Perfect Timing: British Slave Resistance in Florida

If the importance of Portuguese merchants in the Spanish Empire is well known to scholars of early Spanish America, nonetheless their economic activities, complex and wide-ranging trade and kin networks, and family and household structure have not been examined systematically. Until the appearance of this relatively short but highly informative and suggestive volume by Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, the Portuguese for the most part remained shadowy and marginal figures in the Spanish Empire. This book goes far toward filling the gaps in our understanding of the role and impact of the Portuguese. While the demise of the Portuguese merchants at the hands of the Inquisition that targeted them as Spanish-Portuguese relations began to fray in the 1630s has received attention from such scholars as Alfonso Quiroz, the larger presence and experience of the Portuguese “Nation” in the Spanish Empire has not. Although the traditional separation of the histories of Spain and Portugal probably accounts in large part for this neglect, this book reminds us that the two early modern empires and their peoples were closely intertwined for decades and demonstrates the usefulness of the broader approaches of Atlantic or transnational history for dealing with the development of the expanding early modern world.Studnicki-Gizbert introduces his study by bringing to the fore some of the ambiguities that seem inevitably to attach to the Portuguese Nation, which he defines as primarily a maritime and expatriate community of mixed Jewish and Christian origins and identity, whose members lived and advocated an ideology of “open international trade, religious toleration, and a naturalized vision of the economy” (p. 12) that could place them at odds with their sometimes reluctant hosts. The expulsion of Portuguese merchants from the Spanish Empire that resulted from Portugal’s secession in 1640 did not mean the demise of the Nation. On an individual basis many Portuguese who had settled in Spanish America (and Spain itself) had assimilated, while the mercantile/maritime community began to shift its focus of interest toward the developing British and Dutch empires. The latter group constitutes the main focus of this book. The Portuguese who worked as artisans, local traders, or became involved in agriculture or mining in the Spanish Empire remain largely in the background in this study.What we have is a full and detailed examination of the functioning and organization of the Portuguese mercantile and maritime community and of how that group came to play a prominent and crucial role in the economy of the Spanish Empire. The empire was far more international and varied in character than the Spanish Crown desired well before the kingdom of Portugal was brought under the Spanish monarchy in 1580 — indeed, from its inception. The Portuguese not only offered their maritime and commercial expertise and long experience in the African slave trade, they also maintained vital connections to other spheres of international trade in Europe and Asia. Despite complaints about contraband, for a long time the benefits of the Portuguese presence in the Spanish Empire were simply too valuable to be dismissed.Although perhaps the examination of the operation of the Atlantic trade networks and markets constitutes the core of the book, the author offers a fascinating and surprisingly full picture of the internal organization of the Nation in terms of the structure and functioning of mercantile houses and the business and kinship connections that individuals and families maintained, which allowed them to forge an international community that was both strong and elastic. Diverse in terms of regional origin in Portugal and religious background, the Nation’s economic interests, dependence on mutual trustworthiness, and practice of gift giving underwrote a community that above all was rooted in its collective identity rather than in any one place. Households themselves reflected the distinctive character of the Nation, encompassing not only the customary servants, slaves, and apprentices but sometimes more than one family unit.This beautifully written book, based on research in a range of sources and archives that have provided the author with an unusually intimate picture of many of the merchants he examines, is a welcome addition to the literature on the early modern Spanish Empire and its connections with the Portuguese world. It might have been useful to see some comparison of patterns of kinship, household composition, mobility, and collective behavior with those of other groups, which probably would show that some of those patterns were less distinctive than suggested. The early modern Spanish Empire, after all, was settled not by Spaniards but by Basques, Extremeños, Canary Islanders, Congolese, and the like who relocated and retained their distinctiveness by emphasizing ties of kinship, origin, and collective interest. Notwithstanding the absence of such comparisons, however, this is a balanced, multifaceted study of a group that maintained its communal identity and viability in face of shifting political trends and religious intolerance.

