Nexus of Empire

Between 1760 and 1820, many groups in North America grappled with differences of identity, nationality, and loyalty tested by revolutionary challenges. Nexus of Empire turns the focus on the people who inhabited one of the continent's most dynamic borderlands--the Gulf of Mexico region--where nations and empires competed for increasingly important strategic and commercial advantages. The essays in this collection examine the personal experiences of men and women, Native Americans, European colonists, free people of color, and slaves, analyzing the ways in which these individuals defined and redefined themselves amid a world of competing loyalties. This volume humanizes the promise and perils of living, working, and fighting in a region experiencing constant political upheaval and economic uncertainties. It offers intriguing glimpses into a fast-changing world in which individuals' attitudes and actions reveal the convoluted balancing acts of identities that characterized this population and this era.