Diets, Food Supplies and the African Slave Trade in Early Seventeenth-Century Spanish America

2007 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda A. Newson ◽  
Susie Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Labor Income ◽  
Common People ◽  
African Slave ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
The Common

Much has been written about the spread of Old World crops and livestock in the Americas. However, very little is known, except in very general terms, about the availability of different foods, diets and nutrition, particularly among the common people, in different regions of Spanish America in the early colonial period. This derives in part from the shortage of evidence, but it also reflects the difficulties of researching these complex issues, where environmental conditions, access to land and labor, income distribution, regulation of food supplies and prices, as well as food traditions, all interact.

Childhood in the Early Colonial Period

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-73
Author(s):  
Harry Bloch
Keyword(s):  
Child Labor ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Child Life ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
African Slave ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Plymouth Colony ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Poor Children

A great deal has been written about the life, struggles, and accomplishments of pioneer men and women who crossed the ocean to build a new world in the wilderness; but infant and child life during early colonial days is largely hidden in obscurity. Little has been recorded.1 It is known that few children under the age of 7 survived in the crowded immigrant ships: falling into the sea, accidents, hunger, thirst, and sickness took its sad toll. Nevertheless, there were many young2-5: a third of the founders of Plymouth were children; Puritan youth were evident in the great migration to the Massachusetts Bay Colony; several cargoes of poor children and orphans from Dutch almshouses were "bound out" to the burghers of New Netherlands; children were frequently dispatched from England as indentured servants and apprentices; the London Company sent 100 children to Virginia in 1619, and 1,500, kidnapped from Ireland and England, in 1627; African slave children were shipped to the colonies after 1620; and the colonial mother6 bore many children, buried many, and often followed them to the grave at an early age. Fecundity,5 characteristic of early colonists, served to people a continent (the population was 2.5 million in 1776), and provided needed child labor. Over 50% of Plymouth colony consisted of children.7 Colonial children were viewed as miniature adults; and boys and girls were dressed alike until the age of 7.1,7,8 The infant1,7 wore a long linen smock; was covered with a woolen blanket; and a wooden or wicker cradle, hooded to protect from cold draughts, much like those in which Indian babies slept, was its bed.

Encounter with the British: The Legacy of Autonomy in the Mizo Hills

Social Change ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 582-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph K. Lalfakzuala
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Constitutional Reform ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Common People ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Arbitrary Rule ◽  
The Common ◽  
Hill Tribes ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Intense Debate

The colonial policy of exclusion used to govern the Hill tribes of India’s Northeast, or colonial Assam, was, it was claimed, a form of indirect rule. But, as we argue, it was primarily designed to instill more direct control over the tribes who lived there. The policy not only divided the Mizo Hills between its tribal and the non-tribal population, but it also showed that the region was never going to be part of any constitutional reform process during the colonial period. The article tries to analyse how the policy of exclusion became a matter of intense debate; contested by groups who challenged the arbitrary rule of the British who were exploiting it to prop up Mizo chieftains for their own ends. This policy was also contested by groups eager to be part of the constitutional reform. To counter it, the Mizo Union (MU) party was formed. Catering to the aspirations of the common people, MU worked for the establishment of district autonomy after India gained Independence.

THE FIRST GREAT WAVES: AFRICAN PROVENANCE ZONES FOR THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE TO CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, 1570–1640

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID WHEAT
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Forced Migrants ◽  
Cartagena De Indias

ABSTRACTDrawing on port entry records for 487 ships disembarking nearly 80,000 captives in Cartagena de Indias, the primary slaving port in early colonial Spanish America, this article provides a new assessment of the relative importance of major African provenance zones for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transatlantic slave trade. Upper Guinea and Angola furnished roughly equal shares of forced migrants to Cartagena between 1570 and 1640, with a smaller wave of captives from Lower Guinea. While Angola eventually replaced Upper Guinea as the main source of slave traffic to Cartagena, the shift was more gradual than scholars have previously believed.

Legal Agency as Literature in the English Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Common People ◽  
New Model ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
The Common ◽  
Legal Understanding

The literary canon of the mid-seventeenth century has always included works of argument in various spheres—religious, political, philosophical, and juridical—that make up the polemic of the civil wars and the experiment with non-monarchical government that followed. This very large body of usually printed literature was often in the form of a legal plea. One area in which law was reconceived in the name of the common people and exemplified in public and courtroom protest, on the printed page and in the internal politics of the New Model Army, was the Leveller movement, most famously exemplified in the career and expression of John Lilburne. The broader impact of Leveller revisions to legal understanding is exemplified in the activities of the 1650s popular republican and Restoration law publisher John Streater.

Habeas Corpus: from England to Empire

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-269
Author(s):  
Michael Lobban
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Habeas Corpus ◽  
Personal Liberty ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Magna Carta ◽  
The Common ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Right

The ‘Great Writ’ of habeas corpus has long had an iconic status as the ‘writ of liberty’ which ensured that no person could be detained in prison without being put to trial by a jury of his peers. According to the traditional version, popularised by Whiggish constitutional writers from the late seventeenth century onwards, the English constitution as embodied in the common law had, since time immemorial, striven to protect the fundamental rights of Englishmen and women, which included the right to personal liberty. The common law had supplied the writ of habeas corpus, which secured the provision of Magna Carta, that no freeman be imprisoned save by the judgment of a jury of his peers. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Whig version ran, kings with an absolutist bent sought to undermine ancient liberties, by claiming prerogative powers to imprison without trial, and by appointing supine judges who would not protect people's liberties. It took the triumph of Parliament to restore and perfect them. For William Blackstone, one of the key statutes which secured ‘the complete restitution of English liberty’ was the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, ‘that second magna carta’. As Blackstone put it: ‘Magna carta only, in general terms, declared, that no man shall be imprisoned contrary to law: the habeas corpus act points him out effectual means, as well to release himself, though committed even by the king in council, as to punish all those who shall thus unconstitutionally misuse him.’

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