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"Great Britain Colonies America History 18th century."
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The new map of empire : how Britain imagined America before independence
After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. S. Max Edelson's The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain's imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution. Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida's rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces--their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce--and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic. Britain's vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the new world. As London's mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented. Accompanying Edelson's innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Spectacular Suffering
Spectacular Sufferingfocuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves.
The book's first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders.
Spectacular Sufferingthen turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves' petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves' embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion-African slaves-negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery.
Throughout, Mallipeddi's keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights.Spectacular Sufferingis an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.
eBook
Jewish Convict Servants in the American Colonies
“James Revel,” The Poor Unhappy Felon’s Sorrowful Account, ca. 17801 In 1955, exactly seventy years ago, Jacob Rader Marcus first called attention to the existence of Jewish convict servants among the “scoundrels and petty villains” who had been transported from England to serve as indentured workers in the North American colonies.2 In 1970, he named four of them, and, in 1974, he explored the story of fifteen-year-old Feibel Filemann, who was tried in London in 1771 for stealing a linen handkerchief and shipped to the North American colonies.3 Five years later, Todd Endelman compiled aggregate figures for the number of Jews sentenced to be transported to the British colonies from 1730 to 1779, based on Old Bailey court records. [...]in 1993, Eric Goldstein compiled the first list of Jewish convicts sentenced in England to transportation, arriving at a total of 169 names, and traced the history of a small number of them who arrived in Maryland.5 There the matter has rested in relative obscurity. Early historians of American Jewish history, anxious to fete the contributions that Jewish settlers made during the colonial period, might have refrained from telling the story of these low status Jewish convicts for filiopietistic reasons, but the silence of more recent historians is likely due to the fact that there was little of their story to tell.7 Unlike the port Jews, the successful Jewish merchants and trader families of the time—Frank, Levy, Gratz, Sheftall, and Lopez, to name but a few—who settled in Charleston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, and Savannah, the Jewish convict servants scattered throughout Virginia and Maryland had no kinship networks and formed no Jewish communities or even loosely configured groups.
Journal Article
The 'Conquest' of Acadia, 1710
The conquest of Port-Royal by British forces in 1710 is an intensely revealing episode in the history of northeastern North America. Bringing together multi-layered perspectives, including the conquest's effects on aboriginal inhabitants, Acadians, and New Englanders, and using a variety of methodologies to contextualise the incident in local, regional, and imperial terms, six prominent scholars form new conclusions regarding the events of 1710. The authors show that the processes by which European states sought to legitimate their claims, and the terms on which mutual toleration would be granted or withheld by different peoples living side by side are especially visible in the Nova Scotia that emerged following the conquest. Important on both a local and global scale,The 'Conquest' of Acadiawill be a significant contribution to Acadian history, native studies, native rights histories, and the socio-political history of the eighteenth century.
eBook
Disciplining the empire : politics, governance, and the rise of the British navy
\"Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves\" goes the popular lyric. The fact that the British built the world's greatest empire on the basis of sea power has led many to assume that the Royal Navy's place in British life was unchallenged. Yet, as Sarah Kinkel shows, the Navy was the subject of bitter political debate. The rise of British naval power was neither inevitable nor unquestioned: it was the outcome of fierce battles over the shape of Britain's empire and the bonds of political authority. Disciplining the Empire explains why the Navy became divisive within Anglo-imperial society even though it was also successful in war. The eighteenth century witnessed the global expansion of British imperial rule, the emergence of new forms of political radicalism, and the fracturing of the British Atlantic in a civil war. The Navy was at the center of these developments. Advocates of a more strictly governed, centralized empire deliberately reshaped the Navy into a disciplined and hierarchical force which they hoped would win battles but also help control imperial populations. When these newly professionalized sea officers were sent to the front lines of trade policing in North America during the 1760s, opponents saw it as an extension of executive power and military authority over civilians--and thus proof of constitutional corruption at home. The Navy was one among many battlefields where eighteenth-century British subjects struggled to reconcile their debates over liberty and anarchy, and determine whether the empire would be ruled from Parliament down or the people up.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Civil Society and Empire
James Livesey traces the origins of the modern conception of civil society-an ideal of collective life between the family and politics-not to England or France, as many of his predecessors have done, but to the provincial societies of Ireland and Scotland in the eighteenth century. Livesey shows how civil society was first invented as an idea of renewed community for the provincial and defeated elites in the provinces of the British Empire and how this innovation allowed them to enjoy liberty without directly participating in the empire's governance, until the limits of the concept were revealed.
The concept of civil society continues to have direct relevance for contemporary political theory and action. Livesey demonstrates how western governments, for example, have appealed to the values of civil society in their projections of power in Bosnia and Iraq. Civil society has become an object central to current ideological debate, and this book offers a thought-provoking discussion of its beginnings, objectives, and current nature.
eBook