Atlantic History Research Articles

Expanding the Borders of Atlantic History

Expanding the Borders of Atlantic History

Ray Kea and the Historians of the Gold Coast: Debates Over Continuity and Rupture in African and African Diaspora Atlantic Histories

The central role of Gold Coast societies, ports, and cities in the emerging Atlantic circuit is critical to understanding the history of the Atlantic world. The study of the causes and effects of Gold Coast societies’ transition from African polities and economies to transatlantic entrepots and trading emporiums and their subsequent impact on the Americas has been the hallmark of Ray Kea's scholarship. Since the beginning of his career, Kea has been a significant contributor to the study of the African Atlantic, and the field's various debates and disciplinary evolutions. While many scholars of the Gold Coast recognize Kea's work as foundational to scholarship on the Gold Coast, engagement with his work has not been rigorous. Kea is often cited in bibliographies and aspects of his work have served as benchmarks for other forays into Gold Coast histories. However, there is a need to go beyond an appreciation for Kea as a trailblazer, passing reference of his scholarship, and bibliographic citation of his work to a more thorough and consistent discourse with his major ideas and propositions. Kea has been, for example, adept at integrating innovations and ideas in various disciplinary arenas. He dexterously applies Marxist and postmodernist theories, diverse historiographies of the Atlantic world, and conceptual tools to traditional archival and oral historical data in his analyses of Gold Coast and diasporic societies. This review essay argues for Kea's importance and the need for a deeper engagement with his work in the field by putting his work into conversation with both classic Atlantic historiographies and recent scholarship that has built off Kea's.

The Uncertain Atlantic: African and European Transformations of São Tomé Island c. 1533

As the first European colony to specialize in sugar cultivation using a labor force comprised exclusively of enslaved Africans, São Tomé island in the Gulf of Guinea is often considered the birthplace of the sugar plantation complex. But the rise of sugar cultivation there took place amidst deep uncertainties. This essay examines a previously unstudied sixteenth-century São Tomé estate inventory from the vantage points of merchants and officials on São Tomé and in Portugal, and to the extent possible, of the Africans they exploited. Without disputing the economic importance of sugar or that of key sites such as São Tomé for later Atlantic histories, we call attention to contingencies that included the waning fortunes of certain planters and their implications for the enslaved; slave routes’ subordination to changing political dynamics on the African mainland; and evidence of African resistance ranging from litigation to escape to maroon wars that threatened sugar production, the slave trade, and the viability of Portuguese rule on the island. During the 1520s-1530s many parties had a stake in the island’s future, and the rise of sugar was by no means a foreordained outcome.

Continental divide: Native Americans and the Atlantic world

ABSTRACT This essay assesses how historians have studied the relationship between Native Americans and the Atlantic world in the early modern period. It traces the development of what the author calls a “continental divide” between scholars of Indigenous and Atlantic histories, as distinct subfields emerged from different questions, methods, archival practices, and ethical commitments. Recent scholarship has begun to bridge this divide, however, suggesting promising new directions.

Fearful loyalty: The strategic deployment of emotion by the Cuban proslavery elite, 1830–1850

ABSTRACT This article presents the expression of colonial loyalty in nineteenth century Cuba as a tool mobilised by otherwise disenfranchised enslaving elites seeking to shape the island’s governance. Combined with the judicious expression of fear, this paper suggests that “fearful loyalty” was deployed to influence the Spanish colonial government on the subject of slavery. Contemporary periodicals from the USA, examined here, presented Cuban loyalty as effeminate and baffling. Employing the methodology of History of Emotions to analyse private correspondence between Cuban enslavers, Captain Generals in Cuba, and the metropolitan government in Spain, this study rebuts that outsider impression. Adding depth to our understanding of Atlantic History, this article argues that fearful loyalty was a creolised emotional protocol utilised by enslavers and pro-slave trade individuals when attempting to manipulate the Crown to follow the course of action they considered most advantageous to their interests regarding slavery, censorship, and abolition.

Fortunato da Costa Family

This paper reconstructs the history of the Fortunato da Costa family, from the first appearance of its constituting members in Portugal, during the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, through the nation’s political turmoil of the late 1820s and early 1830s, the family’s relocation to São Tomé and Príncipe around 1838-1839, amidst significant Creole-metropolitan tensions on the islands, as well as “intrusions” from the British Anti-Slave Trade Squadron, to its settlement in Angola during an intense period of illegal slave trading and the transition to legitimate commerce, until 1859, when the last known member passed away. The story of the Fortunato da Costa family is an odyssey stretching over half a century, marked by some of the most important processes in Atlantic history. Negotiating these historical developments was anything but easy sailing: in fact, for some it created a series of contradictions, at times leading to the kind of dark moments that families often face. Reconstructing the lives of this unique family thus also presents us with a particularly striking example of the human condition in all its frailties, with a story that is far from unilinear.

Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints: An Atlantic History of Bermuda, 1609–1684 by Michael J. Jarvis (review)

Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints: An Atlantic History of Bermuda, 1609–1684 by Michael J. Jarvis (review)

Dynamic movements, fragmented archives, and everything in between

ABSTRACT This is an epilogue to the collection of essays devoted to Indigenous Americans and the Atlantic World. It focuses on two core arguments found in the papers featured in the forum. The first is the extraordinary mobility of Native people in the Atlantic world – Native people and stories span a vast geographical and temporal span. The second is the bare and scattered archival fragments that are often the only records of these peoples’ complicated lives – Native people and stories are thus hard to find and reconstruct. This tension between Native peoples’ impressive mobility and their fragmented archival footprint opens-up larger questions about how Indigenous Americans reshaped Atlantic histories and why Atlantic histories must center Indigenous Americans.

The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy by Jonathan Singerton

Reviewed by: The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy by Jonathan Singerton Eric Grube Jonathan Singerton, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2022. 366 pp. Jonathan Singerton's The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy accomplishes a revolutionary feat: centering agents and actors from Habsburg lands within the transoceanic processes and upheavals that marked the early revolutionary Atlantic. Singerton argues that Habsburg inhabitants were neither diametrically opposed to the ideals and movements of the revolutionary era nor hermetically sealed off from them. He thus overturns any teleological assumptions that this dynasty—which would wage war against Revolutionary France and would come to embody post-Napoleonic conservatism—rejected outright the American revolutionary project and the fledgling United States. Instead, Singerton argues that merchants, trade representatives, diplomats, [End Page 111] bureaucrats, royals, soldiers, and everyday subjects were integral to the story of the new republic's foundation. Singerton also successfully identifies, narrates, and interprets the bi- and even multilateral dynamics at play, showing how American revolutionaries shaped Habsburg imperial calculations, capital speculations, and material transactions. Singerton succeeds in his main goal of reorienting our sense of who, what, and where constitutes Atlantic history, but he also succeeds in a much more nuanced way: taking what might lend itself to a "traditional," top-down story of high-stakes diplomacy and presenting it from economic and cultural perspectives. Singerton's economic and cultural emphases shed light on the multifaceted sinews stitching together international with intercontinental connections and domestic with foreign affairs across the two sides of the Atlantic. Each chapter examines the topic from a particular optic, ranging from Habsburg intellectual and religious discourses concerning the Americas before the revolution to legal histories of neutrality and neutral shipping that turned the Austrian Netherlands into a wartime commercial nexus. The military stories on offer explore epistolary evidence of eager volunteers from Habsburg Europe seeking to place themselves under Benjamin Franklin's command, while Singerton also presents convincing data concerning commodity exchange between American ports and the Habsburg entrepôts of Ostend, Trieste, and Livorno. His work also rightfully places cultural history front and center, diving deeply into the intricacies of statecraft protocols and etiquette, the perceived breach of which could have had monumental ramifications. His focus on regional histories reveals fascinating tensions between bureaucrats in the Austrian Netherlands and ministers in the metropole of Vienna. What's more, he uncovers the complex international elements at play, as many of these conversations and networks played out via Tuscan networks (among others) in Paris. The resulting book is a tour de force, one that showcases the plurality of ways in which Habsburg inhabitants not just flirted with American revolutionary ideas and overtures but often actively sought to capitalize on new opportunities for mercantile gain and diplomatic prestige. Regardless of a given reader's research focus or interest, one can find in Singerton's work a multitude of fresh ways to conceptualize Habsburg and Atlantic histories. While The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy certainly soars, there are a few ways in which Singerton could have elevated the work to new heights. At times he seems at risk of overplaying his hand regarding the roles of Habsburg inhabitants in the early revolutionary Atlantic. The [End Page 112] extent to which the trade bubble at Ostend burst when the American War of Independence concluded, when other ports again became viable nodes of exchange, could suggest this U.S.-Habsburg trade was neither sustainable nor as desired as is suggested. Indeed, the monograph seems to have a tone of "opportunities lost" by the failure to solidify diplomatic recognition and formal trade agreements between the Habsburg realms and the United States until the nineteenth century. But perhaps in context, these agents saw a rejection of such options as their best strategies for advancement. It would also be interesting to read more about how internal fissures and distinctions within Habsburg holdings—territorial, legal, administrative, and customary—influenced the American Revolution or were in turn influenced by the American Revolution. Singerton addresses these in detail regarding the Austrian Netherlands and Vienna, plus the intra-imperial jockeying for trade between agents in Ostend and Trieste. And he excels...

