Nineteenth-century Atlantic World Research Articles

Knickerbocker Commodore: The Life and Times of John Drake Sloat, 1781–1867 by Bruce A. Castleman

Reviewed by: Knickerbocker Commodore: The Life and Times of John Drake Sloat, 1781–1867 by Bruce A. Castleman Evan C. Rothera Knickerbocker Commodore: The Life and Times of John Drake Sloat, 1781–1867. By Bruce A. Castleman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016, 343 pages, $24.95 Cloth. John Drake Sloat is not a prominent figure in antebellum United States history. His moment of questionable glory occurred on July 7, 1846 during the US War with Mexico when he occupied Monterey and proclaimed the annexation of California to the US. However, Bruce Castleman argues that Sloat’s life and career provide a window into the antebellum US, particularly the realm of naval affairs. This engaging life and times biography explores both Sloat’s impact on the nation and how various elements of the nineteenth-century Atlantic World,—“the practices of Hudson Valley landowners, the suppression of Caribbean piracy, attempts to overthrow the government of Peru, the American maritime labor market, and the expansion and urbanization of New York City” (4) in turn influenced Sloat. Castleman proves an exceptionally able biographer who demonstrates the importance of an often-overlooked New Yorker. Sloat was born in 1781 in Sloatsburg, New York. Frustratingly, few documents survive from his early years and it is impossible to determine what prompted him to go to sea. Castleman uses nineteenth-century biographies [End Page 242] of Sloat, tax records, and census records to reconstruct Sloat’s boyhood. Sloat joined the navy during the Quasi-War (1798–1800), a period of tension between the United States and France. He became a midshipman on the President and participated in the ship’s unsuccessful cruise to the West Indies to hunt French vessels. Peace with France resulted in the reduction of the navy and Midshipman Sloat was discharged under the Peace Establishment Act. Rather than abandoning a career at sea, he turned to sailing merchant ships and made at least fifteen voyages before the War of 1812. This experience served him well when he returned to the Navy, as did his friendship with Stephen Decatur, the dashing naval officer who led the party of volunteers that burned the USS Philadelphia near Tripoli’s harbor. Sloat became the sailing master on the United States and participated in the famous battle between Decatur’s ship and the HMS Macedonian. Castleman concludes, “it would also be unfair, through omission or otherwise, to deny Sailing Master John Drake Sloat substantial recognition for his own seamanship in the defeat and the capture of the HMS Macedonian” (41). Sloat quickly received a promotion to Lieutenant, although he saw little service during the rest of the War of 1812. After the War of 1812, no reduction of the navy occurred comparable to the reduction after the Quasi-War, but the navy had more officers than positions in the small fleet. Sloat eventually received an assignment on the Franklin, which took him to Brazil. However, midway through the cruise, because of a surplus of lieutenants, he was detached and returned to the US. He then received a place on the Congress. The experience he gained on these vessels allowed him to land command of the Grampus. This vessel patrolled the African coast for slavers and the Caribbean for pirates. Watching other commanders in the Caribbean, Sloat received practical lessons in the importance of care and caution. US commanders were supposed to refrain from heavy-handed interventions in the affairs of other countries. However, some commanders faced censure for avenging perceived insults to US honor. Others proved reckless about their involvement in the domestic affairs of other nations. After receiving command of the St. Louis, Sloat arrived in Peru during a period of civil disturbances. At one point, several officials asked him to provide them asylum on his vessel. He thus faced a “delicate situation” (116) and had to tread very carefully. As apparent in his [End Page 243] later career, he eschewed hasty action for calm deliberation and close coordination with diplomatic officials. After completion of the St. Louis’s cruise, Sloat returned to New York. For the next eight years, he performed the work necessary for the functioning of the peacetime navy. Furthermore, he...

Review of The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra et al., & The Brink of Freedom; Improvising life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, by David Kazanjian

The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra et al. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 The Brink of Freedom; Improvising life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World , by David Kazanjian. Duke University Press, 2016

