Search

This article analyzes the initial transformation of the island of Trinidad into a transimperial contact zone during the final decades of the Eighteenth century and how it became a particularly revealing space for colonial experimentation. This process began two decades before the British invasion of 1797 and originated from the core of the Spanish reformist state that sought to experiment with new political, legal, and economic arrangements for its American domains. The intensification of complex transimperial and transcolonial networks that connected imperial agents in Spain, colonial officials in the Venezuelan coast, local residents in Trinidad, and potential French and Irish Catholic migrants in the Lesser Antilles gave shape to the transformation of Trinidad. This article contributes to the history of the transimperial Atlantic by analyzing the initial phase of Trinidad's transformation into a plural slave-based colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the activities of the Dutch administration of the Cape of Good Hope between 1652 and 1795 is fulsomely recorded in the vast archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), ego documents or life writing, such as private diaries and letters, from ordinary inhabitants of the colony are very rare. This state of affairs hampers historians' understanding of how the population of the Cape during this era reacted to and felt about events that we know well from the viewpoint of the VOC. For this reason alone, the existence of three letters by a burgher militiaman during the contest over the Cape between Britain and the VOC authorities during June to September 1795, is significant. Although these letters have resided in the manuscript collection of the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town for half a century, they remain unknown to most historians and the general public. This article presents a translation with commentary of these letters and reveal the valuable insights a perceptive reader can glean from them, not just about the military operations of mid-1795, but also about the political, social and cultural history of the Cape at the end of the eighteenth century from the viewpoint of an ordinary citizen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue investigates how in the times of war, political turmoil, and disruption of commercial practices during the Age of Revolutions two centuries ago, merchants appear as demiurges of a new order. This is part of a polycentric reading of epochal transformations that does not deny the primacy of politics and military power in establishing relations of force, but which underline the complex negotiations at their base. The collection of essays looks at the profound global consequences of the fall of the Spanish American empire, particularly as they related to the decline of mercantilism and the reconfiguration of both Atlantic and inter-Pacific commerce. A crucial element in this transformation was the war economy, which had implications not only in Spanish America, but in the whole of the Hispanic world and beyond. Global merchants or businessmen —foreigners and Hispanic— strategically located in the Hispanic World, whose networks and affairs linked Europe, Asia and the Americas, worked within the vacuum created by the crisis of the Spanish monarchy in what was a fluid and foundational moment. The essays investigate how the Napoleonic Wars and the Wars of Independence against Spain accelerated the emergence of new actors, practices, rules and commercial circuits, by analyzing the personal and business networks that built, redefined and renegotiated the role of Hispanic America in the global economy. This prosopography of merchants thus shows trajectories through which, despite infinite difficulties, global and transregional merchants appear as one of the maieutic forces in the birth of the modern world.

The deconstruction of the 'War of Independence' (1808–1814) as a Spanish nationalist myth was a necessary step in advancing our knowledge of the history of the Age of Revolutions in Spain and of Spanish nation-building itself. However, it set aside those who had in fact experienced those events through a genuine Spanish nationalized lens. Using a corpus of autobiographical sources written between the 1780s and the 1830s, this paper argues that political concepts of Spanish nationhood were already available before the liberal revolution unleashed by the French invasion, that anti-liberals used the language of nationhood in their ego-documents too, and that ideas of independence and constitution pervaded social cleavages and ideological divides. Arguably, then, the War of Independence had both mythical and real dimensions in terms of the history of national identities. Therefore, the great issue in nineteenth-century Spanish nation-building would have not been a congenital 'lack' or 'weakness' of nationhood but an intense cultural war for its definition along political lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that MapOE employed a deep data approach to map the Ottoman Epirus with reference to Albanian ruler Tepedelenli Ali Pasha and the regional order he established using his personal archive and the Ottoman probate records compiled upon his execution. Topics covered include the achievements of Ali Pasha, the creation of a historical gazetteer of the Ottoman Empire and the development of geographic information system-maps to examine the topography of the Ottoman Empire.

