TRANSFORMATIONS: The Atlantic World in the Late Seventeenth Century

Between 1660 and 1689, France and England introduced restrictive trade policies (the pillars of "mercantilism"), and re-defined what had previously been largely unimpeded trans-Atlantic commerce as illicit. This paper explores three possible consequences for contraband trades as they emerged by c. 1713: re-casting American colonies as autonomous economic actors; re-fashioning of inter-colonial relations as an interlocking Anglo-American/Dutch/French American trade triangle; and finally, the expansion of what is termed here "commercial flexibility" among long-distance merchants and ship captains in order to survive and prosper. In certain respects, contraband trades mirror a paradigm shift from a "body politic" to more secular and mechanistic perceptions of society.

My essay will consider textile consumption, standards for appearance, and domestic labor in an effort to understand whether the end of the seventeenth century marked a transformation in the history of the body.

The model of late seventeenth-century Atlantic transformations seems to apply well to the Portuguese empire. There is a well-established body of scholarship on the new turn toward the Atlantic as the Portuguese empire lost ground in the Indian Ocean. With the discovery of gold and diamonds in Minas Gerais, the Portuguese began to pay substantial attention to their Brazilian holdings, leading to important social, political, and cultural transformations. When applied to the Spanish Empire, however, the model seems not to be as persuasive. The chronological landmarks in the historiography on the empire focus on other economic, political, and cultural turning points, including the 1550-1570s (the strengthening of the crown over the encomenderos; the decline of the indigenous populations and the early missionary religious utopias; the Toledan reforms and the rise of the Peruvian silver mines); the 1640s (the Portuguese and Catalonian wars of secession and the onset of the decline of Spain); and the 1750s (the Bourbon Reforms). The scholarship has made a point of demonstrating that even the breakdown of political authority in the Spanish Wars of Succession (1701-1714) registered as a minor blip in the colonies, particularly when compared to the unrest caused later by other international wars, namely, the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars. The model of late seventeenth-century transformations, however, might be useful in calling attention to other overlooked, more subtle developments.

Military and political weakness characterized the European presence in the American Southeast at the end of the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the beachheads of empires, particularly English Charles Town, exerted influence that extended over a thousand miles into the interior continent, becoming conduits for connecting the region’s indigenous peoples to the wider Atlantic World. A widespread Indian slave trade devastated the region, as native and European slavers scoured every nook and cranny in a frenzy of slaving that devastated Southern life for over fifty years. The response of native peoples to the slaving, and to other forces of an encroaching Atlantic World, must be understood in the context of the previous three centuries of Southern history, when the region experienced two other significant periods of change, at the beginning of the fifteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth century. This paper examines the development and character of the English settlement as a beachhead of empire, and the slaving, to explain why Southern Indians turned villages into confederacies as a means to adapt to the widespread challenges they faced in a new Atlantic World.

Colonists in Anglo-America arrived with ties to the people they had left behind. Consequently, their first commercial networks of relatives, friends, coreligionists and correspondents had a hub-and-spoke character; the hubs were the places in Europe they had come from, and especially the European capitals of those places. By the signing of the Peace of Utrecht in 1714, however, colonists’ networks were much less uniformly directed towards the metropolis. They had developed relationships with other people in America (both immediate neighbors and inhabitants of other colonies), people in other European countries besides those they had come from, Africans, and indigenous Americans. Network paths between agents (the agents’ "degrees of separation") were shorter and more direct, and the networks were denser. The colonists’ commercial networks had undergone what physicists (describing, say, the transition of H₂O from water to ice and of metal particles from non-magnetized to magnetized) and network theorists borrowing from them describe as a "phase transition"—a change in organization, in this case from the earlier, less integrated set of hub-and-spoke networks to the later, more integrated, spider-web configuration. This paper broadly examines changes in the number of links among dispersed British subjects, the nature of sharing along the links, and most critically the direction of the links. What happened to network links in the period 1674-1714? Why, and, in particular, what external to the networks enabled and facilitated the shift? What consequences did the transition have for the English Atlantic trading community? The idea of phase transition as applied to commercial networks in this period is useful in understanding the move from relatively autonomous, Eurocentric models to the denser, richer and more varied networks of the eighteenth century, which in turn allowed the English and Americans alike to think of the oceanic community as a coherent, cohesive space and traverse it with regularity.

