His first book, Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876, was published in 1998 by Cambridge University Press. The essay here is drawn from Underwriting: the Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722-1872 (2006). With Jennifer Baker, he is coediting a special issue of Early American Literature, dedicated to economic criticism in early American literary studies.