Eighth FEEGI Biennial Conference
John Hope Franklin Center
Duke University, Durham, NC
18-20 February, 2010
Registration & Local Information • Abbreviated Program • Download Flyer (PDF)
Thursday 18 February
Arriving on Thursday? Come meet the program committee and the other members of the FEEGI executive committee at an informal (no-host) gathering. We'll be at the Six Plates Wine Bar, about 1/2 mile from the conference hotel (map with hotel, bar, and Franklin Center). They serve small plates based on local food until late, so you can get dinner if you choose. Look for the room in the back—we're certain to be there between 7:00pm-9:00pm.
Friday 19 February
Registration and all panels on Saturday and Sunday will be in the John Hope Franklin Center. The Friday Reception will be on Duke University's West Campus, about a 10-minute walk away.
8:15–Registration
Coffee & light breakfast will be served.
8:45–Welcome
Alison Games, Georgetown University, President of FEEGI.
Circuits & Currents
9:00 - 11:00 Session One
The Itinerant Artist in an Age of Expansion: Cassas’s Mediterranean Gambit
Elizabeth Fraser, University of South Florida
fraser@arts.usf.edu
In the 1780s French artist Louis-François Cassas traveled along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, from Turkey to Egypt and produced detailed sketches, the basis for later images and, he hoped, his future prosperity. Traveling only a little over a decade before Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, Cassas has been posthumously neglected. The epic Napoleonic invasion has long been interpreted as marking a shift toward an aggressively imperialist outlook toward the Islamic Mediterranean in the west and has overshadowed the history of earlier travelers to the region. Considering the case of Cassas ultimately challenges us to reconceptualize the relationship between art, travel, and expansionism as it has been seen from a post-Napoleonic perspective.
Cassas was anything but an empowered agent of a would-be colonial state. In his travels within the territories of the still powerful Ottoman Empire, the artist was at best a tolerated guest. Furthermore, originally a lowly drawing master to the wealthy, Cassas owed his career to the support of a series of notables, his subaltern status revealed in his obsequious letters to his patrons. The artist’s professional trajectory nonetheless highlights how travel, and the European expansionism that propelled it, potentially opened opportunities for artists on the margins of late eighteenth-century art institutions. Among the many artist-assistants engaged in the burgeoning industry of travel publications, Cassas was distinguished by his attempt to forge his independence from his patrons. When his key patron was exiled after the French Revolution, the artist produced his patron’s travel book in his own name.
Despite this attempt at self-promotion, the images Cassas made for his ambitious publication implicitly betray his socially precarious position, manifested in an ambivalence about the natives he drew. The artist gives these figures an active, heroic, even disturbing presence very different from the usually passive figures of travel images, a quality at odds with Cassas’s own expressly negative views of Islamic society. Ultimately, due to a variety of financial constraints, his project was never fully completed and remains more a portfolio of prints than a full book publication. He ultimately failed, then, to make of his journey the cultural capital proffered by the European travel-writing industry. As Cassas’s fascinating story shows, the power of the itinerant artist on the expansionist frontier was contingent and unpredictable.
Witsen & Sons: Local Power and Global Enterprise, 1600-1750
Henriette De Bruyn Kops, Georgetown University
debruynh@georgetown.edu
This paper provides a first glimpse of the calculated—yet also visionary—ways in which one particular family used a local stage to launch its ventures in the early modern global economy. Six generations of the Witsen family of Amsterdam combined aggressive expansion into a wide range of commercial markets across the globe with political power at local and state level. For about 150 years, Witsen men held important public office in Amsterdam, and served as directors of several of the Dutch joint stock companies, including the Dutch East- and West India Companies. They consistently held positions that allowed them to influence or control regulatory measures that benefited the family's interests, while actively initiating or sponsoring expansions into new markets. Family members were at the vanguard of Dutch commerce with Russia, New Netherlands, the Levant, Greenland, the West Indies and West Africa, and invested heavily in the East India trade and Surinam sugar plantations. Through astute marriages both the men and the women of the clan expanded the family’s commercial and social network. Sons and nephews followed in the footsteps of fathers and uncles, while cousins and in-laws once-, or twice removed collaborated to solidify and increase the family’s fortunes.
The particularly successful career of Nicolaas Witsen (1647-1717) has been the subject of several studies, but the significant contributions of other family members have been underexposed. If they were discussed at all, they were secondary players in works that focus on foreign merchant communities as a whole, or on other trading conglomerates. The conference paper is based on a combination of archival research in the Netherlands and an array of secondary sources. The paper will be illustrated by contemporary images of family members and the communities in which they operated.
A Catholic Atlantic in a Protestant Empire: Seventeenth Century Missionary Circuits in the English Atlantic World
Shona Johnston, Georgetown University
shonajohnston@gmail.com
In Atlantic history the study of religion and global interaction in the early modern period is dominated by the expansion of the Protestant empires. Recent calls to formulate a Catholic Atlantic model centered on the Catholic empires of the Atlantic world have begun to address this imbalance and reassert the global scope of Catholicism in our understanding of Atlantic imperial expansion and encounters in the early modern period. While the idea of a Catholic Atlantic is a welcome addition to the historiography of religion in the Atlantic world, it continues to frame the study of the early modern world through the dichotomy of a self-contained Catholic world in constant opposition to a similarly insulated Protestant one. The expansion of European religions in this period did not take place within clearly defined doctrinal enclaves.
