Tour Stop No. 1
The BATTERY
“I had no idea of finding a place in America… Such as city that a very few in England can rival it is in its show, gentility, and hospitality.”
-British Naval Officer, 1756
The CAPITAL of
BRITISH NORTH AMERICA
While Virginia and Massachusetts have long dominated the history of colonial America, by the mid-1700s contemporaries often depicted New York as the unofficial capital of British North America. London’s Board of Trade, which steered policy for the empire, had long argued that it should be the official capital, under a consolidation of the thirteen colonies. And the city gained that function somewhat in 1755, when it became the military headquarters of British North America. Because it had such a cosmopolitan population, because its volume of trade was second only to Philadelphia and London itself, and because it was the first to receive information as the only port to get ships directly from England, it was virtually the center of news, fashion, and opinion. Visitors from Europe frequently described it as “London in miniature.” Seen as a model colony, it was rumored to be the king’s favorite.
But in the early 1700s, New York was just a small imperial outpost, like most in the empire. No more than a village really, the city had less than 12,000 people and 1,000 houses, crammed into the southern tip of Manhattan. It was a town where everything lay within a couple of hours’ distance and nearly everyone was a neighbor. Today’s metropolitan region had an even smaller population, living in a few isolated hamlets, nestled between farms, orchards, meadows, swamps, forests, and ponds.
But New York had one of the world’s best natural harbors. And location, location, location. Lying closer to the “sugar islands” (Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica), the most lucrative part of Britain’s empire, the city gradually replaced Boston as the leading northern entrepôt. Philadelphia had a busier dock, with a more developed hinterland and larger population. Yet by 1730 already, George II described New York as “exceedingly necessary… to our kingdom.” By 1740, it was the second-largest port in North America. Crowds gathered at the East River waterfront every April and October to welcome the ships, touching off weeks of frenzied shopping over perfume, handkerchiefs, ribbons, lace, umbrellas, snuff, gloves, and other luxury goods. By 1755, there were 477 vessels in harbor, a sevenfold growth on the Dutch era. By 1763, there were nearly 700. No place consumed more British wares.
This detail from Bernard Ratzer’s Plan of the City of New York in North America (1770) visualizes the mid-century growth, with estates and farms creeping up Manhattan island. By 1760, James DeLancey, perhaps the richest man in all thirteen colonies, was breaking ground on a 339-acre housing development in today’s Greenwich Village, on the “post road” leading to Boston.
William Burgis’s A south prospect of ye flourishing city of New York (published in 1719, with only slight variation in later years) offers a rare view of the city’s waterfront. By mid-century, however, it would have been a thicket of sails.
This watercolor of the British evacuation from New York in 1783, published in the journal of a British warrant officer named Robert Raymond, is the best contemporary visualization of Fort George and its enormous scale.
The dotted line above today’s City Hall indicates where the “upper” (main) barracks stood at the northern edge of colonial New York. During the Revolution, another three buildings were constructed.
But mechanics, shopkeepers, grocers, carpenters, druggists, printers, and other middle-class artisans who clustered in the North Ward, at the center of New York, benefited from the wars, too. As did tavern-owners, innkeepers, and the mass of sailors, cart-men, and ordinary laborers who lived in the East Ward, along the river. With everyone servicing the mass of British soldiers, jobs, wages, housing, and trade increased handsomely for more than a generation. Before the end, New York doubled in population and quadrupled its built footprint. The city still had the same feeling of intimacy. But it had changed enormously, becoming perhaps the most important entrepôt after London.
Thus, just a dozen years rebels seized New York, visitors would have found a thriving city, relishing the high point of “the first British empire.” After nearly a century of war, Britain had gained control of early global trade, ports and shipping lanes in the Atlantic Ocean connecting merchants to markets in the eastern Mediterranean, west Africa, India, and China. It had also ousted its main rival, France, from the largest part of its empire, North America, while relegating Spain to Florida, gaining control of all the land from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River, plus larger swaths of the Caribbean and Canada. New York played a key role in Britain’s victories. And it hoped to enjoy the spoils.
This map, created by the surveyor general Samuel Holland, reveals a far more developed city in 1776. Visitors from Europe almost uniformly described New York as “the most splendid Town in North America.” Isaac Bangs echoed other rebel soldiers who came to New York that year, saying the city “vastly surpass[ed] my expectations.” John Adams noted its “splendor and opulence,” but complained that New Yorkers “talk very loud and fast.”
