Green Atlantic: the Irish in the Atlantic World

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Atlantic Ocean ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
British History ◽  
Great Famine ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Irish People ◽  
Irish Migrants ◽  
American Families

Does an Irish Atlantic exist? Indeed, forgetting Ireland when studying the Atlantic world was frequent as the island was easily integrated into English or British history. However, late studies have put forward not only the unavoidable presence of the Irish in the Atlantic world but also their agency, through commercial and ideological exchanges. Green being the color of the Irish, tinting the Atlantic Ocean green was self-evident, and it gave birth to the Green Atlantic. Among academic works, no one has defined this idiom. It is understood as the transatlantic circulation of Irish people, ideologies, and goods. We believe that the Green Atlantic stems from a comparison with the Black Atlantic. This idiom has become trendy these days, however, with publications and conferences using it. The least we can say is that the Green Atlantic was an unwanted Atlantic: whether it was the Irish indentured servants sent to the colonies or the Irish migrants flowing into America as a result of the Great Famine, the Irish were unwanted “others.” They were deemed unreliable and lazy, and they often were compared to the African slaves or the Native Americans as a savage people hard to civilize. Despite the discrimination they suffered as a result of both their religion and their origin, Irish people have left their mark on many aspects of Atlantic societies. Think of the Carrolls, the Kennedys, and most American families that can claim Irish ancestry with pride now.

The Reformed Church and the Regulation of Religious Literature in the Early Dutch Atlantic World

Itinerario ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-402
Author(s):  
D. L. Noorlander
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
West India Company ◽  
Printed Materials

Catechisms, Bibles, and other printed works were critical for the successful plantation and growth of Dutch religion and culture in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. This essay examines the provision, regulation, and various controversies surrounding religious books and pamphlets in that period. Under the joint supervision of the West India Company and the Dutch Reformed churches of the Netherlands, colonial clergy were supposed to teach everyone from Company soldiers and officers to European settlers, from Africans and African slaves to Native Americans. And the clergy certainly had some missionary achievements, especially where the Company’s power was greatest. However, colonial clergy and churches also faced tremendous difficulties and fell short of their original plans and goals. Studying the different tools they had at their disposal—studying the creation (and destruction) of their printed materials—helps us see the church’s own culpability in these difficulties and failures. Early seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism was restrictive enough and the churches of the Netherlands worried enough about deviance and heterodoxy that they unintentionally undermined their own mission and reduced the Dutch footprint overseas.

Evangelicalism and Conversion

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Gardina Pestana
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Bible ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Religious Revivals

Conversion was a frequently cited reason for European expansion into the wider Atlantic world. All colonizing powers justified their presence in the New World with reference to their mission to bring Christianity to the inhabitants, and indeed a papal bull divided responsibility for those conversion efforts outside Europe between the Portuguese and the Spanish in the late 15th century. Later, as other European states became involved, they used the same justification. The Protestants among them also cited the need to counteract the Roman Catholic efforts—especially those of the Spanish— to rescue the natives from what they deemed false religion. Conversion was, at least in theory, central to the creation of an integrated early modern Atlantic world. On the ground, actual efforts put into the conversion project varied widely, with Roman Catholics relying on religious orders to invest energy in the effort and Protestants doing far less in that direction for the first century or so after they entered the Atlantic world. When conversions did occur, Christian missionaries expected native peoples who converted to change drastically and completely, and they tended to judge anything less than a radical alteration as a false conversion. Much recent scholarship, however, has revealed that Native Americans negotiated between their traditional faith and the new one offered to them by Europeans, making sense of the new by relating it to the old. Conversions to Christianity among America’s first inhabitants were a focal point of European efforts, but they were not the only cases that occurred. Europeans also attempted to convert their African slaves—again more readily among Catholics than Protestants—and one another. By the 18th century, newly founded Protestant missionary organizations often concentrated on the conversion of other Europeans within the wider Atlantic world. Partly as a result of their efforts (but also due to other causes) religious revivals swept the Protestant community during the 1730s and 1740s. “Evangelicalism” refers to those Protestants who emphasize conversion and often expand their numbers through revivals. The term “evangelical” was favored by Protestants on the continent of Europe from the beginning to link their religious movement to the early Christian church. The term was taken up by British Protestants in the 18th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, to refer to their efforts to revive their churches, returning them to their scriptural roots. Evangelical Christians focus on the Bible and on the importance of the conversion process, and they helped to reshape the Protestant Atlantic through their missionary work and their revivals in the 18th century.

