Eighteenth-century 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

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)

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

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)

Slavery and Empire-Making: Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt

Slavery and Empire-Making:Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt Antoinette Burton, Kathleen Wilson, Matthew J. Smith, Daniel Domingues da Silva, James Sidbury, and Vincent Brown Introduction to the Book Forum Antoinette Burton University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Histories of slavery tend to be unevenly distributed in studies of anglophone empire. Imperialism is typically an explanatory force in histories of enslavement: acknowledged as a conditional context in accounts about its reach and significance and typically interwoven in and through its foundational narratives. Conversely, histories of empire, especially those that operate at scale, rarely take slavery fully into account, if at all—as the most recent blockbuster in the field, Caroline Elkins' 2022 Legacies of Violence, powerfully testifies.1 That is to say, it's relatively uncommon for scholars of modern empire to start with slavery and track its longitudinal effects on British imperial histories beyond abolition—save perhaps where the afterlives of antislavery movements and ideology or the material reality of indenture is concerned. With few exceptions, work that actively narrates either the episodic or recurrent connections between enslavement as a violent, extractive practice of racializing capitalism and the emergence of British imperial power as a globalizing project is not the norm in contemporary scholarship.2 The same is true for studies which center the role that enslaved peoples have had in shaping what British "slave-empire" configurations looked like by going beyond the confines of the established archive. With the publication of Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt, the impossibility of segmenting slavery from empire-making in imperial history is directly challenged. As is the notion that the archive places insurmountable limits on imagining the consequential part enslaved men and women played in directing how the interdependence of these histories and their contribution to colonial world-making on a global stage should be told. The book lays down a set of interpretive gauntlets that historians of empire eager for a re-mix of historiographies of slavery and imperialism will welcome. Key to the recalibration the book calls for, is an argument about the urgency of making the frame of war and rebellion—indeed, of historicizing rebellion as war—constitutive of our apprehension of the eighteenth century Atlantic world. Brown calls this "the martial geography of Atlantic slavery" (2), a description that reminds us that rebellions against enslavement were militant responses to its atrocities, and that such militance compels us to re-suture the Caribbean and West Africa anew. This, in order to fully appreciate "the hemispheric reach" of slave revolts. It is well-known that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Caribbean was the focus of a deliberate British imperial strategy. But through a vigorous rereading of a wide variety of historiographical work in both slavery and empire history and studies (and beyond) Brown materially links, for example, the Jamaican slave uprising of 1760-61 to histories of war and conflict on the African continent—conflicts between and among indigenous communities (as well as in opposition to slavers) which had a bearing on the way that rebellion unfolded in the recesses of St Mary Parish. Seeing slave rebellion as a species of military campaign underscores how "war and slavery nourished each other as the histories of Europe, Africa, and America became increasingly intertwined," thereby revealing Tacky's revolt and others to be protagonists in the making of the transoceanic history of slavery, to be sure, but of empire as well. Readers will not want to miss the "animated thematic map" of slave revolt that accompanies Brown's book, not least because it dramatizes in visual terms the combination of geographical re-integration and spatial re-orientation that his study offers to those who may be familiar with Caribbean rebellions or Atlantic world slavery but may not fully grasp their interconnectivity.3 Meanwhile, critical to his project as a whole is Brown's investment in reconstructing histories of key rebels—rebels whose specific identities are elusive but whose composite profiles Brown is especially skillful in building out. The book opens with the story of Wager, whose African name was Apongo and who was a major player in Jamaica in 1760-61. There is a lot we can know...

