British America Research Articles

Ken MacMillan.Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640.:Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640

How did the English justify their right to govern and settle the New World? What arguments did they use to establish colonies on land that was invariably claimed by others, and what were the implications of those arguments for the subsequent history of English and, eventually, British America? As Ken MacMillan notes in the opening pages of this important new book, such questions have long interested British and American historians, yet few have written about them with the clarity and insight that MacMillan achieves here. Drawing on a broad array of sources, including maps, travel narratives, colonial charters, promotional tracts, and diplomatic papers, MacMillan is chiefly interested in two problems: first, the legal arguments with which the English sought to gain the recognition of Europe's other maritime powers (especially Spain and France) for their right to settle in the New World, and second, the precedent that this effort created for the extension of royal and (after 1649) parliamentary sovereignty over the far-flung inhabitants of England's Atlantic empire. Carefully argued and thoroughly documented, the result is a significant contribution to English and American legal and constitutional history, as well as to the field of British imperial history and the history of international law.

Ambrose Marèchal, The Jesuits, and the Demise of Ecclesial Republicanism in Maryland, 1818-1838

The letter from the Archbishop of Baltimore to the Trustees of the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland began inno cently enough. If Almighty God had listened to my prayers and granted me the grace of spending my days in the humble state of life embraced from my youth, Ambrose Marechal assured them, I should never have troubled you with this letter. What followed touched off a conflict between the prelate and the Society of Jesus that would last more than a decade, reach into the highest quarters of ecclesiastical and secular government in Italy and the United States, and, in the process, emasculate the republican institution?the Corporation?that lay at the heart of the dispute. The archbishop went on to inform them that, since he found himself a disposition of Divine Providence, to be the Archbishop of Baltimore, charged with the adminis tration of a vast diocese that necessitated considerable expenses that he did not have the means to meet, he was consequently seeking the renewal of the $1,200 annual stipend that the Corporation had granted to his predecessors for nearly the past twenty years.1 The Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland had been estab lished in 1792 to secure the extensive property held by individuals for the Society of Jesus, now suppressed by the papacy since 1773. Throughout the colonial period, except for a handful of Franciscans in the late seventeenth century, the Jesuits had been the ministerial church in British America. Since there was originally no state support for religion under the rule of the Calverts, the Jesuits had to support them selves as everyone else did?through working plantations. Over the course of its first century in Maryland, the Society acquired land in various ways: through the head right system that Lord Baltimore established to award property to those who brought

Wit and Politics in Revolutionary British America: The Case of Samuel Seabury and Alexander Hamilton

This essay reads the famous exchange of anonymously written pamphlets between the American loyalist Samuel Seabury and the patriot Alexander Hamilton as an episode in transatlantic literary history. Reading the political pamphlet as a genre in which literary and cultural debates over taste and style simultaneously were taking place, this essay argues that for both patriot and loyalist writers, demonstrating British cultural literacy was crucial to establishing political authorship in America. The subsequent debates between Seabury and Hamilton over such subjects as wit and classical expression testify to the ongoing importance of this literacy as well as the larger dissonance between the political and cultural dimensions of the American Revolution.

American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (review)