Scottish Romanticism and Collective Memory in the British Atlantic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth McNeil
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Scottish Literature ◽  
Age Of Revolution ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Critical Site

Charting the transatlantic movements of Scottish literature in the Age of Revolution, this book provides an in-depth examination of Scottish Romantic literary ideas on memory and their influence among various cultures in the British Atlantic. The book brings into relief a distinct Scottish historiography, in which a temporality of modernity takes shape in the forms, tropes and categories of a mode of historical understanding we now would term collective or cultural memory. The study traces this emergent mode in Scottish history writing, both fictional and non-fictional, as it circulated throughout the Atlantic world. It offers a threefold engagement with Scottish Romantic, transatlantic and memory studies while drawing from the perspectives and insights of other critical frameworks – such as indigenous, Black Atlantic and francophone Canada. Examining a range of writing modes such as memoirs, slave narratives and emigrant fiction in various regional and national contexts, the book covers familiar Scottish writers, such as Walter Scott and John Galt, and less familiar ones, such as Anne Grant, Thomas Pringle, and John Gabriel Stedman. It follows other recent studies in making the case for the Atlantic world as a critical site in the making of a culture of modernity while bringing to light the fundamental contribution of Scottish Romantic writing to this culture.

Algonquian Diasporas

Memory Lands ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Community Members ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Native American Tribes

This chapter examines how King Philip’s War gave rise to a significant but often ignored or misperceived history of bondage, enslavement, and diaspora that took Native Americans far from their northeast homelands, and subjected them to a range of brutal conditions across an Atlantic World. It focuses on Algonquians’ transits into captivity as a consequence of the war, and historicizes this process within longer trajectories of European subjugation of Indigenous populations for labor. The chapter examines how Algonquian individuals and families were forcibly placed into New England colonial as well as Native communities at the war’s conclusion, and how others were transported out of the region for sale across the Atlantic World. The case of King Philip’s wife and son is especially complex, and the chapter considers how traditions around their purported sale into slavery in Bermuda interact with challenging racial politics and archival traces. Modern-day “reconnection” events have linked St. David’s Island community members in Bermuda to Native American tribes in New England. The chapter also reflects on wider dimensions of this Algonquian diaspora, which likely brought Natives to the Caribbean, Azores, and Tangier in North Africa, and propelled Native migrants/refugees into Wabanaki homelands.

scholarly journals Les catastrophes naturelles dans les romans caribéens d’expression française

Il Tolomeo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessia Vignoli
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Natural Hazards ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Common Origin ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
Common Features ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Caribbean

The notion of ‘disaster’ pervades the Caribbean thought. The common origin of the Caribbean region, the European colonization, caused two disasters: the extermination of Native Americans and the deportation of African slaves. The union between nature and the oppressed people against the oppressor resulted in the creation of an environmental conscience that the Caribbean literature has often expressed. This essay will investigate the common points shared by some Haitian, Martinican and Guadeloupean authors in the writing of natural hazards. It will show that, despite the diversity that marks the Caribbean, there is a repetition of common features that proves its geopoetic unity.

scholarly journals Framing Black Communist Labour Union Activism in the Atlantic World: James W. Ford and the Establishment of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1928–1931

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Weiss
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
International Trade ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Labour Unions ◽  
Union Committee ◽  
Union Activism

AbstractThe International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was a radical trans-Atlantic network for the propagation of black proletarian internationalism, established by the Red International of Labour Unions in 1928. Its key mastermind was James W. Ford, an African American communist labour union activist who was in charge of the organization and its operations until the autumn of 1931. This article critically highlights Ford's ambitions as well as the early phase of the organization. Both in terms of its agenda and objective as well as in its outreach among black workers in the Black Atlantic, the ITUCNW and its main propagators stressed the “class-before-race” argument of the Comintern rather than the pan-Africanist “race-before-class” approach. This is not surprising as the ITUCNW was one of the organizations that had been established when the Comintern and the RILU had started to apply the “class-against-class” doctrine, which left no room for cooperation between communists and radical pan-Africanists.

The Spanish Caribbean, 1492–1550

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ida Altman
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Diverse Groups

The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the northern Caribbean with three Spanish ships in October 1492 marked the beginning of continuing European contact with the Americas. With his second voyage of 1493 permanent European occupation of the Caribbean began, with enormous consequences for the peoples and ecology of the region. Failing to encounter the wealthy trading societies that Columbus had hoped to find by reaching Asia, Europeans in the Caribbean soon realized that they would have to involve themselves directly in organizing profitable enterprises. Gold mining in the northern islands and pearl fishing in the islands off the coast of Tierra Firme (present-day Venezuela) for some years proved enormously profitable but depended on Spaniards’ ability to exploit indigenous labor on a large scale. The imposition of the Spanish encomienda system, which required indigenous communities to provide labor for mining and commercial agriculture, and the large-scale capture and transportation of Native Americans from one locale to another wrought havoc among the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean, resulting in high mortality and flight. Spaniards in the islands soon sought to supplement indigenous labor by importing African slaves who, in the early 16th century, became a significant if not always easily controlled presence in the region. From the earliest years the Spanish Caribbean was a complex, dynamic, and volatile region characterized by extensive interaction and conflict among diverse groups of people and by rapid economic and institutional development. Although the islands became the launching grounds for subsequent Spanish moves to the nearby mainland, throughout the 16th century and beyond they played a crucial role in sustaining Spain’s overseas empire and integrating it into the larger Atlantic system.

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.

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