Atlantic Port Cities Research Articles

Negotiated Federalism: Intergovernmental Relations on the Maritime Frontier, 1789–1815

Abstract: The U.S. Constitution was designed to produce a profound alteration in the structure of the American federal polity by giving the U.S. government the power to raise its own money and enforce its own laws within the states. But when federal officials began to implement the new constitutional order across the union in 1789, they realized that this process required the participation and consent of state governments, whose legislation, investment, and manpower were needed to allow federal laws to take effect. Because of the power that state governments continued to wield, the successful institution of federal authority within the states relied on intergovernmental negotiation. The Atlantic port cities presented a crucial test case for this negotiated federalism, as the federal government sought to exercise power in spaces where state authority was already entrenched. In the course of setting up the customs and lighthouse services, rebuilding coastal fortifications, and enforcing neutrality and embargo regulations, early federal officials encountered the limits of federal power within the states, and developed intergovernmental negotiation strategies that allowed them to execute federal law in the ports. This negotiated federalism would become fundamental to the governance of the American union.

Women, Empire, and Entomology: An Object Biography of Eleanor Glanville’s Pipevine Swallowtail, c. 1700

Today, the gentlewoman Eleanor Glanville (1655–1709) is often remembered as the first lady of British butterflies. In Glanville’s own lifetime, she gained a reputation amongst London naturalists as an astute collector of butterflies from the South West region of England. Yet, a turn towards Glanville’s material archive, namely, her extant specimens held at the Natural History Museum, London, reveals Glanville’s success as a collector of rare butterflies from the Americas and thus, her complicity in colonial collecting. This article provides an object biography of a single pipevine swallowtail or Battus philenor, c. 1700, labeled “Glandvill.” It follows the butterfly specimen from its obscure origins in the Americas, to Glanville’s residence in the Atlantic port city of Bristol, and to London naturalists’ cabinets of curiosities, where it would became part of a collection that helped found the British Museum, the first public museum of its kind. The life cycle of this object attests to the role that empire played in building one woman’s collection of insects and her contributions to the making of present-day museums. It also suggests that while empire opened up opportunities for some women naturalists, it did not necessarily advance their reputations as collectors.

The Nação Rules: A Comparative Analysis of the Bylaws of Western Sephardic Congregations in the Early Modern Atlantic

Religious persecution, segregation, and commercial networks triggered the diaspora of Iberian New Christians and Sephardic Jews throughout the Atlantic in the Early Modern period. Despite the geographical dispersion, the diverse host environments, and the complex religious experiences, the so-called Western Sephardic Diaspora was founded on the principles of unity and preservation, which were cemented by the notion of belonging to the Nação. Thus, as a cross-border community connected by common geographical origins, collective cultural identity, and a shared New Christian background, the concept of Nação was structural for the definition and evolution of the diasporic experience of Portuguese and Spanish exiles and their descendants from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This article overviews the most recent findings and perspectives on the concept of the Nação as a unifying element of the Western Sephardic Diaspora. Then, it problematizes the interpretation of this concept in different Sephardic communities established in Atlantic port cities. This problem is approached by analyzing these communities’ internal bylaws (ascamot) under the lens of two critical questions: (1) the concept of Nação as defining the borders of belonging to the community and (2) the unity and preservation of the Nação as essential drifts of the organization and management of the community. This analysis emphasizes the tension between the dynamism and particularities of each community and the conservatism of the idea of Nação, promoted by small social and economic elites that exercised increasing control over the communities and their interaction with the surrounding environments.

Erica Dantas Brasil (1969–2022)

