Alison Games

Biographic Data

ID507646
NAMEAlison Games
GIVEN NAMESAlison
FAMILY NAMEGames
SIGNATUREGAMES A
AFFILIATIONSGeorgetown University
ORCID0000-0001-6718-9133
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS41
TOTAL CITATIONS88
AUTHOR COUNT41
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1995
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2023
H-INDEX3

  • Introduction: "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America" Fifty Years Later

    Alison GamesARTICLEThe William and Mary Quarterly2023

    Taking the opportunity of a seminal article's fiftieth anniversary, Audrey Horning, Peter Mancall, Hiram Morgan, and Rory Rapple discuss the impact of Nicholas P. Canny's 1973 William and Mary Quarterly article, "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America," on scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. Alison Games provides an introductory essay for the Forum, and Canny provides a response

  • Making Colonies and Empires in North America and the Greater Caribbean

    Open AccessAlison GamesCHAPTERCambridge History of America and…2021

    To situate colonies and empires in North America in a global context requires dismantling over a century of historiographic conventions that privilege the nation, the colony, and even the local community over broader perspectives. Historians have begun to erode these anachronistic and often artificial divisions through the study of Atlantic history, but even that field of inquiry cannot necessarily take us to a perspective on North America in the…

  • Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory

    Alison GamesBOOKInventing the English Massacre2020Cited by: 1

    Massacres - the mass slaughter of people - might seem as old as time, but the word itself is not. It worked its way into the English language in the late 16th century, and came to signify a specific type of death, one characterised by cruelty, intimacy, and treachery. How that happened is the story of yet another place, Amboyna, an island in the Indonesian archipelago where English and Dutch merchants fought over the spice trade. There a conspira…

  • Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities

    Alison GamesCHAPTERNew World History2019

  • Cohabitation, Suriname-Style: English Inhabitants in Dutch Suriname after 1667

    Alison GamesARTICLEThe William and Mary Quarterly2015Cited by: 1References: 1

    Colonial transitions to new regimes wrought unpredictable outcomes. In 1667 Dutch forces conquered the English colony of Suriname, and in an ensuing treaty, the English and Dutch agreed to “cohabit” the colony. This article draws on Dutch and English sources to investigate this little-known experiment in cohabitation during an era when colonies changed hands frequently and inhabitants often found themselves forced to adapt to new rulers. Cohabita…

  • Conclusion: The Dutch Moment in Atlantic Historiography

    Open AccessAlison GamesCHAPTERDutch Atlantic Connections,…2014

    This chapter investigates an impressive breadth of topics, with an emphasis on trade and commerce but also attentive to such themes as religious practices, domestic relations, slavery, circuits of knowledge, culture, and politics. The authors explores a wide range of connections, including transatlantic religious ties, migration, administrative appointments and patronage networks, commercial links of all sorts, and ties between Dutch settlements …

  • America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem

    Alison GamesARTICLEPreternature Critical and…2014

    Modern inhabitants of the United States are a people of belief—they believe, or so pollsters report, in a supreme being (90 percent), the Devil (70 percent), and angels (77 percent).1 Some 31 percent also believe in witches.2 General readers curious about the historical variety of witchcraft beliefs in the United States will find Owen Davies's book an interesting and useful starting point. In researching America Bewitched, Davies found hundreds o…

  • Violence on the Fringes: The Virginia (1622) and Amboyna (1623) Massacres

    Open AccessAlison GamesARTICLEHistory2014Cited by: 2References: 8

    Two events, both labelled massacres by the E nglish who suffered death at the hands of their rivals, took place within the space of a year on opposite sides of the globe and in widely different overseas contexts. The first episode took place in Virginia in M arch 1622, when O pechancanough and his soldiers killed one‐third of the E nglish colonists in a surprise attack. The second episode transpired in F ebruary 1623 in the S pice I slands, when …

  • The Oxford Handbook 's Capacious Atlantic

    Alison GamesARTICLESlavery and Abolition2013

  • Anglo-Dutch Connections and Overseas Enterprises: A Global Perspective on Lion Gardiner’s World

    Alison GamesARTICLEEarly American studies2011Cited by: 3References: 14

    This article offers a global perspective on the intertwined histories of English and Dutch overseas enterprises in the early seventeenth century. The English and the Dutch were close allies in Europe when they embarked on commercial and colonial ventures. This history of alliance provided crucial military training for Englishmen who served in English colonies in Virginia, New England, and the Caribbean. The English and the Dutch were also rivals,…

  • Witchcraft in Early North America

    Alison GamesBOOKWitchcraft in Early North America2010

    Witchcraft in Early North America investigates European, African, and Indian witchcraft beliefs and their expression in colonial America. Alison Games's engaging book takes us beyond the infamous outbreak at Salem, Massachusetts, to look at how witchcraft was a central feature of colonial societies in North America. Her substantial and lively introduction orients readers to the subject and to the rich selection of documents that follows. The docu…

