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2004 Atlantic Seminar/CRASSH Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the special March 2004 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, “The Atlantic World in Motion,” held in cooperation with the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. A copy of the program, where papers may be viewed in the context of the sessions, is also available. Links from each author's name on the program pages will return the reader to the appropriate abstract here.
Caitlin Anderson. “‘National Characters’: Law, Migration, and Identity in the British Legal World, 1776-1830”
Based primarily on printed law reports and supplementary documents in Britain’s Public Record Office, this paper considers the relationship between law, migration, and the various forms of national legal identity recognized in British courts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For individuals, national status, usually known as “national character,” carried with it a host of privileges and disabilities. Migration offered such individuals, mostly merchants, means of moving chameleon-like from one status to another so as to maximize privileges and minimize disabilities. For their part, judges recognized the destabilizing effect of migration on legal identities and regarded the phenomenon as a new and subversive development that demanded an innovative judicial response. To cope with the protean individuals passing through their courts, judges in the Admiralty and ecclesiastical courts developed and refined a flexible theory of legal identity that could keep pace with people’s movements and foil their evasions. [WP# 04CR013]
Jennifer L. Anderson. “Bounding Oceans, Encompassing Forests: Mobility and Dislocation in the Atlantic Mahogany Trade”
This paper explores two aspects of mobility and consequent dislocation experienced by the enslaved people swept up into the mahogany trade in the mid-eighteenth century. Part I examines the activities of several New England merchants who regularly sold enslaved individuals from one work venue to another in service of the exotic wood trade in Central America and the West Indies. Informal slave sales reshaped peoples’ lives even as they redistributed labor and capital among interconnected ventures, including the high-risk mahogany trade. Part II examines how the rain forest environment shaped the character of slavery in mahogany-harvesting regions. Working within challenging and unstructured natural settings many enslaved persons experienced a high degree of mobility, autonomy, and, at times, even opportunities for self-emancipation. In many ways for its participants, the mahogany trade helped to set the Atlantic world in motion. [WP# 04CR018]
Charles Beatty Medina. “Choosing between Rivals: The Spanish-African Maroon Competition for Captive Indian Labor in the Region of Esmeraldas during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century”
This paper, parting from other studies on forced and voluntary Indian migration in Colonial Quito, examines the competition for Indian labor and subsequent tensions that it created between encomendero elites in Quito and the African maroon societies of Esmeraldas. It proposes that maroon societies in this Pacific Coast province can be best understood as competitors to Spanish power in the region. That is, maroon strategy contained larger aims than autonomy from Spanish authorities and release from the state of slavery. What conditioned the goals and competitive outlets for the Esmeraldas maroons was the strategic location of their settlements along the critical seaway linking Panama to Peru and their intermingling with native societies. The maroons, like all enslaved runaways, were a product of the Atlantic trade. However, in Esmeraldas they altered the imbalance of power between native societies and Spanish colonists. This study further suggests that in line with recent writings on the ethno-genesis of new peoples in Esmeraldas, the ethnically mixed formation of the Esmeraldas maroons resulted in the creation of new “colonial tribes” in the region. These “tribal” associations not only were apparent in the kin-network makeup of the maroon societies, but also were formulated in response to the actions of Spanish authorities and elites. [WP# 04CR023]
Douglas Bradburn. “Subjects and Citizens, Patriots and Pirates: Expatriation, Naturalization, and the Problem of Allegiance in the Revolutionary Atlantic World”
