<p>In my dissertation, "The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti," I investigate the cultural history of West Central African slavery at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the late eighteenth century. My research focuses on the Loango Coast, a region that has received little scholarly attention despite the fact that it was responsible for roughly half of slave exports from West Central Africa at the time. The goal of my dissertation is to understand how enslaved Kongolese men and women used cultural practices to mediate the experience of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic world. To do so, I follow captives from their point of origin in West Central Africa to the Loango Coast and finally to the French colony of Saint Domingue in order to examine these areas as part of a larger "Kongolese Atlantic" world. </p><p>My dissertation begins by exploring the social and political history of the slave trade in the Loango Coast kingdoms, charting the structural changes that took place as a result of Atlantic trade. Next, I use historical linguistics to investigate the origins of captives sold on the Loango Coast. I find that the majority of captives came broadly from the Kongo zone, specifically from the Mayombe rainforest and Loango Coast kingdoms north of the River Congo. I then use a sociolinguistic methodology to reconstruct the cultural history of those groups in the near-absence of written documents. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I follow enslaved Central Africans from the Loango Coast to Saint Domingue, examining how they used specific and identifiable north coast cultural practices in the context of slavery. I find enslaved Central Africans used north coast spiritual tools such as divination, possession, trance, and power objects to address the material problems of plantation life. Finally, I argue the persistence of these spiritual practices demonstrates a remarkable durability of Kongolese ontology on both sides of the Kongolese Atlantic world.</p><p>My research produces new information about the history of the Loango Coast as well as the colony of Saint Domingue. The north coast origin of captives which I establish using historical linguistics contradicts earlier arguments that slaves traded on the Loango Coast originated from Kingdom of Kongo or from the inland Malebo Pool or Upper River Congo trade. I show inhabitants of the coastal kingdoms and Mayombe rainforest were not mere middlemen in the interior slave trade as previously thought, but were the victims of new mechanisms of enslavement created as a result of the erosion of traditional political institutions due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The north coast origin of Loango Coast captives has repercussions for the cultural history of the Americas. It means that captives were not "Atlantic Creoles" with prior knowledge of European culture and religion. I argue historians can only understand the meaning of the cultural practices of Africans in the Americas by understanding where Africans came from and what cultural and linguistic tools they brought with them. The use and transmission of Kongolese ritual knowledge and spiritual technologies in Saint Domingue challenges historians of slavery to move beyond the false dichotomy that culture originated in either Africa or on the plantation and forces a fundamental reassessment of the concept of creolization.</p> / Dissertation

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.

My dissertation argues that paper money created a new regime of value in early America, inscribed on the money itself and expressed in the political ordering of society. The radical ideas about money and value that inspired the colonial currencies originated in Commonwealth England. Those ideas spread to the North American colonies after the Restoration, where they conveyed changing notions about membership in the political community. Paper money, its proponents believed, constituted not only the “sinews” of trade and key to limitless wealth but also the “blood” that nourished the body politic. Ironically, the expansion of paper money in early America after 1710 both reflected and helped kindle broader material and cultural changes throughout the wider English Atlantic world that strained the bonds of the provincial political community. Ultimately, however, it was not these changes, but British attempts to control paper money in the mid-eighteenth century, that became corrosive to the imperial order. Disagreements over the prerogative to create money and value, I contend, occupied a key role in the crisis leading to the American Revolution. / 2020-02-14T00:00:00Z

This dissertation studies the role of translation in the emergence of political concepts as they traveled through the Atlantic world in various discourses, documents, and genres of writing. A practice vital to new revolutionary governments, exiled or internal dissidents, and international abolitionists alike, the translation of political writing supported movements and expanded their scope by, I argue, not merely circulating, but actively transforming the meaning of such concepts as “liberty,” “equality,” “emancipation,” “public feeling,” “the people,” and “abolition.” Our study of this phenomenon has been limited—even stifled altogether—by the still prevailing tendency, academically and colloquially, to misconstrue translation as transparent communication, as the transfer of meaning unchanged from one language to another. Against this tendency, my study proceeds from the understanding that translation is an interpretive act that necessarily varies the meaning, form, and effects of whatever materials are translated. I examine cases of translation that generatively intervened in two decisive moments for the transnational production of the ideas that would become foundational for so-called Western modernity: the Age of Revolutions and the abolitionist period. I offer close readings of the translation of state papers, political theory, and literature by African American educator Prince Saunders, Venezuelan diplomat Manuel García de Sena, Irish abolitionist R.R. Madden, and French writer Louise Swanton Belloc. They demonstrate how key insurgent ideas were forged through cultural exchange in more textured, dynamic historical complexity than we have yet grasped. As the project traces the resignification of political concepts that circulated the ports of the slaveholding Atlantic, into and out of French, Spanish, and English, it seeks to push the disciplinary boundaries of comparative Americanist or Atlanticist frameworks to treat translations as objects of study in their own right, worthy of sustained and systematic analysis. / English

