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Slaves focused their energy and attention, however, not on making money, as slaveholders increasingly did, but on keeping their kin out of the human coffles of the slave trade.

Revealing the entangled lives of texts and textiles in the early modern Atlantic world."e;Textiles are the books that the colony was not able to burn."e;-Asociacion Femenina para el Desarrollo de Sacatepequez (AFEDES)A history of the book in the Americas, across deep time, would reveal the origins of a literary tradition woven rather than written. It is in what Danielle Skeehan calls material texts that a people's history and culture is preserved, in their embroidery, their needlework, and their woven cloth. In defining textiles as a form of cultural writing, The Fabric of Empire challenges long-held ideas about authorship, textuality, and the making of books. It is impossible to separate text from textiles in the early modern Atlantic: novels, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets were printed on paper made from household rags. Yet the untethering of text from textile served a colonial agenda to define authorship as reflected in ink and paper and the pen as an instrument wielded by learned men and women. Skeehan explains that the colonial definition of the book, and what constituted writing and authorship, left colonial regimes blind to nonalphabetic forms of media that preserved cultural knowledge, history, and lived experience. This book shifts how we look at cultural objects such as books and fabric and provides a material and literary history of resistance among the globally dispossessed.Each chapter examines the manufacture and global circulation of a particular type of cloth alongside the complex print networks that ensured the circulation of these textiles, promoted their production, petitioned for or served to curtail the rights of textile workers, facilitated the exchange of textiles for human lives, and were, in turn, printed and written on surfaces manufactured from broken-down linen and cotton fibers. Bringing together methods and materials traditionally belonging to literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, The Fabric of Empire provides a new model for thinking about the different media, languages, literacies, and textualities in the early Atlantic world.

How three white, non-elite American sailors turned their experiences of captivity into diverse career opportunities-and influenced America's physical, commercial, ideological, and diplomatic development.Winner of the John Lyman Book Award by the North American Society for Oceanic HistoryFrom 1784 to 1815, hundreds of American sailors were held as "e;white slaves"e; in the North African Barbary States. In From Captives to Consuls, Brett Goodin vividly traces the lives of three of these men-Richard O'Brien, James Cathcart, and James Riley-from the Atlantic coast during the American Revolution to North Africa, from Philadelphia to the Louisiana Territories, and finally to the western frontier. This first scholarly biography of American captives in Barbary sifts through their highly curated writings to reveal how ordinary individuals in extraordinary circumstances could maneuver through and contribute to nation building in early America, all the while advancing their own interests. The three subjects of this collective biography both reflected and helped refine evolving American concepts of liberty, identity, race, masculinity, and nationhood. Time and again, Goodin reveals, O'Brien, Cathcart, and Riley uncovered opportunities in their adversity. They variously found advantage first in the Revolution as privateers, then in captivity by writing bestselling captivity narratives and successfully framing their ordeal as a qualification for coveted government employment. They even used their modest fame as ex-captives to become diplomats, get elected to state legislatures, and survey the nation's territorial expansions in the South and West. Their successful self-interested pursuit of opportunities offered by the expanding American empire, Goodin argues, constitutes what he calls "e;the invisible hand of American nation building."e;Goodin shows how these ordinary men, lacking the genius of a Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Hamilton, depended on sheer luck and adaptability in their quest for financial independence and public recognition. Drawing on archival collections, newspapers, private correspondence, and government documents, From Captives to Consuls sheds new light on the significance of ordinary individuals in guiding early American ideas of science, international relations, and what it meant to be a self-made man.

A fascinating revisionist history, Sustaining Empire challenges long-standing assertions that this commerce served primarily as a vector for the one-way transmission of revolutionary, liberal ideas from the North to South Atlantic.

Offering a unique perspective on the American Revolution and early American print culture, Revolutionary Networks reveals how these men and women managed political upheaval through a commercial lens.

Ultimately, the book reveals the complex link between government intervention and private initiative in a country struggling to create a political economy that balanced military competence with commercial needs.

These rich accounts of day laborers and domestic servants illuminate the history of early republic capitalism and its consequences for working families.

Ultimately, this book uses the tariff issue to illustrate the critical role that lobbying played within the antebellum policymaking process.

How did people living on the early American frontier discover and then become a part of the market economy? How do their purchases and their choices revise our understanding of the market revolution and the emerging consumer ethos? This work provides answers to these questions by examining the texture of trade between 1760 and 1810.

Looking at farmers as serious independent agents in the making, unmaking, and remaking of the American republic, Grassroots Leviathan offers an original take on the causes of the Civil War, the rise of federal power, and American economic ascent during the nineteenth century.

The story he tells reveals the opportunities and costs of cotton production for the Lower South and the United States.

Offering an intervention into larger conversations about local history, microhistory, and historical scholarship, Entangled Lives is a revealing journey through early America.

She discusses the role of consumers-their reasons for purchasing life insurance, their perceptions of the industry, and how their desires and demands shaped the ultimate product.

This fascinating look at the unpredictable path of a single commodity will change the way readers look at both tea and the emergence of America.

Rather, the Revolution built upon a long history of civic engagement and a complicated relationship between the practice of majority-rule and exclusionary policy-making on the part of appointed and self-selected constituencies.

Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development, providing new insights for both political and economic historians of nineteenth-century America.

Based upon extensive research in both manuscript and printed sources from the period between 1760 and 1830, this book will be of interest to historians of the early republic and economic historians as well as to students of technology, business, and industry.