In the United States in the 1790s, problems that had challenged traditional boundaries of belonging and allegiance in the Atlantic world were exacerbated when numerous American citizens began claiming a “natural right of expatriation”—a right to shed their American citizenship and participate as privateers and partisans for the French Republic. Others rejected such notions as characteristic of the worst enthusiasms of the revolutionary age, as visionary abstractions that destroyed the notion of national community entirely, and as claims that threatened to make the American people nothing more than “A band of Miserable Algerines.” British common law practice and British Admiralty policy complicated the matter even further by denying that a British subject could ever escape the responsibilities of perpetual allegiance, even by naturalization in another country. In fact however, the US population swelled in the 1790s with immigrants claiming to have abandoned their subjecthood—British and otherwise—for the promise of American citizenship. The controversies over the supposed “natural right of expatriation” in the young republic became closely linked to an international debate between “the rights of man” and the friends of order—between the advocates of Tom Paine and Edmund Burke. In the end, the polarization sparked by the controversies over expatriation in the United States helped shape the American law and policy of naturalization, as Americans confronted the problem of building a national community from the mingling of Atlantic refugees, expatriates, and aliens. By exploring a series of court cases involving such claims at all levels of jurisdiction in the United States, this essay analyzes the complex and often competing understandings of allegiance and national belonging that helped order and define the mingling of peoples in the Atlantic World. [WP# 04CR012]
Vera Candiani. “Failed Migrants in the Colonies: European Military Engineers in the Desiccation of the Basin of Mexico”
European military engineers transplanted by the Spanish monarchy to the colonies were migrants whose constant geographical mobility, poor pay, and family obligations in their mother countries militated against their social assimilation at their destinations. Through their participation in the desiccation works of the basin of Mexico, they became potential vehicles for the transfer of European scientific and technological knowledge. Although they tried to inject this knowledge into the project, their outsider status undermined their ability or willingness to compromise with local methods of recruitment and organization of labor for the works, as well as with technological practices that they dismissed as inefficient, if not inhuman. In their drive to protect these practices, which shifted the costs of the project onto rural populations, urban desiccation officials rarely implemented the engineers’ recommendations. The failure of military engineers as migrants and vectors of knowledge was not total, however, as their culture was avidly emulated. [WP# 04CR017]
Thomas P. Chadwick. “Canvassing for the Colonies: Comparative Representations of the Recruitment and Mobilisation of Trans-Atlantic Emigrants in Britain, 1580-1620 and 1660-1710”
This paper focuses on contemporary attitudes, as evident in the pamphlet press, towards the recruitment and attempted mobilisation of emigrants and labour within Britain for colonial Atlantic destinations during two interludes of time, 1580-1620 and 1660-1710. The earlier colonial promoters, particularly those associated with the Virginia Company, it will be argued, accepted the widespread contemporary notion that Britain was over-populated, and they therefore worried little about attracting emigrant labour to the nascent colonies. The overseas settlements were frequently touted as a solution to the socio-economic problems occasioned by an expanding population. Writers also, however, often portrayed colonial enterprise primarily as a religious, especially a missionary, endeavour, which had implications for their attitudes regarding emigration and emigrants. This tendency, it is argued, which was probably a reaction to prevailing anti-colonial sentiment, resulted in the expression, in line with the religious beliefs of the promoters, of exacting preferences for emigrants of good moral character. After the Restoration in 1660, it will be argued, the context, character, and focus of the debate entirely shifted and became almost wholly concerned with the economic merits and demerits of the transfer of emigrants, as a labour source, from Britain to the Americas. It appears, therefore, that a major shift in attitudes occurred during the seven-teenth century regarding the perceived contemporary importance of the issue of the recruitment and mobilisation of labour for the American colonies. [WP# 04CR002]
Emma Christopher. “As Black as a Tar: Seamen of African Origin and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
This paper will examine African, African-American, Afro-British and Afro-Caribbean men who worked onboard British and North American slave ships. It will explore the factors that led them to take such work and the ways in which they interacted with both European crewmembers and captive slaves. It will argue that these men were a central part of the eighteenth-century Atlantic movement of working-class peoples who travelled all ways around the ocean, as well as comprising an early “black Atlantic” that spread information and abolitionism around the port cities of the North Atlantic. [WP# 04CR001]
John C. Coombs. “‘The Substantiall Planters Have of Those Negro Slaves’: The Transformation of Elite Labor Forces and the Development of Slave Society in Early Colonial Virginia”
