In My Power tells the story of letter writing and communications in the creation of the British Empire and the formation of the United States. In an era of bewildering geographical mobility, economic metamorphosis, and political upheaval, the proliferation of letter writing and the development of a communications infrastructure enabled middle-class Britons and Americans to rise to advantage in the British Atlantic world. Everyday letter writing demonstrated that the blessings of success in the early modern world could come less from the control of overt political power than from the cultivation of social skills that assured the middle class of their technical credentials, moral deserving, and social innocence. In writing letters, the middle class not only took effective action in a turbulent world but also defined what they believed themselves to be able to do in that world. Because this ideology of agency was extended to women and the youngest of children in the eighteenth century, it could be presented as universalized even as it was withheld from Native Americans and enslaved blacks. Whatever the explicit purposes behind letter writing may have been—educational improvement, family connection, business enterprise—the effect was to render the full terms of social division invisible both to those who accumulated power and to those who did not. The uncontested power that came from letter writing was, Konstantin Dierks provocatively argues, as important as racist violence to the rise of the white middle class in the British Atlantic world.

This biography of Britain’s spy chief during the Revolutionary War sheds new light on his conspiracy with Benedict Arnold—and his mysterious capture. John André was head of the British Army’s Secret Service in North America as the Revolutionary War entered its most decisive phase. In 1780, he masterminded the defection of the high-ranking American general Benedict Arnold. As the commander of West Point, Arnold agreed to turn the strategically vital fort over to the British. André and Arnold also conspired to kidnap George Washington. The secret negotiations between Arnold and André were protracted and fraught with danger. Arnold’s wife Peggy acted as go-between until September 21st, 1780, when the two men met face to face in no-man’s-land. But then André was captured forty-eight hours later, having broken every condition set by his commanding officer: he was within American lines, wearing civilian clothes, and carrying maps of West Point in his boots. When he announced himself as a spy, the Americans had no recourse. Tried by a military tribunal, he was convicted and hanged. André’s motives for his apparent sacrifice have baffled historians for generations. This biography provides a provocative answer to this mystery—explaining not only why he acted as he did, but how he wished others to see his actions.