Sailors

European overseas expansion and the processes of early modern globalization depended on the labor of sailors. It is therefore not surprising that they are among the most thoroughly studied occupational groups of the early modern world, especially as their historical importance is reflected in a relative abundance of archival source material. Legal records of various kinds have proven an especially rich source that has allowed historians to recover in remarkable detail the lives of early modern sailors as they crisscrossed oceans and imperial jurisdictions, moving back and forth between ship and shore, switching from the fisheries to the merchant marine, and on to naval service and back again. As one of the first predominantly wage-dependent groups of workers in the emerging capitalist world-economy, sailors were subject to an unusually complex constellation of forces that together provided the structure of the international maritime labor market, including the interaction of the push and pull of demand and supply with the multiple and overlapping coercive recruitment systems that in wartime funneled mariners by the tens of thousands onto the gundecks of Europe’s burgeoning war-fleets. But scholarly interest has not only been stimulated by the fact that sailors sailed the ships that projected European imperial aggression overseas, and then carried people, commodities, and ideas back and forth across the oceans. Historians have also been fascinated by the peculiar culture that emerged below deck and in port cities around the world, including its characteristic cosmopolitanism, political radicalism, and sexual libertinism. The titles listed in this bibliography highlight some of the most prominent studies on these and other subjects, but interested researchers will want to consult other Oxford Bibliographies articles as well, including Oceanic History, Ships and Shipping, Piracy, Smuggling, and The Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions.

Capitalism

As a conceptual apparatus for the analysis of complex historical phenomena, “capitalism” has been a powerful tool for historians of the Atlantic World. Capitalism, used as a concept in the sense derived from the work of Karl Marx, generates analyses that integrate the processes of production, consumption, and exchange with the historical development of consciousness and social systems. It is a critique, rather than simply an alternative form, of political economy. How exactly to conduct such critical analysis has been a matter of prolific and sophisticated argument for over a century, and specific definitions of capitalism as an object of historical study vary as functions of that debate. Indeed, debates about the precise formulation and usefulness of capitalism as a concept, and about its geographical and temporal scope as a historical object, have run on similar though by no means parallel lines to debates over the “Atlantic World.” These discourses intersect most vibrantly in the study of Atlantic slavery. From the 19th to the 21st centuries, the relationship of slavery to capitalism has remained a site of intense conceptual struggle. All serious contributions to such debates, and to the study of historical capitalism generally, have relied to some extent on the evidence and analysis of scholars who were not themselves engaged in that study. This bibliography, however, will deal for the most part only with work that deploys the term “capitalism,” signifying a more or less conscious engagement with the tradition and debates that derive from Marx’s work.

Women and the Law

In the early modern Atlantic world, the law conditioned gendered power relations in European and colonial contexts alike. The everyday workings of legal systems yielded a vast archive of legal sources. These include statutes, treatises, petitions, legal instruments, and court, notarial, and probate records. Since emergence of women’s and gender history as vibrant fields of inquiry during the final decades of the 20th century, scholars have mined these and other complementary sources in order to interrogate women’s relationship to the law. Casting c. 1400–1815 as a distinctive period spanning from early colonial encounters to the birth of modern nation-states, these researchers emphasize that overlapping jurisdictions and legal systems shaped early modern women’s statuses and access to recourse. They have traced the ways in which the law structured women’s lives opposing ways: as an instrument of regulation and discipline, and as a source of authority for women within their households and communities. They have additionally analyzed women as legal actors, examining their uses of law and the forms of skill and strategy they demonstrated in the course of such activities. European-descended settlers and officials transported metropolitan legal systems with them to colonial contexts, and such legal systems thus functioned as an instrument of colonialism, affording greater accessibility and protections to white women than to black and indigenous women. Yet African-descended and Native women equally possessed their own understandings of law and justice, and they maneuvered within European-derived legal systems to advance their own interests. This bibliography attends to the major areas of scholarly inquiry on women and the law c. 1400–1815, many of which necessarily overlap. In keeping with recent scholarly trends in Atlantic and early American history, it does so by grouping works thematically. This organizational structure reflects the interconnectedness of the early modern Atlantic world and underscores that the history of women and the law resists straightforward narratives of declension or improvement. By inviting comparisons across regions, a thematic approach clarifies the ways in which specific imperial and local contexts shaped women’s relationship to the law. It also reveals commonalities in the patriarchal character of European-derived legal systems, and the ways in which they functioned similarly in order to create intersecting hierarchies of race, class, and gender. For specific regions, see also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles Gender in the Caribbean, Gender in Iberian America, and Gender in North America.