To fully comprehend how the Catholic and Protestant Atlantic worlds interacted and overlapped, scholars must focus on the varied religious lives of the people populating the Atlantic world. This paper revises the paradigm of separate Catholic and Protestant Atlantics through an examination of the Catholic missionary and clerical circuits that served the Catholic inhabitants of the English Atlantic colonies in the seventeenth century. Staffed by priests from the British Isles and abroad, supported by provincial structures in England, Ireland, and continental Europe, and supplemented by visiting clerics brought to the English colonies by shipwreck, exile, or captivity, the Catholic missions in the English Atlantic strove to establish a Catholic institutional presence in this Protestant empire. Tied to both a global web of Catholic expansion and the imperial networks of the emergent Protestant English empire, these missionary enterprises demonstrate the degree to which Catholic and Protestant spheres of influence overlapped, interacted, and contributed to the religious development of the Atlantic world.
Cultural Implications of Maritime Networks: Dutch Ivory Trade in Early Modern Japan
Martha Chaiklin, University of Pittsburgh
chaiklin@pitt.edu
Ivory was an important commodity that linked Africa and Asia. Demand for ivory connected the Imperial court of China with the deepest jungles of Indonesia. The Japanese archipelago was one of the biggest consumers of ivory in the early modern period. Yet there were no elephants in Japan, so all supplies had to be brought across the ocean. Significantly, this trade increased in the period when Japan was theoretically “closed” to the outside world and when its citizens were forbidden from traveling abroad. During the Edo period commercial arrangements with the Dutch East India Company and the later involvement of Chinese traders brought ivory to Japan in larger quantities than ever before. This supply resulted in a significant cultural impact that markedly changed the material world of the Japanese and created traditions that have impact on the world market today. These facts contradict the policy of self- sufficiency claimed by the shogunate and indicate ties that economically tied Japan to Africa and Europe in ways that have not yet been explored. In this paper East India Company documents will be supplemented by primary source documents in Dutch and Japanese, art, and objects to show how the ivory trade connected a geographically and politically isolated Japan to a much wider maritime world, and demonstrate the effects of this trade upon the material world of early modern Japan.
Coffee Break
Allies & Enemies
11:30 - 1:00 Session Two
The Danish East India Company’s War against the Mughal Empire, or how the Factors of a European Chartered Company Plundered Bengali ships
Kathryn Wellen, KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of
Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
kathrynwellen@yahoo.com
This paper examines the Danish East India Company’s naval attacks against ships coming from the ports of Bengal between 1642 and 1698. It is based primarily upon Danish archival sources but also includes the perspective of an Asian merchant as recorded in the archives of the Dutch VOC. The spoils from these attacks provided the factors at Tranquebar with an important source of income during their twenty-seven year period of isolation from Denmark. In lieu of a more viable economic strategy, the Danes at Tranquebar justified their actions in terms of a war against the Mughal Empire. Over the course of half a century they seized more than thirty ships. The episode highlights the manner in which Europeans excused the use of violence because of their own historical development which linked trade with war and certain essential nation-building processes. Ultimately, however, the use of this violent approach served them poorly because amicable trading with the Mughals could have been much more profitable.
Encountering the ‘Enemy’ on the Amazon Frontier
Nicholas Bomba, Princeton University
nbomba@princeton.edu
When Gaspar de Carvajal chronicled the first expedition along the Amazon River in 1543, the region was still mostly an inaccessible chimera, exerting a strong pull on the European imagination yet not seriously figuring into plans for colonization and exploitation. By the first decades of the seventeenth century, the situation had changed dramatically. A large indigenous population, ripe for conversion and labor, along with the prospect of untapped natural resources attracted large numbers of intrepid Europeans. These would-be settlers came not only from Portugal and Spain but also from France, Britain, and the Low Countries—states that were often at war with each other. These foreign interlopers—as the Iberians called them—were ubiquitous in the many geographical reports directed at the King of Spain (and, after 1641, the King of Portugal) during this period. Instead of constructing a dichotomy of European and the ‘other’ (a common assumption in modern historical scholarship), writers employed a much older classification scheme intended to distinguish friend from foe, reserving the most negative, dehumanizing caricatures for the Protestant ‘heretics’ and ‘corsairs’ whom they feared more than the most primitive natives. The Amazon Indians were evaluated based on their perceived similarity (or lack thereof) to the dreaded ‘enemy.’
This paper examines the idea of the ‘enemy’ and its impact on geographic and ethnographic literature on the Amazon River Basin. Printed accounts of military engagements with the European ‘enemy’ present the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War, the Dutch Revolt, and the War of the Portuguese Restoration. Having established the archetypal enemy as a dominant feature of the contemporary imagination, the paper then examines the writings of Martín de Saavedra y Guzmán, Mauricio de Heriarte, José de Maldonado, and Laureano de la Cruz (among others), revealing how the ‘enemy’ was transported across the Atlantic and influenced these writers’ understanding of the New World and its autochthonous peoples. These sources confirm that, while Europeans often misunderstood native cultures and treated them with undeserved contempt, their vituperation paled in comparison to the barbarization of each other.
