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Every parcel of goods shipped across the Atlantic, from the early modern era through the nineteenth century (and beyond), was accompanied by a unique bill of lading. The bill of lading, an essential piece of commercial paperwork, attested that a certain set of goods had been “shipped in good order” and reminded the shipmaster that it was his job to keep them that way. Legally speaking, the bill of lading was a con- tract, a receipt, and a document of title, all in one. Though the legal power of bills of lading depended entirely on their text, American bills nevertheless began in the early eighteenth century to feature decorations, embellishments, and illustrations. The most popular was a ship sailing inside the embellished letter S of the word Shipped. This image, and others like it, helped the bills’ bearers visualize how material objects were caught up in conceptual frameworks of ownership and nationality. Such images thereby strengthened connections among objects, owners, laws, and nations. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new visual elements, such as flags, human figures, and seascapes, began to appear on American bills of lading, revealing evolving visions of the relationships among commercial goods, vessels, people, nations, and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on payments for slave sales in the later phase of the British slave trade. It analyses the procedures used in the ‘guarantee’ system in transatlantic slaving whereby merchants in British ports forged close connections with African factors in British America and with British businessmen who guaranteed to pay the factors’ bills presented as payments for slave sales. This was an important institutional procedure in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Though the ‘guarantee’ system has been explained in outline in previous studies, the case study presented here offers the most detailed appraisal of this system. Examining the British slave trade to Jamaica in 1790s, then the most significant disembarkation centre for enslaved people taken on British vessels, the paper explains the coordination necessary between groups of British merchants, their African factors in Jamaica and their British guarantee in order to secure payments for slave sales at a time of considerable volatility in the demand for slaves in Jamaica. The paper suggests that cooperation between merchants in different British ports in connection with the slave trade is as worthy of investigation as the rivalry between the British ports involved in the ‘Guinea’ traffic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

information is provided on the conference titled "Community Libraries: Connecting Readers in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850" sponsored by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council held at the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool Athenaeum in Liverpool, England January 24-25, 2014. Topics, including libraries in the 18th century in the Atlantic Ocean region, the relationship between reading and revolution in the Americas and the reading of travel literature, are discussed.

A bibliography related to history is presented, including the books "Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation," edited by John Fea, John Green and Eric Miller, "Teaching the Transatlantic Eighteenth Century," edited by Jennifer Frangos and Cristobal Silva and "How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge," edited by Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan.

The British interest and presence in the South Atlantic Ocean and in South America represent, in the words of Eliga Gould, the kind of “entangled histories” increasingly recognised and studied by scholars of imperial, colonial and maritime history. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the region was most frequently seen as the “key” to the Pacific Ocean. This paper, however, focuses on the place of this oceanic area, its islands and its coastal littorals in another “gateway zone”: the entrance to, and exit from, Britain's Indian Ocean world and the riches of Asia. The strategic location of various South Atlantic islands and South American colonial entrepôts played on the minds of politicians, policy-makers, publicists and merchants in London, as well as colonial governors and military commanders on station. Drawing on the archival riches of the East India Company, as well as primary published material such as pamphlets and prospectuses, this paper will explore the interaction of the Atlantic and Indian oceans at this maritime fault-line. The discussion will demonstrate, for example, how the “barren and rocky isle” of St Helena, “abandoned to a state of hopeless destitution in the solitude of the ocean,” could be regarded as an “essential part of the British Empire.” And similarly, it will demonstrate how places such as Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and Tristan da Cunha were regarded in relation to the rising British Empire in Asia. More broadly, the region cannot be understood, this paper suggests, without considering the wider context of British imperial and commercial activity in the period and, more specifically, the growing importance of British trading and political interests in the East Indies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the July 17, 2014 to July 19, 2014 conference "London and the Americas, 1492-1812" by the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) at Kingston University in London, England. Topics include the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, the role of network theory in scholarship on the Atlantic Ocean region, and papers on the history of London.

