Mark Somos, "American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775" (Oxford UP, 2019)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Dec 3, 2020 · 26m

In Federalist no. 2, John Jay considered the ‘wide spreading country’ of the American republic. It was, he argued, as if the land itself was fashioned by the hand of Providence, which ‘in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together’. When we think of early American political thought, we tend to overlook the powerful influence of the natural environment on the formation of…