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1997 Seminar Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the 1997 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, "Ideas of Empire, Imperial Politics, and the Governance of Colonies: The European Powers in America, 1500-1800." Each author's name is linked to his or her place in the 1997 program, where papers may be viewed in the context of the sessions, and links from each author's name on the program pages will return the reader to the appropriate abstract here. We regret that at present we cannot fulfill requests for copies of Working Papers, though we hope to do so in the future. If you are interested in an individual working paper, please contact the author directly.
David Armitage, "From the Empire of Great Britain to the British Empire: The Emergence of the British Atlantic Community, c. 1540-1740"
The idea of Atlantic history is a product of the late twentieth century, but the conception of an Atlantic community long antedates this historiographical agenda. This paper examines the emergence of a conception of the British Atlantic world as a single polity defined by a distinctive genealogy, history, and ideology. The idea of a community that encompassed Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean islands, and the continental colonies of North America emerged in recognizable form only in the 1730s, when political philosophers, historians, and polemicists argued that these formerly disparate territories were linked by common interests, a shared history, and a unifying ideology into a single commonwealth called the "British Empire." The conception of an Atlantic polity was therefore a relatively late development in British political thought and, once it had emerged, lasted barely thirty years (c. 1735-65).[WP #97020]
Kenneth Banks, "Imperial Control and Urban Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century French America"
Although the French state designed and closely regulated the urban development of French American towns and ports, it is striking that most of the towns developed aspects independent of absolutist control and remained nests of colonial autonomy. A reexamination of colonial correspondence and travellers' accounts suggests that French colonists, both free and unfree, exerted a far greater control over the building of towns than has previously been ascribed to them. I argue that local environments, social and ethnic compositions, and factional politics were at least as influential as the state in determining how colonial towns actually developed. This paper focuses primarily on New Orleans, which, as a well-documented settlement/slave colony founded in the eighteenth century, is an ideal case study of the limitations of French imperial control as expressed in urban design and development. Understanding the role of cities as 'Urban Crucibles,' to borrow Gary B. Nash's phrase, helps us see the critical importance of urban life in creating dynamic and democratic political and social spheres.[WP #97010]
Antonio Barrera, "Spanish Imperial Politics and the Control of Transatlantic Resources or the Formation of Early Modern Science"
In this paper I discuss the development of early modern science in the Spanish Atlantic empire during the sixteenth century. My contention is that early modern science was the product of imperial needs and commercial desires to control, transform, and exploit the new kingdoms. These activities produced a knowledge of the natural world of the Indies based on mathematics and empirical information. These activities also established an instrumental image of the natural world. My paper discusses the connections between sacred and secular views of nature and its ecological and commercial transformation (in the first main section), as well as the mechanisms to obtain information about the natural history and geography of the Indies (in the second section).[WP #97001]
Jennifer Baszile, "The Struggle for Colonial Rule in the Age of Imperial Rivalry: The Case of Colonial Florida, 1670-1686"
The English settlement of Carolina in 1670 triggered a crisis in Florida. Colonial officials defined the existence of Carolina as the most pressing threat to Florida's survival. The intensification of Caribbean piracy and the fundamental shift in Spanish imperial policy contributed to Florida officials' sense of crisis. Decades of neglect and supply shortages significantly weakened the structural foundation of Spanish colonial rule in Florida. Fear of an English attack forced Spanish officials to improve colonial defenses and shore up the structural basis for colonial rule. Because they lacked consistent external support, Spanish officials enlisted the labor and resources of Florida Indians to improve colonial defenses, Most Florida Indians did not initially perceive the English arrival as a dire threat to their security. Indigenous leaders came to resent the increased Spanish demands on their communities. As a result, tensions developed between village and colonial leaders which weakened many longstanding Spanish-indigenous alliances, and led to the breakdown of the consensual basis for colonial rule. In an effort to expand their network of Indian allies, Spanish officials tried to evangelize the indigenous communities in the province of Apalachicola. The planning, implementation, and results of this initiative illustrate the difficulties of expanding and maintaining the consensual basis for colonial rule in this era.[WP #97027]
