S. Max Edelson studies the history of colonial British America and the Atlantic world. His research seeks to describe the material as well as the cultural dimensions of new world colonization. His first book, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard, 2006) examines the relationship between planters and environment in South Carolina as the key to understanding this repressive, prosperous society and its distinctive economic culture. It shows that although plantations often represent stasis in myths of the Old South, they were in fact dynamic instruments of empire. Plantation Enterprise was awarded the George C. Rogers Prize by the South Carolina Historical Society and the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award by the Agricultural History Society. Harvard University Press published a paperback edition of the book in 2011. His current research focuses on the geography and cartography of North America and the Caribbean. Victories in the Seven Years’ War yielded territorial acquisitions that extended British America west to the Mississippi, north into Canada, and south to the Florida Keys and the Windward Islands. To better understand, settle, and defend this new empire, teams of surveyors fanned out across the continent and into the Caribbean Sea to map places as diverse as frigid Nova Scotia and the tropical island of Grenada. Their quest to integrate British America on the eve of the American Revolution is the subject of his current research. The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence is scheduled to be published by Harvard University Press in 2017. It will feature a companion website with a dynamic digital archive of the original maps and charts discussed in the book. In 2007-2008, Edelson began this research as the Kislak Fellow in American Studies at the Library of Congress. A preliminary talk on some of the maps and their meanings can be found here: Online Presentation: Mapping the New Empire: Britain's General Survey of North America, 1763-1782 (Library of Congress Webcast, 4/16/08). He interprets the meanings of the Catawba Deerskin map on a recent episode of the radio show Backstory.