This article engages theories of mobility to examine the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company's (RMSPC's) 1851 expansion into South America. Through a focus on cooperative strategies and trans-oceanic connections, the article also considers the interplay between Atlantic and wider world shipping networks. The first part of the paper compares the RMSPC's South American branch to the more established West Indies route, and probes the significance of the Company's expansion into the South Atlantic in light of the RMSPC's perceived national and imperial role. The second part of the paper turns to the RMSPC's cooperative strategies and connections between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Considered as a case study, the RMSPC indicates that the boundaries of British imperial influence incorporated a degree of flexibility during this period, pointing to a need to revise rigid conceptualisations of empire. An argument is also made for the continuing relevance of the Atlantic as a spatial unit during this era, despite the increasingly global connections of the nineteenth-century world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how and why information moved or failed to move within transatlantic botanical networks in the late eighteenth century. It addresses the problem of how practitioners created relationships of trust, and the difficulties they faced in transferring reputations between national contexts. Eighteenth-century botany was characteristically cross-cultural, cosmopolitan and socially diverse, yet in the 1770s and 1780s the American Revolutionary Wars placed these attributes under strain. The paper analyses the British and French networks that surrounded the Philadelphian plant hunter William Young (1742–1785), to show how botanists and plant collectors created and maintained connections with each other, especially when separated by geographical and cultural distance. It highlights in particular the role played by commercial plant traders, and demonstrates how practitioners used objects to transmit social as well as scholarly information. The transnational circulation of information and knowledge in the Enlightenment was determined by culturally specific judgements about trust, confidence, communication and risk. Despite the prominent role played by material culture within these networks, scholars continued to place high value on face-to-face contact as a means of judging the trustworthiness and cooperation of their agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit facilitated the intra-US slave trade's growth between 1815 and the financial crisis of the late 1830s. Movement of money across geographic space was the enslavers’ chief challenge, and this article details the process of slaving firms’ building credit and remitting funds with which they constructed supply chains in bondspersons. Slave market development was dependent on US and North Atlantic financial integration and comprised three stages. These included use of the Second Bank of the USA, supplemented by domestic bills of exchange, and culminating in the use of southern state banks with northern correspondent ties, which the financial crisis severed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of archaeology in the study of the historical source material related to Arabs immigrants in the Atlantic Ocean Region during the first half of the 20th century, including in the study of manuscripts and rare books. An overview of Arab associations in the Americas, including the Syrian association the Homs Club in São Paulo, Brazil, is provided.

Merchants living in the early modern era experienced their commercial successes and failures not only as participants in great Atlantic world networks of traders and goods, but also as residents of particular local places. Scholars' sensitive and rich portraits of port city commerce portray international traders as the decision makers who shaped longdistance trade, which in turn had a profound influence on the developing character of individual port cities. Integrating and improving across great spans of time and space, the British Atlantic merchant formed coherent networks that shared a language of credit, trust, and profitable exchange. But just as significantly, we can start to integrate the myriad daily economic choices of local city residents with those of merchants, and we can do so productively by recognizing the "cityness" of ports, a quality constituted from the constant interactions, negotiations, and perceptions of their residents within man-made and natural surroundings. This article tests how the intertwined natures of long-distance trade and local cityness affected the different commercial trajectories of three merchants in three different British Atlantic ports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Mexican painter Cristóbal de Villalpando's signature, in which he considered himself an inventor, and the signatures of the Mexican painter Juan Correa in the late 17th century. An overview of the relationship between painters' signatures and their identity and social status in the New Spain transatlantic world is provided.

Recent scholarship on French Revolutionary refugees to the United States has demonstrated their importance to American politics in the 1790s. But while this literature places these refugees within preexisting networks in the French Atlantic, and within the context of the imperial conflicts of the late eighteenth century, it largely ignores their long-term importance to the nineteenth-century United States. In tracing the life of Natalie Delage Sumter—an aristocratic Frenchwoman who immigrated to the United States in 1793 and married into the prominent Sumter family of South Carolina in 1802—this article points to the ways that former refugees continued to participate in trans-Atlantic networks and retain elements of French culture, even as they embraced a life in the United States. As an adult, Sumter sought to square her aristocratic and royalist past with her life in the United States, primarily through family and faith. Her family ties across the Atlantic world, and her support of the Catholic Church and its nascent institutions in the United States, provided Sumter with economic, ideological, and emotional support and were the basis of her lifelong cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses topics discussed in the journal on topics such as Haitian revolution, impacts of the Slave Trade (Portugal) Act in 1839, and British colonial links in the South Atlantic region.