Lígia Bellini, "Indigenous Agency and Colonial Encounters in Brazil, 1500-1600: History and Recent Historiography"
The paper discusses certain characteristics of the cultural traditions involved in the formation of Brazil as a Portuguese colony and the changes they underwent, considering the contact between these traditions as a relationship in which each part influenced the others, although not equally. It focuses on shifts in the ethical and religious principles, and also in the social and economic strategies of the Portuguese, in order that these colonizers could deal with, and be accepted by, native Brazilians. The analysis of recent historiography and primary sources such as writings of the Jesuit fathers and other chroniclers throws the Indians' role as historical agents into relief.[WP #97002]
Saliha Belmessous, "Aspects of the Natives' Instrumentalization by the Colonial Authorities under the French Regime"
According to a deep-rooted historiographic myth, the French colonizers' attitudes about Amerindians were positive. Yet, in fact they depicted Natives as "Savages," sociologically and culturally inferior to Europeans. Since they were regarded as a negligible category, they were dispossessed of their territory. And as they were economic and political partners indispensable to Canada's development, officials considered them from the perspective of their colonial interests. This utilitarian vision was applied in reality as well as in speeches. The French aimed at depriving Natives of their labor and combat force. Therefore they aimed at exploiting them as well as appropriating figures of "Savages," and distorting their identity for political and intellectual purposes.[WP #97022]
Nikolaus Böttcher, "The British Domination of Havana in 1762-1763 and Its Economic and Political Consequences"
During the conflict among Spain, France, and England over political and economic hegemony in Europe in the eighteenth century, Cuba played a decisive role because of its importance as a military bulwark and commercial hinge within the Spanish colonial empire. The end of the Seven Years' War brought the British siege and capture of Havana in summer 1762 and its return to Spain in exchange for the Floridas ten months later. During this short period, strong commercial links between northern Cuba and the main port towns of the British-dominated Atlantic world were established. The aim of this paper is to offer a precise evaluation of the events of 1762-63 based on archival material from Havana (Archivo Nacional), London (Public Record Office, British Library), Madrid (Archivo Histórico Nacional), and Seville (Archivo General de Indias). It will be shown precisely how far-reaching the political, economic, and social consequences of the capture of Havana were, and how the commercial interrelations between foreign merchants and local entrepreneurs in Cuba functioned. The role of Havana's planter class in this period will be determined; also British commercial activities such as the supply of slaves and merchandise during and after the British occupation will be analyzed. The Bourbonian reforms in Cuba are interpreted as a direct result of the temporary loss of Havana. The gradual intensification of commerce with North America is put into this context. The War of Independence interrupted North America's commerce with the British sugar islands and raised Cuba's importance as an alternative market. Although Cuba remained a Spanish possession, by the end of the eighteenth century the island's economic orientation had clearly moved toward the North Atlantic trade system.[WP #97011]
Michael J. Braddick, "Elite Co-Option and State Formation in the British Atlantic World, c. 1530-1700"
The development of the state in early modern England was not a matter simply of executive will or "centralisation." Instead it rested on a process of elite co-option in which influential groups made use of Crown authority in pursuit of their own interests or ideals. The increasing reach of Crown authority was therefore partly the result of a mutuality of interests between "centre" and "locality." The paper suggests that this is a helpful perspective from which to examine the development of the extended Tudor/Stuart polity in the British Atlantic world. Although force played an important part in integrating and protecting Stuart territorial interests, in all cases broader ideals of governance were predicated on, and underpinned by, a broader process of cultural and commercial integration that was not governmental in origin. Still less was it an expression of "executive" or "central" will over local interests, and so the paper offers a critique of accounts of these developments that emphasize force to the exclusion of other processes.[WP #97014]
