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2002 Seminar Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the 2002 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, "The Structure of Colonial Societies, 1500-1825." A copy of the program, where papers may be viewed in the context of the sessions, is also available, and links from each author's name on the program pages will return the reader to the appropriate abstract here.
James Carson. "Old Worlds into New: An Ethnogeography of the Colonial South
Americans, Europeans, and Africans held different ideas about how the world worked. Both Americans and Africans shared an understanding of landscapes that emphasized complementarity and that drew sharp distinctions between an orderly inside world and a disorderly outside one. Europeans brought to America an entirely different notion of landscape that valued hierarchy and the efficient exploitation of natural resources. Intended as a first chapter of a book project, this essay sets the stage for subsequent work on the political, economic, and social relations among the colonial South’s three founding peoples. [WP # 02005]
Meri L. Clark. “ ‘The blight of bad examples’: Morals Legislation and Social Conflict in Colombian Schooling, 1800-1830”
By 1800, many “enlightened” Colombian elites believed that universal primary education guaranteed social stability through moral conformity; others worried that broader access to knowledge undermined hierarchy. When the colonial government began reorganizing elite, denominational schools to include poor and nonwhite children, the reforms led to conflicts among multiracial townspeople, municipalities, and the central government—both colonial and republican—over money, morality, and access. Three issues emerged concerning local versus national authority: legislating morals, assessing community priorities, and deciding which children could attend school. The revolutionary intellectual aperture from 1800 to 1830 challenged conservative ideas about the links between morality and race, even while real inequalities endured within and outside school. [WP # 02024]
Kathryn A. Clippinger. “Dutch Families, Black and White: The Structure of Afro-Dutch Households on the New York Frontier, 1720-1820”
Using a study of Afro-Dutch families as a prism through which to consider familial structure as practice and ideology, this essay problematizes the concept of the eighteenth-century family. The Afro-Dutch family had four different structures in colonial New York, at times based on those sharing a dwelling, at other times based on trade or social networks. Comparing each of these household structures, this study investigates how Dutch and Africans alike defined their “family,” depending on the context. Ultimately, these bi-racial households contributed to the concepts of “race” and “ethnicity” expressed in the art and literature emerging from New York City and other urban centers. [WP # 02020]
Mariana L. R. Dantas. “Slave Manumission and Urban Development in Baltimore, Maryland, and Sabará, Minas Gerais, 1750-1810”
This paper examines the impact of slave manumission on the development of two specific urban environments in the Americas: Baltimore, in the state of Maryland, and Sabará, in the Brazilian captaincy of Minas Gerais. Because manumission was often preceded by a term of servitude or resulted from self-purchase, changing the conditions under which the labor of certain slaves was contracted, it played an important part in the adaptation of slavery as a form of labor organization to the needs and demands of urban environments. Term slaves and quartados (slaves paying off their freedom) became important sources of inexpensive skilled and unskilled labor allowing town dwellers to expand and diversify their businesses and contributing to the process of economic growth and diversification that supported urban development in these areas. [WP # 02016]
Christopher L. Doyle. “ ‘Without a Single Recommendation’: Trans-Atlantic Gentility and Success in Revolutionary Virginia”
Focusing on the rise of St. George Tucker (1752-1827) into elite Virginia society during the 1770s, this essay analyzes the persistence of trans-Atlantic gentility in the Revolutionary South. Traceable to courts of Renaissance Europe, the genteel ethos stressed complaisance, civility, refined manners and aesthetic awareness, material display, and liberal education. A Bermudian fleeing economic decline at home, Tucker used gentility in Virginia to attain elite credentials as a lawyer, build influential friendships, and acquire a wealthy wife. As they had for decades, Virginians of the Revolutionary era continued to reward convincing displays of gentility, because the ethos suggested stability to a culture threatened by upheaval and redefining problematic concepts of “independence,” “virtue,” and “equality.” Tucker’s success solidified his attachment to gentility, influenced his later championing of “republican” reform and Southern interests, and led him to transmit genteel imperatives to a new generation of Southern leaders. His example reveals how gentility moderated Virginia’s revolutionary “transformation” and inhibited its potential for radicalism. [WP # 02013]