Reviewed by: American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Colin Wells (bio) American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Edited by David Shields. New York: Library of America, 2007 952 pp. Writing in these pages in 2003, Philip Gould announced the arrival of “The New Early American Anthology,” one that both broadened the category of “American” to include non-Anglophone works and “press[ed] the boundaries of the literary” to include all manner of texts communicating the variety of experiences of early American life. While this anthological revolution has been generally and rightly celebrated, it was not unreasonable to have wondered at the time how this development would bode for the study of early American poetry in particular. Not only did it fall largely upon this once most-commonly-anthologized genre to make room for the hitherto-unpublished narratives, letters, diary entries, and the like, but poetry seemed to stand out in the new anthologies as the genre least likely to boast of its own groundbreaking new discoveries. What was needed, it seemed, was an anthology that reflected a corresponding [End Page 749] revolution in the study of early American poetry, and that pressed the boundaries of the genre in equally innovative and revisionary ways. With the publication of David Shields’s American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, I am happy to announce the arrival of the New Early American Poetry Anthology. Just how groundbreaking is this latest installment of the Library of America series? It is so, first and foremost, by its very existence. The only other early American poetry anthology currently in print is—get ready for this—a recent reprint of a collection edited by Oscar Wegelin in 1903. The last time a book was published with the title Early American Poetry was 1978, and this was not, in fact, an anthology. One has to go back to 1968 for the last work of this kind—Kenneth Silverman’s Colonial American Poetry—and while this earlier volume can be justly praised for the variety of poems included, particularly from outside of New England, the difference in the scope of Shields’s new collection is substantial. In purely quantitative terms, American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries contains some 300 poems by 108 poets over 836 pages, not including an additional 100 pages of textual, biographical, and explanatory notes. Among this number of poets included are names likely to be found in more traditional literary anthologies (Anne Bradstreet, Ebenezer Cook, Phillis Wheatley, Philip Freneau); several still largely unknown belletrists who cultivated societies of wit and friendship in British America (Jane Turell, Archibald Home, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson); a few historical figures famous for achievements other than poetry, but who also wrote verse on occasion (John Smith, Roger Williams, Bishop Berkeley, Benjamin Banneker); and a dozen or more obscure or anonymous versifiers who simply used poetry as their chosen mode of communication, often with surprising and delightful results. It is this emphasis—what might be called the “uses of poetry”—that sets this collection apart and teaches its readers what is unique and important about early American poetry. For this is an anthology not of “poets” as such, but of men and women who wrote poetry, for a hundred different reasons, each one arising from some distinct cultural and economic circumstance within colonial and Revolutionary-era America. Some of the uses poetry was put to, of course, are quite familiar, and on full display in this collection: there are hymns and psalms and religious meditations, elegies on famous men and ill fated children, political satires on matters of local [End Page 750] and continental import. Still, even well-versed students of early American poetry will be struck by the generic and thematic variety: there are ballads recounting the circumstances of the author’s emigration (the well-known “Sot Weed Factor,” but also “The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of his fourteen Years Transportation in Virginia”); poems on farming, managing slaves, and staple crops (“The Sugar Cane,” “The Convert to Tobacco,” “A Rhapsody on Rum”); poems of school and work (“A College Room,” “A Whaling Song”); poems submitted to newspapers advertising escaped slaves or warning against con-men...

Jay Fliegelman

Jay Fliegelman David S. Shields (bio) "The best obits dissolve character to discover personality. There must be some ceremony, for the candor to make an impression." Sometimes the designs of Providence are odd. Last October 2006, I sat in a hotel lounge with Jay Fliegelman during a break at the American Studies Association Conference at Oakland, discussing the history, forms, and evolution of obituaries. Now, with his forceful opinions about the nature of written memorials echoing in memory, I write his. * * * Jay Fliegelman, Coe Professor and former Department Chair of English at Stanford University, died of cancer and renal failure at his home in Menlo Park, California, on 14 August 2006. He was 58 years old. Author of two landmark studies treating the nature of authority in the Revolutionary Era—Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 and Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance—Fliegelman pioneered a style of textual study that examined expressive works in terms of cultural history. In his scholarship, he eschewed an explicit theoretical or critical methodological program, yet his deep engagement with material culture studies, performance studies, book history, and certain branches of post-structuralism resounded through his writings. He did not write articles. Two unpublished manuscripts may see the light of day. His introduction to Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, a tour de force of cultural contextual scholarship, was fully drafted at the time of his death. His Dramas of American Book Ownership, a meditation on the possession of signal works of American literature by important figures in American history, was reported to be nearly complete. Because his progress reports on writing projects were notoriously unreliable, and because his discomfort with writing grew intense in his later years, there is a real question whether his final masterwork will ever be published. [End Page 135] In some sense the 502 pages of published text that constitute Fliegelman's scholarship do not adequately convey the range of his interests or the peculiar qualities of his mind. They are curiously focused on a mere 50 years of Anglo-American history, display only modest engagement with cultural developments outside of British America and Great Britain, cite no scholarship in languages other than English, and depend upon an archive exclusively limited to printed writings. While his profound grasp of Reformed Christian theology is apparent, there is little evidence of his equally deep knowledge of the pagan classics. Declaring Independence affords glimpses of his keen interest in material objects and material culture study generally, but it in no way conveys his thoroughgoing expertise in the history of ceramics, the technology of graphic print production, the development of optical instruments, or the design of theaters. Much of Jay Fliegelman's mind never came to the page. Only those who enjoyed extensive conversation with him apprehended the compass of his intellect. That conversation had to be face to face. He was not an inspired correspondent. His telephonic communications tended to serve his obsessions. A few colleagues, his graduate students, and a handful of friends in the academy have some idea of the true scope of his engagements. There were aspects of Fliegelman that everyone grasped. That he was witty, brilliant, enthusiastically argumentative, and oddly learned was recognized by all who knew him, including his enemies. He had enemies—and not just because he was baldly judgmental about scholarship. There were persons whose ethos repelled him and he also repelled certain other persons. Interpersonal relationships stood at the center of his life, and there was much about those relationships that had little to do with reason. He attended much to charisma, powers of soul, mood, disposition. Eros, amity, and disgust pulled and pushed persons into various constellations about him. Even the texts which he studied, became personalized in the form of books which he collected. He sought association copies—works that drew peculiar relationships between persons, such as Jefferson's copy of Milton's Paradise Lost. Fliegelman became an intimate of these networks of creation, reception, and celebrity by owning the books, too. A number of years ago, Fliegelman gave an interview describing the eighteenth-century person's regard for the material object. It was...

