6 - Statelessness, Subjecthood, and the Early American Past

Summary

Long before the emergence of the United States, the early modern Atlantic world played host to a bewildering variety of polities. Beyond the orbits of the vast, powerful Aztec and Inka empires, North America’s Indigenous peoples inhabited authoritarian city-states the likes of Coosa and Cofitachequi, confederacies such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Wyandot (Huron), and the modest chiefdoms that predominated from the New England coast deep into the continent’s heart. In the West African interior, the gold-rich empires of Mali and Songhay gave way to the Kingdom of Kongo and its tributary Ndongo, while the Atlantic littoral teemed with mini-states that both embraced and transcended the bonds of kinship. For its part, Europe was a shatter zone of kingdoms perched uneasily atop an ancient landscape of counties, duchies, and fiefdoms, all of it undergirded by Latin Christianity, a faith hell-bent on policing its boundaries and bubbling with discord.