Entangled histories, entangled worlds: The English-speaking Atlantic as a Spanish periphery

American Historical Review

Volumn 112, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 764-786

  Gould, Eliga H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547488920     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.112.3.764     Document Type: Review

References (240)

1. J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (1923; repr., New York, 1970), 410-411.
2. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006);
3. Herbert E. Bolton, "The Epic of Greater America," American Historical Review 38, no. 3 (April 1933): 448-474;
4. Jack P. Greene, "Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective," History Compass 1, no. 1 (2003), http://www.black well-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ 1478-0542.026.
5. See also Ian K. Steele, "Exploding Colonial American History: Amerindian, Atlantic, and Global Perspectives," Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (1998): 70-95;
6. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001);
7. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, 2002);
8. Joyce E. Chaplin, "Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History," Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1431-1455;
9. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford, Calif., 2006), esp. chap. 6.
10. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946);
11. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, Ill., 1999), 2.
12. See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966);
13. Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago, 1967);
14. Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971);
15. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modem, 1492-1800 (London, 1997);
16. Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford, 1999).
17. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 2, 45.
18. For Spain's wider historical importance from the standpoint of Latin American history, see Jeremy Adelman, "Latin American and World Histories: Old and New Approaches to the Pluribus and the Unum," Hispanic American Historical Review 84, no. 3 (2004): 399-409. On the incomparability of Spanish American and Anglo-American history,
19. see Amy Turner Bushnell, "Introduction: Do the Americas Have a Comparable Colonial History?" in Bushnell, ed., Establishing Exceptionalism: Historiography and the Colonial Americas (Aldershot, 1995), xiii-xxiii.
20. Jameson, Privateering and Piracy, 411, 414.
21. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 45.
22. For two recent examples, see Deborah A. Rosen, "Women and Property across Colonial America: A Comparison of Legal Systems in New Mexico and New York," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60, no. 2 (2003): 355-382;
23. Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and New (Cambridge, 2005). Marc Bloch argued that comparative approaches worked best with "societies that are at once neighboring and contemporary, exercising a constant mutual influence... and owing their existence in part at least to a common mutual origin";
24. Bloch, "A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies," in Bloch, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York, 1969), 44-81. Although Bloch is often held up as one of the founders of comparative history, contemporary practitioners of comparative history have not always followed these guidelines.
25. The literature on comparative history, pro and con, is vast; for the current state of the field, see Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York, 2004).
26. See also George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
27. Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies," Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 829-865;
28. Khaldoun Samman, "The Limits of the Classical Comparative Method," Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 24, no. 4 (2001): 533-573;
29. Donald R. Kelley, "Grounds for Comparison," Storia della Storiografta, no. 39 (2001): 3-16.
30. Jürgen Kocka, "Comparison and Beyond," History and Theory 42, no. 1 (2003): 42. Entangled history is an inexact translation of (and slight variation on) histoire croisée,
31. for which see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, "Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity," History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 30-50;
32. Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor, "Comparative History, Cross-National History, Transnational History-Definitions," in Cohen and O'Connor, Comparison and History, ix-xxiv. Although histoire croisée has received its most extensive application at the hands of European historians - especially historians of the Franco-German relationship - interest in entangled histories of various sorts is increasingly evident in other fields;
33. see, for example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia," Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735-762;
34. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998);
35. Emma Rothschild, "Globalization and the Return of History," Foreign Policy, no. 115 (1999): 106-116;
36. Julia Rodriguez, "South Atlantic Crossings: Fingerprints, Science, and the State in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina," American Historical Review 109, no. 2 (April 2004): 387-416.
37. Akira Iriye, "Internationalizing International History," in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 51. The tendency that Iriye notes is especially problematic for histories such as that of early America and the early modern Atlantic world, which predate the emergence of the nation-state as the dominant imaginary in political and historical discourse. For transnational history's influence on historians of the post-1776 United States,
38. see especially Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History," American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1031-1055.