Leslie Choquette, "Corporatism or Physiocracy? The Trades of French Canada in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries"
This essay questions the view of New France as a traditional, Ancien Régime society by examining the issue of corporatism in the Canadian trades. Proceeding from the premise that the French Ancien Régime was itself more complex than the stereotype allows, the paper argues that royal governance of the colony emphasized modern, statist elements of the French polity at the expense of traditional corporatism and privilege. Trades guilds were officially prohibited in New France, and that policy generally met with little resistance from the colonists. A century before the French Revolution, the tradesmen of Canada already lived, to a large extent, in the world that would be advocated by the Physiocrats: that of discipline, individual enterprise, and rational absolutism.[WP #97005]
Laurent Dubois, "Slave Emancipation and the Limits of Citizenship during the French Revolution"
How does a slave become a citizen? During the early 1790s, slave insurgents in the French Caribbean appropriated an emerging Republican language of rights, expanded the meaning of citizenship, and brought about the 1794 abolition of slavery. The administrations that oversaw the transformation from slavery to freedom, notably that of Victor Hugues in Guadeloupe from 1794 to 1798, drew on the gradualist abolitionist thinking of the eighteenth century to limit the rights of the ex-slaves. An examination of Hugues' regime elucidates the functioning of a "Republican racism," which forced the "new citizens" to serve the nation as plantation workers or as soldiers and argued that their history as slaves made full citizenship impossible.[WP #97032]
Andrew Fitzmaurice, "The Civic Solution to the Crisis of English Colonisation, 1609-1625"
This paper looks at the ideologogy of the colony established by the Virginia Company, the first permanent colony established by the English in North America. The paper argues that the ideology of the Virginia Company was civic: that is, neo-Roman and specifically Classical and Italian republican in its intellectual alignments. I propose that this civic ideology was first offered in 1609 as a solution to the failures of Elizabethan colonisation and more immediately to the crisis of the Jamestown colony. In its most obvious form this civic ideology is manifested in a turn from the Elizabethan attempts to emulate Spanish riches to the argument that only civic virtues, and the rejection of wealth, will establish a flourishing commonwealth. From the demonstration of this republican ideology, we may draw two primary conclusions. First, we must revise not only the pre-Civil War history of English republicanism, but also the foundations of American civic traditions. Second, it has frequently been observed that the Elizabethan model of New World conquest was abandoned for colonisation, and it has recently been argued that this shift was toward the idea of commerce and the closely associated legitimising argument of res nullius. Foremost, however, among the various strands of civic tradition employed by the Virginia Company was that which was particularly hostile to commerce. The shift from Elizabethan ideas of empire did not, therefore, anticipate a British commercial empire. Rather, as Robert Gordon (1624) observed, the Virginia colony walked in the footsteps of the Italian republics.[WP #97004]
Thomas Fröschl, "American Empire - British Empire - Roman Empire: The Meaning of Empire in Late Eighteenth Century Political Discourse in the Atlantic World"
The meaning of empire today is obscured by the negative implications of the term imperialism. A close contextual examination of late eighteenth century political discourse reveals, however, a variety of meanings, which justifies a typology of Empires in the Atlantic world, thus providing a structural framework where questions relative to conflicts within and between different imperial organizations can be pursued. I draw a distinction between constitutional empires--either limited (Holy Roman Empire, Britain) or absolute monarchies (Spain, France)--and despotic empires (Roman Empire, Russia, Napoleonic France, Ottoman Empire); constitutional empires could be composite states (House of Austria, Britain), confederate states (Holy Roman Empire, United States), or centralized states (France); despotic empires always were centralized. I further examine the early modern way of empire-building (by conquest and/or settlement), resulting in either incorporation and control by the imperial center (Roman Empire, Russia, Ottoman Empire, Napoleonic France, Britain, Spain), or in limited/full participation of the acquired territories (United States, Holy Roman Empire). In the case of the Holy Roman Empire, however, the imperial constitution prevented any designs of empire-building, thus creating its unique place within the European balance of power.[WP #97018]
Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, "Re-Learning the Lessons of 'First Contact': Englishmen and Scots in Darien, 1698-99"
This paper studies Amerindian-British interactions in late seventeenth century Darien though a close focus on the simultaneous activities of Captain Richard Long (under a commission from the King of England), and Commodore Robert Pennycook (the senior representative of the Council of the Scottish colony in Darien). By following the activities of these two men, the paper examines the process through which Britons forged what they thought were lasting ties with Amerindians in the Isthmus of Darien. The Indians, however, having been engaged in an intricate process integrating European newcomers into their system of native alliances and diplomatic exchanges for some time, had their own ideas of how to forge diplomatic ties, and the process proved at times arduous, tenuous, and disorienting for the Britons.[WP #97025]
Eliga G. Gould, "The End of Greater Britain? Britain and the Federal Implications of the War of American Independence"
This paper is based on the sixth and final chapter of my forthcoming book, Britain and the Atlantic World in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, in association with the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture). In the book, I argue that the imperial crisis stemmed from the growing metropolitan conviction that Britain's American colonies represented integral parts of the British nation, which Parliament might govern in the same manner as it did England, Scotland, and Wales. As this paper suggests, this conviction proved sufficiently strong to make the American Revolution the longest colonial war in modern British history, but not so strong as to prevent Parliament from enacting legislation in 1778 that effectively abandoned the right to tax the inhabitants of Britain's outlying dependencies for revenue. The results, I believe, complicate the notion currently popular with British historians that the Revolution's aftermath witnessed a fairly straightforward intensification of the same policies of imperial consolidation that had contributed to the crisis of American independence.[WP #97019]
Nancy L. Hagedorn, "'A great deal depends upon the Interpreters': Anglo-Iroquois Relations and Imperial Diplomacy in the Colonial Northeast, 1664-1774"
Imperial politics and governance in the colonial Northeast necessarily involved economic, military, and diplomatic exchanges between British officials and colonists and their powerful non-European neighbors, the Iroquois. As the primary intermediaries during these encounters, interpreters played a prominent role in shaping the nature of the relationship among the British, the Iroquois, and other Native groups in the Northeast. Interpreters, as cultural brokers, served as crucial conduits of cultural knowledge and provided the necessary cross-cultural links without which communication and intercultural exchange would have been impossible. In addition, they offer a unique perspective from inside the process of intercultural interaction and reveal themselves to have been vital to effective imperial diplomacy, governance, and expansion in colonial America.[WP #97023]
Douglas J. Hamilton, "Patterns of Scottish Political Patronage in the British West Indies, c. 1763-c. 1800"
The paper is concerned with an examination of the political activity of Scots connected to the British West Indies. It assesses the rise in Scottish involvement in the electoral politics of the islands, finding that it flourished particularly in the period between 1763 and the end of the century. This activity was facilitated by the existence of Scottish networks, which also were able to provide opportunities for Scots to acquire official posts in the West Indies. The number of theswe opportunities grew as Scotland became more closely integrated in the Anglo-Scottish Union. As Scottish representation increased in positions of authority, so too did the ability of Scots to gain concessions at the imperial centre.[WP #97015]
Katherine A. Hermes, "Governing the Northeast: Algonquian, English, and French Jurisdiction, 1575-1775"
This paper examines the transition from tripartite governance of Northeastern America to European imperial predominance in the colonial period. The conquest narrative is re-evaluated by using a legal analysis of three kinds of jurisdiction--territorial, personal, and subject matter. The history of jurisdiction is the history of power. The exercise, sharing, and concession of various types of jurisdiction throughout the colonial period reflected a fragmentation and reformation but also a continuation of sovereignty among three powers. Governance was a process of interaction over two centuries among those powers. Native Americans continued to make and shape the structures of governance throughout the colonial period.[WP #97021]
Daniel Hulsebosch, "Periphery to Center: The Imperial Agents and the Constitution in Eighteenth-Century New York"