Warfare in Spanish America

In the same way that it is possible to understand warfare as organized violence with political ends, it is also useful to think of it as a particular condition of a society: a set of radically transforming experiences of individuals and communities; an unpredictable and chaotic process that defines identities and produces new forms of common life; and the creative space of a particular culture marked by different types of relationships between the members of a community. As can be seen from several historiographical traditions, there is a direct relationship between warfare and the process of state building: the state makes war and war makes the state. The regime established in America from the end of the 15th century to the 19th century can be explained by this relationship between institutional construction and the practice of violence. Like any empire of its time, the Spanish monarchy founded its authority, part of its legitimacy, its fiscal and administrative organization, its bureaucracy, its control systems, and its trade opportunities on the ground of warfare, and with these characteristics informed the slow and problematic processes of conquest, colonization, and subjection of the New World. Approaching Spanish America through both warfare and the military offers two major advantages: on the one hand, learning the history of its institutional, social, political, economic, and cultural development, and on the other, identifying the prolific historiography that has studied it. This bibliographical selection expresses both fields: the history of warfare in Spanish America and its changing historiography. The characteristics, pretensions, contradictions, and flaws of the Spanish institutional framework that for three centuries expanded from the Caribbean and came to dominate immense regions of North, Central, and South America until it entered into crisis and collapsed, leading to the emergence of national states, can be understood from its capacity to mobilize economic and human resources for warfare. Likewise, these very diverse armed forces involved in such processes were historical expressions of the societies that produced them. The studies in this bibliography express the historical complexity of Spanish America from the perspective of organization and experience of warfare. Although the sections are thematic, as far as possible the selection seeks to include in each case the broad spectrum of the three centuries of colonial domination; the sections referring to War Experiences do evolve with a more chronological criterion from conquests to independences and the emergence of national states.

Barbary States

The North African states of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco, which, until the 19th century, Europeans collectively referred to as the “Barbary States,” first came into existence with the spread of Islam across the northern African coast and into the Iberian Peninsula from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century. Over the following eight centuries, these small states on the edges of the Mediterranean world employed a mix of trade and privateering (often labeled piracy) to sustain their economies. Based on religious dictate, Barbary privateers sailed against Christian nations who failed to negotiate a treaty with the Barbary States. Once captured, Christians were sold into slavery in the North African nations. Although commonly referred to as “pirates,” the Barbary ships might more properly be referred to as “privateers” or “corsairs.” While many of these ships were privately held, they operated with the sanction of the Barbary governments, lending a legitimacy to their activity that the term pirate denies them. The practice of privateering was recognized by states throughout the world as legal until 1856, when privateering was abolished under the Declaration of Paris. It was on this premise that the Barbary States, primarily Algeria and Morocco, sailed the Mediterranean in search of wealth. These raids supplied these North African states with both treasure and captives. The crews and state governments split the spoils of the raids, while captive crewmen found themselves on the auction block and sold into slavery throughout North Africa. Captives with few skills often ended up working in the quarries or shipyards. Seamen trained in a trade often found themselves in cities working at their craft. Those sailors who converted to Islam were able to return to sea as crewmen aboard the Barbary corsairs. Officers on the captured vessels were often placed on parole, reflecting similar European practices, provided they paid a monthly fee for their limited freedom. For the European powers, the threat of the Barbary States was best managed through a series of yearly tributes to maintain safe passage for their ships. While the many European navies were more than a match for the North African forces, most European powers deemed annual payment the most effective means for dealing with these North African states. Following the Napoleonic Wars and a series of conflicts with the newly independent United States, the Barbary raids were finally terminated in the early 19th century, culminating with the French conquest of Algeria in 1830.

