Some Problems of the Rhode Island Traders in Java, 1799–1836

1965 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharom Ahmat
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Far East ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Triangular Trade

Before the American Revolution, the economic life of Rhode Island was largely dependent on the Caribbean and African trade. But the acquisition of political independence meant also the closing of these highly profitable channels of trade. Just as the need to find means by which to purchase British manufactures had led Rhode Island to join in the famous triangular trade (between New England, the West Indies and Africa); so now the closing of this trade necessitated the search for an alternative commercial avenue. This alternative was found in the establishment of trade with the Mediterranean, the Baltic and most important of all, with the Far East and the East Indies.

Language and Nation

1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Görlach
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Second Language ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
West Africa ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
National Language ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Similar Development

The concept of linguistic nationalism is first recorded for England in the 16th century, when the dominance of English had to be re-established in fields like the law, science and administration. In the centuries that followed, statements underlining the link between national language and nation are few — even on the Celtic fringe. It was the American Revolution which gave birth to a new centre of anglophones proud of their independent standards; a similar development but with increasingly weaker results has affected Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Second-language countries like India are trailing even further behind, not to mention the problems of creole communities like those in the Caribbean, West Africa or the Southwest Pacific. My paper looks at these communities for evidence of a correlation between linguistic and political independence, standardization and prestige associated with use of the vernacular, and discusses problems connected with the development of alternatives like the standardization of an indigenous language to serve as a badge of national prestige, and as an expression of democratic intentions.

The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Bailey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
The United States ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Triangular Trade

The significance of the slave trade and slavery-related commerce—what I will call the slave(ry) trade—in contributing to the development of colonial America and the United States has been a persistent theme in the work of Afro-American scholars. Two scholars in particular should be cited in this regard. W. E. B. DuBois (1896: 27) pointed out that slave labor was not widely utilized because the climate and geography of New England precluded the extensive development of agriculture: “The significance of New England in the African slave-trade does not therefore lie in the fact that she early discountenanced the system of slavery and stopped importation; but rather in the fact that her citizens, being the traders of the New World, early took part in the carrying slave trade and furnished slaves to the other colonies.” DuBois’s account of the role of Massachusetts and of Rhode Island, which later became “the clearing house for the slave trade of other colonies,” was similar to what was popularized as the “triangular trade” thesis.

France and the American Market in Naval Timber and Masts, 1776–1786

1952 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Walden Bamford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Poor Quality ◽  
Oak Forests ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
The Baltic

The poor quality of western European forests as sources of masts and the depletion of oak forests in Britain and France during the eighteenth century forced the two principal maritime powers to import naval timber and to seek far afield for naval masts. Both Britain and France gradually were forced to increase their imports of timber from neighboring states and the Baltic market. The acquisition of masts for naval vessels involved even greater dependence on markets overseas. Masting trees were sparsely scattered in western Europe; the British Isles produced none. France took some masts from forests in the Pyrenees, Auvergne, Alsace, and Dauphiné, but they were limited in quantity, lacking in flexibility, and were often condemned for their propensity to early brittleness and rot. Masts imported from French colonies in North America proved unsatisfactory in both cost and quality. Until the last quarter of the eighteenth century Britain enjoyed an advantage over France in the acquisition of colonial North American mast supplies, since die forests of New England produced excellent masts of extraordinary size. Britain's imports from New England, under a Royal Navy monopoly, satisfied a sizable part of her needs and reduced the British navy's importation of Baltic mast supplies by perhaps one third in the early 1770's. The American Revolution, however, abruptly ended Britain's monopoly of American masts. The rebellious colonists halted British imports and opened the splendid pine forests of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine to French naval exploitation.

From Church to Denomination: American Congregationalism in the Nineteenth Century

1969 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel C. Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Common Purpose

Springing from English Puritanism, Congregationalism became the established religion of New England outside Rhode Island and at the time of the American Revolution stood pre-eminent in membership and prestige in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Congregationalism's position in New England was not, however, indicative of its national appeal. When the Revolutionary War commenced various of the other American religious groups began to organize themselves into national churches. By the early part of the nineteenth century it was apparent that these national churches forged in the midst of a pluralistic society were denominations, i.e., they were voluntary associations of like-minded individuals united to accomplish certain defined objectives. Thus, religious groups in America came to be defined in terms of a common purpose rather than in terms of a special relationship to civil government or even in terms of a precise theological standard.

Conducting “Siteless Survey”: Results from Coastal New England

1993 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan E. Kerber
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
Land Use Patterns ◽  
Use Patterns ◽  
Statistical Validity ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
Survey Strategy

Selecting an effective archaeological survey takes careful consideration given the interaction of several variables, such as the survey's goals, nature of the data base, and budget constraints. This article provides justification for a “siteless survey” using evidence from a project on Potowomut Neck in Rhode Island whose objective was not to locate sites but to examine the distribution and density of prehistoric remains to test an hypothesis related to land use patterns. The survey strategy, random walk, was chosen because it possessed the advantages of probabilistic testing, as well as the ease of locating sample units. The results were within the limits of statistical validity and were found unable to reject the hypothesis. “Siteless survey” may be successfully applied in similar contexts where the distribution and density of materials, as opposed to ambiguously defined sites, are sought as evidence of land use patterns, in particular, and human adaptation, in general.

