Global citizens

urban citizenship in the construction of English America

Abstract

This essay explores the role that ideas about urban citizenship
played in the political and economic development of English
colonies across the Americas. Scholars have traditionally portrayed
English America as rural in comparison to Spanish and
Portuguese Americas. While it is true that English colonial
towns did have smaller populations than Iberian cities, ideas
about urban political identity were not absent in English colonies.
In fact, urban citizens, and their political culture, were
at the forefront of English colonization in the early-seventeenth
century. In contrast to Iberian America, though, English
colonists established fewer new urban communities and instead
continued to hold on to their identity rooted in particular
English towns and cities. As such, English America became a
web of overlapping urban citizen networks still tied to English
corporate communities. As a result, when the English monarchs
sought to centralize the imperial state in the early seventeenth
century, colonists resisted this political and economic
encroachment by adopting the structures and rhetoric of urban
republicanism. The importance of these urban republican
traditions helps to explain the specific form of republicanism
that became popular in English America in the decades before
the American Revolution. This rich tradition of urban republicanism
was largely disconnected from specific urban communities
in the New World, and this allowed the ideology to be
flexible enough to resist the rationalizing reforms of the late
eighteenth century and give rise to a more overtly exclusionary
definition of citizenship in the new United States.