39. The literature on borderland history is vast, but see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples In Between in North American History," American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 814-841;
40. David J. Weber, "The Spanish Borderlands of North America: A Historiography," Magazine of History 14, no. 4 (2000): 5-11;
41. Nathan J. Citino, "The Global Frontier: Comparative History and the Frontier-Borderlands Approach in American Foreign Relations," Diplomatic History 25, no. 4 (2001): 677-693;
42. Benjamin Johnson, "Engendering Nation and Race in the Borderlands," Latin American Research Review 37, no. 1 (2002): 259-271;
43. Amy Turner Bushnell, "Borderland or Border-Sea? Placing Early Florida," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 60, no. 3 (2003): 643-653;
44. Juliana Barr, "A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the 'Land of Tejas,' " William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 61, no. 3 (2004): 393-434;
45. Iris H. W. Engstrand, "In Virtual Search of the Spanish Borderlands," Historian 66, no. 3 (2004): 501-508;
46. Alan Taylor, "Continental Crossings," Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (2004): 182-188;
47. Juliana Barr, "From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands," Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (2005): 19-46.
48. Greene, "Comparing Early Modern American Worlds."
49. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 304;
50. Richard M. Morse, "Trends and Patterns of Latin American Urbanization, 1750-1920," Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (1974): 416.
51. Victor M. Uribe-Uran, "The Birth of a Public Sphere in Latin America during the Age of Revolution," Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (2000): 440-448, esp. Table 2 (446-447). Mexico City and Lima both had newspapers during the first half of the eighteenth century, but Uribe-Uran discounts their importance because they were published only intermittently (440-441). On historical writing in Spanish America,
52. see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif., 2001).
53. Jose Moya, "Modernization, Modernity, and the Trans/Formation of the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century," in Jorge Cafñzares- Esguerra and Erik Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in World History, 1500-2000 (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2006), 189.
54. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 195.
55. See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992);
56. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995).
57. Clergy of London, Address to the Throne (1745), State Papers (SP) 36/79/80-81, National Archives (formerly Public Record Office), Kew, United Kingdom.
58. Colley, Britons, 2-3.
59. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-c. 1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 4. For the persistence of Britain's preoccupation with the Spanish Empire into the later eighteenth century,
60. see Gabriel Paquette, "The Image of Imperial Spain in British Political Thought, 1750-1800," Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 2 (2004): 187-214.
61. Nicholas P. Canny, "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 30, no. 4 (1973): 575-598.
62. See also Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565-76 (New York, 1976);
63. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford, 2001).
64. John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624), in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1580-1631, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 2: 229.
65. See also Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (Oxford, 1990);
66. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000);
67. April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004), 8, 16-18. For a similar Anglo-Spanish mimesis in Puritan New England,
68. see Canizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors.
69. Alexander VI, "Inter Caetera" (May 4, 1493) and "Treaty between Great Britain and Spain, concluded at Madrid" (October 8, 1670), in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1917-1937), 1: 71-78, 2:187-196.
70. The intellectual legacy of Alexander's donation is the subject of James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 1994);
71. Anthony Pagden, "The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic, to c. 1700," in Nicholas P. Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998), 34-54. For the diplomatic and military history,
72. see Max Savelle, The Origins of American Diplomacy: The International History of Angloamerica, 1492-1763 (New York, 1967);
73. Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624-1690 (Oxford, 1972);
74. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge, 1984).
75. Richard L. Kagan, "Prescott's Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain," American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (April 1996): 430;
76. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 404. As James Epstein notes in "Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the Cause of Louisa Calderon," in this issue, the Black Legend remained a foil for Britain's imperial identity as late as Thomas Picton's trial for the torture of Louisa Calderon, a young mulatto girl, while he was governor of the former Spanish colony of Trinidad in 1801; while conceding that such practices were not legal under the common law of England, Picton's defense successfully argued that Spanish law sanctioned judicial torture.
