<p>This dissertation examines Haiti's crucial role in the re-making of the Atlantic World in the early 19th century. The point of departure for this work is Haiti's Declaration of Independence in 1804 and my research explores how events in Haiti raised profound questions about revolutionary legitimacy and national sovereignty. The emergence of Haiti as an independent nation fueled unprecedented international debates about racial hierarchy, the connections between freedom and sovereignty, and the intertwining of ideological and political relationships among nations and empires. While these debates came to be resolved in part during the next two centuries, they remain alive today both for specific nations and for the international community.</p> / Dissertation

This dissertation examines the ways that slaves and free blacks participated in and shaped the Bourbon Reforms in New Spain (Mexico and Central America) during the period of 1750-1808. By framing the Bourbon Reforms in this part of the Americas through an Atlantic World perspective, centered on the importance of slavery to European empire-building efforts in the eighteenth century, this dissertation argues that the politics of difference was vital to these imperial ambitions even in places where the slave population was relatively small. In the context of the slave and free black populations, the Spanish Empire determined its politics of difference on prejudices against blacks informed by skin color. Slaves and free blacks, nonetheless, actively participated in Bourbon imperial projects through litigation, forcing negotiations by escaping slavery, giving service in the militias defending the frontiers, borderlands, and imperial cities, and forging important kinship ties that shaped their identities and social networks that they used to negotiate their position in the imperial order. I argue that a pivotal moment when racism exacerbated the relationships of slaves and free blacks with the Crown was the Haitian Revolution. Although racist attitudes were already present against blacks, the Haitian Revolution demonstrated that slaves could eradicate slavery and the colonial order associated. The impact of this revolution was profound and even affected regions of the Americas that had small slave populations.

New ideas about trade, society, and the nature of government pulsed throughout the Atlantic World during the eighteenth century. This dissertation explores the relationship between political reforms and life along a colonial frontier. To do so, this project analyzes the effects of new laws imposed by the Spanish monarchy in Central America during the eighteenth century. The policies implemented during this time offered unequal prospects to social groups (e.g., Indians, merchants, soldiers, and farmers), state and non-state institutions (e.g., the Church, town councils, merchant guilds, and regional governments), and individuals to reconfigure traditional local power arrangements. This process, however, produced new conflicts between individuals, communities, and institutions as they attempted to expand and defend their traditional roles in society. I argue Nicaragua's relative isolation from the rest of the Spanish world allowed for the already complex and unwieldy process to become even more difficult. Thus, the majority of the reforms introduced over the eighteenth century remained poorly implemented. Even in areas where royal officials achieved noticeable progress and success, such as the creation of a tobacco monopoly, the new legal regime created new, often unforeseen, problems. In the first part of my dissertation, I examine how vague (and sometimes contradictory) decrees from Spain provided opportunities for new expressions of local power. In the first chapter, I examine the effect that new laws limiting the power of the Church had on local officials and members of the clergy. For example, new ordinance concerning the regulation of private gatherings and dances provoked a major conflict between two pillars of local rule: the bishop and the governor. In the second chapter, I analyze how new laws and decrees contributed to the expansion of an already flourishing black market. New economic ideas, such as ones that established royal monopolies, led to a significant increase in the remittances sent to Spain from Central America; however these same economic policies also eroded local economies and pushed some individuals to participate in illicit trade. The second half of this study analyzes the colonial experiences of indigenous peoples in two very different areas of Central America. In the third chapter, I examine western Nicaragua, where Spanish rule was its strongest and indigenous communities struggled to defend themselves from increasingly onerous demands for labor and tribute. In the fourth chapter, I shift the view to eastern and central Nicaragua and Honduras, where Spain's presence was tenuous or non-existent. There, local indigenous groups capitalized on Spanish fears of a British presence in eastern Central America to extract major concessions and preserve their autonomy while individuals sold their services to the competing empires. This dissertation draws on extensive work with sources, many hitherto untapped, at archives in Spain, Guatemala, the United States, and Nicaragua to demonstrate that residents of Spanish Central America—Spanish, American born Spaniards, natives, mulattos, and mestizos alike—contributed to new understandings of imperial goals that proved that some reforms could be flexible and amendable to local conditions. The legal battles, Church records, military reports, and pleas to the king also highlight shifting ideas about the political, economic, and social organization of society. Beyond its contribution to the limited studies that focus on Nicaragua during the colonial period, my dissertation adds to the broader, comparative fields of colonial studies, economic history, the study of borderlands and frontiers, and the Atlantic World.

