INTRODUCTION

Borders, Places, and Movement

RACHEL B. HERRMANN AND JESSICA CHOPPIN RONEY

Often historians fall into a double bind of reading historical maps as conveying facts rather than arguments, and the fallacy of imposing modern geographical constructs backwards. The twenty-first-century borders of nation-states, which had neither reality nor meaning in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, continue to inflect the organization of current thinking about this period. Claiming Land, Claiming Water asserts that modern scholars bear the responsibility to acknowledge the pitfalls of such practices and to question how the disciplinary origins of history and cartography shape our own assumptions, questions, methods, and archives.

The authors in Claiming Land, Claiming Water investigate 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 (c. 1630–1860). The early modern period was characterized by the rise of oceanic exploration, trade, migration, transcontinental invasion, continental (re)exploration, colonization, empire-building, and the nimble responses of Indigenous actors to the possibilities and perils that newcomers presented.

In this era farmers, fishers, hunters, religious leaders, colonial projectors, traders, sailors, soldiers, diplomats, and cartographers all had their own viewpoint on how space was—or should be—organized. Shaped by their own material and ideational worlds, they experienced land- and waterscapes in distinctive ways and asserted claims accordingly. In the process, as people moved to new places, they imposed onto space their own distinctive ideologies and imaginings.

This volume’s authors demonstrate that these ideologies of space were deeply informed by culture and experience, and yet subject to transformation. Whether traveling to new worlds or experiencing an old world made anew by colonizers, pathogens, and objects, no society could reproduce exactly old social, political, and economic structures. Claims upon space and the power to enforce those claims, particularly if the claims were meant to be exclusive, required evolving political, civil, juridical, military, fiscal, and cartographic technologies.1 The development of those technologies was neither linear nor uncontested, nor was there broad agreement about the sources of authority that legitimated one or another system.

To describe actors moving in and making claims upon early modern space, historians themselves invoke spatial paradigms, none of which have been more influential than one based on water and one on land: Atlantic history and North American hemispheric or continental history. This volume bridges between the two.

The Atlantic world paradigm centers the ocean as the vital link that connected the peoples and histories of Europe, Central and West Africa, and the Americas beginning in the fifteenth century. Characterized by “multiracial, multiethnic, multinational, and multi-imperial” experiences and connections, the Atlantic world’s parameters were characterized by the rise of transoceanic exploration and movement, invasion and resettlement, colonization, voluntary and forced migration, commercial agriculture, long-distance trade, empire-building, and the strategic adaptations, reactions, and responses of Indigenous people.2 Distinct but related to imperial history, Atlantic history insists on multipolarity, polyvocality, and the contingent interplay of many factors at once. While some historians have criticized the Atlantic framework for drawing the scholarly gaze away from the power of Native nations, others have demonstrated that Indigenous American maritime power was formidable not only across the “Red Atlantic,” but also in the Pacific Ocean.3

In contrast to the Atlantic paradigm, continental historians center the North American continent itself. The impetus of looking into the interior stretches back at least to the nineteenth-century scholarship of Francis Parkman, but received new energy in the late nineteenth century, with Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis that the (white) American character was deeply intertwined with the frontier.4 Later work reframed the spatial metaphor from a border line to a zone or multiple zones of contact, trade, and contest between Indigenous nations and newer arrivals from Europe and Africa.5 Over time, much of the center of gravity of early modern continental histories has turned to heavy emphasis on Indigenous peoples because, as Kathleen DuVal has trenchantly reminded us, into the nineteenth century most of North America remained “Native ground.”6 These places, such as the Mississippi River, Mobile Bay, and its environs, were places that Elizabeth Ellis characterizes as borderlands with “multiple and layered land rights.” The Petites Nations did not aspire to exercise “uncontested power” and understood that their reciprocal relationships with other people in the Gulf South were what controlled space.7 Continental history focuses on the political, economic, military, and kinship networks that constituted authority in North America and the contested, brutal process by which the continent was eventually made over from, in Michael Witgen’s words, “Native homelands into American homesteads.”8 That process had not concluded by the time period that this volume considers.

