To study the fragments/whole: Microhistory and the atlantic world

Journal of Social History

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2006, Pages

  Putnam, Lara ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

^b Department of History ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646529137     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2006.0010     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. Edward Kamau Braithwaite, "Caribbean Man in Space and Time," Savacou 11/12 (9/1975): 1.
2. This poem was brought to my attention by Rhonda Denise Frederick, "Colon People: Reading Caribbeanness Through the Panama Canal," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1997), 62.
3. Giovanni Levi, "On Microhistory," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, 1992), 97.
4. On this issue, and for the fundamental insight into the potential synergy between microhistory and Atlantic history that this essay seeks to explore, I am indebted to Rebecca J. Scott, "Small-Scale Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes," American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (2000): 472-479.
5. Joäo José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore, 1993);
6. Paul E. Lovejoy, "Background to Rebellion: The Origins of Muslim Slaves in Bahia," Slavery & Abolition 15, no. 2 (1994): 151-180;
7. Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay, eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (London, 2001).
8. Examples include the York/ UNESCO Nigerian Hinterland Project, which combines data gathering, data base graduate training, and international scholarly exchange [cf. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil During the Era of Slavery (Amherst, N.Y., 2004)]
9. and the NEH-sponsored "Ecclesiastical Sources and Historical Research on the African Diaspora in Brazil and Cuba," a directed by Jane Landers of Vanderbilt University in collaboration with scholars at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (Rio de Janeiro) and the Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora of York University.)
10. Bernard S. Cohn, "Anthropology and History in the 1980s: Toward a Rapprochement," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12, no. 2 (1981): 227-52;
11. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory," Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 19-42.
12. Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, 2004).
13. Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, N.J., 2001).
14. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, 2003).
15. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000).
16. Julius Score, "A Common Wind; Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Age of the Haitian Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986).
17. For a portrait of unexpected circuits in the nineteenth century, see Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
18. James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First Conquerors of Peru (Austin, 1972).
19. Ida Altman, Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and Puebla, Mexico, 1560-1620 (Stanford, Cal., 2000).
20. José C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers; Spanish immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 (Berkeley, 1998).
21. For a community study of Iberian emigration more attuned to the central concerns of Atlantic history, see Juan Javier Pescador, The New World Inside a Basque Village: The Oiartzun Valley and Its Atlantic Emigrants, 1550-1800 (Reno, 2003).
22. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995).
23. María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780 (Stanford, Cal., 2000).
24. Cf. Anthony Smith, "Nationalism and Social Theory," British Journal of Sociology 34 (1983): 19-38;
25. Andreas Wimmer and Nina Click Schiller, "Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences," Global Networks 2, no. 4 (2002): 301-333.
26. Even the most ambitious projects, like the Eltis and Richardson database of slave voyages, work on a finite number of circuits: in their case, the ports linked together by the transatlantic slave trade. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge and New York, 1999).
27. Perhaps more than any other scholar, C.L.R. James detailed the ironies of the imperial origins of anti-imperialism. As he wrote in 1963 of his childhood in Trinidad, "I learnt and obeyed and taught a code, the English public-school code. Britain and her colonies and the colonial peoples. What do the British people know of what they have done there? Precious little. The colonial peoples, particularly West Indians, scarcely know themselves as yet. It has taken me a long time to begin to understand." C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, 1994), 33.
