Eighteenth-century Atlantic World Research Articles

How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

“The pleasure of receiving your favour”

The article deals with correspondence in natural history in the eighteenth century between England and North America. The corpus discussed consists of correspondence between John Bartram and Peter Collinson, and between Alexander Garden and John Ellis. The approach used in the study is qualitative and rhetorical; the main point considered is how the letters construct scientific centre and periphery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. A central concept is the “colonial exchange”, whereby “raw materials” from the colonies — in this case plant and animal specimens, along with proposed identifications and names — are exchanged for “finished products”, in this case codified scientific knowledge contained in publications.

Barbaric traffic: commerce and antislavery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world

Introduction 1. The Commercial Jeremiad 2. The Poetics of Antislavery 3. American Slaves in North Africa 4. Liberty, Slavery, and Black Atlantic Autobiography 5. Yellow Fever and the Black Market Epilogue Notes Index

How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

How to write the history of the New World: histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world

List of illustrations Introduction 1. Towards a new art of reading and new historical interpretations 2. Changing european interpretations of the reliability of indigenous sources 3. Historiography and patriotism in Spain 4. The making of a 'patriontic epistemology' 5. Whose enlightenment was it anyway? Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.

A Tree with Two Different Fruits: The Jewish Encounter with German Pietists in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

N May 7, 1759, the Salzburg Lutheran minister Johann Martin Q X Boltzius made note in his diary of a discussion he had had a Jew in Savannah, Georgia, just a few days earlier. As he was passing by the Jew's house, going about his business in town, the Jew pulled him aside a friendly but urgent application. He handed me an English languageperiodical printed in Pennsylvania called the American Magazine, Boltzius wrote, with the request that I read the sermon which a distinguished rabbi had preached.... He made so much of this sermon, as if nothing like it had ever appeared before, although I found nothing special in it.I Boltzius did not name his Jewish contact in Savannah, nor did he provide any specifics of the article he had read or give any indication of what prior contacts he had had the anonymous Jew in question, although the man was clearly someone who knew him well. Examination of the many published volumes of the diary, printed in Germany by Samuel Urlsperger as part of his Ausffihrliche Nachricht von den Salzburgischen Emigranten (Detailed

The Haitian Revolution

THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modern world.' In ten years of sustained internal and international warfare, a colony populated predominantly by plantation slaves overthrew both its colonial status and its economic system and established a new political state of entirely free individuals-with some ex-slaves constituting the new political authority. As only the second state to declare its independence in the Americas, Haiti had no viable administrative models to follow. The British North Americans who declared their independence in 1776 left slavery intact, and theirs was more a political revolution than a social and economic one. The success of Haiti against all odds made social revolutions a sensitive issue among the leaders of political revolt elsewhere in the Americas during the final years of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century.2 Yet the genesis of the Haitian Revolution cannot be separated from the wider concomitant events of the later eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Indeed, the period between 1750 and 1850 represented an age of spontaneous, interrelated revolutions, and events in Saint

Doing Biography Naturally

The rapid burgeoning of American environmental history, the advent of ecocriticism in literary scholarship, the reinvention of the history of science as cultural studies, and the evolution of comparative imperial discourse studies all have made the history of pre-Darwinian natural history newly compelling. Among the pioneer naturalists of British North America, whose discoveries and reportage won more respect from their European counterparts during the late colonial period than did most other forms of cisatlantic cultural endeavor, none were better known and more highly respected during the late eighteenth century than John and William Bartram, father and son, two Philadelphia Quaker botanists whose intertwined life histories are unfolded in detail for the first time in Thomas Slaughter's narrative biography. John Bartram (1699-1777), designated King's Botanist for the North American Colonies by George III in 1765, established one of the first and most noted private botanical gardens in the American colonies. His son, William (17391823), whose education John carefully oversaw, became not only an internationally respected naturalist in his turn but also a skilled botanical illustrator and, more importantly, author of one of the literary classics of early natural history, Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida ... (1791), which (together with Bartram's miscellaneous essays) Slaughter has recently edited for the Library of America.' Along with White's contemporary The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), Travels has been esteemed by literati from Coleridge to modern times as the most engaging work of literary natural history writing before Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle-for its pioneering field naturalism, for its sincere albeit qualified appreciation of Native American culture, and for its symptoms of an incipient biocentrism and cultural relativism unusual if not unique in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

