The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History

Joseph C. Miller, Joseph C. Miller, Joseph Miller

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400852215
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The first encyclopedic reference to Atlantic history Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the connections among Africa, the Americas, and Europe transformed world history—through maritime exploration, commercial engagements, human migrations and settlements, political realignments and upheavals, cultural exchanges, and more. This book, the first encyclopedic reference work on Atlantic history, takes an integrated, multicontinental approach that emphasizes the dynamics of change and the perspectives and motivations of the peoples who made it happen. The entries—all specially commissioned for this volume from an international team of leading scholars—synthesize the latest scholarship on central themes, including economics, migration, politics, war, technologies and science, the physical environment, and culture.Part one features five major essays that trace the changes distinctive to each chronological phase of Atlantic history. Part two includes more than 125 entries on key topics, from the seemingly familiar viewed in unfamiliar and provocative ways (the Seven Years' War, trading companies) to less conventional subjects (family networks, canon law, utopias).This is an indispensable resource for students, researchers, and scholars in a range of fields, from early American, African, Latin American, and European history to the histories of economics, religion, and science.

• The first encyclopedic reference on Atlantic history
• Features five major essays and more than 125 alphabetical entries
• Provides essential context on major areas of change:
• Economies (for example, the slave trade, marine resources, commodities, specie, trading companies)
• Populations (emigrations, Native American removals, blended communities)
• Politics and law (the law of nations, royal liberties, paramount chiefdoms, independence struggles in Haiti, the Hispanic Americas, the United States, and France)
• Military actions (the African and Napoleonic wars, the Seven Years' War, wars of conquest)
• Technologies and science (cartography, nautical science, geography, healing practices)
• The physical environment (climate and weather, forest resources, agricultural production, food and diets, disease)
• Cultures and communities (captivity narratives, religions and religious practices)
• Includes original contributions from Sven Beckert, Holly Brewer, Peter A. Coclanis, Seymour Drescher, Eliga H. Gould, David S. Jones, Wim Klooster, Mark Peterson, Steven Pincus, Richard Price and Sophia Rosenfeld, and many more
• Contains illustrations, maps, and bibliographies

Part One

Prologue

Historical Dynamics of Change

Joseph C. Miller

The opening century of the four hundred years of Atlantic history explored in this volume can be understood historically only in terms of the cards that the entrants into it brought to the table. The hands they held were similar—in fact global—in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The historical dynamics that motivated and enabled the players in all three regions revolved around very long-term struggles among powerful military interests, who thrived by conquest of accessible lands and the populations living on them. Other, commercial, interests were also at play in Afro-Eurasia. Merchants thrived by moving through the surrounding uninhabited spaces—often deserts—and also on the seas and oceans.

The customary perspective on these processes tends to celebrate “civilizations”—expansive “empires” and the luxuries supported by the wealth appropriated through conquests—thus taking militarism and commerce for granted. This volume balances this familiar story with the more local perspectives of small communities in most of Africa and Native America, as well as more of the ordinary villages in Europe and small communities in the Americas. It also historicizes the triumphs of conquest by emphasizing the costs of achieving them, and even more of maintaining them through time. There is nothing stable about history: continuity is fragile and requires effort to achieve.

Taking a very long-term view, the military conquests prominent in the history of Eurasia were costly and destructive and in the long run tended to burn the aggressors out. On this millennial scale, merchants, on the other hand, tended to accumulate wealth in enduring forms and to grow in financial strength. They invested their excess assets in military regimes that were reaching the logistical limits of plundering and in agricultural and other producers, as well as in more remote, and independent, communities. These relatively isolated communities, in turn, extracted commodities of value to visiting traders, and did so—without abandoning their own strategies of mobility, diversity, and mutual obligations—to invest in productive, but immovable and costly, infrastructure.

Militarists and merchants thus drew similarly on resources external to the structured cultural or political domains within which they competed. The balances among the strategies of local communities, merchant commerce, and military conquest varied by region—Africa, the Americas, and Europe—and within each region as well. This prologue sketches specifics of these variations relevant to what motivated European merchants and militarists to venture out into what became a fast-changing Atlantic World. The results everywhere were enabling for some, if also at the expense of others. But these initial Atlantic-oriented successes eventually proved overwhelmingly effective, enriching, and empowering, primarily for the partnership of merchants and militarists unique to northwestern Europe.

Backgrounds—Lands, People, and Seas

In the second half of the fifteenth century, the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean became historical spaces exploited by humans as relatively marginal players in Europe nosed their ways west beyond the horizons of coast-hugging maritime transportation networks known since ancient times. From Europe, the strong Canary Current flowing south and then west off the desert shores of northwestern Africa carried mariners sponsored by minor members of Portugal’s late-medieval military aristocracy. They probed the barren Saharan coasts in search of fabulous wealth in gold reported to exist in regions beyond the desert, inhabited by people whom Muslims in North Africa distinguished from themselves as “black,” a term also differentiating them as enslaveable unbelievers. Mariners seem to have been aware of these ocean winds and currents, and even the mid-Atlantic Azores archipelago, as early as the first half of the fourteenth century. The modern name for what we now see as an ocean, the Atlantic, comes from the eastern Mediterranean perspective of those ancient eras and alludes implicitly to the mysteries of the open sea among European literati: the word is an adjectival Greek form (atlantikos) referring to the Atlas Mountains in modern Morocco, thus to the endless waters beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Strait of Gibraltar).

Beyond this fanciful vision of the Atlantic in European-written scholarship, practical mariners and pirates had for centuries ranged widely through the northeastern Atlantic, and a few even out to its closer western shores. Portuguese fishermen are reputed somehow to have crossed the north-flowing Gulf Stream to reach the Grand Banks off modern Newfoundland, where they found greater interest in teeming schools of cod and haddock in the sea itself than in the land or its inhabitants. These northerly latitudes had been well known to Norse mariners, who had settled then-uninhabited Iceland as early as the 800s and in the 900s had reached western Greenland and, at least occasionally, even the North American mainland.

For fourteenth-century Christian Europe, commercial prospects to the east loomed much larger. The sophistication of China became legendary upon Marco Polo’s return in 1295 from his venture along Central Asia’s Silk Road, under the sponsorship of Kublai Khan (1215–1294). The Christian holy lands in the eastern Mediterranean had even earlier become targets of pious late Middle-Age European chivalry, culminating in the Crusades, a series of intermittent raids and military occupations by European knights between 1096 and 1272. It is no wonder that the ocean initially attracted primarily interests who were relatively marginal within Europe at the time.

The people along the other shores of the Atlantic cared even less about open waters. Western Africans were oriented internally toward interpersonal relationships of obligation and trust and exploited the ocean only in accessible tidal estuaries, shallow bays, and an extensive network of lagoons running east from the mouth of the Volta River (in modern Ghana) through the vast delta of the Niger River and on to modern Cameroon. Their maritime technologies centered on offshore fishing with nets in long canoes, and fishing communities occupied the shores of sheltered inlets and dried their catches to exchange with inland neighbors for grains, tubers, and other products. One shallow bay in Central Africa harbored a distinctive small bivalve with a shell (nzimbo) that Kikongo-speaking communities in adjacent inland regions circulated as a kind of regional currency. Beyond the nearby horizons of these shoreline communities, the reddening sun set over an Atlantic underworld of ancestors, Kalunga in the word of the Kongo. Neither evidence nor apparent historical motivation supports a conjecture, sometimes heard, of ancient African ancestors of the Olmecs in Mesoamerica, and a report of a massive fleet dispatched from Senegambia to the west in the fourteenth century is no less legendary.

Native Americans were similarly landlubbers, although they also harvested the shellfish and crustaceans of the shorelines and dried the salt from sometimes elaborately constructed tidal pans to trade with inlanders. Also like Africans, they found their ways out to islands accessible with their canoes. The rich marine resources of the shallow Caribbean waters, including manatees, sea turtles, and reef fishes, had long ago attracted settlers from the mainland of Central America, the overspill of populations growing around maize agriculture. They had been followed somewhat later by cassava-cultivating arrivals from northern South America, later called Arawaks from a word for the starchy tuber domesticated in Amazonian forests that they cultivated.

These smaller communities of most of Africa and Native America were efficient, in the sense of sustaining themselves at relatively low cost through the vagaries of varying climates and occasional momentary concentrations of individual authority. The low maintenance required of such small communities, and their consequent durability and ubiquity (not only in the Americas and Africa but also throughout the world, including Europe), derived from the flexible coordination that they achieved without the burdens of the permanent infrastructure of coercion. In contrast, the Eurasian strategies of monumental construction and military destruction, although generally understood as “civilization,” came with considerable costs. These very expensive investments are significant historically—that is, in the sense of motivating change—because conquests could be maintained only with often-coerced, and eventually profound, modifications in the lives of the villagers compelled to support the military and ceremonial aristocracies who managed them.

