Nineteenth-century Atlantic World Research Articles

Liquor Rations and Labour Management in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Abstract A striking yet underexamined system of labour management circulated between land and sea in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world: the use of liquor rations to stimulate worker productivity. Turning to the British naval warship and the American slave plantation, this article depicts how labour supervisors in both settings relied on carefully regulated quantities of alcohol to extract more labour from their workforces. Even as Anglo-American temperance activists called for sobering up the working classes, many naval commanders and slaveholders held firm to the belief that managed intemperance was an essential tool for mobilizing workers. The study of liquor rations and the arguments endorsing their distribution helps to reveal how a spectrum of coercive labour practices swept through the Atlantic world amid the emergence of an industrial capitalist order. Zooming in on the history of these rations enables us to discern labour extraction strategies that operated between the poles of violent coercion and market-based exploitation, and that animated vital sectors of the Atlantic economy during the nineteenth century.

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.

Quilting in West Africa: Liberian Women Stitching Political, Economic, and Social Networks in the Nineteenth Century

Quilts occupy a liminal position in the histories of art and material culture. Centering analyses around specific artworks like Martha Ricks’ 1892 Coffee Tree quilt, as well as investigating women’s writing about their material production, illuminates ignored narratives about the ways black women participated in international social, political, and economic networks around the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Quilters who emigrated from the United States to Liberia in the nineteenth century incorporated an aesthetic heritage from the American South with new visual vocabularies developing alongside the newly independent nation. Artists relied on networks with abolitionists in the United States and local textile knowledge to source materials for their work. Finished quilts circulated in local and international contexts, furthering social, political, and economic objectives. Like Harriet Powers’ bible quilts, Ricks’ quilts gained fame through exhibition and a whimsical artist’s biography. Quilts’ fragility as natural-fiber textiles in a tropical climate makes a finding a body of works difficult to examine as there are no extant Liberian quilts from the nineteenth century. However, it is possible to patch together a network of women artists, their patrons, and audiences from West Africa to North America and Europe through creative investigation of diverse historical records, including diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, and photographs. I argue that by examining Martha Ricks’ artworks, self-presentation through portraiture, and published writing, it is possible to envision a new narrative of black women’s participation in visualizing the newly-minted Republic of Liberia for Atlantic audiences.

Ann L. Tucker. Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy.

Ann L. Tucker’s Newest Born of Nations contributes to a vast scholarly conversation on the United States’ place within the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The book also adds to a substantial dialogue on the nature of antebellum southern identity, the degree of slaveholding nationalism, the durability of Confederate national commitment, and the extent of anti-Confederate Unionism. Documenting “a southern interpretation of nationhood” (2), Tucker explains how a domestic sense of nationalism depended on comparisons to nations and nationalist movements abroad. In her telling, elite white southerners looked to the promise and peril of Europe’s 1848 democratic revolutions to measure the stability of their slaveholding republic and to justify disunion and Confederate nationhood. The “international perspective,” Tucker explains, was “a readily available metaphor for speaking to an audience of fellow white southerners, one that allowed its adopter to translate the concerns of slaveholders into the language of international nationalism” (4). Deftly analyzing a wide range of printed sources, Tucker details how elite white southerners interpreted the fates of distant nations within domestic understandings of liberalism and conservatism. Like most American nationalists, white southerners cherished their liberal privilege of democratic self-government, an ideal under assault across much of the Atlantic rim. The rule of law, individual rights—at least for white men—and the assurance of constitutional sovereignty bolstered the slaveholders’ Union. White southerners nevertheless renounced unchecked liberalism as a threat to a conservative, hierarchical social order. American slaveholders interpreted the stark imbalances of European nations swinging from the extremes of revolutionary democracy to counterrevolutionary centralization as a clear lesson that the United States had to align liberalism and conservatism; otherwise, the alleged right to enslave people would become imperiled.