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by David Kazanjian

Reviewed by: The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by David Kazanjian Ann C. Hall The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. By David Kazanjian. Duke University Press, 2016. 336 pp. David Kazanjian's The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World is a smart, readable, and fascinating book that examines the perception of freedom in the Atlantic world by focusing on the year 1847, when Liberia declared itself as an independent nation-state and when the Caste War, the war between the Creoles and the Mayan rebels, began in the Yucatán. The study is distinct and noteworthy for many reasons, but the most obvious is the fact that no one has compared or simultaneously analyzed these two unrelated incidents, what Kazanjian calls historical and global "flashpoints," before. Further, Kazanjian is careful to point out and explain that his method is not a comparative one. Rather, he examines the incidents "appositionally" (9), resisting the privileging of one event over the other. This method, he argues, presents keener perceptions of the separate cultures but also offers insights into what he calls "quotidian globalities" (16), the experience of the global through everyday activities, events, and artifacts. Rather than examining official documents, procedures, and records, he examines materials such as personal letters, popular journals, and even serialized stories in order to capture the sense of freedom at this time. The appositional methodology is a challenging one that invokes postmodern principles—in general and postmodern literary theory in particular—to analyze the artifacts of these historical moments. And what Kazanjian concludes is that the concept of freedom at this time was not stagnant and fully formed. Instead, it was dynamic, often chaotic and contradictory, and improvisational. In other words, freedom is a performance without rehearsal. For those familiar with Derrida and other postmodern theorists, the method is classic. Kazanjian chooses neglected artifacts to examine the two cultural moments that are not discrete cultural moments. He then highlights the ways both investigate or mimic freedom in often [End Page 122] contradictory and improvisational ways, ways that finally disrupt our understanding not only of each cultural moment but also of our own current concept of freedom. That is, if we acknowledge that these groups of people were struggling to define and experience freedom, then we find ourselves doing so as well. The stereotypical depiction of the establishment of Liberia by recently freed African-American slaves is one of exuberance. At the very least, a sense of relief. These African-Americans are free, unburdened, and either ready to start afresh by establishing their country or finally home again in Africa. Kazanjian's research, however, complicates this view in several ways. First, there are the West Africans, the indigenous population that is being displaced and overrun by the new settlers. As other scholars have also pointed out, the Liberian state "disenfranchised its native inhabitants," which created conflicts that remain in the region today (54). Second, and unique to Kazanjian's scholarship, are the letters from the recently freed African-American Liberian settlers to their former masters in the United States. And what the letters show is not an exuberant embrace of Liberian freedom but instead a nostalgia, a deep longing for their "home" in the United States and their relationships with their former masters. Kazanjian shows that the Liberian experiment created "unsettled" lives and conflicting interpretations of what it meant to be free. In the Yucatán, Kazanjian examines the way in which Creole journals depicted the war against the Mayan rebels by casting the Creoles as the guardians of culture and civility and the Mayans as barbarians. Further, the Creole strategy to overcome their enemies was novel—"the assimilation of Indians into liberal capitalist civility" (158). Basically, they sought to "tame" the Mayans. Creole periodicals situated themselves as pro-white and anti-Indian, but Kazanjian illustrates that they were "more unruly than this" (166) and used everything, even contradictory claims and formerly antagonistic and diverse ethnic groups, to persuade their readers that they were protecting the Yucatán, that they were the civilized Saviors. The result was a deconstruction of their mission...

The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Michele Reid-Vazquez

<i>The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World</i> by Michele Reid-Vazquez

Freedom’s Surprise: Two Paths Through Slavery’s Archives

Research Article| October 01 2016 Freedom’s Surprise: Two Paths Through Slavery’s Archives David Kazanjian David Kazanjian David Kazanjian is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and a 2016–17 Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author, most recently, of The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2016). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2016) 6 (2): 133–145. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0133 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Kazanjian; Freedom’s Surprise: Two Paths Through Slavery’s Archives. History of the Present 1 October 2016; 6 (2): 133–145. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0133 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2016 University of Illinois Press2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic by David Head

