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The term “interdependence” in the title of this book is taken from the fields of ­political science and international relations (for example, Keohane and Nye 1987; Axelrod and Keohane 1985). It was minted during discussions precipitated by political events over the past several decades that challenged the primacy of a certain school of thought in political science called “realism.” Perhaps the main tenant of realism is that the state is the prime mover, the prime actor on the global stage. Joseph S. Nye, a Harvard professor of international relations who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations, puts it this way (2011, pp. 18, 19):

For centuries, the dominant classical approach to international affairs has been called “realism,” and its lineage stretches back to such great thinkers as Thucydides and Niccolo Machiavelli. Realism assumes that in the anarchic conditions of world politics, where there is no higher international government authority above states, they must rely on their own devices to preserve their independence, and that when push comes to shove, the ultimate ratio is the use of force. Realism portrays the world in terms of sovereign states aiming to preserve their security, with military forces as their ultimate instrument.

The preeminence of this school of thought was bolstered by the Cold War, a long period when two states dominated the world stage, vying for hegemony, as the realist school predicts all states will ultimately attempt to do. Yet even in that era, some political scientists observed that states sometimes cooperated in ways that fit uncomfortably with the realist model because they entered into agreements that voluntarily restricted their options. Examples range from the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT) to the European Union. This suggested that states were simply acknowledging the condition of interdependence.

The end of the Cold War accelerated criticism of the realist school. After the Cold War, political states were no longer moving between two hegemons, resisting the power of one and allying themselves with the other. Also, at the end of the Cold War the United States had achieved the status of being the only global hegemon in terms of military power, but economically it experienced periods of great difficulty, one of which continues today. Something other than the power of the state to wage war was clearly at work here in determining the well-being of the country. On September 11, 2001, non-state actors committed acts of terrorism in the United States that resulted in more deaths than the attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated the Second World War. The terrorist threat was unexpected because realism had held sway in universities for decades, influencing students who majored in political science and international relations.

Following 9/11, the world reacted convulsively, and political scientists rushed to defend, amend, or abandon realism. With terrorism, the term interdependence was exchanged for that of “globalization.” The international policy of the United States became more concerned with “fragile states,” where non-state actors, especially terrorists, were thought to thrive, than with stable, powerful states. There was sudden consensus in Washington, D.C., a coordinated response that clearly signaled this policy shift. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, “Over the next 20 years, the most persistent and potentially dangerous threats will come less from emerging ambitious states, than from failing ones that cannot meet the basic needs—much less the basic aspirations—of their people.” Almost identical statements were made by the Secretary of State and the President of the United States (Patrick 2011, p. 4).

Ignored in this discussion has been the cultural basis for human organization. The website of the American Anthropological Association has this to say (http://www.aaanet.org/press/an/infocus/engagedanth/arc_engaged_anth.htm: 2012):

Usually, politicians and journalists rely on international relations specialists in guiding their work; anthropologists are often outside players in this schema, particularly as the field of international relations is, for the most part, dominated by economists and political scientists.

Nonetheless, non-state human organizations preceded the development of the political state as it is assumed to exist today in all parts of the world, which is one based in a founding constitution and a framework of law built on that base. Other, non-state human organizations have always and will continue to coexist with the political state, will greatly influence the political agenda and success or failure of each state, and will as surely drive the course of international relations as do political states.

Culture and History

This book deals with a case in point: the American wars of independence. These have long been of great interest to historians. Historians have usually approached them in a way that is consistent with what has been the reigning view in political science, assuming that military prowess was the determining factor in these conflicts. While the outcome of key battles was surely a necessary factor in securing ­independence, what is inconsistent with the realist view of history is that the American military at the beginning of the conflict existed in only the most rudimentary form. As time went on, it improved, due, in no small part, to the effort of European military advisors. Few, however, would contest that independence would not have been achieved without the presence of substantial French military assistance, both on land and on sea, in America. Military power was in the hands of other countries, and factions within those countries influenced their governments to provide not just military but also economic support to American revolutionaries. In the imagination of a segment of the American public that exercises considerable political influence, independence was won because American militiamen used unconventional tactics against the overly regimented British troops. The Friends of the National Rifle Association (NRA), for example, has as its logo the image of a Minuteman. The reality is more complex. Independence was gained with the assistance of other European countries that were opposed to Britain, provided as an element in overarching economic, political, and ideological transactions. Americans deftly influenced these in both unofficial and official state capacities, but others had very little to do with American intentions or interests.

