Atlantic History

This article addresses the double erasure of both women and the enslaved people whom they owned from the conjoined histories of slavery and empire. It shows how the economic practices of free women of European and African descent helped to make Jamaica the wealthiest and largest slaveholding colony in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic world. The growth of Britain’s American colonies created novel financial and social opportunities for women. They acted as vigorous participants in a high-risk marketplace that was being made global by European imperial activities. As merchants, women thickened the economic ties between Britain and the Caribbean, and helped to make Jamaica an important commercial hub. Financial pragmatism rather than nationalist sentiments drove them to pursue trade in Spanish territories, while also profiting from the frequent military conflicts between European powers. Women’s abilities to pursue entrepreneurial ventures were deeply intertwined with slave ownership. They had a vested interest in maintaining and advancing the severe labour regime in Jamaica and elsewhere in British America. Slave ownership reconfigured women’s financial, legal and social positions. In the colony, the status of being free came to matter more than any other signifier of identity, including gender.

Resumen Francisco de Saavedra fue el segundo intendente de Venezuela en la década de los ochenta del siglo XVIII. Fue enviado por José de Gálvez para aplicar el programa ilus-trado: reorganizar la Hacienda en Venezuela, llevar a cabo reformas económicas y administrativas para el desarrollo de la provincia venezolana. Rápidamente se tejió a su alrededor un poderoso círculo de los más destacados criollos caraqueños (mantua-nos), quienes a su vez, pasada una década de la experiencia de Saavedra en Venezuela, enviarán a sus hijos a la corte. Allá se reactivará el círculo que Saavedra forjó años atrás en Caracas, y funcionará esta vez como un aparato eficaz de lobby cortesano para los venezolanos que hacían su Grand Tour en la corte española. Abstract Francisco de Saavedra was the second Intendente of Venezuela from 1783-1788. He was sent by Jose de Galvez to implement the program illustrated: reorganize the Treasury in Venezuela (the Hacienda), implement economic development policies and administrative for the development of the province of Venezuela. Saavedra quickly joined the most powerful aristocrats (criollos, mantuanos) in Caracas: a powerful circle around the Intendente Saavedra. Ten years later the children of these aristocrats travelling to the Spanish court and reactivate the Circle of Saavedra. Will this circle at the Spanish Court a powerful lobby of Venezuelan, making his Grand Tour.

RESUMO: O objetivo desta publicação é dar a conhecer as características das relações canário‐ portuguesas no contexto da União Ibérica. Neste contexto, analisaremos primeiramente os antecedentes destes contactos, depois inquiriremos sobre a relevância do contingente português na sociedade canária e, em particular, sobre os vínculos mercantis que se estabelecem entre este arquipélago e os diversos territórios portugueses do Atlântico. Por último, exporemos as repercussões que teve, em Canárias, a Restauração de 1640. ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to present the characteristics of the Canary‐Portuguese relations in the context of the Iberian Union. In this context, this research focuses on the background of these contacts, the relevance of the Portuguese contingent in the Canarian society and, in particular, on the commercial ties established between the archipelago and the Portuguese Atlantic territories. Finally, we discuss the impact of the Restoration in 1640 in the Canary Islands.

Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen coined the term ‘supernormal stimulus’ after discovering that birds who lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey prefer to sit on larger, bright blue eggs with black polka-dots. He found that he could exaggerate the key qualities of any natural stimulus to produce a stronger reaction yet--be it nurturance, courtship, fear or aggression.
    Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them.  Humans can generate their own and media are awash with them: friendly smiling faces more consistently welcoming than ones own friends, animated cartoon characters with wider eyes than any real child’s, seductive bodies exceeding any proportions found in nature, and a huge array of supernatural menaces.
    This chapter examines film, television, spectator sports, video games, and social websites as well as more traditional media such as print and musical performance in terms of the concept of supernormal stimuli.

Antes de que los europeos fueran «conmocionados» por la magnitud
de la extensión del espacio americano abierto por los descubrimientos, el Nuevo Mundo fue pensado —reensamblado y deconstruido—
dentro de los marcos constrictivos del pensamiento medieval. La
primera imagen funcional que permitió «componer mentalmente»
estos nuevos espacios fue la insularidad. Dicha imagen se adecuaba
perfectamente a la matriz tradicional de la doctrina jurídica sustentada por el papado romano que dará por resultado las llamadas Bulas Alejandrinas de Partición de 1493. La potestas omninsular —desarrollada durante toda la Baja Edad Media en el Occidente europeo— constituye el basamento jurídico que otorga sentido a esta
donación.