This paper examines constitutional practices in eighteenth-century New York. It connects specific interpretations of the imperial constitution to particular cultural groups and explores how those groups, especially a cadre of imperial agents, struggled to reconfigure the English constitution in the colonial environment. Their debates about the meaning and relevance of English law illuminate the contested definitions of both the Empire and its constitution, as well as the limited ability of imperial politics to contain the tensions resulting from those ambiguities. After the Revolution, new groups emerged and the institutional apparatus of government changed substantially. However, arguments concerning the role of law in an empire endured and helped shape a new legal genre, consitutional law.[WP #97008]
Michael Jarvis, "The Politics of Smuggling: Bermuda's 'Clandestine Trade' with the Dutch West Indies, 1684-1783"
This paper examines the political and economic relationship between the British colony of Bermuda, Great Britain, and the Atlantic/Caribbean world in the eighteenth century. It focuses principally on Bermudian violations of the Navigation Acts and the colony's illicit commerce with the Dutch West Indies. Bermudian and Dutch merchants conspired to defraud the British Crown and the Dutch New West India Company of a variety of duties and fees. and in doing so created an exchange network that privileged the needs of colonists over those of the mother countries. The volume of smuggling peaked during the American Revolution, when Bermudian carriers freighted desperately needed salt and gunpowder to ports in the rebellious colonies. In closing, I consider the political implications of smuggling and suggest that sustained illegal exchange informed a revolutionary rhetoric that called into question the legitimacy of the mercantile system and imperial rule.[WP #97012]
Neil Kennedy, "'By Wrangling and Jangling a Country Prospers': The Failure of Bermuda's Claims to the Turks Islands, c. 1678-1804"
This paper traces the longstanding territorial and commercial dispute between the colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas over the salt industry and international trade of the Turks Islands. With the area in dispute since the late seventeenth century, during the eighteenth century London indulged precedents for Bermudian claims to custom and usage at the Turks, and discouraged permanent settlement, yet asserted Bahamian claims to jurisdiction over the Turks in order to counter foreign encroachments. Resolution in favor of the Bahamas in 1804 was predicated not on the legitimacy of Bermuda's territorial claims via discovery, conquest, or usage, but on the alignment of Bahamian interests with an imperial program that encouraged expansive commercial opportunities with the United States.[WP #97013]
Michael A. McDonnell, "Popular Mobilization and the Coming of Independence and Revolution in Virginia, 1774-1776"
In this paper, using previously neglected county court records and militia petitions, as well as correspondence of the literate gentry, I explore the causes, course, and consequences of an internal uprising in Loudoun County in Revolutionary Virginia in the winter and spring of 1775-1776. The troubles in Loudoun, which were not Loyalist-inspired, were a direct result of the vacuum of colonial authority that resulted following the closure of the county courts, the dissolution of the Virginia House of Burgesses, and the implementation of the policies of an extra-legal revolutionary assembly. The Loudoun uprising was symptomatic of the rising tide of popular discontent directed not only against the British, but also against the gentry-led patriot movement. In effect, it was representative of a struggle over who should rule at home, as well as over home rule, for as ordinary Virginians struggled to contest gentry hegemony in the revolutionary situation and conflict with Britain, they also pushed the patriot elite farther into armed conflict with the metropolitan government and, eventually, toward independence and the establishment of a republican government. What is revealed in the case of Virginia is further evidence of the complex interrelationship between mother country and colony, the governance of the colony itself, and the crucial political and social relationships at the local level upon which the entire edifice truly rested.[WP #97029]
Elizabeth Mancke, "Colonial Corporations and the Emergence of the British Imperial State"