When England received the island of St. Vincent from France after the Seven Years War in 1763, it sought to develop it for sugar production. It was inhabited by small French planters, indigenous Caribs/Kalinago, and the so-called “Black Caribs,” who were of mixed indigenous and African ethnicity. The British attempted to relocate the “Black Caribs” to a reserve to open up their fertile lands for sugar cultivation and keep them separate from white settlers. They fiercely resisted surveying and (re)settlement efforts, leading to war in 1772–1773 and 1795–1797. This article highlights how the racial mixture of the Black Caribs and selective emphasis on either the indigenous or African portion of their ancestry was important in determining what land rights, if any, they possessed. Cognitive dissonance among Britons about an increasingly authoritarian empire and circulating humanitarian ideas also provoked sympathy toward them. This article examines British responses to the First Carib War in both Parliament and the press, particularly in light of the “Black Caribs'” legal rights and humanitarian sentiment toward them. Such feelings were mixed with ambiguous attitudes toward white planters and concern about the morality of waging a war at the urging of Caribbean slaveholders. This article will argue that the racial mixture of the “Black Caribs” opened them up for vilification based on their African background, but also possibly indigenous land rights and humanitarian sentiment. While other scholars have touched on these debates, this article notes the application of humanitarian sentiment not only to indigenous peoples but also to planters and the soldiers who would be sent to fight in St. Vincent. It highlights St. Vincent as a site where empire, law, race, and humanitarianism intersected to produce a complex late eighteenth-century story indicative of larger debates within the expanding British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Agreement of Supreme Allied Command Atlantic (SACLANT) was an emotive public issue in Britain and became wrapped up in Party politics in a General Election year. In Opposition Winston Churchill used the SACLANT issue to attack the Attlee government, which had accepted the Atlantic Command. Once returned to power Churchill pursued SACLANT to a summit meeting with President Truman and afterwards claimed to have extracted significant concessions. Labour Party MPs dismissed these claims as mere face saving devices. This article investigates these contending claims. Ultimately it argues three things. Firstly, Churchill persecuted the Attlee government with SACLANT more successfully than he convinced the Americans of his views on how naval cooperation in the Atlantic ought to be conducted. Secondly, the concessions on SACLANT that Churchill laid before Parliament in 1952 were inflated in their significance. Finally, Churchill did obtain more important concessions/clarifications than critics allowed, this apparent contradiction being explained by the fact that these were private Anglo-American understandings that could not be publicly disclosed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of International Journal of Maritime History is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An introduction is presented which discusses three essays within this issue concerning Scottish mercantile trade relations in the Atlantic Ocean region during the early modern period, including the topics of tobacco commerce, Glasgow, Scotland merchants and the Scottish trading family the Baillies.

Black tradeswomen--enslaved and free women of African descent--played key economic roles in lower Louisiana during the late eighteenth century. This article uses the life of Jeannette, a formerly enslaved negra, as a case study for how women advertised Atlantic ingredients and cloth through a West African framework, and in doing so, popularized Afro-Atlantic material culture in North America. Enslaved in 1749 at the Bight of Benin, West Africa, Jeannette was sent by enslavers to Saint Pierre, Martinique, and then New Orleans, Louisiana, during which time she hired out as a tradeswoman. For much of her life, Jeannette fought against enslavement and negotiated for a place in the marketplace, a space that allowed her more access to autonomy and economic resources than plantation work. Examining personal estate inventories and bills of receipt of residents of French, Spanish, and African descent makes clear that she and others found profit-making opportunities both in the marketplace and in the sale of Afro-Atlantic material cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the rise of printed news media during the opening decades of the seventeenth century fomented and fragmented authority in the polycentric Spanish Habsburg empire. Analyzing the making, dissemination, and reception of transatlantic news from Madrid to Mexico and from Lisbon to Lima, the article explores how the influx of fragments of unverifiable information from overseas undermined the possibility of complete knowledge. While the Spanish Crown exploited news media to create a sense of a unified imperial space, the dynamics of distance resulted in uncertainty and the spread of conflicting narratives that fractured central control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses articles within this issue on topics including the impact of the Haitian Revolution on colonial French planter and author Claude Milscent, the history of France's policy of colonization of French Guiana between 1819 and 1823, and 18th-century merchant Tilly Merrick of Massachusetts.

An introduction is presented to this special issue dealing with topics related to the interrelationship between food and power during the early modern period of the Atlantic Ocean region.

