To “experiment with a parcel of negros”

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-69
Author(s):  
Dennis J. Maika
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Collaborative Model ◽  
New Amsterdam ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
Private Investors

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.

Violence in the Atlantic

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Frédéric Schaub
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Canary Islands ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
African Populations ◽  
Overseas Expansion

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.

The Politics of Reproduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Paugh
Keyword(s):  
Labor Force ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Three Generations ◽  
Caribbean Women ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade

This book examines the history and politics of childbearing in the British Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. British politicians became increasingly concerned to promote motherhood among Afro-Caribbean women during the era of abolitionism. These politicians hoped that a homegrown labor force would allow for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade without any disruption to the pace of labor on Caribbean plantations. The plans for reform generated by British politicians were shaped by their ideas about race, medicine, demography, and religion, and so the book explores these fields of comprehension as they related to reproductive reform. While making a broad survey of the politics of reproduction in Atlantic world, the book also focuses in on the story of a Barbadian midwife and three generations of her family. The experiences of Doll and her female kin illustrate how the campaign to promote fertility affected Afro-Caribbean women, and also how they were able to carve out room to maneuver within the constraints of life in a Caribbean slave society.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

PAWNSHIP, DEBT, AND ‘FREEDOM’ IN ATLANTIC AFRICA DURING THE ERA OF THE SLAVE TRADE: A REASSESSMENT

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul E. Lovejoy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Congo River

AbstractA reassessment of the institution of pawnship in Africa for the period from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century tightens the reference to situations in which individuals were held as collateral for debts that had been incurred by others, usually relatives. Contrary to the assumptions of some scholars, pawnship was not related to poverty and enslavement for debt but rather to commercial liquidity and the mechanisms by which funds were acquired to promote trade or to cover the expenses of funerals, weddings, and religious obligations. A distinction is made, therefore, between enslavement for debt and pawnship. It is demonstrated that pawnship characterized trade with European and American ships in many parts of Atlantic Africa, but not everywhere. While pawnship was common north of the Congo River, at Gabon, Cameroon, Calabar, the interior of the Bights of Biafra and Benin, the Gold Coast, and the upper Guinea coast, it was illegal in most of Muslim Africa and the Portuguese colony of Angola, while it was not used in commercial dealings with Europeans at Bonny, Ouidah, and other places.

scholarly journals Slavery in Puritan New England

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-313
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Pleck
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early America ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Staple Crops

Wendy Warren’s deeply researched New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America depends on investigation of handwritten texts rather than the several new databases about slavery and the slave trade. Warren has tracked down references in the extant literature and added research in unpublished court cases, wills, probate inventories, and private papers in New England as well in London. With her ability to convert a line or two in a court deposition or a will into an argument about the nature of New England slavery, Warren successfully circumvents the illegibility of the archive. The theme of this highly accessible study is how the immoral conjunction of cultivating staple crops for export and racialized slavery reshaped the entire Atlantic world, beginning with a fateful exchange of goods and people between the Caribbean and New England.

scholarly journals Origin of the New England Company, London, With an Account of its Labours on Behalf of the North-American Indians.

1885 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-301
Author(s):  
Wm. Marshall Venning
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
North American ◽  
Indian Language ◽  
North American Indians ◽  
The North ◽  
The Arts ◽  
John Eliot

John Eliot, long known as ‘the apostle of the North-American Red Men,’ and other Englishmen early in the seventeenth century, laboured to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathen natives of New England in their own Indian language, and in doing so, found it necessary to carry on civilisation with religion, and to instruct them in some of the arts of life. Their writings, and more particularly some of the tracts known as the ‘Eliot Tracts,’ aroused so much interest in London that the needs of the Indians of New England were brought before Parliament, and on July 27, 1649, an Act or Ordinance was passed with this title :—‘A Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England.’

The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century

1976 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
Louis B. Wright ◽  
K. G. Davies
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
The North ◽  
The North Atlantic

“A Beautiful Spot for a Grave”

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-61
Author(s):  
Manuel Barcia
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade

This chapter grapples with a number of issues associated with how diseases associated with the slave trade were perceived across the Atlantic world, and what ideas and methods were advised and devised to prevent their arrival and dissemination. It does so by focusing first on the ways in which authorities and individuals attempted to sanitize ecosystems, in order to reduce the threat that so-called pestilential environments, and second on their need to regulate human behavior so as to prevent the spread of these diseases. It also emphasizes that the decisions and policies featured throughout this chapter were influenced by discussions that took place all over the Atlantic world and beyond during the period.

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