This Virginia History Blog looks at three recently published Late Colonial Virginia titles reviewed in Fall 2018. They are related to political and social history, economic history, and material cultural history.
Current releases related to Virginia history in other eras from Spring 2018 journals can be found in previous Virginia History Blogs at Colonial Virginia – Spring 2018, Revolutionary Virginia – Spring 2018, and Civil War Virginia – Spring 2018, and New South and Modern Virginia – Spring 2018. We begin Summer 2018 reviews with Colonial Virginia — Summer 2018.
The TVH webpage for Early and Late Colonial Eras, 1600-1763, features our top title picks taken from the bibliographies of three surveys of Virginia History’s 400 years: two that are widely used in Virginia college courses, and one to be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2019. The page has a Table of Contents for Powhatan Virginia, Early Colonial Policy, Late Colonial Policy, Social History of Virginia, Gender in Virginia, Religious Virginia, African American Virginia, and Wars in Virginia 1600-1763.
“More About Early Colonial Virginia” below provides additional resources.
Late Colonial Virginia political and social history
Indian Captive, Indian King
Timothy J. Shannon wrote Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain in 2018. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly. It is available from HarvardUniversity Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Indian Captive, Indian King” onAmazon here.
In this book, Timothy Shannon offers a description of the social and laboring context of colonial American indenture, the issues of imperial-Native American relations in the British Empire, and British coffeehouse political culture. Peter Williamson’s life is examined before and after Williamson’s autobiographical “French and Indian Cruelty” (1757). It is a tale of an entrepreneur and self-made man who rises from a kidnapped teen indenture in colonial America, to a noteworthy contributor to British politics and literature of the empire following the French and Indian, or Seven Years’ War.
After his indenture, Williamson served as a British soldier in the North American colonies, and on his return to Aberdeen following discharge, he published a sensational description of a capture and escape from Delaware Indians he described as barbaric torturers and cannibals. On winning a suit against Scottish magistrates questioning the account, Williamson invested the proceeds in a printing business and two Edinburgh coffeehouses.
From this new-found middle class platform, Williamson published pamphlets that influenced British perceptions of American Indians, and “IndianPeter” held forth based on his credentials to support compulsory British colonial militia service, centralizing imperial rule in the colonies, and retaining Canada as a British province following the 1763 peace.
Buy “Indian Captive, Indian King” on Amazon here. See also Troy Bickham Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians inEighteenth-Century Britain (2006), Jenny Hale Pulsipher Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England (2018).
Late Colonial Virginia Economic History
The Trouble with Tea
Jane T. Merritt wrote The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Global Consumption in the Eighteenth Century Global Economy in 2017. Reviewed in the Journal of American History. It is available from theJohns Hopkins University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “The Trouble withTea” on Amazon here.
British colonial commodities developed global economic importance in cod and sugar, madeira and rum. As a part of continued imperial expansion and diversification, by the 1700s the British chartered East India Company developed a strategy to monopolize the entire Asian export tea supply. Even though worldwide consumption rose exponentially, oversupply and the costs of its near-term trade expansion into Bengal brought the commercial behemoth to the verge of bankruptcy. But the East India Company, which flew an ensign of alternating red and white stripes, ensured its continued existence by making itself “too big to fail”. It provided substantial incomes to official political investors, and out-sized revenues to the British government. Parliament’s accommodating response to the company’s financial crisis was to initiate imperial oversight, but at the same time to allow the Indian Ocean-based company to distribute tea directly into the North American colonies without going through mercantile middlemen.
Tightening British imperial enforcement of trade threatened to cut off American black market supplies that themselves had evolved to bypass London tea merchants. But despite the market disruptions associated with American patriot boycotts and the Continental Congress with their Revolutionary War, under the new U.S. Constitution, Congress allowed American merchants to re-establish a tea trade with the East India Company monopolists. By the 1790s, American trade amounted to about two-million pounds of tea annually, valued at half of all their China trade.
Buy “The Trouble with Tea” on Amazon here. See also John E.Crowley, Richard L. Bushman The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History (2018), and Allen Greer Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern NorthAmerica (2018).
Late Colonial Virginia Material Culture History
In the Looking Glass
Rebecca K. Shrum wrote In the Looking Glass: Mirrors and Identity in Early America in 2017. Reviewed in theJournal of Southern History. It is available from the Johns Hopkins University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “In the Looking Glass” on Amazon here.
Material objects shaped colonial identity, perhaps none so strikingly as the mirror. Across the 1600s and 1700s, mirror technology improved in the Atlantic world trading exchanges. Rather than use mirrors for magic or ritual, European men in the 1600s and 1700s used the mirror to establish their modernity of enlightenment and rationality.
Shrum traces how mirrors were acquired and by whom, then examines the uses of those mirrors by European men and women, as well as contemporary Native Americans and African Americans. She describes the mirror as important to forming a white racial identity among the Europeans, especially men. Yet she documents several variant meanings found in mirror use among colonial women, Native Americans and African Americans.
Buy “In the Looking Glass” on Amazon here.
More about Early Colonial Virginia
Additional history related to Virginia during this time period can be found at the Table of Contents of TheVirginiaHistorian website on the page for Early and Late Colonial Eras, 1600-1763. Titles are organized by topics related to Powhatan Virginia, Political and Economic Virginia, Social, Gender, Religious, African American and Wars in Virginia.
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the geographically related Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.
For titles by historical period related to Virginia history, these reviews rely on the William and Mary Quarterly (1600-1776), the Journal of the Early Republic (1776 – 1861), the Journal of the Civil War Era (1820-1880), and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (1865 – 1920).