Hubs Of Empire

An introduction to the rich history and culture of the Greater Caribbean—the wealthiest region in British America. In Hubs of Empire, Matthew Mulcahy argues that it is useful to view Barbados, Jamaica, and the British Leeward Islands, along with the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, as a single region. Separated by thousands of miles of ocean but united by shared history and economic interest, these territories formed the Greater Caribbean. Although the Greater Caribbean does not loom large in the historical imaginations of many Americans, it was the wealthy center of Britain’s Atlantic economy. Large-scale plantation slavery first emerged in Barbados, then spread throughout the sugar islands and the southeastern mainland colonies, allowing planters to acquire fortunes and influence unmatched elsewhere—including the tobacco colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Hubs of Empire begins in the sixteenth century by providing readers with a broad overview of Native American life in the region and early pirate and privateer incursions. Mulcahy examines the development of settler colonies during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, explores diverse groups of European colonists, and surveys political, economic, and military issues in the decades before the Seven Years War. The plantation system achieved its fullest and harshest manifestation in the Greater Caribbean. The number of slaves and the scale of the slave trade meant that enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans in all of the affiliated colonies, often by enormous ratios. This enabled Africans to maintain more of their traditions, practices, and languages than in other parts of British America, resulting in distinct, creole cultures. This volume is an ideal introduction to the complex and fascinating history of colonies too often neglected in standard textbook accounts.

"The colonial Low Country (the Carolinas, Georgia) and British Caribbean made up an integrated region quite distinct from the Chesapeake, Mid-Atlantic, or New England. Like Maryland and Virginia, the greater Southeast--which formed, as Mulcahy argues, a dynamic center of the British imperial scheme in the New World--relied on staple crops and slave labor. Yet the economic and social ties that bound the Carolinas and the West Indies created quite distinct cultures, black and white alike, giving planters, e.g., a sense of taste and behavior far more tropical and Continental than the ideals that influenced tobacco planters in the Chesapeake. The location and trade patterns of the Carolinas and West Indies encouraged the purchase of slaves from sources and in numbers that ensured far greater persistence of African traditions (and threats of violence) than elsewhere. Mulcahy offers us a short book that explores this early-American/Caribbean region in the manner of our other series titles--explaining the integrity if not unity of the region and what made it so and also comparing it to other economic/cultural regions in the colonial period"--

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.

The Spanish Empire is famous for being, at its height, the realm upon which "the sun never set." It stretched from the Philippines to Europe by way of the Americas. And yet we know relatively little about how Spain managed to move that crucial currency of governance—paper—over such enormous distances. Moreover, we know even less about how those distances were perceived and understood by people living in the empire. This book takes up these unknowns and proposes that by examining how documents operated in the Spanish empire, we can better understand how the empire was built and, most importantly, how knowledge was created. The author argues that even in such a vast realm, knowledge was built locally by people who existed at the peripheries of empire. Organized along routes and centralized into local nodes, peripheral knowledge accumulated in regional centers before moving on to the heart of the empire in Spain. The study takes the Kingdom of Guatemala as its departure point and examines the related aspects of documents and distance in three sections: part one looks at document genre, and how the creation of documents was shaped by distance; part two looks at the movement of documents and the workings of the mail system; part three looks at document storage and how archives played an essential part in the flow of paper.

There is clear overlap in interests and influences for the fields of Atlantic, environmental, and southern history, but scholarship in them has often advanced on parallel tracks. This anthology places itself at the intersection, pushing for a new confluence. Editors Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson provide a lucid introduction to this collection of essays that brings these disciplines together. With this volume, historians explore crucial insights into a self-consciously Atlantic environmental history of the American South, touching on such topics as ideas about slavery, gender, climate, “colonial ecological revolution,” manipulation of the landscape, infrastructure, resources, and exploitation. By centering this project on a region, the American South—defined as the southeastern reaches of North America and the Caribbean— the authors interrogate how European colonizers, Native Americans, and Africans interacted in and with the (sub)tropics, a place foreign to Europeans. Challenging the concepts of “Atlantic” and “southern” and their intersection with “environments” is a discipline-defining strategy at the leading edge of emerging scholarship. Taken collectively, this book should encourage more readers to reimagine this region, its time periods, climate(s), and ecocultural networks.

This book explores the ways in which Latin poets of the late Republic and the Augustan Age participate in a new cultural preoccupation with the dramatically expanding geographical space of empire.

"To endure war, slave rebellion, and revolution between 1795 and 1821, colonial Venezuelans engaged in neutral commerce with the United States. Trading with the United States thereafter prolonged Spanish colonial rule during the Venezuelan independence struggles"--

Seema Alavi challenges the idea that all pan-Islamic configurations are anti-Western or pro-Caliphate. A pan-Islamic intellectual network at the cusp of the British and Ottoman empires became the basis of a global Muslim sensibility—a political and cultural affiliation that competes with ideas of nationhood today as it did in the last century.