London
In 1771, London is the expansive metropolitan center of finance, trade, commerce, shipping and all other forms of business, including publishing, and one of the most powerful engines of imperial power in the West.
London was by every account the culturally and financially dominant center of the domestic and imperial economy, not least in its role as a center of the book and printing trades.
What made this possible was its sheer size, at around 760,000 people in the early 1770s, with continued growth from domestic and international immigration. This made London almost fourteen times larger than Edinburgh, and twenty-eight times the size of Philadelphia. This gargantuan size and metropolitan heft made every aspect of cultural production—numbers of readers, writers, printers, presses, outlets—easier to sustain and grow.
Given its size, density, and diversity, London also offered the broadest range from high to low occupations and ranks of any city in England, while being fully capable of reflecting the era’s “minute social distinctions.”
Philadelphia’s prominence as a regional hub disseminating knowledge and newsto the rest of the colonies helped it develop an economy based as much onknowledge and information as on manufacturing and trade.