Creolization and Contraband
Creolization and Contraband

Author: Linda M. Rupert

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012-07-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0820343056

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DIVWhen Curaçao came under Dutch control in 1634, the small island off South America's northern coast was isolated and sleepy. The introduction of increased trade (both legal and illegal) led to a dramatic transformation, and Curaçao emerged as a major hub within Caribbean and wider Atlantic networks. It would also become the commercial and administrative seat of the Dutch West India Company in the Americas. The island's main city, Willemstad, had a non-Dutch majority composed largely of free blacks, urban slaves, and Sephardic Jews, who communicated across ethnic divisions in a new creole language called Papiamentu. For Linda M. Rupert, the emergence of this creole language was one of the two defining phenomena that gave shape to early modern Curaçao. The other was smuggling. Both developments, she argues, were informal adaptations to life in a place that was at once polyglot and regimented. They were the sort of improvisations that occurred wherever expanding European empires thrust different peoples together. Creolization and Contraband uses the history of Curaçao to develop the first book-length analysis of the relationship between illicit interimperial trade and processes of social, cultural, and linguistic exchange in the early modern world. Rupert argues that by breaking through multiple barriers, smuggling opened particularly rich opportunities for cross-cultural and interethnic interaction. Far from marginal, these extra-official exchanges were the very building blocks of colonial society./div

Realm between Empires
Realm between Empires

Author: Wim Klooster

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1501719602

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Wim Klooster and Gert Oostindie present a fresh look at the Dutch Atlantic in the period following the imperial moment of the seventeenth century. This epoch (1680–1815), the authors argue, marked a distinct and significant era in which Dutch military power declined and Dutch colonies began to chart a more autonomous path. The loss of Brazil and New Netherland were twin blows to Dutch imperial pretensions. Yet the Dutch Atlantic hardly faded into insignificance. Instead, the influence of the Dutch remained, as they were increasingly drawn into the imperial systems of Britain, Spain, and France. In their synthetic and comparative history, Klooster and Oostindie reveal the fragmented identity and interconnectedness of the Dutch in three Atlantic theaters: West Africa, Guiana, and the insular Caribbean. They show that the colonies and trading posts were heterogeneous in their governance, religious profiles, and ethnic compositions and were marked by creolization. Even as colonial control weakened, the imprint of Dutch political, economic, and cultural authority would mark territories around the Atlantic for decades to come. Realm between Empires is a powerful revisionist history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and provides a much-needed counterpoint to the more widely known British and French Atlantic histories.

In a Sea of Empires
In a Sea of Empires

Author: Jeppe Mulich

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-07-09

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1108489729

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A history of imperial competition, colonial cooperation, and revolutionary currents in the maritime borderlands of the early nineteenth-century Caribbean.

Bound by Bondage
Bound by Bondage

Author: Nicole Saffold Maskiell

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-08-15

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1501764268

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During the first generations of European settlement in North America, a number of interconnected Northeastern families carved out private empires. In Bound by Bondage, Nicole Saffold Maskiell argues that slavery was a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of this emergent aristocracy. Dynastic families built prestige based on shared notions of mastery, establishing sprawling manorial estates and securing cross-colonial landholdings and trading networks that stretched from the Northeast to the South, the Caribbean, and beyond. The members of this elite class were mayors, governors, senators, judges, and presidents, and they were also some of the largest slaveholders in the North. Aspirations to power and status, grounded in the political economy of human servitude, ameliorated ethnic and religious rivalries, and united once antagonistic Anglo and Dutch families, ensuring that Dutch networks endured throughout the English and then Revolutionary periods. Using original research drawn from archives across several continents in multiple languages, Maskiell expertly traces the origin of these private familial empires back to the founding generations of the Northeastern colonies and follows their growth to the eve of the American Revolutionary War. Maskiell reveals a multiracial Early America, where enslaved traders, woodsmen, millers, maids, bakers, and groomsmen developed expansive networks of their own that challenged the power of the elites, helping in escapes, in trade, and in simple camaraderie. In Bound by Bondage, Maskiell writes a new chapter in the history of early North America and connects developing Northern networks of merit to the invidious institution of slavery.

