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Atlantic History in Global Perspective*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

David Eltis
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Abstract

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Type
Round Table Conference: The Nature of Atlantic History
Information
Itinerario , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , July 1999 , pp. 141 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1999

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References

Notes

1 For the latest research on Cherchen man see Barber, Elizabeth Wayland, The Mummies of Urumchi (London 1999).Google Scholar The plaid textiles on the mummies, interred in North-western China about 1,000 BC, could only have been woven on European style looms and the mummies themselves have large noses, fair hair, round eyes, and are six feet tall. This suggests that Chinese and European civilisations did not develop in isolation from each other. Yet it is a large jump from this to the argument that an Atlantic-style cultural integration existed between Europe and Asia at any point before the twentieth century.

2 See Gungwu, Wang, ‘Merchants Without Empire: The Hokkinen Sojourning Communities’ in: Tracy, James D. ed., The Rise ofMerchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge 1990) 400–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For an early recognition of this pattern see Meinig, D.W., The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on Five Hundred Years of History (New Haven 1986)Google Scholar.

4 Harley, C. Knick, ‘Resources and Economic Development in Historical Perspective ‘in: Laidler, David ed., Responses to Economic Change (Ottawa 1986) 1–28;Google ScholarEltis, David, The Rise ofAfrican Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Interpretations of the evolution of western economic dominance that stress the critical role of private property rights usually set up a polarity between private property rights on the one hand and common property resources on the other with the former being classed as ‘western’. For a well known example see North, Douglass C. and Thomas, Robert Paul, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar In fact, group or corporate rights - a hybrid in terms of the above polarity - have been the global norm, a norm to which the western world has returned in a sense since the advent of widespread business incorporation in the nineteenth century. Most post-neolithic societies - western or not - must have drawn a very small share of their total income from common property resources.

6 Curtin, Philip, Feierman, Steven, Thompson, Leonard and Vansina, Jan, African History (Boston 1978) 156–171;Google ScholarMiers, Suzanne and Kopytoff, Igor, ‘African Slavery as an Institution in Marginality’ in: Kopytoff, Miers and eds, Slavery in Africa (Madison 1977) 3–77.Google Scholar For some interesting parallels in one context in the Americas see Starna, William A. and Watkins, Ralph, ‘Northern Iroquoian Slavery’, Ethnohistory 38 (January 1991) 34–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Patterson, Orlando, Freedom 1 (New York 1991) 20–44.Google Scholar

8 If slavery is defined more restrictively in terms of a ‘slave society’ in Moses Finley's sense, then the description ‘peculiar’ remains apt, because, as noted above, there have been only five such societies. See his ‘A Peculiar Institution’, Times Literary Supplement (2 July 1976) 819.Google Scholar But Finley also notes how unusual was the Greek practice of incorporating ‘peasantry and urban craftsmen into the community […] as full members’ (page 821).

9 Private property in land, nuclear family, absence of strong kinship structures - to mention just a few, though there is a strong tendency in the modern literature to stress the African contribution to the making of revolution, as opposed to its consequences. See Fick, Carolyn E., The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville 1990)Google Scholar.

10 Thornton, , Africa and Africans, 197–201,Google Scholar especially the discussion of marriage on the Remire estate in Cayenne in the late 1680s.

11 Sir Atkins, John, 3 October 1675 in: Sainsbury, J. ed., Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series 9 (henceforth CSPCS) 294.Google Scholar

12 Dunn, , Sugar and Slaves, 258.Google Scholar For a full account see CO1/28, 200–205.

13 See CSPCS, 1685–1688, docs 299, 311, 330, 339, 445, 560, 623, 869, 883, 965, 1,286; and Ibid., 1689–1692, doc 1,041. References to the prominent role of Gold Coast slaves in slave resistance all appear to come from the eighteenth century, even though they refer i n some cases to events in the previous century.

14 Patterson, Orlando, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London 1967) 267–268;Google ScholarIdem, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War’ in: Richard Price ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Second edition, Baltimore 1979) 254–259; Craton, Michael, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca 1982) 74–80Google Scholar.

15 Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998), especially 154–185.Google Scholar

16 Personal communication from Pieter C. Emmer.

17 Richardson, David, The Mediterranean Passes (Wakefield 1981).Google Scholar Among the first duties of ships commissioned by the early American Republic at the end of the eighteenth century was protection of US shipping against the Barbary pirates.

18 James Kirkwood to Secretary of State, 6June 1709, CO 388/12, K25.

19 Cundall, Frank, The Mico College, Jamaica (Kingston 1914) 7–9.Google Scholar Samuel Pepys' comments on th e European slaves held by the Barbary states are in his diaries dated 8 January and 28 November 1661.

