Jackson’s story, “The Tavern Fire”, which first appeared in After Hours, Tales from the Ur-Bar, edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray, Daw Books, 2011) and the smallpox epidemics of 17 only made matters worse. The fire that devastated the South End in 1760 (the subject of D.B. Poverty was rampant, and the city’s economy stagnated. After the war, all the colonial economies suffered, but having missed out on the good times, Boston’s populace had nothing on which to fall back. While many industries, especially ship-building, thrived in the mid-Atlantic cities Boston was largely left out of the economic boom. These problems were exacerbated during the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 (known as the Seven Years’ War in Europe, where it was fought from 1756-1763) when New York, and to a lesser extent Philadelphia, became the British Empire’s center of operations for the North American theater.
And as West Indian trade became increasingly crucial to the New World economy, the mere fact of Boston’s remoteness from the islands placed it at a disadvantage. Because Boston’s surrounding countryside was far less agriculturally productive than the hinterlands of Philadelphia and New York - New England’s soil was poor and the distance between the city and farming trade centers was great - Boston was dependent on its rivals for foodstuffs. These numbers were indicative of a larger problem for the city. Twenty years later, Boston’s population had actually contracted slightly Philadelphia’s had grown to nearly 24,000 and New York’s to 18,000. At the beginning of the 1740s, Boston’s population was over 16,000, larger than her two greatest rivals, Philadelphia and New York. Once, she had been the largest city in North America, and the economic center of the colonies. On the one hand, Boston’s best days seemed to be behind her. The city of Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, held a unique and somewhat contradictory position in the North American colonies in the years leading up to the split with England and the War for Independence.
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