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America (review)

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America (review)

Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717-1927 (review)

Reviewed by: Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 Vahid Fozdar Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927. By Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Jessica Harland Jacobs’ Builders of Empire explores the reciprocal relationship between British imperialism and the institution of Freemasonry over two centuries. She argues that eighteenth-century Freemasonry’s transformation from a cosmopolitan and politically inclusive institution into a loyalist, Protestant, white, middle-class fraternity had, by the early nineteenth century, made it a fit instrument and key bulwark of British imperialism. In turn, the imperial government, through officials and royal family members who were Masons, helped protect and extend the Masonic network throughout the empire. Masonry also nurtured in its members overlapping and compatible identities-respectable middle-class, national, and imperial-that helped consolidate a diverse empire through bonds of sentiment. Unlike P.J. Rich’s works examining Freemasonry, British imperialism, and the public school system through the prism of ritualism (e.g, Elixir of Empire and Chains of Empire), Builders of Empire seeks to uncover the complex symbiosis that existed between imperialism and Freemasonry. Tracking a single institution like Freemasonry in both the metropole and the colonies over a period of two hundred years, claims Harland-Jacobs, “presents a viable way to ‘do history’ outside the restrictive framework of the nation state” (8). Following Thomas Metcalf and others, she does not view imperialism only as a creator of difference or solely as an “affinity-builder” (e.g., David Cannadine). Rather, Masons in the empire “had to negotiate a disjuncture between their universalist ideology… and their duties and assumptions as imperialists” (239). Harland-Jacobs writes lucidly, and each chapter transitions smoothly into the next. However, her habit of using one endnote to cite multiple and disparate sources for a whole paragraph can be confusing. Also, in some instances, endnotes reveal that events in the text that appear to have transpired closely in time actually happened years apart, causing the reader to arrive at skewed conclusions. Another frustration is the book’s dearth of numbers-crucial to supporting the large claims being made. Total lodge figures for the year 1887, and a few tables tallying lodges in the empire (3–5, 242–244, 255) do not reveal how many men participated in this institution, since as few as seven Masons could found a new lodge. Indian lodge membership-which could be sizeable, as the author notes (52)-was also very unstable. Other numbers reveal little: “Of the approximately one hundred lodges at work in India during the early 1870s, at least one-fifth included indigenous members” (230). That could translate to twenty Indian Masons in all of India: a gross underestimate. Harland-Jacobs’ best sections are on Britain, Ireland, and Canada, and a fair amount of the book is taken up with developments there (not surprising, since her doctoral dissertation was on Freemasonry in Britain and North America from 1751 to 1918). Yet even Canada was divided by much more than the class resentments or Anglophone-Francophone rivalry that she discusses. There existed intra-Protestant strife, too. And well into the twentieth century Canadian Orangeism (under the Grand Orange Lodge of British America) appears to have been more Protestant, more loyalist, and much more politically significant than Freemasonry. Also, the author does not sufficiently interrogate the changing nature of loyalism. Maintaining it in the white dominions, for example, required concessions by the imperial metropole that led to home rule and, finally, the 1931 Statute of Westminster. Without these, would Masons have stood apart from their fellow colonials as loyalist holdouts? Even Harland-Jacobs acknowledges that they pioneered their own version of home rule by establishing sovereign grand lodges from the 1850s onwards. Not only fraternal sentiment, but the promise of parity implicit in brotherhood made white settler, Caribbean black, and Indian Masons loyal to the empire. When parity was not forthcoming, loyalism waned, as in India. The book’s two most problematic areas are India and religion. India is crucial for any empire-wide analysis of Freemasonry, but here it undermines Harland-Jacobs’ thesis that Freemasonry became a white, Protestant phenomenon in the nineteenth century. Mid...

