Atlantic World

Company of Merchants Trading to Africa as an experimental non-profit regulated company to replace the bankrupt Royal African Company.1 The CMTA was designed to " facilitate Britain's African trade " by governing and maintaining a series of trading establishments on the African coast. The purpose of the company was to protect free trade, a role the state would later adopt. According to historian Christopher Brown, in " The British Government and the Slave Trade: Early Parliamentary Enquiries, 1713-83, " the 1750 Act " aimed to resolve the long-standing tension between a joint stock corporation that had long since lost its commercial standing [the Royal African Company] and the individual traders who conducted the commerce, but had no institutional recognition. " 2 The CMTA was an attempt to synthesize corporatism with free trade. Contemporary debates involving the company reveal insight into the changing roles and relationships between the state, corporations, and private merchants during Britain's transformation into a dominant commercial Empire. Missing from these debates and subsequent

This article contributes to the reassessment of Scottish history and identity in light of the recovery of its connections with black Atlantic issues such as slavery and empire. The ‘paradox’ of the national bard seeking employment as a book-keeper on Jamaica remains an uncomfortable area for modern Scotland. This article considers Burns's biographical and textual (dis-)entanglement with the Caribbean in relation to the subsequent competition over his memory. It reads Robert Burns as a lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora) that opens up a conflicted account of the nature of free labour ideology, slavery and abolition in the late eighteenth century.

Earlier studies carried out on Sungbo’s Eredo (embankment) showed that it is about 165 km in circumference and surrounds the whole of Ijebu Kingdom. From the date obtained by Aremu et al. (2013: 17), the structure is thought to have been built around 5000 years ago. However, it is possible that the site was also occupied during the medieval period, as evidenced in the remains around the sacred grove. This paper reports on a GPS survey of the site and excavations carried out during 2014 fieldwork archaeology intended to confirm or refute the dates previously obtained from the embankment. It examines the cultural materials recovered from the excavation, including Late Stone Age materials and those of the Neolithic period. Analysis of the Neolithic and Late Stone Age materials suggests that the site may be of greater antiquity than earlier reported and that this forest zone of West Africa was occupied at different time periods.

This article highlights narratives of enslavement held in the
Church Missionary Society and Methodist Missionary Society
archives for the Sierra Leone, Yoruba, and Gambia missions
in the nineteenth century. Its particular focus is on
testimonies of Africans who experienced enslavement in
Africa and were subsequently sold to Europeans on the
coast and embarked on trans-Atlantic slave vessels. These
documents form part of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council (SSHRC)-funded SHADD: Studies in the
History of the African Diaspora – Documents project, a
digital publication of the Harriet Tubman Institute for
Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University
(http://tubman.info.yorku.ca/publications/shadd/). This article
catalogues both the narratives uncovered to date – among
the longest unpublished accounts of enslavement in Africa –
and research strategies for uncovering more. It concludes
with an appendix indexing digitized and transcribed
documents available on the SHADD database as research
and teaching resources.

NEW BOOK SERIES: Maritime Literature and Culture offers alternative rubrics for literary and cultural studies to those of nation, continent and area, which inter-articulate with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. The humanities have paid increasing attention to oceans, islands and shores as sites of cultural production, while the maritime imagination in contemporary literatures and other cultural forms has presented ways of responding to human migration, global neoliberalism and climate change. This series provides a forum for discussion of these and other maritime expressions, including enquiries that engage maritime and coastal zones as spaces that enable reflection on labour and leisure; racial terror and performances of freedom; environmental wonder and degradation; metaphor and materiality; and the various implications of globe, world and planet.

How did Spain rule over an immense global empire for more than three centuries given the absence of a standing army and the presence of stark inequalities? In this course students will learn how historians have answered this enduring question, and will analyze a range of primary sources such as wills, artworks, and petitions to develop theories of their own. We explore the experience of empire from the perspectives of diverse groups of people including free and enslaved Africans, indigenous men and women, mestizo soldiers, nuns, and colonial elites. By studying the writings of Andean intellectuals and the testimonies of slaves who took their masters to court or rose up in violent rebellions against the colonial order, students will develop a deeper understanding of the complexity of Spanish rule and its variations across time and place. We also consider the legacies of this global empire, and controversies about how we tell its history.
This course is chronologically and thematically organized. It begins in 1491, on the eve of the Iberian invasion of the Americas and the Caribbean, and ends in 1898, when Spain lost the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.  The semester is structured around four myths about the global Spanish empire that persist in historiography and popular culture: the myth of colonial rule by coercion; the ‘commercial revolution’ and the myth of mobility; and the myth of imperial collapse. Key themes include the development of racial ideologies in the Iberian world, and their impact on the evolution of racial slavery.

