Fort Congaree: A Cosmopolitan Outpost on the Rim of Empire

• Published in: Native south (Lincoln, NE) NE), 2018, Vol.11 (1), p.29-55
• Main Authors: Stewart, James A, Cobb, Charles R
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 18th century; American Indians; Archaeology; British Empire; Capitalism; Coasts; Colonies & territories; Commodities; Consumption; Cosmopolitanism; Dutch language; Ideology; Imperialism; Language acquisition; Mercantilism; Modernity; Native North Americans; Philosophy; Trends
• ISSN: 1943-2569; 2152-4025; 2152-4025
• DOI: 10.1353/nso.2018.0001

Michael Coe has documented a wide range of de rigueur accouterments moving toward eighteenth-century Massachusetts frontier forts, even though the transport of goods would have required grueling journeys over challenging terrain with oxen-drawn wagons.3 Archaeology at an earlier seventeenth-century installation on the Hudson River, Fort Orange (in present-day Albany, New York), revealed that Dutch residents also acquired a range of goods representative of contemporary trends in the Netherlands.4 Clothing orders from the presidio in San Francisco, despite being almost 9,500 kilometers (5,900 miles) from Spain, demonstrate a sophisticated acquaintance with the latest styles ushered in by the Bourbon monarchy.5 To some extent, we can attribute the successful percolation of contemporary commodities throughout the eighteenth century to the emergence of the Consumer Revolution.6 This concept has been very useful for archaeological explorations of the rise of a consumer class competitively engaged in social display and emulation, all made possible by large advances in productivity (especially in England).7 The tinuing of the Consumer Revolution seems to have been particularly successful in spurring a notion of cosmopolitanism outside of the metropole, as advances in logistics and transport facilitated the movement of commodities and finished goods to all corners of the empire. The notion of "cosmopolitanism" has gained considerable currency in anthropology as a means of explaining many of the transcultural trends at the root of modernity and the global.8 Although it has multiple meanings, as used here, cosmopolitanism refers to the broadening scale of interactions prompted by empire building in both Asia and Europe beginning approximately in the mid-second millennium A.D. This approach recognizes that modernity, capitalism, and the world system were not imposed from the West but were mutual constructs between colonizer and colonized, metropole and periphery.9 The European variant of cosmopolitanism is rooted in the upsurge of colonial enterprises in the fifteenth century A.D., and it emerged as a broader philosophy of global design that involved new ideologies, practices, and discourses of management over a vast area of circulating peoples and commodities. Particularly galling to the Spanish, the lords proprietors' patent claimed all lands between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans south of Virginia to an arbitrary line of latitude south of Spanish St. Augustine and