History is written with the use of documents that were often prepared by agents of the state, in particular military and political leaders who recorded events from the perspective of the state. Such histories are recycled in academic circles in ways that are influenced by the assumptions of political realism, as discussed above. In what follows, we will examine some representative events in the American wars of Independence through the lens of archaeology, which is a subdiscipline of anthropology.

At the heart of the approach that we espouse here is the concept of culture. Culture is often confused with society. In fact, the former is an outcome of the latter, although the changes in the organization of society can affect culture. In general, however, it is instructive to understand that a person does not so much have a culture as a culture has a person, and that culture drives each person into the imagined community of the state as well as into non-state human organizations.Kenneth Waltz, a pre-eminent neorealist, has explained the primacy of the state by use of a simple analogy: if a state is invaded and calls 911, there is no guarantee that anyone will answer. He therefore characterizes the international system as one of anarchy. For this reason, states are in a constant struggle to establish hegemony within their region or, if possible, in the world. All other human organizations are assumed to be under the domination of the state. Clearly, however, some escape complete or effective control by the state. Among these are ethnic and religious groups that persist despite state efforts to disband them, or that exist and are nurtured by states as military and economic proxies during temporary alliances. The Taliban provides a recent case study, others are given by Peterson in Chapter 4 of this book. Other non-state actors are corporations that exert tremendous economic influence and at times have operated almost as states do. The Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company are instances of this. They grew to threatened the state monopoly on the use of force by raising their own armies and navies. More recently, corporations operate internationally, in ways that cannot be effectively controlled by any single state. There are also trans-national networks of kinship groups. The royalty of Europe were and are closely related by blood, for example.These non-state human organizations sometimes strive for regional and sometime global hegemony as do states, they form temporary alliances as interdependencies wax and wane, they compete using force, but more often by enticing others to use force for their benefit and by developing and exerting economic and social influence. As with states, alliances do not persist in the face of the reality that there is no overarching, global authority that can resolve disputes in an orderly and peaceful way.

Material Culture and Prospects for Developing a Useable Past

While definitions of culture vary, here we will use two definitions articulated by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. The first is that culture is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life” (Geertz 1973a, p. 89). Because of that, archaeologists are able to understand something of past human cultures through the study of material remains associated with them. Geertz later provided an even more concise, and often quoted, definition: “… man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973b, p. 5).

The webs of significance that humans spin, culture itself, changes, and so our interpretation of the material remains, the material evidence of the past, also changes. Knowing this, our first obligation as archaeological heritage managers must be the preservation of potentially informative material remains. The material with the greatest potential to inform us is that which can still be found in undisturbed context: material that has been preserved, but as importantly, material for which the context in which it was initially deposited has been preserved. Uncontaminated material in context will be understood by future generations in ways that we cannot know, but we can hope that this understanding will be superior to our own. Preservation of archaeological material is done largely through the interpretation that we provide in the present. In a world where financial support is always limited, materials that are seen as very important to the stories told about archaeological resources will inevitably be given priority in terms of preservation over those that are seen as less important. Our challenge is to link archaeological remains to engaging, non-manipulative, and enlightening stories.