New York also had enormous strategic importance. Lying at the mouth of the Hudson, it offered greater continental access, over 315 miles of river, than any port below Canada. That included the Montreal-Albany corridor, assumed to be continentally pivotal in the latterly wars against France between 1689 and 1763. Officials in London described it as "the only bulwark and safe guard of all Their Majesty's plantations.” For that reason, and because it was the only colony to get ships directly from England (speedy “packets,” carrying mail), it was chosen as military headquarters for North America at the start of the French and Indian War (1754-63). New York became the regular staging-port in that enormous conflict, and it provided the British with the largest fleet of “privateers,” or merchant soldiers, by far.
As New York’s economic value grow, so did its fortification. Royal officials bolstered the old Dutch barricades on the East and Harlem rivers, and likewise transformed the largely wooden Fort Amsterdam into a giant fortress of stone, renamed Fort George. It was easily New York’s largest edifice. The battery, or lines of wall around it, bearing 100 cannons, guarded the city from rivals, and by extension the much larger the Hudson. The city also had the only large, permanent garrison in North America. The soldiers lived in a set of barracks at the northern edge of town, which similarly constituted New York’s biggest housing complex. The military, in other words, literally defined its geography, sandwiching the population at both ends — the key sites of protest during the Imperial Crisis.
New York gained enormously from these imperial wars, none more so than sea captains who could devastate rival merchants by raiding “enemy” ships, building small fortunes without royal title or connection. Many of the figures who joined the Sons of Liberty came from this background, most importantly the ubiquitous “king of the mob” Isaac Sears. Between 1739 and 1763, roughly 200 of these men were able to seize upwards of 2 million pounds, an “immense accession of wealth” that produced many of the city’s nouveau riche.
The biggest windfalls for all came in the French and Indian War. For nearly a decade, New York served as the “general magazine of Arms and Military stores” for British North America in what is often considered “the first global conflict.” The future loyalist William Smith noted “Universal joy” among the city’s merchants when the fighting began. New York’s colonial assembly began spending unprecedented amounts of money to supply His Majesty’s Forces with “gargantuan quantities of food, clothing, shoes, alcohol, horses, wagons, and other materiel.” The boom “staggered contemporary imaginations,” not least for rival merchants in Philadelphia and Boston, jealously watching the vast majority of Britain’s 25,000 soldiers and 14,000 marines pour into New York.
The families which had long ruled the colony — the DeLanceys, Livingstons, Alexanders, Beekmans, Morrises, and others — became unimaginably wealthy in these years, by contemporary standards. Expanding into luxury goods, realty, and slave trading, they built lavish mansions, decorated in the finest Georgian style in the South Ward around Fort George (known as “crown town”) and the elite West Ward, along Broad Way. The street became a promenade for dandies (“macaroni”) showcasing the latest fashions, with many visitors comparing it to London’s Broad Street. The less elite clustered in the Dock Ward, east of these neighborhoods, where their houses doubled as storefronts, near the commercial waterfront on the East River. The narrow cobblestone streets were shaded by elm, linden, and beech trees during the hot summers, illuminated by lamps at night, and patrolled by watchmen. Their roofs, painted in dazzling color, had balconies looking out at sparking bays filled with oyster, turtle, and lush varieties of fish, passing seal, whale, and dolphin, and vast woodlands — the rich smell of wildflower and fruit tree greeting visitors miles to sea. A few traders even managed to join the old lords, building country manors with elaborate gardens in upper Manhattan and other retreats like Long Island, where “gentlemen” took up sports like horse-racing, fox-hunting, cockfighting, and sailing.
This map done by the surveyor James Lynn, originally published in Martha J. Lamb’s History of the city of New York (1876), outlines the city’s “wards” (neighborhoods) in 1728.
The POLITICS and
ECONOMICS of EMPIRE
Like most colonies, New York was established by merchants — of the Dutch West India Company, the world’s first multinational. It became royal English property in the late 1600s, after its profitability was secured. The Dutch remained, in a city that was always very diverse. But it was perhaps only natural that so many New Yorkers identified as Englishmen during the high-growth years of the mid-1700s. The city’s business had always been business.
Britain’s expansion had brought prosperity to a colony that had often been unstable in harder times. And the vastly larger empire that New York helped London attain carried the promise of even greater wealth: all the land and natural resources over the eastern mountain range. In part because of this expectation, New York’s population grew 20 percent during the late 1760s and early 1770s, despite the depression caused by the Imperial Crisis. By then, it was already the second-largest city in North America, roughly twice as large as Boston, Charleston, or Newport, with 25,000 residents. Just as many lived in today’s outer boroughs, with perhaps another 113,000 in the rest of the state.
