scholarly journals ‘The middling order are odious characters’: social structure and urban growth in colonial Charleston, South Carolina

Urban History ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMMA HART
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Economic Experience ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

In recent years, the idea that Britain and its northern American colonies were part of a single ‘British Atlantic world’ has provided historians of both the Old World and the New with a novel perspective from which to explore their subjects during the long eighteenth century. With a case study of Charleston, South Carolina, this essay extends British categories of analysis across the Atlantic to uncover the origins of an American middle class. Emphasis is placed on the simultaneous consideration of all arenas of identity formation, with a view to demonstrating that examining either the cultural sphere or the economic one cannot bring a genuine understanding of the coherence of this eighteenth-century middling sort. Investigating the emergence of this social group in the widest possible sense, I show how the economic experience of these middling people forged common values which then found their expression in the cultural and political sphere. Since this middle sort achieved such coherence before 1776 I suggest that we must move away from accounts that depict colonial society as a place of binary opposites and occupational groupings, for such models cannot convey the complexity of the British Atlantic urban society that took shape during this era.

Governance through Documents: The Board of Trade, Its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-290
Author(s):  
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State

AbstractThis article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use of archives that the board sought to enforce constitutional norms of bureaucratic conduct and the authority of central institutions of imperial administration. In the absence of a singular, codified written constitution, the British state relied upon a variety of different kinds of documents to forge the imperial Atlantic into a governed space. The article concludes by pointing to the continuing centrality of documents and archives to the bureaucratic manifestation of the imperial constitution in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

scholarly journals Turkic poetic heritage as symbol and spectacle of identity: observations on Turkmenistan's Year of Magtymguly celebrations

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-336
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Public Culture ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Cultural Activities ◽  
Cultural Sector

This paper presents one case study of state-sponsored cultural activities that occurred throughout 2014, Turkmenistan's Year of Magtymguly, the 290th anniversary of this Turkmen poet's birth. Such activities constitute examples of public culture; they can organize representations of a society's past and present to reaffirm for participants the values and power structure of their society and revalidate its philosophical underpinnings. After examining this Turkic poet's iconicity, this paper compiles 2014's celebratory events from disparate sources, complementing broader general literature on Central Asia's spectacles of public culture and their role in nation-building and identity-formation. Rather than merely resulting from any top-down decision specifying required activities nationwide, the year's events involved numerous synergies as artists, museum and theater administrators, composers, and other cultural-sector workers benefited by responding to the potential of aligning their work with a theme as broad, as widely appreciated, and as eligible for various forms of support as this one. In addition, Turkmenistan's strong central leadership benefited from this widely shared and highly visible celebration, especially emphasizing one element within Magtymguly's eighteenth-century vision, an end to his people's tribal conflicts within a unified Turkmenistan under one leader.

Resisting Independence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Close Study ◽  
New Nation

This book maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities — New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland — the book argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. The book reimagines loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies. The book reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task — to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire. The book describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.

Samuel Storke: An Eighteenth-Century London Merchant Trading to the American Colonies

1965 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
William I. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Business Decision ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
American Trade

In contrast to older views of the passive role of London houses in the American trade, the active influence of a leading English merchant on the business decision-making of his colonial counterparts emerges from this case study.

scholarly journals A Visualization Tool for 1790s Charleston: Locating an Enslaved Population Using GIS

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110485
Author(s):  
Sarah Collins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Study Data ◽  
Visualization Tool ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The City ◽  
Case Study Data

This article promotes the value of GIS methodologies to integrate and analyze a range of historic sources dating to the eighteenth century, utilizing Charleston, South Carolina as a case study. Data compiled from the 1790 Federal Census, the 1790 Charleston trade directory, and Ichnography of Charleston 1788 provide vital and complementary evidence that allows the population of the city to be located, which in turn provides a means of assessing late eighteenth-century residency patterns and the enslaved urban population. The value of data visualization is explored, underscoring the need for historians to engage with visual representations of data to communicate research results.

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