ABOUT THIS BOOK

The first book-length study of the Stamp Act in decades, this timely collection draws together essays from a broad range of disciplines to provide a thoroughly original investigation of the influence of 1760s British tax legislation on colonial culture, and vice versa. While earlier scholarship has largely focused on the political origins and legacy of the Stamp Act, this volume illuminates the social and cultural impact of a legislative crisis that would end in revolution. Importantly, these essays question the traditional nationalist narrative of Stamp Act scholarship, offering a variety of counter identities and perspectives. Community without Consent recovers the stories of individuals often ignored or overlooked in existing scholarship, including women, Native Americans, and enslaved African Americans, by drawing on sources unavailable to or unexamined by earlier researchers. This urgent and original collection will appeal to the broadest of interdisciplinary audiences.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

ZACHARY MCLEOD HUTCHINS is an assistant professor of English at Colorado State University. He is the author of Inventing Eden: Primitivism, Millennialism, and the Making of New England.

REVIEWS

“The volume ably demonstrates that the new “American” nationality was, to a large degree, fictitious, as it excluded women, non-Europeans and members of the lower classes.”—H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Review

“The essays in Community without Consent reflect the cultural and linguistic turn in historiography, shifting the focus from constitutionalism and political thought to popular culture as revealed in sermons, slave narratives, poems, print media, and accounts of crowd actions and riots. Rather than treating these historical texts as straightforward documentary evidence, the literary critics and historians who contributed to this volume approach these sources creatively, exploring their production, reception, dissemination, and often ambiguous and multiple meanings.”—Early American Literature

“In this refreshing collection of essays, the Stamp Act emerges as a fascinating cultural as well as political event about which we know less than we thought. Uncommonly well organized and compellingly argued, the essays build on one another, refer to one another, and cover a surprising amount of interdisciplinary territory without losing sight of the common ground: the events of 1765–66 and transatlantic responses to them.”—David Waldstreicher, professor of history, Graduate Center, City University of New York

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments • Introduction: The Stamp Act, from Beginning to End, Zachary McLeod Hutchins • PART I RITUAL RESPONSES TO THE STAMP ACT • The Sermon That Didn’t Start the Revolution: Jonathan Mayhew’s Role in the Boston Stamp Act Riots, J. Patrick Mullins • Buried Liberties and Hanging Effigies: Imperial Persuasion, Intimidation, and Performance during the Stamp Act Crisis, Molly Perry • PART II THE POETICS OF TAXATION • “Daring to Try the King’s Patience?”: (Futile?) Resistance versus Insatiability in Fabula Neoterica, Gilbert L. Gigliotti • Letters from a Woman in Pennsylvania, or Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson Dreams of John Dickinson, Caroline Wigginton • PART III THE LEVY AND THE SLAVE • The Slave Narrative and the Stamp Act, or Letters from Two American Farmers in Pennsylvania, Zachary McLeod Hutchins • “Providence never designed us for Negroes”: Slavery and British Subjecthood in the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764-1766, Alexander R. Jablonski • PART IV INDIANS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC • “ Homespun,” “Indian Corn,” and the “indigestible . . . Stamp Act”: An Empire of Stereotype in Franklin’s Letters to the London Press, Todd Nathan Thompson • Redness and the Contest of Anglo-American Empires, Clay Zuba • Afterword: Corporatism and the Stamp Act Crisis, Zachary McLeod Hutchins • About the Contributors • Index