Home to perhaps the richest merchants and the biggest landowners on the continent, New York also had the reputation of being a model “royal colony,” long before the debate over independence gave it the undue label of being a “Tory town.” Such was the devotion, even among rebels, that after the first major wave of protest over Britain’s restriction of the colonial economy, New York’s legislature commissioned a gold-plated statue of George III to be erected on Bowling Green, just outside the fort. The only statue of the king in North America, it was extraordinarily large and barely resembled George in face or dress, modeled instead on a famous sculpture of Marcus Aurelius used for busts of the kings who created Britain’s first global empire. New York’s elite were thus likening the young monarch to the most powerful emperor of ancient Rome, now that England had become a modern equivalent. Symbolically, it faced the city’s harbor.
By the mid-1700s, after centuries of reform and resistance, England had also distinguished itself by establishing the world’s first liberal political economy — producing growth rates of 0.5 percent in some years, a quintupling over the global historic average. The radical growth of coal-powered industrialization was still many decades off, and the Dutch who pioneered capitalism already had much smaller growth. But elites in London and colonial outposts like New York were enjoying a “consumer revolution,” as Britain made its first steps towards becoming “the workshop of the world.”
Agostino Carlini RA, Model for an Equestrian Statue of King George III, 1769. Royal Academy of Arts, London.
There is no (accurate) contemporary image of the statue built in New York, famously toppled at the end of the Imperial Crisis after rebels heard the Declaration of Independence, weeks before the invasion of North America began in the city.
Edward Topham, The Macaroni Print Shop, 1772, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Some historians believe the material culture of the 1700s — the renowned architecture, landscaping, artwork, and furniture of the Georgian Age — helped bind the colonies ideologically. In NewYork, the leading consumer of British goods, visitors compared Broad Way to London's Bond Street, where “gentlemen” and “ladies” similarly displayed all the latest wares. The fashion craze also destabilized class and gender norms, the cartoon above lampooning men who dressed, spoke, or behaved in a feminine or androgynous manner.
But the colonies were designed to be dependent. As subjects, they had to purchase finished goods from Britain and take unwanted paupers, criminals, and rebels, while providing the cheap raw materials and labor that allowed the liberal empire to grow. It was a “mercantile” system, with natural resources, people, capital, and manufactures circulating through protected markets, backstopped by the world’s most powerful navy. Many non-elites found opportunity in the order. But it was designed to flow capital upwards within and between its constituent parts. For many, the wealth Britain offered was unrivaled, as was its semi-democratic government and military power. But if the benefits of empire restrained protest during the Imperial Crisis, the constraints spurred rebellion. As one New Yorker explained: “Without the support of Britain, America must become tributary to some other nation; without America, Britain would cease to be opulent.” By the mid-1700s, roughly half of all British shipping was engaged in North America.
"This Actuall Survey of London, Westminster & Southwark," by Philip Lea, in partnership with Robert Morden and Christopher Browne, originally published in 1690.
The liberalization of English feudalism took centuries. But the largest period of growth (until the Industrial Revolution) occurred in the 1700s. The radical decline of agriculture began in the 1600s, causing the urban population began to explode. By 1763, London surpassed Paris as the largest city in Europe. With roughly 750,000 people, it rivaled the world’s biggest metropolises, Thailand’s Ayutthaya, Turkey’s Constantinople, and China’s Beijing.
Most colonists in North America were engaged in farming, which produced little capital outside the surplus big landowners made. But New York was an imperial port. Local goods were “preserved” (finished and packed) in workshops and then exported to Britain, the West Indies, and southern Europe — in that order of scale. By 1769, the city shipped over thirty different products, like grain, flour, pig iron, shingles, barrel staves, pearl, lumber, and potash. These goods were byproducts of “settlement,” forests cut down, wildlife killed and processes, and minerals extracted or refined. Industrialism was thus still rural, dependent on the most powerful sources of energy, wood and water. New York relied on villages around it or up-river for the goods it consumed or prepared for export in 250 warehouses, distilleries, and refineries.
