Colonization and colonization companies persisted well after the era of mass migrations in initiatives such as the “March to the West” and the military dictatorship’s efforts to colonize the Amazon in the 1970s. Covering the republican, Vargas, and dictatorship eras in the way of a birds-eye view, this chapter surveys the recurrent restaging of the nineteenth-century paradigm of colonization in hinterland colonization efforts in the twentieth century, particularly those in “central” Brazil and in the southern Amazon. Ultimately, nineteenth-century colonization dynamics overseen and underwritten by the Brazilian government and led by private entities provided artificial advantages to incoming migrants in relation to other demographic groups, which raises important questions about the historical memorialization of migrant pasts.

The United States was one of the world’s first modern nations and one of the first to break free from colonial rule. It therefore stands at the beginning of the history of economic nationalism. This chapter analyses how nationalist thinking on the economy evolved in the USA from the Revolution to the Civil War. During this era, nationalists shifted from an outward-focused system aiming for economic development to an inward-focussed system based on protection. Developmental ideas were first championed by Alexander Hamilton, but his elitist conception of economic policy did not sit easily with the democratising ethos of the new nation. Economic nationalism became a mass movement as intellectuals like Daniel Raymond, politicians such as Henry Clay and activists in the mould of Mathew Carey jostled over questions of trade, manufacturing and banking. Instead of Hamilton’s close relationship between government and capitalists, the new movement put the everyday American producer at the centre. As it did so, isolationist ideas came to dominate. The intellectual capstone of this strand was provided by Henry Carey, whose influence would entrench a distinctly protectionist ‘American System’.

This essay considers Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond as an imaginative experiment with neurodiversity, considering, in particular, what it means to know, as we do now, that different brains are fundamentally, neurologically different and how neurological difference might have been narrated before there was a language for it. This is an investigation not of intelligence or mental health but of fundamental neurological difference and what it might have meant for the late eighteenth century United States, then a new nation politically organized through republicanism in which representative (white, propertied) men were expected to represent the needs of “the people” and trusted with governance. Ormond troubles the foundational formulation that American bodyminds simply required the right education and training to become, in Benjamin Rush’s words, “republican machines” able “to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.” If republicanism was structured by a presumption of neurotypicality, Ormond presents a fascinating example of a novel working to represent different bodyminds during a time when there were not yet adequate narrative means for doing so.

This essay focuses on the first two Spanish-language texts published in the United States: Santiago Puglia’s 1794 El desengaño del hombre (Man Undeceived) and the anonymous Reflexiones sobre el Comercio de España con sus Colonias en America, en tiempo de Guerra (1799). Read together, these works illustrate how exchange – economic, linguistic, and cultural – informs the beginnings of US Hispanophone literature and reveal how the logic of exchange reflects the uneasy transitions from colony to republic, monarchy to democracy, and agrarianism to commerce. Ultimately, the Hispanophone literature of the period reveals an undecidability between such terms that is itself indicative of both the literature and politics of the early nineteenth-century Americas.

This chapter extends the study of security from political science, sociology, and cultural anthropology to literary studies. To this end, the chapter puts into conversation Charles Brockden Brown’s urban gothic novel Arthur Mervyn (1799/1800) and the theorization of security offered by Michel Foucault. Brown’s fictional exploration of security and Foucault’s historico-theoretical approach both focus on political responses to infectious disease in urban spaces. While there are striking similarities between their perspectives, this chapter does not read Brown with Foucault. Rather, it shows how Brown’s literary treatment of the yellow fever epidemic that raged through Philadelphia in 1793 differs from what Foucault called the “security dispositif.” Brown proposes that the embrace of uncertainty in responding to the epidemic will have positive effects on the moral fiber of the republic. His republican security imaginary is irreducible to the Foucauldian program of critiquing the biopolitical regulation of individual and collective life, not least because Foucault’s target is a political order that is liberal rather than republican.