We are now poised to examine the last of the four major empires whose past has helped create present-day America and whose fate might yet help us shape the America to come. We have looked at Rome, whose classical architecture is replicated in so many of the public buildings of contemporary Washington, DC, and whose fate prefigured that of so many of the empires to follow. We have looked at imperial Spain, without whose rise America would not exist in its contemporary form and from whose fall the new United States acquired territory that we now think of as quint-essentially American. We have looked at the British Empire from which the young United States successfully broke away and from which a more mature America took up the reins of global leadership as that empire waned. It is now time to look at both tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union-at an empire that unexpectedly came twice-from the first of which at its peak the United States bought Alaska, and from the second of which, at its fall, modern America acquired temporary total global dominance.1 Since “Russia is by some measures the most successful imperial enterprise in history, surpassed in size only by the British and Mongol empires” and “far more durable than either one,”2 there are likely to be lessons for contemporary America from the emergence and demise of both these Russian empires. These are lessons to which we now need to turn.

Most comparative studies of the British and American empires focus on the pre-1945 British Empire and the post-1945 American Empire. The tendency to avoid contemporaneous studies of the two empires suggests that there may be more differences than similarities between them, particularly when examining their imperial trade policies from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. For those studies attempting such comparisons, the so-called Open Door Empire of the United States is commonly depicted as having copied the free-trade imperial policies of its estranged motherland by the turn of the century. Such studies then assert that these imitative imperial policies reached new Anglo-Saxonist heights following US colonial Caribbean and Pacific acquisitions from the Spanish Empire in 1898, followed closely by the fin-de-siècle Anglo-American ‘Great Rapprochement’. This chapter challenges this imitative imperial narrative by bringing to light the contrasting ways in which the American Empire grew in the shadow of the British Empire.

Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820

Reviewed by: The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire by Adrian Finucane Tyson Reeder (bio) The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire ADRIAN FINUCANE Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 212pp. Although Atlantic world history is now a mainstay in the historical profession, scholars have only recently begun to integrate the histories of the North and South Atlantic areas. While some historians have compared the British and Spanish imperial projects in the Americas, a small but growing literature has started to analyze more concrete interactions among British and Spanish Americans. In this history of the British-held asiento, Adrian Finucane emphasizes the “compelling mutual interests” of the British and Spanish Empires, noting the Spanish need for slaves in the Americas and the British desire to gain more direct access to South American markets (55). By analyzing interimperial interaction, such scholarship promises to make Atlantic world history more truly transnational rather than merely repackaging imperial history. In The Temptations of Trade, Finucane provides a rich contribution to this late historiographical trend. Finucane recounts the combined histories of the asiento and the South Sea Company. As part of the Treaty of Utrecht, which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, the Spanish Empire granted the British the asiento—a monopoly on the Spanish-American slave trade that expired in 1748. In turn, Parliament entrusted the monopoly to the South Sea Company. Most historians have examined the South Sea Company in relation to the economic bubble that burst and caused a widespread financial crisis in Britain in the 1720s. Instead, Finucane tells the unexamined story of the South Sea Company’s asiento trade. Finucane takes her narrative beyond imperial history, however, as she examines the lived experience of those involved with the trade. The asiento brought into close contact traders in Spain, Britain, Spanish America, and the British and Spanish West Indies. Finucane elucidates their interactions and analyzes how they affected the trajectories of empire. She argues that in the imperial peripheries of the Americas, traders subordinated their loyalties and national identities to their commercial interests. To maximize profits, they engaged in illicit commercial and social relationships, contesting the power of European states to regulate their interimperial associations. Finucane makes clear, [End Page 783] therefore, that “local realities . . . sometimes conflicted significantly with the hopes of those in the metropole” (1). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European empires coveted the precious metals flowing to Spain from South America. Prior to Spain’s concession of the asiento to Britain, British traders sporadically engaged in illicit or unconventional commerce in South America through smuggling, piracy, and privateering. Far beyond the reaches of Spain’s central government, they took advantage of the weakness of imperial control at the edges of empire to penetrate Spanish commerce. They provided valuable information to the British government about the Spanish, but they took more interest in profit than patriotism. By controlling the peace negotiations following the War of the Spanish Succession, British officials compelled the Spanish Empire to concede the asiento, opening the way for a legal, if limited, interimperial trade in the Americas. By tracing the changes wrought on trade structures by the asiento after 1713, Finucane exposes the blurry links between illicit activity and patriotism in the Atlantic world. Prior to 1713, British traders such as Manuel Manasses Gilligan defied imperial laws as they conducted commerce with Spanish subjects. After the concession of the asiento, however, they proved a valuable asset to the South Sea Company due to their extensive knowledge of Spanish trading patterns. Finucane illuminates the debates over political economy in the British and Spanish Empires, arguing that the imperial visions developed in a contested environment rather than according to a uniform ideology of empire. By conceding the asiento to the British, Spanish officials hoped to regularize and benefit from interimperial trade despite the concerns of merchants in Spain that the asiento would erode their monopoly on South American trade. In Britain, Whigs argued against granting the monopoly to the South Sea Company and allowing its factors to settle in Spanish lands. They claimed that the British economy would grow according to the value of labor...

