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This enthralling book is the first to uncover the story of New York City merchants who engaged in forbidden trade with the enemy before and during the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War). Ignoring British prohibitions designed to end North America’s wartime trade with the French, New York’s merchant elite conducted a thriving business in the French West Indies, insisting that their behavior was protected by long practice and British commercial law. But the government in London viewed it as treachery, and its subsequent efforts to discipline North American commerce inflamed the colonists.Through fast-moving events and unforgettable characters, historian Thomas M. Truxes brings eighteenth-century New York and the Atlantic world to life. There are spies, street riots, exotic settings, informers, courtroom dramas, interdictions on the high seas, ruthless businessmen, political intrigues, and more. The author traces each phase of the city’s trade with the enemy and details the frustrations that affected both British officials and independent-minded New Yorkers. The first book to focus on New York City during the Seven Years’ War, Defying Empire reveals the important role the city played in hastening the colonies’ march toward revolution.
Retells the story of America--and of its engagement with its neighbors and the rest of the world--as a series of highly contentious battles over clandestine commerce.
The author traces the U.S. policies in regard to the Iraq War, and examines the challenges in reclaiming the UN as part of the global peace movement.
"The Dutch Atlantic during an era (following the imperial moment of the seventeenth century) in which Dutch military power declined and Dutch colonies began to chart a more autonomous path. A revisionist history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, a counterpoint to the more widely known British and French Atlantic histories"--
Introduction: borderless societies -- The borderland -- Political conflicts -- Rebels and runaways -- The centrality of smuggling -- The web of debt -- Borderless businessmen -- Conclusion: the shape of empire.
A bold new account of the Age of Revolution, one of the most complex and vast transformations in human history "A fresh and illuminating framework for understanding our past and imagining our future. Powerfully argued and engagingly written, Patrick Griffin's timely account of revolutionary regime change and reaction shows how a world of empires became our world of nation-states."--Peter S. Onuf, coauthor of Most Blessed of the Patriarchs "When we speak of an age of revolution, what do we mean? In this synoptic, compelling book, Patrick Griffin asks the difficult questions and invites readers to reconsider the answers."--Eliga Gould, author of Among the Powers of the Earth The Age of Atlantic Revolution was a defining moment in western history. Our understanding of rights, of what makes the individual an individual, of how to define a citizen versus a subject, of what states should or should not do, of how labor, politics, and trade would be organized, of the relationship between the church and the state, and of our attachment to the nation all derive from this period (c. 1750-1850). Historian Patrick Griffin shows that the Age of Atlantic Revolution was rooted in how people in an interconnected world struggled through violence, liberation, and war to reimagine themselves and sovereignty. Tying together the revolutions, crises, and conflicts that undid British North America, transformed France, created Haiti, overturned Latin America, challenged Britain and Europe, vexed Ireland, and marginalized West Africa, Griffin tells a transnational tale of how empires became nations and how our world came into being.
This title is available online in its entirety in Open Access. Dutch Atlantic Connections reevaluates the role of the Dutch in the Atlantic between 1680-1800. It shows how pivotal the Dutch were for the functioning of the Atlantic sytem by highlighting both economic and cultural contributions to the Atlantic world.
Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. These plantation regimes were, to adopt a metaphor of the era, complex "machines," finely tuned over time by planters, merchants, and officials to become more efficient at exploiting their enslaved workers and serving their empires. Using a wide range of archival evidence, The Plantation Machine traces a critical half-century in the development of the social, economic, and political frameworks that made these societies possible. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus find deep and unexpected similarities in these two prize colonies of empires that fought each other throughout the period. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue experienced, at nearly the same moment, a bitter feud between planters and governors, a violent conflict between masters and enslaved workers, a fateful tightening of racial laws, a steady expansion of the slave trade, and metropolitan criticism of planters' cruelty. The core of The Plantation Machine addresses the Seven Years' War and its aftermath. The events of that period, notably a slave poisoning scare in Saint-Domingue and a near-simultaneous slave revolt in Jamaica, cemented white dominance in both colonies. Burnard and Garrigus argue that local political concerns, not emerging racial ideologies, explain the rise of distinctive forms of racism in these two societies. The American Revolution provided another imperial crisis for the beneficiaries of the plantation machine, but by the 1780s whites in each place were prospering as never before—and blacks were suffering in new and disturbing ways. The result was that Jamaica and Saint-Domingue became vitally important parts of the late eighteenth-century American empires of Britain and France.
A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy In a single, readily digestible, coherent narrative, historian Thomas M. Truxes presents the three hundred–year history of the overseas trade of British America. Born from seeds planted in Tudor England in the sixteenth century, Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes shows how colonial American prosperity was only possible because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade.
A groundbreaking history of early America that shows how Boston built and sustained an independent city-state in New England before being folded into the United States 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 revered metropolis 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 pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston’s development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain’s Stuart monarchs and how—through its bargain with the slave trade and ratification of the Constitution—it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States. The City-State of Boston peels away layers of myth to offer a startlingly fresh understanding of this iconic urban center.