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theses

ETD doctoral

This dissertation offers a literary history of rebellion in England’s seventeenth-century American colonies informed by two understudied aspects of early modern political thought. First, it recovers the prohibition on what writers in the period pejoratively called “innovation,” a synonym for revolt reflective of the widespread assumption that any form of change, however small or ostensibly apolitical, was guaranteed to be politically disruptive. Second, it charts the rise of an empirical approach to political knowledge grounded in the eyewitness report genre and focused on the threat of political innovation: a particularizing, inductive alternative to the abstract, deductive discourse of “political philosophy” that I call “Atlantic political science.” In the absence of modern disciplinary distinctions, elites throughout English North America and the Caribbean adapted representational strategies from an emergent natural science in order to make sense of unfamiliar situations, for which the inherited axioms of classical and scriptural political thought failed to prepare them. These scientific techniques helped them to predict, narrate, and thwart the various forms of political innovation threatening their fledgling settlements: from mutiny and heresy to Native American warfare and slave insurrection. But if empiricism fortified the colonial project at a crucial moment, when it still seemed deeply transgressive and entirely unforeordained, it also made inadvertently “audible” the very anticolonial critique it was meant to overcome. Articulated by underclass “innovators,” this critique emphasized the incriminating novelty of colonialism’s elite-sponsored institutions, including repressive new forms of governance, new theologies, and new economic regimes like slavery. Political innovation was not so much prohibited as monopolized by various constituencies in the period because it was not only a pervasive polemical term for rebellion but also a key aspect of modern sovereignty. Appropriating the divine right to enact change, colonial leaders insisted that observably exceptional New World circumstances authorized certain departures from precedent. Rereading political-scientific reports by writers like William Strachey, John Winthrop, and Richard Ligon thus allows us to recast anticolonial rebellion not as a form of “radicalism”—an unabashedly pro-change ethos that only emerges in the late eighteenth century—but rather as resistance to change. Charting the successive emergence of colonies in the greater Chesapeake, New England, and the Caribbean, the dissertation reframes the settlement period as an extended conflict between innovation and “counter-innovation,” that is, between top-down change and restorative underclass rebellion. Ultimately, the project expands our narrow definition of political thought beyond the Eurocentric canon of political philosophy, demonstrates colonialism’s centrality to innovation’s positive transvaluation in the late eighteenth century, and recovers from the history of anticolonial resistance a concept of salutary political change liberated from the hubris of Euro-Christian absolutism and sorely needed in our own innovation-obsessed moment.

ETD_8265

doi:10.7282/T38W3HFQ

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Alexander McLean Mazzaferro

The author owns the copyright to this work.