INTRODUCTION In the history of the Atlantic, the literature on the French, British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires continue to dominate the body of historical writing. Yet the Atlantic activities of these nations differed considerably from those of the smaller ones. The larger nations could create their own section in the Atlantic economy, whereas this was impossible to achieve for the smaller nations. Rather than building up a network of transatlantic migration movements of both Europeans and Africans and integrating these with the trade in European, African, and New World goods, the smaller nations first established trade connections on the African coast, mainly trading in produce. Attempts at entering the transatlantic slave trade were more difficult, and the same applied to the trade in European migrants. Only the Dutch and the Danes were able to establish colonies in the West Indies for any length of time, and only the Dutch and the Swedes established colonies of settlement in mainland North America, albeit for a very short period. The oldest Atlantic empires are those of the Spanish and the Portuguese, which, in spite of their synchronous development, were radically different from one another. The Spanish Empire in the New World was self-contained, whereas Portuguese Brazil was geared to producing products for export destined for Europe and Africa. The Spanish created a string of settlement areas in the New World in which European settlers and the autochthonous population mixed. Exports to Europe were limited to high-value products such as precious metals.

The colonial history of India is frequently associated with the British Empire, yet the French Empire also had a long-lasting and significant presence in India. Jessica Namakkal illuminates this important aspect of India’s colonial history and its legacy in her engaging book, which offers original insights and contributions to various disciplines, including French studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, political science, and memory studies. Namakkal draws on a wide range of sources, perspectives, and original methodologies, including the study of archival material, the press of various nations, memoirs, interviews, visual media, and observations of the landscape and events taking place in contemporary Pondicherry, the former capital of the French Empire in India. The work highlights the complex entanglements, tensions, and rivalries between the British and French Empires that shaped India’s colonial history. The author offers detailed portraits of key figures who played important roles in defining the colonial history and the future of French India, such as Sri Aurobindo, Mira Alfassa, Édouard Goubert, and Raphael Ramanyya Dadala, tracing their actions and examining their thought. The volume also explores the complex interrelations between identity, nationality, ethnicity, and caste of residents of French India, and highlights the ways in which attitudes towards nationality shifted in tandem with the evolving policies and politics of the Empire. Namakkal casts light on the various migrant trajectories which arose as a consequence of the French Empire in India, including the experiences of those who migrated from Europe to French India, those who sought refuge from the British Empire in French Indian territories, and those who migrated from India to France after independence. Through an analysis of various case studies, Namakkal explores the plight of French nationals of Indian origin after independence, who were frequently alienated from both nations. She also provides fresh insight into the experiences and political significance of mixed-race residents of French India, offering a new perspective on the concept of ‘creolization’ in the context of Pondicherry. A particular strength of the work lies in its novel approach to the concept of decolonization. The author argues that decolonization in the context of French India is not merely to be equated with liberation and peace, but suggests that it engendered violence, and remains incomplete in various senses. Namakkal casts light on the ways in which various aspects of the colonial regime, including divisions and inequalities between local and foreign populations, and the oppression of indigenous populations, continue today in the form of the settlement of Auroville near Pondicherry, which, despite the utopian vision of its founder, Alfassa, ‘exemplifies the phenomenon of anticolonial colonialism, a key concept in understanding neocolonialism in a postcolonial world’ (p. 183). This thoroughly researched and thought-provoking book, which offers insights into a frequently neglected aspect of India’s colonial history, is ­especially valuable to scholars working in postcolonial, French, and South Asian studies.