Pregnancy and Reproduction

Until recently, monographs addressing reproduction were relatively rare in scholarship on the Atlantic world. Although studies of gender have proliferated over the last thirty years, the field still has no single body of literature on reproduction itself. Rather, there are multiple distinct—and sometimes overlapping—thematic fields and national or regionally based literatures. Within these, pregnancy has implicitly and explicitly intersected with questions of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, healthcare, mortality, religion, enslavement, and justice. Emergent literature has developed with particular vigor around themes of slavery and the slave trade, colonization and empire, and eugenics. This article approaches the Atlantic world as a global crossroads that is fundamentally interconnected with other world regions. This approach has led to an emphasis on the Americas, especially Latin America and the Caribbean, as they are regions profoundly influenced by empire and enslavement. There is a particular dearth in the historical scholarship on reproduction in Atlantic Africa, although this article includes a few histories of motherhood in East Africa; also although historical scholarship is lacking, there is a wealth of work on pregnancy and childbirth in contemporary Africa. Some of the most important thematic trajectories across these bodies of scholarship are demarcated here, with emphasis on breadth, methodological innovation, geographic coverage, and impact in the field. Also included is a sampling of classics and newer scholarship, with some reference to emerging scholarship as well. Whenever possible non-English language work is highlighted, as it is far too often marginalized and uncited. Monographs are prioritized whenever possible, and readers should note that many of the scholars cited below have a wealth of relevant articles in addition to their books. The collections are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive and generative. Following the first sub-section, which is on Primary Sources: Online Collections and Digital Databases, the subsections are organized alphabetically by subtitle. In 2018, Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell published an admirable and sweeping Cambridge history entitled Reproduction: From Antiquity to the Present Day. The volume includes forty-three chapters and has wide temporal and geographic scope. Although the Cambridge textbook includes the Atlantic world, the chapters are more globally oriented, and do not present an Atlantic view per se. In the works cited below, readers will see the arc of a particularly Atlantic story—one centering issues of justice, freedom, intimacy, and agency, as well as cultural negotiation, conflict, and change. These all manifest in the contexts of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the interconnected worlds of African, Indigenous, Asian, and settler-European communities in the Americas. Finally, a focus on women’s reproduction reifies the essentialized category of normative cis-gender maternity. This reflects a trend in the literature itself, which—with the work of Rachel Ginnis Fuchs on paternity being a notable exception—tends to pay more attention to women’s reproduction than to male contributions to reproduction and childrearing.

South Atlantic Creole Archipelagos

In 2020 Cabo Verde (1557 sq. miles) and São Tomé and Príncipe (621 sq. miles) had a resident population of 556,857 and 210,240 respectively. Both archipelagos were uninhabited when they were settled by Portuguese colonists and African slaves in the second half of the 15th century. The coexistence of Europeans and Africans resulted in the emergence of Creole societies. Due to their differences in geographic position and climate, they developed unequally in economic terms. Santiago, the first of the Cabo Verde Islands to be settled, became a commercial hub for the slave trade from the Upper Guinea coast. São Tomé was also engaged in the slave trade, but in the 16th century established the first tropical plantation economy based on sugar and slave labor. In the 17th century, both archipelagos were affected by economic and demographic decline. Economic recovery did not occur before the mid-19th century. The British established a coal supply station for transatlantic steam shipping in São Vicente, while, enabled by the introduction of coffee and cocoa, the Portuguese reestablished the plantation economy in São Tomé and Príncipe. After the abolition of slavery in 1875 the workforce was composed of contract workers from Angola, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique. As a result, São Tomé and Príncipe became marked by immigration for almost a century. In contrast, pushed by famines and misery, a massive emigration from Cabo Verde began in the 19th century, a feature that has marked the archipelago’s society and identity until the early 21st century. The first anticolonial groups in exile appeared in the late 1950s. An armed liberation struggle in the islands was not possible; however, a group of Cabo Verdeans participated in the armed struggle in Portuguese Guinea. Most prominent among them was Amílcar Cabral (b. 1924–d. 1973). After independence in 1975 the two countries became socialist one-party regimes. In 1990 both archipelagos introduced multiparty democracies with semipresidential regimes. Creole communities also developed in the Gulf of Guinea islands of Bioko (779 square miles) and Annobón (6.5 sq. miles), which belonged to Portugal until 1778 when they became part of Spanish Guinea which subsequently, in 1968, gained independence as Equatorial Guinea. In the 16th century the uninhabited island of Annobón was settled by the Portuguese with African slaves. As a result, the island’s early-21st-century 5,300 inhabitants speak a Portuguese-based Creole, Fá d’Ambó. Bioko (Fernando Po), was the only Gulf of Guinea Island with a native population, the Bubi, and therefore the Portuguese never colonized this island. From 1827–1843 the British navy maintained an antislaving station called Port Clarence (modern Malabo) in Fernando Po. The British recruited workers from Freetown in Sierra Leone, which was the beginning of the development of the Fernandinos, a local Creole community that speaks an English-based Creole language known as Pichi, which is closely related to Krio in Sierra Leone. Currently, there are still about thirty Fernandino families, comprising some 350 people; however, Pichi is spoken by an estimated 150,000 people, since it also became Bioko’s lingua franca spoken by the Bubi majority.

