Faculty and Staff
S. Max Edelson
Associate Professor of History
S. Max Edelson studies the history of colonial British America and the Atlantic world. His research seeks to describe the material as well as the cultural dimensions of new world colonization. His first book, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard University Press, 2006) examines the relationship between planters and environment in South Carolina as the key to understanding a society that was as repressive as it was prosperous. It shows that although they often represent stasis in myths of the Old South, plantations were in fact dynamic instruments of empire. Plantation Enterprise was awarded the George C. Rogers Prize by the South Carolina Historical Society and the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society.
His current research focuses on the geography and cartography of North America and the Caribbean. Victories in the Seven Years’ War yielded territorial acquisitions that extended British America west to the Mississippi, north into Canada, and south to the Florida Keys and the Windward Islands. To better understand, settle, and defend this new empire, teams of surveyors fanned out across the continent and into the Caribbean Sea to map places as diverse as frigid Nova Scotia and the tropical island of Grenada. Their quest to integrate British America on the eve of the American Revolution is the subject of his new book project, “Mapping the New Empire: Cartography and Colonization in British America, 1763-1782.”
In 2007-2008, Edelson was the Kislak Fellow in American Studies at the Library of Congress and a Helen Corley Petit Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UIUC.
Colonial and Revolutionary America, Historical Geography, History of Cartography, Environmental History, Slavery and Plantation Societies