As David Geggus has shown, scores of slave conspiracies and revolts occurred during the Age of Revolutions. In the Greater Caribbean, slave uprisings were especially frequent in the 1790s. One year stood out: 1795. While in a number of colonies revolts were planned in that year but failed to materialize, and in other colonies small numbers of slaves took up arms, large-scale rebellions involving slaves did occur in Coro and Curaçao. The seeds for such rebellious behaviour had been sown in 1789 with the destruction of the ancien régime in France, the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and the promulgation in Spain of a new slave code by King Charles IV. The overthrow or reform of time-honoured structures had an impact not only on slave populations, but also on underprivileged free people of colour. Abolitionism and the immediate French termination of slavery added fuel to the flames.\nI will argue here that the French revolutionary message had a more direct impact on free people of colour in the Caribbean than on slaves.

From 1775 1778, the British inhabitants of Natchez hoped that the relative isolation of their agricultural settlement on the Mississippi River would shield them from the turmoil that the American Revolution had unleashed along the Atlantic coast. As part of the British colony of West Florida, the settlers of Natchez remained nominally loyal, but largely out of a desire avoid the war, not take part in it. When the war came, however, it radically reshaped their world. The old colonial order crumbled and, with it, a system of accommodation that had maintained intercultural stability between Anglo-American settlers and neighboring Indians. In the war's aftermath, a new social order emerged--committed foremost the rapid expansion of plantation agriculture at the expense of peaceful relations with Indian peoples. On the morning of February 19, 1778, the Revolution arrived at Natchez in the form of James Willing, a captain in the U.S. Navy, and his company of one hundred American volunteers. The Patriots pillaged their way down the Mississippi in early 1778 and seized Natchez without firing a shot. Although they remained in the area only five days, their raid exposed British weakness and undermined the colonists' confidence in Britain's ability protect them. (1) In March 1778 the British superintendent of Indian affairs in the South, John Stuart, requested aid from Britain's Choctaw and Chickasaw allies reinforce Natchez's defenses. Stuart believed them to be absolutely necessary for ... the protection and defence of the settlements at the Natchez. (2) By the end of the month, three hundred Choctaw warriors had arrived. (3) When the Choctaws departed Natchez in June, chief Franchimastabe both reassured and warned the colonists: 'In case you are threatened ... [by] the Rebels--remember we are behind you.... But on the other hand should you offer take the Rebels by the hand, or Enter into any treaty with them--Remember also that we are behind you--and that we will look on you as Virginians & treat you as Our Enemies.' (4) The Revolution pitted one element of the British empire, its Indian allies, against another, white settlers. When the Willing raid opened the question of the loyalty of the Natchez colonists, imperial officials enlisted the Choctaws and the Chickasaws pressure the settlers into the British camp. The Choctaws offered protect the people of Natchez, but only if they remained loyal the British cause. The Choctaws played along with the British strategy in order prevent the growing white Natchez population from encroaching on native territory. Although this intimidation reaffirmed the colonists' imperial allegiance, it ultimately eroded the intercultural balance that had sustained the colonial society. The empire had established a colonial order based on mediating the needs of colonists against those of powerful Indian allies. In the wake of the Revolution, that order turned against itself, and it never recovered. (5) Conflict erupted between the Choctaws and the colonists over control of the region's valuable space. This breakdown of the colonial order transformed Natchez from an Indian world into one devoted plantation slavery, sowing the seeds for what became the heart of the Cotton Kingdom. (6) Historians often argue that the American Revolution undermined the position of Indian peoples east of the Mississippi. The new United States became far more aggressively expansionist than the British colonies had been. The United States protected the interests of its western settlers against Indians, whereas the British empire had afforded greater protection its valuable Indian allies. (7) In this respect, the transformation of Natchez reinforces a familiar narrative of native declension after the Revolution. Yet the Spanish empire, not the United States, controlled Natchez during the formative decade after the Revolution, and Spanish policy in Natchez mirrored that of the burgeoning American state. …