This exploratory essay analyzes the relationship between English corporations organized for overseas expansion-in particular the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Virginia Company, the East India Company, and the Hudson's Bay Company-and the emergence of the British imperial state. It argues that relative to constitutional developments within the empire, these companies had much in common. Whenever an overseas venture generated a critical mass of British subjects, the state stepped in to assert its prerogative to determine civil, as opposed to company, government. In the North American colonies from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, this meant revoking charters and taking over governments. In India and Rupert's Land, it meant providing British courts. What distinguished the Massachusetts Bay Company and the Virginia Company from the East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company is not just "colonization" and "commerce," the traditional divisions scholars use, but the minority status of British subjects in India and Rupert's Land. The British state avoided as long as it could the incorporation of non-British, and especially non-European, peoples within its sphere of sovereignty. By treating relations with Indians in Asia and Natives in North America as the private affairs of the EIC and HBC, respectively, the British could help preserve the Anglo-centric definition of the British constitution that cojoined the head of the church with the head of the state. After the Seven Years' War, the constitution of the British imperial state began to diverge from the Protestant constitution of the metropolitan state and established colonies in order to provide governance for an increasingly polyglot empire.[WP #97006]
Paul W. Mapp, "The Role of the Unexplored Regions of North America in European Diplomacy, 1699-1763"
This paper examines the influence on European foreign policy of European geographic perceptions of the unexplored North American West in the period from 1699 to 1763. It focuses on the North American policy of France, and it considers also the policies of Spain, Britain, and Russia. It argues that increasing French understanding of the geographic character of western North America decreased France's desire to maintain its North American empire. The disappointing results of British and Russian exploration in North America, as well as the spread in Europe of an intellectual climate of empirical skepticism, also contributed to this changing French assessment of the value of North America. Conversely, Spanish awareness of French North American exploration magnified Spanish unease about the French presence in North America, making Spain more willing to contribute to the end of that empire by accepting Louisiana from the French in 1763.[WP #97026]
Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, "Winning the Initiative: The Assemblies of the British Caribbean before 1776"
This paper is a draft chapter of a book manuscript provisionally titled "The Schism of Greater Britain: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean," which aims to describe and explain the response of the tropical island colonies of British America to the American Revolution. The paper is specifically concerned with the elected assemblies of the British Caribbean. Their rise complemented the trend in North America. They were as assertive as their mainland counterparts and equally jealous of their privileges. However, the paper finds that there were important differences. First, the islands were more oligarchical with a narrower electoral base. Second, parochial disputes about corporate privileges actually transcended the larger imperial crisis in the British Caribbean until December 1774. Unlike North America, tensions did not mount to a climactic breakdown between the legislatures and governors in the 1770s. The colonial leaders did not claim co-equality between the assmblies and Parliament. They did not deny parliamentary sovereignty. Indeed, the example of the island colonies demonstrates the inadequacy of explaining the American Revolution in terms of the rise of colonial assemblies.[WP #97028]
Rina Palumbo, "Imperial Fantasies: The Stuart Conquest of British North America, 1621-c. 1650"
This paper is a consideration of the introduction of palatinate jurisdiction in North America within the specific context of the succession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603, and the general context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. By examining charters, discovery narratives, and the writings of English theorists and politicians, I come to see the connections forged among monarch, subject, and territory as constituted by, and constitutive of, the development of imperialism.[WP #97003]
Carolee Pollock, "His Majesty's Subjects: Political Legitimacy in Quebec, 1763-1774"
British colonial administrators attempted to establish a legitimate civil administration in Quebec after its cession to Britain by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The paternalist regime they established faced significant challenges: the Catholicism of the Canadiens, the inadequacies of the colonial officials, the conflict between the military and the merchants, and the restlessness of the merchants. The affair of Thomas Walker's Ear highlights the difficulties they encountered. The solutions they devised show their understanding of the eighteenth-century British constitution.[WP #97016]
Matthew L. Rhoades, "Assarigoa's Line: Alexander Spotswood and the Formation of the First American Frontier, 1677-1722"
