Empire of Commerce

"In Empire of Commerce, Susan Gaunt Stearns takes readers back to a time when there was nothing inevitable about the United States' untrammeled westward expansion. Her work demonstrates the centrality of trade on and along the Mississippi River to the complex development of the political and economic structures that shaped the nascent American republic. Stearns's perspective-shifting book reconfigures our understanding of key postrevolutionary moments-the writing of the Constitution, the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Louisiana Purchase-and demonstrates how the transatlantic cotton trade finally set the stage for transforming an imagined west into something real"--