During the eighteenth century, African slavery played a fundamental role in the lives of settlers in the Illinois Country. The master class viewed slavery in terms of control meaning the complete domination of the slave system. Lawmakers, first the French bureaucracy and later (to a lesser extent) the Americans, pursued control through legislation. The most notable slave code was the French, Code Noir de la Louisiane, which tried to specifically address every conceivable slave situation. French settlers in the area also sought control of the slave system through the selective implementation of the law. African-descended people viewed slavery in terms of power. Slavery created imbalances in the lives of these people that they tried to rectify through accessing both spiritual and temporal power. The mode of accessing spiritual power that African-descended enslaved people in the Illinois Country used demonstrates a West-Central-African mindset and is best understood within the context of the African Atlantic Diaspora. Though the Illinois Country changed colonial hands several times from 1673 to 1818, the population makeup and slave system remained relatively unchanged until the massive influx of American settlers at the turn of the nineteenth century. During the beginning of the American administration of the Illinois Country, some French slaveholders integrated into the American indenture system, others remained aloof, and most moved to the Missouri side of the Mississippi River. The coming of the Americans eventually brought about the end of the French settlers and their enslaved people as separately identifiable entities in the Illinois Country.

Traditionally, academic narratives on Irish immigration to the Americas have focused on experiences of dislocation caused by changes in geography. Settlers, they argue, clung to Old World identities, adapted to new cultural habits or mixed the two. This dissertation explores the social and cultural transitions of Irish immigrants who arrived in New Orleans between 1780 and 1820, or during the city’s late Spanish colonial and early national period. Employing an object-focused perspective, it shows that these persons inhabited a transoceanic setting that linked Ireland and the Gulf Coast together in their shared investments in commerce and conscious consumerism. This resulted in a significant overlap between travelers’ Old and New World lives, and it suggests a new migratory model focused on continuity across the Atlantic Ocean. Referencing the examples of foods, linens and enslaved persons, this dissertation shows that Irishmen and women had ample contact with the non-local, even before they moved overseas. This prepared them, in many ways, for their lives abroad. Some goods, like the South American potato, were so ingrained in island culture by the late 1700s that consumers forgot its foreign provenance. Others, like textiles, had values that changed between Ireland and Louisiana. The example of slaveholding, in particular, points to the ways that immigrants encountered human-commodities common to their visual culture but unrecognizable in practice. The many Irish immigrants who became slave-owners, ultimately, adapted material languages concerning wealth and status they brought from Europe to these new consumerism. They thus made sense of the exotic in familiar terms. By examining the growth of commercial webs and the market availabilities of early New Orleans, this project offers an intimate look at experiences of movement, materiality and cosmopolitanism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. / acase@tulane.edu

The colonization of British East Florida in 1763 did not occur in a vacuum. Colonizers formulated different settlement plans based on their experience in the colonies and the Atlantic world in general. The most obvious differentiation was in their choice of labor. Some men chose to base their settlements on slave labor. Others imported white laborers either as indentured servants or tenant farmers. Historians have looked at this differentiation in labor as an important element in the downfall of the colony, but the key question should be: why did each man choose the labor and settlement scheme he did? The answer to this question goes to the nature of the British Empire and the different ideas that developed in the center and peripheral areas of the imperial system. Based on a close analysis of correspondence, official records and petitions, this study examines four different men who were involved in colonizing early East Florida: Colonial governor James Grant, Atlantic merchant Richard Oswald, former member of parliament Denys Rolle, and Scottish physician Andrew Turnbull. Each man dealt with the problems of colonization in different ways. This study is about how each man dealt with the many different influences regarding colonization and labor.

