The Atlantic Republic of Letters offers an alternative intellectual history of early America. Focusing on Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, the book frames Euro-American colonialism as an intellectual enterprise, which was established not only through military and economic means but also through books, ideas, and cultural institutions.
Through research in dozens of archives and rare book libraries, Diego Pirillo brings together two interconnected histories. First, he recovers the place of British America in the cosmopolitan world of the Republic of Letters, studying the communication system that facilitated the transatlantic circulation of knowledge. Second, he shows that knowledge was weaponized in the effort to survey and control North America. While fashioning themselves as independent and cosmopolitan scholars, Franklin and his associates, including James and Martha Logan, Isaac Norris II, Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, and Jane Colden, among others, were in fact deeply tied to political power and tailored their ideas to the needs of their patrons. They served as agents of empire and helped to devise and put into practice the colonial project. Not only were books, libraries, and cultural institutions funded by the wealth created by the slave trade and the expropriation of Indigenous land, but, as Pirillo argues, the very taxonomies and classification systems that Euro-American scholars devised directly shaped the colonial enterprise.
In this respect, The Atlantic Republic of Letters illuminates the relationship among books, intellectuals, and colonial governance, and explores the ways in which knowledge circulated and shaped conquest.
[from publisher’s site]
Diego Pirillo (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore) is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the History Department. His work explores how mobility, displacement, and colonialism shaped the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Italy, Europe and the Atlantic world. He has a secondary interest in modern Italian intellectual history with special attention to authors such as Croce, Gentile and Gramsci. His previous book The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Ithaca, Cornell: University Press, 2018, was awarded the 2019 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies. The Refugee Diplomat offers an alternative history of early modern diplomacy, centered not on states and their official representatives but around the figure of “the refugee-diplomat” and, more specifically, Italian religious refugees who forged ties with English and northern European Protestants in the hope of inspiring an Italian Reformation.
The Atlantic Republic of Letters : Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin.
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026.
