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Introduction: Centering Families in Atlantic Histories
Abstract
This issue of the William and Mary Quarterly originated with papers delivered at a 2011 conference, “Centering Families in Atlantic Worlds, 1500–1800,” cosponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Although both histories of family and histories of the Atlantic world have provoked considerable scholarly debate about the analytical coherence and utility of these terms, putting them together offers an important and fresh view of each. Certainly families were affected by economic, political, or cultural structures of many kinds, but they made choices and pursued strategies that, in thousands or tens of thousands of repetitions, shaped those same patterns. That is, their decisions, described as familial or made in the context of family relations, constituted micropolitics and microeconomics that cumulatively comprised critical elements in configuring the Atlantic world. Looking to Atlantic contexts also heightens our appreciation of the internal dynamics of family, in which those same decisions could be made by individuals either with or against collective family interests. And it asks us to attend to the definitions of family employed by the most interested parties, the people themselves, but also by external authorities who found the exploitation and regulation of family a critical instrument of imperial and other Atlantic powers.
Lives characterised by staggered, stepwise or “ongoing” mobility were ubiquitous in the Early-Modern Spanish world. However, individuals who repeatedly alternated long-distance relocation with prolonged periods of sojourn in different places have attracted limited attention from historians. Contemporary migration studies, by contrast, increasingly stress the importance of considering experiences of mobility from a longitudinal perspective. By doing so, they highlight how, over time and through repeated migrations, individuals and families often transcend official immigration categories, acquire and deploy skills, rely on, create and destroy relational networks, and produce narratives that allow them to make sense of both their trajectories and their experiences of social and place insertion. Drawing on insights from this scholarship and the “new mobilities paradigm,” adopting a narrative, biographical or life-cycle approach, to the mobile lives of enslaved individuals in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, of mestizo children travelling to and from Spain, of Canarian migrants, royal officials and merchants, the contributors to this special issue aim to further our understanding of how the experiences of these individuals were central to the construction and transformation of religious ideas, personal and political identities, and familial, commercial and patronage networks that articulated the early modern Spanish world.
Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion and Exile, 1550-1850 brings together eleven original essays by an international group of scholars, each investigating how family, or the idea of family, was maintained or reinvented when husbands, wives, children, apprentices, servants or slaves separated, or faced separation, from their household. The result is a fresh and geographically wide-ranging discussion about the nature of family and its intersection with travel over a three hundred year period during which roles and relationships, within and between households, were increasingly affected by trade, settlement, and empire building. The imperial project may have influenced different regions in different ways at different times yet, as this collection reveals, families, especially those transcending national ties and traditional boundaries were central to its progress. Together, these essays bring new understandings of the foundations of our interconnected world and of the people who contributed to it.
Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansion and Exile, 1550-1850 brings together eleven original essays by an international group of scholars, each investigating how family, or the idea of family, was maintained or reinvented when husbands, wives, children, apprentices, servants or slaves separated, or faced separation, from their household. The result is a fresh and geographically wide-ranging discussion about the nature of family and its intersection with travel over a three hundred year period during which roles and relationships, within and between households, were increasingly affected by trade, settlement, and empire building. The imperial project may have influenced different regions in different ways at different times yet, as this collection reveals, families, especially those transcending national ties and traditional boundaries were central to its progress. Together, these essays bring new understandings of the foundations of our interconnected world and of the people who contributed to it.
This article argues that the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) has played a fundamental role in western Europe’s economic development. The EMP emerged in north-western Europe in the late medieval period as a result of the preaching of the Catholic Church promoting marriage based on consensus, the rise of labour markets, and specific institutions concerning property transfers between generations that encouraged wage labour by women. It resulted in a demographic regime embedded in a highly commercial environment, in which households interacted frequently with labour, capital, and commodity markets.We also discuss possible long-term consequences for human capital formation and institution building.
