The Dutch in South America and the Caribbean

Author(s):  
Christopher Ebert

The concept of “Latin America” gained currency only in modern times, and its use as an organizing concept for the early modern period is limited. The best way to understand the involvement of the Dutch Republic in overseas colonizing efforts is through the idea of Atlantic history. This involvement was part and parcel of the fitful consolidation of the Republic in the latter decades of the 16th century, as the “rebellious provinces” took their war with Habsburg Spain to Spanish Atlantic possessions. A more sustained assault on the Iberian Atlantic began with the chartering of the first Dutch West India Company (WIC) in 1621. A short-lived invasion of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil’s colonial capital, was followed by a successful occupation of the rich sugar-producing captaincy of Pernambuco from 1630 to 1654. Dutch New York, by way of comparison, was a small venture. Grand schemes for large Dutch colonies in territories claimed by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies came to nothing, and the WIC was reorganized in 1674 with more modest ambitions. The Dutch subsequently established a vigorous presence in Suriname, Curaçao, and a handful of islands in the Lesser Antilles embracing plantation agriculture, trade, and financial services. This bibliography examines Dutch Atlantic world historiography with a focus on competition with the Iberian empires, especially in Brazil. It also discusses works on other Dutch outposts, which are considered collectively as a “Caribbean zone,” whether mainland or island. Administered only loosely by the second WIC, these colonies became sites of vigorous interaction with all the other European Atlantic powers throughout the 18th century. Other sections list works on the Dutch in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in Dutch colonies, the history of Portuguese Jews in the Dutch Atlantic world, and published primary sources relevant to Dutch Atlantic history.

Author(s):  
Paul Butel ◽  
François Crouzet

Among the colonial powers of the early modern period, France was the last to emerge. Although, the French had not abstained from the exploration of fhe New World in the 16th century: G. de Verrazano discovered the site of New York (1524), during a voyage sponsored by King Francis I; Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence to Quebec and Montreal (1535). From the early 16th century, many ships from ports such as Dieppe, St. Malo, La Rochelle, went on privateering and or trading expeditions to the Guinea coast, to Brazil, to the Caribbean, to the Spanish Main. Many French boats did fish off Newfoundland. Some traded in furs on the near-by Continent. Moreover, during the 16th century, sporadic attempts were made to establish French settlements in «Equinoctial France» (Brazil), in Florida, in modern Canada, but they failed utterly. Undoubtedly, foreign wars against the Habsburgs, during the first half of the 16th and of the 17th centuries, civil «wars of religion» during the second half of the 16th century, political disorders like the blockade of La Rochelle or the Fronde during the first part of the 17th century, absorbed the attention and resources of French rulers, despite some ambitious projects, like those of Richelieu, for overseas trade. As for the port cities they tried to trade overseas but they were isolated and not strong enough (specially during die wars of religion) to create «colonies». Some small companies, which had been started in 1601 and 1604, to trade with the East Indies, were very short-lived, and the French did not engage seriously in Asian trade before 1664.


Author(s):  
Aaron Spencer Fogleman

The Moravians were a mostly German Pietist religious group that spread throughout the Atlantic world and beyond in the 18th century. Though considered “Protestant,” their origins predate the Reformation. In the late 14th century, a grassroots religious renewal movement began in Bohemia and Moravia that gained momentum after the martyrdom of its two most important leaders, Jan Hus (b. c. 1369–d. 1415) and Jerome of Prague (b. 1379–d. 1416). Thereafter, a mass movement developed that armed itself and successfully fought off numerous crusades by forces of the Holy Roman Empire bent on its destruction. After a settlement that secured its existence, a branch of this “Hussite” movement became pacifist and called itself the Unitas Fratrum, a name the Moravians carry to this day. Victorious imperial Catholic forces destroyed them and other “Protestants” in Bohemia and Moravia during the Thirty Years’ War, forcing them to go underground. In 1722 a remnant of the old Unitas Fratrum from Moravia settled on the estates of Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) in Upper Lusatia (Saxony). They began building a new community called Herrnhut, with Zinzendorf as their leader, and in 1728 the Unitas Fratrum formally celebrated its rebirth. Under Zinzendorf’s direction, the movement expanded rapidly in the mid-18th century and developed a rigorous mission program that continues to this day. The Moravians promoted ecumenism in a confessional age, which led to their involvement with Lutheran, Calvinist, and other churches in often controversial ways. They are important to Atlantic history because they engaged with Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans in significant ways throughout the Atlantic world, and they kept detailed records of their activities. Many of their early missionary efforts failed, but they became noted for their successes, especially among slaves on St. Thomas, St. Croix, and elsewhere in the Caribbean; the Mahicans, Delawares, and Shawnees in British North America; Maroons and later slaves in Suriname; and Inuits in Greenland. They also had significant short-term successes among the Arawaks in Berbice and Cherokees in northern Georgia. Suriname became a long-term success story in the 19th century, and in the late 19th and 20th centuries, Moravians had tremendous success in Africa. Today, the largest numbers of Moravians are in Africa and North America, not Europe. It is their mission successes in so many places, combined with their disassociation from European imperial projects, their record keeping, and their cosmopolitan Weltanschauung, that make them such an important people to the study of Atlantic history, especially for historians who wish to cross imperial boundaries and study encounters among all peoples in the region.