Histories of ocean science have emphasized the ways that state-sponsored deep-sea expeditions ushered in a new age of oceanic understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay, on the other hand, examines the ways that shallow waters played host to less formal but nevertheless important efforts to create oceanic natural knowledge, often centuries earlier. By documenting the legends and experiences of people who worked on and lived by the ocean—divers, sailors, and fishermen, among others—and corroborating their stories with firsthand observation, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural historians built a nascent science of the sea. In its close focus on "sea beans" and "barnacle geese," subjects of wide conjecture and earnest curiosity, the essay shows how shallow waters welcomed new actors onto the scientific stage and decentered the geographies of knowledge production, thereby advancing contemporary knowledge of oceanic circulation as well as the taxonomies and ecologies of coastal creatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new explanation of the origins of imperial reform in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. It does so by arguing that the efforts of Gaelic Jacobites in Ireland and Scotland, along with those of Native diplomats in North America, should be viewed as similar attempts to reshape the British empire by recourse to the French—and that in the period 1745–8 these attempts bore fruit. By comparing the efforts of imperial officials to cope with the Jacobite rising of 1745 and their failures in Indian diplomacy during the same period, the article posits the existence of an 'Atlantic '45', a shared crisis of diversity that prompted calls for imperial reform and shaped the way it played out in Scotland, North America and Ireland. As they struggled to repress the rebellion and win over Indian allies, imperial officials found that they could not gain control of Gaelic and Indian peoples without also gaining more control over their provincial subjects, an insight that lay at the heart of reform thinking for the rest of the century and put the empire on a collision course with provincial subjects' sense of what it meant to be British. By acknowledging the centrality of diversity and the important contributions of Gaelic and Indian peoples, the article offers a new way of understanding imperial reform and revolution, one that includes a richer and more complex cast and gives more purchase on the different trajectories of Ireland, Scotland, and North America both within and outside empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores American policymakers' efforts to annex the British colony of Bermuda during the U.S. War for Independence (1775-83). From Silas Deane to James Madison, Patriot leaders and diplomats idealized Bermuda as a valuable commercial outpost in the Atlantic world, viewing the colony as essential to their new nation's trade. This article considers the failed proposals, quixotic diplomatic demands, and unrealized military plans to acquire Bermuda to illustrate how conquest and commerce were inextricably linked in the minds of early America's policymakers. By exploring American interest in Bermuda, this article also contends that Patriot leaders' demands for other British territories--Canada, Nova Scotia, the Floridas, the Bahamas, and the trans- Appalachian West--were intended not as a blueprint for a continental empire. Rather, American leaders sought British territories such as Bermuda and the trans-Appalachian West to protect, expand, and promote the republic's Atlantic-based commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the antebellum history of the Franco-American Girard family, especially merchant husband Stephen and his wife Mary of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by focusing on family correspondence about the onset of Mary's madness. Topics include Stephen's brother Jean who lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, issues of gender, capitalism, and cultural economy in the Atlantic world. Mary was diagnosed as being mad in the 1785 after eight years of marriage and by 1790, Stephen had Mary committed to Pennsylvania Hospital, where she remained until her death in 1815.

