Violence in the Atlantic

Author(s):  
Jean-Frédéric Schaub

The shaping of an Atlantic world during the first two centuries of Europe's overseas expansion saw an increase in the use and intensity of violence. Conquest, beginning with the Atlantic archipelagos (Canary Islands, Hispaniola, Santo Domingo), led to massacres and the elimination of populations. The diseases that Europeans brought with them may have done the most to wipe out the Canary Islanders during the fifteenth century, and the Tainos during the first decades of the sixteenth century, but harsh quasi-genocidal actions contributed to the indigenes' demise. The burgeoning Atlantic slave trade was also an especially violent phenomenon. Captivity and slavery by no means began with the exploitation of Atlantic space but the global dimensions of the pressure on African populations, during the sixteenth and particularly during the second half of the seventeenth century, escalated the practice. This article examines the mass murder, religion and violence, violence and the judiciary, alliance, rape, racial and cultural hybridisation, and narratives of captivity and violence.

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-69
Author(s):  
Dennis J. Maika

Abstract In late 1659, the Dutch West India Company’s Amsterdam Chamber began an “experiment” intended to bring a regularized slave trade to New Amsterdam. With Curaçao as a reliable source of enslaved Africans, the Amsterdam Chamber opened the slave trade to independent investors and merchants, following a collaborative model between a state-sponsored corporation and private investors used elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic world. A variety of commercial actors responded to the experiment, devising speculative strategies to incorporate enslaved people into their commercial portfolios. This essay tracks the strategies conceived by New Amsterdam merchants, local wic representatives, and some independent Amsterdam investors, and reveals the experiment’s uneven progression, modulated by changing regional conditions and regular adjustments and reversals by the Amsterdam Chamber. This article adds a new dimension to studies of the early North American regional slave trade, typically seen from an English perspective, by appreciating Dutch New Amsterdam’s legacy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.


1965 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Birmingham

The study of Central African history is still in its infancy. Valuable indications can, however, be obtained by combining the study of oral traditions with that of Portuguese documentary evidence for events taking place near the coasts. It has long been known, for instance, that the overthrow of the powerful Songye rulers of the Luba country indirectly caused long-distance migrations, one of which, that of the Imbangala, came into contact with the Portuguese in Angola. Previous analyses of this migration have suggested that it culminated in the early seventeenth century. In this paper an attempt has been made to show that the Imbangala arrived in Angola much earlier, probably by the mid sixteenth century and certainly before 1575. This date indicates that the Luba invasion of Lunda, which was the direct cause of the migration, probably took place in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Finally, it has been tentatively suggested that the overthrow of Songye rule and the establishment of a new, expansionist Luba empire might have taken place as much as a century earlier, from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Joseph Mazur

This chapter discusses the evolution of symbolic algebra that began in the first half of the sixteenth century. Algebra was not always called algebra. In the mid-fifteenth century some Italian and Latin writers called it Regula rei e census. The twentieth-century mathematician and science fiction author Eric Temple Bell allegedly remarked that in the mid-seventeenth century, mathematicians were able to introduce negative and rational exponents because symbolic manipulation liberated their thinking from the wilderness of words. The chapter considers the contributions of the Arab algebraist al-Qalasādi, who used letters of the Arabic alphabet to denote arithmetic operations and whose notation was clearly an attempt at symbolizing algebra through abbreviations, a first approximation to what we would consider true symbols. It also examines how Italy cultivated the seeds of algebra, citing in particular Gerolamo Cardano's Ars Magna.


1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Wilks

In late medieval and early modern times West Africa was one of the principal suppliers of gold to the world bullion market. In this context the Matter of Bitu is one of much importance. Bitu lay on the frontiers of the Malian world and was one of its most flourishing gold marts. So much is clear from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings, both African and European. A review of this body of evidence indicates that the gold trade at Bitu was controlled by the Wangara, who played a central role in organizing trade between the Akan goldfields and the towns of the Western Sudan. It is shown that Bitu cannot be other than Bighu (Begho, Bew, etc.), the abandoned Wangara town lying on the northwestern fringes of the Akan forest country, which is known (from excavation) to have flourished in the relevant period. In the late fifteenth century the Portuguese established posts on the southern shores of the Akan country, so challenging the monopolistic position which the Wangara had hitherto enjoyed in the gold trade. The Portuguese sent envoys to Mali, presumably to negotiate trade agreements. The bid was apparently unsuccessful. The struggle for the Akan trade in the sixteenth century between Portuguese and Malian interests will be treated in the second part of this paper.


