The Specter of Peace: Rethinking Violence and Power in the Colonial Atlantic

Specter of Peace advances a novel historical conceptualization of peace as a process of “right ordering” that involved the careful regulation of violence, the legitimation of colonial authority, and the creation of racial and gendered hierarchies. The volume highlights the many paths of peacemaking that otherwise have hitherto gone unexplored in early American and Atlantic World scholarship and challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. Early American peacemaking was a productive discourse of moral ordering fundamentally concerned with regulating violence. The historicization of peace, the authors argue, can sharpen our understanding of violence, empire, and the early modern struggle for order and harmony in the colonial Americas and Atlantic World.

Contributors are: Micah Alpaugh, Brendan Gillis, Mark Meuwese, Margot Minardi, Geoffrey Plank, Dylan Ruediger, Cristina Soriano and Wayne E. Lee.

Michael Goode, Ph.D. (2012), University of Illinois at Chicago, is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Utah Valley University. He is the author of multiple articles on relations between colonizers and Native Americans and is currently completing a book entitled A Colonizing Peace: Violence and the Quaker Struggle for Gospel Order in Early America.

John Smolenski, Ph.D. (2001), University of Pennsylvania, Associate Professor of History at University of California, Davis, is the author of Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and co-editor of New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).