The late seventeenth century witnessed a number of correlated phenomena in Central Africa. First of all, women began exercising power in a direct and formal way that made this period distinct from earlier periods. Second, the Portuguese colony of Angola ceased its constant aggression against its African neighbors in the aftermath of notable defeats and Pyrrhic victories. The new period ushered in a new expansion of creolization among people who had been engaged in this process for many years to include people from deeper in the interior. In this changed environment, African elites embraced more fully Western culture and Christianity, but at the same time also created a more syncretic religion.

As European powers challenged Spanish hegemony in the Caribbean and the Americas, more marginalized actors took advantage of the great imperial contests swirling around them to mount rebellions they hoped would transform their oppressed conditions. In the late seventeenth century, maroons challenged Spanish control of Caribbean coasts and colluded with pirates attacking Spanish ports, while on the vulnerable fringes of empire, indigenous groups launched coordinated wars to expel Spaniards from their homelands. Meanwhile, in Spanish cities, an impoverished underclass of Europeans and castas erupted into periodic violence against a Spanish system that seemed increasingly unresponsive to its plight. Although most of these rebellions were finally crushed, they were transformative even in their failure, shaping as they did many of the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century.
For those interested, here is the link for Professor Landers' Web site, "Ecclesiatical Sources for Slave Societies".

New demographic data on the slave trade that has revised older assumptions about sex and age ratio and, in part, this talk will review some of that literature and raise questions about how and if revised demographic data necessarily transforms our understanding of culture and labor in early America. The talk focuses on the relationship between sex ratios, ethnicity, and the reverberative effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and hereditary racial slavery in 17th and 18th century British North America. Moreover, I will raise some additional questions about how demographic data is generated by early modern traders and settlers and what the process of their generation suggests about the links between numeracy, commodification, and racial violence.

Imperial British Historians have described a continuous "Old Colonial System" or the persistence of mercantilism to describe British political economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were the characteristic forms of the First British Empire. More recently historians of the Atlantic World have, with greater subtlety, described a transition from an initial "barbarous" phase of the sixteenth and seventeenth century to an eighteenth-century phase characterized by "stability." This paper suggests that there was indeed a fundamental transformation of British attitudes toward the Atlantic and empire more generally that were cause and consequence of the Revolution of 1688-1689 in England. That Revolution transformed, and was intended to transform, England from an agrarian nation seeking territorial empire into a manufacturing nation supported by a maritime hinterland. The Revolutionary change was necessarily violent (in England, India, and North America), but it made possible the development of stability.

Perhaps the most persuasive measure of the importance of New Netherland to the late seventeenth-century transformation of North America is the chain of consequences that flowed from the colony's erasure from the map. This paper argues that the origins of the Great Lakes "Middle Ground," of King Philip's War, and of Bacon's Rebellion were all, in important respects, consequences of the Dutch West India Company's failure to retain control of the Atlantic and continental trades of North America.

The late seventeenth century was marked by two developments in relation to the investigation of nature and the growth of natural knowledge. In the first place, nature took on a new type of authority. Whereas in the sixteenth century, nature and the knowledge of nature had been a source of millenarian hopes, as expressed, for example, in the work of Paracelsus, Jan Amos Comenius, and Samuel Hartlib, in the seventeenth century, these millenarian hopes had been transmuted into material ambitions, expressed in the commercial projects of such individuals as Johann Rudolph Glauber and Johann Joachim Becher, who employed the language and concepts of millenarian reform but aimed at the material and temporal sphere. Second, the seventeenth century saw a reassertion of a social and epistemic divide based on theory and practice. While many of the observational and empiricist practices of artisans had been incorporated into the new method of what Bacon had called the "New, Active Science" by the late seventeenth century, there was a greater gap than ever between the "new experimental philosophers" of the Royal Society, for example, and artisans and practitioners. These two developments would stamp the character and structure of science as it grew to hold ever greater authority in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the late seventeenth century improving economic conditions in England and declining economic opportunities in more established British North American colonies led to the transformation of colonial labor systems from ones based on temporary European servitude to harsher regimes based on permanent African slavery. The temporal coincidence has led many scholars to infer a causal relationship between the decline in European migration and the shift to African slavery, but this paper argues that colonial elites on the mainland as well as in the Caribbean had already made a conscious decision to embrace racial slavery before changing decisions among potential migrant laborers from Europe forced changes in colonial labor recruitment.