George Galphin's Intimate Empire
292 pages, 6 x 9
1 B&W figure - 9 maps
Hardcover
Release Date:20 Aug 2019
ISBN:9780817320270
George Galphin's Intimate Empire
The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America
SERIES:
Indians and Southern History
University of Alabama Press
A revealing saga detailing the economic, familial, and social bonds forged by Indian trader George Galphin in the early American South
A native of Ireland, George Galphin arrived in South Carolina in 1737 and quickly emerged as one of the most proficient deerskin traders in the South. This was due in large part to his marriage to Metawney, a Creek Indian woman from the town of Coweta, who incorporated Galphin into her family and clan, allowing him to establish one of the most profitable merchant companies in North America. As part of his trade operations, Galphin cemented connections with Indigenous and European peoples across the South, while simultaneously securing links to merchants and traders in the British Empire, continental Europe, and beyond.
In George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America, Bryan C. Rindfleisch presents a complex narrative about eighteenth-century cross-cultural relationships. Reconstructing the multilayered bonds forged by Galphin and challenging scholarly understandings of life in the Native South, the American South more broadly, and the Atlantic World, Rindfleisch looks simultaneously at familial, cultural, political, geographical, and commercial ties—examining how eighteenth-century people organized their world, both mentally and physically. He demonstrates how Galphin’s importance emerged through the people with whom he bonded. At their most intimate, Galphin’s multilayered relationships revolved around the Creek, Anglo-French, and African children who comprised his North American family, as well as family and friends on the other side of the Atlantic.
Through extensive research in primary sources, Rindfleisch reconstructs an expansive imperial world that stretches across the American South and reaches into London and includes Indians, Europeans, and Africans who were intimately interconnected and mutually dependent. As a whole, George Galphin’s Intimate Empire provides critical insights into the intensely personal dimensions and cross-cultural contours of the eighteenth-century South and how empire-building and colonialism were, by their very nature, intimate and familial affairs.
A native of Ireland, George Galphin arrived in South Carolina in 1737 and quickly emerged as one of the most proficient deerskin traders in the South. This was due in large part to his marriage to Metawney, a Creek Indian woman from the town of Coweta, who incorporated Galphin into her family and clan, allowing him to establish one of the most profitable merchant companies in North America. As part of his trade operations, Galphin cemented connections with Indigenous and European peoples across the South, while simultaneously securing links to merchants and traders in the British Empire, continental Europe, and beyond.
In George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America, Bryan C. Rindfleisch presents a complex narrative about eighteenth-century cross-cultural relationships. Reconstructing the multilayered bonds forged by Galphin and challenging scholarly understandings of life in the Native South, the American South more broadly, and the Atlantic World, Rindfleisch looks simultaneously at familial, cultural, political, geographical, and commercial ties—examining how eighteenth-century people organized their world, both mentally and physically. He demonstrates how Galphin’s importance emerged through the people with whom he bonded. At their most intimate, Galphin’s multilayered relationships revolved around the Creek, Anglo-French, and African children who comprised his North American family, as well as family and friends on the other side of the Atlantic.
Through extensive research in primary sources, Rindfleisch reconstructs an expansive imperial world that stretches across the American South and reaches into London and includes Indians, Europeans, and Africans who were intimately interconnected and mutually dependent. As a whole, George Galphin’s Intimate Empire provides critical insights into the intensely personal dimensions and cross-cultural contours of the eighteenth-century South and how empire-building and colonialism were, by their very nature, intimate and familial affairs.
George Galphin’s Intimate Empire is a well-argued analysis of the intimate experience of empire building and the relationships at the heart of that process. Rindfleisch uses a variety of personal, commercial, and government records to recreate the life and social networks of one individual with outsized influence. The author’s focus on Galphin’s Creek connections in particular shows just how far Native influence truly spread in the Atlantic World.’
—H-Net Reviews
‘Detailing Galphin’s social and economic networks was obviously painstaking work because it involved tracking the lives and fates of so many different people, especially in the case of Creek men and women who oftentimes appear only fleetingly in the documents and then oftentimes under various names. Yet Rindfleisch has done it, and he presents convincing and well-argued evidence for virtually every node in Galphin’s network.’
—Robbie Ethridge, author of From Chicaza to Chikcasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715
Perfect for advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars, George Galphin’s Intimate Empire is a significant study illuminating the ways empire cultivated certain relationships, and how those relationships both encouraged and frustrated the process of empire and colonialism in vast early America.’
—Journal of Southern History
‘As the inaugural book for the ‘Indians and Southern History’ series, George Galphin’s Intimate Empire is a masterful piece of scholarship. Rindfleisch conducts a microhistory of an underappreciated Southerner to shed new light on colonialism and kinship in the Native South and, more broadly, the early modern Atlantic world. Further, he complements the community and spatial turns in the Native South scholarship with a clear focus on time, place, and evidence.’
—American Indian Quarterly
Bryan C. Rindfleisch is assistant professor of history at Marquette University. His work has been published in Early American Studies, Native South, The American Historian, Ethnohistory, and Journal of Early American History.
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