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.

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.

<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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