Spanish American Port Cities

Following medieval political traditions, the conquest of America led by the Spanish crown was a highly urbanized enterprise. Cities defined the spaces of colonial America in terms of organization of the territory, control of the population, and the negotiation of political sovereignty on the ground. Early city foundation in the Antilles after 1492 was followed by the major occupation of continental America, when more than two hundred cities were founded over the 16th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries, cities in Spanish America became the hub of social integration, moving from ‘Spanish cities’ to what has been labeled ‘creole metropolises.’ During the age of revolution and independence, the late 18th and early 19th centuries, cities played a major role as the seats of national sovereignty. Typically struggles for independence would start with the rising of creole elites in the capital cities of each viceroyalty. Historiography on Spanish American cities has evolved in the last decades from an institutionally driven or urban growth approach to urban experiences, to an exploration of the multiple facets of urban life: commercial, economic, political, social, and cultural. In the renewal of urban history, the study of port cities has gained significance especially—although not exclusively—in connection to their commercial role, contributing thus to the development of new trends on Atlantic, global, and connected histories. Ports were also spaces for scientific development with shipyards and arsenals as main centers of technological innovation. Studies on port cities, however, have not been systematic and are notably disproportionate among regions and periods within the Spanish Atlantic. There are a considerably greater number of studies related to the first half of the 16th century and late 18th century and to the Caribbean and River Plate regions. Acknowledging this imbalance, this article will prioritize a geographical approach by focusing on particular cities within four main regions in the Atlantic—the Greater Antilles, Northern Mainland Caribbean, Southern Mainland Caribbean and the Southern Atlantic and River Plate Region—as a way to address the complexity of port experiences within those regions during different chronologies. A section on Pacific Connections ports is included to underline the connected nature of Spanish American port cities and their global outreach. Although local examples of port cities will be the core of this article, it opens with an updated review on the main urban history literature, with a section on primary sources following, and a general overview of regional or thematic works on ports, to move then to the geographical sections.

Hunger and Food Shortages

Woven into the fabric of history, hunger and food shortage experienced by individuals, communities, or large-scale societies are important historical markers, often used to chronicle significant points in time. As such, the histories of hunger and food shortage in various places and times in the Atlantic world serve as a productive lens with which to study the political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental parameters of Atlantic world history from pre-contact to present day. Within Atlantic history, just as in the early 21st century, hunger and food shortage can be a result of environmental conditions or natural disaster, such as the severe winters and wet summers which caused Europe’s Great Famine (1315–1322). Hunger and food shortage was and is also the result of intentionally orchestrated conditions including any combination of warfare, politics, poverty, and power. In the early decades of cross-Atlantic contact, food shortage and hunger was a common experience for both immunocompromised indigenous populations as well as inexperienced European explorers and early settlers. Control over food as well as limiting access to it came to serve as an important tool in white control over the land and people of the New World, both indigenous and those forcibly migrated from Africa. While food shortage was a common experience in European history due to mercantilist practices and harvest failures, food shortage and hunger in contemporary history largely is focused on western Africa. Despite the enormous expansion of agricultural productivity, extensive networks of transport infrastructure, and the interlinked global economy, hunger and food shortages still persist in all parts of the world, and indeed thrive, in all parts of the world.

Minas Gerais

The territory known as Minas Gerais (General Mines), roughly corresponding to the highlands of the southeastern region of present-day Brazil, was designated as a separate captaincy of Portuguese America in 1720, became a province in 1815, retained that status during the empire, and was redesignated as a state after the proclamation of the Republic in 1889—dates that roughly coincide with the limits of the overall period under consideration here (occasionally the region will be referred to as simply Minas and the adjective mineiro will be used as a qualifier). Gold strikes in the final years of the 17th century attracted ever larger waves of settlers from Portugal and other European countries and from other parts of Portuguese America, as well as attendant African slaves. A network of urban areas sprang up to house and service a burgeoning population and concentrated stately public and private buildings with their rich interiors. The slave society that emerged from a complex interdependence of mining, agricultural, craft, and service sectors was often considered unruly by colonial authorities, although current interpretations tend to emphasize the relative stability that marked everyday life in Minas, not least owing to a certain prosperity born of that diversity. While imports of African slaves into Minas were massive—perhaps the largest in all the Americas during most of the 18th century—it was the constant intermixing (mestiçagem) of individuals of diverse origins that most stands out in historical terms. By mid-century Minas boasted the largest population of Portuguese America, including the largest slave force, the highest number of Africans, and, above all, the largest population of mixed origin: slaves, freedpeople, and freeborn. Social organization, culture, the arts, and religious practices reflected those admixtures. By the last quarter of the 18th century, gold yields were in decline, but population growth continued and Minas had the largest provincial population when independence arrived in 1822—a situation that would not change until the second or third decade of the 20th century. Characterized by a sort of bucolic diversity during the 19th century, the region nevertheless remained linked to the Atlantic world through the slave trade and thanks to the emergence of coffee production, as well as through its role as the virtual breadbasket of dynamic southeastern Brazil. As the abolition of slavery loomed larger and larger on the horizon, the basic contours of Minas remained in place, but the glow of a diversified prosperity began to grow dimmer.