In his book Mark Peterson presents an innovative perspective on the development of Boston and its New England hinterland as an early modern city-state. His purpose was to tell the story of Boston in its own right, shedding US national history as the dominant interpretative framework. The four reviewers pick up various strands, focusing, among others, on the validity of the city-state concept, especially

While wet nursing interactions between enslaved women of African descent and colonial women have received extensive scholarly attention, much remains to be done in understanding colonial and Native women’s interactions around breastfeeding and infant feeding. This article close-reads two captivity narratives in which baby food features prominently: God’s Protecting Providence, Jonathan Dickinson’s

Piled carpets, whether of Eastern or European production, appeared in colonial homes soon after the colonisation of North America in the early 17th century. Initially displayed on tables and cupboards, they were subsequently used as floor coverings in the homes of political and social elites. Over the 18th century Eastern carpets appear to have lost their original semiotic function: ‘English’ having

From 1630 until its fall in 1654, the Dutch West India Company maintained a colony in northeastern Brazil where it tried to profit from the cultivation of sugar using enslaved African labor. Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen served as this colony’s governor-general from 1636 until 1644, this being the most heavily studied period of the colony’s existence. But the role of Johan Maurits in the transatlantic

In late 1659, the Dutch West India Company’s Amsterdam Chamber began an “experiment” intended to bring a regularized slave trade to New Amsterdam. With Curaçao as a reliable source of enslaved Africans, the Amsterdam Chamber opened the slave trade to independent investors and merchants, following a collaborative model between a state-sponsored corporation and private investors used elsewhere in the

An imagined divide existed between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean since the earliest days of European transoceanic discovery. The separation was reflected in the charters granted to England’s major trading companies which limited access for private merchants to eastern markets. The Indian Ocean was covered by the charter held by the East India Company and centered on bilateral luxury trade. The trade

This article considers Haudenosaunee recitals of the history of the Covenant Chain as a powerful communicative mechanism to define and assert sovereign identity and rights in the context of intercultural diplomacy. It reflects initially on the metaphorical language used to structure these historical narratives and how it enabled the Haudenosaunee to articulate self-understandings of their sovereignty

This manuscript privileges gender as both analytical tool and investigated object to argue for its causative role in American independence. It posits the political doctrine of virtual representation that Britain’s Parliament evoked to assert sovereignty over America in the 1760s generated a transatlantic debate over who and what constituted a freeborn Englishman, a figure at the center of power in

This paper responds to most recent works on the complexity of loyalist identities during the American Revolution. It forms a close reading of over 400 claims submitted by self-identified loyalist claimants from the former colony of New York to the Loyalist Claims Commission. Through a case study of three New York counties (the city and county of New York, Albany County and Tryon County), the paper

This paper offers a critical reflection on the appropriateness of ‘settler colonialism’ as an analytic category for understanding the political dynamics of early America. It argues that the paradigm’s focus on the elimination of the native obscures the resilience of Indian power, and the mechanisms by which that power was exercised and defended. The paper positions settler colonialism in recent treatments

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on colony-specific legislature-issued paper money as a medium of exchange for domestic transactions. The creation of paper money regimes arose piecemeal among the colonies, making each story unique. Maryland’s story is the most complex among the colonies, since the emission of paper money resulted from an attempt to control

This essay examines the anatomical language that appears in 16th- and 17th-century English travel narratives, which authors used to portray efforts to colonize North America as a series of encounters between an American continental body and the English nation. Imagery related to the digestive tract marked struggling or failed efforts, while reproductive and marital imagery described successful ventures

The Treaty of Paris of 1783 brought the American War of Independence to a formal end. But all was not resolved with the return of peace to North America. Loyalists had to build new lives in Canada and elsewhere across the British empire. Similarly, Canadians who had supported and fought for the revolutionary cause were no longer welcome in their ancestral homeland. After years of hardship in the ranks

Generations of scholars have declared the Articles of Confederation to be inadequate to the needs of the nation of necessity replaced by the Constitution of 1787. This interpretation rests on three methodological flaws. First, it is anachronistic by which I mean that scholars use as a standard of judgement answers to questions of constitutional policy embedded in the Constitution. They then judge the

