World 1400 1900

Encyclopedia of the
Atlantic World,
1400–1900
This page intentionally left blank
Encyclopedia of the
Atlantic World,
1400–1900
Europe, Africa, and the
Americas in an Age of
Exploration, Trade,
and Empires
Volume 1: A–K
Volume 2: L–Z
DAVID HEAD, EDITOR

Copyright © 2018 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a
review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Head, David, (Historian), editor.
Title: Encyclopedia of the Atlantic world, 1400–1900 : Europe, Africa, and the
Americas in an age of exploration, trade, and empires / David Head, editor.
Description: Santa Barbara, California : ABC-CLIO, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017015975 (print) | LCCN 2017019195 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781610692564 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610692557 (hard copy, set : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781440859984 (hard copy, vol 1 : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781440859991
(hard copy, vol 2 : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Atlantic Ocean Region—History—Encyclopedias. | Europe—History—
Encyclopedias. | America—History—Encyclopedias. | Africa—History—Encyclopedias.
Classification: LCC D210 (ebook) | LCC D210 .E53 2018 (print) |
DDC 909/.09821003—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015975
ISBN: 978-1-61069-255-7 (set)

978-1-4408-5998-4 (vol. 1)
978-1-4408-5999-1 (vol. 2)
EISBN: 978-1-61069-256-4
22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5
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Contents
Guide to Related Topics ix Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez

Preface xiii (ca. 1490–ca. 1559) 105
Introduction xvii Cahokia 107
Chronology xxiii Canary Islands 111
Cape Verde Islands 113
Abolition Movement 1 Caribs 115
Abolition of Slavery 5 Cartagena de Indias 117
Abolition of the Slave Trade 9 Cartography 119
Acadians 12 Casta System 123
Acosta, José de (1540–1600) 14 Catholic Women Religious
Age of Revolution (1750s–1850s) 17 Missionaries 126
Algonquins 20 Champlain, Samuel de (1574–1635) 130
American Revolution (1775–1783) 23 Chickasaws 133
Amsterdam 27 Chocolate 136
Angola 30 Choctaws 138
Arawaks 32 Code Noir 141
Atlantic Creoles 34 Coffee 143
Atlantic Ocean 36 Colonization Movement 146
Atlantic Slave Trade 40 Columbian Exchange 149
Azores 45 Columbus, Christopher
Aztec Empire 48 (ca. 1451–1506) 152
Bacon, Sir Francis (1561–1626) 53 Conquistadors 156
Bahia 55 Cortés, Hernán (1485–1547) 160
Barbados 58 Cotton 163
Benin 60 Coureurs de Bois 167
Bermuda 63 Creek Indians 169
Bight of Biafra 65 Cuba 172
Black Atlantic 67 Dampier, William (ca. 1651–1715) 175
Black Legend 70 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882) 177
Bogotá 73 Declaration of Independence (1776) 180
Bolívar, Simón (1783–1830) 75 Declaration of the Rights of Man
Books 79 and of the Citizen (1789) 185
Bordeaux 82 De Soto, Hernando (ca. 1496–1542) 189
Bourbon Reforms 84 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal
Bradford, William (1590–1657) 86 (ca. 1490s–1584) 192
Bradstreet, Anne (ca. 1612–1672) 89 Disease 194
Brazil 92 Doña Marina (ca. 1502–ca. 1527) 197
Brébeuf, St. Jean de (1593–1649) 95 Douglass, Frederick (1818–1895) 200
British Atlantic 98 Drake, Sir Francis (ca. 1540–1596) 203
Buenos Aires 102 Dutch Atlantic 206
vi C o n t e n t s
Dutch West India Company 209 Latin American Wars of

Edwards, Jonathan (1703–1758) 213 Independence 361
Elizabeth I (1533–1603) 216 Legal Systems 366
Elmina 218 Liberia 369
Emancipation Proclamation (1863) 221 Locke, John (1632–1704) 372
Encomienda System 224 London 375
Enlightenment 226 Louisiana 377
Equiano, Olaudah (ca. 1745–1797) 230 L’Ouverture, Toussaint
European Exploration 233 (ca. 1743–1803) 380
Evangelicalism 238 Loyalists 383
Fishing and Fisheries 243 Mali Empire 389
Florida 246 Maroons 392
Franciscans 248 Maya Civilization 395
Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790) 251 Mayflower Compact (1620) 399
French Atlantic 255 Mercantilism 403
French Revolution (1789–1799) 259 Migration 407
Fur Trade 264 Mississippians 411
Gens de Couleur 269 Mississippi Bubble (1718–1720) 414
Ghana 271 Moctezuma II (ca. 1466–1520) 417
Gold and Silver 273 Money 419
Gulf Stream 276 Moravians 421
Guns 278 Mourning Wars 424
Haitian Revolution (1791–1803) 283 Napoleon I (1769–1821) 429
Hakluyt, Richard (ca. 1552–1616) 287 Napoleonic Code 433
Hardwood 289 Nationalism 437
Hidalgo, Miguel (1753–1811) 292 Native American Slave Trade 440
Huguenots 294 New Amsterdam/New York 444
Humboldt, Alexander von New France 448
(1769–1859) 296 New Orleans 452
Huron 299 Noble Savage Myth 455
Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead 302 Olmec Civilization 459
Hutchinson, Anne (1591–1643) 305 Oneidas 463
Inca Empire (1438–1533) 309 Onondagas 466
Indentured Servants 313 Ouidah 469
Industrial Revolution 316 Pan-Indianism 473
Iroquois 321 Pequot War (1636–1637) 477
Islam 325 Pernambuco 479
Jamaica 329 Piracy 482
Jamestown 331 Plantations 486
Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826) 333 Pocahontas (ca. 1596–1617) 489
Jesuits 337 Pontiac’s War (1763–1766) 492
Joint-Stock Companies 341 Portuguese Atlantic 495
Juan Diego (1474–1548) 344 Potato 498
Judaism 346 Potosí 501
Kingdom of Kongo 351 Powhatan (ca. 1550–1618) 504
King William’s War (1688–1697) 354 Praying Indians 505
Las Casas, Bartolomé de Privateering 507
(1484–1566) 359 Progressivism 511
Contents vii
Protestant Missionaries 515 Tekakwitha, Saint Kateri

Protestant Reformation 518 (1656–1680) 621
Pueblo Revolt (1680) 522 Tenochtitlán 623
Puerto Rico 526 Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee
Puritans 528 Prophet (1775–1832) 626
Quakers 533 Tobacco 627
Quebec 537 Trade Winds 632
Quetzalcoatl 539 Treaty of Paris (1763) 634
Race 543 Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) 636
Raleigh, Sir Walter (ca. 1552–1618) 546 Treaty of Utrecht (1713) 639
Reconquista 549 Trinidad 641
Rice 552 United Provinces of the Netherlands 643
Rio de Janeiro 555 Viceregal System 647
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778) 557 Viking Voyages 650
Royal African Company 559 Virgin of Guadeloupe 653
Rum 562 Vodou 655
Sailors 567 Wesley, John (1703–1791) 661
Saint-Domingue/Haiti 570 Wheatley, Phillis (ca. 1753–1784) 664
San Martín, José de (1778–1850) 573 Whitefield, George (1714–1770) 666
Scots-Irish 575 Wilberforce, William (1759–1833) 669
Senegambia 578 Williams, Roger (ca. 1603–1683) 671
Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) 581 Wine 673
Slave Rebellion 586 Winthrop, John (1588–1649) 676
Slavery 590 Witchcraft 679
Slave Trade in Africa 594 Women 682
Smith, John (1580–1631) 598 World’s Fair Expositions 686
Smuggling 601 Yamasee War (1715–1717) 691
Spanish Armada (1588) 605 Yoruba Kingdom 694
Sugar 608
Taínos 613 Select Bibliography 699
Tea 615 Editor and Contributors 705
Tecumseh (ca. 1768–1813) 619 Index 711
Guide to Related Topics
COMMODITIES
Books Potato
Chocolate Rice
Coffee Rum
Cotton Sugar
Gold and Silver Tea
Guns Tobacco
Hardwood Wine
Money
DOCUMENTS
Code Noir Emancipation Proclamation
Declaration of Independence Mayflower Compact
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Napoleonic Code
the Citizen
EVENTS
American Revolution Protestant Reformation
Bourbon Reforms Pueblo Revolt
French Revolution Reconquista
Haitian Revolution Seven Years’ War
Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead Spanish Armada
Industrial Revolution Treaty of Paris
King William’s War Treaty of Tordesillas
Latin American Wars of Independence Treaty of Utrecht
Mississippi Bubble World’s Fair Expositions
Pequot War Yamasee War
Pontiac’s War
GROUPS
Acadians Chickasaws
Algonquins Choctaws
Arawaks Conquistadors
Atlantic Creoles Coureurs de Bois
Aztec Empire Creek Indians
Caribs Franciscans
Catholic W
omen Religious Missionaries Gens de Coleur
x G u i d e t o R e l at e d T o p i c s
Huguenots Olmec Civilization

Huron Oneidas
Inca Empire Onondagas
Indentured Servants Praying Indians
Iroquois Protestant Missionaries
Jesuits Puritans
Loyalists Quakers
Maroons Sailors
Maya Civilization Scots-Irish
Mississippians Taínos
Moravians Women
IDEAS, BELIEFS, AND CONCEPTS

Age of Revolution Judaism
Black Atlantic Legal Systems
Black Legend Mercantilism
British Atlantic Nationalism
Casta System Noble Savage Myth
Columbian Exchange Pan-Indianism
Dutch Atlantic Portuguese Atlantic
Enlightenment Race
French Atlantic Vodou
Islam Witchcraft
MOVEMENTS
Abolition Movement European Exploration
Abolition of Slavery Evangelicalism
Abolition of the Slave Trade Migration
Colonization Movement Progressivism
Disease Slave Rebellion
PEOPLE
Acosta, José de Doña Marina
Bacon, Sir Francis Douglass, Frederick
Bolívar, Simón Drake, Sir Francis
Bradford, William Edwards, Jonathan
Bradstreet, Anne Elizabeth I
Brébeuf, St. Jean de Equiano, Olaudah
Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez Franklin, Benjamin
Champlain, Samuel de Hakluyt, Richard
Columbus, Christopher Hidalgo, Miguel
Cortés, Hernán Humboldt, Alexander von
Dampier, William Hutchinson, Anne
Darwin, Charles Jefferson, Thomas
De Soto, Hernando Juan Diego
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal Las Casas, Bartolomé de
G u i d e t o R e l at e d T o p i c s xi
Locke, John Tecumseh

L’Ouverture, Toussaint Tekakwitha, Saint Kateri
Moctezuma II Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet
Napoleon I Virgin of Guadeloupe
Pocahontas Wesley, John
Powhatan Wheatley, Phillis
Quetzalcoatl Whitefield, George
Raleigh, Sir Walter Wilberforce, William
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Williams, Roger
San Martín, José de Winthrop, John
Smith, John
PLACES AND GEOGRAPHY

Amsterdam Jamestown
Angola Kingdom of Kongo
Atlantic Ocean Liberia
Azores London
Bahia Louisiana
Barbados Mali Empire
Benin New Amsterdam/New York
Bermuda New France
Bight of Biafra New Orleans
Bogotá Ouidah
Bordeaux Pernambuco
Brazil Potosí
Buenos Aires Puerto Rico
Cahokia Quebec
Canary Islands Rio de Janeiro
Cape Verde Islands Saint-Domingue/Haiti
Cartagena de Indias Senegambia
Cuba Tenochtitlán
Elmina Trade Winds
Florida Trinidad
Ghana United Provinces of the Netherlands
Gulf Stream Yoruba Kingdom
Jamaica
PRACTICES AND ENTERPRISES

Atlantic Slave Trade Piracy
Cartography Plantations
Dutch West India Company Privateering
Encomienda System Royal African Company
Fishing and Fisheries Slavery
Fur Trade Slave Trade in Africa
Joint-Stock Companies Smuggling
Mourning Wars Viceregal System
Native American Slave Trade Viking Voyages
Preface
The Atlantic world is a concept used by historians to describe how the peoples of
the four Atlantic-facing continents—Europe, Africa, North America, and South
America—became increasingly connected following the opening of sustained, reg-
ular contact between them in the fifteenth c entury. The possible connections among
people runs the gamut of human experiences: exploration and conquest; trade and
commerce; migration, both voluntary and forced; the growth of new ideas, iden-
tities, politics, religions, and cultures; the introduction of new plants, animals, and
diseases; the circulation of information, money, and credit; and the intermingling
of p eoples bringing forth new c hildren, new families, and new p eoples bridging
multiple worlds.
Given the scale of Atlantic history, the present work is necessarily selective rather
than exhaustive. It emphasizes on important individuals, the men and women who
connected empires and nations, and who drove the events that brought different
Atlantic regions together. The Encyclopedia of the Atlantic World 1400–1900: Europe,
Africa, and the Americas in an Age of Exploration, Trade, and Empires highlights impor
tant groups, stepping back from the individual to show how peoples have developed
over time as they come in contact with o thers, often different from themselves. This
two-volume work also looks at the important ideas, objects, and commodities that
circulated through the Atlantic world, changing the lives of people who themselves
never left home. Important events are not neglected; they show history happening
and Atlantic relations changing as a result of how events, always contingent, turned
out. Important places feature prominently in the encyclopedia. Geography is vital
to understanding how a broad complex like the Atlantic world worked in practice.
Finally, the encyclopedia discusses concepts, such as the Black Atlantic, that scholars
of Atlantic history confront in their work.
The Atlantic world is defined by motion, how ideas, p eople, plants, animals, dis-
eases, and objects moved from one place, one continent, to another. In some cases,
the movement is easy to see. The slave trade, for example, forcibly removed p eople
from Africa, reduced them to a commodity, and transported them to the Americas,
where they w ere sold and compelled to labor in the production of crops that would
then be harvested, processed, and transported to markets far away. From the Euro
peans, financing the slave voyages and sailing the ships; to the African slave dealers
selling h umans into bondage to the slave markets of the Americas; to the fields of
Brazil, Haiti, and V irginia and everywhere in between; to stalls of traders of tobacco,
sugar, coffee, and rum, in the Americas and beyond; to the European counting h ouses
where the revenue and costs and the total return on investment was calculated—
the slave trade knitted together e very corner of the Atlantic world.
xiv Pr e fa c e
In other cases, however, the movement from place to place is harder to see. The
Protestant Reformation, for example, was a European event. But its consequences
were far reaching, structuring the way European empires competed with each other
for colonies in the New World, shaping the experience of people, from the Puri-
tans to the Jesuits—who migrated to the Americas for religious reasons—and
changing the lives of Natives and Africans who encountered Christianity in the
New World.
Historians need to periodize their works, to choose a beginning and an end, con-
scious though they are that all beginning and ending dates are, at some level, arbi-
trary. History always has an antecedent; history always has consequences. Scholars
of the Atlantic world generally agree on a starting point: the fifteenth c entury. After
all, the voyage of Christopher Columbus began the process of encounter across the
Atlantic in its many varieties. Columbus, though most famous, was not the first to
voyage out across the ocean. He was not even first to reach the Americas, the
Vikings having preceded him to North America. Similarly, Europeans had begun
pushing to the south earlier in the fifteenth century, with Portugal achieving sig-
nificant breakthroughs in contacting lands along the African coast on the way to
finding a w ater route to India. The encyclopedia thus starts in 1400 to capture the
first moves in the Atlantic world, the moves that allowed Columbus to make his
world changing discovery in 1492. What is more, a few entries push the chronol-
ogy back even further, to show developments shaping how Europeans, Native
Americans, and Africans would act once they came in contact with each other.
Atlantic scholars have less agreement on an endpoint for Atlantic history. Most
often, they choose the early nineteenth century. In this view, the Age of Revolu-
tion, ranging from the American Revolution of the late eighteenth c entury to the
Latin American Wars of Independence of the early nineteenth century, marked a
decisive change in Atlantic relations. The Atlantic world was a world brought
together by the drive for empire as European powers brought more and more ter-
ritory under their sway. The revolutions, however, struck against empire. Colonies
became independent. The ties that had bound Europe to the Americas unraveled.
It is a strong argument. Nevertheless, other connections, beyond imperial ones,
persisted in the Atlantic world, surviving the independence of former colonies. To
take the most obvious example, slavery—a cornerstone of the Atlantic world—
persisted long into the nineteenth c entury. Slavery was abolished by the United
States in 1865, by Puerto Rico in 1873, by Cuba in 1886, and by Brazil in 1888;
more than 60 years after Brazil achieved its independence from Portugal. The Ency-
clopedia of the Atlantic World embraces the broader approach to the chronology of
the Atlantic world. It includes entries on topics throughout the nineteenth c entury,
with a few looking ahead to the twentieth century and making connections to our
world today.
Including 220 entries, the Encyclopedia of the Atlantic World also offers student
and interested nonspecialist readers a detailed Introduction to Atlantic history
between 1400 and 1900, a useful Select Bibliography, a Chronology, and a Guide
to Related Topics that breaks entries down in broad categories. All entries include
See also cross-references to related topics, and many entries also include sidebars
Pr e fa c e xv
covering interesting related topics, themes and ideas. Each entry also concludes
with a bibliography of print and electronic information resources.
Atlantic world scholarship has revolutionized the way historians understand the
vast sweep of history from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. Four conti-
nents. Five-hundred years. Atlantic history is an enormous subject. The following
work provides a guide to lead the way.
Introduction
For Europeans of the medieval and early modern periods, the Atlantic Ocean con-
jured images of the vast unknown, the sea beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, or the
Pillars of Hercules, the world known to the Greeks, and, therefore, the world of
civilization. Europeans had been venturing into the Atlantic abyss since at least the
ninth century CE, when Norsemen traversed the North Atlantic to Iceland, Green-
land, and, eventually, Newfoundland. Other adventurers—mostly Portuguese—
probed southward. They harnessed the winds and currents to explore the coast of
Africa, and eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope. As important as striking
across the Atlantic would become, Europeans of the fifteenth century did not look
in that direction. The lure of wealth and power beckoned from the East, from China
and India, as it had since antiquity. Explorers sailed the Atlantic for shorter Asian
routes, to bypass Arab middlemen, thus raising European profit margins on trade.
Moreover, domestic affairs mattered more. The clash of kingdoms in Europe occu-
pied more than enough attention for merchants and monarchs, not to mention for
ordinary people scratching out a subsistence living.
Other zones of what would become the Atlantic world w ere similarly focused
away from the Atlantic Ocean. In Africa, trade, warfare, and political rivalry brought
the continent’s many p eoples in contact with a Mediterranean sphere. Islam, hav-
ing expanded from the Arabian Peninsula, was an important force. East Africa was
linked to the Indian Ocean. Yet, much trade, and many p eople, moved overland
or via rivers, especially in West Africa, where the Atlantic Ocean was a place for
coastal fishing not exploration. For some cultures, the Atlantic was a foreboding
site. It was the world of the dead, their ancestors, and the line between land and
sea marked the division between the living and the dead.
In the Americas, some groups lived from the seas, and the islands of the Car ib
bean had beckoned to settlers as early as 2000 BCE, when people known as the
Arawaks migrated from mainland South America to the islands. Like Europeans
and Africans, Native Americans were focused more on land-based and internal con-
tacts than on venturing across the waters, though plenty of contact between a
variety of p eoples took place. The Aztecs, to take but one example, had entered
today’s Mexico in the thirteenth century and, over time, they asserted their domi-
nance over the land’s other inhabitants. By the mid-fifteenth century, before the
arrival of the Spanish, the Aztecs ruled over a network of tributaries from their
fortified imperial capital, Tenochtitlán.
Christopher Columbus’s voyage took place in 1492 against a backdrop of p eoples
engaged in many activities other than searching for new worlds. If a generaliza-
tion about such vast territories and diverse people is possible, then from Europe to
xviii I n t r o d u c t i o n
Africa to the Americas, people more often looked inward than outward, and cer-
tainly not across the Atlantic. Columbus then connected Europe and the Americas.
The significance of his achievement took time to unfold. Following four voyages
across the Atlantic, even Columbus went to his grave convinced he had found Asia.
But the stage was set for the emergence of an Atlantic world.
Spain began its conquest of the Americas with the Caribbean and adjacent
lands, their native populations reduced or even eliminated by violence and disease.
Where native populations remained numerous, Spanish conquistadors w ere a dept
at turning pre-existing native rivalries against the dominant power in regions they
coveted. Hernan Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs (1519–1521) succeeded because
he enlisted the help of Aztec tributaries chafing against the empire’s rule. Francisco
Pizarro, conquer of the Incas, followed a similar script in the Andes in 1532. Spain’s
fifteenth-and sixteenth-century conquests brought control, on paper at least, of
the vastness of the Americas outside of Brazil. Controlling that territory, however,
brought its own challenges, as the king relied on brash conquistadors with their
own ideas of who should wield power. Missionary efforts and the more robust
presence of royal officials brought additional players to the Americas.
Spain’s discovery of silver at Potosí, the site of a bonanza mine two-and-a-half
miles up in the mountains of what is today Bolivia, confirmed Spanish dreams of
exporting a fortune from the New World. Spain spent the money, flowing by the
literal ton into the king’s coffers, on foreign wars, combating the Ottoman Empire’s
advance into Europe, fighting off the Dutch Revolt, and turning up the pressure
on Protestant E ngland. Metallic wealth made Spain supreme in Europe. At the
same time, Spain’s rivals were envious. The ships carrying silver and gold from the
American mines invited would-be plunderers, encouraged by Dutch, French, and
English governments eager to blast their way into the lands that Spain claimed as
its own exclusive possession. The Elizabethan sea dog Sir Francis Drake was only
one of the earliest to plunder the Spanish in pursuit of geopolitical policy goals.
Two other developments that came to define the Atlantic world also grew over
the sixteenth c entury: sugar and slavery. The two went together, although they
were not as clearly aligned as they would later become. Nor w ere they practiced on
the same scale. The first booming sugar plantations were built by the Portuguese
on Saó Tomé, an island off the coast of Africa near the equator. Located at a natural
stopping point for European trading ships, including slave traders, Saó Tomé’s
nascent sugar industry benefitted from the availability of labor. Expanding sugar
cultivation to Brazil was slower in developing, however. Despite the region’s supe-
rior natural resources, Brazilian sugar planters depended on Native laborers, who
succumbed easily to European diseases. The slave trade, as it grew in the sixteenth
century, was not the plantation labor force of future years. Instead, slaves w ere set
to toil in silver mines like Potosí and in urban centers, such as Spain’s Cartagena de
Indies, in today’s Colombia. The Atlantic world was being knit together by an econ-
omy of extracting silver and gold, principally in the Americas but also in Africa, and
the process of conquest that made the mining possible.
In the seventeenth c entury, Europe, Africa, and the Americas became more ori-
entated toward the Atlantic as trade, migration (both forced and voluntary), and
I n t r o d u c t i o n xix
warfare all intensified. Spain was challenged by the colonization efforts of E ngland,
France, and the Netherlands in North America and the Caribbean. Portugal’s early
advantage in Africa was also diminished, especially once the Crown of the king-
dom passed to Spain in the late sixteenth c entury.
Spain’s competitors focused their energies on the periphery of the Americas,
places such as the Grand Banks, New France, the Chesapeake Bay region, and the
Hudson River Valley. New, lasting settlements w ere founded, for example, at James-
town (1607), Quebec (1608), New Netherland (1614), and New England (1620).
Gold and silver were still highly prized by European colonizers, but more and more
trade in new crops and commodities drove transatlantic commerce. The fur trade
in New France and tobacco cultivation in the Chesapeake area were less shiny than
bullion, but just as desirable. Sugar growing also proliferated. Brazilian sugar plant-
ers solved the manpower bottleneck that had limited their production, and new
centers of the sugar trade sprouted in French Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-
Domingue (today’s Haiti), and in English Jamaica and Barbados.
Expanding agricultural production and growing trade networks led to the expan-
sion of slavery and the slave trade across the seventeenth century. In Africa, the slave
trade was still dominated by powerful Africans, who captured p eople in the interior,
moved them to the coast, and oversaw their sale to Europeans. Competition among
Africans to supply slaves led to increased warfare as raiders sought to capture more
people. On the other end, competition among Europeans also picked up as Portugal
lost its market share to the Dutch, French, and English. By the end of the c entury,
English ships w ere transporting the most souls destined for sale in the New World.
Voluntary migration also surged in the seventeenth century. Most European
migrants came as servants. In Europe, servitude was a familiar condition and it
could be a v iable life strategy for a poor person hoping to improve his or her lot
over time. The Americas attracted indentured servants, men and women who con-
tracted to labor for several years in exchange for passage across the ocean and the
promise of land when they finished their terms of serv ice. Survival was no sure
thing, but it came with the reward of land that was unattainable in Europe. Reli-
gious strife also drove migration. The Puritans, Quakers, Moravians, and Hugue-
nots were the best known, but a Jewish population also traversed the seas, and
Catholics w ere in no small supply, e ither.
The European powers warred with each other throughout the c entury. European
affairs, especially dynastic interests, remained the focus, but the Americas emerged
as a vital area of concern as well. The lucrative trade of the Americas was worth
fighting over. Throughout the century, Spain continued to claim the region as its
own exclusive possession, with the settlements and endeavors of rivals denounced
as interlopers, smugglers, or pirates. Spain’s rivals, however, succeeded in breaking
the monopoly over time, with England winning a right to colonize in 1671, and
France in 1697. Private adventurers w ere helpful tools for Spain’s enemies. E
ngland,
France, and the Netherlands all partnered with sea rovers, providing licenses (of
varying degrees of plausible legitimacy) to sanction attacks on Spain.
The cycle of wars stretched inland and came to embroil the many Native groups
who populated the Americas, especially in North America. Where once Natives
xx I n t r o d u c t i o n
held the upper hand and Europeans survived at their sufferance, the expanding
European populations changed the balance of power. Natives engaged in creative
policies to meet the new challenge. They allied strategically with Europeans, play-
ing one nation against another, while pursuing their own goals vis-à-v is other
Native groups. Conflict flared most notably in New England as King Philip’s War
(1675–1676) brought united Indian resistance to English colonization; in Virginia as
Bacon’s Rebellion (1676) brought land-hungry former servants up against Natives;
and in New Spain as the Pueblo Revolt (1680) chased Spanish Franciscan missionaries
out of Native communities. Europeans did not invent Indian war, but their grow-
ing presence amplified the scale and scope of violence.
The eighteenth c entury accelerated the trends visible in earlier times. Trade
became more lucrative than ever. Millions of people migrated across the ocean,
both freely and in fetters. War erupted again and again as Europe’s empires vied for
supremacy in Europe, as they always had, with renewed vehemence in Africa and
the Americas.
Slavery surged in the eighteenth century. Not only were more people enslaved,
transported, and sold, but the territories touched by slavery and the slave trade—
from the interior of Africa to the interior of the Americas—also expanded. Powerful
African kingdoms pushed to conquer new lands, their efforts made possible by
the profits of the slave trade and driven by the search for new slaves. New ports
popped up along the West African coast, in the area known as the Gold Coast and
the Slave Coast. Britain’s dominance of the trade continued. Not surprisingly, slave
rebellions also increased significantly, in both numbers and intensity. The eigh
teenth c entury was the c entury of the slave trade. Of all the men, w omen, and
children forced across the Atlantic between 1400 and 1900, half were moved in
the eighteenth c entury alone.
The Atlantic economy grew and changed. The boomtown days of the fifteenth-
and sixteenth-century extractive economies were eclipsed by the slower, steadier
way to wealth of agriculture and trade. Traditional money makers, such as tobacco
and sugar, were joined by products such as rum, indigo, rice, and naval stores, and
an array of newly available consumer goods: clothes, shoes, furniture, silverware,
china, books, pamphlets, and newspapers. In the eighteenth century, transatlan-
tic trade was no longer exotic. People became accustomed to goods and products
from abroad and started to demand them. Even a North American poorhouse, for
example, was expected to offer tea.
War continued to intensify in the eighteenth century. Rivalries in Europe con-
tinued to be the prime mover of events, and the Americas and Africa continued to
feel the effects of European violence spilling over the Atlantic’s shores. War inside
the Americas and Africa also escalated. European-Indian wars in North America,
for example, increased in frequency and scale as Natives attempted to negotiate
their circumstances by pitting Europeans against each other. All t hese factors came
together in the most important war of the c entury: the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763),
whose North American theater was called the French and Indian War by British
colonists. The actions of an ambitious young V irginia colonel named George Wash-
ington helped spark the war; blood was spilled on his 1754 mission to the Ohio
River Valley to disperse the French, who British officials believed encroached on
I n t r o d u c t i o n xxi
their land. Indian allies w ere vital to the war efforts of both sides. The war had
much larger European—and indeed worldwide dimensions—as Britain’s coali
tion included Portugal, Prussia, and several German states, and France allied with
Spain, Russia, Austria, and Sweden. Fighting also took place in Africa, India, and
the Philippines. The Peace of Paris that ended the war in 1763 redrew the map of
Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
The Seven Years’ War also had a profound effect on what would emerge as the
signature movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the dis-
integration of empires and the growth of independent nation-states. In North
America, the French and Indian War left Britain with an enormous debt and an
enormous territory to defend. British policymakers felt it was only fair for their
colonists, who benefitted the most from Britain’s protection, to help defray some
of the cost. Some colonists disagreed, seeing British policy as a threat to their lib-
erties. The ensuing American Revolution touched off an Age of Revolution that
would reshape the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century. At the same time, the
revolution continued to be an international affair that brought in France and Spain
and affected the fortunes of various Indian groups. The American victory reoriented
the connections among empires and forced natives to confront the new reality of
a new nation full of people e ager to move west onto their lands.
The Age of Revolution in the Atlantic world was only just beginning, however.
The French Revolution, even more disruptive throughout Europe and the Ameri
cas, broke out in 1789. By the time the conflicts it initiated concluded in 1815, with
the defeat of Napoleon I, France had lost its colonial crown jewel, Saint-Domingue,
now the independent republic of Haiti. Spain’s colonies were in full rebellion, soon
to become, in the 1820s, yet more republics, whose independence movements had
been touched off by Napoleon’s conquest of Spain. Likewise, Portuguese Brazil—
Napoleon also invaded Portugal—achieved its independence in the 1820s.
Many scholars point to the unraveling of imperial ties, taking place by the early
nineteenth century, as a fitting end to the Atlantic world. Living under new politi
cal regimes, the peoples whose nations faced the Atlantic were simply not con-
nected to each other as they once had been. The abolition of slavery and the slave
trade in the nineteenth c entury also seems an appropriate ending point, since slav-
ery had formed the sinews of the Atlantic system. Haiti made the most dramatic
reversal of the slave system and trade with its 1804 independence banishing both
practices. G
reat Britain, once a country trading slaves on an enormous scale, also
played a pivotal role in eliminating human bondage. In 1772, its judicial system
eliminated slavery on British soil. In 1807, Parliament outlawed the international
slave trade. In 1833, Parliament forbade slavery in the colonies. The full abolition
of slavery took most of the nineteenth century, however. The United States allowed
slavery u
ntil 1865, Cuba u ntil 1886, and Brazil until 1888.
The sundering of connections among Atlantic p eoples in the nineteenth century
should not be overstated, however. European powers held on to some of their
colonies. Spain retained Cuba and Puerto Rico u ntil 1898. Jamaica and Barbados
remained British u ntil the 1960s. Guadeloupe is still part of France. Independence
in the Americas also established new connections among republics, and by the end
of the nineteenth century, the United States became involved in the rest of the
xxii I n t r o d u c t i o n
Americas as an imperial power in its own right. Ideas, goods, credit, and p eople
also continued to cross the Atlantic as the nineteenth century progressed. Atlantic
connections, though changed, did not disappear.
What did change, however, was the intensity of globalization as the nineteenth
century ended and the twentieth c entury began. European colonization of Africa
and Asia deepened. Industrial economies drew on the raw materials of the world.
Nations sought naval bases across the globe to fuel their steamships. The cataclys-
mic wars of the twentieth c entury—r ightly called World Wars—saw fighting in
Europe, Africa, and Asia, and drew in combatants from North America, Australia,
and New Zealand. Any sense of a solely Atlantic zone of interaction no longer made
sense when p eople w
ere living and acting on a global scale.
In his essay “The Idea of Atlantic History,” historian Bernard Bailyn traces the
origins of the Atlantic world as a scholarly concept to post-World War II intellec-
tuals advocating an alliance between the United States and Europe, an alliance that
eventually became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). For t hese intel-
lectuals, thinking outside the nation-state was a bracing experience: something
new and vital to confront the danger posed by communism and the Soviet Union.
By the advent of the Cold War in the 1940s, it was necessary to recover a way of
thinking that a person in Europe or Africa or the Americas would have found famil-
iar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and possibly earlier. The fates of
the people of North America and Europe had been connected across the Atlantic
since 1492.
In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher and
founder of modern economics, wrote that t here w ere “two greatest and most impor
tant events recorded in the history of mankind,” namely, “the discovery of Amer
ica, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope” (Smith
1904, IV.7.166). Both discoveries were examples of breakthroughs that brought the
peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas closer together so that even by Smith’s
time, the results were staggering. Smith noted the exploitive side of European con-
tact with the Atlantic world and he acknowledged that many different paths might
be taken in the future. Nevertheless, he was confident of the benefits of an inter-
dependent world. Smith’s judgment may be too bright to capture the many darker
shades of the discovery, conquest, and expansion of the Atlantic world, but he was
right to emphasize what is all too easy to take for granted: contact between Europe,
Africa, and the Americas changed the world and put the world on the course toward
the present as we know it.
Further Reading
Bailyn, Bernard. 2005. “The Idea of Atlantic History.” In Bernard Bailyn, ed. Atlantic His-
tory: Concept and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bender, Thomas. 2006. A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in the World. New York:
Hill and Wang.
Smith, Adam. 1904 [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and C auses of the Wealth of Nations.
Edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd. Available online at the Library
of Economics and Liberty. http://w ww.econlib.org /library/Smith /smWN17.html.
Chronology
1402 French explorers reach the Canary Islands.