Historians have, of course, long been aware of the importance of Virginia’s seventeenth-century conversion from white to black labor. But while scholars have devoted considerable effort to explaining why this pivotal transition occurred, a detailed analysis of how it happened does not exist, nor has the question of how the “process of conversion” influenced the cultural orientation of African American communities ever been fully considered. Because of their limited access to the transatlantic slave trade, even the wealthiest Virginians initially found it difficult to procure slaves and for decades elite-owned labor forces remained racially mixed. Early African immigrants consequently faced enormous pressure to acquire the language and conform to the behavioral norms of the dominant Anglo-American society, giving the cultural compromises that they ultimately reached with each other an assimilationist bent. As the founding generations relinquished community leadership to their native-born children and grandchildren, African-American society in the colony acquired an anglicized veneer that continued to persist and shape life in slave quarters even after the advent of large direct deliveries in the early eighteenth century. [WP# 04CR020]
Jordana Dym. “Citizen of Which Republic: Foreigners and the Construction of Citizenship in Revolutionary Central America, ca. 1808-1845”
What is a citizen? While the answer may now seem obvious or intuitive, for those defining national citizenship in the revolutionary Atlantic (ca. 1780-1840), the task was complex. How would independent American governments deal with the challenges not just of defining citizens of multi-ethnic populations but also of multinational ones? The vocal presence of voluntary migrants and their diplomatic repre-sentatives prompted local, regional, and international disputes over government authority to set the terms of residence, naturalization, and participation on their own soil. Which republic—local, country of residence, or country of origin—could or should determine the nature and extent of an individual’s citizenship? This paper examines the construction of national citizenship in Central America from the upheavals and constitutional monarchy that followed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain (1808-1821) through the first era of national development (1821-1845). It argues that Central American statesmen, foreign residents, and diplomats all drew from theories of international law (the Law of Nations) to participate in a process of codifying and standardizing definitions of the rights and privileges of “citizens” and “foreigners” in a series of important internal and international disputes. [WP# 04CR011]
Victor Enthoven. “A Dutch Crossing: Migration between the Netherlands, Africa, and the Americas, 1600-1800”
This paper presents an overview of two hundred years of demographic consequences of Dutch presence in the Western Hemisphere. The first section deals with the European Atlantic diaspora via the Netherlands. In more detail it addresses the German migration to North America and the Jewish Diaspora to Suriname and the Antilles. In the second part, the focus will be on Dutch Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Dutch settlements: topics already thoroughly researched by others. I will, however, explain in more detail how free and enslaved Africans also visited the Dutch Republic. In the third and last section, an overview is presented of the mingling between the Europeans, the African Americans, and the indigenous people in Dutch settle-ments in New Netherland (North America), New Holland (Brazil), Guiana, the Antilles, and West Africa. I will specially focus on the ethnicity of the Dutch colonial military forces. [WP# 04CR003]
Stephen Feeley. “Roads Between: Shaping Tuscarora Identities and the Backcountry in the Eighteenth Century”
Despite their dispersal at the end of the Tuscarora War in 1713, for much of the eighteenth century contacts continued between Tuscaroras living in a reservation in North Carolina and another band living among the Iroquois in New York. These ties took the form of two streams: one, of warriors journeying south in the company of Iroquois war parties striking against Catawba-allied tribes in Virginia and the Carolinas; the second, of emigrants who journeyed north to rejoin their kin living in Iroquoia. These contacts helped perpetuate a shared Tuscarora identification between the separate bands, but also exacerbated and created tensions. The existence of such links, and the flow of people that they represented, created problems and opportunities for colonial officials attempting to order frontiers. [WP# 04CR005]
Roquinaldo Ferreira. “Deconstructing African Narrative: Enslavement, Resistance, Community, and Displacement in Angola”
