University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Cultivating Empire: Indians, Quakers, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism, 1754-1846 Lori J. Daggar University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Daggar, Lori J., "Cultivating Empire: Indians, Quakers, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism, 1754-1846" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1675. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1675 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1675 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Cultivating Empire: Indians, Quakers, and the Negotiation of American Imperialism, 1754-1846 Abstract This dissertation examines the ways in which indigenous peoples and missionaries, specifically Quakers (Society of Friends), contributed to the development of the American empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The U.S. civilization plan, in which Friends were central participants, offered agricultural education to American Indian men and, for women, instruction in the “domestic arts” as part of a broader mission complex. Far from being simply a means to “assimilate the Indians,” the mission complex was central to U.S. imperial and economic development, and its methods, endurance, and character grew out of a particular historical moment and as the result of a negotiation of Indians’ and Euroamericans’ goals and motivations. In order to investigate that negotiation, “Cultivating Empire” follows the evolution of diplomacy and agricultural mission work in the Ohio Country as a case study, and it draws upon individuals’ journals, family papers, account books and receipts, as well as missionary correspondences, meeting minutes from the Society of Friends, and various papers of federal, state, and territorial governments.