David T. Garrett. “The Loyalist Inca and Túpac Amaru: Ethnicity, Class, and Allegiance in Bourbon Cusco”
This essay focuses on the Indian nobility of Cusco (Peru) in the mid-eighteenth century, with the goal of explaining its widespread loyalty to the Spanish crown during the Great Rebellion of 1780-1783, itself led by an Indian cacique. An examination of the history, economic position, and relationship to the crown of this indigenous elite provides a more nuanced view of the structure of mature colonial society in the Andes, one that addresses corporate affiliation, class, and ethnicity and not simply the dialectic of Spanish and Indian. In particular, the essay seeks to unearth the political ideology of loyalist Indians and the understanding of colonial society that it represents. [WP # 02003]
Margarita Gascón. “Frontier Societies: A View from the Southern Frontier of the Indies”
While Frederick Jackson Turner called attention to the power of the frontier to model American society, Herbert Eugene Bolton proposed the utility of research on the Spanish presence in North America, stressing the role of garrisons and missions (“frontier institutions”) in places like Florida. From the beginning of the twentieth century onward, Turner’s and Bolton’s legacies have led historians to view frontier societies as particular entities in which certain aspects, related more or less directly to the presence of natives, galvanized social structures. This essay will consider some powerful elements that created and forged the southernmost frontier of the Spanish Empire, although the colonies involved were founded neither as missions nor as garrisons. The colonies that became the southernmost frontier were born as peripheral settlements, providing us the opportunity to consider closely the concepts of “periphery” and “frontier” and to establish similarities and differences in the social structure of the settlements in the Spanish America. [WP # 02004]
Sheryllynne Haggerty. “The Structure of the Philadelphia Trading Community on the Transition from Colony to State”
In 1785 the first Philadelphia trade directory was published, a reflection of the pride and confidence of the city’s people at Independence. This essay uses the directory to detail a far wider trading community than elite (male) merchants. Comparing the Philadelphia trading community with its British counterpart, Liverpool, the essay argues that in 1785 Philadelphia still had the economy of a colonial port, and that its distribution process operated very differently from that of Liverpool. This circumstance was determined by the nature of imports and exports, the youth of the city, and its wealth distribution. Further analysis of the situation in 1791 and 1805, however, demonstrates that the trading community, both men and women, grew and diversified as the economy matured. [WP # 02025]
Marsha L. Hamilton. “Scottish Communities in New England and the North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century”
Seventeenth-century Massachusetts has long been associated with the religious and social ideals of the English Puritan founders of the 1630s. After 1650, however, non-English settlers came to the colony in significant numbers, and by the 1660s they played increasingly important roles in the political and economic spheres, helping to create a complex colonial society. Massachusetts, like England’s other North American colonies, was becoming increasingly “British” in its population and overseas connections. Scottish settlers, as the largest non-English group in Massachusetts, contributed much to this developing sense of Britishness. They maintained their Scottish identities while forming alternative communities, along with other non-English residents, and participating actively in both local society and Atlantic-wide commercial networks. [WP # 02011]
Daniel Kilbride. “From Provincial to National Identity: American Leisure Travelers in Europe, circa 1700-1820”
Concepts of British, and more specifically, English identity deeply influenced how Americans linked travel in the Old World with self and group identity from colonial times until 1820. An examination of how travelers reflected on provincial and national issues reveals that, before Independence, when they consciously sought recognition of their English identity, their task was complicated by their provinciality. In fact, a number of travelers developed a heightened appreciation for their colonial roots in the course of fostering connections with the metropole. Similarly, while many—though by no means all—post-Revolutionary tourists spurned their connections to England, their experiences reveal how Englishness remained an important, if unwelcome and unrecognized, part of how they conceived of American national identity. [WP # 02002]
Dennis J. Maika. “Leadership in Manhattan's Merchant Community: Office-Holding Patterns and the Persistence of a Merchant Elite”
