scholarly journals REIMAGINING THE AFRICAN-ATLANTIC ARCHIVE: METHOD, CONCEPT, EPISTEMOLOGY, ONTOLOGY

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic World ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Institutions ◽  
African Atlantic

AbstractFor many scholars, the history of Africans in the Atlantic world only becomes visible at the juncture of the history of ‘the slave’. However, the sources upon which most of these studies are based, and the organization of the colonial archive more generally operate as something of a trap, inviting researchers to see how African slaves embraced or manipulated colonial institutions and ideas for their own purposes. This article focuses on methodological and conceptual meta questions that challenge how historians conduct African-Atlantic history, arguing that sources of the African past exist in the Americas, if only we are open to seeing them.

For a Comprehensive History of the Atlantic World or Histories Connected In and Beyond the Atlantic World?

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (02) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Atlantic Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Comprehensive History

This article deals with the field of Atlantic history, which first rose to prominence in North America in the early 1990s. Based on a critical review of two recently published books that reflect this “new” historiographical current, it presents the various debates dividing the Atlanticist community, including the different ways of conceptualizing the Atlantic world, practicing Atlantic history, and envisioning the future of Atlantic studies. It argues that the Atlantic world should remain a simple historical framework instead of becoming the main object of investigation. The goal is thus to write a situated history that, while taking into account all historical actors, focuses on the redefinition and renegotiation of power relationships among individuals, groups, and socio-political formations in this interconnected world born out of European colonialism and imperialism.

Atlantic history: what and why?

2001 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS CANNY
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Global History ◽  
History Of

One of the discernible trends in the historiography of recent decades – especially in that which concerns the early modern centuries – has been the emergence of a literature that describes itself as Atlantic History. This paper seeks to identify positive and negative reasons why the once-popular history of exploration and discovery has given way to this new subject, it identifies some fresh meanings that may be drawn from some well-known sources when they are reappraised in an Atlantic context, and it suggests some possibly fruitful lines of enquiry that would lead to a better understanding of how an Atlantic world was fashioned and functioned during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, the paper draws a distinction between Atlantic history and Global history and suggests that the latter is a subject that belongs more properly to the nineteenth and subsequent centuries.

Slavery and Antislavery, 1760–1820

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Leslie Brown
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
Moral Critique ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

In 1760, the ownership of African slaves was common across the Americas, ubiquitous in Atlantic Africa, and tolerated if not always officially permitted in much of Western Europe. By 1820, a new moral critique of colonial slavery and the Atlantic slave had led to the first organised efforts for their abolition. It would seem that the revolutionary era brought with it the beginning of the end for slavery in the Atlantic world. Yet, at the same time, there had never been more slaves in the Americas than there were in 1820. The expansion of the Atlantic slave trade and its increasing concentration on Brazil had profound consequences for the peoples and societies of West Africa. The Age of Revolutions was an era of spectacular growth in the institution of slavery in the Americas, when considered from a hemispheric perspective. This article suggests that the history of warfare has particular relevance to the history of slavery, and, as will become apparent, anti-slavery, in the Atlantic world.

scholarly journals Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
SANGHAMITRA MISRA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Northeastern India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

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