Hakluyt's promise: an Elizabethan's obsession for an English America

Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts. Hakluyt's Promise demonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations-many unpublished since the sixteenth century-and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age. Though he never traveled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England's policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt's thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.

Rape and Sexual Power in Early America

In a comprehensive examination of rape and its prosecution in British America between 1700 and 1820, Sharon Block exposes the dynamics of sexual power on which colonial and early republican Anglo-American society was based. Block analyzes the legal, social, and cultural implications of more than nine hundred documented incidents of sexual coercion and hundreds more extralegal commentaries found in almanacs, newspapers, broadsides, and other print and manuscript sources. Highlighting the gap between reports of coerced sex and incidents that were publicly classified as rape, Block demonstrates that public definitions of rape were based less on what actually happened than on who was involved. She challenges conventional narratives that claim sexual relations between white women and black men became racially charged only in the late nineteenth century. Her analysis extends racial ties to rape back into the colonial period and beyond the boundaries of the southern slave-labor system. Early Americans' treatment of rape, Block argues, both enacted and helped to sustain the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of a New World and a new nation.

Early British Travelers to the U. S. South

What shall we say of the bones, unclean, Whose verdurous anonymity will grow? --Allen Tare, Ode to the Confederate Dead Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam. --Robert Lowell, the Union Dead I. Roanoke When British visitors to America decided to stay, they first stuck roots in the South. The origins of British relations to the World seem so decidedly Yankee in character that it can be hard even in the South to remember that the earliest English explorations of America were as much southern as northern. That New England designates a group of northern United is a historical accident, but one that has left any southern sense of origins skewed and belated: Plymouth Rock actually marked the third time the British came to found a colony (Jamestown in modern day Virginia was second). The first British settlement in the World, and the first birth of an English child on this soil (Virginia Dare), happened in North Carolina, on Roanoke Island. Even the Mayflower was trying to get back to the South, but was blown spectacularly (and conclusively) off course. Americans remember the Mayflower because the Plymouth colony lasted. The United States' southern roots, on the other hand, simply did not take: Sir Walter Raleigh's colony, kept up in fits and starts from 1584, was lost, vanishing almost--but not quite--by 1590. What would have happened if, on John White's return to Carolina's Outer Banks (thirty years before the Pilgrims landed at Provincetown), his family and one hundred-odd others hadn't simply disappeared into the quiet wilderness? What if the lost colony's precedence wasn't almost--but not quite--forgotten by four centuries of recorded history, stymied by unanswerable questions (what really happened to them)? What kind of pageants of that annual rite of national origin might American school-children alternatively stage at Thanksgiving? What kind of food--the early Virginians write of oysters and squirrel broth--would Americans from Maine to California bring to their groaning boards instead? What would it mean if Americans celebrated as southern the English vector that ultimately shaped their nation? Perhaps Americans would care so little about it that nothing would really change. Before a century had passed, historians of Roanoke had begun to complain that the lost colony had vanished in more ways than one. Just twenty years after the event, those colonists never even mentioned and pass into oblivion (Quinn 375). Visitors to the South in the mid nineteenth-century confessed that, although everyone could pick Massachusetts Bay off a map, few could find Roanoke Island, largely because mapmakers consistently forgot to label it. (1) The historical truism of lazy Jamestown and industrious Plymouth that still pervades grade-school history books suggests that southern precedence in national origin doesn't matter much to popular myths of the U.S. in any event--or, if at all, it supposedly matters only to that other stereotype: history-mad, genealogy-obsessed southerners, the ones with a chip still on their shoulders. Although painted as a minority, such people have seemed a concentrated one: they are the force that got May 20, 1775 put on North Carolina's state seal, the date of the (probably spurious) Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence (predating Philadelphia's declaration by more than a year). Nevertheless, one must look very hard to see that fine print as preamble to the U.S. national myth. Academic historians may be the only ones who still have any stake in trying to complicate such stereotypes. For the most part, Americans seem content with the story we've been handed. We teach our children about Squanto, not Manteo. Even in North Carolina, no one buys Virginia Dare dolls. And yet, in a recent English popular history of its relation to the United States, no less a fashionable barometer than that talk show host of the 1980s, David Frost, asserts of Roanoke, Though this colony did not survive, it is nonetheless accepted as the spiritual beginning of an English America that was to become the United States (13). …

