Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies

Between 1810 and 1825, 7,000 English, Scottish and Irish mercenaries sailed to Gran Colombia to fight against Spanish colonial rule under the rebel forces of Simón Bolívar. Their motives were mixed. Some travelled for money, others travelled for honour. Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies explores the lives of these men – their encounters with other soldiers, indigenous people, local women and slaves – as recounted in documents that fall outside the usual remit of military, political and economic historians. Matthew Brown considers the social and cultural aspects of the presence of these ‘foreigners’, and shows how they were an essential part of the revolution which eventually gave South America its freedom. Using archival research from England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia, Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies clearly shows the active role that these mercenaries, informal outriders of the British Empire, played in the creation of Latin America as we know it today.

Shows how the political turmoil of the Spanish American Wars of Independence allowed an upsurge in prize-taking activity by navies, privateers and pirates. Private maritime predation was integral to the Spanish American Wars of Independence. When colonists rebelled against Spanish rule in 1810 they deployed privateers - los corsarios insurgentes - to prosecute their revolutionary struggle at sea. Spain responded by commissioning privateers of its own, while the disintegration of Spanish authority in the New World created conditions in which unauthorised prize-taking - piracy - also flourished. This upsurge in privateering and piracy has been neglected by historians yet it posed a significant threat to British interests. As numerous vessels were captured and plundered, the British government - endeavouring to remain neutral in the Spanish American conflict - faced a dilemma. An insufficient response might hinder Britain's commercial expansion but an overly aggressive approach risked plunging the nation into another war. Privateering, Piracy and British Policy in Spanish America assesses the varied and flexible ways the British government responded to prize-taking activity in order to safeguard and enhance its wider commercial and political objectives. This analysis marks a significant and original contribution to the study of privateering and piracy, and informs key debates about the development of international law and the character of British imperialism in the nineteenth century. Matthew McCarthy is Research Officer at the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Hull in 2011 and won the British Commission for Maritime History/Boydell & Brewer prize for best doctoral thesis in maritime history.

The true 'Boy's Own' adventure of the British volunteers who survived shipwreck, duels, mutinies, wild animals and malaria to fight with Simon Bolivar, 1815–21. In the aftermath of Waterloo, over 6,000 British volunteers sailed across the Atlantic to aid Simon Bolivar in his liberation of Gran Columbia from her oppressors in Madrid. The expeditions were plagued with disaster from the start, one ship sank shortly after leaving Portsmouth with the loss of almost 200 lives. Those who reached the New World faced disease, wild animals, mutiny and desertion. Conditions on campaign were appalling, massacres were commonplace, rations crude, pay infrequent and supplies insufficient. Nevertheless, those who endured made key contributions to Bolivar's success.

Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World brings together ten original essays by an international group of scholars exploring the complex outcomes of the intermingling of people, circulation of goods, exchange of information, and exposure to new ideas that are the hallmark of the early modern Atlantic. Spanning the period from the earliest French crossings to Newfoundland at the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the wars of independence in Spanish South America, c. 1830, and encompassing a range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors direct particular attention to regions, communities, and groups whose activities in, and responses to, an ever-more closely bound Atlantic world remain relatively under-represented in the literature. Some of the chapters focus on the experience of Europeans, including French consumers of Newfoundland cod, English merchants forming families in Spanish Seville, and Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil making the Caribbean island of Nevis their home. Others focus on the ways in which the populations with whom Europeans came into contact, enslaved, or among whom they settled - the Tupi peoples of Brazil, the Kriston women of the west African port of Cacheu, among others - adapted to and were changed by their interactions with previously unknown peoples, goods, institutions, and ideas. Together with the substantial Introduction by the editor which reviews the significance of the field as a whole, these essays capture the complexity and variety of experience of the countless men and women who came into contact during the period, whilst highlighting and illustrating the porous and fluid nature, in practice, of the early modern Atlantic world.

Provides the history of Spanish colonies in America.

Volume III covers the Iberian Empires and stresses the ethnic dimension of the independent processes in Spanish America and Brazil. An important reference text for historians of the Atlantic World with a keen interest in the Iberian Empires.

Recovers a comparative literary history of migrationThis collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the murky spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. These essays together traverse the globe, revealing the experiences - real or imagined - of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.Key FeaturesOffers a comparative framework for understanding the modern history of migration and the aesthetics of mobilityForegrounds interdisciplinary debates about belonging, rights, and citizenshipDemonstrates how mobility unsettles the national, cultural, racialized, and gendered frames we often use to organize literary and historical studyBrings together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the emergence of modernityEmphasizes the globalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries