(2) It seems to me that conclusions reached in the study of colonial urban history no longer require justification in the light of those theoretical models developed within other disciplines. Early studies of the colonial phenomenon, in my view, were aimed at just that -- justifying (and in the process, largely condemning) the behavior of the colonizers over the colonized. The term 'colonial' came to mean, as Anthony King has put it, "a form of cultural oppression". It cannot be denied that, in reality, such oppression does and did exist, but it came to exist in certain situations only as a result and not as an intention of colonial practice.
(3) The view that identifies and defines colonizer/colonized with oppressor/oppressed is an antagonistic one, and has promoted almost wholly negative assumptions with regard to European colonial enterprise in both the scholarly and the general view. My position, which my research is aimed at substantiating, is that this antagonistic approach represents the result of the study and explanation of colonialism from the point of view of the colonized ('oppressed'). In an effort to effect a semblance of balance in the understanding of our subject, I have attempted to approach it from what I call the imperial view; that is, from the aspect of the intentions and motivations of the colonizers.
(4) The construction of a methodology is an intellectual exercise in organization. The frame of reference I have chosen for investigating the planning and planting of British cities abroad in the latter half of the seventeenth century is that of the decision-making apparatus of British society of roughly the same period. This apparatus consists of institutions of two types, which I call the formally constructed and the culturally logical. In the first category fall the central government of Britain, its form and internal relationships; local systems of government such as the parish; the structure of the overseas companies and of special organizations such as the Royal Society, which contributed in substantial ways to overseas ventures. Secondly, Bourdieu's notion of the 'habitus' corresponds to the section of the framework which I term 'culturally logical'. This means that to study such aspects of British cultural practice as land tenure, inheritance traditions and the constitution and construction of towns or the extensions to towns is to understand these forms as they then appear in British culture abroad.
(5) The method of investigating these decision-making institutions I call an analysis of the 'mode of consumption'. That is, knowledge of the process by which ideas were introduced, put into practice and the degree to which they were enforced, generates the information necessary to form thoughtful conclusions.
(6) In the case of the central government, once the form is recognized, the actual process of dealing with a problem, from its introduction to the final decision, has to be determined. For instance, during this period Britain sponsored overseas ventures through the use of chartered companies, so the chartering process, its use by the Crown for financial gain and eventually for control of overseas settlements are of central importance. If there is any doubt in today's world about the power of those charters, one need only study the very recent realignment of the government of Hong Kong by the Governor, Christopher Patten, much to the consternation of China. This summary change was effected under the terms of the colony's charter, prompting the comparison in the press of the governor's actions to those of a Tudor monarch.
(7) The study of the organization and operation of the chartered companies themselves leads to an investigation of their financial structure and to the social as well as formal relationships through which ideas and problems were introduced and processed. The joint stock financing of these companies became more complex over the course of the seventeenth century, affecting not only the stability of the companies and their ventures, that is, the colonies, but also contributing to the establishment of more sophisticated financial structures in Britain, specifically the founding of the Bank of England in 1698.
(8) These companies, however, were ultimately only successful if their representatives or agents were. In the case of Pennsylvania, the Free society of Traders, which William Penn established to handle the commercial activities of his new colony, was out of business by the end of the seventeenth century, due to mishandling and lack of attention by its principal agent in Philadelphia and the subsequent lack of confidence and further investment by the backers in Britain. The proof of this point may be observed by making a comparison with the practices and successes of the most famous of such chartered companies, the East India Company.
(9) In terms of social and/or formal relationships within the companies, the prime example would be the connection and relationship between Josiah Child and John Child of the East India Company, one being the financial adventurer in London, serving for years as the head of the company, and the other, of still undetermined family relationship, serving as the company's representative, or undertaker, in Bombay. In the founding of Pennsylvania, it was to the Quaker community that William Penn appealed for financial backing, as in his earlier venture in West Jersey and later in East Jersey. As long as communications remained open between Penn and the Quaker representatives chosen by him, Pennsylvania grew along the lines designated by the proprietor. When this communication (not swift under the best of circumstances at this period) broke down, then close control of the venture was lost. This is exemplified by the period of fifteen years (1684-1698) when Penn was absent in England lobbying for further support. Another example is the case of East Jersey, centered on Perth Amboy, which became a Scottish settlement, not a Quaker one, as its Scots Quaker administrator was interested in settling Scots, and not necessarily Quakers, as immigrants there.
(10) This illustrates my concern in bringing into focus the human intention in colonial activities, the re-introduction of the study of individual behavior and relationships and of the focus on the importance of historical events in colonial enterprise. This I would offer as a balance to the current theoretical focus on the material, the artifactual and the collective aspects of colonial urban endeavor.
