Thesis advisor: Cynthia L. Lyerly / This dissertation uses an early-modern, transnational lens to examine slavery in eighteenth-century Boston. It serves as a test case for reexamining and reconceptualizing slavery in British North America and the Atlantic World. Rather than the traditional dichotomous conception of slavery and freedom, colonial-era slavery must be understood as part of a continuum of unfreedom. In Boston, African slavery existed alongside many other forms of dependence, including indentured servitude, apprenticeship, pauper apprenticeship, and Indian slavery. Drawing heavily on legal records such as wills and trial transcripts, we can see how African slavery functioned within this complex world of dependency. In this hierarchical, inherently unfree world, enslaved Bostonians were more concerned with their everyday treatment than emancipation. Eschewing modern notions of freedom and liberty and understanding slavery as part of a larger Atlantic World characterized by a culture of unfreedom, this study demonstrates not only how African slaves were able to decode their new homeland and shape the terms of enslavement, but also how marginalized people engrained themselves in the very fabric of colonial American society. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Thesis advisor: Owen Stanwood / The values of free trade, decentralized governance, and staunch anti-Catholicism that defined the British Empire in the eighteenth century were the result of decades of struggle between the Stuart monarchy and its subjects over the future direction of the empire. At the heart of this struggle were Scottish Presbyterians, who conceived this vision of empire while in exile as religious refugees in colonial North America. They opposed the Crown’s preference for an exclusionary, mercantilist, and avowedly Anglican (even crypto-Catholic) empire and fought to undermine it following the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. They succeeded thanks to the religious and trade networks they created to connect their various diasporic communities in the Dutch Republic, northeastern America, and the Caribbean. Their networks also connected them to sympathetic colonial allies who provided the credit and patronage they needed to undermine English restrictions on their work and worship. Between 1660 and 1715, their success as smugglers and religious rabble-rousers, combined with the threat posed by the Darien scheme they financed and supplied, persuaded officials in London that embracing Scottish Presbyterians was a better means of advancing England’s imperial interests than continuing to marginalize them. The success of their networks during their period in exile left many Scots well placed to capitalize on their new status as legitimated Britons after 1707. They quickly filled leading commercial, military, political, and religious offices where they could continue to shape the British Empire in North America according to their vision in the eighteenth century. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

<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.

Current historiography on French empire building in the early modern period rests on a host of unexamined terms, including colony, empire, monopoly, company, and trading privileges. Yet, these terms were anything but fixed, certain or uncomplicated to contemporaries. This dissertation takes as its subject the exercise of authority in New France through proprietorships and companies to get to the political, legal, and ideological heart of French empire building. Organized chronologically, each chapter corresponds to a different constellation of authority, ranging from a proprietorship in which the titleholder subdelegated his trading privileges and administrative authority to two separate parties to a commercial company that managed both jurisdictions. Engaging with cutting-edge international literature on sovereignty, empire formation, and early modern state building, this thesis resituates the story of the colonization of French North America in an Atlantic framework. It relies partly on civil suits that arose in France during the first three decades of the seventeenth century over powers and privileges in New France. This frequent litigation has traditionally been ignored by historians of New France; however, my research suggests that it was an integral part of the process of colonization. On the ground, claimants fought for ascendancy using instruments of legal authority and personal power. These contests in New France often had a second act in the courts of France, where parties’ actions exposed preoccupations quite removed from the colonial enterprise, particularly jurisdictional rivalries, both personal and institutional. New France became part of the admiral’s efforts to consolidate and extend his authority, thereby incorporating the colony into an existing French institution. Royal ambitions to control maritime commerce and navigation conflicted with the admiral’s growing jurisdiction, leading to plays for power in New France. Domestic challenges to exclusive trading privileges overseas were intimately connected to concerns over royal encroachment on provincial jurisdiction. Such examples highlight both the intimate connections between the construction of sovereignty in the colonial realm and the process of state formation in France and the contingency and contestation associated with these processes in the early seventeenth-century Atlantic.

Current historiography on French empire building in the early modern period rests on a host of unexamined terms, including colony, empire, monopoly, company, and trading privileges. Yet, these terms were anything but fixed, certain or uncomplicated to contemporaries. This dissertation takes as its subject the exercise of authority in New France through proprietorships and companies to get to the political, legal, and ideological heart of French empire building. Organized chronologically, each chapter corresponds to a different constellation of authority, ranging from a proprietorship in which the titleholder subdelegated his trading privileges and administrative authority to two separate parties to a commercial company that managed both jurisdictions. Engaging with cutting-edge international literature on sovereignty, empire formation, and early modern state building, this thesis resituates the story of the colonization of French North America in an Atlantic framework. It relies partly on civil suits that arose in France during the first three decades of the seventeenth century over powers and privileges in New France. This frequent litigation has traditionally been ignored by historians of New France; however, my research suggests that it was an integral part of the process of colonization. On the ground, claimants fought for ascendancy using instruments of legal authority and personal power. These contests in New France often had a second act in the courts of France, where parties’ actions exposed preoccupations quite removed from the colonial enterprise, particularly jurisdictional rivalries, both personal and institutional. New France became part of the admiral’s efforts to consolidate and extend his authority, thereby incorporating the colony into an existing French institution. Royal ambitions to control maritime commerce and navigation conflicted with the admiral’s growing jurisdiction, leading to plays for power in New France. Domestic challenges to exclusive trading privileges overseas were intimately connected to concerns over royal encroachment on provincial jurisdiction. Such examples highlight both the intimate connections between the construction of sovereignty in the colonial realm and the process of state formation in France and the contingency and contestation associated with these processes in the early seventeenth-century Atlantic.

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.