The historical perspective of this volume treats change as a challenge. History is about change, of course, but a historicized account of the Atlantic (or any past) starts from the premise that innovation takes creative effort and resources, that novelty presents challenges for humans to seize as opportunity rather than to resist. Arrangements worked out in the past are the only tools that humans have to draw on to compete for success in the emergent circumstances of the present. They create simplified, highly selective, usually self-interested versions of the past as guidelines used in the present to confront the yawning unknown of an incipient future. History, taking full account of the ephemerality and uncertainties of life, is contingent; outcomes are more accidental than intended.

Understanding the historical Atlantic therefore requires a suspension of the comfortable, optimistic visions that typically construct the European past as progressive. Though civilization in Western societies is based on militarization and material wealth, most Africans and Native Americans lived by less costly standards of achieving and maintaining human community; hence, they were less in need of the external resources of the Atlantic to sustain them. An inclusive, balanced consideration of the regions around the Atlantic in the fifteenth century thus understands the great stone structures; the modestsized urban concentrations of people in Europe, the Americas, and (less commonly in) Africa; and in particular the horse-based extreme militarization unique to the Eurasian background not only as “dynamic” but also as unstable, costly anomalies sustainable only by constant innovation to reach and absorb ever-more-distant resources. For particular parties on four continents the Atlantic became such a resource, in differing ways.

Europe with Its Back to the Water

The dynamics of military consolidation in Eurasia had revolved for 3,000 years around the vast spaces of the continent’s temperate latitudes, from the Ukraine to Mongolia, especially the speed and power of the horses bred there. Horse-based raiding from the steppes had long before spilled southward into densely populated agrarian valleys from the Yellow River to Mesopotamia and eventually the lower Nile. In the millennium following Roman domination masses of mounted invaders had repeatedly punctuated the history of western Europe, raising the military costs of defense to the limits supportable within its relatively confined spaces.

Although the military aristocrats of Europe invested heavily in defensive redoubts—the dramatically perched castles and walled villages atop hills that now attract tourists—they survived by contracting in scale, and they multiplied accordingly in numbers. Christian prohibitions on lending money at interest had favored Jewish merchants as the creditors of choice among Europe’s military aristocrats, but merchants in Venice, Florence, and Siena, relatively free of landed military competition, used the wealth generated from Mediterranean commerce to take control of these cities as republics. They were distinctive in Europe in the liquidity that they could mobilize for investment in artisan processing—especially glass in Venice and woolen textiles in Florence—and eventually also in banking and credit for the military aristocrats. The major riverine arteries of central Europe—the Rhone, Rhine, and Danube—similarly supported commercial consolidation of liquid wealth in the hands of the great banking families of the Germanic-speaking areas, not least in the low country around the channels where the Rhine emptied into the North Sea.

Merchants represented potential challenges to military power everywhere in Eurasia. Conquest was cheap, but the costs of consolidating military rule tended to escalate beyond the capacities of the local populations called upon to sustain them. Thus the conquerors’ dynastic heirs sustained the initial grandeur paid for through plundering by slipping into debt to merchant bankers. Merchants and bankers, unlike military rulers who supported themselves through destruction of opponents and exploitation of the survivors, accumulated wealth in durable, relatively low-maintenance forms—coins, jewels, transport and storage facilities, and inventories. They then, even more profitably, leveraged these relatively fixed assets by lending against their cash values for higher returns in the future. The formal proscriptions against lending money at interest by Christian authorities in Europe at some level reflected awareness of the long-term promise—and power—of investing capital at interest. Literally with their backs up against the Atlantic coastline, they could not afford the geostrategic division characteristic of parts of Asia—that is, between the military aristocracies ruling over populated territories and merchant networks investing their growing commercial assets in traversing desert wastelands and empty seas.

By the fifteenth century, growing commercial sectors of the European economy were straining the available quantities of the specie that underlay their commercialized transactions. This shortage of monetized bullion was intensified by a persistent drain of silver into the giant Asian world economy, integrated under Islamic law and stretching from Senegal, Andalusia, and eastern Africa’s Swahili Coast to Central Asia and the Philippines. European aristocrats competed to acquire and display the spices, silks, and fine porcelains of the East, but they had little of comparable quality to offer in return.