Assarigoa's line was negotiated with the sachems of the Five Nations of the Iroquois League, first in 1684 by Francis, Lord Howard of Effingham and then in 1722 by Alexander Spotswood. "Assarigoa," Spotswood's Iroquoian Condolence Council name, thus gained a boundary over which Virginia's frontier population, both Indian and British, could not cross, and created an orderly frontier. Spotswood understood his line to be a boundary between British and Indian populations, with the former dominant east of the line and the Indians, primarily the Five/Six Nations, in control of the territory west of Assarigoa's line. Spotswood's redefinition of the first American frontier thus facilitated the expansion of Virginia's eighteenth-century western empire.[WP #97024]
James C. Robertson, "Late Seventeenth Century Spanish Town: Building an English City on Spanish Foundations"
The English who captured St. Iago de la Vega, Jamaica, found its Spanish colonial cityscape alien. They built a new merchant city at Port Royal but they also retained "Spanish Town" as the new colony's capital. The transition was abrupt and the city was re-oriented in the process. The place names incorporated in the early plat books illuminate the settlers' assumptions about how a town should function. They were very different from those assigned to Port Royal. This recast "City in the Wilderness" was an administrative center whose society was seasonal. Its social landscape was organized around its permanent residents, women and men.[WP #97009]
Linda K. Salvucci, "Stepping Out from the Shadow of Lord Sheffield: Spanish Imperial Appraisals of the Commercial Capacities of the United States, 1783-1807"
In the 1790s and early 1800s, U.S. commercial performance effectively repudiated Lord Sheffield's dire predictions. Yet the latter continue to determine how early Americanists portray the economic prospects of the new nation. The observations of Spanish diplomats stationed in Philadelphia offer fresh insights into the exceptional material circumstances under which the United States was born. For American traders, Cuba quickly emerged as a dynamic, substitute market for the British and French West Indies. The divergent legacies of British and Spanish colonialism allowed the early republic to exploit in a most timely manner the unprecedented opportunities of the Napoleonic era.[WP #97030]
Susan Sleeper-Smith, "The French and Indian are soe much connected that if you disoblidge one . . . the other take part": English Governance in the Western Great Lakes, 1760-1780"
England's attempt to govern the western Great Lakes, following the conquest of Canada, proved far from successful. Neither Native people nor their French fur trader kin were receptive to English governance. Pontiac reminded England that France and not the Indians had lost the recent war. English officers frequently displaced blame for the rebellion on French fur traders and believed that effective governance rested on removal of the people they disparagingly came to call the Interior French. But the French were not removed, and successful governance rooted diplomacy in the context of fur trade society and increasingly relied on these much despised "vile inhabitants." Kin networks either enhanced or hampered English governance, and the St. Joseph Potawatomi and their L'archevêque-Chevalier kin demonstrate that English officers willing to cooperate with the Interior French were successful, while ignorance of or blatant disregard for social processes produced disastrous results, especially during the Revolutionary War.[WP #97017]
Linda L. Sturtz, "Innovation and Tradition in an Imperial-Colonial Contest: Virginia Legislation on the "settled and known . . . point" of Women's Property Rights"
Two private bills passed in Virginia in the first half of the eighteenth century demonstrate the contrast between the colonists' views on women's autonomous power over property and that of imperial authorities. The bills seemed eminently reasonable to the colonists, but unacceptable to imperial personnel. The War for Independence allowed for the re-opening of the debate, but Virginians had considered women's autonomy within marriage half a century earlier.[WP #97007]
Timothy Walker and Diogo Gaspar, "Demands of Empire--The Portuguese Reaction to the American War of Independence: Early Trade Considerations and Diplomatic Relations between Portugal and the United States, 1750-1800"
This paper will focus on the reaction of the Portuguese state to the rebellion and independence of the English North American colonies. This reaction was a mixed one, shaped by the simultaneous but conflicting expedients of an economic interest in North American trade and an abhorrence on the part of the Portuguese Crown for democratic rebellion against monarchical authority. Although the Lisbon regime initially reacted very strongly against the Americans' insurrection, the Portuguese later moderated their position in order not to damage their imperial political and economic interests.[WP #97031]
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