This article analyses the relationship between the postcolonial condition and monarchical legitimation in North Haiti during the reign of King Henry I (1811–1820). For Henry and the North Haitian elites, the choice of monarchy represented an attempt at postcolonial socio-political consolidation inasmuch as a strategy towards the recognition of independence by European powers which themselves underwent a monarchical reconstruction after 1814. Far from being a mere copy of European models, Henry's symbolic politics justified the regime's political existence against French neocolonial ambitions. Reinscribing the Haitian monarchy into a postrevolutionary Atlantic world, this article examines its reception by and exchanges with Britain and the German states and also considers its contestation by the South Haitian republic. Against the backdrop of North Haiti's interaction with the European monarchies, this study proposes understanding the Christophean monarchy as a restoration regime responding to both revolutionary and colonial legacies by adopting a monarchical orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces Irish responses to the crisis of the Hispanic monarchy (1808–25) and the struggle for sovereignty in Spanish America, comparing reactions in Ireland to those of the Irish diasporic community in the United States. It argues that although the Irish were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the cause of the insurgents in Spanish America, their support took different forms and meanings. Whereas contemporaries in Ireland saw the benefits of Spanish American independence for the prosperity and security of the British Empire, Irish radical exiles in New York or Philadelphia viewed the struggle as an opportunity to emphasize the validity of revolutionary and republican principles across the New World. In stressing the relevance of the geopolitical context and of transnational interactions to the development of contradicting imperial and anticolonial views, the article moves beyond prevailing narratives of military involvement and highlights the richness of the Irish experience of the Age of Revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies US American perceptions of the European Revolutions of 1848/49, especially the different receptions of the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth's sojourn in the US, through an analysis of a rather unknown novel Zoë; or the Quadroon's Triumph (1855). Benefiting from different sources, the article examines the impacts of the revolutions of Europe in the US literary, cultural, religious, and political sceneries by pointing to how even non-canonical works reflected upon these influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular royalism has recently emerged as a growing field of research on both sides of the Atlantic. This paper aims to compare the popular political participation in royalist movements in Peninsular Spain, New Spain, New Granada and Venezuela during the crisis of the Spanish Monarchy and the wars of independence (1808-1826). I argue that popular royalism had a dual origin. On the one hand, it was linked to the "monarchical imaginary" of the Ancien Régime. On the other hand, it was deeply connected to the experience of civil war and the role played by slaves, Indians, artisans, labourers and other commoners in royalist militias and armed groups. The reasons to join the royalist side were not necessarily ideological but related to what these particular groups perceived as their own interests. Thus, popular royalism was a political strategy of pursuing their claims and achieving specific benefits in exchange for military service, such as a reduction of the tribute, the concession of freedom, jurisdictional privileges or a salary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two letters from the surviving eighteenth-century correspondence between the polymath professor of history František Antonín Steinský in Prague and his friend, the merchant Joseph Donath in Philadelphia reveal an interesting episode in the transatlantic connections between Central Europe and North America. On the one hand, Donath's scientific observations conducted on behalf of Steinský and his associates reveal the shared enlightened pursuits between both regions, while on the other hand, Donath's scorn for the perceived political backwardness of his former compatriots reflect the widening divide ushered in by the Age of Revolutions. Alongside the first biographical accounts of both Donath and Steinský in English, this article presents for the first time a full transcription of two letters sent from Philadelphia to Prague in the 1790s. It explores the role of science and political discussion within their friendship across the Atlantic and contributes towards unearthing the wider interplay of interpersonal relationships between two different socio-political systems, namely a monarchy and republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the early uses of the term democracy in Spain and in Hispanic America during the 19th century. It is mainly built on the collaborative research conducted in the region in the field of conceptual history in recent years, especially on the publications of the Iberconceptos network. By grouping all the Spanish-speaking countries of the Western Hemisphere into a single block, my comparative approach is schematic, for it is clear that this part of the world is far from being a homogeneous sociopolitical space. Even so, the contrast between the two poles – Spain and Latin America – has proved to be heuristically productive, since it enables us to identify certain similarities and differences between the respective conceptualizations and practices associated with democracy that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic between 1808 and 1875, approximately. From some common features, patterns