A presente tese de doutorado pretende analisar as razões que levaram Rio de Janeiro e Havana a se constituírem como as maiores cidades escravistas das Américas. O recorte inicial da pesquisa é o ano de 1763, quando as duas cidades transformaram-se em localidades-chave nos Impérios Ibéricos graças ao reordenamento das possessões europeias no Novo Mundo. Ainda que em meados do século XVIII Rio e Havana tivessem relações distintas com a escravidão, o que se observa a partir de 1763 é que o cativeiro urbano tornou-se cada vez mais importante para o funcionamento das duas cidades. Tal importância passa a ser operada em outra escala na última década do setecentos, principalmente após a rebelião dos escravos de Saint-Domingue (1791), quando uma série de Revoluções assolou o Mundo Atlântico questionando a totalidade do Antigo Regime. A despeito do movimento abolicionista e das independências americanas, as elites coloniais do Rio e de Havana conseguem refazer suas relações com o poder metropolitano em defesa da manutenção da escravidão e do tráfico transatlântico, que começou a ser operado numa escala nunca vista. Como espelhos que refletiam a escolha política e econômica feita pelas elites luso-brasileira e cubana, Rio de Janeiro e Havana tornaram-se não só importantes portas de entrada para os africanos escravizados, como urbes que dependiam cada vez mais de braços escravos para funcionar. Nem mesmo a assimetria política gerada em 1808 (quando o Rio de Janeiro deixou de ser capital colonial para transformar-se em Corte) alterou a forma sincrônica, e muitas vezes dialógica, por meio da qual as duas cidades lidaram com a escravidão. As semelhanças na articulação entre espaço urbano e cidade vigoraram até a década de 1840, momento em que Rio de Janeiro e Havana passaram a dividir o pouco honroso título de maiores cidades escravistas do Novo Mundo. O ano de 1844 foi especialmente relevante, pois a Rebelião de La Escalera em Havana e os novos rumos nos debates parlamentares para o fim do tráfico no Rio anunciavam mudanças que alterariam o peso da escravidão no espaço citadino. A análise sincrônica deste longo processo foi feita, sobretudo, a partir do exame de documentos que tratassem da instância urbana dessas duas cidades, mas que, ao mesmo tempo, permitissem compreender as relações das urbes com as unidades políticas que faziam parte. Por isso, a maior parte das fontes consultadas foram os documentos produzidos pelos órgãos que administravam as instâncias municipais do Rio de Janeiro e de Havana, sobretudo aquelas que diziam respeito ao governo dos escravos. Acreditasse, pois, que a escolha por essa tipologia documental permitiu a análise de três dimensões da escravidão nessas duas cidades: o cotidiano das relações escravistas em cada uma das cidades; o peso do cativeiro citadino como parte constitutiva das histórias do Brasil e de Cuba; a singular paridade que fez do Rio de Janeiro e de Havana irmãs do Atlântico. / This doctoral thesis aims to analyze the reasons that led Rio de Janeiro and Havana to become the major slave cities in the Americas. The starting point of the research is the year 1763, when both cities became key locations in the Iberian Empires due to the reorganization of European possessions in the New World. Although in mid-eighteenth century Rio and Havana had different relations with slavery, it is noticed from 1763 that the urban captivity became increasingly more important to the functioning of the two cities. Such importance starts to be observed on another scale in the last decade of the Seven Hundreds, especially after the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue (1791), when a series of Revolutions ravaged the Atlantic World questioning the whole of the Old Regime. Despite the abolitionist movement and American independences, the colonial elites of Rio and Havana manage to rebuild their relationships with the metropolitan power in favor of maintaining slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, which began to be operated on a scale never seen before. As mirrors reflecting the political and economic choice made by Luso-Brazilian and Cuban elites, Rio de Janeiro and Havana have become not only important entry points to the enslaved Africans, but also large urban areas that increasingly depended on slave arms to work. Not even the political asymmetry generated in 1808 (when Rio de Janeiro turned from being the colonial capital to being the Royal Court) modified the synchronous and often dialogical way through which the two cities have dealt with slavery. The similarities in the relationship between urban space and city existed until the 1840s, which was the moment at which Rio de Janeiro and Havana began to share the little honorable title of largest slave cities of the New World. The year 1844 was particularly relevant, since the Rebellion of La Escalera in Havana and the new directions in parliamentary debates regarding the end of trafficking in Rio announced changes that would alter the weight of slavery in the city space. The synchronic analysis of this long process was done primarily through the examination of documents that addressed the urban context of these two cities, but at the same time allowed one to understand the relations between the large urban areas and the political units that were part of them. Therefore, most of the consulted sources were the documents produced by the public agencies that ran the \"city\" spheres of Rio de Janeiro and Havana, especially those that concerned the government of slaves. It is believed, therefore, that the choice for this type of documents has allowed the analysis of three dimensions of slavery in these two cities: the daily lives of slave relationships in each of the cities, the weight of the city captivity as a constituent part of the histories of Brazil and Cuba and the unique parity that has made Rio de Janeiro and Havana sisters of the Atlantic.

