New World Orders Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas Edited by John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey "Fascinating case studies of how authority was both brutal yet precarious and malleable in the French, Spanish, English, and Dutch empires of the New World."--American Historical Review "This is an almost ideal anthology for graduate students and scholars still weighing the value of Atlantic-world scholarship. The essays are consistently strong and jargon-free. Editors and authors have produced a crisp, coherent, and readable volume whose case studies and...

Specter of Peace advances a novel historical conceptualization of peace as a process of “right ordering” that involved the careful regulation of violence, the legitimation of colonial authority, and the creation of racial and gendered hierarchies. The volume highlights the many paths of peacemaking that otherwise have hitherto gone unexplored in early American and Atlantic World scholarship and challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. Early American peacemaking was a productive discourse of moral ordering fundamentally concerned with regulating violence. The...