The expanding sugar trade linking Portugal, Brazil, and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries required enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that overseas agents would act honestly and diligently. While the recent literature emphasizes that multiple mechanisms were substitutes in addressing this problem, this article highlights that merchants chose different mechanisms to govern distinct types of transactions and explains why. A reputational mechanism relying on social and economic constraints within an ethnic diaspora governed more complex and higher‐value arrangements. A different mechanism linking economic incentives to professional reputations across the diasporas plying this trade route predominated in simpler and smaller transactions. Finally, long‐distance and transnational judicial enforcement supplemented these two reputational mechanisms. Capable of matching the value and complexity of transactions with the attributes of governing mechanisms, merchants were able to diversify their transactions, expand the market for agents, better allocate agents to tasks, and stimulate competition among them. The resulting decrease in agency costs was critical in such a significantly competitive market as the sugar trade. Evolving institutional choice thus reinforced the expansion of trade. These hypotheses are corroborated by data from a prosopography of merchants of Jewish origin, derived from notarial records from Oporto and Amsterdam, and from Inquisition files. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to reimagine the multidirectional spread of maize and wheat production within the "Old Northwest" during the early period of U.S. nation-state formation. Using a food systems lens, this work reveals deep interconnections among indigenous and non-Native food commodities, land-use practices, and imperial objectives across North America. It also brings the "West" into the web of connections spun in the Atlantic world during and after the Age of Revolutions, highlighting "food frontiers" as agents of historical change influencing coastal urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2017 North Atlantic hurricane season was extremely active, with 17 named storms (1981–2010 median is 12.0), 10 hurricanes (median is 6.5), 6 major hurricanes (median is 2.0), and 245% of median accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) occurring. September 2017 generated more Atlantic named storm days, hurricane days, major hurricane days, and ACE than any other calendar month on record. The season was destructive, with Harvey and Irma devastating portions of the continental United States, while Irma and Maria brought catastrophic damage to Puerto Rico, Cuba, and many other Caribbean islands. Seasonal forecasts increased from calling for a slightly below-normal season in April to an above-normal season in August as large-scale environmental conditions became more favorable for an active hurricane season. During that time, the tropical Atlantic warmed anomalously while a potential El Niño decayed in the Pacific. Anomalously high SSTs prevailed across the tropical Atlantic, and vertical wind shear was anomalously weak, especially in the central tropical Atlantic, from late August to late September when several major hurricanes formed. Late-season hurricane activity was likely reduced by a convectively suppressed phase of the Madden–Julian oscillation. The large-scale steering flow was different from the average over the past decade with a strong subtropical high guiding hurricanes farther west across the Atlantic. The anomalously high tropical Atlantic SSTs and low vertical wind shear were comparable to other very active seasons since 1982. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An array of goods was traded to Africa in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Many were eye-catching consumer goods; others were far more mundane, including 'voyage iron', a metal forged in northern Europe, bars of which acted as a currency along the West African coast. This article examines the geography of voyage iron production, showing that it originated in places – primarily Sweden – that are not often thought of as being connected to Atlantic commerce. It then considers the impact that European iron had on West Africa, where iron smelting was very well-established locally. The vibrancy of African metallurgy has led some distinguished Africanists to dismiss voyage iron as marginal to African needs. By contrast, it is contended here that European iron underpinned an agro-environmental transformation of the coastal forests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and played a major role in the spread of New World crops in West Africa. Voyage iron was a superficially unremarkable producer good but it contributed to a profound reshaping of the economic geography of West Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay on the “Hidden Atlantic” was first published in German in 2009, systematically employing the concept for the first time. It is published here in English translation, slightly revised and supplemented with the most important recent literature. Its basic assumption is that since the beginning of British and US policies implemented against the Atlantic slave trade, slave ship voyages (1808/1820–1874) were no longer outfitted in Europe, but, especially since 1820, equipped in the Americas, primarily in Brazil and Cuba (“Out of the Americas”). In a first part, the essay analyzes the emergence of the Hidden Atlantic, its agents (here essentially “slave traders” and various other agents, such asAtlantic creoles), and the numbers of displaced persons from Africa (2–3 million according towww.slavevoyages.org). Further, the essay considers the marginalization (Joseph C. Miller) of the Hidden Atlantic and the emergence of a research field emanating from the search fornegreroships on the slave trade Atlantic, primarily the search for the other ships which belonged to the captain of the Amistad, Ramón Ferrer. This essay concludes with some initial results of the “Slave Trader Project” on the Hidden Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An interview with Michael Zeuske, researcher at the University of Cologne, Germany, is presented. He discusses his 1993 project on Cuba's plantation culture, history of slave trade and traders in the context of the Hidden Atlantic and criticism of abolitionist. He comments on forms of slavery, marginalization and Catherine Hall's study "Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain".