To a much smaller degree, the city was a port for regional trade as well, serving the hinterland and eastern seaboard. Goods arrived from big towns along the Hudson, the Long Island Sound, and destinations further north and south. But New Yorkers had to import textiles and tableware from small manufacturers in England, tropical goods like sugar and coffee from the Caribbean, and exotic items, like calicos from India and tea from China, from more distant corners of the empire. New York’s press advertised thousands of these items, which arrived monthly on British ships, insured and financed by London’s capital markets. By design, imports far outweighed exports — in 1750, five times more. The relationship was profitable enough, the imbalance off-set by light enforcement of British rules on trade and currency, or military spending in wartime. But in the situation changed dramatically after the French and Indian War.
The IMPERIAL CRISIS Begins
Under Robert Walpole, Britain’s “first prime minister” (1725-42), London had severely relaxed enforcement of colonial regulations and taxed North America very lightly. New York flourished alongside the other colonies during this half-century of Whig party rule. But the era of “salutary neglect” came to a sudden end in 1763.
Technically, colonies had long been forbidden to establish local currency, forcing merchants to rely on British wholesalers for credit. In practice, New Yorkers used local paper money backed in mortgages to get around this rule, like merchants in other ports. But in 1764, Parliament outlawed this practice with the Currency Act, soon after George Grenville became prime minister. The restriction severely curtailed the ability of importers, exporters, shipowners, insurers, wholesalers, and retailers to prosper against competitors in London.
Merchants and big farmers had also long traded with Britain’s rival, the French, Spanish, and Dutch, even though it was nominally illegal during wartime and subject to tax in peacetime. The Hovering Act of 1763 severely curtailed these black markets, too, making it far harder to profit on Britain’s greatest source of revenue, sugar. The Plantation Act of 1764 went further, taxing molasses from the West Indies — even though North America’s colonists had enabled Caribbean planters to focus on the monoculture “cash crop,” by providing food and other necessities which required land.
Although mass protest in the colonies did not erupt until the Stamp Act of 1765, these laws marked the beginning of the Imperial Crisis. Boston was the first to act, petitioning London. New York was the first to support them. Rich merchants feared their wealth might shrink. Giant landowners worried their holdings would be taxed. Both factions dreaded the prospect of revolt from below.
Detail from The Great Financier, or British Economy for the Years 1763, 1764, 1765, showing the new prime minister, George Grenville, holding a scale that demonstrated the staggering debt that Britain had racked up creating its empire. Colonists viewed the regulations and taxes he imposed as unjustified austerity. Like few of his peers, Grenville also saw that North America would be increasingly difficult to “govern” now that Britain had ousted France from the continent. The legislation was thus meant to reassert imperial dominance, not simply to pay off the deficit.
Ten Views in the Island of Antigua (1823).
Sugar was the most profitable crop of the late 1600s and 1700s. Most of the 12 million Africans sold into the Caribbean and South America came during this period. And many of the rising merchant class in Britain were absentee landlords in Jamaica, Barbados, or Antigua.
The least known act in this early wave of taxes and regulations was the first, the Proclamation of 1763. Like other ports, New York depended on the colonial settlements inland, and the British military for defense and expansion. Upstate, six nations of Haudenosaunee controlled the mountainous western and northern part of the state. The so-called “Iroquois” Confederation (from the Algonkian word, meaning “vicious killers”) was the most powerful Indigenous force in North America. They supported the British in the French and Indian War, against their own rivals. But settlers expected to seize their land, after the French and their Native allies were eliminated. Instead, King George III shocked colonials by declaring the area off-limits.
For wealthy speculators, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, it meant a fortune. For poor farmers, however, the news was even more disturbing. Conquest and disease allowed merchants and others to depict North America as a “New World” for Europe’s peasantry. Yet by the early 1700s, landowners had recreated vast holdings, like the churches and nobles in the “Old World.” In New York, just a dozen families owned three-quarters of all royally granted territory — including 1.75 million acres in the Lower Hudson Valley.
The Lords of Trade had restricted grant sizes to 1,000 acres in 1756. But James DeLancey, Cadwallader Colden, William Tryon, and New York’s other governors ignored the edict, rewarding in-laws, friends, and merchants who provided bribes. The result was growing unrest on the vast manors of Frederick Philipse, Beverly Robinson, Philip Schuyler, Robert Livingston, and others in the Hudson Valley, extending into the “rent wars” of the 1800s. Land was the object for nearly everyone, its distribution the primary issue of the age. Unrest simmered all through the Imperial Crisis, as both tenant farmers and Natives sought land from these estates. Although colonists frequently ignored the Proclamation of 1763 (relaxed in ‘68), it became an oft-cited cause for rebellion.
The “Iroquois” Confederation, after the Tuscarora were adopted in 1722. Graphic created by Eric Doxtator (2017). After epidemics of influenza, smallpox, and measles devastated the other five Haudenosaunee nations in the 1600s, they adopted many from the Canoy, Nanticoke, Tutelo, and Shawnee. They also raided Algonquin-speaking groups for captives, as well as other Haudenosaunee. By the 1760s, they numbered perhaps 10,000. Even still, they were the most powerful Indigenous force on the continent. New York was also thinly settled, with greater numbers of Indigenous than most colonies, controlling more land.
Daniel Paterson, Cantonment of His Majesty's forces in N. America according to the disposition now made & to be compleated as soon as practicable taken from the general distribution dated at New York 29th. March (1767), Library of Congress. This map shows the enormous swath of Native land gained in the French and Indian War.
The Proclamation was compensation for the Indigenous, who did much of the fighting in the French and Indian War. It was also Realpolitik. With colonials flooding into what had been New France, an Ottawa chief named Pontiac united Natives up and down the frontier in a rebellion that stretched from 1763 to 1766. In New York, the idea of a Native leader uniting the Indigenous reawakened fears the city had not known since Willem Kieft nearly destroyed the colony in 1643-45. The legislature begged the acting governor, Cadwallader Colden, to request troops from the other colonies to put down the “savage Race of Vermin.” The petition added: “their, as well as our, very Existence” was at stake.
As a surveyor, Colden had grown contemptuous of the great landlords and developed empathy for the Natives. The Irish-born Scotsman published a number of works, hoping to soften colonial views of the Indigenous, and even lived among them. But he was also “unbending, intolerant, tactless,” and fiercely royalist. Outraging many in New York, he upheld the Proclamation.
To enforce it, and protect the French in British Canada from illegal settlement, London stationed 10,000 troops in North America, too — another shock. Across the colonial period, Britain had never kept more than 3,500 soldiers in the colonies — often just a few hundred, usually in one place (less than 2,000 protecting the empire’s crown jewel, the sugar islands). Colonists had welcomed the military against other imperial powers and Natives. But the point now, as one British official put it, was to keep the colonies “as near as possible to the Ocean” and “subservient to the Commerce of their Mother Country.”
Nowhere was resentment greater than in New York, which had the most troops as the military headquarters of British North America. During the Imperial Crisis, Gen. Thomas Gage served as the leading military authority on the continent, speaking regularly with all its governors, customs officials, merchants, and superintendents for Indian Affairs. In 1766, he was forced to send troops into the Lower Hudson Valley, when a tenant riot erupted after two years in which Colden granted vast tracts of land in the Green Mountains (Vermont) to New York’s elite families. Violence returned in 1773-74, after Colden gave the land barons another 2 million acres. But the greatest fear was at home, in the city.
During the French and Indian War, New York saw the British military as the emblem of dizzying prosperity. Now, with the depression created by the various regulations and taxes of 1763-64, they simply added downward pressure on wage-labor. The resentment exploded in 1765, when Parliament enacted the StampAct.
Robert Griffing’s Unconquered depicts three Seneca warriors staring down a British fort in Pittsburgh after Pontiac’s Rebellion. During the conflict, a group of fifty-seven drunken frontiersmen (“the Paxton Boys”) killed twenty Susquehannock near Lancaster, who they conflated with other Natives raiding in Pennsylvania. Whether intentional or not, the artist’s depiction of the clear-cut landscape presents a vivid reminder of the existential threat settler-colonialism posed.
Gen. Thomas Gage served as commander-in-chief of British North America during the Imperial Crisis, from his command in New York York (until he was relocated to Boston in 1774, overseeing the Coercive Acts which touched off the Revolution). A noble who served in the French and Indian War and oversaw the response to Pontiac’s Rebellion, Gage married Margaret Kemble, a scion of New York’s most elite families (the Van Cortlandts, DeLanceys, Bayards, and Schuylers). They lived just outside Fort George.
DEPRESSION & REBELLION
The Revolution sprang from the enormous debt Britain accrued creating its first global empire. Its deficit doubled fourteen times in the 1700s. By the end, interest payments on the £42 million and military spending ate up more than three-quarters of its budget. Although Britain now had a huge imperium, it now had to police its vast new holdings, and the English were already one of the most heavily taxed people on Earth. So Parliament began legislating the colonies.
