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Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South
Informed Power maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring how people in the colonial world came into possession of vital knowledge in a region that lacked a regular mail system or a printing press until the 1730s.Challenging the notion of early colonial America as an uninformed backwater, Alejandra Dubcovsky uncovers the ingenious ways its inhabitants acquired timely news through largely oral networks. Information circulated through the region via spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, and other ad hoc couriers—and by encounters of sheer chance with hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, or fugitive slaves. For many, content was often inseparable from the paths taken and the alliances involved in acquiring it. The different and innovative ways that Indians, Africans, and Europeans struggled to make sense of their world created communication networks that linked together peoples who otherwise shared no consensus of the physical and political boundaries shaping their lives.Exchanging information was not simply about having the most up-to-date news or the quickest messenger. It was a way of establishing and maintaining relationships, of articulating values and enforcing priorities—a process inextricably tied to the region’s social and geopolitical realities. At the heart of Dubcovsky’s study are important lessons about the nexus of information and power in the early American South.
- GenresHistoryAmerican History
280 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 4, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 25, 2024
The focus on information, its importance, and its movement through varied actors serves Dubcovsky well. But she boxes herself in by insisting on a different emphasis (what, who, how) for each part. This is a case where telling the story would probably have been more effective than inventing schemas for an argument. Italicizing words like "how" over and over doesn't actually make the argument more convincing.
More significantly, I think a slightly different, certainly more complex, picture would emerge if she had fully integrated colonial French sources into this narrative. The work she does on finding Native actors and reading their possible motivations in Spanish and English sources is so powerful after all. It feels like an important node--or probably more accurately another network overlapping from the west--is missing.
More significantly, I think a slightly different, certainly more complex, picture would emerge if she had fully integrated colonial French sources into this narrative. The work she does on finding Native actors and reading their possible motivations in Spanish and English sources is so powerful after all. It feels like an important node--or probably more accurately another network overlapping from the west--is missing.
November 15, 2019
Studies of the early colonial southeast have proliferated in the last decade, influenced by scholars’ discovery of the density of the region’s Native American population and the violence of its colonial Indian slave trade. To Joseph Hall’s study of interethnic gift-giving, Matthew Jennings’ treatment of the region’s cultures of violence, and Michelle LeMaster’s work on kinship and diplomacy - among other insightful accounts - we can now add Alejandra Dubcovsky’s penetrating monograph on regional communication networks. Dubcovsky’s title points to one of INFORMED POWER’S key findings: the close relationship between news, and the interpersonal networks that delivered it, and the accumulation of political power. Both the recipients of information and its deliverers recognized that knowledge was power, and strove either to place themselves in privileged information nodes, or to exchange news for other tangible benefits.
As early as the late Mississippian period, southeastern Indians’ trade and communications networks underwent fundamental change, becoming more localized as regional power centers replaced the once-dominant city-state of Cahokia. In the later seventeenth century the Apalachicola Indians constructed an information net that transected the entire region, north to south and east to west, while in the aftermath of the Yamasee War the Coweta Creeks endeavored to build a similar interactive network that included Native peoples and officials of all three local European powers (English, French, and Spanish). Native American networks were far from static, and the rerouting of communication and commercial links both mapped and generated changes in regional power structures.
Europeans knew that their pursuit of power and profit in the colonial southeast depended on building their own network of informants and allies. In Florida the Spanish initially relied on Christian Indian converts and local caciques (chiefs) for news and information. The men who usually communicated with these two groups, missionaries and officials, did not always see eye to eye with each other, and sometimes they used their Native contacts not to obtain objective information but to shore up their own political reputations (as during the Timucuan Revolt of 1656). North of Florida, the English built an extensive network throughout the Native southeast, following the paths and linkages of the seventeenth-century Indian slave trade. Their news system proved intrinsically unreliable, however, since the English slave traders who built it often preferred not to share information with other colonists.
In the early eighteenth century both European networks collapsed. English slavers captured or killed Florida’s mission Indians, and Indian insurgents slaughtered English slave traders during the bloody Yamasee War (1715-16). Both imperial powers rebuilt: the Spanish shifted to paid informants (Yamasee refugees and runaway slaves), while the English in Carolina built diplomatic alliances with surviving Indian nations in the interior. The Carolinians concurrently established a new colonial economy, based on African slave labor and plantation agriculture. They discovered, however, that European-Indian alliance networks undermined the security of the new slave society: Spain recruited runaway slaves as military allies, and Carolina’s Indian allies, whom the white colonists could not afford to alienate, sometimes harbored runaways as well. The European colonies, in short, had survived severe shocks, but the colonists could not behave as they pleased; strong Indian nations and imperial rivals continued to constrain them.
