Making the Early Modern Metropolis: Culture and Power in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia

Philadelphia was the most dynamic city in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America. In Making the Early Modern Metropolis, Daniel Johnson takes a thematic approach to Philadelphia’s related economic, legal, and popular cultures to provide a comprehensive view of its urban development. As he reveals, it was in the interplay of inherited and often competing systems of belief during a period of profound transformation throughout the Atlantic world that early modern cities like Philadelphia were made.