Reviewed by: Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republicby David Head Mariana L. R. Dantas Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic. By David Head. Early American Places. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 201. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4864-3; cloth, $64.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4400-3.) Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republicreveals the fascinating commercial, ideological, [End Page 917]political, and personal links between various North American, Caribbean, South American, and European historical actors along the waters and ports of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Working with nearly 350 federal court cases—as well as shipping news, diplomatic correspondence, and other sources—David Head skillfully weaves together the adventures and misadventures of these seamen, merchants, investors, and statesmen to uncover the complex geopolitical backdrop against which U.S. privateering for the Spanish Americas occurred. Head is mostly concerned with explaining how privateering worked, how the United States government responded to it, and what broader historical context facilitated or discouraged privateering. His answers to these questions emerge from the stories of men like James Chaytor, a Baltimore-based brig captain who renounced his American citizenship and was naturalized in Buenos Aires in order to legally accept a commission to attack Spanish vessels and capture Spanish goods. In the process of serving the greater goal of Spanish American independence, Chaytor also hoped to recover the investment he had made in the commodities he had taken to but failed to sell in Buenos Aires. Head introduces us as well to brothers Pierre and Jean Laffite, French nationals who ran an impressive smuggling scheme in Louisiana, in and around New Orleans. Mediating transactions between privateers eager to sell captured prizes and merchant-buyers eager to profit from the local trade in smuggled goods and slaves, the Laffites built an influential clientele who protected them from legal prosecution and ensured the longevity of their activities. We also learn about Thomas Taylor, a Delaware native turned citizen of Buenos Aires, who recruited privateers in Baltimore to cross the Atlantic and attack Spanish vessels on behalf of his adopted government. Along with other like-minded agents, he mobilized some wealthy and prominent Baltimore investors who helped make privateering for Spanish America an everyday business in that city. Finally, we meet men like Louis-Michel Aury, a French privateer, and Gregor MacGregor, a Scotsman who had served in the Venezuelan army. Both Aury and MacGregor ambitiously attempted to create independently governed havens for privateers in Galveston and on Amelia Island, respectively, vesting themselves with the political authority to issue their own privateering commissions. Through these individual stories, Head teases out the historical context that made privateering attractive and somewhat tolerated: the wars of independence in the Spanish American colonies; U.S. commitment to neutrality during territorial negotiations with Spain after the Louisiana Purchase; and the United States’ cautious sympathy for Spanish American independence at a time when some American citizens expressed enthusiastic support for it. Privateers of the Americasoffers a rich account of how the imperial and national struggle for sovereignty and territorial control intersected with individual pursuits of glory, wealth, and freedom of action to shape the early-nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Moreover, Head effectively challenges a scholarship that has interpreted American diplomatic and political history of the early nineteenth century as the onset of the age of manifest destiny. Instead, he situates events of this period firmly within an Atlantic world context, demonstrating that the comings and goings of the men who transited the Atlantic space during the early republic—and not plans of westward [End Page 918]expansion—were foremost in the minds of American statesmen negotiating U.S. international relationships. Head, therefore, reminds us that the Atlantic world, as a framework through which to interpret human action and political developments in the past, can be as relevant to writing the history of the young nations of the Americas as it has proved to be to the scholarship on early modern European empires. Mariana L...

‘The State of Slavery': Somerset, The Slave, Grace, and the Rise of Pro-Slavery and Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

From 1772 until the 1830s, the landmark decision in Somerset v. Stewart, which held that a slave must be freed by virtue of his presence on English soil, provided a powerful weapon in the trans-Atlantic battle against chattel slavery. But by the 1840s and 1850s, pro-slavery advocates used another British opinion, The Slave, Grace, as a counterargument to shape a new pro-slavery constitutionalism. This article studies four cases critical to understanding this process of reinterpretation: The Slave, Grace (1827), Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), The Slave, Matilda (1837), and Strader v. Graham (1852). These four decisions reveal the escalating battle of legal doctrine pitting freedom based on the absence of positive law vs. the reversion and reattachment of slave status.

TIM FULFORD and KEVIN HUTCHINGS (eds), Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750-1850: The Indian Atlantic.

THE eleven essays in this book are held together by their common goal to insert Native Americans into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic World history. Reading the ‘Notes on contributors’ (namely, Joshua David Bellin, Troy Bickham, Ted Binnema, Helen Carr, Joel Pace, Stephanie Pratt, Robbie Richardson, Lise Sorensen, Alan Taylor, and the book’s two editors) one finds they include literary scholars and historians of various stripes, although more are from Departments of English (seven, including the book’s co-editors) than from those of History (the remaining four). The chapters are arranged roughly chronologically, spanning the period from the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) to the opening of the American West by way of the Oregon Trail (in the 1850s). While much scholarly work has investigated the economic, political, diplomatic, and military aspects of the meeting of British, Native American, and Anglo-American cultures in the age of exploration and settlement, this volume focuses on an under-studied part of that story—the ‘transatlantic literary culture that flourished in the context of colonial struggle in North America’ (1). As such, there is a concentration on written texts: ‘travel accounts, traders’ memoirs, historians’ disquisitions, captivity narratives, treaty speeches, autobiographies, newspaper articles, poems, plays and novels’ (1). Those sources, the editors maintain, demonstrate ‘a complex and shifting relationship, in which Native Americans played a crucial role as people with whom colonists were in contact, and as writers themselves’ (18).