The chapters in this publication deal for the most part with archaeology on the scale of the landscape. War is waged on that scale. We will look at battlefields, military encampments, centers of trade that provided inducements and the materiel for conflicts, and fortifications. While artifacts and sites have been the traditional focal points of archaeological research, in recent decades more and more archaeologists have come to realize that we can understand the behavior of past human populations better if we see artifacts and sites in the broad environmental context of the landscape in which they lived and which they shaped. This presents new preservation challenges; against these challenges presented by the preservation of artifacts and sites seem almost to pale. Artifacts can be put in a museum intended to provide a stable environment. Landscapes are changed by industrial and agricultural development, and the associated construction of roads, houses, and buildings that offer consumer and community needs. At the scale of the landscape, the concerns of environmentalists and archaeological heritage managers tend to converge.

Whose War Is It, Anyway?

In another convergence, archaeological remains associated with American wars of independence are examined in the papers to follow in ways consistent with recent critiques of the standard treatments of history by historians themselves. An archaeological approach leads one ultimately to regard the establishment of independence and sovereignty by what had been the New World colonies of European states as one that was a part of a much larger process of cultural change. Many of the ­historians mentioned in this publication seem to agree with that.

Conflicts that occurred as New World colonies were establishing independence were not only among countries, but also among classes, emerging industries, and corporations. The last of these is a social entity that had only recently emerged at the time of the American War of Independence, but has assumed a pivotal role in the geopolitical world of today. Further, all of these changes were enmeshed in the rise of an ideology that linked the legitimacy of rule not to the divine right of royalty, but to organizations that would ensure the ability of a greater percentage of populations to protection by law from the caprice of monarchs. In the year 1776, this ideology was given voice in works as varied as the American Declaration of Independence and the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Both of these rest upon the philosophical underpinnings of the ideological movements of the time. In 1789, we see this ideology again in a document fundamental to the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, put forth by the Marquis de Lafayette, who, of course, had played an important role in the Revolutionary War in America. It was adopted by the National Constituent Assembly at a time when Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, was in France. As a diplomat, he was in frequent communication with the Assembly. All of this is consistent with an ongoing discussion among intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic about nationhood and the legitimacy and function of the state. Ideas fundamental to this discussion quite clearly evolved in both places. In 1787, George Mason and other delegates to the Constitutional Convention refused to sign the Constitution in part because it did not contain a Bill of Rights. By 1789, just two years later, the proposal for a Bill of Rights put forward by Jefferson’s good friend James Madison was adopted by the United States House of Representatives.

Changes in ideas about the appropriate role of the state among those in positions of leadership were, we argue here, essentially tied to broad cultural change; that is, changes in technology (including military technologies), economic structures, and social organization that both reflected and reformed ideology from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries. We live in a time when the idea of sovereign nation states seems so natural and normal that until recently there was little widespread interest in exactly what they are or how they came to be. Sovereign nation states are seen today as based in legitimate territorial claims (although legitimacy is frequently disputed). Within the area that they occupy, nation states exercise an ultimate authority, an authority based on the rule of law. Outside national boundaries the state is recognized as being the authority with which other states must negotiate all manner of interactions, from trade to war to travel. We assume that a state can rightfully limit access by outsiders and even close its borders. In global geo-politics, then, nation states were seen by those living in the developed world as the only actors with which one must be concerned. And this is because the industrial development that has occurred over the past two centuries is inextricably linked to the perceived legitimacy of nation states.

Written histories, as noted, have largely overlooked cultural transactions among non-state actors that have affected the course of history. Such transactions include those in the period during which the wars of independence in the New World occurred. As Phillip Bobbitt points out in The Shield of Achilles (2002), after the dissolution of states in post-classical times, they reemerged by means of a long process—one that we see here as cultural change—that begins in the medieval world and continues today. This starts with the establishment of princely states in Italy in approximately 1490, which evolved into the larger kingly states that date to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The apotheosis of the kingly state was France under Louis XIV. During his reign there was widespread support for the divine rights of kings, an effective centralized taxation and administrative infrastructure, a dynasty of unquestioned legitimacy, and a ruler of regal temperament. From that time until 1776, what Bobbitt terms Territorial States developed, which began to mitigate notions of divine right and from these, beginning in 1776, State-Nations evolved into Nation-States.