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

At the Crossroads: Introducing New Work in Early America and Colonial Latin America

Livros, periódicos e “papéis efêmeros” no espaço iberoatlântico

Abstract: Far from being established in a natural, or a-temporal way, Atlantic history presupposes precise circumscriptions, socially and politically configured. In this sense, this issue seeks to contribute to the perception of what is defined as the Ibero-Atlantic space, focusing on a specific aspect: the circulation of written culture, expressed in the movements made by books, periodicals, pamphlets and other sets of papers. Our aim is to understand the multiple processes of literate circulation over time. We also intend to think about long-term processes in order to grasp the changes in the configurations of the Ibero-Atlantic world and their persistence. The issue thus tries to demonstrate how each space of creation and appropriation of texts put into circulation is a concrete product of contingent insertion in networks of diverse complexity and density, through which a flow of manuscript, printed objects and ideas materializes, a movement in which systems of links are established between several regions of the Ibero-Atlantic world.

No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic

In No Wood, No Kingdom, Keith Pluymers demonstrates that, over the course of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, gaps between the perceptions and realities of wood scarcity led to contradictory claims about resource availability in the English Atlantic. Pluymers focuses on the role of political ecology, which refers to ideas and practices governing resource use, in shaping imperial expansion. In contesting the “windfall” thesis, or the notion that domestic deforestation impelled the English to expand into the Atlantic basin, Pluymers argues that political ecology in the English Atlantic was characterized by uncertainty due to challenges in defining resource prevalence, regulating the movement of timber, and acquiring accurate information for imperial and commercial interests (9–10, 237). Through an examination of promotional tracts, administrative documents, maps, and forestry regulations in England, Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados, Pluymers paints an insightful picture of officials, foresters, and colonists struggling over questions of land and resource use.The book is organized into five core chapters, not including the introduction or the concluding sixth chapter, with each chapter covering political ecology in distinct geographical spaces. Chapter 1 analyzes the Tudor and Stuart forestry reforms that sought to maximize the valuation of Crown lands through surveying as the kingdom tried to balance the revenue generated from timber leases with local needs (58). In chapter 2, Pluymers shows how the English went from promoting Irish woodlands as places of abundance in the 1580s to the 1630s when the fear that English forests were full of waste prompted closer scrutiny of Irish woods, but by then the Crown had already overzealously granted woodland leases such that royal access to Irish forests was limited (105). Similarly, in chapter 3, Virginia Company promoters initially encouraged a vision of abundance but, when faced with actually governing the Tsenacommacah woods, they tried to forge commercial and material connections with England by using the woods to sustain sericulture and ironworks, which ultimately failed following the 1622 Algonquian attack on Jamestown (128). Chapter 4 turns to Bermuda, where, despite many challenges, Bermudan trees became key to the colony’s early economy and the subject of the 1622 Orders and Constitutions that enacted a conservationist regime on the island (138). In chapter 5, Pluymers argues that environmental degradation on Barbados did not occur because of ecological illiteracy but because the colony’s political ecology shifted in the mid-seventeenth century from protectionism to privileging profits from sugarcane plantations (170). Chapter 6 situates John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664) within these Atlantic discourses of uncertainty to underscore the persistence of scarcity anxieties.Pluymers succeeds at uncovering a range of competing and frustrated political ecologies that existed in the English Atlantic. One of the strongest sections of the book is in Pluymers’s analysis of English maps of Irish forests, which revealed their struggles with documenting the Irish landscape (67–73). Another intriguing aspect is that many colonists relied on Indigenous, African, and Afro-Caribbean experts for ecological knowledge to protect resources in the colonies (110, 166, 189). While the book’s focus on particular places is one of its strengths, one difficulty of the colony-by-colony approach is that it inadvertently reinforces spatial separation by making readers deliberate on the book’s themes across distinct geographical regions. For instance, the tension between the resource interests of colonists and the central government emerges as a key theme throughout (88, 178) but is never really highlighted for the reader. Nonetheless, the book is both timely and contributes to a growing scholarly examination of the disjunction between knowledge and practice in the early modern world. It will especially interest scholars working on environmental, imperial, and Atlantic histories.

Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty ed. by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano

Reviewed by: Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty ed. by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano Nicola Martin (bio) Ireland, Early United States, American Revolution, Empire, Imperialism, Sovereignty Ireland and America: Empire, Revolution, and Sovereignty. Edited by Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. 356. Cloth, $49.50.) This volume is the fruit of a conference held to examine Ireland and America as places that were both shaped by, and actively shaped, empire and revolution. Patrick Griffin and Francis D. Cogliano have done an excellent job in selecting and drawing together thirteen broadly ranging, both chronologically and geographically, contributions to achieve their aim of complicating current understandings of both places. Written by renowned experts in Atlantic history, the essays employ a wide range of sources to interrogate various aspects of empire and revolution, all engaging with the central comparative of the volume to frame their studies. The essays in Part One provide direct comparisons between Ireland and America on themes including resistance to empire, alternatives to independence, and the experiences of dominant minorities in the empire. Those in Part Two broaden out to examine a number of themes related to the revolutionary era, such as mapping, religion and ideology, and post-independence readjustments, using the comparative as a framework for their investigations. In many ways Nicholas Canny's opening essay sets up that comparative, demonstrating how Irish Catholics interacted with, and were characterized by, European empires from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Canny posits this group as one that was part of, yet also somewhat apart from, both Europe and empire. Having set the scene of Irish interactions and position in the Atlantic world, the remaining essays in Part One deal [End Page 163] with a wide range of issues that demonstrate connections and disconnects between Ireland and America. Gordon S. Wood uses revolutionary pamphlets to demonstrate how patriot polemicists used the Irish example, sometimes distorting it in the process, to set out their arguments as to why Parliament had no constitutional authority over them. Eliga Gould outlines a third way between independence and continued subordination, which Ireland achieved through its negotiated settlement of 1782 and which demonstrated a significant divergence from the American patriots, for whom such an option was no longer acceptable. Other essays in Part One are concerned with the volume's key themes of mobilization and imperial attitudes. T. H. Breen posits the British response to the Boston Tea Party and the Easter Rising, rather than the events themselves, as the spark for popular mobilization, while Matthew P. Dziennik emphasises the importance of military mobilization for reinforcing British and American attitudes toward the Irish. Trevor Burnard rounds off Part One with an examination of the development of new imperial attitudes within both the British imperial elite and the imperial populations of Jamaica and Ireland in the 1780s, demonstrating the consequences of the American Revolution throughout the British Atlantic world. In Part Two, the essays move away from direct comparison to a broader framework that draws on the earlier arguments about connections and disconnect to provide important insights to America and the wider Atlantic world before, during, and after the Revolution. Highlights include Max Edelson's study of cadastral maps to illustrate the ad hoc system the British and its imperial peoples used to allocate land throughout the empire during the seventeenth century, a system that invariably ignored Indigenous systems of land allocation. Rachel Banke's investigation of the correspondence and papers of the Earl of Bute and King George III is another important contribution. Banke examines the papers to outline the key tenets of their ideas for imperial reform, convincingly arguing that these were shaped by European influences as a result of George's "enlightened absolutism" (212) and the realities of the post-Seven Years' War context. A key theme running through several essays in Part Two is the new realities and questions of nation and statehood created by the American Revolution. Jessica Choppin Roney examines the co-opting of the Declaration of Independence by Americans who sought support for their own bids for statehood, while Annette Gordon-Reed outlines the constitutional questions arising from the revolution and...

Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean by Ashley M. Williard

Reviewed by: Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean by Ashley M. Williard Frederick C. Staidum Jr. Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean. By Ashley M. Williard. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 312 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. Contemporary scholarship often uses intersectionality as a catchall term reducing complex relationships among race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and more into an oversimplified, additive formula (for example, Black + man + deaf = identity) where the essentialized properties of each social position remain discrete. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated the term, however, formulated intersectionality to expose and name the processes by which diverse modes of marginalization and privilege compound and co-constitute each other, creating new and unique configurations of oppression and opportunity—and, by extension, new subjectivities.1 For Atlantic history, this concept indicates that one cannot explicate the histories of colonization, slavery, and race without also chronicling gender and sexuality because modern conceptualizations of race were founded on interpretations of so-called grotesque and abhorrent African and Indigenous reproductive anatomies, sexual behaviors, and family formations. These categories, moreover, were mutually constitutive and interacted in ways that created new forms and contexts of vulnerability and privilege.2 Ashley M. Williard’s Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean is an important intervention in this conversation as it interrogates the intersections of gender, race, and (dis)ability in the Atlantic world, especially between the early modern French metropole and its Antillean colonies (particularly the understudied Lesser Antilles). Williard focuses on constructions of social positionalities—specifically masculinity and femininity—from 1635 to 1715, the period when the Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique and later the French state first introduced and then cultivated slavery in the Antilles. Engendering Islands astutely demonstrates how polymorphous constructions of gender, sex, race, and [End Page 192] ability were woven throughout early modern “juridical, religious, and medical discourses” (1) and practices, which in turn upheld and were upheld by seventeenth-century French colonization and slavery. And she argues that the gendered discursive mechanisms of colonization produced new forms of human alterity, including novel racial and ableist categories. Williard builds on important work on the early modern racialization of gender and sexuality by incorporating concepts and practices of ability, disability, and hyper-ability.3 As she shows, colonization and enslavement generated ontologies of (dis)ability through various modes, ranging from public maiming to adjudicating economic value, and from conceiving nonwhite bodies as malformed Europeans to endowing those same bodies with fantasies of pathological sexuality and even supernatural abilities. She thus joins emerging scholarship focused on the meaning and experiences of disability in early modern colonial societies of the Atlantic world, bringing together two trends in disability studies that rarely overlap.4 First, scholarship focusing on early modern Europe has illuminated how ideas of human deformity influenced Renaissance-era and seventeenth-century developments in language, performance, medicine, science, social organization, crime and punishment, and—above all—gender and sexuality.5 Second, scholars have given increasing attention to the impairing violence of slavery in the Americas, explicating the centrality of race to the shaping of marginalizing categories such as “lame,” “dumb,” “backwards,” and “dependent,” which defined through contrast what it meant to be a human, citizen, and modern subject.6 [End Page 193] Though these two areas of inquiry have developed in parallel, Williard cogently sutures this divide while also extending both approaches and linking their narratives. Moreover, she does not assume a linear, one-way evolution of gender, sexuality, race, and (dis)ability. In her account, French gender constructs were not exported as stable forms from the metropole to the colonies, and race was not singularly devised in the colonies and then conveyed to France as a fixed concept. Rather, these categories were entangled in a cyclical exchange of invention, resignification, and repurposing that remade ideas of human difference on both sides of the Atlantic. Williard examines an array of early modern actors, including Indi- genous Kalinago people, members of Catholic religious orders, enslaved Africans, French pirates, indentured servants, colonial administrators, merchants, and planters. In each of the book’s four chapters...

Thinking with islands, living with coasts: John Gillis and the making of a blue Atlantic

Exploring the legacy of historian John R. Gillis (1939–2021), this special issue introduction examines the evolution of coastal studies as a field. It shows how Gillis did much to inspire a new generation of interdisciplinary oceanic scholarship that draws from human geography, Atlantic history, global history, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and blue cultural studies. By reimagining the living sea as a subject of, rather than a backdrop for, historical and literary analysis, this swell of research has helped build a “blue Atlantic.”

Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions by Micah Alpaugh

Alpaugh’s Friends of Freedom provides an integrated narrative of the rise of social movements, political protest, and revolutionary mobilization in the eighteenth century in the United States, Britain, Ireland, France, and Haiti. The author contrasts his own work with that of Palmer, who undertook a similar project more than half a century ago in The Age of the Democratic Revolution.1 Like Alpaugh, Palmer argued that common ideals motivated eighteenth-century revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, but as Alpaugh points out, Palmer’s account portrays the American and French Revolutions as “more simultaneous than interrelated” and has little to say about slavery or Haiti. Alpaugh answers these deficiencies, elucidating interconnections between events in various parts of the Atlantic World and highlighting the importance of abolitionism as a precocious protest movement that developed arguments and tactics that would later be adopted by revolutionaries in every place he examines.Alpaugh has overcome daunting challenges in producing this book. Drawing on material from archives in France, Britain, Ireland, and the United States, and engaging with scholarship in a range of historical fields, he has pulled his material together effectively, telling coherent stories and making his argument clear. The book operates on two scales. On the large scale it is divided into two halves, Part I emphasizing the influence of the American Revolution, and Part II tracing the widespread impact of the French Revolution, with French Revolutionary influences ultimately crossing the Atlantic to become manifested in the formation of U.S. party politics. Within this broad framework, the eight chapters in Part I and the five chapters in Part II tell smaller-scale discrete stories including, for example, the struggles of various Protestant groups in America to secure religious liberty and the campaigns of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. This structure allows Alpaugh to recount local developments clearly while emphasizing their Atlantic contexts.The book had to be divided in this way. The overall story is too rich, detailed, and intricate to be conveyed in a single uninterrupted narrative. But there is a noticeable tension between Alpaugh’s claims about interconnected Atlantic revolutions, giving primacy to the American and French Revolutions, and his smaller-scale efforts to recount local developments accurately in detail. The struggle for Protestant American religious liberty, for example, started long before the American Revolution, as did the transatlantic struggle over slavery. In both instances, while the American and French Revolutions changed the terms of argument in important ways, Alpaugh strains to acknowledge the diverse range of voices engaged in the long-running debates.In discussing abolition, Alpaugh emphasises the role of Quakers and white evangelical Protestants who championed new tactics and lines of argument to recruit allies in America, Britain, and France. Africans and people of African descent enter the analysis only mid-stream. On the twelfth page of his discussion of abolitionism in America, Alpaugh introduces Black abolitionists with a paragraph starting, “African-Americans advanced their own cause” (183). Similarly, in the chapter on abolitionism in Britain, Black abolitionists appear only after eight pages discussing white abolitionist leaders. “Blacks living in England,” he writes, “allied for the cause” (205). Black leaders figure more prominently in Alpaugh’s discussion of the Haitian Revolution, but he is emphatic that they were responding to events in France and French debates, and he criticizes historians who fail to center their analysis on the influence of the French Revolution.While Africans and people of African descent figure in the book’s narrative, many inhabitants of the Atlantic world who contributed to the tumult of the revolutionary era—indigenous Americans, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin Americans—are left out. Alpaugh has demonstrated that Atlantic history is intrinsically liberating, releasing us from the confines of national narratives, but—especially if historians wish to work from archival materials—a fully inclusive, comprehensive history of the Atlantic World will almost always be out of reach.