In 1738, an enslaved African, José Inácio, who was sent from Luanda, Angola, to Brazil, managed to make his way to Lisbon and filed a petition with the Portuguese Crown describing how he had been unfairly enslaved and asking to return to Luanda. My paper uses José Inácio’s first-hand account of enslavement to examine four issues: enslavement, resistance, community, and displacement. I begin by relying on Inácio’s account about his mother and his own experience with enslavement to structure my analysis. I then draw on records on enslaved Africans to further understand the several ways Africans could fall into slavery. Historians have implied that enslavement was an irreversible act, but my paper shows how some Africans were able to avoid becoming enslaved through resistance and to negotiate their freedom through institutional mechanisms established by the colonial administration in Luanda. I also argue that creolization is a key aspect to understanding African response to Atlantic slaving. Creole Africans were able to form family, and they created community links. Furthermore, the creolized background of Luanda slaves allowed them to circulate throughout several settings in the African-Brazilian Atlantic world. This section of the paper (displacement) challenges the notion that Atlantic slaving was irreversible and seeks to show that Africans sold into Atlantic slaving were able to reconnect with Africa. I seek to shift away from a macroanalysis of slaving and toward the construction of a framework that centers on African perceptions. [WP# 04CR021]
Jeffrey A. Fortin. “‘The Most uncontrolled Freedom‘: The Haitian Revolution, Jamaican Maroons, and the French Connection”
The Haitian Revolution rocked the Atlantic world, abruptly changing its socio-political composition. By examining the impact of the Haitian Revolution more closely, we can see its effects on marginalized populations across the Atlantic world. Perhaps there is no better illustration of this than the Trelawney Maroons of Jamaica. British colonies, in particular, reacted strongly to the slave insurrection in Haiti. Britons’ fears of a French plot to destroy the Empire provoked iron-fisted dealings with rebellious communities. Throughout the mid 1790s, Jamaica's white officials feared the arrival of French insurgents on the island, who, they alleged, would spark a revolution similar to Haiti's. In response to these anxieties, aroused by the Haitian Revolution and the concurrent radical French ideology, the Trelawney Town Maroons—whose identity developed in opposition to slaves, mulattoes, and others in the African Diaspora—rebelled. In attempting to gain concessions from British officials, Maroons encountered a ruthless governor, who deported the entire community to Nova Scotia. Once adrift in the British Atlantic, the Trelawney Maroons confronted exile in an empire that once recognized them as a quasi-independent nation. This working paper raises questions about several important issues challenging scholars of the Atlantic world. For instance, what was the influence of revolutionary ideology among persons of African descent in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world? How pervasive were British fears of French-inspired revolts of African peoples? How fluid and variegated were African Diaspora identities in the Age of Revolution? Finally, how did the removal of marginalized populations alter an increasingly complex British Atlantic World? [WP# 04CR022]
François Furstenberg. “Francophone Philadelphia and Political Networks in the Early American Republic, c. 1790s”
This paper follows a set of French expatriate refugees who fled the French Revolution to Philadelphia, and examines the social, political, and economic connections they forged—focusing particularly on politics and on land speculation—in order to reassess the nature and practice of US political life during the era of the French Revolution. [WP# 04CR007]
Rhonda M. Gonzales. “Emergent Communities and Collective Identities: African and Indigenous Resistance in Colonial Mexico”
While Mexico’s Spanish viceroy promoted social identities rooted in a biologically based castas system, Mexico’s African, indigenous, and ethnically mixed populations shaped their own identities. In a direct challenge to the government’s desired social order, they organized many collective acts of resistance. Although a variety of protests occurred over the course of the colonial period, this paper examines cimarron settlements and urban rebellions in an effort to understand the way various communities constructed collective identities in an environment of imposed ethnic hierarchy. These forms of protests comprised at least three distinct characteristics. The formation of cimarron settlements was widespread among slaves working in rural settings, while rebellions and riots often characterized resistance in urban areas. Whereas residents of cimarron societies were typically ethnically homogenous, urban dissenters more often comprised heterogeneous ethnic groups. Finally cimarron inhabitants moved to create self-sufficient societies free from Spanish subjugation, while urban-based populations looked to overthrow the oppressive regime and form their own government. Thus collective identities took shape without much regard for the official social order. Instead, they emerged at the junction of location and oppression. [WP# 04CR019]
Claire Healy. “‘English Faces at the Port’: Atlantic Networks in Buenos Aires, 1776-1825”
