Atlantic World Research Articles

The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, written by Cindy Ermus

The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, written by Cindy Ermus

On the Other Shore: The Atlantic Worlds of Italians in South America during the Great War by John Starosta Galante (review)

On the Other Shore: The Atlantic Worlds of Italians in South America during the Great War by John Starosta Galante (review)

‘A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Jamaica’: Pseudobiblical Style and Jamaican Proto-nationalism

Abstract Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, now widely recognized as a watershed in the history of the Atlantic world, fundamentally shaped discussions about Jamaica’s political and legal status within the British empire. Here, I analyze a little-known narrative of the rebellion written by Jewish newspaper editor Sidney Levien in pseudobiblical style, with almost every sentence of the account echoing the language of the King James Version of the Bible. I locate Levien’s narrative within a literary tradition that used pseudobiblical style to describe contemporary political life, especially in America. The literary tradition, identified by historian Eran Shalev, transposed contemporary politics into events of biblical proportion. By using pseudobiblical style, Levien advanced a sense of Jamaica’s importance in nineteenth-century political imagination. While many accounts conceptualized the rebellion as a struggle between White landowners and Black laborers, Levien refused to present Jamaica as a White fatherland or a Black republic.

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.

Postcolonial imaginaries in the West: secular state-building and cultural defence in Québec since the Quiet Revolution

ABSTRACT This article addresses an understudied aspect of public secularity in the Canadian province of Québec, namely how its self-perception as a postcolonial nation vis-à-vis English Canada has shaped its secular state-building since the 1960s. In so doing, it shows that postcolonial legacies and imaginaries, a key theme for studying secularity in non-Western cases, may also prove productive for the North Atlantic world. The historical account proceeds in two parts. In the first period (1960-1980), the Quiet Revolution’s disestablishment of Catholicism was intimately linked to its anticolonial spirit, where the Church was identified as impeding development and self-determination. In the subsequent period (post-1980), the consolidation of Canadian multiculturalism and the rising accommodation demands of minority religions led to a contradictory form of ‘cultural defence’: an increased emphasis on Catholic heritage as well as on laïcité (state secularism), both deployed to underscore Québec’s unique society in distinction from English Canada. Exhibiting the consistent yet evolving effect of (post)colonial identity and memory in a North Atlantic example, and nuancing the concept of cultural defence by identifying its religious and secular forms, the article contributes to building a common vocabulary for the comparative analysis of secularities in Western and non-Western contexts.

Newfoundland Cod and English Piracy in the Early Seventeenth Century

Newfoundland’s cod fisheries were a vital resource in the development and sustenance of Europe’s early modern maritime economies. As the fisheries preyed on cod, they in turn were preyed upon by a new threat in the form of pirates. The pattern of piracy in Newfoundland in the first decades of the seventeenth century provides an insightful foil to English activity in the region as a whole, exposing patterns of European rivalry, national collaboration, and resource extraction. This article uses Newfoundland’s relationship with piracy as a focus to explore those issues, weaving together the histories of pirates, fishermen, and cod in an environmental approach that appreciates their interacting roles in the political ecology of Jacobean England, as well as the wider environment of the North Atlantic world.

Centering Slavery in the Age of Abolition: Insights from the Saint Lucia Register of Plantation Slaves, 1815

Abstract: Scholars have used a range of sources, including oral histories, written accounts, and plantation inventories, to reconstruct the lives of people subjected to slavery in the Atlantic world. Yet in contested colonies such as Saint Lucia, the experiences of enslaved people remain little known. Attention to a seemingly static, bureaucratic document—the 1815 Register of Plantation Slaves—provides details about all 12,726 individuals who were enslaved on estates in Saint Lucia just one year after France ceded the island to Great Britain. This, in turn, facilitates the reconstruction of life histories and genealogies of people who labored on the plantation frontier of the British Empire during the age of abolition. As one of 671 such documents created throughout the empire in the decades after Great Britain's 1807 abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, the 1815 Saint Lucia Register of Plantation Slaves illustrates the potential for such documents to significantly enlarge current understandings of slavery. The register testifies to the importance of regional trafficking and the role of reproductive labor in giving rise to a creolized enslaved population in Saint Lucia, and it poignantly illustrates how these phenomena affected enslaved individuals and families.