Historians of the Atlantic world and of the North American continent share a common goal, which is to recover the multivalent and competitive geopolitical world that predated the dominance of territorial empires or nation-states. In both cases scholars tell rich, interconnected histories that show how entangled were the political, economic, demographic, and cultural processes; how richly varied the cast of characters; and how uncertain and contingent the events that shaped the early modern world. Yet, in doing so, and despite common aims, historians of the North American continent and Atlantic world have pulled in different directions. Thus, while both sets of historians have produced scholarship theorizing space, borders, and zones of interaction, these different historical interpretations have been siloed for too long, making it impossible comprehensively to theorize the making and unmaking of borders on water and land. Our volume brings specialists from both subfields together and asks them to attend to the implications of their methodology in conversation with one another.

The most current scholarship has encouraged authors to move away from dichotomies pitting continents against oceans and to think more carefully about where land and water literally met to thereby revise categories, methodologies, and paradigms. Where some scholars adopt Stephen Hornsby’s perspective that the geography of the British Atlantic can best be understood as two contrasting spatial systems—one fluid and maritime, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and the other a system of combined nodes, staple territories, and agricultural frontiers along eastern North America—others recognize that neither land nor water was neatly “contained.”9 Simone Müller and David Stradling warn against privileging “a container perspective,” by which they mean the geomorphological formations that contained water, such as a river’s banks or the coastlines of an ocean. Such a perspective runs the risk of creating artificial boundaries between land and water or producing a study whose scale is too large. Müller and Stradling recommend moving beyond analyses of containers and watersheds to consider water’s physical characteristics and how people imagined and understood them.10

We urge in this volume that historians benefit when we consider water alongside land and land alongside water. Here, we draw on Tiffany Lethabo King’s theorization of shoals, ecotones characterized by both land and water and that drifted and moved over time. Their blended nature and their movement made them dangerous for navigators. King writes that before the 1860s and the advent of bathymetry—which allowed people to calculate the probability curves that estimated latitude and longitude to locate shoals in geographic space—coral beds, rock formations, and sandbars were difficult to map and to avoid. Their danger forced people to pause before proceeding. We draw on King to encourage scholars of borders analytically “to slow down . . . to move from the automaton to a more alert driver and navigator.” This “shoaling effect,” this deliberate slowing down and careful attention to terrestrial features alongside aqueous ones, offers new interpretive avenues and the potential to reframe our paradigms about space, control, and sovereignty in the early modern period.11

By centering attempts to make and unmake borders not just on land but also on water, this book participates in a shift within the last decade and a half to theorize the use of waterways in the early modern period. This scholarship about watery spaces—including border seas, coasts, saltwater frontiers, the Red Atlantic, the Transimperial Greater Caribbean, river valleys, and undercurrents—has established how central water-based trade, travel, and transportation was to the development of early modern North America. European imperial officials strove—unsuccessfully—to dominate maritime zones, ports, rivers, and the Great Lakes. Indigenous nations and people of African descent challenged Europeans’ plans, retained control of water routes (especially rivers) and used them for their own purposes, and took advantage of aqueous mobility to further their own ends.12

Because our authors address the questions of what makes and unmakes a border and how people used or destabilized those constructs, they necessarily see motion and human agency in what some might misread as teleological boundaries of nation-states or as static images. This volume therefore models methods for using and interpreting historical maps. The authors take maps not as objective depictions of reality but as historically contingent material artifacts expressing a range of desires. The maps discussed are objects with arguments and were co-created by Indigenous informers, colonial observers, European mapmakers, and imperial officials—many of whom had conflicting motives and goals.13 According to this volume’s authors, borders were processes before sometimes (but not always) becoming lines. The volume thus models how to use and theorize maps in practice.

In their origins both the disciplines of history and cartography served power, and more specifically, the project of empire and the rise of the modern nation-state. The very origin of the field of academic history as we know it emerged in the late nineteenth century, “the ideological handmaid of the nation state.”14 Early historians relied on maps that the geographer J. B. Harley contended were themselves “inextricably linked to the rise of the nation-state in the modern world.” Far from neutral images, Harley urged, maps must be read as “‘thick’ texts or as a socially constructed form of knowledge.”15 Historians who have taken this approach include Christian Koot, who has demonstrated how locally constructed knowledge could be transformed and repurposed in metropolitan centers to create engraved maps that might serve as “apparatus of empire.” Max Edelson in turn has shown how such maps misled metropolitan policymakers into believing they had mastery over geographies that turned out to be beyond their grasp.16 We continue to interpret maps as constructed forms of knowledge by thinking in this volume about archives.