77. "Rule Britannia" (1740), in James Thomson, The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. J. Logie Robertson (Oxford, 1908), 420. For a similar contrast between Britain's libertarian (and liberationist) American empire and the despotic empire of Spain, see Edward Trelawney, Governor of Jamaica, to the Duke of Newcastle, January 15, 1740/1, Colonial Office [hereafter CO] 137/ 57/1, 27, National Archives.
78. Ruth Smith, Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995). For the Anglo-Spanish War of 1739 and the response in Britain and the colonies,
79. see Kathleen Wilson, "Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon," Past and Present 121 (1988): 74-109;
80. Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739-1763 (1936; repr., Oxford, 1963);
81. David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750 (Chicago, 1990), 177-194;
82. Bob Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford, 1993).
83. Mather Byles, The Glories of the Lord of Hosts, and the Fortitude of the Religious Hero. A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company June 2, 1740. Being the Anniversary of Their Election of Officers (Boston, 1740), 29, 31.
84. See also Shields, Oracles of Empire, 185-194.
85. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1689), especially chap. 5, §§ 25-51 ("Of Property"),
86. in Locke, Political Writings of John Locke, ed. David Wootton (New York, 1993), 273-286. For the absence of dominium among Indians, see ibid., chap. 8, § 108, 316.
87. See also Pagden, "The Struggle for Legitimacy," 34-54;
88. James Tully, "Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights," in Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), 137-176.
89. Although the work of armchair jurists and theorists, this discourse can also be found throughout the papers and memoranda of colonial officials; see, for example, Harman Vereist, "Observations on the Right of the Crown of Great Britain to the North West Continent of America" (April 16, 1739), CO 5/283, 1-9 et seq.; see also James Muldoon, "Discovery, Grant, Charter, Conquest, or Purchase: John Adams on the Legal Basis for English Possession of North America," in Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce M. Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 25-46;
90. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought;
91. Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
92. For the Spanish reference in the Massachusetts seal, see Pagden, "The Struggle for Legitimacy," 52. In an indication of the prevalence of such views, the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel, whose treatise on the law of nations was the standard text on the subject in both Britain and the colonies during the later eighteenth century, praised the Puritans for "purchas[ing] of the Indians the land of which they intended to take possession"; Vattel, The Law of Nations; or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns. From the French of Monsieur de Vattel (London, 1797), book 1, chap. 18, § 209 (101).
93. Pagden, "The Struggle for Legitimacy," 54.
94. Davenport, European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States, 2: 194.
95. See also Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies.
96. Ernest R. May, The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). See also Rafe Blaufarb, "The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American Independence," in this issue.
97. James Marriott, "Case of the Settlers in the Bay of Honduras" [letter to John Pownall, secretary to the Lords of Trade], April 21, 1766, CO 123/1, 123, 125. For the British settlements on the Central American coast, see Jennifer L. Anderson, "Nature's Currency: The Atlantic Mahogany Trade and the Commodification of Nature in the Eighteenth Century," Early American Studies 2, no. 1 (2004): 47-80.
98. Marriott, "Case of the Settlers in the Bay of Honduras," CO 123/1, 123, 125. The settlers took a similar view of their situation; see, for example, "Letter from the Inhabitants of the Bay of Honduras," June 2, 1745, CO 137/57/2, 130; see also [Daniel Defoe], A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates... By Captain Charles Johnson (London, 1724), 283-284;
99. William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America, 2 vols. (1747; repr., London, 1755), 1: 87-90;
100. Tobias Smollett, Continuation of the Complete History of England, 5 vols. (London, 1760-1765), 2: 189, 364-368. For statelessness as a general problem in American history,
101. see Linda K. Kerber, "Toward a History of Statelessness in America," American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 727-749.
102. Bushnell, "Borderland or Border-Sea?" 643-653.
103. American Weekly Mercury, September 30-October 7, 1731, 2.
104. The Anglo-Spanish dispute over maritime rights in the Caribbean is covered in detail in Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, esp. chaps. 1, 2, and 11.
