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2003 Seminar Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the 2003 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, "Transatlantic Networks, 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.
Denver A. Brunsman. "Everyday Escapes: The Art of Evading the British Press Gang"
Naval impressment, or forced conscription, helped to shape the British Atlantic world of the long eighteenth century (1688-1815). The institution affected the fundamental decisions Atlantic seafarers made during wartime, including where to live, how to dress, and what work to pursue. Yet far from a leviathan, the press gang could be tricked, manipulated, and evaded by ordinary sailors. Allying with merchants, sailors used transatlantic shipping networks to escape conscription. They also relied on local family networks to help free them after being impressed. Seamen’s “everyday escapes,” though not revolutionary, threatened the ideological coherence and political stability of Britain’s maritime “empire of liberty.” [WP# 03010]
Paul Cohen. "Mediating Linguistic Difference in the Early Modern French Atlantic World: Linguistic Diversity in Old and New France"
While France's participation in the early modern Atlantic World offered new opportunities for trade, the dissemination of the Catholic faith, and colonial conquest, it also created new linguistic problems of communication. French explorers, fur traders, and missionaries sought to fashion a linguistic common ground with the Amerindian inhabitants of New France. Although the linguistic challenge of communicating with American Indians was severe, the experience of linguistic diversity was by no means new for the French. Early modern France was an intensely polyglot society in which French was only one of many competing languages. While inhabitants of the Paris region and high nobles across France spoke French, priests said Mass and university professors lectured in Latin, and people in the provinces communicated in a dizzying variety of local languages and dialects. Inhabitants of early modern France were therefore thoroughly accustomed to linguistic diversity. In this paper I analyze early modern French linguistic cultures in light of the larger French Atlantic experience—how French thinking about language shaped the ways in which French merchants, missionaries, and colonial administrators thought about and sought to accommodate linguistic diversity in the Americas on the one hand, and how the Atlantic experience provided new topoi and frameworks for thinking about linguistic diversity back in France. [WP# 03017]
Beatriz Dávilo. "Travels, Correspondence, and Newspapers in the Constitution of Transatlantic Political and Intellectual Networks: Rio de la Plata, 1810-1825"
In Hispanic America, from revolution onward, transatlantic intellectual and political networks provided the local élites political languages and institutional models capable of consolidating a new legitimacy principle substituting the one that had collapsed together with the Spanish colonial order. In the Río de la Plata, as soon as the revolution broke out, the independent governments—seeking external recognition and internal acceptance—encouraged the establishment of those networks by means of travels, correspondence, and the press. Yet it was not until 1820 that an order—based mainly on Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian principles and supported by a liberal élite led by Bernardino Rivadavia—could be built, albeit not over all the Rio de la Plata region, but only in Buenos Aires province. The failure of that experience, a few years later, showed the Buenos Aires élite that the solution to the country’s problems was to be found not in the imitation of European or North American institutional models, but in the transformation of local society, a task that required persistent efforts and that would be accomplished only after many years. [WP# 03015]
John Donoghue. " ‘Hell Broke Loose’: Coleman Street Ward and the Atlantic World of Republicanism, 1626-1661"
My paper will trace the development of an Atlantic network of radical puritan republicans, based in the Coleman Street Ward of London that flourished between 1626 and 1661. Although Coleman Street puritans made important contributions to the political life of early New England, as well as Civil War and Interregnum England, this network has escaped the attention of most scholars of seventeenth-century religious and political thought. I will begin by looking at the contributions Coleman Street Ward merchants made to Parliamentary opposition to the absolute monarchy of Charles I and at their efforts to thwart the Counter-Reformation crusade of Archbishop Laud. As part of this opposition, Coleman Street Ward merchants led the way in chartering, financing, and ultimately settling the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I also explore the more radical puritanism of the ward’s poorer denizens, whose “mechanick preachers” stirred up popular belief that resistance to Stuart tyranny should culminate in the egalitarian transformation of England. I follow these Coleman Street sectarians across the Atlantic in the Great Migration to New England, where they were left to contend with more conservative views of a godly commonwealth, and through their organized opposition to those views in Boston, many were later banished to Rhode Island in 1638. There they established, in their words, a “democratic government” organized around the central idea of “liberty of conscience,” where civil magistrates had no jurisdiction in the spiritual affairs of citizens. In the 1640s, during the English Civil War, many Rhode Island exiles returned to London. In the sectarian meeting houses of the Coleman Street Ward, these “spiritists” participated in, and eventually helped lead, the radical republican opposition to puritan leader Oliver Cromwell, whose regime had assumed many of the trappings of Stuart absolutism. The story concludes at the Restoration, with the execution of Thomas Venner, a former New England sectarian who staged a doomed rebellion against Charles II. [WP# 03002]
