Research Catalog

Title

British forts and their communities : archaeological and historical perspectives / edited by Christopher R. DeCorse and Zachary J.M. Beier.

Publication

Gainesville : University Press of Florida, [2018]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• DeCorse, Christopher R.
• Beier, Zachary J. M.

Description

xvi, 314 pages : illustrations, maps; 24 cm

Summary

• This book is about the diverse communities associated with English and British forts of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It casts new light on forts and their communities by asking new questions and applying innovative methodological approaches.
• While the military features of historic forts usually receive the most attention from researchers, this volume focuses instead on the people who met and interacted in these sites. Contributors to British Forts and Their Communities look beyond the defensive architecture, physical landscapes, and armed conflicts to explore the complex social diversity that arose in the outposts of the British Empire. The forts investigated here operated at the empire's peak in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, protecting British colonial settlements and trading enclaves scattered across the globe. Locations in this volume include New York State, Michigan, the St. Lawrence River, and Vancouver, as well as sites in the Caribbean and in Africa. Using archaeological and archival evidence, these case studies show how forts brought together people of many different origins, ethnicities, identities, and social roles, from European soldiers to indigenous traders to African slaves. Characterized by shifting networks of people, commodities, and ideas, these fort populations were microcosms of the emerging modern world. This volume reveals how important it is to move past the conventional emphasis on the armed might of the colonizer in order to better understand the messy, entangled nature of British colonialism and the new era it helped usher in--Back cover.

Subject

• Fortification > North America > History
• Fortification > West Indies > History
• Fortification > Africa > History
• Fortification > Great Britain > History
• Social conditions
• Military readiness
• British colonies
• Fortification
• Fort
• Kolonie
• Great Britain > Colonies > Social conditions
• Great Britain > Colonies > Defenses
• Great Britain > History, Military
• West Indies
• North America
• Africa
• Great Britain
• Großbritannien

Genre/Form

• History.
• Military history.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: British forts, communities, and their entanglements / Zachary J.M. Beier and Christopher R. DeCorse -- British forts in northern New York State / David R. Starbuck -- Maintaining the military: blacksmithing at Fort Michilimackinac, Michigan / Amy Roache-Fedchenko -- At the margins of empire: British colonial policy and the military community on Carleton Island (1778-1784) / Douglas J. Pippin -- The fort and the village: landscape and identity in the colonial period of Fort Vancouver / Douglas C. Wilson -- Tracing the fur trade: British fort sites along the Columbia River / Robert J. Cromwell -- Everyday entanglements: labor and diversity at the Cabrits Garrison, Dominica / Zachary J.M. Beier -- Enslaved Africans and the British military at the Brimstone Hill Fortress, St. Kitts, West Indies / Gerald F. Schroedl -- Landlords and strangers: British forts and their communities in West Africa / Christopher R. DeCorse -- Supporting the fort: viewing the British landscape from James Island, the Gambia / Liza Gijanto -- People at the gates: Fort Willshire and cultural transformation in the Eastern Cape, South Africa / Flordeliz T. Bugarin -- Conclusion: Porous walls and possessive structures; British forts and networks of the early modern world.

ISBN

• 9780813056753
• 0813056756

LCCN

2017032248

OCLC

• ocn995162417
• 995162417
• SCSB-9005649

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library