ATLANTIC HISTORY:
Regional Networks, Shared Experiences, Forces of Integration

Abstracts

Abstracts of the papers are presented here in alphabetical order by author. We will post the program in May and the full papers as they become available (in early June).

Stephen D. Behrendt, Victoria University of Wellington
Seasonality, the Slave Trade, and Atlantic History
Paper

Harvest and hunting seasons regulated the movement of people and commodities in the pre-industrial Atlantic world. Rainfall amounts and temperature gradients dictated when farmers planted and gathered crops, when fishermen ventured out to sea, when hunters searched for prey, when warriors engaged enemies, and when communities warehoused grains, tubers, fish, and meats. Traders in Europe, Africa, and the Americas organized land and water transport based on seasonal commodity supplies. Those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mariners who ventured into the Atlantic learned first how African and New World climates, foods, manufactures, and markets differed from those in Europe. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Atlantic merchants brokered seasonal supplies of labor, foodstuffs, and handicrafts on three continents, creating regular long-distance trading networks. In discussing the commercial integration of the Atlantic world, this essay spotlights transatlantic slaving. Such a focus enables one to detail transaction cycles on three continents and to illustrate differences between the North and South Atlantic worlds.

Rosalind Beiler, University of Central Florida
Dissenting Religious Communication Networks and European Migration, 1660-1730
Paper

This paper explores a series of intersecting and overlapping Mennonite, Quaker, and Pietist communication networks in the period from 1660 to 1730. Each group developed communication channels that crossed political and cultural lines in their attempts to promote religious toleration. Each also sought contact with people from other groups interested in reforming society through personal piety and, in the process, established relationships that crossed religious boundaries as well. Participants in these transnational, ecumenical networks perceived the potential of colonization for achieving their goals and thus extended their connections across the Atlantic. Religious leaders negotiated for religious toleration with European heads of state seeking people to rebuild regions devastated by wars. British officials also solicited dissenters in their efforts to people the American colonies. Colonial promoters funneled literature and information through these same communication channels to recruit immigrants. The religious information networks that evolved in the second half of the seventeenth century played a key role in shifting the sources of migration to the British colonies away from England at the end of the seventeenth century. Scholars have noted this shift and the push and pull factors that created it. The dynamics of this transition, however, remain elusive. By examining the relationships that linked people participating in religious conversations across cultural and political boundaries, this paper broadens our understanding of the forces reorienting early modern migration flows.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas, Austin
Typology in the Atlantic: What is “Atlantic” about the Early Modern Biblical Readings of Colonization?
Paper

The Bible became an important, if not the most important, document from which the Europeans drew to make sense of expansion and settlement across the Atlantic. The Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, and Spanish often found in the Bible episodes prefiguring their deeds in the Indies. Thus colonization became an act both foreordained and providential. In a tradition of reading the Bible first introduced by the Gospel writers themselves, in which more recent episodes (and actors) are seen as the fulfillment of older ones, typology became the reading technique of choice of all the Europeans in the New World. Spaniards created grid-like urban settlements as they sought to fulfill Ezekiel’s dreams of a New Jerusalem. Franciscans sought to recreate new Temples of Solomon and Golgothas in every sixteenth-century mission they built in Mexico. Puritans saw themselves as Israelites in an Exodus in the Canaanite wilderness that was America. Seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuits in Brazil saw their missions as the fulfillments of some of the apocalyptic prophecies in the book of Daniel. The list of examples could be multiplied endlessly. These typological readings of prefiguration and fulfillment, however, were not new. Every time they set out to crush Muslims, heretics, Jews, or Slavs, crusaders in the Middle Ages were inspired by typological readings of the Bible. Muscovites expanded into central Asia wielding the same biblical texts that the other Europeans were then using in America. Was then there something unique and new about the ways the British, the Portuguese, and the Spanish read their Bibles in the early modern Atlantic? My essay seeks to answer this question.

