The Atlantic World

Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination

Willem Klooster, Alfred Padula, Willem Klooster, Alfred Padula

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429887642
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination brings together ten original essays that explore the many connections between the Old and New Worlds in the early modern period. Divided into five sets of paired essays, it examines the role of specific port cities in Atlantic history, aspects of European migration, the African dimension, and the ways in which the Atlantic world has been imagined.

This second edition has been updated and expanded to contain two new chapters on revolutions and abolition, which discuss the ways in which two of the main pillars of the Atlantic world—empire and slavery—met their end. Both essays underscore the importance of the Caribbean in the profound transformation of the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This edition also includes a revised introduction that incorporates recent literature, providing students with references to the key historiographical debates, and pointers of where the field is moving to inspire their own research.

Supported further by a range of maps and illustrations, The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination is the ideal book for students of Atlantic History.

Part I
Perspectives

Although they were very disparate towns, Boston and Lisbon, linked by the great circular movement of Atlantic winds and currents, were sister cities in the making of the Atlantic world. Lisbon was a cosmopolitan and multicultural society molded by millennia of interchange with the ancient Mediterranean, the capital of a far-flung Asian empire, a city skilled in surviving in a turbulent world. Boston, by contrast, was newborn; without history. Boston harbored the utopian dream of being a new kind of Atlantic city, a model of humanity unsullied by the nastier side of human nature; an anti-Portugal.

In the seventeenth century, the Boston of Mark Peterson’s Chapter 1 “Life on the Margins: Boston’s Anxieties of Influence in the Atlantic World” was scarcely more than a small town, a colony on the northern flank of the British empire in America. Even so, its early history was marked by an extraordinary struggle between utopian isolationists who wanted to reject the Atlantic world or at least to moralize it, and realists who sought full participation in Atlantic markets. The tension between utopian and realistic drives, between moral reform and economic profit, led Bostonians to be called Yankee hypocrites, who simultaneously practiced sharp trading and ostentatious piety. It grew to be a major seaport, thanks in part to engagement in the slave trade. Boston rejected racial and cultural mixing, the multiculturalism which Peterson sees as the very essence of the Atlantic world.

Timothy Walker’s Lisbon (Chapter 2, “Lisbon as a Strategic Haven in the Atlantic World”) portrays a maritime crossroads city whose location near the intersection of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic had, over three millennia, attracted the sailing ships of Phoenician merchants, Muslim invaders, Portuguese colonizers, and the warships of the Royal Navy. Despite its frequent dependence on foreign champions for survival, Lisbon was the base for Portugal’s remarkable maritime achievements: the exploration of the African coast and the discovery of a route to Asia that led, in turn, to a Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean, and the discovery and colonization of Brazil. Lisbon was remarkably skilled in the arts of survival, a true chameleon of a city, shifting its relations from neutrality to join alliances constantly in order to survive. Its plethora of trading partners from around the globe led some to think of it as an Asian city; others thought it the most African city in Europe.

1 Life on the Margins

Boston’s Anxieties of Influence in the Atlantic World

Mark A. Peterson

In his fondest dreams, John Winthrop imagined that Boston would be “as a Citty vpon a Hill,” a community knit together in brotherly affection, a beacon of justice and mercy, an exemplar to his fellow Puritans in England, and a model for future English colonies throughout the Atlantic world: “[H]ee shall make vs a prayse and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England.”¹ Twenty-five years after the founding of Boston, Winthrop’s fellow Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, had his own words to describe the city and the colony of which it was already the hub: he called it “a poor, cold, and useless place.”² When the Lord Protector of England’s thoughts turned to a “Western Design” for expanding England’s global power, he imagined rich, warm, and useful places such as Jamaica and Hispaniola, places where England might “gain an interest in that part of the West Indies in possession of the Spaniard.”³ To that end, Cromwell ardently encouraged New Englanders to abandon their poor, cold colonies and migrate to Jamaica, where they could be of use to England’s greater glory.⁴

Cromwell was not alone in thinking that Boston was a remote and unpromising outpost of Britain’s Atlantic empire. In their heart of hearts, Bostonians knew that their city was not, or at least was not yet, the hub of the solar system. The island colonies to the south were warmer, richer, and more useful than their own to the empires—British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch—that established them. Yet Bostonians were also aware of the insufferable climates, the soaring death rates, the vicious profiteering, the human exploitation, squalid living conditions, and sinful ways of life that characterized these competing plantations. They hoped and prayed that their own experiment would be a place where, in Winthrop’s words, “the riche and mighty should not eate vpp the poore, nor the poore, and dispised rise vpp against theire superiours…”⁵

This was early Boston’s dilemma, and the source of much anxiety through its first two centuries. The city’s founders and their successors were ambitious. They aspired to be the brightest star in Britain’s imperial firmament, to have an exemplary and beneficial influence throughout the rapidly expanding Atlantic world. Yet at the same time, they feared and mistrusted the propulsive forces that were bringing that world into being, and looked with trepidation upon the chaotic societies emerging as old worlds melded into strange hybrid new ones. If John Winthrop sometimes imagined Boston as a “city upon a hill,” he also looked to New England’s remote landscape as a refuge, “a shelter and a hidinge place,” an escape from the corruption and degradation of England’s churches and society, and from the warfare and exploitation that characterized the relationships among Europe’s imperial powers.⁶ Bostonians wanted to shape the larger Atlantic community without being shaped by it—to prosper within it without catching its contagions. By exploring this tension between the utopian aspirations for purity, for removal from the rough and rude conditions of a grasping world of greed and desire, and the powerful ambitions for influence and significance within that larger world, we can begin to assess Boston’s distinctive place in the Atlantic community of the early modern period. For it was not simply in the dreams of its principal founder, but in the longer trajectory of the city’s early history, and in virtually every aspect of its development, that this tension can be seen.

