Date Awarded
2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
History
Advisor
Joshua Piker
Committee Member
Andrew Fisher
Committee Member
Hannah Rosen
Abstract
White settlers in the Northwest Territory fashioned their self-understanding in racialized conceptions of property: landed and human. This thesis seeks to bring together competing strands of historiography to examine the interplay between these two forms of property and their production. Discursively, territorial petitions reveal the ideological language used by white settlers to racially justify dispossession, dislocation, and enslavement; whereas, physically, salt production, a procedure situated at the interstices of these interlocking processes, provides a view into the workings and effects of these rhetorics on the ground. Together, these areas of focus allow for insight not just into the activity of white settlers and the resistance of dispossessed Natives and enslaved Blacks, but also into the workings and creation of early American imperial state.
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-8xyt-vn03
Rights
© The Author
Recommended Citation
Herson-Roeser, Bennett, "“Those Claiming The Rights Of Freemen Are Themselves The Most Execrable Of Tyrants” / A Taste For Empire" (2020). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1616444316.
http://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-8xyt-vn03