Resumo: Este artigo pretende apresentar um breve panorama sobre os usos de uma matéria-prima cobiçada e polêmica: o marfim de origem africana. Base de objetos raros e artísticos, e também de objetos cotidianos, o marfim foi apreciado e consumido por diferentes povos e culturas ao longo dos séculos. A proibição do tráfico internacional deste material, na década de 80 do século XX, só fez crescer a sua procura, valorização e cobiça, tornando o seu valor alto e o comércio ilegal, uma realidade. Abstract: This article aims to present a brief overview of the uses of a coveted and controversial raw material: ivory of African origin. Base of rare and artistic objects, and also of everyday objects, ivory was appreciated and consumed by different peoples and cultures throughout the centuries. The prohibition on international trafficking of this material in the 80's of the twentieth century in order to increase demand, valorization and greed on a material possessing it, making its high value and illegal trade a reality.

This article is the continuation of a previous one dedicated to the study of disputes concerning damage produced by nature or caused by human agency in the ships of the kingdom of Castile. This article analyzes the controversy derived from human relations in the maritime sector. These include the obligations between captains and masters with their crew; those established between carriers and shippers; and those between merchants and carriers on the one hand and their financiers on the other. We will first consider the guidelines to be applied, be they normative or contractual, and later analyze their infringement and their resolution.

Eeuwenlang was Nederland betrokken bij slavenhandel en slavernij, een geschiedenis van uitbuiting en onverholen racisme. Dat verleden speelde zich niet alleen ver weg af, in Afrika en de Cariben, ook dichtbij zijn er sporen van terug te vinden. Zo ook in Leiden zoals deze gids in een vierluik laat zien. ‘Zwart en wit’ biedt vignetten van zwarte mensen, al dan niet slaaf, die ooit in Leiden woonden, en van witte Leidenaren die iets met hen te maken hadden. In ‘Bestuurders en Ondernemers’ passeren prominente stadsgenoten die betrokken waren bij de Atlantische slavenhandel en slavernij de revue. Onder de noemer ‘Universiteit en intellectuelen’ wordt besproken hoe de universiteit en haar studenten, docenten en andere intellectuelen in Leiden zich al dan niet – vooral dat laatste – uitspraken over de slavernij. Tenslotte biedt ‘Collecties en schilders’ een rondgang langs Leidse musea en bibliotheken waar nu nog sporen van het slavenverleden zijn te vinden.

Analysis of the evolution of the Castilian Admiralty income in the late Middle Ages and especially in the fifteenth century. The origin and development of such revenues is studied by identifying their supply sources as well as the repercussions of the leasing system on tax payers. It focuses on jurisdictional conflicts and on the many measures that were taken in the practice of the law.

The Royal Navy has been portrayed as an institution that embodied liberty, regularly employing and relying upon blacks to keep its vessels afloat and to implement Britain’s blue water policy. Despite the critical role black naval seamen played, their employment was shaped more by regional practices than by Admiralty edicts. The result was that blacks were often treated inequitably. Black seamen had less access to pension benefits and were not promoted in the same numbers as working-class white seamen. In England and New York, blacks were largely kept out of royal dockyards and received less favourable compensation than whites. In contrast, while blacks were employed in great numbers in the slave-based economies of Antigua and Senegambia, they were largely barred from highly skilled maritime artisan work. In sum, blacks’ experiences in the Royal Navy were varied and were more influenced by local conditions than by edicts from London.

When historians and philosophers of science discuss instrumentality, they are primarily referring to an epistemological and metaphysical position that holds that science is concerned not with making truth claims but rather with predictability. Scholars correctly locate the origins of instrumental natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, when a drive toward the practical, applied study of nature transformed natural philosophy from

We propose the concept of the “Fish Revolution” to demarcate the dramatic increase in North Atlantic fisheries after AD 1500, which led to a 15-fold increase of cod (Gadus morhua) catch volumes and likely a tripling of fish protein to the European market. We consider three key questions: (1) What were the environmental parameters of the Fish Revolution? (2) What were the globalising effects of the Fish Revolution? (3) What were the consequences of the Fish Revolution for fishing communities? While these questions would have been considered unknowable a decade or two ago, methodological developments in marine environmental history and historical ecology have moved information about both supply and demand into the realm of the discernible. Although much research remains to be done, we conclude that this was a major event in the history of resource extraction from the sea, mediated by forces of climate change and globalisation, and is likely to provide a fruitful agenda for future mult...