Caribbean Encounters: The Guajira Peninsula and its Wayuu Inhabitants during the Age of Revolution, 1769-1803
Ernesto Bassi, University of California, Irvine
ebassiar@uci.edu
This paper will show the multiple ways in which the Guajira peninsula and its Wayuu inhabitants encountered the outside world, and how those encounters have a great potential to enhance our understanding of the interactions between “colonizer” and “colonized” during the turbulent period of the Age of Revolution.
Located at the northernmost tip of South America, the Guajira peninsula was nominally part of the Spanish American dominions. In practice, however, Spanish control of the Guajira peninsula and its inhabitants was very limited. This region was what historians have variously referred to as a periphery, a frontier, a borderland, and a claim. Its peripheral status allowed the Guajira peninsula to become a site where imperial boundaries and legal codes were constantly challenged, thus giving birth to alternative interpretations of space or what scholars have called “rival geographies.” This process of constant challenge favored the emergence of trans-imperial identities that questioned Spanish and other European powers’ control of their Caribbean possessions. Through three types of Caribbean encounters—war against the Spanish authorities, trade with foreigners, and coexistence with blacks deported from the French Caribbean—the Wayuu re-drew the political map of the southern Caribbean and took part in a Caribbean-wide process of creation of a trans-imperial, allegedly revolutionary community.
Perceived by Spanish authorities as potential revolutionaries, the Wayuu successfully combined a history of resistance against Spanish encroachment with imperial fears of revolutionary transmission—especially after the Haitian Revolution—to force Spanish authorities to recognize the autonomy of the Guajira peninsula and its inhabitants. The Wayuu—as imperial authorities (governors, viceroys, and military officers) grudgingly recognized in their correspondence, reports, relaciones de mando, and memoires—were masters of their domains. Less reluctantly, French and British travelers, in multiple geographical descriptions of the area, arrived at the same conclusion.
Research & Technology Workshop
1:00 – 3:00 Lunch Program
Lunch will be provided.
From Shelves to Maps: Reconstructing Networks of Exchanges in the Early Modern Low Countries
Laura Cruz, University of Western Carolina
lcruz@email.wcu.edu
By the mid-seventeenth century, a network of Dutch book sellers had established a complex and bookselling network that functioned both within and outside their borders. Historians have done much to uncover the distribution of books printed in the Low Countries during the early modern period, but we know little about the mechanisms of exchange. From anecdotal sources, we find that booksellers did participate in a system of informal exchange called the ruil. The ruil likely had important economicbenefits, especially to small or medium sized booksellers, but books exchanged through the system were not often recorded in standard account books so their distribution is difficult to trace. This paper draws upon a database of book sale advertisements, in which booksellers indicated members of their exchange networks, in order to reconstruct the scope and magnitude of the ruil. Using the social networking function of GIS, the paper reconstructs those networks spatially. From the spatial patterns emerges the idea that Dutch booksellers engaged in an information sharing network, which led to a unique process of division of labor both within and between cities across northern Europe. What is perhaps remarkable is that they did so in a period during which the obstacles towards cooperation and movement between different economic sectors were daunting, including the absence of a centralized coordination mechanism. The paper argues that orientation towards a largely external market (in this case, for books) pushed changes, largely from below, in the economic culture and organization within the Dutch economy that contributed to its success at home and abroad.
Ideas of Otherness
3:00 – 4:30 Session Three
Rome, Carthage and Shakespearean Migrations
Pompa Banerjee, University of Colorado, Denver
Pompa.Banerjee@ucdenver.edu
This essay examines the migrations in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Reading the description of Antony’s crossing of the Alps, I establish the passage’s link with the earlier migrations of Hannibal, the relentlessly itinerant Carthaginian general who famously crossed the Alps from Africa into Italy (via Spain) in 218 BCE with a vast infantry and terrifying elephants all heading for Rome. Centuries later, Roman ideologies, transferred through their global migrations profoundly shape English cultural practices as the English follow Roman imperial migrations across the globe in the age of Shakespeare. My essay interrogates the question of globalization, rooting it in Roman global migrations and their “cultivation” of “savage” spaces such as pre-Roman Britain, and tracts of Asia and Africa.
I suggest that migrations are never one-way streets and influence travels both ways. Early modern writers expressed considerable anxiety about the cultural perils of migrations; “contamination” from other cultures led to degeneration and the inevitable bleeding of one culture into another. But once a road is made, it allows travel from both directions. Just as Antony went native in Africa and dissipated his heroic Roman masculinity into Egyptian luxury and effeminacy, Hannibal’s migrations across Italy showed that Rome was not the only successful brand of civility: Migrations beckon to the siren call of other cultures, other models of civility.
Then again, migrations often are a violent assimilation of cultural practices and ideologies into something new. At times this may be positive. Seizing on Kwame Antony Appiah’s notion of “Cosmopolitanism,” I read Shakespearean migrations as a cosmopolitan wandering of “contaminators” who in their rootless itinerancy elicit “what is human in humanity” (Appiah Cosmopolitanism, 2006, p 111). Perhaps migrations, even violent passages, enable one to make connections, despite differences. They allow conversations with other humans in a polyglot, confusing world.