1434 Portuguese sailors land in the Azores.
1472 Portugal establishes trade to Benin.
1481 Portuguese ships land in Senegambia to begin trading with
the region.
1482 Portugal builds a fort to conduct the slave trade at Elmina, in
modern Ghana.
1483 Portuguese explorers make landfall at the Congo River.
1488 Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounds Africa, showing
a water route to the Indian Ocean is possible.
1491 Portuguese missionaries baptize the King of Kongo Nzinga
Mbemb, who becomes King João I.
1492 Christopher Columbus, sailing on behalf of Spain, lands in
the Bahamas.
1492 Spain completes the Reconquista, driving the Muslims from
the Iberian Peninsula.
1493 Portugal s ettles São Tome and Príncipe, off the African coast.
1494 The Treat of Tordesillas divides the New World between Spain
and Portugal.
1496 Spain completes its conquest of the Canary Islands by taking
control over Tenerife.
1498 Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama reaches India.
1500 Portuguese ships reach Brazil.
1502 Christopher Columbus embarks on his fourth and final voyage
to the Americas.
1503 Spain begins the encomienda system in the Americas.
1508 Ponce de Leon establishes a permanent settlement in Puerto Rico.
1510 The first Franciscan missionaries land in South America.
1512 Spain proclaims the Laws of Burgos in attempt to curb the abuse
of Indians on encomiendas.
1514 The Portuguese introduce rice to the Americas.
1517 The Protestant Reformation begins in Europe.
xxiv C h r o n o l o g y
1521 Hernán Cortés completes the conquest of the Aztecs.

1521 The first recorded slave rebellion in the New World breaks out
on Santo Domingo.
1522 Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition completes its circumnavigation
of the globe.
1528 Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca lands near Tampa
Bay, beginning a long odyssey in the southeast of the modern-
day United States.
1531 Saint Juan Diego reports receiving a vision of Mary that becomes
known as the Virgin of Guadalupe.
1533 Francisco Pizzaro conquers the Incas.
1534 Jacques Cartier explores the Saint Lawrence River.
1535 Spain establishes the Viceroyalty of New Spain (modern Mexico).
1536 The Spanish establish Buenos Aires.
1539 Hernando de Soto’s expedition lands near present-day
Tallahassee, Florida.
1539 The first book published in the New World comes off a Mexico
City printing press.
1540 The first convent in the New World opens in Mexico City.
1542 Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican priest, publishes
a defense of Indians against European exploitation in An Account,
Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies.
1542 In the New Laws, Spain abolishes Indian slavery.
1545 The Spanish found Potosí, the site of South America’s most
lucrative silver mines.
1555 English merchants form the Muscovy Company, an early joint-
stock trading company.
1558 Queen Elizabeth I ascends to the throne of England.
1566 The Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule begins. It will continue
until 1648.
1571 Sir Francis Drake sacks Panama and plunders the Spanish
silver train.
1577 Sir Francis Drake commences raiding the Pacific coast of
South America.
1588 Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta publishes a book on how to care
for Indians to promote evangelization of natives.
1588 The Spanish Armada fails to conquer England.
1589 Richard Hakluyt publishes The Principall Navigations, Voiages and
Discoveries of the English Nation to promote English colonization
in the New World.
Chronology xxv
1602 The Dutch East India Company is founded.

1607 The English colony of Jamestown is founded in Virginia.
1607 The Beaver Wars begin as Iroquois Indians fight against French
colonists and their native allies.
1608 Samuel de Champlain founds Quebec as a fur trade center in
New France.
1609 The Bank of Amsterdam is established.
1612 John Rolfe introduces Spanish tobacco to cultivation in Virginia.
1620 The Mayflower lands in New England.
1621 The Dutch West India Company is founded.
1623 Dutch traders introduce chocolate to Europe.
1627 Sir Francis Bacon publishes The New Atlantis.
1627 England settles Barbados.
1632 The Jesuit Relations, a collection of dispatches from New France,
begins publication.
1636 The Pequot War begins as New Englanders battle local Indians.
1636 Roger Williams founds Rhode Island after being banished from
Massachusetts Bay colony.
1637 The Dutch seize the slave trading fort at Elmina.
1650 England’s first coffeehouse opens in Oxford.
1650 New E ngland poet Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse, Lately
Sprung Up in America is published in London.
1651 Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan.
1654 The Portuguese push the Dutch out of Brazil.
1655 England attacks Jamaica and seizes control from Spain.
1663 John Eliot translates the Bible into Algonquin.
1664 England wrests control of New Netherland from the Dutch,
renaming it New York.
1671 Quaker preacher George Fox travels the Caribbean and North
America to evangelize.
1672 The Royal African Company receives a charter to trade slaves
on behalf of England.
1675 King Philip’s War, between English colonists and Indians, begins.
1676 Nathanial Bacon leads a rebellion of indentured servants
against the governor of Virginia.
1680 In the Pueblo Revolt, natives rise up against Franciscan
missionaries and Spanish authorities.
1681 Pennsylvania is founded by Quaker proprietor William Penn.
xxvi C h r o n o l o g y
1685 French King Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes, leading
Huguenots to migrate across Europe and to the New World.
1688 John Locke publishes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
and Two Treatise of Government.
1688 King William’s War begins. Also known as the Nine Years’ War,
it lasts until 1697.
1694 The Bank of E ngland is founded.
1697 Naturalist and buccaneer William Dampier publishes A New
Voyage Round the World.
1697 The Treaty of Ryswick gives France control over Saint-Domingue,
the western third of the island of Hispaniola.
1700 Boston minister Samuel Sewall attacks slavery in The Selling
of Joseph.
1702 Queen Anne’s War begins, lasting until 1713.
1707 The Acts of Union create Great Britain, a union of England,
Wales, and Scotland.
1713 The Treaty of Utrecht ends the War of Spanish Succession.
1715 The Yamasee War begins in South Carolina as British settlers
and their Indian allies defeat the Yamasee Indians.
1728 The First Maroon War breaks out in Jamaica.
1731 The French introduce coffee cultivation to Saint-Domingue
(Haiti).
1733 Englishman John Kay invents the flying shuttle to improve
cloth weaving.
1735 Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf initiates the Moravian mission
to Creek and Cherokee Indians in Georgia.
1736 The Chickasaw defeat the French and their Choctaw allies at
the Battle of Ackia, stalling France’s advance north from the
Gulf Coast.
1738 Anglican priest George Whitefield begins a preaching tour of
the American colonies as part of the First Great Awakening.
1739 In South Carolina, the Stono Rebellion of slaves takes place.
1739 The War of Jenkins’ Ear begins between Great Britain and Spain.
1741 A suspected uprising among slaves in New York is put down.
1741 Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards preaches “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God” to a congregation in Connecticut as
part of the First Great Awakening.
1744 King George’s War begins. It lasts four years.
1754 Fighting breaks out between Great Britain, France, and their
Indian allies in the French and Indian War. It w ill merge into
the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).
Chronology xxvii
1755 The Acadians are expelled from Canada by the British.

1756 Benjamin Franklin is made a member of the Royal Society of
London, the premier scientific society.
1756 The Seven Years’ War begins.
1759 The City of Quebec falls to the British.
1762 Great Britain conquers Havana.
1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau publishes The Social Contract and Emile.
1763 The Treaty of Paris concludes the Seven Years’ War with vast gain
of land for Great Britain.
1763 Ottawa chief Pontiac leads an uprising against British positions
in the Great Lakes region of North America.
1763 Great Britain issues the Proclamation of 1763 to forestall
colonists settling west of the Appalachian Mountains.
1764 James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny to improve thread
spinning.
1765 The Stamp Act touches off protests in Great Britain’s North
American colonies.
1772 In the Somerset case, slavery is forbidden in Great Britain.
1773 Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet in Boston, publishes Poems on
Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
1774 Great Britain promulgates the so-called Intolerable Acts in
reaction to the Boston Tea Party.
1775 The American Revolution begins with fighting in New England.
1775 The Pennsylvania Abolition Society is formed in Philadelphia.
1776 Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations, attacking
mercantilism.
1776 The United States declares independence from Great Britain.
1776 Spain creates the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata.
1781 The British Army surrenders at the Battle of Yorktown, the last
major engagement of the American Revolution.
1783 The Treaty of Paris concludes the American Revolution.
1785 Edmund Cartwright invents the power loom to increase textile
production.
1787 The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade is
formed by Quakers and Anglicans in England.
1788 The French Société des Amis des Noirs forms to coordinate
antislavery activities across the Atlantic.
1789 Olaudah Equiano publishes his anti-slavery autobiography,
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African.
xxviii C h r o n o l o g y
1789 The French Revolution begins.

1789 France’s Constituent Assembly issues the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
1791 The Haitian Revolution begins.
1793 King Louis XIV is executed in France.
1793 Eli Whitney invents the cotton gin.
1794 The French Revolution abolishes slavery in France’s colonies.
1795 Jamaica’s Second Maroon War begins.
1799 Naturalist Alexander Humboldt begins his travels through
South America.
1799 Napoleon helps overthrow the Directory government of France.
1801 Toussaint L’Ouverture proclaims himself Governor General for
Life of Haiti.
1802 Napoleon revives slaves in France’s colonies.
1804 Haiti declares its independence from France.
1804 Napoleon Bonaparte issues a new French civil law called the
Napoleonic Code.
1804 Napoleon crowns himself emperor of France.
1807 Great Britain outlaws the slave trade.
1807 Fleeing Napoleon, the Portuguese royal family takes up
residence in Brazil.
1808 The United States fully abolishes the foreign slave trade.
1808 Napoleon’s invasion of Spain leads Spanish American colonies
to establish juntas to govern until the king can be restored.
1810 Father Miguel Hidalgo launches the Mexican Revolution with
his Grito de Dolores.
1811 The slave trade is banned in Chile.
1811 The German Coast Uprising, in Louisiana, is the largest slave
rebellion in U.S. history.
1811 The United States defeats a pan-Indian alliance led by Tecumseh
at the Battle of Tippecanoe.
1812 The Aponte Slave Rebellion breaks out in Cuba.
1812 The United States goes to war with Great Britain in the
War of 1812.
1815 Napoleon is finally defeated and sent into exile.
1816 The American Colonization Society is founded in the United
States to transport freed slaves to Africa.
1819 Simón Bolívar’s army defeats the Spanish at the Battle of
Boyacá, liberating New Grenada.
Chronology xxix
1821 Simón Bolívar is acclaimed the first president of Gran Colombia.