These laws have long been depicted as radical because they imposed “taxation without representation.” But that was hardly novel. Even in Great Britain, just 215,000 men in 3 million could vote. What they actually did was make it far more difficult to avoid or cheat regulation of the most important aspects of the colonial economy. In smaller parts of the empire, colonials had to submit. But North America had roughly a quarter the population of Great Britain, spread over a much vaster territory. It was the one realm able to put up resistance.
English holdings overseas, 1700 (above) and the United Kingdom’s first global empire, 1763 (below)
Americans enjoyed perhaps the highest living standard of any people under state rule, and the lowest tax rate — just a sixth of what the English paid. But ports were severely dependent on the imperial economy, so they were the first to protest. The depression fell hardest on New York. With the end of the French and Indian War, many believed the cost of living had doubled already. But with the legislation of 1764-65, creditors ran short on capital and demanded payment from merchants, who requisitioned debt from artisans, who stopped hiring. Soon the entire city was affected. The new debtor prison filled rapidly, alongside beggars in the streets. Wealthy churches funded temporary public works, but quickly reverted to evictions and forcing “paupers” into labor. As the gap between rich and poor stretched to a breaking point, feelings of betrayal replaced love of the Empire, opening the door to rebellion. Poverty had grown in absolute and relative terms during the 1700s. But it would only mount during the Imperial Crisis. Where the average colonial had enjoyed a higher standard of living than his counterpart in England, by 1776 roughly a third of the population in “big towns” were in poverty. Trade ports like New York were thus also the most radicalized.
This detail from John Wolcott Adams and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes’s draft of the Castello Plan offers an up-close view of the area in 1660. By the 1760s, the battery stretched from the northwestern tip of Fort George to Whitehall, the largest and busiest inlet — at the end of Broad Street (the canal on the right), the only wharf big enough for military ships to lay anchor.
As the supreme emblem of British rule, Fort George became the primary target of protest. The first major event came in October 1765, when the city erupted in the Great Riot over the Stamp Act. Thousands marched down Broad Way, smashing thousands of windows in the elite mansions along the way, before gathering outside the fort. The riot lasted ten hours. The next day, Lt. Gov. Colden reported anonymous death threats, seemingly from unemployed or destitute maritime workers, a quarter of New York’s labor-force. That afternoon, Robert Livingston Sr., the dominant political figure in the colonial assembly, reported that merchants calling themselves the Sons of Liberty had pledged a boycott, and that an even more mysterious group calling itself the Sons of Neptune intended to storm the fort. It was “a mad project,” for which he could think of no precedent.
Gen. Gage warned that New York’s military stores, housed outside the fort, would quickly fall into the hands of a mob, unleashing “a Civil War.” Colden ordered the garrison strengthened. But its engineer John Montresor made clear the fort, and its naval battery, would fall to domestic assault. So, in another unprecedented act, the new governor came in promising to demilitarize the city. In the months that followed, demonstrations grew so large and violent that officials living at the Governor’s House inside the fort had to move onto warships in the harbor because of daily threats of violence. Ten years later, New York’s government would have to do the same, as rebels made good on their promise to storm the fort and take over the city. As the historian Pauline Maier observed, no colony put forward a stronger rebellion in this inaugural year of the Revolution.
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On the commercial rise of New York, see Edwin T. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York until 1898 (Oxford, 2000).
On New York as the imagined capital, see Milton Klein, “Shaping the American Tradition: The Microcosm of Colonial New York,” New York History, 59, no. 2 (1978): 173-97.
On New York as military headquarters of British North America, see Rohit T. Aggarwala, “I want a Packet to arrive,” New York History 98, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 7-39.
On the French and Indian War, see Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (Knopf, 2000) and Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (W.W. Norton, 2016).
On the “Iroquois” Confederation, see Gail D. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (Knopf, 2006); Daniel K. Richter, et al., eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: the Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800 (Penn State University Press, 2003); and Collin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
On British mercantilism and its impact on New York and other port cities, see Serena R. Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); David Waldstreicher and Staughton Lynd, “Free Trade, Sovereignty and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 68 (October 2011); Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Harvard University Press, 2000); Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation To Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York, 1980); and Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton University Press, 1965).
On the pivotal role of cities in the Revolution, see Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (Yale University Press, 2010) and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2007).
On military geography in New York, see John Gilbert McCurdy, “From Fort George to the Fields: The Public Space and Military Geography of Revolutionary New York City,” Journal of Urban History 4, no. 4 (2018).