Remapping the Boundaries of the World: Indian Ocean and the New World in Sixteenth-century Ottoman Imperial and Geographical Consciousness
Pinar Emiralioglu, University of Pittsburgh
pinar1@pitt.edu
In the sixteenth century, Ottoman encounters with the Spanish Habsburgs and the Portuguese in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean became an essential part of the military activities of the Ottoman army and navy. During this period, Ottoman ruling elites and intellectuals articulated the imperial claims of the Ottoman dynasty for universal leadership. They represented the Ottoman Sultans as the new world conquerors. Among the architects of this enterprise were a group of travelers, historians, sea captains, cartographers, poets, and astrologers who created a separate body of geographical literature in the sixteenth century. Although it is well known that rulers in medieval and early modern Europe commissioned geographical works to project their rival and imperial aspirations, a rich collection of surviving Ottoman geographical works has never before received the same analytical treatment, presumably because the Ottomans did not participate in the so-called “Age of Exploration.”
Through an examination of a select body of Ottoman visual and textual depictions of Indian Ocean and the New World in the sixteenth century, my paper will demonstrate that Ottomans not only participated in but helped define a variety of early modern political and geographical trends. It will argue that the development of a heightened sensitivity to geographical knowledge about different parts of the world in this period was intimately related to the articulation of the Ottoman claims to universal imperial sovereignty that had to be broadcast to the political and religious rivals in both East and West. By narrating and depicting the geographical features of the Ottoman realm and different parts of the world, sixteenth-century Ottoman geographers repositioned the Empire to the center and established links to the geographical boundaries of the known world.
Maps, Myths, and Mentalities in the Discovery of Ethiopia and the African Kingdom of Prester John
Andrew Kurt, University of Western Carolina
apkurt@email.wcu.edu
Prester John, a fabled priest-king of phenomenal wealth and power somewhere in the East and a potential Crusade ally of European powers, was not found by Westerners who traveled into China and India in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In northeastern Africa, meanwhile, Ethiopia’s isolation as a Christian kingdom surrounded by hostile Muslim lands contributed to the idea in Europe that Prester John ruled in Ethiopia rather than in India. Starting in the fourteenth century ambassadorial visits between Christian rulers in the Mediterranean and Ethiopian kings accelerated. Ethiopian rulers began to shed the policy of state secrecy, and slowly the medieval perceptions of both Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Prester John – who seemed to have been found – were altered. Not least of concern to Renaissance Europeans was the newly discovered fact that the fabled king was black, a color long associated with evil in ideas of the human race. This paper will investigate how some principal Western cartographers mapped Prester John from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It will trace the factors in the evolution and differentiation of maps containing Prester John’s kingdom. One of the main questions to be addressed is how the embassies between European states and Ethiopia affected the imagery and information on the maps. Conversely, the paper will also compare the maps to the written descriptions of the exotic kingdom by Europeans in order to determine how closely the two genres were aligned. It will also look at a historiographical problem: while some scholars assert that Prester John came to be seen as purely mythical after the decline of the Ethiopian dynasty and Portuguese intervention in the sixteenth century, the famous figure continued for certain Europeans to be connected to Ethiopia instead of India, and for others his supposed realm was transferred to Zimbabwe.
Reception
6:00 – 7:30
Saturday 20 February
Registration and all panels on Saturday and Sunday will be in the John Hope Franklin Center.
8:00 Registration
Coffee and light breakfast will be provided.
Local Politics
8:30 - 10:00 Session Four
Annexing Sindh: South Asian Merchants and British Imperialism
Matthew Cook, North Carolina Central University
mcook@nccu.edu
The British annexation of Sindh in 1843 is an important and often missed chapter in one of the most successful global campaigns of domination—the British Empire. British actions in Sindh are always linked to an aggressive and global anti-Russian policy. Against the backdrop of the “Imperial Great Game,” the fabric of colonial power in Sindh—with its own incongruent players and circumstances—is often lost to this context’s conceit. Historians also explain Sindh’s annexation by emphasizing economic factors. They highlight links between a British military presence and South Asian merchants. They focus on the role of local moneyed groups to argue that the British Empire—both in Sindh and on a global scale— provided property security and types of institutional stability that indigenous states were incapable of guaranteeing. As a result, merchants abandoned indigenous states and shifted their support in favor of British sovereignty. This paper looks beyond the Imperial Great Game and economic rationalism in the global expansion of the British Empire. From the perspective of shared local bodies of dispositions and their cultural distinctions, I focus on the annexation of Sindh to illustrate how Hindu merchants supported the British Empire. I maintain that local support for the British hinged on internal social relations among Sindh’s Hindus and attempts to challenge distinctions of status within this community. I argue that such local distinctions give important insights into larger processes (e.g., the establishment of global empires). By emphasizing local dimensions, this paper rethreads indigenous voices into the contexture of the history of British colonialism in Sindh.
Controlling the Tenant-Patron: Fante-British Relations on the Gold Coast, 1750-1807
Ty Reese, University of North Dakota
ty_reese@und.nodak.edu
This essay examines Fante-British relations during the pinnacle of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It focuses upon how the Fante defined the role of the CMTA and its officers as both a tenant and a patron. This dual role allowed the coastal Fante to eat from the CMTA, that is acquire a diversity of luxury goods, while controlling the slave trade. The latter involved countering any attempt by British slave traders to force the Fante to their terms; usually an attempt to lower slave prices. This relationship, and the CMTA’s role as a tenant-patron, allowed both sides to acquire from the other what they desired; slaves for the British and imported luxury goods for the Fante.
