Early Modern Atlantic Cities

The Atlantic World was an oceanic system circulating goods, people, and ideas that emerged in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. European imperialism was its motor, while its character derived from the interactions between peoples indigenous to Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Much of the everyday workings of this oceanic system took place in urban settings. By sustaining the connections between these disparate regions, cities and towns became essential to the transformations that occurred in this early modern era. This Element, traces the emergence of the Atlantic city as a site of contact, an agent of colonization, a central node in networks of exchange, and an arena of political contestation. Cities of the Atlantic World operated at the juncture of many of the core processes in a global history of capitalism and of rising social and racial inequality. A source of analogous experiences of division as well as unity, they helped shape the Atlantic world as a coherent geography of analysis.

Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World is a collection of essays on the cities of the Portuguese empire written by the leading scholars in the field. The volume, like the empire it analyzes, has a global scope and a chronological span of three centuries. The contributions focus on the social, political, and economic aspects of city life in settlements as far apart as Rio de Janeiro, Mozambique Island, and Nagasaki. Despite the seeming (and real) disparities between the colonial cities located in South America, Africa, and Asia, this volume demonstrates that they possessed a range of commonalities. Beyond their shared language, these cities had similar social, religious, and political institutions that shaped their identities. In many cases, the civic bodies analyzed in these essays such as the city councils or the Misericórdias (charitable brotherhoods), no less than the convents and houses of Catholic religious orders, contributed more to making these cities Portuguese than their allegiance to the crown in Lisbon. Rather than dividing the globe into Atlantic and Indian Ocean spheres, Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World takes the novel approach of bringing together analyses of the social history of these cities in order to stress their shared aspects as well as to suggest paths for fruitful comparisons. By encouraging further scholarship in this rich, yet understudied subject, this collection will not only further comparisons between cities found within the Portuguese empire, but also raise important issues that will be of interest to historians of other European empires, as well as urban historians generally.

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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.

Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World explores the creation, dissemination, and consumption of a specific type of news, ‘business news’, within early modern commercial news networks. The volume contains eleven case studies, written by scholars from a range of disciplines, which span the breadth of the early modern Atlantic from the first appearance of serial corantos in the seventeenth century to the United States’ Declaration of Independence in the late eighteenth century. These expert contributions showcase the range of innovative methodological and theoretical approaches which can be used to study business news, including social network analysis, textual analysis, and qualitative methods.

Charting the evolution of the seaports of Atlantic Spain and Portugal over four centuries, this book examines the often dynamic interaction between the large privileged ports of Lisbon, Seville and Cadiz (the Metropoles) and the smaller ports of, among others, Porto, Corunna and Santander (the Second Tier).

Until recently, study of the early modern economy in Europe has tended to have heroes and villains: the former being the progressive and 'modern' economies of the Netherlands and England, and the latter being doomed, backward and Catholic Italy and Spain. This picture has now changed quite drastically, and there is far more emphasis on the general growth of the European economy during this period. The progressive removal of the neighbouring threats to European prosperity (particularly the gradual crippling of Ottoman power) created an environment which benefited all societies and not simply the traditionally emphasised 'Atlantic' economies.

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, vibrant port cities became home to thousands of Africans in transit. Free and enslaved blacks alike crafted the necessary materials to support transoceanic commerce and labored as stevedores, carters, sex workers, and boarding-house keepers. Even though Africans continued to be exchanged as chattel, urban frontiers allowed a number of enslaved blacks to negotiate the right to hire out their own time, often greatly enhancing their autonomy within the Atlantic commercial system. In The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, eleven original essays by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America chronicle the black experience in Atlantic ports, providing a rich and diverse portrait of the ways in which Africans experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery. Describing life in Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Africa, this volume illuminates the historical identity, agency, and autonomy of the African experience as well as the crucial role Atlantic cities played in the formation of diasporic cultures. By shifting focus away from plantations, this volume poses new questions about the nature of slavery in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, illustrating early modern urban spaces as multiethnic sites of social connectivity, cultural incubation, and political negotiation. Contributors: Trevor Burnard, Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Matt D. Childs, Kevin Dawson, Roquinaldo Ferreira, David Geggus, Jane Landers, Robin Law, David Northrup, João José Reis, James H. Sweet, Nicole von Germeten.