105. "Notes of correspondence between the Lords [of Admiralty] and [Rear Admiral] Stewart as to Spanish depredations, the orders for reprisals, and the difficulties they will raise," May 15, 1731, in R. G. Marsden, ed., Documents Relating to Law and Custom of the Sea, 2 vols. (1915; repr., London, 1999), 2: 278. For similar accounts of peacetime depredations by British and Anglo-American mariners,
106. see Henry Moore, Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, to the Earl of Holdernesse, August 31, 1757, October 4, 1757, and February 6, 1758, CO 137/60, 262, 264, and 270.
107. "Inter Caetera," in Davenport, European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States, 1: 76 (editor's trans.). The original text from which the quoted excerpts are taken reads: "terras firmas et insulas predictas illaramque incolas et habitores... subjicere et ad fidem Catholicam reducere proposuistis" (73).
108. For the longstanding hostility of Anglo-American slaveholders to Protestant missionaries, see especially Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
109. Gilbert Fleming to Don Augustine Pareja, May 21, 1751, CO 152/45, 256. See also Lords of Trade to the Earl of Holdernesse, May 22, 1754, CO 152/41, 63-68. Conversely, when the Jamaican corsair Robert Searle sacked St. Augustine in 1668, he informed the Spanish authorities that his governor had given him permission to enslave all people of color, regardless of whether they were free subjects of the king of Spain; Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida (Athens, Ga., 1994), 136.
110. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 73.
111. See also Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 34, 37, 112-113;
112. John K. Thornton, "African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion," American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1101-1113;
113. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 454-455.
114. "Diary of the Earl of Egmont," January 17, 1738/9, in Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1930-1935), 4: 592. For the growing importance of plantation slavery in Cuba,
115. see Klein, Slavery in the Americas ;
116. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (New York, 1997), 272-273;
117. Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 497-499;
118. Evelyn Powell Jennings, "War as the 'Forcing House of Change': State Slavery in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 62, no. 3 (2005): 411-440.
119. South Carolina's slave statue of 1696 stipulated that male slaves apprehended attempting to escape for the fourth time "shall be gelt"; William M. Wiecek, "The Statutory Law of Slavery and Race in the Thirteen Mainland Colonies of British America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 34, no. 2 (1977): 270.
120. Trelawney to the Duke of Newcastle, May 29, 1741, CO 137/57/1, 101, For more on the use of black soldiers during the Anglo-Spanish War of 1739, see Trelawney to Newcastle, May 17, 1741, ibid., 62-63;
121. Trelawney to Newcastle, April 25, 1742, ibid., 145-146;
122. see also papers relating to the British expedition against Omoa (1779), CO 137/39; Sir John Dalling, Governor of Jamaica, to Lord Germaine, no. 76, July 2 and 28, 1780, CO 137/78, 166-171.
123. See also Edward L. Cox, "The British Caribbean in the Age of Revolution," in Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore, Md., 2005), 275-294;
124. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn., 2006).
125. Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal (Granby, Mass., 1988), 117-118;
126. Trevor Richard Reese, Colonial Georgia: A Study in British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Athens, Ga., 1963).
127. Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade, 4: 595, 604.
128. For the growing receptiveness of Anglo-American planters to black Christianization, see especially Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith. For the Protestant awakening as a response to militant Catholicism, French as well as Spanish,
129. see Nathan O. Hatch, "The Origins of Civil Millennialism in America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 31, no. 3 (1974): 407-430;
130. W. Reginald Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992);
131. Eliga H. Gould, "The Christianizing of British America," in Norman Etherington, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005), 25-26.
132. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 44-45. For African American sailors on British and Anglo-American vessels,
133. see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
134. Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade, 4: 119. For similar observations about the crew of a Franco-Spanish vessel (sailing under the American flag) during the American Revolutionary War, see Sir John Dalling, Governor of Jamaica, to Lord Germaine, no. 18, April 25, 1778, CO 137/73, 143-144.
135. [William Currie], A Sermon, Preached in Radnor Church, on Thursday, the 7th of January, 1747 [i.e., 1748]. Being the Day Appointed by the President and Council of the Province of Pennsylvania, to Be Observed as a General Fast (Philadelphia, 1748), 17.