This paper will examine the movements of Irish, English, and Scottish businessmen in Buenos Aires, 1776-1825, and approaches an understanding of the part they played in creating an auspicious economic climate that enabled Irish migrants to prosper when they began to arrive in Argentina. The paper will highlight the central significance of the community infrastructure that these early Irish and British inhabitants of colonial, and, later, independent Buenos Aires developed, sustained and maintained. British and Irish migrants lived side-by-side with, traded with, and occasionally intermarried with other immigrants and with the Creole, indigenous, and Afro-Argentine populations of Buenos Aires. British identity and citizenship, however, were of vast importance to this small nucleus of British and Irish residents between 1776 and 1825—an identity that many in Ireland were domestically uncomfortable with, yet one that was appropriated for economic and social advantage in Argentina. These migrants were a remarkably mobile group, demonstrating high levels of regional mobility and return migration. The migration of Irish people to Buenos Aires Province differed in many significant respects from the flow of Irish migrants to other destinations in the Atlantic world, thus demonstrating the influence of particular Atlantic networks on immigrants’ decision making and subsequent prospects for success. [WP# 04CR008]
Dan Hicks. “Atlantic Matters: Mobility, Inter-action and ‘Material History’ in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean”
During the 1990s, Atlantic studies benefited from contributions from such diverse fields as ethnography, sociology, and performance studies but received few useful contributions from historical archaeology. Where engaging with Atlantic contexts at all, historical archaeologists have either read capitalist power relations in local spaces or have presented the ocean as a two-dimensional arena across which themes such as “capitalism” or “colonialism” may be chased in comparative studies. In contrast, this paper aims to apply the contextual, interpretive, traditions of historical archaeology—which emphasize especially the role of material culture in imagining and bringing about identities and personal social worlds—to the study of colonial interactions in the eastern Caribbean in the seventeenth century. The paper considers the landscapes of seventeenth-century settlement in southern St. Lucia and St. Kitts, which is often presented as the “mother colony” of English Caribbean settlement. It is argued that through landscapes and material culture in the seventeenth-century Caribbean—whether the “enclosed gardens” at which tropical staples were grown for trade by English and Carib alike, or the juxtapositions of European tin-glazed earthenwares with local, hand-made cooking vessels—a diversity of material Atlantic worlds were imagined and brought about. Through its exploration of interaction, agriculture, and ethnogenesis, the paper aims to provide a case study that demonstrates the great interdisciplinary potential of material history for Atlantic studies. [WP# 04CR010]
Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec. “Slave Migrations, Diasporic Identities, and the Problem of Slave Control in Early American Louisiana”
Despite recent trends in the historiography of slavery within the Atlantic complex, the history of slave migration in early American Louisiana—domestic and transatlantic—is still made of inaccurate estimates and tentative brush strokes. One of the main reasons, apart from the necessity of mastering three languages, has been the generally accepted maxim that most of the available primary sources describing the dislocation and relocation of slaves around the time of the Louisiana Purchase had been lost. Using new English, French and Spanish primary sources and new census calculations, the present paper has documented the forced migration of over 16,000 African, Caribbean, and American slaves between the reopening of the slave trade in late Spanish Louisiana and the beginning of the Anglo-American War. Such diaspora altered, in fundamental ways, the demographic and linguistic identity of the Louisiana slave community and threatened to destabilize the pillars of the new political entity that took form in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. Slave migration in early American Louisiana exposed the fragile articulations of a slave society in the making and called for the renegotiation of the slave / master and slave / slave relationships. [WP# 04CR015]
Mark Meuwese. “Trans-Atlantic Mobility and Native Americans: Brazilian Tupi Indians in the Dutch Atlantic World, 1625-1657”
Most studies of trans-oceanic mobility and migration in the early modern Atlantic World have focused on European colonists and African slaves. By using the Tupi Indians in Dutch Brazil as a case study, I argue that Native Americans were sometimes trans-Atlantic travelers in their own right. When the Dutch West India Company invaded Brazil in the 1620s, several Tupi peoples used the Dutch as a counterweight against the Portuguese. In this paper I show that the coastal Tupis, through their alliance with the Dutch, frequently crossed the Atlantic to gather intelligence, forge multi-ethnic alliances, participate in colonial wars in West Africa, and communicate with metropolitan authorities in Europe. Conceptualizing the Tupi Indians as trans-Atlantic travelers demonstrates that oceanic mobility was not limited to Europeans or people of African descent, but also included Native Americans. [WP# 04CR016]