1821 Mexico achieves its independence from Spain.
1821 Liberia is founded by the American Colonization Society as a
haven for freed slaves.
1822 Denmark Vesey is executed in South Carolina on charges of
plotting a slave rebellion.
1822 The armies of Spanish American liberators Simón Bolívar and
José de San Martín converge at Guayaquil, in modern Ecuador.
1822 Brazil achieves independence from Portugal.
1824 Colombia frees its slaves.
1829 Mexico outlaws slavery.
1830 The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek relocates the Choctaws west
of the Mississippi River.
1831 Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Virginia, killing slave
masters as well as their wives and children.
1833 Great Britain abolishes slavery throughout its empire.
1835 The Malês revolt, the largest slave rebellion in Brazilian history,
breaks out.
1839 Slaves aboard La Amistad rise up against their captors. Their ship
eventually lands in Connecticut.
1845 Frederick Douglass, a former slave and an abolitionist, publishes
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave.
1848 France outlaws slavery throughout its holdings for the final time.
1851 The Crystal Palace Exhibition opens in London.
1859 British naturalist Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection.
1863 Slavery is forbidden in the Dutch colonies.
1863 President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation
Proclamation freeing slaves in territory controlled by the
Confederacy.
1865 The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids
slavery.
1873 Slavery is ended in Puerto Rico.
1886 Cuba abolishes slavery.
1888 Brazil’s Golden Law abolishes slavery. Brazil is the last Atlantic
nation to end slavery.
1898 The Spanish American War breaks out and is quickly won by
the United States.
A
ABOLITION MOVEMENT
The abolition movement was the concerted actions of individuals and groups to
eliminate slavery. First arising in the eighteenth century, especially in Great Brit-
ain and the Anglo-American world, abolitionism stretched across the entire Atlan-
tic until the ultimate abolition of slavery in this region of the world, when Brazil
became the last country to forbid the practice in 1888. Rebellions, revolutions, poli-
tics, and newspaper petitioning characterized the movement, and involved men
and women from all walks of life.
The earliest events in abolitionism, during the first half of the 1700s, w ere small
revolts that occurred when slaves tried to effect change themselves through force.
These rebellions included the slave uprising in New York City, and the Stono Rebel-
lion, the largest revolt in the British colonies to that point in time. The abolition
movement experienced small legal and political victories throughout the second
half of the 1700s. In 1772, Lord Mansfield (1705–1793) presided over the Somerset
court case in E ngland and concluded that not only had slavery never been autho-
rized in England or Wales but also that it was unsupported by British common
law. Mansfield’s decision did not affect colonies throughout the British Empire, but
marked a major victory for the early abolition movement by banning slavery from
Great Britain itself.
Abolition societies founded in the 1770s and 1780s laid the foundation for the
abolition movement of the nineteenth c entury. In the United States, abolitionists
formed the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (1775) and the New York Manumission
Society (1785), while across the Atlantic, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of
the Slave Trade in Britain was founded soon a fter, in 1787. The French Société des
Amis des Noirs formed a year later to dialogue with the societies in Great Britain
and the United States.
The abolition movement picked up steam in the 1790s. In the wake of the French
Revolution, the French assembly passed a law outlawing slavery in both France
and its colonies overseas. The law freed slaves and compensated the slave holders
for their lost slaves. Napoleon r ose to power in 1802 and restored slavery through-
out the French colonies. Although temporary, the outlawing of French slavery
encouraged other groups to continue to push for abolition.
One French colony, Saint-Domingue, was at the center of a pivotal event in both
the Atlantic world and the abolition movement. The Haitian Revolution was a
12-year struggle to end slavery and establish a free country ruled by former slaves. The
Haitian Revolution succeeded in defeating the French, British, and Spanish armies
on the island. The revolution and its aftermath shaped the abolition movement
2 A B OLITION M O V E M ENT
both in the United States and Great Britain. Abolitionists in both countries recog-
nized that agitation could lead to emancipation, while opponents believed that
abolitionist agitation would increase slave revolts. Newspaper coverage of events
such as the Haitian Revolution polarized public opinion on the issue of slavery,
especially in the United States.
Coinciding with the Haitian Revolution, British Member of Parliament William
Wilberforce (1759–1833) pushed for the end of the slave trade in Britain. Wilber-
force was a member of the Clapham Sect, an Anglican reform group united around
abolishing slavery, ending the slave trade, and reforming the nation’s penal sys-
tem. This sect influenced public opinion in Great Britain, and Wilberforce spear-
headed their efforts in Parliament. Their efforts paid off when Parliament passed
the Slave Trade Act of 1807. This act ended the slave trade in the British Empire,
particularly the Atlantic slave trade, but it did not outlaw slavery itself.
The British not only outlawed the slave trade in their empire, but the Royal Navy
enforced it. In the years that followed the Slave Trade Act, the Royal Navy cap-
tured numerous slave ships, freeing and resettling slaves in the West Indies colo-
nies. In 1818, G
reat Britain formed treaties with Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands
to end the Atlantic slave trade.
Final victory came 26 years l ater when Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition
Act of 1833, which ended slavery throughout the British Empire. The catalyst that
sparked this Act occurred in Jamaica. On Christmas Day, 1831, Samuel Sharpe
(1801–1832), a Baptist preacher, led slaves in a revolt that became known as the
Baptist War. The British government forces and the plantation owners brutally sup-
pressed the revolt. In the wake of the suppression, Parliament began an inquiry
that resulted in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
The next major battleground for abolition was the United States. Proponents of
abolition learned from the movements in G reat Britain and France, and especially
their colonies in the West Indies. By the early 1800s, the northern states had abol-
ished slavery, and New York passed a law for the gradual emancipation of its slaves
in 1817. As the British Empire moved to abolish the slave trade, Thomas Jefferson
signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which outlawed importing more
slaves into the country, beginning January 1, 1808. However, slaves already within
or born in the country could still be bought and sold. Antislavery proponents in
congress hoped this act would end slavery in the South, but it did not.
Following the War of 1812, Congress attempted to appease both pro and anti-
slavery advocates with the Missouri Compromise (1820). Antislavery groups hoped
the compromise would end slavery. Missouri was accepted into the Union as a slave
state, but no other slaves states would be accepted that far north of the Louisiana
Territory. To balance the Senate, Maine was formed from part of Massachusetts
and was accepted as a free state. This event ensured that slavery would continue
to be understood as a geo-political issue in the United States. Americans had to
deal with slavery growing in the states where it had previously existed, as well as
extending westward.
The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, attempted to resettle f ree
African Americans in Africa. Many of those involved in the society supported
A B OLITION M O V E M ENT 3
abolition, but some supported the colonization of free blacks to reduce the threat
of slave revolts. They believed removing the free blacks would diminish slaves’
excitement over the possibility of freedom and would strengthen the hold of slav-
ery in the South. British and American governments helped the American Coloni-
zation Society to found the colony of Liberia in Africa and resettled thousands of
free blacks there. Many former slaves did not want to relocate and chose other
means of gaining freedom for those who w ere still slaves. Denmark Vesey was a
former slave who was arrested and killed for organizing a slave revolt in Charles-
ton, South Carolina, in 1822. Vesey planned to organize the slaves in Charleston
and the surrounding area to revolt; they w ere to attack the city, seize weapons from
the armory and ships from the harbor, and sail for Haiti. He also wanted to kill
any slaveholders in the city and f ree as many slaves as they could find. T hese early
events, as well as events in the Car ibbean, prompted Americans to resolve the
issue of slavery.
Key abolitionist leaders emerged between 1829–1833. David Walker’s book
Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829 called for slaves to rise up. Walker’s
target audience was free blacks
living in the North. Walker wrote
to dispel the understanding of
degradation that was prevalent
in the North, because even in
the North, freedom did not mean
equality. Walker represented the
beginning of the shift from abo-
litionists arguing for gradual to
immediate emancipation.
Shortly a fter Walker’s book was
published, William Lloyd Garri-
son (1805–1879), one of the most
important figures of the American
movement, moved from a gradual
emancipation position to imme-
diate emancipation. Garrison was
the editor of the abolitionist news-
paper The Liberator, which he
began in 1831. He used this influ-
ence to try to win over people to
the abolitionist position. He pre-
ferred the use of argumentation
and persuasion rather than vio
lence to convince p eople of the William Lloyd Garrison, one of the leading
abolitionist cause. Garrison played advocates of abolition in the nineteenth c entury.
an important role in beginning His newspaper, The Liberator, took an uncompro-
the American Anti-Slavery Soci- mising stand against slavery and anything less than
ety, which was formed to bring total, immediate emancipation. (National Archives)
4 A B OLITION M O V E M ENT
about the complete abolition of slavery in the United States. Many of the key
leaders of the abolition movement in the United States w ere a part of the Society
at one point or another. At the same time the key abolitionist leaders were emerg-
ing, Nat Turner led the bloodiest slave revolt in the history of the American South
in Virginia, and the Southern states enacted harsher laws governing slaves known
as the Slave Codes. T hese laws w
ere a response to such slave revolts as Denmark
Vesey and Nat Turner’s, as well as the revolts that took place in the British colo-
nies in the Car ibbean, with the hope that they could prevent rebellions.
The abolitionists in the United States had to face a constantly changing politi
cal situation as more states and territories were added, and debates raged on whether
the new land would be slave or f ree. In an effort to influence these decisions, some
abolitionists formed their own political party, such as the Liberty Party. White
northerners comprised a large part of the abolitionist movement, but several key
black leaders rose to prominence. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), an escaped
slave, was the most important leader. His speaking ability and autobiography were
powerful tools in the abolition movement. Abolitionists also used the Underground
Railroad to help lead escaped slaves to freedom.
Politicians proposed the Compromise of 1850 to address new territory won a fter
the Mexican-American War. The Compromise contained provisions that neither
side liked. One key point was the Fugitive Slave Law, governing the recovery and
return of escaped slaves to their masters. Abolitionists considered this law an out-
rage, and the law pushed more northerners into the abolitionist camp. The follow-
ing year, Harriett Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) published the highly influential Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. Stowe hoped to expose the slaves’ plight to northerners and to con-
vince southern slave holders to treat their slaves better. As war was fast approaching,
two major events bolstered the ranks of the abolitionists. The Dred Scott v. Sand-
ford (1857) court case denied citizenship to African Americans and blocked Con-
gress’ ability to legislate on slavery in the territories. The second event was the
John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry. Brown (1800–1859) was an abolitionist who
wanted to capture the armory at Harper’s Ferry to arm his slave revolt. The raid
failed, and Brown was captured and hanged. The election of Abraham Lincoln
(1809–1865) and the beginning of the Civil War (1861–1865) drew the final battle
lines. Although Lincoln was not an abolitionist, he understood the ramifications of
emancipation during the war. On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation
declared freedom to all slaves held in the southern states at war with the Union. The
United States abolitionist movement’s final victory came in December 1865, when
the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, indicating that all
slaves were free under the law. William Lloyd Garrison published the last edition
of the The Liberator that month, symbolically ending the abolition movement in
the United States.
Abolition swept through much of South America during the 1850s, excluding
Brazil. Slavery had been widespread through Brazil; but British pressure forced the
people to stop importing slaves in 1850. The 1870s marked major advances in abo-
lition in Brazil. In 1871, Brazil’s government passed the Rio Branco Act, which
A B OLITION OF SLAV E R Y 5
freed the c hildren of slaves at the age of 21. Final emancipation came in 1888, when
they adopted immediate emancipation for all remaining slaves.
Justin Clark
See also: Brazil; Colonization Movement; Douglass, Frederick; Haitian Revolution;

Liberia; Slave Rebellion; Slavery; Wilberforce, William
Further Reading
Davis, David Brion. 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Drescher, Seymour. 2009. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Rugemer, Edward. 2008. The Problem of Emancipation: The Car ibbean Roots of the American
Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
A B O L I T I O N O F S L AV E R Y
Slavery is an economic system in which a person is the legal property of another
person and provides labor for that person without payment. Slavery was common
in the Atlantic world, and subjected both indigenous Americans and slaves imported
from Africa, as well as their offspring. Abolitionism, a movement demanding the
abolition of slavery, came to prominence in G reat Britain in the late 1700s and the
slave trade was largely abolished in 1807, although slavery itself was only abol-
ished in the Americas on a large scale between 1834 and 1888.
Slavery in the Atlantic world is generally identified with the transatlantic slave
trade, which is estimated to have brought 13 million Africans to the Americas.
However, the earliest p eople to be enslaved there were indigenous p eoples in the
territories conquered by the Spanish and Portuguese after 1492, following Chris-
topher Columbus’ voyages to the Americas. In 1530, King Charles I of Spain issued
a decree prohibiting the enslavement of “Indios,” although the decree was rescinded
in 1534. In turn, Pope Paul III issued a papal bull in 1537, prohibiting the enslave-
ment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, though this had little practical
impact. Another such attempt to forbid the enslavement of natives were the “New
Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians,” issued
in November 1542, by Charles I. It also faced stern opposition. Revised laws were
issued in 1552 and 1573, restricting the use of coerced labor. It was only in 1683,
that Spain abolished the enslavement of the indigenous Mapuche prisoners of war
in Chile. Native Americans continued to be enslaved in North America by the
English, and w ere even sold to Car ibbean plantations. The enslavement of Native
Americans in California lasted u ntil 1867.
The issue of the legality of slavery and its abolition first arose not in the Amer
icas, but in England, where the ruling in the 1772 Somerset court case established
that slavery was illegal in E ngland (a legal position that was also adopted in Scot-
land in 1778). This ruling lead to the emancipation of up to 14,000 slaves in
6 A B OLITION OF SLAV E R Y
ngland, who w
E ere working t here mainly as domestic servants. By then, Quakers
in E ngland and in its American colonies had begun to call for the emancipation of
slaves. In 1783, Quakers presented a petition against the slave trade to the British
parliament. Ending of the slave trade was seen as a first stop to ending slavery alto-
gether. In 1787, a group of Quakers and Anglicans founded the Society for Effect-
ing the Abolition of the Slave Trade, whose campaigns, led by Thomas Clarkson
and William Wilberforce, eventually led to Britain passing the 1807 Abolition of
the Slave Trade Act and to the establishment of a special naval squadron dedicated
to suppressing the transatlantic slave trade. It intercepted slave ships and freed
almost 150,000 people. Slavery itself, though, remained legal in G reat Britain’s col-
onies. However, on St. Helena, in the South Atlantic, (which was a British East
India Company Island, rather than a British colony) children born to slaves after
Christmas Day, 1818, w ere to be free.
Total abolition was a cause subsequently pursued by the Society for the Mitiga-
tion and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions (com-
monly known as the Anti-Slavery Society), founded in 1823, and slavery in the
British Empire was abolished just 10 years later under the 1833 Slavery Abolition
Act. The law freed, in 1834, about 700,000 slaves in the West Indies and, on the
opposite side of the Atlantic, of about 40,000 slaves in South Africa, although a
system of forced apprenticeship was erected in place of slavery. All former slaves
were made wholly f ree in 1838.
In Canada, the first anti-slavery literature was published in 1788, and its author,
James Drummond MacGregor, even purchased the freedom of slaves from col-
leagues in the Presbyterian Church. Upper Canada and Lower Canada passed
legislation for gradual emancipation in 1793 and 1803 respectively, and in Upper
Canada the importation of further slaves was prohibited, while c hildren born to
slaves had to be freed at the age of 25. Slavery in Canada, as in all parts of the Brit-
ish Empire, was made illegal in 1833.
Whereas the abolition of slavery in the United States is usually associated with
the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Constitution of the Vermont Republic,
passed in 1777, declared that male slaves over 21 and female slaves over 18 w ere
to be free, although this provision was not strictly enforced. Pennsylvania also move
to restrict slavery early on, passing the 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slav-
ery, under which children born to slaves were considered free. However, the Act
did nothing to free those currently enslaved; Pennsylvania only freed all slaves in
1847. Similar measures for the gradual abolition of slavery w ere instituted in New
Hampshire (1783), Connecticut (1784), New York (1799), and New Jersey (1804),
while the United States Congress, in 1787, prohibited any new slavery in the North-
west Territories. By contrast, in 1783, all slaves in Massachusetts w ere freed a fter
the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled slavery unconstitutional u nder the
state’s constitution. In Ohio, the state constitution abolished all slavery in 1802.
The Texas Revolution of 1835 was a significant setback for abolition in North
America. Mexico had made slavery in Texas illegal in 1830, but under the 1836
Constitution of the Republic of Texas, slavery was once again made legal in the
state. While in 1825 t here had been just over 400 slaves in Texas, that figure had
A B OLITION OF SLAV E R Y 7
risen to about 250,000 in 1864. A further setback for abolition was the passing by
Congress of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which effectively repealed the so-called
Missouri Compromise of 1820, a United States federal statute that prohibited slav-
ery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36° 30′, apart from within
the proposed state of Missouri. Under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, these two new
territories w ere opened to slavery by allowing their white male settlers to decide
whether to permit slavery within their territories. The ability of slaves to gain their
freedom was also hampered by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, u nder which escaped
slaves had to be returned to their o wners.
In the 1830s, abolitionism in the United States was driven primarily by Evan-
gelical Protestant groups and by individuals such as William Lloyd Garrison, who
started publication of The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper, in 1831, and who
later led the American Anti-Slavery Society. Another of its leaders was Frederick
Douglass, a former slave, who worked closely with President Abraham Lincoln.
The issue of abolition eventually came to a head in the United States in the Civil
War (1861–1865), which ended with the defeat of the Confederate States of Amer
ica, which were slave states that had broken away from the Union. While the war
raged, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring all slaves in
Confederate-controlled areas to be free. A fter the end of the war, the Thirteenth
Amendment to the Constitution, passed in December 1865, abolished slavery in
the United States. Slaves in the Native American nations were also freed after the
Civil War when these nations signed new treaties with the United States.
In the French territories in the Americas, slavery was initially abolished in the
wake of the 1789 French Revolution and following several slave revolts, such as in
Santo Domingo in 1793, but it was re-established in 1802 u nder Napoleon. The
exception was Haiti, where slaves revolted and in 1801 took control of the island’s
“I Will Be Heard”
American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison commenced publication of
his newspaper, The Liberator, on January 1, 1831, with a blistering indict-
ment of compromise on the issue of slavery:
“I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is t here
not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising
as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with mod-
eration. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm;
tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the
mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—
but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I
will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND
I W ILL BE HEARD.”
Source: William Lloyd Garrison. The Liberator. Boston Massachusetts. Vol.1, no. 1.
(Saturday, January 1, 1831). Available online at The Liberator Online Archive.
8 A B OLITION OF SLAV E R Y
government under their leader, Toussaint Louverture, a former slave, who became
governor general and outlawed slavery. The French tried to retake Haiti, but w ere
defeated in 1804. Haiti remained independent, slaves themselves having secured
the abolition of slavery in their territory. Napoleon did, however, abolish the French
slave trade in 1815. The French Society for the Abolition of Slavery was founded
in 1834, and slavery was re-abolished by France in 1848. In the Dutch Car ibbean
territories, slavery was abolished in 1863.
The gradual abolition of slavery in territories of the Spanish Empire in conti-
nental America came about in the wake of the wars of independence in the early
1800s. The principle that children born of slaves should be f ree was enshrined in
law in Chile in 1811, followed, with variations, in Argentina in 1813, in Peru and
Venezuela in 1821, in Colombia in 1824, in Ecuador and Uruguay in 1825, and in
Paraguay in 1842. Slavery was abolished altogether in Mexico in 1829, though
Argentina only abolished slavery in 1853. In the remaining Spanish colonies in
the Car ibbean, slavery was abolished comparatively late, such as in Cuba in 1886
and in Puerto Rico in 1873.
Brazil, a Portuguese colony until 1822, had been the destination for one-third
of all African slaves taken to the Americas. Brazil had declared the maritime slave
trade illegal in 1831 and prohibited the importation of slaves, but, having done
little to enforce its own legislation, Brazil passed a new law in 1851, u nder British
pressure, that criminalized maritime slave trading as piracy and imposed new sanc-
tions on the importation of slaves. The road to abolition itself began with the Rio
Branco law of 1871, u nder which c hildren born to slaves w ere free at birth, and
the Brazilian abolitionist movement was revived in 1883 with the founding of the
Abolitionist Confederation. Prominent figures in the movement included Joaquim
Nabuco and Antonio Bento. In 1885, Brazil passed the Saraiva-Cotegipe Act which
freed all slaves over the age of 60 and which instituted measures for the general
abolition of slavery, including a state administered emancipation fund. Three years
later, in May 1888, Brazil enacted the so-called Golden Law, which made slavery
illegal with immediate effect and without compensation to slave owners (although
slaves, likewise, were not provided for). On the other side of the Atlantic, slavery
in the remaining territories of the Portuguese Empire, including on the western
coast of Africa, was abolished by decrees in 1854 and 1858, which ended slavery
altogether in 1878.
There is some debate amongst historians whether the gradual abolition of slav-
ery came about primarily due to humanitarian and religious concerns or due to
changing economic interests. In the case of the United States, for example, it has
been argued that slavery was inimical to a capitalist manufacturing industry. A free
labor force could be hired and dismissed as required, whereas slave l abor required
an ongoing expense, w hether or not that labor was required. In consequence, it
has been claimed that slavery made it harder for the South to develop a manufac-
turing industry and that it inhibited economic growth, as slave workers had little
interest in implementing new farming techniques.
While slavery in the Americas had become illegal in all countries by the end of
the nineteenth century, in the independent countries on the western coast of Africa,
A B OLITION OF THE SLAV E T R ADE 9
from where the majority of slaves in the Americas had originated, slavery was
only prohibited in the twentieth century, with Mauritania being the last country
to do so in 1981. Nevertheless, millions of people remain trapped in some form
of slavery, including individuals in labor relations not normally associated with
transatlantic slavery, including bonded labor, forced labor, slavery by descent,
and early and forced marriage. L egal measures to tackle the problem of modern
slavery include the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act passed by
the United States in 2000 and the Modern Slavery Act passed by the United King-
dom in 2015.
A. H. Schulenburg
See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of the Slave Trade; Atlantic Slave Trade;
Slavery; Slave Trade in Africa
Further Reading
Drescher, Seymour. 2009. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. New York: Cam-
Hinks, Peter, and John McKivigan (Eds.). 2007. Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition.
Vol. 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. 2011. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and
the Atlantic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
A B O L I T I O N O F T H E S L AV E T R A D E
The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in the nineteenth century was the culmi-
nation of an international effort that mirrored the shift in the economic systems of
the Atlantic community. The closing of the Atlantic slave trade affected economies
in Europe, Africa, and the Americas as part of a larger transition tied to the emer-
gence of industrial production, full-scale capitalism, and late nineteenth century
imperialism. The abolition of the Atlantic slave trade is different from the aboli-
tion of the institution of slavery as well as the internal slave trades of many Atlan-
tic nations. While t here w
ere efforts to halt domestic slave trading in parts of Africa
as early as the late sixteenth c entury, the final abolition of the Atlantic slave trade
required the broad cooperation of many nations, an end to domestic slavery, and
more than a c entury of direct effort by p eople throughout the Atlantic world who
opposed the trafficking of slaves.
An early source of opposition to the Atlantic slave trade came from the king-
dom of Kongo, in the sixteenth century, when King Afonso I recognized the nega-
tive toll of the slave trade on his kingdom. Though the King realized that the
population of his kingdom was declining due to the slave trade, he could not halt
the process underway, as European buyers turned to other suppliers in neighbor-
ing kingdoms. A result of this European interference was increased warfare for the
purpose of capturing slaves. Aside from rulers like Afonso I, opposition to the
Atlantic trade in slaves was sporadic, partly b ecause the number of slaves carried
across the Atlantic Ocean remained small in the seventeenth c entury.
10 A B OLITION OF THE SLAV E T R ADE
The Atlantic slave trade expanded dramatically by the eighteenth c entury as part
of the development of the triangular trade between the continents. This expansion
also led to criticism of slave trading early in the century from different quarters of the
English-speaking world. It is no surprise that early eighteenth c entury opponents of
the slave trade were motivated by their religious beliefs. As early as 1700, prominent
Boston merchant and minister Samuel Sewall attacked the institution of slavery as
well as the slave trade for its inhumanity. Sewell, known mostly for being one of the
judges in the Salem Witch T rials of 1692, emerged as an early anti-slavery advocate.
Sewall attacked slavery and the slave trade in a tract titled The Selling of Joseph (1700).
The work denounces the taking of slaves from Africa while refuting seventeenth
century justifications for slavery. He grounded his rejection of the slave trade in bibli-
cal verses, before concluding that slavery and the trade in slaves violated the laws of
both man and God. The Quakers, at their general meeting, echoed Sewall’s beliefs
and officially lodged their hostilities against the slave trade in London in 1727.
Objections to the slave trade rooted in religious conviction evolved to broader
Enlightenment principles in the second half of the eighteenth century. Prominent
British abolitionist Granville Sharp lodged his first official legal challenge to the
British slave trade in 1765; his was an early, powerful voice in the assault on the
Atlantic slave trade though little progress came u ntil the Somerset Case in 1772.
The case involved a runaway slave, James Somerset, who fled from his master,
Charles Stewart, in 1769. Stewart recovered the slave Somerset in 1771, and planned
to return him to slavery in Jamaica. Lord Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice, accepted
Granville Sharp’s plea for a writ of habeas corpus, which sought to prevent Somer-
set’s sale into slavery in the West Indies. Mansfield’s court l ater ruled that no mas-
ter could forcibly sell a slave abroad, which many interpreted as ending slavery in
Britain. This was a misinterpretation of the decision; nevertheless, the number of
anti-slavery activists grew a fter Mansfield’s ruling. Among them w ere Methodist
leader John Wesley and American Quaker John Woolman, who added to the cho-
rus of voices condemning the slave trade for religious and moral reasons. These
abolitionists were joined by William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and former
African slave Olaudah Equiano in the 1780s.
Equiano’s story provided a critical piece in the struggle against the slave trade.
His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gusta-
vus Vassa, the African (1789), brought the horrors of slavery and the slave trade to
public attention in G reat Britain. Capitalizing on the attention brought by Equi-
ano, abolitionist William Wilberforce presented the first legal proposal for abol-
ishing the slave trade in 1790; the British House of Commons passed a law ending
the slave trade in 1792, but the House of Lords rejected the legislation. Wilber-
force’s efforts merged with those of Sharp and Clarkson to eventually produce a
British proclamation ending the slave trade in 1807. Other nations including Den-
mark (1802), the United States (1808), Sweden and Norway (1813), the Nether-
lands (1814), France (1817), and Spain (1820) also abolished the slave trade. The
fact that so many nations declared the slave trade illegal did not eliminate the traf-
fic in slaves in the Atlantic world. Neither did British patrols of the Eastern Atlan-
tic slow the trade in slaves.
A B OLITION OF THE SLAV E T R ADE 11
Horrors of the Middle Passage

In his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,
or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Olaudah Equiano vividly described life on a
slave ship for the slaves. In a system defined by inhumanity, the voyage from
Africa to the Americas, known as the Middle Passage, stands out for its cru-
elty. In a famous passage from chapter two of his narrative, Equiano recreated
the unspeakable suffering of being confined to the cargo hold of the ship:
“The stench of the hold while we w ere on the coast was so intolerably
loathsome that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of
us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the
whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential.
The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in
the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself,
almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air
soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and
brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. . . . This wretched
situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now became
insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs [makeshift toilets], into
which the children often fell, and w ere almost suffocated. The shrieks of
the women, and the groans of the d ying, rendered the w
hole a scene of horror
almost inconceivable.”
Equiano’s words struck emotional chords with readers and mobilized the
public against the slave trade.
Source: Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African. London, 1789, 78–79.
True gains in curbing the Atlantic slave trade came after communities and gov-
ernments began cooperating to end the trade. The community making up the Afri-
can diaspora played a significant role in advancing the movement against slavery
in the wake of many nations banning the slave trade. For instance, African Ameri-
can antislavery leaders, Nathaniel Paul and Charles Lenox Remond, reached out
to Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce in a transatlantic effort to garner
support against slavery. Meanwhile, Great Britain took the lead in building alli-
ances to stop the smuggling of African slaves across the Atlantic. This was no easy
task; the United States and Great Britain, for example, deployed separate fleets
against the trade in the 1820s, but the United States refused British invitations for
joint patrols due to concerns over national sovereignty. Many thought allowing Brit-
ish officials to inspect U.S. ships v iolated American autonomy.
Great Britain and the United States formally agreed in the 1842 Treaty of Wash-
ington to cooperate against the slave trade. Both nations deployed fleets to West
Africa. The United States created its Africa Squadron, commanded by Commo-
dore Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794–1858) as part of the treaty. A small force of
12 A C ADIANS
four ships was tasked with slowing the illegal slave trade. Under Perry’s command
the squadron captured only one slave ship. Perry’s failure is not surprising as he
only halted ships flying the American flag. Thus, it was easy for slave traders to
escape his grasp. L ater squadron commanders were more active than Perry, catch-
ing 36 slave ships between 1844 and 1861. Anti-slave trade patrols improved in
the 1850s when more nations joined the British in guarding the Atlantic. In 40 years
of patrolling, British forces captured well over 1,000 ships, rescuing thousands of
slaves; yet the slave trade persisted u ntil late in the nineteenth century.
The Atlantic slave trade ceased with the abolition of slavery in several Ameri-
can states and colonies. The outcome of the American Civil War closed one of the
primary slave markets in the Western Hemisphere. Only Brazil and Cuba remained
as major importers of slaves after 1865 u ntil both ended slavery in the 1880s. The
final component in ending the trade came in Africa. Some African rulers protested
the negative effects slave trading had on their kingdoms early on, yet the trade con-
tinued through most of the nineteenth c entury b ecause much of the focus was
on the M iddle Passage. Africa became the focus, partly b ecause missionary socie
ties mobilized support at home for ending the internal slave trade. Both Great
Britain and private colonization societies from the United States founded colonies
in West Africa, in part, to halt slave trading t here. T
hese colonies eventually became
the countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Many of the founders of both countries
were recaptured slaves intercepted by patrols. Supporters of colonization hoped
these colonies would spread Western values and Christianity across Africa and
end the slave trade while integrating the continent and its p eoples into the larger
European dominated economic system. In effect, colonization would destroy the
last remnants of the slave trade while shifting African production to the legitimate
commodities needed in an industrializing world.
Eugene Van Sickle
See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of Slavery; Equiano, Olaudah; Wilber-

force, William
Further Reading
Eltis, David, and James Walvin. 1981. The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade Origins and
Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Inikori, Joseph E., and Stanley L. Engerman. 1998. The Atlantic Slave Trade Effects on Econ-
omies, Societies, and P
eoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Klein, Herbert S. 1999. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ACADIANS
The Acadians are the descendants of settlers from coastal France who migrated to
Canada in the late sixteenth century to form a colony. This colony, which com-
prised the modern Canadian Maritime Provinces and the state of Maine, was ruled
first by France and then by Great Britain, until the settlers were evicted from the
A C ADIANS 13
land in an event known as the Expulsion of 1755, or the Grand Dèrangement. Today,
most Acadians live in the state of Louisiana and maintain a strong culture rooted
in France but with a distinct and unique French dialect and culture.
Colonists from the French provinces of Brittany, Picardy, Normandy, and
Poitou began leaving their homelands in the early sixteenth century as the result
of famine, rising social tensions, religious conflicts, and plagues. The first group
of over 10,000 people left for the territories of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick,
Prince Edward Island, and Maine in 1604, led by Samuel Champlain. The colony,
known as “La Cadie” or Acadia, was financed by the Company of New France.
The farmers, artisans, and fishermen who signed on promised to work for the
company for five years to repay transportation and materials costs, after which
time they became independent landholders. Acadia was one of the earliest suc-
cessful European colonies in North America, and its inhabitants, who came to be
known as Acadians or, in English, “Cajuns,” thrived in this land of relative free-
dom and independence.
Due to their careers of fur trapping, lumberjacking, and trading with Indians,
many Acadians lived on the margins of colonial control, in the isolated wilderness.
As a result, their folkways, cuisine, language, and traditions remained intact and
unaltered by outside influences, while the family unit became extraordinarily
close-knit. This may be most true in terms of the Acadian/Cajun spoken dialect. The
Acadians were hated by many of their English Protestant neighbors, so they tended
to seek out isolation. By socializing only with members of their small community,
the Acadians maintained a dialect of French almost exactly has it had been spo-
ken in the middle of the eighteenth century. The hybridization that did exist in
the language primarily came from the inclusion of Acadian refugees by other immi-
grant and indigenous groups sharing their situation. Thus, modern Acadian looks
more like medieval French, but with scattered Native American, African, and Span-
ish words in the lexicon.
Not surprisingly, Acadian cuisine and m usic follow t hese same trajectories, with
strong roots in Medieval France but with aspects borrowed from other nearby
cultures. Acadian cuisine centers on seafood as the primary protein, but utilizes
some of the vegetable content of more African or Spanish dishes. The Acadian music
of both Nova Scotia and Louisiana (music commonly called zydeco), utilizes French
dance steps but with expanded rhythms borrowed from Native Americans and
Africans. The music and cuisine of the Acadians figure largely in their celebration
of tradition and their group solidarity.
When the British took control of Acadia (first temporarily in 1647, then per-
manently in 1713), they recognized the difficulty of ruling the Acadians. At first,
the British governors attempted to break up the cultural solidarity of the French
Catholic Acadians by relocating Scottish and other Protestant families into the
colony. Unhappy with the progress, in 1745 the British threatened expulsion from
the colony to any Acadians not pledging strict allegiance to the king. The Acadians
firmly opposed allegiance to any British king and rejected war with France. Thus,
British governor, Major Charles Lawrence, ordered the collection and deportation
of all Acadians in 1755.
14 A C OSTA , J OS É DE
The poor conditions on board the ships and the overland routes killed nearly
half of the 15,000 deportees. Small groups managed to stay behind in secret, while
others relocated to other British colonies as indentured servants. The majority trav-
eled the Mississippi River into south Louisiana, totaling over 2,500 Acadians from
1763 to 1776. More immigration followed, culminating in the 1785 arrival of seven
passenger ships with approximately 1,600 Acadians from France.
Apart from urban New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Acadians preferred establish-
ing smaller communities. By the m iddle of the nineteenth c entury, communities
had developed in Attakapas, Opelousas, the Acadian Coast, and along the bayous
Teche and Lafourche. Collectively, t hese settlements became known as “Acadiana”
and their residents “Cajuns,” an Anglicized short form of Acadian. Though united
themselves, the Cajuns experienced conflicts with the more established Creoles—
mixed descendants of earlier European immigrants and native populations. Issues
also developed between Acadians in the eastern part of the region and those in
the west. Lands west of the Atchafalaya River w ere dominated by ranchers and rice
farmers. In the bayou and river landscape of eastern Acadiana, hunting, fishing,
trapping, small-plot farming, and lumberjacking became the most common occu-
pations. Adapting to new ways of using the land and learning how to cooperate with
the resulting cultural clashes became the greatest challenge for Acadians through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the Cajun culture remained strong through
reliance on local farming and the tendency to marry within the community. It was
not until the discovery of oil in the area, in 1901, that sustained outside influences
threatened the status quo for the Acadian settlers. Since then, negotiating the new
world economy and learning to tolerate investors and businessmen from outside
Acadiana has been the region’s primary cultural challenge.
Joshua Hyles
See also: French Atlantic; Louisiana; New France
Further Reading
Brasseaux, Carl. 1988. Founding of New Acadia, 1765–1803; In Search of Evangeline: Birth and
Evolution of the Myth. Thibodaux, LA: Blue Heron Press.
Faragher, John Mack. 2005. A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the French Acadi-
ans from Their American Homeland. New York: W. W. Norton.
Jobb, Dean. 2005. The Acadians: A People’s Story of Exile and Triumph. London: John Wiley
and Sons.
A C O S TA , J O S É D E ( 1 5 4 0 – 1 6 0 0 )
The Spanish Jesuit, José de Acosta, was the greatest natural historian of the Amer
icas in the sixteenth c entury. From a merchant background, Acosta entered the
recently founded Roman Catholic religious order the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)
as a novice in 1552. He was educated at the University of Alcalá de Henares in cen-
tral Spain. Like other Jesuits, Acosta was learned both in the medieval Scholastic
tradition of European universities that drew from the ancient Greek philosopher
A C OSTA , J OS É DE 15
Aristotle and his Greek, Arabic, and Latin disciples and commentators, and the
newer Renaissance humanist learning that drew from a variety of ancient Greek
and Latin authors. Acosta arrived in Peru as a missionary in 1572 and left in 1586,
rising to the height of Father Provincial, or head of the Jesuits in the province of
Peru. He served as the chair of theology at the Jesuit College in Lima. Before return-
ing to Spain in 1587, he spent a year in New Spain. On his return, Acosta dabbled
in politics, supporting the King of Spain in complex struggles involving Spain, vari
ous Jesuit factions, and the Spanish Inquisition. He ended his life as rector of the
Jesuit College at Salamanca, Spain.
Acosta’s books on his Peruvian experience, notably On Caring for Indians (1588)
and Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590) w ere written to promote the evan-
gelization of Native Americans. Acosta covered the history, geography, weather,
plants, animals, and native inhabitants of Peru and Mexico. He also discussed
technological processes, such as the Spanish use of mercury in the amalgamation
of silver. His writings drew on his own travels in Peru as a missionary as well as
the knowledge of Native Americans and Spanish and mestizo writers, such as
Father Juan de Tovar (1543–1623). One of Acosta’s main purposes in his writings
was arguing for the capacity of Native Americans to receive Christianity provided
it was presented in a way suitable for their understanding. Acosta argued that God
had providentially prepared the Natives for Christian conversion, and that their
customs, although shocking to Europeans, did not render them less than human
or beyond redemption. This contradicted the view held by many Catholics that
the religion of Natives was simply devil worship that needed to be extirpated before
they could become Christians. Acosta placed Native civilization in a global hierar-
chy of civilizations. The highest level was occupied by Europeans and other Afro-
Eurasian peoples such as the Chinese and Japanese, who all agreed w ere suitable
for conversion. The Peruvian and Mexican Natives were on the second level, hav-
ing cities and state organization but lacking written language and philosophy; they
were also considered suitable for conversion and w ere the focus of a major mis-
sionary effort in Acosta’s time.
Acosta’s natural science was basically Aristotelian. Unlike many natural histo-
rians of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, he was not a physician or primarily
interested in the medicinal uses of plants or the medical practices of Natives. Nev-
ertheless, his work contains one of the first recorded discussions of altitude sick-
ness and an early description of Native use of the coca leaf. Acosta describes the
coca leaf as extremely valuable, to the point where the Incas did not allow it to be
consumed by ordinary p eople. He also describes the New World beverage, choco
late, claiming that it was widely relished by both Indians and the Spanish resident
in the Americas, although he himself found it disgusting.
Acosta went beyond the enumeration of the features of the Americas into attempts
to explain them within the framework of European knowledge. Since both old and
new worlds had been created by God, he argued, they could be incorporated into
the same intellectual framework despite their differences. This led him to investi-
gate a broad range of phenomena, including climate, magnetic variation, earth-
quakes, and volcanoes. Like other Jesuit Aristotelians, Acosta was not afraid to
16 A C OSTA , J OS É DE
Ahead of His Time

José de Acosta is an originator of the theory that Native Americans had
emerged from Asia and crossed into the Americas over a now-submerged
land bridge connecting the far northern regions of Asia with North America.
From this entry point, Native American ancestors moved south, gradually
settling the continents of North and South America and eventually abandon-
ing hunting for the settled urban life that the Spanish encountered in Mex-
ico. Acosta described this theory in his Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias
(Natural and Moral History of the Indias), which was published in Seville,
Spain, in 1590. Given the state of knowledge in the late sixteenth century,
Acosta’s theory was a remarkable piece of scientific deduction.
contradict specific Aristotelian assertions when they conflicted with reality,

pointing out that his own experience had taught him that Aristotle’s belief that
the tropics w
ere too hot for h
uman beings was clearly wrong. Although Acosta was
struck by the strangeness of the flora, fauna, and inhabitants of the New World,
he argued that they had ultimately originated in the Old World, and that all w ere
part of the same divine creation.
Although the first two books of Natural and Moral History of the Indies were orig-
inally published separately in Latin, the whole work was published in Spanish,
indicating that Acosta was writing for a broad audience of his fellow Spaniards
rather than addressing a Europe wide audience of the learned. However, it dis-
plays a broad knowledge of classical sources reflecting Acosta’s humanistic educa-
tion. In addition to being frequently reprinted in Spain, it was shortly translated
into several vernacular European languages, including French, German, Italian,
Dutch, and English as well as Latin, becoming a basic source of European knowl-
edge of the New World into the eighteenth century and influencing other writers
such as Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), Samuel Purchas (1577–1626), Francis
Bacon (1561–1626), William Strachey (1572–1621), William Robertson (1721–1793),
and William Prescott (1796–1859).
William E. Burns
See also: European Exploration; Jesuits
Further Reading
Acosta, José de. 2002. Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Edited by Jane E. Mangan
with an introduction and commentary by Walter Mignolo. Translated by Frances
Lopez-Morillas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. 2006. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the
Early Scientific Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Burgaleta, Claudio M., S.J. 1999. José de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600): His Life and Thought
Chicago: Jesuit Way.
A G E OF R E V OLUTION 17
AGE OF REVOLUTION (1750s–1850s)

The Age of Revolution, extending from the 1750s to the 1850s, was a period of radi-
cal changes of political regimes throughout the Atlantic world, including the Ameri-
can, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions. In the United States and
other English speaking countries, historians usually choose 1776 and the American
Revolution as a symbolic start of the period, whereas in Europe and Latin America
it is more common to set it in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. T here is a
strong consensus, however, to leave aside the English Glorious Revolution in 1688,
as well as to end the time span with the 1848 revolutionary movements in Europe.
The idea of a new era was born with revolutions themselves, since many of their actors
saw themselves as a part of a wider and more fundamental change in human his-
tory. The concept of a specific revolutionary period of history was developed after
the middle of the twentieth c entury. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848, published in
1962 by Eric Hobsbawm, is a key reference for understanding the different national
processes as a whole. In Hobsbawm’s book, as in the also influential Critique and
Crisis (1959), by Reinhart Koselleck, social and political revolutions are paired with
an economic one, the Industrial Revolution, which can be situated between 1760
and 1840.
The meaning of revolution underwent a shift in the m iddle of the eighteenth
century when concept changed from being an idea of repetition, based on natural
phenomena such as the Earth’s revolution, to meaning a strong change that cuts
every tie with the past. In this view, the French Revolution (1789) replaced tradi-
tional monarchy with a republic, u nder liberal and radical principles, even though
its more immediate reasons can be considered the strong political unrest with King
Louis XVI’s economic policy. Through institutions, such as assemblies and the
republican directorate, the social class of the bourgeoisie assumed a central role in
the government, transforming France into a secular society. The first French Repub-
lic, with a democratic system of election, was proclaimed in September 1792, and
former king, Louis XVI, among many other aristocrats, was executed the follow-
ing year. Compared with absolutist political theory, which assumed that the king’s
power was a delegation of divine power itself, beheading Louis XVI was seen at
the time as the extreme point of the revolution. Sometimes the French Revolution
is considered to run u ntil 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the Direc-
tory and was himself named first consul, but the French Empire that he would
later create would continue many revolutionary policies.
The Age of Revolution was marked by a seemingly unstoppable movement
towards the future. However, the American Revolution (1775–1783) was in many
respects less oriented to the f uture, since at least in the discourse level it sought to
reinstall the rule of law, certain inalienable rights, and reinforce a proto-democratic
tradition already set in the colonies, very much like a modernized version of the
Glorious Revolution. Political tension had been mounting in the Thirteen Colo-
nies since at least 1765, mainly because British Americans resented the British Par-
liament decisions about taxation in the colonies, since the colonies were not
represented in that political body. In 1774, a fter the Boston Tea Party and many
restrictive British laws, a shadow government was formed, the First Continental
18 A G E OF R E V OLUTION
Congress convened, and the Continental Army was created, which would be
involved in the first armed conflicts the following year. In 1776, a fter many colo-
nies had created state constitutions, the Second Continental Congress declared the
independence of the United States of America.
French and American Revolutions offer two contrasting models. The American
Revolution, on the one hand, was an essentially political revolution, in which inhab-
itants of the Thirteen Colonies cut ties with the former colonial master, giving
birth to a new sovereignty without a significant change in its social structure,
notwithstanding the rejection of nobility. As a m atter of fact, independence was
almost exclusively the result of the action of American elites, a “revolution from above”
(Langley 1996, 11–83). The French Revolution, on the other hand, was rather a
social movement that reflected the struggle between the established aristocracy
and an ascending bourgeoisie; even though it changed French political regime,
it did not alter the national characteristic of the French state, and some historians
argue that its consolidation during absolutism was one of the factors that made
revolution pos si
ble, following a classical interpretation of nineteenth- century
thinker Alexis de Tocqueville.
The revolutions in Haiti (1791–1804) and the Spanish American colonies
(1810–1824), can be understood as a combination of both models to different degrees.
Revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti, took inspi-
ration from the movement in the metropolis, since its outbreak was determined
by mulatto workers and m iddle class members that sought political rights within
the colonial structure. But its leaders soon looked for a model in the United States,
whose republican government seemed as a proper goal for a completely new sov-
ereign entity. What defined the Haitian Revolution, however, was that it sparked
the largest slave rebellion in modern history, combining racial, social, and strictly
political motives in a way that made it the only true “revolution from below” (Lang-
ley 1996, 87–144). Because of the small size of Haitian society and its dreadful
history afterwards, it was considered a minor case for many years, but it is clear
today that the Haitian Revolution provides the most extreme example of revolu-
tion in the Atlantic world. Its violent development, as well as the final result of an
independent country that ended colonialism, abolished slavery, defeated a world
power, and destroyed irremediably one of the strongest Car ibbean economies,
showed a negative example of revolution both for contemporary reactionary forces
and for other revolutionaries, whose expectations were perhaps restrained by the
Haitian example.
The Spanish American revolutions, on the other hand, with many differences
among them, started as a result of the collapse of the Spanish imperial system in
1808–1810. The first attempts to fill the power void meant a redefinition of the con-
cept of sovereignty itself, considering the p eople, instead of the monarch, its natural
bearer. A forceful political outcome meant a period of civil war or unrest, particu-
larly violent and long in present-day Argentina and Mexico, which struggled for
more than 50 years u ntil reaching a stable institutional order. The newly born sov-
ereignties achieved a somewhat constitutional republican order, but could not erase
strong economical inequalities that were many times paired with racial divisions. By
A G E OF R E V OLUTION 19
the 1850s, the Spanish American revolutions were regarded as incomplete and fin-
ished at the same time, having changed the political landscape of the Atlantic
world, but with minor impact in the lives of common people. Also, by the middle of
the nineteenth c entury, a neocolonial order took the place of the old one, replacing
direct imperial Spanish ties with loose commercial dependency on Great Britain
and, to a lesser extent, France, other European countries, and the United States.
Along with the American Revolution, the Spanish American revolutions redefined
the Atlantic world, giving birth to a dozen new countries and altering the imperial
power of G reat Britain, which would reorder its domains to avoid more losses, and
Spain, which would see its imperial ambitions reduced to minor possessions in the
American continent (Cuba and Puerto Rico), Africa, and Asia.
Even though it is not related to the Atlantic world, the Greek Revolution
(1821–1832), where Greece fought against the Ottoman Empire, is sometimes
included in the concept of an Age of Revolutions. Like the Atlantic revolutions, it
included social claims, and its result, Greek independence, redefined the imperial
order in Southeast Europe, marking the early decline of the Ottoman Empire and
the start of its slow retreat from Europe.
A second wave of revolutionary movements, sometimes called the 1830s Revo-
lutions, took place throughout Europe. The July Revolution in France, the Belgian
Revolution in the Netherlands, and the unsuccessful November Uprising in Poland
against Russian domination, all took place in 1830, and along with different revolts
in Italy from 1826 onwards, were defined by popular participation and national
identity. Social claims were mixed with a call for a new political order, with the
result of popular monarchies established both in France and Belgium. Kings would
rule with the support of the middle classes and antidemocratic but also equally
antiaristocratic constitutions were formed. Driven by the new force of national-
ism, this second wave also saw the entrance of the lower classes in the revolution-
ary movement.
A third wave, which brought the period to a close, was composed by many demo
cratic revolutionary movements across Europe between 1848 and 1849. Demands
for more political participation as well as basic h uman rights, such as freedom of
speech, set off revolts in which m iddle classes allied with working classes. How-
ever, repression by reactionary governments quickly stopped them. The main
scenes of revolt included France, Italy, the Habsburg Empire, Netherlands, Ger-
many, Belgium, and Poland, as well as Brazil, whose independence, unlike Span-
ish American republics, was negotiated with Portugal and became an empire on
its own. Even though few changes w ere made in the political structure of those
countries, the last remnants of feudalism and serfdom were erased from Western
Europe, and monarchies had to face new challenges accepting some form of popu
lar political participation.
The Age of Revolution, then, implied a strong redesign of the Atlantic world,
since it resulted in the creation of many new independent countries, mainly in
North and South America. Although monarchy did not end, the period gave also
place to republicanism as a legitimate form of government and new social and
political aspirations w ere forged in those years. Freedom as the ultimate h uman
20 AL G ON Q UINS
right became a universal value. It became a goal not only for individuals but also
for p
eoples, compromising seriously the survival of the institution of slavery (alive
only in Brazil, the United States, and Cuba by the end of the period), and ending
serfdom and other forms of dependency in Europe (except for Russia). Major impe-
rial states lost their possessions in the American Continent and in Europe, a
change that would move their interest towards Africa and Asia in the second half
of the century. And revolution itself became a much valued ideal, not lacking vio
lence but full of hope and legitimacy.
Pablo Martínez Gramuglia
See also: American Revolution; French Revolution; Haitian Revolution; Latin Amer-
ican Wars of Independence; Napoleon I
Further Reading
Chartier, Roger. 1991. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Translated by Lydia
G. Cochrane. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Halperin Donghi, Tulio. 1993. The Contemporary History of Latin America. Edited and trans-
lated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1962. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. London: Weindelfed & Nicolson.
Langley, Lester D. 1996. The Americas in the Age of Revolution. 1750–1850. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
ALGONQUINS
Algonquins are indigenous occupants of the Ottawa River Valley in Canada. Along
with their close linguistic and cultural relatives in the Odawa and Ojibwa Nations,
they are part of the Anishinaabeg culture group. First recorded as “Algoumequin”
by Samuel de Champlain (1574–1635) in 1603, Europeans used the term Algon-
quin by the eighteenth century to refer to the broad grouping of Algonquian-
speaking peoples in the pays d’en haut, the French term for the vast “upper country”
surrounding the Great Lakes. Linguists later applied the name to a broad group of
similar languages spoken by native peoples throughout North America. Histori-
cally, Algonquian-speaking peoples were present in significant numbers along the
eastern seaboard of the continent from Virginia to New Brunswick, the pays d’en
haut, the Canadian prairies, and the G reat Plains of the present-day United States.
The Algonquins of the Ottawa Valley w ere important brokers in the seventeenth-
century fur trade. They were allies of the French and opponents of the Iroquois
confederacy in the endemic warfare that transformed the region through the
eighteenth century. Along with their Anishinaabeg counterparts in Quebec and
Ontario, they are import ant actors in the First Nations politics of contemporary
Canada.
Algonquin oral history and indirect archaeological evidence indicate that the
ancestors of the Algonquin p eople settled in the Ottawa River Valley at the end of
the Late Archaic Period 3,000 years ago. More direct archaeological evidence links
the Anishinaabeg to the Woodland Period (1000 BCE–1000 CE). Limited by the
AL G ON Q UINS 21
short growing season of the pays d’en haut, Algonquian bands practiced slash-and-
burn maize agriculture when possible, but relied on hunting, fishing, and gather-
ing to survive the harsh winter. Like other peoples in the region, Algonquins built
longhouses or skin-covered tents, practiced ice fishing with nets, smoked tobacco,
used snowshoes, toboggans, and birch bark canoes, and believed in Manitou, a
power flowing from the Supreme Being through all things. By the seventeenth
century, Algonquins lived in six nomadic patrilineal bands ranging across south-
ern Quebec and eastern Ontario.
The pays d’en haut was ravaged by violence and slavery and crisscrossed with
trade networks long before the arrival of the French in the sixteenth c entury. Euro
pean technology, microbes, and objectives intensified these processes and rapidly
transformed the region as refugees from war, disease, and shifting economic rela-
tionships strengthened existing bands or came together in new alliances. After
Iroquoian-speaking people on the St. Lawrence River succumbed to warfare and dis-
ease after 1534, Algonquin and Montagnais bands clashed with Mohawk bands over
trade and hunting privileges in the rich territory left vacant. This violence took on
new proportions with the establishment of the French trading post at Tadoussac on
the St. Lawrence River, where, in
1603, Samuel de Champlain first
encountered Algonquin warriors
celebrating victory over the Iro-
quois with their Montagnais and
Etchemin allies. Throughout the
seventeenth c
entury, the
region’s native p eoples and Euro
pean newcomers upended exist-
ing trade networks to serve the
demand for European goods in
native communities and Ameri-
can furs in European markets.
Thousands of furs flowed from
Algonquin and Huron country
to French markets e very year in
the first decades of the seven-
teenth c entury. The furs—New
France’s most important export—
were directly controlled by the
native p eoples of the pays d’en
haut. After the founding of New
France in 1608, the French and
their native trade partners slowly A Dutch etching of a 23-year-old Algonquin man
elaborated a “middle ground” of created in 1645. Algonquin p eoples w ere key
trade and diplomacy. Although players in the fur trade and maneuvered among
characterized by creative mis- the European powers who colonized North
understanding and violence, it America. (Library of Congress)
22 AL G ON Q UINS
proved effective in servicing the French market and, after the 1630s, countering the
diplomatic objectives of the Iroquois Confederacy and its Dutch and English
allies. Algonquin bands were key players in this relationship. Occupying the land
between the powerful Huron confederacy and French traders, Algonquin leaders
acted as brokers and benefited from a toll on the trade. As French traders made
their way further up the St. Lawrence River, however, they established a more
direct relationship with their inland suppliers and gradually weakened the Algon-
quin brokers.
Iroquois, Huron, and Algonquin bands fought over direct access to French and
English commodities throughout the seventeenth century. Armed French traders
kept Iroquois raiders in Algonquin country at bay in the 1620s, but Algonquin
efforts to establish direct ties with Dutch traders at Fort Orange (present-day Albany,
New York) prompted quick retribution. In 1634, Mohawk warriors killed Algon-
quin headmen Oumasasikweie, and Tessouat—along with their warriors—as they
passed through Iroquois country to Fort Orange. The resulting war between the
Algonquins and Iroquois raged through the 1640s and resulted in the dispersal of
Algonquin bands from the lower reaches of the Ottawa Valley for more than a gen-
eration. U ntil the late seventeenth century, Algonquin refugees took up residence
in the country recently abandoned by the Hurons, at camps in the west and far
north, and in French missions and forts. However, unlike many Hurons and Iro-
quois dislocated by war, Algonquins did not remain long in the missions or forts.
A fter the Iroquois suffered heavy losses as English allies in King William’s
War (1688–1697) and a dopted a more neutral stance in the ensuing years, Algon-
quin power surged anew. Algonquin warriors were staunch French allies in the
geopolitical contests that decided the political fate of North America; they took
part in Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), King George’s War (1744–1748), and the
Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War (1754–1760 in Can-
ada). After the British Conquest, some Algonquins settled at mission communities
or on official reserves. O thers remained in their homelands, resisting when neces-
sary and adapting to Loyalist settlers arriving in the wake of the American Revo-
lution, to logging interests and encroaching towns in the nineteenth c entury, and
to large-scale commercial interests in the twentieth c entury and the present. T
oday,
approximately 10,000 Algonquins live in 10 separate First Nations in Quebec and
Ontario.
Christopher B. Crenshaw
See also: Champlain, Samuel de; Iroquois
Further Reading
Clément, Daniel, ed. 1996. The Algonquins. Hull, Quebec, Canada: Canadian Museum of
Civilization.
Dickason, Olive Patricia. 1992. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from
Earliest Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the G
reat Lakes
Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press.
A M E R I C AN R E V OLUTION 23
AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775–1783)

