George Galphin's Intimate Empire
The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America

Bryan C. Rindfleisch (Author)

9780817320270

Hardback, published 20 August 2019

328 pages, 1 black & white figure, 9 maps
23.1 x 15.7 x 3.3 cm, 0.6 kg

Detailing Galphin's social and economic networks was obviously painstaking work because it involved tracking the lives and fates of so many different people, especially in the case of Creek men and women who oftentimes appear only fleetingly in the documents and then oftentimes under various names. Yet Rindfleisch has done it, and he presents convincing and well-argued evidence for virtually every node in Galphin's network."" - Robbie Ethridge, author of From Chicaza to Chikcasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715

A revealing saga detailing the economic, familial, and social bonds forged by Indian trader George Galphin in the early American South.
 
A native of Ireland, George Galphin arrived in South Carolina in 1737 and quickly emerged as one of the most proficient deerskin traders in the South. This was due in large part to his marriage to Metawney, a Creek Indian woman from the town of Coweta, who incorporated Galphin into her family and clan, allowing him to establish one of the most profitable merchant companies in North America. As part of his trade operations, Galphin cemented connections with Indigenous and European peoples across the South, while simultaneously securing links to merchants and traders in the British Empire, continental Europe, and beyond.
 
In George Galphin's Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America, Bryan C. Rindfleisch presents a complex narrative about eighteenth-century cross-cultural relationships. Reconstructing the multilayered bonds forged by Galphin and challenging scholarly understandings of life in the Native South, the American South more broadly, and the Atlantic World, Rindfleisch looks simultaneously at familial, cultural, political, geographical, and commercial ties—examining how eighteenth-century people organized their world, both mentally and physically. He demonstrates how Galphin's importance emerged through the people with whom he bonded. At their most intimate, Galphin's multilayered relationships revolved around the Creek, Anglo-French, and African children who comprised his North American family, as well as family and friends on the other side of the Atlantic.
 
Through extensive research in primary sources, Rindfleisch reconstructs an expansive imperial world that stretches across the American South and reaches into London and includes Indians, Europeans, and Africans who were intimately interconnected and mutually dependent. As a whole, George Galphin's Intimate Empire provides critical insights into the intensely personal dimensions and cross-cultural contours of the eighteenth-century South and how empire-building and colonialism were, by their very nature, intimate and familial affairs.