Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic (Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia)

Explores how and why people manipulated borders in the early modern Atlantic worldClaiming Land, Claiming Water shares what historians and geographers wish readers knew about maps and borders before, during, and after the founding of the United States.The essays collected in this volume model how people can learn to interpret maps as arguments, rather than as historical facts, and to read maps for evidence of people and places that were elided, renamed, or destroyed. Contributors travel through the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in the place known by many names: the Atlantic World; the North American continent; borderlands; and homelands.Onto this place where people exercised power over space by forging relationships, colonizers came and imagined borders onto maps.Featuring reproductions of twenty historical maps, the book takes readers through this era of immense disruption to teach them strategies for reading and interpreting these maps critically.Essays