The American Revolution was a transatlantic struggle that disrupted the political,
economic, and social order of British rule in the 13 American colonies between
1775 and 1783, and led to the founding the United States of America. While the
origins of the Revolution is often dated around 1775, the American Revolution is
a result of the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and decades of ten-
sion between G reat Britain and the American colonies. Such tension arose pri-
marily out of a number of British parliamentary decisions that expanded British
authority in the colonies. Though initially a civil dispute between American colo-
nists and the British government, the early events of the Revolution evolved
into a conflict much broader than North America. With the inclusion of colonial
allies such as France, Spain, and the Netherlands, the conflict is also known as the
American War of Independence. Armed conflict in North America ended after an
American-French victory at the B attle of Yorktown in 1781. The American Revolu-
tion officially came to a close on September 3, 1783, when the newly formed United
States and G reat Britain signed the Treaty of Paris. In its aftermath, the Revolution
radically changed world affairs. The Revolution destabilized global power struc-
tures, upheld Enlightenment ideology as a tool for governance, and laid the foun-
dation for further Atlantic revolutions in France, Haiti, and Latin America, among
others.
Following the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1764, the Atlantic world
was marked by diplomatic uncertainties and rapidly changing imperial-colonial
relationships. G reat Britain found itself in the midst of crisis as its national debt
swelled, leading to unprecedented levels of taxation throughout the British Empire
and a search for new ways to generate revenue. In an effort to manage and navi-
gate the changing world wrought by the Seven Years’ War, G reat Britain enacted
policies often identified as catalysts for the American Revolution. Most notably, the
British called for the permanent stationing of 10,000 troops in the American colo-
nies, new measures to create revenue to fund the deployment of t hese troops, and
drastic changes to commerce regulation. In 1764, G reat Britain’s Parliament passed
the Sugar Act and the Currency Act. The former, an updated version of the Sugar
and Molasses Act (1733), reduced the tax rate on molasses and introduced new
taxes on sugar, wine, coffee, pimiento, calico, and regulated lumber and iron exports
from the colonies. These new taxes and regulations severely limited markets for
the sale of colonial exports. The Currency Act was issued shortly after, abolishing
colonial-emitted currency and establishing a hard currency system as the standard.
Already suffering from a trade deficit with G reat Britain, American colonists argued
that such a measure would only exacerbate their difficulties due to the shortage of
hard currency in the colonies.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, crafted by Prime Minister George
Grenville (1712–1770), to raise revenue to protect, defend, and secure the British
colonies in North America. Levying taxes on paper goods, colonists greeted the
Stamp Act as the first serious attempt to thwart their freedoms. The colonists’ chief
objection to the Stamp Act was not to the rate of tax, but to the absence of colonial
representation in the British Parliament. John Dickinson (1732–1808), author of
24 A M E R I C AN R E V OLUTION
“Declaration of Rights and Grievances,” argued that taxation without representa

tion was a violation of colonists’ rights as British subjects. After violent protest and
a convincing case given by Benjamin Franklin, arguing that the colonies had already
provided for the defense and security of the empire, Parliament repealed the Stamp
Act in March 1766. However, the repeal was met with a c ounter measure that
declared Parliament’s sovereign right to establish laws for the American colonies
in the Declaratory Act (1766).
The Quartering Act of 1765, passed two days a fter the Stamp Act, required the
colonies to provide housing for British regulars. If appropriate barracks w ere unfit
to accommodate the soldiers, colonists w ere required to open their homes, inns,
pubs, barns, and buildings suitable for military barracks. In June 1767, Parliament
enacted the Townshend Acts, which established a British Board of Customs located
in Boston that sought to regulate American trade. Additionally, the Townshend Acts
raised taxes on goods such as tea, paper, and glass. It is in this early context that
colonists, including the patriot organization the “Sons of Liberty,” boycotted, peti-
tioned Parliament, and openly protested what they believed was an overextension
of British authority.
The shifting British policies that helped spark the Revolution emerged out of
an attempt to reconcile British imperial aims with the post-Seven Years’ War real
ity. Following the Seven Years’ War, the British Empire was drastically expanded.
Thus, British government sought to secure their global reach by incorporating their
American colonies into the system that had financed their military since the Glo-
rious Revolution in 1689. From this viewpoint, these laws w ere not deliberate acts
of oppression against the colonists, but measures consistent with decades of impe-
rial policy. Some historians contend that the taxation of the American colonists
aimed to provide Americans with a greater sense of inclusion within the Empire.
Nonetheless, American colonists understood their “virtual representation” in Brit-
ish policy making to be a direct infraction of their rights as British citizens. The
British, however, understood this “taxation without representation” as something
entirely consistent with the system that excluded representation from large British
cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool, and Sheffield.
While the British sought to extend their power and consolidate their imperial
authority, the literary production of many notable colonists reveals that Americans
were convinced that the well-being of the empire relied not upon the centraliza-
tion of authority u
nder the direction of the British monarchy and aristocracy, but
rather through a loose union of semiautonomous colonial governments. This con-
viction did not mean that Americans w ere actively seeking to separate themselves
from Great Britain as their own nation, for they were thoroughly invested in the
maintenance of the British Atlantic world. Colonists were deeply involved in Brit-
ish politics and war, thousands of colonists served in the British armed forces, they
participated in transatlantic religious revivals and missionary pursuits, and w ere
active participants in the emerging global market as they sought out Jamaican sugar,
Bermudian rum, Asian tea, and English manufactured goods. Notwithstanding the
unprecedented taxation leveled by the British government, colonists often under-
stood themselves as a thoroughly English p eople.
A M E R I C AN R E V OLUTION 25
However, by January 1769, the American colonies were in a state of unrest as

colonists protested the parliamentary laws. Parliament reactivated the Treason Act
of 1543 to suppress the colonial resistance. On March 5, 1770, in Boston, the unrest
came to a head as an angry mob of American colonists surrounded a group of Brit-
ish soldiers in protest. Threatening the soldiers with verbal attacks and nonlethal
objects, the colonists were fired upon, wounding six and killing five. Known as
the Boston Massacre, this event became a vital piece of the patriot cause, l ater used
as propaganda to win support for American independence. Adding to the growing
transatlantic tension, Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773. While introducing
no new taxes, the Tea Act propped up a financially floundering British East India
Company, subsequently bypassing colonial merchants and threatening local Amer-
ican economies. In protest, Samuel Adams (1722–1803), and a group of men
dressed as American Indians, boarded British East India Company ships and
dumped the Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, an event later remembered as the
Boston Tea Party.
The British government responded to colonial protest by passing several acts
known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts. All passed in 1774, the Boston Port
Act, Administration of Justice Act, Massachusetts Government Act, Quartering Act
of 1774, and the Quebec Act furthered British commercial, political, and military
power in the American colonies. In September 1774, a collection of elected dele-
gates from each colony, known as the First Continental Congress, gathered in Phil-
adelphia to construct a unified response to G reat Britain and the growing tensions
throughout the colonies. Far from united in their proposed course of action, del-
egates settled on measures outlined in the “Declaration and Resolves,” the most
An 1846 lithograph produced by New York print makers Currier and Ives of what is
now known as the Boston Tea Party. Called “The Destruction of the Tea at Boston,” it
depicts the events of December 16, 1773, when colonists dressed as Mohawk Indians
destroyed tea in protest of British tax policy. (Library of Congress)
26 A M E R I C AN R E V OLUTION
notable of which was an official boycott of British goods and prohibition of trade
with G reat Britain.
Great Britain considered the American colonies in rebellion. In April 1775, Brit-
ish troops were ordered to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Han-
cock, and disarm Massachusetts colonists. Armed militia (the famed minutemen)
met British regulars in Lexington and Concord, exchanging gunfire and drawing
the first blood of the American War of Independence. Colonists lay siege to the
British-held Boston, drove British representatives from the colonies, and seemingly
shattered any possibility for peaceful reconciliation. Over the course of the Ameri-
can Revolution, between 60,000 and 100,000 British loyalists w ere driven from
the American colonies to be dispersed throughout the Atlantic world; most nota-
bly in Canada, the West Indies, and Sierra Leone.
By May 1775, British occupied Boston and the Second Continental Congress
convened in Philadelphia. Congress selected George Washington to serve as
commander-in-chief of the newly formed Continental Army. Washington would
lead the Continental Army through six years of war with G reat Britain, emerging
as legendary hero in patriotic lore. Unifying the anti-British sentiment among col-
onists, Thomas Paine published his widely disseminated Common Sense in Janu-
ary 1776. Common Sense quickly found its way throughout the colonies and turned
public sentiment to an outward call for American independence. Not long after its
publication, Congress was forced to address this rising sentiment amidst G reat Brit-
ain’s continued exertion of military force. Colonies had already expelled the royal
government and established new governments, even before an official declaration
of independence. After receiving support from all 13 colonial governments, Richard
Henry Lee (1732–1794) proposed official independence to the Second Continen-
tal Congress on June 7, 1776. A fter Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), and a congres-
sional committee, drafted a document explaining separation from Great Britain,
Congress passed a motion to declare its independence from G reat Britain on
July 4, marking the establishment of the United States of America. In addition to
the “Declaration of Independence,” the Second Continental Congress a dopted the
first constitution of the new nation, known as the “Articles of Confederation,” offi-
cially ratified on March 1, 1781.
By declaring independence without alliance to a European imperial power, the
American patriots advanced a new conception of the Atlantic world. This new order
that would emerge was one organized around a system of independent, sovereign
states that Americans believed would ensure stability, peace, and prosperity; con-
ditions not enjoyed within the imperial power structures. By constituting the United
States as a federation of equal, sovereign states, Americans sought to avoid the divisive
factions that characterized the war-torn history of Europe. While Americans sought
to resist the aims of the imperial British state, they in-turn became state-builders
themselves.
Formed u nder the direction of the Second Continental Congress, a special for-
eign delegation secured an alliance with France on February 6, 1778. With French
aid, the United States would navigate a tumultuous military campaign. A fter more
A M STE R DA M 27
than six years of bloodshed, the United States and France forced the surrender of
General Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. Cornwallis’s surrender signaled the end
of major armed conflict in North America. The war came to an official close on
September 3, 1783, when the United States and Great Britain agreed to the terms
of the Treaty of Paris.
In the Atlantic world of revolutionary America, marginalized people, such as
African Americans, indigenous p eople, and French and Spanish Creoles, w ere
forced to think of themselves not as a part of a local community or tribe, but as
individuals within a large swath of monolithic peoples categorized in such a way
that made sense to Europeans. In other words, the American Revolution nation
building led directly to revolutionary era race-making, with groups that both the
British and Americans failed to recognize as full citizens. T
hese marginalized p
eople
were only acknowledged in so far as it served (or failed to serve) efforts to craft a
new national identity.
Dan Wells
See also: Age of Revolution; British Atlantic; Declaration of Independence; Franklin,

Benjamin; Jefferson, Thomas; Loyalists; Seven Years’ War; Tea
Further Reading
Allison, Robert. 2011. The American Revolution: A Concise History. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
DuVal, Kathleen. 2015. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. New
York: Random House.
Gould, Eliga H., and Peter S. Onuf, eds. 2005. Empire and Nation: The American Revolution
in the Atlantic World. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Polasky, Janet. 2015. Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
AMSTERDAM
Amsterdam was the largest, wealthiest city in the Dutch Republic (also called the
United Provinces of the Netherlands) during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, boasting a population of about 200,000 people for most of that period.
Located at the mouth of the Amstel River in the province of Holland, it was, for a
time, the financial center of Europe and a major entrepôt or gathering place for
trade goods, many of which w ere then redistributed to other countries and conti-
nents. At its zenith in the mid-seventeenth century, it was the foremost entrepôt
in Europe, if not the world, and the true source of Dutch commercial power. Traf-
fic passed from Amsterdam through a large bay called the Zuiderzee, then into the
North Sea and Atlantic Ocean.
The city began as a fishing village in the twelfth c entury, but its inhabitants
were soon participating in local trade circuits, first probably as skippers for others,
eventually as merchants in their own right. The nobles of Holland, who seized the
28 A M STE R DA M
area from a neighbor in the fourteenth century, protected and encouraged trade
because they knew that their newly-acquired soil held little agricultural potential.
Amsterdam’s early merchants worked primarily in the North Sea and Baltic Sea,
carrying what are sometimes called “bulk goods,” including grain, timber, and
fish. Among northern European ports, theirs was second only to Antwerp by the
sixteenth century.
The Dutch Revolt (1566–1648) was a critical catalyst in Amsterdam’s contin-
ued rise. U
ntil that point it was, with Antwerp, part of the Hapsburg Empire, based
in Spain and Austria. When the Dutch rebelled against foreign rule, and when Ant-
werp fell to the Spanish in 1585, many of its inhabitants fled north, settling in
Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, bringing commercial knowledge and experi-
ence that complemented the skills of locals. Antwerp traders, with their connec-
tions in the Iberian empires, had always specialized less in bulk goods than rich
goods such as spices, textiles, and dyestuffs. Amsterdam now began to carry more
of both, and its population swelled with the many new immigrants of 1585. With
the help of the new Dutch state and navy, which suppressed Antwerp’s commer-
cial capacity in a lengthy blockade, Amsterdam quickly surpassed its former coun-
terpart, now rival.
The source of Amsterdam’s power in the seventeenth c entury was threefold: The
city was a center of international trade, finance, and information. Its merchants
did not simply travel to another European entrepôt and carry away goods that actually
originated elsewhere; they went directly to the source, no matter how distant, which
made Amsterdam fundamentally different from predecessors such as Venice and
Antwerp. The East and West India Companies made it a uniquely global entrepôt.
Founded in 1602 and 1621, respectively, they were divided into five or six sepa-
rate chambers, each chamber operating out of a different city or province. In both
cases the richest, most powerful company chamber was located in Amsterdam.
Together they pursued Dutch interests on almost every continent. In the Atlantic
world, the West India Company’s Amsterdam chamber worked at various times in
Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean; sometimes in conjunction with the other cham-
bers, sometimes pursuing its own interests and projects. The city’s merchant
community had always taken an interest in North America, as the name “New
Amsterdam” (capital of New Netherland) suggests. Yet they had an especially prom-
inent role there after 1657 because Amsterdam purchased part of the Delaware
River Valley from the West India Company that year. Amsterdam’s mayors (burgo-
meesters) named their colony New Amstel, a fter Holland’s Amstel River, b ecause
the more obvious name was already taken. Then they administered it like one of
their own wards or neighborhoods. New Amstel was probably the only American
colony owned and run, not by a state or corporation, but by a European city.
African and American gold and silver helped make the city a financial center.
Established in 1609 and sponsored by the city government, the Bank of Amsterdam
was the only major public bank in Northern Europe at the time. It took deposits,
changed money, transferred funds between accounts, and paid bills of exchange.
Anyone who wanted to do serious business in Amsterdam had to have an account
there. In fact, anyone who wanted to trade globally needed its resources as well
A M STE R DA M 29
ecause the peoples of Asia, the Baltic, and the Levant would not accept many of
b
the usual European trade goods, and raw bullion was the only way to meet trade
imbalances in those places. The bank was also used to s ettle international debts
and transfer capital between European states. It was widely trusted b ecause it had
enough metal sitting in its vaults at any given moment to cover at least 90% of
deposits (de Vries and van der Woude 1997, 133–134).
Constant commercial traffic also delivered the most current information about
distant markets and prices. At the Amsterdam stock exchange (beurs), one could
speculate or buy shares in anything from barley to tulips, from small ships to large
joint-stock companies. The value of the beurs as a center of information (versus,
for instance, a traditional regional fair) was its global reach and permanence. An
army of brokers monitored and facilitated transactions. Also useful were the regu-
lar, detailed price lists, the newspapers, and a postal serv ice, all of which served
the financial and mercantile sectors. Through the postal serv ice, and in the news-
papers, one learned about international developments and events that might impact
prices and affect business in general.
Religiously and culturally, the city was quite diverse. The official public church
was the Calvinist or Dutch Reformed Church, as it was in the rest of the Dutch
Republic. For a short time, in the early seventeenth c entury, Calvinists controlled
the municipal government. But they fell from power in the 1620s, and the new
rulers, though members of the same Church, did not care as much about religious
non-conformers. In the 1630s, for example, they allowed the city’s Jewish residents
to build a synagogue. Similarly, Catholics worshipped without much interference
from the city hall in schuilkerken (“hidden churches”), which w ere basically adjoin-
ing row h ouses that Catholics had gutted and converted for their illicit meetings.
Whether this limited, relative tolerance contributed to Amsterdam’s growth and
commercial primacy is a strong possibility. There is no doubt that Jews came there
in part for the unusual freedom and security that they enjoyed, and their connec-
tions were critical for the West India Company’s work in Brazil, among other places.
Amsterdam was still a center of trade and finance in the eighteenth c entury,
though it declined in relative power first and foremost to London, which had a
much larger hinterland. Probably more important in explaining Amsterdam’s
decline was the growing inclination and ability of competitors like the English and
French to take control of their own trade, building up merchant fleets and making
laws to exclude the Dutch in markets that they used to dominate. Once direct trade
became the norm, the Dutch could not carry as many foreign goods and Amster-
dam was not needed any more as a global storehouse, except perhaps for precious
metals. Many merchants became lenders, and in the eighteenth century, the city
was known especially for its banking and foreign loans. Amsterdam’s business cul-
ture had become a rentier’s culture. A series of wars and revolutions in the 1780s
and 1790s, capped by a French invasion between 1794 and 1795, spelled economic
disaster. Amsterdam would not really begin to recover and grow until the mid-
nineteenth century.
D. L. Noorlander
30 AN G OLA
See also: Dutch Atlantic; Dutch West India Company; Money
Further Reading
Attman, Artur. 1983. Dutch Enterprise in the World Bullion Trade, 1550–1800. Gothenburg,
Sweden: Kungl. Vetenskaps-och Vitterhets-Samhället.
De Vries, Jan, and Ad van der Woude. 1997. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and
Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mak, Geert. 1999. Amsterdam. Translated by Philipp Blom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
ANGOLA
Angola is a country located in southwestern Africa. The nation has a total area
(2015) of 481,353 square miles (1,260,700 square kilometers). The country is
roughly twice the size of the state of Texas in the United States. The northern prov-
inces have a tropical damp climate, while the south, along the Atlantic Ocean, is
a desert. The interior is dominated by a central plateau where a moderate tropical
climate prevails.
Portuguese, the official language of the country, is joined by Bantu dialects that
are widely spoken on the local level. The vast majority of the inhabitants of Angola are
descendents of the Bantu p eople. As Bantu is a linguistic group, the people of
Angola are broken into linguistic groups, not necessarily ethnic groups. The larg-
est is the Ovimbundu speaking people who make up 37 percent of the overall pop-
ulation. The next largest is the Kimbundu people at 25 percent and the Bakongo
come in third with 13 percent. Numerous minority groups comprise the remain-
ders of the population. Due to the Portuguese colonial rule, the majority of the
population is Christian with the Roman Catholic Church accounting for between
55 and 70 percent of all Angolans. Despite the majority of the p eople claiming
Roman Catholicism, many practice traditional religious beliefs along with other
religious beliefs. The more rural the population, the greater the likelihood of tra-
ditional African religions and animistic practices being present. Approximately
10 percent of the p eople are Protestant and there is a small community of Mus-
lims in the county.
The original inhabitants of the area now called Angola appear to have been mem-
bers of the Khoisan group. With the arrival of the Bantu people in the fourteenth
to seventeenth centuries, from East Africa and Central Africa, the dynamics changed
in the region. The first European to reach Angolan shores was Diogo Cão, a Portu-
guese explorer who was expanding his home kingdom’s knowledge about south-
western Africa as they attempted to discover an all water route to Asia. Cão landed
at the mouth of the Cuanza River, now the Congo River, in 1483. Subsequent Por-
tuguese voyages led to greater contact and increased trade between the native
population and the European merchants. Like most early explorations by Europe
ans, the Portuguese established contact with the coastal regions and kingdoms and
used them to subdue t hose in the interior.
AN G OLA 31
Unlike many other outposts of Western Africa, Portugal desired to establish a