Bobbitt sees these transformations as closely related to the changing strategies and tactics of warfare, although not driven by them in all cases. For example, he says that princely states developed in response to the use of light artillery, which could be put in place outside princely residences and used to reduce masonry defenses to rubble in a matter of days. Until then, political power was relatively horizontal, spread among nobility, the clergy, the burghers, and the peasants. There was some overlap among these groups. The clergy had authority over marriages and wills, the nobility could call upon vassals in time of conflict, but had no direct authority over peasants owned by the vassals. When Charles VIII of France brought 40 artillery pieces drawn by horses into the Italian peninsula, the order rapidly changed. Whereas states before had occasionally coalesced under the guidance of an unusually talented and charismatic prince, now the state itself was seen to be essential. It provided the means by which to organize an effective defense, which depended upon better organization and increased taxation. But Bobbitt also points to other societal changes that had preceded the threat posed by the use of mobile artillery, which, from a more broadly cultural standpoint, we as anthropologists might see as having been a prerequisite to an effective response. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the most talented in the city, including scholars who had kept alive notions of knowledge based in the classical world, immigrated o the university towns of Italy. They carried with them notions of Greek city-states and Roman city-republics that found an accepting audience in the universities, replacing religious explanations of the world that held sway in Italy at the time of their arrival. These concepts and the cultural assumptions that underlay them were there to be implemented when needed (Bobbitt 2002, p. 79). Although Bobbitt does not say exactly this, among those notions one might expect to find at least a remnant of the polis, translated as city-state in English but conveying more: the notion that the state consisted of a citizenry who gave form to it by constructing an urban landscape. The title of his book refers to the need for a broad cultural approach when developing an understanding of the past. The shield of Achilles was embellished with imagery arranged in nine circles, the first having representations of the earth and celestial bodies, and others depicting many other aspects of cultural life, from a field being plowed to a dancing floor where young men and women perform.

War Reflecting and Reforming Culture

War is no less a cultural phenomenon than is architecture or music—all of these reflect and reform culture as a whole. Knowing this we can better understand the jockeying for position among the nations of the time, which made allies of nations that had been enemies only scant years earlier, and then enemies of these same allies a few years later. This is seen throughout the late eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth. In what became the United States; colonials successfully fought against Britain through the assistance of the French. The French were the first foreign power to lend support to the American rebels thanks to the reluctant consent of His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XVI. In the decisive Battle of Yorktown in 1781, more French than American forces fought on land, and the French Navy under de Grasse defeated the vaunted British Navy at sea at a time when the American Navy was in its infancy. Ironically, the American Navy came into being a few years later to defend the American merchant fleet, not from the depredations of the British, but from the French. The French by then had grown tired of waiting for the America that they had been instrumental in creating to come to their assistance in the continuing struggle against the British for what they saw as global dominance. And then a few years later, during the War of 1812, the French were once again our allies. While there was less enthusiasm, the contribution of the French was still important. They ceased overt hostile action against American interests and contributed weaponry. The cannon used at Fort McHenry during the pivotal Battle of Baltimore in 1814, which gave rise to the United States national anthem, had been salvaged by the French from one of their sunken naval vessels and given to the Americans to aid in the defense against the British.

Behind these shifting national allegiances were economic interests, and the economy was increasingly dominated by corporations. As the economist Niall Ferguson says in his book, The Ascent of Money (2008, p. 128), corporations came into being in the seventeenth century, a creation of the state. Wars in Europe were almost constant; a country improved its position by waging them and of course was obliged to defend against attacks by other countries. Wars were expensive, and to finance them, taxes had to be levied. Increasing taxes was problematic. There came a point when subjects began to protest vigorously, and after that point another when the state itself was threatened by protest and resistance. The rulers of the Netherlands found a way to raise revenue without increasing taxes. They formed a corporation of traders, the Dutch East India Company. The state gave this corporation a virtual monopoly on trade, and the corporation and the state prospered. Depending upon exactly how one defines a corporation, this might or might not have been the first, but its great success soon inspired such corporations in many European countries. The corporation thereafter played a major role in the colonial era. A closer look at history indicates that the actions of colonial era political leaders, as well as the military leaders who took direction from them, were driven by these economic interests.

