In the early American South, a region without a regular mail system or print culture prior to the 1730s, information exchange was not easy. Yet its inhabitants—Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans—created powerful channels of communication across colonial space. In Informed Power, Dubcovsky demonstrates how these largely face-to-face networks both facilitated and complicated the dissemination of news and the redistribution of power within and across communities. This nuanced account weaves together analytically the factors of greed, starvation, disease, customs, technical infrastructures, spirituality, language, and landscape to disassemble the notion that either a dearth of information vexed the early colonial South or that the rise of European power there was inevitable.
Dubcovsky’s thematic questions—“what information did people in the early South want,” “who acquired and spread information,” and “how [did] Indians, Europeans, and Africans use networks to move information”—guide readers across the book’s three parts and chronological unfolding...