The Plantation Carbon Complex: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change in the Early Modern British Atlantic

Abstract: In recent years, scholars working across the humanities and social sciences have suggested that agricultural land use emissions from early modern enslaved labor plantations may have played an important role in the origins of anthropogenic, or human-induced, climate change. Yet historians of slavery and the early modern Atlantic world have been slow to engage with this argument. Focusing on the major enslaved-grown export commodities of the colonial British Atlantic world, this paper employs a carbon accounting method to test whether enslaved labor plantations and enslaved-grown exports substantially increased agricultural land use emissions in the early modern British Atlantic and how they compared to British fossil fuel emissions—namely, coal burning—in the colonial period. For each of the major types of plantations modeled—tobacco, rice, and sugar—enslaved labor, regardless of crop, decisively increased the amount of carbon any single household could emit. But the wide divergence in emissions between different plantation types and export crops suggests that enslaved labor was only one essential, though not singular, factor shaping the carbon footprint of enslaved-based plantations and enslaved-grown commodities. It was instead the interaction of the multiple factors comprising what we call the plantation carbon complex —racial and gender ideologies, crop ecologies, capital requirements, African agricultural knowledge, and enslaved resistance, among other factors—that determined an individual plantation or commodity's emissions. Nonetheless, the results reveal that the combined emissions of enslaved-grown tobacco, rice, and sugar exports far surpassed not only the emissions of the major non-enslaved-grown agricultural exports of the British Atlantic colonies but also British coal emissions throughout the eighteenth century. The form of enslaved-based racial capitalism represented by colonial British plantations thus marked an important transition in the shift toward a more carbon-intensive global economy.

Injury and Value

Abstract This essay explores two historical subjects, Catharina, an enslaved woman living and working in eighteenth-century New Orleans, and Ruth, a free field laborer in post-emancipation Barbados. Through a careful reading of their different but overlapping legal petitions against the planters who worked to control their labor, this essay seeks to distill a shared battle around Black mothering and to reconsider what it means to mother in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, respectively. In so doing, this essay contributes to scholarship that analyzes reproductive racial slavery’s afterlife, particularly how slavery’s matrilineal principle shaped the meaning of Black motherhood in bondage and in freedom. Exploring violent confrontations with empire in moments of profound change, the stories of Catharina and Ruth each offer new definitions of labor and value and hint at how Black women theorized a world beyond racial capitalism.

The Intellectual World of Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Genius

Abstract: This article examines the life and work of Phillis Wheatley and her interlocutors to consider how African-descended people conceptualized liberty and formed an intellectual community during the American Revolution. Her poetry and epistolary exchanges, shared with a range of acquaintances in the Atlantic World, reveal an intellectual universe that she created for herself and one that drew her into the political spotlight. Leaders of the founding generation began to question the intellectual possibilities for an African girl in ways that held political implications for the future of slavery. I argue that Wheatley's life and work opens critical avenues for exploring intellectualism as an aspiration of Black life in early America, and that her world of ideas sheds light on the possibilities of Black girlhood in the late eighteenth century.

The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Cindy Ermus (review)

The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Cindy Ermus (review)

“An Emporium of Beggars,” Medical Rhetoric, Disability, and Philadelphia’s Early Nationalist Welfare Crises

Abstract: In the early 1800s, cities across the Atlantic world launched welfare reforms designed to curtail excessive spending. Cities like Philadelphia opened numerous investigations into the rise of poverty and local governments ushered in new practices that depended heavily on institutions like hospitals, prisons, and boarding schools. This article considers the rhetoric used by early Philadelphia reformers to defend reform practices. Relying on hundreds of pension applications, I compare descriptions of the poor offered by government officials with actual pension records. I argue that these reforms evidence a shifting of historic protections for disabled persons, and a refusal on behalf of government officials to acknowledge the rise of a disabled minority in the United States. Changes to the poor laws barred disabled populations from securing home-based care resources, and posed institutionalization as the sole solution to rising poverty rates.