This essay takes as its subject two distinctive historiographies, one in postcolonial studies and the other in North American history, that both address how intimate domains-sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing-figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. It examines two prevailing trends: on the one hand, an analytic convergence in treatments of, and increasing attention to, intimacy in the making of empire; on the other, recognition of the distinctive conceptual commitments and political investments that shape the fields as separate disciplinary ventures and historiographic domains. I use the terms "postcolonial studies" and "colonial studies" interchangeably, although those who identify themselves with one do not always identify with the other. Some scholars use the term "postcolonial" to signal a cross-disciplinary political project, analytically akin to cultural studies, that rejects colonial categories and scholarship that takes them for granted. Others retain the term "colonial studies" to underscore more concern for the local and labor history of colonial societies while similarly acknowledging the continuing political, economic, and cultural landscape in which populations who have been colonized are subjugated and now live. The
The region between the river Senegal and Sierra Leone saw the first trans-Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. Drawing on many new sources, Toby Green challenges current quantitative approaches to the history of the slave trade. New data on slave origins can show how and why Western African societies responded to Atlantic pressures. Green argues that answering these questions requires a cultural framework and uses the idea of creolization - the formation of mixed cultural communities in the era of plantation societies - to argue that preceding social patterns in both Africa and Europe were crucial. Major impacts of the sixteenth-century slave trade included political fragmentation, changes in identity and the re-organization of ritual and social patterns. The book shows which peoples were enslaved, why they were vulnerable and the consequences in Africa and beyond.
The historiography on slave families in the Atlantic world has tended to revolve around debates over whether the enslaved possessed the agency to construct and maintain natal families in the Americas. These debates have been especially germane to our understanding of the extent to which first-generation African slaves suffered a “social death.” In this article I argue that conceptual categories of natal kin are insufficient for understanding the various configurations of African family in the Atlantic world. Both in the African context, and extending into the Atlantic, Africans formulated overlapping and interconnected communities that resulted in multiple registers of “family.” Blood ties represented one important aspect of these families, but natal kinship was often the by-product of broader adoptive, corporate, spiritual, and intellectual communities. In the Atlantic, Africans found creative means to expand on these communal ideologies, very often building new families from mere threads of sociocultural recognition and belonging.
In 17th-century France, families were essential as both agents and objects in the rise of the market and the process of state formation - phenomena in 17th-century Europe that, as we now know, were critical to the making of the modern world. This book analyzes the intersections of family, economy, and law to interrogate the long roots of the critical relationship between family and political economy. Primarily through a pioneering exploration of civil litigation in French cities, it demonstrates how early modern spouses, families, communities, and the state sought to manage the political economies that underpinned daily life. These economies included a broad range of tangible and intangible resources - law, borrowing, violence, and marital status among them - that needed to be managed, deployed, or mobilized strategically. Household members, neighbours, and authorities invested enormous energy and effort in the daily negotiation of relationships and resources. The 'business' of family involved resources that were the currency of the early modern world these people knew. The perils as well as promises of the often re-framed relations between families, neighbourhoods and states have persisted. Then and now, spouses often found that the experience of marriage continued to be fraught with uncertainty and risk. Precarious finances and ubiquitous borrowing were and remain critical challenges. Violence was then - and too often survives as - a marker of inequality in families. Legal process has long been a powerful site of cultural production as well as regulation for subjects/citizens and states.
This book is about the world of parenting and parenthood in the Georgian era. It navigates recent 'turns' towards emotions, subjectivity, memory, the body and materiality. This approach reveals the profound emotions provoked by motherhood and fatherhood and the labour and hard work it entailed. Such parental investment meant that the experience was fundamental to the forging of national, family and personal identities. Society called upon parents to transmit prized values across generations and this study explores how this was achieved. All in all, raising children needed more than two parents. At all levels of society, household and kinship ties were drawn upon to lighten the labours of parenting and this book reveals how crucial grandparents, aunts, uncles and servants were to raising children. It also discusses the ways in which parenting adapted across the life-course, changed by the transitions of ageing, marriage and family, adversity and crisis, and death and memory.
In 1806 General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, was brought to trial for the torture of a free mulatto named Louisa Calderon and for overseeing a regime of terror over the island's slave population. James Epstein offers a fascinating account of the unfolding of this colonial drama. He shows the ways in which the trial and its investigation brought empire 'home' and exposed the disjuncture between a national self-image of humane governance and the brutal realities of colonial rule. He uses the trial to open up a range of issues, including colonial violence and norms of justice, the status of the British subject, imperial careering, visions of development after slavery, slave conspiracy and the colonial archive. He reveals how Britain's imperial regime became more authoritarian, hierarchical and militarised but also how unease about abuses of power and of the rights of colonial subjects began to grow.