136. [Daniel Horsmanden], A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and Other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants (New York, 1744), 11.
137. See also Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York, 2005), 160-164, 165-167.
138. David J. Weber, Barbaras: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn., 2005), 6. As Weber notes, historians have tended to overlook the large number of Spanish Indians in borderlands (or "frontier" regions) such as Patagonia, California, the Gulf Coast, and the Lower Mississippi Valley. In such regions, the points of contact between Spanish-Indian relations and Indian relations in the empires of France and Britain were considerable;
139. see Amy Turner Bushnell, "Gates, Patterns, and Peripheries: The Field of Frontier Latin America," in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1820 (New York, 2002), 15-28;
140. Weber, Bárbaros, 1-18;
141. Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992).
142. Robert Hodgson, "The First Account of the State of that Part of America called the Mosquito Shore" (1757), CO 123/1, 77.
143. Some Miskito children also served as apprentices in Jamaica: Trelawney to Newcastle, March 16, 1739/40, CO 137/57/1, 35-36. For Anglo-Miskito diplomatic rituals, sexual liaisons, and demography, see Nicholas Rogers, "Caribbean Borderland: Empire, Ethnicity, and the Exotic on the Mosquito Coast," Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 3 (2002): 122-125.
144. Ibid., 126.
145. "The Declaration of Edward King of the Mosquito Indians" (March 16, 1739/40), CO 123/1, 52. See also Hodgson to Trelawney, November 28, 1740, CO 137/57/1, 39-43.
146. Weber, Bárbaros, 204-208.
147. J. Leitch Wright, Creeks and Seminales: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People (Lincoln, Neb., 1986), 114-127;
148. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 274-278, 284.
149. Charles A. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales, and San Fernando de Las Barrancas, 1791-1795 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2005).
150. The notion of a hollow empire cornes from Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge, 1997).
151. See also Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York, 2000), chap. 72.
152. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford, Calif., 1991), xix.
153. See also Amy Turner Bushnell, "Ruling 'the Republic of Indians' in Seventeenth-Century Florida," in Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, eds., Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln, Neb., 1989), 134-150;
154. Jerald T. Milanich, Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians (Washington, D.C., 1999).
155. The relative population figures for mission and non-Indian missions in the Spanish empire come from J. H. Elliott, Britain and Spain in America: Colonists and Colonized (Reading, 1994), 4.
156. Quoted in Weber, Bárbaros, 255.
157. Theda Perdue, " 'A Sprightly Lover Is the Most Prevailing Missionary": Intermarriage between Europeans and Indians in the Eighteenth-Century South," in Charles M. Hudson, Thomas J. Pluckhahn, and Robbie Franklyn Ethridge, eds., Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2006), 165-178;
158. Theda Perdue, "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens, Ga., 2003);
159. Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge, 1999), chap. 6.
160. Quoted in Weber, Bárbaros, 204.
161. For McGillivray and the transformation of Creek society, see Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 116-117;
162. Saunt, A New Order of Things, chap. 3. The term "gorget chief refers to the medal or gorget that Indians wore around their necks as commissioned officers in European armies;
163. Colin G. Galloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, 1995), 60.
164. See also Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991), 403-406.
165. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 276 (including first McGillivray quote);
166. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground, 42 (second McGillivray quote), 82-83;
167. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 282-285;
168. Saunt, A New Order of Things, chap. 3.
169. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 376. For the same goal in the British imperial reforms of the 1760s and 1780s,
170. see Eliga H. Gould, "A Virtual Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy of the American Revolution," American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 481;
171. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), xvii-xix. Because the British imperial reforms were cut short by the Revolutionary War, British and Anglo-American historians tend to place less emphasis on their character as a "failed attempt at national integration"; ibid., xvii, n. 5.
172. But see Stephen Conway, "From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739-1783," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59, no. 1 (2002): 65-100.
173. The Bourbon reforms are the subject of Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759-1789 (Baltimore, Md., 2003).