In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

In Search of Liberty sheds new light on Black freedom struggles during the nineteenth century, locating them within an international context that testifies to the resilience of those African Americans who forged new identities for themselves far beyond the shores of the United States, whether in Africa, the Caribbean, or Europe. The eleven essays in this collection are divided into four geographical sections. The first of these, North America, opens with Franco Paz and Harvey Amani Whitfield's essay on early Black migration to Nova Scotia, viewed through the harrowing case of Elizabeth Watson, an enslaved African American woman whose search for liberty resulted, perversely, in her reenslavement. Mekala Audain tackles another neglected frontier of liberty in her illuminating essay on Black migration from Louisiana to Spanish Texas during the early nineteenth century, while Thomas Mareite explores in telling detail the risk-laden experiences of Black refugees from slavery in early independent Mexico (1821–1836).

In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, and; Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott

Reviewed by: In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, and; Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott Stephanie J. Richmond (bio) In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Edited by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene. ( Athens: University of George Press, 2021. Pp. 326. Cloth, $114.95; paper, $39.95.) Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America. By Elena K. Abbott. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 304. Cloth, $89.99; paper, $29.99.) In the last decade, scholars have well documented the international history of the African American freedom struggle. Historians have chronicled the journeys of Black freedom fighters around the Atlantic world and explored how their connections shaped their activism. In two recently published books, the authors expand our understanding of how African American activists positioned themselves and the spaces they chose to inhabit in the context of their work for freedom and equality. Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene's collection of essays, In Search of Liberty, brings together scholars to weave a portrait of a vibrant and geographically diverse Black Atlantic. Organized geographically, the volume succeeds in recentering the transnational experience of Africans and African Americans as key to their freedom struggles. Elena K. Abbott, in her book Beacons of Liberty, examines one particular thread [End Page 112] of the international freedom struggle: the quest for free soil. In tracing the debates over and meanings of territories and colonies founded without slavery, Abbott brings the debate over free soil out of the American Midwest and into the larger conversation about freedom and slavery in the Atlantic. Both books fill important gaps in the historiography of the freedom struggle. In Search of Liberty is a collection of eleven essays that center internationalism in African American activism and intellectualism. Each section has particular strengths. The three essays on North America take us to the fringes of English-speaking North America, from Nova Scotia to Texas and Mexico. In particular, Thomas Mareite's essay on freedom seekers in Mexico is accessible and explains an often overlooked route on the Underground Railroad. Moving across the Atlantic to Africa, the essays in the next section spend a significant amount of time in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but Marcus Bruce's essay on missions in the Congo Free State brings a much-needed, new look at freedom struggles in post-slave-trade West Africa. The section on the Caribbean also stays close to some well-trodden ground with colonization schemes and the impact of Frederick Douglass and Haitian independence, but the three essays are solid contributions and highlight that the Caribbean was indeed international in context and in its position in African American thought. The final section, on Europe, is the one that does not hold up to the standards of the previous contributions. In particular, Pia Wiegmink's essay on African American women in Europe ignores a substantial body of scholarship on Black women's international travels. Angela F. Murphy's essay on abolitionists in Ireland is stronger but far too brief and focuses mainly on Frederick Douglass. Together, the eleven essays in the volume reveal the importance of international movement to the development of African American freedom philosophies. Elena K. Abbott's Beacons of Liberty examines the impact of free-soil havens outside the United States on the American antislavery movement. By examining the ways in which antislavery and Black newspapers reported on communities of self-emancipated and free people of African descent in Canada, the Caribbean, and West Africa, Abbott challenges the current historiography of both the Underground Railroad and abolitionism to look critically at the ways in which abolitionists and Black freedom seekers used international free soil to fight slavery in the United States. Studies of Black emigration from the United States have, to date, mainly focused on emigration to Africa or Europe. Abbott reminds us that the vast majority of African American emigrants settled just outside the United States' borders...