It was, after all, East India Company (British, not Dutch) ships carrying tea to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia that were turned back in 1773 by the colonists. In Boston, this became known as the Boston Tea Party. The British East India Company had been granted a monopoly on trade with the East in 1600, and in 1742 was granted license for exclusive trade with India until 1783, under an agreement that the Company loan the government of Britain one million pounds. Clearly by now the Company had become an enormous political force.

We can see further evidence of this force in the Treaty of Ghent. This ended the War of 1812 under terms that were surprisingly favorable to the newly emerged United States. The War of 1812 was characterized by one American military debacle after another. The capital of the United States was invaded by the British in 1814. The United States could muster only ineffectual opposition, largely provided by the poorly trained, armed, and led militias of the country. The key structures in the capital of the young government were burned to the ground. The American fleet of hastily constructed small vessels that formed a large part of the nascent American navy was scuttled when threatened by the overwhelming force of the British navy, which was at that moment quite probably the most powerful in the world. And yet only months later the British agreed to the peace talks that resulted in a treaty which left the United States with the same boundaries that it had before the war, and which more importantly positioned it for the great expansion westward that it pursued, very successfully, for the balance of the century. The puzzle has been why the British did not seize upon this moment to reestablish rule, or at least obtain greater control over, its erstwhile colony. Instead, as the historian Phillip Bobbitt says (2002, p. 165):

Of all the powers of the coalition, Britain took away the least in territorial gains. It annexed nothing on the continent. It returned scores of overseas areas seized and occupied during the years of warfare. At Ghent, moreover, Castlereagh had concluded a treaty with the United States that was so generous in its terms in light of the British capture of Washington that American students are routinely taught that the United States actually won the war. This far-sighted statesmen had, perhaps more than any other person at the Congress, created a permanent system of consultation, and genuine “concert of Europe.”

The Concert of Europe that Bobbitt mentions was the brainchild of Castlereagh, who was motivated to form this by the evolution of warfare in Europe from that fought by relatively small armies of professional soldiers under the leadership of the aristocracy, which might employ mercenaries, to wars fought by great masses of the common people. The pattern for this had been set by Napoleon. As Bobbitt observes:

Prior to the 1790s a military treaty might call for the provision of a force of 18,000 or 24,000….The French levée en masse, a nationwide mobilization, transformed this scale. In 1808, on the eve of the campaign that ended at Wagram, Napoleon commanded some 300,000 troops in Spain, another 100,000 in France, some 200,000 in the Rhineland, and another 60,000 in Italy. One expert has calculated that between 1800 and 1815, the number of Frenchmen called up reached two million, of whom an estimated 400,000 died either in service or as a result of service in war.

This radical change in the way that war was fought was costly. To the aggressor, the investment was enormous and failure therefore catastrophic. Nations subjected to such massive onslaughts were devastated unless equally large forces could be called up. Huge numbers of soldiers would have to be trained, armed, and fed at great expense. So great was the expense that a nation could be toppled from within by a populace grown weary of taxation and hardship. Bobbitt points to such insurrections in Belgium (1798), Naples (1799 and 1806), Spain (1808), and the Netherlands (1811–1812). The Concert of Europe obligated a nation subscribing to it to join with any nation attacked against the attacker.

