Sexual intermixture, blood lineage, and legal disabilities in eighteenth-century Jamaica and the British Atlantic

2021 ◽  
pp. 109-118
Author(s):  
Brooke N. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Atlantic

Resisting Independence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Close Study ◽  
New Nation

This book maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities — New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland — the book argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. The book reimagines loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies. The book reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task — to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire. The book describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.

A Body Politic

2021 ◽  
pp. 14-39
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Circulatory System ◽  
Shared Understanding ◽  
National Unity ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
National Importance ◽  
The Many

This chapter discusses how newspapers helped to integrate the vast British Atlantic. Reports and editorials appearing in the dozens of “Weekly Mercuries” carried by ships crisscrossing the ocean gave meaning to an emerging, shared understanding of loyalty and loyalism among the ocean's many and varied British inhabitants. This shared understanding of Britishness drew on Protestant subjects' deeply held fears of their nation's long-standing Catholic enemies, France and Spain. The makings of Daniel Fowle's “Body Politic,” however, depended on reliable Atlantic communication networks, a circulatory system capable of carrying news quickly and regularly to all corners of Britain's vast empire. News of national importance was filtered through these more immediate webs of contact, which played a significant role in shaping distinctive local political cultures and identities in places like New York City, Glasgow, Halifax, and Kingston. During the many wars fought against France and Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century, anti-Catholic rhetoric was able to overshadow divisions within the empire, providing a language of national unity that was so intentionally broad as to appeal to the nation's diverse inhabitants. But in the absence of these wars and these enemies, as was the case for much of the 1760s and 1770s, subjects in these communities struggled to understand what exactly united them as Britons.

In Search of “Fellow Pilgrims”: Radical Protestants and Transconfessional Exchanges in Europe and the British Atlantic, c. 1670–1730

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 590-617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bouldin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
British Isles ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
The Public ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Public Sphere

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.

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