174. Quoted in Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 355.
175. See especially Gould, The Persistence of Empire, chap. 4. For the influence of Britain's example on the reforms of Charles III,
176. see Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, esp. chap. 6.
177. The classic statement on Latin America as part of an "informal" British empire is John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, "The Imperialism of Free Trade," Economic History Review 6, no. 1 (1953): 1-15. For a skeptical assessment that nonetheless accepts parts of the Robinson and Gallagher thesis,
178. see Alan Knight, "Britain and Latin America," in Andrew Porter, ed., The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), 122-145.
179. See also Blaufarb, "The Western Question"; Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713-1826 (Baltimore, Md., 1983);
180. Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 45-46, 121-127, 309 n. 27;
181. Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge, 1998), 244-246. For the centrality of Spanish America in Britain's rivalry with France,
182. see Paquette, "The Image of Imperial Spain in British Political Thought," 187-214;
183. Paul Mapp, "The Spanish Empire and the Seven Years' War," Common-place 1, no. 1 (2000), http://common-place.org//vol-01/no-01/ crucible/crucible-mapp.shtml (accessed April 16, 2007).
184. [Joseph Cawthorne], A Plan of Reconciliation with America; Consistent with the Dignity and Interests of Both Countries (London, 1782), 48.
185. See also Viscount Mahon to the Earl of Chatham, February 11, 1778, in William Stanhope Taylor and John Henry Pringle, eds., Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 4 vols. (London, 1838-1840), 4: 503;
186. William Pulteney, Considerations on the Present State of Public Affairs, and the Means of Raising the Necessary Supplies (London, 1779), 10;
187. [John Jebb], An Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex, Assembled at Free Masons Tavern (London, [1779]), 17 n. For the British debate over federating with the erstwhile colonies between 1778 and 1782,
188. see Gould, The Persistence of Empire, 165-168.
189. Bowing to pressure from the United States, Spain agreed to stop offering sanctuary to escaped slaves in Florida in 1790;
190. Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 80. For Spanish intrigues and threats in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys,
191. see A. P. Whitaker, "Spanish Intrigue in the Old Southwest: An Episode, 1788-89," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 12, no. 2 (1925): 155-176;
192. Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York, 1986), 30-59, 155-163;
193. James E. Lewis, The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783-1829 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), esp. chap. 1.
194. Both groups often displayed the same independence and disregard for the authority of the British government that Marriott noted (supra) in his observations on the logwood cutters on Honduras Bay; see, for example, the depiction of British squatters in East Florida following the province's cession to Spain (1783) as "banditti," "outlaws," and "rebels," in Patrick Tonyn to Lord Sydney, no. 5, December 6, 1784, CO 5/561, 13-20.
195. See also J. Leitch Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America (Athens, Ga., 1971), chaps. 12 and 13.
196. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 281. The Jefferson quote comes from a private letter that Jefferson wrote to George Washington in 1791.
197. See, for example, Jefferson's letter to Archibald Stuart, January 25, 1786, written from Paris in response to news of Spain's secessionist intrigues during the Kentucky Convention of 1785, in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, 1984), 844. "I fear," Jefferson wrote, "that the people... think of separating not only from Virginia (in which they are right) but also from the confederacy."
198. Quoted in Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion, 52. McGillivray intermittently served as intermediary between the Franklinites and the Spanish authorities;
199. Whitaker, "Spanish Intrigue in the Old Southwest," 166-167. On the history of Franklin,
200. see Samuel Cole Williams, History of the Lost State of Franklin (1924; rev. ed., Philadelphia, 1974).
201. See also Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York, 2001), 31. 77 According to records in the Spanish archives, Jackson took an oath of loyalty to the king of Spain at Natchez in 1789;
202. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, 285 n. 16.
203. Robertson to Miró, September 2, 1789, quoted in Whitaker, "Spanish Intrigue in the Old Southwest," 170-171.
204. Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), xvi. The passage quoted refers to the Northwest Ordinance (1787), which applied only to new states admitted to the union from territory north of the Ohio River; in 1790, Congress extended all of the ordinance's provisions to Tennessee except for the prohibition against slavery, making states' right to self-government south of the Ohio even broader,
205. See also Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, Va., 2000).
206. Quoted in Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, 33.
207. For American unilateralism generally, see especially Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford, 1990).
