Description
TitleGeorge Croghan
Date Created2015
Other Date2015-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (xi, 479 p.)
DescriptionThis dissertation integrates my own specifying paradigm of the “situational frontier” and historian David Day’s generalizing paradigm of “supplanting society” to contextualize one historical personage, George Croghan, who advanced the interests of four eighteenth-century supplanting societies—one nation (Great Britain) and three of its North American colonies (Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia)—in terms of three fields of endeavor, trade, diplomacy, and proprietorship. His mastery of intercultural trade and diplomacy enabled him not only to create advantageous conditions for the governments of the three colonies to claim proprietorship of swaths of Indian land, but also to create advantageous conditions for himself to do likewise. The loci of the claims were “situational frontiers,” the distinct spaces where particular Indians, Europeans, and Euro-Americans converged in particular circumstances and coexisted, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently. His mastery of trade and diplomacy enabled him not only to create advantageous conditions for Great Britain to claim proprietorship in the Old Northwest (present-day Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois), but also to create advantageous conditions for himself to do likewise. The supplanting process, according to David Day, involved three overlapping or contemporaneous “stages”: (1) the claiming of legal or de jure pro- prietorship; (2) the claiming of effective or de facto proprietorship; and (3) the claiming of moral proprietorship. The first stage involved a symbolic gesture like raising a territorial flag; the second involved territorial exploration and its consequences, the naming of geographic features, the fortification of borders, the tilling of soil, the development of resources, and the peopling of lands; and the third involved a justification of conquest. Because Croghan at one time or another claimed de jure, de facto, or moral proprietorship of Indian lands for himself, for the three colonies, or for Great Britain, he was a conquer-or.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Robert Daiutolo, Jr
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.