Death and Life in a Colonial Immigrant City: A Demographic Analysis of Philadelphia

Smith, Billy G.

doi:10.1017/s0022050700094729

Cited by 31 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…By 1690, the City of Brotherly Love counted roughly 2,000 European inhabitants. 79 Just over half of them were Friends. 80 A majority of the remaining Europeans were Anglicans.…”

Section: How Philadelphia Monthly Meeting's Case Load Developed Over ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Pluralism, Arbitration, and State Formation: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Quaker Court, 1682–1772

Sahle

2023

Law hist. rev.

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Legal centralization in British America was characterized by the passing of arbitration from the community level to the colonial courts. As a consequence, when the 1765 Stamp Act raised the cost of court business, colonists were at a loss for alternatives. This paper addresses the question of why, at this point, colonists did not return to earlier, non-state forms of arbitration. It offers an explanation by providing a detailed empirical study of an alternative American legal forum: the Philadelphia Quaker monthly meeting. While busy arbitrating disputes in the early colonial period, it declined from around 1720. Contrary to what might be expected, this decline was not the consequence of state efforts to marginalize competing institutions. Rather, the local Quaker population abandoned their community legal forum in favor of the public courts. This was likely due to the Quaker court's reliance on reputation-based instruments for enforcement. As Philadelphia's population grew, the meeting's practice of pressuring culprits into compliance through public shaming lost its edge. Accordingly, Friends moved their legal business to the public courts. The paper contributes to the debates on the legal pluralism of empires, the history of arbitration, and state formation in the Atlantic.

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“…By 1690, the City of Brotherly Love counted roughly 2,000 European inhabitants. 79 Just over half of them were Friends. 80 A majority of the remaining Europeans were Anglicans.…”

Section: How Philadelphia Monthly Meeting's Case Load Developed Over ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Legal Pluralism, Arbitration, and State Formation: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Quaker Court, 1682–1772

Sahle

2023

Law hist. rev.

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“…By 1775, their number had grown to 32,000. 51 The new arrivals were pre-dominantly non-Quaker, many stemmed from continental Europe. 52 It is unclear when Friends became outnumbered by others.…”

Section: The Quaker Colony and Its Courtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Law and Gospel Order: resolving commercial disputes in colonial Philadelphia

Sahle

2020

Cont. Change

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Trade in the early modern Atlantic grew a great deal. While acknowledging that this growth had important economic, social and cultural consequences, scholars have yet to fully explain its causes. This paper argues that formal religious institutions were key. Based on records from colonial Philadelphia, it shows how the Quaker meeting created a legal forum to resolve commercial disputes. The meeting enforced its verdicts by gathering and disseminating information about disputes locally and across the Atlantic world through the Society of Friends’ formal organisation of meetings. Thereby, it re-enforced reputation mechanisms, facilitating the expansion of Philadelphia's trade.

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“…Sources: See Table 1 for the source of the servant distribution. The estimated population and black proportion was taken from Sutherland (1936), except for the population of Philadelphia City which was taken from Smith (1977) and Alexander (1974 chases. The average contract lasted for around four years.…”

Section: Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Immigrant Servant Labor: Their Occupational and Geographic Distribution in the Late Eighteenth- Century Mid-Atlantic Economy

Grubb¹

1985

Social Science History

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Contract Labor played a critical role both in financing European trans-Atlantic migration and in providing a hirable labor force to work the estates of the New World. During the seventeenth century at least three-quarters of the Chesapeake colonists arrived under some form of short term contract (Walsh, 1977: 111). By the American Revolution, a majority of English, German, and southern Irish emigrants still used servant contracts to finance their migration to Pennsylvania (Grubb, 1985). For the year 1773, 61% of the 387 southern Irish immigrants, 18% of the 1,420 Ulster immigrants, 25% of the 382 Scotch immigrants, and 52% of the 174 English immigrants to Pennsylvania entered servitude. For the years 1771–1773, out of 747 German adult male immigrants to Pennsylvania 58% entered servitude. For 1785–1804, 45% of the 7,837 German immigrants to Pennsylvania entered servitude.

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Death and Life in a Colonial Immigrant City: A Demographic Analysis of Philadelphia

Cited by 31 publications

References 9 publications

Legal Pluralism, Arbitration, and State Formation: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Quaker Court, 1682–1772

Legal Pluralism, Arbitration, and State Formation: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Quaker Court, 1682–1772

Law and Gospel Order: resolving commercial disputes in colonial Philadelphia

Immigrant Servant Labor: Their Occupational and Geographic Distribution in the Late Eighteenth- Century Mid-Atlantic Economy

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