Ordinary Lives In The Early Caribbean

Kristen Block examines the entangled histories of Spain and England in the Caribbean during the long seventeenth century, focusing on colonialism’s two main goals: the search for profit and the call to Christian dominance. Using the stories of ordinary people, Block illustrates how engaging with the powerful rhetoric and rituals of Christianity was central to survival. Isobel Criolla was a runaway slave in Cartagena who successfully lobbied the Spanish governor not to return her to an abusive mistress. Nicolas Burundel was a French Calvinist who served as henchman to the Spanish governor of Jamaica before his arrest by the Inquisition for heresy. Henry Whistler was an English sailor sent to the Caribbean under Oliver Cromwell’s plan for holy war against Catholic Spain. Yaff and Nell were slaves who served a Quaker plantation owner, Lewis Morris, in Barbados. Seen from their on-the-ground perspective, the development of modern capitalism, race, and Christianity emerges as a story of negotiation, contingency, humanity, and the quest for community. Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean works in both a comparative and an integrative Atlantic world frame, drawing on archival sources from Spain, England, Barbados, Colombia, and the United States. It pushes the boundaries of how historians read silences in the archive, asking difficult questions about how self-censorship, anxiety, and shame have shaped the historical record. The book also encourages readers to expand their concept of religious history beyond a focus on theology, ideals, and pious exemplars to examine the communal efforts of pirates, smugglers, slaves, and adventurers who together shaped the Caribbean’s emerging moral economy.

Kristen Block examines the entangled histories of Spain and England in the Caribbean during the long seventeenth century, focusing on colonialism's two main goals: the search for profit and the call to Christian dominance. Using the stories of ordinary people, Block illustrates how engaging with the powerful rhetoric and rituals of Christianity was central to survival. Isobel Criolla was a runaway slave in Cartagena who successfully lobbied the Spanish governor not to return her to an abusive mistress. Nicolas Burundel was a French Calvinist who served as henchman to the Spanish governor of Jamaica before his arrest by the Inquisition for heresy. Henry Whistler was an English sailor sent to the Caribbean under Oliver Cromwell's plan for holy war against Catholic Spain. Yaff and Nell were slaves who served a Quaker plantation owner, Lewis Morris, in Barbados. Seen from their on-the-ground perspective, the development of modern capitalism, race, and Christianity emerges as a story of negotiation, contingency, humanity, and the quest for community. Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean works in both a comparative and an integrative Atlantic world frame, drawing on archival sources from Spain, England, Barbados, Colombia, and the United States. It pushes the boundaries of how historians read silences in the archive, asking difficult questions about how self-censorship, anxiety, and shame have shaped the historical record. The book also encourages readers to expand their concept of religious history beyond a focus on theology, ideals, and pious exemplars to examine the communal efforts of pirates, smugglers, slaves, and adventurers who together shaped the Caribbean's emerging moral economy.

Set along both the physical and social margins of the British Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean explores the construction of difference through the everyday life of colonial subjects. Jenny Shaw examines how marginalized colonial subjects--Irish and Africans--contributed to these processes. By emphasizing their everyday experiences Shaw makes clear that each group persisted in its own cultural practices; Irish and Africans also worked within--and challenged--the limits of the colonial regime. Shaw's research demonstrates the extent to which hierarchies were in flux in the early modern Caribbean, allowing even an outcast servant to rise to the position of island planter, and underscores the fallacy that racial categories of black and white were the sole arbiters of difference in the early English Caribbean. The everyday lives of Irish and Africans are obscured by sources constructed by elites. Through her research, Jenny Shaw overcomes the constraints such sources impose by pushing methodological boundaries to fill in the gaps, silences, and absences that dominate the historical record. By examining legal statutes, census material, plantation records, travel narratives, depositions, interrogations, and official colonial correspondence, as much for what they omit as for what they include, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean uncovers perspectives that would otherwise remain obscured. This book encourages readers to rethink the boundaries of historical research and writing and to think more expansively about questions of race and difference in English slave societies.

