ABSTRACT
The brightest star in Britain’s imperial firmament, to have an exemplary and beneficial influence throughout the rapidly expanding Atlantic world. By exploring this tension between the utopian aspirations for purity, for removal from the rough and rude conditions of a grasping world of greed and desire, and the powerful ambitions for influence and significance within that larger world, can begin to assess Boston’s distinctive place in the Atlantic community of the early modern period. The anxieties of influence played themselves out not in sudden transformations after generations of continuity, but steadily, persistently, on a yearly, daily, even hourly basis. Historians have similarly groped for terminology to describe the shadowy worlds, the borderlands, marchlands, margins, or “middle grounds” produced by these exchanges, zones of contact where old boundaries “melted at the edges and merged.” The inoculated person would break out in only a few small and non–scarring poxes or pustules, and then make a full recovery while gaining lifelong immunity.
