Speculators in Empire

Speculators in Empire PDF Author: William J Campbell
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806147105
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
At the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the British secured the largest land cession in colonial North America. Crown representatives gained possession of an area claimed but not occupied by the Iroquois that encompassed parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The Iroquois, however, were far from naïve—and the outcome was not an instance of their simply being dispossessed by Europeans. In Speculators in Empire, William J. Campbell examines the diplomacy, land speculation, and empire building that led up to the treaty. His detailed study overturns common assumptions about the roles of the Iroquois and British on the eve of the American Revolution. Through the treaty, the Iroquois directed the expansion of empire in order to serve their own needs while Crown negotiators obtained more territory than they were authorized to accept. How did this questionable transfer happen, who benefited, and at what cost? Campbell unravels complex intercultural negotiations in which colonial officials, land speculators, traders, tribes, and individual Indians pursued a variety of agendas, each side possessing considerable understanding of the other’s expectations and intentions. Historians have credited British Indian superintendent Sir William Johnson with pulling off the land grab, but Campbell shows that Johnson was only one of many players. Johnson’s deputy, George Croghan, used the treaty to capitalize on a lifetime of scheming and speculation. Iroquois leaders and their peoples also benefited substantially. With keen awareness of the workings of the English legal system, they gained protection for their homelands by opening the Ohio country to settlement. Campbell’s navigation of the complexities of Native and British politics and land speculation illuminates a time when regional concerns and personal politicking would have lasting consequences for the continent. As Speculators in Empire shows, colonial and Native history are unavoidably entwined, and even interdependent.

Speculators in Empire

Speculators in Empire PDF Author: William J Campbell
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806147105
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book

Book Description
At the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the British secured the largest land cession in colonial North America. Crown representatives gained possession of an area claimed but not occupied by the Iroquois that encompassed parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. The Iroquois, however, were far from naïve—and the outcome was not an instance of their simply being dispossessed by Europeans. In Speculators in Empire, William J. Campbell examines the diplomacy, land speculation, and empire building that led up to the treaty. His detailed study overturns common assumptions about the roles of the Iroquois and British on the eve of the American Revolution. Through the treaty, the Iroquois directed the expansion of empire in order to serve their own needs while Crown negotiators obtained more territory than they were authorized to accept. How did this questionable transfer happen, who benefited, and at what cost? Campbell unravels complex intercultural negotiations in which colonial officials, land speculators, traders, tribes, and individual Indians pursued a variety of agendas, each side possessing considerable understanding of the other’s expectations and intentions. Historians have credited British Indian superintendent Sir William Johnson with pulling off the land grab, but Campbell shows that Johnson was only one of many players. Johnson’s deputy, George Croghan, used the treaty to capitalize on a lifetime of scheming and speculation. Iroquois leaders and their peoples also benefited substantially. With keen awareness of the workings of the English legal system, they gained protection for their homelands by opening the Ohio country to settlement. Campbell’s navigation of the complexities of Native and British politics and land speculation illuminates a time when regional concerns and personal politicking would have lasting consequences for the continent. As Speculators in Empire shows, colonial and Native history are unavoidably entwined, and even interdependent.

Properties of Empire

Properties of Empire PDF Author: Ian Saxine
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147983212X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
A fascinating history of a contested frontier, where struggles over landownership brought Native Americans and English colonists together in surprising ways to preserve Indigenous territory. Properties of Empire shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights. As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians’ unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields. Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian “sales” of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today.

Properties of Empire

Properties of Empire PDF Author: Ian Saxine
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781479860524
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A fascinating history of a contested frontier, where struggles over landownership brought Native Americans and English colonists together in surprising ways to preserve Indigenous territory.Properties of Empire shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain's empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights.As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians' unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields.Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian "sales" of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today.

The Inner Life of Empires

The Inner Life of Empires PDF Author: Emma Rothschild
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
The birth of the modern world as told through the remarkable story of one eighteenth-century family They were abolitionists, speculators, slave owners, government officials, and occasional politicians. They were observers of the anxieties and dramas of empire. And they were from one family. The Inner Life of Empires tells the intimate history of the Johnstones--four sisters and seven brothers who lived in Scotland and around the globe in the fast-changing eighteenth century. Piecing together their voyages, marriages, debts, and lawsuits, and examining their ideas, sentiments, and values, renowned historian Emma Rothschild illuminates a tumultuous period that created the modern economy, the British Empire, and the philosophical Enlightenment. One of the sisters joined a rebel army, was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, and escaped in disguise in 1746. Her younger brother was a close friend of Adam Smith and David Hume. Another brother was fluent in Persian and Bengali, and married to a celebrated poet. He was the owner of a slave known only as "Bell or Belinda," who journeyed from Calcutta to Virginia, was accused in Scotland of infanticide, and was the last person judged to be a slave by a court in the British isles. In Grenada, India, Jamaica, and Florida, the Johnstones embodied the connections between European, American, and Asian empires. Their family history offers insights into a time when distinctions between the public and private, home and overseas, and slavery and servitude were in constant flux. Based on multiple archives, documents, and letters, The Inner Life of Empires looks at one family's complex story to describe the origins of the modern political, economic, and intellectual world.