Dale W. Tomich, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Carlos Venegas Fornias, and Rafael de Bivar Marquese. Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Slavery was under attack in the Americas during the nineteenth century just as it reached the plantation as a form of agricultural production. In this stunning book, Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, researchers from Brazil, the United States, and Cuba on “second slavery” have turned a well-funded international project into a short but brilliantly illustrated survey of how plantations worked to produce, through enslaved labor, coffee, sugar, and cotton for an expanding global market. The aim of Tomich, Monzote, Fornias, and Marquese, brilliantly realized, is to show how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy in the nineteenth century led to new zones of commodity production. They argue, convincingly, that second slavery was different from slavery before the advent of industrialization insofar as new environments of mechanized plantation labor and modern management methods radically transformed how enslaved labor worked in growing tropical crops that were increasingly part of global mass markets. They are especially good at showing what happened when enslaved people interacted with new forms of technologies and calculated systems of production in which enslaved people were units of production more than they were people. Their conclusion seems right. The new commodity frontiers of the second slavery, dominated by large plantations that transformed and dominated the landscapes they occupied, were no less capitalist factories than the mills of Manchester.

Space, place, and the landscapes of slavery

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale Tomich, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Carlos Venegas Fornias examines the economic and political restructuring of 19th century slavery through contemporary paintings, plans and images. Ranging across the diverse settings of the lower Mississippi Valley, Cuba, and Brazil, the authors use a landscape-oriented perspective to chart the redeployment, reorganization, and industrialization of slavery during the 19th century, a time referred to as the ‘Second Slavery’. The incremental steps toward abolition during the 19th century did not result in a decline of agriculture based on enslaved labor or weaken the institutions that supported it. Rather, plantation slavery emerged as an efficient agro-industrial system, massive in scale, that was central to the political and economic restructuring of industrial capitalism. New political-economic spaces were exploited, while old ones declined. Focusing on Cuba, Brazil and the Mississippi Valley, the authors examine the contrasting spatial and material organization of plantations to shed new light on how these landscapes expressed both global socioeconomic processes and local contexts. The volume affords an insightful view of plantation landscapes that can be usefully read by historians, archaeologists, and wider audiences.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

This richly illustrated and engaging comparative study focuses on visual representations of plantations in three frontier zones of economic expansion during the nineteenth century: the world of cotton in the lower Mississippi Valley of the United States, sugar plantations in the interior of Cuba, and the coffee zone in the Paraíba Valley of Brazil. Each region became a world leader in the production of their respective crops during what one of the authors (Dale Tomich) has called the “second slavery,” the period after 1800 when increased technological and transportation developments, new forms of land management, and new systems for organizing labor resulted in a significant increase in commodity production and the mass movement of enslaved peoples into these regions. The authors emphasize that “world economic conditions” such as industrialization, population growth, and urbanization drove demand for these crops and fueled agricultural expansion in the three regions, but that local environmental conditions and the demands of different crops gave rise to distinct plantation forms and landscapes in each.In outlining economic forces and agricultural developments, the authors synthesize clearly and effectively the rich literature on cotton, sugar, and coffee plantations that has emerged over the past several decades. What distinguishes their work in this book, of course, is the attention to images of the landscapes that resulted from these developments: the maps, plats, paintings, lithographs, and photographs of plantations, buildings, machinery, and enslaved people, many reproduced in full color. Their goals are twofold: to explore “how visual documents help us to understand these landscapes” and to examine what “such landscapes tell us about the history of the commodity frontiers of the second slavery” (145). In doing so, they move beyond what they see as a limitation of many existing landscape studies, namely the focus on “landscape” as an abstract idea divorced from “any specific material, social, or historical content or context” (5). Such studies may call attention to how landscapes (and representations of landscapes) can articulate power relations, but they do not explore fully the specific historical circumstances in which those relations emerged. That is the focus here.The book is divided into two sections, each with three chapters, one for each region. The first section focuses on the development of plantations and plantation agriculture. The authors make excellent use of regional maps to illustrate different patterns of landholding, the expansion of commodity frontiers across space, and the transportation networks (river and boats, trains, and mules) needed to link plantations to markets. The second section explores the economic and spatial layout of plantations. The analysis of the images here is especially rich. There are some maps, but paintings and photographs are more prominent. The authors offer clear and insightful commentary on these various images as they explain how the spatial layout of plantations and plantation buildings reflected the physical and environmental conditions needed to grow various crops, the labor routines involved in production, and the technological developments that facilitated rapid increases in output. Images of work logs and gin houses in the Mississippi Valley, steam engines and vacuum pans in sugar ingenios, and the drying terraces on coffee fazendas in Brazil all dramatically illustrate new modes and spaces of production on plantations. Even familiar images, such as scenes from a cotton plantation that appeared in Harper's Weekly in the 1860s, are analyzed in the context of work, space, and labor control.While the discussion of images of plantations and plantation operations in each region is illuminating, the comparative framework makes the book especially valuable. Maps of the Cuban and Brazilian plantations, for example, depict a group of structures at the center of those estates that were central to the production process while no such grouping appears on maps and plats of cotton plantations. Likewise, images of barracks housing enslaved people on coffee plantations, which developed in response to the expanded scale of production, and the placement of those barracks differed significantly from the individual structures that housed enslaved people and the spatial layout of cotton estates. In short, the authors' focus on how global economic forces interacted with local environments to reshape the landscapes of these three regions, and their argument that critical attention to images can reveal how those transformations played out on the ground, make an important contribution to our understanding of the period of the second slavery in various parts of the Americas.