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland

Reviewed by: All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland Michael A. Schoeppner (bio) Keywords Slavery, Workhouses, Slave revolts All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849. By Jeff Strickland. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 276. Paper, $29.99.) Nearly eighty years ago, Herbert Aptheker published American Negro Slave Revolts, a seminal work that effectively demolished the once prevailing interpretation among white scholars that slaves in the United States were mostly docile and content. He catalogued hundreds of plots and conspiracies before confiding to the reader, "it is highly probable that all plots, and quite possibly even all actual outbreaks, that did occur, and that are, somewhere, on record, have not been uncovered."1 Since its publication, Aptheker's book has led to hundreds of excavations into the various insurrections and conspiracies in British North America and the United States. It is a testament to the difficulty of resurrecting stories of enslaved people's resistance that historians are still recovering them. Jeff Strickland's recent book All for Liberty is among the most recent. By stitching together fragments from local newspapers, court records, published travel accounts, abolitionist periodicals, and a handful of manuscript collections, he reconstructs the story of Nicholas, an enslaved carpenter, who led a full-scale insurrection while incarcerated in the Charleston workhouse in 1849. The first three numbered chapters primarily serve as context, alternating between broad themes of Atlantic history and the specific mechanisms of slave discipline in Charleston. His first and third chapters—"Slave Insurrections in the Age of Revolutions" and "Urban Slavery," respectively—will be especially helpful for readers new to the subjects or for teachers introducing the topic to undergraduate students. Strickland does well to highlight the barbarity of urban enslavement, particularly in Charleston. Chapter 2 chronicles the development and operations of the Charleston workhouse, a novel technology invented and implemented to punish and discipline the local slave workforce. Chapters 4–6 provide backstory for the rebellion's ringleader and recount the events of the day in which the rebellion occurred. Nicholas, a supremely skilled and well-traveled enslaved carpenter, became increasingly radicalized during and after his trip to New Orleans. His skill, his [End Page 640] desire to keep the fruits of his labor, and his radical Christianity inspired his resistance to Charleston's municipal surveillance regime upon his return from Louisiana. When confronted by a local watchman, Nicholas chose to fight rather than submit, injuring a white patrolman in the process. He was subsequently arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. After a victorious appeal earned Nicholas a new trial, he was found guilty of a lesser charge and sentenced to three years at the workhouse, with regular whippings and stints on the "treadmill," a gruesome torture device. Yet, while incarcerated, Nicholas seemingly enjoyed a privileged status. He avoided the lash and the treadmill, and he was often allowed to loiter in the workhouse yard while cavorting with other inmates. The workhouse manager and workers admitted that they could not really control Nicholas, much to the dismay of local enslavers and the mayor's office. On July 13, 1849, Nicholas prevented one enslaver, John Gilchrist, from retrieving an enslaved woman from the workhouse, even going so far as to beat up Gilchrist's enslaved valet and threaten Gilchrist himself. Knowing this overt act of resistance would not be tolerated, Nicholas and his comrades braced for swift and severe retribution. They decided to fight back rather than submit to the floggings that surely awaited. Armed with clubs and axes, they fought their way out of the workhouse and fled. Eventually, Nicholas, the other two leaders of the rebellion, and dozens of escapees were recaptured. The three ringleaders were convicted and executed in the span of a week. The seventh chapter describes the ramifications of the plot. Strickland connects the rebellion to subsequent political developments in Charleston and beyond: the debate over the construction of African American churches in the city; municipal elections and workhouse reform; and even the debates over Congress's 1850 compromise. Curiously missing, and this is perhaps the book's only real flaw, is any discussion of the consequences of Nicholas...