List of Maps and Tables Acknowledgements A Note on Usage Preface Introduction: Many and Varied New Worlds 1. Europe in the Age of Exploration: The Portuguese and Spanish Empires 2. The French and Dutch in North America and the Caribbean Melting Pot 3. The English Colonies in Mainland North America Before 1650 4. The Growth of New England and the Chesapeake: 1650-1700 5. The English Civil War, the Restoration, and the First British Empire in America 6. Transition: Imperial Wars and British Politics 1689-1748 7. The Regions of Colonial America: Northern Society and Politics in the Eighteenth Century 8. The Regions of Colonial America: Society and Politics in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and the South 9. Christian America and the Great Awakening 10. The New Empire and the Revolt of the Colonies, 1748-1776 General Reference Bibliography Index

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain

SummaryBoth Spanish and French colonial education included several features that restricted education. Many of them persisted long after independence. Against this background, this paper econometrically studies whether in the recent past the colonial legacy still affected schooling in the ex‐colonies of these two former colonial powers – and, for comparison, in the ex‐colonies of Britain, the third of the former big three colonial powers. Using a large sample of countries and numerous controls, it finds substantial negative effects on both secondary enrollment and average years of schooling in former French and, especially, in former Spanish colonies. The negative effects on females are particularly large. By contrast, there are no effects in former British colonies.

Focusses on the lectures and theories of economist and colonial bureaucrat Herman Merivale on the imperial transition of British colonialism from slave labour to free labour, and toward free trade, in 1839. Author specifically shows how Merivale propagated the free trade imperialism of the reformed British Empire by using the "Black Legend" way of thinking, i.e. criticizing Spanish colonialism, to caricaturize the second British Empire, and thus justify imperial policy reforms. Author elaborates on this Black Legend tradition, going back to writings of Las Casas, and how it served as justification for "better" imperialisms of other colonial powers than Spain, and how Merivale's views followed this tradition. He shows how Merivale as part of this criticized the mismanagement, slavery, brutality, mercantilism, and the concentration of power and wealth in Cuba and other Spanish colonies, as negative examples contrasted to the British approach. Author points out, however, how Merivale's views were in part paradoxical and ambiguous, as he favoured a social hierarchy and an imperial authoritarianism limiting free labour.

Focusses on the lectures and theories of economist and colonial bureaucrat Herman Merivale on the imperial transition of British colonialism from slave labour to free labour, and toward free trade, in 1839. Author specifically shows how Merivale propagated the free trade imperialism of the reformed British Empire by using the "Black Legend" way of thinking, i.e. criticizing Spanish colonialism, to caricaturize the second British Empire, and thus justify imperial policy reforms. Author elaborates on this Black Legend tradition, going back to writings of Las Casas, and how it served as justification for "better" imperialisms of other colonial powers than Spain, and how Merivale's views followed this tradition. He shows how Merivale as part of this criticized the mismanagement, slavery, brutality, mercantilism, and the concentration of power and wealth in Cuba and other Spanish colonies, as negative examples contrasted to the British approach. Author points out, however, how Merivale's views were in part paradoxical and ambiguous, as he favoured a social hierarchy and an imperial authoritarianism limiting free labour.

This thesis explores the role of eschatology in shaping early Spanish and English colonial empire in the Americas. Historians of this period have been divided in acknowledging the role of religion, and by proxy eschatology, in the development of colonialism in the New World. By examining the way eschatology influenced colonial actors through tangible ways in how they conducted themselves or dictated policy, a narrative emerges that challenges the historiography that dismisses or downplays the spiritual in favor of solely the material. Individuals representing the Spanish and English empires were fervent believers that the end times were fast approaching, and in turn acted in ways that corresponded with their eschatological viewpoints. People waged war, imposed labor systems, established colonies, and more, all for the ultimate purpose of bringing about the second coming of Jesus Christ. Reframing the narrative of the earliest two centuries following Columbus’s discovery of the New World to incorporate eschatology has major ramifications, complicating the picture of colonialism in the Americas.