scholarly journals ‘Rich flames and hired tears’: sugar, sub-imperial agents and the Cuban phoenix of empire

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Curry-Machado

AbstractThis paper analyses the importation of foreign steam technology into Cuba in the course of the nineteenth century, and the experience of the migrant workers employed to operate it, in order to focus not on Cuba as an isolatable entity, but existing in the context of transnational networks that were involving the island in processes of globalization. This was, at the outset, a ‘sub-imperial’ globalization, operating independently, and implying liberation, from empire. The search for new technologies to enable improvements in sugar production necessarily took the Creole elite beyond the restricted possibilities of the Spanish empire to the industrial centres of the United States, Britain, and France. Such new links helped fuel the emergence of an independent Cuban identity; however, the same globalizing tendencies that were eroding the Spanish empire led Cuba into new forms of imperial domination. The increasing expense of the new steam technology necessitated a growing dependence upon investment from foreign merchant banks, which gradually assumed control over much of the island's production and trade. The same migrant engineers who had begun by assisting Cuban planters took on the role of agents for foreign companies. Rather than contributing their skills, as one more group of migrants in a nation formed out of multiple migrations, these engineers asserted their foreign identity and guarded their privileged position. They came to be seen as symbolic of the process by which Cuba shook off the Spanish yoke only to replace it with another.

Author(s):  
Elena A. Schneider

The conclusion explores the way the invasion and occupation of Havana has been remembered in Cuba, Spain, Britain, and the United States during the 250 years since these events transpired. In general, the role of people of African descent, the institution of racial slavery, and imperial rivalry over the slave trade has been whitewashed or left out of the story. In Spain and Cuba, nationalistic readings of the event have stressed the loyalty of people in Cuba to either Spanish empire or a burgeoning sense of Cuban patria. In Britain the event has virtually been forgotten, a history that went nowhere, other than to prove the strength of British arms. Instead, the obsession with capturing and controlling Cuba gained a second life in the United States. It influenced U.S. intervention in the Spanish-American-Cuban war in the nineteenth century and continues to haunt U.S.-Cuban relations to this day.


2019 ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Sergio Sánchez Collantes

This chapter examines the important role of freethinking and federal republican publications on the formation of anarchist ideology and social practices. It focuses on the distribution and circulation of Spanish freethinking newspapers in Spanish-speaking progressive and anarchist communities in the United States, presenting a new line of inquiry into Hispanic anarchism and its transnational networks. The freethinking movement that crystalized at the end of the nineteenth century constitutes an excellent example of this confluence of ideas. This movement garnered the sympathies of many republicans, socialists, anarchists, masons, and other dissidents who shared the heterodox theses of its main mouthpiece, the weekly journal Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento (The Sunday Supplement of Free Thought). Edited between 1883 and 1909 in Madrid, this paper was well known across Spain.


1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-344
Author(s):  
Frances B Jamieson ◽  
Pamela Chedore

Since the mid-1980s, the rate of new cases of tuberculosis (TB) diagnosed in Canada ceased to follow a downward trend, and has instead stabilized at approximately 7 cases/100,000 population. In the United States, a similar trend emerged, such that in the early 1990s there was an increase in new cases of TB. Outbreaks of drug-resistant TB also occurred with devastating clinical impact. These observations prompted laboratories to re-examine their role in halting the spread of TB. Laboratories play a critical part in the diagnosis of TB; procedures must be optimized to provide rapid and accurate results. This review discusses the role of the mycobacteriology laboratory in the diagnosis of TB, and how new technologies available today have enhanced the ability of the laboratory to provide timely, efficient and accurate results.


Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.


1977 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1009-1027 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Martin

Foreign money remained in widespread use in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century. Several foreign coins were provided legal tender status in order to supplement the scanty American specie supply. A particular disadvantage was the perpetuation of non-decimal units of account, especially in New York. When the U.S. enacted a subsidiary silver standard in 1853, the expedient bases for the lawful status of foreign coin was removed. In 1857, the United States coinage was finally reformed to secure an exclusive national currency.


1997 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
David Goldstein-Shirley

Few subjects in the ethnic experience of the United States are as fraught with mythology and misinformation as black cowboys. Although absent from most classic history texts of the American West, black cowboys probably constituted about a quarter of the working cowboys in the nineteenth century, although q uantitative data to establish a number are lacking. This essay reviews the historiography of black cowboys published during the last half-century, noting how much of it is marred either by glossing over the presence of black cowboys or by credulously repeating estimates of their numbers established by earlier work. The essay speculates whether such problematic scholarship stems from unacknowledged prejudice among mainstream historians or from carelessness and calls for more and improved scholarly attention to the role of African American cowboys in the American West.


2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Jones

The role of business enterprise in integrating economies is one of the central historical themes of the last two centuries. Although globalization—both in its current iteration and in its nineteenth-century form—has been widely studied, the role of the firm, as opposed to macroeconomic forces, has yet to receive sufficient attention. Many research questions remain, including the role of the United States as a host country, the place of multinationals based in emerging markets, and the importance of understudied sectors such as retailing. Business historians should shift the focus of queries from “why” to “how” and go beyond the discipline's traditional organization along national lines to study the behavior of firms worldwide.


Author(s):  
Jay Sexton

Jay Sexton’s opening essay focuses on the role of the Civil War in the realization of U.S. national and global power in the nineteenth century. Though the Civil War gave evidence of the immense military and economic power of the United States, he shows, the projection of that power on the world stage also required foreign collaboration.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Strickland

Jeff Strickland tells the powerful story of Nicholas Kelly, the enslaved craftsman who led the Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the history of the antebellum American South. With two accomplices, some sledgehammers, and pickaxes, Nicholas risked his life and helped thirty-six fellow enslaved people escape the workhouse where they had been sent by their enslavers to be tortured. While Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey remain the most recognizable rebels, the pivotal role of Nicholas Kelly is often forgotten. All for Liberty centers his rebellion as a decisive moment leading up to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. This compelling micro-history navigates between Nicholas's story and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, while also considering the parallels between race and incarceration in the nineteenth century and in modern America. Never before has the story of Nicholas Kelly been so eloquently told.


2019 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 95-113
Author(s):  
Yoon Ok Park

This paper is to explore how the western identity has been established from the perspective of world expositions and museums in Europe, although the issue of identity is so broad that it is difficult to discuss in any one field. In the western world, large-scale international expositions competitively opened in major cities, mainly in Europe and the United States as the nineteenth century is called as the golden age of international expositions. Primarily in England and France, these two countries sought to achieve their goals of promoting trade, developing new technologies, educating the middle class and manifesting their political stance through the medium of exhibitions during the Industrial Revolution. With this effect, not only have museums been established but they have emerged as a result of the expositions in a number of cities in Europe and the United States. Through international expositions and the museum establishment, the nineteenth century presented the power of each country, imperialism and the enlightenment of the public. The comparison and competition between hosting countries as well as the major participating nations became a tool to represent their national identity and show their pride that they were civilized and superior to colonists. Flourished in this era, imperialism and colonialism have contributed to the accumulation of collections of western museums along with the exposition, thereby resulting in the foundation of Western studies such as anthropology, archaeology and natural sciences. These studies were classified and interpreted from the western perspective. In accordance, these disciplines spread throughout the world with colonialism in the Western world view and Eurocentric mindset. Competitive exposure to the country’s industrial development through international expositions and the accumulation of collections in museums of permanent institutions served as an important vehicle of demonstrating who they were.


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