Beatriz Dávilo, National University of Rosario, Argentina
The Making of a Republic: The Rio de la Plata and Its Intercourse with the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic World
Paper

Revolution in the Rio de la Plata, as in the rest of Hispanic America, posed to the local elite the challenge of generating not only a new political order but also a new kind of political subject—one apt to obey the impersonal and universal commandment of the law instead of the personal will of a king. Alongside institutional innovations, this task required fundamental changes in social behavior, cultural patterns, and political values. In this respect, the region’s intercourse with the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic world was crucial, because it made visible the foundations of a completely different social and political organization. This subject has often been addressed from the perspective of the circulation of ideas, as if those intellectual currents could be isolated from the complex network of transoceanic contacts through which they moved. This essay will try a different approach: beginning with the manifold Atlantic connections of the Rio de la Plata, it will explore the mechanisms that acquainted the Buenos Aires elite with the dynamics of the Anglo-Saxon world, to continue analyzing how these mechanisms could help bring Anglo-Saxon political thought into the center of the constitutional debates held in the Rio de la Plata from 1810 to 1827.

Aaron Fogleman, Northern Illinois University
The Atlantic World, 1492-1860s: Definition, Theory, and Boundaries
Paper

Recently Anglo-American and black Atlantic historians have provided much of the creative energy and ideas in the study of the Atlantic world, but definition, theory, and integration in their work needs further development. This essay suggests some possibilities that may be useful, especially as some historians begin to stress that we should study global rather than Atlantic history. The Atlantic world was the world made by contacts between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. Beginning with Columbus, who initiated permanent contact between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, the Atlantic world developed in ways much different than in other areas of the globe where European encounters and activities were significant. The Atlantic world was characterized by massive forced and free migrations of Africans and Europeans to the Americas, the “Columbian exchange,” transatlantic processes of creolization and syncretic religious development, forms of political thought that emphasized the interdependent nature of “freedom” and slavery, and the explosion of merchant capitalism. Three developments from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century led to the decline and transformation of that world: 1) revolution and colonial independence, 2) the end of the Atlantic slave trade followed by abolition, and 3) the shift from merchant to industrial capitalism. Thereafter a radically different Atlantic world developed, with new relationships between Atlantic peoples and continents. Native Americans were largely marginalized in most areas, Europeans lost the Americas but began expanding their colonization efforts in Africa, and Atlantic migrations shifted from forced to free, from African to European, and from south to north in the Americas.

David Hancock, University of Michigan
The Triumphs of Mercury: Connection and Control in the Emerging Atlantic Economy
Paper

This essay examines the dynamics of early modern Atlantic market development. Over the long eighteenth century, both despite and because of the vast scale of the Atlantic Ocean relative to continental Europe, the Atlantic world that emerged after the Discoveries experienced a “great leap forward” in organization. It is perhaps the great hallmark of the age. The transoceanic economy that emerged during this period bore three major attributes: it was extensively linked by networks of commerce and communication; it was decentralized, with relatively light control from European metropolises; and it was significantly self-organized. This essay demonstrates how the organizational processes played out in the lives of commercial agents and structured the North American marketplace in the last third of the eighteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the career of George Frey, a German redemptioner who became a backcountry storekeeper and tavernkeeper and eventually the largest miller in Pennsylvania. Individuals like Frey created the structures of the Atlantic world that affected not only transatlantic and imperial agents but also people from the provinces who might not obviously have participated in the Atlantic economy.

Wim Klooster, Clark University
The History of Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600-1800
Paper

By looking at eight 25-year periods between 1600 and 1800, this paper will examine the heyday of contraband trade in the Americas. As colonies of different empires gravitated to each other, their residents created long-lasting ties that defied metropolitan designs. Incidences of smuggling between subjects of different empires increased steadily after the northern European countries of France, England, and the Dutch Republic planted their flags across the Atlantic in the early seventeenth century. Contraband trade remained a staple of colonial life all over the Americas until the Age of Revolutions, here and there dwarfing legal exchange. Certain regions flourished throughout these eight periods as centers of contraband trade, while others were in bloom for only a short while. Everywhere, smuggling came naturally to settlers seeking affordable products and easy outlets. The initiative was usually taken not by persons residing near the site of exchange, but by a variety of foreign interlopers. Similarly, there was no prototypical smuggler on the receiving end. People from all walks of life participated in illicit business deals. The scope of their commercial contacts was truly astounding.