20 Philip D. Morgan argues that white attitudes toward blacks hardened over the colonial period. In the sense that skin colour and ‘Europeaness’ became increasingly important in the way people identified themselves, this is undoubtedly true. However, it does not explain the emancipation issue which arose in the Northern States during and after the Revolution or changing white attitudes to blacks in the abolition movement in the wider Adantic region in the eighteenth century. Morgan, Philip D., ‘British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600–1780’ in: Bailyn, Bernard and Morgan, Philip D. eds, Strangers within the Realm; Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill 1991) 157–219Google Scholar.

21 Steele, Ian K., The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (Oxford 1986).Google Scholar The density of communication was much less in French case (see Banks, Kenneth, ‘Communications and Imperial Absolutism in the Three French Colonial Ports, 1713–1763’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, Queen's University 1995),Google Scholar and while much greater in the Portuguese Adantic, the communication was between Africa and Brazil, not Portugal, Africa and the Americas - in other words between a slave supplying society and a plantation society. See Verger, Pierre, Trade Relations Between the Bights of Benin and Bahia From the Seventeenth to 19th Century (Ibadan 1976),Google ScholarBauss, Rudolph W., ‘Rio de Janeiro: The Ruse of Late Colonial Brazil's Dominant Emporium, 1777–1808’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Tulane University 1977),Google ScholarCurto, Jose, ‘Alcohol and Slaves: The Luso-Brazilian Alcohol Commerce at Mpinda, Luanda and Benguela During the Atlantic Slave Trade c. 1480–1830 and Its Impact on the Societies of West Central Africa’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of California at Los Angeles 1996)Google Scholar for the nature and intensity of the African-Brazilian connection.

22 Low Dutch migration and a failure to keep pace with English Atlantic trade in the two centuries before 1800 meant that Dutch transadantic networks and contacts with non-Europeans were simply many times less frequent and dense. Even if we allow for the Dutch East Indies, intercourse between England and the transoceanic world - and accordingly daily awareness of the latter - the association of say the consumption of sugar and the enslavement of Africans, and eventually abolitionism, must have been much more likely in England than in The Netherlands. The English had far more settlement colonies than the Dutch and, as mentioned, a much stronger transatlantic community. In the Portuguese case, transadantic community was dense, bu t it was between Africa and Brazil, not Africa, Brazil and Portugal. The slave trade was rooted in the plantation society itself, and most of the plantation produce was either consumed there or shipped t o other parts of Europe. The thrust of all this is that it was notjust English abolitionism that was exceptional, it was the North Atlantic English transatlantic trade and plantation system that was very different from an European perspective.

23 For the recent literature and a judicious discussion of the roots of anti-slavery in the English context see Turley, David, The Culture of English Anti-Slavery, 1780–1860 (London 1991) 1–46, 227–236.Google Scholar For the decline of Dutch slavery in the East Indies, where it might be noted that the institution was not related to export production, see Abeyasekere, S., ‘Slaves in Batavia: Insights from a Slave Register’ in: Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency, 286–314, especially 308–310Google Scholar.

24 Godfrey, Sheldon J. and Godfrey, Judith C., Search Out the Land: The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 (Montreal 1995) 38Google Scholar; Farrar, P.A., ‘The Jews in Barbados’, Journal of Barbados Museum and Historical Society 9 (1942) 130–134Google Scholar.

25 Akenson, Donald Harman, If the lrish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630–1730 (Montreal 1997) 85–87, 117–153.Google Scholar

26 Stein, Robert, ‘The Free Men of Colour and the Revolution in Saint Domingue, 1789–1792’, Histoire Sociale 14 (1981) 14.Google Scholar

27 Clignet, Remi, Many Wives, Many Powers: Authority and Power in Polygynous Marriages (Evanston 1970) 23.Google Scholar

28 Robertson, Claire C. and Klein, Martin A., ‘Women's Importance in African Slave Systems’ in: Robertson, Claire C. and Klein, Martin A. eds, Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison 1983) 15–16 and the literature cited there.Google Scholar

29 Greene, Sandra E., Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (Portsmouth 1996) 4–6, 20–24, 28–47.Google Scholar

30 Maree, J.A. de, Reizen op en Beschrijving van den Goudkust van Guinea I (Amsterdam 1817–1818) 72, 183Google Scholar cited in Coombs, Douglas, The Gold Coast, Britain and The Netherlands, 1850–1874 (London 1963) 6Google Scholar.

31 Behrendt, Stephen D., Eltis, David and Richardson, David, Africa and the Atlantic World (forthcoming Oxford University Press, New York).Google Scholar

32 Spanish production of specie surpassed these peaks in the later eighteenth century.

33 See Eltis, , The Rise of African Slavery.Google Scholar

34 Eltis, David, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York 1987) 269–282.Google Scholar