This article engages the historical approach to the “Hidden Atlantic” (Michael Zeuske) in a complementary, literature-based analysis. It argues that the diverse facets of the “hidden” require diverse methodological approaches; firstly, because the “hidden” has several dimensions, and secondly, because the ethical impetus of the cultural analyst or the historian requires a choosing of sides. Authors of works labelled as “literary” or “fiction,” which are nevertheless known to have a close relationship to real-life experience, negotiate this fine line. The article analyses in greater detail two such works – B. Traven’sDas Totenschiff(1926) and Francisco Goldman’sThe Ordinary Seaman(1997) – with reference to their treatment of the “Totenschiff” and its crews in the context of predatory capitalism. In the first instance, the article explores two dimensions of the “hidden”: the “forcibly rendered absent” (Boaventura de Sousa Santos) and the “opaque” (Édouard Glissant). The literary figure of the “Totenschiff,” the “ship of the dead,” is deployed by the authors to bring to the attention of the readers the plight of the crewmembers who have been expulsed (Saskia Sassen) from society, the callousness and impunity of the perpetuators and agents of predatory capitalism who exploit them, and the complicity of the “civilized” populations who acquiesce to this expulsion. While they do this, the authors use “literariness” to preserve the opacity that protects the expulsed. Through a comparative analysis of the interplay of absences and opacities in both novels, with a particular focus on deviant and hegemonic masculinities, this article explores possibilities for cultural analysts to engage with the “hidden,” without jeopardizing the relative safety granted to the expulsed by opacity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hundreds of Castilian free blackmen and women obtained royal travel licenses to cross the Atlantic in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as black Old Christians. They settled across the Spanish Indies and developed trades as artisans, traders, sailors, healers, and small business owners, often becoming prominent and wealthy vecinos (residents). Exploring these often obscure and long-invisible biographies of individuals, the article revisits key historiographical debates about race, purity of blood, and vassalage in the early Spanish empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Operational, organizational, doctrinal, and cultural differences hampered effective command and control of Canadian and American maritime air power defending shipping against U-boats off the east coast during the Second World War. The American desire to implement US unity of command over both nations' maritime air forces clashed with the Canadian preference for simple cooperation. Canadian airmen resisted several American attempts to impose unity of command until the operational situation in the Battle of the Atlantic revealed inefficiencies in coordination which necessitated all maritime air power in the Northwest Atlantic be centralized under Canadian operational control in the spring of 1943. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early American archives abound with references to episodes of communication, translation, and interpretation, and with a diverse array of Native-language texts. They provide evidence both of practical and philosophical colonial projects and of the ways in which Native people used their languages to mediate colonization. Scholars have uncovered a range of methods that diverse peoples employed to communicate with one another, the contexts that shaped the meanings of the words and messages exchanged, and the broader significance of those exchanges for figures far from the point of encounter. The texts and commentaries that flowed from efforts at language learning and linguistic collection bear testimony to ways Native languages shaped Euro-American intellectual, cultural, and religious history. They also transform previous rubrics for understanding American Indian resistance to linguistic imperialism into a social fact with an archive and a material history. Colonial-indigenous language encounters influenced the cultural and intellectual history of Native individuals and communities, providing new media for linguistic expression and new frames through which to consider their own tongues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late afternoon of Saturday 22 April 1848, the British cruiser H.M.S.Greciangave chase to a suspicious-looking ship it encountered off the coast of Bahia, Brazil. By midnight, theGreciansucceeded in seizing the slave shipBella Miquelina. One week later, theBella Miquelinasailed into the Bay of All Saints at Salvador, Bahia, Brazil under the direction of a British prize crew. The appearance of this captured vessel with 517 Africans on board “set off alarms” all over the city. Many Bahians feared that disembarkation might cause the spread of disease and increase slave resistance in the city. As negotiations unfolded during the next 48 hours between Bahian authorities and British representatives, a group of 80 men attacked theBella Miquelinain hopes of gaining control over the ship and taking the Africans. The British prize crew successfully held of this attack. In the midst of this turbulent milieu, a fugitive African slave named John Freeman rowed a small boat to the side of theGrecianand asked for assistance. Commander L.S. Tindal allowed Freeman to remain on board. Six weeks later, theBella Miquelinareturned to Sierra Leone and the Africans were freed by the British Vice-Admiralty Court at Freetown. One year later, Freeman returned to Sierra Leone on board H.M.S.Adventureas a free man. These events shed light on British strategies to suppress the slave trade to Brazil in 1848 as well as Brazilian and African responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay utilises four exceptional case studies to explore the various causes, experiences and results of escape from slavery in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Atlantic World. These are: Johnny Beckles in Barbados, Jamie Montgomery in Scotland, Castle Slaves at Cape Coast Castle on the West African Gold Coast; and Harriet and Beverly Hemings in Virginia. This essay illuminates the diverse forms of enslavement and escape, showing that while some sought escape from slavery and even their race, others sought sanctuary within slave society and even on plantations, while others used escape as a means of pressuring for changes in their lives and work as enslaved people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is provided which discusses the relationship between scholarship on the economic history of U.S. early republic period and the study of global economic and commercial history. An overview of the British and Spanish colonial history of the Atlantic Ocean Region, including the role that trade played in connecting Spanish and British America, is provided.

The article discusses the study of Atlantic Ocean Region history by Atlanticists as a scholarly field of learning from the mid 2000s through the mid 2010s, including articles on subject in a special issue of the journal "William and Mary Quarterly" (WMQ). An overview of the British America's colonial history of the Atlantic world is provided.

