Showing results for "Power" in Colonial Period

In The Currency of Empire, Jonathan Barth explores the intersection of money and power in the early years of North American history, and he shows how the control of money informed English imperial action overseas. The export-oriented mercantile economy promoted by the English Crown, Barth argues, directed the plan for colonization, the regulation of colonial commerce, and the politics of empire. The imperial project required an orderly flow of gold and silver, and thus England's colonial regime required stringent monetary regulation.

In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clichés, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston’s overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a path-breaking and brilliant new history of early America.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Eastern North America, Natives and newcomers alike understood the close relationship between political power and control of trade and land, but they did so in very different ways. For Native Americans trade was a collective act. The alliances that made a people powerful became visible through material exchanges that forged connections among kin groups, villages, and the spirit world.

As Great Britain and France eyed the Illinois country and the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys for their respective empires, the Overhill Cherokees were coalescing and maintaining a conspicuous presence throughout the territory. Contrary to the traditional narrative of westward expansion, the Europeans were not the drivers behind the ensuing contest over the Tennessee corridor. The Overhills traded, negotiated, and fought with other Indigenous peoples along this corridor, in the process setting parameters for European expansion.

Drawing on encounters between the Creeks of the Southeast and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century, Savage Systers reveals a world in which Native women wielded power through means that shocked European observers: ritualized torture, scalp dances, brutal initiation rites, even infanticide and cannibalism. Far from aberrations, these acts embodied forms of feminine authority rooted deep in tribal culture. In deciding whether a captive lived or died, whether a stranger was rejected or absorbed, Native women determined the fate of peoples and nations.