The book concludes with a preview of slave law in the early republic. Although independence transformed English subjects into American citizens, much about slave law remained the same; English law and English legal procedure continued to be useful for citizens living in a slaveholders’ republic. Republican legal forms were not, in the end, significantly different from forms used under a monarchy, and this had far-reaching consequences. In particular, this legal continuity from the colonial period meant that the commodification of slaves not only continued, but also spread along with the expanding United States. Settlers in new plantation areas of the Deep South, who were steeped in a legal culture that valued tradition, modeled their slave laws on those of South Carolina, and therefore on the language, practices, and precedents of English chattel slavery. The plantation society that they constructed, by hewing so closely to English legal forms, perpetuated the invidious legal fiction that people were things as a working reality in the slave South.

During and immediately after the American Revolution, US writers described a salubrious national climate that would ensure the prosperity of the nation. Maintaining a good climate involved managing air quality through various forms of so-called improvement. In the 1790s, a series of yellow fever epidemics upended this fantasy and suggested that the US atmosphere might be either fundamentally toxic or incredibly vulnerable to foreign contagion. During this period, maintaining healthy air came to be understood as a national security issue. This discourse offers one point of origin for the contemporary militarization of climate to the benefit of some and at the expense of others. The heightened vulnerability of poor and nonwhite communities to airborne toxins can also be traced to the 1790s, when the government prioritized the health of white bodies at the expense of black people. This chapter traces this arc through Mercy Otis Warren’s anti-British plays, writing by and about Benjamin Franklin, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown. The chapter closes by connecting this literary history to contemporary scholarship about air pollution.

The raising of raw silk in the United States at the start of the nineteenth century was a local phenomenon that remained concentrated in areas that had a colonial legacy. In the context of a fast-diversifying economy and the meteoric rise of cotton occurring in the South, it gave little hint of being a branch of agriculture that had the potential to survive in the expanding United States. But sericulture experienced a nationwide rejuvenation between 1820 and 1845, as pockets of cultivation developed across the nation, from Maine to Louisiana. Most of these efforts raised small quantities which tended to be reeled locally and inexpertly, and twisted into sewing thread, though they could hold great value and meaning to individuals and households. The chapter argues that three mutually reinforcing vehicles gave particular shape to these antebellum efforts at silk production: the agricultural press, the postal service, and the agricultural society. These packaged up a nationalist rhetoric that virtuously reconciled agriculture with manufacturing, production with consumption, and progress with nostalgia. But in spite of innovative justifications and wide uptake, many of the self-same issues that had compromised earlier efforts at sericulture eventually rose to the surface. The challenge of making silk American had been accomplished, but not that of making American silk.

This chapter examines the growth of Baltimore’s casual sex trade in the early republic. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the sex trade in Baltimore emerged as part of the broader, mobile world of coastal and Atlantic commerce and labor and functioned as a survival strategy for women whose existences were governed by seasonal labor patterns and the uncertain rhythms of trade. Sex work was a loosely organized and casual affair that was part of poor women’s economy of makeshifts, and it was neither highly profitable nor spatially separated from the everyday world and social fabric of community life in maritime neighborhoods. Men and women, black and white, enslaved and free, sold and purchased sex in taverns, sailors’ boardinghouses, and local groggeries. They did so at significant legal risk and for little in the way of profit, for prostitution in the early city was little more than a subsistence trade.

In 1846, Baltimore entrepreneur Johns Hopkins opened a “splendid” set of commercial buildings on the corner of Lombard and Gay Streets, just north of the Patapsco River. Hopkins, who made his fortune first as a country merchant and then as an investor in the railroad, intended the buildings to facilitate the trade that was central to both Baltimore’s economy and his personal wealth. The buildings were practical, but they were also a symbol of the city’s commercial pretensions. In addition to offices and commodious warehouses where merchants and dry goods dealers could keep the variety of products they imported from the countryside and exported through the port of Baltimore, Hopkins funded the construction of a beautifully designed corner hall. The three-story structure, described as one of the “handsomest buildings in the city,” was adorned with numerous ornaments, including a trident of Neptune and a Roman spade that symbolized Baltimore’s links to maritime commerce and agriculture.