How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.

Explores relationship of law to communal agriculture in three contexts; Indigenous communal grazing; Spanish and Mexican land grants; and Colorado state law of property rights.

This chapter traces the developing English empire across the global tropics. Like their European rivals, English colonists, traders, and governors turned to forced labor and migration to maintain the tropical empire. As they forged this empire, English investors experimented with a wide variety of different colonial models. The early empire was not so neatly divided into territorial expansion in the West and commercial settlement in the East. English colonial architects tried to extend plantation agriculture beyond the Americas to West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and they tried to bring the spices and peppers of the East Indies to the West Indies to grow. They became both imitators and innovators, modeling the successful endeavors of European rivals but also carving their own path. Many of their overseas ventures were utter failures. Yet, slave-produced goods and factories constructed and maintained by forced labor ensured profit margins that would be high enough to continue to attract investors. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery had become the defining feature of the English tropical empire, and there were slave majorities at most English sites in the tropics.

This chapter captures the extent to which journalism fields marginalize African journalists in the coverage of international events unfolding on the continent. This marginalization leads to a continuation of bifurcation in the field that was also present during colonization. It shows that the effect of this bifurcation is that African audiences primarily learn about events happening across the continent from the Global North as opposed to African journalists. Chapter 4 shows how African journalists are marginalized in their fields and how they understand and explain this marginalization.

The nineteenth century saw a transformation in the concept of colonization as political economists recast the term to refer to directed migration and settlement processes. Brazilian statesmen, intellectuals, and businessmen in the newly independent Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) embraced this new brand of colonization as an advantageous policy expedient because it aligned with old regime peopling practices, promised to resolve the question of slavery, and, significantly, held the prospect of individual profits, particularly if carried out by colonization companies. Brazilian engagement with colonization fit within a wider series of colonization processes unfolding within European empires or their overseas dominions as well as throughout the new republics in the Americas. Comparing and connecting the Brazilian case to concurrent peopling efforts across the globe unsettles understandings of colonization as part of a global settler revolution of which Brazil figured as a peripheral case. The key role played by companies as the harbingers of a new colonization paradigm underscores profit as a guiding principle in Brazilian colonization schemes in the nineteenth century.

The genre at the center of this essay—the Anglophone transmasculinity narrative in the long eighteenth century—was a popular and ubiquitous genre for imagining gender transformation and queer relations to sex, desire, and embodiment. I argue that the transmasculine figure was a crucial one for imagining transatlantic biopolitics, often embodying aspects of transformability long associated specifically with white masculinity in a settler colony. Thus, the genre is arguably more representative for the history of whiteness than it is for the history of either queer or trans imaginative or embodied life in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. However, it offers a compelling case study of a genre that can seem spectacularly hyperlegible for contemporary identification. These texts show how sexuality and gender came to be narrative genres in a print/public sphere with privileged relations to intertwined origin stories of the nation, American literary history, and modern queer/trans identities—and a very useful case study in the limits of looking for queer/trans representation in the genres that seem most readily assimilable into a legible prehistory of “queer American literature.”

Horses represented an expensive and logistically challenging aspect of early expeditions, as they had to be brought by boat and then bred in colonial settlements to aid in expansion. This scarcity only elevated the cultural and political significance of horses, evident in the narratives of early Spanish or Indigenous chroniclers and also in strategic efforts to breed horses in colonial settlements, despite the challenging and varied new environments. Beyond the military lore of conquest, horses literally and materially served as the measure for establishing social status, access to political office, and territorial control by colonial representatives, shaping the structure and strategy of colonial expansion in powerful ways.

The introduction outlines the systemic violence that supports liberal society in early America. Focused on the Boston Massacre, it uses the courtroom representations of John Adams in defense of British soldiers to understand how hostile racial difference organized society and how such differences opened the way for the empowerment of White individuals. Here Whiteness and racial hierarchy become key markers in the formation of how violence is deployed in America.

Chapter 8 investigates several aspects of low-road market capitalism across regions of the United States. It tackles Black soldier protest and military discipline, the post-Civil War sale of guns and munitions, and the development of railroads as a physical and economic vehicle for the dispersal of violence in the United States. Labor strikes, the Panic of 1873, and the centrality of the federal governmment to the interests of industrial capitalism are prominent features of this chapter.

Representations of race are intimately bound to representations of the struggle for freedom and autonomy, made more complex by focusing on novels written by women. These representations of race in Irish women’s literature challenge the ability of Irish women to achieve independence alongside rather than against the colonized peoples of the nineteenth-century Irish literary landscape. From Sydney Owenson to Kate O’Brien, from the Act of Union to Ireland’s independence and its joining the European Economic Community, the way in which Irish women’s fiction has defined freedom has depended upon a politics of race, a politics that is sometimes sympathetic and rooted in affective anti-imperialism, and other times is a politics of denial and erasure. If studies of Irish women’s literature is to contend fully with the history of race, we must be attuned to these politics even, or especially, if the narratives of self-fulfilment and independence become the objects of critique.

Chapter 4 retraces how oil infrastructural projects, technology transfers, and the social relations underpinning them turned the Ecuadorean Amazon into an agro-industrial landscape: The ecology of the forest became enmeshed with the economy of oil due to the large-scale extraction since the 1970s. The oil companies’ interest to develop the region converged with the national governments’ aspiration to incorporate the Amazon into the national territory through agricultural colonization. To realize these goals, Texaco set up an extensive network of transportation infrastructure in the rainforest. A multitude of subcontracting firms, however, did the actual work of constructing platforms, roads, pipelines, and camps. Far from being a linear success story, the technological conquest of the Amazon suffered constant setbacks caused by the geological, geographical, and tropical climatic conditions of the rainforest. The progress of technology and colonization also faced opposition from local communities. One such story of resistance against an access road built in the territory of the A’i Kofán is woven into a broader story of how the region underwent a profound material metamorphosis.