Death of an Empire: The Rise and Murderous Fall of Salem, America's Richest City
By Robert Booth
3.5/5
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About this ebook
SALEM has long been notorious for the witch trials of 1692. But a hundred years later it was renowned for very different pursuits: vast wealth and worldwide trade. Now Death of an Empire tells the story of Salem's glory days in the age of sailing, and the murder that hastened its descent.
When America first became a nation, Salem was the richest city in the republic, led by a visionary merchant who still ranks as one of the wealthiest men in history. For decades, Salem connected America with the wider world, through a large fleet of tall ships and a pragmatic, egalitarian brand of commerce taht remains a model of enlightened international relations.
But America's emerging big cities and westward expansion began to erode Salem's national political importance just as its seafaring economy faltered in the face of tariffs and global depression. With Salem's standing as a world capital imperiled, two men, equally favored by fortune, struggled for its future: one, a progressive merchant-politician, tried to build new institutions and businesses, while the other, a reclusive crime lord, offered a demimonde of forbidden pleasures. The scandalous trial that followed signaled Salem's fall from national prominence, a fall that echoed around the world in the loss of friendly trade and in bloody reprisals against native peoples by the U.S. Navy.
Death of an Empire is an exciting tale of a remarkably rich era, shedding light on a little-known but fascinating period of Ameriacn history in which characters such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster interact with the ambitious merchants and fearless mariners who made Salem famous around the world.
Robert Booth
Robert Booth has lectured in philosophy at the University of Liverpool, the University of Manchester, and Liverpool Hope University. His research focuses mainly on how work done at the intersection of phenomenology, ecofeminism, and new realist metaphysics might inform practical means of tackling the environmental crisis and other social ills.
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Reviews for Death of an Empire
7 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A history of the rich families of Old Salem, a subject I didn't expect to care about, but it is told so well I find myself invested in seeing how their stories end and feeling bad when the sailors' lives end as sailors' lives so often did in the age of sail.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting story of the glory days in the age of sailing in Salem and a murder of a prominent Captain that helped to hasten its demise. The commerce with people of the Indian Ocean was huge out of Salem for a period of years. In 1799, Salem was the sixth-largest population center with about 9,5000 inhabitants and it was the richest place in the U.S. Men won and lost fortunes in shipping. Captain Joseph White was murdered in 1830 by a conspiracy of Salem young men of good families. The results of the trials and accusations and lies, along with the U.S. putting more sanctions on imports, spelled out the end of Salem as the dynamic city it once was.