Rethinking Atlantic Empire: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's Histories of Nineteenth-Century Spain and the Antilles

Though his life was tragically cut short, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015) was a trailblazer in the fields of Spanish imperial and Atlantic histories. His numerous monographs, chapters, and articles combined to demonstrate that “Spain's nineteenth-century empire was intertwined with similar empires in the age of abolition, free trade, proconsular despotism, and second slavery” (pp. 4–5). This volume evolved out of two initially unrelated conference panels organized to celebrate Schmidt-Nowara's life and scholarship. Editors Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson have collated 11 chapters that each engage different aspects of Schmidt-Nowara's work and legacy.Eastman and Jacobson organize the collection into four sections. The first consists of a single chapter by Jacobson that charts Schmidt-Nowara's intellectual biography. Therein, Jacobson explains how, as a product of the reinvigorating studying of imperialism at the University of Michigan in the 1990s, Schmidt-Nowara was influenced by “smasher[s] of paradigms” including Rebecca Scott, Geoff Eley, Seymour Drescher, Josep Maria Fradera, and Dale Tomich (p. 22).The second section explores the scholarly effect of these influences. It is comprised of three chapters that examine Schmidt-Nowara's major publications. Chapter 2, by Adrian Shubert, concentrates on Schmidt-Nowara's first monograph, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (1999). Shubert explains the pathbreaking nature of the book, as Schmidt-Nowara revealed “empire and metropolis as acting upon each other reciprocally,” a momentous thing in 1999 (p. 46). Joshua Goode's chapter explains how Schmidt-Nowara's reading of sources “against the grain” allowed him to develop his revolutionary and widely circulated theses (p. 53). In chapter 4, Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller furthers the analysis of Shubert and Goode, explaining that Schmidt-Nowara's scholarship “proved that the colonies were not only economically, strategically, and administratively important to Spain, but were politically and intellectually significant as well” (p. 68). Ultimately, Schmidt-Nowara told “a richly complicated story of domination, resistance, and engagement that is anything but straightforward” (p. 78).The third section of Rethinking Atlantic Empire is made up of five chronological chapters inspired by Schmidt-Nowara's multifaceted contributions to Spanish imperial and Atlantic historiographies. Emily Berquist Soule's chapter concentrates on the intersection of slaveholding and Catholicism in New Spain, using Schmidt-Nowara's thoughts on transatlantic reciprocity to explain how “the Church failed to live up to its own official program for African slaves” (p. 98). In chapter 6, Elena Schneider examines how Schmidt-Nowara influenced approaches to the Hispanic Atlantic with regard to scale, while in chapter 7 Anne Eller looks to the ways that Schmidt-Nowara influenced study of independence by analyzing Spanish colonial ideologies through the lens of the Dominican Republic. Chapter 8 engages with Schmidt-Nowara's effect on the historiography of antislavery, with author Lisa Surwillo exploring the Spanish translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853). Surwillo explains that “the discourse around the transatlantic slave trade shared important similarities” (p. 161). In the final chapter of the third section, Louie Dean Valencia-García examines “the impact of the Spanish colonial project” on the rise of Spanish fascism in the twentieth century (p. 167). Valencia-García argues that Schmidt-Nowara “provided a methodological model to consider power relations more generally amongst marginalized groups” that proves useful to scholars outside his own nineteenth-century focus (p. 179).The fourth section of the anthology consists of two chapters that explore Schmidt-Nowara's posthumous and unfinished works. In chapter 10, Joselyn Almeida looks to Schmidt-Nowara's translation of Fernando Blanco White's Flight to Freedom (1815). Schmidt-Nowara's sensitivity to transnational connections “illuminate[d] how the interimperial relations of European states that vied for power across the Atlantic exacted a violent cost from Indigenous and African peoples” (p. 183). Juan Luis Simal's chapter theorizes about how Schmidt-Nowara's previous works might have shaped his unfinished project on the nature of captivity and experiences of prisoners of war in Napoleonic Europe. The volume ends with an epilogue presenting the transcription of an interview that Schmidt-Nowara gave to the Spanish radio program Hablemos de historia (Let's talk about history). The interview hints at Schmidt-Nowara's outlook on historical study as he engages in “how identities were generated in the metropolis and in the colonies, and how they have conditioned the future of these societies in the contemporary world” (p. 220).Overall, Eastman and Jacobson have organized a powerful reminder of Schmidt-Nowara's titanic contribution to Spanish imperial and Atlantic histories. The contributors write with great emotion, leading to compelling narratives and insightful arguments. This is a volume that should be read widely both for its synthetic treatment of Schmidt-Nowara's work and as a blueprint for how historiographical ideas can shape disciplines and scholarship beyond their own fields.

