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Eastward of Good Hope

Early America in a Dangerous World

Dane A. Morrison

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How did news from the East—carried in ship logs and mariners' reports, journals, and correspondence—shape early Americans' understanding of the world as a map of dangerous and incoherent sites?

Winner of the John Lyman Book Award by the North American Society for Oceanic History

Freed from restrictions of British mercantilism in the years following the War of Independence, Yankee merchants embarked on numerous voyages of commerce and discovery into distant seas. Through the news from the East, carried in mariners' reports, ship logs, journals, and correspondence, Americans at home imagined the...

How did news from the East—carried in ship logs and mariners' reports, journals, and correspondence—shape early Americans' understanding of the world as a map of dangerous and incoherent sites?

Winner of the John Lyman Book Award by the North American Society for Oceanic History

Freed from restrictions of British mercantilism in the years following the War of Independence, Yankee merchants embarked on numerous voyages of commerce and discovery into distant seas. Through the news from the East, carried in mariners' reports, ship logs, journals, and correspondence, Americans at home imagined the world as a map of dangerous and deranged places. This was a world that was profoundly disordered, hobbled by tyranny and oppression or steeped in chaos and anarchy, often deadly, always uncertain, unpredictable, and unstable, yet amenable to American influence.

Focusing on four representative arenas—the Ottoman Empire, China, India, and the Great South Sea (collectively, the East Indies, Oceana, and the American continent's Northwest coast)—Eastward of Good Hope recasts the relationship between America and the world by examining the early years of the republic, when its national character was particularly pliable and its foundational posture in the world was forming. Drawing on recent scholarship in global ethnohistory, Dane A. Morrison recounts how reports of cannibal encounters, shipboard massacres, shipwrecks, tropical fever, and other tragedies in distant seas led Americans to imagine each region as a distinct set of threats to their republic. He also demonstrates how the concept of justification through self-doubt allowed for aggressive expansionism and for the foundations of imperialism to develop.

Morrison reconsiders American ideas about the world through three questions: How did British Americans imagine the world before independence allowed them to travel "Eastward of Good Hope"? What were the signal encounters that filled the public sphere in their early years of global encounter? And finally, how did Americans' contacts with other peoples inflect their ideas about the world and their place in it? Written in a lively, engaging style, Eastward of Good Hope will appeal to scholars and the general public alike.

Reviews

Reviews

...[A] fascinating study of the US's emerging self-identity during the Early Republic combines global history with an analysis of print culture.

Dane Morrison shows how people in the early United States used images of the Orient to situate themselves in the world along a timeline of supposed development from savagery to civilization. The writing is fluent, the material absorbing, and the subject engaging.

Chronicling the fears and anxieties that early Americans imported from overseas—of cannibals, captivity, heretics, and much worse—this elegantly written and convincingly argued book provides a powerful corrective to more triumphalist historical narratives. Morrison's signal contribution is to help us understand the crucial role played by the maritime community in the articulation of an incipient US national identity.

Eastward of Good Hope describes the construction of the narrative of Otherness as American sailors ventured into the Ottoman, China, and Indian trades, and from there to the South Seas. We still live with the categories and impulses shaped by this post-revolutionary construction. This is an essential book for American cultural historians.

In this imaginative and provocative look at American expansion across the seas, Dane Morrison shows the way the wider world appeared to generations of sailors, traders, missionaries, and diplomats who tried but failed to understand the world they found.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
336
ISBN
9781421442365
Illustration Description
1 map
Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Coffeehouse Chatter
Chapter 2. Unholy Lands
Chapter 3. "Unfeeling Mandarins" in Canton and Macau
Chapter 4. Hindoos and Fakirs in India
Chapter 5. Cannibal Isles
Chapter 6

Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Coffeehouse Chatter
Chapter 2. Unholy Lands
Chapter 3. "Unfeeling Mandarins" in Canton and Macau
Chapter 4. Hindoos and Fakirs in India
Chapter 5. Cannibal Isles
Chapter 6. Echoes
Notes
Index

Author Bio
Dane A. Morrison
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Dane A. Morrison

Dane A. Morrison is a professor of early American history at Salem State University. He is the author of A Praying People: Massachusett Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600–1690 and the coeditor of Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory and the World History Encyclopedia, volumes 11–13: The Age of Global Contact.