THE DIASPORA OF AFRICANS LIBERATED FROM SLAVE SHIPS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

AbstractThis article uses the extensive documentation of Africans liberated from slave vessels to explore issues of identity and freedom in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It tracks the size, origin, and movement of the Liberated African diaspora, offers a preliminary analysis of the ‘disposal’ of African recaptives in societies on both sides of the Atlantic, and assesses the opportunities Liberated Africans had in shaping their post-disembarkation experiences. While nearly all Liberated Africans were pulled at least partly into the Atlantic wage economy, the article concludes that recaptive communities in Freetown and its hinterland most closely met the aspirations of the Liberated Africans themselves while the fate of recaptives settled in the Americas paralleled those who were enslaved.

A World Without “Dependant Kings”: Eighteen Hundred and Eleven and the Forms of Informal Empire

IT HAS BEEN ROUGHLY TWO HUNDRED YEARS SINCE THE PUBLICATION OF Anna Laetitia Barbauld's explosively controversial poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, and the same span has elapsed since the Latin American wars of independence, an event her poem prophesies, celebrates, and closes with. This dual bicentennial is a reminder that we have yet to do justice to the impact of the Latin American revolutions on Barbauld's poem, or on Romantic literature more generally. Bringing Latin America into our understanding of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world--something transatlantic studies have only sporadically attempted (1)--shows Eighteen Hundred and Eleven to be part of a lively conversation about the networks of imperialism rapidly emerging between Great Britain and the Spanish American colonies in revolt. In fact, the narrative form of Barbauld's poem offers a remarkable resistance to the discourses of what has recently come to be known as informal as they first began to circulate. It is therefore a profitable lens through which Romantic-era questions of revolution, sovereignty, and empire can be freshly complicated to account for a new and troubling configuration of global influence. At the time Barbauld was writing Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, Latin America (2) was beginning to revolt against Spain, creating a flurry of transatlantic activity. Writers and revolutionaries like Francisco de Miranda, Andres Bello, and Simon Bolivar went to London to seek financial partnership, while British officials and Romantic poets began to think seriously about how such newly opened Atlantic relations might create an opportunity for Great Britain to seize control over American markets and resources. Critics have identified this as the birth of what we now call modern neocolonialism or empire. (3) In Barbauld's day these terms did not exist, but it was no secret that if the Spanish American colonies were to win independence, the British might re-subject them to financial control. As early as 1809 James Mill had written in the Edinburgh Review: fate of Spain is sealed.... The only question remaining for Britain is whether it will take Spanish America for itself ... whether Spanish America will become free under the auspices of British protection. (4) Throughout the nineteenth century Great Britain would enact this very fantasy; Latin America emerged politically sovereign into waiting structures of financial subjugation. These mechanisms of financial dependence had been employed sporadically before, within and without Great Britain's formal empire, but the nineteenth century would witness an unprecedentedly vast institutionalization of empire as a primary means of exerting influence in the new world. In other words, Latin American revolution reorganized the Atlantic network in two crucial ways: it shifted control of the Americas from Spain to Britain, and it made way for empire to step out of the shadow of territorial colonialism as a unique and perhaps even more effective means of overseas dominance. British-Latin American relations offer dynamic ways to revive the well-worn questions of imperial power. Robert Aguirre's 2006 Informal Empire and Rebecca Cole Heinowitz's 2010 Spanish America and British Romanticism both remind nineteenth-century scholars that Great Britain had powerful imaginative and material ties to the southern Americas. Alongside several other key voices in the field, (5) they have noted that while British empire in Latin America had forceful impacts that merit a sustained inquiry such as the formal empire has received, empire also operated under strange and distinct logics. Unlike traditional colonial targets, Latin America entered the Romantic imagination as a powerful symbol of liberty from oppression. Those who wished to return the region to a state of dependency under British imperial power, therefore, faced a unique rhetorical and logical problem, one that began to spark subtle reconfigurations of what sovereignty might mean and how it might be undermined in new ways. …

Toward a Materialist Figuration: A Slight Manifesto

Research Article| September 01 2013 Toward a Materialist Figuration: A Slight Manifesto Monique Allewaert Monique Allewaert University of Wisconsin-Madison allewaert@wisc.edu Monique Allewaert is assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. She is author of Ariel's Ecology: Personhood and Colonialism in the American Tropics, 1760-1820, and is currently working on a book that investigates empiricist claims as well as literary and extra-literary practice in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world to offer a materialist account of figuration. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google English Language Notes (2013) 51 (2): 61–77. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-51.2.61 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Monique Allewaert; Toward a Materialist Figuration: A Slight Manifesto. English Language Notes 1 September 2013; 51 (2): 61–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-51.2.61 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEnglish Language Notes Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2013 Regents of the University of Colorado2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Michele Reid-Vazquez, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), xiii+251, $69.95, $24.95 pb.