The CMTA was first a tenant. It was an outside institution who received permission from the local elite to maintain a coastal presence. At Cape Coast, and at its other coastal enclaves, the CMTA paid a series of ground rents and customs to the local elite. The CMTA also employed numerous coastal caboceers to work in their interest. This involved granting the individual a note that allowed them to collect a monthly salary paid to them in goods. What this meant was that Cape Coast Castle was not a British possession rather the CMTA rented the ground upon which the castle stood. This tenant status reinforced the CMTA’s inferior coastal position. At the same time, the CMTA was a patron in that, by becoming involved in coastal affairs, it distributed goods to the local peoples. This occurred through involvement in conflicts and the coastal palaver system, the hiring of coastal laborers, both free and enslaved, and through numerous other coastal structures that the company became integrated into. For example, within the coastal election system, when an individual assumed a new position of power, that individual distributed gifts. Anytime there was a new governor, or new king, the local peoples demanded the distribution of gifts.
Examining the CMTA’s role as a tenant-patron not only reinforces the focus upon coastal African agency within the trans-Atlantic slave trade but it allows us to better understand the consequences of the slave trade upon West African society. The CMTA did not interact only with the elite rather all segments of coastal society found ways to eat from the company.
“In Times of Hunger All Men Quarrel and All Have Reason”: The Politics of Food Shortage in Late Seventeenth-Century Florida
Amy Turner Bushnell, Brown University
Amy_Bushnell@brown.edu
In the 1680s, the governor of Florida found it increasingly difficult to provision the city of St. Augustine, Spain's easternmost presidio in North America. The arrivals of supply ships from Vera Cruz and Havana had been irregular, and the construction of the stone Castillo de San Marcos had meant extra laborers in town to be rationed, but the main reason for the shortfall was the two-pronged assault on the province of Guale, the presidio's "breadbasket" on the northern border. The people of Guale, attacked from the sea by French and English pirates and from the land by Indian slaveraiders with English firearms, were abandoning their towns and fields and their role as producers of an agricultural surplus. Unleashing fears of famine and profiteering, the food shortage led to bitter controversies in the Spanish ranks over the control of individual, convent, and community granaries and threatened the colonial compact between the presidio and the chiefs.
Coffee Break
Slaves, Markets, & Politics
10:30 - 12:00 Session Five
The Evil King and the Portuguese Rulers
Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University
aaraujo@howard.edu
Over the last years, some scholars have questioned the reasons why the Dahomean King Adandozan (r.1797-1818) was condemned to oblivion. Despite the relatively large written documentation on Adandozan’s reign, the great majority of the scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade and Dahomey did not dedicate more than few paragraphs to this controversial character of Dahomean history. This neglect can be explained by several reasons. Considered as the symbol of disruption, Adandozan was erased from the official history of the Kingdom of Dahomey and is still perceived as an evil king, a tyrannical ruler who was the solely king to violate the Dahomean law and send members of the royal family into slavery to the Americas. Scholars as Robert Cornevin, Melville Herskovits and Maurice Glèlè largely corroborated this vision, widespread through novels such as Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah and Werner’s Herzog film Cobra Verde.
During the Brazilian colonial period (1500-1822), the Kingdom of Dahomey sent at least four embassies to Brazil to negotiate the terms of the Atlantic slave trade, these embassies having generated an extensive correspondence between the Dahomean king, Dona Maria I and the Prince Regent Dom João de Bragança, as well as other letters exchanged by Portuguese officials. Under the light of the new data provided by the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, this paper examines a set of letters (found in Brazilian archives) exchanged by the Portuguese rulers and King Adandozan and also a set of Dahomean artefacts sent by Dahomean king to the Dom João Carlos de Bragança. These letters provide us information about Adandozan aspirations and tastes, allowing us to listen the voice of the Dahomean king. Moreover, some of these letters describing the gifts sent to Prince Dom João, help us to explore a new research avenue related to the material culture exchanges during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. The correspondence gave us not only new elements to understand how the Portuguese rulers and officials perceived the Dahomean king and his emissaries, but also additional information about the main political and military conflicts held during his reign. They allow us to demonstrate how important were the efforts made by the Dahomean king in order to transform Ouidah into the exclusive source of supply of slaves from the Bight of Benin to Brazil. They also help us to follow the extent of the Atlantic slave trade crisis under Adandozan, giving us clues about the main motivations having led to his deposition.
The British Slave Trade and Spanish Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Americas
Elena Schneider, Princeton University
easchnei@princeton.edu
Increasingly, by the mid-18th century, the Spanish crown came to see the trade in enslaved Africans as a threat to its imperial sovereignty, but not in the way that one might think. Before the Haitian Revolution, and apart from the very real risk of rebellion from below of enslaved populations, the Spanish crown was instead most concerned that foreign slave traders, and especially the British who then dominated the traffic, would penetrate closed Spanish colonial markets and create allegiances, dependencies, and even territorial footholds among its subjects.