Devil Take the Hindmost

Devil Take the Hindmost PDF Author: Edward Chancellor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452281806
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day. Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed—and not changed—over the last five hundred years? In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to “stockjobbing” in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the “assurance of female chastity”; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton. From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.

The Speculation Economy

The Speculation Economy PDF Author: Lawrence E. Mitchell
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458722732
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The first book to reveal the deep historical roots of the modern corporate obsession with stock price - a major cause of recent scandals like those at Enron and WorldComDetails how the rise of the modern corporation created the modern stock market - and why this led to an economy dominated by stock speculationAmerican companies once focused exclusively on providing the best products and services. But today, most corporations are obsessed with maximizing their stock prices, resulting in short-term thinking and the kind of cook-the-books corruption seen in the Enron and WorldCom scandals. How did this happen?In this groundbreaking book, Lawrence E. Mitchell traces the origins of the problem to the first decade of the 20th century, when industrialists and bankers began merging existing companies into huge ''combines''- today's giant corporations - so they could profit by manufacturing and selling stock in these new entities. He describes and analyzes the legal changes that made this possible, the federal regulatory efforts that missed the significance of this transforming development, and the changes in American society and culture that led more and more Americans to enter the market, turning from relatively safe bonds to riskier common stock in the hopes of becoming rich. Financiers and the corporations they controlled encouraged this trend, but as stock ownership expanded and businesses were increasingly forced to cater to stockholders' ''get rich quick'' expectations, a subtle but revolutionary shift in the nature of the American economy occurred: finance no longer served industry; instead, industry began to serve finance.The Speculation Economy analyzes the history behind the opening of this economic Pandora's box, the root cause of so many modern acts of corporate malfeasance.

Rogue Empires

Rogue Empires PDF Author: Steven Press
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067497185X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
The man who bought a country -- The emergence of an idea -- King Leopold's Borneo -- Bismarck's Borneo -- Epilogue: "A great act of folly

River of Dark Dreams

River of Dark Dreams PDF Author: Walter Johnson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674074882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.

Iron Empires

Iron Empires PDF Author: Michael Hiltzik
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054477034X
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
From Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Hiltzik, the epic tale of the clash for supremacy between America’s railroad titans In 1869, when the final spike was driven into the transcontinental railroad, few were prepared for its seismic aftershocks. Once a hodgepodge of short, squabbling lines, America’s railways soon exploded into a titanic industry helmed by a pageant of speculators, crooks, and visionaries. The vicious competition between empire builders such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman sparked stock market frenzies, panics, and crashes; provoked strikes that upended the relationship between management and labor; transformed the nation’s geography; and culminated in a ferocious two-man battle that shook the nation’s financial markets to their foundations and produced dramatic, lasting changes in the interplay of business and government. Spanning four decades and featuring some of the most iconic figures of the Gilded Age, Iron Empires reveals how the robber barons drove the country into the twentieth century—and almost sent it off the rails.

The Currency of Empire

The Currency of Empire PDF Author: Jonathan Barth
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150175579X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In The Currency of Empire, Jonathan Barth explores the intersection of money and power in the early years of North American history, and he shows how the control of money informed English imperial action overseas. The export-oriented mercantile economy promoted by the English Crown, Barth argues, directed the plan for colonization, the regulation of colonial commerce, and the politics of empire. The imperial project required an orderly flow of gold and silver, and thus England's colonial regime required stringent monetary regulation. As Barth shows, money was also a flash point for resistance; many colonists acutely resented their subordinate economic station, desiring for their local economies a robust, secure, and uniform money supply. This placed them immediately at odds with the mercantilist laws of the empire and precipitated an imperial crisis in the 1670s, a full century before the Declaration of Independence. The Currency of Empire examines what were a series of explosive political conflicts in the seventeenth century and demonstrates how the struggle over monetary policy prefigured the patriot reaction to the Stamp Act and so-called Intolerable Acts on the eve of American independence. Thanks to generous funding from the Arizona State University and George Mason University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.