The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean

In this book, Tessa Murphy examines the cultural, political, and economic transformations of “the Creole Archipelago,” an interconnected island grouping composed of Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, and Tobago. Murphy successfully demonstrates how this space evolved into a “center of broader imperial experimentation and contestation” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 4). However, this is not a story of imperial competition for political and commercial supremacy. Instead, Murphy persuades readers to rethink the history of the colonial Caribbean. Rather than portraying the Lesser Antilles as discrete national dominions, The Creole Archipelago recounts how these archipelagic borderlands were shaped by the interplay of Europeans, Indigenous Kalinagos, and free and enslaved African descendants. Murphy depicts the emergence of a culturally, politically, and religiously entangled archipelago connected to the Atlantic world but also molded by local dynamics and people. The author's meticulous analysis of multi-imperial sources from repositories in France, the United Kingdom, Martinique, Dominica, Grenada, and the United States allows her to elucidate the formation of this interconnected zone—a hub of new notions of colonial subjecthood, race, and dominion.The book is organized chronologically. After a chapter analyzing how treaty making between Indigenous Kalinagos and French and English colonists was critical in determining seventeenth-century Antillean geopolitics, chapter 2 examines the development of peculiar colonial spaces in Kalinago territories. Ordinary people from the French Antilles looked for opportunity and mobility on Kalinago islands, creating autonomous slave societies beyond imperial control. Chapter 3 analyzes how the Seven Years' War facilitated the development of an absentee plantocracy in the eastern Caribbean with direct connections to slave traders operating in Africa. The Creole Archipelago aligns perfectly with scholarship examining the role of Afro-descendants as legal subjects in the Atlantic world. In chapter 4, Murphy's masterful use of colonial correspondence as well as parish and land records allows her to demonstrate how the post–Seven Years' War eastern Caribbean—not nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and Asia—became the epicenter of early debates and disputes over the rights and privileges of colonial subjects. While Great Britain challenged French Catholics' landownership rights in former Kalinago islands, French settlers and free Afro-descendants embraced British legal culture to protect their rights. Chapter 5 illuminates the relationship between the expansion of sugar plantations, marronage, and racialization in the Creole Archipelago. Murphy also invites us to reexamine the course of important events in Atlantic history. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the American and French Revolutions as episodes of civil and interimperial warfare.The Creole Archipelago joins recent studies that persuasively historicize colonial expansion in the Americas as a process of cross-cultural contact, diplomacy, and contestation. Moreover, the author paints a picture of Caribbean history that is much more intricate than narratives centered exclusively on mercantilism, the slave trade, and plantations. By exploring this space through the lenses of creolization and cultural symbiosis, Murphy makes significant contributions to the literature on imperial formations, race, and subjecthood. The Lesser Antilles were a contested space and served as a laboratory for colonial regulations on people of African descent, regulations that were subsequently implemented in places such as Saint-Domingue and Louisiana. Similarly, the legacy of French colonial society continued under British rule after the Seven Years' War, facilitating spaces of participation and opportunity for French Catholics, both white and free Afro-descendants. The Creole Archipelago also highlights the limitations of exploring turmoil during the Age of Revolutions as responses to political forces emanating from Europe, the 13 colonies, or even Saint-Domingue. In the Creole Archipelago, ordinary people forged alliances that responded more to local political conditions and personal interests than to metropolitan forces, loyalties, and ideologies.Given this journal's Latin American focus, this reviewer wonders whether more emphasis could have been placed on the role of Spanish people in the Creole Archipelago. Certainly, Murphy underscores how Spanish traders from Margarita, Cumaná, and Caracas patronized cacao markets in Saint Vincent. The author also points out the significance of Spanish troops in the French Revolutionary wars. Yet readers might be curious about the relationships between islands such as Tobago and Grenada and Spanish South America, and to what extent these interactions also shaped the Creole Archipelago. Nonetheless, these omissions do not undermine Murphy's sophisticated argument and important scholarly contributions in the least. By seriously considering Indigenous and Black agency, she is better able to portray the Lesser Antilles' complexity beyond the restrictive paradigms of the British West Indies and the French Antilles. The Creole Archipelago is an excellent book that questions established notions of subjecthood and empire “in order to understand the region in a way that would have made sense to those who lived there” (p. 16).