(11) Another example to illustrate this point would be in the investigation of the traditions of land tenure, or the 'culturally logical' institution in Britain, and its subsequent adoption in overseas settlements. Here an event in Britain may be cited as of utmost importance in the later division and disposition of land in the colonies. That event is the dissolution of the monasteries ordered by Henry VIII (the same Tudor monarch associated by the press to the current governor of Hong Kong) in 1536.
(12) Taken as a whole, the land made available by this move, all of it within three years or so of the decree, was the largest single collection of real estate on the market in the history of Britain, after the distribution of lands following the Norman Conquest and before the potential of North America was realized. No one person, however, took advantage of such a vast opportunity as the Dissolution offered, and for the most part the land was acquired piecemeal by the wealthy for partial resale to smallholders. This style of real estate investment and distribution was that provided for by William Penn in his directions to fellow investors in Pennsylvania and subscribed to in other colonies such as Carolina and Georgia.
(13) It would seem, again using Pennsylvania and the policies of William Penn as the example, that the use of the grid plan in laying out the city was essentially a method or tool for controlling the disposition of the land. This was true both for the lots available without payment to those who invested in large tracts of land outside the city, and for the smaller lots made available for sale to smaller freeholders and to merchants. Penn and his agents wanted not just the maximum return for the sale of the land, but also wished to control the disposition of the best sites for those who had invested most heavily. The grid depicted in the famous 'Portrait of Philadelphia' site plan, drawn by Penn's surveyor Thomas Holme in 1683, is now known to have been suggested by Penn soon after his arrival in the colony in 1682, because the city was developing in a way which he could see would not be to his and the other investors' advantage.
(14) Penn had been thwarted in his first plan for the city, previously conceived by him in England, it being also a grid, but one on a very grand scale, so that each lot would have comprised 100 acres. In fact, the plan was not for a city as such, but for a series of small neighboring country estates (covering a total area of approximately 100,000 acres) arranged on the land in a regular manner, with provision at the appropriate site for a small harbor and business district. From studying Penn's intentions and behavior and after the second plan was accomplished, I conclude that Penn was laying out an urban space in which he actually chose not to live. The city lot reserved for himself was not permanently built on, and it seems he planned his principal residence to be a 'country estate' on land near what is now the site of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, reserving the land known as Pennsbury Manor in Bucks County as a 'home farm' for the provisioning of the other two properties, but where he came to live from 1698 to 1702.
(15) This admittedly aristocratic idea and practice of the ideal residence being in the country but within a convenient commuting distance of the city for business and social reasons, follows the pattern of privileged life in which Penn, and many of his investors and contemporary planners of other colonies, participated in late seventeenth century Britain. A similar pattern may be studied for instance in Lord Shaftesbury's Carolina, where Drayton Hall outside Charleston is referred to as a "plantation," but in reality was a country seat within convenient commuting distance of the port.
(16) One of the conclusions which may be stated regarding the rejection of the city as the first place of residence by the proprietor and his wealthy friends may be that the grid plan consisting of small city blocks was understood at that time not just as a control device for financial gain and for purposes related to health, but as a pattern associated with the whole of commercial life. This would seem to be supported by the adoption of a large grid pattern for the new city of Kingston, Jamaica, in 1692, a strictly commercial venture, as the colonial administration of this Caribbean city remained at the political capital of Spanishtown.
(17) And further, if this is so, then the fashionable conceits of the cypher and Baroque plans proposed by Governor Francis Nicholson for Annapolis and Williamsburg become more understandable, as those sites, chosen for administrative and residential, rather than commercial, purposes, did not have to conform to the grid and commercial demands. This is also supported by the evidence of the grid used for the commercial settlement of Baltimore early in the eighteenth century and by that imposed on Manhattan in 1810, when New York City had gained commercial ascendancy over Philadelphia.
(18) And in England, where the primary example of city planning was London, studies have been made of the seventeenth century development of Covent Garden and St. James' Square, without much scholarly regard as to who was actually going to live there. The answer to that is, "not the developers," at least not as the principal place of residence. Squares were a new fashion from the continent, as well as making urban space more salubrious. And further, the failure to wholly adopt the Baroque plans of Wren and Evelyn for the rebuilding of the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666 has as much to do with their commercial impractibility as it did with established, pre-fire patterns of ownership.
(19) Of course, other institutions contributed substantially to the colonial effort. These include the Royal Society, where ideas such as continental Baroque town planning and the necessity for healthful urban environments were explored and discussed; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, organized in 1698 and instrumental in establishing the presence of the Church of England and the parish system in the colonies; and the military, just establishing itself in the latter half of the seventeenth century as a professional full-time standing army.
(20) Rather than exhaustively describing such initiatives, this discussion is limited to the possibility of a methodology -- an approach to the study of colonial urban history -- which is generated from within the boundaries of the discipline itself. In following my interest in the motivation and intentions of the colonizers, I offer one such alternative, which seeks by its nature to address or redress the balance in contemporary theories of colonial urban planning and development.
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