Kate Carté Engel. " ‘Commerce that the Lord could Sanctify and Bless’: Moravian Participation in Transatlantic Trade, 1740-1760"
The eighteenth-century Moravian community, German-speaking Pietists, established missions and settlements throughout the Atlantic world. Their tightly connected network was at once religious and economic in function and purpose. This paper explores the fluid relationship between those two aspects of life in terms of shipping, the life of an individual New York merchant, and then finally through the Commercial Society, a joint venture established in 1758 to capitalize on the information gained through missionary work. The paper’s transatlantic perspective offers a corrective to the idea, particularly strong in Moravian historiography but far more broadly influential, that religiously oriented or community-focused early American societies stood apart from or in opposition to a market-driven economy, and it argues for more complicated melding of religious and economic forms. [WP# 03009]
Amanda Epperson. " ‘If You Intend to Come’: Networks, the Migration Process, and Highland Emigration to the United States"
Migration networks were immensely important in the Atlantic world, as they directed the flow of information between communities and were an important component of the migration process. If strong enough, these networks coalesced into ethnic communities, which either helped or hindered an immigrant’s adjustment to and success in the New World. The significant numbers who left the Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may also have created something of a Gaelic Atlantic world, with communication and movement between the Highlands, Upper Canada, New York, and Ohio. These themes will be explored in the context of Scotch Settlement, a Highland community established in Ohio in 1802. [WP# 03014]
David M. Fitzsimons. "Citizen Paine: National and International Identity in the Atlantic World circa 1800"
Based primarily on an analysis of his actions and his major and minor writings, this working paper attempts to locate the geographic locus of Thomas Paine’s national identity. Arguments singling out England, France, and the United States all offer strong evidence in favor of each contender. So strong are the individual claims that the combined weight of any two outweighs the claims of any single one. This suggests a transnational identity for Paine as a “citizen of the world,” and ample additional evidence supports that case. Ultimately, however, this designation is too broad: the locus of Paine’s identity was a specific part of the world, the Atlantic world, to be precise. [WP# 03001]
Sharilyn Geistfeld. "Plotting Females from Paris to Salvador: Women's Agency and Struggles for Equality in the 1796 ‘Conspiracy of Equals’ in Paris and in the 1798 ‘Tailors’ Conspiracy’ in Salvador, Brazil"
This paper explores the possible presence and political participation of women in a 1798 revolutionary democratic movement—“The Conspiracy of Tailors”—in Salvador, Brazil. Although this movement, which demanded independence from Portugal and a republican form of government, as well as the abolition of slavery and equality for all, was suppressed and its leaders executed, it represented a moment of rupture and questioned the relationships of every person in colonial Salvador. A neglected issue in the existing literature on the 1798 “Tailors’ Conspiracy” concerns the political participation and roles of women. Transcripts from the court trials establish the presence of twelve female witnesses who were detained to give testimony against the alleged leaders of the 1798 conspiracy. Who were these women? What particular factors of their lives and in their environment might have provoked them to participate in the conspiracy? What impact did local culture have on their possible political participation? To what extent might the revolutionary events in Haiti and France have influenced them? It is to the 1796 “Conspiracy of Equals” in Paris, where several women played significant roles, and to the writings of Gracchus Babeuf who laid much of its ideological foundation, that I look to for additional insights and information to more thoroughly examine the presence and possible political involvement of women in the 1798 struggle in Salvador. A similar set of ideas about “Liberté, Equalité, and Fraternité” suggests that transatlantic links might have informed the ideas and actions of both conspiracies, whose common cause was a struggle for equality. This initial study links insights about women’s presence and actions to ideas circulating about women and politics in the late eighteenth century; it offers a way to begin to rethink both transatlantic networks and women’s agency and action, individually and in groups, during the “age of revolution” on this particular southeastern shore of the Atlantic. [WP# 03016]
Travis Glasson. "Masters and Pastors: The SPG and the Conversion of African-Americans in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic"
Over the eighteenth century, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) formed a widespread and multi-dimensional Anglican network concerned with the religious conversion of Africans and African-Americans around the Atlantic. SPG ministers catechized slaves throughout the mainland and Caribbean colonies and the Society mobilized its considerable British resources to forward this work. SPG efforts were predicated on religious beliefs that saw the conversion of heathens as a Christian duty, but which also saw slavery and Christianity as entirely compatible. The SPG’s conversion project was shaped by the ownership of slaves by the Society’s missionaries and by the Society itself, preeminently on Codrington, the Barbadian sugar plantation it controlled. The Society’s attitudes toward slavery and slave ownership meant that the SPG’s endeavors often had ambiguous and double-edged implications for the very people it aimed to convert. [WP# 03019]