Part of a broader study on Manhattan’s seventeenth-century commercial community, this essay examines the formative years of New York’s colonial elite. Merchants with connections to overseas capital filled leadership positions in New Amsterdam’s city government through a self-selection process drawn from Dutch municipal tradition. The result was a stable leadership group in the ten years before and after the English intrusion in 1664, open to both Dutch and English merchants. The magisterial elite used their appointive powers to extend their influence in the community. By the time economic and political conditions began to change in 1674, some members of the local merchant elite had experience with provincial positions that enhanced their status and extended their influence. [WP # 02021]
Cynthia E. Milton. “Poverty and the Politics of Colonialism: ‘Poor Whites,’ Their Petitions, and the Erosion of Privilege in Late Colonial Quito, 1678-1800”
From 1678 to 1800, hundreds of petitions flooded the royal courts of Quito (present-day Ecuador) requesting legal recognition as “solemn poor,” a status intended for “poor whites.” After 1780, primarily as a result of widespread immiseration and merging ethnic-racial boundaries, individuals outside the intended clients began to seek official recognition of their poverty. As more actually impoverished whites and nonwhites successfully petitioned for the status of “poor,” we witness the subsequent erosion of white privilege upon which the colonial structure was built. The resulting transformations in the meaning of poverty and the place of the poor in society bespoke a collapse of a colonial world made up of diverse compacts attuned to distinct social strata of privileges. [WP # 02019]
Dayo Nicole Mitchell. “ ‘The Middle Situation’: Free People of Color in Dominica and Trinidad, 1800-1825”
From wealthy landowners to illegally manumitted laborers, free people of color served as the economic foundation of West Indian slave societies even as the ideological underpinnings of white supremacy declared them unimportant. My dissertation examines their claims to equality and full citizenship and the repercussions of their failures and successes. This essay, the bulk of the second chapter, concentrates on depicting the strategies that free people of color used to combat legal disabilities and to negotiate life in societies organized around the subjection of all nonwhite people. Networks—among islands, among free people of color of differing socioeconomic status, and between whites and free people of color—are a particular focus, as the chapter lays the groundwork for arguing that the literate elites who spearheaded the civil rights movement spoke for the entire community. [WP # 02017]
María Elena Morales. "The Estatutos of Limpieza de Sangre in the Province of Venezuela, 1609-1820”
The discourse on limpieza de sangre is essential to the understanding of values in colonial Latin American societies. The research in this essay stems from a larger study on continuity and change in Latin American history and the transfer of ideas from the European metropolis to the new colonial societies. In fifteenth-century Spain, the discourse on limpieza de sangre appeared as a result of the confrontation between Christians and Jews, in the process of consolidation of an emergent Christian elite strongly opposed to Jews and Moors. Later on, in Latin America, the limpieza de sangre discourse not only continued to oppose different religious beliefs and/or nationalities, but also set the basis for bureaucratization processes. Through an analysis of 120 limpieza de sangre files from the Province of Venezuela between 1609 and 1820, some preliminary results are presented regarding continuities and changes in this discourse. [WP # 02007]
Matthew D. O’Hara. “A Flock Divided: Ecclesiastical Reform, Religious Practice, and Local Identity in Mexico City, 1749-1810”
This essay analyzes the intersection of the colonial caste system and the administration of Mexico City’s parishes during the colonial era. For most of that period, the city’s parishes were divided into those for Spaniards and people of mixed race and those for Indian. In the eighteenth century, two major reforms altered the spiritual landscape of the city. First, from 1750 to 1772, the Indian parishes staffed by the regular clergy were secularized. Second, in 1772 separate parishes for Indians were eliminated. This essay examines both the negotiation of identity in the city prior to these reforms and the effects of the reforms on religious life and individual or group identity. In the aftermath of the reforms, neighborhood-level organizations continued to provide the foundation for religious practice in the parishes, defining their own notion of religious and ethnic space, sometimes in opposition to the projects of the colonial state and the church hierarchy. While colonial authorities and churchmen attempted to impose a rigid, biological definition of calidad (social standing), the parishioners offered a more complex definition of identity that might include marital and family status, social networks, obligations to the state, occupation, and location of residence. [WP # 02010]
Francisco A. Ortega. “The Staging of the Fatalidad lastimosa, or the Creole Nation's Lack of Viability”