Erica Dantas Brasil (1969–2022) Adam Sharman Language students have very particular expectations of teachers who are from the country whose language they’re studying. As far as students are concerned, such teachers don’t just teach the country’s language; they represent the country. They are ambassadors. In Erica’s case, she didn’t represent a bit of the country; she was the entire country. It was official, it was her name. She was Erica Dantas Brasil. And what a job she did being Brazil in Nottingham for more than twenty years, first under the umbrella of the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS), and latterly under that of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. Erica was born in the Brazilian Atlantic port city of Fortaleza in 1969, that is, at the height of the military dictatorship. Her family then moved from the northeast to the south of Brazil in the early 1970s as part of that wave of mass migration to the cities. She was educated principally in São Paulo, where she obtained a BSc in Psychology at the Catholic University, in 1992. In 1994, she completed an MA in Psychology at the State University of São Paulo. Then, in 1998, she won an award from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to do an MA in Social Work in the School of Law and Social Sciences here at the University of Nottingham, which she completed in 1999. A year later, she won a scholarship to do a PhD in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (i.e. SPLAS) in Nottingham. The thesis, which was on Foster Care, was awarded in 2010. The dates tell a story. It was the practice in SPLAS in those days to give PhD students a fees waiver in return for some teaching. Erica was thus a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Portuguese Studies for the first four years of her PhD, before becoming the full-time co-ordinator of the Portuguese language programme in 2004. In other words, she held down a full-time teaching position while doing her thesis. As Coordinator of Portuguese Language, she built a formidable team, training and mentoring colleagues; she developed on-line language exchanges between Nottingham students and students in Brazil; and she dedicated herself to undergraduates with passion and patience. In 2021, her dedication and talent [End Page v] were recognized with a Lord Dearing Award for Excellence in Teaching. She set up internships for our students with a Translation and Interpreting company in São Paulo, and helped establish placements in two British Council partner international language schools in Brazil. In Argentina, she negotiated training for students in the area of advocacy with RELAF, an International NGO dedicated to children’s rights on whose Consultative Committee she sat. Erica was an active researcher. She presented her work in the field of Children’s Rights in Latin America at international conferences. She published articles, book chapters and translations. And she became co-researcher on a project in the History Department of the Federal University Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, funded by the Brazilian Funding Agency, a project that entailed interviewing women who had been involved in armed struggle during the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s and ’70s. Beyond SPLAS and the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Erica served the University on high-level delegations to Latin America. She was a member of the University’s Latin American Regional Advisory Network, with responsibility for fostering collaborations with Brazilian institutions. And in recognition of her outstanding contribution, Erica was promoted to Assistant Professor in Portuguese in 2018. But even without all the achievements outlined above, which include ongoing active participation in Nottingham’s vibrant Brazilian community, it would be enough to single out Erica’s role at the heart of Lusophone Studies in the University. For more than two decades, she helped inculcate in countless undergraduate students a profound love for all things Portuguese and Brazilian. She more than lived up to her name. Erica Dantas Brasil passed away in July 2022, and is much missed by friends, family and colleagues in the UK, Brazil and beyond. [End Page vi] Adam Sharman Professor...

The emergence of Montevideo as an Atlantic port: the political economy of a trans-imperial hub

AbstractIn the late eighteenth century, Montevideo evolved from a small colonial town dependent on Buenos Aires into the main Atlantic port in the region. Networks connecting Montevideo to Luso-Brazilian merchants turned Montevideo into a hub for trans-imperial trade. Between 1778 and 1810, thousands of Spanish and foreign ships entered the port of Montevideo. As a result, although economically dependent on Buenos Aires’ commercial community, Montevideo merchants and authorities managed to use their privileged port, newly created institutions and trans-imperial networks to advance the city's commercial and political role within the estuary. The emergence of Montevideo as an Atlantic port city with global connections was not an isolated event, but a part of a broader process of growing global trade and political transformation.

A Sacred Duty: Nationalist and Anti-Imperial Activisms in Buenos Aires, 1916-1930

The Southern Atlantic city of Buenos Aires emerged a critical hub of radical political activism between 1916 and 1930 at a time when the influence of anarchist activists waned and organized labor often worked with the Radical Civic Union presidents. Whether based in or passing through this city, activists and exiles, partisans, and pretenders pursued various strategies to achieve revolutionary change, raise funds for causes, assure sovereignty, control the public narrative, and network with like-minded individuals and groups. These agitators created webs of associations throughout the Atlantic world in the process. These networks were vital in fashioning enduring transnational connections, strategies of resistance, shared discourses, and symbolic registers that framed how nationalist and anti-imperial interactions were understood. This article focuses on Irish republicans, Catalan nationalists, and Arab anti-colonialists and their interactions with Argentine agitators, sympathizers, and various state actors to more fully understand the importance of Buenos Aires in this period and the consequences on sociopolitical life in this Atlantic port city up to the global depression of 1930.

