Front Matter -- Copyright -- Contents -- Foreword -- General Acknowledgments -- Notes on Contributors -- The Relevance of Peace in Early American History / Michael Goode -- Imperial Peace and Restraints in the Dutch-Iberian Wars for Brazil, 1624–1654 / Mark Meuwese -- “In Peace with all, or at least in Warre with None”: Tributary Subjects and the Negotiation of Political Subordination in Greater Virginia, 1676–1730 / Dylan Ruediger -- Violent Restraint: Keeping Peace in British America and India / Brendan Gillis -- Peace, Imperial War, and Revolution in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World / Geoffrey Plank -- Nonviolence, Positive Peace, and American Pre-Revolutionary Protest, 1765–1775 / Micah Alpaugh -- “Avoiding the Fate of Haiti”: Negotiating Peace in Late-Colonial Venezuela / Cristina Soriano -- The Lessons of Loo Choo: The Historical Vision of American Peace Reformers, 1815–1837 / Margot Minardi -- Afterword: Peace and the End(s) of American History / John Smolenski -- Back Matter -- Index.

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Specter of Peace advances a novel historical conceptualization of peace as a process of “right ordering” that involved the careful regulation of violence, the legitimation of colonial authority, and the creation of racial and gendered hierarchies. The volume highlights the many paths of peacemaking that otherwise have hitherto gone unexplored in early American and Atlantic World scholarship and challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. Early American peacemaking was a productive discourse of moral ordering fundamentally concerned with regulating violence. The historicization of peace, the authors argue, can sharpen our understanding of violence, empire, and the early modern struggle for order and harmony in the colonial Americas and Atlantic World. Contributors are: Micah Alpaugh, Brendan Gillis, Mark Meuwese, Margot Minardi, Geoffrey Plank, Dylan Ruediger, Cristina Soriano and Wayne E. Lee.