permanent colony in Angola. The common practice until the late eighteenth century
was for a European power to establish trading centers where European products
would be traded for African products, including slaves. In essence, they attempted
to influence local African affairs through their merchants. It was not until the mid
1800s that most European powers made the shift to outright control of the Afri-
can territory. The Portuguese, on the other hand, had settled the site at the pres
ent day capital of Luanda in 1575, and established a settlement based on trade. As
the American continents grew in economic importance to the European merchant
world, the demand for labor to work in the Americas increased. L abor was needed
on the various agriculture plantations, such as sugar, coffee, and cotton; in the silver
mines; and for general work. The Portuguese, with extensive plantations in Brazil,
demanded an insatiable number of slaves.
Slaves from Angola made up a very large portion of the Atlantic slave trade. From
the late 1500s to the mid 1800s, it is estimated that between 2 and 3 million slaves
were taken from Angola, destined for the Americas. The majority ended up in
Brazil, but Angolan slaves were sold into Spanish colonies in Central America, to
French, British, Dutch and Spanish Islands in the Car ibbean, as well as in later
centuries to the British North American colonies. As the Atlantic Slave Trade met
with greater European opposition over the course of the nineteenth century, fewer
slaves w ere taken from Angola, but there was a constant exportation of slaves, par-
ticularly to Brazil, until almost the end of the century.
Along with the arrival of the Portuguese explorers in 1491, the influence of the
Catholic Church was linked to attempts at social control by the Portuguese. After
the establishment of the settlement in present day Luanda, Portugal attempted to
expand its rule over the region for the next 100 years. Various Catholic o rders estab-
lished themselves as integral to the overall missionary work in Angola, including
the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans. Despite the slave trade, about 20,000
native Angolans had a dopted Catholicism by 1590. The establishment of a dio-
cese in São Salvador in 1596, cemented the Catholic presence. The Dutch estab-
lished control of many of the Angolan coastal areas by 1641. During a decade long
stay, the Dutch not only furthered the exportation of slaves for the Americas, but
also established Dutch Reformed missions to spread Protestantism to the natives
in the region. Therefore, both colonial powers w ere using religion in the coloniz-
ing efforts. Expulsion of the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century allowed the
Portuguese Catholics to evangelize without much competition.
The evangelization of the Angolan p eople was vital to the Portuguese control
over the region. As early as the seventeenth century, Portuguese royal governors
were appointed over regions of Angola. These attempts were met with strong resis
tance, and it was not until 1902 that the Portuguese seized control of vital areas of
Angola, thus solidifying their control over the region. In the nineteenth century,
the resistance to Portuguese control, not to the slave trade, was so strong that t here
were fewer than 2,000 Europeans in Angola. A fter 1902, key infrastructure was
developed as the colony was to have a permanent Portuguese population.
32 A R AWA K S
Early independence movements started in the aftermath of World War II, and
in 1961, a major uprising started. This coincided with the larger decolonization
movements across the African continent during the time period. In 1975, when
Portugal granted independence, the three groups w
ere fighting each other. The civil
war lasted u ntil 1991 with hundreds of thousands of Angolans killed.
Robert Sherwood
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Portuguese Atlantic; Slavery
Further Reading
Ferreira, Roquinaldo. 2014. Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil
during the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A R AWA K S
Arawak is a broad term for various groups of indigenous people across the Car ib
bean and northern South America. The name eventually came to mean any indig-
enous group speaking a variation of the Arawakan language, including the Taíno
(also known as the Island Arawak) of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the Lucayan
of the Bahamas, the Igneri of the Lesser Antilles, and various Arawakan-speaking
tribes in the Guianas and Venezuela (including the Lokono, Palikur, Akawaio, and
Wapishana). When all subgroups are counted, the Arawaks represent one of the
largest indigenous groups in the Americas at the time of European contact. In fact,
the Arawaks w ere some of the first p eople to be contacted by Europeans, begin-
ning with Christopher Columbus’s first voyage in 1492.
Though the Arawakan-speaking tribes of South America are collectively known
as the Arawaks, similar groups inhabiting the Car ibbean were instead known as
the Taíno, meaning “good” or “kind” in the Arawak language. The members of
the tribe hoped adopting this name would differentiate them from the competing
Carib/Kalinago tribes in the area, who they considered much more warlike. Both the
Arawak and Taíno groups likely migrated from the Amazon Basin or further up
the Andes Mountains in Colombia beginning approximately 2000 BCE. The
Arawaks settled in northeastern South America, while the Taíno scattered across
the islands of the Car ibbean in a second wave of migration around 600 CE. Popu-
lation estimates upon Columbus’s arrival vary widely, though most scholars agree
on 300,000 to 400,000 Arawaks out of a total population of around 750,000 w ere
in the Car ibbean and the Guianas combined. Though Spanish explorers often
reported populations over 2 million it is likely these were inflated figures designed
to impress their underwriters and investors. The “friendly” nature of the Arawaks
toward the Spanish was initially advantageous, allowing them to avoid direct con-
frontation. However, their amicable position toward Columbus eventually led to
large scale enslavement and exploitation of the Arawak people.
Arawak groups relied on the intensive cultivation of cassava as their staple
food, supplementing this with a robust fishing economy. Taínos relied more on
A R AWA K S 33
fish, but both groups ate small animals such as rodents, snakes, and birds. In
addition to cassava, both groups grew corn, squash, beans, yams, and peanuts,
along with other vegetables common to the Mesoamerican and Car ibbean area.
Both groups practiced a type of mound farming, in which a large mound called a
conuco was used as the planting surface. It was packed with leaves to prevent
erosion.
Each tribe treated itself as a small, independent kingdom with a hereditary leader
known as a cacique. Caciques were paid a tribute and were responsible for allotting
workloads among the villagers fairly, and distributing resources equally among the
residents. Arawak homes w ere circular huts constructed of straw, palm leaves, and
mud (though mud was not used u ntil the arrival of African slaves in about 1507)
and usually contained cotton hammocks or banana leaf mats for sleeping and a
few chairs or basic seating couches. Most of the round houses encircled a long rect-
angular h ouse, made of the same material, housing the cacique and his family.
Caciques could take multiple wives, some as many as 30, necessitating the larger
home building. Most villages also contained an open square for meetings and, in
most cases, to h ouse the playing field for the popular Arawak game batey, a kick-
ing ball game similar to soccer.
Most Arawak tribes supported a shaman, a high-ranking medicine man who
served as both the village doctor and spiritual leader. Shamans acted as the over-
seers of a polytheistic religion based on the worship of zemi, gods who possessed
both ethereal and physical form on the Earth. Shamans led the tribe in the worship
of these zemis, as well as conducting regular rituals in the village court. Rituals
and ceremonies could include village dances and celebrations, special feasts, or the
ceremonial drinking of tobacco juice, from which Arawak shamans divined the
future through visions. Sacred bread was often served on t hese occasions, accom-
panied by the beating of drums and the presentation of the carved representa
tions of the zemi.
The Taíno suffered enslavement, the spread of European disease, and conflict
so severely a fter the arrival of Columbus that they numbered only a few thousand
by 1519. By the end of the sixteenth c entury, they had ceased to exist as a distinct
population. Arawak tribes in South America fared better, managing to survive
through alliances and trade agreements with the European colonial powers and
Arawak Justice
For the Arawaks, the justice system was intertwined with their religious beliefs.
For the most serious grievances, injured parties w ere given four options for
justice: direct violence against the transgressor, poisoning of the guilty party,
sorcery, or becoming a kanaima, a type of secret assassin with permission to
kill the wrongdoer. Sorcery ranged from intense prayer and ceremony designed
to bring down judgment on the offending party, to inclusion of the services of
the shaman in casting hexes and encouraging supernatural intercession.
34 ATLANTI C C R EOLES
through retreat into the inaccessible jungles of the Guianas. One such group, the
Lokono, a group of Arawaks located in Venezuela and the Guianas, number over
10,000 today and are, in fact, increasing in population. Even though many of the
Arawak tribes, particularly the Taíno, became extinct, their culture remains a sig-
nificant part of the art, music, and literature of many of the Car ibbean islands.
Additionally, Taíno DNA appears in a significant number of the residents of many
islands, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Dominica.
Joshua Hyles
See also: Caribs; Columbus, Christopher; Taínos
Further Reading
Olson, James Stewart. 1991. The Indians of Central and South America: An Ethnohistorical
Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Rogoziński, Ian. 1999. A Brief History of the Caribbean, from the Arawak and Carib to the Pres
ent. New York: Facts on File, Inc.
Rouse, Irving. 1992. The Taínos: Rise and Decline of the P eople Who Greeted Columbus. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
AT L A N T I C C R E O L E S
Historians use the term Atlantic Creoles to refer to individuals and groups of p eople
whose identities, culture, and ways of living were produced by the interactions
made possible by the increasing connections among Europe, Africa, and the Amer
icas. Frequently multilingual and skilled at adaptation, Atlantic Creoles w ere mem-
bers of many societies and cultures at once. They w ere products of the interaction
and assimilation of different cultures and p eople as the process of exploration, set-
tlement, and empire building created new groups of people unique to the Atlantic
world. Atlantic Creoles occupied the landless spaces of the Atlantic world, the spaces
where movement defined identity, and fluidity stood in place of social and cul-
tural structure. They were the children of the trading villages on Africa’s west coast,
the plantations of the West Indies and the Carolina rice fields. They w ere the p eople
imagined and formed by the expansion and movement of p eople across a vast ocean.
They w ere natives of cross currents and trading lines, slave voyages and explora-
tion, warfare and discovery.
The word “creole” has a number of accepted meanings. At times used to describe
people born in a certain place, p eople of mixed ancestry and multiple ethnic back-
grounds, as well as groups created and protected by the sexual and cultural inter-
action between settlers and native inhabitants of the Americas, the Caribbean, and
Africa, the term rarely fits a single definition or group of people. The large group
of wealthy, mixed-race gens de couleur in New Orleans and Louisiana have, per-
haps most notably, received the “Creole” designation due to their multicultural,
multiethnic backgrounds, as well as their communal dedication to the land upon
which they built their lives. But the term has also come to describe the Franco-
African pidgin spoken in Haiti—called Kreyól—as well as the Krio ethnic group
ATLANTI C C R EOLES 35
of Sierra Leone, who claim direct descent from the freed North American slaves
who originally settled in the British West African port.
All of these varied uses, however, refer to localized examples of a larger, more
expansive group of Atlantic Creoles. As naval technology shrank the oceans, and
Europeans set out to explore the unknown world, p eople began to move and inter-
act in ways never thought possible. As early as the sixteenth century, Portuguese
traders were exploring and setting up trading villages along the western coast of
Africa. Believed to be among the first permanent, or semipermanent, European
settlements in the Atlantic world, these trading villages served as centers of cul-
tural and physical interaction between previously isolated p eople.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic world, European explorers and settlers made contact
with other groups previously unknown to them, establishing trading villages and
colonial settlements on land. By the dawn of the eighteenth century, the Atlantic
Ocean served as a highway of people in motion. Some of them were forced to make
the journey, captured as slaves by European or African traders, and shipped over
the Middle Passage to a life of servitude, and often death, in the New World. O thers
made their way by choice, serving as deckhands on trading vessels, interpreters
for merchants, naval forces, and colonial officials, or guides to a world still shrouded
in the unknown. In any case, t hese people in motion, t hese guides to an unknown
world, or victims of forced migration, became Atlantic Creoles.
Perhaps most notable of Atlantic Creoles was their ability to assimilate and adapt
to their circumstances. B ecause they developed and functioned within a realm
of constant change, their allegiances remained with themselves and their fami-
lies rather than a single community, region, or strip of land. For example, the
Luso-A fricans, those children of the Portuguese trading villages on the Upper
Guinea Coast, served as cultural and physical proxies, representatives of both
Portuguese and local African ways of life. Their collective identities did not fall in
line with any single group, as their ancestries, linguistic histories, and develop-
mental years often crossed previously impenetrable cultural and racial bound
aries. Along the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States, Atlantic Creoles,
some freeborn, others born enslaved, moved with remarkable ease, searching for
the best, most advantageous place to raise their families and become members
of society. Often born in Protestant, Anglophone regions of North America, many
Atlantic Creoles migrated to Spanish Florida, where they voluntarily changed
their names, converted to Catholicism, and established themselves in their new
communities.
It is for this reason, among o thers, that the Creoles of Louisiana have received
such interest from scholars and students alike. As Louisiana passed through French,
Spanish, and American dominion in less than 100 years, the p eople of the region
adopted certain aspects of each new cultural and political regime and merged them
with practices and ideas learned and adopted earlier. This created a community
neither French nor Spanish nor American, at least in the eyes of colonial and territo-
rial officials. As a general w
hole, they spoke French and practiced Catholicism, but
they often signed their names in Spanish, and a dopted Spanish architecture, family
structures, and linguistic inflections. U nder the Americans, Louisiana’s Creoles
36 ATLANTI C O C EAN
An Atlantic Creole Life

Born in Africa, enslaved in the British colonies, and achieving his independence
in Spanish Florida, Francisco Menendez was a typical Atlantic Creole. Some-
time in the late 1600s, Menendez was captured and sold in Africa, trans-
ported to Barbados, and sent to labor in South Carolina. During the Yamasee
War (1715–1717) fought between British colonists and Yamasee Indians,
Menendez sided with the natives. During the war, he escaped south to Spanish
Florida, where runaway slaves were welcomed by the Spanish authorities in
hopes of weakening Spain’s enemy to the north. Menendez gained his free-
dom and lived in St. Augustine, where he was an officer of the militia, and in
Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Born Muslim, Menendez converted to
Catholicism and was baptized with his Spanish name. He birth name is
unknown. When Great Britain won Florida in the Seven Years’ War (1756–
1763), Menendez did not stay. He traveled to Cuba, preserving his freedom in
a Spanish colony. Moving so often between empires and shifting identities
and loyalties over time, Menendez, an otherwise obscure figure, personified
what an Atlantic Creole life was all about.
likewise adapted to the new system, sometimes embracing Protestantism, and even
joining the Nativist, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party in the
1850s. Their names also became more English, and French became a prized cultural
artifact rather than an insular designation of membership.
Andrew N. Wegmann
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Gens de Couleur; Louisiana; Race
Further Reading
Berlin, Ira. 1998. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Landers, Jane. 2010. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
AT L A N T I C O C E A N
The Atlantic Ocean is the body of water that separates the continents of Europe
and Africa from the continents of North and South America. The Atlantic is Earth’s
second largest ocean, covering roughly one-fifth of the planet’s surface—about 31.8
million square miles, or 41.1 million square miles including all of its seas (Baltic,
North, Black, Mediterranean, Baffin Bay, Hudson Bay, Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Gulf
of Mexico, and the Car ibbean). The Atlantic drains nearly half of the world’s land
surface—four times more than the Pacific Ocean—while still being the saltiest and
warmest of the oceans. The Atlantic Ocean was formed when the supercontinent,
ATLANTI C O C EAN 37
Pangaea, broke apart during the Jurassic-Cretaceous ages. Until the late fifteenth
century, the Atlantic Ocean was largely, though not entirely, unexplored. European
exploration across the Atlantic Ocean, especially in the late fifteenth and early six-
teenth centuries, had a profound influence on the history and development of the
world, geographically, economically, culturally, and conceptually.
Medieval Europe did not have one universal concept of world geography. The
sea beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, then called the Pillars of Hercules, was gener-
ally considered mysterious. The world’s size was not known, although many
suspected that the ocean may have been too large to traverse with the sailing tech-
nologies of the day. The Atlantic signified the edge of the known world, and was
called a variety of names: the Atlantic, the River Ocean, the Western Ocean, the
Great Sea, and o thers. Arabian geographers referred to the Atlantic as the Sea of
Darkness or the Sea of Gloom.
The first known Europeans to sail west across the Atlantic w ere Irish monks
who discovered Iceland around 800 CE. By the ninth century, Vikings were also
sailing to Iceland, and by the tenth century they had sailed west to Greenland as
well. Around 1000 CE, Vikings settled in what is today Newfoundland, but this
settlement was abandoned after about 10 years because of inclement weather and
attacks from the Inuits, whom the Vikings called skraelings. These Viking transat-
lantic explorations do not carry the same significance as later European explora-
tions as they simply did not occur at the right time historically. The Vikings did
not have a solid understanding of the importance of the geography.
Certainly Europeans of any nationality were not the only or even the most skilled
sailors in the world in the fifteenth century. China had been trading in the China
Sea and the Indian Ocean since the tenth century, and in the fifteenth c entury,
Arabs and East Indians had also established trading colonies in China, East Africa,
and in Southeast Asia as well. The opening of the Atlantic by European interests at
the latter part of the fifteenth century seems to have been precipitated by the
timely combination of the desire for riches, land, and trade, as well as evolution in
ship-making and navigation technologies, such as the compass and the nautical
astrolabe, and a better understanding of the trade winds.
However, even with the convergence of these factors, the opening of the Atlan-
tic was not an instantaneous event. First instigated by Portugal, followed by the
Kingdom of Castile (Spain) and then by other countries, the earliest exploration
and colonization focused on the west coast of Africa and on the islands of the Medi-
terranean Atlantic—the Azores, Canary, Madeira—and the Cape Verde archipela-
gos. T hese areas were exploited for slaves, sugar, and other goods from the
mid-1300s through the 1400s, with mariners becoming increasingly bolder sail-
ing the African coast in their search for gold, and even at times setting out on voy-
ages of pure exploration. In fact, the Portuguese verb descobrir, “to discover,” first
came into use during the 1470s and 1480s.
As Portuguese mariners eventually opened the South Atlantic to the Indian
Ocean, other mariners began to look for alternate paths to the Indies (what is t oday
Asia). In 1492, a Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus, took his theory that the
circumference of the world was smaller than commonly supposed, and had his
38 ATLANTI C O C EAN
discovery voyage sponsored by the monarchs of Castile and Aragon. Setting off
with a fleet of three vessels and finding a good trade wind, Columbus was able to
land in the Car ibbean, which he insisted was some part of the Indies. He explored
the area for several months then returned to Castile to report his discovery, replete
with examples of kidnapped natives, gold, and crop samples such as chili, pine-
apple, and tobacco.
Although Columbus’s ability to sail so far, and return, had a bit to do with skill
but much more to do with luck, his voyage proved that it could indeed be done.
In fact, Columbus made three subsequent journeys, even though he never fully
understood the importance of the land he found: that it was a place totally unknown
to Europeans. He died contending that he had been exploring some part of Asia.
Columbus’s achievement also went largely unnoticed by other Europeans, who also
did not immediately notice the full significance of his discovery. Gradually, how-
ever, mariners, cartographers, and others began to realize that what they were really
seeing was a w hole new part of the world and a whole new ocean as well.
Empire building followed the opening of the Atlantic. Castile’s conquest of the
Canary Islands, during the fifteenth c entury, provided the experience necessary
for the quick colonization of islands in the Car ibbean in the late fifteenth century
and into the sixteenth c entury. The pattern continued even as Spain moved onto
the mainland of the Americas and overpowered large groups such as the Aztecs
and the Incas. By the mid-sixteenth century, political and religious tensions in
Europe spilled out onto and beyond the Atlantic, with states seeking to acquire as
much wealth as possible via conquest or preserving an advantageous trade bal-
ance. Countries such as Portugal, France, and England felt encouraged to explore
From a Barrier to a Bridge

Christopher Columbus’s voyage changed perceptions of the Atlantic Ocean.
It was once a feared and awesome barrier to Europeans. A fter Columbus, it
became a bridge to new lands and p eoples. Once, Europeans assumed the
world to be unimaginatively large. Now it was shown to be quite accessible.
Whole cultures, most of which had been completely separated and evolving
independently, were now brought into contact. What had been two distinct
worlds were now one, united by the Atlantic Ocean. Millions of years of eco-
divergence began to be reversed and the modern environment began to be
shaped. Not only did p eople from cultures on e ither side of the Atlantic inter-
act and intermix freely together, but so did plant and animal species, as well
as diseases and susceptible populations. Migrants from Europe, Africa, and
Asia exposed people in the Americas to fatal maladies such as smallpox, mea-
sles, yellow fever, mumps, diphtheria, rubella, and other illnesses for which
they had no immunity. Invasion in the New World had begun, for which the
native p eoples, owing to their previous isolation, had little resistance.
ATLANTI C O C EAN 39
and trade in the Americas, and piracy and plunder on the Atlantic Ocean became
one way that the struggles between states was expressed; though often, pirates
were also looking to benefit themselves.
The dramatic advancement of European trade, colonization, empires, and econ-
omies across the Atlantic relied upon the willing participation of disparate groups
of people, European, Indian, and African, without which European interests along
the diverse coasts of the Atlantic Ocean would never have succeeded or even sur-
vived. For example, African merchants and princes kidnapped other Africans from
other ethnic groups and regions to sell into slavery to European traders; early Euro
pean explorers and colonists often relied upon Native American skills and knowl-
edge for their very subsistence even as they enslaved those populations, robbed
them of their land and resources, or otherw ise made war upon different tribes;
Native American chiefs and confederations aligned themselves with European
interests to war against other more powerful Native American confederations and
states; in many American slave societies, free men of color served on militias to
protect colonies not only from slave rebellions but also assaults from e nemy Euro
pean interests; and black and Hispanicized Africans supervised Indian workers at
Spanish-American plantations. The opening of the Atlantic Ocean enabled symbi-
otic relationships between concerns that would otherw ise appear to be compet-
ing, and Europeans were predisposed to ultimately operate this system to their
advantage, resulting eventually in the exploitation of other cultures.
Indeed, commerce and trade drove European interests to cross the Atlantic.
Often when historians and others discuss the history of the Atlantic, they are pre-
dominantly concerned with determining shipping routes, assessing the capacity
of the different trades, studying the impact of the different trades on the econo-
mies of Europe and other economies, thinking about the role that the trades played
in the class system and capitalism, and evaluating how the trades influenced colo-
nization. An important f actor to consider is that while many times t hese activities
are about nations and p eoples, they are inherently taking place on the Atlantic.
Nowhere does this concept play out more clearly than in the trade of h umans
known as the Middle Passage, the conveyance by ship of millions of enslaved Afri-
can men, women, and children from the western part of sub-Saharan Africa to the
Americas. Slavery had a substantial effect on the economies of the colonies and
countries that they were transported to, the economies of the countries doing the
actual exporting of slaves, and even the economies of the places that the slaves were
taken from. Yet it was on the Atlantic Ocean itself that the cultures of the slaves
and those who represented the slaveholders first mingled and clashed. Where slaves
experienced the transition from their previous life and the life that they w
ere about
to lead, if indeed they survived the journey at all, as violence and illness aboard
the ships was rampant. The slave ship gave the slaves their first experience of the
miseries and humiliations that they would suffer under slavery, while also suffer-
ing the shock of being on the open ocean, which did not exist conceptually as a
place for human activities in precolonial West African societies. This terror and
trauma hastened the process of rendering human beings into objects. The global
40 ATLANTI C SLAV E T R ADE
commercial slave trade not only helped to usher in the conception of modern
capitalism but also that of the Atlantic world itself.
The discovery of the Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth century in general, and
Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 1492 in particular, was the beginning
in earnest of Western imperialism, even as imperialism still took several hundred
years to grow strong enough to have the world-changing impact that it had. It was
Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic Ocean that eventually led to the exploratory
and conquering efforts of other Western European countries across the Atlantic,
which in turn impacted such later events as a stronger Russian state and weaker
powers in Asia and among the Ottomans, which had indelible effects on later
world history. European exploration of the Atlantic Ocean undeniably led to the
subjugation and abuse of African and Indian people as well, and those racial and
cultural tensions are still palpable in the world. The opening up of the Atlantic Ocean
created one small, tangible world that could be imaginably conquered. T hose
effects are still felt today, w
hether it is by diplomacy, communications, transporta-
tion, or other means.
Sarah McHone-Chase
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Cartography; Columbian Exchange; Columbus,

Christopher; European Exploration; Viking Voyages
Further Reading
Benjamin, Thomas. 1996. Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians, and Their Shared His-
tory, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Egerton, Douglas R., et al. 2007. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400–1888. Wheeling, IL:
Harlan Davidson.
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. 2009. 1492: The Year the World Began. New York: Harper-Collins.
AT L A N T I C S L AV E T R A D E
The Atlantic slave trade was the international movement of enslaved p eople from
Africa to the Americas as well as the transfer of goods and resources between
Europe, Africa, and the New World. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, the Atlantic slave trade was responsible for the forced movement of millions
of p
eople, with West African slaves representing the bulk of the enslaved persons
traveling across the Atlantic Ocean. For 300 years, European countries used the
slave trade to bolster their economies and extend their respective colonial empires.
Europe’s gain, particularly the growth and development of the British Empire, came
with g reat social and economic loss for Africa and generations of Africans.
The Atlantic slave trade was born through the tenets set forth by mercantilism,
an economic principle, gaining prominence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, which sought to secure fiscal autonomy by accumulating what was
thought to be a limited supply of global commodities. The English would best use
mercantilism and apply its dictates to entering and monopolizing the Atlantic slave
trade. Having a strong navy was paramount to successfully accessing and controlling
ATLANTI C SLAV E T R ADE 41
the commerce ebbing and flowing from Africa to the Eastern Atlantic and eventually
to the Americas and back to Europe. Since only the Netherlands, E ngland, Spain,
France, and Portugal had ships capable of transatlantic circumnavigation, the rival
power began an arms race to take advantage of colonization in the New World.
Acquiring these trade routes represented the first piece in what would become
the triangular trade in slaves.
In the fifteenth c entury, the Portuguese began the race to secure natural and
human resources in an effort to become more self-sufficient. Portugal was the first
European nation to use African slave labor to help bankroll further exploration.
What began as small forays into West Africa, by a Portuguese nation looking to
bolster their economy, morphed into a commercial enterprise that would encom-
pass millions of individuals, every maritime European nation, and Atlantic Africa.
The annual income generated by the Atlantic slave trade was but one piece of the
economic windfall that propelled Western Europe into superpower status. How-
ever, the organization of trade, new crops, and technological advancements helped
open the Atlantic to European enterprise at unimaginable human costs.
Although Portugal was the first European power to explore the Eastern Atlan-
tic, Spain, with its large navy and sound economy, was in a better position to explore
the Western Atlantic, laying claim to much of what would become the Americas.
Needing slaves to improve an already struggling economy, Portugal was content to
exploit the West African slave market. Once Spain began to experience labor short-
ages in their New World holdings, Spain entered negotiations with Portugal for
access to African slaves. In need of revenue, the Portuguese w ere all too willing to
let Spain become partners in the African slave trade. The successful union between
Spain and Portugal allowed Spanish entrance into the trade of West African, dra-
matically increasing the number of slaves plying their way across the Atlantic.
The Spanish and Portuguese took advantage of an already lucrative slave trad-
ing network in place in West Africa and the African interior. Slave trading was prac-
ticed in Africa well before the arrival of Europeans. African traders w ere all too
willing to trade slaves to the Europeans in return for gold, silver, and firearms. By
penetrating and soon thereafter controlling African slave trading networks, the Por-
tuguese and, later, the Spanish were able to become the first superpowers of the
early Atlantic world.
In 1640, at the tail end of the u
nion between Spain and Portugal, slaves making
their way to the Americ as began to dramatically outpace the flow of slaves to
Iberia. Spanish America was experiencing massive reductions in laborers due to
depopulation from the transmittance of European diseases on the indigenous pop-
ulations. With the growth of privateers illegally entering the slave trade market
and drastically affecting current trade networks, the Spanish authorities changed
the patterns of trade. To limit the smuggling of slaves in Spanish America, Spain
decreed that slaves had to be disembarked at Buenos Aires, Cartagena, or Vera Cruz.
By 1660, small numbers of slaves from Brazil began to make their way to British
North America. In less than 50 years, Spain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade
vastly increased the number of slaves being purchased from Africa.
English merchants w ere on the scene dabbling in the Atlantic slave trade in the
mid-1500s. Elizabeth I, and a small group of English investors, witnessed tremen-
dous profit on the first significant trade that consisted of 400 slaves. Pirates, such as
John Hawkins, slowly opened transatlantic commerce by expanding English slav-
ing enterprises. British traders also often supplied Spain and Portugal with slaves
to supplement their colonial workforce. The strength of the Royal Navy lent g reat
confidence in shipping slaves across the Atlantic. As imperial rivalries made their
way from Old World to New, the British focused primarily on supplying their own
North American colonies with slave labor.
During the eighteenth century, Great Britain was formally dispatching increased
expeditions annually, bound specifically for the West African coast, to keep Barba-
dos sugar and Virginian tobacco freely flowing throughout the Atlantic world. There
were also hundreds of merchants inside the British Empire that w ere also looking to
Africa to supply enslaved laborers in the New World. By 1760, Great Britain was the
outright leader in countries participating in the Atlantic slave trade. In the mid-
1760s, British ships brought over a heavily disproportionate amount of Africans
being transported annually to the Caribbean and North America. The Atlantic
slave trade was at its height at this time. An average of £4 million a year was making
its way to British coffers as a direct result from England’s role in the slave trade.
ATLANTI C SLAV E T R ADE 43
A 1788 engraving of the British slave ship Brookes, originally produced by the Society for
Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The image visualized the inhumanity of the
Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade by showing how a single ship could carry over
400 slaves. (Library of Congress)
For G
reat Britain, a large percentage of the annual profits from the Atlantic slave
trade came from the empire’s ability to use the abundant natural resources in its
North American colonies to fuel reinvestment in African slaves. Sugar, cotton,
tobacco and molasses produced in the American plantation south and exported to
Europe was vital in keeping the Atlantic slave trade progressing. Europe’s love for
sugar alone kept the wheels of the Atlantic slave trade rolling.
Following the American Revolution (1775–1783), the Atlantic world was filled
with notions of freedom, independence, and equality and justice for all. The aboli-
tion movement met strong resistance as the Atlantic slave trade, while deemed
immoral by most, continued to be an economic force to be reckoned with. Even
with G reat Britain’s footprint in North America being limited a fter the Revolution-
ary War, the demand for cotton continued to trump the inhumanness of the Atlan-
tic slave trade. Also, the growth in textiles and manufacturing associated with the
Industrial Revolution in Europe led to insatiable demands for cotton production.
Cotton demand encouraged the growth of plantations in the Deep South. The
increase in the number of enslaved laborers in the American south was exponen-
tial. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a vast majority of cotton imported to
Great Britain came from the labor of enslaved Africans in America.
At the same time, abolition movements continued to gain adherents across the
Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1807, both
The Middle Passage

