This volume attempts to throw fresh light on two areas of Benjamin Franklin's intellectual world, namely: his self-fashioning and his political thought. It is an odd thing that for all of Franklin's voluminous writings-a fantastically well-documented correspondence over many years, scientific treatises that made his name amongst the brightest minds of Europe, newspaper articles, satires, and of course his signature on the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution-and yet scholars debate how to get at his political thought, indeed, if he had any political philosophy at all. It could be argued, that he is perhaps the American Founder most closely associated with the Enlightenment. Similarly, for a man who left so much evidence about his life as a printer, bookseller, postmaster, inventor, diplomat, politician, scientist, among other professions, one who wrote an autobiography that has become a piece of American national literature and, indeed, a contribution to world culture, the question of who Ben Franklin continues to engage scholars and those who read about his life. His identity seems so stable that we associate it with certain virtues that apply to the way we live our lives, time management, for example. The image of the stable figure of Franklin is applied to create a sense of trust in everything from financial institutions to plumbers. His constant drive to improve and fashion himself reveal, however, a man whose identity was not static and fixed, but was focused on growth, on bettering his understanding of himself and the world he lived in and attempted to influence and improve.

This volume attempts to throw fresh light on two areas of Benjamin Franklin s intellectual world, namely: his self-fashioning and his political thought. It is an odd thing that for all of Franklin s voluminous writings a fantastically well-documented correspondence over many years, scientific treatises that made his name amongst the brightest minds of Europe, newspaper articles, satires, and of course his signature on the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution and yet scholars debate how to get at his political thought, indeed, if he had any political philosophy at all. It could be argued, that he is perhaps the American Founder most closely associated with the Enlightenment. Similarly, for a man who left so much evidence about his life as a printer, bookseller, postmaster, inventor, diplomat, politician, scientist, among other professions, one who wrote an autobiography that has become a piece of American national literature and, indeed, a contribution to world culture, the question of who Ben Franklin continues to engage scholars and those who read about his life. His identity seems so stable that we associate it with certain virtues that apply to the way we live our lives, time management, for example. The image of the stable figure of Franklin is applied to create a sense of trust in everything from financial institutions to plumbers. His constant drive to improve and fashion himself reveal, however, a man whose identity was not static and fixed, but was focused on growth, on bettering his understanding of himself and the world he lived in and attempted to influence and improve."

The small and remote island of Barbados seems an unlikely location for the epochal change in labor that overwhelmed it and much of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, by 1650 it had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking world, the center of an exchange of people and goods between the British Isles, the Gold Coast of West Africa, and the New World. By the early seventeenth century, more than half a million enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island. In A New World of Labor, Simon P. Newman argues that this exchange stimulated an entirely new system of bound labor. Free and bound labor were defined and experienced by Britons and Africans across the British Atlantic world in quite different ways. Connecting social developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast, Newman demonstrates that the brutal white servant regime, rather than the West African institution of slavery, provided the most significant foundation for the violent system of racialized black slavery that developed in Barbados. Class as much as race informed the creation of plantation slavery in Barbados and throughout British America. Enslaved Africans in Barbados were deployed in radically new ways in order to cultivate, process, and manufacture sugar on single, integrated plantations. This Barbadian system informed the development of racial slavery on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina and then the Deep South of mainland British North America. Drawing on British and West African precedents, and then radically reshaping them, Barbados planters invented a new world of labor.