Reshaping Women's History
Reshaping Women's History

Author: Julie A. Gallagher

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0252050746

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Award-winning women scholars from nontraditional backgrounds have often negotiated an academic track that leads through figurative--and sometimes literal--minefields. Their life stories offer inspiration, but also describe heartrending struggles and daunting obstacles. Reshaping Women's History presents autobiographical essays by eighteen accomplished scholar-activists who persevered through poverty or abuse, medical malpractice or family disownment, civil war or genocide. As they illuminate their own unique circumstances, the authors also address issues all-too-familiar to women in the academy: financial instability, the need for mentors, explaining gaps in resumes caused by outside events, and coping with gendered family demands, biases, and expectations. Eye-opening and candid, Reshaping Women's History shows how adversity, and the triumph over it, enriches scholarship and spurs extraordinary efforts to affect social change. Contributors: Frances L. Buss, Nupur Chaudhuri, Lisa DiCaprio, Julie R. Enszer, Catherine Fosl, Midori Green, La Shonda Mims, Stephanie Moore, Grey Osterud, Barbara Ransby, Linda Reese, Annette Rodriguez, Linda Rupert, Kathleen Sheldon, Donna Sinclair, Rickie Solinger, Pamela Stewart, Waaseyaa'sin Christine Sy, and Ann Marie Wilson.

China’s War on Smuggling
China’s War on Smuggling

Author: Philip Thai

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 023154636X

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Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

Fractional Freedoms
Fractional Freedoms

Author: Michelle A. McKinley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-10-14

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1316739635

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Fractional Freedoms explores how thousands of slaves in colonial Peru were able to secure their freedom, keep their families intact, negotiate lower self-purchase prices, and arrange transfers of ownership by filing legal claims. Through extensive archival research, Michelle A. McKinley excavates the experiences of enslaved women whose historical footprint is barely visible in the official record. She complicates the way we think about life under slavery and demonstrates the degree to which slaves were able to exercise their own agency, despite being ensnared by the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved women are situated as legal actors who had overlapping identities as wives, mothers, mistresses, wet-nurses and day-wage domestics, and these experiences within the urban working environment are shown to condition their identities as slaves. Although the outcomes of their lawsuits varied, Fractional Freedoms demonstrates how enslaved women used channels of affection and intimacy to press for liberty and prevent the generational transmission of enslavement to their children.

Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World
Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World

Author: Aviva Ben-Ur

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2024-01-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1501773178

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Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World represents the first collective attempt to reframe the study of colonial and early American Jewry within the context of Atlantic History. From roughly 1500 to 1830, the Atlantic World was a tightly intertwined swathe of global powers that included Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. How, when, and where do Jews figure in this important chapter of history? This book explores these questions and many others. The essays of this volume foreground the connectivity between Jews and other population groups in the realms of empire, trade, and slavery, taking readers from the shores of Caribbean islands to various outposts of the Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese empires. Jewish Entanglements in the Atlantic World revolutionizes the study of Jews in early American history, forging connections and breaking down artificial academic divisions so as to start writing the history of an Atlantic world influenced strongly by the culture, economy, politics, religion, society, and sexual relations of Jewish people.

Los Adaes, the First Capital of Spanish Texas
Los Adaes, the First Capital of Spanish Texas

Author: Francis X. Galan

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2020-09-25

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 1623498791

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In 1721, Spain established a fort and mission on the Texas-Louisiana border, or frontera, to stem the tide of people and goods flowing back and forth between northern New Spain and French Louisiana. Named in part after the indigenous Adai people, the complex of the presidio (Nuestra Señora del Pilar de los Adaes) and the mission (San Miguel de Cuellar de los Adaes) became collectively known as Los Adaes. It was the capital of Tejas for New Spain. In the first book devoted to Los Adaes, historian Francis X. Galan traces the roots of the current US-Mexico border to the colonial history of this all but forgotten Spanish fort and mission. He demonstrates that, despite efforts to the contrary, Spain could neither fully block the penetration of smuggled goods and settlers into Texas from Louisiana nor could it successfully convert the Native Americans to Christianity and the Spanish economic system. In the aftermath of the transfer of Louisiana from France to Spain in 1762, Spain chose to shutter the fort and mission. The settlers, or Adaeseños, were forced to march to San Antonio in 1773. Some returned to East Texas soon after to establish Nacogdoches. Others remained in San Antonio, the new capital of Spanish Texas, and settled on lands distributed from the secularized Mission San Antonio de Valero, a mission now widely known as the Alamo. Los Adaes, the First Capital of Spanish Texas makes a major contribution to Texas history by providing a richer perspective on the shifting borders of colonial powers.