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America

Never truly a entirely detached from the home countries of its immigrants, colonial America, over the generations, became a model of transatlantic culture. Colonial society was shaped by the conflict between colonists' need to adapt to the American environment and their desire to perpetuate old world traditions or to imitate the charismatic model of the British establishment. In the course of colonial history, these contrasting impulses produced a host of distinctive cultures and identities. In this impressive new collection, prominent scholars of early American history explore this complex dynamic of accommodation and replication to demonstrate how early American societies developed from the intersection of American and Atlantic influences. The volume, edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, offers fresh perspectives on colonial history and on early American attitudes toward slavery and ethnicity, native Americans, and the environment, as well as colonial social, economic, and political development. It reveals the myriad ways in which American colonists were the inhabitants and subjects of a wider Atlantic world. Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, one of a three-volume series under the editorship of Jack P. Greene, aims to give students of Atlantic history a state of the field survey by pursuing interesting lines of research and raising new questions. The entire series, Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World, engages the major organizing themes of the subject through a collection of high-level, debate-inspiring essays, inviting readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Atlantic experience shaped both American societies and the Atlantic world itself.

Globalization, Creolization, and the Not-So-Peculiar Institution

IT HAS BECOME A CLICHE TO PROCLAIM THE NEED TO INTERNATIONALIZE the study of the United States. Well-funded conferences, special issues of prestigious journals, and countless panels at professional meetings have been devoted to discussions of how to overcome the self-perceived provincialism of American historians. I have joined in the parade of historians who have participated in these events. Like most academic fashions, this one is a response, at least in large part, to perceived shifts in the world in which we live--in this case to demographic, political, cultural, and economic transformations that come together under the rubric of globalization. Also like most academic fads, this one has inspired some scholars to do wonderful work, explicating, for example, the way a single crop and its markets can link people's fates across regions, nations, and continents or the way that innovations in journalistic practices helped create a smaller world. (1) This trend has also inspired its share of flashy but superficial scholarship that disguises old ideas by giving them new labels. Historians of slavery and historians of colonial British America can, perhaps, be forgiven for wondering what the globalizing fuss is all about. Through no particular virtues or insights of their own, they have long had to address many questions through transnational approaches. That is in part because scholars of colonial British America are inherently pulled into two distinct national historiographies--that of Great Britain and that of the United States. Scholars of slavery have found themselves in an analogous position as they have attempted to conceptualize the relationships between Old World heritages and New World realities. Atlantic approaches to the history of slavery in the Americas reach back to W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Melville J. Herskovits, and Eric Williams, so it is hardly surprising that the first formal program in Atlantic history and culture at an American university emerged during the 1970s out of the collaboration of historical anthropologists of Afro-Caribbean experiences and historians of the early modern societies that bordered the Atlantic. (2) By the 1970s, then, historians of slavery in colonial British America were being pushed by intellectual traditions and institutional forces to understand the institution of slavery and the experiences of those victimized by it in transnational contexts that included Africa, Europe, and non-English speaking societies in the Americas. If, as a result, the rage for globalizing perspectives did not hit them with the same force that it hit other practitioners of U.S. history, it has nonetheless helped foster important, though subtler, shifts in the field. As it happens, this can be traced with unusual chronological precision, because of a coincidence in timing. Almost ten years ago Philip D. Morgan published Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, and Ira Berlin published Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Each book represents the culmination of over twenty years of work by one of the most respected historians of American slavery. Both are constructed around questions rooted in the historiography of the United States, and both build on the preceding decade's enormous flowering of local studies of slavery in colonial North America. Both books work within the main currents of the field that their authors had helped to shape by taking Atlantic approaches to colonial slavery. Together they all but swept the major professional book prizes in American history in 1998, and together they can be understood to have brought to fruition a generation of scholarship on slavery in colonial North America. (3) Many Thousands Gone is a synthetic work that seeks to bring interpretive order to the mass of information about colonial slavery that had accumulated from the mid-1970s--when books by Peter H. …