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This dissertation examines the life and complicated career of Sir James Wright (1716-1785), in an effort to better understand the complex struggle for power in colonial Georgia. Specifically, this project will highlight the contest for autonomy between four groups: Britains and Georgians (core-periphery), lowcountry and backcountry residents, whites and Natives, and Rebels and Loyalists. An English-born grandson of Chief Justice Sir Robert Wright, James Wright was raised in Charleston, South Carolina following his father’s appointment as that colony’s chief justice. The younger Wright attended Gray’s Inn in London and served South Carolina in a variety of capacities, most notably as their attorney general and colonial agent prior to his appointment as governor of Georgia in 1761. Additionally, he had a voracious appetite for land and became colonial Georgia’s largest landowner, accumulating nearly 26,000 acres, worked by no less than 525 slaves. As governor, Wright guided Georgia through a period of intense and steady economic growth and within a decade of his arrival, no one could still claim Georgia to be a “fledgling province” as it had become intricately engaged in a transatlantic mercantilist economy resembling South Carolina and any number of Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Moreover, Governor Wright maintained royal authority in Georgia longer and more effectively than any of his counterparts. Although several factors contributed to his success in delaying the seemingly inexorable revolutionary tide, his patience and keen political mind proved the deciding factor. He was the only of Britain’s thirteen colonies to enforce the Stamp Act of 1765. He also managed to stay a step or two ahead of Georgia’s Sons of Liberty until the spring of 1776. In short, Sir James Wright lived a transatlantic life, taking advantage of every imperial opportunity which presented itself. He earned numerous important government positions and amassed an incredible fortune, totaling over £100,000 sterling. His long imperial career, which delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony, offers important insights into a number of important historiographic fields.

This dissertation examines the life and conflicted career of Sir James Wright (1716-1785), in an effort to better understand the complex struggle for power in both colonial Georgia and eighteenth-century British Empire. Specifically, this project will highlight the contest for autonomy between four groups: Britains and Georgians (core-periphery), lowcountry and backcountry residents, whites and Natives, and Rebels and Loyalists. An English-born grandson of Chief Justice Sir Robert Wright, James Wright was raised in Charleston, South Carolina following his father’s appointment as that colony’s chief justice. Young James served South Carolina in a number of capacities, public and ecclesiastical, prior to his admittance to London’s Gray’s Inn in London. Most notably, he was selected as their attorney general and colonial agent prior to his appointment as governor of Georgia in 1761. Wright collected more than public offices in his endless quest for respect and social advancement. He also possessed a voracious appetite for land and became colonial Georgia’s largest landowner, accumulating nearly 26,000 acres, worked by no less than 525 slaves. As governor, he guided Georgia through a period of intense and steady economic and territorial growth. By the time of the American Revolution, Georgia had become fully integrated into the greater transatlantic mercantilist economy, resembling South Carolina and any number of Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Moreover, Governor Wright maintained royal authority in Georgia longer and more effectively than any of his North American counterparts. Although several factors contributed to his success in delaying the seemingly inexorable revolutionary tide, his patience and keen political mind proved the deciding factor. He was the only of Britain’s thirteen colonies to enforce the Stamp Act of 1765 and managed to stay a step or two ahead of Georgia’s Sons of Liberty until the winter of 1775-1776. In short, Sir James Wright lived a transatlantic life, taking advantage of every imperial opportunity afforded him. He earned numerous important government positions and amassed an incredible fortune, totaling over £100,000 sterling. His long imperial career delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony and offers important and unique insights into a number of important historiographic fields.