The theme of this book is the kinship relationships that were central to nineteenth-century nascent capitalist society. The middle classes were at the forefront of this development, but as yet only a rudimentary reliable financial and legal infrastructure existed. It was their extensive kinship networks that provided the capital, personnel, skills, and contacts crucial for expanding commercial and professional enterprises. While this was characteristic of the Western middle strata - Protestant and Catholic alike - this study concentrates on Great Britain with some reference to other countries where appropriate. Part I examines kinship relations and how they have been understood. It raises the question of why siblings in particular have been neglected until the last few decades. Part II provides a brief description of British middle-class life and the structure and culture of large families. The following chapters cover sibling relationships from childhood through adult life, especially the differential experiences of sisters and brothers. It includes a chapter on aunts, uncles, and cousins. A wide range of examples is used encompassing ordinary as well as well-known people. Sources include oral histories and data from the 1881 census. Part III is a series of essays on aspects of these relationships: sibling incest; cousin marriage; the impact of seniority and gender in the lives of William Gladstone and his sisters; an examination of Sigmund Freud's relationships to his siblings; the effect of sibling loss. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the relevance of these themes for our contemporary world.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French colonists and their Native allies participated in a slave trade that spanned half of North America, carrying thousands of Native Americans into bondage in the Great Lakes, Canada, and the Caribbean. In “Bonds of Alliance”, Brett Rushforth reveals the dynamics of this system from its origins to the end of French colonial rule. Balancing a vast geographic and chronological scope with careful attention to the lives of enslaved individuals, this book gives voice to those who lived through the ordeal of slavery and, along the way, shaped French and Native societies. © 2012 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
The Saint-Domingue planter Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau did not simply leave colonialism behind when he returned to his hometown La Rochelle: he literally brought some of its complications with him. Five of his mixed-race children by his former slave Jeanne arrived with or soon after their white father. The very existence of this family complicated an increasingly easy equation between blackness and slavery, and for both the planter and his children, family ties shaped their experience of race and status. In the midst of growing racial paranoia in France and legislation that regulated all people of color, Fleuriau and his daughter Marie-Jeanne privileged family over race as a means of carving out a position of autonomy for themselves in French society, albeit in very different ways and for very different reasons. In doing so, they shaped what the category “family” meant in France.
Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau, ex–résident blanc de Saint-Domingue, au lieu d'abandonner le colonialisme après son retour à La Rochelle, a rapporté avec lui certaines des complications coloniales. Cinq des enfants métisses qu'il a eus avec son ancienne esclave Jeanne sont arrivés avec lui, ou peu après. L'existence même de cette famille a compliqué le lien évident entre la négritude et l'esclavage. Pour le planteur et ses enfants les liens familiaux ont informé leur manière d'assumer leur race et leur position sociale. Au milieu de la paranoïa raciale croissante en France au dixhuitième siècle et la législation qui réglementait tous gens de couleur, Fleuriau et sa fille Marie-Jeanne ont privilégié les liens familiaux plutôt que raciaux afin de créer une position d'autonomie dans la société française, bien que par des moyens et pour des raisons très différents. Ils ont ainsi façonné la catégorie « famille » en France.
Although the language of individualism permeated the legal and political systems created during the French Revolution, kinship and friendship networks continued to determine access to positions of power, and the self-interested individual never had much resonance beyond the realm of discourse. Adult sons nonetheless found that they held new legal and symbolic power, which changed the nature of their relationships with preceding generations. Revolutionary transformations in family law and later under Napoléon Bonaparte did not address the situation of widows, but the combination of other laws with the rhetoric of the all-powerful male individual separate from the responsibilities of lineage limited widows' ability to defend their rights. Two cases where adult sons entered into conflict with their widowed mothers illustrate the significance of these changes. These cases shed light on some unexplored consequences of the revolution for the family, revealing how the younger generation benefited relative to their elders. The French case in turn relates to other parts of the globe as the Napoleonic Code, which helped to enshrine this new system, served as a model for legal codes throughout Latin America and in the French Empire.
In the 1760s “Mulatresse Lene” was cassaret (married) to Danish interim governor and slave trader Frantz Joachim Kühberg in Osu on the Gold Coast. The local history of Ga-Danish families such as hers in Osu illustrates how Euro-African women on the West African coast could benefit from marrying European slave traders and could use these marriages to expand their room for maneuver in the coastal society. By marrying European men, christening their children, and sending them to the church school at the Danish fort, Euro-African women claimed a powerful intermediary position in the racialized social hierarchy of the Atlantic slave trade, and as they did so they helped reproduce this same racial hierarchy. Yet Euro-African families were not just taking advantage of their position to widen their opportunities; they were also using it as a means of protection in a violent and stressful slave-trading environment. At the height of the slave trade in the second half of the eighteenth century, Africans participating in the slave trade—even elite Euro-Africans such as Kühberg and her family—were under pressure to protect themselves and their families from being sold across the Atlantic.