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. Following Champlain's example, fellow colonists nurtured similar gardens through the Saint Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind. As Parsons relates, colonists soon discovered that there were limits to what they could accomplish in their gardens. The strangeness of New France became woefully apparent, for example, when colonists found that they could not make French wine out of American grapes. They attributed the differences they discovered to Native American neglect and believed that the French colonial project would rehabilitate and restore the plant life in the region. However, the more colonists experimented with indigenous species and communicated their findings to the wider French Atlantic world, the more foreign New France appeared to French naturalists and even to the colonists themselves. Parsons demonstrates how the French experience of attempting to improve American environments supported not only the acquisition and incorporation of Native American knowledge but also the development of an emerging botanical science that focused on naming new species. Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

Examining communication and information networks during the period of the Régence (1715-23), this article argues that French metropolitan ministers, imperial planners, colonial administrators, and royal cartographers relied heavily upon backcountry specialists-coureurs de bois, runaway soldiers, and veteran voyageurs-to provide ethnographic, geographic, and strategic knowledge, which informed and shaped the policies of post-Utrecht French North America. Subsequently, colonial officials believed that these French frontier diplomats and negotiators were the key to consolidating imperial control over the geographic, political, and cultural landscapes of the Hudson Bay watershed. These backcountry specialists were embedded within Indigenous information networks that criss-crossed North America and were thus important intermediaries between the French state and Indigenous peoples at the edge of empire. Although coureurs de bois and voyageurs became pivotal informants, explorers, fur traders, and military leaders, they not only were unwavering agents of imperial power but also pursued their own agendas and exercised agency in the Hudson Bay watershed. Backcountry specialists initially made it possible for French colonialism to extend into the watershed, but their own ambivalent relationships with the French colonial government and its representatives also fragmented the imperial authority of the French Empire in North America.

This outline of the theoretical and historical parameters of my recently published Famine Irish and the American Racial State synthesizes the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, and David Theo Goldberg, among others. In so doing, it advances a model of the nineteenth-century US state-in-formation that demonstrates how the legal status of the transatlantic Famine Irish took on greater significance than any cultural differences with White Anglo Saxon Protestant America. Key concepts are explored, such as citizenship, nationality, race, ethnicity, the fractional state, the racial state, and the Black and Green Atlantic. Introduced, moreover, is one of the most important yet most overlooked American patriots of the nineteenth century, Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes of New York, whose efforts helped to mold the corporate Catholic Church into a major ideological apparatus of the US state.

On the night of September 20,1615, the eve of the feast of St. Matthew, an expedition of Basque whalers lost their ships in a fjord near Trekyllisvik, Iceland, during a terrible storm. This led to a series of events that culminated in their October massacre at the hands of the islanders.The Basque mariners' bodies, dismembered, would not be buried. However, not all the Icelanders saw the massacre with good eyes. One of them, Jon Gudmundsson, better known as Jon laerdi (1574-1658) or "the wise man", wrote an essay on those events in defense of the victims titled "Sonn frasaga" (The true story). Four hundred years later, on April 20,2015, an international conference investigated various aspects of this tragic episode of the history of Iceland and the Basque Country. The academic meeting took place at the National Library of Iceland with the participation of experts from all over the world. The program, commemorating the fourth centenary of the massacre of Basque whalers in Iceland, was sponsored by the Govrenment of Gipuskoa and the Government of Iceland and organized by the Etxepare Institute, the Basque-Finnish Association, the Center for Basque Studies of the University of Nevada, Reno and the Barandiaran Chair of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Recent archaeological studies have highlighted the sociability of drinking spaces as a means to better understand quotidian activities of non-elites. Through research conducted at Smuttynose Island, in the Isles of Shoals, Maine, I illustrate an often-overlooked narrative of the Atlantic World, and especially colonial North America – the daily life of individuals working within frontier resource extraction communities. Further, I argue that such communities and their assemblages fall within a continuum which places cosmopolitan city-centers on one end and rural settlements on the other.

