Plus, without New York, there is no Bos-Wash which could have lowered the economic importance of the Northeast.
1. Philadelphia and Boston were manufacturing powerhouses independently of New York. The Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers was a pretty natural base for industrialization. E.I. DuPont picked northern Delaware to start his powder mill. Textile mills followed suit. There was also a natural base for manufacturing in Boston. The best shipbuilders lived in New England, and it was a natural extension from this to manufacturing for the purpose of shipping.
Totally agree. The old whaling ports, shipyards and mill towns of New England and the manufacturing towns of eastern PA are testament to their affinity to industrialize. I don't believe Boston annexed other communities beyond the early 18th century but I could be mistaken. Philadelphia and New York of course did into the 19th century, doubling and tripling their populations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pgm123
As far as capital goes, Philadelphia was the center of finance in the U.S. until the early 19th century. The Bank of the U.S. was based in Philadelphia, as was the mint. New York passed Philadelphia in two pieces. First, it passed the U.S. as the nation's top port (by the time of the Revolution). This was a natural extension of geography and Baltimore and Boston would have passed Philadelphia in the absence of NYC. But even at this point, Philadelphia had the most sophisticated exchange system in the U.S. and Europeans entered into the American market through Philadelphia. It was the Erie Canal that was the death nail for the Philadelphia financial market. Trade was the most important demand for financing at the time (manufacturing was small). New York was able to trade from the rich agricultural midlands and Baltimore (and New York) became bigger for trade of Southern agricultural products. When New York secured a dominant place in trade and moved to model its financial market after Philadelphia's, it made no sense to stick with Philly.
So, I don't think Philadelphia would have ever risen to the position New York is currently in, I think it would have been the top financial center in the U.S. because no competing city would have been able to take it. I think it's reasonable to believe that someone would have seen a need for a canal and built it in Pennsylvania if there was no suitable location in upstate New York.
Did not realize that Philadelphia was still the financial center of the US in the early 19th century, but it makes sense and with it being the capitol briefly and home of the mint, more so. Much to Hamilton's dismay I'm sure. I voted for Philly as the mostly likely alternative to NYC based on its development, but I probably undervalued its financial leverage.
I thought too about the idea of a canal from the Delaware/Susquehanna basin westward, or using the Potomac to tie to the Allegheny, but the geography doesn't work. PA canals move north toward the Erie Canal and Mohawk, primarily because of the several northeast-cutting ridges that make up much of Pennsylvania. Driving east-west in PA, the roads climb up and down countless mountain ridges and through several tunnels. The Mohawk River is a natural westward route, dumping into the Hudson. The canal work westward from Rome to Buffalo is through a glacial basin with little variance in elevation. It would seem impossible to take a canal across the Appalachian mountains at any point south without considerable engineering.
Fascinating points about Boston and immigration re: the Irish. I rarely come across German immigration in the 1700s to Boston, nothing in comparison to NYC and of course Philly. I just assumed Boston would still be slow to grow through immigration until the mid 1800s, at which point Philadelphia would have long become several times larger and more prominent. Good points.
Pretty spot-on. Quite an insightful observation from someone who's half the world away. In the same token, I can see the same argument for Sydney when comparing it to larger cities. Truth to be told, lots of people, especially young ones, don't realize how important Sydney is on a world stage. Often, they don't think Sydney should be above LA. But in today's global economy, size (population, GDP) is not the only factor. You have to stay competitive in order to be relevant to the world. The criteria that you listed below, especially #3 should also apply to Sydney as well (if comparing LA & Sydney).
Here is the map which shows the levels of connectivity of the world cities.
The way I think of it is this. If NY vanished or imploded, which city is best able to take up the slack?
