Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670–1776

Although the plantation as a social and economic organizing principle continues to dominate early modern Caribbean historiography, recent literature has explored outside of its confines to document a range of Antillean inhabitants who were neither masters nor slaves. These subjects exploited the inter-imperial f luidity of the region to their advantage in order to carve out commercial, strategic, and cultural niches. This article surveys new studies on smugglers, soldiers, and European ethnic minorities in the colonial Caribbean. These groups are representative examples of much larger sinew populations that the dominant historiographical paradigm of sugar and slaves has overlooked. Despite planters' attempts to essentialize race, class, legal status, and occupation into their simplest forms, a broad body of historical actors resisted and coexisted with the plantation complex and reshaped the designs of empires in the process.In his 2007 survey of Caribbean history, Frank Moya Pons writes that one can understand the Caribbean only as an organic economic system, as a throbbing heart continuously pumping sugar and other commodities to the world market via the Atlantic, while at the same time consuming millions of lives forcefully extracted from Africa and other parts of the world. 1 2011 textbooks from B. W. Higman and Stephan Palmié and Francisco Scarano (eds.) offer less plantation-centric interpretations of Caribbean history. Nevertheless, both still identify the colonial Caribbean, and its associated processes of indigenous decimation, African slavery, and monocrop export agriculture, as the bellwether of rapacious commercial modernity. 2 These surveys acknowledge, to differing degrees, many of the historiographical assumptions underlying the study of the early modern Caribbean. With the possible recent exception of the Haitian Revolution, the plantation complex has been the preeminent lens by which scholars have understood the area's social, economic, and political currents. 3 There are obvious reasons why scholarship on the early modern Caribbean has given such primacy to the institution of sugar slavery. More than in other colonial contexts, the Caribbean witnessed the near obliteration of pre-European societies and their replacement by a socioeconomic model designed to extract maximum profit on a totalizing scale. Additionally, the plantation complex has fit smoothly into a variety of historiographical schools. Imperial history renderings of the Caribbean emphasized each European power's sugar holdings. Nationalist, post-war historians of the Caribbean found the plantation a convenient social organizing principle before the rise of modern nations in the region. Some Caribbean observers coupled slavery and sugar to the birth of capitalism and modernity. 4 More recently, the plantation system has served as the backdrop for studies on the slave trade, slave life, and the Black Atlantic. 5 Although new investigations of Caribbean slavery beyond the sugarcane fields have contributed substantially to our understan...

Section: European Ethnic Minoritiesmentioning

confidence: 98%

More than Slaves and Sugar: Recent Historiography of the Trans‐imperial Caribbean and Its Sinew Populations

Cromwell

2014

“…Whilst Karras was sceptical if Scots were able to repatriate wealth from Jamaica, Hamilton endorsed the Williams thesis-apparently the first Scottish historian since Devine to do so (D. Hamilton, 2005). Natalie Zacek confirmed the 'marked tendency' of Scots to secure employment and opportunities for acquaintances and kin helped them overcome modest status in the early English Caribbean settler colonies (Zacek, 2010). Murdoch (2010) also noted the role of Scots as slavers in America.…”

Section: Centring Slavery In Scottish Historiographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Centring transatlantic slavery in Scottish historiography

Mullen

2022

The historiography of Scotland's connections with transatlantic slavery across the British Empire has flourished in the last 20 years, promoting wider public discussion and civic recognition. Nevertheless, the view that historians of Scotland omitted slavery from Scottish historiography remains part of popular discourse. This article adds nuance by considering the absences and eventual centring of slavery in Scottish historiography. In the 1960s, it was argued by historians that foreign trade-and by extension Atlantic slavery-had a limited effect on the economic development of 18th-century Scotland. However, studies of the Atlantic trades and merchant capital undermined that orthodoxy in the 1970s, although works of that era that addressed Scotland's Atlantic economy tended to acknowledge slavery only in tokenistic fashion, if at all. Nevertheless, whilst slavery was not centred in these works, they established the view that Atlantic commerce and merchant capital were central to Scottish economic development. In the last 25 years, slavery has been centred in Scottish historiography and earlier works have taken on new significance. Studies after 1997 have revealed the involvement of Scots with the slave trade

“…Among others, Nicholas Beasley has underlined this reality in his study of the rich life of Anglican ritual found in the Caribbean and southern North American colonies. “Puritanism and then revivalism are often seen as the dynamic and democratic American religious tradition as the standards of period evangelicals became the standards of most historians” (Beasley, , p. 14; Kopelson, ; Kupperman, ; Mulcahy, , 166; Zacek, , p. 4–6).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Clergy in the early modern Caribbean (ca. 1650–1800)

Brennan

2019

Recent historical studies of religious life in the early modern Atlantic world have increasingly taken into consideration the slave societies of the Caribbean, a region considered by an earlier generation of scholarship to be overwhelmingly irreligious. New methodological approaches to well‐perused documents have yielded significant insights into the everyday religious experiences of Caribbean inhabitants, notably communities that have often been overlooked for their apparent inability to leave archival traces. Such studies have made important contributions to a broader scholarly conversation about categories of difference in the early modern world, particularly in regard to the momentous change in the era that saw race rather than religion emerge as a primary marker of social identity. A significant portion of the primary source material that historians in this dynamic field have consulted was, unsurprisingly, produced by religious officials like Inquisition officers, episcopal authorities, missionaries (both Protestant and Catholic), ministers, and regular clergy, among others. Because they were historical actors who undoubtedly contributed to this shift and because they also produced documentation relating to it, a comprehensive account of the role of clergy in this era is needed. This article surveys this body of scholarship. It interrogates its approach to religious sources and individual religious leaders and assesses what they have revealed about the spiritual and cultural life of the early modern Caribbean.