노예제의 보이지 않는 기억 : 프랑스 항구도시들과 기억의 장소

노예제의 보이지 않는 기억 : 프랑스 항구도시들과 기억의 장소

Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries)

AbstractColonial and postcolonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions functioned as crucial hubs in the commodity flows that accompanied the emergence and expansion of global capitalism. They did so by bringing together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses – legally free or semi-free wage laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. Focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, a crucial moment in the establishment of the world market, the transformation of colonial states, and the reorganization of labor and labor migration on a transoceanic scale, the contributions in this special issue address the consequences of the presence of these “motley crews” on and around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. The introduction places the articles within the context of the development of the field of Global Labor History more generally. It argues that the dense daily interaction that took place in port cities makes them an ideal vantage point from which to investigate the consequences of the “simultaneity” of different labor relations for questions such as the organization of the work process under developing capitalism, the emergence of new forms of social control, the impact of forced and free migration on class formation, and the role of social diversity in shaping different forms of group and class solidarity. The introduction also discusses the significance of the articles presented in this special issue for three prevailing but problematic dichotomies in labor historiography: the sharp borders drawn between so-called free and unfree labor, between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, and the pre-modern and modern eras.

Social Networks and Social Worlds

Abstract This essay argues that the “slave community” paradigm obfuscates alternative lived experiences for enslaved men and women, especially those living in the urban areas of the early modern Atlantic world, and uses eighteenth-century Boston as a case study. A bustling Atlantic port city where slaves comprised between ten and fifteen percent of the population, Boston provides an important counterpoint. Slaves were a minority of residents, lived in households with few other people of African descent, worked with laborers from across the socio-economic spectrum, and had near constant interaction with their masters. Moreover, slavery in Boston reached its zenith before the American Revolution, meaning older, pre-revolutionary and early modern notions of social order—hierarchy, deference, and dependence—structured their society and everyday lives. These factors imbricated enslaved Bostonians in the broader society. Boston’s slaves inhabited multiple “social worlds” where they fostered a rich tapestry of relations and forms of resistance.

Central Europe and the Portuguese, Spanish and French Atlantic, Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Applying a comparative and cross-national approach, this article is based on case studies of four representative European Atlantic port cities, namely Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon and Cádiz, and their socio-economic relations with Hamburg, one of Central Europe’s most important marketplaces. Based on quantitative data of commodity flows towards and from the Atlantic basin, it also analyses the role of German and German-speaking merchant communities that were established in these metropolitan port cities. The article will show how these foreigners circumvented the respective monopolies that excluded them from direct trade with French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies. These monopolies crumbled only during the era of the Atlantic Revolutions and the disintegration of the respective empires.

"All the baubles that they needed": "Industriousness" and Slavery in Saint-Louis and Gorée

Atlantic port cities were sites of commercial, consumer, and industrious revolutions in the eighteenth century. This essay argues that accounts of the Atlantic consumer and industrious revolutions need to include African port cities because they were an important market for consumer goods and services. The Senegambian cities of Saint-Louis and Goree were port cities involved in the consumption of Atlantic and global goods, as well as in the provision of services for ships involved in trade, and especially the slave trade. They had a class of women involved in the economic transformation of the cities, who help illustrate the role of consumerism, as well as the possibilities for accumulation created by the institution of domestic urban slavery. It is useful to look at African port cities because their experiences of urban slavery can help us think critically about what is meant by the industrious household and about how women in different Atlantic contexts were able to accumulate and use invested capital in varying ways.

Book Review: Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economics and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800, edited by Douglas Catterall & Jody Catterall

Book Review: Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economics and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800, edited by Douglas Catterall & Jody Catterall

The American South and the Atlantic World ed. by Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William A. Link (review)

