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22 results

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  • Introduction: What Does America and the World “Mean” before 1825?

  • Edited by Eliga Gould, University of New Hampshire, Paul Mapp, College of William and Mary, Virginia, Carla Gardina Pestana, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of America and the World
    Published online:
    12 November 2021
    Print publication:
    03 March 2022, pp 8-34

  • Summary

    Studying “America and the World” in the period before the advent of the United States carries a different meaning than it does after 1776. As used by historians of the modern United States, as in the other volumes in this series, America and the world usually refers to the foreign policy and global interactions of the American republic, with the United States occupying the role of an independent power and, increasingly, an empire. This volume calls for a different agenda: to understand how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving Indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas; others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe’s imperial powers to secure their American claims; and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. For most of the 300 years after the first European voyages of discovery, we use America to refer not to a single political entity, much less an empire, but rather to a space within which other states, peoples, and empires, many of them centered outside the Western Hemisphere, interacted and vied for supremacy and control.

The Cambridge History of America and the World
  • Volume 1, 1500–1820
  • Edited by Eliga Gould, Paul Mapp, Carla Gardina Pestana
  • Published online:
    12 November 2021
    Print publication:
    03 March 2022
  • The first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas, others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe's imperial powers to secure their American claims, and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, the volume presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America. Essay topics include exploration and environment, conquest and commerce, enslavement and emigration, dispossession and endurance, empire and independence, new forms of law and new forms of worship, and the creation and destruction when the peoples of four continents met in the Americas.

  • 4 - Liberty and Modernity

  • Edited by Jack P. Greene, The Johns Hopkins University
  • Book:
    Exclusionary Empire
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    12 October 2009, pp 112-131

  • Summary

    To Britons during the three centuries covered by this volume, Parliament was the great palladium of British liberty. Although rhetoric did not always match reality, the House of Commons served as the final bastion of representative government in both England and (after 1707) Scotland, the Lords and Commons together guaranteed the personal and property rights of both rich and poor, and Parliament was a mainstay of the English common law. Within Britain's settler empire, by contrast, Parliament's history as a guarantor of liberty was more ambiguous. As Victorian imperialists never tired of noting, libertarian reforms such as Catholic emancipation in Ireland, the suppression of the African slave trade, and, eventually, the abolition of slavery in the West Indies all would have been impossible without forceful intervention from Westminster. Yet these same writers recognized that the theoretically unlimited authority that Parliament claimed over the British empire as a whole was potentially inimical to British liberty as it was practiced in the colonies of settlement. In the words of the nineteenth-century English historian F. W. Maitland, Parliament's imperial sovereignty was boundless in theory but limited in practice: Although free to govern the empire as they saw fit, members of Parliament “habitually” refrained “from making laws of a certain class and [had to] suspect that if [they] made such laws they would not be obeyed.”

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