Firsting In The Early Modern Atlantic World

For centuries, historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery, invasion, conquest, and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting, a discourse that privileges European and settler-colonial presence, movements, knowledges, and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world, 1492-1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro-settlers dominate Native Americans, while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un-firsted in scholarship on this time and place.

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.

This book shows how the Dutch accumulation of great wealth was closely linked to their involvement in warfare. By charting Dutch activity across the globe, it explores Dutch participation in the international arms trade, and in wars both at home and abroad. In doing so, it ponders the issue of how capitalism has often historically thrived best when its practitioners are ruthless and ignore the human cost of their search for riches. This complicates the traditional Marxist understanding of capitalists as middle-class exploiters in arguing for a much greater agency among lower-class Dutch soldiers and sailors in their efforts to benefit from skills that were in high demand.

In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals. In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans, as well as original use of spectacular manuscript atlases, paintings that depict on-the-spot European representations of nature, and texts that circulated imperfectly across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions of individuals. This inspired work of Atlantic, European, and American history begins with medieval concepts of nature and ends in an age when the printed book became the primary avenue for the dissemination of scientific information. Throughout the sixteenth century, the borders between the natural world and the supernatural were more porous than modern readers might realize. Native Americans and Europeans alike thought about monsters, spirits, and insects in considerable depth. In Mancall's vivid narrative, the modern world emerged as a result of the myriad encounters between peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin in this period. The centuries that followed can be comprehended only by exploring how culture in its many forms—stories, paintings, books—shaped human understanding of the natural world.

Societies perceive "Reform" or "Reforms" as substantial changes and significant breaks which must be well-justified. The Enlightenment brought forth the idea that the future was uncertain and could be shaped by human beings. This gave the concept of reform a new character and new fields of application. Those who sought support for their plans and actions needed to reflect, develop new arguments, and offer new reasons to address an anonymous public. This book aims to compile these changes under the heuristic term of "languages of reform." It analyzes the structures of communication regarding reforms in the 18th century through a wide variety of topics.

This book examines the complexities of reformed religion in early-modern England, through an examination of the experiences of Edwin Sandys, a prominent member of the Elizabethan Church hierarchy. Sandys was an ardent evangelical in the Edwardian era forced into exile under Mary I, but on his return to England he became a leader of the Elizabethan Church. He was Bishop of Worcester and London and finally Archbishop of York. His transformation from Edwardian radical to a defender of the Elizabethan status quo illustrated the changing role of the Protestant hierarchy. His fight against Catholicism dominated much of his actions, but his irascible personality also saw him embroiled in numerous conflicts and left him needing to defend his own status.

This is a coordinated presentation of the economic basis of revolutionary change in 16th- and early-17th century England, addressing a crucial but neglected phase of historical development. It traces a transformation in the agrarian economy and substantiates the decisive scale on which this took place, showing how the new forms of occupation and practice on the land related to seminal changes in the general dynamics of commercial activity. An integrated, self-regulating national market generated new imperatives, particularly a demand for a right of freedom of trade from arbitrary exactions and restraints. This took political force through the special status that rights of consent had acquired in England, based on the rise of sovereign representative law following the Break with Rome. These associations were reflected in a distinctive merchant-gentry alliance, seeking to establish freedom of trade and representative control of public finance, through parliament. This produced a persistent challenge to royal prerogatives such as impositions from 1610 onwards. Parliamentary provision, especially legislation, came to be seen as essential to good government. These ambitions led to the first revolutionary measures of the Long Parliament in early 1641, establishing automatic parliaments and the normative force of freedom of trade.

In 1718, a young woman named Moricette Nayl fought with her brother’s mother-in-law and accidentally killed her. Ruled a homicide, the incident set in motion an investigation, a trial, Moricette's flight from justice, an execution in effigy and, ultimately, the pardon of the killer and her reintegration into the community. Based on the detailed records of the court dossier, this microhistory reveals the social networks of a small town, the history of interpersonal violence, the complex criminal justice system at work, and the power of restoring harmony after a tragedy of this magnitude. An enduring mystery is the reluctance of those closest to the crime to participate in the legal process. An explanation for their silence sheds light on the turmoil of the criminal justice system in France in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. Neither independent feudal lords nor an elite tamed by an Absolutist king, the gentlemen overseeing justice in this place maintained a delicate balance between their personal power and the rule of law. The incident and its aftermath also reveal the bonds that make community possible, even in the face of senseless violence.