  • Migration

    Open AccessAlison GamesCHAPTERThe British Atlantic World,…2009

    The year 1500 saw a world as fully in motion as did the year 1800, yet by 1800 the degree, pace, character, and impact of that migration were fundamentally different. During this period, migration within the British Isles made parts of Ireland and England British, it eroded local cultures, and it produced urban societies, of which one, London, was comprised of migrants from all over Britain and became the largest city in Europe. Patterns of migra…

  • English Overseas Merchants in an Expanding World of Trade, 1590–1660

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

    This chapter focuses on English merchants and some of the major venues where they plied their trades. It looks at the diverse experiences of newcomers and old hands, at hiring practices, and at the different strategies merchants employed in trading settlements in order to emphasize the personal skills and the improvisation and adaptability central to overseas trade in this period. Trading worlds in the Ottoman Empire, Lisbon, and Japan are examin…

  • The Cosmopolitan Clergy, 1620–1660

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

    Religious and political instability spawned a population that was central to English overseas ventures: the clergy. This chapter focuses on these wandering clerics. Working as chaplains on ships and in trading posts and in colonies in the Atlantic, English ministers of all religious dispositions found their time overseas a respite and occasionally an opportunity for religious experimentation that in turn shaped the religious settlement in England…

  • Ireland, 1649–1660

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

    This chapter focuses on Ireland in the 1650s, illustrating England's new commitment to brute force (expressed through a new standing army and expanded navy) and to forced migration around the Atlantic as a strategy for colonial success and national power. This imperial reshuffling of people linked Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, and North America, and exposed the government's new vision of a more centralized empire devised in the wake of several…

  • The Mediterranean Origins of the British Empire

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

    This chapter introduces the Mediterranean as the origins of the British Empire. There, the English were weak and vulnerable, and they learned a model of cultural interaction defined by dissimulation and accommodation. This new geographic starting point for English ventures around the globe places English adaptability at the center of the story.

  • Virginia, 1607–1622

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

  • Conclusion

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

    This chapter begins with a discussion of England's transformation from a weak kingdom on the margins of Europe to a nation able to vie with and sometimes defeat Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish rivals in their competition for new territory and coveted commodities. It argues that there was no single colonial template in place, no clear sense yet that people around the world could be lumped together as subjects to be governed in a uniform sty…

  • Before the Grand Tour: The Domestication of Travel

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

    This chapter focuses on English and Scottish recreational and educational travelers. It separates them from other people whom they would also have identified as travelers. One portion of their traveling lives is segregated from other stages of the life cycle in which these people would have characterized themselves as still traveling when they worked as merchants or consuls, ministers, or governors. It is argued that as educational travel became …

  • All the King's Men: Governors, Consuls, and Ambassadors, 1590–1650

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

  • Madagascar, 1635–1650

    Alison GamesCHAPTERThe web of empire2008

    This chapter examines two English colonization efforts in Madagascar, which were planned in the 1630s and enacted in the 1640s. Madagascar may have succeeded as a colonial settlement in the 1640s had its English organizers deterred from assiduously trying to emulate recent colonial successes in the Atlantic and Caribbean. These prior English experiences overrode two equally relevant models, those of the Dutch at Batavia and the Portuguese at Goa.…

  • Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700

    Open AccessAlison GamesARTICLERenaissance Quarterly2008

    Susan D. Amussen. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv + 302 pp. index. illus. map. bibl. $22.50. ISBN: 978-0-8078-5854-7. - Volume 61 Issue 2

  • The Web of Empire: English cosmopolitans in an age of expansion, 1560-1660

    Alison GamesBOOKThe web of empire2008Cited by: 50

    How did England go from a position of inferiority to the powerful Spanish empire to achieve global pre-eminence? This book explores the period from 1560 to 1660, when England challenged dominion over the American continents, established new long-distance trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean and the East Indies, and emerged in the 17th century as an empire to reckon with. The book discusses such topics as the men and women who built the colon…

  • Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches

    Alison GamesARTICLEEarly American literature2008

    Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches Alison Games (bio) Eric Slauter has taken an inventive approach to two difficult and important questions: how do historians and literary scholars make sense of each other's work, and how can we spark more satisfactory conversations among ourselves? I am grateful to him for the thoughtful analysis he has supplied and for encouraging me to consider what interdisciplinary work may contribute to the s…

  • Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (review)

    Alison GamesARTICLEJournal of Colonialism and…2005

    Reviewed by: Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World ed. by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet Alison Games Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World. Edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Brace yourself for an explosion of scholarship about the colony of Virginia: 2007 marks the 400th anniversary…