''Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World'' brings together ten original essays by an international group of scholars exploring the complex outcomes of the intermingling of people, circulation of goods, exchange of information, and exposure to new ideas that are the hallmark of the early modern Atlantic. Spanning the period from the earliest French crossings to Newfoundland at the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the wars of independence in Spanish South America, c. 1830, and encompassing a range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors direct particular attention to regions, communities, and groups whose activities in, and responses to, an ever-more closely bound Atlantic world remain relatively under-represented in the literature. Some of the chapters focus on the experience of Europeans, including French consumers of Newfoundland cod, English merchants forming families in Spanish Seville, and Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil making the Caribbean island of Nevis their home. Others focus on the ways in which the populations with whom Europeans came into contact, enslaved, or among whom they settled - the Tupi peoples of Brazil, the Kriston women of the west African port of Cacheu, among others - adapted to and were changed by their interactions with previously unknown peoples, goods, institutions, and ideas. Together with the substantial Introduction by the editor which reviews the significance of the field as a whole, these essays capture the complexity and variety of experience of the countless men and women who came into contact during the period, whilst highlighting and illustrating the porous and fluid nature, in practice, of the Early Modern Atlantic World.
Author(s): Caroline A. Williams
Publisher: Ashgate
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 276
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Figures......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 10
Preface......Page 14
Introduction: Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World......Page 16
1 Codfish, Consumption, and Colonization: The Creation of the French Atlantic World During the Sixteenth Century......Page 48
2 Negotiating Fortune: English Merchants in Early Sixteenth-Century Seville......Page 72
3 Interlopers in an Intercultural Zone? Early Scots Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1630–1660......Page 90
4 ‘A People So Subtle’: Sephardic Jewish Pioneers of the English West Indies......Page 112
5 Subjects or Allies: The Contentious Status of the Tupi Indians in Dutch Brazil, 1625–1654......Page 128
6 ‘To Transmit to Posterity the Virtue, Lustreand Glory of their Ancestors’: Scottish Pioneers in Darien, Panama......Page 146
7 Controlling Traders: Slave Coast Strategies at Savi and Ouidah......Page 166
8 Walking the Tightrope: Female Agency, Religious Practice, and the Portuguese Inquisition on the Upper Guinea Coast (Seventeenth Century)......Page 188
9 Slaves, Convicts, and Exiles: African Travellers in the Portuguese Atlantic World, 1720–1750......Page 208
10 The Life of Alexander Alexander and the Spanish Atlantic, 1799–1822......Page 218
Bibliography......Page 238
Index......Page 266