In a pattern to be duplicated later in the Atlantic, Italian merchants found markets for their modest products among the Slavic-speaking agricultural populations along the Adriatic and around the Black Sea, selling their goods to them on credit. Indebted Slav buyers ended up repaying their Venetian creditors in captives and dependents, mostly girls and women, whom the Italians sold as slaves to service the wealthy merchant households of port cities around the Mediterranean, from Venice to Barcelona. These Slavic-speaking females were gathered in numbers sufficient to provoke public notice. The ethnonym “Slavs” denigrating them, and eventually also males, as outsiders eventually came to refer also to their status as captives, that is, as “slaves” in English and cognate terms in most European languages. Thus captive Slavs, and a few Africans, became visible in the Christian Mediterranean as ethnicized outsiders, not as the legal category of servus (for slave) inherited from Roman law.

The legal standing of the enslaved on both Mediterranean shores, Muslim and Christian, was instead largely urban and domestic, in contrast with the later public standing of commercialized slaves as productive assets in the Atlantic. That is, though some captives transited public spaces, the ports and marketplaces, they did so only incidentally as they moved into the private households of the urban families wealthy enough to buy them. Households often acquired them or disposed of them through personal relationships of inheritance or marriage or as donations among friends that did not involve currencies or public markets. Within households they were secluded from monarchical law or the public regulations of other recognized corporate bodies—or “orders” or estates. Under the law of the Catholic Church their masters and mistresses were responsible for their spiritual welfare. Under similar Muslim domestic laws of familial responsibility for persons, slaves were ʿabd, or similarly beholden to the heads of the households within which they lived. Outside households, governments—primarily the seaport municipalities around the Mediterranean through which captives passed—were involved primarily as buyers and not as regulators. Christian and Muslim authorities alike raided their confessional rivals on the opposing shores of the inland sea for captives and held them for ransoms in cash or employed them for urban services or as galley slaves to move goods through their harbors.

Rural estates could not compete with the prices that prospering households of Mediterranean cities paid for captives. The Christian manors of the medieval Mediterranean, generally too poor to buy enslaveable outsiders or to generate demand for labor in excess of what local populations could offer, therefore made do with the resident peasant labor generally characteristic of Europe. European military aristocrats’ confinement in Eurasia’s western extremity also denied them the access to remote and alien populations that had brought reliable numbers of captives into Muslim domains, from sub-Saharan Africans and Circassians to non-Muslim populations of South Asia and the outlying islands of the Indonesian archipelago. And just as Muslims’ monotheistic community of faith forbade enslaving other believers, so were Christians in western Europe prohibited from enslaving fellow communicants.

The personal politics of monarchical sovereignty in Europe further inhibited slaving. The aspiring Christian monarchs of Europe were seen as benevolent patrons enmeshed in intricate personal relationships of loyalty—lord to liege and on out to villagers living on the estates of the aristocracy—and patronage and protection in return. These mutual responsibilities contrasted with the entirely one-sided power gained in Asia by military conquests. The sovereign authority of monarchy in Europe was thus comprehensive and exclusive within territorially defined domains, and increasingly direct. As fifteenth-century military aristocrats managed slowly to define and implement claims to the singular sovereignty of monarchy, to the exclusion of all competitors for claims on their local populations, they had little room to tolerate the exclusive loyalty to masters that enslavement entailed. Significant retinues of slaves, beyond the reach of monarchical authority, posed potential threats to supreme royal power.

The royal legal codes in thirteenth-century Europe, from Scandinavia to Iberia, promoted significant assertions of dynastic sovereignty beyond the persons of the kings proclaiming them. These codes only exceptionally recognized competing private rights of individuals over captives. Recruitment of personnel by slaving thus withered away in most of Christian Europe. This was not the case, however, in “Reconquista” Iberia or the independent cities of the Mediterranean. In this context, the increasing commercial, and thus publicly visible, transactions in Slavic-speakers in the fifteenth century prompted creation of the ethnic label that the subsequent distinctively commercialized context of the Atlantic turned into a designation of personal property, and thus a financial asset, with profound consequences for the non-Christians whom Europeans acquired there.

Commerce and Militarization in Africa

The small, flexible communities along the coasts of Africa were relatively self-sufficient. In the interior, communities of traders—pivot points in the extensive regional economies in the northwestern bulge of the continent—had dispersed in diasporas of small settlements linked by their shared Islamic monotheism, literacy employed in contracts and communication over distances, and accompanying Muslim commercial law. With these unifying strategies they moved Saharan salts and other minerals in significant quantities over considerable distances between the desert and the processing and artisan industries of the more populous savanna lands to the south. On their return to the north, the diasporic traders carried grain and other products of the agricultural lat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Alphabetical List of Entries
• Topical List of Entries
• Contributors
• Maps
• Part One
• Part Two
• Index