Given the greatly escalated cost of war, revenue from trade became ever more important, and traders more politically powerful. At the same time, the benefits of peaceful trade became increasingly appealing. Various historians have pointed out that factory owners, maritime traders, and insurance companies put enormous pressure on the British government to end the War of 1812 as quickly as possible. While the Americans had only a rudimentary navy, hundreds of privateers sailed from American ports such as Baltimore, Boston, and New York. Archival research by Geoffrey Footner as reported by John Trautwein (2011, p. 1) has revealed that on December 1, 1814, House of Lords member Joseph Marryat, who in the past defended the virtual monopoly on maritime underwriting enjoyed by Lloyd’s, presented an alarming report to that parliamentary body: By November of that year, 1,175 British merchant vessels had been lost, and of these only 373 recovered. From May through October of that year, 500 ships per month had been taken. Many of the losses to the swift American privateer vessels were in British waters. (See also http://www.history­ofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/member/marryat-joseph-1757-1824 and Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 29). Distraught ship owners, insurers, and merchants in Glasgow wrote to the King:

Unanimously resolved, That the number of American privateers with which our channels have been infested, the audacity with which they have approached our coasts, and success with which their enterprise has been attended, have proved injurious to our commerce, humbling to our pride and discreditable to the directors of the naval power of the British nation, whose flag till of late waved over every sea and triumphed over every rival (Trautwein, 2011, p. 1) 1 and Parliamentary Debates, Vols. 28 & 29.

Military Power, Intelligence, Diplomacy

Economic interests have influenced national interests for centuries, sometimes pulling states in the direction of war, sometimes repelling them from war, depending upon economic benefit to actors, often, but not always, within the state itself that are able to exercise political power. Industries that produce weapons or that supply armies might encourage the state to take one course of action, corporations that profit from international trade another. And while wars fill history books, other means of achieving the strategic objectives of a state are no less important, although these means are not nearly as well represented in the historical record. They are more subtle, and often by nature at least somewhat covert. Edward Luttwak argues in The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (2009) and elsewhere that states accomplish strategic objectives in three ways. In addition to military action, these are by gathering intelligence and by engaging in diplomacy. Luttwak points out that while the Roman empire has received much greater attention from historians, the Byzantine Empire, which grew out of it, lasted much longer. Surrounded by hostile countries, many of which had powerful militaries, that empire invested great effort in understanding the economic, social, and ideological interests of their neighbors. This informed diplomatic efforts, which might include trade in what was most valued by potential enemies, the payment of tribute, bolstering the position of parties that could hold in check those countries that presented the most immediate threat (which might be factions within those threatening countries or other countries), or working with potential adversaries to advance common goals. The overall objective was to avoid military conflict. Wars are inevitably expensive and require raising revenue in ways that are often objectionable to those who must provide it. Wars are also unpredictable, as losses can occur even when victory appears to be certain. Thus, a state less sure that military capability alone will be sufficient to accomplish the strategic objectives, as was the case with the Byzantine Empire, will be more likely to employ the use of intelligence and diplomacy.

The American wars of independence were won during a time when American military power was very weak. Formal national intelligence organizations were not yet in existence. The particular cultural web that we have spun since the Second World War includes the assumption that intelligence can be gathered in no other way than by a specialized organ of the state, making it difficult indeed to understand the true nature of intelligence. Popular culture, which supplies numerous romantic portrayals of roguish secret agents, has played a role in this.

Instead of using surveillance satellites, listening devices, and formal covert operatives, the people most involved with charting the course of the emerging American state collected information firsthand, by incessant correspondence with those in countries that were alternately enemy and ally, and in many cases by living for extended periods in those countries. Among the founders of the American state who spent considerable time in residence abroad were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams. While George Washington was in comparison something of a homebody, he corresponded frequently with all of these while they lived in Europe. They provided him with information about political and economic issues that were current in Europe, as well as keeping him informed about technological and scientific innovations there. The exchange of letters constituted ongoing conversations with all sides asking questions and providing answers.

Personal relationships developed by means of the ongoing exchange of news and ideas. These might have begun as face-to-face encounters, but were maintained through written correspondence that seems extraordinarily voluminous and erudite by the standards of today. Written correspondence could be shared with others having like interests, which formed cordial groups among which information could be shared that could benefit a whole range of collective or individual projects, which might be technological, mercantile, or political in nature. As noted above, it seems clear that the exchange of ideas between Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette, influenced the founding constitutional documents in both the United States and France. Letters that circulated among founding fathers and the intellectual, mercantile, and political leaders of Europe demonstrate the same sort of sharing of ideas that ranged from the technological to the ideological, diplomacy at its best because the process identified and advanced common interests and goals.

