This panel investigates forms of social control in 17th century New England. Arthur George Kamya’s paper examines the regulation of distilled liquor in 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony, exploring how authorities navigated competing moral, economic, and security imperatives. Initially targeting a cross-section of colonists, liquor laws evolved to focus on servants, Native Americans, and eventually African Americans. The colony's approach shifted from moral censure to pragmatic revenue generation, with officials using fines and licenses to fund government operations. Kamya’s study illuminates how alcohol regulation became a tool of social control, state-building, and the construction of racial hierarchies in colonial New England, offering insights into the complex interplay between commerce, governance, and identity formation in early America. As discussed in Alice King’s work, Connecticut adopted a notable strategy towards certain Indigenous populations during the initial decades of settlement, attempting to control and exploit Native communities by turning them into colonial tributaries who would provide essential supplies, wampum, and military aid. King’s paper considers the evolution of tributary politics at the end of the seventeenth century after the Dominion of New England and Glorious Revolution had destabilized colonial authority and left colonists vulnerable to attack by French and Native forces, including the Wabanaki Confederacy during King William’s War, 1689-1697, when Connecticut leaders sought to raise soldiers for New England’s defense from these historic tributary communities.

This panel examines the presence of loyalism in the North Atlantic following the American Revolution. Alexandra Mairs-Kessler’s work demonstrates how Bermuda, a colony whose population remained loyal to the Crown while simultaneously providing economic support to the rebellion, became home to loyalist refugees seeking to rebuild. Refugees William Browne and Bridger Goodrich highlight the tension between pragmatism and vengeance that was part of the loyalist diaspora. These two refugees from Massachusetts and Virginia took different paths during the war, and both their passive and active choices shaped their lasting attitudes regarding the post-war Atlantic World. This study explores how wartime experiences of violence and loss shaped the relationship between these two men and their new colonial home. Ross Nedervelt’s paper discusses how British officials and loyalists turned neighboring border-sea territories—specifically the Bahamas—into sites where imperial forces challenged the United States and its citizens’ sovereignty through resistance and subversive activities. Bahamian colonists, Seminoles, and Black maroons became strategic players in Britain’s counterrevolutionary operations during and immediately after the War of 1812, and an active threat to the United States’ westward expansion. The Bahamian, Seminole, and maroon groups’ armed resistance resulted in General Andrew Jackson and the U.S. army invading Spanish Florida, solidified the U.S.-British Empire border, and began the development of an American foreign policy intended to resist European interference in the western hemisphere.

This essay explores how ordinary Americans conceived of the local committees of safety that served as the backbone of the revolutionary movement in 1774 and 1775. Authorized by the First Continental Congress in late 1774 to enforce the Articles of Association, local leaders largely determined the structure and operation of these committees. As tensions mounted and especially after war broke out in April 1775, committeemen drew on a mixture of historical inspiration, long-standing traditions of corporate governance, and contemporary legal culture to outstrip their Congressional mandate and assert de-facto revolutionary governance in communities across British North America.

“The Atlantic Manor” proposes a new history of colonial New York’s manors from a comparative perspective. The manor was a form of property that granted rights in land and limited legal jurisdiction to a lord. On manors, land ownership was not absolute; rather, rights in land were shared between landlords, tenant farmers, and Indigenous communities. By comparing the role and organization of the manor in England, the Netherlands, Ireland, the Chesapeake colonies, and New France, I argue that the manor was a significant colonial institution across the 17th-century Atlantic, and establish the relevance of New York’s manors—usually viewed as highly idiosyncratic and unique to the Hudson Valley—to historians working on other parts of the Atlantic world.

This panel considers two foreign endeavors that aimed to transform the Early American economy. Jessica Lepler's “The Race to Quincy” is a chapter from the forthcoming UNC Press book Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions. Set in the semicentennial summer of 1826, the chapter flashes back across the Age of Revolutions to reveal the unlikely first Central American interoceanic canal contractor; reconstructs a dramatic meeting between this canal dreamer and a president mourning his revolutionary father; and charts the Adams Administration’s shifting plans for a waterway that might revolutionize the globe. A key source for the chapter is the MHS’s John Quincy Adams Digital Diary. Susan Branson's work examines the impact of sheep rearing and wool production on North America. Branson's paper explores the “merino influenza” that gripped Americans in the first decades of the nineteenth century and situates the enthusiasm for merinos within the context of the drive for economic development: merino enthusiasm fueled the expansion of agricultural societies and spurred the creation of textile manufactories in the northern and mid-Atlantic states. The urgency with which merino enthusiasts sought to obtain these money-making sheep highlights the intimate connection between American diplomacy, business interests, and state and federal support for agriculture and manufacturing.

In addition to providing inexpensive intoxication and occasionally lousy accommodations, northeastern village taverns were urbanizing institutions. Village taverns helped New Yorkers and New Englanders conceive and pursue wide-ranging economic and social ambitions. As nodes in regional transportation networks, taverns connected villages to each other and to larger cities. Through taverns’ print and oral communication networks, entrepreneurs reached wide audiences while leveraging taverns’ links to desirable novelty and urbane improvements. If, as historian Richard D. Brown argues, “urban society is a crossroads phenomenon, bound directly to exchange and communication,” then taverns fostered urbanizing tendencies in the region.

This paper will explore the so-called “white renegades” who cast their lot with Native peoples amid the Revolutionary War on the frontier. By following the personal histories of some of these individuals to Fallen Timbers—where many found themselves in 1794—we can trace how these people continued to subvert cultural boundaries, even as racial divisions became more entrenched through policy and practice during the early republic. In reconstructing their lives, we can begin to conceptualize the multifaceted motivations that led men and women to challenge the hardening divisions developing between white Americans and Indigenous communities during the Revolutionary era.