The Atlantic slave trade was notorious for the transatlantic voyage of slave
ships from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas in what was
known as the M iddle Passage. For the African slaves, the journey across the
Atlantic was a hellish event, with ships filled almost to the point of sinking
with h
uman cargo. Over the three-month journey west, slaves w ere stacked
shoulder to shoulder like sardines with no ventilation, no windows, and
no bathrooms. They lived in stagnate pools of sweat, urine, feces, and vomit
brought on by seasickness. It is estimated that 15 percent of the captive Afri-
cans died during the Atlantic passage, and that perhaps 2 to 4 million Africans
died in total during the Middle Passage between the fifteenth and nineteenth
centuries. It is also estimated that some 6 million Africans were transported
across the Atlantic to slavery in the Americas in the eighteenth c entury alone,
when the slave trade was at its height.
reat Britain and the United States declared the Atlantic slave trade illegal. The
G
Royal and American Navies w ere used to police the now illegal Atlantic slave trade.
Prohibition of the slave trade, however, did not mean suppression, as Spain and
Portugal ramped up slave trading efforts in South America. Thousands of African
slaves continued to make their way to the sugar and coffee plantations in Brazil.
The slow decline in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade had r ipple effects
throughout the Atlantic world. Enforcement of the Atlantic slave trade cost the Brit-
ish 50 years of profits made by its involvement as the principle player in the slave
trade. Back in the United States, domestic social issues w ere exacerbated by the
decrease in African slaves entering the market. Afraid of purchasing international
slaves that might ferment slave revolts at home, plantation owners in the Ameri-
can south evoked harsher punishments and enacted more stringent codes to keep
all people of color from uprising.
Fewer slaves in the world markets placed enormous strain on the bottom line of
plantation o wners’ profits. With fewer African slaves in the marketplace, the average
price for a slave more than doubled for a young, healthy male slave. Agricultural
advancements tempered the rising costs of slaves. The lucrative profits coming out
of Brazil changed the Atlantic slave trade trajectory. By the mid-1820s, the trian-
gular slave trade stretched southward to focus on the importation of African slaves
to Spanish South America. British involvement in the slave trade was as a policing
agent. Driven by humanitarianism, morals, or economics, the British—particularly
the Royal Navy—played a crucial role in ending the Atlantic slave trade.
Once Spain and Portugal succumbed to international demands to abolish the
Atlantic slave trade, the flow of African slaves to Brazil and Cuba dramatically
slowed a fter 1870. Between 1807 and 1870, Iberian investors looking to fuel their
New World investments w ere still able to access slaves via illegal slave trafficking
A Z O R ES 45
to Brazil and Cuba. While the Atlantic slave trade officially ended in 1807, the
illegal movement of African slaves continued for many more years u ntil the abol-
ishment of slavery occurred in Brazil in 1888.
Richard Byington
See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of the Slave Trade; Cotton; Plantations;
Slavery; Slave Trade in Africa; Sugar
Further Reading
Rawley, James. 2005. The Transatlantic Slave Trade. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Thomas, Hugh. 1997. Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Thornton, John. 1998. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400–1800.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
AZORES
The archipelago of the Azores consists of nine volcanic islands in the North Atlan-
tic Ocean approximately 850 miles west of Portugal. The island chain can be
grouped into three main clusters: Flores and Corvo in the northwest; a middle con-
stellation consisting of Graciosa, Terceira, São Jorge, Pico and Faial 150 miles to
the southeast; and then São Miguel, Santa Maria, and the Formigas Reef 500 miles
further to the southeast. This southernmost set lie 800 miles from Lisbon. The
Azores are located about halfway between Portugal and the Americas including
the former Portuguese colony of Brazil and about 500 miles to the northwest of the
Madeira island chain, also a Portuguese Atlantic possession. The islands’ subtropical
climate is temperate with the exception of rather violent winter storms. Substan-
tially impacted by the Gulf Stream, average rainfall is between 28 and 63 inches
with the greatest amount concentrated in the vicinity of Mount Pico. The islands
are named a fter a common Atlantic bird, the goshawk (Açor in Portuguese).
Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Azores would play a pivotal role, some-
what surprisingly given their size and distance from the major continents, in the
shaping of Atlantic world political economy, especially for Europe. European knowl-
edge of the Azores began sometime in the mid-fourteenth c entury. It is thought
that Italian, Majorcan, and Castilian voyagers, engaging creative cross wind strat-
egies to make a return from the Canaries, Madeira and coastal Guinea, first pro-
vided basic information of the uninhabited chain, however vague their travel
account markings may have been.
In 1439, Majorcan mapmaker Gabriel de Valsequa created the first chart to
acknowledge the archipelago. Interestingly, the legend of this map included an
inscription alleging Portuguese discovery of the islands in 1427. Scholars gener-
ally associate landfall in the Azores with the larger efforts by mariners in the early
1440s, mostly u nder the aegis or sponsored by Portugal’s Henry the Navigator,
endeavoring to round the treacherous Cape Bojador off the northern coast of the
46 A Z O R ES
Western Sahara. The feat was first achieved by a vessel captained by Gil Eanes in
1434, making the earlier date of discovery unlikely.
In 1433, Portuguese king Afonso V granted Gonçalo Velho Cabral, a member
of the Order of Christ, a hereditary fief (capitania) to begin colonizing the island of
Santa Maria. Migrants, many of them from the mainland Portuguese provinces
of Algarve and Alentejo, began to make their way first to Santa Maria and then,
in 1444, to São Miguel. Transplants included a number of Sephardic Jews (fleeing
the Inquisition, in part) from the province of Estremadua. Over time, o thers from
provinces of Algarve, Minho, Ribatejo, and the islands of Madeira also helped popu-
late the Azores.
Island pioneers grew grapes, sugar cane, and grain. They also raised sheep,
chicken, pigs, and other domesticated animals. Whaling, timber, wheat, woad (for
dyeing), and sugar production gradually took hold as export enterprises. Velho
Cabral eventually received the title of Commander of the Islands of the Azores in
1443.
In 1522, an earthquake and ensuing landslide struck Vila Franca do Campo
on the south side of São Miguel. At this point, some people migrated to the
Americas, particularly the budding Portuguese colony of Brazil. Crisis would
again sweep the fledgling island colony when, in the form of a political takeover,
as part of a Portuguese crisis of succession, Spain’s Philip II assumed the Crown
in 1581.
Portions of the archipelago resisted Hapsburg hegemony, significantly playing
host to a political faction who favored the rival House of Aviz’s last surviving heir,
António, Prior of Crato. António had made failed attempts on the mainland to pro-
mote his authority before establishing a government in exile headquartered on the
island of Terceira. Thanks to the efforts of Cipriano de Figueiredo, governor of Ter-
ceira, as well as an aristocratic young w oman named Violante do Canto, António’s
court in exile persisted, however modestly, until a Spanish naval force sailed to
the archipelago in 1583.
To confront the Castilians, a combined Portuguese-French force gathered to
challenge Phillip. Yet in the ensuing b attle of Vila Franca at Ponta Delgada to the
south of São Miguel, Portuguese defensive efforts were vanquished and several
thousand lost their lives. Soon consolidating their victory, Spanish authorities exe-
cuted some of the defeated enemies as pirates, leaving their corpses hung at stra-
tegic places to neutralize further resistance.
European interimperial rivalry in the early modern period continued to play
out in the greater Atlantic and in the Azores in particular. English adventurers made
their way to the islands in 1589, their maneuverings part of a long simmering
Anglo-Spanish conflict. Ships were plundered and general mayhem fomented but
not to the extent that the Spanish Crown lost possession of the archipelago.
In 1597, English Queen Elizabeth I launched one final seafaring campaign
against her Spanish rivals. Sailing to the Azores, a combined English-Dutch squad-
ron, known as the Essex-R aleigh Expedition or Islands Voyage, arrived midsum-
mer. Attempting to engage the Spanish navy at key Atlantic points while also
A Z O R ES 47
intercepting the treasure fleet as it passed through the Azores returning from Amer
ica, the plan also included assaulting targeted Spanish possessions on the islands.
Yet upon tangling with Spanish warships, the elaborate plan was torn asunder leav-
ing a battered and embittered group of survivors (including Rear Admiral Walter
Raleigh) only to beat a humiliated return home.
In late 1640, civilians overtook a Spanish garrison in an effort to end the Span-
ish imposed Iberian Union. Simultaneous events on the mainland developed in
such a way that the islands were soon restored to Portuguese possession. Conflict
between the two Iberian powers persisted, however, as part of the larger conflict,
later termed the Portuguese Restoration War, which would last u ntil the signing
of the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668.
In the early decades of the nineteenth c entury, the archipelago again played a
significant role in the shaping of Portuguese politics. In 1820, civil war broke out
between liberal and absolutist factions with the liberals soon emerging victorious.
Calling for a return of the Portuguese king João VI and court—then living in exile
in Brazil after fleeing Napoleon’s armies—as well as a constitutional monarchy, an
ensuing succession crisis soon degenerated into renewed civil war between the two
rival factions headed by competing pretenders to the throne. On one side was Pedro,
recently turned Emperor of Brazil, who headed the liberals. Pedro’s younger brother
Miguel led the opposing absolutist faction.
Pedro eventually stuck a deal with Miguel who agreed to marry Pedro’s daughter
Maria (Maria da Glória) in exchange for kingship. But upon his arrival in Lisbon,
the younger brother broke off the deal, illegitimately usurping royal power with
the tacit support of disgruntled landowners and church officials who disagreed
with a series of liberal reforms only recently undertaken. In response to an official
church decree declaring Miguel as king in February 1828, Pedro abdicated his
charge as Emperor of Brazil in favor of his son Pedro II and established a Liberal
government headquartered in the Azores.
The conflict raged for several years both at land and at sea. The war hit its mid-
Atlantic peak at the B attle of Praia Bay (Praia da Vitória) on the island of Terceira
in August 1829. It was then that Miguelites sought to land troops on the island
but w ere defeated by coastal forces loyal to the Liberals. The victors soon decreed
the city of Angra, the Portuguese capital, on March 15, 1830, and subsequently
professed loyalty to Pedro’s d aughter, Maria. Despite this, the so-called Portu-
guese Liberal Wars would continue for four more years of struggle before Pedro
and his Liberal collaborators managed to force Miguel into exile for good and crown
Maria II as queen in 1834.
The largely Liberal led, yet still quite unstable period known as the Portuguese
Revolution, would persist until 1851 when brigadier (and duke) João Carlos Sal-
danha led a military coup to oust the regime of former mayor of Lisbon and con-
fidant of the queen, Costa Cabral. The change led to the creation of a two-party
political system and renewed efforts to stimulate economic development.
Andrew Wood
48 A Z TE C E M PI R E
See also: Brazil; Cartography; European Exploration; Portuguese Atlantic; Sugar
Further Reading
Birmingham, David. 2003. A Concise History of Portugal. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Russell, Peter. 2001. Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Russell Wood, A.J.R. 1998. The Portuguese Empire 1415–1808: A World on the Move. 2nd ed.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
AZTEC EMPIRE
The Aztec Empire had its origins in the mid-thirteenth century when the Aztecs
(Mexica/Tenocha peoples), part of the last wave of Chichimecs (migrants from north-
ern Mexico), settled in Anáhuac (Valley of Mexico). By the mid-fifteenth century,
the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, combined with the city-states of Texcoco and
Tlacopan as the Triple Alliance, was gaining hegemony over all other central Mex-
ican city-states, which w
ere forced to pay tribute with items such as food, pottery,
and textiles. The arrangement safeguarded the entire region’s political stability
through extensive trading networks and developed a culture of low intensity war-
fare against its enemies, such as the Tlaxcalans, which ensured tribute and sacri-
ficial victims for their religion. The Alliance’s power remained intact until the
Spanish conquest (1519–1521).
A Z TE C E M PI R E 49
The Aztecs w ere a military society with an elite warrior class organized into two
primary divisions, the Eagle and Jaguar cults. Their dress and armor were intended
to emulate and personify the power and ferocity of these predators. B ecause the
region lacked the natural resources and technology for metallurgy, their weapons
were made from stone and wood. High-ranking soldiers and leaders used heavy
wooden clubs called macanas. With sharp obsidian imbedded edges, they could
decapitate an enemy in one stroke. The second principal weapon was the atlatl, a
wooden baton with a handle on one end and a socket that engaged a small sharp
lance on the other. A flipping motion propelled a light spear faster and farther than
if hand thrown. Lower ranking warriors used s imple bows and arrows.
The Aztec Empire’s political and economic stability required continuous mili-
tary campaigns. Once in power, emperors w ere expected to build on the achieve-
ments of their predecessors by expanding their kingdoms’ political and economic
influence. Consequently, at the start of their reign, rulers sought to expand the bor-
ders of their empire. By the start of the sixteenth century, during the reign of
Moctezuma II, the emperor enjoyed a semidivine status because he was thought
to hold special powers of and the ability to interpret omens, a significant belief
that directly influenced the outcome of the 1519–1521 Spanish conquest. Mocte-
zuma’s inability to predict the purpose of the Spanish conquistadors and his cap-
ture caused his subjects to assassinate him.
The Aztecs initiated wars to increase the number of tributary states for the Triple
Alliance, while also capturing victims for human sacrifices. Many times, simply
the threat of an invasion could lead to the capitulation of an opponent. Warfare
was an integral element of Aztec society and regarded as a perpetual religious and
political necessity. Although the Aztecs did not have a permanent or standing army,
all males were required to participate actively in times of war. Diplomatic missions
usually preceded combat where ambassadors offered a peaceful alternative of tribute
and acceptance of the supremacy of the Aztec gods. For individual warriors, dem-
onstrating personal valor, a common value for most military societies throughout
history, was the opportunity to be rewarded with promotion of military rank and
social status.
Mexican lore claims that the god Huitzilopochtli instructed the Aztecs to migrate
from northern Mexico southward into Mesoamerica. He promised that the Aztecs
would find their home in the location where they spotted an eagle holding a snake
in its beak while perching atop a pear cactus. According to the Tira de la Peregri-
nación (the Boturini Codex), a Mexican codex dating from the mid sixteenth
century, the Aztecs began their journey from a place called Aztlan around 1100
CE. The exact location of Aztlan, however, is unknown, although it was likely
somewhere in northwestern Mexico.
By the time of their arrival in the Valley of Mexico, the Aztecs had evolved from
hunter-gatherers into settled agriculturalists who spoke Nahuatl, the most com-
mon Mesoamerican language. They arrived at this location under precarious cir-
cumstances of their own making. Initially living on the margins of the region, they
served as mercenaries for the communities who already lived there, including the
last remaining Toltec city-state of Culhuacan. In 1325, they fled to an island in the
iddle of Lake Texcoco, following the human sacrifice of the daughter of the ruler
m
of Culhuacan. It was h ere that they saw Huitzilopochtli’s promised vision that iden-
tified their permanent home. As they began building their island city-state of
Tenochtitlán, they continued serving as mercenaries for the other regional pow-
ers. This tenure ended following the end of the ruling dynasty of the Azcapotzalco
city-state in 1428. Their supremacy was solidified when they reconciled with the
rulers of Culhuacan through intermarriage with the Toltec ruling dynasty, which
provided the secondary benefit of creating a direct connection to ancient Meso-
american history. Its hegemony quickly extended throughout central Mexico.
Tenochtitlán’s livelihood rested on tribute from conquered p eoples, which they
received from communities within the central plateaus and from southern and east-
ern Mesoamerica. They also controlled trading routes that passed through colonies
in Zacatecas and Durango that reached as far as the modern United States South-
west and Paquimé in modern day Casas Grandes, Chihuahua. Two large civiliza-
tions that remained outside of the Aztec’s reach were the Tarascan people in west
central Mexico and the Nahua city-state of Tlaxcala who they failed to conquer.
The empire was composed of various political units that varied in geographic
and demographic size. Subject city-states controlled smaller political units, but local
elites retained their positions of power while collecting tribute and labor for
themselves and their Aztec governors. Aztec hegemony was not based on garrison-
ing soldiers within the conquered communities, but instead it focused on the swift
military deployment during rebellions. Additional deterrents for warding off sub-
versive activity included human sacrifices of belligerent warriors and the marriage
of noble w omen to the rulers of the Triple Alliance.
The Aztecs created a mythology, historically and culturally linking themselves
to preceding Mesoamerican civilizations, particularly to Teotihuacan and the
Toltecs. However, there were many concrete commonalties amongst all Meso-
american civilizations. Architecturally, all societies used the stepped pyramid as
the basic shape of their pyramids, and linguistically, they all developed a hiero-
glyphic writing system. Other noteworthy examples included the format of the
Mesoamerican ballgame based on an I-shaped ball court with sloped walls. This
sporting event had ritual significance related to the movements of the sun and
moon. Along with the Maya, the Aztecs abided by a complex 260-day ritual cal-
endar combined with a 365-d ay solar calendar forming 52-year cycles similar
in cultural importance.
Due to Tenochtitlán’s location surrounded by Lake Texcoco, imaginative and
resourceful farming methods were required for supporting the city’s growing pop-
ulation. By 200 CE, terracing and raising fields had developed into an established
agricultural system. Toward the end of the late formative period (200–400 CE),
the chinampa (hanging garden) method emerged. It obtained its complete form by
1200 CE. Chinampas were artificial islands made up of mud piled atop reed mats
that were anchored to the shallow lakebed with willow trees. The Aztecs then lay-
ered the fenced-in area with lake sediment and vegetation to bring it above sea
level. The system expanded the production of foods such as maize, squash, chili,
and beans.
A Z TE C E M PI R E 51
The chinampas or hanging gardens of Tenochtitlán, capital of the Aztec Empire. Given its
location inside Lake Texcoco, the city’s residents devised creative ways to farm. (DEA/
G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images)
During the latter third of the fifteenth century, the Aztec Empire expanded sig-
nificantly through aggressive military engagements and tactful diplomacy. Adding
to its success and demonstrating their high level of sophistication was an extremely
complex, well-organized bureaucracy. A significant difference between central and
southern Mesoamerican city-states was that the Aztecs had one single emperor versus
the Maya city-states, which each had their own king. The emperor was chosen
through an election of a council of nobles, priests, and military leaders; his pri-
mary responsibility was military leadership. Nobles served as the public officials,
judges, and governors of conquered regions. Warriors could obtain noble status by
demonstrating their valor during b attles. Priests, a distinct class, performed ritu-
als aimed at pleasing the gods and warding off natural disasters such as earth-
quakes and droughts.
Nonetheless, because the conquered city-states retained a large degree of internal
integrity, t here existed a consistent desire for a return to political autonomy. Con-
sequently, the Aztec Empire’s tribute-collecting structure was unable to suppress
rebellious activity. The T riple Alliance’s confederation lacked political integration.
Coupled with the lack of a permanent military presence, the confederation was
constantly under threat of revolutionary activity. Conquered people remained
loyal to their local community rather than to the larger state. This parochial out-
look, patria chica, continues to influence Mexican identity in the twenty-first
century. Finally, a community’s suppression did not mean that their deities w ere
abolished, but Aztec gods were added to the pantheon of the local populations.
The Spanish Conquest began in April 1519 when Cortés’s expedition landed in
present day Vera Cruz on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It ended in August 1521
with the fall of Tlatelolco, a township near Tenochtitlán, and the capture of the
last emperor, Cuauhtémoc. T here w
ere many f actors that contributed to the Aztec
defeat, none more profound then the demographic decimation brought on by Euro
pean diseases. Gunpowder and steel weapons also benefitted the Spanish, as did
the assistance from the Aztec’s enemies, especially the city-state of Tlaxcala. Thus
began the Spanish colonial era and the replacement of the Aztec Empire by the
colony of New Spain.
Jaime Aguila
See also: Conquistadors; Cortés, Hernán; Maya Civilization; Moctezuma II;