Clearing Swamps, Harvesting Forests: Trees and the Making of a Plantation Landscape in the Colonial South Carolina Lowcountry

Abstract English colonists and African slaves began occupying the South Carolina Lowcountry in the late seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century thousands of slaves cleared thousands of acres of swamplands to create the colony’s signature rice fields and secure its place within the Atlantic economy. This essay examines the changing perceptions and uses of trees as the key to understanding how planters transformed a perceived wilderness into one of British America’s wealthiest and most repressive plantation societies. Colonists used trees to assess and understand the land’s capacity for market agriculture. Slaves cleared land of its wood to prepare the terrain for planting, provide Britain’s empire with vital commodities, and build the infrastructure of daily material life in the region. As colonists and slaves came into sustained engagement with this landscape they learned to exploit its distinctive natural resources more intensively. This transformation is better understood as a process of agricultural adaptation than as an episode in environmental degradation.

Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, eds. Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. vi+386. $50.00 (cloth).

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Clearing Swamps, Harvesting Forests: Trees and the Making of a Plantation Landscape in the Colonial South Carolina Lowcountry

English colonists and African slaves began occupying the South Carolina Lowcountry in the late seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century thousands of slaves cleared thousands of acres of swamplands to create the colony's signature rice fields and secure its place within the Atlantic economy. This essay examines the changing perceptions and uses of trees as the key to understanding how planters transformed a perceived wilderness into one of British America's wealthiest and most repressive plantation societies. Colonists used trees to assess and understand the land's capacity for market agriculture. Slaves cleared land of its wood to prepare the terrain for planting, provide Britain's empire with vital commodities, and build the infrastructure of daily material life in the region. As colonists and slaves came into sustained engagement with this landscape they learned to exploit its distinctive natural resources more intensively. This transformation is better understood as a process of agricultural adaptation than as an episode in environmental degradation.

American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World

Susan Scott Parrish's subtitle reveals the exact contours of her study. Yet she begins with a different image: the Guinea-born slave Kwasi. The governor of the Dutch colony of Surinam “sent Kwasi to the Hague in 1776 to visit Willem V, prince of Orange” (p. 2). William Blake engraved Kwasi's likeness for a book; Linnaeus named in his honor a tree native to Surinam (Quassia amara) whose products formed a substantial export to Europe. “[A] principal healer and diviner for both slaves and colonials in Surinam,” Kwasi helped the Dutch attack the Saramakas, escaped slaves and their descendants (ibid.). What does Kwasi have to do with the British colonists and their scientific correspondents in London? Parrish demonstrates, in seven chapters and thirty-two monochrome illustrations, that “Kwasi shows us, in the colonial sphere and by extension the larger Atlantic world, the ways in which conjuring and scientific modes were by no means walled off from each other among imported African, displaced native, colonial European, and imperial European communities” (p. 5). “British America … was exceptional as a meeting place or battleground for once distant peoples, microbes, plants, and animals that produced a strange new world for all” (p. 7).