Across the 18th century, Cuba, the jewel and gateway of Spanish America, whose capital was the hemisphere’s third most populous city, had been clamoring for more enslaved Africans in order to power every facet of its economy. “Nothing is undertaken on the island that doesn’t need slaves,” wrote one observer. The island’s main slave supply came from Jamaica, either via contraband or the South Sea Company’s monopoly trade, and rumors swirled in Madrid and Seville about traitorous allegiances between Spanish and British subjects forged by this trade.
In this presentation, I argue that the crown’s response to this predicament, and the very real threat of British encroachment in Cuba, helped impel Spanish expansion into West Africa and the acquisition of what would become Spain’s only sub-Saharan colony, Equatorial Guinea, in 1778. By using sources from both Madrid and the island of Cuba, I show how pressure from below, and the threat of economic “disloyalty,” compelled the expansion of the slave trade into Spanish America, ironically, even at the moment when forces were amassing to abolish the trade in Britain. I argue that this process provides an often overlooked case study for the elasticity of the Spanish mercantilist system and the importance of the geopolitics of the African slave trade, even before the 19th century, at the center of Spanish imperial politics.
The Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade on the Windward Coast of Africa
Jelmer Vos, Old Dominion University
jelmervos@hotmail.com
As the American demand for slaves increased over the course of the eighteenth century, slave traders began exploiting new markets in Africa, including regions on the so-called Windward Coast. Earlier known among European merchants for their exports of pepper and ivory, these regions only began exporting slaves on a significant scale after 1740, mostly in response to a growing demand from British and Dutch traders. However, whereas British slavers focused largely on the Grain Coast, usually to complete a trade that had started in Sierra Leone, the Dutch did business all along the coast from Cape Mount down to Cape Lahou. The latter became one of the principal ports in the history of the Dutch slave trade, after 1740 supplying on average 1,000 slaves per year.
The existing historiography on the Atlantic slave trade provides few if any clues as to the development of these new African markets for slaves. How was the transition to an export trade in slaves accomplished? What sort of personal and/or commercial relations existed between European and African merchants that served to underpin the new export trade? And how did the Dutch, a minor player in the Atlantic slave trade, come to dominate the trade in Cape Lahou? This paper examines the growth of the slave trade on the Windward Coast using the logbooks of the Middelburg Commerce Company (1740-1800), papers of intercepted Dutch interlopers from before 1730, as well as a number of printed accounts from other European traders from the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Lunch & Business Meeting
The business meeting is open to all FEEGI members, for whom lunch will be provided. Elections for new executive committee members will be held, among other items on the agenda.
Identity Formation I
1:30 – 2:45 Session Six
“Those Who Camp at a Distance”: Native American Expansion into the Florida Interior
Andrew Frank, Florida State University
afrank@fsu.edu
This ethnohistorical paper reexamines the formation of the Seminole Indians on the southeastern borderlands in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It makes two connected arguments that combine to disconnect the geographic migration into Florida from the creation of a socially and politically distinct Native community. First, it contends that Seminole ethnogenesis occurred as part of and in response to the slow centralization that was occurring among the Creek Indians in the region. In this explanation, traditionally autonomous villages moved socially, politically, and sometimes physically away from other Creek villages in the Lower South as they rejected the new obligations demanded by Creek nation building. Second, it demonstrates how the Seminoles slowly coalesced through the spread of reciprocal relationships that were largely forged by marriages, matrilocal residences, ceremonial ties, and social relationships. This incremental and social explanation of the formation of the Seminoles contrasts sharply with earlier scholarly accounts, explanations that tend to either overemphasize the authority of the Spanish and their influence on Native loyalties or insist that the Seminoles formed as “cimarrones” or “runaways” in a power-vacuum of Florida. Instead, this paper argues that Florida should, as Kathleen DuVal and others have show for other borderlands, be understood as a “Native ground.” By placing this history in this Native context, the paper recaptures the Muskogee Creek translation for the term “Seminole” as “those who camp at a distance.” This interdisciplinary essay, which comes from a larger book project on the history of Florida’s Seminole Indians, draws its conclusions about Native behavior from archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, and archival materials from the Spanish and English archives.
From Engagé to Habitant to Large-Scale Slaveholder: Tracing the Instability and Variability of Identity and Culture in 18th Century Creole Louisiana
Andreas Heubner, Justus Liebig University Giessen
Andreas.Huebner@gcsc.uni-giessen.de
Introducing the concept of critical junctures of globalization, German political scientist Ulf Engel and historian Matthias Middell have recently implemented an analytical category to examine processes of global history. While focusing on historical spaces, moments, and arenas of globalization, the concept stresses both processes of fragmentation and reconfiguration, and incidents of destabilization and unfolding of spatial reference points. According to Engel and Middell, critical junctures of globalization produce distinct situations for social and cultural change. (1)
My paper will refer to this concept and apply it to the historic space, moment, and arena of the German Coast of the lower Mississippi Delta in the period from 1720 to 1820. Consequently, I am going to argue that global processes influenced and shaped the (re-)formation of culture and identity of transnational German migrants at the German Coast under French and Spanish dominion. (2)
At a macro level, the paper will link local developments of deterritorialisation and reterritoria- lisation to global processes, for instance the beginning of the French colonial expansion in Louisiana, the French and Indian War, the Haitian Revolution, and the Louisiana Purchase. By this means, I intend to extract specific resources and circumstances that trigger social and cultural change. At a micro level, the paper accounts for the perspective of transnational mi- gration to the German Coast and traces processes of culture and identity formation as these are rendered on the basis of class, gender, and race. The reconfiguration of spatial reference points is here most noticeable in the transformation of German immigrants from engages to habitants to large-scale sugarcane plantation owners and slaveholders.
