Paul Musselwhite, "Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

New Books in African American Studies · Oct 8, 2019 · 33m

Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston and Philadelphia while mocking the scattered settlements of the French. Colonial founders characterized their social experiment as a ‘City on a Hill’, and texts that promoted colonization listed the size and location of a growing number of principal towns and cities. Outside the confines of cities lay different places: the backcountry of settlement and Indian war; an unmapped landscape of forests…