Established and more recent scholarship insists on recognizing non-European ways of seeing and depicting space, a project that necessitates expanding our concept of archives. Gregory A. Waselkov reminds us that “drawing maps was within the competence of every adult southeastern Indian of the colonial period”; it was not a specialized skill confined to a limited number of surveyors and mapmakers as in Europe. With different priorities than Europeans, Indigenous mapmakers produced maps that symbolically communicated political relationships as “graphic depictions of the balance of power.” Native Americans had mental maps, in addition to physical ones, even if they declined to share them with colonizers or if colonizers declined to acknowledge them as co-authors. Lisa Brooks and Christine DeLucia engage in recovering Indigenous landscapes, establishing that Native Americans made place-worlds through kin relationships, and that local and tribal archives, oral traditions, and memories can and should inform how scholars interpret these places today.17

The essays in this volume explore how colonists, Native Americans, and African-descended people saw and ordered space: how they claimed it, asserted power over it, and forged relationships across and beyond it. Collectively, the essays show people shaping political economies of space on land and water, which is to say, creating the social, political, legal, economic, and intellectual conditions that structured power within imagined, constructed, and often contested basins of geographic space. Human assertions and technologies inscribed certain areas with particular meaning, but our authors show that in the early modern era most zones remained porous and open to rival uses by people within and without. In the end, claiming land and claiming water was an endless work in progress.

This volume is organized into three parts, though as with any rigorous study of land and water, contributors speak across and beyond their containers. The authors in Part I, “Ways to Think About Borders,” describe European officials, and free settlers’ schemes, hopes, and assumptions about the relationship between borders, power, and reality throughout North America and on the Atlantic coast. Edward Gray studies the peculiar constitutional history of the founding of Maryland to argue that it was the first English continental colony to be legally enclosed by formal boundaries. Gray reminds us that “sovereignty . . . was unlikely to be territorial in any modern, spatial sense. It would remain, throughout the colonial era, a matter of persons and produce.”18 In Christian Koot’s chapter, John Povey’s addition by hand of watercolor borders to a 1676 map of New England offers readers insight into the process of imperial reimagining for that region as the Lords of Trade in England sought to rein in the territorial ambitions of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Borders on maps, Koot argues, might be used not only as implements of authority or legitimacy, but also and alternatively as “things to think with.” When Povey inked new colored lines, he helped to imagine a spatially defined entity called “New England,” and so to bring it into being.19 Bitterly as English colonists sometimes grieved to their monarch about the boundaries between English colonies, still more laden were contests between rival empires. Alex Zukas uses the early eighteenth-century map “war” between cartographers Herman Moll and Guillaume Delisle, working on behalf of the British and French empires respectively, to explore Europeans’ competing and self-serving justifications for empire, which can be contrasted visually in the kinds of maps they produced. Moll’s and Delisle’s maps stressed those continental features that buttressed their empire’s claims and thus functioned as “weaponized” “symbolic resources to support the empire-building.”20 These first three chapters, in common with much of the archives of empire, tell us much about the aspirations and preoccupations of colonizers. By contrast, John Morton shows that in reality locals attained clarity over disputed territory earlier than metropolitan authorities. This assertion builds from unusual sources, which he calls “data maps,” detailed charts of local settlements that itinerant missionaries assembled in the early nineteenth century. While US and British metropolitan authorities fussed at one another for decades about the precise location of the border that separated Maine from New Brunswick, Morton shows that by 1804 “the boundary was a fixed reality” to the people who lived there. On the Maine–New Brunswick border, “itinerant ministers and their parishioners fixed the line in place,” an example of a border drawn not by metropolitan officials or religious antagonists (e.g., Catholic vs. Protestant), but by co-religionists concerned about the material support of their respective churches.21