José Gabriel Martínez-Serna, Southern Methodist University
The Society of Jesus and Its Atlantic Networks in the Pre-Suppression Period
Paper

The Society of Jesus had one of the most extensive networks in the early modern world, with its Atlantic Provinces the most important element in the global reach of its organization. The Jesuit network circulated people, funds, religious objects, books, manufactured goods, commodities, correspondence, and written reports with a regularity seldom matched by other Atlantic corporations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The order’s frontier missions, urban colleges and residences, as well as the rural estates that funded much of this system were spokes in a hierarchical scheme with its apex in Rome. The Jesuit organizational structure was designed to link its basic element, the province, directly with the Jesuit curia in Rome, sometimes bypassing imperial hubs. Yet despite this well-structured organizational scheme, the Jesuit network ultimately depended on secular counterparts for its continuing circularity. This dependence varied considerably from one province to another according to the individual province’s wealth or the imperial laws under which it operated. In the nexus between the Company of Jesus and secular networks were the Jesuit procurators, figures tasked with the administration of each province’s properties as well as the construction, functioning, and flow of the Society’s network.

Mark Peterson, University of California, Berkeley
Theopolis Americana: The City-State of Boston, the Republic of Letters, and the Protestant International, 1689-1739
Paper
Note: Paper contains links to images.

This essay explores the construction by Boston’s mercantile, political, and cultural leaders of their part in an international network of common interest and cooperation, centered in the North Atlantic among the Protestant powers and communities of Northern Europe and their colonies, but with commercial ties and political ambitions reaching into the Caribbean, the Iberian peninsula, and the West African trade as well. The essay is built upon two kinds of archival evidence: first, the writings of merchants, politicians, and cultural elites such as Jonathan Belcher, Increase Mather, and his son Cotton, as they established relationships with counterparts in middle Europe, the Low Countries, France, and throughout the European colonial world; second, the material artifacts generated by these connections—in particular the extensive library collected by several generations of the Mather family. The argument highlights Bostonians’ efforts to build durable relationships among like-minded people throughout the Atlantic world, regardless of political allegiance. These relationships among commercial and religious allies were grounded in common ideas of benevolence and charity, and united within an oppositional stance against Roman Catholicism and those states, particularly France, that championed it. The time frame of the essay extends from the moment in 1689 when Bostonians revolted against Edmund Andros, the military governor of New England appointed by the Catholic James II, and joined James’ Protestant successor William III’s wars against France, to the outbreak of the War of Jenkins Ear, when New Englanders joined the assault on the Spanish Caribbean in 1739. The willingness of New Englanders to participate in these ever-widening and increasingly remote wars depended on the political, economic, and cultural ties that Bostonians forged and sustained throughout this era.

Emma Rothschild, Harvard University/University of Cambridge
David Hume and the Sea Gods of the Atlantic
Paper

The essay will look at the life of David Hume—who never crossed the Atlantic, although he set out for Massachusetts in the summer of 1746, only to be diverted to the French East India Company’s port of L’Orient—as a way of exploring what the Atlantic meant to individuals in England, Scotland, and France, and especially to minor officials, in the middle of the eighteenth century. Hume’s Atlantic world, I will suggest, is an interesting illustration of the ways in which Atlantic relationships extended far inland, into the interior provinces and the interior of individual experience; of the extent to which these Atlantic relationships, which were continuous in so many respects with Asian and Indian Ocean relationships of commerce and empire (as in the innumerable requests, in the 1760s and 1770s, for positions in the “East or West Indies”), were at the same time distinctive, especially in respect of the ownership of land and slaves; and of the association between the Atlantic world and the enlightenment, in Hume’s own sense of a disposition or way of thinking, “fluctuating, uncertain, fleeting, successive and compounded.”