A book forum featuring The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830 by Brian R. Hamnett. His 2017 volume argues that the origins of Ibero-American Independence must be found in the interplay between the Spanish and Lusitanian monarchies and the American empires ruled by them. It was internal conflict within these empires that led to independence, not revolution, separatist sentiment

This article argues that early American political elites had no viable competing model for a successful polity other than an empire. It emphasises that this group’s recognition of the need for power in a competitive Atlantic world, expressed through the institutions of an empire, forced them to reconsider their ideas of what forms a republic could take. The article focuses on the ratification of the

Using transmediality as an approach to analyse the use of symbols in Anglo-American protest culture during the 1760s and 1770s sheds new light on the process of creating ideological alliances and the making of meaning. In the same way written text created a shared realm of ideas even as they were read and reinterpreted in accordance with different political and social contexts, visual templates, for

This article explores the lives of the countless “Indian Factors” who straddled Native and European worlds during the eighteenth century. For the most part, these individuals were born of mixed unions between European men and Creek women, and were employed as traders and intermediaries in the deerskin trade and Creek-British politics. However, after the Seven Years’ War, Indian factors triggered a

In 1797, John Adams called together a special session of Congress. Adams informed the assembled members that he had sent new ambassadors to France and requested a buildup of the military. Adams’s belligerent message set the stage for the military engagement with France that came to be known as the Quasi War. In the message, Adams included some documents about French depredations in the Netherlands

This essay is a contextual analysis of the History of New Hampshire (1784–1792) by Jeremy Belknap, founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society. I situate Belknap’s historical and institutional achievements within the framework of settler colonialism studies to argue that Belknap used his profound knowledge of previous New England historiography to write a settler history of American colonization—a

The purpose of this study is to provide greater insight into the power of native women as understood by sixteenth century North American conquistadors by juxtaposing two analogous but geographically distinct settings. Depictions of women in New France by Jacques Cartier, Samuel Champlain and their followers in the northern borderlands of North America are compared to those depictions made by Hernando

The U.S. Constitution was first developed at the 1787 Convention, where each state’s vote was determined by the majority preference of its delegates. Two of the delegates from New York, John Lansing and Robert Yates, both strident anti-Federalists, left the Convention early due to disagreement with the proceedings. Their departure cost New York its vote for the rest of the Convention, and has been

Slave flight in the antebellum South did not always coincide with the political geography of freedom. Indeed, spaces and places within the South attracted the largest number of fugitive slaves, especially southern cities, where runaway slaves attempted to pass for free blacks. Disguising themselves within the slaveholding states rather than risk long-distance flight attempts to formally free territories

This article utilizes digital humanities social network analysis to examine Native women’s roles in overlapping familial and economic social ties revealed in two early Dutch account books. Taken individually these records are difficult to fit into broader analyses; many of the individual Native people who appear in early account books are recorded only once or at most a handful of times and rarely

We analyze Williamsburg, Virginia, builder Humphrey Harwood’s business ledger (1773–1793); a traditional businessman in a time of business innovation. He faced the problems of colonial businessmen: an insufficient money supply forced him to extend credit, creating re-payment problems and re-payment costs. Business practices managing these problems were becoming widespread. Harwood practiced none. This

It was something of an embarrassment to the founding generation of the United States that freedom had been won with the aid of English America’s two arch enemies, France and Spain. The Spanish Empire in America was clearly at odds with the revolutionary cause. Not only had it stood as a traditional enemy, but it adhered tightly to monarchy and Roman Catholicism – which together amounted to probably

The Yamasee War was a watershed moment in the history of colonial South Carolina. The trade in captive Native Americans through Charles Town was much lower after the war, but did not stop. Continuities across this rupture included captives coming into possession of the colony through the same mechanisms as before the war: as diplomatic gifts, as captives taken in warfare, or as traded commodities.

