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This research strives to reveal how ideologies of race, class, and gender manifested in the social, physical, and material landscapes of pre-emancipation colonial Saba, Dutch Caribbean. Race, class, and gender serve as facets and vectors for ideology. By viewing them as processes, their capacity to express such through their social and material environments are inextricably tied to their particular temporal and spatial contexts. Through comparisons of the social and material environments of multiple, contemporaneous social contexts within Saba, common social and material vectors among these ideological facets can become apparent. This work diverges from similar, previous research in that it undertakes a post-colonial approach to study the dialectics involved between locally-based, culturally-derived abstractions of class, race, and gender, and the materiality which resulted from these relationships. Dialectical studies emphasize an accountability to the totality of a given social environment. As a single researcher, tracing the processes of ideological abstractions such as class, race, and gender while accounting for the whole can be a daunting task. It is facilitated, however, by studying social environments that are bounded through geographical limitations with small populations, but with sufficient cultural similarities to the region to permit insightful contextualization of similar and divergent processes within their respective ideologies. Saba is a Caribbean island just 13 square kilometers in area, with a population that never exceeded 1,877 residents by the time of emancipation. It saw very little immigration to the island after 1700, and remained a Dutch possession for most of its colonial era. Saba never developed into a full plantation economy characterized by a large majority of enslaved Africans relative to free European-descent residents; rather, the population of white residents compared to enslaved Africans and free Sabans of African descent fluctuated mildly around fifty per cent respectively. The island of Saba is therefore an ideal environment to demonstrate the utility of dialectical archaeology when employed at the ground level in a whole-society context. To date, a dialectical archaeology involving a whole-society approach has not been undertaken in North American or Caribbean historical archaeology, in part due to the sheer volume of research data that it necessitates. Fortunately, the social and geographic realities of Saba make such an approach feasible, and the social and material database derived from this research permits insights into a range of issues of concern to historical archaeologists. In particular, this concerns: • Differentiating between slavery, free poverty, and low class in the archaeological record. • The dialectic between scale, locality, and perspective in defining and situating class and poverty.
Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism tells the history of Early American Jews, focusing on the objects of everyday life used and created by Jews, such as ritual baths, food, gravestones, portraits, furniture, as well as the synagogue. By uncovering these objects and exposing the common culture of the Jewish Atlantic world, the book provides a fresh understanding of a crucial era in Jewish and American history. It offers new insights about the origins of Jewish American messianism, helping readers better understand messianism in contemporary American society. It charts the shared culture of these Jews who lived in the port towns in the Caribbean and on both sides of the Atlantic, and author Laura Arnold Leibman argues that thinking about Judaism as an embodied religion is key to understanding their culture. Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism makes early Jewish American history entertaining, accessible, and interesting to general readers, as well as to academic audiences. A companion website contains thousands of photographs of material culture from throughout the Jewish Atlantic world, as well as study guides for using the images.
A Sefardic Pepper-Pot in the Caribbean. History, Language, Literature and Art. , 2016
The paper seeks first to provide an overview of the New Christian and Jewish colonizers and their networks on each of the three islands before the consolidation process began around 1650. After this introduction, I will discuss some of the trading connections through the use of some biographical examples so as to provide some understanding of the micro as well as the macro structures of Jewish and New Christian networks in the Caribbean and wider Atlantic worlds.
Wim Klooster, Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600-1800
Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1825 , 2009
Illicit trade was big business in many parts of the New World in colonial times. In the two centuries after 1600, it also grew increasingly complex. If the initial examples of inter-imperial smuggling usually involved exchanges between northern Europeans and settlers of Spanish America, after the establishment of French, English, and Dutch colonies many different bilateral and multilateral types of contraband trade emerged. Dividing the period 1600-1800 into eight sections of 25 years each, this essay shows how the dominant smuggling centers, the items exchanged, and the volume of trade kept changing.