28. The life histories have been transcribed as part of the following projects: Erna Brodber, "Life in Jamaica in the early twentieth century: A presentation of ninety oral accounts" (unpublished mimeo held in the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Mona);
29. "Autobiografías Campesinas" (unpublished mimeo held in the Biblioteca Central, Universidad Nacional Autönoma, Heredia, Costa Rica), vols. 23, 26;
30. "Entrevistas de Paula Palmer" (manuscript transcriptions and audiotapes held in the Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica, San Jose).
31. Crucial scholarly publications covering these developments include Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850-1914 (Mona, Jamaica, 1984);
32. Elizabeth M. Thomas-Hope, "The Establishment of a Migration Tradition: British West Indian Movements to the Hispanic Caribbean in the Century after Emancipation," International Migration 24 (1986): 66-81;
33. Elizabeth MacLean Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration: White Capital and Black Labor, 1850-1930 (Boulder, Col., 1988);
34. Bonham C. Richardson, "Caribbean Migrations, 1838-1985," in The Modern Caribbean, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill, 1989);
35. Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill, 2002), Ch. 2.
36. See Lara Putnam, "Afro-Caribbean Missionaries in the Salvation Army, ca. 1900-1940: Racism and Anti-Racism, Imperial Christianity and Moral Reform," paper presented at Religious Studies Colloquium, University of Pittsburgh, Jan. 21, 2005.
37. For more on these disparate voluntary associations and their ideologies, see Lara Putnam, "Transnational Circuits of the Interwar Caribbean," in El Caribe Centroamerico, Publicaciones del Instituto Renvall no. 18 (Helsinki, 2005).
38. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London, 1998), brilliantly places Garvey and other U.S.-based Caribbean radicals in the frame of reference of Afro-Caribbean migratory experience.
39. "For the Defence of the Empire: Answers in the Parishes to the Call of His Majesty the King. Recruiting Meetings. Speakers' Appeals to Patriotism of Jamaica's Manhood." (Jamaica) Gleaner, 26 Nov. 1915.
40. W.E Elkins, Black Power in the Caribbean: The Beginnings of the Modern National Movement (New York, 1977), 29-45;
41. Glenford D. Howe, Race, War, and Nationalism: A Social History of West Indians in the First World War (Kingston, 2002).
42. National Archives of the United Kingdom, British Public Record Office, CO 884/13/7: "Trinidad: Disturbances in Port-of-Spain (December 1919): Reports by the Commissioners appointed to enquire into the Conduct of the Constabulary," p. 66.
43. Trinidad: Disturbances in Port-of-Spain (December 1919): Reports by the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Conduct of the Constabulary Ibid.
44. On the boy scout troops founded in Port Limon, Bocas del Toro, Colon, and Panama City by Ninth Battalion veterans in these years, see Putnam, "Transnational Circuits."
45. "New Addition to West Indian Colony," Panama Tribune, 3 Feb. 1929, p. 5.
46. "A Record of Deeds," Panama Tribune, 30 Dec. 1928, p. 16.
47. "Scouts reviewed by British Minister," Panama Star and Herald, 1 Dec. 1923, enclosed in British Public Record Office, FO 371/8475, f. 105.
48. A.A.Butcher, "Jottings," Panama Tribune, 18 Nov. 1928, p. 14;
49. A.A. Butcher, "Scout Corner," Panama Tribune 11 Nov. 1928, p. 14.
50. Cf. "Rev. Jas. A. Black On Life of Our People, Panama," Jamaica Gleaner, 6 Oct. 1932, p. 10.
51. Cf. "Lynching Scill Fashionable in the Southern U.S., "Panama Tribune 13 Jan. 1929, p. 9;
52. "Wales Alarmed over Color Question" and "Father Dies Defending Daughter from Whites," both from Panama Tribune, 3 Feb. 1929, p. 2.
53. "Flays British Smugness: Jamaica Scholar Gives Frank Opinion," Panama Tribune, 3 Feb. 1929, p. 5.
54. Two years later Moody founded the League of Coloured Peoples, a venue for black professionals' denunciation of racialism in Britain, See also Michael Adas, "Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology," Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004): 31-63.
55. "Balboans Pay Visit Aboard Cruiser Delhi: Party of Scouts and Others Inspect Craft While on Visit to Isthmus," (Jamaica) Daily Gleaner, 20 July 1932, p, 23.
56. A paid subscription is required to access the service.
57. "Colon Aids Boys' Town," (Jamaica) Daily Gleaner, 4 March 1944.
58. "Jamaica Orchestra Fail in Competition," (Jamaica) Daily Gleaner, 30 May 1939, p. 19.
59. "Congratulations on Golden Wedding," (Jamaica) Daily Gleaner, 2 April 1974, p. 18.