Este libro homenaje se formula como un dialogo abierto entre grupos de investigacion europeos y americanos sobre problematicas referidas a una vision Atlantica de la proyeccion de los Imperios Ibericos en la Edad Moderna. Los ejes convocantes son aquellos que a lo largo de su dilatada trayectoria en la investigacion historica ha desarrollado y publicado la Dra. Maria Ines Carzolio, tanto en Argentina como en el extranjero: Las raices medievales de la Europa Moderna, las monarquias del Antiguo Regimen, la organizacion del espacio social y los agentes sociales en la modernidad, cuestiones sobre creencias y religiosidad, estudios urbanos y, finalmente, problematicas en torno al campo discursivo y cultural.

This is a study just published by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute in Upper Manhattan on the oldest known colonial laws of the Americas dealing with the control of the first large enclave of black, mostly enslaved population in the continent in modern times. It is a set of laws or ordenanzas issued by colonial governor and viceroy of La Española Diego Colón on January 6th 1522, as a quick response to the serious uprising of slaves that occurred in that colony a few days before, as per all indications on the 25th or the 26th of December of 1521. This work is an offshoot of the compilation, transcription, translation and commenting efforts done during several years while constructing the website First Blacks in the Americas / Los Primeros Negros en las Americas, and it includes a review of the seeming discrepancies discovered in recent decades around the exact dating of the uprising. After I retired from CUNY DSI I did some additional study on the issue and now we have a much more cohesive and rounded interpretation on the matter –in my opinion-- that is included in the monograph. I am enormously thankful to the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and its Director Dr. Ramona Hernandez for taking the step of publishing the monograph, which I think is a decent piece of research and may serve as a stepping stone for other researchers that may want to expand and deepen our collective knowledge about the earliest slavery regime of the Americas as it developed in the 1500s in what is today the Dominican Republic. It is a source of joy to have an institution that can promote research and quickly disseminate it to the academic world and to our communities at large. Some of the endeavors tried in the monograph are, in a way, quite daring, like trying to translate a 16th century Spanish legal text into English when you are not an English language scholar and you yourself constantly struggle to find the adequate words in English to convey nuances of a Spanish vocabulary that you feel much more familiar with, but until we get scholars of Shakespeare's language, or English-dominant scholars in general, interested or concerned about translating into English some important texts coming from the Spanish-language world, I think it is a right of members of Latino communities to try to translate these texts into English to the best of their ability, so that the English language public has a chance to learn more about the thick, rich and complex historical legacies of our peoples. I absolutely embrace and look forward to the possibility that somehow someone else with a finer sense of English as a written language could contribute an improved version of this translation in the future, but I just felt these ordinances were just too important a historical document, especially now that we are about to hit the first quincentennial of their issuing, to let them remain under the radar of English-literate academia, and Western academia in general. As you know, I am nowadays obsessed about pushing the idea and goal of having academic Departments in Dominican Studies established in CUNY and SUNY, since as a New York-born Dominican American I think this would be critical for the survival of a well-informed Dominican culture in the U.S. Yet, as I do that, I hope I will also be able to continue to do research on the early colonial Dominican past, and share the findings with you all.

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that during the age of revolution (1760s–1840s) most sectors of the maritime industries experienced higher levels of unrest than is usually recognized. Ranging across global contexts including the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans as well as the Caribbean, Andaman, and South China Seas, and exploring the actions of sailors, laborers, convicts, and slaves, this collection offers a fresh, sea-centered way of seeing the confluence between space, agency, and political economy during this crucial period. In this introduction we contend that the radicalism of the age of revolution can best be viewed as a geographically connected process, and that the maritime world was central to its multiple eruptions and global character. Mutiny therefore can be seen as part of something bigger and broader: what we have chosen to call maritime radicalism, a term as well as a concept that has had virtually no presence in the literature on the revolutiona...

– This paper proposes to study the early-modern Portuguese magistracy to demonstrate a specific character of the Portuguese imperial experience which resided in an intense circulation of its agents, either between different colonial territories, either between the colonies and mainland Portugal. It underlines the precociousness of its bureaucratization, which derives from the notion of royal service and its non-transactional nature, since the early 16th century. The paper elaborates on the role played by magistrates and their circulation in the construction of a common juridical space that is built by the Portuguese crown throughout the early-modern period in its overseas territories. It ends up proposing some exploratory methodologies to map and measure the construction and extension of this bureaucratic network, making use of both prosopographical data and network analysis methods.