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-696 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob W. Faber

The Great Recession was a consequence of widening inequality and the growth of a tiered financial services system, in which the rich and the poor have access to vastly different tools for wealth accumulation. The spatial organization of these dynamics created neighborhoods vulnerable to predation on behalf of subprime lenders and other fringe service providers. This project seeks to understand the reproduction of institutional marginalization in consumer finance. Results show that racially isolated neighborhoods in New York City, where subprime lending and foreclosures were common, were uniquely vulnerable during the Great Recession and were communities where check cashing outlets (CCOs) sprouted, highlighting a mechanism for the reproduction of inequality over time. CCOs cost more per transaction than a checking account—potentially totaling tens of thousands of dollars over a career. The link between widening financial services inequality and the recession’s consequences provides a strong impetus for safety net and community investment policies.


2021 ◽  

It is hard to overestimate the extent to which anti-Catholicism structured the Atlantic world. As much as Catholicism itself was a transatlantic force (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History article “Catholicism” by Allyson M. Poska), the counter-response to Catholicism had a pervasive influence, especially in the Protestant-dominated North Atlantic (see “Protestantism” by Carla Gardina Pastana). It was, as Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda have observed, “nimble and ubiquitous” (The First Prejudice, p. 15). The past decade has witnessed significant growth in the scholarship on anti-Catholicism. The most important overall advancement is our growing understanding that anti-Catholicism was more than just a knee-jerk prejudice. It was a complex, varied, and protean phenomenon that warrants close analysis. To a great degree, the growing sophistication of the historiography on anti-Catholicism across the Atlantic basin builds on the work of historians of early modern England and Britain, who have been carefully documenting and analyzing the phenomenon since the 1970s. Because this work is relatively narrow in its geographic scope—often limited to a particular county or region, individual, group, or theme—it is not covered here; but this historiography has been hugely important in providing a foundation for the works that are represented. The bibliography covers scholarship on anti-Catholicism from the 17th through the 20th centuries with a necessary focus on the North Atlantic world. It pays special attention to the British context not only because the literature is most developed for that region but also because it was the British who were most responsible for transferring anti-Catholic ideas, identities, institutions, and policies across the ocean. That said, historical examination of anti-Catholicism in the Dutch world is growing and is thus represented here as well. Overall, the works were selected either for their influence on studies of anti-Catholicism in the Atlantic world in various times and places, or because they adopt a wide geographical lens and deal directly with the Atlantic dimensions of anti-Catholicism. Indeed, one of the trends in the historiography is a shift from early modern and nation-centric studies to transnational investigations that include the 19th and 20th centuries (scholarship on the 18th century, while growing, still lags somewhat behind the early modern and 19th-century literature.) Other trends include efforts to distinguish anti-Catholicism from its closely related corollary, anti-Popery, and to explore the relationship between them; growing calls for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of anti-Catholicism; analysis of cross-fertilization of various forms of anti-Catholicism evident in the Atlantic world; and a commitment to studying how those targeted by anti-Catholicism navigated the systemic oppression it created.


Author(s):  
Evan Haefeli

The Dutch Atlantic is often ignored because for much of its history it was quite small and seemingly insignificant compared to other European colonies in the Americas. However, it began with extraordinarily ambitious conquests and colonizing schemes. The present-day Dutch Caribbean—St. Martin, Saba, Eustatius, Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire—is but the remnants of what was, in the first half of the 17th century, an empire that claimed large portions of Brazil, the Caribbean, North America, and Africa. Forged during the decades-long Dutch Revolt against Spain, this budding empire collapsed soon after the Dutch gained Independence in 1648. European powers that had been allies against the Spanish turned against the Dutch to dismantle their Atlantic empire and its valuable trade. A series of wars in the second half of the 17th century reduced the Dutch colonies to a handful of smaller outposts, some of which in the Caribbean remain Dutch to this day. A recent wave of scholarship has emphasized the dynamism, ambition, and profitability of the Dutch Atlantic, whose fate reflected its origins in the small but dynamic Dutch Republic. Like the Republic, it was acutely sensitive to changes in international diplomacy: neither was ever strong enough to go entirely on its own. Also like the Republic, it was very decentralized. While most all of it was technically under the authority of the West India Company, a variety of arrangements in different colonies meant there was no consistent, centralized colonial policy. Moreover, like the Republic, it was never a purely “Dutch” affair. The native Dutch population was too small and too well employed by the Republic’s industrious economy to build an empire alone. As the Dutch Atlantic depended heavily on the labor, capital, and energy of many people who were not Dutch—other Europeans, some Americans, and, by the 18th century, a majority of Africans—colonial Dutch language and culture were overshadowed by those of other peoples. Finally, the Dutch Atlantic also depended heavily on trade with the other European colonies, from British North America to the Spanish Main. The Dutch were expert merchants, sailors, manufacturers, and capitalists. They created Europe’s first modern financial and banking infrastructure. These factors gave them a competitive edge even as the rise of mercantilist laws in the second half of the 17th century tried to exclude them from other countries’ colonies. They also displayed a talent for a variety of colonial enterprises. New Netherland, covering the territory from present-day New York to Pennsylvania and Delaware, began as a fur-trading outpost in the 1620s. However, by the time it was captured by the English in 1664 it was rapidly becoming a “settler colonial society.” Suriname and Guyana developed profitable plantations and cruel slave societies. In Africa and the Caribbean, small Dutch outposts specialized in trade of all sorts, legitimate and not, including slaves, textiles, sugar, manufactures, and guns. Although their territorial expansion ceased after 1670, the Dutch played an important role in expanding the sugar plantation complex of other empires, partly through their involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Until the Age of Revolutions, the Dutch Atlantic remained a profitable endeavor, keeping the Dutch involved with Latin America from Brazil to Mexico. Venezuela in particular benefitted from easy access to Dutch traders based in Curaçao. Religion played a smaller, but still important role, legitimating the Dutch state and enterprises like the slave trade, but also opening up windows of toleration that allowed Jews in particular to gain a foothold in the Americas that was otherwise denied them. Although the surviving traces of the Dutch Atlantic are small, its historical impact was tremendous. The Dutch weakened the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic Empires, opening up a path to Imperial power that would subsequently be seized by the French and British.