Blackness in the Black Legend: How narratives of race and slavery in the Amistad affair shaped anti-Hispanicism and "American Exceptionalism"

Abstract: This article examines Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad, which depicts a slave rebellion and mutiny on a Cuban slave ship in 1839, as a lens through which to view the origins of the Black Legend. The Black Legend emerged in 1830s in the U.S. to depict Latin American instability as the result of Spanish oppression, violence, cultural inferiority and Catholicism. The narrative served to benefit the ideology of white supremacy and the myth of American (read U.S.) "exceptionalism" by drawing global attention away from the maintenance of slavery in the U.S. and highlighting Spanish and Cuban involvement in the clandestine slave trade in the nineteenth century. The article analyzes a variety of secondary and primary sources that place blackness at the center of the construction of the Black Legend, from contemporary accounts of the Amistad revolt to subsequent references to blackness in histories of U.S.-Latin American relations in the 1830s and 1840s. The article shows how Spielberg inserts Christianity as a force for racial equality and holds up the judicial branch of the U.S. government as a model for Latin America to follow, echoing the inherent contradictions of the Black Legend in the late twentieth century. Ultimately, the article argues that U.S. history must be examined in relation to the history of Latin America, and narratives of blackness in the Atlantic world shaped national mythos and identities in similar ways. Examining the African Diaspora in the Americas, as well as the subsequent national narratives of race and national identities, helps to deconstruct narratives of exceptionalism and reveal political motivations and contradictions in the Black Legend narrative.

Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World, by Karen B. Graubart

<i>Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World</i>, by Karen B. Graubart

Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World, By Karen B. Graubart

Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World, By Karen B. Graubart

Book Review: French Connections: Cultural Mobility in North America and the Atlantic World, 1600–1875 by Robert Englebert and Andrew N. Wegmann, eds.

Book Review: <i>French Connections: Cultural Mobility in North America and the Atlantic World, 1600–1875</i> by Robert Englebert and Andrew N. Wegmann, eds.

Book Review: The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Cindy Ermus

Book Review: <i>The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World</i> by Cindy Ermus

Karen Graubart. Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World, New York, Oxford University Press, 2022, 350 páginas

Karen Graubart. Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World, New York, Oxford University Press, 2022, 350 páginas

‘Enslavement, Emotions and Oppositional Insolence in the Slave Society of British Guiana’

ABSTRACT Enslavers utilized various methods of physical and psychological violence to effect emotions of terror and fear in their African captives in order to create and maintain systems of enslavement throughout the Atlantic World. But these methods also produced emotions in the victims which could act against the systems of enslavement. One such emotion was anger and its visible display towards the enslavers was forbidden throughout the Atlantic World. But the extreme domination of enslavement also resulted in challenges to the system. In this article, I will document and analyse visible displays of the emotions of anger and vengeance by the enslaved in the colonies that became British Guiana. The emotion of vengeance in these cases was conducted through open insults which allowed slaves a way to assert themselves and belittle their enslavers. This study is based on documented complaints of the enslaved during the nineteenth century in the colony of British Guiana, housed at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. These documents are unique in the annals of British West Indian slavery as they give voice to the enslaved on a variety of topics.

Wandering books in the global Enlightenment: The life of an eighteenth-century library that crisscrossed the Atlantic

ABSTRACT This study examines the “life” of an eighteenth-century private library that migrated from Spain to New Spain in 1765 and returned, greatly reduced, back to Europe in 1772. The collection’s owner was José de Gálvez (1720–1787), a reformist Spanish statesman and recently appointed royal inspector of the Mexican viceroyalty. Standing at the crossroads of book history, the history of reading, and political history, this piece examines the library and its books from both a material and intellectual perspective. It relies on “Thing Theory,” a methodological approach that opens avenues for further research on human-object relations in the Atlantic world. Examining the interplay between the owner, his ideas, his biography, and his book collection, this study expands book history’s geographies and proposes a new narrative about the global dimensions of the Enlightenment.