Part II of the volume, “Creating Place,” focuses on how people intellectually understood and in practice shaped the spaces and places they occupied, from the plantation landscape of the Caribbean, to the riverine networks of ambitious merchants, to the battlefield terrain that military men had rapidly to sketch. Authors explore what Paul Musselwhite calls in this volume “spatial technology,” insisting that paradigms about the occupation, possession, control, and depiction of spaces humans inhabit are historically contingent, constructed, and subject to change.22 Musselwhite challenges the inevitability of the English plantation complex and private property ownership, tracing the uneven shift in English definitions of what constituted a “plantation” from earlier ideas that cast it as a public, civic project to later ideas that redefined it as a private space of economic profit that expanded state power and paved the way for the growth of capitalism. Kim Gruenwald explores the compelling interest of merchants to harness the capacity of moving water to transport goods and people to distant markets. These interests led merchants to argue for their own unfettered access to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers even when the Lenape (Delaware), Miami, and Shawnee nations hunted south of the Ohio and sought to protect their villages, farms, and claims to the north and west of it. Where officials from rival Atlantic empires wanted rivers to act as inflexible, nonporous boundaries under their control, merchants saw rivers as conduits and arteries of trade. Gruenwald suggests that the region often denominated “the trans-Appalachian west” might be better called the “Riverine West” to recognize that it was the swift-flowing downstream water, more than fertile land beyond the Appalachians, that first enticed empires and white settlers alike.23 Finally, Karen Rann reminds us that the perception and strategic mapping of space included not only distance but also height. She explores the creation of contour lines, a new element that had contentiously to be worked out in carto-technology and introduced into carto-literacy in response to the difficulties that British military men faced when striving to map mountainous, contested territory. She reminds us that in the early modern period the production of maps required “bodies moving through terrain.”24 Finding and agreeing on a single, reproducible carto-technology that could more accurately communicate that experience and a terrain’s myriad features—gradient, height, soil, vegetation, and so on—was a contentious work of time and considerable effort well into the nineteenth century.

Part III, “Movement,” the final section of the volume, centers the people navigating through and across borders, attempting to invest such lines with meaning or subvert the meanings imposed by others. Charles Prior uses John Mitchell’s 1755 map of North America to show how this European source centers Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) territoriality, history, power, and epistemologies. As Anglophone officials tried to create an asymmetrical colonial world, they found themselves instead required to work in a larger, polyvalent international world shaped by Indigenous sovereignties. In the North American northeast, Prior argues, “the international was characterized by embedded diplomatic customs and rituals that were intrinsic to the political culture of the Haudenosaunee. . . . drawing Europeans into the orbit of the Confederacy along multiple paths, routes and circuits of exchange and power.”25 Chad McCutchen and Jennifer Monroe McCutchen shift the focus southeast and further forward in time, finding similarly that Indigenous power, particularly of the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy, served to check US, British, and Spanish ambitions and ensure instead “the persistence of community-level authority and coalition-based politics,” even to the frustration of the centralizing ambitions of a Creek leader like Alexander McGillivray.26 The McCutchens argue that Creek strategies, in blending colonial experience with new sociopolitical ideologies and in substituting diplomatic and commercial relationships for territorial hegemony, symbolize the transitional phase of geopolitics in the Gulf region after the US War for Independence. Rachel Herrmann extends the focus on commercial relationships between Spaniards, Britons, Creeks, and Seminoles in the Gulf South with a chapter examining the Spanish policy of comercio libre. She argues that Spanish inabilities to acquire geographic knowledge of rivers and Creek geographic control of those vital networks enabled Muscogees to continue serving Creek women’s interests through the sale of dressed deerskins. In semi-aqueous Creek homelands characterized by local town politics and Spanish forts and trading houses on the coast, the Spanish allowed relaxations to comercio libre’s tariffs and rules about foreign traders.27 By contrast Harvey Amani Whitfield and Sarah Chute study people uprooted to an entirely new geography seeking autonomy but often finding the opposite. “The history of Black people crossing the early American-Canadian border,” they remind us, “is usually framed as a crossing from American enslavement to Canadian freedom.” In fact, “the aquatic highway of the Atlantic” connected Black people in the Maritimes to both spaces of freedom and (re)enslavement.28 By following three case studies of two men and one woman striving for freedom, they demonstrate how elusive such freedom could be in the Maritimes and how a combination of political jurisdiction, water borders, personal networks, and pure chance shaped each person’s quest for freedom. We end with Samuel Truett’s chapter on border-crossing strangers and villagers, whose lives were entangled in terrestrial and aqueous spaces. Truett follows the life of John Denton Hall, “a child of the Atlantic World,” to model one way to “circumnavigate” the different histories considered in this volume and to disrupt our tendencies to write toward the formation of aggregated cultures, empires, or nations.29

Collectively, the essays in this volume speak to how space informed practice and how people reshaped space. This volume works to bring into one frame land and water; the power dynamics around imagining, enforcing, and subverting borders; and the dexterity of people seeking to assert their own rights over particular spaces. It offers methodological suggestions, contributing to a praxis of how people in the early modern Atlantic and North America claimed land and water. Weaving through all the spatial paradigms runs a productive tension between stasis and change; endurance and innovation; solidity and fluidity.

