The first two-hundred years of New Yorkās economic history can be usefully understood as a tale of two commodities: beaver pelts and sugar.
Immediately upon the first contact between the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley and Europeans in 1609, the two groups began exchanging commodities. The newcomers to the area probably already knew that the natives could provide effectively unlimited quantities of beaver pelts, which were highly valued on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean. And Europeans could offer in exchange goods made of metal and glass that enhanced the localsā quality of life substantially. Both peoples were already quite familiar with trade as a potentially mutually beneficial form of social interaction. Of course, not all of the interactions between first peoples and the newcomers benefited both groups. There were occasional bloody conflicts, which the Europeans, with their superior military technology usually won. More devastating to the Native Americans were the imported communicable diseases, which came close to wiping out native populations.
The profitability of buying beaver pelts in North American and selling them in Amsterdam provided the economic incentive, which, along with geopolitical considerations, motivated the Dutch in 1624 to establish New Netherlands as a permanent settlement centered in the Hudson Valley with its capital, New Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island. So much so that to this day a beaver appears on the corporate seal of the City of New York. Native Americans accommodated the newcomersā presence because of the benefits they realized on the same transactions.
Chapter 1, therefore, centers on the North American market for beaver pelts: the identities and situations of the sellers and buyers, the sources of demand and supply, the venues for and structures of transactions, the ancillary activities that developed to sustain the trade, its profitability, and that it was the New Netherlandsā principal economic raison dāetre.
The Dutch were, however, motivated to establish a permanent presence in the Middle Atlantic region of North America at least as much, and probably more so, by geopolitical considerations as by business interests. And it was geopolitical priorities that motivated the Netherlands to cede the territory to an English Proprietor, James, Duke of York, in 1664.
During the 150 years after the British gained suzerainty over New York City, the Atlantic world was the theater of nearly continuous warfare, mostly between the English and the French leading varying groups of allies. Military conflict, however, did not prevent the massive increase in cane sugar production in the Caribbean basin. Expansion of sugar cultivation, refining, and trading increased demand for plantation laborers, food to feed them, specialized capital goods, ships, and commercial services. Because the indigenous populations had been decimated by disease and harsh treatment, production of all of these and of other colonial exports such as tobacco necessitated the āpeoplingā of the Americas. Most of those who arrived in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic coast were forced from their homes in Africa by slave traders. A large majority of migrants to the British Middle Atlantic and New England colonies were induced to move voluntarily by ideological or economic incentives.
Chapter 2 begins with an explanation of how the Caribbean sugar industry developed and of its importance to the Atlantic economy as a whole. This is followed by a discussion of the ways in which this industryās growth, the concurrent imperial warfare, and local public policies influenced the patterns of population growth in the British North American colonies. The initial perspective encompasses the development of the Middle Atlantic and New England regions and their principal port cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Then the focus narrows onto New York and an analysis of why this City grew relatively slowly before about 1763 and why immigration accelerated thereafter. The chapter concludes with a review of the economic and political influences that positioned New York City as the central metropolis of a region extending from the headwaters of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers to Montauk Point on Long Island and from New Haven, Connecticut, to the Raritan River valley in New Jersey.
In 1800, New York was one of three roughly equal-sized port cities serving as central places in the region comprised by the nine northern U.S. states. One important economic function of each of these cities was the provision of mercantile servicesātransportation of goods and people, trade-goods dealing and brokerage, wholesale and retail sales, commercial jurisprudence, business journalism, etc. Chapter 3, therefore, deals in some detail with the ways in which commerce was conducted in the Atlantic world from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth century. One aim of this analysis is to identify ways in which New York as a commercial center differed from the other two important ports so as to set the stage for understanding how and why this City became the North American metropolis during the next phase of its history. Chapter 3 begins with an analysis of how eighteenth-century merchants used social networks to help mitigate some of the risks of doing business across a turbulent ocean in an age of sail and in a world lacking institutions of credit intermediation. This section explores the hypothesis that, as the nexus of more ocean-spanning national, ethnic and religious social networks than either Boston or Philadelphia, New York had a comparative advantage as an entrepot that would stand it in good stead in the future. The final section of Chapter 3 and of Part I deals with local and imperial public policy as it affected commerce with the goal of identifying ways, if any, in which governments influenced the development of the three ports.
![]()
Ā© The Author(s) 2019
Aaron GurwitzAtlantic MetropolisPalgrave Studies in American Economic Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13352-8_11. Beverstad
End AbstractIn and around the Hudson River Valley during the second quarter of the seventeenth century, early modern European and late woodlands Native American peoples met and interacted with each other. Although communicable diseases carried by the Europeans would eventually lead to the decimation of Native American populations and although some interactions were brutally violent, for the most part the early engagement was mutually beneficial.
At the time and to us in retrospect, the differences between these cultures were more apparent than their similarities, and historians have generally emphasized their mutual strangeness. One, in particular, of these differences commands the attention of an economist. Northwestern Europe was one of the most densely occupied and intensively exploited land areas on the planet. By contrast, among similarly fertile and climatically benign regions, northeastern North America was surely one of, if not the, least densely occupied and least intensively exploited. And the contrast became starker during the seventeenth century as Native American populations collapsed.
The differences were very important, but the two cultures were similar enough to make it possible for them to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges beginning immediately after contact. For one thing, both Western Europe and northeastern North America were themselves home to arrays of diverse, independent societies, speaking different languages, dealing with different environmental and economic challenges, worshiping different gods in different ways, exerting and acquiescing to different forms of political authority, sometimes living peacefully and doing business side by side, and sometimes fighting wars. In this regard, both cultures differed from the geographically extensive and politically unified societies of, for example, China or Peru. So, at first contact, both sides had some experience in dealing with the āotherā and, at least potentially, benefitting from such interactions. Second, by the year 1600 societies on both sides of the North Atlantic had developed stable, productive systems of agriculture capable of producing more than minimal subsistence requirements in the average crop year. Finally, both societies had at least some familiarity with the practice of trade: in consumer staples with near neighbors and in exotic, luxury, or prestige goods across longer distances.
Although people of European descent would eventually come to dominate life in the region, the changes that took place during the first post-contact decades reflected European and Native American influences in roughly equal degrees. In this regard, the immediate post-contact period in the Hudson Valley appears to have differed from contemporary experiences in the Chesapeake tidelands or on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, where the emerging American societies reflected much less indigenous influence.
Two Late Woodlands Cultures
Commonalities
Archaeologists characterize the pre-contact Native American way of life in the area that became New York as ālate woodlands culture.ā
The indigenous peoples made their living by hunting, fishing, gathering, and cultivating crops. Animal husbandry was not practiced. They lived in structures framed by tree branches and covered with bark. Settlement populations ranged from single-family units to several thousand individuals living in multifamily dwellings. A dense, extensive network of trails and streams and ingeniously designed canoes facilitated transportation and communication (Bailyn, 2012).
Men specialized in hunting, sometimes migrating seasonally from settlements to distant hunting grounds. Women tended highly productive, mixed gardens of the āthree sistersā crops of corn (maize), beans, and squash or pumpkins. Cultivating these three crops on the same plot of ground was efficient, the beans helped maintain soil fertility by fixing nitrogen, the corn stalks provided a framework on which the bean vines could climb, and the broad-leaved squash plants inhibited weed growt...