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider

Reviewed by: The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider Matt D. Childs (bio) The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World elena a. schneider University of North Carolina Press, 2018 360 pp. In June 1762, Britain brought the Seven Years’ War to Havana, Cuba, the largest city in the Caribbean, the third largest in the Americas, and Spain’s gateway to its vast empire in mainland Latin America. Assembled outside of Havana’s harbor was a British force that would number 28,400 sailors, soldiers, and enslaved Africans—amazingly more people than lived in any British colonial city in the Americas at the time. After a six-week siege that even involved digging a tunnel under the famous Moro military fortress that guarded Havana’s deep harbor to dynamite its walls, the Spanish finally surrendered. The British would occupy Havana for nearly a year before it would be returned to Spain in exchange for Florida in 1763. Spain and Britain alike recognized the siege and occupation of Havana as a watershed moment in the history of the Atlantic world, often giving it as much historical weight as the arrival of Columbus in the 1490s and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Given the importance of the occupation of Havana for shaping Caribbean, Imperial, and Atlantic history, scholars have analyzed the event from military, political, economic, and diplomatic angles, which has produced a long and detailed historiography. Historian Elena Schneider’s The Occupation of Havana is the latest addition to this largest body of scholarship, and without a doubt it is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date. Other scholars have emphasized the importance of the siege and occupation of Havana, but mainly to illustrate a different story. For example, the event often figures as one of the last battles of the Seven Years’ War that forced Spain to the peace table, or the resistance by Cuban colonists is [End Page 499] highlighted as an early form of nationalism, or most frequently the economic changes initiated by the British during their brief occupation is portrayed as the first step in the development of the Cuban plantation system. Schneider breaks with this scholarly tradition whereby the occupation of Havana is leveraged to make an argument about a different historical topic. Instead, she explains that methodologically her study is a longue durée history of the preceding interactions between the British and Spanish in the Caribbean before the siege, a detailed narrative and analysis of the occupation and of the long-lasting consequences after Havana returned to Spanish rule. In developing this line of analysis, Schneider has performed exhaustive research in over two dozen archives in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean working in sources that range from papers relating to heads of state discussing political and military events down to the minutiae of individual sale transactions recorded by notaries. Drawing on this diverse source base, she skillfully juggles multiple levels of analysis that range from the macro analysis of global-structural events to the micro scale of individual actions by the enslaved produced out of contingency and expediency. Utilizing these sources and examining the occupation of Havana from a long historical view, Schneider argues that “the British invasion and occupation of a Spanish colonial space was not the radical rupture in Cuban history that it was once depicted as being . . . [but rather] the intensification of existing patterns and processes of interactions . . directly connected to slavery, the slave trade, and population of African descent . . . before during and after the events that transpired in 1762 and 1763” (9). In buttressing her argument on how the occupation of Havana was an intensification of preexisting patterns and accelerated interactions between colonies and empires in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Schneider has structured her book through six detailed chapters separated into three parts. In part 1, “Origins,” the author provides an intellectual and cultural history of what she wittingly labels the “Deep History of British Plots against Havana,” which traces schemes, conspiracies, and actions to take Havana and New World Spanish lands fueled by religious and imperial rivalries. Collectively, these early...

Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution by John Gilbert McCurdy

Reviewed by: Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution by John Gilbert McCurdy Rachel Engl (bio) Keywords (Lang: English) U.S. Revolutionary War, British Army, Military geography, Quartering Act Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution. By John Gilbert McCurdy. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. 328. Cloth, $45.00.) In the Declaration of Independence, colonists opined against the quartering of British troops as one of the enumerated grievances they addressed to King George III. This experience was not limited just to colonists in Boston or other major cities in British North America. By contrast, as John McCurdy compellingly reveals in his book, Quarters: The Accommodation of the British Army and the Coming of the American Revolution, this practice pervaded British colonies throughout the Atlantic world. The Crown was eager to station troops throughout North America, yet British officials did not fully anticipate the ramifications of this plan. In the years leading up to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, dealing with British troops had become a reality intimately known to most colonists across North America. Moreover, it was through this shared experience, McCurdy argues, that Americans began to separate themselves from the British and imagine themselves as a nation as they sought an answer to the fundamental question of “where do soldiers belong?” Structuring the book thematically, McCurdy explores the evolution of Americans’ views on the proper place of the military within eighteenth-century society. He considers more traditional places one might associate with quarters such as houses and barracks in addition to broader locales ranging from the more localized level of cities and towns to the nation and empire. In doing so, McCurdy astutely links these variety of spaces through the discourse of military geography, a term he defines as the study of “the [End Page 741] influences that soldiers, weapons, and martial codes have on notions of place” (7). McCurdy reiterates throughout his book that historians have far too long ignored the particular practice of quartering employed by the British in addition to the military geography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, more broadly. This is a valid critique for much of the research produced by revolutionary-era scholars; however, he overlooks the great work of Steven Elliott, a recent graduate of Temple University whose dissertation focuses on the military geography of New Jersey during the Revolutionary War.1 McCurdy, though, is admittedly more interested in the prewar years because at the core of his study is a fresh re-examination of the Quartering Act. Because of the centrality of the language of the Quartering Act and its revisions over time to the nuances of the book’s argument, it would have been useful to have an appendix with the complete text of the legislation for reference. Nevertheless, McCurdy persuasively contends that the Quartering Act “reshaped the military geography of British North America,” and the variety of responses to the attempts to implement it within the colonies by key British officials like General Gage foreshadowed the Crown’s inability to accommodate the demands and interests across its empire (91). One of the greatest strengths of McCurdy’s wide-ranging study is his consideration of quarters within the borderlands. His discussion fits well with current scholarship investigating the interactions within the land inhabited by Native Americans yet challenged by colonists’ persistent desire to expand westward across the continent.2 He skillfully demonstrates how, on the ground, there were inconsistencies in the implementation of the Quartering Act as British officials weighed the particular variables of local conditions against the needs of the army. Whereas Americans sought to rid their homes and towns of the presence of the British troops, the borderlands were inherently much more militarized because of the [End Page 742] tension between colonists and Native Americans. At the same time, though, there was also much more ambiguity on the borderland about the proper place for the military. McCurdy examines the practice of quartering not only in the western borderlands but also in British colonies throughout the Atlantic world. Although some of this story will be familiar to those who have read Andrew...