In postrevolutionary Montreal between 1783 and 1820, a reassertion of patriarchal rule was integral to reaffirming a hierarchical society, a counterrevolutionary bulwark against the republican United States. This reassertion of patriarchy was thus fundamental to the sociopolitical project underpinning the new British Empire, which had to contend with unstable ethnic and plebeian social groups, including potentially rebellious peoples such as French Canadians and people of color, including black slaves, panis or Indian slaves, and mulattoes. Reasserting the government of the family elided differences between the family and the household, which included kin, apprentices, and servants. The political ideology represented by patriarchalism thus forestalled the emergence of the “modern” private family form. Evidence from the criminal courts of Quebec shows the ways in which patriarchal masculinity was policed by both patrician and plebeian men and how it was employed to defuse challenges from rival concepts of masculinity, especially those proclaimed by turbulent youth and the omnipresent military.
Elite African merchants accessed credit from European traders through a system known as pawning. Indigenous to Africa, the system required African traders to place family members, usually their sons, in the hands of Europeans as security for the trade goods advanced to them. Pawns could also be used to guarantee the fulfillment of diplomatic agreements. Under the system of pawning practiced by African and British traders on the eighteenth-century Gold Coast, if the African merchants did not return with the required number of slaves by a given date, then their children were considered slaves and could be sold off the coast. Generally, everyone involved tried to avoid that drastic measure, but some unscrupulous captains kidnapped pawns, an act that could have disastrous consequences for the conduct of the trade. Africans might respond by closing the trade or by retaliating against any British traders who fell into their hands. For that reason, the British often worked to prevent that outcome or retrieved kidnapped pawns from the Americas and returned them to their families, often years after their enslavement. As a result of this system, British traders tried to understand the family relationships among their African counterparts, and they often developed close relationships with these family members that worked to further the trade. The slave trade had significant family and class dimensions, and pawning illustrates how closely the trade was bound to larger social, political, and economic structures.
This essay calls for an approach to Spanish Atlantic family history that takes into account the essentially fictive nature of all families, including those based on blood relations, in order to better appreciate the nonbiological affective ties that made Spanish colonialism possible in the first place. Familiaridad, or the family-like relations created through practices of child rearing and youth training, was integral to the Spanish colonial project in Lima, Peru. In this Atlantic hub, “becoming” castes, diasporas, ethnicities, and races often involved, ironically, dependencies and affections created with other groups—something that is evident in the complexities of community among early indigenous migrants to Lima; the construction of Atlantic slave kinship and slave familiaridad in masters' households more generally; and the sentimental ties that developed between hired wet nurses and “Spanish” foundling girls.
Spanish fathers' arrangements for mestizo children in Peru from the 1540s through the 1560s highlight Iberian family practices in transition. The 1532 arrival of Spanish men in Peru created the context for many sexual unions, coerced and consensual, between Spanish men and indigenous women. Many Spaniards chose to ignore the children of these unions. However, dozens in the cities of Lima and Arequipa recognized their children. To enact their paternal role, these men removed children from their indigenous mothers' care and sent them to Spanish households in Peru and even Spain. Extant cases such as these expose family-like relationships in a context of cultural encounter. Here, Spanish fathers considered the upbringing of their out-of-wedlock children, its material and cultural aspects, as part of their paternal obligation. Records reveal that the pattern for the care of mestizo children and their indigenous mothers emphasized Iberian role models for mestizos. Moreover, the incorporation of these children into Spanish households considered their value as labor. By the 1560s it became routine to refer to these boys and girls as mestizos, but in the 1540s and 1550s they were sons and daughters who garnered the attention of their Spanish fathers. Their experiences exemplify how family adapted to transatlantic empire.
In the decades following the first voyages of Columbus, complex and ethnically diverse societies formed in the large islands of the Caribbean (Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Cuba) as a result of the nature of the colonizing enterprise, which centered on gold mining and agriculture and relied on the coerced labor of the islands' indigenous inhabitants. Spaniards also imported African slaves to provide labor for mines and sugar estates. Drastic population loss among the indigenous groups, importation of Indians from elsewhere in the Caribbean, a high degree of mobility on the part of Europeans who sought opportunities throughout the region, and early revolts led by African slaves all contributed to royal and ecclesiastical policies intended to safeguard marriage and family life, which were seen as crucial to fostering social stability. The rigors of the labor regimen imposed on Indians and Africans undermined their ability to form and maintain families. Though Spanish men might have preferred to marry European women, their primary domestic relations often were with indigenous, or perhaps African, women. The result was the early formation of an increasingly mixed population, especially in the smaller towns and countryside, that ultimately constituted the core of society in the Spanish Caribbean.
