The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy Circuits of trade, money and knowledge, 1650-1914 (original) (raw)
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Islands at the Crossroads: Migration, Seafaring, and Interaction in the Caribbean, 2011
By 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht had ended the War of Spanish Succession and had, in theory, formalized the imperial domains of north ern European powers in the Americas, particularly in the Caribbean. Simultaneously, a series of legislative actions taken by the imperial seats attempted to control these boundaries through the establishment of trading regimes which privileged royal monopolies and national trading companies. Yet rather than a period of equilibrium in the Caribbean plantation colonies, the eighteenth century was marked by considerable internal regional trade in which the interstices of empire were sites of inter-and intracolonial economic interaction. In this chapter we explore the incongruity of collective economic frontiers and po liti cal boundaries. Specifically, we focus on the ways in which everyday internal and informal trade circumvented colonial frontiers. This incongruity has implications for the ways in which the material world shaped everyday life and for the way in which we as archaeologists are conceiving human interaction.
that thrives and is dependent on the physical, intellectual, commercial, and artistic labor of Europeans, Africans, indigenous tribes, and every mixture thereof. What makes this collection so insightful is its focus on the richness of the sixteenth century in and of itself. If you consider the fact that we never have and never will be able to predict the future, it is unfair to simply judge a culture or historical period as a precursor to that of another era, especially when such an evaluation is made through a dichotomous cause-and-effect perspective. These essays are strengthened by their concerted focus on the complexity of Caribbean life during the sixteenth century .
As a profession, historians have made a point to study almost every civilization, every acculturated corner of the Earth and every people that has given rise to Empires, Republics and massive hegemonies. However, some areas remain comparatively untouched. The region of the Caribbean, for example, seems to be mostly shrouded in legend and myth, according to popular culture. Yet a select few loyal and passionate historians have managed to dedicate their professional lives and careers to exploring, archiving, and digging up the past in the Caribbean Islands of the Greater, Lesser and Leeward Antilles. Some information on region came easily enough through research of the Imperial records of the major nations involved in the exploration and colonization process which still remain in power today, such as Great Britain and the rest of the modern United Kingdom. In analyzing the work of these historians, who provide valuable secondary source research on a geographic region relatively untouched, the groundwork is formulated for the next generation of historians.
William & Mary Quarterly , 2022
In recent years, the dwindling reliance on national and single-imperial frameworks of analysis in favor of an emphasis on connectivity and entanglement has stimulated a surge of fresh transimperial and colonial histories. This shift in focus has been especially pronounced in the study of the early modern Caribbean, where it has also generated an invigorating new trend focusing on broader regional integration. Scholars now regularly embrace multilingual research projects to explore how lived experiences of colonial officials, planters, merchants, and enslaved and free people of color in the Caribbean were shaped by interisland and regional networks as much as by the assertions of sovereignty issued from distant imperial metropoles. By attending to illicit commercial networks, shared responses to natural disasters, and maritime border crossings, historians have produced textured understandings of regional integration and brought into view a Greater Caribbean as a recognizable unit of historical analysis. 1 In In a Sea of Empires, Jeppe Mulich both narrows and expands this focus, for though he concentrates specifically on the Leeward Islands in the northeastern corner of the Caribbean, he also makes the case that integration at the microregional level was a critical component of early nineteenth-century globalization. By examining formal and informal relations among the Dutch, French, Spanish, British, Danish, and Swedish colonies from the end of the American Revolution through the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean, Mulich argues that layered networks forged through cross-imperial practices of contraband trade, slavery, and privateering made the Leeward Islands "a politically polyglot zone of thin sovereignty and local integration" (2). As a result, he suggests, they serve as a historical example of an "inter-imperial microregion" (2), an ideal type that Mulich suggests can be found across the globe but whose role in early globalization remains little explored. As both a sociological model for the analysis of globalization from a regional perspective and a historical case study of the Leeward Islands, In a Sea of Empires is well-written and conceptually stimulating. The theoretical
The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century
2019
Edited by Ida Altman and David Wheat. Contributions by Lauren MacDonald, Cacey Farnsworth, Erin Stone, Ida Altman, Shannon Lalor, Brian Hamm, Marc Eagle, David Wheat, JMH Clark, Pablo Gómez, Spencer Tyce, Gabriel de Avilez Rocha. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803299573/