Abstract
When William Penn arrived in the Delaware Valley in 1682, he found a population with diverse national origins, the legacy of a seventy-year contest among colonizing powers to control the valley. Those disputes had rested on the shared assumption that everyone belonged to nations, cultural and political collectivities formed of sovereign and subjects. But with Sweden, the Netherlands, and England all claiming ownership of the Delaware Valley, settlers with different backgrounds fought, traded, and transferred their loyalties to a succession of political regimes. Thompson argues that those “cosmopolitan forms of interaction and communication coexisted with, and indeed reinforced, national identities."