This article argues that the method of transregional history offers a valuable new tool for studying early modern territorial borders. Where existing research strands do not always suffice to accommodate the complexity of such boundaries, this new concept can serve as an alternative. Firstly, transregional history points out that early modern boundaries were not the outcome of actions that were pursued at one spatial level, be it local, regional, national, transnational, or global, but existed at multiple negotiated levels at once. Secondly, the method prompts historians: a) to not predefine “the” singular border of the region under scrutiny, but to follow historical actors as they shifted from one course of action to another in dealing with these multiple borders; and b) to question what transcended the boundaries of a region instead of highlighting how they separated one “unique” area from the next. In doing so, transregional history helps to reformulate questions about territoria...

Bibliography of books published by Horst Pietschmann or Doctoral Thesis and some extraordinary MA-thesis tutored by  Professor Horst Pietschmann as chairholder of Latin American History at Hamburg ,published in German and some also in English or Spanish, during the years 1985 to 2005 and somewhat later.

Abstract: Grave-opening was a shared European practice of possession and knowledge production in the early Americas, identifying what indigenous peoples believed of the afterlife and what items they valued. If mortuary practices such as interring wealth with the dead were deemed idolatrous, then the disruption and looting of graves and the people who made them was permissible. Nowhere was grave-opening more profitable than in sixteenth-century Peru, where the dispossession of the wealthy and sovereign Inca dead transformed Spanish imperial fortunes. But English cosmographers also explored the conversion of New World interments, seeing correspondences between Tudor reformation of the English afterlife and Spanish efforts in Peru. At Baffin Island, Roanoke, Guiana, and other places, English subjects surveyed the local dead, seeking a Peru of their own. Yet retracing English entanglement with Spanish grave-opening reveals the disentanglement of their colonial models as well. At Jamestown and Plymouth, settlers destroyed elite interments and associated markers of power and historicity; heartbroken indigenous kinspeople punished the English accordingly. Abandoning Peruvian precedent, English promoters of colonization portrayed North America’s Indians and their dead as less sovereign and more diabolical than the Incas, justifying a deeper extirpation of their bodies and history from the land.

Este artigo elege a clivagem naturais da terra / reinóis como vetor principal de análise das características do clero presente no espaço atlântico português, enfocando os clérigos seculares dos Açores, da Madeira e do Brasil durante o século XVIII. Identifica os traços principais do perfil dos sacerdotes que se habilitaram no Santo Ofício e a origem dos titulares das prebendas dos cabidos do centro-sul brasileiro: Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo e Minas Gerais. Demonstra-se que acesso aos lugares do poder eclesiástico foi permeado por uma série de dinâmicas sociais e políticas, intermediando as relações entre a Coroa, as elites locais e segmentos intermédios. 

Abstract: The fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries at large witnessed a process of sovereignty and governance definition, which played out also in the management of relations within the international order. Whilst acknowledging the key role of the Hundred Years’ War in this, the paper discusses friendship and alliance as both notional and legally binding premises in regulating interaction between polities and peoples in the period. It singles out Anglo-Portuguese relations as a case in point. Regarded to this day as long-standing allies, Portugal and England were connected by such ties — formal and informal — of commercial as well as political and military interdependency. Marine relations were central in this regard, with the sea providing both the setting and a driving force for many an interaction. In such an environment, conflict was a given. Was conflict among self-proclaimed allies any different from conflict generally speaking? How expedient was conflict management when compared with outer players? In the backdrop of mercantile practices and royal policy-making — treaties, business contracts, diplomacy, and judicial procedure included — the paper addresses the interrogations arising from the correlation between conflict and alliance as projected ‘from above’ and as experienced ‘from below’.

Journées d'études des doctorant.e.s - Laboratoire de Recherche 'Mondes Américains', École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) / Université Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne
«Circulations, transferts et trajectoires aux Amériques, XVIe - XXIe siècles»
7th - 11th December, 2020 [online]

El proceso de reconquista y repoblacion desarrollado en Castilla durante la Plena Edad Media contribuyo a consolidare! poder monarquico. germen de la nocion de Estado, marcando diferencias con otras zonas europeas. Dicho proceso se desarrolle en varios frentes: ocupacion de territorios, percepcion de parias, obtencion de botines... En todos ellos participe la monarquia. que recibio derechos por tales conceptos y se constituyo en arbitro del proceso general de enriquecimiento. La consolidacion del Estado provino. asimismo, del hecho de que todo ello se hizo al margen de los llamados «poderes universales», quienes se vieron suplantados por una idea imperial propia y por una politica regalista, que canalizo en su beneficio los posibles medios de intervencion del papado: bulas de cruzada y rentas eclesiasticas. Por ello, la expansion territorial y politica generada por estos medios quede regtilada mediante tratados de particion entre Estatios. Tal situacion se vio reforzada en la Baja E...

La colonización de las Islas Canariasse encuentraíntimamente ligadaal procesode expansióneuropeaen la Baja Edad Media, nacido como respuestaal estancamientoeconómicoexperimentadodesdefinalesdel siglo xííí y uno de cuyos principalesrasgosfue el incremento de las actividades terciarias. Ahora bien, dicho proceso conoció diversasmodalidadesy fasesde desarrollo>cuya elección y desenvolvimiento en el Archipiélago afectaron de forma singular su devenir histórico. Las modalidadesa las que hemos hechoalusión son, básicamente, tres: creación de enclavescomerciales; implantación de protectorados o zonas de influencia política; y colonización.Las dos primeras, que a menudo aparecenunidas, pretendeninfluir en las estructuras existentesen suslugaresde acción perosin suplantarías>y tenían tras sí una larga tradición en el Mediterráneo.La tercera,entendidacomo transformación sustantivay global de la realidad preexistente,constituye una relativa novedadde la época,pues la anterior etapade exp...

British Forts and Their Communities is about the diverse communities associated with English and British forts of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. While forts and fortifications have received a great deal of attention from both historians and archaeologists, research has often focused on their military roles. These iconic edifices were, however, places where an array of people of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds met and interacted. Bringing together case studies of fort communities from throughout the British Empire, this volume examines the complex histories of fort settlements. During this period, the British Empire was at its peak, and colonial settlements and trading enclaves, linked by merchant fleets and the British navy, were scattered across the globe. Often marked by forts, defensive works, and military garrisons, these enclaves demonstrated Britain’s military might and defined British commercial and geopolitical interests. While integral to global ...

This article surveys previously underexamined American and British intelligence networks that operated in the Netherlands during the eighteenth century and demonstrates the relevance of the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic to the larger history of the Netherlands, early modern Europe, and the revolutionary Atlantic. The Dutch Republic's favourable geographic location, its postal services, its sophisticated press, and its mercantile economy made it an ideal place to extract information and build intelligence networks, shaping power politics in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Additionally, this article illustrates how these Anglo-American intelligence networks affected the Dutch Republic and the revolutionary Atlantic. In the late 1770s, American revolutionaries successfully deployed their intelligence network to unleash a propaganda campaign that aimed to convince the Dutch public of their cause. By infiltrating the liberal and sophisticated Dutch printing press, the Am...

O Mar configurou Portugal. Na nossa História manteve presença constante como factor de desenvolvimento nacional, como via de acesso a novas terras, novas gentes, novos produtos, novos negócios. Há quarenta anos, o 25 de Abril causou uma mu-dança estrutural na posição geopolítica de Portugal e consequentemente no nosso conceito estratégico nacional. Este conceito, desestruturado e indefinido durante cerca de uma geração, tem vindo a reconfigurar-se desde os anos 90 do século passado no sentido de uma reorientação nacional para o Mar, tendo a Expo 98 sido um marco desse movimento. Há dez anos atrás, em 2004, o relatório produzido pela Comissão Estratégica dos Oceanos-O Oceano, um Desígnio Nacional para o Século XXI-, veio finalmente redefinir esse conceito, criando efectivamente uma visão e formu-lação estratégica de desenvolvimento nacional centrado no Mar, integradora das opções europeísta, atlantista e africanista. Temos assim hoje um conceito estratégico nacional bem definido, emb...

ABSTRACT Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1700–15), the Spanish monarchy began a reform program to centralize the state, curb monarchial inefficiency, and defend Spanish territorial sovereignty. To fulfill these objectives, the Spanish Monarchy incorporated geographic knowledge and associated language and practices into its agenda of reform. Ultimately, the piecemeal pursuit of geography during the Caroline period led to inconsistencies in the precision of Spanish cartography that became apparent during the occupation of Spain in 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars (1807–14). Beginning in 1810, Spanish American civic leaders wrestled with the future of the Spanish colonies and soon democratic republics began to replace the former colonial governments. This paper begins to analyze the impact of Spanish geographic products and monuments on the development of republican values in the Ibero-Atlantic world in the period following the dissolution of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy. Investigating the legacy of these maps, monuments, censuses, and cadastral surveys will illuminate how scientific products produced to advance specific arguments of imperial sovereignty and nationhood are reinterpreted as similar evidence of nationhood by a different body politic.