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“Those Claiming The Rights Of Freemen Are Themselves The Most Execrable Of Tyrants” / A Taste For Empire

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:wm.edu/oai:scholarworks.wm.edu:etd-7098
Date01 January 2020
CreatorsHerson-Roeser, Bennett
PublisherW&M ScholarWorks
Source SetsWilliam and Mary
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceDissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects
Rights© The Author, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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