Michele Reid-Vazquez, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), xiii+251, $69.95, $24.95 pb.

MICHELE REID-VAZQUEZ. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.

During the fall of 1843, panic spread among government officials and planters in Cuba when rumors reached them that a slave revolt was in the works. The nervousness of the colonial elite was not surprising: in the last thirty years, the slave population on the island had doubled, leading to frightened comparisons with Haiti. The official response was swift and brutal. 1844 came to be known as the Year of the Lash, a reference to the repressive policies that followed the alleged Conspiración de la Escalera, or Conspiracy of the Ladder, the plot named for a common interrogation technique used by the government—suspects were tied to a ladder and whipped in order to coerce a confession. Michele Reid-Vazquez's book examines the aftermath of La Escalera. Among the many people accused of fomenting the rebellion—the slaves, British abolitionists, and foreigners in general—free people of color took the brunt of the repression. The Cuban elite determined that the revolt's ringleaders had to be punished to set an example. Ten prominent members of the free black community were executed, including well-known men of letters, colonial militia officers, and established artisans. Hundreds of other free Cubans of African descent were tortured, deprived of their property, sent to jail, or deported, their expulsion connecting these refugees to other Atlantic world exiles.

Introduction: Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

SummaryThe Introduction contextualises the development of Thomas Reid's Common Sense philosophy as the foundation for what would be known as the Scottish School of Common Sense. This introductory discussion of Reid's philosophical system bridges his thought in the Scottish Enlightenment with the special issue's focus of Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World.

Michele Reid-Vazquez. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World - The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Michele Reid-Vazquez. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 208. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.

Michele Reid-Vazquez. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World - The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Michele Reid-Vazquez. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 208. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 24.95 paper. - Volume 69 Issue 2

Michele Reid-Vazquez. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Michele Reid-Vazquez. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 208. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.

Michele Reid-Vazquez. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. By Michele Reid-Vazquez. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. xiii, 208. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95 cloth; $24.95 paper.

The year of the lash: free people of color in Cuba and the nineteenth-century Atlantic world

Michele Reid-Vazquez reveals the untold story of the strategies of negotia-tion used by free blacks in the aftermath of the Year of the Lash--a wave of repression in Cuba that had great implications for the Atlantic World in the next two decades.At dawn on June 29, 1844, a firing squad in Havana executed ten accused ringleaders of the Conspiracy of La Escalera, an alleged plot to abolish slavery and colonial rule in Cuba. The condemned men represented prominent members of Cuba's free community of African descent, including the acclaimed poet PlAcido (Gabriel de la ConcepciOn ValdEs). In an effort to foster a white majority and curtail black rebellion, Spanish colonial authorities also banished, imprisoned, and exiled hundreds of free blacks, dismantled the militia of color, and accelerated white immigration projects.Scholars have debated the existence of the Conspiracy of La Escalera for over a century, yet little is known about how those targeted by the violence responded. Drawing on archival material from Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, Reid-Vazquez provides a critical window into under-standing how free people of color challenged colonial policies of terror and pursued justice on their own terms using formal and extralegal methods. Whether rooted in Cuba or cast into the Atlantic World, free men and women of African descent stretched and broke colonial expectations of their codes of conduct locally and in exile. Their actions underscored how black agency, albeit fragmented, worked to destabilize repression's impact.

Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss . Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique . (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. Pp. vi, 300. $39.95.

What is the relationship between racial categories and economic factors in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world? Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss struggles productively with this and other challenging questions while presenting a survey of Martinique's history from 1802, the year the island was returned to France from revolutionary-era British occupation, to 1848, the year abolition definitively came to France's Caribbean colonies. Her book presents a major contribution to a field dominated in recent years by scholarship on Saint Domingue and the Haitian Revolution. After 1804, Martinique was the largest of the remaining French colonies in the Caribbean. Although the early nineteenth century has often been treated as a brief extension of the colonial ancien régime, the new political and economic realities of the period in Martinique mean that this century must be understood on its own terms. Using this background of overlapping Caribbean and French contexts, Hartkopf Schloss provides an able and thorough account that focuses on the way identity (whether racial, gendered, local, or metropolitan) was “defined, challenged, and policed” in the final phase of French slave society. Her research should be of interest to historians of race and slavery in the antebellum South, Brazil or Cuba, and others seeking an Atlantic framework of comparative analysis.