Many of the essays in this volume originated from an expanding network supported by funding from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council that has aimed to bring together scholars working on several different types of boundaries: landed, watery, continental, Native American, and hemispheric borders in the early modern Atlantic world. This book emerges from four linked international conferences we organized in the United States and United Kingdom that supported the research of historians, geographers, and literary scholars in considering these questions, collecting together diverse perspectives on early modern borders.30

In the decade since we embarked on the first grant application for this project, much has changed for us in our own subject positions respectively in Bristol, England, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and for our authors. Our thinking, writing, and editing took place in the context of Brexit; a US presidency characterized by the building of a border wall and the banning of people from predominantly Muslim countries; continuing debate about the US-Mexico border; the invasion of Ukraine by Russia; the political and economic reconfiguration of Europe; and a deadly pandemic that crossed national, state, city, and household lines to infect communities worldwide. As the book went to press the US president began forecasting radically new global priorities, provoking diplomatic and trade realignments in North America, Europe, and beyond. Suddenly there was once again disagreement over what to call the Gulf of Mexico, and long-established control of spaces from Gaza to Greenland seem to at least some policymakers to be up for grabs. In short, now more than ever it seems important to hone the analytic tools—and the long scholarly vision—to situate claims to water and land as constructs of power. And to remember that however powerful borders seemed, people, networks, and nations always subverted and contested them.

