In Calvinists and Indians in the Northeastern Woodlands, Stephen T. Staggs analyzes the impact of the Dutch Reformation upon the cross-cultural relations between those living in and around New Netherland. Staggs shows that Native Americans and New Netherlanders hunted, smoked, ate, and drank together, shared their faith while traveling in a canoe, and slept in each other’s bedrooms. Such details emerge in documents written by New Netherlanders like Megapolensis. Author of the most accurate account of the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawks) by a Dutch Reformed minister, Megapolensis provides a window into the influence and limits of the Dutch Reformation upon the dynamic, multifaceted relationships that developed in the early modern Northeastern Woodlands. Megapolensis came of age when Dutch Reformed theologians looked to the Bible to incorporate Indians into a Reformed worldview. In so doing, they characterized Indians as “blind Gentiles” to whom the Dutch were being called, by God, to present the gospel through the preaching of the Bible and the Christian conduct of colonists, which necessitated social interaction. This characterization ultimately informed the instructions given to those heading to New Netherland, raised expectations among the clergy and lay chaplains who served in the colony, and prefigured the reciprocal, intimate relationships that developed between Indians and New Netherlanders during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The legends that die hardest are those of the romantic outlaw, and those of swashbuckling pirates are surely among the most durable. Swift ships, snug inns, treasures buried by torchlight, palm-fringed beaches, fabulous riches, and, most of all, freedom from the mean life of the laboring man are the stuff of this tradition reinforced by many a novel and film.

It is disconcerting to think of such dashing scoundrels as slaves to economic forces, but so they were—as Robert Ritchie demonstrates in this lively history of piracy. He focuses on the shadowy figure of William Kidd, whose career in the late seventeenth century swept him from the Caribbean to New York, to London, to the Indian Ocean before he ended in Newgate prison and on the gallows. Piracy in those days was encouraged by governments that could not afford to maintain a navy in peacetime. Kidd’s most famous voyage was sponsored by some of the most powerful men in England, and even though such patronage granted him extraordinary privileges, it tied him to the political fortunes of the mighty Whig leaders. When their influence waned, the opposition seized upon Kidd as a weapon. Previously sympathetic merchants and shipowners did an about-face too and joined the navy in hunting down Kidd and other pirates.

By the early eighteenth century, pirates were on their way to becoming anachronisms. Ritchie’s wide-ranging research has probed this shift in the context of actual voyages, sea fights, and adventures ashore. What sort of men became pirates in the first place, and why did they choose such an occupation? What was life like aboard a pirate ship? How many pirates actually became wealthy? How were they governed? What large forces really caused their downfall?

As the saga of the buccaneers unfolds, we see the impact of early modern life: social changes and Anglo-American politics, the English judicial system, colonial empires, rising capitalism, and the maturing bureaucratic state are all interwoven in the story. Best of all, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates is an epic of adventure on the high seas and a tale of back-room politics on land that captures the mind and the imagination.

Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilizing their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. This book explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the medieval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands.

An elaborately crafted and decorated tomahawk from somewhere along the north American east coast: how did it end up in the royal collections in Stockholm in the late seventeenth century? What does it say about the Swedish kingdom’s colonial ambitions and desires? What questions does it raise from its present place in a display cabinet in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm? This book is about the tomahawk and other objects like it, acquired in colonial contact zones and displayed by Swedish elites in the seventeenth century. Its first part situates the objects in two distinct but related spaces: the expanding space of the colonial world, and the exclusive space of the Kunstkammer. The second part traces the objects’ physical and epistemological transfer from the Kunstkammer to the modern museum system. In the final part, colonial objects are considered at the centre of a heated debate over the present state of museums, and their possible futures.

“Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are” was the challenge issued by French gastronomist Jean Brillat-Savarin. Champagne is declared a unique emblem of French sophistication and luxury, linked to the myth of its invention by Dom Pérignon. Across the Channel, a cup of sweet tea is recognized as a quintessentially English icon, simultaneously conjuring images of empire, civility, and relentless rain that demands the sustenance and comfort that only tea can provide. How did these tastes develop in the seventeenth century? Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France: Across the Channel offers a compelling historical narrative of the relationship between food, national identity, and political economy in the early modern period. These mutually influential relationships are revealed through comparative and transnational analyses of effervescent wine, spices and cookbooks, the development of coffeehouses and cafés, and the ‘national sweet tooth’ in England and France.

Centered on moral critiques of wealth and the unequal distribution of risks and rewards in the lengthy voyages required by the East Indies trade, this book examines the debates surrounding England’s earliest global trading ventures. Arguments over the staggering loss of lives and national resources and struggles over control of the new trade in luxuries reveal the forging of rationales justifying the new capitalist inequalities. Yet Company servants traveling abroad to conduct the risky trade resisted this newly coalescing social formation through strategic disobedience to their masters’ will, controlling information and promoting ignorance when it served their financial and sexual purposes. Conflicting Claims to East India Company Wealth, 1600–1650 interrogates the forces that shaped England’s earliest forays into capitalist imperialism by tracing the battles over corporate control of men’s finances, marriages, and bare survival at the dawn of its global trade.

In Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines, the author analyzes the literature and politics of “spiritual conquest” in order to demonstrate how it reflected the contribution of religious ministers to a protracted period of social anomie throughout the mission provinces between the 16th-18th centuries. By tracking the prose of spiritual conquest with the history of the mission in official documents, religious correspondence, and public controversies, the author shows how, contrary to the general consensus in Philippine historiography, the literature and pastoral politics of spiritual conquest reinforced the frontier character of the religious provinces outside Manila in the Americas as well as the Philippines, by supplanting the (absence of) law in the name of supplementing or completing it. This frontier character accounts for the modern reinvention of native custom as well as the birth of literature and theater in the Tagalog vernacular.

Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period.

Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works—the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann’s book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory—the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.  

This landmark collection makes a major contribution to the burgeoning field of broadside ballad study by investigating the hitherto unexplored treasure-trove of over 100,000 Central/Eastern European broadside ballads of the Czech Republic, from the 16th to the 19th century. Viewing Czech broadside ballads from an interdisciplinary perspective, we see them as unique and regional cultural phenomena: from their production and collecting processes to their musicology, linguistics, preservation, and more. At the same time, as contributors note, when viewed within a larger perspective—extending one’s gaze to take in ballad production in bordering lands (such as Germany, Poland, and Slovakia) and as far Northwest as Britain to as far Southwest as Brazil—we discover an international phenomenon at work. Czech printed ballads, we see, participated in a thriving popular culture of broadside ballads that spoke through text, art, and song to varied interests of the masses, especially the poor, worldwide.