Reviewed by: The American South and the Atlantic World ed. by Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William A. Link Steffi J. Cerato (bio) The American South and the Atlantic World. Edited by Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William A. Link. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. Pp. 274. $74.95 cloth) The eleven essays featured in this collection arose from a series of conferences at the universities of Manchester, Copenhagen, Cambridge, and Florida between 2008 and 2010. Emphasizing inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives in the study of the American South, [End Page 293] this scholarship will appear as a three part series published by the University Press of Florida. This initial volume emphasizes both the limitations and possibilities of Atlantic frameworks, addressing key historiographical debates concerning approaches towards the South as a culturally distinct region. Similar efforts to counteract such characteristics within the historiography of the South have explored the cultural, economic, and political ties of the South beyond national borders (The South and the Caribbean: Essays and Commentaries, edited by Douglass Sullivan-Gonzales and Charles Reagan Wilson [2003], for example). This collection, however, provides a much welcomed address of the challenges laid out by historians of both the Atlantic world and the American South, perhaps most poignantly offered by Jack Greene in his 2007 Journal of Southern History piece titled “Early Modern Southeastern North America and the Broader Atlantic and American Worlds.” The contributors to this volume primarily hail from history departments, but a handful of scholars from literature, English, and theater studies departments provide contributions that illustrate the flexibility of Atlantic approaches for cross-disciplinary study of the South. Keith Cartwright’s concluding essay provides readers with a chance to meditate on the future of Atlantic approaches across historical, literary, and cultural disciplines, while Natanya Keisha Duncan, Kathleen Gough, and Leigh Ann Duck each build on post-1990s scholarship on the black Atlantic, as they evaluate personal currents of exchange to and from the United States, Africa, and Europe. The editors provide a pleasant balance between essays that directly address the strengths and faults of the Atlantic framework and pieces that validate its application. Several fresh case studies illustrate how competing legal and political regimes in the Atlantic world influenced the lives of individuals within the South while also engaging with defined historiographical challenges. Jon Sensbach’s essay on early southern religions addresses how the “weight of an apparent fundamentalist destiny overpowers the narrative of southern history,” illustrating the transatlantic character of southern religions, particularly [End Page 294] indigenous religions or non-Protestant denominations before the eighteenth century (p. 49). Although the subject of Martha Jones’s essay has been examined by other scholars, readers interested in the Saint-Dominguan refugee experience in the United States will find this piece provides new material that emphasizes the experience of French slaves as they “confronted new rules, rituals, and structures of power” under the diverse legal regimes of Atlantic port cities (p. 106). Contributors are sensitive to the temporal and thematic limitations that have challenged scholars of the American South in their application of the Atlantic world framework beyond the study of colonial era. Offering the longest piece in the volume, Brian Ward initiates readers into this theoretical engagement, praising the power of local and regional studies that emphasize transoceanic exchange while acknowledging the geographical restrictiveness of Atlantic studies that have primarily emphasized coastal regions or focused on activity on the ocean itself. Trevor Brunard’s essay turns towards another set of boundaries established within Atlantic scholarship, confronting what he and several other contributors view as “an unfortunate distancing between the historiographies and historical practice of colonial America and antebellum American history”(p. 130). Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie’s excellent critique of the 1970s scholarship surrounding U.S. emancipation and comparative abolition reminds us that even seemingly progressive comparative approaches can still perpetuate notions of a distinct South as a “geospatial framework, expanded to situate the U.S. South in the Atlantic world, ended up generating its own kind of exceptionalist narrative”(p. 150). The thematic fluidity of the essays may seem murky at times, but taken as a whole, the volume engages in a much needed exploration of a conceptual...

An Angry God in the Hands of Sinners: Enslaved Africans and the Uses of Protestant Christianity in Pre-Revolutionary Boston

This article contends that slaves were able to successfully appropriate Christian institutions to decode the Euro-American world they arrived in and resist the dehumanization associated with African slavery in the Americas. Looking beyond religiosity, eschewing the teleological obsession with freedom that obfuscates our understanding of slavery, and using Boston—an Atlantic port city full of churches and slaves—as a case study, we are able to see how enslaved Africans were able to use what they learned in Boston's churches, including the ability to read and write and a powerful Christian vocabulary, in order to meet the master class and other whites on their own terms and challenge the boundaries of slavery.

Women in port: gendering communities, economies, and social networks in Atlantic port cities, 1500-1800