Sheryllynne Haggerty. "Absent Kings in Kingston? Business Networks and Family Ties: The View from Eighteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica"
Much of the ‘traditional’ or received history of the British West Indies concentrates on sugar, slavery, and the ‘absentee’ elite planter class. Little work has been undertaken on port and mercantile communities in the region, despite their importance in binding the British Atlantic world together. This paper will turn the ‘absentee’ story on its head, and use two case studies to demonstrate that being white in Jamaica did not guarantee wealth. Family and mercantile connections, risk taking, bloody-mindedness, and some luck were required in order to succeed. Merchants in ports such as Kingston were vital to the conduct of trade through their use and abuse of their connections. These personal stories also demonstrate, however, that while these men were trying to make their fortune in Jamaica, there were many demands on them from their families at home. They were required to give both financial and emotional support while they were ‘absentees’ from England in Jamaica. [# 03005]
Emma Hart. " ‘The Public Works are every where carrying on with Spirit’: Charleston and the Emergence of a British Atlantic Civic Ideal, 1730-1790"
This paper examines the processes and people involved in the construction of public space in Charleston, South Carolina, during the colonial and revolutionary era. By placing this investigation in the general context of urban development in a British Atlantic world, it shows how changes taking place in the English town environment guided the development of this New World town. As ways of building, designing, and ordering the landscape transformed the British town, they also shaped Charleston. What is more, the ongoing investment of Charlestonians in the idea of a ‘modern’ town eventually resulted in the establishment of a separate urban elite. This town elite was distinct from the colonial elite, and their commitment to a certain civic ideal further united them with their metropolitan cousins. Thus, despite its location in an American slave South, in many ways the Charleston of 1790 was still operating as part of a British Atlantic urban world. [wp# 03004]
Christopher Hodson. "Conversations with Power: The Acadians’ Atlantic, 1755-1785"
This paper examines the settlement of fifteen hundred Acadian refugees—former inhabitants of Nova Scotia expelled from their province by the British in 1755—on agricultural colonies near the French town of Chatellerault during the early 1770s. Inaugurated in 1773, these experimental communities collapsed during the winter of 1775/1776, sending most of their inhabitants fleeing to the nearby port city of Nantes and eventually to Spanish Louisiana. Scholarly literature usually attributes the failure of the Chatellerault colonies to the incompatibility of a pervasive, well-defined Acadian identity with the ancien régime’s restrictive structures. Instead, I argue that a resourceful cadre of leaders engineered the colonies’ decimation, holding the exiled Acadians together by coercion, violence, and the keen manipulation of post-Seven Years’ War France’s myriad political insecurities. Their actions, along with those of the refugees who chose to stay in the Chatellerault colonies, reveal the Acadians’ Atlantic world as a highly politicized labor market ruled by resource-rich, labor-poor empires. [WP# 03018]
Christian Koot. "In Pursuit of Profit: Persistent Dutch Influence on the Inter-Imperial Trade of New York and the Lesser Antilles, 1621-1689"
After a review of the English-language scholarship concerning the construction of the Dutch and English Atlantic empires in the seventeenth century, I use a comparative perspective to consider the importance of persistent Dutch influences in two particular British places in the Western Hemisphere during the seventeenth century: the city of New York and the port cities of the Lesser Antilles. This work will reveal the extent to which resident colonists continued to depend heavily upon intra-Caribbean and transatlantic commerce with more commercially successful Dutch traders. Trade with the Dutch Republic allowed the immature English settlements to survive exogenous and endogenous crises and spurred their internal economic development through the supply of needed goods and services. By detailing the benefits inter-imperial trade provided, my paper suggests that membership in the empire was just one of a variety of factors that enabled English colonies to succeed. [WP# 03012]
Silvia Marzagalli. "The Establishment of a Transatlantic Trade Network: Bordeaux and the United States, 1783-1815"
Eighteenth-century Bordeaux was well integrated into the Atlantic economy. The bulk of the city’s trade lay in the West Indies. In the 1780s, exchanges with the United States were limited. The French Wars changed this situation and initiated intense transatlantic relations between the United States and Bordeaux. Behind the appearance of an important Franco-American import-export trade, neutral U.S. ships sustained traditional Bordeaux transatlantic exchanges. The paper assesses the participation of American and Bordeaux merchants in the establishment of these trade links and explores the nature of the ties they built across the ocean. Politics, trust, and information emerge as the key factors enabling merchants to conduct business. Their network, defined as a structure that underlay coordination mechanisms, relied heavily on personal acquaintances and kinship. [WP# 03006]