Taking a perspective that considers both local actors and global tendencies, the paper will argue that the instability and the variability of categories such as culture and identity initiated the creolization of transnational German migrants.
(1) Cf. Engel, Ulf and Matthias Middell, “Bruchzonen der Globalisierung, globale Krisen und Territorialitätsregimes – Kategorien einer Globalgeschichtsschreibung.“ Comparativ 15, no. 5/6 (2005): 15ff.
(2) The paper will also consider earlier ideas of global history referring to notions of “diaspora”, expansion, and settler organization such as Cohen, Robin, “Diasporas, the Nation-State, and Globalization,” in The Global History Reader, ed. Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye (New York, London: Routledge, 2005), 102f.
Forging and Identity in the Colonial City: Havana
Katrina Gulliver, Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität
hello@katrinagulliver.com
This paper examines the ways in which Havana, a 'European' city in the Antilles, represented the exotic and also forged a new urban identity as a crucible of cultural exchange. I start with the British invasion, and look at how popular culture ‐ the rise of print culture and the 'urban' novel ‐ demonstrates this new subjectivity in the decades following.
During the Seven Years War, British forces launched a campaign to capture Havana in 1762. Through the responses of local people and accounts of observers, attitudes to their place in the Spanish empire, towards their British invaders, and towards the rest of the island can be gleaned. Havana had developed its own identity (and an identity for its residents, as Habaneros) distinctive from that of Spanish subjects, or even other Cubans.
The British held the city for six months, and correspondence from the city during this period demonstrates the level of cooperation that developed between the British forces and the local community. The siege demonstrated to the people of the city that the Spanish could not be relied upon to protect them, and helped to strengthen a local identity separate from the empire.
As an ethnically diverse city, Havana was already developing a unique culture and the challenge of the British invasion served as an opportunity to strengthen this (and weaken ties with the Spanish metropole). This paper examines the development of identity as a response to challenge and form of pragmatic cooperation and resistance. This parallels in some ways the racial striation of the city which was both upheld and undermined by legislation regarding the freedom of slaves and interracial marriage.
During the nineteenth‐century, the city developed a more distinct identity both in expressions of Cubana identity by local writers, and observations of visitors (such as Alexander von Humboldt) that marked the city's distinction and a site of creation of new urban sensibilities and cultural practices.
Identity Formation II
3:00 - 4:00 Session Seven
Otherworldly Colonizers: The African Dead in the Early Modern
Pablo Gomez, Vanderbilt University
pablo.f.gomez@vanderbilt.edu
Death was all around in the seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean, a disease-ridden, and viciously violent place. In Caribbean cities, rituals around the dead, and the dying, were particularly effective tools for the shaping and modeling of African and European world views. Based on inquisition, ecclesiastical, governmental and medical records from archives in Europe and the Americas, this paper explores African ideas and rituals about death, dying and the dead in early-modern Cartagena de Indias. Through the examination of a topic, for the most, neglected in the existent historiography of the early modern Iberian Caribbean, this paper describes a society and culture that was far more cosmopolitan, tolerant and heterodox than what traditional stories of Iberian backwardness and rigidity portray. In early-modern Caribbean port cities like Cartagena, African ideas about death and its causes were prevalent. Instead of looking at them as the “magical” “uncivilized” ideas of a superstitious lot, Europeans amply embraced, believed and adopted African cultural beliefs and practices. As in the rest of the New World, African concepts were modified to fit the new realities in which they were enacted. Concepts of dying and ideas about death and the dead functioned as exceptional and fluid routes for African cultural integration and re-imagination in the Americas. They served as cultural bridges. Thus, the dead's influence in Iberian Caribbean society was, more than a force for resistance and confrontation, an adaptative and integrative one. The dead were, thus, essential for the creation and reinvention of African culture in Spanish Caribbean locales. They allowed the living ones to recognize themselves and re-appropriate, and reinvent their lives.
Gender, Race and Freedom: Ambiguous Identities among the ‘Castle Slaves’ of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in the Era of the Slave Trade
Rebecca Shumway, University of Pittsburgh
shumway@pitt.edu
Drawing on the eighteenth-century correspondence and account books of the English trading companies (Royal African Company and Company of Merchants), this paper examines the ways in which the unfree laborers in the forts and castles on the coast of Ghana occupied a social and cultural space that blurred conventional notions of “African” vs. “European” and “free” vs. “slave” identity, and how their gender identities affected their experiences as members of the so-called Atlantic community. The European trading companies—representing England, Holland and Denmark—employed several hundred men, women and children in their permanent trade facilities on the Ghana coast throughout the eighteenth century. Referred to variously as “castle slaves,” “company’s slaves,” “committee’s slaves,” and “company’s caboceers,” the non-white personnel built and maintained the forts, provided a range of domestic services for their inhabitants and served as interpreters and liaisons between the Europeans and their African host communities. My initial findings suggest that nearly half of the castle slaves were women, and that many of these women raised infants and small children inside the castle walls. Beginning phases of research also suggest that a large number of the castle slaves were so-called “mulattoes,” descendants of European men and African women. This paper will examine three questions: First, why were so many of the castle slaves women and how did being a woman affect one’s lived experience in the forts? Second, what percentage of the castle slaves were of mixed European and African ancestry and how did their identities as “mulattoes” affect their experiences? And third, how did racial and/or gender identities affect the strategies and possibilities for castle slaves to obtain freedom?