Seven respondents assess James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s essay from a variety of perspectives. Sidbury and Cañizares-Esguerra conclude the Forum with a reply.
Myriad new peoples emerged in Africa, America, and Europe during the first three centuries following Columbus’s arrival in the New World. They did so in ways that were deeply rooted in local conditions and idiosyncratic contingencies as well as linked through the movements of peoples, goods, and ideas back and forth across the Atlantic. By focusing on ethnogenesis as the product of the local as well as the global, we have sought to put the experiences of Africans and Amerindians at the center of Atlantic history. Ours is a call for historians not to privilege the tiresome national and imperial narratives that have dominated the field but to dig out of archives the countless contingencies that shaped local experiences.
This article is part of a History Compass cluster on ‘Rethinking Gender, Family and Sexuality in the Early Modern Atlantic World’.
The cluster is made up of the following articles:
‘On Currents and Comparisons: Gender and the Atlantic ‘Turn’ in Spanish America’, Bianca Premo, History Compass 8.3 (2010): 223–237, doi: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2009.00658.x
‘Women and Families in Early (North) America and the Wider (Atlantic) World’, Karin Wulf, History Compass 8.3 (2010): 238–247, doi: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2009.00659.x
‘Family Matters: The Early Modern Atlantic from the European Side’, Julie Hardwick, History Compass 8.3 (2010): 248–257, doi: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2009.00660.x
The following essay originated as one of these three contributions to a roundtable discussion held at the 14th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 2008. The roundtable, ‘Rethinking Gender, Family, and Sexuality in the Early Modern Atlantic World’, was meant to be as much invitation as inventory and was astonishingly well attended at 08:00 in the morning, with standing room only for a thoughtful, lively audience whose comments, questions, and suggestions are reflected here (although in no way fully represented). As historians of gender and family in the North Atlantic, European, and Iberian worlds, we had hoped to encourage more central and systematic attention to gender within the Atlantic World paradigm by cataloging some recent works in their fields and pointing the way for future studies. Yet, a funny thing happened on the way to the conference. Independently, each of us began to engage with the challenges of simply inserting family and gender into ‘the Atlantic’ as both as conceptual place and a historical practice. The essays that emerged, therefore, departed from conventional historiographies that survey the state of the field. Rather, these are theoretical and methodological reflections on the implications of de‐centering national and colonial narratives about the history of gender. At a time when transnational historical scholarship on early modern women promises to explode, these essays aim to inspire debate about the conceptual utility of the Atlantic as a paradigm for understanding issues of gender, family, and sexuality, as well as its ramifications for feminist scholarship everywhere.
From 1778 to 1784, in an attempt to colonise Patagonia, the Spanish Crown transported more than 1,900 peasants from northern Spain to the Río de la Plata. Based on Enlightenment ideas about economy and society, the Crown used the colonisation scheme to assert control over some of its most marginal subjects. In the hope of transforming these peasants from poverty-stricken burdens on society into filial agents of empire, the Crown invested heavily in the health and wellbeing of the colonising mothers and children, and clearly established the monarchy as a benevolently powerful paternal authority.
This article looks at the role of gender in the creation of a capitalist economy in England in the early modern period. Most capital in this period was both accumulated and transferred by means of marriage and inheritance, so it stands to reason that the laws governing marriage and inheritance played a role in structuring the economy. English property law was distinctive in two respects: first, married women under coverture were even more restricted than in the rest of Europe; second, single women enjoyed a position unique in Europe as legal individuals in their own right, with no requirement for a male guardian. I suggest these peculiarities had two consequences for the development of capitalism. First, the draconian nature of coverture necessitated the early development of complex private contracts and financial arrangements, accustoming people to complicated legal and financial concepts and establishing a climate in which the concept of legal security for notional concepts of property (the bedrock of capitalism) became commonplace. Second, without the inhibiting effect of legal guardianship, England had up to fifty per cent more people able to move capital purely because that market included the unmarried half of the female population in addition to the male population. This area needs a great deal more research and three comparative European approaches to single women's financial activity are offered: public investment records; court records of debt litigation; and individual biography of single female entrepreneurs. The connections proposed between marital property law and economic development are suggestive and deserve further consideration.