Enlightenment philosophers had long feared the effects of crisscrossing boundaries, both real and imagined. Such fears were based on what they considered a brutal ocean space frequented by protean shape-shifters with a dogma of ruthless exploitation and profit. This intellectual study outlines the formation and fragmentation of a fluctuating worldview as experienced through the circum-Atlantic life and travels of merchant, slaveowner, and slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley during the Era of Revolution. It argues that the process began from experiencing the costs of loyalty to the idea of the British Crown and was tempered by the pervasiveness of violence, mobility, anxiety, and adaptation found in the booming Atlantic markets of the Caribbean during the Haitian Revolution. Tracing Kingsley’s manipulations of identity and race through his peripatetic journey serves to go beyond the infinite masks of his self-invention and exposes the deeply imbedded transatlantic dimensions of power.

During the nineteenth century, the Gulf of Mexico fostered the movement of people, ideas, and news throughout the surrounding regions. Although each colony and state surrounding the basin had distinct cultures and traditions, they shared the legacy of slavery and emancipation. This study examines the transformation of labor that occurred for sugar planters in British Guiana and southern Louisiana during the age of emancipation. In this comparative project, I argue that in the 1830s planters from the British West Indies set the trajectory for solutions to the labor problem by curtailing the freedom of former slaves with Asian contract labor. Those in the sugar parishes of southern Louisiana followed this same framework in the 1860s yet it led to different outcomes. The nature of the circum-Caribbean provided opportunities for planters throughout the Gulf to observe the Asian indentured system and use a form of it in their distinct societies.

Archaeological research at Harbour Island, Bahamas, was designed to help explore and develop the concept of maritimity, or identity grounded in perceived (or imagined) shared traits deriving from a community’s relationship with the maritime environment. Maritimity can best be identified by using three broad and overlapping categories of Landscape, Maritime Resources and Maritime Material Culture. Historical documents and maritime cultural landscape elements establish the maritimity of Harbour Island in the context of these categories. Artifacts, procured through archaeological survey of nine properties inhabited since at least the eighteenth century, are analyzed to investigate whether there any notable differences in the archaeological assemblages of maritime communities that indicate maritimity. Analysis relies on Stanley South's artifact classification system and his Carolina Artifact pattern. The nine properties are compared among themselves as well as with four other sites from the western British Atlantic region. Comparisons between the Harbour Island sites reveal a strong homogeneity of ceramic types at all households and a low representation of personal and clothing artifacts that indicate the relative poverty of the community. Maritime activities are not strongly represented in the archaeological record. When compared to four other sites from Jamaica, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Delaware, the assemblage from the Harbour Island community is relatively comparable to other sites influenced by British colonial culture. Although the domestic artifacts contain little maritime material culture, the development of the island's built environment demonstrates maritimity in both the categories of Landscape and Maritime Material Culture. Faunal remains from Harbour Island, consisting primarily of fish and shellfish, provide archaeological evidence of the importance of the Maritime Resources category. Only when the evidence from all three categories of maritimity is considered together can Harbour Island be identified archaeologically as a community that strongly identified with both the maritime environment and the dominant British Colonial Atlantic culture.