Late in the afternoon of June 8, 1692 a violent uprising took place in Mexico City and underscored the frailty of colonial domination. The uprising, mostly by urban Indians and poor castas (mestizos, blacks, and mulattoes), raised the worst possible fears within elite colonial circles as the rioters attacked, vandalized, and set fire to the institutional centers of political control (the City Hall, jail, local archives, and the Viceroy's private quarters). Though riots and rebellions were rather common in New Spain, the events of 1692 were felt and articulated as catastrophic by the colonial elite, and several narratives were produced in the attempt to make sense out of them and to restore moral—if not social—order. Although recent scholarship has produced a new approximation of the riot’s social composition, the fundamental question of what the elite saw in these events that made them so uneasy has not been properly addressed. In this essay I follow the historical account of the disturbances produced by Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora in a letter to his Spanish friend, the admiral Andrés de Pez. I compare that document with other accounts of the riots, explore its rich figurative language, scrutinize its many allusions to past historical events and sources, and use an approach inspired by contemporary trauma theory to determine what the author found so startling about the riots. [WP # 02009]
Christer Petley. “ ‘The best poor man’s country in the world’? The Position and Aspirations of Non-Sugar-Producing Landowners in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Society”
This paper discusses non-sugar-producing landowners, an important social group that remains understudied. I argue that they were mainly dependent on the sugar estates for their income. Owing to their gender and color, white males in this group enjoyed a limited degree of participation in public life denied to women, free black, and colored landholders. They also had greater opportunities for social and economic advancement. I will conclude by contending that, although the white men were linked to the elite by various ties of dependency, the privileges and the opportunities open to them meant that they closely identified their interests with those of the sugar-planting elite. This strengthened the elite’s ability to control a potentially volatile slave society, ridden with disaffection. [WP # 02018]
David L. Preston. “The Trojan Horse of Empire: Imperial Crisis in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1760-1774”
Scholarship on British North America’s expansion into the trans-Appalachian west in the 1760s has centered on the imperial, diplomatic, and military dimensions of British relations with Native Americans in the Ohio Valley. This essay examines the structures of Euroamerican and Indian settler communities and British garrisons in the contested Ohio Valley; it explores how illegal colonial settlements, racial violence, and British military communities spawned an imperial crisis by the mid-1760s. A close analysis of ordinary peoples’ experiences challenges recent interpretations that the British Empire restrained colonial expansion after the Seven Years’ War. The British army in fact facilitated colonial settlement on the Ohio Indians’ lands. [WP # 02006]
Sandra Rebok. “Alexander von Humboldt and the Colonial Societies of Spanish America”
This study presents an in-depth analysis of Alexander von Humboldt´s descriptions and critical comments on the colonial societies of the regions he visited during his well-known expedition through the Americas (1799-1804). The criticisms of colonialism that he expressed, reflecting his personal convictions, have been the focal point of many studies, but von Humboldt also was able to offer a more differentiated assessment, through comparison of regional and local traditions and developments, that has not yet been analyzed. His personal diaries, which offer many interesting comments on colonial society, have scarcely been used in Humboldtian research, because they are available only in German and partially in French and Spanish. [WP # 02001]
J. Elliott Russo. “ ‘Being Nearly Related’: Authority and Kinship in Colonial Maryland”
This essay examines the process of elite formation and replication at the local level. Through a close study of officeholders of colonial Somerset County, Maryland, and their kin, the paper explores the translation of elite status and power into effective county governance. The analysis moves outward from officeholders to the larger population of county residents and assesses the extent to which major officeholders were related not only to each other, but also to men and women who occupied lower positions in the social hierarchy. The essay concludes that increasingly dense ties of kinship and long association connected Somerset’s residents in ways that fostered a stable and cohesive, albeit stratified, society. [WP # 02014]
Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss. “ ‘The class of white sub-alterns’: Elite White Efforts to Control Martinique’s Male petits blancs, 1802-1830”
