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.
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