ABSTRACT
Conceived and promoted as trading and administrative outposts by the expanding mercantile empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a dozen colonial ports became thriving commercial towns by 1700. As the colonial ports facilitated the transit of British customs, they emphasized those that seemed most useful. Except for the New England towns, where the English for a time predominated, all of the colonial ports developed a diversified population by the close of the century. With continued growth in the eighteenth century, all the colonial ports assumed additional responsibilities. Thus the colonial ports, designed to serve as dependent administrative and trading centres in an expanding mercantile empire, developed, in the course of a century and more of turbulent growth, a degree of autonomy that enabled them to assume a role of leadership in the struggle for independence.