Supremacy and the Origins of American Slavery

Katharine Gerbner has provided readers a much-needed treatment of the relationship between Protestant Christianity and the emergence of White Supremacist racial ideology in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Scholars have long perceived the general outlines of the story that unfolds in Gerbner's book, but no one has highlighted the connective tissues with as much care and detail. With her book, it is now much easier to see what we once could only imagine to be there: Christians (Protestants in this telling) played a singular role in the articulation of a racial ideology that would eventually become a widespread rationale for slavery throughout much of the Atlantic world. There are surprises in this tale, such as the seemingly paradoxical role played by historical actors who scholars often credit with being on the right side of history—the Quakers and Moravians, for example, who are typically cast as characters intent on destabilizing slavery. Not so, according to Gerbner. In this way, she does marvelously well to show how Protestant Christianity was never really above the fray and that those we might like to imagine were the progenitors of an eventual antislavery critique were also critical conduits in the development of modern-day racism.

Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Histrionics of the Pulpit

AbstractThe eighteenth-century Atlantic world was swept with a radical new form of Christian preaching that aimed to engage the feelings and sensations of mass audiences. In the nineteenth century, this heart-centered preaching became a mainstream form of American Christianity, but in its first hundred years, it was widely regarded as perverse, effeminate, and depraved. Early evangelical Christianity threatened to destabilize social and political orders, to drive the masses “out of their senses,” and to throw gender norms into chaos. This article argues that attention to “trans tonality”—an investigation of trans at the level of tone, expression, and sensation—offers a surprising trans history of early American culture and opens up an archive rich with accounts of gender and sensory variance.

From a cosmopolitan fraternity to a loyalist institution: Freemasonry in British North America in the 1780s–1790s

ABSTRACTBritish Freemasons accommodated the revolutionary politics of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world until the 1790s, when the British waged war against revolutionary France and suppressed internal radicalism and associations they defined as seditious. British Grand Lodges reoriented to overt displays of loyalty, such as adopting royal patrons, and consolidating their authority over Freemasonry. This transformation from an elastic and cosmopolitan fraternity to a loyalist institution was highly embattled. This essay examines this shift within “Hiram Lodge No. 17” in Saint John, New Brunswick. Lodge members became embroiled in political conflicts in the colony’s first election in 1785. A decade later, members sparred with Masonic officialdom, after Nova Scotia’s provincial grand lodge adopted the anti-revolutionary turn of British Grand Lodges. It clamped down on fractious lodges, including Hiram Lodge, a case demonstrating the complex relationship between fraternal organizations and the dynamic political culture of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

Blackness and lines of beauty in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world

ABSTRACTThis essay recalibrates the visual signifier of blackness in eighteenth-century art to the period’s adjoining theories and visual aesthetics of lines. The uneven archive of eighteenth-century Anglophone materials – comprised of visual representations of black subjects and written works by black subjects – invites readers of the present to move between, at least, visual and textual modes of interpretation. Building from the scholarship of David Dabydeen and the work of eighteenth-century Londoner, grocer, critic and free black artist Ignatius Sancho, this essay argues that the interplay of visual and textual lines renews readings of eighteenth-century representations of blackness. On the one hand, readings around this interplay open up a recognition of the interrelatedness of literary production, like the rise of the English novel, and the Caribbean plantation system; on the other, these readings gesture at the submerged relationships between eighteenth-century black subjects in the Anglophone Atlantic world.

Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Londa Schiebinger

Reviewed by: Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Londa Schiebinger Rana Hogarth Londa Schiebinger. Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2017. xvi + 234 pp. Ill. $24.95 (978–1–5036–0291–5). For many scholars the eighteenth-century Caribbean represents a contentious space shaped by European colonization and Atlantic World slavery. For others it is a geographic space where cultures and knowledge collided. Londa Schiebinger’s latest book, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century [End Page 120] Atlantic World, combines these views and offers a new perspective: the eighteenth-century Caribbean as a site of medical innovation, experimentation, and knowledge production. She sees its indigenous and African inhabitants as skilled healers—experts on local plants and herbs—and stewards of highly sought-after medical knowledge. As Schiebinger notes early on in the text, “Fine educations in Europe could not guarantee success on the ground in the tropics” (p. 5). As such, European practitioners relied on enslaved healers’ knowledge or knowledge shared with them from indigenous sources. Her book then is devoted to exploring the transfer of knowledge from enslaved African practitioners to European physicians and the contentious relationships between these two groups set against a backdrop of Atlantic World slavery. Indeed, Schiebinger recounts how European physicians resorted to spying on enslaved healers to learn of their secret cures and running “trials” in which European treatments were pitted against local or indigenous ones to test their efficacy. Her book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 examines the experimental impulse in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. In this chapter, Schiebinger demonstrates how white physicians took advantage of their new surroundings and their exposure to black Africans in unfamiliar climates to explore questions about racial difference, the origin of black skin color, and the effect of climate and place on bodily temperature through experimentation. Chapter 2 traces how European practitioners gained access to African and indigenous American plant based therapies. Schiebinger balances cautious speculation with textual sources to outline the transfer of knowledge from indigenous sources to African ones, and African ones to European. African slaves not only practiced medicine, but adopted indigenous knowledge and adapted their own healing customs to treat ailments that proved too challenging for European physicians. She draws these points out in her discussion of yaws—a contagious, painful, disfiguring skin condition that left slaves unable to work. Chapters 3 and 4 explore principles of medical ethics and medical experimentation as it was understood and practiced in the metropole and the colonies. Schiebinger carefully puts experimentation on enslaved populations in the broader context of experimentation that took place in Europe and in the colonies on the poor, prisoners, and other wards of the state. These groups, Schiebinger contends, were vulnerable to medical experimentation. Unlike slaves, however, they did not carry a value as property—a status that Schiebinger notes could shield slaves from reckless experimentation. That said, slaves faced having their humanity acknowledged and dismissed. When it suited a physician’s experimental aims, slaves’ bodies could be interchangeable with whites. In other cases, they were viewed as innately different, but close enough substitutes. Chapter 4 stands out for its descriptions of exploitative experiments conducted on enslaved populations. Schiebinger examines John Quier’s dangerous experiments with smallpox inoculation that involved more than eight hundred slaves in Jamaica during the 1760s. This chapter clearly highlights the long and still understudied history of the medical subjugation of Africans and their descendants across the Americas. The fifth chapter rounds out the narrative by exploring the [End Page 121] underlying tensions between white medical interventions and slaves’ use of spirituality in healing as was the case with obeah and vodou. European practitioners and colonial officials, Schiebinger notes, dismissed enslaved people’s healing practices as witchcraft or quackery. Some went as far as citing such practices as propagating rebellion (p. 128). Schiebinger acknowledges that her narrative does “privilege European-style experimentation”—in both the sources used and the ways “experimentation is conceptualized” (p. 15), but she clearly gestures toward the limitations of such sources. The reader does...

Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, written by Londa Schiebinger

Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, written by Londa Schiebinger

The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World by Denver Brunsman; Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution by Christopher P. Magra

<i>The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World</i> by Denver Brunsman; <i>Poseidon’s Curse: British Naval Impressment and Atlantic Origins of the American Revolution</i> by Christopher P. Magra

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American LiteratureFictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American LiteratureFictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi

Reviewed by: Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi Morgan Vanek (bio) Ramesh Mallipeddi. Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic. U of Virginia P, 2016. Pp. xiv, 265. US$49.50. Politically suspect, self-indulgent, ineffective: sentimentalism, Ramesh Mallipeddi admits, and metropolitan sympathy for slaves' suffering in particular, "has been the target of withering critique" by scholars of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world (4). In Spectacular Suffering, however, Mallipeddi invites us to reevaluate sentimental sympathy—not to recuperate this metropolitan preoccupation with the injured black body but rather to develop a new theory of slave agency that will better account for the "embodied [End Page 192] dimensions of black experience in slave narratives and in black cultural and aesthetic forms" (5). To this end, the book's first half examines scenes of physical distress in sentimental responses to slavery from metropolitan observers like Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne, while the second turns to the less well-studied archives of slaves' representations of their own experiences of dispossession, which range from Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Ignatius Sancho's Letters to medical records, captains' journals, and the proceedings of parliamentary investigations of the slave trade. By reading these archives together, Spectacular Suffering demonstrates how "the emergence of actual slaves as speaking subjects in the English public sphere was . . . shaped by the discursive parameters" of the metropolitan focus on spectacular suffering (71), and how these slaves, as speaking subjects, nonetheless managed to leverage spectatorial sympathy to generate a "melancholic counterknowledge of colonial modernity" (11). With attention to the methodological challenges that necessarily attend any excavation of these fragmentary archives, Mallipeddi thus strives to shift the focus of contemporary scholarship on the Atlantic world and begins to bridge the current "chasm between recovery projects that aim to generate historical knowledge about slavery . . . and those that take corporeal dimensions of slave existence as their point of departure to trace acts of regeneration and recuperation undertaken by enslaved people themselves" (15). Meticulously researched, clearly written, and original, Spectacular Suffering delivers on this promise: Mallipeddi both exposes the troubling ways contemporary critics reproduce their metropolitan subjects' tendency to foreground spectacle and suffering and demonstrates how recentring slaves' "bodily experience as a source of knowledge" can open new avenues of inquiry about how the "ostensible objects of sentimental compassion" generated their own "affective response to . . . the commodification of their bodies" (4–6). Instructors will find Mallipeddi's first three chapters especially useful, as the book begins with compelling close readings of widely anthologized and frequently taught texts (Behn's Oroonoko, Steele's Spectator No. 11 [Inkle and Yarico], and Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey) that demonstrate just how similar the transformations of the injured body at the centre of sentimental representations of slave distress are to the transformations of the body that underpin the commodification and punishment that characterize Atlantic slavery. In Chapter One, for instance, Mallipeddi identifies Oroonoko as a "foundational" illustration of this dynamic (47), weaving together research on the conventions of heroic drama, the logic of the fetish, and the processes of trade and mercantilist exchange to expose "the changing valences of the black body as a consequence of its commodification" (50). In Chapter [End Page 193] Two, Mallipeddi takes a similar approach, combining Jürgen Habermas' and Michael Warner's analyses of the public sphere with a close study of the heroic epistle (or lover's complaint) to argue that, in Steele's Spectator No. 11, the sympathy the heroic epistle makes available to Yarico, its heroine, emerges only "via a bracketing of racial slavery," by foregrounding her abandonment rather than her enslavement (70). By tracing this move through the many adaptations Steele inspired, furthermore, Mallipeddi discovers that this gesture also tightly circumscribed the sympathy available to Mary Prince, whose nineteenth-century History of her own enslavement was censored for acknowledging any forms of freedom she found within either slavery or sexual relationships; like the fictional Yarico, Mallipeddi observes, Prince is authorized to vouch for her experience as a woman or a slave, but not both. More striking, Mallipeddi finds that contemporary critical emphasis on the auction...

Philippe Girard. Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life.