Author(s):  
Sally Tuckett

Textile history is not just about the cloth itself; it is also about how that cloth was made, who used it and how, and what these factors can tell us as researchers about wider social, cultural, economic, and political practices of the past. Whether made of animal or plant fibers; woven, knitted, or felted; plain or dyed; embroidered or printed, textiles are used on some level by all societies and cultures. This use ranges from flat textiles such as blankets or bedding to utilitarian and fashionable garments that, respectively, protect or adorn the body, as well as giving observers a visual cue by which they can judge and categorize the wearer. Within the Atlantic world specifically, textiles can tell us about the ingenuity, social hierarchy, and cultural practices of indigenous populations before, during, and after colonial expansion. They can inform us about the development of the Atlantic economy in the early modern period, and the rise of industrial textile production over domestic manufacture from the late 18th century onward. Significantly, they can also tell us about the personal skills, tastes, and circumstances of the indigenous, free, and enslaved people who made, transported, used, and interpreted these goods in and around the Atlantic world. Exploring and understanding the history of textiles therefore involves the study of craft and design, technology and industrialization, goods and consumption, and people and society. Readers will find it helpful to also consult the Oxford Bibliographies articles on “Clothing,” “Material Culture in the Atlantic World,” “Cotton,” and “Silk.”


Author(s):  
Roberto Pastor

ALLAN J. KUETHE y KENNETH J. ANDRIEN, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century. War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713-1796, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2014.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 595
Author(s):  
Vladimir V. Mihajlović

The all-encompassing changes that have shaped the west of Europe during the early modern period, introducing new ways of perceiving (and investigating) the whole universe, and each individual as well, have decisively influenced the foundations of our discipline. The special credit should be paid to the antiquarian movement and the generations of its followers. On the other hand, according to the general consensus, the region of modern Serbia, being a part of the Ottoman Empire, has not attracted the curiosity of the antiquarians until the second half of the 18th century. Numerous reviews of the history of archaeology in Serbia, both by local and foreign authors, consolidate this view. However, the life and work of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658–1730) offers a significantly different view of the roots of archaeology in these parts. Born in an aristocratic family in Bologna, highly educated, serving in the Austrian Imperial army by the end of 17th century, Count Marsigli spent almost two decades in the lands of the middle Danube valley. During the Vienna war (1683–1699), and then fortifying the new frontier after the Peace of Karlovac (1699–1701), L. F. Marsigli got acquainted with the rich heritage (above all from the Roman times) of the region. He published the results of his research in the volume entitled Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. The very title suggests the importance Marsigli assigned to the Classical past, whose vestiges he described in the second of six books of this work. Under the title De antiquitatibus Romanorum ad ripas Danubii, in accordance with the best antiquarian traditions, the learned Count offers a comprehensive and systematic review of the Roman material culture along the Danube banks – in his own words – of Pannonia and Moesia. Marsigli’s antiquarian endeavours in the field and the subsequent published accounts establish a massive contribution to the antiquarian tradition in the region of modern Serbia, and then – indirectly, through the works of the 19th century authors – to Serbian archaeology in general.


1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Nils Martola

Per Kalm was born in 1716 in Sweden, the son of a family of Lutheran clergymen from the province of Ostrobothnia. He began his studies in natural sciences at Åbo Akademi in 1735, moved to Uppsala University in 1740, and soon became one of Carl Gustaf Linné’s foremost disciples. Pehr Kalm was considered as one of the purest exponents of 18th century Enlightenment and rationalism in Sweden/Finland. In October 1747 he commenced his journey to America, and returned to Stockholm in June 1751. His primary objective was to collect seeds of plants and trees considered to be economically useful for Sweden. During the journey Kalm kept a detailed diary in which he wrote observations on the weather, on plans and agricultural matters, on sundry customs among ethnic groups he met, reported discussions with different people, and made extracts from sources he deemed interesting.


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