During the 1780s, the Spanish crown endeavored to facilitate and expedite commercial exchange within its vast Atlantic territories, a goal which it hoped to accomplish by creating new consulados (merchant chambers and courts) in many port cities of the empire. The need to create new consulados became an especially important issue after the implementation of the new system of comercio libre in 1778, which significantly stimulated economic activity across the Atlantic. Paying attention to Spain's efforts to create a modern commercial empire, this article asks why new metropolitan consulados were created in the mid-1780s, while, in the colonies, they came to fruition in the 1790s, after the infamous minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez, died in 1787? The article argues that, unlike Gálvez, who was committed to an extractive system of imperial governance, the ministers who came to power after 1787 were inspired by a distinct kind of soft colonialism, espousing that, if the empire were to survive, it had to govern its colonies with gentleness. This, in turn, entailed stimulating economic improvement in the colonies while promoting bonds of reciprocity among subjects from both sides of the Atlantic. By reconstructing the events that led to the creation of new consulados in the colonies, this article uncovers how a new regime of colonial economic improvement was put into place in order to bind the empire during a moment of impending crisis.

Dès 1793, alors que la guerre intérieure et extérieure fait rage, des centaines de navires américains commencent à approvisionner Bordeaux en céréales, riz et denrées coloniales. En dépit des efforts des deux gouvernements, l’indépendance des Etats-Unis, reconnue dix ans plus tôt, n’avait pas suscité un courant commercial significatif entre la France et l’Amérique du Nord. C’est donc bien les guerres révolutionnaires et la neutralité américaine qui donnent une impulsion fondamentale pour que les négociants du principal port français entrent en relation avec les armateurs américains. S’appuyant sur un large éventail de sources, souvent inédites, ce livre montre comment ils ont su éviter l’asphyxie du port girondin. Pour ce faire, il reconstitue les nouveaux courants d’échanges qui se mettent en place et le fonctionnement des réseaux marchands qui, du moins jusqu’en 1807, se jouent d’un conflit franco-britannique de plus en plus âpre, et du blocus continental.

"In a sweeping reassessment of early American literature, The Gender of Freedom explores the workings of the literary public sphere—from its colonial emergence through the antebellum flourishing of sentimentalism. Placing representations of and by women at the center rather than the margin of the public sphere, this book links modern forms of political identity to the seemingly private images of gender displayed prominently in the developing public sphere. The 'fictions of liberalism' explored in this book are those of marriage and motherhood, sentimental domesticity, and heterosexual desire—narratives that structure the private realm upon which liberalism depends for its meaning and value. In a series of bold theoretical arguments and nuanced readings of literary texts, the author explores the political force of these private narratives with chapters on the Antinomian crisis in Puritan Massachusetts, early national models of gender and marriage in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Hannah Webster Foster, infanticide narratives and nineteenth-century accounts of motherhood in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child, and 're-arranging' marriage in the poetry of Emily Dickinson."

Free Sample Chapter (Introduction): http://www.sup.org/pages.cgi?isbn=0804758476&item=Introduction_pages&page=1

Stanford UP catalogue: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=836

Google books: http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Gender_of_Freedom.html?id=UuPsKmi46tsC

Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gender-Freedom-Fictions-Liberalism/dp/0804758476


Contents: The Gender of Freedom

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Gender of Freedom and Women in Public

1. Gender, Liberal Theory, and the Literary Public Sphere

2. Puritan Bodies and Transatlantic Texts

3. Contracting Marriage in the New Republic

4. Sociality and Sentiment

Coda: Queering Marriage—Emily Dickinson and the Poetics of Title

Notes

Works Cited

Index

O texto discute as especificidades
históricas do espaço sul-atlântico
com base em três períodos a partir da
chegada de Pedro Álvares Cabral, em
1500, passando pela abertura do Canal
de Suez (1869), até o fim do apartheid na
África do Sul (1991-1994), acontecimentos
que favorecem a reemergência dos
laços sul-sul no Atlântico. Assim, o
artigo explora a dimensão cultural das
conexões sul-atlânticas, embora se centre,
fundamentalmente, na construção do
conceito espaço-temporal.

