Interview with Robert Paulett about his new book, An Empire of Small Places

Britain's colonial empire in southeastern North America relied on the cultivation and maintenance of economic and political ties with the numerous powerful Indian confederacies of the region. Those ties in turn relied on British traders adapting to Indian ideas of landscape and power. In AN EMPIRE OF SMALL PLACES, Robert Paulett examines this interaction over the course of the eighteenth century, drawing attention to the ways that conceptions of space competed, overlapped, and changed. He encourages us to understand the early American South as a landscape made by interactions among American Indians, European Americans, and enslaved African American laborers.

The Early American Places (EAP) series focuses on historical developments in specific places of North America. Though these developments often involved far-flung parts of the world, they were experienced in particular communities—the local places where people lived, worked, and made sense of their changing worlds. By restricting its focus to smaller geographic scales, but stressing that towns, colonies, and regions were part of much larger networks, EAP will combine up-to-date scholarly sophistication with an emphasis on local particularities and trajectories.

This is the fourth video featuring an EAP author. In each video, the author is asked three questions:
1) Why did you focus your research on this particular place/area/region?
2) Please tell us a little more about your book.
3) Is your study specific to your area or is it applicable to other places/area/regions?