This article examines the possibility that the trans-Atlantic slave trade influenced the political institutions of villages and towns in precolonial Africa. Using anthropological data, it shows that villages and towns of ethnic groups with higher slave exports were more politically fragmented during the precolonial era. Instrumental variables are used to show that the relationship is causal. It is argued that this fragmentation is important for relative economic development because it still influences political institutions today. This argument is supported by the use of more contemporary data to show that in contemporary Nigeria and Tanzania, areas with higher levels of precolonial political fragmentation have a higher incidence of bribery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1795 and 1808 several Shawnee orators recounted to British and US officials a story about a Shawnee voyage to England. These narratives push scholars to reconsider the Atlantic world paradigm from an Indigenous perspective. They reveal Native constructions of space and historicity that cannot be easily integrated into the standard frameworks of Atlantic history. Instead of an ocean that united four continents into a single "Atlantic world," the Shawnee storytellers imagined a kcikami, a dangerous borderland separating radically different cultural, spiritual, and racial realms. Such Native understandings of the sea are critical for indigenizing past landscapes often framed in Eurocentric terms. Moreover, the Shawnee narratives highlight the complex roles of storytelling in Native-newcomer relations and Shawnee intranational debates during a critical period when growing colonial power rapidly eroded the "middle ground" across the lower Great Lakes and political disputes factionalized the Shawnees, putting new pressures on how people constructed and forgot the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines the strange case of Hannah West, a 'very fair female of the white race of mankind' who had patches of black skin upon her body. A closer glance at William Charles Wells's 1818 posthumous publication of her case, Account of A female of the white race of mankind, part of whose skin resembles that of a Negro, exposes the process through which Wells crafted an incipient theory of natural selection that was based upon the belief that innate racial differences between blacks and whites were a result of generational adaptations to specific disease environments. Finally, this article demonstrates how Wells maintained Hannah West's whiteness, despite the potential for her skin to disrupt commonly held associations between skin colour and race. Rather than casting her as a racially transformative figure, Wells used her case to not only reify but also reaffirm the distinctiveness of black and white bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Atlantic slave trade came to an end in Brazil in the 1850s, a new form of trafficking began across the borders of Brazil and its neighboring countries. Free persons--mainly women and children living in small communities in Uruguay and Argentina--were kidnapped to be sold as slaves in Brazil. By analyzing the illegal enslavement of the African Rufina and her family along the border between Brazil and Uruguay in 1854, this study argues that Brazilian catchers opened up a new frontier of enslavement, kidnapping free persons in countries where slavery was already abolished. The kidnappings and the diplomatic problems that they generated brought tensions to the development of international relations between Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Britain in the 1850s and 1860s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1772 until the 1830s, the landmark decision in Somerset v. Stewart, which held that a slave must be freed by virtue of his presence on English soil, provided a powerful weapon in the trans-Atlantic battle against chattel slavery. But by the 1840s and 1850s, pro-slavery advocates used another British opinion, The Slave, Grace, as a counterargument to shape a new pro-slavery constitutionalism. This article studies four cases critical to understanding this process of reinterpretation: The Slave, Grace (1827), Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), The Slave, Matilda (1837), and Strader v. Graham (1852). These four decisions reveal the escalating battle of legal doctrine pitting freedom based on the absence of positive law vs. the reversion and reattachment of slave status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other Atlantic ports, Philadelphia relied on the services of local pilots to steer ships in and out of its harbor. Seagoing vessels faced risks in shallow coastal waters that differed from those on the open ocean, and many crews were grateful for the assistance of skilled pilots. Nonetheless, these local experts occupied an uneasy niche in maritime commerce. Merchants resented the expense of their services, and captains sometimes bristled at the implicit challenge to their authority, even as the pilots themselves pressed for more generous compensation. Pennsylvania attempted to address the issue with regulation, but its efforts only served to underscore tensions within the port economy. Beyond the conflict between pilots and merchants, the particulars of the regulatory regime also pitted trans-Atlantic traders against coasting merchants, and novice pilots against their more experienced brethren. The fight over harbor pilotage therefore reflected broader conflicts over the shape of the Atlantic economy and how its benefits would be distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of the slave trade in Spanish colonies in America. Emphasis is given to topics such as the relationship between slavery and economic power, demographic changes related to captives from Africa, and the labor of African slaves in the production and distribution of goods within the Spanish imperial economy and transatlantic trade.