New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware are often grouped as the "middle colonies", but I'd like to get people's views on how culturally similar they really were. I'm interested in this both before and after the ARW, for the 1750-1850 period.
In some timelines New York is often grouped more with New England, based on trade links, but I wonder if that is too much based on New York City. I would have thought upstate New York would have had a lot of similarity to Pennsylvania, but I don't really know. What was Philadelphia's economy most like?
There's also the aspect that these colonies were more ethnically diverse than other places, but it seemed it was more Dutch in New York and more German in Pennsylvania. How well did these groups get on?
Finally, Delaware was a slave state with powerful ruling families. Surely this is more similar to Virginia than New York?