Kevin Roberts. “Congolization in Atlantic Louisiana: The Multi-Ethnic, Catholic Networks of Africans and Creoles, 1795-1825”
My paper advances two principal arguments: first, it examines Catholicism as a tool, and local Catholic churches as sites, of community-building for slaves and free people of color in southern Louisiana. Specifically, I argue, first, that the importation of approximately 15,000 African slaves between 1795 and 1810 prompted a significant social and cultural upheaval among the colony’s people of African descent. To navigate that upheaval, Creole slaves and free people of color used the act of godparenting to forge large, interlocking networks of fictive kin that they understood as important to the social survival of the African and African Louisianan community. Second, even though Congolese slaves accounted for a majority of the new arrivals, enslaved people from a handful of other West African societies—namely, Mandingas, Igbos, and Chambas—constituted a significant proportion of the 1795-1808 migration. Consequently, the act of godparenting not only built a social bridge between the predominant Congolese and the once-predominant Creoles, but also built connections among all the new arrivals and the Creole population. [WP# 04CR014]
Linda M. Rupert. “‘Sailing Suspicious Routes’: Atlantic Diasporas and the Transgression of Boundaries in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean Contraband Trade”
The inter-imperial contraband trade that thrived in the eighteenth-century Caribbean involved the crossing of numerous boundaries, not only geographic and political frontiers, but also social and racial barriers. Successful smuggling ventures entailed collusion among a variety of people, including colonial officials, vessel owners, merchants, captains, and sailors (black and white, enslaved and free). This paper examines the intermingling of people that occurred at the nodal points of illicit trade—in ports, on board vessels, and at coastal rendezvous sites—and the connections that participants developed across the perceived divides of empire, race/ethnicity, and social class. I focus on commerce between the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao and the northern littoral of mainland Spanish America in the mid-eighteenth century. This provides a window into the complexities of human interactions that occurred in the interstices of emerging empires in the early modern colonial Atlantic world. [WP# 04CR004]
Rosalie Smith McCrea. “Caribbeana’s Hybrid Muse: Creole Visual and Material Cultures in the Making, 1660-1840”
This paper will show that within the colonial circum-Atlantic odyssey, as it concerned Jamaica and other English-speaking Caribbean Islands from ca. 1660 to 1840, visual and material production emerged through diasporic diffusion based on historical, political, and economic changes being created for the region from other metropoles. Groups such as Sephardic Jews played pivotal roles in Port Royal culture. Throughout the five visual case studies, the notion of Paradise as an Island Eden is a recurring motif. “Land and Landscape” came to signify social and material betterment and status for a certain Creole class, those whose forebears had aided in wresting Jamaica from Spanish colonial rule. Toward 1730, for some elites landscape also acted as a commemorative signifier in an attempt to recapture lost humanist European thinking, bringing together, for example, allegories such as the Four Corners of the Earth. From 1760 onward, the Jamaican landscape appeared to have become even more commercialized with Creoles’ desire to appropriate metropolitan aesthetic styles in order to lure potential buyers from the center as well as from within their periphery. Paradise as an Island Eden also operated as signifier for unlimited hybridization and mutation under colonial commerce and progress with the Botanical Garden. We begin to see the formations of the Afro-Creole inflections of Caribbean identity being brought forward only during the apprenticeship system (1833-1838) and after full emancipation. This came about through the commercial medium of lithography. [WP# 04CR009]
David Watson. “Cultures of Conflict? British Soldiers on the Colonial Frontier in the Period after the Seven Years War”
This essay explores the complex interaction between the different inhabitants of the British North American frontier, in the period after the end of the Seven Years War. In particular, it focuses on the, often difficult role of British soldiers in their frontier posts and their interaction with Native Americans and French colonists. This work does not focus on diplomatic relations on the frontier. Instead, it looks at how the garrisons functioned in their ultimately futile mission to preserve peace. The role of the British Army on the frontier is controversial. Though this period saw a rising tide of violence in the frontier region, the British Army also proved able to co-operate with Native Americans, despite the often malicious actions of French settlers. [WP# 04CR006]
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