We can, for the sake of argument, think of the evolution of the Atlantic community in three stages or aspects.⁷ First, contact and conquest, as European imperial powers explored the far reaches of the Atlantic basin, laid claim to the rich resources it found, used force to uphold those claims, and incidentally created new transatlantic and cis-Atlantic linkages among previously remote and isolated locations.⁸ Second is the process by which these new linkages were solidified in economic terms, where exploitable resources of the Atlantic world were knit together in stable patterns—the commercial trade in staple crops, the evolving labor market, especially in slaves, and the commoditization of land that characterized the Atlantic economy.⁹ Finally, we can think of the emergence of Atlantic cultures, syncretic blends of the various “Old World” societies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas that met and interacted in these zones of contact.¹⁰ These stages need not be thought of as strictly chronological; they were all aspects of a broad process of development, taking place at different rates over diverse regions of the Atlantic world. This chapter explores the tensions Bostonians felt between aspiration and anxiety in each of these three aspects of development, these three main ligatures of Atlantic society: the realm of imperial affairs, the conquest and dominance of territories; the realm of economic development, trade, and commerce, including, most significantly, the slave trade; and the realm of culture.

In 1630, when Boston was founded, England’s imperial ambition, its interest in pursuing Atlantic expansion, was at low ebb. The Stuart monarchs had offered only weak support for the Protestant cause on the European continent during the Thirty Years’ War, with miserable consequences. Part of what drove Winthrop and his fellow Puritans from England was their fear that the Catholic successes in Europe would soon sweep England as well.¹¹ Furthermore the unofficial Elizabethan strategy of preying on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean, and looking to Atlantic colonies as potential staging grounds for launching the Sea Dogs’ raids, had faded from view, replaced by the Stuarts’ desire for a Spanish alliance.¹² Boston’s founders did not see themselves as partaking in a grand English expansionist project, but fleeing from a foundering nation to a safe haven. And for its first half-century, in part as a matter of policy, in part through geographical accident, Boston and its interests were indeed extremely remote from the centers of imperial conflict in the Atlantic world.

As the northernmost English New World colony, Boston was far from threatening the Spanish Main, and even the sea lanes that brought Caribbean traffic back to Europe veered away from the North American continent far to the south of the New England coast. Sensibly enough, Spain never contested the English presence in Massachusetts Bay—why bother?¹³ More immediately, Boston’s location placed it roughly midway between the Dutch outpost at New Amsterdam and France’s expansive but thinly settled colony along the St. Lawrence. Yet here, too, Boston posed little threat and saw little conflict with either of these potential enemies in the first half-century of settlement. The Hudson and the St. Lawrence, not the Charles and the Mystic, were clearly the routes to the lucrative fur trade of the North American interior that the French and Dutch both sought. Early Boston was mainly a somewhat suspicious trading partner, rather than a threat, to its nearest imperial neighbors. Even at the moment of English conquest over Dutch New Amsterdam, Boston and New England neither took part in nor gained much advantage from an operation directed by the metropolis.¹⁴

Similarly remote in the early years was the possibility of extensive conflict with powerful native American confederations. The coastal regions of Massachusetts had been decimated before the New England settlement by waves of smallpox and other diseases, so that the immediate area around Boston was much depopulated.¹⁵ The more powerful Amerindian confederations in the interior, the Abenakis to the north and the Iroquois to the west, were sufficiently distant as to have little to do with the new settlements around Massachusetts Bay. It would not be until 1675 that Boston was drawn into a major imperial conflict, King Philip’s War. The war, in part the result of Iroquois, specifically Mohawk, expansion into western Massachusetts, put increasing pressure on English–Amerindian relations that were already collapsing under the pressure of New England’s growing settler population.¹⁶ Even this bloody two-year war never spilled over into other imperial relationships: New France did not join the conflict, and New England fought the war on its own, without assistance from the metropolis.¹⁷

In short, then, it can be said that for its first half-century, Boston hewed closely to its initial goal to be a refuge and a hiding place for the godly, remote from the imperial conflicts that characterized so much of the early Atlantic world. Even during the protectorship of the more-or-less sympathetic Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, Boston remained largely aloof from his “Western Design.” Although a few Bostonians helped to plan the expedition, few New Englanders heeded Cromwell’s advice and moved to the Caribbean to fight the Spanish.¹⁸ Unlike many Atlantic port cities, early Boston never heard the pounding of enemy cannons or the march of occupying soldiers in its streets. The sole exception to this claim in fact proves the rule. The only time Boston was occupied by enemy forces and placed under martial law was when England itself tried to end Boston’s longstanding commitment to independent self-governing isolation. When James II revoked the Massachusetts charter in 1685 and lumped New England with New York under a single overarching royal government, English troops and a military governor tried, but failed, to convince Bostonians to conform to the larger imperial project. The rebellion of 1689, in which Edmund Andros, the military governor, was arrested and deported, demonstrated conclusively that two generations after its founding, Bostonians held fast to their commitment to avoid entanglement in imperial ambitions.¹⁹

The nearly simultaneous rebellion in Britain against Andros’ patron, King James II, and the subsequent installation of a Dutch Protestant on England’s throne in the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689, utterly transformed Bostonians’ view of their place in the imperial contest for Atlantic power. Unlike the hated crypto-Catholic Stuart monarchs, William of Orange took an active interest in forming Protestant alliances and advancing the Protestant cause in Europe and across the Atlantic as well.²⁰ His efforts, and those of his successors, the Hanoverians, to reorganize and consolidate Britain’s overseas possessions were designed to increase their potential for military and economic gains against Catholic, and especially French, competition.

Thi...