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From household objects to maps and ideas of race, Kariann Yokota examines early US history through the lens of postcolonial theory. While its leaders went to great lengths to establish their "civility,"what really distinguished the new nation were its unlimited natural resources, slavery, and the displacement of native societies.
2017 Bentley Book Prize, World History Association Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrella...
The essays collected here offer a comparative, multilingual, or multisited approach to ideas and representations of America. The contributors explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn ...
Reveals how commodity failure, as much as success, can shed light on aspirations, environment, and economic life in colonial societies.
In My Power tells the story of letter writing and communications in the creation of the British Empire and the formation of the United States. In an era of bewildering geographical mobility, economic metamorphosis, and political upheaval, the proliferation of letter writing and the development of a communications infrastructure enabled middle-class Britons and Americans to rise to advantage in the British Atlantic world. Everyday letter writing demonstrated that the blessings of success in the early modern world could come less from the control of overt political power than from the cultivation of social skills that assured the middle class of their technical credentials, moral deserving, an...
"A Taste of Power is an investigation of the crucial role culinary texts and practices played in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies since the founding of the United States. Nutritional advice and representations of food and eating, including cookbooks, literature, magazines, newspapers, still life paintings, television shows, films, and the internet, have helped throughout American history to circulate normative claims about citizenship, gender performance, sexuality, class privilege, race, and ethnicity, while promising an increase in cultural capital and social mobility to those who comply with the prescribed norms. The study examines culinary writing and practices as...
King George III will not stay on the ground. Ever since a crowd in New York City toppled his equestrian statue in 1776, burying some of the parts and melting the rest into bullets, the king has been riding back into American culture, raising his gilded head in visual representations and reappearing as fragments. In this book, Wendy Bellion asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George III-and why they keep bringing it back. Locating the statue's destruction in a transatlantic space of radical protest and material violence-and tracing its resurrection through pictures and performances-Bellion advances a history of American art that looks beyond familiar narratives of paintings and polite ...
Introduction: America's Business with China -- Founding a Free, Trading Republic -- The Paradox of a Pacific Policy -- Troubled Waters -- Sovereign Rights, or America's First Opium Problem -- The Empire's New Roads -- This Slave Trade of the Nineteenth Century -- A Propped-Open Door -- Death of a Trade, Birth of a Market.
Examines the critical role of urban taverns in the social and political life of colonial and revolutionary America From exclusive “city taverns” to seedy “disorderly houses,” urban taverns were wholly engrained in the diverse web of British American life. By the mid-eighteenth century, urban taverns emerged as the most popular, numerous, and accessible public spaces in British America. These shared spaces, which hosted individuals from a broad swath of socioeconomic backgrounds, eliminated the notion of “civilized” and “wild” individuals, and dismayed the elite colonists who hoped to impose a British-style social order upon their local community. More importantly, urban taver...