Browse

Between the 16th and the 19th centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity, actively participating in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm on a par with European monarchies. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, this book examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture, traces its development across four centuries marked by war and the Atlantic slave trade, and finally narrates its unraveling as 19th-century European colonialism penetrated Africa. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christian visual material, the book approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries, showing that the African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to shape a novel and evolving Kongo Christian worldview. The book sheds new light on the cross-cultural interactions that created the early modern world, highlighting cultural exchanges while also taking into account the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.

Atlantic Wars explores how warfare shaped human experience around the Atlantic from the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. Military concerns and initiatives drove the development of technologies like ships, port facilities, fortresses, and roads that made crossing the ocean possible and reshaped the landscape on widely separated coasts. Forced migrations made land available for colonization, and the transportation of war captives provided labor in the colonies. Some wars spread to engulf widely scattered places, and even small-scale, localized conflicts had effects beyond the combat zone. Wars in Africa had consequences in the colonies where captives were sold. Europeans and their descendants held the upper hand in combat on the ocean, but in the early modern period they never dominated warfare in Africa or the Americas. New ways of fighting developed as diverse groups fought alongside as well as against each other. In the Age of Revolution enslaved Africans, indigenous Americans, and colonists in various places rejected cross-cultural alliances and the prevailing pattern of Atlantic warfare. New military ethics were developed with important implications for the governance of the European empires, the security of the new American nation-states, the legal status of indigenous peoples, the future of slavery, and the development of Atlantic economy. The pervasive influence of warfare on life around the ocean becomes apparent only by examining the Atlantic world as a whole.

The content derives from the British Academy’s public lecture programme which presents specialist research in an accessible manner. The papers range in subject matter over music, psychology, history, economics and linguistics, demonstrating the depth and breadth of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that the British Academy champions.

This book, which provides a collection from scholars in the field of the precolonial history of Western Africa (the region between Senegal and Sierra Leone), aims to bring the history of the region to wider historical attention. It spans the whole pre-colonial period between the first Portuguese voyages of discovery and the transition to legitimate commerce in the 19th century, and as a whole offers a synthesis of the importance of this region of Africa in the emergence of the Atlantic world between the 15th and 19th centuries. The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 looks at African‐European relations from a comparative perspective, analysing the themes of creolisation and Euro-African communities in Western Africa and beyond, in Elmina and Sao Tome. Part 2 looks at the Atlantic dimension of trade, with chapters looking at Dutch, English and French engagements with the region. Part 3 looks at island contexts, and the role of the Capeverde islands as transshippers of culture and connections to the Caribbean. Part 4 looks at the trade in slaves and commodities, and the effects this commerce had on African societies. Finally, Part 5 looks at Western Africa in the era of the transition to ‘legitimate commerce’ in the run-up to the colonial era.

This book rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the mid-eighteenth century. It explores the Company’s political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to war-making and colonial plantation. This book also traces the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, revealing how Company leadership wrestled with typically early modern problems of governance, authority, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. the book thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, “commercial” and “imperial” eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a “trading world” of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, the book offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of globalization, this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century.

(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kōtte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answers, this book explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It explores a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest. It also connects the histories of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This is a timely intervention in the current debate on the future of Global History.

This book is part of an intellectual project aimed at including indigenous voices in the debate over European appropriation of overseas territories. It is concerned with European efforts to negotiate with indigenous peoples the cession of their sovereignty through treaties. To grasp the extent of European legal engagement with indigenous peoples, the book examines the history of treaty making in European empires (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British) from the early 17th to the late 19th century, that is, during both stages of European imperialism. While scholars have often dismissed treaties, assuming that they would have been fraudulent or unequal, this book argues that there was more to the practice of treaty making than mere commercial and political opportunism. Indeed treaty making was also promoted by Europeans as a more legitimate means of appropriating indigenous sovereignties and acquiring land than were conquest or occupation, and therefore as a way to reconcile expansion with moral and juridical legitimacy. As for indigenous peoples, they engaged in treaty making as a way to further their interests even if, on the whole, they gained far less than the Europeans and often less than they bargained for. The vexed history of treaty making presents particular challenges for the great expectations placed in treaties for the resolution of conflicts over indigenous rights in postcolonial societies. These hopes are held by both indigenous peoples and representatives of the post-colonial state and yet, both must come to terms with the complex and troubled history of treaty-making over 400 years of empire.

