M.L. (Mark) Thompson

• The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century (Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

My first book was about the ways that ethnicity, national identity, and cosmopolitanism intersected in the Delaware Valley during the seventeenth century. It's also about people: Henry Hudson, John Smith, Peter Minuit, Johan Printz, Peter Stuyvesant, William Penn, among many others.  It touches on New Sweden, New Netherland, New Haven, Maryland, Brazil, settler revolts, invasions, and Penn's debt to English imperialism.

You can read more about it at: http://the-contest-for-the-delaware-valley.blogspot.nl/ and http://lsupress.org/books/detail/contest-for-the-delaware-valley/

• "Land, Liberty, & Property: Surveyors and the Production of Empire in British North America."

My new book project is a cultural history of land surveyors that aims to show how surveyors constituted Britain's empire in North America through practices of measuring and representing the landscape. Drawing from historical, geographical, and literary approaches, it presents surveyors as key players in a settler-driven process that attached landowners first to their lands, markets, and local institutions, and only secondarily to the imperial authorities that oversaw them. "Creole" surveying practices adapted from European models ultimately gave settlers more, not less, control of their own properties and communities. But these practices also tied them closely to an empire that promised to protect their rights to land, liberty, and property.