https://paulmusselwhite.com/research daily 0.75 2019-10-18 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d21168f41ec3a000101565e/1562449555435/ Research https://paulmusselwhite.com/home daily 1.0 2019-10-16 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d2be2e038fa560001c057dd/1563207461090/Musselwhite_9780226585284.jpg Home - Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2018) https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d2be31838fa560001c05db3/1571254320458/EAHS_008_color%252B%2525282%252529.jpg Home - Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America (Brill, 2017) https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d2be301d13ca700016ca1a2/1563207474842/Musselwhite-cover.jpg Home - Virginia 1619: Slavery & Freedom in the Making of English America (UNC Press/OIEAHC, 2019) 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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d2918c8d659a60001582820/1574195219441/DSCF0368.jpg About https://paulmusselwhite.com/articles daily 0.75 2021-07-13 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/60ede705c450ee47308013fa/1626203895274/ Articles - Naming Plantations Journal of Social History 54.3 (Spring 2021) This essay pioneers my methodology for a new critical approach to the study of plantation names in early America. It uses the radically underutilized evidence of tract names in Maryland to explore how definitions of the plantation changed on the ground, and the way that definition shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d2795b52d6d1c00019c2a1a/60ede47dd6ef6771c1dc9f82/1626203895274/iiif-service_gmd_gmd385_g3851_g3851g_la002219-full-pct_25-0-default.jpg Articles - Naming Plantations Journal of Social History 54.3 (Spring 2021) This essay pioneers my methodology for a new critical approach to the study of plantation names in early America. It uses the radically underutilized evidence of tract names in Maryland to explore how definitions of the plantation changed on the ground, and the way that definition shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d2795b52d6d1c00019c2a1a/5d2798baf5437900016539ff/1562876445626/chi-musselwhite-fig06002.jpg Articles - Annapolis Aflame: Richard Clarke’s ‘Rebellion’ and the Imperial Urban Vision in Maryland, 1704- 1708 William and Mary Quarterly 71:3 (July 2014): 361-400 From 1704 to 1708, conspiracy rumors swirled around Maryland politics. Maryland governor John Seymour repeatedly accused Richard Clarke, a member of a respected planter family, of piracy, forgery, arson, and rebellion, yet Clarke managed to evade capture. The fears and resentments that Clarke's troubles expose all had one thing in common—their focus on the newly established capital city of Annapolis. Clarke's desperate intrigues reveal the ways in which Annapolis was reshaping social, political, and economic power around its plantation hinterland. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d2795b52d6d1c00019c2a1a/5d27a12a19d7450001e97247/1571251289156/1630_Hondius_Map_of_Virginia_and_the_Chesapeake_-_Geographicus_-_NovaVirginiaeTabula-hondius-1630.jpg Articles - Private Plantation: The Political Economy of Land in Early Virginia in Virginia 1619: Slavery & Freedom in the Making of English America (UNC Press, 2019) The year 1619 is famous for multiple events that reshaped colonial Virginia. These watershed moments have received a huge amount of scholarly attention. But one critical transformation - the decision to begin granting private land to planters - has been seen as an obvious and uncontroversial step. This could hardly be any further from the truth. The issue of how land would be distributed and owned by colonists raised fundamental questions about the balance between private profit and the public good; in 1619 Virginia was in the midst of a bitter debate over how English settlers would create property in America. It was during this debate that they groped their way toward a vision of the “plantation” as a private commercial enterprise. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d2795b52d6d1c00019c2a1a/5d2795fc16364a0001604203/1562875884203/Figure+3.jpg Articles - “‘This infant Borough’: The Corporate Political Identity of Eighteenth-Century Norfolk” Early American Studies 15.3 (Fall 2017) The Virginia port of Norfolk was one of the few towns in early America to be formally incorporated as an independent borough in the colonial period, and it turns out that this anomaly can tell us much about the attitudes and anxieties of Virginia’s slave-owning planter elite. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d2795b52d6d1c00019c2a1a/5d279c084e0ade0001b77be0/1562877863950/Howard_Pyle_-_The_Burning_of_Jamestown.jpg Articles - “What town’s this Boy?" English Civic Politics, Virginia’s Urban Debate, and Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter Atlantic Studies 8.3 (September 2011): 279-99 Nathaniel Bacon’s dramatic 1676 rebellion in Virginia is well known to any student of colonial American history, but it was also a source of horror and fascination to contemporaries in England. Just a few years after the rebellion, the popular court playwright Aphra Behn penned a tragic play loosely based on the events of the rebellion, entitled The Widow Ranter, or The History of Bacon in Virginia. Surprisingly, though, for those familiar with a story of Bacon’s Rebellion that focuses on the colony’s dispersed plantations and frontier character, Behn chose to focus her play on Bacon’s dramatic decision to burn the colonial capital city, Jamestown. The fact that she made this choice can tell us much about the critical and unstable place of cities and towns within the English empire in the late seventeenth century. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d2795b52d6d1c00019c2a1a/5d28ad25de276e0001891910/1562947950082/pexels-photo-577777.jpeg Articles - “Like a Wild Desart": Building a Contested Urban Sensescape in the Atlantic World in Beck, Krampl, and Retaillaud-Bajac, ed. Les Cinq Sens de la Ville: Du Moyen Âge à Nos Jours (Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2013) Building towns and cities was a critical part of the way Europeans claimed and justified their control over colonial spaces in the Americas. Historians are accustomed to studying the layout of these places as markers of imperial ambitions and colonial culture. But cities and towns were much more than just abstract visual artifacts - they were lived spaces, full of odors, tastes, and sounds. How were these other sensory elements of urban life actively manipulated in the service of the imperial and colonial project? This essay explores the early development of Williamsburg, Va. and traces the way that its urban sensory landscape was a subject of imperial attention and debate. https://paulmusselwhite.com/research-projects daily 0.75 2019-10-16 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5da76f87baea9c28ed1c7fcc/1571254085455/ Research Projects - Naming Plantations in the English Atlantic Most people know that plantations had names - like Mount Vernon or St. Nicholas Abbey - but when and why did they receive these names, and what can they tell us about what kind of place it was understood to be? This project uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how plantation was redefined on the ground in early America, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to plantations reveal what exactly they thought a plantation was. By analysing plantation names from across the English Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries, this project charts the changing popularity of elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, European place-names, and the affects of the landowner. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d28f3dda18b8a0001d31ce2/5d28f60a3a3bfb000125f451/1571254085455/Sloane+1707.jpg Research Projects - Naming Plantations in the English Atlantic Most people know that plantations had names - like Mount Vernon or St. Nicholas Abbey - but when and why did they receive these names, and what can they tell us about what kind of place it was understood to be? This project uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how plantation was redefined on the ground in early America, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to plantations reveal what exactly they thought a plantation was. By analysing plantation names from across the English Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries, this project charts the changing popularity of elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, European place-names, and the affects of the landowner. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d28f3dda18b8a0001d31ce2/5d28fd190a8f1600011dea43/1562967321244/ Research Projects https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d28f3dda18b8a0001d31ce2/5d28fd1eb481110001a77dbe/1571254096210/Moxon+1677.jpg Research Projects - Planting Jamaica: Defining the Political Geography of Empire After Oliver Cromwell’s ill-fated Western Design washed up on the island of Jamaica in 1655, everyone agreed that the key to making this backwater of Spanish America into a valuable English possession was planting. But what exactly did that mean? This project explores the way in which the English conquest of Jamaica brought to the fore the divergent definitions of plantation that had emerged in the English Atlantic over the previous two decades. The effort to settle Jamaica brought together individuals with colonial experience in Barbados, New England, Suriname, and Ireland, who all had subtly different definitions of plantation. The imperial state’s particular interest in the fate of Jamaica made the new colony a critical site for testing these competing definitions, both through formal imperial policy and through the reconstruction of spatial order on the island. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/5d28f3dda18b8a0001d31ce2/5d29012b6ce53e0001ab290d/1571254151799/11077003.jpg Research Projects - Planters in the Eye of the State: Defining Planter Identity Through Compensation in St. Kitts and Nevis, 1706-1709 In 1706, during the height of the War of the Spanish Succession, French forces invaded and devastated the English territory on the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, destroying buildings and seizing property and enslaved people. In an unprecedented move, the British Parliament formally recognized the value of the planters to the Empire. It agreed to compensate them for their losses and sent commissioners to inventory all of the lost property. These officials gathered data that offers a unique window into the material life of the early eighteenth-century Caribbean. But they were also acutely sensitive to the identities of individual claimants and their status within the empire, recording some as “planters” and others as merchants, tradesmen, or merely inhabitants. Analysis of these records reveals the extent to which the status of planter had come to be defined in relation to the state and the imperial economy. https://paulmusselwhite.com/plantation-names-project daily 0.75 2019-07-15 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d2caf2ac0196500012739ab/1562788818607/34029-1.jpg Plantation Names Project https://paulmusselwhite.com/contact daily 0.75 2019-07-06 https://paulmusselwhite.com/new-page daily 0.75 2019-07-06 https://paulmusselwhite.com/oldbookstuff daily 0.75 2019-07-15 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d265ac3d2985b00016a4a07/1562948750698/ Unused Book Page https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d2791aa6f14cb0001749343/1563157272578/EAHS_008_color%252B%2525282%252529.jpg Unused Book Page - Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America Co-edited with Daniela Hacke (Brill, 2017) 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. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d27852be4735400012353a8/1563157249612/Musselwhite-cover.jpg Unused Book Page - Virginia 1619: Slavery &Freedom in the Making of English America Co-edited with Peter Mancall and James Horn (UNC Press, 2019) 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. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d200e72337c400001e04028/t/5d27851ae19ec500016b2d82/1563157216776/Musselwhite_9780226585284.jpg Unused Book Page - 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.