This short essay uses empirical evidence to examine the West African origins of handshakes and other greetings associated with African Americans. It adds to our understanding of the unique cultures developed by people of African descent, specifically in North America.

Treasures Afoot:
Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018

Shoes tell us stories.  They can reveal the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of the people who wore them. Shoes that were crafted in the eighteenth century (the Georgian era of Anglo-American culture) and that now pepper museum collections have stories to tell about everyday life in early America.  They reveal that early Americans were sophisticated, selective consumers who sought out name-brand footwear from British craftsmen, ordering from those whom they associated with high quality, upscale fashion, genteel living.  In early America, even before the consumer revolution that began in the 1740s, American shoppers craved the elegant footwear that London cordwainers crafted and that filled the shelves of shops in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and beyond.  And, in a process of self-fashioning, they engaged in adaptive reuse, modifying their shoes to their own specifications, and making their British shoes American, connoting their own sense of national identity.  During the 1760s, resistance to the so-called “innovations” imposed by a novice king and a pliant Parliament challenged comfortable identities and loyalties and called into question these customary purchasing arrangements.  During these years, Americans navigated these boisterous seas of consumption, as leaders and consumers debated the role of “enemy” goods, by attempting both to impose non-intercourse agreements and promote local manufacture yet with many consumers continuing to wear their favored British shoes.

Resenha de CUNHA, Manuela Carneiro da, "Negros, estrangeiros: os escravos libertos
e sua volta à África" (2ª edição, revista e ampliada, São Paulo,
Companhia das Letras, 2012); e OTERO, Solimar, "Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World" (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010).

Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 2016 (cloth) and 2018 (paperback). Preview: https://flexpub.com/preview/atlantic-africa-and-the-spanish-caribbean

Sex and sexuality are topics that have defined feminism since its inception. What has changed is that there is now a generation of feminists and scholars who are comfortable not only to write in their own disciplines but who incorporate feminist ideas in their research. This book assembles a variety of essays, most of which were written especially for this collection, that negotiate sex and sexuality in historical contexts as well as in contemporary times. There is a common ground of history and (popular) culture among the articles. While different theories of feminism operate in these essays, feminist lenses have allowed the reevaluation of familiar topics from early religious practices to medieval literature to current films and advertising. The authors represented in this collection range from established feminist and gender scholars to those who employ feminist theoretical frameworks in their respective disciplines.

This book presents a provocatively new interpretation of one of New Orleans' most enigmatic traditions, the Mardi Gras Indians. By interpreting the tradition in an Atlantic context, Dewulf traces the " black Indians " back to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and its war dance known as sangamento. He shows that good warriors in the Kongo kingdom were per definition also good dancers, masters of a technique of dodging, spinning and leaping that was crucial in local warfare. Enslaved Kongolese brought the rhythm, dancing moves and feathered headwear of sangamentos to the Americas in performances that came to be known as " Kongo dances. " By comparing Kongo dances on the African island of São Tomé with those in Latin America, the Caribbean and Louisiana, Dewulf demonstrates that the dances on New Orleans' Congo Square were part of a much broader Kongolese performance tradition. He links that to Afro-Catholic mutual-aid societies that honored their elected community leaders or " kings " with Kongo dances. While the public rituals of these brotherhoods originally thrived in the context of Catholic procession culture around Epiphany and Corpus Christi, they transitioned to carnival as a result of growing orthodoxy within the Church. Dewulf's groundbreaking research suggests a much greater impact of Kongolese traditions and of popular Catholicism on the development of African-American cultural heritage and identity. His conclusions force us to radically rethink the traditional narrative on the Mardi Gras Indians, the kings of Zulu and the origins of black participation in Mardi Gras celebrations.

http://www.ulpress.org/item_224/From-the-Kingdom-of-Kongo-to-Congo-Square.php

In 1790, the Spanish Crown sent a “botanist- chemist” to South America to implement production of a chemical extract made from cinchona bark, a botanical medicament from the Andes used throughout the Atlantic World to treat malarial fevers. Even though the botanist- chemist’s efforts to produce the extract failed, this episode offers important insight into the role of chemistry in the early modern AtlanticWorld. Well before the Spanish Crown tried to make it a tool of empire, chemistry
provided a vital set of techniques that circulated among a variety of healers, who used such techniques to make botanical medicaments useful and intelligible in new ways.