The criteria are
1. Quality extant infrastructure (ports, transport, built environment), with room for easy scaling of plant and population in amenable areas
2. A critical mass of productive institutions, business centres, higher education and specialist professionals - who would act as a magnet for more of these essential assets, and who could start ramping the city into overdrive to take up NY's slack 3. Easy access to the rest of the country, and to the power centres of the world
By these criteria, I'd say the obvious choice is Chicago, despite its economy and population being smaller than LA's. The place has the bones - people and institutions - of a mini-NY, with a lot of space (unfortunately, at the moment) to fill in. SF and LA have an advantage in their sea ports and proximity to Asia, I suppose.
I don't believe Boston annexed other communities beyond the early 18th century but I could be mistaken. Philadelphia and New York of course did into the 19th century, doubling and tripling their populations.
Boston could have had a 1 or 2 million population if they did but today those independent towns wouldn't allow it just as the ones in Chicago.
I don't believe Boston annexed other communities beyond the early 18th century but I could be mistaken. Philadelphia and New York of course did into the 19th century, doubling and tripling their populations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by urbanologist
Boston could have had a 1 or 2 million population if they did but today those independent towns wouldn't allow it just as the ones in Chicago.
Actually NYisontop, Boston annexed most of its land in the 19th century just like NY, Philadelphia and Chicago.
However, Boston seems to have done its annexations slowly as a gradual process compared to the other 3 cities. Wickapedia on Boston annexations - The city annexed the adjacent towns of South Boston (1804), East Boston (1836), Roxbury (1868), Dorchester (including present day Mattapan and a portion of South Boston) (1870), Brighton (including present day Allston) (1874), West Roxbury (including present day Jamaica Plain and Roslindale) (1874), Charlestown (1874), and Hyde Park (1912).[49][50] Other proposals, for the annexation of Brookline, Cambridge,[51] and Chelsea,[52][53] were unsuccessful.
Increasingly big cities were seen as a bad thing by many suburbanites so you see less and less annexations after 1900 (at least in the big Northern cities). Philadelphia did most of its annexing by 1854, NYC was done by 1898, Boston by 1912, and Chicago by 1920.
Because Boston did not annex enough in the 1800s when it was still relatively easy to annex and the pickings were still good, she found increasing suburban-rural resistance by the late 1800s and early 1900s. After 1900 it was basically too late. In particular, the refusal of Brookline and Cambridge to join the city, help to block Boston from moving more inland.
Actually NYisontop, Boston annexed most of its land in the 19th century just like NY, Philadelphia and Chicago.
However, Boston seems to have done its annexations slowly as a gradual process compared to the other 3 cities. Wickapedia on Boston annexations - The city annexed the adjacent towns of South Boston (1804), East Boston (1836), Roxbury (1868), Dorchester (including present day Mattapan and a portion of South Boston) (1870), Brighton (including present day Allston) (1874), West Roxbury (including present day Jamaica Plain and Roslindale) (1874), Charlestown (1874), and Hyde Park (1912).[49][50] Other proposals, for the annexation of Brookline, Cambridge,[51] and Chelsea,[52][53] were unsuccessful.
Increasingly big cities were seen as a bad thing by many suburbanites so you see less and less annexations after 1900 (at least in the big Northern cities). Philadelphia did most of its annexing by 1854, NYC was done by 1898, Boston by 1912, and Chicago by 1920.
Because Boston did not annex enough in the 1800s when it was still relatively easy to annex and the pickings were still good, she found increasing suburban-rural resistance by the late 1800s and early 1900s. After 1900 it was basically too late. In particular, the refusal of Brookline and Cambridge to join the city, help to block Boston from moving more inland.
The annexation is interesting
When you look back into the 17 and 1800's many of the 20 largest cities are parts of NYC/Philly/Boston
For Philly places like Northern Liberties, Southwark, Spring Garden etc all made the list and today would really all nearly be part of the broader CC area or directly connected etc.
Also its interesting that even in say 1800 these areas were populated more densly than today in many cases
It probably wasn't until some time in the 1820's that NYC surpassed Philly in population considering the urban aggregations
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