Abstract
Recent books on Benjamin Franklin cast a wide net, placing Franklin within the Atlantic republic of letters and community of scientists as well as the political economy of empire and capital-ism. Carla Mulford’s Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire sheds new light on imperial politics, theories of empire, and Enlightenment ideas throughout the Atlantic world. Her focus on empire builds on a resur-gence of imperial history, one that devotes equal attention to center and periphery and gives voice not only to policymakers but to women and men, free colonists and servants, slaves and indigenous peoples. Infl uenced by this literature, Mulford incorporates the entire empire—Canada, Ireland, Scotland, and India as well as Britain and her American colonies—into her analysis.