The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (review)

Reviewed by: The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel Elizabeth Mancke The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel. Edited by Peter A. Coclanis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. 377 pp. $49.95 (cloth). In "The Dutch Atlantic Economies," the opening essay of this fine collection, Jan de Vries shows that by the 1770s the Dutch imported [End Page 237] more from the West Indies than from Asia, a "point [that] will surprise even specialists in the economic history of the early modern period" (p. xiii), notes Peter Coclanis, the editor. European trade with Asia had been expanding at about 1 percent per annum, and at 2 percent in the Atlantic basin, which the Dutch shift reflects. In Asia, the Dutch entered a centuries-old economic world, while in the Atlantic they participated in creating one. Yet the "organization, operation, practice, and personnel" of that economy, as distinct from the internal economies of societies around the Atlantic, is understudied. This collection of essays helps fill that gap, and in its entirety makes two striking and complementary contributions. First, commercial networks crisscrossed the Atlantic like a "spider's web" (p. 31), rather than in a linear fashion as envisaged by mercantilist conceits or scholarly models of triangular trades. Second, these complex and "self-organizing" (p. 31) networks were integral to the rapid and often chaotic growth of the Atlantic economy. Attention to networks allows scholars to study the permeability of empires, which were not self-contained units. Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert's analysis of Iberian commercial controversies shows the tension between conservative Spaniards connected to the royal court and Portuguese merchants and bankers who operated in Spain's empire after the union of the crowns in 1580 and espoused more liberal trade policies. In essays on seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch relations, Claudia Schnurmann and April Lee Hatfield document the extensive integration of the Dutch into English America. Hatfield shows that inVirginia they muted their national identities by anglicizing their names, speaking English, and associating with coreligionists. Schnurmann reconstructs Anglo-Dutch networks to question the nature of religious, regional, and national identities in the Atlantic world. "Supranational trade" (p. 196) networks, she suggests, often reflected regional identities, for example ties between Massachusetts and Dutch Surinam, which conflicted with national objectives. Breaching the commercial boundaries established by imperial policies became commonplace in the French Antilles as Kenneth Banks shows in his work on the smuggling of slaves into eighteenth-century Martinique. French mercantilist policies, as elaborated by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the 1660s, were designed to curb trade with foreigners, but economic and diplomatic objectives could work in opposition. After France acquired St. Domingue in 1697, the demand for slaves rose beyond what French merchants could supply. A scarcity of slaves encouraged foreign smugglers, whom some colonial officials ignored, some courted, and few challenged. Licit trade was also complex. David [End Page 238] Hancock's analysis of the transformation of Madeira wine "from common plonk into the highest status, most expensive wine in America" (p. 60), tracks the personal networks between Madeira producers and British colonial consumers that allowed them to craft highly localized varieties. His work shows how colonial demand shaped innovations in the production of an Atlantic commodity. Robert S. DuPlessis compares changing patterns of local demand of cloth consumption in Montreal, Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans, ca. 1680–1770. His data show a general decline in woolen consumption and an increase in cotton consumption, consistent with the work of others on the "standardization of colonial consumer goods" (p. 81), but with quite particular ethnic and regional patterns. Amerindians continued to prefer woolens, but gradually increased their purchases of cottons. Wearing cotton tended to be gendered; women wore it more than men. Slaves also wore more cottons and of lower grades than did others. Colonial consumers of cloth, as with consumers of Madeira wine, influenced local markets, notwithstanding transatlantic trends toward more standardized demand. Regional commodity production, the Atlantic economy, and colonial image are explored in essays by S. Max Edelson and Laura Náter. Colonial commodities gained "reputations" in the Atlantic world that affected their valuation...

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America (review)

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America (review)

Teaching & Learning Guide for: How Should We Look at Rape in Early America?

