When royal commissioners came to enforce the demands of the newly restored King Charles II, many New Englanders chafed against what they saw as arbitrary rule. Adrian Chastain Weimer shows how, despite being under immense metropolitan pressure, they mobilized to defy the crown, forming a robust and longstanding constitutional culture.

In dozens of slave conspiracy scares in North American and the Caribbean, colonists terrorized and killed slaves whom they accused of planning to take over the colony. Jason T. Sharples explains the deep origins and historical triggers of these incidents and argues that conspiracy scares bound society together through shared fear.

No Wood, No Kingdom explores the conflicting attempts to understand the problem of wood scarcity in early modern England and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies.

Contested Currents presents a new perspective on the history of New England by following its many rivers—tracing how the changes Native Americans and European colonists made to rivers drove the dramatic environmental and social transformation of the region.

The Temptations of Trade reveals the opportunities and tensions of doing business in regions far from strict imperial control, where the actions of individuals could both connect empires and drive them to war.

Speculation Nation chronicles the “mania” for land speculation that swept the new United States, as the nation’s elite founders rushed to profit off Native American dispossession. It reveals how the American Revolution produced a republican “empire of liberty” with financial speculation at its core.

The Atlantic Republic of Letters offers an alternative intellectual history of early America. Situating Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia in the context of a broader Atlantic intellectual world, it shows how early American intellectuals helped to devise and put into practice colonialism.

Making All the World America offers a new account of the Doctrine of Discovery. While scholars have maintained that the doctrine operated through the suppression of Indigenous peoples, Timothy Bowers Vasko contends that the doctrine’s ideological work actually depended on the recognition of Indigenous rights and sovereignty.

Featuring reproductions of twenty historical maps and using historical examples of people, Claiming Land, Claiming Water explores how and why some people imagined and made claims to bounded space—and how and why other people confounded or challenged those claims—through a formative period of intense change in North America and the Atlantic world.

Beginning with French colonizers creating systems of Indigenous and African slavery in the 1720s and concluding with the Missouri Crisis of 1819, The Centrality of Slavery examines how empires, settlers, and enslaved people created, maintained, and challenged systems of slavery in the Middle Mississippi Valley.