Set along both the physical and social margins of the British Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean explores the construction of difference through the everyday life of colonial subjects. Jenny Shaw examines how marginalized colonial subjects--Irish and Africans--contributed to these processes. By emphasizing their everyday experiences Shaw makes clear that each group persisted in its own cultural practices; Irish and Africans also worked within--and challenged--the limits of the colonial regime. Shaw's research demonstrates the extent to which hierarchies were in flux in the early modern Caribbean, allowing even an outcast servant to rise to the position of island planter, and underscores the fallacy that racial categories of black and white were the sole arbiters of difference in the early English Caribbean. The everyday lives of Irish and Africans are obscured by sources constructed by elites. Through her research, Jenny Shaw overcomes the constraints such sources impose by pushing methodological boundaries to fill in the gaps, silences, and absences that dominate the historical record. By examining legal statutes, census material, plantation records, travel narratives, depositions, interrogations, and official colonial correspondence, as much for what they omit as for what they include, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean uncovers perspectives that would otherwise remain obscured. This book encourages readers to rethink the boundaries of historical research and writing and to think more expansively about questions of race and difference in English slave societies.

This book discusses the ways in which early modern hagiographic sources can be used to study lived religion and everyday life from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. For several decades, saints’ lives, other spiritual biographies, miracle narratives, canonisation processes, iconography, and dramas, have been widely utilised in studies on medieval religious practices and social history. This fruitful material has however been overlooked in studies of the early modern period, despite the fact that it witnessed an unprecedented growth in the volume of hagiographic material. The contributors to this volume address this, and illuminate how early modern hagiographic material can be used for the study of topics such as religious life, the social history of medicine, survival strategies, domestic violence, and the religious experience of slaves.

This four-volume collection brings together rare pamphlets from the formative years of the English involvement in the Caribbean. Texts presented in the volumes cover the first impressions of the region, imperial rivalries between European traders and settlers and the experience of day-to-day life in the colonies. Volume 4: Making Meaning The flora and fauna of the islands and their economic potential was documented in a number of tracts which also helped to promote the colony as an attractive and bountiful place to settle. Running counter to the promotional literature was a whole sub-genre on natural disasters. Hurricanes and earthquakes were relatively common, and the commentators who wrote about them did so from a variety of motives: to entertain, to shock, to warn or simply to record them. Often portrayed as irreligious, settlers engaged energetically in the religious debates of the time. Dissenters were encouraged or coerced into leaving for the colonies and a number of Quaker publications condemned the transportation of their coreligionists. Though most settlers were members of the Church of England, its textual footprint was quite small and many more dissenting tracts have survived.

Fifteen families.Four hundred years. The complex saga of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite in America’s history. For decades, writers from Cleveland Amory to Joseph Alsop to the editors of Politico have proclaimed the diminishment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who for generations were the dominant socio-cultural-political force in America. While the WASP elite has, in the last half century, indeed drifted from American centrality to the periphery, its relevance and impact remain, as Michael Gross reveals in his compelling chronicle. From Colonial America’s founding settlements through the Gilded Age to the present day, Gross traces the complex legacy of American WASPs—their profound accomplishments and egregious failures—through the lives of fifteen influential individuals and their very privileged, sometimes intermarried families. As the Bradford, Randolph, Morris, Biddle, Sanford, Peabody and Whitney clans progress, prosper and periodically stumble, defining aspects in the four-century sweep of American history emerge: our wide, oft-contentious religious diversity; the deep scars of slavery, genocide, and intolerance; the creation and sometime mis-use of astonishing economic and political power; an enduring belief in the future; an instinct to offset inequity with philanthropy; an equal capacity for irresponsible, sometimes wanton, behavior. “American society was supposed to be different,” writes Gross, “but for most of our history we have had a patriciate, an aristocracy, a hereditary oligarchic upper class, who initiated the American national experiment.” In previous acclaimed books such as 740 Park and Rogues’ Gallery, Gross has explored elite culture in microcosm; expanding the canvas, Flight of the WASP chronicles it across four centuries and fifteen generations in an ambitious and consequential contribution to American history.

In this new edition of his crucial introduction to Caribbean history, Gad Heuman provides a comprehensive overview of the region's history, from its earliest inhabitants to contemporary political and cultural developments. Topics covered include: - The Amerindians - Sugary and Slavery - Race, Racism and Equality - The Aftermath of Emancipation - The Revolutionary Caribbean - Cultures of the Caribbean - Contemporary Themes This third edition has been updated to reflect the latest developments in the literature, and takes into account important recent events including the rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba, the ongoing problem of climate change and the threat of the Zika virus. The companion website, which includes chapter questions, a primary documents bibliography, a timeline and link to relevant websites, has also been updated with new material. The book considers not only the political and social struggles that have shaped the Caribbean, but also provides a sense of the development of the region's culture. The Caribbean: A Brief History is ideal for all students seeking a clear and readable introduction to Caribbean history.