Today we can walk into any well-stocked bookstore or library and find an array of historical atlases. This book traces how these collections of “maps for history”—maps whose sole purpose was to illustrate some historical moment or scene—came into being. Beginning in the sixteenth century, and continuing down to the late nineteenth, it discusses milestones in the origins of historical atlases as well as individual maps illustrating historical events in alternating, paired chapters. The author focuses on maps of the medieval period because the development of maps for history hinged particularly on portrayals of this segment of the postclassical, “modern” past. The book concludes with a detailed catalogue of more than 700 historical maps and atlases produced from 1570 to 1870.

At its height in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch West India Company controlled a scattered but sizeable portion of the western hemisphere, from present-day Albany, New York, to northeast Brazil. In 1647, the Dutch historian, theologian, and philosopher Caspar van Baerle created a landmark historical narrative, which he published in Latin. Now, after more than 350 years, the definitive record of the brief period when the Dutch ruled Brazil is available in English for the first time. Included are rare historical descriptions of relations with the native population, the indigenous flora and fauna, the workings of the sugar economy, attitudes toward private property and religious pluralism, global intrigue involving the Spanish and Portuguese, and the development of the slave trade. The original illustrations and maps from van Baerle's volume—a number of which are reproduced here—were used by Europeans well into the nineteenth century.

In Search of the Way is a history of intellectual and religious developments in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1582–1860. It begins with an explanation of the fate of Christianity, and goes on to cover the changing nature of the relationship between Buddhism and secular authority, new developments in Shintō, and the growth of a consciousness of ‘being Japanese’; but the main emphasis is on the process by which Neo-Confucianism from Song and Ming China captured the imagination of the intellectual class and informed debate throughout the period. The narrative is divided into three sections, breaking at 1680 and 1786, each section prefaced with an essay that provides the historical, political, social, and economic background to the intellectual and ideological discussions that follow. The narrative aims, as far as possible, to show how one set of concerns led to another with some interesting digressions on the way. This period is treated as being important in its own right, not merely as a backdrop to the events of the Meiji Restoration.

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

An unprecedented exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire’s capital, The King and The People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah’s devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only as the ruled.

This book brings together medieval Iberia, colonial Mexico, and colonial New Mexico through the largely unexplored history of the Virgin Mary as a figure of warfare and cross-cultural encounter. Beginning around 1000, Mary was drawn into warfare between Muslims and Christians in Iberia, emerging as an icon of the so-called Christian reconquest, which ended in 1492. In the process, rulers of Castile and Aragon developed a Marian sense of monarchy and Mary helped define the manliness of Christian men of war. In the religiously–mixed polities of high medieval Castile and Aragon, Mary became a key figure through which Muslims, Christians, and Jews negotiated their relationships with each other, and articulated identities. Mary also became central to the Christian view of the conversion of Muslims and Jews. The Spaniards who established colonies in the Caribbean and Mexico brought with them these medieval understandings of Mary. In the New World, the conquistadors both used her in the conquest of indigenous peoples and held her out to these people in evangelical efforts, influencing how some indigenous eventually appropriated her as their own military icon. Legends about her role in the conquest of Mexico became repositories of colonial identities, Spanish and indigenous. These legends inspired men involved in the founding of seventeenth-century New Mexico. There, Mary figured prominently in how colonists, friars, and Pueblos viewed the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the re-establishment of the Spanish colony in the 1690s. Her role in colonial New Mexico reverberates in the state’s contemporary ethnic politics.

Born into a Xhosa royal family around 1792 in South Africa, Jan Tzatzoe was destined to live in an era of profound change—one that witnessed the arrival and entrenchment of European colonialism. As a missionary, chief, and cultural intermediary on the eastern Cape frontier and in Cape Town and a traveler in Great Britain, Tzatzoe helped foster the merging of African and European worlds into a new South African reality. Yet, by the 1860s, despite his determined resistance, he was an oppressed subject of harsh British colonial rule. The book reclaims Tzatzoe's lost story and analyzes his contributions to, and experiences with, the turbulent colonial world to argue for the crucial role of Africans as agents of cultural and intellectual change.

