Resituates the Spanish Caribbean as an extension of the Luso-African Atlantic world from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, when the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns facilitated a surge in the transatlantic slave trade.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. This book investigates these diverse artifacts to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire.

When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians.