Zlib - Pub The Atlantic World

THE ATLANTIC WORLD
As the meeting point between Europe, colonial America, and Africa, the history of
the Atlantic world is a constantly shifting arena, but one which has been a focus of
huge and vibrant debate for many years. In over thirty chapters, all written by experts
in the field, The Atlantic World takes up these debates and gathers together key,
original scholarship to provide an authoritative survey of this increasingly popular
area of world history.
The book takes a thematic approach to topics including exploration, migration,
and cultural encounters. In the first chapters, scholars examine the interactions
between groups which converged in the Atlantic world, such as slaves, European
migrants, and Native Americans. The volume then considers questions such as
finance, money, and commerce in the Atlantic world, as well as warfare, government,
and religion. The collection closes with chapters examining how ideas circulated
across and around the Atlantic and beyond. It presents the Atlantic as a shared space
in which commodities and ideas were exchanged and traded, and examines the
impact that these exchanges had on both people and places.
Including an introductory essay from the editors which defines the field, and
lavishly illustrated with paintings, drawings, and maps this accessible volume is
invaluable reading for all students and scholars of this broad sweep of world history.
D’Maris Coffman is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and Director of the
Centre for Financial History at Newnham College, University of Cambridge; Adrian
Leonard is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Financial History at Newnham
College, University of Cambridge; and William O’Reilly is lecturer in Early Modern
History at the University of Cambridge.
THE ROUTLEDGE WORLDS
THE CELTIC WORLD
Edited by Miranda Green
THE GREEK WORLD
Edited by Anton Powell
THE REFORMATION WORLD
Edited by Andrew Pettegree
THE EARLY CHRISTIAN WORLD
Edited by Philip F. Esler
THE ROMAN WORLD
Edited by John Wacher
THE MEDIEVAL WORLD
Edited by Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson
THE BIBLICAL WORLD
Edited by John Barton
THE HINDU WORLD
Edited by Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby
THE ENLIGHTENMENT WORLD
Edited by Martin Fitzpatrick
THE WORLD OF POMPEII
Edited by Pedar W. Foss and John J. Dobbins
THE BABYLONIAN WORLD
Edited by Gwendolyn Leick
THE RENAISSANCE WORLD
Edited by John Jeffries Martin
THE EGYPTIAN WORLD
Edited by Toby Wilkinson
THE ISLAMIC WORLD
Edited by Andrew Rippin
THE VIKING WORLD
Edited by Stefan Brink and Neil Price
THE BYZANTINE WORLD
Edited by Paul Stephenson
THE ELIZABETHAN WORLD
Edited by Susan Doran and Norman Jones
THE WORLD OF THE AMERICAN WEST
Edited by Gordon Morris Bakken
THE OTTOMAN WORLD
Edited by Christine Woodhead
THE VICTORIAN WORLD
Edited by Martin Hewitt
THE ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN WORLD
Edited by Augustine Casiday
THE SUMERIAN WORLD
Edited by Harriet Crawford
THE ETRUSCAN WORLD
Edited by Jean MacIntosh Turfa
THE GOTHIC WORLD
Edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend
THE WORLD OF THE REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN REPUBLIC
Edited by Andrew Shankman
THE WORLD OF INDIGENOUS NORTH AMERICA
Edited by Robert Warrior
THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE WORLD
Edited by Michael Saler
THE OCCULT WORLD
Edited by Christopher Partridge
Forthcoming:
THE MODERNIST WORLD
Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross
THE BUDDHIST WORLD
John Powers
THE CRUSADER WORLD
Adrian Boas
THE POSTCOLONIAL WORLD
Jyotsna Singh and David Kim
THE WORLD OF FORMATIVE EUROPE
Edited by Martin Carver and Madeleine Hummler
This page intentionally left blank
THE
ATLANTIC
WORLD
Edited by
D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and

William O’Reilly
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and William O’Reilly
The right of D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and William O’Reilly to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-415-46704-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-73921-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby
CONTENTS
List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Notes on Contributors xiv
1 The Atlantic World: Definition, Theory, and Boundaries 1

D’Maris Coffman and Adrian Leonard
PART I: ATLANTIC EXPLORATIONS 11

2 Animals in Atlantic North America to 1800 13
James Taylor Carson and Karim M. Tiro
3 Science and Ideology in the Spanish Atlantic 34

Sandra Rebok
4 Fish and Fisheries in the Atlantic World 55

David J. Starkey
PART II: THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLES 77

5 Facing East from the South: Indigenous Americans in the Mostly
Iberian Atlantic World 79
Laura E. Matthew
6 Southern Africa and the Atlantic World 100

Gerald Groenewald
7 Emigration from the Habsburg Monarchy and Salzburg to the

New World, 1700–1848 117
William O’Reilly
vii
– Contents –
8 Seafaring communities, 1800–1850 131

Brian Rouleau
PART III: CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS 149

9 Colour Prejudice in the French Atlantic World 151
Mélanie Lamotte
10 Atlantic Slaveries: Britons, Barbary, and the Atlantic World 172

Catherine Styer
11 Morocco and Atlantic History 187

James A. O. C. Brown
12 The Atlantic and Pacific Worlds 207

Paul D’Arcy
13 An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of

the French Atlantic 227
Laurent Dubois
PART IV: WARFARE AND GOVERNANCE 243

14 Violence in the Atlantic World 245
John Smolenski
15 War and Warfare in the Atlantic World 264

Geoffrey Plank
16 Political Thinking, Military Power, and Arms Bearing in the British

Atlantic World 281
Charles R. Drummond, IV
17 Atlantic Peripheries: Diplomacy, War, and Spanish–French Interactions

in Hispaniola, 1660s–1690s 300
Juan J. Ponce-Vázquez
PART V: RELIGION 319

18 Catholicism 321
E. L. Devlin
19 Protestantism in the Atlantic World 347

Travis Glasson
20 The Freest Country: Jews of the British Atlantic, ca. 1600–1800 364
Natalie A. Zacek
21 Islam and the Atlantic 376

Denise A. Spellberg
viii
– Contents –
22 American Identity and English Catholicism in the Atlantic World 393

Maura Jane Farrelly
23 Navigating the Jewish Atlantic: The State of the Field and Opportunities
for New Research 413
Holly Snyder
PART VI: CREDIT, FINANCE, AND MONEY 439

24 British Joint-Stock Companies and Atlantic Trading 441
Matthew David Mitchell
25 Speculating on the Atlantic World 457

Helen Paul
26 Paper Money, 1450–1850 471

Dror Goldberg
27 The Credit Crisis of 1772–73 in the Atlantic World 491

Paul Kosmetatos
PART VII: COMMERCE, CONSUMPTION, AND

MERCANTILE NETWORKS 511
28 Reassessing the Atlantic Contribution to British Marine Insurance 513
A. B. Leonard
29 The Economic World of the Early Dutch and English Atlantic 531
Edmond Smith
30 The Cultural History of Commerce in the Atlantic World 546

Jonathan Eacott
31 ‘To Catch the Public Taste’: Interpreting American Consumers in

the Era of Atlantic Free Trade, 1783–1854 573
Joanna Cohen
PART VIII: THE CIRCULATION OF IDEAS 597

32 ‘Excited Almost to Madness:’ Slave Rebellions and Resistance in the
Atlantic World 599
Jeffrey A. Fortin
33 Economic Thought and State Practice in the Atlantic World:

The ‘Phénomène Savary’ in Context 618
D’Maris Coffman
34 The Classical Atlantic World 633

N. P. Cole
ix
– Contents –
35 The Atlantic Enlightenment 650

William Max Nelson
Index 667
x
FIGURES
2.1 Mask with antlers, 1400–1600 (wood & bone), Mississippian culture
(c. 800–1500) 14
2.2 Florida Indians hunting deer while disguised under deerskins, from
‘Americae Decima Pars’ engraved by Theodor de Bry (1528–98) 1591 16
2.3 New Belgium Map, plate from ‘Atlas Contractus’ c. 1671 18
2.4 ‘A view of ye Industry of ye Beavers’ from Herman Moll’s New and
Exact Map, 1715 19
2.5 Pennsylvania Town and Country Man’s Almanack 24
3.1 Las Casas 38
3.2 Emperor Carl V with Quevedo and Las Casas 39
3.3 Alejandro Malaspina 43
3.4 Indigenous man. From the Canadian Expedition of Alejandro
Malaspina (1789–94) 44
4.1 Dragging in the seine net 65
4.2 A naval architect’s representation of an early fifteenth-century
English dogger 69
5.1 Tlaxcalteca and Spaniards fighting the Mexica Tenochca at Tenochtitlan 81
5.2 Frontispiece of a 1722 reprint of the second part of el Inca Garcilaso
de la Vega’s Commentarios reales, originally published in 1617 87
6.1 A view of the Cape of Good Hope and a plan of the town of the
Cape of Good Hope and its environs, published 1795 (engraving) 101
8.1 John Archibald Woodside’s painting, entitled: We Owe Allegiance to
No Crown 135
10.1 Barbary Pirates 175
10.2 Tripoli – stronghold of Barbary Pirates 176
11.1 Catalan Map of Europe and North Africa 188
12.1 Map of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans 208
15.1 Pinasses, large French and English ships trading with the Americas 266
15.2 Slave traders in Gorés 270
16.1 The specter of the standing army in eighteenth-century America 285
17.1 Santo Domingo, 1671 301
17.2 Buccaneer in the West Indies, 1686 303
xi
– Figures –
18.1 Virgin of Guadalupe 331

18.2 Inca Princess 333
19.1 Frontispiece and title page of the 1787 edition of the Book of
Common Prayer into the Mohawk language 354
19.2 Engraved portrait of the Afro-Dutch minister Jacobus Capitein 356
21.1 The title page of Roger Williams’ ‘Bloudy Tenent’ 1644 385
21.2 Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman, also known as the Prince of Slaves 388
22.1 Virginia, Maryland, Chesapeake Bay 396
22.2 Cecil Calvert, first Lord Baltimore 402
24.1 The several journals of the Court of Directors of the Company of
Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies 442
24.2 The South-Sea House in Bishops-gate Street, published according to
Act of Parliament, for Stowe’s Survey, 1754 443
24.3 Views of forts and castles along the Gold Coast, West Africa,
about 1700 447
25.1 Trade label of the South Sea Company 458
25.2 ‘The Bubblers Bubbl’d’ or ‘The Devil Take the Hindmost’, 1720 459
26.1 Bill of Exchange, 1690/1 475
26.2 Assignat (banknote) for 50 sols dated revolutionary year II (1793)
of French Republic 482
27.1 Tobacco ships in America 494
28.1 The Corsini Papers 515
29.1 Hakluyt’s Map of the New World 1587 532
29.2 New Belgium, plate from ‘Atlas Contractus’, c. 1671 540
30.1 Ralph Earl, Elijah Boardman, 1789 564
32.1 Slavery/West Indies 607
32.2 Black slaves working on a plantation and sugar factory 608
33.1 Frontispiece of ‘Le Parfait Negociant’ by Jacques Savary, Paris,
1665 (engraving) 620
33.2 The Great Financier, or British Economy for the Years 1763,
1764, 1765 626
33.3 An exciseman of the seventeenth century leads an attack on smugglers 628
P UB LISHERS’ ACKNO W L E D G E M E NTS

The publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright
material: Alamy, Alan Hopper of the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University
of Hull, Baker Business Historical Collections – Kress Collection, Harvard University,
Bridgeman Art Library, The Trustees of the British Museum, Denver Art Museum,
Getty Images, John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Library of Congress,
Massachusetts Historical Society, Mary Evans Picture Library, National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich, Scala Archives.
We would also like to thank the editors of Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der
Neuzeit (5.Jg, 2005, Heft 1) for permission to reprint William O’Reilly’s article,
‘Emigration from the Habsburg Monarchy and Salzburg to the New World, 1700–1848’
as Chapter 7, and to thank Routledge for permission to reprint Laurent Dubois’ article,
‘The Enslaved Enlightenment: rethinking the intellectual history of the French Atlantic’
(Social History, Volume 31, Issue 1, 2006) as Chapter 13.
xii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to thank Laura Pilsworth, Associate Editor of History at
Routledge, Emily Kindleysides, then Assistant Editor, Geraldine Martin, Senior
Production Editor, and Catherine Aitken and Paul Brotherston, Editorial Assistants,
for their stalwart support of this volume through the vicissitudes of the past seven
years. Catherine in particular worked tirelessly to shepherd the book through the
critical final months. The recruitment of contributors proved a remarkably rewarding
experience, and offered a rare opportunity to blend various methodological
approaches and theoretical stances. As editors, we are pleased that so many of the
original contributors remained onboard when the editorial team changed in August
2013 and are proud that the new contributors, numbering almost two dozen, went
to such Herculean efforts to produce their own essays within only nine months.
Throughout the volume’s lengthy birthing, there was some attrition with resulting
oversights and omissions. We trust that those who rue the absence of an article on
their favorite theme will at least discover new topics and new approaches within
these covers.
Special thanks are due to Charles Drummond, Jaya Dalal, Lucia Novak, and
Penelope Coffman for their indefatigable work as research assistants, copy editors,
and proofreaders of the original submissions. Froma Zeitlin also deserves a warm
thank you for ensuring the speedy delivery of a clean digital copy of one of the
reprinted chapters for use by the optical character recognition software. Conversations
with the contributors and with Mark Goldie, Jenny Mander, John Morrill, David
Ormrod, and Julia Rudolph have produced both recommendations for contributing
authors and new directions to explore. Any errors nevertheless remain our own.
Finally we would like to acknowledge our students, especially those at the
University of Cambridge and the University of Pennsylvania, for their enthusiasm for
the subject matter and for asking the very questions these essays are meant to answer.
We hope that future generations will profit from their curiosity and from the vibrancy
and rigor of this new generation of Atlantic scholarship.
xiii
CONTRIBUTORS
James A. O. C. Brown recently completed a Research Fellowship at the University of

Cambridge funded by the Leverhulme Trust, exploring the development of
political legitimacy in the medieval Maghrib and Islamic Spain, as part of which
he contributed to a recent volume of the Proceedings of the British Academy, The
Articulation of Power in Medieval Iberia and the Maghrib (2014). His other
research has focused Morocco’s relationship to the emergent modern world,
particularly in his first book Crossing The Strait: Morocco, Gibraltar and Great
Britain in the 18th and 19th Centuries (2012).
James Taylor Carson is Professor of History and Chair of Department at Queen’s
University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His work focuses broadly on the
ethnohistory of North America’s first peoples and he has authored Searching for
the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (1999)
and Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial
South (2007) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. He is currently
working on a short book about how historians use racial language and categories
to write United States’ history.
D’Maris Coffman is a Leverhulme/Newton Trust Early Career Fellow in the History
Faculty of the University of Cambridge and is the Director of the Centre for
Financial History at Newnham College, where she remains a fellow. From
October 2008 through September 2013, she was the Mary Bateson Research
Fellow at Newnham. Her first monograph, Excise Taxation and the Origins of
the Public Debt, was published in October 2013. Most of her current research
focuses on the role of state finance in the development of capital markets in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and North America and on the
consequences of the growth of the fiscal state for agricultural commodity markets.
Joanna Cohen is lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. Her research examines
the intersections of consumer culture, political economy, and citizenship in
nineteenth-century America. She is currently completing a book called Luxurious
Citizens: Consumption and Civic Belonging in Nineteenth Century America. She
xiv
– Contributors –
has published articles in the Journal of the Early Republic and The Winterthur
Portfolio and has appeared on the BBC Radio 3 program, Freethinking, as one
of the AHRC New Generation Thinkers.
Nicholas Cole is a Senior Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, Oxford.
His research focuses on the political thought and governing institutions of the
early American Republic. He has a particular interest in the utility of classical
thought for the founding generation. He is currently working on a study of the
understanding of Executive Power in the nineteenth century. Thomas Jefferson,
the Classical World, and Early America, which he edited along with Peter Onuf,
was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2011.
Paul D’Arcy is Associate Professor in the Department of Pacific and Asian History at
the Australian National University. He teaches courses in Pacific history and
environmental conflict in the Asia Pacific region. His current research focuses on
Pacific and Southeast Asian indigenous maritime history, engagement and
interactions between Asia and the Pacific, and regional perspectives on contemporary
maritime resource management in the Pacific region. He is the author of The
People of the Sea: Environment, Identity and History in Oceania (2006).
E. L. Devlin is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of History,
University of Cambridge, and a bye-fellow at Selwyn College. His research
explores British diplomacy in the long eighteenth century, with a particular
emphasis on cultural exchange, the public life of ambassadors, and the importance
of extra-European affairs to Anglo-European relations. His first book is a study
of British relations with Papal Rome in the late seventeenth century, and he is
currently beginning a project investigating British responses to the baroque from
the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries.
Charles R. Drummond, IV, is the Postdoctoral fellow at the William P. Clements, Jr.
Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft at the University of Texas at Austin.
He has recently completed his Ph.D. in history at Trinity College, Cambridge
that explores debates over military power in the British Isles in the second half of
the seventeenth century. From 2014 to 2015 he will be a post-doctoral fellow at
the Clements Center at the University of Texas at Austin where he will be
working on a monograph on the original meaning of the Second Amendment to
the U.S. Constitution.
Laurent Dubois is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke
University, where he is the Faculty Director of the Forum for Scholars and
Publics. His most recent book is Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012) and he
is currently completing a history of the banjo.
Jonathan Eacott is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California,
Riverside. His publications include, ‘Making an Imperial Compromise: The
Calico Acts, the Atlantic Colonies, and the Structure of the British Empire,’ in the
William and Mary Quarterly. His forthcoming book uncovers the vital
importance of India in the development of the British Empire in the Atlantic and,
later, the early American Republic.
xv
Maura Jane Farrelly is Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of the
Journalism Program at Brandeis University. She holds a Ph.D. in history from
Emory University, with an emphasis on religion and the colonial and early-
American periods. Farrelly is the author of Papist Patriots: The Making of an
American Catholic Identity, published by Oxford University Press. Before
joining the faculty at Brandeis, she was a full-time journalist, working for
Georgia Public Radio in Atlanta and the Voice of America in Washington, D.C.,
and New York. She has also freelanced for National Public Radio and the British
Broadcasting Corporation.
Jeffrey Fortin is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel College, Boston where
he teaches courses on Atlantic and Early American history. His research focuses
on race, migration, and identity formation during the Age of Revolution. He has
published in Atlantic Studies, among other journals, and recently co-edited
Atlantic Biographies: Individuals and Peoples in the Atlantic World, a collection
of essays that use biography to interpret and analyze Atlantic history. Jeff is
currently finishing a book-length biography of Paul Cuffe, the celebrated African-
American sea captain, entrepreneur, and supporter of African colonization.
Travis Glasson is Associate Professor of History at Temple University and received
his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is the author of Mastering Christianity:
Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (2012) and his other
publications include articles in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal
of British Studies. He is currently at work on a project examining the experiences
of neutrals around the British empire during the American Revolution.
Dror Goldberg is a senior lecturer in the Department of Management and Economics
at The Open University of Israel. His research focuses on the history of money
since the early modern period and the theory of money. He is currently writing a
book entitled How Americans Invented Modern Money, 1607–1692 for the
University of Chicago Press.
Gerald Groenewald is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies
at the University of Johannesburg. He has published widely on the social,
economic, and cultural history of the Cape of Good Hope during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, including Trials of Slavery (2005).
Paul Kosmetatos is a retired structured products trader, who obtained his M.A. in
Early Modern History at Kings College London before undertaking a Ph.D. at
the University of Cambridge on the Credit Crisis of 1772/3. He has a forthcoming
article in the Financial History Review on the winding up of the Ayr Bank. He
won Best Graduate Student Paper at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies in 2012.
Mélanie Lamotte is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge. Her research
focuses on color prejudice in the early modern French empire, especially in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Guadeloupe, Louisiana, and Bourbon
Island. Her thesis is entitled ‘Colour prejudice in the early modern French
empire, c. 1635–1767.’ In 2013, she was a Fellow at the Kluge Center, Library
of Congress.
xvi
A. B. Leonard is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Financial History,

University of Cambridge, and Affiliated Lecturer at the University’s Faculty of
Economics. He has written widely on topics related to marine insurance and the
Atlantic World. Current projects include a history of commercial insurance in
London in the twentieth century, editing Marine Insurance: International
Development and Evolution, co-editing The Caribbean and the Atlantic World
Economy: Circuits of Trade, Money and Knowledge, 1650–1914, and curating
a permanent exhibit about the history of Lloyd’s, to be installed on the old
insurance market’s trading floor. Prior to returning to academia to receive
Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Economic History from Cambridge, he worked as
a writer and commentator on commercial insurance for publishers including the
Financial Times and Reuters.
Laura Matthew is an Associate Professor of Latin American history at Marquette
University. Her research focuses on Mesoamerican history and indigenous
experiences of early Spanish colonialism in Guatemala. She is the co-editor with
Michel Oudijk of Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of
Mesoamerica, and author of Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in
Colonial Guatemala, winner of the Howard F. Cline Prize and the Murdo
MacLeod Prize. She is currently working on a book about indigenous trade and
migration along the southern Pacific coast in the sixteenth century.
Matthew David Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of History at Sewanee: The
University of the South. He has published on joint-stock companies and on
British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in such journals as Enterprise and
Society, Itinerario, and The Journal of the Historical Society. He is currently at
work on a book examining the transformation of British trade with Africa
between 1697 and 1732.
William Max Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto
specializing in the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. His
research focuses on the ways that ideas about time, race, and biopolitics emerged
in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic world. He is the author of a
forthcoming book on this topic and he recently co-edited a book with Suzanne
Desan and Lynn Hunt, The French Revolution in Global Perspective.
William O’Reilly is University Lecturer at the History Faculty of the University of
Cambridge. He has worked on a range of topics in early modern European and
Atlantic history, and is particularly interested in the history of European
migration, colonialism, and imperialism. His current research project, with the
working title, Surviving Empire: The Translation of Imperial Context in a
Globalizing World, 1550–1800, explores the inter-relationship of European
imperialisms from the later sixteenth century to the French revolution. In 2006
Dr. O’Reilly was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in European
and Atlantic History. In 2013, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for
excellence in teaching.
Helen Paul is a lecturer in Economics and Economic History at the University of
Southampton. She is an economic historian focusing on the early modern period,
xvii
especially the Financial Revolution and Atlantic trade. Her first book, The South
Sea Bubble: An Economic History of its Origins and Consequences, is a revisionist
account of the famous financial crash of 1720. She has published a number of
book chapters about the fiscal-military or contractor state in Britain and its links
to the Royal Navy. She is currently the chair of the Women’s Committee of the
Economic History Society.
Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia.
He is the author of John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker
in the British Empire, Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and
the British Empire, and An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against
the Peoples of Acadia.
Juan J. Ponce-Vázquez is a Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Lawrence University.
His research focuses on the Spanish Caribbean societies during the seventeenth
century. His current book project, entitled At the Edge of Empire: Social and
Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1697, explores how the peoples of the
Spanish colony of Santo Domingo transcended their marginal location and status
within the Spanish colonial world and took advantage of the intense imperial
competition that engulfed the Caribbean during the seventeenth century, with
the arrival of Northern European settlers.
Sandra Rebok works for the Spanish National Research Council and is currently a
Marie Curie Fellow at the Huntington Library (2013–2015). Her actual research
project focuses on the networks of knowledge Alexander von Humboldt established
within the United States and his impact on the development of sciences in this
country. She has recently published a book on the relationship and intellectual
exchange between Humboldt and Thomas Jefferson (University of Virginia Press,
2014). She has also curated several exhibitions in the field of history of science.
Brian Rouleau is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University. His first
book, With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American
Maritime Empire, focuses on encounters between U.S. sailors and peoples overseas
during the nineteenth century. He has also published articles in Diplomatic
History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and Early American Studies.
Edmond Smith is undertaking his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. His research
focuses on the commercial communities of early modern Europe with a specific
focus on the English East India Company. His thesis, ‘Networks of the East India
Company, 1600–1625,’ will be completed in 2015. He has published articles on
Anglo-Dutch relations, the role of naval power in Indian Ocean diplomacy and
the distribution of practical information for investors in overseas commerce.
John Smolenski is Associate Professor of History at the University of California,
Davis. His research focuses on culture and identity in the Atlantic world. He is
the author of Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial
Pennsylvania and the co-editor (with Thomas Humphrey) of New World Orders:
Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas. His current book,
Rethinking Creolization: Culture and Power in the Atlantic World, is under
contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
xviii
Holly Snyder has been Curator of American Historical Collections at Brown

University’s John Hay Library since July 2004. Her research focuses on Jews in
the colonial British Atlantic, and her articles have appeared in the journals Rhode
Island Jewish Historical Notes, The William & Mary Quarterly, Jewish History,
and Early American Studies, as well as in a number of scholarly compilations.
She received her Ph.D. in American History from Brandeis University in 2000,
and holds an M.S.L.S. and an M.A. degree in American History from The
Catholic University of America.
Denise A. Spellberg is Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on Islamic civilization and
the history of Islam in Europe and the United States. She is the recipient of the
Carnegie Foundation Scholarship for her research on Islam in early America. Her
most recent book is Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (2013).
David J. Starkey is Professor of Maritime History at the University of Hull, UK. He
is Chair of the British Commission for Maritime History and editor-in-chief of
the International Journal of Maritime History. He has written and co-edited
works on various maritime themes, with British Privateering Enterprise in the
18th Century (1990), Shipping Movements in the UK, 1871-1913 (1999),
England’s Sea Fisheries (2000), Oceans Past (2007) and A History of the North
Atlantic Fisheries (2009, 2012) among his published works.
Catherine Styer earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research
focuses on race, gender, slavery, and empire in the early modern Atlantic world.
She is currently completing a manuscript Slaves to Empire. Before returning to
academia, she trained as a solicitor in London.
Karim M. Tiro is Professor of History at Xavier University. He is the author of The
People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through
the Era of Removal and co-editor of Along the Hudson and Mohawk: The 1790
Journey of Count Paolo Andreani. His essays have appeared in the Journal of the
Early Republic, American Indian Law Review, and elsewhere.
Natalie Zacek is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester.
Her research focuses on the colonial and antebellum American South and the
Caribbean, and she is currently at work on a study of the cultural meaning of
horse-racing in nineteenth-century America. Her first monograph, Settler Society
in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (2010), won the Royal Historical
Society’s Gladstone Prize, and she has published articles in, amongst other journals,
Slavery and Abolition, the Journal of Peasant Studies, and History Compass.
xix
SO
UT
H
CA
RO AZORES
GE L IN
OR A
GI
A Charleston
FL
O RI
DA
Havana
NEW CUBA
SPAIN
Santo Domingo
PUERTO RICO
Veracruz ANTIGUA
JAMAICA GUADELOUPE CAPE VERDE
Cartagena MARTINIQUE ISLANDS
de Indias BARBADOS
Portobello NEW
GRANADA Cayenne
M
A
Equator
R IN
SU
PERU BRAZIL
P A C I F I C Lima
Bahia
O C E A N
Rio de Janeiro
Buenos
Aires
xx
N
MADEIRA
CANARY ISLES
Arguin
Séné
gal
Goree
e
G am
on
bi a
Le
Whydah Benin
ra
er
Si Calabar
Elmina ngo
PRINCIPE Co
SÂO TOMÉ Loango
Cabinda
Luanda
A T L A N T I C Mozambique
Benguela
O C E A N
MADAGASCAR
0 1000 2000 miles

0 1500 3000 km
xxi
London
Bristol Amsterdam
Nantes
Genoa
North Florence
Philadelphia New York Azores Lisbon Med
Maryland Seville iter
ran
Atlantic ean
Carolinas Virginia Madeira Sea
St. Augustine
Bermuda Canary Sahara Desert
Florida Ocean Islands Per
Gulf of Egypt sian
Mauritania Gul
Mexico Bahamas f
Nile
Re
dS
Cuba Santa Domingo Cape Se Songhay Arabia
ne
ea
Jamaica Guadeloupe Verde ga
l
Ni
Martinique Islands
ge
Caribbean Sea Barbados Gambia
Akan States Oyo Benin r

Mina
go
Equator São Tomé
Con
n
Amazo
Mombasa
Pernambuco Kongo
(Recife) Luanda
Bahia Benguela Zam
bez
i
Mozambique
Minas
Gerais Madagascar
Rio de Janeiro
Pacific South
Ocean Atlantic
Ocean
The Atlantic in the early colonial period
xxii
CHAPTER ONE
THE ATLANTIC WORLD

Definition, theory, and boundaries
D’Maris Coffman and Adrian Leonard
W hat is meant by the term ‘Atlantic World’ and how has its usage evolved in the
last thirty years? If ‘Atlantic history’ has entered its fourth decade, what is left of
the intellectual project inaugurated in the 1980s by Bernard Bailyn at Harvard and Jack
Greene at Johns Hopkins? How should the Braudelian ambitions of the longue durée
of Atlantic regional history sit with postcolonial explorations of the African and Native
American experiences, which are by their nature punctuated by political narratives?
Historians have traditionally defined ‘Atlantic history’ by the ocean itself and
through the interactions among the continents that compose its basin: the Americas,
Africa, and Europe. For over a decade, David Armitage’s construction of three types
of Atlantic history: circum-Atlantic, trans-Atlantic, and cis-Atlantic, have underpinned
the debate. Circum-Atlantic history focused in this typology on the Atlantic as a
geographical expression, while trans-Atlantic history was essentially comparative,
and cis-Atlantic history (the ideal type) was contextualist, offering ‘history of a place
in relation to the wider Atlantic world’ (Armitage, 2002, pp. 21–24). Although
seldom acknowledged, such an approach contained within it a bias for particular
flavors of intellectual history or micro-histories done by social and cultural historians,
which had come to the fore in the intellectual climate of the 1990s. Older approaches
still had some currency, though they often bore the stain of ‘trans-Atlantic history.’
That has begun to change. Peter Coclanis has recently added a fourth category to
Armitage’s tripartite system: conjuncto-Atlantic history (Coclanis, 2009, p. 349).
This approach links Atlantic studies with other historiographies, in order to gain
further insights into broader historical experiences. It does so by exploring the
interrelationships between, and impacts upon, ex-Atlantic regions, institutions, and
peoples arising from the various political, social, and economic developments which
occurred in the Atlantic region. This approach adopts Atlantic history as a field of the
even newer discipline of world history, and seems for Coclanis to act as a justifying
raison d’être for studies of the Atlantic world, helping to overcome what he has
described as its ‘limiting’ explanatory power (2009, p. 338). (Indeed, if Armitage was
correct in his 2002 declaration [p. 11] that ‘we are all Atlanticists now,’ then we are
all world historians today.) There is much to be said for adopting Atlantic history to
investigate bigger historiographical questions, maybe even to contribute to the
1
– D’Maris Coffman and Adrian Leonard –
resurgent grand-theory history which has returned to the discipline. Much recent
work that is or could be classed as Atlantic history has made such contributions.
That said, Coclanis’s complaint could be made of any branch of history, yet the vast
majority of the entries on publishers’ swelling lists in all historical branches prove
that it is possible to avoid antiquarianism, and to make a genuine contribution to
historical understanding, without addressing the ‘big questions’ of history, or
adopting a world history approach.
The extended Armitage assignment of types of Atlantic history has been augmented
by several reflective assessments of the structure of the discipline. In their introduction
to Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (2009), editors Jack Greene and Philip
Morgan present and refute five ‘objections’ to the idea of Atlantic history, declaring
it ‘not necessarily a flawed, conceptually muddled subject.’ They then offer a complex
framework to avoid these perceived potential pitfalls. These prescriptions – to avoid
the reductionism which lurks when looking for sharp similarities or differences in
comparative Atlantic history; to look across borders; to focus sometimes on sectors;
to consider the circulation of values and ideas; to consider the traditional questions
of imperial history in the context of the Atlantic world; and to pay close attention to
chronologies – have all been embraced by at least some Atlanticists since Greene and
Morgan wrote (and had in many instances been considered much earlier). These are
useful methodological guidelines, but they may also be constrictive. Recent works,
such as Guy Chet’s The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State
Authority, 1688–1856 (2014), have respected all of these guiding principles to a
greater or lesser degree, but moved beyond them to consider broader questions in a
way which follows the direction set out by Coclanis (in the case of Chet, to examine
questions of the nature and reaches of sovereignty).
In assembling the chapters for this book, the editors have sought intentionally to
eschew Atlantic history which follows a prescribed course. The Atlantic world,
according to most chronological brackets adopted to define it, was distinctively early
modern. As such, it was part of Europe’s evolution to modernity, its great period of
transition when new ideas were floated, new institutions built, and new approaches
adopted. While the ‘old world’ was in the throes of this tumultuous change, it was
simultaneously shrugging off the truths of scholasticism in a world now known to
extend far beyond the knowledge of the ancients. Europeans were entering unknowns
both at home and abroad. In this way the Atlantic could operate as an experimental
space, a bolt-hole, and a wild west. This opens the door to an array of historical
explorations which may extend or enlighten other historiographies of the early
modern experience, or indeed may rest, freestanding, upon their own merits.
Unconstrained historical research, work which is seen as Atlantic history by the
researcher, or indeed by the consumers of the product, should therefore be a
component of Atlantic history, regardless of its scope or focus. This may, of course,
make Atlantic history something of a dog’s breakfast, yet that in itself does not
necessarily make it conceptually muddled, provided reductionism is avoided.
This goal is not always accomplished, of course. The danger exists in the study of
Atlantic history – as in any field of historical enquiry – that one can give greater
weight to events in one’s own Atlantic world than they merit in a broader context.
This happens often, such as the observation that Atlantic exploits ‘involved the
nation in expensive wars’ (Kupperman, 2012, p. 96). In fact, for the most part, the
2
– chapter 1: The Atlantic World –
great, distinctively home-grown dynastic conflicts which were fundamental to the

shaping of early modern Europe were played out in part in the Atlantic and other
realms of European empires (as had never been possible before), but activities in these
distant locations were not in and of themselves casual. Indeed, much of this rivalry
was expressed not in the Atlantic, but in the eastern reaches of the British, Dutch,
Portuguese, and Spanish empires. Thus, reductionism can be unwittingly accomplished
with equal ease when some of the favorite subjects of Atlantic history, from economic
integration to evangelization, are considered in an Atlantic context to the exclusion
of important, related, and often modifying developments in other realms which had
been opened to direct access by European navigation. Again, Coclanis would applaud
such expansive consideration of broader histories.
Thus, this volume is not meant to serve as a handbook of Atlantic history as such.
Those looking for one would be much better served by the recent publication of the
Oxford History of the Atlantic World (Canny and Morgan, 2011) which offers a
comprehensive view of the current state of play from within Atlantic history as an
established discipline. Our volume on the ‘Atlantic World’ offers something radically
different, and encapsulates an approach that does not fit neatly within historical
schema. Our Atlantic World, as befits the Routledge Worlds series, reflects an
ecumenical approach to the topic, one that seeks neither to compartmentalize nor to
discipline practitioners, but rather to illustrate the methodological diversity of more
recent ‘post-Atlantic’ approaches. Our authors consider not only traditional
interactions amongst Africa, Europe, and the Americas, but also look to the Pacific,
the Baltic region, the Cape Colony, and North Africa for evidence of commercial and
cultural exchanges. Essays in this volume consider the natural world alongside that
of a human-built environment, and make no clear distinctions between maritime and
oceanic historical approaches. Many of the essays in this volume take up neglected
themes, which were marginalized by traditional approaches to Atlantic history, but
upon closer inspection should be central to the project. The history of Judaism and
Islam in the Atlantic World is considered alongside more familiar accounts of Catholic
and Protestant Christianity. Atlantic slavery is explored from all angles, including
that of Europeans enslaved by Barbary piracy. Although the chapters are not
deliberately arranged to highlight disagreements amongst authors, perceptive readers
will detect them.
As two of the editors are financial historians by trade, the volume also explores the
Atlantic experience of money and credit, and considers the integration of Atlantic
financial and money markets with those in Europe in particular. Political economy is
not divorced from histories of consumption and commerce, and mercantile practice
is considered alongside state practice. The editors hope that the sheer scale and scope
of this work will prove stimulating for students and established scholars alike.
STRUCTURE OF THE B O O K
Part I, entitled ‘Atlantic Explorations,’ examines the physical world as experienced
both by indigenous peoples and by European settlers. In Chapter Two, James T.
Carson and Karim M. Tiro offer a lyrical description of attitudes and beliefs of the
native peoples towards the animal world as they experienced it, and show how those
differed from those of European settlers. They describe a centuries-long process by
3
which Palaeolithic land use patterns were rapidly replaced by Old World post-
Neolithic farming practices, with predictable results for native flora, fauna, and
peoples. Sandra Rebok’s Chapter Three explores the Spanish encounter with the
New World and considers how the discovery altered the European consciousness,
informing not only science and humanistic scholarship, but also re-shaping ideology
and religion. Her account concentrates on contemporary narratives of New World
exploration, and considers the entire period from first contact in the fifteenth-century
through to late nineteenth-century writers. In Chapter Four, David Starkey offers a
compelling example of a new maritime history that goes beyond traditional treatments
of oceangoing vessels to a wider explanation of the maritime economic sector,
especially fish and fisheries, upon which so many livelihoods depended. His treatment
considers simultaneously the social, economic, technological, institutional, and
geographical influences upon those communities whose main employment came from
the harvesting of food from the sea. Not only does his chapter introduce students to
the Nordic Atlantic, so often neglected in other treatments, but also he connects these
apparently regional economies to larger global networks.
If Part I frames the physical world for the reader, Part II considers the ‘Movement
of Peoples’ through a multitude of often-neglected imperial frames. In Chapter Five,
Laura Matthew explores the uneasy place of the history of the indigenous peoples of
South and Central America in the historiography of the Iberian Atlantic world. The
tragic destruction of the Mexica and Inca empires owed both to the fierce rivalries
between them and the arrival of Europeans, but Matthew argues forcibly that the
new arrivals were not only Spanish, but also French, Italian, English, Irish, and Dutch
in origin. Her essay conveys both a sense for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
experiences and for the fate of indigenous peoples in Iberia after the Bourbon
succession and the Atlantic revolutions. Gerald Groenewald surveys rarely
acknowledged connections between South Africa and the Southern Atlantic World in
Chapter Six. As he acknowledges, part of the neglect of the pivotal role played by the
Cape colony in the historiography was a result of the isolation of South African
scholars in Apartheid. Over two decades later, the progress of re-integration remains
a slow one, with the most attention paid to the slaving and whaling activities of the
Dutch East Indian Company (VOC) in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Groenewald suggests additional possibilities for research, as the Cape colony served
as a portal between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. William O’Reilly’s Chapter
Seven, a reprint of an article that appeared in Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der
Neuzeit ten years ago, reminds readers of an equally overlooked corner of Atlantic
history, namely that of emigration from Hapsburg lands to the New World in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. O’Reilly explains that Protestants migrating
for religious reasons could move to Magyar lands and that many did. Thus migration
to the New World from the Empire occurred on a small scale, involving individuals,
families or small groups. The one exception to what O’Reilly calls ‘micro-migration’
involved the Protestants of Salzburg, whose eighteenth-century experience he explores
in detail. By the early nineteenth century, emigration controls were relaxed enough in
practice (though not in theory) to permit mass emigration to the Americas. In Chapter
Eight, Brian Rouleau investigates neglected early-nineteenth-century seafaring
communities, finding them paradoxically playing a central role in the broader Atlantic
experience. Rouleau reminds readers of the significance that complaints of seamen
4
and their masters had for the American Revolutionaries, and considers the myths and
realities of their ‘radical republican’ politics and the putatively loose morality of
waterfronts. Seafaring communities resisted most reformist impulses, but ultimately
oceangoing commerce, the vessels and their crews were transformed by the
technological shift from sail to steam.
Part III explores a variety of ‘Cultural Encounters,’ echoing many of the themes in
Part II while showcasing a variety of new methodological approaches and surprising
source material available to the current generation of Atlantic historians. In Chapter
Nine, Mélanie Lamotte looks at experiences of color prejudice in the French Atlantic
using Guadeloupe as a case study. She argues that color prejudice existed from the
outset of French colonization in the Caribbean. Lamotte considers how the legislation
produced by the governmental élite in Guadeloupe and across the broader Caribbean
and French Atlantic World contributed to the entrenchment of color prejudice.
Drawing upon a wealth of under-explored sources, she also illustrates cases of fluidity
across color lines in the social life of early modern Guadeloupe. Echoing many of the
themes in Chapter Eight, Catherine Styer’s treatment of Barbary slavery in Chapter
Ten contextualizes the practice, which ultimately saw over twenty-five thousand
captives put to work in North Africa as slaves. Contrary to popular histories of
Barbary slavery (which romanticize it in comparison with New World slavery), Styer
finds that the overwhelming majority of captured Britons died in captivity, often
through over-work, starvation and violence. She argues that historiography which
promotes the comparison of Barbary slavery to New World slavery does violence to
our understanding of both phenomena, which can be better understood on their own
terms. In Chapter Eleven, James Brown ponders the consequence of considering the
place of Morocco in Atlantic historiography. In contrast to Styer, he de-emphasizes
narratives of piracy in favor of considering the sultanate of Morocco as a state actor,
in particular in the context of the struggle over Gibraltar as a gateway to the Atlantic.
While Morocco remained firmly part of the ‘Old World’, Brown emphasizes that the
European powers saw North Africa as part of the same imperial frame as the rest of
their Atlantic empires. Modern historians have done otherwise at our peril, even as
Brown’s findings challenge the ‘Atlantic paradigm’ so prevalent in earlier generations
of Atlantic historiography. Paul D’Arcy takes an even wider perspective in Chapter
Twelve with his exploration of the implications of the emerging Pacific historiographies
for Atlantic history. D’Arcy’s essay will be especially useful to students as he helps his
readers conceive of the complex physical and human geographies, the weather
patterns and the enormous distances involved. Pacific Islanders left traces of their
own pre-historic encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Atlantic world. These
contacts continued into the colonial period and by the eighteenth century, they even
travelled on western ships and settled in western colonies. In effect, Groenewald’s
case for the importance of considering Southern Africa in Chapter Six is mirrored by
D’Arcy’s survey of the significance of the Pacific context. This section closes with
Chapter Thirteen, a reprint of an essay by Laurent Dubois which considers the
importance of Michèle Duchet’s Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières
(Anthropology and History in the Century of the Enlightenment) for our understanding
of the intellectual history of the French Atlantic. This piece was chosen because
universalist histories of the sort attempted by Duchet should be rendered
comprehensible and made far more meaningful by the first four chapters in this
5
section. Duchet’s focus on the problems of colonial governance anticipates the theme
of the next section.
In Part IV, the authors consider problems of ‘Warfare and Governance’ in the
Atlantic context, beginning with the everyday realities of violence in Chapter
Fourteen. Smolenski argues, somewhat controversially, that violence and
preconceptions legitimizing its use served as a kind of ‘perpetual motion machine of
colonial domination’ (Smolenski, p. 256). In constructing his narrative around this
theme, he finds commonalities in the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic
experiences of race and slavery, and in the processes of conquest and colonization.
Without seeking to supplant more traditional approaches, Smolenski’s example
suggests the possibilities of thematic approaches to comparative cultural histories of
institutional practices. In Chapter Fifteen, Geoffrey Plank also looks at the role of
violence in shaping four and a half centuries of the Atlantic experience, but mainly
restricts his enquiry to warfare, particularly interstate warfare, in an attempt to give
students a good grounding in the political narratives of conquest and colonization. In
Chapter Sixteen, Charles Drummond turns instead to militias, and their places in the
‘military vocabularies’ of the British Atlantic. Disputes over where military power
rested, in the legislature or the executive, which began during the English Civil Wars,
continued through the Revolutionary period and the early American republic. Militias
were contrasted foremost with standing armies. Drummond ultimately argues for a
‘distributionist’ approach to the Second Amendment of the American constitution in
an effort to recapture the contemporary meaning. Chapter Seventeen concludes this
section with Juan Ponce-Vazquez’s exploration of Spanish and French interactions in
seventeenth-century Hispaniola. His case study of conflict and cooperation in what
he calls the ‘Atlantic periphery’ will help students understand how these conflicts
played out in practice, while at the same time illuminating the often-neglected
experiences of elites in the Spanish and French Caribbean settlements.
Part V consists of six essays exploring ‘Religion’ in the Atlantic World. Eoin Devlin
offers a comprehensive overview in Chapter Eighteen of New World Catholicism,
conveying a sense for the chronological sweep, the geographical reach, and the
diversity of belief and practice in the Spanish and French overseas empires. Devlin
contrasts the implications of the extension of the Gallican liberties of the French
church with the more orthodox Spanish Catholicism. Travis Glasson’s treatment of
Protestantism in Chapter Nineteen considers the diversity of Protestant belief and
practice, and considers tensions both between Catholics and Protestants and between
different Protestant denominations. Some of these conflicts were an extension of
European rivalries in the imperial frame, whereas others were born of competition
for resources in the New World. Both these chapters also explore the indigenous
experience of Christian missionary activity, evangelization and forced conversion. In
Chapter Nineteen, Natalie Zacek considers the experience of New World Jewry in
the British Atlantic, comparing the experience of Jews to those of Quakers and
Huguenots. She finds that Jews were numerically small but economically significant,
with strong networks reaching into the Iberian Atlantic world as well. While Jewish
settlers may have been integrated into wider communities, few were assimilated, a
finding she attributes partly to anti-Jewish sentiment and partly to the self-enclosed,
communal tendencies of the emigrants themselves. Denise Spellberg’s discussion of
Islam in the Atlantic world focuses both on actual West African Muslim slave
6
populations, on the one hand, and with attitudes contemporary Europeans had
towards ‘notional Muslims’ or the possibilities of Islamic communities in the New
World. In this wide-ranging piece, she reflects on rumors of those Muslim
crewmembers who purportedly sailed with Columbus, on the meaning of ‘Mohametan’
in contemporary discourse, and on the origins of Jefferson’s edition of the Qu’ran.
Maura Jane Farrelly looks ahead to English Colonial Catholicism and its place in the
formation of early American identity. Her essay serves to redress the scant attention
paid to the experience of English Catholics when confronted with an explicitly
latitudinarian, contractarian theory of government as embodied in the American
constitution. Her treatment naturally focuses on Quebec and Maryland, where most
Catholics lived, and conveys a sense of how the inhabitants of Maryland in particular
dealt with the intense anti-Catholicism of the Protestant British state before the
Revolution and with their ready embrace of the possibilities of independence from
England thereafter. Holly Snyder ends this section with a polemical essay on the place
of early modern Jewish history in wider trends of Atlantic historiography, arguing
forcibly that the latter has been too ‘Christocentric’ whereas the former has shown a
reluctance to confront the difficult issues of where Jewish peoples fit within early
modern racial discourses. As she observes, the often fantastic eschatological constructs
that governed the place of Africans and indigenous peoples within a Christian
cosmology, and in turn provided rationales for their enslavement and extermination,
were complicated by the presence of Jews in ancient Christian texts. She concludes
that both scholars of Europe and of the Atlantic world would benefit from enlarging
the field of vision not only to the Atlantic but also to Africa when exploring relations
between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The editors believe that the first five essays
in this section, in very different ways, respond to the spirit of her plea, as do those
offered by Catherine Styer and James Brown in Part III.
In Part VI, four authors consider different dimensions of ‘Credit, Finance and
Money’ in the Atlantic context. In Chapter Twenty-four, Matthew Mitchell offers an
overview of British joint stock companies and their roles in the Atlantic trade.
Mitchell notes that they were chartered by the British state and highlights their
importance as instruments of state policy. In his account, success depended on a
subtle mix of political connections and the expertise of personnel, and he weighs the
experiences of the Company of Royal Adventurers, the Royal Africa Company, the
Hudson Bay Company, and the South Sea Company in turn. Mitchell concludes by
noting their commercial success while acknowledging the roles of many of these
companies in the expansion of the slave trade.
In her treatment of joint-stock companies in Chapter Twenty-five, Helen Paul
focuses instead on the events of 1719/1720 and the role of the Atlantic trade in fuelling
speculation in shares in the John Law’s Mississippi Company and in the British South
Sea Company. She argues forcefully for the significance of contemporary beliefs about
the possibilities of Atlantic trade after the end of the War of Spanish Succession and
the Great Northern War. Her account will be especially useful to students who want
to understand how the Atlantic and Baltic trading systems overlapped, and why the
early eighteenth century experienced a step-change in contemporary appreciation of
the potential profits that such trade could bring. Dror Goldberg looks at both the real
and mythological contributions of Atlantic trade to the development of paper money
in Chapter Twenty-six. First, Goldberg emphasizes the expansion of the sheer volume
7
of bills of exchange used to finance transatlantic trade as an advance upon their use in
predominately intra-European trade in the preceding centuries. Second, he argues that
interstate competition and with it military finance increased both the varieties and the
volume of paper money. Finally, the Atlantic colonies themselves issued inconvertible
paper money when confronted with the scarcity of precious metals with which to mint
coin. Despite a variety of cautionary tales of the dangers of rapid inflation, the use of
paper money in the Atlantic world continued more or less unabated. Paul Kosmetatos
offers a case study in Chapter Twenty-seven of the Credit Crisis of 1772/3, which
began with Alexander Fordyce’s flight to the continent in June 1772 and rapidly
spread to Scotland leading to the collapse of the Ayr Bank just over a fortnight later.
Kosmetatos traces the transmission of the crisis to North America, and in doing so
establishes the extent to which British Atlantic financial markets were integrated with
those of the metropole. Tobacco merchants emerge as the vector of contagion as they
were the most vulnerable to a generalized tightening of credit conditions. Ironically,
the Glasgow tobacco merchants themselves were saved by the fact that most of their
customers were French (an unintended consequence of the collapse of Law’s scheme
as described in Chapter Twenty-five) and paid in coin, rather than via the Dutch and
English bills market described in the previous chapter.
Part VII looks in turn at ‘Commerce, Consumption and Mercantile Networks’ in
the Atlantic world. In a polemical Chapter Twenty-eight, Adrian Leonard argues
forcibly against Joseph Inikori’s view that Atlantic trade catalyzed the development
of the London insurance market. He shows that the institutional practices of the
London market were developed well before the seventeenth century, and that any
unique problems of insuring human cargoes contributed little to what institutional
changes did occur. Atlantic warfare did increase demand for insurance; the London
market turned out to be stable enough to accommodate it, while other European
markets for marine insurance declined in importance. In Chapter Twenty-nine,
Edmund Smith explores commercial relations between the Dutch and English Atlantic
worlds. While many studies of Anglo-Dutch relations end with the loss of New
Netherland to the English in 1673, Smith focuses on the first hundred years. As with
Starkey in Chapter Four, Smith emphasizes the importance of the fishing industries
as the primary mover of early commercial expansion by both the English and Dutch,
which he regards as just as important as (and even a driver of) anti-Iberian foreign
policies in the twin contexts of the Dutch Revolt and Spanish Armada. In Chapter
Thirty, Jonathan Eacott considers the cultural history of Atlantic commerce in a
globalized context. Although demand for Atlantic goods was scarce in Asian markets,
demand for Asian goods was great in Atlantic ones. By the same token, demand for
New World products was high in Europe, and over time New World markets for
European goods eclipsed the importance of colonial possessions as sources of raw
materials. The resulting economic warfare shaped not only ideas about political
economy, but also labor practices and business forms. In Chapter Thirty-one, Joanna
Cohen turns to the question of how ideas about public taste interacted with laissez-
faire economic ideologies and free trade policies in the early American republic. On
the whole, the Victorians deplored what they perceived as the crudeness of American
tastes, especially their embrace of foreign goods. Cohen reveals the nationalist
dimensions of debates over taste, and traces how American ideas about taste
converged with notions of a democratic marketplace.
8
The eighth and final part explores ‘The Circulation of Ideas’ in the Atlantic world.
In Chapter Thirty-two, Jeffrey Fortin explores slave rebellions and slave resistance. He
traces these phenomena over a four-hundred year history and considers both the
African and indigenous American experiences, but focuses most of his attention on the
eighteenth century, especially the Revolutionary era. Not surprisingly, the Jacobin
rhetoric of the French Revolution resonated in slave societies, but failed to find support
from the French armies, who continued to suppress revolts brutally. If anything, there
was a remarkable consistency in the way in which the French, British, Spanish and
Portuguese empires worked to contain the spread of revolutionary ideas. In Chapter
Thirty-three, D’Maris Coffman investigates the spread of mercantile policies and
commercial practices through the publication of merchant manuals, of which Jacques
Savary’s Le Parfait Négociant is a paradigmatic example. Coffman employs the tools
of historians of the book to explore the work’s publication history, and argues that
careful attention to the text of successive editions reflects both a cementing of European
commercial rivalries and a concern with providing up-to-date guides to trading in the
Atlantic and African contexts. In Chapter Thirty-four, Nicholas Cole examines the
reception of classical texts in the Atlantic world. Just as the New World posed
problems for European eschatology, the ancient world provided frameworks through
which Europeans might understand their discoveries. Contemporary understandings
of classical political thought have long since had a place in intellectual histories of the
British Atlantic world, but these discussions are often narrow in scope and tend to
ignore, for instance, the importance of classical rhetorical forms in favor of classical
political thinking. Cole’s survey suggests the value of a more rigorous, subtler approach
to these discourses. The thirty-fifth and final chapter by William Nelson focuses
attention on the idea of an ‘Atlantic Enlightenment,’ the use of which he defends
against critics of the term. Nelson is particularly interested in Enlightenment discourses
of racial differentiation, on the one hand, and natural rights and anti-slavery on the
other. He explores how they might co-exist simultaneously. Nelson also sees the
Atlantic context, somewhat more controversially, as a laboratory for political
experimentation, as well as stimulant to developments in political economy and in
radical politics. Nelson emphasizes what he calls ‘intellectual reciprocity’ between
America and Europe, a metaphor which works equally well for the more mundane
spheres of economic, social, and cultural exchange explored in this volume.
As editors, we hope that our readers have come away with an appreciation of the
methodological pluralism that characterizes the new generation of Atlantic
scholarship. In contrast with too much of the historiography of early modern Europe,
which tends to magnify the differences between social and cultural history, between
longer-term economic histories and contingent political narratives, and between
confessional histories and histories of religious practice, Atlantic historiography
tends to embrace an array of sources and approaches, organized instead around
particular themes or problems, such as slavery or conquest. Atlantic historians have
also been quicker to embrace interdisciplinary approaches drawn from geography
and anthropology, while preserving a prominent place for written sources where they
exist. This, in turn, has made Atlantic history especially receptive to work on
consumption, taste, and material culture.
Economic history in the Atlantic context has also welcomed the work of financial
historians, who focus on market microstructure, market intervention, and state
9
policies rather than longer-term narratives of economic and social change. This spirit
of ecumenism has also served to bridge traditional divisions amongst historians of
political and economic thought, and between intellectual historians and historians of
the book. If Atlantic History has lost some of its coherence in the aging process, this
volume’s editors hope that what has been gained in midlife is a genuine appreciation
of new ideas and new approaches.
REF EREN CE S
Armitage, David, ‘Three concepts of Atlantic history,’ in Armitage, David and Michael J. Braddick
(eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 11–27.
Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press,
2000).
Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip (eds.), The Oxford History of the Atlantic World (Oxford
University Press, 2011).
Chet, Guy, The Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State Authority,
1688–1856 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).
Coclanis, Peter A. ‘Beyond Atlantic history,’ in Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D., Atlantic
History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 337–356.
Elliott, J.H. The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
Greene, Jack and Morgan, Philip, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University
Press, 2009).
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, The Atlantic in World History (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Padgen, Anthony, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France,
c. 1500–c. 1850 (Yale University Press, 1995).
10
PART I
ATLANTIC EXPLORATIONS
CHAPTER TWO
ANIMALS IN ATLANTIC
NORTH AMERICA TO 1800
James Taylor Carson and Karim M. Tiro
T he Native peoples of North America historically believed that animals helped

bring about the world as we know it. According to the Iroquois, for example, it
was Muskrat who dived to the bottom of the waters to gather the mud that he spread
on Turtle’s back to make the world we inhabit today. Algonquian peoples who lived
along the present-day Potomac River saw in the hares that scurried through the forest
undergrowth reminders of Ahone who had once fashioned the earth in his forepaws.
With help from the winds the Great Hare then populated the world with men and
women before creating the fish, deer, and other beings that would feed and clothe
those first people.1
The Europeans who first arrived in North America saw things otherwise. In their
stories, it was a Father who first made the earth and then the animals and then the
people. ‘And the fear of you and the dread of you,’ the Book of Genesis promised, ‘shall
be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth
upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.’
Men became as gods ruling the land just as He ruled them from the heavens such that
those who possessed the power to control nature became ‘civilized’ while those who
were a part of nature became ‘savage.’ The promise of such domain, however, came at
a steep price. ‘And surely your blood of your lives will I require,’ the Father covenanted
with his chosen children ‘at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of
man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man.’2
When they invaded North America, Europeans encountered a dynamic faunal
ecology that had come into being around ten or eleven thousand years earlier. Under
pressure from a warming climate and hungry humans, the giant mammals that had
dominated life during the preceding Pleistocene Ice Age became extinct. The hunters
who finished them off, however, unwittingly created a new animal world. Smaller
mammals like white-tailed deer, mountain lions, raccoons, wolves, beavers, and
opossums emerged from the shadows once cast by their massive cousins and,
notwithstanding the ebbs and flows that characterize any ecosystem, such modest
animals assumed a more important place in the landscape and the human diet.
Just three centuries after Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean in
1492 the post-Pleistocene faunal ecology of eastern North America had crashed and
13
– James Taylor Carson and Karim M. Tiro –
been replaced by a new one that drew together the domesticated and commensal
creatures of Europe, Asia, and Africa with the remnant indigenous survivors of the
invasion of America. We might think of this new animal world as ‘creole,’ given its
multiple origins and hybrid implications. The word ‘creole’ suits what happened in
eastern North America between 1492 and the end of the eighteenth century because
of the creative if also often destructive changes that occurred and the hybrid faunal
ecology that resulted from three centuries of colonization. Indeed, the term derives
from the Spanish word criollo that named the American cattle that had evolved from
Iberian types after they were let loose on the salt marshes of Hispaniola and the
grasslands of Mexico.3
Figure 2.1 Mask with antlers, 1400–1600 (wood & bone),

Mississippian culture (c. 800–1500)
Private Collection/Photo © Dirk Bakker/Bridgeman Images
14
– chapter 2: Animals in Atlantic North America –
Archaeologists have shown that although women’s horticulture contributed the

majority of calories to the diet of most First Peoples after ad 800, animals remained
crucial to the survival of North America’s Native populations, and none more so
than the white-tailed deer. Women turned its skins into clothing while both men and
women transformed its bones and antlers into scrapers, awls, flutes, and other tools.
Turkey and bear were also important as were, depending on the weather, time of
year, or other circumstances, squirrels, rabbits, beaver, waterfowl, mussels, turtles,
and a variety of freshwater fishes. Oysters, crabs, and fish from salt marshes and
ocean shores added to the richness of this living world.4
Such a world, however, was not ‘natural’ in the sense that it existed independently
of the people who inhabited it. People set fires annually in late winter to clear forest
undergrowth and to encourage first-growth grasses that attracted deer, turkeys, and
other animals while it also wiped out the hordes of irritating chiggers, ticks, and fleas.
The fires also consumed much of the acorns, nuts, and pine mast and so disadvantaged
bears. To compensate, some people preserved bear grounds by selective weeding to
enable hardwood trees, berry undergrowth, and grapevines and persimmon trees to
flourish and provide everything an ursine could want.
Beyond the boundaries of human habitation plentiful layers of mast, nuts, and
other forest foods attracted any number of animals. Massive canebrakes that wound,
ribbon-like, along the rivers and creeks enabled rabbits, bison, bear, and deer to
browse and prosper while ensuring that new stands of cane emerged from the nubby
stumps they left behind. Beaver too made their mark on the land. The ponds they
built diversified forest landscapes by sustaining a wide variety of marsh plants and
fishes, and they also provided secure sources of water. People were the paramount
predators but wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions also moved through the land and
preyed primarily upon the deer herds that were rooted to their particular, perhaps
even ancestral, territories.5
To talk of deer, bears, and rabbits, however, pinpoints animals we know today,
collapses the distance between then and now, and distorts what they meant to the
people who lived with them. To gain some sense of eastern North America’s animal
history, we must open the perspective of biology to the more obscure and contingent
realm of cosmology, for what people believed about animals influenced everything
they did. Native American women, for example, tended to make the pottery that
people used to cook and store food and imprinted their creations with stylized snakes,
owls, falcons, and frogs. Occasionally they mixed coiled serpents from the watery
underworld with the crested heads of the birds that soared in the orderly sun’s sky
into one hybrid creature to express the frightful powers of creatures that fit no known
categories. Priests, shamans, and chiefs used bright red cardinal feathers to invoke the
sun, black crow feathers to conjure death, or owl skins and bones to access the
darker powers of witchcraft. They used their powers to communicate with animal
spirits and, at times, even transformed themselves into animals.6 In such a world
animals conveyed sacred powers, moral meanings, and existed as signposts to guide
people through the mysteries of their lives.
While Native North Americans had domesticated dogs (and turkeys here and
there), they had nothing resembling Europeans’ close relationship with horses, cows,
sheep, swine, and chickens. It had taken people in what today we call the Near East
and east Asia about ten thousand years to perfect the Neolithic complex that came
15
Figure 2.2 Florida Indians hunting deer while disguised under deerskins,
from ‘Americae Decima Pars’ engraved by Theodor de Bry (1528–98) 1591
Private Collection/Bridgeman Images
16
to characterize European agriculture. They began with beasts of least resistance:

sheep and goats, gregarious animals that were submissive and who needed no specific
territory in which to live. Then came other animals that possessed characteristics that
suited them to cohabit with humans – hogs, cattle, and last, horses and chickens.
Such animals evolved to depend on humans for their food, reproduction and safety
and, in return, they conferred upon their masters ready supplies of meat, milk,
cheese, butter, tallow, eggs, and leather, not to mention the power to build, to travel,
and to conquer.7
The Neolithic Revolution reached Europe about seven thousand years ago and
with it came one of its many unforeseen consequences: disease. Lethal viruses emerged
in the dirty and overcrowded conditions that characterized the early farms, towns,
and cities that arose on the backs of domesticated animals. Close proximity and poor
sanitation enabled pathogens to jump species all the while becoming stronger and
more adaptable. People astride horses, donkeys, and camels carried them farther and
farther afield where the new germs decimated people who had had no prior exposure
to such things as smallpox, measles, influenza, and plague.8
Native North Americans, by contrast, lived among, rather than with, animals.
Epidemiologically, this distinction would prove devastating, since it meant they did
not co-evolve with animal diseases. After Columbus’s voyages successive epidemics
of smallpox, measles, influenza, and other pathogens that had arisen from the
domestication of animals sliced through eastern North America’s indigenous
population, reducing it from an estimated one million in 1492 to fewer than 200,000
by 1800. In the aftermath of the initial and most dramatic demographic collapse,
remnant groups across eastern North America had to band together into new societies
in order to survive.9
As people died or fled the epidemics, deer, bison, and other animals moved into
their empty homes, fields, and towns as did Europeans. As time passed and colonial
towns grew out from their original toeholds on the coast and expanded ever westward
up rivers and down paths, the survivors and the invaders shared in all the complexity
that accompanies human contact wherever it occurs. Indigenous hunters, for example,
provided the newcomers with dried venison and fish, smoked bear and turkey while
women offered maize porridge, squashes, and other garden crops. Such exchanges
and interchanges caused colonial governors anxiety about the mixing of what they
took to be ‘savages’ with their own ‘civilized’ people. But as colonial populations
grew the invaders began to clear the forests, destroy animal habitats, and assert their
own environmental sensibilities. Such steady pressure diminished deer, bear, beaver,
and other animal populations and imperiled indigenous populations who, at the
same time, were still struggling to recover from the original epidemics that had
accompanied the invaders across the sea.10
Europeans regarded the early American faunal landscape with profound
ambivalence. America’s animals elicited a mix of sentiments that ranged from
wonder, curiosity, and desire to fear and contempt. Coming from a continent where
wild animals had been largely extirpated, Europeans were immediately struck by
the abundance of fauna. Early depictions of North America, like John White’s
sixteenth-century paintings of present-day coastal North Carolina, highlighted the
ample fish and fowl. Matthew Visscher filled empty spaces on his map of “New
Belgium” with bears, rabbits, turkeys, beavers, and deer. For potential colonists and
17
Figure 2.3 New Belgium, plate from ‘Atlas Contractus’ c. 1671 by Matthew Visscher
the investors who backed colonial ventures, these images of animals represented
food security and economic opportunity. Deer even lent the enterprise a whiff of
gentility, since in Europe they were to be found mostly in game parks for the sporting
pleasure of the aristocracy.
There were also animals that Europeans had never seen. Circa 1520, Pietro Martire
d’Anghiera published his description of an opossum: ‘a monstrous beaste with a
snowte lyke a marmasette, eares lyke a batte, handes lyke a man, and feete lyke an
ape, bearing her whelpes about with her in an outwarde bellye much lyke unto a
greate bagge or purse.’ In America, Europeans also reacquainted themselves with
animals that had disappeared from their own countries. Beavers, once present
throughout Europe, were now rarely to be found west of the Ural Mountains. Early
descriptions of northern North America were replete with droll descriptions of the
rodents. Beavers were praised for their ability to alter the landscape, and their lodges
and dikes elicited comparisons to Venice.
By way of explanation, observers exaggerated the animals’ social organization,
and wrote of beaver architects and beaver republics. Europeans could not help but
think that such strange creatures said something important about the place, although
they were not exactly sure what.11
18
Figure 2.4 ‘A view of ye Industry of ye Beavers’

from Herman Moll’s New and Exact Map, 1715
Private Collection/© Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images
Such curiosity, however, soon gave way to commerce because the invaders needed
products that they could sell in order to fund their costly trans-Atlantic enterprises.
Animal skins and furs were among the first commodities that underwrote the
European invasion of North America. The colder northern forests were home to
many species of fur-bearing animals, including otter, bear, bobcat, mink, muskrat,
fox, and marten. European furs having been largely depleted, these animals stimulated
great interest. Sixteenth-century European fishermen, primarily Basques, quickly
identified furs as a commodity they could obtain from the Indians and sell back home
at a tidy profit, and none more so than the beaver.
The beaver’s woolen underfur was superbly adapted to the manufacture of hat
felt, and hats mattered deeply to Europeans as markers of prosperity and of identity.
Whatever their particular shape or style, hats fabricated with beaver wool were
19
uniquely capable of retaining their shape when wet. Thus, the fur-trade entrepôts of
Québec and Beverwijck (Albany) emerged as the economic engines of New France
and New Netherland. Dutch lawyer and administrator Adriaen van der Donck wrote
in 1655 that ‘The beaver is the main foundation and means why or through which
this beautiful land was first occupied by people from Europe.’ French- and Dutch-
traded pelts made their way not just to Paris and Amsterdam, but to Russia, where
the manufacture of fur hats was a specialty craft. The fur trade was less central to
English colonization, but its economic potential was hardly lost on them. Puritans
may have traversed the Atlantic for reasons unrelated to beaver, but they were also
famously fond of their hats, and they knew what they were made from. Popular
demand for durable and water-resistant headgear was such that England passed laws
imposing penalties on those who sold items advertised as ‘beaver’ but that were in
fact devoid of the animal.12
French, Dutch, and English merchants relied on Native trappers, and offered a
variety of goods that Native communities desired. In 1636 one Montagnais chief
observed with satisfaction, ‘the Beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles,
hatchets, swords, knives, bread; in short, it makes everything.’ Although the
Montagnais chief’s statement reverses common Eurocentric assumptions regarding
Indian naïveté in the exchange of goods, the trade was already moving quickly
beyond exotic foodstuffs and useful implements to ones that made life more
dangerous. Specifically, European traders introduced firearms. As hunters ranged
ever more widely, and competition for a limited supply of animals increased, so did
conflict. By mid-century, guns were indispensable for self-defense. Still, a band or
village could only use so many guns. After all other wants were satisfied, traders
engaged another motivation for the hunt: alcohol. In the end, the Indians’ ideological
proscriptions against overhunting were nullified by their pressing need for weapons
for self-defense, their communities’ growing dependence upon European metalware
and textiles, and their addiction to alcohol.
This vicious cycle of dependency drove Native trappers to decimate the beaver
population across the Northeast several times over. Once the colony of New France
was firmly established, it exported 20–30,000 beaver pelts every year. Beavers were
particularly vulnerable, since their slow and sedentary ways made them relatively
easy to kill. Although beavers might produce two to five offspring per year, this was
not enough to counter the increasingly intense hunt, and there is evidence to suggest
that the beaver were struck by epizootics as well. As early beaver-hunting areas failed,
trappers went farther afield. The Hudson Bay Company was chartered in 1670; by
1800 – at which time North American harvests were in excess of a quarter-million
beaver per annum – its trapping activities of necessity extended as far as the Canadian
Rockies and Beaufort Sea. Since beavers altered local hydrology, the deaths of
millions of them in turn led to declines in populations of birds, fish, and amphibians
that thrived in the habitats the beavers had created.13
The southeast’s warm climate meant that beaver pelts never achieved the thickness
of their northern counterparts. Instead, deerskins emerged as the top trade item
owing to European demand for soft gloves, book bindings, riding breeches, and early
industrial belts. Estimates of the deerskin trade that financed the early southern
colonies are difficult to quantify but some specific examples suggest catastrophe for
the animals. In 1707, for example, 120,000 processed skins departed Charles Town,
20
South Carolina, in the holds of ships bound for England. In the mid-1700s Savannah
exported between 100,000 and 150,000 annually while in the 1780s Choctaws
traded about 100,000 skins annually, and the French and Spanish trading houses and
ports accounted for untold tens of thousands as well. Hunters traded the skins for
commodities such as cloth, metal tools, guns, ammunition, and alcohol, and as they
invariably lapsed into debt in the rigged credit system they had to hunt more and
more to cover their deepening losses. If we combine the deer killed in the skin trade
with the numbers needed for domestic consumption, scholars’ best estimates reckon
that indigenous hunters probably took about one million deer a year from southeastern
forests. Such over-hunting emptied the forests to such an extent that by the early
1800s, when the European market for furs and skins had coincidentally also dried
up, what had been a way of life for indigenous peoples for centuries was no longer
possible. As one Choctaw leader put it, ‘We cannot expect to live any longer by
hunting. Our game is gone.’14
But it was not hunting alone that altered eastern North America’s post-Pleistocene
faunal ecology. While the hunting of animals promised profits for skin traders and
merchants, the great majority of trans-Atlantic migrants sought advancement by
transforming the landscape to make it more hospitable to the animals and crops they
were accustomed to raising and consuming back in Europe. The attendant habitat
destruction was vast. Slowly but steadily, trees were cut down in order to clear land
for planting, to supply lumber for building houses, to provide fuel for fires to keep
them warm, and to build fences to either contain their livestock or keep them apart
from their crops. Deforestation deprived native animals of shelter and sustenance,
reduced the diversity of plant life, and ultimately raised temperatures and promoted
soil runoff that silted rivers.15
Livestock were regarded as key sources of motive power, fertilizer, and food, so
they were afforded considerable space on ships carrying European settlers to America.
The first animals to arrive were spread among the 17 ships that comprised Christopher
Columbus’ second voyage to the Caribbean. In November, 1493, cats, dogs, pigs,
cattle, horses, chicken, and goats arrived on Hispaniola along with 1500 men brought
to establish control over the land. During the voyage disease had jumped from the
pigs to everyone else and when they disembarked they introduced a lethal sickness to
the indigenous Arawak people. The pigs and cattle turned loose on the island laid a
foundation for the subsequent expansion of Spanish livestock throughout the region
and on to the mainland through de Soto’s expedition, the establishment of Spanish
missions in Florida, and English raids during the War of the Spanish Succession.16
Further north, John Smith boasted of how in 1608–9 ‘Of three sowes in eighteene
moneths, increased 60, and od Piggs. And neere 500 chickings brought up themselves
without having any meat given them.’ (Less fortuitously, the colonists’ corn had been
‘consumed with so many thousands of Rats that increased so fast, but there original
was from the ships.’) Governor Francis Wyatt proclaimed in 1623 that his colony’s
fortunes ‘depends upon nothing more, then the plentifull increasing and preserving of
all sorts of Beasts and birds of domesticall or tame nature.’17 In the same spirit, John
Winthrop made careful reckonings of cows as he oversaw immigration to Boston. In
1625, the Dutch West India Company sent more than one hundred ‘stallions and
mares, bulls and cows’ as well as pigs and sheep to New Netherland.18 Self-reproducing
populations of cows, pigs, and horses had taken root in the colonies within about a
21
quarter-century. By 1651, Rensselaerwijck boasted more than seven horses per farm.
In 1682, Thomas Ashe wrote of South Carolina that ‘The great encrease of their
Cattle is rather to be admired than believed; not more than six or seven years past the
Country was almost destitute of Cows, Hogs and Sheep, now they have many
thousand head.’19
While most of these animals were kept for subsistence purposes, a modest trade in
livestock developed among the mainland colonies, obviating the need to transport
large numbers of animals across the Atlantic except to improve breeding stock, which
was done only rarely. Mainland colonies also began to supply animals and animal
products to West Indian colonies, a trade that grew throughout the colonial period.
Caribbean sugar mills were turned by horses, and slaves needed meat for sustenance.
New England provided both by 1650. The islands along its coast were proving ideal
for grazing livestock since they could be easily cleared of predators and were
convenient for shipping. The production of live animals, hides, and salt beef for the
West Indian market was also an important element of the economy of South Carolina
at its founding. The colony’s early population benefitted from the presence of West
Country Englishmen and enslaved Africans from Jamaica and the Spanish islands in
the Caribbean whose past experiences with livestock in both their original homelands
and in the Caribbean brought together English bullwhips with Spanish and
Senegambian traditions of horse-mounted pastoralism and nightly penning to create
a new way of raising cattle.20
European animals were themselves important agents of change, and they often
acted independently of humans. Since labor was scarce in all the colonies, the practice
of allowing animals to range freely was widespread. In 1705, New Jersey’s royal
governor, Lord Cornbury, stated that the ‘woods are full of wild horses,’ and such
observations were commonplace.21 Animals were least carefully tended and controlled
in those areas where the opportunity cost was highest. Thus, tobacco-growing settlers
in the Chesapeake were the least patient husbandmen. The self-reliant hog was the
animal of choice in early Virginia, and sheep, cows, and even horses were initially
rare. There was little need for draft animals so long as tobacco was cultivated by hoe.
An English visitor in Virginia in 1700 observed that ‘the Hogs run where they want
and find their own Support in the Woods without any Care of the Owners.’ The hogs
apparently did well enough without them. As he described it, the swine ‘swarm[ed]
like vermin upon the Earth.’22 Cattle, horses, pigs, and chickens acted as a kind of
advance guard, seizing control of forests and grasslands in advance of the march of
human conquest and dispossession. Animals exerted their own particular forms of
invasion and destruction. Cattle, for example, required 15 to 20 acres each to subsist
and, along with other livestock and swine, they devoured grasses and shrubs, pine
and hardwood mast, and berries upon which the remnant stocks of deer, bear, and
other native species relied. Roving herds also flattened canebrakes, trampled gardens,
and uprooted forests such that they, along with settlers’ axes and saws, contributed
to widespread deforestation and soil erosion. Native plants and grasses also began to
yield to hardier European plants that had co-evolved with the new herd animals. The
seeds of such grasses came in the coats and dung of the invading domesticated species,
or were planted by colonists to sustain their creatures. As native pasturage declined,
farmers would have to devote significant acreage to hay, timothy, and other grasses
to sustain their livestock.23
22
By 1739, the roughly 40,000 people of New France occupied themselves with the
upkeep of 26,000 sheep, 9,700 horses, 27,000 pigs, and 38,800 head of cattle. Due
to the expense of feeding over the long winter, livestock were either released to roam
the woods, stabled with insufficient food, or slaughtered. The cold climate likely
accounts for the relative abundance of sheep which, due to their particularly high
requirements for shelter and protection, had a more limited presence as one proceeded
southward through all the Atlantic colonies. Kalm reported that the horses of New
France were strong, but the cows and sheep were degenerated from their French
stock.24 Kalm, who visited the English colonies as well, made similar comments about
the livestock there, and this assessment was echoed widely.
New Englanders lined their landscape with fences and walls to keep crops and
animals separate, and many towns maintained a commons and hired young men to
serve as communal herders. However, New Englanders proved slower to erect
structures to protect the animals against winter. Most New England cattle were oxen
used for draft and, like the region’s horses, were unimpressive in stature. As farms
were subdivided and soil fertility declined, the practice of cattle raising and penning
grew more common and became more market-driven. Upland farmers sold cattle to
their counterparts in the valleys, who fattened them to the greatest extent possible for
sale in Boston and New York. The region continued to find a market for beef and
small horses in the West Indies. Dairying intensified as well – a fact that was nowhere
better exemplified by the 1200-pound ‘mammoth cheese’ sent to President Jefferson
upon his inauguration by the people of Cheshire, Connecticut.
The upkeep of animals in the Middle Colonies had generally hewed more closely
to European standards than elsewhere. This was partly because of closer attention to
breeding from the outset on the part of Dutch farmers and William Penn and ongoing
animal regulation in the form of marking and the collection of stray animals. The
eighteenth-century influx of German immigrants, who excelled in cultivating
meadows and building barns, also helped hold the line on deterioration. However,
the feeding and labor demands of livestock upkeep placed an upper limit on the size
of herds in the Middle Colonies. The key was the economic opportunity provided by
the presence of larger, better-organized export and urban markets.25
Animals were present in all colonial cities, which teemed with a variety of creatures
brought there to be slaughtered and consumed or shipped, or to reside there to
supply food, transportation, sport, or companionship. The built landscape was
modified to include facilities for killing and marketing animals, as well as sustaining
populations of fowl, dairy animals, and horses. Household pets included cats, dogs,
and exotic birds. Of course, some animals made their homes there of their own
volition: rats and stray dogs became a particular problem as human settlements grew
increasingly dense.
To the south and west of the Philadelphia hinterland, herding, fencing and housing
of animals diminished as settlements were smaller and the demands of tobacco had
absorbed colonists’ energies. Even after the tobacco economy went into decline, the
only animals that received careful tending were racing horses; hogs and all other
horses continued to run wild. In the Shenandoah Valley, the Carolinas, and Georgia,
wild Spanish cattle and stock imported from the Middle Colonies were mixed in a
loose but effective system of occasional penning that allowed colonists to maximize
the benefit of the free range while retaining some control over the animals. One
23
Figure 2.5 Pennsylvania Town and Country Man’s Almanack

Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG/Bridgeman Images
24
account claimed it ‘not an uncommon thing to see one man the master of from 300
to 1200, and even 2000 cows, bulls, oxen, and young cattle; hogs also in prodigious
numbers.’ This observation is significant not just in its description of the quantity of
cattle, but the paucity of people involved. These ranches constituted the aggressive
avant-garde of a colonial ecosystem that was literally chewing its way inland at an
ever-quickening pace.26
Maintaining control over herds that ranged freely required a modicum of effort in
the form of collecting, feeding, and neutering animals. Through a combination of the
neglect of their owners and the animals’ own initiative, many of these domesticates
escaped human control and returned to some degree of wildness. This was particularly
true in the South, where forage was available year-round, and the animals could
withstand the cold. As early as 1560, Spanish swine introduced by explorers and
missionaries ran wild in the southeast, and as they did so their genetic heritage as
European wild boars re-emerged so that with each subsequent generation the tusks
grew a little longer, the bristles a little more wiry, and the backs a little more ridged.
Long-horned cattle and chickens followed into La Florida about sixty years later as
part of the mission system that the Spanish erected to subjugate Native populations.
To these were added the myriad domesticates introduced by the English in the
seventeenth century. Although colonists erected enclosures, known as cowpens, to
which cattle would be lured back nightly in order to ensure their safety and docility
and to collect their dung, many creatures absconded.
The principal native animals that gained in this new faunal landscape were those
that found themselves presented with a sudden abundance of food. Birds, such as
bobolinks and crows, that ate seeds planted by colonial farmers, throve. For a time,
so, too, did the top predators. Colonial domesticates were prey to wolves, bears, and
pumas. However, the predators’ victory would prove short-lived, as the colonists
launched a sustained and unsparing counterattack with guns and traps on behalf of
their beasts. That they enlisted Natives in the enterprise indicates the colonists’
seriousness in this endeavor given that they were generally leery of armed Natives in
the woods so close to their settlements. Predator populations were decimated, and
they forced them to beat a steady retreat as the colonial ecosystem deprived them of
both their accustomed forest habitat and their lives.27
Against a massive and implacable backdrop of awful loss of life, land, and liberty,
native peoples benefitted somewhat from the increasing prevalence of relatively docile
– hogs excepted – animals wandering in the woods. Native hunters regarded cattle,
hogs, and horses as fair game and either took or killed and consumed them when
they could. However, doing so did not compensate calorically for the foodstuffs that
animals destroyed when they ravaged Native clambeds and fields of corn, beans, and
squash. Nor did it compensate for the antagonism livestock-killing might provoke on
the part of the animals’ colonial owners and the colonists in general. As historian
Virginia DeJohn Anderson has pointed out, livestock topped the list of irritants in
quotidian relations between Indians and colonists. Divergent cultural perspectives on
the proper relationship between humans and living animals reflected different
understandings of property and nature. The struggle over animals was the struggle
over land writ small.28
When Natives complained of animal trespasses, New England colonists initially
offered compensation and attempted to control the animals by fencing them in, or by
25
helping the Indians build fences around their fields. However, it was not long before
unruly animals had surpassed the limits of New Englanders’ willingness to bear the
full cost of their livestock. Fencing strategies failed because fences were regularly
defeated by rooting pigs, and ready access to wood diminished over time. English-
style stone walls would have been more effective, but the additional investment of
time and labor was unacceptable to the colonists. Ultimately, the Puritans
acknowledged the justice of Native complaints but also defined the livestock in
question as an important marker over their native neighbors. It was by virtue of
animal husbandry itself that they felt entitled to eminent domain over Indian lands.
In his General Considerations for the Plantations in New England, John Winthrop
took up the objection, ‘what warrant have we to take that land?’ His answer was that
the Indians’ claim was inferior because they ‘enclose no ground, neither have they
cattle to maintain it.’29
In 1666, Patuxent Indians in Maryland asked the colony’s leaders to grant them
refuge from the plague of swine. They asserted, ‘Your Hogs & Cattle injure Us. We
Can fly no farther. Let us know where to live & how to be secured for the future from
the Hogs & Cattle.’30 But the Patuxents’ complaints were scarcely heeded in the rough
world that was the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, where an English servant could
have two years added to his indenture for the theft of a hog. If harassment by livestock
prompted the Indians to move, then the animals had served colonization well. Of
course, resentful Natives oftentimes stole, killed, or mutilated livestock in retribution.31
Indeed, some colonists came to see opportunity in livestock conflicts. In 1640, the
governor of New Netherland, Willem Kieft, purposefully escalated a dispute over the
alleged killing of several Dutch hogs on Staten Island by Raritan Indians in order to
subdue them decisively. This controversy festered and ultimately spiraled into a
vicious war with Algonquians across the lower Hudson River Valley and Long Island,
known as Kieft’s War. Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia was more aptly named than we
usually recognize, since it was sparked when some Indians took a colonist’s hogs and
the colonists took the Indians’ lives in retribution. Thomas Ludwell, secretary of the
colony of Virginia, asserted that the colonists who were ‘the forwardest in the
rebellion’ had been those who settled near Indians and whose ‘cattle and hoggs
destroye[d] all the corn of the other Indians of the towne.’ Bacon’s Rebellion resulted
in the death of a large number of Indians and the expropriation of those who survived
them, although not as quickly or completely as Bacon’s followers had hoped.32
As native fauna dwindled, Native peoples’ traditional subsistence cycles were
compromised and the trade in furs and skins declined. To survive they had to replace
the lost meat and trade commodities and adopt the invaders’ Neolithic complex if
they were to regain the food, energy, and trade goods that they had lost. This included
revising their relationship to animals to become, in a much more proximate way,
masters rather than partners. With reluctance, they slowly turned to animal husbandry
themselves. Swine and chickens were the first animals adopted, since they were least
disruptive to seasonal patterns of movement and had reasonably close predecessors
in dogs and turkeys.33 Native women often took the lead in this enterprise, since their
traditional roles were as the sustainers of life in the homes and fields that comprised
the towns and villages of native North America. Native men eventually took up
horse, hog, and cattle raising and, in so doing, retained the spatial mobility that had
defined their earlier roles as woodland hunters. Animals under Native care were more
26
generally supervised only casually, so they grew more scrawny, hardy, and ornery,
and the growing herds of horses, cattle, and swine forced people to spread out and
live on scattered ranches rather than in the closely packed villages that had been
home to their grandparents. Native people also began to fence their crops to keep the
browsers out, all of which had a tendency to inculcate notions of private property
that had not been there before, just as the many brands burned on cattle’s flanks and
notches cut into pigs’ ears bespoke a novel kind of ownership of living beings that, in
the pre-contact past, would have been unthinkable.34 But the unthinkable had, in
fact, happened. Thousands of years before, hunters had triggered the creation of a
new faunal environment in eastern North America when they and a changing climate
drove mammoths and other large mammals into extinction. Such losses enabled a
new order of smaller, more prolific mammals to flourish alongside the insects, fishes,
and birds that had been there all along. Afterwards, the post-Pleistocene ecology
ebbed and flowed as all ecologies do for millennia until the arrival of Europeans,
their animals, and their diseases at the end of the fifteenth century. While it had taken
people in Eurasia ten thousand years to domesticate animals, in eastern North
America it took only a generation or two in any given place for Neolithic animal
husbandry to devastate the post-Pleistocene ecology. After three centuries of ongoing
colonization and colonial expansion, the faunal ecology had been thoroughly
creolized.35 The European invaders and their descendants cleared forests, drained
swamps, and dispossessed entire nations of people to make way for livestock pastures,
free ranges, and separate fields of corn, wheat, tobacco, and rice. Euro-American
animal husbandry and agriculture did not, however, completely displace indigenous
fauna nor did they constitute a wholesale replication of the western European pattern.
Instead, a mix of the two emerged that, to be sure, bore all of the substantial scars
that had followed the European invasion of North America.
As the three sets of European invaders – the people, the animals, and the diseases
– moved into eastern North America they did mighty destructive work. Conquests
and epidemics decimated towns, villages, and families, emptying the land of thousands
of people and allowing other animal populations to flourish. With the rise of the
commercial skin and peltry trades, the invasion’s survivors took to the forests and
fields to kill far more animals than their parents had to keep up with the demands of
the Atlantic World’s burgeoning economy and the spiral of economic dependency.
For a nearly a century millions of animals fell annually and their furs, pelts, and skins
voyaged across the seas back to the European metropoles until, at the end of the
eighteenth century, market demand for the skins and furs collapsed along with the
stocks of deer, beaver, and bear that had once so populated the landscapes of eastern
North America. In the widowed forests, streams, and savannas, horses, cattle, and
swine proliferated and claimed vast amounts of land and resources for their own
subsistence. Through foraging and trampling, they devastated former ecosystems in
ways that the invaders who introduced them could hardly have imagined. By feeding
the invaders, powering their mills, pulling their ploughs, fertilizing their fields,
running wild, and destroying habitat, not to mention helping to wreck Native
Americans’ former way of life, the animal invasion of eastern North America helped
to create a new creole landscape that bespoke three centuries of struggle between two
ancient faunal ecosystems, one domesticated the other not, for the life and land of
one corner of the larger Atlantic World.
27
NOTE S
The authors wish to thank Virginia DeJohn Anderson, James D. Rice, and Jack Stenger for
their comments and criticisms.
1 Richter 1992: 8–11; Rice 2009: 1–2.

2 Hale 1993: 15; Pagden 1993: 6; Genesis 9: 5, King James Bible.
3 Domínguez 1986: 13; Klein 2000: xiii–xv.
4 Silver 1990: 30.
5 Silver 1990: 24–28, 31, 51, 61–62; Ethridge 2003: 38; Chapman and Feldhamer 1982:
98, 214, 269, 465, 507, 711; Krech 1999: 153–55; Braund 1993: 65; Pearson 2013: 129,
130, 133; Skabelund 2013: 804.
6 Williams and Elliott 1998: 1–5; Snow 1998: 63, 76–78; Milanich, Cordell, Knight,
Kohler, and Sigler-Lavelle 1997 (1984): 41–42, 91–112, 176–77; Lankford 1987: 57, 62,
66–67, 106–7, 125; Krech 2012: 73–82; Bogan 1980: 48–49.
7 Aberth 2013: 141–48; Crosby 2004: 21–25.
8 Panno 2011: 29–30, 57–58; Crosby 2004: 12, 29–31; Zimmerman and Zimmerman
2003: 59–60, 156.
9 Crosby 1976: 289–99; Ubelaker 2006: 694–701.
10 White 1983: 10–11, 34; Bartram 1995: 60–164; Bossu 1962: 68–69, 146–47; Silver 1990:
186; Davis 2000: 53–55; Usner 1992: 27, 36.
11 Parrish 1997: 485; Sayre 1997: 219–47, esp. 228–30.
12 Quoted in Jacobs 2009: 109; Turgeon 1998: 585–610; Rich 1955; Carlos and Lewis
2010: 18.
13 Richards 2003: 511–13.
14 Krech 1999: 155, 160–63; Braund 1993: 69–72; Silver 1990: 99–100; White 1983: 85;
Oatis 2004: 112–39; Carson 1999: 71, as quoted.
15 Haan 1981: 341–58.
16 Crosby 2004: 182; Cook 1998: 28–29.
17 Smith 1632: 86; quoted in Anderson 2002: 379.
18 Anderson 2004: 99; Jacobs 2009: 122.
19 Quoted in Haan 1981: 350.
20 Romani 1995: 52, 60; Anderson 2004: 244; Jordan 1993: 23–25, 55–68, 109–18; Otto
1986: 123–24; Otto 1987: 20–21.
21 Wacker and Clemens 1995: 65; Miquelon 1987: 202.
22 Anderson 2004: 110–16; quoted in Taylor 2001: 47.
23 Cronon 1983: 142; Bidwell and Falconer 1925: 105–6.
24 Miquelon 1987: 202–3; Kalm 1772: II:327–28.
25 Thompson 1942: 18–42; Russell 1982: 82–92; Garrison 1987: 3–8; Purvis 1995: 37–55;
Bidwell and Falconer 1925: 105–6.
26 Thompson 1942: 44–63 (quote 63).
27 Coleman 2004: 52–65.
28 Anderson 1994: 606–8.
29 Anderson 2004: 192–95.
30 Quoted in Taylor 2001: 136.
31 Perdue 1995: 100; Anderson 2004: 236; Richard L. Haan 1981: 350–51;
32 Williams 1995: 253–55; Anderson 2004: 231; Washburn 1957: 135, 161 (quote); Rice
2012: 4–6, 123–25, 191.
33 Pavao-Zuckerman 2007: 5, 11; Hatley 1993: 161–62; Saunt 1999: 47–54; Adair, 1930:
241, 444–45; Bartram 1995: 227; Romans 1775: 16, 23–24, 62–63, 68, 92–94, 184, 326;
Silver 1990: 110–12, 135, 149, 175–76, 179–80; Davis 2000: 46, 52, 68, 72, 77; Braund
28
1993: 51, 58, 72, 157, 178; Anderson 2004: 119, 178–79; White 1983: 87–92, 100, 102;
Ethridge 2003: 50, 159, 164–67.
34 Braund 1993: 75–76, 135; Anderson 2004: 112–14; Stewart 1996: 22, 55, 72–74;
Bartram 1995: 53, 189; Otto 2002: 56, 60; Saunt 1999: 159–71; White 1983: 103–5,
109; Ethridge 2003: 137, 163–64, 182–83.
35 Vigne 2011: 178.
REF EREN CE S
Aberth, John (2013) An environmental history of the Middle Ages: the crucible of nature,
London: Routledge.
Adair, James (1930) Adair’s history of the American Indians, Samuel Cole Williams (ed),
Johnson City, Tenn.: Watauga Press.
Anderson, Virginia DeJohn (1994) ‘King Philip’s herds: Indians, colonists, and the problem of
livestock in early New England’, The William and Mary Quarterly 51/4: 601–24.
——(2002) ‘Animals into the wilderness: the development of livestock husbandry in the
seventeenth-century Chesapeake’, The William and Mary Quarterly 59/3: 377–408.
——(2004) Creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early America, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Bartram, William (1995) William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians, Gregory A. Waselkov
and Kathryn E. Holland Braund (eds), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Bidwell, Percy Wells and Falconer, John I. (1925) History of agriculture in the northern United
States, 1620–1860, Washington: Carnegie Institution.
Blitz, John H. (1993) Ancient chiefdoms of the Tombigbee, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press.
Bogan, Arthur Eugene (1980) ‘A comparison of late prehistoric Dallas and Overhill Cherokee
subsistence strategies in the Little Tennessee River Valley’, PhD thesis, Knoxville: University
of Tennessee.
Bossu, Jean-Bernard (1962) Travels in the interior of North America, 1751–1762, Seymour
Feilor (ed and trans), Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Braund, Kathryn E. Holland (1993) Deerskins & duffels: the Creek Indian trade with Anglo-
America, 1685–1815, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Carlos, Ann M. and Lewis, Frank D. (2010) Commerce by a frozen sea: Native Americans and
the European fur trade, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Carson, James Taylor (1999) Searching for the bright path: the Mississippi Choctaws from
prehistory to removal, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Chapman, Joseph A. and Feldhamer, George A. (eds) (1982) Wild mammals of North America:
biology, management, and economics, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Coleman, Jon T. (2004) Vicious: wolves and men in America, New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Cook, Noble David (1998) Born to die: disease and New World conquest, 1492–1650, New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Cronon, William (1983) Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England, New York: Hill and Wang.
Crosby, Alfred W. (1976) ‘Virgin soil epidemics as a factor in the aboriginal depopulation in
America’, The William and Mary Quarterly 33/2: 289–99.
——(1994) Germs, seeds, & animals: studies in ecological history, Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe.
——(2004) Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900–1400, 2nd ed.,
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, Donald Edward (2000) Where there are mountains: an environmental history of the
southern Appalachians, Athens: University of Georgia Press.
29
Domínguez, Virginia R. (1986) White by definition: social classification in Creole Louisiana,

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Ethridge, Robbie (2003) Creek country: the Creek Indians and their world, Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press.
Fischer, John Ryan (2007) ‘Cattle in Hawai’i: biological and cultural exchange’, Pacific
Historical Review 76/3: 347–72.
Galloway, Patricia (1994) ‘Confederacy as a solution to chiefdom dissolution: historical
evidence in the Choctaw case’, in Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser (eds), The
forgotten centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704, Athens:
University of Georgia Press.
——(1999) Choctaw genesis, 1500–1700, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Garrison, J. Ritchie (1987) ‘Farm dynamics and regional exchange: the Connecticut Valley
beef trade, 1670–1850’, Agricultural History 61/3: 1–17.
Gifford-Gonzalez, Diane and Hanotte, Olivier (2011) ‘Domesticating animals in Africa:
implications of genetic and archaeological findings’, Journal of World Prehistory 24/1:
1–23.
Gleach, Frederic W. (1997) Powhatan’s world and Colonial Virginia: a conflict of cultures,
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Haan, Richard L. (1981) ‘The “trade do’s not flourish as formerly”: the ecological origins of
the Yamassee War of 1715’, Ethnohistory 28/4: 341–58.
Hale, John (1993) The civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, London: Fontana Press.
Hatley, M. Thomas (1993) The dividing paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the
era of Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jacobs, Jaap (2009) The colony of New Netherland: a Dutch settlement in seventeenth-century
America, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Jordan, Terry G. (1993) North American cattle-ranching frontiers: origins, diffusion, and
differentiation, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Kalm, Peter (1772) Travels into North America, London: T. Lowndes.
Klein, Sybil (2000) ‘Introduction’, in Sybil Klein (ed), Creole: the history and legacy of
Louisiana’s free people of color, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Knight, Vernon J. Jr. (1994) ‘The formation of the Creeks’, in Charles Hudson and Carmen
Chaves Tesser (eds), The forgotten centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American
South, 1521–1704, Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Krech, Shepard III (1999) The ecological Indian: myth and history, New York: W. W. Norton
and Co.
——(2012) ‘Indigenous ethnoornithology in the American South’, in David M. Gordon and
Shepard Krech III (eds), Indigenous knowledge and the environment in Africa and North
America, Athens: Ohio University Press.
Lankford, George E. (ed) (1987) Native American legends: Southeastern legends – tales from
the Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw, and other nations, Little Rock, Ark.: August House.
Mainfort, Robert C. Jr. (1988) ‘Middle Woodland ceremonialism at Pinson Mounds,
Tennessee’, American Antiquity 53/1: 158–73.
Melville, Elinor G. K. (1997) A plague of sheep: environmental consequences of the conquest
of Mexico, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Milanich, Jerald T., Cordell, Ann S., Knight, Vernon J. Jr., Kohler, Timothy A., and Sigler-
Lavelle, Brenda J. (1997 [1984]), Archaeology of northern Florida, A.D. 200–900: The
McKeithen Weeden Island culture, Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Miquelon, Dale (1987) New France, 1701–1744: a supplement to Europe, Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart.
Mooney, James (1992) History, myths, and sacred formulas of the Cherokees, Asheville, N.C.:
Historical Images.
30
Mwacharo, J.M., Bjørnstad, G., Hern, J.L., and Hanotte, O. (2013) ‘The history of African
village chickens: an archaeological and molecular perspective’, African Archaeological
Review 30/1: 97–114.
Oatis, Steven J. (2004) A colonial complex: South Carolina’s frontiers in the era of the
Yamassee War, 1680–1730, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Otto, John Solomon (1986) ‘The origins of cattle-ranching in colonial South Carolina, 1670–
1715’, South Carolina Historical Magazine 87/2: 117–24.
——(1987) ‘Livestock-raising in early South Carolina, 1670–1700: prelude to the rice plantation
economy’, Agricultural History 61/4: 13–24.
——(2002) ‘Cattle-grazing in the Southeastern United States, 1670–1949’, in Mary J. Voss-
Henninger (ed), Animals in human histories: the mirror of nature and culture, Rochester:
University of Rochester.
Pagden, Anthony (1993) European encounters with the New World: from Renaissance to
romanticism, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Panno, Joseph (2011) Viruses: the origin and evolution of deadly pathogens, New York: Facts
on File.
Parrish, Susan Scott (1997) ‘The female opossum and the nature of the New World’, The
William and Mary Quarterly 54/3: 475–514.
Pavao-Zuckerman, Barnet (2007) ‘Deerskins and domesticates: Creek subsistence and
economic strategies in the historic period’, American Antiquity 72/1: 5–33.
Pearson, Chris (2013) ‘Dogs, history, and agency’, History and Theory 52/4: 128–45.
Perdue, Theda (1995) ‘Women, men, and American Indian policy: the Cherokee response to
“civilization”’, in Nancy Shoemaker (ed), Negotiators of change: historical perspectives, on
Native American women, New York: Routledge.
Pluckhahn, Thomas J. (2003) Kolomoki: settlement, ceremony, and status in the Deep South,
A.D. 350–750, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Potter, Stephen R. (1993) Commoners, tribute, and chiefs: the development of Algonquian
culture in the Potomac Valley, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Pyle, Gerald F. (1986) The diffusion of influenza: patterns and paradigms, Totowa, N.J.:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Purvis, Thomas L. (1995) Revolutionary America 1763 to 1800, New York: Facts on File.
Rice, James D. (2009) Nature and history in the Potomac country: from hunter-gatherers to
the age of Jefferson, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
——(2012) Tales from a revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the transformation of early America,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rich, E. E. (1955) ‘Russia and the colonial fur trade’, The Economic History Review 7/3: 307–28.
Richards, John F. (2003) The unending frontier: an environmental history of the early modern
world, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Richter, Daniel K. (1992) The ordeal of the longhouse: the peoples of the Iroquois League in
the era of European colonization, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Romani, Jr., Daniel A. (1995) ‘The Pettaquamscut purchase of 1657/58 and the establishment of a
commercial livestock industry in Rhode Island,’ in New England’s Creatures: 1400–1900: Dublin
seminar for New England folklife annual proceedings 1993, Boston: Boston University Press.
Romans, Bernard (1775) A concise natural history of east and west Florida, New York:
Bernard Romans.
Russell, Howard S. (1982) A long, deep furrow: three centuries of farming in New England,
Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England.
Saunt, Claudio (1999) A new order of things: property, power, and the transformation of the
Creek Indians, 1733–1816, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sayre, Gordon M. (1997) Les sauvages américains: representations of Native Americans in
French and English colonial literature, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
31
Silver, Timothy (1990) A new face on the countryside: Indians, colonists, and slaves in South
Atlantic forests, 1500–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sioui, Georges E. (1992) For an Amerindian autohistory: an essay on the foundations of a
social ethic, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Skabelund, Aaron (2013) ‘Animals and imperialism: recent historiographical trends’, History
Compass 11/10: 801–7.
Smith, John (1632) The Generall Historie of Virginia, London: Edward Blackmore.
Smith, Marvin T. (1987) Archaeology of aboriginal culture change in the interior Southeast:
depopulation during the early historic period, Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
——(2000) Coosa: the rise and fall of a Southeastern Mississippi chiefdom, Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Snow, Frankie (1998) ‘Swift Creek design investigations: the Hartford case’, in Mark Williams
and Daniel T. Elliott (eds), A world engraved: archaeology of the Swift Creek culture,
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Steadman, David W. (2001) ‘A long-term history of terrestrial birds and mammals in the
Chesapeake-Susquehanna watershed’, in Philip D. Curtin, Grace S. Bush, and George W.
Fischer (eds), Discovering the Chesapeake: the history of a watershed, Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Stewart, Mart A. (1996) ‘What nature suffers to groe’: life, labor, and landscape on the Georgia
coast, 1680–1920, Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Storey, Alice A., et al (2012) ‘Investigating the global dispersal of chickens in prehistory using
ancient mitochondrial DNA signatures’, PLoS ONE 7/7: 1–11.
Taylor, Alan (2001) American colonies: the settling of North America, New York: Penguin.
Thompson, James Westfall (1942) A history of livestock raising in the United States, 1607–
1860, Washington: United States Department of Agriculture.
Turgeon, Laurier (1998) ‘French fishers, fur traders, and Amerindians during the sixteenth
century: history and archaeology’, The William and Mary Quarterly 55/4: 585–610.
Ubelaker, Douglas H. (2006) ‘Population size, contact to nadir’, in Douglas H. Ubelaker (ed),
Handbook of the North American Indians, vol. 3: Environment, origins, and population,
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Usner, Daniel H. Jr. (1992) Indians, settlers, & slaves in a frontier exchange economy: the
Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Vigne, Jean-Denis (2011) ‘The origins of animal domestication and husbandry: a major change
in the history of humanity and the biosphere’, Comptes Rendus Biologies 334/3: 171–81.
Wacker, Peter O. and Clemens, Paul G. E. (1995) Land use in early New Jersey: a historical
geography, Newark: New Jersey Historical Society.
Washburn, Wilcomb E. (1957) The governor and the rebel: a history of Bacon’s Rebellion in
Virginia, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Welch, Paul D. (1991) Moundville’s economy, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
White, Richard (1983) The roots of dependency: subsistence, environment, and social change
among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, Lincoln: University of Nebraska.
Williams, James Homer (1995) ‘Great doggs and mischievous cattle: domesticated animals
and Indian-European relations in New Netherland and New York’, New York History
76/3: 245–64.
Williams, Mark and Elliott, Daniel T. (1998) ‘Swift Creek research: history and observations’,
in Mark Williams and Daniel T. Elliott (eds), A world engraved: archaeology of the Swift
Creek culture, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Wood, Peter H. (1989) ‘The changing population of the colonial South: an overview by race
and region, 1685–1790’, in Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley
(eds), Powhatan’s mantle: Indians in the colonial Southeast, Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
32
Worth, John E. (1998) Timucuan chiefdoms of Spanish Florida, vol. 1: Assimilation,

Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Zimmerman, Barry E. and Zimmerman, David J. (2003) Killer germs: microbes and diseases
that threaten humanity, revised ed., New York: Contemporary Books.
33
CHAPTER THREE
SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY

IN THE SPANISH ATLANTIC
Sandra Rebok
INTRODUCTIO N
S pain’s encounter with the New World in the fifteenth century had a crucial impact
on both sides of the Atlantic. One important aspect was its contribution to the
progress in different fields of scientific knowledge through the then unknown nature
and cultures of America. This process unleashed in the year 1492, and consisted in
the beginning of the intellectual awareness of this part of the world, until then ignored
by the European consciousness. The activities of Spanish royal officers, soldiers,
merchants and missionaries constituted what can be considered an early scientific
revolution, since the information collected in America questioned and in some aspects
even contradicted the European classical scientific tradition.1 Furthermore, it was
indeed an innovative approach to validate the personal experience of a scholar as
source of learning; this new empirical tradition emerging in America was opposed to
the textually based scholastic and humanist tradition.2 Nevertheless, evaluating the
impact of the newly obtained scientific information about natural history, geography,
ethnography and medicine of the New World, we have to keep in mind the fact that
this knowledge was essential for controlling the acquired regions and for establishing
the Spanish empire overseas. As a consequence, it cannot be seen disconnected from
its colonial purpose; thus analyzing the history of Spanish scientific research
undertaken in America and its contribution to early modern European knowledge
includes also the study of colonial science in the frame of an imperial expansion.
During the last 500 years, in different historical epochs there were many approaches
to the historiography of the scientific exploration of America. This essay does not
focus on the much debated question of which approach can be considered scientific in
a modern sense. Rather it departs more from the idea that scientific research is subject
to evolution, that it is imbedded in ideological, political, philosophical and social
currents and cannot be meaningfully analyzed in isolation from these factors. Two
main aspects that have to be mentioned in this context are on one side the ideology,
the actual discussions and philosophical currents which define the consciousness of
the researchers and their way to approach the object of the study, modify the focus of
their work and conduct the topic of their interest. On the other side, the political
34
– chapter 3: Science and ideology in the Spanish Atlantic –
circumstances deciding which topics are to be investigated, which studies are actually
to be published and which research fields should receive financial support.
My intention is to demonstrate the impact of these questions on the evolution of
the Americanist anthropology in Spain. The definition of Americanism being used
in the following study comprehends the knowledge and the research of the American,
namely the entire environment which comprises the persons as well as the institutions
dedicated to the study and interpretation of the American cultures, in their merely
theoretic as well as practical aspects. In fact, the Americanism conceives a complete
aggregation of disciplines and interests, united by the only but sufficient link of the
American as a primarily geographic concept. Our focus of attention centers basically
on the anthropological and ethnographic aspect – though, in certain moments,
other aspects, such as the American archaeology for instance, will receive
corresponding attention.
Spain was a pioneer in the discovery, as well as in the scientific investigation of the
New Continent, therefore there exist strong historical, cultural and traditional links
between both worlds on either side of the Atlantic. This also explains the extraordinary
possibilities that Spain had in the research related to different human cultures, since
the New World for a long time has been considered a singular laboratory for questions
related to this field.
This study approaches the Americanism exclusively from the Spanish side,
particularly taking into account its rather dynamic and variable character during the
centuries. It is a study of the Spanish science in America from an inside view; due to
the limitation of its extension, no comparisons to other nations can be established,
nor can the critics from outside regarding the Spanish science, what is understood as
Leyenda Negra, be included. For the same reasons, unfortunately, within the
framework of this article, the American voices cannot be considered.
This historic process will be presented in its different phases in order to highlight
the characteristic aspects of each period of time and to indicate the evident modifications
undergone from one to the other. The focus of this essay is not to chronicle all Spanish
activity undertaken in the field of Americanism, but rather to demonstrate the basic
research interests and methods that characterize the studies undertaken in each epoch.
Therefore, the scope of this contribution is based on the description of main theories
and the scientists behind the projects conducted overseas as well as the modifications
in the methods of work applied during the different phases.
PH A SE OF CONTACT AND D IS CO VE RY: 1 4 9 2 – 1 6 0 0

A certain polemic debate arises when trying to find the most appropriate term for the
historic occurrences of those times – was it a discovery, an encounter between two
worlds or a culture clash? We can definitely say that in the year 1492 an encounter
occurred between the Old World, bearer of the so-called western Christian culture,
and the New World. There was an enormous richness in different cultures, situated
in very distinct levels of development. Actually, since it was not a contact between
equals, but a quite aggressive encounter, the term encounter becomes somewhat
euphemistic. Looking at it this way, it could be more adequate to name it a violent
cultural clash. Nevertheless, this paper adopts the point of view that there was indeed
a discovery – the scientific discovery of America.
35
– Sandra Rebok –
The first phase of the development of the Americanism can be considered from the
point of view of a naturalist, since it is characterized by a marked predilection for the
natural elements in its broadest understanding. When the Europeans encountered the
New World, this put into question a large part of their existent knowledge or their
acquired ideas about geography, biology, fauna, flora as well as the nature of the
human being. Inevitably the richness of the American nature, regarding the variety in
the flora, fauna as well as the different cultures, has been contemplated from the
perspective of the Old World and compared with what had been known until then.
A first attempt to classify the entirety of new knowledge – followed by the majority
of the authors – was to divide it into two large categories: the natural (geography,
flora and fauna) and the moral or cultural (the human being and its different cultural
manifestations). The numerous Spaniards in this period of time who conducted
studies or research projects in America had one general interest: getting to know the
native societies. Nevertheless, behind this common aim, very different intentions
became manifest. Basically, three groups with their particular approaches to the
indigenous societies can be differentiated: the military, the missionaries and the royal
officials. Whereas the soldiers were looking for information about these cultures for
military reasons; the missionaries depended on knowledge about the native population
in order to convert them to Christianity; and finally, the officials needed this
information in order to be able to administer these societies in a more efficient way.
The group that provided us with most information and whose working methods
were more similar to the tasks of a modern anthropologist is without doubt that of the
missionaries. What were the interests and the motivation of these first chroniclers?
Which aspects of the work of those scholars caught more attention? One of the first
and main tasks of the missionaries was the study of the functioning and origin of the
American religions. The majority of the missionaries who wrote about the
autochthonous cultures recognized that it was imperative to know the principles of the
indigenous religions before proceeding to the Christianization of the native population.
Therefore, in this period, an elevated number of descriptions of the different religious
systems were produced giving an account of their deities, sacred intermediaries, mystic
formulations, festive rites or rites of transition, forms of religious organization, the
different classes of priesthood or shamanism, as well as their ethical convictions, which
were all integral parts of their religion or at least legitimized this way.3
Along with the interest in converting the indigenous population to Christianity,
the linguistic work of the missionaries was carried out in parallel. At the beginning,
the predominant intention was to teach Spanish in order to establish a better
communication with the Indians, but due to the obtained experience, the missionaries
saw that they had an easier access to the people by learning their language. As a
consequence, many missionaries dedicated their time to the study of the native
languages, annotating the obtained information and thus writing the first dictionaries.
Another important issue, the axis of the anthropological considerations of those times,
was the functioning and the legitimacy of the native societies. The contemplation about
this aspect has always been conditioned considerably by the Spanish policy towards the
autochthonous population – their interest to obtain information, which could help to
administer the new colonies. Thus, their efforts to understand the local form of
government originated an elevated number of descriptions about the political and cultural
systems of the indigenous societies. In addition, both the legitimacy of these societies as
36
well as the much-debated question of the ‘capability of the Indians’ were discussed.
Another topic of interest, generated in this context, was the process of acculturation of
the indigenous population in the communities and the towns as a hybrid society.4
A part of these first studies had as a fundamental motive the defense of the Indians.
There was an intellectual movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth century called
indigenist or criticist, which criticized the Spanish behaviour during the colonization
of America. The first to express their protest regarding the treatment of the native
population in the public were the missionaries. A considerable number of them
dedicated their time to write about the American cultures with the intention of finding
arguments to defend them against the aggressions of the Spanish military as well as
the encomienda system,5 the slavery, the labour in the mines or other ways to
dismantle the cultural order established prior to the arrival of the Spaniards.
Without doubt, the most famous representative of this group was the Dominican
friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), whose treatises are today considered as
indispensable indigenist writings. One of his lifetime concerns was to define with
precision and clarity the cultural content of the American Indians. He considered
them as a cultural unity, in disregard of the differences among the diverse cultures.6
For Las Casas, the Indians were human beings equal to all in everything except their
beliefs – a point of view that shocked his contemporaries – and it can be asserted that,
though his language was not that of a modern anthropologist, his concepts in many
aspects contain an approach well ahead of his time.
One common element in the writings of the first chroniclers in their descriptions
of the curiosities of the New World, regarding nature as well as the indigenous
cultures, was comparing them with the European knowledge of those times. On one
hand this served to give a point of reference to the scholars and researchers for their
studies and on the other hand, it made it easier for the readers to imagine from what
they were reading.
Another subject that has been a constant issue in the Americanist bibliography
was the question of the origin of the American Indian. Since the discovery, all type
of speculations and theories were spread: apart from the most absurd and inept
ones, there were also others which raised the question with a certain rigour based
on rather scientific methods. Already in the first period of research in the New
World this topic had been addressed in a more theoretical way, without direct
implications in the practice of evangelization or of the functionaries of the colonial
administration. This subject was of interest because it answered the question of how
to connect the American population with the Old World – by using the comparative
method between cultural features and institutions of the Euro-Afro-Asian and
American cultures.7
Among the numerous scholars and authors of this epoch, the Franciscan missionary
Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) is especially noteworthy for his applied working
methods and his decisively scientific approach and can be considered as one of the
first anthropologists regarding the American cultures. His famous publication
Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España, written between 1570 and 1580,8
is appreciated as a veritable anthropological writing of the Aztec population in which
he meticulously studies their cultural reality. Another person who influenced the
thinking and approach of the chroniclers at the end of the sixteenth century was the
Jesuit José de Acosta (1539–1600) whose paradigmatic opus Historia natural y moral
37
Figure 3.1 Bartolomé de las Casas

© Mary Evans Picture Library
38
Figure 3.2 Emperor Carl V with Quevedo and Las Casas

de las Indias was published for the first time in 1590.9 According to Alcina Franch,
the treatment of the American reality by Acosta could also be qualified, in the more
open sense of the word, as ‘scientific’ or ‘systematic’, since he analyzed the reality of
the American continent as if it were a natural history, in which the climate, geography,
fauna, flora and the human being had an equivalent value; though the latter was
addressed in a special manner, as being the creator of culture and for holding moral
values.10 Another of the primary natural history books of America in the sixteenth
century was published by Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo (1478–1557), who in 1532
was officially appointed cronista de Indias,11 having been assigned the task of writing
the social and natural history of the Indies. Under the title Historia general y natural
de las Indias his major work appeared between 1535 and 1547, which was based on
his prior writing, Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias of 1526.12 The main
purpose of his natural history was practical and utilitarian – to identify the use of
plants, animals, trees and fish for human purposes.13 It comprised two aspects of
natural entities: the empirical description of single entities and their incorporation
into a single framework for the understanding of this diversity. According to Oviedo’s
conception of the world, both hemispheres shared the same system of relations and
the diversity of the natural phenomena was merely the product of diverse provinces
and constellations.
39
Regarding the testimonies of these first chroniclers it has to be mentioned that

there have been doubts and concerns about the authority and reliability of these early
historical sources. Some scholars claimed they were based on Eurocentric
misinterpretations, misleading testimonies or even imaginary elements associated
with the New World. This raised the question – impossible to answer in the framework
of this article14 – regarding what point in time material to reconstruct historical
processes should be considered as scientific in the more narrow sense.
In addition to these writings by early scholars there were other important sources for
ethnological or ethnographical information, such as the Leyes de Indias, promulgated
by Felipe II in 1567. This was a compendium of legal dispositions aimed to organize life
in the Spanish colonies. Part of them were the so-called Relaciones geográficas de
Indias,15 which through detailed questionnaires gathered concrete information about
the geographical, cultural, social and economic situation of the new territories as well
as their inhabitants. Another way to glean information of anthropological interest was
from the Probanza de Méritos, a system to accredit private or communal rights regarding
the Crown, which usually included relevant data of the indigenous world. Also the Casa
de Contratación, a government agency created in Seville in 1503, which attempted to
control all Spanish exploration and colonization from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, is an important resource in this context. Thanks to the many experts dedicated
to produce information about the New World, it became a real chamber of knowledge
regarding the navigation, cosmography and geography of America.16
Without doubt, what gives a unique and indispensable importance to the
information collected in the first part of the sixteenth century was the fact that the
cultures were still existent and almost without influence from the European world.
Thus, valuable observations could be obtained and registered about an anthropological
reality that was on its way to extinction as a sequel of the discovery and conquest.
To summarize, it can be asserted that this initial period of Spanish Americanism
was characterized on one side by the lack of correct and exact data about the
American reality, and on the other by the broad search for precise information
considered necessary to clarify the mysteries of the New World.17 Besides this scientific
curiosity, the interest for the American continent derived mainly from the possibilities
it offered for a future economic exploitation. In this phase also the study of the
unknown cultures in its last instance was undertaken with the aim to use this
information for a better and more profitable administration of the Spanish empire.
Therefore, in this context anthropology in its initial stages can also be considered as
a weapon of knowledge for the exploitation of the colonies.
PERIOD OF COMP ILATIO N: 1 6 0 0 – 1 7 5 0

This period was a phase of revision and reorganization of the information obtained
during the prior centuries. By then there were fewer unknown things to discover
compared to earlier, and certain idea about the American cultures already existed.
Therefore, the scholars of those days dedicated their time mainly to the lecture of the
works of the first chroniclers in order to make compilations about what had already
been investigated and to note the modifications that had been produced since then. In
this context the works of the Jesuit scholar Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–87)
should be pointed out in particular.
40
Another reason to study the already known data was to write the first historical books
of certain regions of America in general. Therefore, the seventeenth century was very
fruitful, the New Continent seemed now less mysterious than before and the acquired
knowledge helped to see and understand its context. Some of these historians wrote
exclusively from Spain, using these written sources, others combined them with their own
research in America. One of the best known examples is the Historia del Nuevo Mundo
written by the Jesuit scholar Bernabé Cobo (1582–1657).18 This work, which remained
incomplete, was conceived in three parts, the first one dealing with natural history and
the other two with moral history, one about Peru and the other about New Spain.
Another example is the Franciscan historian Juan de Torquemada (1562–1624),
who was chosen to be chronicler of the Orden de San Francisco de Nueva España to
write a history of the Franciscan missionary work and to compile the most notable of
the indigenous traditions. He produced several books, though he is basically known
for his Monarquía Indiana, finished in the year 1613.19 For this major undertaking he
used several sources such as ancient pictographic codices or those produced at the
moment of the conquest, Indian relations written mainly in Nahuatl in addition to
oral information provided by the Indians themselves.20 Finally, both Felipe Guamán
Poma de Ayala and Martín de Murúa devoted their time to write the history of Peru,
and should be mentioned in this context as well.
In addition to these revisions of the main publications of the eighteenth century, there
was another anthropological interest, more of a philosophical orientation, which occupied
the scholars: The polemic about the ‘nature’ of the Indians. Not only in Spain, but also
later in other colonizing nations, this subject provoked many philosophical discourses
about the ‘good savage’ or the ‘bad savage’. The various American peoples evoked
different images by the Spaniards and attracted more or less sympathies. For example, the
Araucanos were associated with braveness and independence, and, the Patogones were
rather described as miserable and ‘animal-like’ people.21 The ethnic group that caused the
most controversy were the Jíbaros whom the Spaniards saw as clear manifestations of the
‘bad savage’, due to their social anarchy, misanthropy as well as their religious
indifference.22 Particularly the last aspect was of considerable weight; therefore, it is not
surprising that the Spaniards rejected the Jíbaros from their Catholic ideal.
Among the few concrete research projects undertaken in this period of time is the
work of some missionaries. The publications of Jacinto de Carvajal (1648), who carried
out expeditions along the rivers of Santo Domingo, Apúre and the Orinoco, described
the geography as well as the fauna, flora and anthropology of the Llanos.23 He
developed large lists of ethnic groups with their more or less precise localization, along
with excellent descriptions of their traditions, rituals and diverse habits.24 In 1741 José
Gumilla presented a book focused mainly on the missionary activity, in which he
treated with the same passion aspects of the language, physical appearance and culture
of the Indian groups living on both sides of the River Orinoco.25 Another example is
Miguel del Barco (1706–90), who described in his work Historia natural y crónica de
la antigua California (1757) first the animals, then plants, mineralogy and finally the
subjects of anthropological matters, particularly the indigenous languages and cultures
of California. In the second, apparently added, part of his work, known as crónica, he
addresses the Spanish activities in this region, particularly the missionary labour.26
These three cases belong to what can be considered ‘late naturalism’, a period of
time which connected the discoveries of the sixteenth century with the so-called scientific
41
travels of the eighteenth century. According to Alcina Franch, in the first half of the
eighteenth century a confluence of two traditions can be observed: One is represented
by the naturalism of the prior centuries, typical for the labour of the intellectuals of this
period of time on the American continents, and the other more recent tradition of a
rather scientific character, which proceeded from Europe and had a specific interest for
the territories in the New World. This preference was in part political and always of an
economical nature, since the incipient capitalism, which was to peak in the second half
of this century, had at the same time a need for raw materials, places for experimentations
with cultivations and, furthermore, markets for the expansion of Western Europe.27
With this focus and reference to the Spanish Americanism, the seventeenth century
and the first part of the eighteenth can be considered as a period of transition, in
which fewer new aspects were discovered, but where the bases were prepared for the
future developments.
PERIOD OF THE GRAND SCIENTIFIC TRAVELS: 1750–1862

With the Enlightenment, from the second half of the eighteenth century an important
project to modernize the country began. The ministers of the Spanish monarch Carlos
III pretended to reform the Antiguo Régimen from inside the regime, and this was
reflected in their opposition to the isolation of Spain, towards the Inquisition as well
as the exaggerated privileges of the aristocracy, which were conceived as obstacles for
the progress of the country.28 Moreover, the enlightened Bourbons had a major
cultural interest; among other ways this became evident in numerous scientific
expeditions that were sent towards different regions of America.
These travels, encouraged and patronized by the Crown or by different institutions,
caused a significant advancement in the knowledge about the New World, basically
in the fields of botanical, geological, zoological or cultural questions. Several of
these expeditions were called ‘vaccination expeditions’, and their aim was the
protection of the indigenous population against diseases, for instance smallpox. It
remained difficult to establish a clear category for these scientific expeditions,
because even if the main focus were directed to a specific field, this did not diminish
their interest for other collateral aspects or subjects of equal scientific value, such as
anthropology or archaeology.
What can be asserted is that in this epoch there was no predilection for the human
element, it was rather conceived as a part of the whole complex of natural sciences.
The eighteenth century represented the rise of the biological and natural sciences,
which explains why a significant number of the Spanish scientific expeditions of this
period had a particular fondness for botanical and zoological questions. Important
expeditions in a more anthropological context were those directed by Alejandro
Malaspina and Guillermo Dupaix; thus their principal characteristics will be
mentioned as representative examples.
The large expedition of Alessandro Malaspina (1754–1810), an Italian born
nobleman and naval officer in Spanish service, and José Bustamante y Guerra
(1759–1825) was undertaken along the American and the Asian coasts in the Pacific
Oceanic during the years 1789 to 1794 and constituted one of the major economic,
scientific and logistic efforts achieved by a European country during this fruitful
period of time. The group of naturalists on this expedition had an intrinsic fondness
42
for the topics related to geography and particularly the improvement of the
cartography of the coasts along where this expedition sailed, as well as the fauna
and flora of the regions visited. Regarding the more anthropological questions, it
can be said that though they were not focusing on these matters in particular, from
an ethnographical point of view the Malaspina expedition is considered one of the
most important ones of its epoch. During its journey from south to north along the
Pacific coast of America, numerous and valuable data about the various indigenous
groups was collected, concerning the human beings themselves, their culture,
instruments, clothing, ornaments, celebrations and funeral customs.
Figure 3.3 Alessandro Malaspina

© Mary Evans/Iberfoto
43
Figure 3.4 Nootha Indian, drawn during Malaspina’s visit

to the Spanish outpost on Vancouver Island
© Mary Evans/J. Bedmar/Iberfoto
44
Guillermo Dupaix (1750–1817), on the other hand, with his travels through
Mexico between 1805 and 1808, became one of the pioneers of the archaeological
sciences. The travels of Dupaix can be taken as the culmination of a posture of
archaeological curiosity at the end of the eighteenth century, and on the other hand,
as the first of a large series of what we have called ‘archaeological travellers’.29 He
would compare his discoveries in Mexico constantly with what he had read about
Egyptian, Greek and Roman artwork. Through this method, very soon he became
aware of some deficiencies in the first archaeological questions of his time and this
gradually evolved into methods that we could qualify as to some extent scientific.
Nevertheless, the veritably innovative aspect of his approach was his anthropological
interest from the point of view of an archeologist, showing the link between the
cultures he encountered with the constructors of the artwork he described. Meanwhile,
during the entire nineteenth century and occasionally even at the beginning of the
twentieth century, many archeologists did not get further than an esthetic or stylistic
interpretation of the objects, or their pure classification. Dupaix – foreseeing what
was going to be the real content of archeological science – explained that the major
interest was not in the objects themselves, but in the fact that they were the evidence
to understand their complex culture.
These scientific travels coincided with a new spirit in European society known as
exoticism and defined as a certain fascination for foreign and distant cultures or ways
of life. The enlightened Spanish nation again manifested its interest in the American
cultures, although now from a different angle: a considerable number of publications
around the idea of the ‘good savage’ came up, particularly dramas with a romantic–
philosophical background. In these writings, the enlightened idea became apparent
that it would have been better to civilize the Indians instead of destroying them as the
conquerors had done.30 This exoticism materialized in a certain passion for the
curiosities brought from America by those travelers, and as a consequence, in
gathering these rarities.
A crucial role in this context was played by the Spanish king Carlos III, as the art
of collection reached its peak during his kingship.31 Due to his special predilection for
the objects coming from the New World, he instructed the colonies in America to
collect samples of all types of material. Therefore, several expeditions were sent
overseas with the aim to remit to the Peninsula all types of material that belonged to
both the natural and the social sciences. In this context a number of expeditions can
be highlighted: the expedition of Martín de Sessé y Lacasta and José Mariano Mociño
in New Spain (1787–1803), the voyage of Hipólito Ruiz and Joseph Pavón through
Peru and Chile (1777–88), the long experience of the Spanish botanist and physician
José Celestino Mutis in Nueva Granada and furthermore the scientific exploration of
Cuba conducted by the Count of Mopox (1796–1802) as well as Félix Azara’s
expedition through Mesoamerica (1781–1801).32
In order to display the numerous objects gathered at the most distant points of
America, in the year 1771 the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural in Madrid was
created, being officially opened in 1776 under the direction of the natural scientist
Pedro Franco Dávila (1711–86).33 This demonstrates that the ethnographic-
anthropologic interest of this period of time had a very important museographic or
collectionist component, since in the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural almost the
same significance was given to the anthropological and archaeological collections as
45
to the objects of a strictly natural sciences provenance. Besides these kinds of

collections, Carlos III also expressed a notable fondness for American antiquities and
he was considered the protecting spirit and first promoter of the archaeology in Spain
– a role that was assumed and developed by his successor Carlos IV. Thanks to the
effort of Carlos III, archaeology emerged as a scientific branch, with the first
excavations carried out in the years 1785 and 1787 in the Maya ruins of Palenque,
which had considerable significance as the beginning of the official study of ancient
cultures. The eighteenth century was not only an important period for travellers and
collectors, but as a consequence of these circumstances, the interest to classify the
obtained material arose. The idea of the classification emerged from the necessity to
sort the newly acquired plants in the botanical gardens and the collections in the
cabinets and perhaps even more from the need to prepare and print catalogues of the
obtained material.
In this context, the labour of Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) leading to the creation of a
taxonomical system of universal value should be emphasized. This system permitted
the natural scientists of the entire world to understand each other and enabled them
to accumulate in a rational manner the acquired knowledge of the nature in a way
which facilitated comparison of this information coming from very different places.34
Another decisive event that resulted from the arrival of an increased amount of
information from the New World in those times, was the creation of the Archivo
General de Indias in 1785 by the historian Juan Bautista Muñoz (1754–99) in
Sevilla.35 This archive was built to collect all types of documents such as unpublished
travel reports of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, countless geographical
surveys, various manuscripts on natural history as well as the entire official
correspondence between Spain and its colonial territories in America. At the same
time, Muñoz began working on his opus magnum Historia del Nuevo Mundo,36
which included a compilation of numerous and relevant facts about the indigenous
peoples of America. It constituted a clear replication from Spain’s side to the work of
William Robertson (1721–93) titled The History of America, published in 1777,
which revealed the English point of view, and was sought to present the contribution
of Spain to American natural history and geography.37 Unfortunately, Muñoz was
only able to finish the first volume, leaving behind countless preparative documents.38
In this manner, the travels of the eighteenth and the first years of the nineteenth
century with all their corresponding consequences, directly or indirectly set the tone
for the beginning of scientific Americanism in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless, there was a crucial event which ruptured this process for a considerable
period of time: That event was the end of the Spanish rule in their American colonies
as one of the results of its War of Independence against the French in the context of
the European Napoleonic wars.39 This major change emerged in most Hispanic
territories at approximately the same time and provoked a radical cut in the relationship
of the ancient colonies with their mother country. Until the beginning of the 1860s,
Spain refused to admit this independence and still intended to recover its former
American belongings. Therefore, from Spain’s side there was also a loss of scientific
interest in these territories and thus the expeditions and the research in these regions
of the New World were suspended. Another consequence of the independence of the
American countries was the end of the strict and exclusive politics established by the
Spaniards for their colonies that prohibited scientific research conducted by other
46
European nations in these territories. The expeditions under the auspices of the
Spanish Crown were then substituted by travels, missionary work or expeditions
organized by other countries, mostly European. There were also progressively more
and more North American initiatives. In this context we can discuss a certain
‘rediscovery’ of America as a result of the decline of the Spanish empire: scholars no
longer had to rely upon the information given by Spanish authors, as they were now
able to undertake their own studies according to their own questions and methodology.
Though until the year 1862 no research of relevance launched in America can be
pointed out, there was certain progress in the anthropological sciences in Spain,
which also had its impact on the theoretical development of the Spanish Americanism.
The first anthropological publications of a general character appeared, for example,
the philosophical-moral treatise of Vicente Adam entitled Lecciones de Antropología
ético político-religiosa40 or the work of Francisco Fabra y Soldevila with the title
Filosofía de la legislación natural, fundada en la Antropología.41
A considerable number of these first enthusiasts of anthropology in the early
nineteenth century were physicians. Their incentive for increasing their studies in this
aspect was their desire to categorize the human being; which soon turned out to be
one of the favourite discussion topics in the national Ateneos, the traditional forum
for intellectual discussions.
In general it can be presumed that in the period of time described above, the
interest for America was no longer inspired because of it being something magic,
susceptible of numerous interpretations, but by the fact that it was now something
more familiar, better known and conceivable for Europeans. In contrast to prior
centuries, the base for manifestations of Americanism was rationalism. One
consequence of this new spirit was the reestablishment and redefinition of the order
of the world, by integrating the American cultures in the general history of mankind.
P HASE OF F ORMAT IO N: 1 8 6 2 – 1 9 3 6
Since the 1860s, Spain recognized the impossibility of recovering its colonies and this
was manifested by a change of its policy towards these countries. As a consequence,
new relations were established with these independent republics, though now under a
different concept: no longer in the frame of the motherland–colony relationship, but
as an encounter of equality between sovereign governments. The proof of this modified
attitude was the dispatch of a new scientific expedition to America in 1862: the
Comisión Científica del Pacífico (CCP), a Spanish scientific expedition to the Pacific,42
under the leadership of Marcos Jiménez de la Espada (1831–98).43 The idea for this
project was born in 1860 due to the lack of material from the New World for the
universities and museums; finally two years later, the departure of a naval squadron
to the coast of South America was approved, organized by the Spanish government in
order to include a commission of several scientists tasked to carry out an in-depth
study of the geography, fauna, flora, etc. Among these specialists in different fields
there was also the anthropologist Manuel Almagro y Vega, who was responsible for
the research undertaken on the indigenous cultures, being the first Spanish
anthropologist with this academic denomination conducting studies in America.44
Until their return in 1866 the participants of this project spent almost four years
travelling through different countries of America, from time to time divided in smaller
47
groups in order to work in a more effective way, studying in detail the reality of this
world and collecting an elevated number of objects of the encountered material
culture. These data and collections were sent to the Peninsula and there received by a
special commission, in charge of cataloguing and arranging the collections until the
return of the members of the expedition. Shortly after their return to Spain, this
material was exposed to the public in the context of a major exhibition prepared in
the Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid. Unfortunately, the political and economic
problems that Spain had to face at this point in time deferred the study of this
collection according to the planned manner. They were consigned to the Museo
Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, from where they would be later on transferred to
other places, such as the Museo de América and the Museo Nacional de Etnología,
both located in the Spanish capital.
The Comisión Científica del Pacífico can be regarded as the decisive event for the
development of the Spanish Americanism in the second half of the nineteenth century,
since now the focus, under which America was studied, had changed: for the first time
the New Continent was approached as an autonomous region. A new generation of
researchers had been formed, who now saw America as completely independent and
different from Spain, a territory where Spaniards were to be merely neutral observers.
Aside from this scientific exploration, there was only sparse Spanish activity in
America in this period of time. Indeed this was the last large voyage to America
undertaken by Spain and it took almost one century until another interdisciplinary
project was accomplished; meanwhile the travelers and scientists from other countries
showed a substantial eagerness to conduct their research in these regions.
Nevertheless, during the same years the institutionalization of anthropology in
Spain progressed considerably through the creation of museums, anthropological
societies, research laboratories or similar institutions.45 A very important personality
in this process was Pedro González Velasco, considered also as one of the first modern
anthropologists in Spain.46 In 1865 he created the Sociedad Antropológica Española,
which edited two publications: the Revista de Antropología (1874), and the
Antropología moderna (1883). In addition to this editorial activity, the Society
promoted a favourable environment for teaching as well as for debate of contemporary
scientific questions such as the evolutionist theory of Charles Darwin regarding the
classification of the races and the variety as well as the origin of the human species.47
Another merit of this institution was the study of the ethnographical problems using
as their basis the extensive information of the scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth
century (Gómara, Fernández de Oviedo, Diaz de Castillo, Francisco de Xerez, Cieza
de León, etc.).48
In 1867 the Museo Arqueológico Nacional was created, to which the historic
collection – such as the antiquities and rarities of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias
Naturales, the former Real Gabinete de Historia Natural – was transferred. The
objects of American origin were there established in different categories, which were
primarily comprised of archaeological and ethnographic objects, next to a smaller
section of colonial art.49
Also, due to the personal initiative of González Velasco, in 1875 the Museo
Nacional de Etnología was founded as the first museum with an anthropological
character in Spain. During its history it has undergone different stages, having been
renamed, changed its institutional situation and, as a consequence, its corresponding
48
scientific conceptions as well. Nonetheless, this museum was not merely a place for the
exposure of objects since it also collaborated closely with other scientific institutions.
It was, for instance, the first director of this museum, Manuel Antón Ferrándiz, who
implemented anthropological studies in the Spanish university in the year 1892. He
started teaching in the laboratory that he created in the museum, where he inaugurated
a free professorship in 1885. Finally in 1892 he established a chair of anthropology in
the faculty for science of the Universidad Central de Madrid.50
By reason of the IV International Americanist Congress celebrated in 1881, an
important exhibition of the objects coming from the New World was organized, this
being the second one after the one exposed in the Real Jardín Botánico. Nevertheless,
due to various difficulties and the limited knowledge acquired in those days about the
ancient history of America, it was difficult to assign the objects to their corresponding
cultures or ethnic groups, and the lack of geographic information precluded
comparisons with already classified pieces in other museums.
Another significant event of that time related with the Americanist concerns, was
the first official historic (and not religious) celebration of the discovery of America:
the fourth centennial of 1892.51 Dozens of chronicles were edited for the first time,
several exhibitions were organized, besides important congresses and scientific
meetings.52 Also numerous Latin American countries participated in this
commemoration with a huge number of objects, coming both from public property
and from private collections. The reaction provoked in the Spanish society by this
centennial reflects the different attitude of the people that existed in those days
towards America. Besides the critical voices who pointed out the violence and
injustice committed during the conquest of America, there were numerous defences
of the civilizing work undertaken by Spain in the New World. Some were obsessed
with the revitalization of the Spanish colonialization, and some maintained a rather
nationalist position and in spite of the intellectual and political efforts to take up
again the Americanist concerns on a new basis, they continued to see America
basically as a problem and not as an assimilable cultural area.53
In the midst of this process of institutionalization of scientific Americanism there
was also a decisive political development that produced a major change in the
national self-consciousness of Spain: that was the independence of the last Spanish
colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. As a consequence of this loss the
Spanish society suffered a painful disinterest regarding America. The intellectuals and
the writers of this country constituted what later would be called the Generación del
98, a critical movement that searched in society the causes of this colonial decadency
in the midst of the epoch of major English and French imperialism.
One consequence of this political incidence was the duality of the scientific interest
in America from 1898 onward: on one hand, rather from the left wing of society, there
was a feeling of shame about what had happened in the former colonies and they
preferred to forget about this experience, and on the other hand, people situated more
in the right wing, continued to see America as something glorious, where the merits of
Spain were to be highlighted. In the following years, and particularly with the beginning
of World War I, this duality was intensified, which resulted in the fact that in Spain,
until the end of the 1920s, there was no progress in the field of American anthropology.
Looking at this panorama of activities and problems relating to the development
of anthropology and more precisely to the Americanism of the second half of the
49
nineteenth century, the question about the contribution of this period of time to the
approach towards this scientific branch emerges. It is certain that the years between
1868 and 1936 were the most unstable period in Spanish politics and that these
circumstances naturally had their impact on the development of sciences in general
– and even more on those concerning social aspects. This became evident in the
inability to establish a scientific programme. Nonetheless, in spite of these difficulties,
along these years the foundation was prepared for modern Spanish anthropology.
The earlier mentioned ensemble of expeditions, travels, exhibits, congresses, creation
of institutions, etc. facilitated the birth of anthropology as a modern science in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The objects gathered in prior expeditions not
only served to enrich the collections, but also they were now studied in detail in the
newly established research centres of the museums and universities. This was the
context in which scientific Americanism emerged, distinguishing itself from prior
scientific travels through a more theoretic basis, in connection with concrete
approaches to the problems as well as through different ideological currents.
F INAL CONSIDE RATIO NS

From its first contact with the western world the American continent became a
magnificent scenario where under varying circumstances in different periods of time,
Spain conducted important research projects and studies.54 Due to the role this
country played in the process of the conquest as well as the scientific discovery of the
New World, Americanism in its anthropological or historical facets is an integral part
of its own past and not a mere scientific or scholarly field as could be said for some
other countries. Therefore, the history of Americanist anthropology in Spain should
be studied depending on the changes, struggles and ideological comings and goings
of the last 500 years. For these reasons, the present article demonstrates the
connections between the particular approach of the research and the contemporary
philosophical background in each period of time.
It can be asserted that numerous interesting anthropological studies in America
were already conducted shortly after the conquest, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century. The motivation for those researchers to carry out their scientific activities
might have been curiosity, ambition, ardour for adventures, love for the fellow
human being or simply compliance with their duties, since many were devoted to the
missionary work or employed in other ways for the conquering government. In any
event, through their general observations and annotations, their interest in other
societies, their study of the native languages (which led to the first dictionaries), and
finally the fact that they lived long periods of time among the Indians, the basis for
modern fieldwork was set.
The activities and the mentality of the Spanish traveler of the eighteenth century
cannot be compared with the Americanist work undertaken by the writers of the
sixteenth century. As already mentioned, these were basically travelers who spent
only a short time with the populations they visited. What motivated them was more
a general curiosity for the American world and less a particular interest for its
cultures; rather, this was considered as another integral part of the foreign natural
landscape, such as the minerals or the plants. Also in the cabinets of curiosities, the
Indians were not of interest as representatives of their particular cultural heritage, but
50
rather their belongings as well as their products were shown as rare objects, due to
the collectionist eagerness that was predominant in that society.
From the second half of the nineteenth century and through the Comisión Científica
al Pacífico, finally the interest for American cultures was resurrected, an interest that
in a way shows similarities with that of the first naturalist of the sixteenth century,
although, as a matter of course in the nineteenth century, according to the general
tendencies of this epoch, there was less speculative background and more of a
scientific approach.
In conclusion, it can be said that as a result of all these research projects and studies
in the field of American anthropology from the time of the discovery until our days –
independently of the concrete intentions of each epoch – the Spanish Americanism is
based on a rich tradition. The historical conditions for this process were the encounter
and establishment of connections between the two hemispheres of the world, studied
in the scope of Atlantic History. From the sixteenth century, this country contributed
considerably to the development of empirical practices. The Spanish Crown used the
knowledge of natural history to create its Atlantic empire, and American ethnography
and anthropology to control and administer these territories. In the process of
establishing a long-distance empire, Spain provided a paradigmatic case to explore the
relations between politics and knowledge55 – and particularly the interconnection of
both, as the case of the development of Spanish Americanism during the history
shows. Thus, its contribution to the scientific exploration of the far side of the Atlantic
was shaped by the experience of being pioneers in this endeavour; Spaniards writing
the history of the New World with their unique approach, interest and conditions
constitute a relevant branch of Atlantic History.
NOTE S
This study has been undertaken under the framework and with financial aid of a research
project HAR201021333-C03–02, financed by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad
and within the activities aimed at the dissemination of science carried out at the Vicepresidencia
Adjunta de Cultura Científica at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. Final
research and modifications of the text were carried out in the frame of the Marie Curie Grant
AHumScienceNet (FP7–PEOPLE–2012–10F), financed by the European Commission Research
Executive Agency. It is a thoroughly revised and actualized version of a prior publication: S.
Rebok, ‘Americanismo, ciencia e ideología: La actividad americanista española a través de
la historia’, Anales. Museo de América, vol. 4, 1996, 79–105. The advice and help received
from Félix Jímenez Villalba, subdirector at the Museo de América in Madrid, was of utmost
importance in the preparation for the first Spanish version of this text.
1 Among the works that reflect on the Spanish Atlantic are: J. Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature,
Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian New World,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006; A. Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: the
Spanish-American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution, Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2006; Daniela Bleichmar, et al. (eds), Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires,
1500–1800, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009.
2 Barrera-Osorio, op.cit., p. 128.
3 M. M. Marzal, Historia de la antropología indigenista: México y Perú, Barcelona:
Editorial Anthropos, 1993, p. 20.
4 Ibid., p. 21.
51
5 The encomienda system was a trusteeship labour system that was employed by the Spanish
Crown on the native population during the colonization of the New World.
6 J. Alcina Franch, El descubrimiento científico de América, Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos,
1988, p. 41.
7 Marzal, op. cit., pp. 21–22.
8 B. de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, Madrid: Alianza
Editorial, D.L. 1988.
9 F. del Pino-Díaz (ed.), Acosta, José de, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Madrid:
CSIC, 2008.
10 Alcina Franch, op. cit., pp. 189–90.
11 Already in the year 1511 an official position had been created with the title Cronista de
Indias del Rey, whose work can be compared with the one of a librarian in our days.
12 F. de Oviedo, Gonzalo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar
oceánico, Guadalajara: Ediciones Facsímiles Ponton, 2006.
13 A good analysis of Oviedo’s work is found in: Barrera-Osorio, op. cit., pp. 104–12.
14 For more information please see Rebok, op. cit., pp. 101–3.
15 F. de Solano (ed.), Cuestionarios para la formación de las Relaciones Geográficas de
Indias. Siglos XVIXIX, Madrid: CSIC, 1988; R. Álvarez Peláez, La conquista de la
naturaleza americana, Madrid: CSIC, 1993, particularly pp. 99–246.
16 Barrera-Osorio, op. cit., particularly chapter 2, ‘A Chamber of Knowledge: The Casa de
la Contratación and its Emprical Methods’.
17 For more details on diverse campaigns to gather information see ibid., chapter ‘Circuits of
information. Reports from the New World’.
18 B. Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, Madrid, Atlas, 1943; B. Cobo, History of the Inca
Empire: an account of the Indians’ customs and their origin together with a treatise on
Inca legends, history, and social institutions, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.
19 J. de Torquemada, Monarquía indiana: de los veinte y un libros rituales y monarquía
indiana, con el origen y guerras de los indios occidentales de sus poblazones, descubrimiento,
conquista, conversión y otras cosas maravillosas de la mesma tierra, Mexico: UNAM, 1975.
20 Alcina Franch, op. cit., p. 63.
21 J. A. Gonzalez Alcantud, ‘América desde España: Entre el ideal heróico y el exotismo’,
América: una reflexión antropológica, Granada: Disputación provincional de Granada,
1992, p. 10.
22 Ibid., p. 9.
23 J. Caravajal, Relación del descubrimiento del río Apure hasta su ingreso en el Orinoco,
Madrid: Edime, 1956.
24 Alcina Franch, op. cit, p. 192.
25 Idem; J. Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado. Historia natural, civil, y geographica, de este gran
rio, y de sus caudalosas vertientes (…), Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1945.
26 Ibid., p. 193. M. del Barco, Historia natural y crónica de la antigua California, Mexico:
UNAM, 1973.
28 M. Sellés, J. L. Peset and A. Lafuente, Carlos III y la ciencia de la Ilustración, Madrid,
Alianza, 1988; L. Rodríguez Díaz, Reforma e Ilustración en la España del siglo XVIII.
Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, Madrid: Fundación Universitaria española, 1975.
30 Gonzalez Alcantud, op. cit., p. 14.
31 See chapter ‘Panorama histórico de las Ciencias Naturales en la España de finales del siglo
XVIII’, in: M. Á. Puig-Samper and S. Rebok, Sentir y medir. Alexander von Humboldt en
España, Aranjuez: Doce Calles, 2007, pp. 19–46; Sellés, Peset and Lafuente, op. cit.
52
32 M. Á. Puig-Samper, Las expediciones científicas durante el siglo XVIII. Historia de la ciencia

y de la técnica, vol. 28, Madrid: Akal, 1991; A. González Bueno, La expedición botánica al
Virreinato del Perú (1777–1788), Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1988; J. A. Amaya, Celestino Mutis
y la Expedición Botánica, Madrid: Debate, 1986; M. Frías Núñez, Tras el Dorado Vegetal.
José Celestino Mutis y la Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reino de Granada, Sevilla:
Diputación de Sevilla, 1994; Mutis al natural: ciencia y arte en el Nuevo Reino de Granada,
exhibition catalogue, Museo Nacional de Colombia, Dec. 2008–March 2009, Bogotá:
Museo Nacional de Colombia, SEACEX, 2008; D. Higueras (ed.), Cuba Ilustrada. La Real
Comisión de Guantánamo, Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1991; M. P. de San Pío Aladrén and M. Á.
Puig-Samper (eds), El águila y el Nopal. La expedición de Sessé y Mociño a Nueva España
(1787–1803), Madrid: Lunwerg, 2000; A. R. Steele, Flores para el Rey. La expedición de
Ruiz y Pavón y la Flora del Perú (1777–1788), Barcelona: Serbal, 1982; M. Á. Puig-Samper
and F. Pelayo, ‘Las expediciones botánicas al Nuevo Mundo durante el siglo XVIII. Una
aproximación histórico-bibliográfica’, in D. Soto Arango, M. Á. Puig-Samper and L. C.
Arboleda (eds), La Ilustración en América Colonial, Aranjuez: Doce Calles, 1995, pp. 55–65.
33 A. J. Barreiro, El Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, Aranjuez: Doce Calles, 1992.
34 M. Á. Puig-Samper, ‘Difusión e institucionalización del sistema linneano en España y
América’, in A. Lafuente, A. Elena and M. L. Ortega (eds), Mundialización de la ciencia y
cultura nacional, Aranjuez: Doce Calles, 1993, pp. 349–59.
35 N. Bas Martín, Juan Bautista Muñoz (1745–1799) y la fundación del Archivo General de
Indias, Valencia: Artes Gráficas Soler, 2000.
36 J. Bautista Muñoz, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1793.
37 W. Robertson, The History of America, 2 vols, London: A. Strahan, 1777. About the
reception of this publication in Spain see: Cañizares-Esguerra op. cit., 2007, pp. 170–90.
38 For a good analysis about Muñoz’s work, the creation of the archive and the difficulties
he had to face publishing his Historia del Nuevo Mundo see ibidem, pp. 190–203.
39 Also known as the Peninsular War.
40 V. Adam, Lecciones de antropología ético-político-religiosa: o sea, sobre el hombre
considerado como ser sociable, religioso y moral, Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1833.
41 F. Fabra y Soldevila, Filosofia de la legislación natural, fundada en la antropología o en el
conocimiento de la naturaleza del hombre y de sus relaciones con los demas seres, Madrid:
Imprenta del Colegio de SordoMudos, 1838.
42 M. Á. Puig-Samper, Crónica de una expedición romántica al Nuevo Mundo: La Comisión
Científica del Pacífico (1862–1866), Madrid: CSIC, 1988; R. Ryal Miller, Por la ciencia y
la gloria nacional: La expedición científica española a América (1863–66), Barcelona:
Serbal, 1983.
43 L. López-Ocón Cabrera, De viajero naturalista a historiador: Las actividades americanistas
del científico español Marcos Jiménez de la Espada. 2 vols, Madrid: Universidad Complutense,
1991; L. López-Ocón Cabrera and C. M. Pérez-Montes Salmerón (eds), Marcos Jiménez de
la Espada (1831–1898). Tras la senda de un explorador, Madrid: CSIC, 2000.
44 M. Almagro, Breve descripción de los viajes hechos en América por la Comisión Científica
enviada por el Gobierno de S. M. C. durante los años de 1862 a 1866, Madrid: M.
Rivadeneyra, 1866.
45 M. Á. Puig-Samper and A. Galera, La antropología española del siglo XIX, Madrid:
CSIC, 1983.
46 M. Á. Puig-Samper, ‘Pedro González de Velasco. Creador del primer Museo Antropológico
español’, Historia 16, 78, 10/1982, 103–8.
47 About the darwinist polemic in Spain see M. Á. Puig-Samper, Darwinismo y Antropología
en el siglo XIX, Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1992, pp. 47–52.
48 C. Lisón Tolosana, Antropología social en España, Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1971, p. 108.
53
49 P. Cabello Carro, Coleccionismo americano indígena en la España del siglo XVIII,

Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica 1989, p. 37.
50 P. Romero de Tejada, Un templo a la ciencia. Historia del Museo Nacional de Etnología,
Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1992, pp. 17–18.
51 S. Bernabeu Albert, ‘Los orígenes del Americanismo español contemporáneo: El IV
centenario del descubrimiento de América (1892)’, in P. Cagiao Vila and E. Rey Tristán
(eds), Aproximación al americanismo entre 1892 y 2004: proyectos, instituciones y
fondos de investigación, Santiago de Compostela: Servizo de Publicacións e Intercambio,
2006, pp. 13–31.
52 Ibid., pp. 24–25.
53 Gonzalez Alcantud, op. cit., p. 19.
54 For more information on the history of Spanish science see J. M. López-Piñero, Ciencia y
técnica en la sociedad española de los siglos XVI y XVII, Barcelona: Labor, 1979; Álvarez
Peláez, op. cit.; J. Vernet, Historia de la Ciencia Española, Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 1998; L.
López-Ocón Cabrera, Breve historia de la ciencia española, Madrid: Alianza, 2003.
55 Barrera-Osorio, op. cit., p. 133.
54
CHAPTER FOUR
FISH AND FISHERIES

IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD
David J. Starkey
M aritime historians might have ambivalent feelings concerning the assertion of

two leading Atlantic historians that ‘we need historical studies of all things
maritime, from weather patterns to port cities, from sailors to winds and currents’
(Greene and Morgan 2009: 12). On the one hand, they might be gratified to read that
their specialist subject area is deemed to be of relevance to researchers in another field
of enquiry. At the same time, they might be dismayed that their contributions to
knowledge and understanding have seemingly made little impact, for Greene and
Morgan’s call for more work on ‘the most obvious leading edge of the Atlantic world:
the maritime sector’ (Greene and Morgan 2009: 12) infers that research into the
maritime dimension of the historical process is underdeveloped. This might well have
been true in the early 1970s, when maritime history was generally regarded as a topic
for ‘hobbyists’ (Broeze 1989). Since then, however, it has not only developed steadily
as a recognizable sub-discipline, but also generated a substantial body of literature,
elements of which bear directly on the human engagement with the ocean that gives
Atlantic history its name (Broeze 1995).
Three of these elements are particularly relevant to this chapter. First, a technical
approach has yielded a welter of evidence concerning the development of the vessels
that have enabled people, cargoes, ideas, cultures and modi operandi to move around
and across the Atlantic region since time immemorial. The fundamental historical
significance of the practicalities of sea travel is the core theme of this literature, the
most comprehensive and accessible work on this subject being the twelve-volume
Conway’s History of the Ship (Gardiner 1992–96). The second historiographical
strand relates to the utilization by humans of the sea for purposes of transport, defence,
resource extraction and recreation. Such functional divisions are broken down, in
turn, into discrete industries, notably shipping, shipbuilding, port and fishing, as well
as less clearly demarcated activities like oil and gas extraction, maritime defence,
seaside tourism, marine recreation and the multifarious ancillary services that support
the sea-reliant industries (Starkey 1997). In the context of this economic approach to
the maritime past, a growing number of historical studies of the fisheries have been
published in recent decades (Robinson 2011; Starkey and Heidbrink 2012: 16–20),
including broad appraisals of the North Atlantic fisheries (Starkey et al. 2009; Starkey
55
– David J. Starkey –
and Heidbrink 2012; Sicking and Abreu-Ferreira 2009) and more focused analyses of
particular fisheries (Robinson 1996; Poulsen 2007; Poulsen 2008) and the fishing
interests of regions and nations (Gray 1979; Vickers 1994; Coull 1996; Starkey et al.
2000; Thór 2002, 2003). Whereas the exploitation of a largely passive resource is key
to the technical and socio-economic approaches, the interaction between human and
natural factors in the historical process lies at the heart of a third element in the
maritime literature. According to this environmental view, human activities have
impacted upon the dynamic process of environmental change, while natural drivers
have influenced the development of human societies (Bolster 2006, 2012; Poulsen
2007; Starkey et al. 2007; Poulsen 2008; Jackson et al. 2011).
This chapter draws upon these maritime perspectives to examine the place of fish
and fisheries in the evolution of the Atlantic world. Attention is initially afforded to
the physical characteristics of the North Atlantic, specifically the topographic,
oceanographic and ecological factors that largely condition the marine ecosystems
inhabited by fish and penetrated by humans. The second part focuses on the economic,
social and cultural drivers that underpinned the capture, processing and consumption
of fish by the societies that developed on the littorals and islands of the North Atlantic.
The modi operandi by which free-living fish were commodified into a marketable
product are the subject of the third section of the study. In the final part, the various
ways in which fish and fisheries influenced the movement of people, cargoes,
techniques and cultures around and across the North Atlantic are discussed. By
charting these courses, this chapter offers a positive response to Jeffrey Bolster’s
charge that historians need to put the Atlantic into Atlantic history (Bolster 2008).
ENVIRONMENT A ND E CO L O G Y
Three broad factors have interacted to configure the waters, terrain and life forms
that comprise, bound and inhabit the North Atlantic – an ocean realm that extends
southwards from approximately 80oN in the Arctic to a hypothetical line connecting
Cape Hatteras in North America to the Straits of Gibraltar that separate Europe from
North Africa (this section is based on Starkey and Heidbrink 2012: 14–16). First, the
topography of the region is fundamental to the character and distribution of its
natural resources. This is evident in the physical interface between land and sea at the
margins of the ocean. Here, the mountains and fjords that dominate the coastlines of
Norway and Greenland contrast with the coastal dunes and marshlands of the Bay of
Biscay, the sandy beaches, spits and lagoons of the Portuguese shoreline and the
estuarial salt marshes that mark the littoral areas of the Gulf of Maine, Chesapeake
Bay and Delaware Bay. It is also apparent in the shape of the islands that intrude
upon the vast expanse of water that both divides and connects Europe and North
America. The Faroes and Iceland, which break into three segments the submarine
ridge that extends from Scotland to Greenland, exemplify the truly ancient lineage of
such topographical features. When volcanic material poured through fissures in the
Earth’s crust some 50 million years ago, it solidified into a basalt plateau that has
subsequently been sculpted by glacial, fluvial and coastal processes to form the 18
islands of the Faroese archipelago. Iceland is a product of volcanic activity that has
persisted over the last 20 million years at the intersection of the Mid-Atlantic and
Greenland–Scotland ridges, where lava has exuded and cooled to form a highly
56
– chapter 4: Fish and fisheries in the Atlantic World –
distinctive and somewhat bleak terrain. Ridges are but one facet of the sea floor.
Rather more significant from the perspectives of fish and fisheries are the shelves that
were once part of the continental land masses, but were submerged when the end of
the last Ice Age caused sea levels to rise. Varying in extent from a few to over 500
kilometres, these shelves comprise sandy slopes, irregular outcrops and deep trenches,
such as the Devil’s Hole, the Norwegian Deep and the Cap Breton Canyon. Elevated
plateaux also occur on the shelves, with Dogger, Faroe, Grand, Burgeos, Stellwagen
and Georges among the more notable of these ‘Banks’.
The second factor is oceanography. Identifiable by the coherence of their salinity
and temperature, numerous water masses flow across and around the varied
topography of the North Atlantic. Perhaps the single most important influence is the
relatively warm and saline North Atlantic Current (Gulf Stream), a body of water that
moves from the Gulf of Mexico through the Caribbean and proceeds in a northeasterly
direction across the ocean. In pursuing this course it collides and mixes with colder
water flowing south from the Arctic Ocean, and is channelled by the land masses,
depths and bottom gradients of the Atlantic. It has a differential bearing on the region.
In the northwest Atlantic, for instance, it has a minimal influence, for the Labrador
Current, fed by the cold waters of the Canadian and West Greenland Currents, flows
southwards along the Labrador coast, its outer stream sweeping past eastern
Newfoundland and across the Grand Banks. Around Iceland, the North Atlantic
Current mixes with colder waters flowing from the north in a generally clockwise
gyre, while it dominates the upper layers in the seas surrounding the Faroes. In the
deeper water of the Greenland and Norwegian Seas, a complex system of horizontal
and vertical exchange occurs, whereby the comparatively warm water of the North
Atlantic Current flows in from the south in the upper layers and comparatively cold
water from the north flows out through the deeper layers. In this ocean space, the
North Atlantic Current separates into various discrete flows, some of which move
south around the British Isles to form the predominant oceanographic influence in the
Celtic and North Seas, and the waters off the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula.
The third broad factor is the relationship between living organisms and their
environment – that is, the ecology – of the North Atlantic. Currents, sea temperatures,
topographical features and wind systems interact to determine the precise mix of
marine animals in the twelve large marine ecosystems – Barents Sea, Norwegian
Shelf, North Sea, Celtic-Biscay Shelf, Iberian Coastal, Faroes Plateau, Iceland Shelf,
East Greenland Shelf, West Greenland Shelf, Labrador-Newfoundland Shelf, Scotian
Shelf, Northeast US Continental Shelf (LME 2009) – that occupy the region’s
continental shelves. Such environmental factors condition the abundance of
phytoplankton, the microscopic cells that form the base of ocean life, and zooplankton,
a very heterogeneous group that ranges in size from a few micrometres to several
centimetres, with some species only existing as plankton in their juvenile stages, while
others are planktonic through their whole life cycle. Plankton are consumed by fish
and marine mammals, which in turn are eaten by predators – including humans –
from further up the food chain. But as the productive capacity of any given water
mass is highly variable and seasonal, plankton abundance and fish populations are by
no means evenly distributed across the diverse waters of the North Atlantic. Some
general patterns can be perceived. Whereas the biodiversity of marine life diminishes
from the Equator to the North Pole, the abundance of individuals and tolerance to
57
environmental variations normally increases. In the eastern reaches of the North

Atlantic, for instance, approximately 700 species of fish have been identified in Ibero-
Atlantic waters and the Bay of Biscay, while 230 species are known to inhabit the
North Sea and 170 have been recorded on the Faroe Shelf. Further north, relatively
few cold-water species predominate, a pattern that is replicated in the northwest
Atlantic, although the prevalence of colder ocean currents means that the limits of
these species extend much further to the south.
Amidst this diversity of marine life, two types of fish have attracted human
predators. Pelagic species, such as herring, mackerel, sardine, pilchard and tuna,
which have oily flesh and are rich in unsaturated fats, shoal in the upper layers of
the sea. Although they are prevalent across the North Atlantic region, particular
concentrations inhabit different ecosystems; for instance, while Atlanto-Scandian
herring live in the northeast Atlantic, discrete stocks of herring inhabit the North
Sea, the Barents Sea and the waters covering the Iceland shelf and the Northeast US
Continental Shelf. Such fish are highly migratory and swim in vast numbers to
spawn in favourable environmental conditions. Although this behaviour is generally
predictable, there have been many instances when shoals have periodically
‘appeared’ or ‘disappeared’ in certain locations, the most striking example being
the extraordinary concentrations of herring that gathered off the Swedish west
coast during the so-called ‘Bohuslän periods’ of c. 1556–89 and c. 1752–1808
(Sendahl 2003: 189; Poulsen 2008: 50–53). The other set of species are bottom-
swimming demersal fish such as cod, ling, pollock, hake, haddock, plaice and
halibut, which are especially prolific in the northerly waters of the region. Often
termed ‘white fish’ due to the colour of their comparatively dry flesh, these species
do not shoal in the manner of herring, sardine and mackerel, and comprise
individuals that are much larger on average than pelagic fish. Nevertheless, they
migrate regularly in search of prey and waters that are conducive to reproduction,
conditions that attract substantial congregations of cod off north Norway in the
early spring, Iceland in June and July and in the inshore waters of New England and
Newfoundland during the summer months. In stimulating the extractive efforts of
human fishers, such natural congregations of fish have suffered high levels of
mortality, which over the long term have affected the reproductive capabilities,
migratory movements and abundance of some stocks of demersal and pelagic
species (Rosenberg et al. 2005).
Environmental drivers further influence ecology through the strong positive
correlations that exist between ocean currents, sea temperatures and climatic
conditions. Sub-flows of the North Atlantic Current, for instance, serve to increase
the surface temperature of the Norwegian and Barents Seas to levels that are 5–10oC
higher than those prevailing in similar latitudes in the northern and southern
hemispheres. Adjacent terrestrial areas are influenced by such exceptional marine
conditions and therefore the coastal districts of Norway and Russia enjoy less severe
winters and milder summers than the maritime regions of northeast North America,
which are cooled by the Labrador Current. Human behaviour is shaped to some
extent by such basic environmental factors, notably in respect to settlement patterns,
the seasonal rhythm of life and the quest for naturally occurring sources of food. This
is evident in the development of the fisheries in the northern reaches of the Atlantic
World during the early modern era.
58
MOTIVES AND D RIVE RS

Humans are not born with an innate desire to extract fish from their natural habitats.
Fishing is therefore a product of the conscious decisions of people and societies to
capture aquatic animals. In the 1450–1850 era, such a choice was sometimes
exercised for recreational purposes, with angling for freshwater species emerging as
a pastime during the fifteenth century. In England, this was signalled in 1496, when
Dame Juliana Berners published her Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle – the first
documentary indication that fishing had assumed a place alongside hawking and
hunting in the leisure pursuits of gentlemen. Over the next century or so, sport
fishing developed to such an extent that in 1653 Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler,
which unequivocally cast fishing as a pleasurable diversion, appealed to a growing,
largely well-to-do audience (Cowx 2002: 367). Throughout human history, however,
the principal motive for taking fish from freshwater and saltwater environments has
been to provide food for human consumption. With flesh that is rich in protein,
calcium, unsaturated fats and vitamins A, B and D, fish also yield oil, fertilizer and
other by-products.
In environmental settings where subsistence options were comparatively limited,
fishing played a significant role in the lifeways of the human inhabitants. This was
apparent in the far northern reaches of the Atlantic region, where indigenous peoples
like the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq in northeast North America, the Greenlandic Inuit
and the Sami of Fennoscandia were obliged to adapt to the fluctuating abundance
and distribution of natural resources, both terrestrial and marine. During the early
modern period, these adaptive strategies paralleled, connected with, or were absorbed
by market-oriented forms of fishery emanating from the south and the east.
Commercial fishing entails commodification, a process by which living aquatic
animals are converted into food and other marketable goods. Although it had long
been practised in freshwater and inland seas, it did not extend into the saltwater of
the North Atlantic until the later stages of the first millennium. Archaeological
analyses of fish bones found in various British locations indicate ‘that the most
important change in English fishing between ad 600 and 1600 occurred within a few
decades of ad 1000 and involved large relative increases in catches of herring (Clupea
harengus) and cod (Gadus morhua), many of which were probably distributed by
trade’ (Barrett et al. 2009: 33). The diets of western Europeans altered during this
period, with freshwater species becoming less significant than fish caught at sea. This
shift offered advantages to captors. Whereas fish might belong to landowners,
monarchs and others who exercised riparian rights of ownership over inland – and
sometimes coastal – waters (Woolgar 2000: 39; Amorim 2009a: 279–80; Amorim
2009b: 245–79), the ‘high seas’ and their inhabitants, which lay beyond what later
became known as territorial limits, were less constrained by such proprietary rights
(Barnes 2009: 165–220). Here, fishing transformed a free resource into private
property that captors might choose to process into a product for marketing and sale.
Such a prospect persuaded countless people over many centuries to risk their capital,
labour power and lives in an effort to generate personal income and profit by
harvesting food from the sea.
The scale and character of this commercial activity was governed by the interplay
of a range of economic, political, socio-cultural, technological, institutional and
59
environmental influences that varied in intensity and impact over time and space.
Demand was generally the key determinant. At the societal level, this was broadly
conditioned by the number, distribution and prosperity of prospective consumers.
It is probable, for instance, that the expansion of the early medieval fish trade in
northern Europe was driven by the increase in the continent’s population from
approximately 30 to 80 million between 1000 and the 1330s (Cipolla 1993: 96).
Intensifying this demand-side pressure was urbanization, which stimulated
commercial food production, including the supply of freshwater and marine fish, as
inferred by evidence pertaining to fish consumption in Scandinavia, England, eastern
Europe and the Netherlands (Nielssen 2009: 104–6; Woolgar 2000: 39–40; Van
Dam 2009: 309–10). A similar pattern was apparent in the late fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, when the growth of Europe’s population from 61.6 million in
1500 to 78 million in 1600 (De Vries 1984: table 3.6), coupled with the expansion
of the majority of towns and cities, precipitated an increase in food production,
with the extension of agriculture into common and marginal lands being mirrored,
to some extent, by the extension of European fishing activity to the continental
shelves that surround Iceland and lie adjacent to Newfoundland and New England.
Separating these expansive phases, the Black Death of the 1340s and 1350s, which
killed at least 25 million people – or one-third of Europe’s population (Cipolla
1993: 96) – had a profoundly negative impact on the sea fisheries during the late
fourteenth century. In a similar, though less pronounced, manner, the decline and
slow recovery of Europe’s population – from 78 million in 1600 to 74.6 million in
1650 to 81.4 million in 1700 (De Vries 1984: table 3.6) – was probably one of the
causes of the stagnation apparent in many fisheries in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries.
Levels of demand were affected in various ways by the standard of living of the
population. Whereas falling real incomes might increase demand for relatively cheap
varieties of fish, greater relative affluence could have the opposite effect, as it
sometimes allowed consumers to purchase comparatively expensive foodstuffs such
as meat, fowl, ‘luxury’ freshwater fish species and fresh sea fish (Carmona and López
Losa 2009: 262–63). Such consumption decisions were not simply made on the basis
of personal preference, for food choices have deep cultural meanings, with local
custom, social status and fashion, as well as market forces, explaining why over the
long term the Portuguese came to prefer bacalhau (dried salted cod), while the Dutch
generally opted for herring and the English developed a taste for fresh white fish. As
Turgeon asserts in relation to the burgeoning desire of the French to eat Newfoundland
cod during the sixteenth century:
Eating gives agency to foods and to people. It represents a form of social action
by the choice of foods eaten, by the people who eat them, by the manner in
which they are prepared, by the place they are eaten and by the performance of
eating itself.
(Turgeon 2009: 34–35)
Religious belief further shaped the pattern of demand, for Christians were discouraged
from eating meat on fast days, which in much of medieval Europe comprised three
days per week, as well as the four weeks of Advent and the six weeks of Lent. Fish
60
consumption was permissible during these fasts, a concession that probably stimulated
fishing activity, although abstainers might choose other alternatives to meat, such as
eggs, cheese and butter (Woolgar 2000: 36–37; Van Dam 2009: 314–18). Fasting
became less prevalent after the Reformation in the sixteenth century, which perhaps
precipitated a contraction in the demand for fish, at least in Protestant countries. In
England, for instance, the state passed legislation in 1548 and 1563 that was designed
to revive fishing activity, and thereby train seafarers for naval service, by restoring
Saturdays and Wednesdays as ‘fish days’ (Jackson 2000: 47). Nevertheless,
notwithstanding the Reformation, stockfish from north Europe and saltfish from
Newfoundland continued to sate the large Catholic markets of France, Iberia and the
Mediterranean, while Dutch herring exports to the Baltic remained buoyant until
well into the seventeenth century (Michell 1977: 177–78).
A range of inputs influenced the development of the early modern fisheries, with
human resources the most important of the various factors of production. Labour
was a vital ingredient, for muscle rather than mechanical power was largely used to
haul sails, pull oars, cast nets and lines, cure catches and convey produce to market
during the 1450–1850 period. While skill and experience were required to catch
and process fish in viable commercial quantities, the seasonality of fisheries – as
dictated by ecological and environmental factors – meant that many fishermen
engaged in occupations other than fishing for parts of the year, with agricultural
work the most common (Starkey 1992: 169–70; Nielssen 2009: 84–88; Thór 2009:
325–26). Merchants were likewise central to the production, processing and
marketing facets of the fisheries. It was their initiative and capital that purchased
and set forth carrying vessels to convey fishermen and gear to the fishing grounds
and catches to curing facilities, which were often under their control. Credit was
also advanced by merchants to enable fishermen to procure the necessary equipment
and materials to engage in the fishery, with the season’s catch normally serving as
the in-kind repayment (Nielssen 2009: 85–86; Candow 2009a: 388–89). Among
the resources supplied, facilitated or managed by mercantile creditors were two pre-
requisites. First, in fisheries that deployed hook and line catching methods, such as
the cod fisheries, bait production was a highly significant ancillary activity; indeed,
in many coastal districts, it not only constituted an important occupation, but also
a fishery in its own right (McKenzie 2007: 77–89; Payne 2010: 1–28). The second
pre-requisite was salt. Essential to the curing branch of many fisheries, this basic
but valuable commodity was conveyed to shore-based processing stations and
shipped aboard vessels engaged in ‘offshore’ fisheries, wherein the fish were cured
on deck and stored in barrels in the hold. Nations, regions or merchants with ready
access to supplies of salt had an important cost advantage, with source areas like
the Bay of Biscay and the Portuguese littoral assuming a significant role in the
fisheries (Innis 1954: 48–51).
Technical change was generally piecemeal and incremental during the 1450–1850
period, although there were a number of important innovations, notably in the
processing sector. While the development of a high-quality herring cure in the
Netherlands underpinned the pre-eminence of the Dutch North Sea herring fishery
during the early modern period, the eastwards diffusion of salting techniques from
Newfoundland to Iceland and Norway enabled cod producers to sell dried salted cod
(klipfish) as well as stockfish from the 1740s onwards (Nielssen 2009: 90; Thór
61
2009: 337–38). At the same time, the market for stockfish, especially the poorer
quality varieties, improved when it was softened by mechanical rather than manual
hammering in purpose-built mills that were increasingly prevalent in Germany from
the early sixteenth century (Wubs-Mrozewicz 2009: 197–98). In Galicia, the
introduction by Catalonians of pressing techniques during the late eighteenth century
served to increase the productivity of the pilchard fisheries by rendering marketable
a greater proportion of catches and generating fish oil (sain), a saleable by-product
(Carmona and López Losa 2009: 263–64). There were fewer major innovations in
the capture sector of the fisheries, although the introduction of decked sailing vessels
(smacks) from the 1790s added a new dimension to the Icelandic fisheries (Thór
2009: 340–43), while in the early nineteenth century the replacement of handlines by
longlines had a positive impact on the productivity of French fishermen on the
Newfoundland banks (Candow 2009a: 395). Improvements in sea transport also
facilitated the development of the fisheries, for vessels were necessary to convey
fishermen and their gear to the fishing grounds, and to return catches to market. In
this respect, the significant improvements in navigation, vessel design and propulsion
that collectively constituted the ‘first shipping revolution’ in the fifteenth century not
only allowed Columbus to cross the Atlantic, but also enabled early-modern fishermen
to promote long-distance migratory fisheries (Gardiner and Unger 1994). Although a
host of relatively minor incremental improvements in the size, efficiency and safety of
vessels took place in the interim (Gardiner and Bosscher 1995), it was not until the
nineteenth century that the ‘second shipping revolution’, in which wooden walls and
sail power were gradually supplanted by metal hulls and steam propulsion,
significantly altered the scope and scale of the sea fisheries.
Shipping was just one of numerous external factors that served to stimulate,
facilitate or constrain the development of the fisheries. Shifts in the supply and price
of other foodstuffs, including freshwater fish, were another exogenous force. In this
respect, changes in the prices of grain and fish in northern Europe during the
seventeenth century, which saw the relative value of fish decline sharply (Nielssen
2009: 86–87), perhaps explain the contraction in fishing activity that marked the
period. Institutional factors also impinged on the workings of the market for fish.
States and rulers occasionally offered bounties to encourage fishing activity, a notable
example being the payment of 30–50 shillings per ton to English merchants who
fitted out herring ‘busses’ from the 1740s (Jackson 2000: 52–53). In contrast,
government policy might constrain the fish trade, as demonstrated by the establishment
of state-controlled, monopolistic trading companies in Iceland, the Faroes and
Greenland in 1602, 1709 and 1774 respectively by the Danish crown, the prohibition
of fish exports in seventeenth-century Portugal and the erection of mercantilist
trading and colonial frameworks, especially by Britain and France. Taxes levied on
salt, landings and vessels added to the operational costs of fishermen (Jones 2000:
107–8), while the onset of maritime war generally led to losses of men, gear and
vessels, either to state mobilization or enemy action, as was evident in the damage
and disruption wrought upon the Netherlandish herring fleet during the wars of the
1400–1650 period (Sicking and Van Vliet 2009: 337–64), and in the frequent attacks
on English fishing stations on Newfoundland by French forces, and vice versa, during
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Candow 2009b: 424–26). Equally,
war might yield advantages for fishermen through the forcible exclusion of rivals
62
from fishing grounds or shore areas. The private sector also spawned institutions and
interest groups. In the Dutch Republic, for instance, the North Sea herring fishery
(Grote Visserij) was increasingly dominated by a College of merchants, which
prescribed the onboard curing process, controlled the supply of labour and restricted
the entry of merchants into the business (Poulsen 2008: 109–21). In Spain, maritime
guilds not only managed the fisheries, but also regulated the work and remuneration
of the fishermen (Carmona and López Losa 2009: 257–61), while in Portugal,
brotherhoods (confrarios) of fishermen emerged in medieval times as members
endeavoured to ensure that each enjoyed material and spiritual equality (Amorim
2009a: 283–84).
MODES AND ZO NE S
The multifarious factors that interacted to persuade people to capture fish and
consume fish products gave rise to a range of fisheries in the North Atlantic region
during the 1450–1850 period. Some of these were prosecuted in inland areas, where
freshwater fish were caught for human consumption. In Labrador, for instance, the
Innu used vegetal fibre nets to take trout under the ice (Keenlyside and Andreasen
2009: 378), while in Iceland the sagas relate how salmon – ‘God’s Gift’ – helped to
sustain the population (Pétursdóttir 1998: 54–71), and across Europe the appetites of
the wealthier members of society were sated by pike, perch, trout and sturgeon taken
by rod and line from ponds and rivers (Woolgar 2000: 44). In many places, the
exploitation of naturally occurring fish was complemented – and often superseded –
by the cultivation of fish stocks in purpose-built freshwater ponds, a practice that
intensified in relatively densely populated, urbanized regions during the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. In Brabant and Hainaut, for instance, ponds, reservoirs and
even defensive ditches were developed by entrepreneurial property owners intent on
generating profits from ‘carp in the city’; that is, from the production and sale of a
valued commodity in a growing market (Deligne 2009: 283–95).
Numerous commercial fisheries – each embracing catching, processing, distribution
and marketing activities – were conducted concurrently or sequentially according to
the seasons. They have been afforded various descriptors in the historical literature.
Some authors have adopted political divisions to describe fisheries based in, and
administered by, nation states – a parameter that for larger and more active fishing
countries such as France, Spain and England included a range of discrete businesses.
Other studies have focused on particular marine areas and species. Such approaches
indicate, for instance, that North Sea herring was the object of relatively large-scale
fishing efforts emanating from nine northwest European countries and regions – the
Dutch Republic, Norway, Bohuslän, Scotland, England, ‘German states’, Denmark,
Flanders and France (Poulsen 2008: 43–69) – while the cod stocks off Newfoundland
were exploited during various epochs, and in various ways, by Basque, Portuguese,
Spanish, French, English and North American fishermen (Innis 1954; Barkham 2009;
Candow 2009b). Another descriptor commonly deployed relates to the productive
resources utilized, with catching devices cast adjectivally to describe the trawl and
line fisheries (Robinson 1996; Robinson 2000: 72–80), while the socio-economic
status of fishers is also used to differentiate indigenous, subsistence, artisanal and
commercial fisheries.
63
Appraisals of the North Atlantic fisheries over the long term are rendered
problematical by such definitional complexities. Enumerating the fisheries, for
example, depends upon which criteria are applied, with political divisions indicating
that some twenty ‘fishing nations’ were active during the early modern era, while the
broader criteria of nationality, principal catching area and target species suggest
that at least fifty large-scale, recognizably discrete fisheries were prosecuted (Starkey
et al. 2009). Even so, the many changes in political boundaries and regimes that
occurred over time, as well as the regional variations in techniques, products and
markets within seemingly ‘national’ fisheries, mean that such calculations lack
precision. A clearer, more enlightening picture can be painted by considering the
fisheries in terms of space and process. Although the catching branch of each fishery
was prosecuted in the relatively shallow waters that cover the littoral areas and
continental shelves of the North Atlantic region, the means of production and
distribution were not necessarily based on the adjacent land masses and islands,
while various modi operandi were practised afloat and ashore. Assessing the fisheries
according to such variables reveals that four ‘zonal modes’ were current during the
early modern era.
First, there were the shore fisheries. A diverse, ubiquitous facet of the coastal
districts of the region, these activities entailed the capture of fish, and gathering of
shellfish, by people working from the coast and banks of estuaries. This was not a
seagoing, vessel-based business. Rather, the catching gear deployed along the
region’s shores ranged from large, sophisticated dams to spears, lines, nets and pots,
the fish and shellfish they ensnared providing a significant – and often fresh –
supplement to the diets of the captors and their communities (Kowaleski 2000: 23–
25). Indigenous peoples engaged in such activity during the early modern era. In
Labrador and Newfoundland, for instance, Europeans in the late fifteenth century
encountered fishing practices dating back 4,000 years, when ‘early maritime people
possessed elaborate fishing and sea mammal hunting tools to exploit coastal and
offshore marine resources’, notably swordfish, walrus and seal (Keenlyside and
Andreasen 2009: 376). In Greenland, Danish traders and government officials
interacted with the hunting culture of the Inuit, who trailed seals, bears and other
animals, deriving food, skins, oil and blubber from their prey. Mobility and an
annual resort to winter, spring, summer and autumn settlements were the
cornerstones of a highly seasonal hunting cycle, in which fish were not captured on
a large scale, but served as a supplementary source of nourishment in certain times
of the year, and as an emergency food in times of dearth (Keenlyside and Andreasen
2009: 383). A seasonal migratory pattern also prevailed in the northernmost parts
of Norway, Finland, Sweden and Russia, where the Sami population adapted
opportunistically to its natural and commercial environments. Here, fishing assumed
its place alongside hunting, animal husbandry and, in ecologically favourable areas,
grain cultivation in a semi-subsistence, semi-commercial adaptive strategy.
Accordingly, ‘when market demand failed and external supplies became scarce, the
Sami were able to withdraw from the market and rely on other forms of sustaining
life. But as long as the market mechanisms functioned, they were equally capable of
using them to satisfy their needs’ (Hansen 2009: 76).
Other shore fisheries were essentially market-oriented, with pelagic species the
primary targets. Around the rim of the North Sea, for instance, shore fishing
64
techniques were deployed in the herring fishery, with seine nets set from beaches in
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and England accounting for part of the
salted herring output that constituted a highly significant facet of the region’s
commercial activity throughout the early modern era (Poulsen 2008: 72). The
Bohuslän fishery was the most productive of these shore-based businesses, though
only during the comparatively short periods when the herring shoals migrated
regularly into coastal waters. In 1574–88, for example, exports of salted herring
averaged almost 6,000 metric tonnes per year and reached a peak of just over 13,000
metric tons in 1585. When the herring next appeared in significant numbers from
1748 to 1808, Bohuslän became the single most important contributor to the North
Sea herring catch, with over 30,000 tonnes of salted fish exported in the 1790s and
early 1800s, as well as over 100,000 tonnes of train oil (Poulsen 2008: 51–53, 70–
71). Further south and west, the Cornish pilchard fishery was partly conducted from
the shore, with seine nets used to encircle the shoals when they ventured towards the
low water mark on the county’s many accessible beaches. Seining was dominated by
‘men of substance, drawn from the local landowning gentry and merchant classes’,
with the fishermen working for a wage and a productivity bonus of a small proportion
of the catch. Although the seining season rarely extended beyond eight weeks, the
pilchard it generated formed a major item in the diets of local people as well as an
export good that in the 1760s accounted for 60 per cent of British fish exports, most
bound to markets in the Mediterranean (Pawlyn 2000: 85–87).
Figure 4.1 Dragging in the seine net

Reproduced from C.F. Drechsel, Oversigt over vore Saltvandsfiskerier I Nordsøen og
Farvandene indenfor Skagen, Copenhagen 1890
65
In terms of operational area and curing technique, the inshore fisheries – the
second zonal mode – were not far removed from the shore fisheries. Their catching
effort, however, was largely expended in sailing vessels or rowing boats that conveyed
fishermen to grounds that were rarely more than a few hours from the coast (Childs
2000: 19–22). Provisioned only for short voyages, and with limited carrying capacity,
inshore fishing boats generally returned within two or three days of departure, ideally
with an optimal quantity of fish – in Lowestoft, this was ten–twelve lasts, or 120,000–
144,000 fish – that was fresh enough to process ashore (Butcher 2000: 57). Although
distinct from the shore fisheries in that portable, as opposed to static, catching
techniques were deployed, there were many similarities and overlaps between the two
modes. With regard to the pelagic sector, the pilchard fisheries of southwest England
boasted an inshore dimension, with self-employed boatmen driving pilchard shoals
ashore amidst the darkness of summer nights (Pawlyn 2000: 85–86). Moreover, the
inshore herring fisheries were prosecuted in the North Sea by fishermen taking herring
in gill, seine and drift nets cast from a great variety of generally small, short-range
craft (Haines 2000: 66–70; Poulsen 2008: 43–69). Such catches were landed on the
adjacent coasts for salting, smoking or pickling in line with local practice and
preference. Typically, shore and inshore catches were cured in the same facilities
before despatch to local, inland or overseas markets.
The inshore mode dominated cod production in north Europe and the mid-Atlantic
islands, with catches largely taken by men fishing in boats with handlines, rod and line,
or, from the late eighteenth century, longlines. Many of the vessels utilized for inshore
fishing were oar-powered, their names indicative of the manpower they required;
accordingly, the Shetlanders set forth four-oared fourerns, while Faroese rowing boats
ranged in size from the fýramannafar, propelled by four oarsmen to the seksæringur,
which was worked by twelve men. Similar ranges of oared vessels were deployed in the
inshore fisheries of Iceland, where the rowing boat was the mainstay of the fishing
effort for nearly a millennium. In these Nordic areas, the fish were taken on baited lines
and returned to shore, where they were beheaded, split, gutted and hung to dry on
horizontal poles (stokkr), stone walls or gravel for weeks, or even months, depending
upon the amount of dry weather. Temperatures fluctuating around 0oC for months at
a time, with the aid of strong winds – climatic conditions that prevailed in north
Norway and the mid-Atlantic islands – were essential for freeze-drying the catches. The
dried cod – known as stockfish – yielded by this simple, low-cost process remained
viable as a food product for between five and seven years, an attribute that rendered it
a highly valued commodity throughout the medieval and early modern periods
(Perdikaris and McGovern 2009: 63–65; Wubs-Mrozewicz 2009: 190–92; Thór 2009:
337–38). The inshore cod fishery possessed a migratory quality in that many fishermen
travelled relatively short distances to live in temporary settlements while they engaged
in inshore catching and processing activity for the duration of the fishing season. In
Norway, for instance, fishermen annually moved north to work in the inshore waters
and on the shore of the Lofoten Islands, a practice that spread further north to Finnmark
from the fifteenth century. While large numbers of Icelanders walked for up to twelve
days across their island to engage in seasonal inshore fishing activity off the southwest
and west coasts, the ‘haaf’ fishery that emerged in the Shetlands during the seventeenth
century also entailed seasonal migration, with fishermen travelling to the northern
parts of the archipelago to live and work in rudimentary fishing stations for up to two
66
months during the summer. The finished product, moreover, was carried long distances
to points of consumption, with Bergen serving as the mercantile hub of a trade that for
centuries linked north Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Shetland fishing grounds
with markets in Scandinavia, the British Isles, central and southern Europe (Wubs-
Mrozewicz 2009: 187–208).
Movements of labour and gear were the defining characteristics of the third zonal
mode, the migratory fisheries prosecuted by Europeans in the inshore waters and coastal
areas of northeast North America. This business resembled the inshore fisheries in that
it was undertaken by fishermen working from small vessels close to the shore, where
catches were returned for processing. But it differed from the inshore fisheries of north
Europe and the mid-Atlantic islands in respect of spatial scale. This was a transoceanic
activity in which fishermen, gear and other productive resources were shipped out and
back across the Atlantic in spring and autumn, having been resident in temporary
dwellings at the processing stations established on the shore for the duration of the
summer fishing season. Likewise, in this truly ‘international economy’ (Innis 1954),
their products were also conveyed across the ocean to markets in southern Europe and
the Caribbean. A further contrast with the Nordic inshore fisheries lay in the product,
for a different type of cured cod was produced in northeast North America. Here,
fishermen in chaloupes, skiffs, dories or other forms of small boat caught cod by rod
and line in the inshore waters of the Gulf of Maine and Newfoundland. Their catches
were landed at shore processing stations – known as stages in Newfoundland – where
they were beheaded, split and laid out to dry after receiving a light covering of salt
(Candow 2009a: 392–94, 398–400). The final product was salted dried cod – or saltfish
– which from the early sixteenth century assumed a prominent place in the growing
array of staple goods that were traded and consumed in the emerging Atlantic World.
English merchants and fishermen, the majority based in southwest England and
the Channel Islands, dominated the migratory inshore fisheries from the late sixteenth
century to the 1790s. Down to the 1630s, they endeavoured to conduct a migratory
fishery in New England, but the region’s favourable resource endowments and
comparatively benign climate enabled early settlers to develop economic activities –
grain cultivation, timber production, handicraft manufacturing – that complemented
the fisheries and gave migrants the option to over-winter and settle. Whereas an
inshore fishery conducted by New England residents soon became a mainstay of the
region’s economy (Innis 1954: 70–81; Gray 2000: 96–100; Candow 2009a: 405–7),
Newfoundland, with its narrow resource base and generally inhospitable climate,
remained little more than a ‘fishing ship moored on the banks’ during the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. However, the migratory character of the fishery sowed
the seeds of its own demise, for members of the transient workforce began to over-
winter and survive by engaging in the inshore ‘bye-boat’ fishery. This was a slow
process that commenced during a series of poor fishing seasons in the third quarter
of the seventeenth century, but only gathered momentum from the 1730s, especially
during the 1739–48, 1756–63, 1775–83 and 1793–1815 wars. As the inshore fishery
grew symbiotically with the island’s population, the merchants – despite persistently
lobbying the English government to support the migratory fishery – adjusted their
core business from production to servicing, from catching and curing cod to supplying
island-based fishermen with credit and provisions, and distributing and selling their
catches in transoceanic markets (Starkey 1992: 168–70; Candow 2009b: 426–38).
67
Whereas migratory fishing swiftly gave way to resident fisheries in New England,
and eventually gave rise to permanent settlement in Newfoundland, the offshore
fisheries – the fourth zonal mode – had few migratory ramifications, for it entailed
transitory work that was undertaken afloat. Such activity might be termed ‘industrial’
in scale, scope and organization, for it was practised in comparatively large, capacious
seagoing vessels that remained on the fishing grounds for relatively long periods.
Distinguished by the curing process used, practitioners of this mode of production
preserved their catches aboard ship, generally by packing the fish in barrels of salt
and storing them in the hold before returning to port when fully laden. This process
was deployed in the North Sea, with the Grote Visserij, as it later became known,
emerging in the Netherlands in the fourteenth century and developing into the most
productive strand of the multi-layered herring fishery from the late sixteenth century
to the 1740s. Undertaken annually by fleets of ‘busses’, which preyed on the herring
shoals as they proceeded south from Shetland waters in the late spring to the southern
reaches of the North Sea in the autumn, this business was organized and regulated
from the 1560s to 1857 by merchants belonging to the College van de Grote Visserij.
Key to the viability of this industry were the co-ordination of the fishing effort, the
barriers to entry imposed by the College and, most importantly, the consistently high
quality of the herring produced through the regulated, systematic curing process
conducted at sea and ashore – a product that rivals in England, Scotland and the
German and Scandinavian states struggled to emulate. Responsible for approximately
75 per cent of the herring extracted from the North Sea during the seventeenth
century (Poulsen 2008: 43–46, 70), the Grote Visserij was perceived as a highly
profitable ‘Golden Mountain’, which accounted for an estimated 8.9 per cent of
Holland’s gross domestic product in the early sixteenth century – a figure that had
declined to 0.3 per cent by 1807, due largely to the expansion of other sectors of the
Netherlandish economy (Van Bochove 2009: 209–11).
Cod was also taken on a large scale by offshore enterprise. English fishermen, for
instance, were extracting cod from Icelandic waters from the early fifteenth century to
the 1680s. In the early stages of this business, catches were taken ashore and processed
into stockfish in the manner of the Icelandic rowing boat fishery (Thór 2009: 343–44).
During the early sixteenth century, however, deteriorating relations between English
mercantile interests and Iceland’s increasingly restrictive Danish rulers persuaded the
fishermen to alter their modus operandi by salting their catches in a shipboard
operation that only involved contact with the shores of the adjacent island during
times of emergency. This was a seasonal activity, which commenced in March with
the departure from East Anglian ports of fleets of ‘doggers’ – relatively large vessels of
30–100 tons burthen, with 20–40 strong crews – for Icelandic grounds, whence they
returned with holds full of salted and barrelled cod in late August and September.
While the English Icelandic fishery appears to have ceased by the 1690s – having
peaked in the early 1630s, when some 160 vessels engaged in the fishery (Jones 2000:
106–10) – other Europeans continued to prosecute offshore fishing in Icelandic waters,
notably the Dutch during the eighteenth century, with the French dominating the
business for over a century from the 1780s (Thór 2009: 345–46). France’s principal
offshore interest, however, was the ‘green’ fishery conducted on the Newfoundland
banks from the 1540s, or possibly earlier (Candow 2009b: 418). In terms of modus
operandi, this business appears ‘to have borrowed heavily from the Dutch North Sea
68
herring fishery in that cod, like herring, was caught on the high seas and salted aboard
ship’ (Candow 2009a: 394). Baited hooks on lines paid out by men standing in tapered
barrels on platforms erected on the ship’s sides was the catching method deployed,
with the cod being treated, salted and barrelled afloat to yield a product that was
conveyed directly to France in the fishing ship when her hold was full. Practice altered
over time, the most significant variation being the development of ‘bank’ fishing by the
French and the British off Newfoundland and by New Englanders on the Scotian
Shelf. This was essentially a hybrid of inshore and offshore techniques, with fishing
vessels returning to adjacent coasts at regular intervals to land salted or ‘wet’ catches
for drying at shore stations on St Pierre, southeast Newfoundland and Nova Scotia
(Candow 2009a: 394–401).
In the late eighteenth century, the fisheries, in common with other economic
activities in the North Atlantic region, began to experience structural, technical and
market changes on an unprecedented scale. The dismantling of state controls and
monopolistic practices in Russia, Norway, Denmark and the mid-Atlantic islands
liberalized fishing effort and marketing, leading to increasing output and product
diversification (Lajus et al. 2009: 56–59; Nielssen 2009: 89–92; Thór 2009: 330,
340). In Newfoundland, the ‘ancient’ migratory fishery, which had reached its greatest
extent by many measures in the late 1780s, collapsed, never to recover, during the
wars that raged across the region over the following two decades (Starkey et al. 2000:
103–4). Further south, the New England fisheries were ‘revolutionized’ by the
Figure 4.2 A naval architect’s representation of an early fifteenth-century English dogger

Used with kind permission of Alan Hopper, Maritime Historical Studies Centre,
University of Hull
69
emergence in the 1830s of the mackerel fishery and, more especially, by the introduction
of ice as a preservative in the inshore cod fishery, which eliminated the need for shore
processing and facilitated the rapid growth of the fresh fish market (Candow 2009a:
401). A similar pattern was evident across the ocean, where fishermen from southwest
England – perhaps displaced by the demise of the migratory fishery in Newfoundland
– began deploying beam trawls in the North Sea to capture demersal species in the
1820s. Once the railways connected ports with the burgeoning urban districts of early
industrial England in the 1840s (Robinson 2000: 73–76; Gerrish 2000: 112–18),
white fish caught by sailing trawlers and delivered fresh to market – a new form of
inshore fishery that grew and spread to other countries after 1850 – swiftly developed
into the leading sector of the ‘modern’ North Atlantic fisheries.
YIELDS AND F L O W S
The scale of the early modern North Atlantic fisheries, both separately and in the
aggregate, is difficult to measure due to the paucity, inconsistency and doubtful
reliability of surviving sources of information. Nevertheless, numerous estimates of
effort and catches are available. These reveal, for instance, that approximately 12,000
men were engaged in the French Newfoundland fishery during the late sixteenth
century (Turgeon 2009: 37), while some 6,000 Englishmen travelled to work on
Newfoundland in 1615 (Starkey and Haines 2001: 5), 9,000 Icelandic fishermen
worked their island’s inshore waters in 1770 (Thór 2009: 348), and around 14,000
humans preyed on the cod stocks off Lofoten in 1829 (Nielssen 2009: 91). Among
the disparate figures that relate to output, it is apparent that in 1680 the North Sea
yielded between 25,000 and 35,000 metric tonnes (mt) of herring (Poulsen 2008:
69–70), and the Newfoundland fisheries (English and French) produced a total of
185,280 mt of cured cod (Turgeon 1995: 106), whereas in 1770 the equivalent
estimates stood at 40,000–60,000 mt of herring (Poulsen 2008: 69–70), and
260,232 mt of cod (Starkey and Haines 2001: 10). By the mid-nineteenth century,
calculations suggest that production levels had reached 200,000 mt of North Sea
herring (Poulsen 2008: 69–70), 322,000 mt of British Newfoundland cod (Starkey
and Haines 2001: 10), 185,000 mt of New England cod (Candow 2009b), and
164,000 mt of Norwegian stockfish (Nielssen 2009: 111), with a further 64,000 mt
of fish landed in Spain’s Atlantic ports (Carmona and López Losa 2009: 275).
Effort and yields of the magnitude suggested by these snapshots were significant to
the development of the Atlantic World. From a narrow business perspective, they
generated wealth for investors of capital in the catching, processing and retailing
sectors, income and employment for those whose labour was recruited to take,
transport, cure and sell fish, and food that was consumed by populations across the
region, in inland as well as coastal areas. Losses of vessels, crews, materiel and money
might also accrue from this business, while opportunity costs and negative long-term
impacts on fish stocks and marine habitats could ensue from the commodification of
living marine resources. From a broader, deeper Atlantic perspective, the fisheries
entailed the delivery of food from points of extraction to places of consumption by
virtue of the movement of resources and goods around and across the ocean. In
essence, they were supply chains, the links in which comprised flows of various types
and amplitudes. Commodity flows involving the exchange of fish products for other
70
goods enabled societies on the fringes and islands of the Atlantic to exploit their
comparative advantages. Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic stockfish, for instance,
was exchanged for textiles manufactured from English wool in Flemish towns, and
grain from central Europe, while herring extracted from the North Sea by the Dutch
paid for the primary and manufactured commodities they procured in all parts of
their far-flung trading world, and the salted cod of the inshore, migratory inshore
and offshore fisheries of northeast north America was conveyed to southern Europe
and the Caribbean, where it was traded for wine, fruit, specie or rum (Pope 2004;
Candow 2006). Fish was therefore one of the principal commodities in the commercial
nexus that lay at the base of the Atlantic economy.
People travelled along the coasts and across the ocean in the quest to take fish.
Some set forth specifically to find commercially viable stocks of fish, with voyages to
the northwest Atlantic in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries offering a
prime example of the exploratory role that the fisheries might play. Countless
numbers were shipped to the catching zones, with fishermen from the North Sea
littoral, the British Isles and Iberia ‘following the fish’ to Shetland, Iceland,
Newfoundland and New England, while Norwegians and Germans moved north to
engage in the cod fisheries of Nordland and Finnmark. Some of these movements
were short in terms of both distance and time; for instance, many agricultural
workers in coastal districts across the region engaged in the fisheries on a seasonal
basis, which might oblige them to live in comparatively rudimentary dwellings in
marginal settlements for just a few weeks each year. In other settings, however,
seasonal migrations were not only of longer duration, but were also a first step
towards permanent settlement in places adjacent to the fishing grounds. The ways in
which the extent and character of the fishing effort could shape migratory and
settlement patterns are exemplified by Newfoundland’s experience from 1500
through to the early nineteenth century. For much of this period, over-wintering was
discouraged by the merchants who dominated the business, hazardous due to the
island’s harsh climate and limited resource base, and socially unappealing because
of the virtual absence of women, families and civil institutions. But once the
population of the island began to grow in the second quarter of the eighteenth
century, the settlements that developed not only reflected the seasonality and
commercial fluctuations of the fishery, but also the socio-cultural and political
characteristics of the areas where the incoming residents originated – that is,
southwest England and, from the early nineteenth century, Ireland (Handcock 1989:
Pope 2004; Pope 2009).
Lifeways, cultures and modi operandi flowed in other directions, notably in the
Nordic realm. This had been manifest in the Viking Age (c. 750–1100), when the
farming–fishing dual economy practised by Scandinavians was transplanted to the
places they settled, notably the Shetlands, Orkneys, Faroes and Iceland. Such diffusion
of process and product had longstanding ramifications for such places:
The long-term consequences of the pre-commercial Norse fish distribution network

‘going global’ were profound. The commonplace expertise of Nordic fisher-folk
and Nordic chieftains in making and marketing dried fish, though an unworthy
subject for sagas, may well be one of the most lasting legacies of the Viking era.
(Perdikaris and McGovern 2009: 87)
71
Such deep-seated technical and cultural connections underpinned the emergence of

important commercial ties between northern Europe and these Atlantic islands, with
capital and mercantile expertise flowing westwards to procure the islanders’ stockfish
for despatch to the markets of Europe via entrepôts such as Bergen and Copenhagen
(Thorleifsen 2009). The fisheries therefore served as a binding agent in the Nordic
sphere of influence – the Norgesvoldet – that has shaped the political, economic and
cultural development of the northern reaches of the Atlantic over the last millennium.
REF EREN CE S
Amorim, I. (2009a) ‘Portuguese fisheries, c.1100–1830’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I.
Heidbrink (eds) A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early Times to
the mid-Nineteenth Century, Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
——(2009b) ‘The evolution of Portuguese fisheries in the medieval and early modern period:
a fiscal approach’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds) Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of
the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, Leiden: Brill.
Barkham, M.M. (2009) ‘The offshore and distant-water fisheries of the Spanish Basques,
c.1500–1650’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I. Heidbrink (eds) A History of the North
Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early Times to the mid-Nineteenth Century,
Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
Barnes, R. (2009) Property Rights and Natural Resources, Oxford: Hart.
Barrett, J.H., Locker, A.M. and Roberts, C.M. (2009) ‘“Dark Age economics” revisited: the
English fish-bone evidence, 600–1600’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds) Beyond the
Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, Leiden: Brill.
Bolster, W.J. (2006) ‘Opportunities in marine environmental history’, Environmental History,
11 (3): 567–97.
——(2008) ‘Putting the ocean into Atlantic history: maritime communities and marine ecology
in the northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800’, American Historical Review, 113 (1): 19–47.
——(2012) The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.
Broeze, F. (1989) ‘From the periphery to the mainstream: the challenge of Australia’s maritime
history’, Great Circle, 11 (1): 1–13.
——(1995) (ed.) Maritime History at the Crossroads: A Critical Review of Recent Historiography,
St John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association.
Butcher, D (2000) ‘The herring fisheries in the early modern period: Lowestoft as microcosm’,
in D.J. Starkey, C. Reid and N.R. Ashcroft (eds) England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial
Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, London: Chatham.
Candow, J.E. (2006) ‘Salt fish and slavery’, in D.J. Starkey and J.E. Candow (eds) The North
Atlantic Fisheries: Supply, Marketing and Consumption, 1560–1990, Hull: North Atlantic
Fisheries History Association.
——(2009a) ‘The organization and conduct of European and domestic fisheries in northeast
North America, 1502–1854’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I. Heidbrink (eds) A History
of the North Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early Times to the mid-Nineteenth
Century, Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
——(2009b) ‘Migrants and residents: the interplay between European and domestic fisheries
in northeast North America, 1502–1854’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I. Heidbrink (eds)
A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early Times to the mid-
Nineteenth Century, Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
Carmona, J. and López Losa, E. (2009) ‘Spain’s Atlantic coast fisheries, c.1100–1880’, in D.J.
Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I. Heidbrink (eds) A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1,
From Early Times to the mid-Nineteenth Century, Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
72
Childs, W.R. (2000) ‘Fishing and fisheries in the Middle Ages: the eastern fisheries’, in D.J.
Starkey, C. Reid and N.R. Ashcroft (eds) England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea
Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, London: Chatham.
Cipolla, C.M. (1993, 3rd edn) Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and
Economy, London: Routledge.
Coull, J.R. (1996) Scotland’s Sea Fisheries: A Historical Geography, Edinburgh: John Donald.
Cowx, I.G. (2002) ‘Recreational fishing’, in P.J.B. Hart and J.D. Reynolds (eds) Handbook of
Fish Biology and Fisheries: Volume 2, Fisheries, Oxford: Blackwell.
Deligne, C. (2009) ‘Carp in the city: fish-farming ponds and urban dynamics in Brabant and
Hainaut, c.1100–1500’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds) Beyond the Catch:
Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, Leiden: Brill.
De Vries, J. (1984) European Urbanization 1500–1800, London: Methuen.
Gardiner, R. (series ed.) (1992–96) Conway’s History of the Ship, London: Conway Maritime
Press (12 volumes).
Gardiner, R. and Unger, R. (eds) (1994) Cogs, Caravels and Galleons: The Sailing Ship 1000–
1650, London: Conway Maritime Press.
Gardiner, R. and Bosscher, P. (eds) (1995) The Heyday of Sail: The Merchant Sailing Ship,
1650–1830, London: Conway Maritime Press.
Gerrish, M. (2000) ‘Following the fish: nineteenth-century migration and the diffusion of
trawling’, in D.J. Starkey, C. Reid and N.R. Ashcroft (eds) England’s Sea Fisheries: The
Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, London: Chatham.
Gray, M. (1979) The Fishing Industries of Scotland, 1790–1914, Oxford: Aberdeen University
Studies.
Gray, T. (2000) ‘The distant-water fisheries of south west England in the early modern period:
fisheries to the east and to the west’, in D.J. Starkey, C. Reid and N.R. Ashcroft (eds)
England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300,
London: Chatham.
Greene, J.P. and Morgan, P.D. (2009) Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Haines, M. (2000) ‘The herring fisheries, 1750–1900’, in D.J. Starkey, C. Reid and N.R.
Ashcroft (eds) England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales
since 1300, London: Chatham.
Handcock, W.G. (1989) So Longe as There Comes No Women: Origins of English Settlement
in Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland: Breakwater.
Hansen, L.I. (2009) ‘Sami fishing in the pre-modern era: household sustenance and market
relations’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I. Heidbrink (eds) A History of the North Atlantic
Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early Times to the mid-Nineteenth Century, Bremerhaven:
Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
Innis, H.A. (1954, 2nd edn) The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Jackson, G. (2000) ‘State concern for the fisheries, 1485–1815’, in D.J. Starkey, C. Reid and
N.R. Ashcroft (eds) England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and
Wales since 1300, London: Chatham.
Jackson, J.B.C., Alexander, K. and Sala, E. (2011) Shifting Baselines: The Past and Future of
Ocean Fisheries, Washington DC: Island Press, 2011.
Jones, E. (2000) ‘England’s Icelandic fishery in the early modern period’, in D.J. Starkey, C.
Reid and N.R. Ashcroft (eds) England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of
England and Wales since 1300, London: Chatham.
Keenlyside, D.L. and Andreasen, C. (2009) ‘Indigenous fishing in northeast North America’, in D.J.
Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I. Heidbrink (eds) A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1,
From Early Times to the mid-Nineteenth Century, Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
73
Kowaleski, M. (2000) ‘Fishing and fisheries in the Middle Ages: the western fisheries’, in D.J.
Lajus, J., Kraikovski, A.V. and Yurchenko, A. (2009) ‘The fisheries of the Russian north,
c.1300–1850’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I. Heidbrink (eds) A History of the North
Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early Times to the mid-Nineteenth Century,
Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
LME (2009) http://lme.edc.uri.edu. Accessed 23 June 2014.
McKenzie, M.G. (2007) ‘Baiting our memories: the impact of offshore technology change on inshore
species around Cape Cod, 1860–95’, in D.J. Starkey, P. Holm and M. Barnard (eds) Oceans
Past: Management Insights from the History of Marine Animal Populations, London, Earthscan.
Michell, A.R. (1977) ‘The European fisheries in early modern history’, in E.E. Rich and C.H.
Wilson (eds) The Cambridge Economic History of Europe: Volume 5, The Economic
Organization of Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nielssen, A.R. (2009) ‘Norwegian fisheries, c.1100–1850’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I.
Pawlyn, T. (2000) ‘The South West pilchard, trawl and mackerel fisheries, 1770–1850’, in D.J.
Payne, B.J. (2010) Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North
Atlantic, 1818–1910, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Perdikaris, S. and McGovern, T.H. (2009) ‘Viking Age economics and the origins of commercial
cod fisheries in the North Atlantic’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds) Beyond the
Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, Leiden: Brill.
Pétursdóttir, S.S. (1998) ‘God’s gift: salmon fishing in Iceland in the Middle Ages’, in P. Holm
and D.J. Starkey (eds) North Atlantic Fisheries: Markets and Modernisation, Esbjerg:
North Atlantic Fisheries History Association.
Pope P. (2004) Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Pope, P. (2009) ‘Transformation of the maritime cultural landscape of Atlantic Canada by
migratory European fishermen, 1500–1800’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds) Beyond
the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, Leiden: Brill.
Poulsen, B. (2008) Dutch Herring: An Environmental History, c. 1600–1860, Amsterdam: Askant.
Poulsen, R.T. (2007) An Environmental History of North Sea Ling and Cod Fisheries, 1840–
1914, Esbjerg: Fiskeri-og Søfartsmuseet.
Robinson, R. (1996) Trawling: The Rise and Fall of the British Trawl Fishery, Exeter:
University of Exeter Press.
——(2000) ‘The line and trawl fisheries in the age of sail’, in D.J. Starkey, C. Reid and N.R.
Ashcroft (eds) England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales
since 1300, London: Chatham.
——(2011) ‘Hook, line and sinker: fishing history – where have we been, where are we now
and where are we going?’ Mariner’s Mirror, 97 (1): 167–79.
Rosenberg, A.A., Bolster, W.J., Alexander, K.E, Leavenworth, W.B., Cooper, A.B., and
McKenzie, M.G. (2005) ‘The history of ocean resources: modeling cod biomass using
historical records’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 3 (2): 78–84.
Sendahl, J. (2003) ‘The Bohuslän herring fishery, c.1752–1808’, in D.J. Starkey, P. Holm, J Th.
Thór and B. Andersson (eds) Politics and People in the North Atlantic Fisheries since 1485,
Hull: North Atlantic Fisheries History Association.
Sicking, L. and Abreu-Ferreira, D. (eds) (2009) Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North
Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, Leiden: Brill.
74
Sicking, L. and Van Vliet, A.P. (2009) ‘“Our Triumph of Holland”: war, violence, and the
herring fishery of the Low Countries, c.1400–1650’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds)
Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850,
Leiden: Brill.
Starkey, D.J. (1992) ‘Devonians and the Newfoundland trade’, in M. Duffy, S. Fisher, B.
Greenhill, D.J. Starkey and J. Youings (eds) The New Maritime History of Devon: Volume 1,
From Early Times to the late Eighteenth Century, London: Conway Maritime Press.
——(1997) ‘Introduction’, in D.J. Starkey and A.G. Jamieson (eds) Exploiting the Sea: Aspects
of Britain’s Maritime Economy since 1870, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Starkey, D.J., Reid, C. and Ashcroft, N.R. (eds) (2000) England’s Sea Fisheries: The Commercial
Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, London: Chatham.
Starkey, D.J. and Haines, M. (2001) ‘The Newfoundland fisheries, c.1500–1900: a British
perspective’, in P. Holm, T.D. Smith and D.J. Starkey (eds) The Exploited Seas: New
Directions for Marine Environmental History, St. John’s, Newfoundland: International
Maritime Economic History Association.
Starkey, D.J., Holm P. and Barnard M. (eds) (2007) Oceans Past: Management Insights from
the History of Marine Animal Populations, London: Earthscan.
Starkey, D.J., Thór, J.Th. and Heidbrink, I. (eds) (2009) A History of the North Atlantic
Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early Times to the mid-Nineteenth Century, Bremerhaven:
Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
Starkey, D.J. and Heidbrink, I. (eds) (2012) A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 2,
From the 1850s to the early Twenty-First Century, Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
Thór, J.Th. (2002) Sjósókn og sjávarfang: Saga sjávarútvegs á Íslandi I. bindi. Árabáta-og
skútuöld, Akureyri: Vélaöld.
——(2003) Uppgangsár og barningsskeið: Saga sjávarútvegs á Íslandi II. bindi 1902–1939,
Akureyri: Vélaöld.
Thór, J.Th. (2009) ‘Icelandic fisheries, c.900–1900’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór and I.
Thorleifsen, D. (2009) ‘The role of fishing in colonial Greenland’, in D.J. Starkey, J.Th. Thór
and I. Heidbrink (eds) A History of the North Atlantic Fisheries: Volume 1, From Early
Times to the mid-Nineteenth Century, Bremerhaven: Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum.
Turgeon, L. (1995) ‘Fluctuations in cod and whale stocks in the North Atlantic during the
eighteenth century’, in D. Vickers (ed.) Marine Resources and Human Societies in the North
Atlantic since 1500, St. John’s, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research.
——(2009) ‘Codfish, consumption and colonization: the creation of the French Atlantic world
during the sixteenth century’, in C.A. Williams (ed.) Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic
World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move, Farnham: Ashgate.
Van Bochove, C. (2009) ‘The “golden mountain”: an economic analysis of Holland’s early
modern herring fisheries’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds) Beyond the Catch:
Van Dam, P.J.E.M. (2009) ‘Fish for feast and fast: fish consumption in the Netherlands in the
late middle ages’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds) Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of
the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, Leiden: Brill.
Vickers, D. (1994) Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County,
Massachusetts, 1630–1850, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Woolgar, C.M. (2000) ‘“Take this penance now, and afterwards the fare will improve”: seafood
and late medieval diet’, in D.J. Starkey, C. Reid and N.R. Ashcroft (eds) England’s Sea
Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300, London: Chatham.
Wubs-Mrozewicz, J. (2009) ‘Fish, stock and barrel: changes in the stockfish trade in northern
Europe, c.1360–1560’, in L. Sicking and D. Abreu-Ferreira (eds) Beyond the Catch:
75
PART II
THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLES

CHAPTER FIVE
FACING EAST FROM THE SOUTH

Indigenous Americans in the
mostly Iberian Atlantic World
Laura E. Matthew
W here do Indigenous peoples of the Americas fit within the Atlantic World
paradigm? It cannot be imagined without them. Like their counterparts in the
North Atlantic, Natives in the mostly Iberian South Atlantic were prominent allies in
European military conquests and active participants in an extraordinary cultural and
intellectual exchange. Their lands and labour were essential to the wealth of new
empires. Their agriculture helped trigger a demographic boom in Europe. Like Africans
and to a lesser extent Europeans, Native Americans experienced dramatic relocation
and dislocation in the South Atlantic during the early modern period. ‘Indians, far
from being marginal to the Atlantic experience, were, in fact, as central as Africans,’
writes Jace Weaver, arguing for a Red Atlantic to parallel Paul Gilroy’s Black one.
‘Native resources, ideas, and peoples themselves traveled the Atlantic with regularity
and became among the most basic defining components of Atlantic cultural exchange.’1
Yet as Paul Cohen has pointed out, there are good reasons for historians of the
Indigenous peoples of the Americas to hold the Atlantic World at bay.2 The dizzying
sense of movement that so often characterizes Atlantic studies stands in stark contrast
to Indigenous America’s powerful sense of historical permanence: the ‘we people
here’ that the Nahuas of central Mexico used to describe themselves in their own
language rather than adopt the Spanish misnomer indios.3 Indigenous Americans
were and are the only members of the Atlantic World rooted in the hemisphere ‘since
time immemorial’, as they often claimed in Spain’s colonial-era courts. In the face of
warfare, epidemic disease, and colonization, some Natives reconstituted their
communities in relation to known geographies. Others proclaimed their indigeneity
despite significant migrations.4 And while some Natives were coastal peoples,
continents rather than oceans constitute the centre of Indigenous American history.
Natives did not cross the sea to the same degree as Europeans and Africans during
the early modern period, and for Indigenous history the Pacific represents the
shoreline of major civilizations rather than an even more remote outpost of Europe
or Africa. To fold Indigenous history into the Atlantic World therefore runs the risk
of academic cannibalism. Too often, Native America serves merely as a tragic
backdrop to the main stories of Atlantic history thus far: the global rise of Europe
and the African slave trade.
79
– Laura E. Matthew –
My answer to this dilemma is not to provide an overview of Indigenous history

under European colonialism, an approach that evades the question of ‘where Indigenous
peoples fit’. Nor do I wish here to catalogue the ways in which Native America
inevitably participated in the rhythms of the Atlantic world, though this approach –
exemplified most recently by Weaver – has its merits.5 Instead, I will explore three key
themes of Atlantic World history that have mostly been developed from a European or
African perspective: imperial warfare, transatlantic migration, and imagining the
Other. What happens when we interrogate these themes from the perspective of Native
America, in this case from the Caribbean and northern Mesoamerica to Patagonia? Do
the themes still make sense? Are the histories they tell still Atlantic?
BEYOND CONQUEST: IM P E RIAL W ARF ARE

Atlantic history tends to distinguish between the mostly Spanish, sixteenth-century
military conquests of Native America and the violence incited by Dutch, French, and
English challenges to the Iberian empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
There are good reasons to do so; the mutual shock of initial contact combined with the
fall of such large, hierarchical polities as the Mexica and Inca empires would not be
repeated.6 From an Indigenous historical perspective, however, early conquest wars
and later imperial rivalries are not so easily separated. Imperial rivalries within and
amongst the Mexica and Inca sowed as much destruction as the European invaders,
and were replicated on a sometimes smaller scale in nearly all successive encounters
with Europeans. The sixteenth century was not uniquely Spanish or even Iberian;
French, Italians, English, Irish and Dutch entered the South Atlantic and engaged
Native Americans almost immediately. Militarized incursions into un-subjugated
Native territory continued into the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. And like their
European counterparts, Native leaders consistently confronted the perils and possibilities
of the Atlantic World by adopting new methods of warfare to their advantage and
exploiting tensions among strangers, from the sixteenth century onwards.
It has long been recognized that internal and imperial rivalries played a major role
in the downfall of both the Mexica and the Inca empires. From 1519 to 1521, the
Spanish served as crucial allies in what was essentially an uprising of massive
proportions against the Mexica centred at Tenochtitlan. Yucatecan Maya initially
attacked the Spanish expedition led by Hernando Cortés in 1519. But as Cortés
traveled up the Gulf Coast he encountered informants eager to stoke his interest in
Tenochtitlan with tales of great riches and abusive leadership. The independent
altepetl (city state) of Tlaxcala, implacable enemy of the Mexica, attacked the Spanish
as they approached Tlaxcalteca territory. At the point of doing away with the intruders,
the Tlaxcalteca then proposed an alliance against the Mexica. The partnership was
sealed by a joint massacre against the ancient altepetl of Cholula, bringing the pacified
pilgrimage site into the alliance as well. Accompanied by thousands of Tlaxcalteca
and Cholulteca warriors, the Spanish were escorted inside Tenochtitlan and received
as guests. For six months, the strangeness of the situation and Moctezuma’s clear
concern provided Tlaxcala and its partners a perfect opportunity to destabilize the
imperial city before being forcibly chased out in June 1520. During the following year
the insurgent allies rebuilt their forces, incorporating disaffected altepetl subject to the
Mexica. They attacked Tenochtitlan again in June 1521, with a new partner:
80
– chapter 5: Facing East from the South –
Ixtlilxochitl of Texcoco, a breakaway member of the Mexica’s own Triple Alliance.

Weakened by siege and smallpox, Tenochtitlan fell in August of that year. As William
Prescott put it in his epic, nineteenth-century Anglo-American history of the event,
‘the Indian empire was in a manner conquered by Indians’.7
The Spanish conquistadors, despite being the natural heroes of their own letters and
chronicles, reported that tens of thousands of Nahuas and others fought alongside and
vastly outnumbered them in Mesoamerica. But seeing the conquest of Tenochtitlan
from a Native perspective means more than simply acknowledging the extent to which
Natives participated in the event. Historians have recently emphasized the Mesoamerican
flavour of Hernando Cortés’s and other Spanish conquistadors’ entradas into
Tenochtitlan and later, to the edges of the former Mexica empire.8 Spaniards relied on
Mesoamerican messengers, military and political intelligence, and knowledge of the
region for cues regarding future campaigns. They went where the Mexica had gone,
towards regions of significant wealth or production on the suggestion of Mesoamerican
leaders who also gathered troops, coordinated supplies along the invasion routes,
communicated with resistant towns, and colonized recently pacified areas based on their
own past experience and strategic aims. The Mexica were key players in these early
efforts, supported by their vast military infrastructure. Michel Oudijk and Matthew
Figure 5.1 Tlaxcalteca and Spaniards fighting the Mexica Tenochca at Tenochtitlan
© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images
81
Restall deem the spread of joint Mesoamerican-Spanish forces extending from Peru to
New Mexico ‘precedented expansion’, as defeated yet still powerful polities shifted
alliances and were recruited for new campaigns in ways that would have seemed utterly
familiar to Mesoamericans.9 While Spaniards brought valuable new technologies, an
element of unpredictability, and in some cases a desperate viciousness, ‘Spanish’
campaigns against Mesoamerican polities in the sixteenth century followed recognizably
Mesoamerican patterns and goals and were fought mostly by Mesoamericans themselves,
sometimes entirely independent of any Spanish participation or even awareness.
The Inca empire, too, was famously brought down as much by intra-imperial and
regional rivalries as by Spanish attack. The death around 1528 of the Inca Huayna
Capac, head of the four-cornered empire Tahuantinsuyu – possibly of smallpox,
which arrived in Peru before the Spanish did – set off a fratricidal war of succession
into which the Spaniards were inserted. One son, Atahuallpa, seized control of his
father’s armies in the north. Another son, Huascar, seized the capital city of Cuzco in
the south and led a campaign against Atahuallpa that resulted in Huascar’s defeat.
After the famous, violent encounter between Atahuallpa and the Spanish conquistador
Pizarro in November 1532 that led to Atahuallpa’s capture, Atahuallpa ordered
Huascar’s execution in Cuzco from his own captivity in Cajamarca. Another son of
Huayna Capac, Manco Inca, allied with the Spanish to take over Cuzco after
Atahuallpa’s execution by Pizarro. Manco Inca abandoned Cuzco to the Spanish in
1536. His sons maintained independent Inca rule in Vilcabamba for almost forty
years, until the defeat of Tupac Amaru in 1572.10 Meanwhile, other Andeans allied
with the Spanish against the Inca. The Cañari of modern-day Ecuador and the
Chachapoya of the regions north of Cuzco had only been subjugated by the Inca a
half century earlier, and sided with Huascar against Atahuallpa. They remained loyal
to the Spanish when Manco Inca later broke his own Inca-Spanish alliance, with
varied results across their dispersed colonial-era settlements.11 And in Cuzco, the new
Spanish ally Paullu Inca carefully built his own political dynasty based on his
increasingly sophisticated reading of Spanish ideas of lordship. Andeans gathered
intelligence about and manipulated the Spanish as much as the other way around,
and maintained particular, even triumphant, memories of the period.12
The historiographical prominence of these imperial defeats is what sets the early
Spanish conquests apart, not any particular patterns of alliance and warfare. At the
same time that the Spanish were fighting wars of conquest in Mexico and Peru, both
Spaniards and Portuguese were making steady but less spectacular inroads into
independent regions such as the Muisca territory of what would become the Kingdom
of New Granada (Colombia), the Brazilian coast, and the Rio de la Plata area, with
varying mixtures of violence and diplomacy.13 Challenges to Iberian expansion arose
almost immediately from English and French pirates threatening both the Atlantic
and Pacific Coasts throughout the sixteenth century, and from English, German and
Dutch explorations and settlements along the Atlantic coast beginning as early as the
1530s. In every instance, Natives resisted and aided Europeans according to their
own strategic aims. Northeastern Brazil and Guyana, where no Native empire existed,
is a case in point. Speakers of Karib, Awarak, and Tupi languages alternately fought,
fled and allied with the Portuguese, English, Irish, French, Dutch and Scots who
established trading posts along the Atlantic coast. The intruding Europeans depended
on Native allies to protect them against each other, against hostile Native groups,
82
and eventually against African slave revolts on sugar plantations. One Native lineage
in the Darién peninsula, the Carrisolis, positioned themselves as the main point of
contact between Spanish administrators and potential Native allies based on their
descent from a Spaniard captured and adopted as a boy.14 These Native-European
alliances, however, depended on remuneration and were easily dissolved. Where
Europeans saw treachery and betrayal by subjected Indians, Natives saw opportunities
for trade and the maintenance of their autonomy. At the same time, European
incursions led to new intra-Native alliances, conflicts and migrations, leading to
wholly new tribal configurations still surviving in the Amazon today. In northeastern
South America, as Neil Whitehead put it, ‘tribes made states and states made tribes.’15
In the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, the history of European
invasion of the Americas looks much the same. Natives continued to resist and aid
Europeans, to maintain their own polities, to suffer and survive epidemic disease, and
to play European rivals off each other well beyond the early modern period, in ways
that strongly echo the early conquest and colonial experience. In northern New Spain,
the Comanches, Apaches, Kiowas, Caddos, Pawnees, Tonkawas, and other Native
groups so thoroughly controlled their own and surrounding territories between 1750
and 1850 that they rendered European and Euro-American claims to land and power
practically meaningless. Native trade and diplomacy purposefully pitted the French,
British, and Spanish against each other in the eighteenth century, and the United States
against Mexico in the nineteenth. At their height of territorial and political dominion
the Comanches were so unassailable that Pekka Hämäläinen has classified their
network of family alliances an empire akin to that of the Mongols. Like the sixteenth-
century Natives of northeastern Brazil, the Comanches allied with U.S. agents only as
long as they received remuneration (sometimes as ransom for stolen captives), and
viewed offers of money as gifts between friends rather than indications of submission.16
Like the Spanish-descended Carrisolis of Darién in the seventeenth century, Quanah
Parker, the son of an Anglo captive woman and a Comanche man, would be the
primary point of contact between his tribe and the U.S. government in the 1860s and
1870s though with a decidedly less friendly beginning and less assimilationist attitude.
At the other end of the Iberian empire the newly christened Mapuche – in reality, like
the Comanche, a shifting mix of alliances and kinship groups – also maintained their
independence and control of substantial territory well beyond the beginnings of
Chilean and Argentinian statehood. Once again, some chose to ally with invading
powers while others resisted.17 As had been true for the ‘Chichimeca’ at the fringes of
the Mexica empire and the resistant Inca of Vilcabamba in the sixteenth century, only
with concerted, violent repression and the continued pressure of European and Euro-
American colonization – not only Spanish, Anglo-American, Chilean, and Argentinian,
but also German, British, French, and Italian – would the Comanches in the north and
the Mapuches in the south finally be subjugated.
In Atlantic history, imperial warfare almost always refers to conflicts between
Europeans. It is temporally situated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and
geographically near the water (on the ocean, in the Caribbean, along coastlines) or in
imperial borderlands (which as Claudio Saunt has pointed out were also Native
homelands).18 But from a South Atlantic Native perspective, the term ‘imperial
warfare’ also brings to mind the sixteenth-century Mexica and Inca whose own
militarism and rivalries are impossible to disentangle from their experience of
83
European conquest. It alludes to the shifting Native alliances that characterized not
only these early conflicts but many hundreds of smaller or less famous military
encounters throughout the early modern period and across the American continents.
It does not preclude the epic battles for Comanchería and Patagonia in the nineteenth
century, or the ‘rebellions’ of Tupac Amaru in Peru and the Caste War of Yucatan.
What seems most pertinent in all these military encounters is their inherent sense of
instability and insecurity, which quickly hardened into a ‘colonial normal’
characterized by unequal power relations and enforced by violence.19 Bernard Bailyn’s
characterization of the early Atlantic World as imperiled by ‘authorized brutality
without restraint’ can be extended far beyond the sixteenth century.20
INDIANS IN UNEXPE CTE D P L ACE S :

TRANSATLANTIC M IG RATIO N
Transatlantic migration from east to west – whether voluntary or forced, European
or African – has been a foundational topic of Atlantic Worlds research. Intra- and
intercontinental migrations of Indigenous peoples constitute a rich vein of research
for the history of Native America. But what about Natives who traveled from west
to east? It is an indication of how intermittently this question has been asked that a
recent surge of interest in the topic has rested firmly on the foundations of mid-
twentieth century scholarship.
The largest numbers of Natives traveling to Europe in the sixteenth century were
slaves and servants, many of them children who came primarily from the Caribbean
in the earliest years of colonization. Slaving was a natural extension of Christian
expansion during medieval times and intensified after the fall of Constantinople in
1453 and the progression of the Portuguese into the Azores and Madeira Islands and
northwest Africa. Christopher Columbus and his associates brought a dozen or so
Native slaves from the Caribbean to be shown and sold in their first journey back to
Europe, in 1493. By 1495 slaving had become a formal enterprise, and Columbus
famously brought some 500 Native captives to Iberia in four ships that year. In a
pattern that would be repeated, some died on the journey while others became so ill
that they were left in Andalucía while the little more than the half remaining were
sent to Barcelona to be presented to the queen. Isabel I was apparently disturbed by
the sight of these survivors, and suspended any future slaving until the legal question
of the Indians’ status as vassals of the Crown could be resolved. Columbus and
others meanwhile continued to bring hundreds of Native captives to Iberia, whom
they sold primarily in the markets of Seville and Lisbon.21
In 1500, queen Isabel declared the liberty of any Natives enslaved in Spain without
proper paperwork. Contradictory royal statements in subsequent years allowed for the
enslavement of ‘cannibals’ and the voluntary passage of Natives to Spain with
authorization – rules that were bent or broken to continue the trade. Isabel I’s request in
her will that her husband clarify the proper treatment of the Crown’s newest vassals in
Spanish territory was followed by a royal council regarding policies of ‘just war’. The
rate of Native slaves being imported into Europe slowed, but did not stop. Slavers
continued to bring Native captives from Spanish America to Lisbon, then sold them as
‘Brazilians’ or ‘indios de Calicut’ since it was legal to buy Natives enslaved by the
Portuguese. Other Natives – both newcomers and those already enslaved in the Iberian
84
peninsula – were classified as ‘moros’, ‘loros’, or ‘berberiscos’ (Muslims from north and
west Africa) or as ‘moriscos’ (Muslims from the peninsula), all of whose enslavement was
also legal. Natives from Portuguese Brazil were increasingly labeled ‘black’ to distinguish
them from illegally captured indios of the Spanish realms, though all indications are that
the numbers of Natives who were transported from Brazil in Iberia in the sixteenth
century also remained low due to their vulnerability to Old World diseases. (Disease also
threatened Brasilianen Natives who fought as allies of the Dutch in Africa in the mid-
seventeenth century; a majority died, mostly of yellow fever rather than battle wounds).22
Esteban Mira Caballos has quantified 2,442 Natives brought to Spain between 1493–
1550, over 80 percent of these from Hispaniola before 1502 but with significant surges
from New Spain and northern South America between 1513–17 and 1528–32. While
surely lower than the true total, the decreasing numbers and lack of documentary
evidence of Native slaves being brought into Iberia en masse after 1550 suggest a tapering
off in the trade towards the second half of the sixteenth century, in part due to the ban
on Native slavery within Spanish realms instituted by the New Laws of 1542.23
What was life like for these Native American slaves in Iberia? If they had not
already been, they were branded on the face, usually with the date of sale and name of
owner, a practice prohibited in Spain in 1532 but still practiced in the 1550s. As was
typical of Iberian slavery, they served as household slaves who worked for the clergy,
court, merchants and artisans, sometimes learning new crafts and practicing them
independently. Some had come to Iberia as paid servants traveling with their masters,
but found themselves treated or even sold as slaves in the peninsula. Many lived a
peripatetic life, moving from household to household and city to city. Some became
homeless and/or beggars, to be mentioned in court cases and concerned complaints
issued by city administrators. Natives were baptized in Spanish churches, and when
they married, tended to marry other Natives or perhaps Mestizos. In the second half
of the sixteenth century some petitioned the Council of the Indies in Spain for their
freedom on the basis of having been illegally enslaved, or sometimes simply out of a
desire to return to the Americas. Those whose petitions were successful were supposed
to have their passage paid by the Crown, but records indicate that many ended up
stranded in the port city of Seville, legally free but unable to afford the trip home.24
Although their mortality rates from the crossing were often high, things were not
necessarily as bleak for ‘criados’ – both Natives and Mestizos – who were adopted by
Iberian clergy, conquistadors and administrators eager to train collaborators for their
Christianizing mission and to demonstrate the exotic wonders of the New World.
Cristobal Colón brought Natives captured in Hispaniola to Spain to be trained as
interpreters in his first return voyage in 1493; in 1515–16 the archbishop of Seville
received another such group to be trained as translators at the city’s monastery of San
Leandro, where the few who survived were seen playing their famous ball game.25 In
multiple trips beginning in 1519 Hernando Cortés brought Native performers to
impress the Hapsburg court, servants and noble sons whom he intended to distribute
amongst Spanish monasteries.26 Beyond the dangers of mortal illness, crossing the
Atlantic could mean both risk and refuge for these ‘go-betweens’.27 Fr. Calixto de San
José Tupak Inka, for instance, was an Inca descendant and Mestizo who served the
Franciscan order as an adopted servant (donado) in Peru. After a Native uprising
attacked the Franciscan missions, in 1742 Fr. Calixto became the order’s ambassador
to the Inca nobility. In 1748 he traveled illegally to Spain with a fellow Franciscan to
85
warn the Crown of the nobility’s unrest, chasing down the king’s carriage on the road
towards a hunting expedition.28 Fr. Calixto does not seem to have suffered in Spain
for his boldness, professing as a Franciscan lay brother in 1751 and being aided by the
Franciscans in acquiring license and money to return to Peru in 1753. Promptly,
however, the viceroy of Peru accused him of sedition, dwelling on his Indianness and
the ‘natural inconstancy of his kind’.29 Fr. Calixto was arrested, sent in chains back to
Spain, and died there comfortably but confined to a Franciscan convent in Granada.
Mestizo children of Spanish fathers and Indigenous mothers were particularly liable
to be sent to Spain in the first generations of European settlement of the Americas.
Young Martín Cortés, son of Hernando Cortés and his Nahua translator and partner
Malintzin, was only six years old when he traveled with his father to visit the Hapsburg
court in 1529. He remained in Spain to be part of Prince Philip’s retinue while his
father went back to Mexico, and did not return until 1562.30 The transatlantic
experience of Mestizo children like Martín Cortés depended to a great extent on their
father’s wealth, status and personal concern for their wellbeing. Most were sent to the
households of their Spanish father’s relatives to be raised, sometimes by an abandoned
but legal wife. Most were generally well provisioned as a matter of paternal responsibility
and even love. As Jane Mangan has pointed out, European-born fathers who sent their
children back to their European families were in a profound way sending them ‘home’.
But although these children’s transatlantic experiences were generally not as traumatic
as those of Indigenous slaves, they could nevertheless be difficult. Crossing the Atlantic
meant forcible separation not only from their Indigenous families and culture but more
painfully, from their mother – whose loss is often perceptible in bequests left many
years later to children still in Spain who had never been seen again.31
These children might or might not be welcomed in their new homes. They often
assimilated into Spanish society, but not all found that process easy or entirely
desirable, as exemplified by one of the most famous cases of Mestizo transatlantic
crossings: that of Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, or el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Born in
1539 to Spanish captain Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega and the Inca princess Chimpu
Ocllo (Isabel Suárez), Suárez de Figueroa was raised in a bicultural, bilingual
household until age 10 when his father contracted marriage with a young Spanish
woman and removed him from his mother’s care. Upon his father’s death in 1559,
Suárez de Figueroa traveled to Spain to continue his education as his father’s will had
requested and for which he received a substantial sum of money. He presented himself
to the Spanish court seeking favours befitting the rank of both his mother and his
father, and was granted the required permission to return to Peru when his petitions
were rejected. Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, however, did not go home. Instead, he
settled in Montilla, Córdoba, and changed his name to Garcilaso de la Vega. He
would never leave Europe, but spent the rest of his life writing histories of the New
World as ‘el Inca’.32 An invented coat-of-arms in the frontispiece of his most ambitious
work, the Commentarios reales (1609), combines references to his own and his
father’s military service to the Spanish Crown and Christianity with symbols of Inca
rulership and dualistic philosophy.33 Writing in Spain to a Spanish audience and
largely as a Spaniard, Garcilaso nevertheless claimed the authority to write true
history – and to point out the errors of such famous Spanish chroniclers as Francisco
López de Gómara – based not only on extensive research but also on his childhood
experience in Peru and perhaps most importantly, his Native heritage.34
86
Figure 5.2 Frontispiece of a 1722 reprint of the second part of

el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Commentarios reales, originally published in 1617
© Iberfoto/Mary Evans Picture Library
87
Finally, Indigenous nobles from New Spain and Peru traveled to Iberia to petition the
Spanish crown for individual or community privileges throughout the colonial period.
Despite the Crown’s official sanction against such Native transatlantic crossings, these
Indigenous nobles traveled in style, were received with honour, and usually enjoyed the
financial support of the Spanish Crown during their stay. The firstborn son of Moctezuma,
don Martín Cortés Moctezuma Nezahualtecolotzin, arrived in Spain to request a coat of
arms and restitution of lands in 1524, only three years after Tenochtitlan’s defeat. In
1527, he returned to Spain accompanied by no less than forty nobles from Tenochtitlan,
Texcoco, and Tlacopan (the old Triple Alliance), as well as Tlaxcala (the leaders of the
insurgency against that alliance), Culhuacan, Chalco-Tlamanalco, Tlatelolco and
Cempoala – all presumably seeking privileges and recognition. By 1532 don Martín had
personally petitioned the king three times, had been the guest of the Dominicans at their
Toledan convent of Santo Domingo de Talavera de la Reina and the Franciscans at their
convent in Madrid, and had married a Spanish noblewoman who returned to Mexico
with him.35 The Tlaxcalteca nobility traveled to Spain in 1528–29 with their own
agenda: to seek collective recognition as a province and city with the same legal status as
any city in Spain, and thus protection from being given in encomienda.36 Mesoamerican
nobility, both Indigenous and Mestizo, would continue to petition the Crown directly
throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. Indeed, some of the most famous images
of the conquest period from a Native perspective were finished during one of these trips.
Diego Muñoz Camargo of Tlaxcala, Mexico, was a Mestizo nobleman raised in a
Spanish household in Mexico, but who had spent much of his adult life writing a
laudatory history of Tlaxcala in prose and painting on behalf of that city’s petitions for
royal recognition. In 1583, Muñoz Camargo traveled with the Tlaxcalteca lord don
Antonio de Guevara to Spain to deliver his work to the king, and completed one early
version, now known as the Relación geográfica or Descripción de la ciudad y provincia
de Tlaxcala, in Madrid before returning to Mexico.37
Andean noblemen and women also crossed the Atlantic. The case of doña Beatriz
Clara Coya of Lima reminds us that some Indigenous women moved to Spain with
their Spanish husbands; doña Beatriz received special permission to travel in exchange
for a payment of 1000 pesos and the assurance that she was not being forced to leave
her homeland.38 Caciques and other descendants of Andean nobility often traveled to
Spain illegally, and perhaps more persistently than Mesoamerican elites throughout
the colonial period because the Inca policy of absorbing local elites produced a large
number of Inca descendants. These Native supplicants petitioning on their own or
their community’s behalf were not looked upon favourably by the Council of the
Indies, which encouraged the Crown to prohibit them for the ‘inconveniences’ they
caused: risk of death for the petitioners, but also the cost and bother of supporting
them during their stay in the peninsula for periods that in some cases lasted more
than a decade, and the danger that they would remain in Spain indefinitely as
‘vagabonds’ or as potential subversives interested in restoring Inca power. José Carlos
de la Puente Luna argues that Indigenous nobles from Peru learned quickly to
manipulate both the Crown’s desire to protect its ‘poor and miserable’ Native vassals
and the Council’s concerns over their presence in the peninsula. They were practically
bribed to return home by grants of titles and generous funds tied to their departure.39
African and European transatlantic crossings are usually treated separately in the
historiography of the Atlantic World, yet both help illuminate the Native experience.
88
Indigenous slaves who were captured, chained and transported in the holds of ships
to be branded and sold in Portuguese and Spanish markets obviously had much in
common with their African counterparts forcibly sent to the Americas. Their fate
depended to a great extent on the qualities of the owners they acquired. They were
unlikely to be united with family and neighbors on the other side of the ocean. Being
relatively few in number, Indigenous slaves in Iberia also lacked the opportunities
Africans had to build new diasporic communities or to maintain their traditions
except, perhaps, in port cities like Seville.40 But more so than their African counterparts,
enslaved Natives could appeal to the Crown as vassals and victims with a reasonable
expectation of positive results.
The experiences of free Natives who crossed the Atlantic, by contrast, are more
comparable to those of Europeans. Their fortunes would to a large degree be based
on patronage, class and connections. Middling sorts had the possibility to make a
new life across the ocean and to gradually assimilate into their new milieu. At the
level of the nobility and upper classes, however, the subjugation, segregation and
even fear of Indigenous culture are apparent. Though they might stay in Iberia for a
number of years, most Indigenous nobility returned to America and to their own
communities, forming a parallel elite subordinate to Euroamerican criollos. Wealthy
Mestizos and descendants of Indigenous nobility who assimilated into the Spanish
ruling classes, meanwhile, might retain their social position and carefully celebrate
the noble parts of their Indigenous heritage.41 But on either side of the Atlantic, the
elite to which they belonged – whether peninsular or criollo – was fundamentally
European in character.
A STRANGE L IKE NE S S :
N A T I V E IMAGINARIES OF THE E U RO P E AN ‘ O THE R’
A great deal of scholarship has considered how early modern Europeans intellectually
assimilated the Americas: from Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America in
1961 and J.H. Elliott’s The Old World and the New in 1970, to Anthony Pagden’s
European Encounters with the New World in 1993 and Karen Ordal Kupperman’s
America in European Consciousness in 1995, to Jorge Cañizares Esguerra’s How to
Write the History of the New World in 2001. Most recently, interest in this question
has been keen within the history of science.42 The Spanish, particularly those involved
with Christian evangelization, were enthusiastic students of Indigenous history,
language and customs. Other Europeans exhibited considerably less interest in Native
intellectual or historical traditions until later in the early modern period. Indigenous
peoples, on the other hand, had no choice but to rapidly size up their invaders – but
their assessments are more elusive and require a reconsideration of the traditional
sources of intellectual history.
The most direct and earliest representations of Europeans in the South Atlantic
come from Native painters and scribes who were trained to write in Roman script by
Catholic friars. In New Spain, the monumental Florentine Codex (1547–79) co-
authored by Franciscan Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of mostly unnamed
Natives describes central Mexican history and culture in both Nahuatl and Spanish,
with illustrations. The Mexica Tlatelolca who were Sahagún’s main partners in the
creation of the Codex were ethnically related to the Mexica Tenochca of Tenochtitlan.
89
In Book Twelve describing the Spaniards’ arrival and the battle for the city, the
Tlatelolca scribes tend to blame the Tenochca for the empire’s downfall. The
challenges of reading for a Native perspective via colonial-era texts are exceptionally
apparent here. Despite the unusual format of Nahuatl and Spanish versions side-by-
side and the fact that the two versions differ in significant ways, it is impossible to
untangle the mutual influences of the Codex’s European and Native authors. James
Lockhart wonders whether the anti-Tenochca bias so apparent in Book Twelve of the
Florentine Codex may have actually been mitigated by Sahagún; likewise, the use of
the loan word ‘diablo’ (devil) to describe a preconquest indigenous deity would,
Lockhart suggests, have been an entirely natural usage to these Christian-educated
Nahua scribes.43 Nevertheless, the Florentine Codex provides a distinctively
Indigenous view of the conquest of Tenochtitlan. The Spaniards are impressive, at
times ruthless, and particularly greedy when it comes to gold. The Tenochca are
weak and pitiable; the Tlatelolca are brave and constant; the Tlaxcalteca are conniving
and the Xochimilca are treacherous. In a story within the story the Spaniards are
described to Moctezuma, who has not yet seen them:
Their war gear was all iron. They clothed their bodies with iron, they put iron on
their heads, their swords were iron, their bows were iron, and their shields and
lances were iron…and they wrapped their bodies all over; only their faces could
be seen, very white. Their faces were the color of limestone and their hair yellow-
reddish, though some had black hair…and their dogs were huge creatures, with
their ears folded over and their jowls dragging. They had burning eyes like coals,
yellow and fiery. They had thin, gaunt flanks with the rib lines showing; they
were very tall. They did not keep quiet, they went about panting, with their
tongues hanging down. They had spots like a jaguar’s…
Of these terrible dogs the parallel Spanish text merely states: ‘They also told him
[Moctezuma]…of the dogs they brought along and how they were, and of the ferocity
they showed and what color they were.’44
The Florentine Codex seems to confirm the popular idea that Moctezuma and
other Natives initially took the Spanish to be gods. Much ink has been spilled on this
theme, mostly to discredit it as a Spanish fantasy, mourn it as a retrospective
rationalization of the defeated, or ridicule it as a Eurocentric misunderstanding of
what the Nahuatl term for ‘god’ signified.45 A deeper consideration of Native
epistemologies is needed to get much beyond these conclusions, much as literary
scholar Gonzalo Lamana has attempted to do for Peru. According to the 1557
account of Juan de Betanzos, a Spaniard who married an Inca noblewoman and
gathered testimony from her relatives, the Spaniards were quickly labeled ‘gods’ with
certain characteristics that could be analyzed via Andean schemas. Messengers
reported to Atahualpa that the strangers from the sea did not eat raw meat (i.e.
human flesh), and thus had not arrived to conquer. They seemed to consume gold
and silver. They looked strange, and their clothes did not indicate any internal
hierarchy. They could speed across land (on horses), but could not make water move
or do anything else supernatural. By the end of this inquiry, Lamana argues, Atahualpa
had discerned that the Spanish were not gods but was deeply curious and worried
about them. The massacre that followed shortly after his first meeting with Pizarro’s
90
representatives resulted not from Atahualpa’s imagining the Spanish were divine, but
from the dangerous situation created by both sides trying to size each other up.46
In sixteenth-century Mesoamerican painted manuscripts postdating the fall of
Tenochtitlan, Spaniards are commonly shown seated in European style chairs or atop
horses with beards, swords, and distinct types of clothing (including hats and shoes),
as well as their own banners and armor.47 In the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a
painted depiction of the conquest of Guatemala created by Native allies from that
altepetl around 1540, a single African – surely undercounting the number of Africans
that would have accompanied the Spanish – is clearly demarcated with unique, rustic
costume and barefoot, but with a long Spanish spear. The Maya are also portrayed
as barefoot and rustic, a typical convention of barbarism justifying conquest in
Mesoamerican pictorial writing. The Quauhquecholteca retain their own traditional
warrior costumes of jaguar pelts and eagle feathers, but carry Spanish swords and are
painted with the same pale skin tone as the Spanish, which Florine Asselbergs
interprets as a visual assertion of their equivalence as conquistadors. The Spanish are
shown with their conventional beards, hats, seats and horses, with one important
exception: a single Spaniard traveling at the head of the departing troops dressed in
full Quauhquecholteca warrior regalia.48 Clothing here is not merely communicative
but potentially transformative, and could work both ways. When Hernando Cortés
executed the Mexica king Cuauhtemoc and his fellow ruler of Tlacopan during a
journey through Yucatan in 1526, writes the Nahua historian Chimalpahin, he
spared the life of a third lord and named him Cuauhtemoc’s successor. The surviving
lord was prepared for his return journey home with a gift that under the circumstances
must have been fraught with meaning: ‘their [i.e., the Spaniards’ type of] clothing and
a sword, a dagger, and a white horse.’49
As the colonial period progressed, Mesoamericans began to depict themselves in
Spanish-style dress and with beards. This stylistic shift often marked the line between
ancient and more recent history. In the 1691 Tira de Santa Catarina Ixtepeji, which
traces a Zapotec elite lineage from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century,
even the ancients have beards. A shift in costume occurs, however, with the Zapotec
lord Coqui Lay who allied with the Spanish in the sixteenth century, shown
brandishing a sword and in European-looking dress next to a Spanish conquistador
on a horse. Coqui Lay’s descendants are thereafter also dressed in European style. In
these later paintings the claim of being ‘we people here’ from ‘time immemorial’ was
important, but so was the change in rulership that came with Europeans and
Christianity. Affiliation with the Spanish world – in this case, visually signaled
through dress, swords and the claim of being Indian conquistadors – asserted both
local authority and obedience to the Spanish Crown.50 Conversely, Inca-descended
lords who in everyday life likely pronounced their authority in part by wearing
European dress processed in the festival of Corpus Christi in Cuzco in the late
seventeenth century in richly ornamented Inca costumes, presenting themselves as
living mediators between the ancient past and the colonial present.51 A century and a
half after contact with Europeans and Africans, these Native elites depicted and
reimagined themselves according to distinctly colonial codes.
A more satirical tone is struck in the famous drawings of Guaman Poma de Ayala,
the Quechua-speaking Andean who wrote the 1,189-page Nueva corónica y buen
gobierno styled as a report and letter to the Spanish king. Like el Inca Garcilaso de la
91
Vega, Guaman Poma wrote his history of the Spanish invasion and conquest of Peru
from a self-consciously Native perspective. In 398 illustrations that accompany the
Nueva corónica, Spaniards and Africans are judged by the care or cruelty they show
the Native population and their own good or bad habits, while those who have sex
outside their ‘pure’ group and the products of these relationships, Mestizos and
Mulatos, are ruthlessly criticized.52 Like the Florentine Codex, the Nueva corónica
offers a complex portrait of the Spanish. One idealized Spanish couple ‘show charity,
and rule with love the Indians of this kingdom’ while another are ‘great gluttons’.
Priests are shown lovingly aiding Natives with their petitions, or fornicating with
Indigenous women and beating their charges with sticks. Africans are depicted mostly
sympathetically: as servants who must deliver punishment to Natives, who are also
punished themselves, and who (like good Andeans) can be the most devout converts
to Christianity. Again, dress marks identity. Africans, Spaniards, Mestizos and
Mulatos dress mostly the same. Andeans wear their own distinctive garb, although
some Andean elites are shown adopting elements of Spanish dress such as their hats.53
For Guaman Poma, clothing signaled Native identity and served as a form of
protection against sexual and cultural contamination: ‘Spaniards, mestizos and
mestizas and black women, mulatos, and mulatas, should not wear the clothes of
Indians nor should Indians wear the clothes of Spaniards. All of this is a great offense
to God.’54 This is not so much imagining a faraway Other as creating social boundaries
in a very crowded, chaotic social reality.
Indeed, a great deal of colonial Latin American history – as separate from Atlantic
Worlds history – considers how Indigenous peoples fit European and African
epistemologies into their own understandings of a world that had dramatically,
irrevocably changed, often in very immediate ways. Some scholars focus on religious,
medical or cosmological questions via language, art and ritual – categories, it should
be pointed out, whose definitions cannot be assumed.55 Some have tracked changes
and continuities in Indigenous worldviews via philological analysis of secular
historical or ‘mundane’ texts.56 Some have sought out entirely different hermeneutics,
for instance Carolyn Dean’s reading of Inca stonework or Frank Salomon’s historic-
anthropological readings of the Andean khipu.57 The question of power is inescapable,
particularly when it comes to the Christian intellectual frameworks that underpinned
Iberian colonialism. Mesoamerican painting could preserve and rework ancient
histories, but only very carefully could it reference fundamentally Native
understandings of sacrifice and renewal. Guaman Poma wrote in defense of Andeans,
but using the tools of the colonizer and as a devoted Christian whose apparently
sincere piety allowed him his voice. The very techniques of preserving and creating
knowledge had been forcibly altered, and later generations of Indigenous intellectuals
would be products of this hybridity. Under the weight of all this, the Atlantic Worlds
category of ‘imagining the Other’ collapses.
CONCLU S IO N
Where does this exercise leave us? Of the three themes I have chosen to explore, one
– imperial warfare – comes off as unhelpfully Eurocentric. Another – imagining the
Other – seems both impossibly large given the profound impact of colonization on the
Indigenous world (intellectually, materially, spiritually, artistically, linguistically, etc.),
92
and dangerously colonial itself in its attempt to create some equivalency between
experiences fundamentally marked by unequal power relations. The theme of
transatlantic migration, however, challenges the ‘we people here’ of Indigenous
American history in useful ways. It reminds us of the early and brief but important
Native slave trade. It encourages us to look for Natives not only in transatlantic
crossings but also up and down both the American coasts, for instance survivors of
King Philip’s War sent to the Caribbean, Nicaraguan slaves and Nahua warriors
invading Peru, or Native sailors.58 And it raises important questions about the cultural
acceptance, rejection and assimilation of Indigenous people and Indigenous history in
Europe versus the Americas, in comparison with the experience of other groups in the
Atlantic World such as Jews, North Africans and Asians that do not quite fit into the
European–African–Indigenous trichotomy.59
Perceptive readers will have noticed that throughout this essay I have tipped my
hat towards the Indigenous history of the North Atlantic.60 This comparative
potential is perhaps the most important reason for Indigenous American history
not to bypass the Atlantic World completely. Atlantic history’s delight in spaces
and situations ‘shot through with a multiplicity of entangled actors and agendas’61
may run counter to the agenda of much Indigenous history, which seeks to reclaim
and prioritize Indigenous narratives for their own sake.62 Some of the questions
asked of the Atlantic World simply make no sense in the context of Indigenous
history. But in its best manifestations – crossing national and linguistic boundaries,
tracing overlapping epistemologies, emphasizing the global chains into which the
individual, the familial, the local, and the regional were inserted during the early
modern period – Atlantic history encourages us to see connections between the
South and North that constitute an increasingly important part of Indigenous
activism and scholarly research in the Americas. A great deal more could be gained,
for instance, by comparing and supporting research on the relationships between
the two largest populations facing east from the Americas in the early modern
Atlantic: transplanted Africans and Natives.63 Indigenous American history, for its
part, has much to offer Atlantic World studies in its sophisticated analyses of
power, loss, transculturation and survival. Neither field should be imagined
completely without the other.
NOTE S
1 Weaver 2011: 422.
2 Cohen 2008.
3 Lockhart 1992: 115–17.
4 Farriss 1984: 67–78; Matthew 2012a; Warren 2014.
5 Weaver 2014.
6 Lee 2011: 3–8.
7 Prescott and Lockhart 2001: 818.
8 Hassig 1994 and Lockhart 1993 were fundamental to this reorientation. See also Restall
2003; Asselbergs 2008 [2004]; Townsend 2006; Matthew and Oudijk 2007; Oudijk and
Restall 2008; Altman 2010; Matthew 2012a; Levin Rojo 2014.
9 Oudijk and Restall 2007: 42–54.
10 Yupangui, ed. Julien 2006: viii–ix.
11 Oberem 1974; Salomon 1987.
93
12 Dean 1999; 185–99; Lamana 2008: 159–81.

13 Francis 2007; Thornton 2012: 175–81.
14 Whitehead 1990; Whitehead 1992; Gallup-Díaz 2001; Kars 2011.
15 Whitehead 1992.
16 Hämäläinen 2008: 323–25; Barr 2007.
17 Zavala Cepeda 2008.
18 Saunt 2006b.
19 Lamana 2008: 147–57
20 Bailyn 2005: 62–64; see also Blackhawk 2006.
21 Mira Caballos 2000: 46–48; Pagden 1982: 31; Weaver 2014: 38–50.
22 Van Deusen 2012; Metcalf 2005: 174; Meuwese 2012: 155.
23 Mira Caballos 2000: 107–13.
24 Ibid.: 82–84, 94–105.
25 Ibid.: 86–90.
26 Cline 1969: 70–90.
27 Metcalf 2005; Yannakakis 2008.
28 Loayza 1948: 7–94.
29 Ibid.: 92.
30 Townsend 2006: 188–204.
31 Mangan 2013: 277, 284–86, 291.
32 Chang-Rodríguez 2006: 15–38.
33 López-Baralt 2008.
34 One of Garcilaso’s main sources was the Historia occidentalis of the Jesuit Blas Valera,
who like Garcilaso was a Mestizo of Spanish-Inca origin and author of an extensive
history of the Inca rooted in his Native heritage. Like Fr. Calixto, Valera would end his
life exiled in Spain – although in his case, the same religious order that had adopted him
was responsible for his denunciation and imprisonment.
35 Castañeda de la Paz 2013: 216–27.
36 Baber 2009: 36–37.
37 Muñoz Camargo and Acuña 2000.
38 De la Puente Luna 2012: 29n22.
39 De la Puente Luna 2012: esp. 26n19, 28, 30. Fear of subversion was also expressed
towards Mestizos; see Burns 2007: 197–99.
40 On African diasporas, see O’Toole 2007; Sweet 2003. On European migrants to America,
see Lockhart 1994; Altman 2000; Herrera 2003.
41 Chipman 2005.
42 For example Wey Gómez 2008; Cañizares Esguerra 2006; Bleichmar 2012.
43 Lockhart 1993: 31, 186–87.
44 Ibid.: 80–81.
45 Ibid.: 14–21; Restall 2003: 110–18; Townsend 2003; Gruzinski 1992: 41–53.
46 Lamana 2008: 31–53
47 Boone 2000: 47–48.
48 Asselbergs 2008.
49 Chimalpahin et al. 1997: 169. On the potential transformations induced by dress, see
Carrasco 1999: 115–63; Olivier and Sule 2004: 144–45.
50 Boone 2000: 127; Florescano 2002; Cuadriello 2004; Matthew 2012b.
51 Dean 1999: 122–59.
52 Adorno 2000.
53 Det Konelige Bibliotek, The Guaman Poma Website 2006: images 220, 217, 235, 202,
276, 275, 200.
54 Ibid.: folio 553.
94
55 Alberro 1988; Harris 2000; Sell and Burkhart et al. 2004–9; Durston 2007; Wake 2010;
Hanks 2010; Ramos 2010; Tavárez 2011; Solari 2013.
56 Lockhart 1993; Schroeder 1997; Terraciano 2001; Wood 2003; Haskett 2005; Osowski
2010; Townsend 2010; Pizzigoni 2012.
57 Dean 2010; Salomon 2004.
58 Weaver 2014: 431, 437.
59 Compare to Vaughn 2006.
60 Beyond specific references, the section titles come from Den Ouden 2005; Deloria 2004;
Shoemaker 2006.
61 Cañizares Esguerra and Breen 2013: 602
62 Weaver et al., 2006.
63 Saunt 2006a; Klopotek 2011; Sweet 2003; Restall 2005, 2009.
REF EREN CE S
Adorno, R., 2000. Guaman Poma: Writing and resistance in colonial Peru. University of
Texas Press, Austin.
Alberro, S., 1988. Inquisición y sociedad en México, 1571–1700. Fondo de Cultura Económica,
México.
Altman, I., 2000. Transatlantic ties in the Spanish empire: Brihuega, Spain & Puebla, Mexico,
1560–1620. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.
——2010. The war for Mexico’s west: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550.
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Asselbergs, F.G.L., 2008 [2004]. Conquered conquistadors: the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan:
a Nahua vision of the conquest of Guatemala. University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colo.
Baber, R. J. 2009. ‘Categories, Self-Representation and the Construction of Indios,’ Journal of
Spanish Cultural Studies 10:1, 27–41.
Bailyn, B., 2005. Atlantic history: concept and contours. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Barr, J., 2007. Peace came in the form of a woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas
borderlands. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Blackhawk, N. 2006. Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American
West. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Bleichmar, D., 2012. Visible empire: botanical expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic
Enlightenment. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London.
Boone, E.H., 2000. Stories in red and black: pictorial histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs.
University of Texas Press, Austin.
Burns, K., 2007. ‘Unfixing Race,’ in Rereading the black legend: the discourses of religious and
racial difference in the Renaissance empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo,
and Maureen Quilligan, University of Chicago Press, 188–202.
Cañizares-Esguerra, J., 2006. Nature, empire, and nation: explorations of the history of science
in the Iberian world. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.
Cañizares-Esguerra, J., Breen, B., 2013. ‘Hybrid Atlantics: future directions for the history of
the Atlantic World,’ History Compass 11:8, 597–609.
Carrasco, D., 1999. City of sacrifice: the Aztec empire and the role of violence in civilization.
Beacon Press, Boston.
Castañeda de la Paz, M. 2013. Conflictos y alianzas en tiempos de cambio: Azcapotzalco,
Tlacopan, Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco (siglos XII-XVI). Instituto de Investigaciones
Antropológicas, UNAM, México.
Chang-Rodríguez, R., 2006. Franqueando fronteras: Garcilaso de la Vega y La Florida del
Inca. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, Lima.
95
Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin, D.F. de S.A.M., Anderson, A.J.O., Schroeder, S., Ruwet, W.,
1997. Codex Chimalpahin. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Okla.
Chipman, D.E., 2005. Moctezuma’s children: Aztec royalty under Spanish rule, 1520-1700.
Cline, H.F., 1969. ‘Hernando Cortés and the Aztec Indians in Spain.’ The Quarterly Journal
of the Library of Congress 26, 70–90.
Cohen, Paul 2008. ‘Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the limits of a historiographical
concept.’ History of European Ideas 34, 388–410.
Cuadriello, J., 2004. Las glorias de la república de Tlaxcala: o la conciencia como imagen sublime.
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM : Museo Nacional de Arte, INBA, México.
Dean, C., 1999. Inka bodies and the body of Christ: Corpus Christi in colonial Cuzco, Peru.
Duke University Press, Durham, N.C.
——2010. A culture of stone: Inka perspectives on rock. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
De la Puente Luna, J.C. 2012. ‘A costa de Su Majestad: indios y dilemas indianos en la corte
de los Habsburgo,’ Allpanchis 39 (72), 11–60.
Deloria, P.J., 2004. Indians in unexpected places. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kan.
Den Ouden, A.E., 2005. Beyond conquest Native peoples and the struggle for history in New
England. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
Det Konelige Bibliotek, 2006. The Guaman Poma Website, http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/
poma/info/en/frontpage.htm (accessed March 14, 2014).
Deusen, N.E. van, 2012. ‘Seeing Indios in Sixteenth-Century Castile.’ The William and Mary
Quarterly 69, 205–234.
Durston, A., 2007. Pastoral Quechua: the history of Christian translation in colonial Peru,
1550–1650. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind.
Farriss, N.M., 1984. Maya society under colonial rule: the collective enterprise of survival.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.
Florescano, E. 2002. ‘El canon memorioso forjado por los títulos primordiales,’ Colonial Latin
American Review 11, 183–230.
Francis, J.M., 2007. Invading Colombia: Spanish accounts of the Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada
expedition of conquest. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pa.
Gallup-Díaz, I., 2001. The door of the seas and key to the universe: Indian politics and imperial
rivalry in the Darién, 1640–1750. Columbia University Press, New York.
Gruzinski, S., 1992. Painting the conquest: the Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance.
Unesco : Flammarion, Paris, France.
Hämäläinen, P., 2008. The Comanche empire. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Hanks, W.F., 2010. Converting words: Maya in the age of the cross. University of California
Press, Berkeley.
Harris, M., 2000. Aztecs, Moors, and Christians festivals of reconquest in Mexico and Spain.
University of Texas Press, Austin, TX.
Haskett, R.S., 2005. Visions of paradise: primordial titles and Mesoamerican history in
Cuernavaca. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Hassig, R., 1994. Mexico and the Spanish conquest. Longman, London; New York.
Herrera, R.A., 2003. Natives, Europeans, and Africans in sixteenth-century Santiago de
Guatemala. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Kars, Marjoleine 2011. ‘“Cleansing the Land”: Dutch Amerindian Cooperation in the
Suppression of the 1763 Slave Rebellion in Dutch Guiana’ in Empires and Indigenes:
Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion and Warfare in the Early Modern World, ed.
Wayne Lee, New York University Press, New York, 251–276.
Klopotek, B., 2011. Recognition odysseys: indigeneity, race, and federal tribal recognition
policy in three Louisiana Indian communities. Duke University Press, Durham.
96
Lamana, G., 2008. Domination without dominance: Inca-Spanish encounters in early colonial
Peru. Duke University Press, Durham.
Lee, W.E., 2011. Empires and indigenes: intercultural alliance, imperial expansion, and
warfare in the early modern world. New York University Press, New York.
Levin Rojo, D., 2014. Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the invention of Nuevo
Mexico. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Loayza, F.A., 1948. Fray Calixto Túpak Inka, documentos originales y, en su mayoría, totalmente
desconocidos, auténticos, de este apóstol indio, valiente defensor de su raza, desde el año de
1746 a 1760. Las doce dudas, códice del año de 1570, de autor anónimo. D. Miranda, Lima.
Lockhart, J., 1992. The Nahuas after the conquest: a social and cultural history of the Indians
of central Mexico, sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Stanford University Press,
Stanford, Calif.
——1993. We people here: Nahuatl accounts of the conquest of Mexico. University of
California Press, Berkeley.
——1994 (1968). Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: a social history. University of Wisconsin Press,
Madison, Wis.
López-Baralt, M. 2008. ‘Tinku, concordia y ayni: Tradición oral andina y neoplatonismo en
dos obras del Inca Garcilaso’ in Nuevas lecturas de La Florida del Inca, eds. Carmen de
Mora y Antonio Garrido Aranda, Madrid, Iberoamericana, 31–54.
Mangan, J.E., 2013. ‘Moving Mestizos in Sixteenth-Century Peru: Spanish Fathers, Indigenous
Mothers, and the Children In Between.’ The William and Mary Quarterly 70, 273–294.
Matthew, L.E., 2012a. Memories of conquest: becoming Mexicano in colonial Guatemala.
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
——2012b. ‘Lost and found: Three hundred year old manuscript found in Milwaukee,’ http://
marquettehistorians.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/lost-and-found-three-hundred-year-old-
mexican-document-found-in-milwaukee/#more-164 (accessed March 14, 2014).
Matthew, L.E., Oudijk, M.R., 2007. Indian conquistadors: indigenous allies in the conquest
of Mesoamerica. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Metcalf, A.C., 2005. Go-betweens and the colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600. University of
Texas Press, Austin.
Meuwese, M., 2012. Brothers in arms, partners in trade: Dutch-indigenous alliances in the
Atlantic world, 1595–1674. Brill, Leiden; Boston.
Mira Caballos, E., 2000. Indios y mestizos americanos en la España del siglo XVI.
Iberoamericana; Vervuert, Madrid; Frankfurt am Main.
Muñoz Camargo, D., Acuña, R., 2000. Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala. El
Colegio de San Luis; Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala, San Luis Potosí [Tlaxcala de
Xicohténctal].
Oberem, U. 1974. ‘Los cañaris y la conquista española de la sierra ecuatoriana, otro capítulo de las
relaciones interétnicas en el siglo xvi.’ Journal de la Société des Américanistes 63 (1), 263–274.
O’Toole, R.S., 2007. ‘From the Rivers of Guinea to the Valleys of Peru: Becoming a Bran
Diaspora Within Spanish Slavery.’ Social Text 25, 19–36.
Olivier, G., Sule, T., 2004. Tezcatlipoca: burlas y matamorfosis de un dios azteca. Fondo de
Cultura Económica, México.
Osowski, E.W., 2010. Indigenous miracles: Nahua authority in colonial Mexico. University of
Arizona Press, Tucson, Ariz.
Oudijk, M.R., Restall, M. 2007. ‘Mesoamerican Conquistadors in the Sixteenth Century,’ in
Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica, eds. Laura
Matthew and Michel Oudijk, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 28–64.
——2008. La conquista indígena de Mesoamérica: el caso de Don Gonzalo Mazatzin Moctezuma.
Universidad de las Américas Puebla: Secretaría de Cultura del Estado de Puebla: Instituto
Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Puebla; México, D.F.
97
Pagden, A., 1982. The fall of natural man: the American Indian and the origins of comparative
ethnology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York.
Pizzigoni, C., 2012. The life within: local indigenous society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650–
1800. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California.
Prescott, W.H., Lockhart, J., 2001. History of the conquest of Mexico. Modern Library,
New York.
Ramos, G., 2010. Death and conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532–1670. University
of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind.
Restall, M., 2003. Seven myths of the Spanish conquest. Oxford University Press, New York.
——2005. Beyond Black and Red: African-native Relations in Colonial Latin America.
UNM Press.
——2009. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford
University Press.
Salomon, F., 1987. ‘Ancestors, Grave Robbers, and the Possible Antecedents of Cañari “Inca-
ism.”’ In Natives and Neighbors in South America: Anthropological Essays, ed. Harald O.
Skar and Frank Salomon, Museum of World Culture, Göteborg, Sweden, 207–232.
——2004. The cord keepers: khipus and cultural life in a Peruvian village. Duke University
Press, Durham.
Saunt, C., 2006a. Black, white, and Indian: race and the unmaking of an American family.
Oxford University Press, New York.
——2006b. ‘“Our Indians”: European Empires and the History of the Native American
South,’ in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, eds. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and
Erik R. Seeman. Prentice Hall, New York, 61–76.
Schroeder, S., et al., 1997. Codex Chimalpahin, 2 vols. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman OK.
Sell, B.D., Burkhart, L, 2004–2009. Nahuatl theater, 4 vols. University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman.
Shoemaker, N., 2006. A Strange Likeness: becoming red and white in eighteenth-century
North America. Oxford University Press, Oxford; New York.
Solari, A., 2013. Maya ideologies of the sacred: the transfiguration of space in colonial Yucatan.
Sweet, J.H., 2003. Recreating Africa: culture, kinship, and religion in the African-Portuguese
world, 1441–1770. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Tavárez, D., 2011. The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in
Colonial Mexico. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.
Terraciano, K., 2001. The Mixtecs of colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui history, sixteenth through
eighteenth centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.
Thornton, J.K., 2012. A cultural history of the Atlantic world, 1250–1820.
Townsend, C. 2003. ‘Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico,’
in American Historical Review 103:3, 659–687.
——2006. Malintzin’s choices: an Indian woman in the conquest of Mexico. University of
New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
——2010. Here in this year: seventeenth-century Nahuatl annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla
Valley. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.
Vaughan, A.T., 2006. Transatlantic encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; New York.
Wake, E., 2010. Framing the sacred: the Indian churches of early colonial Mexico. University
of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
Warren, S., 2014. The worlds the Shawnees made: migration and violence in early America.
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C.
Weaver, J. 2011. ‘The Red Atlantic: Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges,’ The American Indian
Quarterly, 35 (3), 418–463.
98
——2014. The Red Atlantic: American indigenes and the making of the modern world, 1000–
1927. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Weaver, J., Womack, C.S., Warrior, R.A., 2006. American Indian literary nationalism.
University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Wey Gómez, N., 2008. The tropics of empire: why Columbus sailed south to the Indies. MIT
Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Whitehead, Neil L. 1990. ‘Carib Ethnic Soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and the Antilles,
1492–1820.’ Ethnohistory, 37 (4), 357–385.
——1992. ‘Tribes Make States and States Make Tribes: Warfare and the Creation of Colonial
Tribes and States in Northeastern South America,’ in War in the tribal zone: expanding states
and indigenous warfare, eds. R. Brian Ferguson and Neil Whitehead. School of American
Research Press; University of Washington Press, Sante Fe, N.M.; Seattle, Wash, 127–150.
Wood, S.G., 2003. Transcending conquest: Nahua views of Spanish colonial Mexico.
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman [Okla.].
Yannakakis, Y., 2008. The art of being in-between: native intermediaries, Indian identity, and
local rule in colonial Oaxaca. Duke University Press, Durham.
Yupangui, D. de C., Julien, C.J., 2006. History of how the Spaniards arrived in Peru. Hackett
Pub. Comp., Indianapolis.
Zavala, J.M., 2008. Los mapuches del siglo XVIII: dinámica interétnica y estrategias de
resistencia. Editorial Universidad Bolivariana, Santiago, Chile.
99
CHAPTER SIX
SOUTHERN AFRICA
AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD
Gerald Groenewald
W hy is southern Africa so rarely covered in volumes on the Atlantic World?

Although, in the wake of the Second World War, some pioneer historians and
advocates of a unified analysis of the four continents bordering the Atlantic considered
southern Africa to be part of this ‘community’,1 this was not borne out in the subsequent
developments of Atlantic history which has been little concerned with the deep
southern part of the ocean. Thus, a major new synthesis such as Thomas Benjamin’s
The Atlantic World contains no discussion of Africa south of Angola and hardly
mentions the Cape of Good Hope.2 This state of affairs is partly related to the fact that
early practitioners of Atlantic history viewed the ocean as ‘a basin around which a new
civilization slowly formed’.3 But this basin was not completely bounded or closed-off:
the original purpose for crossing the Atlantic was to connect Europe with the East
Indies, and the passage around the Cape of Good Hope in the south Atlantic continued
to provide this throughout the period covered by this volume, as is increasingly being
acknowledged.4 But perhaps the main reason for this state of affairs in the historiography
of the Atlantic is the result of the isolation of South African historians until the 1980s
and their own inward-looking habits and practices.5 For a long time historians of the
colonial Cape tended to look to the hinterland and the interior of Africa, forgetting
that the inhabitants of the Cape during this period were mostly ocean-oriented. This is
what will be described in this chapter, which also affords one the opportunity to
rethink the traditionally conceived notion of the Atlantic World as being bounded and
closed-off. Serving as it did as a pivot between two oceans; the existence of a colonial
society at the Cape of Good Hope made possible the development of a globalised,
unified oceanic world by the nineteenth century.
The colonial history of South Africa traditionally gets divided between the Dutch
and British ‘periods’.6 From the establishment of a refreshment station in Table Bay in
1652 until the conquest, in the context of the Napoleonic wars, of the Cape of Good
Hope by Britain in 1795, the west and south coasts of southern Africa were under the
control of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). From that year, except for a brief
interregnum during 1803–6 when the Cape reverted to control by the Dutch Batavian
Republic, southern Africa remained part of the British Empire until the creation of the
Union of South Africa in 1910. For most of the twentieth century this historical
100
– chapter 6: Southern Africa and the Atlantic World –
‘division’ was replicated in the historiography of the country with the VOC period
considered the almost exclusive terrain of Afrikaans-speaking historians (who viewed
themselves as the descendants of the European settlers who came to southern Africa
during the VOC period). These historians reinterpreted the early modern history of
South Africa to serve the Afrikaner nationalist paradigm prevalent for most of the
twentieth century. In practical terms this meant a concentration on settler disputes
with the VOC (demonstrating a desire for freedom and sovereignty from oppressive
‘foreign’ powers) – thus revealing an innate nationalism on the part of Afrikaner
forebears – and on the advancing frontier of the colony which was driven by the needs
of pastoralists farmers. The latter (called trekboers) were seen as the forerunners of the
nineteenth-century Voortrekkers who, in Afrikaner mythology, opened up the
hinterland (the southern African Highveld) for the Afrikaners,7 thus spreading them
all across what would later become ‘South Africa’.8 It is noticeable how these Afrikaner
historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries virtually ignored the history of
the (very cosmopolitan) early modern Cape Town, as well as the larger place of the
Cape in the world of the VOC and in the context of European expansion and global
interaction. These were not historians who would have encouraged their students to
adopt a broader perspective on the history of colonial South Africa.9
Figure 6.1 A view of the Cape of Good Hope and a plan of the town
of the Cape of Good Hope and its environs, published 1795 (engraving)
101
– Gerald Groenewald –
This state of affairs changed radically during the late 1970s and 1980s when a
group of mostly English-speaking younger scholars, influenced by the so-called
revisionist or radical school of South African historiography, started to challenge
perceived interpretations of southern Africa’s colonial past and, particularly, to
uncover new topics and subjects for research. For the first time South Africa’s
slave past was seriously studied, while hitherto ignored groups such as the
Khoikhoi (the original inhabitants of the Cape) and freed slaves (‘free blacks’)
received sustained attention. Important new interpretations of the colonial Cape’s
economy, its racial structure and the role of the frontier were also developed. In
addition to a number of important monographs, the major achievement of this
era was the edited volume, The Shaping of South African Society, which appeared
in 1979 and in a much revised and expanded version in 1989, and which played
a major role in providing an impetus for the study of colonial southern Africa.10
Much of this work was heavily influenced – in topics, approaches and
methodologies – by the new histories of colonial British North America appearing
during this time. This was partly a consequence of the Anglophone background
of these new practitioners,11 but was primarily due to the parallels between
colonial southern Africa and the United States: both were settler colonies12 deeply
marked (and scarred) by their experiences of slavery, the impact of which could
still be felt in the twentieth century. Thus, not only were the new monographs on
Cape slavery heavily influenced by North American examples,13 but certain
aspects such as the influence of the frontier and the rise of white supremacy were
being actively compared.14
Although much of the impetus for this new work came from North American
historiography, all of this new work remained firmly rooted in a land-based analysis
with little or no cognisance of the Cape’s broader oceanic contexts (excluding, of
course, work on the slave trade). In addition, this work continued the old Afrikaner
concentration on the immediate hinterland of Cape Town, virtually ignoring the
centrality of the port city. With the advent of a democratic South Africa, it seems as
if the previous obsession with the history of the Cape’s slave and Khoikhoi
populations began to work itself out. Alongside the New South Africa’s desire to
create a new society less concerned with issues of race, some of the pioneers of Cape
historiography, along with a younger generation of scholars, started to investigate
new topics of the Cape’s colonial past. As was to be expected, much of this new
work took its inspiration from the New Cultural History and concerned itself with
issues relating to identity, individuality and personal relationships. However, a
significant deviation from previous studies of the colonial era was a new interest in
the history of Cape Town as an urban, cosmopolitan space in the context of a
transoceanic world. Historians of the Dutch period finally started to consider the
place of the Cape of Good Hope in the wider world of the VOC, while those of the
British period considered the role and place of the Cape in the new transnational
history of the British Empire. At last Cape historians began to break their isolation
and to interact actively with the work of scholars outside of the Anglophone world.15
Although this work has recently been criticised for going too far in its neglect of
class and race, and for being too parochial and microhistorical in some instances, it
has nevertheless paved the way to start thinking about the Cape in a more global
context since the historiography of colonial southern Africa has now reached a
102
complexity and depth of understanding which make fruitful considerations of

broader contexts possible.16
* * *
Latter-day tourists to Cape Town are often sold the idea that what they are looking
down upon at Cape Point – the southernmost tip of the Cape peninsula – is the
‘meeting of two oceans’. This is of course technically a lie: Cape Town firmly falls
within the Atlantic Ocean since the southernmost point of the African continent is at
Cape Agulhas some 100 kilometres to the east.17 It is here, as the local tourist board
valiantly tries to convince visitors, that the two oceans actually meet rather
unspectacularly. But in terms of human geography, and certainly historically, Cape
Town can certainly claim to being at the crossroads of two oceanic worlds, of serving
as a pivot which connects the Indian and the Atlantic oceans. Thus already by the
eighteenth century the Cape of Good Hope had earned the nickname of ‘the tavern
of two seas’.18 How did this come about?
‘Atlantic history is the story of a world in motion,’ Bernard Bailyn recently
remarked.19 Thus too the history of colonial southern Africa, which is unthinkable
without ocean-crossing ships. Ships made the exploration of the Atlantic Ocean
possible, and it was because of the inherent shortcomings of early modern ships in
overcoming the tyranny of time and distance that the Cape of Good Hope became
part of this world. From the start of the Portuguese discovery of a route to the East via
the Cape of Good Hope in the late fifteenth century, southern Africa has served as a
much-needed refreshment point for passing sailors. At first Table Bay was the obvious
stopping place, but after the viceroy of the Portuguese East Indies, Francisco de
Almeida, was killed there in 1510 during a skirmish with the indigenous Khoikhoi, the
Portuguese avoided the Cape and preferred to have their stops-over further along the
east coast of Africa.20 The southern point of Africa only really became part of the
Atlantic orbit when the Dutch and English started to challenge the Portuguese
hegemony in the late sixteenth century. Since the establishment of the English East
India Company (EIC) in 1600 its ships usually used Table Bay as a stop-over. The
ships of the VOC, founded in 1602, had various roughly halfway calling places,
especially the islands of St. Helena, Mauritius and Madagascar, but in 1616 the VOC
determined its sailing course and insisted that its ships – except in emergencies – use
Table Bay as its stop-over.21 In 1619 the VOC and EIC formally agreed that both
would use the Cape as a halfway station en route to the East.22 Thus, from the 1620s
onwards, Table Bay and its inhabitants firmly entered the transoceanic world created
and exploited by the mercantile companies of the Atlantic. Hundreds of (mostly Dutch
and English, but also French and Danish) ships, and thousands of the men who sailed
them, thus called at the Cape during the first half of the seventeenth century.23
But this was not only a case of the North Atlantic world encountering a new ‘New
World’; it meant that the process of Africans interacting with Europeans which had
been occurring further north along the African coast, repeated itself at the southern
point of the continent, albeit in a different way, yet with equally deleterious effects.
After de Almeida’s fateful encounter with the pastoralist Khoikhoi, who had been
practising transhumance in the south-western areas of southern Africa for upward of
a thousand years by the time of European interaction,24 an image developed of them
103
as ferocious barbarians. This went hand-in-hand with the reigning perception of

southern Africa in the Iberian imagination as the Cape of Storms where Adamastor
(in the form of Table Mountain) stood guard over ‘a forbidden portal – a crucial
threshold between East and West’ which the Cape represents.25 It is for these reasons
that Portuguese sailors preferred to bypass Table Bay. But, as Dutch and English
sailors started to experience in the seventeenth century, the Khoikhoi were not at all
unwilling to engage in small-scale trade with passing crews and the ready supply of
meat created by this, coupled with the bountiful nature surrounding Table Bay (and
the discovery of its relative meteorological calm during certain parts of the year),
soon meant that it became widely known as the Cape of Good Hope.
Very early on the Cape became more than a mere ‘halfway station’: by the late
1610s, the EIC sent an annual ship to the South African west coast to hunt seals and
whales, although this venture died after a few years.26 During the same period,
English ships also at various times off-loaded a few convicts and other unwanted
persons at Table Bay or on Robben Island, some of whom were taken by other ships
to the East.27 During this period some individual Khoikhoi were also taken – some
willingly, others not – to either Europe or the East Indies where they picked up the
rudiments of Dutch and English. Those who returned could use their experience and
expertise to act as mediators in the trade between passing Europeans and the various
Khoikhoi groups.28 Although what is described here concerns – by North Atlantic
standards – relatively few people engaged in relatively unimportant economic
activities, it does demonstrate how from even before more permanent European
settlement in southern Africa, the region and its inhabitants partook of larger
processes created by ships from the Atlantic plying the oceans around its coast.
Southern Africa became firmly part of the globalising world created by transoceanic
merchant companies when the VOC formally founded a refreshment station for its
ships in Table Bay. Its first commander, Jan van Riebeeck, landed with just over a
hundred men (and a few women and children) in 1652 with the instructions to build
a ‘fort and garden’ and to maintain friendly (and profitable) relations with the local
Khoikhoi. Although van Riebeeck was by no means the ‘founding father’ Afrikaner
mythologizing tried to make of him later (constantly applying, as he did, for
promotion to the East Indies), his tenure at the Cape changed the fate of southern
Africa’s history. Not only did he manage – after some difficulty – to establish
successfully a station and to prove its usefulness to the VOC and its ships and crews,
but two of his decisions set into motion processes with far-reaching effects on the
subsequent history of the region. First, in an attempt to improve the profitability of
the station and ensure its long-term survival, the VOC allowed some of its employees
to leave its service in 1657 and to settle as farmers on the understanding that they will
sell their produce to the Company. These people were known as ‘free burghers’ – they
were ‘freed’ from their original contracts with the VOC, although they remained
subjects of the Company. Second was the decision, in 1658, to import slaves to
southern Africa to serve both the VOC and the newly created group of free burghers.
Slaves had to be imported since the VOC forbade van Riebeeck from enslaving the
local Khoikhoi population for fear that it may lead to reprisals and a drop in the
much-needed supply of livestock for passing ships.29
With these events of the 1650s the future development of a unique colonial society
was set in motion. Like the contemporary societies of the Americas, the Cape of
104
Good Hope became a settler society predicated on imported slave labour. Unlike
most of them, though, and in line with other VOC possessions in the East Indies, the
Cape remained until 1795 firmly the possession of a merchant company which strictly
controlled all aspects of life – but especially the economy – in its colony: as one high-
ranking VOC official reminded the Cape’s free burghers in the 1780s when some of
them agitated for greater liberty: ‘it is a truth which nobody can deny…that this
whole establishment [the Cape of Good Hope] exists only because of, and for the
sake of, the Company…’.30 Already by the 1680s and 1690s, free burghers and their
slaves had established extensive grain and wine farms in the arable regions of the
south-western Cape (the immediate hinterland of Cape Town), and from the early
1700s onwards, their descendants gradually moved into the northern and eastern
interior where they mostly engaged in pastoral farming.31 By the end of Dutch rule,
most of the non-desert western part of modern South Africa was settled by free
burghers who were all connected – legally, economically, culturally and mentally – to
the centre of the colony, Cape Town. As elsewhere in the Atlantic world, this
expansion of Europeans had deleterious effects on the indigenous population: already
by the second decade of the eighteenth century there were no more independent
Khoikhoi remaining in the south-western arable districts of the colony – having
succumbed to a combination of diseases and wars – while those who fled to or
originally lived in the interior continually came into conflict with the pastoralist
European settlers who competed with them for resources.32
* * *
Although the aforegoing may seem to have been a sui generis process, this was not the
case: the developments on the frontiers of the Cape colony, hundreds of kilometres
inland from the port city which was its centre, were influenced by much larger processes
driven by the globalising north Atlantic world. Thus, by the end of VOC rule in 1795,
there were some 17–18 000 European colonists in southern Africa (of which 2–3 000
were Company personnel) and about the same number of slaves (of which 500
belonged to the Company and the rest to the free burghers).33 Most of these people,
and the vast majority of their immediate ancestors, came to the Cape from elsewhere,
brought here by ships whose routes were determined by trade patterns. Thus,
throughout the existence of Cape Town as a VOC station, some forty to sixty Dutch
ships annually called here on their way between north-western Europe and the eastern
rim of the Indian Ocean basin. But this was by no means all: for the eighteenth century
we know that the VOC figures only represent some 60 per cent of the total number of
ships which called at the Cape: every year ships belonging to other nations – mostly the
English and French, but also American and Scandinavian countries – would stop at the
Cape, ranging from only a handful each year to more than a hundred by the end of the
eighteenth century. Overall, the figures fluctuated somewhat due to changing war and
trade imperatives, but one significant development was that from the 1770s onwards,
and especially during the 1780s and 1790s, the number of ‘foreign’ ships calling at the
Cape increased significantly and overtook that of VOC ships: for example, of the 622
ships which stayed over here between 1790 and 1793, only 233 were of Dutch origin.34
The aforegoing demonstrates how significant a node Cape Town was in a network
of population movement between the North Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. We know
105
that about 10 per cent of those people who embarked in the Dutch Republic
disembarked in Cape Town – some simply because they needed to recuperate in the
local hospital and took a later ship to the East – but mostly because they chose to stay
at the Cape.35 In this way, the vast bulk of Cape colonists during the VOC period came
here as individuals in service of the VOC – only a very small percentage (such as the
group of just over a hundred Huguenots from France in the late 1680s) were direct
immigrants who arrived in larger groups. Most people who disembarked from the
VOC’s ships were soldiers in service of the VOC who – after working in the Cape
Town garrison – were released from their Company contracts and became free
burghers.36 The bulk of these indirect immigrants who came to the Cape as VOC
soldiers were German speakers from central Europe who, because of political and
economic turmoil, first went to the Dutch Republic and thence tried their luck
overseas.37 In fact, about the same percentage of the ‘progenitors’ of the colonial Dutch
in southern Africa who identified themselves as Afrikaners by the nineteenth century
came from German as from Dutch-speaking lands:38 the fact that during the early
decades of the colony most of the free burghers were of Dutch origin, coupled with the
fact that most of these German immigrants married the locally born daughters of
earlier migrants, meant that the colony maintained its Dutch ‘character’, certainly in
linguistic terms.39 This was an ongoing process. Colonial southern Africa had always
been a country of migrants and settlers maintained contact with their relatives
elsewhere: we know that there existed a form of chain migration at the Cape whereby
successful colonists here were followed in due course by family members from Europe.40
In this way too, southern Africa formed part of a process of dislocation, migration and
settlement starting in north-western Europe and continuing across the Atlantic to the
‘new worlds’ which bordered it; a process made possible by ocean-crossing ships.41
While the free burghers of early modern southern Africa shared the same European
origins, background and immigrant experience as their fellow colonists in the
Americas, the same cannot be said of the slaves who were brought to the colonial
Cape. Here too slaves were forced migrants from elsewhere, but very few of them
came from the Atlantic world: except for the first two consignments of slaves taken
to the Cape in 1658, who derived from Dahomey and Angola,42 the vast bulk of Cape
slaves originated in the Indian Ocean world. This was the consequence of the fact
that – despite its geographic position – the Cape formed part of a trading network
based on the Indian Ocean: because it existed for the sake of the VOC, it followed
that its slaves should also derive from VOC sources.43 In this sense too the Cape is
unusual since only a small percentage of slaves were obtained and imported specifically
for the Cape, namely those who were imported on behalf of the local VOC
administration from Madagascar.44 The bulk of slaves arrived in small numbers
aboard the trading ships of the VOC – not as part of large slave cargoes.45 And they
came from all over the Indian Ocean world: the 63,000 or so slaves imported to
southern Africa between 1658 and the end of the legal slave trade in 1808 derived in
roughly equal proportions from four geographical areas, namely Madagascar, India
and Ceylon, the Indonesian archipelago and Mozambique. The sources of Cape
slaves changed over time, and at different periods certain areas predominated: thus
most Cape slaves in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries came from
Madagascar and the Indian sub-continent, while Mozambique started to dominate
slave imports to the Cape only in the final decades of the eighteenth century.46 The
106
latter development was partly due to the rise in importance as a source for slaves of
the Swahili coast, Madagascar and the Mascarenes from the late eighteenth century
onwards, and many American (especially Brazilian) slavers sold part of their cargoes
in Cape Town on their way to the Atlantic.47
During the early modern period the Western hemisphere was, as Felipe Fernández-
Armesto has argued, unified through the trade in and use of African slaves.48 Southern
Africa did not form part of this particular aspect of the Atlantic experience – or at
least not in the same format. Not only did slaves arrive from a wide and diverse
geographic area in the Indian Ocean region, the nature of Cape slavery also differed
from the better-known plantation slavery which was so wide-spread in parts of the
western Atlantic. Although, from the 1710s onwards, slaves at the Cape slightly
outnumbered colonists, this numerical supremacy was never more than about 10
percent. In addition, except for Cape Town which had a sizeable slave population,
slaves were distributed in small holdings (on average 5–10) on relatively isolated
farms.49 Coupled with the disparate cultural and linguistic background of Cape slaves
and the fact that they came here in small numbers, this meant that no unified slave
culture developed here akin to other slave societies, which partly explains why there
were no large-scale slave uprisings in Dutch South Africa.50 Slaves had to adapt to the
culture of their owners and had to speak their language – although they certainly did
contribute to the formation of Afrikaans.51 Although miscegenation did occur and
there existed a small ‘free-black’ community in Cape Town, the numbers were such
that the development of a mestizo-type culture – as existed in Dutch Batavia for
instance – was not possible.52 Although newly discovered evidence shows that some
slaves and free blacks managed to keep up links with other parts of the Indian Ocean
world,53 the extent of this is unlikely to be comparable to the network of links that
colonists had with relatives in Europe. Thus, although colonial South Africa was a
settler society based on Indian Ocean slave labour – and while this experience
certainly left a deep impact on aspects of this society, such as race relations – it
remained in many respects a remarkably ‘Atlantic’ society in which European culture
and ideas dominated. This was certainly something which contemporary visitors to
the Cape recognised for which reason it did not, in their view, compare favourably to
the exoticism and splendour of the East Indies.54
* * *
From the start colonial southern Africa was linked to the Atlantic world of the north
through a web of words, ideas, discourses and images made possible through the
infrastructure created by the VOC: its ships and their routes. Stories of people who
visited the Cape soon piqued the interest of the scholars of Europe keen to expand
their knowledge of the new worlds which were opened up through trade and travel.
Via a web of connections linking Europe with various people ‘on the ground’,
knowledge of the Cape’s flora, fauna and indigenous inhabitants entered the
discussions and discourses of people in the northern Atlantic.55 Thus, thanks to the
networks created by the VOC, the philosopher Leibniz was able to include discussion
of the Cape Khoi language in his disquisitions on the origins of language.56 This
inclusion of southern Africa in the world of knowledge and imagination created by
the Atlantic ocean extended beyond correspondence – both official and private – and
107
word-of-mouth. Since the start of the European encounter with southern Africa,
visitors to the Cape capitalised on European interest in the local Khoikhoi (and, from
the late eighteenth century, the Xhosa) and the natural wonders of Africa by
publishing books and images of their experiences. Although much of this fed into
certain tropes and discourses, and while much of this literature borrowed extensively
from one another (especially images), over time knowledge about southern Africa
started to accumulate in Europe which helped to create a certain image and expectation
of Africa and the colonial experience in the European mind.57 This was a dynamic
process influenced both by new and expanding knowledge of the South African
reality and of changes in European thinking about the world: thus by the late
eighteenth century the original depiction and conception of the Khoikhoi as being
subhuman and degenerate gave way to Rousseau’s conception of them as being
‘noble savages’ hitherto untainted by European influences.58
Just as knowledge about the Cape spread northwards through the Atlantic via ships
and people, so too did newly developing ideas and ways of thinking percolate down
to the Cape. Thanks to the role of intermediaries such as ministers of religion who
trained in Europe, the Cape elite were able to follow debates and controversies raging
in the northern world, even though the public sphere at the Cape was small and overt,
formal debate limited. Nonetheless, books and knowledge emanating from the
European Enlightenments found their way here.59 And knowledge of these new ways
of thinking certainly impacted on the lives of ordinary people at the Cape: thus, a new
generation of Cape clergy influenced by European and American pietism implemented
radically different policies about female morality in their churches during the 1780s
and 1790s.60 The same period, what Palmer called the ‘Age of Democratic Revolutions’,
also witnessed the free burghers at the Cape questioning the VOC’s restrictive trade
policies and demanding both greater political rights and more economic freedom.61
These people too were influenced by reading texts emanating from elsewhere in the
Atlantic, and listening to the talk of sailors and other visitors to Cape Town.62 As has
recently been demonstrated for other parts of the Atlantic, revolutionary ideas were
distributed (and acted upon) by all groups of people who crossed this ocean, and new
ideas spread as much through talk in taverns as they did through books and
newspapers.63 The Cape formed part of this network of radical ideas being spread by
working-class people, including black sailors from America.64 This information
network extended to slaves in southern Africa by the late eighteenth century –
individual (albeit isolated) cases of slaves resisting owners and insisting that they have
rights reveal that some of the ideas which caused such turmoil in the northern Atlantic
percolated down even to isolated farms in the Cape Town hinterland.65 Recent work
has revealed that, certainly by 1808, revolutionary talk and rumours could be used by
Atlantic sailors to incite Cape slaves to the only large-scale (albeit unsuccessful) slave
uprising in the history of South Africa.66 In these ways, then, southern Africa formed
part of the complex nexus of ideas, rumours and knowledge made possible by people
and ships from different parts of the Atlantic criss-crossing the ocean.
* * *
The changes which started to affect the Cape during the last decades of the eighteenth
century were in part made possible through its greater contact with other parts of the
108
Atlantic world, influenced by wider geopolitical and economic developments. Thus,

in 1780 – in the context of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch war – a British fleet was sent to
capture Cape Town so that it could aid in the further development of British interests
in the Indian Ocean. In the event, the British were thwarted by the French, the allies
of the Dutch, who were keen to keep the Cape out of British hands in order to protect
their own interest in the Mascarene Islands. During the 1780s several French-speaking
regiments were stationed in Cape Town to protect it. This had a huge impact on the
economy and culture of the town, earning it in short time the nickname of ‘Little
Paris’.67 The last decades of the eighteenth century also saw an increase in American
shipping around the Cape as East Coast merchants increasingly started trading with
the East Indies.68 But it was the British, with growing involvement in the Indian
Ocean, whose interest in the Cape – which became a real threat in the context of the
Napoleonic wars because of the Dutch–French alliance – led to it being conquered
from the Dutch in 1795. Except for a brief period when the Cape reverted to the
Batavian Republic in 1803–6, the Cape remained firmly in the British sphere for the
rest of the nineteenth century. This can be seen in the make-up of merchant shipping
calling at Table Bay: in 1806, about 40 British ships anchored here, with about the
same number of American ones and 20 ships from other European powers. By 1820,
the 28 European ships were dwarfed by the number of British vessels which were
almost twentyfold that of other powers.69 This picture changed somewhat over the
next few decades as other ports on the Cape south coast, notably Port Elizabeth,
started trading with Cape Town, leading to an increase in locally based merchant
ships, and American and European ships continued to call in Table Bay. But
throughout the nineteenth century southern African waters remained firmly in the
sphere of the British navy and merchant fleets.70
From the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth, southern Africa
played a major role in the process of the decline of the Atlantic World system and the
rise of a more globalised world interconnected through commerce.71 This is because of
the strategic position of especially Cape Town in connecting the Atlantic Ocean and
its system with that of the Indian, thus acting as a pivot from one world to the other
during this crucial period of transition.72 Under the VOC, the Cape’s primary aim was
to support the Dutch trading network. While Dutch South Africa’s economy certainly
was dynamic (albeit small), it was nonetheless crucially dependent on the VOC’s
shipping traffic.73 This started to change radically under the British: the introduction
of free trade and the greater availability of imported goods led to the rapid development
of a merchant class consisting of both settled Dutch and newly arrived British colonists.
The Cape benefitted much from the large-scale conflicts in which Britain was engaged:
not only provisioning the fleet but also providing all kinds of goods and services for
St. Helena in the Atlantic.74 From the 1830s, when the Cape economy was injected
with a great deal of capital from Britain as compensation for the abolishment of
slavery, southern Africa increasingly became part of a global British economy.75
Southern African merchants operated in both London and Cape Town while exports
and imports from the various Cape ports increasingly integrated this part of the world
with the north Atlantic, a process which accelerated sharply with the discovery of
minerals in the interior during the 1870s.
The increased ship traffic to and from southern Africa did not only affect the
economy: many of these ships also brought new migrants to the Cape. The British
109
take-over of the Cape resulted in large numbers of both administrators and soldiers
being settled here, as well as more permanent settlers – not only new immigrants
from Britain but also those who served in India and chose to settle at the Cape rather
than return to Europe.76 But the bulk of migrants to southern Africa in the first half
of the nineteenth century came from Europe: not only were there the well-known
mass migration of a few thousand poor people from the British isles to the eastern
districts of the Cape Colony in the early 1820s,77 but a steady stream of immigrants
from the Dutch- and German-speaking parts of Europe continued to arrive throughout
the nineteenth century, much as they did in the eighteenth.78 In this way, colonial
southern Africa remained a country of migrants who, as before, brought with them
ideas and notions from elsewhere in the Atlantic. Thus, the pietist movement which
swept throughout the north Atlantic in the last decades of the eighteenth century
started to have a major impact on life in southern Africa from the early 1800s when
missionaries inspired by their religious ideals arrived in the country and – for the first
time – seriously started to labour among the remnants of the Khoikhoi and, somewhat
later, among the Xhosa.79 By the 1820s and 1830s, the presence of missionaries in
southern Africa with strong links to influential interest groups in Britain, coupled
with local discourses surrounding the freedom of press, free trade and the supremacy
of the rule of law, led to the victory of the so-called humanitarian movement at the
Cape.80 In some ways the Cape experience became paradigmatic for the British
Empire, as shown in how it drove the 1835 Select Committee on Aborigines instituted
by the British parliament. But southern Africa was not just unified with the British
world through shared ideas and ideals – during the same period it became firmly
entrenched, thanks to the ships passing it from the Atlantic to India and Australia, in
a transnational world which debated, rumoured and gossiped about ideas emanating
from both the metropole and the colonies: both news and scandals – like people and
commodities – could cross the oceans via the Cape.81 Thus, although at first the Cape
of Good Hope was but part of a route to the Indies, it still afforded the one portal
from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and hence to a global world – a development
which was complete by the late nineteenth century when industrialising southern
Africa formed part of a world united through capital and crime, news and migration.82
NOTE S
1 Carlton Hayes and Charles Verlinden, quoted in Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History:
Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, Mass. & London, 2005), 13 and 19.
2 Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared
History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2009), 34.
3 Godechot and Palmer in Bailyn, Atlantic History, 25.
4 Kerry Ward, ‘“Tavern of the Seas?”: The Cape of Good Hope as an Oceanic Crossroads
during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in J.H. Bentley, R. Bridenthal and
K. Wigen (eds), Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic
Exchanges (Honolulu, 2007), 137–52.
5 Thus, with the exception of Gerrit Schutte, virtually no Dutch historian paid any attention
to colonial South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s, despite the growth of VOC
scholarship in the Netherlands during this period.
6 One of the greatest desiderata for the historiography of colonial South Africa is an
integrated study of the two periods. As this chapter illustrates, the period of the late
110
eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries was crucial for establishing Cape Town’s
central role in the development of a cross-oceanic world; a view which gets lost when
historians of the Dutch period stop abruptly in 1795 or, as often happens, when scholars
of British South Africa ignore the earlier history of the colony.
7 In fact, as demonstrated by Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of
Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (Harlow & London, 2001) this was but one of several large
dislocations and upheavals various groups in the interior of southern Africa experienced
between the 1820s and 1840s, completely transforming the politics of the Highveld and
bringing it firmly into the orbit of Western power centred on the South African coast.
8 Cf. the masterful trilogy of books P.J. van der Merwe published between 1937 and 1944
which – along with its author – had a stifling influence on VOC historiography in South
Africa until the 1970s. See on the significance and influence of van der Merwe, Nigel
Penn, ‘Trekboers Revisited’, African Affairs 95, 378 (1996), 126–30 and J.S. Bergh, ‘P.J.
(Piet) van der Merwe en D.J. (Dirk) Kotzé aan die Stuur by Stellenbosch, 1959–77: Goue
Jare of Verspeelde Geleenthede?’ Historia 53, 2 (2008), 208–62.
9 Cf. on Afrikaner nationalist historians and VOC historiography, Ken Smith, The Changing
Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Johannesburg, 1988), chapter 3 and
Nigel Worden, ‘New Approaches to VOC History in South Africa’, South African
Historical Journal 59 (2007), 3–18.
10 Richard Elphick, ‘Hermann Giliomee and The Shaping of South African Society: Memories
of a Collaboration’, South African Historical Journal 60, 4 (2008), 553–61.
11 Most of the influential scholars of this generation, such as Richard Elphick, Leonard
Guelke, Robert Ross, Nigel Worden, Susan Newton-King and Robert Shell, were either
raised in the UK or the USA, or else received their postgraduate training there.
12 In this sense South Africa deviates rather sharply from other Dutch colonies, except for
New Netherland which passed from Dutch control too early to be usefully compared to
the VOC Cape.
13 Cf. Greg Cuthbertson, ‘Cape Slave Historiography and the Question of Intellectual
Dependence’, South African Historical Journal 27 (1992), 26–49.
14 Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson (eds), The Frontier in History: North America
and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven & London, 1981); G. Frederickson (ed.),
White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New
York & Oxford, 1981).
15 For example, an international conference at the University of Cape Town in 2006 which
brought together scholars of the VOC world from Asia, Africa, Europe and North
America. This was followed up in 2008 with a conference on written culture in the
colonial world which, for the first time ever, brought together historians of colonial Africa
and Latin America; cf. Nigel Worden (ed.), Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material
Culture in the VOC World (Cape Town, 2007) and Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn (eds),
Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas, 1500–1900 (Cape Town
and Leiden, 2011). For a consideration of the development and import of this new
historiography, see Worden, ‘New Approaches to VOC History’ and Laura J. Mitchell
and Gerald Groenewald, ‘The Pre-Industrial Cape in the Twenty-First Century’, South
African Historical Journal 62, 3 (2010), 435–43.
16 Cf. Nicole Ulrich, ‘Time, Space and the Political Economy of Merchant Colonialism in the
Cape of Good Hope and VOC World’ and the response by Nigel Worden, ‘After Race and
Class: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Early Colonial Cape Society’, South African
Historical Journal 62, 3 (2010), 571–88 and 589–602.
17 Cf. http://www.southafrica.info/about/geography/oceansmeet.htm (accessed 10 March 2012).
18 C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London and New York, 1965), 242.
19 Bailyn, Atlantic History, 61.
111
20 Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: The
Making of a City (Cape Town, 1998), 13–14.
21 Karel Schoeman, Armosyn van die Kaap: Voorspel tot Vestiging, 1415–1651 (Cape Town,
1999), 181.
22 R. Raven-Hart, Before Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from 1488 to 1652 (Cape
Town, 1967), 97.
23 At least 363 VOC ships called at the Cape between 1610–51, most of which stayed here
on average for two to three weeks. No such complete figures have been published for
other nations, but from those which have left literary records of their visits between 1610
and 1649, at least 62 were English with 23 from other powers; figures compiled from J.R.
Bruijn, F.S. Gaastra and I. Schöffer, Dutch Asiatic Shipping in the 17th and 18th Centuries,
3 volumes (The Hague, 1979–87) and Raven-Hart, Before Van Riebeeck, 46–181.
24 Richard Elphick, Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (Johannesburg,
1985), chapters 1–3.
25 Nicolas Vergunst, Hoerikwaggo: Images of Table Mountain (Cape Town, 2000), 55; cf.
Hedley Twidle, ‘Prison and Garden: Cape Town, Natural History and the Literary
Imagination’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 2010), chapter 1 on the figure of Adamastor
in Camões and subsequent literary representations of the Cape. David Johnson, Imagining
the Cape Colony: History, Literature, and the South African Nation (Edinburgh, 2012),
chapter 1 discusses the various historiographical and literary treatments of the Khoikhoi’s
victory over de Almeida.
26 Raven-Hart, Before Van Riebeeck, 63.
27 Ibid., 67–84.
28 Cf. on the two most famous such individuals, Coree and Autshumao, Elphick, Khoikhoi,
76–86. Apparently Coree was kept in London for ‘Six Months in Sir Thomas Smiths
House then Governor of the East India Company’ where ‘he would daily lye on the
ground, and cry out very often in broken English, Coree home go…’, quoted from Edward
Terry, ‘A View of the Bay of Souldania near the Coast of Good Hope on the Coast of
Africa’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 1, 3 (1947), 75.
29 Earlier work on the ‘founding moment’ in South Africa’s colonial history has now been
replaced by the synthesis of Karel Schoeman, Kolonie aan die Kaap: Jan van Riebeeck en
die Vestiging van die Eerste Blankes, 1652–1662 (Pretoria, 2010).
30 Quoted from G.J. Schutte, De Nederlandse Patriotten en de Koloniën: Een Onderzoek
naar hun Denkbeelden en Optreden, 1770–1800 (Groningen, 1974), 66 (my translation).
31 Leonard Guelke, ‘Freehold Farmers and Frontier Settlers, 1657–1780’, in Richard Elphick
and Hermann Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, 2nd ed.
(Cape Town, 1989), 66–108.
32 Cf. from a large literature, Richard Elphick and V.C. Malherbe, ‘The Khoisan to 1828’,
in Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society,
1652–1840, 2nd ed. (Cape Town, 1989), 3–65; Susan Newton-King, Masters and Servants
on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge, 1999) and Nigel Penn, The
Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th
Century (Athens, OH and Cape Town, 2005).
33 P. van Duin and R. Ross, The Economy of the Cape Colony in the Eighteenth Century
(Leiden, 1987), 112–15.
34 On shipping figures, its fluctuations and the causes thereof, see Bruijn, Gaastra and
Schöffer, Dutch Asiatic Shipping, and Willem H. Boshoff and Johan Fourie, ‘Explaining
Ship Traffic Fluctuations at the Early Cape Settlement, 1652–1793’, South African Journal
of Economic History 23, 1–2 (2008), 1–27. Data for foreign ships come from Coenraad
Beyers, Die Kaapse Patriotte gedurende die Laaste Kwart van die Agtiende Eeu en die
Voortlewing van hul Denkbeelde, 2nd ed. (Pretoria, 1967), 333–35; see also, for a detailed
112
study of part of this period, Maurice Boucher, The Cape of Good Hope and Foreign
Contacts, 1735–1755 (Pretoria,1985).
35 Bruijn, Gaastra and Schöffer, Dutch Asiatic Shipping, vol. 3, 168. No similar figures exist
for the homeward journeys from the East, nor for foreign ships (although it is unlikely
that the contribution to the local population from privateers was significant since all
people who wished to live at the Cape of Good Hope needed the permission of the VOC
as the latter considered the colony its private possession).
36 J.E. Louwrens, ‘Immigrasie aan die Kaap gedurende die Bewind van die Hollandse Oos-
Indiese Kompanjie’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Stellenbosch, 1954) and R.C.-H. Shell,
‘Immigration: The Forgotten Factor in Cape Colonial Frontier Expansion, 1658 to 1817’,
Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies 6, 2 (2005), online.
37 J.R. Bruijn, ‘De Personeelsbehoefte van de VOC Overzee en aan Boord, Bezien in Aziatisch
en Nederlands Perspectief’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der
Nederlanden 91 (1976), 218–48 and Roelof van Gelder, Het Oost-Indisch Avontuur:
Duitsers in Dienst van de VOC (Nijmegen, 1997), chapters 1–2. On German–Dutch
migration and experience, cf. Jan Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600–1900
(London, 1987) and Erika Kuijpers, Migrantenstad: Immigratie en Sociale Verhoudingen
in 17e-eeuwse Amsterdam (Hilversum, 2005).
38 34.8 per cent Dutch and 33.7 per cent German; cf. J.A. Heese, Die Herkoms van die
Afrikaner, 1657–1867 (Cape Town, 1972).
39 The large number of second-language speakers of Dutch certainly influenced the
development of a unique version of Dutch, viz. proto-Afrikaans, during the eighteenth
century; cf. e.g. Fritz Ponelis, The Development of Afrikaans (Frankfurt am Main, 1993),
17–21. The VOC also tried through most of its tenure to prevent the Cape’s Germans
from developing into a ‘group apart’ by inter alia refusing the establishment of a Lutheran
church in Cape Town before 1780. Officially the colony maintained its Dutch character
in spite of the large number of foreign elements in it.
40 This process has not yet been studied systematically for the colonial Cape, but see Gerald
Groenewald, ‘Entrepreneurs and the Making of a Free Burgher Society’, in Nigel Worden
(ed.), Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town
(Johannesburg and Hilversum, 2012), 48–49 for some pertinent examples. Cf. on the
workings of this process for German–Dutch migration, Kuijpers, Migrantenstad.
41 Cf. Bailyn, Atlantic History, 91–94 for brief remarks on this process for the better-known
western parts of the Atlantic world. Likewise, the Cape formed part of a network of
political patronage which crossed both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds but with its
origins firmly in the Netherlands where it was determined which high-ranking VOC
officials would be stationed where, much as happened in Spanish and British America;
ibid., 50–51 and, on the Cape, Robert Ross and Alicia Schrikker, ‘The VOC Official
Elite’, in Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West, 26–44.
42 See on this first slave import to South Africa, Karel Schoeman, Early Slavery at the Cape
of Good Hope, 1652–1717 (Pretoria, 2007), 50–83.
43 Markus Vink, ‘“The World’s Oldest Trade”: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian
Ocean in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of World History 14, 2 (2003), 131–77.
44 Between 1652 and 1795 we know of 33 VOC-sponsored voyages to Madagascar, and five
to Mozambique and Zanzibar (in the late eighteenth century), with the aim of trading
slaves; James C. Armstrong and Nigel A. Worden, ‘The Slaves, 1652–1840’, in R. Elphick
and H. Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, 2nd edn. (Cape
Town, 1989), 112; cf. Karel Schoeman, Portrait of a Slave Society: The Cape of Good
Hope, 1717–1795 (Pretoria, 2012), 119–70.
45 Many VOC personnel who repatriated from the East Indies sold their personal slaves
(who accompanied them on the first leg of the journey) in Cape Town since it was
113
technically illegal to bring slaves to the Netherlands. In addition, small numbers of ‘excess’
slaves were sometimes sent from Batavia or Colombo; Armstrong and Worden, ‘The
Slaves’, 116–17 and Schoeman, Portrait, 266–314.
46 R. C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of
Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Johannesburg, 1994), chapter 2 and Nigel Worden, ‘Indian
Ocean Slavery and its Demise in the Cape Colony’, in Gwyn Campbell (ed.), Abolition and
its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London and New York, 2005), 30–38.
47 Worden, ‘Indian Ocean Slavery’, 37–38; cf. Richard B. Allen, ‘The Mascarene Slave-
Trade and Labour Migration in the Indian Ocean during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries’, in Gwyn Campbell, The Structures of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia
(London, 2004), 33–50.
48 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Americas: A Hemispheric History (New York, 2003), 64–65.
49 Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, 1983),
14–15 and Nigel Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, 1985), 94–95.
50 Nigel Worden, ‘Revolt in Cape Colony Slave Society’, in Edward A. Alpers, Gwyn
Campbell and Michael Salmon (eds), Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia
(London, 2007), 10–23.
51 Slaves and the Khoikhoi were second-language speakers of Dutch. The fact that their
numbers – and the rate at which it increased – were just right (not too many or too fast)
meant that it was possible for a new Dutch-based language to develop during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at the Cape but not in other Dutch colonies such as
New Netherland or Batavia where the balance of first- versus second-language speakers
and the rate of change did not create favourable conditions for language genesis; cf.
Gerald Groenewald, ‘Waarom Afrikaans? Die Ontstaan van Afrikaans in die Konteks van
die Nederlandse Koloniale Wêreld’, forthcoming.
52 Cf. on Batavia, Pauline D. Milone, ‘Indische culture, and its relationship to urban life’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History 9, 4 (1967), 407–26; Jean Gelman Taylor,
The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd ed. (Madison
and London, 2009) and, for the lack of creolisation at the Cape, Richard Elphick and
Hermann Giliomee, ‘The Origins and Entrenchment of European Dominance at the Cape,
1652–c. 1840’ in Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South
African Society, 1652–1840, 2nd ed. (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), 521–
66; Ad Biewenga, De Kaap de Goede Hoop: Een Nederlandse Vestigingskolonie, 1680–
1730 (Amsterdam, 1999), 267–90.
53 Susan Newton-King, ‘Family, Friendship and Survival among Freed Slaves’, in Worden
(ed.), Cape Town between East and West, 153–75.
54 Thus the Lammens sisters found in 1736 that, except for the omnipresence of slaves, ‘the
habits, attire and food here are all as in the mother country’, while two decades earlier
Maria van Riebeeck, the granddaughter of the founder of the Cape station and the wife of
the governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, compared the Cape very unfavourably with
the East; Gerald Groenewald, ‘Friends Old and New: The Lammens Sisters at the Cape,
1736’, Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 59, 4 (2005), 160 and
161 (quote).
55 Mary Gunn and L.E. Codd, Botanical Exploration of Southern Africa (Cape Town, 1981);
L.C. Rookmaaker, The Zoological Exploration of Southern Africa, 1650–1790 (Rotterdam,
1989) and Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong and Elmer Kolfin (eds), The Dutch Trading
Companies as Knowledge Networks (Leiden, 2010). See below on the Khoikhoi.
56 Gerald Groenewald, ‘To Leibniz, from Dorha: A Khoi Prayer in the Republic of Letters’,
Itinerario 28, 1 (2004), 29–48.
57 Siegfried Huigen, De Weg naar Monomotapa: Nederlandstalige Representaties van
Geografische, Historische en Sociale Werkelijkheden in Zuid-Afrika (Amsterdam, 1996)
114
and idem, Knowledge and Colonialism: Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa

(Leiden and Boston, 2009).
58 Cf. Johnson, Imagining the Cape Colony, 37–56; Huigen, Knowledge and Colonialism,
132–35; Malvern van Wyk Smith, ‘“The Most Wretched of the Human Race”: The
Iconography of the Khoikhoin (Hottentots), 1500–1800’, History and Anthropology 5, 3
(1992), 285–330; Linda E. Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of
‘Hottentots’ in Early Modern England (London, 2001) and Francois-Xavier Fauvelle-
Aymar, L’Invention du Hottentot: Histoire du Regard Occidental sur les Khoikhoi, XV-
XIX Siecle (Paris, 2002).
59 Gerald Groenewald, ‘On Not Spreading the Word: Ministers of Religion and Written
Culture at the Cape of Good Hope in the 18th Century’, in Adrien Delmas and Nigel Penn
(eds), Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas, 1500–1900 (Cape
Town and Leiden, 2011), 302–23.
60 Gerald Groenewald, ‘Een Spoorloos Vrouwspersoon: Unmarried Mothers, Moral
Regulation and the Church at the Cape of Good Hope, circa 1652–1795’, Historia 51, 2
(2008), 5–32.
61 The standard study remains Beyers, Kaapse Patriotte, although new and forthcoming
work by Teun Baartman, e.g. ‘Protest and Dutch Burger Identity’, in Worden (ed.), Cape
Town between East and West, 65–83, is bound to deepen our understanding of the so-
called ‘Patriot Movement’. For a study of the Cape movement in the context of the wider
Dutch world, see Schutte, Nederlandse Patriotten, chapter 4.
62 Beyers, Kaapse Patriotte, 170–234.
63 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of
the Revolutionary Atlantic (London and New York, 2000); Alan Gregor Cobley, ‘That
Turbulent Soil: Seafarers, the “Black Atlantic” and Afro-Caribbean Identity’, in J.H.
Bentley, R. Bridenthal and K. Wigen (eds), Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral
Cultures and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, 2007), 153–68.
64 Keletso E. Atkins, ‘The “Black Atlantic Communication Network”: African American
Sailors and the Cape of Good Hope Connection’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 24, 2
(1996), 23–25.
65 Cf. examples in Nigel Worden and Gerald Groenewald, Trials of Slavery: Selected
Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal Records of the Council of Justice at the
Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794 (Cape Town, 2005), 606–8 and 612–19. This topic has
not yet received the attention of Cape historians it deserves, but for important pointers see
Nicole Ulrich, ‘Counter Power and Colonial Rule in the Eighteenth-Century Cape of
Good Hope: Belongings and Protest of the Labouring Poor’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of
the Witwatersrand, 2011), chapter 5.
66 Nigel Worden, ‘“Armed with Swords and Ostrich Feathers”: Militarism and Cultural
Revolution in the Cape Slave Uprising of 1808’, in Jane Rendall, Richard Bessel and
Nicholas Guyatt (eds), War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830 (London, 2010), 121–38
and Nicole Ulrich, ‘Abolition from Below: The 1808 Revolt in the Cape Colony’, in
Marcel van der Linden (ed.), ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ and Changing Labour
Relations: Long-term Consequences of the British Act on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,
1807 (Leiden and Boston, 2011), 193–222.
67 Worden, van Heyningen and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 81–83.
68 Cf. James R. Fichter, So Great a Profitt: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-
American Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2010).
69 Cf. Worden, van Heyningen and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 164.
70 E.A.G. Clark, ‘Port Sites and Perception: The Development of the Southern and Eastern
Cape Coast in the Nineteenth Century’, South African Geographical Journal 59, 2 (1977),
150–67 and idem, ‘“The Spirit of Private Adventure”: British Merchants and the
115
Establishment of New Ports and Trades in the Cape of Good Hope, 1795–1840’, in
Stephen Fisher (ed.), Innovation in Shipping and Trade (Exeter, 1989), 111–30.
71 Cf. Benjamin, Atlantic World, 661: ‘A fragmented world of more or less autonomous
cultures, societies and states gave way to an increasingly connected, interdependent and
uniform world.’
72 This suggestion builds on Kerry Ward’s description of how the disintegration of the Dutch
empire in South Africa helped in building up that of the British; Network of Empires:
Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, 2009), 297–307.
73 The Cape of Good Hope was an unusual combination of both extractive and settler
economies; cf. Willem H. Boshoff and Johan Fourie, ‘The Significance of the Cape Trade
Route to Economic Activity in the Cape Colony: A Medium-Term Business Cycle
Analysis’, European Review of Economic History 14, 3 (2010), 469–503.
74 See on the economy of the Cape during the transitional period from the Dutch to the
British, Robert Ross, ‘The Cape of Good Hope and the World Economy, 1652–1835’, in
Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society,
1652–1840, 2nd ed. (Cape Town, 1989), 243–80.
75 Cf. Lalou Meltzer, ‘Emancipation, Commerce and the Role of John Fairbairn’s Advertiser’,
in Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais (eds), Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in
the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg, 1994), 169–99 and Wayne Dooling,
Slavery, Emancipation and Colonial Rule in South Africa (Scottsville, 2007).
76 R.R. Langham-Carter, ‘The “Indians” in Cape Town’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South
African Library 35, 4 (1981), 143–50.
77 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa
and Britain (London and New York, 2001).
78 In fact, more Dutch immigrated to the Cape in the three decades, 1808–37, than in the
preceding three decades when the Cape was largely under Dutch control. But even this
figure was dwarfed by the 30–40,000 Germans who moved to South Africa in the nineteenth
century; C. Pama, Die Groot Afrikaanse Familienaamboek (Cape Town, 1983), 18.
79 Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for
Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal, 2002).
80 Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Cape Town
& Johannesburg, 1996).
81 Cf. Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–1850
(Melbourne, 2004) and Christopher Holdridge, ‘Circulating the African Journal: The
Colonial Press and Trans-Imperial Britishness in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Cape’,
South African Historical Journal 62, 3 (2010), 487–513.
82 For compelling case studies of these developments, focusing particularly on the link
between capital and crime on the Highveld, see Charles van Onselen, The Fox and the
Flies: The Criminal Empire of the Whitechapel Murderer (London, 2007) and idem,
Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa, 1880–1899 (Cape Town, 2010).
116
CHAPTER SEVEN
EMIGRATION FROM THE HABSBURG

MONARCHY AND SALZBURG
TO THE NEW WORLD, 1700–1848
William O’Reilly
A USTRI A, AMERICA AND A TYP O L O G Y O F M IG RATIO N
M igrations are nothing new in Austrian and Central European history. Political
and religious motivated migration, the migration of elites, seasonal trade
workers and agricultural labourers, or the travelling of tradesmen and students were
common along the highways and bye-ways of Central Europe in the eighteenth century.
The transportation revolution which accelerated the process of economic integration
in the Holy Roman Empire in the eighteenth century also facilitated the expeditious
movement of Austrians both within the country and without.1 Yet Austria’s position
in the history of European migration in the pre-1848 moment is a particular, and
peculiar, one. By the commencement of the nineteenth century, three distinct strands
of migration were in evidence in the German-speaking parts of the Habsburg monarchy:
First, the political and religiously motivated forced emigration of Protestants to
Prussia and America, as well as the Ländler who travelled, and were deported,
respectively, during the reigns of Charles VI and Maria Theresia, from Karnten,
Oberösterreich and Steiermark to the Banat and to Siebenbürgen.2 Second, the more
common European phenomenon of seasonal migration, inspired by local over-
population, from the Alps and from the lands bordering the Carpathians to the agrarian
regions of the Bavarian Schwabian Alpenvorland and to inner Hungary (Schwabenziige
and Sachsenganger). And third, the immigration of political, artistic and crafts elites
from abroad to the imperial capital Vienna. These immigrants included the soldier and
army leader Prince Eugen von Savoyen, the composer Mozart from Salzburg, Beethoven
from Bonn and Clemens Metternich from Koblenz, who count among the illustrious
many who came to the hereditary lands (Erblander) during this time.3
Yet the history of emigration from Austria, and the Habsburg Monarchy more
generally, is a curiously nineteenth-century phenomenon; curious, when compared
with Austria’s neighbours in western Europe. In an eighteenth century which saw
fierce competition for colonists in many parts of the Holy Roman Empire, in France
and in further parts of western Europe, few Habsburg subjects crossed the Atlantic
in search of opportunity and a new life. This paper will explore this subject, and will
suggest that it was the availability of sites of relocation much closer to the Heimat,
117
– William O’Reilly –
most notably in parts of Hungary, which both dissuaded many migrants from
crossing the Atlantic and which spurred the Viennese administration in the eighteenth
century to prohibit practically all subjects from legally departing the territory. Only
with a relaxation in legislative prohibitions on freedom of movement and a renewed
literary interest in America, from the end of the eighteenth century, did emigration to
America become both a possibility and an ambition for many in the Austrian lands.
From 1453 until 1806, the Holy Roman Empire was governed, almost without
interruption, predominantly from Vienna by a Habsburg emperor. Within the Holy
Roman Empire there existed the Austrian Hereditary Lands and the lands of the
Bohemian crown, typically governed by the selfsame individual as the emperor, but
wearing a different crown, being Oberhaupt of the House of Austria, King of Bohemia
and Hungary, and having a myriad titles for each and every territory governed. And
lastly, there were the possessions and dominions of the House of Austria outside the
borders of the Empire, comprising Hungary and, later, Galicia and Bukowina. In
1804, an ‘Austrian’ Empire proper was created and continued to exist until 1918. The
Austrian Monarchy in the eighteenth century was a mildly centripetal agglutination of
bewilderingly heterogeneous elements.4 ‘Austria’ was much more than a ‘composite’
monarchy, for some of the territories of the House of Austria were part of the Holy
Roman Empire, whereas other possessions were not. It is for this reason that the true
nature and extent of ‘Austrian’ emigration to America in the period 1700–1848 is very
difficult to assess, for at times ‘Austrians’ behaved as ‘Germans’ and are, as such,
difficult to distinguish. While emigration to the Austrian lands was marginal in
comparison with inner migration to Hungary, its very marginality makes it all the
more interesting; why might an individual decide to emigrate from Styria to America,
rather than take the much shorter route to Hungary much closer to hand? These
points serve to highlight the more general shapeshifting nature of migrants’ identities
in the long eighteenth century, when regional identity sometimes gave way to a
linguistic identity, sometimes to a religious or political badge of identity. A prime
example is Salzburg, which lay outside Austria proper until 1815.
Salzburgers who left the city in the nineteenth century were not ‘Austrians’, but
shared most aspects of quotidian life with their neighbours who were. In America in
the eighteenth century, they were known as ‘Salzburgers’ and as ‘Germans’, but never
as ‘Austrians’. Use of ‘Austria’ in the period here considered can be anachronistic but
it will be used for the remainder of this paper to refer to the German-speaking regions
within the Austrian Habsburg lands between 1700–1848.5
Emigration from Austria in the eighteenth century followed, largely, an established
movement from the east to the west, with the exception of Protestant migration from
within Austria to the east of the Habsburg-governed territories. Migrations in the pre-
industrial period, however, impacted only on a small percentage of the entire population.
In the mercantilist economic and populationist politics of the eighteenth century,
emigration was perceived as a direct challenge to the well-being of the state, by
challenging the maintenance of a stable, and full, population. Overtaken by the
popularity of the British American colonies, lands ‘granted special blessings’,6 the
Habsburg Monarchy had great difficulties in persuading willing migrants that the
preferred direction in which to travel was east, and not west; to Hungary rather than
to America.7 Stories of the opportunities available to those willing to live and work in
America became ever more common and popular in the eighteenth century as agents,
118
– chapter 7: Emigration to the New World –
many in the pay of Dutch shipping houses, tramped the highways and byways of
Central Europe, earning Kopfgeld for every man or woman they recruited for the
colonies. These recruiters, known colloquially as Seelenverkaufer, Werber or
Menschendiebe, retailed stories of endless land, of opportunities unequalled anywhere
other than America. America became the stuff of fairy-tales, where hunger never
existed and people sailed on rivers of milk and honey. Belief in a better world, sometimes
leaning very heavily towards a mythical ‘Eldorado’ was reinforced by the appearance
of recruiters with their story-telling ability.8 In the face of such competition with agents
working for the settlement of the American colonies, it proved difficult to convince
willing migrants of the merits of Hungary, known by many as the ‘German graveyard’.
The primary initiative for the Habsburg Monarchy’s internal colonisation drive was a
reaction to shortcomings in the political and administrative system controlling
Habsburg governmental practice.9 The greatest advocate of this change was Wenzel
Anton Graf Kaunitz, who recognised the socio-political, economic, and political
advantages in settling the Habsburg territories outside the hereditary lands with loyal
subjects.10 Kaunitz saw no other alternative but to revert to a dualist policy of
prohibiting subjects from departing the Austrian lands, while often covertly directing
those who were en route to travel to Hungary rather than America.11 Yet eighteenth-
century Austrian recruiting efforts to, at times, prohibit and, at other times, sanction
emigration appeared outdated, ineffective and unattractive and remained closed to
change and innovation.12 The lure of the American colonies was proving too powerful
to be challenged by neighbouring Austrian-administered territories as rival
destinations.13 Yet while emigration to America was illegal, families had at the very
least access to information about conditions there. Hungary remained under-marketed
and thus unattractive to those subjects who would be potential colonists. Bad
communication and the lack of an information network seemed to be the greatest
obstacles to a greater success in the imperial colonisation of Austrian territories. In
general, the settlement of parts of Hungary with Austrian and German migrants was
exceptionally badly organised and lacked both official scrutiny and interest, especially
when compared with the activities of agents for North America and for other
contemporary European absolutist states engaged in the attraction and settlement of
migrants.14 Agents working for Vienna failed to imbibe the methods employed by
agents working for Pennsylvania or any of the American colonies and by the time new
methods were attempted it was too late. Those settlers who became agents in the
Hungarian Banat were quick to realise that opportunities there were just as advantageous
as in America: they ascribed the name ‘Europe’s America’ to the Banat in the hope of
increasing the popularity of the destination.15 Agents were quick to realise that much
of the determination to move to America was associated with the name, and referring
to the Banat as ‘Europe’s America’ infused Hungary’s reputation with positive attributes
previously only associated with North America. But the administration in Vienna,
which approved of this migration to the east, had not learned from the successes of
recruiters for America in the 1740s and 1750s.
EMIGRATION FROM THE M O NARCHY

This point goes some way in explaining why emigration from the Austrian lands was
a relatively rare occurrence in the eighteenth century. While incentives certainly
119
existed for many subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy to cross the Atlantic, emigration
was limited to a few thousand people at most. Whereas by 1734, an estimated 10,000
families had moved through Austrian lands, with the approval of the Viennese
administration, to settle lands in Hungary, perhaps as few as 1 percent of that
number had crossed the Atlantic to America.16 Knowledge of America was prevalent
and common in the Monarchy, but emigration was curtailed for a variety of reasons.17
By the eighteenth century, Europe and the Americas were linked economically,
socially and culturally as never before, with America acquiring a reputation as the
land of opportunity, advancement and adventure. Yet the Habsburg Monarchy was
not, like many western European neighbours, a state with a tradition of overseas
migration. While attempts were made to establish trading centres, most notably at
Trieste, little came of these efforts, largely as a result of restrictions imposed during
negotiations over the Pragmatic Sanction. Unlike its regal neighbours to the west, the
Austrian Habsburgs did not possess colonies in the Atlantic, Indian or Pacific Oceans,
nor was it likely they ever would. The House of Habsburg continued to share a
lengthy border with an Ottoman Empire which in the early eighteenth century was
entering a period of steady decline. Conscious that land regained in military successes
from the Ottoman Empire would need to be absorbed into the Habsburg
administrative system as speedily and efficiently as possible, civil and military
administrators alike recognised the need to colonise these new territories with the
greatest speed and by planting the most loyal subjects. Hungary, and particularly the
Banat of Temesvar, was to be an experiment in colonial government of a type the
Habsburg administration had not tried before. What began with the end of the siege
of Vienna in 1683 would continue until the close of the eighteenth century; a unique
process of expansion not limited to extra-European activities, but operated within
the continent, too.18 Colonisation and expansion within continental Europe were
intrinsic parts of contemporary developments in the Atlantic world and the
continental processes of reconquest and settlement were either modelled on, or
directly imitated, practices in North America.19 The Banat was to be an entrepot for
merchants and ministers, soldiers and settlers, a new site for development and design.
Just as in North America, these early years of conquest and colonisation in southern
Hungary had economic and administrative success as the ultimate objective, and
most hinged on the successful plantation of the country with colonists. This was a
unique opportunity for a Habsburg Monarchy which desired and badly needed
wealth; a near land-locked power with far-reaching ambitions for expansion and
growth. For the first time, the Habsburg administration found itself in the role of
coloniser: not in the terra incognita of the Americas, nor in the res nullius of the
Pacific, but in the ‘lost lands’ of Europe.20
The Habsburg Monarchy thus became a colonial enterpriser in the more unusual
position of colonisers within the European continent. The experiment of colonial
government which led Sweden to colonise New Sweden along the Delaware took
place in the Nordic north in the lands of the Sarni; Britain had its colonial experiment
in Ireland before venturing to New England in North America. The Habsburg Empire
had its experiment in the Banat of Temesvar in Hungary, before pushing later in the
eighteenth century into Galicia in the north and thereafter consolidating her
government of the northern Balkans in the nineteenth century. In a model which was
advocated in England’s colonies and in the Balkans alike, colonists were the worker
120
bees of colonial industry, and the hive could be transplanted to different landscapes.21
The early eighteenth century ushered in choice for potential colonists, and competition
for their labour was inevitable. Colonists, the worker bees who built eighteenth-
century Empires, were presented with the one great directional choice: to go east or
go west, to Hungary or to America. And the Monarchy needed to ensure that
emigrants were dissuaded, or legally prohibited, from moving to America. The
cameralist state duly responded in a slew of codes which limited the right of movement
and prohibited the colonial American competition for colonists.
E MIGRATION, LAW AND THE E M P IRE

Significant changes in legislation governing emigration to the Americas and the
Habsburg dominions occurred from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The
century began with prohibitions on movement, even though the Aulic Chamber, the
Reichshofrat, ruled in 1725 that ‘it is against the nature of German freedom to
remove the ius emigrandi from German subjects’.22 Many German states attempted
to dissuade emigration by introducing a departure tax, similar to a quit rent, which
emigrants were required to pay. Without exception, all states in the Holy Roman
Empire prohibited emigration at certain times during the nineteenth century. On 7
July 1769, Emperor Joseph II, in order to avoid the ‘intolerable evil of depopulation’,
especially ‘of young men’, stated that the ‘emigration of Imperial subjects to foreign
lands will no longer be tolerated.23 This imperial decree was implemented by many
states, but the gap between the de iure position and the de facto reality was often
wide, and laws may not have disseminated sufficiently to prohibit emigrants leaving
the state. Over the course of the nineteenth century, successive bans on emigration
seriously curtailed movement from Austria to North America at a time when over
100,000 migrants from elsewhere in the Empire were crossing the Atlantic.
From 1932, emigration from Austria required official sanction (Emigrationskonsens),
without which emigration was illegal. This permission incorporated the resignation
of, or release from, citizenship and subjectship on a variety of levels (Ortsobrigkeit,
Kreis amt, stadtischer Magistrat). In the first half of the nineteenth century, just as in
the course of the nineteenth century, the principal wish of the state remained the
maintenance of a strong population, most easily attained through the strict control of
departure from the state. Emigration from Austria and the lands of the Habsburg
Monarchy to North America remained the final refuge rather than the first choice;
the reserve of religious refugees and political patriots, denied a voice at home and
seeking refuge in republican America.24 Only with the basic law of 1967
(Staatsgrundgesetz) did the situation change in any significant way, when Austria-
Hungary bestowed upon its citizens the right to make decisions concerning the
crossing of state borders for reasons of emigration (das Prinzip der Freiheit der
Auswanderung),25 limited, however, by military service. While in reality, such
possibilities were already in existence from the Grundentlastung of 1949, such a
legislative change was highly significant and facilitated the mass emigration of many
Austro-Hungarian subjects to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth
century. No longer were emigrants from Austria and the lands of the Monarchy
exceptional individuals or political refugees, but constituted the over 400,000 emigrants
who sought a better life in the United States.26
121
THE GREAT EX CE P TIO N:

THE SALZB URG MIGRA TIO N TO AM E RICA
The sole exception to the micro-migration of individuals or singular families from
the Monarchy to America was the migration of Protestants from Salzburg which
took place in the 1730s. Protestants had lived in parts of Austria from the earliest
stages of the Reformation.27 The forcible expulsion of Protestants from parts of the
Austrian lands, however, reached a new turn in the later seventeenth century, as
with events in the east Tyrolian Defregger valley.28 In the winter of 1684 Prince-
Bishop (Förstbischof) Max Gandolph Graf von Kuenburg (1668–87) expelled the
Evangelical farmers of the Defregger Valley, giving them fourteen days to leave and
forcibly retaining these families’ children behind.29 Four years later, one of the most
famous of all Austrian exiles (Exulanten) of the late seventeenth century, Josef
Schaitberger (1658–1733), was expelled from the salt mining region of Dürrnberg
bei Hallein. In the winter of 1685/86 he, and many others, were forced to emigrate,
leaving their children behind to be raised as Catholic, and from his base in Nürnberg
he attempted to raise the spirits, and raise to arms, his brother Protestants in Austria.
Through his Sendbrief and his more famous song, ‘lch bin ein armer Exulant’, he
became a champion of crypto-Protestants throughout the Austrian lands.30 Events
escalated when, in 1728, the Price-Bishop Leopold Freiherr von Firmian (1727–44)
called the Jesuit Order to Salzburg who attempted, through active preaching and
campaigning, to convert the many Protestants of the Pongau to Catholicism.
Appointing Hieronymus Cristani von Rall as his chancellor in 1731, Firmian
initiated investigations into the state of Protestantism in his territory, vowing to
preserve ‘the old glory of the Catholic religion’, despite one-fifth of the population
being ‘Acatholic’.31 In seven legal petitions to the Corpus Evange/icorum of the Holy
Roman Imperial Diet in Regensburg, over 19,000 Protestant farmers drew the
attention of the Protestant lands in the Empire to events underway in Salzburg. The
farmers were intent on protecting themselves and their Protestant culture, and
gathered in Schwarzach on 5 August 1731, swearing by salt (der Salzbund von
Schwarzach) to stand together against the incursion of Jesuitical Catholicism in their
district. Prince-Bishop Firmian saw this as an act of rebellion, as the beginning of a
Protestant Peasants Revolt in his territory, and called on Emperor Charles VI for
military support. On 31 October 1731 Prince-Bishop Firmian, again in violation,
certainly of the spirit, of the 1648 Osnabrück Peace treaty, declared that all adherents
of the Augsburg Confession must depart the territory of Salzburg by April 1732; as
this was a matter of expelling ‘rebels’ from the territory, the established practice of
granting three years to sell property was denied the Salzburg Protestants. Instead,
non-landowners had to leave within eight days, landowners had three months to sell
up and leave. Firmian confidently reminded all who challenged his actions that his
predecessor, Prince-Bishop Graf Paris Lodron, had not signed the Osnabrück
Instrument of Peace.32 Over 20,000 adherents of the Augsburg Confession departed
the Prince-Bishopric in 1731 and early 1732. The majority – approximately 16,000
– travelled north to Prussia, where King Friedrich William I had invited the expelled
Salzburgers to settle in East Prussia, under an Edict of 2 February 1732. The
economic and military development of Prussia in the course of the eighteenth century
owes a not-inconsiderable amount to the productivity, and the rich taxes paid, by
122
this successful colony of Salzburg Protestants.33 Other Salzburgers settled on the

Dutch–Flemish island of Cadsand; others in Holland, in Denmark, in the neighbouring
German regions north-west of Salzburg; a small number in England and in other
overseas European territories. A relatively small number, but significant in the
history of Colonial America, settled in Georgia.
Largely as a result of the efforts of the pastor and Senior Samuel Urlsperger (1685–
1772), who had held office at the German St. Mary’s church in the Savoy, London,
was a corresponding member of the ‘Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge’
(SPCK), and whose own ancestors had been exiled from Steiermark as Protestants
during the Thirty Years War, Salzburgers found themselves on a path across the
Atlantic. Urlsperger, from 1723 pastor at the St. Anna Church in Augsburg, used his
contacts in London – especially his friendship with one of the chaplains of the German
Court Chapel at St. James’s, London, Friedrich Michael Ziegenhagen, who had also
studied at Halle – to promote the idea of transplanting emigrating Salzburgers to the
British North American colonies. When the ‘Trustees for Establishing the Colony of
Georgia in America’ received a royal charter from George II in 1732, the area between
South Carolina in the north and Florida in the south was bestowed upon them for the
founding of a colony. With the triumvirate aims of driving back Spain’s aims on the
east coast of America; to philanthropically serve the ‘relief of poor subjects made poor
by misfortune or want of employment’; and to create new markets for English
products, they immediately thought of the fleeing Salzburgers as suitable colonists.34
As time moved on, most of the future settlers of the Georgia colony would come to be
called ‘Salzburgers’, irrespective of whence German-speaking Central Europe they
came. On 15 December 1732 the Trustees decided to settle Salzburgers in Georgia
and at the beginning of September 1732, some Salzburg Protestants gathered in
Augsburg where, being provided for spiritually by Urslperger, they waited until 31
October 1733. On that date, 42 men and their families, 78 people in all, sailed on the
Main and Rhine downstream to Rotterdam under the leadership of Baron Philipp
Georg Friedrich von Reck (1710–98).35 At Rotterdam, where they arrived on 27
November, two pastors joined the group – Johann Martin Bolzius (1703–65) and
Israel Christian Gronau (1714–45) – who would accompany the emigrants on their
voyage to Georgia and care for the group’s pastoral needs. On 2 December 1733, the
Salzburg migrants departed Rotterdam on the Purysburg for Dover and whence for
North America. While at Dover, the cleric Henry Newman wrote to Philipp von
Reck, wishing a speedy crossing and noting that ‘our German Missionaries to East
India commonly get the English Language in their Voyage thither, but I hope Your
Voyage will not be long enough for that purpose’.36 After 67 days out from England,
the group reached the harbour of Charleston in South Carolina, where they spent five
days recovering from the trans-Atlantic crossing. A further day sailing on the Savannah
River brought them to Savannah on Tuesday, 12 March 1734, at around 2 p.m. A
total of 143 days had passed from leaving Augsburg to arriving in Savannah. The
colony would soon see the establishment of ‘Ebenezer’, the new home of the
Salzburgers in America. On 28 December 1734, a second transport of 57 Salzburgers
arrived under the leadership of Jean Vat aboard the Prince of Wales. This was an
important contribution to the fledgling colony, as many of the new colonists were
trades- and craftsmen. A third group arrived on 17 February 1736 under the leadership
of Baron Philipp von Reck, although of the total 227, only a small number were
123
Salzburg emigrants. A fourth and final group would arrive on 2 December 1741,
under the leader Johann Friedrich Vigera, accompanied by the ‘surgeon’ Johann
Ledwig Mayer (Meyer). Each Salzburg family received 25 hectares of land, ground for
a house and place for a fruit and vegetable garden. After five years construction and
development, the settlement of Ebenezer was a functioning settlement.
Many colonial investors and proprietors began to realise the possibilities intrinsic
to the supply of information to the Austrian lands concerning the New World. Pastor
Johann Martin Bolzius maintained such a correspondence from Georgia with his
Lutheran superior, the Reverend Samuel Urlsperger at Augsburg.37 He noted that the
Salzburg migrants did not venture along the much shorter voyage to Hungary for a
number of reasons, including the obvious fear of religious persecution, although
German Protestants did settle in Hungary during this time.38 Rather, the Salzburgers
were encouraged in their westward journey by news of America as a ‘New Canaan’.39
Being passively anti-Habsburg at the very least, these migrants were further
discouraged from moving east by the prevalent and circulating malevolent reports of
Hungary as the ‘colonist’s graveyard’. Bolzius cannot be accused of lavishing praise
on life in the new colonies, nor did he encourage his contemporaries in Germany to
uproot and undertake the voyage. ‘Certain German news printed in Jena and Hanover
about Carolina and Georgia’, he wrote, ‘contains much that I either do not find here
at all, or the advantages of these provinces are much too exaggerated. It is a good,
healthy, and well-situated land, but there are many difficulties in cultivating it. […]
He who makes a reasonable living in his Fatherland, and has freedom of conscience
[…] does better if he remains where he is. But if […] God provides willingness and
opportunity for the journey to America, and he is not too old yet nor unfit for work,
may he come in God’s name; he will not rue it.’40 Yet even Bolzius was open to
manipulation. Little did he know that his letters were being edited with the deliberate
intention of removing any disparaging and negative remarks about America, to
promote Protestant movement to America.41 The favourable reports given in the
published version of the travelogue were, in part, due to the careful bowdlerising of
his text by the Reverend Samuel Urlsperger. The unexpurgated versions show that
Bolzius’s fellow Salzburg passengers aboard vessel bound for North America had far
more immediate concerns than contemplating the wonders of God, including lack of
food, of clean water and of sanitation. Only when the original correspondence is
compared with the printed version can the ‘cleansing process’ be fully appreciated.
Samuel Urlsperger went so far as to edit out all references to sickness, infertile soil
and the high level of mortality at Ebenezer, Georgia.42 One Salzburg colonist,
Matthias Braunberger, audaciously disparaged the settlement in Georgia, but luckily
for Urlsperger the potentially calumnious letter fell into his hands and he censored it,
concealing all adverse news concerning the settlement of Ebenezer from a potential
readership in Austria and Germany.
While written correspondence from both America and Hungary to the Austrian
lands varied greatly in style, it addressed similar themes of family issues; food, drink,
land and religious practice.43 Of course, not all letters were flattering to the new land,
and many promoters found it necessary to alter correspondence to support claims of
a better life overseas. Still others ascribed the name ‘Europe’s America’ to Southern
Hungary in the hope of increasing the popularity of the destination in the Empire.44
Despite its distance and legal prohibition on travel to the country, America remained
124
at the forefront of the ‘Austrian’ imagination, and this conceptualisation of America

as a ‘land of milk and honey’ would intensify at the end of the eighteenth century.
T H I N K I NG AB OUT AMERICA: AU S TRIA L O O KS W E S T

In the eighteenth century ‘Austrians’, like other peer Europeans, looked upon America
as the home of children of nature, noble red-men and savages, who possessed all the
virtues of the human race uncorrupted by the contaminating influences of civilisation
and government. Thousands of Europeans knew America only through the letters
that came from across the sea, and from the travel literature and emigrant guides that
appeared in all the leading European languages.45 The ‘image’ of America was
comprised of a complex group of associations, phrases, ideas and attitudes in varying
forms and combinations that evoked America in the readers’ minds.46 It was in the
nineteenth century that the ordinary people of Europe looked to America as the land
of their dreams; the nineteenth century was ‘the American century’ in that America
stood as the ideal and goal of many of Europe’s masses. It was for countless Europeans,
just as for Austrians, ‘the Century of the Common Man’, the century of mass
emigration to America.47
In general, from the end of the eighteenth century German-language publications
looked to America with a curious, yet sympathetic, eye.48 One can find in the German-
language literature of the early nineteenth century two pictures of America. One,
emphasising its rawness, hypocrisy, and materialism, and the curse of slavery; the
other, representing the United States as a country where the refugees of Austria and
Germany could find freedom from caste systems, from secret police, from bureaucracy
and censorship, and from a standing army.49 Significant publications from this period
became the common currency in the exchange of opinions about America; frequently,
these publications were first published in Vienna or were re-published for the Austrian
market. It is no coincidence that the works of that Habsburg subject and explorer
Ignaz Edler von Born (1742–91) would have an impact on his peers in Vienna in the
last decades of the eighteenth century and would lead to the publication in Vienna of
the first systematic geological description of America, written by Johann David
Schopf.50 These works informed a new audience of the possibilities, and potential, of
America as a site of success and a resource for refuge. Such sentiments were not
uncommon from the earliest years of the United States. Austrian interest in America
awoke with a vengeance through the provocation of such authors as the enigmatic
Karl Postl, a Kreuzherr from Moravia who had moved to Vienna and changed his
name to Charles Sealsfield.51 Sealsfield made five visits to America and his stories
circulated widely in Austria and Hungary;52 his writings had a decided influence on
emigration from Austria in the early nineteenth century.53 Another neglected, but
equally important figure in understanding Austria’s image of America and Austrian
emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century is the Austrian poet Nikolas
Lenau.54 Lenau wrote parodies on Yankee Doodle, referred to the United States as
the ‘verschweinte’ instead of the ‘Vereinte Staaten’ and helped to spread such
misinformation about the United States among the population at home in Austria as
the belief that birds do not sing and flowers do not smell in America.55 Such negative
opinions became more frequent as a growing body of clerics and academics challenged
the reputation of America as a deus ex machina for life’s woes and worries. One such
125
voice was the Reverend Philip Schaff, who reported in 1854 that many respectable
men of high culture, especially in Austria, spoke only with contempt of America,
which they regarded as ‘a grand bedlam, a rendezvous of European scamps and
vagabonds.’56 Debates about the advisability, or otherwise, of allowing information
about America to circulate freely were contentious. It was even reported that the
Emperor Franz-Joseph had refused permission for the establishment of chairs of
American history at Prague and Vienna.57
CONCLU S IO N
While emigration from the Austrian Monarchy, and the Austrian lands in particular,
was exceptional in the eighteenth century, it nonetheless established a pattern for the
mass emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century. Had Habsburg
administrators not been so preoccupied by mercantilist economic practices which
stressed the need for a strong population – ubi populus, ibi obulus – then perhaps
more immigrants would have departed the country to live across the Atlantic. But
this is too simple; in reality, opportunities within the Empire in the eighteenth century
far and away outweighed those overseas, at least for the majority of subjects. Only
an elite of the population – skilled craftsmen, artists, clerics and nobles and political
and literary activists – expressed any great desire to travel to the Americas, and they
could, and did, without great difficulty. Others were denied the luxury of choice in
this matter, as in the Salzburg migration. Religious refugees fled the Empire as they
were forced to do so; their petitioning having failed, Salzburg Protestants had no
other option but to emigrate. And a small number of highly motivated, part-Pietist,
part-Europamude, refugees made their way to America. Austria and the Americas
had been inextricably linked before the eighteenth century, but by the end of that
century, Austria and the United States were forging a new relationship. If America
became the first new nation, then its relationship with Austria and Austrians would
ensure that neither could ever be an ‘old nation’ again.58
NOTE S
1 David F. Good, Uneven Development in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparison of the
Habsburg Empire and the United States, in: The Journal of Economic History 46 (1986),
137–51, here 145.
2 See Erich Buchinger, Die Geschichte der Kaminer Hutterischen Bruder in Siebenburgen und
in der Walachei (1755–70), in: Russland und Amerika. Ein Beitrag zum Schicksal von
Kaminer Transmigranten und zur Geschichte der heutigen Hutterischen Bruderhiife in den
USA und Kanada, in: Carinthia I 172 (1982) 145–303; William O’Reilly, Agenten, Werbung
und Reisemodalitaten. Die Auswanderung ins Temescher Banal im 18. Jahrhundert, in:
Matthias Beer/Dittmar Dahlmann (Hg.), Migration nach Ost-und Sudosteuropa vom 18.
bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts. Ursachen-Formen-Verlauf-Ergebnis (= Schriftenreihe
des lnstituts für Donauschwabische Geschichte und Landeskunde, Bd. IV, 1999), 109–20.
3 Heinz Fassmann/Rainer Munz (Hg.), Einwanderungsland Osterreich? Historische
Migrationsmuster, aktuelle Trends und politische Maßnahmen. Wien 1995, 131.
4 R.J.W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700. Oxford 1979, 446.
5 For a full and detailed consideration of these issues, see: Grete Klingenstein, Was bedeuten
‘Osterreich’ und ‘österreichisch’ im 18. Jahrhundert? Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Studie, in:
126
Richard G. Plaschka/Gerald Stourzh/Jan Paul Niederkorn (Hg.), Was heisst Osterreich? lnhalt
und Umfang des Osterreichbegriffs vom 10. Jahrhundert bis heute. Wien 1995, 149–220.
6 Christopher Sauer writing in the Pennsylvanische Berichte, 1 December 1754.
7 See, inter alia, William O’Reilly, Migration, Recruitment and the Law: Europe Responds to
the Atlantic World, in: Horst Pietschmann (Hg.), Atlantic History. History of the Atlantic
System 1580–1830 (= Proceedings of the Joachim Jungius Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften/
Universität Hamburg History of the Atlantic System Conference). Göttingen 2002.
8 Dirk Hoerder/Horst Rossler (Hg.), Distant Magnets: Expectations and Realities in the
Immigrant Experience. New York 1993.
9 Konrad Schunemann, Osterreichs Bevölkerungspolitik unter Maria Theresia. Berlin 1835, 16.
10 lmre Takacs, Die wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Folgen der Wiederbesiedlung der ungarischen
Tiefebene im 18. Jahrhundert, in: Ungarische Jahrbücher XIII (1933), 103.
11 Anton Tafferner, Ouellenbuch zur Donauschwabischen Geschichte Bd. Ill. München
1978, 244–46, no. 147–48; Konrad Schunemann, Die Einstellung der theresianischen
lmpopulation (1770–71), in: Jahrbuch des Wiener Ungarischen lnstituts Bd. 1 (1931),
173 f., Bevolkerungspolitik, wie Anm. 9, 271, 303–16.
12 Schunemann, Bevolkerungspolitik, wie Anm. 9, 170.
13 William O’Reilly, Conceptualising America in Early Modern Central Europe, in:
Explorations in Early American Culture. Pennsylvania History 65 (1998), 101–21.
14 See: Georg Reiser, Zur spat-theresianischen Ansiedlung im Banal. Gottlob, Triebswetter,
Ostern, in: Neue Heimatblatter I (1935), 258 f; Friedrich Reschke, Genese und Wandlung
der Kulturlandschaft des süd-ostlichen jugoslawischen Banats im Wechsel des historischen
Geschehens. Dissertation Universitat Koln 1968, 571.
15 Roger Bartlett/Bruce Mitchell, State-Sponsored Immigration into Eastern Europe in the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in: Roger Bartlett/Karen Schönwalder (Hg.), The
German Lands and Eastern Europe. Basingstoke 1999, 91–114, here 105; Mark Haberlein,
Vom Oberrhein zum Susquehanna. Studien zur Auswanderung nach Pennsylvania im 18.
Jahrhundert. Stuttgart 1993, 89–92.
16 F. Milleker, Die erste organisierte deutsche Kolonisation des Banates unter Mercy 1722–26.
Werschetz 1939, 8; M. Braess, Die Schwaben im Banal, in: Deutsche geogr. Blatter hg. v. d.
geogr. Gesellschaft in Bremen, Bd. XXI, Heft 2 (1898), 70; K. Moller, Wie die schwabischen
Gemeinden entstanden sind, 2 Bde. Temesvar 1923, here Bd. 1, 9; H. Zerzawy, Die Besiedlung
des Banats mil Deutschen unter Karl VI. D.Phil. Dissertation Universitat Wien 1931, 30.
17 For a more detailed consideration of the recruitment of German-speaking migrants and
colonists for North America and lands of the Austrian Monarchy in the eighteenth century,
see: William O’Reilly, To the East or to the West? Agents and the Recruitment of Migrants
for British North America and Habsburg Hungary, 1717–80, Dissertation University of
Oxford 2002 (to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2015 as Selling Souls. The
international trade in German migrants, 1680–1780).
18 Ronald Robinson, Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a
Theory of Collaboration, in: Roger Owen/R. Sutcliffe, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism.
London 1972, 117–42. More recently, Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government. Science,
Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. New Haven/London 2000, esp.
Preface, xi–xviii, highlights the importance of understanding the reverse processes of
colonization at work in Europe in the ‘Age of Expansion’.
19 Review of Nicholas Canny, Europeans on the Move. Studies on European Migration,
1500–1800. Oxford 1994, by Jeremy Black, in: English Historical Review CXll (1997), 201.
20 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World. Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France
c.1500–c.1800. New Haven/London 1995, 76.
21 ‘Endorsed by both ancient wisdom and nature, the hive seemed to offer a perfect model for
colonization. Just as bees swarmed from the overfull hive, English men and women should
127
leave England, groaning under its heavy burden of overpopulation, for the good of the
commonwealth,’ Karen Ordahl Kuppermann, The Beehive as a Model for Colonial Design,
in: Dies. (Hg.), America in European Consciousness 1493–1750. Chapel Hill/London
1995, 272–92, here 273. Of course, the hive is also a familiar analogy in Central Europe
and the Balkans: the seal of the constitution of the Matica srpska, published in 1864, shows
a bee-hive, out of which bees are flying.
22 Robert Jutte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge 1994, 203; U.
Scheuner, Die Aus wanderungsfreiheit in der Verfassungsgeschichte und im Verfassungsrecht
Deutschlands. Tübingen 1950, 210, n. 4, ‘das es wider der teutschen Freiheit laufe, den
Untertanen das ius emigrandi zu entziehen’ [it ran contrary to Teutonic liberties to withdraw
from the subjects the ‘jus emigrandi’ (i.e. the rights of religious emigration)]: G.H. van Berg,
Handbuch des Teutschen Policeyrechts. Hannover 1799–1806, part II, 19 and 47. By the end
of the century, the Handbuch des deutschen Polizeirechts (1799) suggested that the emigration
of a ‘surplus’ in society was advantageous for the general population and the state.
23 Berg, Handbuch, wie Anm. 22, vol. 1, part VI, 1 18.
24 Traude Horvath/Gerda Neyer (Hg.), Auswanderungen aus Osterreich. Von der Mitte des 19.
Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart. Wien 1996, 14–1 5.
25 Erich Zollner, Geschichte Österreichs van den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Wien 1970, 444.
26 Hans Chmelar, Höhepunkte der Österreichischen Auswanderung. Wien 1974, 20–21; Ders.
(Hg.), Nach Amerika. Burgenlandische Landesausstellung 1992. Eisenstadt 1992, esp.
‘Exportgut Mensch. Hohepunkt der Österreichischen Auswanderung bis 1914’, 72–91.
27 A correspondence survives between the Hofgastein-resident Martin Lodinger and Martin
Luther. See Gerhard Florey, Geschichte der Salzburger Protestanten und ihrer Emigration
1731/32. Wien/Koln/Graz 1977, 39–42.
28 Peter G. Trapper, Emigriert – missioniert – deportiert. Protestanten und Geheimprotestantismus
in Osterreich und Salzburg zwischen Gegenreformation und Toleranz, in: Rottenburger
Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 13 (1994), 179–89.
29 Erich Buchinger, Die ‘Landler’ in Siebenbürgen. Vorgeschichte, Durchtuhrung und Ergebnis
einer Zwangsumsiedlung im 18. Jahrhundert. München 1980, 35–40.
30 Gustav Reingrabner, Jose ph Schaitberger, Bergmann und Exul Christi. Wien 2000.
31 Florey, Geschichte der Salzburger Protestanten, wie Anm. 27, 79.
32 J.K. Mayer, Die Emigration Salzburger Protestanten von 1731/32, in: Mitteilungen d.
Gesellschaft f. Salzburger Landeskunde, Bde. 69–71 (1929–31); C.F. Arnold, Die
Austreibung der Salzburger Protestanten und ihre Aufnahme bei den Glaubensgenossen.
o.O. 1900; Gerhard Florey, Bischofe, Kelzer, Emigranten. Salzburg 1967.
33 Martin Behaim-Schwarzenbach, Hohenzollnerische Colonisationen. Ein Beitrag zu der
Geschichte des preu Bischen Staates und der Colonisation des Östlichen Deutschlands.
Leipzig 1874.
34 W.K. Kavenagh (Hg.), Foundations of Colonial Georgia. A Documentary History, Vol. 3.
New York 1973, 1822 f. Thomas J. Müller-Bahlke/Jürgen Grosch/ (Hg.), Salzburg – Halle
– Nordamerika. Tübingen 1999, Llll-LXV.
35 George Fenwick Jones (Hg.), Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in
America. Edited by Samuel Urlsperger, Vol. X, 1743. Athens, Georgia 1988, 131–68;
Florey, Geschichte der Salzburger Protestanten, wie Anm. 27, 185.
36 George Fenwick Jones, Henry Newman’s Salzburger Letterbook. Athens, Georgia 1966, 89.
37 [Samuel Urlsperger], Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America,
hg. v. George Fenwick Jones, Marie Hahn, vols. I-XVIII. Athens, Georgia, 1968–95. For
the background to Salzburg emigration in 1733, see Mack Walker, The Salzburg
Transaction. Ithaca, NY, 1993. Klaus G. Loewald/Beverly Starika and Paul S. Taylor (Hg.),
Johann Martin Bolzius Answers a Questionnaire on Carolina and Georgia, in: William and
Mary Quarterly. XIV (3rd series, 1957), 218–62.
128
38 Mack Walker, The Salzburger Migration to Prussia, 70, in: Hartmut Lehman/Hermann
Wellenreuther/Renate Wilson (Hg.), In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German
Settlements in Eighteenth-Century Europe and America. University Park, Pennsylvania 2000.
39 Paul Raabe/Heike Liebau/Thomas Muller, Pietas Hallensis Universalis. Weltweite
Beziehungen der Franckeschen Stiftungen im 18. Jahrhundert (= Katalog der Franckeschen
Stiftungen, Bd. II). Halle 1995, esp. 85: ‘Durch Vermittlung des Augsburger Theologen
Samuel Urlsperger, der eng mit den halleschen Pietisten zusammenarbeitete, wurde eine
Gruppe van Salzburgern in der kurz zuvor gegründeten Kolonie Georgia angesiedelt und
van Halle aus mit Pastoren versorgt’ [Through the mediation of the Augsburger theologian
Sam Urlsperger, who worked closely with the Pietists of Halle, a group from Salzburg was
settled in the recently founded Georgia colony and was supplied with pastors from Halle].
40 Rev. Samuel Urlsperger, Der ausführlichen Nachrichten von der Koniglich-Gross-
Brittannischen Colonie Saltzburgischer Emigranten in America. Halle 1735–52, in 19
Teilen, 3 Bde., here Bd. 3, 951.
41 George Fenwick Jones, The Salzburger Saga. Religious Exiles and Other Germans Along
the Savannah. Athens, Georgia 1984, 13.
42 Ebd., 18; Oers., German-Speaking Settlers in Georgia, 1733–41, in: The Report. A Journal
of the German American History XXXVlll (1982), 35–51.
43 A.G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty and Property: German Lutherans in British Colonial
America. Baltimore 1993, 23.
44 Roger Bartlett/Bruce Mitchell, State-Sponsored Immigration into Eastern Europe in the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in: Roger Bartlett/Karen Schonwalder (Hg.), The
German Lands and Eastern Europe. Basingstoke 1999, 91–1 14, here 105; Hiiber/ein, Vern
Oberrhein zum Susquehanna, wie Anm. 15, 89–92; Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in
Strangers. The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. University Park,
Pennsylvania, 1999, 27–31 and 116.
45 Carl Wittke, The American Theme in Continental European Literatures, in: The Mississippi
Valley Historical Review 28 (1941), 3–26, here 3. See also Stephan W. Gorisch, Information
zwischen Werbung und Warnung. Die Rolle der Amerikaliteratur in der Auswanderung des
18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Darmstadt/Marburg 1991, passim.
46 Merle Curti/Kendall Birr, The Immigrant and the American Image in Europe, 1860–1914,
in: The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 37 (1950), 203–30, here 204.
47 47 ibid., 203.
48 Hildegard Meyer, Nord-Amerika im Urteil des Deutschen Schrifttums bis zur Mitte des 19.
Jahrhunderts. Hamburg 1929; Heinrich Schneider, Lessing und Amerika, in: Monatshefte
für Deutschen Unterricht 30 (1938), 424–32; Walter Wehe, Das Amerika-Erlebnis in der
deutschen Literatur, in: Geist der Zeit Bd. 17 (Wien), 96–104; James T. Hatfield/Elfriede
Hochbaum, The Influence of the American Revolution upon German Literature, in:
Americana Germanica vol. 3 (1900), 338–65.
49 Meyer, Nord-Amerika, wie Anm. 48, 38f., 41, 60.
50 Johann David Schopf, Beytrage zur mineralogischen Kenntniss des ostlichen Theils von
Nordamerica und seiner Geburge was first published in the review Physikalische Arbeiten
in Wien 1785; it was later published by Joh. Jakob Palm in Erlangen in 1787. For Born, see:
lgnatz Edler von Born, Briefe Ober mineralogische Gegenstande, auf seine Reise durch das
Temeswarer Bannat, Siebenbörger […] Frankfürt/Leipzig 1774; Ders., Catalogus
bibliothecae bornianae publica auctione vendetur die 10 novembris 1791. Wien 1791.
51 For the reverse view, that of Austria from America, see: Karin M. Schmidlechner, Splitting
Images. US-lmpressionen Oberösterreich, in: Ursula Prutsch/Manfred Lechner (Hg.), Das
ist Österreich. lnnensichten und Außensichten. Wien 1997, 311–33.
52 William P. Dallmann, The Spirit of America as Interpreted in the Works of Charles Sealsfield.
Washington University Studies. St. Louis 1935. Interpreted as a champion of theories of ‘race’
129
and ‘blood’, Sealsfield was claimed by the Nazis as their own, in an article in the Berliner
Lokal-Anzeiger (26 May 1939); see: Wittke, American Theme, wie Anm. 45, 10, n. 23.
53 B.A. Uhlendorf, Charles Sealsfield, Ethnic Elements and National Problems in his Works.
Chicago 1922; A.B. Faust, Charles Sealsfield’s Place in Literature, in: Americana Germanica
vol. 1 (1897), 1–18; Otto Heller/Theodore H. Leon, Charles Sealsfield, Bibliography of His
Writings (= Washington University Studies). St. Louis 1939; Eduard Castle, Der grosse
Unbekannte. Das Leben von Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl). Wien/ München 1952.
54 Paul C. Weber, America in Imaginative German Literature in the First Half of the
Nineteenth Century. New York 1926, 162 f.
55 Anton X. Schurz, Lenau’s Leben. Stuttgart 1855, Bd. 1, 204.
56 Philip Schaff, America. A Sketch of the Political, Social, and Religious Character of the
United States. New York 1855, vii.
57 Appleton’s Journal, 9:494 (1 2 April 1873), after Merle Curti, The Reputation of America
Overseas (1776–1860), in: American Quarterly 1/1 (1949), 58–82, here 62 and n. 16.
58 In contradistinction to the claims of Peter J. Katzenstein, The Last Old Nation: Austrian
National Consciousness since 1945, in: Comparative Politics 9/2 (1977), 147–71, here 147.
130
CHAPTER EIGHT
SEAFARING COMMUNITIES,
1800–1850
Brian Rouleau
I n 1849, no less an authority than Herman Melville reflected upon the sailor’s
instrumentality to the Atlantic world. Himself a seaman before moving on to
write memorable maritime novels such as Moby Dick and Billy Budd, Melville
could speak from experience as he sketched out what it meant to be a waterborne
worker. Seafarers, in his estimation, were ‘the true importers, and exporters of
spices and silks; of fruits and wines and marbles; they carry missionaries,
ambassadors, opera-singers, armies, merchants, tourists, [and] scholars to their
destination;’ they acted as ‘a bridge of boats across the Atlantic’ and were,
fundamentally, the ‘primum mobile of all commerce.’ If they suddenly disappeared,
he reminded his readers, ‘almost everything would stop here on earth.’ Yet the
centrality of seamen to the basic functioning of Atlantic exchange systems, Melville
concluded, was easily overlooked. For, the author asked, ‘what are sailors?’ ‘What
in your heart do you think of the fellow staggering along the dock?’ These were,
ultimately, men ‘deemed almost the refuse and offscourings of the earth.’ Seafaring
communities crucial to the daily lives of millions around the Atlantic, Melville
complained, were hidden in plain sight.1
That paradox – of the central and yet largely overlooked role seafarers played
within the broader nineteenth-century Atlantic world – remains the focus of this
essay. We know a great deal about the circulation of goods, peoples, and knowledge
which comprises Atlantic history, and yet, the sailors who moved those items,
individuals, and ideas are often ignored or taken for granted. There are many possible
explanations for our selective amnesia regarding the waterborne world, but the most
significant factor is almost certainly the strange disciplinary divides which still insist
on treating sailors as a distinct class of people worthy of separate inquiry. In the
words of one early American maritime historian, ‘the sailor lives in a little world of
his own,’ and ‘is like the inhabitants of some undiscovered country.’ As that attitude
became consensus opinion, seafaring communities were often studied as discrete and
bounded entities unto themselves, almost entirely cut off from the world which
surrounded them. This insistence upon sailor isolation was ironic, though, given the
influential role mariners played in weaving together the disparate threads of the
Atlantic basin. Even a cursory glance at the early nineteenth-century maritime world
131
– Brian Rouleau –
belies claims about the sailor’s relative isolation, and forces us to concede that
seafaring communities have long been at the center of the Atlantic world.2
REVOLUTIONARY B E G INNING S
One defining moment for transatlantic seafaring communities was the era of
revolutionary upheaval initiated by the American war for independence. A top down
history of that conflict has gentlemen assembled in Philadelphia to draft declarations
and coordinate a united colonial response to the supposed tyranny of British policy.
Examining events leading up to (and during) the formal break between Great Britain
and thirteen North American colonies from the bottom up, however, situates sailors
in the thick of anti-imperial protest. The American Revolution, in a very real sense,
began on the waterfront. It was mariners, after all, who were deeply affected by
interruptions in trade instigated by Parliament’s attempts to more stringently police
colonial commerce after the Seven Years’ War. Many sailors made up the mob of
irate Bostonians – a ‘motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes, mulattoes, Irish teagues
and outlandish Jack Tars,’ in John Adams’ disapproving words – fired upon by
British soldiers during the infamous ‘massacre’ of 1770. And seafarers more generally
turned out en masse to protest the practice of impressment, wherein the Royal Navy,
to replenish its ranks, seized subjects from port cities and forced them into service
aboard ships of war.3
Impressment was itself a truly Atlantic practice, given the British navy’s size,
dominance, and omnipresence. But, if experience with the press gang united disparate
seaside communities throughout the region, so did the politics and tactics of anti-
impressment. Imperious naval officers seeking to forcibly recruit seamen often ran up
against the determined resistance of mariners and local populations willing to lose
neither friends and relatives nor the value of their labor. The press was a threat to
personal liberty, but bad for business as well, given the commercial disruptions
resulting from the extraction of men from merchant vessels. Prior to the American
Revolution, therefore, several sizeable anti-impressment riots rocked both colonial
seaports and British cities. And many sailors were in the vanguard of the independence
movement exactly because it would – at least in theory – put an end to the experience
of servitude aboard His Majesty’s ships. Liberty, at times an abstract concept for the
nation’s founders, had more immediate meaning for people subject to involuntary
work under arduous conditions. Seafaring communities throughout America
therefore saw much to gain from political separation with Britain, and threw
themselves into the effort.4
When Thomas Jefferson inserted impressment into the Declaration of
Independence’s list of grievances against George III, he merely ratified what was
already popular sentiment along the waterfront. Indeed, anti-impressment was the
source of politicization for plebian peoples (not simply sailors, but many other of the
harbor’s denizens as well) during the revolutionary era, and it is nearly impossible to
overstress the pervasive climate of fear and resentment produced by the regularity of
capture and forced labor. The arm of the imperial state, in other words, often fell
most forcefully on seafaring communities. Sailors’ violent resistance, meanwhile,
pushed others less inclined to act closer to rebellion. Hence one patriot’s assessment
that the uprising against the crown had been precipitated by seamen, fishermen, and
132
– chapter 8: Seafaring communities –
harbor workers: ‘an army of furious men, whose actions are all animated by a spirit
of vengeance and hatred against the English, who had destroyed their livelihood and
the liberty of their country.’5
At times during the revolutionary struggle, allegiances could be fickle and survival
often depended upon flexible loyalty – mariner John Blatchford’s chronicle of the
revolutionary Atlantic spoke of repeated capture and re-capture by British and
American authorities on the high seas – but a high percentage of now self-consciously
American seamen remained loyal to the patriot cause despite inducements offered by
their British captors. By the end of the war many sailors proudly spoke of their
centrality to the struggle for independence. Iconography and memorialization of the
conflict in the United States, moreover, often valorized the contributions and heroic
sacrifices of seamen. In a new democratic republic nominally devoted to the
advancement of ordinary people, common sailors stood as potent symbols. Maritime
issues, moreover, continued to percolate throughout public discussion of the new
nation’s place within the wider Atlantic world.6
‘BRAVE REP UB LICAN S O F THE O CE AN’

With independence secured by 1783, the new United States was now free to crawl out
from under the restrictive legislation which had sought to confine colonial trade
within the boundaries of the British empire. American ships began to fan out across
the globe, reaching as far as China within a few short years of the Revolution’s
conclusion. But this new-found liberty to traffic with the world carried with it certain
dangers. The most pressing of these was the absence of the Royal Navy’s protection.
Previously, ships departing North America could rely on military escort. The young
republic’s ships, on the other hand, were potential prey for both marauders and rival
maritime states. Waters around North Africa proved especially troubling, given the
prevalence of piratical powers. Those societies’ ruling classes made their money
extracting tribute from foreign governments in exchange for safe passage through the
Mediterranean. Nations which could or would not pay, on the other hand, were
considered fair game for plundering. Captured crews, meanwhile, were often brought
ashore and sold into slavery unless ransomed.7
By 1784, an American vessel had been seized by a Moroccan raider, with Algerian,
Tripolitan, and Tunisian pirates quick to follow suit, oftentimes with the encouragement
of British officials eager to exact vengeance against their former dependents. The
United States paid tribute and spent money to free hostages when it could, but these
expenditures at times represented over one-sixth of the young nation’s budget, and
quickly overwhelmed the treasury. The number of captive sailors, meanwhile,
continued to grow. Generally confined to port cities, enslaved seamen were set to
work on chain gangs constructing roads and fortifications, while those with artisanal
skills saw service as forcibly enlisted blacksmiths or carpenters. But the men were also
objects of public fascination at home in the United States. Redeemed captives wrote
narratives detailing their suffering, popular plays were performed describing the
experience of Barbary captivity, and port-city subscriptions raised money to alleviate
their suffering. Much of the Barbary literature, moreover, became a roundabout way
of publicly discussing the contradictions posed by slavery within the United States
itself. Abolitionists wondered how ‘Turkish’ slavery could horrify Americans, given
133
the nation’s own population of unfree laborers. In what would become a trend across
the early nineteenth century, seafaring communities were enlisted to examine and
discuss some of the larger problems plaguing American society. The maritime world
often tested the definition and limits of national sovereignty, not to mention the very
meaning of ‘liberty’ itself. Sailors heavily publicized their many miseries abroad, and
drove a larger conversation about the implications of independence. Was the nation
truly sovereign if it allowed its ‘brave republicans of the ocean’ (a term many American
sailors used to refer to themselves) to remain suffering captives abroad? How could a
country for which mariners had sacrificed abandon them?8
That question became all the more urgent as the British continued the practice of
impressment. With Napoleon’s rise to power and France’s strengthening position on
the European continent, Great Britain looked to its naval supremacy as a key bulwark.
But, chronic manpower shortages prolonged the Royal Navy’s dependence upon the
abduction of seafarers. The United States, which pursued an official policy of
neutrality in what was considered a European affair, nevertheless found itself
repeatedly drawn into the conflict. This was largely the result of maritime actors.
American merchants (and a federal government almost entirely dependent upon
customs receipts for its basic solvency) expected to profit from the wars of the French
Revolution by acting as a carrier for belligerent powers. Essential food and other
commodities could be transshipped by U.S.-flagged vessels, allowing the republic to
flourish even as monarchical Europe imploded. Of course, the exercise of neutral
rights requires that states at war respect those rights, and this was something the
British in particular were not inclined to do.
Britain’s infamous ‘Orders in Council’ granted the country’s naval personnel the
right to board nominally neutral shipping, impress alleged subjects found aboard,
and interdict any goods thought potentially beneficial to an enemy power’s war
effort. The British justified their behavior as that which was necessary to preserve
liberty throughout the Atlantic basin, threatened as it supposedly was by Napoleonic
tyranny. And moreover, they rejected American claims that mariners naturalized as
U.S. citizens were immune from naval seizure. Rather, British authorities subscribed
to the idea of indefeasible allegiance, which is to say, once a subject of the crown,
always a subject. The figures remain imprecise, but it is believed that between 1803
and 1812, between six and eight thousand sailors were forcibly removed from
American ships. Relations between the United States and Great Britain deteriorated
all the more rapidly after the Royal Navy began to target even ships afloat in American
territorial waters. The most notorious of these episodes saw HMS Leopard open fire
on USS Chesapeake outside of Norfolk, Virginia. Three American sailors were killed
outright, while another four were stolen out of the damaged ship. Public
demonstrations of outrage spread throughout the country, with seafaring communities
again at the center of a maelstrom. Seafarers led the charge in agitating for punitive
measures, and once again, waterfront districts proved themselves among the most
politically active and highly radicalized spaces within the Atlantic world.9
The rallying cry which ultimately resulted in an American declaration of war was
‘Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights.’ Emblazoned on a banner flown by American naval
war hero Captain David Porter, the slogan was intended as a defiant display meant
to rally seamen and goad adversaries. Yet each half of that singular equation possessed
a history prior to the 1812 conflict with Britain which made American citizens
134
particularly receptive to it as a rationale for combat. ‘Free trade’ was an elastic term
possessed of multiple meanings. But, at some basic level, it expressed hostility to the
then-reigning paradigm of mercantilism, with its emphasis on protectionist policy
meant to enrich individual empires and cripple rival states. American revolutionaries
had imagined themselves rebelling against such antiquated policies and ushering in a
new era of international relations rooted in the free and peaceful exchange of goods
on seas open to the ships of all nations. ‘Sailors’ rights,’ on the other hand, possessed
a more plebeian meaning. It spoke to a long tradition of popular resistance to
impressment. When combined, the concepts proved a potent justification for the War
of 1812 with Great Britain, a war fought largely over what Americans saw as
Figure 8.1 John Archibald Woodside’s painting, entitled: We Owe Allegiance to No Crown
© 2014 Photo National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
135
repeated violations of their sovereignty on the high seas. The fighting itself remained
inconclusive and the 1814 treaty ending hostilities settled nothing; the belligerent
powers merely agreed to resume the status quo antebellum. But, with the decisive
defeat of Napoleon, the British war machine was rapidly disassembled, thus ending
impressment and interdiction. Seafaring communities in the United States of course
elected to see the war as one fought for their interests, and a conflict in which their
contributions effectively allowed the republic to win a ‘second independence’ from an
oppressive foe. America, many of its sailors insisted, would not become a mere client
state to its former overlord. Popular iconography during the war often pictured
American sailors, swaddled in the flag, proclaiming ‘We Owe Allegiance to No
Crown.’ European powers, in other words, had no right to treat the nation’s citizens
– and particularly its sailors – as subjects. The War of 1812, while divisive at home,
and often disastrous at the battlefront, seemed to have established that principle, if
little else. And yet, for those who remained in power at the end of the era’s many
wars of revolution, the politicized waterfront looked dangerous.10
C O N TAINING THE CONTA G IO N O F RAD ICAL IS M

In one sense, Atlantic seafaring communities settled down after 1815. The chaos of
war and revolution had been contained by the forces of reaction, and an efflorescence
of transoceanic trade was the result. But important changes were nevertheless afoot
throughout the region. Counterrevolutionary forces had, in the space of a few decades,
borne witness to the role of maritime workers in circulating seemingly ‘dangerous’
ideologies. In response, there was a concerted, state-driven effort to curtail what
powerbrokers saw as the seafaring sector’s worst tendencies. The revolutionary
potential of plebeian radicalism along the waterfront had been useful during the
struggle for American independence, and sailor grievances had helped mobilize vast
constituencies in subsequent Atlantic conflicts designed to make watery highways safe
for national commerce. But some people clearly worried that the insurrectionary
potential of maritime workers could be put to far more unwholesome ends.
Hints of these efforts at stymieing the saltwater powder keg were apparent by the
early eighteenth century at least. The British state took the lead in suppressing piracy
throughout the Atlantic world, given the threat to mercantile interests such sea-robbers
represented. The quest to contain piracy was ironic, to some extent, given that England
itself had helped create the problem by issuing copious letters of marque authorizing
the plunder of Spanish treasure ships. Privateers without enemy targets, it turns out,
would begin to turn on their former masters, and the problem soon required a solution
before ceaseless marauding and skyrocketing insurance rates made transatlantic
commercial enterprise entirely unprofitable. But buccaneers were more than a military
threat to the secure conduct of trade. Many pirates were notable for their democratic
and egalitarian practices – the election of officers and sharing of wealth – within a
maritime world where shipboard norms tended toward hierarchy and authoritarianism.
Piracy should not, of course, be confused with utopian socialism. Their brutality often
replicated the very state-sanctioned violence they claimed to rebel against, while many
more pirates reinforced the Atlantic world’s worst human rights violations by
trafficking in slaves and plantation-based commodities. And yet, the existential threat
pirates represented to the intertwined interests of mercantile capitalism and the nation-
136
state was taken seriously. No expense was spared in exterminating seaborne raiders,
whose often gruesome executions stood as very public warnings to any who might
wish to imitate their crimes.11
The seagoing community showed itself disposed to other forms of labor radicalism
as well. Perhaps not as drastic or dramatic as piracy, efforts at shipboard combination
and organization still appeared dangerous enough to warrant violent response on the
part of the maritime state. There is no better example of this than the spring 1797
mutinies aboard Royal Navy vessels anchored at Spithead and the Nore. The
complaints centered on low wages and abuse by certain unpopular officers, and
sailors organized a fleet-wide ‘floating republic’ of elected delegates to negotiate with
officials and maintain discipline within their own ranks. Sailors couched their
grievances in patriotic language, and promised to return to duty should an invading
French force appear. The Admiralty settled the Spithead dispute peacefully, but when
mutineers at the Nore began to blockade London and issue demands for the
dissolution of Parliament and immediate peace, authorities took a harder line. The
principal ringleaders were captured and executed, with many more sentenced to
penal colonies or flogging. Though ultimately suppressed, episodes such as these are
instructive for their involvement with the etymology of the term ‘strike.’ Mariners
who crippled their ships by striking (or lowering) the sails made serious contributions
to the origins of collective labor action.12
In the United States, the potentially subversive qualities of seafaring communities
often revolved around the issue of race. Black sailors, in fact, were viewed by
slaveholding interests as a potential conduit for abolitionist agitation. There was
certainly precedent for believing as much. The Haitian Revolution was a particularly
crucial flashpoint in the creation of African-American communication networks
spreading news of slave insurrection throughout the West Indies and U.S. South. One
historian, for example, has traced the life of Newport Bowers, an African-American
mariner constantly on the move from Boston to Baltimore and St. Domingue, and at
the latter location acting as an intermediary between ships and shore while assisting
escaped slaves. More generally, black sailors and waterfront workers combined with
Haitian refugees to circulate rumor and information regarding uprisings, often
inspiring imitators elsewhere. Denmark Vesey, in Charleston, South Carolina was one
such individual. His life as a free black laborer (and former Haitian slave) in a southern
port city placed him in a prime position to act as intermediary between West Indian
radicalism and American plantation laborers. During his 1822 trial for allegedly
masterminding a slave insurrection, it came out that Vesey was in contact, through the
aegis of mariners, with revolutionaries in Haiti. Hence the fears many slaveholders
harbored regarding the insurrectionary potential of maritime communication
networks. Black sailors, in a general sense, set dangerous examples of mobility and
freedom for plantation slaves. But local black maritime workers – enslaved and free
river pilots and watermen – were also notorious conduits for the spread of news and
anti-slavery literature from harborside to outlying countryside, as well as agents of the
underground railroad helping to sneak escaped slaves aboard ships bound north. The
many complaints of slaveowners about African-American mariners are revealing; the
Wilmington Aurora, for example, editorialized that black sailors ‘are of course, all of
them, from the very nature of their position, abolitionists, and have the best opportunity
to inculcate the slaves with their notions of freedom and liberty.13
137
There were, in fact, long-standing patterns within black communities around the
Atlantic of seeing seafaring as an opportunity to escape some of the worst injustices
of landward life. As romantic nationalism intertwined with racism to harden
prejudices ashore, life afloat presented some amelioration; the barbaric Middle
Passage, in other words, was not the only way by which peoples of African descent
experienced the ocean. By 1820, some estimates place the number of black sailors at
something close to 20 percent of the Anglo-American maritime workforce. Most of
these individuals served as cooks, stewards, and other lower-status positions aboard
ship, though a smaller (but significant) number rose to places of influence and
authority as officers and river pilots. As these men found, the ordered and hierarchical
nature of shipboard society tended to downplay the significance of race. Vessels
required cooperative endeavor on the part of their inhabitants, and black sailors
often worked as equals alongside white shipmates, thus experiencing a degree of
racial tolerance and harmony not often found on shore. Seafaring labor also provided
geographic mobility, allowing black sailors to travel to places beyond their immediate
horizon, sometimes experience better treatment elsewhere, and even participate in
events thought momentous in the advancement of their particular race. The floating
world was, of course, no paradise, and black sailors could be subjected to indignities
and humiliations no different than what they were accustomed to within segregated
societies at home. This was particularly true as the nineteenth century progressed and
nonwhite seamen began to fill more and more of the shipping industry’s most menial
positions. But, on the whole, black mariners saw shipboard labor as a reliable source
of wages, which in turn offered opportunities for advancement and upward social
mobility uncommon for most other people of their color within the Atlantic world.
Free black communities throughout the area were often anchored by their relatively
prosperous seagoing members. Given those circumstances, it makes sense that
Maryland slave Frederick Douglass could refer to sailing ships plying the Chesapeake
Bay as ‘freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world.’ ‘I am confined in
bands of iron,’ he complained, but ‘O that I were free! O, that that I were on one of
your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing!’ Tellingly, the famed abolitionist
later escaped bondage dressed as a mariner and carrying a seaman’s protection
certificate provided by a free black sailor from the North.14
Such a state of affairs was of course, from the perspective of slaveholders,
unacceptable. It was only further evidence of the seafaring community’s fundamental
subversiveness, and, just as authorities in England had moved against insurgent
strikers, so would masters act to crush this menace to slavery. And so, in response to
the threats posed by the polyglot maritime world, South Carolina in 1822 passed a
Negro Seamen Act. That law was, in turn, swiftly replicated by other southern
legislatures. Collectively, these regulations required the detention of all black sailors
aboard ships in slaveholding ports. Nonwhite seamen were arrested, marched ashore,
and imprisoned until their vessel’s departure, with ship captains responsible for the
posting of a bond meant to subsidize incarceration. Northern merchants complained
of the immense inconvenience and expense such a policy presented, while Britain and
France lodged formal diplomatic complaint about their free citizens of color being
unlawfully detained by American authorities. But legal challenges to the laws were
turned back. Southern jurists argued that the Negro Seamen Acts were no different
than the laws which governed black life in the North. If Yankee states could prevent
138
African Americans from voting, segregate them in public accommodations, and

prevent their intermarriage with white people, then what prevented slaveholders
from enacting their own restrictions? More pressingly, the law’s champions argued
that just as the basic right of self-preservation granted states the authority to enact
quarantines against sick people to avoid epidemics, so could that same impulse allow
for the quarantine of people who might spread the ‘contagion’ of slave insurrection.
For in southern ports, one of the Seamen’s Acts’ apologists argued, ‘we think the
presence of a free negro, fresh from the lectures of an Abolition Society equally
dangerous’ as any other traveler carrying some communicable tropical malady. The
laws withstood efforts to overturn them, and represented further challenge to the
relatively unrestricted border-crossing which had characterized an earlier Atlantic
world. Class and race began to exercise far greater control over the lives of seafaring
communities previously insulated, more or less, from those divisive ideologies.15
Thus currents of resistance and revolution which subverted the status quo
circulated the Atlantic, but these were, at the same time, routes along which repression
traveled. The variety of ‘racial quarantine’ practiced by southern U.S. states was one
component of a broader transoceanic effort. These restrictions were crafted in
response to exactly the sort of insurgent impulses the seafaring community helped
transmit. In Great Britain, for example, Parliament passed the Merchant Shipping
Act of 1823. It was a law designed to deal with the island’s own ‘racial contagion,’
represented by so-called Lascar (or South Asian) seamen shipped to English ports
aboard East India Company vessels. According to the bill’s terms, Lascar sailors
were, while in Britain, to be housed within their own segregated facilities. And, those
who did not return home aboard their vessels could be arrested, charged with
vagrancy, and imprisoned. Meanwhile, the British colony of Sierra Leone was
conceptualized, at least in part, as a dumping ground for black seamen mustered out
of the Royal Navy – but unwanted on the streets of London – during the massive
demobilizations sweeping Europe after Napoleon’s defeat. These laws were all
rationalized as efforts to strengthen the national bloodline by expelling foreign-born
and nonwhite ‘impurities.’ In Cuba too, local authorities, protective of slaveholding
interests, and hoping to wall the island off from the revolutionary agency of seafarers,
began to enforce their own Negro Seamen Act. Recognizing the seafaring community’s
insurgent capacity, burgeoning nation-states and anxious colonial leaders throughout
the Atlantic world began to draw lines and enforce boundaries.16
R EFORMING THE ATLA NTIC W ATE RF RO NT

In attempting to delimit and contain a ‘dangerous’ free-floating maritime class, states
did not act alone. Seafaring communities also increasingly became the objects of
interest for reform societies seeking to better, as they saw it, the sailor’s condition.
Mariners, many complained, led immoral and self-destructive lives, characterized by
excessive drinking, sexual licentiousness, and brutal brawling. Taken as a whole,
those vices were certainly problematic, but the larger problem again connected to the
issue of ‘contagion.’ For the issue here was exactly that the sailor’s dissolute lifestyle
might infect and pervert communities throughout the Atlantic where seafarers
regularly made landfall. Cleaning up the waterfront would help purify seaport cities,
but would also prevent mariners from spreading the ‘infection’ of depravity as they
139
circulated among locations throughout the Atlantic. Diplomats and missionaries

stationed overseas painted a picture of mariners as, in the words of one evangelist,
‘white-faced heathen.’ Prone to sickening displays of viciousness, men of the sea
needed to be restrained for the good of the entire project of social, economic, religious
uplift that was the ‘civilizing mission.’ Descriptions of seafarers as ‘rogues,’ ‘rascals,’
and ‘miscreants’ peppered more official chatter within the Atlantic world’s diplomatic
channels, all used to express a growing sense that maritime rambunctiousness
demanded containment before more catastrophic damage could be done.
Transformation of the sailor’s habits, pursued through a variety of methods, became
a common answer to the problems presented by an aquatic class of supposedly
questionable moral fiber.17
And so, during the nineteenth century, waterfront reformers – mostly evangelical
Christians inspired by a series of transatlantic religious revivals known as the Second
Great Awakening – founded organizations dedicated to the advancement of the
sailor’s material and spiritual conditions. These were the so-called Bethel Societies.
Beginning first in Britain and quickly scattering throughout the Atlantic, ships,
churches, and harborside meetinghouses raised the Bethel flag, calling sailors to
worship, asking them to renounce their supposedly sinful ways. Meanwhile,
associations such as the American Seamen’s Friend Society and Port of London
Society (later the British Sailors’ Society) pressured ship owners and mercantile firms
to donate money that would be used to distribute bibles, build churches, erect
boarding houses and reading rooms, and establish banks for the benefit of common
seamen. Commercial hubs where sailors swarmed became attractive targets for those
seeking a solution to what middle-class activists increasingly referred to as the
recklessness of the ocean’s nautical ambassadors. While typically understood as one
part (and a relatively insignificant one when compared to abolition or temperance) of
the era’s larger reform movements, we might better view these efforts as part of a
consequential and coordinated international assault against the threat to the stability
of the mercantile economic order posed by mariner misdeeds. Powerful interests
aligned behind this crusade, and couched their proposed solution to a perceived crisis
in Atlantic capitalism in the language of religious uplift. The steady, sober, spiritually
sound habits of businessmen needed to become those of sailors as well.18
‘Proper’ authorities – mostly merchants and their allies in government – the
argument went, would be secure in their profits once they had taught mariners the
virtues of sobriety and self-respect. This was, of course, a self-interested claim.
Drunken and degenerate crews endangered ships and their valuable cargoes, thereby
driving up marine insurance rates and the costs of doing business more generally. A
concerted effort to instruct seamen to ‘behave,’ to bring some semblance of discipline
to transatlantic waterfront communities more generally, would ensure a more
compliant workforce. The secure conduct of trade now depended upon toughening
the temperament of the era’s largest and most influential class of transnational
intermediaries: sailors. With the many ‘villainies [that] have been practised’ by
mariners on his mind, it was, as one U.S. diplomat argued, ‘absolutely necessary to
retrieve the character of Americans’ at his outpost, and presumably, elsewhere.
‘Character’ – a concept central to reform movements of the long nineteenth century
– became a word repeated in diplomatic correspondence, and spoken about as crucial
to the commercial contacts which sustained the Atlantic world. Missionaries,
140
meanwhile, saw in their efforts at sailor conversion a dual advantage: the preservation
of valuable economic relations jeopardized by mariner radicalism and disruptiveness,
as well as the creation of additional evangelists who would spread the Word as they
traveled the world. Reformers divined in the omnipresence of American sailors at all
the planet’s parts a prophetic possibility. Mariners, ‘confined to no place,’ men of
‘extensive influence,’ if brought to Christ, could prove instrumental to ‘the spread of
truth in the world.’ Sailors became itinerant evangelists in a double sense: of the
nation, and, given proper exertions, the word of God. As one rapturous waterfront
prophet enthused, ‘let the seamen of our land be converted…and an influence is
brought to bear upon the missionary enterprise which will give it a mighty impulse;
the Gospel will have free course and be glorified throughout the world!’19
But nor were sailors the sole ‘problem.’ Harborside districts more generally were
often the subject of middle-class suspicion, ire, reformism. The seafaring community
consisted not only of sailors working at sea, but their wives, children, and families
ashore, all of whom performed much of the labor which allowed Atlantic waterfronts
to operate. Women were absolutely crucial actors here, and though life on the open
ocean was an almost entirely male pursuit, the era’s so-called ‘gentler sex’ performed
a good deal of the rough work which allowed families with husbands, brothers, and
sons at sea to scrape by. With men absent, waterfront households, marketplaces, and
lives more generally were run overwhelmingly by female entrepreneurs. To make ends
meet, women performed piecework spinning yarn and canvas for sails and flags,
opened their homes to paid boarders, and operated taverns or brothels. They managed
money, property, and made other financial arrangements, thus cultivating a dependency
among seafarers upon their partners back home. These were individuals, in short, who
did not comport with emerging ideals and standards regarding the ‘proper’ place of
women within society. Bourgeois ideologues might have insisted that the women’s
sphere remain confined to the household and isolated from the tawdry and
hypercompetitive commercial world, but for the waterfront’s denizens, such separation
of men’s and women’s roles made little practical sense. Part of the problem with
seafaring labor from the reformers’ point of view, then, was that it degraded women
by forcing them into the sort of independent role in the world for which they were
ill-equipped. It turned women into producers of wealth rather than passive, if prudent,
consumers. Moreover, they contended, men were supposed to support their dependents;
with charities and poor-relief for seafaring families straining city tax revenues,
observers pointed to the deficient masculinity of mariners – who failed to provide for
their families – as a source of urban disorder and moral decay. Port-city women,
however, even if rarely empowered by the assumption of responsibilities otherwise
coded ‘male,’ showed remarkable resourcefulness despite the rampant poverty and
broader disapproval surrounding their lives. Many proved scornful of attacks against
their character as women who propagated vice and impropriety.20
Seafarers themselves were also usually unenthusiastic about reformist agendas
considered to be efforts at curtailing their freedom. To be sure, some sailors appreciated
waterfront reformers, and took seriously their attempts to save souls and improve
conditions afloat and ashore. Mariners, like many other peoples exposed to missionary
work throughout the Atlantic world, used evangelism to their own ends, took advantage
of what opportunities it presented, and discarded what they disagreed with. Indeed,
many sailors were especially supportive of transatlantic campaigns against corporal
141
punishment at sea; flogging afloat was eventually outlawed in the United States by
1850 and Great Britain by 1879. But, the overall thrust of the historical record suggests
that many more men were actively hostile toward maritime improvement organizations.
Customary understandings of liberty within the seafaring community placed emphasis
upon the very drinking and ‘vice’ reformers sought to eradicate. The bonds of fraternity
among shipmates could potentially be disrupted if the activists’ vision triumphed.
Most individuals appear to have looked upon the changes as, in the words of one
seafarer, ‘a new instrument of tyranny.’ This was a particularly provocative assessment
amongst American sailors, given their sense of themselves as crucial instruments in the
republican revolution against oppression. Efforts to curtail their traditional liberties –
not considered immoral, but rather, as necessary release after the close confinement of
an ocean voyage – were to be met with skepticism if not outrage.21
ATLANTIC ANO M IE
But for seafaring communities on the defensive vis-à-vis their customary rights and
privileges, the nineteenth century proved a befuddling age throughout the Atlantic.
Norms related to the time-honored waterfront conception of liberty began to disintegrate
at a rapid rate. This was an era characterized by swift technological and structural
change, and maritime peoples at mid century would gaze upon a world transformed. It
was difficult, circa 1850, to point to much that was definitively Atlantic about an
increasingly globalized industry. The pace of change was different depending upon one’s
location within the Atlantic world. Large seaports such as London, Liverpool, and New
York had begun to transform by the eighteenth century and earlier. Smaller seaports like
Salem or Newport experienced definitive alterations over the course of the nineteenth
century. But no matter the precise chronology, the results were largely similar: voyages
were becoming more capital intensive, labor intensive, and difficult as time progressed.22
Seafaring at an earlier moment had, with some important exceptions, been
characterized by the basic familiarity of ships’ crews with one another and their
officers. Men knew their shipmates within the larger context of the local community
in which they all resided, and while on the open ocean, crews were governed by long-
standing norms within that community. Individuals who went to sea, moreover, did
so as a stage in their working lives. They were not, in other words, part of a permanent
class of maritime workers, but rather, a collection of young men who had grown up
near the sea, and took to the ocean because it was expected of them, and because
seafaring was a natural way to make ends meet early in life before settling down
ashore. The vast majority of Atlantic voyages were short, coastal excursions which
connected places relatively close to one another, and most who labored afloat rarely
had occasion to speak of their duties as something out of the ordinary. Today, we are
accustomed to think of maritime work as something extraordinary, and sailors as
relatively eccentric or exotic persons. But the construction of seafaring communities
as fundamentally ‘different’ or ‘distinct’ from other places or types of labor was itself
a process, a set of ideas with a history of their own.23
And that process accelerated rapidly during the nineteenth century, the result of
both technological change and the increased volume of transatlantic trade. The
burgeoning dimensions of commercial traffic was itself a product of concomitant
industrial and market revolutions sweeping across the western hemisphere. Seafaring
142
labor fed a massive machine comprised of captive African laborers extracting cotton,
sugar, and other staples in the Americas, as well as the manufacturing facilities in
Europe which processed those commodities. But, as more ships plied the Atlantic,
carriers faced stiffer competition. Profit margins significantly narrowed, and
premiums were placed on speed, as well as on turnaround in port. In this more
rapidly paced economic environment, costs were cut wherever possible in order to
preserve a particular shipping firm’s competitive advantage. Those saving measures
usually impacted common sailors most significantly. So while many basic elements of
the seaman’s duty – to hand, reef, knot, splice, and steer – remained familiar enough,
the context in which they were performed had been transformed. Larger vessels,
longer voyages, strange destinations, and different crew composition gave to life
afloat in the nineteenth century a flavor quite unlike that of earlier eras.24
The faster-paced tempo of nineteenth-century seafaring life is best reflected in the
rise of packet ships traversing the Atlantic. In 1817, several New York textile
merchants proposed to redefine oceanic shipping by introducing regularly scheduled
service between their homeport and Liverpool. The draw was supposed to be speed.
Tramp shipping had long moved from port to port in a fairly haphazard way, picking
up cargo and ballast at a captain’s discretion. Packet service – named for the packets
of mail innovators expected to deliver regularly between North America and Europe
– promised instead to adhere to defined timetables. Their motive was to secure profit
from postal service contracts, passengers, and freight. Their prices came at a premium,
but with the promise of speed and dependability. Shifts in shipping technology,
pushed by packet companies, made those promises possible. The box-like ships of the
seventeenth and eighteenth century were replaced by narrower, sleeker designs
capable of carrying more sail and cutting through the water at faster pace. These
were the so-called Baltimore clippers, forebears of the famously majestic clipper ships
of the 1840s and 1850s, and they sailed as the ‘Black Ball Line,’ named for the dark
spheres painted on their canvas. A new era of rapid transit was inaugurated, further
advanced by technological changes. The advent of steam power was gradually, if
fitfully, brought to bear on oceanic commerce, which resulted in American
entrepreneur Edward Collins and Englishman Samuel Cunard operating several
Atlantic steamship lines. The Atlantic world itself was becoming more fast-paced,
with an emphasis placed on reliability, timetables, and scheduling.25
Yet the thinning profit margins along which highly competitive carriers operated
took a real toll on seafarers. Across the nineteenth century, shippers shaved labor
costs by skimping on pay, while at the same time, hard-driving captains and ‘bucko’
mates imposed stricter disciplinary regimes in order to extract more labor from men
driven to push vessels across the ocean far faster than ever before. In the aggregate,
voyages between 1800–1850 became more arduous, crew sizes were reduced, and
real wages shrank. All of this meant, for common sailors, harsher punishment, longer
periods of time spent at sea, more labor for each individual while afloat, and all for
diminishing compensation. A key element in this new maritime regime was the
heterogeneous social composition of nineteenth-century crews. Previously, a ship’s
complement consisted of people who knew one another, moved in roughly comparable
social circles, and only in rare instances, expected to spend their entire working lives
at sea. Now, larger and larger numbers of vessels shipped crews composed of men
who were strangers to one another, and whose officers were more responsive to
143
shipping firms than the needs of ordinary seamen. The pressures of the bottom line
helped create a more distinct, perpetual, and self-perpetuating class of mariners.26
In a word, the nineteenth-century Atlantic seafaring community was experiencing
rapid proletarianization. Maritime work was shifting from something one did
temporarily to something connoting more permanent status. Upward social mobility
within seafaring communities declined precipitously; generally, men became locked
into position rather than climbing the ranks. Waterfront districts were increasingly
populated by a permanent underclass of shipboard workers trapped in persistent cycles
of poverty and debt-dependency. Rather than being dispersed throughout the
population, specific urban arenas arose to cater to the needs of impoverished seafarers,
while the mercantile elite and a better-paid officer class occupied the healthier, wealthier
zones of ever more stratified Atlantic seaport cities. Hence one historian’s assertion
that the period from 1850 to 1950 was ‘the great era of the proletarianized waterfront.’
Seafaring was riven by the cleavages of class more than ever before, and shipmasters
responded to the risks of employing perennially discontented and underpaid workers
by running a tighter ship. And, as the scores of cases before courts sitting in admiralty
testify, shipmasters and their officers were much quicker to reinforce their commands
with physical abuse. Sailors showed their dissatisfaction by jumping ship; the swift rise
in rates of desertion reflects these sweeping changes in seafaring labor.27
Voting with one’s feet became a popular tactic within the Anglo-American
maritime world. The United States and Great Britain still dominated shipping lanes
in the Atlantic, but, by the 1850s, British and American citizens abandoned the ocean
in large numbers. They turned inward, seeking opportunities in industry ashore, and
were replaced by sailors from northern Europe, South Asia, and the Pacific Rim. But
it was not only the maritime labor pool which was globalizing at this point in time.
The Atlantic basin was becoming less a bounded commercial entity and more a
jumping off point for the wider world. Or, that is to say, the commerce of the Atlantic
world was integrating more thoroughly into a world system of exchange. These
changes, of course, were not all-encompassing. Specialized, localized seafaring
populations ended the 1850s looking much the same as they had during the 1800s.
Coastal trade networks still flourished and interior waterways were expanded with
the reshaping of rivers and the construction of canals. Fishermen still plied the North
Atlantic’s waters, whaleships continued to thread their way through familiar seas,
and colliers still hauled their sooty loads across the North Sea. The sheer diversity of
seafaring communities cannot be overstated. But nor can the broader trends shaping
those communities be denied. As the volume of trade increased exponentially,
waterborne work became more and more sweated. The composition of the labor
force in turn shifted. Shipowners from the Atlantic world’s principal maritime powers
increasingly recruited foreign-born workers to man vessels and subjected those ships
to more stringent discipline. Maritime labor, meanwhile, became a much less
remunerative occupation. It was now low-status work performed by those individuals
thought too ‘intemperate,’ ‘restless,’ or ‘aimless’ to succeed on shore.28
Indeed, seafaring was thought the destiny of a ‘degraded’ and altogether ‘different’
caste of men exactly because it increasingly looked retrograde within the burgeoning
‘free-labor’ (or ‘freer labor,’ at least) markets of industrial capitalism coming to
dominate Atlantic seaport cities. Men who labored on ships, by the developing
standards of the time, were subject to what was considered an unusual degree of
144
regulation by public authorities. And, moreover, sailors were still harshly disciplined
within their floating workplaces by masters given broad legal authority to maintain
order and compel labor. Sailors, therefore, simply looked like something of a breed
apart within the capitalist system’s growing army of workers. For while a factory
worker could, at least in theory, walk away from his job whenever he pleased, a
seafarer could be legally obliged to continue serving. Deserting a textile mill was not
a crime; deserting a ship, on the other hand, was considered an offense, and the
seaman in question could be arrested, jailed, and forced back on board. This made
seamen appear as anachronisms, as something closer to a slave or an indentured
servant. Seaman Roland Gould thus explained the increasingly anomalous position
of seafaring communities within the liberalizing order of the Atlantic world by asking
his nineteenth-century readers an easily answerable question: ‘What American would
ever be content to rivet the chains of slavery upon himself?’ The externally coercive
and largely patriarchal command structure of seafaring communities were now things
to be avoided; Gould’s query implied as much. The rigidity of shipboard discipline
marked seafaring as odd in a world coming to consensus about the importance of
internalized self-discipline – rather than legal and physical coercion – in the
maintenance of labor relationships. Fewer men, therefore, chose that watery way of
life unless absolutely necessary.29
Sailors were no longer celebrated as the bulwark of republican liberty, or the proud
keepers of the British empire’s wooden walls. They were now alternately pitied and
excoriated as a quasi-enslaved class of unfree laborers radically out of step with the
modernizing transatlantic basin. In the United States, the free-ranging western settler
became the ‘stock’ national hero, while in Great Britain, the pith-helmeted pioneers of
empire attained greater renown than their floating forebears. America turned to the
commercial world locked within its own vast territorial empire; its former mother
country’s interests simply grew to encompass more of the planet’s peoples beyond the
Atlantic. Meanwhile, those who remained at sea were increasingly thought of by people
on shore as strangers, aliens, and exotic. Seafaring communities, which had started the
nineteenth century as powerful symbols and important political icons, had become, as
Melville complained, the perceived ‘refuse and offscourings of the earth.’ Beginning at
the center of events, the noted novelist implied, mariners were, by the 1850s, now at
the periphery; they had, by and large, been ‘forgotten.’ Crucial actors in helping craft
the connective linkages that defined the Atlantic world, seafarers had become a
transnational proletariat removed from much of the public’s consciousness. They were
less ‘Atlantic’ and more ‘global.’ Sailors had, in effect, been swallowed whole – reduced
to poverty and condemned to anonymity – by the same forces they had helped unleash.
NOTE S
1 Herman Melville, Redburn (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849), 178–79.
2 Frank T. Bullen, The Men of the Merchant Service (New York: Stokes, 1900), 251–53.
3 Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 97–129; Gary Nash, Urban
Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American
Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).
4 Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-
Century Atlantic World (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013).
145
5 Jesse Lemisch, ‘Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary
America,’ William and Mary Quarterly 25, No. 3 (July, 1968), 371–407, and quoted 401;
Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar Versus John Bull: The Role of New York’s Seamen in Precipitating
the Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1997); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The
Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 211–47.
6 Blatchford in Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 97–98.
7 Kariann Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial
Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 115–52; Robert J. Allison, The
Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
8 Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum
American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2008), 46–70; Lawrence Peskin,
Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); ‘Brave republicans of the ocean’ in
Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 130–62.
9 Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 163–91.
10 Paul Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); Troy Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the
British Empire, and the War of 1812 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 20–48.
11 Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2004); Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750
(Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War Against
the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
12 N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1996); James Dugan, The Great Mutiny (New York, 1965).
13 Julius Scott, ‘Afro-American Sailors and the International Communication Network,’ in
Howell and Twomey, eds., Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life
and Labour (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Acadiensis Press, 1991), 37–52; W. Jeffrey
Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1997); David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and
Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001), quoted p. 28.
14 Bolster, Black Jacks; Cecelski, Waterman’s Song; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity
and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Frederick
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (London: H.G. Collins, 1851), 61.
15 Bolster, Black Jacks, 200–214 and Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the
World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: UNC Press,
2011), 50–55; Michael Schoeppner, ‘Navigating the Dangerous Atlantic: Racial
Quarantines, Black Sailors, and United States Constitutionalism,’ (Ph.D. Diss., University
of Florida, 2010), passim, and quoted, p. 69.
16 Isaac Land, ‘Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London,’
Journal of Social History 39, No. 1 (Fall 2005), 89–110 and Land, War, Nationalism, and
the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). On Cuba, see
Schoeppner, ‘Navigating the Dangerous Atlantic,’ 188–213.
17 Berkshire County Whig, Vol. 1, Issue 42, Dec. 23, 1841. The best treatment of waterfront
reform movements appears in Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 195–227.
18 Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 195–227. The more general spirit of reform is covered
in Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell, 2002). Valerie Burton argues that reformers propagated the stereotype of
the rowdy sailor as a foil to the sort of workers – soberly inclined, fastidious – they hoped
to raise within Britain and the U.S. in ‘“Whoring, Drinking Sailors”: Reflections on
146
Masculinity from the Labour History of Nineteenth-Century British Shipping,’ in

Margaret Walsh, ed., Working Out Gender: Perspectives from Labour History (London:
Ashgate, 1999), 84–101. Stereotypes about sailors, then, tell us next to nothing about
maritime lives, but rather speak to the imperatives of capitalist development ashore.
19 RG 59, M101, Consular Despatches from Canton, China, Reel One, letter dated May 11,
1795; The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Sept., 1832), 1–2 and New
Bedford Port Society quoted in ibid., 15; ‘Communications and Selections: The Shipmaster’
in Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal Vol. 8, No. 1 (Sept. 1835), 9; ‘When Shall the
World be Converted Unto God?’ in The Sailor’s Magazine and Naval Journal Vol. 7, No.
67 (March, 1834), 204–5; ‘Who Prays for the Conversion of Seamen?’ in The Sailor’s
Magazine and Naval Journal Vol. 7, No. 75 (Nov., 1834), 67. As Isaac Land argues in
War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 77: ‘Jack Tar ruled the waves, but until he could
master himself, he would remain a suspect figure.’ Broader importance of ‘character’ to
nineteenth-century reformers is seen in James Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of
Character in Gilded Age America (New York: NYU Press, 2010).
20 The lives of women in port in Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and
Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Ellen
Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary
America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Elaine Forman Crane,
Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630–1800 (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1998); Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New
England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720–1870 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2000).
21 Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront, 195–227, quoted 221; Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns
Against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum
America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Margarent Creighton, Rites
and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge
22 Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).
23 Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 163–213.
24 Ibid.
25 Alex Roland, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Alexander Keyssar, The Way of the Ship: America’s
Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600–2000 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2008),
158–71.
26 Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 163–213.
27 ‘Proletarianization’ of deep-sea labor in Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep
Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed
Hydra; Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 248–51; John R. Gillis, The Human Shore:
Seacoasts in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 112–13, who refers to
the period from 1850–1950 as the ‘great era of the proletarianized waterfront.’
28 Emphasis on coastal and interior waterways in Roland, Bolster, and Keyssar, Way of the
Ship. Fisheries are discussed in Christopher P. Magra, The Fisherman’s Cause: Atlantic
Commerce and the Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009) and W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the
Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
29 Vickers, Young Men and the Sea, 214–47; Roland Gould, The Life of Gould, An Ex-Man-
of-War’s-Man; With Incidents on Sea and Shore, Including a Three-Year’s Cruise on the
Line of Battle Ship Ohio, on the Mediterranean Station, Under the Veteran Commodore
Hall (Claremont, N.H.: Claremont Manufacturing Company, 1867), 191.
147
PART III
CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS
CHAPTER NINE
COLOUR PREJUDICE
IN THE FRENCH ATLANTIC WORLD
Mélanie Lamotte
F rom the beginning of French settlement in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century,
physical and cultural differences significantly shaped social relationships. This was
a time of significant interaction between the peoples of Europe, of Africa and of the
New World. The mental impact of seeing foreign bodies and cultures could generate
negative reactions. Naturally, some Europeans had already encountered black and
Amerindian individuals before this period, and had conveyed varying images of them.
There were old ideas inherited from classical writers such as Pliny the Elder, Herodotus,
and the medieval writer Leo Africanus, who depicted Africans as either hospitable or
monstrous and brutish.1 From the fifteenth century, Spanish and Portuguese travellers
encountered the inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles, whom they called ‘Caribs’, and
they began bringing African slaves to the New World at the beginning of the sixteenth
century. From an early date, there were numerous reports, including those of
Christopher Columbus, depicting the people of the Americas either as hospitable or as
fierce cannibals on the border of humanity.2 It is difficult to assess the extent to which
these writings influenced the French settlers, officials and missionaries who came to
the Lesser Antilles in the seventeenth century, but they were probably read by a
significant number of people since many were translated into French.
This article focuses on the development of colour prejudice in the early modern
French Atlantic World and examines inter-ethnic encounters on the ground, in the
context of French Guadeloupe – an island located in the Lesser Antilles. The period
covered spreads from the beginning of French colonisation in Guadeloupe in 1635 to
1759, the first year of the English occupation of the island, which would last until
1763. Reactions to inter-ethnic encounters in the French Atlantic were extremely
complex, fluctuating according to economic, demographic, social and political
contexts. Thus this article presents specific incidents of colour prejudices and
considers general conclusions that might be drawn from them. By the mid-eighteenth
century, several French Caribbean islands, including Guadeloupe, had developed
labour-intensive plantation regimes based on large enslaved workforces of black,
mixed and Amerindian captives controlled by a small minority of French settlers. The
need to maintain this socio-economic system contributed to the formation of a
particularly segregated and prejudiced society.
151
– Mélanie Lamotte –
In this essay, I frequently use the expression ‘colour prejudice’ instead of the word
‘race’. Definitions of the word ‘race’ vary, but it frequently refers to the classification
of humankind into groups supposedly having distinct hereditary physical and
intellectual characteristics.3 Some believe that the word ‘race’ should be avoided,
because of its connections with the nineteenth-century theories positing the existence
of inferior and superior races. Others argue that ‘race’ should be avoided because
scientists have demonstrated that there is no biological basis to racial categories.4
Today it is clear that ‘race’ is a cultural and social construction. It reflects a way
people think about some aspects of human differences, generating discriminations
and antagonisms visible in the sociocultural reality. Historians are now embracing
‘constructivist’ approaches, by examining how concepts of ‘race’ were built
throughout history. This essay does not deny the fact that the concept of ‘race’
already existed in early modern Guadeloupe; in fact, it highlights some embryonic
evidence of the presence of ‘racial thinking’, and when this is the case, the word ‘race’
is always used. In the seventeenth century, however, physical and intellectual
differences were generally not perceived as being fixed biologically and hereditarily
through several generations. They were, instead, often considered to be the products
of environmental and cultural causes, such as territorial sun exposure or foreign
customs. Thus, in 1667, French missionary Jean-Baptiste DuTertre, who had been in
the Antilles between 1640 and 1657, argued that Africans only had flat noses and
thick lips because their parents crushed their faces during their childhood. He
explained that he once owned a slave raised in Dominica and Guadeloupe with ‘the
face as beautiful as those of French people because [the] Fathers had categorically
forbidden his mother to flatten his nose’.5 Intelligence too was frequently considered
to have resulted from cultural factors and not from an innate capacity. For example,
Father Mongin, who travelled to Martinique and St. Christopher, pointed out in
1682 that ‘some blacks do not lack intelligence and are capable of all sorts of arts and
sciences, if they are raised that way’.6 Creole slaves, who were born and raised in the
colonies, were often thought to be more intelligent than Africans for this reason.
In addition, factors such as divergences in religion, customs, social status and the
simple perception of unfamiliar physical features not considered to be innate and
hereditary, were more important than ‘racial thinking’ in shaping inter-ethnic
relations in the seventeenth-century French Caribbean. Thus the concept of ‘colour
prejudice’ – defined as the hostility, dislike and antagonism causing an unfavourable
and a discriminatory treatment of people who have a different skin tone, physical
appearance and cultural heritage – can do justice to this historical context. The
category of ‘ethnicity’ is here used to refer to particular cultural heritages and physical
features, ‘racial’ or not.
During the period covered by this essay, the word ‘race’ generally meant lineage or
ancestry either in relation to animals or to noble families. The Dictionary of the
French Academy (1694) defined the French word ‘race’ as the ‘ancestry, lineage,
origin’ of animals and old noble families. By the seventeenth century, the French élite
often believed that the assumed values and virtues of the old nobility (Noblesse de
Race) were transmitted through blood and that consequently, commoners were
unable to become equal to the old nobility, even when they bought titles of nobility.
Marriages of members of the old nobility with commoners were increasingly perceived
as mésalliances – unions with people of inferior birth and social status, which
152
– chapter 9: Colour prejudice in the French Atlantic World –
corrupted blood purity.7 It has been argued that by the beginning of the eighteenth
century, these metropolitan discourses had migrated to the French Atlantic World
colonies and consequently, the French regarded inter-ethnic marriages as mésalliances
threatening the purity of white blood.8 This essay suggests that, by the beginning of
the eighteenth century in Guadeloupe, such notions had emerged, at least among a
few élite men.
Historiography focusing on the emergence of racial antagonisms in the French
Atlantic World seems relatively underdeveloped in comparison to the considerable
number of works on the construction of ‘race’ in the British Atlantic.9 In the second
half of the twentieth century, some historians had begun work on the history of
cross-ethnic attitudes in early modern France, the French Antilles, as well as in the
broader early French Atlantic World.10 When a substantial number of analysts began
to study the history of racial antagonisms in the early modern French empire, they
often focused their attention on the eighteenth century.11 Interestingly, today, the
historiography of the French Caribbean also largely focuses its attention on the
eighteenth century.12 A few English-speaking scholars have recently begun to
investigate the early French Caribbean, however.13
Similarly, over the last two decades, a substantial number of historians have
become interested in early cross-ethnic attitudes in the French Atlantic World. A few
historians have worked on the emergence of ‘ethnic prejudices’ in the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century French Caribbean.14 Others have focused their attention on
early modern France.15 But in comparison, historians working on cross-ethnic
attitudes in the early French settlements in North America remain more numerous.16
This essay carries these works further by examining the less studied early phase of
development of colour prejudice in the French Caribbean. It relies on under-exploited
sources including judicial records, censuses and parish registers, as well as the works
of the missionaries who, from the first years of settlement, came to the Caribbean to
serve the settlers and to evangelise the Caribs. As far more attention has been granted
to the early modern history of Martinique and Saint-Domingue, this paper provides
a much needed exploration of the early modern history of Guadeloupe.17 It shows
that blacks and Amerindian people contributed to the development of colour
prejudice along with the Europeans, an idea that has rarely been examined in
historiography. This essay also argues that negative attitudes became more entrenched
in the first half of the eighteenth century, this being particularly visible in increasingly
prejudicial legislation enacted by the French colonial planter élite and by the mother
country across the Atlantic. Finally, it suggests that, in spite of these regulations, and
in addition to existing antagonisms, there were significant instances of cross-ethnic
fluidity in social relations and in the structure of the society in Guadeloupe during the
entire period covered by this essay.
EMERGENCE OF COL O U R P RE J U D ICE

From the beginnings of European settlement in the 1630s to the turn of the seventeenth
century, colour prejudice emerged in the French Caribbean, alongside positive attitudes.
The first decades of this period have been called the ‘Frontier-Era’ because the
plantation regime had not yet developed and black slaves were still a minority in the
French Caribbean.18 It is necessary to be cautious when considering early modern
153
censuses. The 1698 census denounced, indeed, the ‘lack of regularity and accuracy
which characterise the work of militia officers when they make the censuses’.19 But one
of the first documents providing a demographical count of the Guadeloupian population
suggests that, by 1671, African slaves and their descendants had reached demographic
parity with the white population. In that year, 4,267 ‘nègres’ (‘negroes’) were listed in
the Guadeloupian census, amounting to 57.6 per cent of the population.20 This was
partly because the Guadeloupian sugar industry had begun to develop. The proportion
of black inhabitants increased slightly until the end of the seventeenth century. In
1699, 6,185 slaves were recorded (64 per cent of the population).21 The authorities
feared slave insubordination. In a letter written in 1672, Governor Claude Francois Du
Lion complained of black unruliness in Guadeloupe arguing that, ‘the nègres understand
that their number is increasing’ and as a result ‘they stand stronger and are less
submissive’.22 Only 47 mulâtres (‘mulattoes’, people of mixed heritage 0.6 per cent of
the population) were listed in the 1671 census and 291 (2.78 per cent of the population)
in 1696.23 The free people of colour (libres), comprising blacks, mulâtres and
Amerindians, represented a growing minority in Guadeloupe in 1697 (457 individuals,
or 11.49 per cent of the free population).24 Contemporary accounts of missionaries
Raymond Breton and Jean-Baptiste DuTertre, active in the early French Antilles,
suggest that the number of indigenous people inhabiting Guadeloupe during the first
decades of colonisation was substantial. But between the 1640s and the 1660s, the
number of Caribs diminished considerably, due to disease and exile. Following the
Franco-Carib wars that lasted until 1660, Caribs signed a peace treaty requiring them
to move to Grande-Terre, Dominica and St. Vincent. There were only a dozen sauvages
(‘savages’, referring to the Amerindian population) recorded in the 1664 census.25
In the seventeenth-century French Caribbean, the different ethnic groups adopted
both negative and positive attitudes toward each other. To Europeans not used to
seeing blacks, black skin colour could appear shocking and repulsive. Missionaries,
in particular, often said that people of African ancestry were ugly and blacks were
often considered to have a bad smell. In 1667, DuTertre stated: ‘One cannot verify
the proverb which says that love is blind in a better way than by considering the
dysfunctional love which conduces some of our French men to love their negresses
despite the blackness of their faces, which makes them hideous, and their unbearable
smell, which should, in my opinion, extinguish the ardour of their criminal fire’.26 In
addition, missionaries described the nègres they encountered as primitive, passive,
and, in the words of missionary Pierre Pelleprat, who lived in the Antilles between
1651 and 1653, ‘not very intelligent’.27 They also often charged blacks with moral
vices such as laziness, drunkenness and theft.28
Commentaries concerning people of African descent were not entirely negative,
however. In the French Caribbean, settlers seem to have thought more highly of
Angolan slaves than of other Africans. In 1659, missionary André Chevillard, who
stayed in the French Caribbean from 1647, stated that while blacks from the Cap
Vert were ‘stupid’ and ‘rude’, those from Angola and Guinea possessed ‘subtle
intelligences’.29 Clerics also developed optimistic opinions concerning blacks, perhaps
because people of African descent often became very good Christians. Although one
must be cautious with the evidence because the clerics probably wanted to instruct
the French in Christianity, early missionaries celebrated African converts as excellent
Christians ‘who very often serve as an example of piety to our French people’.30
154
French attitudes toward the indigenous populations of the Antilles varied as well.
Comments regarding the Caribs’ skin colouring, which was considered to be ‘sallow’,
were usually neutral.31 Early missionaries such as DuTertre, Pelleprat and De
Rochefort described the Caribs as being physically well built.32 Caribs were also
ascribed virtues such as politeness, bravery and gentleness.33 The first clerics sent to
the Iles du Vent also tended to regard them as ‘noble savages’, uncorrupted by the
vanities of the Old World.34
But descriptions of the indigenous population were not always positive. Early
chroniclers such as Breton, Chevillard and Du Puis sometimes considered the Caribs
to be barbarous.35 Although the Caribs did not, apparently, eat human flesh very
often, some missionaries liked to underscore their reputation for cannibalism.36 The
Caribs were also thought to lack intelligence. Breton, with faint praise, declared,
‘They are not too stupid, considering the fact that they are savage people.’37 The
meaning of the term sauvage, often used among French settlers to designate the
indigenous inhabitants of the Americas was negative in the seventeenth century. The
1694 Dictionary of the French Academy described sauvages as ‘people who usually
live in the woods, without religion, law, and fixed abode, more like animals than like
humans’. Such negative ideas were perhaps due to French feelings of cultural
superiority following the conquest.
In Guadeloupe, ethnic categories surfaced in literary discourses and administrative
papers from the first years of settlement, reflecting a form of discrimination. Censuses
from this period provide information concerning the state of mind of the administrators
in charge of managing the making of local censuses – as well as of the state officials
in charge of gathering the data. In the Guadeloupian census of 1664 and in the
missionaries’ writings of the same period, the categories nègre, négresse (‘negress’),
nègre libre (‘free negro’), sauvage and mulâtre are noted.38 From 1671, census-makers
began to divide these groups more visibly, by creating tables and columns with
headings and the category serviteur blanc (white servant) appeared.39 This grouping
was probably created in order to clearly distinguish the remaining white indentured
servants from black and mulâtre domestic servants.
It is more difficult to attain information concerning early attitudes toward white
settlers among non-Europeans. Some people of African descent considered whites to
be depraved, miserable, rude, ignorant and incompetent. In 1698, Labat stated that
‘the nègres always attribute to white people all the bad faults which make a person
despicable and they commonly say that blacks only go bad by associating with whites
and by following their example’.40 In the same year, Labat also reported how, in the
French Lesser Antilles, blacks particularly enjoyed observing white people to identify
their defects and ‘to mock them when they are together’.41 Moreover, black slaves
might have developed feelings of superiority over the petits blancs (poor whites).
Labat related how, in 1698, one of his black slaves decided to give his savings to a
white beggar, ‘in order to have the pleasure of calling him poor white man’. He
explained how this same slave told him that only white people could be poor because,
unlike white people, blacks were too ‘big-hearted’ to leave someone in such a
miserable state.42 The same missionary also devoted a section of his book to rumours
circulating from Africa to the Antilles through slave ships, according to which the
French were fierce cannibals, bringing the Africans overseas with the sole intention of
eating them. He explained that ‘because of this slander, many slaves became desperate
155
during the Atlantic crossing, and they preferred throwing themselves overboard to
going to a country where people would supposedly devour them’.43
The Caribs also expressed negative opinions concerning French people, especially
about their physical features. While to Europeans, beards symbolised virility and
power, the Caribs abhorred body hair. According to De Rochefort, ‘the Carib think
that it is a great deformity to have a beard’.44 The indigenous population also
commented negatively on European habits. In 1654, DuTertre wrote: ‘they never
stroll and they laugh a lot when they see us going from one place to another without
any purpose. They think that is one of the stupidest things that we do.’45 Non-
European people’s prejudiced attitudes toward the French may be interpreted as a
form of resistance against white people’s attempt to dominate them or, in the case of
slaves, as a reaction to the masters’ harsh treatments. Feelings of cultural superiority
may have caused some of these negative attitudes too.
Antagonisms were apparently strong between Caribs and people of African
descent. In 1694, Labat explained that one of the reasons why the settlers should
avoid using Carib servants was the ‘reciprocal dislike between them and the nègres’
and that ‘their pride make them believe that they are extremely superior to the
nègres’.46 This was partly due to the fact that blacks quickly became associated with
slavery and the Caribs highly prized their freedom. These feelings were reciprocal. In
1667, DuTertre noted blacks’ ‘dislike for our Caribs’.47 Labat also commented that
‘the nègres, who are at least as proud as the Caribs, look at them with disdain,
especially when they are not Christians, and they always call them “sauvages”’.48
Thus, blacks apparently disliked the Caribs because they did not acculturate and, by
referring to them as ‘sauvages’, they helped to reinforce the common prejudice
directed against the indigenous population.
In the ‘Frontier-Era’ of the early French Caribbean, Europeans were, in some
instances, open to the possibility of mixing socially with black, mulâtre and indigenous
people, although demographic constraints may have played a part in this phenomenon
too. With regard to the non-Europeans, French settlers seem to have favoured
concubinage over marriage, possibly due to social pressures. The scarcity of primary
sources does not allow a precise assessment of the level of Guadeloupian inter-marriages
for the period between 1635 and the 1660s. But evidence indicates that some trans-
ethnic unions took place during this period. In 1669, Du Lion wrote, ‘there are many
more men and boys than girls in age of getting married, as a result some masters
married their négresses’.49 Among a few instances of intermarriages, this document
mentions Manuel Vaze, a thirty-five-year-old ‘free’ nègre married to the presumably
white ‘Mary Blanche’ and living with her in Capesterre.50 In 1667, DuTertre also
claimed to ‘have seen some [mulâtres], who had married French women’.51
In addition, there were cases of white settlers forging friendships with people of
colour. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, an Englishwoman living in
Guadeloupe, whose name was recorded as Elizabeth Catinquiesme, approached a
notary to free her mulâtre slave, André, ‘for the friendship that she and her husband
feel toward him’. The authorities suspected André to be the son of Elisabeth’s
husband, an Englishman named Richard Longly and of Elizabeth’s mulâtresse slave,
Jeanneton. When Elizabeth died, André lived with Richard Longly, according to the
Guadeloupian authorities, ‘as if he were his own child, and as a free man’. Then
Longly entrusted André to Capuchin priests who taught him ‘how to read and write’
156
and trained him as a carpenter. When André later decided to claim the freedom that
had been given to him by his deceased mistress, the authorities refused perhaps partly
because he had become ‘a skilful carpenter of a considerable price’.52
In addition, white people and free people of African ancestry – not just domestic
slaves – sometimes shared the same household. Although there is no way to determine
whether genuine friendship or necessity brought these individuals together under the
same roof, the 1664 census mentions a free mulâtre named Jean Bourdain and his
daughter Marye Bourdain, who lived together in a case (a cabin) with a presumably
white ‘vagabond’ named Jean Delabord, in St. Amand.53 Moreover, in the second
half of the seventeenth century, few white families had any qualms about raising their
own children alongside those of their slaves. In 1667, DuTertre explained that ‘there
are few families on the Islands, who do not raise the little nègres together with the
children of the house’.54
Fluid relations also existed between the indigenous community and the French.
The case of Father Breton, who lived among the Guadeloupian Caribs between 1641
and 1653 and achieved a remarkable knowledge of the Carib language, is well
known. Moreover, some settlers apparently married indigenous women. The unique
early parish register of Capesterre shows instances of marriages between Frenchmen
and indigenous women. For example, Charles des Champs and Susanes Belamée, a
sauvagesse (‘savage woman’), married each other before baptising their twin boys
Charles and Jean, in August 1648.55 In the second half of the seventeenth century, a
substantial number of the few remaining Caribs were recorded as educated or living
in French households. Thus, in 1671, Sieur Du Buisson and his wife Anne Jardin,
residents of Grande-Terre, possessed eight ‘male and female sauvages being educated
by Mme Jardin’.56 By associating with each other and living together, these individuals
may have developed interethnic friendships.
Alongside these instances of cross-ethnic fluidity, there were significant
antagonisms. By the 1660s, there were strong oppositions to intermarriages. The case
of a Flemish settler named Jacob Michel, who was taken to the court of the
Guadeloupian Sovereign Council in 1667, illustrates this point. Some of Michel’s
relatives wanted to exclude his free black wife Marie Läcotti from family inheritance
by annulling their marriage. The court approved their request and declared Jacob
and Marie’s marriage null and void due in part to ‘the shame cast on the family’.57
Official opposition to intermarriages was also apparent in 1703, when the Council of
Martinique refused to register the title of nobility of two Frenchmen because ‘they
had lived a contemptible life and married two mulâtresses’.58 As blacks occupied an
inferior position, several white officials and at least some settlers thought such
marriages to be humiliating. The authorities also wanted to prevent free blacks from
improving their socio-economic status in order to maintain the developing social
hierarchy. By the end of the seventeenth century in Guadeloupe, social and
governmental pressures had apparently deterred most French people from marrying
people of colour. In 1695, Father Labat reported that on the Iles du Vent he had only
met two white men who had married black women. One of these men was the
Lieutenant of the Militia of Pointe-Noire in Guadeloupe, named Antoine Lietard,
who married a ‘very beautiful négresse’ called Barbe in 1673 and they ‘had handsome
little mulâtres’. While Labat’s comment seems rather favourable, the parish register
of Pointe-Noire indicates that nobody came to their wedding ‘for very grave reasons’.59
157
There was also antagonism between the Caribs and people of African ancestry.
Although the well-known appearance of the ‘black Caribs’ in seventeenth-century St.
Vincent attests that, in the Caribbean, there were alliances between black and
indigenous people, in Guadeloupe, the Amerindians rarely united with blacks. Labat
also observed that ‘it is very rare to see a Carib willing to marry a négresse and a
négresse would never decide to marry a Carib’.60 Indeed, DuTertre reported that
Caribs ‘do not want to associate with the nègres at all, they never eat with them, and
they build their cases separately because they all think that people would look at
them as if they were slaves if they see them talking to the nègres’.61
Between 1635 and the 1660s, white people, the indigenous populations and the
people of African descent formed a moderately flexible social hierarchy. During the
first decades of settlement, the social order was not defined along a clear colour line,
to a large extent because not all unfree people were black. Numerous engagés
(indentured servants) worked in conditions that were very similar to those of slaves.
DuTertre reported, regarding the engagés, that ‘the settlers often force them to work
with the slaves, and this afflicts these poor people more than all the excessive
maltreatments that they have to endure’.62 In August 1669, Du Lion even considered
the indentured system to be ‘a form of slavery’.63 There were far fewer Amerindian
slaves than indentured servants and indigenous people were often thought to be too
indolent to be reduced to slavery.64 As a result, the missionaries recommended that
masters assign Caribs to less demanding tasks, such as fishing or hunting. Colour
prejudice seems to have shaped the formation of a discriminatory social status for
black slaves, because of all unfree people, they were given the most arduous tasks. In
1667, DuTertre even related how, when asked to perform hard work, indigenous
slaves responded that ‘these sorts of work are only good for the nègres’.65
By the end of the seventeenth century a social hierarchy more clearly defined along
a colour line and yet slightly flexible had taken form. Although areas of sugar cane
plantations expanded slowly, the number of indentured servants began to diminish
rapidly by the 1660s: the 1698 census lists only two engagés.66 At the end of the
seventeenth century, the authorities had to reduce the period of engagement from
three years to eighteen months because the number of volunteers was too small.67
Word of bad treatment experienced by the engagés may have reached France. As a
result, black labour became the predominant mode of production in the French
Antilles. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, most African slaves newly
arrived in the French Caribbean cultivated the land, positioned at the bottom of the
social hierarchy. Craft industry offered esteemed positions to free and unfree people
of colour. Labat stated: ‘I have seen some of them, who were so proud to be masons
and joiners that they were going to Church with their ruler and in their work
overalls’.68 Consequently, white fathers liked placing some of their mulâtre offspring
in workshops for apprenticeships and although there were also black creole and
African artisans, mulâtres frequently occupied this higher position, as was the case
with the previously mentioned mulâtre André Richard, who became a ‘skilful
carpenter’. As white indentured servants gradually vanished from the French Antilles,
people of colour began to take up the relatively distinguished status of servant,
allowing them to be ‘well fed and well dressed’.69 Towards the end of the seventeenth
century, household servants were often mulâtres or blacks. Thus, in 1671 in Trois
Rivière, Leger Millard Champagne and his wife Marguerite owned a ‘mulâtresse
158
servant’.70 In the same year, in Vieux Fort, Mr. Jean Baptiste Delaseine had a black
servant named Marie Mamachou, the ‘spouse’ of presumably white Jacques Valette,
who was ‘master of case, bourgeois and merchant’.71 The fact that a few women of
colour married Frenchmen of high social standing, like Jacques Valette and Marie
Mamachou or Lieutenant Lietard and freed black Barbe (the latter couple in 1673 in
Pointe-Noire), confirms the belief that the socio-economic hierarchy was not
completely rigid. Since in seventeenth-century censuses free mulâtres, blacks and
Caribs were recorded together without any distinction, it is not possible to examine
the ethnic origins of the free people of colour. Mulâtres were, apparently, more likely
to be manumitted than blacks, since they had a white parent. For this reason, skin
colour may have acted as a factor of social mobility for individuals of fairer skin,
while increasing discrimination against darker people.
Finally, during this same period, the French governmental élite issued a raft of
discriminatory regulations. In the early modern period, the legislation related to
colour prejudice resulted from centrifugal influences in Guadeloupe and the broader
Caribbean, as well as from the metropolitan authorities. Guadeloupe came under the
direct authority of the French Crown in 1674 and it felt the effects of Louis XIV’s
politics of centralisation through legal and administrative control. Each colony
influenced royal decisions and laws through dispatches; thus the ministry of the
Marine received colonial guidance, supervising the entire French empire through
orders and legislation. The Governor General of the Iles du Vent received and carried
out general orders and policies from the mother country into the French Antilles, but
the Governor of Guadeloupe also influenced local judicial and administrative
decisions. In October 1664, a royal order established a Sovereign Council of
Guadeloupe ‘to judge with sovereign power and in the last resort criminal and civil
trials’. This judicial and legislative body also registered regulations and on some
occasions, it issued arrêts (regulations). In the seventeenth century, the Governor of
Guadeloupe normally headed the Sovereign Council with a few councillors who were
nominated among the élite of Guadeloupe.72 From 1668, Guadeloupe came under the
administrative dependence of the Superior Council of Martinique, which began to
register an important number of regulations for Guadeloupe.
In the late seventeenth century, the metropolitan authorities were apparently
influenced by negative attitudes when they determined the legal status of mulâtre
children in the Antilles. Before the 1670s, mulâtres were usually freed after reaching
the age of twenty-four years. But when Guadeloupe was placed under the direct
authority of the French Crown in 1674, royal authorities decided that ‘mulâtres
whose mothers are slaves will remain enslaved for life’, according to Roman law.73
First Intendant of the Antilles Jean-Baptiste Patoulet argued in 1681 that the unique
reason for ending the systematic manumission was the ‘depraved inclinations of
mulâtres and mulâtresses’, who once freed were devoted to ‘libertinism’.74 Article IX
of the 1685 Code Noir, an ordinance regulating slavery in the French Antilles, also
stated that mulâtre children born of enslaved mothers were to remain enslaved and
according to this same article, fathers refusing to marry the mothers of their mulâtre
offspring had to pay a fine of 200 pounds of sugar.75
However, in Guadeloupe, the political élite seemed opposed to such unions. An
arrêt issued in December 1667 by the Sovereign Council of Guadeloupe attempted to
restrict intermarriages between whites and blacks by forbidding ‘to all priests and
159
clergymen to perform any marriage ceremony between a white man and a black
woman or a white woman and a black man without the agreement of the Governor
or the Commandant of this island’.76 In 1681, Governor General of the Iles du Vent
Count of Blénac also obliged white fathers of mulâtre children to pay a fine of a
hundred pounds of sugar to the Church.77 By the end of the seventeenth century, the
use of article IX seems to have mirrored a form of colour prejudice in Guadeloupe:
when the mulâtre master Jean Boury fathered an illegitimate child with one of his
black slaves, the Sovereign Council of Guadeloupe refused to apply the sentence
provided by the article, arguing that Jean was not white.78 Despite an exhaustive
review, no other instances of application or non-application of these regulations were
discovered in the judicial records. But these measures may have created discriminations
by rendering black slaves ‘forbidden’ to white people.
TH E INTENSIF ICATION OF CO L O U R P RE J U D ICE

Promoted by demographic, economic, social and political factors, colour prejudice
intensified from the beginning of the eighteenth century to 1759. From the end of the
seventeenth century to the 1710s, the slave population increased, significantly
outnumbering whites. In 1710 Guadeloupe, 9,706 slaves were listed in the census
(representing 65 percent of the population).79 From the 1720s, largely owing to the
vacant fertile lands of Grande-Terre, Guadeloupe grew into a flourishing centre of
sugar production.80 As a consequence, the number of slaves increased considerably.
In 1731, 27,087 black captives were recorded in censuses, amounting to 75 percent
of the population of the island and this proportional figure continued to increase
until the 1750s, as a Guadeloupian census made in 1753 mentioned 40,525 black
slaves, corresponding to 81 percent of the population.81 White settlers became,
consequently, a small minority attempting to control a large-scale enslaved labour
force. During this period, the number of indentured servants remained relatively
small: the 1707 census mentions only one engagé, although this figure rose to 142 in
1718.82 The number of free people of colour in Guadeloupe remained relatively low
until 1732, as only 580 libres were recorded in 1710 (11 percent of the free population)
and this figure rose to 1,314 libres in 1732 (14 percent).83 Between 1733 and 1759,
censuses stopped quantifying free people of colour. Yet the number of manumissions
taking place in the French Antilles seems to have increasingly preoccupied the
authorities. In 1711, 1713, 1729 and 1736, ordinances prevented French people
from freeing their slaves without the agreement of the local authorities.84 From the
1720s to the 1740s, bad weather and the War of Austrian Succession (1742–48)
generated food shortages and general misery.85 As the servile group was the first to
suffer, maroonnage and slave revolts multiplied.86 All of these factors may have
reinforced colour prejudice.
Indeed, from the 1690s to 1759 in Guadeloupe, negative attitudes toward people
of African ancestry seem to have become more intense. By the 1720s, ‘racial thinking’
had emerged, as evidenced by the fact that at least a few élite men had begun to
classify people into groups presumably having common hereditary traits transmitted
through blood. The case of a white surgeon named Gilles Petit who was taken to the
court of the Guadeloupian Sovereign Council by his brother-in-law Jacques Denis
Huard in March 1727 is a case in point. Similar to the Michel case of 1667, Jacques
160
Denis sought to exclude Gilles’ black wife Magdelon from the family inheritance by
nullifying their marriage. This confirms the idea that some white settlers and
politicians wanted to prevent blacks’ economic ascendancy and thereby protect their
own position at the top of the social hierarchy, though it is impossible to say how far
this particular incident can be attributed to prejudice or mainly to greed. Magdelon
and Gilles were married in Pointe Noire and then moved to Grand Cul-de-Sac where
they had ‘numerous male and female mulâtre children’. Procureur Général Monsieur
Dorillac believed their marriage to be void partly due to ‘the considerable inequality
of their conditions’. He wanted to satisfy Jacques Denis’s request, arguing that such
mésalliances were ‘scandalous’, ‘monstrous’ and ‘shameful’. He explained that ‘on
these islands, there are people of equal rank for all colours and for all species’ and
concluded that since ‘there is no lack of men and women of equal blood’ in
Guadeloupe, such unions should be categorically prohibited. In his opinion, therefore,
the people of colour had to marry within their own supposedly inferior racial and
socio-economic groupings. Interestingly, Dorillac also questioned the integrity of the
Dominican priest who had performed the marriage, pointing toward possible
divergences of opinion concerning interracial marriages, between the priests and
some of the political élite. There were probably some divergences of opinion among
the political élite too: for we find that, in the end, seven Council members declared
the marriage to be legally acceptable, against four members willing to invalidate the
union. The final outcome of this trial is unknown.87
In addition, during the first half of the eighteenth century the classification of the
different ethnic groups of Guadeloupe in administrative papers became more defined.
While preserving the categories of ‘nègre’, ‘négresse’, ‘mulâtre’, ‘mulâtresse’ and
‘sauvage’, in 1729 the census-makers created the category, blanc (‘white’).88 Thus the
settlers could differentiate themselves more clearly from people of colour. Similar
types of categorisations appeared in administrative papers in other early-modern
French colonies, suggesting that a process of imperial administrative unification was
perhaps taking place. The administrative papers of French Louisiana also contain
numerous occurrences of the words ‘nègre’, ‘négresse’, ‘sauvage’, ‘sauvagesse’,
‘mulâtre’, ‘mulâtresse’ and ‘blanc’.89
In the first half of the eighteenth century, social tensions intensified too. The
available documentation shows that interracial marriages between whites and blacks
were very rare during this time. For the period between 1700 and 1759, the well-
preserved parish registers of Le Gozier in Guadeloupe mention only one union
between a white individual and a person of colour: the French woman Marie
Madelaine Delbourg married François Thaouira, a ‘free mulâtre’, in 1757, but this
was probably because that they already had two illegitimate children, Charles and
François.90 However, the most striking aspect of accentuated colour prejudice was
the considerable increase in the number of illegitimate mixed children. Illegitimate
children were relatively rare in seventeenth-century censuses. Between the 1720s and
the 1750s, in the single parish of Le Gozier, fifteen illegitimate mixed children were
baptised. In April 1740, for example, the priest baptised a mulâtre named Charles
‘born out of the libertinage of Marie Rose Girard free négresse and the Frenchman
Guillaume Le Roux’.91 Rejection of interracial unions was not restricted to Le Gozier,
as more illegitimate children appear in all the Guadeloupian parish registers. For
example, in 1703 in St. François, a priest baptised Magdeleine ‘a little mulâtresse,
161
daughter of Marie Thomas unmarried free négresse, who says that Gabriel Leblond,
assistant warrant officer, is the father’.92 These circumstances suggest that consensual
or forced cross-ethnic sexual encounters were numerous and the fact that some
Frenchmen refused to recognise their mulâtre offspring suggests that social pressures
were significant. Such situations were also probably related to the 1667 legislation
aimed at preventing intermarriage.
It might be said that in the first half of the eighteenth century, the intensification
of colour prejudice was most visible in the legislation issued by the governmental élite
across the Atlantic. In 1758, the lawyers Monsieurs Nadau and Marin proposed a
reform of the 1685 Code Noir for the French Iles du Vent, and decided that ‘It is
necessary to always maintain freed slaves in an inferior position, and to prevent them
from associating with whites’ on the basis that with ‘article VI of the Edict of March
1724, his Majesty forbad the inhabitants of Louisiana to marry blacks’. It was
eventually decided that, as already stated in the regulation of 1667, the Gouverneur
Général and the Intendant should be allowed to forbid marriages between white
individuals, and the people of colour.93
In addition, discriminatory measures against miscegenation and free individuals of
colour became numerous. An ordinance issued in November 1704 prevented the
administrators of the French Iles du Vent from providing titles of nobility to all
Frenchmen who had married women of colour, thus precluding people of colour
from becoming nobles.94 A royal declaration of February 1726 prevented free people
of colour from receiving donations from whites ‘inter vivos, because of death or for
any other reason’. According to the authorities, this law merely aligned local
legislation with the newest iteration of the Code Noir, issued for Louisiana in March
1724.95 By the 1720s, discriminatory laws against free people of colour in the French
Antilles had begun to threaten them with re-enslavement as punishment. Thus, a
decree issued in June 1720 in Martinique prevented free people of colour of the
French Antilles from wearing luxurious clothes, and forced them to dress with
‘clothes of little value, without silk, gold-effect and lace, unless they are very
inexpensive’, under threat of loosing their freedom in the event of a second offence.96
Six years later, a royal declaration imposed fines on free people of colour who
harbored maroon slaves in their houses. Those unable to pay would be ‘reduced to
the condition of slave’ also, claimed authorities, ‘in accordance with the Edict of
March 1724 which is used in our province of Louisiana’.97 These regulations may be
interpreted in light of the persistence of instances of cross-ethnic fluidity in the social
life and the social structure of the society, which despite the consistently low
proportion of free people of colour in Guadeloupe, threatened white people’s position
at the top of the social order in a time of economic crisis.
PER SI ST E NT INSTANCES OF CRO S S -E THNIC F L U ID ITY

All evidence shows that, despite these regulations and alongside other negative
attitudes, some instances of social fluidity occurred in Guadeloupe. In cabarets, inter-
ethnic social relations may have tended to undermine the development of antagonisms.
From the seventeenth century in the French Caribbean Islands, cabarets were places
in which people smoked, ate, drank and gambled. According to several regulations
issued between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth
162
century, the slaves of Basseterre and Saint-François frequented these cabarets ‘day
and night’.98 A regulation issued in August 1711 explained that ‘most freed slaves
manage Cabarets, even in white people’s houses who are despicable enough to
support their indecent activities’.99 An ordinance dated 1729 explained how white
vagabonds often drank and gambled in cabarets with domestic servant slaves, free
blacks and mulâtres. It prohibited ‘the people running Cabarets, especially the free
mulâtres, nègres and négresses, to offer an accommodation to [these vagabonds]
under threat of paying a fine of two hundred pounds’.100 Cabarets also offered
accommodation to a substantial number of Europeans travellers and sailors.101 The
evidence suggests that fluid inter-ethnic relations may have also occurred in even
more public settings. In a letter written in 1727, First Councillor to the Councils of
the Iles du Vent Sr. Menier complained that ‘the mulâtresses walk together with
merchants’ wives, either in churches or on the streets in public’ and ‘they assume the
appearance of being placed under the too great protection of white people who are
thrown with them in libertinage and filth’.102 Indeed, some whites acted as protectors
and defenders for blacks and this is especially true of some missionary priests. In the
1730s, the sermons of a Jesuit priest named Marcé generated heated discussions in
Guadeloupe. During the Sunday service, he asked white masters to treat their slaves
with humanity and declared that ‘by revolting against their masters, the nègres would
soon avenge God’ for all the mistreatments that they were enduring. The witnesses
reported how some ‘nègres’ woke up their companions who had fallen asleep during
the service to listen to this sermon, and how several black women began to laugh.
The authorities protested that such types of discourses were extremely dangerous
since there were, in Guadeloupe, ‘more than thirty thousand slaves’ always ready to
revolt to ‘shaken the yoke of slavery’.103 A few white people might even have taken
part in some of the slave rebellions that took place in early modern Guadeloupe.
During the slave revolt of 1737, the slave Valentin Jacquot was arrested on a pirogue
‘where there was a white man’, both were allegedly on their way to the coast to ‘tell
case slaves to get ready for the revolt’.104
Finally, there is evidence of friendship ties between free mixed people and free
blacks. Mulâtres sometimes chose blacks to be the godparents of their children. This
was the case of Guillaume Galopin and Jeanne, both ‘mulâtres’ from Capesterre, who
chose Jean Dupont and Angelique Sabré ‘free nègres’ as godparents for their daughter
Angélique in June 1702.105 For the period between 1700 and 1759 in Le Gozier, 39
percent (seven cases) of the mentioned wedded free blacks had married non-black
individuals and 82 percent (14 cases) of the mentioned wedded mulâtres had married
another mixed individual.106 This pattern cannot really be interpreted as evidence of
antagonism because, as will be shown below, most free people of colour were mulâtres.
During the first half of the eighteenth century, the socio-economic hierarchy was,
apparently, not completely defined along a colour line. In early eighteenth-century
Guadeloupe, the vast majority of the free people of colour were mixed individuals,
which confirms the idea that mixed people often occupied a higher status than blacks.
There were 597 free mulâtres in 1718, amounting to 82 percent of the number of free
people of colour, and this figure rose to 1,177 in 1732, corresponding to 90 percent
of the free people of colour.107
However, in many instances, the colour lines of the social order blurred; this is
especially true of interrelations in towns. The judicial and legal registers in this period
163
express major concerns about a category of enslaved people of colour who were,
according to the authorities, ‘almost free’ (presque libres).108 In accordance with
Article 28 of the 1685 Code Noir, slaves were not allowed to possess any property.109
However, a significant number of slaves seem to have managed to work for their own
interest, to earn money and sometimes to become wealthy. Most of these slaves lived
in the towns of Guadeloupe, especially in Basseterre and Saint-François. According to
a general order of 1749, these slaves ‘rent their services for a day or a month, to work
as sailors, porters, domestic servants as if they were independent’ and their masters left
them ‘to their own devices provided that they pay regularly the price imposed on them
for a day or a month’.110 A regulation issued in August 1711 also protested that, in the
broader French Caribbean, several masters offered to their slaves the possibility of
buying their freedom, therefore driving them to commit thefts or to work
independently.111 The 1749 regulation described the ‘almost free’ people of colour as
being able ‘to undertake any trade and any profession, with the same liberty as white
people’. They worked as independent bakers, peddlers and seemingly very often, as
merchants. Some of them became wealthy enough to lease houses and shops from
whites who, according to the authorities, had enough ‘baseness of soul’ to offer them
places to rent. Many of these slaves also worked as tavern and cabaret managers and
some were, apparently, involved in prostitution. In Guadeloupian towns, some
maroon slaves were also able to sell their services. It allegedly became impossible to
recognise slaves anymore, because the ‘almost free’ people of colour enjoyed
‘immoderate luxury’ with ‘apparels very much above their rank, their bold and
insolent attitudes, the jewels that they wear, their feasts and the balls and gambling
parties that they organise in cabarets’.112 Already in 1720, the authorities in Martinique
and Guadeloupe had protested that ‘the apparel of the mulâtres and free nègres or
slaves is often above that of the free people to whom they are subjected’. It also
described the people of colour as ‘a nation marked by the seal of colour due to the sin
of their first father, all born in the character of baseness and yet, subjected to a spirit
of vanity’.113 This statement suggested a hereditary state of inferiority perhaps in
reference to the Curse of Ham – a religious myth that emerged in late medieval Europe
according to which black people were the descendants of Canaan, who had been
cursed by Noah in Genesis IX. Both dark skin and black slavery were sometimes
thought to have resulted from this divine curse.114 The first half of the eighteenth
century saw a significant rise in new regulations aimed at suppressing the existence of
the ‘almost free’ people of colour. The regulation of 1749 prohibited slaves from
renting out their services without obtaining written permission from their masters.115
Different regulations issued between 1711 and 1755 by the royal authorities in France,
the Government General of the French Antilles in Martinique, as well as by the
Superior Council of Guadeloupe prevented slaves from selling commodities.116 The
political authorities wanted to prevent thefts and prostitution, but also to keep the
‘almost free’ people of colour in a position of economic inferiority in order to preserve
a sharp colour line and protect the institution of slavery.
In Guadeloupe some people of colour apparently became quite wealthy. This was
the case of an ‘almost free’ slave named Jeanne Fary belonging to Sr. Houel. According
to the ‘Inventory of the properties of Jeanne Fary in favour of Sr Houel of October 6
1716’, Sr. Houel had allowed Jeanne ‘to enjoy the profit that she made by delivering
the babies of the women of this country.’ When she died, her freed nephew Jean
164
inherited her properties, which he possessed until 1716, when he died without having
an heir. Jeanne’s inheritance must have been quite significant, since Sr. Houel went so
far as to write to the King in order to obtain all of Jean’s properties. These included a
farm and a ‘residence’ located on Sr. Houel’s lands in Guadeloupe.117 The evidence also
reveals that some free people of colour were wealthy enough to become slave owners
themselves. This was the case of a mulâtresse named Alegre. In 1720, the Superior
Council of Martinique protested that she, as well as other slave owners in Basseterre
and Saint-François, did not send their slaves to accomplish the Easter Duty.118 On
other rare occasions, people of colour acquired power and renown as well. This was
the case of a French free mulâtre pirate named Louis Serville, who commanded the
Spanish ship La Vierge du Bail and its French, Martinican, Spanish, English and
Amerindian sailors and black slaves. In the 1720s, he became rich by stealing Spanish
commodities and silver from the French and English ships that sailed in the Caribbean.
He was a much-dreaded pirate because his crew comprised Amerindians able to make
poisoned arrows. He also stole an English ship named La Marguerite and kidnapped
its British crew. The Guadeloupian authorities eventually confiscated his ships and
belongings and he was arrested, judged in Basseterre, and sent to the galleys.119
It can be seen, therefore, that the history of colour prejudice in the early modern
French Atlantic World was extremely complex. In Guadeloupe, the political élite,
missionaries, settlers, petits blancs (poor whites), whether in urban or rural areas, all
adopted different attitudes toward non-Europeans. Even within these different groups,
reactions could vary significantly from one individual to another. Like other French
Caribbean islands such as Saint-Domingue or Martinique, Guadeloupe developed an
intense plantation regime which gave birth to a particularly prejudiced and segregated
society, but the nature of this prejudice was by no means universal. Additionally, while it
would eventually benefit them the most, Europeans had no monopoly on colour prejudice.
Black and Amerindian people adopted their own prejudicial attitudes toward each other
and toward whites, but political, economic, social and technological supremacy gave
Europeans the possibility of theorising colour prejudice and of applying it in the socio-
economic reality in a much more virulent way than non-Europeans could ever do during
this period. The discriminatory laws created by the French colonial planter authorities
and metropolitan governmental élite across the Atlantic in the first half of the eighteenth
century contributed to this phenomenon. But as demonstrated above, in Guadeloupe, the
highly discriminatory attitudes of these colonial planters and state officials did not always
prevent instances of inter-ethnic fluidity from existing alongside colour prejudice.
NOTE S
I am grateful to the Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer, where I began research on early
modern Guadeloupe. Thanks also to Saliha Belmessous, Philip Boucher, Myriam Cottias,
John Garrigus, Sue Peabody and Cécile Vidal for their helpful suggestions and comments.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to my advisors William O’Reilly, Pernille Roge, François-
Joseph Ruggiu and to my friends Nathan Marvin, Benjamin Osborn and Mary White, who
commented on several drafts of this article.
1 Bostock and Riley 1893: V, chp 1, passim; P. Du Ryer, 1645: III, IV passim; Africain 1556,
passim, e.g. I, Livre 1.
2 Estorach and Lequenne 1979–91: passim, e.g. ‘Lettre à Luis de Santangel’ II, 45–55.
165
3 Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English 2005; Collins English Dictionary
2008.
4 Feldman, Lewontin and King 2003: V, 374.
5 DuTertre 1667: II (Traité VIII), 508.
6 Châtillon 1984: 130.
7 Devyver 1973; Jouanna 1977 and 1981.
8 Aubert 2004: 439–78.
9 For an outline of the numerous debates concerning the relationship between ‘race’ and
colonial slavery among historians of Virginia, see Vaughan 1989: 311–54.
10 Andereggen, 1988; Cohen 1980; Debbasch 1967; Duchet 1971; Hall 1971.
11 E.g: Bonniol 1992; Hudson 1996; Smedley 1993; Rogers 2009.
12 Debien 1974; Dubois 2004; Garrigus 2010; Geggus 2002; Pluchon and Abénon 1982;
Popkin 2007; Régent 2004.
13 Boucher 2008; Moitt 2001; Peabody 2005.
14 Aubert 2004; Boucher 1996; Dorlin 2006; Elisabeth 1974; Garraway 2005; Peabody
2004; Régent 2010.
15 Boulle 2007; Curran 2011; Palmer 2010; Peabody 1996.
16 Aubert 2004; Belmessous 2005; Hall 1992; Ingersoll 1999; Nash 1974; Spear 2009;
Usner 1992; Vidal 2009.
17 Elisabeth 2003.
18 Boucher 2008: 3, 62–144 passim.
19 Centre des Archives d’Outre Mer (CAOM) G1 469.
20 CAOM G1 469 (Census for Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre and Les Saintes).
21 CAOM G1 469 (Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre and Les Saintes).
22 CAOM C7A2, f.87.
23 CAOM G1 469 (Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre and Les Saintes); CAOM G1 469 (Basse-Terre,
Grande-Terre and Marie-Galante).
25 CAOM G1 469 (Basse-Terre).
27 DuTertre 1654: (Partie V), 474–75; Pelleprat 1655: 56.
28 DuTertre 1667: II (Traité VIII), 497; Labat 1724, II (Partie IV), 59.
29 Chevillard 1659, 193; DuTertre 1667: II (Traité VIII), 496.
30 DuTertre 1654: (Partie V), 475.
31 Breton 1647: I, 53; DuTertre 1654: (Partie V), 398.
32 Ibid.
33 Rochefort, 1658: 407; Du Puis 1652: 206; DuTertre 1667: II (Traité VII), 356, 377.
34 DuTertre 1667: (Traité VII), 357–58.
35 Breton 1647: I, 81; Chevillard 1659: 171; Du Puis 1653: 204.
36 PetitJean-Roget 1996: 65; Boucher 1992: 7; DuTertre: 1654, (Partie V), 450–51.
37 Breton 1647: I, p. 53.
38 CAOM G1 469.
39 CAOM G1 468.
40 Labat 1742: IV, 486.
41 Labat 1724: II (Partie IV) 58.
42 Labat 1742: IV, 484–85.
43 Labat, 1742: IV, 450–51.
44 Rochefort 1658: 385.
45 DuTertre 1654: (Partie V), 399.
46 Labat, 1722: II, 75.
166
48 Labat, 1722: II, 75.

49 CAOM C7A1 f58.
50 CAOM G1 469.
52 CAOM F3 225, 291–332.
53 CAOM G1 469.
55 CAOM 85MIOM182.
56 CAOM G1 468.
57 CAOM F3 133, 36.
58 CAOM F132, 639.
59 Labat 1724: II (Partie II), 35; CAOM 85MIOM276.
60 Labat 1724: I (Partie II), 26.
62 DuTertre 1667: II (Traité VII), 477, 488.
63 CAOM C7A1, f58.
64 DuTertre 1667: II (Traité VIII), 486, 488–89.
65 DuTertre 1667: II (Traité VIII), 493, 486.
66 CAOM G1 469.
67 CAOM B2 f.175v.
68 Labat 1724: I (Partie III), 328.
69 Labat 1724 I (Partie II),330.
70 CAOM G1 468.
71 CAOM G1 468.
72 CAOM F3 221, pp. 365–67 and F3 236 pp. 382–83.
73 Labat 1724: I (Partie II), 37.
74 CAOM F3 248, f.687.
75 Receuil D’Edits 1744: II, 85.
76 CAOM CAOM F3 133, f.36.
77 CAOM F3 248, f.687.
78 Debbasch 1967: 46.
80 CAOM F3 236, p. 775.
81 CAOM G1 497 (Basse-Terre); CAOM G1 497 (Guadeloupe and its dependent islands).
82 CAOM G1 497.
83 CAOM G1 497 (Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre and Les Saintes); CAOM G1 497 (Basse-Terre
and dependent islands).
84 CAOM 6DPPC 1323; F3 222, p. 189; F3 236, pp. 680–81; F3 224, pp. 485–89; A 25,
f.173–74; F3 224, pp. 485–86, 489; F3 236, pp. 681–83.
85 CAOM F133, p. 47; F3 223, pp. 145–47; F3 223, pp. 207–9; F3 225, pp. 433–36; F3 225,
pp. 611–12; F3 225, p. 649; F3 226, pp. 413–17.
86 CAOM C7 A10, p. 19; F3 225, pp. 183–90, pp. 209–41.
87 CAOM F3 224 pp. 213–39; F3 224 pp. 241–44.
88 CAOM G1 497.
89 Vidal 2009.
90 CAOM 85MIOM197.
91 Ibid.
92 CAOM 85MIOM352.
93 CAOM F3 90, f.85–89.
94 Moreau de St. Méry 1784: I, 716.
95 CAOM F3 236, pp. 676–77.
167
96 CAOM F3 236, p. 701; CAOM 6DPPC 1323.

97 CAOM A25, f.59.
98 CAOM F3 226, p. 475.
99 CAOM F3 222, p. 189.
100 CAOM 6DPPC 1323.
101 CAOM F3 236, p. 342.
102 CAOM F3 224, pp. 359–61.
103 CAOM F3 224, pp. 791–96.
104 F2 225, pp. 209–41.
105 CAOM 85MIOM182.
106 CAOM 85MIOM197.
107 CAOM G1 497 (Basse-Terre) and CAOM G1 497 (Basse-Terre and dependent islands).
108 CAOM F3 226, p. 476.
109 Receuil D’Edits, 1744: II, 90.
110 CAOM F3 226, pp. 475–86.
111 CAOM F3 222, p. 189.
112 CAOM F3 226, pp. 475–86; F3 222, p.189.
113 CAOM 6DPPC 1323.
114 Braude 1997; Braude 2011.
115 CAOM F3 226, p. 485.
116 CAOM 6DPPC 1323; F2 222, p. 189; F2 226, p. 484; F3 227, pp. 1–3.
117 CAOM F3 222, pp. 451–52.
118 CAOM F3 222, pp. 643–45.
119 CAOM F3 224, pp. 429–35.
REF EREN CE S
Lucien Abénon, La Guadeloupe de 1671 à 1759: Etude politique, économique et sociale (2 vols.,
L’Harmattan, Paris, 1987).
Léon Africain, Historiale Description de l’Afrique (2 vols., Christophe Plantin, Anvers, 1556).
Guillaume Aubert, ‘“The Blood of France”: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic
world’, William and Mary Quarterly, third series (2004), Vol. 61, No.3, pp. 439–78.
Amon Andereggen, ‘The image of the African in the French collective psyche’, Peuples Noirs
Peuples Africains (1988), No. 59–62, pp. 129–40.
Saliha Belmessous, ‘Assimilation and racialism in seventeenth and eighteenth century French
colonial policy’, in The American Historical Review, (2005), No. 110, 2, pp. 1–56.
Jean-Luc Bonniol, La couleur comme maléfice: une illustration créole de la généalogie des
‘Blancs’ et des ‘Noirs’ (Albin Michel, Paris, 1992).
John Bostock and Henry Riley eds. and trans., The Natural History of Pliny (6 vols., George
Bell & Sons, London, 1893).
Philip Boucher, Cannibal encounters: Europeans and Islands Caribs, 1492–1763 (Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1992).
——‘Race and Slavery in France and in the French Caribbean before 1700’, paper given at the
French Colonial History Conference in 1996.
——France and the American tropics to 1700: tropics of discontent? (Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore, 2008).
Pierre Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Perrin, Paris, 2007).
Benjamin Braude, ‘The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical
Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Period’, The William and Mary Quarterly,
Third Series, (Jan, 1997), Vol. 54, No. 1, pp. 103–42.
168
——‘The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery.’
Catholic Historical Review (July, 2011), Vol. 97, No. 3, pp. 587–88.
Raymond Breton, Relation de L’isle de la Guadeloupe, Reproduction of the editions of 1647,
1654 and 1656 by the Bibliothèque d’Histoire Antillaise (Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe,
Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, 1973).
——Relations de l’Ile de la Guadeloupe, 1647–1656 (2 vols., Publication of the Société
d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, Basse-Terre, 1978).
Marcel Châtillon, ‘L’évangélisation des esclaves au XVIIe siècle. Lettres du R. P. Jean Mongin,
1676’, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe (1984), No. 61–62, pp. 3–136.
André Chevillard, Les desseins de son Eminence de Richelieu pour l’Amérique: reproduction
de l’édition de 1659 (Basse-Terre, Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1973).
William Cohen, The French encounter with Africans: white response to blacks, 1530–1880
(Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1980).
Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment
(Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2011).
Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique
esclavagiste Caraïbe: 1635–1833 (Dalloz, Paris, 1967).
Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux antilles françaises XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Société d’Histoire de
la Guadeloupe, Basse-Terre, 1974).
André Devyver, Le sang épuré: Les préjugés de race chez les gentihommes français de l’Ancien
Régime 1560–1720 (Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1973).
Elsa Dorlin, La matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de nation française (La
Découverte, Paris, 2006).
Laurent Dubois, A colony of citizen: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the Caribbean
1787–1804 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2004).
Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (François Maspero, Paris,
1971).
Mathias Du Puis, Relation de L’Etablissement d’une colonie Françoise dans la Gardeloupe Isle
de L’Amerique et des Moeurs des Sauvages (Marin Yvon, Caen, 1652).
——Relation de l’establissement d’une colonie françoise dans la Gardeloupe (sic) isle de
l’Amérique et des moeurs des sauvages Reproduction de l’édition de 1652 (Société d’histoire
de la Guadeloupe, Basse-Terre, 1972).
Jean-Baptiste DuTertre, Histoire générale des Isles de Saint-Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de
la Martinique et autres dans l’Amérique (Jacques & Emmanuel Langlois, Paris, 1654).
——Histoire Générale des Antilles habitées par les François (4 vols., Thomas Iolly, Paris, 1667–71)
Léo Elisabeth, ‘The French Antilles’, in Neither Slaves Nor Free: The Freedman of African
Descent in The Slave Society of the New World, David Cohen and Jack Greene eds. (Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1974), pp. 134–71.
——La société martiniquaise aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 1664–1789 (Karthala, Paris, 2003).
Solelad Estorach and Michel Lequenne trad., Christophe Colomb: La découverte de l’Amérique
(3 vols., La Découverte, Paris, 1979–91).
Marcus Feldman, Richard Lewontin and Mary-Claire King, ‘Race: a genetic melting-pot’,
(2003), Nature, 424: 374.
Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Duke
University Press, Durham, 2005).
John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (Palgrave
Macmillan, New York, 2010).
David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002).
Gwendolyn Mildo Hall, Social control in slave plantation societies: a comparison of St
Domingue and Cuba (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1971).
——Africans in Colonial Louisiana (Louisiana University Press, Baton Rouge, 1992).
169
Nicholas Hudson, ‘From “nation” to “race”: The origin of racial classification in eighteenth-
century thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, (1996), Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 247–64.
Thomas Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the
Deep South, 1718–1819 (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1999).
Arlette Jouanna, Ordre social: Mythes et hiérarchies dans la France du XVIe siècle (Hachette,
Paris, 1977).
——L’idée de race en France au XVIe siècle et au début du XVIIe (2 vols., Université Paul-
Valéry, Montpellier, 1981).
Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (2 vols., La Haye, 1724).
Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (6 vols., Guillaume Cavelier,
Paris, 1722).
——Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (6 vols., P. Husson, T. Johnson, P. Gosse, J. Van
Duren, R. Alberts, & C. Le Vier , the Hague, 1724).
——Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (8 vols., Ch. J.B. Delespine, Paris, 1742).
Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, 2001).
Louis-Elie Moreau de St. Méry, Loix et Constitutions des Colonies Françoises Sous le Vent
(6 Vols., Quillau, Paris, 1784–90).
Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: The people of Early America (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-
Hall 1974).
Jennifer Palmer, ‘What’s in a Name? Mixed-Race Families and Resistance to Racial Marginalization
in Eighteenth-Century La Rochelle,’ French Historical Studies (Summer 2010), Vol 23, No. 3,
pp. 357–85.
Sue Peabody, ‘There are no slaves in France’: the political culture of race and slavery in the
Ancien Régime (Oxford University Press, New York, 1996).
——‘“A Nation Born to Slavery”: Missionaries and Racial Discourse in Seventeenth-century
French Antilles’, Journal of Social History, (Fall 2004), Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 113–26.
——‘Négresse, Mulâtrese, Citoyenne: Gender and Emancipation in the French Caribbean,
1650–1848’, in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, Pamela Scully and
Diana Paton eds. (Duke University Press, Durham, 2005).
Pierre Pelleprat, Relation des missions des PP de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les isles et dans
la Terre Ferme de l’Amérique Méridionale (Sebastien and Gabriel Cramoisy, Paris, 1655).
Henry PetitJean-Roget, ‘Les femmes caraïbes insulaires: lecture comparée des chroniques
françaises du XVIIe et du XVIIIe sur les petites Antilles’, Bulletin de la société d’histoire de
la Guadeloupe (1996), No. 109, pp. 45–69.
Pierre Pluchon and Lucien Abénon, Histoire des Antilles et de la Guyane (Privat, Paris, 1982).
Jeremy Popkin, Facing racial revolution: eyewitness accounts of the Haitian insurrection
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007).
Frédéric Régent, Esclavage, métissage, liberté: la révolution française en Guadeloupe, 1789–1802
(Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris, 2004).
——, ‘Unité ou variétés du genre humain dans le cadre de l’esclavage colonial français du XVIIe
au XIXe siècle’ (IHRF, Université Paris 1, workshop ‘Fait colonial’, 23 November 2010).
Charles de Rochefort, Histoire Naturelle et Morale des Iles Antilles de l’Amérique (Arnould
Leers, Rotterdam, 1658).
Dominique Rogers, ‘Raciser la société: un projet pour une société domingoise complexe’,
Journal de la Société des Américanistes (2009) Vol. 95–2, pp. 235–60.
Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: origin and evolution of a worldview (Westview
Press, Boulder, 1993).
Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex and Social order in Early New Orleans (Johns Hopkins University
Press, Baltimore, 2009).
170
Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower
Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1992).
Alden Vaughan, ‘The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia’,
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, (Jul., 1989), Vol. 97, No. 3, pp. 311–54.
Cécile Vidal, ‘Francité et situation coloniale. Nation, empire et race en Louisiane française,
1699–1769’, in Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 64 (2009), pp. 1019–50.
Les Histoires D’Herodote mises en François par P. Dv Ryer (3 vols., Antoine de Sommaville
& Augustin Courbé, Paris, 1645).
Receuil D’Edits, Declarations et Arrests de Sa Majeste Concernant l’Adiminstration de la
Justice & de la Police des Colonies Françaises de l’Amérique, & les Engagés (les Libraires
Associez, Paris, 1744).
171
CHAPTER TEN
ATLANTIC SLAVERIES
Britons, Barbary, and the Atlantic World
Catherine Styer
I n the late 1580s, the Englishman Thomas Saunders was serving on board the Jesus
voyaging to Tripoli in North Africa along with a multinational crew containing at
least 23 of his countrymen. On leaving Barbary, the machinations of two Frenchmen
brought the ship under suspicion and ‘Turkish’ pirates seized the crew and merchants
and chained them up ‘foure by foure.’ The Turks despoiled the vessel, hanged the mate
Andrew Dier, and made the rest of the company slaves ‘perpetuall unto the Great
Turke.’ Saunders and his comrades had their heads shaved and were set half naked to
row in the galleys and to quarry stones under the hot North African sun. He reported
that two of the crew were forced to convert to Islam and were raped. The rest struggled
with the violence of their overseers, the hardship of their labors, and the inadequacy
of their food and clothing. They were redeemed one year later by the efforts of Sir
Edward Osborne, but half of the company had already perished from disease and
overwork. Saunders was among those fortunate enough to survive their enslavement
and, on returning to England, published an account of his ordeal in 1587.1
One hundred years later Thomas Phelps also printed the story of his experiences as
a slave in Barbary, this time in Morocco. Phelps was employed on board the Success
of London sailing for Madeira, and was captured shortly after leaving the Irish coast.
He was put to work quarrying and building, ‘not Living…but Starving and Dying
daily.’ Attempts to ransom him failed and in desperation he fled from his captors on
gouty legs and frantically rowed to a nearby English man of war. Phelps had his
revenge, however: he piloted the English man of war to burn some of the Moroccan
fleet before returning home and publishing his tale of enslavement and escape in 1685.2
Stories of Barbary slavery were still popular a century later. In the 1790s, for
instance, James Wilson Stevens was one of several Americans eager to recount the
horrors suffered by his countrymen enslaved in Algiers to readers at home. Stevens
recorded how American slaves were ‘subjected to a series of misery which humanity
blushes to record,’ weighed down with chains, and set to work at the marine and in
public quarries before their ransom was finally paid.3 Eighteenth-century Englishmen
also remained interested in shocking tales from North Africa. Authors titillated
British readers with fictive tales of slavery and escape, and ex-captives rehearsed the
depredations they had suffered for a fascinated audience at home.
172
– chapter 10: Atlantic slaveries –
Throughout the period associated with the British Atlantic world, Britons were
enmeshed in two slave systems.4 In their new colonies, Britons acted as traders and
slave-owners, abducting and transporting men, women, and children from Africa
and establishing a brutal system of racial slavery. At the same time, they were also
involved in a slave system based in the Barbary States of North Africa. There, Britons’
roles were more diverse. In the early 1600s, some Britons operated as Barbary pirates
and slavers themselves. Later in the seventeenth century, Britons more frequently
acted as redeemers and activists, protesting the enslavement of their fellow countrymen
and working to have them released. Most Britons who found themselves in the
Barbary States in this period, however, were there as slaves.
This second slave system in which early modern Britons were involved has received
little attention from Atlantic historians. Barbary slavery is usually analyzed as a
domestic, political problem of limited impact and duration. It enters the national
narrative of seventeenth-century Britain only as a precursor to the Civil Wars and
finds a place in the American story solely as a crisis point in the early years of the new
republic’s foreign policy.5 Barbary slavery was, however, a more enduring and
significant problem for Britons at home and in their Atlantic colonies than its current
scholarly treatment suggests. American colonists and merchants fell victim to attack
throughout the period and the most devastating years of British enslavement in North
Africa were actually during the 1670s and 1680s. Barbary slavery was, furthermore,
very much a problem of empire and the Atlantic world, spilling out beyond the
concerns of domestic politics. As Britons established overseas colonies they became
more inviting prey, and the trade routes between America, continental Europe, and
Britain were haunted by Barbary slavery’s ever-present threat.
The number of enslaved Britons taken to North Africa was, of course, dwarfed by
the number of African people abducted to the Americas, but this second slave system
was nonetheless an important component of the early modern British Atlantic world.
There are, perhaps, two main ways to assess its impact on British life: the number of
British slaves taken to North Africa and the visibility of the Barbary problem back
home and in England’s Atlantic colonies. The number of men taken is hard to
calculate with great precision; the archival material available to study the enslavement
of Britons in the early modern Barbary States is patchy, fragmented, and scarce.
There are no North African ledgers of men taken or captives sold, and lists of
abducted men compiled by English merchants, local authorities within Britain, and
the London government are incomplete. Most of those enslaved were poor men,
seized from small fishing boats off the English and Irish coasts or coming home from
Newfoundland, whose disappearance often went unrecorded unless a petition from
his family for aid happens to have survived. The archival records which are available,
however, do indicate that many thousands of men were captured and offer some
insight into the geographical and temporal patterns of Barbary enslavement.
As early as the sixteenth century, English, Irish, and Scottish shipping suffered regular
attacks from the Barbary pirates. The Jesus was captured in 1587 with 23 men on
board, the Mary Marten of London appears to have been seized in the 1590s with her
crew, and the Three Half Moons was taken in the same decade and her crew enslaved at
Alexandria, as was the Toby of London whose twelve-strong company were all detained
in Morocco until redemptions could be arranged.6 The capture of many small fishing
vessels may well have gone unrecorded in this period, before any bureaucratic redemption
173
– Catherine Styer –
process was established, if no one from their small crews lived to carry the news back to
Britain. A more revealing approach when trying to assess the number of men taken in
this early period, therefore, is to look at how the problem was perceived at home and
what efforts were thought necessary to redeem men missing in North Africa. Such efforts
were substantial and the frequency and geographical spread of collections to raise money
to redeem abductees in the late sixteenth century indicates a fairly significant loss of
men. The evidence of widespread, and sometimes annual, collections, suggest that as
many as 1,000 Britons fell victim to these corsairs before 1600.
The pace of slaving quickened after 1600 and the numbers of men reported captured
in letters from North African and British ports are startlingly large. It is possible that
numbers were exaggerated in an effort to persuade the government in London to act.
That different sources provide fairly similar estimates does lend the reports credibility
however. In a missive to Lord Salisbury of July 1611, Sir Fernando Gorges reported
that 2,000 English, Irish, and Scots men were enslaved in Barbary as a whole.7 An
anonymous report in the state papers estimates that 70 English ships were taken
between 1609 and 1611, and 330 more between 1611 and 1616 by the Algerians
alone.8 If each ship had a crew, on average, of around fourteen men, that would indicate
about 5,600 slaves captured from the British Isles and taken to Algiers.9 In 1619 the
Privy Council, having collected reports from merchants and sailors in London and the
outports, believed 300 ships, and therefore around 4,200 men, had been captured by
vessels from Algiers and Tunis in ‘recent years.’10 As Britons were being taken into
Tripoli and Morocco as well – indeed there were around 260 British slaves in Salé
alone in 1610 – it seems reasonable to estimate that at least 7,000 men were taken out
of British ships and enslaved in North Africa in the years between 1600 and 1620.
Throughout the 1620s and 1630s similarly large numbers of Britons were enslaved
by North African pirates. Richard Ford estimated that already by 1622 a further 500
men had been brought into Algiers, a number that is corroborated by the outports: the
Mayor of Dartmouth, for instance, reported 130 men taken from just his region by
Turks in the same period.11 Men continued to be captured in the following years, with
1625 proving particularly disastrous. The Mayor of Plymouth informed the privy
council that the ‘Turks’ had taken over 1,000 men in that one year alone and there are
records of 37 named ships captured between 1624 and 1625 with possibly as many as
518 men on board, all of whom were killed or enslaved.12 Although many attacks were
recorded, reports of total figures – for instance that there were 3,000 Britons enslaved
in Algiers and 1,500 in Salé in 1626 – suggest the capture of small ships often left no
trace in the archives.13 Between 1629 and 1638 attacks by the Barbary corsairs intensified
yet further. At least 2,420 men, women, and children were enslaved from land raids and
from the capture of more than 115 ships.14 Again such large figures reported from
sailors returning to British ports are corroborated by the ‘men on the ground’ in
Barbary. In 1637, for instance, the consul James Frizell informed the king and council
that 1,524 Britons had been sold in Algiers between 1630 and 1637 and that the Salé
corsairs had sold over 800 in the same period.15 Between 1639 and 1641 another 1,200
were enslaved by men operating out of Algiers and Salé. A petition to the king from
3,000 slaves in Algiers in 1640 reported that 957 new slaves had been brought in since
May 18, 1639.16 They attached a list of these men’s names which, sadly, has been lost.
There were several factors involved in this upsurge in Barbary pirate attacks
against British targets in the early seventeenth century. It resulted partly from a
174
Figure 10.1 Barbary Pirates

175
change in the domestic politics of North Africa. After 1600, Constantinople’s grip on
the regencies of Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria, and influence over the Kingdom of
Morocco, was loosening and oligarchies arose in each of these locations whose power
was based on piracy. The British had also become more inviting prey. In the 1570s
the English ‘re-entered’ the Mediterranean in large numbers and in the following
decades trade to the Levant flourished.17 English ships were also venturing to the
‘new world’ in ever greater numbers, providing more targets for those pirates
operating out of the Atlantic ‘pirate republic’ of Salé.
The situation continued to worsen at mid-century and the ‘British were largely
powerless in stopping the corsairs’ during the British Civil Wars and the Protectorate.18
In 1640 a fleet of 60 Algerian ships cruised the English Channel; in 1641 60 Cornishmen
were seized from St Michael’s Mount near Penzance; in 1645 another 240 were taken
from the Cornish coast; and ‘Salé rovers were still busy plundering the West Country,
hauling off fresh captives by the score from the villages and fishing boats of Cornwall
and Devon’ into the 1650s.19 After 1650, Tripoli also temporarily became a more
important center of operations for the corsairs. Tripolitan vessels took the Ursula
Bonadventure in 1654, an unidentified Scottish ship in 1656, and the Levant
Company’s Resolution in 1657.20 Although it is once again difficult to calculate exact
figures for this period, the evidence supports an estimate of at least 9,000 Britons
captured between 1620 and 1660. Such a figure is possibly conservative, for David
Delison Hebb has suggested that 8,000 English, Irish, and Scotsmen were taken to
Barbary between 1616 and 1640, and in 1641 the English Parliament estimated that
there were four or five thousand Englishmen enslaved in Algiers alone.21
Figure 10.2 Tripoli – stronghold of Barbary Pirates

© Private Collection/Bridgeman Images
176
The rate of attacks after the Restoration by pirates operating out of North African
ports increased, culminating in an overwhelming number of seizures and enslavements
between 1677 and 1682 when Britain and Algiers were openly at war. The archives
contain reports of 182 named British ships captured between 1660 and 1682 with
around 2,000 men on board. In addition there are 1,368 individually named captives
in the sources for the same period – some of whom were likely serving on these ships,
and some of whom were probably captured in unrecorded attacks. Contemporary
reports again contain large numbers. William Hagget estimated that at least 2,000
Britons had been captured by Algerian and Moroccan pirates before 1669, and
Thomas Baker, consul at Algiers, later recorded around 3,000 more enslaved during
the official war time years.22 An English newsletter estimated there were 2,500
Englishmen enslaved at Algiers by 1681.23 It seems likely that at least another 7,000
Britons were captured between the Restoration and the peace of 1682 with Algiers.
The following 20 years were occupied with redeeming surviving captives from Algiers
– as late as 1695 there were still several hundred Britons there – and attacks on
British shipping declined somewhat.24 Morocco, however, was becoming increasingly
hostile towards the close of the seventeenth century, and upwards of 500 Britons
were enslaved there between 1680 and 1700.25
As late as the eighteenth century, when Britain was established as a dominant and
slave-owning imperial power, hundreds of Britons were still being abducted to North
Africa, with Morocco the most common destination. At least 470 Britons are recorded
as being transported to Morocco in the first two decades of the new century, and
during the 1730s 29 Britons were taken at Oran with the Spanish and over 130 more
were captured at sea and enslaved.26 More were abducted in the 1740s, and by 1759
there were over 350 British slaves in Morocco despite numerous efforts to free them.27
Including the steady stream of men enslaved at Algiers, at least another 1,500 Britons
were likely enslaved during the eighteenth century.
In total, as many as 26,000 men (and a few women) were abducted from English,
Scottish, Irish, and colonial ships and shores between the late sixteenth and late
eighteenth centuries and were set to work as slaves in North Africa. Such large numbers
of missing men would surely have had an impact. Each of those enslaved men left
behind parents and often a wife and family who quickly had to become knowledgeable
about Barbary slavery. If 26,000 British men were captured, therefore, maybe three or
four times that number were deeply affected by the loss of a husband, father or son.
Barbary slavery was also highly visible throughout England, and even those who
had not lost friends and family members to the corsairs were aware of the problem.
Early modern Britons published numerous pamphlets and books recounting
skirmishes with Turks at sea and offering harrowing accounts of slavery in Algiers
and Morocco, with some texts going through several editions. Thomas Troughton’s
Barbarian Cruelty was reprinted twice, for example, and Joseph Pitt’s A True and
Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mahommetans went through
four editions. For those who could not read, there were plays about the Ottoman
Empire and slavery, and spectacular water fights between Turks and Britons were
staged in English towns. Huge crowds turned out to witness the occasional processions
of British ex-slaves through the streets of London. These parades were theatrical and
eye-catching, with emaciated men dressed in rags displaying the horrors of their
enslavement for all to see.28
177
There were also frequent requests for charity to help Barbary slaves throughout
England and Wales, and giving alms to the widows of captives, or to ex-slaves
returned from North Africa, was commonplace. Churchwardens’ accounts from
English parishes show a steady stream of charity to ex-captives and local people
seeking to free loved ones, especially after 1650. There were also several national
collections and in the 1690s ministers were required to go ‘from House to House to
ask and receive from all Parishioners, as well Masters and Mistresses, and Servants,
as Lodgers, Sojourners, or others in their Families, their Christian and Charitable
Contributions, and to take the Names of all those which shall Contribute thereunto.’29
Records from Somerset suggest the collection instructions were carried out carefully
and everyone, from local landowners to servants, contributed. It would have been
difficult in such circumstances for many in England or Wales to be left unaware of
the Barbary slave problem.
Barbary attacks were also well known in Scotland and Ireland, both of which lost
disproportionately large numbers of men to North African slavery. In Scotland there
were frequent local and regional collections to redeem abductees, and the Barbary
pirates were an ever-present threat to Irish ships and coastal villages. One of the most
spectacular attacks by North African corsairs occurred in 1631 on the south coast of
Ireland when 109 men, women, and children were snatched out of their beds to a
lifetime of slavery.30 Algerian and Moroccan ships were a common sight off the coast
of Ireland, and many Irish ships travelling to England or the continent were captured
and the men enslaved. In 1632 there were even rumors that the Turks planned to
invade.31 For two centuries Irish mariners, and their families on shore, lived in fear of
attacks by Barbary pirates, and their depredations became the stuff of folklore, legend
and public house names.32
Britons overseas in North America and the Caribbean were also acutely aware of
the danger posed by North African slavers. The supply lines and trade routes between
Atlantic colonial ports and Europe were constantly disrupted, especially by pirates
operating out of Salé, and numerous ships and men were captured. Nine of the 24
ships appearing on an unpublished list of vessels ‘taken and destroyed’ by the
Algerians in 1684, for instance, were travelling between Europe and North Africa –
two coming from Newfoundland, two bound for New England, and five involved in
trade with Virginia.33 As Paul Baepler has noted, by the 1660s ‘Massachusetts
merchants regularly encountered Barbary privateers on their way to Europe’ and a
number of high profile colonists were seized: Jacob Leisler of New York; William
Harris, one of the original founders of Rhode Island; and Seth Southel, the Governor
of Carolina.34 The danger of Barbary piracy was frequently publicized in North
American ports as officials tried to alert seamen of the need to be cautious. In 1679,
for example, the king ordered that notices be put up along the quays in Newfoundland
that all shipping must return home in convoy or risk being captured and the crews
enslaved in North Africa. In 1701 a circular letter was sent to the governors of
England’s American colonies notifying them of the recent peace agreement with
Algiers and the workings of the new Barbary ‘pass’ system. Records from the Council
of Virginia show the information was taken seriously and circulated to local officials.35
Like their fellow nationals in the British Isles, men and women in the colonies also
learned of Barbary slavery as they watched collections being undertaken to redeem
their relatives, friends, and neighbors. On August 17, 1678 a brief was granted to
178
church officers in New York to collect money for redemptions, and later Governor
Benjamin Fletcher gave permission for colonists to beg charity to rescue their
relatives.36 In 1693, 4,302 New Yorkers raised the generous sum of £400 to help
Barbary slaves, an amount which compares favorably to the totals amassed in the
larger English towns during the highly bureaucratic 1692 national collection. Of
those who contributed to the New York collection, 13 percent were listed as
‘negroes.’37 Perhaps experiences of the early Atlantic trade in enslaved African people
and its horrors encouraged black New Yorkers to sympathize with fellow colonists
who they imagined were held in like conditions. There are also several records of
collections held in Massachusetts: the 1698 minutes of the Council of Massachusetts
show a collection was ordered in all congregations to raise money to redeem some
New England men who had been taken captive, and in preceding years several briefs
had been issued to raise money for specific slaves.38 Some colonists even plotted, or
at least invested in, revenge. Recent work by Mark Hanna has demonstrated the
extent to which anti-Muslim and anti-Barbary pirate sentiments motivated the ‘Red
Sea Pirates’ operating out of American ports in the 1690s. Ex-slaves such as Jacob
Leisler were keen investors in such projects.39
The number of early modern Britons affected by Barbary slavery was significant
and England’s Atlantic colonies and trade routes were shadowed by potential pirate
attack. Barbary slavery was highly visible in British culture, ex-slaves were a
commonplace sight in many towns, and Britons across the Atlantic world were
interested in the subject. When an ordinary Englishman of the period contemplated
his country’s embryonic empire, he may have thought about exploration and exotic
goods, but he would also have been mindful of the costs paid in the enslavement of
British sailors, merchants, and would-be settlers. Not only were early modern Britons
interested in the fate of their countrymen abducted to North Africa, but they also
seem to have understood capture by the Barbary pirates to be a form of slavery.
Historians have generally been unwilling to share this assessment and, so far, have
directed little scholarly attention to the lives of those who were captured. The
experience of British slaves in Barbary varied greatly with time, place, and luck and
there is much still to learn about their labor and treatment. The evidence surviving in
British archives nevertheless allows a glimpse into these slaves’ lives and indicates
why abduction to Barbary looked like slavery to those captured and to those watching
anxiously from home.
Britons seized by pirates operating out of North African ports in the decades
before the Restoration endured a dismal existence. The majority were sold at Salé
and Algiers, most to private owners and some to the state. While the range of their
experiences and of the labor they were expected to carry out was wide, the majority
were used on board corsair ships or in the Turkish fleet. Gunners, carpenters, sail
makers, and pilots were much sought after and forced to ply their trade for their new
owners. The rest of the able-bodied seamen likely endured a new life as a galley slave,
a life from which relatively few returned. Many died at the oar of exhaustion,
starvation, and violence, or on shore from the plague and other diseases that were a
constant presence in the crowded, unsanitary ‘bagnios’ where galley slaves were kept
during the winter months. Francis Knight, an English merchant who was himself
enslaved in the galleys of Algiers between 1631 and 1638, wrote movingly of the
experience of his fellow oarsmen in his 1640 account. Life in the galleys was so
179
terrible, he recounted, that it caused the men ‘to curse the day of their Nativities.’
They were forced to drink salt water, were so exhausted they were in ‘continual
extasties’ (ecstasies), had to endure heat so fierce the flesh was ‘burned off their
backs,’ were made to sit continuously for days, were compelled to row so hard they
sweated blood and broke their hearts, and were ‘beaton to put on their clothes and
beaten to take them off…beaten to eate, drinke, sleepe, and wash, and beaten for
doing any of these.’40
The chance of any man captured before 1660 returning to Britain was very small.
Robert C. Davis, in his study of Italian slaves in the North African Ottoman regencies,
has concluded that for an Italian seized between 1530 and 1780 there was a ‘less than
50/50 chance of returning home,’ and this despite the strenuous efforts made by the
relatively effective Catholic Orders of Redemption.41 The redemption rate for Britons,
especially in the early decades of the seventeenth century, appears to have been
significantly lower than for Davis’ Italian slaves. The English were notorious for the
lackluster efforts of the state and the protestant church to redeem enslaved men. There
was never enough money and those funds that were collected were often misapplied,
and very few slaves in this period managed to help themselves. Most men captured
between 1580 and 1660, therefore, probably lived out the remainder of their lives in
North Africa. If a generous interpretation is given to every reference to redemptions in
the British archives, the total recorded as redeemed during this 80-year period is 2,673.
This is a small proportion, 15.7 percent, of the estimated 17,000 enslaved.
The experiences of British slaves in the second half of the seventeenth century
varied even more widely. Most were enslaved at Algiers and Salé, with a few in
Tripoli and Tunis. Generally they were owned privately, although some were public
slaves employed on building works, especially in Morocco during and after the reign
of Muley Ishmael (1673–1727). Galley slavery also remained a possible fate: as late
as 1694, the English consul at Algiers was still providing relief to British galley slaves.
Other slaves were set up by their owners in shops and taverns, forced to ply a trade,
and made to hand over their profits to the men who had bought them.
Redemption rates after 1660 did improve slightly. The archives contain the names
of 1,084 slaves liberated in the two decades following the Restoration and 567
redeemed between 1681 and 1701, making a total of 1,651. If approximately 7,500
British men, women, and children were enslaved in North Africa during these
decades, around 22 percent subsequently made it home again. Most redemptions in
this period were carried out either by fleets sent to North Africa, by consuls or
negotiators in Barbary ports, or, most frequently, by merchants directed by the
London government to re-purchase British slaves. Between 1660 and 1700, as in the
earlier period, very few men escaped, managed to redeem themselves or were freed by
their families. Redemption records for this period are fairly reliable as a bureaucratic
system was in place allowing redeemers to re-claim money from the London
government for the men and women they freed.
By the eighteenth century, redemption efforts by the London government were
better organized and more slaves were eventually rescued, but slavery could still be
relatively long and many British slaves died of exhaustion, starvation, violence, over-
work, and disease while they waited for their liberty to be re-purchased. Of 388
Britons enslaved in Morocco between 1714 and 1719, for example, 290 were
eventually freed, but 78 died and 20 converted to Islam despairing of rescue.42 For
180
men captured after 1700, slavery could still be extreme and arduous. Slave life in
Morocco was so bad, Thomas Troughton wrote, and conditions so appalling, that he
and his fellow slaves were forced to consider cannibalism in order to survive.43 Most
Britons who were enslaved in eighteenth-century Algiers, furthermore, were never
re-claimed from their servitude at all.
The evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of captured Britons,
especially those taken in the seventeenth century, never returned home. Most died
laboring in foreign lands of disease, starvation, and over-work. Most had their labor
appropriated by coercion and violence, whether or not they rowed in the galleys or
quarried stone. Most were permanently separated from their families and communities
and joined a servile class defined by its members’ cultural and religious identities.
There were probably some British slaves who met with good treatment and charity in
North Africa, and lived comfortable, even profitable, lives. But an examination of the
few who did should not shift the historian’s gaze from the many more who suffered
in the galleys and quarries of their masters. Nor should it blind scholars to the fact
that even those Britons who were well treated had usually been abducted from their
friends and family, and were, in most cases, held in North Africa against their will.
In Atlantic world scholarship there has understandably been a great moral and
intellectual imperative to distinguish white slavery in North Africa from black slavery
in the Americas and the Caribbean. The two slave systems were not at all alike, and
there has been an impulse among scholars to differentiate the two and to find another
category than ‘slavery’ for those Britons and Americans abducted to Barbary.
Historians have offered varying justifications for their reluctance to employ the word
‘slavery’ to describe the abduction and forced labor of Britons (and other Europeans
and, later, Americans) captured by the Barbary pirates in the early modern period.
For some scholars, the Atlantic slave trade in abducted African people has come to
define the term, and all other forms of unfreedom require a different word. Others
have denied that Barbary slavery was ‘slavery’ because of its socio-economic context,
arguing it was not part of an economic system based on the commodification of
labor, but rather some crusader relic in which a few Europeans were held captive as
a show of status. A third group has argued that too few men were taken and that
there was a short temporal limit to many Europeans’ captivities with most being
quickly repatriated. It was more like being a captive or a prisoner of war, they suggest,
than being a slave.44
The archival evidence, however, undermines these arguments. It is clear, for
example, that the enslavement of Christians was central to the seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century economies and militaries of Morocco and Algiers. Ellen G.
Friedman has even demonstrated that the labor of captives and the money raised by
their ransom was ‘critical to the Algerian economy’ until late into the eighteenth
century.45 Nor were slaves held by North Africans only for reasons of prestige. Davis
has recently argued, ‘in Mediterranean slavery, as in the Americas, human beings were
commodities’ bought and sold for profit and for their labor.46 There existed in Algiers,
moreover, just as in any other city with a lively slave market, men who speculated on
the trade in men and for whom buying and selling people was a business like any
other. In early modern North Africa, European men and women were a commodity
traded in the market place for profit and put to hard labor under the threat of violence.
An analysis of the available archival data for British slaves also suggests that
181
enslavement in North Africa was usually life-long. The majority of enslaved Britons,
especially in the seventeenth century, never returned home and did not opt to change
religion, or were prevented from doing so by their owners. Most either died quickly
from disease or worked as slave laborers for the remainder of their lives.
While acknowledging that the North African trade in enslaved Britons and the
Atlantic European trade in enslaved Africans were very different phenomena,
approaching the former by comparison with the latter is not especially helpful. We
need to place British slavery in North Africa in its own time and context. Very few
men living in the seventeenth century understood or evaluated this problem by
comparison with the Atlantic trade in enslaved African people. As late as 1700, for
many Britons, European abduction to Barbary was all they knew of slavery. To them,
slavery was something European Christians endured under African Muslim masters.
To them, slavery often had a white face. When they thought of empire and
enslavement, they were as likely to imagine the dangers of Turkish galley slavery as
the horrors of plantation slavery in their new American colonies.
Barbary slavery was an enduring, significant, and well-known problem in the
British Atlantic world, and contemporaries most certainly considered it slavery. If
historians are to excavate the ideas and cultural issues surrounding early-modern
slaving practices, it may be more helpful to think in terms of Atlantic slaveries. These
two slave systems, the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans and Barbary slavery, had a
parallel history in this period. Both, as they affected Britons, were products of
imperial expansion and both underwent important changes in the late seventeenth
century. Both also endured into the nineteenth century when changing attitudes to
African slavery made tolerance of the last remaining slaves in Barbary impossible.
This re-assessment of Barbary slavery has important ramifications for Atlantic
historians. It complicates the recent groundbreaking work by David Eltis on slavery
in the Americas. Eltis has argued that by the early modern period it had become
unthinkable to enslave certain categories of people – Europeans and Christians – but
that it remained legitimate to enslave others for far longer. He sees the dividing line
between these categories in racial terms. Barbary slavery, he suggests, although a
significant problem, actually demonstrates how strongly Europeans felt it was
illegitimate to enslave other Europeans. He maintains that Europeans went to great
lengths to free their fellow countrymen who fell into the hands of the North Africans.
Eltis, however, over-estimates the zeal of Europeans in this cause. Most enslaved
Britons languished in slavery for years with the government unwilling to do much to
help them. There were, furthermore, circumstances in which Britons were enslaved
with the collusion of merchants and with the approval of their king and government.
Britons knew their countrymen could be and often were enslaved. There was not, in
practice or in their understanding of slavery, any clear racial line distinguishing those
who could and could not be enslaved. It is important to recognize this complexity if
historians are fully to understand the Atlantic discourse on slavery and freedom, and
the development of more modern conceptions of racial slavery in the Americas.
Finally, this re-assessment of Barbary slavery also raises questions as to what it
meant to be British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In precisely the period
when Britain was emerging as a major imperial power and celebrating its subjects’
special claim to freedom, thousands of Britons were languishing in North African
slavery. A closer examination of those slaves – whose enslavement was protested and
182
whose was not – may reveal much about British identity in the period. An expansive
view of Atlantic slaveries, one which replaces Barbary slavery into the Atlantic
narrative, offers new insights into the central Atlantic world questions of race,
unfreedom, empire, identity, and belonging.
NOTE S
1 Saunders 1587.
2 Phelps 1685.
3 Stevens 1797.
4 For brevity, ‘Britons’ is used in this essay to mean Englishmen, Irish, Scots, and English
Atlantic world colonists.
5 For England see Matar 2005; Andrews 1991; Hebb 1994. For the United States see Allison
1995; Lambert 2005; Peskin 2009; Tucker 1963.
6 APC (1580–81): 90, 265; Saunders 1587; Webbe 1590; Hasleton 1595; Fox 1589.
7 Letter dated July 5, 1611, CSPD (1611–18): 55.
8 TNA SP 71/1, f. 96.
9 An average crew size of 14 for captured ships in this period seems to be a conservative
estimate. An unpublished list in the state papers dated 1627 indicates the average size of
the crews on the ships it details as taken was 14. TNA SP 71/1, f. 84. A similar list for
ships taken between 1629–39 reveals the average crew size on each captured ship was 18.
TNA SP 71/1, f. 163.
10 Letter from the Council to Lord Zouch dated February 7, 1619. CSPD (1619–23): 12.
11 Letter from Richard Ford to the king and council dated February 24, 1622. TNA SP 71/1,
f.39; letter from the Mayor of Dartmouth to the king and council dated June 20, 1622.
CSPD (1619–23): 409.
12 Letter to the Council dated August 12, 1625. CSPD (1625–26): 83.
13 Letter dated June 10, 1626. CSPD (1625–26): 343.
14 TNA SP 71/1, f.163; TNA SP 71/1, f.105; TNA SP 71/1, f.84; CSPD (1633–34): 357; The
London Guildhall, MS 30045; CSPD (1635): 389, 398; CSPD (1635–36): 302; CSPD
(1636–37): 4, 60, 140; CSPD (1637): 478; RPCS (1633–35) :142; RPCS (1635–37): 169,
387; RPCS (1638–43): 440; Calendar of State Papers: Ireland (1625–32): 617, 621;
Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series (1574–1660): 214.
15 Letter dated October 18, 1637. TNA SP 71/1, f.165; Calendar of State Papers, Colonial
Series: America and West Indies (1675–76): doc 181.
16 CSPD (1640–41): 134.
17 Andrews 1984: 88, 97; Davis 1969: 78–98.
18 Davis 2009: 34.
19 Davis 2009: 34; Edmund Rossington to Viscount Conway, newsletter, July 4, 1640 in
Playfair 1972: 54.
20 CSPD (1655–56): 313; CSPD (1657–58): 55.
21 Hebb 1994: 140, 269.
22 Letter dated May 25, 1669. CSPD (1668–69): 342; Letter dated January 24, 1702. TNA
SP 71/4, f. 46.
23 CSPD (1680–81): 598.
24 Letter dated February 8, 1691. TNA SP 71/3, f. 103; Letter dated November 21, 1694.
TNA SP 71/27.
25 ‘A List of the Subjects of their Majesty of great Brittain that are in Captivity att Maccaness
and Elsewhere under the Emperor of Morocco.’ Gloucestershire Record Office, D1833x2,
Letter 45; TNA, CO 5/785: 175, 304; John Ellis, letter dated August 16, 1698. CSPD
(1698): 374.
183
26 TNA SP 71/15, f.57, f.166; TNA SP 71/5: 453, 478, 485, 509, 515; TNA SP 71/6: 51–53,
104, 309, 405, 415; TNA SP 71/16, ff. 233, 256, 348; Norfolk Record Office, LC 27/3;
Anon 1721; Windus 1725; de La Motte 1736.
27 TNA SP 71/8: 269; TNA SP 71/20, f. 237.
28 Munday 1610; Naile 1613; Taylor 1613. There were processions of redeemed slaves in
1637 and 1734.
29 Somerset Archives, DD\SAS\C/795/SE/93.
30 Calendar of State Papers: Ireland (1625–32): 621. Only three of those abducted from
Baltimore were ever heard from again.
31 Calendar of State Papers: Ireland (1625–32): 640.
32 Barnby 1969: 101–29.
33 TNA SP 71/2.
34 Baepler 1995: 95–120.
35 Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series (1701).
36 Fernow 1987: 31; O’Callaghan 1850: Vol III, 417.
37 Baepler 1995: 114–15.
38 Calendar of State Papers Colonial Series: America and West Indies (1697–98): 175.
39 Hanna 2006.
40 Knight 1640: 28–29.
41 Davis 2003: 173. No doubt the chance of being redeemed for an Italian slave in the first
decades of the seventeenth century was considerably less.
42 Anon 1721; TNA SP 71/16, ff. 233, 247; TNA SP 71/5: 453, 478, 509, 515; TNA SP
71/6: 51–54.
43 Troughton 1751: 23.
44 Allison 1995; Baepler 1999; Colley 2004; Wheeler 2000.
45 Friedman 1980: 618.
46 Davis 2009: 15.
REF EREN CE S
Primary
Acts of the Privy Council of England, volume 12, 1580–81. John Roche Dasent (ed.), 1896, p. 90.
Anonymous. A Description of the Nature of Slavery among the Moors and the Cruel Sufferings
of those that fall into it. London, 1721.
——A Narrative of The Shipwreck of The British Brig, Surprise of Glasgow, John William
Ross, Master, On the Coast of Barbary on the 28th December 1815 And Subsequent
Captivity of the Passengers and Crew by the Arabs until Ransomed by the Worshipful
Company of Ironmongers. London, 1817
Cason, Edmund. A Relation of the whole proceedings concerning the Redemption of the
Captives in Ariger and Tunis. London, 1646.
Fox, John. ‘The Worthy Enterprise of John Fox, in Delivering 266 Christians out of the
Captivity of the Turks’ in The Principall Navigations Voyages and Discoveries of the
English Nation, Richard Hakluyt. London, 1589.
Hasleton, Richard. Strange and wonderfull things. Happened to Richard Hasleton. London, 1595.
Knight, Francis. A Relation of Seaven Yeares Slaverie under the Turkes of Argeire, suffered by
an English Captive Merchant. London, 1640.
de La Motte, Philémon. Several Voyages to Barbary. Translated by Joseph Morgan. London, 1736.
Munday, Anthony. Londons love, to the Royal Prince Henrie. London, 1610.
Naile, Robert. A relation of the royall magnificent, and sumptuous entertainement, given to the
High and Mighty Princesse, Queene Anne, at the renowned citie of Bristoll. London, 1613.
184
Phelps, Thomas. A true account of the captivity of Thomas Phelps at Machaness in Barbary
and of his strange escape in company of Edmund Baxter and others. London, 1685.
Saunders, Thomas. A true description and breefe discourse, of a most lamentable voyage,
made latelie to Tripolie in Barbarie, in a ship named the Jesus. London, 1587.
Stevens, James Wilson. An Historical and Geographical Account of Algiers. Philadelphia, 1797.
Taylor, John. Heavens blessing, and earths joy. London, 1613.
Troughton, Thomas. Barbarian Cruelty. London, 1751.
Webbe, Edward. The rare and most wonderfull things which Edw. Webbe an Englishman
borne, hath seene and passed in his troublesome travailes. London, 1590.
Windus, John. A Journey to Mequinez. London, 1725.
Secondary
Allison, Robert J. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Andrews, Kenneth R. Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of
the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
——Ships, Money and Politics: Seafaring and Naval Enterprise in the Reign of Charles I.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Baepler, Paul. ‘The Barbary Captivity Narrative in Early America,’ The Journal of Early
American Literature, 30.2 (1995), pp. 95–120.
——ed. White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Barnby, Henry. ‘The Sack of Baltimore,’ Journal of the Cork Historical and Archeological
Society, 74 (1969), pp. 101–29.
Birchwood, Matthew. Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640–1685. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2007.
Burton, Jonathan. Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624. Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2005.
Clissold, Stephen. The Barbary Slaves. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1992.
Clowes, William Laird. The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present.
1903; repr., Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996.
Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850. New York: Random
House, Inc., 2004.
Davis, Ralph. ‘English Foreign Trade 1660–1700’ in The Growth of English Overseas Trade
in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. W. E. Minchinton. London: Methuen &
Co., 1969, pp. 78–98.
Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the
Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
——Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim Slavery in the Early-Modern
Mediterranean. Santa Barbara: Praeger Press, 2009.
Eltis, David. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
Fernow, Berthold, compiler. New York (Colony) Council: Calendar of Council Minutes
1668–1783. New York: Harbor Hill Books, 1987.
Friedman, Ellen G. ‘Christian Captives at “Hard Labor” in Algiers, 16th–18th Centuries,’ The
International Journal of African Historical Studies 13.4 (1980), pp. 616–32.
Hanna, Mark. The Pirate Nest: The impact of piracy on Newport, Rhode Island and Charles
Town, South Carolina. Ph.D. Dissertation in History, Harvard University, 2006.
Hebb, David Delison. Piracy and the English Government, 1616–1642. Aldershot: Scolar
Press, 1994.
185
Lambert, Frank. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. New
York: Hill and Wang, 2005.
Matar, Nabil. Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689. Miami: University Press of Florida, 2005.
O’Callaghan, E. B. ed., The Documentary History of the State of New York, arranged under
the direction of the Hon Christopher Morgan, Secretary of State. Albany: Weed, Parsons
and Co., Public Printers, 1850. Vol III.
Peskin, Lawrence A. Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public,
1785–1816. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Playfair, Robert L. The Scourge of Christendom: Annals of British Relations with Algiers prior
to the French Conquest. New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
Tucker, Glen. Dawn Like Thunder: The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the US Navy.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century
British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Wolf, John B. The Barbary Coast: Algiers under the Turks, 1500–1830. London: W. W. Norton
and Company, 1979.
186
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MOROCCO AND ATLANTIC HISTORY
James A. O. C. Brown
I n 1603, Aḥmad al-Manṣūr, sultan of Morocco from 1578 until that year, wrote to
Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558–1603) outlining preparations for a joint Anglo-
Moroccan attack on the Spanish possessions in the New World. His plan was a
response to an initial English suggestion that such an attack would be more effective
than a direct attack on Spain itself, which had been the subject of previous discussions
with the Moroccans. Al-Manṣūr affirmed that he was willing to fund the expedition
– something well within his capacity as the recent conqueror of the Songhay Empire
in West Africa, which brought such wealth to the sultan that he is known to history
as al-Dhahabī, ‘the golden’ – but he had requested a suitably well-armed English ship
in which to transport the treasure.1
Al-Manṣūr further requested that more detailed thought be given to the long-term
management of any successful conquests. He did not, he wrote, contemplate merely
sacking Spanish territories and leaving. Rather he envisaged colonies perpetually
attached to the English and Moroccan crowns, whose revenues would be divided
between them. He also enquired whether or not Elizabeth intended to send English
colonists, or whether she would agree that Moroccans would be better, as being
more suited to the heat.2
In some ways, the recollection of this project brings to mind the counter-factual
description by J.H. Elliot in his re-imagining of English history were Christopher
Columbus to have taken service with Henry VII of England rather than Isabella and
Ferdinand of Spain.3 The involvement of a Muslim state in the conquest and
colonisation of the New World would conceivably have had even more dramatic
consequences for the course of world history. Yet perhaps it was only the deaths of
Elizabeth and al-Manṣūr shortly after one another in the same year as the proposed
project that prevented its realisation.
To most historians of the Atlantic world, the unfulfilled possibility of an Anglo-
Moroccan attack on the Americas probably appears as little more than an unlikely,
if intriguing, footnote to any serious account of the processes by which that world
was formed. Historians of Morocco might respond that such a collaboration was not
such a remote prospect as might easily be assumed. There were substantial and
complex diplomatic exchanges between the two countries, particularly in the late
187
– James A. O. C. Brown –
Figure 11.1 Catalan Map of Europe and North Africa

© British Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman
sixteenth century, when shared enmity of Spain motivated their alliance and when
both countries were embarking upon imperial projects of expansion.4
Yet, leaving aside counter-factual exercises, any such dialogue between the
historians of the Atlantic world on the one hand and Morocco on the other would
expose some important and neglected questions for both groups.5 For the former, it
must be immediately evident that Morocco is a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
Despite a significant stretch of Atlantic coastline – currently longer, even excluding
the disputed Western Sahara, than any African state north of Angola, for example – it
is barely mentioned within discussions of Atlantic history, defined recently as ‘the
evolving history of the zone of interaction among the peoples of Western Europe,
West Africa and the Americas’.6 Although a semantic argument might be made that
Morocco is included in that list, in terms of historiographical output it is clear that it
is not. Of course, bare geographical statistics do not necessarily merit Morocco’s
inclusion in analyses of the field, but the case for its consideration in the debate, as
we will see, rests on considerably more.
The problem might equally be posed from the reverse standpoint, however. Since
at least the beginning of the Muslim period, Morocco has been fundamentally defined
by its position on the Atlantic. It is al-Maghrib al-Aqṣā, literally ‘the farthest West’,
where ‘Uqba b. Nāfi’, leader of the first Muslim army to reach the Atlantic, is said to
188
– chapter 11: Morocco and Atlantic history –
have ridden into the sea and lamented that there were no more lands before him to
conquer for Islam.7 The ocean thus lay squarely before generations of Moroccans,
simultaneously forbidding and inviting, as it did for the European peoples further
north whose curiosity is often described as having fuelled the epochal voyages of
exploration into it; like many other peoples around the Atlantic basin, Moroccans
‘too feel the wind and watch the waves crash against the shore’.8
Yet despite the ocean’s presence, Moroccan historiography has so far paid little
attention to Atlantic history as a field. Interest in Atlantic perspectives may, as Games
has noted, be uneven among specialists of different regions; among Moroccanists, it
seems practically non-existent.9 Partly, this is a result of the long-standing tendency
in the field to emphasise the country’s supposed withdrawal from and resistance to
the great processes of modern globalisation of which the formation of the Atlantic
world was a crucial part.10 However, there have of course been important studies on
various aspects of Morocco’s relationship with the Atlantic, to which we can happily
refer as the foundation of any attempt to develop a more explicitly Atlantic perspective.
This chapter, therefore, offers some preliminary outline answers to the question of
the relationship between Morocco and the Atlantic world as it is now studied. It will
argue first that Moroccan history has some important elements that need to be
integrated into the study of the Atlantic system. Patricia Pearson has rightly argued
that ‘knowledge of the context in which the Atlantic World [sic] was formed and
functioned – that is, the past of all the regions involved – is required for complete and
accurate understanding of the region and period’.11 It is clear that Morocco is among
those regions in that it was significantly involved in the economic, cultural and
technological processes that resulted in European expansion around and across the
Atlantic, and equally clear that Moroccan history was heavily shaped by that
involvement. The intensity of the relationship between Morocco and the Atlantic
world did decline after around 1600, however, indicating the important truism of
Moroccan history that the country faces many directions at once. Its relationship
with the Atlantic system, while undoubtedly significant, was not definitive in the way
that it was for some other regions in the ocean’s basin.
Second, it will be argued that this relative ambiguity of Morocco’s relationship to
the Atlantic world is itself significant in the context of some important debates that
are still shaping the relatively novel, if notably fertile, field of Atlantic history. In this
sense, Morocco’s absences from both the historical Atlantic world and the discourse
of Atlantic history are perhaps just as significant as its presence. They not only point
to the nature of the relationship between the Atlantic and other regional networks,
but also further clarify some of the ambiguities and tensions within the project of
Atlantic history as a framework within which different impulses simultaneously
deconstruct and reinforce the West’s role as the arbiter of historical change in the
modern era. In presenting both of these arguments, I offer a conventional but sincere
caveat that they are those of a Moroccanist venturing – historiographically if not
literally – into the wide waters of the Atlantic for the first time, and as such are
intended to begin a debate and not in any sense to conclude it definitively.
The first and perhaps most significant aspect of Morocco’s role in the evolution of
the Atlantic world is the country’s position as a crucial site of what we might call its
pre-history. There is obviously a strong argument for defining the origins of the
Atlantic world by the watershed of 1492 and the subsequent processes of the
189
‘Columbian exchange’.12 Yet any attempt to account for and understand that defining
event must surely include the technological, economic and cultural context in which
it took place, and in that context Morocco’s position was significant.
It is clear, for example, that long before the establishment of sustained connections
between the eastern and western coasts of the Atlantic basin came centuries in which
the foundations for that leap across the ocean were laid. As David Abulafia’s recent
study has argued, European voyages to the Canary Islands in the fourteenth century
were an important precursor, not only geographically, but also intellectually for later
discoveries further west.13 These voyages – although not their results – repeated those
made as long ago as the first century under the aegis of Juba II, king of the Roman
client state of Mauretania (roughly equivalent to what is today northern Morocco
and western Algeria), who sent voyages to the islands to expand the already flourishing
trade in the region around the Strait of Gibraltar.14
The knowledge of these voyages seems to have been inherited by Muslim
geographers and sailors, who also subscribed to the classical idea that the Atlantic
(known among other titles as al-baḥr al-muḥīṭ, ‘the encircling sea’) surrounded the
entire landmass of the earth. At least one state-sponsored attempt, recorded by the
Sicilian geographer al-Idrīsī, was made by the Moroccan sultanate to repeat Juba’s
voyages, when the Almoravid sultan ‘Alī b. Yūsuf b. Tāshfīn (r. 1106–43)
unsuccessfully planned a fleet to conquer the islands. Al-Idrīsī and others also mention
voyages made from the Iberian peninsula heading south and west into the Atlantic,
and report islands opposite the coast of Safi in Morocco and elsewhere.15
It is tempting to speculate on how these sporadic contacts influenced the culture of
the Islamic West (i.e. al-Andalus and the Maghrib), and whether or not they had any
effect similar to the reshaping in Christian Europe of ideas about the nature of humanity,
the role of revelation in human societies, the salvation of previously unknown peoples,
and so on.16 The reports of an island or islands to the west of the Atlantic coast of
Morocco were fragmentary and fantastical – al-Idrisī counted among them the island
‘of the two sorcerer brothers’ (al-akhawayn al-sāḥirayn), for example – and therefore
provided all the more scope for speculation.17 It seems at least credible, for example, to
consider some kind of relationship between knowledge of these strange, isolated islands
and the influential philosophical allegory Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (‘Alive the Son of Aware’)
by the Andalusi polymath Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185 ce). A scholar and a minister to the
Almohad sultan Abū Ya’qūb Yūsuf (r. 1163–84), Ibn Ṭufayl used the story of the
eponymous boy growing up alone on a isolated island to analyse the relationship
between revelation and reason.18 There were certainly at this time important links
between the practical experiences of sailors and the development of scientific knowledge
in the fields such as astronomy and cartography, but whether or not there was a
similarly definite link with philosophy now seems impossible to determine.19
We return to more certain ground, however, by mentioning the development of
maritime links along the Atlantic coasts of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula
during the medieval period, which gave that region of eastern Atlantic an important
degree of unity before the first phases of the European ‘age of discovery’. As Picard
has shown in his detailed study of ‘the Muslim Atlantic’ during the medieval period,
the western coasts of al-Andalus and Morocco were an important site of maritime
trade and navigational development.20 The routes of regular trade along this part of
the Atlantic seaboard linked dozens of ports between the Tagus river to the north and
190
Wadi Sous in the south.21 These routes were themselves linked through the Straits of
Gibraltar to the commercial networks of the Mediterranean, as well as providing the
launching pad for exploratory voyages further south.22 This relative familiarity is
reflected in the use of the term by some medieval Muslim geographers of baḥr al-
maghrib, ‘the Western sea’, i.e. the Atlantic immediately around the coasts of the
Iberian peninsula and Morocco. This suggests a distinct unity separate from the
unknown ocean beyond, and linked rather to the Mediterranean through the Straits
of Gibraltar, similar perhaps to the Portuguese term Mar Pequeña, and the later
concept used by some historians of the ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’.23
Thus, the nascent European maritime powers in the Atlantic of the thirteenth
century were by no means emerging into a marum incognitum. Rather they were
inserting themselves into a system of maritime trade and communication which
already existed, albeit one which was rapidly changing in response to their arrival.
Morocco’s Atlantic coast became the training ground for European expansion,
providing both cartographical knowledge and human experience. Once through the
Straits of Gibraltar, ships coming from the Mediterranean were often forced south by
the prevailing winds; their sailors became familiar with Moroccan ports, and began
to consider for the first time the possibilities of sailing south around Africa or west to
the Indies.24 For the Genoese and Portuguese in particular, the coast of Morocco on
either side of the straits was the site for the creation of important initial outposts,
either through treaty agreements and the establishment of fondouks by the former or
in the form of the militarised fortress–factories of the latter.25
The coast of Morocco was not, however, just a physical waypoint on the eventual
routes established across the ocean, but was intimately connected to the motives for
and the manner of their development. Strategies developed to address the economic
problems fuelling European expansion found early expression in the emergent
network linking the western Mediterranean with the Canary Islands and the
Atlantic coasts of Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula, before the same pressures
pushed the expansion beyond the eastern seaboard and across the ocean. Thus, the
economic processes which did so much to shape the Atlantic world also heavily
impacted on Morocco.
Among these strategies was first the attempt to gain direct access to the source of
bullion, in order to overcome the adverse balance of trade dogging Europe’s overseas
commerce; in this case by trying either to participate in or bypass the existing
networks of the trans-Saharan gold trade.26 Second, Morocco became an important
source of agricultural produce and raw materials – most notably sugar, but also
grain, copper, iron and saltpetre – during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Sugar production had already reached Morocco by the ninth century, and was
particularly well-established in the warm, well-watered Sous valley in the south of the
country. It expanded rapidly, however, as a result of the growing trade with Europe,
in which the Moroccans exchanged sugar particularly for weapons and also cloth.
Thus, although the transfer of sugar from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic is
generally associated with the cultivation of the crop on the Atlantic islands of Madeira
and the Canaries and then in the New World, this shift was already underway
through the growth of sugar production in Morocco and the Iberian peninsula,
although these would themselves decline significantly after the sixteenth century
under pressure of competition from Brazil and the Caribbean.27
191
Thus, as Cornell has argued, far from being ‘out of the loop’ of the processes of
incorporation into the emerging system of the world economy, as is often asserted,
Morocco was central to its early phases.28 An indication of this was the intense
competition among different European states to control the trade with Morocco.
Portugal, for example, bitterly resented the growth of English trade there, which they
considered reserved to themselves by papal decree. Elizabeth I ignored their threats
to prohibit English trade with Portugal in retaliation, on the grounds that the trade
with Morocco was more important to her subjects.29 Besides the English, the
merchants of Genoa, Venice, France and Flanders competed for trade, dodging the
coastal patrols of the Portuguese intended to suppress the ‘illegal’ commerce of their
rivals, and establishing their own links in the areas of northern Morocco controlled
by the Wattasid dynasty (1472–1554) where Portuguese influence was limited.30
It was in this quest for resources along the Moroccan coast that Europeans
developed many of the new tactics and technologies that underpinned later military–
commercial expansion in the New World and elsewhere: a mixture of trade, slaving
and privateering ‘which were turned into the “voyages of discovery”’.31 The
Portuguese, most notably, developed alliances and tribute relationships in Morocco
that anticipated similar strategies in their later empire building.32 The country was
also an important early source of slaves for the Portuguese, whose raids into the
countryside around their enclaves ultimately contributed to the erosion of the stability
of their position in the country. It is difficult to quantify the number of slaves taken
from Morocco by the Portuguese, but it was certainly in the thousands annually
during the early 1500s, when the exportation of slaves was sometimes the largest
single source of revenue from their colonies there.33 Although little information
survives about individuals among this group, who were mainly transported to Spain
and Portugal, an intriguing exception is ‘Estebánico the Black’, a tribesman from
Azzemour who travelled to the New World as the servant of the Spanish explorer
Alvaro Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. He was subsequently among the first explorers of the
American Southwest and whose memory was preserved in folk tales of the Pueblo
Indians.34 Thus Morocco was thus among the sources for ‘the recruitment of a wide
variety of peoples, their interaction, their conflicts, their partial absorption and their
creation of new cultures’ – a defining process of Atlantic history.35
The early Iberian slave trade, also including West Africans and Moriscos, anticipated
and partly prepared the way for the much larger-scale plantation slavery of the New
World.36 Like other economic and military aspects of the growing European influence
in Morocco, it was related to the cultural attitudes which defined European, especially
Iberian, attitudes to their expansion in the Atlantic. The Reconquista and the subsequent
processes of attempting to assimilate the conquered non-Christian population in Spain
and Portugal were fundamental to the evolution of Iberian ideas about racial and
religious purity that shaped the societies of Latin America.37 Morocco was in many
ways the site of an intermediate stage in this transmission, since the religious dimension
of Europe’s conquest of the New World was equally engrained into its commercial and
military exploits in the Maghrib. From the papal bull of crusade granted before the
conquest of Ceuta in 1415 onwards, it was at least in part religious motives – such as
the prospect of victory over the Muslims, a route to the Holy Land through North
Africa or the possibility of a grand alliance against Islam with the mythical Christian
king of Africa, Prester John – which motivated this ‘neo-Reconquista’.38
192
This role as both the physical and conceptual waypoint for European expansion
was not confined to that stemming from Iberia. Matar, for example, has highlighted
the importance of the ‘triangle’ between England, North Africa and North America
and its role alongside other, more well-known trading triangles around the Atlantic.
It was no accident, for example, that Drake stopped in Morocco during his famous
voyage to the Americas in 1577. Similarly, the idea of the ‘Moor’, to some extent
conflated with the ‘Turk’, played a crucial role in the development of English
understandings of the Native American population. There were even proposals,
paralleling the debate in Iberia, for the English to colonise Morocco.39
Morocco was, therefore, significant as a crucible in which important elements of
the Atlantic world were first forged. This was true both in economic terms and in the
processes of cultural transformation, which, as Eltis has argued, are crucial to
understanding them.40 Hindsight should not obscure the fact that for the better part
of a century after Columbus’ first crossing of the Atlantic, the decisive weight of
Iberian expansion hung in the balance between the Americas and North Africa, in
other words between trans-Atlantic and eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean, between
New World and Old. It was only with the Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr (also known as
the Battle of the Three Kings) in 1578 that Portuguese ambitions in Morocco were
finally curtailed, at the same time as bringing about, albeit indirectly, the unification
of the Iberian peninsula under Philip II. As Hess has argued, Iberia did not shake off
its centuries-long engagement with the societies of the Muslim Mediterranean and
reorient itself toward the New World overnight in 1492; the following century or so
was heavily shaped by external competition with the Ottoman Empire and internal
attempts to assimilate Iberia’s mixed religious heritage that did not reach their
conclusion until the final expulsion of the Moriscos in 1614.41
If the Iberian footholds of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had become more
significant – not an unrealistic prospect, given that, for example, the Portuguese and
their Moroccan allies were raiding as far as the outskirts of Marrakesh in the 1510s42
– it surely would have retrenched their interests in the Mediterranean and the Old
World, perhaps decisively, and certainly giving the Atlantic world a very different
character. Access to land, labour and precious metals much closer at hand would in
themselves have been attractive, and the Iberian combination of material ambition
and religious fervour would have found an outlet against the historic religious enemy,
instead of the substitutes of the New World onto whom the crusading impulse was
partly sublimated.
However, despite Morocco’s place in the working out of some eventual trajectories
of European expansion around the Atlantic basin, it should not be seen as only the
site of the activity of outsiders. On the contrary, Morocco was profoundly affected
by these events, and can certainly be counted among those societies whose
‘transformations, experiences and events’ may be, at least in part, explained by the
processes created by the intersection of the four landmasses of Atlantic history.43 The
Iberian incursions in Morocco were not just a crucial phase of European expansion,
and hence of Atlantic integration, but ‘decisive in the formation of modern Morocco’.44
This process similarly had cultural, technological and economic aspects.
Economically most significant was the rapid growth of sugar production
aforementioned, which also ultimately encouraged the export to Europe of other
Moroccan agricultural produce and, in the later sixteenth century, copper and
193
saltpetre. It has been argued, although not conclusively, that this provoked the
utilisation of slave labour on a large scale for sugar production in southern Morocco,
mirroring the ‘strange connection between sugar and slavery’ that developed in the
New World. Whether or not this was the case, the increase in agricultural and mining
production did encourage the growth of wage labour, as peasants left their own
cultivation to work in those industries.45
In the political sphere, one very significant result of the Iberian incursions of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the entrenchment of the practice and rhetoric of
jihād (here, ‘religious war’) as a defining element of political legitimacy in Morocco.
This became a fundamental aspect of the exercise of state power under both the Sa’di
and ‘Alawi dynasties well into the nineteenth century.46 Paralleling this rhetorical
development, efforts to resist Iberian incursions also prompted advances in military
technology and tactics in Morocco, particularly the use of gunpowder weapons, and
also the reorganisation and equipping of the Moroccan army.47
On the other hand, the presence of Christian enclaves also engendered other, more
complex intersections with local socio-political structures. As we have already
mentioned, the Portuguese had local allies in their military raids inland. In other
regions Europeans found a niche within existing Moroccan social institutions, such as
the Genoese merchants who traded at the weekly country markets around Fes.48 Some
of these co-operative relationships were formalised by agreements such as the treaty
between Portugal and the Wattasid dynasty in 1471, which conceded both Asilah and
Tangier to the Portuguese, while others developed in a more de facto fashion.49
By a similar paradox, the processes of resistance engendered by the military and
commercial expansion of Portugal and Spain on Morocco’s coasts actually contributed
toward the country’s greater engagement with wider Atlantic networks. Successive
rulers during the sixteenth century encouraged trade with England, Holland and
France in order to diversify their maritime trade and also to secure access to European
military supplies.50 This pushed Morocco toward an ‘Atlantic policy’ both
diplomatically and economically, as it tried to outflank its expansionist Iberian
neighbours to the north.51 It was during this period, for example, that Anglo-
Moroccan relations blossomed under Aḥmad al-Manṣūr and Elizabeth I. As Matar
has pointed out, Morocco consequently had substantial involvement in ‘European’
diplomacy during the sixteenth century.52 These simultaneous but divergent responses
to the impact of European power and the nascent networks of European influence in
the Atlantic point to the fundamental ambiguity of Morocco’s overall relationship to
the Atlantic world. Moroccan history during the period between the fifteenth to
nineteenth centuries was to a significant degree defined in terms of the tension
between those forces drawing the country and its society seaward and those directing
them inland. Since at least the late tenth century, and particularly under the Almoravid
and Almohad empires, the development of state structures in Morocco and in the
Maghrib generally had been closely tied to the control of overland trade, particularly
the trans-Saharan gold trade, and much less closely related to maritime affairs.53 That
is not to say that control of Morocco’s ports and shipping was unimportant to the
country’s rulers – as we have already noted, both were important for military and
economic reasons during the medieval period. However, generally speaking the
inland entrepȏts and the routes connecting them were the centres of gravity around
which the state coalesced, from where it exercised more indirect power on the
194
country’s ports.54 Then, as a result of the growth of European commercial influence

and military threat, Moroccan society underwent a slow, spasmodic reorientation
toward the sea, as maritime connections became increasingly integrated into the
political and economic life of the country. This process tended toward the Atlantic
more than the Mediterranean in part because, with their very first incursion in
Morocco by the conquest of Ceuta, the Portuguese effectively shut off the country’s
historic outlet to the Mediterranean and its most important medieval port. The trend
toward the sea was encouraged both by the gradual decline of the trans-Saharan
trade and by Morocco’s periodic instability, which facilitated the entrenchment of
European influence and the growth of semi-autonomous local powers, especially but
not exclusively in coastal regions, using the revenues of foreign trade and access to
military supplies to resist central control.55 In another manifestation of the
simultaneous engagement with and confrontation of European expansion, the
maritime orientation was also driven by the growth of Moroccan piracy and
privateering in the seventeenth century. This reinforced local autonomy in the ports
concerned, and disrupted European shipping on both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar
to the extent that it provoked several campaigns to suppress it.56
These centrifugal forces in turn tended to provoke a reassertion of state power, a
pattern exemplified in the growth of Portuguese power and the emergence of the
Sa’di dynasty during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with which we have been
most concerned here, but which was repeated during the early establishment of
‘Alawi rule in the late seventeenth century, and again in the renewal of the ‘Alawi
state under Sīdī Muḥammad b. ‘Abd Allāh (r. 1757–90). In those cases, European
influence was exercised mostly by the British, Spanish and, to some extent, the
French. Sīdī Muḥammad sought both to benefit from but also control the growth of
maritime commerce in order to prevent its negative impact on the power of the
Moroccan state. In doing so, he refashioned the traditional symbiosis of state and
commercial interests in Morocco in a way that institutionalised the shifting balance
of trade from land to sea.57 Similarly, he brought piracy under closer state control in
order to use Morocco’s capacity to disrupt commerce in order ‘to force Western
powers into closer dialogue and negotiation’.58
However, this gradual maritime reorientation should not be read simply as
Morocco’s inexorable integration into the Atlantic system. It is obvious but bears
repetition in this context that Morocco lies in an overlapping zone between or at the
meeting point of several important regions – Saharan, Mediterranean, and Maghribi
as well as Atlantic – each with its own historic economic and cultural coherence. As
David Abulafia has suggested, relatively empty spaces such as these, whether or not
actual seas or oceans, ‘have played an essential role in the transformation of societies
across the world by bringing into contact with one another very diverse cultures’.59
Morocco participated historically to a greater or lesser extent in each of these systems
– something already implicit in the discussion above – so that its position was
primarily defined by being between, or rather part of, all of them, rather than wholly
in one or another. Thus the Atlantic dimension of the country’s development was in
constant dialogue with its other faces, even as the country’s Atlantic orientation
increased in importance.
It is necessary, therefore, to highlight the context of the country’s relationship to
the Atlantic world. After the early period of initial European expansion to around
195
1600 that most directly concerned Morocco, its links to that system continued to
develop but became less intense. Partly this was because the focus of the expansion
had definitively broadened beyond its first targets around the ‘Atlantic Mediterranean’,
of which Morocco’s Atlantic coast had been a crucial part. It was also because the
Sa’di dynasty had successful restored state power and resisted Morocco’s further
colonisation and/or peripheralisation.
This reduced intensity manifested itself diplomatically, for example, in the
relegation of Morocco to a position of lesser strategic importance for the European
Atlantic powers. The addition of Tangier to England’s early colonies in 1661 seemed
significant to contemporaries, offering both control of the Straits of Gibraltar and an
eastern Atlantic port to complement the acquisition of Jamaica a few years earlier;
but it proved impossible to hold in the face of renewed Moroccan resistance, and was
soon removed from England’s developing Atlantic network.60 The trade of Morocco
continued to be the subject of rivalry between England, Spain and France in the
eighteenth century, but not to the same degree as it had been during the initial period
of European expansion.61 It was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries that the competition of the ‘Great Powers’ in Morocco reached its second
peak, in a different context of globalised colonialism.
The movement of people between Morocco and the rest of the Atlantic world
similarly declined after the relatively high numbers of, on the one hand, Moroccan
slaves being taken out and, on the other, European merchants venturing beyond the
country’s ports to its inland cities and trade routes. Some Moroccan Jews seem to
have been among the early Jewish communities in the New World, as might be
expected given the community’s strong connections to the Marrano population
expelled from Iberia and generally to Sephardic networks in Holland and elsewhere.62
Occasionally, too, we also find Muslim Moroccans in the Americas – a half-Dutch,
half-Moroccan privateer who settled in New Amsterdam, for example, or a merchant
trading to Baltimore.63 European merchants and consuls remained in Morocco, but
were increasingly confined to its ports except for occasional diplomatic missions to
see the sultan. The only Europeans and Americans in the country otherwise were
generally captives taken by privateers and pirates or enslaved after being shipwrecked,
a particular risk for any ship bound for West Africa because of the currents running
toward the Moroccan coast to the east of the Canary Islands.64
So although we have seen that Moroccan history was certainly ‘Atlantic’ in the
sense that it experienced the ‘creation, destruction and re-creation of communities as
a result of the movement, across and around the Atlantic basin, of people,
commodities, cultural practices and ideas’,65 its position among several regional
systems and the declining intensity of its engagement with the Atlantic world suggest
that these processes of refashioning and exchange were also shaped by the waves
washing on its other ‘shores’.
Thus, for example, at the same time as beginning to import European military
materials and techniques in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Moroccan
sultanate also looked to the Ottomans for such expertise. Military reforms in the
Ottoman Empire and Egypt similarly influenced Morocco in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.66 While Aḥmad al-Manṣūr developed his ‘Atlantic policy’, he
was also strongly committed to the extension of Moroccan influence across the
Sahara.67 Culturally and religiously, Morocco continued to look eastwards toward
196
the historic centres of the Muslim world, the most likely destinations for any
Moroccan traveler well into the nineteenth century, whether pilgrim, merchant or
scholar.68 While Sīdī Muḥammad did promote Morocco’s Atlantic trade and engage
with the Atlantic powers diplomatically (most famously, perhaps, as the first sovereign
to recognise the independent United States of America), he also looked to his
relationship with the Ottoman Empire and promoted his role as defender of Muslims
in the Mediterranean, particularly through the ransoming of Muslim slaves.69 During
his rule, Atlantic trade was boosted by the founding of Essaouira (Mogador) and a
generation of merchants began to shift their investments toward maritime commerce
and away from the traditional caravan trade. Yet despite this the caravan trade
eastwards to Algiers and beyond, the trade axis linking the great emporium of Fes to
the sea through Tetuan, and to some extent the trans-Saharan trade remained
important for Moroccan trade well into the nineteenth century.70
The overlapping circuits of trade through Morocco are also recorded in the late-
eighteenth-century travels of one merchant, ‘Abd al-Salām Shabānī, who travelled
from his home town of Tetuan to Timbuktu, residing there for several years travelling
further south into Hausaland for several more years, from where he returned to
Morocco. He set out again from Tetuan, this time eastwards to Egypt and then to the
Hijaz, where he performed the Muslim pilgrimage of ḥajj while also continuing his
trade. Upon returning from this trip, he engaged in the commerce between Tetuan
and the British colony of Gibraltar, which encouraged him to extend his business
further into Europe with a trip to Hamburg.71
Of course, this multi-faceted relationship to the outside world was not unique to
Morocco among those societies engaged in the Atlantic system; but this characteristic
– being both of the Atlantic world and not of it – was perhaps more strongly
pronounced in Morocco than in many other regions. The societies of the New World
were essentially products of the ‘Columbian exchange’. For the European societies
engaged in the Atlantic world, their involvement in it was almost as definitive, even
if were to be argued that it was only so as the first stage of an ultimately global
process. In sub-Saharan Africa, the impact of European arms and the population
transfers of the Atlantic slave trade were certainly of clearer immediate significance
than the slower, more hesitant spread of European influence in Morocco.72 Uniquely
among the non-European societies of the Atlantic basin, Morocco had a long history
of interaction with Europe before the late fifteenth century (even if to some extent
mediated through al-Andalus), which muted the transformative effect of the
intensification of this interaction during the period of European expansion.
Herein lies the ambiguity of considering Morocco from an Atlantic perspective;
while productive, it is in itself insufficient. While focusing on the coherence and unity
of the ocean basin – natural enough in the field’s early phases – Atlantic history has
yet to clarify as fully the relationship of the Atlantic system to other regional or
supra-regional systems. There is a lively and important debate about the place of the
Atlantic as the axis or meeting point for the other circuits of trade and cultural
exchange underpinning the processes of globalisation.73 The example of Morocco
tends most strongly to support the position of some in this debate that although the
Atlantic system was in many ways coherent, it does not necessarily follow that it was
self-contained or necessarily unitary at all levels. While the various parts of the
Atlantic world obviously had a relationship with each other and together formed a
197
system that had a certain relationship with other regional systems, the different parts
may also at other levels have had their own particular relationships with other
regions. For example, the emergence of the Atlantic world from the Mediterranean
has been an object of consideration for some time (albeit with some ellipses discussed
here), but less attention has been paid to the question of how this relationship
continued.74 Although the results did not make themselves felt instantaneously of
course, expansion into the Atlantic basin ultimately made the Mediterranean into a
relative backwater for the new European powers, but for Morocco this shift was not
so conclusive, putting it among those regions we might, using Colcanis’ term, label
‘conjuncto-Atlantic’.75
In this regard, Morocco is perhaps difficult to accommodate for Atlantic historians
because it was part of the Old World, and continued to be so. Its conceptual
relationship with the processes of European expansion has more in common with
those societies and economic networks of Asia that were much more difficult for
European expansion to uproot than those in the New World.76 If, as Fernández-
Armesto has argued, what defined Atlantic, as opposed to Mediterranean, colonisation
by the European powers was the possibility of ‘plantation’ methods – bringing in
slave or other populations to work land that was either empty or rapidly depopulated
upon European arrival – Morocco could not fundamentally be incorporated into the
new Atlantic world of Europe’s creation.77 It was able to adapt to and deflect the
acceleration of European expansion, unhampered by some of the major factors that
facilitated European conquest elsewhere: the shock of their arrival, technological
disparity, vulnerability to new diseases. Once again, we can see Morocco is
simultaneously of the Atlantic world, and yet not of it, at least as historians have
largely constructed it.
This problem is a telling one in the context of the related critique of Atlantic
history as imperial history or histories rehashed, ‘a neo-colonial, politically correct
attempt at re-writing European history with some “other bits” given deferential
treatment’.78 The consequent calls for greater recognition of the ‘black Atlantic’ are
well known.79 The implications of Morocco’s complex ethnic and racial history in
this context, the country’s relationship to sub-Saharan Africa and the validity of
analysing it in a specifically African framework are separate questions too complex
to be addressed adequately here, but at the very least it can be said that the argument
for including Morocco in the framework of Atlantic history is related to the overall
process of addressing its residual imperial, Eurocentric biases, whether these are
ultimately deemed justifiable or not.80 It is unfortunate, after all, for any defence
against the charge of Eurocentrism that in omitting Morocco almost completely from
their analyses, Atlantic historians have ignored a region of the ocean basin in which
European control was relatively weak for so long, despite, as outlined above,
Morocco’s role in the formation of the Atlantic system.
Overall, therefore, it seems that an analysis of Morocco within an Atlantic
framework would be ‘for better and worse’.81 On the one hand, there is no doubt that
‘the explanatory power and suggestive implications created by the vision of the
Atlantic region as a coherent whole’ have some important implications for
understanding a country’s relationship to and role within it.82 Particularly during the
early phase of European expansion, Morocco was an important site in many aspects
of the processes of economic change and cultural encounter that came to define the
198
Atlantic system. Likewise, the history of Morocco itself was strongly influenced by its
experience of these processes.
However, at other levels the experience of Morocco points beyond a unitary
Atlantic paradigm, supporting the trend toward relating that system to others in
various ways. Atlantic history provides a way to understand a world that was created
as the different parts of the oceanic basin were brought into contact for the first time,
and whose development was subsequently defined to a large extent by the creation of
those relationship; but from a Moroccan perspective neither the novelty of the system
nor its unity can really be said to apply in the same way as to other regions. Although
Morocco was deeply influenced by the development of the Atlantic world, that
experience was shaped by the long history of contact between Islam and Christendom
in the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, as well as by the country’s
continuing relationship to other cultural and economic spheres. These factors
ultimately helped drive European expansion further into the Atlantic, to a certain
extent relegating Morocco to the margins of the oceanic system. They should not,
however, push historians of the Atlantic similarly to bypass it. Although Morocco
poses difficulties for the sustaining of the traditional, mainstream Atlantic paradigm,
it equally offers material for the development of a richer, more subtle and more
sustainable successor.
NOTE S
1 On the Songhay Empire, its invasion by Morocco and the empire’s subsequent decline, see
S. M. Cissoko, ‘The Songhay from the 12th to the 16th Century’, in D. T. Niane (ed.),
Africa from the Twelfth to Sixteenth Century, General History of Africa IV (London,
Paris & Berkeley, CA, 1984), pp. 187–210; Michel Abitbol, ‘The End of the Songhay
Empire’, in B. A. Ogot (ed.), Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, General
History of Africa V (London, Paris & Berkeley, CA, 1992), pp. 300–326.
2 Henry de Castries (ed.), Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc: première sèrie –
dynastie Saadienne: archives et bibliothèques d’Angleterre, 3 vols. (Paris, 1918), Vol. 2,
pp. 206–9. For an introduction to al-Manṣūr and his reign, see M. García-Areñal, Ahmad
al-Mansur: The Beginnings of Modern Morocco (Oxford, 2009).
3 See J. H. Elliott, ‘Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation’, in David Armitage and Michael
J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke & New York,
2002), pp. 233–49.
4 For an introduction to the Arab-Muslim conquest of North Africa, see M. Brett, ‘The
Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam in North Africa’, in J. D. Fage and R. Oliver (eds.),
Cambridge History of Africa (Cambridge, 1978), Vol. 2, pp. 490–544.
5 On Anglo-Moroccan relations around this time, see in particular Nabil Matar, ‘The Anglo-
Spanish Conflict in Arabic Sources c.1588–96’, in Mohammad Shaheen (ed.), From Silence
to Sound: Studies in Literature and Language. Festschrift for Hussam el-Khateeb / Min
al-ṣamt ilā ‘l-ṣawt (Beirut, 2000), pp. 456–38 [sic]. For an interesting theoretical discussion
of the early contacts and exchanges between Morocco and England by the same author, see
Nabil Matar, ‘The Question of Occidentalism in Early Modern Morocco’, in Patricia
Ingham and Michelle Warren (eds.), Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New
York, 2003), pp. 154–70. This shared enmity remained an important aspect of Anglo-
Moroccan relations subsequently as well. See, for example, R. Lourido-Díaz, ‘Relaciones
politicas anglo-marroques en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII. Bases militares espanolas en
Tanger durante el bloquero de Gibraltar por Carlos III’, Hispania: Revista Española de
199
Historia, 31 (1971), pp. 337–83. On Morocco’s imperial ambitions during this period, see
Mohamed Chérif, ‘Les prétentions califales dans l’expédition d’Ahmed al Mansur au
Soudan (1590)’, in M. Balard and A. Ducellier (eds.), Le partage du monde: échanges et
colonisation dans la Méditerranée médiévale, Série Byzantina Sorbonensia (Paris, 1998),
pp. 375–84; Nabil Matar, ‘The Maliki Imperialism of Ahmad al-Mansur: The Moroccan
Invasion of Sudan, 1591’, in Elizabeth Sauer and Balachandra Rajan (eds.), Imperialisms:
Historical and Literary Investigations, 1500–1900 (New York & Basingstoke, 2004),
pp. 147–62; and most recently, Nabil Mouline, Le califat imaginaire d’Ahmad al-Mansûr
(Paris, 2009).
6 The use of the terms ‘Morocco’ or ‘Moroccan’ to indicate or describe a political entity or
geographical area before the modern period is problematic. It is used here with reference
to the period before the establishment of the Sa’di dynasty in 1554 as a purely geographical
term, meaning the approximate area that is now the modern state of Morocco, to
distinguish it from the wider Maghrib. Used in reference to subsequent periods, these
terms refer to the place and the dynasty that ruled it, in the awareness that this might
strictly be considered anachronistic. Although this usage is somewhat arbitrary, it is
adopted here with its shortcomings for the sake of convenience and brevity.
7 Bernard Bailyn, ‘Introduction: Reflections on Some Major Themes’, in Bernard Bailyn and
Patricia L. Denault (eds.), Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual
Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, MA, 2009), pp. 1–43 at p. 1. See also Horst Pietschmann,
‘Introduction: Atlantic History – History between European History and Global History’,
in Horst Pietschmann (ed.), Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System 1580–1830
(Göttingen, 2002), pp. 11–55 at p. 35, where Atlantic history is defined as ‘a connecting
element between European, North American, Caribbean, Latin American and West African
history’. Morocco’s total coastline is 1,835 km, very slightly more than Portugal’s 1,793
km, although of course around one-quarter of the Moroccan coast lies inside the Straits of
Gibraltar (‘CIA World Factbook – Coastline’ [https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/
the-world-factbook/fields/2060.html – accessed 12 December 2009]).
8 Peter C. Mancall, ‘Atlantic Colonies’, New England Quarterly 75 (2002), pp. 477–87 at p. 477.
9 Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, American
Historical Review 111 (2006), pp. 741–57 at p. 750.
10 Julien, for example, described Moroccan history from the Sa’dis onwards as ‘one of
increasingly marked withdrawal…[By 1820] Morocco was taking virtually no part in the
economic life of a world in which commercial exchanges were developing with increasing
speed’ (Charles-André Julien, History of North Africa: From the Arab Conquest to 1830
[New York & Washington, 1970], pp. 269–70). Miège concluded similarly that in 1830
‘Morocco remained isolated from the grand revolutions in Europe of politics, demography
and technology, from that growth of men, ideas and money which…began the decisive
shift in relations between Europe and the rest of the world’ (J. L. Miège, ‘Relations
exterieures XVIe siécle – debut du XXe siécle’, in Maroc: les tresors de royaume, 15 avril
– 18 juillet 1999 [Paris, 1999], pp. 217–23 at p. 222). For a critical review of this aspect
of Moroccan historiography, see J.A.O.C. Brown, ‘Anglo-Moroccan relations in late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with particular reference to the role of Gibraltar’,
Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009, pp. 3–16.
11 Patricia Pearson, ‘The World of the Atlantic before the “Atlantic World”: Africa, Europe,
and the Americas before 1450’, in Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts (eds.), The Atlantic
World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington, IN, 2008), pp. 3–26 at p. 3.
12 Games, ‘Atlantic History’, p. 747.
13 David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus
(New Haven & London, 2008), pp. 31–62.
200
14 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book VI, 201–5. See Dunae W. Roller, The World of
Juba II and Kleopatra Selene: Royal Scholarship on Rome’s African Frontier (London &
New York, 2003), pp. 196–97.
15 See Christophe Picard, L’océan Atlantique musulman. De la conquête arabe à l’epoque
almohade. Navigation et mise en valeur des cȏtes d’al-Andalus et du Maghreb occidental
(Portugal-Espange-Maroc) (Paris, 1997), pp. 34, 161 & 181; Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd
ed. (Leiden. 1954–99) [hereafter EI2], ‘Al-Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ’, Vol. 1, p. 934; ibid., ‘Al-Djazā’ir
alKhālidāt’, Vol. 2, p. 522.
16 See Abulafia, Discovery of Mankind.
17 See Halima Ferhat, ‘Demons et merveilles: l’Atlantique dans l’imaginaire Marocain medieval’,
in Abdelmajid Kaddouri (ed.), Le Maroc et l’Atlantique (Rabat, 1992), pp. 31–49; Picard,
L’océan, pp. 31–35. The Atlantic was also known as al-baḥr al-muẓlim or baḥr al-ẓulumāt,
‘the sea of shadows’, an indication of its perceived mysterious character.
18 For an English translation, see Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale,
trans. Lenn Evan Goodman (Los Angeles, 2003) For some perspectives on the work’s
significance and later reception, see Lawrence I. Conrad (ed.), The World of Ibn Ṭufayl:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (Leiden, 1996); G. A. Russell, ‘The
Impact of the Philosophus autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the Society of Friends’,
in G.A. Russell (ed.), The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-
Century England (Leiden, 1994), pp. 224–65.
19 Picard, L’océan, p. 36.
20 ibid. See also Christophe Picard, La mer et les musulmans d’Occident au Moyen Age
VIIIe-XIIIe siécle (Paris, 1997).
21 See Picard, L’océan, p. 187ff.
22 On early Muslim voyages along the Atlantic coast, see J.F.P. Hopkins and N. Levtzion
(eds.), Corpus of early Arabic sources for West African history (Cambridge, 1981),
pp. 130–31, 190–91 & 272–73. On the link with the Mediterranean, see Olivia Remie
Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The commercial realignment of the
Iberian peninsula, 900–1500 (Cambridge, 1994).
23 See EI2, ‘Al-Baḥr al-Muḥīṭ’, Vol. 1, p. 934; John K. Thornton, ‘The Portuguese in Africa’,
in Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds.), Portuguese Oceanic Expansion,
1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 138–60 at pp. 139–40; Felipe Fernández-Armesto,
Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
1229–1492 (London, 1987), p. 152; David Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, in W. V. Harris
(ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005), pp. 64–93 at pp. 80–82.
24 See Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, p. 153; David Abulafia, A Mediterranean
emporium: the Catalan kingdom of Majorca (Cambridge, 1994), p. 208; Abulafia, Discovery
of Mankind, p. 38.
25 See H. C. Krueger, ‘Early Genoese Trade with Atlantic Morocco’, Medievalia et
Humanistica 3 (1945), pp. 3–15; Georges Jehel, ‘Les relations entre Gênes et le Maghreb
occidental au moyen age, aspects politiques et économiques’, in Mohammed Hammam
(ed), L’occident musulman et l’occident chretien au moyen age (Rabat, 1995), pp. 107–22;
Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (London &
New York, 2005), pp. 1–20.
26 Ibid., pp. 26, 90 &140–48.
27 See Salmi-Bianchi, ‘Anciennes sucreries’; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: the Place
of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1986), pp. 24–29; J.H. Galloway, ‘The
Mediterranean Sugar Industry’, Geographical Review 67 (1977), pp. 177–94 at pp. 190–94;
V.J. Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic Dimensions of Reconquista and Jihad in Morocco: Portuguese
Dukkala and the Sadid Sus, 1450–1557’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 22
(1990), pp. 379–418 at pp. 402–3. On the role of sugar in the growth of trade between
201
Morocco and England in particular, see T.S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade
(Manchester, 1959), passim.
28 Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic Dimensions’, pp. 379–80 & 407–9.
29 See P.G. Rogers, A History of Anglo-Moroccan Relations to 1900 (London, n.d.), pp. 9–10.
30 Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic Dimensions’, pp. 395–96.
31 Newitt, History, p. 12.
32 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, ‘Patterns of Settlement in the Portuguese Empire, 1400–1800’, in
Bethencourt and Curto (eds), Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, pp. 161–97 at p. 166.
33 Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic dimensions’, pp. 387 & 393–387 & 394.
34 See Robert Ricard, Études sur l’histoire des Portugais au Maroc (Coimbra, 1955), p. 156;
Hsain Ilahiane, ‘Estevan de Dorantes, the Moor or the slave? The other Moroccan
explorer of New Spain’, Journal of North African Studies 5 (2000), pp. 1–14.
35 Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins
of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, CA & London, 1991), p. 31.
36 See Ruth Pike, ‘Slavery in Seville in the Time of Columbus’, in H. B. Johnson Jr. (ed.), From
Reconquest to Empire: the Iberian Background to Latin American History (New York,
1970), pp. 85–101.
37 See H.B. Johnson Jr., ‘Introduction’, in Johnson (ed.), From Reconquest to Empire,
pp. 3–40; M. García-Areñal, ‘Moriscos and Indians: A Comparative Approach’, in
G.J.H. van Gelder and Ed C.M. De Moor (eds.), The Middle East and Europe:
Encounters and Exchanges, Orientations 1 (Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 39–55.
38 A.R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2009),
Vol. 1, pp. 1–26.
39 De Castries (ed.), Sources inédites, Vol. 2, p. 222ff & Vol. 3, p. 129; Nabil Matar, Turks,
Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, 1999), pp. 83–109. For an
analysis of the ways in which the paradigms of English understandings of Native
Americans and Muslims related to each other, see Nabil Matar, ‘Britons, Muslims, and
American Indians: gender and power’, Muslim World 91 (2001), pp. 371–80.
40 David Eltis, ‘Atlantic History in Global Perspective’, Itinerario: European Journal of
Overseas History 23 (1999), pp. 141–60 at pp. 143–44.
41 See Newitt, History, p. 19; Filipe Themudo Barata, ‘Portugal and the Mediterranean: a
Prelude to the Discovery of the “New World”’, Al-Masaq 17 (2005), pp. 205–19; Andrew
C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth Century Ibero-African
Frontier (Chicago & London, 1978). On the expulsion of the Moriscos, see Már Jónsson,
‘The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609–14: the destruction of an Islamic
periphery’, Journal of Global History 2 (2007), pp. 195–212.
42 Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic dimensions’, p. 387.
43 Games, ‘Atlantic History’, p. 747.
44 Mohamed Ennaji, ‘Le Maroc et l’Atlantique durant les temps modernes’, in Kaddouri
(ed.), Le Maroc, pp. 95–120 at p. 100. See also Ahmed Bouchareb, ‘Les conséquences
socio-culturelles de la conquête ibérique du littoral marocain’, in Maria García-Areñal and
María J. Viguera (eds.), Relaciones de la Península Ibérica con el Magreb siglos XIII-XVI:
Actas del coloquio, Madrid 17–18 diciembre 1987 (Madrid, 1988), pp. 487–537.
45 Mintz, Sweetness, p. 29. Berthier asserts that the need for slave labour for the production
of sugar was one of the motivations for al-Manṣūr’s conquests in the Sudan (see Paul
Berthier, ‘L’archéologie, source de l’histoire économique. Les plantations de canne à sucre
et les fabriques de sucre dans l’ancien Maroc’, Hespéris-Tamuda 7 (1966), pp. 33–40 at
p. 40). On the use of wage labour and the absence of large-scale agricultural slavery, see
Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic dimensions’, pp. 403–4.
46 See Amira K. Bennison, Jihad and its Interpretations in Pre-colonial Morocco: State-society
Relations during the French Conquest of Algeria (London, 2002), pp. 15–33. It is true that
202
jihād had long been established as an important element of political legitimacy in al-Andalus
and the Maghrib under the Umayyads, the Almohads and the Almoravids. However, this
tradition was reshaped and reinvigorated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in response
to the first direct Christian attacks on Morocco itself and in the unstable conditions of the
Wattasid era, when central authority in the country seemed unable to resist such incursions.
I am grateful to Dr. Bennison for her insights into this topic.
47 See Weston F. Cook, The Hundred Years’ War for Morocco: Gunpowder and the Military
Revolution in the Early Modern Muslim World (Boulder, CO, 1994); A. Dziubinski,
‘L’armee et la flotte de guerre marocaines à l’époque des sultans de la dynastie saadienne’,
Hespéris-Tamuda 13 (1972), pp. 61–94.
48 See Ricard, Études, pp. 124–27.
49 See Mohamed Mezzine, ‘Les rélations entre les places occupées et la localités de la région
de Fès aux XVième et XVIième siècles, à partir de documents locaux inédits: les Nawāzil’,
in García-Areñal and Viguera (eds.), Relaciones, pp. 539–60.
50 See Jacques Caillé, ‘Ambassadeurs et représentants officieux de la France au Maroc’,
Hespéris 38 (1951), pp. 355–65; Jacques Caillé, ‘Ambassades et missions marocaines aux
Pays-Bas à l’époque des sultans saadiens’, HespérisTamuda 4 (1963), pp. 5–67; Jacques
Caillé, ‘Le commerce anglais avec le Maroc pendant la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle:
importations et exportations’, Revue Africaine 84 (1940), pp. 186–219; Willan, Studies,
p. 92ff; Rogers, AngloMoroccan relations, pp. 7–20.
51 See Bernard Rosenberger, ‘Les Sa’diens et l’Atlantique au XVIe siècle’, in Mohamed Tahar
Mansouri (ed.), Le Maghreb et la mer à travers l’histoire (Paris, 2000), pp. 201–22;
Dahiru Yahya, Morocco in the Sixteenth Century: Problems and Patterns in African
Foreign Policy (Harlow, 1981).
52 Matar, ‘Anglo-Spanish conflict’. Later Moroccan rulers also understood and attempted
to exploit the dynamics of religious rivalry in Europe, as in the case of Mawlay Ismā’īl’s
(r. 1672–1727) well-known letter to the exiled Catholic James II of England (see Henry
de Castries, Moulay Ismail et Jacques II: une apologie de l’Islam par un sultan du Maroc
[Paris, 1903], pp. 7–8).
53 See Yves Lacoste, ‘General characteristics and fundamental structures of mediaeval North
African society’, Economy and Society 3 (1974), pp. 1–17; James L. Boone et al.,
‘Archeological and Historical Approaches to Complex Societies: The Islamic States of
Medieval Morocco’, American Anthropologist 92 (1990), pp. 630–46; Ronald A. Messier,
‘Sijilmâsa: l’intermédiaire entre la Méditerranée et l’ouest de l’Afrique’, in Mohammed
Hammam (ed.), L’occident musulman et l’occident chretien au moyen age (Rabat, 1995),
pp. 181–96; James A. Miller, ‘Trading through Islam: the Interconnections of Sijilmasa,
Ghana and the Almoravid Movement’, in J.A. Clancy-Smith (ed.), North Africa, Islam
and Mediterranean World: from the Almoravids to the Algerian War (London & Portland,
OR, 2001), pp. 29–58. On the importance of the Maghrib’s position as an intermediary
zone between West Africa and the Mediterranean, see Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean
and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (London, 1972), Vol. 1,
pp. 467–77. On trade across the Sahara generally, see D.T. Niane, ‘Relationships and
exchange among the different regions’, in Niane (ed.), Africa, pp. 614–35.
54 Lacoste, ‘General characteristics’, pp. 3–4. On the political importance of maritime power
in the medieval period, see Picard, L’océan, pp. 341–61 & 459–82. For the actual
operation of this power and the relative autonomy of Maghribi ports, see J.D. Latham,
‘The Rise of the ‘Azafids in Ceuta’, Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972), pp. 263–87.
55 On the decline of the trans-Saharan trade with Morocco, see Michel Abitbol, ‘Le Maroc
et le commerce transsaharien du XVIIe siècle au début du XIXe siècle’, Revue de l’Occident
Musulman et de la Méditerranée 30 (1980), pp. 5–20. On the relationship between
regional autonomy and European trade in Morocco, see J.A.O.C. Brown, ‘AngloMoroccan
203
relations and the embassy of Aḥmad Qardanash, 1706–8’, Historical Journal 51 (2008),
pp. 599–620 at pp. 603–7.
56 See J. Bookin-Weiner, ‘The “Sallee Rovers”: Morocco and the Corsairs in the seventeenth
century’, in Reeva S. Simon (ed.), The Middle East and North Africa: Essays in honour of
J.C. Hurewitz (New York, 1990), pp. 134–40; J. BookinWeiner, ‘Corsairing in the
economy and politics of North Africa’, in George Joffé (ed.), North Africa: Nation, State
and Region (London & New York, 1993), pp. 3–33.
57 For a more detailed analysis of this process, see Brown, ‘Anglo-Moroccan relations in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, pp. 27–63. On Sīdī Muḥammad’s foreign and
trade policy generally, see Fatima Harrak, ‘Foundations of Muhammad III’s Foreign Policy’,
in Jerome Bookin-Weiner and Mohamed El Mansour (eds.), The Atlantic Connection: 200
Years of Moroccan-American Relations 1786–1986 (Rabat, n.d.), pp. 31–48.
58 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas
and Empires to Become a Part of World History (London & New York, 2008), p. 66.
59 See Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, esp. pp. 75–76 & 91–93. Although he does not refer to
the Maghrib specifically in this sense, others have interpreted the region in this spirit (see
Brent D. Shaw, ‘A Peculiar Island: Maghrib and the Mediterranean’, Mediterranean
Historical Review 18 [2003], pp. 93–125).
60 See Rafael Valladares Ramirez, ‘Inglaterra, Tanger y el “estrecho compartido”: los inicios
del asentamiento ingles en el Mediterraneo occidental durante la guerra hispano-portuguesa
(1641–61)’, Hispania: Revista Española de Historia 51 (1991), pp. 982–93; José Ignacio
Martínez Ruiz, ‘De Tánger a Gibraltar: el estrecho en la praxis comercial e imperial Británica
(1661–1776)’, Hispania: Revista Española de Historia 65 (2005), pp. 1043–62; E. M.G.
Routh, Tangier: England’s lost Atlantic outpost, 1661–1684 (London, 1912); Linda Colley,
Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London, 2002), pp. 21–43.
61 See, for example, Lourido-Díaz, ‘Relaciones politicas’; Brown, ‘The embassy of Aḥmad
Qardanash’. On the development and decline of a ‘French Atlantic’ during the first period
of French colonialism see Silvia Marzagalli, ‘The French Atlantic’, Itinerario: European
Journal of Overseas History 23 (1999), pp. 70–83.
62 ‘Morocco’, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 16 vols. (Jerusalem, 1971), Vol. 12, pp. 326–47.
Jewish immigration to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies before independence was of
course limited because of the religious restrictions placed on them there (see, for example,
Eva Alexandra Uchmany, La vida entre judaísmo y el cristianismo en la Nueva España,
1580–1606 [Mexico City, 1992]). Greater toleration in the Dutch colonies particularly,
and to a lesser extent those of Britain and France, resulted in the establishment of Jewish
communities to which some Jews from Essaouira (Mogador) emigrated in the eighteenth
century and which maintained links with Morocco through charitable donations (see
André Chouraqui, Histoire des Juifs en Afrique du Nord [Paris, 1985], p. 357; I.S.
Emmanuel and S.A. Emmanuel, History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, 2 vols.
[Cincinnati, 1970], Vol. 1, pp. 166–68; Mordehay Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the
Caribbean: the Spanish-Portuguese settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas
[Jerusalem, 2002], p. 26). Jewish migration to South America also increased after
independence, as testified by among other things visas issued from the Moroccan consulate
at Gibraltar (see Victor Mirelman, ‘Sephardim in Latin America after Independence’, in
Martin Cohen and Abraham Peck [eds.], Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture
and History [Tuscaloosa, AL & London, 1993], pp. 235–67 at pp. 240–49; Anita
Novinsky, ‘Sephardim in Brazil: the New Christians’, in R. D. Barnett and W. M. Schwab
[eds.], The Sephardi Heritage: Essays on the History and Cultural Contribution of the
Jews of Spain and Portugal – Vol. 2: The Western Sephardim [Grendon, Northants,
1989], pp. 431–41 at pp. 440–41; Nadia Erzini, ‘Hal yaslah li-taqansut [Is He Suitable for
Consulship?]: The Moroccan Consuls in Gibraltar during the Nineteenth Century’,
204
Journal of North African Studies 12 [2007], pp. 517–29 at pp. 524–25). On the Sephardic
community in Holland and its links to Morocco, see for example Jonathan I. Israel, ‘The
Sephardim in the Netherlands’, in Elie Kedourie (ed.), Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi
Experience, 1492 and After (London, 1992), pp. 189–212; Mercedes García-Areñal and
Gerard Albert Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in
Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore, 2003).
63 Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes (Brooklyn,
NY, 2003), pp. 205–12; National Archives, London, Foreign Office papers 52/14, ff. 121–28.
64 On the geographical factors contributing to shipwrecks on the Moroccan coast, see
Suzanne Schwarz, Slave Captain: the Career of James Irvine in the Liverpool Slave Trade,
2nd ed. (Liverpool, 2008), pp. 40–43. On various aspects of the general phenomenon of
European captives in North Africa, see for example Paul Baepler (ed.), White Slaves,
African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (Chicago,
1999); E.G. Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa in the Early Modern Age
(Madison, WI, 1983); Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery
in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2003);
Daniel Vitkus (ed.), Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from
Early Modern England (New York, 2001).
65 Elliott, ‘Atlantic History’, p. 239.
66 See Cornell, ‘Socioeconomic dimensions’, pp. 399–400; Dziubinski, ‘L’armee,’ p. 93; Cook,
Hundred Years’ War, pp. 243–51; Abderrahman El Moudden, ‘Looking Eastward: Some
Moroccan Tentative Military Reforms with Turkish Assistance (18th–early 19th centuries)’,
Maghreb Review 19 (1994), pp. 237–45; Amira K. Bennison, ‘The “New Order” and Islamic
Order: The Introduction of the Nizāmī Army in the Western Maghrib and its Legitimation,
1830–73’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 36 (2004), pp. 591–612.
67 See note 4 above.
68 See Abderrahman El Moudden, ‘The Ambivalance of Rihla: Community Integration and
Self-Definition in Moroccan Travel Accounts, 1300–1800’, in Dale F. Eickelman and
James Piscatori (eds.), Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious
Imagination (Berkley & Los Angeles, 1990), pp. 69–84.
69 See Abderrahmane El Moudden, ‘Sharifs and Padishahs: Moroccan-Ottoman Relations from
the 16th through the 18th Centuries’, Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1992; R. Lourido-
Díaz, ‘La obra redentora del sultan marroquí Sîdî Muhammad b. Abd Allàh entre los cautivos
muslumanes en Europa (siglo XVII)’, Cuadernos de Historia del Islam 11 (1984), pp. 139–84;
R. Lourido-DÍíaz, ‘El Sultan alawi Sidi Muhammad b. Abd Allāh (1757–90) y sus sueños de
hegemonía sobre el Islam occidental’, Orientalia Hispanica 1 (1974), pp. 472–89; Thomas
Freller, ‘“The Shining of the Moon” – The Mediterranean Tour of Muhammad ibn ‘Uthmān,
Envoy of Morocco, in 1782’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 12 (2002), pp. 307–26. On
the recognition of the United States, see J. Bookin-Weiner, ‘The Origins of Moroccan American
Relations’, in Bookin-Weiner and El Mansour (eds.), The Atlantic Connection, pp. 19–31.
70 See Mohamed El Mansour, Morocco in the Reign of Mawlay Sulayman (Wisbech, 1990),
pp. 11, 62–63 & 71; Brown, ‘Anglo-Moroccan Relations in the late Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries’, p. 140ff.
71 Shabānī’s career was recorded in an interview at Dover in England, where he had ended
up following his capture and the seizure of his goods by Russian privateers on his return
voyage from Hamburg (see James Grey Jackson, An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa
Territories in the Interior of Africa by El Hage Abd Salam Shabeeny with Notes, Critical
and Explanatory [London, 1820]).
72 On the relationship between integration to the Atlantic and socio-economic change, see
for example James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal
River valley, 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1993).
205
73 For a review of works deconstructing a unitary Atlantic framework and Eurocentric

conceptualisations of world trade during the early modern period, see for example Peter Colcanis,
‘Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?’, William & Mary Quarterly 63 (2006), pp. 725–42.
74 See Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus.
75 Colcanis, ‘Atlantic World’, p. 739. He usefully adds this term to Armitage’s threefold
internal division of the Atlantic system into ‘trans-Atlantic’, ‘circum-Atlantic’ and ‘cis-
Atlantic’ (see David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in Armitage and
Braddick [eds], The British Atlantic World, pp. 11–27).
76 See Barata, ‘Portugal and the Mediterranean’.
77 Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 170–71.
78 William O’Reilly, ‘Genealogies of Atlantic history’, Atlantic Studies 1 (2004), pp. 66–84
at p. 69.
79 See for example Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London,
1993); Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London & New York, 2003).
80 For a review of the debate among historians of the Maghrib about the region’s conceptual
and analytical relationships with its neighbours, see L. Carl Brown, ‘Maghrib Historiography:
the Unit of Analysis Problem’, in Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins (eds.), The Maghrib
in Question (Austin, TX, 1997), pp. 4–16.
81 Colcanis, ‘Atlantic World’, p. 725.
82 Bailyn, ‘Reflections’, p. 2.
206
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE ATLANTIC
AND PACIFIC WORLDS
Paul D’Arcy
T he vast majority of maritime historians focus on bodies of water defined by their

continental margins, even though their particular interest might be thematic
rather than regional connections and coherence. Four such ocean spaces attract the
attention of most maritime historians: the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea,
the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean is the largest by far and
the only one of these four not to have a substantial body of scholarship that
conceptualizes it as a coherent, inter-linked space (see Figure 12.1).
This lack of coherence is largely the result of the sheer size of the Pacific. It covers
an area greater than all of the land in the world combined. The Pacific is also larger
than the Atlantic, Indian and Mediterranean combined: 165,721,000 kilometers
squared as opposed to 158,048,000 kilometers squared.1 A hemisphere cartographic
projection taken from the centre of the Pacific is largely aquatic, and therefore blue
and featureless in keeping with the terrestrial priorities of most mapping traditions.
The Pacific is devoid of islands for thousands of miles in its northern and eastern
sections, but also contains the vast majority of the world’s islands within a roughly
triangular wedge jutting out from its western margins to Rapanui (Easter Island) in
the southeast Pacific.2 While the former subdivisions have similar academic approaches
to Atlantic maritime spaces, the latter ‘sea of islands’ as the late Tongan scholar Epeli
Hau’ofa referred to it, has a quite distinct body of scholarship because of its cultures,
history and seascapes.3 After comparing the Atlantic and Pacific as oceanic
environments, this chapter largely focuses on scholarship on the Pacific Islands, the
most oceanic habitat of humankind, before suggesting approaches that might enhance
key problems in contemporary Atlantic scholarship. The following observations
favour the Pacific world over that of the Atlantic on the assumption that this
collection’s readership will be better versed in the latter than the former and will
therefore benefit from exposure to another world and another body of scholarship.
The Pacific’s sea of islands and the history of its coastal inhabitants are particularly
relevant to Atlantic World historians seeking to conceptualize their field more in
terms of histories of the sea than histories across the sea. Calls have mounted recently
to balance essentially continental, Euro-centric outlooks emphasizing the flow of
goods and people across the sea as measures of cultural and regional coherence with
207
– Paul D’Arcy –
Atlantic Pacific Indian

Ocean Ocean Ocean
Figure 12.1 Map of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans
more oceanic ones. The sea is not merely a passage for people between terrestrial
stages of historical actions but also one of rich spaces of historical enactment, and
cultural meaning and memory. As Karen Wigen noted in her introduction to a recent
forum on oceans in history, ‘No longer outside time, the sea is being given a history,
even as the history of the world is being retold from the perspective of the sea.’4
Pacific Studies has much to offer those seeking to make the sea more prominent in
history. Pacific Island maritime history is intimately linked to indigenous history, and
has been enhanced by the survival of indigenous seafaring traditions and maritime
cultural outlooks and priorities through the era of European and Japanese colonial
rule. While Atlantic scholars are blessed with an abundance of written sources, Pacific
scholars by necessity must employ more multidisciplinary approaches to take account
of cultures whose history was recorded orally and who live in seas less travelled by
those who recorded their observations in written form. Pacific Islands and the Pacific
seas have however been intensively studied by anthropologists in particular since
World War II and are today still more closely linked to local environments for their
subsistence and well being than many in the Atlantic World who have grown less
dependent on local seas because of their central place in the global economy their
overseas’ expansion helped create. These features combine to produce populated seas
that are used intensively, culturally mapped in intimate detail and imbued with history.5
THE P ACIFIC AN D ATL ANTIC

AS OCEAN ENVI RO NM E NTS
The Pacific Islands are sometimes referred to collectively as Oceania. They are
generally divided into three geographical areas: Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.
These terms were coined by the nineteenth century French explorer Dumont d’Urville,
who deemed them to be racial and cultural classifications.6 He also included Island
Southeast Asia as a fourth area which he named Malaysia, although this four way
grouping did not remain coherent within academia. Malaysia is today part of
Southeast Asian studies while the other three are part of Pacific Island studies. With
the exception of a number of Pacific archaeologists tracing Pacific migration routes
back to their ultimate homelands, few scholars have linked the two regions as
interacting entities. Recent studies by historians are challenging this divide as an ex
post facto intellectual imposition.7
208
– chapter 12: The Atlantic and Pacific Worlds –
D’urville’s Polynesia consisted of all the islands east of a line running along the west
coast of New Zealand to Fiji and up to the western end of the Hawai’ian chain. The
only place where another race existed in close proximity was Melanesian Fiji, which
lay a few days’ sail northwest of Tonga. Micronesia consisted of all the islands from
Palau, Yap and the Mariana Islands in the west across to Kiribati in the east. Its cultural
borders were all clearly demarcated by large sea gaps, although d’Urville’s Micronesia
extended much further north than the current Micronesian political entities extend to
incorporate islands closer to Japan. Melanesia stretched from Fiji to New Guinea and
down to Australia. D’Urville’s Malaysia incorporated much of Island Southeast Asia.
Its only close Oceanic neighbours were the peoples of western New Guinea.
Two distinct bio-geographical zones are recognized within Oceania: Near Oceania
and Remote Oceania.8 These divisions map the progressive diminution of terrestrial
and marine species’ diversity eastward from their dispersal point into the Pacific as the
gaps between islands increase.9 Near Oceania is located in the Western Pacific, and
encompasses most of the islands designated as Melanesia under the existing classification.
This area demonstrates a great deal of environmental continuity with Island Southeast
Asia in terms of its large ‘continental’ islands, and small gaps between islands. In
contrast, Remote Oceania, broadly coinciding with Micronesia and Polynesia, is
characterized by large gaps between smaller Oceanic islands and archipelagoes. It is
also notable for its very limited land area relative to ocean area. Oceania was settled
from the west which meant that its colonizers encountered a gradual transition from
islands similar to their homelands in the western archipelagic margins of the Pacific to
island environments that were increasingly more oceanic in nature as they moved east.
It was an ideal transition zone to hone their already considerable seafaring skills as they
sailed onwards in search of new island homes, spurred on by generations of successful
discoveries of under-populated and increasingly unpopulated homes in the expanse of
islands. Sailing predominantly into the wind was also beneficial for exploring new seas
as the key issue was ensuring the ability to return home rapidly in case of adversity or
failure to discover new lands before food supplies ran short.10
The boundary between Near and Remote Oceania lies east and south of the
present day Solomon Islands.11 It then passes east and north of the Bismarck
archipelago, extending westward off the north coast of New Guinea before turning
north to pass east of the Philippines. To the west of this line humans can usually
travel between islands without losing sight of land because of the high mountains on
these islands and the relatively narrow sea gaps between them. In contrast, Remote
Oceania is made up of islands clustered into archipelagos that are now separated by
at least 350 kilometres of ocean. Islands in this region tend to be smaller than in Near
Oceania, and their flora and fauna more attenuated. This is because it was populated
by an extremely limited Indo-Malayan biota that dispersed from the larger islands in
Near Oceania. New Caledonia and Aotearoa/New Zealand12 are exceptions. Both
are continental in terms of size and diverse resource base, although New Caledonia
is nevertheless relatively impoverished compared to islands of a similar size in Near
Oceania. Otherwise, the only island landforms in this eastern sector are high volcanic
islands, coral atolls and other kinds of coralline islands.
Short-term variation in atmospheric circulation patterns, temperature and rainfall
are the most important environmental influences on Pacific Islanders. Regular
voyaging between islands requires intimate knowledge of wind patterns which dictate
209
inter-island travel as well as rainfall patterns to nourish island crops. In the more
open eastern two-thirds there are zones crossing the ocean from east to west, each
with a distinct pattern of surface winds. In the higher latitudes of both hemispheres,
strong westerly winds blow for most of the year. Between these two belts are two
zones of trade winds. In the Northern Hemisphere these blow from the northeast,
while south of the equator they blow from the southeast. Their strength diminishes
in the western third of the Pacific. The trade winds are not continuous, but generally
blow for at least part of every month. They are most consistent between May and
September. For the remainder of the year winds blow from both east and west. The
equatorial area between these belts of trade winds is known as the doldrums, which
generally experiences light, variable winds and total calm. However, it is also subject
to occasional squalls, heavy showers and thunderstorms.13
The western Pacific is dominated by monsoon and typhoon weather patterns
arising from the periodic heating and cooling of the Asian landmass. The monsoon
winds blow from the northwest away from Asia in the Northern Hemisphere winter,
and from the southeast towards Asia in the Northern Hemisphere summer. Typhoons
or hurricanes occur in much of the western tropical Pacific. These spiral storms begin
as areas of slowly circulating cloud that gather energy from the warm ocean waters
that they pass over. They develop into giant mobile whirlwinds that can last for
weeks. Their high winds and torrential rains carve a path of destruction, while the
accompanying storm waves devastate coastal areas and low lying coral islands.
There is great variability within these seasonal climatic patterns. Typhoons can
occur during any month of the year. Similarly, storms with gale force winds may
occur during any month over much of the region.14 Rainfall also varies widely.
Generally areas near the equator experience high rainfall with limited seasonal
variation. Further from the equator annual rainfall diminishes substantially, and is
subject to marked seasonal variation.15 In such variable conditions, the worst-case
scenario rather than the overall average determines the viability of a community.
During El Niño conditions zones of convergence that cause heavy rainfall in this
part of the Pacific move towards the equator. The usual areas of convergence such as
the Carolines and Fiji then experience a decline in rainfall. Variation even occurs
within the Caroline Islands. Islands that normally have high rainfall like Palau and
Pohnpei may experience drought, while drier areas further east such as the Marshalls
may experience high rainfall.16
A phenomenon known as the El Niño involves the periodic disruption of weather
patterns and fisheries across the Pacific Ocean as well as into the Americas and Asia.
This phenomenon is explained in terms of variations in the strength of the southeast
trade winds. When strong, these winds were believed to allow upwelling by displacing
surface water westward away from the coast. El Niño conditions resulted from a
weakening of these winds. Much of the world’s climate is determined by the exchange
of heat and moisture between ocean and atmosphere. As the largest body of water,
the Pacific has a crucial role. When pressure gradients lead to weaker than usual
easterly winds in the eastern Pacific, this leads to a deepened warm surface layer off
Peru that is far less productive than the upwelling mix that occurs otherwise.17
Rather than being abnormal, El Niño is merely the extreme warm surface phase of
an eighteen to twenty-four month cycle that also exhibits an extreme, cool surface
water phase known as La Nina. The occurrence of these cycles is irregular, although
210
they seem to occur on average every three to seven years. Historical records also
suggest that these cycles vary in intensity. In a La Niña phase the opposite conditions
apply. These conditions may cause strong trade winds that push water westward, so
that the sea level in the western Pacific is up to 2 feet higher than in the east.18
The movement of seawater influences life at sea, just as terrestrial flora is influenced
by atmospheric circulation. Much of the daily and seasonal behaviour of near-shore
marine biota is oriented around tidal patterns.19 Seawater also circulates in ocean
currents. Two vast loops, or gyres, dominate the Pacific. The one north of the equator
flows clockwise, while the other flows anti-clockwise. The currents on the western
side of these gyres increase in intensity as they flow away from the equator. Islands
deflect these currents, particularly the southern, westward-moving flow. Between
these two gyres is the Equatorial Countercurrent, which flows from the Carolines
across to Panama. These tropical currents vary seasonally in strength, and even
location. Seasonal wind shifts account for much of this variation. As well as these
larger, general flows there are smaller, irregular currents that result from local eddies,
islands and other barriers to flows on the ocean floor. Such currents may also exhibit
seasonal variation because of changing winds and weather conditions.20
These currents have important consequences for life in the ocean. Surface currents
affect human travel and subsistence. They either facilitate or hinder boat travel.
Either way, their variability required that mariners acquire an intimate knowledge of
local conditions. Plankton, the basis of all ocean food chains, is one such organism.21
Deep ocean currents also affect the food chain by transporting decomposing organic
matter that falls from surface waters enriched by the sun’s penetration. Such currents
transport this matter away from tropical seas towards the polar seas, where it rises to
the surface and moves back towards the equator along surface currents. The result is
that most tropical seas have much poorer offshore habitats than their temperate and
polar equivalents. Tropical seas tend to consist of intense concentrations of marine
biota surrounded by large tracts of relatively impoverished seas.
Oceanographers now generally accept that all marine ecosystems are in constant
flux, and that they are open systems influenced by marine and climatic influences
generated elsewhere. Such ecosystems are characterized by short-term perturbations
and disruptions as well as more regular, seasonal patterns. People who live in such
environments must view the world differently from those who inhabit more closed,
stable environments. Short-term environmental perturbations and unpredictable
changes from external elements fostered expectations of unheralded elements intruding
from beyond the horizon, curiosity about where these elements came from, and flexible,
opportunistic strategies to cope with this, at times, uncertain world. Once established,
most Pacific Islander societies developed some form of magazine economy and inter-
island marriage or trade links with other communities to insulate themselves against
climatic variability in rainfall, El Niño cycles, and natural disasters such as typhoons.
A host of factors promote the rich fisheries so valued by sea peoples. Most marine
species inhabit the benthic (ocean floor) or neritic (near shore) zones rather than the
pelagic (open ocean) zone. Sunlight is a key factor. Approximately 90 per cent of the
entire marine bio-mass is made up of phytoplankton, tiny plant plankton that combine
sunlight, carbon dioxide and nutrients to produce organic matter in a manner similar
to terrestrial plants. To enable photosynthesis they concentrate in the upper level of the
sea where sunlight penetrates, which is down to 100 or 150 metres in clear conditions.
211
Phytoplankton forms the basis of the marine food chain.22 Shallow seas concentrate
marine life and organic fallout near the surface. Areas with a lot of turbidity or
upwelling re-circulate decomposing organic matter back into the living ecosystem.
Landmasses with high runoff periodically flush land nutrients into offshore waters.
The main ecosystems in the coastal waters of Remote Oceania are coral reefs,
lagoons, and mangrove swamps. Some locations lack these buffers, allowing waves
to break directly against the shoreline. The reef–lagoon complexes are among the
most productive ecosystems on the planet. Only tropical rain forests rival reef–lagoon
complexes in terms of productivity and diversity. The 150 kilometre long barrier reef
surrounding Palau has nine species of sea grass, more than 300 species of corals, and
approximately 2000 species of fish.23 Most, but not all areas of high productivity are
geographically fixed and in shallow near-shore locations. Tidally driven sea fronts on
continental shelves, fronts along subtropical climatic transition zones, and areas of
counter currents, gyres and eddies are also highly productive.24 Other highly
productive open ocean ecosystems are areas of shallow water shoals, or areas where
upwelling enriches the upper layers with nutrients. Fijian fishermen refer to one as
Thakau Lala, the ‘Empty Reef’. It has no land, just a circular reef enclosing a shallow,
sheltered body of water.25 Bukatatanoa is the name given to a reef 11 miles east of the
island of Lakeba that encloses a lagoon nearly 200 square miles in extent.26 Similarly,
the Marshallese were familiar with a huge, current-free area of ocean south of the
atoll of Ailingalaplap. They call it Eon Woerr, literally ‘over coral’ in reference to its
presumed shallow depth.27 As will be discussed in the final section of this chapter,
such offshore areas of plenty extended the cultural worlds, boundaries and tenure
regimes of Pacific Islanders beyond sight of land.
Atlantic maritime spaces are shaped by many of the same broad processes at work
in Pacific spaces, particularly those shaping the movement of oceanic waters and the
concentration of marine biota. Rich fisheries were first found in near-shore shallow
seas and continental shelves such as the North Sea and the Grand Banks off
Newfoundland and later in sea mounts further out to sea.28 Just as in the Pacific, the
main surface currents are two large gyres separated by the eastward flowing Atlantic
Equatorial Countercurrent. The North Atlantic gyre rotates clockwise, while the
South Atlantic gyre flows counterclockwise, driven by northeast and southeast trade
winds respectively. The trade winds and equatorial currents of the gyres facilitate
voyaging westward across the shortest width of the open ocean Atlantic from the
Cape Verde Islands to the West Indies, while the return passage continued along the
gyres away from the equator until the currents began to change direction eastward in
zones of westerly winds. The approximate 10,000 mile circuit averaged five months
sailing and a further four months waiting for the right winds. Hurricanes began
forming off the West African coast and moved westward towards Florida and the
West Indies before moving north towards the Atlantic seaboard of North America.29
SEAS OF HISTORY AND SEA S O F ANTHRO P O L O G Y

Few have attempted to construct an image of the Pacific Ocean as a coherent entity
in the way Fernand Braudel has for the Mediterranean, or K.N. Chauduri and David
Pearson have for the Indian Ocean. To Braudel the whole Mediterranean ‘shared a
common destiny, a heavy one indeed, with identical problems and general trends if
212
not identical consequences’.30 For Chauduri, long distance trade, the monsoon
climatic system, and broadly similar historical forces created a degree of cohesion
amongst the four great civilizations that spanned the region. In the Irano-Arabic,
Hindu, Indonesian and Chinese worlds ‘the idea of a common geographical space
defined by the exchange of ideas and material objects was quite strong, not only in
the minds of merchants but also in those of political rulers and ordinary people’.31
No such coherence has ever been attributed to the vastly more expansive world/s
encompassed by the Pacific Ocean. The few Pacific-wide histories that have been
attempted focus on the region’s integration into a wider global economy which is
seen as beginning when Europeans began to move into the Pacific. The modern
concept of a Pacific community is essentially based on the modern economic
relationship between East Asia and North America. It is a relationship with little
legacy of pre-existing cultural or historical ties, and one that has only been made
possible by communications and transport revolutions in the last two centuries.32
Prior to this phase the Pacific is generally viewed as a prohibitive void rather than
an avenue for movement. Pre-European Pacific peoples are usually considered to
have conducted localized interactions only, with a resultant consciousness that was
at best regional rather than pan-Pacific.33 Such pan-Pacific passages were dominated
by European vessels. European encounters with the South Pacific began in 1567
when Magellan sailed westward across Oceania from South America. Other Spanish
voyages of discovery followed in his wake. A series of violent encounters and the
decimation of colonies in Melanesia from malaria soon ended Spain’s South Pacific
engagement. Henceforth, the Spanish focused on Micronesia and the trans-Pacific
galleon trade carrying goods between the colonial ports of Manila and Acapulco.
Their route bypassed most inhabited islands in the Pacific, while former links between
Guam and the Caroline Islands diminished with the violent establishment of Spanish
rule in the Marianas and the subsequent loss of seafaring capacity within the island
chain.34 European contact with the Pacific became more sustained from the late 1760s
onwards as voyages of exploration by a number of European nations gradually
mapped Australasia and Oceania, most famously and comprehensively through the
three expeditions of Captain James Cook from 1768 to 1779. Focusing on the flow
of traffic between the Pacific’s terrestrial margins removes indigenous voices and
overlooks interactions with the sea that were part of daily life of most islanders and
which we argue offer the greatest contrast to Atlantic approaches.
Despite its relatively late development, Pacific Island history has nevertheless
produced a large body of published studies, and developed a distinct character. Most
of its studies have been on inter-cultural relations between Pacific Islanders and
Europeans over the last two and a half centuries.35 Pacific historians have largely
focused on the impact of Western products, peoples and ideas on Pacific Islanders,
with much emphasis placed on presenting Pacific Islanders as rational, active agents in
this process. The majority of Pacific Islanders’ millennia of history was recorded and
conveyed orally, which has meant that much Pacific history has become multidisciplinary
to incorporate non-literate sources such as oral traditions, linguistic patterns and
material remains. This has enhanced rather than diluted the nature of Pacific history.
Until quite recently even those studying Pacific Islanders tended to treat individual
communities in relative isolation. Arbitrary colonial boundaries assisted by cutting
the Pacific into administrative units of study that bore no resemblance to voyaging
213
spheres.36 Modern academic writings of even the most geographically wide-ranging

field of study, the pre-European period of Oceanic history, portray external contacts
as being of limited significance in the development of individual islands after their
initial colonization by humans. Pre-European cultural development is usually depicted
as driven by the interaction of internal processes. These include: adaptation of the
founding culture to a new environment; population growth on a limited land area;
environmental change, both natural and human-induced; and cultural emphasis on
competition for status channelled into warfare, or the intensification of production
for redistribution to forge social and political obligations. The possibility of new
arrivals introducing cultural innovations is not dismissed, but it is almost always
considered of secondary importance.37
Concern at this tendency to treat islands as closed cultural systems was expressed
in the late 1970s when a series of well-argued articles called for an end to the
pervasiveness of narrowly focussed studies. Kerry Howe called this approach
‘monograph myopia’, which he and others characterize as ‘finding out more and
more about less and less’.38 These critics noted that there seemed to be no guiding
direction or overall purpose beyond accumulating information and filling gaps.
Oskar Spate observed that such historians ‘may on occasion not see the Ocean for
the Islands, may be content to be marooned on the tight but so soft confines of their
little atolls of knowledge, regardless of the sweep of the currents which bring life to
the isles’.39
Calls for academics to view the sea more as a means of communication than as an
isolator have mounted. Now Island communities are increasingly portrayed as
connected ‘in a wider social world of moving items and ideas.’40 Local traditions, the
distribution of cultural traits, and observations by literate outsiders all attest to inter-
island voyaging within most archipelagos. Voyaging between archipelagos was also
apparent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in at least three regions of Remote
Oceania. Such external contacts probably waxed and waned, as did their impact. For
example, Ian Campbell notes that archaeological, linguistic and traditional evidence
all suggest that the period from c. ad 1100 to 1500 was an era of significant upheaval
and inter-island movement through much of Oceania.41
Such a world created a wider sense of community and belonging. Perhaps the most
articulate voice for this new vision has been the late Epeli Hau’ofa. In his 1994 article
‘Our Sea of Islands’, Hau’ofa asserts that:
The world of our ancestors was a large sea full of places to explore, to make their
homes in, to breed generations of seafarers like themselves. People raised in this
environment were at home with the sea. They played in it as soon as they could
walk steadily, they worked in it, they fought on it. They developed great skills for
navigating their waters, and the spirit to traverse even the few large gaps that
separated their island groups.
Theirs was a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled,
unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers.42
To overcome this legacy, Hau’ofa believes that Pacific Islanders must now decolonize
their minds, and recast their sense of identity by rediscovering the vision of their
ancestors for whom the Pacific was a boundless sea of possibilities and opportunities.
214
Others have begun to argue for the need to incorporate the sea into our vision in
ways that go beyond merely tracing the highways of sea travel between islands. Geoff
Irwin notes that: ‘Most prehistorians have concentrated on the evidence for intervals
of time between islands but it could help our explanations to give more consideration
to the intervening space – which is ocean – and the changing social and environmental
circumstances of the islands and people in it.’43 While Irwin suggests a way forward,
he does not discuss the ocean environment in detail. His work also remains rooted in
Western scientific discourse. The only discussion of Islanders’ conceptions of the
ocean relates to their navigational techniques.
The sea must also be seen as a cultural space in the worldview of the inhabitants
of the islands. Hau’ofa makes this point in a sequel to ‘Our Sea of Islands’. He notes
‘for us in Oceania, the sea defines us, what we are and have always been. As the great
Caribbean poet Derek Wolcott put it, the sea is history’.44 Few studies examine the
sea as both a physical and cultural space. Three works on Pacific seascapes are
noteworthy in this regard: Bob Johannes’ Words of the Lagoon, Michael D. Lieber’s
More Than a Living and Edvard Hviding’s Guardians of Marovo Lagoon.45 Johannes’
book is essentially a study of fishing knowledge and practice, reflecting his background
in marine biology. An anthropologist by training, Lieber traces the role of fishing
activities in the social, political and ritual life of the inhabitants of Kapingamarangi
Atoll. Hviding’s work is the most comprehensive. Also trained in anthropology, he
attempts to knit together the physical and cultural worlds that make up the territory
of the people of the Marovo Lagoon in the Solomon Islands. To Hviding, ‘the sea
plays a crucial role in Marovo as a focus of cultural and social relations; it is the
context for practice, interaction, and encounters, and is a cornerstone of Marovo
identity, history, and material sustenance’.46 He suggests that the inhabitants of the
lagoon construct their perception of nature through their day-to-day use of that
environment. It is not a cultural system that is merely transferred from the mind of
the elders to the memory of the young. Such a system would be imposed upon the
environment, but not influenced by it. There is no nature–culture dichotomy here.
The Marovo peoples’ view of nature emerges from engagements with the environment
in multiple forms of knowledge and practice.47 Hviding’s work is also significant in
demonstrating that some maritime environments can be endowed with as much
cultural value and detail as terrestrial environments.
The general consensus is now that the first Pacific Islanders were skilled seafarers
and explorers who evolved sophisticated navigational techniques involving waves,
swells, stars and signs of land such as land-based seabirds to map the oceans as well
as the lands they came across. Linguistic reconstructions of their proto-language
suggest they came into the Pacific with canoes and food storage techniques capable
of supporting long open sea voyages into the unknown which then evolved in situ
over time.48 Early European explorers such as Captain Cook marveled at the seafaring
capabilities of Pacific Islanders and their canoes, many of which exceeded those of
Cook in both carrying capacity and maneuverability. To traditional navigators,
islands were not tiny specks in a vast sea but rather broad screens of signs such as
shore-based seabirds fishing up to 50 miles out to sea and returning home at dusk,
reflections of land and near-shore surfaces on the underside of clouds, and the pattern
of waves bounced off or diverted around island barriers. These signs considerably
expanded the navigator’s target area and therefore made voyaging less haphazard.49
215
Few Island communities were restricted to one island. They often travelled by sea,
and knew or suspected worlds beyond their usual voyaging range. Expectations of
forces from beyond the horizon were deeply embedded in their worldviews long
before the tall ships of Europeans sailed into view. Centuries of experience had taught
them that new lands, new opportunities and new and old threats hovered just beyond
the walls of heaven where sea met sky and which defined the boundaries of the world
of usual experiences. Pacific Islander communities were highly localized in their
affinities, expansive, even regional in their interactions, and subject to rapid and
significant changes resulting from external influences.50
Studies since Hau’ofa’s call for a re-examination of indigenous maritime history
have detailed a variety of ways in which the oceanic environment shaped Islander
societies, and Islanders shaped the sea. Most felt at home in the water. The waters of
the Pacific were cultural seascapes rich in symbolic meaning; crowded with
navigational markers, symbols of tenure, fishing and surfing sites, and reminders of
gods and spirits in the form of maritime familiars and sites of their exploits. These
seascapes altered as territories changed hands, navigational knowledge expanded
and contracted, and storms and climate effected reef and shore configurations, and
the distribution of species. To truly understand Pacific Islanders’ relationship with
the sea it is necessary to look at all maritime activities; swimming, diving, fishing,
seafaring and navigation, boat building, religion and ritual, naval warfare and
strategies for dealing with familiar outsiders and unexpected intrusions.51
The Atlantic is much less well endowed with seas of islands, and those it does
contain lacked the indigenous seafaring traditions and marine economies of the
Pacific. Felipe Fernández-Armesto and David Abulafia have both characterized the
tropical eastern Atlantic archipelagos of the Madeira group, the Azores, the Canaries,
the Cape Verde Islands and São Tome as an Atlantic Mediterranean because
civilization was transplanted here by southern European cultures into islands that
with the exception of the Canaries were uninhabited. Nautical technology and
navigational limitations created an island world that traded within itself and back
with Europe, but lacked the infrastructure to push further east despite the belief
shared with Pacific Islanders that more islands surely lay ahead awaiting discovery
and colonization.52 The Caribbean was the other sea space within the Atlantic world
that was a sea of islands with well-established indigenous cultures spread throughout
its islands when Europeans first arrived. While the shores of the Caribbean’s
continental margins hosted elaborate civilizations with monumental stone
architecture, elaborate ritual and sophisticated agriculture as occurred in a few Pacific
archipelagos such as those of Hawai’i and Tonga,53 most island cultures of the
Caribbean left less grand legacies. Many of their coastal inhabitants shared with
Pacific Islanders a heavy reliance on the sea for sustenance, while keeping a wary eye
out for sea raids from marauding Carib peoples. By and large however, their maritime
technology and sophistication did not match that of the Pacific.
Three themes and approaches stand out in Atlantic studies to an historian trained
in Pacific ways of seeing. The first is that the sea is primarily viewed as either a neutral
or hostile passage for people, ideas, germs and goods, but not as a habitat. Second,
despite brilliant works of environmental history that have set the standard for Pacific
specialists to follow such as Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange, the focus of
Atlantic studies is overwhelmingly cultural, especially the creation of hybrid creole
216
cultures or colonial offshoots of founding European nations and their relations with
their European founding nation – the English Atlantic, the Portuguese Atlantic and
so on. Lastly, indigenous peoples are portrayed overwhelmingly as victims, especially
of disease, or as silent and marginalized with the possible exception of post–slave
trade West African history.
PACIF IC AP P ROACHES FOR ATL ANTIC S P ACE S

Studies such as this volume continue a long tradition among Atlantic historians of
periodically rethinking their approaches in highly creative ways. Today, perhaps
more so than ever before, Atlantic World scholars appear more willing than ever to
adopt new ways of reflecting upon and extending this now mature and increasingly
crowded field of historical endeavour. In a recent review of Atlantic scholarship,
Alison Games noted that the Atlantic as an ocean and the continents that bound it
are modern creations that have been superimposed upon smaller worlds perceived by
earlier generations – the Atlantic has been viewed as a number of seas for most of its
history.54 Increasingly trans-Atlantic and later global exchanges of peoples, goods
and pathogens linked these worlds and gave them a common destiny and coherence
formerly lacking. The price has perhaps been to lose sight of or marginalize local
interactions with local environments, and particularly with the sea.
A re-exploration of these local maritime worlds will not necessarily unravel the
intellectual coherence of the Atlantic World, but rather modify and enrich it by
expanding zones of cultural interaction out to sea where cultural boundaries are more
fluid and contested, and adding more of a human–environment interaction dimension
to Atlantic studies. Were the first trans-Atlantic cultures essentially mono-cultural,
homeland–colony relationships within distinct British, French, Spanish worlds spanning
the Atlantic but not part of the Atlantic, or did they arise offshore as multicultural and
multilingual exchanges between fisher-folk who were divided by national jurisdictions
in which they were marginal but bonded by the dangers of the sea? Coming from the
Pacific where European whaling and trading vessels were soon host to crews drawn
from across the Pacific and Asia, I have always wondered why more is not made of
incidents such as that noted by Michel Mollat du Jourdin in his Europe and the Sea that
even when their nations were engaged in the Hundred Years’ War during the fourteenth
century, British and French fishers could still work together and interact peacefully.55
Five maritime themes common to the Pacific that might enhance Atlantic World
historians’ efforts to make the sea a more integral part of Atlantic history: the near to
shore sea as a human habitat; the sea as a culturally differentiated space; the sea as a
contested space, and sea as a zone of culture contact, and finally the sea as a decisive
influence on human history rather than merely an environmental stage for history.
All are present in Atlantic histories, but most are marginal in influence.
The sea was an integral and welcome part of coastal dwelling Pacific Islanders’
daily lives. The sights, sounds and smells of the sea pervaded their lives, while the
tastes of the sea were often on their lips. Marine species made up a significant part of
the diet. Cook’s expeditions recorded 150 types of fish known by Tahitians in the
1770s, at least forty-eight of which were identified as edible.56 They felt at ease in the
sea, and excelled at swimming and diving. The missionary William Ellis went so far
as to describe Hawai’ians as ‘almost a race of amphibious beings.’ He detailed how
217
Familiar with the sea at birth, they lose all dread of it, and seem nearly as much
at home in the water as on dry land. There are few children who are not taken
into the sea by their mothers the second or third day after birth, and many who
can swim as soon as they can walk.57
Ellis’s description is not isolated. Numerous observers were struck by how comfortable
Islanders were in the water, and often described them in terms usually reserved for
marine creatures. There are a number of accounts of Islanders surviving for long
periods in the water, or swimming long distances in rough seas. When the Tahitian
Tamaha took offence at the treatment meted out to him by the boatswain’s mate on
a United States’ vessel sailing from the Marquesas Islands, he jumped overboard and
swam off. He did so despite the fact that their last port of call was 20 miles distant,
and ‘it was blowing fresh with a considerable sea.’ Tamaha made it back safely,
claiming to have been in the water for one day and two nights.58
In contrast, many British seamen could not, and still cannot, swim. Contemporary
British writer James Hamilton-Paterson found that most of the crew of a lifeboat in
the British fishing community of Fraserburgh could not swim. Only recent generations
had learnt to swim in the comfort of indoor swimming pools as part of their school
education. Most displayed an almost fatalistic attitude to the sea, derived from an
underlying assumption that once you fall into the sea’s clutches you are finished.59
This outlook may simply reflect the grim realities of the colder latitudes and waters
of the north Atlantic, but it is also true that these feelings run deep in European sea
cultures and have a long heritage. Cultural attitudes affect our ability at sea. Our
bodies are insulated with subcutaneous fat like marine mammals, so that we are
buoyant and streamlined. The more relaxed you are in the water the less chance you
have of drowning. Something like 15 percent of all drownings are ‘dry drownings’,
as people panic when they inhale their first water, sending their larynx into violent
spasms that result in suffocation.60
The use of the sea as a place for leisure and social gatherings is a relatively recent
phenomenon in European cultures. Until the nineteenth century many coastlines
were almost deserted outside of ports. Watchtowers and lighthouses were perhaps
the two main structures associated with European coasts, and both were responses to
dangerous elements from the sea.61 The Atlantic coasts of North America were only
subject to hostile fleets periodically and correspondingly evolved different cultural
landscapes along their shores.62 Whether they embraced the sea more than their
European cousins in swimming ability is unclear, but a history of trans-Atlantic
variations in swimming and maritime leisure activities strikes one as an important
way to embrace the sea as a factor in Atlantic cultural construction and identity.
Cultural attitudes not only affect our comfort in the sea but also how we map and
otherwise percieve the sea. Hawai’ian sources are among the richest repository of sea
lore in the Pacific and confirm Hviding’s observations that Solomon Island cultural
maps of the sea both affect and are affected by practical use of the sea. The seas
surrounding the Hawai’ian islands were divided into regions on the basis of which
aquatic aumakua (spirits) and gods held sway. The waters off O’ahu were protected
from man-eating sharks by order of the shark gods Kanehunamoku and Kamohoali’i.
Hawai’ians claimed that in 1834 a rogue shark was killed by guardian shark aumakua
off Waikiki when it came seeking food.63 A number of fishing grounds were marked
218
out by ‘Ai’ai, the son of the fishing god Ku’ula-kai. Various sites mark places of
significance on ‘Ai’ai’s voyages of discovery. Thus a long thin outcrop of pahoehoe
lava on the Hana coastline at Leho’ula is the backbone of the giant puhi (eel) slain by
‘Ai’ai for raiding his father’s fishponds. The puhi was called Koona, and had made its
home in a nearby sea cave called Ka-puka-ulua (the hole of the crevalle). Prior to this
it had lived in the sea just off Wailau on the windward coast of Moloka’i. However,
it had moved to Hana after a battle with a large mano (shark) at Wailau. A large sea
cave marked the spot where Koona had killed the mano by causing part of a sea cliff
to collapse upon it.64 While most fishing occurred near to shore, deeper offshore
waters were also exploited regularly; by trolling, angling, netting near the surface,
and long lining or more rarely by the use of traps. Traps might be set down to depths
of seventy-five fathoms, while some Hawai’ian long lines used for benthic species
could reach down 1200 feet. The result was knowledge of the seabed beyond the
sight of the naked eye, and less anxiety about what dwelt below the surface.65
Ocean depths have always held a fascination and fear for Europeans. They were
unknown and unknowable until well into the twentieth century. It was only in the
last century that European science overturned a long-held belief that water increased
in density as well as pressure with depth. Until then, it was believed that water density
caused sunken ships and drowned sailors to drift suspended at middle depths
according to their weight. Below this, was the azoic layer, forever dark, freezing and
lifeless because of the inability of the sun’s rays to penetrate it.66 The Atlantic passage
was feared with considerable trepidation by many seafarers and successful arrival at
the destination was seen as an act of providence.67 European cultures generally exhibit
fear and hatred of sharks in equal measure in dramatic contrast to Pacific Islanders
distinguishing between friendly and hostile sharks and adoption of individual sharks
as guardian ancestral spirits. On the other hand, tales of close relationships between
sea peoples and seals and dolphins are common to both the Pacific and Atlantic.
Tales of silkies linking humans and seals along the west coasts of the British Isles
resemble stories of humans mating with dolphins and porpoises common throughout
Micronesia. Associated clans refrained from killing or eating them, and often had
porpoise tattoo designs on their bodies.68
Many Pacific Islanders maintained tenure claims offshore. The most detailed
studies deal with the Western Carolines, where the sea was crowded with fishing
banks, reefs, and smaller, uninhabited atolls that were regularly exploited. Evidence
collected around the turn of the twentieth century reveals that Puluwatese fished on
Oraurau-feis (Manila Bank) southwest of Puluwat, Suat Reef (Enderby Bank) to the
northwest, Asebar Reef in the east, and Maianjor to the southeast. All these fisheries
were less than a day from Puluwat. Canoes would leave about midnight to arrive at
the fishing grounds early the next day. After fishing for the remainder of the day, they
departed in the evening, and arrived back at Puluwat the following day. Most of
these fishing grounds lie between 20 miles and the 100 mile average overnight sailing
range from Puluwat.69
Maritime rights needed to be constantly protected and asserted. Confrontations
occurred along borders and within maritime territories, and ranged from low-level
raiding of individual fish traps to attempts to permanently seize control of enemy
fishing grounds. Polish ethnographer Jan Kubary noted that in Palau it was ‘considered
perfectly natural to rob the traps of the weaker neighboring villages, although the same
219
offence practiced against kin or fellow villagers would not be accepted’.70 When the
trader Andrew Cheyne visited Yap in 1864 he found that the people of Tomil and
Weeloey were at war after the Tomil people killed two Weeloey men over a fishing
ground dispute.71 On other occasions groups attempted to forcibly seize fisheries. The
districts of Ko’olau and Kona on the Hawai’ian island of Moloka’i went to war over a
disputed fishing ground. Kona emerged victorious in battle and held on to the fishery.72
Most cultural contacts at sea did not result in violence. Pacific Island historians
have particularly focused on the dynamics of culture contact. Their approaches and
focus has potential application to the Atlantic World, particularly at sea where
historian David Chappell argues ships became liminal spaces that extended the usual
coastal zone of contact out to sea. Broadly speaking, three approaches dominate. In
the 1990s a hotly contested debate took place on the nature of western contact
between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins on why Hawai’ians killed
Captain James Cook after initially treating him with great reverence. Sahlins advocated
that culturally specific worldviews were key determinants of actions in situations of
culture contact, and Obeyesekere argued for more pragmatic, universally understood
influences behind actions. Historian Ian Campbell argues that a distinct culture of
contact arose as both sides realized they faced unusual circumstances and resorted to
more flexible behaviour themselves in an attempt to accommodate these circumstances.73
Much of this culture contact between Pacific Islanders and Europeans took place
at sea as a number of individuals moved between cultures in the years following
sustained European contact. From 1770 vessels themselves became zones of
encounter, as Islanders took the opportunity to travel on Western vessels. What
began as a trickle of invited guests in the late 1700s and early 1800s, became a flood
as Islanders who eagerly sought employment on commercial vessels. Hawai’ians,
Tahitians, and Māori were particularly prominent as crew because of their islands’
popularity as ports of call. Most Islanders who travelled on these vessels spent their
time within Oceania, with occasional visits to ports on the Pacific Rim such as Sydney
and Valparaiso. Some sailed into the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.74
Melanesians joined this outpouring from the 1860s when vessels began
recruiting them as labour for the emerging plantation economies of settler colonies
such as Queensland, Fiji and New Caledonia.75 Islanders travelled out of a sense of
curiosity and adventure, or a desire to free themselves from constraints at home. Like
earlier Polynesian crew members on Western vessels they hoped to enhance their
status through the exotic tales and goods they returned with. The Melanesian labour
trade involved tens of thousands of people and has generated significant interest
among historians. Interpretations broadly divide between those seeing it as
exploitation and deceit and those seeing it as a process in which Islanders had a great
deal of choice and control.76
In most books and articles the environment is relegated to the general introduction
that outlines environmental and cultural structures to set the stage for the human
drama that then unfolds. A few works by archaeologists explore the potential of a
more thorough integration of environmental considerations into historical narratives.
In Tom Dye’s study of Marquesan fishing, and Kirch’s component of the Anahulu
study, changes in resource use are related to particular historical eras, albeit in a
largely generalized, systemic way.77 While regular, seasonal events shaped the rhythm
of human activity, shorter-term, less predictable elements of the environment such as
220
typhoons also intruded into the actions and attitudes of Pacific Islanders. On occasion,
such intrusions had dramatic and far-reaching implications for the communities that
they affected. For example, a super typhoon in the late eighteenth century seems to
have caused such devastation and deaths in the Caroline Islands that it shattered the
power of two dynasties and required the resettlement of one island.78 The most
obvious point of comparison is the impact of typhoons in the Pacific and hurricanes
in the Caribbean and Atlantic seaboard of North America. Pacific Island societies in
Micronesia’s Typhoon Alley extend their resource base through marriage-based kin
links, magazine economies and maintaining sophisticated sailing technology to enable
temporary or permanent relocation.
There is one final argument for making the sea more central to Atlantic and all
ocean history. Criticisms of Atlantic historians for converting Atlantic crossings into
mere passages of time across undifferentiated maritime spaces somewhat distort the
reality of the time-space continuum at sea. The Tongan concepts of Ta and Va
construct oceanic space, and particularly maritime space, and time as fluid and inter-
related. Pacific Islander notions of space have long been recognized as distinct from
Western ones, but the closer linking of both to the conception of time is an important
refinement that moves us closer towards core issues of cultural identity.79 It is also an
important way of spanning the divide between cultural and environmental
explanations in ocean history. Humans are far less able to shape the sea than the
land, and so must adjust their rhythms and cultures to suit. Closer examination of the
interaction of island and ocean space and time may therefore reveal key influences on
Pacific Islander culture and identity, and perhaps to a lesser extent that of Atlantic
coastal peoples as well? As scholars as diverse as Michael Adas and Greg Dening
have argued, concepts of time lie at the heart of cultural identity and social, political
and economic relationships.
NOTE S
1 These figures are used here as relative measures rather than absolute measures. They are
taken from A.G. Poynter (ed.), The Grolier Atlas of Asia and the World, London, George
Philip & Son, 1985, 7, which lists the relative sizes of oceans and seas in descending order
as: Pacific 165,721,000 sq km, Atlantic Ocean 81,660,000 sq km, Indian Ocean 73,422,000
sq km, Arctic Ocean, 14,351,000 sq km, and the Mediterranean Sea, 2,996,000 sq km.
This calculation distinguishes some contiguous bodies of water to the Atlantic (Caribbean,
1,942,000 sq km, Gulf of Mexico, 1,813,000 sq km, and North Sea, 575,000 sq km) and
Pacific (Bering Sea, 2,274,000 sq km, Sea of Okhotsk, 1,528,000 sq km, East China Sea,
1,248,000 sq km, and Sea of Japan, 1,049,000 sq km) as separate entities.
2 William L. Thomas Jr., ‘The Pacific Basin: An Introduction’, in A.P. Vayda (ed.), Cultures
of the Pacific: An Anthropological Reader, Garden City, New York, The Natural History
Press, 1963, 7–38, and Ben Finney, ‘The Other One-Third of the Globe’, Journal of World
History, vol. 5(2), 1994, 273–97.
3 Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 6 (1), 1994, 148–61,
and K.R. Howe, Nature, Culture, and History: The ‘Knowing of Oceania’, Honolulu,
University of Hawai’i Press, 2000.
4 Karen Wigen, ‘Introduction’, Oceans of History Forum, The American Historical Review,
vol. 111(3), June 2006, 717–21 (http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.3/
wigen.html, accessed 2 August 2014), para 1, and Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History:
Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, The American Historical Review, vol. 111(3),
221
June 2006, 741–57 (http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.3/games.htm,

accessed 2 August 2014), paras 10, 17–19.
5 Paul D’Arcy (ed.), Peoples of the Pacific: The History of Oceania to 1870, Aldershot,
Ashgate Publishing, 2008, xix–xlv.
6 See Geoff R. Clark (ed.), Dumont d’Urville’s Divisions of Oceania: Fundamental Precincts
or Arbitrary Constructs? special issue of The Journal of Pacific History, 38(2), 2003.
7 Some works span these regional dividing lines within academia. For works linking
Southeast Asia and Oceania for example, see P. Swadling, Plumes from Paradise: Trade
Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and Their Impact on New Guinea and Nearby Islands
until 1920, Boroko: Papua New Guinea National Museum in association with Robert
Brown and Associates, 1996, and Peter Bellwood, James Fox & Darrell Tryon (eds.), The
Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Canberra: Department of
Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National
University, 1995. For recent revisionist history of Southeast Asian–Oceanic interaction
see Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012, and Paul D’Arcy, “Sea Worlds: Pacific and Southeast
Asian history centered on the Philippines” in Rila Mukherjee (ed.),Oceans Connect: New
Directions in Maritime Studies, Primus Books, Delhi, 2012, 20–35.
8 R.C. Green, ‘Near and Remote Oceania: Disestablishing Melanesia in Culture History’, in
Andrew Pawley (ed.), Man and a Half: Essays in Pacific Anthropology and Ethnobiology in
Honour of Ralph Bulmer, Auckland, Polynesian Society, 1991, 491–502, especially 493–95.
9 See E. Alison Kay, Little Worlds of the Pacific: A Essay on Pacific Basin Biogeography,
Harold L. Lyon Arboretum Lecture no. 9, May 9, 1979, Lyon Arboretum, Honolulu,
1980, 25, 33.
10 Geoffrey Irwin, The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
11 Excluding the Santa Cruz Group, 352 kilometres to the east of the main chain.
12 Aotearoa is the Polynesian word for modern day New Zealand and is used here to refer
to that landmass before there was a significant European presence there in the 1840s.
13 For a good succinct summary, see Douglas L. Oliver, Oceania: The Native Cultures of
Australia and the Pacific Islands, 2 vols., Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1989,
vol. 1, 409–12.
14 On seasonal wind patterns and their variability see Oliver, Oceania, vol. 1, 14, and Ben
R. Finney et al, ‘Wait for the West Wind’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 98(3),
1989, 261–302, especially 265–67, 272–73.
15 Oliver, Oceania, vol. 1, 15–17.
16 Christopher S. Lobban and Maria Schefter, Tropical Pacific Island Environments,
Mangilao, Guam, University of Guam Press, 1997, 104–6.
17 This overview is based on Harold V. Thurman, Essentials of Oceanography, Columbus,
Ohio, Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co., 1983, 261–62; David B. Enfield, ‘Historical and
Prehistorical Overview of El Nino/Southern Oscillation’, in Henry F. Diaz & Vera
Markgraf (eds.), El Nino: Historical and Paleoclimatic Aspects of the Southern Oscillation,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, 95–117; Lobban & Schefter (1996) 103–7;
and Tom Spencer, ‘Changes in the Global Environment: Uncertain Prospects for the
Pacific’, in Ben Burt & Christian Clerk (eds.), Environment and Development in the Pacific
Islands, National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University,
Canberra, 1997, 243–63, especially 253–54.
18 Good overviews of global weather patterns associated with the ENSO phenomenon are
found in Enfield (1992) 100–102, and Matthias Tomczak & J. Stuart Godfrey, Regional
Oceanography: An Introduction, Oxford, Pergamon, 1994, 364–67. A recreation of
historical ENSO patterns using such data is attempted by William H. Quinn, ‘A Study of
222
Southern Oscillation-related Climatic Activity for A.D. 622–1990 incorporating Nile

River Flood Data’, in Henry F. Diaz & Vera Markgraf (eds.), El Nino: Historical and
Paleoclimatic Aspects of the Southern Oscillation, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1992, 119–49.
19 Good discussions of tidal patterns are found in Harold J. Wiens, Atoll Environment and
Ecology, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1962, 207–15; William A. Anikouchine, &
Richard W. Sternberg, The World Ocean: An Introduction to Oceanography, Prentice
Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973, 133–38; and Thurman (1983) 152–56.
20 This discussion of Pacific currents is based on information drawn from Thurman (1983)
125–35; Anikouchine & Stenberg (1973) 96–117; Wiens (1962) 188–90; Tomczak &
Godfrey (1994) 118–31; and Oliver (1989) vol.1, pp. 7–8.
21 For example, see Rudolf S. Scheltma, ‘Long-distance Dispersal by Planktonic Larvae of
Shoal-water Benthic Invertebrates among Central Pacific Islands’, in Kay, E. Alison (ed.),
A Natural History of the Hawai’ian Islands: Selected Readings II, University of Hawai’i
Press, Honolulu, 1994, 171–86, especially 178–79.
22 On ocean food chains see Thurman (1983) 258–60; Anikouchine & Sternberg (1973) 235–39;
and Taivo Laevastu, & Herbert A. Larkins, Marine Fisheries Ecosystem: Its Quantitative
Evaluation and Management, Fishing News Books Ltd., Farnham, Surrey, 1981, 20–21.
23 On lagoon-reef ecosystem productivity see Sequoia Shannon & Joseph R. Morgan,
‘Management of Insular Pacific Marine Ecosystems’, in Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Norton
Ginsburg & Joseph R. Morgan (eds.), Ocean Yearbook 10, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1993, 196–213, especially 199–200; Asahitaro Nishimura, ‘Fishing in Indonesia
from the Marine Ethnological Viewpoint with Respect to Wallace’s Line’, in Bela Gunda
(ed.), The Fishing Culture of the World: Studies in Ethnology, Culture and Folklore
(2 vols.), Budapest, Akademiai Kiado, 1984, vol.2, 677–703, 696–97.
24 For discussions on the optimal conditions for fisheries see G.D. Sharp, ‘Fish Populations
and Fisheries: Their Perturbations, Natural and Man-Induced’, in H. Postma & J.J.
Zijlstra (eds.), Ecosystems of the World 27: Continental Shelves, Amsterdam, Elsevier,
1988, 155–202, especially 172; Anikouchine & Sternberg (1973) 214ff.; Thurman (1983)
224, 264; David Sopher, The Sea Nomads: A Study of the Maritime Boat People of
Southeast Asia, Singapore, National Museum of Singapore, 1977, 22–25, 31, 34; and T.
Stell Newman, ‘Man in the Prehistoric Hawai’ian Ecosystem’, in E. Alison Kay (ed.), A
Natural History of the Hawai’ian Islands: Select Readings, University of Hawai’i Press,
Honolulu, 1972, 559–603, especially p. 577.
25 Lorimer Fison, Tales from Old Fiji, London, The De La More Press, 1907, 162–63.
26 R.A. Derrick, A History of Fiji, volume 1, Suva, Government Press, 1968 (reprint of 1950
revised edition), p. 37, note 1.
27 Max W. de Laubenfels, ‘Ocean Currents in the Marshall Islands’, Geographical Review,
vol. 40(2), 1950, 254–59, especially 258.
28 Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea, Island Press, Washington D.C., 2010,
17–44.
29 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and
Community, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, 3–5; and Thurman (1983), 129–30.
30 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II, 2 vols., New York, Harper and Row, 1972–73; vol. I, 14; K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and
Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985; and Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean,
London, Routledge, 2003.
31 Chauduri (1985) 21.
32 See Arif Dirlik, ‘The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional
Structure’, Journal of World History, vol. 3(1), 1992, 55–79 for an overview of the concept.
223
33 Dirlik (1992) 64.

34 See O.H.K. Spate, The Pacific since Magellan: Vol. 1: The Spanish Lake, Canberra,
Australian National University Press, 1979.
35 The terms Pacific Islander and Islander are used here interchangeably to refer to Pacific
Islanders in general, while the terms European and Western are used interchangeably to refer
to influences and people emanating from European and North American Caucasian societies.
36 Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Contending Approaches’, in Donald Denoon (ed.), The Cambridge
History of the Pacific Islanders, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 3–36, 6.
37 This scheme is most elegantly argued in P.V. Kirch, The Evolution of the Polynesian
Chiefdoms, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, 71–216. For a concise
overview on the evolution of theory in Oceanic prehistory see P.V. Kirch, ‘Prehistory’ in
Alan Howard & R. Borofsky (eds.), Developments in Polynesian Ethnology, Honolulu,
University of Hawai’i Press, 1989, 13–46.
38 K.R. Howe, ‘Pacific Islands History in the 1980s: New Directions or Monograph
Myopia?’, Pacific Studies, vol. 3(1), 1979, 81–90, 81.
39 O.H.K. Spate, ‘The Pacific as an Artifact’, in Niel Gunson (ed.), The Changing Pacific:
Essays in Honour of H.E. Maude, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1978, 32–45, 34.
40 Irwin (1992) 204. For an early exploration of this concept, see P.V. Kirch, ‘Exchange
Systems and Inter-island Contact in the Transformation of an Island Society: the Tikopia
Case’, in P.V. Kirch (ed.), Island Societies: Archaeological Approaches to Evolution and
Transformation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, 33–41.
41 I.C. Campbell, A History of the Pacific Islands, Christchurch, University of Canterbury
Press, 1989, 36.
42 Epeli Hau’ofa (1994) 153–54.
43 Irwin (1992) 136.
44 Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 10(2), 1998, 392–410, 405.
45 R.E. Johannes, Words of the Lagoon: Fishing and Marin Lore in the Palau District of
Micronesia, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1981; Michael D. Lieber, More Than
a Living: Fishing and the Social Order on a Polynesian Atoll, Boulder, Colorado, Westview
Press, 1994; Edvard Hviding, Guardians of Marovo Lagoon: Practice, Place, and Politics
in Maritime Melanesia, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1996.
46 Hviding (1996) xiii.
47 Hviding (1996) 27, 369, 371.
48 See K.R. Howe (ed.), Waka Moana: Voyages of the Ancestors: the Discovery and Settlement
of the Pacific, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.
49 See Ben Finney and Sam Low, ‘Navigation’ in K.R. Howe (ed.), Waka Moana: Voyages of
the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific, Honolulu, University of
Hawai’i Press, 2007, 154–97.
50 Paul D’Arcy, The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania,
Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
51 D’Arcy (2006), and Howe (2007).
52 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492, London, Macmillan, 1987, 152, and David
Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans’, in W.V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2005, 64–93, 80–82.
53 See for example, Kirch (1984) 223–63.
54 Games (2006) paras 4–5.
55 Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Europe and the Sea, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1993,
152. He does note that on other occasions fishers from different nations came to blows
at sea – 147–52.
224
56 Gordon R. Lewthwaite, ‘Man and the Sea in Early Tahiti: Maritime Economy through
European Eyes’, Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 7(1), 1966, 28–53, 34, citing J.R. Forster,
Observations made during a Voyage round the World, London, G. Robinson, 1778, 440–41.
57 William Ellis, Polynesian Researches: Hawai’i, Rutland, Vermont, Charles E. Tuttle Co.,
Publishers, 1969a (reprint of new edition, 1842), 369.
58 Captain David Porter, Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean, 2 vols., Upper
Saddle, New Jersey, The Gregg Press, 1970, 140, 180.
59 James Hamilton-Paterson, Seven-Tenths: the Sea and Its Thresholds, London, Vintage,
1993, 198–99.
60 Thomas Farber, On Water, Hopewell, New Jersey, The Ecco Press, 1994, 48–49.
61 Jourdin (1993) 41, 92, 195–96, 223, and Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery
of the Seaside 1750–1840, London, Penguin, 1995.
62 John R. Stilgoe, Alongshore, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994.
63 Dorothy Barrere (ed.), Ka Po’eKahiko: The People of Old, by Samuel Kamakau, Honolulu,
Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1964, 73–74.
64 On the legend of ‘Ai’ai see Martha Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology, Honolulu; University
of Hawaii Press, 1970, 22–23.
65 See; Hommon (1975) 123. One fathom equals 6 feet.
66 Hamilton-Paterson (1992) 151, 154–56.
67 Steele (1986) 11–12.
68 See William H. Alkire, ‘Porpoises and Taro’, Ethnology, vol. 7(3), 1968, 280–89, and
Katharine Luomala, ‘Porpoises and Taro in Gilbert Islands’ Myths and Customs’, Fabula,
vol.18(1), 1977, pp. 201–11.
69 H.P. Damm, P. Hambruch, and E. Sarfert, ‘Inseln um Truck (Polowat, Hok, Satowal)’, in
G. Thilenius (ed.), Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition 1908–1910, vol. II, B, VI(1935),
1–288, Hamburg, Friederichsen, De Gruyter & Co., 1935, 50, 56.
70 J.S. Kubary, Ethnograpische Beitrage zur Kenntnis de Karolinische – archipels, Leiden,
P.W.M. Trap, 1895, 148.
71 Andrew Cheyne, Journal of a Voyage to the Islands of the Western Pacific in Brigantine
‘Acis’ A. Cheyne Commander, 21 February 1864.
72 Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, 2 vols., Rutland, Vermont,
Charles E. Tuttle Co.,1969, 282.
73 See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in
the Pacific, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992, and Marshall Sahlins, How
‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1995. See also I.C. Campbell, ‘European-Polynesian Encounters: A Critique of the
Pearson Thesis’, The Journal of Pacific History, 29(2), 1994, 222–31.
74 See David A. Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanic Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships,
Armonk, New York, M.E. Sharpe, 1997, especially 28–40, 158–63.
75 K.R. Howe, Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement
to Colonial Rule, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1984, 329–43.
76 See Doug Munro, ‘Revisionism and its Enemies: Debating the Queensland Labour Trade’,
The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 30(2), 1995, 240–49. For the impact of returning
labourers, see Peter Corris, Passage, Port and Plantation: A History of Solomon Islands
Labour Migration, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1973, 111–25.
77 Tom Dye, ‘The Causes and Consequences of a Decline in the Prehistoric Marquesan Fishing
Industry’, in D.E. Yen & J.M.J. Mummery (eds.), Pacific Production Systems: Approaches
to Economic Prehistory, Canberra, Occasional Papers in Prehistory no. 18, Department of
Prehistory, RSPAS, Australian National University, Canberra, 1990, 70–84; and P.V. Kirch
The Archaeology of History. Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of
Hawai’i, vol. 2., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
225
78 D’Arcy (2006) 128–33.

79 On the centrality of senses of time to cultural identity, see Greg Dening’s ‘Reflection: On
Civilizing’ in his Islands and Beaches. Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas 1774–1880,
Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1980, 263–67, especially 264, and Michael Adas,
Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western
Dominance, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989, 241ff.
226
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AN ENSLAVED ENLIGHTENMENT
Rethinking the intellectual history
of the French Atlantic
Laurent Dubois
I n 1971, Michèle Duchet published Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières

(Anthropology and History in the Century of the Enlightenment), which provided
a sweeping analysis of the French production of knowledge about Africa and the
Americas during the eighteenth century. Her work remains one of the most careful
and convincing analyses of the complex and contradictory tangle of Enlightenment
intellectual currents that both celebrated the universality of the human race and put
forth hierarchical and differentialist theories about different groups that are often of
startling arrogance and racism.1
In a few early sections of her work, Duchet traced out how the Enlightenment
critiques of colonial slavery in the Caribbean emerged in the second half of the
eighteenth century in relation to the daily problem of colonial governance in the
colonies themselves. Administrators in the slave colonies of the Caribbean during this
period, she argued, were deeply concerned with the interrelated problems of
marronage (the frequent escape of the enslaved from the plantations), high mortality
and the violence of masters. They wrote extensively about these problems, creating
analyses and documents that informed the writing of central texts of the period,
particularly the Abbé Raynal’s multi-volume history of European colonialism,
L’Histoire des Deux Indes.2 The criticism of slavery that expanded over the course of
the eighteenth century, then, was not ‘the progress of a humanism that created its
own values and succeeded in imposing a conception of man’. In fact, the ‘humanism’
of the philosophes adjusted itself to economic, social and political realities, and
proposed solutions that coincided with those advocated at the same time by
administrators of different colonies and the clerks at the Bureau des colonies.3
Duchet placed the phenomenon of marronage at the centre of her analysis, noting
the continuous preoccupation with maroons (fugitive slaves) in texts stretching over
the entire eighteenth century. She called attention to ‘the persistence of an anxiety’
driven by ‘the impossibility of ending a rebellion’, arguing that the ongoing presence
of maroons created ‘a new situation’. Moreover, she insisted that the heroic slave
rebels who appeared in a number of Enlightenment works, affirming ‘the dignity of
man’ through the ‘refusal of injustice’, were directly based on ‘real models’ in the
Caribbean such as Makandal and Cudjoe. The ‘revolt’ that ‘found its voice’ in
227
– Laurent Dubois –
Enlightenment texts, then, had ‘already taken form in the plantations of Surinam or
Saint-Dominigue’, in insurrections that reflected ‘a collective attitude of refusal or
revolt’. The resistance practised in the Caribbean, therefore, was part of the field of
intellectual and political activity that comprised the Enlightenment. Even if, for the
most part, they did not themselves participate in the production of writing about the
basic questions regarding humanity, nature and rights that slavery raised, Duchet
suggested, enslaved rebels were nevertheless key actors in this broader history.4
Since Duchet’s work was published there has been a steadily growing interest
among scholars regarding the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers dealt with
questions of cultural difference, ‘race’ and slavery. This work has shown us the
variety and complexity of writing on these themes, and highlighted many of the
contradictions within the work of particular Enlightenment thinkers. However, this
work in intellectual history has not taken up the theoretical and methodological
challenge issued by Duchet: writing a history of the Enlightenment whose actors
include not only the familiar literate intellectuals that historians and theorists have
long studied, but others who did not for the most part articulate their political
philosophy in writing – the slaves.
Writing an intellectual history of the enslaved might strike many scholars of the
history of ideas as a quixotic enterprise. To do so, scholars obviously must confront
major obstacles: the fragmentary nature of the relevant written record, a dependence
on profoundly hostile observers for much of this record, and the necessity of reading
backwards from political action to political philosophy. But these obstacles are not
insurmountable. Historians working in Caribbean and African-American history
have for some time been engaged in exploring the history of political thought within
enslaved communities, providing us in the process with methods that can also be used
to gain a fuller understanding of the Atlantic currents of thinking that produced the
Enlightenment. Hillary Beckles, for instance, has insisted that we move beyond the
idea that ‘slaves existed in an atheoretical world which was devoid of ideas’ and
‘political concepts’, and expand our understanding of the ways slaves ‘made definite
political analysis of the power structure they encountered’ and resisted in ways that
made them central protagonists in the demolition of slavery.5
In seeking to write an intellectual history of the enslaved, we should begin by
acknowledging that in their dependence upon small numbers of literate members or
allies for news, and in their focus on oral exchange of information and ideas, they
were in fact like many other communities throughout Europe and the Americas
during the same period. Even among elites, spoken transmission of ideas and news
was an important part of the intellectual process. Although the ability to participate
in textual production obviously enhanced these exchanges and expanded the distances
and modes of transmission through which they could take place, there is no convincing
reason to conserve a solid categorical distinction between the intellectual activities of
free and enslaved individuals. We should begin from the assumption that there was
an intellectual life within slave communities, and that this life involved movement
between ideas and action, between the abstract and the particular, between past,
present and future.
In this article I imagine how we might write a history of the Enlightenment – and
particularly its development in the French Atlantic – that integrates the thought and
action of a range of communities in France and the Caribbean. In doing so I build
228
– chapter 13: An enslaved Enlightenment –
upon the work of scholars who have insisted on the diversity of Enlightenment
thought’s engagement with questions of race and slavery. Sankar Muthu, for instance,
has recently emphasized that the term ‘the “Enlightenment” groups together an
extraordinarily diverse set of authors, texts, arguments, opinions, dispositions,
assumptions, institutions and practices’, and insists on the need to ‘pluralize’ our
understanding of the political thought of this period, notably by acknowledging
important strands of thought that issued powerful critiques of European imperialism.
The ‘pluralization’ of the Enlightenment he proposes, however, focuses on what I see
as only one particular field within it: that of written texts generated, distributed and
debated within continental Europe. Here I argue, following Duchet, that scholars of
the Enlightenment should consider taking another step in expanding their
understanding of the diversity of the thought of this period. By developing a truly
Atlantic approach to the history of the ideas during this period, I suggest, we can
make connections not only between literate elites on both sides of the ocean but also
between the diverse spheres of intellectual debate which took place in a world that
was quite integrated by currents of trade in commodities, and in news and ideologies.
The construction of a more integrated intellectual history of the Enlightenment can
contribute to the broader rethinking under way in a variety of fields of the ways in
which the set of discursive and intellectual habits wrongly identified as ‘western’
thought emerged through the process of imperial conquest and consolidation, and
the responses it engendered.6
Because it produced both a stunningly successful slave revolution and, as a result,
numerous documents and memoirs about the course of this revolution, Saint-
Domingue’s slave revolution provides a particularly useful site for examining the
political culture within slave communities. This revolution, furthermore, ranks as
perhaps the greatest political triumph of the Age of Revolution, and it might even be
said that it best embodies the promises of Enlightenment universalism.7
In order to situate the political and intellectual contributions of this revolution, I
begin with an examination of recent scholarship on Enlightenment approaches to the
question of slavery and race. I then turn to a set of questions that are curiously absent
from this scholarship. What were the enslaved talking about and reading in the late
eighteenth century? How did they articulate their political visions and demands?
Although it is unlikely that we will ever have more than an extremely partial answer
to this question, there are enough traces to suggest that their access to intellectual and
political debates was wider than might be assumed.
A number of the classic and nearly sacred thinkers of the French Enlightenment
have been, during the past decades, on the receiving end of a blistering set of critiques
on the part of scholars concerned with the seeming contradiction between their
celebration of natural rights and their open justification for, or their lack of, direct
criticism of the Atlantic slavery that was a bedrock of their societies. Leading the
charge has been Louis Sala-Molins who, in two works published over a decade ago,
took Montesquieu and Rousseau, as well as abolitionist thinkers like the Marquis de
Condorcet and Dénis Diderot, to task for their racist views. More recently, Laurent
Estève has expanded Sala-Molins’s critical approach to Enlightenment treatments of
slavery through a close analysis of Montaigne, Rousseau, Buffon and Diderot.8
The best French representative of a ‘racist Enlightenment’ is the Comte de Buffon
who, in his Histoire naturelle, published between 1748 and 1778, laid out a
229
hierarchical portrait of the human species that not only justified but actually rendered
necessary the slavery of certain groups. A similar way of thinking informed the
approach of the Baron de Montesquieu, one of the central theorists of natural rights.
While in his L’Esprit des Lois, published in 1748, he argued that slavery was contrary
to natural rights, in the rest of his work he suggested that different climates required
different laws, and accepted the idea that slavery might be required in certain contexts.
Indeed, he went so far as to argue that while ‘peoples of the North’ were in a ‘coerced
state’ if they were not free, most people in warmer zones were in fact in a ‘violent’
state if they were not enslaved. He called the colonies of the Antilles ‘admirable’ and,
in his Pensées, wrote that ‘Negroes’ were so ‘naturally lazy’ that those who were
‘born free do nothing’. The broad principles of natural law laid out by Montesquieu
were immediately and comfortably denied to a good portion of the human race.9
Jean-Jacques Rousseau represents a more ambiguous case: Estève and Sala-Molins
lambaste him primarily for his ‘silence’ surrounding the actually existing slavery. As
Sala-Molins complains, having established that the word ‘slave’ and the word ‘rights’
are contradictory, Rousseau nevertheless speaks not a word in criticism of the blatant
violation of this principle in the French kingdom. Rousseau mentions the ‘sadness
and desperation’ of a group of people forced onto ships and brought far from their
homes by force: individuals from Iceland transported to Denmark. Rousseau must
have known about the slave trade, about slavery in the Caribbean, about the Code
Noir itself, yet he mentions none of them. The reality of the ‘middle passage’ is off
the page, in the distance, and appears barely as a trace: Rousseau mentions that the
‘Hottentots’ at the Cape of Good Hope are able to see, with their naked eyes, ships
on the sea that the Dutch can only see with the ‘aid of glasses’. Estève wonders
whether the ships they saw so clearly might be those carrying ‘human cargo’; but
Rousseau did not make this leap in his writing. Although Rousseau frequently and
incisively critiqued concrete examples of inequality and tyranny in his society, he
conspicuously avoided any attack on slavery as it actually existed. Although, to Sala-
Molins, Rousseau’s blindness to Atlantic slavery was inherited by the ‘revolutionaries
of 1789’, who had read Rousseau ‘very well’, ‘they were the ones who were the
slaves, and it was up to them to break their own chains and get rid of their tyrants’.
The problem of the enslaved in the Caribbean ‘was not part of the instruction manual
for the revolution’.10
The eighteenth century did have, as both Sala-Molins and Estève concede,
prominent thinkers who directly attacked slavery, detailing and decrying the horrors
of the middle passage and those inflicted by white masters in the Caribbean,
particularly Dénis Diderot in his famous contributions to the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire
des Deux Indes. Sankar Muthu has forcefully argued, through an examination of
Diderot’s contributions to Raynal’s work and his Supplément au Voyage de
Bougainville, that he articulated a powerful critique of imperialism by presenting
‘New World peoples as conscious, fully rational and cultural beings’ and, more
broadly, theorizing all humans as being ‘constitutively cultural beings’. Diderot, as
Muthu notes, ‘describes gleefully’ the prospect of Europeans ‘having their throats
slashed open’ by slaves. This is true both in his famous passage predicting the arrival
of a ‘Black Spartacus’ and in a lesser-known dialogue between a master and a slave
in which the latter tells the former not to ‘complain if my tears open your chest to find
your heart’ or ‘when you feel, in your cut-up intestines, the taste of death, which I
230
have stirred in with your food’. Diderot also, Muthu argues, insisted that Europe was
not superior to other cultures and had no right to impose its culture on other peoples.11
Estève, however, is less impressed by Diderot’s contributions, and notes that,
while Diderot took an important step in explicitly identifying slavery as a ‘crime’, his
work also includes many ambiguities and a hierarchical vision of blacks that remains
tied to the differentialist attitudes of other thinkers of the time. Sala-Molins,
meanwhile, acknowledges the contributions of the Marquis de Condorcet in his 1781
anti-slavery work Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres, but ultimately criticizes
Condorcet for presenting racist visions of slaves in his insistence on the need for an
extremely slow and gradual process of emancipation. Estève’s conclusion – which
differs in important ways from that of Muthu – was that even the most progressive
thinkers of the Enlightenment, such as Diderot, ultimately failed to ‘think difference’
outside of ‘hierarchy’. He writes that from the Enlightenment we should retain the
possibilities of universalism, but he also warns against letting the ‘celebration of
natural rights’ allow us to ‘make the corpses disappear from our closets’.12
Sala-Molins attacks a habit of convenient forgetting even more forcefully when he
asks, referring to the debates about the holocaust: ‘Who has ever asked the question:
“How can one think after Saint-Domingue?” We think peacefully after Saint-
Domingue.’ There was, he insists, a crucial link between the celebrated Enlightenment
and the brutality of slavery, and it is crucial for us to confront that. ‘How should we
read the Enlightenment? With the Code Noir in hand.’ The work of Sala-Molins and
Estève identifies, then, within Enlightenment discourse, a set of operations that are by
now all too familiar to students of slavery and emancipation, and empire more broadly:
universal claims were intertwined with justifications for exclusions based on the
incapacity of certain ‘others’ to enjoy their natural rights. We must confront the
Enlightenment, Estève and Sala-Molins suggest, not as a foundation for democracy and
humanism but as a set of discourses saturated with racism and hierarchical thinking.13
This critique, however, does not fully answer the challenge posted by Duchet
decades ago, for neither Sala-Molins nor Estève situate the complexities of
Enlightenment thought about slavery and the colonies within the complexities of the
social world that generated the knowledge they articulated. Despite the length of
trans-Atlantic journeys, information about the colonies was constantly circulating
through conversations among merchants, sailors, planters and all types of vagabonds
who travelled between Europe, Africa and the Americas, through newspapers and
travel accounts, novels and plays and, of course, administrative reports that made the
ocean crossing. And though the vast majority of slaves lived and died in the colonies,
slavery was not only a far-off problem: there were significant populations of slaves,
as well as free people of African descent, in London and Paris as well as port towns
like Bordeaux and Bristol. In both Britain and France, too, there were widely discussed
court cases through which some slaves won their freedom from masters by arguing
that enslavement was not legal within the boundaries of Europe. All of this meant
that European intellectuals lived in a world into which the colonies were integrated
on many levels. The multiple currents of Enlightenment thought were always already
shaped by the realities of the Americas, and the explosion of political thought and
activity that occurred after 1789 was rooted not only in France itself but in the larger
Atlantic world. It is this reality – of a world integrated not only through the circulation
of chained bodies and of the commodities slaves produced, but also through the
231
circulation of declamations, ideas and hopes generated by this onslaught of injustice

– that I would argue we need to understand better.
Sala-Molins takes to task the idea that the Enlightenment set in motion the Haitian
Revolution through a sarcastic reading of the ‘fable’ (included in, among other works,
C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins) that Toussaint Louverture was inspired by
Raynal’s work, particularly the passages calling for a ‘Black Spartacus’ to break the
chains of the slaves. In order to be so inspired, Sala-Molins writes, Louverture would
have had to read them while ‘systematically skipping’ the racist passages of the same
text. But, asks Sala-Molins, how did the rebel of Saint-Domingue ‘succeed in the
subtle academic exercise that consists in deducing from a discourse that, occasionally,
concerns him, what this discourse does not say or suggest, what it eliminates with
complete serenity and clarity?’ Having emphasized throughout his work that the
Enlightenment worked either openly to justify or wilfully to overlook slavery in the
Atlantic, Sala-Molins insists that it had no role in shaping revolution in the Caribbean:
‘The black, always a slave and still always standing, truly invented his liberty’.14
Are these, in fact, the terms of the choice before us as historians? Is the only
alternative to a reading that sees the Haitian Revolution as a derivative sideshow to the
French Revolution, which Sala-Molins rightly derides, to ridicule the idea of Louverture
reading Raynal, and to simplify the complexity of the Enlightenment to the point that
it is impossible for those who wish to resist slavery to draw on it in some form? Can
we not see the enslaved both as independent political and intellectual actors, inspired
by their own experiences and hardly dependent on masters or European administrators
for their agency or love of liberty, and – precisely because we see them as independent
political and intellectual actors – as readers, listeners, thinkers, and generally
participants in a broader Enlightenment debate? If we escape the prison of what Sala-
Molins rightly calls a ‘Franco-centric’ approach that sees everything emanating from
Paris, is our only choice to run headlong into another interpretive prison – a mirror
image – in which there are two worlds, one a corrupt and endlessly hypocritical world
of Europe and another a zone of spontaneous liberation in the Caribbean?
What if, instead, we seek to construct a picture of an integrated space of debate
over rights, of universalism, over governance and empire? What if we populate this
space with different actors, with different perspectives, and admit among the central
actors in this story the enslaved, for whom the questions of rights were never only
abstract? They, along with the widely recognized colonial free people of colour, were
participating in a debate at once profoundly real and inherently theoretical. To
understand the Atlantic as an integrated intellectual space is not to succumb to a
reading that places Europe at the centre of all intellectual production. Indeed, this
integration, I would argue, is the only way to destabilize the still-strong, at times
seemingly unmovable, presumption that Europeans and European colonists were the
exclusive agents of democratic theorizing. Instead, we might understand more about
the complex and contradictory inheritances of the Enlightenment if we explore the
possibility that it was crafted not only in Europe but also in the Caribbean. It may
then begin to make a bit more sense that what many thinkers of the twentieth century
wish to inherit from the Enlightenment – the principle that all human beings, of all
colours and origins, are born with natural human rights that they have a right to
defend, with force if necessary – is both promulgated and contradicted by the texts we
think of as the foundations of modern political thought. Why this disjuncture? Because
232
what we have inherited – particularly ideas of universal rights generally understood as

the product of the European Enlightenment – were to a large extent generated by
thinkers and actors located not in Europe but on the plantations of the Caribbean.
In addition to ‘pluralizing’ our idea of what constitutes the Enlightenment, then,
we need to revise our sense of where it took place. Over the course of the eighteenth
century, particularly during its final decades, there was indeed a space in which
powerful theorizations of, and demands for, universal rights were articulated and put
into practice, ultimately overthrowing long-standing and brutal forms of repression
and tyranny and opening the way for new ways of conceiving of humankind. This
space of theorization and debate, however, was an Atlantic one that included the
classic texts and debates we understand as constituting the Enlightenment, to be sure,
but which was also fundamentally shaped by the actions of individuals, both enslaved
and free, who were subjected to the violent forms of racial exclusion that under-
girded the imperial systems of the eighteenth century.
In Colonialism and Science, James McClellan III provides an analysis of the
philosophical and legal activities of wealthy creoles in Saint-Domingue during the
eighteenth century. McClellan details the intellectual pursuits of a number of men in
Saint-Domingue who, organized around a scientific society called the Cercle des
Philadelphes, sent the first balloon in the Americas into the sky, carried out
horticultural experiments, and debated politics and governance. Some of them, most
notably Moreau de Saint-Méry, made important contributions to debates about
governance and slavery over the course of the eighteenth century.15
In a brilliant analysis of the legal culture of Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth
century, Malech Ghachem suggests that the legal activities of free people of colour
and the enslaved in the colonies had an influence on the evolution of administrative
practice and even the law itself. As in other slave societies, the process of constant
negotiation and, sometimes, open conflict between masters and slaves shaped debates
over the governing of slavery. This can be seen particularly well in the controversies
surrounding the royal reforms in slavery promulgated in 1784 and 1785, and the
storm of controversy that ensued. As Ghachem shows, the debates about these
reforms took place under the shadow of the threat that slave revolution might well
break out. Planters argued that intervention on the part of the state would incite
uprisings, while administrators riposted that unchecked violence on the part of
masters was sure to lead to the same thing. The actions slaves took to testify and to
challenge masters, notably in the famous LeJeune case, allowed them, though of
course in very circumscribed ways, to participate in this broader debate.16
The enslaved, then, were understood to be potential political actors in late
eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue. The danger that revolution might take place –
and Ghachem has shown that commentators did in fact use the word ‘revolution’ –
shaped public discourse not only among Enlightenment intellectuals in Paris but also
among administrators and planters in the colonies. Although few commentators
explored in detail the question of what the slaves were discussing and thinking, there
was at least a sense of the possibility that they might emerge as a dangerous political
force. Such fears accelerated – and became part of the violent debates over the rights
of free people of colour and the question of slavery – after 1789.
The revolutionary context brought about an increased circulation of political
tracts as well as rumours of both dreaded and hoped-for events. Many administrators
233
and planters quickly became preoccupied with the question of how information and
ideas might influence the actions of slaves. In July 1789 several slave women arriving
in French ports were detailed and sent back to the colonies, under the pretext that
they might hear or learn things in France that could be dangerous in the colonies.
Planter representatives from Saint-Domingue wrote back to the colony in August
1789 recommending that any writings in which the term ‘liberty’ appeared be seized,
and that free people of colour arriving from Europe be intercepted. In September,
moreover, the Club Massiac requested that merchants in port towns prevent those of
African descent from embarking for the colonies, and received several assurances
from captains that they would do so. Measures were taken in Saint-Domingue to
control the flow of information: in April 1790 local officials in Le Cap directed the
town’s postal director ‘to stop all arriving or departing letters that are addressed to
mulattos or slaves and to deliver these letters to the municipality’. They were to keep
this procedure a secret, presumably so that officials could use this surveillance to
uncover evidence of sedition or conspiracy.17
After the uprising of 1791, such measures were redoubled: the Colonial Assembly
of Saint-Domingue responded by passing a ‘provisional decree, prohibiting the sale,
impression, or distribution of any pieces relative to the politics and revolution of
France’. The question of what political ideas had been circulating within slave
communities, furthermore, became a focus of a great deal of polemic in writings and
debates about the insurrection. Many writers claimed that the ideas of Enlightenment
anti-slavery, as well as the various documents and ideologies that emerged through
the French Revolution, had incited the uprising. The planter Félix Carteau famously
wrote in a memoir that slaves learned of revolutionary ideals through pamphlets,
engravings and conversations between slaves and sailors working together on the
docks. Carteau claimed he had seen abolitionist texts ‘among the hands of some
Negroes’; and though few of them could read, ‘all it took among the slaves of a
plantation was one who could read to the others, as the plots were being formed, to
give them proof of how much they were pitied in France, and how much people
wanted them to free themselves of the terrible yoke of their pitiless masters’. The fact
that most slaves could not read obviously did not mean that they could not hear,
transmit and respond to ideas present in written texts circulating in the colony.
Indeed, by writing that the abolitionist texts slaves read provided ‘proof’ to slaves of
‘how much they were pitied in France’, Carteau suggests that they had already heard
information about European abolitionism through the spoken word. Carteau also
emphasized the powerful role abolitionist images might play among the enslaved,
blaming anti-slavery activists for having disseminated ‘among the Negroes of the
Colony many books that showed pity for their fate, and many similar engravings’.
Slaves, he wrote, only had to open their eyes ‘and listen to the interpretation of the
subject, which was repeated from mouth to mouth’, in order to understand that
across the Atlantic there were those who would support them if they revolted.18
It is tempting, and reasonable, to dismiss writings blaming abolitionists for having
stirred up revolution in the Caribbean as part of a broader set of reflexes of denial that
made independent slave action unimaginable to most European writers. But in doing
so we overlook an interesting admission that is made by these admittedly hostile
observers: in blaming European abolitionists for slave action, they perhaps unwittingly
portrayed the slaves as both interpreters of texts and political actors engaged in the
234
pursuit of alliance and support. This is particularly clear in the writings of some who
blamed not simply abolitionists but the culture of the Enlightenment as a whole for
having set off the slave revolt. In order to make this argument, they implicitly had to
accept that slaves had been influenced by, and responded to, the intellectual currents
of eighteenth-century thought. Writers such as Carteau, and others, clearly understood
that, even if the enslaved could not read, they could hear about and exchange news
and ideas orally. Planters and administrators also clearly acknowledged through their
writings and their actions that slaves were responding to the broader debates about
slavery and governance that were taking place in the Atlantic world.19
Of course, the interpretations and trading of accusations on the part of planters,
abolitionists and administrators about the causes of slave revolution – while they can
suggest to us the contours of the debates within slave communities – can take us only
so far into the mental world of the insurgents of Saint-Domingue. What other routes
are there? Once the insurrection began, the insurgent leaders produced a number of
documents that issued demands and sought to negotiate a variety of outcomes with
the French administration. White prisoners, some of whom were used as secretaries,
produced accounts of their time among insurgent camps that nevertheless provide us
with important insights into the debates within these camps; and political symbols
whose meaning we can seek to interpret were used by insurgents.20
One debate regarding the politics of insurrection in Saint-Domingue has revolved
around the seeming contradiction between the use of royalist and republican symbols
on the part of insurgents. In presenting themselves and articulating their demands,
insurgents sometimes made reference to the discourses of republicanism, particularly
the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but more often they made use of royalist symbols.
Rather than signifying a fragmented or contradictory set of political ideologies,
however, the cohabitation of these forms provides us with an entry into the
particularities of the Caribbean political culture embodied in the slave revolution of
1791–93. Indeed, to analyse the political culture of the insurgents in terms of
dichotomies defined according to the specific European political context of the time is
to obscure the complex realities of the Caribbean political context. Both royalist and
republican discourses were deployed, indeed subsumed, by insurgents in the articulation
of their central goal: a reform and, eventually, an abolition of slavery. By laying claim
both on the authority of the king and on the promises of republican rights emanating
from the evolving metropolitan power structure, slave insurgents intervened in a long-
standing conflict between colonial planters and the metropolitan administration,
taking advantage of a new virulence in this conflict, and ultimately deepening it.21
The king served as a gathering point for demands for abolition because, in the
context of colonial politics, he was seen as a counter-weight to the planters, primarily
because of the important attempts at reforming slavery issued in 1784 and 1785.
These royal actions incited widespread and vociferous opposition on the part of
planters, and their angry conversations about them would have provided one way for
the enslaved to learn about them. In these reforms, the king was presented quite
forcefully as a friend and defender of the slaves. The articles on the reforms were all
issued directly from the authority of ‘His Majesty’. One article, for instance, declared
strongly that in cases where managers of masters killed one of their slaves, the king
‘wished them to be’ pursued as ‘murderers’. The reforms, furthermore, promised
changes that would have had a great impact on the daily lives of slaves, particularly
235
by securing for them both the right to cultivate their own garden plots and the right to
receive food from their masters or managers. Had these reforms been followed, the
amount of profit slaves could have gained from their own work would have increased.22
Evocations of the king were often combined quite comfortably with the use of
republican symbols by insurgents, who often evoked both the king and the National
Assembly as authorities whom they hoped would hear their demands. Georges
Biassou, for instance, wrote in late 1791 of his willingness ‘to serve his King, the
nation and its representatives’. This was logical enough, since at the time both were
centres of authority in Paris. But the combination of royalist and republican symbols
continued into 1793, when one insurgent flew a tricolor flag decorated with fleur-de-
lys. Over the course of 1793, however, as the conflict between republicanism and
royalism became superimposed in a clearer way onto the conflict between pro-slavery
masters and sympathetic republican administrators, many insurgents came to throw
in their lot with the republic and embrace its symbols.23
As for the language of rights, and the broader Enlightenment context out of which
it emerged, there are several reports that describe insurgents demanding their ‘rights’
when asked what they were pursuing. One group, when questioned shortly after the
beginning of the insurrection, apparently stated that ‘they wanted to enjoy the liberty
they are entitled to by the Rights of Man’. There are other reflections of the circulation
of Enlightenment ideas, too, notably in letters sent by Jean-François and Biassou to
local administrators in late 1791 in which the term ‘general will’ was used in referring
to the demands of the ‘multitude’ of African slaves who made up the majority in the
insurgent camps. The term may, of course, have been the addition of the white
secretary who seems to have written these letters. There is no way to rule this out, but
it is worth at least allowing for the possibility that the insurgents themselves might
have found this a useful concept in laying out what they wished written in the letters
their secretaries penned for them.24
Acknowledging the place of a republican language of rights in insurgent discourse
does not mean, as I have already suggested above, interpreting the revolution in
Saint-Domingue as the result of the ‘contagion’ of republican ideas. Although this is
an enticing intellectual habit – one that curiously ties together planter idealogues with
some current interpretations of the revolution – the crucial point is not that ideas
from Europe might have inspired insurgents in Saint-Domingue but that insurgents
in Saint-Domingue made use of, and profoundly transformed, the very meaning of
republicanism. Caribbean political culture was as much a part of the formation of
what we consider republican political culture as it was an inheritor of it. Insurgents
in the Caribbean, in effect, generated new strands of discourse that were, like all
discourse, both embedded and in tension with the web from which they emerged.
That many of the texts that Sala-Molins and others have rightly deconstructed for
their racism and hypocrisy – the Code Noir and the writings of philosophes – were at
times evoked and used by insurgents in pursuit of liberation in the Caribbean suggests
not that this revolution was derivative but that it was a zone of engagement and
debate with broader discourses. That the king could be invoked as a protector of
slaves, because royal codes had been presented as such by the French administration
and lambasted as interventionist by planters, shows not a lack of understanding on
the part of the enslaved but a sense of the power and possibility of political symbolism.
That the Enlightenment arguments for rights were taken up and the justifications for
236
leaving Africans out of them were left behind shows precisely that insurgents in the
Caribbean were not imprisoned by someone else’s interpretation of them.
The centrality of Caribbean insurgents in shaping the ultimate meaning of
Enlightenment discourses is particularly clear if we follow the chronology from 1791
to 1794, and acknowledge that the pinnacle of republicanism during the era of the
French Revolution was the decree abolishing slavery and granting citizenship to all
people, of all colours. The evolution of insurgent political ideologies in the years after
1791 was a varied and complex process, one that took a different course in each
province of the colony and even in each group of insurgents. As Carolyn Fick has
examined in detail, the demands made expanded from more reformist calls, including
the abolition of the whip and the granting of three free days per week, to more radical
demands for an end to slavery itself. Michel Rolph Trouillot has argued that the
revolution ‘thought itself out politically and philosophically as it was taking place’ in
a process where ‘discourse always lagged behind practice’. It is certainly true that the
revolutionary transformations opened up new spaces for the political imagination,
created new contexts for free debate and the exchange of ideas, and infused many
with a sense of exuberant possibility that may have been rare indeed in a world
dominated by a seemingly unmovable institution of slavery. But I would add that
pre-revolutionary political discourse among slaves may have been more complex
than we might generally assume, sustained by the decades of conversations and
debates tied to choices made on and off the plantations. As the enslaved had sought
openings within the legal system, for example, they necessarily engaged a key strand
of political discourse: legal reasoning.25
The central point about this political evolution, of course, is that it was sustained
and accelerated by a powerful military force constituted by the insurgent armies.
Because of this, the evolution of the tactics and ideological justifications presented by
metropolitan commissioners like Sonthonax and Polverel must be seen primarily as
the product of a response to, and negotiation with, the insurgent political force
represented by men like Jean-François, Biassou and Louverture, but also Pierrot,
Macaya, Sans-Souci and many others. Their ultimate choices were, of course, inflected
by the agenda of the Spanish officers who supported these insurgents for a time, but
even there the Spanish were clearly never in control of what they wishfully called their
‘auxiliaries’, as David Geggus has noted. In other words, having won territorial
control over parts of Saint-Domingue through their military exploits, the insurgents
were able to gain ideological control over the process that led to the dramatic abolition
of slavery in 1793 in Saint-Domingue and in 1794 throughout the French empire.26
Perhaps the most difficult part of understanding this process, however, is the task of
seeking to understand the role of political ideologies that drew on the home traditions
of the African-born people who made up a majority in Saint-Domingue at the time of
the revolution. Pioneering work in this regard has been done by John Thornton, who
has argued provocatively that the Kongo can be seen as as much a fount of intellectual
resources for the revolution as metropolitan France. At the same time, David Geggus
has warned, the problem of avoiding ‘the twin perils of exoticizing or occidentalizing
the slaves’ and imagining the ‘attitudes and beliefs of those Africans and children of
Africans of two centuries ago’ is an ‘intractable’ one. Obviously, the first challenge is
reconstructing as precisely as possible the varied and contested political strands that
were shaping political life in West and Central Africa during the latter half of the
237
eighteenth century. This, however, is not enough, since we must also come to understand
how these political ideologies were transplanted and transformed as they confronted
the very particular situation of plantation slavery as it existed in Saint-Domingue at the
time. To put it another way, we must ask ourselves: would we recognize an ‘African’
political ideology if we saw one? Would it be possible to distinguish it from one rooted
in ‘European’ traditions, or from the complex strands of Caribbean political thought
emerging from within the plantation complex? Here a constant questioning of
categories is in order, for to begin truly to grasp the intellectual history of the eighteenth-
century Caribbean we must understand the layering of transformations and translations,
rooted in Africa, Europe and the Americas, that produced it.27
What if, as we sought to understand the history of universalism in the Atlantic
world, we could tell an integrated story that goes something like this: the discovery
of the Americas generated a space for new ways of thinking about humanity and
natural rights, and out of encounters between Native Americans, Africans and
Europeans there emerged new ways of thinking about belonging, governance, subject-
hood and, eventually, citizenship. These new ways of thinking may have been written
down overwhelmingly by the educated elites in Europe and the colonies, yet they
drew on the circulation of meanings and ideas in which those who were not literate
participated; through their labour but also through their resistance – both in actions
and in speech – enslaved peoples in the Atlantic world both generated problems of
governance and began to propose new solutions by insisting on their own dignity and
denying the justifications issued for their enslavement; as thinkers in Europe argued
against slavery and for the primacy of natural rights, drawing on this broader context
of which they were a part, they in turn influenced colonial administrators who
witnessed the actions and sufferings of the enslaved, who saw and heard them, and
who in turn produced new interpretations that emphasized the need for limits on the
power of masters and for abuse; these reformist tendencies, though certainly limited
in scope and ultimately aimed at preserving colonial production and societies in
which people of African descent were viewed primarily as sources of labour,
nevertheless opened up windows and possibilities for change; in and through these
decades of debate in France there was a parallel set of debates in communities of the
enslaved on both sides of the Atlantic, about tactics but also about ideas; together,
these debates laid the foundations for the intellectual and political explosion that
would take place during the 1790s in the Caribbean.
One could then, perhaps, go one step further and argue that this explosion
generated what we view today as the true thinking of the Enlightenment – a concrete
and radical universalism that overthrew profit for principle and defended human
rights against the weapons of empire and the arguments of racial hierarchy. This
advance, unsurprisingly, was met with hostility and with reaction; its victory was
turned back in some ways; and it became saturated with many of the contradictions
that infused the thinking of the Enlightenment itself. But precisely this process of
reaction, the combination of planter nightmares and slave hopes, played out in crucial
ways during the next decades to lead to other phases of liberation, followed by other
phases of reaction, a cycle in which we still reside.
What if we took up the task of writing such a story – or one like it? Actually doing
so, of course, is more difficult than simply envisioning it, but incorporating silence and
subordinated voices into our broader narrative may enable us to tell a better history
238
– one more grounded in the integrated political and intellectual reality of the Atlantic
world – of the ideas and practices surrounding universalism and human rights.
NOTE S
I wish to thank Christopher Schmidt-Nowara for inviting me to write on the topic of slavery
and the Enlightenment, and both him and the editors of Social History for their helpful
comments on the article. The ideas presented here have been profoundly shaped by the work
of, discussions with, and comments by Julius Scott and Rebecca Scott. Earlier versions of this
article were presented at the Colloquium of the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology
and History at the University of Michigan in January 2005, at the conference ‘L’expérience
coloniale: Dynamiques des échanges dans les espaces Atlantiques à l’époque de l’esclavage’
in Nantes in June 2005, and at the conference ‘Atlantic History: Soundings’ at Harvard
University in August 2005. My thanks to the participants at all these events for their comments,
particularly Ira Berlin, Chandra Bhimull, Douglas Chambers, David William Cohen, Myriam
Cottias, Alejandro de la Fuente, Dena Goodman, Jean Hébrard, David Pedersen, Emma
Rothschild and Stuart Schwartz.
1 Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1971).

2 This work went through a large number of editions in the late eighteenth century in
French, and parts were also published in English translation: Guillaume Thomas François
Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the
Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. John Justamond (London, 1783).
3 Duchet, op. cit., 145.
4 Ibid., 139.
5 Hillary Beckles, ‘Caribbean Anti-slavery: The Self-liberation Ethos of Enslaved Blacks’,
Journal of Caribbean History, XXII, 1 & 2 (1988), 1–19. Among the many contributions to
the history of political thought in enslaved communities is C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins
(New York, 1963), to which this article owes an obvious debt, as well as Emilia Viotti da
Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Dememara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (Oxford,
1994); David Barry Gaspar, Bondsmen and Rebels: A Study of Master–Slave Relations in
Antigua (Durham, 1993); and Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (Cambridge, 2003). I
have attempted to detail the intellectual and political currents in the revolutionary French
Caribbean, particularly Guadeloupe, in A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave
Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, 2004).
6 Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, 2003), 1–2 and Conclusion;
see also Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge,
1997), 1–2. The foundation work on circuits of news in the Atlantic is Julius Scott, ‘The
Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian
Revolution’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1986); see also Peter Linebaugh and
Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary
Atlantic (Boston, 2000).
7 The same is true, of course, of other contexts in which enslaved peoples played important
military and political roles in struggles for liberation, such as the wars of independence in
Latin America. On this see, for instance, Peter Blanchard, ‘The Language of Liberation:
Slave Voices in the Wars of Independence’, Hispanic American Historical Review,
LXXXII, 3 (2002), 499–523.
8 Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir; ou, la calvaire de Canaan (Paris, 1987) and Les Misères
des Lumières: sous la raison, l’outrage (Paris, 1992); Laurent Estève, Montesquieu,
Rousseau, Diderot: du genre humain au bois d’ébène (Paris, 2002). The broadest treatment
of how Enlightenment writers in France, including novelists and playwrights, dealt with
239
the question of slavery remains Edward Seeber, Anti-Slavery Opinion in France during the
Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1937).
9 Estève, op. cit., 30–34, 153; on Buffon see also Duchet, op. cit., part II, chap. 1.
10 Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, op. cit., 241, 249, 254; Estève, op. cit., 163–202, quote 178,
n.455.
11 Muthu, op. cit., 66–67, 109, 299, n.26.
12 Estève, op. cit., 205, 210, 255–56; on Condorcet see Sala-Molins, Les misères, op. cit.,
chap. 1; I present an examination of Condorcet, and link up the contradictions in his
thought to the ‘Republican racism’ of post-emancipation administrators in the
revolutionary French Caribbean, in Dubois, op. cit., chap. 6.
13 Sala-Molins, Les misères, op. cit., 14, 17.
14 Ibid., 158–60.
15 James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime
(Baltimore, 1992).
16 Malech Walid Ghachem, ‘Sovereignty and Slavery in the Age of Revolution: Haitian
Variations on a Metropolitan Theme’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2001).
On the influence of Enlightenment ideas on legal decisions in another context see Colin
Maclachan, ‘Slavery, Ideology and Institutional Change: The Impact of Enlightenment
on Slavery in Late Eighteenth-century Maranhao’, Journal of Latin American Studies XI,
1 (May 1979), 1–17.
17 Gabriel Debien, Les colons de Saint-Domingue et la Révolution: Essai sur le Club Massiac
(Paris, 1951), 97, 158–59; Mitchell Bennett Garrett, The French Colonial Question,
1789–91 (Ann Arbor, 1916), 23; Chaela Pastore, ‘Merchant Voyages: Michel Marsaudon
and the Exchange of Colonialism in Saint-Domingue, 1788–94’ (Ph.D. dissertation,
Berkeley, 2001), 59.
18 Philadelphia General Advertiser, 322 (11 October 1791); Félix Carteau, Soirées
Bermudiennes, ou entretiens sur les événements qui ont opéré la ruine de la partie française
de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Bordeaux, 1802), 75–76.
19 For two examples of writers who blamed the Enlightenment for the revolt, see the poem in
Moniteur général de la partie française de Saint-Domingue I, 1 (15 November 1791), 1; and
Antoine Dalmas, Histoire de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue (Paris, 1814), vol. I, 159.
20 For a good analysis of one important prisoner’s narrative, that of Gros, see Jeremy Popkin,
‘Facing Racial Revolution: Captivity Narratives and Identity in the Saint-Domingue
Insurrection’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, XXXVI, 4 (2003), 511–33.
21 On this, in the following paragraphs I draw on a more extended argument about insurgent
ideology I have presented in ‘“Our Three Colors”: The King, the Republic and the Political
Culture of Slave Revolution in Saint-Domingue’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions
Historiques, XXIX, 1 (Spring 2003), 83–102; and Avengers of the New World: The Story
of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), chaps 4 and 5.
22 A copy of the royal reforms is available within the ‘Mémoire rélatif à l’ordonnance du 4
Décembre 1784 sur les gérens [sic] et la police des noirs’, Beineke Rare Books Library,
Documents Relating to the French Participation in the American Revolution, Gen MSS
308, Box 1, Series III, Folder 32. On the importance of these reforms for slaves, see
Carolyn Fick, ‘Emancipation in Haiti: From Plantation Labour to Peasant Proprietorship’,
Slavery and Abolition, XXI, 2 (August 2000), 11–40 and Ghachem, op. cit.
23 Biassou to Commissioners, 23 December 1791, AN DXXV 1, Folder 4, No. 20; Moniteur
générale…de Saint-Domingue III, 104 (28 February 1793), 419.
24 See Philadelphia General Advertiser, 321, 322 and 349 for examples of the use of a language
of rights by insurgents; Jean-François and Biassou to the Commissioners, Archives
Nationales, DXXV 1, Folder 4, No. 6.
240
25 Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below
(Knoxville, 1990), provides an excellent account of the evolution of insurgent tactics and
demands; see also Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production
of History (Boston, 1995), 89; a recent addition to our knowledge of this evolution is a
paper by Yves Benot, ‘La parole des esclaves insurgés de 1791–92: indépendance
immédiate!’ presented at ‘La traite, l’esclavage colonial, la Révolution de Saint-Domingue
et les droits de l’homme’, UQAM, Montréal, 4–5 March 2004.
26 David Geggus, ‘The Arming of Slaves during the Haitian Revolution’, in P. Morgan and C.
Brown (eds), The Arming of Slaves in World History (New Haven, 2006), 209–32. I emphasize
and explore the important contributions of Caribbean insurgents to the broader discourse of
universalism in A Colony of Citizens, op. cit.
27 David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington, 2002), 42; John Thornton,
‘I Am the Subject of the King of Kongo: African Political Ideology and the Haitian
Revolution’, Journal of World History, IV (Fall 1993), 181–214.
241
PART IV
WARFARE AND GOVERNANCE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
VIOLENCE IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD
John Smolenski
W here did colonial Atlantic cultures come from? This question has animated
many of the longest running scholarly debates about the history of the
Americas. Historians of Anglo-America have written both of European ‘seeds’
shaping colonial cultures and of the transforming power of the frontier.1 Scholars of
Afro-Atlantic cultures have pondered the enduring strength of African ‘survivals’ in
the face of the horror that was plantation slavery.2 Latin Americanist anthropologists
have examined how a Spanish ‘culture of conquest’ crystallized in a colonial order
and how conquest ruptured the pre-colonial past and created a mestizo imaginary.3
These debates have waxed and waned, with scholars in each respective field showing
greater or lesser interest over time. Crucially, however, they have seldom talked to
each other, confining their arguments to interlocutors within their own area of
specialty. This tendency – entirely understandable, given the immense complexity of
colonial Atlantic history and the dizzying amount of scholarly literature produced on
the topic – has unfortunately made it difficult to see common themes across the
whole. The big question – where did colonial Atlantic cultures come from? – has
devolved into many smaller ones, to the detriment of scholars working in all subfields
of colonial Atlantic history.
I propose here to explore the question through a thematic, rather than geographic,
approach. Seeking origins in process rather than place, I contend in this essay that
violence played a determinative, perhaps even the determinative, role in creating
Atlantic cultures. It facilitated linkages among Europe, the Americas, and Africa. It
shaped the development of local colonial cultures on these different continents. In
other words, it helped make and remake Atlantic worlds and the Atlantic world over
and over again from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
The argument here requires establishing some definitions. Violence here refers to
the infliction of pain, whether physical or psychological, or coercion through the
threat of violence, whether implicitly or explicitly stated. It includes war, juridically
imposed forms of punishment, and forms of ‘private’ coercion, such as labor discipline
or sexual assault.4 Culture here is treated as both socially learned sets of practices,
and the public meanings ascribed to these practices as they circulated through a given
community or communities.5 The usage of Atlantic draws from David Armitage’s
245
– John Smolenski –
useful delineation of ‘three concepts of Atlantic history’: circum-Atlantic, to describe

transnational history; trans-Atlantic, to describe international history; and cis-
Atlantic, to describe local histories framed in a wider Atlantic context.6 Though
intended to be suggestive rather than comprehensive or conclusive, this essay aims to
highlight the mutually constitutive relationship between culture and violence in
generating trans-Atlantic ties and cis-Atlantic cultures (with a brief discussion of
circum-Atlantic trends), in the hopes of outlining a common history of violence and
culture in the colonial Atlantic world. Let me begin by looking at the cultural
foundations of trans-Atlantic exploration and colonization.
* * *
Colonial discourses of conquest played a central role in the creation of trans-Atlantic

connections in the early modern period. Indeed, one might say that they almost
preceded Atlantic colonization itself. Ideologies of chivalry and crusade motivated
Iberian explorers and conquerors in the Canaries, Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde
Islands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.7 Portuguese authors celebrated
victories over Muslim opponents in northern Africa; the royal chronicler Gomes
Eanes de Zuara wrote with pride about priests celebrating mass in the main mosque
in Ceuta after that city had fallen in 1415 to Portuguese forces.8 Though Portuguese
explorers traveling along the west African coast did not attempt to conquer the
kingdoms they encountered in the fifteenth century, they nonetheless sought to
expand the Christian faith on their travels. They achieved their greatest success in
1491 when the Kongolese ruler Nzinga a Nkuwu accepted Christian baptism and
adopted the name João I, honoring the Portuguese monarch.9
Meanwhile, the so-called ‘Reconquista’ – that centuries-long Christian struggle to
expel Muslim kingdoms from the Iberian peninsula – captured the imagination of
Spanish soldiers and rulers. By the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the ‘Indies’
in 1492, he had already been conditioned to see this trans-Atlantic voyage in terms
of this on-going Christian crusade. Indeed, as Stephen Greenblatt has noted,
Columbus referred to his landfall in these new islands as a great victory. His choice
of ‘a phrase more appropriate in 1492 to the conquest of Granada than to landfall in
the Caribbean’ showed the impact of this crusading ideology on the Genoese
navigator.10 Both the Portuguese and the Spanish crowns saw their overseas endeavors
as latter-day variations of the Roman empire, Renaissance heirs to this ancient
tradition but empowered by a new, Christian Rome.11
Iberians were not the only ones possessed of this chivalric spirit.12 English explorers
also saw their overseas endeavors as crusades of their own sort. Sir Francis Drake’s
swashbuckling attacks on Spanish enemies furthered the nation’s glory but also
represented Protestant strikes against a spreading Catholic menace. Epic tales of
Drake’s endeavors inspired Englishmen for decades thereafter.13 Richard Haklyut,
England’s greatest colonial promoter, believed that the crown should fund overseas
exploration ‘to plant Christian Religion,’ ‘to trafficke,’ and ‘to conquer.’ In each case,
English colonizers would have to contend with Spanish rivals as well as indigenous
peoples.14 As literary scholar Michael Warner has noted, these epics and promotional
writings represented the first ‘Anglo-American’ literature, emerging in England before
the first attempts to establish overseas settlements and predating the establishment of
246
– chapter 14: Violence in the Atlantic World –
permanent American colonies by decades.15 These fantasies of conquest acted as

models of and models for North American colonization.16
Moreover, for Europeans of various stripes, stories of American colonization
acted as tools of self-definition. Imperial powers justified their endeavors through
comparison with other countries. For the Jesuit theologian José de Acosta, colonial
expansion was part of a grand providential story in which God had intended the
Spanish to use American gold and silver to fight ‘infidel’ Muslims and ‘heretic’
Protestants.17 For the Dutch, denunciations of Spanish depredations against Native
Americans closely mirrored cries of outrage against Hapsburg attempts to quash
rebellion in the Netherlands; this ‘black legend’ of Spanish perfidy stood in sharp
contrast to Dutch dealings with Indian peoples in the Americas.18 The English,
meanwhile, focused on two types of cruelty when writing about their imperial rivals:
the cruelty Spanish conquistadors inflicted upon Native Americans and that which
Dutch soldiers inflicted upon English colonizers. They became critics of victimization
and victims themselves.19 In all of these cases, though, these charges and counter
charges affirmed the moral superiority of Spanish, Dutch, or English colonization,
respectively; all that differed was the nationality of the one telling the tale. In a very
real sense, condemnations of other European nations became stories they told
themselves about themselves, authorizing continued American colonization.20
Of course, the opening of American colonization spurred the elaboration of other
forms of colonial discourse as well: legal narratives of intrusion legitimating the
dispossession of indigenous peoples and the assertion of sovereignty over them.
Spanish jurists first pointed to a 1493 papal donation granting them the Americas,
but developed more elaborate theories as the sixteenth century went on. Francisco de
Vitora and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda took pains to show that Native American
societies failed to follow natural law, rendering them incapable of self-governance
and fit to be governed by the Spanish crown. English promoters, meanwhile, rejected
these claims, not least because they denied the authority of the pope to award lands
to Catholic princes. Instead, they declared the Americas terra nullius, uninhabited
land over which Europeans could extend their authority. Though this required a
certain amount of intellectual gymnastics, including the assertion that since indigenous
peoples seemingly lacked private land ownership, they therefore lacked sovereignty
over American territory, it nonetheless provided at least a patina of authority.21
Upon settling in the Americas, European powers relied on a variety of different
rituals to take possession of the land and peoples they encountered. All sought to
convince indigenous rulers to cede power diplomatically, whether through voluntary
surrender (as Hernán Cortés claimed the Mexica ruler Moctezuma had done), willing
subordination to a European monarch (as when the Powhatan paramount chief
Wahunsonacock ‘allowed’ Christopher Newport to crown him as a vassal of King
James), or ceremonies that established colonizers as superior partners in a European–
Indian alliance.22 Spaniards read before any military attack a Requerimiento intended
to give native peoples the opportunity to submit to authority of pope and crown or
be conquered by force. English settlers built houses, planted gardens, and fenced in
farms to mark ‘empty’ lands as their own. These rituals enacted the legal justifications
for conquest and dispossession countless times from the sixteenth through the
eighteenth centuries. They proclaimed the legitimacy of colonial settlement to one’s
compatriots, rival European powers, and native peoples.23
247
That colonizers developed somewhat dense explanations of the nature of conquest

should not perhaps be surprising. Writing about the creation of the production of
cultural authority, anthropologist Greg Urban argues that there is nothing inherent in
any culture that allows it to claim superiority over any other. Culture, he writes, ‘is
inert. It contains no force that would cause it to spread, to perpetuate itself, in the face
of resistance in the form of alternatives.’ The motive force that would allow a claim to
authority over other cultures or peoples, he continues, can only come from arguing
about culture; this force is, in a word, metacultural.24 In the Atlantic world, European
narratives of identity and destiny – the stories they told themselves about themselves
– helped create national imperial cultures. Narratives of legality acted as metacultural
commentaries on these imperial stories, allowing particular European powers to claim
theirs as the legitimate sovereignty. And the rituals of possession made these imperial
narratives and metacultural justifications ‘true,’ even as violence frequently played a
significant, if not always acknowledged, role in the rituals themselves.
And yet, the reality proved more complicated. Spanish jurists intended the
Requerimiento to be a performative text, one whose utterance instantiated new social
relationships.25 Supposedly, its reading instantly transformed alien peoples – the
indigenous inhabitants of the Americas – into either vassals or enemies. But as
contemporary critics recognized, the linguistic gap that existed between Spaniards
and Indians prevented the latter from even understanding the text, let alone complying
with its requirements. Violence, under the guise of legality, was inevitable. Conquering
Spaniards may have wanted to do things with words; they ended up saying things
with wars.26
English claims to authority faced similar dilemmas. Colonizers did more than deny
Indians’ collective ownership of land as sovereign territory. They similarly denied
native ownership of land as private property, suggesting that the ‘wilderness’ was
vacuum domicilium, vacant land ripe for the taking. Such beliefs, however, reflected a
fundamental misunderstanding of Indian conceptions of territorial sovereignty and
land use. English colonizers – and their governments – persistently missed the ways in
which Indian nations read the boundaries of their political communities on the
landscape. They also failed to see how native farmers and hunters actually used
supposedly ‘empty’ lands. The English believed their building, fencing, and planting to
be assertions of mastery that made space, culture, and sovereignty isomorphic. But
their supposedly transparent forms of taking possession of the land were anything but,
leading to confusion and conflict during the first decades of colonization, especially as
they used violence, implied or otherwise, to ensconce their values into law.27
Native Americans adapted to English ceremonies of possession in many regions of
North America, adopting animal husbandry and European modes of agriculture.
Wampanoag leader Metacom (known to Anglo-New Englanders as ‘King Philip’)
became a ‘keeper of swine,’ domesticating animals for protein and profit. He even
proved willing to use colonial courts to defend his interests against rival claimants.
His fellow Wampanoags on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of
Massachusetts, did likewise.28 In some respects, this represented a triumph of colonial
codes (using the word in both a cultural and legal sense), as English ways of living in
the landscape took predominance. But it also helped sustain Indian communities in
the face of English encroachment. What might have appeared as Indian acculturation
was instead part of a process of transculturation in which indigenous peoples in New
248
England integrated aspects of English life into their own society, but for native ends
and to sustain native economic and political power.29
Indeed, Anglo-American colonizers in New England saw these changes in Indian
communities as threat more than triumph. Settlers’ responses revealed the seriousness
of the challenge: having justified their claims to ‘waste’ lands on the grounds that
Indians had done nothing to improve (and thus possess) them, some colonists
threatened violence when faced with Indian fences marking the boundaries of Native
lands.30 Anglo-American courts frequently upheld the claims of English farmers while
denying those of Indian ones, making the legal system a tool of colonization. Such
problems contributed to the outbreak of one of the bloodiest wars in colonial Anglo-
America, King Philip’s War. This war, which spanned 1675 and 1676, came after
decades of tension over land use, years in which indigenous peoples tried to
incorporate some English values into their way of life. As one historian has noted,
Metacom launched the war, in some respects, ‘on behalf of cooperation,’ upset about
the passing of the rough harmony that had existed.31 English colonizers, then, needed
violence to make their narratives of conquest and the practices through which they
enacted these narratives fit together. Violence helped them believe the stories they
told themselves about themselves.32
Nowhere was the reciprocal relationship between violence and the formation of
trans-Atlantic cultures more apparent than in wars between colonizers and natives.
Violence in the colonial Americas, like violence everywhere, proved ‘a vivid expression
of culture values,’ freighted with symbolic meaning. Conceptions of which forms of
violence were appropriate (and when), and who could be fit objects of appropriate
violence were culturally bounded. Conflicts between Spaniards and Mexica during
the siege of Tenochtitlan, between Dutch and Indian nations in New Netherlands
during Kieft’s War, and England and Wampanoag and Narragansett Indians in King
Philip’s War in New England witnessed a similar phenomenon: revulsion at Indian
styles of warfare – and the resultant belief that this kind of unrestrained violence
placed natives outside the bounds of civilized society – encouraged European soldiers
to resort to early modern variations of ‘total war.’33 Conceptions of violence thus
helped reinforce cultural boundaries through the construction of what Michael
Taussig has called ‘the colonial mirror which reflects back onto the colonists the
barbarity of their own social relations, but as imputed to the savage or evil figures
they wish to colonize.’34 Put another way, these colonial wars helped make true the
narratives of conquest that played a role in driving overseas expansion.
These conflicts generated literary responses that attempted to explain, and contain,
colonial violence. Cortés’s ‘Letters of Relation,’ detailing his exploits to Emperor
Charles V, declared that ‘no race, however savage, has ever practiced such fierce and
unnatural cruelty, as the natives of these parts.’ First published in 1522, Cortés’s
writings inaugurated a new genre of Spanish chronicles celebrating American
conquests.35 Meanwhile, King Philip’s War prompted much soul searching – quite
literally – among Anglo-Americans in New England, leading them to question, then
reaffirm, their covenant with God. In the end, they felt secure that their behavior
during the war had been justified and that they had shown themselves superior to
‘savage’ Indians and the cruel Spanish of the ‘Black Legend.’36 Even where Europeans
denounced the violence of colonial wars, they did so in terms that fit with the national
narratives that justified imperial expansion, as when Dutch authors condemned
249
William Kieft, Governor of New Netherlands, for demonstrating a capacity for

viciousness that matched that shown by the Spanish in their wars in the Low Country
and the Americas.37 These chronicles, polemics, histories, and denunciations all acted
as metacultural glosses that helped trans-Atlantic colonial cultures take root in the
Americas. In doing so, they enabled imperial expansion.
In this light, Urban’s assertion that cultural authority emerges only through
metacultural argument about culture leads to a disturbing conclusion. ‘Violence,’ he
notes, ‘is metacultural and, indeed, may be a fundamental manifestation of
metaculture.’38 Historically, culture and violence had a symbiotic relationship in the
colonial Atlantic – perhaps even more so because the definitions and boundaries of
cultural authority were so unclear as European powers tried to establish (and
maintain) their rule. Colonial violence helped create a ‘space of death’ that was, in
Taussig’s words, ‘one of the crucial spaces where Indian, African, and white gave
birth to the New World.’39
* * *
These trans-Atlantic histories unfolded within a broader system of exchange,

conquest, and context. The creation of an increasingly integrated Atlantic system
accelerated the movement of peoples and goods within and among four continents,
drawn from societies along the littoral. Local communities became enmeshed in
translocal flows. Emerging networks of violence, some of which built on preexisting
patterns, played a crucial role in this process. Understanding the reciprocal relationship
between violence and culture in particular cis-Atlantic histories – local stories framed
in an Atlantic context – requires an exploration of the relationship between violence
and culture in particular circum-Atlantic histories.
The history of slavery in the colonial Atlantic provides the best example of these
Atlantic changes. Slavery in western Africa predated the arrival of Europeans in the
fifteenth century. Africans acquired slaves through warfare, judicial punishment, or
self-sale (though the last was extremely rare). But if slavery was omnipresent, it was
not the defining element of society. Kinship and lineage determined social structure;
elders controlled the means of production and divisions of age and sex mattered more
than the line between slave and free. Slaves worked in a wide variety of different
occupations, rather than being confined to a single social stratum. Moreover, slavery
existed as one system of dependency among others, albeit the most extreme form.
Only slaves could be bought and sold, but others – including junior kin or individuals
held in pawnshop – had their labor controlled by others.40 The slave trade predated
the arrival of Europeans as well. West Africa occupied one end of a trans-Saharan
slave trade from the seventh century on. Muslim traders, prohibited from enslaving
their coreligionists, purchased and shipped west African slaves as far east as the
Indian Ocean. Nearly one million slaves went east in this trade between 1400 and
1600 – approximately as many as went west across the Atlantic during the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.41
The opening of an Atlantic world, however, wrought several changes. First, it
changed how slaves were acquired. Military enslavement continued to be the most
significant source of slaves as the trans-Atlantic trade developed. But where African
rulers previously waged wars for political ends and took slaves as spoils of battle,
250
they showed an increasing willingness after the mid-seventeenth century to fight for
the primary purpose of gaining slaves. As the volume of the trade grew, so too did the
cycles of warfare.42 Second, it changed who was enslaved. Traditionally, African
slave owners preferred adult women or children, each of whom might be incorporated
into a lineage through marriage or adoption. Increasingly, however, African slavers
targeted adult males as commodities, who commanded a higher price from trans-
Atlantic merchants.43 Third, it changed where slaves came from and where they went.
African communities in the hinterlands increasingly found themselves vulnerable to
warfare, kidnapping, and enslavement as the seventeenth century passed into the
eighteenth. Moreover, the volume of the trans-Atlantic trade outstripped the trans-
Saharan trade after 1700. In all of these cases, earlier patterns of slavery and the slave
trade changed in response to growing demand for bound laborers on American
plantations, particularly after the dramatic rise of sugar production after 1650.44
Regional histories of violence changed as they became part of a larger circum-Atlantic
history of violence. Moreover, these new patterns of enslavement and slave trading in
turn helped fuel the growth of slave systems that would be so important throughout
the colonial Americas, shaping countless local histories.
* * *
So what, then, of those countless locales that existed within these larger circum-
Atlantic circuits? How can we make sense of their histories? I would argue that
studying violence throughout the Atlantic offers a way to see histories of local cultures
as parts of a larger picture. In other words, such an analysis presents a way to do cis-
Atlantic history, smaller stories told with an eye to the much broader context. For
violence played a role in creating local Atlantic communities, regimes of citizenship,
and cultures of slavery. These communities grew, in part, out of colonial economies
of violence – the range of permissible exchanges of violence that determined who
could inflict pain upon whom and under what conditions.45 These official and
unofficial regulations, managed and reinforced through everyday life, lay at the heart
of the imperial project.
As many scholars have noted, the Iberian Atlantic colonies were characterized by
a high degree of intercultural mixture that lead to the growth of a mestizo or creole
population. Indeed, some have celebrated the ‘fusion’ of Europeans and indigenous
peoples off the coast of Africa and in the Americas. Echoing creole rejections (dating
back to the colonial period) of continental claims that interracial sexual relations had
led to biological and cultural degeneration, more modern authors have presented
mixed populations as a source of vitality.46 These communities, however, owed their
existence to systemic sexual violence. The creole population of Cabo Verde, the first
Atlantic colony which contained a permanent settler society, was comprised almost
entirely of the children of male Portuguese slave owners and their female African
slaves. Colonizers there quickly established administrative structures that
institutionalized the slave regime, protecting not just the nascent African coastal slave
trade but also owners’ sexual exploitation of their female slaves, which both proved
crucial to the rise of a plantation slave system.47 On the western side of the Atlantic,
sexual assault played a role in the Spanish conquest of the Americas from the start.
Chroniclers wrote of Indian women’s fondness for ‘Christians’ and their willingness
251
to ‘debauch and prostitute themselves,’ even as Spanish soldiers seized women as

spoils of war or accepted them as captive ‘gifts’ from native allies. (Indeed, the most
famous such ‘gift,’ celebrated by Cortés as the famed Doña Marina, played a crucial
part in the conquest of the Mexica empire.)48 Sexual violence, in other words, had a
central role in the origin of different colonial Atlantic cultures.
The symbiotic relationship between violence and culture lay at the center of
emerging slave systems across the ocean as well. The growth of the trans-Atlantic slave
trade and the rapid expansion of European colonies in the Americas relied upon a
constant infusion of new, bound labor. New world plantations became sites of cultural
creativity, even as work there was ‘grinding [slaves] into sugar, coffee, and other crops
for export’ for slave owners’ profit. As numerous scholars have noted, slave cultures
in places such as in Cuba, Mexico, Minas Geras, and the Carolina low country (to
name only a few examples) reflected different African elements, fused in a crucible of
death and destruction.49 Plantations also required the creation of new imperial regimes
to accommodate an institution that had largely faded into disuse in most western
European nations by the fifteenth century.50 Colonizers developed cultures of slavery,
dynamic mixtures of racial, legal, and labor practices that undergirded slavery as an
institution. Power mediated these developments at every step.
The creation of full-blown cultures of slavery proved essential for the survival of
those European colonies that relied upon the production of agricultural exports. The
well-documented ‘ordeal’ of Virginia, England’s first permanent Atlantic colony,
epitomized this problem. Settlers navigated a delicate balance between tradition and
novelty during the colony’s first decades. If one 1649 traveler called the Chesapeake
‘English grounde in America,’ it was only tenuously so.51 Though some scholars have
claimed that colonizers tried earnestly to recreate older traditions across the Atlantic,
their efforts in this respect seem, in retrospect, fitful at best.52 Colonial law proved an
early example of this trend. Seventeenth-century English vocally celebrated common
law traditions that guaranteed their famed ‘liberties.’ Indeed, the law occupied a
central place in Anglo-Americans’ self-definition.53 But Thomas Dale’s imposition of
the Laws Divine, Moral, and Martiall in 1609 foreshadowed future legal changes in
the colony. Dale’s Laws saved the colony, but also represented an abrogation of
liberties Englishmen across the Atlantic never could have tolerated.
This trend accelerated after the colonizers established the House of Burgesses in
1619. Now with the power to craft their own laws, they soon showed that Virginia’s
legal distinctiveness resulted from conscious choice, rather than a dearth of legal
knowledge among provincial judges.54 When faced with the choice of following
English examples or following their own path, Anglo-Americans chose a particularly
American path. Planters initially tried to use the Statute of Artificers (1563), which
regulated hireling labor in England, in America. After the 1630s, however, they
abandoned English-origin statutes regarding labor entirely, instead creating a legal
culture of labor that focused almost entirely on servitude. They made the conditions
of servitude significantly more onerous, empowering masters to use harsher methods
of corporal punishment against servants, gave servants fewer rights, and increased
the number of offenses that could lead to a servant’s time under indenture being
extended. Towards the end of the century, they would also alter the law to make the
market in servants’ contracts run more smoothly and decided that their laws governing
the emancipation of servants took precedent over English ones.55
252
Moreover, by this time Anglo-Virginian colonizers had already spent decades

crafting a regime of racial slavery that would play a dominant role in the colony’s
labor regime. The English had no true experience with slavery before the arrival of
the first ‘20 and odd Negroes’ that arrived as slaves in 1619. In the 1640s, however,
legislators in Virginia began to draw racial distinctions that facilitated the institution’s
rise, passing a law that defined women of African descent as ‘laborers,’ while
exempting Euro-American women from that category.56 In 1662, the Assembly
passed two laws that first created a culture of labor that clearly delineated slavery
from other forms of labor and that allowed for slavery’s indefinite perpetuation. One
gave indentured servants protections, for the first time, from mistreatment at the
hands of their masters; it outlawed the physical disfigurement of persistent runaway
servants, prohibited immoderate correction of wayward servants, and confirmed
servants’ ability to complain of abuses in court.57
Meanwhile, another law declared that ‘all children borne in this country shalbe held
bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.’58 This law represented a
radical rejection of colonists’ Anglo-American legal heritage. Previously, slaves had
won freedom suits by proving that their father had been free; as judges in those cases
admitted, English common law had always determined patrilineal descent more
significant than matrilineal descent. In deciding that children’s status should follow the
condition of the mother, legislators had decided to abandon the common law to follow
the civil law maxim that partus sequitur ventrem – the offspring follows the womb. In
doing so, they adopted customs practiced elsewhere in the Americas, where Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and Dutch slave-owners followed ancient Roman traditions.59
Nor did the legislature stop in 1662. In 1669, they enacted a law declaring that
baptism did not lead to freedom, meaning that Christians could enslave other
Christians – as long as the slaves were of African descent. And in 1691, they outlawed
all interracial sexual relations, drawing lines between black and white as starkly as
they could. Legislators had through these actions created a culture of slavery, one in
which certain individuals were fit to labor for life and others were not; one in which
some individuals had their legal personhood stripped away and others had theirs
affirmed; one in which some individuals’ bodies were subject to particular forms of
corporal punishment and others were not; and one in which race defined the lines
between the two groups. They developed, in other words, a particular economy of
violence which underwrote the colonial economy. This culture underwrote the
growth of Virginia’s plantation economy, as the slave population grew from under 4
percent of the colony’s total population in 1670, to 30 percent of the colony’s total
population in 1700, to over 40 percent of the colony’s total population in 1720.60
Englishmen in Barbados had a similar experience. First settled by the English in
1627, colonizers on that island created a plantation system that deviated from English
norms. Sugar production especially proved a problem, as it had a longer growing
season and required new technologies and different forms of agricultural organization
than any crop grown in England. Where Portuguese planters in Brazil had embraced
African slavery fairly rapidly on their sugar plantations, their counterparts in
Barbados continued to draw on the labor of bound Englishmen for some time after
they began sugar cultivation. Bound labor on the island, however, became ‘a new and
different institution’ based on ‘the systematic application of legally sanctioned force
and violence’ – a sharp deviation from traditional practice across the Atlantic.61
253
Indentured servants lost customary rights and legal protections to which they had
been entitled in England, while finding themselves subject to unprecedented forms of
physical punishment. According to European visitors to the island, their condition
resembled that of slaves more than of indentured servants in England.62
The creation of this culture of labor helped the development of a culture of slavery
after mid-century. The number of slaves in Barbados nearly equaled the number of
white bound laborers in 1655. By the 1670s, there were three slaves for every two
white servants; a decade later, slaves outnumbered servants 2.3:1.63 Moreover,
Barbadian legislators moved more quickly to pass laws defining and protecting
slavery, culminating in a comprehensive 1661 ‘Act for the Better Ordering and
Governing of Negroes.’ Declaring Africans to be ‘of barbarous, wilde and savage
nature’ and thus ‘wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws, Customs, and
Practices of our Nation,’ the act detailed the ways in which masters and magistrates
could work, discipline, and punish enslaved laborers. Though this act borrowed to
some degree from English precedents regarding the regulation of servants and,
tellingly, the declaration of martial law, it nonetheless represented a significant
innovation in a land ‘largely free of English oversight, tradition, and law.’64
That same year, the assembly passed an act for the regulation of servants that gave
them, at least on paper, protection from some of the worst abuses of the plantation
system – protection denied slaves. Just as their counterparts in Virginia would do a
year later, Barbadian lawmakers established an institutional edifice to undergird the
particularly brutal system of human exploitation they had developed. The existence
of two separate acts revealed leading colonists’ desire to create two different kinds of
workers whose persons could be owned – and bodies could be regulated – in different
ways. (Tellingly, they never adopted a law tracing slave status through the line of the
mother, as Virginians did; this simply seems to have been customary.) They had
created a culture of slavery within a true space of death. In 1700, Barbados had a
black population of approximately 50,000; colonizers had imported over 212,000
enslaved Africans over the previous seventy-five years, this demographic disaster a
testament to the world plantation owners had made.65
Other European colonial powers, too, created new Atlantic cultures of violence as
they created new cultures of slavery. Slavery existed in Spain and Portugal before the
opening of the Atlantic world, as did legal prescriptions and proscriptions regulating
the treatment of slaves. The ‘Reconquista’ increased the slave population, though
Iberian Christians were more likely to enserf defeated Muslims than enslave them
during these wars.66 Spain and Portugal (but especially the latter) embraced African
slavery after the opening of an Atlantic trade in the 1440s, and African slaves
comprised as much as 15 percent of the population in some Portuguese port cities.
Nonetheless, African slaves worked largely in the same occupations as Muslim slaves
– primarily as domestic servants – and in the same conditions.67
But with the opening of Atlantic colonies off the coast of Africa, these patterns
changed. By mid-century, Portuguese settlers had established sugar works on
Madeira, drawing on enslaved Africans for the lion’s share of their workforce. Shortly
thereafter, Castilian conquerors established sugar plantations almost immediately
after conquering the Canaries, though the near total destruction of the native
population through war and disease required them to seek an alternative source of
labor: Africans. By the sixteenth-century, the Azore islands became large sugar
254
producers; São Tomé boasted sixty sugar plantations in 1522, some of which had as
many as 300 slaves. And by 1550, Portuguese planters had begun what would become
the largest plantation complex in the Americas in the sugar cane fields in Brazil. The
growth of plantation agriculture necessitated multiple transformations. Enslaved
peoples in the colonial Atlantic worked in different occupations and in larger units
than their predecessors had. It also involved an intensification not just in the labor
demands made of slaves, but also in the types of punishments used to keep these slave
economies going. If the laws governing slaves changed little during the rise of the
Iberian plantation complex, the cultures of slavery that defined life in Madeira, the
Canaries, São Tomé, and Brazil quickly deviated from any ‘Old World’ traditions.68
In the case of France, the law prohibited the practice of slavery on French soil. It
quickly became apparent, however, that this proscription did not apply to the
Americas.69 French planters attempted to emulate other European colonizers,
establishing sugar plantations on their Caribbean possessions. Initially, they tried to
rely on engagés – indentured servants – as a permanent labor force in a growing
plantation economy. Thousands of French laborers headed to the Caribbean between
the 1620s and 1660s, working in desperate conditions that shocked visiting
missionaries to the islands.70
Ultimately, however, this experiment in engagé labor failed and planters turned to
imported Africans. By 1660, for example, slaves comprised more than half of
Martinique’s population; by 1684, they would be more than two-thirds of the
population.71 Colonizers in St. Domingue embraced slavery somewhat less slowly,
but in 1713 more than 81 percent of the colony would be enslaved, working in the
same brutal conditions as enslaved workers elsewhere on Atlantic sugar plantations.
Meanwhile, royal officials promulgated the Code Noir in 1685, a collection of laws
regulating slavery in the colonies. Not as harsh as English slave laws but without
some of the more moderate provisions of Spanish slave laws, it defined slaves’ status
as property while allowing masters to punish their slaves, up to the point of torture,
for infractions. In other words, it denied their humanity in ways far worse than the
‘inhumane’ environment the engagés faced.72
The creation of colonial cultures of slavery did more than simply regulate official
and unofficial labor regimes. It also involved the creation of increasingly elaborate
legal categories of race, as well as laws governing sexual relations across racial
boundary lines. In Spanish America, legislators adapted laws regarding limpieza de
sangre (purity of blood) passed in Europe for use in the colonies. Where these statutes
had previously been used to track the Jewish and Muslim ancestry of conversos and
moriscos, respectively, in Spain, they came to be used to track Indian and African
ancestry among colonial residents of mixed ancestry.73 In French colonies, meanwhile,
the 1685 Code Noir established, among other things, the legal privileges of those
born of interracial relationships. In this way, the management of race, gender, and
sexuality played a role in maintaining colonial cultures of slavery just as interracial
sexual violence played a role in creating those cultures.74
It can be easy enough to examine these histories discreetly, to write the stories of
race and slavery in the English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese Atlantic separately.
One could also, quite productively, write comparative histories of conquest
colonization within and among these imperial powers. Looking at the relationship
between culture and violence in communities within these empires, however, provides
255
a way of seeing them in a particular combination, of showing how they existed as

part of a larger whole. Though these local histories might, when viewed from a
particular angle, look like discrete stories, each occupied a place within a kaleidoscope
of Atlantic colonialism, one held together by the exercise of force and coercion in
ways large and small.
* * *
Of course, this essay is, as noted at the outset, suggestive rather than conclusive. One
could easily attempt to find the origins of Atlantic cultures elsewhere, perhaps with a
different thematic focus or geographic outlook. One might also write different
histories of violence in the Atlantic world, perhaps focusing on material rather than
on cultural forces. The preceding discussion hardly forecloses the possibility of other
narratives about this era and these places. But focusing on the intertwined history of
violence and culture in the Atlantic has its own merits, as I hope I have shown.
Looking at the mutually constitutive relationship between violence and culture has
three primary benefits. First, it provides an opportunity to engage with multiple levels
of Atlantic history (drawing again on Armitage’s three concepts of American history)
simultaneously, analyzing trans-Atlantic histories while keeping cis-Atlantic
variations on a theme in mind. Second, it suggests a way of making sense of historical
entanglements and entangled histories, together. One of Atlantic history’s virtues is
the fact that it lets its practitioners move beyond nationalist assumptions, revealing
the importance of connections that spanned old empires and the forces that criss-
crossed the ocean. At the same time, some scholars have argued that its true value lies
in the fact that it destabilizes nationalist narratives, allowing for more rigorous
comparative work of those societies that emerged out of the colonial Atlantic world.
Exploring the history of violence and culture gives scholars a means to address the
history of trans-Atlantic ties that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas, while also
giving scholars a way of telling a larger trans-Atlantic history that spans multiple
regions and historiographies.
Lastly, analyzing violence and culture together captures something crucial about
life within the Atlantic in this era. Feeding off of each other – with particular cultural
preconceptions legitimating and encouraging specific forms of violence, and practices
of violence and domination spawning new cultures – they acted as a sort of perpetual
motion machine of colonial domination. Atlantic cultures of violence determined
who suffered, how they suffered, and who occupied positions of power in which they
could inflict suffering. This was the world in which Europeans, Africans, and
Americans lived and died. As such this particular way of telling the history of the
Atlantic world has, I think, a resonance all its own.
NOTE S
I would like to thank Michael Goode, Katie Harris, and Natalie Troxel for thorough, and very
helpful, readings of this essay at the last minute.
1 Fischer, 1989; Hartz, 1964; Turner, 1975.

2 Frazier, 1978; Herskovits, 1941; Price, 2001.
256
3 Foster, 1960; Gruzinski, 1993, 2002.

4 Plank, 2010; Smolenski, 2005.
5 Bourdieu, 1977; Geertz, 1973c; Greenblatt, 1988; Ortner, 1999; Sewell, 2005; Urban, 1991.
6 Armitage, 2002: 15.
7 Cañizares-Esguerra, 2006: 7.
8 Newitt, 2010: 25.
9 Thornton, 1998: 257, 2013: 57–60.
10 Elliott, 2006: 17; Greenblatt, 1991: 53.
11 Pagden, 1995: 11–62; Županov, 2010: 26–27.
12 Cañizares-Esguerra, 2006: 7.
13 Shields, 2007, 2009.
14 Mancall, 2007: 164; Oberg, 1999.
15 Warner, 2000: 55–56.
16 See Geertz, 1973b: 93.
17 Brading, 1991: 2, 22.
18 Schmidt, 2001.
19 Pestana, 2011; Shields, 2009.
20 Geertz, 1973a: 448.
21 Armitage, 2000: 96–98; Jennings, 1975: 82, 135; Pagden, 1990, 1998; Tomlins, 2010: 113–20.
22 Cortés and Elliott, 2001: xxvii–xxviii; Richter, 2011: 114.
23 On the Requirement and fences, see Seed, 1995: 16–40 and 69–99
24 Urban, 1993: 228.
25 On the cultural dynamics of this process, see Urban, 2001: 144.
26 Austin, 1975; Faudree, 2012.
27 On ideas of land ownership among Indians and Europeans, see Shoemaker, 2004: 16–20.
On cultural space and sovereignty, see Greene, 1992; Smolenski, 2005.
28 Anderson, 1994; Richter, 2001: 98; Silverman, 2003; Smolenski, 2005: 1–3.
29 Robert Blair St. George defines transculturation as ‘the action whereby a politically
dominated culture appropriates some of the symbolic forms of a dominant or imperial
culture in order to articulate its own continuing vision of autonomy’ under colonialism:
St. George, 2000: 26. See also Mazzotti, 2000; Mignolo, 2000: 14–16, 167–70.
30 Silverman, 2003: 528.
31 On Indians’ difficulties in court and conflicts over land helping cause King Philip’s War,
see Anderson, 1994: 602. On Philip as a ‘rebel for cooperation,’ see Richter, 2001: 105.
32 Geertz, 1973a.
33 Clendinnen, 1993; Haefeli, 1999: 18; Lepore, 1998.
34 Taussig, 1984: 495.
35 Brading, 1991: 25–58; Clendinnen, 1993; Cortés, 2001: 262.
36 Lepore, 1998: xiv.
37 Schmidt, 2001: 276–80.
38 Urban, 1993: 228–29.
39 Taussig, 1984: 468.
40 Lovejoy, 2011: 11–15. Paul Lovejoy describes pawnship as a practice in which individuals
could be ‘held as security for a debt’ whose value was based not on their productive
capacity but on ‘the expectation that their relatives would repay the debt and thereby
release the pawn from bondage’ (p. 13). See also Thornton, 1998: 98–125.
41 Lovejoy, 2011: 27; http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?yearFrom=1400&
yearTo=1700 (accessed May 1, 2014).
42 Lovejoy, 2011: 83–87. On changes in war, see Heywood and Thornton, 2007: Chapter 3.
43 Eltis, 2000: 287; Lovejoy, 2011: 20.
44 Lovejoy, 2011: 19, 27.
257
45 See Smolenski, 2005: 14.

46 Green, 2012: 104; Martinez-Echazabal, 1998; Miller, 2004.
47 Green, 2012: 104–5.
48 Wood, 1998: quotation on 12. Karen Vieira Powers has raised a caution against a recent
historiographic tendency to cast indigenous women as completely passive victims of
conquistador violence, arguing this totalizing discourse discounts female agency. This
point, while well-taken, nonetheless concedes the centrality of coerced sex in the space
conquest (Powers, 2002).
49 Brown, 2008: 49. The literature on slave cultures in the Americas is vast. For some
introduction to the literature, see the references cited in note 3, as well as Mintz and Price,
1992. For some of the more recent work that highlights the role of violence in the formation
of slave societies, see Brown, 2008; Smallwood, 2007; Sweet, 2003; Trouillot, 2002.
50 Blackburn, 2010: 31–93; Eltis, 2000: Chapter 1.
51 Colonel [Henry] Nowood, A Voyage to Virginia (1649), cited in Horn, 1994: 138.
52 Handlin, 1957: 4.
53 Greene, 2002.
54 Billings, 1979: 242–44. James Horn argues that nonetheless the legal system in the
Chesapeake would have been extremely familiar to settlers: Horn, 1994: 338.
55 Billings, 1991; Horn, 1994: 271; Morgan, 1975: 216–17; Pagan, 2003; Tomlins, 2010: 263–75.
56 Brown, 1996: 107–36.
57 Tomlins, 2010: 455–59f.
58 Tomlins, 2010: 455.
59 Billings, 1991: 57; Tomlins, 2010: 455–59. Jonathan Bush has pointed out that colonial
slave law resembled Roman slave doctrines only through its embrace of matrilineal
descent was was otherwise ‘new’ law: Bush, 1993: 425.
60 McCusker, 2006: 5:561, 653.
61 Beckles, 1989: 5.
62 Beckles, 1990: 511.
63 Beckles, 1990: 505.
64 Gaspar, 1999; Newman, 2013: 55, 192 (act quoted at 192); Nicholson, 1994.
65 Newman, 2013: 214.
66 Elliott, 2006: 107; Klein, 1986: 9.
67 Klein, 1986: 6, 14.
68 Blackburn, 2010: 107–12; De La Fuente, 2004; Fuente, 2008; Schwartz, 1985, 2004;
Viera, 2004.
69 Peabody, 1994.
70 Blackburn, 2010: 281–82; Boucher, 2008: 144, 153; Moitt, 2001: 2–18; Pritchard,
2007: 94–95.
71 Garrigus, 2006: 25.
72 Garrigus, 2006: 39; Peabody, 2011: 603.
73 Martínez, 2008.
74 Aubert, 2004; Garrigus, 2006: Chapter 1.
REF EREN CE S
Anderson VD (1994) King Philip’s Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in
Early New England. William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 51(4), 601–24.
Armitage D (2000) The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
——(2002) Three Concepts of Atlantic History. In: Armitage D and Braddick MJ (eds), The
British Atlantic world, 1500–1800, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 11–30.
258
Aubert G (2004) The Blood of France: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World.
William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 61(3), 439–78.
Austin JL (1975) How to do things with words. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Beckles H (1989) White servitude and Black slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press.
Beckles HM (1990) A ‘riotous and unruly lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the
English West Indies, 1644–1713. William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 47(4), 503–22.
Billings WM (1979) The Transfer of English Law to Virginia. In: Andrews KR, Canny NP, and
Hair PEH (eds), The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and
America, 1480–1650, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 215–44.
——(1991) The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. Virginia
Magazine of History and Biography, 99(1), 45–62.
Blackburn R (2010) The making of New World slavery: from the Baroque to the Modern,
1492–1800. 2nd. ed. New York: Verso.
Boucher PP (2008) France and the American tropics to 1700: tropics of discontent? Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bourdieu P (1977) Outline of a theory of practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brading DA (1991) The first America: the Spanish monarchy, Creole patriots, and the liberal
state, 1492–1867. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brown KM (1996) Good wives, nasty wenches, and anxious patriarchs: gender, race, and
power in colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Brown V (2008) The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Bush JA (1993) Free to Enslave: The Foundations of Colonial American Slave Law. Yale
Journal of Law & the Humanities, 5(2), 417–70.
Cañizares-Esguerra J (2006) Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Clendinnen I (1993) ‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty’: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico. In:
Greenblatt S (ed.), New World Encounters, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 12–47.
Cortés H (2001) Hernan Cortes: Letters from Mexico. Rev. Pagden A (ed.), New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
De La Fuente A (2004) Sugar and Slavery in Early Colonial Cuba. In: Schwartz SB (ed.),
Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680, Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, pp. 158–200.
Elliott JH (2001) Cortés, Velázquex, and Charles V. In: Pagden A (ed.), Hernan Cortes: Letters
from Mexico, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. xi–xxxviii.
——(2006) Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Eltis D (2000) The rise of African slavery in the Americas. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Faudree P (2012) How to Say Things with Wars: Performativity and Discursive Rupture in the
Requerimiento of the Spanish Conquest. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22(3), 182–200.
Fischer DH (1989) Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Foster GM (1960) Culture and conquest: America’s Spanish heritage. New York: Wenner-
Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Frazier EF (1978) Race and culture contacts in the modern world. Westport, Conn: Greenwood
Press.
Fuente A de la (2008) Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press.
Garrigus JD (2006) Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. The Americas
in the early modern Atlantic world, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
259
Gaspar DB (1999) With a Rod of Iron: Barbados Slave Laws as a Model for Jamaica, South Carolina,
and Antigua, 1661–97. In: Hine DC and McLeod J (eds), Crossing boundaries: comparative
history of Black people in diaspora, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 343–66.
Geertz C (1973a) Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight. In: The Interpretation of Cultures;
Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, pp. 412–54.
——(1973b) Religion as a Cultural System. In: The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays,
New York: Basic Books, pp. 87–125.
——(1973c) Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. In: The
Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, pp. 3–30.
Green T (2012) The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589.
Greenblatt S (1988) The Circulation of Social Energy. In: Shakespearean Negotiations: the
Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California
Press, pp. 1–20.
——(1991) Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Greene JP (1992) Mastery and the Definition of Cultural Space in Early America: A Perspective.
In: Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History,
Charlotsville: University Press of Virginia, pp. 1–12.
——(2002) ‘By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them’: Law and Identity in Colonial British
America. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 33(2), 247–60.
Gruzinski S (1993) The conquest of Mexico : the incorporation of Indian societies into the
Western world, 16th-18th centuries. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
——(2002) The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization.
New York: Routledge.
Haefeli E (1999) Kieft’s War and the Cultures of Violence in Colonial Americas. In: Bellesiles
MA (ed.), Lethal imagination: violence and brutality in American history, New York: New
York University Press, pp. 17–40.
Handlin O (1957) The Significance of the Seventeenth Century. In: Smith JM (ed.), Seventeenth-
Century America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 3–12.
Hartz LM (1964) The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States,
Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace &
World Inc.
Herskovits MJ (1941) The Myth of the Negro Past. New York, London: Harper & Brothers.
Heywood LM and Thornton JK (2007) Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation
of the Americas, 1585–1660. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Horn JPP (1994) Adapting to a new world: English society in the seventeenth-century
Chesapeake. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Jennings F (1975) The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Klein HS (1986) African slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Lepore J (1998) The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity.
New York: Knopf.
Lovejoy PE (2011) Transformations in slavery: a history of slavery in Africa. 3rd ed. New
Mancall PC (2007) Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Martínez ME (2008) Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza De Sangre, Religion, and Gender in
Colonial Mexico. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
260
Martinez-Echazabal L (1998) Mestizaje and the Discourse of National/Cultural Identity in

Latin America, 1845–1959. Latin American Perspectives, 25(3), 21–42.
Mazzotti JA (2000) Mestizo Dreams: Transculturation and Hetereogeneity in Inca Garcilaso
de la Vega. In: St. George RB (ed.), Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America,
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, pp. 131–47.
McCusker JJ (2006) Colonial Statistics. In: Carter SB, Gartner SS, Haines MR, et al. (eds),
Historical Statistics of the United States Millennial Edition, New York: Cambridge
University Press, vol. 5, pp. 627–64.
Mignolo W (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Miller MG (2004) Rise and fall of the cosmic race: the cult of mestizaje in Latin America.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Mintz SW and Price R (1992) The birth of African-American culture: an anthropological
perspective. Boston: Beacon Press.
Moitt B (2001) Women and slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Morgan ES (1975) American slavery, American freedom: the ordeal of colonial Virginia. New
York: W.W. Norton.
Newitt M (ed.) (2010) The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: a documentary history.
Newman SP (2013) A new world of labor: the development of plantation slavery in the British
Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Nicholson BJ (1994) Legal Borrowing and the Origins of Slave Law in the British Colonies.
The American Journal of Legal History, 38(1), 38–54.
Oberg ML (1999) Dominion and civility: English imperialism and Native America, 1585–
1685. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
Ortner SB (1999) The fate of ‘culture’: Geertz and beyond. Representations books; 8, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Pagan JR (2003) Anne Orthwood’s bastard : sex and law in early Virginia. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Pagden A (1990) Dispossessing the Barbarian: Rights and Property in Spanish America. In:
Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American
Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 13–36.
——(1995) Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-
c. 1800. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
——(1998) The Struggle for Legitimation and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c.1700.
In: Canny NP (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume I: The Origins of
Empire British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, 1: New York:
Oxford University Press, pp. 34–54.
Peabody S (1994) Race, Slavery, and the Law in Early Modern France. Historian, 56(3), 501–10.
——(2011) Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Atlantic World, 1420–1807. In: Eltis D,
Engerman SL, Eltis D, et al. (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 594–630.
Pestana CG (2011) Cruelty and Religious Justifications for Conquest in the Mid-Seventeenth
Century English Atlantic. In: Gregerson L and Juster S (eds), Empires of God: religious encounters
in the early modern Atlantic, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 37–57.
Plank G (2010) Violence. In: Burnard T (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History,
New York: Oxford University Press.
Powers KV (2002) Conquering Discourses of ‘Sexual Conquest’: Of Women, Language, and
Mestizaje. Colonial Latin American Review, 11(1), 7–32.
261
Price R (2001) The Miracle of Creolization: A Retrospective. New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe
West-Indische Gids, 75(1), 35–64.
Pritchard J (2007) In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730. 1st ed. New
Richter DK (2001) Facing East from Indian Country: a Native History of Early America.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
——(2011) Before the Revolution: America’s ancient pasts. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press.
Schmidt B (2001) Innocence abroad: the Dutch imagination and the New World, 1570–1670.
Schwartz SB (1985) Sugar plantations in the formation of Brazilian society: Bahia, 1550–1835.
——(2004) A Commonwealth within Itself: The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry. In: Schwartz
SB (ed.), Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 158–200.
Seed P (1995) Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640.
Sewell WH (2005) The Concept(s) of Culture. In: Logics of history: social theory and social
transformation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 152–74.
Shields DS (2007) The Genius of Ancient Britain. In: Mancall PC (ed.), The Atlantic World
and Virginia, 1550–1624, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 489–510.
——(2009) Sons of the Dragon; or, The English Hero Revived. In: Bauer R and Mazzotti JA
(eds), Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas Empires, Texts, Identities., University of
North Carolina Press, pp. 101–17.
Shoemaker N (2004) A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-century
North America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Silverman DJ (2003) ‘We Chuse to Be Bounded’: Native American Animal Husbandry in
Colonial New England. William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 60(3), 511–48.
Smallwood SE (2007) Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Smolenski J (2005) Introduction: The Ordering of Authority in the Colonial Americas. In:
Smolenski J and Humphrey TJ (eds), New World orders: violence, sanction, and authority
in the colonial Americas, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1–16.
St. George RB (2000) Introduction. In: St. George RB (ed.), Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial
in Early America, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, pp. 1–29.
Sweet JH (2003) Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese
World, 1441–1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Taussig M (1984) Culture of Terror – Space of Death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and
the Explanation of Torture. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26(3), 467–97.
Thornton JK (1998) Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400–1800.
——(2013) Afro-Christian Syncretism in the Kingdom of Kongo. Journal of African History,
54(01), 53–77.
Tomlins CL (2010) Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English
America, 1580–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Trouillot M-R (2002) Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context. In:
Axel BK (ed.), From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, pp. 189–210.
Turner FJ (1975) The significance of the Frontier in American History. In: The frontier in
American history, Huntington, N.Y.: R. E. Krieger Pub. Co., pp. 1–39.
262
Urban G (1991) A discourse-centered approach to culture : native South American myths and
rituals. Texas linguistics series, Austin: University of Texas Press.
——(1993) Culture’s Public Face. Public Culture, 5(2), 213–22.
——(2001) Metaculture: how culture moves through the world. Public worlds ; v. 8, Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Viera A (2004) Sugar Islands: The Sugar Economy of Madeira and the Canaries, 1450–1650.
In: Schwartz SB (ed.), Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World,
1450–1680, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 42–84.
Warner M (2000) What’s Colonial About Colonial America? In: St. George RB (ed.), Possible
pasts: becoming colonial in early America, Ithaca: Cornell Univ Press.
Wood S (1998) Sexual Violation in the Conquest of the Americas. In: Smith MD (ed.), Sex and
sexuality in early America, New York: New York University Press, pp. 9–26.
Županov, Ines (2010) ‘The Wheel of Torments’: Mobility and Redemption in Portuguese
Colonial India (Sixteenth century). In: Greenblatt S (ed.), Cultural mobility: a manifesto,
New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 24–74.
263
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WAR AND WARFARE

Geoffrey Plank
W arfare shaped the Atlantic world between 1400 and 1815, but many of the
dynamics that operated in that period had already revealed themselves in the
medieval period with the Viking occupation of the Faero Islands, Iceland and southern
Greenland, and the establishment of a small Norse outpost on the northern tip of
Newfoundland. The Vikings acquired the ability to enter the North Atlantic only as
a consequence of their military successes in Europe. Warfare secured them the
necessary wealth and political power, and helped motivate the technological
innovations that made crossing the ocean possible. The Norse built their first sailing
ships around the year 700 and deployed them against Anglo-Saxon, Frankish and
Irish enemies before sailing into the Atlantic. The resulting warfare spurred migration.
The Icelandic sagas embellish the events they recall, but there is no reason to doubt
the political dynamic they describe. A series of military confrontations, with rulers
jockeying for position, establishing outposts on distant islands and carrying warriors
and settlers with them, drove Viking colonization on Greenland and Newfoundland.
The fate of the Vikings’ Newfoundland colony at the start of the eleventh century
serves as an instructive tale on the vulnerability of European settlements in the Americas.
The settlers did not encounter any indigenous people at first, but when they did they
entered combat. According to one saga, the Vikings abducted two Native boys and sent
them to Greenland in the hope that they would learn Norse, embrace Christianity and
help pacify their kinsmen. That colonisation project came to nothing, and after a few
years, sensing that they were surrounded in a hostile territory, the colonists gave up. A
larger settlement with easier access to supplies from Greenland might have soldiered on,
but under the circumstances the outpost seemed too risky and expensive to maintain.1
The Europeans who entered and travelled the Atlantic after 1400 in many respects
resembled their ill-fated predecessors. The ships that carried the Portuguese into the
ocean and down the coast of Africa in the fifteenth century were the product of a
shipbuilding tradition in which designers had long sought to reconcile the requirements
of commerce and war.2 The Portuguese were able to finance their expeditions as a
consequence of their military success against Muslim adversaries on the Iberian Peninsula,
which secured them a measure of political stability, fiscal resources, and a charge from
the Pope to extend their campaigns into Africa. Similarly, Spain’s conquest of Granada
264
– chapter 15: War and warfare in the Atlantic World –
provided an impetus for its ventures across the Atlantic, and the later colonizing efforts
by other European powers were inspired in part by violent dynastic, commercial and
sectarian rivalries. Like the Vikings in the eleventh century, Europe’s colonists after 1492
frequently fought each other and their colonizing efforts led to warfare with and among
indigenous peoples. New colonies were particularly vulnerable in the early years of
settlement because of their dependence on ships for protection and trade.
In contrast to the Norse settlers on Greenland and Newfoundland, the Europeans
who entered and crossed the Atlantic after 1400 eventually established permanent
settlements and transatlantic communication links that persist to this day. Their
success stemmed in no small part from their readiness to engage in endemic armed
conflict. From the fifteenth century onward warfare in the Atlantic world was peculiarly
destructive. In Africa and the Americas noncombatant populations were targeted and
captive taking escalated as the belligerents sought to terrorize each other, assert their
own dominion, and gain riches through the slave trade. Warfare transformed politics
on every continent ringing the Atlantic and ultimately helped bind the ocean’s peoples
together. By the eighteenth century the Europeans and the Americans were experiencing
periods of war in sync, as large-scale conflicts typically spread from one side of the
ocean to the other. Transatlantic warfare sharply distinguished a period of global
history, one that ended with the fall of Napoleon in 1815.
WAR AND COMMERCE AT S E A, 1 4 0 0 – 1 8 1 5

The vessels that first carried the Portuguese down the coast of Africa resembled those
that had plied the coasts of Europe and the Mediterranean through the Middle Ages,
but ship design began to change radically in the fifteenth century, partly under the
influence of military considerations.3 The Portuguese had placed guns on some of
their ships as early as the fourteenth century, but the practice became much more
widespread after the 1470s, when shipbuilders in Venice found a way to mount a
cannon on the bow of a galley. Over the next century Scottish, English and Portuguese
ship designers struggled to place heavy artillery on larger sailing ships. They succeeded
by the 1580s, and cannons become essential to the military operations of ships. The
heavy guns were used to bombard coastal targets, and when ships confronted each
other on the water they maneuvered close together, typically fired a single volley, and
prepared for boarding and combat on deck.4
Not all of the armed vessels that visited the shores of Africa and the Americas
belonged to navies, as even merchant ships had the power to awe and intimidate. The
shock of first seeing a European sailing ship became the stuff of legend among Native
Americans and Africans alike.5 As carriers of passengers and trade goods, large ships
were the most persistent and efficacious technological advantage the Europeans held
over the indigenous peoples of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. They were
essential to the operations of the nascent transatlantic empires, and therefore they
became targets as well as instruments of military force. On rare occasions Native
American warriors seized sailing vessels and used them in attacks against colonial
forces.6 West Africa’s rulers were in a better position to organize sustained, large-
scale campaigns, and more regularly policed their harbors, on occasion taking to sea
and attacking European ships.7 Nonetheless, throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, except in the close vicinity of Africa, the vessels plying the
265
– Geoffrey Plank –
Figure 15.1 Pinasses, large French and English ships trading with the Americas.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University
open Atlantic belonged to the Europeans and their colonial descendents. Native
American and African seamen may have served on ships, but from the perspective of
the commanders naval warfare was an exclusively European or colonial concern.
On the ocean it was often difficult to distinguish commerce from warfare. English,
Dutch and French pirates and privateers struck Portuguese ships off the coast of Africa
and Spanish vessels in the Caribbean. Even the Portuguese fishing fleet off Newfoundland
faced attack. The men who invested in these campaigns and manned the vessels did so
for profit. By the 1580s a customary shares system was in place for compensating the
men who worked on privateers. While hoping to make profits, private raiders also
frequently served the interests of their sectarian and political leaders. In the late 1580s
the English government issued licenses to an average of 100 privateering enterprises a
year, as part of its ongoing struggle against Spain.8 Particularly for the English, the
violence reshaped the ships themselves. With access to relatively cheap iron cannons,
English merchants routinely armed their vessels. This limited their ability to carry
heavy, bulky produce, but it gave them an advantage during times of conflict, providing
a measure of security and creating new economic opportunities.9
The prospect of raiding Spanish shipping lanes was a powerful early motive for
colonization, helping to inspire the French Huguenot effort to settle in South Carolina,
the English projects at Roanoke, Jamestown and Bermuda, and all of the early Dutch,
French and English ventures into the Caribbean. The Spanish claimed all the islands
266
of the Caribbean under the terms of two papal bulls issued in 1493 and the 1494
Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal. Nonetheless, by the mid-sixteenth
century it had become clear that neither Spain nor Portugal possessed a fleet large or
powerful enough to keep French, English, or Dutch interlopers out of their claimed
territorial waters. Neither country was willing to formally cede its authority on the
seas, but at the same time the other powers, recognizing Spanish and Portuguese
weakness, refused to stay out. Under these circumstances a new pragmatic
understanding developed, that the Caribbean Sea and all the waters off of North and
South America lay ‘beyond the line,’ meaning that Europe’s diplomats agreed among
themselves that no act of violence or depredation on the American side of the Atlantic
would be construed as a cause for full-scale war.10
Spain invested enormous resources defending its most valuable cargo, the silver it
extracted from the mines of Peru. Peruvian silver sailed through the Caribbean once
a year escorted by a fleet of heavily armed ships.11 Pirates and privateers dreamed of
taking the treasure fleet, but never succeeded. The silver was captured only once, by
the Dutch navy in 1628.12 Private maritime raiders were more successful pursuing
smaller prizes, and they found more riches to seize later in the seventeenth century
and in the early decades of the eighteenth century after sugar cultivation and the slave
trade transformed the Caribbean economy. Before the eighteenth century the
competing European powers differed in the extent to which they invested in
centralized navies or relied on privateers. From the sixteenth century forward Spain
sought to strengthen its navy, possibly to the detriment of its merchant fleet. England’s
Queen Elizabeth, by contrast, privatized naval warfare on a grand scale, and even
after the English navy gained greater support and fiscal resources in the second half
of the seventeenth century, privateers remained an essential component of Britain’s
maritime strategy. By the middle decades of the eighteenth century the British, the
French and the Spanish were all relying heavily on privateers, though Britain by that
time possessed the most potent navy in the world.13
When they reached the shores of the Americas navies could wield enormous power.
In most colonized regions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the settlers
remained dependent on overseas trade for the necessities of life, and therefore colonial
combatants were almost always vulnerable to naval blockade. The colonists were not
only economically but also politically subordinate to Europe, however, and therefore
navies were often deployed away from America in order to answer the concerns of the
home countries. Britain, for example, possessed the largest fleet in the world in the
eighteenth century, but in wartime the British government usually kept most of its ships
in European waters to ward off any possible attack from the continent.14
When deployed in colonial waters, large navies often played a decisive role in
combat. The planters in the Caribbean were always conscious of their vulnerability
to blockade.15 In the seventeenth century the Dutch relied on naval superiority to
seize Portuguese outposts in Angola and Brazil as well as along the coasts of the
Indian Ocean.16 Naval forces were decisive when the English conquered New
Netherland from the Dutch in 1664 and when the Dutch retook the colony in 1673.17
The British campaigns against the French in Acadia in 1690, 1704, 1707 and 1710
similarly demonstrated the importance of armed ships. The British were finally able
to conquer and hold the colony (renamed Nova Scotia) only after the leaders of the
1710 expedition secured support from the Royal Navy.18 Britain’s campaigns against
267
French Canada followed the same pattern. Ambitious plans to attack the colony in
1709 and 1746 were abandoned because the Admiralty was unwilling to send its
ships across the ocean. They took that risk in 1711, but the effort failed because the
fleet foundered in a storm. Success came only in the period between 1758 and 1760,
when the British navy arrived in full force and, coordinating its operations with the
army, assumed a dominant position across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the nearby
North Atlantic. Britain maintained its blockade of the St. Lawrence River only
intermittently, but when it did the French in Canada were starved.19
The American wars of independence exhibited a decline in the power of Europe’s
navies. The failure of the British blockade of Boston in 1774 and 1775 demonstrated
one of two things: either that the American economy – in New England at least – had
grown and diversified to such an extent that a naval embargo could no longer be
relied upon to defeat a colonial adversary; or that a revolutionary movement could
not be easily suppressed by a siege.20 The French (and the British) would learn a
similarly ambiguous lesson in Haiti in the 1790s, as would the Spanish early in the
nineteenth century during the dissolution of their mainland American empire.
Nonetheless, navies continued to play an important role in determining the balance
of power. Whenever European troops were deployed in the Americas they relied
heavily on naval support. Therefore their success in land battles often depended on
their control of the shipping lanes. The United States declared independence from
Britain in 1776 in part to give the revolutionary movement access to military aid
from France and, more specifically, help from the French navy. The gambit paid off
in 1781 when a French fleet took control of the waters off Yorktown and, operating
in conjunction with George Washington’s Continentals, surrounded Charles
Cornwallis and his men, forcing them to surrender.21 For the next two years, until the
Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, the erstwhile ‘revolutionary’ war was fought
primarily in the Caribbean between the British, the French and the Spanish, with
navies playing prominent roles.22
For the rest of the revolutionary era, through the Napoleonic period and for
decades after that, the superior size and strength of the British navy affected the
course of American politics. In Brazil, Buenos Aires, Chile and elsewhere in the
crumbling Portuguese and Spanish Empires, Britain’s naval interventions helped
determine the outcome in colonial wars for independence.23 The Royal Navy also
defined the parameters of North America’s War of 1812. During that conflict U.S.
expansionists dreamed of defeating the British in Canada, but they knew they could
not challenge Britain at sea. Though American privateers cruised the Caribbean
during the war, no one in America contemplated seizing any British-ruled islands.24
C O LO N IZATION, SLAVERY, AND W ARF ARE O N L AND

Though they fought among themselves, from the fifteenth century forward the
Europeans and their descendents dominated the Atlantic Ocean. The expansion of
European power was more contested on land, and for centuries the relative strength
of European and indigenous military forces along the coasts of Africa, on the islands
of the Caribbean, and on the mainland of the Americas depended on an array of
variables including spectacularly discriminatory disease environments and shifts in the
pattern of trade. With the exception of the Azores, Madeira, and a few other
268
uninhabited islands in the Atlantic, nearly everywhere the Europeans colonized in the
early modern period they met armed resistance, and endemic warfare continued on
the margins of most of their colonies and trading posts. Imperial soldiers, settlers and
traveling merchants sought local allies, and consequently they often incorporated
themselves into African and Native American diplomatic, military and commercial
networks. The newcomers and the indigenous peoples struggled to understand each
other, find common interests and exploit the opportunities that arose with the
expansion of transatlantic commerce. Conflicts arose as a consequence of ongoing
cultural misunderstandings and conflicting conceptions of justice and the appropriate
use of force. Additionally, in many theatres of combat profits could be made by
exploiting political instability. African, Native American and colonial leaders amassed
riches, power and prestige in the context of war. Many indigenous and colonial
communities felt vulnerable and believed that they had to engage in aggressive military
action – or, at a minimum, issue dramatic threats – in order to survive. New ways of
fighting developed, often involving a combination of hostage taking, torture, mutilation
and other forms of exemplary punishment, or enslavement and the sale of captives.
The custom of taking captives in wartime and putting them to work as slaves had
been common in many parts of Europe, Africa and the Americas before the fifteenth
century.25 Medieval Christian crusaders used war captives as slaves on sugar
plantations they established on conquered Mediterranean islands.26 In the sixteenth
century Portuguese colonists adopted a similar practice on islands off the coast of
Africa, forcing slaves they acquired through military action to work in their fields.27
In the early days of colonization on Madeira, the Portuguese may have sent raiders
to the Canary Islands to seize workers. It did not take long for them to realize,
however, that they were better off purchasing workers in Africa. That continent’s
economy was already well organized for the delivery of slaves. In many societies
along the African coast individuals were enslaved as a punishment for crime. The
convicts joined other slaves who had been illicitly kidnapped, and those – a large
portion of the enslaved population – who had been captured in war.28 At least since
the late 1750s when the antislavery campaigner Anthony Benezet began to protest
against the Atlantic slave trade, activists and historians have been engaged in a debate
over the slave trade’s influence on warfare in Africa.29 The transatlantic slave trade
was not the only cause of Africa’s wars, but there can be no doubt that the trade
enriched and empowered the continent’s wartime leaders, increased the cost of
warfare and profoundly altered the consequences of military defeat.
The transatlantic economy that developed in the sixteenth century could not have
been established or sustained without warfare and other forms of physical violence
on a massive scale. Spain’s first large-scale colonizing effort in the Americas, the
conquest and settlement of Hispaniola, arguably set a pattern for much of what was
to follow, though in its severity the episode may have been unique. In accordance
with the repartimiento system introduced by Columbus in 1497, individual colonists
demanded labor and tribute from indigenous islanders. Wielding this authority they
broke up families and destroyed entire communities, sending men to work in gold
mines and placing women and children to work on newly established farms. The
local economy collapsed, resulting in famine and tens of thousands of deaths. Some
of the islanders killed themselves, but more died of disease, and by 1520 their numbers
may have dropped to as low as 500 from an initial population of about a quarter of
269
Figure 15.2 Slave traders in Gorés
270
a million.30 Throughout the Americas, indigenous populations were vulnerable to

Eurasian and African pathogens. Epidemic diseases repeatedly wrecked Native
communities and limited their ability to resist colonization. The Indians were
susceptible not only because they were missing certain biological immunities, but also
often because they suffered through food shortages, forced migrations, and other
stresses that came as a direct consequence of war.31
Over the next two hundred years, on several of the Caribbean islands, colonization
led to the total destruction of the indigenous population, a turn of events that
encouraged the planters to turn to the transatlantic slave trade as a source for labor.32
By contrast, Native populations seldom disappeared on the mainland of North or
South America. Quite the contrary; at least until the eighteenth century in many
regions the European colonists were outnumbered and needed assistance from Native
allies if they were to conduct successful military campaigns. In 1519 Hernan Cortés
succeeded against Moctezuma only with assistance from a large body of disaffected
indigenous Mexicans. Many of his Native allies had grievances against the Aztec
Empire, but others were simply trying to make the best of a difficult situation. All of
them were impressed by the newcomer’s military potential and they recognized the
logistical advantage Cortés held over his opponents with his ability to send men and
supplies quickly across long distances on horses and large ships.33 Cortés was able to
establish Spanish hegemony over the heartland of Mexico, but later in the colonial
period on the margins of Spanish settlement, perhaps most dramatically in and around
New Mexico, in times of crisis the colonists’ survival could depend on the outcome of
complex negotiations with a variety of powerful, disunited Native groups.34
While the Spanish frequently reached accommodations with Native leaders in
order to secure and maintain power, their official policy toward the peoples of the
Americas, especially in the sixteenth century, was uncompromising. Citing the Papal
Bull of 1493, they insisted that they crossed the ocean with full legal authority and
for the benefit of the Native Americans. The rituals that the Spanish army conducted
to establish and dramatize the delegated power of the church and the crown
encouraged colonial officials and missionaries alike to interpret resistance as rebellion
and treat it as a crime.35 On occasion the Spanish responded to perceived disobedience
with severe punitive measures that blurred any distinction between labor discipline,
criminal sanction, religious instruction, and full-scale war. Often church officials and
military men asserted their authority most vehemently in outposts where they felt
vulnerable, in the Yucatán, for example, or New Mexico.36
In Hispaniola, Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru, Spain’s empire in the Americas was
associated with the forcible expropriation of land and resources, the imposition of
new social hierarchies, and coercive, exploitative labor relations.37 From the perspective
of many observers, violence seemed endemic to the entire colonial system, and the
pattern of Spanish imperialism had lasting effects on the actions of subsequent
colonizers. The Spanish subjugation of Hispaniola and Mexico, recounted graphically
in the writings of the first bishop of Chiapas, Bartolomé de las Casas, convinced many
imperial promoters in France, England, and Holland that the Native peoples of the
Americas needed protectors and champions, that they were desperate for liberation
from the Spanish, and that they would therefore welcome colonization by any other
European power. Las Casas, of course, was Catholic, and he insisted that the crimes
of the Spanish colonists violated the precepts of Catholic Christianity. Nonetheless
271
after his work was translated and published in northern Europe, his accounts of
Spanish atrocities were repeated by Protestant propagandists who increasingly came
to view the Americas as a potential new zone of conflict in the ongoing wars of the
Protestant Reformation. But even as Protestant colonial promoters claimed to espouse
an alternative model of imperial expansion, at the same time in many respects they
hoped to replicate the Spanish experience. The rhetoric the English used to support
their early transatlantic colonial enterprises closely resembled Spanish imperial
propaganda.38 This was not merely the result of emulation. In their recent histories,
England and Spain had much in common. Though they took opposite sides in the
controversies dividing Christendom, England’s Protestants and Spain’s Catholics both
adopted old arguments that had been used to support earlier crusading ventures. Spain
and England were also similar in that both countries had long been engaged in struggles
against allegedly benighted peoples on their own frontiers. The Spanish launched its
transatlantic imperial enterprise immediately after defeating Muslim Granada, and
many of the juridical and military practices they took to the Americas – including their
way of distributing land, bound labor, and political authority to the officers of its
conquering armies – drew on precedents from the period of the reconquista.39
England’s ongoing struggles in Ireland and along its border with Scotland similarly
informed its behavior across the ocean.40
In the early 1560s, when French Protestants arrived in the Carolinas and built the
first European fort on the Atlantic coast of mainland North America, the French
quickly discovered how difficult it could be to establish durable, productive alliances
with Native American groups. The Huguenots, unfamiliar with the norms of North
American diplomacy, slighted those who had initially cooperated with them, tried to
shift alliances, and ended up antagonizing almost everyone in their immediate
vicinity, leaving them vulnerable to Spanish attack.41 The early Virginia colonists
made similar mistakes, and the two major conflicts that resulted, in 1622 and 1644,
can accurately be described as simply pitting Native American warriors against
armed colonists. The warfare that beset French Canada, New Netherland, and New
England in the first half of the seventeenth century was more complex, as competing
colonial groups and Native confederacies jockeyed for power and access to trade
goods. Muskets became an important item of commerce, transforming Native
American warfare and altering the balance of power among the tribes.42
Acquiring arms as a consequence of successive alliances with the Dutch and the
English, the Iroquois League violently asserted itself and eventually became a
dominant player in the fur trade by securing hunting grounds, demanding furs as
tribute from others, and occupying trade routes across the St. Lawrence Valley and
as far south as the Ohio. Long ago historians labeled the Iroquois League’s
seventeenth-century campaigns the ‘Beaver Wars,’ and the designation appropriately
highlights the role of commerce in promoting bloodshed. The fighting became almost
self-perpetuating. As Daniel K. Richter has shown, at the height of the wars the
Iroquois League was struggling to maintain its own population. Families and villages
sought to adopt outsiders to replace the men, women, and children they were losing,
and their desire to acquire war captives became, in and of itself, a powerful motive
for military raids.43 Captive taking had been part of Native American warfare for
centuries, but it escalated nearly everywhere in the context of colonization, and
particularly in the early decades of the eighteenth century in the southeast, the
272
practice was directly and simply tied to the operation of the Atlantic economy. Native
groups sold their captives to the British and the French, and the British shipped many
of them to the Caribbean where they worked and died as slaves.44
There is a consensus among historians that Native Americans military culture
changed in the context of colonization, but scholars continue to debate whether the
colonists’ way of fighting ‘Indian Wars’ represented a sharp departure from the
customs of their ancestors. John Grenier argues that a new ‘way of war’ emerged
among the English in America, with distinctive features including ‘the destruction of
enemy noncombatants and their agricultural resources,’ ranging, and ‘scalp hunting.’45
While it is certainly true that practices such as scalping were distinctly American, it is
also important to remember that armies fighting in Europe engaged in other practices
closely associated with American frontier warfare, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century Ireland, for example, and in the Highlands of Scotland in 1746. When
soldiers committed widespread rape, burned houses and fields across large areas,
killed prisoners or displayed body parts along the sides of roads, early modern
European commentators often described their conduct as ‘lawless.’ In most instances,
however, those episodes resulted from an overlay of conflicting customs and laws.46
When fighting men from differing military traditions faced each other, the antagonists
on both sides were frequently shocked by the other’s behavior and responded with a
kind of unflattering mimicry, animated by a desire for revenge. This happened on
occasion in Ireland and Scotland and repeatedly in the woods of North America
when English colonists and Native American warriors fought.47
The incongruity of competing military traditions contributed to the ferocity of
frontier warfare, but in Ireland, Britain, and North America another kind of cultural
conflict had equally devastating consequences. Judicial officers and soldiers applied
coercive force according to different rules, and problems arose when military forces
were deployed against armed opponents in order to execute the sanctions of the
criminal law. This happened, for example, in Ireland in 1569 and 1574, in New
England in 1676, in Scotland in 1746, and in Nova Scotia in 1749. Government
agents seeking to defend the sovereignty of the British crown suspended the protocols
that normally governed European military conduct. Facing alleged rebels and
traitors, commanding officers insisted that they had the authority – indeed the
obligation – to expose prisoners taken on the field of battle to trial, punishment, and
in some cases death. Adopting this stance made negotiation difficult, and it had the
effect of prolonging and intensifying conflict.48 Perhaps the ultimate manifestation
of this dynamic in British North America came in 1763, when Colonel Jeffery
Amherst, seeking to defend the uncontested sovereignty of George III, refused to
honor the rituals of Native American diplomacy.49 Amherst antagonized the most
powerful Native leaders of the trans-Appalachian west, and when attacked he
pursued a range of punitive measures that included one effort to infect Native
peoples with small pox.50 He may not have actually made anyone ill, but his actions
are still worth examining. Amherst did not champion lawless behavior. It is likely
that he believed that even his attempt to spread infectious disease enjoyed legal
sanction. He was operating in a hostile environment, seeking to punish people he
believed to be savages and rebels, but he could not rely on the orderly judicial
machinery that in Europe might have been used to uphold the sovereign’s monopoly
on the use of violence.
273
A similar fusion of military and judicial functions affected the conduct of the
Peruvian colonial authorities in 1780 and 1781 when they confronted the indigenous
army of Tupac Amaru, and operated more commonly throughout the Western
Hemisphere when slaveholders met large-scale resistance from those they intended to
control as slaves.51 The notorious brutality of Maroon warfare, with men, women
and children targeted, homes and fields destroyed, prisoners decapitated or burned
alive, and corpses placed for weeks or months on display, reflected the desperation of
both runaways and planters. In the British Caribbean and elsewhere, slaveholders
denigrated Maroons as traitors, murderers, and savages reverting to a vicious African
culture. The British disdained negotiating with them, but on those few occasions
when Maroon communities acquired enough strength to endure, most notably on
Jamaica, the colonial authorities had little choice but to consider the limits of their
own power and at least temporarily agree to terms. Colonial officials faced similar
dilemmas on the periphery of Surinam and near many other slaveholding societies in
the Caribbean and the American mainland. Even more clearly than in Africa, the
maintenance of chattel slavery as a labor system sparked a relentless cycle of warfare
on the margins of the American colonies.52
TRANSATLAN TIC W AR
In 1654, in the closing months of the first Anglo-Dutch war, a ship captain and
merchant from Massachusetts named Robert Sedgwick received a commission from
Oliver Cromwell to attack the Dutch colony of New Netherland. He was given
command of four ships and 200 English troops, and returned to America where he
recruited 700 more colonial volunteers. By the time this force had been raised,
however, news had arrived from Europe that England and Holland had concluded a
peace. Sedgwick’s intended siege of New Amsterdam was cancelled, but he was
unwilling to disband his forces and therefore to make the best use of them he could,
he sailed east and took control of the French colony of Acadia. England’s treaty with
Holland had effectively precluded a move against the Dutch colony, but from the
New Englanders’ perspective it was acceptable to attack the French even though
England and France were not formally at war.53
The Sedgwick expedition illustrates a general pattern in the relationship between
European diplomacy and colonial warfare in the seventeenth century. The
governments of Europe frequently took an interest in the defense of their colonial
possessions, and diplomatic and military events in Europe could, on occasion,
determine American outcomes. This happened repeatedly during the contest over
New Netherland. Often, however, wars between the colonists followed their own
timetable. French and English settlers could fight each other even when Europe
remained at peace.
The pattern was different in the eighteenth century, though arguably this was a
difference of degree rather than kind. There were still major wars fought in North
America, such as the French colonists’ Fox Wars, for example, or the Massachusetts
war against the Abenaki, that did not correspond directly to any European conflicts.
Similarly there were European wars such as the mid-1730s War of the Polish
Succession that did not trigger combat in the colonies. Overall, however, after 1689
most major wars in Europe resulted in fighting across the ocean, and conflict in the
274
Americas roiled European affairs. With the exception of the American Revolution,
from 1689 until 1815, in every major conflict between France and Britain, French
and British forces engaged each other on both sides of the Atlantic.
Transatlantic diplomacy and warfare profoundly affected politics in both America
and Europe. Native American polities, already reconfigured in the aftermath of
epidemic disease, dislocation and conflict in the seventeenth century, again were
reordered, as power and wealth gravitated toward those groups who most successfully
positioned themselves in an ever-more elaborate set of alliance networks incorporating
rival colonial empires. The Iroquois, in particular, became sophisticated negotiators
sensitive to European affairs.54 Some scholars have questioned whether there ever
was such a thing as an ‘Amerindian Atlantic.’55 The simple chronology of Native
American history answers the question. From 1689 through 1713 and again from
1744 through 1763, imperial warfare devastated many Native communities.
Conversely, in much of North America Native peoples prospered in the period from
1713 to 1744, when Britain and France maintained a fragile peace.56
Colonial warfare had an equally pervasive influence on the direction of politics in
Europe. Almost as soon as it began in 1701, the War of the Spanish Succession
became a contest between France and Britain over access to the trade of the Spanish
Empire.57 Britain gained important concessions in the treaty that ended that conflict,
including a license to sell slaves to the Spanish in the Caribbean. The next major
transatlantic war began in 1739 as a result of Britain’s efforts to defend and expand
its colonial trading privileges. The War of Jenkins’ Ear initiated an expanding cycle
of violence that eventually engulfed most of Europe as the War of the Austrian
Succession.58 The Seven Years War, the climactic global confrontation between the
British and French empires, similarly started in the Americas. As the powers of
Europe were drawn into increasingly prolonged and expensive conflicts to defend
their colonial interests, the very structure of their governments changed. While Britain
developed a robust and effective fiscal–military state, France struggled to finance its
wartime adventures.59 The cost of its intervention in the American Revolution
contributed to the financial crisis that brought down the Bourbon monarchy.
The eighteenth century was the first age of transatlantic warfare, and that era
gradually came to a close as a consequence of the political upheavals that began with
the American Revolution and ended with the defeat of Napoleon. In order to win
their independence from Britain, the Patriots in America allied themselves with
France, but soon after the fighting ended many citizens of the new republic began to
look askance at what George Washington called ‘entangling alliances.’ The divisive,
pro-British policies of the Adams administration, culminating in America’s 1798–
1800 ‘Quasi-war’ with France, reinforced a widespread apprehension that if the U.S.
confronted any European power militarily, the resulting conflict would divide the
country, undermine its autonomy and corrupt its republican principles. Presidents
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in turn, struggled to maintain American
neutrality. They experimented with trade embargos in an effort to discover a way to
resolve international conflicts without resort to warfare.60
Meanwhile, during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, most of the
Western Hemisphere witnessed war. Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal were drawn
into a protracted series of conflicts that ultimately had the effect of weakening the
ability of all four countries to control large parts of their transatlantic empires.61
275
Sailing became more dangerous as the belligerents targeted shipping in an effort to

strangle their opponents economically. There were violent confrontations in the
Caribbean including Napoleon’s disastrous, unsuccessful effort to restore French
sovereignty and slavery in Haiti. Independence movements broke apart the Spanish
Empire on the mainland of North and South America, and the Portuguese monarchy,
losing control of Portugal, established a new and separate polity in Brazil. All of these
developments had the effect of distancing the Americas from Europe politically,
facilitating the establishment of the nineteenth-century diplomatic order which drew
a distinction between European and American affairs.
Of all the Europeans, the British retained the greatest power on both sides of the
Atlantic, thanks to the strength of their navy. The British also held strategically important
colonies on the mainland of North America and remained influential in Native American
affairs. Many in the United States viewed Britain as a rival, and a series of controversies
involving naval operations and the arms trade west of the Appalachians culminated in
the Anglo-American conflict known in North America as the ‘War of 1812.’62 The U.S.
and Britain fought for three years. Though no territory changed hands the war was
hardly inconsequential, because it ended with a set of peace agreements that helped
reshape the pattern of diplomacy and warfare across the Atlantic world.
The Napoleonic Wars ended in Europe with the Congress of Vienna and the
creation of a new diplomatic order based on a balance of power between several
European states. The new system discouraged international conflict and proved so
resilient that nearly a century passed before the continent experienced another
protracted large-scale war. The settlement that ended the War of 1812 in North
America had different implications. The conflict had strengthened the standing of
those within the United States who argued that the country should distance itself
from European affairs. At the same time, Andrew Jackson’s performance in the Battle
of New Orleans, his subsequent campaigns against the Creeks, his invasion of Spanish
Florida and his political triumph in 1828 empowered those who supported militant
U.S. expansionism. Under the terms of the treaty ending the War of 1812 Britain had
promised to desist from trade with Native Americans living within the borders of the
United States. In effect Britain left the United States free to pursue its own wars south
of the 49th parallel free from British interference.63 In 1823 the Monroe Doctrine
established an enduring policy framework in which the United States sought to bar
any new European intrusion into North or South America. Partly as a consequence,
for the rest of the century, wars would be conducted only on one side or the other of
the Atlantic Ocean. The first age of transatlantic warfare was over.
NOTE S
1 See W.W. Fitzhugh and E.I. Ward, eds, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
2 F.M. Hocker and J.M. McManamon, ‘Medieval Shipbuilding in the Mediterranean and
Written Culture at Venice’, Mediterranean Historical Review 21, 2006, 1–37.
3 R.C. Smith, Vanguard of Empire: Ships of Exploration in the Age of Columbus, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 30–49; J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of
Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 230.
4 N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Guns and Sails in the First Phase of English Colonization, 1500–1650’,
in N. Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the
276
Seventeenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 79–98; Smith, Vanguard
of Empire, pp. 148–70.
5 G. Fox, The Journal of George Fox, ed. N. Penney, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1911, vol. 2, 251; E.E, Clark, Indian Legends of Canada, Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1960, p. 150; S.T. Rand, Legends of the Micmacs, New York, 1894, p. 225; G.H.
Loskiel, History of the Mission of the United Brethren Among the Indians in North America
trans. G.I. La Trobe, London: Brethren’s Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel, 1794,
p. 123; J.A.U. Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw
(Bath, n.d., 1780?), 11; O. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. V.
Caretta, London: Penguin, 2003, p. 55; M. Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History,
New York: Viking, 2007, p. 104.
6 See O.P. Dickason, ‘La “Guerre navale” des micmacs contre les britaniques, 1713–63’, in
C.A. Martijn, ed., Les Micmacs et la mer, Montreal: Recherches amerindiennes au
Québec, 1986, p. 244.
7 J. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2d ed.,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 37–38; J. Thornton, Warfare in
Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800, London: UCL Press, 1999, p. 23.
8 K.R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War,
1585–1603, Cambridge: Recherches amerindiennes au Québec, 1964, pp. 33, 39, 44.
9 Rodger, ‘Guns and Sails’, pp. 79–98, 86–87.
10 E.H. Gould, ‘Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic,
c. 1772’, William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 60, 2003, pp. 471–510, here pp. 479–81.
11 K.R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1978, pp. 64–70.
12 C.R. Phillips, Six Galleons for Spain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 4–5.
13 C.E. Swanson, Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare,
1739–1748, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.
14 N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Sea Power and Empire, 1688–1793’, in P.J. Marshall, ed, The Oxford
History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998, pp. 169–83.
15 A.J. O’Shaughnessey, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British
Caribbean, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, pp. 49–50.
16 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 1415–1808, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992, pp. 23–24.
17 R.C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977, pp. 20–24, 87–88.
18 G. Plank, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, pp. 10–67.
19 See A.J.B. Johnston, Endgame 1758: The Promise, the Glory, and the Despair of
Louisbourg’s Last Decade, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007; J.R. Dull, The
French Navy and the Seven Years’ War, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005; see
also generally F. Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire
in British North America, 1754–1766, New York: Knopf, 2000.
20 R. Buel, In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
21 See generally R. Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; D. Higginbotham, The War of American
Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies and Practices, Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1983.
277
22 W.M. James, The British Navy in Adversity: A Study of the War of American Independence,
London: Longmans, Green, 1926, pp. 316–65.
23 See D.E. Worcester, Sea Power and Chilean Independence, Gainesville: University of
Florida Press, 1962, and more generally G.S. Graham and R.A. Humphreys, The Navy
and South America, 1807–1823, London: Navy Records Society, 1962.
24 T. Bickham, The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the
War of 1812, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 91–92, 152–54.
25 See in particular C. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in
Early America, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.
26 W.M. Evans, ‘From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of
the “Sons of Ham”’, American Historical Review 85, 1980, 34.
27 Thornton, Africa and Africans, p. 34.
28 Rediker, The Slave Ship, pp. 73–107.
29 A. Benezet, Observations on the Inslaving, Importing and Purchasing of Negroes,
Germantown, Penn.: Christopher Sower, 1759, pp. 3–5.
30 K.R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1978, pp. 4–11.
31 D.S. Jones, ‘Virgin Soils Revisited’, William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser. 60, 2003, 703–42.
32 On the fate of the Indians of the Lesser Antilles see K.F, Kiple and K.C. Ornelas, ‘After the
Encounter: Disease and Demographics in the Lesser Antilles’, in R.L. Paquette and S.L.
Engerman, eds, The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1996, pp. 50–67; P.P. Boucher, Cannibal Encounters: Europeans
and Island Caribs, 1492–1763, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
33 C. Townsend, ‘Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico’,
American Historical Review 108, 2003, 659–87.
34 R. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and
Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846, Palo Alto, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1991; J.F.
Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest
Borderlands, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
35 P. Seed, ‘Taking Possession and Reading Texts’, William and Mary Quarterly 3d se. 49,
1992, 202–7.
36 I. Clendinnen, ‘Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in
Sixteenth-Century Yucatán’, Past and Present 94, 1982, 27–48; Guteirrez, When Jesus
Came, 44–45, 53–54.
37 For events in Guatemala and Peru, see W.G. Lovell, Conquest and Survival in Colonial
Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatan Highlands, 1500–1821,
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985; S.J. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and
the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Humanga to 1640, Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1982.
38 J.C. Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1500–1700, Stanford,
Cal.: Standford University Press, 2006.
39 M. Góngora, Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America, trans. Richard Southern,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 1–32; D.J. Weber, The Spanish
Frontier in North America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 23, 124–25; but
see also L. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 33–45.
40 N.P. Canny, ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’, William
and Mary Quarterly 3d ser. 30, 1973, 575–98.
41 D.B. Quinn, North America from its Earliest Discovery to First Settlements, New York:
Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 240–61.
278
42 For a vivid account of the transformative impact of muskets see F. Anderson and A.
Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, New York:
Penguin, 2005, 1–53.
43 D.K. Richter, ‘War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience’, William and Mary Quarterly
3d ser. 40, 1983, 528–59.
44 A. Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 299–301. For discussions of captive taking
in other parts of North America, see E. Haefeli and K. Sweeny, Captors and Captives: The
1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2003; B. Rushforth, ‘“A Little Flesh We Offer You”: The Origins of Indian Slavery in
New France’, William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser. 60, 2003, 777–808; B. Rushworth,
‘Slavery, The Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance’, William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser.
63, 2006, 53–80; Brooks, Captives and Cousins.
45 J. Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 21, 43. For a starkly different
assessment of early American warfare see G. Chet, Conquering the American Wilderness:
The Triumph of European Warfare in the Colonial Northeast, Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2003.
46 For a discussion of this dynamic in the British-colonial context see Gould, ‘Zones of Law,
Zones of Violence’, pp. 474–75.
47 A.J. Hirsch, ‘The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England’,
Journal of American History 74, 1988, 1187–1212.
48 Canny, ‘Ideology of English Colonization’, pp. 581–82; J.H. Pulsipher, Subjects Unto the
Same King: Indians, English and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, pp. 119–34; G. Plank, Rebellion
and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire, Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, pp. 29–52, 156–57.
49 R. White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650–1815, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 256–60.
50 E.A. Fenn, ‘Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-century North America: Beyond Jeffery
Amherst’, Journal of American History 86, 2000, 1553–80.
51 A.F. Galindo, ‘The Rebellion of Tupac Amaru’, in D. Castro, ed., Revolution and
Revolutionaries: Guerilla Movements in Latin America, Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly
Resources, 1999, pp. 1–10.
52 A.O. Thompson, Flying to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas,
Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006, pp. 144–74, 265–94; M.
Caton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1982; M.C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A
History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal, Granby, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey,
1988; W. Hoogbergen, The Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname, New York: Brill, 1990;
Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979; Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 59–66.
53 R. Gildrie, ‘Segwick, Robert,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004, vol. 49, 653; J.G. Reid, Acadia, Maine and New Scotland:
Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth Century: Marginal Colonies in the Seventeenth
Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981, pp. 135–38.
54 J. Parmenter, ‘After the Mourning Wars: The Iroquois as Allies in Colonial North American
Campaigns, 1676–1760’, William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser, 64, 2007, 39–82.
55 P. Cohen, ‘Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiographical
Concept’, History of European Ideas 34, 2008, 388–410.
279
56 D.K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 151–88.
57 S.J. Stein and B.H. Steiin, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of
Early Modern Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, pp. 106–44.
58 R. Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993,
pp. 21–23, 28–29.
59 J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990; J. Pritchard, Louis XIV’s Navy, 1748–1762,
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987, pp. 184–205; S. Schama, Citizens: A
Chronicle of the French Revolution, New York: Knopf, 1989, p. 65.
60 D. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980, pp. 209–35; J.C.A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s
War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 22–25.
61 See J. Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic, Princeton: Princeton
62 J. Latimer, 1812: War with America, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2007; D.R. Hickey,
The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
63 For a fuller discussion of this transition see E. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The
American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2012.
280
CHAPTER 16
POLITICAL THINKING, MILITARY

POWER, AND ARMS BEARING
IN THE BRITISH ATLANTIC WORLD
Charles R. Drummond, IV
I n Federalist 41, James Madison celebrated both British and American military
institutions. Both countries, unlike the great powers of Western Europe, possessed
military forces that would not lead to oppression. This was only possible, he
explained, because they had been similarly blessed by geographic insulation from
foreign entanglements by the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, respectively.
They were thus able to do without large, regular army forces, which would have
undoubtedly introduced military despotism and eroded civil liberties. Instead, they
could largely rely upon citizen-based militias and the fleet.1 Madison clearly discerned
a large degree of consonance between British and American attitudes about military
power, and this article argues that the ‘British Atlantic world’ proves a useful
organizing principle for examining political thinking on military power in the British
Isles and early America.2 This article treats the period between c. 1640 and c. 1868,
that is, from a little before the outbreak of the English Civil Wars to a little after the
conclusion of the American Civil War. Such a large-scale study, albeit one primarily
concerned with the American founding, might call to mind Lovejovian unit ideas that
persisted and were transmitted, unaltered, across the Atlantic. This is not my
contention. Indeed, while commonalities are emphasized, attention is also given to
the transformation of ideas over time.3
M I LI TARY VOCAB ULARIES IN THE B RITIS H ATL ANTIC

This study represents an analysis of the language and vocabularies used to discuss
military power in the early modern British Atlantic world. There is a recognition that
such languages were neither stable nor monolithic, and reference is given to a wide
spectrum of views about military power, running from broadly ‘republican’ to more
‘courtly’ paradigms. The study begins with a justification of the focus on the British
Atlantic world. There follows an examination of the two poles of ‘republican’ and
‘courtly’ paradigms explaining their shared terminologies and divergent conclusions.
Attention is then directed to the key categories and controversies related to military
power in the British Atlantic world, including: the debate over the ‘militia power,’
which attempted to locate military power in the executive (king/president) in relation
281
– Charles R. Drummond, IV –
to the legislative (parliament/congress); the fundamental dichotomy of the

‘militia’/‘standing army’; the debate over the differential military powers of the
center/periphery; resistance theory; and arms bearing, especially in relation to the
Second Amendment. It is argued that the Second Amendment must be understood in
light of early modern British Atlantic discussions on military power. It is further
suggested that the Second Amendment should be read in light of a broader ‘distributist
approach,’ which focuses on the distribution of military power within the early
American polity.
In the later half of the seventeenth century, beginning with the English Civil Wars,
Britons engaged in an extended discussion about the interaction between military
power and politics. This discussion can best be described as a series of debates relating
to political thinking about military power centered on three axes. First, Britons
wondered who held ultimate sovereign military power: either king or parliament?
Second, they wondered what form of military organisation was best, both in terms of
geopolitical strength and domestic political ramifications: either the militia or a
professional army? Finally, many worried how military power might be linked to the
religious controversies of the day. Fears revolved around how military power could
be used in order to impose Anglicanism, toleration for religious dissenters, or, perhaps
most terrifyingly, Catholicism through the use of a ‘popish army.’ These questions
were pressing, following as they did upon the heels of the ‘military revolution,’ and
they cast a long shadow, shaping attitudes towards military power on both sides of
the Atlantic until the middle of the nineteenth century.4
These early modern British Atlantic debates and controversies, of course, were not
entirely without precedent. Concern about the political ramifications of military
power had been a mainstay of political thinking stretching back to antiquity. Probing
questions about the relationship between political and military power had also been
raised in the Italian peninsula by civic humanists, including Bruni and Machiavelli,
who warned of the dangers of condottieri and celebrated civic militias.5 This legacy
of reflection on military power was, of course, important to the development of
British ideas. Nonetheless, one can bracket off a distinctly British style of reflection
on these matters, informed by the area’s peculiar institutional arrangements, memory
of the Civil Wars, and politics.
By the same token, in America, political thinking about military power occurred
within the context of a broader Atlantic world, in which different European powers,
including the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch used military means to bolster
imperial designs. One might expect North-South influence of the colonial powers on
one another, especially in terms of their attitudes about military power, rather than a
mere East-West transmission of British ideas across the Atlantic.6 Nonetheless, this
intra-colonial impact was not remarkably pronounced, and American discussions
were more heavily inflected by British viewpoints and attitudes. Early Americans
largely transferred British military institutions across the Atlantic and continued to
think about military power in a way remarkably similar to their British cousins.
Of course, the presence of a shared language did not mean that political thinking
about military power was without variation. Generally speaking, there was a
spectrum of positions running from a ‘republican’ to a more ‘courtly’ paradigm of
military power. Proponents of the former inveighed against professional armies kept
up in peacetime (or ‘standing armies’ in the contemporary parlance), and argued for
282
– chapter 16: Political thinking and military power –
the importance of the militia. These views often occurred alongside preferences for
parliamentary and/or local control over military power, as opposed to royal and/or
centralized control.7
By focussing on the widespread distribution of military power, many advocates of
the republican paradigm hoped to equip people with the means to rebel against a
future despotic government. This republican paradigm came into being in the 1640s
and 1650s, with much of it present in the writings of Sir Henry Vane and James
Harrington, as well as in a more obscure anonymous pamphlet, The peaceable militia
(1648).8 It was further articulated by Whig opponents of the Stuarts in the Restoration
period, and it persisted in the writings of authors such as Andrew Fletcher, John
Toland and John Trenchard in the 1690s. It was then preserved into the eighteenth
century by ‘Country Party’ writers, including Henry St John, first Viscount
Bolingbroke, and the authors of Cato’s letters.9 In early America, the republican
paradigm was widespread and dominated critiques of British military power in the
1760s and 1770s. Later in the century, Anti-Federalists, most notably Patrick Henry,
were vocal advocates of these ideas in their attacks on the Constitution, and the
republican paradigm continued to motivate American analyses of military power
until around the period of the American Civil War.
The courtly paradigm, on the other hand, reversed almost all of these positions.
It emphasized the power of the king over parliament, the importance of the standing
army over the militia, the center over the localities, and it abhorred popular resistance
against the regime. This constellation of ideas proved to be the natural position
taken by kings and courtiers, who recognized the potential of monarchically
controlled regular forces to bolster kingly and state power. The courtly paradigm
can be seen in many of the remarks of Charles II and James II, and it is further
reflected in the Earl of Orrery’s A treatise of the art of war (1677) and Sir Bernardo
Gascoigne’s memoranda on military matters prepared in the mid-1680s for James
II.10 During the ‘land forces controversy’ (1697–1701) (sometimes called the
‘standing army controversy’) following the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War, some
elements of this paradigm were taken up by Lord Somers and the Whig Junto, who
were helped in their propaganda efforts by a young Daniel Defoe.11 The torch of the
courtly paradigm was thereafter carried on by ‘Court Whigs,’ and it was eventually
taken up, at least in some form, by the Federalists, perhaps most vociferously by
Alexander Hamilton.12
POLARITIES O F P O W E R
The first major controversy over political thinking about military power in the early
modern British Atlantic world revolved around the balance of military power
between the executive and the legislative. This important question first surfaced
during the ‘Militia Ordinance controversy’ (1641–1642) in the lead-up to the
outbreak of the English Civil Wars. Amidst a fraught political scene, two
contradictory commands issued forth from king and parliament on the raising of the
trained bands. The issuing of both the king’s Commissions of Array and the
parliament’s Militia Ordinance forced the English people to grapple with the thorny
constitutional question of who held ultimate sovereignty over the military.13 This
difficult question persisted well after the 1640s and continued to inform discussions
283
about military power for decades to come. After the Restoration of the Stuart
monarchy, there was a general understanding that the king alone possessed the
militia power – that is, ultimate sovereignty and command over the realm’s military
forces. This was then confirmed in acts of parliament in 1661 and 1662, in which
the king’s possession of sole power over the militia was proclaimed. Throughout the
Restoration period, however, republican thinkers questioned the notion of the royal
militia power, and argued that control over the military should be vested in
parliament, or even directly in the people.
The dispute over the ‘militia power’ was remembered in colonial America, and it
was recapitulated in similar debates about the division of federal military power
between the executive and legislative branches.14 Many shared Edmund Randolph’s
concern that the president represented the ‘foetus of monarchy.’15 Some were
concerned that a future president might be a second Cromwell, a military dictator
who would use the army for self-aggrandisement and the establishment of autocracy.16
The transition from king to commander-in-chief, from prerogative to presidency, was
complex and controversial, most notably due to the fact that post-Revolutionary
America was emphatically a republic, which claimed to have sloughed off monarchy.
In the Articles of Confederation, the legislature (namely, the Confederation Congress)
was given the ‘sole and exclusive right and power of determining on peace and war.’17
Under the Constitution, the new Congress had the power to declare war, and was
given substantial new powers over regulating the professional army, the militia and
the navy, but the President was also declared Commander-in-Chief and was given
wide powers over the military and foreign affairs.18
A tendency to mistrust monarchical (and presidential) power was pronounced in
some circles, especially amongst Anti-Federalists, in early America.19 The
pseudonymous author Tamony, writing in Virginia, similarly attacked what he
believed to be the overly vast powers granted to the president with respect to the
military. In fact, ‘Tamony’ argued that the new president would possess even vaster
powers over the military than the King of Great Britain. Although he admitted that
the president would not have the ‘magic name of King,’ he attacked the ‘great
prerogatives’ of the American executive, whom he believed would command a force
‘unrestrained by law or limitation.’20 ‘Philadelphiensis,’ a Pennsylvanian Anti-
Federalist with some of the most overheated anti-monarchical rhetoric of the period,
warned that the president would prove an ‘Emperor,’ a militaristic king at the head
of a standing army. He would prove a veritable Asiatic despot ‘surrounding by
thousands of blood-suckers, and cringing sycophants,’ supported by ‘Turkish
Janissaries,’ who were ‘better acquainted with plundering their country than fighting
for its protection.’21
Opposed to such criticisms were Federalists, especially Hamilton, who were less
concerned about the dangers of executive absolutism.22 The tendency on the part of
Anti-Federalists to draw parallels between the president and the king of Great
Britain was described by Hamilton as preposterous, and he carefully delineated the
vast differences between these offices.23 While the king of Great Britain was a
hereditary monarch ruling with prerogative powers existing outside the warp and
woof of ordinary law, the president was an elected official, holding a tenure of four
years, who possessed clearly enumerated powers under Article II and was recallable
through impeachment.24
284
Figure 16.1 The specter of the standing army in eighteenth-century America (above):
This famous engraving of the Boston Massacre was prepared by Paul Revere and printed
only three weeks after the incident. A famous piece of propaganda, the engraving portrays
the British regular troops in a menacing manner. They stand arrayed in a straight column on
the right, muskets raised, firing upon the citizens of Boston. Anti-standing army rhetoric was
strong in colonial America, and this image can be seen as a visual representation of concerns
about a British standing army of regulars. © De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images
285
THE MILITIA VS THE S TAND ING ARM Y

It is also worth pointing out that political thinking about military power in the early
modern British Atlantic was overwhelmingly concerned with land forces and less
interested in the navy, largely since it was less readily apparent how the fleet might
interfere with domestic politics. When the navy was discussed in political terms, it
was typically celebrated leading to the kind of easy elision of the fleet, Protestantism,
and liberty immortalized in ‘Rule, Britannia!’ (1740).25 Considering this neglect of
sea forces, the fundamental principle running through early modern British Atlantic
political thinking on military power was the drawing of a stark division between the
‘militia,’ a military force made up of civilian soldiers levied and armed based upon a
property-based tax and the ‘standing army,’ a centralized, professional fighting force,
which increasingly was maintained even after the conclusion of hostilities. This
militia/standing army dichotomy was first formulated in the 1640s and 1650s under
the pressures of the English Civil Wars, but was only fully articulated during the
‘land forces controversy’ (1697–1701) after the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War as
William III attempted to keep up a massive standing army of more than 30,000
soldiers in light of concerns about a recrudescence of Anglo-French hostilities. To
supporters of the republican paradigm, the militia was a peculiarly privileged form of
military organization – ‘quasi-feudal’ in origin and directly controlled by the gentry
and nobility in the localities. It was seen to possess special liberty-preserving qualities
distinctly lacking among regular forces.26 The militia, moreover, was celebrated not
only as a military force but also as a vehicle for societal reform and the cultivation of
republican virtue. It was considered to be, at least theoretically, the people-at-arms
(populus armatus). As such, it was utterly inconceivable that it could have any
interests opposed to the general population.
The standing army, however, was a different beast altogether. Etymologically the
army was standing because it was kept up even after the negotiation of peace – a
taboo in an age that traditionally considered both armies (as well as parliaments) to
be events rather than institutions. In addition, the term ‘standing army’ was often
used in a loose way to refer to regular troops more generally, or, in fact, to refer to
any military force deemed to have particular interests opposed to the common good.
It is, perhaps, not surprising that the standing army was deemed one of the preeminent
threats to freedom of the age, and contemporaries worried that a standing army
might be used to crush representative institutions, destroy due process, and extirpate
the Protestant religion. To the more courtly-inclined, however, the militia was a sorry
affair, ineffective in the face of professional soldiers.27 Far preferable were regular
troops who had made fighting their trade, and who were able to devote all of their
time to training and honing their expertise in the art of war.
A tendency to distinguish between standing armies and militias persisted
throughout the eighteenth century, and it was eventually transmitted across the
Atlantic.28 While in England the peerage had exercised a significant degree of control
over the militia, especially through service as Lords Lieutenant, the absence of
hereditary aristocracy on American soil precluded the persistence of aristocratic
dominance.29 Despite this, early America inherited a great number of beliefs about
the militia informed by the earlier British republican paradigm. The Maryland
Constitution (1776) and the New Hampshire Constitution (1784) reflected a broadly
286
shared belief that ‘a well-regulated militia’ was the ‘proper’ and ‘natural’ defence of
a free state.30 The militia, as well, continued to be a local organization, which was
largely colony- and later state-based.
If the militia was clearly a state-based organization under the Articles of
Confederation, the Constitution significantly complicated this distinction. Under the
new Constitution, Congress was given vast powers over ‘organizing, arming, and
disciplining’ militia forces. On top of this, the Congress was entrusted with the power
of training the militia ‘according to the discipline prescribed by Congress’, and the
even more significant power of ‘calling forth the Militia’ in order to ‘execute the Laws
of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions’.31 Reaction to greater
federal control over the state militias was broadly negative among those who valued
the local roots of the militia.
Another question that continued to dog political actors throughout the early modern
period was the size and extent of the militia.32 If the militia, according to republican
theory, was meant to be, essentially, the people-at-arms, then it followed that all citizens
needed to be mustered together in militia forces. Despite this, plans to include the
totality of the citizenry (even if it was restricted to male property owners) were always
more aspirational than achievable. Indeed, there were several proposals for the creation
of ‘select militias’ of men, especially chosen for increased training and preparation, who
would be better versed in military exercises than other, more nominal, members of the
militia. This idea had a long history in England, especially in the institution of the
‘trained bands,’ a special subset of the militia forces, who underwent more vigorous
training and drilling. Such ideas, however, were anathema to some Anti-Federalists,
who remained attached to a vision of the militia that encompassed all of the citizenry.33
If the militia was typically celebrated in the early modern British Atlantic, the same
could not be said of the standing army. In fact, one of the great mainstays of British
Atlantic political discourse was the almost universal aversion to standing armies.34
Potent historical memories, including Cromwell’s Major-Generals scheme and the
dragonnades of Louis XIV ensured that anti-standing army rhetoric remained a
dominant chord in British discourse for centuries. Similar views were echoed in
America, which itself had witnessed ‘garrison government’ under the British and had
reacted with fits of apoplexy to the stationing of large British forces of regulars in
Boston and elsewhere before the Revolutionary War.35 One slight difference in the
eighteenth century, however, was the waning of Catholicism as a theme in anti-army
discourse. While in late seventeenth-century Britain much of the fear of the standing
army centered on the ‘popish army,’ which would impose despotism and Catholicism
on the peoples of the British Isles, after 1689 these themes increasingly receded into
the background. Nonetheless, Americans followed their British cousins in an almost
hereditary aversion to standing armies.36 Indeed, as one Anti-Federal writer put the
matter, the standing army was ‘useless and dangerous,’ an infection, which would
encourage vice and dissolute behaviour and destroy civil liberties.37 Meanwhile, the
‘Maryland Farmer’ advised his readers to engrave on the tender minds of their
children the dictum that ‘There is no form of government safe with a standing army,
and there is none that is not safe without,’ a principle that he took to represent the
‘first article’ of his ‘political creed.’38
Americans attacked the standing army of the British stationed in the colonies in
the 1760s and 1770s, and critiques of standing armies formed an important trope in
287
the Declaration of Independence (1776). Moreover, a large number of state

constitutions included language opposed to standing armies.39 The ratification
controversy, however, represented the biggest single outburst against standing armies
in early America. Anti-Federalist criticisms of the military clauses were heated and
formed one of the movement’s most pronounced lines of attacks on the proposed
Constitution. Complaints invoking standing armies made by Anti-Federalists
generally centered upon two clusters of related issues, namely excessive presidential
and federal power over the military.
Anti-standing army discourse was integral to the Anti-Federalists’ polemical
efforts, and it highlighted both of these core complaints. The ‘Son of Liberty’ argued
that a standing army was a threat to freedom and a support for tyrants.40 Patrick
Henry, at the Virginia ratifying convention, was deeply concerned about what he
perceived to be the unlimited nature of Congress’s power to raise armies. He imagined
that Congress would keep up armies continually on foot, even in peacetime, and
billet them on the people (a concern reflected in the later Third Amendment).
According to Henry, such ‘unlimited authority’ would inevitably lead to despotism.41
Luther Martin, similarly, argued that the Constitution gave Congress untrammelled
authority to raise and support standing armies in peacetime, without any restrictions
to their number. In this way, the Constitution provided for the introduction of the
standing army, ‘that engine of arbitrary power, which has so often and so successfully
been used for the subversion of freedom.’42
CEN TER, LOCALITIES AND ARM E D RE S IS TANCE

Perhaps the most distinctive element of American thinking about military power was
its intense focus on issues related to the center/localities, especially with respect to
federalism.43 This is not surprising, considering the fraught nature of state–national
relationship in early America, as thirteen previously distinct colonies struggled to
define their relation to one another. These federalism concerns, however, must be
understood as being intimately linked with the ‘militia’/‘standing army’ dichotomy
discussed in the previous section. The regular forces were largely seen as falling
within the ambit of the national government. This was, in fact, a natural conclusion
given British practice and the importance of the Continental Congress’s role in the
erection of a national Continental Army.
In the British Isles, the regular forces were distinctly national organizations,
existing in English, Scottish and Irish establishments. These forces bore a special
relationship to royal power and were largely disconnected from the offices and
structures of local government, including the commissions of the peace, the lieutenancy
and the boroughs.44 This was sharply contrasted with the organization of the militia,
which was local and county-based, each force being presided over by a Lord
Lieutenant (generally the most important peer of the region) appointed by the king.
The Lord Lieutenant was assisted by a collection of Deputy Lieutenants drawn from
the local gentry. The lieutenancy thus was held in great esteem throughout the period,
as a source of patronage and as a mechanism for recognizing local elites.45 Some
ancient constitutionalist writers, in fact, even traced the main contours of the
lieutenancy to pre-Norman practice, equating the Lord Lieutenant to the ancient
Anglo-Saxon office of the heretoch.46 In America, the arrangement of the militia was
288
similar, but was state-based rather than county-based. The chief executive of each
state – variously called a ‘governor’ or ‘president’ – indeed acted in a manner akin to
a Lord Lieutenant.
The U.S. Constitution transformed the general distribution of military competencies
by giving significantly more control over military power to the national government,
in the process radically altering the careful distribution of military power, to which
Americans had become accustomed. The earlier Articles of Confederation had
represented itself as an agreement of the states to enter into a ‘firm league of friendship’
with one another ‘for their common defence.’ However, there was little which made
this aspiration a reality.47 Financial charges incurred in the promotion of the common
defense were to pass onto the states, but there was no mechanism available to the
Confederation Congress to compel the discharge of these requisitions.48 This haphazard
situation was considered one of the main defects by those in attendance at the
Philadelphia Convention.49 As such, the Constitution made providing for the common
defense one of its core desiderata, and in the process, it drastically shifted military
initiative away from the states and towards the national government.50
The proposed breadth of federal control over military power caused some degree
of concern at the Convention.51 Elbridge Gerry was perhaps most outspoken in this
respect, and he openly wondered whether this change would destroy the ‘Sovereignty
and Liberty of the States’ and lead to the introduction of a regal system of government,
overseen by an over-powerful president. Increased federal control over military
power was, indeed, one of the chief complaints of Anti-Federalists against the
proposed Constitution. Luther Martin considered the Constitution’s exaggerated
power over national regular forces and the militia as tending to the utter destruction
of the state governments, and to the erection of an irresistible federal government
that could never be overthrown by state military power.52 The writer ‘Philadelphiensis’
attacked the regular army as the ‘mighty basis’ of the new federal constitution, the
cornerstone of its entire monstrous, despotic edifice.53
In the state ratifying conventions and among Anti-Federalist writers, there was
special concern about the national government’s ability to call forth the state militias
to assist the federal government in time of emergency (i.e. the federal government’s
ability to ‘federalize’ state militias). Luther Martin complained that a limitation on
this extensive power had been vainly urged at the convention.54 On the other hand,
there were fears that the federal government, far from being overly involved in the
state militias, would neglect them by failing in its responsibilities to arm and organize
the militias, thus paving the way, indirectly, for the dominance of regular forces.55
Furthermore, among New York Anti-Federalists of an abolitionist bent, there was
the added concern that militia forces would be dragged into southern states in order
to quell slave revolts or for the further enslavement of peoples.56 Supporters of
ratification attempted to assuage Anti-Federalist fears, and Madison responded that
it was extraordinarily unlikely that the federal government would entirely take the
initiative with regard to military power from the states.57
Today, military power qua military power is generally conceptualized as exclusively
falling within the purview of a government, possessing a Weberian monopoly on the
use of coercive force (Gewaltmonopol des Staates). In the early modern British
Atlantic, however, especially among more republican-inclined thinkers, military
power was often viewed in a very different manner. Although the Weberian model
289
was slowly coming into being, the experience of the English Civil Wars and the
Glorious Revolution ensured there was a tradition within the early modern British
Atlantic recognizing the potential for non-governmental exercise of military power
especially through resistance against a despotic regime. This viewpoint, however,
existed side-by-side more courtly visions, emphasizing the royal monopoly on the
‘militia power’ as well as broader norms prohibiting rebellion as treason. In fact, the
conceptual apparatus for resistance against the state, at least as articulated in Locke’s
Second treatise, was conceived as a radical rejection of this notion of the royal ‘militia
power’ by providing justification for violent and popular resistance against tyrants.58
This tradition of ‘revolution principles’ persisted well into the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries in the early modern British Atlantic world.59 Even the celebrated
English jurist William Blackstone, criticized by Jefferson for his ‘honeyed
Mansfieldism,’ cited Article VII of the English Bill of Rights (‘That the subjects which
are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as
allowed by law’) in justification of an ultimate right of resistance possessed by the
English people, linked to arms bearing. He saw this ‘auxiliary right’ as, essentially a
‘natural right of resistance when the sanctions of society and laws are found
insufficient’ to protect the people’s inalienable rights.60
America was heir to this republican tradition and, indeed, many of these concepts
helped form the core of the founding generation’s claims to a right to resistance
against their British colonial overlords.61 The great locus classicus on this point is
undoubtedly the Declaration of Independence (1776), whose ringing words have
been so endlessly quoted.62 According to Jefferson, all men were ‘endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights’ including the rights to ‘Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness.’ The failure of the British government under George III to
secure these rights, accompanied by his regime’s ‘long train of abuses’ of the peoples’
rights, justified the violent, military overthrow of the current government.
However, it is important to realize that this set of concerns about resistance was
intimately connected to concerns about executive power, standing armies, and the
militia. Indeed, there was a tendency, first apparent in late seventeenth-century British
republican writers to distinguish between government by ‘law’ or by ‘the sword.’63
The latter involved the use of coercive military force to impose policies upon an
unwilling people, paradigmatically through standing armies, which would be
instrumental not only in denying peoples liberties, but also in preventing any future
resistance against the government. Coercive military government by the standing
army, in essence, locked a people into a terrifying scenario from which it would be
impossible to break free. Increased national control over the militia, as proposed by
the U.S. Constitution, prompted strong fears that the military might be used to institute
government by the sword, forcing the troops of the army and the militias to ‘subdue
their fellow citizens who dare to rise against the despotism of government.’ Anti-
Federalists warned that the proposed Constitution in its erection of a federal standing
army and its enervation of the state-based militias would forever ‘rivet the shackles of
slavery on you and your unborn posterity.’ The ‘Maryland Farmer’ argued that the
envisioned national standing army was problematic precisely because, if erected, it
would destroy ‘all hopes of a revolution in favor of the rights of mankind.’64
However, if the standing army threatened the possibility of future resistance against
despotism, the mechanism for implementing such resistance was somewhat more
290
complicated. It had been typical within British discourse to speak of the collective
people’s right to resistance, but by the same token, there was also a tendency to see the
militia, deemed to be the people-at-arms, as the natural organ of resistance. This
elision of the people and the militia persisted in the American context. Unsurprisingly,
in light of federalism concerns, the state-based militia were also sometimes
conceptualized as an important locus for resistance to a future tyrannical national
government. Luther Martin bemoaned the proposed Constitution’s increased control
over the state-based militias, and wondered whether they would now be fit ‘to preserve
their existence against a general government armed with powers sufficient to destroy
them.’65 Professor Akhil Amar clearly is right to note that many late eighteenth-century
Americans imagined that the state militia acted ‘in some sense outside of government,
rather than as a professional and permanent government bureaucracy.’66 In the event
of an overly powerful federal government, the state militia would be used as the
Pennsylvanian Anti-Federalist ‘The Deliberator’ suggested, to prevent the ‘annihilation
of the state governments.’67 Perhaps the latest instantiation of this manner of thinking
about resistance vis-à-vis the militia, is in fact the American Civil War, in which the
state militias of the Confederacy were thought of in precisely such terms.68
ARMS B EARING AND THE S E CO ND AM E ND M E NT

Arms bearing, especially in analyses of the Second Amendment, is often abstracted
from debates over military power. This is a major error. Indeed, early modern British
Atlantic conceptions of arms bearing were largely military in nature. The major
impetus behind preserving widespread, population-level arms bearing was driven by
assumptions present in the republican paradigm of military power, as discussed
above. Widespread arms bearing, indeed, was crucial primarily in facilitating the
training and armament of men who might serve within the militia. An arms-bearing
population, arrayed as the militia, in turn, was useful in that it obviated the need for
large standing armies, which posed a threat to liberties. Further value was derived
from an arms-bearing population’s ability to serve as a potential locus for resistance
in the event of the rise of a tyrannical government.
Arms bearing, therefore, was located directly within the matrix of concerns explored
within this article. The ideological interconnections between the republican paradigm on
military power and arms bearing can best be seen in two documents, separated in time
from one another by over 140 years and by the Atlantic Ocean. The first is Thomas
Erle’s ‘Papers of instructions for the Parliamentary meeting’ prepared around the time of
the Glorious Revolution.69 The West Country gentleman Erle put pen to paper with his
views for governmental reform in light of the disastrous reign of James II, and he argued
that every householder with more than £10 per annum be armed with a musket to be
used in case of invasion. He further argued the need for a reform of the militia laws, in
order to revive the trained bands as a viable force. The benefit of these reforms would be
the disappearance of the standing army, which would no longer be needed, and could be
reduced to a small number of troops kept in the Cinque Ports and other coastal garrisons.
These themes and ideas are remarkably similar to those found in the American
Joseph Story’s influential Commentaries on the Constitution of 1833, which has been
described as ‘the most massive and most widely discussed treatise on constitutional
law in pre-Civil War America.’ Story’s explanation of the meaning of the Second
291
Amendment, in particular, bears a number of parallels to Erle’s ‘Paper of instructions’.70

Story, in fact, recognized that the core language of the Second Amendment could be
traced back to the English Bill of Rights. However, in doing this, he did not claim that
the amendment was unmoored from military concerns nor that the right to bear arms
was individual and unconnected to the militia – a point foregrounded in the recent
decisions by Heller and McDonald by the Supreme Court.71 According to Story, the
Second Amendment was intimately connected to the militia, which he described as
‘the natural defence of a free country.’ Moreover, he argued that the militia was
crucial precisely because of its role in making unnecessary the need for a standing
army, which could easily be used by ‘ambitious and unprincipled rulers to subject the
people’ to tyranny. While locating the right to bear arms within this military context,
he also focused on the importance of widespread arms bearing amongst the citizenry
in connection to resistance. Widespread arms bearing was crucial, he argued, as a
‘strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers’.72
Story was not aberrant in his yoking of the Second Amendment to military concerns.
In fact, the dominant manner of discussing arms bearing in early America followed this
pattern. Although it is, of course, impossible in the space allotted to discuss at any great
length, or with any degree of certainty what precisely the Second Amendment’s original
meaning might have been, nonetheless, this article suggests a greater need for a focus
on the military context of the Second Amendment through what might be called a
‘distributist approach’ to the amendment centered on exploring how the Second
Amendment reflected republican attitudes about the appropriate distribution of
military power within a ‘free state.’ A broad commitment to arms bearing in eighteenth-
century America was almost always connected to ideas about the distribution of
military power. This, in fact, is eminently clear in the state constitutions of the period.73
The Pennsylvania Constitution (1776) claimed that the people had a right to bear arms
‘for the defence of themselves and the state.’ The same provision went on to argue that
standing armies in peacetime were ‘dangerous to liberty’ and that the military should
be kept under strict subordination to the civil power.74 The Massachusetts Constitution
(1780) claimed that the people had a right to keep and bear arms ‘for the common
defence,’ and mentioned that standing armies could not be kept up without the consent
of the state legislature.75 Although some of the language of these amendments suggests
that arms bearing was tied to personal defense, issues of military power, especially in
relation to bolstering the militia and curbing standing armies, were omnipresent.
The Second Amendment was similarly related to the issue of military power, as the
debate over ratification and the passage of the Bill of Rights makes clear. The
Constitution represented a radical expansion of national control over not only the
regular forces but also the state militias. Anti-Federalists, in particular, were concerned
about this development, and criticisms were brought at state ratifying conventions
and by pamphleteers about a number of different issues, including: undue presidential
power over the militia; the threat to the militia represented by increased national
control, especially in the possible disarmament of the militias; the likely expansion of
regular forces to create a ‘standing army’; and the disturbing implications greater
national control had in preventing necessary rebellion against an overly powerful
federal government. It should be apparent that the Second Amendment was largely
motivated by the genuinely military debates explored throughout this article, and it
is only within the context of such debates that its original meaning can be understood.
292
In light of this, it is worthwhile to pause for a moment to look at one proposal

from the Virginia ratifying convention, which helps contextualize how a number of
ideas about military power were seen to relate to one another. The ratifying
convention mentioned in the same proposed amendment to the Constitution a
number of different points. First, that the people had the right to keep and bear arms.
This sat alongside, however, language claiming that a well-regulated militia ‘composed
of the body of the people trained to arms’ was the ‘proper, natural, and safe defence
of a free state.’ In addition, the amendment included harsh verbiage condemning
standing armies in time of peace as ‘dangerous to liberty,’ and it included a further
clause supporting the constitutional principle that military power be under
subordination to the civil power.76 All these issues were of a piece and intimately
connected to the right to bear arms.77 The military context of arms bearing was
eminently clear to the members of the Virginia ratifying convention, even if it may no
longer be clear to historians.
The Bill of Rights was prompted by Anti-Federalist concerns, yet its provisions
were drafted by defenders of the Constitution, who wished to preserve the
Constitution’s structural arrangements and integrity.76 Understanding the Second
Amendment’s precise original meaning has proven difficult, a difficulty further
exacerbated by the often-unhelpful vehemence of the historical debate over the past
few decades, which has inevitably been tied to modern political and legal
considerations.79 Despite this, it seems apparent that a thorough understanding of
political thinking about military power in the early modern British Atlantic is a
necessary precondition for anyone wishing to appreciate the original meaning of the
Second Amendment. The language of the amendment itself is spare, only twenty-
seven words: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’ The amendment
grants a right to bear arms to the ‘people,’ but which ‘people’? The crucial debate
amongst historians (and legal scholars) has hinged on who these people were precisely,
i.e., the scope of the amendment). Was the right to bear arms intended to be restricted
to militia service, or was it a general right of citizenship? Too little attention, however,
has been given to the amendment’s purpose in light of political thinking about
military power in the broader British Atlantic world.
This article does not present a hegemonic ‘model’ of the Second Amendment,
accompanied by grandiose claims of having finally ascertained the historical ‘original
meaning’ of this difficult sentence, but this article does propose that a proper way to
gain a fuller understanding of the Second Amendment’s original meaning is through
a ‘distributionist approach’ to the amendment.80 The Second Amendment represents
a somewhat cryptic and rather perfunctory nod in the direction of the republican
paradigm, favoring a more widespread distribution of military power throughout the
states and the localities. This view privileged representative institutions over the
executive, the militia over the standing armies, the state government over the national
government, and the people over governmental authority. Of course, it hinted
towards this viewpoint without interrupting the actual institutional arrangements
found in the Constitution. Nonetheless, its codification of the principle of the ideal of
an armed populace, arrayed together as a militia, was thought important to
contemporaries, who assumed that such an arrangement would serve as a bulwark
against excessive power in the centralized organs of the national government. In
293
addition, in the event of despotic disaster, widespread arms bearing would facilitate
a Lockean ‘Appeal to Heaven.’ Appreciating this radically different vision of military
power is difficult, particularly on the other side of the American Civil War, a conflict
that did so much to tear asunder the earlier republican paradigm on military power.
However, undertaking an imaginative engagement with the past is essential for
historians and jurists who are interested in the Second Amendment, and it is only by
unearthing the complex set of beliefs about military power held by early modern
Britons and Americans that it is possible to construct a comprehensive and nuanced
account of this controversial amendment’s original meaning.
NOTE S
1 Federalist: No. 41.
2 Inspiration for this approach comes from Bailyn 1967; Wood 1969 and Pocock 1975, but
I embrace a history of political thinking rather than a history of political thought, in line
with Rory Rapple 2002; Finnegan 2007 and Midgley 2008.
3 Lovejoy 1936. Instead my article follows an approach more similar to that of Armitage 2012.
4 On the military revolution see Parker 1996; Black 1991 and Downing 1992
5 Pocock 1975: chs. 5–8. On the reception of Machiavelli see Raab 1965; Pocock 1971 and
Rahe, 2006.
6 See Cañigares-Esguerra 2003.
7 Worden 2002; Scott 2004 and Browning 1982.
8 Vane 1656; Harrington 1977; Anon. 1648.
9 Fletcher 1997; Robertson 1985; Toland 1698; Trenchard 1697 and 1698. See also Kramnick
1992 and McMahon 1990.
10 Boyle 1677; Gascoigne 1685.
11 Somers 1697; Defoe 1698a and 1698b.
12 Federici 2012.
13 Schwoerer 1971: 45–76.
14 Eliot 1836–45: III, 418.
15 Farrand 1911: I, 66.
16 Storing 1981: III, 55.
17 Articles of Confederation 1781: art. 9.
18 U.S. Constitution 1787: art. I, sect. 8; art. II, sect. 2.
19 Federalist, No. 3. Eliot 1836–45: I, 350–51.
20 Storing 1981: V, 146.
21 Storing 1981: III, 107, 129.
22 Federalist: Nos. 71–72.
23 Federalist: Nos. 66, 68.
24 Federalist: Nos. 69, 73.
25 Thomson 1763: II, 191.
26 Goring 1955: 17.
27 Storing 1981: III, 111.
28 Boynton 1967; Stater 1994; Western 1965; Cress 1979; Cornell 2006 and Breen 1972.
29 Federalist: Nos. 62–63.
30 Thorpe 1909: 1688, 2456.
31 U.S. Constitution 1787: art. I, sect. 8.
32 Eliot 1836–45: III, 428.
33 For discussion of the citizen militia conceptualized as the body of the people, see, for
instance, Williams 2003: 46–49.
294
34 On standing armies see Schwoerer 1974; Reid 1981.

35 Webb 1979, 1966, 1977.
36 Storing 1981: III, 61–62.
38 Storing 1981: V, 28.
39 E.g. Thorpe 1909: 1688.
41 Eliot 1836–45: III, 410.
42 Farrand 1911: III, 207.
43 On federalism see LaCroix 2011.
44 Clode 1869; Hindle 2000.
45 See Stater 1994.
46 On the ancient constitution see Pocock 1957. For the idea of the ‘heretoch’, see Lambarde
1568: fos. 136r-v and Blount 1661: 157.
47 Articles of Confederation 1781: arts. II, III.
48 Articles of Confederation 1781: art. VIII.
49 Farrand 1911: I, 273; Federalist: No. 44.
50 U.S. Constitution 1787: art. I, sects. 8, 9.
51 For a discussion of federalism concerns in relation to the Second Amendment see Higginbotham
1998.
52 Farrand 1911: II, 635; III, 208–10, 259–60.
53 Storing 1981: III, 115.
54 Farrand 1911: III, 157.
55 Eliot 1836–45: II, 521; III, 418.
56 Storing 1981: VI, 35, 62.
57 Federalist, No. 45.
58 A reading of Locke’s Second Treatise along these lines can be found in Drummond 2014:
ch. 2. On Locke more generally see Ashcraft 1986; Goldie 1983: 61–85.
59 The term is taken from Kenyon 1977.
60 See Cottrol and Diamond 1995: 995–1026.
61 Federalist, No. 43.
62 On the intellectual context of the Declaration of Independence, see Armitage 2007. Many
early state constitutions contained explicit criticisms of ‘non-resistance’, a doctrine attacked
as ‘slavish’, e.g. Thorpe 1909: 3422
63 Storing 1981: V, 45.
64 Storing 1981: III, 153; V, 25, 42.
65 Farrand 1911: III, 208.
66 See Amar 2005.
67 Storing 1981: III, 177.
68 Amar, indeed, has argued that the Civil War represented a radical constitutional shift in
how the armed forces were understood. The overwhelming importance of the regular
forces of the national government in crushing the Confederacy ensured the primacy of the
national army. Amar 2005: 380.
69 Although the MS suggests the document is from 1689, Professor Mark Goldie has
persuasively argued that it was prepared in December 1688, see Goldie 1995; Erle 168[8].
70 Powell 1985: 1285.
71 Story 1833: III, 746–47.
72 Goldie 1995.
73 Adams 2001.
74 Thorpe 1909: 3083.
75 Thorpe 1909: 1892.
295
76 Farrand 1911: III, 157.

77 Eliot 1836–45: III, 659.
78 A point made in Finkelman 2000: 117–47.
79 A good introduction to the main contours of the exceedingly dense historiography on the
Second Amendment can be found in Bogus 2000. See also Kates 1983; Cress 1984;
Shalhope 1986; Lund 1987; Levinson 1989; Halbrook 1989; Cottrol and Diamond 1991;
Uviller and Merkel 2003; Konig 2004; Cornell 2006; Churchill 2007; Halbrook 2008;
Charles 2010 and 2011.
80 Legal rules need to be understood through recourse to background norms, which can be
thought to ground them, so too originalist ‘models’ purporting to present a hegemonic
account of amendments can be thought of as being backed by historical ‘approaches’
privileging certain themes and categories. My distributist approach would highlight the
importance of the distribution of military power to the amendment’s original meaning.
REF EREN CE S
Adams, William Paul. The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making
of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, trans. Rita Kimber and Robert Kimber
(expanded ed., Lanham, MD, 2001).
Amar, Akhil Reed. America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York, NY, 2005).
Anon., The peaceable militia (London, 1648).
Armitage, David. ‘What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,’ History of
European Ideas 38.4 (Dec., 2012), pp. 493–507.
——. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
Ashcraft, Richard. Revolutionary Politics: Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton,
NJ, 1986).
B[lount], T[homas]. Glossographia, or, A dictionary interpreting all such hard words of
whatsoever language now used in our refined English tongue with etymologies, definitions
and historical observations on the same: also the terms of divinity, law, physick,
mathematicks and other arts and sciences explicated (London, 1661).
Bailyn, Bernard The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967).
Beckett, Ian F.W. Britain’s Part-Time Soldiers: The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1946
(Manchester, 1991).
Black, Jeremy. A Military Revolution?: Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800
(London, 1991).
Bogus, Carl, ed. The Second Amendment in Law and History (New York, NY, 2000).
Boyle, Robert. A treatise of the art of war dedicated to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty
(London, 1677).
Boynton, Lindsay. The Elizabethan Militia, 1558–1638 (1967).
Breen, T.H. (1972). ‘English Origins and New World Development: The Case of the Covenanted
Militia in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts’ Past & Present 57.1 (1972), pp. 74–96.
Browning, Reed. Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, LA, 1982).
Cañigares-Esguerra, Jorge. ‘Some Caveats About the “Atlantic” Paradigm,’ History Compass 1
(2003), pp. 1–4.
Charles, Patrick. ‘The 1792 National Militia Act, the Second Amendment, and Individual
Militia Rights: A Legal and Historical Perspective,’ Georgetown Journal of Law & Public
Policy 9.2 (2011), pp. 323–92.
——. ‘The Right of Self-Preservation and Resistance: A True Legal and Historical Understanding
of the Anglo-American Right to Arms,’ Cardozo Law Review De Novo 18 (2010), pp. 18–60.
296
Churchill, Robert. ‘Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the Right to Keep Arms in Early
America: The Legal Context of the Second Amendment,’ Law & History Review 25.1
(2007), pp. 139–75.
Clode, Charles. The Militia Forces of the Crown, Their Administration and Government
(London, 1869).
Cornell, Saul. A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control
in America (New York, NY, 2006).
Cottrol, Robert and Raymond Diamond. ‘The Fifth Auxiliary Right: Review of Joyce Lee
Malcolm’s, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right’ (Cambridge,
MA, 1994), Yale Law Journal 104.4 (1995), pp. 995–1026.
——. ‘The Second Amendment; Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration,’ Georgetown
Law Journal 80 (1991), pp. 309–61.
Cress, Lawrence Delbert. ‘An Armed Community: The Origin and Meaning of the Right to
Bear Arms,’ Journal of American History 71.1 (1984), pp. 22–42.
——. ‘Radical Whiggery on the Role of the Military: Ideological Roots of the American
Revolutionary Militia,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979), pp. 43–60.
Defoe, Daniel. A brief reply to the History of standing armies in England with some account
of the author (London, 1698).
——. An argument shewing, that a standing army, with consent of Parliament, is not
inconsistent with a free government, &c (London, 1698).
Downing, Brian. The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and
Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (1992).
Drummond, Charles. ‘Political Thinking and Military Power in Later Stuart Britain, 1660–1701’
(Ph.D. diss., Cambridge, expected 2014).
Eliot, Jonathan, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the
Federal Constitution (Washington, D.C., 1836–45).
Erle, Thomas. ‘Paper of instructions for the Parliamty. meeting after the revolution’ (c. 168[8])
Churchill College, Cambridge Archive Centre Erle MS 4/4/5.
Farrand, Max, ed. Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1911).
Federici, Michael. The Political Philosophy of Alexander Hamilton (Baltimore, MD, 2012).
Finkelman, Paul. ‘“A Well Regulated Miltia”: The Second Amendment in Historical Perspective’
in Carl Bogus, ed., The Second Amendment in Law and History (New York, NY, 2000).
Finnegan, Michael. ‘The Impact of the Counter-Reformation on the Political Thinking of Irish
Catholics, c.1540-c.1640’ (unpub. Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2007).
Fisher, Louis. Military Tribunals and Presidential Power: American Revolution to the War on
Terrorism (Lawrence, KA, 2005).
——. Presidential War Power (2nd ed., Lawrence, KA, 2004).
Fletcher, Andrew. Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1997).
Gascoigne, Bernardo. ‘Memoranda to James II’ (c. 1685) British Library, Additional MSS 38,850.
Goldie, Mark. ‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism,’ Political Studies 31 (1983), pp. 61–85.
——. ‘Thomas Erle’s Instructions for the Revolution Parliament, December 1688’. Parliamentary
History 14.3 (1995), pp. 337–47.
Goring, J.J. ‘The Military Obligations of the English People, 1511–58’ (unpub. Ph.D. diss.,
University of London, 1955).
Halbrook, Stephen. A Right to Bear Arms: State and Federal Bill of Rights and Constitutional
Guarantees (Westport, CT, 1989).
——. The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms (Chicago IL, 2008).
Harrington, James. The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed. J.G.A.
Pocock. (Cambridge, 1977).
Higginbotham, R. Don. ‘The Federalized Militia Debate: A Neglected Aspect of Second
Amendment Scholarship’, William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998).
297
Hindle, Steve. The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640
(Basingstoke, 2000).
Kates, Don. ‘Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment,’
Michigan Law Review 82 (1983).
Kenyon, J.P. Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge, 1977).
Koh, Harold. The National Security Constitution: Sharing Power After the Iran-Contra Affair
(New Haven, CT, 1990).
Konig, David. ‘The Second Amendment: A Missing Transatlantic Context for the Historical
Meaning of the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms,’ Law & History Review 22
(2004), pp. 119–60.
Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole
(Ithaca, NY, 1992).
LaCroix, Alison. The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Cambridge, MA, 2011).
Lambarde, William, ed., Archaionomia, siue de priscis anglorum legibus libri sermone Anglico,
vetustate antiquissimo, aliquot abhinc seculis conscripti, atq[ue] nunc demum, magno
iurisperitorum, & amantium antiquitatis omnium commodo, è tenebris in lucem vocati
(London, 1568).
Levinson, Sanford. ‘The Embarrassing Second Amendment’ Yale Law Journal 99 (1989),
pp. 637–60.
Lovejoy, Arthur. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge,
MA, 1936).
Lund, Nelson. ‘The Second Amendment, Political Liberty, and the Right to Self Preservation,’
Alabama Law Review 39 (1987).
May, Thomas. Arbitrary government display’d to the life, in the tyrannic usurpation of a junto
of men called the Rump Parliament, and more especially in that of the tyrant and usurper,
Oliver Cromwell. In which you have a clear view of the arbitrary, illegal, and unjust
proceedings, of those persons under the notion of liberty. And a compendious history of
those times, faithfully collected: with the characters and lives of several of those usurpers,
and a brief account of the several persons that suffered death, and imprisonment under
them for their loyalty to their king and country (London, 1683).
McMahon, Marie. The Radical Whigs, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon: Libertarian
Loyalists to the New House of Hanover (Lanham, MD, 1990).
Midgley, Henry. ‘The Political Thinking of the New Model Army 1647–54’ (unpub. Ph.D.
diss., University of Cambridge, 2008).
Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution, 1500–1800: Military Innovation and the Rise of
the West (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1996).
Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical
Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957).
——. ‘Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century’ in
Politic, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thinking and History (Chicago, IL, 1971),
pp. 104–47.
——. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican
Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975).
Powell, H. Jefferson. ‘Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution: A Belated Review,’
Yale Law Journal 94.5 (Apr. 1985). pp. 1285–314.
Prakash, Saikrishnar and Michael Ramsey. ‘The Executive Power over Foreign Affairs’ Yale
Law Journal 111 (2001), pp. 231–356.
Raab, Felix. The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation, 1500–1700
(London, 1965).
Rahe, Paul. ‘Machiavelli in the English Revolution’ in Paul Rahe, ed., Machiavelli’s Liberal
Republican Legacy (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 9–35.
298
Rapple, Rory. ‘The Political Thinking and Mentality of English Military Men in the Reign of
Elizabeth I, 1558–88’ (unpub. Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2002).
Reid, John Philip. In Defiance of the Law: The Standing-Army Controversy, the Two
Constitutions, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Wilmington, NC, 1981).
Robertson, John. The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh, 1985).
Schwoerer, Lois. ‘“The Fittest Subject for King’s Quarrel”: An Essay on the Militia Controversy,
1641–42’ Journal of British Studies 11.1 (Nov. 1971), pp. 45–76.
——. “No Standing Armies!” The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore,
MD, 1974).
Scott, Jonathan. Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writings of the English Revolution
(Cambridge, 2004).
Shalhope, Robert. ‘The Armed Citizen in the Early Republic’ Law and Contemporary Problems
49 (1986), pp. 125–44.
Somers, John. A letter balancing the necessity of keeping a land-force in time of peace: With
the dangers that may follow on it (London, 1697).
Stater, Victor. Noble Government: The Stuart Lord Lieutenancy and the Transformation of
English Politics (Athens, GA, 1994).
Storing, Herbert J. ed. The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago, IL, 1981).
Story, Joseph. Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: With a Preliminary
Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States Before the Adoption of the
Constitution (3 vols., Boston, MA, 1833).
Thomson, James. The Works of James Thomson, 2 vols (London, 1763).
Thorpe, Francis, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and the Organic
Laws of the State, Territories, and Colonies; Now or heretofore Forming the United States
of America. (Washington, D.C., 1909).
Toland, John. The Militia Reform’d and The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments (London, 1698).
Trenchard, John. A Short History of Standing Armies in England (London, 1698).
——. An Argument, shewing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government
and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy (London, 1697).
Uviller, H. Richard and William Merkel. The Militia and the Right to Arms, or, How the
Second Amendment Fell Silent (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003).
Vane, Sir Henry. A healing question propounded and resolved upon occasion of the late
publique and seasonable call to humiliation in order to love and union amongst the honest
party, and with a desire to apply balsome to the wound, before it become incurable
(London, 1656).
Webb, Stephen Saunders. ‘Army and Empire: English Garrison Government in Britain and
America, 1569–1763’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 34 (1977).
——. ‘The Strange Career of Francis Nicholson’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 23
(1966), pp. 513–48.
——. The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of the Empire, 1569–1681
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1979).
Western, J.R. English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1802
(London, 1965).
Williams, David C. The Mythic Meanings of the Second Amendment: Taming Political
Violence in a Constitutional Republic (New Haven, CT, 2003).
Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969).
Worden, Blair. Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil War and the Passions of Posterity
(London, 2002).
299
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ATLANTIC PERIPHERIES
Diplomacy, War, and Spanish–French
Interactions in Hispaniola, 1660s–1690s
Juan Ponce-Vázquez
I n 1690, a French force of 900 men entered the northern Spanish region of
Hispaniola and headed to the town of Santiago de los Caballeros, in the north of
the island. When the Spanish lookout stationed at the edge of town informed the
commander of Hispaniola’s northern forces, Antonio Pichardo de Vinuesa, of the
appearance of the advancing troops, he mustered the city’s fighting force, called for
reinforcements from nearby Spanish towns, and readied the defenses. Once they
reached the outskirts of town, the French soldiers sent a message to the Spanish
troops: no harm would befall the townfolk of Santiago as long as they swore loyalty
to the king of France. If they refused, they would suffer a merciless attack. Pichardo
gathered all the captains in a military council, who agreed to allow the enemy to
enter the town and surround it, which would let the French wreak havoc and destroy
a great number of houses. As part of the scheme, two captains volunteered to
ambush the enemy.
The Spanish ambush was very successful, killing over eighty French soldiers. In the
aftermath of the attack, it was rumored that as the Spanish forces attacked, some
French soldiers had shouted ‘Treason! Treason!’ pointing to a possible pact between
the invading force and some local residents. Another rumor stated that the attack was
the result of debts incurred by Antonio Pichardo’s nephew Pedro Morel de Santa
Cruz and his business associates in their dealings with French merchants.
Pedro Morel, who had been absent from Santiago at the time of the attack,
returned that same afternoon from Santo Domingo where he had been promoted
to the military rank of maestre de campo by the governor in the capital.1 According
to the information received later in Santo Domingo, everyone expected that
Morel would convince his uncle Pichardo to organize a force to pursue the French
and attack them as they withdrew, ‘thus eradicating the reputation he had
accumulated during the period of peace in that city [Santiago] and this one [Santo
Domingo] of a great merchant with the French.’2 Instead, his first act was to
gather all the captains to inform them of his new rank and reaffirm their obedience.
Next, he chastised the men who participated in the ambush against the French
troops and did everything he could to disparage their performance in the field.
Morel also secured a letter signed by the Cabildo (Town Council) of Santiago
300
– chapter 17: Atlantic peripheries –
requesting the relocation of the town of Santiago to another part of the island due
to its proximity to French territory. The governor and members of the Audiencia
of Santo Domingo in the capital interpreted this move as a scandalous and
abhorrent capitulation of the territory to French settlers. The two captains
responsible for the attacks against the French, however, refused to cede any land,
claiming that ‘they wanted to live there, they would, and they would defend their
land to death.’3
The behavior of the military leaders of Santiago to the French attack, allowing the
enemy to enter the town, and avoiding direct combat (with the exception of the two
captains leading the ambushes) baffled Ignacio Pérez Caro, the governor of Santo
Domingo. Pérez Caro proceeded to send the canon of the cathedral of Santo Domingo,
a close friend of Pedro Morel, to convince the residents to rebuild their houses and
resettle. It was also rumored that the canon received much of the merchandise that
Morel and his allies bought from the French merchants and sold in Santo Domingo.
Eventually, the governor himself traveled in person to Santiago to investigate the
attack and its aftermath. Pedro Morel and the Cabildo of Santiago apologized for
writing the letter asking for the town’s relocation, and Antonio Pichardo was removed
from his post and general of the Spanish forces in the north of the island for allowing
the enemy troops to enter Santiago unopposed.4
Figure 17.1 Santo Domingo, 1671

© Universal Images Group Limited/Alamy
301
– Juan Ponce-Vazquez –
The actions of the local military leadership in Santiago and the events that
surrounded the 1690 French attack of the city of Santiago raise numerous questions
regarding the relationship between French and Spanish residents of Hispaniola during
the last decades of the seventeenth century, the nature of such relations, and the role
Spanish residents played in the implementation of Spanish imperial policy in
Hispaniola during these years, both of which proved to be crucial for the future of
the island in the last decades of the seventeenth century.
The actions of Pedro Morel and the captains who participated in the ambush
against the French troops represent the two extremes in Spanish attitudes towards
their French neighbors in Hispaniola throughout the last two decades of the
seventeenth century. In this chapter, I argue that by the last decades of the 1600s,
French and Spanish residents in Hispaniola had developed a deeply ambivalent and
fluid relationship that ranged from open violence to collaboration. By the end of the
century, however, Spanish residents on the island, organized in patronage networks
of associates and dependents, came to rely on French merchants and settlers as the
most secure sources of commerce, and as such, afforded them a level of economic
prosperity Spanish traders operating in Santo Domingo could not provide. I also
argue that the rise of intercolonial trade occurred alongside the growing efforts of the
Spanish Crown to eliminate French settlements from Hispaniola. The participation
of Spanish local residents in the war effort allowed them to manipulate the Spanish
offensive and foil imperial designs of a unified Spanish colony of Hispaniola. Spanish
residents of Hispaniola played a direct role in foiling Spanish imperial plans for the
island, thus choosing the short-term benefits of accommodation to the neighboring
French presence over a unified island under Spanish control that remained isolated
from Atlantic markets.
I
The lands of western Hispaniola had been uninhabited since the Spanish population
was forcibly removed in 1605 to prevent them from dealing with English, French,
and Dutch merchants. By the 1630s, English and French adventurers had inhabited
the western shores of the island. These men, popularly known as buccaneers due to
their habit of cooking meat in an Arawak-style grill known as boucan, dedicated
their time to hunting feral cattle and planting tobacco, which they would take to
Tortuga for sale to European merchants. Situated off the northwestern tip of
Hispaniola, the island of Tortuga became the most important non-Spanish settlement
in the region from the 1630s to 1670s. As Tortuga increased in importance as an
entrepôt, it also attracted the attention of the Spanish governors in Santo Domingo,
who saw the presence of these foreigners both in Tortuga as well as in the western
parts of Hispaniola as encroaching on Spanish territory. These so-called trespassers
were killing feral cattle that, at least nominally, belonged to the long-time Spanish
residents of Hispaniola. In two separate instances, 1635 and 1652, the governors of
Santo Domingo organized expeditions to expel the foreigners from Tortuga. They
were successful in both instances, but due to the inability to garrison Tortuga, or to
populate the area with Spanish settlers, the French and English peoples who had been
expelled from Tortuga soon returned.
302
Figure 17.2 Buccaneer in the West Indies, 1686

By the late 1650s, Northern Europeans had become a permanent fixture on the
island’s depopulated regions. Writing in 1653, a governor of Santo Domingo
informed the Council of the Indies in Spain that his troops had caught English, Irish,
Dutch, and French prisoners during their patrols through western Hispaniola.5
Earlier that same year, an oidor from the Audiencia of Santo Domingo reported that
in the two years he had been on the island, fifty-seven foreigners, most of them
303
French, had been apprehended, sent to Santo Domingo, and shipped to Spain.6 These
prisoners only represented a small sample of those residing in the theoretically
depopulated regions. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Hispaniola had
become a contested borderland where Spanish authorities struggled to maintain
control over their territorial claims while groups of Northern Europeans attempted
to benefit from the uneven control Spain had over large swaths of the island. This is
the implied message in a travel narrative published in London in 1655, in which its
author claims that ‘The Cattel of Europe, which have been transported thither, have
thriven abundantly and multiplied into such incredible numbers, […] especially in
Hispaniola, and in many parts of the Continent beside, live wilde in herds upon the
Mountains, and may be killed by any body that will take the pains to doe it.’7 Such
open invitations as this one to exploit the riches of the New World surely increased
the appeal of places as dimly populated as Hispaniola at a time when Northern
European monarchies were more interested than ever in expanding in the Caribbean
in opposition to the expansionist tendencies of the Spanish monarchy. In 1655, those
aspirations became apparent when the English attacked Santo Domingo. The English
attack became a powerful reminder to colonial administrators of the imminent and
recurring danger that Spanish Caribbean possessions faced during those years.8
It was precisely the 1655 English attack that forced Spanish forces stationed in
Tortuga since its capture in 1652 to hurriedly return to Santo Domingo, thus allowing
the French settlers to return. In the years that followed, the French colony of Tortuga
flourished. Its population of 900 people in 1660 jumped to 6,500 individuals (2,012
of them black, and 200 colored) in 1681. A population estimate for that same year in
the Spanish colony placed it at 6,312 individuals, including soldiers from the garrison,
slaves, and free blacks.9 Even though the Spanish estimates seem rather conservative,
there is little doubt that the explosive growth of Tortuga represented a clear threat to
the territorial integrity of the Spanish colony, particularly after 1670, when the
settlement of Cap François, on the northern coast of Hispaniola, quickly became the
most important port of the new French colony.
II
As the population of the French colony grew, the Spanish colony faced its own internal
troubles. Starting in the 1660s, there were reports of repeated waves of epidemics
ravaging the population of Santo Domingo. As early as 1659, Governor Juan de Balboa
believed that the city was prone to the spread of leprosy due to the constant contact
between sick residents and their relatives, as well as their disregard for the advice of the
local doctor.10 The repeated outbreaks of smallpox and measles that ravaged the
population through the 1660s were much more serious, and affected both slave and
free populations. In 1677, an already debilitated population faced a wave of dysentery
that killed what seemed like a significant number of residents, although the testimony
of witnesses do not offer data on the number of deaths. The only data available is that
offered by the Archbishop, who documented the baptism of 638 children and the
death of 780 individuals. Therefore, the city of Santo Domingo experienced negative
growth during these years, which probably also impacted the city’s business and trade.
It is unclear whether the waves of disease also impacted the countryside and the island’s
other villages, although it seems possible that they were spared.11
304
In addition to attacking its human inhabitants, the diseases spreading through

Santo Domingo also affected crops. Beginning in the 1630s and 1640s, cacao trees
had been introduced in Hispaniola as an alternative to the previous crops such as
ginger, whose profits were on the decline. Cacao was embraced by the elites and
religious institutions as the only viable cash crop, and was produced extensively. By
the late 1650s, Rodrigo Pimentel, the wealthiest man in the colony, had planted a
total of 38,000 cacao trees on his various properties. His slaves harvested an average
of 1,000 cargas of cacao annually, which earned him a reported 12,000 pesos.12
In the 1660s, cacao was well on the way to becoming the cash product that residents
needed to turn the economy of the colony around from the economic decline that had
affected the island since the 1570s. Between 1669–71, such optimistic prospects had
vanished. That year, numerous letters from Santo Domingo reported that cacao trees
were falling prey to a disease that prevented the trees from producing fruit and
eventually killed them.13 A look at the tithe collected by the Archdiocese of Santo
Domingo during these years seems to indicate that trend. In 1666, the Archdiocese
collected almost 13,000 pesos. Only three years later, it managed to collect only 4,000
pesos.14 The ruin of the cacao trees due to ‘blasts,’ which contemporaries also
experienced in Cuba and Jamaica, was felt by everyone in the colony, particularly those
near the capital. The disappearance of the crop interrupted the incipient trade that the
port of Santo Domingo had begun to experience due to the cacao bonanza. Most
planters were reduced yet again to practice subsistence agriculture and cattle ranching.15
As if diseases affecting both humans and crops were not enough, natural disasters
also challenged Hispaniola residents. In 1673, an earthquake hit the island, causing
great destruction in the capital. Many private residences and religious buildings,
some dating back to the early 1500s and shaken by years of torrential Caribbean rain
and winds, could not withstand the tremors and collapsed. Writing almost twenty
years later, in 1691, the governor of Santo Domingo reported that with the exception
of the cathedral, most of the buildings around the main square still lay in ruins.16 The
owners, possibly pressed by economic hardship, seem to have been unable or
unwilling to rebuild their houses. In 1680, a hurricane swept over the island, causing
even more destruction.17
III
Despite those challenges faced by the population and economy of the colony, Spanish
officials continued their efforts to thwart French advances. Beginning in 1647, the
Crown authorized the formation of two companies of thirty men each to patrol the
northern and southern coasts of the island and capture buccaneers and marauders
living in the western parts of the island. The troops filled their ranks with professional
Spanish soldiers, but the difficulty of maintaining an adequate number of soldiers in
the Santo Domingo garrison led to compromises: professional soldiers were appointed
to leadership positions, while local black and mulatto recruits represented the bulk of
the troops when professional soldiers were not available. In 1653, one of the oidores
of the Audiencia wrote to Spain announcing that he had sent over fifty-seven
foreigners to Europe, including English, French, and Dutch, which seems to indicate
that these troops were indeed an effective tool to at least keep in check the Europeans
who inhabited the borderlands.18
305
For reasons that are unclear, the two companies were disbanded during the
governorship of Juan de Balboa (1659–61). According to a witness, the governor
thought that the troops were useless and claimed that, ‘His Majesty did not pay
blacks or mulattoes,’ a statement that was clearly false but was used as an excuse to
renege on payment of the salaries owed to those locals when the troops were
disbanded, at a time of deep economic constraints by the local Treasury. It could
have also been a way for the governor to pocket the money himself. The governor’s
statement also provides an example of the racialized disdain that many Spanish
officials serving in Hispaniola showed for the increasingly colored population of the
island. In this sense, Balboa’s elimination of the two companies might have been due
to the fact that most of the soldiers at this point were indeed local free black and
mulatto residents.19
The absence of these two companies patrolling the borderlands allowed Europeans
free movement through the island, which most Spanish residents did not mind, even
benefited from, so long as this movement was peaceful. During governor Balboa’s
tenure, French people (very possibly, French indentured servants who escaped their
patrons) were at times seen walking in and out Santo Domingo working as teamsters,
which seems to indicate that the labor needs of local residents might have taken
precedence over fears of invasion.20 For inhabitants of borderland regions, and unlike
Spanish colonial administrators, birthplace was not a cause of concern, as long as
these individuals abided by the local codes of conduct.
Foreigners had resided in Santo Domingo and other towns on Hispaniola since the
early days of the colony. The presence of Portuguese families and merchants in Santo
Domingo dates to the origins of the city in the early 1500s. During the seventeenth
century, foreigners of all origins had made Hispaniola their home. Some married into
local society and stayed and were considered members of the community. In
Hispaniola, as in many other places in Latin America, a person’s belonging to the
local community was not determined by birthplace, but by his ability to situate
himself within the community and extract rights and fulfill duties to society.21 Ricardo
Ermenzon (Richard Emmerson?) was one of those men. He is described in the sources
as a surgeon and vecino, that is, a permanent member of the community. In 1672, he
was called by the governor to translate some English documents recently received
from Jamaica. He managed to translate only part of them, arguing that the ink was
too dark to read the handwriting and that ‘he had not exercised [his tongue] in over
twenty years.’22 Not only was Ricardo’s status as a vecino not questioned by the
authorities, but by his own admission, he had been away from English territory
(possibly in Hispaniola) for a good part of his adult life and become naturalized into
Spanish society.
But not all foreigners crossed into Spanish territory to work or reside peacefully
among the local residents. The disbandment of the two patrol companies emboldened
other French colonists to initiate attacks on Spanish settlements. In 1660, thirty men
guided by a Spanish mulatto attacked the settlers in the region of Guaba, taking them
prisoner.23 That same year, 300 Frenchmen from Tortuga sacked the town of
Santiago, killing 150, and forcing its remaining inhabitants to seek refuge in the
mountains. When an oidor of the Audiencia went to Santiago in the aftermath of the
attack to investigate the state of its defenses, he found a few Frenchmen who had
been residing in Santiago for a time. The fact that the oidor found them there indicates
306
that they feared no reprisal from their neighbors for their countrymen’s attack to the
city, proving yet again that birthplace or nationality held little importance to the
ways that local residents defined their neighbors.24
The 1660 attack on Santiago led Governor Balboa to create a permanent garrison
containing at least fifty soldiers in the town.25 In the following years, some of these
soldiers established ties with the local population, married local women and formed
their own families. Others, confronted with the pressures of living in a frontier town
like Santiago, deserted their posts to live as ranchers and hunters in the countryside.
The posts that they left open were filled by local Santiago residents, for whom
working the land or tending cattle had become very challenging due to the constant
threat of a French attack. Their salary as soldiers allowed them to continue earning
a living at a time of increasing conflict. It also accelerated the creolization of the
garrison and the connections between the soldiers and the local residents.26
During the 1670s, the clashes between Spanish and French settlers continued as
the French expanded their control over the western part of the island. Such instability
led to a reconstitution of the two companies who had previously patrolled the island.
This time, however, the troops were formed from the start with local residents and
led by professional soldiers. These troops were involved in the constant clashes
between Spanish and French forces along the frontier. The two Spanish companies,
however, were insufficient to stop French attacks on Spanish settlements. In 1673,
French forces attacked the towns of Cotuy and La Vega, the latter only 70 miles away
from the capital. The attackers burned part of the towns and killed residents and
cattle. The town of Santiago, located farther north, was much more exposed to
attacks. Many of its residents had land and cattle stretching all the way to what once
was the town of Bayahá (today Port Dauphin, Haiti), but faced with the French
attacks, they had to abandon it. Francisco Sánchez, alcalde mayor of the northern
lands, viewed the growing French presence on the island with increasing worry, and
warned the Council of the Indies in Spain that once the French took root in the land,
it would be almost impossible to expel them. This in turn would create ‘great
inconvenience to this city [Santo Domingo] and to all the Indies, because this island
is in the middle of their commerce, and every year the enemy captures many vessels,
to great prejudice to Your vassals and Your Royal treasury.’27
Sánchez’s attempts to alert the crown of the dire situation that Hispaniola residents
were experiencing seemed to produce little results. The Cabildo (City Council) of
Santo Domingo wrote in even starker terms, referring to the colony as ‘the almost
cadaverous…body of the unhappy Hispaniola.’ Its members complained of the death
of many slaves in the epidemics that ravaged the island and the lack of slave ships
arriving in Santo Domingo. They also claimed that the few merchants that came to
Santo Domingo sold their products ‘without fear from God…at prices that provide
them over 100% profit, and against human and divine laws.’28
In the second half of the 1670s, the Spanish residents of Hispaniola, and especially
those located in the area surrounding Santo Domingo, found a new source of labor
thanks to the proximity of their neighbors. As the French transitioned from a system
that employed indentured servitude to one dependent on slavery, many African slaves
started escaping their new masters and crossing the borderland region into Spanish
territory. These slaves were captured by Spanish authorities and questioned to find
out if they had been previously taken from other Spanish territories in the Caribbean.29
307
Once it was established that they had not, they were given in deposit to powerful
local residents and Crown officials to work on their lands or households. According
to Jerónimo Chacón, a new oidor who arrived in 1675, some members of the elites
had pressured the governor to have the slaves sold at auction, but those who had the
slaves in deposit resisted the sale.30 Another member of the Audiencia pointed out an
alternative option: setting the slaves free as a reward for escaping the French.31 By
1675, the Crown had decided to keep the slaves in deposit with local residents, but
the depositaries would have to pay a salary to the Treasury for the use of their
labor.32 As slaves continued arriving in the Spanish territory, the Audiencia of Santo
Domingo sought a more permanent arrangement for the status of these slaves. In
1677, another twenty slaves arrived, and after a disputed trial among the elites and
the Audiencia’s attorney to decide the future of these runaway slaves, the Audiencia
decided to declare all slaves escaped from French territory free, hoping that this
would encourage other slaves to escape and would weaken the French colony. The
governor also created a settlement on the outskirts of Santo Domingo for the former
slaves called San Lorenzo de los Minas, in reference to Elmina Castle, on the African
Gold Coast, and the port of origin of some of the new residents. The creation of
towns of runaway slaves, which was later applied to other border regions such as St.
Augustine in Florida, became a way to increase the population of border regions, as
well as increase the supply of food to local markets, and improve the defenses of
Spanish territories. These new settlers were also trained in the use of spears so they
could participate in the defense of the colony if it ever became necessary to do so. By
1686, the initial settlement of fifty former slaves had already grown to 150 individuals,
and it continued to grow as more slaves escaped French control.33
IV
Beginning in the 1680s, the diplomatic relationships between the Crowns of Spain
and France changed in important ways. Formalized in the peace of Nijmegen in
1678, the end of the Franco–Dutch war, in which Spain sided with the latter, marked
the beginning of a time of peace between the two kingdoms. The news of the peace
agreement reached the Spanish officials in Santo Domingo in 1680, and the period of
peace lasted until 1689. The governor of Santo Domingo decided to send an envoy to
Tortuga to inform the governor there of the new peace between the two monarchies.
The person chosen to carry out the mission was Juan Bautista Escoto, a cleric from
Santiago. Escoto was very well received, and French officials informed him of the
wealth, trading prowess, and strength of their military in case of a Spanish attack. He
also observed that the island of Tortuga was a very busy port in which Spanish ships
regularly stopped to trade, as well as ships from the Bay of Biscay, in northern Spain,
Italy, and many other European ports. He also noted the frustration of French settlers
towards the Spanish policy of welcoming French indentured servants and slaves into
their lands, thus depriving the French of their labor force.34
The reaction of the French governor of Tortuga to the news of the peace was tepid
at best. Even though he acknowledged the peace treaty, he observed that the document
did not make any reference to Hispaniola. He promised to do everything in his power
‘according to justice and reason,’ and would keep French subjects from Spanish
lands, but they would still make provisions in Hispaniola, in those lands they had
308
acquired ‘by right of conquest.’ He also expressed his desire to come to an agreement
on borders.35 The French governor thus intended to keep his options as open as
possible while extracting some concessions from the Spanish.
The mistrust between the governors was evident, both in their handling of the
peace as well as in their interpretations of each other’s moves. On January 1, 1681,
once Escoto had returned to Santo Domingo, the French governor sent four men by
land with a new letter to his Spanish counterpart. The men were intercepted in the
north of the island and asked to return to French territory, due to fears that they
might be encouraging trade between French and Spanish residents. Their letter was
taken to the governor in Santo Domingo. The members of the Audiencia did not like
the fact that the French governor had sent four men by land. Such an act was perceived
as a discourtesy (as opposed to sending one single cleric, as the Spanish had done)
and an attempt to survey Spanish lands and defenses. In his communication, the
governor of Tortuga interpreted the letter of the peace rather liberally in the eyes of
his counterpart. He tried to convince the Spanish that the exchange of prisoners
contained in the peace agreement signaled that the Spanish had to return the French
indentured servants and slaves that had escaped from French territory, while the
governor of Santo Domingo argued that he could not return those that had come of
their own will.36 These exchanges between the imperial authorities of both colonies
underscore the fragility of the Franco–Spanish peace in Hispaniola and the self-
serving reading that each side made of the text. While the Spanish saw it as an
opportunity to stop French advances, the French interpreted it as a way to legitimize
their territorial gains and recover some of their lost labor.
From the north, others raised the alarm about the French. Jerónimo de Robles,
alcalde mayor of Santiago, declared that the four French men sent by the governor of
Tortuga had said in his presence that ‘it is impossible their [French settlers’] removal
from the island, and that we [the Spanish] should get the idea off our heads.’ Jerónimo
also claimed that the French had all the provisions they desired from Europe, and
they had become bolder since the time of the peace, going into territories that they
would have never dared to enter during times of war. His letter is signed by all the
officers serving in the northern region of the island to add credibility to his statement.37
The urgency that the letter conveys might also be motivated by his desire to highlight
the risks of his job in order to receive his long delayed salary, but the threat of French
encroachment, as perceived by some peninsular royal officials, is nonetheless evident.
Not all peninsular officials saw French encroachment as a threat. When Artillery
General Andrés de Robles (1684–90) took office as governor of Santo Domingo, he
was faced with the island’s deep budgetary deficit, and so decided to once again
eliminate the two companies in charge of patrolling the frontier, claiming that during
peace times such troops were no longer necessary.38 His actions earned him a scathing
reply from the Council of the Indies: ‘…[R]egarding that island, treaties do not apply
because, as I have informed you in numerous decrees, foreigners inhabiting those
lands do it illegally, and they are merely tolerated.’39 From this reaction, we can
extract at least a couple of conclusions. First, it is curious that the attitude of the
Crown here is very similar to that first reaction of the governor of Tortuga when he
received the Spanish cleric with the news of the peace treaty. Both the Spanish Crown
and the governor of Tortuga contested the validity of the treaty for Hispaniola (even
though the governor of the French colony did try to use the treaty for his own
309
advantage later, as we saw). Second, despite being inhabited by French settlers for
decades, the Crown refused to acknowledge the French presence as legitimate, and
still held out hope of a future reunification of the island under Spanish control. The
position of the royal officials on the ground was based on the reality of the
circumstances and the very real financial constraints of the island, while the Crown
still held western Hispaniola as sovereign Spanish territory and expected its governor
to behave accordingly.
Despite some continuing tension along the border areas over land and cattle during
these years, the reality on the ground seems to have been quite different from the
images that soldiers serving in Santiago painted or that Crown officials in Madrid
imagined. During peace time, the French and Spanish attacks on each other’s territory
completely halted. At the same time that military actions ceased, commercial relations
flourished. They had undoubtedly existed before, but during these years, the
documentary evidence of these exchanges is much more abundant, which might
indicate an increase of those exchanges.40 It seems that the peace between France and
Spain was interpreted by some French merchants as an opportunity to gain new
customers. In a letter addressed ‘to the Spanish gentlemen whose hands found this
[letter] and to those from San Juan de Guaba,’ the French merchant Carlos de Orange
informed his prospective customers that ‘observing that your very Christian king has
made peace with ours, we joyfully look forward to meeting you, […] you can come
here as safely as if you were with your own brothers.’ He insisted that the governor
of Tortuga himself sanctioned these deals and that they would find everything they
wished at a good price.41 If it was true that the governor of Tortuga supported French
merchants’ attempts to expand their business into the Spanish colony, it might
indicate that he embraced the peace as an opportunity to seek non-military avenues
to benefit the French colony. There is evidence of at least one other letter like this one,
but it is very difficult to ascertain how many of these letters circulated, how many
people read them and participated in these exchanges.
The existing documentation seems to indicate that commercial interactions with
French merchants became increasingly common during this period. Even among
Spanish settlers at the border, where armed scuffles with French groups still occurred,
trade was unavoidable. For example, talking about the Spanish residents of the
settlement of Banica, within the border region, Governor Robles wrote that, ‘even
though they ordinarily trade with the enemies with great disorder and little faith, I
have decided to leave them there because they maintain the enemies at a distance from
their settlement.’ These settlers, the governor added, were ‘the worst vassals that Your
Majesty has on this island.’42 The fact that despite Robles’ negative assessment of the
settlers he was willing to leave them indicates the importance of these populations to
deter French advances. The behavior of these settlers (both combative toward and
collaborative with the French) provides a window into the ambiguous experience of
living in a porous borderland, where enemies and trading partners were just roles that
individuals and communities adopted according to necessity and opportunity.
By the end of the 1680s, commerce with the French had spread through the Spanish
border regions of Hispaniola. Governor Robles was informed that even some of the
most respectable residents of the town of Santiago were engaged in these deals, selling
cattle, horses, and mules to the French, but it was impossible to find evidence because
the Spanish residents protected each other. The governor only managed to arrest two
310
mulatto brothers who lived in Santiago. Two members of the local militia accused
them of selling 150 heads of cattle for 7 to 10 pesos each to the French in 1686, and
another 120 in 1687. The two men who provided the information to the governor did
it in secret, because ‘it is true that [the informants] would have been speared if [Santiago
residents] had known that they gave me the news.’ As punishment, the two brothers
were exiled for six years to the Araya fortress, which sits along what is today’s
Venezuelan coast.43 The fact that these two brothers were of mixed race and quite
successful in their deals with the French might have made them easy targets for their
neighbors. The denunciation of the two mulatto brothers gave the authorities in Santo
Domingo someone to blame, while it eliminated two market rivals. It is also relevant
that the two individuals who reported the two brothers to the governor were both
local militia captains, since there is ample evidence that members of both the Cabildo
of Santiago and the local militia (whose leaders were often members of both bodies)
were actively involved in the trade. Among those mentioned are Antonio Pichardo de
Vinuesa and his nephew Pedro Morel de Santa Cruz, both active participants in the
1690 defense of the town of Santiago that opened this chapter. They were both
members of the local elite, and both served as alcaldes of Santiago at different times.
The Pichardo family had resided in northern Hispaniola for over a century.44
Pichardo made a career as a militia captain, and had led multiple expeditions
against the French in the northwest beyond the Dajabón river and the Guaba valley.
According to the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, Pichardo was ‘the knife and scourge
of the French on this island.’45 His accomplishments on the military front did not,
however, ensure that he was treated well by the governing forces on the capital.
Salaries of soldiers in the northern frontier were often delayed for years, if ever paid
at all. Pichardo was no exception. Writing in 1688, he complained that he had not
received any salary in the previous three years, and since his appointment of cabo
general (highest ranking military officer in the northern frontier), he had only received
a small fraction of his salary.46 Unable to exert enough political influence in Santo
Domingo, the needs of soldiers in general, and especially those in the northern
frontier, were regularly ignored in the capital. The military elites in Santiago
constituted the first line of defense against a possible French invasion, but at the same
time, deprived of their salaries almost permanently, they actively participated in trade
deals with French settlers as their only means of survival. In the Hispaniola
borderlands, militia solders embodied this duplicity despite its apparent
incompatibility. They were both the defenders of the colony, and active trading
partners with those who they were supposed to defeat and expel from the island.
During the peaceful years of the 1680s, as the northern residents of the island
began dealing with their French neighbors, the circulation of French and Spanish
peoples and cattle across the frontier could not have passed unnoticed to the militia
or the soldiers patrolling the northern frontier. In most cases they were active
participants in these deals. Governor Robles believed that French settlers were trading
with the owners of every cattle ranch in the north. He tried to persuade local
authorities to act, but these officials claimed they did not know anything about the
deals. The governor took this attitude as an excuse not to act. He pointed out that the
local justices and Pichardo were in on these deals, and questioned how local residents
had gathered 200 heads to be sold to the French on a ranch belonging to Pichardo’s
brother without his knowledge and collaboration.47
311
V
The year 1689 brought to an end a period of relative peace between the residents of
the Spanish colony of Hispaniola and the French settlers who inhabited the western
shores of the island, as France and Spain renewed hostilities in Europe.48 It is in this
context that the French attack of Santiago in 1690 took place. If colonial officials in
Santo Domingo already had doubts about the ability or even the willingness of the
garrison and militia from Santiago to defend the north of the island from French
encroachment, the events surrounding the 1690 French attack just confirmed their
worst suspicions. As early as 1689, the viceroy of New Spain had started the
preparations for a Spanish assault to eradicate all French settlements on the western
part of the island. The offensive was planned as a dual attack: local militias and
professional soldiers in the Spanish colony would strike by land, and the Armada de
Barlovento, the Spanish Caribbean fleet, would attack by sea.
At the head of the royal bureaucracy at this time was Ignacio Pérez Caro, who had
been appointed Governor of Santo Domingo in exchange for monetary compensation
owed to him by the Crown. More than any of his predecessors, Pérez Caro’s time in
office became a business venture whose success depended on his good relations with
the local elites. The fleet arrived in Santo Domingo in November 1690. Governor
Pérez Caro called a meeting of the military captains of the island. Even though
Pichardo was no longer commander of the northern forces, he attended as a captain,
as did his nephew Morel. The newly appointed commanders of the troops in Santiago
and the captains of the border patrolling forces, who according to some witnesses
were ‘subordinates’ of Pichardo and Morel, were also in attendance. Despite Morel’s
carelessness in the defense of Santiago that year, the governor initially appointed him
head of the land forces. The news pleased Morel’s allies, but the great majority of
captains did not hide their dissatisfaction with the governor’s choice. The governor
was thus forced to reconsider and finally settled on a professional soldier who was a
popular choice among the Santo Domingo elites. Pedro Morel was then appointed his
second in command, as a way to keep the elites from the north of the island content.49
In January 1691, the area of Cap François and its nearby settlements were
surrounded by a Spanish force of 1,300 men who were supported from the sea by the
fleet. They killed 200 men and captured significant quantities of coin, textiles, and
other valuable products. Once the region was secure, the captains of the army
gathered to discuss whether they should move forward and attack Port-de-Paix.
Arguing that they lacked ammunition and food, despite having seized ample amounts
of both in Cap François, many of the captains refused to continue the attack.50
Sargento mayor José de Piña, in a letter to an oidor of the Audiencia of Santo
Domingo, described how Pedro Morel, who many considered the real commander,
took every possible measure to slow the attack and benefit from it. He gave quarter
to prisoners in exchange for secret caches of money and jewels, and protected the
property of some French landowners from pillaging. Morel accumulated a significant
amount of loot, which he shared with his uncle Pichardo, other relatives, and his
allies, while leaving everyone else without a reward.
Piña, who was the third in command of the expedition, believed that the
overwhelming momentum that the Spanish force had experienced could have led to
the expulsion of the French from Western Hispaniola had it not been for Morel’s
312
actions. The success of the mission was, in fact, impeded by the unwillingness of the
local militia to continue the campaign, which preferred to concentrate its efforts in
the pillaging and accumulation of the loot acquired in the sack of Cap François. Piña
did not mince words when describing the actions of Morel, his relatives and allies. He
depicted the local elites as committed ‘to discredit[ing] our arms to cover their malice
and cowardice.’ After only two weeks in French territory, the Spanish force retreated,
leaving the property and houses of many French settlers untouched. Any loot left
over after Morel had taken his share was loaded into the fleet ships and taken to
Veracruz, thus depriving the rest of the participating local militia of their reward for
the campaign.51
In 1692, a second expedition was organized. This time, the governor gathered
1,700 men from the Spanish fleet, the garrison of Santo Domingo, and the local island
militias. This last group was very reticent to join due to the treatment they had received
from Pedro Morel in the 1691 expedition. Governor Pérez Caro had to resort to
giving each man five pesos as an incentive to join the campaign. Many of them replied
that they did not need the money to serve the king. They only needed an experienced
commander who treated them well. As an added incentive, Pérez Caro gave them
permission to take as much property from the French as they wanted as a reward for
the participation, something that Morel had not allowed in 1691. Still reluctantly, the
militia nonetheless gathered in Santo Domingo to prepare for the attack.52
Once the entire force was gathered in the capital, the governor announced that the
commander of the expedition would be, once again, Pedro Morel, with some members
of the Cabildo of Santo Domingo as second. This decision angered many soldiers of
the fleet, who expected to be commanded by a professional soldier. It also disappointed
many among the local militias, who saw themselves once again in the hands of a man
they did not respect. Some members of the local militias left for their hometowns
after the new commander was announced, but most stayed, and eventually set out
with the army towards French territory.53
The army set up camp not far from the enemy in anticipation of the attack. The
local militia units were grouped according to their villages of origin. In the camp,
Morel rearranged the units, separating men from their neighbors and trusted friends.
He also removed local militia captains from the command of each unit. Following
Governor Pérez Caro’s instructions, Morel took merchants of certain wealth but little
military experience, who were unknown to the militia forces, and without any
knowledge of the men and terrain in which they would be fighting, and appointed
them captains. As if these changes were not enough to undermine the morale of the
militia soldiers, Morel also prohibited members of the army from taking any property
from the French settlers with the exception of used clothing. This order clearly
contradicted the promises the governor made to the militia soldiers when they were
recruited. The reorganization of the local militias, the substitution of local captains,
and the prohibition against looting the enemies proved too much for the militias.
That same evening, they left the camp en masse and returned to their homes. Morel
attempted to continue without them, but deprived of the most experienced men and
those with the best knowledge of the territory, he was forced to abort the campaign.
A few days later, the expedition returned to Santo Domingo without facing the
enemy. Once the Spanish forces returned to Santo Domingo, Perez Claro wrote to his
superiors in Spain claiming that the militia had left the camp because they were afraid
313
upon the news of the arrival of French reinforcements. Such claims exculpated Morel,
and the governor himself, from any wrongdoing.54
In 1697, the treaty of Ryswick put an end to the War of the League of Augsburg
and settled the future of Western Hispaniola. Spain acknowledged France’s possession
of the western part of the island, thus giving up on its aspirations to expel the French
and unify the territory. As French settlers consolidated their position in the western
lands of the island in the second half of the seventeenth century, the place of the
island in the geopolitical struggle between the Spanish and French crowns was forever
altered. The Spanish residents of the island had to protect their territory and property
from French encroachment, but at the same time, their neighbors provided new
opportunities for trade and, to a certain degree, prosperity in ways that had been
impossible to them for nearly one hundred years, during which the Spanish crown
never gave up its hopes of expelling the French from Western Hispaniola and placing
the entire island once again under its control. Those aims, however, were dependent
upon the collaboration of royal officials on the ground and local residents, which
proved hard – at times impossible – to count on due to the divergent objectives of
these three groups: Crown, royal officials, and local residents.
Even though the relationship between French settlers and Spanish residents was
prone to constant violent clashes, both groups accommodated to their circumstances,
particularly in times of peace between the Crowns. Trade flourished and peaceful
interactions across the border increased. Runaway French indentured servants and
slaves escaped to Spanish lands, and although their escape created diplomatic tensions
between the governments of both colonies, their presence in the Spanish local economy,
after years of disease and death, proved extremely positive. Spanish residents of
Hispaniola learned to live with the risks associated with having French neighbors as
they increasingly enjoyed the benefits of their presence in the western lands. These
benefits were always uneven, with certain sectors of the local elite benefiting from it
more than the rest of the population. In Santo Domingo, being part of a powerful
network was a crucial aspect of leading a prosperous life in this borderland colony.
Eventually, however, the power and influence that these elites wielded locally
played a crucial role in the ambitions of two Atlantic empires in the Caribbean stage.
For France, the intervention of local Hispaniola residents allowed the colony to survive
and go on to become its most valuable possession in the Americas during the eighteenth
century. As for Spain, the effect of local interference in imperial plans thwarted the
attempt to unify the island and to eliminate the center of operation of a powerful
enemy in Caribbean waters. While Atlantic imperial projects strived to accomplish
unambiguous triumphs, both Spanish and French residents of Hispaniola struggled to
balance the directives of their respective royal imperatives without granting either a
complete victory. It was precisely in this ambiguous balance that the local residents of
a peripheral colony found the most profitable conditions for their survival.
NOTE S
1 Governor Ignacio Pérez Caro to the Council of the Indies. August 6, 1690. Archivo
General de Indias (henceforth AGI), Santo Domingo (SD). 65, Ramo (R). 6, Number (N).
215; Oidor Fernando de Araujo Rivera to the Council of the Indies. April 24, 1691. AGI,
SD. 55, R. 20, N. 126.
314
2 ‘…desvaneciendo por este medio el crédito que en tiempo de paces tenía de gran
comerciante con dichos franceses así en aquella ciudad como en esta.’ Oidor Fernando de
Araujo Rivera to the Council of the Indies. April 24, 1691. AGI, SD. 55, R. 20, N. 126.
3 ‘que allí querían y habían de vivir y defender el lugar hasta morir.’ Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Governor Andrés Pérez Franco to the Council of the Indies. April 23, 1653. AGI, SD. 57,
R. 5, N. 70.
6 Oidor Francisco de Montemayor y Cuenca to the Council of the Indies. December 14,
1653. AGI, SD. 57, R. 5, N. 79.
7 Gent 1655: 138.
8 For a description of the 1655 English attack on Santo Domingo as well as the motivations
behind it and its aftermath, see Carla G. Pestana, ‘English Character and the Fiasco of the
Western Design,’ Early American Studies 3 (Spring 2005): 1–31.
9 French population data was extracted from Michel Camus (1985). Cited in Philip P.
Boucher, France and the American Trophics to 1700. Tropics of Discontent?. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, pp. 238. The Spanish population data is extracted
from a letter from Friar Domingo de Navarrete, Archbishop of Santo Domingo, to the
Council of the Indies, April 30, 1681. AGI, SD. 93, R. 5, N. 241.
10 Balboa could not know that most people are immune to leprosy. Governor Juan Balboa
Mogroviejo to the Council of the Indies. November 7, 1659. AGI, SD. 58, R. 6, N. 80.
11 The information regarding the measles and smallpox outbreaks are from February 3,
1669. AGI, SD. 76, R. 1. The report of the dysentery epidemic is contained in a letter of
oidor Juan de Padilla to the Council of the Indies, August 24, 1677. AGI, 63, R. 3, N. 32,
document 4. The demographic data comes from a letter by Archbishop Friar Domingo de
Navarrete to the Council of the Indies, April 30, 1681. AGI, SD. 93, R. 5, N. 241. The
Archbishop did not specify how many of the dead were Spanish and how many were
people of color, either slave or free.
12 1 carga amounts approximately to 50 pounds. AGI, Escribanía de Cámara, 22A, fol. 323v
13 For testimonies of the death of the cacao trees, see for instance the letter by Governor
Ignacio de Zayas Bazán to the Council of the Indies, May 29, 1671. AGI, SD. 76, R.1; or
letter by resident Manuel González Pallano to the Council of the Indies, May 2, 1675.
AGI, SD. 90, R. 2.
14 AGI, SD. 93 and 94. For a full table of the tithe of the Archdiocese of Santo Domingo in
the 17th century, see Ponce-Vázquez 2011: 169.
15 To see the effects of the disease in the neighboring Jamaica, see Momsen and Richardson
2009: 482.
16 Governor Ignacio Pérez Caro to the Council of the Indies. July 27, 1691. AGI, SD. 91, R. 4.
17 Anonymous: 1680.
18 Information about the formation of the troops can be found in a letter by the treasury officials
to the Council of the Indies, November 12, 1666. AGI, Escribanía, 12A; Oidor Francisco de
Montemayor to the Council of the Indies. December 14, 1653. AGI, SD. 57, R. 5, N. 79
19 The witness was Francisco de Luna, a veteran soldier who had served for 37 years on the
island and one of the officers of the companies that Balboa dismantled. He testified in
Balboa’s residency trial. AGI, Escribanía, 12A, bundle 1.
20 These men were likely indentured servants that escaped their French masters and found
work for Spanish residents. Ibid.
21 See Herzog 2003.
22 ‘Había más de veinte años que [la lengua] no la ejercitaba.’ Governor Ignacio Zayas
Bazán to the Council of the Indies. January 27, 1672. AGI, SD. 62, R. 5, N. 31
23 Oidor Andrés Martínez de Amileta to Governor Juan de Balboa. April 21, 1660. AGI,
Escribanía, 12B, bundle 8.
315
24 Ibid.
25 The number of soldiers in this garrison is unclear in the sources.
26 Lope de las Marinas y Nevares, alcalde mayor of Santiago, to Governor Juan Balboa. July 4,
1661. AGI, Escribanía, 12B, bundle 8, col. 65r.
27 ‘…se siguen grandes inconvenientes a esta plaza y a todas las Indias por estar esta isla en
medio del trajín de ellas y que todos los años apresa el enemigo muchas embarcaciones del
comercio, todo el daño y perjuicio de vuestro vasallos y disminución de vuestra Real
Hacienda.’ Francisco Sánchez Calderón to the Council of the Indies. Undated (but
information within the letter seems to indicate it was written in 1674), AGI, SD. 90, R. 2.
28 ‘El cuerpo…casi cadáver de la Infeliz Española.…Nos venden sin temor de Dios lo que le
compraron a más de cien por ciento de ganancia y contra lo que prohiben las leyes divinas
y humanas.’ The Cabildo of Santo Domingo to the Council of the Indies. April 24, 1679,
in Rodríguez Morel 2007: 373.
29 A good number of the slaves captured in pirate incursions of Spanish possessions around
the Caribbean were sold in Western Hispaniola. This is the case of the slaves captured in
the attack on Veracruz in 1684. In the cases in which Spanish authorities were able to
establish Spanish ownership of a slave, they sent word to the slave’s master. See for
instance, Governor Andrés de Robles to the Council of the Indies November 24, 1684.
AGI, SD. 64, R. 6, N. 156.
30 Oidor Jerónimo Chacón Albarca to the Council of the Indies. June 6, 1675. AGI, SD. 63,
R. 2, N. 14, document 6.
31 Fiscal Juan Garcés de los Fayos to the Council of the Indies. January 22, 1675. AGI, SD 63,
R. 1, N. 1
32 Royal Decree, June 15, 1675. AGI, SD. 63, R. 2, N. 15.
33 Interim Governor Juan de Padilla to the Council of the Indies. October 25, 1677. AGI,
SD. 63, R. 3, N. 62; Governor Andrés de Padilla to the Council of the Indies. December
9, 1686. AGI, SD. 303. For more on the town of runaway slaves created in St. Augustine
in the 1730s, see Landers, 1999.
34 Governor Francisco de Segura to the Council of the Indies. 1681. AGI, SD. 64, R. 3, N. 061.
35 ‘…todo lo que sea de justicia y razón…’; ‘…por derecho de conquista…’ Letter of Jacques
Nepveu de Pouançay, governor of Tortuga, to Governor Francisco de Segura [1681]
translated into Spanish by Oidor Antonio Cemillán Campuzano. Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Jerónimo de Robles Cornejo, alcalde mayor of Santiago, to the Council of the Indies. June
28, 1681. AGI, SD. 294.
38 Governor Andrés de Robles to the Council of the Indies. April 24, 1687. AGI, SD. 65, R. 3,
N. 44.
39 ‘…[R]especto de que por lo que mira a esa isla no se entienden los tratados de ellas porque
los extranjeros que las habitan están mal introducidos y sin derecho alguno. Sólo es una
tolerancia la permitida, como os tengo remitido en diferentes cédulas.’ Royal Decree,
January 29, 1690. AGI, Escribanía, 26C, R. 2, fol. 121r.
40 In fact, the excuse that the governor of Santo Domingo gave the governor of Tortuga
about not allowing his four men to arrive in Santo Domingo was ‘the issue of prohibited
trade’ (‘por el tema de los comercios prohibidos’). Francisco de Segura, governor or Santo
Domingo to Jacques Nepveu de Pouançay, governor of Tortuga. January 25, 1681. AGI,
SD. 64, R. 3, N. 061.
41 ‘A los señores españoles que la hallaren o a cuyas manos viniese y a los de San Juan de
Guaba’; ‘[V]iendo que vuestro rey cristianísimo ha establecido la paz con el nuestro de que
nos hallamos gozosos y deseando encontrados […] podéis venir aquí seguramente como
con vuestros propios hermanos.’ Carlos de Orange, February 24, 1681. AGI, SD. 92.
316
42 ‘Aunque el trato y comercio con los enemigos es común y ordinario con ellos con gran
desorden y poca fe todavía los he dejado estar allí porque detienen los enemigos más cerca
de sus poblaciones.’ Governor Andrés de Robles to the Council of the Indies. May 5,
1687. AGI, SD. 65, R. 3, N. 49; ‘Los peores vasallos que Vuestra Majestad tiene en esta
isla.’ Governor Andrés de Robles to the Council of the Indies. July 20, 1687. AGI, SD. 65,
R. 3, N. 66.
43 ‘[…] es cierto que los alancearían si supieran quién me había dado la noticia.’ Governor
Andrés de Robles to the Council of the Indies. November 17, 1688. AGI, SD. 65, R. 4, N. 98.
44 Pichardo’s grandfather had been alcalde of the town of Puerto Plata in 1582. For a full list
of merits and family tree of Antonio Pichardo de Vinuesa, see AGI, Indiferente General,
127, N. 5. Pedro Morel was the son of one of Pichardo’s sisters.
45 ‘Ha sido años ha el cuchillo y azote del francés en esta isla.’ Friar Domingo de Navarrete,
Archbishop of Santo Domingo, to the Council of the Indies. April 4, 1679. AGI, SD. 93,
R. 5, N. 230.
46 From 1669 to 1679 he only received seven pesos and a half per month of his salary. From
1679 to 1685, twelve pesos and a half. Antonio Pichardo de Vinuesa to the Council of the
Indies. April 6, 1688. AGI, SD. 91, R. 3.
47 Governor Andrés de Robles to the Council of the Indies. April 13, 1688. AGI, SD. 65,
R. 4, N. 120.
48 A Royal Decree sent to the governor of Santo Domingo in May 24, 1689, announced the start
of the war with France. Governor Andrés de Robles acknowledged its receipt in September
15, 1689. Governor Robles to the Council of the Indies. AGI, SD. 65, R. 5, N. 187.
49 Oidor Fernando de Araujo Rivera to the Council of the Indies. April 24, 1691. AGI, SD.
65, R. 7, N. 229; Eagle, 2005: 93.
50 Ibid.
51 ‘…deslucir nuestras armas por encubrir su mal obrar y cobardía.’ Sargento mayor of
Santo Domingo José de Piña to Fernando Araujo Rivera, oidor of the Audiencia of Santo
Domingo. January 25, 1691. Ibid.
52 Unsigned letter (possibly written by Fernando de Araujo Rivera, oidor of the Audiencia of
Santo Domingo.) April 18, 1692. AGI, SD. 66, R. 1, N. 1.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
REF EREN CE S
Anonymous. (1680) Relación verdadera en que se da cuenta del horrible huracán que sobrevino
a la isla y puerto de Santo Domingo de los Españoles el día 15 de agosto de 1680. Madrid:
Lucas Antonio de Bedmar, printer.
Boucher, Philip P. (2010) France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent?
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Camus, Michel (1985) Correspondance de Bertrand Ogeron, gouverneur de l’île de la Tortue
et coste de Saint-Domingue au XVIIe siècle. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Ateliers Fardin.
Eagle, M. (2005) The Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the Seventeenth Century. Ph. D. Tulane
University.
Gent, N. N (1655) America: or An exact description of the West-Indies more especially of
those provinces which are under the dominion of the King of Spain. Faithfully represented
by N.N. Gent. London: printed by Ric. Hodgkinsonne for Edw. Dod.
Grivetti, L. E. and Shapiro, H.-Y. (2011) Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage. John
Wiley & Sons.
Herzog, T. (2003) Defining nations: immigrants and citizens in early modern Spain and
Spanish America. New Haven: Yale University Press.
317
Landers, J. (1999) Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Momsen, Janet Henshall and Richardson, Pamela (2009) ‘Caribbean and South America.
Caribbean Cocoa: Planting and Production’, in Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage,
eds. Louis Evan Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Pestana, C. G. (2005) ‘English Character and the Fiasco of the Western Design’, Early
American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3(1), pp. 1–31.
Ponce-Vázquez, Juan J. (2011) Social and Political Survival at the Edge of Empire: Spanish
Local Elites in Hispaniola, 1580–1697. Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania.
Rodríguez Morel, Genaro (2007) Cartas del cabildo de Santo Domingo en el siglo XVII. Santo
Domingo: Publicaciones del Archivo General de la Nación.
318
PART V
RELIGION
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CATHOLICISM
E. L. Devlin
T he Christians who established the foundations of the Catholic tradition in Africa

and South America came from a society which defined itself, to a significant
extent, through its common Catholic identity. Christendom was a Europe of the
Catholic Church, and the extension of that faith and its institutional apparatus were
bound together amidst the commercial and colonial imperatives which also informed
the creation of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although a
desire to establish more efficient trade routes to the east led to the arrival of Christian
Europeans in both Africa and South America, from the moment of that arrival an
evangelistic purpose of conversion emerged as central to their intentions in both
continents. Although significant local and regional differences and distinctiveness
existed throughout western Europe, a common Catholic identity was still potent at
the beginnings of extra-European evangelical and entrepreneurial enterprises. In such
a context Christopher Columbus can be described as a ‘militant Catholic’ even
though Christian evangelism was not initially a central motivation behind his
voyages.1 The first Portuguese to arrive in West Africa in the fifteenth century
introduced themselves first and foremost as Christians, and left a drawing of the cross
to identify themselves to potential converts.2 John Cabot landed in Newfoundland in
1497, sponsored by the English king Henry VII and claiming the territory in the
name of the pope while armed with a crucifix. The most striking contrast underlying
the spread of Catholicism throughout the Atlantic world can be found in the precise
nature of the Catholicising process and, especially, the political context informing it.
The conversion of the Amerindians was part of an outright territorial conquest, while
the willing adhesion of some African leaders to Christianity played a significant role
in establishing a more ‘diplomatic’ relationship between the European powers and
the African elite; a distinction between an ‘inclusive’ version of Catholicism
incorporated traditional beliefs into a Catholic framework, against an ‘exclusive’ one
focused on confessional purity.3 The later development of a French presence in North
America operated as a kind of midpoint on this spectrum: neither a native-led
movement nor part of a full-scale territorial conquest, the experiences of French
missionaries had sustained and significant echoes with some of the counter-
reformation responses to Catholic unorthodoxy within post-Reformation Europe
321
– E. L. Devlin –
itself.4 In the British territories, the experiences of the Catholic minority were shaped
by the ingrained nature of Protestant anti-Catholicism, and respite from persecution
was found only in those few colonies which supported religious toleration.5
From the first arrivals of European Catholics, traditional African and Amerindian
beliefs informed responses to the newcomers along established religious lines. In that
sense, in the white heat of first contact, the story of the beginnings of Atlantic
Catholicism was often understood to be a story of returns. In the Kongo, the
kingdom’s founder Lukeni lua Nimi (c. 1380–1420) was reinterpreted as a
prefiguration of the Catholicising leadership of Afonso I (c. 1456–c. 1542), although
sometimes the comparison was hostile.6 The paleness of Christian skin marked them
as liminal creatures, and the first Europeans in the Kongo in 1483 were regarded as
‘water or earth spirits of the mbumba dimension’.7 Christian historians of Aztec
culture were keen to draw attention to identifications of Hernán Cortés, or even St
Thomas, with the serpent-god Quetzalcoatl, who had been prophesised to return to
Mexico. The initial welcome granted the Christians on those terms gave Cortés an
important foothold in Aztec society, and was significant in facilitating its eventual
destruction.8 Similarly, the Christian response to the discovery of the New World
replicated the importance of religious belief in dealing with the sudden appearance of
unfamiliar peoples. Instead of elevating them to godhood, the Europeans – by and
large – relegated them to the role of savage and slave. God was present in these events
insofar as the discoveries, conquests and conversions were part of His unfolding of
the divine narrative, a process of continuing revelation decanting the progressive
story of mankind, even if the discovery of the New World raised difficult questions
about what it was to be human, and what this might mean for global Catholic
responsibilities.9 Debates about the nature of humanity and the hierarchy of societies
identified in the world were central to Catholic thinking about the peoples of the
Americas from the early sixteenth century. The most famous of those public disputes,
in 1550–51 between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas, explored
the nature of Amerindian humanity.10 In practical terms, these debates were about
the inter-relations of Catholic evangelism and Iberian colonial interests, for they
sought to decide whether natives had souls, and asked if they could be truly converted
and achieve salvation. The intellectual disagreements these debates highlighted, and
the tensions identified between the balance of religious or colonial imperatives in
motivating Iberian activity in the New World, demonstrate that from the beginnings
of Catholic involvement in the Americas, disagreements were incumbent between the
church (or, at least, missionaries) and the crown. These issues would only become
more prominent as time passed, especially in the evolving tensions between crown
control of the Atlantic colonies, and the various ecclesiastical institutions which
emerged in Africa and the Americas over the centuries. Rivalries developed between
those structures themselves, and throughout the centuries Rome aspired to make
those hierarchies subordinate to its oversight.11
INSTITUTIO NS
Although the Portuguese had been actively pursuing Catholic evangelisation in the
Kingdom of the Kongo since the 1480s, papal recognition of these efforts was formally
made only in 1494. Through the Treaty of Tordesillas, the papacy awarded Saharan
322
– chapter 18: Catholicism –
Africa to the guiding leadership of the Portuguese crown, while at the same time the
Castilian monarchy was given greater authority over the Americas.12 In 1493, Pope
Alexander VI had recognised the importance of ‘the propagation of religion and the
augmentation of holy worship and the exaltation of the Catholic faith and the salvation
of souls’ as central to the Iberian expansionist mission.13 A few years later, in 1501,
Alexander authorised the granting of tithes for the maintenance of churches and clergy
in the New World, celebrating the ‘exaltation of the Catholic faith and the subjugation
of barbarous and infidel nations’ with the promise of new churches being built.14
Papal claims to dispense with continental territories in this way were, of course, borne
from the Church’s universalist claims to jurisdiction over all God’s created landmasses
and peoples, but the impact of such decrees was, in reality, already superseded by the
spread of Catholic spirituality in both Africa and the Americas.
Catholicism already had a long history in Ethiopia, and continued to survive in
parts of North Africa and Egypt despite the successes of Islam.15 In the Kongo, the
first baptisms were understood within the context of the mbumba cult, but gifts from
the Portuguese king, as well as the discovery of a black stone cross, won supporters
from the political elite to the new cult-religion.16 As in Benin and elsewhere in Africa,
the focus of missionary activity in the Kongo continued to be the conversion of
monarchs.17 When he converted to Catholicism, the Kongolese king Nzinga a Nkuwu
adopted the name Joao I (after the Portuguese king) and, somewhat against his
wishes, Christianity soon moved beyond being just the purview of the Kongolese
elite.18 It secured support through the broadest similarities between its beliefs and
native religions; for instance, the notion of ‘two worlds’. But Catholicism was
separate and distinct from traditional practices too. The liturgy remained in Latin,
and the focus of sacramental activity emphasised ritual and sensory engagement.
Joao’s successor, Afonso I, was concerned to establish a Christian Kongo as part of
the ‘larger religious, diplomatic, and symbolic system of the early modern Atlantic as
a land belonging to the realm of Christendom’. The cathedral at Sao Salvador was
built in 1549, and the city became a ‘symbol of Kongolese Catholicism’, famous for
its bell, while the king was usually present at the cathedral’s ritual activities. Kongolese
Catholicism remained a religion of the state, and benefited from strong monarchical
leadership in the sixteenth century, despite undulating tensions between the monarchy
and ecclesiastical authority.19
At various times in its history, the Kongo’s kings were hostile to the Jesuits and
episcopal claims to jurisdiction. Through ambassadors sent to Rome, appeals were
made to the popes for more direct influence over the church and its personnel, against
the influences claimed by the Portuguese crown. At least in the short-term, such calls
were often successful, but complicated dynamics between the Portuguese and
Kongolese monarchies, as well as ecclesiastical authority, remained an issue.20 Efforts
by the pope and the Portuguese king to subordinate the Kongolese monarchy to the
bishop of São Tomé in the 1530s failed, but in 1596 the creation of the diocese of Sao
Salvador allowed the Portuguese crown to nominate its bishops.21 The new diocese
also gave more influence to the Kongo’s own leadership and, despite resistance from
the Iberian monarchs, the Kongolese kings secured more control over the patronage
of dioceses in their territories and administrative jurisdiction over the tithe. Italian
regular clergy became much more prominent in the Kongo from the mid-seventeenth
century, undermining Iberian dominance of the African church, a development
323
encouraged by the monarchy.22 Clerical activity was supported by the Franciscans

and Augustinians in the first instance; from the 1550s the Jesuits and Dominicans,
and from the 1580s the Carmelites.23 However, the presence of missionary orders
was relatively meagre until the arrival of the Capuchins in the 1620s, and a sustained
bout of missionary activity would last – in decline – until the nineteenth century.24
Through the Capuchin presence in Soyo, something like a direct link between the
Kongolese monarchy and Rome was established.25 Portuguese interest in the Kongo
waned in the late seventeenth century, and its focus – along with the Jesuit mission
– moved to Angola. Over the course of the early modern period, Catholic evangelism
had moved throughout Africa. The Kingdom of Warri was effectively converted in
the late sixteenth century by Augustinians based in São Tomé and the rulers of Sierra
Leone were converted by Jesuits in the early seventeenth century.26 But a few decades
later, official interest in such activities declined, and African Catholicism was
sustained by the smaller remnants of earlier missions, especially through the efforts
of native catechists who maintained Catholic beliefs and ritual practices when the
imperial and commercial imperatives of the European empires directed the attention
of the central authorities elsewhere.27
Catholic evangelisation was an important part of Spain’s civilising mission in the
Americas, and a significant motivation for the conquistadores.28 Although the
counter-reformation effort had not yet taken hold in continental Europe, the Spanish
and Portuguese experience of the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the late
fifteenth century ensured that the loyal subjects of the crown were sensitive to the
importance of evangelisation to the spread of Spanish civilisation, and were able to
employ ready-made institutions and other mechanisms to consolidate the faith.29 The
Inquisition, and its associated bureaucracy, was introduced into the Americas in
1520.30 Its presence, alongside the harsh deployment of native labour in the earliest
years of Spanish colonial activity, was essential to the emergence of the anti-Spanish
‘black legend’, which interpreted Spain’s Catholic empire as a brutal and repressive
society, and contributed to the centrality of anti-Catholicism as an important
characteristic of Protestant settlements in the New World.31 The Spanish Inquisition
was an institution not established in Rome by the central ecclesiastical authorities of
the church, but created under the auspices of the Spanish crown to deal with racial
and religious purity in the Iberian Peninsula. Its translation into New Spain highlighted
the centrality of a Catholicising agenda to crown interests in Mexico, but also drew
attention to the problem of authority, leadership and power in the Catholic Atlantic
world. Even Cortés was strongly motivated by his desire to secure souls for the church
– and consequently, subjects for the crown too. Writing to the king in October 1524,
he commented ‘Each time I have written to Your Sacred Majesty I have told Your
Highness of the readiness displayed by some of the natives of these parts to be
converted to Our Holy Catholic Faith and to become Christians’; Cortés goes on to
explain that the quantity and quality of Catholic missionaries sent to Spain had been
inadequate.32 His letter is a reminder of some of the problems posed by the power
structures of the Catholic Church, the role of the monarchy in its territories, and the
relative independence of many of the religious orders in establishing their own
missionary spaces in an environment influenced by so many competing agendas.
At the beginning of Spanish activity in the Americas, the crown played the central
role in church administration. Under a Papal Bull of 1508, all ecclesiastical benefices
324
lay within the king’s jurisdiction. The archbishop of Seville held the primary authority
over American clergy until independent dioceses began to be established in the 1540s,
with the crown nominating bishops. By 1564 there were twenty-two dioceses and
five archdioceses.33 Within those structures a variety of clerical and missionary
activities took place. The establishment of reducciones, closed Catholic settlements
led by missionaries, offered protection to Catholic converts while ensuring clerical
authority and religious orthodoxy were preserved.34 Out of the reducciones emerged
new generations of native-born Catholic missionaries who evangelised among their
own peoples, although the acceptability of this practice from the European perspective
changed over time.35 While the conversionary efforts of various religious orders
achieved significant successes, rivalries between them were common, often deeply
political and ultimately disruptive. The arrival of new orders in the Americas or
Africa antagonised those who had established earlier foundations. The Jesuit mission
in the Kongo in 1548–55 failed because of tensions between the orders, the secular
European priests and the indigenous clergy.36 In the early seventeenth century, against
the background of Portuguese conflict with Spain, Spanish Jesuits argued that their
Portuguese counterparts were offering inadequate Catholic education in Africa.37 At
the same time, on the island of São Tomé, serious economic decline encouraged the
question of Catholic orthodoxy to become prominent. Descendants of Jews who had
long since been Catholic were now labelled ‘New Christians’, and the language of the
Catholic reconquest of Iberia surfaced more than a century after the expulsion of the
Moors.38 The people of São Tomé were seen by Iberian overlords and the institutional
church as potential Jews or subject to Moorish influence, demonstrating that, despite
the profoundly Catholic history of the island’s population – complicated marginally
with the assimilation of African religious practices from the resident slave population
– racial mixing could still surface as a problematic factor for contemporaries
interpreting the purity and orthodoxy of Catholic populations in an imperial context.
Atlantic Catholicism emphasised participation in ritual activity alongside a basic
catechistical knowledge. As in continental Europe, lay Catholics were expected to
pursue an active and committed life of prayer and sacramental enthusiasm, and in
most communities, missionaries and clerics led these pursuits. However, the relative
paucity of available priests also meant that the full rigours of Catholic sacramental
life could not always be enforced. Significantly, the sacraments of ordination and
confirmation required a presiding bishop, and not every Catholic jurisdiction had
one to hand.39 Processes of ‘translation’ were also in play throughout the Catholicising
effort in the Kongo. Missionaries used salt in baptisms as a possible defence against
witches, reflecting how ‘Kongolese ideas of evil were incorporated into Christianity’.40
The sacramental life of the missions created a bureaucratic record which now survives
as a vital source for exploring the numbers and nature of Catholic conversions. The
creation of baptism records is one example of how missionaries in Africa echoed the
responsibilities of the Tridentine parish priest in Europe, establishing a paper trail
between the central ecclesiastical authorities and the missions, which included
Catholic slaves in the Americas too.41
Supporting the formal sacramental practices of the church, missionaries and crown
officials encouraged the creation of confraternities across the Atlantic world. As in
Europe, these bodies were a corporation with some kind of shared spiritual interest,
often dedicated to a specific saint or to the Virgin. They were at the vanguard of
325
syncretic Catholicism, which merged traditional religious practices with Catholic

ritual, and native belief with Catholic teachings. The confraternities were also a means
through which lay Catholics could be granted a leadership role within their communities,
even if clerical oversight ensured orthodoxy. Race and ethnicity could become a key
aspect of confraternal identity and used to further incorporate native Africans and
Amerindians into the church’s institutions. The first confraternity for black Catholics
in Spain was founded in Cadiz in 1593.42 Lay confraternities were especially important
in the Kongo and Angola, and crown and ecclesiastical authorities encouraged Africans
to establish and lead their own congregations. This was ‘a means of social control’ for
the authorities, but it also reflected two of the most significant characteristics of
Atlantic Catholicism: a desire to shape church practice to the pre-existing norms of
African society, while also being influenced by shifts in continental European
Catholicism (in this case renewed enthusiasm for lay confraternities in the Tridentine
Church).43 In Africa, while Capuchin missionaries assisted the spread of confraternities,
the organic evolution of these social orders is apparent in myriad examples from across
the Atlantic world. The Confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary in Luanda comprised
slaves and free black Catholics and was founded in 1658, requesting formal recognition
from Rome within a few years. It took almost two hundred years for the confraternity
of the same name in Lisbon – with its membership of African descendants – to be
recognised, even though the confraternity had been extremely successful in the sixteenth
century.44 In 1682 Lourenço da Silva, an Afro-Brazilian anti-slavery campaigner at the
court of Madrid, became procurator of the Confraternity of Our Lady Star of the
Negroes, with a focus on turning the confraternity into a global one. There were
regional differences in the spread of confraternities for black Catholics; until the
eighteenth century they were less prominent in Brazil than in Portugal, but by that time
most Brazilian towns had several black confraternities.45 In the middle of the eighteenth
century, twenty-four black Catholics founded a confraternity in Madrid, almost two
hundred years after the first had been established in Spain.46 Confraternities continued
to be created and supported by crown and church authorities into the eighteenth
century, often adapting to new ideas about racial or ethnic identities.
The ecclesiastical leadership based in Rome, concerned with the question of
discipline and orthodoxy in Europe, was equally determined to maintain a watchful
eye on developments in the Iberian presence in South America and Africa. The
consolidation of clerical and episcopal discipline in the Tridentine Church was a
keynote of a more intense commitment to evangelism and the maintenance of Catholic
orthodoxy in the extra-European world. As in continental Europe, the bishops in
Africa and the Americas achieved a new social standing and more conspicuous
leadership role, and could find themselves openly and explicitly challenging crown
policies in their dioceses. They could also challenge the local power structures too;
through the 1610s tensions increased between the resident bishop of Sao Salvador
Manuel Baptista Soares and King Alvaro III.47 Sometimes, the complicated power
structures between Catholic monarchies and ecclesiastical authorities benefited the
consolidation of both church and monarchical power over native elites. In 1622 the
inauguration of a Roman congregation with oversight over overseas missions,
Propaganda Fide, transformed the church’s administration of Catholic communities
in the Atlantic world, and challenged the established power of monarchy and colonial
governments. The Collegium urbanum was created to train missionaries, and
326
catechisms in various languages were printed in Rome and transported throughout the
Atlantic world by its agents. Such texts were also developed by missionaries working
in Africa and the Americas.48 As early as the 1550s the first translations of the catechism
into Kikongo by the Jesuit Diogo Gomes were printed in Lisbon.49 These developments
ensured the Tridentine church was not just confined to rejuvenating the Catholic
tradition in Europe, but also directed its response to Protestantism within a broader
global mission of evangelisation and the defence of Catholic orthodoxy.
The experiences of Catholics in North America were more directly connected to
confessional tensions incumbent between Catholics and Protestants and new attitudes
towards empire-building and colonial rivalries in the aftermath of the Reformations.
The inability or disinterest on the part of the sixteenth-century French crown to
embroil itself in the Atlantic world stemmed primarily from the weaknesses of the
monarchy during the period when other powers consolidated their extra-European
activities. Until the seventeenth century, French interest in the New World had been
limited to the profit-making enterprises of colonial companies who established a
loose network of French settlements in North America, accompanied – at the fur
traders’ insistence – by Catholic missionaries.50 New France’s Catholic identity had
been central since the 1630s, when Cardinal Richelieu prohibited Protestants from
living in the colony.51 In 1658, François de Laval became the first vicar apostolic, a
papal appointee, but also a leading member of the Sovereign Council, and eventually
the king’s close ally.52 As part of the process of re-consolidating the power of the
crown within France itself, Louis XIV successfully deprived the companies of their
independence and subordinated the church and its missionaries to crown authority in
the early 1660s. In New France, Louis claimed the right to nominate ecclesiastical
appointments, and the church became profoundly dependent on the crown for its
financial security. After 1663, the king nominated bishops, and 40 percent of church
funds came from the crown. The local intendant and the Sovereign Council oversaw
the administration of the colonial church.53 This translation of French Gallican
privileges into North America is another potent indication of the different assumptions
Catholic monarchs made about their position vis-à-vis the papacy, and the broader
institutional apparatus of the Church. In 1674, the apostolic vicariate was turned
into the diocese of Quebec, and in 1819 it became an archdiocese.
The evolution of these jurisdictional forms highlights the longer-term success of
Catholic consolidation in Quebec. Its episcopal structures remained intact even after
the territory was lost to the Protestant British in 1760.54 In the newly formed United
States, debates continued in the eighteenth and nineteenth century about the
administration of the church, especially its finances and evangelical purpose. Before
independence, the various missionary orders had fallen under the jurisdiction of the
vicars apostolic in England, but now Catholic bishops based in America argued about
the dynamics between church and state.55 In the 1820s, John England, bishop of
Charleston, South Carolina, opposed the use of state finances by the church, while the
archbishop of Baltimore, James Whitfield, supported federal financing of Christian –
including Catholic – evangelism among Native Americans. In the commonplace anti-
Catholicism which remained potent in the United States, Catholics were assumed to
oppose the separation of church and state, and religious liberty. In 1832, Pope Gregory
XVI issued a papal bull condemning precisely those concepts, as well as freedom of the
press. But five years later, in 1837, the American bishops formally pronounced their
327
support for liberty of conscience.56 The nationalities of the bishops alone – French,
English, Irish – demonstrate the complexity of the church’s evolving presence in the
Americas. Bishop England was central to establishing the first Provincial Council of
Baltimore, which alongside diocesan synods, would prove a relatively effective way for
the American church to govern its disparate components, and engage with problems
of sacramental orthodoxy, church structure and administration, as well as the need for
evangelisation among African Americans, former slaves and western Indians.
THRESHO L D S
The emergence of a more disciplined and centralised global church in the mid-
sixteenth century generated problems of contemporary interpretation and assessment
for global Catholic evangelism. Since the late fifteenth century a popular and enforced
syncretic Catholicism had emerged throughout the Atlantic world, and responses to
this required contemporaries to address the problematic question of defining Catholic
orthodoxy in the Atlantic context and, particularly, deciding how far native religious
and social practices could be allowed to coalesce with Catholic beliefs and teachings.
Throughout the history of the global church in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, this question of ‘the merging of religions’ would become even more
contentious and embittered, as the disciplining of Tridentine renewal, geopolitical
conflicts, and rivalries between the missionary orders emerged. These debates were
not absent before the Reformation either, but the history of Catholic syncretism in
the Atlantic world highlights that ‘religion responded both to its internal dynamic
and to the new dynamic created by culture contact and physical transfer’.57 Although
Catholic missionaries and evangelists often led these processes, they sometimes
emerged organically from engagement with native interpretations too. This
equilibrium – the creation of new forms of Christianity which allowed Africans and
Amerindians to embrace the faith while at the same time preserving a connection to
traditional beliefs and customs – ultimately gave an extraordinary strength, potency
and longevity to Atlantic Catholicism, and insulated it from many of the most
debilitating debates within European Catholicism in the modern period.
The origins of syncretic Catholicism in Africa and the New World can be seen in
the complicated attitudes Europeans held towards native peoples and societies.
Although they were usually understood as barbaric and uncivilised, native religious
practices fascinated missionaries, and are often prominent in the detailed descriptions
assembled by Europeans throughout the early modern period.58 They were not quite
denigrated but, rather, understood as a manifestation of the devil’s active work in
these territories. They were sinful, but not pagan or heretical.59 Other African
‘characteristics’ were appreciated as pseudo-Christian: the Kongolese willingness to
share was ‘truly Apostolic’ and resonated with concepts of Catholic charity.60 The
Europeans’ appreciation of some similarities between Catholicism and native religions
only served to underscore the diabolic manipulation of Christian practice apparent in
native understandings. Aspects of Amerindian beliefs – notably serpent-deities –
made the devil’s real presence even more conspicuous.61 In other cases, stories from
the classical and biblical traditions were interpreted to indicate a kind of mythological
universalism; the fables of Nipinoukje and Pipinoukhe in North America were read
as a version of Castor and Pollux.62 Syncretic Catholicism emerged from a sense that
328
many aspects of native ritual and religious tradition could legitimately be incorporated
into Catholic practice. Indeed, one of the most significant features of the Iberian
crowns’ interest in the New World, and their method of colonialism, itself hinged on
a biological syncretism being established between subject peoples. Miscegenation
between Europeans and Amerindians was actively encouraged, and within a few
generations the Spanish colonies were dominated by a native, mixed-race, Catholic
community. The mestizo became another category in the Iberian fascination with
race and religion long-since prominent even before the discovery of the New World.
African Catholicism had a very profound reaction on the nascent American church
too, for the arrival of Africans – often as slaves – transported syncretic Catholic
practices to another continent, where they often flourished and joined with American
Catholicism in an even more complicated interplay of plural Catholicisms.63
Although Europeans had successfully established Catholicism in the Kongo in the
late fifteenth century, its position was still insecure in the early decades of the next
century. Joao I’s support for the faith became more circumspect later in his reign, and
it was not until his son became king in 1509 as Afonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga) that the
conversion of the kingdom was consolidated. This full-scale Catholicisation was
heralded by Afonso’s witnessing the appearance of a cross in the sky or, in other
versions, a vision of St James.64 As in his father’s reign, its native elite led the Kongo’s
embrace of the faith. Afonso used ‘a range of regalia, narratives and ritual apparatus’
to consolidate his authority, and following his conversion he ‘imposed Christianity as
the kingdom’s state religion and integrated it into the symbolic and historical fabric of
the realm’.65 Afonso regarded the Portuguese king as his equal, a ‘brother’, and the
Kongolese kings were usually recognised as monarchs in their own right by the church.66
In Afonso’s reign, the Mani Vunda, the religious leader who balanced the crown’s
political influence among the nobles, was given a ‘Christian religious role’, while the
nobles as a group were willing to embrace Catholic sacramental life, adopt Portuguese
names, and celebrate the main feasts of the church and its saints. Kongolese terms from
traditional religious practices were used in a Catholic context; for instance, ‘nganga’,
the word for priest, was now used to describe Catholic clergy.67 Nevertheless, non-
Christian nganga were assimilated into a Christian diabolist framework, and it was
assumed that the Devil was working through them.68 The regalia and politico-religious
arguments for Afonso’s policies demonstrated a ‘cross-cultural manipulation of
symbols and narratives’ allowing him to establish his position as a Catholic monarch
who respected his heritage – even if he destroyed African artworks to impress the
Portuguese as part of his assault on traditional religious idols.69 Despite Afonso’s
longer-term success at establishing Catholicism’s centrality to the Kongo’s religious
identity, there remained considerable resistance from adherents of traditional African
religious practises. The evolution of a syncretic Catholicism was partially the result of
this organic negotiation between political and religious authorities within the Kongo,
and the broader influences of traditional religious belief and practice, which allowed
some Catholics in Africa to be accused of witchcraft.70 The tropes of African witchcraft
and Christian ideas could even come to share the same linguistic forms.71 Later, in the
reign of kings Garcia and Antonio, concessions were made to an ‘indigenous religious
revival’ threatening Catholicism’s established standing. Nevertheless, with the help of
missionaries, Kongolese Catholics would survive the collapse of central government in
the 1660s and sustain ‘an African variant of Christianity’ for decades.72
329
One of the most potent examples of syncretism in the Kongo can be observed in the
emergence of the cross as a symbol of the connections between syncretic spirituality and
materiality in the early modern Kongo. Brass crucifixes created in Africa became the most
prominent symbol of the success of Catholicism, and they ‘brought together local ideas of
death and regeneration…and Christian beliefs in the passing and resurrection of Christ’.73
The cross came to be the strongest symbol of an African Catholicism fusing European
figurative sculpture – the image of Christ – with traditional Kongolese images and ideas,
for instance the ‘Four Moments of the Sun’. This was an emblem symbolic of life’s journey
and the passing of the day from morning to night, and the ‘Four Moments’ motif was often
represented in the form of the human body.74 A ‘cross’ was apparent in the placement of
the figure’s limbs which was twice echoed in the materiality of the Catholic crucifix – first,
in Christ’s own body, and second, in the cross itself. The popularity of the cross in African
Catholicism highlights how brass-workers in the Kongo brought ‘their own cultural
assumptions’ to bear in their creation of a distinctive Catholic material culture, and could
themselves be as sophisticated and sympathetic to the potentials of religious fusion as
Catholic missionaries. In sixteenth-century Benin, sculptural artefacts from the period of
Christian interaction highlight ‘the indigenous African cosmologies into which the early
Portuguese travellers entered, and through which these strangers were reconfigured’, and
so African sculptors were granted interpretative agency. By this time, carved African
objects were being used in Catholic ritual and achieved a sacred purpose in the new
religion.75 In the same way, traditional native ritual was adapted. As late as 1740, the
Capuchin Bernardino d’Asti described how dancers of the sangamentos wore regalia
dating back to Afonso’s reign to perform a series of ‘martial dances’ after Mass on major
Catholic feast days. These sangamentos had moved from being about agricultural cycles
and hope for prosperity, to a commemoration of particular holy days – ‘an altered symbolic
realm’.76 They are emblematic of the ‘cross-cultural manipulation of symbols and narratives’
defining Catholic material culture in the Kongo during, and after, Afonso’s reign.77
Similar trajectories occurred in South America, fuelled both by the specific
conversionary purposes of Europeans, and by the response of Amerindians to
Catholicism in their own right. In South America, the position of the mixed-race
mestizo was important to the cultural syncretism which defined the nature of Catholic
society and ritual. Confraternities focused on several significant saints encouraged a
hybrid baroque art to merge Catholic and native Amerindian styles and subjects.78 The
appearance of the Virgin Mary to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531 confirmed to Iberian
Catholics, and the global Catholic Church as a whole, that European engagement with
the Atlantic world was pre-ordained as part of the divine narrative and a core aspect of
the ongoing process of Christian revelation. The Americas became a truly, if contested,
Catholic space, and images of the Virgin of Guadalupe were often flanked by smaller
depictions of various miraculous occurrences, received and welcomed equally by both
Europeans and non-Europeans alike. Even into the modern period, the Virgin remained
a potent symbol of Catholic universalism, and its transcendent righteousness in the
sacred and secular worlds.79 In one such image from 1774, she forms the centrepiece
flanked by depictions of saints in the ether, with their miraculous interventions
occurring in the temporal world. Below the Virgin are two figures representing the
embodiment of continuing ideals for the Catholic Atlantic world: at the base of her
right foot is the contemporary pope, Benedict XIV, and at her left, a native Amerindian
princess and symbol of conquered – or assimilated – Spanish Mexico.
330
Figure 18.1 Virgin of Guadalupe

© Denver Art Museum
331
This female figure is also a reminder of how adeptly Catholic missionaries used
gendered images and ideas to win converts, and the spread of Catholicism was
followed by an increasing celebration of female spirituality in the Americas.80 From
the beginning, Europeans in Africa had been associated with the liminal and the
feminine, and the church’s emphasis on female saints and holy figures only heightened
this connection.81 The most obvious manifestation of female prowess in the Atlantic
Catholic world was the emergence of female convents and the prominence of nuns in
the spiritual lives of Catholic communities. These women were usually of Spanish
descent, but often born in Iberian America, and could be controversial.82 Juana Inés de
la Cruz (1651–95), a Hieronymite nun born near Mexico City, became one of the
leading poets of her age, and was condemned by her Archbishop for supporting female
education.83 St Anne was assimilated into pre-existing interpretative models, while
Catherine Twkakwitha and Rosa da Lima represented a potent female American
Catholicism. The profundity of female spiritual writings from New Spain demonstrates
the intensity of female religiosity.84 Outside the cloisters, it also led to an increased
emphasis on females in traditional Amerindian history, religion and myth. An ancestor
portrait from Peru in the early 1800s depicts a woman identified as the first Catholic
convert in the Andes. The male head she holds by its hair, dripping his blood onto her
white dress, is her prize decapitation, the result of an attempt to force her to break her
(Christian) vow of chastity. The imagery emphasises her essentially ‘native’ identity
and is intended to do so; her violent resistance imitates the conquest of Cuzco by the
first Incan queen, Mama Occllo, who beheaded her rival, as well as the biblical story
of Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes. It is a perfect example of how the tropes of
Amerindian and Christian history were being assimilated and synchronised throughout
the early modern period. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was still
important and relevant to identify and celebrate these legacies. For American Catholics,
they were not a mark of impurity or imperfection, but rather of genuine Catholic
enthusiasm and recognition of the vitality of Catholic Amerindian society.
Despite the successes implied in the spread of syncretic Catholicism, it also created
significant problems for the reputation of Catholics who could not always control
how they were interpreted within the context of native traditions. In 1528 the followers
of one of Cortés’s rivals, Panfilo de Narvaez, were shipwrecked off the coast of Texas.
There were four survivors, including a Moorish slave and a Spaniard, Cabeza de Vaca,
who would later write an account of his experiences. Enslaved by Karankawa Indians,
they ‘reluctantly became magical healers at the Indians’ insistence’. The Indians
assumed that, since the Europeans had brought with them a variety of illnesses, then
they could also cure them. The Europeans sought to cure using Catholic ritual, ‘by
making the sign of the cross over them and blowing on them and reciting a Pater
Noster and an Ave Maria; and then we prayed as best we could to God our Lord to
give them help and inspire them to give us good treatment.’85 In this instance, the
Europeans fell back on Catholic ritual as a means of alleviating their persecution by
the Indians, but this approach could lead to an accidental syncretism, and assimilated
Catholic practice within a dominating native interpretative framework. It was not
uncommon in North America for Catholic prayer and ritual to be interpreted within
pre-existing shamanic tropes, and for the impact of the European presence in the New
World to be considered in this way. When people did die because of diseases brought
by Europeans, or indeed through other natural causes, missionaries were often accused
332
Figure 18.2 Inca Princess

© Denver Art Museum
of shamanism, and of poisoning the natives. The missionaries themselves were

interpreted as diabolic agents.86 The use of sugar as a means of winning over native
children to baptism and in catechising classes was one way in which Catholics found
themselves accused of attacking natives, poisoning their children and complicit in the
destruction of native societies.87 The perceived loss of traditional talismanic powers
following Christian conversion could lead to despair. In 1639, native Amerindians
asked ‘what is the use of believing?’ as missionaries were actively confronting
333
‘sorcerers’ and their diabolic compacts.88 Many Amerindians did not want to go to
Heaven, for their relatives would not be there, and many were disturbed to find that
embracing Christian culture meant more than simply building some churches.89 As
Catholicism became established in the French territories, new converts developed
illustrated catechisms and new techniques for self-mortification more suited to their
own society – an instance of organic syncretism at work.90 They enthusiastically
pursued the sacramental life, rising early in the morning for Mass and instruction,
while their society was also blighted by the introduction of French brandy and the rise
of new ‘vices’ centring on alcohol.91 The complexity of the Amerindian response to
Catholic evangelism, at different times and different places, was marked by one
sustained similarity. Most Catholic converts who were won over were children or the
dying; if the latter survived, the legitimacy of their ‘conversion’ could be problematic,
while the focus on children encouraged a missionary focus on long-term education as
a means of securing orthodoxy, catechistical knowledge and true belief.
In New France, the establishment of missionary activity was heavily indebted to
the support of wealthy French Catholics, and in the first instance was inspired by the
example offered by the Spanish in South America.92 Over the course of several
decades, French missionaries sought to evangelise by learning native languages, and
attempting to synchronise established beliefs within Catholic thought and practice.
Although conflict between the French and native peoples was almost constant,
Catholics were encouraged to engage with Iroquois culture. But in contrast to the
syncretic missionary activity of Catholics in New Spain, the coureurs des bois acted
more as a buffer between the French settlements and the American natives, rather
than a Catholicising presence. It was a new generation of counter-reformation
missionaries which had most success in making evangelising inroads into the North
American territories, as missionary orders like the Recollets emerged to create a
particularly distinct association between Catholicism and France. The Jesuits were,
perhaps, the most important of the missionary orders, and their annual reports back
to Europe, with their ‘unparalleled richness of…ethnographic detail’ reflect the
broader Catholic interest in native cultures, and an emphasis on understanding it.93
They engaged with almost every native nation in north eastern America, and made
clear distinctions between them. Although the French were closely allied to the
Algonquins, the Jesuits regarded the Iroquin nations as superior because they more
closely resembled European society.94 Catholic missionaries were assisted in their
efforts by the assumption that they were agents of the French crown and trading
companies, and the Iroquis, at least, were very interested in developing trading
connections with Europe.95 As in other parts of the Atlantic world, aspects of native
beliefs were assumed to reflect the nascent understanding of the Christian God. The
Jesuit Jean de Brebeuf, in 1636, believed the ‘poor Indians’ really acknowledged the
Christian God in their prayers ‘though blindly, for they imagine in the heavens an
oki…a demon of power which rules the seasons of the year, which holds in check the
winds and the waves of the sea’. Because of these similarities, it would be ‘easy’ to
‘lead these peoples to a knowledge of their Creator’.96 However, the various North
American nations proved more difficult to immerse within the faith in the absence of
a territorial conquest. Amerindian attitudes to Catholicism in North America were
not always hostile, but it was nearly always predicated on a kind of cultural relativism,
and an openness to a concept of ‘multiple and relative supernatural truths’, in which
334
Catholic and native beliefs co-existed side-by-side.97 Catholic evangelicals were

stymied by this unwillingness to commit absolutely to a Catholic worldview, even a
syncretic one.
TENSIO NS
The primacy of syncretism might suggest the emergence of Catholicism in Africa and
the Americas was chiefly and happily a process of assimilation, encouraged by
Catholic missionaries, pursued by natives with enthusiasm, and ultimately a core
aspect of global Catholic triumphalism after the Reformation. That is true, to a point,
but neglects the use and threat of violence as one means by which Catholicisation was
achieved. King Afonso was reputed to have buried his mother alive for refusing to
abandon native icons, and this story was reported well into the modern period as a
sign of the intensity of his faith.98 The vibrancy of Catholicism in the Atlantic world
gave sustenance to counter-reformation missionaries who moved further afield, to
Asia and the Philippines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as those
who moved deeper into Africa and the Americas during the modern period. But
suspicions about these syncretic processes had been present since the fifteenth century,
and continued to be prominent, and not just among Catholic missionaries and visitors
nervous that they had failed to stamp out traditional beliefs.99 Europeans, Africans
and Amerindians were all equally concerned – in different ways – with the question
of preservation, authenticity and truth in their beliefs and the rituals used to inscribe
them in their cultures. Conflicts within and between these groups could be deeply
political, challenging assumptions about the nature of power and its ownership.
Hostility to Catholic syncretism became a cornerstone of Atlantic anti-Catholicism,
and Protestant evangelism was dubious about the quality of syncretic Christianity,
preferring to destroy native religions outright, rather than assimilate them.100 Some of
the most radical challenges to Roman Catholicism in the Atlantic world came not just
from Protestant opponents but from within the syncretic Catholic tradition too.
From the perspective of Catholic Europeans observing, or participating, in the
emergence of syncretic Catholic practices in the Kongo, the key challenge to orthodoxy
was to be found in the legacy of so-called ‘festishes’, material artefacts worshipped in
traditional religion and used in various social rituals. It was not always easy to
identify the boundaries between objects totally assimilated into the new Catholic
culture, and those understood purely within the contexts of earlier native traditions.
The use of fetishes were not just limited to religious practices, but also had a broader
social role as medicinal and healing objects. Catholics confronting them in the Kongo
found themselves in a similar position to their peers working to remove practices in
Europe which had simply been part of local folklore and social custom, but which in
the post-Reformation period were being re-designated as witchcraft or heresy.101 In
October 1621, Bishop Pedro da Cuhna Lobo at São Tomé witnessed what he believed
to be a procession of Jews carrying a golden calf past the cathedral. His interpretation
was informed by increasing hysteria about the purity of Catholic practice in São
Tomé at this time, and was most probably a Catholic procession mixed with
traditional African rites. The ‘golden calf’ was some kind of fetish which had survived
in the island’s Catholic culture. The problems of liminality, fetish survivalism and the
porosity of religious orthodoxy in the Catholic world remained potent.
335
Even so obvious an orthodox symbol as the cross – and the use of crucifixes in
Catholic ritual – was not unchallenged. In the early eighteenth century, a female mystic
named Dona Beatriz, sometimes called Kimpa Vita, experienced a series of visions in
which she saw the Holy Family as members of Kongolese society, and emerged from
this experience with her body inhabited by St Anthony.102 The Antonian movement
she led developed in the context of a Kongo destabilised by economic failure and civil
conflict. The much-weakened Catholic monarchy was upbraided for abandoning Sao
Salvador, and Beatriz claimed that Christ had been born in the city. In 1705, she
occupied the ruined cathedral and gathered thousands of Catholic zealots – chiefly
peasants – around her. The conflict which followed between King Pedro, supported by
the Capuchins and other missionaries in Africa, and the Antonians, supported by rival
Kongolese aristocrats, hinged on the meanings of Catholic materiality and
sacramentalism; its symbolic and social functions. Beatriz destroyed many nkisi
(African objects with spiritual powers), declared the cross to be a fetish, and burned
it. In this dispute, there was a real ‘danger of repudiating the entire sacramental
teaching which the Kongo had accepted for two hundred years as the structural core
of its public religion’.103 The cross became one of the recurring motifs for the defenders
of royal authority and Catholic sacramentalism, and King Pedro embraced it as his
personal symbol, ensuring ‘the struggle lay between the cross upon the one hand and
the “Salve Antoniana” symbolised by the crown which St Anthony and her male
followers always wore, upon the other’.104 Beatriz was captured and burned for heresy
in July 1706 and crucially, the decision to execute her was made by the Mani Vunda,
a powerful statement of the legacies of pre-Christian Kongolese power structures,
ameliorating Beatriz’s attempts to further ‘Africanise’ the Catholic Church in the
Kongo. Pedro retook Sao Salvador in February 1709, the king reputedly armed only
with a cross. The defeat of Antonianism’s anti-sacramentalism consolidated the
cornerstone of syncretic Kongolese Catholicism as it had emerged since the fifteenth
century. But Beatriz had offered a potent challenge, and consolidated a material
tradition which continued into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Images of
Christ, the Virgin and other significant Catholics figures would increasingly be depicted
as Kongolese, while sculptures of St Anthony – although invoked by the Capuchins in
the war against Beatriz – continued to hold associations with her millenarian
movement.105 One metal sculpture of the saint, ‘Toni Malau’, offers an image of a kind
of reconciliation: in his right hand he holds a cross, and in his left, stands the Christ-
child, contemplating a goldfinch, a portent of the crucifixion.
If the Antonian movement represented a challenge within the African church, the
broader legacies of the split within European Christianity were felt in other parts of
the world. The establishment of British colonies in North America highlighted some
of the tensions emerging between Catholics and Protestants in the New World, within
the context of strong anti-Catholic sentiment in the British Isles. The establishment
of Maryland by Lord Baltimore in the 1630s was a direct riposte to the Protestant-
minded sensibilities of other British colonies. Rejecting Virginia’s oaths of supremacy
and allegiance, the Catholic Baltimore secured a charter for a colony allowing
Catholics to participate in civic life and freely pursue their religious beliefs.106 But
Maryland was not a Catholic colony, and Catholics were a minority, even if they
held significant influence and were often quite wealthy. Throughout the seventeenth
century the number of Protestant settlers increased significantly. Many of them
336
subscribed to normative English attitudes about Catholicism: it was intolerant,

associated with European absolutist government, and a threat to the commercial and
imperial aspirations of Protestant Britain. Baltimore seemed to recognise that the
success of his experiment relied on the Catholic population remaining quiet and, in
contrast to the very public sacramental life of Catholics elsewhere in the Americas,
called for Catholic ritual to be practiced in private.107 Although Maryland witnessed
a rise in the numbers of Catholic schools, and most of the public religious buildings
in seventeenth-century Maryland were Catholic churches, they were austere when
compared to their European counterparts.108 There was little ornate religious art or
stained glass on public display, and chapels were often based in private houses.109
Despite this private lifestyle, the Catholic minority still antagonised their Protestant
neighbours. The most prominent religious order was again the Jesuits, who had some
success in finding Catholic converts, and extended their activity throughout British
America.110 After thirty years of focusing on Indian natives, they turned their attention
towards the Protestant English instead.111 As they became more established, the Jesuits
asserted their own independence against Baltimore’s assumptions of a private
Catholicism subscribing to a central secular loyalty, in tensions which echoed those
between crown and cleric elsewhere in the Atlantic world.112 Despite Baltimore’s
hostility to a strong Catholic evangelism, the colony suffered three rebellions against
Catholic proprietorship in the seventeenth century, all connected to broader political
and religious crises back in mainland Britain: during the British civil wars in 1645–46,
the Interregnum in 1652–58 and finally in 1689 in the aftermath of the Glorious
Revolution.113 The latter consolidated the introduction of anti-Catholic legislation
during the eighteenth century and this defined Colonial American perspectives, and
then those of the early United States, towards Catholics, even if many later supported
the American Revolution and its enthusiasm for private religiosity.114 Attitudes
towards Catholics marked a kind of syncretic assimilation of post-Reformation
European fears about the religion in the American context: ‘in Maryland, an anti-
Catholic ideology was in place which built upon the English anti-Catholic tradition,
fused the fears and concerns of many mainstream Protestant Maryland planters, and
located the sources of those fears in the proprietor and his Catholic governors.’115 It
was sustained in part by continuing Catholic immigration, especially from Ireland and
through slaves from Africa. Conflict with Spain and France in the 1750s led to an
intensification of anti-Catholic sentiment, and a return to the old tropes of conflating
tyrannical government with popery.116 Irish Catholics were seen as sympathetic to
Spain, and in the 1630s and 1640s had led revolts in Barbados. In June 1689 they
were encouraged by the Jacobite governor general to destroy the English plantation of
St Kitt’s.117 Fears of Catholics were grounded in contemporary reality, while at the
same time embracing an earlier discourse identifying the pope as Antichrist and
interpreting the Catholic Church within a millenarian framework. Fears of Catholics,
slaves, and Catholic slaves all existed within a similar paradigm, interpreted as a
significant threat to Protestant security. The arrival of Catholic slaves from Africa, as
well as the conversion of slaves to Catholicism while living within British territories,
was an attack not just on British interests, but more intimately, on Protestant
households too.118 Slaves were expected to observe the sacramental calendar of the
church, and participated in the same services as free Catholics. The ecclesiastical
hierarchy resisted attempts to exempt slaves from their religious responsibilities until
337
tensions over the collection of the tobacco crop on saints’ days became too sustained
in the late eighteenth century, and some Jesuits granted dispensations.119 Of course,
many of the slaves were owned by Jesuits, Recollets or other missionary orders,
emphasising that the Catholic Church was not fundamentally opposed to slavery,
even if it was sensitive to abuses within the institution.120
The exportation of slaves from Africa to the Americas connected Catholic
communities across the Atlantic. Many slaves were themselves Catholic, and found
themselves part of a broader Catholic society if they were transported to Iberian or
French America, or part of a different Christian tradition if in British or Dutch
territories. From the early sixteenth century, King Afonso had objected to the capture
and trading of Kongolese subjects on religious grounds, arguing that the abduction
of his subjects was an affront to his position as a Catholic king and his sacred role in
the Catholic world. Similarly, Catholic missionaries in the Americas were actively
involved in attempts to prohibit the exploitation of native peoples as labourers or
slaves. The most powerful advocates were those whose condemnation was built ‘not
merely on abstract principles, but on their personal knowledge of the evils arising
from the actual operation of the slave trade’.121 Pope Paul III issued a bull on the issue
and in 1534 Charles V ordered that natives should not be compelled to work in the
mines.122 One hundred and fifty years later, Lourenço da Silva – who claimed descent
from the Kolgolese royal family – campaigned for Roman intervention against
perpetual slavery, especially for Catholics who ‘with holy baptism [God] had directed
towards the enjoyment of eternal glory’. Pope Innocent XI referred these complaints
to Propaganda Fide, and both pope and congregation viewed slavery as ‘a disgraceful
offence against Catholic liberty’ with practical consequences for evangelisation: ‘the
progress of the missionaries in spreading the holy faith remains impeded’ by slavery.123
Rome turned to crown authorities to ensure that abuses were stamped out, and
Capuchin missionaries won the support of the Holy Office to condemn perpetual
slavery. However, this did not amount to a full condemnation of ‘just enslavement’,
as articulated by Aristotle and the Roman legal tradition. In the end, the efforts by
the Holy Office to defeat perpetual slavery were ignored, although Catholic opponents
of slavery throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries referred to its
conclusions. The reason for this defeat was the result of the complex nature of
government in the Atlantic world: ‘the Holy Office could define questions of ethics,
but the enforcement of its decisions depended on clerics and laity whose immediate
ecclesiastical and ultimately political loyalties lay elsewhere’.124 Slavery was another
long-running cause of tensions between the religious, economic and colonial
motivations behind European empire-building, and the complicated interplay of
authority between papal and ecclesiastical hierarchies, colonial administrations, and
European monarchical interests.
CONCLU S IO N
The story of Catholicism in the Atlantic world might be reduced to one of burgeoning
empires using Catholicism as a label for justifying commercial and territorial
exploitation, securing land and power in the name of the Lord, but the experience of
Catholicism – and of all kinds of Catholics – was so varied in the spiritualities,
cultures and social practices which emerged that such a simplistic approach cannot
338
be sustained. Instead, the evolution of different forms of Catholic thought and

practice throughout the Atlantic world demonstrate the vitality and flexibility of the
nascent global church from the late medieval period and into the modern. That
adaptability also generated significant problems, concerns and challenges for the
Church’s leadership and Catholics’ broader associations with the societies in which
they lived. Because ‘the church was not only the church of the poor and the
oppressed…it was also the church of the privileged and of the conquistadores’,
Atlantic Catholicism generates many questions about the nature of Catholic
orthodoxy over four centuries and three continents.125
Although there were broad similarities in the ways Catholicism evolved in Africa
and the Americas, particularly in the development of syncretic approaches merging
Catholic materiality and ritual with traditional social practises, there were significant
differences too. The extent to which South American populations embraced
Catholicism needs to be quantified by the reality that the Iberian presence reflected a
territorial conquest as well as a spiritual one. If that quality was not entirely absent
in some parts of the African experience, it was at least mitigated by the more willing
embrace of its political leadership throughout much of Western and Central Africa to
tolerate or actively encourage, the spread of Catholicism in their territories. Catholic
Africa was strongly connected to the emerging trading systems joining continental
Europe to the Americas, partially as a result of emergent slaving networks, and the
strong Christian traditions which had existed in that continent since the fifteenth
century contributed to Catholic evangelism in the post-Reformation period. In North
America, a strident contrast emerged between the experiences of Catholics living in
French Canada and those within British settlements. Even in the most religiously
tolerant British settlements, Catholics remained a minority and anti-Catholicism had
a potent impact on these communities and in the later United States.126 The residue of
traditional anti-Catholicism, a stronger sense of ‘orthodoxy’ within the modern
Catholic Church in Europe, and a shared disdain of syncretic approaches from both
Catholics and Protestants in the Enlightened world had a significant impact on how
non-European Catholicism was appreciated – or not – in the modern period. In the
nineteenth century, the particularities of Kongolese Catholicism especially, were
perceived to undermine the integrity of the universal (European) Catholic tradition,
and many of the most successful and potent practices in the African Catholic
experience were dismissed as ‘fetishes’, when in fact, they had been introduced and
adapted to precisely counter native practice and the survival of various traditions.127
This raises the question of how the success of Catholicism in the Atlantic world
might be assessed. Certainly, contemporary missionaries believed that God was on
their side in this struggle, and that they had made enormous progress in winning
converts to the new faith. The key was education, and it is not surprising that Catholics
in the Atlantic world focused on the catechism and the building of schools; harnessing
local elites and winning rulers to the cause, while at the same time concentrating their
focus – often controversially – on children. One Jesuit in New France bemoaned native
abhorrence of corporal punishment; ‘How much trouble this will give us in carrying
out our plans of teaching the young!’ he exclaimed.128 But missionaries were always
nervous that conversions were based on misunderstandings, ambition or fear. It was
not unknown for deathbed converts to abandon their new faith the moment they
returned to life, and the targeting of the dying also brought Catholics into disrepute
339
among natives. And, of course, Catholic evangelism was nearly always invested with
the broader colonial ambitions of the imperial powers. Nevertheless, accounts of
confrontations between Indian converts visiting Dutch settlements adjacent to New
France greatly satisfied their Jesuit observers: ‘When they return from the land of the
Dutch, they relate to us with much pleasure their success in the disputes they have had
with the Dutch on points of religion, to the shame and confusion of those heretics’.
Atlantic Catholicism not only saved natives from diabolic influence and barbarism,
but put them in the frontline of European confessional disputes as well. But although
the legacies of Reformation and counter-reformation were strongly felt in the Atlantic
territories where Catholics sought to sway souls, Atlantic Catholicism was never just
a proxy for European concerns. Instead, it offered a profound opportunity for the
expansion of the faithful, and posed complicated challenges for an institution whose
claims for universalism now extended far beyond the borders of an erstwhile
Christendom, into a world in which new forms of Catholic thought and practice
became a central part of a global religion. The responsibility was keenly felt, and
converts and missionaries alike understood their purpose as a cross to be continually
borne as much as it was a triumph to be celebrated.129
NOTE S
1 Taylor 2001: 33.
2 Elbl 1992: 169.
3 Thornton 1984: 152–53.
4 Eccles 1987: 27–28.
5 Taylor 2001: 214.
6 Hilton 1985: 45.
7 Hilton 1985: 50.
8 Carrasco 2008.
9 Elliott 2007: 184.
10 Huxley 1980.
11 Wright 2005: 26–27.
12 Elliott 2007: 68; Hastings 1995: 72.
13 Symcox 2001: 39.
14 Symcox 2001: 58.
15 Hastings 1995: 3–45, 62–67.
16 Fromont 2011b: 111–12.
17 Hastings 1995: 77–89.
18 Hastings 1995: 73.
19 Hastings 1995: 81; Thornton 2001: 96, 102.
20 Thornton 1984: 162–64.
21 Hastings 1995: 87; Thornton 1984: 163.
22 Thornton 1984: 164.
23 Hastings 1995: 85.
24 Hastings 1995: 94–102.
25 Thornton 1984: 161–62; Gray 1983.
26 Thornton 1988: 264.
27 Thornton 1988: 273.
28 Headley 2000: 1119–55.
29 Elliott 2007: 67.
340
30 Boxer 1978: 84–93.

31 Taylor 2001: 33.
32 Cortes 2001: 332.
33 McAllister 1984: 194–95.
34 Greer 2000: 6.
35 Boxer 1978: 2–11, 14–22.
36 Thornton 1984: 149.
37 Thornton 1988: 269.
38 Garfield 1990.
39 Pyne 2008: 45.
40 Thornton 2003: 279–80.
41 Thornton 1977: 509–10; Pyne 2008: 34.
42 Gray 1987: 56.
43 Gray 1987: 54.
44 Gray 1987: 55.
45 Gray 1987: 54.
46 Gray 1987: 56.
47 Hastings 1995: 89–90.
48 Thornton 1984: 155–56; Hastings 1995: 82.
49 Hastings 1995: 82.
50 Eccles 1987: 27; Trigger 1965.
51 Elliott 2007: 213.
52 Eccles 1987: 30.
53 Eccles 1987: 29, 34.
54 Clark 1993: 273.
55 Pyne 2008: 31.
56 Carey, 338–43.
57 Thornton 1998a: 235.
58 Thornton 1979a; Thornton 1979b; Thornton 1987: 409.
59 Thornton 1984: 151, 156.
60 Thornton 2003: 283; Greer 2000: 48.
61 Greer 2000: 50.
62 Greer 2000: 30.
63 Thornton 1988: 262, 270.
64 Fromont 2011a: 57; Hilton 1981: 192n.8
65 Fromont 2011a: 53.
66 Thornton 1981: 183.
67 Thornton 1984: 156.
68 Thornton 1984: 158.
69 Fromont 2011a: 57.
70 Thornton 1998a: 256.
71 Thornton 2003: 278–79.
72 Thornton 1984: 165–66; Thornton 1988: 262.
73 Fromont 2011a: 53.
74 Thompson 1981.
75 Fromont 2011a: 57.
76 Fromont 2011a: 53.
77 Blier 1993: 376.
78 Davidson 2007.
79 Brading 2003.
80 Thornton 2006: 441–42.
341
81 Blier 1993: 380, 386; Gray 1999.

82 Soeiro 1974; Black 2003; Deslandres 2003; Greer 2003; Myers 2003; Taylor in Greer and
Bilinkoff 2003; Brading 2003; Gray 1999; Kiddy 2000; Pearsall in Armitage and Braddick
2002; Thornton 2006.
83 Thomas 2012; Prendergast 2007.
84 Ibsen 1999.
85 Taylor 2001: 69.
86 Taylor 2001: 110; Tuer 1993: 86–92.
87 Greer 2000: 88.
88 Greer 2000: 75.
89 Greer 2000: 81.
90 Greer 2000: 151.
91 Greer 2000: 140.
92 Taylor 2001: 107.
93 Greer 2000: 1.
94 Greer 2000: 7.
95 Greer 2000: 12.
96 Greer 2000: 47.
97 Taylor 2001: 109.
98 Thornton 2001: 100–101.
99 Thornton 1988: 266–67.
100 Pestana in Armitage and Braddick 2002: 79.
101 Thornton 1988: 277.
102 Thornton 1998b.
103 Hastings 1998: 153.
104 Hastings 1998: 153–54.
105 Hastings 1998: 152–53.
106 Krugler 1979: 55.
107 Krugler 1979: 55, 75.
108 Bosworth 1975: 546; Fogarty 1986: 583.
109 Pyne 2008: 22.
110 Pyne 2008: 18, 23.
111 Krugler 1979: 62; Pyne 2008: 19.
112 Krugler 1979: 66–73.
113 Pestana in Armitage and Braddick 2002: 83; Stanwood 2010; Stanwood 2007; Stanwood 2011.
114 Fogarty 1986: 574, 584; Farrelly 2011.
115 Graham 1993: 216.
116 Bosworth 1975: 540.
117 Brown in Armitage and Braddick 2002: 224.
118 Bosworth 1975: 546.
119 Pyne 2008: 31, 33–34.
120 Eccles in Armitage and Braddick 2002: 174.
121 Gray 1987: 52.
122 Gray 1987: 57.
123 Gray 1987: 60.
124 Gray 1987: 66.
125 Gray 1987: 67.
126 Krugler 1979: 59.
127 Thornton 1984: 166.
128 Greer 2000: 36.
129 Greer 2000: 153.
342
REF EREN CE S
Abé, Takao, The Jesuit mission to New France: a new interpretation in the light of the earlier
Jesuit experience in Japan (Brill, 2011).
Black, Charlene Villasenor, ‘ St Anne imagery and maternal archetypes in Spain and Mexico’ in
Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial saints: discovering the holy in the Americas,
1500–1800 (Routledge, 2003), 3–30.
Blier, Suzanne Preston, ‘Imaging otherness in ivory: African portrayals of the Portuguese ca. 1492’,
Art Bulletin, 75.3 (1993), 375–96.
Bosworth, Timothy W., ‘Anti-Catholicism as a political tool in mid-eighteenth century Maryland’,
Catholic historical review 61.4 (1975), 539–63.
Boxer, C.R., The church militant and Iberian expansion, 1440–1770 (John Hopkins University
Press, 1978).
Brading, D.A., Mexican phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: image and tradition across five
centuries (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Brown, Christopher L., ‘The politics of slavery’ in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick
(eds.), The British Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Carey, Patrick W., ‘American Catholics and the First Amendment: 1776–1840’ Pennsylvania
magazine of history and biography 113.3 (1989), 323–46.
Carrasco, David, ‘Spaniards as gods: the return of Quetzalcoatl’ in Bernal Diaz del Castillo,
The history of the conquest of New Spain, David Carrasco (ed.) (UNM Press, 2008).
Casares, Aurelia Martin and Christine Delaigue, ‘The evangelization of freed and slave black
Africans in Renaissance Spain: baptism, marriage, and ethnic brotherhoods’, History of
religions, 52.3 (2013), 214–35.
Clark, J.C.D., The language of liberty, 1660–1832: political discourse and social dynamics in
the Anglo-American world (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Cortes, Hernan, Letters from Mexico, Anthony Pagden (ed. and trans.) (Yale University Press, 2001).
Dantas, Mariana L.R., ‘Humble slaves and royal vassals: free Africans and their descendants in
eighteenth-century Minas Gerais, Brazil’ in Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (eds.),
Imperial subjects: race and identity in colonial Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009).
Davidson, Peter, The universal baroque (Manchester University Press, 2007).
Deslandres, Dominique, ‘In the shadow of the cloister: representations of female holiness in
New France’ in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial saints: discovering the holy
in the Americas, 1500–1800 (Routledge, 2003), 129–52.
Eastman, Scott, Preaching Spanish nationalism across the Hispanic Atlantic, 1759–1823
(Louisiana, 2012).
Eccles, W.J., Essays on New France (Oxford, 1987).
Elbl, Ivana, ‘Cross-cultural trade and diplomacy: Portuguese relations with West Africa,
1441–1521’, Journal of world history, 3.2 (1992).
Elliott, J.H., Empires of the Atlantic world: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (Yale
Farrelly, Maura Jane, Papist patriots: the making of an American Catholic identity (Oxford
Fisher, Linford D. and Lucas Mason-Brown, ‘By “Treachery and Seduction”: Indian baptism and
conversion in the Roger Williams Code’, William and Mary Quarterly, 71.2 (2014), 175–202.
Fisher, Andrew B. and Matthew D. O’Hara (eds.), Imperial subjects: race and identity in
colonial Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009).
Fogarty, Gerald P., ‘Property and religious liberty in Colonial Maryland Catholic thought’,
Fromont, Cécile, ‘Dance, image, myth, and conversion in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1500–1800’,
African arts 44.4 (2011a), 52–63.
343
——, ‘Under the sign of the cross in the kingdom of Kongo: religious conversion and visual
correlation in early modern Central Africa’, Res 59/60 (2011b), 109–23.
Garfield, Robert, ‘Public Christians, secret Jews: religion and political conflict on Sao Tome Island
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, The sixteenth century journal, 21.4 (1990), 645–54.
Graham, Michael, ‘Popish Plots: Protestant fears in early colonial Maryland, 1676–89’,
Gray, Richard, ‘A Kongo princess, the Kongo ambassadors and the papacy’, Journal of religion
in Africa, 29 (1999), 140–54.
——, ‘The papacy and the Atlantic slave trade: Lourenço da Silva, the Capuchins and the
decisions of the Holy Office’, Past and present 115 (1987), 52–68.
——, ‘“Come vero Prencipe Catolico”: the Capuchins and the rulers of Soyo in the late seventeenth
century’, Africa, 53.3 (1983), 39–54.
Graziano, Frank, Cultures of devotion: folk saints of Spanish America (Oxford University
Press, 2006).
Greer, Allen, ‘Iroquois virgin: the story of Catherine Tekawitha in New France and New Spain’
in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial saints: discovering the holy in the Americas,
1500–1800 (Routledge, 2003), 235–50.
Greer, Allen (ed.), The Jesuit relations: natives and missionaries in seventeenth-century North
America (Bedford/St Martin’s, 2000).
Hastings, Adrian, ‘The Christianity of Pedro IV of the Kongo, “The Pacific” (1695–1718)’
Journal of religion in Africa, 28.2 (1998), 145–59.
——, The church in Africa, 1450–1950 (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Headley, John M., ‘Geography and empire in the late Renaissance: Botero’s assignment, western
universalism, and the civilizing process’, Renaissance quarterly, 53.4 (2000), 1119–55.
Hilton, Anne, The kingdom of Kongo (Oxford University Press, 1985).
——, ‘The Jaga reconsidered’, The journal of African history, 22.2 (1981), 191–202.
Huxley, G. L. ‘Aristotle, Las Casas and the American Indians’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish
Academy, 80C (1980), 57–68.
Ibsen, Kristine, Women’s spiritual autobiography on Colonial Spanish America (Florida, 1999).
Karras, Allan L. and John Robert McNeill (eds.), Atlantic American societies: from Columbus
through abolition, 1492–1888 (Routledge, 1992).
Kennedy, J.H., Jesuit and savage in New France (Yale University Press, 1950).
Kiddy, Elizabeth E., ‘Congados, Calunga, Candombe: Our Lady of the Rosary in Minas
Gerais, Brazil’ Luso-Brazilian review, 37.1 (2000), 47–61.
Krugler, John D., ‘Lord Baltimore, Roman Catholics and toleration: religious policy in Maryland
during the early Catholic years, 1634–49’, Catholic Historical Review 65.1 (1979), 49–75.
Law, Robin, ‘Religion, trade and politics on the “slave coast”: Roman Catholic missions in Allada
and Whydah in the seventeenth century’ Journal of Religion in Africa, 21.1 (1991), 42–77.
Matthew, Laura E., Memories of conquest: becoming Mexicano in colonial Guatemala
(University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
Maxwell, David James and Ingrid Lawrie (eds.), Christianity and the African imagination:
essays in honour of Adrian Hastings (Brill, 2002).
McAllister, Lyle N., Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492–1700 (Minnesota Press, 1984).
Mulvey, Patricia A., ‘Slave confraternities in Brazil: their role in colonial society’, The Americas,
39.1 (1982), 39–68.
Murphy, Thomas, Jesuit slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York and London, 2001).
Myers, Kathleen Ann, ‘“Redeemer of America”: Rosa da Lima (1586–1617), the dynamics of
identity, and canonization’ in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial saints:
discovering the holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (Routledge, 2003), 251–76.
Osokowski, Edward W., Indigenous miracles: Nahua authority in colonial Mexico (University
of Arizona Press, 2010).
344
Pearsall, Sarah M. S., ‘Gender’ in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British
Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Pestana, Carla Gardina, ‘Religion’ in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The
British Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 69–92.
Prendergast, Ryan, ‘Constructing an icon: the self-referentiality and framing of Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz’, Journal for early modern cultural studies, 7.2 (2007), 28–56.
Prieto, Andrés I., Missionary scientists: Jesuit science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810
(Vanderbilt University Press, 2011).
Pyne, Tricia T., ‘Ritual and practice in the Maryland Catholic community, 1634–1776’, U.S.
Catholic Historian 26.2 (2008), 17–46.
Randall, Catharine (ed.), Black robes and buckskins: a selection from the Jesuit relations
(Fordham University Press, 2011).
Rushforth, Brett, Bonds of alliance: indigenous and Atlantic slaveries in New France (University
of North Carolina Press, 2012).
Soeiro, Susan A., ‘The social and economic role of the convent: women and nuns in Colonial
Bahia, 1677–1800’ Hispanic American historical review, 54.2 (1974), 209–32.
Stanwood, Owen, The Empire reformed: English America in the age of the Glorious Revolution
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
——, ‘Catholics, Protestants, and the clash of civilisations in early America’ in Chris Beneke
and Christopher S. Greanda (eds.), The first prejudice: religious tolerance and intolerance
in early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
——, ‘The Protestant moment: antipopery, the Revolution of 1688–89, and the making of an
Anglo-American empire’, Journal of British studies, 46 (2007), 481–508.
Sweet, James H., ‘Defying social death: the multiple configurations of African slave family in
the Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly, 70.2, (2013), 251–72.
Symcox, Geoffrey (ed.), Italian reports on America, 1492–1522: letters, despatches and papal
bulls, Giovanna Rabitti (textual ed.) and Peter D. Diehl (trans.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001).
Tavrez, David Eduardo, The invisible war: indigenous devotions, discipline and dissent in
colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2011).
Taylor, Alan, American colonies: the settling of North America (Penguin, 2001).
Taylor, William B., ‘Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe in the seventeenth century: hagiography
and beyond’ in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial saints: discovering the holy
in the Americas, 1500–1800 (Routledge, 2003), 277–97.
Tevarez, David, ‘Legally Indian: inquisitorial readings of indigenous identities in New Spain’
in Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (eds.), Imperial subjects: race and identity in
Colonial Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009).
Thomas, George Antony, The politics and poetics of Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz: women and
gender in the early modern world (Ashgate, 2012).
Thompson, Robert Farris and Joseph Cornet, The four moments of the sun: Kongo art in two
worlds (National Gallery of Art, 1981).
Thornton, John K., ‘Elite women in the Kingdom of Kongo: historical perspectives on women’s
political power’, Journal of African history, 47.3 (2006), 437–60.
Thornton, John, ‘Cannibals, witches, and slave traders in the Atlantic world’, William and
Mary quarterly, 60.2 (2003), 273–94.
——, ‘The origins and early history of the Kingdom of Kongo, c. 1350–1550’, International
journal of African historical studies, 34.1 (2001), 89–120.
——, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400–1800 second edition
(Cambridge University Press, 1998a).
Thornton, John K., The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian
movement (Cambridge University Press, 1998b).
345
Thornton, John, ‘The African experience of the “20. and Odd Negroes” arriving in Virginia in
1619’, William and Mary quarterly 55. 3 (1998c), 421–34.
Thornton, John K., ‘On the trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas’,
The Americas, 44. 3 (1988), 261–78.
——, ‘The correspondence of the Kongo kings, 1614–35: problems of internal written evidence
on a central African kingdom’, Paideuma, 33, (1987), 407–21.
Thornton, John, ‘The development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo,
1491–1750’, Journal of African history, 25.2 (1984), 147–67.
——, ‘Early Kongo-Portuguese relations: a new interpretation’, History in Africa 8 (1981), 183–204.
——, ‘The slave trade in eighteenth century Angola: effects on demographic structures’, Canadian
Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 14.3 (1980), 417–27.
Thornton, John K., ‘A note on the Archives of the Propaganda Fide and Capuchin Archives’,
History in Africa 6, (1979a), 341–44.
——, ‘New light on Cavazzi’s seventeenth-century description of Kongo’, History in Africa 6,
(1979b), 253–64.
Thornton, John, ‘Demography and history in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1550–1750’, The journal
of African history, 18.4 (1977), 507–30.
Thornton, John K., and Linda M. Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the making
of the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Trigger, Bruce G., ‘The Jesuits and the fur trade’, Ethnohistory 12.1 (1965), 30–53.
Tuer, Dot, ‘Old bones and beautiful words: the spiritual contestation between Shaman and
Jesuit in the Guarani missions’ in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial saints:
discovering the holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (Routledge, 2003), 77–98.
Vainfas, Ronaldo, ‘St Anthony in Portuguese America: saint of the Restoration’ in Allan Greer
and Jodi Bilinkoff (eds.), Colonial saints: discovering the holy in the Americas, 1500–1800
(Routledge, 2003), 99–111.
Verhoeven, Timothy, Transatlantic anti-Catholicism: France and the United States in the
nineteenth century (Palgrave, 2010).
Watts, Edward, In this remote country: French colonial culture in the Anglo-American
imagination, 1780–1860 (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Williams, Margaret Todaro, ‘Integralism and the Brazilian Catholic Church’, Hispanic
American historical review, 54.3 (1974), 431–52.
Wright, A.D., The counter-reformation: Catholic Europe and the non-Christian world (second
edition, Ashgate, 2005).
346
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PROTESTANTISM
Travis Glasson
P rotestantism was born in Europe, but it came of age in the Atlantic world. For
much of the sixteenth century, it was uncertain whether either reformed
Christianity or the Atlantic colonization schemes of the northern European states
that most readily embraced Protestantism would endure. By the seventeenth century,
though, it is possible to discern an interconnected, vibrant Protestant Atlantic world
that provided the setting for many important developments in religious and cultural
history. This Protestant Atlantic was but one segment of the Atlantic world as a
whole, overlapping with other subdivisions of that wider zone of interaction and
exchange: the multinational commercial Atlantic, the Atlantic empires of European
powers, the black Atlantic, and those parts of the Atlantic world where Catholicism,
Islam, Judaism, west African religions, or an array of American indigenous religions
predominated. Differentiating part of the Atlantic world as the Protestant Atlantic
risks obscuring the myriad connections between it and other ‘Atlantics’ as well as
places and people elsewhere in the world. However, focusing on the Protestant
Atlantic as an expansive but integrated space allows its particular features to be
seen in relief. Here, three of those features will be stressed: the way the Atlantic
functioned as a zone of religious contact and competition; the central role that the
circulation of people, texts, and practices played in this space; and how these
patterns of contact and circulation fostered a creativity that produced new and
significant forms of religiosity.1
* * *
From the outset of Iberian expansionism, European voyages of exploration and

colonization blended political, commercial, and religious goals. Similarly intertwined
motivations affected how elites and common people in early modern Europe responded
to the new theology and practices introduced by Protestant reformers, and these patterns
were repeated as Protestant people moved out into the Atlantic. The foundational
documents for most Atlantic colonies included clauses that promoted religion in the
new world even as their backers dreamed of rich earthly rewards. Many of the earliest
Protestant ministers to visit the Americas and west Africa were chaplains employed by
347
– Travis Glasson –
European explorers, navies and trading companies. The growth of commerce and
European strategic control initially spread Protestantism around the Atlantic.
By the seventeenth century, the dividing lines between Catholics and Protestants
in Europe and between European empires in the Americas had hardened
considerably. Warfare between European powers, which often though not always
included a confessional dimension in the seventeenth century, was a near constant
phenomenon. Internal disputes within European states over the domestic fate and
course of the Reformation spilled into their Atlantic holdings. Such conflicts,
including the Thirty Years War in central Europe, the Dutch Republic’s long fight
for independence from Spain, disputes over the place of Protestantism in France,
and the oscillating fortunes of the Reformation within the seventeenth-century
English church, made the Atlantic a site where disputes between Catholics and
Protestants were played out.
This often bloody rivalry between European Catholics and Reformers circumscribed
the Protestant Atlantic. Europe’s most powerful Protestant states, England (and after
1707, Britain) and the Dutch Republic, and, to a lesser extent, other Protestant
polities like Sweden and Denmark, controlled the places in the Atlantic where
Protestantism would predominate. For much of the seventeenth century, the relatively
narrow band of North American and Caribbean territories controlled by these
powers had a precarious existence, threatened by the Catholic powers of France,
Portugal, and Spain. This sense of a looming Catholic danger in the western Atlantic
mirrored Protestant concerns in Europe about the possibility of reformed territories
there – Britain, the Netherlands, Protestant lands in Germany – being conquered and
returned to Catholicism by force. By the eighteenth century, the long-term future of
the Protestant Atlantic colonies looked more secure, but continuing warfare between
European powers and the mingling of confessional with national animosities, as in
the case of the eighteenth-century rivalry between Britain and France, helped ensure
that hostility to Catholicism remained one of the common currencies of the Protestant
Atlantic world.
It has rightly been observed that differences between Catholics and Protestants
can be overemphasized, and that Protestants in the Atlantic world inherited an array
of common Christian worldviews that pre-dated the Reformation.2 Nonetheless,
parts of the Atlantic world became vigorously contested territory between Catholics
and Protestants. Ireland, home to a predominantly Catholic population and a
succession of Protestant colonization schemes, was an early site of such conflict.3
The Caribbean colony of Providence Island was central to early Puritan hopes; it
was attacked and destroyed by the Spanish in 1641.4 The English took Jamaica from
the Spanish in 1655, and many other islands changed hands, often repeatedly.
Competition in Atlantic borderlands also underlined differences. French Catholic
and Dutch/British Protestant missionaries vied for converts and allies among the
Iroquois.5 The sense of Protestant common identification and shared opposition to
Catholicism was strengthened by the events of 1688, the ‘Anglo-Dutch moment’
that brought the Dutch William of Orange to the English throne and marked
England’s rejection of the possibility of a return to Catholicism. To be sure, in some
places Protestants and Catholics found ways to live together and not all or even
most conflicts in the Atlantic world were motivated primarily by religion.
Nevertheless, the ubiquity of conflict in the Atlantic meant that the subjects of
348
– chapter 19: Protestantism in the Atlantic World –
Protestant European empires often fought against foes that were conceptualized as
both national and theological enemies.
* * *
To look at this process another way, confessional conflict also helped transform
Protestantism from a European movement into a much wider phenomenon. This
occurred partly because the Atlantic world served as a place of refuge for European
Protestants during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This process began in
Europe, with Britain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands becoming home in the
sixteenth century to Protestant migrants from elsewhere in Europe. Beginning with
the journey of separatist English Protestants to the Netherlands and then to the
Plymouth Colony in the 1620s and the subsequent, larger ‘Great Migration’ of some
20,000 Puritans to Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, the movement of Protestants to
the Americas created dense webs of connections stretching across the Atlantic.6
These New Englanders shared a view with many subsequent groups of Protestant
émigrés that trans-oceanic migration would afford them the space to live in societies that
conformed with their religious beliefs. Crucially for the development of the Protestant
Atlantic world, while the British and the Dutch controlled most of the territories to which
Protestant people emigrated, the migrants themselves represented a broad cross-section
of European Protestantism. French Protestants, for example, made up a large share of the
population of New Netherland and contributed to the British Protestant plantations
established in Ireland in the seventeenth century. The emigration of Huguenots into the
Atlantic ballooned after 1685, when the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes subjected
them to new persecution at home.7 Economic opportunities further jumbled populations;
Dutch speakers, for example, were prominent among the early generations of planters in
the Danish West Indies. German-speaking Protestants began crossing the Atlantic from
the 1680s, punctuated by episodes of mass migration such as those by the ‘poor Palatines’
in the 1700s and the ‘Salzburgers’ in the 1730s. Total German migration may have
reached 75,000 by about 1760. The period between 1701 and 1780 saw approximately
60,000 Scottish Lowlanders and 70,000 Ulster Protestants, most of whom were
Presbyterians, migrate to Britain’s colonies.8 Most Protestant migrants did not move
primarily for religious reasons, nor did they all travel west. Large numbers of Huguenots,
for example, migrated to Prussia. However, against the backdrop of Europe’s Catholic/
Protestant divisions, these trans-Atlantic migrations reinforced senses of interconnection
grounded in a shared faith that many had suffered in order to retain.
These population movements also helped make the Atlantic world a zone of
contact and competition between different forms of Protestantism. In the seventeenth
century, emigrant groups often attempted to establish societies where their own views
on theological principles, structures of church governance, and patterns of worship
could be put into effect. Among Britain’s early colonies, both ‘Puritans’ and adherents
to the episcopal Church of England gave their churches legal protection and financial
support in New England, Virginia, and in the Caribbean. The Dutch established the
Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church in their continental and Caribbean colonies,
making it ‘the central institution in shaping and maintaining Dutch identity in the
New World.’9 Similarly, the Danes established the Lutheran Danish National Church
in the Virgin Islands. While ‘toleration’ of ‘dissent’ was widespread in the Protestant
349
Atlantic and a few colonies enshrined the principle of religious freedom in their
foundational laws, the more standard approach in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth century was to legally establish a church and thereby stamp it with the
support and approval of the forces of authority.10
However, these state-allied churches very rarely had the institutional resources or the
strong metropolitan backing that would have been required to enforce genuine Protestant
uniformity. Before the eighteenth century, most colonial societies outside of New England
lacked the numbers of church buildings and university-trained ministers that would have
been necessary to replicate European patterns of institutional Protestant religious life.
The eighteenth century saw a dramatic effort to build and staff new churches, a process
that in Britain’s thirteen North American colonies Jon Butler has characterized as part of
the sacralization of the American landscape.11 However, this process occurred only after
patterns of toleration and religious and ethnic diversity had been established. The Atlantic
colonies therefore put Protestants of different affiliations in much closer proximity with
each other than they tended to live in most European places or than the founding
generations of many communities had hoped. This fostered the rich mixture of beliefs
and practices that became a defining feature of Protestant life in the Atlantic world.
This cacophony of Protestant voices led to concerns among some that, despite initial
hopes, colonies in the Americas were dangerously unregulated, ungodly societies. These
fears emerged quite early in New England, as Puritan leaders struggled with the
challenges posed by Quakers and dissidents like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.12
These concerns were also central for the resurgent Church of England that emerged
from the tumultuous second half of the seventeenth century. While several early colonies
had seen the establishment of the Church of England along lines similar to English
practice, little else was done to expand and staff the church abroad on a scale
commensurate with the growth of the English empire. With the development after 1688
of a more stable Church of England committed to an epsicopal ecclesiology and hopeful
about the prospects for close cooperation between the established church and a now
reliably Protestant state, Anglicanism became a powerful force around the Atlantic.
Under the leadership of Thomas Bray, two new organizations, the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Foreign Parts (SPG), were founded to strengthen the Church of England at home and
abroad. Many early supporters of these organizations shared a belief that ‘dissenters’
and outright irreligion were dangerously dominant in Britain’s Atlantic colonies.13
This reinvigorated Anglicanism produced political activity: New York, Maryland,
North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia all enacted full or partial Anglican
establishments between 1690 and 1758. While the bulk of the work of the SPG and
the SPCK was directed at providing colonial Anglicans with ministers, churches, and
literature, these groups’ periodic efforts to use their political influence in London or
the colonies brought them into conflict with other Protestants. Anglican drives to
secure legal establishments for the Church of England were often bitterly opposed by
other Protestants. SPG challenges to the monopoly position of Puritanism in New
England led to wars of words between ministers on both sides. Above all, repeated
but ultimately unsuccessful Anglican attempts to create colonial bishops activated
deep fears among other Protestants.14
The diversity and interconnectedness of Protestantism around the Atlantic also
produced conflicts within denominations. From the 1730s, Congregationalist,
350
Presbyterian, and Anglican ministers all faced challenges from within their own
traditions by proponents of new and unsettling forms of emotion-laden religious
revivalism. These religious revivals, collectively labeled as the Great Awakening,
crossed the sea, with historians uncovering evidence of interrelated sets of revivals in
the Americas, Britain, Ireland, and the Netherlands.15 Revivals often produced bitter
controversies between opponents and proponents of new, ‘enthusiastic’ forms of
religiosity that revealed deep disagreements about what it meant to be a Protestant.
This revivalism appealed to broad swathes of the Atlantic’s Protestant population,
but it also challenged ministerial and political authority by transcending established
gender, racial, and class divisions.16
Conflicts within Protestantism were real but should not be overstated. Lay people
were on the whole much less concerned about the intricacies of disputes between
different denominations than ministers were.17 In many regions, the difficult conditions
and sparse populations typical of rural and frontier life minimized the influence of
ministers and formal worship practices in favor of simple, accessible types of familial
or communal worship. Just as importantly, clerical and political supporters of
established churches had only limited abilities to insist on and enforce uniformity. Even
‘Puritan’ New England was home to many views and voices on how to live a godly
life.18 For colonial representatives of churches, like the Church of England, that looked
to Europe for authority and support, communications across the Atlantic were regular
but often slow. It could take years of back and forth communication to resolve disputes
over many issues including finances, building new churches, and ministerial misconduct.
Even for leaders of groups like Congregationalists, Quakers, and Presbyterians that
erected independent structures of denominational authority in the colonies, the
possibilities for settler mobility in the Atlantic world meant that non-conformers of all
sorts could move relatively easily beyond the pale of their control. Two of the British
colonies where religious authority was most zealously established, Massachusetts and
Virginia, were soon bordered by colonies, Rhode Island and Maryland, that became
known as bastions of religious liberty. These obstacles to control meant that in most
Atlantic colonies, the balance of power and influence within congregations was tilted
more toward the laity and local elites and away from ministers and metropolitan elites
than was the norm in Europe. As individuals or in communities, Atlantic Protestants
had considerable freedom to choose how to live and worship. Collectively, their
choices produced a rich and varied religious landscape.
* * *
The differences between denominations, or indeed between Protestants and Catholics,

appear especially small when considered alongside a third type of contact and conflict
that shaped the Protestant Atlantic world: reformed Christianity’s encounter with the
varied non-Christian faiths of Native Americans and Africans. The missionary impulse
played a mixed and often minor role in initiating imperial expansion by Protestant
powers.19 Nevertheless, as Protestant people moved across the Atlantic contact with
non-Christian populations became inescapable and many Protestants shared with
European Catholics the perception that Native American and black African populations
should be categorized as ‘heathens’ and converted. They differed at times, however,
on how that should be accomplished and what ‘conversion’ actually entailed.20
351
Protestant conversion efforts lacked the deep institutional and financial resources
that underpinned early Catholic efforts to convert Native Americans in the Atlantic
territories controlled by Spain, Portugal, and France. This is not to say that Protestant
individuals and communities were uninterested in evangelization. The documents
establishing the Virginia Company in 1606 emphasized that the Christianization of
Native Americans would be to ‘the glorrie of hys divyne maiestie.’21 The first seal for
Massachusetts Bay famously featured an Indian and the wishful slogan ‘Come Over
and Help Us,’ and Puritans capitalized on the sympathy of Cromwell’s Parliament to
found the New England Company (1649), a missionary organization dedicated to
spreading ‘the Gospel of Christ unto and amongst the heathen natives in or near New
England and parts adjacent in America.’ Lowland Scottish Presbyterians founded the
Scottish Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1709), which promoted the
conversion of Scotland’s Highland population and Native Americans as twin branches
of a program to further the Reformation around the Atlantic.22 The need to produce
ministers and Anglo-Indian intermediaries for this conversion work was a major
impetus behind the founding of some of British America’s earliest colleges, including
both Harvard (founded in 1636) and William and Mary (1693). This link long
persisted, reappearing in George Berkeley’s failed attempt to create a college in
Bermuda in the 1720s and the trans-Atlantic effort to found Dartmouth College
(1769), originally chartered ‘for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian
Tribes in this Land…and also of English Youth and any others.’
Among some settlers and early promoters of colonization, the existence of Native
Americans – a population confusingly not mentioned in the Bible – was explained by
identifying them with one of the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. This raised millenarian hopes
that the conversion of Native Americans would herald the second coming of Christ.
These hopes, and the wider Puritan interest in the conversion of Native Americans,
reached their apogee in the work of John Eliot, who undertook a systematic effort to
remake Indian society as more godly and more ‘civilized,’ that is more like the society
settlers were working to create in their New England. Eliot’s plan effected the
resettlement of indigenous people into what became fourteen new towns of ‘Praying
Indians,’ where the essential skills of literacy could be taught and patterns of right
living could be inculcated. Eliot’s dreams for a Christianized Indian population,
never entirely popular with his fellow settlers, were engulfed by the violence of King
Philip’s War, which hardened notions that there were insurmountable differences
between Europeans and Native Americans and destroyed the idea that New England
could be a place they might amicably share.23
More generally, the experiences of seventeenth-century New England’s Protestant
‘Praying Indians’ raise questions of how ‘success’ should be defined and what part
assessing ‘success’ should play in histories of missionary activity. While many
generations of historians have taken the failure of most Protestant missionary efforts
to produce conversions of Native Americans en masse as evidence of either lack of
zeal or the product of some inherent and essentially unchanging feature of indigenous
cultures, these approaches now seem rather arid. In part this is because defining what
did and what did not count as ‘conversion’ was problematic for many Protestants
and often intertwined with notions of civility. Reception of Catholic sacraments and
participation in communal worship did not amount to genuine conversion for most
Protestant commentators, and they were often critical of Catholic missions on these
352
grounds. It seems likely that efforts to count ‘converts’ based on the reports of
European missionaries underestimate the possibilities for creative adaptation and
partial adoption of Protestantism by Native Americans. The story of colonial New
England Indians’ interactions with Christianity, for example, has been effectively
characterized as ‘a tale of ebb and flow, engagement and disengagement, affiliation
and deaffiliation, which varied by individual and community.’24 This applies
particularly to the eighteenth century, when the native peoples of eastern North
America had been in contact with Protestantism for a century.
Variety, therefore, was a theme. Many Native Americans long rejected
Protestantism because they remained more attached to other religious beliefs and
practices. While disease and expanding settler populations put Native American
communities under tremendous pressure, the power of colonists to coerce indigenous
peoples into patterns of behavior remained limited. This is especially the case
because, as Daniel Richter has noted, the vast interior of North America remained
‘Indian Country’ throughout the colonial period.25 Like other residents of the
Atlantic world, eastern North American Indians could and did avail themselves of
opportunities to move, sometimes in defense of their religious and cultural traditions.
It is also clear that in some cases individuals and groups used Protestantism to meet
their own spiritual and communal needs. A segment of the Mohawks adopted
Anglicanism in the eighteenth century as part of a political, military, and religious
alliance with Britain that endured even through their resettlement in Ontario after
the American Revolution. Characterizing these Indian choices as ‘failures’ or
‘successes’ for Protestant missions obscures the more complex dynamics at play in
these interactions.
The history of Protestantism’s encounter with African peoples and west African
religions unfolded differently. While Protestant settlers and intellectuals tended to
conceptualize Native Americans as an array of autonomous peoples to whom
missionaries needed to be sent, African ‘heathenism’ arose as an area of concern for
Protestants because of its presence within their own households, where enslaved
black people were becoming a growing presence. The trans-Atlantic slave trade,
slavery, and the effort to spread Protestantism among Africans and their descendants
were therefore entangled early on, and this had a number of effects. While Catholicism
had a much older presence, there was not a sustained, large-scale Protestant
missionary outreach to free African populations in Africa before the nineteenth
century. In North American colonies and in the Caribbean, early efforts to convert
African-born people and their descendants were neither particularly systematic nor
the purview of dedicated Protestant missionaries or organizations like the New
England Company. For example, in the Anglophone Atlantic there were not
seventeenth-century or early eighteenth-century texts, analogous to those produced
by John Eliot or the SPG-sponsored translation of the Book of Common Prayer into
Mohawk (1715), designed to further the conversion of speakers of African languages.
Instead, the conversion of enslaved people was long left to those masters who might
be interested in exercising their patriarchal authority to promote the conversion of
their ‘servants’ and to ministers who viewed their primary responsibility as tending
to their settler congregations. In some places in the seventeenth century, such as New
Holland and early Virginia, this led to the incorporation of relatively small, though
too easily forgotten, numbers of enslaved people into Atlantic congregations.
353
Figure 19.1 Frontispiece and title page of the 1787 edition of the
Mohawk Book of Common Prayer
More commonly, ministers reported that their white congregations were deeply
hostile to efforts to convert their slaves. Initially, this opposition may have been
attributable to the fact that the non-Christian status of many west Africans formed
part of the legal and religious justifications that Europeans produced to legitimize
their enslavement. Early British colonial laws tended to differentiate permanently
enslaved people from other types of unfree laborers by reference to their ‘heathenism,’
which raised the theoretical possibility that Christian baptism might provide the basis
for an enslaved person to claim temporal freedom. In response, settler-controlled
colonial legislatures passed acts designed to make explicit that conversion had no
bearing on the legal position of enslaved people. Colonial ministers, particularly
Anglicans, tended to support and even promote these efforts to eliminate potential
conflicts between Protestantism and Atlantic slavery. They did so based on a widely
shared understanding that the Bible sanctioned slavery and in the hope that such
measures would lessen masters’ resistance to conversion efforts. Other aspects of
missionary activity also activated settler fears. The centrality of reading the Bible and
other texts to many forms of Protestantism seemed to some to entail teaching enslaved
354
potential converts to read. Some masters and ministers did so, but most saw equipping
enslaved people with literacy as a dangerous step that magnified the possibilities for
resistance and rebellion.
Protestantism’s place within black populations around the Atlantic world first
changed as the numbers of enslaved people in Atlantic colonies exploded in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Paradoxically, while white Atlantic
Protestantism was shaped by the freedom of movement enjoyed by European settlers,
black Atlantic Protestantism was molded by forced migration and Africans’ and
African-Americans’ experiences of enslavement. First, this led to some individuals in
the colonies looking to call wider attention to the ‘plight’ of so many unconverted
enslaved people in the Atlantic world. The Quaker founder George Fox criticized the
physical cruelty of masters and their neglect of enslaved peoples’ spiritual welfare,
calls echoed by the Anglican minister Morgan Godwyn. This rising awareness of the
black population of the Atlantic as a field for mission affected the SPG as it began its
missionary program, leading the Society’s leadership in England and the Bishop of
London to promote this branch of their work among their European benefactors,
and to appoint a small number of specialized catechists with particular responsibility
for converting enslaved people.26
Through approximately 1730, members of the Church of England were the most
active advocates for the conversion of black populations in the Protestant Atlantic
world. Because the Church of England and other state-allied churches regularly
signaled their support for the existing colonial order, including slavery, their messages
may have held limited appeal for enslaved people. The SPG, for example, worked to
develop Codrington College on Barbados as a place for training future missionaries,
whose duties would include converting enslaved people. In a plan that blended
mastership with mission, the college was to be supported by profits from an attached
sugar plantation worked by enslaved people, whom the SPG hoped to convert as a
model of Christian paternal slave owning for other masters.27 The principle that
black Christianization and Atlantic slavery could complement each other was also
echoed in west Africa and Europe. The first black man ordained as a minister of the
Dutch Reformed Church, Jacobus Capitein (c. 1717–47), was a west African who
was trained and employed as a chaplain by the slave-trading Dutch West India
Company. The missionary efforts of the Church of England and other national
churches produced some converts – certainly numbering in the thousands in total
around the Atlantic by 1730 – but these conversions occurred in ones and twos
rather than in large groups or whole communities.
This situation changed more dramatically in the mid-eighteenth century. By
then, the enslaved population in mainland North America had become more
‘creolized,’ mitigating some of the language and cultural barriers that had limited
earlier conversion efforts. The religious environment there also had been altered by
the growth of denominational diversity and the onset of the Great Awakening,
with religious revivalism beginning to appeal to African-American people in
significant numbers. These developments set the stage for the growth of Protestant
Christianity, largely Baptist and Methodist, among free and enslaved black people
in North America. In several Caribbean islands too, the revivalist-minded
Moravians established missions to communities of enslaved people in the mid-
eighteenth century.
355
Figure 19.2 Engraved portrait of the Afro-Dutch minister Jacobus Capitein

© The Trustees of the British Museum
356
Revivalist preachers offered hope for salvation to any person who experienced
conversion, and this message of equality could reach across divides of race and
enslavement. While every Protestant church in the Atlantic world made
accommodations with slavery, groups like the Baptists, Moravians, and Methodists
that grew through revivalism were less closely identified with colonial slave traders
and owners. The predominance of lay leadership and popular preaching within these
movements meant that black people themselves, rather than just white ministers,
acted as agents of evangelization to black communities.28 The comparative malleability
of these forms of Protestantism, in which patterns of worship and points of theology
were less rigidly articulated than in state churches, also meant that African-American
people could shape practices and principles to make them meaningful in their own
lives and incorporate African views on spirituality. By the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, these developments led to black Protestantism becoming a new and powerful
source of connection and community around the Atlantic world.29
* * *
Movement was central to the development of the Protestant Atlantic world. However,
it was not just one-time or one-way movement that helped define this space. Instead,
the Protestant Atlantic featured the continual circulation of people, texts, and
practices. These patterns of circulation spread European developments through the
colonies, forged connections between colonies, and allowed colonial innovations to
cross back to Europe. Mobility characterized the lives of many of the key figures in
the history of Atlantic Protestantism. Despite the dangers of maritime travel and the
hardships endured by those who journeyed over colonial roads and rivers and into
undeveloped backcountries, many individuals completed astounding circuits to
promote their faith. In 1671, the founder of Quakerism George Fox decided to travel
to Britain’s Atlantic colonies, both to visit with emigrant Quakers and to keep his
young, fractious religious movement unified. Fox’s travels took him to Barbados,
Jamaica, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, and North Carolina. Fox’s travels in
the colonies not only promoted Quakerism, the circum-Atlantic journey he undertook
in the early 1670s also shaped the Friends’ distinctive beliefs and commitments. Fox
experienced Atlantic slavery first hand in Barbados, and his writings from there on it
marked the starting point of debates within the Society about the legitimacy and
godliness of slavery, discussions that would ultimately put Quakers at the forefront
of Atlantic abolitionism.
George Fox developed his ministry through circum-Atlantic motion; George
Whitefield’s career was founded on it. As a young man, Whitefield was a member of
the ‘Holy Club’ that John Wesley founded while a student at Oxford in the 1730s.
After his ordination as an Anglican minister, Whitefield decided to join the Wesley
brothers as a missionary in America. From this first voyage there in 1738 until his
death in 1770, Whitefield was to cross the Atlantic thirteen times and visit most British
North American colonies, where his preaching spread revivalism and Calvinistic
Methodism. He also made fourteen separate journeys from England to Scotland, and
visited places as far-flung as Bermuda, Gibraltar, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Like
the revival movement itself, Whitefield ignored denominational distinctions and
sought to bring his message to anyone who would hear him. Whitefield’s itinerant
357
preaching helped him become ‘the most famous person in America’ in the mid-
eighteenth century and he was lionized by his backers and attacked by his opponents
in both the colonial and British press.30
Fox and Whitefield were celebrated figures in their own days. A third example of
the way that circulation marked the Protestant Atlantic world is provided by a less
exalted but no less remarkable person, the Moravian woman Rebecca Protten. As
Jon Sensbach has uncovered, Rebecca was probably born of mixed European and
African parentage on the British island of Antigua. As a young girl, she was kidnapped
by slave traders and sold to a Dutch-speaking planter living on the Danish island of
St. Thomas. There, she learned how to speak, read, and write Dutch and was exposed
to Christianity through the Dutch Reformed Church. Despite the confession of the
household in which she lived, a Catholic priest baptized the young woman as Rebecca.
Her life changed again when, now a freed woman, she joined a Moravian church
recently founded on the island. Moravianism radically challenged both Euro-
American race and gender roles, which Rebecca capitalized on to fashion a ‘self-
appointed role as Christian apostle’ and a teacher to enslaved people on the island.
In the early 1740s, Protten traveled with other Moravians on a trans-Atlantic
voyage that ended at the Moravian settlement of Herrnhaag, Germany. There, in
1746, Rebecca married Christian Protten, a man of mixed-race parentage who had
been born at a Danish slave trading station in west Africa. The couple and their
daughter, Anna Maria, lived in German Moravian communities for a decade, where
Rebecca rose to become a deaconess. In 1765, she joined her husband as a missionary
to west Africa’s Gold Coast, where they planned to build a ‘Negro village for the
Lord’ and where Rebecca would serve as a schoolmistress. The Prottens were not
welcomed by many in this slave-trading outpost, but Rebecca continued to work in
west Africa until her death in 1781 at the age of sixty-two. Her life, shaped by her
faith and lived in the Caribbean, Europe, and west Africa, documents the mobility
and connectedness that marked the Protestant Atlantic.31
Protestant travelers like Fox, Whitefield, and the Prottens brought their messages
to many, but even more people were affected by the texts that religious networks sent
around the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Publishers in both
Europe and the colonies found a ready market for religious literature of all sorts.
Books were valuable commodities in Atlantic colonies and religious texts of various
kinds – bibles, sermons, works of theology, and tracts on practical morality, reports
of revivals – made up much of the reading material that circulated in them.32 As one
reflection on life in eighteenth-century Connecticut reported, ‘The Bible and Dr.
Watt’s Psalms and Hymns were indispensable in every family, and ours was not
without them. There were also, on the “book shelf”, a volume or two of Sermons […]
and very few other books and pamphlets, chiefly of a religious character.’33 The view
that good religious literature was essential and too scarce in many colonial households
motivated European-based groups like the SPCK and the SPG to ship thousands of
copies of religious texts to North America and the Caribbean in the eighteenth
century. Protestants of all varieties used the printed word to bridge distances of time
and space, promote shared principles, and create senses of circum-Atlantic community.
Similarly, religious practices moved through the Atlantic world. The practices of
religious revivalism are the best documented example of this phenomenon, with
congregations in the colonies and Europe learning of how religious revivals were
358
conducted in other places and replicating those patterns in their own communities. In
another vein, Susan Juster has documented the culture of prophecy as a trans-
denominational, trans-racial, and trans-gender phenomenon in the late eighteenth-
century and early nineteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world.34 To this can also be
added the practice of congregational singing, which was promoted by Moravians and
Methodists, spread by revivalism, and adopted and modified by black, white, and
Native American Protestants of multiple denominations around the Atlantic to
promote faith and fellowship.35
* * *
The circulation of religious practices highlights another noteworthy characteristic of

the Protestant Atlantic: the way the patterns of contact, competition, and circulation
present in this space produced a tremendous outpouring of religious creativity in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The twin trunks of European Lutheranism and
Calvinism branched in many directions when planted in the early modern Atlantic
world. A number of groups – Quakers, Methodists, Moravians, and the panoply of
black Protestantism in all its varied denominational forms – were born in this place
and time. The founding generations of these faiths lived in the Protestant Atlantic and
much of what marked these types of Protestantism as new and distinct emerged from
the ways that Atlantic cultures and institutions functioned.
Perhaps the strongest example of this is the rise of Methodism in the mid-eighteenth
century, a Protestant church whose foundation can be plausibly traced not just to the
Atlantic world but to a specific trans-Atlantic crossing. When the devout young
brothers John and Charles Wesley sailed to Georgia in 1735 as Anglican missionaries,
they met a group of Moravians on their ship. These Moravian travelers left a deep
impression on John Wesley when they responded to a life-threatening storm at sea by
calmly praying together. The Wesleys’ nearly two years in Georgia were difficult. The
brothers struggled to make much headway among Georgia’s settlers and the
experience left John Wesley depressed and uncertain when he returned to England.
He sought solace in the fellowship that he had witnessed on his voyage out to Georgia,
worshipping with a Moravian community in London and then traveling to Herrnhut
in Germany to visit the movement’s home. After a period of intense self-examination
under the guidance of the Moravian Peter Böhler, Wesley in 1738 felt his ‘heart
strangely warmed’ at the meeting of a small religious society in London, the conversion
experience that underpinned his future evangelizing.36
Wesley soon broke his formal connection with the Moravians, but he combined
many of their techniques for promoting community and affective religiosity with the
traditions of the Church of England in developing Methodism. In the coming years,
Wesley, along with George Whitefield and a growing number of other preachers,
would spread Methodism’s calls for personal conversion and the adoption of
Methodist practices throughout Britain and the Atlantic world. While it grew from
within Anglicanism, and it was to suffer its own internal divisions, Methodism
attracted adherents from many sources. Lay preachers became essential to the spread
of Methodism and through them Methodism’s approaches to worship and living a
Christian life – outdoor preaching, ‘classes’ for seekers and ‘bands’ for the converted,
the communal meals and services known as love feasts, the singing of hymns, and
359
others – became part of the spiritual landscape of Europe and Atlantic colonies. As
befitting a movement that drew on multiple sources, Methodism long functioned for
some as an additional set of practices and connections that existed alongside
membership in the Church of England and for others as the defining affiliation of
their religious lives.37
Methodism’s vibrancy and effort to appeal to people who had been marginalized
within Atlantic culture helped make the movement a powerful one within black
communities.38 Black adherents to Methodism were prominent in places like Virginia
and Maryland from the 1760s and by the late eighteenth century there was a circum-
Atlantic network of black Methodists, including people and places like Phillis Wheatley
in Boston, Anne and Elizabeth Hart in Antigua, Olaudah Equiano in London, and
Boston King in Nova Scotia and later Sierra Leone. This religious network also became
a platform that some of its members would use to launch criticisms of Atlantic slavery.
Equiano’s autobiography, for example, blends an account of his own spiritual journey
with an attack on the horrors and injustices of the slave trade.39 John Wesley himself
was converted to the cause of antislavery and issued the tract ‘Thoughts on Slavery’ in
1774, lending his weight to the developing movement.
Not all white Methodists in the late eighteenth century welcomed the growing
presence of black people within their congregations. When some black Methodists in
Philadelphia grew tired of discrimination at the hands of their co-religionists they
responded creatively as other Atlantic Protestants had often done when they disagreed
with the forces of institutional authority. They elected, in 1787, to leave their
congregation and establish one of their own, a movement that would develop into
the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century. As the history of
early Methodism illustrates, the religious inventiveness that the Atlantic fostered did
not flow in only one direction from Europe to the colonies. Instead the various
currents within Atlantic Protestantism crossed and mingled with each other and with
faith traditions outside those of the European Reformation.
* * *
The Protestant Atlantic world described here was most integrated in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The connections and circulations that characterized the
Protestant Atlantic certainly did not disappear all at once or at the same rate in all
places after this period, but by the mid-nineteenth century, a number of new
developments reoriented the ways that many Protestants thought about their
communities and the ways that Atlantic churches were functioning. In the most
heavily settled colonies in mainland North America, separation from Britain and the
creation of the independent United States gradually eroded institutional ties between
churches in the former colonies and Europe. This was most dramatic in the case of
the Church of England, which was disestablished in the new states and which was
reborn as the independent Protestant Episcopal Church. The dislocations and
reevaluations caused by the American Revolution also affected the Church of England
in other colonies in Canada and the Caribbean that remained part of the British
Empire because it spurred the creation of a new class of colonial bishops. American
Methodists undertook similar measures to create a distinct ecclesiastical structure in
the period immediately following the Revolution. These changes put these churches
360
on a more secure and effective local footing, but this independence limited the
importance of continuing connections to Europe and the rest of the Atlantic.
At the same time, the rise of new religious movements signaled wider reorientations
within North American societies away from the Atlantic coast and towards the north
American interior and different sources of identity. The paradigmatic religious
example of this reorientation is the development of Mormonism in the 1830s, a faith
whose origins and sacred texts were rooted not in Europe or the Atlantic but in the
westward-facing young republic of the United States. When early Mormons, like
other religious minorities before them, faced persecution they looked to find new
spaces to live and worship as they chose. But, unlike the Huguenots or Salzburgers of
a previous era, early Mormons sought space for their beliefs not by using the Atlantic
as a highway to their own New Jerusalem, but by moving steadily westward to
Illinois and then to the dry lands of the American southwest.
Changes on the eastern side of the Atlantic similarly decreased the centrality of
this space to various groups of Protestants. In Britain, a vigorous missionary
evangelicalism emerged in the early nineteenth century, but it was oriented towards
new and expanding sites of empire in the African interior and Asia rather than
towards the Atlantic world. Missionary interest in the Caribbean and North America
continued, but this was now one relatively small aspect of a much larger program. In
this way the Atlantic Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
subsumed within the global Protestantism that developed in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. In the last two hundred years Protestantism has grown into a
worldwide movement, with congregations not only in Europe and the Americas, but
also millions of adherents in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The diversity that
characterizes this contemporary global Protestantism is largely a legacy of reformed
Christianity’s development in the early modern Atlantic world.
NOTE S
The author thanks Rebecca Goetz for her insightful comments on this essay.
1 C. Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; and and C. Pestana, ‘Religion,’ in D.
Armitage and M. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 69–92 treat the British Atlantic. Important surveys of
religion in early America include P. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society,
and Politics in Colonial America, New York: Oxford University Press, Updated Edition,
2003; and J. Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
2 J. Canizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 3–31.
3 J. Ohlmeyer, ‘A Laboratory for Empire: Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism,’ in K.
Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 26–60.
4 K. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993.
5 D. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era
of European Colonization, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992; J.
Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 71–178.
361
6 A. Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999.
7 B. Van Ruymbeke and R. Sparks (eds.), Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France
and the Atlantic Diaspora, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003; J. Butler,
The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in a New World Society, Cambridge, MA:
8 B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the
Revolution, New York: Vintage Books, 1988, p. 25; J. Horn, ‘British Diaspora: Emigration
from Britain, 1680–1815,’ in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire.
Volume II. The Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 31.
9 D. Voorhees, ‘Tying the Loose Ends Together,’ in J. Goodfriend (ed.), Revisiting New
Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America, Leiden: Brill, 2005, p. 316.
10 Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven, pp. 15–33; Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, pp. 98–128.
11 Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, p. 98.
12 C. Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts, Cambridge: Cambridge
13 R. Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007, pp. 40–117.
14 J. Bell, The Imperial Origins of the King’s Church in Early America, 1607–1783, Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 166–85; C. Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic
Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775, New York: Oxford University Press,
1962; J. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social
Dynamics in the Anglo-American World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
15 S. O’Brien, ‘A Transatlantic Community of Saints: The Great Awakening and the First
Evangelical Network, 1735–55,’ American Historical Review, 91, 1986, pp. 811–32; L.
Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern
Period, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; F. van Lieburg, ‘Interpreting the
Dutch Great Awakening (1749–1755),’ Church History, 77, 2008, pp. 318–36.
16 T. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial
America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007; P. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven,
131–60; R. Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1982.
17 C. Pestana, ‘Between Religious Marketplace and Spiritual Wasteland: Religion in the
British Atlantic World,’ History Compass, 2, 2004, pp. 3–5.
18 D. Hall, ‘Narrating Puritanism,’ in H. Stout and D. Hart (eds.), New Directions in
American Religious History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 51–83.
19 D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000, pp. 61–69; B. Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New
World, 1570–1670, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 176–84.
20 J. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 66–78; J. Axtell, The Invasion Within: The
Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
21 R. Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, p. 35.
22 M. Szasz, Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Education in the
Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.
23 R. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War, Cambridge, MA:
24 L. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in
Early America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 8.
362
25 D. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
26 T. Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic
World, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
27 J. Bennett, Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington
Plantations of Barbados, 1710–1838, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958.
28 On the importance of non-white missionaries to the spread of Protestantism more
generally, see E. Andrews, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British
Atlantic World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
29 S. Frey and B. Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African-American Protestantism in the
American South and British Caribbean to 1830, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998; A. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum
South, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978; M. Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey
to an Afro-Baptist Faith, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979; J. Thornton, Africa and
Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge
30 H. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism,
Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1991; F. Lambert, ‘Pedlar in Divinity:’
George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994; and and B. Schlenther, ‘Whitefield, George (1714–1770)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 ([http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/29281, accessed August 7, 2014).
31 J. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; A. Fogleman, Jesus is Female: Moravians and the
Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007, pp. 34–104.
32 D. Hall, ‘Introduction,’ in H. Amory and D. Hall (eds.), The History of the Book in
America, Vol. I, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, Cambridge: Cambridge
33 D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book, Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1996, p. 37.
34 S. Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
35 D. Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005,
pp. 68–74; D. Stowe, How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 16–63; M. Sirini, ‘Hymnody as
History: Early Evangelical Hymns and the Recovery of American Popular Religion,’
Church History, 71, 2002, pp. 273–306; and W. Pitts, Old Ship of Zion: The Afro-Baptist
Ritual in the African Diaspora, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 11–51.
36 H. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism, 3rd ed.,
London: Epworth Press, 2002, pp. 107–45.
37 Hempton, Methodism, pp. 13–85.
38 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, pp. 80–148; Hempton, Methodism, pp. 24–25,
105–8, 132–35.
39 V. Carretta (ed.), Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-
Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2003, pp. 7–14.
363
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE FREEST COUNTRY

Jews of the British Atlantic World,
ca. 1600–1800
Natalie A. Zacek
I n a letter to his friend, the Cambridge don Charles Mason, the Reverend William
Smith, a Church of England minister on the island of Nevis, described a recreational
outing which took place ‘in the Month of July, 1719’, at which time ‘Mr Moses
Pinheiro a Jew and myself, went to angle in Black Rock Pond’, a body of water
‘situate[d] a quarter of a mile or better Northwards from Charles Town our
Metropolis or Capital, and about thirty yards distant from the Sea’.1 Smith lived in
Nevis from 1719 to 1724, serving as rector of the parish of St. John’s Fig Tree,
outside Charlestown, before returning to England to take up the well-endowed living
of St. Mary’s, Bedford.2 As the island’s principal clergyman, he possessed considerable
social capital, and his letters are filled with references to the elite men and women
which whom he socialised. That he chose to befriend a Jew, and to give this
relationship a prominent mention in correspondence with a friend in the metropole,
implies that it was possible for Jews to form bonds of acceptance and friendship with
Gentiles, even churchmen. But that Smith felt it necessary to identify Pinheiro
exclusively in terms of his religion suggests that their friendship was complicated by
the latter’s status as a member of a religious minority within colonial British America.
Jews were a numerically small but economically significant presence in the British
Atlantic world from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth,
a period which saw the birth and rapid development of the sugar industry in the
Caribbean, and the formation of transatlantic mercantile communities in the port
towns and cities therein and on the North American mainland. The economic and
social development of both regions was greatly influenced by the diaspora of Jewish
settlers from Brazil in the mid-seventeenth century. In 1654, Portuguese forces seized
control of the Dutch colony of Recife, the centre of northern Brazil’s burgeoning
sugar industry. With the possibility of religious persecution looming, Jewish colonists
looked to settle elsewhere in the Atlantic world. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies,
with their active Inquisitorial institutions, clearly offered no haven to Jewish refugees,
and Louis XIV’s increasing hostility towards non-Catholics both at home and
overseas forestalled resettlement within the French empire.3 For those Jewish settlers
who preferred not to return to the Netherlands, the only places which seemed to offer
refuge were the English and Dutch settlements in the Americas, particularly those in
364
– chapter 20: Jews of the British Atlantic –
which the Recifean Jews’ experience of the cultivation and commerce of sugar were
likely to be an asset. By 1680, the earliest census of Barbados listed 54 Jewish
households, consisting of 184 individuals, in the capital and principal entrepot of
Bridgetown, with at least another hundred resident in the island’s second town,
Speightstown; by 1750 the four to five hundred Jewish residents comprised about 3
per cent of the island’s total population.4 Estimates suggest that Jews, who settled
first in Port Royal and, after that city’s destruction by an earthquake in 1692, in the
capital city of Spanish Town, constituted 10 per cent of Jamaica’s white population
by the eighteenth century; in 1724 the Reverend Robert Robertson estimated that the
white population of Nevis, which with Antigua, Montserrat and St. Kitts made up
the federated Leeward Islands colony, consisted of ‘about seventy householders with
their families, being in all (children included) some three hundred whites of which
one-fourth are Jews’.5 Smaller Jewish communities emerged in the port towns of
British North America, particulary Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston
and Savannah, where ‘they comprised an almost infinitesimal proportion…of the
population. At the time of the first national census of the United States, approximately
1500 of the nation’s three million inhabitants were Jews, and the largest Jewish
American communities, New York and Charleston, consisted of only a couple of
hundred people.’6
Seventeenth-century English attitudes towards Jews, though considerably more
accommodating than those of Europe’s Catholic powers, were not particularly
welcoming. For Britons, metropolitan and colonial alike, religious tolerance failed to
generate a willing acceptance of alien groups such as Jews and Gypsies, with whom
the former were frequently linked in the popular imagination, due to their alleged
shared ‘criminality, itinerancy, commerce, cohesion, and threatening and deviant
sexuality’.7 Many Englishmen might have found farfetched William Hughes of Gray’s
Inn’s 1656 assertion, echoing centuries of the notorious practice of the blood libel,
that Jews ‘make it their annual practice to crucifie children’, but they might have
deemed more convincing the warning of the MP Thomas Papillon (1623–1702) that
Jews, though not necessarily a threat to national security, were so culturally and
socially alien that it would be impossible to assimilate them into the English body
politic.8 After their expulsion by Edward I’s decree in 1290, Jews were virtually
absent from England until Oliver Cromwell authorised their readmission in 1655. A
seventeenth-century Englishman was more likely to have met a Muslim, or ‘Moor’,
than to have had a personal encounter with a Jew, and in this instance unfamiliarity
bred, if not contempt, then at least suspicion.9 In his posthumously published Second
Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England (1642), the influential jurist Edward
Coke described Jews as ‘wicked and wretched men’ who used ‘cruell’ means to enrich
themselves and ‘shewed no mercie’ in their dealings with English Christians. Although
Coke, who died in 1634, had probably never encountered a Jew – those few who
lived in England before 1655 presented themselves publicly as Spanish or Italian
Catholics, and practiced their faith in secrecy – he was convinced that Jewish character
was eternal and immutable, and that it was not necessary to be personally acquainted
with Jews in order to understand their nature.10
Following their readmission, English distaste for Jews is evident from a number of
anonymous broadsides of the early eighteenth century, which, following the Act of
Union, attempted to defame the Scots by comparing them to Jews. A 1721 verse
365
– Natalie A. Zacek –
which satirised the ‘Caledonian Clans’ opened by inquiring of the reader, ‘Was you
ne’er, in a Cabbin/Confin’d like a religious Rabbin?’ and went on to compare the
Jewish clergyman to ‘a Monkey (‘Tis all by Way of Simile)/Imprison’d in a Cage’.11
Still cruder in its satire was an earlier screed against the Scots, which claimed that
they were ‘down-right Egyptians by the[ir] Lice’, but that their allegedly penny-
pinching, double-dealing nature branded them simultaneously as ‘right Jews in their
Hearts’.12 In the popular imagination, Jews and Scots, though represented by the very
different physical stereotypes of the swarthy, hunched Semite and the freckled, gangly
Caledonian, both served as representatives of the undesirable qualities of miserliness,
greed, and untrustworthiness, particularly within the context of commerce and
finance. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scots and Jews tended to be both
educated and unlanded, attributes which encouraged their participation in the fields
of trade and speculation as the sorts of ‘sophisters, economists, and calculators’
whom Edmund Burke would deplore towards the end of the eighteenth century as
bringing about the end of ‘the age of chivalry’.13 Of course Scots were, in the eyes of
most Englishmen, less foreign and more assimilable than Jews; both groups might
have suffered frequent ridicule, but only the latter had their civil and political rights
abridged by both law and custom. Popular distaste towards Jews was a constant in
eighteenth-century England, and although this hostility might remain dormant for
years, it could easily flare up at moments of social or political stress. In the summer
of 1753, Parliament passed the Jewish Naturalization Bill, which gave foreign-born
Jews the right to own land and ships, and to engage in commerce with Britain’s
colonies ‘without receiving the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’, only to be surprised
by a tremendous popular furore in response. Pamphlets and sermons poured forth
depicting Jews as ‘money grubbing, dishonest, cunning interlopers…blasphemous,
clannish, and traitorous’, and Jewish men were attacked in the streets of London by
those convinced of the existence of a Jewish conspiracy against British authority,
property and masculinity, including the mandatory circumcision of all male Britons.14
Fearing for public order, Parliament quickly repealed the Bill.
Despite these powerful undercurrents of anti-Semitism, England was, after the
Cromwellian era, ‘probably the freest European country a Jew could find’, and its
colonies, particularly those which lacked the resources, and in many instances the
desire, to establish a strong Church of England presence therein appeared as potential
havens to the dispossessed Jews of Recife.15 Nonetheless, the assemblies of several of
the English colonies imposed substantial disabilities upon their Jewish inhabitants. In
1661, only a few years after the onset of the Brazilian Jewish diaspora, a delegation
of the merchants of Barbados, at that time the wealthiest colony in English America,
petitioned the Lords of Trade and Plantations to bar Jews from participation in island
commerce, pleading that ‘the Jews are a people so subtle in matters of trade…that in
a short time they will not only ingross trade among themselves, but will be able to
divert the benefit thereof to other places…’, presumably by deploying their supposedly
innate craftiness and trickery in order to construct tightly knit networks of their co-
religionists throughout the Americas.16 Barbados was by the late seventeenth century
already becoming physically and commercially over-crowded, and would grow ever
more so over the next century, encouraging a climate of hostility against Jewish
settlers; in 1739 the long-established Jewish community at Speightstown was
dispersed after a mob attacked local Jews and destroyed their synagogue, due to a
366
rumour that a band of Jewish men had assaulted a Christian.17 Although the majority
of Jewish migrants to the English colonies had paid the substantial fees to acquire
Letters Patent of Denization, which granted them the status of English subjects, and
thus the right to engage in transatlantic trade without violating the provisions of the
Navigation Acts, they were subject to still stricter controls in Jamaica, where they
were obligated to pay heavy additional taxes as well as being excluded from holding
public office and serving in the militia, both major institutions of political influence
and masculine prestige within island society.18 In addition to accepting these
disabilities, the Jews of Jamaica also felt it necessary to propitiate the local authorities
from time to time by presenting them with what Christian islanders termed ‘Jew
pies’, pastry crusts filled with coins, which they hoped would yield them improved
treatment, or at least prevent their situation from worsening.19 In Barbados, they
were further burdened by being barred from testifying in court against any Gentile
whom they felt had mistreated them, and they were similarly unable to defend
themselves against accusations from their non-Jewish neighbours.20
Attitudes and practices such as these encouraged Jewish settlers in the larger
English islands, such as the Abudiente, Senior, and Levy Rezio families of Barbados,
to try their luck in the Leeward Islands colony.21 But these smaller communities were
not initially more welcoming to Jews; in 1694, the Antiguan House of Assembly
approved a bill which attempted to relegate Jewish islanders to a second-class legal
and economic status by forbidding them to engage in trade with slave peddlers and,
more threateningly, by licensing local magistrates to try Jews suspected of criminal
activities by using ‘any such evidence as the said Justices shall judge sufficient in their
own judgments and consciences’.22 Even in Nevis, which by the early eighteenth
century boasted the highest percentage of Jews in its white population among the
English colonies in island and mainland alike, Jews were the subject of punitive
legislation as ‘evil-minded Persons, intending nothing but their own private Gain,
and the Ruin of the Poor’, who were known to ‘ingross and buy whole Cargoes of
Provisions at a cheap Rate, and to retale them again at excessive Prices, thereby
forestalling the Market’. They were also accused of profaning the Christian Sabbath
by ‘trading with Negroes…on the Lord’s Day’, participating in the semi-illegal
markets which slaves conducted on Sundays.23 These misdeeds appeared to threaten
the island planters’ control both of their bondspeople and of local commerce, and as
such generated considerable anxiety regarding their Jewish neighbours.
Burdened as they were by these legal proscriptions and popular prejudices, Jews
nonetheless flourished in the English West Indian colonies. The Recifean exiles and
their descendants constructed and participated in an extensive network of contacts
which connected them with their co-religionists elsewhere in the Caribbean, in the
Dutch colony of Surinam, and in the Netherlands, as well as in British North America,
particularly New York and Newport. Their extensive experience in the business of
sugar cultivation and their familiarity with the languages and commercial practices of
the Spanish and Portuguese colonies allowed them to function as conduits of
information, finance, and commerce across the imperial boundaries of the Atlantic
world.24 In addition to these valued skills and networks, Jews also possessed the
advantage of their whiteness; as the ratio of black slaves and free people of colour rose
steadily in relation to the number of white settlers, Jews’ very complexion became a
badge of their comparative trustworthiness to their fellow islanders. By 1740, the
367
passage of the Plantation Act by Parliament exempted Jews in the colonies (though
not those in the metropole) from the need to take the Oaths of Supremacy and
Allegiane, acknowledging the sovereign as the supreme head of the Church of England,
and provided for the naturalisation of foreigners who had lived in Britain’s American
colonies for seven years. These concessions allowed both English- and foreign-born
Jews to attain a greater degree of inclusion within colonial society, though to a certain
extent they simultaneously reified their position as social outsiders.25
Because they stood outside the world of local political life in colonial British
America, and were almost exclusively endogamous in relation both to marital choice
and to social life more generally, it is through the wills left by Jews of the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century British Atlantic world that it is most possible to understand
the extent to which these men and women were connected both to their Christian
neighbours and to fellow members of the diasporic Jewish community of the
Americas. The will of Haim Abinum de Lima, for example, depicts this Nevisian Jew
as enmeshed in a network of personal and commercial relationships with Jews and
non-Jews alike, one which crossed both colonial and imperial boundaries. De Lima
was open in his profession of Judaism, as is indicated by his stated wish ‘to be buried
after the rites of the people called Jews,’ by his philanthropic activity in connection
with the Mikve Israel synagogue in the Dutch colony of Curaçao, and by his bequests
of a ‘Little Sepher for Sr Eustacia Rodes for the Kaal, [and] the great Sepher for my
cousin David the son of Ab[raha]m Piza, senior’.26 But his status as an observant Jew
did not forestall the development of close contacts, and even friendship, with
Christian islanders. None of the three men who served as witnesses to his will –
William Liburd, John Burke senior and Adam Brodie – were Jews. This situation
might be considered axiomatic; in many instances, island law barred Jews, like other
non-jurors, from acting as witnesses to any kind of legal transaction. But Liburd,
Burke and Brodie were men of considerable property and prestige in Nevis, and their
apparent willingness not merely to witness de Lima’s will, but also to accept the
responsibility of carrying out its provisions and bequests indicates an instance of a
significant degree of Anglo-Jewish amity. Such a responsibility was not a trivial one,
particularly in cases such as that of de Lima, who chose to distribute his property
among a large number of heirs in St. Kitts, Barbados and Curaçao, and whose estate
was therefore complicated and time-consuming to administer.27
Considerably more elevated than Haim Abinum de Lima in both the economic
and social realms was the Pinheiro family, with whose son Moses the Reverend
William Smith had socialised. The family’s progenitor, the prosperous merchant and
rum distiller Isaac Pinheiro, was born in Spain and became a freeman of New York
in 1695, but maintained Charlestown, Nevis, as the headquarters of his rapidly
expanding mercantile network.28 He died in 1710 in the course of a visit to New
York, to which he may have travelled in order to carry out his responsibilities as
commercial agent to Abraham Bueno de Mezqueta, another Jewish resident of Nevis
and a member of a family whose business interests extended throughout colonial
British America.29 Perhaps sensing the approach of death and doubting that he would
survive the long voyage back to Nevis, Isaac drew up a new will in New York, the
provisions of which reveal the extent of both his wealth and his affective relationships.
Isaac’s wife Esther was his principal legatee, inheriting ‘all the Houses and Land…in
Charles Towne’, but his resources were sufficient to allow him to make sizable
368
bequests to his five adult children, and to leave annuities to his father Abraham and
sister Rachel in Amsterdam and to his sister Sarah Mendes Goma in Curaçao.30 To
serve as ‘Trustees and Overseers of this my Will’, Isaac selected two Nevisians. One
was Solomon Israel, a prosperous merchant and a leading figure in the Jewish
community; the other was Captain Samuel Clarke, a prominent planter and the
commander of the island’s militia.31 The relationship between Pinheiro and Clarke
appears to have been an intimate one; not only did the former refer to the latter as
‘my Loving Friend’, but he also bequeathed to him the sum of ‘Tenn pounds currant
Money of this Island…to buy…a Mourning Sute’, the practice of wearing mourning
clothes being reserved at this time to the family and intimate friends of the decedent.32
No less eminent a person than New York governor Rip Van Dam, whom Esther
Pinheiro named as ‘my friend’, served as one of two ‘special attornies’ who assisted
the widow in her role as executor of the will.33
After Isaac’s death, Esther assumed his place at the head of his commercial
network, maintaining and expanding the family’s business interests, primarily
through the acquisition of a small fleet of merchant vessels which travelled between
New York, New England, Britain and the West Indies, with an occasional stop at
Madeira to take on casks of the sweet wine so popular among West Indian planters.34
Between 1716 and 1718, Esther herself made a series of voyages to the ports of New
York and Boston in her 20 ton sloop, the Neptune, exchanging cargoes of sugar,
molasses, and other island commodities for New England timber and provisions and
imported European manufactured goods.35 By 1720, Esther was the owner of the
Samuel, a 25 ton sloop with a crew of five, which made several voyages each year
between Boston and Nevis from 1720 to 1722. The Samuel ceased to appear in
Nevis’s Naval Office records after 1722, implying that it had been lost at sea or had
been sold to someone off the island, but by the beginning of 1724 it had been replaced
in the Pinheiro fleet by the brigantine Esther, a 60 ton vessel which the eponymous
Mrs. Pinheiro owned in partnership with Jonathan Dowse of Charlestown,
Massachusetts, where the ship had been built the previous winter. Initially, the Esther
appears to have replaced the defunct Samuel on the Boston-Nevis route, but by 1728,
when the merchant Ebenezer Hough, another Bostonian, had replaced Dowse as the
ship’s co-owner, it began to make far more ambitious transatlantic voyages between
Nevis and the ports of London and Cork. Around this time Esther acquired yet
another ship, the Abigail, a small brig of 35 tons, which plied the route between
Nevis, London and Madeira.36 As a participant in both local and transatlantic
commerce, Esther’s influence stretched beyond the spheres of both her family and
Nevis’s Jewish community. Her entrepreneurial activities assured her a prominent
place in the mercantile community in which she lived, and further allowed her to
integrate her family into Nevisian society and, beyond, into the economic life of New
England shipping and commerce.
The small worlds which Jews constructed for themselves in the port towns of the
British Atlantic, on the North American mainland as well as in the West Indies, were
largely parallel to, rather than intertwined with, those of their Gentile neighbours.
Most Jews lived, by choice or by necessity, in closed communities. They were almost
entirely endogamous, marrying other members of their communities or looking to
Jewish enclaves throughout the British and Dutch colonies for spouses. Endogamy
was desirable from the perspective of religious adherence and cultural persistence,
369
but it prevented Jewish settlers from reaping the numerous benefits which could be
gained through intermarriage, such as the possibility of acquiring land, money, and
political influence through participation in the kinship networks of the ‘great tangled
cousinry’ which allowed white elites throughout colonial British America to gain and
retain hegemony.37 It is noteworthy than the Nevisian Solomon Israel, one of very
few colonial British American Jews to sit upon a jury, and therefore to claim the legal
and political rights of an Englishman, had married a Christian woman, an action
which encouraged ‘his disassociation from the faith…and his ability to move within
the upper social, political, and economic classes’ of the wider community.38 By
contrast, Moses Pinheiro might have gone fishing with an Anglican clergyman, but
when he came to take a wife, he chose a Barbadian Jewish woman named Lunah.39
Of course, endogamy did not prevent Jews from attaining wealth. It did, however,
ensure that Jews would remain outside the formal and informal spheres, those of
office-holding and kinship, which presented those who settled in the Anglo-American
colonies with their most promising opportunities to rise in influence and esteem
within local white society. Even the wealthiest Jew could not sit on the Governor’s
Council or in the Assembly, or even serve as a juror, a justice of the peace, or a
member of the militia, despite the fact that adult white males were so few in number
in many of these communities that it was difficult to fill these offices. In times of war,
Jews were encouraged to ‘assist and defend [their communities] with the utmost of
their Power, Strength, and Ability’, but in less fraught moments the sole civic
responsibility entrusted to them was ‘to behave themselves fairly and honestly
amongst us’.40
The cosmopolitan nature of Jewish identity in the Atlantic world allowed Jews to
develop networks of kinship which stretched over thousands of miles and which
benefited its participants in their search for marital and commercial opportunities,
and allowed the small number of synagogues in the eighteenth-century Americas to
flourish in financial and cultural terms and to function as nodes of support and
cultural survival for Jewish enclaves.41 But Judaism marked a boundary more definite
than that of even the most radical and alarming deviations within Protestantism, as
is shown by the trajectory of Quaker and Huguenot settlement and social integration
in colonial British America. Huguenots and Quakers could, and often did, distance
themselves from their suspect heritage through intermarriage with Anglicans and at
least outward observance of Church of England practices. Jews, in contrast, neither
desired nor were encouraged to marry outside their faith, and the stamp of otherness
marked even those who were less than entirely committed to their religion. Alternative
Protestant identities were permeable to processes of Anglicisation and Anglicanisation
in a way which could not be true of Jews. Jacob Marcus, the pioneering historian of
Judaism in the Americas, claimed that ‘the typical colonial Jew was true to his heritage
because he was not pressed to be untrue to it’, but nor was he in any way encouraged
to connect himself (or herself) to a more general sense of Englishness.42
The apparently rapid disappearance of many of the Jewish communities of colonial
British America is reflective of the tenuous nature of the relationship between the
Jewish population and the wider local community. As the sugar trade began to
decline in the final decades of the eighteenth century, and as a series of hurricanes
devastated the eastern Caribbean, Jewish islanders, at least some of whom had family
connections in the region which stretched back over a century, quickly abandoned
370
the West Indian colonies in favour of the Anglo-American settlements on the

mainland, or relocated to the Dutch colony of Curacao, the most vital Jewish outpost
of the Atlantic world.43
These migrations were accelerated by the aftermath of the American Revolution,
which cut the commercial bonds which had developed for more than a century
between Jews in the English West Indies and those on the North American mainland.44
As Jonathan Sarna has noted, all of the organised Jewish communities of colonial
North America, which he enumerates as New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Savannah
and Charleston, developed in port cities and catered to the needs of transatlantic
merchants.45 In comparison with the Jews of the Caribbean, who were almost
exclusively of Sephardic heritage and tradition, many of those on the mainland were
Ashkenazim from central or eastern Europe, most notably in Philadelphia, home to
the Polish Jewish financier Haym Solomon and the German immigrant merchants
Nathan and Isaac Levy. Although these Ashkenazi Jews often intermarried with local
Sephardim, who were widely perceived as having higher social status within the
Jewish community, they were also more prone than their West Indian compatriots to
join with their Gentile neighbours in commercial ventures, social life, and even
marriage.46 The trajectory of the Franks family of Philadelphia illuminates the extent
to which ‘Jews of sufficient gentility…were accepted as members of an anglicized
Philadelphia elite, to which Quakers, Anglicans, and Presbyterians all belonged’.
While the family’s progenitor, Jacob Franks, had been the parnas, or president, of the
Shearith Israel synagogue in New York, and he and his wife Abigail Levy raised their
nine children as observant Jews, his son David married Margaret Evans, the daughter
of a leading Philadelphia Quaker family. David and Margaret’s children were raised
as Christians, and reached the heights of Philadelphia society. Abigail married
Andrew Hamilton, who served as attorney general and as acting governor of
Pennsylvania, and Rebecca, a notable local belle, was selected as one of the ‘Queens
of Beauty’ at the Meschianza, a grand ball in full British aristocratic style which was
held in 1778, which British army officers gave for their Loyalist friends before the
forces left the city.47
While the high degree of assimilation experienced by elite Jews in Philadelphia was
not representative of the wider experience of Jews in eighteenth-century North
America, the small size of their communities, even in comparison with those of the
Caribbean, encouraged a dilution of identity through intermarriage between
Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and also between Jews and Christians. When, following
the Revolution, it became increasingly difficult for mainland and island Jews to trade
and communicate with one another, as they had done for nearly a century and a half,
‘the Atlantic world that colonial North American port Jews had known ended…and
Jews ceased to identify themselves…as “members of the nation”’.48 Under these strains,
American Jewish communities began to fragment in the final years of the eighteenth
century, losing their sense of themselves as ‘port Jews’ and becoming simply another
minority group within an ever larger and more diverse United States. So insignificant
and unthreatening were these Jewish communities that anti-Semitic rhetoric and
activity, always a threat in colonial North America up to the Revolution, relinquished
its influence in the political and social sphere, and would not revive until the latter half
of the nineteenth century, when large numbers of Jews, mostly impoverished and
almost exclusively Ashkenazi, began to immigrate to the United States.
371
As a final point, it may be useful to speculate about the apparent assimilability of

Quakers and Huguenots, which offers an interesting contrast to the continued
distinctiveness of Jews in colonial British American society. All three groups
encountered significant opposition and even persecution in seventeenth-century
England, wracked as it was by every kind of disorder, and in its empire, yet all
succeeded in creating niches for themselves in colonial society by the early decades of
the eighteenth century. Jews, however, remained within self-contained enclaves
centred upon a handful of port towns. They participated in imperial commerce and,
to a certain extent, in neighbourly rituals of sociability, but, unlike the Quakers and
Huguenots, they appear, other than amongst the Philadelphian elite, very rarely to
have intermarried with Anglican settlers, nor did they gain a role in the political or
military establishments which were a principal source of local prestige and patronage.
Huguenots and Quakers were on some levels far more assimilable than Jews into
the mainstream of Anglo-Atlantic society, but this assimilability was at least in part
the result of their apparent willingness to become part of the larger society, a tendency
which few Jews seem to have shared. Societal inclusion resulted from the combination
of the ability of a group or an individual to accommodate itself to certain norms and
its willingness to do so. In other words, inclusion in a community was the result, not
of a completely autonomous decision on the part of one side or the other, but of a
negotiation between the two. The Jews of the English colonies might under certain
circumstances be integrated into the wider community, but they would very rarely be
assimilated within it. The persistence of anti-Jewish sentiment among seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Englishmen dovetailed with the communal and self-enclosed
tendency of Jewish settlers to create a subtle yet distinct sense of cultural distance
which both groups were willing to enforce through law and custom alike. In the end,
most of these Jewish colonists were prototypical sojourners within the early modern
Atlantic world, moving between islands and mainland and across imperial boundaries,
and leading lives characterised by fluidity and mobility. Perhaps only those who were
laid to rest in the Jewish cemeteries which remain their most notable material legacy
can be described as permanent residents of most of their communities within the
British Atlantic world.
NOTE S
Some of this material has been previously published in Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the
English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (Cambridge, 2010), chapter 3, and in Zacek, ‘“A People
So Subtle”: Sephardic Jewish Pioneers of the English West Indies’, in Caroline Williams, ed.,
Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World (Aldershot, 2009), pp. 97–112.
1 William Smith, A Natural History of Nevis, and the rest of the English Leeward Charibee
Islands in America (Cambridge, 1745), p.10.
2 Elsa V. Goveia, A Study on the Historiography of the British West Indies (Mexico City,
1956), p. 34.
3 In Article One of the Code Noir of 1685, Louis XIV instructed French colonial officials
‘to expel from our islands all the Jews who have settled there; to them, as declared enemies
of Christianity, we command to leave within three months from the publication of this
edict, on pain of loss of liberty and property’ (reprinted in F. R. Augier and S. C. Gordon,
Sources of West Indian History [London, 1962], p. 92).
372
4 Mordechai Arbell, The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean (Jerusalem, 2002), p. 199.
5 Thomas G. August, ‘An Historical Profile of the Jewish Community of Jamaica’, Jewish
Social Studies 49 (1987), pp. 303–26, here p. 304; Robertson, quoted in Arbell, Jewish
Nation, p. 221.
6 William Pencak, ‘Jews and Anti-Semitism in Early Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania Magazine
of History and Biography 126 (2002), pp. 365–408, here pp. 366, 367.
7 Dana Rabin, ‘Seeing Jews and Gypsies in 1753’, Cultural and Social History 7 (2010),
pp. 35–58, here p. 37.
8 Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular
Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, 1995), p. 40; Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The
Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark, Del., 1995), p. 82.
9 Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York, 1999),
pp. 3–4.
10 Holly Snyder, ‘“Usury, to the English Mind”: The Image of the Jewish Merchant in the British
Atlantic World’, paper presented to the Ninth Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute
of Early American History and Culture, New Orleans, Louisiana, June 2003, pp. 1–2.
11 ‘To ******** *******, Esq.,’ in Samuel Keimer, ed., Caribbeana (Millwood, N.Y.,
1978), vol. 2, pp. 54–55; italics in original.
12 Caledonia; or, The Pedlar turn’d Merchant: A Tragi-Comedy, as it was Acted by His
Majesty’s Subjects of Scotland, in the King of Spain’s Province of Darien (London, 1700),
p. 9. In early modern English parlance, ‘Egyptians’ denoted gypsies.
13 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), p. 113.
14 Dana Rabin, ‘The Jew Bill of 1753: Masculinity, Virility, and the Nation’, Eighteenth-Century
Studies 39 (2006), pp. 157–71, here 157, 158; Rabin, ‘Seeing Jews and Gypsies’, pp. 36, 40.
15 David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), p. 100. For a useful
survey of recent scholarship, see Isaac Land, ‘Jewishness and Britishness in the Eighteenth
Century’, History Compass 3 (2005), pp. 1–12.
16 Report of the Council for Foreign Plantations to the King [Charles II], 24 July 1661, in W.
Noel Sainsbury (ed.), Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series: America and West Indies,
1661–1668 (London, 1880), p. 49. As Nuala Zahedieh has observed, ‘the skill with which
Jewish merchants managed to comply with English [trade] regulations, and their success
at commerce, combined to cause resentment’ on the part of non-Jewish English colonists.
See Zahedieh, ‘The Capture of the Blue Dove, 1664: Policy, Profits, and Protection in
Early English Jamaica,’ in Roderick A. MacDonald (ed.), West Indies Accounts (Barbados,
1996), p. 45.
17 Arbell, Jewish Nation, pp. 203, 207.
18 Frank Wesley Pitman, The Development of the British West Indies (New Haven, 1917),
p. 27. See also Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith Hurwitz, ‘The New World Sets an Example
for the Old: The Jews of Jamaica and Political Rights, 1661–1831’, American Jewish
Historical Quarterly, 55 (1965), pp. 37–56. Sacramental requirements prevented Jews in
England and its colonies from voting for or holding office, receiving a naval commission,
being called to the bar, or taking a degree at a university, placing them on the same
footing as all other non-Anglicans at this time (Rabin, ‘Seeing Jews and Gypsies,’ p. 40).
19 Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew (Detroit, 1970), vol. 1, p. 108.
20 Arbell, Jewish Nation, 204.
21 Arbell, Jewish Nation, pp. 214, 215.
22 Quoted in Mindie Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and
Society in Antigua and Barbuda (Washington, D.C., 1994), p. 25.
23 Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Nevis, from 1664, to 1739, inclusive (London,
1740), pp. 11, 12. As Karen Fog Olwig has noted, Jews in Charlestown, Nevis, ‘were
alleged to deal with slaves who sold them stolen goods and thus to practice unfair trade.
373
Similar accusations were made against Jews throughout the West Indies and seem to have
been occasioned by the fact that they controlled a large part of the trade on several
islands.’ See Olwig, Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the Afro-
Caribbean Community of Nevis (Chur, Switzerland, 1993), p. 63.
24 Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire (New York, 1981), p. 317.
25 Holly Snyder, ‘Rules, Rights, and Redemption: The Negotiation of Jewish Status in British
Atlantic Port Towns,’ Jewish History 20 (2006), pp. 147–70, here p. 153.
26 Will and codicil of Haim Abinum de Lima, 27 June 1765 and 2 December 1765,
‘Abstracts of Nevis Wills in the P[rivy]. C[ouncil]. C[ollections],’ in Oliver, Caribbeana,
vol. 2, pp. 158–59. The term ‘Sepher’ or ‘Sefer’ refers to any of a number of Jewish
sacred books, most commonly the Torah.
27 Will of de Lima, Caribbeana, vol. 2, p. 159.
28 Marcus, Colonial American Jew, vol. 1, p. 99.
29 ‘Jews of Nevis’, unattributed typescript, Nevis Historical and Conservation Society,
Charlestown, Nevis, p. 3. De Mezqueta appears in 1692 as ‘Mr Abraham Buino
Demesquieta’, one of nine Barbadian Jews possessed of ‘houses and plantations on the
island’; see Frank Cundall, et al., ‘Documents Relating to the History of the Jews of
Jamaica and Barbados in the Time of William III’, Publications of the American Jewish
Historical Society 23 (1915), pp. 25–30, here p. 29.
30 Will of Isaac Pinheiro, in Leo Hershkowitz, Wills of Early New York Jews, 1704–1799
(New York, 1967), pp. 21–24; Stern, American Jewish Families, p. 250.
31 Ibid., p. 24. Solomon Israel also served as a witness to the wills of the vintner George
Richardson and the merchant Azariah Pinney, founder of the ‘West-India Fortune’
analysed by Richard Pares; he is notable for being perhaps the only Jew in the English
West Indian colonies to have been permitted to serve as a juror, a responsibility restricted
by law and custom to members of the Church of England.
32 Marcus, Colonial American Jew, p. 99.
33 Friedman, ‘Wills’, p. 158.
34 See David Hancock, ‘Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: The
Invention of Madeira Wine’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1998), pp. 197–220.
35 C.O. 187/1 and 187/2, Naval Office Returns, Nevis, 1720–29, National Archives of the
United Kingdom, Kew.
36 C.O. 187/1 and 187/2.
37 The phrase is that of Bernard Bailyn in ‘Politics and Social Structure in Virginia’, in James
M. Smith, ed., Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1959), p. 111.
38 Michelle M. Terrell, The Jewish Community of Early Colonial Nevis (Gainesville, Fla.,
2005), p. 147.
39 Malcolm H. Stern, First American Jewish Families: 600 Genealogies, 1654–1977
(Cincinnati, 1978), p. 250.
40 ‘An Act to repeal a certain Act against the Jews’, The Laws of the Leeward Islands, in Acts
of Assembly Passed in the Island of St. Christopher; From the Year 1711, to 1769 (St.
Christopher, 1769), p. 11.
41 Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century synagogues appeared in the English colonies in
Barbados (Bridgetown and Speightstown), Jamaica (Port Royal, Spanish Town, and
Kingston), Nevis (Charlestown), New York (New York City), Georgia (Savannah),
Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Rhode Island (Newport), South Carolina (Charleston), and
Virginia (Richmond).
42 Marcus, ‘The American Colonial Jew: A Study in Acculturation’, The B. G. Rudolph
Lecture in Judaic Studies, Syracuse University, 1968, p. 19.
43 Arbell, Jewish Nation, p. 221.
374
44 See Richard Pares, Yankees and Creoles: The Trade between North America and the West
Indies before the American Revolution (London, 1956).
45 Sarna, ‘Port Jews in the Atlantic: Further Thoughts’, Jewish History 20 (2006), pp. 213–19,
here 214.
46 Sarna, ‘Port Jews,’ p. 215; Pencak, ‘Jews and Anti-Semitism’, pp. 368, 369, 374.
47 Pencak, ‘Jews and Anti-Semitism’, p. 371; Leo Hershkowitz, ‘Rebecca Franks, 1760–1823’,
Jewish Women’s Archive (http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/franks-rebecca), consulted 16
February 2014.
48 Sarna, ‘Port Jews’, pp. 216, 217.
375
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ISLAM AND THE ATLANTIC
Denise A. Spellberg
T he phrase ‘Islam and the Atlantic’ invokes more than the category of religion, for
Islam as a political and cultural presence has had a real but also imagined presence
in what we implicitly define as a Europeanized, Christian Atlantic world since its
inception. Muslims lived in this Atlantic but, ironically, their practice of the faith was
often obscured in favor of discourses about notional Muslims who, whether depicted
as eternal enemies or as future citizens, provided a foil to emerging definitions of
European religious persecution and tolerance, particularly in the Anglo-Atlantic.
A history of Islam in the Atlantic world in all its imperial incarnations has yet to
be written. What follows is a thematic, anecdotal introduction to the permutations of
Islam – and the presence of Muslims, largely focused on the British and Spanish
imperial spheres, with some attention to the Dutch and Portuguese realms. But let us
commence with a very different possible beginning for Islam in the Atlantic…
Europeans may receive credit for the maritime ‘discovery’ and colonization of the
Atlantic world, but some historians now assert that Muslims crossed this ocean first.
The most serious of these claims, however, are hardly definitive, nor have they
enjoyed widespread acceptance or even acknowledgment by Atlantic historians. The
earliest of these reports within the Islamic sphere dates from the tenth century, when
the historian al-Mas’udi (d. 956), who never ventured west of Egypt, stated in his
chronicle that beyond the navigable ocean, Muslims accepted that there was yet
another ocean, described as ‘unnavigable due to its darkness’ (Sezgin, 2011: 130).
This, of course, was the Atlantic. There even exist reports that Sultan Muhammad
Abu Bakr, the ruler of Mali, not only dispatched a fleet from his West African
kingdom, with the directive that they reach ‘the other side of the ocean,’ but that after
a first unsuccessful attempt, the Muslim ruler joined a second naval expedition,
which ‘never returned.’ The year was 1312 (Sezgin 2011: 132).
The claims that Muslims discovered a ‘New World’ by crossing the Atlantic have
not met with much academic acceptance, and those who have attempted to teach
these events as fact have met with ridicule and significant resistance, particularly in
the U.S. (Bennetta 2003). However, historically, we are on more solid ground when
appreciating that the Atlantic world’s discovery by Christian Europeans succeeded,
in part, because of their reliance on earlier Islamic scientific breakthroughs. Beyond
376
– chapter 21: Islam and the Atlantic –
the astrolabe and nautical compass, Muslim navigators excelled in determining

longitudinal precision as early as the eleventh century, a skill which Columbus
inherited directly (Sezgin 2011: 149). For example, he would have known from
Islamic calculations that ‘one equatorial degree equals 56 and 2/3 miles’ (Sezgin
2011: 154). There is also evidence that Muslim pilots were used by the Portuguese
explorer Vasco da Gama to explore the West coast of Africa (Sezgin 2011: 151).
Among the crew who sailed with Columbus, including the part owner of the Pinta
and Ñina, there were reputedly Spaniards of Muslim descent (Dirks 2006: 62–64).
The presence of these moriscos, former Muslims forcibly Christianized, has been
accepted by serious historians (Gomez 2005: ix).
Yet whether these individuals still practiced Islam in their transatlantic trek has
not been verified and, indeed, is unlikely, at least, officially. The reason? By 1501,
practicing Muslims and Jews were banned from crossing the Spanish Atlantic (Gomez
2005: 14). By 1508, the ‘children and grandchildren of the converts of Jews and
Muslims’ were also forbidden passage across the Atlantic by order of King Ferdinand,
an assertion which would be repeatedly reaffirmed by Spanish authorities (Cook
2008: 37). The intent of this policy was to keep the ‘corrupting’ influence of Islam
and Judaism away from Native Americans, destined for conversion to the ‘true’
Catholic faith. Despite these prohibitions, Karoline P. Cook has discovered roughly
100 individuals who were accused of practicing Islam in the Spanish New World,
most often the charges are recorded in Inquisition records (Cook 2008: 5).
There is more conclusive evidence that European forays into North Africa resulted
in the enslavement of Muslims who then, against their will, traversed the Atlantic.
One such notable, documented case is that of a Moroccan from Azemmour, whose
hometown on the eastern Atlantic littoral had fallen to the Portuguese in 1513.
Enslaved as the result of Portuguese conquest, this Muslim served his Spanish owner
and became known as Estevanico de Dorantes. He crossed the Atlantic during a
Spanish expedition to Florida in 1527, which was driven aground near Tampa, due
to a hurricane. Thus began Estevanico’s trek, along with the remaining survivors, to
Mexico via Texas. The Moroccan not only survived privation and a second
enslavement by Native Americans in Texas, he later joined a Spanish expedition of
exploration in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold, which led him overland
through New Mexico and Arizona. Estevanico was killed by Native Americans in
New Mexico in 1539 (GhaneaBassiri 2010: 11–12). He and other members of his
party are credited with the earliest Spanish exploration of Texas – and the Southwest,
which remains the first documented account of a probable Muslim explorer taking
active part in the European quest to expand the borders of their New World. His
Spanish contemporaries referred to Estevanico as black and Arabic-speaking, but
Christian, possibly because of the prohibition against Muslims in the Spanish New
World (GhaneaBassiri 2010: 10, n. 6; Gomez 2005: 5). This transatlantic tale reminds
us that the Atlantic coast of West Africa included a considerable Islamic presence and
point of contact with Europeans. It was also not uncommon for European traders,
captured by North African corsairs, to convert to Islam, be ransomed and expand
their commercial reach into the Caribbean, which Kristen Block has documented for
Spanish, French, and English merchants (Block 2012: 57, 68, 159).
Whether former Muslims sailed with Columbus or not, it is certain that these
European voyages of discovery had been initiated to find alternative routes around the
377
– Denise A. Spellberg –
Islamic-controlled Mediterranean and Red Sea, then the only maritime access to coveted
commodity markets in the Indian Ocean and China. In sailing west, across the Atlantic,
Europeans really intended to go east, avoiding the powerful presence in Egypt of the
Mamluks (1250–1517) and, later, the Ottomans (1517–1923). The European discovery
of the Atlantic was thus propelled by avoidance of Islamic political and commercial
dominance in the Mediterranean. The two bodies of water cannot be separated when
writing a history of Islam in the Atlantic (GhaneaBassiri 2010: 10). A case for this
‘triangle’ (England, the Muslim Mediterranean, and America) has been advanced by
Nabil Matar for the English since the sixteenth century (Matar 1999: 83–84).
Once Europeans navigated successfully across the Atlantic, they brought with
them foodstuffs for cultivation that had been discovered in the eastern Islamic world
under the patronage of the Abbasid dynasty (r. 750–1258) in Baghdad. These new
crops were then diffused westward to Islamic North Africa, Spain, and Sicily. Muslims
not only spread these new crops of sugar cane, rice, cotton, and citrus; they hybridized
them in areas that would fall under Christian control in the Iberian peninsula by
1492 (Watson 1983: 15–51). Muslim agricultural breakthroughs were accompanied
by Islamic technological advances in irrigation in places like Valencia, Spain. These
were replicated by Franciscan monks around their San Antonio, Texas, missions in
the seventeenth century (Glick 1972). Most of these Muslim-pioneered crops required
not just advanced irrigation techniques, but the importation of African slave labor to
both South and North America.
Among these West African slaves were many practicing Muslims. Estimates of this
population are not precise and vary geographically, but at highest count the expert
Sylviane Diouf has proposed, for all of the Americas and the Caribbean, that 15 to
20 percent of African slaves were Muslim, while another historian suggests the lower
figure of 10 percent (Diouf 1998: 48). Many Muslims from West Africa, particularly
from Senegambia and Sierra Leone, often possessed agricultural expertise in rice
cultivation. White, British colonists preferred these mostly Muslim slaves for their
plantations in the southern states of North America, particularly South Carolina,
Georgia, and Louisiana (Carney 2001; Diouf 1998:47). The demand for slaves to
tend crops first developed in the Islamic world, especially sugar cane, rice, and cotton,
ironically, propelled the transport of the greatest number of Muslims throughout the
Atlantic world. The very appellations in Spanish and English for key Islamic crops
reflect Arabic origins: al-sukkar, for zucar in Spanish or sugar in English; and al-ruz,
for arroz in Spanish or rice in English. And these are just a few of the terms for New
World crops with similar linguistic antecedents.
European Christian voyages of discovery were propelled by reactions against
Islamic maritime dominance, on the one hand, while, on the other, they succeeded
because of Muslim breakthroughs in navigational technology. Although Europeans
refused to credit these Islamic precedents as ingredients in their successful Atlantic
ventures, they also brought with them knowledge about Islam as a religious and
political system, which they transplanted in their New Worlds. Indeed, learned
historians such as Nabil Matar, have argued that the English template for understanding
Native Americans had been shaped by earlier, violent encounters with Muslims in the
North African and the Ottoman sphere: ‘As they [the English] began their conquest of
the Americas they transported their anti-Muslim ideology of religious war across the
Atlantic and applied it to the American Indians’ (Matar 1999: 130).
378
This doctrine of a holy war against Muslims, transplanted to the New World’s
indigenous inhabitants, also existed in Spanish lands. There, Santiago, the patron
saint of the Christian Reconquista against Islamic political control in Iberia, received
the honorific Matamoros, or Muslim Slayer, a title which morphed in his New World
incarnation into Mataindios, the Slayer of Native Americans. When Santiago’s
birthday is recalled annually on July 26th throughout the Catholic Mediterranean
and Spanish America, it is customary to celebrate still with mock conflicts between
Moros (Muslims) and Cristianos (Christians). At the end of these public performances,
Santiago Matamoros appears on a white horse, holding a thunderbolt, ready to
exterminate the Muslim threat, a holiday annually celebrated in Chimayo, New
Mexico, by actors on horseback (Harris 2000: 18–19, 183, 206–8). The original
conflict in New Mexico, however, was not between the Spanish and enemy Muslims,
but between the Spanish and Native Americans at the Battle of Acoma, where the
Pueblo were defeated in 1598 (Spellberg 2004: 152).
This is but one example of the enduring antipathy to an Islamic enemy from Europe
reincarnated on the other side of the Atlantic. The phrase moros y cristianos persists
less dramatically in Cuba and Brazil as a dish combining black beans (the Muslims)
and white rice (the Christians). As we shall see, the imputation of blackness to Muslims
was part of their definition on both sides of the Atlantic. Sometimes the comestible
combination is referred to simply as arroz moro, or Muslim rice, a reference that did
not honor the special agricultural skills of Islamic slaves cultivating that crop.
The transposition of Islam as the religion of a more powerful political enemy also
existed in the English Atlantic world. Nabil Matar argues that Britons, who could
not assert dominance over the Ottomans or against North African corsairs in the
Mediterranean by the end of the sixteenth century, ‘began to demonize, polarize, and
alterize’ Muslims (Matar 1999: 12). For some English explorers, such as Captain
John Smith, this was not difficult to do. He had begun his life of adventure battling
the Ottomans in Hungary, where he was captured and became the slave of a Muslim
woman (Marr 2006: 2). After escaping, he created a coat of arms emblazoned with
the heads of three Turks, whom he had slain. When his ventures of exploration and
conquest became transatlantic, Smith named a coastal area of northern Massachusetts
after the Muslim woman who had once owned him but had treated him kindly and
then named three coastal islands after those infamous three Turks from his earlier
crusading life (Marr 2006: 2). Just as a Muslim woman had once come to his rescue,
but is seldom remembered, Smith would become more famous for his encounter with
the Native American woman, Pocahontas. But, he opined in 1616 that his countrymen
‘were more interested in the Mediterranean than in America’ (Matar 1999: 58). Thus,
individual not just collective British experiences with Islam ‘prefigured’ interactions
with Native Americans as the barbaric enemy Other (Marr 2006: 2–3).
The very terms used by Europeans to define Muslims reflected the fusion of hostility
and misunderstanding which also crossed the Atlantic (Spellberg 2013: 25–26). The
two most common pre-modern terms in English for Muslims were ‘Turk’ and
‘Mahometan.’ The former, because of the Ottoman military threat, became
synonymous with all Muslims, regardless of ethnicity. By the sixteenth century, the
word was hardly neutral: it signified someone ‘cruel’ and ‘tyrannical,’ a barbarian
(Spellberg 2006: 489–91) Even after the Ottoman military threat subsided following
the second, unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683, the rulers of the Ottoman North
379
African regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers, were still correctly recognized by
Europeans as rulers of Turkish extraction.
The word ‘Mahometan,’ in English usage since the sixteenth century, indicated one
who (incorrectly) worshipped Muhammad, rather than, God, the more accurate
description of a Muslim’s beliefs (Oxford English Dictionary 1970: 6:38). Orthographical
variations of this term abounded in English, while both the French and English also
employed the more accurate form of ‘Mussulman’ or ‘Mussulmen,’ which was closer
to the Arabic collective noun: muslimun. The latter European variation is still employed
by the French today (Dakhlia and Vincent 2011). The English and, eventually,
Americans also employed the word ‘Moor,’ which originally meant an inhabitant of
North Africa as defined by the Roman province Mauretania, the home of the ‘Maurus.’
In Spanish, the equivalent became moro, which, like Moor, implied that the individual
in question possessed dark or black skin. Hence, the term ‘blackamoor’ in English, the
variation in Portuguese is blackmoor (Gomez 2005: 7; Spellberg 2013: 26).
According to Maria Elena Martínez, the evolution of an Islamic religious identity
into a racial one reached its final destination in seventeenth-century Spanish America,
where the word morisco, which originally meant a Muslim convert to Christianity,
would be transformed in Mexican casta paintings into a reflection of racial hierarchies
in the Spanish New World (Martínez 2008: 165). Thus, the Mexican Inquisition
reviewed the case of Beatriz de Padilla, described in 1658 as ‘an unmarried morisca,
daughter of a Spaniard and a free mulatta’ (Martínez 2008: 165). (The Spaniard
father was understood as white, while the mother’s designation as mulatta meant a
female descendant from a white Spanish male and a black woman.) Thus, the original
implication of the term moro, with its heritage of Islamic belief and insinuation of
blackness, morphed into part of a raza, or race. This racial identity finally prevailed
over any retention of Islam as a religious marker for the inhabitants of Mexico
through the eighteenth century.
What Europeans knew about Islam on both sides of the Atlantic was the product of
a Christian print culture that demonized Muslims and their beliefs. Christians, whether
Catholic or Protestant, envisioned the Antichrist as an incarnation of Muhammad or
the Ottoman sultan. Martin Luther (1483–1586) asserted that ‘the Antichrist is at the
same time the pope and the Turk, meaning the Ottoman sultan’ (Forrell 1945: 264).
German woodcuts dramatically reproduced these images for the illiterate (Scribner
1994: 182–83). In linking this Islamic Antichrist to his commentaries on the book of
Daniel, Luther merely reconstituted and redirected an earlier Catholic theological
stance, which defined the Prophet as the Antichrist’s harbinger (Daniel 1966: 184–85).
Like Luther, the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509–64) believed that the
Prophet Muhammad and the pope represented the two-horned Antichrist (Slomp
1995: 134). In the sixteenth century, Catholic theologians responded to these Protestant
polemics with charges of their own that excoriated Luther as no better than the Turks:
The Turk tears down churches and destroys monasteries – so does Luther, the
Turks turn convents into horse stables and make canon out of church bells – so
does Luther. The Turk abuses and treats lasciviously all female persons, both
secular and spiritual. Luther is just as bad for he entices monks and nuns out of
their monasteries into false marriages.
(Miller 1994: 146)
380
For one Christian, no matter what denomination, to defame a fellow believer in

terms of Islam would continue as a standard libel, beginning in the sixteenth century,
a slur which still persists in the Atlantic world (Spellberg 2013: 20–22).
The Englishman John Foxe (1516–87) detailed the horrible suffering of Protestant
martyrs at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, with illustrations, a tract which flourished
on both sides of the British Atlantic. In this text, Protestants perceived Catholics and
Muslims as cruel religious enemies, with twin missions of conquest and conversion, a
logical extension of their theological depiction as the Antichrist (Spellberg 2013: 17–18).
In 1697, the Anglican cleric Humphrey Prideaux’s anti-Islamic polemic, The True
Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in the Life of Mahomet became the equivalent of
an Anglo-Atlantic best seller, with multiple editions in England and editions printed in
Philadelphia (1758), Connecticut (1784), and Vermont (1798) (Allison 2000: 14). Great
Awakening preachers such as Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) interpreted the book of
Revelation to include the destruction of Islam (Marr 2006: 89). These virulently anti-
Islamic Christian polemics represented the most dominant vision of Islam, not as a
religion but as a heresy invented by a violent, fanatical prophet, a view that had changed
little since the eighth century (Spellberg 2006: 488–89).
Yet among these predominantly anti-Islamic treatises, versions of the Qur’an also
crossed the Atlantic into Dutch and British North America. To focus on just four that
survived the trip reveals the variety of their provenances and reception. One of these,
perhaps the earliest in North America, belonged to a man named Anthony Jansen van
Salee, also known as Anthony ‘the Turk’ (GhaneaBassiri 2010: 9). Presumably, his
surname indicates his origin from the Moroccan Atlantic citadel of Salé, a notorious
port for Muslim corsairs. As Kambiz GhaneaBassiri recounts: ‘Anthony immigrated
to New Amsterdam sometime around 1630 as a colonist for the Dutch West India
Company’ (GhaneaBassiri 2010: 9). His father was, most likely, a Dutch privateer,
who had fought the Spanish in the Mediterranean, but was captured by Muslim
raiders from North Africa and converted to Islam, reaching the status of admiral
under the ruler or Morocco. Anthony’s mother was believed to be Moroccan. When
he died in 1676, he left in his will to his New York City descendants his copy of the
Qur’an (GhaneaBassiri 2010: 9). In what language was this Qur’an? We do not
know. But its preservation and passage to his descendants by this man of Islamic
heritage suggests the importance it retained for its owner.
Although ‘the Turk’s’ Qur’an was probably the earliest copy to reach North
America, there were others which followed close behind. Cotton Mather (d. 1728),
a scion of Puritan Massachusetts Bay, made several un-ironic allusions to the
Qur’an in The Christian Philosopher (1721), a treatise which asserts ‘the harmony
between science and religion’ (Mather 1994: lxix). The section which refers to the
Qur’an begins rather unflatteringly: ‘To render us more sensible thereof [of modern
philosophy], we will propose a few points of the Mahometan Philosophy, or Secrets
reveal’d unto Mahomet, which none of his Followers, who cover so much of the
Earth at this Day, may dare to question’ (Mather 1994: 110). Mather, as Christian
Scientist, then goes on to paraphrase Qur’anic references to natural phenomenon
such as the stars in the heavens (Mather 1994: 111, 346–47; Qur’an 37: 6–10);
earthquakes (Mather 1994: 111, 347; Qur’an: 214:33), and thunder/thunderbolts
(Mather 1994: 111, 347; Qur’an 18:40). Mather probably owned the first English
translation of the Qur’an, done in 1649 by Alexander Ross, based on an earlier
381
French version (Matar 1998: 79). There was an initial uproar in London over this
translation, which many feared would encourage good Christians to embrace
Islam. For a time, the publisher was thrown in prison (Matar 1998: 76–82). Ross
ultimately defended his work, asserting that staunch Christians would not be
inveigled away from their faith. The history of European translations of the Qur’an
continued to be inextricably linked to Christian polemic (Elmarsafy 2009: 1–2).
Thus, owning a Qur’an did not necessarily contribute to a Christian’s accurate
understanding of Islam.
Yet the Christian philosopher Mather referenced not only the Qur’an, but also a
quite different translation of a work of medieval Islamic philosophy by Ibn Tufayl (d.
1185). This work, originally titled Hayy ibn Yaqzan in Arabic, Mather cited from
either a Latin version, translated in 1671 as Philosophus Autodidactus, or a later
seventeenth-century English translation of the tale, which came to be known as The
Self-Taught Philosopher. Mather praised the Muslim philosopher, who, ‘more than
five hundred years ago,’ had demonstrated that ‘without any Teacher, but Reason in
a serious View of Nature, led to the Acknowledgment of a Glorious GOD’ (Mather
1994:11–12). Mather praised Ibn Tufayl for already demonstrating in his allegory
what the native of Massachusetts also attempted to prove in his Christian philosophy:
that by simply ‘using his Rational Faculties,’ one would inevitably come to understand
not only natural science, but also accept the existence of God. Mather exclaimed:
‘God has thus far taught a Mahometan!’ which Mather intended, in turn, as a lesson
for fellow Protestant Christians (Mather 1994: 12). In the midst of a plethora of
predominantly biased, negative information about Islam, Cotton Mather
demonstrated that other avenues of Islamic learning also could influence devout
Christians across the Atlantic.
Mather was not alone in being influenced by this Islamic philosophical tract. It is
probable that John Locke derived his view of the mind as a tabula rasa from it, for
the son of Edward Pococke, his favorite professor and first chair of Arabic at Oxford,
had translated the treatise in 1671, the year in which John Locke began his Essay on
Human Understanding. Historians speculate about the impact of this Islamic
philosophical tract on Locke’s work (Russell 1994: 236–53). But Locke was not
alone in this regard. Englishmen as different as the Society of Friends’ leader George
Keith and Daniel Defoe were influenced by Ibn Tufayl’s work, with many suggesting
that the prototype for Robinson Crusoe had been derived from the Islamic allegory
(Russell 1994: 236–53).
The Qur’an bought by Thomas Jefferson in 1765, eleven years before writing the
Declaration of Independence, was the first translation made directly from Arabic to
English. The task was undertaken in 1734 by the Anglican lawyer George Sale. He
learned his Arabic in London from two Syrian Christians. At the time Jefferson
bought the Qur’an, he was a student of law in Williamsburg, Virginia (Spellberg
2013: 81–82).
Although this version of the Qur’an was financed by an Anglican missionary
society, Sale’s Qur’an, as it came to be known, was by far the most accurate
translation then available. Jefferson would have been struck by Sale’s depiction of
the Prophet Muhammad as ‘the lawgiver of the Arabians’ (Sale 1984: A2). Most
Europeans had long denied the Qur’an as a book of revelation, defaming the
Prophet as an ‘impostor’ and religious fanatic. However, Sale, in his 200-page
382
‘Preliminary Discourse’ demonstrated, for the time, a more even-handed approach

to the faith of Islam. Although he defamed the Prophet as the author of a ‘false
religion,’ he nevertheless praised his virtues, which included ‘piety, veracity, justice,
liberality, clemency, humility, and abstinence’ (Sale 1984: 178). Sale also denied
that Islam had been spread by the sword, a common Christian claim since the eighth
century, and refused to condemn the Prophet’s polygamy, a standard defamation,
asserted in contrast to the celibate Jesus. Instead, Sale emphasized that the Hebrew
prophets had taken more than one wife (Sale 1984: 178). For his condemnation of
the anti-Islamic polemic of his countryman Humphrey Prideaux, the historian
Edward Gibbon would dub Sale posthumously in 1788 as ‘half a Mussulman’
(Spellberg 2013: 271).
There is no direct evidence about what Jefferson learned from his Qur’an or its
lengthy ‘Preliminary Discourse,’ in which Sale outlined Islamic history, ritual, and
law. But he would not be the only American president to own the Muslim sacred text.
In 1806, former president John Adams bought the first edition of the Qur’an printed
in the U.S. at Springfield, Massachusetts (Qur’an 1806). This was not Sale’s
translation, but the American printing of the first English version of 1649, a text
translated from a French original. Arabic Qur’ans have been identified among Muslim
slaves in Georgia, Trinidad, Brazil, and Jamaica (Diouf 1998: 113).
Despite access to the Qur’an, it is clear that during Jefferson’s lifetime he absorbed
and expressed quite negative views of the faith, based on European precedents. For
example, in 1776, he advanced the argument that Muslims only wanted to know
what was in their Qur’an, and nothing more, a view he adopted directly from the
French philosophe Voltaire (Spellberg 2013: 103). This assertion he raised in debate
in the Virginia House of Delegates, arguing that Islam, like Catholicism, repressed
‘free enquiry’ (Spellberg 2013: 103).
However, in the very same year, a few months after writing the Declaration, Jefferson
recorded in his notes this pivotal precedent from his intellectual hero, the English
philosopher John Locke’s Letter on Toleration (1689): ‘[He] sais: “neither Pagan nor
Mahometan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth
because of his religion”’ (Jefferson 1950, 1: 548; Spellberg 2006: 490). Jefferson would
reaffirm this same assertion in his autobiography in 1821, five years before his death.
Despite prosecuting as president an undeclared war against the North African kingdom
of Tripoli, the Founder insisted that his most important legislation, A Bill for Establishing
Religious Freedom, made law in 1786, included protections for Muslim civil rights. He
asserted that the Bill ‘meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection, the Jew
and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and the Infidel of every
denomination’ (Jefferson 1998: 46; Spellberg 2006: 490). Presumably, Jefferson’s
principled forecast for the inclusion of future Muslims as American citizens construed
them as white – and free.
It is clear that Jefferson never connected the Muslims in his theory of political
equality with the actual practice of Islam in America, where practitioners of the faith
may well have labored on his own plantations. Although this cannot be proved for
Jefferson, based on slave nomenclature, we know that George Washington owned at
least two Muslim slaves. We find on his 1774 list of taxable ‘items’ the names of two
Muslim slaves: ‘Fatimer’ and ‘Little Fatimer,’ two women indubitably named after
the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima (d. 632) (Thompson 2010: 2:392–93).
383
As the historian Michael Gomez has stated, ‘Muslims arrived in North America by
the thousands, if not tens of thousands’ (Gomez 2005: 166). This means that this
religious minority outnumbered Jews in the eighteenth century, and possibly,
Catholics awash in a Protestant majority. Neither Washington nor Jefferson ever
attested to witnessing the practice of Islam on their plantations. Reasons for this may
vary, but certainly include the fact that Muslims were a minority among slaves, and
may well have practiced their faith singly – and in secret.
Jefferson’s inclusive view of future Muslim citizens co-existed with his
predominantly, but not exclusively, negative view of Islam as a faith (Spellberg 2013:
236–39). In this seemingly contradictory position, he was not alone, for Roger
Williams, often designated as the earliest champion of religious liberty in North
America, professed similar views. Although Jefferson adopted the idea of Muslims as
future citizens with civil rights from Locke, not Williams, the founder of the
Providence Colony in Rhode Island also condemned Islam, even while he defended
the liberty of conscience of its adherents. Echoing standard Protestant defamations of
both the Prophet and the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Williams forecast that
‘the Pope and Mahomet’ would soon be in the ‘Ashes’ of hell (Williams 1963: 5:
Dedication 3). Muslims, in his estimation, had no chance of salvation.
But the heretical belief that Muslims, indeed all believers, would be saved regardless
of their faith – did exist among some Catholics throughout the Atlantic world, as
Stuart Schwartz has demonstrated for both the Portuguese and Spanish empires
(Schwartz 2008). In cases brought before the Inquisition, this belief would be
condemned as the heresy of Origen of Alexandria (d. 254). It was not unknown for
even Old Christians, those without the ‘taint’ of previous Jewish or Muslim ancestry,
to swear, as the peasant Juana Perez did before the Spanish Inquisition in 1488 that
‘the good Jew would be saved and the good Moor, in his law, and why else had God
made them?’ (Schwartz 2008: 22). But, it also should be remembered, that Roger
Williams described his own brother in Providence as one who ‘runs strongly to
Origins’s [sic] notion of universal mercy at last, against an eternal sentence’ (Williams
1963: 5: xxxii, n. 1). While such beliefs are not quantifiable, they existed among both
Protestants and Catholics in the Spanish and British Atlantic spheres amidst virulent
anti-Islamic sentiment.
Also coexisting with Williams’ dire salvific forecasts, we see the earliest expression
of his embrace of universal religious toleration that included Muslims in his The
Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience, published in 1644.
More than ten times, Williams defended the right of Muslims to worship freely,
without coercion or violence perpetrated upon them by Christian ruling authorities
(Spellberg 2013: 58). In one such passage, he invoked their future as neighbors whose
beliefs should not be the subject of state control.
And I ask, whether or no such as may hold forth other Worships or Religions
(Jews, Turkes, or Antichristians) may not be peaceable and quiet Subjects, loving
and helpfull neighbours, faire and just dealers, true and loyall to the civill
government? It is clear they may from all Reason and Experience in many
flourishing Cities and Kingdoms of the World and so offend not against the civill
State and Peace; nor incurre the punishment of the civill sword…
(Williams 1963: 3: 142)
384
Figure 21.1 The title page of Roger Williams’ ‘Bloudy Tenent’ 1644
Courtesy Library of Congress
385
As a working template for an ideal government, Williams as President of Providence

Plantations, adopted a truly Atlantic metaphor – a ship of state – in 1655, one in
which ‘It hath fallen out sometimes, that both papists and protestants, Jews and
Turks, may be embarked upon one ship; upon which supposal I affirm, that all the
liberty of conscience, that I ever pleaded for, turns upon these two hinges – that none
of the papists, protestants, Jews or Turks, be forced to come to the ship’s prayers or
worship…, if they practice any’ (Williams 1963: 6: 278–79). In this vessel, he made
room, once again for Muslims – and Jews – and even Catholics, at a time when all
three were despised on both sides of the Atlantic by English Protestant majorities.
Historians who have remarked upon the inclusion of Jews in this vision often have
argued that by adding Muslims to this list of believers, Williams was actually further
marginalizing Jews from the normative Christian viewpoint (Cohen 1992: 17). But
this was not his intention, for Williams sought to extend the religious toleration of
the government to all believers. By including Muslims in his purview, he was making
a case for a universal, if still theoretical, category of religious inclusion in the Atlantic
world, one that would be echoed indirectly by both Locke and Jefferson.
Although Williams claims to have met and conversed with real Muslims in his
homeland (Williams 1988: 2:664), there is no evidence that any actual Muslims
applied to become members of his colony, despite a recent rather dubious declaration
in Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America: A Genealogical History, which
states as an unverified assertion: ‘The presence of Jews and Muslims among its
[Rhode Island’s] settlers, and Freemasons, is to be expected’ (Hirschman and Yates
2012: 187). While there is certainly evidence of a Sephardic Jewish population in
Newport, there is absolutely no proof of an active Muslim presence in Williams’
colony of Rhode Island.
Yet, even in Dutch Long Island, settlers forecast and defended the ideal of Muslim
religious liberty from government control in 1657, presumably, without the presence
of real practitioners of Islam. (This was two years after Williams’ vision of his multi-
religious ship of state.) We find this idea endorsed in a document that would come to
be known as the Flushing Remonstrance. The thirty-one signatories invoked the
Golden Rule ‘desireing to doe unto all men as wee desire all men shoulde doe unto
us,’ and included ‘Jews, Turkes and Egyptians’ in their plea for the colonial
government of Long Island to stay out of religious matters – for all believers
(Dreisbach and Hall 2009: 108–9).
While Williams forecast that Muslims might one day be passengers on his ideal
ship of state, he never envisioned the very different transatlantic voyage described by
a real Muslim named Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman, a West African slave from Guinea,
bound for servitude in North America in 1788. (The Arabic Ibrahim, for Abraham,
as pronounced by native speakers of African languages, ended in a vowel.) As part of
an autobiography he dictated, Ibrahima wrote:
They sold me directly, with fifty others to an English ship. They took me to the
island of Dominica. After that I was taken to New Orleans. Then they took me
to Natchez, and Colonel F[oster] bought me. I have lived with Colonel F. 40
years. Thirty years I labored hard. The last ten years I have been indulged a
good deal.
(Austin 1997: 81)
386
Through a series of extraordinary coincidences, Ibrahima was granted his

freedom, with the proviso by his owner that he only exercise it once he returned to
Africa. Pleading on Ibrahima’s behalf, a local newspaper editor wrote the senator
from Mississippi, identifying the slave as Moroccan, with a plea that he be allowed
to return to his homeland (Alford 2007: 98). This mistake reflected the enduring but
false American assumption that all Muslims must be from North rather than West
Africa, even in 1826. Ibrahima played up this distinction, insisting that he was a
‘Moor,’ and not a ‘negro’ (Gomez 2005: 181–82). Included in the letter sent to the
senator was a missive written by Ibrahima in Arabic, which was supposed to be a
letter to the ruler of Morocco, but, in reality, was a passage of the Qur’an. The U.S.
government attempted to use Ibrahima’s Islamic identity to curry favor with the
ruler of Morocco, and the sultan volunteered to pay for the slave’s passage to his
putative homeland. However, when Ibrahima actually met the president, he
admitted that he would rather go to Liberia, which was closer to his actual home
(Alford 2007: 120).
By 1828, Ibrahima would be described as ‘the most famous African in America,’
because before returning across the Atlantic to Africa, he went on a tour of
northeastern cities, speaking and often demonstrating his Arabic literacy. When
asked to write the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic, he instead wrote the Fatiha, the Qur’an’s
opening chapter, a subterfuge never identified by his audiences (Austin 1997: 66).
Ibrahima pretended to embrace Christianity to merit the sponsorship of the
American Colonization Society, dedicated to sending free blacks back to Africa to do
business and spread Christianity. In multiple appearances, he attempted to raise
money to free all of his children and grandchildren, but he failed, and Ibrahima
despaired: ‘I desire to go back to my country again; but when I think of my children,
it hurts my feelings. If I go to my own country, I cannot feel happy, if my children are
left’ (Austin 1997: 81). Although his American supporters were convinced of his
Christianity, when Ibrahima spied the shores of Africa in 1829, he began to pray
publicly as a Muslim, a faith he had never renounced. He died a few months after his
return, never finding his way back to his original homeland. His story has been told
by Terry Alford, in his biography, Prince Among Slaves and, most recently, on
television by the Public Broadcasting Corporation, as narrated by Mos Def, in 2008.
The Arabic literacy of Ibrahima changed his life, providing him with the singular
opportunity to return from America across the Atlantic to Africa. More than seventy-
five other cases of Arabic literacy have been documented throughout the Atlantic
world exclusively among men (Austin 1997). However, in West Africa, some estimate
that up to 20 percent of Muslim girls would have attended Qur’an schools, the
equivalent of primary instruction, and, along with boys would have learned some
Arabic (Diouf 1998: 7). Evidence of female Muslim slave literacy does not exist, but
that does not mean that all Muslim women who crossed the Atlantic were illiterate.
Fewer literate girls and women were enslaved and transported, and fewer of those
who survived the Middle Passage would have known Arabic, resulting in this dearth
of written evidence. However, while such literacy might signal the particular
intelligence of individual Muslim male slaves, it often became part of a tactic for
asserting their ‘superiority’ over non-Muslim slaves. Michael Gomez has explained
this tendency as the result of some Muslims identifying in their past African lives as
slaveholders themselves, who often traced their ancestry to early Arab conquerors
387
Figure 21.2 Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman, also known as ‘Prince’.

Caption in Arabic in his own hand reads: ‘His name is Abd al-Rahman.’
Courtesy Library of Congress
(Gomez 2005: 178–79). In Africa, too, Muslims would have elevated their practice
of Islam over other, enemy tribes of non-Muslims. This pronounced self-definition of
Muslim slave superiority was further enhanced by education and literacy in Arabic,
which, in turn, allowed slave masters to singularize those who professed Islam among
the Africans they owned.
388
While Muslim demonstrations of Arabic literacy often resulted in elevated status

and better treatment, the ability to read and/or write was often viewed as suspect by
white owners, and could be dangerous, because in the U.S. teaching any slave to
write was illegal (Diouf 1998: 106–8; Lepore 2002: 125–28). But, when Muslims
arrived from Africa with Arabic literacy, there was little colonial officials throughout
the Atlantic world could do. There is no question that literacy linked Muslim identity
to slave agency.
The Inquisition in Spanish colonies actively prosecuted those thought to be writing
Islamic amulets for protection. And Spanish colonial authorities repeatedly blamed
Muslim slaves and former slaves as troublemakers for precipitating uprisings among
Native Americans in Hispaniola (1522–32), Mexico (1523), Cuba (1529), Panama
(1550–82), Venezuela (1550), Peru (1560), Ecuador (1599), Guatemala (1627),
Chile (1647), and Martinique (1650) (Diouf 1998: 147).
By the time of the Haitian slave revolt in 1791, there was a clear connection between
the written Arabic word and the uprising, according to both Michael Gomez and
Sylviane Diouf (Gomez 2005: 86–87; Diouf 1998: 128–34). On this sugar-producing
island, Tamerlan, a forty-four year old slave named after the Turkic world conqueror
Tamerlane (d. 1405), ‘had written over twenty lines,’ of Arabic. When questioned by
a French authority, he identified the writing as ‘a prayer’ (Gomez 2005: 86–87). Two
months later, the Haitian Revolution began. French authorities insisted that the
leaders were Muslim – and that they were communicating in Arabic. Michael Gomez
believes it more likely that these short texts were, in fact, amulets, verses of the Qur’an
preserved on paper, designed to be worn, usually in leather wrappings, concealed on
one’s person as protection (Gomez 2005: 87–90; Diouf 1998: 128–31).
Arabic amulets served a similar function in the slave revolt in Bahia, Brazil in
1835, where sugar was also the main export (Reis 1993: 15). There remains some
irony in the economic centrality of this crop, pioneered and diffused by Muslims to
Europe, then transferred to imperial colonies throughout the Atlantic, which then
required a steady stream of West African, often Muslim slaves, for production. The
sugar economy spun a connective Islamic web from the introduction of this crop to
Europe, through to the Atlantic presence of Muslim slaves, who would foment revolts
against those who used their labor to produce this commodity.
The classic treatment of the Bahia slave revolt is by João José Reis, who notes that
while Muslims may have led the revolt, they were not in the religious majority (Reis
1993: 97). However, Reis emphasizes that this uprising was not equivalent to jihad,
or any exceptional Islamic quest for dominion in the New World (Reis 1993: 128).
While leaders of the revolt were often designated as Malês, from mu’allim, for
religious teacher, they also rallied non-Muslims to join them. Islamic leaders united
Africans, all of whom were black and unfree. That these scraps of paper bore writing,
even in Arabic, proved a powerful part of the attraction for non-Muslims who had
known only oral culture (Diouf 1998: 129).
One of the reasons non-Muslims joined the Bahia revolt may be explained by their
belief in the power of Islamic amulets. Almost always these papers included the
bismillah in Arabic: ‘In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful’ (Reis
1993: 100–101). But this ubiquitous phrase in Muslim life might then also include
either verses from the Qur’an about protection from the ‘infidel,’ or other, more
magical repetitions of shapes and letters. For example, one talisman invoked the
389
names of the angels Gabriel and Michael, the former believed by Muslims to have
conveyed God’s word in Arabic to the Prophet (Reis 1993: 100). The power of these
amulets lay not just in their religious statements, but was also the product of the
baraka, or blessing, imbued by the special spiritual power of the men who produced
them. All of them were apotropaic in design, but some warded off mundane threats
from humans and spirits. Others were intended to ward off death, most directly in
the revolts. In contradiction to this hope, some of these amulets were recovered from
the bodies of slaves who died in the Brazilian uprising, a testament to the finite limits
of their power (Reis 1993: 99–100).
‘With a documented presence of five hundred years,’ writes Sylviane Diouf, ‘Islam
was, after Catholicism, the second monotheist religion introduced into post-
Columbian America’ (Diouf 1998: 179). If one counts Judaism, it was, perhaps, the
third. Yet Diouf is right to point out that unlike other religions brought by Europeans,
‘not one community currently practices Islam as passed on by preceding African
generations’ (Diouf 1998: 179). While a few survivals of Muslim practice were
recorded along the coast of Georgia in the 1930s by the WPA, only tantalizing
glimpses of possible survivals in other African religions, as well as material culture
and music echo today (Gomez 2005: 155–56). They are the subject of continuing
study. Islam, as a living monotheism, would not return to the Caribbean, South
America, and the United States until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when
new Muslim immigrants from the Middle East appeared.
While the remnants of Islam as a religion introduced into the Atlantic world with
a real West African Muslim slave population in the pre-modern era have withered,
what remains robust is the struggle to define the place of the faith as an intellectual
and religious construct with resonant implications for contemporary Muslims.
Images of Muslims as the eternal enemy Other thrive, sharing much in common with
pre-modern Atlantic antecedents. Such negative precedents continue to conflict with
those unique voices who once challenged the predominance of these stereotypes, and,
in a variety of radical assertions, insisted upon the premise of tolerance, inclusion,
and civic equality for all believers, including the adherents of Islam. The outcome of
this embattled Atlantic past remains to be resolved – on both sides of the ocean.
REF EREN CE S
Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, rptd 2007).
Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000).
Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual
Struggles (New York: Routledge, 1997).
William J. Bennetta, ‘Arab World Studies Notebook lobs Muslim propaganda at teachers.’ The
Textbook League, October 2003. http://www.textbookleague.org/spwich.htm (accessed
April 30, 2014).
Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Caribbean: Religion Colonial Competition, and the
Politics of Profit (Athens: Univgersity of Georgia Press, 2012).
Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Naomi Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992).
390
Karoline P. Cook, ‘Forbidden Crossings: Morisco Emigration to Spanish America, 1492–1650,’

(PhD diss., Princeton University, 2008).
Jocelyne Dakhlia and Bernard Vincent, eds., Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe (Paris:
Albin Michel, 2011).
Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New
York University Press, 1998).
Jerald F. Dirks, Muslims in American History: A Forgotten Legacy (Beltsville, MD: Amana
Publications, 2006).
Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, eds., ‘The Flushing Remonstrance,’ in The Sacred
Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations
in the American Founding (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2009).
Ziad Elmarsafy, The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction
of Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2009).
George W. Forrell, ‘Luther and the War against the Turks,’ Church History 14:4 (1945): 256–71.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
Thomas S. Glick, The Old World Background of the Irrigation System of San Antonio, Texas
(El Paso, TX: University of El Paso Press, 1972).
Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience of African Muslims in the Americas (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000).
Elizabeth Hirschman and Donald Yates, Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America, A
Genealogical History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012).
Thomas Jefferson, ‘Autobiography,’ in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 7–104.
——, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. 40 vols. (Princeton: Princeton
Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
‘Mahometan,’ in The Oxford English Dictionary, 13 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 6:38.
María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in
Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
——, Turks, Moors & Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999).
Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher, ed. Winton U. Solberg (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Gregory H. Miller, ‘Holy War, Holy Terror: Views of Islam in German Pamphlet Literature,’
(PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1994).
Oxford English Dictionary. 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).
The Qur’an: Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mahomet (Springfield, MA: Henry Brewer for
Isaiah Thomas, 1806). John Adams Library, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Arthur
Brakel, trans. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
391
G.A. Russell, ‘The Impact of the Philosphus Autodidactus: Pocockes, John Locke and the
Society of Friends,’ The ‘Arabick’ Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth-
Century England, ed. G.A. Russell (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994): 236–53.
George Sale, trans. The Koran (1734) (New York: Garland Press, 1984).
Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German
Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Fuat Sezgin, Mathematical Geography and Cartography in Islam and Their Continuation in
the Occident. Vol. 4. English version of Vol. XIII of Geschichte Des Arabischen
Schriftums. Translated by Renata Sarma and S.R. Sarma. Revised by Guy Moore and Geoff
Sammon (Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, 2011).
Jan Slomp, ‘Calvin and the Turks,’ in Christian-Muslim Encounters, ed. Yvonne Y. Haddad
and Wadi Haddad (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1995), 126–142.
Denise A. Spellberg, ‘Inventing Matamoras: Gender and the Forgotten Islamic Past in the
United States of America,’ Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 25:1(2004): 148–64.
——, ‘Could a Muslim be President? An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate’, Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 39:4(2006): 485–506.
——, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).
Mary V. Thompson, ‘Mount Vernon,’ Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, ed. Edward
E. Curtis IV, 2 vols. (New York: Facts on File, 2010), 2: 392–93.
Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of
Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution, ed. Samuel L, Calwell, vol. 3 in The
Complete Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963).
——, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glen LaFantasie, 2 vols. (Providence, RI:
Brown University Press/University Press of New England, 1988).
——, George Fox Digg’d out of His Burrowes, ed. J. Lewis Diman, vol. 5 in The Complete
Writings of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963).
——, The Letters of Roger Williams, ed. John Russell Bartlett, vol. 6 in The Complete Writings
of Roger Williams, 7 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963).
392
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AMERICAN IDENTITY
AND ENGLISH CATHOLICISM
Maura Jane Farrelly
T he American Revolution was more than just a physical conflict or the ultimate
articulation of an Enlightenment, ‘contractarian’ approach to government.1
When they broke away from the parent country and declared their full and absolute
independence from Great Britain, England’s colonists in North America took a step
that had profoundly cultural and psychological implications, as well.
The colonists had always thought of themselves as ‘English,’ after all.2 Even the
ones who came to Pennsylvania from Saxony or New York from Sweden understood
in the eighteenth century that what they were living in was an ‘English’ colony.
Indeed, one of the many paradoxes of the American Revolution was that when they
rebelled against England, the Patriots claimed to be doing so in the name of the
‘rights of Englishmen.’ England’s government, they believed, had once been the
world’s most ardent protector of human beings’ natural rights to property, political
representation, personal security, and the rule of law. The English system had become
corrupt, however – sullied by the power-mongering of dishonest MPs who had grown
greedy and ‘corpulent’ as a consequence of the wealth brought into England by the
mercantilist, colonial system.3 To protect themselves from the gangrenous qualities of
this unfortunate corruption, the colonists believed they needed to separate themselves
from the disease’s source – to ‘chop off their right arms,’ so to speak, and forge a new
identity for themselves without the assistance of that appendage that had been such
a vital part of who they were.
To protect their rights as Englishmen, in other words, the residents of England’s
colonies had to proclaim that they were not ‘English’ anymore. The success of the
independence movement, then, raised the unavoidable question of who these former
colonists were, now that they were no longer English. More to the point, it challenged
the first two or three generations of Americans to forge a cultural path for their
grandchildren and great-grandchildren to follow in a brand-new country that had no
common language or religion, and where many of the traditional ties of national
heritage had been thrown off voluntarily.
Historians have typically taught that the creation of a distinct and recognizably
‘American’ national identity took place between 1815 and 1860. It was during these
decades that the United States expanded its reach to the Pacific Ocean; the steam
393
– Maura Jane Farrelly –
engine, ‘Waltham System,’ and a growing network of canals, railroads, and telegraph
lines launched the so-called Market Revolution; race-based slavery was challenged
and ultimately outlawed; and Calvinist Orthodoxy, with its high-minded
intellectualism, limited atonement, and staunchly individualistic approach to
salvation was replaced by a gentler, more ‘democratic’ variety of evangelicalism that
was still pretty judgmental and individualistic, but nevertheless offered the promise
of salvation to everyone, not just the elect – and also did not require a Harvard
degree, as barely literate itinerate preachers like the Methodist Peter Cartwright
made clear.4
I am not looking to challenge this narrative in any way. I think it is useful – but
more than that, I also think it is quite accurate.
I do want to suggest, however, that there were pockets of people who became
‘American’ long before the Erie Canal was built in 1824, if by ‘American’ we mean
an identity that is committed to more than just democratic individualism and free-
market capitalism. If we add to that mix a commitment to republicanism, church–
state separation, and religious pluralism – and if we remember that to become
‘American’ one had to see oneself as ‘non-English’ first – then I think one of the first
populations of Americans may actually have been the Catholic population in
eighteenth-century Maryland, making colonial Maryland very important to scholars’
understanding of how New World experiences shaped – and even changed – Old
World identities.
Now, anyone who is familiar with the Catholic mindset or the Church’s history
will realize that the claim I am making is a somewhat bizarre one. The Catholic
Church, after all, did not actually embrace the principle of church–state separation
until 1965, when the Second Vatican Council drafted its statement on religious
freedom, Dignitatis Humanae. The Catholic Church, of course, is hardly democratic
in its sensibilities. True freedom has never been the purview of the individual for a
Catholic, the way it is for most Americans; true freedom for a Catholic is found
within the community – and with the assistance – of the Church. On top of this, the
rhetoric leading up to the American Revolution, which was really the ultimate
articulation of the principles that would define American identity, was vehemently
anti-Catholic. George III’s decision to allow the free practice of Catholicism in
Quebec was the key development that convinced the colonists that the King, as
opposed to simply Parliament, could no longer be relied upon to protect their liberties.
As one veteran from New Hampshire recalled in 1821, the common cry of the Patriots
was, ‘No King, No Popery.’5
‘American’ identity, scholars such as John McGreevy and Jay Dolan have
acknowledged, is not – and never has been – a natural fit for Catholics. There is an
inherent tension between the individualistic foundation of America’s cultural identity
and the communal and hierarchical orientation of Catholicism’s understanding of
society, authority, morality, and salvation. It would be wrong to say that the American
and Catholic traditions are entirely incompatible with one another; nevertheless, it is
true that Catholicism is, in the words of Dolan, ‘rooted in traditions very different
from those of American culture’ – and that before the Church reforms of the 1960s,
the differences between the two traditions could be quite sharp.6
Yet, the Catholics living in British colonial America at the time of the Revolution
understood the individualistic, rights-oriented language of America’s Founders and
394
– chapter 22: American identity and English Catholicism –
embraced the notion of republican government and church–state separation that

animated the first generation of Americans. Outside Canada, most of Britain’s
colonial Catholics lived in Maryland, a colony that had been founded in 1634 by an
English Catholic nobleman. They supported the independence movement in numbers
that were proportionately greater than those of their Protestant neighbors, as
evidenced by their donations to the Continental Army and their service in that army,
as well as their membership in local committees of safety and the militia units from
Maryland that patrolled the Chesapeake Bay and saw action in New Jersey and
Long Island.7
Protestants in Maryland, who were the majority, were quite reluctant initially to
participate in the boycotts and non-importation agreements leading up to the
Revolution, prompting John Adams to recall many years later that ‘neither the State
of Maryland, nor [any] of their Delegates were very early in their conviction of the
necessity of independence.’8 Unlike the other colonies, Maryland had £25,000 sterling
in the Bank of England, which allowed it to get around a prohibition on the issuing
of paper money that was a part of the widely hated Currency Act of 1764. In 1766,
Maryland’s assembly issued more than £40,000 in paper bills, an action that no
other colony could take and a freedom that tended to make the imperative of
independence less economically obvious to merchants in Maryland.9
But not everyone in Maryland looked at independence primarily in economic
terms. John Adams might be forgiven for not noticing that the colony’s sluggish
response to the question of independence was peppered with a healthy dash of
Catholic ardency. The only Catholic man present at the meeting of the First
Continental Congress in 1774 was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and he was there in
an advisory capacity only; as an advisor, Carroll tended to express his opinions solely
within the confines of Maryland’s delegation. Nevertheless, Charles Carroll revealed
his staunch support for the independence movement a year and a half after the
Continental Congress met for the first time, when he and his cousin, John – a priest
who had been born in Maryland and trained by the Society of Jesus in Europe –
traveled to Quebec on the Congress’s behalf in a failed effort to get Canada’s Catholic
majority to sign onto the independence movement.10
Why Maryland’s Catholics were so willing to embrace independence from England
when their Protestant neighbors were not – and when the individualistic tenets that
the independence movement rested upon were far more compatible with a Protestant
theological outlook than they were with a Catholic one – is a story that reveals much
about both the role of cultural context in the creation of Catholic identity and the
role of religious experience in the creation of American identity. As such, the story of
Maryland’s Catholics in the decades leading up to the American Revolution has
much to teach scholars who are seeking to understand the parameters of cultural
exchange in the Atlantic World.
Until Quebec became a part of the British Empire in 1763 as a consequence of
France’s loss to England in the Seven Years War, Maryland was home to the largest
concentration of Catholics in British colonial America. St. Mary’s County, on the
southern tip of the western shore of the Chesapeake, was the initial area settled when
the first colonists arrived in Cecilius Calvert’s colony in 1634, and for the entire
colonial period, then, St. Mary’s was the county that had the largest number of
Catholics living within it.
395
Figure 22.1 Virginia, Maryland, Chesapeake Bay

©Antiquarian Images/Mary Evans
396
Not only that, but the Catholics who lived in St. Mary’s and neighboring Charles
Counties tended to be quite wealthy – a consequence of the fact that they and their
ancestors had come to Maryland from England, where the recusancy fines that began
to be levied during the reign of King James I all but guaranteed that only the wealthy
(or those who had wealthy benefactors) could afford to remain Catholic. In 1675, for
example, 40 percent of Maryland’s Catholics owned estates that were worth more
than £100, whereas just 25 percent of the freemen overall could make that claim.
More than 80 years later, in 1758, ten of the 20 largest landowners in Maryland were
Catholic, at a time when just 13 percent of the colony’s population identified with the
Church of Rome.11
In spite of the fact that they had a lot to lose – precisely because they were so
wealthy – 79 percent of the Catholic men who married in St. Mary’s County between
1767 and 1784 swore their allegiance to the free state of Maryland, donated money
and supplies to the American war effort, and served in the Continental Army or the St.
Mary’s County Militia. Fifty-eight percent of the men who belonged to the Jesuits’
congregation at St. Inigoes Manor in 1768 did the same, and a genealogical analysis
of the lives of more than 2,000 men from St. Mary’s County who aided the independence
movement reveals that slightly more than half of them were probably Catholic at a
time when the Catholic population of St. Mary’s County was just 25 to 32 percent.12
In contrast, it is estimated that just 30 to 40 percent of Maryland’s population
overall actively supported the war effort. The willingness of Maryland’s merchants to
participate in the boycotts and non-importation agreements leading up to the war
seems to have been tied largely to the health of the colony’s economy, which was good
in the 1760s, but not-so-good after 1772, thanks to a glut in the international tobacco
market. Another relevant factor in Maryland’s ultimate support for independence was
– perhaps ironically – the dependence that the merchant community had on the Port of
Philadelphia. In the eighteenth century, Baltimore Harbor could not handle ships that
had a draft of more than 8 feet, and many of Maryland’s merchants, therefore, relied
on Philadelphia, where the ideological commitment to the boycotts was much stronger.13
But why were Maryland’s Catholics so committed to the independence movement,
when the movement itself was animated by anti-Catholic rhetoric, and its ideology
rested upon an understanding of natural rights as outside the social order that was
anathema to the Church until the twentieth century? Catholic leaders in Europe, such
as Arthur O’Leary, a Franciscan priest from Ireland, condemned the movement as a
‘sedition’ that would most assuredly lead to the revolutionaries’ damnation, in spite
of the fact that England’s government had been no friend to the Catholic Church.14
That Catholics did support the American Revolution was for many years an
assumed, but entirely unproven proposition. Early Catholic historians such as Martin
Griffin and Peter Guilday looked at muster rolls from the revolutionary period and
considered every Irish name they found there to be evidence of Catholic support. In
doing so, these scholars ignored the reality that a sizeable number of the Irish living
in colonial America, especially in the slaveholding South, were Protestants from
Ulster, rather than Catholics from Munster, Leinster, and Connaught. They also
failed to appreciate that the Catholic community in colonial Maryland was English
for the most part, rather than Irish.15
Undoubtedly, part of the reason Catholic historians from the early twentieth
century assumed that their colonial co-religionists had been ardent Patriots was that
397
the converse – namely, that they had been Loyalists – was unflattering and certainly
not the message that Catholic scholars needed to be sending to their Protestant
countrymen in an age when fears of ‘rum, Romanism, and rebellion’ were still
running high.16
But one other reason these early historians assumed that Catholics had been
Patriots may have been that the first two generations of lay Catholics who followed
the Revolutionary War were known – by contemporary priests and non-Catholic
observers alike – to have had some rather strongly democratic sensibilities. These
sensibilities manifested themselves most frequently in the phenomenon of ‘lay
trusteeism,’ a system whereby boards of elected laymen would weigh in on a host of
non-theological matters affecting the Church, ranging from whether or not and how
a new roof might be placed on a chapel, to the selection of priests and the payment
of their salaries.17
John Carroll, the first bishop of the United States, was generally supportive of the
laity’s democratic pretensions – though his reactions to their efforts to treat their
priests as elected servants did, occasionally, smack of the Old World training he had
received from the Jesuits in French Flanders. In 1785, Carroll accused the members
of New York City’s first Catholic parish of ‘acting nearly in the same manor as the
Congregational Presbyterians of your neighboring New England states’ when they
expressed a desire to choose their priest and control the new parish’s budget.
Nevertheless, the native of Prince George’s County, Maryland, did assure the laymen
in New York that he would extend a ‘proper regard’ to them ‘in the mode of the
presentation and election [of pastors].’18
Carroll’s willingness to work with the laity in this way was an impulse that some
of his contemporaries – and certainly many of the bishops who came over from
Europe to assume their positions in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as the
Church’s infrastructure in the new United States grew – did not share. Some clergy,
such as the French-born Stephen Badin of Kentucky, decried the ‘extravagant
pretentions of Republicanism’ that they found among the laypeople they were
working with in the 1790s. Bishop Louis William Dubourg of New Orleans, who
was born in the Caribbean but was sent to live with his grandparents in France at the
age of two, lamented in 1816 that ‘the principles of freedom and independence’ had
been ‘imbibed by all the pores in these United States,’ including the Catholic pores.
In 1829, Bishop James Whitfield, who was born in England and succeeded John
Carroll as the Bishop of Baltimore after Carroll’s death in 1815, convened the First
Provincial Council of Baltimore to address the ‘problem’ of lay trusteeism in the
American Church. At this gathering, the nation’s bishops, nearly all of whom were
foreign-born, designed a plan that they hoped would weaken the power of lay trustees
by requiring that all church properties be deeded to an appropriate bishop. ‘It would
be a great good to religion,’ the clergy in attendance noted, ‘if this simple plan were
universally adopted and the system of church trustees entirely abolished.’19
But in spite of the clerical opposition that the laity faced, America’s Catholics were
still exhibiting ‘pretensions of Republicanism’ three years after the First Provincial
Council of Baltimore met. These pretensions were ‘extravagant’ enough to attract the
attention of the English journalist, Harriet Martineau, during her tour of the United
States. Although Martineau believed it was ‘the Pope’s wish to keep the Catholics of
America a colonial church,’ she observed that the Catholic population in America
398
was ‘democratic in its politics and made up of the more independent-minded

occupations.’ She noted with delight that ‘the Catholic religion is modified by the
spirit of the time in America; and its professors are not a set of men who can be
priest-ridden to any fatal extent.’20
Martineau’s idea that the Catholic faith had been ‘modified by the spirit of the
time’ is how scholars who study the pre-immigrant Church have generally explained
lay trusteeism and the existence of a strongly democratic element in the American
Catholic community during the first few decades that followed the Revolutionary
War. The country’s first Catholics, historian James O’Toole has written, were
‘influenced by broader American notions of authority.’ They were ‘accustomed to the
republican idea that ordinary people such as themselves were the source of power in
civil society,’ and they assumed, then, that that meant they were the source of at least
some power within the Catholic Church, as well.21
Undoubtedly, early American Catholics were influenced by the broader American
notions of authority that characterized their time. This explanation for the Catholic
republicanism found in the early national period certainly has many merits. But the
fact that Catholics in colonial Maryland were more likely than their Protestant
neighbors to support the independence movement – again, in spite of the anti-Catholic
rhetoric that animated that movement – does suggest that something more than just
broad American notions of authority may have been at work in the making of an
‘American’ Catholic identity. Indeed, there may have been something about their
specific experiences as English Catholics in eighteenth-century Maryland that
influenced the members of America’s first Catholic community and encouraged them
to support the Patriots’ cause and embrace the implications that cause had for their
national identity.
The Catholic community in the lower thirteen colonies at the time of the Revolution
was small. A census conducted at the behest of London’s Bishop Richard Challoner
found that there were 16,000 Catholics living in Maryland in 1763, another 8,000 in
Pennsylvania, and approximately 1,500 in New York. No other English colony had
a measurable Catholic population. The Catholics in New York were not served by
any priests, and the census-takers concluded that the New Yorkers’ sense of themselves
as ‘Catholic’ was minimal, at best. The border between Maryland and Pennsylvania
was highly contested until 1776, when the surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah
Dixon finally settled an 84-year-old boundary dispute between the Calvert and Penn
families. It is possible, therefore, that some of the Catholics whom Challoner’s
census-takers placed in Pennsylvania were actually living in Maryland. Regardless of
which colony they actually lived in, though, all of the Catholics in Maryland and
Pennsylvania were served by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, which
never had more than 21 priests working in British North America – and frequently
had fewer than a dozen.22
On the surface, the ratio of one priest for every 1,191 Catholics in colonial America
may seem like a good one, considering that in 2009, the Archdiocese of Boston had
just 749 priests serving a community that was 1.8 million strong (a ratio of 1:2,403).
Colonial Maryland, however, did not have a regular postal service or even a network
of paved roads, let alone the 310 primary and secondary schools, six colleges, 40
Councils of the Knights of Columbus, three newspapers, and one public access
television station that the Archdiocese of Boston has at its disposal to sustain Catholics
399
in modern-day Massachusetts. In colonial Maryland, many lay Catholics were

fortunate if they were able to interact with a priest as frequently as once a month –
and some had to reconcile themselves to making their confessions and receiving
Communion just one time a year.23
In such an environment, it would have been very easy to simply abandon one’s
religious identity – and a few people did. Being Catholic in Maryland was not like being
Catholic in Spain or France, where the cultural and legal landscape was dominated by
the Church. In colonial Maryland, one could not just ‘go with the flow’ and be Catholic.
A man or woman had to actively assume responsibility for his or her religious identity.
People assumed this responsibility when they named their sons after Catholic
saints, even though a name like ‘Ignatius’ or ‘Francis Xavier’ essentially guaranteed
that a boy would never have a political career in Maryland. They asserted their
Catholic identity when they arranged to have their slaves baptized and then married
by a priest, even though slave marriage, which was sacramental for Catholics, was
illegal in the colony. Catholics in Maryland maintained their religious identity by
forming lay sodalities, which did not become popular in Continental Europe until the
Vatican started promoting them in the early nineteenth century as a response to the
secularism and anti-clericism of the French Revolution. In these sodalities, lay
Catholics agreed to pray about the Sacrament of the Eucharist at certain times
throughout the week – often during months when the Eucharist was completely
unavailable to them because weather conditions prevented one of Maryland’s few
priests from visiting them.24
In Maryland, one had to choose to be and remain a Catholic. That decision –
made every single day by individual Catholics, on their own, without the constant
presence and support of a clerical advisor – facilitated the development of a new
Catholic identity that was unlike anything found in Europe and comfortable with the
democratic language of the independence movement. The ‘ownership’ that colonial
Catholics assumed over their religious identity did not, in and of itself, turn them into
Patriots. It was, however, one of the factors that helped to prepare them to accept the
new national identity that was held out to them in the 1770s.25
Of course, Catholics in early-modern England had had to assume a substantial
degree of responsibility for their religious identity, as well – secreting clergy away in
‘priest holes’ and accepting the onerous obligation of recusancy fines. Certainly
Catholic identity became a choice in eighteenth-century England, just as it did in
colonial Maryland, and this choice did have implications for the meaning and nature
of Catholic identity in England at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The Cisalpine
Movement of the 1780s and 1790s revealed a liberal mindset among some of England’s
Catholics that stressed the importance of individual autonomy within the community
of the Church, the limited scope of the Pope’s jurisdiction in England, and the need for
membership within a particular religious organization to be completely voluntary.26
Many of the same forces that compelled Catholics in British colonial America to
take responsibility for their faith also compelled some Catholics in England – whence
Maryland’s Catholics came – to construct a new and personal understanding of what
it meant to be Catholic. Whereas those forces empowered the English to challenge
their church to become more compatible with English identity, in America, the forces
prepared Catholics to accept an entirely new national identity, one that came wrapped
in the rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, but which offered Maryland’s Catholics their best
400
hope for a return to the more tolerant times their ancestors had enjoyed at the time
of Maryland’s founding by a Catholic proprietor.
Those more tolerant times – or specifically, the ‘memory’ that Maryland’s Catholics
constructed of those tolerant times in the decades that followed their demise – hold the
key to understanding how and why British colonial Catholics became something
different from their co-religionists in both England and Continental Europe. To become
‘Americans,’ after all, Catholics in British North America had to do more than simply
find a way of reconciling their faith with the democratic and individualistic principles
upon which American identity would rest. They also had to view themselves as something
other than ‘English’ before they could choose to break away from the parent country.
Maryland had been founded in 1634 by Cecilius Calvert, an English Catholic convert
who owned a barony in Ireland known as ‘Baltimore.’ For the first 55 years of Maryland’s
existence, Catholicism had been tolerated there, in spite of the colony’s ties to England.
Lord Baltimore’s charter gave him the authority to do whatever he deemed was necessary
to keep the peace among Maryland’s religiously mixed residents, and in 1649, after a
particularly nasty rebellion that had been launched by Calvinists who resented being
under the rule of a Catholic proprietor, Cecilius Calvert used his authority to push an
act of religious toleration through the colony’s assembly. It applied to all Christians and
was the first act of religious toleration in the English-speaking world – passed a half-
century before John Locke published his now-famous ‘Letter Concerning Toleration.’
Calvert’s ‘Act Concerning Religion’ was designed to keep religious bigotry at bay so
that Maryland’s residents could learn how to live and work with one another and start
turning a profit in the colony for themselves and their proprietor. The law did more
than simply prevent the government from establishing a church or penalizing people for
worshipping within a particular Christian tradition – practices that were standard in
England, where Catholic priests were guilty of treason simply by virtue of their vocation
and the recusancy fines levied against religious dissenters were high enough to bankrupt
some of them. Calvert’s act also placed an obligation upon the citizens of Maryland
themselves; it required them to be mannerly when it came to the subject of religion.
Residents were barred from using ‘reproachfull words’ about one another’s religious
beliefs, and anyone who used an epithet such as ‘Roundhead,’ ‘Puritan,’ ‘Antinomian,’
or ‘Jesuited Priest’ was to be fined or flogged under the provisions of the act.27
The years that followed the passage of the Act Concerning Religion were far from
consistently peaceful. Many Protestant settlers continued to chafe under the leadership
of a Catholic proprietor and governor, and their displeasure with Calvert and his co-
religionists occasionally expressed itself in ways that became quite violent. Battles
were fought; fines were levied; floggings were ordered. Yet, for the most part, religious
toleration did characterize life in Maryland throughout Cecilius Calvert’s tenure as
proprietor. That toleration continued into the first two decades of his son’s
proprietorship, as well. So long as Maryland’s residents swore that they would ‘be
not unfaithfull to the Lord Proprietary, or molest or conspire against the civill
Government,’ Cecilius Calvert showed himself willing to extend a degree of religious
toleration to them that occasionally went beyond even the limits of the law – as a
Jewish doctor named Jacob Lumbrozo discovered in 1658, when his loyalty to Lord
Baltimore resulted in his being pardoned of the charge of blasphemy, in spite of the
fact that the Act Concerning Religion actually called for the execution of anyone who
denied the divinity of Jesus.28
401
Figure 22.2 Cecil Calvert, first Lord Baltimore

402
Lord Baltimore’s religious toleration, however, was destined to be short-lived. In

1689, angry Protestants in Maryland, emboldened by the Glorious Revolution back
home in England, once again rose up against their Catholic proprietor, who was, by
this point, Cecilius Calvert’s son, Charles. The fighting lasted for nearly three years.
In 1692, then, the Lords of Trade, operating under England’s newly crowned King
William III – who had, himself, achieved his position by challenging the authority of
an English Catholic ruler – revoked Charles Calvert’s charter and appointed a royal
governor who quickly disenfranchised Catholics and began the process of establishing
the Church of England in Maryland. That goal was finally achieved in 1702.29
The Calvert family eventually got the charter back, but only after Charles Calvert’s
son and grandson had converted to Anglicanism. For nearly 90 years, then – from the
Glorious Revolution in 1689 until the American Revolution in 1776 – Maryland’s
Catholics were subjected to a host of laws, drafted and passed by their Protestant
neighbors, which restricted their civil, military, educational, economic, religious, and
even parental rights and behavior.
The legislative onslaught was not continuous, however. It came in fits and starts.
Maryland’s Protestants tended to enact anti-Catholic legislation during times when
they were feeling most insecure about their ‘English’ identity. Historian Jack Greene
has noted that the eighteenth century was a time of high anxiety for many British
colonists when it came to the topic of their national identity. By 1720, after all, the
North Atlantic seaboard was populated with people who thought of themselves as
‘Englishmen’ and relished the rights and liberties that came with that identity, but had
not been born in England – had not even been born to people who had been born in
England – and would probably never visit the island. Throughout the 1720s, 1730s,
and 1740s, therefore, these colonists clung desperately to their English identity, filling
their houses with British furnishings and sipping their tea from British china, ‘so that
they might,’ Greene tells us, ‘with more credibility think of themselves and their
societies – and be thought of by the people in Britain itself – as demonstrably English.’30
In Maryland, the anxieties about English identity were particularly high at times –
at least among Protestants – because of the colony’s Catholic history and its
concentration of Catholic families. The Glorious Revolution, after all, had firmly
established that to be ‘English’ was to be ‘Protestant.’ The first charge that Parliament
levied against the Catholic King James II when they ousted him and replaced him with
his Dutch Calvinist son-in-law, William of Orange, was that he ‘did endeavor to
subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion’ in England. Noting that it was ‘inconsistent
with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish
prince,’ the Declaration of Right barred Catholics from inheriting the throne and
prevented any monarch or heir apparent from marrying a Catholic. To this day, a
Catholic is still not allowed to become the king or queen of England. In 2011, however,
the leaders of the sixteen nations that were technically ruled by England’s sovereign did
agree to allow their future monarchs to marry members of the Roman Catholic faith.31
Maryland’s identity as a proper, ‘English’ colony was suspect in a way that the
identities of the other colonies were not because of its Catholic origins. Protestants in
the colony were keen, therefore, to shore up Maryland’s connection to England by
limiting the size and activity of the colony’s Catholic population. Anti-Catholicism,
like tea and china, was a way for Maryland’s eighteenth-century Protestants to think
of themselves and their society as ‘demonstrably English.’
403
Their anxieties, however, were not perpetually high; one of the more bizarre layers
to the story of anti-Catholicism in colonial Maryland is the reality that Catholics and
Protestants were married to one another, descended from one another, and involved
in business partnerships with one another. They lived near one another and sometimes
even attended one another’s worship services whenever the Anglican or Catholic
priests who represented their own religious traditions were unavailable. Fourteen
percent of the marriages that Frs. Joseph Mosley and John Bolton performed for
Catholics in Queen Anne’s and Cecil Counties in 1768 involved Anglican and
Calvinist partners. In 1734, the Reverend Samuel Smith of All Hallow’s Parish in
Anne Arundel County admitted to his friend, Arthur Holt, that sometimes when he
was too sick to hold Anglican services, his congregants would visit the homes of their
Catholic neighbors and attend Mass there.32
It was whenever they perceived an overt threat to Maryland’s status as an ‘English’
colony that political leaders proposed and implemented legislation that taxed
Catholic lands or restricted Catholic gun ownership or denied Catholic widows and
widowers the right to rear their own children.33 Those overt threats came after the
failed Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, when dozens of prisoner-servants arrived
in the colony, denying the legitimacy of the Glorious Revolution and proclaiming
their loyalty to the son and grandson of King James II. The threats came again in
1756, when Le Grand Dérangement brought more than 900 Acadian exiles to
Maryland as part of the English government’s plan to disperse the French-speaking
Catholic population of Nova Scotia. Those Canadian Catholics had been rendered
suspect by the French and Indian War (1754–63), a conflict that took place just
across Maryland’s borders in southwestern Pennsylvania; this war, too, heightened
Protestant anxieties about Maryland’s status as an English colony.
The Catholics in Lord Baltimore’s colony did not share the anxieties of their
Protestant neighbors, of course. While there was still much about English identity
that they wished to claim for themselves – the right to be represented in the legislative
deliberations that governed their lives, for starters – Maryland’s Catholics understood
after the revocation of Charles Calvert’s charter and the establishment of the Church
of England in Maryland that English identity alone was not going to be enough to
provide them with the rights they sought. The fact that their colony was tied to
England, after all, was the reason the religious toleration their ancestors had been
allowed to enjoy in the seventeenth century had disappeared. Those ancestors,
Charles Carroll of Annapolis wrote in 1754, had ‘transported themselves into this
Province, then a Wilderness, and in the Hands of a barbarous People,’ precisely
because they understood that ‘by such a Sacrifice they should procure to themselves
and their Descendants all the religious and Civil Rights they were deprived of in his
Majesty’s Dominions in Europe.’34
If Maryland had not been an English colony, the Glorious Revolution might not
have reverberated there to the extent that it did. This was how Catholics understood
the situation. Protestants in Maryland believed that to protect their natural rights, they
needed to strengthen their ties to England; Catholics, however, knew that the colony’s
ties to England were precisely the reason their natural rights were being denied.
Throughout the eighteenth century, Maryland’s Catholics constructed a
collective ‘memory’ for themselves of a time in their colony’s past when their
seventeenth-century ancestors had enjoyed the benefits of full-citizenship. The
404
memory emphasized Maryland’s autonomy vis-à-vis England. It was a bit selective,

however. It tended to avoid the rampant religious nepotism that characterized
Charles Calvert’s leadership of the colony after 1675, and it also downplayed the
violent episodes of religious bigotry that did take place in the colony even during
the years when the Act Concerning Religion was the law of the land. The memory
was not meant to be an actual history of religious life in Maryland, however. In the
short-term, Catholics used it to prevent the extension of England’s anti-Catholic
laws to the landscape in Maryland; in the long-term, they used the memory to
sustain themselves as a religious community during a period in their colony’s
history when being Catholic had become decidedly inconvenient. The memory
preserved Catholic identity, in spite of the inconveniences that came with it, by
linking that identity to liberty and tradition and, in so doing, ennobling it. In
emphasizing Maryland’s autonomy, the memory also prepared Catholics in the
colony to jump at the chance to be independent from England when the opportunity
finally presented itself.
The earliest surviving articulation of this memory dates back to 1718, in a protest
that was written by an English Jesuit serving in Maryland named Peter Atwood. The
protest was entitled ‘Liberty and Property, or The Beauty of Maryland Displayed,’
and the circumstances surrounding Atwood’s authorship of the essay are a little
convoluted. The priest wrote the essay to protest an effort on the part of Maryland’s
assemblymen to repeal a piece of anti-Catholic legislation that the colony’s
lawmakers had previously passed and implemented. Atwood was certainly not
pleased to be living under the law that the assemblymen were looking to throw out;
he insisted, however, that the lawmakers’ intentions in repealing the law were far
more dangerous than the law itself, because those intentions violated the autonomy
of Maryland’s ‘constitution.’
The situation was as follows: In 1704, shortly after the Church of England was
established in Maryland, the colony’s locally elected assemblymen ordered the
sheriff of St. Mary’s County to put a padlock on the door of the Catholic chapel
there, and they passed, then, an ‘Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery in this
Province.’ The law was similar, but not identical to a law that had been passed by
Parliament in England two years earlier. Its primary mechanism for curbing the
growth of popery was a tax that was placed on all Catholic servants brought into
the colony from Ireland.
Following the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, however, Maryland was one of several
British colonies that were forced to accept as servants those supporters of the deposed
King James II who had been taken prisoner during the rebellion. A large number of
these prisoner-servants were Catholic, prompting the colonial assembly to take a
serious look at the Catholic population in Maryland and conclude that the ‘growth
of popery’ had not, in fact, been curbed.
Noting that ‘professed Papists still multiply and increase in number’ in spite of the
law, the Lower House of the assembly proposed that the local law from 1704 be
thrown out, so that the colony could defer to that ‘one Act of Parliament made in…
the Reign of His late Majesty, King William the Third, whereby there is good
Provision made to prevent the Growth of Popery, as well as in this Province, as
throughout all his Majesty’s Dominions.’35 Protestants, the Lower House concluded,
need not resign themselves to being overrun by propagating papists; they simply
405
needed to stop trying to solve the problem on their own. If Maryland’s lawmakers
repealed their indigenous Act to Prevent the Growth of Popery and deferred to the
one passed in 1700 by Parliament in England instead, the problem of punishing
popery in Maryland would become the purview of the English courts. Anyone caught
violating the well-codified recusancy laws of the parent country would be subject to
deportation, and the colony’s Catholic population would consequently be curbed.
The proposal was a flagrant violation of Maryland’s separate constitution,
according to Peter Atwood. The priest was naturally concerned about the anti-
Catholic goals of the legislative maneuver; knowing that he could not rely upon the
religious sympathies of Maryland’s assemblymen, however, he chose to emphasize
the autonomy that Maryland’s lawmakers would be giving up if they implemented
their plan. ‘That the Penal Laws of England extend not hither was for 70 years and
more the opinion of all in Maryland,’ Atwood reminded the assemblymen, drawing
their attention to the distinctive nature of the principles and practices that animated
society in colonial Maryland. Criminal laws in the colony had always been drafted
by Maryland’s assembly, not by Parliament. Any attempt, therefore, to extend
anything to the colony other than those English laws ‘deemed an Englishman’s
birthright’ was ‘highly prejudicial to, if not destructive of our constitution.’
The word ‘constitution’ cropped up time and again in Atwood’s essay. ‘Altho our
Government is framed…according to the model of that of England,’ the priest
insisted, Maryland had its own assembly, and the separate and unique nature of the
constitution that guided that assembly had made it such that religious toleration was
‘far from…inconsistent’ with the colony’s identity. Respect for the collective Catholic
right to worship freely may not have been a characteristic of life in England, but in
Maryland, it was a ‘fundamental part of our constitution,’ according to Atwood.
Indeed, ‘Liberty of Conscience’ was the ‘reason behind the peopling of this province’
and the ‘perpetual and inherent birthright of each Marylandian.’36
It is noteworthy that Atwood spoke of both ‘an Englishman’s birthright’ and the
‘birthright of each Marylandian.’ The distinction was essential to his argument in
1718, and it was one that would ultimately have revolutionary ramifications when
Protestant leaders in New England and Virginia articulated it in a different context
60 years later. Even as they insisted that they were good Englishmen, deserving of
English rights, Maryland’s Catholics did not – and could not – make their argument
without appealing to a related, but different birthright: the one that they had as
residents of a colony that, unlike England itself, had been founded with their best
interests in mind.
To be sure, Peter Atwood was no revolutionary. He and the lay Catholics who
utilized his argument – his ‘memory’ – in the years that followed were not bold
enough during the Penal Period to insist that they were not English subjects. They did
not have the freedom in the first half of the eighteenth century to make such an
argument; many people in North America and England, after all, were arguing that
Catholics could not be trusted to be good Englishmen by virtue of their enslavement
to the Pope in Rome. There was much about what it meant to be an Englishman that
Maryland’s Catholics wanted to see applied to themselves. They were not interested,
therefore, in throwing off the mantle of English identity entirely.
But the fact is that long before Protestant colonists recognized that they had
evolved into something different from their supposed countrymen in England,
406
Catholic colonists understood that to be English in Maryland meant something

different from what it meant to be English in England. When, in the wake of the
Stamp Act of 1765, colonial leaders in Anglican Virginia, Congregationalist
Massachusetts, and Quaker Pennsylvania started to insist that their rights as
Englishmen were being violated by an English government that refused to recognize
the separate nature of their colonies’ constitutions, Catholics in Maryland heard an
argument that was quite familiar to them.
The Lower House of the Assembly approved the proposal to repeal Maryland’s
indigenous law and defer to the recusancy laws of England, but the Upper House
blocked the measure. Squabbling between the two houses, however, rather than Peter
Atwood’s eloquence, seems to have been the reason that the repeal failed. Atwood
was called to appear before the assembly following the publication of his essay, but
for unknown reasons he never actually appeared, and there is no further discussion
in the assembly’s minutes of his ideas. The Lower House would try at least two other
times in the next 40 years to repeal Maryland’s anti-Catholic laws and defer to the
laws of England, however, and several private individuals brought lawsuits against
Catholics, charging those Catholics with having violated the laws not of Maryland,
but of England.37
Atwood’s beliefs about the separate nature of colonial constitutions had not yet
found a mainstream audience in Maryland. His words, however, do seem to have
had an impact on the Catholic community to which he belonged. Catholics in
Maryland echoed his sentiments throughout the rest of the eighteenth century –
primarily during their efforts to protect their property from taxes and inheritance
restrictions that applied to Catholics in England but had not yet been written into the
local laws of Maryland.
During one dispute, a court in England issued a ruling that – in hindsight – was
extremely significant, though it failed to attract much attention in the colonies at the
time. In 1724, the Catholic heirs of Robert Brooke used Atwood’s understanding of
Maryland’s constitution to defend their inheritance against the challenges of Robert’s
brother, Thomas. Thomas was an Anglican convert, and Robert had been a Catholic
priest. Thomas had not challenged his brother’s share of their father’s estate when the
property had been left to them in 1689, but following Robert’s death in 1723,
Thomas insisted that his brother could not pass the property on to anyone in his will,
since the property had never rightfully been his.
Thomas challenged his brother’s claim to their father’s estate on the grounds that
England’s Act for Further Preventing the Growth of Popery had made it illegal for
Catholic clergy to inherit land. The Maryland native John Darnall – who had been
reared a Catholic, but converted to Anglicanism so he could practice law – represented
Robert Brooke’s heirs. He argued that British statutes did no apply to Maryland. The
colony, after all, had it own ‘act against Popery,’ and that act, Darnall pointed out,
did not prohibit the clergy from inheriting anything.
After five years, a British court finally determined that Fr. Robert Brooke’s claim
to the estate was, in fact, legitimate because he had inherited ‘lands in the Plantations,’
as Britain’s colonies were called, ‘where our Act against Popery…does not extend.’38
It was a seemingly unremarkable decision in 1729. In three-and-a-half decades,
however, the idea that the laws passed by Parliament in England did not ‘extend’ to
‘lands in the Plantations’ would become an animating argument in the Stamp Act
407
Riots, the non-importation agreements, the Boston Tea Party, and, ultimately, the
war for American independence.
* * *
As it turned out, the gamble that Catholics waged paid off. The state constitution
that Maryland’s leaders adopted in 1776 following their declaration of independence
from England mirrored the historical constitution that Catholics insisted had
animated the colony’s political and cultural life at the time of its founding. Gone were
all of the restrictions on Catholic voting and office-holding that had governed
Maryland for nearly 90 years. Consequently, the Maryland Gazette, which had used
the terms ‘Popery’ and ‘arbitrary power’ interchangeably in 1774, was able to
congratulate a Catholic convert, Thomas Sim Lee, on his election in 1781 as the
second governor of the free state of Maryland.39
In the 1770s, Maryland’s Catholics were among the colonists most prepared to
accept the cultural and psychological implications of independence from England.
The independence movement’s emphasis on personal freedom and its insistence on
the separate nature of the colonies’ constitutions resonated with a population that
had been self-consciously defining itself for generations – and had also experienced,
first-hand, the negative consequences of being tied politically to England. Maryland’s
Catholics were not like their co-religionists in England or in Continental Europe. The
story of Catholicism’s survival in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Maryland,
therefore, reveals much about how the constellation of trade, settlement, violence,
technology, conversion, epidemiology, and law that scholars now call the ‘Atlantic
World’ was able to create religious, cultural, and ultimately national identities that
were unheard of in the Old World.
NOTE S
1 For more on the rise of contractarianism in seventeenth-century English political thought –
and its ultimate manifestation, then, in the American independence movement of the 1770s
– see Michael Zuckert’s Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ, 1994).
2 Jack Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British
Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 70, 175.
3 Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1967), 11. See also Pauline
Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of
American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York, 1972); and Edward Countryman,
The American Revolution (New York, 1985).
4 For a recent example of this narrative, see David Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought:
The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007).
5 Daniel Barber, The History of My Own Times (Washington, DC, 1827), 17.
6 Jay Dolan, In Search of American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in
Tension (New York, 2002), 7. See also John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American
Freedom (New York, 2003).
7 Maura Jane Farrelly, Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (New
York, 2012), 242.
8 John Adams to Tomas Jefferson, September 24th, 1821, in Adams-Jefferson Letters: The
Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed.
Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill, 1988), 577.
408
9 Jack P. Greene and Richard M. Jellison, ‘The Currencty Act of 1764 in Imperial-Colonial
Relations, 1764–76,’ William and Mary Quarterly 18 (1961): 493–94; Katherine L.
Beherns, Paper Money in Maryland (Baltimore, 1923), 51–52.
10 Charles Carroll, Journal of Charles Carroll of Carrollton during his Visit to Canada in
1776, ed. Brantz Mayer (Baltimore, 1876).
11 Francis Edgar Sparks, Causes of the Maryland Revolution of 1689 (Baltimore, 1896), 50;
Michael Graham, ‘Meetinghouse and Chapel: Religion and Community in Seventeenth
Century Maryland,’ in Colonial Chesapeake Society, ed. Lois Green Carr, Philip D.
Morgan, and Jean B. Russo (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 268–69; William Hand Brown et
al., eds., Archives of Maryland (Baltimore, 1883–), :315; Ronald Hoffman, Princes of
Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500–1782 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 267.
For more on the gentrification of English Catholicism in the seventeenth century, see
Christopher Haigh, ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England,’
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1981): 129–47.
12 The religious affiliations of most of the Patriots from Maryland are unknown. With the
help of Henry C. Peden, however, I have identified 2,035 men from St. Mary’s County
who aided the independence movement, and at least 51 percent of them were either
Catholic – as evidenced by the fact that they were married, baptized, or buried in the
Church, left money or property to the Church, or had their children baptized in the
Church – or the sons, fathers, and brothers of Catholics – as evidenced by the names and
property that they shared with known Catholics, their residential proximity to known
Catholics, and their involvement in the probate proceedings of known Catholics. We do
not know what percentage of the St. Mary’s County population, overall, was Catholic in
the 1770s. We can, however, make logical estimates. Governor Horatio Sharpe believed
that around 7 percent of Maryland’s entire population was Catholic in 1758, but the only
surviving county-by-county census of the Catholic population before the Revolution was
done in 1708. At that time, 32 percent of the households in St. Mary’s County were
Catholic, and around 9 percent of the colony’s entire white population was Catholic. The
overall Catholic population in Maryland, in other words, was 23 percent smaller in 1758,
when Governor Sharpe wrote about it, than it had been 50 years earlier, when Catholic
households made up 32 percent of the population in St. Mary’s County. A 23 percent
reduction in the Catholic population of St. Mary’s County would put the population at
25 percent – which is why I estimate that the population in the 1770s was between 25
and 32 percent. See ‘Marriages, St. Francis Xavier and St. Inigoes Churches,’ ‘Baptisms,
St. Francis Xavier and St. Inigoes Congregations,’ ‘Maryland Catholic Subscribers to
Boston Relief, 1760,’ ‘Catholics Listed in Manorial Rent Rolls, St. Mary’s County,’
‘Census, St. Inigoes, St. Mary’s County, 1768,’ and ‘Presumed Catholic Births Recorded
at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church,’ in Timothy J. O’Rourke, comp., Catholic Families of
Southern Maryland (Baltimore, 1985), 1–39, 43–70; Henry C. Peden, Revolutionary
Patriots of Calvert and St. Mary’s Counties, Maryland, 1775–1784 (Westminster, Md.,
2006); Gaius M. Brumbaugh, Maryland Records: Colonial, Revolutionary, County and
Church, from Original Sources (Baltimore, 1928), 2: xi, 63–78, 314–411; Lois Green
Carr and David William Jordan, Maryland’s Revolution of Government, 1689–92
(Ithaca, 1974), 33n.
13 Robert M. Calhoon, ‘Loyalism and Neutrality,’ in Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., A
Companion to the American Revolution (Malden, Mass., 2000), 235; Archives of
Maryland, 9: 315, 25: 258–59; M. Christopher Newton, Maryland Loyalists in the
American Revolution (Centreville, Md., 1996); Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissension:
Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore, 1973), 80–82, 98–100;
David Curtis Skaggs, ‘Maryland’s Impulse toward Social Revolution, 1750–76,’ Journal
of American History 54 (1968): 771–86.
409
14 Zachary R. Calo has pointed out that there is a lively scholarly debate about the origins of
‘rights language’ in Catholic social thought. Some scholars, such as Jacques Mariatain,
John Finnis, and – of course – John Courtney Murray, have rightly pointed to the existence
of ‘natural rights’ in the ‘natural law’ tradition of Thomas Aquinas. The natural law
tradition, however, was premised on the notion of duties, and all rights were presented as
being a consequence of the duties that men and women had within the social order; rights
were not conceived by Aquinas as being inherent to the individual, in other words. Some
scholars have noted that Pope Leo XIII did, occasionally, use the word ‘right’ in the modern,
individualistic sense – particularly in Rerum Novarum, which was released in 1891. But
most agree that it was not until after Vatican II that the Church embraced modern ‘rights
language.’ See Calo, ‘Catholic Social Thought, Political Liberalism, and the Idea of Human
Rights,’ Journal of Christian Legal Thought 1 (2011): 1–13, here 8; Jean Porter, ‘From
Natural Rights to Human Rights: Or, Why Rights Talk Matters,’ Journal of Law and
Religion 14 (1999–2000): 77–90; Brian Tierney, ‘Religious Rights: A Historical Perspective,’
in Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives, ed. John Witte,
Jr. and Johan D. van der Vyver (The Hague, 1996), 17–45; J. Bryan Hehir, ‘Religious
Activism for Human Rights: A Christian Case Study,’ in ibid., 97–119. For Fr. Arthur
O’Leary’s understanding of the Revolution, see his Address to the Common People of the
Roman Catholic Religion (1779), ed. Michael Bernard Buckley (Dublin, 1868), 103–5.
15 See Martin Griffin, Catholics and the American Revolution, 3 vols. (Ridley Park, PA,
1907–11), 2: 185, 217; Peter Guilday, The Life and Times of John Carroll (New York,
1922), 86; David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001),
13; Farrelly, Papist Patriots, 20, 148.
16 The phrase ‘rum, Romanism, and rebellion’ was used by the Presbyterian minister Samuel
Burchard to describe the foundation of the Democratic party in the presidential election
of 1884. See Mark Wahlgren Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of
a President, 1884 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).
17 For more on lay trusteeism, see Patrick Carey, People, Priests and Prelates: Ecclesiastical
Democracy and the Tensions of Trusteeism (Notre Dame, IN, 1987).
18 ‘John Carroll’s Letter on Lay Trusteeism in New York City,’ (1786) in Mark Massa and
Catherine Osborne, eds., American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader (New
York, 2008), 32.
19 Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism, 40–43.
20 Harriet Martineau, Society in America (New York, 1837), 2: 323.
21 James O’Toole, The Faithful: A History of Catholicism in America (Cambridge, MA,
2008), 59.
22 Account of the Condition of the Catholic Religion in the English Colonies of America
(1763), rpt. Catholic Historical Review 6 (1920–21), 517–24; Robert Emmett Curran,
American Jesuit Spirituality: The Maryland Tradition (New York, 1987), 10, 13; Jason K.
Duncan, Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685–1821
(New York, 2005), 22–23; ‘Regulations for the Maryland Mission, 1759, by Father
Corbie, English Provincial,’ Maryland Province Archives (MPA), Special Collections,
Georgetown University, Box 2, Folder 9; Box 18, Folder 6.
23 Robert O’Grady, ed. The Boston Catholic Directory, 2009 (Braintree, MA, 2009), 235;
MPA, Box 18, Folder 6; ‘Official report from the Superior, Father G. Hunter, to the
Provincial, Father Dennett, July 23rd, 1765,’ in History of the Society of Jesus in North
America, Colonial and Federal, Documents, ed. Thomas Hughes (New York, 1907), 1: 337;
Tricia T. Pyne, ‘Ritual and Practice in the Maryland Catholic Community, 1634–1776,’
U.S. Catholic Historian 26 (2008): 14–46, here 24.
24 Farrelly, Papist Patriots, 152–87. For more on the nineteenth-century development of
sodalities and other forms of devotionalism in Europe, see Mary Heimann, Catholic
410
Devotion in Victorian England (New York, 195); Derek Holms, The Triumph of the Holy
See: A Short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century (Shepherdstown, WV, 1978);
Ann Taves, ‘Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,’ Church History 54 (1985): 482–95; McGreevy,
Catholicism and American Freedom, 27–29.
25 Patricia Bonomi was one of the first scholars to talk about how religious experience
helped to ‘prepare’ the colonists to accept the ideology of the Revolution. She focuses on
evangelical Protestants, though, and does not consider Catholics at all. See her Under
the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York,
1986), 10, 132.
26 Eamon Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected, II (1787–96),’ Recusant History 10
(1969–170), 317–27; Joseph Chinnici, The English Catholic Enlightenment: John Lingard
and the Cisalpine Movement, 1780–1850 (Sheperdstown, WV, 1980), 93–97.
27 Farrelly, Papist Patriots, 99; ‘An Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish
Recusants,’ Jac. I, c. 3,4, in Statues of the Realm, ed. T.E. Tomlins et al. (London, 1810–28),
4: 1071–73; ‘An Act Concerning Religion,’ April 21, 1649, Archives of Maryland, ed.
William Hand Brown et al. (Baltimore, 1883–present), 1: 244–47. The recusancy fines
levied during the reign of King James I gave Parliament the right to seize two-thirds of a
recusant’s estate if the MPs determined that the fines levied previously were not arduous
enough to force the recusant to start attending the Church of England.
28 Jacob Lumbrozo had immigrated to Maryland from Portugal in 1656. He was charged
with blasphemy two years later, after he admitted in public that he believed Christ’s
miracles had been works of ‘magic’ and that the Resurrection was a rumor that had been
started when Jesus’ disciples removed his body from the tomb. The Act Concerning
Religion did not apply to anyone who denied ‘our Saviour Jesus Christ to bee the sonne
of God.’ Jacob Lumbrozo, however, had sworn his loyalty to Cecilius Calvert not long
before making his public statements about Jesus. Maryland’s governor, therefore –
claiming to be acting on behalf of the proprietor – pardoned Lumbrozo ten days after his
arrest. The Portuguese Jew went on, then, to receive his papers of denization, which
allowed him to acquire property and vote. He ended up having a very lucrative career in
Maryland as one of the colony’s few doctors. See ibid., 41: 203, 258–59, 591, and 3: 488;
J. H. Hollander, ‘Some Unpublished Material Relating to Dr. Jacob Lumbrozo,’
Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 1(1893): 25–40.
29 Lois Green Carr and David William Jordan, Maryland’s Revolution of Government,
1689–1692 (Ithaca, NY, 1974), 161.
30 Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 70, 175.
31 ‘English Bill of Rights, 1689,’ The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and
Diplomacy, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University, August 31, 2009, http://
avalon.law.yale.edu/17th{_}century/england.asp (accessed 2008); ‘Ban on British monarch
marrying a Catholic to be lifted,’ Catholic Herald, October 31, 2011. For more on the
link between ‘Protestant’ and ‘English’ identity that was established by the Glorious
Revolution, see Owen Stanwood, ‘The Protestant moment: Antipopery, the Revolution of
1688–89, and the Making of an Anglo-American Empire,’ Journal of British Studies 46
(2007): 481–508; Colin Haydon, ‘“I love my King and my Country, but a Roman catholic
I hate”: Anti-Catholicism, Xenophobia, and National Identity in Eighteenth-Century
England,’ in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c.1850,
ed. Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (New York, 1998), 33–52; Jeremy Black, ‘Confessional
State or Elect Nation? Religion and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England,’ ibid., 53–74;
Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness, an Argument,’ Journal of British Studies 31
(1992): 309–29; and J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty: Political Discourse and
Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (New York, 1994), 237–57.
411
32 Marriage Register for St. Joseph’s Parish, Cordova, Talbot County, and St. Francis
Xavier, Bohemia, Cecil County, Maryland State Archives (MSA), SC4649; Arthur Holt to
Samuel Smith, May 21, 1734, in The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library,
American Colonial Section, ed. William Wilson Manross (Oxford, UK, 1965), 3: 76–77.
33 ‘An Act for Laying an Additional Duty…on all Irish Servants, being Papists,’ Archives of
Maryland, 33: 109, ‘Papists and Dissenters,’ ibid., 25: 582–582; ‘An Act for the Better
Administration of Justice in Testamentary Affairs,’ ibid., 30: 334.
34 ‘Charles Carroll Protests Against the Assembly’s Act,’ rpt. in The American Catholic
Historical Records, ed. Martin I. J. Griffin (Philadelphia, 1908), 261–64.
35 Archives of Maryland, 33: 288–89; ‘William III, 1998–99: An Act for the Further
Preventing the Growth of Popery’ (11 and 12 William III, c. 4), in Statutes of the Realm,
1695–1701, ed. John Raithby (London, 1820), 7: 586–87.
36 Peter Atwood, ‘Liberty and Property, or the Beauty of Maryland Displayed,’ rpt., United
States Catholic Historical Magazine 3 (1889–90): 237–63, here 248, 249, 252, 242.
37 Beatriz Bentacourt Hardy, ‘Papists in a Protestant Age’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Maryland, 1993), 265; Maryland Gazette, November 13, 1755; Thomas Hughes, History
of the Society of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal, from the First Colonization
till 1645, Text (New York, 1908), 2: 533.
38 History of the Society of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal, from the First
Colonization till 1645, Documents, ed. Thomas Hughes (New York, 1907), 1: 225.
39 Maryland Gazette, September 8th, 1774, and April 21st, 1781.
412
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
NAVIGATING THE JEWISH ATLANTIC

The state of the field
and opportunities for new research
Holly Snyder
A dam Sutcliffe opened a 2009 essay on early modern Jewish historiography with
the rhetorical question, ‘Are we all Atlanticists now?’1 One could certainly
wonder whether this tongue-in-cheek query – a parody of the declarative way David
Armitage opened a 2002 essay on historiographical frameworks for The British
Atlantic World – was intended to poke a metaphorical sharp stick at the reader. For
any assessment of work in the field to date reveals that Jewish historians2 of the
present moment, with a few rare exceptions, are hardly Atlanticists at all. A thorough
reading of Sutcliffe’s piece finds him, in a pattern that has become all too typical
among Jewish historians, sloughing off the potential contribution of a broad Atlantic
paradigm for Jewish history in favor of a constrained Sephardic model of the early
modern Atlantic. Indeed, Sutcliffe points to several ‘dangers’ that he believes the
Atlantic paradigm may pose for Jewish historiography: that historians may simply
replace old-fashioned nation-based Jewish historical writing with an equally limited
binary division between the Atlantic and the non-Atlantic regions (‘the West’ and ‘the
Rest,’ as he terms it), that historians will use an Atlanticist approach as a method of
avoiding discussion of unsettling issues within particular national historiographies,
and that the lack of a global context will only perpertuate a kind of peculiar
orientalism within Atlantic Jewish historiography that juxtaposes romanticized
notions of medieval Spain against a decisively Ashkenazi version of modernity.3
While these cautions are well-advised, it seems to me that they spring from a deeper
unease, and constitute perhaps a self-reflexive defense of Jewish historiography as it
is presently practiced, against the suspicion that an Atlantic Jewish paradigm might
undermine the very premises on which more traditional forms of Jewish history
writing have relied for several generations now. The essay thus proves less provocative
than Sutcliffe’s opening would lead the reader to suspect; Sutcliffe has instead crafted
a historiographical apologetic for the sloth with which practitioners of Jewish history
have approached the Atlantic paradigm.
Why have Jewish historians largely ignored the potential for re-examining Jewish
history through the Atlantic lens – an approach to historical analysis that an outside
observer might think they would find of keen interest for their work, given the ‘vitally
important role’ of Iberian Jews, Conversos, and crypto-Jews in Atlantic networks, as
413
– Holly Snyder –
readily documented by Sutcliffe and other Jewish historians? In part, this has been a
product of the particular methodologies of Jewish history, but a larger truth is that it
is the end result of the effective ghettoization of Jewish history as a field. Although
not entirely by intent, historians working in national historiographies writ large, as
David S. Katz pointed out in 1991, have traditionally viewed Jews as just a small and
exotic minority of their respective national populations, and decided that Jewish
aspects of various topics were of marginal relevance, at best, to the national story.
Thus, these aspects have been routinely ignored. Jewish historians, by contrast, have
chosen, instead, to examine the meaning of these same aspects but only within a
narrow context that is nominally and specifically Jewish, thus ignoring their
significance for a nationalist approach.4 The few historians who do engage topics
with an eye toward both their Jewish and national aspects tend to emphasize their
importance to the Jewish community of a particular place or in a particular time
(thus inflating them out of scale to their importance within the national, international,
and temporal contexts), or to portray them in an excessively patriotic light. Either
way, the results invite dismissal as either anecdotal or antiquarian, or perhaps both.
It would be fair to say that the larger framework for historiography of the Jewish
experience in the Atlantic world has thus far suffered the ignominity of being seen as
neither fish nor fowl by the very historiographical trajectories that might be thought
principally responsible for enlarging and sustaining such a paradigm.
The lack of engagement by Jewish historians with the broader Atlantic paradigm
thus far underscores a number of ongoing tendencies within Jewish historiography
itself that have come to frame the field as a whole. As early as 1999, David Sorkin
declared, ‘it is by now belabouring the obvious to lament the “ashkenazification” of
modern Jewish history,’ noting that the then-extant understanding of early modern
Jewish history ‘tends to marginalize the sephardim.’5 It is telling that though the field
has grown substantially beyond the intensive study of Ashkenaz6 alone in the past
decade and a half, the geographical center of Jewish historical study for the early
modern period has remained grounded in Central Europe ever since the field was first
established in the early nineteenth century. And if the keen interest among academics
in Atlantic history is, as Sutcliffe suggests, the byproduct of faltering relations between
the United States and Europe in the wake of the toppling of the Berlin Wall, Jewish
historians are just as imprisoned by the internal politics of the modern Jewish world.
Jewish historians, themselves predominantly of Ashkenazi background, have long
been in denial about the diversity of the Jewish diaspora. It took, for example, the
1977 electoral victory by the ethnically diverse Likud block under Menachem Begin
– the first government of Israel not controlled by the Ashkenazi-dominated Labor
Party – to bring serious attention by scholars to the significant subfields of Sephardic
and Mizrachi Studies; scholarly interest in the Beta Yisrael (Ethiopian Jewry) lagged
until Operations Moses and Solomon transferred tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews
to Israel between 1984 and 1991. There are many Jewish sub-cultures around the
world that remain understudied, including those of the Magreb, Turkey, Subsaharan
Africa, and all of Asia, from Iraq to India and Uzbekistan to China. Even now,
scholarship on Sephardi, Mizrachi, and other non-Ashkenazi Jewish diasporas operates
at the margins of the field, and early modernists in these areas find only modest support
for their work, particularly outside of the limited arenas of the early modern religious,
political, and economic development of Western Europe and the Mediterranean.7
414
– chapter 23: Navigating the Jewish Atlantic –
Adam Sutcliffe is certainly not alone in his effort to circle the wagons around the
ingrained traditions of Jewish historiography. A defensive tone threads through a
number of works by the few Jewish historians who aim to address the larger field of
historical study in a serious way, as they are pressed to grapple with public and
defamatory distortions of historical realities disseminated by unscrupulous parties
who invoke purported Jewish conspiracies of various sorts.8 In recent decades, driven
in part by such public attacks on Jews and Jewish history from various quarters and
in part by a longstanding historiographical tradition that emphasized study of the
Jewish community in its own right, Jewish historians of the early modern period have
by and large turned their scholarly focus substantially inward, toward intensive study
of the Jewish experience intended principally for a Jewish audience. Somewhat
stymied by the tortuous difficulties of parsing out the Jewish role in race relations in
the Americas and Africa before 1800, particularly in light of contemporary sensitivities
surrounding public discussions of slavery and reparations, they have by and large left
racial issues to Jewish historians of later periods, where Jews may more easily be
presented as heroic – such as in Jewish participation in the twentieth-century push for
civil rights in the United States – or, at least, as having had empathy for the oppressed.9
Indeed, in the latter half of the twentieth century, Jewish historians in general limited
their efforts to topics attaching lower levels of public controversy – that is to say,
topics less likely to bring the opprobrium of a broader public down on the heads of
the Jewish community – and in the process came to define Jewish history in narrow,
insular ways that tend to maintain a central focus on Christian-dominated Europe to
the exclusion of the rest of the Jewish diaspora, and even of the modern State of
Israel. ‘Here,’ as Jonathan Schorsch has noted, ‘Jewish history is more Eurocentric
than the Europeans.’10 And the study of Jews in the early modern Atlantic theatre
has, until quite recently, been the case which proved this general rule. Jewish
historians, as a body, simply have not yet taken seriously the potential for
understanding early modern migration to the New World as a transformational event
in the history of the Jewish diaspora, reflecting in degree if not in kind the neglect
nationalist historians have shown for the varied roles that Jews and other minority
actors played in shaping early modern nationalist and imperial trajectories in the
Atlantic sphere after Columbus.
Of course, general historians are equally to blame for neglecting Jewish aspects of
a wide variety of topics, as well as for dismissing the ways in which attitudes toward
Jews shaped both Christian theology and the worldview of individual Christians,
especially in their early encounters with the New World. Historians of the early
modern Atlantic have, on the whole, ignored the prospects for examining Jewishness
as a social category beyond the boundaries of Europe, just as if, in leaving the
continent, Europeans had left all of their attitudes and assumptions about Jews
behind them as being of no use to their settlement in the Americas. The records tell
us a different story: many early accounts of European settlers and travellers in the
New World, including that of William Penn, recount how native peoples of North
America resembled European Jews. Moreover, the anti-Jewish bigotry displayed by
Peter Stuyvesant in 1654 could hardly have originated with his experience of the
Indians on Manhattan island.11 As these samples attest, there are unrecorded trails in
the historiographical forest that, having been passed by, still present possible
pathways for exploration, allowing ample opportunity for those interested in
415
pursuing research on Jews in the Atlantic theatre after 1500. This essay provides an
overview of existing research pertinent to the field and outlines opportunities for
expansion, drawing attention to some of the many lacunae open for future pursuit.
WORK WITHIN NATIONA L HIS TO RIO G RAP HIE S

The trend toward the creation of national historiographies, spawned at the juncture
of the professionalization of historical study and the rise of nationalism in the
nineteenth century, clearly shaped the establishment of a number of historiographical
traditions – including that of Jewish history. The scientific study of Jewish history
(originally called Wissenschaft des Judentums) was, in fact, first promoted about
1819 by Leopold Zunz and others through the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft
der Juden (Society for Jewish Culture and History) in Berlin at the precise moment
when German nationalism began its rise, culminating in the unification of the separate
German states as a single nation state under Bismarck in 1871.12 Jewish history as a
field was therefore embedded from the moment of its conception in a nationalist
agenda – though from the standpoint of Zunz and later proponents, right up to the
creation of the State of Israel in 1948, this meant inculcating the vision of Jews in
diaspora as an independent but landless, semi-nomadic transnational ethnic entity
rather than a nation state fixed in space with geographical boundaries. The powerful
impetus for nationalist historiographies since then has tended to shape Jewish
historians, both professional and amateur, as proponents of the Jewish experience
within a single nationalist frame – a paradoxical development belied, as it is or at
least ought to be, by the transnational realities of the Jewish diaspora.
As the sense of periodization evolved within the field of Jewish history, the civil
emancipation13 of the Jews took on the mantle of a historical dividing line between
the ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’ eras. For many Jewish historians, it is thus civil
emancipation which forms the singular watershed moment within respective
nationalist historiographies, precisely because it encapsulates a key tension of the
modern diasporic experience: that is to say, at what point do diaspora Jews lose their
distinctive status as a segregated minority group and become eligible for full
subjecthood or citizenship in the nation? Indeed, Adam Sutcliffe’s argument takes its
bearings from recent work by Jewish historians (himself among them) that focuses
new attention on the long process of European civil emancipation for Jews, which
took place, roughly, between the French Revolution and the early twentieth century.
Given that periodization, it should come as no surprise that the most interesting of
these works have come from historians of the Jews of France and from those pursuing
the broad impact of the Enlightenment on shifting attitudes toward Jews.14
But while this new work provides much needed attention to a significant lapse in
the prior historiography on European Jewry, it has had the effect of subsuming the
critical developments of the early modern era under the presentist trope of the Jewish
entré into ‘modernity’ by means of acculturation and civil emancipation in Europe.
Further, and in addition to misrepresenting the Jewish experience of the early modern
era, it may not be the logical place to situate the development of ‘modern’ history for
Jews living beyond Europe. Using civil emancipation as the organizing principle for
a model of Jewish ‘modernity’ elides many critical issues for Jewish communities in
places beyond the reach of Europeans – Bukhara (in present day Uzbekistan) is only
416
one such example15 – while emphasizing the underlying bias in the field for a
Eurocentric narrative of Jewish history as a whole that remains grounded in Germany.
Overall, it asserts a curious and pronounced disconnect with the Jewish experience
writ large, especially for earlier times and non-European geographies. Yet despite its
limitations, civil emancipation as an explanation for Jewish modernity has not, as of
this writing, been seriously challenged, amended, or revisited by Jewish historians. In
fact, David S. Katz is one of the very few Jewish historians working within a nationalist
tradition who has argued for the efficacy of examining Jewish history from a more
wholistic perspective.16 Even a cursory examination of the nationalist historiographies
of Western Europe reveals important questions about the general atmosphere for
political, religious, and economic activity – questions with substantive impact both
for Jewish communities and individual Jews, while monarchical absolutism gradually
gave way to the imperial nation state, and the age of the court Jew (dated, by Jonathan
Israel, at roughly 1650 to 1713 or, to put it into the broad framework of European
history, from the end of the Thirty Years War to the end of the War of the Spanish
Succession) gave way to the age of mercantilism. As Jonathan Israel persuasively
argues, the transformation of the Jewish condition from enforced marginality into
‘the mainstream of European life’ can only be understood within the wider context
of the political and social fracturing of Christian Europe wrought by the Reformation.17
This is not to say that the nationalist framework has nothing to contribute. As David
Katz points out, there is still value in examining Jewish interactions with given
national subcultures, rather than simply trying to tie varied subcultures to a ‘common’
Jewish experience which, in many ways, they simply do not fit. A comparative
synthesis of the Jewish experience in the early modern era would be empowered by a
series of such national studies of respective Jewish communities.
As a whole, historians of American Jewry have been no better than their Europeanist
counterparts, paying lip service to the Atlantic paradigm while failing to incorporate
its broader methodology into their work, and in particular ignoring the call for
comparative studies. In fact, there is a concerted dissonance between early modern
European Jewish history and early American Jewish history that is unparalleled in
the early modern Jewish historiography of other geographic regions. The neglect of
transatlantic and other transnational connections has much to do with the way in
which American Jewish history arose as a sub-field and its status within Jewish
history, as well as with its curious approach to periodization, which until quite
recently has trivialized anything that took place prior to 1850 (or, for that matter,
anything that involved Sephardim). Originally created by a group of professional and
amateur historians in America interested in studying Jews in America, its first
practitioners in the 1890s pursued an agenda that sought to use every conceivable
means to document Jewish advances in American life and to prove Jews had been
good Americans from the moment of first settlement. From this overtly patriotic
beginning, the field remained largely engaged in historical writing for a popular
audience and thus did not gain sufficient strength as a discipline to win a place in
academia until American universities began to hire faculty (both American- and
European-born) with doctorates from German universities whose training emphasized
the Wissenschaft approach.18 As result, the writing of American Jewish history moved
directly from a consistently patriotic to a patently Eurocentric model by the time it
was being taught at American colleges and universities after World War II. Rooted in
417
the distinctively European perspective that was part and parcel of the great
Wissenschaft historiographical tradition, arising from Ashkenazi Jewish academics
trained in German universities who focused their studies on German Jewry, the
Jewish history of the United States was presented as having little, if any, significance
prior to the first wave of German Jewish migration in the late 1840s.19 In fact, there
is a common underlying presumption among American Jewish historians, perhaps
coming out of the American patriotism of the original founders of the sub-field as
well as out of inattention to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the later
generation of both professional American and American Jewish historians, that civil
emancipation was simply handed to American Jews by right-thinking founders,
without discussion, debate, or effort by American Jews themselves – and this despite
the evidence of documents from the early national period that have been extensively
anthologized.20 Until recently, little effort had been made by historians, whether
Americanist, Atlanticist, or Jewish, to analyze the world inherited by these emigrants
of the 1840s, let alone the peregrinations of earlier generations of Jews to Canada,
Latin America, the Caribbean, or Africa. Indeed, Jewish historians have almost
entirely ceded the latter two geographies to anthropologists.
This need not be the case. Work on the larger frame of Atlantic legal geographies,
notably by Eliga Gould,21 has begun to identify areas where Jewish historians could,
were they so inclined, make a distinctive contribution. What strikingly emerges from
the present over-reliance on the nationalist agenda, sadly, is the utter absence of any
comprehensive discussion of Jewish civil emancipation during the Age of Revolutions.
The potential for a long transnational dialogue about Jewish citizenship rights in the
commonwealth and the republic has utterly missed, and been missed by, Jewish
historians of the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean; it is a
story that remains, in large part, to be told.22
TOWARD TRANS-NATIONAL HIS TO RIO G RAP HIE S

While, as a discipline, Jewish history potentially has important transnational
perspectives to offer, it has been difficult to encourage Jewish historians to break
away from the Eurocentric nationalist mindset when it comes to the writing of Jewish
history. Indeed, Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, in their Paths to Emancipation:
Jews, States and Citizenship (1995) – the seminal volume on this topic – note that the
available literature on Jewish civil emancipation in the late 1980s ‘treated the
incorporation of Jews into western modernity either as unitary experience in spite of
considerable differences…or as sui generis in single-country studies.’23 Although
there has been much attention to the process of emancipation, beginning with the
appearance of the Birnbaum and Katznelson volume, this work continues to center
itself in Central and Western Europe, including examples from elsewhere, principally
from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, only as counter-narratives. Comparative
work on Jewish emancipation that crosses the great Atlantic divide, as noted above,
is still wholly lacking; little effort has been made to examine how the guarantees of
the U. S. Constitution (1787), specifically that for Freedom of Religion under the Bill
of Rights, might have affected Jewish expectations for emancipation in other British
colonies (Canada, Jamaica, and Barbados all had significant Jewish populations at
the time) or Europe; nor has there been much serious consideration given to how the
418
American break with Britain effected, for good or for ill, rights talk by Jews in other
places. Coordinated attempts to generate comparative study of Jewish societies and
subcultures thus far appear to have resulted in little more than the occasional
conference volume or edited compilation of articles in or from selected journals.
Most of these efforts necessarily suffer – to greater or lesser degrees – from an uneven
approach to their content. Even while they attempt to break the mold, the essays in
these volumes betray Eurocentric standards of analysis and theoretical underpinnings;
for example, of the 25 to 30 papers presented at the 1997 conference ‘The Jews and
the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450–1800’ at the John Carter Brown Library,
only two dealt in any respect with North America, while more than half of those on
Latin America focused on the Inquisition; another case in point is the 2002 volume
Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centers, 1550–
1950, which includes only a single article covering the Atlantic out of 13 pieces by 11
scholars included in the compilation. At that rate, conceptualization of a ‘Jewish
Atlantic’ is little more than tokenism. The published volume from the first Lavy
Seminar at Hopkins includes 10 essays, only one each from the Americanist and
Africanist perspectives – a somewhat better balance than the JCB and Port Jews
volumes, though the Europeanist perspective still predominates, comprising 80
percent of the content (author’s disclosure: the single Americanist essay in the latter
volume is mine).24
If early modern Jewish historians have not gone so far as to embrace the Atlantic
history model, that has certainly not prevented them from devising an alternative
model of their own to represent the development of early modern Jewry. This new
model, developed over the course of the past decade by Lois Dubin and David Sorkin,
both specialists on Jews in Enlightenment Europe, purports to address the character
of ‘acculturated Jewish merchants in port cities’ for the express purpose of
understanding their path toward integration into the broader Gentile society. Dubin
coined the term ‘Port Jew’ in her work on Hapsburg Trieste, and the model has been
known by that name ever since.25 It was, however, Sorkin who created the theoretical
underpinnings for the model, as a distinctive ‘social type’ consisting of ‘merchant
Jews of sephardi or…Italian extraction who settled in the port cities of the
Mediterranean, the Atlantic seaboard and the New World’ during the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. However, once the model began to assume
popularity among other Jewish historians, as witnessed by the Southampton 2001
conference on this topic that resulted in the Cesarani volume, Sorkin attempted to
limit the model by subsequently adding a second category, ‘Jews in port cities,’ as a
catch-all applied without ethnic, geographical, or chronological specificity. He now
stated that Port Jews should be distinguished from other early modern Jews by five
traits: migration, the valuation of commerce, formation of community through
voluntary association, re-education in normative Judaism, and a Jewish identity
better characterized by ethnicity and rationalism than by religious belief. Sorkin’s
revisions ignored much historical evidence, including some documenting the activities
of a number of Ashkenazi merchants of port cities in both the old and new worlds
who fit Sorkin’s Port Jew social type in every respect except their ethnicity – much as
a number of early Sephardim were every bit the Court Jews of their respective times
and places. And in proscribing particular categories of experience to define the Port
Jew social type, Sorkin denied a range of Jewish experiences that were unique to and
419
over time became characteristic of the Jewish experience in the New World, such as
plantation ownership, as well as other non-mercantilist professions generally available
to early modern Jews, like the practice of medicine.
In his attempt to bifurcate the Port Jew model, it would seem that Sorkin created
a distinction without a difference, for the new category ‘Jews in port cities’ was only
intended to allow the Port Jew concept to maintain its ethnic purity as a specifically
Sephardic social type. In practice, this conception would render analysis of Jewish
communal life endlessly confusing, as Sorkin’s splitting of the categories would have
classified Sephardi merchants of maritime communities as ‘port jews’ while their
Ashkenazi and Mizrachi counterparts, along with religious functionaries who served
communal purposes and non-merchant Sephardi professionals and laborers who
lived alongside them would have been merely ‘Jews in port cities.’ Sorkin’s motivation
in his argument for the purity of the Port Jew model appears to have been, at least in
part, to re-direct Jewish historians toward the Sephardi experience, as a counterpoint
to the earlier dominance of court Jews as the principal subjects of Jewish historical
writing. The latter model, arising as it did out of German Jewish history, was thus
tagged among historians as ethnically Ashkenazi, although examination of the
evidence indicates this was not exclusively true, suggesting that the rise of court Jews
had much more to do with the process of the patronage/clientage system of court
politics than with ethnic stereotyping.26 Still, however noble his motivations, Sorkin’s
revisions have struck other Jewish historians as odd and ill-founded. In part, this is
because ‘Sephardi’ as an early modern ethnic grouping is methodologically fraught,
as evidenced in some detail through work on particular Jewish communities, notably
Ken Stow’s work on early modern Jewish Rome and Daniel Swetschinski’s work on
Jewish Amsterdam.27 But a more significant, if little heeded, critique was offered by
C. S. Monaco, whose study of the elite Sephardi merchant Moses E. Levy revealed a
lived experience quite at odds with the theoretical underpinnings of Sorkin’s model.28
Even Lois Dubin was among the detractors to Sorkin’s proposed revision to the
model: in a 2004 piece, Dubin critiqued Sorkin’s proposed categories and attempted
to redefine the characteristics of Port Jews in ways that made them less driven by
internal notions of identity and allegiance, to rather better reflect the ongoing
discourse between Port Jews and their surrounding communities. Dubin suggested
features that, in my experience, more appropriately describe Port Jews and their
communities: a geographical focus in dynamic maritime centers driven by commerce,
the perception within the broader society that Jews had commercial prowess and
were therefore useful members, encouragement to merchants of all types to settle for
the purpose of developing commerce, a favorable legal status for Jews (though not
necessarily equivalent to full equality), a self-consciousness among Jews of the
importance of building relationships with both Jews and non-Jews for the furtherance
of commerce. Dubin, with direct experience interpreting the evidence of Jewish
mercantile activity and its impact on Jewish individuals and communal life for
Trieste, here lays out an agenda of themes ripe for expansion and comparative study
throughout the Jewish world. Though she curiously neglects to mention the Americas
or Africa, even while targeting Asia as a potential focus for study, the expansive
nature of her vision is broadly applicable to the study of the Jewish Atlantic as well
as to other portions of the diaspora. Prospective Jewish Atlanticists would be wise to
review this essay and take up at least a few of the challenges Dubin profers.29
420
SAILING ON TO THE J E W IS H ATL ANTIC

Dubin’s modelling brings us back to the topic of the historical work that actually
touches on the Jewish Atlantic world. To date, very few studies have actually
approached Jewish history, in any degree, from an Atlanticist perspective.30 As one
might imagine, with so few full-length studies available in the field, coverage of many
important topics is still wholly lacking. Dutch West Indies trade and society, for
example, have been well-documented for the Jews of New Holland, Curacao,
Surinam, and New Amsterdam, while Jewish involvement in the French overseas
colonies has received peculiarly scattered and inconsistent attention. In addition,
Atlantic studies that discuss the role of the Jews divide fairly evenly among those
which closely examine the Jewish experience and those which include Jews as part of
a general historical portrait.
The pattern of publication suggests that if there is a central flaw to the methodological
basis on which historians of all varieties have pursued the history of Jews in the early
modern era it is that they have largely left the New World and its discovery out of the
picture. In fact, it seems the neglect of this topic stems from a general lack of familiarity
among Atlantic historians with recent work on Renaissance and early modern Jewish
scientific thinking fostered over the past few decades by David Ruderman, Noah
Efron, and André Neher, among others. Failing to find Jews written into the record of
New World explorations, they have assumed that if Jews had any role in the systems
that led to discovery of the New World it was at best a minor one; yet, as Patricia Seed
notes, there has been a wholesale erasure from the historical record of the Jewish and
Converso identity of many modern scientists and mathematicians working in Portugal
in the fifteenth century.31 That Jewish scientists discussed and interpreted the findings
of Columbus, and attempted to map them (as did David Gans in Prague) or brought
scientific skill with them to help settle the New World (as did metallurgist Joachim
Gans) is similarly little heeded by Atlantic historians.32 Then, too, American Jewish
historians have perpetuated the misimpression that Jewish emigrants who settled in
the New World remained more strongly tied to Europe than to their new home in the
Western hemisphere. Jacob Rader Marcus, a leading figure in American Jewish history
during the latter half of the twentieth century, as Jonathan Schorsch points out,
claimed that ‘the typical American Jew’ turned his back to the frontier and looked to
the east, to Europe, as the locus of ‘the culture he knew and cherished.’33 This broad
claim distorts the realities of colonial settlement significantly by excluding the
experience of Iberian Jews and Conversos, many of whom had experienced torture at
the hands of the Inquisition prior to reaching American shores. The attitude of the
latter was more succinctly captured by the sixteenth-century Converso apologist
Samuel Usque, who wrote,
O Europe, my hell on earth, what shall I say of you since you have won most of
your triumphs at the expense of my limbs?34
In short, while Jews were just as ‘European’ as any other New World settler who
originated from the northeastern shores of the Atlantic, they do not appear to have
been more closely tied to Europe than non-Jewish settlers. To apply such a general
characterization to the likes of, say, Asser Levy van Swellem, who spent many years in
421
New Netherlands, eking out a living in trade between New Amsterdam and Beverwijk
through the Hudson valley, at times the only Jew in the colony, flies in the face of the
evidence. Had Levy so desired, he could easily have gone back to Europe like his
compatriots from the St. Catherine and lived a European life. But despite numerous
trials, he chose to stay in the wilds of America. That alone says something about the
engagement of individual Jews with the American wilderness.35 The Gratz brothers,
Barnard and Michael, who formed a partnership with George Croghan to further the
development of the Pennsylvania backcountry in the mid-eighteenth century, and Luis
de Carvajal (called ‘el mozo,’ so as to distinguish him from an uncle of the same
name), crypto-Jewish martyr of the backcountry in New Spain in the sixteenth century,
who persisted in his Jewish beliefs despite several rounds of imprisonment and torture
at the hands of the Mexican Inquisition, provide yet other examples of American Jews
who run counter to Marcus’ claim.36 For these Jews, the American wilderness promised
the opportunity of refuge foreclosed to them in Europe.
Asser Levy, the Gratz brothers, Luis de Carvajal, and their respective colonial
cohorts suggest that if we are to comprehend the varied experiences of early modern
Jews in the Americas, a new approach is required – one that examines closely the
evidence of geographical and social as well as religious identity. To do this requires
tackling some fairly thorny issues; still, there are a number of important themes that
deserve more attention from a transatlantic perspective than they have yet received.
These include (though are by no means limited to) Jewish social networks, detailed
study of Jewish mercantile activity, and Jewish participation in transatlantic labor
systems, with a particular focus on slavery and the slave trade.
Early modern Jewish social networks present a theme that at present is poorly
grasped, as historians have attempted to focus instead on religious identity. The
religious self-definition of early modern Iberian Conversos is a Gordion knot that
fascinates scholars while resisting easy analysis. In large part, its complexity owes
much to the nature of the extant sources. But documents created by the Inquisition
can hardly be said to be without bias. David Graizbord has offered some important
cautions for approaching this material, and in particular about making too literal a
reading of the Inquisitorial record; anyone aware of our contemporary public debate
over the validity of confessions extracted through the use of torture will have a keen
sense of the pitfalls Graizbord has described.37 This problematique perhaps explains
why the great bulk of historiography available on Jews in Latin America focuses
almost solely on the issue of Converso religious identity.38 But while tackling this task
may be critical to understanding the survival of post-conversion Jewish identity in the
Iberian Atlantic world, the corpus of scholarly attention devoted to it has also inhibited
our comprehension of how professing Jews, crypto-Jews, and Conversos were linked
together by blood, by marriage and by commerce, and how identity was shaped both
by limitations imposed within areas where the presence of the Inquisition kept incipient
Jews from ever having the safety to freely express their opinions without fear of
retribution and links to areas where such freedoms could be taken as granted.
Within the last decade, new scholarship has demonstrated promise in suggesting
other ways of approaching the question: Brazilian scholar Bruno Feitler, for example,
describes a complex picture of Jewish life in Northeast Brazil, with individuals at
some points publicly espousing Judaism and at others declaring themselves good
Catholics.39 Feitler’s study reveals a plasticity to Jewish identity, as Conversos publicly
422
bent their professed religious ideology to suit their immediate needs for individual
and familial survival and upward mobility. It is a view that is reflected in the sources
not only from Catholic territory but also in reports delivered to the Inquisition even
from Protestant strongholds on the opposite side of the Atlantic – London,
Amsterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg – where Jews were free to be openly Jewish without
fear of reprisal. Until these works appeared, historians of all types routinely missed
these nuances because their own present-minded notions of religion dictated that one
could not be both Christian and Jewish (or, for that matter, Christian and Muslim)
at the same time. Our current historiographical conventions hold that religious
identity in the early modern period was fixed – whether given at birth or chosen in
adulthood, individuals abode with it for life. But perhaps it was never so, and the
convention on which we have relied for several generations now was unthinkingly
created by historians for the sheer convenience of having populations which fit the
categories that historians wanted to analyze. How difficult to imagine, then, that our
historical subjects would defy us and act dynamically, choosing for themselves what
religious identity seemed best to them at the time rather than waiting quietly in a box
to be counted.
Indeed, it was not until the early nineteenth century, with the birth of the Reform
movement, that Jews had the option to choose between normalized forms of Jewish
ritual practice. Until that moment, those who disagreed with synagogue elders had
nowhere else in Judaism to go. In the absence of a viable alternative, choosing to be
‘Christian’ for a while must have seemed, to some, more attractive than having no
place at all to express one’s faith.40 But, of course, this going back and forth between
religious identities poses new challenges for the historian. In the face of such choices
by individuals, and even whole families, how can we judge religious commitment?
Further, how can we hope to derive a meaningful measurement for apostasy?
It is here that we might turn for help to sub-fields of Jewish scholarship previously
little used by historians of either the Jewish or general varieties: Jewish sociology,
promoted and developed since the 1950s principally by the late Marshall Sklare
(among others) and now in its maturity; and Jewish ethnology, the study of
comparative Jewish cultures, a field that continues to evolve. Sklare, in particular,
saw the importance of an understanding of history toward the development of sound
sociological theory; in fact, he opened the 1958 compilation The Jews: Social Patterns
of an American Group with the question of not ‘whether’ but ‘how much’ history a
sociologist ought to know. Early modern historians might quibble with Sklare’s
decision to use, as his principle historical foil, an article by Bernard Weinryb that sets
its opening with the great wave of Jewish immigration to the United States in the
1880s. However, it remains for historians to bring Jewish sociology into the early
modern era by historicizing the work of Jewish sociologists – not vice versa.41 Jewish
ethnology is yet an emerging area, just beginning to take on a life of its own, as a
2009 conference at Brown University attests. Indeed, even ethnological studies of
singular Jewish communities have already made useful contributions to the historical
understanding of Atlantic Jewry.42 With its focus on the culture, characteristics, and
folkways of various groups, Jewish ethnology has the potential for important
contributions to the writing of Jewish history, and in particular for the kind of
comparative work that Atlantic history, as a discipline, proposes to foster.43 One
important example that suggests the potential efficacy this approach might have for
423
Atlantic Jewish history is the question of where and why Jewish slaveholders made
concerted efforts to educate as Jews the mulatto offspring of their liasons with
enslaved or free women of color, and these offspring (both male and female) then
transmitted Judaism to their own children, giving rise to a population of Jews of
color, as happened both in Surinam and, across the Atlantic, in Guiné.44 Jewish
slaveholders in other places, we know, behaved quite differently. In Jamaica, while
Jewish men maintained relationships with free and enslaved women of color, they
made little effort to acknowledge their paternity of the children resulting from these
unions and none at all to transmit Judaism to their children or other slaves.45 Here, a
comparative study that examines this juxtaposition in some detail might illuminate
aspects of early modern Jewish culture that are now poorly understood. Stephen
Sharot has laid out a useful methodology for pursuing historical comparative studies
of just this type, using religious separatism and religious syncretism as the poles on a
sliding scale of Jewish cultural variation.46
Taking an Atlantic approach to Jewish history not only allows historians to
expand the range of comprehending the Jewish diaspora beyond the boundaries of
Europe; it also has potential for bridging chronological boundaries, allowing Jewish
historians to push the Atlantic model beyond the rigid periodization and geographical
boundaries that some of its chief advocates (notably Bernard Bailyn and David
Armitage) have attempted to impose. Recent work by Arthur Kiron and Adam
Mendelsohn, for example, focuses attention on Jewish literary and cultural networks
that spanned the Atlantic in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, laying the groundwork
for further development of a distinctively transoceanic Anglophone Jewish culture in
the period when Jewish emigration from Europe to the Americas began in earnest.47
There is perhaps no better example of the potential contributions of an Atlantic
model for understanding Jewish history and culture than that of the Yiddish theatre,
which, by the 1890s had begun its travels back from the Americas to Russia and
Eastern Europe, coming to a pinnacle with the popularity of Yiddish film on both
sides of the Atlantic in the years between the two world wars. Though long ignored
by European-trained Jewish historians because of its genesis in the United States, the
circuitous travels of American Yiddish theatre and film, including international stars
such as Molly Picon and Boris Tomashevsky, gave a vibrancy to transnational Jewish
culture that it has not recaptured since. Indeed, Yiddish theatre brought Jewish
cultural traditions full circle, reaching generations of migrants and their now creolized
children, making them not simply transatlantic voyagers but circumatlantic
cosmopolitans.48 Seen in this light, the study of Jewish history from an Atlantic
perspective has great potential for enlarging the reach of Jewish historiography to all
four of the Atlantic continents, bringing Africa, North America, and Latin America
into focus along with Europe and allowing Jewish historiography to take the lead in
reshaping the way in which historians understand history in general. And, indeed, it
is from literary historians that the first tentative steps toward putting forward a
transatlantic analysis of early modern Jewish culture have recently come.49
As to Jewish mercantilism, Derek Penslar points out that until the 1970s, Jewish
historians focused their attention on politics and religion but paid little heed to Jewish
economics. Jonathan Israel’s magisterial European Jewry in an Age of Mercantilism,
first published in 1985 and now in its third edition, was a groundbreaking study of
the pathways created for Jewish communal life by European political economy in the
424
early modern period; Penslar himself has contributed greatly to our understanding of
the economic thought of Jews themselves. Nevertheless, Penslar’s focus has been on
the modernization of Jewish economic culture, and in particular the key transition
from marginal traders and vagrants to petit-bourgeois tradesmen and professionals
between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while Israel’s has been on the larger
picture of European politics and intellectual culture (that of the Netherlands in
particular). That certainly leaves much more to be done on the internal political
economy of Jewish communities and individuals in the early modern period,
particularly for the period prior to the end of the Thirty Years War (1648), when
Penslar begins his study.50 Many of the best works on Jewish merchants do not cover
transatlantic trade (a case in point is Francesca Trivellato’s Familiarity of Strangers,51
a study of Jewish merchants in Livorno and their trading networks in Europe and
Asia); those few that do tackle Jewish Atlantic mercantilism often amount to less
than their claims. An early example of the latter is that of Gedalia Yogev’s Diamonds
and Coral (1978), whose initial chapter titles seem promising but whose survey of
Atlantic commerce is disappointingly brief and cursory. Still, Yogev’s study could be
excused for being a product of its time, as Yogev was particularly interested in the
trade with Asia and there was then little research available on which to build an
understanding of Jewish transatlantic commerce. Stephen Alexander Fortune’s 1984
attempt to analyze the role of Jewish merchants in British West Indian commerce
between 1650 and 1750 proved woefully inadequate with much less excuse, given
the stated focus of the work and Fortune’s contact with primary documents.52 Sarah
Abrevaya Stein’s recent work on Jews in the feather trade provides an intriguing
analysis of transatlantic trading patterns from Africa to Europe and the Americas
but, alas, focuses on the twentieth century.53 What is an early modernist to do?
While much work is in process on networks of those involved in trade, little
attention has been paid to the particular role of Jewish commerce within and between
wider imperial frameworks. Cathy Matson’s work on New York merchants, while
inclusive, speaks in such broad and general terms that it is impossible to see where
and how the trading patterns of Jewish merchants may be distinguished from those
of the English and Dutch merchants who dominated the city’s mercantile elite.54 Wim
Klooster’s ongoing work admirably captures Dutch West Indies trade out of Curacao,
integrating the island’s Jewish population into the picture, yet does not discuss how
they did what they did.55 Again, application of the framework recently laid out by
Eliga Gould may be of some help in this regard. The involvement (or lack) of Jewish
merchants in trading contraband, their interactions with illicit actors (pirates, slaves,
maroon communities, and Indians), the relative success or failure of their legitimate
trading activities, and the manner in which they were forced to manage competition
from merchants operating with the backing of full imperial subjecthood are areas
that merit further exploration but have not yet received adequate attention. Further,
there is much to be done with exploring the nature of the trading activities embarked
upon by early modern Jews and the strategies they used in pursuit of trade. How did
their activities complement or supplement what other groups of merchants were
doing? What different skill sets and connections did they bring to the table, and how
did these help or hinder their prosecution of trade in a variety of early modern
commodities, from foodstuffs to manufactured goods? Just how instrumental – or
not – were Jewish merchants in the transatlantic slave trade?
425
Perhaps the most important area that Jewish historians have not yet addressed in
a serious way is that of labor systems, and in particular Jewish participation in the
institution of slavery. Here, again, is a topic worthy of serious examination and
discussion within Jewish history, yet few works have managed to overcome a
defensive posture in order to take a hard and critical look at the evidence of Jewish
slave ownership. Certainly, it is difficult for Jewish historians conscious of the great
pain suffered by the victims of slavery to avoid looking for some way of differentiating
Jews from other classes of slaveholders and slavetraders, or to deter the effort to
explain away Jewish participation in the system. But the undisputed fact is that Jews
did participate in the transatlantic slave system and, like other groups of European
Americans, benefitted from its unapologetic appropriation of the labor of Africans,
creolized Blacks and Indians, not only as slaveowners and traders but as members of
a somewhat privileged caste. It is time for Jewish historians to own that truth and
confront this difficult and disturbing past. We will not have a credible handle on the
world these Jews inhabited, their place within it, or their understanding of Judaism
itself until we come to terms with the historical evidence that documents these simple
facts, and learn to discuss them dispassionately and with great candor.56 The ongoing
work of Jonathan Schorsch has made a substantial contribution toward untangling
some of these threads, in particular through close contrast of Jewish religious texts
on slavery with the ritual behavior of individual early modern Jews and Jewish
communities toward the African slaves in their midst. And recent work by Peter
Mark and Jose da Silva Horta makes an enormously important contribution by
documenting Jewish culture and communal life in West Africa, and shows great
promise for enlarging our understanding of the complex relations between Jewish
merchants, Africa, and Africans. However, there is ample room for more scholarship
and new voices. As Schorsch pointed out, the relationship of Jewish slaveowners to
their slaves in the Anglophone Caribbean is a tale yet to be explored.57 It appears, for
example, from my own cursory study of Jewish relations with slaves in Jamaica,58
that Jewish slaveowners acted no differently than white Christians when it came to
teaching their slaves about their faith; but little work has been done to elicit the
history of the descendants of extra-legal relationships of Jamaican Jewish men with
women of color. This begs the question of how we can hope to understand the extent
of racial attitudes among early modern Jews, and the range of ways they chose to act
toward people of color. What were the conditions in Jamaica that might explain why
Jews in Jamaica have behaved so differently toward their children of color than their
counterparts in Surinam?59 How do we explain the seemingly widespread impetus of
the Jews of the Joden Savanne and Guiné to teach Judaism to their children of color,
while Jews elsewhere did not?
There are also ways in which historians ought to consider Jews as part of the
larger framework of racial distinction in the early modern Atlantic world. Winthrop
Jordan set the tone for our present discussion back in 1968 by suggesting that
American racism began at the moment the English encountered Africans in West
Africa.60 But in his discussion, Jordan removed the very concept of race from its
historical contexts, presuming that it sprang de novo from contact with Africa; he
thus explored neither the earlier conceptions of ‘blackness’ in English culture or the
religious and nationalistic contexts from which they sprang. As James Shapiro has
since noted, the perceived ‘blackness’ of Africans has its antecedents in the specifically
426
English and more broadly Christian application of ‘blackness’ to Jews and other
groups in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.61 With the advantage of 40
years of hindsight and much new historiography on race, it would be worth revisiting
Jordan’s assumptions. Going back to the early modern religious understanding of the
racial attributes of the sons of Noah, outlined so well by Benjamin Braude,62 may
help us give new life to a close examination of the role religion may have played in
the transition of racial ideologies from Europe to the New World, and how European
attitudes were then complicated by encounters with Africans and native peoples of
the Americas. Was it only the ‘shock of the new’ that drove Englishmen to treat
Africans as less than human, or is there a broader ideological genealogy to the way
‘blackness’ could be used to create the kind of dehumanization of a class of people
that allowed for the psychological justification of their enslavement?
CONCLU S IO N
If Jewish historians are overly Eurocentric, Atlantic historians have certainly been
unthinkingly Christocentric. Each side might argue that it is only following the
obsessions of its subjects, but it may be worthwhile to ask whether both have taken
their tired historiographical premises for granted. Was early modern Judaism really
so limited to European geography, or has the modern historiographical focus on
Jewish Europe blinded Jewish historians to the varied ways in which New World
experiences began to reshape both Jews and Judaism?63 Should we take early modern
Christians only at their word, or do their motivations and actions bear a closer
scrutiny than they have yet received? Might the general focus on Christians and their
endeavors blind Atlanticists to some of the subtle elements of social reality in the
Atlantic world – and in particular, to the Jewish aspects of their context – causing
them to write histories that distort external realities of intergroup relations as they
unthinkingly reflect a Christian inner reality? That is, taking the Christian perspective
on that world for granted, do they fail to ask pertinent questions about the limitations
of a text-based Christian worldview and how it may have reinforced the individual
initiative to rationalize disregard for the humanity of Indians and Africans, in ways
that Christians simply could not do with respect to Jews precisely because Jews were
imbedded in Christian texts while Indians and Africans were not? By failing to
explore the various roles of Jews and others in that Christian cosmology, have
Atlantic historians been missing a gigantic piece of the puzzle for understanding
racial distinctions in the New World context?
In an essay entitled ‘A Domesday Book for the Periphery,’ Bernard Bailyn imagined
early North America as a place in which ‘primitivism and civilization’ were
counterposed, each dominant in its own time and space, and equally responsible for
defining the character of America and Americans. The essay closes with the poignant
image of Thomas Jefferson, ‘slave owner and philosophe,’ gazing ‘from Queen Anne
rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivated land.’ We must remain cognizant
that the world of which Bailyn writes did not belong exclusively to Christians of
European origin. It was peopled with a variety of cultural and linguistic forms, Indian
and African as well as Euro-caucasian, Jewish, and Muslim as well as Protestant and
Catholic, Spanish, Portuguese and French, as well as Dutch and British. This world
of savagery and culture in equal measure, Bailyn wrote, was one that we historians
427
‘can only grope’ at; we are like Tantalus, he suggests, and understanding is always
just out of our grasp. Adam Sutcliffe suggests another metaphor for the Jewish
Atlantic: a ‘fascinatingly alien’ people, from a world profoundly unlike our own.64
Both of these images are, I think, self-limiting in ways that are not conducive to
good historical writing.65 The early modern Jewish Atlantic is a world whose
knowledge has, over many generations, been carelessly misplaced. It is an attic full of
ancient books we have not yet read, some of them in languages we have not yet
mastered. The successful pursuit of Atlantic Jewish history will, then, require that we
begin the process of reclaiming that lost information, browsing the shelves and
opening dusty texts to unpack unfamiliar themes and restore them to the context of
their making. We must rethink our assumptions of the shape of both the Jewish
world and the Atlantic world. Jewish historians must allow the Americas and Africa
into the story in a larger way, examine more closely the conversation between Jewish
Europe and Jewish America, and listen to what the early modern Americas and Africa
can contribute to our understanding of the Jewish diaspora. Atlantic historians also
must expand their field of vision, taking in what is peripheral along with what is
central, and must think more wholistically about the link between others here (Jews,
Irish, Muslims) and others there (Indians, Africans), not as individuated groups but
in terms of broader patterns of social inclusion and marginalization. The evidence is
there, just waiting for us to discover it.
NOTE S
1 Sutcliffe 2009.
2 For purposes of clarity, ‘Jewish historians’ and ‘Jewish Atlanticists’ are used throughout
this essay to refer to practitioners in the field of Jewish history, not to historians who
happen to be Jewish.
3 Sutcliffe 2009: 18–21, 23–24, 29–30.
4 Katz 1991.
5 Sorkin 1999: 87.
6 That is, German and East European Jewry.
7 In November 2008, for example, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion
sponsored a three-day conference entitled, ‘Integrating Sephardi & Mizrachi Studies:
Research and Practice’ with the stated goal of ‘reviewing the current state of sephardic
studies within the academy’ because ‘in the last few decades the study of sephardi and
mizrachi culture has increased significantly but Judaic studies as a field has not integrated
a wider perspective on the diversity of Jewish experiences in the modern period.’ The
conference was held in Los Angeles, currently home to a sizeable community of Jewish
immigrants from Iran.
8 One such attack, directly pertinent to the study of Atlantic history, has come through the
much decried pseudo-scholarship of the Nation of Islam’s Historical Research Department.
See, e.g., Faber 1998, a work Faber researched and wrote as a direct response to claims
that Jews had been largely responsible for the transatlantic slave trade, published by the
Nation of Islam as The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in 1991. Though
two eminent historians of the transatlantic slave trade have also refuted the claims, in a
general way, with quantitative analyses, Faber’s work attempted to recreate the historical
context for the Anglo-American slave trade and put Jewish involvement into appropriate
perspective. Faber’s work has been the rare piece of dispassionate scholarship contributed
to a body of literature otherwise dominated by scholarly polemics, including: Friedman
428
1998; Brackman 1994; and Caplan 1993. On the limitations of Faber’s work, see Schorsch
2000: 130, note 51. Outside of this limited area, as Schorsch notes, work by Jewish
historians on racial questions takes on an ‘overwhelmingly apologetic’ tone. Ibid.: 102.
9 In no way do I mean to imply here that American Jewish historians have neglected to
address troublesome aspects of Black–Jewish relations in the twentieth century; anyone
familiar with the historiography for this period will know of the plethora of recent work
that tackles this important but problematic subject. My comments here refer only to the
apparent lack of interest by Jewish historians of the early modern period in addressing
such issues. On this point, see also Schorsch 2000: pp. 102–3. As to works on the twentieth
century which portray Jews in a positive light vis-à-vis the struggle for civil rights for
African Americans, see, for example, Schultz 2001; Mohl 2004; Diner 1977.
10 Schorsch 2000: 104.
11 Daiutolo 1983, citing an account by William Penn. In a tract originally published in 1607
that remained popular in Spain, being reprinted in 1625 and 1729, Fray Gregorio Garcia
made similar observations about the resemblance to Jews of Indians living in the vast
territory controlled by Spain. See, also, Popkin 1993; Williams 1998; and, especially,
Parfitt 2012: 67–69.
12 Sutcliffe, in a footnote, points to Jacob Katz (1904–98) as ‘most influentially associated’
with what he calls the ‘Germanocentric paradigm.’ Sutcliffe 2009: 223, note 3. While
Katz was certainly among the most influential Jewish historians of the late twentieth
century, scholarship in Wissenschaft des Judentums preceded his birth by nearly a century.
For a useful discussion of Katz’s predecessors in the field, see Liberles 1995: 94–124.
13 Throughout this essay, the term ‘civil emancipation’ is used to refer to the removal of
political disabilities, and ‘emancipation’ will refer only to extinguishing the bonds of
chattel slavery.
14 See, e.g., Malino 1978; Schechter 2003; Sutcliffe, 2003. See, also, Israel 2006. A few
works on emancipation in other nations, notably the Netherlands, also fit into this frame.
See, e.g., Michman 1995.
15 Kaganovich 2003; Thompstone 1995; Poujol 1986.
16 Katz 1991: 61–62, 74.
17 Israel 1985: 258–59.
18 See, for example, the extended discussion of Columbia’s search for a Jewish historian, as
recounted in Liberles 1995: 1–93; Schorsch 2000: 123, note 18; and Robinson 1994.
19 See, e.g., Ira Katnelson’s synthesis, entitled ‘Between Separation and Disappearance: Jews
on the Margins of American Liberalism,’ in Birnbaum and Katnelson 1995: 157–205.
Sources cited by Katznelson focus on post-1848 German immigration and ignore the state
by state struggle for Jewish civil emancipation and political participation that took place
between 1776 and 1875. As Adam Mendelsohn notes, American Jewish historians ‘have
eschewed a transnational approach’ to the historiography, thus leaving unaddressed many
topics of significance for the development of American Jewry. Mendelsohn 2007: 179.
20 See, e.g., Sarna and Dalin 1997; Sarna, Kraut and Joseph 1985; Schappes 1950 (also
reprinted in 1952 and 1971); Marcus 1959.
21 See, especially, Gould 2007A (presented at the Library of Congress conference Seascapes,
Littoral Cultures, and Trans-Oceanic Exchanges in February 2003 and since published in
the conference volume Seascapes) and Gould 2007B.
22 For American Jewish history, see Chyet 1958; for Canadian Jewish history, see Godfrey
and Godfrey 1995. Both works constitute general surveys of legal statutes within these
respective nations but provide little in the way of an interpretative framework for
understanding the differences found at the state, provincial or regional levels; neither
draws connections to similar laws in other colonies or nations. For a beginning in this
direction, see Snyder 2000, Snyder 2006A and Snyder 2006B.
429
23 Birnbaum and Katnelson 1995: ix–x.

24 One popular volume, Todd M. Endelman’s Comparing Jewish Societies comprises selected
articles drawn from the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History; conference
volumes that have appeared since that date include: Bernardini and Fiering 2001,
consisting of papers from the June 1997 conference by the same name convened at the
John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island; Cesarani 2002, comprising
papers delivered at a 2001 conference sponsored by the AHRB Parkes Centre at the
University of Southampton and originally published as a special issue of Jewish History
and Culture; a special issue of Jewish History in May 2006, comprising essays presented
as a panel at the 35th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies in
December 2003; and Kagan and Morgan 2009, drawn largely from papers delivered at
the first Lavy Seminar at Johns Hopkins University in March 2005. On the uneven content
of these volumes, see, for example, my reviews of the Bernardini and Fiering volume in
New West Indian Guide, Vol. 78, No. 3&4 (2004), pp. 7–8, and The European Legacy:
Toward New Paradigms, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2004), pp. 128–30, and of the Cesarani volume
in International Journal of Maritime History, Vol. XVII, no. 1 (June 2005), pp. 315–16.
An exception is the new volume edited by Jane S. Gerber of the City University of New
York, which arose out of the first academic conference ever held on the topic of Caribbean
Jewry; the conference took place in Kingston (Jamaica) in January of 2010 and was jointly
sponsored by CUNY and the United Congregation of Israelites in Jamaica.
25 Sorkin, David, ‘Enlightenment and Emancipation: German Jewry’s Formative Age in
Comparative Perspective,’ in Endelman 1997: pp. 104–5; Sorkin 1999: 87–97 (see,
especially p. 88, note 7); Dubin 1999; Dubin, Lois, ‘Researching Port Jews and Port
Jewries: Trieste and Beyond,’ in Cesarani 2002: 47–58; Sorkin, David, ‘Port Jews and the
Three Regions of Emancipation,’ in Cesarani 2002: 31–46.
26 On Court Jews, the seminal work is that of Selma Stern, first printed in Germany as Der
Hofjude im Zeitalter des Absolutismus: ein Beitrag zur europïschen Geschichte im 17.
und 18. Jahrhundert, and republished in English translation by the Jewish Publication
Society in 1950; see, also, the essays in Mann and Cohen 1996. On court culture, the
seminal work is Elias 1983.
27 Stow 2001: 23–29; Swetschinski 2000, p. xii. Both Stow and Swetschinski point to the
problematique of using the term ‘Sephardi’ as a catch-all term for non-Ashkenazi Jews of
the early modern period; Stow, for example, indicates that the Jewish community of Rome
was well established prior to the mid-fifteenth century, a generation before the expulsion
from Spain; indigenous Roman Jews therefore cannot be said to be ‘Sephardim,’ as they
had no historical or genealogical connection to Iberia. In fact, Stow points to Shlomo Ibn
Verga’s account of Sephardi refugees from Spain being turned away by Rome’s Jewish
inhabitants in 1492, requiring the intercession of the pope in order to enter the city, Stow
1992: 286–87. Further, Swetschinski observes that during the seventeenth century
Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam never used the term Sephardi when referring to themselves.
28 Monaco cites Levy’s 1819 observations of the backward nature of the Jewish community
of Curacao to highlight the model’s false presumption of enlightened cosmopolitanism.
Monaco 2009: 138, 143–49; Monaco 2005.
29 Dubin 2004: 14–17.
30 These have included, over the course of the past two decades or so, a half dozen
monographs and perhaps the same number of doctoral dissertations that have not yet
found their way into monograph form, along with a fair number of shorter article-length
publications. Among the former are: Klooster 1998; Feitler 2003; Schorsch 2004; Zacek
2010; Rupert 2012. The latter include work by Noah Gelfand (NYU, 2008) on Jews of
the Dutch Atlantic world and my own dissertation, a comparative study of Jewish identity
and social place in the British Atlantic world (Brandeis, 2000), along with the important
430
study by Catana Tully Cayetano (SUNY Albany, 1989) on Jewish involvement in early
New World sugar production.
31 Seed, Patricia, ‘Jewish Scientists and the Origin of Modern Navigation,’ in Bernardini and
Fiering 2001: 82–83.
32 Neher 1986: 102–68; Grassl 1998. See, also, Ruderman 1995.
33 Schorsch 2000: 104, citing Marcus 1970: 1, xxviii.
34 Efron, Noah, ‘Knowledge of Newly Discovered Lands Among Jewish Communities of
Europe (from 1492 to the Thirty Years War),’ in Bernardini and Fiering 2001: 54. The
quotation comes from Usque’s Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, which was
translated from the original Portuguese by Martin A. Cohen and published by the Jewish
Publication Society of America in 1964.
35 On Asser Levy, see Snyder, Holly, ‘English Markets, Jewish Merchants, and Atlantic
Endeavors: Jews and the Making of British Transatlantic Commercial Culture,’ in Kagan
and Morgan 2009: 57–63.
36 On the Gratz brothers, see Byars 1916. On Carvajal, see Hordes 2005; Cohen 1973; Toro
1944. Carvajal’s writings have also been the subject of several literary studies, including:
Dollinger 2002.
37 See Graizbord 2008: 32–65.
38 In the Bernardini and Fiering volume, for example, all of the seven essays on the Ibero-
Atlantic world deal in some fashion or other with Converso religiosity, and of these five
address directly their confrontations with the Inquisition.
39 Feitler 2003; Feitler, Bruno, ‘Jews and New Christians in Dutch Brazil, 1630–54,’ in
Kagan and Morgan 2009: 123–51. It seems the trends that Feitler documents may have
become something of a cultural tradition: a later example from nations under Protestant
control is the case of Abraham Gabay Crasto, a descendant of Portuguese Conversos who
lived both as a Jew (while in his native Surinam) and as a Christian (while sojourning in
New York) between 1810 and 1850; see Bennett 1994. Feitler’s findings certainly call into
question Bennett’s surmise that the case of Gabay Crasto was ‘unique.’
40 Excommunication was occasionally used by early modern Jewish communities as a means
of keeping restive congregants in line, the case of Baruch Spinoza in Amsterdam being
perhaps the most prominent. See, e.g., Kaplan 1984: 153–55; Kaplan provides an
Appendix showing more than 30 instances of excommunication between 1622 and 1683.
See, also, Nadler 2001; Wesselius 1990; Yovel 1977. The practice of Herem was
widespread in the Jewish world; at least one case took place in New York’s Shearith Israel
Congregation during the eighteenth century. See Snyder 2001: 17; original documents for
this case are transcribed in Godfrey and Godfrey 1991: 401–6.
41 See Sklare 1958: 3–39; also, Sklare 1971.
42 The only serious full-length academic study of the Jewish community in Jamaica published
to date, for example, was that of anthropologist Carol Holzberg (1984). Holzberg’s study
suggests some important ways in which the Jews of Jamaica have historically interacted
with other components of Jamaican society. Holzberg’s ethnographic study stepped in
where historians had previously failed: in the mid-1960s, Samuel and Edith Hurwitz went
to Jamaica for a year intending to write a history of the community; however, the book
that resulted from their efforts was, instead, a general history of the island. See Hurwitz
and Hurwitz 1965; Hurwitz and Hurwitz 1971.
43 The conference was entitled ‘Cultured Jews: The Art and Science of Jewish Ethnography.’
44 Cohen 1991: pp. 157–62; Ben-Ur, Aviva, ‘A Matriarchal Matter: Slavery, Conversion,
and Upward Mobility in Suriname’s Jewish Community’ in Kagan and Morgan 2009:
152–69; Mark, Peter and Jose da Silva Horta, ‘Catholics, Jews and Muslims in Early
Seventeenth Century Guiné,’ in Kagan and Morgan 2009: 170–94.
45 Snyder 2007: 155–59.
431
46 Sharot, Stephen, ‘Religious Syncretism and Religious Distinctiveness: A Comparative

Analysis of Pre-Modern Jewish Communities,’ in Endelman 1997: 23–60.
47 Kiron 2006; Mendelsohn 2007; Mendelsohn 2008. Mendelsohn’s study further stretches
the paradigm by including Australia (along with Britain, Canada, the United States and
South Africa), thus making it trans-Pacific as well as transatlantic.
48 See Warnke 2004; Hoberman 1991. On the application of the terms ‘transatlantic’
(crossing the ocean), and ‘circumatlantic’ (travelling around the ocean) to historical study,
see Armitage 2002.
49 Leibman 2012; Hoberman 2011.
50 See Penslar 1997; Penslar 2001.
51 Trivellato 2009.
52 Fortune 1984; for a detailed discussion of its problems, see also the review by James
Walvin in William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 42, no. 3 (July 1985), pp. 413–15.
53 Stein 2008.
54 Matson 1998.
55 Klooster 1998.
56 For a model of how this might be done, see Hancock 1995.
57 Mark, Peter and Jose da Silva Horta, ‘Catholics, Jews and Muslims in Early Seventeenth
Century Guiné,’ in Kagan and Morgan 2009: 170–94; Schorsch 2000: 130.
58 See Snyder 2007: 151–61. For further study of this body of records, see also Mirvis, Stan,
‘Sexuality and Sentiment: Concubinage and the Sephardi Family in Late Eighteenth-
Century Jamaica’ in Gerber 2014: 223–40.
59 On Surinam, see Cohen 1991; Ben-Ur, Aviva, ‘The Cultural Heritage of Eurafrican
Sephardi Jews in Suriname’ in Gerber 2014: 169–94. Ben-Ur is currently at work on a
book project documenting Jewish identity among Jews of color in Suriname between
1660 and 1863.
60 Jordan 1968: 4–7.
61 Shapiro 1996: 162, 170–73, 197; see also, Felsenstein 1996: 248, 316 n. 9.
62 Braude 1997.
63 See, e.g., Sarna 2004: xiv, xviii, 137–44. Far from embracing the declensionist model,
Sarna emphasizes the dynamic nature of American Judaism, from the colonial period to
the present, finding multiple examples of reinvention and revitalization alongside examples
of assimilation across time.
64 Bailyn 1987: 111–31; Sutcliffe 2009: 30.
65 A case in point is the traditional historiographical neglect on the topic of Muslims in early
America, recently redressed by Denise Spellberg’s book on Jefferson and his Qur’an
(2013). Here, Spellberg moves our perspective beyond its traditional Eurocentric limits by
exposing how knowledge and study of Islam by Jefferson and others of his generation
helped to shape founding notions of religious pluralism for the United States.
REF EREN CE S
Armitage, David, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’ in Armitage, David and Michael J.
Braddock (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2002), pp. 11–30.
Bailyn, Bernard, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1987).
Bennett, Ralph G., ‘The Case of the Part-Time Jew: A Unique Incident in Nineteenth-Century
America,’ American Jewish Archives, Vol. 46, no. 1 (1994), pp. 38–61.
Bernardini, Paolo and Norman Fiering (eds.), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the
West, 1450–1800 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001).
432
Birnbaum, Pierre and Ira Katnelson (eds.), Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Brackman, Harold, Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind the Nation of Islam’s ‘The Secret
Relationship Between Blacks and Jews’ ([New York]: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994).
Braude, Benajamin, ‘The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical
Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,’ William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd
Series, Vol. 54, no. 1 (January 1997), pp. 103–42.
Byars, William Vincent, B. and M. Gratz: Merchants in Philadelphia, 1754–1798; Papers of
Interest to Their Posterity and the Posterity of Their Associates (Jefferson City, Missouri:
The Hugh Stephens Printing Co., 1916).
Caplan, Marc, Jew-Hatred as History: An Analysis of the Nation of Islam’s ‘The Secret Relationship
Between Blacks and Jews’ (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1993).
Cayetano, Catana Tully. Outcasts of Jewish Descent and the Early Develoment of the Sugar
Industry in the New World (State University of New York at Albany diss. 1989).
Cesarani, David (ed.), Port Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading
Centres, 1550–1950 (London: Frank Cass, 2002).
Chyet, Stanley F., ‘The Political Rights of the Jews in the United States: 1776–1840,’ American
Jewish Archives, Vol. 10, no. 1 (1958), pp. 14–75.
Cohen, Martin A., The Martyr: The Story of a Secret Jew and the Mexican Inquisition in the
Sixteenth Century (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973).
Cohen, Robert, Jews in Another Environment: Surinam in the Second Half of the Eighteenth
Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991).
Daiutolo, Robert, Jr., ‘The Early Quaker Perception of the Indian,’ Quaker History, Vol. 72,
no. 2 (1983), 103–19.
Diner, Hasia, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977).
Dollinger, Karen R., In the Shadow of the Mexican Inquisition: Theological Discourse in the
Writings of Luis de Carvajal and in Sor Juana’s ‘Crisis de un Sermon’ (Ohio State Univ.
doc. diss., 2002).
Dubin, Lois, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999).
——, ‘“Wings on their feet…and wings on their head”: Reflections on the Study of Port Jews,’
Jewish Culture and History, Vol. 7, no. 1–2 (2004), pp. 14–17.
Elias, Norbert, The Court Society (Oxford, England: B. Blackwell, 1983).
Endelman, Todd M., Comparing Jewish Societies (University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Faber, Eli, Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: NYU
Press, 1998)
Feitler, Bruno, Inquisition, Juifs et Nouveaux-Chrétiens au Brésil: le Nordeste XVIIe et XVIIIe
Siécles (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003).
Felsenstein, Frank, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular
Culture, 1650–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Fortune, Stephen Alexander, Merchants and Jews: The Struggle for British West Indian
Commerce, 1650–1750 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984).
Friedman, Saul, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction
Books, 1998).
Garcia, Gregorio, Origen de los Indios de el Nueuo Mundo, e Indias Occidentales (Valencia:
Pedro Patricio Mey, 1607).
Gelfand, Noah. A People Within and Without: International Jewish Commerce and
Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [sic] Dutch Atlantic World (New
York University Diss. 2008).
Gerber, Jane S. Jews in the Caribbean (Oxford: Littman Library, 2014).
433
Graizbord, David, ‘Religion and Ethnicity Among “Men of the Nation”: Toward a Realistic
Interpretation,’ Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, n. s. Vol. 15, no. 1 (Fall
2008), pp. 32–65.
Godfrey, Sheldon and Judith Godfrey, ‘The King vs. Moses Gomez et al: Opening the Prosecutor’s
File, Over 200 Years Later,’ American Jewish History, Vol. 80 (Spring 1991), pp. 401–6.
Godfrey, Sheldon J. and Judith C. Godfrey, Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth
of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 1995).
Gould, Elija H., ‘Lines of Plunder or Crucible of Modernity? Toward a Legal History of the
English-Speaking Atlantic, 1660–1825,’ in Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären
Wigen (eds.) Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges
(Manoa: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), pp. 105–20.
Gould, Eliga H., ‘AHR Forum: Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking
Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,’ The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, no. 3 (June
2007), pp. 764–86.
Grassl, Gary C., ‘Joachim Gans of Prague: The First Jew in English America,’ American Jewish
History, Vol. 86, no. 2 (1998), pp. 195–217.
Hancock, David H., Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the
British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Hoberman, J., Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds (New York: Museum of
Modern Art and Shocken Books, 1991).
Hoberman, Michael, New Israel/New England: Jews and Puritans in Early America (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).
Holzberg, Carol, Minorities and Power in a Black Society: The Jewish Community of Jamaica
(Lanham, Maryland: North South Publishing Co., 1984).
Hordes, Stanley M., To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
Hurwitz, Samuel J., and Edith Hurwitz, ‘The New World Sets an Example for the Old: The
Jews of Jamaica and Political Rights, 1661–1831,’ American Jewish Historical Quarterly,
Vol. 55, no. 1 (1965), pp. 37–56.
Hurwitz, Samuel J. and Edith F. Hurwitz, Jamaica: A Historical Portrait (New York: Praeger, 1971).
Israel, Jonathan I., Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation
of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
——, European Jewry in an Age of Mercantilism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)
Jordan, Winthrop, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1968, 1977).
Kagan, Richard L. and Philip D. Morgan (eds), Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and
Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Kaganovich, Albert, ‘Rossiia “Absorbiruet” Svoikh Evreev: Imperrskaia Kolonizatsiia,
Evreiskaia Politika i Bukharskie Evrei,’ Ab Imperio, no. 4 (2003), pp. 301–28.
Kaplan, Yosef, ‘The Social Functions of the Herem in the Portuguese Jewish Community of
Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century,’ in Jozeph Michman (ed.), Dutch Jewish History:
Proceedings of the Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Netherlands, November 28
– December 3, 1982 (Jerusalem: Institute for Research on Dutch Jewry, 1984), pp. 153–55.
Katz, David S., ‘The Marginalization of Early Modern Anglo-Jewish History,’ Immigrants &
Minorities, Vol. 10, no. 1–2 (1991), pp. 60–77.
Kiron, Arthur, ‘An Atlantic Jewish Republic of Letters?,’ Jewish History, Vol. 20, no. 2 (May
2006), pp. 171–211.
Klooster, Wim, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795 (Leiden: KITLV
Press, 1998).
434
Leibman, Laura Arnold, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early
American Jewish Life (Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2012).
Liberles, Robert, Salo Wittmayer Baron: Architect of Jewish History (New York: NYU Press, 1995).
Malino, Frances, The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1978).
Mann, Vivian B. and Robert I. Cohen (eds.), From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art,
Patronage, and Power: 1600–1800 (Munich: Prestel, 1996).
Marcus, Jacob Rader, American Jewry – Documents – Eighteenth Century: Primarily Hitherto
Unpublished Manuscripts (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1959).
——, The Colonial American Jew (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).
Matson, Cathy, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Mendelsohn, Adam, ‘Tongue Ties: The Emergence of the Anglophone Jewish Diaspora in the
Mid-Nineteenth Century,’ American Jewish History, Vol. 93, no. 2 (2007), pp. 177–209,
here p. 179.
——, Tongue Ties: Religion, Culture and Commerce in the Making of the Anglophone Jewish
Diaspora, 1840–1870 (Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis Univ. doc. diss., 2008).
Michman, Jozeph, The History of Dutch Jewry During the Emancipation Period, 1787–1815:
Gothic Turrets on a Corinthian Building (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995).
Mohl, Raymond A., South of the South: Jewish Activists and the Civil Rights Movement in
Miami, 1945–1960 (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2004).
Monaco, C. S., ‘Port Jews or a People of the Diaspora? A Critique of the Port Jew Concept,’
Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, n.s. Vol. 15, no. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 137–66.
——, Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
Nadler, Steven, ‘The Excommunication of Spinoza: Trouble and Toleration in the “Dutch
Jerusalem”,’ Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 19, no. 4 (2001),
pp. 40–52.
Neher, André, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: David
Gans (1541–1613) and His Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Littman
Library, 1986).
Parfitt, Tudor, Black Jews in Africa and the Americas (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
Penslar, Derek J., ‘The Origins of Jewish Political Economy,’ Jewish Social Studies, new series
Vol. 3, no. 3 (1997), pp. 26–60.
——, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001).
Popkin, Richard H., ‘The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory,’ in Shalom Goldman
(ed.), Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries (Hanover, New
Hampshire: Brandeis University Press, 1993), pp. 70–90.
Poujol, Catherine, ‘Les Juifs de Buhara: Ou la Permanence d’une Communaute,’ Cahiers du
Monde Russe et Sovietique, Vol. 27, no. 1 (1986), pp. 111–23.
Robinson, Ira, ‘The Invention of American Jewish History,’ American Jewish History, Vol. 91,
no. 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1994), pp. 307–20.
Ruderman, David, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Rupert, Linda M. Creolization and Contraband : Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
Sarna, Jonathan D., American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
Sarna, Jonathan D. and David G. Dalin, Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience
(South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1997).
435
Sarna, Jonathan D., Benny Kraut and Samuel K. Joseph, Jews and the Founding of the Republic
(New York: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1985).
Schappes, Morris U., A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654–1875
(New York: Citadel Press, 1950), also reprinted in 1952 and 1971.
Schechter, Ronald, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Schorsch, Jonathan, ‘American Jewish Historians, Colonial Jews and Blacks, and the Limits of
Wissenschaft: A Critical Review,’ Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 6, no. 2 (2000), pp. 102–32.
——, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004).
Schultz, Debra L., Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement (New York:
NYU Press, 2001).
Shapiro, James, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
Sklare, Marshall (ed.), The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group (Glencoe, Illinois: Free
Press, 1958).
Sklare, Marshall, America’s Jews (New York: Random House, 1971).
Snyder, Holly, A Sense of Place: Jews, Identity and Social Status in Colonial British America,
1654–1831 (Brandeis Univ. diss., 2000).
——, ‘Customs of an Unruly Race: The Political Context of Jamaican Jewry,’ in Barringer,
Timothy, Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz (eds.), Art and Emancipation in
Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
——, ‘Declarations of Inter-Dependence: The Trans-Colonial Trajectory of Jewish Rights and
Liberties in the Anglo-Atlantic Empire, 1740–1830,’ 12th Annual Conference of the
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (Quebec City, June 9, 2006).
——, ‘Queens of the Household: The Jewish Women of British America,’ in Nadell, Pamela S.
and Jonathan D. Sarna (eds.), Women and American Judaism: Historical Perspectives
(Hanover, New Hampshire: Brandeis University Press, 2001), pp. 15–45.
——, ‘Rules, Rights and Redemption: The negotiation of Jewish status in British Atlantic port
towns, 1740–1831,’ Jewish History, Vol. 20, no. 2 (May 2006), pp. 147–70.
Sorkin, David, ‘The Port Jew: Notes Toward a Social Type,’ Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol. 1,
no. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 87–98, here p. 87
Spellberg, Denise, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2013).
Stein, Sarah Abrevaya, Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Stern, Selma, The Court Jew: A Contribution to the History of the Period of Absolutism in
Central Europe (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1950).
Stow, Kenneth R., ‘Ethnic Rivalry or Melting Pot: The “Edot” in the Roman Ghetto,’ Judaism,
Vol. 41, no. 3 (Summer 1992), pp. 286–97.
——, Theatre of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2001).
Sutcliffe, Adam, ‘Jewish History in an Age of Atlanticism,’ in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D.
Morgan (eds.), Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of
Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 18–30.
——, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Swetschinski, Daniel, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century
Amsterdam (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000).
Thompstone, Stuart, ‘Central Asia’s Jewish Minority and its Contribution to Tsarist Russia’s
Economic Development,’ Renaissance & Modern Studies, Vol. 38 (1995), pp. 60–79.
Toro, Alfonso, La familía Carvajal: Estudio Histórico Sobre los Judíos y la Inquisición de la
Nueva España en el Siglo XVI (Mexico City: Editorial Patria S.A., 1944).
436
Trivellato, Francesca, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and
Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
Usque, Samuel, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel [Martin A. Cohen, trans.]
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964).
Warnke, Nina, ‘Going East: The Impact of American Yiddish Plays and Players on the Yiddish
Stage in Czarist Russia, 1890–1914,’ American Jewish History, Vol. 92, no. 1 (2004), pp. 1–29.
Wesselius, J. W., ‘Spinoza’s Excommunication and Related Matters,’ Studia Rosenthaliana,
Vol. 24, no. 1 (1990), pp. 43–63.
Williams, James H., ‘“Abominable Religion” and Dutch (In)tolerance: The Jews and Petrus
Stuyvesant,’ De Halve Maen, Vol. 71, no. 4 (Winter 1998), pp. 85–87.
Yovel, Yirmiyahu. ‘Why Spinoza was Excommunicated,’ Commentary, Vol. 64, no. 5 (1977):
46–52.
Zacek, Natalie A. Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776 (Cambridge
437
PART VI
CREDIT, FINANCE, AND MONEY

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BRITISH JOINT-STOCK COMPANIES

AND ATLANTIC TRADING
Matthew David Mitchell
Our sovereign lord and lady the king and queen’s majesties, considering how much
the improvement of trade concerns the wealth and welfare of the kingdom, and that
nothing has been found more effectual for the improving and enlarging thereof
than the erecting and encouraging of companies whereby the same may be carried
on by undertakings to the remotest parts, which it is not possible for single persons
to undergo…
(Records of the Parliaments of Scotland: 2013)
The preceding passage from the 1693 ‘Act for Encouraging of Forraigne Trade’
succinctly sets out the reasons why an early modern state – in this case, Scotland –
would choose to charter a joint-stock trading company. What the Scottish legislators
wanted, and wanted quickly, was a homegrown Atlantic trading system that could
rival England’s already-established oceanic commerce. The ‘Company of Scotland
tradeing to Affrica and the Indies’, as it was dubbed in a further piece of establishing
legislation in 1695, seemed to offer just such a shortcut to commercial empire due to
three special capabilities of joint-stock companies.
First, joint-stocks offered the opportunity to invest and profit to people from
across the social spectrum, not only those expert in the mysteries of overseas trading.
Fully 34 per cent of the Company of Scotland’s initial capital subscription of 153,448
Scottish pounds came from Scotland’s lairds, a share outweighing that of Scotland’s
merchants. Second, the great risks of oceanic trade in the early modern technological
environment were spread among this multitude of investors rather than being borne
by ‘single persons’, whether acting individually or in small partnerships. Third, a
state by granting broad liberties to a joint-stock company could allow it to carry on
its own diplomatic and military policy in the lands where it traded – an advantage
thought to be particularly useful in the ‘remotest parts’ of the world where European
state power could not extend and where the power of indigenous polities was
thought to be too crude to provide proper security. None of these capabilities
worked to the advantage of the Company of Scotland, which sank much of its
capital – a sum amounting to one-sixth of the realm’s circulating coinage – into a
Central American colony that soon proved a dead loss. The consequences of this
441
– Matthew David Mitchell –
Figure 24.1 The several journals of the Court of Directors of the Company of Scotland
Trading to Africa and the Indies
Reproduced by kind permission of The Royal Bank of Scotland © 2014
442
– chapter 24: British joint-stock companies –
disaster proved fatal for the Scottish Parliament, which in 1707 assented to its own
dissolution and the creation of a United Kingdom ruled from Westminster as the
price for Scottish access to the pre-existing English Atlantic system (Watt 2007: 28,
57, 82–83, 207–16, 251–54).
In the course of this system’s development the English state had experimented with
several chartered companies of its own, though none of them failed so dramatically as
the short-lived Company of Scotland and none matched the success that the British
East India Company achieved in Asian trade. Even so, the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries formed the classic period of English/British joint-stock
commercialism in the Atlantic Basin. The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) had been
established in 1670 and its core business of purchasing beaver pelts from the
inhabitants of the American far north for the supply of Europe’s hatting industry
would enjoy its greatest success following the conclusion in 1713 of the War of the
Spanish Succession. The South Sea Company (SSC) would receive its charter in 1711
and though the expectations of its Parliamentary supporters that it would serve as a
bedrock of government finance soon collapsed along with the great speculative bubble
of 1720, the company would carry out its commercial role as Britain’s official purveyor
of enslaved African labourers to Spanish America for an additional two decades.
Figure 24.2 The South-Sea House in Bishops-gate Street,

published according to Act of Parliament, for Stowe’s Survey, 1754
Bleichroeder Print Collection, Kress Collection. Baker Library,
Harvard Business School (olvwork 368953)
443
On the other hand, in 1707 a third great joint-stock trading firm, the Royal African
Company (RAC), faced a political fight for its survival that it would soon lose. Like
South Sea and Hudson’s Bay Companies, the Royal African Company also enjoyed a
charter that granted it a monopoly over a branch of British Atlantic trade, in this case
the supply of African commodities to Britain itself and enslaved labourers to its
American colonies. From the RAC’s foundation in 1672 it faced illicit competition
from ‘separate traders’, but by the 1690s these had organized themselves into a highly
effective political lobby aimed at convincing Parliament and British public opinion
that the RAC monopoly not only infringed the liberty of the individual subject, but
actually held back the efficient development of British commerce as a whole.
The separate traders’ wide-ranging critique questioned most of the fundamental
premises for the very existence of joint-stock companies. Were they really the best
way of raising the capital necessary for long-range trading while spreading the
inherent risk? Did it really serve the interests of Crown or of country to grant such
sweeping liberties to a specially chosen group of its subjects? Could the RAC really
supply enslaved labourers to the colonies in greater numbers and at lower prices than
the separate traders could if given the opportunity? Did the company really do the
best possible job of exporting British manufactures and thus providing employment?
In short, was the RAC – and by extension, other joint-stock companies – using the
capabilities of the joint-stock form to conduct overseas commerce as efficiently as
possible, or was it simply hiding behind the protection of its monopoly privilege to
engage in inefficient yet profitable ‘rent-seeking’ behaviour?
TH E FIRST ENGLISH JOIN T-S TO CKS , 1 5 5 5 – 1 6 6 0

Long before the establishment of the Royal African Company and its contemporaries,
similar questions were being asked of the very first of England’s joint-stock
companies, the Muscovy or Russia Company. Chartered in 1555, the Muscovy
Company made only a meagre contribution to the wealth of the realm, but it set the
pattern for the Atlantic trading concerns of the seventeenth century and beyond in
at least two important ways. First, from its beginning the company faced clandestine
competition from fellow English subjects. In 1566 Parliament responded to
company appeals for relief from these violations of its charter by passing an act
calling for the seizure of Russia-bound non-company vessels and their cargoes. As
would happen in virtually every subsequent case in which a joint-stock company
sought to assert an exclusive privilege, the bolder ‘interlopers’ simply flouted this
law, which was enforced only weakly. A related second problem confronting the
Muscovy Company was the opportunistic behaviour of its own members and
employees, some of whom participated in illicit trade on their own accounts (Willan
1948: 316–20).
As a rule the sixteenth-century English forays into Atlantic commerce lacked key
elements common to the Muscovy Company and the later joint-stock companies.
Beginning in 1553 a group of London merchants pooled their resources for the fitting
out of a series of trading expeditions to the coast of West Africa, bringing back gold,
spice, and ivory. Rather than the permanent joint-stock that characterized the
Muscovy Company, the partners in these African ventures reclaimed their original
capital plus a share of the profits after each individual voyage and then had the
444
option to reinvest in the next voyage. The operation also lacked a royal charter, let
alone a monopoly privilege, although Queen Elizabeth herself invested in the voyages
of 1561, 1563 and 1564. After this the slave-trading expeditions of the Plymouth-
based John Hawkins eclipsed the activities of the London partners. Hawkins
organized the financing of his commercial activities in Africa along similar lines as the
Londoners had, as would the anti-Spanish privateers and Northwest Passage seekers
that followed him such as Martin Frobisher, Thomas Cavendish and Francis Drake
(Rabb 1967: 61–63; Scott 1912: 3–9). In 1588 while these men were occupied with
harrying the Spanish Armada, eight merchants from London and Exeter took the
next organizational step, receiving a royal charter that granted them a ten-year
exclusive privilege to trade in Africa under the name of the Senegal Adventurers
(Scott 1912: 10–11).
The first three decades of the seventeenth century saw a great surge of interest in
the establishment of English joint-stock companies, though the goal of most of these
was Atlantic colonization rather than commerce. Gentlemen investors, as opposed to
merchants, were conspicuous by their numbers in many of these colonial projects,
accounting for 560 of the 1,684 members in the Virginia Company, 26 out of 122 in
the Massachusetts Bay Company, and 78 out of 105 in Sir Walter Ralegh’s various
South American ventures. By contrast, investors in the commercially focused East
India Company were almost entirely merchants. This suggests that in comparison
with the profit-minded merchants, gentlemen’s investments may have been motivated
more by the desire to expand England’s territory, wealth and glory rather than their
personal fortunes (Rabb 1967: 28–42).
Yet one Atlantic trading company, the Gynney and Bynney Company, counted
thirty landed gentlemen among its thirty-eight identifiable members. This firm’s 1618
charter from James I acknowledged the intention to ‘run a uniform course in the
setting up and prosecuting a trade of merchandise’ to Africa, symbolized by its
establishment and maintenance of the first English trading fort on the African coast.
This company proved a rather spectacular financial failure: the first ship dispatched
was lost at sea and the first three voyages together resulted in the loss of £5,600 out
of its initial capital of about £7,000. It also proved as incompetent in restraining
interlopers as it was inefficient in conducting its own trade. While the company
apparently attempted to seize and condemn interloping vessels where it could, the
interlopers successfully lobbied the Parliament of 1624 to declare the Gynney and
Binney charter a grievance on the grounds that it raised the price English textile
makers had to pay for African dyestuffs. After these reverses the company stopped
fitting out voyages, instead licensing others to carry on the trade, including several of
its own members (Porter 1968: 59; Rabb 1967: 30; Scott 1912: 11–15).
Despite the 1628 purchase of a controlling interest by one of its most prominent
member-licensees, Nicholas Crispe, the Gynney and Binney Company succumbed to
bankruptcy in 1631. Crispe, however, saw great commercial potential in West Africa
and immediately reorganized the company under a new charter from Charles I with
a 31-year monopoly clause. The new Company of Merchants Trading to Guinea
(otherwise known as ‘Nicholas Crispe and Company’) took as its mainstay the trade
in dyestuffs from Sierra Leone, but also attempted inroads into the trade of the Gold
Coast. Crispe’s company built at least four trading factories in this new region of
interest, thus staking a claim alongside the more established Portuguese traders and
445
the Dutch West India Company, the United Provinces’ own Atlantic joint-stock
trading firm. Though Crispe faced competition from these quarters as well as from
the continuing challenge of English interlopers, he would later claim that his company
imported half a million pounds worth of African gold from 1636 to 1644 (Porter
1968: 61–65).
The politics of the Civil War undid Crispe’s success. Knighted in 1640, this staunch
Royalist lost control of the Company of Merchants Trading to Guinea after
Parliament froze his assets in 1644. The company’s subsequent managers proved
better at Interregnum politics than at trading with Africa. Interlopers including
Samuel Vassall, a major figure in the growing transport of enslaved Africans to
Barbados, continued to complain about the company monopoly, prompting a
governmental inquiry into its affairs in 1651. This inquiry found that the company
had lost some £100,000 during its existence, yet recommended the extension of its
charter through 1664 on the grounds that the perils of trading with Africa made a
joint-stock company necessary. Vassall later ceased his criticisms of the company and
indeed bought a stake in it himself, but by 1657 the company no longer found its
string of African forts profitable, leasing them to the East India Company as
waystations (Porter 1968: 66–72; Smith 2006: 23).
THE HIGH P ERIO D O F THE

AFRICAN COMPANIE S , 1 6 6 0 – 1 7 1 2
The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought about a new era of joint-stock
enterprise as senior members of the House of Stuart took an interest in the
possibilities of Atlantic commerce. Charles’s brother James, Duke of York and
their cousin Prince Rupert led the list of subscribers who in 1660 and 1663 obtained
charters naming them the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa
(CRA). The 1663 charter stipulated that the company should have the ‘“whole,
entire and only trade for the buying and selling bartering and exchanging of for or
with any Negroes, slaves, goods, wares and merchandises whatsoever to be vented
or found at or within any of the Cities” on the west coast of Africa’ (Donnan 1930:
169n; Zook 1919b: 148).
The appearance of ‘Negroes’ and ‘slaves’ at the head of the list reflected a major
change in the emerging political economy of the English Atlantic. Colonists in
Virginia and Maryland had long since identified tobacco as the cash crop best adapted
to their climate, while Barbados and Jamaica proved ideal for sugar monoculture. By
1663 planters in all of these locations were abandoning their earlier experiments with
white indentured servitude, turning instead to enslaved Africans as their main source
of labour (Menard 2007: 310–12, 318). The killing labour regime and hostile disease
environment of the plantations ensured that planters in the American colonies would
face a constant need for newly imported slaves to replace the dead (Tadman 2000:
1536–37). The Company of Royal Adventurers obliged the planters by delivering
nearly 16,000 enslaved Africans to America from 1662 to 1672, although the
company’s assertion of its exclusive rights to the trade did not prevent English
interlopers from delivering an additional 7,000 slaves over the same period (Voyages).
The Royal Adventurers’ most dangerous rivals were not their unchartered fellow
English subjects, but the West India Company (WIC), the Dutch Republic’s entry
446
into Atlantic joint-stock commerce. Since its foundation in 1621, the WIC had
conquered the entire string of Portuguese fortresses along the West African coast,
including the main Gold Coast castle of Elmina. Dutch dominance of the Gold Coast
was by no means complete, for upstart West India Companies from Sweden,
Denmark, and Brandenburg each maintained at least one tenuous settlement there,
but when the Portuguese sought to re-enter the trade in 1689 the Dutch were able to
force their ships to purchase passes at Elmina (Postma 1990: 14–18, 75–77).
Starting in 1664 the Company of Royal Adventurers mounted its own military
challenge to Dutch control of the Gold Coast. The conquest by Sir Robert Holmes of
several WIC ships and factories provoked a response in kind by a Dutch fleet under
Michiel de Ruyter. In 1665, these mutual depredations between the two companies
pushed England and the Dutch Republic themselves into open war, the second
between the two states since 1650 (Zook 1919a: 177–82; 1919b: 153–56). The
CRA’s interests suffered badly in the war it fomented; the company sent eighty-nine
ships to Africa to purchase slaves from 1662 to 1666, but only seven from 1667
through 1672 (Voyages). Rendered incapable of further trading, the CRA during the
late 1660s resorted to the time-honoured expedient of selling licences to those who
could, including several of its own shareholders. One group of licensees – perhaps
seeing little possibility of loosening the Dutch grip on the Gold Coast trade – set up
a separate unchartered joint-stock under the name of the Gambia Adventurers,
paying the CRA £1,000 annually for the exclusive privilege of trading to the
Senegambia region under the CRA charter (Zook 1919b: 156–58).
Figure 24.3 Views of forts and castles along the Gold Coast, West Africa, about 1700
© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
447
This period of disarray ended in September 1672 with the establishment of the
Royal African Company, the last in the series of joint-stocks chartered by the English
crown to conduct the realm’s trade with Africa. Like its predecessor the CRA, the
RAC enjoyed substantial gentry and aristocratic involvement with ten out of twenty-
four charter members ranking as esquires at least; on the other hand, the new
company received about three-fourths of its initial capitalization of £110,100 from
merchants (Donnan 1930: 179–80; Davies 1960: 64–66). Because the CRA’s
experience seemed to indicate that ‘the powers and privileges in our said Letters
Patents granted were not sufficient for those purposes for which they were designed’,
the Royal African Company received a much wider set of liberties than those
possessed by its predecessor, including ‘full power to make and declare peace and
war with any of the heathen nations’ within the charter’s geographical limits. Second,
the RAC would have the right of search and seizure and the assistance of customs
officers and the Royal Navy (whose Lord Admiral, James Duke of York, was also the
RAC’s ceremonial Governor) in order to enforce the prohibition of interlopers from
the 5,000 miles of coastline from Morocco down to the Cape of Good Hope. Finally,
the charter provided that any interlopers captured on the African coast would be
heard in a prerogative court administered by the RAC itself with authority to
condemn ships and confiscate cargoes (Donnan 1930: 179, 188–91).
These powers went some way towards interdicting interlopers, especially on the
coast of Africa (Carlos and Kruse 1996: 305; Davies 1960: 115–16), but the challenge
of monopoly enforcement was much greater in the Americas. Here the sugar and
tobacco planters who were the main purchasers of enslaved labourers also dominated
colonial politics, and they wanted the largest possible labour supply at the lowest
possible cost, giving them the incentive to connive in smuggling. Between 1679 and
1682 the RAC’s Caribbean agents reported the arrival of thirty-two interloping
vessels, but were able to seize only four of them. Colonial governors, anxious to
curry favour with local elites, often refused to support the RAC’s efforts to seize
interlopers, and even when such seizures were successful, they stood little chance of
being upheld in colonial courts (Davies 1960: 113–20; Zahedieh 2010a: 116–17). As
a result, the RAC’s powers to restrain competition were of limited use. The available
documents of slave trading voyages show that from 1674, when the Royal African
Company sent out its first slave ship, through 1688, British vessels embarked an
approximate total of 141,807 enslaved human beings in African ports; seven out of
every ten were embarked by RAC ships and the other three out of ten on interloping
vessels (Voyages).
The Revolution of 1688 ended the reign of James II, the RAC’s great Stuart patron
who had succeeded his brother Charles only three years before, and simultaneously
brought into disrepute the expansive view of the royal prerogative upon which the
RAC’s charter rested. In the following year the court of King’s Bench, under its newly
appointed Lord Chief Justice Sir John Holt, reversed an admiralty court’s pro-
company verdict in the 1684 case of Nightingale v. Bridges, finding in favour of the
owners of an interloping vessel seized by a Royal Navy frigate on monopoly-
enforcement duty. The RAC largely curtailed its coercive efforts against interlopers
after this decision, which established common-law jurisdiction over cases involving
its monopoly privileges and rendered the company’s own prerogative court ineffective
(Stump 1974: 29–32).
448
Much as happened simultaneously in the Indian Ocean trade, which split between
partisans of the Old and New East India Companies, the battle between interlopers
and the RAC over the state of the African trade now entered the halls of Parliament.
A voluminous pamphlet literature on both sides of the question extended the dispute
into the court of public opinion; indeed, ‘the debate surrounding the African trade
generated as much literature as, if not more than, any other economic controversy
during this period’ (Keirn 1995: 437). Sharing the mercantilist preoccupation with
the realm’s balance of trade, the mostly anonymous pamphleteers on both sides
sought to convince readers that their preferred commercial system would maximize
both the African demand for English goods and the African supply of enslaved
labourers to the English plantations (Mitchell 2013b: 442–46). In 1697 the ‘separate
trade’ lobby, representing the interests of interlopers along with the many colonial
planters who believed themselves underserved by the Royal African Company, won
a somewhat hollow victory in the form of an Act that confirmed their right to
participate in the African trade, but required them to pay the RAC a duty of 10 per
cent for the upkeep of its forts, on the grounds that all English traders in West Africa
benefited from the protection of the forts (Zahedieh 2010a: 52).
Continued Anglo-Dutch hostilities in Africa lent credence to the perceived need for
the forts, though the tactics on both sides had become less direct than they were in the
1660s. During the 1670s and 1680s the Royal African Company and the Dutch West
India Company engaged in an increasingly expensive contest to offer the most lavish
bribes to the African rulers and merchants who controlled trade on various parts of the
coast in hopes of securing exclusive trading rights. The stakes increased during the 1690s
when the RAC and WIC took sides in an eight-year succession battle in the kingdom of
Komenda on the western Gold Coast, with each company encouraging its preferred
claimant to attack the trading posts of the rival company. Though at the time England
and the Dutch Republic shared a ruler in William of Orange and a common French
enemy, officers in the African service of both the RAC and WIC considered their
commercial rivalry as something separate from the policy of their sovereigns (Law 2007).
The spectre of Dutch competition loomed large in the economic thinking of
Charles Davenant, the prolific pamphleteer engaged by the Royal African Company
to write a plea for the renewal of its monopoly that ran to three volumes and 136
total pages. The Dutch, according to Davenant,
have laid it down for a Maxim, that in all Foreign Trades where the Trade must
be maintain’d by Force and Forts on the Land, and where they cannot conveniently
keep up an Amity and Correspondence by Ambassadors alone, there seems to be
an absolute Necessity of carrying on such Trades, by Joint-Stocks.
(Davenant 1709: 28)
Davenant’s lengthy treatise appeared in 1709 amid a welter of new pro- and anti-
RAC publications as the so-called Ten-Percent Act approached its scheduled
expiration in 1712. This time all the ink spilled on both sides of the question resulted
in no new legislation at all, but with the burdensome ten-percent duty expired and
the Royal African Company having gained no Parliamentary sanction of their
privileges, the separate traders could claim complete political victory over the
monopolists (Pettigrew 2013: 43–44).
449
Following this de facto opening of the slave trade, and contrary to the dire
prophecies of Davenant and other pro-RAC pamphleteers, Britain actually expanded
its overall share of the trade even as the company’s share dwindled in the face of
unrestrained competition from the private traders. From 1672 to 1712, Royal African
Company ships delivered 133,551 enslaved persons to the Americas, an annual
average of 3,257. By contrast, during the first decade of duty-free trade from 1713 to
1722, the separate traders delivered a collective annual average of 12,705 Africans
for sale to colonial planters (Voyages). Savvy and well-capitalized traders like
London’s Humphry Morice, who would fit out at least seventy-three slaving voyages
between 1709 and 1732, had effectively eroded what competitive advantages the
RAC had possessed (Rawley 2003; Voyages). In the process, each year they
condemned roughly four times as many human beings to involuntary transportation
across the Atlantic and forced labour in the Americas as the Royal African Company
had done during each year of its monopoly.
HUDSON’S B AY, S O U TH S E A,
A N D ROYAL AFRICAN CO M P ANIE S AF TE R 1 7 1 3
If the political events of 1712 marked a precipitous decline in the fortunes of the
Royal African Company, those of 1713 portended a brighter future for Britain’s two
other Atlantic trading companies of the day: the Hudson’s Bay Company and the
South Sea Company. The South Sea Company (SSC) received its charter from Queen
Anne in 1711, the brainchild of the Tory circle around Lord High Treasurer Sir
Robert Harley. The new firm was to serve in part as a holding company for over £9
million worth of the National Debt – a connection with state finances that in 1720
would lead to the inflation and bursting of the South Sea Bubble, by far the best-
known event in the company’s history (for which see the essay in this volume by
Helen Julia Paul). From the beginning, however, Harley had pictured a commercial
foundation for the SSC’s financial functions, promising potential investors that the
projected company would enjoy a monopoly on the previously clandestine trade
between the British Caribbean islands and the Spanish Main. In 1711 with the War
of the Spanish Succession in progress, this was a speculative proposition at best, but
the peace negotiations in Utrecht resulted in a contract (the asiento) for the British
crown to supply 4,800 slaves annually to Spain’s empire for a period of thirty years,
which Queen Anne immediately awarded to the South Sea Company (Wennerlind
2011: 197–203, 218–19).
Initially the South Sea Company conducted its branch of the trade in enslaved
human beings in much the same way that the Royal African Company had approached
the supply of slaves to the British plantations: chartering vessels and freighting them
with cargo to be exchanged in Africa for slaves to be transported to Jamaica, where
the slaves would be ‘refreshed’ on shore before the final transit to the markets in such
Spanish Caribbean ports as Cartagena, Panama, Veracruz, or Havana. Later on the
company sought ways to externalize some of the risks of this itinerary. One way of
doing this was to allow the Royal African Company to exchange cargoes from Europe
for slaves and then sell them to the South Sea Company, which would handle the
Middle Passage. Another method involved the SSC’s agent at Kingston in Jamaica
purchasing Africans from private traders and transferring them to SSC vessels for the
450
run to the Spanish Main. From about 1729 the SSC concentrated on this short-haul
slaving business along with its transatlantic supply of slaves to Buenos Aires and its
privilege of sending one ship a year laden with European consumer imports to one of
Spanish America’s trade fairs (Palmer 1981: 9–12, 15–16).
The South Sea Company faced significant barriers in making this trade profitable,
many of them similar to those the Royal African Company had faced. British
interlopers and even the SSC’s own opportunistic captains bit into company profits,
while the planters of Jamaica attempted several times to impose duties on the landing
and re-export of slaves, hoping to prevent Spanish slave purchasers from monopolizing
the most productive enslaved agriculturalists. Even in peacetime South Sea captains
and land-based agents quarrelled constantly with Spanish officials over the terms of
the asiento. During wartime the trade ground to a halt, as it did during the war of
1718–20, while the outbreak in 1739 of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (or to the Spaniards,
the Guerra del Asiento) ended the SSC’s trading operations more or less permanently,
though it remained in existence as a manager of government securities well into the
nineteenth century (Palmer 1981: 65–66, 83–94). Yet in contrast to the Royal African
Company, the South Sea Company’s profitability during its years of supplying slaves
to Spanish America seems on the incomplete evidence available to have been ‘far
from unprofitable’ and even ‘better than good’ (Palmer 1981: 155).
The end of war with France in 1713 also signalled improved prospects for the
Hudson’s Bay Company. Established in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC)
was the first Atlantic trading firm to extend the joint-stock model of commerce
beyond Africa. Though joint-stock companies had initially set up several English
colonies in America, individual merchants mainly took on the business of supplying
them with European consumer goods and carrying away their agricultural products
(Zahedieh 2010a: 80–81). Compared with trade to Barbados or Massachusetts-Bay,
the fur trade of ‘Rupert’s Land’ seemed better adapted for a joint-stock, since it
involved ‘an area without a structured government or governor and without
permanent European settlers’. Within twenty years of its charter, the new company
constructed four trading factories on the west coast of Hudson Bay. Until 1713,
however, the factories existed under constant threat of French military action and the
HBC’s trade remained relatively small (Carlos and Lewis 2010: 3–5, 40–43).
With British authority over the Canadian Shield region recognized in the Treaty of
Utrecht – and with populations of fur-bearing animals waning in Russia and around
the North American Great Lakes – the company found that it controlled a large
portion of the supply of pelts to the European hat industry. Nor did France attempt
the conquest of the region in any of the five Anglo-French wars of the next hundred
years; as a result, the Hudson’s Bay Company enjoyed lower security costs than the
Royal African Company, whose installations had always faced a greater threat from
seagoing Europeans than from African attackers (Carlos and Lewis 2010: 5, 12, 43).
If forts therefore represented a lesser liability to the HBC than to the RAC, their
warehousing function also served as a greater asset. Pelts could be purchased and
stored for months in expectation of the HBC’s annual ship, but humans could not be
kept for nearly so long in the heat and squalor of the RAC’s slave dungeons.
French coureurs de bois operating from Quebec and Montreal did compete with
the Hudson’s Bay Company to purchase pelts from Native American hunters, often
forcing the British factors to offer the hunters a significantly greater amount of
451
European-made consumer manufactures in exchange for each pelt than the company’s
official price standard indicated. Yet compared to the Royal African Company,
whose factors also bartered for African commodities and enslaved persons according
to an official list of prices, the directors of the Hudson’s Bay Company could give
their factors much more latitude to vary from the standard while still trading
profitably (Carlos and Lewis 2010: 53–67). The hunters also did well out of this
exchange, acquiring imported household goods and luxuries along with producer
goods such as firearms that allowed them to harvest the products of the subarctic
environment more efficiently. The resulting standard of living for Native Americans
around Hudson’s Bay arguably equalled that of labourers in England (Carlos and
Lewis 2010: 78–95, 179–83).
In 1749 the Hudson’s Bay Company faced a political test when representations from
the projectors of a rival company prompted a Parliamentary inquiry into whether the
revocation of the HBC monopoly might increase the supply of furs. The HBC’s
counterargument echoed that of the Royal African Company during its own political
troubles by (erroneously) invoking the barbarity of their trading counterparts and (more
credibly) the bogey of potentially violent competition from a rival European state, in
this case France instead of the Dutch Republic. Unlike the RAC, the HBC prevailed; the
investigating commission recommended to Parliament that the company retain its
monopoly (Carlos and Lewis 2010: 134–39; Wagner 2012: 9). Even so, the halcyon
days could not last forever for the Hudson’s Bay Company. In the wake of the British
conquest of Quebec during the Seven Years’ War, a new British firm, the Montreal-
based North West Company, rivalled the HBC’s control for control of a trade in beaver
pelts that was already declining due to overhunting (Carlos and Lewis 2010: 184–88).
As for the Royal African Company, it experienced a brief but extraordinary revival
after James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, led a coterie of mostly aristocratic
investors in a successful bid to purchase the company during the Bubble year of 1720
(Shea 2011, 18–19). Though he assured his fellow shareholders that his short-term
plans involved the recapture of the slave trade to British America, Chandos privately
believed the company unable to compete with the separate traders in the post-1712
political environment (Mitchell 2013a: 546, 555n, 558–60).
Instead, over the next three years Chandos led a secret RAC ‘bye committee’ in
organizing a series of expeditions aimed at locating and securing previously unknown
sources of gold, spices and drugs within Africa itself. In time Chandos expected that
imports to Europe of such newly discovered commodities would become the Royal
African Company’s main line of business, generating sufficient profits to allow the
company to purchase and transport slaves at a loss until the separate traders were
priced out and had to leave the trade. For the moment the company used Chandos’s
infusion of new capital to fund the largest trading volume in its history: over £100,000
of European goods and Asian re-exports sent to Africa in the single year of 1723.
Fierce competition from other Europeans seeking to buy African commodities and
enslaved persons meant that this massive investment of working capital produced
only massive losses, starving the company of cash and stretching its credit to breaking
point. Thus did Chandos’s long-term project fail and by 1726 he and his friends had
cut themselves loose from RAC affairs (Mitchell 2013a: 554–60, 567–73).
In 1731 the company sent out its last slaving voyage, thereafter focusing on the
management of the trading posts for which purpose it received an annual Parliamentary
452
subsidy of £10,000. The revocation of this subsidy in 1746, and Parliament’s decision
in 1750 to give the management of the forts over to a newly organized consortium of
traders to Africa, led to the RAC’s final dissolution in 1752 (Davies 1960: 345;
Hancock 1997: 175, 182–85). The evolution of the British Atlantic system had left
the RAC behind.
CONCLUSIO NS
Being chartered by the British state, joint-stock trading companies existed in the first
instance as instruments of that state’s policy. Once in existence they tended to operate
quite independently of that policy, yet they maintained an interest in keeping the state
convinced of their usefulness for its objectives. When a company failed in using politics
to protect its chartered privileges, it then had to fall back upon the commercial expertise
of its personnel to stave off its challengers and extend its existence. In large part this
meant selecting cargoes in England that would prove in-demand and exchangeable for
enslaved Africans, Canadian beaver pelts, or Peruvian silver several months and
thousands of miles away. This was a daunting challenge for any prospective early
modern transoceanic trader, but the HBC, RAC and SSC all seem to have used the
wide range of their operations to achieve at least a temporary advantage in acquiring
and handling market information. Yet when the political barriers that protected a
company’s markets from domestic competition did collapse, as happened to the Royal
African Company beginning in the 1690s, it was only a matter of time before a
significant number of separate traders gained sufficient experience and capital to erode
the joint-stock’s economies of scale while avoiding its diseconomies. Of course, even
when a company did enjoy a market mostly protected from British rivals, competitors
from elsewhere in Europe could make life difficult for its traders. The results of
warmaking and diplomacy, both among European states and among the companies
they chartered, therefore bore heavily on the differing fortunes of the companies.
The South Sea and Hudson’s Bay Companies both enjoyed effectively protected
markets thanks to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, lasting for the SSC until the renewal
of war with Spain in 1739 and for the HBC until after the conquest of Quebec in the
war of 1754–63. Aside from the relative handful of French–Canadian fur traders,
continental Europeans largely conceded British control of each company’s respective
market. As for the African trade, the open violence in the 1660s between the Company
of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa and the Dutch West India Company proved
disastrous for both, and the continued attempts of the WIC and the CRA’s successor,
the Royal African Company, to thwart each other left the door to African riches open
for other Europeans. The English and Dutch states blundered by devolving diplomatic
and military powers onto chartered companies, inadvertently blocking the way to a
mutually profitable accommodation in the African trade. The Royal African Company
also did less well than its two contemporaries in navigating the politics of the British
Empire itself, proving unable to see off Parliamentary challenges to its monopoly
privileges in the 1690s through 1710s as the Hudson’s Bay Company did in 1749.
Though the literature on the British Atlantic joint-stock companies does allow for
such insights, it is limited by the fact that most existing works consider individual
companies in isolation rather than juxtaposing multiple companies. Comparative
studies along four distinct dimensions will greatly expand our understanding of the
453
significance of joint-stocks. First, while this essay has attempted some broad
comparisons among the three big British Atlantic joint-stocks, more detailed studies
will surely produce additional evidence for the reasons underlying their divergent
trajectories. Second, comparisons between these three companies and Atlantic joint-
stocks from elsewhere in Europe may prove useful, particularly for understanding the
joint-stocks as quasi-autonomous diplomatic and military actors on an international
stage. The British East India Company offers a third potential counterpoint; recent
work by Philip J. Stern has extended our understanding of its approach to the
projection of political and military power, while James R. Fichter has demonstrated
the means by which even this highly successful joint-stock trader eventually succumbed
to commercial challenge by small-scale American merchants in the early nineteenth
century. To most fully explain the phenomenon of joint-stock companies within the
development of capitalism, however, the most essential comparison is with competing
traders operating under different organizational forms. For instance, study of the
methods by which the separate slave traders not only overcame the RAC’s advantages,
but also expanded the trade in enslaved labourers far beyond what the larger firm
had ever managed, will suggest much about the difference that joint-stock companies
made to the wider Atlantic economy.
The Hudson’s Bay, Royal African, and South Sea Companies do seem to have
achieved at least indifferent commercial success as they developed their respective
branches of Britain’s emerging Atlantic trading system. This success could last only
as long as the keepers of the British state believed the companies’ monopoly privileges
to be justified. Yet the remarkable – and horrific – expansion in the volume of the
slave trade once the Royal African Company lost its own privileged position suggests
that perhaps the joint-stocks never were justified as an efficient means of conducting
transoceanic commerce in the early modern Atlantic environment.
REF EREN CE S
Behrendt, Stephen D. (2001) ‘Markets, Transaction Cycles, and Profits: Merchant Decision
Making in the British Slave Trade’, William and Mary Quarterly, 58, 1: 171–204.
Carlos, Ann M. (1994) ‘Bonding and the Agency Problem: Evidence from the Royal African
Company, 1672–91’, Explorations in Economic History, 31, 3: 313–35.
Carlos, Ann M. and Jamie Brown Kruse (1996) ‘The Decline of the Royal African Company:
Fringe Firms and the Role of the Charter’, Economic History Review, 49, 2: 291–313.
Carlos, Ann M. and Santhi Hejeebu (2007) ‘Specific Information and the English Chartered
Companies, 1650–1750’ in Leos Müller and Jari Ojala, eds., Information Flows: New
Approaches in the Historical Study of Business Information, Helsinki: Studia Historica.
Carlos, Ann M. and Frank D. Lewis (2010) Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and
the European Fur Trade, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Carlos, Ann M. and Stephen Nicholas (1988) ‘“Giants of an Earlier Capitalism”: The Chartered
Trading Companies as Modern Multinationals’, Business History Review, 62, 3: 398–419.
Davenant, Charles (1709) Reflections upon the Constitution and Management of the Trade to
Africa, Vol. 1, London: Printed for John Morphew.
Davies, K. G. (1960) The Royal African Company, 2nd edn., London: Longmans.
Donnan, Elizabeth (ed.) (1930) Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to
America, Vol. 1, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Eltis, David (2000) The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
454
Fichter, James R. (2010) So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-
American Capitalism, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hancock, David (1997) Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the
British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, S. R. H. and Simon P. Ville (1996) ‘Efficient Transactors or Rent-Seeking Monopolists?
The Rationale for Early Chartered Trading Companies’, Journal of Economic History, 56,
4: 898–915.
Keirn, Tim (1995) ‘Monopoly, economic thought, and the Royal African Company’ in John
Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property, London: Routledge.
Law, Robin (2007) ‘The Komenda Wars, 1694–1700: A Revised Narrative’, History in Africa,
34: 133–68.
Menard, Russell R. (2007) ‘Plantation Empire: How Sugar and Tobacco Planters Built Their
Industries and Raised an Empire’, Agricultural History, 81, 3: 309–32.
Mitchell, Matthew David (2013a) ‘Legitimate commerce in the eighteenth century: the Royal
African Company under the Duke of Chandos, 1720–26’, Enterprise and Society, 14, 3: 544–78.
——(2013b) ‘Three English Cloth Towns and the Royal African Company’, Journal of the
Historical Society, 13, 4: 421–47.
Palmer, Colin (1981) Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739,
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Pettigrew, William A. (2013) Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of
the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Pincus, Steven C.A. (2008) ‘A Revolution in Political Economy?’ in Maximillian E. Novak,
ed., The Age of Projects, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Porter, R. (1968) ‘The Crispe Family and the African Trade in the Seventeenth Century’,
Journal of African History, 9, 1: 57–77.
Postma, Johannes Menne (1990) The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rabb, T. K. (1967) Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion
of England, 1575–1630, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Rawley, James (2003) ‘Humphry Morice: Foremost London Slave Merchant of His Time’,
London: Metropolis of the Slave Trade, Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
‘The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707’ (2013), K.M. Brown et al., eds., St Andrews,
http://www.rps.ac.uk/trans/1693/4/107 (accessed 14 November 2013).
Scott, W. R. (1912) The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock
Companies to 1720, Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shea, Gary S. (2011). ‘(Re)financing the Slave Trade with the Royal African Company in the Boom
Markets of 1720’, Centre for Dynamic Macroeconomic Analysis Working Paper Series 201114.
Smith, S. D. (2006) Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World
of the Lascelles, 1648–1834, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stern, Philip J. (2011) The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern
Foundations of the British Empire in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stump, W. Darrell (1974) ‘An Economic Consequence of 1688’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal
Concerned with British Studies, 6, 1: 26–35.
Tadman, Michael (2000) ‘The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural
Increase in the Americas’, American Historical Review, 105, 5 (Dec. 2000), pp. 1534–75.
Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org (accessed 15
November 2013).
Wagner, Michael (2012) ‘Managing To Compete: The Hudson’s Bay, Levant, and Russia
Companies, 1714–63’, Business and Economic History On-Line: Papers Presented at the
Business History Conference Annual Meeting, 10, http://www.thebhc.org/publications/
BEHonline/2012/wagner.pdf (accessed 9 November 2013).
455
Watt, Douglas (2007) The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union, and the Wealth of Nations,
Edinburgh: Luath Press Ltd.
Wennerlind, Carl (2011) Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Willan, T. S. (1948) ‘Trade between England and Russia in the Second Half of the Sixteenth
Century’, English Historical Review, 63, 248: 307–21.
Zahedieh, Nuala (2010a) The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic economy,
1660–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zahedieh, Nuala (2010b) ‘Regulation, rent-seeking, and the Glorious Revolution in the
English Atlantic economy’, Economic History Review, 63, 4: 865–90.
Zook, George Frederick (1919a) ‘On the West Coast of Africa’, Journal of Negro History,
4, 2: 163–205.
Zook, George Frederick (1919b) ‘The Royal Adventurers in England’, Journal of Negro
History, 4, 2: 143–62.
456
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SPECULATING ON THE
ATLANTIC WORLD
Helen Paul
T he Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles of 1720 are two of the most famous
financial bubbles in history, and amongst the earliest. Each owes its name to a
great joint-stock trading company. John Law had restructured the French economy
to conform to his ‘System’ or ‘Système’. He combined a number of companies into
one leviathan. It is known to posterity as the Mississippi Company and was involved
in a number of Atlantic trading ventures.
The South Sea Company was founded in London in 1711 (Carswell, 2001: 45). It
was to assist the state by restructuring part of the National Debt. It offered its shares
in exchange for the debt obligations held by government creditors. For this, it was
paid a fee by the British state. It was granted the monopoly right to trade slaves to
Spanish America (the Asiento). It could also trade in goods, both with and without
official sanction from Spain. Share prices in Paris and London rose to unsustainable
heights during 1720, partly (but not solely) due to the activities of over-optimistic
investors entering the market. The Paris market experienced a bubble first. As it was
bursting, another bubble was inflating in London. The South Sea Company’s shares
rocketed in price and dragged the rest of the London stock market along as well. This
chapter discusses how Atlantic Worlds intersected with the European financial
system, with particular reference to the South Sea Company. These linkages have
received less attention than lurid tales of gambling manias and frauds.
The standard explanation for the South Sea Bubble is that the company directors
were engaged in some sort of fraud and the rest of the country went gambling mad.
The contemporary pamphlets, songs, plays and prints which satirise the South Sea
Bubble have been a fertile source for historians. However, they tell us very little about
why investors chose to put their money into shares and into the South Sea Company in
particular (Paul, 2011a: 88–101). Lord Macaulay (1986: 490), writing in the nineteenth
century, used the word ‘mania’. Mackay (1841) included the South Sea and Mississippi
bubbles in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
The title says it all. (Logan (2003) describes how popular Popular Delusions was in the
Victorian era.) Carswell (1960) wrote one of the classic texts on the South Sea Bubble.
He thought that ‘“speculative fever” […] is hardly a sufficient explanation’ (Carswell,
2001: 12). He did believe that the company’s trading prospects were negligible and
457
– Helen Paul –
Figure 25.1 Trade label of the South Sea Company

© Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy
of no interest to the company in any case. It had, he claimed, no ‘real assets or even
prospects’ (Carswell, 2001: 241). Galbraith (1994: 47) got the terms of the Asiento
wrong and claimed that only one ship a year was allowed to sail (Paul, 2011a: 56–57).
Referring to the market conditions for both London and Paris, Galbraith (1994: 43)
wrote, ‘Insanity born of optimism and self-serving illusion was the tale of two cities’.
458
– chapter 25: Speculating on the Atlantic World –
Figure 25.2 The Bubblers Bubbl’d or The Devil Take the Hindmost, 1720
© The Print Collector/Alamy
Some of the South Sea directors were unscrupulous and bribed prominent people
(Carswell, 2001: 181–93). They provided loans to their shareholders which may
have helped inflate prices for other shares temporarily. However, it is not necessary
to posit that the entire financial market went gambling mad. Garber (1990) proposed
that the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles were both rational bubbles. Only a
minority of investors would have to be over-optimistic to start a price rise. If others
rationally predicted that the price would continue to rise, they could buy in in order
to sell out. Greenwood and Nagel (2009: 239) from their analysis of recent trading
data, found that inexperienced investors are more ‘prone to the optimism that fuels
the bubble’. Inexperienced investors may well have come into the Paris and London
459
– Helen Paul –
stock markets, and this might have helped to inflate a bubble. However, they were
also alongside experienced investors. There is no evidence that these people, as a
class, went ‘gambling mad’. Nor is it necessary for them to be viewed with suspicion
for simply following a sensible trading strategy. Financial historians such as Hoppit
(2002), Neal (1993) and Paul (2011a) reject stories of mysterious speculative manias.
Such tales are not an accurate reflection of a more complicated history. The topic is
plagued by what Hoppit (2002) has cogently termed ‘the myths of the South Sea
Bubble’. The matter is not helped by the fact that scholars like Carswell downplayed
the role of the company’s trading arm. This chapter will discuss the trading side of
the company and also contemporary views of the Atlantic trading system.
The Atlantic trade routes linked Europe, Africa and the Americas and ensured a
flow of goods, people and ideas around the Atlantic system. The dreadful trade in
human beings underpinned the plantation economies of the Caribbean and boosted
the labour force in the European colonies in continental America. Spain was unable
to maintain her own transatlantic supply of slaves, due largely to the extra resources
needed for the African side of the trade.
African kingdoms had a great deal of power, relative to their European trading
associates. African traders brought slaves to the coast from the hinterland. Europeans
were only really able to settle at the coast, often on land rented from African kings.
For example, in the town of Ouidah (or Whydah), the local ruler had sited three
different European trading forts cheek by jowl (Law, 2004: 17–19). Ouidah itself
had no harbour and slave ships were forced to anchor offshore and to load goods by
canoe. The Europeans were forced to compete with each other at a place convenient
to the local Africans. It was not convenient for the Europeans, which shows where
the real power lay. African traders required a mix of goods, which could change over
time and by location. Thus Europeans needed access to a large range of products as
the exact selection required was so variable. European companies had representatives
who could then liaise with local traders and kings to determine their requirements.
The companies also had trading forts to guard their unsold stock, house slaves and
act as a base (Daaku, 1970: 38–39).
The requisite maritime expertise and naval support was also essential. Long sea
voyages required particular technologies and skills, but also huge capital investments.
The Spanish empire already claimed much of the state’s resources, including
bureaucratic costs and military support (Paul, 2011a: 40). Spain would have found
her resources stretched further if she entered the competitive world at the African
coast. The task was deputised to other nations, via the Asiento. (The Dutch had held
the Asiento at one point, for example [Wright, 1924].) Eventually, the Spanish
granted the Asiento to the British. The main British slave trading company was the
Royal African Company (RAC). It had strong ties to the Royal Navy and supported
the South Sea Company’s trading activities (Paul, 2008). The RAC had its problems,
but it had a network of forts along the coast and great experience in the trade.
The Atlantic World has been conceptualised as a series of overlapping ‘worlds’: the
English Atlantic or the French Atlantic to name but two. It is important to note that the
Baltic trading system interlocked with the Atlantic World. A particular type of ship was
needed to cross the Atlantic, especially if it was fitted out to carry slaves. The ships
needed to be large and sturdy enough to weather an Atlantic crossing. They had to be
made of good quality materials to withstand the punishment inflicted by Atlantic gales.
460
Certain Baltic materials had few substitutes. Large ships required large masts, and such
items were more readily sourced from the Baltic trade than from anywhere else (Paul,
2008). The best quality iron for anchors came from Sweden: known in Britain as
Orgrund (Öregrund) iron after the port it was shipped from. Of course, Britain had its
own ironmongers and manufacturers but their ironware was intended for different
purposes, such as nail-making. The Royal Navy insisted on Orgrund iron for its anchors
(Evans et al., 2002). Unsurprisingly, there was a great deal of overlap in the fortunes of
the Baltic and Atlantic trading systems. There was also an overlap of personnel. Men
who worked as Baltic merchants turned up in the Atlantic trading companies such as
the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company. Carswell’s (2001: 244–55)
directory of South Sea men includes several. For example, William Astell was a director
of the South Sea but also dealt in Baltic stores such as timber (Carswell, 2001: 245).
It is notable that the Baltic region had been disrupted by the Great Northern War
(1700–21) between Sweden and an alliance of its neighbours led by Russia. The war
may have officially ended in 1721 but the writing was on the wall when Charles XII of
Sweden died in 1718. As Charles was the main belligerent, it was obvious that the war
was coming to a close (Frost, 2000: 290–300). Its ability to dislocate trading patterns
would be over. Not only did the ending of the Great Northern War reduce risks for
international merchants, but it also freed up supplies needed to equip Atlantic shipping.
The War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) had a much more direct effect on
the Atlantic trade. The same peace dividend for both wars meant that risks were
reduced and resources were freed up for private investment. For those merchants and
financiers involved in both the Baltic and Atlantic trades, the ending of two main
wars was a boon. Even those who were only involved in the Atlantic trade would
have understood the value of Baltic supplies to shipbuilding. Another effect of the
ending of the War of the Spanish Succession was that the Asiento was part of the
peace negotiations. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) conferred the Asiento upon Queen
Anne, who transferred it to the South Sea Company.
The ending of two major wars may explain why there were excess resources to
invest. In addition, the South Sea Bubble was partly inflated by funds coming from
Paris when John Law’s System unravelled. Neal (1993: 70–71) noted that funds
moved from Paris to London and then to Amsterdam and Hamburg. Law’s System
requires some discussion as it too relates to the Atlantic trading system. John Law’s
programme of reforms for France was more radical than anything which occurred in
England. The new Regent of France inherited all the economic problems of the regime
of Louis XIV (died 1715). The Sun King’s expenditures had been onerous. He had
contracted war debts like other European sovereigns, but he had also built Versailles
at great expense. Earlier in the reign the controller general of finances, Colbert, had
undertaken financial reforms (McCollim, 2012: 1–13). At the very end of Louis’s life,
the king appointed another reformer. This was the cautious Desmaretz (or Desmarets).
Desmaretz wished to reform the economy in a gradual way. He was the nephew of
the great Colbert, and had been his principal assistant. According to McCollim
(2012: 8), Desmaretz was only appointed at the ‘nadir of the reign’. Previously, he
had been excluded from power and viewed with suspicion by Louis. Desmaretz also
made powerful enemies and they ensured his downfall after his master died in 1715.
Amongst Desmaretz’s key reforms was the dixième: a tax on income. Property owners
were required to declare their income.
461
– Helen Paul –
This tax [the dixième] violated one of the principles of French society at the time
because it disregarded the social status of the property owner […] In effect, the
new law disregarded the privileges that Louis XIV’s government had worked so
hard to preserve or create in fashioning an ordered society.
(McCollim, 2012: 1)
John Law was more palatable to the French élite because he appeared to be able to
harness reform to the existing social structure. His financial innovations, such as a
paper currency, were far more radical than those of Desmaretz. They were also
implemented at great speed. Law was appointed by the French Regent in 1715. Velde
(2007) gives a good overview of Law’s ‘System’. Briefly, its main components were
‘an operation in public finance, the other [the creation of] paper money’ (Velde:
2007: 276). The paper money experiment was the first of its kind in Europe to create
an official paper currency as legal tender. Paper instruments, such as records of
government debts, did already circulate as a type of money. Money is anything,
which is a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. However,
Law’s paper money was intended to be the dominant type of official currency. He
even attempted to force its acceptance instead of commodity money (coins made
from precious metals).
The Atlantic side of the System involved Law’s battles with public finance. In 1717,
Law created a large joint stock company which was to develop territory in Louisiana.
Early modern Louisiana covered an area equivalent to 40 per cent of the modern United
States. The land was unsettled by Europeans and the intention was to settle and develop
it. The company took over the tobacco monopoly (Velde 2007: 277) and, eventually,
it gobbled up most of the overseas trading ventures which held a royal charter. Murphy
(1997) provides the definitive account of Law’s life and career and he describes the
System in great detail. Law’s company had several names, but is known to posterity as
the Mississippi Company. It included the trading companies, the Company of the East
Indies (Compagnie des Indes) and the China Company (Compagnie de la Chine). Then
the African Company (Companie d’Afrique) was added (Murphy: 1997, 188). Law
embarked upon a complicated string of financial manoeuvres in order to finance all
these mergers. Within his leviathan company were the components of much of France’s
Atlantic trade. Tobacco, African trade and American colonial development were all
now under one heading. Investors in the Mississippi Company were not exclusively
speculating on the French Atlantic World. They were still involved with the political
project. The French elite believed that Law could use the riches of foreign trade to
avoid the sort of social changes proposed by Desmaretz.
Law’s potential success forced the British to restructure their National Debt too.
Otherwise, the British could lose the next war. The British government had contracted
a number of debts on unfavourable terms. It had tried to convert these debts to a
more acceptable form, and reduce its bureaucratic costs. A number of debt conversions
had already occurred successfully. The South Sea Company was to offer its shares in
exchange for government annuities. Some of these annuities were called ‘irredeemables’
as the government had no right to convert them without the holder’s permission. The
government could not take advantage of lower interest rates and more favourable
terms (Neal, 1993: 12–13). The South Sea Company did manage to convince annuity
holders to convert, which was beneficial for the state. The South Sea company had
462
been formed partly to deal with navy debt. Payments to Royal Navy contractors had
fallen heavily into arrears. The situation was becoming desperate by the end of the
War of the Spanish Succession. The South Sea Company was founded and shares
given to naval contractors in lieu of cash payments. By this method, the great
ironmaster Sir Ambrose Crowley gained enough shares to head the company (Flinn,
1960). From the first, the South Sea Company was a creature of the state. Viewing it
solely as a private concern is a mistake. It was part of what Brewer (1989) termed ‘the
fiscal–military state’.
Brewer (1989) introduced the idea of a fiscal–military state which combined the
activities of war and trade. Successful warfare brought trading privileges and colonies,
but commercial tensions could lead to further warfare. Paul (2008) argued that a large
joint-stock company was not merely a private entity. It performed services for the
state and expected help in return. The Royal African Company was keeping a British
presence in West Africa without which independent traders would not thrive. The
other European nations would take over British forts and perhaps take over the whole
coastal trade. The slave trade was important, not merely because of the slaves
themselves, but also because of the industries associated with the trade. All sorts of
manufactured goods were exported along the Atlantic slave routes and important
imports were shipped back to Britain. The sugar and tobacco industries were part and
parcel of the slave trade. It is not surprising that the entire trading issue was a politically
important one. There were numerous Parliamentary enquiries held (Brown, 2007).
Like the RAC, the South Sea Company’s future was bound up with the future of
the state itself. Both companies worked closely with the Royal Navy to ensure that
the merchant shipping had convoy protection. This was a major consideration. When
the Royal Navy suspended convoy protection temporarily during the War of the
Spanish Succession, the Royal African Company halted its shipments (Paul, 2011b:
213–16). Such close connections within the fiscal–military, or perhaps fiscal–naval
state, were important. However, they are not usually highlighted in the secondary
literature of the Bubble or in the contemporary propaganda. Perhaps the assistance
was so obvious that it went without saying. As such, it has become less obvious to
later commentators.
Investment in the South Sea has often been presented in black or white terms. On
the one hand, there are the naïve investors who have been duped, gone gambling mad
or both. On the other are the fraudsters and stock jobbers. Modern financial models
often follow Black’s (1985) categorisation of noise traders (those who do not trade
on information) and informed traders. This may seem very similar to the black and
white view of the Bubble, but it is not. Financial models are known to be abstractions
from reality, whilst proponents of gambling mania arguments seem to believe that
they reflect the truth. Rational or careful investment in the South Sea is overlooked,
even though financial historians have found evidence of reasonable trading strategies.
Altorfer-Ong (2007) uncovered the South Sea investments made by the cautious
burghers of the Canton of Berne in Switzerland. Temin and Voth (2004) looked at
the activities of Hoare’s Bank and concluded that it advised its clients well.
Such insights are outweighed by the volume of works about gambling manias and
frauds. Some of these do not present much in the way of evidence to back up their
claims, or get details wrong. An early proponent of the genre was Archibald
Hutcheson MP who was involved in the government inquiry into the crash: the Secret
463
– Helen Paul –
Committee. This was probably the highlight of Hutcheson’s career and he was loath
to let anyone forget it. A large number of truly tedious pamphlets by Hutcheson are
preserved in the archives. His oeuvre included little in the way of economic argument,
but he provided figures and calculations purporting to show that the South Sea
scheme was doomed to fail. Dale (2004: viii) praised Hutcheson as ‘the unsung hero
of the South Sea Bubble’. Paul (2012) argued that Hutcheson had originally predicted
that the South Sea Company would be too successful. His calculations into the
scheme’s workings were flawed and hard to follow. It is unlikely that potential
investors gleaned much from him, before the Bubble reached its height. His insight
was that the Bubble would burst, but that was presumably obvious by the time he
reached that conclusion. It is important to realise that contemporaries did not
necessarily rely upon works which happen to have found a home in an archive.
Literary critics, amongst others, have studied the propaganda surrounding the
scheme. For example, Downie (1979) has studied government propagandists
including Defoe and Swift. Markley (1994) discussed Defoe’s claims about the riches
of the ‘South Seas’. De Goede (2000) analysed how Defoe conceptualised credit as a
female figure called ‘Lady Credit’. Although such studies are illuminating, they
cannot tell us how readers used such propaganda. It is unlikely that investors simply
swallowed propaganda whole. Potential investors would also be able to obtain
information and advice from professional brokers or from within their social circle.
The professional advice of Hoare’s Bank has already been mentioned. Laurence
(2006) showed that Lady Betty Hastings and her sisters relied upon correspondents
in London to give them information about the market. Coffee houses were also an
important site of both share trading and of information about the market. A map of
Exchange Alley shows a number of coffeehouses including the famous Garraway’s
(Dale, 2004: 32). Today, the only sign of it is a blue plaque affixed to the wall. In its
time, Garraway’s and its rivals would provide coffee, a location to meet and
newspapers. Some publications, such as John Castaing’s Course of the Exchange,
printed the share prices of the major companies. An investor would need both
information and the means to use it correctly. Either the investors or their advisor
needed the skills set to trade in the market. Murphy (2009: 193) showed that a small
subset of traders had developed skills in derivatives trading. She also discussed the
information networks and financial press of the period (Murphy, 2009: 89–136).
There were rational reasons to invest in the South Sea scheme. Some would not
have been captured in the propaganda of the day, and have received less attention as
a result. One of the most obvious is that investors would have found it easier to
diversify their portfolio if they could buy shares. If an individual had most of their
capital tied up in their estate, house or business then joint-stock company shares were
an important alternative. Shares could be bought for comparatively small amounts of
money, especially if they were paid for by instalments. The South Sea Company
offered subscription shares (Paul, 2011a: 84–87). Shea (2007) argued that investors
could treat these shares as a put option: they had the option, but not the obligation
to buy. Whether or not they did so, the returns from overseas trading companies were
unlikely to be closely correlated to the returns from a landed estate. The shares
themselves had diversification built into them. A South Sea share combined different
types of potential return which had different probabilities of success. The government
fee to the company was low risk and low return. The company’s slave trade had a
464
higher risk but was more lucrative, as was its trade in smuggled goods. And, if Spain’s
empire started to fray at the edges, then the company might have an advantage in
taking over a former Spanish colony. This was a long shot, but if it paid off it would
have generated a very high return indeed. There was also an element of portfolio
diversification within the one share, which was another feature. A risk-averse
purchaser might be attracted by the government payments. Thomas Guy clearly
wanted a steady income for his proposed hospital. He purchased South Seas shares
before the bubble started to inflate (Cameron, 1954). Others might also purchase a
share because of one of the more risky streams of income attached to it.
A third reason, at least for government creditors, was a liquidity premium. Some
of the more extreme accounts of the Bubble present investors throwing away solid
government securities for worthless paper (for example, Chancellor, 2000: 93).
Annuity holders were scattered and could not easily form a coherent pressure group,
whilst a single company had more bargaining power. This was important when the
government was in arrears. By the time of the South Sea conversions, Neal (1993: 91)
showed that the targeted annuities were trading at a deep discount. In addition,
annuities which were illiquid carried a risk. Joint-stock shares were assignable (i.e.
could be easily transferred to another person) but annuities were not (Neal, 1993:
92–93). Neal (1993: 93–94) showed that there were liquidity premia for the previous
successful conversions.
In addition, people who could not carry on a business themselves could invest in
trade as rentiers. Women could buy and sell shares. If they were inclined to avoid
Exchange Alley itself, they could act via a broker. Some ladies even conducted their
business in the shops near to the Alley, where their brokers came to meet them. This
is important, as married women lost their legal identity and became ‘feme covert’
(sic): i.e. their legal identity was covered by that of their husband. Their property,
with a few exceptions, was owned by their husband. Women, like Lady Mary Wortley
Montague, were able to trade in shares without their husbands being any the wiser
(Paul, 2011a: 66–68).
Much has been made of the suspension of the South Sea Company’s trading privileges
in 1718. The Spanish temporarily halted the trade in this year, due to a dispute over
territory between it and its opponents (Paul, 2011a: 27). The company was part of the
wider fiscal–military (fiscal–naval) state. Therefore, it benefited from government
support but was vulnerable to the vagaries of international politics. Whenever
diplomatic relations between Spain and Britain broke down, the company was
punished. This occurred in 1718 and again in 1726. The trade was stopped and some
of the company’s assets seized. Carswell (2001: 64) wrote, ‘with its trade at a full stop
for all to see, the Company became, from sheer necessity, a naked finance corporation’.
Dale (2004: 49–50) argued that the stock market had never valued the South Sea’s
trade much in any case. Hence the share price was not greatly affected by the news. The
lull in trade would have had a great effect if investors thought it was permanent.
Forward-looking investors did not simply consider a company’s activities today.
They also consider its future prospects. If South Sea investors believed that the
company would ultimately prevail and recommence its trade, then they would still be
interested in the company’s shares. The strength of the Royal Navy had not diminished
and Spain did not have a strong fleet to rival it. The Spanish fleet had been destroyed
at the Battle of Cape Passaro in 1718 (Paul, 2011a: 27). Therefore, it was not clear
465
– Helen Paul –
how Spain proposed to avoid the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht for any length of
time. The history of the East India Company (EIC) is littered with similar setbacks.
However, in the popular imagination the EIC has a Whig history of success and the
South Sea has no trading history to speak of. These simplifications have come about
over time. In some cases, the companies become mere ciphers in a wider Whig
historical narrative: the EIC and the expansion of the British Empire, and the South
Sea and financial folly.
It is a useful thought experiment to ask what a reasonably well-informed person
knew about the South Sea trade. South America was the source of much of the bullion
which flowed into Europe. Some of it then flowed out again to pay for goods from
India, China and ‘the East’. The Chinese in particular had no need for European
manufactures. Chinese porcelain and silk were sought after in Europe. To trade with
China, there was no option but to secure supplies of bullion. Spain controlled its
colonies but restricted their ability to produce their own manufactures. In theory, the
colonies purchased goods from Spain but they were also willing to purchase
contraband imports. The slave trade was a way to bring in contraband as the Spanish
seemed unable to maintain slave supplies themselves. When the British gained their
Asiento contract, the Spanish had just seen the last of the Hapsburg monarchs of
Spain. Under Hapsburg rule, the country had maintained a vast empire which looked
as if it would collapse under its own weight. Scholars such as Kamen (1978) and
Grafe and Irigoin (2012) have questioned whether or not Spain’s economic health
was indeed parlous. In any case, the new Bourbon monarchy did institute reforms
and the Spanish held on to their empire. If there was a small, even very small, chance
that the South Sea would be able to capitalise on Spain’s weakness then this should
be part of the investment decision. If the South Sea emulated the later success of the
East India Company and staked out a colony, then the rewards could be enormous.
Any stake, no matter how small, in the company would provide a huge return. If
Georgians were prepared to venture a small amount of money on South Sea
subscription shares they might stand a chance of a windfall. Such a decision may be
gambling (or speculation), but it was gambling with small stakes, which investors
could afford to lose. It was not gambling mania. It would be similar to buying a
lottery ticket which promised a small chance of winning a large prize.
The notion of an Atlantic world allows scholars to consider the trading routes as
they were imagined by traders themselves. The ocean itself becomes the common
factor and its history replaces a piecemeal collection of national histories. Scholars
decided to use the concept of particular Atlantic worlds, for example a British Atlantic
world co-existing with a Spanish one. There may be several Atlantic worlds
superimposed upon one Atlantic Ocean. However, whichever world we consider it
did not function apart from other trading systems, such as the Baltic and the East
Indian and Chinese trades. The trade goods required by African slave traders included
items brought into Europe from the East. Chinese porcelain was found at Savi – the
capital of the West African Kingdom of Hueda. Savi was abandoned in 1727 (Kelly,
1997). African preferences for certain high quality imports, such as porcelain, could
not easily be substituted from within the Atlantic system. Similarly, the shipwrights
who constructed the great transatlantic ships preferred high quality Baltic stores.
Therefore, the Atlantic World had an overlap with the Baltic and ‘Eastern’ ones. Even
someone who had never left England might have a mental map of the interlocking
466
trading mechanisms, like the moving parts of a watch. This effect is not captured in
the propaganda, even of writers such as Defoe. Defoe was an author, not an
international merchant. Therefore, a narrow focus on the works of propagandists
ignores the mental maps which merchants themselves would have developed. Defoe
was not primarily writing for them, but for those who were not so well informed.
By comparison with the spectacular failures, the details of more successful
investment strategies have largely been hidden from view. There are three main
reasons for this state of affairs. First, some investors may have chosen to downplay
their good fortune to avoid envy or confiscation. Second, the records detailing the
investments may have been lost over time. Third, if the records exist they may not be
in a suitable format for widespread consumption. One of the more immediately
tangible effects of the Bubble is that a bookseller called Thomas Guy was able to sell
his shares for far more than he paid for them (Cameron, 1954). Guy had originally
bought South Sea shares as a long-term investment for his proposed charitable
projects. The famous Guy’s hospital in London was the result. Had Guy chosen to do
something else with his money, his successful strategy may not have come to light.
The records of men like Guy may not survive in a usable form, if at all. There is a
clear selection bias in the types of materials which are kept and the type of people to
whom they belong.
Famous authors, or those who could afford the vanity press, had a greater chance
of being read in later years than the unknown merchants who made up the City of
London. Even the records which do survive are not always clear. Isaac Newton’s
jottings about investments in the South Sea do not show conclusively how he fared in
the Bubble (Hall and Tilling, 1977: 96–97). This is despite the popular tale that he
suffered badly. He is credited with the (presumably apocryphal) remark that he
‘could not calculate the madness of the people’. This witticism is far more entertaining
than the reality of his account books, which are understandably somewhat dry. Yet
it is in account books and ledgers that evidence of successful trades is found. The
sources may not be easy for the layman, or even the professional historian, to access
or to interpret. They are certainly not as racy as the jottings of Defoe or the prints of
Hogarth. However, a number of authors have used account books to show how
certain investors did fare well and without being part of a sinister plot. Even the
entertaining tale of Lord Londonderry and John Law’s high stakes bet regarding
future share prices has only recently been told. Neal (2012) took several decades to
bring together enough (initially uncatalogued) archival material to write his book.
He described how two major financiers entered into an important financial contract
with each other, just as the situation in Paris was becoming critical.
Historical financial crises are often treated differently to other recurrent crises,
such as wars. Wars are treated as separate historical episodes with their own causes
and effects. The context is foregrounded in any discussion. Financial crises are often
grouped together into one or more basic types. Until very recently, their similarities,
rather than their differences, receive the most attention. Abstract economic models of
financial bubbles can help us to understand them, but obviously render them
ahistorical. Even the twin bubbles of the Mississippi and South Sea were different
events though linked. Both appeared after the War of the Spanish Succession, and
towards the end of the Great Northern War. There were investors who were caught
up in both. Neal (1993) has cogently argued that there was financial contagion
467
– Helen Paul –
between the Paris and London markets. However, this does not mean that either
bubble can be explained by a simple discussion of fraud and gambling. Nor does it
mean that the London and Paris bubbles had exactly the same features. The
Mississippi bubble was tied to Law’s system, whilst the British financial system was
not radically overhauled.
This chapter considered how the Baltic and Atlantic trading systems interacted,
and how they both benefitted from the ending of wars. Investors may have
conceptualised the Atlantic system due to their personal knowledge, or from personal
connections with brokers and merchants. The surviving propaganda does not
necessarily capture the Atlantic world of the successful merchant. Nor are the
quotidian considerations of liquidity, portfolio diversification or women’s legal rights
mentioned in the popular histories of the Bubble. Yet all these various details might
be brought together as part of an investment decision. The competition between
France and England may have also played a part. Those with spare funds could invest
in companies engaged in the Atlantic trade, but which were also part of their own
state’s financial architecture. The states themselves were putting their trust in the
strategic importance of the Atlantic World.
REF EREN CE S
ALTORFER-ONG, S., 2007. State investment in eighteenth-century Berne. History of
European Ideas, 33, 4: 440–62.
BLACK, F., 1985. Noise. Journal of Finance. 41, 3: 529–43.
BREWER, J., 1989. The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
BROWN, C.L., 2007. The British Government and the Slave Trade: Early Parliamentary
Enquiries, 1713–83. In: Farrell, S., Unwin, M. & Walvin, J. (eds), The British Slave Trade:
Abolition, Parliament and the People. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 27–41.
CAMERON, H.C., 1954. Mr Guy’s Hospital, 1726–1948. London: Longmans.
CANNY, N. and MORGAN, P., 2011. The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
CARSWELL, J., 1960. The South Sea Bubble. London: Cresset.
——, 2001. The South Sea Bubble, revised ed. Thrupp: Sutton.
CHANCELLOR, E., 2000. Devil take the Hindmost: A history of financial speculation.
Reprint ed. New York: Plume.
DAAKU, K.Y., 1970. Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A study of the
African Reaction to European Trade. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
DALE, R., 2004. The first crash: lessons from the South Sea Bubble. Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press.
DE GOEDE, M., 2000. Mastering ‘Lady Credit’: Discourses of Financial Crisis in Historical
Perspective, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2, 1: 58–61.
DICKSON, P.G.M., 1967. The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development
of Public Credit, 1688–1756. London: Macmillan.
DOWNIE, J.A., 1979. Robert Harley and the press: propaganda and public opinion in the age
of Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
EVANS, C., JACKSON, O. and RYDÉN, G., 2002. Baltic Iron and the British Iron Industry
in the Eighteenth Century, Economic History Review, 55, 4: 642–65.
FLINN, M.W., 1960. Sir Ambrose Crowley and the South Sea Scheme of 1711. Journal of
Economic History, 20, 1: 51–66.
468
FROST, R.I., 2000. The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe,
1558–1721. London: Longman.
GALBRAITH, J.K., 1994. A Short History of Financial Euphoria. New York: Penguin.
GARBER, P.M., 1990. Famous First Bubbles. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 4, 2: 35–54.
GRAFE, R. and IRIGOIN, A., 2012. A Stakeholder Empire: the political economy of Spanish
imperial rule in America, Economic History Review, 65, 2: 609–51.
GREENWOOD, R. and NAGEL, S., 2009. Inexperienced investors and bubbles. Journal of
Financial Economics. 93: 239–58.
HALL, A.R. and TILLING, L., 1977. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Cambridge:
HARRIS, R., 1994. The Bubble Act: Its Passage and Its Effects on Business Organization.
Journal of Economic History, 54, 3: 610–27.
HARRISON, P., 2001. Rational Equity Valuation at the Time of the South Sea Bubble. History
of Political Economy, 33, 2: 269–81.
HOPPIT, J., 2002. The Myths of the South Sea Bubble. Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 12: 141–65.
KAMEN, H., 1978. The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth. Past & Present, 81, Nov.: 24–50.
KELLY, K.G., 1997. The Archaeology of African-European Interaction: Investigating the
Social Roles of Trade, Traders, and the Use of Space in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-
Century Hueda Kingdom, Republic of Benin. World Archaeology, 28, 3: 351–69.
LAURENCE, E.A., 2006. Lady Betty Hastings, Her Half-Sisters, and the South Sea Bubble:
family fortunes and strategies. Women’s History Review, 15, 4: 533–40.
LAW, R., 2004. Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’, 1727–1892.
Athens OH: Ohio University Press.
LOGAN, P.M., 2003. The Popularity of Popular Delusions: Charles Mackay and Victorian
Popular Culture. Cultural Critique. 54, Spring: 213–41.
MACAULAY, T.B., 1986. The History of England. Edited and abridged with an introduction
by H. Trevor-Roper. Reprint ed. London: Penguin Classics.
MACKAY, C., 1841. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. London:
Richard Bentley.
MARKLEY, R., 1994. ‘So Inexhaustible a Treasure of Gold’: Defoe, Capitalism, and the
Romance of the South Seas. Eighteenth-Century Life, 18, 3: 148–67.
McCOLLIM, G.B., 2012. Louis XIV’s Assault on Privilege: Nicolas Desmaretz and the Tax
on Wealth. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press.
MURPHY, A.E., 1997. John Law: economic theorist and policy-maker. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
MURPHY, A.L., 2009. The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation
before the South Sea Bubble. Cambridge Studies in Economic History. Cambridge:
NEAL, L., 1993. The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age
of Reason, paperback edn. Studies in Monetary and Financial History. Cambridge:
——, 2012. ‘I Am Not Master Of Events’: The Speculations of John Law and Lord Londonderry
in the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
PAUL, H.J., 2008. Joint-Stock Companies as the Sinews of War: The South Sea and Royal
African Companies. In: Torres, R. ed. War, State and Development: Military Fiscal States
in the Eighteenth Century. Navarre: Universidad de Navarra, 277–94.
——, 2011a. The South Sea Bubble: an economic history of its origins and consequences.
Routledge Explorations in Economic History. London: Routledge.
——, 2011b. ‘The maintenance of British slaving forts in Africa: the activities of joint-stock
companies and the Royal Navy’. In: Torres, R. and Conway, S. eds. The Spending of the
469
– Helen Paul –
States: military expenditure during the long eighteenth century: patterns, organisation, and
consequences. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 213–36.
——, 2012. Archibald Hutcheson’s reputation as an economic thinker: his pamphlets, the
National Debt, and the South Sea Bubble. Essays in Economic and Business History, 30,
93–104.
SCOTT, W.R., 1911. The Constitution of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies
to 1720, vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SHEA, G.S., 2007. Understanding Financial Derivatives during the South Sea Bubble: the Case
of the South Sea Subscription Shares. Oxford Economic Papers, 59, i73–i107.
TEMIN, P. and VOTH, H-J., 2004. Riding the South Sea Bubble. American Economic Review,
94, 5, 1654–68.
VELDE. F.R., 2007. John Law’s System. American Economic Review, 97, 2, 276–79.
WRIGHT, I.A., 1924. The Coyman’s Asiento (1685–89). Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche
Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, 23–62.
470
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
PAPER MONEY, 1450–1850
Dror Goldberg
INTRODUCTIO N
W hen piles of looted gold and silver began to be shipped from America to Spain
in the sixteenth century, nothing seemed more certain than the continued use
of precious metals as money in Europe. It must have seemed unlikely that the Atlantic
World would become the epicentre of the antithesis of precious metal, namely paper
money. Paper money could be merely a technical device of saving on transportation
of precious metal coins, but the way paper money developed in the early modern
Atlantic made it much more than that.
Commercial banks issued paper money in return for deposited coin and promised
its redemption on demand but actually lent the deposited coin to others, and
sometimes lent paper money without any coin being deposited. Banks thus took the
control of the quantity of money from governments and miners. Their paper money
fueled the commercial growth of the West and greased the wheels of the Industrial
Revolution. Commercial paper money made economic miracles where it operated
with the least regulation – eighteenth-century Scotland and nineteenth-century United
States – but it opened the door to recurrent financial crises. The evil twin of the
banknote – unbacked, inconvertible, government-issued paper money – became the
ultimate tool of war finance. A doomsday device, it wrecked economies and
governments after giving them victories on the battlefield. Paper money was one of
the most important forces of the period and helped make the North Atlantic the seat
of some of the greatest powers of the modern era. This chapter traces the evolution
of paper money from humble beginnings to the centre of political and commercial
debates as the modern era began, an era which paper money helped to launch.
WHAT IS PAP E R M O NE Y?
There is often confusion about what constitutes ‘paper money’ in the early modern
era, since there were numerous types of paper financial instruments and the
boundaries between them were not clear, sometimes on purpose. Contemporary
confusion has been exacerbated by home bias of patriotic historians who have a
471
– Dror Goldberg –
‘we were the first’ agenda, and by appearances and terminologies that mislead
modern scholars.
This chapter takes a narrow definition of paper money. Paper money is a type of
currency: It is a general medium of exchange, circulating in the economy, regularly
and casually used to buy goods and services in retail markets. Today currency can be
defined as something that one can find in most cash registers. For a paper to function
as currency it must have several properties. First, it must be legally easily transferable,
on the spot, and payable to bearer. If transfer requires a visit to the issuer’s office, this
is not currency. Second, the denomination must be conveniently ‘round.’ A paper of
£37.29 is not money because cognitive limitations of sellers (and today the structure
of cash registers) make it too cumbersome to accept. Third, the denomination must
be in the correct proportion to the prices of most goods and services. A paper note of
£10,000 is not money because you cannot go shopping with it.
Paper money needs to be distinguished from two other paper financial instruments.
Paper money was often a promise of precious metal coin, or an IOU. There are other
types of IOUs which can be loosely called bonds, and which are not paper money.
Their denominations are too large and often not round, and even when they pass
from hand to hand, these hands are not of buyers and sellers in retail markets but
hands of investors and speculators. This difference has consequences, especially when
the issuer is a government. A government that issues too many bonds loses the trust
of investors, and they stop buying its bonds. A government that issues too much
paper money can get away with it for much longer. People still accept its money,
because money has a grip on everyone’s daily activities that makes it nearly impossible
to avoid. Money, therefore, is much more powerful than bonds. Whereas government
bonds are supposed to be repaid by future taxes, paper money inflation is a tax in
itself, being paid implicitly through the increase of prices between the moment one
accepts a bill and the moment one buys with it. Putting formalities aside, economists
simply refer to an ‘inflation tax,’ which is just another type of tax.
Many bonds in the early modern era were called banknotes or looked like modern
paper money, and are easily mistaken today for paper money. Due to the very
different economic implications of bonds and money, this suggests a cautious
approach. The burden of proof is on historians and numismatists who claim that
something was ‘paper money.’ Evidence can come from facts about actual circulation,
the ratio between the denomination and prices and wages, deliberations inside the
government before issue, text of authorizing laws, and text on the notes. Often such
evidence is not provided in the sources available to me, and then I use the more
neutral term ‘banknote’ or ‘note’.
Another paper financial instrument, which is distinguished here from paper money,
is the bill of exchange, which includes the cheque as a special case. It involved a
request to a third party to pay, and it usually had large, non-round denominations.
Bills of exchange often passed among merchants and financiers, but not in retail
markets. Governments could not easily finance wars by issuing them in unlimited
quantities, nor could employers pay wages with them.
Being a currency with no intrinsic value, paper money also has to be distinguished
from debased precious metal coin and token coin. Countless kings abused the trust
given in their coins by replacing some of the precious metal in their coin with base
metal. More coins were produced with the precious metal that thus became available,
472
– chapter 26: Paper money –
resulting in extra war resources but also high inflation. In extreme cases, the coins
were entirely made of base metal and were mere tokens. This is similar to printing
paper money for war, but the scale is different. Paper can be produced in much larger
quantities, much faster, and much cheaper than coin, without mining even one ounce
of precious metal, and therefore it easily broke the records of coin inflation. Another
difference has to do with fractional reserve banking. A bank could issue paper money
to a depositor of coin while lending the deposited coin to a third party. This action,
which increased the amount of money according to the needs of commerce and
industry, could not be replicated by debasing coin.
MEDIEVAL B AC KG RO U ND
By the end of the Middle Ages there were semi-mythological reports throughout
Europe about the recent or ancient monetary use of small, presumably stamped
pieces of leather, which were sometimes convertible into precious metal coin.1 This
was essentially a non-metallic token coin, which was perhaps somewhat close to
paper because parchment was a standard material for writing. Marco Polo told
Europeans about proper paper money in China, where every seller had to accept the
paper money under penalty of death.2
Polo’s Venice and other northern Italian city-states pioneered banking. Banks
provided safe-keeping of coin and lending services. A depositor was given a receipt
with his name that could be used only by him in redeeming the deposit at any time.
Since it was not transferable, the receipt was not money. The cheque was also invented
there. The more important form of paper was the banks’ books, where transfers
between accounts were made. This was money on paper, but not paper money.
Bonds of various types were common throughout Europe, often issued by
governments to finance wars.3 Initially they were not transferable, and even when
transfer was allowed it usually required a visit to the issuer’s office. Government
bonds were issued to financiers and suppliers and had large denominations. In
England they were usually not even paper but long notched sticks called tallies. All
these instruments were not money. Any person could in principle pay for purchases
with an IOU, if only both sides could read, and that was common practice among the
merchants of northwest Europe.
Southern European merchants used the bill of exchange. The bill originally aimed
at avoiding the cost and risk of sending coin over long distances to pay for imports.
It can best be explained as a generalised form of a cheque. For example, London
merchant L imported wine from Bruges merchant B and exported wool at the same
value to Bruges merchant BB. Instead of sending gold back and forth (to B and from
BB) he sent his creditor B an order addressed to his debtor BB, in which BB was asked
to pay B. The only coin payment was thus made within Bruges.4
In general, there were four parties to a bill of exchange – one merchant and one
banker in each port. London importer L paid coin to a London banker LL and got a
bill of exchange asking Bruges banker BB to pay Bruges exporter B. This bill was sent
by L to B. The inter-bank debt of LL to BB would be offset by future bills going in
the other direction. Sometimes BB and LL were branches of the same banking house,
such as the Medici.5 Usually no coin travelled even within ports, but credits were
transferred in the banks’ books.6 In the Middle Ages the bill could not be legally
473
transferred to others before reaching its final destination, and therefore it was clearly
not money. But there was an important lesson: Coin could be completely and
voluntarily set aside if paperwork was working properly and enforced by law.
EXP ERIMENTS AND VARIANTS

I N THE EUROP EAN AT L ANTIC: 1 4 5 0 – 1 7 0 0
The middle of the fifteenth century was associated with two events which were critical
for the development of paper money in Europe. First, after centuries of abusing paper
money to finance wars, the last Chinese paper money lost its value and China reverted
to uncoined silver.7 China then absorbed huge quantities of silver through trade with
Europe, and even more so after the American looting began. Europeans needed silver
to pay the international mercenaries which were their main fighting force, and the
silver flows to China led to a perceived shortage of silver in Europe. This set Europe’s
course towards mercantilism first (each country trying to accumulate as much metal
as possible) and paper money later. The second important event was that Gutenberg
made the printing of paper money feasible.
Paper money evolved along two routes. One route was state money, used to
finance war, and backed by promises or threats (as in China). Another route was
commercial money, backed by promises of metal, land, or goods, and often improving
on Italian practices such as banks, cheques, and bills of exchange. The two routes
inspired each other and sometimes crossed paths.
Ironically, paper money first appeared in the early modern Atlantic in Spain.8
During the reconquest of Granada, sometime in the period 1483–85, the commander
of the town Alhama de Granada ran out of coin to pay wages to soldiers. He gave
them papers on which he wrote denominations, promised to redeem the paper in coin
later on, and forced the townspeople to accept these notes. In 1574, the Dutch city of
Leyden did something similar with stamped paper coins when besieged by Spain.
Nearby Middleburg stamped leather. Redemption in metal after the sieges was
promised, and acceptance of this money in trade was probably not optional.
Both experiments were successful but not followed up in peacetime. Possible
reasons include: Conservatism, fear of over-issue by either the legal authority or
counterfeiters, and pessimism regarding the government’s ability to supervise markets
effectively in peacetime.
During the sixteenth century, as Antwerp replaced Bruges as the Atlantic financial
centre, bills of exchange and IOUs started circulating but only among merchants.9
Some were payable to bearer with the simplest informal transferability. Others were
endorsed by signatures on their backs, and all those signing were jointly liable for
payment with the initial debtor. Instruments of the latter type moved further away
from being paper money, which for anyone other than the issuer is something that
one pays and forgets about.
The war that brought paper money to Leyden also devastated Antwerp and led to
an exodus of financiers and merchants to Amsterdam. The coinage situation there
was complicated since hundreds of types of different coins arrived from many nearby
mints.10 The situation was initially handled by kassiers (‘cashiers’) who accepted
deposits and provided cheques. They may have invented the banknote – a transferable
printed receipt. No evidence has been brought to suggest that their paper instruments
474
Figure 26.1 Bill of Credit, 1691

Image from the Massachusetts Historical Society. Not to be reproduced without permission.
were used among ordinary people. The receipts were probably in large, non-round
denominations, and only used by merchants.
In 1609 Amsterdam replaced the kassiers with an imitation of Venice’s exchange
bank. The Wisselbank (‘exchange bank’, a.k.a. Bank of Amsterdam) entered the
intrinsic value of each deposited coin in the depositor’s account and did not issue
paper money. Local law obliged merchants to settle large bill of exchange debts in the
475
banks’ books. Other Dutch cities imitated Amsterdam, which in 1621 allowed the
kassiers to resume activity by working for the Wisselbank.
In England scriveners operated with deposits and loans on a small scale, while the
Royal Mint was a safe for merchants’ deposits.11 In 1640 Charles I confiscated the
deposits to pay for war. He soon kept one-third as a forced loan and returned the
rest. This was the end of the Mint as a safe place and goldsmiths emerged as an
alternative. They issued named receipts at first, and quickly imitated the kassiers’
banknotes (‘pay to bearer’) and cheques (‘pay to order’).12 Although often celebrated
as ‘paper money’, these instruments were not fit for retail transactions. Their most
common denomination was £100 and none was under £5.13 For comparison, a simple
laborer earned £12–15 a year and a carpenter £25.14
After the Civil Wars of the 1640s, Parliament was in debt to soldiers so it confiscated
lands of its opponents. Every soldier was given a debenture which acknowledged the
debt. The debentures could be used in purchasing confiscated land and were freely
traded. Combined with the Italian pawn shop known as Lombard, it was probably
this experiment which led to the idea of land banks, appearing in pamphlets in the
1650s.15 It was essentially a money-printing pawn shop of mortgages.16 A land owner
who needed liquidity would deposit a land title and get a loan in convenient banknotes
– printed by the pawn shop itself. While banknotes could not be redeemable in land
directly, at least land would limit the amount of notes printed, and foreclosed land
could be sold for coin which would then be available for note redemption. These
banknotes, unlike other paper instruments, would be designed in their denominations
and transferability to function as money. Their circulation would not be incidental as
was the case with goldsmiths’ receipts, cheques, and bonds.
The next few decades saw interesting experiments. Attempts to launch land banks
in England failed. In 1661, near the Atlantic World, Stockholm’s exchange bank
experimented with proper paper money to substitute heavy copper coins (weighing
up to 20 kg). Overissue led to loss of confidence by banknote holders and the
government ended the experiment in 1664.17 In 1667 the English government made
its first mass issue of tradable paper bonds. These Exchequer orders were sometimes
directly used by the government in purchases of war supplies, but they were not
money. They were named, could be transferred only at the Exchequer, most had very
large denominations, and most were immediately sold to goldsmith-bankers who
held them until maturity. A 1672 royal bankruptcy ended the experiment.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 led to a generation of expensive wars with
France. The Bank of England was born in 1694 as a private institution. Its purpose,
like that of Venice’s latest public bank, was merely to recruit lenders from the public
to help war finance.18 Its effect on the money supply was incidental and initially
negligible. Depositors could get various paper instruments with round denominations
and bearer or order clauses, which were redeemable on demand. Historians often
refer to these as ‘paper money’, especially those which were revealingly called
‘running-cash notes.’ However, after briefly experimenting with various types of
notes of £5 and less, from 1697 the minimal denomination was £20. It is revealing
that earlier proposals to imitate the Wisselbank in England had £20 as the threshold
above which payments would have to be settled in the bank’s books.19 The Bank of
England was a merchants’ bank. In 1695 the Scottish Parliament chartered the Bank
of Scotland, where the first notes had a minimal denomination of £5.20
476
Parliament also authorised land banks which failed to get off the ground, and
reminted all coin in 1696. The resulting brief shortage of coin was partially answered
by Exchequer bills. Unlike the 1660s Exchequer orders, they had round denominations
as low as £5, were payable to bearer, transferred by simple endorsement, and
receivable for taxes. But they were still government bonds, with denominations too
large for retail transactions, paying interest, and given only for coin lent to the
Exchequer rather than at the Mint.
The war of the 1690s also resulted in a brief monetary experiment in Norway.21
Jorgen Thor Mohlen, a leading merchant and courtier, incurred losses to privateers
and got permission in 1695 to print temporary notes with which to continue his
business. It seems that these notes were paper money, as they were legal tender
(meaning that creditors had to accept them) and convertible into coin with delay. The
government revoked the notes the following year because the public had no faith in
the notes and demanded immediate redemption. Perhaps the 1660s Swedish
experiment gave inspiration for both issuer and the public.
Outside of Scandinavia the traditional use of paper as bonds and bills of exchange
may have been too strong for experiments in small denominations. The population
catered for in 1690s England was lenders to the government, which were typically
nobles, financiers and merchants, rather than ordinary people. However, the same
motive of war finance had just led to a different financial revolution in America, one
that derived its power in the exact opposite way – by bringing paper instruments to
ordinary people.
AMERICAN WARS , 1 6 0 0 – 1 7 0 0
The Spanish bonanza of precious metal indirectly caused American paper money. It
motivated others to settle America, but instead of finding metal the colonists found
themselves starved of coin even more than in Europe. They became expert monetary
improvisers, and when wars magnified the problem, they found limited political
freedom to solve it with paper money.
Virginia started as a gold-digging enterprise, but soon turned into a tobacco
plantation. There was not enough coin around, and several culprits have been
mentioned.22 First, England prohibited exportation of its coin because it thought it
had too little. Second, the balance of trade tended to keep coin in England. Any coin
that the colonists obtained was shipped to England to buy the manufactures that
were not available in America, leaving no coin for domestic circulation. Third, export
of bullion or foreign coin from England was permitted, and early Virginia had the
right to establish a mint, but it was too poor and chaotic to pull it off.23
Under such circumstances, it was natural to use the most common agricultural
produce as money, as was the case in the financially backward areas of Europe. Dried
tobacco leaves became official money, but they were very inconvenient. Tobacco-
denominated private IOUs became common and in 1633 Virginia passed a law to
establish exchange banks, to clear on paper all these IOUs.24 The law was probably
modeled on Dutch banks, but was not implemented, probably because the poor
colony could not procure the physical infrastructure of storehouses and the boats
needed to reach them. The use of IOUs as currency was later hampered when it was
enacted that creditors holding IOUs could pass them on only with the issuers’
477
knowledge. Such difficult transferability probably emanated from excessive litigation

or counterfeiting and eliminated the IOUs’ monetary potential.
New England seemed to have suffered most from coin shortage.25 Its growing,
market-oriented, diversified economy had more paid laborers, more opportunities for
internal trade, and no obvious single type of commodity money. It was not allowed
to have a mint. Its balance of trade was worse because it had nothing like tobacco to
export to England, while the high material demands of its middle-class families meant
large imports from England.26 To solve the problem, Massachusetts immediately
enforced in law the transferring of IOUs, long before England did, thus enabling
IOUs of important people to have limited circulation. Grain, bullets, fur, and Natives’
seashells also became legal money. Opening of a mint had to await the abolishment
of royalty in England in 1649.
In the meanwhile, the Dutch West India Company occupied Pernambuco in
northeast Brazil. Dutch rule lasted from 1630 to 1654, and was accompanied by
constant fighting with Portugal.27 The local money was sugar. Governor Johan
Maurits of Nassau was a scientifically minded noble who brought dozens of scholars
and two financiers. Probably waiting for coin shipments from home, he issued
emergency paper money to soldiers in 1640 and 1643 and forced its acceptance.28 He
was probably inspired by the Leyden episode, which was well known to every Dutch
person and especially to Maurits whose family was prominent in that episode. This
seems to have been the first paper money in America.
In 1669 the English colony of Antigua established two public tobacco banks which
issued paper money for deposited tobacco.29 The incidence of such a bold experiment
in a tiny colony was perhaps related to the fact that the leading colonist was one
Samuel Winthrop.30 Just a few years earlier, his brother John Jr. – Governor of
Connecticut and America’s only scientist – presented a bank plan to the Royal Society
of London (of which he was a member).31 The details are unknown, except that it
was not to be based on coin, and probably based on land or goods. In 1675 the
Antigua banks closed due to fraudulent excessive issue of paper.
In the early 1680s England eliminated both the charter and the mint of Massachusetts.
In 1685 the land bank idea came to Massachusetts with an English financier named
John Blackwell.32 He had been Cromwell’s paymaster, prominent in the debenture
market of the 1640s, and partner in a London land bank scheme which was attempted
in 1683. It was this plan which he brought to Massachusetts. Getting the colony’s elite
on board, his plan won preliminary approval by the government in 1686. An English-
appointed dictator of the short-lived Dominion of New England invalidated all the
land titles in 1688, and so the land-based bank was immediately aborted.
Paper money came to French Quebec in 1685.33 Soldiers were not paid due to
delays in shipment of gold from France. The local government improvised money
from playing cards, promising to redeem the notes in gold upon arrival. The promise
was fulfilled, and the temporary measure was repeated intermittently in the following
years, in spite of objections from the home government.
In 1689 Massachusetts regained its independence during the American phase of
the Glorious Revolution. Involved in the Nine Years’ War (known in America as
King William’s War), in 1690 it tried to occupy Quebec and ended up with a huge
debt to troops and suppliers. Tax collections in grain were slow and the soldiers
demanded pay. The government might have issued token coin or land-backed notes,
478
but there was no word from England regarding permission to reopen the mint or
revalidation of land titles.34 As a provisional government seeking restoration of its
charter, it could not take the risk of alienating England.
Following common practice, Massachusetts issued debentures to the soldiers, but
also made the debentures eligible for tax payments. Then, with partial inspiration
from Canada, it allowed the debentures’ conversion into bearer ‘bills’ with small,
round denominations. The bills were not named, did not need endorsement for
transfer, were acceptable in tax payments, and were theoretically redeemable at the
empty treasury. They were not called ‘money’, and were not forced on anyone other
than the treasury, so as not to look as if the colony once again violated the Crown’s
monopoly over money. The bills circulated at par after a rough start. Soon they came
to be called ‘bills of credit.’ Once Massachusetts got a new charter in 1692, it was
confident enough to upgrade the bills to the level of proper money: They could
discharge any private debt. In later terminology, the bills became ‘legal tender’ for all
debts and taxes. The bills received in tax payments were reissued by the Treasury
over and over, and solved the coin shortage. The absence of precious metal coin at
the treasury, and the lack of hope of a British shipment of coin, proved to be irrelevant
for the bills’ circulation.
It was the first time in Western civilization that paper money backed only by its
ability to discharge debts and taxes (just like today’s paper money35) circulated on a
regular basis. Unlike the hybrid bills and notes soon to be issued in England and
Scotland, the Massachusetts bills (like the Quebec and Brazil bills) were intentionally
made for retail market transactions and were proper paper money. Their lowest
denomination was 2 shillings, 50 times less than the lowest English and Scottish
paper denomination (a pound had 20 shillings). Bringing paper instruments to the
people was not an end in itself but a tool of war finance. Massachusetts could pay its
soldiers with inconvertible, unbacked paper money because its soldiers were its own
people, paying taxes there, and buying from local taxpaying sellers. England could
not do something similar because it had to pay foreign mercenaries on the continent,
and they wanted metal.
DIF F USION AND INFL ATIO N: 1 7 0 0 – 7 5

There were no more major inventions of paper money after 1700. It was known that
paper money could be used to finance war and fuel commerce, and could be backed by
metal, land, goods, punishment, or its acceptance for debts and taxes. The following
decades witnessed diffusion of paper money throughout the Atlantic World. In some
places, paper money was adopted in imitation of foreign colonies and nations. In other
places, local tradable bonds received more monetary features, such as lower
denominations, and became paper money. Some places discovered paper money inflation.
In England paper money was still not materialised. Transferability of promissory
notes still relied more on custom than on law, and only in 1704 Parliament made
transferability enforceable in law.36 The first £10 notes were issued in 1759. Smaller
banks also stayed with large denominations. Exchequer bills, which originated in the
1696 recoinage, continued.
In 1704 the Bank of Scotland started issuing £1 notes, which would become the
most common currency of Scotland for the rest of the century.37 After the 1707 Union
479
with England, Scotland experienced benign neglect. This led to relatively unregulated
banking, which sometimes bordered on anarchy, but revolutionised a backward
agrarian economy. The Royal Bank of Scotland was chartered in 1727 and attacked
the older bank by presenting a large amount of notes for redemption. For protection,
both banks used an ‘option clause,’ allowing them to postpone redemptions for half a
year with interest. More banks were opened later and even small businesses issued
small-denomination notes. In 1765 Parliament prohibited notes of less than £1 and the
option clause. In Dublin, by the 1750s private banknotes of goldsmiths and others
were common among merchants, and this practice later spread to the rest of Ireland.38
Louis XIV’s wars exhausted the French treasury and economy. In 1701 a recoinage
began. Billets de monnaie were issued as IOUs to those who handed their coin.39 The
government itself was confused about whether these were bonds or money. It tried to
force their use in some transactions, but gave them large denominations and refused
to accept them in some of its own transactions. By 1711 they were traded at heavy
discounts and were converted into more ordinary bonds.
A Scottish financier, John Law, concocted a complicated scheme of handling the
French government debt.40 His fast evolving scheme (1715–20) remains a puzzle to
this day. It included bonds which were more like stocks, stocks that were more like
stock options, and paper money too.41 The paper money was briefly imposed on all
large transactions. When the scheme collapsed the paper money became worthless,
and nobody in France wanted to hear about paper money and banks for decades to
come. Outside the European Atlantic, paper money had already resumed in Sweden
and diffused to Denmark. When Law’s trauma was somewhat forgotten, it diffused
to Austria and Russia as well.
Back in America, the long wars of Louis XIV made the military paper moneys of
Massachusetts and Quebec permanent, unlike all previous military paper moneys in
the West. The wars also led to diffusion to other colonies: French Acadia (today
Nova Scotia) imitated Quebec’s cards,42 while South Carolina (1703), New
Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey (1709), Rhode Island (1710), and
North Carolina (1712) imitated Massachusetts’ legal tender.43 After the wars these
colonies kept their paper moneys. The discipline of the legislatures weakened and
they were tempted to issue too much money.44 The taxes legislated to absorb the bills
were postponed more and more into the future. The quantity thus increased and the
result was inflation. In Quebec, inflation led the French government to end card
money in 1719, but it was revived in 1729.45
The land bank idea returned in a public form. In 1706 it was created in Barbados
and soon shut down by England.46 It was luckier on the continent, adopted in South
Carolina (1712), Massachusetts (1714), Rhode Island (1715), and New Hampshire
(1717).47 It got another boost when suggested as a solution to the recession of the
early 1720s (caused by the crash of John Law’s ‘system’ and related British and
Dutch bubbles). The land bank spread to Pennsylvania and Delaware (1723), New
Jersey (1724), North Carolina (1729), Maryland and Connecticut (1733), and New
York (1737). Some of Maryland’s bills were freely distributed to taxpayers, and were
all redeemable in sterling bills of exchange in the distant future. Antigua’s public
tobacco notes were revived in Virginia in 1717, vetoed by England, and resumed in
1730. In the 1730s Boston merchants circulated silver-backed notes, but other
attempts of private banking in New England were shot down by either local
480
government or Parliament.48 Colonial merchants circulated bills of exchange among

themselves before sending them to London for payment.49
By 1740 Parliament started debating the New England inflation that was eroding the
debts owed to British merchants.50 As the War of the Austrian Succession spread to America
(King George’s War), the colonies printed more money than ever before. Massachusetts
increased its money supply seven times from 1744 to 1748, and prices doubled. In 1749,
with Parliament’s gun pointed at its head, Massachusetts redeemed all its notes for coin
that was owed to it by Britain for war expenses. Rhode Island, the worst paper inflationist,
planned to continue printing, and led to Parliament’s Currency Act of 1751. It forbade all
New England colonies from issuing anything other than temporary bills, and from forcing
these bills on private creditors. Meanwhile, tobacco notes diffused to Maryland (1747) and
North Carolina (1754). The French and Indian War, which soon spread to Europe as the
Seven Years’ War, brought the last colonies on board the paper money train (land bank in
Georgia and legal tender in Virginia). The end of war saw the elimination of card money
in occupied Quebec,51 and the 1764 Currency Act that restricted all the colonies’ paper
money.52 The Act had a significant role in provoking the American Revolution.
In the Southern Atlantic metal still ruled, with a few exceptions. The British colony
of Saint Helena, between Brazil and Africa, seems to have had paper money of 2.5
shillings in 1722.53 The Dutch colony Surinam started issuing card money in 1761,
initially only in large denominations and backed by bills of exchange. Later the
denominations declined and the money was issued against mortgages.54 Regarding
Brazil there are claims that ‘bonds of some trading companies circulated as money since
the 1750s…for local transactions,’ and that ‘certificates’ issued by the Inspector General
of Diamonds since 1771 were money.55 These claims should be treated with caution.
REVOLUTIONS: 1 7 7 5 – 1 8 2 0
British colonial paper money not only paved the way to the American Revolution. It
also financed much of it.56 The Continental Congress and colonies printed money
from 1775, sometimes imposing criminal penalties on those refusing their currencies.
Since the Continental Congress had no authority to tax, its money (called ‘continental’)
lacked the anchor which states’ paper moneys did have. Congress’ empty promise to
pay coin after the war lost value and by 1780 the continental became worthless. It
was a massively successful inflation tax that gave Americans their independence.
After Independence, states kept issuing their own paper moneys to get out of the
postwar recession, and some chartered private note-issuing banks.57 Again Rhode
Island abused the system, creating inflation on purpose to erode farmers’ debts. The
1787 Constitution therefore prohibited state-issued legal tender paper money. Nothing
was said about federal paper money, so according to standard legal interpretation
there was no prohibition. It seems that there was a reluctance to block the possibility
of using once more at war this most powerful financial weapon. The United States
founded a mint and returned to metal. A partially public bank, the Bank of the United
States, was chartered by Congress in 1791. Dozens of private banks followed,
chartered by the states and issuing paper money because the states could not.
In 1811 Congress did not renew the charter of the Bank of the United States. During
the War of 1812 all banks outside New England suspended convertibility in 1814 and
their notes lost up to 30 per cent of their value. The U.S. Treasury, which issued war
481
bonds since 1812, printed its own paper money in 1815. 58 Congress chartered a second
Bank of the United States in 1816, and convertibility was resumed in 1817. In the same
war, the British forces in Canada issued convertible paper money, called Army Bills.59
Britain’s European enemies helped the United States gain independence but paid a
price. Spain’s debt led it to issue the hybrid vales reales from 1780.60 These were large-
denomination bonds which were legal tender for large payments and had potential
circulation mostly among merchants and financiers. The smallest denomination was
equal to a carpenter’s annual salary. Probably inspired by Venetian and English
precedents, Banco de San Carlos was founded to help market these bonds.61
The American War led France to bankruptcy and all hell broke loose. France had
chartered the private Caisse d’Escompte already in 1776, and modelled after the Bank
of England it issued convertible banknotes.62 Royal efforts to use the bank to prevent
state bankruptcy led to bank runs and suspension of convertibility. More such notes
were issued to close the 1789 government deficit. In that year the assignat bond was
introduced to finance the tax-less regime.63 The bonds could be used to buy confiscated
church land. Soon the assignat’s interest rate was gone and its denominations
plummeted until it became inconvertible paper money in 1792. This was partly done
to replace the Caisse’s notes which were private and legal tender only in Paris.
Figure 26.2 Assignat (banknote) for 50 sols dated revolutionary year II (1793)
of French Republic
© The Art Archive/Alamy
482
War led to massive printing of assignats as the almost only source of government
revenue, and with it came the inevitable inflation. Harsh penalties for those refusing
the assignat or accepting it at a discount did not help, nor did its imposition on
occupied territories. In 1795 the assignat was worthless. A similar currency, the
mandat, briefly circulated in 1796.
Although superficially similar to convertibility, the church land option could not
help maintain the assignat’s value because the promise was not for a specific piece of
land, or a piece of land of a certain pre-determined size. The promise was for purchase
at market values. And when printing brought inflation, land prices rose too, leaving
nothing to anchor the value of paper. Since nobody had to buy church land, this
mechanism was also much weaker than the acceptance of paper in tax payments.
Napoleon restored monetary prudence by establishing the silver franc and
restricting the new Bank of France that issued only old fashioned banknotes of large
denominations for merchants and financiers.64 The recent trauma was accompanied
by fears that ordinary people would initiate bank runs in their ignorance, and that
small denomination notes would drive silver out.
France’s enemies also used bonds and paper money to maintain the war effort. In
Spain, the vales declined in denomination (not enough for retail) and comprised
much of the budget in some years.65 By 1800 they lost most of their value. Banco de
San Carlos briefly issued convertible notes in 1803.66
Portugal issued endorsable bonds in 1796.67 In 1797 the denominations were
lowered to enable the bonds to be used as money and they were forced on all
transactions. The paper was accepted at heavy discounts, especially when France
invaded. It circulated only in the large cities, as people elsewhere did not consider it
to be real money. By 1813, prices more than doubled.
Even England succumbed to the pressure. In 1797, fears of a French invasion led
to panic in London and depositors stormed the Bank of England.68 The government
ordered to suspend redemption of the Bank’s notes and of the notes of the Bank of
Ireland (established 1783). At the beginning of the suspension many merchants
declared that they would continue to accept the Bank’s notes in trade. Hoarding, war
needs, and changes in the exchange rate between gold and silver led to a shortage of
coin. In response, lower denominations appeared in the notes of the Bank of England
(£1), and of other banks in England, Scotland, and Ireland.69 Now banknotes in
England finally reached ordinary retail transactions. The Bank of England wanted to
resume convertibility already in 1797 and again in 1803 but the government refused
in order to keep this potential source of revenue. There was some money printing and
inflation, but nothing comparable to the American and French experiences.70 During
the suspension the notes were formally legal tender for taxes but not for private
debts.71 Until 1811 they were still universally accepted for private debts in practice,
but then paper depreciated against gold. Traumatised by the assignats, Parliament
refused to formally make the notes full legal tender, but did it in practice in 1812 with
technical legal tricks.
The revolutions in Europe also affected Latin America. Wartime deficits increased
Spanish taxation of the colonies, and then Spain was occupied by France. These events
provoked American revolutions in 1810. In the disintegrating viceroyalty of New
Granada, paper money was quickly issued in Venezuela and Colombia.72 Argentina
financed the war with bonds which ‘took on, at times, the characteristics of quasi-
483
money and circulated, although by all accounts in a very limited fashion.’73 The same
goes for bonds of the Caja Nacional de Fondos de Sud America, which converted the
variety of Argentine bonds into uniform billetes. In Brazil, bills of foundry houses
backed by the Treasury are claimed to have functioned as money from 1803.74
Outside the main area of wars and revolutions, paper money quietly diffused to all
corners of the Atlantic World. In 1790 the British Canadian province of the Island of
Saint John (today Prince Edward Island) started issuing legal tender paper money
with denominations as low as half a pound.75 The usual colonial coin shortage led to
the issue of paper money in Dutch South Africa, first by the government (1782) and
later by a land bank (1793).76 The British occupation chartered another note-issuing
bank in 1809. In all cases there were over-issue and high inflation. Inflated Danish
paper money diffused to the Atlantic Danish possessions of Iceland (1778)77 and
Norway (1791).78 According to numismatists, emergency issues also spread to the
Danish possessions of Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the Danish West Indies (today
United States Virgin Islands), as well as to Haiti, French Guiana, and Puerto Rico.79
These claims should be treated with caution.
THE DUST SETTL E S : 1 8 2 1 – 5 0

By the time the revolutions in Europe and America were over, the secret was out.
Wars could be financed with paper money. Marco Polo was right. There is no need
to mine gold or debase gold coins. All you need is paper, and some functioning
branches of government to support it by either carrot or stick. Theories of money,
inflation and war finance would never be the same. In the age of the greatest political
revolutions, this in itself was a revolution.80
Most governments in the Atlantic World therefore strengthened their control on
paper money, by nationalizing existing banks, establishing new national banks, or
printing from the treasury. Nobody wanted inflation unless necessary, so nations in
peace returned to metal, but with banknotes that were only partially covered by
metal in the banks’ vaults (fractional reserve banking). The decline in banknotes’
denominations generally became permanent. They would henceforth belong to the
common people as well as to financiers and merchants, because that proved to be
useful for both war and commerce. The assignat-traumatised France, Belgium, and
the Netherlands experienced significant delay in this trend.81
Leading by example was the Bank of England, still nominally private.82 In 1821 it
returned to gold. In 1833 its notes formally became legal tender for private debts (as
long as they were convertible into gold). In 1844 it became the monopolist paper
issuer in England and its Issue Department was separated from its Banking Department.
Free entry into the paper-issuing business was closed in Scotland at the same time.83
The same trends could be seen in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil.84 Mexico, the world’s
leading producer of silver, rejected paper money.85
High inflation continued to be associated with wars, directly or indirectly.
Argentina was continuously at war and paid for it with paper money.86 Soon after
independence, the Republic of Texas relied on paper money before joining the United
States.87 Long after independence, Haiti sent its gold to France as indemnity. Paper
money replaced gold in domestic circulation, and this soon led the government to
print its deficits away.88
484
In the United States, however, government control over paper money weakened.89
The state-chartered banking system kept growing, and by 1825 there was twice as
much capital invested in U.S. banks than in all the banks of England and Wales, even
though the U.S. population was smaller. A bank charter, with the associated privilege
of issuing paper money, became ‘a democratic right,’ while elsewhere it was a privilege
restricted to few. As in Scotland, paper money allowed the leveraging of a limited
supply of gold coins to develop an expanding economy with easy credit to anyone
who could convince bankers to lend him money, and in principle anyone could
become a banker. Congress again did not renew the charter of the Bank of the United
States and it expired in 1836. The British possessions of Canada and South Africa
also had private banks issuing the local paper money.90
CONCLU S IO N
There seem to be three effects of the Atlantic World on the development of paper
money from curiosity and myth in 1450 to greatness in 1850. First, the countries of
the European Atlantic dominated long-distance trade. The financial centres that
facilitated this trade moved along the Eastern Atlantic shore once a century, from
Bruges to Antwerp to Amsterdam and to London. The bills of exchange and
promissory notes of that trade helped promote the idea that in various ways paper
could replace metal on a voluntary, regular basis. Second, the contested great riches
of maritime trade and colonialism increased warfare between the nations of the
European Atlantic. This contributed to the progress of military paper money, which
led the way in reaching ordinary people rather than merchants and financiers. Third,
the American Atlantic outside the Iberian colonies found no metal, and had temporary
political freedom to print paper instead.
The interaction between both sides of the Atlantic contributed to the progress of
paper money. Wars that started on one side diffused to the other side. Ideas flowed back
and forth and imitation was mutual. Before the American Revolution, Americans hated
the Bank of England while the British despised the colonists’ inconvertible paper money.
After the American Revolution, however, the charter of the Bank of the United States
was inspired by the Bank of England,91 and Britain found wartime inspiration in the
inconvertible paper money that the colonists perfected during the American Revolution.
Another recurring theme in the story is that a particularly bad experience with
paper inflation traumatised a country and it reverted to precious metal as the anchor
of its monetary system, until memory faded and the witnesses died, or until the next
major war broke. Prime examples are France after John law and after the 1790s, the
United States after Independence, and Great Britain after the Napoleonic Wars.
This story ends in 1850, just before the gold discoveries in California and Australia
would change global money and lead the world to a Gold Standard, and just before
the paper money in the United States would be nationalised in the Civil War.
NOTE S
1 Einzig 1966: 216–17, 226, 236–37, 250–51, 259, 286; Sargent and Velde 2002, 219.
2 Polo 1871: I, 378–80.
3 van der Wee 1977.
485
4 Adapted from de Roover 1948: 58–59.

5 Adapted from Neal 1990: 5–8.
6 de Roover 1948: 57.
7 von Glahn, 1996.
8 These stories and similar ones are told in Sargent and Velde 2002, 219–22.
9 de Roover 1948: 54, 70–71 (fn. 37–38); van der Wee 1977: 324–29.
10 Spufford 1995.
11 Richards 1929 is the source of English facts in this section unless mentioned otherwise.
However, his interpretation of various instruments as ‘paper money’ is disputed here.
12 Recent comprehensive work on the goldsmith-bankers and the Wisselbank can be found
in various articles by Stephen Quinn (occasionally with co-authors).
13 Quinn 1997: 420. The smallest check reported by Richards is for almost £10 (p. 51).
14 Muldrew 1998: 81–83.
15 Goldberg forthcoming.
16 Horsefield 1960 reviews the theoretical literature on money and banking in England
before 1710.
17 Jensen 1896: 393–95.
18 van der Wee 1977: 313.
19 Davis 1901: II, 6, 26.
20 Checkland 1975 is the standard reference for Scottish banking.
21 Norges Bank 2014.
22 Nettels 1934.
25 Sylla 1982: 23–25.
27 Boxer 1973.
28 Abreu and Lago 2001: 333, fn. 16.
29 McCusker 1976: 95.
31 Davis 1901: II, 63–67.
32 Goldberg 2011.
33 Shortt 1925: xlix–lv.
34 This episode is analysed in detail in Goldberg 2009.
35 McCusker 1976: 97.
36 Richards 1929: 48–49, 42–43.
37 Cameron 1967: Chapter 3.
38 Fetter 1955: 10–11.
39 Murphy 1997: 115–20.
40 Murphy 1997.
41 This interpretation is from Velde 2009.
42 Shortt 1925: lv.
43 Brock 1975: Chapters II–III. A recent survey is Sylla 2001.
44 Nettels 1934: 267–75.
45 Shortt 1925: lxi–lxxi.
46 Nettels 1934: 269–71.
47 Brock 1975: Chapters I–III.
48 Davis 1901: II, Chapters VI–XII.
49 McCusker 1976, 100–103.
50 Davis 1901: I; Brock 1975.
51 Shortt 1925: lxxxv–lxxxvii.
486
52 Ernst 1973; Brock 1975: Chapter IX.

53 Cuhaj 2008: 1045.
54 de Vries 2001: 135–36.
55 Macedo et al. 2001: 202, fn. 31; Abreu and Lago 2001: 336; Cuhaj 2008: 141.
56 Harlow 1929.
57 Sylla 2001.
58 Hurst 1973: 136.
59 Bordo and Redish 2001: 273–74.
60 Hamilton 1947: 79–82.
61 Tortella and Comín 2001: 160.
62 White 2001: 84; Bordo and White 1994: 252.
63 Aftalion 1990.
65 Hamilton 1947: 83.
66 Tortella and Comín 2001: 169–70.
67 Macedo et al. 2001: 210–12.
68 Fetter 1950.
69 Richards 1929: 43; Fetter 1955: 17–18.
70 Bordo and White 1994: 255–59.
71 Fetter 1950.
72 McFarlane 2014: 93, 104.
73 Cortés-Conde and McCandless 2001: 386–87; Millington 1992: 16–17.
74 Abreu and Lago 2001: 336.
75 Powell 2005: 15.
76 South African Reserve Bank 2014; Goosen et al. 1999: 16-7.
77 Central Bank of Iceland 2002: 7, 11–14; Jensen 1896: 375–76.
78 Norges Bank 2014.
79 Cuhaj 2008: 477, 623, 430, 644, 520, 999–1000, respectively.
80 See also McCusker 1976: 94.
81 Cameron 1967: Chapters 4–5; De Nederlandsche Bank 2014: 3.
82 Clapham 1944: II, Chapters 2–3.
84 Tortella and Comín 2001: 170, 161; Macedo et al. 2001: 212-17; Abreu and Lago 2001:
363–67; respectively.
85 Marichal and Carmagnani 2001: 302.
86 Cortés-Conde and McCandless 2001: 388–93, 402.
87 Miller 1949.
88 Logan 1961: 437; Lacerte 1981: 507, 510; Cuhaj 2008: 644–46.
89 Sylla 2001: 248.
90 Bordo and Redish 2001: 274–76; Goosen et al. 1999: 17–18; respectively.
91 Sylla 2001: 245–46, 258.
REF EREN CE S
Abreu, Marcelo de Paiva, and Luiz A. Correa do Lago. 2001. Property Rights and the Fiscal
and Financial Systems in Brazil. In Bordo and Cortés-Conde.
Aftalion, Florin. 1990. The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation. Trans. Martin
Thom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bordo, Michael D., and Roberto Cortés-Conde, eds. 2001. Transferring Wealth and Power
from the Old to the New World: Monetary and Fiscal Institutions in the 17th through the
19th Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
487
Bordo, Michael D., and Angela Redish. 2001. The Legacy of French and English Fiscal and
Monetary Institutions for Canada. In Bordo and Cortés-Conde.
Bordo, Michael D., and Eugene N. White. 1994. British and French Finance during the
Napoleonic Wars. In Michael D. Bordo and Forrest Capie, eds., Monetary Regimes in
Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boxer, C. R. 1973. The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brock, Leslie V. 1975. The Currency of the American Colonies, 1700–1764. New York: Arno Press.
Cameron, Rondo. 1967. Banking in the Early Stages of Industrialization: A Study in
Comparative Economic History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Central Bank of Iceland. 2002. The Currency of Iceland: Issues and Features of Icelandic
Notes and Coins. Reykjavik: Central Bank of Iceland.
Checkland, S. G. 1975. Scottish Banking: A History, 1695–1973. Glasgow: Collins.
Clapham, John Harold. 1944. The Bank of England: A History. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cortés-Conde, Roberto, and George T. McCandless. 2001. Argentina: From Colony to Nation:
Fiscal and Monetary Experience of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. In Bordo and
Cortés-Conde.
Cuhaj, George S., ed. 2008. Standard Catalog of World Paper Money: General Issues, 1368–1960.
12th edition. Iola: Krause Publications.
Davis, Andrew McFarland. 1901. Currency and Banking in the Province of the Massachusetts
Bay. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan.
De Nederlandsche Bank. 2014. History of DNB. Available at http://www.dnb.nl/en/about-dnb/
organisation/history/. Accessed 1 April 2014.
Einzig, Paul. 1966. Primitive Money: In its Ethnological, Historical and Economic Aspects.
2nd edition. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Ernst, Joseph Albert. 1973. Money and Politics in America, 1755–1775: A Study in the
Currency Act of 1764 and the Political Economy of Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Fetter, Frank Whitson. 1950. Legal Tender during the English and Irish Bank Restrictions.
Journal of Political Economy 58: 241–53.
——, ed. 1955. The Irish Pound, 1797–1826: A reprint of the Report of the Committee of 1804
of the British House of Commons on the Condition of the Irish Currency. Abingdon: Routledge.
Glahn, Richard von. 1996. Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goldberg, Dror. 2009. The Massachusetts Paper Money of 1690. Journal of Economic History
69: 1092–1106.
——. 2011. Why Was America’s First Bank Aborted? Journal of Economic History 71: 211–22.
——. Forthcoming. How Americans Invented Modern Money, 1607–1692. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Goosen W., A. Pampallis, A. van der Merwe, and L. Mdluli. 1999. Banking in the New Millennium.
Kenwyn: Juta & Co.
Hamilton, Earl J. 1947. War and Prices in Spain, 1651–1800. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harlow, Ralph Volney. 1929. Aspects of Revolutionary Finance, 1775–1783. American
Historical Review 35: 46–68.
Horsefield, J. Keith. 1960. British Monetary Experiments, 1650–1710. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Hurst, James W. 1973. A Legal History of Money in the United States, 1774–1970. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Jensen, Adolph. 1896. A History of Banking in the Scandinavian Nations. Trams. William
Price. In A History of Banking in all the Leading Nations. New York: The Journal of
Commerce and Commercial Bulletin.
488
Lacerte, Robert K. 1981. Xenophobia and Economic Decline: The Haitian Case, 1820–1843.
The Americas 37: 499–515.
Logan, Rayford W. 1961. The U.S. ‘Colonial Experiment’ in Haiti. The World Today 17: 435–46.
Macedo, Jorge Braga de, Alvaro Ferreira da Silva, and Rita Martins de Sousa. 2001. War,
Taxes, and Gold: The Inheritance of the Real. In Bordo and Cortés-Conde.
Marichal, Carlos, and Marcello Carmagnani. 2001. Mexico: From Colonial Fiscal Regime to
Liberal Order, 1750–1912. In Bordo and Cortés-Conde.
McCusker, John. Colonial Paper Money. 1976. In Eric P. Newman and Richard G. Doty, eds.,
Studies on Money in Early America. New York: The American Numismatic Society.
McFarlane, Anthony. 2014. War and Independence in Spanish America. New York: Routledge.
Miller, E. T. 1949. The Money of the Republic of Texas. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly
52: 294–300.
Millington, Thomas. 1992. Debt Politics After Independence: The Funding Conflict in Bolivia.
Gainesville: University of Florida Press.
Muldrew, Craig. 1998. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social
Relations in Early Modern England. Houndmills: Macmillan Press.
Murphy, Antoin E. 1997. John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Neal, Larry. 1990. The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age
of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nettels, Curtis P. 1934. The Money Supply of the American Colonies before 1720. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Norges Bank. 2014. Norges Bank’s History. Available at http://www.norges-bank.no/en/
about/history/norges-banks-history. Accessed 1 April 2014.
Polo, Marco. 1871. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and
Marvels of the East. 2 vols. Trans. Henry Yule. London: John Murray.
Powell, James. 2005. A History of the Canadian Dollar. Ottawa: Bank of Canada.
Quinn, Stephen. 1997. Goldsmith-Banking: Mutual Acceptance and Interbanker Clearing in
Restoration England. Explorations in Economic History 34: 411–32.
Roover, Raymond de. 1948. Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges. Cambridge:
Mediaeval Academy of America.
Richards, R. D. 1929. The Early History of Banking in England. London: P. S. King & Son.
Sargent, Thomas J., and François R. Velde. 2002. The Big Problem of Small Change. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Shortt, Adam, ed. 1925. Documents relating to Canadian Money, Exchange and Finance
during the French Period. Ottawa: Canadian Archives.
South African Reserve Bank. 2014. History of South African Banknotes 1782 to 1902. Available
at https://www.resbank.co.za/BanknotesandCoin/SouthAfricanCurrency/BankNotes/Pages/
HistoryofSouthAfricanbanknotes1782To1920.aspx. Accessed 1 April 2014.
Spufford, Peter. 1995. Access to Credit and Capital in the Commercial Centres of Europe. In
Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen, eds., A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European
Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sylla, Richard. 1982. Monetary Innovation in America. Journal of Economic History 42: 21–30.
——. 2001. The United States: Financial Innovation and Adaptation. In Bordo and Cortés-Conde.
Tortella, Gabriel, and Francisco Comín. 2001. Fiscal and Monetary Institutions in Spain
(1600–1900). In Bordo and Cortés-Conde.
Velde, François R. 2009. Was John Law’s System a Bubble? The Mississippi Bubble Revisited.
In Jeremy Atack and Larry Neal, eds., The Origins and Development of Financial Markets
and Institutions: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
489
Vries, Jan de. 2001. The Netherlands in the New World: The Legacy of European Fiscal,
Monetary, and Trading Institutions for New World Development from the Seventeenth to
the Nineteenth Centuries. In Bordo and Cortés-Conde.
Wee, Herman van der. 1977. Monetary, Credit and Banking Systems. In E. E. Rich and C. H.
Wilson, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, volume V: The Economic
Organization of Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
White, Eugene N. 2001. France and the Failure to Modernize Macroeconomic Institutions. In
Bordo and Cortés-Conde.
490
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE CREDIT CRISIS OF 1772–73

Paul Kosmetatos
INTRODUCTIO N
O n 9 June 1772, Alexander Fordyce, the Scottish leading partner of the London
bank of Neale, James, Fordyce, and Down, absconded to the Continent after being
caught wrong-footed in his speculations in East India stock.1 Fordyce’s flight and
eventual surrender the following September was the first act of a multifaceted financial
crisis which raged for about a year.2 The initial distress in the London market peaked on
22 June with a series of bank runs, when ‘a universal bankruptcy was expected, and the
stoppage of every banker looked for’.3 The simultaneous impact in Scotland was even
more spectacular, when the ambitious and experimental Ayr Bank (Douglas, Heron
&Co.) was also forced to stop payment on 24 June with over £1.2 million in liabilities.4
A second phase of the crisis centred on Amsterdam in the winter of 1772–73, with
the collapse of the bank of Clifford & Sons among others.5 Ripples were felt across
Europe and in the North American colonies, and the crisis closed its circle in London
when Sir George Colebrooke, Chairman of the East India Company and a notorious
speculator in his own accord, became its last prominent victim in March 1773.6
The on-going financial troubles of the East India Company are the connecting
thread between the two phases of the crisis. Ever since the award of the diwani of
Bengal to it in 1765 had raised expectations of a dividend windfall, its shares had
become an object of intense speculation and had already followed a recognisable
bubble trajectory in 1766–69. The credit crisis in June 1772 forced the Company to
lower its dividend from the very high levels it had reached in previous years,
particularly when the Bank of England discontinued the rolling short-term loans the
Company had come to depend on as working capital ahead of its annual sale in
England. The Company’s finances were finally tidied over by the government and the
Bank of England as part of the Regulating Acts of 1773, albeit at the price of some
loss of independence, but the blow to its stock price in late 1772 helped break the
Amsterdam speculators and the banks which had financed them.7
Although neither Horace Walpole’s fears that ‘one rascally and extravagant
banker [had] brought Britannia, Queen of the Indies, to the precipice of bankruptcy’,8
nor James Boswell’s prediction that ‘1772 [would] ever be remembered as a year of
491
– Paul Kosmetatos –
confusion, dismay, and distress’ proved accurate in the end,9 the episode possesses
several aspects that merit continued attention. Adam Smith’s references to the Ayr
Bank affair in Book II of the Wealth of Nations have attracted most of what modern
academic interest persists,10 but the affair as a whole is notable for being one of the
first endogenous financial crises caused by growth itself, rather than war or
government policy.11 Its rapidity and geographical extent moreover can easily give
the impression of causal relationships existing between its various episodes, and
promote talk of financial contagion. Contemporaries were indeed quick to do just
that, describing Fordyce’s failure as the spark that ‘set fire to the mine’,12 and
marvelling at the speed with which news of it was brought to Edinburgh by ‘a
gentleman who came down in 43 hours’.13 In the same passage quoted above, Boswell
described the shock in Scotland as just that: ‘like a company connected by an electrical
wire, the people in every corner of the country have almost instantaneously received
the same shock’. This conviction that the 1772–73 crisis displayed contagion
characteristics is echoed in the limited modern literature on the affair. The actions of
the Bank of England to limit the spread and severity of the shock are likewise
proposed to constitute an early instance of a Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) in action,
some thirty years before the classical formulation of the concept in Henry Thornton’s
Inquiry on the Paper Credit of Great Britain.14 Charles Kindleberger considered
1772 as a typical example of financial contagion at work, and an almost canonical
one on the desireability of a LOLR.15 Fernand Braudel even suggested that the crisis’
British origins signify that ‘Amsterdam was no longer the [financial] centre or
epicentre of Europe [and that] this had already shifted to London’.16
While an all-encompassing account of the 1772–73 crisis has yet to be written,
some of its individual episodes have been described in detail. The North American
side of the story is one, thanks in large part to the work of J. M. Price, T. M. Devine,
and R. B. Sheridan.17 All three have identified the financial connections associated
with the colonial trades, tobacco foremost among them, as the likeliest route of
transmission of the crisis from Europe to America. They have moreover drawn
attention to the fact that the crisis occurred at a particularly interesting juncture in
the relations between Britain and its American colonies, falling as it did between the
breakdown of the colonial non-importation agreements in 1770 and the breakout of
hostilities in 1775. The literature is universally (and commendably) careful not to
make too much of the crisis as a direct ‘cause’ of the American Revolution, despite its
close proximity in time. Circumstantial connections do remain, most notably the East
India Company tea destroyed in December 1773, which had found its way to Boston
Harbor through the provisions of the Regulating Acts that accompanied the
government’s rescue loan of £1,400,000. The most that can be safely said however,
is that the crisis may have ‘helped focus the discontent of the colonists…and thus
helped to make [them] more responsive to anti-British propaganda’,18 though even
this cautious a conjecture has been doubted in the literature.19
A more interesting question is to establish whether the crisis was indeed transmitted
from Britain to America in the contagious manner claimed both by its contemporaries
and by later literature. Quite apart from providing a satisfyingly causal narrative for
the crisis, its propagation by genuine financial contagion would support the existence
of systemic risk in the financial system of the 1770s. ‘Contagion’ can be a nebulous
concept, and the literature is unfortunately all too ready to use words like ‘spread’ in
492
– chapter 27: The credit crisis of 1772–73 –
describing the sequence of the crisis episodes, and thus tacitly assume a causal
relationship between them.20 Causality however is easier to state than to prove in this
as in so many other historical arguments. The mere coincidence of economic
difficulties across different financial centres or economic sectors does not necessarily
imply that contagion is at work. Going beyond this simple causal requirement,
contagion in its purest sense arises from a narrow (or idiosyncratic) shock that is
limited to a small set of institutions. Such a shock can include the outright failure of
a small number of ‘systemically important’ market players (like Fordyce’s bank or the
Ayr Bank in 1772), but could just be the release of adverse news on them, or merely
the heightening of suspicions on their financial health. Any further failures that occur
afterwards must concern players who were completely insulated from this original
shock.21 Therefore such events as the breakout (or end) of war, bad (or bumper)
harvests, and new (or repealed) legislation with broad effect such as regulations or
tariffs, can be causes of a broad systemic crisis but generally not of contagion.
Contagion should moreover not be confused with the effects of economic recession,
even if they have directly arisen from a financial shock, as these are usually too slow
and open to other external impulses over the lifetime of the crisis. Therefore, contagion
mechanisms are not only causal and sequential but also comparatively rapid.
THE AMERICAN CO L O NIAL TRAD E S

AN D TH EIR FINANCIAL CONNE CTIO NS W ITH B RITAIN
Contemporaries attributed the market break to what Adam Smith later termed ‘over-
trading’,22 a term which encompassed both asset speculation during a period of rapid
economic growth, as well as imprudent monetary expansion. Later opinion is broadly
in agreement, sometimes using the contentious word ‘bubble’ to describe the period
preceding 1772.23 According to this traditional narrative, the buyoancy of the British
economy following the victorious end to the Seven Years War and Clive’s advances
in India very soon turned to excessively ambitious projects, conspicuous consumption,
monetary fallacy such as the overuse of redrawn ‘fictitious’ bills of exchange, and
speculation filled with ‘roguery’ and ‘stupidity’.24 This volatile mixture is supposed to
have needed only a spark to ‘set off the mine’, as Sir William Forbes put it in his
famous comment.
Scotland features prominently in this narrative. Following the final defeat of
Jacobitism, the Scottish economy had entered an expansionary phase which accelerated
in the late 1760s and peaked just before 1772. The growth of the Scottish share of the
tobacco trade with North America after 1750 was especially noteworthy, growing
from a fifth of the British total in 1744 to over half in 1769.25 Almost all of this
activity was centred on the Clyde and destined for re-export to England and,
increasingly, the Continent, particularly after Scottish firms won the lucrative
monopoly contract with the French Farmers-General.26 The adoption of the non-
importation agreements by the Americans had a predictably negative effect on imports
after 1765, but after most of the Townshend duties were repealed in 1770 tobacco
imports once again grew rapidly, reaching an all-time high of 47 million lbs in 1771.
This Scottish dominance of the tobacco trade was founded on the cost advantage
Scots enjoyed over their English competitors. Part of this was due to the lower costs
of locally produced manufactured goods that were supplied to the colonists. Henry
493
Hamilton estimated that £100 of Glasgow goods purchased £230 of tobacco in

Virginia, although this margin may have incorporated the advantageous exchange
between sterling and the Virginia currency.27 Equally important were the advantages
inherent in the Scottish system of tobacco purchasing in America.
The tobacco trade with Britain followed two distinct business models.28 The older
system, usually adopted by London traders and involving the produce of large
plantations, was the plantation or consignment system. This involved the planter
arranging for a British trader to assume the costs and risks of storing and marketing
his entire crop in Europe (though not those associated with shipping and insuring it)
in exchange for a commission. The merchant in turn arranged for the purchases of
manufactured and consumer goods required by the planter and shipped them by
return vessel. Any deficit (as was usually the case) between the price of the crop and
that of the European goods was financed by the British merchant and secured on the
planter’s personal bond. The newer commercial, or store-based, system, which
became increasingly prevalent among Glasgow traders after 1750, involved
dispatching factors to America as ‘supercargoes’, or recruited them among the
Scottish emigrants in the colonies. They in turn set up stores in the colonies which
purchased tobacco directly and sold European goods to the planters on credit. Title
to the crop passed to the factor on purchase, and all freight and insurance costs for
transportation to Europe were assumed by the store. As in the case of the consignment
system, any deficit incurred by the planter was financed by the British store owner
Figure 27.1 Tobacco ships in America

494
and secured on land mortgages. Planters, both under the consignment and commercial
systems of trade, generally ran credit balances with their British counterparts for at
least 12 months, although store credit generally consisted of numerous small-sized
debts compared to the larger balances run in the consignment trade.
The commercial system became increasingly popular as it proved better suited to
the needs of smaller farmers and planters; by 1775 over three-quarters of Virginia
tobacco were traded under it.29 The reason for this was once again cost: Scottish ships
achieved much quicker turn-around times due to the presence of their affiliated factors
on the spot, who could arrange for the shipment of the produce of the smaller planters
they traded with in more flexible manner than for the case of large consignments.
Shipping to Glasgow rather than London also enjoyed the advantage of a round-trip
that was shorter by four to six weeks, and which followed a route that was mostly
immune to hostile action in case of war, unlike the Channel route typically used by
English importers. Since freight charges could range from a third to a half of the prime
cost of tobacco, the savings achieved by Glasgow merchants were substantial and
allowed them to be much more competitive in the prices they offered to planters.30
The Clyde tobacco boom, and to a lesser extent the growth of other colonial
trades such as sugar, rum, and cotton, gave some impetus to those Scottish industries
which supplied the manufactured goods demanded by the colonies.31 Banking services
also saw increased demand, since tobacco importation through the store system was
a particularly capital intensive business.32 It is estimated that an initial investment of
four times the cost of each hogshead of tobacco was necessary for the store system to
function, not only because of the capital expenditure required in setting up the
network of overseas stores, but also due to the planters running chronic deficits with
their European counterparties. A contemporary estimate put it that £55,000 in goods
and credit needed to be invested for an annual import rate of 2,200 hogsheads, at the
time selling for £6 each.33 These large capital requirements may have been partly
behind the consolidation of the industry to a few large firms, which fell from 91 in
1728–31 to only 38 in 1773.34 Some of these firms, like John Glassford & Co., or the
Buchanan and Cunninghame groups of interconnected partnerships, were large
concerns with tens of established stores in America and turnovers in the hundreds of
thousands of pounds.35
Perhaps paradoxically given the comparative backwardness of its economy,
Scotland’s banks seem to have enjoyed a competitive advantage over the English in
supplying capital for the colonial trades, and longer-term capital at that.36 English
private banks were still restricted to a maximum of six partners under the provisions
of the 1708 Bank of England monopoly, which perforce constrained their assets even
at the usual leverage for this period of 10–12.37 Scottish banks by contrast functioned
under a legal regime that allowed unincorporated partnerships of many persons, and
enjoyed the advantage of operating as a separate legal personality (though not with
limited liability).38 The Royal Bank of Scotland and the Glasgow-based Ship, Arms,
and Thistle banks had all supported the colonial trades at an early stage,39 and the
new Ayr Bank with its large resources and support of prominent landowners,
merchants, and professionals throughout the Lowlands joined them in 1769. The
Ayr Bank has been strongly (but not always justly) criticised by posterity for
incompetent and venal management, and for fanning the flames of a huge credit
bubble.40 Its rapid credit growth supposedly consisted of ‘taking up the bad loans of
495
the other banks’41 and funding ‘every kind of social pretention’,42 while its excessive
paper money issuance was maintained by precarious short-term money market loans
in London. Part of this credit was directed towards the purchase of sugar plantations
in the Ceded Islands in the Caribbean, recently won from the French in the Seven
Years War, particularly in Grenada where William Alexander & Sons, a major
Edinburgh tobacco and banking concern, and the Home family from Berwickshire
acquired plantations.43 Both were to feature prominently in the aftermath of the 1772
crisis, albeit in different capacities: George Home of Branxton became the factor and
manager overseeing (and, happily for posterity, meticulously recording) the unwinding
of the Ayr Bank after 1773, while the surviving partners of Alexanders and their two
large estates in Grenada were involved in long and bitter litigation with the Bank of
England that took decades to resolve.44
When the non-importation agreements broke down in 1770, the tobacco trade
intensified to compensate for the time it had been restricted, aided no doubt by the
boom conditions in Britain. Sources agreed than an ‘amazingly great’ volume of
goods was shipped from the mother country in 1771, and realised that the balance of
trade, always in deficit from the point of view of planters, was turning even more
against them.45 Official estimates (which do not necessarily correspond to commercial
values) put this deficit at £2.6 million in 1771 and almost £1.5 million at the time of
the crisis in 1772. Total American debts outstanding just before the Revolution are
estimated between £2–6 million. R. B. Sheridan estimates a possible figure of as high
as £4–5 million for the peak of the boom, assuming a natural retrenchment of credit
following the crisis in 1772.46
All tobacco merchants, whether Scots or English (or indeed, American),
consignment- or store-based, and whatever their sources of capital, depended on the
City of London for effecting their fund transfers. The bill of exchange drawn on
London or Amsterdam bankers (and, increasingly, on aggressive Scottish newcomers
like the Ayr Bank) was the long-established cornerstone of international trade in this
period, allowing the fast and safe transfer of funds without the risk and expense of
transporting specie, even had specie been abundantly available – which was far from
the case.47 Tobacco factors either drew or purchased existing London or Scottish
bills, using either cash or – far more frequently – local paper money, and remitted
those to their British parent companies. The inherent transferability of bills, by means
of serial endorsements, made them convenient and somewhat mitigated their cost.
This was invariably high: the structural deficits of the tobacco trade for the Americans,
together with the scarcity of specie and the fact that American paper money issues in
all their great variety, and (all too often) their inflationary disrepute, were not readily
accepted by British merchants, drove demand for London bills ever higher – typically
between 25–33 per cent in premium.48 Going beyond cost, the bills system also
introduced an extra dimension of credit risk to the transaction between exporter and
importer, should any doubt befall the security of the London or Scottish banker who
had ‘accepted’ (i.e. guaranteed) the bill.
Much has been made of the practice of drawing ‘fictitious’ bills during the 1770–72
boom, ever since Smith’s analysis of the Ayr Bank failure in the Wealth of Nations.
These were fiat financial instruments that did not correspond to real underlying
commercial transactions, and which were often redrawn just before maturity so that
the short-term loan (bills typically ran for 50–70 days) could be extended for a longer
496
duration.49 Fictitious bills were certainly used heavily in Europe, particularly in

effecting so-called ‘accommodation loans’, a form of interbank loan that made use of
a bill drawn and accepted by established bankers in the major money markets like
London or Amsterdam. This was not an innovation particular to this period, but long-
established practice in the absence of a modern interbank market, nor was 1772 the
first time such loans had been associated with a serious financial crisis.50 Sources are
nonetheless almost uniform in asserting that the practice had exceeded previous
experience in 1772, particularly when Scottish bills were concerned. The bills employed
in the tobacco and other colonial trades were very much ‘real’ however, supported by
a voluminous trade in real commodities. Indeed, the very fact that the booming colonial
trade created so many genuine bills which could be also used as a monetary instrument
may have even fed the financial boom, by providing increased quantities of the very
instrument that was its signature.
Although the preceding discussion has focused on the bilateral trade between
colonies and mother country, not all commerce was conducted in this fashion, just as
not all pre-1772 American debts were owed to British counterparties. Indeed, the
case has been made that internal American debts outnumbered those owed to
Britons.51 Colonist merchants were already making their presence felt, trading directly
either with the West Indies or with southern European countries, and participating in
the tobacco and other colonial trades in their own account. Such ‘cargo traders’ were
often based in the ‘semi-open and commercially active…northern provinces’,52 which
were not as tightly integrated with Britain as the southern colonies with their staple
crop based economy operating under the restrictive colonial regime established by
the Trade and Navigation Acts. They were however as dependent on the London
money markets for their operations, since bills of exchange were the standard
instrument through which their cash flows could be affected. This exposed them to
the availability of short-term credit there, binding them to the British financial nexus
as strongly as the southern planters with their large capital needs and chronic trading
deficits with Britain.
THE IMPACT OF TH E 1 7 7 2 – 7 3 CRIS IS

ON TRANSATLANTIC F INANCE
Contemporary press reports and correspondence described an emotional outburst in
the market and society at large when the crisis broke out. ‘Public calamity’, ‘tragedy’,
‘catastrophe fatal to thousands’, ‘horror and confusion’, are some of the statements
found in only one London newspaper report.53 David Hume talked of ‘universal Loss
of Credit and endless Suspicions’ in Edinburgh,54 while the Scots Magazine reported
the ‘whole city [of London] in uproar, and many of the first families in tears’. The
same correspondent warned of suicides arising from this sense of desperation, and
lurid tales indeed abounded in the press for a time, describing merchants cutting their
own throats, shooting or hanging themselves, not to mention the by now proverbial
jumping out of a ‘window in agony of mind arising from the failure of the Bankers’.55
Such reports were not entirely fantasy either: the younger Robert Bogle of the London
Scottish tobacco house Bogle & Scott did jump out of the proverbial window ‘in a
phrenzy’ when his firm stopped payment – although he survived.56 Those involved in
the colonial trade on both sides of the Atlantic quickly joined this chorus of alarm.
497
Even if he was by then somewhat calmer, the aforementioned Bogle repeated a few
months later the exaggerated claim that ‘the South Sea affair was a trifle to what has
now happened’ that was also appearing in the press.57 George Norton of the large
John Norton & Sons tobacco concern was typical in stating that ‘were [he] to recount
the many Catastroph’es that have happen’d & the many families reduced to want &
Beggary [he] should fill a volume of Incidents’.58 Joshua Johnson of the London and
Maryland tobacco trading firm of Wallace, Davidson & Johnson estimated the
situation in almost the identical phrasing as Hume: ‘the breaking of Fordyce & Co.
bankers has stagnated business; every man seems afraid of each other’.59
Such reactions are all too often described as ‘panic’ in the literature, sometimes even
‘spreading panic’, implying contagion of some sort.60 It can also be argued, however, that
the reactions of at least some market participants were in fact all too rational in view of
the sudden change in market circumstances. The revelation of previously unavailable
information can lead market participants to reassess their risk accordingly, even to the
point of resorting to capital flight, forced asset liquidations, or the denial of new credit.61
This ‘informational contagion’ presumes an imperfect information regime where ‘the
costs of acquiring and processing [market] information make a correct assessment of
fundamentals difficult and a certain degree of ignorance rational’,62 a not altogether
unreasonable assumption for the eighteenth-century British financial network. The
‘wake-up call’63 that can set off the contagion sequence in motion may be the outright
failure of a market player who is considered systemically important (like Fordyce or the
Ayr Bank), an increase in the rate at which bills are dishonoured or protested, or merely
the suspicion that the behaviour of the financial establishment has altered drastically. In
June 1772, it was not just that Fordyce was rumoured to have been deeply committed in
the bills trade and in Alley speculations, but that his failure was attributed by many to
ongoing – though unsubstantiated – rumours that the Bank of England was refusing to
discount bills drawn by Scots and Amsterdam Jews. 64 The very fact that the Scot Fordyce
had absconded could have been seen as proof of such a policy change, even if – as is more
than probable – this never took place in reality.65 The rate at which bills were protested
certainly rose during the crisis to perhaps as high as 25 per cent,66 and complaints about
the Bank of England’s discount policy continued both in Britain and on the Continent.67
Any new knowledge that existing bills were being dishonoured by their drawers, or that
new bills were being returned protested from their acceptors, or that the ultimate
discounting power in the country was choosing to refuse them, could thus very rationally
lead market participants to restrict their bills acceptances, or to call in what outstanding
loans they could. Eight months after the breakout of the crisis, and after the January
wave of stoppages in Holland had dealt a new blow to the bills of exchange network,
Joshua Johnson described himself ‘trembling with fear’ lest more houses stop
for, if they do, we most surely must have many more of our bills returned [i.e.
protested] than is at present, and the quantity already is so great that I know not
what to do about it. The Bank continues not to discount and they have by that
means distressed the whole mercantile body and, unless they relapse soon, I fear
the whole nation will become a bankrupt.68
Suspicion could encompass whole classes of market participants, assigning to them

guilt by mere association. No other category in 1772 was suspected or publically
498
excoriated more than the Scots, who had already been the subject of a virulent
campaign in the Wilkite press for some years. As Walpole put it,
As [Fordyce] is a Scotchman, and as the Scots have given provocation even to the
Bank of England, by circulating vast quantities of their own banks’ notes, all the
clamour against that country is revived, and the war is carried very far, at least
in the newspapers.69
Resentment at this ‘deluge of Scotch paper for English gold’ went beyond letters in
the press or satirical prints.70 The concurrent failures of other Scottish bankers in
London like Fordyce, Grant & Co. and Charles Ferguson & Co. led to general
consternation about the quality of Scottish bills, particularly as ‘the foundation of
them [was] very little understood, though of late much the topic of conversation’.71
The stoppage of the Ayr Bank made such fears even more acute, although the bank
eventually managed to fend off bankruptcy and satisfy drafts on it through the
(ultimately ill-advised) issuance of £450,000 in life annuities.72 John Norton
specifically warned that he was ‘credibly inform’d that Virginia Bills drawn payable
in Scotland are now discharged by drafts on the Heron & Douglas Bank which lately
stopt, for which reason those who purchase Bills ought to be carefull of whom’.73
Johnson similarly cautioned his American correspondents to take particular care in
purchasing any bills of exchange that might be tainted from any Scottish connections:
It is hardly doubted that all your Scotch factors will be knocked up. I recommended
to you caution in the last [letter] respecting the purchase of Scotch bills, but now
let me beg of you not to have anything to do with them at any rate, for I assure
you I am very doubtful of the ones I have by me will [be protested]; indeed no
one will do anything with them; they are all so frighted, and I assure you that it
is not only my opinion but everyone’s else that there will be a total bankruptcy
with the Scotch in most countries.74
There are indications that some transatlantic traders curtailed their trading activities
in the face of the crisis. The large W. Cunninghame & Co. Scottish concern explicitly
declared on 19 August the company’s ‘fixed resolution to adopt a new plan in carrying
on their business more frugally…as they are morally certain that there will be but few
goods imported into the colony [of Virginia] next year’. They accordingly warned
their factors that they should expect ‘very scanty supplies next year’ and urged them
to clear their inventories of goods. They furthermore instructed them to ‘have more
dependance on receiving payment of [their] debts’, and restricted the leverage of their
stores by limiting their ability of drawing bills on the parent company without first
remitting a fraction of the face value of the bill in cash.75 This restriction varied
according to store location: from a leverage factor of 4 to 5 for their Rappahannock
and Potomac stores, to 3–4 for the ones at Cabin Point and Petersburg, to only 2 or
at most 3 for those at Shockoe and Rocky Ridge.76 In general, the Cunninghame firm
showed much hard-headedness in responding to the crisis, despite paying lip-service
to the usual hyperbole about ‘amazement, terror, astonishment, and suspicion [being]
visible in every countenance’. In the same letter quoted above, they showed no little
schadenfreude in stating that though
499
the shock must have been terrible, it will show who has and who has not a
foundation and will make everyone be much more on their guard in what manner
they trade beyond their bottom.
One of the Cunninghame representatives in America echoed this frustration at what

he viewed as the excesses of the boom and the incursions of independent traders, by
declaring himself
happy if this shock to credit has an effect to the advantage of the trade of this
colony. If fewer goods are imported, fewer will trade on their own account and
the advance of course may be increased.77
Such informational and behavioural effects aside, contagion can also be transmitted
through strictly financial connections.78 The most obvious way this can occur is
through dishonoured debts, leading to cascading defaults as more debts are
dishonoured in turn.79 It is not very likely that such a direct route was a major factor
in 1772, despite the large American debts due to British merchants. As mentioned
above, most of those arose from the trading deficits of planters, and there had always
been the option of discharging them by supplying staple commodities like tobacco
instead of cash. Credit exposures arising from bills of exchange were a more serious
matter, however. Bills were short-dated, generally running from 50 to 70 days and
never longer than three months, and the bill holder in fact had a claim upon multiple
counterparties, thus obscuring the credit risk picture. Not only was the original
drawer and acceptor of the bill liable for its face value, but so were also any endorsers
who might have signed on the bill in its path to the ultimate creditor’s hands. This
multiplicity of claim entitlement could rapidly transmit financial distress, as merchants
were unsure whether they would be called upon for repayment of bills they had
drawn, accepted, or endorsed to counterparties. Johnson’s letters to his American
factors frequently listed firms or persons who might be under a cloud of suspicion, or
were already having their drafts protested in London, along with warnings against
purchasing any bills that might be tainted by association, since
almost every merchant notes the bills drawn on them, so that it requires you use
the utmost caution on your parts that you have good endorsers to those bills
you purchase.80
Bills on London, Edinburgh, or Amsterdam were also held as liquid assets due to the
chronic dearth of cash on both sides of the Atlantic. These were either sold on,
discounted for cash, or remitted in payment of other debts, including other bills. The
stoppage of any of the signatories on a bill could very easily drive its value downward,
leaving the current holder with a sharply devalued (or worthless) asset.
Such distress did not necessarily lead to bankruptcy, at least not immediately. The
numbers of British bankruptcy commisions instituted in 1772 did rise appreciably, in
fact reaching the highest level since 1706 and would only be surpassed again in the
war year of 1778.81 The size of the proven debts for the major failures of 1772 was
likewise very substantial.82 In general however, comparatively few participants in the
trade went immediately bankrupt in a way that would cause the cascading defaults
500
that would be evidence of financial contagion. Among tobacco traders only the
London Scottish house of Bogle & Scott and their correspondents Simpson, Baird, &
Co. went bankrupt during the June crisis, and there were no notable bankruptcies
among the big warehousemen who supplied the transatlantic trade with goods.83 The
only equivalent in America was the stoppage of an unnamed Carolina house
mentioned by Joshua Johnson, though whether it actually went bankrupt or not is
not specified.84 A second wave of failures coincided with the January 1773 Amsterdam
crisis and continued all through the year. This time several big tobacco houses
stopped, including some of the prominent Buchanan interlocking partnerships.85
Others resisted longer before finally succumbing: William Alexander & Sons, who
were connected with such central players of the crisis like the London private bank
of Glyn & Hallifax as well as the Ayr Bank, received two large rescue loans from the
Bank of England for a total of £220,000, and were the beneficiary of a further
favourable – and contentious – loan from the Ayr Bank for £10,000 in 1774, as well
as of another £5,000 in loan guarantees by no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin.
Even so, they could not avoid eventual bankruptcy and long litigation over the
family’s estates in Grenada, before their last surviving partner eventually absconded,
first to France, and finally the newly independent United States.86
Most debt cases took years to resolve, and in extreme cases like that of the Ayr
Bank, decades. During that time other factors came into play, topmost of all of course
being the rapidly deteriorating political situation culminating in the Revolution. R. B.
Sheridan has tried to extract some information specific to the financial crisis from the
Loyalist Claims Commission documents, while a write-down of £15,000 in the 1786
Ayr Bank balance sheet was attributed to Hamilton & Co. and Simon Brown, all of
whose assets were in America.87 In all cases however, it is difficult to distinguish
which effects were due to the financial crisis and which to the political situation. In
any event, bankruptcy was only the final resort for creditors. More often than not,
debtors would open their books and try to come to some accommodation with
creditors, either continuing operations in the meantime, or agreeing to an orderly
wind-up. In some cases credit was extended over the crisis period until liquidity was
reestablished, and in others debtors and creditors agreed to a composition, that is the
payment of a fraction of the debts. Johnson’s letterbook goes into some detail about
this process, both concerning his company and also the arrangements of other
troubled merchants. The timing of such a proposal was particularly crucial in view of
the shaky confidence prevailing in the markets. Johnson described this dilemma in
responding to such a proposal by his associates:
You certainly don’t recall the injury it has done many houses in raising a suspicion
of their goodness or you would not have advised it…If we are to preserve the
reputation of the house, I must by no means [call my creditors together to
demonstrate our security is good]; that I was subject to be arrested and might be
threw in gaol from the present exceeding ill temper amongst the tradesmen.88
Tobacco merchants trading under the store system were much more susceptible to
mechanical contagion compared to those still operating under the old consignment
one, since they depended on bills for effecting their remittances to their British
creditors. Independent American ‘cargo traders’ operating outside both systems were
501
even more vulnerable, since they could neither benefit from long-term store credit,
nor supply tobacco in part payment of their debts. Any disruption to the bills of
exchange network could be instant and fatal for them, as would any retrenchment on
the part of their London correspondents on whose short-term credit their solvency
depended. By contrast, the greatest hardship those operating under the consignment
system might encounter was a straightforward scarcity of capital. This might prevent
them from purchasing more land and slaves to expand production, but would not
pose an immediate threat to their solvency.
On the other hand, large planters were much more worth pursuing in court by
their creditors, unlike stores who were typically owed numerous and individual small
debts. For instance, the £63,000 owed to John Norton & Sons in 1773 arose from
398 distinct debts.89 Table 27.1 shows the distribution of debts due to two stores in
Port Royal and Fredericksburg by the failed Bogle & Scott firm. Close to half of the
almost £9,000 owed arose from four comparatively large debts over £500, the largest
of which was for a little over £1,700. These debts would have been worth pursuing.
Another 14 debtors owed between £100 and £500 a total of about a third of the
outstanding store debt. The remaining 15 per cent arose from 41 small debts whose
originators would very likely have been safe from being pursued in court, and who
could always move to the interior of the vast country if hard pressed. Indeed, one
reason for the comparatively conciliatory attitude on the part of creditors was that
the collection of debts in America posed major challenges. There had never been
enough cash in the colony in the first place, and the disruption in the bills market
removed the most ready alternative for making remittances to Britain. Payments in
kind were still possible of course; the sugar from the Grenada plantations of William
Alexander & Sons was explicitly used to service their large Bank of England rescue
loans, and later became a major bone of contention in the laborious litigation
involving them.90 Tobacco could be used in the same way, although the glut caused
by the bumper harvest reduced its usefulness in that respect.
Between the recovery of debts that would have been normally carried forward by
the stores before the crisis, remittances in support of drawn bills of exchange, and the
repatriation of specie to Britain by merchants who needed to support their credit
there, there was a sudden drain of cash out of the colonies. One contemporary put
the total amount of cash shipped out of the country at £100,000 for the nine months
Table 27.1 Debt distribution of Port Royal and Fredericksburg stores of Robert and
Robert Bogle and William Scott, 22 June 1772
Number of debts Total owed (£)
Below £20 15 195

£20 - £50 16 468
£50 - £100 10 716
£100 - £500 14 3,453
£500 - £1,000 2 1,209
over £1,000 2 2,952
59 8,994
Source: RBS SPS/12
502
preceding June 1773.91 The discount in the rate of exchange between sterling and
local currency rose from 20 to 30 per cent between October 1771 and May 1773,
both due to this cash drain and the bidding up of the increasingly scarce good bills of
exchange. Nevertheless, the colonial economy had been accustomed to specie
shortages, as indeed was the British one as well. It is far more likely that the disruption
in the bills of exchange market affected business more seriously than the removal of
£100,000 of specie.
EFFEC TS ON OVERALL TRA NS ATL ANTIC B U S INE S S

AND THE QUESTION O F CO NTAG IO N
It is not easy to establish whether the transmission of the British credit crisis to
North America caused appreciable negative effects on overall business.There are no
reports that the underlying demand for colonial commodities fell in Europe.
Tobacco prices remained comparatively low throughout the crisis years of 1772–
73, but that was more a result of five straight bumper crops starting in 1770.92 At
first glance, trade figures for England and Scotland as shown in Tables 27.2 and
27.3 do seem to indicate that transatlantic trade contracted due to the crisis.
Volumes of imported tobacco fell more significantly for English importers than for
Scottish ones (a fall of 11.5 per cent and 4.3 per cent year-on-year respectively).
This apparent resilience of the Glasgow traders, despite the involvement of
prominent Scots bankers in the crash, has been attributed to the fact that a large
part of their re-exports were directed to French customers who paid in cash, unlike
those Hamburg or Amsterdam customers of the English who instead relied on the
bills market. Scottish exports to France had risen by almost 69 per cent by volume
of merchandise, from 12 million lbs in 1771 to over 20 million lbs in 1772, and
remained over 21 million lbs the following year.93 Even the much smaller English
tobacco exports to France jumped from 1771 to 1772, and although they retreated
somewhat in 1773, remained at much higher levels than previously. There also
remains the possibility, that the apparent drop in overall imports in the crisis year
is either an artifact of the way the annual figures were collated, or of the clearing of
inventories after the record imports of 1771. In fact, English tobacco imports more
than cancelled this apparent drop with a rise of 12.4 per cent in the following year,
while Scottish imports remained largely stable at their new slightly lower levels.
Over the whole 1772–73 period therefore, overall tobacco imports remained
broadly stable though somewhat below the 1771 all-time peak, while British
exports to France stayed at record levels. Similarly, English sugar imports from the
West Indies (Scottish sugar imports were dwarfed by comparison and are not as
relevant) show a small year-on-year drop of 2.4 per cent for 1773, but then resume
their strong upward trend they were on since 1765. Data for arrivals of British
flagged slaving ships to the Caribbean underline this picture (Table 27.4), showing
a very small drop for 1772 before recovering strongly in 1773. In all cases, what
impact the financial crisis may have had on the volume of colonial trade is dwarfed
by that of the war that was to break out only three years later. Tobacco imports
completely collapsed to virtually zero then, never to recover again for the case of
the Glasgow merchants, while the sugar and slave trades were also disrupted,
particularly after the French capture of Grenada in 1779.
503
Table 27.2
Tobacco imports, 1755-85 (in millions of lbs)

70.0
60.0
50.0
40.0
•England
(includes re-exports
from Scotland)
■Scotland
30.0
20.0
10.0
Sources: (1) English data: Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics
1697-1808 (Oxford, 1960), Tables XVI and XVII
(2) Scottish data: Henry Hamilton, An Economic History of Scotland in the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford,1963), Appendix IX
Table 27.3
English sugar imports, 1755-85 (in '000s of cwt)

2,200
2,000
1,800
1,600
1,400
1,200
1,000
800
Source: Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics 1697-1808 (Oxford,
1960), Tables XVI and XVII
504
Table 27.4
British-flagged Slaver Caribbean Arrivals, 1755-85

200
180
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
Source: Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. http://www.slavevoyages.org

(accessed March 28, 2014).
There is stronger evidence from wholesale commodity prices for Charleston, that
have the further advantage of a finer data set than the annual totals of the import
data.94 These show an unequivocal peak just before the crash month of June 1772,
following an almost steady rise since 1770. After the crash, prices fell by almost 30
per cent, and despite some volatility never regained the same peaks throughout the
last three years of peace.
It is nonetheless difficult to depend on such aggregate figures as an explicit indicator
of the effects of the financial crisis, and certainly not as evidence of contagion
according to the specific definition. Contagious relationships between the American
colonies and the distressed European money markets are certainly plausible, but the
surviving evidence is sparse. Capital repatriation to Britain on the part of distressed
traders is an appealing hypothesis, but there is at present little archival evidence to
corroborate it. It is far more likely that the disruption in the bills market transmitted
financial distress more decisively than the removal of even £100,000 in specie.
Furthermore, there are other possible explanations for the difficulties faced by
tobacco traders after 1772. The great surge in imports on both sides of the Atlantic
that followed the normalisation of trade in 1770 may have been followed by a
correction to more sustainable levels as built-up inventories were cleared. Moreover,
the tobacco glut in Europe depressed prices by itself, thus worsening the chronic
deficits of planters, and made it difficult for British importers to keep extending ever
higher credit by supplying the same quantities of goods as in the peak year of 1771.
In general terms too, 1772 paled in comparison with the economic dislocation that
was to follow as political friction between mother country and colonists worsened
into rebellion, and eventually into European war.
That said, we should not altogether dismiss the effects of the crisis on the
transatlantic trading network, even if we remain sceptical of contemporary hyperbole
505
which builds it up to an unprecedented disaster. The level of financial integration and

sophistication of the international financial network in 1772 was such as to make the
contagious transmission of the crisis both plausible and serious. Contemporaries
certainly thought as much, stressing that ‘such [were] the connexions of trade that the
English could not feel complacent about the distress of Scottish bankers’,95 and that
‘the failure of a great house in another country is very little different to a failure in
our own’.96 No other contemporary reaction underlined such fears better than the
speed and decisiveness with which the Bank of England intervened to interpose the
‘shelter of the Castle of Public Credit’ to protect the financial system from the storm,97
even if the first theoretical expression of the concept of the Lender of Last Resort still
lay three decades in the future.
NOTE S
1 London Evening Post, June 9–11, 1772.
2 Bingley’s London Journal, September 5–12, 1772.
3 Scots Magazine, XXXIV (1772), p. 311.
4 Henry Hamilton, ‘The Failure of the Ayr Bank, 1772’, Economic History Review 8 (1956),
405–17.
5 Charles Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Commerce and Finance in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge,
1941), 169–88.
6 Lucy S. Sutherland, ‘Sir George Colebrooke’s World Corner in Alum, 1771–73’, Economic
History: A Supplement to the Economic Journal III (1934), 237–58.
7 Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics (Oxford, 1952),
222–29.
8 Horace Walpole, The letters of Horace Walpole: earl of Orford, Volume 5 (P. Cunningham,
ed.) (London, 1891), 395–96.
9 James Boswell, Reflections on the Late Alarming Bankruptcies in Scotland (Edinburgh,
1773), 1.
10 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford,
1976) (hereafter: WoN), II.ii.73–77. S. G. Checkland, ‘Adam Smith and the Bankers’, in
A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson, eds., Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1975), Hugh Rockoff,
‘Parallel Journeys: Adam Smith and Milton Friedman on the Regulation of Banking’,
Journal of Cultural Economy, 4, 3 (2011), 255–83.
11 Julian Hoppit, ‘Financial Crises in 18th Century England’, Economic History Review 39,
1 (1986), 39–58. Jacob M. Price, France and the Chesapeake; a history of the French
tobacco monopoly, 1674–1791 (Ann Arbor, 1973), 639.
12 Sir William Forbes, Memoirs of a Banking-House (London and Edinburgh, 1860), 39–44,
Scots Magazine (hereafter SM) XXXIV, 304–18.
13 London Evening Post, 18–20 June 1772.
14 Henry Thornton, An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great
Britain (London, 1802).
15 Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (New
York, 2000), 162.
16 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Vol. 3 (Berkeley, 1992),
268–69.
17 Jacob M. Price, ‘The Rise of Glasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade, 1707–55’, William
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (1954) 179–99, Capital and Credit in British Overseas
Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700–1776 (Boston [Mass.], 1980). T. M. Devine,
‘Glasgow Merchants and the Collapse of the Tobacco Trade, 1775–83’, Scottish Historical
506
Review, 52, 153 (1973), 50–74, ‘Sources of Capital for the Glasgow Tobacco Trade, c.
1740–80’, Business History, 16, 2 (1974), 123–29. Richard B. Sheridan, ‘The British Credit
Crisis of 1772 and the American Colonies’, Journal of Economic History, 20 (1960), 161–86.
18 Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, p. 186.
19 Emory G. Evans, ‘Planter Indebtedness and the Coming of the Revolution in Virginia’,
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 19 (1962), 511–33.
20 For instance Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, p. 172 (on two occasions),
Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, p. 124.
21 This definition is adapted from Olivier De Bandt and Philipp Hartmann, ‘Systemic risk in
banking: a survey’, in Charles Goodhard and Gerhard Illing (eds.), Financial Crises,
Contagion, and the Lender of Last Resort (Oxford, 2002), 249–97. This review article is
in general a good starting point for approaching the vast literature on this subject.
22 Smith, WoN, II.ii.57.
23 For instance Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, p. 172, Price, Capital and
Credit, p. 131, Julian Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business 1700–1800 (Cambridge,
1987), p. 99.
24 Hoppit, Risk and Failure, p. 134.
25 Henry Hamilton, An Economic History of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford,
1963), 255–56.
26 Price, France and the Chesapeake, pp. 608–9.
27 Hamilton, Economic History, p. 259.
28 Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, pp. 168–71, J. H. Soltow, ‘Scottish traders
in Virginia, 1750–1775’, Economic History Review, 12, 1 (1959), 83–98.
30 Hamilton, Economic History, p. 259. Price, ‘Rise of Glasgow’, 187–90.
31 T. M. Devine, ‘The Colonial Trades and Industrial Investment in Scotland, c. 1700–1815’,
Economic History Review, 29, 1 (1976). 1–13. Hamilton, Economic History, p. 262.
32 Price, Capital and Credit, p. 124.
33 Devine, Sources of Capital, pp. 116–17.
34 Hamilton, Economic History, p. 266.
35 Soltow, ‘Scottish traders in Virginia, 1750–1775’, p. 85, Hamilton, Economic History, p. 266.
36 Devine, Sources of Capital, p. 116.
37 Examples include Barclays (Barlcays Group Archives [BGA] 364/1–40 &78–84), the
Bristol Old Bank, and its London correspondent, Prescott Grote (Royal Bank of Scotland
Archives (RBS) MCB/1/1 and PRE/263).
38 R. H. Campbell, ‘The Law and the Joint-stock Company in Scotland’, in P. L. Payne, ed.,
Studies in Scottish Business History, 136 (1967), 137–5. Charles W. Munn, The Scottish
Provincial Banking Companies, 1747–1864 (Edinburgh, 1981), 5–6.
39 Price, France and the Chesapeake, 607–8, Capital and Credit, 63–95.
40 Smith, WoN, II.ii.73–77. Committee of Inquiry appointed by the Proprietors, The
Precipitation and Fall of Mess. Douglas, Heron, and Company, Late Bankers in Air with
the Causes of their Distress and Ruin, Investigated and Considered (Edinburgh, 1778).
41 Kindleberger, Manias, p. 44.
42 Wilson, Anglo-Dutch Finance, p. 171.
43 National Archives of Scotland (NAS), Home-Robertson papers, GD267/1–4.
44 NAS, Court of Session papers, William Alexander vs Creditors of William Alexander:
Sequestration; Proceedings in England, CS181/6942.
45 Quoted in Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, p. 173.
46 Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, p. 166, Devine, Sources of Capital, p. 117.
Lawrence H. Gipson, ‘Virginia Planter Debts before the American Revolution’, Virginia
Magazine of History and Biography, 69, 3 (1961), 259–77.
507
47 T. S. Ashton, An Economic History of England: The 18th Century (London, 1955),

p. 186, Neal, pp. 5–9.
48 Roger W. Weiss, ‘The Issue of Paper Money in the American Colonies, 1720–74’, Journal
of Economic History, 30, 1 (1970), 770–84.
49 For Smith on the Law of Reflux and the Real Bills Doctrine see David Glasner, ‘The Real Bills
Doctrine in the Light of the Law of Reflux’, Lloyd W. Mints, A History of Banking Theory
in Great Britain and the United States (Chicago, 1945), 9–30, Morris Perlman, ‘Adam Smith
and the Paternity of the Real Bills Doctrine’, History of Political Economy, 21 (1989), 77–90.
50 Isabel Schnabel and Hyun Song Shin, ‘Liquidity and Contagion: The Crisis of 1763’,
Journal of the European Economic Association 2, 6 (2004), 929–68. Stephen Quinn and
William Roberds, ‘Responding to a Shadow Banking Crisis: The Lessons of 1763’, Federal
Reserve Board of Atlanta Working Paper Series, 2012–18 (2012).
51 A. C. Land, ‘Economic Behavior in a Planting Society’, Journal of Southern History, 33
(1967), 479.
52 Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, p. 168. Price, Capital and Credit, pp. 127–29.
53 Middlesex Journal, July 2–4, 1772.
54 David Hume to Adam Smith, 27 June 1772, The Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford,
1977), p. 162.
55 Morning Chronicle, June 24, 1772, Bingley’s London Journal, July 4–11, 1772, London
Chronicle, November 17–19, 1772, General Evening Post, July 2–4, 1772, Sheridan, ‘The
British Credit Crisis of 1772’, p. 176.
56 RBS GM/1357, Robert Oliphant to William Putney, 22 June 1772. Robert Bogle Jr. to
George Bogle, London, November November 19, 1772, quoted in Price, France and the
Chesapeake, p. 640. Frances Norton Mason (ed.), John Norton & Sons, Merchants of
London and Virginia (hereafter: Norton letterbook), p. 254 George F. Norton to John
Hately Norton, July 8, 1772.
57 Bogle letter quoted in Price, France and the Chesapeake, op. cit.
58 Norton letterbook, op. cit.
59 Jacob M. Price (ed.), Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, 1771–1774 (hereafter: Johnson
letterbook) (London, 1979), 41d, 22 June 1772, p. 40.
60 For instance, Hoppit, ‘Financial Crises’, p. 54, Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of
1772’, p. 172, Price, France and the Chesapeake, p. 639 and Capital and Credit, p. 131.
61 Mervyn King and Sushil Wadhwani, ‘Transmission of Volatility between Stock Markets’,
Review of Financial Studies, 3 (1990), pp. 5–33, Matt Pritsker, ‘The Channels for
Financial Contagion’, pp. 67–97 in S. Claessens and K. Forbes (eds.), International
Financial Contagion (Boston, 2001).
62 Thomas Moser, ‘What is International Financial Contagion?’, International Finance, 6, 2
(2003), 157–78.
63 Morris Goldstein, The Asian Crisis: Causes, Cures, and Systemic Implications
(Washington, 1998), 18.
64 Middlesex Journal, 3–6 September 1772, Bingley’s Journal, 6–13 June 1772, General Evening
Post, 20–23 June 1772, NAS GD44/43/70/7, James Balfour to James Ross, 21 July 1772.
65 The only documented change in Bank official policy is a 13 May 1773 resolution to
increase the discount rate on foreign bills to 5 per cent, starting on 24 June that year, that
is a year after the crisis broke out (BOE, Extracts from court minutes relating to discounts,
G29/1, fo. 6).
67 For instance Anonymous, Réflexions sur les dernieres banqueroutes en Anglettere &
Hollande, et conduite du Ministere Anglois à ce sujet (pamphlet claiming to be printed in
London, 1773). Bogle letter quoted in Price, France & Chesapeake, op. cit. NAS
GD267/22/7/57, George Home to Patrick Home, 29 June 1772.
508
68 Johnson letterbook, 61, 5 February 1773, p. 59.

69 Horace Walpole, The Letters of Horace Walpole: Earl of Oxford, Volume 5 (P. Cunningham,
ed.) (London, 1891), 395–96.
70 F. G. Stephens and M. D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the
Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (London, 1870), ‘A view of the
Deluge of Scotch Paper Currency for English Gold’, anonymous satirical print, 1 August 1772
(BM Satires 4961).
71 Scots Magazine, XXXIV, 313.
72 Lloyds Group (Bank of Scotland) Archives, NAS945 20/30/3.
73 Norton letterbook, John Norton to john Hately Norton, 6 August 1772, p. 266.
74 Johnson letterbook, 42, 1 July 1772, pp. 40–41.
75 T. M. Devine (ed.), A Scottish firm in Virginia, 1767–1777, W. Cunninghame and Co.
(hereafter: Cunninghame letterbook), to J. Neilson, 19 August 1772, p. 58.
76 Cunninghame letterbook, as above.
77 Cunninghame letterbook, to Messrs W. Cunninghame & Co. per the Nelly, Capt. Brown,
22 August 1772, p. 88.
78 Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale, ‘Financial Contagion’, Journal of Political Economy,
108, 1 (2000), 1–33.
79 Philippe Jorion, and Gaiyan Zhang, ‘Credit Contagion from Counterparty Risk’, Journal
of Finance, 64, 5 (2009), 2053–87, David Marshall, ‘Understanding the Asian crisis:
Systemic risk as coordination failure’, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Economic
Perspectives, 22 (1988), 13–27.
80 Johnson letterbook, 47a, 20 August 1772, p.45 and 52a, 7 October 1772, p. 49.
81 Hoppit, Risk and Failure, Appendix I, 182–83.
82 Paul Kosmetatos, ‘The Winding-Up of the Ayr Bank, 1772-1827’, Financial History
Review, 21, 2 (2014), 165–190.
84 Johnson letterbook, 41e, 22 June 1772, p. 40.
86 Price, France and the Chesapeake, p. 693–700.
87 NAS GD224/178/8.
88 Johnson letterbook, 83a, 28 June 1773, p. 80, and 86, 30 June 1773, p. 83.
89 Norton letterbook, p. 293.
90 NAS CS181/6942, William Alexander & Sons, sequestration proceedings in England,
NAS CS222/278, sequestration proceedings in Scotland.
91 Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, pp. 175, 178.
93 Price, France and the Chesapeake, pp. 641–43.
94 George Rogers Taylor, ‘Wholesale commodity prices at Charleston, South Carolina,
1732–91’, Journal of Economic and Business History IV (1932), 366–77, quoted in
Sheridan, ‘The British Credit Crisis of 1772’, pp. 174–75. Note also Sheridan, ‘The British
Credit Crisis of 1772’, p. 174n, for further price index references.
95 Bingley’s Journal, 20–27 June 1772.
96 General Evening Post, 2–5 January 1773
97 ‘Ship News Extraordinary’, Morning Chronicle, 29 June 1772.
509
PART VII
COMMERCE, CONSUMPTION,
AND MERCANTILE NETWORKS
Liverpool ENGLAND
Bristol London
D
RE S EUROPE
S C T U RI E
ER, FUR
IL, LUMB NU
FA UXU
WHALE O M A D S, L
Boston O
New York O GO
CC
Philadelphia BA
, TO
D
NORTH I GO
IND
ER
OO
ES
AMERICA , SILK
E
W
RIC
, BE
ES,
SS
ON
Charleston
MOLASS
R
L
SL
,
O
ER
AR,
H
,M
AVES
UG
AR
S
G
UM B
,
LOT
V
SU
ES
R, L ESTOCK
AV
Atlantic
RU
U
O LI
SL
M
F
Ocean
FLISH,
,I
GUNS, C
RO
N
AFRICA
,GU
CARIBBEAN
N
PO
ISLANDS
W
SL D
AV
Mi E S
ER
,C
G OL D,
dd
le LO
IV
Pas TH
sag
e ,T
OR
Y,
OO
LS SP
IC
E S,
H AR D
W O OD S
Trade routes in the Atlantic linking Europe, Africa and North and South America
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
REASSESSING THE
ATLANTIC CONTRIBUTION
TO BRITISH MARINE INSURANCE
A. B. Leonard
N ew world discoveries from 1492 increased the known land endowment per
European capita six-fold. This enormous introduction of one of three factors of
production into Europeans’ early modern mercantilist economies could be exploited
only after the addition of the other two, labour and capital. Historians have only
recently begun to explore one important source of the latter in the context of Atlantic
World development, the provision of capital through marine insurance. There as
elsewhere, marine insurance provided individual merchants with crucial contingent
capital, allowing them to trade with less resources than the perils of a specific voyage
prudently demanded. It permitted the maximum investment of cash and credit into
cargoes and vessels. As Captain John Butler wrote to a correspondent in Amsterdam
in 1735, ‘I could make no Ensurance here, and I beg of you that you would get
insured for me two thousand pounds, for it is too great a Risque for me to run with
my little fortune, without insurance’.1
Butler couldn’t afford his planned venture without the backstop of an insurance
policy, since he feared ruin if his vessel or trade goods were lost. However, he could
limit his downside with insurance. If the ship had sunk, whether due to the rage of
the seas or the actions of pirates or enemies, the underwriters would have paid him
£2,000 towards the loss – presuming, of course, that his correspondent secured cover.
Under the well-established structure of a marine insurance contract, the buyer receives
the promise of an injection of capital from the underwriters (usually fellow merchants,
but sometimes others with capital to risk) if an insured loss actually occurs. In
exchange, the insured merchant pays an advanced fee, called a premium, calculated
as a percentage of the maximum possible payout.2
This system of mercantile risk-sharing stretches back much further into the history
of finance than the Atlantic discoveries of the early modern era. Underwriting – the
practice of merchants sharing the risks of their endeavours amongst themselves
through premium insurance – has been a catalyst of international trade since Italian
adventurers developed the financial instrument in the later middle ages, during their
commercial revolution. The structure of the marine insurance contracts was developed
and standardised fairly rapidly, and has changed very little since, such that one
historian has argued that the earliest Italian ‘policies did not differ very much even at
513
– A. B. Leonard –
the end of the fourteenth century from either those of the subsequent centuries or…
from those of the present day’.3
Long before merchants began to insure the perils of Atlantic World ventures, they
used their risk-sharing system to provide contingent capital for more local trade. The
insurance structures developed in medieval Italy were adopted and routinely practised
in major ports there at least as early as the first decades of the fourteenth century.
Lombard émigrés brought the practice to London within a century. In 1426 Alexander
Ferrantyn, a Florentine merchant resident in the city, insured his vessel the Seint Anne
of London, and its cargo of French wine, for £250 with 17 other resident Italian
merchants. The policy states that the agreement was governed by the customary practice
of Florence. The example is not isolated. The ledgers of the merchant bank Filippo
Borromei & Co. record insurance transactions in London from at least 1438, covering
the bankers’ cloth trade with the mainland. Other entries show that the bank was also
sometimes an underwriter, illustrating the mutual nature of insurance practice.4
These examples show not only that insurance was practised in London in the
fifteenth century, but also that its development was already advanced. Likewise, the
basic structure of the market, with merchants insuring one another (making them
‘merchant-insurers’), and sometimes deploying the capital of other wealthy men as
underwriters, was copied from Italy, and was well established. Dispute resolution
processes were already in place, and the contractual form, or policy, was already widely
known and adopted. Trade statistics for the period are scant, but it is known, for
example, that merchants in England imported an annual average of 7 million tonnes of
dry wine in the first half of the fifteenth century, and exported 27.5 million cloths. This
number increased to over 90 million in 1500 to 1561. This is the sort of commerce that
was being insured in London during the period when marine insurance emerged there.5
As England’s international insurance market evolved and matured, the trade risks
which underwriters assumed was most often unconnected to the Atlantic World
economy. In 1539 the Bristol merchant John Smythe insured a shipment of iron he was
importing from San Sebastian in Spain. The policy, which covered only part of the
value of the iron, cost about £1.6.0. Further evidence from Smythe’s ledger shows that
he insured often, although not always, on cargoes ranging from wine to wood. The
Italian merchant Bartholomew Corsini, trading from London in the 1580s, routinely
insured his ships and trade goods, which comprised primarily exports of English cloth
and primary products, and imports of various Mediterranean goods. While such extant
evidence is scant, court records show that the practice of insurance was widespread in
London in the sixteenth century. Cases recorded then include more than a dozen heard
in the High Court of Admiralty, nearly a score heard by the Privy Council, and a
handful each in the courts of Chancery and King’s Bench. Mayne & Poyn v. De Gozi,
the earliest known case to have reached the formal courts, was heard in 1538.6
The sixteenth-century London insurance market was already ordered and
increasingly institutionalised. Roughly 30 brokers and 16 notaries operated in
London in the sector during the 1570s. The former group facilitated introductions
and interactions between buyers and sellers of insurance, and managed financial
relationships. The latter drew up policies, kept registers of their details, and managed
client monies. Merchants and their insurers also sometimes dealt directly, without the
intermediation of third parties. The activities of all were governed by a set of customs
and principles based upon an inheritance from Italian merchants, such as those
514
– chapter 28: Atlantic contribution to British marine insurance –
Figure 28.1 A 1583 policy drawn up at the Office of Assurances in London

for Bartholomew Corsini
Guildhall Library
515
governing the Ferrantyn contract, and the modifications of merchant-insurers in

Antwerp and Amsterdam. These insurance customs were an important component of
the lex mercatoria, or law merchant. Most disputes were resolved internally according
to these law merchant principles. When, in 1575/6, a number of frauds were
perpetrated against underwriters, a royal patent was granted to the merchant Richard
Candeler to operate the Office of Assurances, which possessed an exclusive right to
draw up and register marine insurance policies in London (although it did not grant
a monopoly over underwriting itself).7
Contemporary recognition of the importance to trade of marine insurance was
widespread. The English marine insurance act of 1601 stated that, when they are
insured, ‘all Merchants, sp[ec]iallie the younger sorte, are allured to venture more
willinglie and more freelie’. However, the causal relationship between the growth of
trade and the rise of insurance is circular. Insurance indeed encouraged merchants to
trade, but the increased demand for insurance which arrived with burgeoning English
seaborne commerce helped to spur the expansion of the insurance market. This
pushed down the cost of cover, which in turn boosted the take-up of marine insurance.
As the market expanded in the later sixteenth century, inevitably driving up the
number of disputes which could not be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties
through non-binding arbitration, the need for a more formal system of dispute
resolution was recognised. The Privy Council responded with a series of initiatives,
and parliament established a Court of Assurance under the 1601 Act to settle cases
arising in London.8
The purchase of insurance became ever more common in the seventeenth century.
The journal of Baltic trader Charles Marescoe records that between June 1664 and
April 1668 he purchased 108 policies from 31 underwriters who provided total cover
of £39,715. His successor, Jacob David, purchased 36 policies worth £30,770
between 1673 and 1677, from 77 discrete underwriters (although some of Marescoe-
David’s trade went intentionally uninsured, or only partially covered). Many more
examples could be cited which show that in the seventeenth century marine insurance
was commonplace, widespread, and often – if not always – purchased by merchants
when venturing aboard. A final example shows that London’s marine insurance
market was also becoming an international one. Writing in 1657, Samuel Lamb, a
London trader, stated that English merchants usually shipped their wares in Dutch
vessels, ‘which ships were usually insured in London; and it is the Hollanders custom
to this day, that when they send any single ship southward for their own accounts,
oftentimes to insure them in England’. Lamb also states that heavily armed English
merchant vessels were typically uninsured, but such vessels were not the norm.9
Readers are forgiven for wondering, at this point, why this chapter appears in a
book about the Atlantic World. The reason is this: amongst the very limited recent
published work in English about marine insurance, some has declared strongly that
it was Atlantic World trade that led to the development and growth of the British
marine insurance market. For example, Christopher Ebert has recently argued that
‘Atlantic shipping was the great spur’ in the development of marine insurance, from
the time of the discoveries to 1630. He states that ‘colonial trade tended to lead to
accelerated state involvement in the activities of the merchants involved, and
consequently spawned an evolving institutional framework…one [aspect] of which…
was the development of maritime premium insurance practices situated partly in a
516
state-supported institutional context mainly during the years 1550 to 1630’. Ebert’s
conclusions followed marine-insurance market analysis by Joseph Inikori, who
presented calculations in his 2002 book Africans and the industrial revolution in
England which purport to show, for the 1790s, that ‘the [marine insurance] premiums
for the slave trade and the West Indies trade together…is 63 percent of the whole
[marine] insurance market in Great Britain’. When US risks insured in London are
included, his total rises to ‘very much above 70 per cent of the entire market’.10
While there can be no doubt that the marine insurance market received a great
boost and much income from Atlantic trade, the drivers of its development were
much broader than these simple Atlanticist arguments claim. As shown above, and in
much more detail elsewhere, the practices and institutions of marine insurance were
developed and established long before Atlantic World trade became significant. The
balance of this chapter will attempt to deflate the recent assertion that Atlantic World
trade was the main driver of the development of marine insurance.
Ebert’s assertion specifies colonial trade as the catalyst to institutional developments
in the marine insurance market, rather than the conventional seaborne trade between
European ports, which was increasing significantly in the period 1550 to 1630. Ebert
goes on to specify further that the ‘spread of state-supported premium insurance
practices [occurred] in order to facilitate Atlantic trade’. However, the balance of
extant documents does not support this thesis. Evidence such as the extant London
policies underwritten in the period shows that development of institutional structures
supporting marine insurance responded primarily to disputes over policies which, in
the vast majority, related to non-colonial trade to Europe and the Mediterranean. Six
of eight relevant disputes heard and recorded in England’s High Court of the
Admiralty between 1547 and 1565 involved European trade; another was over a
voyage to India. Nor was it specifically the trade of this period which ‘spawned an
evolving institutional framework’. As has been shown above, by 1550 the outline
framework of marine insurance markets, including state involvement in them, had
been evolving for many centuries in southern Europe. State involvement matured in
England in the years culminating in the marine insurance act of 1601, but not due to
the perils or pressures of Atlantic World trade. Of 17 relevant cases heard before the
English Privy Council between 1573 and 1590/1, the ports of call are recorded for
only three voyages. All were between ports in England and France or Spain. Arguably
it was these cases, along with a petition from leading merchants about their desire for
a state solution to the rising incidence of fraud against underwriters, which prompted
the Privy Council into a flurry of marine insurance institution-building activity. The
Councillors’ three-pronged effort in the 1570s formalised the framework for the
resolution of marine-insurance-related disputes in London under elected
Commissioners of Assurance, established Candeler’s monopoly Office of Assurances,
and attempted to codify the customary law merchant which for at least a century had
governed marine insurance in London and elsewhere. In 1601 the statutory Court of
Assurances was established under parliamentary legislation drafted and presented by
Francis Bacon.11
Ebert claims that ‘Insurance was especially associated with “rich trades”, that is,
trade in overseas commodities.’ Conventionally, the rich trades are those in high-
value goods ranging from silks to spices, which comprise only a subset of ‘overseas
trade’. It has often been argued that higher-value trade goods were more likely to be
517
insured, but much evidence shows that during the sixteenth century bulky, low-
valued commodities were often covered. Above we saw the Bristol merchant John
Smythe regularly insuring his shipments of iron in 1539. By the 1570s, even fishing
vessels and their cargoes were also regularly insured. A tract about the Newfoundland
fishery published in 1580 reports that ‘A shippe of Excester is gone to the Warde
house, to fishe for Codd and Lyng; the venture for the Shippe, Salte, and Victualls is
three hundredth pounde; for eightene pownd [i.e., six per cent] all is assured.’ Many
more examples could be cited, showing incontrovertibly that marine insurance was
not limited to luxury items.12
Ebert shows that some changes in insurance institutions occurred concurrently
with the rise of Atlantic trade, but provides no evidence of a causal link. The absolute
growth of trade in the period Ebert examines, including the entry into local marine
insurance markets of many individuals who were unfamiliar with market practice,
and, much earlier, the need of merchants to develop more efficient, more effective
instruments which separated capital provision from risk transfer, were the key drivers
of change in marine insurance markets. Atlantic trade was, at best, another factor
among many.
Inikori’s analysis is much better considered, and therefore deserves much more
attention. His explanation of the strong link between marine insurance, trade, and
trade finance is essentially correct: insurance spreads the risk of ‘floating considerable
property by sea’ while ‘mobilising funds for investment’. His description of early
forms of marine risk transfer as ‘little more than a loan’ is also fundamentally correct.
A group of financial instruments with origins dating back at least to the era of
imperial Rome, and which together may be described as sea loans, connected the
advance of trade capital to risk transfer through the forgiveness of the loans in case
of actual loss. Inikori cites bottomry, a form of loan in which capital is advanced
against the ship itself as security (strictly speaking for the repair or provisioning of a
vessel in a foreign port, but commonly for trade finance). Bottomry and other early
varieties of ocean-going trade finance, such as the cambium nauticum, had the
distinctive characteristic of the discharge of the debt without repayment in case of
loss of insured property. However, their medieval function was threefold. They
advanced capital for trade, removed some of the risk of losses at sea, and third, they
avoided usury laws through their risk transfer structure, with interest disguised as a
risk premium (a ploy which the medieval Church accepted). Early risk transfer
mechanisms for ocean-going trade thus combined borrowing and risk transfer.13
These forms of risk transfer were very early drivers of the development of marine
insurance, in part because they were expensive. When bills of exchange became
popular, and when merchants became sedentary, sea loans became less useful.
Premium insurance emerged in medieval Italy to satisfy only the risk transfer element,
disconnected from the advance of capital. The wording of marine insurance contracts
was fixed in England, based on much older Mediterranean precedents, by Candeler
in the 1570s, when England had only just begun to flirt with Atlantic trade. The
policy wording remained almost completely unchanged until the 1980s. Bottomry
was used well into the nineteenth century, but it had lingered long after the modern
insurance contract was developed. Premium insurance was dominant in Atlantic
World trade, and it did indeed mobilise funds for investment, but only contingent
funds, to be paid only in cases of actual insured loss. It also helped to loosen
518
commercial credit. For example, when colonial merchants consigned goods to

metropolitan merchants, they would often draw bills against their consignees before
the goods arrived, and insure the goods to reduce the likelihood that the bills would
be dishonoured because the cargo failed to arrive. However, these systems and
practices were not a product of the Atlantic World. They had been developed in Italy
by the fourteenth century, and were widespread long before Atlantic trade gained
great importance.14
Inikori offers a multi-stranded argument to support his contention that the
‘Atlantic slave economy’ was responsible for the development of marine insurance.
He argues that demand for marine insurance was limited before the arrival of the
Atlantic trade, which he asserts was more perilous than other trades, and therefore
spurred insurance-buying. He dismisses the trade to India and the east as generally
uninsured. Finally, as stated above, he calculates that an enormous share of Britain’s
total marine insurance business was related to the Atlantic trade.
Inikori first argues that limited demand for marine insurance slowed its development
in England prior to the second half of the seventeenth century, but that the growth of
English trade and its reorientation away from Europe to ‘regions where the much
greater risks compelled a more regular procurement of insurance cover’ – the Americas
– prompted its development. These arguments echo relatively common misconceptions
about the under-development of marine insurance in England prior to about 1720.
These include, for example, misrepresentation of the observation of Frederick Martin,
the author of The History of Lloyd’s and of Marine Insurance in Great Britain.
Writing in 1876, Martin declared that ‘up to the commencement of the great war [for
supremacy of the seas from 1775] the insurance of ships, and of property sent by sea,
had not been held to be absolutely necessary, and there were numbers of merchants
who deemed it no more requisite to insure the vessels and cargoes they owned against
loss than to insure their houses’. Inikori cites the second part of Martin’s statement,
but in context it is a far cry from his later assertion that ‘the average merchant in
England did not regularly insure his property at sea’. Nor is it in any way akin to
characterising the marine insurance market as under-developed. Wright and Fayle, in
their 1928 History of Lloyd’s, found ‘nothing to show that [the] system had proved
inadequate to the requirements of commerce’ even in the Elizabethan era.15
Prior to 1717 nearly all marine insurance underwriting in London was carried out
by individual merchant-insurers, or sometimes by merchant partnerships. In essence,
private traders comprised the insurance market. However, when joint-stock
companies began to emerge in great numbers in the late seventeenth century, many
merchants believed such a company would better serve the needs of insurance buyers.
Leaving aside the protracted debates which surrounded the formation of joint-stock
insurers, it needs only to be said that in 1720 the Bubble Act (which, ironically, was
intended primarily to prevent the formation of new joint-stock companies) permitted
‘two several and distinct corporations’ to underwrite marine insurance under royal
charter. All other corporations, societies and partnerships were prohibited from the
business. The companies formed were the London Assurance and the Royal Exchange
Assurance. However, individual underwriters were permitted to carry on trading.16
A 1958 article about the London Assurance Company by Arthur John cites an 1810
estimate of the potential maximum insured value of ‘English foreign trade in 1720 at
£20.3 millions, of which some £2.3 millions were underwritten by the two companies’,
519
and asserts that this ‘merely confirms…what has long been known – namely, that a
large part of coastal and foreign-bound shipping proceeded without cover’. Inikori
draws heavily on this article to support his arguments, and repeats these same quotes.
In a footnote, he states that ‘As John suggests, the private underwriters could not have
done much more business than the two corporations in the early years of the century.’
As will be shown below, the two companies shared about 10 per cent of the total
market at that time, while individual underwriters had the rest. John makes no
suggestion that private underwriters could not handle demand for insurance, stating
instead that the private underwriters, who numbered over 150 in London at this time,
were ‘better able, and thus more willing, to accept risks of all kinds’.17
Much evidence shows that private underwriters were able to meet the demand that
existed. In 1719 Attorney General Nicholas Lechmere reported petitioners’ claims
that ‘the Pretence of Difficulties in gaining Insurance is altogether Groundless’. More
concretely, the merchant-insurer John Barnard stated in an affidavit that ‘no sums
which English or Foreign merchants have Occasion to Insure, are too large for the
[private] Insurers to take at Reasonable Prices’. The broker John Bourne stated that
‘it is very easy to procure Insurances for the largest Sums that are wanting to be
Insured’. While the last two men were petitioning against the formation of a chartered
joint-stock insurer which argued that, among other benefits, it would be able to
assume larger risks, others in their camp later stated that ‘no Proof has been made’
by the proponents of incorporation that ‘Trade had suffered from the Want of Ability
in the [private] Insurers’.18
In any case, the supply-side argument does not support the contention that low
demand slowed England’s insurance-market development. Here, two qualifying
observations may be made. First, it is obvious that as trade volumes rise, the amount
of insurance purchased will also rise. The eighteenth century saw significant growth
in trade volumes (see Table 28.1). Second, while there can be no doubt that a large
share of trade went uninsured, there is much evidence that the opposite was true for
a large share. While insufficient records survive to estimate market penetration with
any worthwhile confidence, other evidence supports the assertion that marine
insurance was a significant and much-used sector well before the English Atlantic
trade was of importance.
Table 28.1: English (British) imports, exports, and re-exports, 1622–1824, official
values, £ million19
Imports Exports Re-exports
1598–1600* n/a 0.22 n/a

1622 2.32 2.62 n/a
1663/69 4.4 4.1 n/a
1700 5.84 3.73 2.08
1725 7.10 5.67 2.81
1750 7.77 9.47 3.23
1775 13.55 9.72 5.48
1800 30.57 24.30 18.85
1824 37.5 48.7 10.2
520
Consider, for example, the efforts of the Elizabethan Privy Council to create a
formal framework for its operation, and the parliamentary creation of the Court of
Assurance. These institutional development steps would have been taken only in
response to a genuine demand for dispute resolution mechanisms in an important
market. Given that the commonplace mechanism of adjudication in London’s marine
insurance market was arbitration, and that relatively few contracts would have led to
a formal dispute (if this were not true, and it had been usual for insurance contracts
to lead to disputes, surely no insurance market at all would have existed), then a need
for state-backed dispute resolution mechanisms must indicate that the use of marine
insurance was relatively widespread.
Inikori concedes that ‘the practice of marine insurance was well-established in
London in the sixteenth century’, but he argues that it was not ‘specialised’. Instead,
it was ‘undertaken as a sideline by merchants whose main activity was something
else’. This observation is correct, but is a red herring. Many of London’s leading
underwriters, including the famous John Julius Angerstein, widely regarded as the
father of modern Lloyd’s, remained active in multiple branches of trade and
commerce, including raising state loans with Alexander Baring, even after the
Napoleonic Wars, when London was firmly established as the world’s leading
insurance centre. In 2013, private individuals whose main commercial activity was
something other than underwriting provided more than £2.7 billion of capital to
Lloyd’s, widely recognised as the most specialised insurance market in the world.20
These facts together should not lead to the conclusion that the ‘slow development
of marine insurance as a specialized business in England was due to the limited size
of the market for marine insurance arising from the absolute volume of England’s
seaborne commerce as well as the attitude of merchants to insurance’. While there
can be no doubt that the growth of England’s trade led to increasing demand for
marine insurance, this alone did not determine the size of the London marine
insurance market, as Lamb’s testimony highlights. Further, while the ‘attitude
towards insurance’ may have dictated that not all cargoes should be insured at all
times for all voyages, it is not clear whether this was because full cover was not
wanted for some reason, or that it was not purchased because it was not available. It
may have been because, as seems most likely, complete coverage was uneconomic at
the prices offered by London’s insurers in the earlier part of a period which saw a
long decline in insurance pricing. Nor is the prevalence of the attitude in any way
certain, since many merchants did opt to insure. The West Indies merchant William
Freeman, for example, explained that ‘it’s my general custom to insure when
adventures are anything considerable, whether at peace or war. When the danger is
least, premium is low, and so I look upon it as a safe way.’21
Although insurance was clearly well established in the seventeenth century and
widespread in the sixteenth, Inikori claims that ‘it is generally known that in the
eighteenth century the average merchant in England did not regularly insure his
property at sea’. Although this may be said of the seventeenth century despite the
evidence of insurance activity cited above (and it may even be true), no such consensus
has formed about the eighteenth. John states, citing an 1810 tract addressed to the
then-chairman of Lloyd’s, that in combination the two chartered companies
underwrote policies with an annual insured value of about £2.3 million in their first
year, 1720. Evidence delivered before a related parliamentary committee in 1810
521
heard that the chartered companies had about 10 per cent of the insurance market in
their first year, suggesting a total sum insured of roughly £23 million. In 1720 the
total international trade of England and Wales was, according to modern estimates,
£13 million. The anonymous 1810 writer calculated the total value of insurable ships
and cargoes entering and leaving England at £20.3 million (of which English foreign
trade was £14 million). Thus, the total value of ships and goods insured in England
in 1720 was greater than the total value of English trade goods and ships that year.
Even if coastal trade, foreign insurance buying in London, and a significant
understatement of the companies’ market share are ignored, it must remain difficult
to argue that the majority of England’s early eighteenth-century ocean-going
commerce was uninsured.22
What of the second of Inikori’s arguments, that the risks faced by Atlantic traders,
and especially slaving vessels, were greater than for other vessels, which prompted
them to buy more insurance than the average merchant adventurer? Inikori states
that ‘the risks involved in trans-Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century were infinitely
greater than those in the trade with nearby Europe [and] more so in wartime’.
Hyperbole notwithstanding, this assertion deserves careful examination. Inikori
states that ‘war was by far the greatest hazard faced by the [European slave] traders…
particularly so, because struggle over control of overseas trade was a major factor in
these wars’. The contemporary comments quoted in his 1996 article Measuring the
hazards of the Atlantic slave trade, in which he presents a detailed analysis of the
causes of the loss of 1,053 slaving vessels in the period 1689–1807, indeed show that
contemporaries believed the trade to be risky. However, the evidence he cites does
not state whether slaving was made ‘uncertain and precarious’ by peculiar market
risks, such as the variability of pricing, or by unusual transportation risks.23
According to Inikori’s analysis of the causes of slave-vessel losses in the period
1689–1807, wartime capture was by far the leading peril, resulting in 679 losses,
including 248 vessels taken during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
Yet the risk of capture was not intrinsically greater for slavers than for other vessels.
During wartime, privateers operated often or sometimes in the approaches to most of
the world’s major ports, from India to the Spanish Main. The English Channel, given
its proximity to major French privateering ports such as St Malo, was particularly
vulnerable. All enemy vessels were fair game. No evidence has come to light that
slave vessels were particularly favoured targets, and, in contrast, it is easy to speculate
that the added challenges of assuming control of a vessel packed with human cargo
– not easily sold without a long and perilous voyage – suggest the opposite. It seems
likely that the capture of a slave vessel by privateers would lead to slave insurrection,
making such vessels particularly unattractive targets. Further, vessels departing from
major ports other than London, including Bristol, Glasgow and Liverpool, frequently
took a ‘Northabouts’ route which avoided the privateer-infested Sound and Channel,
despite it taking longer.24
An important aspect of capture is the ability to ransom vessels, and indeed to
insure the cost of ransom. This, however, is not a product of the slave trade, nor was
war necessarily the driver. In 1682 the Philadelphia merchant James Claypoole
insured John Spread on his return voyage from New England ‘personally against
capture by the Turks at 2 percent by good men’. From the 1580s formal English
policies always included, as named insured perils, ‘Men of War…Enemies…Letters
522
of Marque and Counter-Marque, Suprisals, and Takings at Sea’. Ships’ masters were
obliged to ransom their vessels if this was in the interests of the vessels’ owners, and
insurers were ‘obliged to declare immediately that they will contribute towards the
payment of the ransom’. If a ransomed ship was lost or taken again on the same
voyage, insurers were twice liable. Capture-and-ransom became institutionalised,
and was far more convenient than seizure for both captor and captured. It was
perhaps less so for insurers. The cost of a ransom was less than that of a total loss of
vessel and cargo, but the chance of a recapture negating the loss was eliminated, and
efforts at evasion and resistance by crews were probably reduced.25
Recapture was another commonplace. For example, Williams recounts that the
Bud, Captain Robert Tyrer, was captured in 1798 by a privateer while sailing for
Guinea, but was retaken (with her captor) by navy vessels a week later. Thus capture
did not mark the end of Bud’s slave-trading career; the ship, under the same captain,
completed triangular voyages in 1799 and 1801. Similarly Thomas and William
Barton’s slaver Agreeable was captured the same year in the West Indies, and drawn
into service as a French cruiser, but was retaken by the Concorde and the Amphitrite,
and completed seven more slave voyages. Clearly vessels lost in wartime were sometimes
quickly returned to service. Finally, if the threat of wartime losses due to the capture of
slave vessels were a significant driver of development of the insurance market due to an
exceptional level of risk faced by slave ships, one would expect them to form a
significant part of the total number of ships captured or captured and ransomed.
However, the 679 losses of slavers during the 118 years between 1689–1807 attributed
to capture by Inikori pales in comparison to 2,600 prizes and 1,100 ransoms against
British vessels in just five years between the passage of the Cruisers and Convoys Act
in March 1708 and the conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht in April 1713.26
Loss due to wreck is non-discriminatory. Inikori states that 17.7% of the lost
vessels he enumerated suffered their fate due to ‘slave insurrection, conflict with local
Africans, or wrecks on the African coast’. Unfortunately in neither article nor book
has he offered more numerical detail, so it is impossible to know if, for example,
losses due to the seas were more frequent in this location than the average casualty
rate for all merchant vessels. A table including descriptive excerpts from Lloyd’s List
appears in the article, but as Inikori points out, in very many cases it is impossible to
determine the specific cause of each loss from the brief descriptions reported. Several
vessels are listed as ‘blown up’, a relatively frequent fate for armed merchantmen
carrying powder and shot.27
Some of the vessels Inikori included as reported ‘lost’ appear not to have been lost
at all. The King David, according to the Lloyd’s List report quoted by Inikori,
suffered a slave insurrection on its voyage from Old Calabar to St Kitts. The captain
and all but four of the crew were killed. The survivors ‘carried the ship into
Guadeloupe’. While the cargo was lost to its owners, the vessel appears to have been
saved. The same can be said of the Lamb, much of whose crew was dead or disabled,
perhaps as a result of an insurrection in which 14 slaves were killed. Despite the
hardships, Captain Anyon ‘got fresh hands, and sail’d…for S. Carolina’. The Mercer
was seized by slaves in 1789, but ‘afterwards retaken by the African King’. All three
vessels are included in Inikori’s table of 188 ‘vessels lost due to insurrection of slaves,
conflict with coastal Africans, and wrecks off the coast’, but these three vessels, at
least, were not lost.28
523
Slave insurrection is a peril which carriers of non-human cargoes clearly did not
face, but comprises only a small proportion of the insurrection and African loss
grouping. However, ‘conflict with coastal Africans’ is not. Instead, the examples cited
in Inikori’s enumeration appear to be incidents of the ancient peril of piracy, which is
probably less likely to menace slave vessels than those without human cargo, for the
same reasons that privateers steered clear of slavers. While Inikori muses that the
motivation of local venturers who seized slaving vessels may have been solidarity with
captives, the accounts he presents seem to present banditry, rather than rescue, as the
principal driving interest of free Africans who boarded slavers. In 1785, the Good-
Intent was ‘plundered by the Natives at Gabon’ then set on fire. The following year
the James was ‘totally lost’, and ‘his first boat plundered of 12 slaves’. Finally, Inikori
acknowledges the gaps in the record which make impossible the calculation of accurate
loss ratios – the measure of insurers’ premium income versus claims against that
income – but then goes on to compound the problem. ‘Although there are indications
of double counting in the reporting of losses, it may be reasonable to add about 200
vessels to the figure to make up for missing reports’, he states, but does not justify his
estimate. Equally, it may be reasonable to subtract 100, given the double-count and
the inclusion in the totals of vessels which apparently were not lost.29
The assertion that ‘the trans-Atlantic slave trade had the greatest amount of risk
among all international trades of the period’ is not supported by the analysis of the
causes of losses in Lloyd’s List. Inikori’s claim that ‘unlike merchants in some other
trades, who could afford to be more relaxed in matters of insurance, the slave traders
were compelled by the unusual level of risk involved in their business to secure
insurance cover regularly to help spread the risk’ is not supported by the evidence,
and no comparative examples from ‘other trades’ are offered. Inikori goes on to cite
examples of vessels which did not purchase insurance, or which intentionally
underinsured their cargoes, including correspondence between merchants and
captains which instructs them to be extra careful, since the enemy will be nearby and
the cargo is uninsured or underinsured. ‘Extraordinarily high premium rates’ may
have encouraged ‘larger firms’ to retain risk, Inikori suggests. If so, this means that
wartime risks faced especially by Atlantic slavers were not a driver of the insurance
market. More likely, however, is that some slavers chose to retain risk because they
did not desire contingent capital at the price offered. If their own resources were
sufficient to ensure that losses would not sink the firm, and their volume and frequency
of trade was sufficient to ensure that they suffered only the mean statistical level of
loss, the purchase of insurance was rendered merely a cash-swapping exercise with
insurers. Still others may simply have possessed a larger-than-average risk appetite.30
Having argued that marine insurance demand was weak in England, and that
Atlantic traders bought more cover because their trade was more risky, Inikori goes
on to assess ‘the contribution of the Atlantic slave economy to the expansion of the
market for marine insurance that was central to the emergence of England as the
centre of marine insurance in the world’. He does this by making assumptions about
market size. First, he estimates the total size of the marine insurance market by
extrapolating from the marine insurance premium income of a single market player
– the London Assurance Company. He ‘derived’ his estimates of this premium income
not from hard numbers, but through extrapolation from a line-graph in John’s article.
‘If it is accepted that the trend in growth of [the company’s] premium income from
524
1720 to 1820…represents roughly the general trend in the growth of the market as a
whole, then a tolerably reliable estimate of the volume of business in the period
1720–1807 can be made’. For the critical period of his investigation, 1793 to 1807,
Inikori uses this trend to arrive at a total average annual marine insurance market
premium of £4 million. The average is based on a ‘backwards projection’ from a
starting point of a £10.95 million in total premium income in 1809, a figure drawn
from a contemporary declaration of Lloyd’s chairman John Julius Angerstein (Inikori
also mentions, in a footnote, an estimate of £10.3 million for 1811). In 1809 the
benchmark London Assurance’s premium income was ‘roughly three times its average
annual premium income from about 1793–1807’. Inikori then leaps to the conclusion
that the entire insurance market grew threefold in the same years.31
He does not suggest the change to the London Assurance’s premium income might
be a result of a change in corporate underwriting policy, rather than a sudden tripling
of the overall market size, but figures for marine premium levels at the London
Assurance’s parallel company, the Royal Exchange Assurance, strongly suggest this
explanation. Supple found that the latter company’s marine income, which averaged
£23,000 per year in 1771–75, reached £275,000 in 1796–1800. From this example,
it seems that a tenfold increase in premium income occurred at the Royal a decade
before the trebling of premium at the London. Something other than overall market
size must have been at play, then. There can be no doubt that the French wars which
ended the long eighteenth century spurred significantly increased spending on marine
insurance, but much of the change reflected in premium income totals was the result
of price increases, rather than greater demand. As underwriters ventured their capital
to insure risks when the predictable perils of peacetime were multiplied by much less-
predictable actions of war, they raised their prices to ensure that the uncertainty was
covered (although Gibb argues that the experience of the War of American
Independence left Lloyd’s underwriters able to ‘frame their policy on the calculable
risks of privateers’). This historian of Lloyd’s also describes these war years as a time
of great profitability for underwriters. In short, 1809, a year of blockade and vigorous
belligerent naval activity, is an extremely poor index year on which to base market
size estimates which span a century.32
It is not possible to accept the correlation between one company’s premium growth
and overall market size. According to Supple, the London Assurance and the Royal
Exchange Assurance ‘approached the expanding demand for [marine] insurance with
such caution as to retain only a very small proportion’, approximately 4 per cent
between them. This is underlined by the lack of growth in the marine insurance
premiums of the London Assurance in the years 1720–93, a period when the nation’s
international trade more than trebled, and when, according to Inikori, London
became ‘the centre of marine insurance in the world’. The trend in the company’s
marine insurance premium growth cannot be used to extrapolate growth rates or
premium income figures for the marine insurance market as a whole.33
This error is in part attributable to another misinterpretation by Inikori of John,
who wrote that ‘the years 1730–39 and 1763–76 were clearly associated with a fall
in marine insurance activity, which there is reason to believe was not confined to the
London Assurance’. Inikori repeated this sentence in a footnote, adding: ‘Arthur
John thought the premium income trend of the London Assurance Company reflects
the general trend of the market’, although John suggested a correlation only in terms
525
of these periods of lower uptake. Inikori failed to cite John’s claim that, unlike the
private underwriters, ‘the companies…tended to become more conservative in their
business as the century wore on’. For example, of £656,000 in insurance cover
underwritten on the frigate Diana and its cargo for an 1807 voyage from Vera Cruz
to England, only £25,000 was written by the companies, just 4 per cent of the total
(precisely the market share Supple estimated for the companies at this time). This
misinterpretation of John undermines the basis of Inikori’s argument about the
drivers of the growth of marine insurance by beginning from incorrect assumptions
about market size and development.34
Having presented arguments about the high levels of risk faced by slaving vessels,
Inikori goes on to estimate the total amount of premiums spent by British slave
traders to insure their triangular voyages, calculating the spend on cover for cargoes
to Africa, slaves to the Americas, and ships for the entire voyage. His total for the
period 1750 to 1897 is £11.72 million, of which £7.831 million was spent after
1790. The calculations he has made to determine these figures are, however, extremely
opaque. Working backwards, two problems become clear. First, Inikori has assumed
that all cargoes and vessels were always insured to their full value. As his own
evidence states, this was particularly unlikely. Second, he has chosen to use insurance
prices which are at the top end, or sometimes seemingly above, those which he has
garnered from a small set of primary and secondary sources. Few of the periods for
which a rate is given match the periods for which cargo and vessel values and slave
numbers are tabulated in Africans and the industrial revolution or his 1992 article
The Volume of the British Slave Trade 1655–1807. However, it is clear that
assumptions made have maximised end results. The statement ‘everything considered,
it is likely that the figures in the table [Insurance Premiums in the British Slave Trade]
understate the amount of premiums generated by the British slave trade in the period’
therefore seems to be, at best, overly optimistic.
A similar set of calculations follows, presenting Inikori’s estimates of the total cost
of insuring goods shipped between Britain, the West Indies, and the United States.
Inikori rightly states that commission trade was usually insured, although based on a
single opinion, he assumes that only half the American exports to Britain were
covered. He mentions the fact that following its independence US merchants
purchased less of their insurance cover in London, which is indeed true: when
independence freed the 13 colonies from the restrictions on corporate insurance
formations introduced in the Bubble Act of 1720, American merchants, who had
practised underwriting as individuals for many decades, quickly formed their own
insurers. The business of insuring American trade in London declined quickly and
dramatically. Inikori makes an adjustment to his estimate of premiums spent in
London to insure US Atlantic trade as a result.35
Inikori next combines his estimates of annual average premiums for the slave trade
and the West Indies trade in the 1790s, to reach a total premium figure of £2,522,000.
He declares: ‘this is 63 percent of the whole marine insurance market in Great Britain,
put at about £4 million’. He notes that the addition of US risks insured in London
raises the total ‘above 70 percent of the entire market’. Unfortunately, as shown
above, Inikori’s estimate of a £4 million market is woefully inadequate, based on a
regrettable backwards calculation which, at the very least, ignores a fall in the
companies’ market share from 10 per cent in the 1720s to 4 per cent in the 1800s,
526
which suggests a total market size 150 percent larger, or £10 million. Such a figure
seems also to be intuitively correct, since it is almost inconceivable that total market
premium would have risen from £1.8 million to only £4 million in a period which
experienced the multiplication of international trade, the increasing use of insurance,
and the elevation of London to the position of world leader in marine insurance.
Thus, Inikori’s conclusion that ‘the estimates presented can reasonably support…that
premiums on British trans-Atlantic commerce (including the slave trade), the re-
export trade in slave-produced American products, and on the trans-Atlantic
commerce of other European powers constituted the bulk of the marine insurance
market in England in the eighteenth century’ is, again, overly optimistic. The error in
the market-share multiplier alone suggests 25 per cent is a more likely figure.36
Another misinterpretation – one which allows Inikori to dismiss all eastern trade
from being insured – makes the gross overestimate appear more plausible. ‘The East
India Company that dominated the other major long distance trade of the period
carried its own risks’, Inikori declares. While this is technically true, at least for the
most part, a great deal of eastern trade was insured – that of the agency houses, of
the private ‘privilege’ trade of EIC servants, the vessels owned by private merchants
but leased to the Company, and even the private ‘country’ trade along the Indian
coasts and between India and China. The Indiaman Scaleby Castle, for example, was
insured in 1799 for £148,100. Insurers at Lloyd’s also underwrote the ‘country trade’
along the India coasts, and between India and China. The 1807 risk book of the
Lloyd’s underwriters Clagett & Pratt comprises a record of the insurance they sold
during the year. It shows, for example, that the London agency Bruce & Co. bought
cover in February for goods shipped from Canton to Bombay on the vessel Anna, six
weeks later for goods on the return voyage, and shortly after for the next Bombay
run. Each entry in an underwriter’s risk book reflects only one of many ‘lines’, or
proportional shares, underwritten on specific risks. Edward Allfrey’s 1809
underwriting records show that on 2 January he accepted lines worth £2,000 in total
on three policies covering cargo belonging to Bruce & Co while in transit from
Calcutta to London. The same day the underwriter John Janson insured £1,500
worth of Bruce & Co’s cargoes for the same voyage. Janson wrote lines on Bruce &
Co policies on 13 occasions during the year; on three of these risks, Allfrey also
participated. This trade was sufficiently robust, and large enough to support the
emergence of an new insurance-company sector in the Indian Presidencies and in
Canton by the turn of the century.37
In conclusion, it seems that it was not trade in the Atlantic World which spurred
the development of marine insurance institutions, nor was it the unique perils of
Atlantic trade which encouraged merchants to take up insurance when otherwise they
had typically chosen to go uninsured. The institutions and principles of marine
insurance were well established long before the Atlantic trade gathered any great
volume or velocity. The same can be said of London marine insurance institutions and
Atlantic trade. The use of marine insurance was widespread in England in the sixteenth
century, and a practical, efficient, and stable market existed to support demand.
Institutional developments occurred, but were implemented primarily to avert costly
disputes and fraud against underwriters, rather than to deal with unique Atlantic
challenges, including those arising from the transport of slaves. The increased volume
of British trade in the eighteenth century was certainly a driver of growth in insurance
527
uptake, just as heightened wartime threats encouraged more insurance buying.

However, these threats were not peculiar to Atlantic World trading. Recent arguments
to the contrary appear to put the Atlanticist horse before the evidential cart.
NOTE S
1 For the relative size of the new land endowment, see Webb, Walter Prescott: The Great
Frontier, London: Secker & Warburg, 1953, p. 17. Butler quote cited in Inikori, Joseph:
Africans and the industrial revolution in England: a study in international trade and
economic development, Cambridge: University Press, 2002, p. 343.
2 In practice, Butler would probably not have received the entire £2,000, because an ‘abatement’,
akin to a modern deductible, would probably have applied. For non-merchant underwriters
in Italy, see Leone, Alfonso: ‘Maritime insurance as a source for the history of international
credit in the Middle Ages’, Journal of European Economic History, 12 (1983), p. 367.
3 For a comprehensive exploration of the Mediterranean origins and early spread of marine
insurance, see Leonard, A.B. (ed.): Marine insurance: international development and
evolution, Palgrave History of Finance Series, Basingstoke: Routledge, forthcoming 2015.
For the Italian commercial revolution, see Spufford, Peter: Power and profit: the merchant
in medieval Europe, London: Thames & Hudson, 2002; Stefani, Giuseppi: Insurance in
Venice from the origins to the end of the Serenissima, vol. I, Amoruso, A.D. (trans.),
Trieste: Assicurazioni Generali, 1958, p. 61.
4 Bensa, Enrico: Il contratto di assicurazione nel medio evo, 1884, translated to French,
Valéry, Jules, as Histoire du contrat d’assurance au moyen age, Paris: Anciemme Librairie
Thorin et Fis, 1897, p. 20; Thomas, A.H. (ed.): Calendar of plea & memoranda rolls of
the City of London preserved among the archives of the Corporation of London at the
Guildhall, AD 1413–1437, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943, pp. 208–10;
machine-readable data drawn from the Borromei ledgers is available at www.
queenmaryhistoricalresearch.org/roundhouse/default.aspx (accessed 15 June 2014).
5 For the early development of marine insurance practice and law-merchant customs, see
Leonard, Marine Insurance; for the nomenclature ‘merchant-insurers’ see, for example, the
1693 parliamentary ‘Bill to enable divers merchants-insurers…’, 9 December 1693, Journal of
the House of Commons, 11 (1693–97), p. 26; Sacks, D. H.: The widening gate: Bristol and the
Atlantic economy, 1450–1700, Berkley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 22–23, 26.
6 Vanes, Jean (ed.): The ledger of John Smythe, 1538–1550, London: HMSO, 1974, p. 85;
Guildhall Library, CLC/B/062/MS22281, CLC/B/062/MS22282, the Corsini papers,
policies issued to Bartholomew Corsini; Ibbetson, D.: ‘Law and custom: Insurance in
sixteenth-century England’, Journal of Legal History, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008), p. 293.
7 BL Lansdowne MS 113/9, ‘Some Merchants, Notaries, and Brokers petition Sir James
Hawes, Lord Mayor of London, against Rich. Candley’s grant for registering policies of
assurance’ (undated, 1574). For the development of insurance institutions in England, see
Leonard, A.B.: The origins and development of London marine insurance, 1547–1824,
unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, 2013. For the
Law Merchant and codification in English marine insurance, see Rossi, Guido: ‘The Book
of Orders of Assurances: a civil law code in 16th century London’, Maastricht Journal,
Vol. 19, No. 2, (2012), pp. 240–61.
8 43 Eliz. c. 12, 1601, An Act Conc’nge matters of Assurances amongst Marchantes.
9 Roseveare, Henry (ed.): Markets and merchants of the late seventeenth century: the
Marescoe-David letters, 1668–80, Oxford: University Press, 1987, pp. 582–884; Lamb,
Samuel: ‘Seasonal observations humbly offered to his Highness the Lord Protector’
(1657), reprinted in A collection of scarce and valuable tracts, sec. ed., vol. VI, Scott,
Walter (ed.), London: printed for T. Cadell and others, 1811, pp. 448.
528
10 Ebert, Christopher: ‘Early modern Atlantic trade and the development of maritime
insurance to 1630’, Past & Present, No. 213 (2011), pp. 89–90; Inikori, Africans, p. 356.
11 Ebert, Atlantic trade and the development, p. 100; TNA HCA 24/29 f. 45, policy
underwritten for Anthony de Salizar, 05 Aug. 1555; Marsden, R.G.: Select pleas in the
Court of the Admiralty, vols. I & II, London: Selden Society, 1897; Dasent, John R.: Acts of
the Privy Council of England, New Series, Vols. VII–XX, London: H.M.SO., 1893–1900.
On the Privy Council’s insurance projects, see Leonard, A.B.: ‘Contingent commitment: the
development of English marine insurance in the context of New Institutional Economics,
1577–1720’, in Coffman, D., Leonard, A., and Neal, L.: Questioning ‘credible commitment’:
re-thinking the Glorious Revolution and the rise of financial capitalism, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 48–75.
12 Ebert, Atlantic trade and the development, p. 102; Hitchcock, Robert: A pollitique Platt
for the development of the fisheries, London: 1580, cited in Tawney, R.H. and Power, E.
(eds), Tudor economic documents, three volumes, London: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1924, III, p. 253.
13 Inikori, Africans, p. 338; de Roover, Florence Edler: ‘Early examples of marine insurance’,
Journal of Economic History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1945).
14 For the continuity of the insurance contract, see Leonard, Origins and development. On
insurance gurantees for bills of exchange, see Price, Jacob: ‘Transaction costs: A note on
merchant credit and the organisation of private trade’, in Tracy, James (ed.): The political
economy of merchant empires, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 289.
15 Emphasis added. Martin, Frederick: History of Lloyd’s and of marine insurance in Great
Britain, London: Macmillan & Co., 1876, p. 161; Inikori, Africans, pp. 339, 342; Wright,
C. and Fayle, C.E.: A history of Lloyd’s. London: Macmillan & Co., 1928, p. 35.
16 6 Geo. 1. c. 18, 1720, An Act for better securing certain Powers and Privileges, intended
to be granted by His Majesty by Two Charters, for Assurance of Ships and Merchandize
at Sea, and for lending Money upon Bottomry; and for restraining several extravagant
and unwarrantable Practices therein mentioned (the Bubble Act).
17 John, A.H.: ‘The London Assurance Company and the Marine Insurance Market of the
Eighteenth Century’, Economica, New Series, Vol. 25, No. 98 (May, 1958), pp. 128, 133;
Inikori, Africans, p. 340 n; The special report from the committee appointed to inquire
into, and examine the several subscriptions for fisheries, insurances, annuities for lives,
and all other projects carried on by subscription…, London: House of Commons, printed
by Tonson, J., Goodwin, T., Lintot, B., and Taylor, W., 1720, p. 45.
18 All quotations from Special Report 1720, pp. 44, 55.
19 For 1598–1600, Fisher, F.J.: ‘London’s export trade in the early seventeenth century’,
Economic History Review, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1950), p. 153; for 1622, Ormrod, Commercial
empires, p. 56; for 1663/69, Davis, English foreign trade, p. 154; for 1700–1824, Mitchell,
B.R.: Abstract of British historical statistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1962, pp. 279–82. * London only.
20 Eliz. Cap. 12; arbitration clauses were included in marine insurance policies in England at
least as early as 1555. TNA HCA 24/29 f. 45; Inikori, Africans, p. 339; Association of
Lloyd’s Members, Lloyd’s Market Results and Prospects 2013, London: ALM, 2013, p. 6.
21 Inikori, Africans, pp. 339–40. For insurance price declines, see Leonard, A. B.: ‘The pricing
revolution in marine insurance’, working paper presented to the Economic History
Association, Sept. 2012, http://eh.net/eha/system/files/Leonard.pdf (accessed 15 June
2014); William Freeman to John Bramley, 16 July 1680, in Hancock, David (ed.): The
letters of William Freeman, London Merchant, 1678–1685, London: London Record
Society, 2002, p. 162.
22 Inikori, Africans, p. 342; John, The London Assurance, p. 127; Mitchell, Historical statistics,
p. 448; A subscriber to Lloyd’s: A letter to Jasper Vaux, London: Printed for J. M. Richardson,
529
1810, pp. 23, 47; Report from the Select Committee on Marine Insurance, Sess. 1810, London:
House of Commons, 1824, committee report, p. 3, testimony of J.J. Angerstein, p. 68.
23 Inikori, J.E.: ‘Measuring the hazards of the Atlantic slave trade’, Revue Française
d’Histoire d’Outre-mer 83, No. 312, (1996), p. 54.
24 Inikori, Africans, p. 253–54; MS Rawl Lett 66 fol 17, Letterbook of Joseph Cruttenden.
25 For a discussion of capture and ransom, see Leonard, A.B.: ‘Underwriting Marine Warfare:
Insurance and Conflict in the Eighteenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime
History, Vol. 25, No. 2, Dec 2013, pp. 173–86; the perils named were explicitly covered in
all London policies which I have examined and which were issued between the seventeenth
and nineteenth centuries, unless specifically excluded; Claypoole is cited in Zahedieh,
Nuala: The capital and the colonies: London and the Atlantic economy 1660–1700,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 85 n; Weskett, John: A complete digest
of the theory, laws, and practice of insurance, London: Printed by Frys, Couchman, &
Collier, 1781, pp. 440–41; Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, p. 154.
26 Williams, Liverpool privateers, p. 366–67; TransAtlantic slave trade database, www.
slavevoyages.org (accessed June 15, 2014); Bromley, J.S.: ‘The French privateering war,
1702–13’, in Bell, H.E. & Ollard, R.L. (eds): Historical essays 1600–1750 presented to
David Ogg. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1963, p. 229.
27 Inikori, Africans, p. 253.
28 Inikori, Measuring the hazards, p. 64, 71.
29 Inikori, Measuring the hazards, p. 70.
30 Inikori, Africans, pp. 342, 344.
31 Inikori, Africans, pp. 342, 342, n. 86.
32 Supple, Barry: The Royal Exchange Assurance: A history of British insurance 1720–1970.
Cambridge: University Press, 1970, p. 191; Gibb, D.E.W.: Lloyd’s of London: a study in
individualism, London: Macmillan & Co., 1957, p. 49.
33 Supple, Royal Exchange, p. 53, 188; Mitchell, British historical statistics, pp. 448–50.
34 John, The London, pp. 131, 133; Inikori, Africans, p. 342; ‘Report from the select
committee on marine insurance, 18 April 1810’, British Parliamentary Papers, 226 (1810),
reprinted 11 May 1824, p. 58.
35 For a discussion of US underwriting before and after independence, see Leonard, A.B:
‘From local to transatlantic: insuring trade in the Caribbean’, in Leonard, A.B. and Pretel,
D.: The Caribbean and the Atlantic World economy: circuits of trade, money and
knowledge, 1650–1914, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2015; Inikori, Africans, p. 353–54.
36 Inikori, Africans, pp. 356–57.
37 Inikori, Africans, pp. 357; Testimony of Angerstein, ‘Report from the select committee’,
p. 58; Clagett & Pratt, Risk book 1807, Lloyd’s of London Archive (LLA); Edward
Allfrey, Risk book 1809, LLA; Risk book of John Janson, 1809, British Library ADD
MSS 346730; Leonard, A.B.: ‘Underwriting British trade to India And China, 1780–1835’,
Historical Journal, Vol. 54, No. 4, Dec. 2012, pp. 983–1006.
530
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE ECONOMIC WORLD

OF THE EARLY DUTCH
AND ENGLISH ATLANTIC
Edmond Smith
INTRODUCTIO N
I n 1584, Richard Hakluyt, a well-known proponent of English overseas expansion,

wrote a treatise extolling the benefits of English expansion in North America. In ‘A
Discourse on Western Planting’, he highlighted the benefits of English activities in the
north Atlantic through three arguments: the benefits of trade, the potential land
available, and the importance of expansion in order to ‘greately annoye’ the ‘proud
and hatefulle Spaniardes’ (Hakluyt and Deane, 1877: 55). Each of these points reveals
how the English perceived the world beyond Europe and Peter Mancall considers the
text to represent ‘a comprehensive rationale for expansion’ (2007: 155). While the
development of expansion did not follow Hakluyt’s plans, the plans do represent
how the English understood the world. England was on the periphery of the Spanish
and Portuguese Empires that dominated the Atlantic by the end of the seventeenth
century, and English activities were often attempts to engage or compete with this
existing, complex system.
The Dutch also engaged in activities in the Atlantic from an originally peripheral
position, with activities in Brazil and the Caribbean as much a part of an overseas
strategy to damage the Spanish–Portuguese Empire as a plan to trade in the East
Indies. From the Dutch perspective, the two Iberian empires had no claim to monopoly
privileges in the Atlantic or Asia (De Vries, 1997: 383). The success of the Dutch state
was dependent on revolt against the Spanish empire in Europe, and the rapid
development of overseas activities on a global level was very much a response to their
need to damage the Hapsburg throne. As in the English example, Dutch activity
overseas was also seen as beneficial ‘for damaging the enemy and for security of the
fatherland’ (Oldenbarnevelt quoted in Boxer, 1979: 1). Consequently, the earliest
history of Dutch overseas activity simultaneously sees expansion in the north Atlantic
– particularly through fishing – and the development of long-distance trade throughout
the Atlantic coast of Europe (Israel, 1990: 20–25). Raiding and trading in the Atlantic
was an important third facet to Dutch expansion, but in many respects came second
to the perspective of the state, leaving early Dutch activities in the hands of individuals
already connected to the Atlantic economy (Da Silva, 2011: 7–32).
531
– Edmond Smith –
Figure 29.1 Hakluyt’s Map of the New World 1587

© Private Collection/Peter Newark American Pictures/Bridgeman Images
Historians have written a significant volume of work on the development of the

British, and to a much lesser extent the Dutch, Empire in the Atlantic world. The Dutch
Atlantic has received the least attention of the two; indeed, Pieter Emmer and Wim
Klooster (1998: 1) asked ‘why has the history of Dutch expansion in the Atlantic been
neglected?’, and questioned whether the success of the Dutch in Asia has been detrimental
to historians’ interest in their activity elsewhere. Alongside Emmer, Klooster questioned
whether the conception of a Dutch Atlantic is useful at all (Emmer and Klooster, 1999:
48–69). Recently, Gert Oostindie and Jessica Roitman (2012: 129–30) have noted a
slow reversal of this trend, themselves arguing for a new typology for examining the
Dutch Atlantic during this period. Lacking a formal colonial empire in the Atlantic for
much of the early modern period (a contrast to successes in the East Indies), the Dutch
in the Atlantic have instead been examined through the role played by individuals and
intermediaries rather than a singular focus on the Dutch West India Company (WIC).
Oostindie and Roitman (2012: 149–51) ask how the Dutch were able to dominate a
substantial share of Atlantic trade without a colonial power and in a region dominated
by competing imperial superpowers (first Spain and Portugal, then Britain and France)?
On the other hand, the British are often placed centre stage in Atlantic history, the
dominant group in a theoretical paradigm intended to explore interconnectivity and
the entanglement of imperial activity. For example, over the past 15 years this trend is
532
– chapter 29: The early Dutch and English Atlantic –
clear in three key collections: Nicolas Canny’s The Origins of Empire (1998); Elizabeth
Mancke and Carole Shamms’s The Creation of the British Atlantic World (2005); and
Nicolas Canny and Philip Morgan’s The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World
(2011). However, the role of the English and Dutch in the earliest decades of their
Atlantic activity should place them far from the centre of the Atlantic World. Instead,
they should be seen as peripheral actors, engaging within (or in opposition to) the
existing Spanish and Portuguese Empires, also taking on the role of supplicant in
many of their interactions with indigenous groups in Africa and America. As Eliga
Gould (2007: 764–86) has convincingly demonstrated, the English Atlantic world was
very much a periphery of the Spanish Atlantic – part of an entangled Atlantic world.
During the early modern period, while the particular nature of relationships
between each ‘national’ group might change, and competition shift, the Atlantic
world remained an arena where participating states and individuals could profit
themselves at the expense of the others. The early history of Dutch and English
activity in the Atlantic world must therefore seek to understand the interaction,
engagement and competition that defined relationships within the Ocean basin.
Critics of Atlantic history have argued that interconnectivity between the Atlantic
and global activities of each country demonstrate the limitations of Atlantic history,
suggesting instead that the idea of ‘cosmopolitans’ or ‘global lives’ would be a more
all-encompassing approach. Numerous historians have argued these points over the
past decade, notably Peter Coclanis’ pieces ‘Atlantic world or Atlantic/world?’ (2006)
and ‘Beyond Atlantic history’ (2009); Alison Games’ article ‘Beyond the Atlantic:
English globetrotters and transoceanic connections’ (2006); and Philip Stern’s
contribution ‘British Asia and the British Atlantic: comparisons and connections’
(2006). However, in spite of these objections, this Atlantic perspective has become
particularly dominant within the historiography of overseas expansion and the
British Empire. In some respects, the history of Dutch activities has had the reverse
problem, with studies focusing far more on the development of the Dutch Empire in
Asia, at the expense of a global perspective that includes Atlantic activities. In a
recent review, Holly Rine (2011: 24–29) stressed the importance of ‘putting the
Dutch Republic back in New Netherland’ and highlighted the significance of Jaap
Jacob’s work in bringing Dutch North American activities back into the limelight.
For both the Dutch and the English, participating in the Atlantic world was part
of broader, global strategies and interests that drew much from continental aspirations
and objectives. From the late sixteenth century onwards, English and Dutch actors
entered the Atlantic world from their northern periphery, integrating and interacting
with existing structures and adding a further level of entanglement. Much of this
activity went hand-in-hand with other trade and colonisation, both in Europe and
globally, and the influence of this broader picture was substantial in the Atlantic. In
this chapter, Kenneth Andrews’ (1984) three areas of overseas activity – trade,
plunder and settlement – are each given a section, but space has also been made to
include two important foundations for Atlantic activity: fishing and exploration.
Throughout all of this analysis, commonalities and contrasts between the English
and Dutch experiences are sought. Together, the English and Dutch entered an
Atlantic world already dominated by existing Iberian empires, beginning a process of
integration and usurpation that would continue to entangle the region over the
proceeding centuries.
533
F ISHING
For both the Dutch and the English, the Atlantic was not a region unknown when the
Spanish and Portuguese were exploring the distant shores of Africa and America in
the fifteenth century. However, earlier activities were restrained by practicality and
many of them (beyond the occasional voyage of exploration) were limited to taking
advantage of the original Atlantic commodity; the sea itself. Fishing was, throughout
the early modern period, an essential industry for the British and the Dutch, with fish
a staple of diets in both, and the Atlantic provided access to this resource in abundance.
During the early modern period, herring and cod were sought after by the fishing
communities active in the Atlantic, with other goods like whale also attractive.
Herring was a staple food source in much of Europe, partly due to the limitation on
eating meat on certain days but also due to the relative ease of storing herring for
long periods. Whale was also an important product, primarily because of the growing
demand for large quantities of oil. Cod was a further important fishing product of the
Atlantic, and in some respects, the first good to connect the English and Dutch
Atlantic experience with the New World, as these fish were sought after in regions
close to the Atlantic seaboard of North America, particularly in the region that would
become known as Cape Cod. Transported back to Europe, each of these three
commodities played important roles in their domestic economies, in turn connecting
with the Atlantic coast of Europe through re-export of the fish and the purchase of
essential fishing goods, such as salt.
In the Dutch case, superiority in herring fishing was a key ingredient for their
commercial success (Israel, 1990: 23). In part, this was closely linked to interaction
with the Atlantic coast of Europe, with salt brought from Spain vital for the success
of the industry. Furthermore, shipbuilding developed rapidly to take advantage of
their geographic situation, with efficient specialist vessels (herring busses) designed
specifically for activity in the Atlantic. These were large boats with crews of 15 or 18
men, and were designed to weather ocean storms and provide room on board for the
evisceration, salting and packing of the herring. Ownership of these ships was shared
throughout the Dutch community, with investment available in shipping concerns
from the sixteenth century. This spread the risk of these activities and laid the ground
for the development of a larger community of investors willing to engage in overseas
activities (Israel, 1990: 23). Even by the 1560s (before the Dutch revolt), the north
Netherlands fishing industry operated over 500 herring busses and employed up to
7000 men (Israel, 1990: 24). Later, the importance of the industry and its dependence
on access to salt meant it became a potential target for attack, with Spanish ministers
believing that withdrawing access to Iberian salt would seriously hinder the Dutch
economy (Israel, 1990: 22).
In the Atlantic world, English and Dutch fishing was seen, by friends and enemies
alike, as foundations for the national economies of each. Such was the importance of
English fishing, and the perceived strength obtained by the Dutch by their investment
in this resource, that one merchant, Robert Kayll, wrote in 1615 that the East India
trade should be abandoned in favour of further investment in this area (Kayll, 1615)!
For the Dutch, the essential role of their herring industry to the economy continued
into the seventeenth century. Attacks on the herring busses in the North Sea became
regular aspects of war, with Spanish forces executing extensive attacks from as early
534
as 1625 and the English attempting the same following the outbreak of war with the
Dutch in 1652 (Unger, 1980: 279). David Ormrod (2003: 107) has highlighted how
tensions over Atlantic fishing grounds were among the major sources of tension
between the English, Dutch and other European states, and their role in the Atlantic
world is important. The fishing industry was a central part of the English and Dutch
Atlantic experience, and through re-export and competition with other European
states formed part of the entangled Atlantic experience that spread across the ocean.
Furthermore, it enabled both participants the opportunity to develop expertise and
innovate in a manner that made further Atlantic participation achievable and attractive.
EXP LORATIO N
Beyond fishing, the English experience of the Atlantic world extended quite logically
into voyages of exploration – even though many of these sought to establish links
with Asia rather than lands bordering the Atlantic itself. In part, these were intended
to enable the raiding and trading activities that are detailed later in this chapter, but
they were also a separate aspect of English overseas expansion. As early as the
fifteenth century the English had attempted to explore further into the Atlantic, with
the voyages of Cabot an example of England’s advanced approach to overseas activity
from a period just as early as the Spanish. However, following Cabot there was a
long period before further voyages were attempted, with these being a response to the
Spanish and Portuguese monopoly over the southern trade routes. Instead, the
English sought to explore alternative routes to reach Asia, with the Crown, the gentry
and the merchant community funding a number of voyages to seek a north-east or
north-west passage throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth.
Finding new sea routes would enable the English to circumvent the Iberian empires.
At the same time, the Dutch were participating to a much greater extent in Portuguese
and Spanish expansion, in part due to the close relationship between the Iberian empires
and the Low Countries before and after the Dutch revolt. With greater participation in
these imperial activities, the Dutch were able to draw on considerable experience
operating within the Atlantic, and wider, world. Merchants from Antwerp, and then
the Northern provinces, could depend on existing commercial networks and therefore
operate to a greater extent within the Iberian Atlantic, limiting the requirements of
more extensive exploration. Also, following the Dutch revolt, using force to operate
within these areas was not only possible but also an important motivator for Dutch
participation in the Atlantic world – again making a northern passage unnecessary. As
such, rather than seeing a concerted effort from the Dutch regarding exploration in the
Atlantic, the later sixteenth century witnessed collaboration and information-gathering
efforts on a huge scale. Interaction with the Iberian empires through relationships in
Europe was thus a key facilitator for later Dutch activity in the Atlantic world. However,
as war with Spain made the voyage to the East Indies increasingly troublesome following
the establishment of the Dutch East India Company and subsequent increase in value
of returning voyages, alternative routes were sought. In 1609, the Dutch East India
Company engaged the English navigator Henry Hudson to explore for a northern
passage, with English exploratory expertise now sought after. This Dutch expedition,
led by an Englishman, enabled the Dutch to lay claim to a large region in North America
where the Dutch colony of New Netherland would later be established.
535
While unable to find northern route to Asia, the English were successful in other
respects. Large fisheries off the North American coast were discovered, trade with
Muscovy was established, English cartography and navigation advanced, and English
seamen obtained many new skills necessary for long ocean voyages. In the end, the
requirement for voyages of exploration lessened. The English obtained the
navigational knowledge for the sea route to Asia through Drake’s circumnavigation
and the capture of Portuguese charts, and war with Spain made imperial boundaries
seem a lot less important. Furthermore, English translations of Spanish texts began
to appear, although many of these were accounts of the Spanish conquest of America
rather than practical information (Elliott, 2007: 6–7). Also, as mentioned, the Dutch
had greater access to navigational information and some of this filtered through to
England. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, there was significant exchange
between these two peripheral nations as they both sought to enter the Iberian Atlantic.
Throughout these many voyages of exploration, it is important to remember that the
desired destination was the East Indies. Even though they did assist the development
of English overseas activity in the Atlantic they were part of broader English attempts
to develop a global presence overseas.
P LUNDE R
Dutch and English exploration in the Atlantic world met with three, sometimes
overlapping, results: raiding, trading, and/or colonisation. Each of these were
experienced by the English and the Dutch during the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century. In the case of raiding, or privateering, in the Atlantic world, the
primary incentive was often the need to break into the Spanish and Portuguese
Empires and enter the lucrative markets of the Atlantic world.
English raiding in the Atlantic and further afield is a prominent aspect of the
country’s overseas activities during the final decades of the sixteenth century. Often
a consequence of damaged relationships with Spain – at least when endorsed by the
crown – English raiding in the Atlantic was a source of substantial profits and pride
for participants. Of these, Drake’s voyages are the most notable, resulting in the
circumnavigation of the globe. These voyages covered substantial areas and raided
possessions across the Spanish Atlantic, including the prized silver fleets (Appleby,
1998: 61–62). After 1585, war between England and Spain enabled the English to
embrace a more aggressive naval stance towards Spain, an approach to the conflict
necessitated by the relative weakness of the English crown. By allowing private
interests to prosecute the war through privateering, not only did the Crown save
money but private interests found an avenue for investment that would provide many
with the experience and funds to trade and colonise following the end of the conflict
(Andrews, 1984: 223–55). Many participants in this early privateering played a
further role in supporting later English expansion – in particular, much of the silver
obtained was used to invest in the English East India Company (EIC) after 1600.
After the turn of the century English raiding in the Atlantic declined, but it was
still an intermittent threat to shipping, particularly in times of war with Spain – and
later the United Provinces and France. To support the growing trade within the
Atlantic world, whole fleets were also deployed against the Spanish in the Caribbean;
attempts to reach peace diplomatically continued simultaneously. In one example,
536
Christopher Newport led a combined Anglo-French force against Spanish raiders

from Cuba (Andrews, 1984: 285). Interestingly, English, French, and Dutch co-
operation regarding the contraband trade in the Atlantic was a regular feature in
this period. Many individuals crossed between these three groups to trade
successfully. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, war in Europe
created situations where northern European raiders could take advantage of
Spanish weakness in the Atlantic. Sometimes this was through attacks on Spanish
shipping, but more common was contraband trade with friendly ports and people
throughout the Atlantic. To trade successfully, the English found it necessary to
enter relationships in the Caribbean that were unnecessary in other regions, such as
north American areas where no pre-existing European empires existed, again
highlighting the entangled qualities of trading in the expanding world of seventeenth
century commerce.
Following the start of the Dutch revolt, raiding Spanish fleets in the Atlantic was
an important part of Dutch overseas policy. These raids had numerous benefits for
the emerging state, damaging the Spanish enemy and providing a means of accessing
the South American silver that would become an important foundation for their
overseas trading activities. The prevalence of privateering within Dutch maritime
activities was such that it enabled a dedicated privateering industry to develop during
this period (Lunsford, 2005: 9–11). These predatory opportunities were taken up
with particular gusto within Zeeland, where peace with Spain was greeted with little
enthusiasm in 1609 (Price, 1994: 223). Like the English, Dutch raiding in the Atlantic
was intermittent after the end of the war with Spain, but became an attractive
proposition once more after war was renewed in 1621 and the Dutch West India
Company (WIC) was founded. The founding of this Company had been based in
some part due to the belief that raiding in the Spanish Atlantic would be hugely
profitable. However, these profits were not always realised, with significant WIC
losses before 1628, when they were successful in capturing the Spanish silver fleet.
WIC raiding continued with limited success until 1646 (Emmer, 1998: 70–73). It was
eventually replaced by attempts to conquer Spanish and Portuguese possessions in
America and Africa, which enabled the emergence of dominant Dutch trading within
a small region of the Atlantic.
TRADE
Raiding, which had made up such an important part of the early English and Dutch
experience of the Atlantic, was rapidly substituted and overtaken by trade. In some
cases this was undertaken beyond the reaches of the Iberian empires, but it also took
place within these regions, often against the wishes of the colonial authorities.
Supporting numerous trading circuits and providing access to a wide range of
commodities, the Atlantic world provided an exceptional opportunity for merchants
of both countries to make considerable profits. Intermediaries and transnational
relationships were vital for trading success, and the interconnections within the
Atlantic world are readily apparent.
Dutch trading in the Atlantic was a continuous presence throughout the early
modern period, with war and peace offering different challenges for merchants rather
than curtailing activity altogether. An important part of this trade was the Dutch salt
537
trade to Venezuela, which replaced the Dutch salt trade with Spain and Portugal in
the sixteenth century and enabled the continued success of the United Provinces’
fishing industry. From 1601, over a hundred Dutch ships were visiting Venezuela
each year, stopped only briefly by Spanish attempts to impose their authority with a
navy. The success of the trade continued throughout the war with Spain, remaining
both useful and profitable. Like other trading within the Atlantic world, the Venezuela
trade is one example where working across the boundaries of jurisdictions was a
requirement for the trades’ success. To do so, the Dutch maintained positive
relationships with numerous intermediaries across the Atlantic.
These relationships are primarily apparent in the brokering of trades across
colonial boundaries. Cátia Antunes (2008) has demonstrated the entangled
relationship between the Dutch trading world and the Hispanic empires further,
highlighting how these connections played an important role in connecting
merchants both within and across colonial boundaries. Particularly important for
the Dutch were the relationships sustained within the Atlantic Jewish community,
which enabled Dutch participation in the slave trade within and without the sphere
of the Iberian monopoly (Da Silva, 2011: 7–32). Through their commercial
relationships, and the ability of Dutch merchants to act across the Atlantic world,
the ubiquity of Dutch shipping in the Atlantic is easily explained. With Amsterdam
inheriting Antwerp’s role in the distribution of Brazilian goods in Europe, and the
city’s ability to harness the developing tobacco trade in a similar manner, the Dutch
obtained an important position within the Atlantic trading economy (Klooster,
2011: 171–73). Furthermore, when peace was finalised in 1609 between the Dutch
and Spain, the obstacles that had limited Dutch activity were removed, enabling the
consolidation of activities in America and complete Dutch domination of the north–
south trade along Europe’s Atlantic coast. This included the flow of Baltic grain
and naval stores to Spain, and the return flow of American silver to the United
Provinces (Israel, 1997: 37).
Partly in response to Dutch success, English merchants too returned to trading
after 1602. With numerous ventures to South America the English trade started well.
In these voyages, we continue to see the connectedness of English overseas trading
endeavours. Where Atlantic raiding had provided access to silver for investment in
the EIC, its members then used their new experience and income to invest once more
into the Atlantic world. Trade continued successfully for the next two decades, with
small settlements established along the coast of Brazil to engage with Portuguese
plantations throughout the colony. However, conflict with Spain in 1621 and
Portuguese attacks in 1623 and 1625 against the English and Dutch positions forced
the expulsion of many traders. As a result, the English strategy reverted to raiding,
with the Guiana Company founded in 1626 specifically to prosecute the conflict –
albeit with no success. With the establishment of colonies in the Caribbean in the
1620s, alternatives were offered to these trading groups, who shifted their investment
into these new colonial ventures.
Further north, English and Dutch trading in the Atlantic was less likely to form
around pre-existing communities of Europeans and instead stemmed from engagement
with the local communities. Although less profitable than the Caribbean and Brazilian
trade, goods from the northern areas (such as furs) were highly sought after. With
numerous expeditions launched to tap into the internal trade of North America, the
538
English were able to access these products consistently. This trade was one of the
incentives for founding English settlements in the north, similar to that attempted at
Roanoke in the sixteenth century, but from the beginnings of the Virginia Company
in 1607 the traders who founded the Company had broader aims: the cultivation of
commodities that could be traded in the Atlantic world.
New products emerged from this expansion in trade. Tobacco in particular drew
attention, both negative, such as King James’ pamphlet A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco,
and positive, such as the rapid increase in imports, which reached £60,000 by 1610
(Andrews, 1984: 295). Tobacco became a highly sought after commodity, first by
English merchants and later by plantation owners seeking cash crops for the English
market. Indeed, tobacco became a product typical of the Atlantic – of little use for
sustaining settlements, but profitable when exported to Europe. Here, as in many
other ways, colonial and trading activities in the Atlantic world were symbiotic.
The slave trade was also an area where both the Dutch and the English were active
participants. While the Dutch only became major players following their acquisition
of territory in Brazil in the 1630s, Dutch ships had participated in the trade from as
early as 1596 (Emmer, 1998: 33). For the English on the other hand, the slave trade
had been an important part of their Atlantic activities since Hawkins’ voyages in the
1560s, with Hawkins willing to use force as a means of obtaining slaves in Africa in
order to initiate peaceful trade with Spanish America. It was, however, a failure, and
the English turned from slave trading for the next few decades (Appleby, 1998: 61).
In the seventeenth century both the English and Dutch started to participate in the
slave trade to a greater extent, by establishing outposts on the African coast and
through direct trading with African rulers or Portuguese intermediaries along the
coasts. Many of these slaves were transported to the Iberian colonies of South
America, but others were sold in the developing Dutch and English colonies.
In addition to their competition with the Iberian empires, trade increasingly became
a source of rivalry between the Dutch and English. As David Ormrod (2003) has made
clear, English attempts to expand their trading activities, partly in the Atlantic but also
in the Mediterranean, Baltic, and East Indies, were seen as a direct threat to Dutch
trade. Beyond the North Sea, the Anglo-Dutch relationship became increasingly
strained. In the East Indies, this conflict came close to open war on numerous occasions
in the early seventeenth century, and was a source of ill feeling within merchant groups
that made it difficult for closer relationships between the two states to develop
effectively, even after the renewal of conflict between Spain and the United Provinces.
From the English perspective, Dutch attempts at monopoly in the East Indies, and
their treatment of English merchants, were part of attempts to create a universal
monarchy and trading domination that would exclude the English (Pincus, 1992: 22).
The Dutch and English experiences of Atlantic trade were, therefore, experiences
where their merchants were regularly crossing boundaries and actively engaging in
activities within the boundaries of the Spanish and Portuguese imperial domains.
Furthermore, through the re-export of Atlantic commodities throughout Europe this
trade created interconnections on numerous levels and played an important part in
integrating the Atlantic economy. With the role of intermediaries clear, the
entanglement of the various trading circuits and their participants is apparent. To
understand the Atlantic world of England and the Dutch it is essential to integrate
them into the existing Atlantic world created by the Iberian empires.
539
SETTLEM E NT
Building on many of the successes in the trading and raiding arenas that the Atlantic
offered, both the English and the Dutch sought to increase their influence in the
Atlantic world through colonisation. In both cases, the extent of this colonisation
during the first decades of the seventeenth century was minimal, with only limited
territorial gains made in North America, much of the Caribbean remaining in
Spanish hands, and Dutch rule in Brazil weak and short-lived. On the African coast,
forts were established, offering access to the trades described earlier in this chapter
but not becoming major colonies in terms of population or territory. On the other
hand, what the early colonies lacked in size they made up for in their importance to
English and Dutch trading circuits. The colonies all enabled access to important
commodities. As such, they were integral parts of the Atlantic economies experienced
by both the Dutch and the English in early seventeenth century. Through colonial
designs, these northern European states and their subjects become increasingly
engaged in cultural and economic exchange with non-European peoples, interaction
that significantly changed their perceptions of the world and the shape of their
respective Empires.
Figure 29.2 New Belgium, plate from ‘Atlas Contractus’, c. 1671

540
Simultaneous to the raiding in the Atlantic, the late seventeenth century also saw
numerous attempts to launch colonies across the Atlantic world. Some of these were
merely theoretical and part of a strategy that was particularly apparent in the Hakluyt
treatise mentioned previously. However, other plans came closer to fruition. Sir
Walter Raleigh made extensive plans for the colonisation of Guiana for example, and
the abortive but repeated attempts to colonise Roanoke also demonstrate the scope
of English colonising plans during this period (Appleby, 1998: 62–65).
Although early colonisation efforts in Roanoke and the colonisation of Ireland
had given many individuals the skills and desire to participate in further expansion,
it was a significant step to turn this interest into investment and support for a North
American colony. In 1606, merchant and gentry investment created the Virginia
Company. A joint stock company with many of the same members as the EIC and,
indeed, some of the same leaders, the Virginia Company sought to establish a
significant and profitable colony on the Atlantic coast. Initial plans for the colony
had focused on hoped-for access to mineral or other wealth that had been found by
Spain to the south. The application for a grant for the colony made it clear that the
colony would be ‘planted’ in North America in land considered unoccupied by the
English – a significant difference to the conquest that characterised Spanish expansion
(Elliott, 2007: 9). Little information was available regarding what was expected by
the settlers and the lack of success of many ventures attests to the risks involved.
On their arrival, the English colonists found local groups who were already familiar
with Europeans, and it was through intermediaries again that the English were able to
enter existing trading circuits and gain access to the goods essential for survival
(Games, 2006: 746). Over the next 15 years, the interaction between the two
communities grew, with indigenous workers assisting the English in return for
European goods and the development of consistent diplomatic efforts between the two
groups, including what could be called a Wahunsonacock embassy to London in 1616.
In spite of the early difficulties, the Virginia Company continued to see commercial
opportunities and the Jamestown settlement soon became the centre of a plantation
economy built around the desire to produce commodities for export to England. It
took years for the community in Virginia to establish this agriculture effectively and
the death toll was considerable, but experimentation in the end prevailed and the
cultivation of tobacco was successful. However, in the end the Virginia Company
failed. In 1622, the local leader Opechancanough attacked the colony, killing one-
third of the colonists and making the future of the Virginia Company untenable. The
Crown took over and continued to operate the colony as the first Crown colony in the
Atlantic world, and the colony continued to develop (Games, 2011: 117–46).
However, the most successful attempts at colonisation in the early seventeenth
century were not in North America but in the islands of the Caribbean. Following a
series of failures to establish outposts in Guiana, English colonists started to consider
the validity of island colonies. Between 1624 and 1632, these were established on St
Christopher, Barbados, Nevis, Montserrat and Antigua. These colonies were more
successful than those of other European states in attracting migrant labour from
Europe, and each rapidly developed plantation economies built on the export of
tobacco and cotton (Mc.D Beckles, 1998: 218–22). Roper (2009), for example,
considers tobacco cultivation to be the most important aspect of early American
history and the reason for support from commercial interests. These colonies added
541
a further level on entanglement within the Atlantic. Christian Koot (2011) has
recently demonstrated how English and Dutch participants depended on each other
for support, and Dutch merchants played an important role in the success of English
Caribbean colonies. As these plantation economies developed, the need for labour
became increasingly important for their continued success, and as a result English
merchants increasingly turned towards African slave trade. Through this trade, in
addition to continued migration from England, Scotland and Ireland, the colonies
grew rapidly. Their success in producing tobacco did cause a market glut in the
1630s and 1640s, but they continued to attract support and became integral aspects
of England’s overseas activity in the coming centuries, both providing Atlantic
commodities for the English market and granting access to the commercial circuit of
the developing Caribbean.
As suggested by the excerpt from Hakluyt in the introduction, colonisation in the
Atlantic world had dual aims of economic and political gain. As Oostindie and
Paasman (1998) have suggested, ‘Dutch colonialism had started in the geopolitical
context of the struggle against Spain’ and this obvious rationale for overseas
expansion is clear. In the Atlantic world this is particularly clear, with attempts to
seize territory a consequence of the renewal of war with Spain in 1621. With the
ending of the truce, it was no longer possible for the Dutch to continue their trade
with Spanish-controlled South America, the Caribbean, or Africa in such large
numbers. The establishment of the Dutch WIC sought to alleviate the impact of this
curtailing of Dutch activities, but for the first decade the Company met with little
success, relying on trade with Guinea and raiding in the Atlantic to stay solvent
following defeat and expulsion from Brazil, Puerto Rico and Elmina (Guinea). It was
only after 1634 that the situation improved, with military expansion in Brazil
enabling the Dutch to seize considerable sugar-producing areas and begin the export
of numerous commodities from Brazil back to Europe. The seizure of Elmina in
Guinea from the Portuguese in 1637 bridged the Atlantic for the Dutch, giving them
control, for the first time, of land and markets in all three continents shaping the
Atlantic world. In turn, these colonies also invigorated the Dutch slave trade, with
23,163 Africans transported to the Dutch Brazilian territories between 1636 and
1645 (Israel, 1990: 162–63). For the Dutch as much as the English, forced migration
was the main source of labour in the Atlantic colonies.
The governance of the English and Dutch colonies was a combination of military
rule and planter oligarchy during the earliest period of expansion. In Africa, the forts
along the coast were trading facilities, but also (usually) armed and operated as
military outposts. In the case of the WIC this was particularly noticeable in the early
period, as conflict with the Portuguese and Spanish and huge military expenses
necessitated strict control on the part of the WIC government. Over time however,
this strict military administration shifted, with colonists becoming increasingly
important as part of local administrations – even going so far as to create a shared
parliament of Dutch and Portuguese members in Dutch Brazil (Emmer, 1998: 81–82).
In contrast, the English colonies had a much greater range of administrative styles.
This was partly a consequence of the divided structure of English expansion, with
different colonies falling under the administration of different trading and colonial
bodies rather than a centralised company. As the seventeenth century continued, and
migration to the North American coast increased, this divide in forms of administration
542
and social structure increased – particularly in areas where religion was an important
aspect of the colonising drive.
CONCLU S IO N
As the Dutch and English began to participate in the Atlantic world to a greater
extent during the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth
they did so from a clearly peripheral position. Although their fishing activities and
the English exploration for northern passages fell beyond the limits of Iberian activity,
even these were dependent on interaction with the Iberian empires. For fishing, access
to Portuguese and then Venezuelan salt was essential for Dutch prosperity, and
interaction throughout the Atlantic developed because of this northern Atlantic
aspect of English and Dutch Atlantic activity. Exploration was only necessary due to
the Iberian monopoly over the southern routes and the inability of the English to
access the navigational knowledge and experience of their Spanish and Portuguese
competitors. The Dutch learned much from their access to the Iberian empire before
the revolt, and the ongoing relationships between the Dutch merchant community
and intermediaries throughout the Atlantic world remained a useful means of
operating within the Iberian-dominated Atlantic.
The incentives for entering the Atlantic world for each group were also dominated
by their interaction with Spain. Damaging the Spanish enemy was a key component
for the English and Dutch states who could use private interests in raiding and trade to
undermine the Spanish war effort at little or no cost to themselves. Furthermore, the
colonial expansion of both the English and the Dutch sought to create possibilities for
damaging the Iberian position. For the Dutch, their colonies were directly taken from
the Portuguese in Brazil and on the African coast, and these were operated through
predominantly military administration in their early stages. In the English case, the
colonies in the Caribbean were taken in response to Spanish attempts to curtail their
trading activities, and the islands were chosen in part for their potential as plantations
for tobacco and cotton, but also for their potential role in providing accessible locations
to launch raids against the Spanish. In the Caribbean and Brazil, the English and
Dutch activities were, for much of this period, directly in opposition to the Spanish
authorities in Madrid, trading in contraband or through networks of intermediaries
that enabled trading activities within the boundaries of the Iberian Atlantic.
These relationships, and the permeable boundaries of the Iberian Atlantic, reveal
another important facet of English and Dutch interaction with the Atlantic economy.
To succeed, they were reliant on the support and co-operation of numerous groups,
with transnational interaction common. In the Dutch case, communities that had
spread between the northern and southern Netherlands survived the revolt against
Spain and were particularly useful for Dutch traders in the Atlantic. Lisbon and
Amsterdam for example were strongly connected by a Jewish community that
facilitated contact between merchants from both cities and developed links throughout
the Atlantic world. The entanglement of the Atlantic world is clear through the study
of relationships such as these, as is the need for such relationships from the perspective
of the peripheral players in the Atlantic economy.
The Atlantic world continues to represent a useful means of exploring the
relationship between English and Dutch overseas agents and the Iberian empires that
543
dominated the region. In this early period, the entanglement of different organisations
and individuals is particularly striking and the economic development of the Dutch
and English Atlantic was dependent on interaction and cooperation just as much as
anti-Iberian aggression. However, overseas expansion by the English and Dutch was
not limited to the Atlantic. It is important to remember that while the Atlantic world
can reveal the entanglement of numerous empires we should not overlook the
entangled and interconnected nature of both English and Dutch expansion elsewhere
in the seventeenth century.
REF EREN CE S
Andrews, K. 1984, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: maritime enterprise and the genesis of the
British Empire, 1480–1630, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Antunes, C. 2008, ‘Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam: an insight on entrepreneurial behaviour in
the Dutch Republic’, in Jarvis, A. and Lee, R. (ed.), Trade, Migration and Urban Networks
in Port Cities, c. 1640–1940, International Maritime Economic History Association,
St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Appleby, J. 1998, ‘War, politics and colonisation’ in Canny, N. (ed.), The Origins of Empire:
British overseas enterprise to the close of the seventeenth century, Oxford University
Press, Oxford.
Blakemore, R. 2014, ‘Thinking outside the gundeck: maritime history, the royal navy and the
outbreak of the British Civil War, 1625–21’, Historical Research, vol. 87, no. 236, pp. 1–24.
Boxer, C. 1979, Jan Compagnie in War and Peace, 1602–1799: a short history of the Dutch
East India Company, Heinamann Asia, Hong Kong.
Canny, N. & Morgan, P. (eds.) 2011, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850,
Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Canny, N. (ed.) 1998, The Origins of Empire: British overseas enterprise to the close of the
seventeenth century, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Coclanis, P. A. 2006, ‘Atlantic world or Atlantic/world?’ William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 63,
no. 4, pp. 725–42.
—— 2009, ‘Beyond Atlantic history’, in Greene, J. D. & Morgan, P. D. (eds.), Atlantic history:
a critical reappraisal, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Da Silva, F. R. 2011, ‘Crossing Empires: Portuguese, Sephardic, and Dutch Business Networks
in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1580–1674’, The Americas, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 7–32.
De Vries, J. 1997, The First Modern Economy: Success, failure, and perseverance of the Dutch
economy, 1500–1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Elliott, J. H. 2007, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830,
Yale University Press, New Haven.
Emmer, P. 1998, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580–1880, Ashgate, Farnham.
Emmer, P. & Klooster, W. 1999, ‘The Dutch Atlantic, 1600–1800: expansion without Empire’,
Itinerario, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 48–69.
Games, A 2006, ‘Beyond the Atlantic: English globetrotters and transoceanic connections’,
William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 675–92.
—— 2011, Web of Empire: English cosmopolitans in an age of expansion, 1560–1660, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Gould, E. 2007, ‘Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: the English-speaking Atlantic as a
Spanish periphery’, The American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 3, pp. 764–86.
Hakluyt, R. & Deane C. (ed.) 1877, A particular discourse concerning the great necessitie and
manifold comodyties that are likely to growe in this Realme of England by the Western
discoveries lately attempted, Maine Historical Society, Cambridge [Mass].
544
Israel, J 1990, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
—— 1997, Conflicts of Empires: Spain, the Low Countries and the Struggle for World
Supremacy, 1585–1713, Continuum, London.
Kayll, R. 1615, The Trades Increase, Nicholas Oakes, London.
Klooster, W. 2011, ‘The Northern European Atlantic World’ in Canny, N. & Morgan, P., The
Atlantic World, c.1450–c.1850, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Koot, C. J. 2011, Empire at the Periphery: British colonists, Anglo-Dutch trade, and the
development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713, New York University Press, New York.
Lunsford, V. 2005, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands, Palgrave Macmillan,
New York.
Mancall, P. 2007, Hakluyt’s Promise: an Elizabethan obsession for an English America, Yale
University Press, New Haven.
Mancke, E. & Shamms, C. (eds.) 2005, The Creation of the British Atlantic World, Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Mc.D Beckles, H. 1998, ‘The “Hub of Empire”: the Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth
Century’, in Canny, N. (ed.), The Origins of Empire: British overseas enterprise to the close
of the seventeenth century, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Oostindie, G. L. & Paasman, B. 1998, ‘Dutch attitudes towards colonial empires, indigenous
cultures, and slaves’, Eighteenth Century Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 349–55.
Oostindie, G. L. & Roitman, J. V. 2012, ‘Repositioning the Dutch in the Atlantic, 1680–1800’,
Itinerario, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 129–60.
Ormrod, D. 2003, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age
of Mercantalism, 1650–1770. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Pincus, S. 1992, ‘Popery, Trade and Universal Monarchy: the ideological context of the outbreak
of the second Anglo-Dutch war’, English Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 422, pp. 1–29.
Price, J. L. 1994, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: the politics of
particularism, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Quinn, D & Quinn, A (eds.) 1993, Discourse on Western Planting, Hakluyt Society, London.
Rine, Holly 2011, ‘Putting the Dutch Republic back in New Netherland’, Reviews in American
History, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 24–29.
Roper, L. H. 2009, The English Empire in America, 1602–1658: Beyond Jamestown, Pickering
and Chatto, London.
Stern, P. J. 2006, ‘British Asia and the British Atlantic: comparisons and connections’, William
and Mary Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 693–712.
Unger, R. 1980, ‘Dutch Herring, Technology and International Trade in the Seventeenth
Century’, The Journal of Economic History, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 253–79.
545
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE CULTURAL HISTORY

OF COMMERCE IN THE
ATLANTIC WORLD 1
Jonathan Eacott
I n 1789 the Connecticut merchant Elijah Boardman commissioned a particularly

Atlantic portrait of himself. Merchant portraits were not specific to the Atlantic
World; Eurasian merchants also sat for portraits to advertise their social and financial
credit. Nevertheless, Boardman’s upright posture, elegant clothing and tidy work spaces
projected to Americans and Europeans a holistic sense of the individual as confident,
stable and respectable that would not have been as obvious to their Asian counterparts.2
The many books lined up prominently under Boardman’s desk showcased Boardman’s
Atlantic, and particularly British Atlantic, definition of his character, as well as the lack
of separation between one’s self and one’s business that characterized pre-corporate
commercial life. Although some of the books may have been printed and bound in
America, Britons on the other side of the ocean had written them, and only one was a
business manual. The London Magazine underscored Boardman’s knowledge of the
politics and fashions of the Atlantic’s leading metropolis, while Francis Moore’s Travels
and William Guthrie’s New System of Modern Geography suggested knowledge of the
greater world with which he traded. William Shakespeare’s collected works, Samuel
Johnson’s Dictionary, and Benjamin Martin’s Philosophical Grammar vouched for
Boardman’s participation in polite cultured society. John Milton’s Paradise Lost
suggested Boardman’s caution for both the temptations of the devil’s avaricious sidekick,
Mammon, and the commercial monopolies Milton derided. Similarly, the bolts of cloth
visible through the open door behind Boardman attested to the desirability of goods
imported from Britain and Boardman’s taste and skill as a merchant. One slightly
unrolled bolt near the centre of the painting revealed a prominent British customs stamp
suggesting that Boardman obtained his wares through legal and respectable channels,
and more figuratively that they bore the stamp of approval of London fashion. Such
prominent books and fabrics imported from Britain may seem out of place in a United
States which had only recently fought for its independence from the British empire.
Indeed, Boardman himself served as a patriot in the American Revolution, and some
commentators see his portrait as evidence of a new national character.3 The posture,
clothing, books, and cloth in Boardman’s portrait, however, tell a story not so much of
American independence, but of both Boardman’s and America’s place in an Atlantic,
and increasingly prominently British Atlantic culture of commerce.
546
– chapter 30: The cultural history of commerce –
Atlantic commerce was ‘a whole way of life’ for merchants such as Boardman, and
in many ways it increasingly shaped and was shaped by the lives of all sorts of people
from Western Europe to the coast of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.4
Commercial culture happened in the Atlantic World’s portraits, such as Boardman’s,
and literature, such as Milton’s, and in its shops, coffee houses, counting offices,
manufactories, sugarcane fields, government halls and religious centres. This chapter
follows the trading currents of the Atlantic as the ocean bubbled new practices, ideas,
institutions and goods up into all of facets of life to help create a new network of
commercial culture. It begins with a narrative that locates European activity in the
Atlantic within larger processes of European imperial expansion that spanned the
globe. Some of the cloth in Boardman’s portrait, for instance, most likely came from
Britain’s possessions two oceans away in India. From Columbus’ stumbling upon the
West Indies on his way to seek such goods from Asia, to the support of state
apparatuses, to the everyday activities of individuals, global commerce paid for
global empires, and these empires, in turn created opportunities for commerce. This
narrative also suggests that the commercial culture of the Atlantic World stimulated
and was in turn stimulated by new trading practices, habits, tools and institutions;
religious, scientific and political thinking; and mass forced and free migrations that
provided new commodities and consumer markets. The three sections following the
opening narrative, ‘Practice and Profit’, ‘Faith, Morals and Markets’, and ‘Migration
Based Production and Consumption’ consider these themes in turn.
ATLANTIC COMMERCE IN A G L O B AL CO NTE X T

When the Lydia sailed from London to Boston in 1770 it made an Atlantic voyage.
Its cargo came from several European countries and included four trunks of books,
six cases of stationary, numerous cases of glass and several sheets of lead. The Lydia,
however, also brought several chests of tea and porcelain from China, hundreds of
yards of cotton fabric from India, and a box filled with dozens of pounds of various
East Indian spices.5 Such voyages with complicated and cosmopolitan cargoes
repeated tens of thousands of times between the fifteenth century and the middle of
the nineteenth. During this period merchants integrated the Atlantic into the valuable
and pre-existing coasting trades of Europe, the North Sea and the Mediterranean, as
well as circuits of trade extending to Asia and, eventually, the Pacific Islands.
Regardless of their locations, these trades grew largely out of the same imperial
desires: profit and power. With their ‘fluid centers’ to borrow a phrase from the
historian Victor Lieberman, recent histories of these various circuits of trade have
done invaluable work in exposing the scale of exchange in many parts of the early
modern world and the porousness of supposedly heavily regulated imperial trading
systems.6 Yet such histories often give the impression of bounded oceans analogous
to the nationally bounded narratives that they have done so much to decentre. This
is not to argue that the whole globe is the only reasonable geographic framework for
the analysis of historical commerce. That merchants who traded with Europe,
Western Africa and the Americas might also have traded with the Middle East, the
Asian Subcontinent and beyond, does not necessarily suggest that an Atlantic
commercial sub-culture was a fiction. These global activities do demand, however,
that historians think rigorously about what differentiated the Atlantic commercial
547
– Jonathan Eacott –
culture and why that differentiation matters. The Lydia’s voyage was Atlantic, but it
was also a connection to the oceans beyond.
Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Portuguese merchants both benefiting from and
backing Portuguese and Spanish conquests set in motion many of the trades and
network trading mechanisms which would characterize the culture of Atlantic
commerce for centuries. Beginning in the early fifteenth century the Portuguese
Crown led the development of European seaborne exploration along the West and
East African coasts and across the Indian Ocean.7 Portuguese merchants, particularly
Jews and New Christians, embedded themselves, often violently, as small commercial
colonies in African, Asian and South American ports previously unknown to
Europeans. They emulated the networks of family members and friends that Genoese
and Venetian traders already used in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere in the
Mediterranean. Network associates depended on personal letters, bills of exchange
and lengthy terms of credit to facilitate trade. Portuguese trade bolstered government
finances through duties, monopoly profits, and the development of a well-capitalized
merchant elite that served as the primary lender to the Portuguese Crown, and from
1580 to 1640, the union Crown with Spain.8 Networked Portuguese merchants
increasingly dominated global trade through licit and illicit means, while the
numerically and militarily stronger Spanish, with the assistance of Genoese merchants,
focussed more on conquering foreign peoples, developing Caribbean and South
American slave plantations, and extracting precious metals. The Spanish Crown
dispatched regular fleets to and from Seville and Havana, Cartagena and San Juan. In
Havana a heterogeneous population built vibrant trading, provisioning, and ship-
building sectors for and through the regular Carrera de Indias fleets.9 The Dutch in
Antwerp too found a profitable role in the Iberian system, dispersing Atlantic imports
throughout Northern Europe. Still, the Dutch desired greater access to the Atlantic,
and during the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), they fought the Iberians not only for
political independence but for control of the valuable spice, slave and sugar trades.
The Dutch targeted Portuguese trading settlements which provided easier and in
many ways more profitable targets than the Spanish territories in Mexico and Peru.10
Unable to participate easily in the closed Iberian system and more limited in
resources than the Dutch, merchants in other Northern European ports such as
Middelburg, La Rochelle and especially, London, focussed on consorting with their
state governments to fund and fit out private vessels to capture valuable Iberian
cargoes. Typically, these privateers needed little in the way of expensive armaments
and relied on close-quarters combat and an overwhelming superiority of fighting men
to take control of enemy vessels – sinking a merchant ship with heavy broadsides
brought no profit. Many captains oscillated between privateering and pirating, the
latter of which freed them from paying the Admiralty and the Queen their shares of
the loot. A veneer of patriotism covered attacks on the Spanish and Portuguese. To
take wealth from the Catholic Iberians both weakened the principal enemy of the
Protestant English and Dutch, and strengthened the capital positions of the Northern
powers. The merchants won doubly too: not only did they earn a share of the booty
but in taking the booty they drove countless Iberian merchants into bankruptcy and
out of competition in the regular trades. Privateers and pirates operated globally, but
their Atlantic activities poaching valuable African, and South and Central American
cargos held particular importance.11 The resulting enhanced capital position of many
548
English merchants encouraged a new round of investing in expansive business

pursuits which would more clearly set the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades off from
each other.
The English and Dutch fused the pre-existing forms of state-sponsored monopoly
trade and the joint stock company, fostering hopes of profits for investors and revenue
for the state through the export of the valuable commodities expected to be found in
Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Portuguese Crown had already utilized
monopolies to generate revenue in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as those
granted to Prince Henry and the Casa da India. The Spanish Crown, too, attempted
to enforce multiple royal monopolies. The English and Dutch, however, used the
capital pooling and risk spreading nature of joint stock companies to offset political
and capital weaknesses. The companies shared the same legal and ideological
underpinnings, and within each country often the same investors from both the
middling and upper sorts. English and Dutch companies such as the Turkey, later
Levant Company (1581) and East India Companies (1600 and 1602) were initially
focussed on trade, not settlement. English Atlantic companies, in contrast, focussed
more on settlement to drive trade, and included the Virginia Company (1606), which
established colonies in Virginia and Bermuda; the Massachusetts Bay Company
(1629); and, the Providence Island Company (1629), which began settlements on
Providence Island off the Mosquito Coast and Tortuga off San Domingo. Meanwhile,
the Dutch West India Company (1621) ramped up privateering against the Iberians,
and obtained a monopoly over the Dutch portion of the African slave trade and
Dutch colonization in the West Indies and the Americas. With Portuguese shipping
beset by English and Dutch privateers, King John IV adapted for defence the strategy
which the English and Dutch had used offensively to muscle in on the Iberian trades,
chartering the Brazil Company and granting it two naval squadrons for protection
(1649).12 After the English Restoration, the Royal African Company (1660) gained a
legal monopoly over the English slave trade, and the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670)
challenged the French monopoly in the North American fur trade, extending often
damaging European goods and relationships of commercial exchange to multiple
indigenous peoples. Some also hoped to expand settlement aggressively in the Indian
Ocean along Atlantic models. Whether in the Indian or Atlantic Ocean, trading profit
was always the intended bottom line. Profit had such importance that early settlers,
such as those at Jamestown in Virginia, often emphasized the procurement and
production of exports at the expense of their own survival.13 The English, Dutch,
French (1664) and Swedish (1731) East India Companies proved enduring in
conception if not in execution or profitability, while Northern European intra-oceanic
trade in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans quickly came to follow the earlier
Portuguese New Christian model of private merchant networks. The advantages of
joint stock companies in raising capital, spreading risk, and projecting power were
thought to compensate for the greater distances and more powerful indigenous
regimes that Europeans encountered in trade with Asia. In the accessible Atlantic
trades, looser networks of private Northern European merchants displaced the joint
stock companies over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Virginia
Company had already lost control of Jamestown in 1624 and by 1792 the Hudson’s
Bay Company was the only remaining major British or Dutch chartered joint stock
company focussed on the Atlantic.14
549
As the chartered companies collapsed trade expanded much more dramatically to

the Americas and Africa than to Asia, to the benefit of private merchant networks
and, if properly harnessed, their states. Intra-imperial trade was common and could
be supported by governments when it seemed to be in the state’s interests – it could
even be vital to colonial development, as for English colonies trading with the Dutch.15
Despite Dutch commercial success, however, the growth in Atlantic trade was
increasingly driven by the English and, for a time, the French colonial presences in
the Caribbean and North America. British shipping tonnage in the second half of the
seventeenth century tripled through success in expanding colonial populations and
conquering Dutch colonies, as well as the assumption of the asiento de negros to
service the insatiable Spanish demand for slaves, creation of a slave and tobacco
economy in the Chesapeake, evolution of the Navigation Acts, and formation of the
Board of Trade.16 Tonnage rose rapidly again from the middle of the eighteenth
century, reaching 153,000 tons burden per year in the early 1770s. Meanwhile,
English shipping to the East Indies increased from approximately 8,000 tons burden
per year in 1663 to 29,000 tons, a similar rate of growth but a much smaller addition
of tonnage.17
Debate raged over whether trade, like politics, was a zero sum game, but many
agreed that economic growth should be aided by the state.18 Imperial governments in
Europe established a range of regulations to better harness expanding trades for
metropolitan gain, most famously the mid-seventeenth-century English Navigation
Acts. These acts required English ships with a crew at least three-fourths English to
be used in all coastal and colonial trade, as well as trade from Asia, Africa and
America. Additionally, certain ‘enumerated’ goods could only be shipped from the
colonies to England, except when deemed helpful in furthering the national interest.
Enforcement was erratic and difficult, but direct trade between English colonists and
Holland declined sharply, while English Atlantic merchants and vessels came to
dominate the trade between Britain and America and the West Indies, if not the trade
between the colonies of England and the colonies of other European powers. By
encouraging the use of English vessels and sailors, the Navigation Acts expanded
shipping and naval power. Using a range of protections and taxes the state generated
sizeable new revenues, enhanced its credit position, directed economic growth and
gained tens of thousands of experienced seamen available to be impressed into the
British navy in times of need. French kings passed similar laws, culminating in
attempts by Louis XV which largely failed despite the grizzly penalty of ‘banishment
to the galleys’. Smuggling was a constant difficulty in the Atlantic World, and such
acts were most successful when they reflected both metropolitan and colonial interests
in protected markets.19
The expansion of European markets through the mass settler colonization of the
Americas most dramatically marked seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic
commerce as different from that in the other world oceans. By the late eighteenth
century perhaps a few hundred thousand European migrants had ventured to the
Indian Ocean. Europeans had also transported hundreds of thousands of individuals
from Africa and Madagascar and unknown numbers of other peoples throughout the
Indian Ocean as part of a much longer and larger Afroeurasian slave trade. In the
Americas, Europeans attempted to turn indigenous labour and slaving practices to
their benefit. After contact with Europeans, however, disease devastated indigenous
550
communities in the Americas unlike in Asia. Large migrant populations became

essential to colonization in the Atlantic. Approximately 1 million European migrants
had already travelled to the Americas between 1492 and 1700, and millions more
arrived before 1850. Europeans brought over 10 million people to the Americas as
slaves from Africa, with the vast majority going to the West Indies, Brazil and Spanish
America.20 The enormous slave populations in the Atlantic produced new commodities
in remarkable quantities for European markets, but were not major consumers of
European goods. Utilizing slave production and large and rapidly growing colonial
consumer markets, British power continued to expand during the eighteenth century.
British merchants came to dominate most Atlantic trades, including lumber, fish,
tobacco and eventually sugar to Europe, cloth to Africa, and cloth, slaves, guns, wine
and pots to the Americas. While many of the mechanisms of trade and commodities
traded were little different from those of the Portuguese two centuries earlier, the
scale of trade and Britain’s place within it had changed dramatically.21
Atlantic commercial culture was both part of, and distinct from, global imperial
pursuits. Merchant networks, privateering, joint stock companies, imperial legal
frameworks, and trade as warfare were not confined to the Atlantic World. The
European struggle for profit and power was a global struggle. Nevertheless, the
prominence of merchant networks over joint stock companies for direct trade to
Europe; shifts in intellectual, moral and religious conceptions of trade and luxury;
the settlement of Europeans, particularly in North America; and the forced migration
of Africans as slaves, particularly to South America and the West Indies, all built on
one another to set Atlantic commercial culture off from European trade with Asia.
North America and the western coast of Africa became massive new markets for
European goods, much more important than the markets offered by enslaved Africans
or the populations of Asia. These expanding consumer markets made the Atlantic
World an important subculture of global commerce, and the British increasingly
dominant within that subculture.
P RACTICE AN D P RO F IT
Between the 1500s and the 1850s, Atlantic merchants transformed natural harbours
into entrepot port towns to spread their networks of family, finance and trade. For
Atlantic merchants, negotiation was not an abstract concept. Merchants constantly
negotiated to enhance their social and financial credit, settle methods and rates of
payment, buy and sell merchandise, and procure shipping. The sort of line often
posited as modern today between business and personal affairs barely existed, if it
existed at all. Trade depended on kinship ties and the establishment of personal
credit – the lifeblood of the system. Establishing credit involved particular sets of
performances and material displays that differed little in purpose across the time and
space of the Atlantic World. The general practices of shipping, too, changed little
before the middle of the nineteenth century. The most dramatic changes occurred,
instead, in retailing, where many new institutions and advertising tactics served and
encouraged consumer demand.
Merchants centralized Atlantic commercial functions in leading European cities
such as Seville, Amsterdam and London; colonial economic functions in local port
towns; and daily activities in their counting house residences. Characteristic of the
551
major European entrepots that would follow it, Seville’s population tripled in size
during the sixteenth century. A host of Genoese, Portuguese and other European
merchants established enclaves in the city. In the mid-seventeenth century, Amsterdam
displaced Seville as the leading centre of trade and finance in the Atlantic World by
utilizing a relatively open trading system and offering the most secure bank, the most
capricious stock exchange, and the most developed insurance market. Amsterdam
was also a hub of commercial information; published price lists, for instance,
circulated from 1585.22 In the eighteenth century, London, the Western Europe’s
largest metropolis and seat of commerce and government for an empire, quickly
becoming the world’s most powerful, usurped Amsterdam. As much as one-quarter
of London’s nearly 1 million inhabitants depended on commerce. And, according to
one estimate, one in six male Britons in the eighteenth century lived in the city at
some stage of their lives. Several thousand merchants from Britain, Europe and the
Americas met daily on the Royal Exchange’s quadrangle to swap letters, bills of
exchange, stocks, goods, political petitions and gossip. The Exchange and its vicinity
offered highly developed capital and commodity markets, several major insurers, and
a range of banking services. Additionally, a slew of increasingly sophisticated printed
circulars, such as Lloyd’s List begun in 1692, distributed the details of ship
movements, exchange rates, bullion prices and commercial news gathered from far-
flung networks of correspondents.23 Great London merchants had fortunes surpassing
a half million pounds, several times the wealth of their colonial associates.24
Yet merchants in the colonial ports of all of the European powers played a critical
dual role by simultaneously de-centralizing Atlantic trade and centralizing local trade.
Generally, merchants did not prefer to pass all their goods through one primary
imperial port. Instead, depending on the Atlantic currents and seasons, imperial legal
restrictions, and one’s willingness to trade evasively, merchants shipped goods as
directly as possible from the regional port nearest the site of production to the port
where the goods were most in demand. As in the leading ports of Europe, colonial port
towns offered an enterprising merchant connections to government officials, financiers
and consumers, as well as a critical mass of other merchants to associate or compete
with. Many merchants acted both on their own account and as commission merchants
or agents for other merchants, with the commission trade rising and falling in particular
trades and ports at different times. Merchants congregated at coffee houses where they
discussed trade, posted notices, sought out ship captains, and increasingly in the
eighteenth century, read the local financial papers. While a quality port provided the
foundation for urban growth, a city’s success depended on the quantity of raw
materials it could draw in and its access to markets in its rural hinterland.25
Individual merchants often centralized their work and family life in the same
building, reflecting the extent to which trading made up a complete lifestyle. Clerks’
offices generally occupied the first floor with the merchant’s living accommodations
above. Marriages often occurred between strategically associated merchant families,
solidifying social, economic and political connections. Wives primarily looked after
domestic responsibilities and managed household servants. Nevertheless, they often
gained considerable knowledge of the family enterprise from their proximity to the
book-keeping and business conversations of their husbands. Throughout the Atlantic
World women could and did directly manage commercial concerns, often when their
husbands were ill, abroad or deceased. Additionally, countless women often managed
552
retail operations on accounts independent from their husbands.26 Merchants

frequently apprenticed sons, nephews, grandchildren or the children of friends in
their counting offices to learn reading, writing and accounting. Eventually, merchants
dispatched some of these young men as supercargos to gain additional experience to
become partners, agents in distant ports, or independent merchants.27 The broad
characteristics of these relationships changed little until the middle of the nineteenth
century when new commercial organizations and the increasingly common separation
of a merchant’s workplace from the home dovetailed with larger societal changes in
the doctrine of separate spheres, at least in ideology, if not clearly in fact.28
A merchant’s household needed to look wealthy and reputable, not just for reasons
of personal vanity or social status, but because financial credit largely depended on
the appearance of social credit and limited risk. The appearance of frivolous or
tasteless spending had a negative effect on one’s credit, and thus displays of wealth
were ideally also displays of responsibility and virtue. While conspicuous consumption
and virtue may appear to be mutually exclusive, a social code laying out proper
behaviour and spending was negotiated throughout the Atlantic World.29 By spending
on tasteful and virtuous items one’s credit was enhanced not impugned. Expensive
musical instruments, books and curiosities most displayed the virtuous characteristics
of a family of polite learning. A wealthy merchant also displayed virtue in his family’s
taste for stylish architecture, gardens, furniture, dress, carriages and civic
improvements. Not only did one look reputable by showcasing good taste, knowing
the fashionable market signified likely success in buying and selling goods to satisfy
consumers. Spending needed to be complemented by a steady demeanor and carefully
phrased letters and conversations, performances for associates and customers alike.30
Such appearances, along with the recommendations of others, underpinned social
credit, which, in turn, underpinned a merchant’s financial credit and business
opportunities. Much like merchants, labourers, artisans and others increasingly
needed to establish, project and evaluate social credit to obtain and give financial
credit for the goods and services that they desired. The widespread policy of
imprisoning merchants and consumers who failed to meet their obligations reflected
the lack of distinction between an individual and his or her financial credit.31
From the Portuguese, to the Dutch, to the British, merchants were caught in an
awkward social and economic position dependent on paper and fraught with risk.
Merchants enjoyed more wealth than the mass of the population, but typically less
than the aristocracy. The value of land, the mainstay of aristocratic wealth in Europe,
and of planter wealth in the Americas, increased slowly and more or less constantly.
Merchant wealth, in contrast, was tied up primarily in commercial papers and
merchandise which could change instantly from being assets to liabilities at any time.32
A severely limited supply of gold and silver coins in many colonies made commercial
paper particularly crucial from trans-Atlantic trade to the smallest transactions
between shopkeepers and consumers. Merchants used bills of exchange, based on
personal credit, as their primary tools for commercial transactions. A bill of exchange
involved often four parties. The merchant paying for the goods (the payer) purchased
a bill of exchange from a nearby second individual (the drawer) who was owed money
by a third individual (the drawee) living near the seller of the goods (the payee). The
payer sent the bill of exchange to the payee, who presented it to the drawee for
payment at a specified time. The transaction paralleled the use of a cheque if one
553
imagines the payer’s bank as the drawer and the payee’s bank as the drawee. Without
an international banking system, negotiating bills of exchange required both good
credit and a network of trusted associates.33 As one merchant firm wrote, ‘there can be
no connection in trade where there is not confidence.’34 Bills of exchange, even backed
by family or trusted friends, added a substantial level of risk as a party might go
bankrupt or otherwise be unwilling or unable to pay his or her liabilities. Defaulted
payments put other creditor merchants at risk. One merchant bankruptcy within a
long chain of credit could bring down several merchants at once.35
Few merchants enjoyed stable wealth and none enjoyed the benefits of modern
limited liability to protect their families from business failures. One study has shown
that the majority of British trading families suffered a major financial collapse during
the period, and these findings could likely be replicated throughout the Atlantic
World.36 To maintain, let alone increase their incomes, merchants needed to be
constantly buying and selling goods within the constraints of their credit and the
availability of shipping. Profits depended on good advice, instincts, timely market
news from one’s network, and chance. Although, as Ian Steele has explained, the
Atlantic was in many ways more a highway than a barrier, communication was
inconsistent, often incomplete, and regularly out of date.37 Goods could thus be
poorly chosen, bought too dearly, or sold too cheaply in a suddenly glutted market,
in addition to the risks of loss at sea through shipwreck, privateers or pirates. The
only protection came from the widespread expansion of often costly and unreliable
insurance. French rates, for instance, rose as high as 40 per cent when the country
was at war. Even such high rates did not guarantee protection; insurers frequently
went bankrupt, and during the Seven Years’ War those still in business stopped
issuing policies.38
The willingness to face such risks might appear surprising; merchants, however,
lived in a world in which planning for the long term was imprecise at best and
pointless at worst. Multiple commissions, chains of bills of exchange, and transaction
cycles lasting several months or years confused not only profits and losses but
assessments of risk. In a world where sickness and death came quickly and often, the
potential for handsome short-term gains trumped long-term fears of over-extension.
Finally, a widespread belief that kin and friends should help a distressed associate
and his family diffused risk. Failure, after all, could happen to anyone, at any time,
and be caused by the collapse or death of a party far along a chain of bills. Allowing
the total collapse of an associate’s business, moreover, could drag down one’s own.39
Once a merchant had negotiated bills and purchased goods, shipping had its own
subculture involving shipowners, ship husbands, captains, supercargoes and ship and
dock hands. Many merchants doubled as shipowners, but instead of owning ships
outright they often owned shares in one or more vessels through what the Dutch
called rederij. In both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades individuals ranging from
butchers to aristocrats also purchased shares. The owner with the most shares served
as the ship’s husband and took added responsibility for managing the vessel as a
business concern. Husbands advertised available freight tonnage in coffee houses,
newspapers, and through word of mouth for one or more intended destinations. A
merchant might accompany the goods or hire a supercargo for the voyage to oversee
the unloading and sale of the cargo at the destination and to purchase and load new
merchandise. The captain or ship master was responsible for the safety of the ship
554
and command of the crew, although on slaving voyages captains often managed the
sale of the slaves as well. Additionally, captains often managed side deals on their
own accounts. On board, the captain, supercargo, and well-to-do passengers kept
private cabins, but frequently dined and socialized together. They expected, and
typically received, respect and deference from the crew.40 Ship hands saw the world,
but lived a risky life with low pay, poor rations, cramped space, and the threats of
corporal punishment, illness and shipwreck. Life at sea and their own lively subculture
made them immediately recognizable on land. The historian Charles Boxer has
suggested that seventeenth-century Dutch efficiency in trade was due, in particular,
to the severe exploitation of Dutch seamen.41
Many aspects of Atlantic commercial culture changed little throughout the period,
but the rapid expansion of trade occurred alongside radical changes in retailing. The
rise of the ready-made goods trade as well as an increasing separation between places
of production and places of retail transformed how merchants and consumers
interacted. Independent shop retailers and peddlers appeared in increasing numbers
in cities and towns in the Netherlands, Britain and France, and in the European
colonies across the Atlantic as early as the sixteenth century. By the middle of the
eighteenth century retail shops were omnipresent, and large wholesalers had emerged
to manage and distribute a growing range of products newly available in standardized
cuts, sizes and qualities. Shopkeepers arranged such products in impressive interiors
and window displays designed to stimulate consumer desire.42 In the middle and late
eighteenth century, print advertising became essential as a means of informing
customers at each point in the retail chain of the lines of products available. North
American colonial newspapers, in particular, carried a staggering quantity of
advertisements with increasingly sophisticated presentations. Merchants emphasized
the recent arrival and metropolitan origin of their produce, and promised the best
prices, most fashionable selection, and longest credit. Imported goods had special
importance in colonial societies that boasted few high-end artisan producers.43
Looking to take better advantage of such markets by avoiding merchant middlemen,
British manufacturers in the middle of the eighteenth century began dispatching their
own agents to sell products directly to colonial shopkeepers. Agents and competing
merchants circulated sample books and fabric swatches from which wholesalers and
retailers throughout the Atlantic World could order specific goods and patterns.44
When combined, these many changes in retail practice helped to remake consumption
habits, urban landscapes and popular fashions.
European, African and American merchants developed a distribution network
spread between various entrepots and across the Atlantic Ocean. This enduring and
diffused system depended on credit and personal connections. Merchants used major
and minor port cities to centralize market functions, economic decision making and
commercial services, while they used their network connections to decentralize trade
flows. Negotiations occurred through letters and personal conversations at all stages
of a transaction. Trade depended, more than anything, on the negotiation of social
and financial credit, which themselves were tightly intermingled. Merchants,
therefore, worked diligently to establish and maintain not only their good reputations,
but the networks of associates necessary to protect them if their reputations became
sullied, often due to the failure of merchants far distant on the credit chain. This
largely material-based performance of one’s values and identities would come to
555
characterize Atlantic consumer culture. Indeed, the most remarkable changes to

commercial practices during the period came in retailing the consumer goods that the
ever expanding networks of merchants moved throughout the Atlantic World.
FAITH, MORALS A ND M ARKE TS

Increased trade and consumption did not go unquestioned. People disagreed sharply
over the morality of profits, markets and new consumer goods, debates which
ultimately played into the economic success of the Netherlands and, especially,
Britain. On the one hand, the ideal qualities of a merchant: stability, honesty,
frankness, charity, frugality and humility, varied little amongst the European powers,
and closely followed the ideal qualities set forth for all individuals in the Catholic and
Protestant faiths. On the other hand, successful merchants also needed to be highly
competitive, guarded in the information that they shared, aggressive negotiators,
frequent creditors and debtors and projectors of wealth.45 As trade and consumer
culture expanded, tensions between these two sets of qualities spilled over from
merchant life to the life of a growing cross section of individuals. Religious, intellectual
and political leaders became increasingly concerned with the moral and financial
realities of burgeoning market economies. To use the terms of the historian Henry
Clark, the ‘gap’ between the ‘moral infrastructure’ and daily commercial life caused
considerable anxiety amongst thinkers and leaders in Atlantic communities
throughout the period; how they bridged the gap, however, varied considerably.46
In the mid-seventeenth century the Jewish and New Christian Portuguese merchant
network buoying up the Portuguese and Spanish states drained through the gap
between ideals and realities forced wider by the Iberian Inquisition. Iberian merchants
had been lobbying Spanish leaders for freer trade, the end of royal regulation over the
timing of shipping, and the option to form joint stock companies to compete with
Dutch and English merchants. Many in the church and court, however, feared
merchant influence over public policy. They suspected merchants of working against
the Catholic Church and the crown by syphoning off wealth through credit, usury
and exchange unmoored from physical production. Thousands of persecuted, wealthy
and well-connected merchants flowed out of the gap into the relative tolerance of
protestant Northern Europe at precisely the moment that France, the Netherlands
and England began to exert themselves as major players in Atlantic commerce.47
Ultimately, neither France nor the Netherlands made the most attractive harbours for
merchants fleeing persecution. The former with potential advantages in population
size, productive capacity and state strength, lacked beneficial commercial policies; the
latter with beneficial commercial policies lacked a powerful state.
French prejudice against commerce was less clearly an issue of religion than of
monarchical conceit. Instead of depending upon the fortunes and financial expertise
of merchants, the French court maintained both revenue and obedience by selling
offices and charges to the nobility.48 Arguments that self-interest and the interests of
the public good were mutually exclusive dominated French political economy. French
leaders widely denounced merchants and financiers as greedy, vain and profane.
Those who believed in the competing theories of the moralistes and who hoped to
emulate the commercial successes of the Netherlands and Britain struggled to gain
influence over French policy. As France became an increasingly commercial society,
556
rapidly expanding its Atlantic trade from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth
century, the gap between public ideals and economic reality continued to grow.49
In the Netherlands, in contrast, little such gap existed. Dutch thinkers, artists and
governments celebrated the commercial basis and success of the republic.50 Many
Europeans in the sixteenth century described the Dutch as a most frugal people, but
with economic growth in the seventeenth century came new attitudes towards
consumption. Calvinist and humanist critics of heightened levels of consumer
spending lashed out with sermons, rituals and engravings: increased spending was a
sign of decreased virtue, which could lead only to public rot and decline. Yet few
seemed to heed such distressing prognoses.51 Writers of panegyrics, painters and
engravers celebrated the activity, wealth and size of Dutch ports, and eagerly depicted
the great range of commodities that poured into them. In Jurriaen van Streek’s Still
Life with Moor and Porcelain Vessels (c. 1670) the objects of commerce, including
oranges, oysters, glassware, silver, porcelain and fabrics literally spill off of the table.
A slave smiles submissively suggesting the basis of Dutch West Indian power and
inviting the viewer to share. The partially consumed abundance bathed in a warm
glow appears more cheerful than ominous. Such still lifes, popular as the Dutch rose
to economic prominence in the seventeenth century, and different from the
predominantly religious painting of Portugal, celebrated wealth, consumption and
imperial power typically with little overt sense of criticism.52
Simultaneously, other Dutch etchers, painters and architects emphasized the
importance and glory of seaborne commerce. Artists created a new genre of imagery
fusing highly realistic and accurate depictions of ships with dramatic settings. Reinier
Nooms’ etchings of commercial and military ships were extraordinarily popular,
attesting to the public’s interest in celebrating Dutch command of the seas. Similarly,
Hendrick Vroom’s View of the River Ij Near Amsterdam (c. 1630) depicts countless
vessels crowding out the panorama of the city behind, and emphasizing the source of
Amsterdam’s wealth.53 Prominent wind-blown flags leave little doubt of a powerful
sense of pride in Dutch commercial achievements. In his other works, Vroom’s
interchangeable use of bright blowing flags, warm golden lighting, great puffy clouds
and tumultuous storms to depict heroic commercial and military struggles on the sea
set the pattern for dozens of painters who followed. Dutch architecture, too,
celebrated the dual economic and political importance of trade. Amsterdam’s new
town hall finished in 1655 and located in immediate proximity to the city’s commercial
weigh-house, provided a striking manifestation of the centrality of trade to the
public’s identity. Yet while the republic sought to enable commerce and spread a
vision of reduced international trade barriers and vigorous consumption, it lacked
the financial, regulatory and military strength of the French state, and ultimately
more importantly, the English.54
Merchants increasingly found the most supportive landing across the English
Channel where popular beliefs, economic philosophy and a powerful state combined.
Already, by the end of the sixteenth century, few in England seriously doubted the
value of market-based trade, or the importance of a strong state in regulating and
enforcing the honest behaviour of both buyers and sellers. A fundamental humanist
faith in contracts and market negotiations encouraged a sense of moral equality
amongst individuals, a dramatic shift from a pre-modern, pan-European culture that
had emphasized social inequalities. Indeed, the term ‘interest’ suggested not usury but
557
a positive co-dependence whereby one person literally took a vested interest in the
success of another. Popular portrayals of the landed upper classes as unproductive
and outside the relationship of moral equals implicit in market society existed across
Europe, but the English Revolution permanently embedded these beliefs into
England’s ruling ideology. The protectionists and anti-Orangist revolutionaries who
gave rise to the Navigation Acts validated commerce as a national goal as well as
merchants and mariners as national heroes. Upon the restoration of the monarchy,
Charles II, the self-proclaimed ‘King of Trade’, entered London under triumphal
arches depicting commercial and naval scenes that left little doubt of the centrality of
merchant commerce to the English state. Similarly, the importance of commerce to
the public good figured in much of Restoration theatre.55 By 1720 belief in the market
economy had become so firmly entrenched that the dramatic collapse of the South
Sea Bubble, which brought down thousands of investors and battered the British
economy, did not lead to a tear down of the commercial system.
The Bubble and other collapses did, however, foreground the risks of trade, the
potential fictionality of wealth, and the importance of Christian teachings against the
vices of mammon, covetousness and luxury. With market-based commerce established
as both an individual and public good, questions about the Godliness of its corollary,
consumption, received considerable attention. Some preachers attempted to reconcile
these concerns, and such men as Locke, Milton, Defoe and Addison emphasized
frugality to attempt to balance the risks and benefits inherent in a market-based
economy. Defoe, for example, argued that luxuries stimulated economic growth and
relieved the poverty of artisans, corrupting only those few consumers who overspent.
Meanwhile, building on the English faith in the market and belief in the ordained
morality of economic exchange, such thinkers as Thomas Mun, Jacob Vanderlint and
Edward Misselden drafted a new economic science that encouraged greater
consumption to generate economic growth. Such ideas caused little stir when
published in economic tracts, but when the Dutch-born Bernard Mandeville claimed
that heady spending and not Calvinist frugality drove Dutch economic success in his
early eighteenth century, The Fable of the Bees or, Private Vices, Public Benefits,
intended for widespread public distribution, he was attacked as an immoral advocate
of vice and debilitating foreignness.56
During the eighteenth century, however, the discordance between support for
market trade on the one hand and the denunciation of luxury on the other harmonized
as the terms of what Maxine Berg has called ‘the luxury debates’ shifted across
Europe and throughout the Atlantic World. Concerns over debilitating vice continued
but were increasingly displaced by the growth of interest in taste, comfort and
aesthetics.57 Many Protestant Evangelical millenarians and supporters of the
Newtonian Enlightenment who believed in a non-interventionist God increasingly
also stressed that the market-based system dependent on consumption for its
expansion mirrored the natural universal system of life.58 In a sermon to the merchants
of Bristol, for instance, the Reverend Alexander Catcott posited a line of godly
commercial activity extending from the Biblical city of Tyre to the Britain of his
present, quickly brushing aside Isaiah’s contention that Tyre was ripe for God’s
judgement.59 Additionally, the imagery of increasing British commerce and maritime
power infused British painting, as in the Netherlands a century before. Heroic and
patriotic scenes of naval engagements, such as Dominic Serres’ The Second Battle of
558
Finisterrer, 4 October 1747, and serene views of commercial ports, such as Samuel
Atkins’ A View of the Pool Below London Bridge (1790), increased dramatically
over the eighteenth century. Collectively these patriotic works represented the
interdependent duality of British seaborne power: force and commerce.
During the French Revolution, engravings, such as Isaac Cruikshank’s French
Happiness/English Misery (1793) patriotically celebrated the generous levels of
consumption in Britain made possible by commerce and a strong state. Cruikshank
ironically labelled emaciated Frenchmen fighting anarchically for a frog’s leg as
happy, in comparison to a party of jovial, fat Englishmen living under the banner of
constitutional rule and supplied with great roasts, beer, white linen, and even an
imported bird in a cage, as miserable. Living in plenty was not immoral nor simply
fun, it was a sign of Britain’s greatness. The increasing popularity of Adam Smith’s
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations that packaged a
range of economic and moral arguments for the mutually beneficial relationship
amongst trade, public wealth, self-interest and consumption, further underscored the
entrenchment of this new attitude towards consumer society.
The benefits of the market, however, still needed to be justly distributed, a point
that became increasingly important in late-eighteenth-century attacks on the British
East India Company and the slave trade. Both concerns grew out of the ideology of a
moral political economy valued in Britain and in revolutionary America. British
Americans came to see the East India Company monopoly over tea imports as a type
of slavery, and as unjustly rewarding a company acting on non-free principles, both
in its trade monopoly and its non-democratic government over India. During the
non-importation movements the Boston Tea Party colonists made a moral political
point about the freedom of the market. Britons at home likewise increasingly agitated
against the East India Company monopoly and in favour of freer trade; with one
alderman noting, for instance, that ‘so soon as monopoly ceased to be necessary, it
ceased to be just’.60 Similarly, for most of the previous three centuries, the questions
of morality implicit in the slave trade, although voiced, did not gain traction. With
the alignment of Protestant theories of God-given liberty and market principles as
part of the moral foundation of society, came growing acceptance that individuals
must have legal free choice in their economic affairs and that both buyer and seller
benefited from a market value for goods and labour.61 The end of both the East India
Company monopoly and the slave trade within less than a decade marked the
maturing development of belief in the morality of market culture throughout the
British Atlantic and indeed beyond.
The concordance of relative religious tolerance, popular faith in the social and
economic importance of the market, trust in Newtonian science, belief in a Protestant
natural order, and acceptance of the morality of consumption provided an
environment conducive to the growth of British Atlantic commerce. Similar ideas
existed in the Netherlands, but in Britain the gap between moral ideals and economic
growth had been bridged with the aid of, and to the aid of, a powerful central state.
The celebration of trade as patriotic and of a new market-oriented morality appeared
in painting, architecture, theatre and literature in the Netherlands and Britain.
Market morality was contested, but a major shift occurred in both countries as
consumption went from being seen as corrupting, to potentially generative of liberty
and justice. This new morality lent power to calls for the banning of British imports
559
into the Thirteen Colonies before the American Revolution, and the ending of the
East India Company monopoly and the slave trade. Britons could purchase free
labour sugar and Wedgwood porcelain branded in favour of abolitionism to make
political points. Consumer choice and market justice had become particularly Atlantic
moral obligations to be enforced by the state.
M I G R A T ION B ASED P RODUCTIO N AND CO NS U M P TIO N

State and religious leaders could support, displace, or destroy Atlantic merchants,
but they struggled to control consumption. Sumptuary laws, increasingly common
throughout much of Europe before the seventeenth century as a reaction against
rising levels of consumption, disappeared, first in Britain and later in Continental
Europe, as they dropped out of step with a spreading popular belief in the morality
of market culture and consumerism.62 By yoking a relatively tolerant and powerful
state to the pursuit of self-interest, large colonial markets, and the widespread
development of diversified and decentralized colonial trade, Britain developed a
new model of Atlantic commercial culture particularly in contrast to the core urban
centres, large bureaucracies, bilateral trade and transfer of precious metals favoured
by Spanish rulers.63 Although Europe had been the dominant locus of British trade
for centuries, the eighteenth-century growth of British North America firmly
established the potential of distant colonies as sites not only of production but of
valuable and intense consumption. The value of these rapidly growing consumer
markets transformed the importance of the Americas and of Atlantic commerce.
While some differences existed in consumption tastes from colony to colony and
nation to nation, differences in rates of consumption primarily depended upon
economic opportunity and the availability of goods. Knowing how to spend became
essential to the construction of self not only for the European middling ranks but
for people ranging from African slaves to Native Americans to colonial farmers.
Atlantic merchants and colonial producers encouraged and fuelled these markets,
while, in a reciprocal action, the ever growing demand for new goods stimulated
further trade.
Massive increases in Atlantic slave plantation agriculture during the long eighteenth
century helped to transform early-modern consumer culture by expanding its reach
downwards on the social spectrum and outwards around the Atlantic.64 Under brutal
and tragic conditions slaves produced goods that had previously been considered
luxuries, such as tobacco, sugar, chocolate, coffee and mahogany in such quantities
that they could become relatively widespread consumer items through a trans-
cultural, trans-imperial and trans-Atlantic process of adaptation and adoption.65
During the eighteenth century, European imports of tobacco, for example, increased
from 50 million to 125 million pounds, while coffee imports increased from 2 million
to 120 million pounds. Sugar, desired to sweeten coffee, chocolate and tea, grew in
popularity most remarkably in Britain, with consumption rising to over 20 pounds
per person per year. Euro-American consumer culture depended, not only on Atlantic
production, but on products such as tea, porcelains and fabrics imported from China
and India. These goods were combined into often elaborate social contexts, such as
the porcelain tea service or the tobacco snuff box or pipe. Demand thus begot
demand.66 As the historian David Hancock describes, producers, merchants and
560
consumers engaged in a shared cultural conversation to introduce and refine new

goods and fashions.67 These goods, moreover, increasingly ‘mediated the relations
between individuals and the social worlds they inhabited’.68
The growth of market-based consumer culture occurred first in the Dutch Republic,
but most remarkably in British North America, where it gained a critical economic
importance.69 London served as the British empire’s leading node of political power,
commercial exchange, and manufacturing capacity; it was not, however, the only
node, nor did the benefits of empire flow primarily one way.70 The British American
colonies enjoyed rapid economic development and rising real wealth levels while
other colonies fell into economic decline. Entrepreneurial merchants, tradesmen,
planters and industrialists took their wealth and ideas throughout the British empire
with faith in the protection of the British navy and the assumed tolerance of British
rulers. The widespread growth of small private farms on land secured often violently
and unscrupulously from Native Americans offered a source of economic stability to
the lower sorts, who in turn offered important markets for West Indian commodities
and manufactured goods from Europe and Asia.71 Although they may have found
themselves geographically in the margins, many white migrants eventually gained
economic agency in the colonies.72 Colonists purchased a wide and growing range of
imported consumer goods including cloth, shoes, furniture, soap, cooking utensils
and dishware. One study of the Chesapeake suggests that over half of all expenditures
were on such imported goods.73 During the eighteenth century, and continuing after
the American Revolution, the North American share of British exports grew from 5.7
to over 25 per cent, challenging continental Europe as Britain’s main trading partner.74
While British manufacturers and merchants clearly benefited in supplying them, these
vibrant colonial communities belie simple conceptions of Britain as a wealthy core
with a marginalized and dependent empire.
The advantages in colonial market size, freedom from religious persecution, and
effective government increasingly enjoyed by British merchants and consumers
appears clearly when contrasted against the situation of their French competitors. In
1700, non-slave settlers in British North America already outnumbered those in New
France perhaps more than ten to one. This relative imbalance occurred for a variety
of reasons, including a widespread French antipathy to emigration, and royal
prohibitions banning Jews and Protestant Huguenots, in many ways the most eager
migrants, from settling in New France. Several hundred thousand Huguenots left
France to settle in the Netherlands, Britain and the British North American colonies,
creating and expanding networks of French kin and associates but also further
bolstering Dutch and British trading connections and capital. Despite dramatic
growth in French sugar imports from the West Indies in the first half of the eighteenth
century, an emphasis on slave plantation agriculture produced weaker colonial
consumer markets. European settler colonists in North America tended to consume
more. Major participants in the fur and sugar trades, French merchants operated
under the constraints of small colonial markets, disruptive prejudices, and often
unfavourable political policies. 75
Consumer culture varied based on local conditions not only from one side of the
Atlantic to the other, but from empire to empire, and colony to colony within empires.
Individuals readily adapted fashions and the meaning of goods to their local
environments, ideas and practices.76 That Africans frequently assigned much higher
561
value than Europeans to manufactured ‘baubles’, was not a sign of weaknesses, but
an indication of the specificity of their local demand structure. Indeed, the terms of
the slave trade increasingly favoured and profited those African leaders who played
an active part in shaping and controlling it.77 The French in New France, moreover,
lived differently from the Spanish in New Spain and the English in New England,
who lived differently from the Dutch in New Netherland, and indeed, from the
English in Jamaica.78 The importance of the intersection of imperial heritage and
local conditions in the colonies has been explained by several historians.79 David
Hume’s discounting of the effects of climate and geography, and his observation that
‘the same set of manners will follow a nation, and adhere to them over the whole
globe’ captured an imperial ideal that played out differently on the ground.80
Nevertheless, in the context of commercial culture such differences should not be
overstated. Commerce, trade and centralized production of everything from West
Indian sugar to Irish linen, Dutch tulips and British cutlery caused a convergence in
the material life of Atlantic consumers, if not for those enslaved. The products
available and popular amongst Europeans throughout the Atlantic World, as well as
general consumer attitudes, did not differ dramatically. The Dutch in New Amsterdam
adapted when conquered by the English, as did the French inhabitants of Grenada
after the Seven Years’ War. The latter sent a memorial to the British government
pledging ‘to serve their new country with their persons, their talents, and their
Fortunes’, requesting only the right to remain Catholic.81 Such offers were in part
about self-preservation, but in offering their fortunes they likely expected to gain
from better access to British trading networks and consumer goods.82 Atlantic
merchants eagerly traded with each other across imperial boundaries by legal or
illegal means, and eighteenth-century consumers surveyed newspapers overflowing
with advertisements boasting of the finest new importations from rival empires.
The origins of the goods were certainly global; nevertheless, the large settler
colonies and European- and American-owned slave plantations made this new
consumer culture far more prevalent in the Atlantic. By the middle of the eighteenth
century thinkers and policy makers in other Atlantic powers saw the British culture
of imperial commerce and state support as so successful that they tried to literally and
figuratively translate it to their own economic and imperial situations.83 In early-
nineteenth-century Latin America, British merchants replicated in part their own
success in North America by importing vast quantities of new mass-produced goods,
further spreading the Atlantic consumer economy. By the middle of the century,
Britain provided half of all of Brazil’s imports. Slowly, India and to a lesser extent
China became sizeable consumer markets for European goods. London’s merchant
bankers meanwhile, such as the Barings and Rothschilds, supported the development
of industry and railways throughout the Atlantic and beyond, replicating new
patterns and enhancing interconnections.84 The middle of the nineteenth century
marked a new phase characterized by a short-lived but relatively open British
commercial framework, and more importantly, dramatic advances in steamship and
rail transportation, telegraph communication, industrialization and urbanization
across Europe and America.85 From 1400 to 1850, merchants, consumers, producers
and imperial states had transformed the Atlantic from a world of strikingly different
cultures into a co-dependent market with a bewildering selection of broadly
standardized goods critical for the projection of one’s self.
562
CONCLU S IO N
All of the major Atlantic powers, including the early United States, traded and warred
actively around the globe; the Atlantic was not, as Peter Coclanis has rightly pointed
out, completely a world apart.86 Many polities in Asia had systems of exchange and
regional trading networks before seaborne European incursions in the sixteenth
century. Due to the strength of their own manufacturing systems and cultures, people
in these non-Atlantic networks had little interest in buying Atlantic goods, but they
had plenty that people in the Atlantic world wanted. While thus tied to the Middle
East, Asia, and Indonesia, people around the Atlantic participated in a shared set of
habits and practices of trade, commercial thought and migration-based production
and consumption patterns that made up a specific sub-culture.
North and South America, for reasons of disease and technological inequality,
provided in European imaginations, if not always in fact, welcoming terrain for mass
settlement. Notwithstanding their frequent positions as outcasts, radicals and slaves,
Atlantic migrants brought with them many of the ideological and cultural norms of
the lands which they left. For European migrants, in particular, this meant extending,
adapting and at times re-inventing the cultural patterns of commerce common in
Europe. European merchants trading to the Caribbean and North and South America
typically found not only eager markets for new world products in Europe, but
growing markets for old world products in the Americas and Africa. Yet the Atlantic
World was bifurcated in theory if not always in practice by the competing claims of
rival peoples and European empires with their own trade policies. European empires,
with few exceptions, attempted to constrain trade between empires. Economic
warfare went hand-in-glove with military warfare. Also with few exceptions,
regulations were difficult to enforce and only partially successful. The similarities,
indeed, the interoperability, legally or not, amongst the commercial cultures of all the
Atlantic powers from Africa to the USA are too often lost by nationally based histories
and by historical questions that emphasize change and difference. While different
motivations for expansion, modes of possession, and intellectual currents should not
be overlooked, fundamentally, all of the Atlantic powers depended directly on a
broadly similar commercial culture for their success and failure.
Before the middle of the nineteenth century the leading imperial powers changed,
but the practices of networked private merchants established by the Portuguese in the
sixteenth century proved remarkably enduring. A failure to reconcile the commerce
conducted by such merchants and the consumption that it supported with moral and
political thought in Portugal, Spain and France created dangerous fissures. In the British
Atlantic these gaps were bridged with a new market-based morality in an environment
boasting a strong central state and support for an expensive navy capable of defending
and expanding commerce. As the nineteenth century progressed, Britain expanded its
influence in South America, and replicated its North American settlement patterns in
Australia and New Zealand, encouraging, often violently, a global commercial culture
of private trade. New theories of political economy, business and labour forms, and
technologies started a new phase in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Atlantic
commercial culture that from the earliest days of Portuguese exploration had
transformed and been transformed by the wider world of which it was a part, fell away,
taking with it merchants like Boardman and the tortures of slave plantations alike. As
563
America, Germany, Russia and Japan industrialized, Britain’s economic leadership role
too fell away. The legacy of the commercial culture of the Early Modern Atlantic,
however, has been enduring, not least where fortunes are made and lost in stock
markets, shopping malls displace Native American burial grounds and communist
ideologies, and the wounds of a commoditized humanity continue to hurt.
Figure 30.1 Ralph Earl, Elijah Boardman, 1789

© 2014. Image copyright the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
NOTE S
1 The author thanks the members of the Mellon Workshop on the Global Nineteenth
Century at the University of California, Riverside who read and commented most helpfully
upon an early draft of this chapter.
2 For earlier colonial American examples of merchant portraits see, Roger B. Stein, Seascape
and the American Imagination, New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1975, pp. 10–15. Asian
merchants posed in substantially different clothing and did not necessarily see a standing
posture as one of authority and confidence. European merchants in Asia also often posed
564
with elements of Asian clothing and decor to signify their position outside of the Atlantic.
Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art
and the Prospect of India, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007, p. 72. For an example of a
Dutch merchant posing under an Asian umbrella and pointing to his European vessels see,
Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age, New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 116. For an example of a painting of a British merchant
with hookahs and other Asian objects see, Charles D’Oyly, 1820s, WD 4403, f.40, Asia,
Pacific, and Africa Collections, British Library.
3 David Jaffee, ‘Changing Modes of Furnishing’ in Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg
(eds), Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European
and American Past, New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 82–83; Christopher John Murra,
Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, New York: Taylor & Francis, 2004, p. 895;
Eileen Rebeiro, ‘Elijah Boardman, 1789’, in Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser et al., Ralph Earl:
The Face of the Young Republic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 155–56.
Several studies explore the relationship between the Early Republic and Britain’s lasting
influence. See for examples, Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary
America Became a Postcolonial Nation, London: Oxford University Press, 2011; Elisa
Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America, Chicago: Chicago
4 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950, London: Chatto and Windus, pp. xviii,
232–42.
5 John Mein, A State of Importations From Great-Britain into the Port of Boston, Boston,
1770, p. 26–27.
6 Victor Lieberman, ‘Transcending East-West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in
Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas’, in Victor Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-
Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999, 28.
For examples of ocean and sea histories, see: Arne Bang-Andersen, Basil Greenhill, Egil
Harald Grude (eds), The North Sea: A Highway of Economic and Cultural Exchange,
Character-History, Stavanger: Norwegian University Press, 1985; Paul Butel, The Atlantic,
Ian Hamilton Grant (trans.) New York: Routledge, 1999; Satish Chandra (ed.), The
Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce and Politics, New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1987; K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An
Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1985; Ashin Das Gupta, India and the Indian Ocean World: Trade and Politics,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004; Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke,
Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2007; Om Prakash, Bullion for Goods: European and Indian Merchants in the Indian
Ocean Trade, 1500–1800, New Delhi: Manohar, 2004.
7 For the classic overview see, Charles Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825,
New York: Knopf, 1969, pp. 1–83.
8 M. D. D. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668, New York:
Routledge, 2005, pp. 147–48, 167–69, 180–81; Gunnar Dahl, Trade, Trust, and Networks:
Commercial Culture in Late Medieval Italy, Lund, Sweden: Nordic Academic Press, 1998;
Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002, pp. 169–88. On the role of the Genoese in the Atlantic see, Ruth
Pike, Enterprise and Adventure: The Genoese in Seville and the Opening of the New World,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain
and Spain in America, 1492–1830, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 18; Daviken
Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the
Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007,
pp. 65, 93, 105–30. The Portuguese did use slaves to create products to fuel their trade and
565
also pursued precious metals. The point remains, however, that their focus was dominating
global trade in the sixteenth century. Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 150–57, 308,
318–26. Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an
Introduction, Yvonne Freccero (trans.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970, pp. 79–157.
9 Butel, The Atlantic, pp. 69–74; Alejandro de la Fuente, César García del Pino, and
Bernardo Iglesias Delgado, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008, pp. 51, 64, 120, 127–30, 223–27.
10 Butel, The Atlantic, pp. 73, 89–91; Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 109–15.
11 Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of
the British Empire, 1480-1630, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 246–51.
On Dutch and French privateers see, Butel, The Atlantic, pp. 100–101, 116–17, 130. Philip J.
Stern, ‘British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections’, William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser., October 2006, vol. 63, no. 4, 694–710.
12 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 60–62, 181–85, 222–24, 320–21; Charles
Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600–1800, New York: Knopf, 1965, pp. 43–53;
Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763, 2nd ed., New York: Longman,
1984, pp. 172–76. Kenneth Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime
Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1985, pp. 316, 320–52, 360–61; Stern, ‘British Asia and British
Atlantic’, pp. 694–707. Henk den Heijr, ‘The Dutch West India Company, 1621–1791’,
in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven (eds), Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch
Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817, Boston: Brill, 2003, pp. 77–103.
13 Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 1930, Reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2001, pp. 47–48. On the need for export profits in New England see, Dwight B.
Heath (ed.), Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Bedford: Applewood
Books, 1963, pp. 16, 21, 33, 40. Additionally, both the Pilgrims and Puritans adopted
corporate models to govern the distribution of land seized from native Americans into
new towns for profit. John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship
and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century, Chapel Hill:
Published by the Institute of Early American History and Culture, by the University of
North Carolina Press, 1991, pp. 7–37, 79–86.
14 Henk den Heijr, ‘Dutch West India Company’, in Postma and Enthoven (eds), Riches from
Atlantic Commerce, pp. 93–103; Victor Enthoven, ‘An Assessment of Dutch Transatlantic
Commerce, 1585–1817’, in Postma and Enthoven (eds), Riches from Atlantic Commerce,
pp. 387–417. The Marquis of Pombal chartered several new Portuguese monopoly
companies to trade to South America in the 1760s. Briefly important, these companies
accounted for little of the Atlantic World’s overall trade and folded within a few decades;
Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 181–84, 192–93, 227. The Hudson’s Bay
Company did face competition, particularly from the Northwest Company from 1779 to
1821, when the two companies merged to restore a monopoly position.
15 Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the
Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713, New York: New York University, 2011,
esp. pp. 3–7, 13, 218–27.
16 Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–
1775, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, pp. 97, 397–98; Donna Merwick,
Possessing Albany, 1630-1710: The Dutch and English Experiences, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2003, pp. 188–285; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American
Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, New York: Norton, 1975, pp. 295–315;
Lawrence A. Harper, The English Navigation Laws: A Seventeenth Century Experiment in
Social Engineering, New York: Columbia University Press, 1939, pp. 239, 253; Ian K. Steele,
Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720,
566
Oxford: Clarendon, 1968, pp. 10–41; Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American
History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, p. 4:64.
17 Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, London: Macmillan, 1962, pp. 17, 395–406. On the Dutch see, Johannes
Postma and Victor Enthoven ‘Introduction’, in Postma and Enthoven (eds), Riches from
Atlantic Commerce, pp. 1–12; Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 280.
18 New attention is being paid to these debates. For more see the contributions to, ‘Forum:
Rethinking Mercantilism,’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., January 2012, vol. 69,
no. 1, 3–70.
19 Harper, English Navigation Laws, pp. 387–414; Davis, English Shipping, p. 393; William
Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production, and Consumption in England,
1640–1845, London: Oxford University, 2003, pp. 5–205; John Brewer, The Sinews of
Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989;
Koot, Empire at the Periphery, p. 185; James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French
in the Americas, 1670–1730, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 192–93.
20 Woodrow Borah, ‘The Mixing of Populations’, and Magnus Mörner, ‘Spanish Migration to
the New World Prior to 1800’, in Fredi Chiappelli (ed), First Images of America, 2 vols,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 2:707–22 and 737–82. On native
American enslavement see for examples, Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous
and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early
American History and Culture, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2012; Alan
Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South,
1670–1717, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002; William L. Sherman, Forced Native
Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1979; Stuart
B. Schwartz, ‘Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian
Responses in Northeastern Brazil’, American Historical Review, February 1978, vol. 83, no.
1, 43–79. Estimates of African enslavement numbers vary; see, Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘The
Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis’, Journal of African History, 1982, vol. 23,
no. 4, 494–500; Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa,
2nd ed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 19. For a brief overview of the
Afroeurasian slave trade see, Pier M. Larson, ‘African Diasporas and the Atlantic’, in Jorge
Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (eds), The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000,
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2007, pp. 134–35. For European Indian Ocean forced
migration and enslavement of Africans and others see, Richard B. Allen, ‘Satisfying the
“Want for Labouring People”: European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850’,
Journal of World History, 2010, vol. 21, no. 1, 59–68.
21 P. K. O’Brien and S. L. Engermen, ‘Exports and the Growth of the British Economy from
the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens’, in Barbara L. Solow (ed) Slavery and the
Rise of the Atlantic System, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 180–99.
22 Youssef Cassis, Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780–2005,
Jacqueline Collier (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 9–24; Simon
Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden
Age, New York: Knopf, 1987, pp. 345–50; Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, pp. 19–20.
23 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and
the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750, New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987, p. 21; Davis, English Shipping, pp. 34–36, 390; Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship,
p. 176; Neil McKendrick, ‘The Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century England’, in
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 21; Natasha Glaisyer, The Culture of
Commerce in England, 1660–1720, London: Boydell, 2006, pp. 27–36; John J. McCusker
and C. Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism, Amsterdam:
567
Rodopi, 1991, pp. 292–326; Larry Neal, ‘The Rise of a Financial Press: London and
Amsterdam, 1681–1810’, Business History, April 1988, vol. 30, no. 2, 165–75.
24 David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the
British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995,
p. 385; Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic
Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia, Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of
Early American History and Culture, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1986,
p. 128; Phyllis Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts
Merchants, 1670-1780, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 131.
25 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and
Community, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 1–93; Hancock, Citizens of
the World, pp. 86–89; Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit, pp. 41–47; Hunter, Purchasing
Identity, p. 87; Jacob Price, ‘Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns
in the Eighteenth Century’, Perspectives in American History, 1974, vol. 8, 130–70.
Historians have debated the shifting importance of commissions; see, R. C. Nash, ‘The
Organization of Trade and Finance in the British Atlantic Economy, 1600–1830’, in Peter
Coclanis (ed), The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries:
Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2005, pp. 95–133.
26 Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England,
1680–1780, Berkeley: University of California, 1996, pp. 125–46; Julie Hardwick, Family
Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 128–33.
27 Hancock, Citizens of the World, pp. 89–101; Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, pp. 282–83;
Jacob M. Price, ‘Directions for the Conduct of a Merchant’s Counting House, 1766’,
Business History, July 1986, vol. 28, no. 3, 134–37. Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the
Ocean Sea, p. 81; John F. Bosher, ‘Success and Failure in Trade to New France’, French
Historical Studies, 1988, vol. 15, no. 3, 455–56.
28 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780–1850, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 149–270, 357–60.
29 Craig Muldrew, Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in
Early Modern England, New York: St. Martin’s, 1998, pp. 4, 148–49, 311; Bosher, ‘Trade
to New France’, pp. 452–55. For examples of merchant advice guides see, Daniel Defoe,
The Complete English Tradesman, London: Charles Rivington, 1727; Benjamin Franklin,
‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’, in Works of the Late Doctor Benjamin Franklin, Consisting
of His Life Written by Himself; Together with Essays, Humorous, Moral, and Literary,
Chiefly in the Manner of the Spectator, London: G. Dilly, 1796, pp. 39–42; Jacques Savary,
Le parfait negociant ou Instruction generale pour ce qui regarde le commerce de toute sorte
de marchandises, tant de France que des pays estrangers, Paris: Chez L. Billaine, 1675.
30 Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, pp. 65, 85–87; Hancock, Citizens of the
World, pp. 258–376; Peter France, ‘The Commerce of Self’, Comparative Criticism, vol. 12,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 39–56; in colonial ports, such as
Charleston such ideals were grafted onto local conditions and planter societies; Emma
Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic
World, London: University of Virginia, 2010, pp. 125, 132–41, 156–76.
31 Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 3, 17–18; Hardwick, Family Business,
pp. 136–60, 169–78.
32 Hancock, Citizens of the World, pp. 292–95.
33 Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic, pp. 94–95; John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in
Europe and America, 1600–1771. A Handbook, Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute
568
of Early American History and Culture, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1978,
pp. 18–23, 116–30, 234–35.
34 Hayes and Polock to Harford and Powell, 17 May 1769, Box 2, Henry Marchant Papers,
Mss 552, Rhode Island Historical Society.
35 Defoe, Complete English Tradesman, pp. 1:Supplement, 3–4; Bosher, ‘Trade to New
France’, p. 451.
36 Hardwick, Family Business, pp. 133–35; Hunt, Middling Sort, pp. 23–34.
37 Steele, English Atlantic.
38 Cassis, Capitals of Capital, pp. 17–18; Davis, English Shipping, pp. 318–19; Bosher,
‘Trade to New France’, pp. 447–49.
39 Hunt, Middling Sort, pp. 34, 164–66; Peter Razzell and Christine Spence, ‘The Hazards
of Wealth: Adult Mortality in Pre-Twentieth-Century England’, Social History of
Medicine, 2006, vol. 19, no. 3, 381–405; Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 61.
40 Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, pp. 6, 19; Pike, Enterprise and Adventure, pp. 76–77;
Davis, English Shipping, pp. 81–102; Holden Furber, John Company at Work, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1951, p. 275; GD1/453/1, National Archives of Scotland cited
in Huw Bowen, Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain,
1756–1833, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 284; Lucy Sutherland, A
London Merchant, 1695–1774, London: Frank Cass, 1962, pp. 119–22. Studnicki-
Gizbert, Nation upon the Ocean Sea, pp. 59–61.
41 Rediker, Between the Devil, pp. 10–13; Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation upon the Ocean Sea,
p. 61; Boxer, Dutch Seaborne Empire, pp. 67–68.
42 Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England,
Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989; A. J. and R. H. Tawney, ‘An Occupational
Census of the Seventeenth Century’, Economic History Review, 1934–35, vol. 5, no. 1,
30–39; Georgio Riello, A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the
Long Eighteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 95–98, 110; John
Stobart, Andrew Hann, and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and
Shopping in the English Town, c. 1680–1830, New York: Routledge, 2007; Claire Walsh,
‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design
History, 1995, vol. 8, no. 3, 157–76.
43 Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang, ‘Sans-culottes, sans café, sans tabac: Shifting Realms of
Necessity and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford
(eds), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 49; Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution:
How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004, pp. 118–47.
44 Michael Edwards, The Growth of the British Cotton Trade 1780–1815, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1967, pp. 147–80. German merchants tied to German
producers in the pre-factory period performed a similar role to British manufacturers’
agents; see, Klaus Weber, ‘The Atlantic Coast of German Trade: German Rural Industry
and Trade in the Atlantic (1680–1840)’, Itinerario, 2002, vol. 26, no. 2, 108–13.
45 Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce, pp. 18, 86–95.
46 Henry C. Clark, Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France,
New York: Lexington Books, 2007, pp. 4, 8.
47 Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, pp. 119–31, 157–78.
48 Laure Chantrel, ‘Les Notions de richesse et de travail dans in la pensée économique
français da la seconde moitié du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle’, Journal of Medieval
and Renaissance Studies, Winter, 1995, vol. 25, no. 1, 129–245.
49 Clark, Compass of Society, pp. 4, 8.
50 Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 106, 191.
569
51 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 295–99, 326–40.

52 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, pp. 144–45, 264–75; Luís de Moura Sobral, ‘The
Expansion of the Arts: Transfers, Contaminations, Innovations,’ in Fransisco Bethencourt
and Diogo Ramada Curto (eds), Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, New York:
53 For examples of Reinier Nooms’ work see, George S. Keyes (ed.), Mirror of Empire: Dutch
Marine Art of the Seventeenth Century, New York: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in
Association with Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 301–12, 413; Hendrick Vroom’s
View of the River Ij Near Amsterdam reproduced in Jeroen Giltaij and Jan Kelch, Praise
of Ships and the Sea: The Dutch Marine Painters of the 17th Century, Rotterdam: Museum
Boijmans Van Beuningen; Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1996, p. 93.
54 David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the
Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003,
pp. 9–27, 64, 337–50.
55 Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 134–47, 319–20; Hoxby, Mammon’s Music,
pp. 92–105; Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of
English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 24–79,
172–84; Richard Kroll, Restoration Drama and ‘The Circle of Commerce’: Tragicomedy,
Politics, and Trade in the Seventeenth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press,
2007, pp. 1–8, 59–61, 234.
56 Glaisyer, Culture of Commerce, p. 86; Liz Bellamy, Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-
Century Novel, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 2–3, 13–21; J. G. A
Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, pp. 462–505; Hoxby,
Mammon’s Music, pp. 20, 233–35; Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early
Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996,
pp. 3–4, 26–40; Thomas Keith Meier, Defoe and the Defense of Commerce, Victoria,
Canada: University of Victoria, 1987, pp. 84–88; Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, p. 297.
57 Maxine Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century
Britain’, Economic History Review, 2002, vol. 55, no. 1, 2–3; Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of
Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past &
Present, February 2004, no. 182, 94–95. On the endurance of concerns about luxury and
their new manifestations, see James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and
Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800, Oxford: Clarendon, 1992, pp. 157–200.
58 Meier, Defoe and the Defense of Commerce, pp. 31, 40–42; Boyd Hilton, The Age of
Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865,
Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, pp. viii, 13–15, 50, 126–33, 209–10; Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific
Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp.
73–80; Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and
Republicans, Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp. 81–88. It is important to note that what many
political economists saw as limited government intervention was in fact substantial government
intervention, but of a different kind than in sixteenth-century Spain or the twentieth-century
Soviet Union; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, New York: Rinehart, 1944, p. 139.
59 A. S. Catcott, The Antiquity and Honourableness of the Practice of Merchandize. A
Sermon Preached Before the Worshipful Society of Merchants of the City of Bristol, in the
Parish Church of St. Stephen, November the 10th, 1744 (Bristol, 1744).
60 Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, pp. 151–85. Jonathan Eacott, ‘Trading Language:
British Merchants and Political Economy Between 1793–1815’, MA Thesis, Queen’s
University, Kingston, 2001, pp. 55–76; Alderman Wray, quoted in East India Trade.
Report of the Proceedings of the Meeting at Kingston-Upon-Hull, 6th April, 1812, on the
Subject of Laying Open the Trade to the East Indies, Hull: J. Perkins, 1812, p. 7.
570
61 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, Chapel

Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, by the
University of North Carolina Press, 2006, pp. 27, 37–116, 158–59, 233–37, 326–27; G. R.
Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998, pp. 48–64.
62 Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit, p. 60; James B. Collins, ‘State Building in Early Modern
Europe: The Case of France’, in Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories, p. 187. Chandra
Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983, p. 182. For an example of religiously enforced sumptuary laws
functioning outside the state, albeit briefly, see Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The
Kingdom of Matthias, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 31–33.
63 Guadalipe Jiménez Codinach, ‘An Atlantic Silver Entrepôt: Vera Cruz and the House of
Gordon Murphy’ in Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (eds), Atlantic Port Cities:
Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 149–50; Lance R. Grahn, ‘Cartagena and its Hinterland in the
Eighteenth Century’, in Knight and Liss (eds), Atlantic Port Cities, pp. 168–88; Jacob M.
Price, ‘Summation: The American Panorama of Atlantic Port Cities’, in Knight and Liss
(eds), Atlantic Port Cities, p. 267.
64 Mukerji, From Graven Images; Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, pp. 304, 314–18;
Carole Shammas, The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America, Oxford:
Clarendon, 1990; Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain,
1660-1760, New York: Routledge, 1988; Cissie Fairchilds, ‘The Production and
Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in Roy Porter and John
Brewer (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods, New York: Routledge, 1992.
65 On slavery in the cutting of mahogany see, Jennifer Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of
Luxury in Early America, London: Harvard University Press, 2012, pp. 156–83.
66 Jordan Goodman, ‘Excitantia: Or, How Enlightenment Europe took to Soft Drugs’, in
Jordan Goodman (ed), Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, London:
Routledge, 1995, pp. 126–33; Butel, The Atlantic, pp. 133–38; Marcy Norton, Sacred
Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008, pp. 141–200.
67 David Hancock, ‘Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic: The
Invention of Madeira Wine’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Autumn, 1998, vol. 29,
no. 2, 197; see also, David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of
American Trade and Taste, London: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 144–71.
68 Cary Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?’ in
Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (eds), Of Consuming Interests,
Charlottesville: Published for the United States Capitol Historical Society by the University
Press of Virginia, 1994, p. 487.
69 On the Dutch as first see Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 323.
70 Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, ‘The Apprenticeship of Colonisation’ in Solow (ed), Slavery, p. 151.
71 Carson, ‘Consumer Revolution’ in Carson, Hoffman, and Albert (eds), Consuming
Interests, pp. 502, 513; Shammas, Pre-Industrial Consumer, p. 44.
72 The many white migrants who entered America as indentured servants had little initial
choice and power in the colonies. After their period of service was finished, these migrants
typically had opportunities for advancement. Virginia Anderson, New England’s
Generation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 104–9; Marianne
Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America,
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999, p. 192; Bernard Bailyn, The
Peopling of British North America, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986, pp. 60–64.
73 Timothy Breen, ‘“Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the
Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, 1988, vol. 119, no. 1, 82–83; Shammas, Pre-Industrial
571
Consumer, p. 62; Lois Carr, Russell Menard, and Lorena Walsh, Robert Cole’s World:
Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland, Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early
American History and Culture, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1991, p. 85.
74 Jacob M. Price, ‘What did the Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade,
1660–1790’, Journal of Economic History, 1989, vol. 49, no. 2, 274.
75 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, pp. 189–229; Butel, The Atlantic, p. 132; Marc Engel,
Divergent Paths: How Culture and Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 71–72; François Crouzet, ‘Angleterre et
France au XVIIIe siècle, essai d’analyse comparée de leurs croissances économique’,
Annales ESC, March-April 1966, pp. 261–66; Richard Drayton, ‘The Globalisation of
France: Provincial Cities and French Expansion c. 1500–1800’, History of European
Ideas, 2008, vol. 34, no. 4, 427–28. John F. Bosher, ‘Huguenot Merchants and the
Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
ser., January 1995, vol. 52, no. 1, 77–102; R. C. Nash, ‘The Huguenot Diaspora and the
Development of the Atlantic Economy: Huguenots and the Growth of the South Carolina
Economy, 1680–1775’, in Olaf Uwe Janzen (ed) Merchant Organization and Maritime
Trade in the North Atlantic, 1660–1815, St. John’s, Newfoundland: Research in Maritime
History, 1998, pp. 75–105; Price, ‘What did the Merchants Do?’, pp. 270–71.
76 Breen, ‘“Baubles of Britain”’, p. 82.
77 David Eltis, ‘Precolonial Western Africa and the Atlantic Economy’, in Solow (ed.),
Slavery, pp. 102–18; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, Cambridge:
78 For a most concise and wide ranging, if too neatly compartmentalized overview of the
translation of national European ideals to the Americas see, Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of
Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1995. The classic work on the similarities and differences amongst British
colonies is, Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern
British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture, Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988. On the English and Dutch in New Netherland see, Merwick, Possessing
Albany. For the English compared to the Spanish see, Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic.
79 For a brief overview see, Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic, pp. xiv–xvii.
80 David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 1742, pt I, essay XXI, par. 10–19.
On a later British imperialist desire to replicate national European hierarchies see, David
Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001, p. xix.
81 ‘Memorial of the French Inhabitants of the Island of Grenada’, Shelburne Papers, vol. 74,
Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
82 On the difficulties of commerce in the French empire and the benefits of trade with the
British and Dutch see, Pritchard, In Search of Empire, pp. 201–29.
83 Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy,
London: Harvard University, 2011, esp. pp. 13–16, 51–69, 136–42.
84 François Crouzet, ‘Angleterre-Brésil, 1697–1850: Un siècle et demi d’échanges
commerciaux’, Histoire, économie et société, 1990, vol. 9, no. 2, 304–10. On British
informal imperialism in Latin America see, Mathew Brown (ed.), Informal Empire in Latin
America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. On merchant bankers
see, Stanley Chapman, The Rise of Merchant Banking, Abingdon: Routledge, 1984.
85 Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of
a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999, pp. 29–55,
120, 286–87.
86 Peter A. Coclanis, ‘Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?’ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
ser., October 2006, vol. 63, no. 4, 725–42.
572
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
‘TO CATCH THE PUBLIC TASTE’

Interpreting American consumers in the era
of Atlantic free trade, 1783–1854
Joanna Cohen
I n June 1853, George Wallis and several colleagues arrived in New York City, to
conduct research on the state of American manufactures for the British government.1
Their plan was to visit the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition, a vast display of
American national industry. Intended to rival the great exhibition that had taken place
in London only two years earlier, the New York Crystal Palace trumpeted America’s
industrial skill and proclaimed their free trade commitments to a watching world.2
Unfortunately, this ambitious exhibition did not get off to a good start. Arriving in
Gotham in good time for the grand opening, Wallis and his fellow travelers discovered
the exhibition had been delayed by a month.3 Undaunted, they chose to embark on a
tour of the United States, hoping to see first hand the state of American manufacturing.4
Wallis approached this trip from an unusual perspective. As the headmaster of the
National School of Design in Birmingham, his interest was not in the mechanical
innovations or patented inventions that Americans had showcased in the London
exhibition of 1851. Instead, Wallis wanted to see what he could of American taste
and style. Travelling throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic, Wallis pored
over cottons, woolens, worsteds, silks, lace, printed fabrics, tapestries and carpets as
well as a variety of cutlery, edge tools, hardware, precious metalwork and ceramics,
decorative furniture and even clothing. In short, he examined the full gamut of
consumer goods that Americans made at midcentury.5
Within this context, Wallis was especially interested in the transatlantic
relationships between British manufacturers and the American market. ‘English
manufacturers,’ he mused, ‘have it especially in their power to either assist in the
formation of a purer taste in the American people, or by neglecting their growing
judgment, to oppose, and retard but not crush it. By assisting its development they
are likely to secure to themselves, or at least, share very largely in a market for a long
time almost entirely their own, but which is gradually being occupied by their
Transatlantic competitors.’6 As one of the breed of emerging professional tastemakers
in Britain, it was unsurprising that Wallis should have been interested in the
development of American taste. But what was surprising was his belief that British
manufacturers had a capacity to influence American taste through their productions
and in doing so capture a foreign market. Such a supposition suggested that despite
573
– Joanna Cohen –
nearly seventy years of American independence, men like Wallis still hoped to achieve
a very specific cultural dominance in the United States that would work to serve
Britain’s political economy.7
Wallis’s faith in the power of taste to influence the nature of transatlantic trade
appeared confident. But in fact his comment revealed the questions that many Britons
shared about how commerce would work in a world that was slowly embracing the
tenets of free trade.8 While exhibitions such as those in London and New York
promised cooperation and commitment to the international project of free trade,
these same exhibitions were competitive arenas, where the challenges of contending
for international markets was abundantly clear. Embedded in Wallis’s call for
manufacturers to shape the taste of the American people was a concern that as
markets became less protected and more integrated, a nation’s ability to capture the
taste of foreign consumers would become a far harder proposition.
Such concerns were well established by the 1850s. Even before these vivid
expositions had been staged, some British manufacturers recognized that the only
solution to this particular challenge of free trade would be to tailor their production
in order ‘to catch the public taste.’9 Yet the project of catering to the consumer was
not one that came easily to the tastemakers of Victorian Britain. The standards of
taste had long been considered markers of civility and morality in England and the
principles of design helped to constitute national pride and commercial prowess.
Thus when men like Wallis suggested dictating the standards of taste to foreign
consumers he was not just responding to concerns that England might lose its
competitive edge, he was also trying to combat fears that bowing to foreign consumer
demand could fundamentally alter the identity of a nation. This was the cultural
conundrum of free trade philosophy.
Scholars have long recognized that implementing the tenets of free trade posed a
problem for Victorian Britons and have explored the ways in which British politicians,
diplomats and reformers worked to promote national interest while implementing the
new framework of laissez-faire policy.10 Free trade has also captured the attention of
intellectual historians, who have done important work in tracing out the intricacies of
theoretical debate that blossomed out of liberal doctrine in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century.11 But fewer historians have looked at the ways in which a different
group comprising artists, designers, manufacturers and civil servants like Wallis
grappled with the problems that free trade and foreign consumer taste posed for British
politicians and manufacturers.12 These men were confronted with the opposing
demands of cosmopolitan commerce and patriotic production, and found no way to
satisfy the claims of both. Looking beyond the familiar grounds of trade negotiations
on the one hand and the intellectual debates over doctrine on the other, this essay
illuminates how anxieties over national aesthetics complicated the implementation of
free trade in the nineteenth century, shedding new light on the way in which the men
and women of the Atlantic World understood the changing nature of capitalist markets.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentaries on the nature of consumer goods
often characterized commodities as weapons in a war for commercial advantage. One
anonymous American woman argued in 1786 that a vain female desire for consumer
goods ‘enfeebled [her] country with more speedy destruction than it was in the power
of foreign arms to accomplish.’13 Indeed, the idea gained traction over the course of
the nineteenth century. Marx and Engels dubbed cheap commodities ‘the artillery’
574
– chapter 31: American consumers in an era of Atlantic free trade –
with which the free trade bourgeoisie battered down all commercial protections.14 But
such characterizations obscure the multilateral power of consumer goods. Goods were
far more than weapons in the hands of the producers. British commodities, sold in
America, were vehicles of taste and makers of identity, which carried cultural influence
both ways and not always in a manner that the British found reassuring.15 Catering to
the tastes of Americans, manufacturers confronted the ways in which free trade
opened up their own nation to the influences and preferences of foreign demands,
subtly testing articulations of British national identity as well as the very idea of what
national borders could in fact contain and protect.16
LON DON AND AB ROAD: ME TRO P O L ITAN TAS TE

IN THE LATE EIGHTE E NTH CE NTU RY
Long before George Wallis would puzzle over the preferences of Americans, Britons
around the empire attempted to understand the slippery concept of taste. By the close
of the eighteenth century, debates over the meaning and definition of the term
dominated the realm of public and private discussion in Britain and America.17 It was,
as Edmund Burke suggested, a word ‘like all other figurative terms…not extremely
accurate…liable to uncertainty and confusion’.18 In purely philosophical terms,
understandings of taste had been subtly rethought over the space of several decades.
Thinkers from Lord Shaftesbury and David Hume to Immanuel Kant, slowly
introduced the idea that beauty and taste, far from being fixed measures, might be
learned, subjective and even variable, cultivated best through the pursuit of politeness.19
Theorists such as William Hogarth and Adam Smith added a different dimension to
this debate. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith acknowledged the effect that
the mutable standards of fashion and custom might have on taste while Hogarth,
writing in 1735 attempted to make a case for an aesthetics that was based on sensation
and pleasure, rather than moral judgement.20 Such arguments located the formation of
taste in realms that were changeable and personal. It allowed for a diversity of taste
that was new. Despite their many differences, by the end of the eighteenth century,
these thinkers had de-stabilized aesthetic certainties and come to define the judgement
of taste as a subjective and sensuous response to the material world.
Despite the shifting intellectual grounds upon which the idea of taste now stood,
late eighteenth-century elite society remained convinced that good taste, when
correctly identified, reflected a virtuous use of wealth. Those who possessed taste also
possessed an ability to steer clear of the perils of excessive consumption.21 Poor taste,
most often identified through a person’s indulgence in luxury goods, was a clear
indication that an individual had succumbed to immoral, sensuous consumer habits.
This elite conviction was reflected broadly across a cultural landscape of jeremiads,
sermons, novels and satires. Yet the sheer proliferation of these cultural forms, most
often summed up as the ‘luxury debates’ indicated that as commercial society grew,
luxury itself had become an indeterminate category, both in conceptual and material
terms.22 Manifested in the seemingly endless production of novelties, baubles and
trinkets that could adorn both bodies and homes, luxury consumer goods included
calicoes and silks, porcelain and silverware, ribbons, shawls, teapots and sugar
tongs.23 Faced with this bewildering array of goods, eighteenth-century theorists and
thinkers used the discourse of taste to give polite society a set of principles on how to
575
reconcile the aesthetic and moral realm with the baser demands of the commercial
world.24 Thus, taste was simultaneously an acknowledged reflection of morality and
subjective expression of judgement, a tension that was reflected in the many anxious
musings on the subject.
These tensions were heightened further still by the nationalist inflection embedded
in the discussion of taste and design from the mid eighteenth century onwards. The
rise of nationalist sentiment was not a solely British concern; indeed the interest in
national culture and patriotic productions in Britain was matched by an equally
pressing preoccupation with the same in France.25 The competition over whose
culture was the more superior only served to clarify differences and sharpen
expressions of nationalistic pride. In Britain, concerns that elite Francoplihia was
corrupting national tastes, manners and morals, manifested in a number of ways,
including the active promotion of British manufactures and design to combat the
French infiltration of British society. The Anti-Gallician Association, founded in
1754 by a collection of tradesmen, connected the cultivation of British design with
increased national commercial strength. Similarly, the Society of Arts worked hard to
promote technical innovations in British manufacturing, offering premiums for
innovative product design and technological improvement.26 This was in many ways
a culture war, with both taste and technology acting as weapons in a battle to claim
national supremacy. By the end of the eighteenth century, tradesmen and artisans
argued that the production of tasteful goods could and should reflect national pride
and commercial prowess.
The nationalist dimensions of these debates raised a series of questions over taste
in Britain’s Atlantic World empire. Between the Act of Union and the Seven Years
War, trade between Britain and its colonial outposts expanded in astounding ways,
with 95 per cent of the increase in Britain’s commodity exports being sold to ‘captive
and colonial markets’.27 This energetic exportation of ‘British baubles’ was not just
the basis of a commercial ascendancy for Britain. It was also the foundation of a
powerful new expression of British identity in the colonies, especially in North
America, connecting consumers from Boston to Charleston back to London, through
a shared taste for everything from textiles to teapots.28 Many colonial followers of
fashion looked to London for their standards of style and through this aesthetic
expression, reinforced their own connection to a national identity they were proud to
claim. But these same consumers of Britain’s Atlantic World empire also posed a
challenge to the elite tastemakers of London. British North Americans may have
followed London fashions but they did not slavishly copy them. Through articulations
of their different preferences and their distinctive demands, these colonial consumers
subtly tested the idea that national taste emanated only from the metropole.29
The differing standards of taste in the colonies was no secret in late eighteenth-
century England. Indeed, for some, this difference was old news. Merchants who
shipped British manufactures and East India goods to the West Indies and North
America had long been aware that colonial taste was somewhat different from that
of the London beau monde or even England’s provincial gentry. American consumers
looked to buy textiles in colours that were less bright and patterns less elaborate.
New York merchants worried that London fashions were too showy for American
tastes and bought instead, differently figured fabrics that they hoped would suit their
consumer’s needs.30 Moreover, North American consumers were subject to different
576
trade regulations that permitted the expression of different tastes. The colonial craze
for calico textiles for example was specific to America; the vastly fashionable Indian
cotton was banned in England after 1721, a result of pressure from silk and linen
weavers.31 In the practical world of commerce then, colonial taste had long been seen
as separate from that of its metropolitan counterpart, a distinct but not necessarily
inferior sector of the Atlantic World economy. The tastes of these colonial consumers
did not at first cause as much concern amongst London social critics. Prohibited by
colonial law from setting up their own manufacturing establishments and hemmed in
by mercantilist restrictions on all sides, the preferences of these consumers could be
easily managed and seemed unlikely to truly disrupt the production of goods or the
manufacturing of standards of taste.32
Such metropolitan complacency did not last. Responding to the changing moral
and political imperatives of the latter half of the eighteenth century, British social
critics began to question the power of colonial taste in the empire. They turned first
to the West Indies, where fortunes were made quickly and extravagance was rife.
Metropolitan audiences partly attributed such extravagance to sheer distance from
polite society. Planters (even those who did not reside permanently in the Caribbean)
could not immerse themselves in the English culture of politeness. Thus they were not
conditioned to temper greedy acquisition with tasteful and moral restraint. As a
result metropolitan audiences judged that the planter class lacked the taste that was
exhibited by the British-based gentry.33 A caricature of a Jamaican plantation owner,
published in London in November 1807 by William Holland demonstrated the
dynamic with brutal directness.34 The print showed a couple of ‘West India
Fashionables’ dressed in absurdly large hats, drawn along by a procession of black
slaves against a bleak and windy Caribbean backdrop. The exaggeration of the
planter’s fashion, so tasteless and out of place, sent a clear message about the failure
of West Indian society to cultivate appropriate standards of taste, despite their wealth
and pretensions.
But this particular print also illuminated a number of other problems that underlay
the issue of taste in West Indian society. Although eighteenth-century philosophers
had begun to frame taste as an attribute to be acquired, there were still limits on who
could claim to possess that quality. In 1757, David Hume had elaborated on one of
those limits, arguing that slaves were subjects utterly devoid of taste. Having deemed
taste an acquirable property, philosophers like Hume, naturally considered what
institutions, associations and values might also predispose an individual to fail in
their acquisition of taste. Perhaps living among slaves was one such condition?
Outnumbered by these ostensibly tasteless beings, as the print so clearly depicted, the
image raised a question: did proximity to slaves preclude the acquisition of taste, or
was it dependence on slavery as an institution that corrupted slave owners’ taste?35
These musings, along with the slow rise of abolitionist sentiment condemning the
existence of sugar plantations and New World slavery, resulted in an underlying
question as to whether or not the immorality of slavery would permit its proponents
to exhibit good taste. Here was a case where commercial wealth could not be refined
by the principles of good taste, since the society itself was founded on immoral
precepts. Yet it could hardly be denied that the fortunes made in the Caribbean gave
the planter class a great deal of wealth and power in metropolitan Britain. As Tobias
Smollett had put it in 1771, ‘planters, negro drivers, and hucksters from our American
577
plantations…discharge their affluence without taste or conduct’.36 Politically and

culturally, this group of consumers, white Creoles and nabobs, had the capacity to
shape consumer demand within British society.37
Metropolitan cultural critics also treated North American consumers with
ambivalence. Merchants and manufacturers were keenly aware that the American
market represented a crucial outlet for their goods.38 Indeed, between 1710 and 1770
British exports to North America increased 8.6 times their initial level, mirroring a
similar increase in American population levels.39 Thus the defiant consumer politics
of the Revolution created alarm in Britain, even as American efforts to exhibit good
taste received satirical treatment from London’s fashion commentators and
cognoscenti. Mary Darly’s print of Miss Carolina Sullivan, one of the obstinate
daughters of America, published in 1776, followed a common visual joke of the day,
a laugh at the overweight, oversized wigs worn in polite society.40 Yet if the purchasers
of Darly’s print could laugh at the American failure to wear a tasteful wig and thus
feel more secure in their own choice of accessories and moral superiority, the
decoration of the wig would have certainly been more unsettling. Adorning the
headdress was a series of canons, while perched precariously on the side of the wig
was a line of military tents, standards flying. Most ominous, a small figure hanging
from a gallows dangled at the front. The imagined wig signaled that American politics
were refashioning American taste. For those Britons who had read or heard Benjamin
Franklin’s threat to parliament, that continued taxation would induce Americans to
change their consumer habits as a means of protest, the boycotts of the Revolution
must have seemed alarming in the extreme.41 The new world, with its corrupt
plantations and rebellious politics, seemed to create an entirely new order of consumer
tastes to contend with by the end of the eighteenth century.
AMERI CAN TASTE IN A POST- RE VO L U TIO NARY W O RL D

If Miss Carolina Sullivan’s wig forced British merchants and manufacturers to wonder
whether the War of Independence had created a new kind of consumer, the same
question of American taste only became more acute in the wake of the Revolution.
The end of the conflict meant the end of America’s colonial status and its place within
the larger mercantilist political economy that had governed its trade for over a
century. The abrupt transition forced British politicians, merchants and manufacturers
to confront an uncomfortable possibility. Would American customers still have a
preference for British goods, now associated with a former imperial enemy, or had
the Revolution transformed the taste of the new nation? Even during the war, Patriots
had asserted their revolutionary allegiance by rejecting British style and favoring
Gallic fashions. As the war ended, Americans sought to establish new trade
relationships with France.42 By 1783 however British merchants were relieved to
discover that business was resuming along its old lines, as they found themselves able
to dump hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of their imports and manufactures
onto the quays and docks of American cities.43 In the short term, trade seemed to
resume without a hitch, though not without debate.
Yet the mood back in Britain was far from sanguine and there was little consensus
on how best to re-establish the long-term commercial relationship that Britain had
with America. The question of how to retain access to the American market was
578
one that took precedence. This was in part a practical question, but it was one that
was also partly influenced by the emerging doctrines of Adam Smith. In 1776,
Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations had made it clear that if Britain was
to embark on the task of instituting free trade then producers would have to pay
increased attention to their market. ‘Consumption,’ Smith wrote, ‘is the sole end
and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended
to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.’44 Such
an observation intensified British concerns about the American market. If consumer
desire was, as Smith said, what powered the surging tides of commerce, then
commanding that desire, both at home and abroad, became an issue of pressing
national importance.
While Prime Minister Lord Shelburne could see the virtue of Adam Smith’s
doctrine of free trade, he was not instinctively inclined to institute laissez-faire policy
towards America. This was in large part due to his persistent refusal to even
countenance the idea of American independence, even as the war drew to a close. In
1782, Shelburne had worked hard to institute a policy that would negate the
consequences of independence and it was out of this impulse that he proposed to
maintain America’s commercial privileges with Britain, thus hoping to perpetuate a
commercial fiction that the newly United States had not in fact left the empire.45
Shelburne, along with Pitt the Younger who took over the prime ministerial post in
1783, could see the virtue of negotiating a peace treaty that did not place barriers
between Britain and its former colony and hoped to establish a new reciprocity
between the former enemies.46
Yet despite a rising interest in the spirit of laissez-faire liberalism that was
circulating slowly through Westminster, the more powerful voice in the immediate
wake of the war was that of John Baker Holroyd, Lord Sheffield. In April 1783, he
had published a pamphlet that had condemned the efforts of Pitt’s government to
establish free trade with America and urged the government to re-enshrine the
principles of mercantilism. Observations on the Commerce of the American States
with Europe and the West Indies was a sneering indictment of Englishmen’s eager
desires to resume trading as if nothing had happened. In his opening salvo, Sheffield
pointed out that, ‘[b]y asserting their independence, the Americans have at once
renounced the privileges, as well as the duties, of British subjects – they are become
foreign states.’47 Sheffield argued they should not be allowed to trade as they once
had. American merchants had forfeited the right to the markets of the West Indies
and the privileges of trading within the protective embrace of the British Empire.
Sheffield dismissed the anxious claims that Americans would turn their back on
British goods as a result of this stance and was especially dismissive of concerns that
Americans would look instead to France for their fashions. In discussing American
reliance on British wool for example, he noted that during the Revolutionary War,
France had granted Congress a sum of money to help pay for the clothing of the
American troops. Much to the dismay of their Gallic allies however, John Laurens,
acting as the US army’s agent, had bought English cloth and sent it back to America
to garb the Continental Army. Sheffield related this anecdote with an unbecoming
glee, emphasizing that Laurens had told the French (who had accused him of being
ungrateful if not downright disloyal) that his responsibility had been to find the best
he could for his troops. Nor had this been an isolated incident. Sheffield was quick to
579
point out that despite being at war with Britain, Americans had continued to import
British manufactures whenever they could, until the French had threatened to
withdraw their support from the US entirely.48
The decision to invoke their commercial victory over the French was surely
deliberate on Sheffield’s part. France had been Britain’s long-time rival, and hatred
of this Catholic nation was at the heart of British identity in the eighteenth century.49
Yet at the same time this was the nation whose tastes had penetrated deep into the
British beau monde’s own understanding of fashionable standards, providing
Britons with examples of both elegance and effeminacy. The debate over whether
Britain or France could lay claim to superior taste remained unresolved by the end
of the Revolution, but Sheffield hoped to allay British concerns about national pride
and economic superiority by pointing to American consumer preferences. If
Americans chose British woolens even as they waged a war against their
manufacturers, then Sheffield thought that imposing the small penalty of being
excluded from Britain’s protective imperial umbrella would certainly not deter
Americans from seeking out British goods. Sheffield’s efforts carried the day despite
Pitt’s effort to liberalize trade. Americans remained subject to the restrictions of the
Navigation Acts, their trade with the West Indies limited, although the Privy Council
did introduce orders that attempted to encourage direct trade between America and
metropolitan Britain.50
Sheffield’s arguments were based partly on the idea that American consumers
would respond to the quality of the goods alone in making their choices about what
to buy and from whom.51 It was an argument that reflected the eighteenth-century
supposition that it was the proficiency of design and the quality of craftsmanship that
yielded goods in the best taste.52 Yet such an argument did not convince all observers
and Britain’s reluctance to negotiate a commercial treaty with the US in the wake of
the war left others concerned. Richard Champion, the former deputy paymaster
general of the army and a lobbyist working for the West India interest, warned ‘[a]
great stress is laid upon the necessity which the Americans will be under to purchase
English goods, from their not being able to procure them in any other country upon
such cheap and advantageous terms.’ But, he continued, ‘[it] is, however, a hazardous
attempt to drive them to this necessity. Mankind are formed of materials which have
a great aptitude to resist, when force is employed.’53 Rather than forcing Americans
down the path of increased self-sufficiency, Champion advocated for the ‘radical
cure’ of free trade.
By opening up commerce to the natural competition between nations, he argued,
Britain’s manufacturing prowess and the tendencies of American taste would do the
work of securing the future of transatlantic commerce. ‘The Americans…are already
relapsing into their former luxury and enjoyments,’ he wrote. ‘[T]he orders for goods
which have lately been transmitted, are filled with as many superfluities as necessaries.
This is not a wise conduct in the infancy of a new Republick; the establishment of
which ought to be founded in examples of frugality, not of luxurious enjoyments. But
if their own Governments have not this consideration, and they offer a Trade which
must in some measure produce a state of Dependence upon Europe, it will not be a
wise conduct in us to neglect so advantageous a prospect.’54
Champion’s analysis illuminates the dilemmas that accompanied the slow embrace
of free trade policy in Britain. How could the politicians at Westminster be sure that
580
the supposed principles of laissez-faire economics, still poorly understood, would

operate? Certainly Champion was quick to point out that cheap goods above all
would act as an inducement to American consumers. But besides that, Champion
realized that his argument for Britain’s commercial future was based on two hopeful
suppositions: first that the American government would not attempt to legislate into
existence a republican political economy, one that would limit the influx of luxury
British goods into the new nation, and second, that Americans themselves would not
embrace the more austere qualities of republican civic virtue and would instead
continue to maintain a taste for British superfluities. Both suppositions would prove
to be of enduring concern and interest.
Despite the initial indications that Americans continued to hanker after British-
made goods and the imports they shipped in from the East Indies, some of the
republic’s new citizens were quick to warn Westminster politicians and the British
public more broadly not to rely on American preferences for British goods for too
long. William Bingham, an influential Philadelphia merchant, living in London in
1784, replied to Sheffield’s pamphlet thus:
There may at present be some partiality in the States, for British manufactures;
– yet this predilection arises from cradle prejudices and has greatly decreased
during the war; – and it would be unwise in Great Britain to place any reliance
on a continuation of it: – for the manufactures of other countries, if equally
good, and afforded cheaper, will, by a continued competition, be eventually
preferred; especially as there will be a constant succession of emigrants from
different parts of Europe, who have no decided preference in favour of the
fashion or quality of British manufactures, and who, by mixing with the mass of
the people, will gradually effect a change in their taste.55
Bingham’s warning emphasized one of the crucial conundrums facing British

politicians, merchants and manufacturers as they contemplated the future: the
question of how American consumer taste would develop as the new nation severed
its political, economic and above all cultural ties with their former imperial mistress.
What would an influx of new people combined with a separate government and a
new range of economic imperatives do to the nature of American taste? There were
few immediate answers to these questions. As the nineteenth century opened,
politicians, like the philosophers and fashion cognoscenti before them, grappled with
the nature of taste and its formation. No longer an objective category of judgement,
now slipping beyond the reach of the metropolitan influence in new ways and imbued
with enhanced commercial power through the political economy of Adam Smith, the
nature of American taste and the scope of the American market posed a set of
problems previously unknown to British politicians.
These were not issues that were resolved immediately in the wake of the War of
Independence. In fact, the complexities of establishing new trade relations between
Britain and America continued to provoke disputes well into the nineteenth century.
Between 1783 and 1815, the governance of trade between Britain, the United States
and France, caused both domestic and international tensions as first the infamous Jay
Treaty, then the French Revolution, the Quasi War, the Napoleonic Wars and finally
the War of 1812 itself, forced politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to confront the
581
limitations of their commercial power in a changing Atlantic World.56 With

governments on both sides of the Atlantic threatening their rivals’ commercial
privileges and curtailing trade, using measures ranging from tariffs to embargoes, the
Smithian vision of a laissez-faire global economy seemed far beyond reach. Indeed,
by 1815, Europe was, as one scholar has claimed, ‘an ocean of protectionism’ with
only a few small liberal islands exhibiting a different approach.57
More worrying for British merchants and manufacturers were the increased
tendencies of Americans to erect the barriers of protection around their infant
industries. One of the first acts of Congress had been to establish a revenue-raising
tariff and between 1806 and 1815, first Jefferson and then Madison oversaw the
passage of various trade restrictions, including an embargo, in an effort to punish
European depredations on American commercial neutrality.58 Although these were
rescinded in 1815, the fortress mindset did not disappear. In the wake of the War of
1812, an increasingly vocal group of mid-Atlantic manufacturers were becoming
more organized in their quest for protectionist tariffs. This quest culminated in 1824,
when Congress passed a tariff explicitly designed to protect American woolens,
establishing what political economist Henry Carey would call ‘the American
System’.59 Yet as some historians have argued, the end of the Napoleonic Wars did
usher in a new openness to shifting the basis of international trade relations towards
freer trade, especially among the European powers.60 Indeed, before free trade policy
became a commercial reality, various British merchants, authors and ultimately
politicians engaged indirectly with one of the key questions that free trade would
pose: what determined the taste of the consumers who would drive the engines of
productive economy: both at home and abroad.
KEEP ING TRACK OF A M E RICAN TAS TE

Some British manufacturers were quick to assume that the political independence of
America would naturally produce a taste for new designs. Most prominent among
these examples was the canny potter Josiah Wedgewood. Wedgewood had extensive
experience in producing for the American market. But in the wake of independence,
he capitalized on this knowledge, producing goods that he thought would reflect the
new patriotic sentiments of his customers. His designs for jugs, plates, toby jars and
other items included images of patriotic emblems, portraits of George Washington
and Benjamin Franklin, the eagle insignia and encouraging mottoes for American
consumers to reflect on as they supped their tea or drank their punch.61 Less well-
known ceramic producers also cashed in on this design trend. One factory near
Liverpool produced a design in the 1810s with a list of all the states, their date of
joining the Union and their population inscribed on one side, while on the other, the
female figure of Liberty was seated, holding aloft a plaque inscribed ‘Agriculture,
Commerce, Prosperity.’62 It is difficult to judge whether such products were popular,
but their manufacture points to the fact that British potters were labouring under the
assumption that the Revolution had altered the tastes of the American market.
Reflecting the idea that each nation possessed a unique set of tastes, British
manufacturers attempted to cater to those demands.
Such an assumption helps to account for the persistent fascination that British
visitors to the United States had for American manners and tastes in the early decades
582
of the nineteenth century. Henry Bradshaw Fearon for example, who travelled to the
United States in 1818 to make a report for a group of prospective emigrants, paid
particular attention to the habits of American consumers. He explored both the
source of their goods and fashions as well as the nature of the people’s taste. Among
his first impressions of the country was the general inferiority of good taste despite a
general expression of personal pride. ‘[The labouring class] were not better clothed
than men in a similar condition in England,’ he observed ‘but they were more erect in
their posture, less care-worn in their countenances…intermixed with these were
several of the mercantile and genteeler classes. Large straw hats prevailed; trowsers
were universal. The general costume of these persons was inferior to men in the same
rank of life in England.’63 Venturing further into the city of New York, Fearon
commented not only on the lack of well-dressed white ladies but also on the ‘number
of blacks, [who] are finely dressed, the females very ludicrously so, showing a
partiality to white muslin dresses, artificial flowers and pink shoes.’64 Fearon’s
comments suggest that he was attempting to discern how nationhood had changed
the tastes of American consumers. America’s working class empowered through new
habits of democracy exhibited their own sartorial preferences. American freedpeople,
whose tastes Fearon thought worth it to mention, even if he did so with derision,
demonstrated how even tastes deemed unworthy of consideration were nonetheless a
part of this newly forming market. Politics and a racial order that were highly
unfamiliar were imagined as having an impact on America’s national tastes, rendering
them both coarse and ridiculous.65
More sympathetic to the Americans, was the author Frances Wright, who travelled
through America at the same time as Fearon did, from 1818 through to 1820. Wright
was far more sympathetic towards the Americans, but she was also keenly aware of
the difficulties Americans were facing in cultivating a national style and taste in dress.
Like Fearon she was quick to see a connection between the new political order and
its effect on taste. Discussing the unmarried youth of America she noted, ‘their dress
is elegant, sometimes too showy and costly than befits a republic’, and she noted that
from New York to the backcountry, American women were purchasing ‘the flaunting
silks of France and Indies’.66 The liberal Wright believed that Americans’ efforts to
sustain their republic would be better served through ‘the positive resistance to so
becoming a dereliction of principle and good taste’ and encouraged Americans to
hold fast to their ‘practice of clothing every member of their family in articles of
domestic manufacture’.67 But English readers of Wright’s tale might have taken away
another point from her observations. Throughout the eighteenth century and on into
the nineteenth century, textiles from France and the East Indies had competed with
English silk woven on the looms of Spitalfields workers.68 Reading that Americans
were developing such tastes, these workers may have worried about how they could
adapt and compete with these powerful commercial rivals. Wright’s comments about
French silks might also have rung alarm bells for British merchants, hoping to supply
the American market with the goods they had to offer. Through publications like
Wright’s and Fearon’s then, Britons were left to wonder how American taste would
develop as the republic matured and what effect that would have on English
commerce, production and design. As the advocates for free trade policy in Britain
became more insistent that they be heard, the debate over taste took on a new, more
overtly political dimension.
583
TASTE AND FR E E TRAD E :

THE SELECT COMMITTE E O F 1 8 3 5
Historians have long been clear that the intellectual centre of the transition to free
trade policy was in Britain, where a group of radical free traders, including Sir Henry
Parnell, Richard Cobden and William Bright advocated for the establishment of free
trade and in particular for the repeal of the Corn Laws.69 By the 1830s, ‘economic
liberalism burst forth as a crusading passion’, that brought with it new debates over
how Britain could maintain its commercial prowess in a world of global competition.70
It was against this backdrop that taste became the focus of intense interest among
British politicians. But it was not the taste of their foreign markets that initially
prompted concern; instead it was the dynamics of the domestic market that attracted
attention. As the government began to dismantle the protections of an earlier era,
politicians, merchants and manufacturers began to consider what would promote the
purchase of British productions above all the other goods to be had on the open
market. Concerned with production and supply, the focus of public debate quickly
became the tastefulness of the goods themselves and by extension the aesthetic
training of the British artisan.
In the summer of 1835, the radical MP for Liverpool William Ewart convened a
Parliamentary Committee to hear evidence on the state of ‘Art and Manufactures’ in
Britain.71 Among the committee members were Sir Robert Peel, Henry Lytton Bulwer
and Henry Warburton, all of who would be vocal supporters of free trade over the
course of their careers. Warburton in particular had been schooled in politics by James
Mill, was friends with David Ricardo and had joined the Political Economy Club at its
founding in 1821.72 Over the course of several months, between July and September, the
committee would hear twenty-eight witnesses testify on the best way to ‘extend among
the People, especially the Manufacturing Classes, a knowledge and taste for Art’.73
The immediate presumption of both the committee members and the witnesses was
that Britain’s artisans required a level of government-sponsored art education that
was unheard of in Britain but worryingly already a familiar part of both French,
Belgian and German industrial education.74 One witness, James Morrison, the head of
a large commercial house in London and a twenty-year veteran of the dry goods trade
lamented, ‘I have felt so much the want of such institutions, especially since the
discussions on the subject of free trade and the admission of foreign manufactures’.75
The deliberate cultivation of tasteful production was key to the proponents of free
trade. If the French or Germans could outdo British artisans in the precepts of design
then the logic of free trade would mean that these competitors would outstrip British
producers.76 Charles Robert Cockerell, an associate of the Royal Academy, was even
more damning in his demand for better industrial training. Echoing an older rhetoric
that linked good taste to morality rather than commercial advantage alone, Cockerell
thundered: ‘I have deplored the indifference shown by Government on a subject which
materially concerns the honour and character of England as respects arts and which is
of paramount commercial and national importance in a manufacturing country,
where the cultivation of taste only is wanting to give us superiority over the world.’77
However, the committee struggled with the question of whose taste ought to be
cultivated. The initial aim of the committee had been to establish a model for a
National School of Design, thus training producers to create better patterns for
584
textiles as well as more seductive designs for goods ranging from iron stove fronts to
ormulu ornaments. The supporters of this project saw its benefits in clear commercial
terms. Cockerell in particular was clear that ‘the ignorance of the true principals of
design’ meant that there was a ‘constant waste of capital in the capricious and random
endeavour to catch the public taste’.78 But Cockerell’s rhetoric suggested a shift that
was taking place when it came to thinking about taste. Alongside the training of
artisans, this associate of the Royal Academy was arguing that the public as a
collective whole had tastes that required attention. In fact, repeatedly the testimony
of the witnesses suggested that training the artisan was not enough. If the British
economy was to prosper, then the public taste would also require an education.
This education was not intended to teach the consumer to identify and purchase
only British made goods. Rather, the liberal bent of the committee meant that
witnesses and committee members alike were keen to prove that free trade had had
the overall effect of improving the public taste to the benefit of the national economy.
John Jobson Smith, the owner of a Sheffield Iron Foundry was quick to point out that
opening of commercial intercourse with France had meant that ‘French ornaments
and French style [had] become introduced in [Britain] and [had] become ingrafted
into [British] style’. Smith argued that this process of incorporating French style into
British production had had the overall effect of improving ‘national taste’ as the
committee termed it, an improvement that had led to consumers wanting a greater
number of more expensive items. ‘We cannot produce articles too expensive for the
public taste of the present day,’79 Smith pointed out with pleasure. Free trade, Smith
was glad to confirm, had the potential to be good for business.
Nonetheless, the logical extension of this argument was that cultivating even better
taste would be even better for business and here the committee was afraid that Britain
was lagging behind the continent. All the evidence pointed to the fact that European
governments were training their population in the principles of design, something
that led directly to a people possessed of better standards of taste.80 The debate over
what kind of training to offer the British population certainly took up a large portion
of the committee’s attention. But in principle it seemed clear that the public taste
could be educated through an exposure to classical art housed in galleries and
museums, as well as exhibited through urban design and public architecture. A few
also advocated for the introduction of drawing as a skill, but here consensus faltered.
Witnesses seemed not to be advocating for the creation of formal schools of public
taste, rather the more informal approach of a general environment of tastefulness.
Opinion also diverged as to who among the public should receive this education.
Interestingly the committee did not specifically discuss consumer tastes as they related
to gender. In referring to the ‘public’ this committee at least was oddly silent on the
question of whether it was male or female preferences or both that would drive their
decision to institute a more thorough programme of educating public taste.81
However, when it came to the question of class, the discussion became slightly more
overt. While some witnesses agreed with the committee that ‘not merely the lower
and middling classes, but a great portion of the upper classes have not had their taste
proportionately cultivated’ others were more sympathetic and argued that the English
upper classes at least, had excellent taste.82
Ultimately however, the committee seemed to focus more on the education of the
lower and middling classes, since the committee identified this group as having the
585
greatest capacity for changing the dynamics of the British manufacturing economy.
Yet a note of unease lingered throughout these months of testimony. While most
witnesses seemed confident that the public taste could be trained, there was a
disquieting undercurrent of comment that suggested that in fact it was the producer’s
task to simply understand and then cater to the public’s taste. ‘The dealer’s study is
not so much to improve the taste of the public, as to discover what goods will sell
most readily and produce them to the largest profit’ argued one C. Smith in front of
the committee. He continued with brutal clarity: ‘the taste of the public must infallibly
operate upon the seller.’83 Had the debate over taste been simply an argument about
economic advantage this might not have been unsettling. But it was clear that these
men also believed a public preference for tasteful goods to be a positive reflection of
national character. Thus, the idea that the public taste and especially the lower
classes’ preferences ought to dictate the mode of production was one that did not
come easily to an elite who planned to act as the architects of a newly powerful
British political economy.
F OREIGN TASTE AN D F RE E TRAD E ?

The ultimate recommendation of the Select Committee was that the government
should establish a School of Design in London to train teachers in the applied arts.
The Committee authorized a grant of £10,000 for the purpose and gave operational
control of the School over to the Board of Trade.84 Their actions were not especially
innovative. In fact, they were merely following the example laid out for them by the
French, the Germans and even the Americans who had all established schools or
institutes prior to this point, that educated producers in the art of tasteful production.
In fact it had been the awareness of these initiatives that had been the starting point
for the committee hearings. But of course, such initiatives were unable to help
manufacturers who hoped to produce for foreign markets and consumers. They could
not hope to train a foreign public to demonstrate better taste. Thus they monitored the
American market, trying to ascertain what shaped American demands and desires.85
Before 1833, when American tariffs had risen to their highest levels, the tastes of
American consumers had been almost a moot point. Instead, British manufacturers
simply had to contend with the problem that the US Congress was continuing to
obstruct British merchants in their efforts to do business with American retailers.86
But in 1833, Senator Henry Clay brokered a legislative compromise in Congress that
began the gradual reduction of American tariffs. The move away from tariffs seemed
to present British manufacturers with an opportunity, but they worried it would be
squandered by the Conservative government’s adherence to the Corn Laws. By the
late 1830s, free trade manufacturers argued that one of the Corn Laws’ most
devastating effects was that they legitimated American retaliatory efforts to shut out
British goods from the American marketplace. ‘It is impossible to multiply too greatly
the proofs of the injury which the corn laws [sic] are inflicting upon our manufactures
by cherishing foreign competition’ reported The Sheffield Independent in 1839.87 The
proof that free traders sought seemed to arrive in 1842, when the Whig Congress
reinstituted a prohibitive tariff to deal with the United States’ growing public debt.
For four years, a rising chorus of voices championed the end of protectionist tariffs
on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally in 1846, Peel’s ministry brought the Corn Laws
586
to an end and this was followed in short order by the passage of the Walker Tariff in
the US, a tariff that lowered duties on a broad range of imports. Such reductions were
only the beginning. In 1849, Britain abolished the Navigation Acts and up until
1861, the spirit of free trade seemed to envelop the two nations in unprecedented
ways and a new interest in American consumer demand took shape in both America
and Britain.88
Whether they supported free trade or not, by mid-century many Americans
connected the widespread demand for finished consumer goods with a direct
expression of a democratic political order. Addressing the crowds gathered at an
exhibition of American-made manufactures staged by the Franklin Institute in
Philadelphia in 1847, Joseph Chandler proclaimed: ‘[t]hose…who in this country
are…transfusing into the lower classes…the wants of refinement are ministering to
the diffusion and maintenance of true republicanism.’89 A universal desire for refined
consumer goods, accompanied by open access to them within the marketplace,
argued Chandler, leveled out society. Moreover, Chandler implied that an equality of
good taste in consumer goods was a core component of a democratic republic.
Indeed, by the mid nineteenth century, many observers believed that consumption
habits in America showcased a crucial aspect of democratic society. As Chandler’s
colleague at the Franklin Institute, William Kelley argued, America could be imagined
as ‘millions of luxurious citizens’ all waiting to buy the goods that to him expressed
the ‘life of the nation’.90
This idealized democratic marketplace was not admired in Britain. At the Great
Exhibition of 1851, the British press mercilessly mocked the American exhibit for its
want of refinement and lack of exhibits.91 Scathingly referred to as the ‘prairie
ground’, London observers were quick to point to the tasteless and uninteresting
character of American productions. This included condemnation for such practical
items such as ice-making machines, corn-husk mattreses, fireproofed safes, india-
rubber shoes and McCormick’s Virginia Reaper.92 All of these objects generated a lot
of interest, but could hardly be described as the height of elegance. At a moment
when the British believed good taste to be an expression of society’s moral standards
such a shocking lack of refinement intensified British scrutiny of American society.93
In attempting to explain this lack of taste, British commentators turned to an
examination of the US’ political economy. ‘The absence in the United States of those
vast accumulations of wealth which favour the expenditure of large sums on articles
of mere luxury, and the general distribution of the means of procuring the more
substantial conveniences of life, impart to the productions of American industry a
character distinct from that of many other countries,’ explained the authors of the
Official Description and Illustrated Catalogue for the Great Exhibition. Pointing out
that very few American productions were created solely as ‘an object of virtu’ the
authors of the catalogue noted instead that, ‘both the manual and mechanical labour
are applied with direct reference to increasing the number or the quantity of articles
suited to the wants of the whole people’.94 The London Observer echoed such
sentiments, claiming that the American industrial system was ‘democratic in its
tendencies’ and that American manufacturers ‘produce for the masses…and look for
their reward to the public demand alone’.95 Yet, these demands appeared to be the
antithesis of good taste. The American exhibit thus challenged the idea that
commercial progress produced a more civilized society. But the exhibit also raised a
587
new set of questions. In the context of an international exhibition dedicated to

spreading free trade, the American exhibit posed a problem: with freer trade came the
freer flow of goods, demands and desires. Yet these productions and preferences had
an acknowledged and potentially detrimental effect on the social and political fabric
of society. The question was: could British manufacturers cash in on supplying the
American market but resist the urge to lower their own standards of production and
corrupt the quality of British taste in the process?
By the time of the New York Exhibition of 1853, the idea that the virtues of American
democracy could be seen in the widespread diffusion of luxury goods was well
established in American minds. The journalist Horace Greeley, describing the great
lesson to be learned from the Exhibition, argued that American ‘progress, in these
modern times, then consists in this, that we have democratized the means and appliances
of a higher life; …we have brought…the masses of the people up to the aristocratic
standard of taste and enjoyment and so diffusing the influence of splendor and grace
over all minds.’96 But British observers such as George Wallis were not convinced.
Certainly Wallis, like other British observers before him, had found there was an elite
taste for elegant goods in the US. Indeed, concerns that Americans preferred the
productions of France, when it came to purchasing refined luxury goods continued to
circulate in Britain.97 But it was the goods intended for a mass market that caused
greater anxiety. Instead of seeing refinement for the masses, Wallis found American
manufacturing to be slapdash and hurried, meaning that American-made goods
‘lack[ed] the perfect finish and completeness of appearance’ which characterized
European goods of a similar type.98 Cottons were made plainly and cheaply, designed
to use up the ‘short waste of other branches of the woolen manufacture’.99 These
satinets, as they were called, replaced the imported fustians and velveteens that made up
the clothes of the working classes in Britain. Wallis believed that they lacked durability
and reflected a less than admirable desire for ‘short-lived’ articles that were made for
appearance and not for long use.100 American taste was ‘tawdry and unimaginative’ but
as British tastemakers acknowledged, British manufacturers had to respond.101
The question of how to manage these tastes back in England worried tastemakers
and manufacturers. Those invested in national design education urged the government
to invest more heavily in training British manufacturers in the standards of good taste
so that they might more effectively compete for ‘the market of the world’. Especially
those with a more conservative outlook clung to the idea that taste had ‘laws, rules
and principles’ that ‘were sanctioned by the reverence of all ages and of all countries’.
But such assertions had lost ground by the middle of the nineteenth century.102
Instead, British observers fretted that catering for the tastes of the American market
was having a negative impact on the high standards of British manufacturing.
The prime example of this phenomenon was the British production of shoddy.
Shoddy was the term given to textiles made from the scraps and rags that were
collected and re-spun into yarn and then woven into fabric that might be bulked up
by the addition of a little extra fresh wool. The centre of British shoddy manufacture
were the small towns of Yorkshire, in particular Dewsbury, which had transformed
from ‘a village to a town of some thirty thousand inhabitants’ as a result of this
‘extraordinary transformation of old garments into new’.103 In Dewsbury, men and
women passed rags collected from all over Europe through iron toothed cylinders,
stripping them of any cotton filaments until they disintegrated into short scraps of
588
yarn. Then amidst the lint-filled air, known as ‘devil’s dust’ they would begin the
process of cleaning and spinning these small strings of wool back into textile.104 The
result was a fabric that looked fine at first glance but that soon wore out once it was
put into use. Horace Greeley reported having seen men pick handfuls of wool scraps
off of their shoulders, as their shoddy coats wore down to the lining.105
Americans were well aware that shoddy constituted a large portion of the textiles
that British merchants imported to the US.106 Although they too recognized that
shoddy was not especially durable, many did not seem to mind and indeed set about
trying to imitate the production of such textiles. Indeed, the satinets that Wallis
commented on were in all likelihood an effort to imitate shoddy. But British
commentators were far less sanguine about the effects of shoddy on both the British
economy and its reputation for adhering to high standards of taste and quality.
Commenting on the escalation of the shoddy trade, a writer for The Spectator noted:
There used to be a time when to say of any manufactured commodity that it was
‘English’ implied ipso facto that it was sterling – sound to the heart – made to
stand wear and tear, and defying scrutiny to prove any falsity in its pedigree. That
time has passed; and we may well say that the decline of English repute in that
respect has reached an alarming point, when even the manufacture of woollen
cloth, so long identified with our national name, has ceased to be sterling.107
Selling shoddy to the ‘Yankee’ customer might be easy to sustain for the time being,
but this particular author was concerned that losing sight of British standards in an
effort to cater to the not-so-discerning tastes of the Americans would ultimately
undermine the entirety of British trade.
The concern voiced by The Spectator was of course in part about maintaining
market share. But there was something else that was disturbing about shoddy. It
seemed to be the ultimate expression of free trade production. Here was a product
that was a cosmopolitan co-mingling of raw materials, made not out of any tradition
of artisanal craft but was instead a manufactured commodity arising out of an
international consumer demand. Although he did not condemn shoddy outright, it
was Horace Greeley who captured this essence of shoddy. In the warehouses of
Yorkshire, where the merchants of the rag trade collected their haul, Greeley reckoned
a visitor would find ‘the cast-off garments of Great Britain and the Continent of
Europe…the tattered remains of the clothes, some of which have been worn by
royalty in the various Courts of Europe, as well as by peers and peasants. The rich
broadcloth of the English nobles here commingles with the livery of their servants
and the worsted blouses of French republicans…American under-shirts, pantaloons,
and all other worsted or woollen goods…reduced to one common level and known
by the one common appellation of “rags”.’108 Shoddy seemed to embody the tawdry
democratic tastes of its consumers, challenging the ideas that commerce should reflect
progress, refinement and the quality of the nation in its entirety.
The concerns over shoddy revealed the deep anxieties that some Britons nurtured
when it came to implementing free trade. Although the Great Exhibition itself seemed
to promise Victorian Britons that the progress of commerce would secure the
international community’s journey towards a more civilized world, some British
manufacturers and merchants were less sure of this progress.109 Instead they saw the
589
de-stabilizing potential of responding to the diverse, democratic and potentially

degraded tastes of a global market of consumers. Such recognition elevated the
importance of the consumer in broad discussions about the operations of a national
and international market. It put the dictums of Adam Smith to the test and revealed
that free trade’s promise challenged deeply held assumptions about quality, value and
taste in Victorian society. What Britons learned from the Americans’ consumer tastes
was that market integration came with a cultural price tag attached. It was a price
they were apparently willing to pay.
NOTE S
The author would like to thank Erik Mathisen and Zara Anishanslin for their thoughtful and
thorough reading of this essay as well as the challenging and fruitful questions they continued
to ask. She would also like to thank D’Maris Coffman for the opportunity to become involved
in the collection and her immense and generous patience throughout.
1 ‘English Commissioners at New York’ Farmer’s Cabinet (Amherst, NH) 16 June, 1853.
2 William R. Wallace, ‘An Ode for the Inauguration of the American Crystal Palace’ New
York Times, 14 July, 1853. See also Charles Hirschfeld, ‘America on Exhibition: The New
York Crystal Palace’ American Quarterly 9 (Summer 1957), 101.
3 ‘The Directors’ The Barre Patriot (Massachusetts) June 3, 1853.
4 George Wallis and Joseph Whitworth, The American System of Manufactures. The Report
of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States in 1855 and the Special Reports
of George Wallis and Joseph Whitworth ed. and introd., Nathan Rosenberg (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 21–22.
5 This list reflects the items that Wallis had been commissioned to judge by the British
government. See Wallis and Whitworth, The American System of Manufactures, 22.
6 Wallis quoted in ‘Belfast Government School of Art – Annual Conversazione and
Distribution of Scholarships’ The Belfast News-Letter Issue 12012, April 7, 1854.
7 Michael Snodin, ‘Victorian Britain, 1837–1901: Who Led Taste?’ in Michael Snodin and
John Styles, ed., Design and the Decorative Arts, Britain 1500–1900 (London: V&A
Publications, 2001), 369.
8 There is debate over the rate at which free trade was being embraced although most agree
that the significant shift towards implementing free trade took place in 1846 with the
repeal of the Corn Laws. See C.P. Kindleberger, ‘The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe,
1820–75’ The Journal of Economic History 35 (March, 1975), 28–36; John Vincent Nye,
‘The Myth of Free Trade Britain and Fortress France: Tariffs and Trade in the Nineteenth
Century’ The Journal of Economic History 51 (March, 1991), 23–46; Douglas A. Irwin,
‘Free Trade and Protection in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France Revisted: A Comment
on Nye’ The Journal of Economic History 53 (March 1993), 146–52.
9 Arts and Manufactures Committee, Report from Select Committee on Arts and
Manufactures (HC, 1835, 598–375), 102.
10 The classic account remains Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and
Economic Origins of Our Time 2nd edition (Boston: Beacon, 2001). A great deal of the
literature especially from the 1970s and 1980s focused on the theory of hegemonic
stability, looking specifically at Britain as the free trade hegemon and British politicians
and philosophers as the architects of free trade. For a review of this scholarship and of its
limitations see Patrick K. O’Brien and Geoffey Allen Pigman, ‘Free Trade, British
Hegemony and the International Economic Order in the Nineteenth Century’ Review of
International Studies 18 (April 1992), 89–91 and Arthur A. Stein, ‘The Hegemon’s
590
Dilemma: Great Britain, the United States and the International Economic order’
International Organization 38:2 (Spring 1984), 355, n.1. See also C.P Kindleberger, ‘The
Rise of Free Trade in the West’; James Ashley Morrison, ‘Before Hegemony: Adam Smith,
American Independence, and the Origins of the First Era of Globalization’ International
Organization 66 (Summer 2012), 395–428. Some recent articles to look beyond the
hegemonic stability theory and examine a wider array of pressure groups and parties
include Simon Morgan, ‘The Anti-Corn Law League and British Anti-slavery in
Transatlantic Perspective, 1838–46’ The Historical Journal 52 (2009),: 87–109; Richard
Huzzey, ‘Free Trade, Free Labour and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain’ The Historical
Journal 53 (June 2010), 359–79 and Anthony Howe, ‘John Bull and Brother Jonathan:
Cobden, America and the Liberal Mind’ in Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey, ed., The
American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 107–20.
11 See especially Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Free Trade and Protectionism in America,
1822–1890 vol. 1, ed. Lars Magnusson (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
12 Some exceptions are Wolfram Kaiser, ‘Cultural Transfer of Free Trade at the World
Exhibitions, 1851–62’ Journal of Modern History 77 (September 2005), 563–90; Lara
Kriegel, ‘Culture and the Copy: Calico, Capitalism and Design Copyright in Early
Victorian Britain’ Journal of British Studies 43 (April 2004), 233–65.
13 ’Mr. Wheeler, Your attention is Requested to the enclosed Piece from a Female
Correspondent’ The United States Chronicle, Political, Commercial and Historical
(Providence RI) 11 May, 1786.
14 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor, The Communist
Manifesto 1888 (London: Penguin, 1985), 84.
15 The literature on consumer goods as markers of identity and makers of taste is expansive.
See John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York:
Routledge, 1993); Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Of Consuming
Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va.: University
Press of Virginia, 1994); T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer
Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Kate
Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2010); Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of
Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003); John Styles and Amanda Vickery, eds., Gender, Taste and Material Culture in
Britain and North America 1700–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
16 The relationship between material culture, taste and national identity is brilliantly
explored in Leora Auslander, Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain,
North America and France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Auslander
focuses on domestic productions and does not consider the ways in which foreign tastes
or demands impacted this relationship.
17 Styles and Vickery, Gender, Taste and Material Culture, 14.
18 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful
(London: J. Dodsley, 1759), 4 cited in Amanda Vickery, ‘“Neat and Not Too Showey”:
Words and Wallpaper in Regency England’ in Styles and Vickery, Gender, Taste and
Material Culture, 201.
19 Dabney Townsend, ‘From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of
Aesthetic Experience’ Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (April–June, 1987), 287–305.
20 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 2002),
227–29. On Hogarth see Maxine Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities
in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ The Economic History Review 55 (Feb 2002), 13.
591
21 On the luxury debates see Luxury in the Eighteenth Century. Debates, Desires and
Delectable Goods, ed., Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (New York: Palgrave, 2003);
Michael Kwass, ‘Ordering the World of Goods: Consumer Revolution and the
Classification of Objects in Eighteenth Century France’ Representations, 82 (Spring,
2003), 87–116; John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought from Eden to
Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
22 Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates’ in Luxury in
the Eighteenth Century, 1–14.
23 Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the
Eighteenth Century’ Past and Present 182 (February 2004), 91–96; T.H. Breen, ‘“The
Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century’
Past and Present 119 (May 1988), 73–104. The classic account of the ‘consumer
revolution’ is Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer
Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, Ind.:
Indiana University Press, 1982).
24 Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2011), 17.
25 Auslander, Cultural Revolutions, 7.
26 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009), 90–91; Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention,’ 17–18. For another aspect of
this debate over design, regarding Spitalfield silk weavers’ competition with French
weavers see Zara Anishanslin, Embedded Empire: Hidden Histories of Labor, Landscape
and Luxury in the British Atlantic World (New Haven, forthcoming), chapter 1.
27 Colley, Britons, 69.
28 Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 76–200.
29 Haulman, The Politics of Fashion, 34–35.
30 Ibid., 18–20, 45.
31 Ibid., 32–33.
32 On the centrality of imports (legal and illegal) for British North Americans see Carole
Shammas, ‘How Self-Sufficient was Early America?’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History
13 (Autumn 1982), 263–68; On the Navigation Acts see Linzy A. Brekke ‘“To Make a
Figure”: Clothing and the Politics of Male Identity in Eighteenth-Century America’ in
Gender, Taste and Material Culture, 235; on sumptuary laws in the colonies see Linzy A.
Brekke ‘“The Scourge of Fashion”: Political Economy and the Politics of Consumption in
the Early Republic’ Early American Studies (Spring 2005), 114.
33 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 115,119.
34 [Print] J[ames] S[ayer], ‘On a Visit – Taking a Ride – West India Fashionables’ (London,
William Holland, 1807).
35 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 102.
36 Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771; London, 1884), 37.
37 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 125.
38 Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, xx
39 C. Knick Harley, ‘British Industrialization before 1841: Evidence of Slower Growth
During the Industrial Revolution’ Journal of Economic History 42 (June 1982), 280.
40 ‘Miss Carolina Sullivan, one of the obstinate daughters of America,’ printed by Mary
Darly, London, September 1, 1776. Caricature and Cartoon File, PR 010 #1776–3,
negative number 39754. Collection of The New-York Historical Society. Reproduced in
Haulman, The Politics of Fashion, 159.
41 ‘Examination before the Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons,’ Feb. 13,
1766 The Papers of Benjamin Franklin 3: 124 (http://franklinpapers.org) and Breen, The
Marketplace of Revolution, 195–200.
592
42 On the wearing of French fashions see Haulman, The Politics of Fashion, 175–80. The
controversy over the British Meschianza ball held in Philadelphia in May 1778 also
illuminates this tension over British fashions. See Haulman, The Politics of Fashion, 172–73
and Susan Klepp, ‘Rough Music on Independence Day: Philadelphia’ in Matthew Dennis,
Simon P. Newman and William Pencaks, eds., Riot and Revelry in Early America (University
Park, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). On trade see Merril D. Peterson, ‘Thomas
Jefferson and Commercial Policy, 1783–93’ William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series,
22:4 (October 1965), 595–600.
43 See for example: ‘Advertisement’ South Carolina Weekly Advertiser, 12 March 1783,
‘Albany June 16’ Pennsylvania Packet, 3 July 1783, ‘Advertisement’ Pennsylvania Packet,
17 April 1783, ‘Advertisement’ Pennsylvania Packet, 8 July 1783, ‘New-York, July 17
Advertisement’ Salem Gazette, 7 August 1783, ‘London May 29’ Pennsylvania Packet, 16
August 1783. For an overview see Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise:
Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture,
1986), 263; Peter J. Marshall Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the
British Empire after American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 264.
44 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannon, introduction Robert Reich
(New York: Modern Library, 2000), 715.
45 John E. Crowley, The Privileges of Independence. Neomercantilism and the American
Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 70.
46 Ibid., 72. See also James Ashley Morrison, “Before Hegemony,” 25.
47 John Baker Holroyd, Earl of Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the American
States with Europe and the West Indies (London: J. Debrett, 1784), 2. See also George
Chalmers, Opinions on Interesting Subjects of Public Law and Commercial Policy Arising
from American Independence (London: J. Debrett, 1784).
48 Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the American States, 10–11.
49 Colley, Britons, 19–25.
50 Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and Making of
a New World Empire (Cambridge Mass and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), 119.
51 Sheffield also assumed that the price of goods would play a significant role as well as the
fact that Americans relied on the British for generous lines of credit. See Sheffield,
Observations on the Commerce of the American States, 5.
52 Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention,’ 18.
53 Richard Champion, Considerations on the Present Situation of Great Britain and the
United States of America, with a view to their further commercial connexions, 2nd edition
(London: John Stockdale, 1784), 58.
54 Ibid., 263–64.
55 William Bingham, A Letter from an American, Now Resident In London, to a Member of
Parliament on the Subject of Restraining Proclamation and containing Strictures on Lord
Sheffield’s Pamphlet on the Commerce of the American States (London: J. Stockdale,
1784), 45.
56 See Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth, 136; Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic,
Donald R. Hickey, ‘American Trade Restrictions during the War of 1812’ The Journal of
American History 68:3 (December 1981), 517–38.
57 Paul Bairoch quoted in Nye, ‘The Myth of Free-Trade Britain and Fortress France’, 24.
See also C.P Kindleberger, ‘The Rise of Free Trade’, 27.
58 Act of July 4, 1789, c.2, Stat. 1. For the period 1807 to 1815 see Joanna Cohen, Luxurious
Citizens: Consumption and Civic Belonging in Nineteenth Century America (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming) chapter 2. See also Hickey, ‘American
Trade Restrictions’.
593
59 Daniel Peart, ‘Looking Beyond Parties and Elections: The Making of United States Tariff
Policy during the Early 1820s’ Journal of the Early Republic 33:1 (Spring 2013), 94, 107.
See also Jonathan J. Pincus, Pressure Groups and Politics in Antebellum Tariffs (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
60 Kindleberger, ‘The Rise of Free Trade’, 27.
61 Regina Blasszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgewood to
Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 52–88.
62 Unknown maker, Jug, made Liverpool, England, ca. 1795, 414:1095–1885, Victoria and
Albert Museum, London, UK. See also James and Ralph Clews, Jug, made in Cobridge,
England, ca. 1825, C.38–1974, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK.
63 Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America, a narrative of a Journey of Five Thousand
Miles 2nd edition (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818), 6.
64 Ibid., 9.
65 It was not only Britons who thought free black people lacked taste. Americans were quick
to mock and dismiss the tastes of free black people also, attitudes which in fact helped to
reinforce British conceptions. See Nancy Reynolds Davidson, ‘E.W. Clay: American
Political Caricaturist of the Jacksonian Era’, PhD. diss.,The University of Michigan, 1980.
66 Frances Wright, Views of Society and Manners in America, ed. Paul R Baker (Cambridge,
Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 33.
67 Ibid., 201.
68 Anishanslin, Embedded Empire, chapter 1.
69 Kindleberger, ‘The Rise of Free Trade’, 28–30; Irwin, ‘Free Trade and Protection in
Nineteenth-Century Britain and France Revisited’, 146.
70 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 143.
71 29 Parl. Deb. (3rd ser.) (1835) 553–55.
72 Stephen Farrell, ‘Warburton, Henry, (1754–1858)’, The History of Parliament: The House
of Commons, 1820–1832 ed. D.R Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820–32 (accessed March 23, 2014).
73 Report from Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (1835), 2.
74 Paul A.C. Sproll, ‘Matters of Taste and Matters of Commerce: British Government
Intervention in Art Education in 1835’, Studies in Art Education 35:4 (1994), 107–8;
Edward Bird, ‘Art and Design in the Nineteenth Century – Dilemma and Conflict’ in
Proceedings of the Conference of the European Academy of Design 3: 1995.
76 Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23.
78 Ibid., 102.
79 Ibid., 11–12.
80 Ibid., 2–6; 22, 27, 88.
81 This is surprising since Victorians believed women to be especially susceptible to the
beguiling nature of consumer goods. See Margot Finn, ‘Working-Class Women and the
Contest for Consumer Control in Victorian County Courts’ Past and Present 161 (Nov.,
1998), 135, 141. See also Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian
Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
82 Report from Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (1835), 19, 39.
83 Ibid., 46.
84 Bird, ‘Art and Design in the Nineteenth Century – Dilemma and Conflict’, although
ultimately the Select Committee were pre-empted and the government allocated £1600 for
the foundation of a national School of Design in 1835. See Sproll, ‘Matters of Taste and
Commerce’, 109.
594
85 ‘American Complaints of British Monopoly’, The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent,

20 November, 1841, 1139.
86 This was despite British efforts to lessen the effects of the Corn Laws by introducing a
sliding scale for manufactured goods in 1828. See Simon Morgan, ‘America, Protectionism
and Democracy in British Free Trade Debates, 1815–61’ in The American Experiment
and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914 ed. Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth
Livesey (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 94.
87 Foreign Intelligence, The Sheffield Independent April 13, 1839, 3.
88 American support for free trade came largely from southern pro-slavery intellectuals. See
Michael O’ Brien Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860
II (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 817, 891; Brian
Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics and the Global Origins of the
Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 100–145; Walter Johnson,
River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2013), 282–83. For an overview of American tariff policy see the
classic F.W Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States (1892 reprint: New York and
London: Knickerbocker Press, 1923). On British free trade see Morgan, ‘America,
Protectionism and Democracy in British Free Trade Debates’, and Anthony Howe, ‘John Bull
and Brother Jonathan: Cobden, America and the Liberal Mind’ in The American Experiment
and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914 ed. Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth
Livesey (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 107–19.
89 Joseph R. Chandler, Address Delivered at the Close of the Seventeenth Exhibition of
American Manufactures Held by the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for
the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, October 1847 (Philadelphia: Franklin Institute,
1847), 10.
90 William Kelley quoted in The Franklin Institute, Report of the Twenty-Second Exhibition
of American Manufactures, Held in the City of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: R.W. Barnard,
1852), 14.
91 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, The Industry of Nations, as Exemplified in
the Great Exhibition of 1851 I (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,
1852), 101–2.
92 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, Official and Illustrated
Catalogue by Authority of the Royal Commission III (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851),
1431–62. On the prairie-ground reference see Wallis and Whitworth, The American
System of Manufactures, 7.
93 John Styles, ‘Victorian Britain, 1837–1901, Introduction’ in Design and the Decorative
Arts, 336.
94 Official Catalogue and Illustrated Description III, 1431 (cited in Wallis and Whitworth,
n.2 p. 7).
95 Charles T. Rodgers, American Superiority at the World’s Fair (Philadelphia: J.J. Hawkins,
1852), 127. Rodgers quoted the Observer with pride.
96 Horace Greeley, ed., Art and Industry: As Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal
Palace, New York – 1853–4 (New York: Redfield, 1853), 58.
97 ‘America and Canada’ (London), Daily News, May 23, 1849.
98 Wallis and Whitworth, The American System of Manufactures, 204.
99 C.R. Goodrich and B. Silliman, ed. Science and Mechanism: Illustrated by Examples in
the New York Exhibition, 1853–4 (New York: G.P. Putnam and Company, 1854), 161.
100 Wallis and Whitworth, The American System of Manufactures, 304.
101 ‘American Industry’ The Morning Chronicle (London) March 30, 1854.
102 ‘Belfast – Government School of Art’ The Belfast News-Letter April 7, 1854.
103 Greeley, Art and Industry 212.
595
104 The concerns over quality were accompanied by a worry for the work force used to
produce shoddy. This was part of a wider debate over the problem of wage labour and its
relationship to free trade. For the broader Anglo-American context see Marcus Cunliffe,
Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830–1860 (Athens
GA: University of Georgia Press, 1979).
105 Greeley, Art and Industry 211.
106 C.R. Goodrich and B. Silliman, ed. Science and Mechanism, 160.
107 ‘Caveat Venditor’, The Spectator June 18, 1853, 18.
108 Greeley, Art and Industry, 208.
109 Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition, 22–24.
596
PART VIII
THE CIRCULATION OF IDEAS

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
‘EXCITED ALMOST TO MADNESS’ 1

Slave rebellions and resistance
in the Atlantic World
Jeffrey A. Fortin
‘A bout twelve or one clock in the night’ of 6 April 1712, Governor Robert Hunter
reported a ‘bloody conspiracy of some of the slaves’ aiming ‘to destroy as many
of the inhabitants’ of New York City ‘as they could.’2 Meeting at an orchard in the
middle of town and armed with knives, hatchets, swords, and guns, ‘about three and
twenty’ enslaved Africans – and Native Americans, according to some unverified
reports – ‘resolved to revenge themselves.’3 One slave torched his master’s shed while
the others gathered around. The ‘noise of the fire spreading through the town’ drew
a quick response from the white inhabitants of the bustling seaport; immediately
upon ‘the approach of several’ whites intent on controlling the flames, ‘the slaves
fired and killed them.’4 Within minutes, nine white ‘Christians’ lay dead, with another
six injured.5
Reports of the mayhem quickly reached Governor Hunter, who summoned the
militia to capture the rebellious slaves. With the slaves retreating into the woods, a
search of the town on the following day revealed that six of the conspirators ‘first laid
violent hands on themselves’ by committing suicide.6 Twenty-seven other slaves were
captured and condemned to death. Twenty-one of those caught were ‘burnt, [the]
other hanged, one broke on the wheel’ – the latter a particularly tortuous death
whereby the bones were slowly, systematically broken and crushed so as to cause
excruciating pain over a series of hours.7 ‘The most exemplary punishment inflicted
that could possibly be thought of,’ Governor Hunter earnestly reported, involved
‘one’ of the condemned who was ‘hung alive in chains in the town’ for all to see.8 He
died slowly of dehydration and exposure, with birds likely picking the man’s bones
clean of flesh after a few days’ passing.
Within one year, the Common Council for the City of New York passed several
new acts for the regulation and punishment of slaves. These new, stricter black codes
focused mainly on controlling nighttime activities of slaves, making it illegal to travel
without a ‘Lanthorn and a Lighted Candle’ or for slaves to inhabit certain parts of
the city after sunset.9 Most importantly, the rebellion hardened the practice of slavery
in this city with a high concentration of slaves – approximately 20 percent of the total
population in bondage.10 The city’s Common Council argued for better regulation of
slaves to halt future revolts and to increase the number of ‘White Servants’ imported
599
– Jeffrey A. Fortin –
into the city.11 Restrictions on manumission would also limit the number of free
blacks in the city, supposedly making it more difficult for persons of African descent
to gather and conspire against whites. Additionally, slaves could no longer claim a
right to freedom through conversion to Christianity, a key highlight in this separate
code of laws developed specifically for application to the slave population.
The reality of slavery in New York City was different from common modern
perceptions of slavery, yet entirely familiar to citizens of the early-modern Atlantic
World. New York City’s slave population represented the vast diversity of the Trans-
Atlantic Slave Trade: most had been born in the West Indies, Angola, the Congo, the
Gold Coast of West Africa, and even along Africa’s eastern Coast and Madagascar.12
Urban slaves possessed a level of mobility uncommon for a plantation slave because
often their duties were dependent on traveling to different establishments within
town. New York City, in particular, was a mixture of ethnicities and races, some free
and some enslaved, complicating the social and economic exchanges between
individuals within the community. Tavern walls witnessed enslaved and free Africans,
creoles, Native Americans and a milieu of Europeans drinking side-by-side and
chattering about the latest news brought by ships from around the Atlantic, leading
to an enslaved population intimate with the political and social fabric of the city.
Undoubtedly on that Sunday night in mid-spring, the two dozen or so slaves involved
in the uprising chose the Sabbath – a day of rest for colonial Americans – knowing
the city’s white residents’ guard would be down. The slaves clearly played on growing
anxieties in the city fueled by recent murders committed by slaves on Long Island and
an increasing concern among whites about a newly opened school to educate and
Christianize slaves and Indians.
Rebellions like the one in New York in 1712 occurred often throughout the
Atlantic world between 1450 and 1850. Slave revolts took on a variety of meanings,
but they represent one of the more extreme acts of resistance to enslavement.
Rebellions large and small committed the participating slave to death: either caught
and executed, or committing suicide before being captured, rebellious Africans rarely
escaped with their lives or freedom.13 As the slaves in the 1712 rebellion found out,
insurrection could be an excruciating way to protest their bondage – a dramatic act
of the desperate, or a valiant expression of agency. Death, according to many West
African beliefs, provided an escape from slavery where individuals could be reborn in
the company of their ancestors.14
Although rebellion is the most obvious and often discussed form of resistance to
slavery, persons of African descent responded to their enslavement in a variety of
ways. As Philip Morgan argues, ‘In work and in play, in public and private, violently
and quietly, slaves struggled against their masters,’ making the act of resistance an
evolving, continuous negotiation of power between master and slave, slave and
master.15 Slaves resisted their captivity by running away, through work stoppages/
slowdowns, playing on whites’ anxieties, committing suicide and creating a new
African–Atlantic culture, among other methods.16 Each of these forms of resistance
shared a common thread: enslaved Africans and Native Americans not only reacted
to their oppressors, but often they influenced these relationships. For nearly 400
years of enslavement in the Atlantic world – Brazil was the final Atlantic nation to
abolish slavery in 1888 – enslaved peoples developed numerous ways in which to
combat their status and express agency over their situations.
600
– chapter 32: Slave rebellions and resistance –
Resistance need not mean certain death for enslaved Africans or Native Americans
in the Atlantic world. Nor was resistance to slavery an act of the powerless. Although
in the past scholars have characterized slaves as passive and submissive, unwilling to
fight their captors, contemporary scholarship offers a corrective, mostly identifying
the variety of ways slaves challenged the master/slave relationship.17 Enslaved peoples
faced a world in which unimaginable despair and loss of hope would seem to rule;
yet, because of individual resiliency and group cooperation acts of resistance became
the critical conduit through which to shape their world. From everyday acts to grand
insurrections – even revolutions – slaves acted out their humanity by confronting
their dire situation directly.18 Surprisingly successful in their resistance, slaves
negotiated and renegotiated power relationships with their captors. Sometimes this
meant gaining their freedom, sometimes this meant death, but it always meant a
disruption in that individual’s life of bondage – a powerful motivation even if escaping
from the grind of slavery for only a few hours.
Difficult challenges await scholars attempting to understand resistance and rebellion
in the Atlantic world. Beyond the multiple languages and broad geographic locations
of archives that contain documents relative to slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade, the most basic, and somewhat unavoidable problem in current scholarship is
the lack of records left by the slaves themselves. Largely illiterate and purposefully
kept from socio-political environments – such as courts, legislative bodies, churches,
etc. – that often produced copious amounts of records, slaves’ intentions and plans to
resist slavery are difficult to trace. In short, slaves planning an insurrection or choosing
to run away rarely recorded their objectives for fear of being uncovered. The written
accounts of enslavement that do exist were produced by exceptional people in unique
circumstances, such as Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, and
others that remain extremely valuable to historians but tell us little about the common
slave’s method of resistance.19 Importantly, the only way to arrive at a true sense of
resistance and rebellion in the Atlantic World is to consider a vast array of documents,
whether slave narratives or records produced by the enslavers themselves.
By no means comprehensive, we will explore the nature of resistance and rebellion
in much the same fashion enslaved peoples did. Until recently, studies of slave
resistance often centered on mainland North America, suggesting that Africans
resisted bondage immediately upon arrival from the Middle Passage. By exploring
slave resistance and rebellion in an Atlantic context, it becomes clear that resistance
started with the point of capture in Africa. From there, we will follow slaves along
the routes they took to their final destination, whether on a plantation or as urban
bonded labor, highlighting along the voyage moments of resistance, rebellion and the
resulting negotiated power relationships that emerged. Frequently the smallest act of
defiance warranted a change in the captive African’s conditions; other times it took a
massive, violent insurrection to shape the enslaved environment. At all times resistance
endeavored to challenge that bleakest of human conditions: the absence of freedom.
* * *
In 1448, a Portuguese slave trader, Alvaro Fernandez, recounted his second voyage
to West Africa to buy some slaves. Along with providing insight into the existing
practice of slavery on the continent, where ‘some Moors’ sell ‘those Negroes whom
601
they have kidnapped’ to Christian merchants, the narrative details early raiding
missions by Europeans along the coast of Africa.20 Inadvertently, the account also
reveals the nature of resistance by potential captives. Well before Columbus’ voyages
to America Europeans were engaged in small-scale slavery aimed primarily at
providing domestic servants as opposed to large plantation labor forces that would
blossom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The hunt for these servants
regularly brought Europeans to Africa. Historian Ira Berlin identifies the Africans
involved in these early exchanges with Europeans as ‘Atlantic creoles’ because ‘they
became part of three worlds’ – Africa, the Americas and Europe – ‘in the Atlantic
littoral.’21 Not always enslaved, Atlantic creoles were often educated and highly
culturally literate, able to move from one socio-cultural setting to another with ease.
Fernandez was not interested in acquiring potential Atlantic creoles. His mission
was to capture slaves. Returning to ‘the land of the Negroes,’ Fernandez immediately
encountered Africans’ resistance to being enslaved by these ugly, hairy white men.22
Once in Guinea, Fernandez ‘journeyed along the sea coast’ and ‘in a few days…came
upon a village, and its inhabitants issued forth like men who showed they had a will
to defend their houses.’23 After a futile attempt to engage the men of the village,
Fernandez’s men retreated, waiting for the opportune moment to launch a raid. The
next day they ‘espied some of the wives of those Guineas’ collecting shellfish some
distance from the village.24 Descending upon them, Frenandez’s men marveled at the
‘strength of the woman,’ whom, targeted for capture by the raiders, resisted with
fortitude. ‘For not one of the three men who came upon her,’ Fernandez exclaimed,
‘would have great labor attempting to get her to the boat.’25 The people of this
anonymous village along the coast of Guinea, including the mother whose two
children were also taken into captivity, demonstrated the most basic form of resistance
to slavery: fighting the initial capture.
Even when the seemingly weakest members of villages – children – were targeted
they found ways to resist being kidnapped. Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who
authored the widely selling The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African, recalled an incident when a slave raider entered his
village after all the adults left to work in the fields for the day. Perhaps under the
impression of easy pickings, a ‘rogue’ entered Equiano’s neighbor’s yard one day
ready to ‘carry off as many as they could seize.’26 Alarmed by Equiano’s calls, the
‘stoutest’ of the children surrounded the man, ‘entangl[ing] him with cords, so that
he could not escape till some of the grown people came and secured him.’27
Equiano’s detailed narrative illuminates how well versed even the youngest Africans
were in the trickery of the slave traders – to the extent that they were able to fend
off their captors.28
The process of enslavement began in Africa, as raiding parties led by African slave
traders captured their bounties in the interior of the continent. Two-thirds male and
primarily young, those Africans unable to fight off slave raiders were immediately
confined or bound in some type of device to ensure compliance throughout the often
long march to the coast where captives would be counted, classified, and readied for
sale to the slavers laying in anchor in the bay. Wooden yokes, iron necklaces, and
chains introduced stunned men, women, and children to the horrors of slavery.29
These coffles – a line of people joined by mechanical devices such as a forked log –
marched grimly over terra firma, with those unable to keep the pace hacked to death.
602
For some, facing the unknown or experiencing the violence of the moment of
capture inspired resistance. At any opportunity captives ran away. Occasionally,
successful runaways formed de facto maroon communities perhaps made possible by
the fact that most slaves were farmers or from agricultural backgrounds, providing a
source of bonding in their mutual experiences. Many captives cried out, attempting to
draw attention to themselves and their captors, willing outside aid to interrupt the
long march. However, as Equiano reported in his Narrative, these cries were met with
a stopper placed in the mouth, forcing them to march to the factories in silence. By the
time the gag was released, captives were often so ‘overpowered by fatigue’ and hunger
that resistance proved difficult.30 Sleep, ‘our only relief…allayed our misfortune for a
short time,’ providing only the slightest respite from the descent into bondage.31
At the factory, where slaves were counted, inspected, and classified, resistance
continued. Initially, slaves were housed in weak enclosures, often able to escape by
digging beneath the walls through the loose sand. These ‘booths,’ as one account
refers to them, were constructed directly on the beach.32 Sometimes ‘compass’d round
with a mud-wall, about six foot high,’ these factories were lightly defended at first
and often muddy, disease-ridden environments.33 High death rates for both Africans
and Europeans stationed at the factories made them less than desirable ports of call
on the slavers’ voyage. But, as the trade increased these structures grew in size and
effectiveness, buildings were expanded to include full foundations and mortared
walls, making it more challenging for slaves to escape and marking the factories’
emergence as fully defended forts dotting the landscape of the Gold Coast of West
Africa.34 Inside, the forts were divided by gender, with men on one side and women
on the other to maintain order and ease accessibility for buyers. Deep inside the
bowels of these forts, Africans awaited sale, and their first sunlight in days, weeks, or
months, before loading into one of the large canoes for transport to the slave ship
anchored in the coastal waters.
Once on the water, new opportunities for resistance and rebellion revealed
themselves to those Africans seeking escape. In what might seem like the confining
gunwales of a canoe or thickly lumbered walls of a 700-tonne ship, Africans rose
against their enslavement with might and intensity. Captains of the slave trade
understood the most difficult portion of their voyage to be the run westward across
the Atlantic. With the average crossing between six weeks and six months, ‘the
tediousness caus[ed] a great mortality among them.’35 Facing such conditions, slave
ship captains took several precautions against potential insurrections, including
division of the sexes, highly regulated feedings of the cargo, heavy shackles, and
cramped dimly lit quarters intended to further break the spirits of the Africans.36 The
most important precaution, according to experienced seamen, was avoidance of
‘taking in too many…from want of knowing how to manage them aboard’ with just
enough care taken to ensure safe passage across the Atlantic and arrival in port in the
West Indies with as many surviving cargo as possible.37
Sailing under the banner of England’s joint-stock Royal African Company, a firm
with nearly 40 percent of its trade composed of enslaved Africans, Captain Thomas
Phillips kept a detailed journal that vividly described the process of enslavement from
the moment after capture to their arrival in the West Indies.38 Importantly, Phillips’
journal reveals the degree to which Africans were willing to avoid enslavement and the
new opportunities for resistance shipboard. As Phillips’ Hannibal lay anchored off the
603
coast of Guinea, the captain and his crew loaded some seven hundred newly purchased
slaves onto heavy-duty oceangoing canoes for transport to the slaver. ‘The men were
all put in irons,’ he reported, ‘two and two shackled together, to prevent their mutiny,
or swimming ashore.’ For many newly enslaved Africans these attempts to prevent
escape mattered little. ‘The negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country,’
affirmed Phillips, ‘that they often leap’d out of the canoes, boats and ship, and kept
under water till they were drowned…to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats.’39
Intended to deter, the iron shackles only caused Africans to change their strategy of
resistance. ‘They [had] a more dreadful apprehension of Barbadoes than we can have
of hell, though in reality’ Phillips convinced himself, ‘they live much better there than
in their own country.’40 Suicide offered a way out of Africans’ earthly purgatory.
Despite witnessing seemingly common suicidal behavior, Captain Phillips remained
detached from, and somewhat aggravated by his captives. ‘We have likewise seen
divers numbers of them eaten by sharks,’ he stated, concerned by these sharks that
‘kept about the ships in this place, and I have been told will keep about’ the Hannibal
until reaching port in Barbadoes, ‘for the dead negroes that are thrown overboard in
the passage’ will provide a steady diet.41 The grim reality of death, the ever-present
moans as the weight of enslavement seemed to crush Africans, in the eyes of their
captors, did little to raise emotion in Phillips’ words. Apparently cool to the plight of
his commodities, Phillips expressed little regret at losing some of his cargo to the sharks.
Perhaps the ultimate form of resistance, suicide illustrates the differences in European
and African cultural beliefs as well as how attuned to their cargoes slave ship captains
could be. Phillips himself understood the meaning behind the act for Africans, lamenting
the loss of about ‘12 negroes who drowned themselves, and others starv’d themselves
to death.’ Phillips explained to his imagined audience that ‘‘tis their belief that when
they [committed suicide] they return home to their own country and friends,’ to which
he mused, ‘home is home, etc.’ To prevent these suicides, other captains dismembered
a few of the ‘most unruly’ offenders because ‘they believe if they lose [a] member, they
cannot return home again.’ Professing to be stunned by such deeds, Phillips refused to
practice this degree of ‘barbarity and cruelty.’42 Slave ship captains understood their
captives to a degree that might seem unfathomable, yet it was essential to their success:
they accepted resistance by Africans in limited amounts before acting to suppress it.
Later in the eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano’s explicit details about life
shipboard during the arduous journey from freedom in Africa to slavery in the
Americas depicted suicide as a mode of resistance infused with African spiritual
beliefs. Under a pervasive stench of death, bodily fluids and rotting food, Equiano
recalled expecting to ‘share the fate of my companions…the inhabitants of the deep’
who had jumped ship, releasing themselves from the torturous journey, becoming
‘much more happy than myself.’43 Confronting the unknown yet understanding his
new status as enslaved, Equiano ‘envied them the freedom they enjoyed’ in the depths
of the Atlantic.44 Equiano’s own despair became so intense that he attempted to go
without food but was forced by the ship’s crew to accept their rations. Combating the
horrid conditions onboard a slaver became a struggle of life and death, crew versus
cargo, and a battle of the individual’s will.
Beyond Equiano’s desire to live, whether enslaved or not, his Narrative captures
the veracity with which petrified Africans took the situation into their own hands.
On a day with smooth sailing and moderate wind, ‘two of my wearied countrymen,
604
who were chained together…preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made
through the nettings, and jumped into the sea.’45 Far from surprised, Equiano recalled
‘another quite dejected fellow…follow their example,’ plunging himself into the
ocean, rather than face a life in shackles.46 Many Africans resisted their captors with
a finality that was twofold. Suicide not only cost the traders financially but it made
the slaver’s crew anxious over the prospect of mass suicide or revolt shipboard,
striking fear into the minds of those very men whose survival depended on coercion
and violence aimed at their captive cargoes.47
A continual tension existed between slave ship crews and their enslaved cargo.
Africans resisted their fate through suicide and crews did what they could to limit
losses. A fine line governed these actions: how many suicides or beatings would it
take before an entire cargo mutinied? This continual negotiation between the two
groups illustrates how resistance did not always need to occur in large groups or
dramatic episodes. Sometimes resistance took the form of individuals fasting; at other
times resistance was the enhancement of an omnipresent fear of what could happen
shipboard. Regardless, as experience mounted, European slave ship captains began
to avoid carrying a cargo of too many Africans from the same ethnic background to
avoid conspiracies and collaboration against themselves.
As the slaver prepared for its Trans-Atlantic crossing crews tended to the cargo,
securing the holds to circumvent shipboard insurrection. For an imprudent crew,
revolt could happen immediately after securing their cargo. A Dutch factor, William
Bosman, recalled the ‘carelessness of a master’ who laid the ship’s anchor in the hold
of the male slaves.48 Using the heavy anchor ‘in a short time they broke all their
fetters in pieces,’ emerging on the deck where ‘before all was appeased about twenty
of them were killed.’49 Despite this particular revolt’s failure, Bosman heard of several
more successful insurrections in the harbor. ‘They resolve and agree together…to run
away from the ship’ by killing the Europeans, ‘set the vessel a-shore; by which means
they design to free themselves.’50 Acutely aware of the desperation and fear amongst
the captured Africans, slave ship crews needed to be alert and take care not to
misplace items that could facilitate an uprising. Africans often took advantage of the
first – and virtually every – opportunity they had to resist enslavement, whether
through shipboard rebellions or some other means.
There exist numerous accounts of insurrections aboard slavers making the dreary,
often monotonous Trans-Atlantic crossing. Alexander Falconbridge, a ship’s surgeon
who recorded a narrative of the events he witnessed on countless voyages involving
the slave trade, offered perhaps the most powerful description of life onboard a
slaver. He explained that ‘few of the Negroes can so far brook the loss of their liberty
and the hardships they endure, they are ever on the watch to take advantage of the
least negligence in their oppressors.’51 Reflecting further, ‘insurrections are frequently
the consequence…seldom’ are these acts ‘expressed without much bloodshed.’52 Even
when outright rebellion failed, ‘they are likewise always ready to seize every
opportunity for committing some acts of desperation to free themselves from their
miserable state and notwithstanding the restraints which are laid, they often
succeed.’53 Writing in the Age of Revolution, Falconbridge cast his narrative in stark
contrast to the recent American Revolution and burgeoning French Revolution. Few
crewmembers onboard slavers commented on Africans’ liberty, yet all understood
that their captive cargoes were desperate to avoid the Middle Passage.
605
Most often ships’ crews were able to beat down an insurrection, whether through
brute force or, upon hearing rumors of a planned revolt, by punishing its presumed
leaders. Countless times, however, revolts occurred with dire consequences. French
trader John Barbot described one brutal episode on the vessel, Don Carlos. In a
‘premeditated’ attack, ‘seeing all the ship’s company, at best but weak and many
quite sick,’ several slaves had ‘broken off the shackles from several of their
companions’ feet.’54 Armed with all ‘things they could lay their hands on’ to ‘use for
their enterprise,’ they ‘fell in crouds and parcels on our men.’55 Surprised by the
rebellion, several crewmembers were quickly overrun. The armed men stabbed the
‘stoutest of us all, who receiv’d fourteen or fifteen wounds’ that killed him. Next,
they sliced through the nerves of the boatswain’s legs, rendering him immobile and
highly susceptible to gangrene. Then, the mutineers cut the ‘cook’s throat to the pipe’
and wounded three others, throwing overboard one of the wounded.56 In a spectacular
display of force the Africans overturned the hierarchy of the ship.
As chaos ensued, the crew gathered their weapons, ‘firing on the revolted slaves, of
whom we kill’d some, and wounded many: which terrify’d the rest’ who returned
between decks in defeat.57 When it appeared the revolt would be quashed, the ‘most
mutinous…leapt over board, and drown’d themselves in the ocean with much
resolution, shewing no manner of concern for life.’58 Having lost twenty-eight slaves in
the madness, with four or five crew members killed, Barbot’s men identified the main
conspirators and had each physically capable white man aboard severely whip the
ringleaders. Spending two brief paragraphs in his lengthy journal describing the revolt
suggests how ordinary the events were that day. In the moment when the slaves rose up
against their captors, the captain and his crew acted swiftly to put down the insurrection;
yet, the journal seems to describe a series of events altogether expected, almost routine
in the way they unfolded. Despite their commonplace, shipboard resistance usually
failed to release the Africans onboard from their captivity, resulting in the safe passage
on average of roughly two-thirds of the captives who began the voyage.59
For those Africans who did not successfully resist bondage through suicide, successful
shipboard insurrection, or by running away when slave traders attempted to kidnap
them in Africa, another opportunity to affect their future awaited at the completion of
the Middle Passage. Approximately 37 percent of slave voyages ended in the West Indies,
while 58 percent culminated in South America, with the remainder scattered in mainland
North America (just 4 percent) and Africa (1 percent).60 In these far-flung locations
slaves were redistributed through auction houses and markets. Sales could take the form
of an auction, a parade through the port’s streets, or even a ‘scramble,’ which involved
a mass of buyers in a chaotic scrum, pulling and tugging at the arms of slaves they saw
fit to purchase for a pre-arranged price. The slave-broker may appear to have held the
power, yet Africans invented numerous ways to influence to whom they were sold, if not
entirely break free from bondage. Whether in a scramble sale in Jamaica or an auction
house in New Orleans, the market provided unique opportunities for the daring.
The market environment could be chaotic, where stunned Africans were examined,
picked, and prodded, with potential buyers even tasting their sweat to determine the
health of the slave. To the same degree Africans often resisted their kidnappers on the
eastern side of the Atlantic, once in port on the western side they employed the most
basic act of resistance: the attempt to flee their captors. The confusion of a scramble-
style sale provided the opportune moment for ‘the poor astonished negroes’ who
606
Figure 32.1 Slavery/West Indies

Mary Evans Picture Library
‘were so much terrified by these proceedings, that several of them…climbed over the
walls of the courtyard, and ran wild about the town.’61 Although eventually captured,
the slaves briefly experienced freedom from the primeval scramble, where buyers tied
together handkerchiefs or ropes to corral as many bodies as possible.
Evidence abounds for the myriad ways that slaves influenced their sale. As historian
Walter Johnson argues, ‘slaveholders were forced to consider their slaves a party to
their own sale’ because the slave held a unique position of power where even subtle acts
could influence the price or sale of the individual.62 Because sale meant another journey
into the unknown for the slave – raising questions, to begin with, about what kind of
treatment they may receive from their new owners – these human commodities resisted
their own sale in numerous ways. Reports of individuals maiming themselves to make
them less desirable in the marketplace – what good is a field worker with a missing
hand? – demonstrate the lengths to which individuals would resort to remain with the
same owner. Other slaves tried to make themselves more desirable to certain buyers
with a reputation for treating their property in a more humane manner. Regardless of
the method, slaves on the auction block understood that moment as ripe with opportunity
to shape their own futures. Inside the domestic trade within antebellum America slaves
could resist their sale through increasingly dramatic measures, even threatening suicide.
In this manner, the individual targeted for sale could alter the stakes, renegotiating with
his or her master where he or she was willing to be sold, if at all.63
607
In contrast to most other moments in the process of enslavement, life on a

plantation in the Atlantic world offered Africans a plethora of opportunities for
resistance to their bondage. It was on the plantation that slaves experienced stability:
relatively sturdy housing, fairly consistent ownership, the ability to carve a semi-
private space, and the prospect of negotiating power relationships with the overseer,
owner, and other slaves. The wide-open landscape mocked Africans in bondage – the
cleared land awaiting cultivation must have made freedom appear just beyond the
horizon, or off in the rugged mountains that surrounded tillable lands. For many, the
harsh labor and violence of plantation life provoked rebellion, resistance, and daily
efforts to define the terms of their enslavement with the specter of life outside of
bondage looming in the distance.
Perhaps the essential road to resistance for a plantation slave, however, resembled
one of the most basic forms of resistance to slavery back in Africa. Running away
from one’s enslavement proved time and again to be a popular method through
which the individual could gain – at least – temporary freedom. Runaway slave
advertisements from the eighteenth century reveal that this act of resistance was
commonplace.64 A survey of newspapers throughout the American colonies contains
numerous advertisements offering payment for the return of their slaves with reward
amounts varying depending on a slave’s value to the owner, which often depended on
whether or not the slave was a skilled laborer.65
Runaway slaves patterns suggest this form of resistance was often aimed at
temporary relief of strenuous work. In the Carolina Lowcountry, for example, reports
of runaway slaves peaked in June when continuous work in the rice fields began,
marking the most tedious and difficult two months on the plantation. Plantation
overseers found a simple way to combat this seasonal upsurge in runaways, claiming
Figure 32.2 Black slaves working on a plantation and sugar factory

Iberfoto/Mary Evans Picture Library
608
that slaves were ‘kept to their work by mere dint of Encouragement of a Beef and
some Rum, added to lenient treatment by the Overseer.’66 By running away in summer
months, slaves reduced the amount of workers in the fields, which allowed weeds to
overtake the rice and reduce the crop yield. Planters and Overseers knew that fewer
workers meant less profit, making accommodating slaves’ demands necessary, to
some degree, in order to produce marketable rice. By simply providing extra food or
some rum to appease their slaves, overseers knew this would ensure enough workers
in the field to cultivate the rice successfully.
Despite the regular return of slaves to plantations, runaways were periodically
successful in escaping bondage. Maroon communities composed of runaway slaves
and their descendants sprang up in plantation-based slave societies throughout the
Atlantic world, from the mainland American colonies to the French Caribbean island
of Martinique to Portuguese Brazil.67 Along the Savannah River in the Carolina
Lowcountry stable, well-built maroon communities seemed to taunt white South
Carolinians who found it necessary to mount military expeditions against the
runaway communities.68 Further south, maroon communities thrived in the West
Indies. On the British sugar island of Jamaica, in particular, maroon-founded
communities survived Spanish rule as well as the British take-over in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Divided into numerous towns such as
Spanish Town, Accompong, and Trelawney Town, maroons lived in tension with
whites, as well as other free and enslaved blacks and mulattos on the island.
Periodically whites hired maroons to hunt down other runway slaves, prizing their
knowledge of Cockpit Country, so-called for its rugged landscape that provided
numerous spaces for hiding out. Despite momentary collaboration, maroons
throughout the island caused havoc and cost planters money in stolen goods by raiding
plantations for food, women, and alcohol. Noted scholar Orlando Patterson argues
that ‘Few slave societies present a more impressive record of slave revolts than
Jamaica,’ where maroon communities continuously put pressure on the island’s slave
system.69 The First Maroon War, which occurred shortly after the English takeover
from the Spanish and concluded with a treaty in 1739/40, yielded to decades of
seemingly continuous plantation raids and land conflicts that eventually resulted in
the Second Maroon War in 1796. The short war resulted in the deportation of an
entire maroon community – the Trelawney Town Maroons – identified as the lone
group responsible for the conflict.70 Nevertheless, maroons in Jamaica rarely were
returned to slavery, making them perhaps the most successful runaways in the Atlantic
littoral in part because they fashioned an existence outside of slavery, working for
whites when necessary and maintaining focus on guarding their own self-interest.
For Native Americans, fleeing their captors proved to be their greatest defense
against widespread enslavement. In writing of colonial Louisiana – the very real
melting pot of the Atlantic where Africans, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Englishmen, and
Native Americans intermingled – historian Daniel Usner asserts that a ‘more serious
threat to the designs of colonial planners was the general recalcitrance of Indian slaves
and their potential for collaboration’ with African slaves. ‘Given their knowledge of
the terrain and familiarity with local tribes,’ Native American runaways ‘held the key
to unlocking mass rebellion.’71 Indian slaves fell out of favor once large numbers of
Africans were imported into European colonies throughout the Atlantic in part
because of the destabilizing threat they posed to the plantation system but also because
609
they resisted bondage adeptly by running away. Knowing the lay of the land and able
to use kinship networks unavailable to newly arrived Africans facilitated Indians’
escape from slavery. Indeed, some Native Americans were hired to capture runaway
African slaves because of their abilities to navigate the complex, always shifting social
and environmental landscapes of the Americas.72 For Native Americans, running away
contributed significantly to the decline in Europeans using Indians for labor.
Life on the plantation provided many other opportunities for resistance. Slaves
often faked illness or slowed work in order to combat harsh demands from an
overseer or planter. These labor disputes were effective ways that slaves could
renegotiate the type and length of task assigned to them, providing a level of input
and influence over their work assignments.73 With enough experience, overseers and
slave masters understood that ‘Should any owner increase the work beyond what is
customary, he subjects himself to the…discontent amongst his slaves as to make them
of but little use to him.’74 Despite being held in bondage Africans could shape their
daily lives through work, whether that meant gaining concessions in the form of
extra food or alcohol, or by convincing the overseer to lower production expectations.
Many enslaved Africans resisted harsh conditions on plantations by steeling away
enough money to buy freedom. Mary Prince, a slave in the West Indies during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, recalled, ‘I had saved about 100 dollars,
and hoped, with a little help, to purchase my freedom.’75 Prince utilized those times
‘When my master and mistress went from home, as they sometimes did…and made
the most of it’ by taking on odd jobs for extra pay.76 Prince even occasionally bought
and resold hogs to acquire ‘a little cash’ to buy her freedom.77 Although not as
widespread as running away or implementing work stoppages, purchasing one’s own
freedom proved to be an act of resistance of the highest order because slaves worked
within the very financial systems that ensured their bondage in order to gain their
freedom. In some parts of the Atlantic, self-purchasing was guaranteed by law. Once
a slave initiated the legal mechanisms to purchase their freedom, a master or owner
could do little to block the slave’s manumission.78
Resistance to enslavement was as varied as the ethnicities of Africans held in
bondage and it frequently occurred in the courts. In 1705, on the French sugar island
of Martinique, Babet Binture sued for her freedom, testing the French colonial courts.
‘Claiming to have been born of a free father and a free mother’ but with no records
available to support her claims, the case was ‘dismissed…declar[ing] her a slave’ and
‘to punish her temerity to start inappropriate and groundless proceedings.’79 Three
years later, Jean Doussin, a public official, petitioned the court to change Binture’s
status because it had been determined that her sister was free since birth. Although
the court agreed, declaring ‘Babet, Negress, and all her children free and emancipated’
their freedom was once again taken in 1713 after recently appointed Governor
Phelypeaux argued successfully that they endangered public welfare, as well as placed
the Binture’s former owner, a widow, in a state of destitution.80
Clearly more troubling to the man was the ‘ruin of the La Pallu family’ – Binture’s
former owners – ‘one of the better and the most numerous of this land,’ to whom
‘this judgement has caused extreme disorders.’81 With dishonor brought to the family,
Binture and two other free women ‘currently play as nightclub proprietors, madams,
whores, fences of stolen property and runaway slaves.’82 Upset over the state of
affairs in Martinique, Governor Phelypeaux was convinced that society as a whole
610
suffered greatly with these freed women doing ‘everything that is prohibited by the
Code Noir,’ the French laws aimed at controlling the empire’s African population.83
He seemed to wonder how degraded the island would become if Binture were allowed
to remain free.
If courts refused to support the pleas for emancipation, Africans throughout the
Atlantic tested other legal bodies to see if they would heed the calls for their enslaved
brethren. In 1773, as revolutionary fervor grew in the American colonies, free blacks
sought inclusion by petitioning provincial legislative bodies in the ‘divine spirit of
freedom [that] seems to fire every human breast on this continent.’84 On ‘behalf of
our fellow slaves in this province,’ Boston’s petitioners joined together in resisting the
institution that could easily reclaim these four freedmen and return them to
enslavement.85 Continuing the tradition of Martinique’s Babet Binture, free and
enslaved Africans alike challenged the very legal systems that upheld slavery for two
centuries of Atlantic expansion to abolish the institution in the name of liberty for all.
Such petitions often fell short of their intended goal. Yet, these petitions provided the
foundation for future events that would see persons of African descent rise in
frustration to raze the structures of plantation slavery on one Caribbean island, and
infuse fear and anxiety throughout the entire Atlantic slave system. Beginning in
1791, a new, independent, free black nation would rise in the midst of some of the
harshest, most brutal slave societies known to history.
* * *
In the spring of 1685, Le Code Noir, or the Black Code, a decree authored by King
Louis XIV codified the nature of slavery in the French Atlantic World. Beyond casting
all Jews out of French Atlantic holdings, and making Roman Catholicism the more
or less official religion of the state, Le Code Noir laid out clear and sometimes brutal
ground rules for slaves and their masters. Article XVI of Le Code Noir struck at slave
owners’ greatest fear: rebellion. To counter the most violent and, for whites in the
Atlantic, dangerous form of resistance to enslavement, the article declared that ‘slaves
who belong to different masters’ are forbidden ‘from gathering, either during the day
or at night, under the pretext of a wedding or other excuse,’ risking ‘corporal
punishment that shall not be less than the whip and the fleur de lys, and for frequent
recidivists and in other aggravating circumstances, they may be punished with
death.’86 Le Code Noir largely governed slaves’ status and treatment in the French
Atlantic, especially on the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Saint Domingue.
Just over one century later, on 29 August 1793, the French Commissioner Léger
Félicité Sonthonax, issued a decree for the northern parts of the French colony of
Saint Domingue. Building on The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen, issued four years prior and proving to be the catalyst for the French
Revolution, Sonthonax’s decree extended to slaves and gens de couleur freedom and
the full rights of citizenship.87 A year later, the French National Convention issued a
much more broad, sweeping repeal, declaring that ‘the slavery of Negroes in all the
colonies is abolished,’ and ‘that all men, without the distinction with regard to
color…will enjoy all the rights ensured by the constitution.’88 In short succession –
just four years between the beginning of the French Revolution and the abolition
decree in Saint Domingue – an uprising of slaves on the small but influential French
611
sugar island of Saint Domingue sparked what would become the most significant
episode of slave resistance in the Atlantic World: the Haitian Revolution. Inspired by
the French Revolution, African slaves, men of color – gens de couleur – and whites
engaged in a long battle over the emancipation of the island’s slaves. Although not
always a rebellion defined in stark racial lines, slavery and bondage were at the heart
of the conflict.
On an island nation where slaves numbered at least 200,000 and nearly two-thirds
of the population had been born in Africa by the late eighteenth century, Saint
Domingue was ripe for revolution.89 The multi-layered existence of slavery in Saint
Domingue provided unique circumstances that yielded the Atlantic’s first independent
free black nation. A growing mixed-race class of slaves, descended from their white
masters and relieved of work on the plantation but not officially free, combined with
a substantial population of free people of color who themselves owned plantations
and slaves to make for a combustible atmosphere. The Declaration of the Rights of
Man ignited the powder keg of Saint Domingue when slaves in the north burned
approximately one thousand plantations, demanding the same freedoms of the gens
de couleur, and driving slave owners to America to escape death at the hands of their
former captives.
Despite the rhetoric of the French Revolution, the French Army responded to
quash this freedom struggle but was quickly defeated by armies of ex-slaves. In a
weakened state and virtually defenseless, Saint Domingue officials began to turn to
the rebellious slaves for help: rather than lose the wealthiest colony in the world,
limited emancipation was offered to slaves in exchange for their common defense
against British and Spanish invaders. Full emancipation soon followed as whites,
gens de couleur and ex-slaves fought off other European powers in 1794. For the
next ten years Toussaint L’Overture ruled the nation embroiled in racial and class
conflict. As the revolution cooled in France and Napolean seized power, he sent
General Leclerc to Haiti to regain control and re-instill slavery – the sugar island
proved too wealthy and tempting to ignore. Leclerc quickly arrested and exiled
L’Overture, but failed to win the support of his gens de couleur allies who in turn
united with the now free slaves to rebel against Napoleon’s army, defeating the
French with finality.90
Christened ‘Haiti,’ the new nation stood as a beacon to slaves and free blacks
around the Atlantic World. Over the past century, scholars have often been fixated
on the Haitian Revolution’s sometimes brutal events, where ‘massacres’ were
commonplace, representing a pervasive anxiety about the threat of black insurrections
in the Atlantic World. Yet, the revolution significantly impacted slavery throughout
the Atlantic, providing a unique example of resistance for Africans held in bondage.
With a great deal of growing pains, Haiti emerged as a rare successful rebellion
against slavery and in so doing it became the zenith of slave resistance, proving that
escaping a life in bondage was possible.
What began with fighting off slave traders in Africa, continued on the forced
march to slave factories along the coast, resuming once again with desperate struggles
shipboard during the Middle Passage, acquiring new significance in the New World
slave markets, and finally blossoming on the plantations driving the Atlantic economy.
Less than a century after the failed insurrection in New York City in 1712, Haiti
transformed the Atlantic World and beyond, becoming ‘a crucial moment in the
612
history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for
human rights everywhere.’91 Whether enslaved peoples resisted their bondage through
revolt, suicide, work stoppages, or running away, their horrifying circumstances
demanded defiance. In small and fantastic acts of insubordination, slaves were able
to shape their own worlds by resisting their captors, overseers, and owners. It is a
reflection of enslaved peoples’ humanity and perseverance that they were able to rise
against the racist institution and capitalistic system that enforced chattel bondage.
For the vast majority of enslaved peoples the only true freedom achieved came upon
their deaths, yet resistance enabled slaves to carve a slice of liberty if only for the
briefest moment.
NOTE S
1 The Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 29 January 1856 as reprinted in Major Problems in African
American History, Volume I: From Slavery to Freedom, 1619–1877, eds. Thomas C. Holt
and Elsa Barkley Brown. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. p. 248.
2 ‘Letter from Governor Robert Hunter, June 23, 1712’ in Documents Relative to the
Colonial History of the State of New York, ed. E.B. Callaghan. Vol. V. pp. 341–42.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 28 February 1713, Vol. III, p. 28.
10 Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in
Colonial New York City. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 138.
11 Ibid. p. 132.
12 Thelma Willis Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in
Colonial New York City. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 133.
13 The Haitian Revolution, from 1791–1804, being the one major exception.
14 Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation
in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. p. 86.
15 Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake
and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. p. xxii.
16 The formation of new cultures and retention of traditional African cultures and identities
is viewed by many scholars as a distinct form of resistance to enslavement. For more on
this complex discussion, see Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; Michael A. Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial
and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998; and
John Savage, ‘Black Magic and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial Society in
Early Nineteenth Century Martinique,’ in Journal of Social History, Vol. 40, No. 3
(Spring 2007), 635–62.
17 For example, Stanley Elkins introduced what later became known as the Sambo Thesis,
concluding that the institution of slavery proved so overwhelming that Africans had little
choice but accept their condition and become child-like dependents to their masters. See:
Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1959.
18 For varied treatments on slave rebellion and resistance in past several decades, see: Eugene
Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Rebellions in the Making
613
of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979; Anne C.
Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2005; and for a somewhat comprehensive reference source, see
Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, ed. Junius Rodriguez. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007.
19 For examples of documents produced by enslaved or formerly enslaved Africans, see:
Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta. New York: Penguin Classics,
2001; and The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: New
Amsterdam Library, 1987. For an interesting perspective of reading between the lines of
colonial documents to uncover slaves’ voices, see Natalie Zacek, ‘Reading the Rebels:
Currents of Slave Resistance in the Eighteenth-Century British West Indies,’ in History in
Focus, 12 (2007) http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Slavery/articles/zacek.html (accessed
13 August 2014).
20 ‘Of how Alvaro Fernandez returned again to the land of the Negroes’ in Documents
Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, ed. Elizabeth Donnan. New
York: Octagon Books, 1969. p. 39.
21 Berlin, p. 17.
22 ‘Of how Alvaro Fernandez returned again to the land of the Negroes,’ p. 39. Africans
were so startled by Europeans’ appearances that some checked their bodies for gills. For
more on Africans’ perceptions of Europeans, see also David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery
of Europe, 1450–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
23 ‘Of how Alvaro Fernandez returned again to the land of the Negroes,’ p. 39.
24 Ibid. p. 40.
25 Ibid. p. 40.
26 Equiano (Gates). p. 25.
27 Ibid.
28 It should be noted that some scholars have raised questions about Equiano’s claim to
having been born in Africa. Vincent Carretta has uncovered records that show Equiano
could have been born in South Carolina. Although this would seem to cast doubt on
Equiano’s description of his capture in Africa, Carretta suggests Equiano could have
accurately reconstructed such events based on other Africans’ experiences in, as well as
widely known contemporary accounts of the slave trade. See Vincent Carretta, Equiano,
the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. pp. 15–18.
29 For a more detailed description, see Marcus Rediker, Slave Ship: A Human History.
Boston: Beacon Press, 2008. p. 100.
30 Equiano, Narrative, pp. 25–26.
31 Ibid. p. 26.
32 ‘A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea…’ by John Barbot, reprinted in
Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, p. 293.
33 Thomas Phillips, ‘A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal (1693–94) from England
to Cape Monseradoe, in Africa,’ in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave
Trade to America, ed. Elizabeth Donnan. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. p. 399.
34 For more on the factories, see Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle
Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
pp. 37–41.
35 ‘An Abstract of a Voyage to Congo River or the Zair, and to Cabinde, in the Year 1700,’
in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, ed. Elizabeth
Donnan. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. p. 460.
36 For more in-depth discussions of conditions on board slave ships, see: Emma Christopher,
Slave Ships and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006; Rediker, Slave Ship; and Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery.
614
in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, p. 460.
38 Ann M. Carlos and Jamie Brown Kruse, ‘The Decline of the Royal African Company:
Fringe Firms and the Role of the Charter,’ in Economic History Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 2
(1996), p. 292.
39 Thomas Phillips, ‘A Journal of a Voyage Made in the Hannibal (1693–94) from England
to Cape Monseradoe, in Africa,’ in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave
Trade to America, ed. Elizabeth Donnan. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. pp. 400–403.
40 Ibid. p. 402.
41 Ibid.
42 ibid.
43 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, the African, in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York:
A Mentor Book, 1987. p. 35.
44 Ibid. p. 36.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 For more on the tenuous relations between ships’ crews and enslaved Africans, see Emma
Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
48 ‘A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guniea, Divided Into Gold, Slave, and
the Ivory Coasts,’ William Bosman, in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave
Trade to America, ed. Elizabeth Donnan. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. p. 443.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa. London:
J. Phillips, 1788. p. 30.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, ed. Elizabeth
Donnan. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. p. 457.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid. The man thrown overboard was able to catch on to a piece of the rigging, eventually
pulling himself to safety.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Some ships could arrive in the West Indies with loss of ‘only’ 5–7 percent their cargo, but most
had substantially higher rates of mortality reaching over 50 percent in some cases. See Herbert
S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Long-term Trends in African Mortality in the Transatlantic
Slave Trade,’ in Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic
Slave Trade, eds. David Eltis and David Richardson. London: Routledge, 1997. pp. 36–48.
60 http://slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces (accessed 24 March 2009).
61 An Account of the Slave Trade…, Falconbridge, p. 34.
62 Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999. p. 30.
63 Ibid. See specifically Chapter Two, ‘The Chattel Principle,’ pp. 30–44.
64 For an interesting and expansive collection of eighteenth-century runaway slaves see the
University of Virginia’s digitized collection at http://etext.virginia.edu/subjects/runaways
(accessed 13 August 2014).
615
65 Lathan Algerna Whindey, ‘A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from
1730–87,’ in Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the
African-American Experience, ed. Carroll Pursell. Cambrigde: MIT Press, 2005. pp. 9–15.
See also, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the
Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
66 Josiah Smith to George Austin, 22 July 1773 – 22 July 1774, as reprinted in Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint, p. 151.
67 For further reading on various maroon communities, see Wim S.M. Hoogbergen. The
Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname. New York: Brill Academic Publishers, 1990; and Maroon
Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
68 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, pp. 450–51.
69 Orlando Patterson, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First
Maroon War, 1665–1740,’ in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas,
ed. Richard Price. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. p. 246.
70 Jeffrey A. Fortin, ‘“Blackened beyond Our Native Hue”: Removal, Identity and the
Trelawney Maroons on the Margins of the Atlantic World, 1796–1800,’ in Freedom
on the Margins: A Special Issue of Citizenship Studies. Vol. 10, No. 1 (February 2006),
pp. 5–34.
71 Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The
Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1992. p. 58.
72 For more, see: Allan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in
the American South, 1670–1717. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. pp. 94–95.
73 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, p. 184.
74 Ibid.
75 ‘The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave,’ in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., p. 205.
76 Ibid.
77 ibid.
78 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, pp. 212–13.
79 ‘A Tavern Keeper Sues for Her Freedom in Martinique,’ in Slavery, Freedom, and the Law
in the Atlantic World: A Brief History with Documents, eds. Sue Peabody and Keila
Grinberg. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2007. p. 37.
80 Ibid. p. 39.
81 Ibid. pp. 40–41.
82 Ibid. p. 41.
83 Ibid.
84 ‘Petition of Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook, and Chester Joie, Boston, April
20, 1773,’ in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. Volume
I: From Colonial Times through the Civil War. ed., Herbert Aptheker. New York: The
Citadel Press, 1968. pp. 7–8.
85 Ibid. For more see Thomas J. Davis, ‘Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and
Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–77,’
in The New England Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Jun 1989), pp. 248–63.
86 As translated in Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with
Documents, eds. Laurent Dubois, John D. Garrigus. New York: Macmillan, 2006. p. 52.
87 As reprinted in Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World, p. 61.
88 Ibid. p. 62.
89 Population estimates based on Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle:
Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
616
p. 30. Other statistics suggest a slave population of 450,000 with only half of those
persons born in Africa, see Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World, p. 8.
90 For more on the complex revolution in Saint Domingue, see: Laurent Dubois, Avengers of
the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2005; C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San
Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989.
91 Dubois, Avengers of a New World, p. 7.
617
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND STATE

PRACTICE IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD
The ‘Phénomène Savary’ in context
D’Maris Coffman
I f the Cultural Turn of the last quarter of the twentieth century contributed to a
slow marginalization of economic history and the history of economic thought, the
financial crisis of 2007–8 and the Great Recession that followed arrested and
eventually reversed that process. In the last few years, scholars have begun to re-visit
many of the canonical works of political economy, beginning with Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations. Much of their enthusiasm lies in the prospect of interrogating the
intellectual origins of the neoliberal emphasis on free markets and free trade. As a
consequence of the renewed interest in putatively heterodox economic ideas, authors,
classically dismissed as ‘mercantilist’ by mainstream economics, have received
considerable attention, which in turn has mirrored an outpouring of empirical work
on how early modern empires were actually governed. Smith’s arguments about the
central role of the Atlantic economy in catalyzing economic development in Britain,
a narrative which inspired generations of scholars including Karl Marx himself,
remain more widely accepted than his specific critiques of mercantilism (Zahedieh,
2010, pp. 1–3; Stern and Wennerlind, 2013, pp. 3–4).
At the same time and without denying the enduring significance of influential
accounts of the role of ideology and confession in shaping the different political
cultures of the respective European imperial powers, historians have begun to
emphasize the convergence, rather than divergence, of state practice, especially in key
areas like commercial regulation, taxation, and the policing of economic crimes
(Pagden, 1995; Hont, 2005; Coffman et al., 2013; Reinert and Røge, 2013). In the
process, scholars have come to appreciate the importance of neglected literary genres
– including merchant manuals and published public accounts – and of the translation
of economic treatises from one European language to another in spreading both
commercial and fiscal practices (Reinert, 2011; Reinert and Røge, 2013; Soll, 2014).
Recent revisionist scholarship has thus coalesced around three related preoccupations:
exploring the possibility that these newly re-discovered non-canonical genres and
texts might yield important insights into mercantile practice, understanding better
what ‘state’ power meant in practice in the imperial frame, and finally questioning
the presumption found in Montesquieu that promoting trade and commerce produced
peace rather than war. The power of these new approaches can be illustrated through
618
– chapter 33: Economic thought and state practice –
examination of the publication history of Jacques Savary’s Le parfait négociant in

France, which cannot be properly understood without reference to the Atlantic
context and with it the intense rivalry between the French and English in realizing
their overseas imperial projects. As the history text of successive editions of Savary’s
manual reveals, contemporaries themselves were often unsure how far international
trade was a zero-sum game or an opportunity for all to prosper.
When Savary published Le parfait négociant, ou Instruction générale pour ce qui
regarde le commerce des marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (‘The Perfect
Merchant, or the General Instruction regarding mercantile commerce of France and
foreign nations’) in 1675, he dedicated his efforts to Jean-Baptise Colbert. [Illustration
33.1]. From a merchant who prospered under Colbert’s commercial policies, such a
choice is unsurprising. Yet Savary’s connection was more immediate than that of a
remote admirer. Over the course of his public career, he served Nicolas Fouquet,
Seguier, and Colbert. Savary came from a cadet branch of a minor noble family, was
educated in the law, and made a fortune as a wholesale merchant. After increasing
his position and wealth by strategic marriage and by tax farming, he became a
commercial advisor to the crown. Under Colbert, Savary was appointed to the
Council on Reform (of the commercial code) and played enough of a leading part
that the president of the commission unveiled the new ‘Code Savary’ in his name. If
the biographical information offered in an eighteenth-century edition of Le Parfait
Négociant can be believed, the commission further honored him by asking him to
prepare what they had learned for general publication in a manual, which might
serve as a guide to noble families whose younger sons wanted to enter the mercantile
trade, as was the practice in England.1 Jacob Soll (2009, pp. 86–90) develops this
theme in his treatment of the didactic intentions of the text for disciplining the French
to Colbert’s vision for world dominance through trade.
Albert Hirschman, one of the earliest modern historians to take Le Parfait Négociant
seriously, noticed immediately that Savary was the first in this period to make the
claim, later echoed by Montesquieu, that ‘[Divine providence] has dispersed its gifts
so that men would trade together so that the mutual need which they have to help one
another would establish ties of friendship among them. This continuous exchange of
all comforts of life constitutes commerce and this commerce makes for all the gentleness
of life’ (Hirschman, 1977, pp. 59–60). Hirschman saw this shift in attitude towards
commerce as a fundamental one in the development of the ideology of capitalism.
Unfortunately, historians of early modern Europe have largely ignored both
Hirschman’s suggestion of the work’s importance and the figure of Jacques Savary.
Despite thirty-one printings in three languages (French, German, and Dutch) in less
than a century (1675–1777) and a thirty-second and thirty-third in 1800, Le Parfait
Négociant has not attracted much scholarly attention in either French or English.2
Jochen Hoock, one of the editors of the authoritative compendium of merchant
handbooks and treatises, Ars Mercatoria, contributed an essay to Innovations et
Renouveaux Techniques de l’Antiquité à nos Jours, a volume compiling conference
papers from the tenth-anniversary meeting of the Colloque International de Mulhouse
in 1987. With the exception of this excellent, if difficult to obtain, discussion of Le
Parfait Négociant as a publishing phenomenon, the only full-length treatment in the
secondary literature is a single article by Henri Hauser in Revue d’Historie Économique
et Sociale in 1925 and a recent discussion by Trivellato which points to Savary as the
619
– D’Maris Coffman –
Figure 33.1 Frontispiece of ‘Le Parfait Negociant’ by Jacques Savary,

Paris, 1665 (engraving)
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images
620
source of the myth of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange (Hoock, 1989; Hauser,
1925; Trivellato, 2012). Otherwise, there are occasional references in the literatures
on merchant mentalities, early modern accounting, and material culture (Rabuzzi,
1995–96; Bonno, 1948; Hirschman, 1977). Although Bonno’s footnote proved
erroneous, he too used a quotation from Savary to suggest that the French knew that
the English nobility saw nothing wrong with participating in trade. Bonno begins his
section on English commercial activity by citing Savary: ‘en Angleterre le commerce
est trouvé tellement honnête que la noblesse de la plus haute dignité fait le commerce
de laine et de bétail’ (‘in England trade is found so honourable that the highest nobility
engage in the trade of wool and cattle’) (Bonno, 1948, p. 50).
Yet beyond a brief mention in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912, based almost
entirely on the preface to the 1721 edition, no biographical treatment of the author
exists (Goyau, 1912). The scholarly attention paid to Le dictionnaire universel du
commerce by Savary’s son, Savary des Bruslons, is not much greater: one article from
the 1920s, one chapter in a recent monograph, and only the occasional reference
otherwise (Vignols, 1929; Perrot, 1992). This is all the more surprising because the
Goldsmiths’-Kress Library contains seventeen editions of Le Parfait Négociant
(Rogers, 1986; Nicholes and Reeves, 1966). The editions chosen for this discussion
– 1675 (Paris), 1676 (Geneva), 1679 (Paris), 1697 (Lyon), 1701 (Paris, Lyon), 1721
(Paris), and 1777 – were selected for their bibliographical interest and the relevance
of the publication dates to their political contexts. Of additional interest, the 1676
edition is bilinear (French and High German) and the 1721 edition included, as part
of the preface, the aforementioned ‘La Vie de Monsieur Savary.’ Of these, all but the
1777 edition, the last revised edition issued, were available on microfilm.
In their brief mention of Le Parfait Négociant in their companion volume to Ars
Mercatoria, Jeannin and Hoock put it somewhere ‘between a handbook and a treatise
(zwischen Handbuch und Traktat)’ (Jeannin and Hoock, 1991, pp. 168–69). For
them, Savary’s role as Colbert’s advisor in framing commercial policy was the singular
and most interesting aspect of the work. They argued that the cultural and literary
significance of the text, particularly over the course of its hundred-year publication
run, was not a product of its technical quality (Jeannin and Hoock, 1991, p. 169),
which they regarded as inferior. Hoock (1989, p. 123) had developed this analysis at
length in his earlier contributed essay, concluding that what he calls the
‘Phénomène Savary’…exprime bien plutôt de façon emblématique les ruptures

sociales, intellectuelles, techniques et technologiques qui ont lieu à l’extrême fin
du XVIIe siècle. Le Parfait Négociant y participe par son discourse légitimant et
l’action pédagogique qu’il représente.3
Hoock’s analysis understands genre at the level of ‘conjuncture’ and sees a structural
process by which elite commercial activity is made legitimate not only in France but
also in the British Isles and in Italy. He sees Le Parfait Négociant of a piece with
Lewis Roberts’ The merchants mappe of commerce (1638) and Gio-Domenico’s Il
negociante (1638). All three make their information about good trading practice
accessible to the reading public at large, but are targeted at the nobility in particular
(Hoock, 1989, p. 119). In Hoock’s view, Savary’s sons both ‘prolonged and modified’
the enterprise; for him, the Le dictionnaire universel du commerce appropriated the
621
genre of the alphabetical dictionary to formulate a complete and simple commercial

vocabulary, available in one small and inexpensive volume, thereby making the
information accessible to an even wider reading public, including those in the French
overseas empire (Hoock, 1989, pp. 119–20). Without saying so explicitly, Hoock
appeared to be taking his ‘Phénomène Savary’ as a kind of exemplar of Norbert Elias’
Civilizing Process by which elite values were established in courtly circles and
disseminated outward to commercial society by successive generations.
Hoock’s argument is convincing in a general sense, but the text itself embodies the
ambiguities contained within the popularization of Colbert’s project. Some chapters,
especially those containing information on trading in the Americas and Africa, were
assiduously updated by the editors in successive editions, while others were left
virtually untouched despite containing anachronistic and even outdated discussions.
An examination of a single chapter over seven editions illustrates this tension, while
also opening a window into the depth of English and French commercial rivalries. A
three-page advertisement for the 1721 edition tells the reader that Savary’s son,
Jacques Savary des Bruslons, faithfully contributed additions to the chapter entitled
‘Du Commerce d’Hollande & de Flandre’ for the 1713 edition. This updated discussion
offered information on the banks of Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The advertisement
also mentioned even newer revisions, which the editor credited in marginal notations
to their respective authors.4 These additions, made to the second chapter of the second
volume, were judged by the editor to be significant enough to convince potential
buyers to purchase the new edition. Unlike the editorial attention paid to the treatment
of Holland, the following chapter entitled ‘Du Commerce d’Angleterre, d’Ireland, &
d’Ecosse’ was never updated. With the exception of orthographical changes and
printers’ conventions, the text of the 1777 edition is the same as the 1675 one. Over
the hundred-year publication history, there were no additions, amendments, or
marginal notations to the chapter on trading with the English. A close examination of
this third chapter suggests something of the persistent intensity of the commercial
rivalry between France and England as it played out in this text.
Consisting of a little over 2500 words, the chapter offers a litany of complaints,
couched as warnings, about the bad treatment that French merchants can expect at
the hands of the English. Apart from a single mention of Irish customs, there is no
discussion of either Ireland or Scotland. Savary follows the first two paragraphs,
which detail the items traded by the French and the English, with eighteen specific
charges against English trading practices. The majority of the complaints turn on the
extraordinary duties on French imports and exports (purportedly double those on
native merchants and triple in the case of Irish cloth), prohibitions on the import of
French cloth, tin and gold (lace, coins, silk or wire), the granting of monopolies to
London merchants for the sale of merchandise to French traders, and the exclusion
of French merchants from any form of retail or direct wholesale trade, including
trade from the French overseas empire (Savary, 1777, p. 458–59).
The author finds equally odious the requirement that French merchants post bail
bonds to guarantee good behavior, the mandate that they use British labor to load their
ships, and the English practice of levying export duties on French re-export trade
(Savary, 1777, p. 459). According to Savary, French wine merchants suffer especially
bad treatment. They must first offer their wares to the purveyor of the king’s household,
who takes the best wines at any price he sees fit. The remainder they must market to the
622
London firm holding the monopoly; because they cannot sell directly to tavern owners,
they have to accept the prices offered (Savary, 1777, p. 459). French merchants are also
forbidden to transport anything for a third party that might be carried on English ships
and cannot easily be naturalized in England. Worse still, according to Savary, if they die
intestate, their goods are forfeit to the English king; and, when parliament votes
extraordinary supply it raises the funds by taxing resident French aliens double those of
natives and other foreigners (Savary, 1777, pp. 459–60). Savary insists that the only
way to do business in England is through a London agent with connections to a
merchant house, but warns that, much like their government, individual English trading
companies deal in bad faith. As evidence of this charge, he produces an example of a
short vignette, a kind of picaresque of a fraud that an English agent perpetrated on his
French employer, involving fraudulent invoices, forged bills of lading, and third-party
endorsements (Savary, 1777, pp. 460–61; Mander, 2010, p. 73, n. 23).
Reconstructing the immediate contexts for most of Savary’s charges was not
difficult. The author warns his readers of ‘la haine implacable qu’ils ont pour notre
Nation’ or ‘the implacable hatred which they have for our nation’ (Savary, 1777, p.
458). Stuart historians have long acknowledged the shift in English public opinion in
the 1670s from an anti-Dutch to anti-French posture. The unpopularity of the Anglo-
Dutch wars, fears of Louis XIV’s ambitions towards universal monarchy, and
increasing concern about the Duke of York’s Catholicism all played a role (Pincus,
1995). So too did the public’s perception, shared by members of parliament, of the
‘unfavourable balance’ of trade with France. As Margaret Priestley noted in her
treatment of this dispute, there was a striking symmetry to the complaints on the
English and French sides, as they alleged virtually identical practices (Priestley, 1951).
In 1674, a year before the publication of Le Parfait Négociant, fourteen prominent
London cloth merchants, led by Sir Patience Ward, estimated for the ‘Lords
Commissioners for the Treaty for Commerce with France’ that trade imbalance with
the French at £965,128 (Ward, 1674; Priestley, 1951, p. 39). In a footnote, the
petitioners insisted their figures were understated because they excluded important
imports, including ‘toys for women and children, fans, jessamin-gloves, laces, point-
laces, rich embroidered garments, and rich embroidered beds, and other vestments,
which are an incredible value’ (Ward, 1674). As Priestley argued in her investigation
of the realities of Anglo-French trade, these figures were substantially over-stated, as
too were their complaints about the consequences of Colbert’s protective tariffs for
the English woolen export market (Priestley, 1951, pp. 42, 48). Yet Priestley also
acknowledged the significance of the million pound figure, exaggerated or not, in
shaping both public opinion and economic policy (Priestley, 1951, p. 52).
Savary’s complaints refer to specific aspects of the English parliament’s mercantilist
policies and the inherent conflicts between those protectionist objectives and the
Crown’s interest in maximizing the customs revenue. In 1663, three years after the
Restoration, the government had reckoned French trade as the most important
branch of foreign trade. According to C.D. Chandaman, a formidable historian of
the English public revenue, the French import trade represented a sixth of the total
London merchant trade, and the customs revenue from French imports more than
twelve times that of exports (Chandaman, 1975, p. 15). The alliance between London
merchants who wanted to protect domestic manufactures and the so-called ‘Country
Party’ opposition in Parliament translated into a push, in the 1670s, for protectionist
623
legislation. Between 1673 and 1677, no fewer than four bills to prohibit French
imports entirely were introduced to Commons (Chandaman, 1975, p. 18). Savary’s
complaints echo the details of Parliament’s mercantilist policies: the singling out of
French goods for selective imposition (levied as ‘extraordinary revenue’ in 1670) and
the doubling of duties on French cloth in the same year (Chandaman, 1975, p. 17).
The Wine Act of 1670, renewed at three-year intervals, increased the duties on French
wine merchants. Although the additional duties payable by foreign merchants
exporting English goods had been abolished in 1673, the eighteenth-month assessment
passed in that year offered bounties to merchants exporting grain to the continent. By
1675, it would have been very difficult indeed for a French merchant to do business
in London without an English agent.
Not surprisingly, English authors of the period produced similar attacks on French
trading practices. The anonymous ‘English Gentleman abroad’ complained in 1679
in a ‘letter to his Friend in England,’ entitled ‘Popery and Tyranny: or the Present
State of France’ of the following abuses:
5. Endeavouring to make his subjects sole merchants of all trades, as well imported
as exported, and not only by the priviledges already mentioned upon their
Commodities and Ships, but also by putting all manner of Discouragements upon
all Foreign Factories and Merchants by Difficulty in their Dispatches, delayes in
point of Justice, subjecting them to Foreign Duties and Seizures, not suffering
them to be Factors to the French or any other Nation but their own, and in case
of Death to have their Estates seized as Aliens, and the Countenance and conceiving
the French have as to all Duty when employ’d in the Service of Foreigners.
(Anonymous, 1679, p. 13)
The author also complained about French monopolies, rebating of customs duties to
domestic shippers, the practice of ‘giving their shipping preference of employment…
obliging all [the king’s officers] to fraught French ships at such a rate before any
strangers, as also fifty sols per ton imposed on foreign vessels.’5 Much like the
anonymous author of Monsieur Colbert’s Ghost, this author believed the foreign and
imperial policy and mercantilist interests of France to be aligned (Anonymous, 1684).
Although the context for Savary’s complaints about English trading practices can
be easily demonstrated, the source for his anecdotal evidence for the perfidy of
London agents, related at the end of the chapter, has proven elusive. The author
concludes by reiterating his reasons for recounting this fraud: ‘J’ai rapporté cet
exemple pour faire voir la mauvaise foi des Anglois, & qu’il faut prendre de bonnes
précautions pour négocier avec eux’ (Savary, 1777, p. 461).6 By contrast, Savary had,
in the preceding chapter, conducted his discussion on Holland with a tone of
neutrality. He concludes by reminding the reader of the even-handed treatment he
should expect in there: ‘En Hollande on paye les droits pour les marchandise qui
entrent & qui sortent des leurs Etats, selon les fortes de marchandises, & suivant
qu’ils font mentionnés dans le Tarif, qui vont environ à cinq pour cent’ (Savary,
1777, p. 451).7 His treatments of Flanders and Italy, also matter-of-fact, contained
none of the vitriolic reserved for trading practices in the British Isles. In short, Savary’s
treatment of trading practices in the British Isles reads more like the polemical
literature of the late 1670s than it does as a ‘handbook’ or pedagogical ‘treatise.’
624
Savary’s description of the trading practices in the British Isles can only be read
profitably within the context of the Anglo-French trade conflicts of the 1670s, which
had intensified as the English tried to settle Hudson Bay. Even more surprising than the
actual charges against English trading practices was the inclusion of this section in
subsequent editions of the work, even after British sovereignty over the Hudson Bay
was recognized in the Commercial Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Unlike the chapter on
trading with the English, the chapter on Holland, it was revised periodically to reflect
changes in the trading climate. The 1721 edition included a ‘nouvelle augmentation’
introduced in the 1713 edition on ‘Banques d’Amsterdam & de Rotterdam,’ following
the financial crises of 1719 and 1720 in Paris, Amsterdam, and London. The new
edition gives the history of the banks from the early seventeenth century and describes
how the cities act as guarantors and cashiers (Savary, 1777, pp. 451–52). Yet the 1697
and 1701 printings, much less the subsequent ones, make no reference of the founding
of the Bank of England, despite the fact that other French writers commonly regarded
the Bank of Amsterdam as its inspiration. Marginal references by the printer explain
the expansion of the sub-section on Flanders in four installments: in 1701, 1713, 1715
and 1721 (Savary, 1777, pp. 454–57; Savary, 1721, v. 2, pp. 117–20). The most
significant of these revisions (1713, 1715) appear to be in response to the commercial
treaty of Utrecht. Jacques Savary des Bruslons, as the former inspector-general of the
Customs House in Paris, would have had the expertise to re-write the section on the
British Isles and even the incentive to grapple with the growing reputation of the English
customs and excise service for aggressively policing smuggling (see Figure 33.3).
The omission becomes more striking because, on the English side, parliamentary
opposition to ratification of the Utrecht treaty in 1713 rested in no small part on the
recycling of statistics from the ‘Scheme of Trade’ in 1674 (Priestley, 1951, p. 40). Perhaps
for the editors of Le Parfait Négociant, the disingenuous English were at it again. In any
case, after the death of the elder brother, Louis-Philémon Savary, in 1727, the revisions
ceased. William Reddy’s explanation in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a
Cultural Perspective for the retention of dated material on the cloth trade in subsequent
editions and knock-offs of Savary des Bruslons’s Dictionnaire Universel hardly applies
here (Reddy, 1986, pp. 264–70). According to Reddy, the exquisite attention to detail
reinforced Colbert’s maxim that ‘quality was the key to prosperity’ and ‘reminded one that
evaluating cloth in the eighteenth century required the skills of the connoisseur rather than
those of a technician’ (Reddy, 1986, p. 266). By contrast, no eighteenth-century Frenchman
had to look as far as the third chapter of the second volume of Le Parfait Négociant for a
reminder that Englishmen wished ill upon their continental commercial rivals.
Most of Savary’s manual, however, was far more prosaic than the chapter on
trading with the English. Beyond the material aimed at educating merchants on how
to keep accounts, it contained a wealth of commercial intelligence. As other scholars
have noted, it contained excellent advice on trading with Spain, including the
importance of following the cargoes of ships arriving at Portobelo (Lamikiz, 2014).
As Donald Harreld’s recent treatment of the text within the context of a wider study
of how business information was transmitted in early modern Europe suggests,
Savary’s work was part of a larger genre of French texts instructing French merchants
in trading practices in Europe, Asia, and the Americas (Harreld, 2007). Most texts
were specialized in their remit, concentrating on specific geographical areas or on
particular trades, whereas Savary’s sons opted for a more comprehensive treatment.
625
Figure 33.2 George Grenville looks to the North American colonial trade to
balance the budget after the Seven Years War
In contrast to the willingness of Savary’s sons to allow the entries on England to

stand, their ‘nouvelle augmentation’ on French trading companies and the
opportunities attendant to them revealed a remarkable sophistication both in their
presentation of trading practices and in their historical account of relevant legislation
(Savary, 1777, pp. 587–94). They offer an account of the origins of the Company of
Senegal, the increasing importance of African slavery to its trading activities, and the
relationship between the African activities of the Compagnie française des Indes
occidentales and its expeditions in Quebec. The nuanced discussion of the War of
Spanish Succession, which also attempts to estimate the effects of the asientos, stands
in sharp contrast to the polemical treatment of English commercial legislation in the
chapter discussed above (Savary, 1777, pp. 590–91). Ironically, whereas the Hudson
Bay controversy was part of the context for the tension between France and England
in the 1670s, it receives scant mention in the new material, which instead focuses on
the creation and fortunes of the Mississippi Company, first established in 1684
(Savary, 1777, pp. 591–92). The Savary brothers give an account of the creation of
the Company of the West in 1717, in which they firmly recognize the importance of
626
mounting pressure on royal finances, while nevertheless minimizing John Law’s role.
Though this new material was incorporated in the 1721 edition, the discussion of the
Mississippi Company ends in September 1719 with the issuance of fifty million new
shares. Likewise the following chapter, which offers specific notes on trading practices
in Martinique, the Antilles, Grenada, French Guinea, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue,
and Canada, is evenhanded in its treatment. Particular care is taken to map the
relationships between the imports to and exports from the regions of France, including
Brittany, Normandy, La Rochelle, and Bourdeaux, and the corresponding activities
in the imperial frame. The Canadian material received was immediately rewritten
after the Commercial Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 (Savary, 1777, pp. 600–603).
In these new augmentations, colonial warfare is presented as a matter-of-fact
handmaiden to commerce, without the moralizing that accompanied the earlier
discussion of trading with the English. The chief impression given by the text, however,
is the recognition on the part of the Savary brothers of the limitations of state power,
both with respect to the African slave trade and to the governance of the Louisiana
territories. At the same time, sympathetic treatments of the interests of the Dutch
Republic, Spanish Empire, Scandinavian monarchies, Russian Empire, and Italian states
repeatedly emphasize the gap between official policy and the practice on the ground.
More is the pity that the British overseas trading empire never received the same
treatment in subsequent revisions of the work, especially as the 1777 edition would have
offered an opportunity to reflect on the outcome of the Seven Years War in 1763 and
the financial consequences of the war for the British Atlantic system (see Figure 33.2).
Another interpretation of the violence of Jacques Savary’s assessment of the
English trading practices (and perhaps the willingness of successor editors to retain
it) is suggested by Joan DeJean’s article on Molière’s Le Festin de Pierre, in which she
positions censorship as part of the ‘work of forgetting.’ In her view, Molière’s play
hit too close to home:
The official mission of French culture was to promote this vision of the civilizing
effects of all things French. In this vision Molière’s story of a society in which the
boundary between market values and aristocratic values had been eroded had no
place. The possibility that France might be becoming, like its models in the overseas
trade, a nation of shopkeepers, more interested in the price of things than in proper
social stratification – or in sexual conquest – was quite clearly unthinkable.
(DeJean, 2002, p. 80)
Like Hoock, DeJean sees the civilizing process, except in reverse. In her view, the elite
interests, embodied by state censors, were uncomfortable with the commercialization
of society (this process of ‘becoming English’), which Colbert simultaneously
orchestrated as Comptroller-General of French finances and whitewashed as patron
of the arts, including Molière. DeJean mentions Savary in passing, as the author of a
manual whose purpose was to teach the nobility how to identify mercantile aptitude
and cultivate it in their children (2002, p. 58). What she neglected to mention is that
Savary did so at the behest of Colbert, who wanted to encourage both continental
and overseas trade. Savary’s participation in Colbert’s political and economic project
explains why Savary and his work have been all but forgotten by modern scholars, as
the subsequent triumphs of the physiocrats in France and the political economists in
627
Figure 33.3 Modern Rendering of a seventeenth-century exciseman

leading an attack on smugglers8
Private Collection/© Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images
England marginalized both French and English mercantilist discourses. Taken

together, Hoock and DeJean do provide complementary explanations of the paradox
of the ‘Phénomène Savary,’ i.e. its publishing success and its subsequent consignment
to obscurity. Modern scholars should benefit from its rediscovery, not least because
Savary was participating in a process that was not a French but rather European and
ultimately Atlantic phenomenon, as European nations emulated and imitated each
other as they pursued their ‘jealousies of trade’ (Hont, 2005).
NOTE S
For the helpful feedback and sympathetic hearing she received, the author is grateful to the
audience of her paper entitled, ‘Echoes of the Picaresque in Jacques Savary’s Le Parfait Négociant,’
which she presented at ‘Early Modern Exchanges,’ Launch Conference, 15–17 September 2011,
628
UCL, London. As a result of this panel and a follow-up conference at Newnham College in July
2012 entitled ‘Anglo-French Perspectives on The Literature of Commerce and the Commerce of
Literature in the Long 18th Century,’ Jenny Mander and D’Maris Coffman are undertaking the
first English translation of Le parfait négociant.
1 Jacques Savary, Le parfait négociant, ou Instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le

commerce des marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1721). This introduction,
entitled ‘La vie De Monsieur Savary’ was written by his son, Louis-Philémon Savary.
2 For a comprehensive listing of the printings, see Pierre Jeannin and Jochen Hoock (1991,
pp. 488–97).
3 English translation: ‘the “Phenomenon Savary” expresses very nicely in an emblematic
way the social, intellectual, technical and technological ruptures at the very end of the
seventeenth century. Le Parfait Négocians participates in it by its legitimating discourse
and the pedagogical action that it represents.’
4 Advertissement, sur la huitiéme Edition du Parfait Negociant (1721), pp. 2–3.
5 ‘Fraught’ appears to be a variant early modern spelling for ‘freight.’
6 English translation: ‘I reported this example to show bad faith of the English & that it is
necessary to take good precautions in order to trade with them.’
7 This text was preserved from the earlier editions, and directly precedes the addition about
the banks of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. ‘In Holland we simply pay ad-valorem duties upon
entry and exit, and they are mentioned in their book of tariffs and are about five percent.’
8 Ironically although this is an early twentieth century work, it captures beautifully the
belief that eighteenth-century commentators had about the ferocity with which the English
prosecuted smuggling.
REF EREN CE S
Primary sources
Anonymous. Popery and Tyranny: Or the Present State of France, in relation to its Government,
Trade, Manners of People, and Nature of the Countrey. As it was sent in a Letter from an
English Gentleman abroad, to his Friend in England. (London, 1679).
——. Monsieur Colbert’s ghost, or, France without bounds being a particular account by what
ways it has attain’d to that supream grandure, and relating the secret intreagues of the French
Kings ministers at the courts of most of the princes and states of Europe, with remarkes there
upon: also some reflections on the interest of those princes. (Cologne, 1679; London, 1684).
Savary, Jacques. Le parfait négociant, ou Instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le commerce
des marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1675).
——. Le parfait négociant, ou Instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le commerce des
marchandises de France et des pays étrangers / Der volkommene Kaufmann (Genève, 1676).
marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1679). 2nd edition.
marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Lyon, 1697). 5th edition.
marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1701). 5th edition, re-print.
marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1721). 8th edition.
marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1777). 17th edition.
Ward, Sir Patience, et al. A scheme of the trade, as it is at present carried on between England
and France (London: 29 November 1674).
629
Secondary literature
Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Bamford, Paul Walden. ‘French Shipping in Northern European Trade, 1660–1789.’ The
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Sep., 1954), pp. 207–19.
Bermingham, Ann and John Brewer (ed.). The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image,
Object, Text (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Bonno, Gabriel. ‘La Culture et la Civilisation Britanniques Devant L’Opinion Francaise de la
Paix D’Utrecht aux Lettres Philosophiques (1713–34).’ Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society, New Ser., Vol. 38, No. 1 (1948), pp. 1–184.
Brewer, John and Roy Porter (ed.). Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge,
1993).
Chandaman, C. D. The English Public Revenue 1660–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
Coffman, D’Maris; Leonard, Adrian and Neal, Larry (eds). Questioning Credible Commitment:
New Perspectives on the Rise of Financial Capitalism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013).
Cole, Arthur H. The Historical Development of Economic and Business Literature (Rensselaer:
Hamilton Printing Company, 1957).
Cole, Charles W. Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism. 2 vols. (Hamden: Archon
Books, 1964).
Crouzet, François (ed). Le Négoce International XIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Economica, 1989).
DeJean, Joan. ‘The Work of Forgetting: Commerce, Sexuality, Censorship, and Molière’s Le
Festin de Pierre,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 29, No. 1, Fall 2002, pp. 53–80.
Dewald, Jonathan. Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and
Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge
Gauci, Perry. The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society 1660–1720
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Goyau, Georges. ‘Savary’ in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIII, 1912.
Harreld, Donald J. ‘An Education in Commerce: Transmitting Business Information in Early
Modern Europe’ in Information Flows: New Approaches in the Historical Study of Business
Information, edited by Jari Ojala and Leos Müller (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden
Seura, 2007).
Hauser, Henri. ‘Le “Parfait Negociant” de Jacques Savary,’ Revue d’Historie Économique et
Sociale, Vol. 13 (1925), pp. 1–28.
Hirschman, Albert O. The passions and the interests: political arguments for capitalism before
its triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
Hont, Istvan. Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Hoock, Jochen. ‘Le phénomene Savary et l’innovation en matière commerciale en France aux
xviie et xviiie siècles,’ in Innovations et Renouveaux Techniques de l’Antiquité à nos Jours:
Actes du Colloque International de Mulhouse. ed. J.-P. Kintz (Strasbourg: Assoc.
interuniversitaire de l’Est, 1989).
Howard, Stanley E. ‘Public Rules for Private Accounting in France, 1673 and 1807,’ The
Accounting Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Jun., 1932), pp. 91–102.
Jeannin, Pierre and Jochen Hoock. Ars Mercatoria: Handbücher und Traktate für den
Gebrauch des Kaufmanns 1470–1820; Eine analytische Bibliographie, Vol. II: 1600–1700,
Vol III: Analysen: 1470–1700 (with Wolfgang Kaiser) (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1991).
630
Kintz, Jean-Pierre (ed.). Innovations et Renouveaux Techniques de l’Antiquité à nos Jours:

Actes du Colloque International de Mulhouse 1987 (Strasbourg: Assoc. interuniversitaire
de l’Est, 1989).
Lamikiz, Xabier. ‘The Transatlantic Flow of Price Information in the Spanish Colonial Trade,
1680–1820’ in Merchants and Profit in the Age of Commerce, 1680–1830, edited by
Pierre Gervais, Yannick Lemarchand and Dominique Margairaz (London: Pickerring &
Chatto, 2014).
Langford, Paul. 1989. A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Mander, Jenny. ‘Picaros, Pirates and Colonial History,’ in The Philological Quarterly, Vol. 89,
No. 1 (Winter 2010), pp. 55–74.
McVeagh, John. Tradefull Merchants: The Portrait of the Capitalist in Literature (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
Meuvret, Jean. Études d’histoire économique, recueil d’articles (Paris: A. Colin, 1971).
Mitchell, Brian R. ed. British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Murris, Roelof. Le Hollande et les Hollandais au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles, vus par les
Francais (Paris: E. Champion, 1925).
Nicholes, Eleanor L. and Dorothea D. Reeves. ‘The Kress Library of Business and Economics
and Some of Its Treasures.’ The Business History Review, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Summer, 1966),
pp. 237–49.
O’Brien, Patrick K. 1988. ‘The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815,’ Economic
History Review, 2nd ser., 4Vol. 1, No. 1: 1–32.
Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France,
c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Parker, R. H. ‘A Note on Savary’s “Le Parfait Negociant”,’ Journal of Accounting Research,
Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 260–61.
Perrot, Jean-Claude. Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique: XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1992).
Pincus, Steven C.A. ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular
Settlement from anti-Dutch to anti-French in the 1670s’ Historical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2
(1995), pp. 333–61.
Priestley, Margaret. ‘Anglo-French Trade and the “Unfavourable Balance” Controversy,
1660–85,’ The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1951), pp. 37–52.
Rabuzzi, Daniel A. ‘Eighteenth-Century Commercial Mentalities as Reflected and Projected in
Business Handbooks,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1995–96), pp. 169–89.
Reddy, William M. ‘The structure of a cultural crisis: thinking about cloth in France before
and after the Revolution’ in Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). The Social Life of Things: Commodities
in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 261–84.
Redlich, Fritz. ‘An Eighteenth-Century Business Encyclopedia as a Carrier of Ideas.’ Harvard
Library Bulletin, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1971), pp. 73–98.
Reinert, Sophus A. 2011. Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Reinert, Sophus A. and Pernille Røge (eds). The Political Economy of Empire in the Early
Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Rogers, Ruth R. ‘The Kress Library of Business and Economics,’ The Business History Review,
Vol. 60, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 281–88.
Roseveare, Henry. Markets and Merchants of the late Seventeenth century: the Marescoe-
David Letters, 1668–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Savary, Jacques. Le parfait négociant, ou Instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le commerce
des marchandises de France et des pays étrangers (Paris, 1721).
631
Schaeper, Thomas J. The French Council of Commerce 1700–1715: A Study of Mercantilism

after Colbert (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1983).
Soll, Jacob. The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations. (New
York: Basic Books, 2014).
——. The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s secret intelligence system (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2009).
Sonnino, Paul (ed.). The Reign of Louis XIV: Essays in Celebration of Andrew Lossky (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1990).
Stern, Philip J. and Carl Wennerlind (eds). Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in
Early Modern Britain and its Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Trivellato, Franesca. ‘Credit, Honor, and the Early Modern French Legend of the Jewish
Invention of Bills of Exchange’ in The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 84, No. 2 (June
2012), pp. 289–334.
Turner, Raymond. ‘The Excise Scheme of 1733’. The English Historical Review, Vol. 42,
No. 165 (1927.), pp. 34–57.
Usher, Abbott Payson. ‘Colbert and Governmental Control of Industry in Seventeenth Century
France’ The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 16, No. 11 (Nov., 1934), pp. 237–40.
Vignols, Leon. ‘Le dictionnaire universel du commerce de Savary des Bruslons; L’opinion des
négociants nantais en 1738, etc.,’ Annales de Bretagne, Vol. 38, No. 4 (1929), pp. 742–51.
Zahedieh, Nuala. The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
632
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
THE CLASSICAL ATLANTIC WORLD
N. P. Cole
O n the shore where the colony of Virginia had its first beginnings stands a
monument to the tenacity and achievements of those early British settlers. Yet
the pagan obelisk and Roman wreaths with which their seventeenth-century society
is symbolized and celebrated reflect not their own understanding and representations
of their community, but a vocabulary associated with the wider American achievement,
and in particular the politics and political theory that in the late eighteenth century
produced the modern American republic. Across the continent of America and
around the Atlantic world, a similar classical vocabulary symbolizes legitimacy,
civilization, learning and achievement. In the federal and state capitals of the United
States, neo-classical buildings house the various branches of government, a connection
between the ancient and modern world for which Thomas Jefferson, through his
deliberate choice of the temple at Nîmes as the model for the post-Independence
Virginian Capitol building, is in part responsible. Familiarity has perhaps dulled
modern observers to some of the original impact of such buildings, but their original
and striking impression can be glimpsed in the art of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. A watercolour by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, ‘View of the City of
Richmond From the Bank of the James River’ painted in 1798 and now in the
possession of the Maryland Historical Society, shows the newly constructed,
unmistakably classical, capitol building rising above the modestly constructed houses
of contemporary Richmond. Latrobe would go on to work on many important public
buildings in America, not least of which is the national Capitol Building in Washington
D.C., and he was important in promoting a style of Greek Revival architecture that
has proved enduring and influential.
The connections between the ancient and the Atlantic world began long before the
age of republican government. The first English translations of Ovid made in North
America were by George Sandys, who lived in Virginia between 1621 and 1631,
serving as the treasurer of the Virginia Company and as a member of the council.
Elements of his translation and commentary were informed by his knowledge of and
beliefs about the New World, though his beliefs were the product of reading rather
than experience. In the 1940s, Richard Beale Davis wondered whether or not a work
begun in England, continued during the voyage, completed in America and first
633
– N. P. Cole –
published on return to England deserved to be called ‘genuine American literature’.

If this work sits uncomfortably in such a narrow category, however, it sits much
more easily in a category of Atlantic literature. The translation is far from infused
with constant reference to the New World – it was, after all, a translation of Ovid’s
text – but all the same, the books composed in America do contain references to the
New World. As Davis noted, his commentaries on Ovid show a familiarity with
works on the West Indies, Mexico and Florida.1 More recently, James Elison has
emphasized that both the 1626 edition of his translation, and the 1632 commentaries
that Sandys published on Ovid, explicitly referred to the fact that they were a product
of his time in America, contrasting the ‘muses’ of the classical text with the wars,
tumults and ‘rudenesse’ of Virginia. He had not only brought civilization to the
shores of Virginia, but he was making a claim to have produced its first work of
learning and scholarship.
Since the very discovery of America, the classical past provided Europeans with
one of the frameworks through which they understood and with which they described
the nature of the American continent and their own role on it. Classical texts travelled
to America with its earliest settlers, while in Europe writers struggled to reconcile
classical views of the world with the discovery of a new continent and its peoples.
Seeking to characterize the significance of this classical lens through which those
living on both sides of the Atlantic viewed their relationship to the American
continent, to the past and to each other, is a difficult task. Accurately capturing the
view of many Europeans and their descendants over the centuries that this volume
covers, Thomas Jefferson expressed the view that the classics formed the foundation
of most and an ornament to all branches of human knowledge.2 Events in history,
scientific discovery, observations on newly discovered lands and peoples could all be
discussed with classical allusion, citation and parallel, and in that sense, to chart in
full the reach of the classics into the modern, Atlantic world, would be to write the
history of western thought itself. One project begun in the 1980s did promise to
survey the reception of the classics throughout the Atlantic World, though the ill
health of one of its editors meant that only the first of six planned volumes in the
series The Classical Tradition and the Americas ever appeared.3 The scheme that
project outlined, however, would have covered most areas of human endeavour in
the Atlantic world in some form, and would have been a worthy monument as much
to the place of the classics in western thought before the twentieth century as it would
have been to the importance of the classics in the Atlantic world itself. It was,
however, part of a longer and more controversial tradition of research.
In the mid-twentieth century, historians of both the United States and the rest of the
continent bemoaned the fact that little work had been done on the significance of the
modern understanding of the classical past for the shaping of American history.4 Their
works appeared at the same time that European scholars were beginning to make
similar points about the contribution of the classical tradition to European thought.5
Given the dependence of America on European classical scholarship and editions of
classical texts, it is perhaps surprising that scholarship in this area, especially as it
pertains to North America, has not been more consciously written within the
framework provided by Atlantic History. By definition, American readers of classical
texts were engaged in the exchange of goods and ideas across the Atlantic world.
James Madison took advantage of Thomas Jefferson’s appointment in Paris during
634
– chapter 34: The classical Atlantic World –
the 1780s to ask him to acquire books on a broad range of topics, ancient as well as
modern. Madison had made his specific request for classical works in a list of
instructions sent to Jefferson in April. He wished Jefferson to find ‘such of the Greek
and Roman authorities where they can be got very cheap, as are worth having, and are
not on the common list of school classics’. Beyond the ancient authors themselves, he
was also interested in translations of their works, and he repeated a long-standing
request for ‘treatises on antient or modern foederal republics’.6 As it turned out, it was
Madison’s request for classical texts that caused Jefferson the greatest difficulty. ‘The
Greek and Roman authors,’ he explained, ‘are dearer here than I believe anywhere else
in the world. No body here reads them, wherefore they are not reprinted.’7
Historians of the United States have, for the most part, however, sought to identify
the texts and histories that may have conditioned American thinking, often failing to
integrate the classical influences on the revolutionary generation with other traditions
of thought, and failing to emphasize properly the Atlantic context of American
interest in the ancient world. One of the challenges for historians of this classicism is
that similar classical motifs and imagery were present throughout the Atlantic world,
and deployed by both imperial powers and young republics. Common to all Atlantic
interest in the ancient world was a sense that the ancients represented ideals of
civilization and knowledge and classical imagery could thereby confer a sense of
legitimacy and connection to a greater civilization. In that sense, the ancient world
provided a common language for certain ideas throughout the Atlantic world. Yet it
is equally true that the same architecture in a European, imperial capital could make
a very different statement when perched on the Atlantic’s western shore.
It is not, perhaps, a coincidence that articles making the case that classical
influences on America were worthy of greater study appeared in the late 1930s, when
democracy in Europe seemed on the verge of extinction and Americans debated
whether or not it was worth saving at all. They represented a challenge to the
prevailing sentiment at the time that the American republican achievement and its
intellectual basis was essentially a product of circumstance and the genius of one
particular generation of Americans. ‘Though students of American government in the
last three decades of the eighteenth century,’ wrote one scholar, ‘were familiar with
the political forms and experiences of these older so-called republics, they agreed that
they found in them practically no helpful contribution to the American experiment.’
Innovation in American government, it was argued, was the product of necessity,
circumstance and the experience of colonial government.8
The early works drawing attention to the importance of the classical tradition in
America need to be read in this context. These studies were initially written partly as
a reaction against a general sense of American exceptionalism, in the context of
growing interest in charting the contributions of previous traditions to the emergence
and evolution of American republicanism.9 Though the Revolution was increasingly
understood as the product of European thought, one other significant result was a
series of studies that specifically examined the contribution of the classics to American
thinking before and after the Revolution.10 All argued that the contribution of the
classics had been significant, and aimed to counter the ‘natural assumption’ that
American thought had been formed by English and French liberals, Deists and
philosophes.11 Other studies have since focused on the thought not of America
generally but of particular thinkers.12 Focussing on the contribution to American
635
– N. P. Cole –
political thought, Gilbert Chinard noted the importance of a theory of balanced

government, derived ultimately from the ancient world, and the prominence of the
use of ancient history in debate about the shape and function of the Senate, especially
in Madison’s thought.13 He commented on the close connection between the American
theory of the separation of powers and the ancient theory of balanced government.
‘It is clear that in the opinion of several delegates [to the Constitutional Convention],’
he wrote, ‘the executive represented the monarchical power, the senate the
aristocratical, and the house the popular power.’14 Like all of these early studies that
focused merely on the classical connections in American thought, he was rightly
cautious about his conclusion, writing only that ‘it is necessary to realise that the
most modern form of government is not unconnected with the political thought and
the political experience of ancient times’.15
The most extensive claim for the classical contribution to American thought was
made by Richard Gunmere in an essay on the American Constitution that claimed
unambiguously that ideas absorbed from classical reading had had a crucial role in
helping to forge the shape of the Constitution of the United States, and had perhaps
helped to shape the crisis that led to the Revolution itself.16 Like many similar works,
Gummere was clear that his intent was only to study the influence of the classics, and
not to consider the contribution of other traditions. Indeed, in some of the detail of
his commentary Gummere shied away from asserting the direct and decisive influence
of the classics. In this caution, he followed broader trends of the time. Writing later,
but reflecting on similar methodological problems, Trevor Coulborn, who examined
the influence of Whig History on the thought of the Revolution, noted that he sought
to avoid ‘the contention that a colonist adopted a particular political opinion because
he had read a particular book’.17
Gummere’s essay provoked a gentle but firm corrective from Meyer Reinhold,
who highlighted unease in early America at the presence of classics in education.18 He
drew attention to those voices in early America that disliked and were even suspicious
of the emphasis on classical culture, and highlighted the complex attitudes towards
the classical texts even of men, such as Jefferson, genuinely interested in them.
Subsequent work examined this early dispute about education in more detail.19
More recently there has been a renewed effort to revive the idea that classical
modes of thought were foundational to American ideas on government. Carl Richard
has analyzed the American engagement with the ancient world by identifying classical
models and anti-models in American thought, while David Bederman has explicitly
outlined the ‘classical foundations’ of the American Constitution.20 Both have stressed
parallels between ancient and American institutions and American knowledge of the
ancient world. Shalev’s studies have charted in detail engagement with the ancient
world and classical allusion in American political writing at the end of the eighteenth
century.21 Yet the difficulty of evaluating the significance of this influence alongside
other sources of political thought remains a problem more often identified than
confronted. Gummere acknowledged even while asserting classical thought as an
organizing principle underlying American institutions that this did not always seem
apparent to American republicans themselves. ‘Colonials credited Bolingbroke with
the doctrine of checks and balances, and Montesquieu with the separation of powers,’
he noted, while at the same time arguing forcefully that both doctrines were to be
found in Polybius’ description of Rome.22 Historians focused on the contribution of
636
ancient thought have often consciously left this tension unresolved, but this option
was not open to one particular group of historians who wrote explicitly about
causation and the history of ideas.
From the late 1960s onwards, many historians sought to chart not merely the
influences on the development of American thought but more ambitiously the
ideology that in itself provided the primary explanation for the Revolution and
subsequently the form of American government.23 One of these movements,
championed in particular by Gordon Wood, spoke explicitly about an era of ‘classical
politics’, beginning before the Revolution and ending with the 1787 Constitution.
The ‘classical republicanism’ school earned their label from their assertion that the
Americans were fluent in a language of virtue, a language that derived its vocabulary
from classical – and especially Roman – texts. This language expressed and explained
not a classical but a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophy that
required the subordination of individual interests to those of the polity and the public
good. They did not assert a distinctively American reception of the classics, indeed
quite the reverse was either the explicit argument or the most natural inference from
their comments. Rather the philosophy they identified echoed Machiavelli’s suggestion
that virtue was the sustaining spirit of a republic. The Americans they described,
therefore, were ‘classically republican’ in the sense of a commitment to individual
and collective virtue that seemed to echo Roman exhortations. They had inherited
from the English a tradition of republicanism whose ideas had their roots in the
ancient world,24 and were committed to a system of politics that was alien to and
would give way to the individualistic liberalism of the nineteenth century and beyond.
As they explained it, the ‘end of classical politics’ was the creation of a system of
government that no longer looked to English antecedents, ‘the mixed constitution
and the proportioned social hierarchy on which it rested,’ to provide a source of
stability. The transformation of politics at the end of the eighteenth century was a
‘shattering’ not of the influence of classical ideas but of (‘classical’) whig conceptions
of politics, above all its sense of virtue.25
As far as explaining American interest in the classical heritage is concerned, the
name usually applied to this school of historians can be misleading.26 Searching for
the source of the organizing ideas behind American politics, these historians drew an
important distinction as far as the classics were concerned. Seeking to describe the
most important sources of ideas for American thinking in the eighteenth century, and
locating in particular the importance of Whig ideas, their methodology necessitated
shifting emphasis away from the classical heritage itself. While they might provide
language that was consonant with a developing American ideology, they did not
themselves shape it. As Bernard Bailyn famously explained it:
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the revolution,
but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought. They contributed
a vivid vocabulary but not the logic and grammar of thought, a universally
respected personification but not the source of political and social beliefs. They
heightened the colonists’ sensitivity to ideas and attitudes otherwise derived.27
The apparent interest of Americans in the ancient world was, Bailyn argued, deceptive.
It was the product of habits formed at school and elites’ intellectual fashion rather
637
– N. P. Cole –
than deliberate choice. These historians viewed classical authors as significant

primarily for the fact that they stood at the head of long traditions that ultimately
gave rise to the American modes of thought.28
The third approach of historians has developed this idea of political culture even
further and been more explicitly comparative. Here again, the conclusions can be
negative as well as positive, and whereas Arendt saw strong comparisons between
some American attitudes and Roman ones, Paul Rahe’s survey of ancient and modern
thought emphasized the gulf that separated the society and politics of the ancient
world from those of modern states.29 Modern political philosophers, he wrote, far
from being in sympathy with the political philosophy of the ancient world, made the
break between the two worlds stronger by ‘systematically subordinating public to
private concerns’.30 How to protect the right to enjoy private property had become
one of the defining questions of modern political philosophy from Harrington
onwards, a question that had not been fundamental to ancient considerations of
politics. Furthermore, the eighteenth-century mind, Rahe believed, was well aware of
the break that had been made with the ancient tradition, and he quoted Edmund
Burke on the point:
It happened…that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the
earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the
ancient commonwealth turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates,
or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money
was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise.31
Rahe suggested that the very notion of the public good itself, devotion to which was
the primary ingredient of virtue as identified by historians of classical republican
America, was not a fundamental part of modern political philosophy. The emphasis
seemingly placed upon it in the eighteenth century was, in Rahe’s view, deceptive.
Praise might be lavished upon the notion of the common good, but, ‘they consistently
defined that common good as the defence of their own lives, liberty and property’. He
regarded as a universal political assumption of the period the observation that, ‘no
man when he enters into society does it from a view to promote the good of others,
but he does it for his own good’. Even those Americans with the highest regard for
the classical world – he cited Mercy Otis Warren as his example – praised the classical
notion of virtue but nevertheless always subordinated the rights of the community to
the rights of the individual.32 Coupled with the notion that the modern world had
seen, and continued to see, technological and material progress that further distanced
it from the ancient,33 he argued, it was important to stress not the similarities but the
‘chasm separating the Americans from the ancient Greeks’.34
There has, then, been considerable and sustained interest in debating the
contribution of the classics to the period of the revolution and early republic in the
United States. Some works have extended these themes into the nineteenth century,
though the claims of these works have typically been more modest, charting the
classical dimension to enduring debates over religion, slavery and education rather
than making the strong claims of the works focused on the eighteenth century.35 One
important work in recent years has taken up the challenge to examine the reception
of the classics in Spanish America in more depth and has been notable for its claim
638
that reception of the classics in the New World could influence the understanding of
the classics in Europe too.36 In doing so, it is one of the few monographs that really
does attempt to write an Atlantic history of an aspect of classical reception.
Beyond the competing claims about the contribution of the classics to the creation
of the American republic that have captured the interest of historians of the United
States, the reception of the classics has interested historians of America because of the
remarkable nature of the reception that transplanted wholesale an important element
of European culture to the American continent, and caused classical texts to be read
within a wholly new and unfamiliar context. As Wolfgang Haase captured it,
Americans remained constantly in contact with European traditions of interpretation,
and yet the constant ‘confrontation with the fundamentally foreign’ allowed ‘over
time, what were at least the elements of specifically American traditions’.37 Local
receptions of the classics in the Atlantic world all have their own unique elements, as
individuals applied their classical learning to their own peculiar situations. If awareness
of the ancient world infused European thinking throughout the Atlantic world and
across centuries, merely charting the presence of classical reading, allusion and citation
in the New World is unlikely to reveal much of value. Certain themes, however, stand
out as being especially worthy of particular study, elements of which are common to
the reception of the ancient world in different parts of the Atlantic world.
The first of these, important for its endurance and ubiquity, was the contribution
that the classics made to the way in which Europeans, colonists and their descendants
have understood the relationship between America and Europe. As Anthony Grafton
suggested in his study of the intellectual shifts that accompanied the discovery of the
Americas, from the moment of discovery those who had understood the world on the
basis of classical and medieval authorities faced the difficult task of reassessing the
classical and medieval authorities that had been proved fallible.38 This was no easy
process, and Grafton suggests that the result of this dramatic undermining of ancient
authorities was, over the course of a hundred and fifty years, a growing emphasis on
empirical knowledge. The authority of classical authors was far from destroyed,
however, and continued to inform the way that people living on both sides of the
Atlantic described their sense of the gulf that separated European and American life.
In Europe, ideas of a civilized Europe contrasted with a wild and untamed America
persisted, and frequently found expression in classical vocabulary. In 1775, the
London Magazine published a frontispiece urging the reconciliation of Britain and
her North American colonies. In it, America is depicted personified as a native
American woman, dressed in a caricature of native costume. England, on the other
hand, is depicted as a woman in fine, classical dress, almost indistinguishable from
the Goddess Peace who stands between them, urging them to reconcile and return to
commerce. It is not the only benefit of peace, however. As the verse underneath the
image makes clear, it is the duty of ‘England, unrivaled in the liberal arts’ to continue
spreading the learning of civilization ‘to remotest parts’.
Yet for their part, Americans challenged this view of the relationship between
Europe and America both before and after Independence. Jefferson’s generation had
inherited a curriculum and a mode of discourse that strongly privileged knowledge of
the classics and discussion of antiquity. If knowledge of the classics was widely held
to be the mark of the educated man, then a population widely schooled in the classics
was the mark of a civilized and virtuous society. For this reason, some revelled in the
639
– N. P. Cole –
idea that Americans might be better guardians of the classical than the European
nations. ‘The learning of Greek and Latin, I am told,’ Jefferson wrote in his Notes on
the State of Virginia, ‘is going into disuse in Europe. I know not what their manners
and occupations may call for: but it would be very ill-judged in us to follow their
example in this instance.’39
The suggestion that despite being separated by an ocean from Europe’s ancient
universities Americans were nevertheless well versed in the classical tradition both
reflected and contributed to a growing sense of national confidence. In the years
before the Revolution, Americans were eager to suggest that American knowledge of
the classics was diffused more widely than in Europe, and some were even prepared
to go further and suggest decay in European universities. The men who settled
America, John Adams wrote in a 1765 essay, ‘both the clergy and the laity’ had been
led by men familiar with ‘the historians, orators, poets and philosophers of Greece
and Rome’, and some of their libraries still existed, ‘consisting chiefly of volumes in
which the wisdom of the most enlightened ages and nations is deposited’, but which,
he could not resist adding, their descendants, though educated in European
universities, had difficulty in reading.40 The famous Letters from a Farmer in
Pennsylvania, written by John Dickinson and published anonymously in 1767 to
spur opposition to the British, made a similar point in a more subtle way. Using the
opportunity afforded by anonymity, Dickinson adopted the literary persona of a
modestly successful farmer, whose hard work and property won him the leisure to
read in his library and talk to ‘two or three gentlemen of abilities and learning’.
Through them and his private reading, this fictitious farmer acquired knowledge of
history and law.41 Each of these letters ended with a short Latin epigram.42 These
have several rhetorical purposes, but one of them is to suggest that even a self-taught,
Pennsylvanian farmer might be familiar enough with the classics to be able to support
his argument in such a way. If such learning was possible in the farms of Pennsylvania,
perhaps American society was more cultured and virtuous than European.
A similar sentiment produced Jefferson’s famous, if joking, comment to the author
of Letters from an American Farmer that ‘ours are the only farmers that can read
Homer’. He had been indignant when he read in a French journal that the British had
recently patented a type of wheel-making, held in London to be a great rediscovery of
an ancient method, but which he knew to be similar to a method commonly known in
New Jersey. Jefferson’s consternation was increased all the more because ‘Dr. Franklin,
in one of his trips to London, mentioned this practice to the man now in London, who
has the patent for making those wheels’. Seeing that a magazine article praised the
British for rediscovering a method mentioned in Homer, Jefferson took offence on
behalf of his countrymen. His sense of indignation was heightened all the more because
the American method was in fact much closer to the one described in the Iliad than the
method that the London workshop had adopted. He wished, therefore, to ‘reclaim the
honor of our farmers’ – though, in seriousness, for their inventiveness rather than their
classical learning.43 Nevertheless, his jest also captures the classical tone of American
politics and society after the Revolution. It captures, too, the desire of the American
patriot to subvert European prejudices. During most of the eighteenth century, until
the end of the War of Independence, British cartoonists depicted the colonists in North
America as a boorish, even savage, people living on the very edge of civilization. It
delighted Americans to suggest that America not only equalled Europe in learning,
640
civilization and virtue, but surpassed her in important ways. American writers were
able, thereby, to subvert the claims of cultural superiority made by those living in
Europe, paradoxically relying upon the same language of classicism and in spite of the
fact that there were scant examples of a genuine, American contribution to classical
scholarship.
This, too, is the primary message presented by the many neo-classical public and
private buildings erected after American Independence. Commenting on his design
for the Virginia Capitol, Jefferson does not emphasize a moral or republican message,
but an aesthetic one:
I send by this conveiance designs for the Capitol. They are simple & sublime, more
cannot be said, they are not the brat of a whimsical conception never before brought
to light, but copied from the most precious, the most perfect model of antient
architecture remaining on earth; one which has received the approbation of near
2000 years, and which is sufficiently remarkable to have been visited by all travellers.44
Writing to secure Madison’s help in advancing his proposals for the Virginian capitol,
Jefferson expressed concern for the reputation of his country and explained his choice
of model for the building:
It is very simple, but it is noble beyond expression, and would have done honour
to our country as presenting to travellers a morsel of taste in our infancy
promising much for our maturer age…But how is a taste in this beautiful art to
be formed in our countrymen, unless we avail ourselves of every occasion when
public buildings are to be erected, of presenting to them models for their study
and imitation?…You see I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an
enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as it’s object is to improve the taste of
my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of
the world and procure them it’s praise.45
Second, ancient authors provided a way for Europeans to explain and justify their
treatment of other Atlantic peoples. The crimes of slavery and the destruction of
native cultures were neither the products of nor sustained by classical reading, but
ancient authors, and most especially Aristotle, did provide a language by which those
who perpetrated them justified their actions. As Richard has shown, both sides of the
debates over slavery and emancipation in nineteenth-century America debated the
question in classical terms.46 Nor was such an impulse confined to the English-
speaking world. The Spanish had debated their treatment of the native peoples of
America in similar, Aristotelian terms.47 In 1748, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the
Laws devoted Book XV to attacking European justifications of slavery, including a
detailed attack on the grounds for slavery established by ancient authorities. To the
shame of his American readers, who cited him liberally as an authority on other
matters, the chapters on slavery seem to have made no impact on them at all.
At least in the structure of the one extended argument that he himself presented on
the question of slavery, Jefferson also relied heavily on Aristotle. Although in general
terms historians have noted the parallel between Aristotle’s ideas on slavery and the
views Jefferson expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia, and Richard hinted at a
641
– N. P. Cole –
more direct link,48 the full extent to which Jefferson structured his own text around
Aristotle’s discussion has not been fully examined. Of course, irrespective of anything
he read in Aristotle, racism and a reception of certain contemporary ‘scientific’
notions on the origins of species are explanation enough for Jefferson’s thinking.49
Yet although it is true to say that Aristotle stood simply at the head of a long
tradition of pro-slavery thinking,50 it is also possible to show that feeling pressure to
defend slavery (and, in part, his own hypocracy) against European critics, Jefferson
engages closely with Aristotle’s discussion of slavery. Not only does the structure of
the argument show a striking similarity with the structure of Aristotle’s own
discussion of the issue in Politics I, but also the scales of probability are tipped further
towards the suggestion that Jefferson drew on Aristotle by an interesting remark he
makes about the native Americans in Query VI of the Notes, where the topic under
discussion was the native plants and wildlife. He thought that the native American
male subjugated the female to ‘unjust’ hard labour, and that the roles of the male and
female in that society were not sufficiently separated. This is a curious echo of the
comment by Aristotle that among barbarian peoples insufficient distinction is made
between the female and the slave (in 1252b), and suggests that Jefferson, at least in
this work, chose to follow Aristotle’s tripartite division: the citizen, the barbarian
(who might be civilized, in Jefferson’s view), and the natural slave (who could never
be a citizen).
Two particular rhetorical choices by Jefferson have obscured his reliance on
Aristotle. The first was his presentation of his findings on slavery as the result of his
own private observations. This was not an unusual ploy of writers on disputed
territory in the eighteenth century. To cite authorities for his view on slavery would
have been to invite criticism of those writers, and would have weakened his case. The
second rhetorical device is more interesting: Jefferson held the practice of ancient
slavery as a counter-example to the American institution. He was making the
rhetorical claim that the American example was more justly administered than the
ancient example, and in fact selected the ‘correct’ people for slavery. His aim was to
damn ancient slavery by contrast and thereby blunt attacks on the Virginian
institution. Again, it would have weakened his case to have attacked the example of
slavery in the ancient world as unjust at the same time as making any explicit
relationship between his arguments and those of an ancient philosopher.
Jefferson drew his contrasts with ancient slavery in two ways. The less important
was to find examples of the treatment of slaves in the ancient world that he could
condemn as especially cruel. He contrasted, for example, Cato’s selling of slaves ‘and
everything else that had become useless’, or the ‘common practice [of exposing to the
elements and leaving to die]…diseased slaves whose case had become tedious’ with his
claim that the Virginians would not tolerate such action. He disapproves too of the
ancient principle that slaves could give evidence in legal cases – under torture. He prefers
instead the principle that they should not be able to give evidence at all.51 These examples
are meant to ease the conscience of the Virginian slave-owner, just as his rejection of
environmentalist arguments he hopes will be bolstered by the observation that:
…among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled
too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s
children. Epictetus, Diogenes, Phaedon, Terence, Phaedrus, were slaves. But they
642
were of the race of whites. It is not their [the American slaves’] condition then,
but nature, which has produced the distinction.
Third, Americans shared with Europe a tradition of political writing in which

engagement with ancient authors was judged as a mark of serious scholarship.
Montesquieu, one of the most cited thinkers in Revolutionary and post-Independence
America,52 commented frequently on Roman and Greek history in his Spirit of the
Laws. Reflecting on this in the middle of his work, he wrote that ‘One can never leave
the Romans; thus it is that even today in their capital one leaves the new places to go
in search of the ruins; thus it is that the eye that has rested on flower-strewn meadows
likes to look at rocks and mountains.’53 Before writing his more famous work, in fact,
he had written Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline,
and in this followed many other writers who had explicitly combined an interest in
political theory and contemporary politics with classical scholarship and observations
on Roman and Greek history. Popular authors more famous for other works include
Thomas Hobbes, whose translation of Thucydides had not shied away from comment
on contemporary politics, and Robert Filmer, who had written an essay Observations
upon Aristotle’s Politicks; and Niccolò Machiavelli, who had presented his work on
republics as Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy. As Machiavelli wrote in the
preface to that work, comparing ancient to modern events not only enabled better
understanding of them both, but the reader to draw practical lessons from history.54
This motif is seen in overtly political works as well as theoretical ones. The
translation of a fragment of Polybius – specifically his thoughts on the Roman
constitution – could provide an opportunity to call for annual Parliaments, for
example.55 This tendency could be taken to an extreme: Johnathan Swift’s A Discourse
of the Contests and Dissentions Between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens
and Rome (1701) is not, as it might first appear, primarily a history of the well-
known turmoils of Greek and Roman politics at all, but, through the emphasis it
gives to particular events, a cleverly worked commentary on contemporary British
partisan struggles. The parallels are, however, mostly left for the reader to draw
rather than being made explicit. Read out of its historical context the complexity of
this subtext is, as one of its editors has noted, unintelligible to the modern reader
without exhaustive notes explaining the allusions to contemporary affairs.56
At the end of the eighteenth century, revolutionaries and republican philosophers
on both sides of the Atlantic discussed the example of ancient republics and
democracies at length, and chose classical symbols to represent their experiments in
government. All the same, no institutions in the new United States were created by
directly following classical models, even if James Madison did prepare carefully for
the 1787 Constitutional Convention by reading Greek and Roman History and
preparing his Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies. The closest that America
ever came to establishing any institution with a simple, obvious, classical precedent
was during the Revolutionary War itself, when to Jefferson’s disgust, his fellow
Virginians considered creating a dictator on the Roman model to deal with the British
invasion. ‘What clause in our constitution,’ asked an exasperated Jefferson in Notes
on the State of Virginia, ‘has substituted that of Rome, by way of residuary provision,
for all cases not otherwise provided for?’57 The idea of a dictator, with absolute
power over life, property and law was, as Jefferson accurately observed, a proposal
643
– N. P. Cole –
with no precedent in English law and practice, and had instead been borrowed from
the example of ancient Rome. In the event, however, the measure failed by narrow
margins both times it was proposed.
In post-Revolutionary America the upper chambers of the various legislatures
were frequently discussed as if they were recreations of ancient institutions, even if in
their form and function they are more naturally explained as new versions of colonial-
era councils. Certainly, the twenty-six-member Federal Senate created by the 1787
Constitution bears little close comparison with the four- to six-hundred-member
debating chamber of the Ancient Roman state from which it took its name. However,
lacking a theory of representation that coherently justified bicameral systems and still
somewhat beholden to the notion that lower chambers should be understood as a
direct substitute for direct democracy, Madison and other Federalists discussed the
role and nature of the Federal Senate as if it was indeed a recreation of ancient
Rome’s. Urging the people of New York to adopt the Constitution, Madison wrote
of the Senate’s role:
I shall not scruple to add that such an institution [a senate] may sometimes be
necessary as a defence to the people against their own temporary errors and
delusions…there are particular moments in public affairs when the people,
stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the
representations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves
will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.58
The Senate was to be able to provide the interference ‘of some temperate and
respectable body of citizens,’ until ‘reason justice and truth can regain their authority
over the public mind’. In case anyone missed the point, he added that all of the ancient
republics worthy of emulation had appointed a senate to control the passions of
democratic government. He acknowledged that the appointment of senator for life on
the Roman model would be ‘repugnant to the genius of America’, but nevertheless left
his readers with a strong hint that the appointment of senators for six-year terms by
state legislatures (that is, the appointment of a body beyond direct popular control),
should be welcomed as emulating at least certain aspects of the Roman Senate:
I am not unaware of the circumstances which distinguish the American from

other popular governments, as well ancient and modern; and which render
extreme circumspection necessary in reasoning from one case to the other. But
after allowing due weight to this consideration it may still be maintained that
there are many points of similitude which render these examples not unworthy
of our attention. Many of the defects, as we have seen, which can only be supplied
by a senatorial institution, are common to a numerous assembly frequently
elected by the people, and to the people themselves.59
A classically inspired distrust of democracy even in an America committed to

republican government remained common, though not universal, in American
political writing well into the nineteenth century. Modern discussions of the
Constitution would no doubt emphasize its Federal nature, rather than attempting to
explain its institutions in quasi-classical terms, and a sensitivity to the fact that
644
Madison’s generation continued to reply on what were in a republican context

increasingly awkward, classical models of government to describe their political
institutions, reveals the gulf that separates them from modern thought about politics,
democracy, representation and society. Perhaps the greatest legacy of all of this has
been to inject into American political discourse a fear of institutional failure that
contributes greatly to what Richard Hofstadter called the ‘paranoid style’ in American
politics.60 The founding texts of the American nation, including the much-read
Federalist Papers, are infused with warnings that if America’s political institutions
fail to contain the dangers, the American experiment in republicanism will suffer the
same disastrous fate that met ancient states.
On the western shore of the Atlantic, then, classical learning arrived with the first
settlers, providing both a bridge back to European thought, reminding European
settlers of their European roots while also providing them with the opportunity to
justify their actions on a new continent and with a way to distinguish themselves from
the Europe they had left behind. The classical corpus provided obvious motifs upon
which those championing the achievements of the New World could draw. To be sure,
the classics never had any monopoly on the Atlantic imagination. Pierre Eugene Du
Simitière, an engraver who was involved in the creation of several seals for use in the
early American Republic, proposed using coats of arms along more traditional
European lines. The first committee charged with the creation of a national seal
rejected both John Adams’s proposal of a classical design and suggestions by Benjamin
Franklin and Jefferson for a design based on Exodus. Instead they recommended a
complex design based on Du Simitière’s idea of a national coat of arms. It would have
celebrated in six quarters the various nations that had peopled America, supported by
the goddesses of liberty and justice. This design was not ultimately adopted, and the
motto ‘e pluribus unum’ and the eye of Providence were the only aspects of that
committee’s proposals that would be incorporated into the Seal eventually adopted by
the United States.61 Instead, the Great Seal of the United States, at least on its reverse,
uses two lines from Virgil’s Aeneid to make two claims that, while using a European
source, separates America from Europe: first, that the American Republic is the will of
Providence, and second that its creation marks a new epoch of time, one that is as
significant a break with the past and as great in its importance as the founding of the
city of Rome had been for the history Europe. Yet despite this attempt to divide the
world into East and West hemispheres using a language of classicism, the most lasting
legacy has been one of unity. Neoclassical public and private buildings ring the Atlantic
world, monuments to shared tastes and an enduring deference to ancient aesthetics,
and made possible by the wealth created by Atlantic trade.
NOTE S
1 Richard Beale Davis, ‘America in George Sandy’s “Ovid”’, The William and Mary
Quarterly, Third Series, 4, number 3 (1947): 300–303.
2 Jefferson John Brazer, 24 August 1819.
3 Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold, editors, The Classical Tradition and the Americas:
European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition (Berlin and Boston: Walter
de Gruyter, 1993), VIII.
4 Charles F. Mullet, ‘Classical Influences on the American Revolution’, Classical Journal 35
(1935): 92–104; Tom B. Jones, ‘The Classics in Colonial Hispanic America’, Transactions
645
– N. P. Cole –
and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 70 (1939): 37–45, Gilbert

Chinard, ‘Polybius and the American Constitution’, Journal of the History of Ideas 1,
number 1 (1940): 38–58.
5 Harold Talbot Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries (Chicago,
Ill.: The University of Chicago press, 1937).
6 James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 27 April 1785.
7 Jefferson to Madison, 1 September, 1785
8 George M. Dutcher, ‘The Rise of Republican Government in the United States’, Political
Science Quarterly 55, number 2 (1940): 199, 201. For a history of American exceptionalism
see Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity
from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). The classical
tradition was not alone in being cited by those challenging American exceptionalism before
the 1950s. Other works included: Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study
in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922); America
and French Culture, 1750–1848; Merle Curti, ‘The Great Mr. Locke: America’s Philospher,
1783–1861’, in The Huntington Library Billetin, no. 11 (1937), pp. 108–151.
9 Louis B. Wright, ‘The Purposeful Reading of Our Colonial Ancestors’, ELH 4, number 2
(1937): 85–111.
10 Mullet, ‘Classical Influences on the American Revolution’; Chinard; George P. Schmidt,
‘The Classics and Democracy’, Journal of Higher Education 13, number 8 (1942): 414–19;
Henry C. Montgomery, ‘Thomas Jefferson as a Philologist (II)’, American Journal of
Philology 65, number 4 (1944): 367–71; Harvey Wish, ‘Aristotle, Plato, and the Mason-
Dixon Line’, Journal of the History of Ideas 10, number 2 (1949): 254–66; Douglass Adair,
‘A Note on Certain of Hamilton’s Pseudonyms’, William and Mary Quarterly 12, number 2
(1955): 282–97.
11 Chinard, 38.
12 Dorothy M. Robathan, ‘John Adams and the Classics’, New England Quarterly 19,
number 1 (1946): 91–98; Douglass Adair, ‘A Note on Certain of Hamilton’s Pseudonyms’,
Author unclear in Journal. Editor assumed. William and Mary Quarterly 12, number 2
(1955): 282–97; Leo M. Kaiser, ‘John Quincy Adams and His Translation of Juvenal 13’,
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114, number 4 (1970): 272–93; James
M. Farrell and John Adams, ‘John Adams’s Autobiography: The Ciceronian Paradigm
and the Quest for Fame’, New England Quarterly 62, number 4 (1989): 505–28; James
M. Farrell, ‘“Syren Tully” and the Young John Adams’, The Classical Journal 87, number
4 (1992): 373–90; Carl J. Richard, ‘A Dialogue with the Ancients: Thomas Jefferson and
Classical Philosophy and History’, Journal of the Early Republic 9, number 4 (1989):
431–55; Lyon Rathbun, ‘The Ciceronian Rhetoric of John Quincy Adams’, Rhetorica 18,
number 2 (2000): 175–215.
13 Chinard, 56.
14 Ibidem, 51.
15 Ibidem, 57.
16 Richard M. Gummere, ‘The Classical Ancestry of the United States Constitution’, American
Quarterly 14, number 1 (1962): 3–18.
17 H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins
of the American Revolution (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), xviii.
18 Meyer Reinhold, ‘Opponents of Classical Learning in America during the Revolutionary
Period’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, number 4 (1968): 221–34.
19 Shevaun E. Watson, ‘Complicating the Classics: Neoclassical Rhetorics in Two Early
American Schoolbooks’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, number 4 (2001): 49; Caroline
Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual
Life 1780–1910 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 11–43,45–49.
646
20 Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American
Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Carl J. Richard, ‘The
Classical Roots of the U.S. Congress: Mixed Government Theory’, in Inventing Congress:
Origins and Establishment of the First Federal Congress, edited by Kenneth R. Bowling
and Donald R. Kennon (Athens, Ohio: Published for the United States Capitol Historical
Society by Ohio University Press, 1999); David J. Bederman, The Classical Foundations
of the American Constitution: Prevailing Wisdom (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
21 Eran Shalev, ‘Ancient Masks, American Fathers: Classical Pseudonyms during the
American Revolution and Early Republic’, Journal of the Early Republic 23, number 2
(2003): 151–72; Eran Shalev, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination
and the Creation of the American Republic, Jeffersonian America (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2009).
22 Richard M. Gummere, ‘The Classical Ancestry of the United States Constitution’,
American Quarterly 14, number 1 (1962): 7–8.
23 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt Brace, 1991); Robert E.
Shalhope, ‘Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Re-
publicanism in American Historiography’, William and Mary Quarterly 29, number 1
(1972): 49–80; Robert E. Shalhope, ‘Republicanism and Early American Historiography’,
William and Mary Quarterly 39, number 2 (1982): 334–56; Isaac Kramnick, ‘Republican
Revisionism Revisited’, The American Historical Review 87, number 3 (1982): 629–64;
Richard K. Matthews, ‘Liberalism, Civic Humanism, and the American Political Tradition:
Understanding Genesis’, Journal of Politics 49, number 4 (1987): 1127–157; Daniel T.
Rodgers, ‘Republicanism: The Career of a Concept’, Journal of American History 79
(1992): 11–38; Richard P. Gildrie, ‘The Republican Synthesis Revisited: Essays in Honor
of George Athan Billias (Review)’, Journal of Southern History 61, number 3 (1995):
584–85; Steve Pincus, ‘Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Progressive Individualism:
Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth’, American
Historical Review 103, number 3 (1998): 705–36. Bailyn, interestingly, was gently critical
of the extension of his approach past the Revolution, though his later attempts to nuance
his position have not been widely noted. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the
American Revolution, Second, First published 1967 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), v–vi; Jack N. Rakove, ‘Gordon S. Wood, the “Republican Synthesis,” and
the Path Not Taken’, William and Mary Quarterly 44, number 3 (1987): 621.
24 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
25 Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 606ff.
26 For an insightful analysis of the history of this label, see Gildrie, ‘The Republican Synthesis
Revisited’, 102–6.
27 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Second, First
published 1967 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 22–26; cf. Mullet,
‘Classical Influences on the American Revolution’, 93ff.
28 Douglass Adair, The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2000). For the influence of this thesis, see the introduction to that edition.
For a ‘Roman’ and ‘Greek’ tradition in political thought see Eric Nelson, The Greek
Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8ff.
29 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London; New York: Penguin Books, 1970), 180–214;
Paul A. Rahe, ‘Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece’, American Historical Review 89,
number 2 (1984): 206, 267.
647
– N. P. Cole –
30 Paul A. Rahe, New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought, volume 2,
Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1994), 214.
31 Burke, Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, 22nd March
1775, quoted at ibidem, 214.
32 Ibidem, 121.
33 Ibidem, 108–10.
34 Paul A. Rahe, Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime, volume 3,
Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1994), 191, 45–46.
35 Winterer, The Culture of Classicism; Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity:
American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2007); Carl J. Richard, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece Rome
and the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univeristy Press, 2009).
36 Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).
37 Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold, Classical Tradition and the Americas: European
Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition, volume 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1994), XI.
38 Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of
Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
39 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, edited by William Peden (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 147.
40 John Adams, ‘A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law’, in The Revolutionary Writings
of John Adams, edited by C. Bradley Thompson (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), 24.
41 John Dickinson, ‘Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania’, in Empire and Nation, edited by
Forrest McDonald (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999), 3.
42 For analysis of which, see Richard M. Gummere, ‘John Dickinson: Classical Penman of
the Revolution’, The Classical Journal 52, number 2 (1956): 84.
43 Jefferson to St. John de Cr’evecoeur, 15th January 1787.
44 Thomas Jefferson to James Currie, 28 January 1786.
45 Jefferson to James Madison, 20th September 1785.
46 Richard, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece Rome and the Antebellum
United States, 181–203.
47 Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the
Modern World (London: Hollis & Carter, 1959), 44–61.
48 Carl J. Richard, ‘A Dialogue with the Ancients: Thomas Jefferson and Classical Philosophy
and History’, Journal of the Early Republic 9, number 4 (1989): 451.
49 Eric Foner, ‘The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation’, Journal of American
History 81, number 2 (1994): 443.
50 The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 18, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of the
Revolution, 42.
51 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, edited by William Peden (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 141–42.
52 Donald S. Lutz, ‘The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century
American Political Thought’, The American Political Science Review 78, number 1
(1984): 193–95.
53 Charles Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller
and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 172.
54 Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvy C. Mansfield and Nathan
Tarcov (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6.
648
55 Edward Spelmen, A Fragment out of the Sixth Book of Polybius, Containing a Dissertation
upon Government in General, particularly applied to that of the Romans…To which is
prefixed a Preface, wherein the System of Polybius is applied to the Government of
England (London: J. Bettenham, 1743).
56 Jonathan Swift, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions Between the Nobles and the
Commons in Athens and Rome, edited by Frank H. Ellis (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon
Press, 1967), vi.
57 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 129.
58 James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited by Isaac
Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1987), 371.
59 Ibidem, 372.
60 Richard Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Harper’s Magazine (1964).
61 Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, edited by Julian P. Boyd, volume 1
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 494–97.
649
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THE ATLANTIC ENLIGHTENMENT
William Max Nelson
A lthough the term ‘Atlantic Enlightenment’ is not yet widely used, it should be. The
term – and more importantly, the category that it refers to – adds something useful
to the study of the Enlightenment as well as the study of the Atlantic world. There is
some risk, of course, in stretching the concept of Enlightenment too far or diluting it
by adding yet another particular or peripheral Enlightenment to the constellation of
Enlightenments that have emerged from the historiography in the last few decades;
these Enlightenments range from the large and somewhat concentrated (French,
Scottish, English, American, German, Protestant, Jewish, Radical, Vitalist, etc.) to the
more modestly sized or dispersed (Socinian, Arminian, Swiss, Neapolitan, Utrechtean,
etc.).1 But the risk seems worth taking for several reasons. First, there are signs that
there was a distinctly Atlantic Enlightenment composed of individuals whose
intellectual development and contributions were deeply grounded in the mobility and
fluidity, the interconnection and reciprocity, the circulation and contestation that
characterized the early modern Atlantic world. The Atlantic contexts of colonialism
and slavery profoundly affected the development of most aspects of Atlantic
Enlightenment thought – whether political, economic, social, or scientific – and helped
account for many of the differences between ideas emerging from the Atlantic and
some European sites of the Enlightenment. Second, a better understanding of this
Atlantic Enlightenment will give additional depth to one of the fundamental assertions
of the historiography of the Atlantic world – that there was a highly integrated and
meaningful circulation and connection in the early modern Atlantic world. Of the
three pillars of the Atlantic world historiography – the circulation of people,
commodities, and ideas – the history of ideas seems to be the least developed in terms
of having a unified narrative. While there are excellent works about the circulation and
development of ideas in the early modern Atlantic world (particularly in relationship
to politics and science), there is still much to be determined about the nature and
characteristics of the intellectual context of this circulation and development.2 Finally,
I would suggest that we can identify and analyze multiple Enlightenments, while still
recognizing a single unified Enlightenment, and in fact, bringing the Atlantic world
further into the historiography of the Enlightenment gives us a new angle from which
to address persistent and important questions about the Enlightenment (which in the
650
– chapter 35: The Atlantic Enlightenment –
work of most specialists of the Enlightenment is still generally located on the dry land
of Europe, despite a historiography of an American Enlightenment).3
Although the Atlantic narrative of the Enlightenment is still in its early stages, the
appearance of the first book to claim the title The Atlantic Enlightenment (2008)
adds to the sense that the time for the study of the Atlantic Enlightenment has
arrived.4 The book seems to capture both the promise and the difficulty in writing the
history of the Atlantic Enlightenment – for as the editors acknowledge in the
introduction, the volume really focuses on ‘a North Atlantic Enlightenment primarily
protestant in denomination, and anglophone in orientation,’ with ‘its axis
unashamedly tilted toward Scotland.’5 While significant questions remain about the
proper parameters and perspectives of this inchoate subject, I wish to suggest some
of the ways that an Atlantic frame for the study of the Enlightenment can enrich
existing approaches and point the way towards others. Even to pose the question of
whether the Atlantic Enlightenment existed, begins to open up new avenues of
research and new candidates for re-evaluation.
After identifying some of the representative figures and features of this Atlantic
Enlightenment, I will suggest five topics or themes in the development of Enlightenment
ideas that are particularly well suited to inquiries within an Atlantic framework.
These are subjects that will probably reveal a greater Atlantic distinctiveness when
investigated more closely: the new discourses of social and political inclusion and
exclusion (primarily those discourses utilizing notions of natural rights and racial
exclusion); the emergence of biopolitical ideas and practices; the contributions of the
enslaved and free people of African descent; the development of liberal political
economic theory; and the development of radical political ideas (e.g. radical
egalitarianism, arguments for greater liberties, and justifications for national
independence, revolution, and democratic institutions, etc.). Of these five topics, I
will focus on the first two, since they appear to be the most promising avenues of
research due to their high degree of Atlantic distinctiveness, their expansiveness
(involving numerous people, places, and branches of knowledge), the depth and
breadth of their historical impact, and their ability to yield a new perspective on
persistent questions about the Enlightenment.
The year 1776 might function as a useful date to mark the beginning of the Atlantic
Enlightenment. While the year was obviously important in America and the British
Empire, it also had a profound effect across the Atlantic world, in European centers
of the Enlightenment as well as European colonies. It was a time when American
figures of the Enlightenment gained a new assertiveness and the philosophes in
continental Europe became newly interested in America and the Atlantic world more
generally. The year, for example, was a crucial turning point for the French philosophe
Denis Diderot as he was both inspired by the American Revolution and discouraged
by the blow that enlightened reform suffered in France when the philosophe-
administrator Turgot was dismissed from his important ministerial position.6 Diderot
greatly admired the Declaration of Independence, and as he wrote his contributions
to the radicalized 1780 edition of the influential Histoire des deux Indes (written by
multiple contributors but published under the name of abbé Raynal), he created what
was probably the most widely read eighteenth-century account of the American
Revolution.7 This account of the Revolution and the defense of the people’s right to
resist tyranny (drawing on the arguments made by another Atlantic Enlightenment
651
– William Max Nelson –
author, Thomas Paine), joined a text that was already one of the most significant and
widely read critiques of European colonization and slavery. The widespread
popularity and impact of the Histoire des deux Indes captures some of the ferment
and vitality of the nascent Atlantic Enlightenment. In its desire to rethink politics and
commerce – particularly as they manifest in colonialism and slavery – as well as its
broad view of the entire Atlantic world (and indeed the other Indies), Histoire des
deux Indes stands as one of the monuments of the Atlantic Enlightenment.8
Diderot’s Atlantic turn captures two of the most important characteristics of the
Atlantic Enlightenment – that it emerged from the back-and-forth transmission and
translation of ideas between Europe and the rest of the Atlantic world, and that the
hybrid and dialectical ideas and disputes of the Atlantic Enlightenment came about in
the era rightly characterized as the Age of Revolution. This revolutionary age was a
newly self-aware era when those involved in politics, philosophy, and science gained
a new sense of their ability to separate themselves from old ways of being and thinking
(seen most radically in the desire of some French revolutionaries to construct a
completely new future).9 This type of self-aware assertion (and the link between
intellectual and political revolutions) was captured by Thomas Paine in 1782 as he
responded to the portrayal of the American Revolution in the Histoire des deux Indes:
‘Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution more extraordinary
than the political revolution of the country. We see with other eyes; we hear with
other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.’10 While
Paine’s claims demonstrate the revolutionary self-awareness and sense of novelty that
many of the figures of the Atlantic Enlightenment shared, the completeness of the
break from the past should not be overstated. While there was often a desire to leave
behind tradition and older ways of thinking, it was precisely the tension between old
and new that defined so much of the Atlantic Enlightenment. It was the dialectic
between influence and independence that formed the intellectual and political contours
of the Atlantic Enlightenment as citizens of the Atlantic world self-consciously drew
upon the European tradition while asserting the value (economic and epistemological)
of their local particularities. It was not just a question of identity formation or the
assertion of political or cultural autonomy; it was the search for a way to think
through, as well as beyond, the forms inherited from the European tradition.
A strange ambivalence often resulted from this attempt to simultaneously be
within and without the boundaries of European thought. This ambivalent dialectic
can be seen in grand events like the American Revolution – where, for instance,
revolutionaries drew on the European natural law tradition to fashion a new
articulation of natural rights that helped justify their endeavor.11 But it can also be
seen in the dramatically more modest (yet symbolically important) events like when
Benjamin Smith Barton, the American naturalist and eventual president of the
American Philosophical Society, created the new hybrid name Didelphis woapink for
a variety of opossum found in North America.12 Retaining the bi-nomial structure of
the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus and the Latin family name, Didelphis, Barton
replaced the Latin term marsupialis with the Native American term woapink that
supposedly described the animal’s white face.
As figures of the Atlantic Enlightenment like Barton drew on the language and
concepts of Europe to create their own hybrid knowledge and intellectual dispositions,
the Atlantic Enlightenment came of age in the last quarter of the eighteenth century
652
and persisted into the first decades of the nineteenth century, when it slowly and
unevenly transformed into something else. It had its moments of crystallization and
realization in some of the democratic Atlantic revolutions and independence
movements, although there was never a simple or direct relationship between
Enlightenment theory and revolutionary practice. The existence of Enlightenment
figures who were characteristically Atlantic and who embodied the Enlightenment’s
theoretical and practical concerns varied considerably over time and place. For much
of its existence, the Atlantic Enlightenment was most present in North America and
the French Caribbean colonies, with Philadelphia and Cap François (the capitals of
the new United States and the French colony of Saint-Domingue respectively) coming
closest to being its centers. In these places, there were many signs of the types of
books, newspapers, learned societies, libraries, correspondence networks, colleges,
and masonic lodges that functioned as the infrastructure of the Enlightenment.13
Some of the important and characteristic figures of the Atlantic Enlightenment
were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, James Madison, Thomas
Paine, Joseph Priestley, Joel Barlow, Richard Price, William Bartram, Benjamin Smith
Barton, Mark Catesby, John Witherspoon, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Bryan Edwards,
Olaudah Equiano, J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, the marquis de Lafayette, Médéric-
Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Pierre-Paul-François-Joachim-Henri Le Mercier
de la Rivière, Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Gabriel de Bory, Julien Raimond,
abbé Raynal, Denis Diderot, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Marie-Jean-Antoine-
Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours, Jacques-
Pierre Brissot de Warville, abbé Henri-Baptiste Grégoire, Constantin-Françoise
Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, Francisco José de
Caldas, Hipólito Unanue, and Hipólito José da Costa. There were also men like John
Locke, Hans Sloane, and Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan whose
works helped lay some of the intellectual foundations of the Atlantic Enlightenment.
Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was one of the foundational
works of Enlightenment philosophy of mind and human perfectibility, he was directly
involved in colonial administration (including a role in the authorship of the
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina), and his powerful arguments from the Two
Treatises of Government were used to justify English colonization as well as American
revolution.14 Hans Sloane, a physician, founder of the British Museum, and president
of the Royal Society in London, resided in the Caribbean for two years, brought back
a number of material objects (many of which were put on public display in London),
and wrote a prominent book about the Caribbean that provided a model of an
encyclopedic natural history of the region.15 Lahontan had been an army officer in
New France and his popular written works played an important role in fostering
European interest in native Americans, developing the notion of the ‘noble savage,’
and inspiring later critiques of European colonization.16 There were also a number of
figures of Enlightenment that resided in, or travelled through, the Atlantic world, but
lived largely before the formation of the distinctively Atlantic Enlightenment.
Scientist, statesmen, author, and printer Benjamin Franklin was the most important
of these early figures, but the scientific activities of Cadwallader Colden and John
Bartram, as well as the French scientific expedition led by Charles-Marie de La
Condamine through Spanish America were important early steps in the development
of the Atlantic Enlightenment.17 They helped demonstrate the intellectual and
653
practical potential of the Atlantic world – a place that could produce great scientists
and practical knowledge of great utility and commercial value.
There were a number of figures of Enlightenment spread throughout Spanish
America. Although the concentration of these figures and the depth and breadth of
supporting institutions seems to have been less than some of the colonies and states
of North America or in Saint-Domingue, clerical Creole authors articulated a
‘patriotic epistemology’ in the mid-eighteenth century that established a critical
tradition of engaging with figures of the European Enlightenment. Based on pointed
critiques of historical and natural historical accounts of the New World, a number of
authors questioned the epistemological assumptions, system building, and sweeping
judgments of European authors, particularly in relation to the claims that the
environment of the New World caused degeneration (as Buffon, Robertson, de Pauw,
Kalm, and Raynal famously claimed).18 Building on this tradition of critical
epistemology that asserted the importance of local knowledge and first hand
observation, a new generation of Enlightenment figures emerged in Spanish America
in the 1780s and 1790s. Enabled by the Bourbon Reforms, people like author and
publisher José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez took advantage of the Spanish government’s
policies minimizing the influence of the Church and supporting learned institutions
and publications. Publishing two short-lived periodicals before founding and almost
single-handedly writing and compiling the periodical Gacetas de literatura de México
from 1788 to 1795, Alzate was a secular priest and a persistent critic of European
accounts of the people, plants, and history of the Americas. In his periodicals, Alzate
publicized news from the Republic of Letters and the learned academies of Europe
while remaining an outspoken critic of what he saw as the de-contextualizing and
homogenizing tendencies of Enlightenment systems of thought and the natural
historical practices such as Linnaean taxonomy.19 Alzate was surrounded in New
Spain (Mexico) by a group of Creole authors who also attempted to merge native
history and scientific traditions with European knowledge and scientific practices.
This was also true of other figures of the Atlantic Enlightenment in Spanish America
such as the distinguished naturalist, astronomer, and engineer Francisco José de
Caldas in the vice royalty of New Granada (Columbia) and the physician, naturalist,
and journalist Hipólito Unanue in the vice royalty of Peru.20
The lusophone presence in the Atlantic Enlightenment was rather limited until the
so-called ‘generation of the 1790s’ emerged in the wake of Pombal’s reforms in
Portugal (which included the significant curriculum reform of the University of
Coimbra). A number of small learned academies were established in Brazil in the
eighteenth century, but none of them lasted for long – most of them dissolving or
being disbanded within a year or two of their founding – and by the late eighteenth
century Brazil still lacked a printing press or a university (Coimbra was in fact the only
university in the Portuguese empire).21 Many of the members of the reformist
generation of the 1790s were born in Brazil, educated at Coimbra, and then became
involved in correspondence networks and scientific expeditions that reached across
the Atlantic world. Some of these figures who came of age in the 1790s were José
Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva, Tomáso Antônio Gonzaga, Francisco Josée de Lacerda
e Almeida, and José Joaquim de Cunha de Azerdo Coutinho, Hipólito José da Costa,
Alexadre Rodrigues Ferreira, Manuel Galvão da Silva, Joaquim José de Silva, João da
Silva Feijó.22 Through their travels across and around the Atlantic, they made contact
654
with leading European and American figures of Enlightenment and they made their
own contributions to the development of natural history, jurisprudence, and political
philosophy. Hipólito José da Costa, for example, was a cosmopolitan editor and
publisher of colonial origin, Portuguese education, and an Atlantic itinerary (for a
time living in Philadelphia and journeying throughout North America and the
Caribbean collecting natural historical samples) who eventually settled in London,
where he printed his politically dissident monthly publication Correio Braziliense.23
Although the Atlantic Enlightenment was distributed throughout the Atlantic
world, there were also sites of convergence when a number of important figures of
the Enlightenment found themselves residing in the same place at the same time, such
as the mid-1790s in Philadelphia. Already the center of the Enlightenment in America
(and the home of the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical
Society), Philadelphia received an influx of people fleeing from the revolutionary
tumult in France and Saint-Domingue (including Constantin-François Volney,
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, and Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry), as
well as British sympathizers of the French Revolution (including the Scottish botanist
Alexander Wilson and the Unitarian radical Thomas Cooper). Volney, Talleyrand,
Moreau, Wilson, and Cooper all became members of the American Philosophical
Society and contributed to the intellectual and political ferment that received
additional animation from the immigration of the illustrious English chemist,
Unitarian, and ardent republican, Joseph Priestley.24
While there are many figures who composed the Atlantic Enlightenment, I want to
focus on four figures – Thomas Jefferson, Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry,
Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Thomas Thistlewood – who represent
important characteristics of the intellectual and political developments. Thomas
Jefferson is an exemplary figure for his Atlantic itinerary, with time spent in American
and European centers of Enlightenment, but also because of the wide range of subjects
that he wrote about (best represented by the diversity of topics in Notes on the State
of Virginia); his personal acquaintance with and correspondence with many of the
other figures of the Enlightenment; his authorship of the influential works that
demonstrated some of the ideas that were central to the Atlantic Enlightenment (the
Declaration of Independence containing one of the most important articulations of
natural rights and Notes on the State of Virginia containing one of the most important
articulations of a creole natural history and the importance of local and particular
knowledge); his membership in (and presidency of) the American Philosophical
Society; his collecting one of the most significant personal libraries in North America
(which became the foundation for the collection of the Library of Congress); and his
establishment of what became the University of Virginia.25
While Thomas Jefferson – the statesman, lawyer, political philosopher, architect,
and naturalist – is a well-known figure with an enormous amount written about him,
a similar breadth of learning and experience can be found in a more obscure figure
whose life and works nonetheless embody so many characteristics of the Atlantic
Enlightenment. Much in the way that Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia
exemplified the combination of broad encyclopedic interest and a focus on local and
particular knowledge, as well as practical political economic concerns and larger
philosophical problems, Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s monumental
Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie
655
française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1796) was a similarly typical beacon of the

Atlantic Enlightenment.26 Beginning in the 1780s, as part of a large government
project to reform French colonial law, Moreau began researching and editing a
different encyclopedic work: the six-volume work, Loix et contitutions des colonies
françoises de l’Amérique sous le Vent, which collected the laws and decrees relating
to the French colonies in the Caribbean with the intention of codifying colonial law
and providing a new resource for colonial administrators to use in making informed
decisions.27 During this research, with its unprecedented access to the ministerial
archives, Moreau began to gather information for his monumental Description,
which he originally envisioned as an enlightened encyclopedia covering all aspects of
life in the Caribbean. Although he did not fulfill this grand vision, his Description
remains one of the best sources for historical information about Saint-Domingue and
it was one of the most wide-ranging books to be published during the Enlightenment.
As the full title of the Description indicated, it covered the history of the
geographical, political, economic, and social structures of the French side of the
island of Hispaniola, but it also touched upon elements of everyday life and culture.
In places, the Description reads like an ethnographic study, with descriptions of
linguistic creolization, the fashion tastes of free women of color in Cap François, the
religious practices of the ‘danse vaudoux,’ and the sexual predilections of the white
men of Saint-Domingue. But the Description’s most original and troubling intellectual
contribution to the Atlantic Enlightenment was the treatment of fractional racial
difference. Moreau created an elaborate attempt to identify, name, and classify all of
the combinations of descent between people of African and European origin. When
he divided the range between complete whiteness and blackness into 128 genealogical
parts, Moreau’s racial calculus went far beyond the era’s other discussions of racial
classification. In fact, Moreau took his calculations even further and posited the
hypothetical existence of someone who was 1 part black and 8,191 parts white.28
Born at mid-century in Martinique, Moreau travelled to Paris as a young adult,
where he trained in law and gained a job in the Parlement of Paris during the turbulent
years of ‘the Maupeou revolution’ when the Parlement and the crown struggled for
legitimacy and power.29 Upon returning to the Carribean, he settled in Saint-
Domingue and began working as a lawyer and soon became a judge in the colonial
judiciary. Through the 1780s, Moreau travelled back and forth between Saint-
Domingue and Paris, researching and writing Loix and Description. In 1789, as the
revolution began to take shape, Moreau found himself in France. He became a politic
activist for both the colonial interests of the planters and the interests of the
metropolitan members of the Third Estate.
After his political career was crippled by rumors that he wanted to end slavery,
Moreau remained in France until he was forced to flee the Terror. Settling in
Philadelphia, he was involved in proliferating Enlightenment ideas through print as
an author, printer, and book-seller. He set up a printing press and bookstore that
published his own work on Saint-Domingue, as well as books and pamphlets on
Spanish Santo-Domingo, improving the breed of horses in the United States, Joseph
Priestley’s reflections on the chemical theory of phlogiston, a European perspective
on American prisons, and an encyclopedic presentation of the arts and sciences for
young people. He printed many of these works in both French and English, and
throughout his life, he remained engaged with scholarly works from parts of the
656
Atlantic world quite distant from his own place of residence – as can be seen in his
translation of a Spanish naturalist’s observation on the quadrupeds of Paraguay.30
Throughout his travels in the Atlantic world, Moreau participated in Masonic
activities in Saint-Domingue, Paris, and Philadelphia, becoming a member of the
illustrious Loge des Neuf Sœurs in Paris, which was packed with Enlightenment
luminaries such as Franklin and Voltaire, and becoming president of the Loge’s
educational subsidiary the Musée de Paris. He was also a member of important
learned societies including the American Philosophical Society and Saint-Domingue’s
Cercle des Philadelphes, which he helped gain royal letters patent, turning it into the
Société Royale des Science et des Arts du Cap François.
Moreau was not simply a Frenchman or a Caribbean creole, a royal administrator
or a French revolutionary, a cosmopolitan by choice or an émigré by necessity, a
partisan of liberty or a theorist of racial difference – he was all of these things. He was
‘a citizen of the Atlantic’ and – while he has not been ignored by historians – there is
still much to be learned about his life and the ways that his itinerant Atlantic existence
played a role in his intellectual development and his lasting contributions to the
Atlantic Enlightenment.31 I suspect that as we know more about figures like Moreau,
the contours of the Atlantic Enlightenment will become significantly clearer.
Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil is an example of a more obscure – but still
significant – figure of the Atlantic Enlightenment. He was a legally minded reformists
who drew heavily on Montesquieu’s legal and political ideas in his development of a
creole jurisprudence, opposed the metropolitan ancien régime hierarchy and its
enshrined special privileges, attacked mercantilism while articulating liberal economic
arguments that were consistent with the new Enlightenment political economy,
ardently supported the American Revolution, and implicitly built upon the new
Enlightenment approaches to natural history and race.32 His two-volume
Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie française de Saint-Domingue (1776–
77) remains one of the best historical sources for information on eighteenth-century
Saint-Domingue.33 It was one of the most vituperative critiques of colonial governance
(rivaled in the francophone world only by the 1780 edition of the Histoire des deux
Indes) and a strong articulation of the importance of local knowledge and empirical
observation in the creation of law and the process of governing.34
Hilliard’s Considérations also included a proposal for the racial engineering of
Saint-Domingue that was one of the most surprising and extreme visions of biopolitics
in the eighteenth century; in fact, it was one of the first plans ever to propose the
racial engineering of a real population actually existing in the world.35 Hilliard’s plan
drew on metropolitan developments in legal and biological theory in an attempt to
address the social, political, and military circumstances of Saint-Domingue. The plan,
proposed in the 1770s, was neither a metropolitan or colonial plan, it was an Atlantic
hybrid, much as Hilliard was. His life exhibited the movement across great distances
and between different cultures that was so typical of many of the most notable
intellectual figures of the early modern Atlantic world. He was born in France and
moved to Saint-Domingue as an adolescent, was exiled from the colony for his radical
writing, spent time in New York during the American Revolution, returned to the
Caribbean to take up the position of royal prosecutor in Grenada (from which he
was quickly removed and exiled from the island), moved to Paris to earn his living as
a writer (although he was jailed for his increasingly radical critiques of the monarchy
657
and colonial policy), only to once more move to the Caribbean where he died in
mysterious circumstances just as the French and Haitian Revolutions were getting
underway (it was rumored that a group of planters had him murdered).36
In addition to a two-volume synoptic work on Saint-Domingue, Hilliard published
a wide variety of works including histories of the American Revolution, an account
of British financial policy, anti-mercantilist polemics, a novel set in America during
the Revolutionary War, and a variety of pamphlets on morality. While in Paris, he
was also a member, like Moreau, of one of the French Enlightenment’s most exclusive
and exemplary fraternal organizations, the masonic Loge des Neuf Sœurs. The lodge
functioned much like a learned academy, fostering the egalitarian and cosmopolitan
ideals that were associated with the more progressive masonic lodges of the era.37
While Hilliard had a less illustrious career than Jefferson or Moreau, there were
even more peripheral figures in the Atlantic Enlightenment who often lived further
from urban centers and the types of learned societies, libraries, book-sellers, and
periodicals that would have allowed for a substantive engagement with the
Enlightenment. These figures often did not make a significant direct contribution to
the Enlightenment – or maybe even a modest one such as a short notice in the
publication of a learned society – but many of them nonetheless put concerted effort
into staying abreast of the philosophical and scientific developments of the day.
Furthermore, they may have played an important role in the proliferation of
Enlightenment dispositions and practices that contributed to the circumstances
enabling some of the direct contributions to the Enlightenment for which we have
textual or material evidence.
Thomas Thistlewood, for instance, was a stunningly violent, sadistic, and
tyrannical plantation overseer and slave owner, who nonetheless aspired to make
himself into a learned figure of the Republic of Letters. After moving to Jamaica from
England in 1750, he acquired and built a number of scientific instruments such as
telescopes, microscopes, and hydrometers. He amassed a library of approximately
one thousand volumes while pursuing his practical interests in botany, horticulture,
and meteorology.38 Thistlewood also participated in a small informal network of
provincial Jamaicans with whom he often traded and borrowed books. His
commonplace book – where he transcribed interesting and instructive passages from
his reading material – records a surprising number and variety of Enlightenment
works. Most surprisingly – for a provincial plantation overseer and modest landowner
in what would have appeared to be an intellectual backwater of the Atlantic world
– many of the books were written by well-known Enlightenment authors including
French philosophes such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and the novelist and
chronicler Louis-Sébastien Mercier.39
Thistlewood’s engagement with these authors raises questions not only of the
penetration of Enlightenment ideas into some of the most seemingly un-enlightened
parts of the Atlantic world, they also raise question about the role of Enlightenment
ideas in the re-assessment of even the most fundamental foundations of the Atlantic
world, such as the institution of slavery. In addition to transcribing critiques of
slavery from the books of Rousseau and Montesquieu into his commonplace book,
Thistlewood copied the now famous passage from Mercier’s futurist novel where he
imagined a Paris in the distant future that included a statue celebrating ‘the Avenger
of the New World’ who destroyed the tyranny of slavery through bloody violence.40
658
Historians today often invoke this passage as a sign of a rare and eerie prescience,
and it has been used many times as an epigraph, title, or illustrative quotation.41
Along with Diderot’s invocation of a black Spartacus rising up to end slavery,
Mercier’s vision haunts the historiography of the Atlantic world and the Haitian
Revolution, and it appears that it may have also haunted even one of the most sadistic
and peripheral of slave owners in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
By way of conclusion, I would like to suggest five lines of inquiry that could
contribute to the development of a historiography of the Atlantic Enlightenment. The
first two of these topics build on the fact that all four of the men I have just discussed
were all deeply involved in the world of slavery (with Jefferson, Moreau, and Hilliard
giving great consideration to its political, economic, moral, and scientific dimensions).
We still have much to discover about how the Enlightenment created such powerful
discourses of inclusion based on ideas of toleration, equality, cosmopolitanism, and
natural rights, while simultaneously creating powerful and lasting discourses of
exclusion based on the perception (and creation) of differences such as race.42 How
this paradoxical situation emerged is still a central question (maybe the question) of
the Enlightenment.43 The Atlantic seems like the most promising frame to arrive at a
compelling analysis of the simultaneous development of new ideas of inclusion and
exclusion during the eighteenth century because the most powerful discourse of
inclusion (self-evident natural rights) and one of the primary discourses of exclusion
(racial differentiation) have distinctively Atlantic genealogies.
Recently, scholars have brought greater attention to the transatlantic nature of the
development of ideas of human rights as well as the fact that ‘perhaps more than any
other set of ideas, race was Atlantic.’44 Over the past ten to fifteen years, intellectual
historians of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world have demonstrated how instrumental
the eighteenth century was in the creation of the idea of race and how much the Atlantic
was the crucible within which this idea was formed.45 Yet, it is still unclear how some
of the most prominent advocates of notions of equality, natural rights, and common
humanity also held profoundly inegalitarian ideas in relation to race. The co-mingling
of universalism and racism in a single person poses one of the most difficult problems
for Enlightenment historiography and embodies one of the most seemingly contradictory
legacies of Enlightenment ideas. This is particularly true because this strange admixture
is found in some of the most noteworthy of Enlightenment figures, such as Voltaire,
Kant, Hume, Buffon, and Jefferson, to name just a few.
Related to the development of these discourses – and another promising line of
historical inquiry that I will suggest for future research on the Atlantic Enlightenment
– is the manner in which the colonies in the Atlantic world functioned as ‘laboratories
of modernity’ where biopolitical projects were developed and sometimes implemented.
While Michel Foucault identified the eighteenth century as the era of the emergence
of biopolitics, he did not mention the ways that colonial history in the Atlantic world
– with the intertwined questions arising from the interaction of settler populations,
slave populations, and native populations – was a major site of development of
modern biopolitics. In fact, he largely ignored the issues of race and colonialism.46
This oversight has been corrected for the literature on the development of biopolitics
in the nineteenth century, but there has not yet been an adequate recognition of the
role of the colonies during the eighteenth century or of the role of Enlightenment
thought. It was precisely because of the colonization of places like Saint-Domingue (a
659
society where roughly 90 percent of the population was enslaved in the late eighteenth
century), that free residents of the colony, administrators in the colony and the
metropole, as well as people connected to the colonial project through economic,
scientific, and military activities, were forced to consider new questions about
knowing, controlling, and transforming populations. Although they have received
little attention from historians of Europe, some of the most extreme ideas of biopolitics
were directly related to concerns with the relationship between the populations in the
colonies and the population in the metropole. These plans go far beyond the
demographic concerns or the development of techniques for monitoring populations
that Foucault first drew attention to in his writing on the development of biopolitics.
Many of the most comprehensive, interventionist, and extreme biopolitical ideas
and practices that attempted to know, regulate, and transform populations were
developed in the context of the colonial slave societies of the Atlantic world.
Elsewhere, I have attempted to situate a little known, yet highly troubling and
complex product of the Atlantic Enlightenment: the first plans proposing the racial
engineering of a real population actually existing in the world.47 In addition to these
proposals for racial engineering, the Atlantic world saw the creation of a great variety
of biopolitical projects: the creation of numerous laws and ordinances to encourage
or discourage marriage between whites and blacks; projects of political arithmetic
like that of Benjamin Franklin; the creation of expeditions of royal midwives to Saint-
Domingue to increase settler populations; the many attempts to increase the
reproduction of slaves through improved health and birthing practices; calls for the
creation of systems of identification, surveillance, and census for free people of color
on Saint-Domingue; the introduction of the Police des noirs regulations in France in
the 1770s; the purchasing of the legal status of whiteness from Spanish royal
administrators through the process of gracias al sacar; Victor Hugues’ racial census
on Guadalupe in the 1790s; and a variety of proposals for the forced relocation or
assimilation of emancipated slaves.48
The paradigm of the Atlantic Enlightenment also affords the opportunity to better
include a number of figures of the early Black Atlantic diaspora in the history of the
Enlightenment and to discover ways that enslaved peoples contributed to the
development of Enlightenment knowledge and practices. It may enable scholars to
find new connections between seemingly disparate phenomena and to create a
broader picture of the contribution of slaves and free people of African descent.49
These developments include: the writing of narratives of slavery and freedom by early
authors of the Black Atlantic such as Ignatius Sancho, Philis Wheatley, Olaudah
Equiano, and Quobona Ottobah Cugoano; the employment of rights discourse by
the slave insurgents in the late-eighteenth-century Caribbean; the political
radicalization of some sailors of African descent; the establishment in the mid-1780s
of the masonic African Lodge No. 459 in Boston by Prince Hall, a black leather
worker and veteran of the American Revolutionary War; the contribution of African
slaves to Enlightenment practices such as smallpox inoculation; and the contributions
of slaves to the development of valuable and useful botanical knowledge.50
Another promising area of inquiry into the character and impact of the Atlantic
Enlightenment is the development of political economy. As scholars are beginning to
demonstrate, the Atlantic economy played a much more important role in the
development of liberal political economy than previously realized. The study of
660
political economy holds out the promise of better integrating European intellectuals
into the Atlantic Enlightenment, as many of the most prominent figures in the
development of political economy in the European Enlightenment – such as Adam
Smith, the Physiocrats, Turgot, and Condorcet – were people with a significant
interest in Atlantic trade, imperial conflict, and the peoples of the Atlantic world.51
Some of these figures had direct and sustained involvement with the Atlantic world,
such as Pierre-Paul Mercier de la Rivière who was an intendant of Martinique before
becoming one of the most famous Physiocrats and a consulting expert to the French
ministry in charge of the colonies. But more surprising and promising is the depth of
Atlantic connections and interest that have recently been suggested for David Hume,
someone who never left Europe and is ‘at first sight a distinctively unAtlantic figure,’
yet whose Atlantic entanglements (commercial, political, personal, aspirational, and
imaginative) seem to have played a significant and unrecognized role in the formation
of his influential political and economic ideas.52 Through the study of political
economy, there is also much to discover about the role of political economic theory
in undermining metropolitan authority (particularly through anti-mercantilist
critique) and its complicated role in the Bourbon reforms in the Spanish empire.
The last and largest topic – the development of radical ideas and revolutionary
politics – is one of the topics that has received the most extensive treatment in the
historiography of the Atlantic world. In fact, it was a focus from the beginning in the
work of scholars like Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot.53 But several recent
works demonstrate that there is much to learn about the broadly Atlantic character
of radical ideas and their relationship to the great democratic revolutions and
independence movements of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth
century. Some of the most promising new literature illuminates the development of
transatlantic revolutionary cosmopolitans, the role of the ideas of the Radical
Enlightenment, the relationship between the Atlantic Revolutions, the broad Atlantic
impact of the Haitian Revolution, the role of the Atlantic world in the French
Revolution, and the role of the Declaration of Independence in providing a model for
asserting national autonomy.54
There was a deep intellectual reciprocity between the European figures of
Enlightenment and the Atlantic world that is still only beginning to be discovered.
While the historiography of the early modern Atlantic world has taken off and
established itself as a major field of study in the last several decades, the story of the
Atlantic Enlightenment as a singular and coherent movement – or at least a useful
framework to study this intellectual reciprocity – remains largely to be told.
NOTE S
1 For the most significant arguments for multiple Enlightenments, see J. G. A. Pocock,
Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. (New York, 1999–2008); Dorinda Outram, The
Enlightenment (New York, 1995); and Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich, ed., The
Enlightenment in National Context (New York, 1981).
2 See Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, eds., The Atlantic Enlightenment (Burlington,
2008); Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent
Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); and Manuela
Albertone and Antonino De Francesco, Rethinking the Atlantic World: Europe and
America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions (New York, 2009). On the Sciences in the
661
Atlantic world, see James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and
Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra,
How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in
the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, 2001); Neil Safier, Measuring the New
World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008); Londa Schiebinger
and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce and Politics in the Early
Modern World (Philadelphia, 2005); James Delbourgo and Nicolas Dew, eds., Science and
Empire in the Atlantic World (New York, 2008); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity:
Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, 2006).
3 On the American Enlightenment, see Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America
(Oxford, 1976); Donald F. Meyer, The Democratic Enlightenment (New York, 1976);
Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1997); and Nina Reid-Maroney, Philadelphia’s Enlightenment, 1740–1800 (Westport,
Conn., 2001).
4 Manning and Cogliano, The Atlantic Enlightenment.
5 Manning and Cogliano, The Atlantic Enlightenment, 9–10.
6 Anthony Strugnell, Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political
Thought After the Encyclopédie (The Hague, 1973), 205–17.
7 Histoire des deux Indes is the commonly used title for Histoire philosophique et politique
des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes which was published
by abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal in 1772 (with 1770 printed on the title
page), expanded in a co-authored revised edition of 1780, before being pirated and
reissued in innumerable editions in various languages. For Diderot’s contributions to the
1780 edition, see Michèle Duchet, Diderot et l’Histoire des deux Indes, ou l’écriture
fragmentaire (Paris, 1978).
8 On the reception and importance of the Histoire des deux Indes, see Sankar Muthu,
Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, 2003), 72–121; Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and
Manfred Tietz, eds., Lectures de Raynal: L’Histoire des deux Indes en Europe et en
Amérique au XVIIIe siècle (Oxford, 1991); and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Anthony
Strugnell, eds., L’Histoire des deux Indes: Reécriture et polygraphie (Oxford, 1995).
9 On the French Revolution and the future see, Lynn Hunt, ‘The World We Have Gained:
The Future of the French Revolution’ The American Historical Review 108, no. 1
(February 2003): 1–19.
10 Thomas Paine, ‘Letter Addressed to the Abbé Raynal’ (1782), in Philip S. Foner, ed.,
Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945), 2:243.
11 See Jack N. Rakove, ed., Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Boston,
1998); Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New
York, 1997); and Michael P. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic (South Bend, 1997).
12 Parrish, American Curiosity, 134–35.
13 On correspondence networks between naturalists in the Atlantic world, see E. C. Spary,
Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago,
2000), 49–98; and Parrish, American Curiosity, 103–35. On politics and American,
Dutch, and French correspondence networks, see Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, ‘Corresponding
Republics: Letter Writing and Patriot Organizing in the Atlantic Revolutions, circa 1760–
92’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2011). On the history of printing, reading,
newspapers, and books, see Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in
the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 2000); and David S. Shields and Caroline Sloat, et al.,
Liberty! Égalité! ¡Independencia!: Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolutions in the
Americas, 1776–1838 (Worcester, Mass., 2007). On the history of the theater, see Heather
S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the
Hands of the People (Cambridge, 2003) and Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of
662
Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850
(Baltimore, 2014). On Freemasonry, see Margaret Jacob, Living the Enlightenment:
Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991); Stephen C.
Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the
American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill, 1996); and James E. McClellan III,
Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore, 1992), 183–205.
14 On the colonial uses of Locke and Locke’s colonial involvement, see James Tully, An
Approach to Political Philosophy: John Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993); Barbara
Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism (Oxford, 1996);
and David Armitage, ‘John Locke, Carolina, and the “Two Treatises of Government”,’
Political Theory 32, no. 5 (October 2004): 602–27; On the American uses of Locke, see
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.,
1967); and May, Enlightenment in America.
15 Arthur MacGregor, ed., Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father
of the British Museum (London, 1994).
16 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to
Romanticism (New Haven, 1993), 117–40; Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, 11–71.
17 Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 2004); Joyce
Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New
York, 2006); Alfred R. Hoermann, Cadwallader Colden: A Figure of the American
Enlightenment (Westport, Conn., 2002); Nancy E. Hoffmann and John C. Van Horne, eds.,
America’s Curious Botanist: A Tercentennial Reappraisal of John Bartram (1699–1777)
(Philadelphia, 2004). On the La Condamine expedition, see Safier, Measuring the New
World. On science in the early modern Atlantic see, Delbourgo and Dew, Science and Empire.
18 Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900,
trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, 1973); Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of
the New World.
19 Fiona Clark, ‘“Read All About It”: Science, Translation, Adaptation, and Confrontation
in the Gazeta de Literatura de México, 1788–95,’ in Daniela Bleichmar et al., eds., Science
in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, 2009); Cañizares-Esguerra,
How to Write the History of the New World, 281–307; Antonio Lafuente, ‘Enlightenment
in an Imperial Context: Local Science in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World,’
Osiris, 2nd series, 15 (2000): 155–73.
20 Antonio Lafuente, ‘Enlightenment in an Imperial Context’; and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra,
Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World
(Stanford, 2006), 112–28.
21 E. Bradford Burns, ‘Concerning the Transmission and Dissemination of the Enlightenment
in Brazil,’ in The Ibero-American Enlightenment, ed. A. Owen Aldridge (Urbana, 1971),
269–70; and Francisco Betancourt, ‘Enlightened Reform in Portugal and Brazil,’ in
Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, ed.
Gabriel Paquette (Burlington, Vermont, 2009), 43.
22 See Kenneth Maxwell, ‘The Generation of the 1790s and the Idea of Luso-Brazilian
Empire,’ in Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil, ed. Dauril Alden (Berkeley, California,
1973), 107–44; and Neil Safier, ‘A Courier between Empires: Hipólito da Costa and the
Atlantic World,’ in Soundings in Atlantic History, 263–93.
23 Safier, ‘Hipólito da Costa and the Atlantic World.’
24 May, Enlightenment in America, 197–222; and Reid-Maroney, Philadelphia’s Enlightenment.
25 On his life and work, see Dumas Malone, Jefferson and his Time, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948–
81); Peter S. Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, 2007); Kevin J. Hayes,
The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford, 2008); and
Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore, 1988).
663
26 Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile,

politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, 3 vols. (Paris, 1958
[Philadelphia, 1796]). See the discussion of Jefferson, Moreau, and Bryan Edwards in
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823
(Oxford, 1999), 184–95.
27 Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et contitutions des colonies françoises de
l’Amérique sous le Vent, 6 vols. (Paris, 1784–90).
28 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description, 86–100. Also see Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and The
Gods (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), 228–37; and Garraway, Libertine Colony, 260–75.
29 For biographical information on Moreau, see Etienne Taillemite, ‘Moreau de Saint-Méry,’
introduction to Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique; and Anthony Louis
Elicona, Un colonial sous la Révolution en France et en Amérique: Moreau de Saint-Méry
(Paris, 1934).
30 Félix de Azara, Essais sur l’histoire naturelle des quadrupeds de la province de Paraguay,
trans. Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, 2 vols. (Paris, Year IX [1801]).
31 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 9.
32 For Hilliard’s intellectual output and his status as a figure of the Enlightenment, see Gene
E. Ogle, ‘“The Eternal Power of Reason” and “The Superiority of Whites”: Hilliard
d’Auberteuil’s Colonial Enlightenment,’ French Colonial History 3 (2003): 35–50; Malick
Walid Ghachem, ‘Sovereignty and Slavery in the Age of Revolution: Haitian Variations
on a Metropolitan Theme,’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2001); and Malick
W. Ghachem, ‘Montesquieu in the Caribbean: The Colonial Enlightenment between Code
Noir and Code Civil,’ in Daniel Gordon, ed., Postmodernism and the Enlightenment:
New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (New York, 2001),
7–30; and Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French
Caribbean (Durham, North Carolina, 2005), 218–26.
33 H.D. [Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil], Considérations sur l’état présent de la colonie
française de Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris, 1776–77).
34 See Ghachem, ‘Montesquieu in the Caribbean.’
35 William Max Nelson, ‘Making Men: Enlightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering,’ The
American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (December 2010): 1364–94. In this article, I also
discuss a plan for the racial engineering of Saint-Domingue which was written at the same
time as Hilliard’s by a former governor of the island, Gabriel de Bory. On Hilliard’s plan,
also see, Garraway, The Libertine Colony, 218–26.
36 On Hilliard’s biography, see Ogle, ‘Power of Reason.’ There is additional biographical
information – although some of it questionable – in Lewis Leary’s introduction to Michel-
René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Miss McCrea: A Novel of the American Revolution
(Gainesville, 1958 [1784]), 6–11.
37 On the Neufs Sœurs, see Louis Amiable, Une loge maçonnique d’avant 1789, la R. L. Les
Neufs Sœurs, ed. Charles Porset (Paris, 1989 [1897]).
38 On Thistlewood’s attempt to fashion himself as a figure of the (Atlantic) Enlightenment, see
Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the
Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, 2004), particularly pages 101–36. Also see Douglas
Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86 (Kingston, 1999).
39 April G. Shelford, ‘Pascal in Jamaica: Or, The French Enlightenment in Translation,’
Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 36 (2008): 53–74.
40 Shelford, ‘Pascal in Jamaica,’ 73–74. Thistlewood read a 1772 translation of Mercier’s
Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred published in Dublin. Mercier’s
wildly popular novel was originally published as L’An 2440 in 1771, with many
subsequent editions.
664
41 A recent notable usage (where it is epigraph, title, and point of discussion) is Dubois’
excellent, Avengers of the New World, 57–58.
42 See Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in
French Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Philosophical Basis
of Eighteenth-Century Racism,’ in Harold E. Pagliaro, ed., Racism in the Eighteenth
Century (Cleveland, 1973), 245–62; and Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light:
Slavery and the French Enlightenment (Minneapolis, 2006).
43 This offers the opportunity to revisit questions raised by historians of Early America; see
Edmund S. Morgan, ‘Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,’ Journal of American
History 59(1) (1972): 5–29; and Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.
44 Joyce E. Chaplin, ‘Race,’ in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British
Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, 2002), 154. Also see Lynn Hunt, Inventing
Human Rights: A History (New York, 2007); Rakove, Declaring Rights; and Eric Slauter,
The State as a Work of Art (Chicago, 2008), 169–214.
45 See Nelson, ‘Making Men;’ Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of
Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, 2000); Nicholas Hudson,
‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century
Thought,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 3 (1996): 247–64; Bruce Dain, A Hideous
Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.,
2002); Guillaume Aubert, ‘“The Blood of France”: Race and Purity of Blood in the French
Atlantic World,’ William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 61, no. 3, (2004): 439–78; Sue
Peabody, ‘There are No Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the
Ancien Régime (New York, 1996); Pierre H. Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de
l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 2007).
46 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York, 1978); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s
History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N. C., 1995); and Ann
Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002).
47 Nelson, ‘Making Men.’
48 See Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore,
2009); Aubert, ‘The Blood of France’; Joyce E. Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin’s Political
Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (Washington, D.C., 2008); Karol K. Weaver,
‘The King’s Midwives: The 1764 Midwife Expedition to Saint-Domingue and Why It
Failed,’ Nursing History Review 13 (2005): 5–21; Nelson, ‘Making Men’; Peabody, There
are No Slaves; Boulle, Race et esclavage, 85–107; Ann Twinam, ‘Racial Passing: Informal
and Official “Whiteness” in Colonial Spanish America,’ in New World Orders: Violence,
Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial America, ed. John Smolenski and Thomas J.
Humphrey (Philadelphia, 2005), 249–72; Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens:
Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill,
2004), 262–66; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the
Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968); and James Sidbury, Becoming African in America:
Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford, 2007).
49 On the need for a new approach to the intellectual history of the enslaved, see Laurent
Dubois, ‘An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French
Atlantic,’ Social History 31, no. 1 (February, 2006): 1–14.
50 On the ‘African freemasons’ in America, see James Sidbury, Becoming African in America:
Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford, 2007), 73–77, 87–88; and Bullock,
Revolutionary Brotherhood, 158–60. On the narratives of slavery and freedom, see
Audrey Fisch, ed., The Cambridge Companion to The African American Slave Narrative
(Cambridge, 2007), 11–80. On the use of rights discourse by slave insurgents, see Laurent
665
Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French

Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, 2004), 23–29; and Dubois, Avengers of the New
World, 105. On the political radicalization of sailors of African descent, see Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners,
and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000). On the contributions
of slaves to medical practices such as smallpox inoculation and the use of medical
botanicals, see Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of
Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Chicago, 2006). On the contributions to botany,
see Schiebinger and Swan, eds., Colonial Botany, and Londa Schiebinger, Plants and
Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
51 Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Emma Rothschild, ‘Global Commerce and the Question of
Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Provinces,’ Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 1
(2004): 3–25; Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French
Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass., 2010); and Pernille Røge, ‘“La clef de Commerce”: The
Changing Role of Africa in France’s Atlantic Empire, ca. 1760–97,’ History of European
Ideas 34, no. 4 (2008): 431–43.
52 Emma Rothschild, ‘The Atlantic Worlds of David Hume,’ in Bailyn and Denault,
Soundings in Atlantic History, 405–48.
53 Robert R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and
America, 1760–1800 (Princeton, 1959–64); and Jacques Godechot, France and the
Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799, trans. Herbert H. Rowen
(New York, 1965).
54 See Albertone and De Francesco, Rethinking the Atlantic World; David Armitage and
Sanjay Subrahmanyan, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840
(London, 2009); Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, William Max Nelson, eds., The French
Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca, 2013); Perl-Rosenthal, ‘Corresponding
Republics;’ Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic
(Princeton, 2006); David Andress, 1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age (New York,
2009); Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the
Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010); David P. Geggus, ed., The
Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, South Carolina,
2001); Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic
(Baltimore, 2010); Julia Gaffield, ed., The Haitian Declaration of Independence
(Charlottesville, forthcoming); Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A
Comparative History (New York, 2009); Lynn Hunt, ‘The French Revolution in Global
Context,’ in Age of Revolutions; Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce; Laurent Dubois, ‘An
Atlantic Revolution,’ French Historical Studies 32, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 655–61; Dubois, A
Colony of Citizens; and David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global
History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).
666
INDEX
Abbasid Dynasty, 378 Admiralty, 137, 268, 548

Abd Allah Sīdī Muhammad b., 195, 197. See Advent, 60
also Muhammad Aeneid (Virgil), 645
Abd Rahman, Ibrahima al-, 386–387 Afonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga), 322–323,
Abd Salam, Sabani al-, 197 328, 330, 335, 338
Abenaki, 274 Africa, 1, 14, 79, 85, 100, 103, 108, 151, 155,
Abigail (ship), 369 173, 191–192, 227, 231, 238, 245,
Abolition Society, 139 251, 254, 256, 264–266, 269, 274,
Abu Bakr, Muhammad (Sultan), 377 321–322, 327, 329–330, 332, 335–339,
Abudiente, Senior, 367 353, 387–389, 414, 418, 420, 424–
Abulafia, David, 190, 195, 216 426, 448, 450–453, 460, 481, 524,
Abu Yaqub Yusuf (sultan), 190 533–534, 537, 542, 547, 549–551,
Acadia, 67. See also Nova Scotia 563, 601–602, 604, 606, 612, 622
Acapulco, 213 African, 83, 91, 152, 254, 265, 269, 353,
Acatholic (Catholic), 122 387, 428, 445–446, 548
Accompong, 609 African Americans, 139, 328, 355
Acosta, Jose de, Historia natural y moral de African Catholicism, 328–330, 339
las Indias, 37, 39, 247 African coast, 448, 540
Act Concerning Religion (Calvert), 401 African Company, 462. See also Mississippi
Act for Encouraging of Forraigne Trade, Company
1693 (Parliament of Scotland), 441 African east coast, 600
Act for Further Preventing the Growth of African Gold Coast, 308, 358, 445, 447,
Popery (England’s Act), 407. See also 449; as to Elmina, 447
Brooke, Robert African interior, 361
Act for the better ordering and Governing of African Lodge No. 459, 660
Negroes (Barbados), 254 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 360
Acts of Parliament, 1661 and 1662, 284 African(s), 22, 79, 89, 91–92, 103, 151–152,
Act of Union, 365, 576 154–155, 181, 237–238, 250,
Adamastor, 104. See also Table Mountain 254–256, 326, 329, 335, 351, 353,
Adams, John, 132, 383, 391, 395, 408, 640, 355, 361, 388, 426–428, 446, 450,
645–646, 648 453, 460, 523–524, 539, 542, 551,
Adam, Vicente, Lecciones de Antropologia 561, 599–606, 609–610–612
etico politico-religiosa, 47 Africans and the industrial revolution in
Addison, 558 England (Inikori), 517, 526
667
– index –
African slavery, 626 American Catholics, 332, 398–399

African slaves, 151, 154, 600–613 American Civil War, 281, 283, 291, 293
Africanus, Leo, 151 American Colonization Society, 387
Afrikaans, 107 American Constitution, 63, 636
Afrikaners, 101, 106 American Enlightenment, 136, 650
age of Democratic Revolutions, 108 American Independence, 641
age of discovery, 190 American Indians, 3, 378. See also Indians
Age of Revolution, 229, 605, 652 (South American)
Agreeable (ship): as to owners, Barton, American in European Consciousness
Thomas and William 523 (Kupperman), 89
Ahone, 13 Americanism, 35–36, 46–47, 49; as to
Aiai, 219 modern, 42
Ailingalaplap, 212 Americanist, 418
Alawi Dynasties, 194 American Jewish historians, 417–418, 421
Alawi rule, 195 American Philosophical Society, 652, 655,
Alegre (mulatresse), 165 657
Alexander VI (pope), 323 American Republic, 644–645
Alexandria, 173 American Revolution, 132, 275, 337, 353,
Alford, Terry, Prince Among Slaves, 387 360, 371, 393–395, 397, 403, 481,
Algeria, 176 485, 492, 496, 546, 560–561,
Algerian economy, 181 578–580, 605, 635–637, 640, 643,
Algerians, 174, 178 651–653, 657–658, 660
Algiers, 172, 176–177, 180–181, 197, 380 American(s), 35,133, 135, 145, 172, 181,
Algonquians, 26, 333 196, 256, 273, 282, 287, 289, 291,
Allah, 389 380, 393–395, 427, 481, 485, 493,
Allfrey, Edward, 527 496, 546, 561, 574, 578–583, 586,
All Hallow’s Parish (Maryland), 404 588–589, 635, 637–640, 643, 645
Almagro, Manuel y Vega, 47 American Seaman’s Friend Society, 140
Almeida, Francisco d’ (Viceroy, Portuguese American southwest, 192, 361
East Indies), 103 American System, 582
Almohad (Empire), 190, 194 American War for Independence, 132
Almoravid Empire, 194 Americas (The) 79, 83, 86, 89, 93, 104,
Alpenvorland, Bavarian Schwabian, 117 120–121, 126, 143, 151, 155, 173,
Alps, 117 181–182, 187–188, 193, 196, 210,
Alvaro III, king, 326 227–228, 231, 238, 245, 247–253,
Alzate, Jose Antonio, 653–654; as to 255–256, 264–265, 268–269,
Gacetas de Literatura de Mexico, 654 271–272, 275–276, 314, 322–328,
Amar, Akhil (Professor), 291 330, 332, 334–336–339, 347–351,
Amaru, Tupac, 82, 84 364, 368, 371, 378, 415, 420, 422,
America, 18, 21, 34, 36, 41–42, 45–50, 89, 424–425, 427–428, 448, 460, 519,
108, 117–123–126, 144, 252, 267, 526, 547, 550–553, 560, 563, 602,
273–275, 281–282, 284, 286–288, 622, 625, 639, 654
290, 292, 327, 337, 357, 378–379, Amerindian Atlantic, 275
387, 390, 397–399, 417, 422, 427, Amerindians, 154, 158, 165, 321, 326,
447, 451, 460, 471, 477–478, 328–330, 333, 335
480–481, 484, 492, 494, 500–502, Amherst, Colonel Jeffrey, 273
533–534, 536, 538, 547 549, 559, Amsterdam, 20, 423, 461, 474–475, 485,
562, 564, 575, 577–579, 583, 587, 491–492, 497, 500, 513, 516, 538,
602, 612, 633–636, 639–641, 543, 551–552, 622, 625
643–645, 655 Andalucia, 84
American Catholicism, 329 Andalus, al-, 190, 197
668
– index –
Andean(s), 82, 91, 92 Appalachians, 276

Anderson, Virginia DeJohn, 25 Appeal to Heaven (Locke), 293
Andes, 332 Apure (river), 41
Andre (slave), 156–157 Arabic (language), 382, 387–390
Angerstein, John Julius (Lloyds chr.), 521, Arabic amulets, 389
525 Archbishop of Santa Domingo, 311
Anghiera, Pietro, d’, 19 Archdiocese of Boston, 399
Anglicanism, 350, 353, 359, 403 Archdiocese of Santo Domingo, 305
Anglicanisation, 370 Archivo General de Indias; Historia del
Anglican(s), 350, 354, 370–371, 404 Nuevo Mund (Munoz), 46
Anglican Virginia, 407 Arctic Ocean, 56
Anglo-America, 245, 249, 252 Argentina, 483–484
Anglo-American(s), 83, 252 Argentinian, 83
Anglo-Dutch war, 274 Aristotle, 338, 641–642; as to Politics I, 642
Anglo-French Wars, 451 Arizona, 377
Anglophone Caribbean, 426 Armada de Barlovento, 312
Angola, 100, 106, 154, 188, 324, 326, 600 Armesto, Felipe Fernandez, 198, 216
Angolian slaves, 154 Arminian Enlightenment, 650
Animals, as agents of change, 25–27; as to Armitage, David, 1, 24, 424; as to The
commercial use, 19–21; as to British Atlantic World, 413
domesticated use, 21–26; Army Bills (convertible paper money), 482
Anna (ship), 527 Ars Mercatoria (Hoock), 619, 621
Anne Arundel County (Maryland), 404 Art and Manufactures in Britain, 584. See
Anne, Queen, 450, 461 also Ewart, William (MP)
Anthony the Turk (aka Anthony Jansen va Articles of Confederation (US), 284, 287,
Salee), 381 289
Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Article II (US Constitution), 284
lumieres (Anthropology and History Article VII of the English Bill of Rights; as to
in the Century of Enlightenment) honeyed Mansfieldism, 290
(Duchet), 227 Asebar Reef, 219
anti-Catholicism, 322, 324, 327, 335, 339, Ashe, Thomas, 22
394, 399–400, 404–406 Ashkenaz, 414
antichrist, 337, 380–381 Ashkenazi, 420
antichristians, 384 Ashkenazification, 414
anti-Federalists, 283–284, 287–288, 292–293 Ashkenazi Jews, 371
Anti-Gallician Association, 576 Ashkenazim, 371
Antigua, 358, 360, 365, 478, 480, 541 Asia, 14, 198, 210, 217, 335, 361, 414, 420,
Antiguan House of Assembly, 367 425, 531–536, 547, 549–551, 561,
Antiguo Régimen, 42. See also Carlos III 563, 625
anti-Habsburg, 124 Asians, 93
Antinomian (forbidden Maryland epithet), Asian Subcontinent, 547
401 Asiento, 460; as to Mississippi and South
Antilles, 152, 154–155, 230, 627 Sea Bubbles, 457–458, 461, 466
anti-Semitism, 366 Asiento de negroes, 550
Antonians, 336 Asilah, 194
Antonio, king, 329 Assembly (colonial Virginia), 253
Antwerp, 423, 474, 485, 516, 535, 548 assignat (banknote), 482–483
Aotearoa/New Zealand, 209. See also New Astell, William, 460
Zealand Asti, Bernardino, d’ 330
Apaches, 83 Atahuallpa, 90–91. See also Capac,
Apostolic, 328 Atahuallpa
669
– index –
Ateneos (magazine), 47 Audiencia of Santa Domingo, 300, 306,

Atkins, Samuel, View of the Pool Below 308–309, 312
London Bridge, 559 Augsburg, 123–124
Atlantic Catholicism, 322, 325–326, 328, Augsburg Confession, 122
339–340; as to Atlantic Catholic Augustinians, 324
World, 332 Aulic Chamber (the Reichshofrat), 121
Atlantic colonies, 347, 350, 355, 360 Australasia, 213, 485, 563
Atlantic commerce, 444, 446 Australia, 110, 209
Atlantic creoles, 602 Austria, 117–118, 121–122, 125–126, 480
Atlantic Enlightenment, 650–661 Austrian, 117
Atlantic Enlightenment, The (Burlington), Austrian Empire, 118
651 Austrian Habsburgs, 120
Atlantic history, 414, 421, 423–424, 634, Austrian Hereditary Lands, 118
639; as to conceptually; Austrian Monarchy, 118, 126
circum-atlantic; conjuncto-atlantic; Austrians, 117–118, 125–126
trans-atlantic; cis-atlantic, 1, 198, 246, Avenger of the New World, 658
251, 256 Ayala, Felipe Guaman Poma de, 41; Nueva
Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal coronica y buen gobierno, 91–92. See
(Greene and Morgan), 2 also Peru
Atlantic islands, 7 Ayr Bank (Douglas Heron & Co.), 491–493,
Atlanticists, 1, 3, 413, 418 495–496, 498–499, 501
Atlantic Jewry, 423 Azara, Felix, 45
Atlantic joint-stock commerce, 441–447 Azemmour, 377. See also Dorantes
Atlantic littoral, 377, 602 Azzemour, 192
Atlantic Mediterranean, 196, 216 Azores, 84, 216, 246, 254, 268
Atlantic Ocean, 20, 34, 56–58, 62, 67, 71, Aztec Empire, 271
85–86, 88–89, 100, 103, 107–110,
117–118, 120, 126, 131, 133, Bacon, Francis, 517
143–145, 153, 165, 188–190, Bacon’s Rebellion, 26
192–195, 197, 207, 212, 216–217, Badin, Stephen (of Kentucky), 398
219–220, 234, 238, 250–253, 256, Baepler, Paul, 178
265, 266–269, 275–276, 281–282, Baghdad, 376, 378
286,291, 338, 347–349, 351–352, Bahia, 389
357–359, 361, 367, 376–377–382, Bailyn, Bernard, 1, 103, 424, 637; as to
386–387, 390, 421, 423–424, 450, A Domesday Book for the Periphery,
460, 466, 485, 497, 500, 505, 531, 427
534–538, 540–543, 547–548–549, Baker, Thomas (consul), 177
554–555, 560, 581–582, 586, Balboa, Juan de (Governor) 304, 306–307
603–604, 634, 639, 643 Balkans, 120
Atlantic Revolutions, 661 Baltic, 539
‘Atlantic world or Atlantic/world?’ Baltic (region), 3, 61
(Coclanis), 533 Baltimore, 137, 195, 336–337; as to an Irish
Atlantic World, The (Benjamin), 100 barony, 401
Atlantic World Trade, 517–518 Baltimore Clippers, 143
Atwood, Peter, 405, 407; as to Liberty and Baltimore Harbor, 397
Property, or The Beauty of Maryland Banat, 117, 119–120
Displayed, 405–406 Banat of Temesvar, 120
Auberteuil, Michel-Rene Hilliard d’, 653, Banco de San Carlos, 482–483
655, 657; as to Considerations sur Banica, 310
l’etat present de la colonie francaise de bank note, 474, 476, 480, 482–484
Saint Domingue, 657 Bank of Amsterdam, 625
670
– index –
Bank of England, 395, 476, 482–485, Beaver Wars, 272

491–492, 496, 498–499, 501–502, Beckles, Hillary, 228
505, 625 Beethoven, 117
Bank of France, 483 Begin, Menachem, 414; as to Likud block,
Bank of Ireland, 483 414
Bank of Scotland, 476 Belamee, Susanes, 158, sons Charles and
Bank of the United States, 481; as to second Jean, 158
charter in 1816, 482, 485 Belgium, 484
banks (ocean): as to Burgeos, 57; as to Benedict XIV ( pope), 330–331
Dogger, 57; as to Faroe, 57; as to Benezet, Anthony, 269
Georges, 57; as to Grand, 57; as to Bengal, 491
Stellwagen, 57 Benin, 323, 330
Banques d’Amsterdam & de Rotterdam, Benjamin, Thomas, The Atlantic World, 100
625. See also Savary berberiscos (Muslim slave), 85
Baptist, 355, 357 Bergen (Norway), 72
Barbados, 253–254, 337, 355, 357, Berkeley, George, 352
365–368, 418, 446, 451, 480, 541, Berlin, 416
604 Berlin Wall, 414
Barbarian Cruelty (Troughton), 177, 181 Bermuda, 266, 352, 357, 549
Barbary 172, 174–175, 179, 181–182 Berners, Dame Juliana, Treatyse of
Barbary ‘pass’ system, 178 Fysshynge with an Angle, 59
Barbary pirates, 173–181 Betanzos, Juan de, 90
Barbary slavery, 173–183 Beta Yisrael (Ethiopian Jewry). See also
Barbary slaves, 179–181 Operation Moses
Barbary States, 173 Bethel Societies, 140
Barbary States of North Africa, 173, Beverwijk (Albany), as to fur trade 20
Barcelona, 84 Beyond Atlantic History (Coclanis), 533
Barco, Miguel del, Historia natural y crónica Beyond the Atlantic: English globetrotters
de la antigua California, and crónica and transoceanic connections (Games),
added, 41 533
Barlow, Joel, 653 beyond the line, 267
Barents Sea, 57–58 Biassou, Georges, 236–237
Baring, Alexander, 521 Bible, 354, 358
Barings (bank), 562 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, A,
Barnard, John, 520 1786, 383
Barton, Benjamin Smith, 652 Bill of Rights, 282, 293; as to Freedom of
Barton, Thomas and William. See Bud Religion, 418
Bartram, John, 653 bills of credit, 479
Bartram, William, 653 bill(s) of exchange, 472, 475, 477, 481, 485,
Basques, 19 552–554, 621
Basseterre, 163–165 Billy Budd (Melville), 131
Batavian Republic, 109 Bingham, William, 581
Battle of Acoma, 379 Binture, Babet, 610–611. See also Doussin
Battle of al-Qasr al Kabir (aka Battle of Birnbaum, Pierre, Paths to Emancipation:
Three Kings), 193 Jews, States and Citizenship, 418
Battle of Cape Passaro, 465 Bishop of London, 355
Battle of New Orleans, 276 Bismarck, Otto von, 416
Bayaha (now Port Dauphine, Haiti), 307 Bismarck Archipelago, 209
Bay of Biscay, 56, 58, 61, 308 Blackamoor (or blackmoor), 380
Beatriz, Dona (aka Kimpa Vita), 336 Black Atlantic, 660
Beaufort Sea, 20 Black Ball Line, 143
671
– index –
Black Death, 60 Brazil, 85, 191, 253, 255, 267–268, 276,

Black Jacobins, The (James), 232 326, 364, 379, 383, 389, 478, 481,
Black Legend, 249 483–484, 531, 538–540, 542–543,
Black Rock Pond, 364. See also Charles 551, 600, 609, 654
Town Brazil Company, 549
Black Spartacus, 230, 232, 659 Brazilians (indios de Calicut), 84
Blackstone, William, 290 Brebeuf, Jean de (Jesuit), 333
Blackwell, John, 478 Breton, Father, 157
Blanche, Mary, 156 Breton, Raymond, 154–155
Blatchford, John (mariner), 133 Bridgetown, (Barbados), 365
Blenac, Count of, 160 Bright, William, 584
Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Bristol, 231, 522, 558
Conscience, The (Williams), 384 Britain, 62, 100, 109–110, 120, 132, 134,
Boardman, Elijah, 546–547, 563 138–140, 172, 174, 176–178, 180,
Board of Trade, 550, 586 182, 231, 267–268, 273, 275–276,
Bogle & Scott, 497, 502 337, 348–351, 353, 359–361, 369,
Bogle, Robert, 497–498 419, 444, 450, 460, 463, 492, 494,
Bohemian crown, 118 496–498, 502, 505, 526, 532, 546,
Bohler, Peter, 359 550, 552, 555–556, 559–560, 563,
Bohuslan, 63, 65 575–581, 584–585, 587–588, 627,
Bolingbroke, Viscount, 283, 636 639
Bolster, Jeffrey, 56 Britain’s Atlantic Colonies, 357
Bolton, John, Fr., 404 Britannia, Queen of the Indies, 491
Bolzius, Johann Martin (pastor), 123–124 British, 69, 83, 109, 134, 173, 182, 195,
Bombay, 527 267, 268, 272, 274, 276, 287, 337,
bonds, 472–473, 476–477, 479–484 349, 427, 462, 466, 485, 532, 553,
Bonifacio, Jose de Andrada e Silva, 654 574, 587, 640
Bonn, 117 British America, 364, 368, 370, 400, 452
Book of Common Prayer, 353 British American Jews, 370
Bordeaux, 231 British Asia and the British Atlantic (Stern),
Born, Ignaz Edler von, 125 533
Bory, Gabriel de, 653 British Atlantic, 153, 286–287, 290, 293,
Bosman, William, 605 369, 381, 453, 559, 563, 576
Boston, 23, 137, 268, 287, 360, 369, 576 British Atlantic trade, 444
Boston Harbor, 492 British Atlantic World, 173, 182, 281, 283,
Bostonian(s), 132, 369 364, 368, 372
Boston Tea Party 408, 559 British Caribbean, 274
Boswell, James, 491–492 British Civil Wars and Protectorate, 176,
bottomry, 518 337
Bourbon Reforms, 654 British Colonial America, 394
Bourbons, 42 British commerce, 444
Bourdain, Jean, 157 British East India Company, 443, 454
Bourdain, Marye, 157 British Empire, 100, 102, 110, 133, 360,
Bourdeaux, 627 450, 453, 466, 532–533, 546, 579
Bourne, John, 520 British flagged Slaver, Caribbean Arrivals,
Boury, Jean, 160 505
Bowers, Newport, 137 British Isles, 57, 67, 70, 110, 174, 219, 281,
Brabant, 63 287–288, 336, 621, 624–625
Braudel, Fernand, 12 British Museum, 653
Braunberger, Matthias, 124 British North America, 102, 273, 365, 367,
Bray, Thomas, 350. See also SPCK and SPG 381, 399, 401, 560–561
672
– index –
British North American Colonies, 123 Caledonian, 365

British North Americans, 576 Caledonian Clans (opening inquiry set forth
British Parliament, 1835 Select Committee in text), 366
on Aborigines, 110 California, 485
British Sailors’ Society, 140. See also Port of Calixto, Fr., Tupak Inka de San Jose, 85–86
London Society Calvert (family), 399
Britons, 173–174, 176–177, 179–182, 282, Calvert, Cecilius, 401; as to Act Concerning
293, 365–366, 379, 497, 546, 552, Religion, 401, 405; as to son Charles,
559–560, 575, 578, 583, 590 403; as to Charter revocation, 403
Brodie, Adam, 368 Calvert, Charles, 405
Brooke, Robert, 407; as to his brother Calvin, John, 380
Thomas’ lawsuit in the challenge of his Calvinism, 359
father’s will, 407 Calvinist, 401, 566
Brown, Simon, 501 Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church, 349
Bruce & Co., 527 Calvinistic Methodism, 357
Bruges, 473, 485 Calvinist Orthodoxy, 394
Bruni, 282 Campbell, Ian, 214
Bruslons, Savary des, Le dictionnaire Canaan, 164
universel du commerce, 621 Canada, 268, 360, 395, 418, 478, 482, 485,
Brydges, James (First Duke of Chandos), 452 627
Bubble Act of 1720, 519, 526 Canadian and West Greenland currents, 57
Buchanan & Cunninghame partnerships, Canadian Catholics, 404
495 Canadian Rockies, 20
Bud (ship). See Tryer, Captain Robert Canadian Shield, 451
Buenos Aires, 268, 451 Canargo, Diego Munoz, 88
Buffon, Comte de, Histoire Naturelle, 229, Canari(es), 82, 191, 216, 246, 254–255
659 Canary Islands, 190–191, 196, 269
Bukatatanoa, 212 Candeler, Richard (operator of the Office of
Bukhara, Uzbekistan, 416 Assurances), 516–518
Bukowina, 118 Canny, Nicholas, The Origins of Empire,
Bulwer, Henry Lytton, 584 533; as to The Oxford Handbook of
Burke, Edmund, 575 the Atlantic World, 533; The Oxford
Burke, John, Senior, 368 History of the Atlantic World, 3
Butler, Captain John, 513 Canton, 527
Canton of Berne, Switzerland, 463
Caballos, Estaban Mira, 85 capability of the Indians, 37
Cabildo (City Council) of Santo Domingo, Capac, Atahuallpa (son of Huayna), 82. See
307, 313 also Atahuallpa
Cabildo (Town Council) of Santiago, Capac, Huascar (son of Huayna), 82
300–301, 311 Capac, Huayna (Incan), 82
Cabo Verde, 251 Capac, Manco Inca (son of Huayna), 82
Cabot, John, 321, 535 Cap Breton Canyon (ocean trench), 57
Caciques, 88 Cape Agulhas, 103
Cadiz, 326 Cape Cod, 534
Cadsands (Island), 123 Cape Colony, 110
Caisse d’Escompte (French bank), 482 Cape Hatteras, 56
Cajamarca, 82 Cape of Good Hope, 100, 102–105, 110,
Cajs Nacional de Fondos de Sud America, 230, 448
484 Cape of Storms, 10
Calcutta, 527 Cape Point, 103,
Caldas, Jose, de, 653–654 Capesterre, 156–157, 163
673
– index –
Cape, The, 101–110 Casa de Contratacion, 40. See also Felipe II

Cape Town, 101, 102–103, 106–109 Castaing, John, Course of the Exchange, 464
Cape Verde Islands, 212, 216, 246 Caste War of Yucatan, 84
Cap François, 304, 312–313,653, 656 Castillo, 48
Capitein, Jacobus (minister), 355 Castle, Elmina, 308
Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., 633 Castle of Public Credit, 505. See also Bank
Cap, Le, 234 of England
Capuchin(s), 324, 330, 336 Castor and Pollux, 328
Cap Vert, 154 Catalonians, 62
Carey, Henry, 582 Catcott, Reverend Alexander, 558
Caribbean, 21–22, 57, 67, 71, 80, 83–84, Catesby, Mark, 653
93, 151, 158–159, 165, 178, 181, Catholic, 122, 271, 321, 325, 327, 338,
191, 216, 221, 227–228, 230, 380, 394, 397–401, 403–406, 427,
232–234, 236–238, 246, 255, 265, 562
267, 271, 273–274, 276, 304, 307, Catholic Africa, 339
349, 353, 358, 360–361, 364, 367, Catholic Atlantic World, 324
370–371, 377–378, 390, 398, 418, Catholic Christianity, 3, 271
460, 503, 531, 536–538, 540–543, Catholic Church, 324, 330, 394, 397, 399,
547, 550, 563, 577, 653, 655–658, 556
660 Catholic Church(es), 330, 332, 337–339,
Caribbean Sea, 267 399–400
Caribs, 151, 153–159. See also Lesser Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912, 621. See also
Antilles Savary
Caritat, Nicholas, 653 Catholicisation(s), 329, 335
Carlos, Jose de la Puente Luna, 88 Catholic Iberians, 548
Carlos III (Spanish king), 42, 45–46. See also Catholicism, 282, 287, 32, 323–324,
Antiguo Régimen 326–330, 332, 336–339, 347–348,
Carmelites, 324 383, 390, 394, 401, 408, 623
Caro, Ignacio Perez, 301, 312–313 Catholic Mediterranean, 379
Carolina, 124, 178 Catholic Orders of Redemption, 180
Carolina low country, 252, 609 Catholics, 272, 326–330, 332–334,
Carolinas, The, 23 336–339, 348, 351, 381, 384, 386,
Carolina Sullivan, one of the obstinate 394, 397–401, 403–408, 422
daughters of America, Miss (Darly), Catinquiesme, Elizabeth, 156
578 Cato’s Letter, 283
Caroline Islands, 213, 221 Cavendish, Thomas, 445
Carolines, 211 Ceded Island in the Caribbean, 496
Carpathians, 117 Celtic-Biscay Shelf, 57
Carrisolis (natives), 83 Celtic Sea, 57
Carroll, Charles (of Annapolis), 404 Cempoala, 88
Carroll, John (1st U.S. Bishop), 398 central Africa, 237, 338
Carrollton, Charles of Carrollton, 395 central Europe, 67, 71, 106, 117, 119, 123,
Carrollton, John (priest), 395 348, 371, 414, 418
Cartagena, 450, 548 ‘Century of the Common Man’, 125
Carteau, Felix (planter), 234–235 Cercle des Philadelphes (society), 233
Carvajal, Jacinto de, 41, 46 Ceuta, 192, 195, 246
Carvajal, Luis de (el mozo), 422 Ceylon, 106
Cartwright, Peter (Methodist), 394 Chacon, Jeronimo, 308
Casa, Bartolome de las, Bishop, 271, 322. Chachapoya, 82
See also Chiapas Chalco-Tlamanalco, 88
Casa da India, 549 Challoner, Bishop Richard, 399
674
– index –
Champagne, Leger Millard, and Marguerite, Christian Rome, 246

158 Christian(s), 154, 156, 178, 181–182, 251,
Champion, Richard, 580–581 253, 321–322, 324, 367, 371,
Champs, Charles des, 157 379–384, 401, 415, 423, 427, 599
Chandler, Joseph, 587 Christian Sabbath, 367
Channel Islands, 67 Christian Scientist, 381
Charles County (Maryland), 397 Christocentric, 427
Charles Ferguson & Co., 499 Church of England, 349–351, 355, 360,
Charles I, king, 445, 476 366, 368, 370, 403–405
Charles II, king, 283, 446; as to “King of Church of Rome, 397
Trade”, 558 Church, the, 518
Charles V, king, 249, 338 Cisalpine Movement, 400
Charles VI, king, 117, 122 Civilizing Process (Elias), 622
Charles XII, king (Sweden), 461 Civil War (U.S.), 485
Charleston, 123, 137, 365, 505 Civil Wars, 173, 476
Charles Town (Charleston), 20–21, 371 Clagett & Pratt (underwriters), 527
Charlestown, Massachusetts, 369 Clarke, Captain Samuel, 369
Charles Town, Nevis (Metropolis or Claro, Perez, 313
Capitol), 364; as to Pinheiro, 368 classical republicanism school (U.S.), 637
Chasseboouef, Constantin-Françoise, 653 Classical Tradition and the Americas, The,
Chauduri, K.N., 212–213 634
cheque, 472–474, 476–477 Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 40
Chesapeake, 22, 26, 252, 550, 561 Clay, Henry, 586
Chesapeake, Bay, 56, 138, 394 Claypoole, James, 522
Chet, Guy, The Ocean is a Wilderness: Clifford & Sons, 491
Atlantic Piracy and the Limits of State climate, 210–212
Authority, 1688–1856, 2 Club Massaic, 234
Chevillard, Andre, 154–155 Clyde (river), 493
Cheyne, Andrew, 220 Cobden, Richard, 584
Chiapas, 271. See also Casa, Bartolome de Cobo, Bernabe, Historia del Nuevo Mundo,
las, (Bishop) 41
Chichimeca, 83 Coclanis, Peter, 1–3, 198 563; as to ‘Atlantic
Chile, 45, 268, 387 world or Atlantic/world?’ 533; as to
Chilean, 83 ‘Beyond Atlantic history’, 533. See
Chimalpahin, 91 also Atlantic history
Chimayo, New Mexico, 370 Cockerell, Charles Robert, 584–585
China, 133, 378, 414, 466, 473–474, 527, Cockpit Country, 609
547, 560, 562 Cocqui, Lay (Zapotec), 91
China Company, 462. See also Mississippi Code Noir (Black Code) 1685, 230–231,
Company 236, 255, 610–611; as to Article IX,
Chinese, 466 regulating slavery in the French
Cholul, 80 Antilles, 159–160; as to Article XVI,
Christ, 141, 330, 336, 352 with respect to slave rebellion, 61; as
Christendom, 199, 272, 321, 323, 340 to proposed reform, 162; as to Article
Christian, 60, 92, 140, 327, 377 28 regarding rights of slave to own
Christian Europe, 190, 417 property, 164
Christianity, 36, 86, 91–92, 154, 264, 321, Code Savary (reformed French commercial
323, 325, 329, 347, 351, 353, 380, 387 code), 619
Christianization, 36, 352, 355 Codrington College (Barbados), 355
Christianized, 377 coin, metal, 472–473, 476–478, 480–481,
Christian Philosopher, The (Mather), 381 483–485
675
– index –
Coke, Edward, Second Part of the Institute Company of the East Indies, 462. See also
of the Lawes of England, 365 Mississippi Company
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 461, 619, 627; as Company of Merchants Trading to Guinea
Comptroller General of French (aka Nicholas Crispe and Company),
finances, 627 445; as to Crispe’s loss of control, 446
Colden, Cadwallader, 653 Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into
Colebrooke, Sir George (Chr. EIC), 491 Africa (CRA), 446; as to subscribers,
College of Merchants, 63 Duke of York, Prince Rupert,
College van de Grote Visserij, 68 446–447; as to west coast of Africa,
Collegium urbanum, 326 446, 453
Collins, Edward, 143 Company of Scotland tradeing to Affrica
Colloque International de Mulhouse, 619 and the Indies (aka 1693 Scottish Act
Colombia, 483 for Encouraging Foreign Trade), 441
Colombian Exchange, The (Crosby), 216 Company of Senegal, 626
Colon, Cristobal, 85 Company of the West, 626
Colonial America, 123 Compleat Angler (Walton), 59
Colonial Assembly of Domingue, 234 Concord and Amphitrite (ships), 523. See
Colony of New France, 9, 14 also Bud
colour prejudice, 151–152, 154–165 Condamine, Charles-Marie de la, 653
Columbian Exchange, 197 Condorcet, Marquis de, 229, 653, 661;
Columbus, Christopher, 62, 84, 151, 187, Reflexions sur l’esclavage des Negres,
193, 246, 269, 321, 377, 415; as to 231
1942 Caribbean landfall, 13; as to Condottieri, 282
discovery of new ‘Creole’ animal Confederacy, 291
world, 14; as to Jewish scientists, 421 Confederation Congress (U.S.), 284, 289
Comancheria, 83 Confraternities, 330
Comanches, 83 Confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary in
Commander in Chief (of U.S. Military), 284 Luanda, 326
Commentaries reales (Garcilaso), 86 Confraternity of Our Lady Star of the
Commerce d’Angleterre, d’Ireland, & Negroes, 326
d’Ecosse, Du (Savary des Bruslons), Congo, 600
622 Congregationalist, 350–351
Commerce d’Hollande & de Flandre, Du Congregationalist Massachusetts, 407
(Savary des Bruslons), 622 Congregational Presbyterians, 398
Comission Cientific del Pacifico (CCP), Congress (U.S.), 287–288 481–482, 485,
47–48. See also Espada, Marco 579, 582, 586
Jimenez de la Congress of Vienna, 275
Commentaries on the Constitution (Story), conjuncture, 621
291 Connaught (Ireland), 397
Commentarios reales (garcilaso), 86 Connecticut, 358, 381,478, 480; as to
Commercial Treaty of Utrecht 1713, 625, Cheshire, 23
627; as to English ratification 625 Conquistadores, 324
Commissions of Array, 4 Considerations on the Greatness of the
commodification of fish, 59–62; as to effects Romans and their Decline,
of commodification, 62–65 (Montesquieu), 643
Common Council for the City of New York, Considerations sur l’etat present de la
599 colonie francaise de Saint Domingue
Commons (House of), 624 (Hilliard), 657
Communion, 400 Constantinople, 84
Compagnie francaise des Indes occidentals Constitution (U.S.), 283–284, 287–291, 293,
(Savory), 626 481, 636–637, 644
676
– index –
Constitutional Convention, 636, 643 Court Whigs, 283

consumption, 579. See also Smith, Wealth of Coutinho, Jose Joaquim de Cunha de
Nations Azerda, 654
contagion spread, 492–493; of depravity, Coya, dona Beatrice Clara, 88
139–142; of radicalism,136–139 Creation of the British Atlantic World, The,
Continental Army, 288, 397, 579 (Mancke and Shamm), 533
Continental Congress, 288, 481, Creeks, 276. See also Jackson, Andrew
Continental Europe, 400–401, 408, 560 Creole slave, 152
Continentals, George Washington’s, 268 Creolized Blacks, 426
conversos, 255, 413, 421–422 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John, 653
Conway, History of the Ship, 55 Crisp, Nicholas (member-licensee), Gynney
Cook, Captain James, 213, 215, 220 and Bynney Company, 445–446
Cooper, Thomas, 655 Croghan, George, 422
Copenhagen, 72 Cromwell, Oliver, 274, 284, 365
Cordoba, 86 Crosby, Alfred, The Colombian Exchange,
Cork, 369 216
Cornbury, Lord, 22 Crowley, Sir Ambrose, 463
Cornishmen, 176 Cruikshank, Isaac, French Happiness/
Corn Laws, 584, 586 English Misery, 559
Cornwall, 176 Cruisers and Convoy Act, 1708, 523
Cornwallis, Charles, 268 crypto-Jews, 414, 422
Corpus Christi, 91 crypto-Protestants, 122
Corpus Evangelicorum, 122 Cuauhtemoc, 91
Correio Braziliense (Costa), 655 Cuba, 45, 49, 139, 252 305, 379, 387, 537
Corsini, Bartholomew, 514 Cudjoe, 227
Costa, Hipolito Jose da, 653–655; as to Cugoano, Quobona Ottobah, 660
Correio Braziliense 655 Culhuacan, 88
Cortes, don Martin Moctezuma culture clash, 35
Nezahualtecolotzin, 88 Cunard, Samuel, 143
Cortes, Hernando, 80–81, 85–86, 91, 247, Curacao, 368–369, 371, 421, 425
252, 271, 322, 324; as to Letters of Currency Act of 1764, 395
Relation, 249 Curse of Ham, 164. See also Genesis IX, as
Cortes, Martin (son of Hernando), 86 to curse of Noah
Cotuy, 307 Custom House in Paris, 625.
Council of Martinique, 15 Cuzco, 82, 91, 332
Council of Massachusetts, 179
Council of Reform; as to French commercial da Gama, Vasco, 377
code, 619 Dahomey, 106
Council of the Indies (Spain), 88, 307, 309 Dajabon river, 311
Councils of the Ils du Vent, 1727: as to letter Dale, Thomas, Laws Divine, Moral and
of complaint, 163 Martiall, 252
Councils of the Knights of Columbus, 399 Danes, 349
Council of Virginia, 178 Daniel, Book of, 380
Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, A (King James), Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin
539 Islands), 349, 484
Counter-reformation , 324, 340 Danse vaudoux, 656
Country Party (England), 623 Darien peninsula, 83
Course of the Exchange (Castaing), 464 Darly, Mary, Miss Carolina Sullivan, one of
Court Jews, 419–420 the obstinate daughters of America, 578
Court of Assurances, 517, 521 Dartmouth College, 354
Court of Chancery, 514 Dartmouth, Mayor of, 174
677
– index –
Darwin, Charles, 48 Diderot, Denis, 230–231, 651–653. See also

David, Jacob, 516 Histoire des deux Indes; Supplement
Davis, Richard Beale, 633–634 au Voyage de Bougainville
Davenant, Charles (writer), 449 Diego, Juan, 330
Davila, Pedro Franco, 45. See also Real Dier, Andrew, 172
Gabinete de Historia Natural Dignitatis Humanae (Second Vatican
Davis, Robert C., 180 Council 1965), 394
debt distribution of Port Royal and Diogenes (slave), 642
Fredericksburg stores, 502t Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions
Declaration of February 1726; as to rights of Between the Nobles and the
people of colour, 162 Commons in Athens and Rome
Declaration of Independence, 132, 288, 290, (Swift), 643
651, 655, 661 Discourse on Western Planning, A
Declaration of Right, 403 (Hakluyt), 531
Declaration of the Rights of Man, 235–236, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
382, 611–612 (Machiavelli), 64
Defoe, Daniel, 283, 558; as to government Dixon, Jeremiah, 399
propagandist, 464, 466; as to Domenico, Gio, Il negociante, 621
Robinson Crusoe, 382 Domesday Book for the Periphery, A
Defreeger Valley, 122 (Bailyn), 427
deists and philosophes, 635 Dominica, 152, 154, 386
Delabord, Jean, 157 Dominicans, 88, 324
Delaseine, Jean Baptiste, 159 Dominion of New England, 478
Delaware, 480 Dona Marina, 252. See also Cortes
Delaware Bay, 56 Don Carlos (ship), 606
Delaware (river), 120 Dorantes, Estevanico de, 377
Delbourg, Madeline, 161 Dorillac, Procureur General, 161
Deliberator, The, by the Pennsylvanian Douglass, Frederick, 138, 601
Anti-Federalist, 291 Doussin, Jean, 610
Denmark, 62–63, 65, 69, 123, 230, 348, 480 Dover (England), 123
Description topographique, physique, civile, Dowse, Jonathan, 369
politique et historique de la partie dragonnades of Louis XIV, 287
francais de l’isle SaintDominque Drake, Sir Frances, 193, 246, 445, 536
(Moreau), 655–656 Dr. Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, 358
Desmaretz (French financial reformer), Dublin, 480
461–462 Du Boisson, Sieur, 157
Devil’s Hole (ocean trench), 57 Dubourg, Bishop Louis William (of New
Devil, The, 329 Orleans), 398
Devon, 176 Duchet, Michele, Anthropologie et histoire
Dewsbury, 588 au siècle des lumieres (Anthropology
Dhahabi, Al- (the golden), 187. See also and History in the Century of
Mansur, Ahmad al- Enlightenment), 227–229
Diamonds and Coral (Yogev), 425 du Jourdin, Michel Mollat, Europe and the
Diana (ship), 526 Sea, 217
Dickinson, John, Letters from a Farmer in Du Lion, Governor Claude Francois, 154,
Pennsylvania, 640 156, 158
Dictionary (Johnson), 546 Dupaix, Guillermo, 42, 45
Dictionary of the French Academy, The, Dupont, Jean, 163
152, 155 DuPuis, 155
dictionnaire universel du commerce, Le Durrnberg bei Hallein, 122
(Savary), 621, 625 d’Urville, Dumont, 208–209
678
– index –
Dutch, 60, 68, 71, 80, 82, 85, 103–104 106, Edwards, Jonathan, 381
109, 230, 247, 267, 272, 282, 305, Egypt, 196–197, 323, 378
340, 349, 358, 427, 447, 460, Egyptians, 386
531–536. 538–540, 542–543, EIC, 103–104, 549. See also East India
548–549, 550, 553–554, 556, 562 Company
Dutch (language) 619 1814 Treaty, 136
Dutch Atlantic, 532, 543–544 1835 Select Committee on Aborigines
Dutch Batavian Republic, 100, 107 (British Parliament), 110
Dutch Brazil, 542 Eighty Years War, 548
Dutch East India Company 100, 535, 549. Eldorado (mythical better world), 119
See also VOC Elias, Norbert, Civilizing Process, 622
Dutch Empire, 532–533, 627 el Inca (pseudonym of Garcilaso de Vega),
Dutch-French Alliance, 109 86
Dutch Long Island, 386 Eliot, John, 352–353
Dutch Republic, 63, 106, 348, 446–447, Elizabeth I, queen, 187, 192, 194, 267, 445
449, 452, 533, 561 Ellis, William, 217–218
Dutch Reformed Church, 355, 358 Elliott, J.H., 187; Old World and the New,
Dutch South Africa, 107, 484 The, 89
Dutch West India Company (WIC), 21, 355, Elmina, Guinea, 542; as to Gold Coast, 447
381, 446, 448–449, 453, 478, 532, El Niño, 210–211
537, 542, 549 Eltis, David, 182, 193
DuTerte, Jean Baptiste, 152, 154–158 Emigrationskonsens (official sanction), 121
Dye, Tom, 220 Empire, 118; as in Holy Roman, 118, 120
encomienda system, 37
east Anglian ports, 68 enemy Other, 390
East Asia, 213 Engages (indentured servants), 158, 160,
east coast of Africa, 103, 548, 600 255
Easter Duty, 165 Engels, 574
eastern Atlantic, 199 England, 20–21, 60–61, 63, 65–66, 67–68,
eastern Europe, 60, 371, 418, 424 70, 123, 136, 173, 177–178, 187,
Eastern North America, 353 193–194, 196, 246, 252–254,
East Greenland Shelf, 57 271–272, 274, 286, 327, 348, 355,
East India, 123 357, 359, 364–366, 372, 378, 381,
East India Company, 103, 445–446, 466, 393, 395, 397–398, 400–401,
491–492, 526–527, 536, 538, 541, 403–408, 447, 449, 452–453, 461,
549, 559–560. See also EIC 468, 476–477–480, 483, 485, 493,
East India Trade, 534 503, 516–517, 519, 521–522,
East Indies, 100, 104–105, 107, 109, 524–527, 531, 536. 541–542, 550,
531–532, 535–536, 539, 550, 581, 556–557, 576–577, 583, 588, 619,
583 621–623, 626, 633–634, 638–639,
East Prussia, 122 658
East, The, 466 England, John (Bishop of Charleston),
Ebenezer (new home in Georgia for 327–328
Salzburgers), 123–124 English, 25, 60, 80, 103–104, 133, 176,
Ecuador, 82, 38 180, 19–193, 247–248, 252–253, 265,
Eddaouira, 197. See also Mogador 272, 304–305, 328, 348, 378, 380,
Edict of March 1724, Article VI, 162 393, 397, 401, 403–404, 407, 426,
Edict of Nantes, 349; as to Revocation, 349 466, 503, 505, 531, 533–543,
Edict of 2 February 1732, 122 549–550, 562, 589, 619, 622, 625,
Edinburgh, 492, 497, 500 627, 637, 656
Edward I, king, 365 English (language), 379–380, 382
679
– index –
English America, 366 Eucharist, Sacrament of the, 400

English Atlantic, 217, 255, 446, 460, 533, Eurasia, 27
543–544 Euroamerican (criollos), 89
English Atlantic trade, 520 Eurocentric, 415
English Bill of Rights, 292 Europe, 1, 3, 14, 20–21, 42, 56, 60–61, 66,
English Catholic, 401 71–72, 79, 83, 93, 100, 104, 107–108,
English Channel, 176, 281, 522, 557 110, 120, 134, 139, 143, 151, 173,
English Christians, 365 178, 197, 228–229, 231–232, 234,
English Civil Wars, 281, 283, 286, 290 238, 245, 255–256, 264, 267, 269,
English Crown, 448 273–276, 305, 309, 312, 321,
English Enlightenment, 650 324–327, 333–335, 339, 347–349,
English Gentleman Abroad (anon), 624 355, 357–358, 360–361, 389,
English grounde in America, 252. See also 397–398, 400, 414–416, 418,
Chesapeake 421–422, 414, 424–427, 452–453,
Englishmen, 22, 176, 179, 246, 252–253, 460, 466, 473–474, 477, 481, 484,
365–366, 370, 372, 382, 393, 403, 491–492, 494, 497, 503, 505,547
406, 427, 609 517,519, 531, 533–535, 537, 539,
English Navigation Acts, 550 541, 548, 550, 552, 558, 560–561,
English Restoration, 549 563, 582, 588–589, 602, 619, 625,
English Revolution, 558 634–635, 638–641, 643, 645,
English sugar imports, 504 651–652, 654, 660–661
English West Indies colonies, 367, 371 European, 46, 84, 415, 421, 628, 640
Enlightenment, 42, 228–229, 231–232, European Americans, 426
235–236, 238, 416, 450, 653, 655, European Atlantic, 480, 485
658, 660–661 European Catholics, 322, 335, 348
Enlightenment, Europe, 419 European Catholicism, 326, 328
Enlightenment, The, 650–651, 654–656, European Christianity, 336
658–659 Europe and the Sea (du Jourdin), 217
Eon Woerr, 212 European Encounters with the New World
Epictetus (slave), 642 (Pagden), 89
e pluribus unum (motto of U.S.), 645 European Enlightenment, 108, 233, 654,
Equator, 57 661
Equatorial Countercurrent, 211–212 European Jewry in an Age of Mercantilism
Equiano, Olaudah, 360, 601–604, 660; as to (Israel), 424
The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah European Jews, 415–417
Equiano, or Gustavus, the African, European Napoleonic Wars, 46
602 European Protestants, 349
Erie Canal, 394 Europeans, 13, 17–18, 27, 36, 47, 64,
Erle, Thomas, 291–292; Papers of 67–68, 79, 82–83, 89, 91, 103–105,
instructions for the Parliamentary 125, 153–154, 156, 165, 181–182,
meeting after the revolution, 291 192, 194, 196, 213, 216, 219–220,
Ermenzon, (or Emmerson), Ricardo, 306 232, 238, 247, 249–251, 256,
Escoto, Juan Bautista, 308 264–266, 269, 276, 305–306, 322,
Esguerra, Jorge Canizares, How to Write the 328–330, 332, 354, 377–380, 390,
History of the New World, 89 415, 452, 460, 462, 473, 538, 541,
Espada, Marcos Jimenez de la, 47 546, 548–549, 551, 556, 562, 600,
Estebanico the Black, 192 602–603, 605, 634–635, 638–639
Ethiopa, 323 Europe’s America, as to Hungarian
Ethiopian Jews, 419. See also Operation Banat, 119; as to southern Hungary,
Moses 124
ethnic prejudices, 153 Ewart, William (MP), 584
680
– index –
Exchange Alley, 464–465 First Maroon War, 609

Exchange, The (London), 552 First Provincial Council of Baltimore, 398
Exchequer, 476–477 fisheries: development of, 55, 59–65
Exeter, 445 fishing, 55–59, 534
Exodus, 645 fish species, 58
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Flanders, 63, 624–625
Madness of Crowds (Macaulay, Lord), Fletcher, Andrew, 283
457 Fletcher, Governor Benjamin, 179
eye of Providence, 645 Florentine Codex (Sahagun), 89–90, 92
Florida, 21, 25, 123, 212, 308, 377, 634
Fable of the Bees or, Private Vices, Public Flushing Remonstrance, 386
Benefits, The (Mandeville), 558 Forbes, Sir William, 493
Fabra, Francisco, y Soldevila, Filosofia de la Ford, Richard, 174
legislacion natural fundada en la Fordyce, Alexander, 491, 493, 498–499
Antropologia, 47 Fordyce, Grant & Co., 499
Faero Islands, 264, 484 Foster, Colonel, 386
Falconbridge, Alexander, 605 Foucault, Michel, 659–660
Familiarity of Strangers (Trivellato), 425 Fouquet, Nicolas, 619
Faroes, 56, 62, 67, 71 Four Moments of the Sun (Kongolese
Faroes Plateau, 57 image), 330
Fary, Jean, 164–165 Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, 109
Fary, Jeanne, 164 Fox, George, 355, 357, 358. See also
Fatiha, 387 Quakers
Fatima, 383 Foxe, John, 381
Fearon, Henry Bradshaw, 583 Fox Wars, 274
Federalist, 283–284, 644 France, 62, 63, 69, 106, 134, 138, 153, 158,
Federalist 41, 281 192, 194, 196, 228, 231, 234,
Federalist Papers, 645 237–238, 255, 271, 274–275, 300,
Federal Senate (U.S.), 644 308, 310–312, 314, 327, 333, 337,
Feijo, Joao da Silva, 654 348, 352, 398, 400, 451–452, 461,
Felipe II, 40. See also Leyes de Indias 468, 476, 478, 480, 483–485, 501,
Ferdinand, king, 377 503, 517, 532, 536, 555–556, 561,
Fernandez, Alvaro, 601–602 563, 576, 578–580, 583, 585, 588,
Ferrandiz, Manuel Anton, 49. See also 612, 619, 621–624, 626, 651, 655–657
Universidad Central de Madrid Franch, Alcina, 39, 42
Ferrantyn, Alexander, 514. See also Seint Franciscans, 86, 88, 324
Anne of London Franco-Dutch war, 308
Ferreira, Alexandre Rodrigues, 654 Francophilia, 576
Fes, 194, 197 Franklin, Benjamin, 501, 578, 582, 645,
Festin de Pierre, Le (Moliere), 627 653, 657, 660
Fick, Carolyn, 237 Franklin Institute, 587
Fiji, 209, 220 Franks, David, 371
Filippo Borromei & Co., 514 Franks, Jacob, 371
Filmer, Robert, Observations upon Franks, Rebecca, 371; as to Queen of Beauty
Aristotle’s Politicks, 643 at Meschianza, 371
Filosofia de la legislacion natural, fundada Franz-Joseph, Emperor, 126
en la Antropologia, (Fabra), 47 Fraserburgh, 218
Finland, 64 Fredericksburg, 502
Finnmark, 66, 71 free burghers, 105–106, 108
Firmian, Leopold Freiherr von (Prince- Freeman, William, 521
Bishop), 122 Freemasons, 386
681
– index –
free trade, 135 Galacia, 62, 118, 120

French, 46, 60, 68, 69, 80, 82–83, 109, 151, Gambia Adventurers (licensee of CRA), 447
154–156, 195, 267–268, 272–274, Games, Alison, 217; as to ‘Beyond the
282, 300–301, 304–305, 307–310, Atlantic: English globetrotters and
312–313, 328, 333, 380, 427, 496, transoceanic connections’, 533
562, 580, 584, 586, 612, 621–622, Gans, Joachim (scientist), 421
628 Garcia, King, 328
French (language), 619 Garcilaso de la Vega (formerly Gomez Saurez
French Acadia, 480 de Figarosa, pseudonym, el Inca), 86,
French America, 338 as to Commentarios reales, 86
French and Indian War, 404, 481 Garcilaso, Sebastian de la Vega, 86
French Antilles, 153, 159–160, 162, 164 Garraway’s (London), 464
French Army, 612 Gascoigne, Sir Bernardo, 283
French Atlantic World, 151, 153–154, 165, General Considerations for the Plantations
228, 255, 460, 462, 611 in New England (Winthrop), 26
French Canada, 268, 272, 339 Genesis (Book of), Legend of the Father, 13;
French Caribbean Islands, 151–154, 156, as to Curse of Ham, Chapter IX, 164
158, 162, 164–165, 653 General order of 1749; as to slaves renting
French Catholics, 333 their services, 164
French Crown, 159, 308, 314, 327, 333, 656 Genoa, 192
French East India Company, 539 Genoese, 191
French Empire, 159, 364 Gentile(s), 364, 367, 383
French Enlightenment, 229, 665 George II, king, 123
French Farmers-General, 493 George III, king, 132, 273, 290, 394
French Flanders, 398 Georgia, 123–124, 350, 359, 378, 383, 390,
French Guadeloupe, 151. See also 481
Guadeloupe Georgians, 466
French Guinea, 484, 627 German (language), 619
French Happiness/English Misery, German Court Chapel, 123. See also St.
(Cruikshank), 559 James London
French Jews, 416 German Enlightenment, 650
French Lesser Antilles, 155 German immigrants, 15
French Louisiana, 161 German Jewry, 418
Frenchmen, 172, 306, 609 German Protestants, 124
French National Convention, 611 Germans, 71, 118, 584, 586
French Protestants, 272, 349 German States, 63, 68
French Quebec, 478 Germany, 62, 124–125, 348, 417, 564
French Revolution, 134, 232, 234, 237, 400, Gerry, Elbridge, 289
416, 581, 605, 611–612, 661 Gewaltmonopol des Staates, 289
French Revolutionary War, 522, 655, 658 Ghachem, Malech, 233
‘Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights’, 134 Gibraltar, 197, 357
Friedrich William I, king, 145 Gines de Sepulveda, Juan, 322
Friedman, Ellen G., 181 Girard, Marie Rose, 161
Frizell, James (consul), 174 Glasgow, 495, 522
Frobisher, Martin, 445 Glorious Revolution, 290–291, 337,
Frontier Era, 153, 156 403–404, 476, 478
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina Glyn & Hallifax, 501
(Locke contributing), 653 God, 249, 332, 333, 336, 339, 380, 382,
384
Gabon, 524 Goddess Peace, 639
Gacetas de Literatura de Mexico (Alzate), 654 Godechot, Jacques, 661
682
– index –
God’s Gift (salmon), 63 Guadeloupian Caribs, 157

Godwyn, Morgan, 355 Guadeloupian Sovereign Council, 157, 159
Gold Coast of West Africa, 603 Guam, 213
Golden Mountain, 68. See also Grosse Guardians of Marovo Lagoon (Hviding),
Visserij 215
Golden Rule, 386 Guatemala, 91, 271, 389
Gold Standard, 485 Guevera, Lord don Antonio de, Relacion
Gómara, 48 geografica or Descripcion de la cuidad
Gomes, Jesuit Diogo, 327 y provincia de Tlaxcala, 88
Gonzaga, Tomaso Antonio, 654 Guiana, 541
Good Intent (ship), 524 Guilday, Peter (historian), 397
Gorges, Sir Fernando, 174 Guiana Company, 538
Gould, Seaman Roland, 144–145 Guinea, 154, 386, 542; as to Guine, 424,
gracias as sacar, 660 426, 602, 604
Granada, 86, 246, 264, 272, 474, 562 Gulf Coast, 80
Grand Banks, 56, 212 Gulf of Maine, 67
Grand Cul-de-Sac, 161 Gulf of Mexico, 57
Grand-Terre, Dominica, 154, 157, 160 Gulf of St. Lawrence, 268
Gratz, Barnard and Michael (brothers), 422 Gumilla, Jose, 41
Gray’s Inn, 365 Gutenberg, 474
Great Awakening, 351, 355 Guthrie, William, New System of Modern
Great Britain 132, 134–135, 139–140, 142, Geography, 546
145, 284, 393, 485, 517, 526, 589 Guy, Thomas, 465, 467
Great Exhibition of 1851, 587, 589 Guyana, 82
Great Hare, 13 Gynney and Bynney Company, 445; as to
Great Migration, 349 Nicholas Crisp (member licensee), 445
Great Northern War, 461, 467 Gypsies, 365
Great Recession, 618
Great Seal of the United States, 645 Habsburg Empire, 120–122, 126
Great Turke, 172 Habsburg Monarchy, 117–119–122
Greece, 640 Hapsburg Trieste, Dubin and Lois’ model,
Greeley, Horace, 588–589 419
Greek(s), 638, 640 Hagget, William, 177
Greene, Jack, 2, 55; as to Atlantic History: A Hainaut, 63
Critical Appraisal, 2 Haiti, 137, 268, 276, 484, 612
Greenland, 56, 62, 64, 264–265, 484 Haitian Revolution, 137, 232, 389, 612,
Greenland Seas, 57 658–659, 661
Greenland–Scotland ridges, 56 Hajj, 197
Gregoire, Abbe Henri Baptiste, 653 Hakluyt, Richard (colonial promoter), 246;
Gregory XVI, pope, 327 as to A Discourse on Western
Grenada, 496, 501, 503, 627, 657 Planning, 531, 541–542
Grenier, John, 273 Hall, Prince, 660
Griffin, Martin (historian), 397 Halle, 123
Gronau, Israel Christian (pastor), 123 Hamburg, 197, 423, 461
Grotte Visserij, 68. See also Golden Mountain Hamilton, Alexander, 283–284
Grundentlastung of 1949 (emigration law), Hamilton & Co., 501
121 Hamilton, Andrew (wife Abigail Franks),
Guaba, 306 371
Guaba valley, 311 Hamilton-Patterson, James, 218
Guadeloupe, 151–153–155, 157–165, 523, Hana, 219
627, 660. See also French Guadeloupe Hannibal (ship), 603–604
683
– index –
Hanover, 124 Historia del Nuevo Mundo (Munoz) 46

Harley, Lord High Treasurer, Sir, 450 Historia General de las Cosas de la Neuva
Harris, William, 178 Espana, (Sahagun), 37
Harrington, James, 283 Historia natural y cronica de la antigua
Hastings, Lady Betty, 464 California (Barco), 1
Hart, Anne & Elizabeth, 360 Historia natural y moral de las Indias
Harvard University, 352 (Acosta), 37
Hau’ofa, Epeli, 207; Our Sea of Islands, Historia general y natural de las Indias
214–216 (Oviedo), 39
Hausaland, 197 Histoire des Deux Indes, L’ (Raynal), 227,
Hauser, Henri, Revue de Histoire 230, 651–652, 657
Economique et Social, 619 Histoire, naturelle, Buffon, Comte de, 229
Havana, 450, 458 History of America (Robertson) 46
Hawaii, 216 History of Lloyd’s (Wright and Fayle), 519
Hawaiian chain, 209 History of Lloyd’s and of Marine Insurance
Hawaiian island(s), 218, 220 in Great Britain, The (Martin), 519
Hawaiians, 217–218, 220 History of the Ship (Conway), 55
Hawkins, John, 445, 539 HMS Leopard, 134
Hayy ibn Yaqzan, (Ibn Tufayl), 190; as to Hoare’s Bank, 463–464
renamed version Philosophus Hobbes, Thomas, 643
Autodidactus or The Self Taught Hogarth, William, 467, 575
Philosopher, 382 Holland, 68, 123, 194, 196, 271, 274, 498,
heathenism, 353–354 550, 622, 624
Hebb, David Delison, 176 Holland, William, 577
Heimat, 117 Holmes, Sir Robert, 447
Henry, Patrick, 283, 288 Holofernes, 332
Henry, Prince 549. See also Casa da India Holt, Arthur, 404
hereditary lands (Erblander), 117 Holy Club (at Oxford), 357
Henry VII, king, 187 Holy Family, 336
Henry VIII, king, 321 Holy Office, 338
Herodotus, 151 Holy Land, 192
Heron & Douglas Bank, 499 Holy Roman Empire, 117–118, 121
heretoch, 288 Holy Roman Imperial Diet in Regensburg, 122
Herrnhaag, Germany, 358–359 Holyrod, John Baker, 579
High Court of Admiralty, 514, 517 Home, George, 496; as to Ayr Bank, 496
High German (language), 621 Homer, Iliad, 640
Highlands of Scotland, 273 honeyed Mansfieldism: as to Article VII of
Hijas, 197 the English Bill of Rights, 290
Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Michel-Rene, 653, Hoock, Jochen 619, 621, 627–628; as to Ars
655, 657–659; as to Considerations Mercatoria, 619; as to Innovations et
sur l’etat present de la colonie Renouveaux Techniques de l’Antiquite
francaise de Saint Domingue, 657 a nos Jours, 619, 621–622
Hinterland, 101. See also southern African Hottentots, 230
Highveld Houel, Sr., 164
Hirschman, Albert O., 619, 621 Hough, Ebenezer, 369
Hirshman, Elizabeth, Jews and Muslims in House of Austria, 118
British Colonial America: A House of Burgesses, 252
Genealogical History, 386 House of Habsburg, 120
Hispaniola, 14, 21, 85, 269, 271, 300, 302, Howe, Kerry, 214
304–305, 306–311, 389, 656 How to Write the History of the New World
Historia del Nuevo Mundo (Cobo), 41 (Esguerra), 89
684
– index –
Huard, Jacques Denis, 160–161 Independence (U.S.), 485, 639

Hudson Bay, 625 India, 106, 110, 414, 464, 493, 519, 522,
Hudson Bay west coast, 451 527, 547, 559
Hudson, Henry, 535 Indian(s), 352, 415, 426–427–428
Hudson River Valley, 26 Indian Country, 353
Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), 20, Indian Ocean, 103, 105–106, 109–110, 120,
443–444, 450–454, 549 207, 220, 250, 267, 378, 548–550
Hughes, William (of Gray’s Inn), 365 Indian Ocean basin, 105
Huguenots, 106, 272, 349, 361, 370, 372, Indian Ocean trade, 449
561 Indian Presidencies, 527
Hugues, Victor, 660 Indians (South American), 5, 45, 81, 83
Hume, David, 497–498, 575, 577, 659, 661 Indian Wars, 273
Hundred Years’ War, 217 Indies, 110, 191, 246, 306, 583
Hungary, 117–120, 124, 125, 379. See also indigenist or criticist (intellectual
Schwabenziige and Sachsenganger movement), 37
Hunter, Governor Robert, 599 Indigenous American History, 79
Hutcheson, Archibald, MP, 463–464. See indigenous peoples: as to Beothuk, 59; as to
also Secret Committee Inuit,59; as to Mi’kmag, 59; as to
Hutchinson, Anne, 350 Sami of Fennoscandia, 59, 64
Hviding, Edvard, Guardians of Marovo Indonesia, 563
Lagoon, 215, 218 Indonesian archipelago, 106
Industrial Revolution, 471
Iberia, 71, 84–85, 88–89, 193, 196, 325, Ines, Juana de la Cruz, 332
379. See also Spain Inikori, Joseph, 518–527; Africans and the
Iberian America, 332, 338 industrial revolution in England, 517;
Iberian Atlantic World, 422, 535 as to Measuring the hazards of the
Iberian Catholics, 330 Atlantic slave trade, 522; as to The
Iberian Christians, 254 Volume of the British Slave Trade
Iberian Conversos, 422 1655–1807, 526
Iberian Crown, 329 Innocent XI, pope 338
Iberian Empire, 80, 83, 531, 535, 537, 539, Innovations et Renouveaux Techniques de
543 l’Antiquite a nos Jours (Hoock), 619
Iberian Inquisition, 556 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Iberian Jews, 413, 421 Wealth of Nations, An (Smith), 559
Iberian Peninsula, 57, 190–191, 246, 264, Inquiry on the Paper Credit of Great Britain
324, 378 (Thornton), 492
Iberians, 548–549 Inquisition, The, 324, 384, 389, 421–422
Iberian South Atlantic, 79 Inspector General of Diamonds, 481
Iberio-Atlantic waters, 58 Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano,
Ibn Tufayl, 190; as to Hayy ibn Yaqzan, 382 or Gustavus, the African, The
Iceland, 56, 58, 61–63, 66–67, 71, 230, 264, (Equiano), 602–604
484 Interregnum, 337
Icelanders, 66 International Americanist Congress, 49
Iceland Shelf, 57–58 Invention of America, The (O’Gorman), 89
Idrisi, al-, 190 IOUs, 473, 474, 477–478, 480
Iliad, Homer, 640 Iraq, 414
Iles du Vent, 155, 157, 159–160, 162 Ireland, 120, 178, 272–273, 337, 348–349,
Illinois, 361 351, 357, 397, 401, 480, 483,
impressment, 132 541–542, 622
Inca, 80, 82–83 Irish, 80, 82, 176, 328, 397, 428
Inca Empire, 80, 82 Irish Catholics, 337
685
– index –
Iroquois, 13, 275, 333, 348 President, 23, 275; as to owner of a

Iroquois League, 272 Qur’an, 382–384; as to Notes on the
Irwin, Geoff, 215 State of Virginia, 640–643
Isabel I, queen, 84 Jena (Germany), 124
Isabella and Ferdinand, queen and king, 187 Jesuited Priest (forbidden Maryland epithet),
Ishmael, Muley, 180 401
Islam 3, 172, 189, 192, 199, 323, 347, Jesuitical Catholicism, 122
376–384, 386, 388, 390 Jesuit Order of Salzsburg, 122
Islamic Antichrist, 380 Jesuit(s), 324, 333, 337–338, 398, 405
Islamic North Africa, 378 Jesus, 401
Islamic West, 190 Jesus (ship), 172–173
Island of Saint John (now Prince Edward Jewry, 419
Island), 484 Jew(s), 93, 325, 335, 364–372, 383–384,
Island Southeast Asia, 208–209. See also 386, 414, 421–424, 426–427, 498,
Malaysia 548, 561, 611
Israel, 415, 416; as to Ashkenazi-dominated Jews and Muslims in British Colonial
Labor Party, 414 America: A Genealogical History
Israel, Jonathan, 417, 425; as to European (Hirschman and Yates), 386
Jewry in an Age of Mercantilism, 424 Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the
Israel, Solomon, 369–370 West, 1450–1800, 1997 (Conference
Italian, 80, 83, 180 paper at the John Carter Brown
Italian Catholics, 365 Library), 419
Italian states, 627 Jewish, 414, 418, 423, 427
Italy, 308, 621, 624 Jewish America, 428
Ixtlilxochitl, 81 Jewish Amsterdam, 420
Jewish Atlantic, 419–421, 428
Joachim, Pierre Paul François, 653 Jewish Atlanticists, 420
Joao I, adopted name of Nzinga a Nkuwu, Jewish Diaspora, 414–416, 428
323 Jewish Enlightenment, 650
Jackson, Andrew, 276. See also Creeks Jewish ethnology, 423
Jacobites, 493 Jewish Europe, 427
Jacquot, Valentin, 163 Jewish History, 413–418, 421, 423–424,
Jamaica, 22, 196, 274, 305–306, 348, 357, 426, 428
367, 383, 418, 424, 426, 446, Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753
450–451, 562, 606, 609, 658 (England), 366
Jamaicans, 658 Jewish world, 420, 428
James (ship), 524 Jews of Recife, 366
James, C.L.R., Black Jacobins, The, 232 Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group,
James, I, king, 397, 445; A Counter-Blaste The (a Compilation), 423
to Tobacco, 539 Jibaros, 41
James II, king, 283, 291, 403–404; as to jihad, 389
ended reign, 448, Joao I (formerly Nzinga a Nkuwu), 246, 329
Jamestown, 266, 549 Joden Savanne, 426
Janson, John (underwriter) 527 Johannes, Bob, Words of the Lagoon, 215
Japan, 209, 564 John Carter Brown Library Conference
Jardin, Anne, 157 1997, Jews and the Expansion of
Jay Treaty, 581 Europe to the West, 1450–1800, 419
Jeanneton (slave), 156 John IV, king, 548
Jefferson, Thomas, 132, 290, 386, 427, 582, John Glassford & Co., 495
633–636, 641–642, 645, 653, 655, John Norton & Sons, 498, 502; as to George
658–659; as to Aristotle, 642; as to Norton, 498
686
– index –
John, Prester, 192 Kongolese, 328, 336

Johnson, Joshua, 501. See also Wallace Kongolese Catholics, 329, 332
Davidson & Johnson, 498 Kongolese Catholicism, 339
Johnson, Samuel, Dictionary, 546 Koolau, 220
joint stock companies, 444 Koona, 219
joint stock trading company, 441–454 Kopfgeld (bonus or reward), 119
Joseph II, emperor, 121 Kubary, Jan, 219
Juan, San de Guaba, 310 Kuenburg, Max Gandolph Graf von
Juba II, King (Mauretania), 190 (Prince-Bishop), 122
Judaism, 3, 347, 368, 370, 377, 390, 419, Kupperman, Karen Ordal, 2; America in
422–424, 426–427 European Consciousness, 89
Ku’ula-kai, 219
Kamohoali’i, 218
Kanehunamoku, 218 Labat, 155–158
Kant, Immanuel, 574, 659 Labrador, 57, 63–64
Kapingamarangi Atoll, 215 Labrador current, 57–58
Kapukaulua, 219 Labrador-Newfoundland Shelf, 57
Karankawa Indians, 332 Lacerda, Josee de Almeida, 654
Karnten, 117 Lacotti, Marie, 157
Katznelson, Ira, Paths to Emancipation: Lady Credit, 464. See also Defoe
Jews, States and Citizenship, 418 Lafayette, Marquis de, 653
Kaunitz, Wenzel Anton Graf, 119 Lahontan, Baron de, 653
Keith, George, 382. See also Society of Friends Lakeba, 212
Kelley, William, 587 Lamana, Gonzalo, 90
Khoikhoi, 102–105, 108, 110 Lamb (ship), 523
Kieft’s War, 26, 249 Lamb, Samuel, 516
Kieft, Willem, 26, 250 land banks, 477–478, 480
Kilkongo (language), 327 Ländler, 117
Kimpa Vita (aka Dona Beatriz), 332 La Nina, 210
King, Boston, 360 La Pallu Family, 610. See also Binture
King David (ship), 523 La Rochelle, 548, 627
kingdom of Komenda, 449 Las Casas, Bartolome de, 37–39
Kingdom of New Granada (Colombia), 82 Latin, 323, 640
Kingdom of the Kongo, 322 Latin America, 192, 306, 361, 418–419,
Kingdom of Warri, 324 422, 424, 483, 562
King George’s War, 481 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, View of the City
King of Bohemia, 118 of Richmond from the Bank of the
King of Great Britain, 284 James River, 633
King of Hungary, 118 Laurens, John 579
King Philip’s War, 93, 249, 352 Laval, Francois de, 327
King William’s War, 478 La Vega (Haiti), 307
Kings Bench, 514; as to Sir John Holt, Lord Lavy Seminar at Hopkins, 419
Chief Justice, 448 Law, John, 457, 461–462, 467, 480
Kingston, Jamaica, 450 Laws Divine, Moral, and Martiall (Dale),
Kiowas, 83 252
Kiribati, 209 Law’s (John) System, 461–462, 485
Knight, Francis, 179 lay Catholics, 325–326, 398, 400, 406
Koblenz, 117 Leblond, Gabriel, 162
Kona, 220 Lecciones de Antropologia etico politico-
Kongo, 322–326, 329–330, 336. See also religiosa (Adam), 47
Lukeni lua Nimi (founder) Lechmere, Attorney General Nicholas, 520
687
– index –
Lee, Thomas Sim, Governor Maryland, 408 Livorno, 425

Leeward Islands, 365, 367 Llanos, 41
Legend of the Father, Book of Genesis, 13 Lloyd’s, 521, 525, 527
Le Gozier, 161, 163 Lloyd’s List, 523–524, 552
Le Grande Derangement, 404 Lobo, Pedro da Cuhna (Bishop) 335
Lehoula, 219 Locke, John, 386, 558, 653; as to Appeal to
Leibniz, 107 Heaven, 21; as to Essay on Human
Leinster (Ireland), 397 Understanding; 382: as to Letter on
Leisler, Jacob, 178–179 Toleration, 383, 401; as to Second
Lenau, Nikolas (poet), 125 Treatise, 290; as to Two Treatises of
Lent, 60 Government, 653
Leon, Cieza de, 48 Lodron, Paris Graf (prince-bishop), 122
LeRoux, Guillaume, 161 Lofoten Islands, 66, 70
L’ Esprit des Lois: Pensees (Baron de Loge des Neuf Soeurs in Paris, 657–658
Montesquieu), 230, 640, 643 Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises
Lesser Antilles, 151. See also Caribs de l’Amerique sous le Vent, (Moreau)
Letter on Toleration (Locke), 383, 401 655–656
Letter Patent of Denization, 367 LOLR (Lender of Last Resort), 492, 506
Letters of Relation (Cortes), 249 Lom, Louis Armand d’Arce, 653
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania Lombard, 476
(Dickinson), 640 London, 109, 123, 137, 139, 142, 174, 177,
Letters from an American Farmer, 640. See 231, 304, 350, 359–360, 366, 369,
also Jefferson 382, 399, 445, 457–459, 461, 464,
Letters Patent, 448 467, 473, 481, 483, 485, 491–492,
Levant, 176 495–497, 500, 514, 516–517,
Levant Company, 176, 549 519–522, 525, 527, 541, 547–548,
Levenda Negra (Spanish science), 35 551–552, 558, 561, 573–574,
Levy, Nathan and Isaac, 371 576–577, 581, 584, 587, 624–625,
Leyden, 474 640, 653, 655
Leyes de Indias, 40; in part, Relaciones London Assurance Company, 519, 524, 525
geograficas de Indias, 40 Londonberry, Lord, 467
Liberia, 387 London Company, 549
Liberty and Property, or The Beauty of Londoners, 445
Maryland Displayed (Atwood), 405 London Magazine, 546, 639
Liberty of Conscience, 406 London Observer, The, 587
Library Company of Philadelphia, 655 Long Island, 26, 386, 395, 600
Library of Congress, 655 Longly, Richard, 156
Liburd, William, 368 Lopez, Francisco de Gomara, 86
Libya, 176 Lord (The), 338, 358
Lieber, Michael D., More Than a Living, Lord Baltimore, 336, 401, 403
215 Lord Proprietary, 401
Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, 91 Lords Commissioners for the Treaty for
Lietard, Lieutenant, 157, 159 Commerce with France, 623
Lima (Peru), 88 Lord’s Day, 367
Lima, Haim Abinum de, 368; as to his Lords of Trade, 403
bequests, 368 Lords of Trade and Plantation (Barbados),
Lima, Rosa da, 332 366
Linnaeus, Carl, 46, 652 Lords Lieutenant, 286, 288
Lisbon, 84, 326–327, 543 Lord’s Prayer, 387
Little Paris (Capetown), 109 Lorenzo, San de los Minas, 308
Liverpool, 142–143, 522, 582, 584 Loros (Muslim slave), 85
688
– index –
lost tribes of Israel, 352. See also Native Males (from mu’allim) as revolt leaders, 389
American Indians Mali, 376
Louis XIV, 287, 327, 364, 480, 550, 611; as Malintzin (Cortes partner), 86
to Sun King, 461 Mamachou, Marie, 159
Louisiana, 162, 378, 462, 609 Mama Occllo, queen (first Incan Queen),
L’Overture, Toussaint, 232, 237, 612 332
Lovejovian, 281 Mamluks, 378
Low Country, 250, 535 Mammon, 546
Lowestoft, 66 Mancke, Elizabeth, Creation of the British
Loyalists, 398 Atlantic World, The, 533
Ludwell, Thomas, 26 Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees
Lukeni lua Nimi (founder). See Kongo or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, 558
Lumbrozo, Jacob, 401 Manhattan Island, 415
Luther, Martin, 288–289, 291, 380 Manila Bank, 219. See also Oraurau-feis
Lutheran Danish National Church, 349 Manilla, 213
Lutheranism, 359 Mani Vunda, religious leader, Afonso’s reign
Lydia (ship), 547 329; as to Beatriz, 336
Mansur, Ahmad al-, Sultan of Morocco,
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 282, 294, 298, 569, 187, 194, 196. See also Dhahabi Al-
637, 643, 647–648; Discourses on the Mapuche, 83
First Ten Books of Livy, 643 Marce (priest), 163
Mackay, Charles, Extraordinary Popular Marcus, Jacob, 370
Delusions and the Madness of Marguerite, La (ship), 165
Crowds, 457 Maria Theresa, empress, 117
Madagascar, 103, 106–107, 550, 600 Mariana Islands, 209, 21
Madeira, 84, 172, 191, 246, 254–255, market revolution, 394
268–269, 369 maroons (fugitive slaves), 227, 274, 608–610
Madison, James, 275. 281, 289, 582, Marova Lagoon, 215
634–635, 641, 644, 653; as to Notes Marquesas Islands, 218
on Ancient and Modern Marrakesh, 193
Confederacies, 643 marronage, 227
Madrid, 45, 48, 88, 310, 326, 543 Marshall Islands, 210
Maescoe, Charles, 516 Marshallese, 212
Magdeleine (daughter of Marie Thomas), Martha’s Vineyard, 248
161 Martin, Benjamin, Philsophical Grammar,
Magellan, 213 546
Maghrib, 190, 192 Martin, Frederick, The History of Lloyd’s
Maghrib, al-Aqsa-al- (the farthest West), and of Marine Insurance in Great
188 Britain, 519
Maghrib, Bahr al- (western sea, Atlantic), Martineau, Harriet, 398–399
191 Martinican, 165
Maghribi, 195 Martinique, 152–153, 162, 164–165, 255,
Magreb, 414 389, 609–611, 627, 656, 661
Mahomet, 384 Martire, d’Anghiera, Pietro, 18
Mahometan (Muslim) 379–380, 382–383 Marx, Karl, 574
Maianjor, 219 Maryland, 26, 336–337, 350–351, 357, 360,
Main (river), 123 394–395, 397, 399–401, 406–407,
Makandal, 227 446, 480–481; as to Catholics, 395,
Malaspina, Alejandro, 42–44 403–405, 408; as to Assembly and
Malaysia, 208–209. See also Island Delegates, 395; as to Lower House
Southeast Asia proposing Act of 1704 be repealed to
689
– index –
defer to Act of Parliament with a Menier, Sr., 1637

Provision to prevent the Growth of Menschendiebe (recruiter), 119
Popery, 405–406–407; as to Upper Mercer (ship), retaken by African King (ship)
House blocking the measure, 407 Merchant Shipping Act of 1823, 139
Maryland Constitution, 286 merchants mappe of commerce, The
Maryland Farmer, 287, 290 (Roberts), 621
Maryland Gazette, 408 Mercier, Henri de la Riviere, 653
Maryland Historical Society, 633 Mercier, Louis Sebastien, 658
Marylandian, 406 Mercier, Pierre Pau de la Riviere, 661
Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, mesalliances, 152–153, 161
399 Mesoamerica, 45, 80–81, 91
Mary Martin (ship), 173 Mesoamericans, 82, 91
Mascarene Islands, 109 Mestizos, 85, 88–89, 92, 329–330
Mascarenes, 107 Metacom (aka King Philip), 248
Mass, 330, 333, 404 Methodism, 359–360
Massachusetts, 179, 248, 274, 351, 379, Methodist(s), 355, 357, 359–360
382, 400, 474, 478–481 Metternich, Clemens, 117
Massachusetts Bay, 349, 352, 381, 451 Mexica, 80–81, 83, 249, 377
Massachusetts Bay Company, 445, 549 Mexica empire, 80–81, 83
Massachusetts Constitution, 292 Mexican Inquisition, 380, 422
Mason, Charles, 365, 399 Mexicans, 271
Masudi-al, 376 Mexico, 14, 45, 79, 82–83, 86, 88, 252, 271,
Mataindios (slayer of native Americans), 379 322, 324, 380, 389, 484, 548, 634
Matamoros (Muslim slayer), 379 Mexico City, 332
Matar, Nabil (historian) 378 Mezqueta, Abraham Bueno de, 368
Mather, Cotton, The Christian Philosopher, Michel, Jacob, 157
381–382 Micronesia, 208–209, 213, 219
Maupeou revolution, 656 mid-Atlantic, 573
Mauretania, 190, 380 mid-Atlantic Islands, 66–67, 69
Maurus or moro, 380 Mid-Atlantic ridge, 56
Maurits, Johan, Governor, 478. See also Middle Ages, 265, 473
Nassau Middleburg, 474, 548
Mauritius, 103 Middle Colonies, 23
Maya, 91 Middle East, 390, 547, 563
Mayer (Meyer), Johann Ludwig, 124 Middle Passage 138, 387, 450, 601,
Mayne & Poyn v. De Gozi, 514 605–606, 612
McClellan, James III, The Black Jacobins, 233 migration, 117–119; as to emigration,
McCormick’s Virginia Reaper, 587 119–121; as to immigration, 121–125
Measuring the hazards of the Atlantic slave Mikve Israel Synagogue, 368
trade (Inikori), 522 militia controversy, 283
Medici, 473 Militia Ordnance, 283
Mediterranean (nations), 61, 65, 191, 193, Mill, James, 584
195, 197–198, 265, 414, 418–419, Milton, John, 558; as to Paradise Lost,
517–518, 547–548 546–547
Mediterranean Islands, 269 Minas Geras, 252
Mediterranean Sea, 133, 176, 191, 195, 207, Misselden, Edward, 558
212, 378–379, 381, 539 missionaries, 36; as being students, 36; as
Melanesia, 208–209, 213 being teachers, 36; as being critics, 36
Melanesians, 220 Mississippi, 387
Melville, Herman, 131, 145; as to Billy Mississippi Bubble, 457, 459, 467
Budd, 131; as to Moby Dick, 131 Mississippi Company, 462, 626–627
690
– index –
Mizrachi, 414 Morice, Humphrey, 450

Moby Dick (Melville), 131 morisca, 380
Mociño, José Mariano, 45 moriscos, 191–193, 255, 377, 380
Moctezuma, 80, 88, 90, 247, 271. See also Mormons, 361
Cortes, don Martin Moctezuma Mormonism, 361
Nezahualtecolotzin Moroccanists, 189
Mogador, 197. See also Essaouira Moroccan Jews, 196
Mohawk (language), 353 Moroccan(s), 187, 189, 377, 387
Mohawks, 353 Morocco, 172–174, 176–177, 180–181,
Mohlen, Jorgen Thor, 477 188–190–198, 381, 387, 448
Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin), Le Festin Moros (Muslim slave), 85
de Pierre, 627 Morrison, James, 584
Molokai, 219–220 Mosley, Joseph, Fr. 404
Monarquia Indiana (Torquemada), 41 Mosquito Coast, 549
money, paper, 472–474, 476–485 mortgages, 476
Mongin, Father, 15 Mozambique, 106
Mongols, 83 Mozart, 117
monograph myopia, 21 MPs (Parliament), 393
Monroe Doctrine, 276 Muhammad (Prophet), 380, 382,
Monsieur Colbert’s Ghost (anon), 624 Muhammad, Sidi b. Abd Allah 195, 197
Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 465 mulatos, 92
Montesquieu, Baron de, 229–230, 239, 658, mullatta, 380
618–619, 636; as to L’Esprit des Lois; mulatres, 154–165
Pensees, 230, 641, 643; as to Muley Ishmael, 180
Considerations on the Greatness of the Mun, Thomas, 558
Romans and their Decline, 643 Munoz, Juan Bautista, Archivo General de
Montilla, 86 Indias, 46; Historia del Neuvo
Montreal, 451 Mundo, 46
Montserrat, 365, 541 Munster (Ireland), 397
Moore, Francis, Travels, 546 Murua, Martin de, 41. See also Peru
Moor(s), 193, 325, 365, 380, 384, 387, 601 Musée de Paris, 657
Mopox, Count of, 45 Muscovy or Russia Company (chartered
Moravia, 125 1555), 444, 536
Moravianism, 358 Museo Arqueológico Nacional, 48
Moravians, 355, 357, 359 Museo de America, 48
Moreau, Mederic Louis-Elie de Saint-Mery, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, 48
653, 655–659; as to Description Museo Nacional de Etnologia, 48. See also
topographique. physique, civile, Velasco, Gonzales, director
politique et historique de la partie muskrat, 13
francais de l’isle Saint Dominque, Muslim(s), 192, 197, 247, 254, 365,
655–656; as to Loix et constitutions 376–377, 381, 383–384, 386–390,
des colonies francoises de l’Amerique 423, 427–428
sous le Vent, 655–656 Muslim Mediterranean, 193, 378
Morel, Pedro de Santa Cruz, 300–302, Mussulman, or Mussulmen, 380
311–314 Muthu, Sankar, 228, 230–231
More Than a Living (Lieber), 215 Mutis, José Celestino, 45
Morgan, Philip, 2, 55, 600; Atlantic History:
A Critical Appraisal, 2; as to Oxford Nadau and Marin, Monsieurs (lawyers),
History of the Atlantic World, 3; as to (Code Noir), 162
The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic Nafi, Uqbab, 188
World, 533 Nahuas (of Mexico), 79, 81
691
– index –
Nahuatl (language), 41, 89 New England Company, 352–353

Napoleon, 134, 136, 265, 275, 483, 612 New Englanders, 14, 23, 69, 349
Napoleonic Wars, 100, 275, 485, 521–522, New England Indians, 353
581–582 Newfoundland, 57–58, 60–64, 67–71, 173,
Narragansett Indians, 249 178, 212, 264–266, 321
Narvaez, Panfilo de, 332 New France, 20, 23, 327, 333, 339–340,
Natchez, 386 562–563
National Assembly (France), 236 New Granada, 483, 654
National Debt (Britain), 450, 457, 462 New Guinea, 209–210
National School of Design in Birmingham, New Hampshire, 394, 480; as to
573, 584 Constitution, 286
Native American Indians, 79–80, 84, 238, New Holland, 353, 421
247–250, 265, 271–273, 276, 327, New Jersey, 395, 480, 640
352, 379, 389, 452, 600, 609, 653 New Jerusalem, 361
Native American Protestants, 359 New Laws of 1542 (Native slavery ban), 85
Native North Americans, 15, 17, 351, 377, Newman, Henry (cleric), 123
599, 600–601, 610 New Mexico, 82, 271, 377, 379
Native Peoples of Americas: Arawak, 21, New Netherland(s), 17, 20, 26, 249–250,
Choctaw, 21–22; Iroquois,13; 267, 272, 274, 349, 421, 533, 535,
Patuxent 26; Raritan, 26 562
Nassau. See Maurits New Orleans, 386, 606
Navigation Acts, 367, 550, 558, 580, 587 Newport, 142, 365, 367, 371
Neale, James, Fordyce and Down, 491–498 Newport, Christopher 247, 537
Neapolitan Enlightenment, 650 New South Africa, 102
Near Oceania, 209. See also Oceania New Spain, 45, 83, 85, 88–89, 312, 324,
negociante, Il (Gio-Domenico), 621 332–333, 422, 562, 654
Negroes, 601–602, 605 New Sweden, 120
Negro Seamen Act, 138–139 New System of Modern Geography
Nemours, Pierre Samuel Dupont de, 653 (Guthrie), 546
Neolithic Revolution, 17; as to effect of Newton, Isaac, 467
pathogens on animals, people and Newtonian Enlightenment, 558
fauna, 5–6 New York, 23, 142, 178–179, 350, 357,
Neo-Reconquista, 192 365, 367–369, 371, 393, 398–399,
Netherlands, 60–62, 65, 68, 247, 348–349, 480, 583, 644, 657
351, 357, 364, 367, 425, 543, New York City (Gotham) 398, 573–574,
555–556, 558–559, 561 599–600, 612
Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (Ayala), New York Crystal Palace Exhibition of
91–92 1853, 573, 588
Nueva Granada, 45 New Yorkers, 399
Nevis, 364–365, 367–369, 541 New World, 35–37, 40, 42, 46–47, 49–51,
Nevisians, 369 85–86, 124, 151, 187, 191–194,
Nevis’s Naval Office records, 369 196–198, 250, 322, 324, 327–329,
New Amsterdam, 196, 274, 381, 421–422, 336, 349, 376–378, 389, 394, 415,
562 419–421, 426–427, 633–634, 639,
New Caledonia, 209, 220 645, 654
New Canaan, 124. See also America New Zealand, 3, 209, 563
New Christians, 325, 548 Nightingale v. Bridges (Admiralty case
New Continent, 41, 48 1684), 448
New England, 22, 58, 60, 67–68, 71, 120, Nimes (temple), 633
178, 248–249, 268, 272–273, 349– Nine Years’ War, 283, 286, 478
352, 369, 406, 478, 481, 522, 562, 573 Nipinoukje and Pipinouke (fable), 328
692
– index –
Noah, 427 northern Europe, 60, 62, 67, 144, 272, 548
‘No King, No Popery’ (Patriots cry, northern Europeans, 304
American Revolution), 394 Northern Hemisphere, 210
non-Catholics, 364 Northern Morocco, 190
non-English, 394 northern South America, 85
non-Europeans, 155–156, 165 northern Spain, 308
non-Jews, 420 North Pole, 57
non-Muslims, 389 North Sea, 57–58, 62, 64–65, 68, 70–71,
Noom, Reinier, 557 144, 212, 534, 539, 547
Nordland, 71 Norton, George. See John Norton & Sons
Nore, 137 Norton, John, 499
Norfolk, Virginia, 134 Norway, 56, 58, 61, 64, 66, 69, 477, 484
Norgesvoldet, 72 Norwegian, 67
Normandy, 627 Norwegian Deep (ocean trench), 57
Norse, 264 Norwegians, 71
North Africa, 3, 133, 172–173–174, Norwegian Seas, 57
177–182, 190, 192–193, 323, 377, Norwegian Shelf, 57
380–381 Northwest Africa, 84
North African 174 North West Company, 452
North Africans, 93, 182 northwestern Europe, 105
North America, 13, 17–19, 27, 56, 58, 67, Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies
119–121, 123–124, 133, 143, 153, (Madison), 643
193, 212–213, 218, 221, 248, Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson),
272–274, 276, 321, 327, 327–328, 640–642, 655
332–333, 336, 339, 353, 355, 358, Nova Scotia, 69, 267, 273, 360, 404, 480
360–361, 371, 381, 384, 386, 393, Nurnberg, 122
406, 415, 419, 424, 427, 493, 503, Nzinga a Nkuwu, 246, 323. See also Joao I
531, 535, 538, 540–541, 549–551,
562–563, 576, 578, 606, 633–634, Oahu, 218
653–655 Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance, 368
North American colonies, 132, 350 Oberhaupt, 118. See also House of Austria;
North American Enlightenment, 651 King of Bohemia; King of Hungary
North American Great Lakes, 451 Oberösterreich, 117
North American Indians, 353 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 220
North Americans, 378 Observations on the Commerce of the
North America’s animal history, 3–5, 8 American States with Europe and the
North and/or South America, 267, 271, West Indies (Sheffield), 579
275–276, 378 Observations upon Aristotle’s Politicks
North Atlantic, 57, 79, 93, 105, 109–110, (Filmer), 643
212, 218, 264, 268, 471, 531 Oceania, 208–209, 213, 215, 220. See also
North Atlantic current (Gulf Stream), 57–58 Near Oceania; Remote Oceania
North Atlantic, physical characteristics: as to Ocean is a Wilderness: Atlantic Piracy and the
topographic factors, 56–57; as to limits of State Authority, 1688–1856,
oceanographic factors, 56–57; as to The (Guy), 2
ecological factors, 56–57; Office of Assurances, 516–517
North Carolina, 17, 350, 357, 480–481 Official Description and Illustrated
northeast North America, 59, 333 Catalogue. See Great Exhibition of
Northeastern Brazil, 82–83, 422 1851
northeastern South America, 83 O’Gorman, Edmundo, The Invention of
northern Africa, 246 America, 89
northern Balkans, 120 Ohio, 272
693
– index –
Old and New East Indies Companies, 449 packet service, 143
Old Calabar, 523 Pagan, 383
Old World, 35, 37, 155, 193, 198, 255, 394, Paine, Thomas, 652–653
408 Palatines, 349
Old World and the New, The (Elliott), 89 Palau Islands, 209, 219
O’Leary, Arthur (Franciscan priest), 397 Palenque (Mayan ruins), 46
Ontario, 353 Palmer, Robert, 661
Opechancanough, 541 Panama, 211, 389, 450
Operation Moses, 414 Padilla, Beatriz de, 380
Oran, 177 Papal Bull of 1493, 271
Orange, Carlos de, 310 Papal Bull of 1508, 324
Oraurau-feis, 219. See also Manila Bank Papers of instructions for the Parliamentary
Orden de San Francisco de Neuva Espana meeting after the revolution (Erle),
(Torquemada), 41 291
Orders in Council (Britain), 134 Papillon, Thomas (MP), 365
Ordinance of November 1704: as to papists, 386, 405
constraints on administrators of the Paradise Lost (Milton), 546
French, 162 Paraguay, 657
Ordinance of 1729: as to cabaret Paris, 20, 231, 233–236, 457–459, 461,
regulations, 163 467, 625, 634, 656–658
Origen of Alexander, 384 Parker, Quanah, 83
Origins of Empire, The (Canny), 533 Parlement of Paris, 656
Orinoco (river), 41 Parliament (England), 132, 137, 139, 176,
Orkneys, 71 352, 366, 394, 405–407, 445, 448,
Orrery, Earl of, A Treatise of the art of war, 452, 476–477, 480, 481, 483, 623; as
283 to 1566 action for seizure of Russian
Osborne, Sir Edward, 172 bound cargoes), 444
Osnabrück Instrument of Peace, 122 Parliamentary Committee, 584
Ottoman Empire, 120, 177, 193, 196, 197, Parliament’s Currency Act of 1751, 481
548 Parliaments of Scotland, 441; as to Act for
Ottomans, 378–379 Encouraging of Forraigne Trade,
Our Sea of Islands (Hau’ofa), 214–215 1693, 441
Ovid, 633–634 Parnell, Sir Henry, 584
Oviedo, Gonzales Fernandez (cronista de Patagones, 41
Indies), 39, 48: as to Historia general y Patagonia, 80, 84
natural de las Indias, 39; as to Sumario Pater Noster and Ave Maria, 332
de la natural historia de las Indias, 39 Paths to Emancipation: Jews, States and
Oxford, 357 Citizenship (Birnbaum and
Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, Katznelson), 418
The (Canny and Morgan), 3, 533 Patoulet, Jean Baptiste, 159
Patriots (American revolution), 393–394,
Pacific Coast, 82 397–400, 578
Pacific Islands, 207–208 Paul III, pope, 338
Pacific Islanders, 209, 212, 214, 215, Paullu Inca, 82
219–221, 547 Pavon, Joseph, 45
Pacific Ocean, 207–214, 216, 218–219, 393 Pawnees, 83
Pacific Oceanic, 42 peaceable militia, The (anonymous), 283
Pacific (region), 3, 120, 213 Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, 308. See also
Pacific Rim, 144, 220 Franco-Dutch War
Pagden, Anthony, European Encounters Pearson, David, 212
with the New World, 89 Pedro, king (Kongo), 336
694
– index –
Peel, Sir Robert, 584 Pitt, Joseph, A True and faithful Account of
Pelleprat, Pierre, 154–155 the Religion and manners of the
Penal laws of England, 406 Mahommetans, 177
Penal Period, 406 Pitt the Younger (Prime Minister), 579
Penn (family), 399 Pizzaro, 82, 90
Penn, William, 23, 415 Plantation Act (Parliament), 368
Pennsylvania, 119, 393, 399, 404, 480, 640 Pleistocene Ice Age, 13; animals and fauna
Pennsylvania Constitution, 292 before and after, 2, 11
Pennsylvanian Anti-Federalists, The Pliny the Elder, 151
Deliberator, 291 Plymouth Colony, 349
Pensees (Baron de Montesquieu), 230 Plymouth, Mayor of, 174
Penzance, 176 Pocahontas, 379
Perez, Juana, 384 Pococke, Edward (Arabic first chair at
Perfect Merchant, The (Le parfait negociant, Oxford), 382
ou Instruction generale pour ce qui Pohnpei, 210
regarde le commerce des marchandises Pointe-Noire, 157, 159, 161
de France et des pays etrangers) Political Economy Club, 584
(Savary), 619–621, 623, 625 Politics I (Aristotle) 642
Pernambuco, Brazil, 478 Polo, Marco, 484
Peru, 41, 45, 82, 84–86, 88, 90, 92, 93, 271, Polybius, 643
332, 389, 548, 654. See also Ayala Polynesia, 208–209
and Murua, 41 Polyverel, 237
Petit, Giles, 160–161 Pongau, 122
Phaedon (slave), 642 Pope, 264, 384, 406
Phaedrus (slave), 642 Popery, 408
Phelps, Thomas, 172 popish army, 282, 287
Phelypeaux, Governor, 610. See also Binture Port-de-Paix, 312
Phénomène Savary, 621–622, 628 Port Elizabeth, 109
Philippines, 49, 209, 335 Porter, Captain David ,134
Phillips, Captain Thomas, 603–604. See also Port Jew(s), 419–420
Hannibal Port Jews: Jewish Communities in
Philip II, king, 193 Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading
Pichardo, Antonio se Vinuesa, 300–301, Centers, 1550–1950, 419 (John Carter
311–312 Brown Library Conference Paper
Philadelphia, 371, 381, 397, 587, 653, 1997)
655–657 Portobelo, 625
Philadelphia Convention, 289 Port of London Society, 140. See also British
Philadelphienis, 284, 360, 371 Sailor’s Society
Philsophical Grammar (Martin), 546 Port Royal (Barbados), 365, 502
Phydiocrats, 662 Portugal, 62–63, 192, 194, 254, 267,
Picon, Molly (film star), 424 275–276, 326, 348, 352, 421, 478,
Pimentel, Rodrigo, 305 483–484, 532, 538, 557, 563, 654
Pina, José de, 312–313 Portuguese, 60, 82, 84, 103, 191–192,
Pinheiro, Isaac (ancestor of Moses), 368; as 194–195, 264–265, 269, 282,
to wife Esther, 368–369; as to father 321–322, 329, 377, 427, 447,
Abraham and sisters Rachel and Sarah 542–543, 548, 551, 553, 563
Goma, 369 Portuguese Atlantic, 217, 255
Pinheiro, Moses, a Jew, 364; as to wife Portuguese Brazil, 85
Lunah, 370; See also Black Rock Pond Portuguese Crown, 246, 323, 548–549
Pinta and Nina (ships), 377 Portuguese East Indies, 103
pirate republic (Salé), 176 Portuguese Empire, 384, 531, 533, 536, 654
695
– index –
Portuguese littoral, 61 Providence Island Company, 549

Postl, Karl (aka Charles Sealsfield), 125 Provincial Council of Baltimore, 328
Post-Revolutionary America, 644 Prussia, 117, 122, 349
Potomac River, 13 pseudo-Christian, 38
Powhatan, 247 Pueblo Indians, 192
Pragmatic Sanction, 120 Puerto Rico, 49, 484, 542
Prague, 126, 421 Puluwat, 219
Praying Indians, 352 Puluwatese, 219
Preliminary Discourse (Sale), 383 Puritan (forbidden Maryland epithet), 401
Presbyterians, 349, 351, 371; as to actions Puritans, 26, 349, 352
of Lowland Scottish, 352 Pursburg (ship), 123
Price, Richard, 653
Prideaux, Humphrey, 383; as to The True Quakers, 350–351, 357, 359, 370–372; as
Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d to founder Fox, 355
in the Life of Mahomet, 381 Quaker Pennsylvania, 407
Priestly, Joseph, 653, 655–656 Quasi War, 581
Prince Among Slaves (Alford), 387 Quauhquecholteca, 91
Prince George County (Maryland) 398 Quebec, 20, 394, 478, 480, 626; as to fur
Prince of Wales (ship), 123 trade, 451–453; as to Catholic
Prince, Mary, 601, 610 consolidation, 327
Privy Council, 174–5, 514, 516–517, 521, 580 Queen (British), 548
Probanza de Meritos, (accreditation of rights Queensland, 220
system). See Felipe II Qur’an, 381–383, 387, 389
proletarianization, 144 Quetzalcoatl, 322
Propaganda Fide, 326, 338
Prophet, The, 380, 382–384 race, 151–153
Protestant anti-Catholicism, 322 racist Enlightenment, 229; See also Buffon,
Protestant Atlantic, 347–349, 351, 355, Count de
357–358, 361 Radical Enlightenment, 650, 661
Protestant Atlantic colonies, 348–350, Raimond, Julien, 653
358–359 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 445, 541
Protestant British, 327, 337 Rall, Hieronymus Cristani von (chancellor),
Protestant Christians, 382 122
Protestant Christianity, 3, 355 Randolph, Edmund, 284
Protestant English, 458 Rapanui (Easter Island), 207
Protestant Enlightenment, 650 Raynal, Abbe, 227, 232, 653; as to
Protestant Episcopal Church, 360. See also L’Histoire des dues Indes, 227
Church of England Real Gabinete de Historia Natural, 45
Protestant Huguenots, 561 (Davila). See also Pedro Franco
Protestantism, 122, 286, 327, 347–349, 351, Davila, Director
353–355, 357, 359–361, 370 Real Jardin Botanico, 48–49,
Protestant Peasants Revolt, 122 Recife, 364
Protestant Reformation, 272 Reck, Baron Philipp Georg Friedrich von, 123
Protestant(s), 117, 122–123, 247, 272, 290, Reconquista, 192, 246, 254, 272, 379
327, 336, 339, 348–353, 357, 359–361, Red Atlantic, 79
381, 384, 386, 399, 403–404, 427 Reddy, William; as to Social Life of Things:
Protten, Christian 358 Commodities in a Cultural
Protten, Rebecca, 358 Perspective, 625
Providence, 645 Rederij, 554
Providence Colony, 384 Red Sea, 378
Providence Island, 348, 549 Red Sea Pirates, 178
696
– index –
Reducciones (closing missionary led Catholic Robben Island, 104

settlements), 325 Roberts, Lewis, The merchants mappe of
Reformation, 61, 122, 335, 340, 348, 417 commerce, 621
Reformations, 327–328, 360 Robertson, Robert Reverend, 365
Reformers, 348 Robertson, William, History of America, 46
reformism: as applied to mariners, 139–142; Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 382
as applied to their working wives, 141 Robles, Andres de, 309
Regensburg, 122. See also Holy Roman Robles, Jeronimo de, 309–311
Imperial Diet Rochefort, de, 155–156
Regulating Acts of 1772, 491–492 Roman Catholic Church, 384
Regulations between 1711–1715: as to Roman Catholicism, 335, 611
prevention of slaves from selling Roman empire, 246
commodities, 164 Romanism and rebellion (Protestant fears,
Regulation of August 1711, 16; as to slaves Pre-American Revolutionary War),
right to buy freedom, 164, 398
Regulation of 1749: as to right to work for Romans, 643
almost free people, 164 Rome, 322–324, 326, 338, 406, 518, 636,
Regulation of 1667, 15; as to powers of 640, 643–645
Gouverneur General and the Rothschilds (Bank), 562
Intendant, 162 Rotterdam, 123, 622
Reflexions sur l’esclavage des Negres, Roundhead (forbidden Maryland epithet), 401
Marquis de Condorcet, 231 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30, 658
Relacion geografica or Descripcion de la Ross, Alexander, 381–382
cuidad y provincia de Tlaxcala, Royal Academy, 584–585
(Guevara), 88 Royal African Company (RAC), 444,
Remote Oceania, 209, 212, 213. See also 448–454, 460–461, 463, 603
Oceania Royal Bank of Scotland, 480, 495
Renaissance, 421 Royalist, 446
Rensselaerwijck, 22 Royal Exchange Assurance, 519, 525
Repartimiento system, 269 Royal Mint, 476–477
republic, 284 Royal Navy, 132, 134, 137, 139, 267, 448,
Republicanism, 398 460–461, 463, 465; as to Lord
Republic of Letters, 654, 658 Admiral, James, Duke of York, 448
Republic of Texas, 484 Royal Society of London, 478, 563
Requerimiento, 247–248 Rule Britannia, 286
Resolution (ship), 176 Rupert’s Land (fur trade), 451
Restoration, 177, 179–180, 284, 623 Rush, Benjamin, 653
Revelation, book of, 381 Russia, 20, 58, 64, 69, 424, 451, 461, 480,
Revolution of 1688, 448 564
Revolutionary War, 287, 398–399, 640 Russian Empire, 627
Revue de Histoire Economique et Social Ruiz, Hipolito, 45
(Hauser), 619 Ruyter, Michael de, 447
Rezio, Levy, 367
Rhine (river), 123 Sabbath, 600
Rhode Island, 178, 351, 357, 384, 386, Sabre, Angeline, 163
480–481 Sa’di Dynasty, 194–196
Ricardo, David, 584 Safi, 190
Richelieu, Cardinal, 327 Sahagun, Bernardino de, Historia General de
Richmond, 633 las Cosas de la Nueva Espana, 6–7;
Riebeeck, Jan van, 104 Florentine Codex, 89–90
Roanoke, 266, 539, 541 Sahara, 196
697
– index –
Saharan, 195 & de Rotterdam, 625; as to Du

Saharan Africa, 322–323 Commerce d’Hollande & de Flandre,
Sailors’ rights, 135 622; as to Du Commerce d’Angleterre,
Saint-Mery, Moreau de, 233, 655 d’Ireland, & d’Ecosse, 622, 625; as to
Sala-Molins, Louis, 229–232, 236, Compagnie francaise des Indes
Salé (city), 174, 176, 178–180 occidentals, 626; as to Le dictionnaire
Sale, George (lawyer and translator), 382; as universel du commerce, 621, 625–626
to Preliminary Discourse, 383; as to Savi (Hueda), 466
half a mussulman, 383 Savory, Louis-Philemon, 625–627
Salee, Anthony Jansen van (aka Anthony Savoy, 123
‘the Turk’), 381 Savoyen, Eugene von (prince), 117
Salem, 142 Saxony, 393
Salisbury, Lord, 174 Scaleby Castle (ship), 527
salt, 61–62 Scandinavia, 60, 67–68, 477
Salzburg, 117–118, 122 Scandinavian monarchies, 627
Salzburger Protestants, 123 Scandinavians, 71
Salzburgers, 118, 122–124, 349, 361 Schaitberger, Josef, 122
Samuel (ship), 369 Schaff, Philip, Reverend, 126
San Antonio, Texas, 378 Scheme of Trade, 625
Sancho, Ignatius, 660 School of Design in London, 586
San Domingo, 549 Schopf, Johann David, 125
Sanchez, Francisco (mayor), 307 Schorsch, Jonathan, 415
San Juan, 548 Schwabenziige and Sachsenganger, 117. See
San Lorenzo de los Minas, 308 also Hungary
Santa Domingo, 300–302, 304–308, Schwarzach, 122
310–314 Scotian Shelf, 57, 69
Santa Domingo (river), 41 Scotland, 56, 68, 178, 272–273, 357, 441,
Santa Domingo de Talavera de la Reina 471, 479–480, 483, 485, 491–492,
(monastery), 88 499, 503, 542, 622, 651
Sandys, George, 633–634 Scots, 82, 176, 365–366, 493, 499
Santiago (Patron saint of Reconquista), 379 Scots Magazine, 497
Santiago de los Caballeros, 300–302, Scottish Enlightenment, 650
306–307, 309–312 Scottish Lowlanders, 349
Sao Salvador, 323, 326, 336 Scottish Parliament, 443, 476
Sao Tome, 216, 255, 324–325, 335 Scottish Society for Promoting Christian
Sarni, 120 Knowledge, 352. See also Presbyterian
Saunders, Thomas, 172 seafaring, 142–145
Saut Reef (Enderby bank), 219 Sealsfield, Charles (formerly Karl Postl), 125
sauvage, 155, 156 , 161 Seamen’s Acts, 138
Savannah, 21, 123, 365, 371 Sebastian, San, 514
Savannah River, 123, 609 Second Amendment, 282, 291–293
Savary, Jacques, 619–621, 623–624, Second Battle of Finisterre, The, 4 October
627–628; as to Perfect Merchant, The 1747 (Serres), 558–559
(Le parfait negociant, ou Instruction Second Great Awakening, 140
generale pour ce qui regarde le Second Maroon War, 609
commerce des marchandises de France Second Part of the Institute of the Lawes of
et des pays etrangers), 619; as to La England (Coke), 365
Vie de Monsieur Savary (preface later Second Treatise (Locke), 290
edition), 621 Second Vatican Council, 1965 Dignitatis
Savary, Jacques des, Bruslons, 621–622, Humanae, 394
624–627; as to Banques d’Amsterdam Sedgwick, Robert, 274
698
– index –
Seelenverkaufer (recruiter), 119 slave punishments, 599–607

Seguier, 619 slave rebellion in New York of 1712,
Seint Anne of London (ship), 514. See also 599–600
Ferrantyn slave rebellions, 600, 604–605
Select Committee, 586 slave resistance, 601–613
Select Committee on Aborigines, 1835, 110 slave revolt of 1737, 163
Semite, 366 slave revolt of 1791 (Haiti), 389, 612–613
Senate (U.S.), 36 slave revolts, 600–608
Senegal Adventurers, 445 slave(s): racial, 153–165, 173, 179, 181–183,
Senegambia, 378, 447 599–601, 613; enslaved by capture by
Sensbach, Jon, 358 Barbary States of North Africa,
Sephardi, 414, 419–420 172–183:
Sephardim, 371, 414, 417 slave runaways, 606–610; as to Native
Sermons, 358 Americans, 610
Serpent deities, 328 slave trading; as to asiento, 457, 459,
Serres, Dominic, The Second Battle of 460–461, 466, 550, 603–607
Finisterrer, 4 October 1747, 558–559 slavery abolition; as to Brazil, 600; as to
Serville, Louis, 165 Haiti 612–613
Sesse, Martin de y Lacasta, 45 slavery, ancient, 642
Seven Cities of Gold, 377 slavery, 230–238, 245, 250–255, 601–613
Seven Years’ War, 132, 275, 452, 481, 493, Sloane, Hans, 653, 663
496, 554, 562, 576, 627 Smith, Adam, 661; as to An Inquiry into the
1764 Currency Act, 481 Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Sevilla (Seville), 46, 84, 85, 89, 548, Nations, 559, 579; as to The Theory
551–552 of Moral Sentiments, 575; as to
Shaftesbury, Lord, 575 Wealth of Nations, 590, 618; as to
Shamm, Carole, The Creation of the British Wealth of Nations Book II, 492–493,
Atlantic World, 533 496, 581
Sheffield Independent, The, 586 Smith, C., 586
Sheffield Iron Foundry, 585 Smith, Captain John, 21, 379
Sheffield, Lord, Observations on the Smith, John Jobson, 585. See also Sheffield
Commerce of the American States Iron Foundry
with Europe and the West Indies, Smith, Samuel, Rev., 404
579–580 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 653
Shelbourne, Prime Minister Lord, 579 Smith, William, Rector; as to St. John’s Fig
Shenandoah Valley, 23 Tree, Charles Town, Nevis, 364, 368
Shetlanders, 66 Smollett, Tobias, 577–578
Shetlands, 66–67, 71 Smythe, John, 514, 518
Siebenburgen, 117 Soares, Manuel Baptista, Bishop, 326
Sicily, 278 Social Life of Things: Commodities in a
Siege of Tenochtitlan, 249 Cultural Perspective (Reddy), 625
Siege of Vienna, 379 Sociedad Antropologica Espanola, edited
Sierra Leone, 139, 324, 360, 378, 445 publications, Revista de Antropologia
Silva, Joaquim José da, 654 and Antropologia moderna (Velasco),
Silva, Lourenco da, 326, 338 19
Silva, Manuel Galvao da, 654 Society of Arts, 576
Simitiere, Pierre Eugene du (engraver of U.S. Society of Friends, 382
seal), 645 Society of Jesus in Europe. See John
Simpson, Baird & Co., 501 Carrollton
1601 Act, 516 Society for Jewish Culture and History, 416;
1648 Osnabrück Peace Treaty, 122 as to promoter Leopold Zunz, 416
699
– index –
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Spaniard(s), 36, 41, 46, 48, 51, 81–82, 86,
(SPCK), 123 90–92, 247–249, 332, 377, 609
Society Royale des Science et des Arts du Spanish (language), 36, 89
Cap Francois, 657 Spanish, 80, 83, 89–92, 177, 195, 213, 237,
Socinian Enlightenment, 650 247, 249–250, 266–268, 271–272,
Solomon, 414 275, 282, 309, 333, 348, 379, 381,
Solomon, Haym, 371 427, 466, 543, 548, 562, 609
Solomon Islands, 209, 215 Spanish America, 84, 255, 379–380, 443,
Somers, Lord, 283 457, 539, 551, 638, 653–654
Somerset, 178 Spanish Americanism, 42, 48, 51
Songhay Empire, 187 Spanish Armada, 445
Son of Liberty, 288 Spanish Atlantic, 255, 377, 533, 536–537
Sonthonax, Leger Felicite, 237 Spanish Catholics, 365
Sorkin, David, 419–420 Spanish Crown, 47, 51, 88–89, 91, 246–247,
South (Colonial America), 397 302, 305, 308–310, 312, 314, 324,
South Africa, 100–102, 105, 107–108, 485 450, 549, 556–557
South America, 213, 321, 326, 330, 333, Spanish Empire, 40, 275, 384, 531, 533,
390, 466, 538–539, 542, 551, 563, 536, 661
606 Spanish Florida, 276
South Asia, 144 Spanish Inquisition, 324
South Atlantic, 79–80, 90, 100, 212 Spanish Islamic crops, 378
South Carolina, 22, 123, 137–138, 266, Spanish Island Slaves, 13
350, 378, 480. See also Charleston. Spanish Jesuits, 325
South Carolinians, 609 Spanish Main, 450, 522
south eastern North America, 378 Spanish Mexico, 330
Southeast Pacific, 207 Spanish New World, 377, 380
Southel, Seth (governor), 178 Spanish science (Levenda Negrae), 35
southern Africa, 100–106, 107–110 Spanish Town (Barbados), 365, 609
southern African Highveld, 101. See also Spate, Oskar, 214
hinterland SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian
southern Europe, 67, 517 Knowledge), 350, 358. See also Bray
southern Greenland, 264 Spectator, The, 589
South Sea Company (SSC), 443–444, Speightstown (Barbados), 365–366
450–451, 453–454, 457, 460, SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
462–467 in Foreign Parts), 350, 355, 358. See also
South Pacific, 213, Bray
South Sea Bubble, 450, 457, 459–460, Spithead, 137
464–468, 558 Spread, John, 522
South Seas, 464 Springfield, Massachusetts, 383
Sovereign Council (New France), 327 Staatsgrundgesetz (law of 1967 granting the
Sovereign Council of Guadeloupe, 159–160 right to emigrate), 121
Sovereignty and Liberty of the States, 289 St. Amand, 157
Soyo, 324 Stamp Act of 1765, 407
Spain, 35, 41, 47–50, 63, 84–86, 88, 187, Stamp Act Riots, 407–408
188, 192, 194, 196, 254–255, St. Anna Church (in Augsburg), 123
266–267, 272, 275, 304, 308, 310, St. Anne, 332
312, 314, 324–326, 337, 348, 352, St. Anthony (vision), 336
368, 378, 400, 413, 453, 457, 460, Staten Island, 26
465, 466, 471, 483–484, 517, 532, Statute of Artificers, 252
534–539, 541–543, 548, 563, 625. St. Augustine, 308
See also Iberia St. Catherine (ship), 422
700
– index –
St. Christopher, 152, 54 Surinam, 228, 274, 367, 421, 424, 426, 481
St. Domingue, 137, 153, 165, 228, 231–237, Sutcliffe, Adam, 413–415
255, 611–612, 626, 653–657, Swahili coast, 106
659–660; as to Cercle des Sweden, 64–65, 120, 348, 393, 480; as to
Philadelphes, 657 Oregund iron, 461
Steiermark, 117, 123 Swedish East India Company, 549
Stern, Philip, British Asia and the British Swellem, Asser Levy van, 421–422
Atlantic, 533 Swift, Jonathan, 464; as to A Discourse of
Stevens, James Wilson, 172 the Contests and Dissentions Between
St. Francois, 161, 163–165 the Nobles and the Commons in
St. Helena, 103, 109, 481 Athens and Rome, 643
Still Life with Moor and Porcelain Vessels Swiss Enlightenment, 650
(van Streek), 557 Switzerland, 349
St. Inigoes Manor (Maryland), 397 Sydney, 220
St. James (vision), by Joao I Syncretic Catholicism, 328, 332, 335; as to
St. James, London, 123 Kongolese, 336
St. John, Henry, 283
St. John’s Fig Tree, 364. See also Smith, Ta (Tongan concept), 221
William Table Bay, 100, 103–104, 109
St. Kitts, 337, 365, 368, 525 Table Mountain, 104. See also Adamastor
St. Lawrence Valley, 272 Tagus river, 190
St. Malo, 522 Tahitian(s), 217–218, 220
St. Mary’s (Bedford), 365 Tahuantinsuyu, 82
St. Mary’s (Maryland), 397 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 655
St. Mary’s Church (German) 123. See also Tamaha, 218
London Tamerlan (slave named for Tamberlane),
St. Mary’s County, 397, 405 389
St. Mary’s County Militia, 397 Tamony (pseudonymous author), 6
St. Michael’s Mount, 176 Tampa, 377
Story, Joseph, 291–292; Commentaries on Tangier, 194, 196
the Constitution, 291 Tantalus, 428
St. Pierre, 69 Tashfin, Ali b. Yusuf b., 190
Strait(s) of Gibraltar, 56, 190–191, 195–196 Taussig, Michael, 249–250
Streek, Jurriaen van, Still Life with Moor Tenocha, 90
and Porcelain Vessels, 557 Tenochtitlan 80–81, 88–91. See also Triple
St. Thomas, 322, 358 Alliance
Stuarts, 283 Ten-Percent Act, 449
Stuyvesant, Peter, 415 Terence (slave), 642
St. Vincent, 154, 158 Tetuan, 197
Suarez, Gomez de Figueroa, 86 Texas, 332, 377
Suarez, Isabel (Chimpu Ocllo, Inca Princess), Texcoco, 81, 88. See also Triple Alliance
86 Thakau Lala (Empty Reef), 212
Suat Reef (Enderby Bank), 220 Thaouira, Francois, and children Charles
sub-Saharan Africa, 198, 265, 414 and Francois, 161
Success of London, 172 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith),
Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias 575
(Oviedo), 39 Third Amendment (U.S. constitution), 288
Superior Council of Guadeloupe, 164 Thirteen Colonies, 560
Superior Council of Martinique, 159, 165 Thirty Years War, 123, 348, 417, 425
Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville Thistlewood, Thomas, 655, 658
(Diderot), 230 Thomas, Marie, mother of Magdeleine, 162
701
– index –
Thornton, Henry, Inquiry on the Paper True Nature of Imposture Fully Display’d in
Credit of Great Britain, 492 the Life of Mahomet, The (Humphrey)
Thoughts on Slavery (Wesley), 360 381
Three Half Moons (ship), 173 Troughton, Thomas, Barbarian Cruelty,
Thucydides, 643 177, 181
Timbuktu, 197 Trouillot, Michel Rolph, 237
Tira de Santa Catarina Ixtepeji, 91 Trustees for Establishing the Colony of
Tlacopan, 88, 91. See also Triple Alliance Georgia in America, 123
Tlatelolco, 88, 90 Tryer, Captain Robert, 523
Tlaxcala, 80, 88 Tunis, 174, 380
Tlaxcala (city in Mexico), 88 Tunisia, 176
Tlaxcalteca, 80, 90 Tupac Amaru, 274
Tobacco Imports (England and Scotland), Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 651, 653, 661
503f Turkey, 414
Toby of London (ship), 173 Turkish Janissaries, 284
Toland, John, 283 Turk, 193, 380
Tomashevsky, film star, 424 Turks, 172, 177–178, 379, 381, 384, 386, 522
Tomil, 220 Twkakwitha, Catherine, 332
Tonga, 209, 216 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 653
Toni Malau (Saint), 336 Typhoon Alley, 221
Tonkawas, 83 typhoons, 210–211, 221
Torquemada, Juan de, Monarquia Indiana: Tyre, 558
Orden de San Francisco de Neuva Tyrolian Defregger valley, 122
Espana, 41
Tortuga, 302, 304, 306, 308–310, 549 Ulster Protestants, 349, 397
Trade and Navigation Acts, 497 Unanue, Hipolito, 653–654
Travels (Moore), 546 Union of South Africa, 100
treatise of the art of war, A (Earl of Orrey), Union, The, 582
283 Unitarian, 655
Treaty of Paris, 268 17 United Kingdom, 443
Treaty of Ryswick, 21, 314 United Provinces, 446, 536, 538–539
Treaty of Tordesillas 1494, 267, 322 United States, 83, 102, 121, 125–126,
Treaty of Utrecht, 451, 453, 461, 465, 523 133–134, 136–137, 139, 141–142,
Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle 144–145, 275–276, 327, 337, 339,
(Berners), 59 360, 365, 371, 376, 383, 387, 390,
trekboers, 101 393, 398, 414–415, 418, 423–424,
Trelawny Town, 609 471, 481–482, 484–485, 501, 526,
Trelawny Town Maroons, 609 546, 563, 573–574, 579–583,
Trenchard, John, 283 587–589, 633–634, 635, 638–639,
Tridentine Church, 326–327 643, 645, 653, 656
Trieste, 120, 420 United States of America, 197, 268, 563
Trinidad, 383 Universidad Central de Madrid 49. See also
Triple Alliance (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Ferrandiz, Manuel Anton
Tlacopan), 81, 88 University of Coimbra, 654
Tripoli, 172, 174, 176, 380, 383 University of Virginia, 655
Trivellato, Francesca, Familiarity of Ural Mountains, 18
Strangers, 425 Urban, Greg, 248, 250
Trois Riviere, 158 Urlsperger, Senior Samuel, 123–124
True and faithful Account of the Religion Ursula Bonadventure (ship), 176
and manners of the Mahommetans, A U.S. Constitution, 418
(Pitt), 177 U.S. Continental Shelf (northeast), 57–58
702
– index –
U.S.S. Chesapeake, 134 Virginia, 22, 26, 178, 252–253, 254, 284,
U.S. South, 137 349, 351, 353, 360, 406, 446, 478,
U.S. Treasury, 481 480–481, 494, 499, 541, 549,
Utrecht, 450 633–634
Utrechtean Enlightenment, 650 Virginia Capitol building, 633, 641
Uzbekistan, 414 Virginia Company, 352, 445, 538, 541, 633
Virginia House of Delegates, 383
Va (Tongan concept) 221 Virginians, 643
Vaca, Alvaro Nunez Cabeza de, 192, 332 Virgin of Guadalupe, 330
vacuum domicilium (vacant land), 248 Virgin Islands, 349
Valencia, Spain, 378 Virgin Mary, 330,
Valette, Jacques, 159 Virgin, The, 325, 336
Valparaiso, 220 Visscher, Matthew, 17
Van Dam, Rip, (governor, New York) 369 Vitalist Enlightenement, 650
Van der Donck, Adriaen, 20 VOC, 100–108. See also Dutch East India
Vanderlint, Jacob, 558 Company
Vane, Sir Henry, 283 Volney, comte de, 653
Van Riebeeck, Jan, 6 Volney, Constantin Francois, 655
Vassall, Samuel, 446 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) 383,
Vat, Jean, 123 657–659;
Vaze, Manuel, 156 Volume of the British Slave Trade 1655–1807,
Velasco, Pedro Gonzalez, Sociedad The (Inikori), 526
Antropologica Espanola, 48, edited Voortrekkers, 101
publications; Antropologia moderna, Vroom, Hendrick, View of the River Ij Near
48; Revista de Antropologia moderna, Amsterdam, 557
48. See also Museo National de
Etnologia Wadi Sous, 191
Venezuela, 389, 483, 538 Wahunsonacock (chief), 247
Venice, 473 Waikiki, 218
Veracruz, 313, 450, 526 Wailau, 219
Vermont, 381 Wales, 178, 485, 522
Versailles, 461 Walker tariff, 587
Vesey, Denmark, 137 Wallace, Davidson & Johnson: as to Joshua
Victorian Britain, and Britons, 574 Johnson, 498
Vie de Monsieur Savary, La (Savary), 621 Wallis, George, 573–575, 588–589
Vienna, 117–119, 125–126 Walpole, 491, 499
Vierge du Bail, La (ship), 165 Waltham System, 394
Vieux Fort, 159 Walton, Izaak, Compleat Angler, 59
View of the City of Richmond from the Wampanoag, 248–249. See also Metacom
Bank of the James River (Latrobe), Warburton, Henry, 584
633 Ward, Sir Patience, 623
View of the River Ij Near Amsterdam War of Austrian Succession, 160, 275, 481
(Vroom), 557 War of 1812, 135–136, 268, 276, 481,
View of the Pool Below London Bridge 581–582
(Atkins), 559 War of Independence, 46, 525, 578, 581, 64
Vigera, Johann Friedrich, 124 War of Jenkins’s Ear, 275, 451
Viking Age, 71 War of the League of Augsburg, 314
Vikings, 264–265 War of the Polish Succession, 274
Vilcabamba, 82–83 War of the Spanish Succession, 21, 417, 443,
violence, 245, 249–251 450, 461, 463, 626
Virgil, Aeneid, 645 Warville, Pierre Brissot de, 653
703
– index –
Washington, George, 275, 383–384, 582 William Alexander & Sons, 496, 501–502
Wattasid dynasty, 192, 194 William and Mary, College of, 352
W. Cunninghame & Co., 499 William of Orange, king, 348, 403, 449
Wealth of Nations (Smith), 618 William III, 286, 403
Wealth of Nations, Book II (Smith), Williamsburg, Virginia, 382
492–493, 496, 579 Williams, Roger, 350, 384; as to President of
Wedgewood, Josiah, 582 Providence Plantations, 386;
Weeloey, 220 Wilmington Aurora, 137; as to The Bloudy
Werber (recruiter), 119 Tenent of Persecution for Cause of
Wesley, Charles, 359 Conscience, 384
Wesley, John, 357, 359; Thoughts on Wilson, Alexander, 655
Slavery, 360. See also Holy Club Wine Act of 1670, 624
west Africa, 187–188, 196, 237, 250, 321, Winthrop, John, 21; General Considerations
355, 358, 377–378, 387, 445, 463, 547 for the Plantations in New England, 26
West African Kingdom of Hueda, 466 Winthrop, John Jr, Governor, 478
west African(s), 192, 354, 355 Winthrop, Samuel, 478
west coast of Africa, 377, 444, 446 Wissenschaft des Judentums (scientific study
West Country (England), 6, 176 of Jewish history), 416; as to promoter
West Country Englishmen, 22 Leopold Zunz, 416
western Africa, 250, 339, 347, 425, 449, Witherspoon, John, 653
548, 600 Wolcott, Derek, 215
western Algeria, 190 word of God, 141
Western Carolines, 219 Words of the Lagoon (Johannes), 215
western Europe, 42, 117, 188, 281, 414, World War I, 49
417–418, 547 World War II, 208, 417
Western Hemisphere, 274–275 WPA, 390
Western Hispaniola, 314 Wright and Fayle, History of Lloyd’s, 519
western Sahara, 188 Wright, Frances, 583
western Mediterranean, 199 Wyatt, Francis (governor), 21
western Pacific, 209, 21
west Greenland Shelf, 57 Xerez, Franciso de, 48
West India Company (WIC), 446–447 Xochimilca, 90
West India Companies, 447; as to Xhosa, 108, 110
Brandenburg, 447; as to Denmark,
447; as to Sweden, 447 Yap Islands, 209, 220
West India Fashionables, 577 Yankee Doodle, 125. See also United States
West Indian colonies, 12 Yates, Donald, Jews and Muslims in British
West Indies, 23, 137, 212, 369, 523, 526, Colonial America: A Genealogical
547, 550–551, 561, 576–577, History, 386
579–580, 603, 606, 634 Yogev, Gedalia, Diamonds and Coral, 425
Westminster, 431, 579–580 Yorkshire, 588–589
West, The, 471 Yorktown, 268
Wheatley, Philis (of Boston), 360, 660 Yucatan, 91, 271
Whig History, 636 Yucatecan Maya, 80
Whig Junto, 283
Whitefield, George, 359 Zapotec, 91
White, John (artist), 17 Zeeland, 537
White Servants, 599 Ziegenhagen, Friedrich Michael, 123
Whitfield, James (Archbishop of Baltimore), Zuara, Gomes Eanes de, 246
327, 357–358, 398 Zunz, Leopold, promoter of Jewish History,
Wigen, Karen, 208 416
704

Zlib - Pub The Atlantic World

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Zlib - Pub The Atlantic World

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Zlib - Pub The Atlantic World

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE ATLANTIC WORLD

D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and

ISBN: 978-0-415-46704-9 (hbk)

Notes on Contributors xiv

1 The Atlantic World: Definition, Theory, and Boundaries 1

PART I: ATLANTIC EXPLORATIONS 11

3 Science and Ideology in the Spanish Atlantic 34

4 Fish and Fisheries in the Atlantic World 55

PART II: THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLES 77

6 Southern Africa and the Atlantic World 100

7 Emigration from the Habsburg Monarchy and Salzburg to the

8 Seafaring communities, 1800–1850 131

PART III: CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS 149

10 Atlantic Slaveries: Britons, Barbary, and the Atlantic World 172

11 Morocco and Atlantic History 187

12 The Atlantic and Pacific Worlds 207

13 An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of

PART IV: WARFARE AND GOVERNANCE 243

15 War and Warfare in the Atlantic World 264

16 Political Thinking, Military Power, and Arms Bearing in the British

17 Atlantic Peripheries: Diplomacy, War, and Spanish–French Interactions

PART V: RELIGION 319

19 Protestantism in the Atlantic World 347

21 Islam and the Atlantic 376

22 American Identity and English Catholicism in the Atlantic World 393

PART VI: CREDIT, FINANCE, AND MONEY 439

25 Speculating on the Atlantic World 457

26 Paper Money, 1450–1850 471

27 The Credit Crisis of 1772–73 in the Atlantic World 491

PART VII: COMMERCE, CONSUMPTION, AND

30 The Cultural History of Commerce in the Atlantic World 546

31 ‘To Catch the Public Taste’: Interpreting American Consumers in

PART VIII: THE CIRCULATION OF IDEAS 597

33 Economic Thought and State Practice in the Atlantic World:

34 The Classical Atlantic World 633

35 The Atlantic Enlightenment 650

18.1 Virgin of Guadalupe 331

P UB LISHERS’ ACKNO W L E D G E M E NTS

James A. O. C. Brown recently completed a Research Fellowship at the University of

A. B. Leonard is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Financial History,

Holly Snyder has been Curator of American Historical Collections at Brown

0 1000 2000 miles

Akan States Oyo Benin r

The Atlantic in the early colonial period

THE ATLANTIC WORLD

D’Maris Coffman and Adrian Leonard

great, distinctively home-grown dynastic conflicts which were fundamental to the

James Taylor Carson and Karim M. Tiro

T he Native peoples of North America historically believed that animals helped

Figure 2.1 Mask with antlers, 1400–1600 (wood & bone),

Archaeologists have shown that although women’s horticulture contributed the

to characterize European agriculture. They began with beasts of least resistance:

Figure 2.4 ‘A view of ye Industry of ye Beavers’

Figure 2.5 Pennsylvania Town and Country Man’s Almanack

1 Richter 1992: 8–11; Rice 2009: 1–2.

Domínguez, Virginia R. (1986) White by definition: social classification in Creole Louisiana,

Worth, John E. (1998) Timucuan chiefdoms of Spanish Florida, vol. 1: Assimilation,

SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY

PH A SE OF CONTACT AND D IS CO VE RY: 1 4 9 2 – 1 6 0 0