From an Oceanic Empire to a New Nation

In the first century and a half of colonial settlement in Massachusetts Bay, Boston quickly developed into the region’s most important city, one of the key sites in the British Atlantic empire. Making the most of relatively limited natural resources, Boston became an important entrepôt: a port for trading and transshipment. Its merchants became masters of the maritime commerce which linked New England, Britain, and the broader colonial world through exchanges of money and goods, deeply enmeshed with the plantation economies and enslaved labor of the south and the Caribbean. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the city began to resent the demands of an increasingly centralized British imperial administration. Boston became the flashpoint for the American Revolution, with its urban spaces hosting some of the first skirmishes that would eventually lead to all-out warfare. As the thirteen colonies struggled towards independence, ideas about commonwealth government drawn from the geography of Massachusetts towns became highly influential in the ideology of the new republic.