Joanne McKay. "Arthur Dobbs and Henry McCulloh: Developing the Empire, 1725-1765"
This paper will focus on selected aspects of the lives and careers of Arthur Dobbs and Henry McCulloh, two intriguing figures who made valuable contributions, politically and economically, to the British North American Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. While in Ireland Dobbs, a landowner and a Member of the Irish Parliament, cultivated an extensive interest in the North American colonies, and when he undertook the practical implementation of his schemes for colonial development, he formed an alliance with Henry McCulloh, a prominent and wealthy London merchant. This paper will highlight the transatlantic nature of their careers and enhance awareness of Dobbs and McCulloh by identifying and assessing the nature of their interests in the British Empire—specifically the North American colonies—and the success of a selection of their colonial ventures from their own accounts and those of their network of contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic. [WP 03013]
Jeremy Mumford. "The Right To Be Different in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Empire: Transatlantic Context and an Andean Example"
The early modern Spanish empire rejected religious pluralism but allowed the possibility of cultural pluralism, in the sense of tolerating minorities’ customs, institutions, and traditional leaders. The right to be different was by no means guaranteed—in fact, presumptions were against it—but there was room for argument. Three arguments for pluralism emerged in the sixteenth century, in debates over how to rule Spanish moriscos (converted Muslims) and New World peoples: that conquered people might require different forms of society because they were less civilized than Spaniards; that they had an inherited right to their own ways; and that Spain might sell conquered people the right to be different. In the mountains of Peru, however, a fourth argument was articulated alongside the others: that the landscape where the conquered people lived might itself require a different form of society. This argument for environmental pluralism emerged in debates over a distinctive feature of Andean society—the organization of a community as a scattered network of enclaves, rather than as a compact settlement. In the sixteenth century, some Spaniards defended this model as appropriate for the Andes, while others attacked it as barbaric. In the 1570s, the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo reorganized Andean society, moving native Andeans into newly built villages called reducciones de indios. But this did not fully settle the question of Andeans’ right to be different. I argue that the organization of Viceroy Toledo’s reducciones drew on theories of cultural pluralism as well as on arguments against it. [WP# 03003]
Rachel O’Toole. " ‘From the Same Land’: Colonial Casta and African Networks in Seventeenth-Century Peru"
Transatlantic traders labeled colonial slaves according to misnomers of African geographies and polities known as casta or nación that Africans in the Americas would articulate as reasons for allegiance or enmity. Employing casta categories in slave trade records and provincial criminal cases, this working paper outlines multiple schisms among Africans and criollos who labored on coastal Peruvian sugar haciendas. Slaves articulated African Diaspora identities that included occupa-tional hierarchies as well as local affinities such as kinship and household. In doing so, Africans and their descendants gave meaning to casta while undermining its colonial intentions. This brief intervention expands Atlantic studies to consider Diaspora identities in the Pacific where Spanish casta categorization transformed, and was challenged by, Africans as well as indigenous communities. While Spanish law separated people according to casta, the larger project examines African and Indian interactions across, and in conjunction with, these colonial divisions, to explore hegemonic mechanics of colonization. [WP# 03007]
Susanah Shaw. "The Women of Amsterdam and the Formation of Transatlantic Networks, 1609-1664"
Women participated in essential ways in the making of a transatlantic economy in the early Dutch trading empire. Through international family trade and gendered economic networks, women in the Old World helped sustain overseas ties between 1609 and 1664. Studying the ways ordinary men and women in Amsterdam traded with New Netherland and the wider Dutch Atlantic reveals how social networks underlay the formation of an Atlantic world. [WP# 03011]
Javier Villa-Flores. " ‘The Speaking Arts of the Devil’: Divination and Ventriloquism among Slave Women in Seventeenth-Century Colonial Mexico"
This paper analyzes the use among Afro-Mexican slave women of the physical technique known as “talking through the chest,” a ventriloquist art of divination that gained the practitioners the fearful respect of a multi-ethnic clientele in New Spain. Producing voices that appeared to originate somewhere other than their actual source, Afro-Mexicans created entities that offered advice, located stolen or lost objects, or helped their clientele to make difficult decisions. Based on Inquisitorial records, religious treatises, and slave legislation of the time, this essay will explore the ways in which slave diviners crossed and negotiated colonial and racial boundaries by performing this magical strategy of deflection of responsibility, voice authorization, and self-fashioning in New Spain. At a broader level, my essay will offer a new approach to the study of religious syncretism in a trans-atlantic context by analyzing the use and representation of African divinatory practices in colonial Mexico. [WP# 03008]
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© 2003 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.Created August 7, 2003.