The visual records and visual legacies of slavery

How did visual techniques serve to facilitate slave regimes? How can an attention to the visual record enhance our understanding of slavery? In what ways does this record survive in our contemporary visual economy? This essay considers these questions through an analysis of Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale Tomich et al. and of the contested practice of “plantation weddings” in an era dominated by the photographic image.

Visuality, rhetoric, and reality in the Second Slavery

This piece engages with the new book Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. It places the text within the longer publication histories of the four authors, while also articulating what is unique about the book under discussion. Finally, it wrestles with the authors’ particular take on aesthetics and power, as well as the theory of plantation landscape they advocate, suggesting the usefulness of some alternative perspectives.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale W. Tomich et al.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale W. Tomich et al.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Toward a Multilingual Victorian Transatlanticism

This essay argues that scholarship being done under the sign of transatlantic studies, and Victorian transatlantic studies in particular, is problematically focused on the anglophone northern Atlantic region. Challenging both the essentialness and the disciplinary primacy of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, I argue instead that the entire nineteenth-century Atlantic world was a geographically and linguistically permeable space. Paying attention to crossings from north to south and vice versa is both methodologically and ethically necessary. From a methodological perspective, it can help us produce much more thorough answers to the questions transatlantic studies purports to ask about identity and community. But reading beyond anglophone British and U.S. American texts can also help us decolonize our reading and thinking. Of course, work like this requires scholars to read in second and third languages; as such, this essay discusses and denaturalizes the institutional barriers to multilingual English studies. It also offers a case study—a brief reading of a novel by Argentine writer Vicente Fidel López—demonstrating the insights that can be gained by expanding both our geographic perspective and our methodological toolbox.

The Adjudication of Slave Ship Captures, Coercive Intervention, and Value Exchange in Comparative Atlantic Perspective, ca. 1839–1870

AbstractWhat were the consequences of creating jurisdictions against the transatlantic slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Answering this question requires a comparative focus on the courts of mixed commission that adjudicated naval captures of slave ships, located at Sierra Leone (the foremost site of British abolition) and Brazil (the primary mid-century target). Court jurisdiction conflicted with sovereign jurisdiction regarding the presence of recaptives (“liberated Africans”), the risk of re-enslavement, and unlawful naval captures. To rescue the re-enslaved and compensate the loss of property, regulating anti-slave-trade jurisdiction involved coercive strategies alternating with negotiated value exchanges. Abolition as a legal field emerged from interactions between liberated Africans, British diplomatic and naval agents, and local political elites in Brazil and on the Upper Guinea Coast.

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.

