Paul Musselwhite
 

Publications

 
 

Books

 
 
Musselwhite_9780226585284.jpg
 

Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

The Chesapeake region of early America was, and remains, famous for its rural character. However, repeated waves of frustrated urban development in the region were critical to framing the political and economic structures of its tobacco planter society. The competing currents of thought that shaped battles over town building sparked bitter division, but they helped would-be planters think through their position within the empire and the Atlantic economy. This book explains how colonization schemes in the Chesapeake that initially set out to erect cities as the symbol of civic and economic order were a catalyst in the local creation of a plantation society that valorized rural order, and laid the foundation for the Southern planters’ agrarian anti-capitalist myth.

“A nuanced but bold and compelling account of the dynamics and evolving relationship between town and plantation, which ought to be at the core of our understanding of the rival political and economic ideologies that defined the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Atlantic” - Philip J. Stern

“A brilliant and important book. Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth is part of a new wave of histories that take ideas in early American history seriously.” - Andrew Fitzmaurice


 

Virginia 1619: Slavery & Freedom in the Making of English America (Unc Press/OIEAHC, 2019)

Co-edited with Peter Mancall and James Horn

 

The essays brought together in this volume demonstrate that Anglo-Americans have simultaneously experimented with representative government and struggled with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient colonists. Looking back from 2019, we can understand that what happened on the shores of the Chesapeake four hundred years ago was no accident. Slavery and freedom were born together as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. Three hallmarks of English America - self-government, slavery, and native dispossession - took shape as everyone contested the future of empire along the James River in 1619.

“Timely and insightful, Virginia 1619 brings together influential transatlantic scholars to assess debates around race, gender, and political authority from the colonial British Atlantic.” - Audrey Horning

Musselwhite-cover.jpg

EAHS_008_color%2B%25282%2529.jpg
 

Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America (Brill, 2017)

Co-edited with Daniela Hacke

 

This collection brings together pathbreaking scholarship on the role the five senses played in early America. With perspectives from across the hemisphere, exploring individual senses and multi-sensory frameworks, the volume explores how sensory perception helped frame cultural encounters, colonial knowledge, and political relationships. These essays elucidate different ways in which the expansion of rival European empires across the Americas involved a vast interconnected range of sensory experiences and practices. Empire of the Senses offers a new comparative perspective on the way European imperialism was constructed, operated, implemented and, sometimes, counteracted by rich and complex new sensory frameworks in the diverse contexts of early America.

 
 

“A brilliant and important book. Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth is part of a new wave of histories that take ideas in early American history seriously.”

Andrew Fitzmaurice

 
Herrman+Map+1.jpg
 

Essays & Articles

 
 
 
Figure+4.jpg