Notes

1. 1.  See for example, William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983); James Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (Yale University Press, 1995); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (Yale University Press, 2018).
2. 2.  Philip Morgan and Jack P. Greene have suggested Atlantic history should be “thought of . . . primarily as a perspective,” rather than a discrete discipline. Philip D. Morgan and Jack P. Greene, “Introduction: The Present State of Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford University Press, 2009): 3–33, esp. 4 and 24.
3. 3.  For the critique, see for example Julianna Barr, “The Red Continent and the Cant of the Coastline,” William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (July 2012): 521–26; Allan Greer, “Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America,” American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 365–86. On Indigenous maritime power, see Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2015); Joshua L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderlands People (Yale University Press, 2015); Matthew R. Bahar, Storm of the Sea: Indians and Empires in the Atlantic’s Age of Sail, (Oxford University Press, 2019); James Hill, “‘Bring Them What They Lack’: Spanish-Creek Exchange and Alliance-Making in a Maritime Borderland, 1763–1784,” Early American Studies 12, no. 1 (2014): 36–67.
4. 4.  Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (Henry Holt and Company, 1921), 1–38; William Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1987): 157–76; Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, “Introduction: On the Connection of Frontiers,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (University of North Carolina Press, 1998): 1–15.
5. 5.  Herbert Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (Yale University Press, 1921); Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (Jun. 1999): 814–41.
6. 6.  Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
7. 7.  Elizabeth N. Ellis, The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 6, 25.
8. 8.  Michael Witgen, “A Nation of Settlers: The Early American Republic and the Colonization of the Northwest Territory,” William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2019), 391–98 (quote 393); Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Shapes of Power: Indians, Europeans, and North American Worlds from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 31–68.
9. 9.  Stephen J. Hornsby, “Geographies of the British Atlantic World,” in H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John G. Reid, Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–44, esp. 43.
10. 10.  Simone M. Müller and David Stradling, “Water as the Ultimate Sink: Linking Fresh and Saltwater History,” International Review of Environmental History 5, no. 1 (2019): 23–41, esp. 27–29, 30 (containers).
11. 11.  Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019), xv.
12. 12.  See note 3 above. See also S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Harvard University Press, 2017), 24; Christian Koot, A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake (New York University Press, 2018); April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018); John Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (University of North Carolina Press, 2023); Renaud Morieux, “Anglo-French Fishing Disputes and Maritime Boundaries in the North Atlantic, 1700–1850,” in Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era: Essays in Honor of Robert C. Ritchie, ed. Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas (Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2015), 41–75; David A. Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 21; Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke University Press, 2016); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2010); Michael J. Chiarappa, “Working the Delaware Estuary: African American Cultural Landscapes and the Contours of Environmental Experience,” Buildings & Landscapes 25, no. 1 (2018): 64–91; Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2018); Matthew J. Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012); Douglas Hamilton and John McAleer, eds., Islands and the British Empire in the Age of Sail (Oxford University Press, 2021); Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
13. 13.  Reuben Rose-Redwood, Natchee Blu Barnd, Annita Hetoevėhotohke’e Lucchesi, Sharon Dias, and Wil Patrick, “Decolonizing the Map: Recentering Indigenous Mappings,” Cartographica 55, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 151–62; Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 3, 10–12; Koot, A Biography of a Map in Motion, 9, 11, 176; Nicholas Gliserman, “Introduction: Unpacking the Meaning of Maps, Power, and Boundaries,” in The Power of Maps and the Politics of Borders: Papers from the Conference Held at the American Philosophical Society, October 2019: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 110, no. 4 (American Philosophical Society Press, 2021), 1–10; Reed, “Thinking Multidimensionally,” 57–70; Juliana Barr, “Borders and Borderlands,” in Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 9–25, esp. 16–17.
14. 14.  Allan Greer, “National, Transnational, and Hypernational Historiographies: New France Meets Early American History,” The Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2010): 695–724 (quote 696); Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Harvard University Press, 2020).
15. 15.  J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 59, 52.
16. 16.  Koot, A Biography of a Map in Motion, 176; Edelson, The New Map of Empire, 332–33. Harley’s call aligned with anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s practice of “thick description,” the classic articulation of which remains Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Daedelus 101 (1972): 1–37.
17. 17.  Gregory A. Waselkov, “Indian Maps of the Colonial Southeast,” in Indians in the Colonial Southeast, revised and expanded edition (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 435, 445; Louis de Vorsey Jr., “American Indians and the Early Mapping of the Southeast,” in William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps, 3rd ed., revised by Louis de Vorsey Jr. (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 65–98; Christine DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (Yale University Press, 2018); Lisa M. Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press, 2018); Christine Delucia, “Recovering Material Archives in the Native Northeast: Converging Approaches to Traces, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism,” Early American Literature 55, no. 2 (2020): 355–94, esp. 356, 366, 368. On expanding the concept of archives, see Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
18. 18.  Edward G. Gray in this volume, “Toward a Prehistory of Territory: Thomas Hobbes, the Maryland Palatinate, and the Colonial Boundary Problem,” 33.
19. 19.  Christian J. Koot in this volume, “Things to Think With: The Use of Borders on a Seventeenth-Century Map of New England,” 38, 39.
20. 20.  Alex Zukas in this volume, “Lines on a Map: Crafting and Contesting Borders in Guillaume Delisle’s and Herman Moll’s Early Eighteenth-Century Maps of North America,” 62.
21. 21.  John Morton in this volume, “Data Maps of Downeast Maine: Missionary Records from the Early Republic Borderlands,” 91, 94.
22. 22.  Paul Musselwhite in this volume, “Depicting and Defining the Plantation in the Early English Caribbean, 1625–1675,” 118.
23. 23.  Kim M. Gruenwald in this volume, “When a River Is a Border: Rivalries and Commercial Networks in the Riverine West,” 159–60.
24. 24.  Karen Rann in this volume, “Military Lines: How the Introduction of Contours Affected Maps and Movement,” 181.
25. 25.  Charles Prior in this volume, “Indian Centers, Colonial Peripheries: Locating the International in Early America,” 207.
26. 26.  Chad McCutchen and Jennifer Monroe McCutchen in this volume, “‘Playing the Old Game of Double’: Navigating Creek and Spanish Geopolitics in the Post-Revolutionary Gulf South,” 219.
27. 27.  Rachel B. Herrmann in this volume, “Comercio Libre: Revisiting a Concept on Trade and Borders in Creek Homelands,” 242, 244–45.
28. 28.  Harvey Amani Whitfield and Sarah Chute in this volume, “Possibilities and Peril: Exploring the Transnational Experiences of Black People in the Maritimes, 1783–1792,” 264, 265.
29. 29.  Samuel Truett in this volume, “Amphibious Tales: Villagers and Strangers in a Border-Crossing World,” 290, 293.
30. 30.  “On Edge: New Frontiers in Atlantic History,” University of Southampton, Southampton, England, June 2016 (sponsored by an Adventures in Research Award from the University of Southampton, 2015); and “Geographies of Power on Land and Water: Space, People, and Borders,” American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA, July 2018; “Zones and Lines: New Conversations on Borders,” Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, May 2019; and “Lines on a Map: Crafting and Contesting Borders in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond,” British Library, London, England, December 2019 (Grant ref: AH/R002320/1, a Networking Scheme Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2017–19).