A New World of Labor The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic Simon P. Newman ""A New World of Labor" is a landmark event in British Atlantic history. It is a major book by a major historian and will have an enormous impact on the way we conceptualize any number of topics, from the importance of integrating once again seventeenth-century British developments with developments in Africa and the Americas; to the necessity of seeing the Atlantic slave trade as considerably different in Africa and America; to reassertions of the centrality of labor in understanding New World social and cultural development."--Trevor Burnard, author of "Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World" "This wide-ranging study persuasively argues that flexible and adaptable forced labor systems existed in the British Atlantic, and that Barbados was a major cultural hearth, where planters invented a new and exportable form of bound labor. "A New World of Labor" is a powerful and impressive work."--Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University ""A New World of Labor" possesses a number of strengths to recommend it. Importantly, Newman contrasts the conditions for workers with indentures in England versus those in the Caribbean, pointing out how much more in keeping with slave labor the indentured worker was in Barbados. Also significant is the equal attention he gives to European and African workers in the Royal African Company. Indeed, in Newman's hands, the English are finally given the same sort of comprehensive treatment that other scholars have devoted to the Dutch and Danish employees on the gold coast."--John Thornton, author of "Africa and Africans in the Formation of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680" The small and remote island of Barbados seems an unlikely location for the epochal change in labor that overwhelmed it and much of British America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, by 1650 it had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking world, the center of an exchange of people and goods between the British Isles, the Gold Coast of West Africa, and the New World. By the early seventeenth century, more than half a million enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island. In "A New World of Labor," Simon P. Newman argues that this exchange stimulated an entirely new system of bound labor. Simon P. Newman is Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American History at the University of Glasgow and author of "Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic" and "Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia," both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. The Early Modern Americas 2013 352 pages 6 x 9 15 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-4519-6 Cloth $55.00s 36.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-0831-3 Ebook $55.00s 36.00 World Rights American History, Latin American/Caribbean Studies Short copy: "A New World of Labor" connects developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the British experience of slavery on the West African coast and with the initial development of African chattel slavery in Barbados, whose labor system played a foundational role in defining how plantation slavery developed throughout British America.

Embodied History The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia Simon P. Newman Winner of the 2004 American Studies Network Book Prize "Newman has ably probed the limited representations of the bodies of the poor in the public records--glimpses of lives otherwise unrecorded--and has given us a useful and readable account of the ways in which the poor were regulated by the emergent disciplinary power of the modern state, even as some poorer individuals were able in limited ways to resist that power."--"William and Mary Quarterly" "A well-researched, well-written, and compelling study of citizens who have, until now, been overlooked by historians. . . . Newman vividly recreates the experiences of the impoverished men and women who found themselves in the city's almshouse, prisons, or hospitals. He also uses primary sources to explore the lives of the African Americans (many of them runaways) and sailors who, more or less, made the city their home. The work concludes with an exploration of the role death played in the lives of the urban poor. . . . Provocative and intellectually satisfying."--"Choice" "Nobody can give the long-dead poor a voice, but Newman has come very close indeed."--"Journal of the Early Republic" "Brilliantly conceived and executed. This fascinating, truly significant book is required reading for anyone interested in the early Republic and is a natural for use in both graduate and undergraduate courses."--"Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography" ""Embodied History"'s interpretations are bold and imaginative. They ought to inspire additional investigations of the poor, their coping strategies in the lives in which they found themselves, and their own perspectives on those lives."--"International Journal of Maritime History" Offering a new view into the lives and experiences of plebeian men and women, and a provocative exploration of the history of the body itself, "Embodied History" approaches the bodies of the poor in early national Philadelphia as texts to be read and interpreted. Through a close examination of accounts of the bodies that appeared in runaway advertisements and in seafaring, almshouse, prison, hospital, and burial records, Simon P. Newman uses physical details to paint an entirely different portrait of the material circumstances of the poor, examining the ways they became categorized in the emerging social hierarchy, and how they sought to resist such categorization. Simon P. Newman is Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American Studies, University of Glasgow, and author of "Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic," also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Early American Studies 2003 224 pages 6 x 9 14 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3731-3 Cloth $65.00s 42.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-1848-0 Paper $24.95s 16.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0292-2 Ebook $24.95s 16.50 World Rights American History Short copy: "A useful and readable account of the ways in which the poor were regulated by the emergent disciplinary power of the modern state."--"William and Mary Quarterly"