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.

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.

Let the Oppressed Go Free recovers the sophistication and influence of antislavery theology and abolitionist activism in eighteenth-century America. Far from inevitable, the abolition of slavery in the North resulted from tenacious activism by Quakers, African Americans, and antislavery evangelicals during the American Revolution.

The Household War shows how the early modern English debate over what slavery was and how it ought to be practiced in the household resulted in the development of two distinct systems of bondage in colonial Massachusetts and Virginia, laying the foundation for a future house divided.

In this first biography of Elihu Palmer, Kirsten Fischer depicts a once notorious freethinker who countered Christianity with the idea of an interconnected universe infused with a divine life force. Denounced as "heretical," Palmer's speeches and writings shaped the contest over freedom of religion and of speech in the new United States.