This book covers the evolution of royal policy in Spanish America as eighteenth-century Spain modernized its empire and transformed itself into a power of the first order. Tracing the interplay between war and reform, the analysis confronts the diverse realities of the Spanish Atlantic world, which stretched from the northern Mexican borderlands to Argentina and Chile. Unlike earlier studies on eighteenth-century Spain, this work incorporates the early Bourbon experience into the narrative and integrates the impressive reemergence of the Royal Armada into a fuller picture of administrative, commercial, fiscal, ecclesiastical, and military change.
An Economist Book of the Year, 2001. In the 18th century, a debate ensued over the French naturalist Buffon’s contention that the New World was in fact geologically new. Historians, naturalists, and philosophers clashed over Buffon’s view. This book maintains that the “dispute” was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the New World and its people. In addressing this question, the author offers a strikingly novel interpretation of the Enlightenment.
Fruitfully combining approaches from economic history and the cultural history of commerce, this book examines the role of interpersonal trust in underpinning trade, amid the challenges and uncertainties of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. It focuses on the nature of mercantile activity in two parts of Spain: Cadiz in the south, and its trade with Spain's American empire; and Bilbao in the north, and its trade with western and northern Europe. In particular, it explores the processes of trade, trading networks and communications, seeking to understand merchant behaviour, especially the choices made by individuals when conducting business - and specifically with whom they chose to deal. Drawing from a broad range of Spanish, Peruvian and British archival sources, the book reveals merchants' experiences of trusting their agents and correspondents, and shows how different factors, from distance to legal frameworks and ethnicity, affected their ability to rely on their contacts. Xabier Lamikiz is Associate Professor of Economic History at the University of the Basque Country. .
The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is a collection of essays focusing on the expansion, elaboration, and increasing integration of the economy of the Atlantic basin—comprising parts of Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In thirteen essays, the contributors examine the complex and variegated processes by which markets were created in the Atlantic basin and how they became integrated. While a number of the contributors focus on the economic history of a specific European imperial system, others, mirroring the realities of the world they are writing about, transcend imperial boundaries and investigate topics shared throughout the region. In the latter case, the contributors focus either on processes occurring along the margins or interstices of empires, or on "breaches" in the colonial systems established by various European powers. Taken together, the essays shed much-needed light on the organization and operation of both the European imperial orders of the early modern era and the increasingly integrated economy of the Atlantic basin challenging these orders over the course of the same period.
This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus's arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America. Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires' processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.
This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. African institutions, political events, and economic structures shaped Africa's voluntary involvement in the Atlantic arena before 1680. Africa's economic and military strength gave African elites the capacity to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics of colonization which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers, and he explains why African slaves were placed in roles of central significance. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors, transferring and transforming African culture in the New World.
Introduction: Empires at war -- Civil war in the British Empire : the American Revolution -- The war on privilege and dissension : the French Revolution -- From prize colony to black independence : the revolution in Haiti -- Multiple routes to sovereignty : the Spanish American revolutions -- The revolutions compared : causes, patterns, legacies
Early modern, long-distance trade was fraught with risk and uncertainty, driving merchants to seek means (that is, institutions) to reduce them. In the traditional historiography on Spanish colonial trade, the role of risk is largely ignored. Instead, the guild merchants are depicted as anti-competitive monopolists who manipulated markets and exploited colonial consumers. Jeremy Baskes argues that much of the commercial behavior interpreted by modern historians as predatory was instead designed to reduce the uncertainty and risk of Atlantic world trade. This book discusses topics from the development and use of maritime insurance in eighteenth- century Spain to the commercial strategies of Spanish merchants; the traditionally misunderstood effects of the 1778 promulgation of "comercio libre," and the financial chaos and bankruptcies that ensued; the economic rationale for the Spanish flotillas; and the impact of war and privateering on commerce and business decisions. By elevating risk to the center of focus, this multifaceted study makes a number of revisionist contributions to the late colonial economic history of the Spanish empire.
“Engaging unique sources . . . Londa Schiebinger untangles the complex relationships between European and local physicians, healers, plants, and slavery.” —François Regourd, Université Paris Nanterre In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die. The history of medicine bristles with attempts to find new and miraculous remedies, to work with and against nature to restore humans to health and well-being. In this book, Londa Schiebinger examines medicine and human experimentation in the Atlantic World, exploring the circulation of people, disease, plants, and knowledge between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. She traces the development of a colonial medical complex from the 1760s, when a robust experimental culture emerged in the British and French West Indies, to the early 1800s, when debates raged about banning the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. Massive mortality among enslaved Africans and European planters, soldiers, and sailors fueled the search for new healing techniques. Amerindian, African, and European knowledges competed to cure diseases emerging from the collision of peoples on newly established, often poorly supplied, plantations. But not all knowledge was equal. Highlighting the violence and fear endemic to colonial struggles, Schiebinger explores aspects of African medicine that were not put to the test, such as Obeah and vodou. This book analyzes how and why specific knowledges were blocked, discredited, or held secret. “In this urgent, probing and visually striking volume, Londa Schiebinger, one of the pioneers of feminist and colonial science studies, shifts our understanding of Enlightenment racial attitudes to the domain of the medical, making a vital contribution to the dynamic new wave of research on science and slavery in the Atlantic world.” —James Delbourgo, Rutgers University
