Frontier seaport: Detroit's transformation into an Atlantic entrepot, 1701--1837.

This dissertation expands the historiographical boundaries of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to include Detroit. It argues that by 1760, this seemingly remote and minor fur-trade settlement was thoroughly integrated into the economy and culture of the North Atlantic basin: it served as a critical link in a commercial chain stretching to Russia and China; it conducted business with merchant firms from around the North Atlantic; and it clamored for and was saturated with the same transnational merchandise prevalent throughout the entire French and British Atlantic world. Frontier Seaport demonstrates that Detroit's Atlantic incorporation was hastened by its location on the fringe of empire: its profitability, its proximity to the Great Lakes, and its potential for commercial development enticed east-coast merchants to relocate there, bringing with them established transatlantic networks, commercial development schemes, business acumen, and access to popular culture and merchandise. Transplanted eastern merchants did not bank on the persistence of Detroit's administrative and social localisms, responses to an environment characterized by ethnic diversity and absentee colonial management. Frontier Seaport closely examines these localisms, arguing that they threatened political incorporation into the Atlantic world: Detroit's merchants worked diligently (and successfully) to erode them beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century. In consequence, by Michigan's attainment of statehood in 1837, Detroit looked much like any cosmopolitan American metropolis, poised to become a manufactory-seaport: a new type of American entrepot. This project complicates our understanding of the Atlantic's reach, the interdependencies of metropolitan and peripheral spaces, and the roles that liminal settlements like Detroit played in their interactions with both West and East. It takes to task conventional interpretations of Detroit that understand it only as a remote fur-trade outpost or as an idealized middle ground. Instead, it emphasizes non-frontier associations, unearths the inhabitants' motivations, and documents the roles fulfilled by them on local, regional, continental, and international stages. In short, Detroit was a complicated geographic space as much tied to the empire as it was situated on the frontier, and as committed to attaining its own economic and cultural prowess as it was to functioning in more traditionally colonial ways.Ph.D.American historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127115/2/3382032.pd