List of Maps and Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Contributors Introduction. Mother Courage and Her Sisters: Women's Worlds in the Premodern Atlantic, Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell Section 1: Metropolitan Frameworks The Women of Early Modern Triana: Life, Death and Survival Strategies in Seville's Maritime District, Alexandra Parma Cook Aberdeen and the Dutch Atlantic: Women and Woollens in the Seventeenth Century, Gordon DesBrisay Ports, Petticoats and Power? Women and Work in Early-National Philadelphia, Sheryllynne Haggerty Between Lady and Slave: White Working Women in the Eighteenth-Century Leeward Islands, Natalie Zacek Section 2: Traders and Travelers The Price of Assimilation: Spanish and Portuguese Women in French Cities, 1500-1650 Gayle Brunelle Capable Entrepreneurs: The Women Merchants and Traders of New Netherland, Kim Todt and Martha Dickinson Shattuck Can she be a woman? Gender and Contraband in the Revolutionary Atlantic, Ernst Pijning Lives On the Seas: Women's Trajectories in Port Cities of the Portuguese Overseas Empire, Junia Ferreira Furtado Section 3: Interactions and Intermediaries Wives, Brokers, and Laborers: Women at Cape Coast, 1750-1800, Ty M. Reese Gendering the Black Atlantic: Women's Agency in Coastal Trade Settlements in the Guinea Bissau Region, Philip J. Havik Housekeepers, Merchants, Rentieres: Free Women of Color in the Port Cities of Colonial Saint-Domingue, 1750-1790, Dominique Rogers and Stewart King Conclusion. Women in the Port Cities of the Early Modern Atlantic World: Retrospect and Prospect, Noble David Cook Bibliography Index

The Benevolent Education of Maritime Laborers at America's First Schools for the Deaf

The poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright Sarah Pogson Smith, born in England in 1774, spent portions of her life in a number of Atlantic port cities, including Charleston, New York, Hartford, and Philadelphia. This experience added depth and thematic interest to her writing, but it also meant that when her short and troubled marriage to a New Yorker ended in 1826, the network of friends and relations she could petition for support was geographically scattered. As a single woman who spent most of her early life in Charleston, Pogson Smith also faced particular obstacles in claiming the domestic credibility or northern sympathies that characterized the most commercially successful women writers of her era. She could not realistically expect to live off the profits of her writing, but she recognized that nonmonetary forms of profit, including what Mary Kelley calls tokens of friendship in the form of social and material support, might accrue to the savvy woman writer who wrote in support of a charitable cause (388). In 1826, the year her marriage failed, she donated the profits raised by selling a collection of her poems called Daughters of Eve to the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb via the New York Female Association, a women's charity created to support the school. The New York Institution, based near the home Pogson Smith briefly shared with her husband, developed a practical curriculum that attracted local students as well as students from Charleston and other southern cities. By linking her poetry with the school through the donation, Pogson Smith thus aligned herself with a national Deaf community that cut across regional sympathies, found authority to write in a concerned maternal voice for a group of people infantilized by disability, and ingratiated herself with print professionals eager for the New York Institution to produce both cheap labor and a steady stream of customers for their schoolbooks. (1) In this essay, I will first examine the history and especially the curriculum of the New York Institution and other early American schools for the Deaf, which taught skills of broad applicability in both northern and southern seaports and thus helped to create a national Deaf community that spanned the North and South. I will then show how this transnational appeal created opportunities not only for deaf students but also for the charitable women (including Pogson Smith) who organized to support the schools. Pogson Smith enjoyed modest success as a writer, but she was able to enjoy remarkable social comfort, given her status as a single, childless, and itinerant woman. She also garnered support and donations for a school that would enable the development of a thriving Deaf World in America, especially in its maritime urban centers. I argue that Pogson Smith figures as an early and important example of the charitable woman writer, the literary and social force that would increasingly shape literature and American life over the course of the nineteenth century. Her success in melding the profits of writing with the profits of charity in the 1820s presages, and perhaps helped make possible, the great success ambitious charitable women writers like Sarah Josepha Hale would have in effectively merging the two professions over the next several decades. MORE THAN INTERESTING COINCIDENCE: THE RISE OF DEAF EDUCATION IN MARITIME COMMUNITIES In just two years, from 1817 to 1819, schools for the deaf sprang up in Hartford, Philadelphia, and New York City. Each was situated on a major waterway, and not coincidentally. (2) Maritime centers were logical sites for the schools. Their large populations naturally included correspondingly high numbers of deaf and other disabled individuals; furthermore, maritime laborers and their families were at high risk of injury and illnesses that could cause deafness. Although the growing body of scholarship on Deaf education in the United States has not yet taken up the relationship of these schools to their maritime surroundings, that inquiry is overdue. …

‘As a slave woman and as a mother’: women and the abolition of slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro*

