Atlantic Families

Abstract

The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the 18th century, but it represented division also, separating families across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing political landscapes, imperial ambitions, or even simply personal tragedy, many families found themselves fractured and disoriented by the growth and later fissure of a larger Atlantic world. Such dislocation posed considerable challenges to all individuals who viewed orderly family relations as both a general and a personal ideal. The more fortunate individuals who thus found themselves ‘all at sea’ were able to use family letters, with attendant emphases on familiarity, sensibility, and credit, in order to remain connected in times and places of great disconnection. Portraying the family as a unified, affectionate, and happy entity in such letters provided a means of surmounting concerns about societies fractured by physical distance, global wars, and increasing social stratification. It could also afford social and economic leverage to individual men and women in certain circumstances. This book explores the lives and letters of these families, revealing the sometimes shocking stories of those divided by sea in a series of microhistories. Ranging across the Anglophone Atlantic, including mainland American colonies and states, Britain, and the British Caribbean, the book argues that it was this expanding Atlantic world — much more than the American Revolution — that reshaped contemporary ideals about families, as much as families themselves reshaped the transatlantic world.

Broadening Our Horizons: Towards an Interdisciplinary Prehistory of the Andes

“…In short, we would explicitly associate both the Early and Middle Horizons with step-changes in food production: two different agricultural intensification thresholds (see Pearsall 2008). What we do not advocate, of course, is a simplistic argument that the spread of the major language families of the Andes is to be sought uniquely in agriculture (see Heggarty & Beresford-Jones 2010: 180).…”

Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750

“…92 has been particularly infl uential in showing the key role of families in the eighteenth century, emphasising their agency (as glimpsed through their letters) in shaping the political and economic language of the Atlantic. 93 An Atlantic perspective 'allows the telling of more complex stories about the variety of ways in which people experienced the early modern period's transformative process of nation-building and state formation'. 94 Based on this emerging scholarship, this book emphasises the need to view the lives and experiences of Quaker women in relation to the wider social and political developments within and without their spiritual community that took shape across the Atlantic.…”

Reconsidering the migrant letter: from the experience of migrants to the language of migrants

“…For example, scholars in europe have paid more attention to migrant letters in the context of 'popular' or 'working-class' writings and traditions of 'popular literacy' than those in the United States (for example see Barton & Hall, 2000;Castillo gómez, 2002;Lyons 2012Lyons , 2013. On the other hand, studies of migration and mobility within european imperial spaces and the writing practices of individuals and families of the middling and upper sectors who moved in these spaces have developed in parallel (but not necessarily in dialogue) with studies of migrant letters (Pearsall, 2008;Rothschild, 2011). 3 There is, therefore, plenty of room for comparisons and collaborations by scholars at the international level, in a way that is closer to the experience of migrants themselves who traversed national boundaries and were exposed to multiple cultural influences.…”