208. The phrase is from a dispatch by the British spy "P[eter] Allaire," August 1790, quoted in Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion, 59.
209. Jackson is "the border captain" in Marquis James, Andrew Jackson: The Border Captain (New York, 1933).
210. The term caudillo appears in an offhand characterization of Andrew Jackson in Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-2840s (New York, 1983), 18.
211. In a review of Formisano's book, "Putting Some Class Back into Political History: The Transformation of Political Culture' and the Crisis in American Political History," Reviews in American History 12, no. 1 (1984): 80-88,
212. Paul Goodman called the characterization an "unexplained swipe" (81).
213. But see Sean Wilentz, "The Original Outsider," New Republic 206, no. 25 (1992): 34-38, who refers to Jackson as the "Tennessee caudillo" (36);
214. and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Andrew Jackson's Honor," Journal of the Early Republic 17, no. 1 (1997): 1-36, who also uses the term, crediting Formisano without repeating Goodman's criticism (3).
215. Fred Anderson and Andrew R. L. Cayton also indirectly liken Jackson to a caudillo, writing that Santa Anna the Mexican "caudillo... resembled Jackson the Tennessee militia commander";
216. Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (New York, 2005), 254.
217. Gary B. Nash, "The Hidden History of Mestizo America," Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 941-964.
218. Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, 234.
219. See also Alice Dunbar-Nelson, "People of Color in Louisiana: Part II," Journal of Negro History 2, no. 1 (1917): 57-61.
220. Adelman and Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," 814-841;
221. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
222. The literature on Jackson and the conquest of the Southeast is enormous; for the formative influence of Jackson's early involvement with Spain, see especially Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars;
223. Anderson and Cayton, The Dominion of War, chap. 5;
224. Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York, 1993).
225. For the interconnected history of British and Anglo-American imperial thought during the later nineteenth century, see especially Paul Kramer, "Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910," Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002): 1315-1353.
226. The first Atlantic Seminar in the United States convened at Johns Hopkins in 1967; the creation of the Johns Hopkins Program in Atlantic History and Culture followed in 1971. For the importance of interconnectedness in Atlantic history, see Jack P. Greene, "Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World," in Greene, Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 17-42;
227. David Eltis, "Atlantic History in Global Perspective," Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 141;
228. Horst Pietschmann, "Introduction: Atlantic History-History between European History and Global History," in Pietschmann, ed., Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System 1580-1830 (Göttingen, 2002), 35-43;
229. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), esp. 59-62.
230. The potential for truly interconnected Atlantic histories emerges forcefully in John R. Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York, 2004).
231. Recent examples of the fruitful application of comparative history include Carole Shammas, "Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 52, no. 1 (1995): 104-144;
232. Camilla Townsend, Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America - Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Baltimore, Maryland (Austin, Tex., 2000);
233. Richard Ross, "Legal Communications and Imperial Governance: British North America and Spanish America Compared," in Christopher L. Tomlins and Michael Grossberg, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America (Cambridge, 2007, forthcoming), I am grateful to Richard Ross for permitting me to read his essay before it was published.
234. See discussion above and at notes 8-11. For a brief but cogent discussion of the relative merits of (and appropriate subjects for) comparative versus connected approaches to Atlantic history,
235. see David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, 16-25.
236. See also Canizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors, chap. 6.
237. Thomas Bender, "Introduction: Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives," in Bender, Rethinking American History in a Global Age, 8. Bender is referring here to limits vis-à-vis global history;
238. see also Peter A. Coclanis, "Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History," Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 169-182.
239. Francisco Valdes-Ugalde, "Janus and the Northern Colossus: Perceptions of the United States in the Building of the Mexican Nation," Journal of American History 86, no. 2 (1999): 575.
240. See also Bushnell, "Do the Americas Have a Comparable Colonial History?," xiii-xxiii.