Focus Questions What are the advantages or disadvantages of various approaches to studying the history of rape? How do different approaches endorse particular perspectives (either historical or contemporary) on sexual assaults? What does the study of rape reveal about life in early America? What comparisons can you make to the understanding, process, or prosecution of sexual assaults in other times and places? What do these comparisons suggest about how we write the history of rape? Author Recommends * Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).This book is a comprehensive study of the social, legal and cultural histories of rape in early America. Looking at all of British America from 1700–1820, Block encourages readers to think beyond the legal definition of rape to unravel how early Americans thought about and treated sexual coercion in their daily lives. Her multi‐faceted analysis extends racial constructions of rape back into the colonial period and beyond the bounds of the southern slave‐labor system. * Cornelia H. Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Chapter 5, 231–84.Dayton provides an excellent legal study of rape in the colony of Connecticut that also focuses on the people involved in sexual assaults. She traces the shifts from a seventeenth‐century religious view of rape as a sin of concern to the entire community toward an eighteenth‐century view of rape as a serious crime only when committed by outsiders. * Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), Chapter 5, 159–90.Fischer explores how rape and other forms of sexualized violence were part of the production of race in colonial North Carolina. Fischer looks at an array of rape cases, as well as violent assaults (especially on enslaved people) with less obvious sexual intent. In so doing, she suggests a wider conceptualization of the intersection of sexual and racial oppression in the colonial South. * Pamela Scully, ‘Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth‐Century Cape Colony, South Africa,’American Historical Review, 100 (1995): 335–59.Scully looks at the intersection of race, sex, class, and ideas about masculinity in colonial South Africa through an in‐depth analysis of rape law and cases. This piece provides a nice comparison to the racialized views of rape in the colonial U.S. context, particularly in the ways that it explores the sexual abuse of African women as part of the European imperial project.Online Materials 1. DoHistory http://dohistory.org/two_stories/index.html This website is centered around the diary of an eighteenth‐century New England midwife named Martha Ballard. In that diary, she mentions a rape trial in which she testifies and about which she wrote in her diary. The website allows you to look at all the known primary sources used to reconstruct what happened in this case, comparing the official documents to Martha Ballard’s comments. Click to ‘Table of Contents’ to see an overview of the story. 2. The History of Rape: A Bibliography http://de.geocities.com/history_guide/horb/ Stefan Blaschke has compiled an incredibly extensive bibliography on the history of the rape worldwide. Users can search the bibliography alphabetically by author, chronologically, geographically, topically or by keyword.

Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (review)

Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America. By Jennifer J. Baker. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 218. Illustrations. Cloth, $50.00.)Reviewed by Philip GouldSecuring the Commonwealth a historically astute study of the complex relations between economic and literary history in early America. Encompassing the period between the 1690s, when Massachusetts Bay first introduced government-issued bills of into the colonial economy, and the 1790s, when debates about fiscal policy helped to spur the formation of national political parties, this book provides not so much a developmental history as an analytic survey of key moments where economic and literary histories converge. A member of the English Department at Yale, Jennifer Baker announces that her book is not primarily concerned with analogies between money and language but, rather, with a historical reading of literature (10). Her real concern with the changing ideological terrain in which such terms as and value were conducted-and contested. Literature (understood broadly as letters) was an important site where this occurred, as early American writers like Benjamin Franklin, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, and Judith Sargent Murray saw their literary productions as potential economic interventions (5).Drawing on the disciplines of economic history and political theory, Baker's study first argues that traditional cultural suspicions in colonial America about the danger of economies were challenged by an emergent culture of speculation that more optimistically viewed capitalism's promise to promote simultaneously both individual opportunity and communal cohesion (4). Especially by the end of the eighteenth century, when Scottish moral philosophy and economic theory had taken hold in British America, Americans were increasingly persuaded that public actually strengthened ties among citizens. Scholars of the early republic will note that the book's discussion of late eighteenthcentury economic does have a kind of Hamiltonian tenor to it, because personal, commercial, and public contexts for credit all devolved upon psychological dynamics of trust, faith, and potentiality (25). Not only, then, does the book make an argument about what modern about late-colonial and early national America, but it also tries to dismantle the opposition between community and modernity. Paper schemes denned the boundaries of community . . . but they also defined a community by soliciting, and even exacting commitment (17).Whatever questions the book raises about the uneven and highly contextual nature of these historical changes, it does offer intriguing readings of early American literary works with an eye for their economic themes and formal features. Perhaps its greatest strength its ability to show how early American writers adapted and redeployed the language of economies. Readers of the JER may be less interested in the two early chapters on colonial Massachusetts and Virginia, but these early discussions do begin to show the rhetorical complexity and mobility of economic ideas and language. For example, Baker argues that Cotton Mather's writing on Massachusetts Bay's economic woes during the 1690s understood economic and spiritual forms of redemption not merely as tropes, but as sorts of analogous mindsets under providential designs, which demanded New English citizens wait patiently and not panic. (Wise advice to the elect and creditors alike!) Particularly noteworthy her reading of Mather's famous biography of Governor William Phips, which subtly imparts the lesson to creditors and speculators to embrace unpredictability and change. …