Rights, privileges, and the place of the artisan in colonial New York.
Item
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Title
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Rights, privileges, and the place of the artisan in colonial New York.
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Identifier
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AAI9820566
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identifier
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9820566
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Creator
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Middleton, Simon David.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David Nasaw
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, United States | Law | Anthropology, Cultural
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Abstract
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Until the middle of the eighteenth century tradesmen in colonial New York held a particular political and economic position in a social order formed around commitments to a natural hierarchy, deference and mutual respect for the rights and privileges of freeborn Englishmen. Whether high born or of the meaner sort, free men were entitled to claim the privileges of their place. Rulers and the elite expected obedience and deference from their social inferiors; skilled workers claimed respect for their trade privileges and a reasonable return for the work they did. Free men justified their claims to special consideration in a public language of privilege peculiar to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This language, or shared way of talking about politics, drew upon contemporary debates regarding the nature of government and legitimate authority. Thus the language of privilege connected the rhetoric of the middling and meaner sort with that of the high born and learned, and situated them both within a broader scheme of contemporary views of political philosophy.;Over the course of the early eighteenth century the operation of the economy, changes in the practices of municipal government and the introduction of the English common law undermined the language of privilege and the place of the artisan in New York. Collectively these changes produced a shift in the language of politics which diminished the force of claims made in the older terms of hierarchy, inequality and respect for the privileges of each in their place. The decline of the public language of privilege with which men justified preferences and inequality left in its wake a colonial public who claimed and shared equality and unalienable rights under the rule of law It was into this novel and changing environment that the Lockean views of rights and resistance, unacceptable in general debate in the late seventeenth century, took a firmer and ultimately enormously significant hold. The decline in the language of privilege and the place of the artisan provided for new kinds of discussion about rights and privileges in work. In so doing it played an important part in the process which transformed colonial subjects, claiming the rights of Englishmen and the privileges of their place, into Americans who possessed universal equal rights and liberty based not upon their membership in a specific society but upon their humanity.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