Who Owns Haiti? People, Power, and Sovereignty ed. by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman

Reviewed by: Who Owns Haiti? People, Power, and Sovereignty ed. by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman Andrea Steinke Who Owns Haiti? People, Power, and Sovereignty. Edited by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. ISBN- 13: 9780813064598. US $19.95, paperback. Inspired by the symposium "Who Owns Haiti? Sovereignty in a Fragile State, 2004–2014," held in Washington, DC, in May 2014, this volume gives an excellent overview of the myriad actors challenging and undermining the independence and sovereignty of the Haitian nation, past and present. In a total of ten contributions, the authors uncover the contestations to Haitian sovereignty running a throughline in the country's history. The essays analyze recurrent aid interventions in a country home to the first postwar development project, far-reaching economic structural adjustment programs, and foreign military occupations, all but facilitated by the elite of a predatory Haitian republic capitalizing on the oppression of the majority of the population.1 Edited by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman, Who Owns Haiti? is a timely contribution to a series of contemporary examinations on sovereignty in the context of Caribbean emancipation, including Yarimar Bonilla's Non-sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015) and Karen Salt's Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (2019). Its chapters revolve around a notion of sovereignty that goes beyond purely legalistic definitions of a nation in control of its borders and its monopoly on violence to include such concepts as selfhood, agency, justice, and ownership. The volume at hand proves this approach particularly useful in examining the complexities of contested sovereignties. Assembling authors from a variety of disciplines such as history, anthropology, political sciences, economics, and development studies, Who Owns Haiti? includes a plurality of scholarly perspectives examining the relationalities of Haiti to the world. Historian Laurent Dubois, for example, elaborates on Jean Casimir's concept of the counter-plantation as "a system of engagement that is based on an absolute commitment to maintaining autonomy and dignity" (26), deriving from vivid memories of the colonial atrocities symbolized by the plantation system. Robert Fatton Jr. then uses the world-system approach to describe Haiti as situated at the "outer periphery," subjected to international tutelage and trusteeship, especially with regard to the many aid interventions the country has been forced to succumb to in the past seventy years. In a similar vein, Robert Maguire analyzes US aid to [End Page 309] Haiti during the past decade, focusing on post-2010 earthquake funds, and ends with the grim yet not necessarily unexpected conclusion that the "vast majority of aid ultimately remains in control of non-Haitian entities" (99). Political scientist François Pierre-Louis Jr. offers a take on the role of the Haitian elite, especially in electoral processes, attesting to their lack of will to "govern the country in the interest of and to the benefit of all" (63). The chapter also explores the unfortunate role that the United States, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the United Nations stabilization mission to Haiti, MINUSTAH, have played, particularly in the rise to power of former Haitian president Michel Martelly. Pierre-Louis's contribution also sheds light on the current political crisis in Haiti. Ricardo Seitenfus, the former OAS representative in Haiti, analyses the Brazilian contribution to the UN mission MINUSTAH. The mission to Haiti marked not only a turn from peacekeeping toward stabilization but also a regional turn in UN engagement. The majority of boots on the ground came from Latin American countries. Seitenfus's article depicts Brazil's foreign-policy evolution from "non-interference" to a thirteen-yearlong intense engagement with UN intervention. Throughout the mission, Brazil provided not only the Force Commander but also the largest contingents. The article further shows how "Haiti became a preferential client of the UN Security Council" (82). Who Owns Haiti? concludes with three anthropological contributions. Karen Richman's essay historically analyzes the religious field in Haiti, critically engaging the contested spiritual landscape after Douz Janvye. Scott Freeman and Chelsey Kivland then take a deep dive into ethnographic descriptions of Haitian acts of resisting and appropriating (un)deliberate attempts to undermine...

Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations ed. by Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks

Reviewed by: Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations ed. by Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks Brandon R. Byrd Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations. Edited by Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 205. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5311-1; cloth, $86.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5310-4.) Few inventions have been more intertwined, influential, or destructive than race and nation. European nation-states first emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the same moment that Europeans devised the transatlantic slave trade. The concept of race followed soon thereafter. While some European and American theorists insisted that every national group contributed its own special gift to the world, others proclaimed that nation-states existed on a hierarchical scale dictated by racial inequalities. The latter group of theorists achieved widespread acceptance of their inseparable beliefs in racial and national domination. By the late nineteenth century, the scientific racism and militaristic nationalism birthed in the age of slavery became the foundation of an era of imperialism and Jim Crow. Millions of Westerners accepted that race was a biological fact, that nation-states should be racially homogeneous, and that national hierarchies were not only natural but also explainable by the unequal, inherent capacities of their male citizens. A different history was possible. Across the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, countless free and enslaved black people championed an inclusive and egalitarian idea of humanity and envisioned a postemancipation world made of multiracial, or even black, republics. Those women and men often associated freedom with full citizenship and asserted their belonging to the nation-states that their labor had built. They articulated hopes and expectations foregrounded in Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks's Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations. An edited collection of essays first presented at a symposium held at Rice University, Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations offers a compelling, comparative assessment of black people's understandings of race and nation during an age of emancipations stretching from the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions to the passage of Brazil's "Golden Law." Its ten essays from leading scholars are organized according to four themes: mobility and migration, law and legal status, labor and freedom, and race and the public sphere. Although spanning more than a century and addressing the black experience in mainland North America, the Caribbean, South America, and West Africa, the essays that compose Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations offer a coherent narrative and illuminate through implicit comparison. As the editors write, the essays make the collective argument "that the Age of Emancipations represented a crucial moment in which people of African descent transformed the meaning of citizenship and national belonging" across the Atlantic world (p. 2). This fundamental point is made especially clear in Celso Thomas Castilho's essay, "The Racial Terms of Citizenship: Abolition and Its Political Aftermath in Northeastern Brazil." Focusing on public debates about and celebrations of abolition in the northern Brazilian city of Recife, Castilho demonstrates "how the mass interracial mobilizations that characterized Brazilian abolitionism also created new ideas about race and political belonging" (p. 184). He captures how [End Page 439] Afro-Brazilians staked claims to citizenship through their involvement in civic associations and their commemorations of abolition. In one evocative scene from June 13, 1888, the one-month anniversary of Brazil's abolition law, formerly enslaved people in Garanhuns asked for a commemorative mass at the local chapel and rejoiced in '"the restoration of their rights, though this was happening three centuries too late'" (p. 193). They, as Castilho writes, joined countless other freedpeople who "presented themselves as rightful members of the community" (p. 193). While Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations foregrounds black people's similar, subversive assertions of belonging in nation-states that identified themselves with whiteness or antiblack multiracialism, it also shows how they forged new nation-states and redefined citizenship during the age of emancipations. Synthesizing recent scholarship on early Haitian history, Philip Kaisary's '"To Break Our Chains and Form a Free People...

Brooklyn's Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Melissa Meriam Bullard

Brooklyn's Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Melissa Meriam Bullard

Mary Anne Sadlier’s trans-Atlantic links: Migration, religion and translation

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to studies in transnational book history by examining the trans-Atlantic links between religion, translation and migration as illustrated by the life and work of an Irish translator in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Mary Anne Sadlier (1820–1903) is mostly known as a prolific Irish-American author of Catholic, immigrant and patriotic novels. Regarded today as one of the most influential writers of the Famine generation, she emigrated from Ireland to North America, and married into a successful Catholic publishing family, D. & J. Sadlier. This essay offers a departure from the existing literature. Despite the fact that she translated and edited numerous works from the French, Sadlier’s translations remain largely unexplored in the critical literature. Religion, morality and education were the driving force behind her translations, and her work illustrates the growth of a Catholic literature in English in the constructive period of both the Irish and the American Catholic Church. Moreover, the example of a woman who was in her day successful outside the domestic arena as a writer-translator-editor-publisher invites us to touch on issues of social and cultural authority for women at the time. Sadlier’s story is symptomatic of a wider and emergent Catholic transnational culture – or translocal culture – in the nineteenth century. Mobility and translation, therefore, challenge fixed notions of identity and nationality. Beyond reflecting the hyphenated Irish-American experience, Mary Anne Sadlier’s life and work provide us with a sound example of the ways in which translation contributed to extending and multiplying trans-Atlantic connections.