Toussaint Louverture was an extraordinary historical figure in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Contemporaries and historians have compared him to George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1791, when the military campaign of the Haitian Revolution began, Louverture was numbered among its early leadership. By 1797, he became the general-in-chief of French armed forces in Saint-Domingue and the leader of the Haitian Revolution. Four years later, similar to Washington and Bonaparte, Louverture became the head of a government he had helped to establish. Upon learning of his death in 1803, American diarist Elizabeth Drinker lamented, “the celebrated African Chief, is dead” (Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker [1991], 3:1659). The English poet William Wordsworth offered an elegy for the fallen hero: “Thou hast left behind / Powers that will work for thee … There’s not a breathing of the common wind / That will forget thee” (“To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” 1803). Over fifty years after his death, according to Matthew J. Clavin’s Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War (2010), the image of the Haitian Revolution’s leader served as a resonant, polarizing symbol on both sides of the war that determined the fate of American slavery. Louverture’s was a revolutionary life in the midst of Atlantic revolutions.

Much More Than the Half Has Never Been Told: Narrating the Rise of Capitalism from New Granada's Shores

Much More Than the Half Has Never Been Told:Narrating the Rise of Capitalism from New Granada's Shores Ernesto BassiiD In one of the first reports he sent to Spain on October 14, 1782, shortly after assuming his new position as viceroy of New Granada, Antonio Caballero y Góngora expressed his optimism about the economic potential of the viceroyalty for whose prosperity he was now accountable.1 In his opinion, it was time to take advantage of "the enormous wealth with which the immense liberality of the Almighty (had) endowed that precious portion of the Americas." While arguing for the viceroyalty's tremendous potential and dreaming of its future prosperity, Caballero y Góngora also presented a picture of present misery, which he attributed largely to the abandonment and under-exploitation of the viceroyalty's rich gold and silver mines.2 Exploiting the viceroyalty's mineral and agricultural potential immediately became the central priority of the newly appointed viceroy. His proposal for the future development of New Granada, thus, simultaneously stressed mining and agricultural production as engines of economic growth and development for Spain's American territories. Intensive exploitation of the viceroyalty's natural resources would, Caballero y Góngora hoped, insert the young viceroyalty into the growing late eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. Caballero y Góngora's diagnosis of and vision for New Granada is a typical example of a late eighteenth-century literature associated with the modernizing efforts known in the historiography of colonial Spanish America as the Bourbon reforms. The report is also an important source to further our understanding of the "fundamental rethinking of the rise of capitalism" that, historian John Tutino rightly claims, is currently underway.3 To the classical notion, derived from Max Weber, of capitalism—an economic system usually associated with globally integrated markets, great capital investment and reinvestment, efficient use of production factors, free wage and specialized labor, and innovation and creativity, all geared towards maximizing profit—as a "European, mostly British, primarily Protestant invention," a series of recent studies have added alternative genealogies that convincingly make the case for "a more inclusive story" of the rise of capitalism.4 Collectively, the work of Kenneth Pomeranz, John Tutino, Eric Williams, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Dale Tomich, Daniel Rood, Edward Baptist, Walter Johnson, and Sven Beckert, among [End Page 529] others, has made a compelling case for China, Spanish North America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. South to join western Europe as cradles of capitalism.5 This article puts New Granada at the center of this rethinking process. In doing so, I am not claiming that capitalism was born or invented in New Granada, but that a better understanding of its origins needs to acknowledge that New Granada (and other similar places) were part of the competition and conversation (i.e. the information exchanges, debates, common set of readings and policy proposals) that, during the late eighteenth century, resulted in the emergence of a capitalist world economy. In short, this article argues that Caballero y Góngora and other prominent members of New Granada's political and economic elite actively sought to incorporate their viceroyalty into the increasingly integrated and wealth-generating commercial circuits of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. That they failed to do so, does not imply that they did not invest time and other more tangible resources like ink, paper, and money into their efforts. Moreover, that they failed to become key players in the capitalist world economy of the Atlantic does not imply that they did not stand a chance of becoming successful Atlantic capitalists. The view from New Granada makes it possible to tell the story of the rise of capitalism as "a history of what was deemed possible but remained unrealized."6 Incorporating New Granada allows us to understand the global conversation and competition out of which some places—like Cuba and the U.S. South—emerged as leading suppliers of some of the commodities that made early capitalism and the modern world. Unlike Cuba and the U.S. South, New Granada (and many other places) did not emerge a victor in the global capitalist competition. From New Granada's Caribbean shores, thus...