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Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America

byMatthew Kruer

Matthew Kruer recasts the late seventeenth-century crisis known as Bacon's Rebellion by placing Indigenous power at its center. Native nations used diplomacy, trade, migration, and warfare to shape the Chesapeake even as colonial settlers competed for land and authority. The instability that followed exposed fractures within English rule and accelerated racialized systems of slavery and dispossession. Kruer argues that “anarchy” was not simply disorder among colonists but a struggle over sovereignty involving many peoples. The book reveals early America as a contested Indigenous landscape rather than a settled colonial possession.

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Publication date

2021

Format

Print edition

Pages

320

ISBN

9780674976177