The Landscapes

The role played by burgeoning New World trade in the economic change that was a precipitant of the wars of independence, and which funded them, can be seen in the description of St. Eustatius that Gilmore presents to us in Chap. 2. The landscape approach that he takes is evident in that the St. Eustatius Center for Archaeological Research (SECAR) has virtually completed a GIS for the island that includes historic sites found and recorded over 40 years. Gilmore points out that the enormous trade profits made on St. Eustatius provided a great deal of the capital required for industrialization in Europe and the United States. Ron Chernow, in his book, Alexander Hamilton, has this to say about the wealth of just the British islands in the Caribbean (2004, p. 7):

… the small, scattered islands generated more wealth for Britain than all of her North America colonies combined. The West Indians vastly outweigh us of the northern colonies, Benjamin Franklin grumbled in the 1760s. After the French and Indian War, the British vacillated about whether to swap all of Canada for the Island of Guadeloupe; in the event the French toasted their own diplomatic cunning in retaining the sugar island.

Caribbean trade shaped the personality of Hamilton, who was born on the island of Nevis, and after moving to the “northern colonies” established many business interests there. In this, he had company among the founding fathers. Gilmore, in Chap. 2, notes that of the approximately 150 people to whom the term founding fathers has been applied, more than 30 had some relationship with St. Eustatius alone. The island also linked the United States to European allies in a way other than financial, says Gilmore: Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin encouraged all official correspondence to be sent through St. Eustatius, which was officially neutral, but which acted as a conduit for financial support to the young United States. This might have been among the motives for the British sacking of the island in 1781, which realized 100 million pounds. As Gilmore says inChap.2:

Trevor Burnard (2001) has put the value of the entirety of Jamaica at around 26 million pounds sterling. All of England and Wales was valued at around 275 million pounds sterling. All thirteen American colonies were worth around 110 million pounds sterling. Thus, one can see the true value of the capital invested in St. Eustatius, during wartime and prior to its maximum apogee—about the same as the entirety of the thirteen North American Colonies.

It may therefore come as no surprise that Alexander Hamilton, coming from the Caribbean hive of trade, went on to found the United States National Bank, and essentially established the financial viability of the federal government. Chernow, Hamilton’s biographer, in an interview called him “the father of federal government.”

This stance brought Hamilton into conflict with many of the founding fathers from Virginia, who envisioned an agrarian United States. Among them were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and initially George Washington. Yet during Washington’s Presidency, he supported Hamilton in his efforts to strengthen the federal government by putting it on a firm financial footing that would allow it to participate fully in the industrialization that would soon gain momentum on both sides of the Atlantic. The obvious question would be why he would take a position counter to that espoused by his fellow Virginians, which whom he shared the belief in an agrarian ideal.

Chapter3, by Robert Selig and Wade Catts, deals with the Battle of Princeton, and in doing so provides insights into Washington’s later support for the establishment of strong central government and his acquiescence to the creation of a national bank. The Battle of Princeton was a rare military victory for the Continental Army. In contrast to the Battle of Yorktown, which ultimately secured independence for the United States, it was won by the Continental Army alone. At Yorktown, well-trained and armed French land troops outnumbered Continental Army soldiers three or four to one. At the Battle of Princeton, Washington overcame enormous liabilities inherent in the use of poorly trained and armed troops by rallying them at precisely the right moments and places. The archaeological findings at the Battle of Princeton illuminate how Washington used the terrain to his advantage, as well as highlighting some of the logistical difficulties that Washington had to overcome. A GIS was central to this landscape analysis. A lack of standardization is apparent, for example, in the wide range of lead balls received during the survey. The Continental Army was fighting with “rifles, fowling pieces, imported muskets, captured muskets, and locally made muskets.” This graphically presents the overarching problem that Washington faced during his more than eight years as head of the Continental Army, the inability of the federal government to provide the funds and authority required to field a highly competent military. It is also highly notable that Hamilton was Washington’s aide-de-camp at Princeton and through much of this time. As Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury in later years, then, Hamilton was in an excellent position to make his ­argument to Washington for a strong and affluent federal government.