This book forum focuses on Wim Klooster’s The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2016). In his book, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets

Historians have noted the wave of cultural and civil nationalism that swept the United States following the War of 1812. “Moon Struck Lunatics” positions American nationalism in the Era of Good Feelings within the broader context of global events. The article probes the impact of the Spanish-American Revolutions on early Americans’ consciousness as a nation. The revolutions contextualized for Americans

Paine remains the most important contributor to the American and French revolutions for whom no reliable collection of writings has been published. All existing collections of Paine’s writings fall short of scholarly standards. At least twenty-six Paine’s texts have been deattributed and seventeen have been recently added to his collected works. A complete edition based on modern scholarly standards

This article explores the issue of discriminatory taxation against colonial Jamaican Jews and the trans-Atlantic Jewish lobby. Based on colonial correspondences, this article makes two main arguments. First, Collective Jewish taxation was debated in colonial correspondences to a far greater extent than its actual financial significance, as it became an issue symbolic of the growing rift between the

This essay explores the connections between Paine’s international thought and the theory of liberal internationalism in the field of Political Science. Paine was first to provide a coherent theory of how democracy, free trade, and limited military spending would promote both peace and prosperity. One troubling inconsistency in Paine’s liberal internationalism rests in his advocacy for both small military

The directors of the Dutch West India Company gambled their reputations and capital in a decades-long scheme to conquer and pacify Brazil, and in the end, they lost. This essay explores the various religious elements of that scheme or “mission,” as it was also called: establishing the Dutch Reformed Church as the colony’s public church, spreading the message of the “true religion,” attacking sin and

It has been famously argued that Tom Paine was not much of an economic thinker. Indeed, in his published work, we see relatively scarce systematic commentary on the subject. But, as befitting his origins in a mercantile family, Paine as a young man had prepared for a career as an excise officer. He later fully participated in a broader Enlightenment conversation about the new world of credit, trade

This article addresses Paine’s participation in the French Revolution, which has been largely either overlooked or caricatured by most scholars. It examines why the speeches he delivered and the writings he published in France during the various stages of the shift from monarchy to republic are significant and why they should not be merely considered as “a nice footnote to the politics of the Gironde”

Thomas Paine share with the Montagnards and the popular movement in the French Revolution the same conception of the republic. It is based on the guarantee of the right to exist, based on an idea of freedom defined as equality of personal rights. Instead, the Girondins and Condorcet whose political ideas are yet systematically associated with his, highlight the unlimited freedom of the owner as the

Benjamin Franklin played a significant role in the early encounter between Rome and the United States. By highlighting Franklin’s role one is likely to question the two main tenets of traditional Catholic historiography in this regard. First of all, that the Holy See did not unwillingly submit itself to any imposition of newly-devised American democratic procedures in selecting how best to deal with

Historians have commonly portrayed the Pennsylvania backcountry as a lawless, violent region. Many have attributed this these levels of violence to the influx of Scots Irish migrants to the province after the 1720. Examining several eighteenth-century Pennsylvania counties, this article demonstrates that earlier scholars have consistently overestimated levels of crime on the frontier. Moreover, court

By the end of the seventeenth century, Anglo-Americans on both sides of the Atlantic accepted the importance of surveying to any system of land ownership. Most historians of colonial British have similarly taken colonial surveying practices as a given. This article complicates these assumptions through an examination of Pennsylvania in a wider context. In fact, land policy in colonial Anglo-America

Colonizers in seventeenth and eighteenth-century British North America lived in a world with many frontiers. Looking at the map, they did not perceive a single, westward-rolling frontier line separating settled from unsettled or civilized from savage. Rather, they focused on discrete spaces most exposed to military attack, by land or by sea, and in most in need of military protection. Frontiers represented

In 1765, frontiersmen in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania forcibly prohibited British officials and colonists from participating in the Indian trade, intercepting and destroying goods intended for Native Americans in the Ohio Country. Imperial officials and civil leaders in Pennsylvania condemned the actions of the so-called “Black Boys,” suggesting that they represented a form of insurrection. Close