ABSTRACT
British colonial cities created the most dynamic sexual cultures in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world. This chapter explores how the urban colonial environment facilitated the development of these particularly dynamic sexual cultures. It focuses on the premier cities in the three principal eighteenth-century British colonial ventures: settler societies of British North America; slave societies of the British West Indies; and British mercantile communities in the East Indies. Eighteenth-century British colonial cities were cities at sea. Each was a port in a maritime world. Eighteenth-century Philadelphia earned a reputation as a city with a permissive sexual culture and exceptionally independent women. Mid-century Philadelphia was the most cosmopolitan city in British North America. Kingston was more diverse than the surrounding countryside, attracting both the island's free people of the colour and the resident whites, including a sizable Portuguese Jewish population, reducing the magnitude of the enslaved black majority.
