The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin (The Early Modern Americas)

Places Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia in the context of a broader Atlantic intellectual world and investigates the entanglement among books, knowledge, and colonialismThe Atlantic Republic of Letters offers an alternative intellectual history of early America.Focusing on Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia, the book frames Euro-American colonialism as an intellectual enterprise, which was established not only through military and economic means but also through books, ideas, and cultural institutions. Through research in dozens of archives and rare book libraries, Diego Pirillo brings together two interconnected histories.First, he recovers the place of British America in the cosmopolitan world of the Republic of Letters, studying the communication system that facilitated the transatlantic circulation of knowledge.Second, he shows that knowledge was weaponized in the effort to survey and control North America.While fashioning themselves as independent and cosmopolitan scholars, Franklin