“Why should you be so furious?”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
First Aid ◽  
Global English ◽  
East Indies ◽  
English Identity

Chapter 4 focuses on the representation of Anglo-Dutch relations from Asia to America in the seventeenth century. The chapter analyzes the representation of an incident in 1623 on the spice island Amboyna when Dutch traders tortured (with waterboarding) and killed their English rivals in the East Indies. Decades later, New England writers returning to this incident, treating it as news, invoked anti-English violence half a world away to lay claim to a global English identity. The chapter compares visual representation of the Amboyna incident with John Underhill’s “figure” of the Mystic Fort massacre in New England, arguing that these representations of violence are key elements of colonial fantasies that made (and make) real atrocities possible. The coda discusses Stephen Bradwell’s 1633 first-aid manual, partly inspired by the Amboyna incident, which maintains that properly trained, authorized metropolitan authorities can control the potential dangers of the remedies torture and tobacco.

Emancipation and Free African Americans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African Descent ◽  
American Population ◽  
African American Population ◽  
Free African Americans

Except in parts of Rhode Island and Connecticut, slavery was a peripheral institution, and throughout New England during and after the Revolution there was widespread support to emancipate slaves. Some of the states enacted emancipation laws that theoretically allowed slavery to continue almost indefinitely, and slavery remained on the books as late as 1857 in New Hampshire. Although the laws gradually abolished slavery and although the pace was painfully slow for those still enslaved, the predominant dynamic for New England society was the sudden emergence of a substantial, free African American population. What developed was an even more virulent racism and a Jim Crow environment. The last part of the chapter is an analysis of where African Americans lived as of 1830 and the connection between racism and concentrations of people of African descent.

scholarly journals The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865

2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 631-636
Author(s):  
Noam Maggor
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Regional Autonomy ◽  
Atlantic Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
City State ◽  
The City ◽  
American Nation

Mark Peterson's The City-State of Boston is a formidable work of history—prodigiously researched, lucidly written, immense in scope, and yet scrupulously detailed. A meticulous history of New England over more than two centuries, the book argues that Boston and its hinterland emerged as a city-state, a “self-governing republic” that was committed first and foremost to its own regional autonomy (p. 6). Rather than as a British colonial outpost or the birthplace of the American Revolution—the site of a nationalist struggle for independence—the book recovers Boston's long-lost tradition as a “polity in its own right,” a fervently independent hub of Atlantic trade whose true identity placed it in tension with the overtures of both the British Empire and, later, the American nation-state (p. 631).

Surinam Plantations in Dutch Archives

Itinerario ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-126
Author(s):  
Peter Boomgaard
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Good News ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Indian History ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The University

The 1979 issue of Itinerario, (no. 2) opened with “A note on Suriname Plantation Archives at the University of Minnesota”, in which Richard Price of the Johns Hopkins University reported his discovery of some 2,000 manuscript pages on a number of Surinam plantations in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. This, of course, is very good news. It is perhaps still better news that the Dutch archives contain vast and almost untapped (resources on a 200-odd plantations! I am, however, certainly not the first tone to make this ‘discovery’: Mrs. M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz not only mentioned it in her Ph.D. dissertation “Asian trade and European influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630”, but she even ordered part of the archives herself. It must be the unbridgeable gap between scholars interested in the East Indies /and those who study West Indian history, that her enthusiastic remarks on the availability of plantation material went unheeded. When nine years later Th. Mathews published his article “Los estuadios sobre historia economica del Caribe (1585 - 1910)”2, he mentioned the Dutch West Indies as a blank on the Caribbean map as far as economic (plantation) history is concerned. Since Mathews wrote his article the historiographic situation has improved only slightly, and it is an ironic comment on Surinam historical scholarship that tiny Curaçao's XlXth century plantation economy by now has found its historian, while the Surinam plantations are still in search of an author.

The Crompton Closing: Imports and the Decline of America's Oldest Textile Company

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 231-260
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY J. MINCHIN
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Apparel Industry ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Continuous Operation ◽  
Manufacturing Industries ◽  
The South ◽  
Textile And Apparel ◽  
Textile And Apparel Industry

This article explores the demise of the Crompton Company, which filed for bankruptcy in October 1984, causing 2,450 workers in five states to lose their jobs. Crompton was founded in 1807 in Providence, Rhode Island and when it went out of business it was the oldest textile firm in the country, having been in continuous operation for 178 years. Despite its history, scholars have overlooked Crompton, partly because most work on deindustrialization has concentrated on heavy manufacturing industries, especially steel and automobiles. I argue that Crompton's demise throws much light on the broader decline of the American textile and apparel industry, which has lost over two million jobs since the mid-1970s, and shows that textiles deserve a more central place in the literature. Using company papers, this study shows that imports played the central role in causing Crompton's decline, although there were also other problems, including the strong dollar, declining exports, and a reluctance to diversify, which contributed to it. The paper also explores broader trends, including the earlier flight of the industry from New England to the South and the industry's unsuccessful campaign to pass import-restriction legislation, a fight in which Crompton's managers were very involved.

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