and milestones that this essay reveals it is possible to draw a schematic chronology that could serve as a general framework to subsequent more specific historical studies on the evolution of the concept of democracy in this or that particular country belonging to this cultural area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the eighteenth century, members of the colonial elite of the Captaincy General of Venezuela addressed a letter to the king of Spain in which they sought permission to have a printing press in the city of Caracas. In the letter, they argued that the establishment of such a press was fundamental for the economic and commercial development of the Captaincy. Months later, they learned that the permission for a printing press had been denied without further explanations. Venezuela became one of the last capital cities in colonial Spanish America to possess this technology. The lack of a printing press during this politically dynamic period moved by the Atlantic revolutions did not necessarily affect public access to reading, sharing of information, and political debate in Venezuela. Venezuela's unique geographical location, and its open and frequent connections with the Caribbean region during the Age of Revolutions allowed for the effective entrance and transit of people and written materials that spread revolutionary ideas and impressions, creating a dynamic and contested political environment. Here I argue that during the late-colonial period, semiliterate forms of knowledge transmission, partially promoted by Spanish reformism, mobilised a socially diverse public that openly debated the monarchical regime, the system of slavery, and the hierarchical socio-racial order of colonial society. The colonial public sphere in Venezuela was shaped, then, within a context of emerging socio-racial tensions and became a space of contestation and struggle, animated by the overlapping of contradictory political discourses. This study contributes to recent debates about the character, nature, and relevance of the public sphere in the colonial world. It explores the circulation of manuscripts and ephemeral written materials, the different modes of production and reception of texts that developed in the colonial context, and an analysis of the character of the urban spaces that facilitated the performativity of texts. It thus offers a new framework for understanding the emergence of a public sphere in Venezuela, a colonial peripheral province with no printing press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2018 publication of Julius S. Scott's The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution inspired a renewed focus on the reverberations of the Haitian Revolution. Here, six scholars of the Atlantic World and the Age of Revolutions consider the historiographical implications of The Common Wind and remind us how the Haitian upheaval belongs at the very center of the ripples of modernity that spread across the globe from the revolutionary Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the volume on "The Fraternal Atlantic" places the eighteenth-century emergence of freemasonry within the context of the dynamic Atlantic world. It highlights three characteristics that persisted into the twentieth century: the importance of freemasonry to sociability across borders; the tensions within freemasonry between cosmopolitan fraternalism and the turbulent political waters of the modern era, often leading to exclusive practices; and the plasticity of freemasonry that facilitated local adaptations and resiliency. A focus on freemasonry and the fraternal Atlantic offers a bridge between the early modern and modern eras, from the Age of Revolutions to movements for international cooperation after the First World War. It likewise mitigates the tendency of Atlantic scholarship to compartmentalize into various sub-Atlantics, instead seeing the Atlantic world as a zone of interaction with broader global connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on free people of color in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions has focused on themes of mobility and resilience, with emphasis on the few remarkable individuals who pursued their freedom and respectability in imperially visible registers. These themes sometimes mask as much as they reveal. Mobility ignores those individuals who remain in place in families and communities, and resilience elides efforts by some free people of color to secure the benefits of the slave economy for themselves and their descendants. Often figures are assigned subversive motives or subaltern potential they perhaps would not recognize, when in fact their actions sometimes served to legitimate colonial order and strengthen racial divides by distancing themselves from more marginalized groups. Possible displays of respectability complicated revolutionary-era negotiations among the long free, the enslaved, and recently freed. Free people of color frequently defined margins from the enslaved rather than subvert them, including through largely unconsidered realms of taste or conspicuous consumption. This examination raises questions regarding extant conceptions of how Caribbean free people of color acquired and wielded social, cultural, and symbolic capitals. Perhaps more often than operating on socially progressive or latent revolutionary positions they evinced concern for systemic continuity. This essay, which introduces the following research that explores this topic, suggests new avenues of investigating these overlooked complexities in motivations and actions by free people of color, a population of disproportionate importance in the cultural politics of the revolutionary Caribbean. Without this recalibration, we risk underappreciating the legacy of late Caribbean colonialism, minimizing the context of revolutionary change and state formation, and