This article explores how enslaved and freedwomen in Rio de Janeiro and Havana, the capital cities of the Americas' last two slaveholding territories, played a crucial and specific part in helping speed and shape the gradual emancipation processes that unfolded simultaneously in each context during the 1870s and 1880s. In each city, women were at the front line of legal battles for freedom waged by the enslaved and their freed relatives. The article suggests several reasons why. First, in both Brazil and Cuba, the abolition process was shaped by ‘free womb’ laws which, along with other subsequent legislation, created specific new opportunities for women to make legal claims on the basis of motherhood. Second, such petitions chimed not only with official legal stipulations but also with broader Atlantic anti-slavery rhetoric that sought emotive responses to the plight of slaves and appealed particularly to specific notions about maternal love. Third, these (ex-)enslaved women's struggles were shaped by their own understandings of the significances of freedom and of motherhood, and by their daily lives in these two Atlantic port cities, where women had long been a significant presence in each city's population and economic and cultural life. Looking beyond their ‘individual’ claims for freedom reveals how such claims emerged from a collective context of proximity, cohabitation and exchange of information and help. Despite the major differences between the broader economic and political trajectories of each country and city, it is the similarities between women's actions and contributions to the emancipation process that are particularly striking.

Popular memory, public performance, and demands for citizenship in urban Cochabamba and Buenos Aires: a review

By the year 2050, seventy-five percent of the world's population will reside in cities, and much of it will be poor (Scholar 2006,3). Three quarters of the population of Latin America now lives in dense urban settlements, which experienced a 40% growth in population between 1960-2000 (NACLA 2007). As powerful forces of globalization1 and migration exert their inexorable influence on people's lives, growing divisions between people and communities diminish access to justice and human rights. According to Stuart Hall (2006), this urban "dystopia" has worsened in the past three decades, leading one to imagine that life in cities is on its way to becoming more (miserably) similar in nature, regardless of the city in which one lives. The two works under review provide an instructive opportunity to reflect upon assertions that life in any Latin American city is like that in any other. In many ways, the cities chosen for comparison could not be more different. Cochabamba is a landlocked, third-largest city in Bolivia with a population of under one million, while nearly 13 million people live in the Atlantic port city of Buenos Aires, the

“Miss Fan can tun her han!” Female traders in eighteenth-century British-American Atlantic port cities

She washi off an scrubi off, she Dragi dunga gate, She stock it our wid half her lunch An start fe speculate! Miss Fan described in the quote above epitomises the tenacity and versatility of women in the early-modern Atlantic world. Lack of access to capital meant that women often had to be extremely entrepreneurial in their approaches to commerce. Half her lunch represents that small capital, but with hard work, women could manage to speculate successfully. This article investigates the trading opportunities available to women in three Atlantic port cities: Philadelphia, Charleston and Kingston. Port cities presented women with particular opportunities and problems with regards to work and income opportunities because their economies were based far more on commerce than other activities. There is no doubt that despite the hindrances placed in their way, these women made significant contributions to the economies of each port. Taking a comparative perspective highlights not only the similar problems faced by female traders throughout early-modern British America, but also the way in which factors such as the wider economy, race, the law and gender constructs shaped their abilities to contribute to the economy. The ability of these women to work within these constructs and to stretch their boundaries, whether white or black, free or slave, and whether by choice or necessity, is amazing.

Havana and the Atlantic in the sixteenth century

Havana in the 1550s was a small coastal village with a very limited population that was vulnerable to attack. By 1610, however, under Spanish rule it had become one of the best-fortified port cities in the world and an Atlantic center of shipping, commerce, and shipbuilding. Using all available local Cuban sources, including parish registries and notary, town council, and treasury records, Alejandro de la Fuente provides the first examination of the transformation of Havana into a vibrant Atlantic port city and the fastest-growing urban center in the Americas in the late sixteenth century.De la Fuente argues that Havana was much more than a port servicing the Spanish imperial powers. Analyzing how slaves, soldiers, merchants, householders, and transient sailors and workers participated socially, economically, and institutionally in the city, he shows how local ambitions took advantage of the imperial design and how, in the process, Havana was turned into a Caribbean trading center with a distinctly Mediterranean flavor. By situating Havana within the slavery and economic systems of the colonial Atlantic, de la Fuente also contributes to the growing focus on port cities as contexts for understanding the early development of global networks for economic and cultural exchange.