Roots Of Empire

Roots of Empire is the first monograph to connect forest management and state-building in the early modern Spanish global monarchy. The Spanish crown's control over valuable sources of shipbuilding timber in Spain, Latin America, and the Philippines was critical for developing and sustaining its maritime empire. This book examines Spain's forest management policies from the sixteenth century through the middle of the eighteenth century, connecting the global imperial level with local lived experiences in forest communities impacted by this manifestation of expanded state power. As home to the early modern world's most extensive forestry bureaucracy, Spain met serious political, technological, and financial limitations while still managing to address most of its timber needs without upending the social balance.

Analyses the origins and nature of the Roman empire, and its continuing influence in discussions and debates about modern imperialism

Through interdisciplinary essays covering the wide geography of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization investigates the diverse networks and multiple centers of early modern globalization that emerged in conjunction with Iberian imperialism. Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization argues that Iberian empires cannot be viewed apart from early modern globalization. From research sites throughout the early modern Spanish and Portuguese territories and from distinct disciplinary approaches, the essays collected in this volume investigate the economic mechanisms, administrative hierarchies, and art forms that linked the early modern Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization demonstrates that early globalization was structured through diverse networks and their mutual and conflictive interactions within overarching imperial projects. To this end, the essays explore how specific products, texts, and people bridged ideas and institutions to produce multiple centers within Iberian imperial geographies. Taken as a whole, the authors also argue that despite attempts to reproduce European models, early Iberian globalization depended on indigenous agency and the agency of people of African descent, which often undermined or changed these models. The volume thus relays a nuanced theory of early modern globalization: the essays outline the Iberian imperial models that provided templates for future global designs and simultaneously detail the negotiated and conflictive forms of local interactions that characterized that early globalization. The essays here offer essential insights into historical continuities in regions colonized by Spanish and Portuguese monarchies.

This book reveals how the structures and practices of past empires interact with and shape contemporary 'national' ones.

Traces the emergence of a revolutionary conception of political authority on the far shores of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Based on the equal natural right of English subjects to leave the realm, claim indigenous territory and establish new governments by consent, this radical set of ideas culminated in revolution and republicanism. But unlike most scholarship on early American political theory, Craig Yirush does not focus solely on the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. Instead, he examines how the political ideas of settler elites in British North America emerged in the often-forgotten years between the Glorious Revolution in America and the American Revolution against Britain. By taking seriously an imperial world characterized by constitutional uncertainty, geo-political rivalry and the ongoing presence of powerful Native American peoples, Yirush provides a long-term explanation for the distinctive ideas of the American Revolution.

A major study of the cultural origins of the Tudor plantations in Ireland and of early English imperialism in general.

Native American Roots: Relationality and Indigenous Regeneration Under Empire, 1770–1859 explores the development of modern Indigenous identities within the settler colonial context of the early United States. With an aggressively expanding United States that sought to displace Native peoples, the very foundations of Indigeneity were endangered by the disruption of Native connections to the land. This volume describes how Natives embedded conceptualizations integral to Indigenous ontologies into social and cultural institutions like racial ideologies, black slaveholding, and Christianity that they incorporated from the settler society. This process became one vital avenue through which various Native peoples were able to regenerate Indigeneity within environments dominated by a settler society. The author offers case studies of four different tribes to illustrate how Native thought processes, not just cultural and political processes, helped Natives redefine the parameters of Indigeneity. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of early American history, indigenous and ethnic studies, American historiography, and anthropology.