Nash is especially concerned with economic fluctuations in the urban economies of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, paying close attention to the working and living conditions of servants, slaves, and other poor people. The major modern book to provide an overall assessment is Nash 1979. His interpretations have now been superseded in more-specialized studies, but they are still worth mining for information. Carl Bridenbaugh’s books include much descriptive and illustrative material drawn from newspapers and town records, but they lacked a quantitative dimension. Bridenbaugh 1971a and Bridenbaugh 1971b are written by the first academic historian in the 20th century to attempt broad studies of North American port cities. Nearly all of the main studies of this sort exclusively cover North America rather than the Caribbean. Instead, one has to sample a handful of books and articles that provide varied introductions to the development of these urban centers. There is no satisfactory, up-to-date overview of British American port cities, either using original sources or synthesizing secondary literature. Therefore, interesting work on port cities is often done by scholars primarily concerned with other analytical questions, such as social structure, race, and consumption. Few scholars specialize in the history of British American ports, however, and even fewer publish works on colonial urban history. The main published studies dealing directly with these ports are cited in this article. Apart from Kingston, Jamaica, and Bridgetown, Barbados, these island ports were little more than small towns before 1800. The West Indian sugar islands were not sufficiently large to have more than one main port each. These ports were situated where transaction and distribution costs could be concentrated in one trading center. Boston was the leading port in Massachusetts and throughout New England, New York City was the hub of New York’s trade, Philadelphia dominated the Delaware Valley’s seaborne commerce, Baltimore emerged by the time of the American Revolution as the chief port on the Chesapeake Bay, and Charleston was the focal point for ships and trade throughout the Lower South. Most North American regions were dominated by one particular port. The port cities themselves varied considerably: some were extensive sites for shipbuilding and its associated trades, some mainly served as shipping points, and some were connected to thriving agricultural hinterlands. These populations differed in their ethnic and racial composition, in social status and income, and in residential patterns and living standards. Merchants, retailers, wholesalers, agents, shopkeepers, manual laborers, and seamen all formed part of the population of these port cities. Although relatively small by today’s standards-no North American port city had a population greater than 25,000 by 1776-these multilayered maritime communities were essential cogs in the wheels of coastal and transatlantic commerce. In the collection a great number of town plans, fortification plans, charts on paper and vellum, school atlases and drafts, proof prints and used maps with annotations are kept.British American port cities were an important part of the social, economic, cultural, and political fabric of North America and the West Indies in the early modern period. Accents and specialties are maps by Dutch mapmakers with special attention to cartographers from Leiden. The emphasis lays on cartographic material of the Low Countries and western Europe and the regions of the Dutch East- and West-India companies (VOC and WIC) and the former Dutch colonies of present-day Indonesia, Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles. The maps are dating from the sixteenth century to the present-day. In addition to the Bodel Nijenhuis Collection, the collection of Maps and Atlases includes several other sub collections, such as the Van Keulen Collection, the Dutch colonial map collection of the former library of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), the map collection of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), and several other smaller sub collections. The larger part was bequeathed in 1872 as a legacy of publisher Johannes Tiberius Bodel Nijenhuis (1797-1872). 3,000 manuscript maps), 3,500 atlases and 25,000 topographical prints and drawings. Maps and atlases have been collected from the founding of the University Library in 1587 onwards the collection of maps and atlases now consists of approximately 100,000 map sheets (including c.
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