This book explores the hidden history of a family in slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean empires of France and Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A tale of legal intrigue, this biography uncovers the family lives of slaves and free people in two islands, Réunion (Isle Bourbon) and Mauritius (Isle de France). Madeleine, a girl from Bengal, entered the service of a French mistress in Chandernagor in the 1750s and accompanied her to France, where she became the slave of a planter couple who brought her to Isle Bourbon. Madeleine’s three children — Maurice, Constance, and Furcy — survived monsoons, famine, and the French Revolution. At the heart of the story is Furcy’s legal struggle to free himself from his putative master, Joseph Lory, a case that was ultimately decided by the Royale Court (Cour royale) of Paris in 1843. A meticulous work of archival detective work, Madeleine’s Children investigates the cunning, clandestine, and brutal strategies that masters devised to keep slaves under their control while painting a vivid picture of the unique and evolving meanings of slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean world.

From schoolbooks to scholarly monographs, mercantilism has come to be synonymous with early modern political economy, though it is just as often criticized as inadequate, incomplete, or incoherent as both a theory and a set of policies. This book takes a new approach to this problematic subject by rethinking its broad foundations. From a variety of perspectives, its authors situate mercantilism against the backdrop of wider transformations in seventeenth-century Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic, from the scientific revolution to the expansion of empire. Not seeking to offer yet another definition or critique of mercantilism, this book instead reappraises its value in light of new approaches and understanding of the core characteristics and objects with which it has been traditionally associated: population, money, commodities, markets, merchants, institutions, warfare, and, of course, the state. In so doing, it offers a new narrative of early modern political economy that neither abandons nor assumes the use and validity of mercantilism but rather situates it in its various political, scientific, intellectual, social, and cultural contexts.

These dramatic tales of seafaring and shipwrecks have been translated into English for the first time from the author's sixteenth-century reports on the perils and disasters experienced by travelers to and from the New World. These narratives contain important information about colonial navigation, meteorology, geography, shipping, trade routes, and sociology. The author's goal in writing about these events is not only to share these captivating stories with others but also “o that men may know the many perils that accompany sea travel.”

This book shows that from the moment European expansion commenced through to the 19th century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. Colonisation was countered not only by force but also by ideas. Indigenous peoples made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law which applies between peoples: that is, a kind of law of nations which was comparable to that being developed by Europeans. Confronted by indigenous claims, Europeans were forced to make rival claims. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonisation is, of course, well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. In the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonisation should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim. Indigenous claims show that a dialogue was being held between colonisers and colonised which can only be restored by staging all the participants and showing how they dealt with and reacted to each other. By enlightening the history of indigenous legal opposition to dispossession from the beginning of colonisation, this book will provide the general community with a means of engaging with the political challenges and responses posed by legal conflicts with indigenous peoples over the question of land.

Nursing and Empire draws on archival research and life history interviews to focus on the migration and settlement of the Indian nurses who formed the first female dominated migration pattern from India to the United States during the Cold War. Reddy argues that this movement must be understood as part of the shifts within Anglo-American capitalist imperialism that have tied the development of nursing labor in India to processes of U.S. social formation since the nineteenth century. The book thus begins with the movement of US based single female Protestant medical missionaries to India in the nineteenth century and then details the remaking of the colonial medical mission through the Jim Crow segregation and “open door imperialism” of the Rockefeller Foundation between World Wars I and II. Framed within this context, Reddy positions Indian nurse immigration as one outcome of shifts within the international division of nursing labor at the onset of the American Century. Throughout this historical sweep, Nursing and Empire also contains a detailed analysis of the shifting stigmatization and rising status of Indian nursing labor through hierarchies of race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and religion. The result is an immigration study that examines the position of Indian nurses within labor markets as well as inside and outside of kinship networks and variously constructed communities.

Volume III of this series contains chapters on the writing of history globally during the early modern era, from 1400 to 1800. The volumes proceed in geographic order from east to west, beginning in Asia and ending in the Americas. It aims at once to provide a selective but authoritative survey of the field and, where opportunity allows, to provoke cross-cultural comparisons. This is the third of five volumes in a series that explores representations of the past from the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the world.