Neil Safier, University of Pennsylvania
Spreading Centers: The Enlightenment in Atlantic Perspective
Paper

My contribution will employ the methodological insights of Atlantic history—and its concomitant emphasis on mobility, contact, and exchange—to reexamine the circulation of late eighteenth-century ideas and actors across geographic and imperial frontiers. I will examine these Atlantic circuits by considering an extraordinary individual case: that of Hipólito José da Costa (1774–1823), a Luso-Brazilian naturalist, printer, and journalist whose multiple itineraries between three continents comprised an explosive mixture of industrial espionage, botanical exchange, print-house intrigue, inquisitorial pursuit, and political apotheosis. Hipólito’s movements—from Colonia del Sacramento in the Platine estuary to the University of Coimbra, from Philadelphia to New York and Veracruz, and from an Inquisition cell in Lisbon to Gibraltar and later London—can be understood only if we consider the Atlantic system as an integrated whole. His traversal of what are often considered as separate and distinctive Atlantic worlds—British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—requires us to expand our understanding of the connective tissue stretching across the Atlantic at the very moment that the imperial web is fraying. Employing Hipólito as a guide and sharing his de-centered perspective can provide important insights into this critical period in European and (Latin) American affairs: a moment when the crumbling structures of several European empires gave way to newly independent nations, freed from the strictures of colonial rule but still heavily burdened by the social, racial, and economic legacies they acquired under the Old Regime.

Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University
Scientific Exchange in the Atlantic World
Paper

Historians and theorists of colonialism have developed various models for understanding colonial science that place Europe in the center—the gravitational metropole that sucks in profits, goods, and knowledge from distant peripheries. According to this paradigm, knowledge exchange in the eighteenth century was empire-based, with metropolitan hubs serving as repositories and clearing houses. But this is only part of the picture. Shifting from a colonial, periphery-metropole model to an Atlantic World model, a more complex understanding of the circulation of knowledge emerges. This essay examines Amerindian, African slave, and European medical practices as they mixed in that cauldron of cultural upheaval known as the West Indies. I highlight—to the extent possible—the mixing and hybridization, collecting, sorting, and extinctions of the knowledge of these three groups, attempting to understand the contributions of each to what we today call tropical medicine. Europeans have been the focus of colonial science and medicine because they wrote extensively about it (and in the languages that many U.S.-based historians read). Amerindians and African slaves, by contrast, left no documents about their use of plants and medicines. Hence, our access to their practices is filtered through European texts, in which the many African and Amerindian naturalists active in these areas remain faceless and nameless—they are referred to as a "slave doctor," a "native," and the like. Nonetheless, we can know something about scientific exchange in the Atlantic World of the eighteenth century. I trace Amerindian naturalists, the peripatetic Arawaks, Tainos, and Caribs, who moved much knowledge and many plants from place to place in the Caribbean basin; African slaves—both males and females—who transported African flora and knowledge of its uses with them to the West Indies; and Europeans—mostly males—who actively bioprospected in both Europe and the West Indies for useful and profitable cures. To limit my project, I will compare practices in the French and British West Indies, especially Saint Domingue (the most profitable Caribbean colony in this period) and Jamaica (with its relatively developed scientific establishment). The essay concludes with a consideration of the impact of mercantilist policies and imperial boundaries on the circulation of medical knowledge in the greater Atlantic World.

John Thornton and Linda Heywood, Boston University
Managing the State: African Political Leadership in Kongo and Dahomey, 1660-1815
[Note: this paper will not be available in advance of the Conference.]

Studies of Africans in the Atlantic have tended to focus exclusively on the slave trade, especially from the European perspective. Still less attention has been devoted to African states as having internal dynamics that were at least partially independent of their external commercial relations. Our study will look at how African leaders balanced the affairs of the state with the commercial relationships they maintained with Europeans. The cases of Kongo and Dahomey illustrate two divergent outcomes. In Kongo a strong state collapsed, allowing a rampant slave trade to grow, while in Dahomey a robust state emerged and consolidated itself while participating in the slave trade.