1989 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-121
Author(s):  
J. M. Rogers

A conspicuous feature of Ottoman history from the sixteenth century onwards, or even of fifteenth-century Mamluk Egypt, is that the mass of surviving administrative documents, well complemented by European sources, makes it possible to apply a range of economic and social concepts to illuminate their economy and society. For Persia the documents are far fewer and, even where, as in seventeenth-century Iṣfahān, the extant Safavid documents are exceptionally well complemented by European source material, doubts, often of a Marxian or Braudelian order, on the legitimacy of applying European concepts to Persian society are often entertained. In other periods the paucity of material is compounded by ethnic diversity – tribal versus settled populations; Turks versus Iranians or Iranians versus Turco-Mongols, all with deeply rooted authentic traditions – which is rarely documented, let alone explained, by the contemporary historians. It is almost as if the right kind of anthropologist could do more than the historian to exploit what material there is.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 7-50
Author(s):  
Paul Bushkovitch

Abstract Russian historians have traditionally seen the church as merely the handmaiden of the state. Yet in the realm of foreign policy the heads of the Orthodox Church in Russia played a distinct role from the end of the fifteenth century to peter’s time. They were participants in the most important decisions (though not in routine affairs), especially about war and peace. In wartime the metropolitans and bishops produced exhortations to the army. In the sixteenth century these were not only calls to fight the infidel but frequently sermons to the Russians to be better Christians. After the mid-seventeenth century the sermons at the time of war, now in Western rhetorical style, came from a wider group of clergy and were more uniformly calls to fight for Orthodoxy. In Peter’s time such sermons became secular justifications for the wars.


1974 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Evans

The resurgence of oligarchies in England's provincial towns during the fifteenth century and their firm control over almost all aspects of civic life during the sixteenth century has received considerable attention and is apparently beyond dispute. The characteristic feature of this oligarchical control was the domination of the important civic offices by urban dynasties whose members practiced the most influential and lucrative trades, were the most affluent citizens, and were linked by close family ties. Comparatively few studies have been made of officeholders of the seventeenth century, especially for the period after 1660, yet the evidence so far accumulated suggests that officeholding remained the exclusive privilege of a closed social elite. Nevertheless, Norwich may provide an instructive exception. An examination of the pool of men eligible for political office in Norwich, the largest provincial capital, indicates that the door to political office was open to men of diverse social backgrounds and occupations to a greater extent than during the sixteenth century and apparently much more so than in the other large provincial capitals.Oligarchy may be defined as the possession and exercise of power by a few individuals either directly, as a consequence of holding the important political offices, or indirectly, as a consequence of controlling recruitment of officeholders and influencing their decisions. In the former case, which was the general pattern establishsed in those fifteenth and sixteenth-century towns which remained free from the intervention of territorial magnates, oligarchy implies further that the magistrates have either the exclusive privilege of appointing their own replacements or the ability to manipulate the mechanism of political recruitment involving a wider electorate through control of the processes of nomination and election of officeholders.


Ars Adriatica ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 313
Author(s):  
Ivana Prijatelj Pavičić

The author of the paper demonstrates how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiography applied a number of identity stereotypes which were linked to the Slavs, Dalmatians, Illyrians, Morlachs, and Croats in contemporary literature and scholarship to three well-known Schiavoni artists: Andrea Meldola (Andrija Medulić), Niccoló dell’Arca and Giulio Clovio (Julije Klović). For example, the qualifier ‘barbaric’, used to denote the work of Niccoló dell’Arca in sixteenth-century historiography from Bologna, represents one of the stereotypical characteristics about the Schiavoni which were frequent at the time.The first part of the article focuses on sixteenth-century interpretations of the Croatian and Macedonian identity (origin) of the famous painter of miniatures, Giulio Clovio (Julije Klović) in the works of his contemporaries such as Giorgio Vasari and Francisco de Holanda, followed by those in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, Ivan Golub and Milan Pelc. Particular attention is given to the currently prevailing hypothesis that the Macedonian origin of Giulio Clovio (Julije Klović) might have been invented with the aim of testifying to his artistic and ancestral rootedness in the classical world.The second part of the article deals with records about Andrea Meldola and Niccoló dell’Arca in the writings of Italian historiographers Girolamo Borselli, Cherubino Cherardacci, Carlo Ridolfi and Marco Boschini, all of whom tried to interpret specific stylistic features in the works of these two artists as a consequence of what one can call their genotype and phenotype. The author of the article draws particular attention to the appearance of the ideologeme concerning the barbaric character of Niccoló dell’Arca in the records of Girolamo Borselli (late fifteenth century) and Cherubino Cherardacci (sixteenth century).


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