John Peterson also describes a landscape of trade and conflict in Chap.4, aptly titled, “World Powers at Play.” Clearly, this play was of the deadly serious sort. This has been documented in other parts of the world at other times, including in Peter Hopkirk’s book, The Great Game (1990), which describes the mid-nineteenth century struggle between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia. Like the earlier competition for strategic positions in the Pacific that Peterson describes, which greatly influenced the emergence of sovereign states in the Americas, in Central Europe this involved control of trade routes (including the Silk Route), the collection of intelligence, and military conflicts. Just as importantly, such struggles also engaged indigenous populations. What is also striking about the landscape that Peterson tells us about is that it be can used to tell the story of how indigenous cultural groups jockeyed for position in the face of the ever increasing presence of power of European nations in the region, a pattern seen many times during the wars of independence in the Americas. For example, the Shawnee allied themselves with France during the French and Indian War but then became an important military ally to the British in the War of 1812 under Tecumseh because the British held out the promise to them of a semi-independent sanctuary that would block further American movement to the West. Later, as this movement occurred, America gained the Southwest and California in 1848 with the assistance of southern Plains Indian tribes, in particular the Cheyenne and Arapaho, then repaid the favor by relocating them to ever smaller reservations. Peterson shows us the mechanics of these cultural transactions in the Western Pacific, tracing them back through time to the millennia-old empires of Southeast Asia, and relates them to the emergence of New World sovereign states.

Chapter5, Finding the French in Fairfax County, again highlights the use of GIS in the analysis and study of a landscape. In this case, the artifacts associated with the archaeological site in question are almost ephemeral. They were deposited in only five days by the troops under the command of General Rochambeau, which played an essential role in the defeat of General Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781. French supply wagons camped at this site, now partially within a Bureau of Land Management Special Recreation Management Area, Meadowood, as they moved south through Virginia to Yorktown on September 18, 1781. French and American troops as well as cannon and other weapons had been sent by ship from Baltimore and Annapolis down the Chesapeake Bay, and engaged the British there before the empty wagon train arrived. The French on their return northward the following year made camp at this site, division by division, on five nights in July of 1782 (United States National Park Service, (2006)). In the heat of the summer, the troops would depart as early as 1:00 a.m. in the morning (Selig, 2009: 663). One can imagine the confusion that would attend breaking camp in the dark were not the logistics of the march impeccably arranged. The person in charge of these logistics under General Rochambeau, Louis-Alexandre Berthier, later became Chief of Staff under Napoleon during his European campaigns. The maps and written descriptions of the French campsites as planned under the direction of Berthier leave little doubt that the key portions of the camp, including the structures occupied by officers, are within Meadowood. Artifacts found at the site corroborate this in an interesting way, Because Meadowood is in the densely populated county of Fairfax, Virginia, near roads that have been in existence for over 200 years, and is a place accessible to recreationalists of many sorts, the most easily identified artifacts have long since been collected and so lost to the archaeological record. What remained to be found were the homely fragments of the many kettles used by soldiers for cooking. In collecting the recognizable military artifacts, the French had in one sense been found, although in a way that deprived forever those in the future access to this material. An interpretive program under development by the Bureau of Land Management will be used to rediscover the French. In doing this it will make more public the crucial role played by not only the French government, which underwent a sea change, from monarchy to republic, during the time that France provided assistance to the Continental Army, but also other actors, state and non-state, on both sides of the Atlantic, who were involved in the beginning of the end of the colonial period.

All of the landscapes described inChaps.2–5 can be used to arrive at an understanding of American history as an important element in world history, and world history as inseparable from American history. To the extent that this promotes a more effective and productive engagement among American states and nations in other regions of the world, it can be seen as contributing to a useable past.