One shortcoming of Dubcovsky’s study is that it ends in the early 1740s, as these vulnerabilities in the English colonial project became most obvious. South Carolina remained vulnerable to and dependent on its Indian neighbors until at least the 1760s, but by then the planter class had built strong defenses against runaway slaves: Indian allies (like the Catawba) agreed to begin working for the colonists as slave-catchers, and the new colony of Georgia grew into a barrier between Carolina and Spanish Florida, which of course had been its original purpose. I appreciate the author’s observations about the limits on European colonists’ power, but the English planter class, in particular, did not take very long to overcome these restrictions.
As early as the late Mississippian period, southeastern Indians’ trade and communications networks underwent fundamental change, becoming more localized as regional power centers replaced the once-dominant city-state of Cahokia. In the later seventeenth century the Apalachicola Indians constructed an information net that transected the entire region, north to south and east to west, while in the aftermath of the Yamasee War the Coweta Creeks endeavored to build a similar interactive network that included Native peoples and officials of all three local European powers (English, French, and Spanish). Native American networks were far from static, and the rerouting of communication and commercial links both mapped and generated changes in regional power structures.
Europeans knew that their pursuit of power and profit in the colonial southeast depended on building their own network of informants and allies. In Florida the Spanish initially relied on Christian Indian converts and local caciques (chiefs) for news and information. The men who usually communicated with these two groups, missionaries and officials, did not always see eye to eye with each other, and sometimes they used their Native contacts not to obtain objective information but to shore up their own political reputations (as during the Timucuan Revolt of 1656). North of Florida, the English built an extensive network throughout the Native southeast, following the paths and linkages of the seventeenth-century Indian slave trade. Their news system proved intrinsically unreliable, however, since the English slave traders who built it often preferred not to share information with other colonists.
In the early eighteenth century both European networks collapsed. English slavers captured or killed Florida’s mission Indians, and Indian insurgents slaughtered English slave traders during the bloody Yamasee War (1715-16). Both imperial powers rebuilt: the Spanish shifted to paid informants (Yamasee refugees and runaway slaves), while the English in Carolina built diplomatic alliances with surviving Indian nations in the interior. The Carolinians concurrently established a new colonial economy, based on African slave labor and plantation agriculture. They discovered, however, that European-Indian alliance networks undermined the security of the new slave society: Spain recruited runaway slaves as military allies, and Carolina’s Indian allies, whom the white colonists could not afford to alienate, sometimes harbored runaways as well. The European colonies, in short, had survived severe shocks, but the colonists could not behave as they pleased; strong Indian nations and imperial rivals continued to constrain them.
One shortcoming of Dubcovsky’s study is that it ends in the early 1740s, as these vulnerabilities in the English colonial project became most obvious. South Carolina remained vulnerable to and dependent on its Indian neighbors until at least the 1760s, but by then the planter class had built strong defenses against runaway slaves: Indian allies (like the Catawba) agreed to begin working for the colonists as slave-catchers, and the new colony of Georgia grew into a barrier between Carolina and Spanish Florida, which of course had been its original purpose. I appreciate the author’s observations about the limits on European colonists’ power, but the English planter class, in particular, did not take very long to overcome these restrictions.
September 19, 2017
The author structures her book around three overly simplistic themes: what information was of value, who carried said information, and how information traveled. The information in question is essentially the news in the early South (but not Virginia or North Carolina or anywhere but modern Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina really...). She views the different groups in the early south as nodes in communication networks. She claims she analyzes every node equally; however this is not the case, African slaves are barely mentioned until part III, women are a non-factor, and Native groups are highly prioritized and are the bulk of the book's focus.
I've written an entire academic review on this book, but this is the gist of my opinion.
I've written an entire academic review on this book, but this is the gist of my opinion.
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October 4, 2017Superb book -- nicely focused arguments, well supported, and clear, accessible writing. Learned lots about the 15th-17th century southeast, and the power struggles and conflicts between and among the many contesting nations there.
The archival and historical work of surfacing unwritten narratives and erased histories is always worthwhile; the techniques Dubcovsky demonstrates offers some new ways to approach material. I look forward to reading more of this type of original and pathbreaking research.
The archival and historical work of surfacing unwritten narratives and erased histories is always worthwhile; the techniques Dubcovsky demonstrates offers some new ways to approach material. I look forward to reading more of this type of original and pathbreaking research.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews