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— nineteen — Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds Historians of neither the indigenous inhabitants of the mainland of southeastern North America nor the colonies Europeans established there after 1560 have ever been comfortable working within the framework of the history of the South. The very idea of the South as a distinctive entity characterized by slavery, large numbers of people of African descent, large plantations producing staple crops for export, low investment in education and other social amenities, and deep religiosity makes sense only in the American national context that took shape during the fifty years following the American Revolution and the subsequent creation of a new federal state that by the 1820s had, however tenuously, drawn all the inhabitants of southeastern North America into a national union. Only as a consequence of their experiences within that union did the people of these discrete political societies come to understand, first, that they had a common interest in relation to other segments of the union and, over time, that they had a common identity and composed a distinctive region. To be sure, the political societies that evolved out of these early colonies all subsequently became parts of the South and, to one degree or another, shared in the defining of its attributes. Indeed, as the South became a self-conscious entity in the years after the Missouri Compromise, residents of those old societies , especially Virginians and South Carolinians, often acted as leaders in the construction of a southern regional consciousness. If historians of the South have been content to search the pasts of the colonies for the rudiments of the later South, and if some students of the southern colonies have been complicitous in such projects, most colonialists have found the anachronism and decontextualization inherent in such undertakings discomforting and have This chapter was written for a special issue of the Journal of Southern History. It is republished here with permission from “Early Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds,” Journal of Southern History 73 (Aug. 2007): 1–14. Greene, final pages 426 Greene, final pages 426 2/12/13 2:27 PM 2/12/13 2:27 PM Early Modern Southeastern North America 427 suspected that they would lead to distorted interpretations. For more than a century, the urge to avoid such disfigurement has driven historians of the early modern Southeast to seek frameworks that did not treat their areas of study as anterooms to the histories of the United States and its subset the South. The historians involved in this endeavor have been remarkably successful. They have represented the early modern southeastern colonies as outposts or extensions of the European empires to which they were attached and, further , as products of early modern European expansion, populated by European and African immigrants and culturally fused with indigenous peoples. Historians have used the perspectives of empire and of expansion to highlight the significance and changing character of European attachments, the concept of diaspora to focus attention on the extent and depth of the African connection , and the idea of encounter to investigate the impact of both upon the indigenous populations who inhabited the Southeast in considerable numbers before and after the arrival of Europeans and Africans. Two additional and complementary perspectives, the Atlantic and the pan-hemispheric, offer still other routes by which historians of the early modern Southeast may escape the pitfalls of anachronism and set their area of study in an even broader contemporary context.¹ Modern historical investigation over the past century has revealed that the early modern Southeast was, by any measure, a place of extraordinary diversity . Its indigenous inhabitants were descendants of urban-dwelling and mound-building Mississippian peoples who had reached their zenith in the thirteenth century. At the time of their encounter with Europeans in the sixteenth century, they spoke a variety of languages and were divided into several large chiefdoms and confederacies and several hundred smaller nations. Many of these people were sedentary and agricultural, a few were sedentary and subsisted on marine resources, and others supplemented their part-time agriculture with hunting and gathering or were nonagricultural and seasonally nomadic. Despite severe demographic decline, a result of war, enslavement, and their susceptibility to European diseases, they continued for two centuries to be numerically predominant in the region as a whole. As late as 1760 they 1. See Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic...

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