Coffee Break
Science & Medicine
4:30 - 6:00 Session Eight
Natural History, Humoral Pathology and the Enigma of Tropical Nature: Disease Etiology and Early Expansion in West Africa, 1450 to 1500
Hugh Cagle, Rutgers
hcagle@history.rutgers.edu
The earliest decades of overseas expansion brought Europeans–chiefly the Portuguese–into direct and sustained contact with one of the most formidable disease environments in the world. Historians and historical epidemiologists now take the deadly character of the West African littoral for granted. But its epidemiological distinctiveness was not at all clear to fifteenth century Europeans; they had to discover it for themselves. This process of recognition unfolded over the course of the fifteenth century. I draw on travel accounts, chronicles and the scattered writings of European merchants to examine how encounters with exotic nature and mysterious disease environments from Cabo Blanco to the Gold Coast forced subtle changes to humoral medical theory. Numerous scholars have demonstrated that early modern Europeans’ perceptions of unfamiliar human communities and strange natural worlds took shape within an interpretive framework predicated on authoritative classical texts. Where health and illness were concerned, the Hippocratic corpus and a host of Galenic writings were similarly foundational. I argue that, as expansion proceeded, classical medical insights faced the revisionism of early modern writers just as did works by such diverse thinkers as Aristotle (on natural slavery), Ptolemy (on geography), or Pliny the Elder (on natural history). The Portuguese encounter with the overseas tropical world was a pivotal moment in the history of humoral pathology. And although humoral theory would remain the dominant interpretive framework for medical practice, colonial medicine in the early modern tropical world unfolded in response to novel understandings of the link between exuberant nature and disease.
Amerindian Doctors, European Practitioners, and the Making of Empiricism in the Sixteenth Century
Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Colgate College
abarrera@mail.colgate.edu
My work argues that the encounter of the New World is one of the key elements in the emergence of empirical practices that shaped sixteenth and seventeenth century science in Europe. The encounter made possible both the partial rejection of classical authorities and the validation of personal experience as a source of knowledge. The empirical practices I discuss emerged as part of the commercial and imperial activities surrounding the exploration and colonization of the New World. I this paper I examine the empirical method employed by Dr. Francisco Hernández in his expedition to Mexico from 1571 to 1577. Philip II sent Dr. Hernández to Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines to collect information about, and samples of, medicinal plants. Why? Who (a group of people or one) proposed this idea? How did he accomplish his expedition? At the end, Hernández stayed in Mexico for six years and the result of his work included no fewer than 1,100 paintings of plants. Who made those paintings and how? My paper discusses the different issues involved in the Hernández expedition and puts this expedition in the larger context of the Spanish American colonial and commercial context.
The Medicines Trade in the Portuguese Atlantic World: Dissemination of Plant Remedies and Healing Knowledge from Brazil, c. 1580-1830
Timothy Walker, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
twalker@umassd.edu
Portuguese colonial exploration and settlement in Brazil during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a significant (though to date largely underappreciated) dimension of medical inquiry, the impact of which resonated throughout the Atlantic scientific world and beyond. Early contacts with native peoples and sustained missionary activity, combined with pragmatic attempts to address threats to the health of European settlers in the South American tropics, occasioned Portuguese medical-botanical prospecting in the Amazon and other regions of Brazil. Such pioneering experimentation added extensively to human knowledge and understanding of traditional South American healing practices and pharmacological botany. The enduring impact of these early scientific inquiries has long outlasted the transient economic importance of the Lusophone maritime empire. Descriptive works about South American medicinal plants by Portuguese observers during the early modern period informed Europeans for the first time about many of the efficacious drugs commonly employed in Tupí, Guaraní and other indigenous Brazilian healing traditions. Portuguese colonial agents spread indigenous drugs and information about native South American healing methods to Europe, as well as to colonized territories in Africa, India, China and Indonesia.
This paper will examine the role and influence within Portugal’s maritime dominions of medical techniques, remedies and specific drugs originating in colonial Brazil. It will focus attention on the earliest collaborative interaction between indigenous healers and Portuguese missionaries (mainly the Jesuits) on the Brazilian colonial frontier, who then passed that knowledge on to European physicians, surgeons and pharmacists working in colonial South American medical facilities. It was in such institutions that indigenous techniques were most often employed to the edification of Portuguese colonial agents (missionaries, colonial administrative officials, maritime commanders and state-licensed medical practitioners), who would then become the conduits disseminating those techniques to Europe or other colonial locations.
Banquet
7:00 – 9:30 pm
Alison Games, Georgetown University and outgoing FEEGI President, will offer brief and informal remarks on "A Tale of Two Massacres: Virginia (1622) and Amboyna (1623) in Comparative Perspective." The banquet will be held at Dos Perros, a new Mexican restaurant in downtown Durham (additional fee required).