This essay explores elite white Creole and European efforts to control the behavior of Martinique's male petits blancs (little whites) between 1802 and 1830. Specifically, it examines efforts to control the numbers of petits blancs occupying the island, to thwart interracial alliances between that population and the island's gens de couleur (free coloreds), and to enact legislative and extra-judicial measures that might ensure familial coherence within poorer white families. It also explores the resistance of male petits blancs to such measures. Through this analysis, the essay illustrates not only the concrete steps that the colonial state took to maintain white superiority and to legitimize a class- and behavior-specific definition of whiteness, but also the fluid nature of white identity in early nineteenth-century Martinique. [WP # 02022]
John Smolenski. “ ‘Bastard Quakers’ in America: The Keithian Schism and the Creation of Creole Quakerism in Early Pennsylvania”
This essay examines the Keithian schism in early Pennsylvania as a case study in the transfer of English cultures and religions in the New World. Exploring George Keith’s claim that his opponents in the Friends Meeting were “bastard Quakers,” I argue that the Keithian schism was the result of rapid creolization, a difficult period in which Pennsylvania Friends tried to adapt to a different, American context while they incorporated a significant number of Quaker converts into their fold. Locating this event within the larger context of the development of British America, I argue that historians should place greater emphasis on the role creolization played in structuring colonial society. [WP # 02012]
Miranda Spieler. “The Guillotine Sèche: Mechanisms of Proscription in Revolutionary France and French Guiana, 1791-1799”
In the wake of the coup of 18 fructidor year V (4 September 1797) against royalists in France's legislative corps, the remaining deputies discovered an expedient and republican technique of national deliverance—deportation, often referred to as the guillotine sè. The story of deported priests and deputies in Guiana has long been a favorite in the royalist black book of the Revolution as an illustration of supreme evil by calculating Jacobins. Outside that tradition, the event rates as a marginal, accidental misfortune prompted by national emergency. Against custom, I argue that an investigation of the purge after fructidor, using the methods of cultural history, yields an especially revealing portrait of Jacobin political ideology and of Guiana’s own revolutionary civic culture. [WP # 02021]
Marcela Ternavasio. “New Recruitment Methods of the Governing Elite in Río de la Plata between 1810 and 1825”
This essay analyzes the changes produced in the social composition and recruitment methods of the governing elite in Río de la Plata in the period when the Spanish Empire collapsed. The abrupt adoption of a representative regime with periodic elections after 1810 transformed the relationships and behavior of the main social groups born from the colonial order. Those changes affected the social composition of the elite by widening its bases—allowing new members—and thus making possible the participation of some groups who previously had been excluded from public affairs. [WP # 02026]
Ben Vinson III. “Studying Race from the Margins: The 'Forgotten Castes': Lobos, Moriscos, Coyotes, Moros, and Chinos in Colonial Mexico”
Using the 1791 military census of Revillagigedo and the 1811 Mexico City census, this essay analyzes the functioning of the late colonial Mexican caste system, particularly with respect to Afro-Mexican racial categories. Of critical importance is studying the demographic impact of lobos, coyotes, moriscos, and chinos. Through an analysis of these groupings, which have received little previous attention in the scholarly literature, new insights are gained into racial pluralism and mestizaje in the colonies. A focus on these marginal groupings provides a deeper understanding of the colonial mentality and of the currency of core racial groupings, such as mulatto, español, and mestizo. [WP # 02008]
Bradford J. Wood. “Carrying Everything before Them: The Rise of the Lower Cape Fear Elite, 1725-1775”
In the decades after their first settlement at Brunswick in 1725, the Lower Cape Fear’s leaders made their region into the wealthiest and most politically influential part of North Carolina. The Lower Cape Fear elite took advantage of the regional limits that characterized social interaction for most settlers. The Lower Cape Fear’s increasing participation in the Atlantic World continued to be dominated by perspectives largely determined by experiences within the region itself. The social structure of the Lower Cape Fear region developed out of the interplay between local variations of experience and the more generalized processes that influenced colonial settlements throughout the British Atlantic world. [WP # 02015]
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© 2002 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.Created September 6, 2002.