misunderstanding the ambitions and centrality of free communities of color to these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eighteenth-century Venezuela was a highly stratified society in which race, education, occupation, honor, family ties, and economic resources all played important roles in defining the place that each member occupied. In this complex social map, not all social groups had equal access to education; literacy was a marker of status and power. Traditionally, literate and formally educated people belonged to the white elite, while the majority of the supposedly “non-literate” population belonged to lower social groups of color, who relied largely on oral media for the transmission of knowledge. By the end of the eighteenth century, this picture began to change: the number of people who owned books increased, an incipient informal market of books began to operate, and original networks for the circulation of books and manuscripts among different social groups proliferated. Increasingly mixed-race groups, known as pardos, learned to read and write through informal means to an education. However, members of the colonial white elite interpreted pardos’ access to literacy and education as a way of challenging the proper social order and authority. This article analyzes the case of Juan Bautista Olivares, a literate pardo musician who in 1795 was sent to court in Cádiz, accused by the Venezuelan governor of subversion; Olivares, however, successfully defended himself, declaring his loyalty to the Spanish Monarchy and proving his pious behavior. Pardos, like Juan Bautista, creatively navigated social tensions and the effects of the Atlantic Revolutions by shaping their political identity as royalists, questioning the local government and reasserting their loyalty to the Spanish Monarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the making of space in modern parliamentarism from a transatlantic perspective. By considering the case studies of New Granada and Spain between 1810 and 1831, this article focuses on the differences in shaping parliamentary space during the revolutionary period in Europe and the Americas. This study considers the multiplicity of spaces in the construction of parliaments as modern institutions. It also discusses the influences of early modern estate parliaments in the construction of new institutional space in revolutionary times. In the process, several elements will be considered, such as the choice of the town where parliaments convene and the internal organization of the assembly hall. It is argued that, despite similar issues beyond the construction of a new institution, the influence of the king’s presence in Spain led to a different shape of internal parliamentary space compared to New Granada. Such an approach makes an original contribution to the debates on the transformation of sovereignty during this period and it therefore reshapes the interpretation of the revolutionary process from a cultural perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Benjamin Franklin played a significant role in the early encounter between Rome and the United States. By highlighting Franklin's role one is likely to question the two main tenets of traditional Catholic historiography in this regard. First of all, that the Holy See did not unwillingly submit itself to any imposition of newly-devised American democratic procedures in selecting how best to deal with the new republic. Secondly, that Franklin did constantly intervene in religious matters, at least as far as these concerned the establishment of the Catholic Church in the United States. In fact, the adoption of a democratic form of selection of the higher hierarchy was easily accepted and indeed exploited by the Holy See. Furthermore, much was going on underneath the official doctrine of the separation between church and state. This resembled old- regime diplomatic wrangling and had Franklin as its main protagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Liberalism in the Early Nineteenth-century Iberian World’. The essay reviews why Iberian intellectual history, particularly liberal political thought, has been neglected in English-language scholarship. It offers suggestions for the incorporation of Portuguese and Spanish language texts into the broader canon. The essay then outlines persistent debates common to the study of liberalism in both Iberian and other national contexts, in an effort to instigate a dialogue between intellectual historians of Spain and Portugal and their counterparts elsewhere. It concludes with a consideration of the geopolitical forces, cultural trends, and social conditions that encouraged the forging of transnational liberalism in the early nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to continue the discussion carried on in previous editions of the journal concerning the concepts of transfer, crossed and entangled history and their employment in various fields of enquiry. Specifically, it attempts to clarify some of the principles associated with this growing body of scholarship and the manner in which they may aid in the conceptualisation and historiography of the rise of national movements over the period 1763–1848. Given the procedural dispositions described below, crossed or entangled histories on the rise of nationalism in Europe and the European colonial world would be expected to incline toward particular subject matter and questions, and even presuppose, to paraphrase another writer, a conception of the nation as ‘a relational (cultural) construct’. This largely cultural perspective on the rise and early history of national movements in Europe and the Atlantic World has a number of heuristic advantages, not least of which is its value in enabling productive linkages between older approaches to the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]