The Material World of Cloth: Production and Use in Eighteenth-Century Rural Pennsylvania

C LOTH was the most material item of material culture in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Laborand resource-intensive, and therefore costly to make, fabrics and clothing represented the largest expenditure on household goods for most families.1 An understanding of the place of textiles in early America is fundamental to current historiographical debates over rural household self-sufficiency, the transition to capitalism, and the emergence of a consumer culture. Yet, despite the vast literature that these issues have generated and despite a growing interest in the material culture of the period, historians have neglected this essential commodity.2

Design for Large-Scale Production in Eighteenth-Century Britain

In a recent essay published in the Journal of British Studies, T. H. Breen has characterised the AngloAmerican Empire that straddled the Atlantic during the eighteenth century as an 'Empire of Goods'.1 The eighteenth-century British Atlantic world was bound together, he argues, not simply by ties of language or administration, but also by flows of commodities, in particular manufactured consumer products. Such products circulated both within the constituent units of the British Atlantic EmpireEngland, Scotland, Ireland, the North American and the West Indian colonies and between those units, but it is the flow westward from Great Britain to the North American mainland that most effectively illustrates the themes I want to develop in this paper.* The burgeoning population of colonial British North America (over two million people by 1770) was dominated by relatively prosperous, small-scale commercial farmers. Indeed, there was considerable justification in the mid-eighteenth-century description of Pennsylvania as 'the best poor man's country in the world'.2 These were not pre-capitalist, selfsufficient peasants.3 A large proportion of the commodities that flowed westwards across the Atlantic were manufactured consumer products intended for this market; products made principally in England, which was already, at the start of the eighteenth century, probably the most industrialised of the major European states. As early as the 1740s, an upcountry Connecticut shopkeeper's ledger books reveal stocks of gloves, pots, pans, cards, knives, earthenware, thimbles, buckles, buttons, combs, spectacles, nails, silk, wire, tape, pewter dishes and cloth, almost all imported from England. 'Already', said an astonished German clergyman in the 1750s, 'it is really possible to obtain all the things one can get in Europe in Pennsylvania, since so many merchant ships arrive there every year'.4 Yet few of these products were manufactured in the colonies themselves. In other words, North America provided a large market of prosperous primary agricultural producers, hungry to buy finished and semi-finished consumer products, few of which were produced locally. Many of these products sold, at least in part, on their appearance. They were fashion products in the sense that their successful sale depended on con-

The Slave Economies in Political Perspective

The economic interpretations of the slave economies of the New World, as well as those social interpretations which adopt the neoclassical economic model but leave the economics out, assume everything they must prove. By retreating from the political economy from which their own methods derive, they ignore the extent to which the economic process permeates the society. They ignore, that is, the interaction between economics, narrowly defined, and the social relations of production on the one hand and state power on the other. For any economic system remains not merely a method of allocating scarce resources, but a system that, at least on the margin and frequently more pervasively, commands those scarce resources. Even an international market such as that which prevailed in the Atlantic world during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depends heavily on the state formations that guarantee the ultimate command of economic goods. Neoclassical economists achieve their theoretical sophistication by falling silent on the social relations of production that ultimately determine the prices of commodities in the market. In other words, these economists mystify reality by abstracting prices from the social relations of production and then blithely assuming that their abstraction provides an effective analytic substitute for those social relations. Even in a society such as our own where most facets of human life pass through the market, there remain pockets of nonpriced labor-for example, the household work of many women and the early reproduction of human capital. In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, commercial capital organized the market and fed off it, but it did not evenly penetrate all productive sectors. Typically, commercial capital organized the surplus production of larger or smaller domestic units of labor before the transformation of labor-power into a commodity. In this respect, the slave plan-