Tenochtitlán
Further Reading
Knight, Alan. 2002. Mexico: Volume 1, From the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest. London:
Cambridge University Press.
Meyer, Michael C., William L. Sherman, and Susan M. Deeds. 2013. The Course of Mexican
History. London: Oxford University Press.
B
BACON, SIR FRANCIS (1561–1626)
Sir Francis Bacon was an English philosopher, l awyer, and statesman, and although
he never crossed the Atlantic, the Atlantic played an important role in his thoughts
and career. As a philosopher, Bacon is best known for his emphasis on knowledge
gathering as necessary for the foundation of accurate ideas about nature and the
increase of h uman power over nature, sometimes referred to as Baconian empiri-
cism. European contact with the Americas was an example of increased h uman
power, and Bacon used the mariner’s compass as one of the three innovations that
marked off modern times—the others being gunpowder and the printing press
The reign of James I of E ngland (r. 1603–1625) saw an expansion of English colo-
nization efforts in North America, and Bacon was a leading supporter of establish-
ing new colonies. His The Reign of Henry VII discussed the voyages of Sebastian
Cabot in the late fifteenth c entury and the earliest days of the European encounter
with the Americas as a lost opportunity for England. In 1610 he was a founder of the
Newfoundland Company, an organization devoted to promoting colonization of New-
foundland. Bacon had a keen awareness of the risks of colonization, at one point
contrasting settlement in V irginia unfavorably with the extensive colonization of
Ireland that occurred in James’s reign. His essay “Of Plantations” suggests that the
founders of colonies not look for short-term profits but take the long view of at least
20 years, since the obsession with making colonies profitable from the earliest years
had been greatly destructive to them. He suggested that colonization companies
Atlantic Expansion and the Advancement

of Knowledge
For Sir Francis Bacon, the expansion of Europe was linked to the advancement
of knowledge more generally. On the title page of Bacon’s The Great Instauration
(1620) a ship is depicted passing through the Pillars of Hercules that divide the
Mediterranean from the Atlantic. The image symbolizes Bacon’s goal to advance
European knowledge beyond the limits set by the philosophers of Greek and
Roman antiquity. Although the image was not original with Bacon—a very
similar image appears on the title of page of the Spanish cosmographer Andrés
García de Céspedes’ Rules for Navigation (1606) and the Pillars of Hercules
appear in the imperial iconography of the Spanish Habsburg ruler Charles V
(1500–1558)—Bacon saw European expansion across the Atlantic as a meta
phor for the advancement of knowledge.
54 B A C ON , SI R F R AN C IS
should be led by nobles and gentlemen rather than merchants, as aristocrats are bet-
ter able to take long-term views than are profit-oriented merchants. Despite any
hesitation he might have had about the viability of transatlantic colonies, Bacon was
one of the investors in the Virginia Company at the issuance of the second Virginia
charter in 1609, and sat on the Council of the Company in London. His cousin,
Nathaniel Bacon, Sr., became president of the company and acting governor of Virginia.
In many ways, Bacon’s imperial model was Spain, whose strength he ascribed to its
Atlantic ties to its possessions in America and the riches it had derived there from.
He particularly wondered at the ability of Spain to hold so vast an empire with so
few Spaniards. Bacon was well-read in the literature of Spanish America, including
works of the Inca noble turned Spanish humanist Garcilaso de la Vega and the Jesuit
José de Acosta. Although Bacon’s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis (1627), is set in the
Pacific rather than the Atlantic, its hierarchical organization is in many ways remi-
niscent of the Spanish Empire, and Spanish is the language that the fictional ship-
wrecked mariners use to communicate with their hosts. In the hall of illustrious men
in Bacon’s utopia, Columbus is given prominence.
As a minister of James I, Bacon was implicated in James’s pro-Spanish policy,
most notably in his leading role in the Spanish-backed prosecution of Sir Walter
Raleigh after his failed expedition
to Guiana, a failure that led to
Raleigh’s execution in 1618. How-
ever, Bacon advocated an aggres-
sive policy against Spain and its
Empire in Considerations Touching
a War with Spain (1624) addressed
to James’s son Charles, the future
King Charles I. He placed the jus-
tification of the potential Spanish
War in the context of the early
stages of the Thirty Years War in
Continental Europe rather than
in Atlantic terms. In it he viewed
the far-flung nature of the Span-
ish Empire as a weakness, put-
ting it at the mercy of a superior
naval power. The wealth of Spain
was transported by sea; there-
fore, it would be of little use to
Spain if another power controlled
the sea. Spanish treasure also
The English philosopher Francis Bacon showed made a war with Spain potentially
a remarkable range of interests. Although best lucrative, whereas wars gener-
remembered for his work developing the scientific ally w ere expensive. The Spanish
method, he was also an advocate of colonization. Empire had also drained Spain
(Library of Congress) of the people who had emigrated
B AHIA 55
to the Spanish possessions in the Americas and elsewhere. Bacon advocated what
would come to be called a blue water military strategy emphasizing naval force.
He believed that an alliance of England and the United Provinces of the Nether-
lands, by joining their powerful fleets, could prevail against Spain.
Bacon’s influence on the New World did not end with his death. The Puritan
founders of New E ngland, like the Puritans of E
ngland, were influenced by Bacon’s
ideas of the restoration of knowledge and induction. In the late seventeenth century,
the science of England’s Royal Society, which reached across the Atlantic to the
British American colonies, claimed Baconian inspiration. Bacon’s empiricism and
his belief in scientific and technological progress made him a hero of the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment, including the American Enlightenment. Thomas Jeffer-
son ranked him with his compatriots John Locke (1632–1704) and Isaac Newton
(1642–1727) as one of the three greatest intellects of all time.
William E. Burns
See also: Acosta, José de; British Atlantic; Enlightenment
Further Reading
Albanese, Denise. 1996. New Science, New World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Jardine, Lisa and Alan Stewart. 1999. Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon.
New York: Hill and Wang.
Martin, Julian. 1992. Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy. Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press.
BAHIA
Often regarded as the center of Afro-Brazilian culture, Bahia is a state in North-
east Brazil that became prominent as the center of Brazilian sugar production, the
primary motivation for Portugal’s colonization of Brazil. Bahia gets its name from
the nearby Baía de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints). Under Portuguese king Man-
uel I’s sponsorship, Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467–1520) navigated the first Europeans
to Brazil to 1500. The bay was home to the Tupinambá, Amerindians who spoke
Tupian languages. Manuel I commissioned a fleet to sail back to Brazil from Lis-
bon in 1501. That year, on All Saints’ Day (November 1), Portuguese sailors, along
with the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, entered the Bay of All Saints. Vespucci
and others became convinced that t hese newly encountered lands in the Western
Hemisphere were not part of Asia but a New World.
After Manuel I died, his son, João III, reigned as king of Portugal. João III deci
ded to establish direct royal government in Brazil. In 1549, he sent Tomé de Sousa
to Brazil. Sousa served as Brazil’s first governor-general. A nobleman with military
experience in Africa and India, Sousa fortified the city of Salvador overlooking the
Bay of All Saints and made it the seat of colonial government. Salvador remained
the capital of Portuguese America until being supplanted by Rio de Janeiro in 1763.
Sousa was instructed by João III to encourage the planting and milling of sugarcane.
Situated on a peninsula that receives the Paraguaçu River and separates the bay
56 B AHIA
from the Atlantic Ocean, Salvador became the commercial center of the fertile
Recôncavo coastal lowlands, where sugarcane, along with tobacco and cotton, was
grown for export while other crops were grown for food, especially cassava.
Among t hose who arrived in Brazil with Sousa w ere Father Manuel da Nóbrega
and five other Jesuits. The development of plantation agriculture made Bahia nota-
ble in the African slave trade. In 1558, Salvador became the site of the first slave
market in the Western Hemisphere. Bahia contained a mixture of European, Afri-
can, and Amerindian cultures. While converting Amerindians to Roman Catholi-
cism, the Jesuits faced hostility from fellow Europeans who sought to make
Amerindians into slaves. Nóbrega denounced the enslavement of Africans, but the
Jesuits eventually assented to and participated in the institution of slavery. Bahia’s
most renowned Jesuit was António Vieira. Born in Lisbon, Vieira immigrated as a
child with his parents to Salvador. Preaching to Bahia’s Portuguese settlers, black
slaves, and Amerindians in Jesuit-r un aldeias (mission villages), Vieira established
a reputation as a gifted orator. He was regarded as one of the Lusophone world’s
literary masters by the time of his death in Salvador in 1697.
In May 1624, a Dutch West India Company fleet commanded by Jacob Willek-
ens invaded and occupied Bahia. The Dutch surrendered after a combined
Portuguese-Spanish fleet of 52 ships containing over 12,000 men sailed into the Bay
of All Saints in March 1625. Led by Fradique de Toledo Osório, this was the larg-
est force sent from Europe to the Western Hemisphere up to that time. In the
interior, more so than on the coast, Bahia became dominated by large landhold-
ers. By the end of the seventeenth century, individuals in the dry interior region of
northeastern Bahia, known as the sertão, owned tracts of land larger than Portu-
gal. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cultivation of cacao on plan-
tations became important for the Bahian economy. Native to the Amazon and
Orinoco river basins, cacao seeds w ere processed into cocoa butter, cocoa pow-
der, and chocolate.
In 1798, the Bahian Conspiracy (also known as Revolt of the Tailors) against
the Portuguese colonial government, was plotted in Salvador. The conspiracy, how-
ever, did not move beyond the planning stage. Almost all the conspirators were
native-born Brazilians, influenced by principles of the Enlightenment, the Ameri-
can Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. The conspira-
tors formed an alliance of artisans, intellectuals, slaves, and soldiers, who hoped a
popular uprising would bring independence from Portugal and racial equality.
Thirty-six people were brought to trial, mostly self-employed artisans, 10 of whom
were tailors. Eleven of those brought to trial were slaves and three w ere former
slaves. The colonial authorities and the privileged landowning and merchant fam-
ilies remained united against the threat of a revolution in Bahia.
Troops loyal to Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807. In response, Portugal’s Prince
João VI fled with his court to Brazil. João VI returned to Portugal in 1821, leaving
behind his son Pedro, who soon after issued a declaration of Brazilian indepen
dence and was crowned Emperor Pedro I of Brazil in 1822. When the Empire of
Brazil was established u nder Pedro I in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia was still controlled
B AHIA 57
by forces loyal to Portugal. In 1823, Brazilian troops occupied Salvador and made
Bahia a province of the empire. However, many Bahians opposed their province’s
union with Pedro I’s increasingly authoritarian monarchy. Popular movements sup-
ported by the nonwhite lower classes and the military rank and file conveyed
distrust of the monarchy. The repression of these movements reveals that Bahia’s
elite consented to centralized monarchy to maintain social order.
Several slave rebellions occurred in Bahia in the nineteenth century. In 1835,
Salvador experienced the Western Hemi sphere’s most significant urban slave
rebellion, the Malê Uprising, in which Islam played an important role. At the time,
Salvador’s population was roughly 65,500, of whom 27 percent were enslaved Afri-
cans and 16 percent enslaved blacks born in the Western Hemisphere (Reis 1993,
6). The well-organized uprising was directed by mostly Malês, as Muslim Africans
were called in Bahia. The uprising was crushed a fter much destruction of property
and loss of life. More than 500 participants were sentenced, some to death, others
to prison, torture, or deportation.
In 1831, opposition to Pedro’s rule in the Brazilian Parliament combined with a
string of regional rebellions to convince the emperor to resign and return to Por-
tugal, leaving his position to his five-year-old son, Pedro II. In Salvador, the Sabi-
nada Rebellion of 1837–1838 erupted. The rebellion’s name derives from an
instigator, the newspaper editor and physician Francisco Sabino Álvares da Rocha
Vieira. Unhappy with the government in Rio de Janiero, the Sabinada rebels
declared Bahia independent u
ntil Pedro II reached adulthood. The rebels consisted
of urban professionals, army and police officers, as well as slaves who abandoned
their masters. F ree blacks made up the majority of the rebel forces.
With the passage of the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) in 1888, Brazil became the last
nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. A year later, a military revolt
headed by Manuel Deodoro da Fonseca forced Pedro II to abdicate. Fonseca became
the first president of the Republic of Brazil, of which Bahia became a state. By this
time, the regional identities of modern Bahia had formed. Farthest from the state
capital of Salvador was the vast São Francisco River valley, an area that drew its
wealth from cattle ranching, manioc farming, and small mining operations. The
Bahian statesman and jurist Rui Barbosa became the principle author of the Con-
stitution of 1891, which was largely modeled on the United States Constitution. As
Brazil’s minister of finance, Barbosa ordered the destruction of numerous docu-
ments concerning slavery in the desire to erase this memory from Brazilian
history.
In 1893, Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, known to his supporters as Antônio
Conselheiro (Anthony the Counselor), formed a religious community of more than
20,000 at Canudos in Bahia’s northern interior (Fausto 1999, 155; Levine 1992,
16). Canudos became the site of Brazil’s most famous millenarian movement. Deem-
ing Conselheiro a backward subversive menace to the secular republic and the
official Roman Catholic Church, government troops destroyed Canudos in 1897.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Bahia was distinguished by lasting cultural
influences from Africa. Of the many syncretic religions that blended Catholicism
58 B A R B ADOS
with African rites, Candomblé predominated, and the dance-like martial art of
capoeira continued to thrive within Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian population.
David M. Carletta
See also: Brazil; Jesuits; Latin American Wars of Independence; Portuguese Atlan-
tic; Rio de Janeiro; Slave Rebellion; Slavery; Sugar
Further Reading
Fausto, Boris. 1999. A Concise History of Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Graden, Dale Torston. 2006. From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–1900. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press.
Levine, Robert M. 1992. Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern
Brazil, 1893–1897. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Reis, João José. 1993. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Trans-
lated by Arthur Brakel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Schwartz, Stuart B. 1985. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia,
1550–1835. New York: Cambridge University Press.
BARBADOS
Barbados is a small island in the Atlantic Ocean that encompasses a landmass 20
miles long and 15 miles wide. Situated north of Venezuela and southeast of Puerto
Rico, the island has been a significant seaport, especially through its capital at
Bridgetown, since the early seventeenth century. Before European contact in the
1490s, Carib, Kalingo, and Arawak p eoples populated Barbados. A fter English set-
tlement in 1627, Barbados became the center of the English colonial slave system,
where it was the first English colony to implement large-scale sugar slavery and
import g reat numbers of African slaves. The forms of slavery that developed on
Barbados in the seventeenth century were applied in later English colonies through-
out the New World, especially among planters in South Carolina a fter many of
those colonists migrated from Barbados to the North American mainland during
the 1670s. Many other Barbadian planters and former indentured laborers moved to
Jamaica, building their wealth by applying lessons they learned about slave systems
in Barbados.
After Europeans first encountered the island during the 1490s, Native Ameri-
can populations declined quickly due to changes in the island’s disease environ-
ment. When English settlers first arrived in the 1620s they found the island
essentially depopulated. During the later seventeenth century, Barbados trans-
formed from an early colonial frontier to a significant sugar economy that became
the central economic focus of the burgeoning English colonial empire, at least until
the rise of the Jamaican economy during the eighteenth century. Initial European
workers on the island were mostly English, Irish, and Scottish indentured servants
struggling through a form of proto-slavery that was harsh in its labor demands
and violence. Indentured servants usually had contracts of 5 to 10 years, and they
worked off the cost of their voyages, or criminal sentences, on the island’s various
B A R B ADOS 59
The Birth of Sugar Production

Sugar planter Richard Ligon (ca. 1585–1662) visited Barbados and published
an extensive account of the island, its p eople, and the growth of its sugar
industry. “At the time we landed on the island,” he wrote, “we were informed
that the g reat work of Sugar-making, was but newly practiced by the inhab-
itants there.” Nevertheless, the industry grew quickly. “Some of the most
industrious men, having gotten Plants from . . . a place Brazil, and made
trial of them at the Barbadoes; and finding them to grow, they planted more
and more, as they grew and multiplied on the place.”
Source: Richard Ligon. A True and Exact history of the Island of Barbadoes. London,
1657, 85.
plantations. Sugar became crucial to Barbados following the Barbadians’ support

for the Royalists during the English Civil War (1642–1651).
The switch to sugar monoculture throughout the island, from previous mixed
agricultural systems that involved tobacco, cotton, and indigo planting, instigated a
demand for labor beyond that which could be handled through European inden-
tured servitude alone. In an era when demand for sugar rose throughout Europe and
the Americas, labor costs for European laborers increased, European dominance of the
African coast was entrenched, and Barbadian planters embraced African slave labor.
During the 1680s, Barbadian slave masters entered an era of increased freedom
from market controls, leading to further growth of slavery on the island and the
formation of a slave colony where Africans greatly outnumbered Europeans. This
led to the formation of a greater number of slave codes, laws to control slave’s move-
ment and ownership of goods, due to the fear experienced living as an outnumbered,
through still dominant, European population. The need to control slaves, who
were increasingly feared as possible agitators, led Barbados to stay loyal to Great
Britain during the American Revolution (1775–1783).
Throughout the colonial era, slaves resisted their condition through both every-
day struggle, especially among female slaves, and more substantial means such as
Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816, which involved a massive revolt of Africans against their
masters. Unlike most sugar systems of slavery, Barbados had a large population of
female slaves, many of whom suffered sexual abuse from their masters. However,
the large number of female slaves led to forms of everyday resistance to the slave
system that w ere in many ways different from the forms of opposition applied in
other slave colonies. Barbados slaves created an advanced trading system amongst
themselves, led by female peddlers who traded with large maroon communities of
runaway slaves and negotiated informal labor deals with their masters. These many
measures of slave resistance led in part to the formal abolition of the slave trade in
1807 and the British General Emancipation of 1834.
Andrew Kettler
60 B ENIN
See also: British Atlantic; Slave Rebellion; Slavery; Sugar
Further Reading
Beckles, Hilary. 1989. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Craton, Michael. 1982. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Dunn, Richard. 1972. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies,
1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Menard, Russell. 2006. Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early
Barbados. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Swingen, Abigail. 2015. Competing Visions of Empire: L abor, Slavery, and the Origins of the
British Atlantic Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
BENIN
The Benin Kingdom and Empire, the creation of the Edo p eople of southwestern
Nigeria, traces its origins back before the eleventh century CE. It participated in
trade with Europeans almost from the moment that they appeared on the coast
of West Africa. Benin and Portugal established trading relations sometime a fter
1472, and for over 30 years, Benin supplied the Portuguese with palm oil, ivory,
and cotton cloth via a trading post that the Portuguese established at Gwato on
the Ose River, 18 miles from Benin City. The relationship cooled after 1516, when
Benin banned the sale of male slaves. Benin maintained its independence until
1897 when British troops sacked Benin City.
Although linked ritually to the Yoruba people to the West who formed several
kingdoms that resisted unification, the compact clan-based city states formed by
the Edo coalesced under a dynasty called Ogiso, meaning “Kings of the Sky” into
one compact kingdom centered at Ile-Binu (Benin City) located at the intersection
of a north-south and east-west trade route. Well-endowed in terms of climate and
agriculture, the developing kingdom began to import copper from Tadmekka
and Darfur used to produce the brass and bronze statuary and plaques for which
Benin became famous.
According to Bini legend, as backed by verifiable accounts, a crisis that ended
the Ogiso dynasty led the Uzama, a group of hereditary nobles, to seek a new ruler
and dynasty-founder from among the Yoruba. Thus Oduduwa, a mythical person-
age viewed as the founding ancestor of the Yoruba kingdoms, sent his son Oran-
miyan, no doubt also a mythical figure, to rule Benin. Oduduwa was the Ooni (ruler)
of Ile-Ife, reputedly the place where the Yoruba p eople emerged and still the ritual
capital of Yorubaland. Oranmiyan married the daughter of a Bini aristocrat with
whom he had a son, Eweka, clearly a historical figure. When Eweka came of age,
Oranmiyan returned to Ile-Ife, leaving Eweka b ehind as the first oba (ruler or king),
stating that only a son of the soil could rule Benin. Upon his return to Yorubal-
and, Oranmiyan settled in the town of Oyo where he had another son Ajaka. E ither
he or Ajaka first took the title, alafin (emperor), of Oyo and began the expansion of
Oyo into an empire. Although never incorporated into the Oyo Empire and sometimes
B ENIN 61
encroaching upon Yoruba territory, Benin rarely failed to seek symbolic investi-
ture by the Ooni of Ile-Ife for its newly crowned obas.
This myth-enshrouded account of a change of dynasty was no doubt intended
to mask the reality that Benin was invaded and forced to accept a foreign dynasty,
but the fact that this dynasty survived and still exists today is proof that it was
accepted by and assimilated into Edo society. That Eweka, actually Eweka I, really
existed and ruled from 1180 to 1246 is proven by verifiable events evoked by Bini
dynastic oral tradition.
Succeeding obas strengthened the institution of kingship and centralized the
structures of the kingdom. Oba Ewedo, who ruled in the 1250s, reduced the power
of the Uzama chiefs, creating a cadre of court officials accountable only to him.
Trade expanded with Benin exporting salt, cloth, pottery, and beads north and
importing increasing quantities of copper.
During the reigns of Oba Euware the Great (1440–1480), his son, Oba Ozolua
the Conqueror (1481–1504), and his grandson, Oba Esigie (1504–1547), Benin
became an empire extending its authority over non-Edo peoples. Its well-organized,
disciplined army conquered south to the Atlantic Ocean, east to the Niger River
Delta, and west into Yorubaland. The army made efficient use of canoes to navi-
gate the creeks and lagoons west of the Niger River Delta.
The military leaders of Benin recognized the importance of firearms. Because
the Portuguese king Manuel I, hesitated to sell weapons to pagans, a Bini delegation
sent to Lisbon by Oba Esigie to complain about Portuguese slaving agreed to per-
mit Portugal to send Catholic missionaries to Benin City in return for the sale of
firearms. Subsequently, Oba Esigie permitted one of his sons and several officials to
be baptized. The agreement, however, was not pursued for very long. Still needing
The city of Benin as depicted by a British officer in 1897, the year Royal Marines sacked
the town in retaliation for the death of British consul-general James Phillips. (H. Ling
Roth. Great Benin, 1903)
62 B ENIN
firearms, an eighteenth c entury oba attempted to have the blacksmiths, who tradi-
tionally made the Bini weaponry, make guns but with little success.
Benin continued to be powerful in the seventeenth c entury. Benin City was rede-
signed by order of Eware the G reat with wide streets crossing at right a ngles, large
buildings constructed of wood, and massive ramparts. It continued to impress
European visitors. Olfert Dapper, a Dutch engraver who published a view of Benin
City in 1668 compared it favorably to Amsterdam.
Decline began in the eighteenth c entury b ecause of the destructiveness of the
slave trade. Peripheral territories broke away, attacking each other to generate slaves
to be sold on the coast. Benin, too, increased its slaving activities but on a rela-
tively small scale, mainly selling prisoners resulting from defensive wars.
Nineteenth century Benin was first marked by a period of succession disputes
and civil wars, but later on, in response to British calls for what they termed “legit-
imate trade,” Benin experienced a period of expanded sales of palm oil, and a fter
1887, wild rubber. But the British, who had established the Niger Coast Protector-
ate in 1885, hemmed in Bini trade by permitting the Itsekiri to serve as privileged
middlemen between Benin and European traders. Oba Osemwede retaliated by
imposing heavy taxes on non-Bini traders, and banning the export of all goods
from Benin except palm oil.
In these circumstances, the British Vice-Consul H. L. Gallwey attempted in 1892
to persuade Oba Ovonramwen and his chiefs to sign an all-encompassing protec-
torate treaty, even claiming that the Oba had signed it, despite the latter’s denials.
Although the provisions of this treaty called for the ending of h uman sacrifice and
slave trading in Benin, they would also have ended the independence of Benin. In
January 1897, acting British Consul-General James Phillips attempted to follow
up the treaty by persuading Oba Ovonramwen to end the trade boycott that he
had imposed in opposition to it. Phillips and his entourage were ambushed and
killed. In retaliation, a force of Royal Marines commanded by Admiral Sir Harry
Rawson sacked Benin City, destroying or looting much of its artwork, pieces of
which were taken to the British Museum or auctioned to museums in Berlin and
Vienna.
Benin was incorporated into colonial Nigeria and today is encompassed in Nige-
ria’s Edo State. An oba still reigns in Benin City, Oba Erediauwa, but has only
ceremonial responsibilities.
Leland Conley Barrows
See also: Slave Trade in Africa; Yoruba Kingdom
Further Reading
Bondarenko, Dimitri, and Peter M. Roese. 2003. A Popular History of Benin: The Rise and
Fall of a Mighty Forest Kingdom. Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang.
Bradbury, R. E. 1970. The Benin Kingdom and the Edo-Speaking Peoples of South-Western
Nigeria. London: Wightman Mountain, 1970.
Ryder, Alan Frederic Charles. 1969. Benin and the Europeans, 1485–1897. London:
Longmans.
B E R M UDA 63
BERMUDA
Bermuda, also called the Bermudas or Somers Isles, is the oldest and most popu-
lous British Overseas Territory in the North Atlantic Ocean. Located 640 miles
east-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, it consists of 181 islands, with
the largest being Main Island. Bermuda’s total area of approximately 33 square miles
is less than half the size of Washington, DC. St. George’s, the first capital of Ber-
muda, was established in 1612. With a subtropical climate, Bermuda is now pri-
marily a busy tourist destination.
Bermuda had no human habitation u ntil the sixteenth c entury. European sail-
ors had sailed past the islands before 1500, as the homeward return route from
the Indies for Spanish fleets went just northward. Spanish and Portuguese vessels
would stopover on the islands and stock up on water and food. Legends arose about
mysterious spirits and devils b ecause of the raucous native birds and wild hogs.
Combined with the frequent storms and the treacherous waters around the islands’
reefs, the archipelago, known as the Isle of Devils, was not immediately settled.
The islands are named after the first known European explorer to land in Ber-
muda, Spanish captain Juan de Bermúdez (d. 1570), who arrived in 1503 in his
ship La Garza (the heron). He claimed seemingly uninhabited islands for the Span-
ish Empire, and “La Bermuda” (or La Garza) first appeared on a map in 1511.
Settlement occurred by accident. In 1609, the British sailors landed on Bermuda
as the result of a shipwreck, an incident thought to be the inspiration of William
Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. A flotilla led by Sir George Somers (1554–1610)
foundered during a storm but the crew managed to reach safety. The men stayed
10 months, began a new settlement, and built two small ships to continue to James-
town in the Virginia colony. Bermuda was claimed for the English Crown and run
as an extension of the V irginia Company, which sent permanent settlers in 1612.
These first settlers found many wild pigs, probably left by previous visitors as food
for passing ships. T hese pigs w ere remembered later in the islands’ currency as
“Bermuda Hogs.”
Bermuda’s early economy was very weak, leading the Somers Isles Company to
assume control in 1615. In 1620, Bermuda was granted limited self-governance,
making its Parliament the fifth oldest in the world. Initially, the islands grew tobacco
as its only crop but it proved of low quality. The small land area available for cul-
tivation made agriculture unprofitable. Bermudians replanted farmland with the
native juniper ( Juniperus bermudiana, or Bermuda cedar) trees that then grew
thickly and spawned a lumber industry.
The first slaves w ere brought into Bermuda in the 1620s. They w ere mostly Afri-
cans from Cape Verde and Native Americans. They made many attempts to escape
or rebel, such as the 1673 conspiracy that resulted in even more stringent restric-
tions on slave movement. The islands also received many immigrants as inden-
tured servants, including passengers from shipwrecked vessels and the crews of
captured e nemy ships. Bermuda served as a penal colony for Irish and Scottish
political prisoners sold into servitude.
Bermudian sailors and merchants flourished in whaling, privateering, and the
merchant trade. They settled and founded new overseas towns and colonies,
64 B E R M UDA
especially in the American south, and dominated trade along the Atlantic sea-
board and the West Indies. Bermudians fished for cod on the G rand Banks off
Newfoundland and worked in Central America’s lumber industry. Bermudians
were both fishermen and lumber workers, and also ran the salt trade through
the Turks Islands. These maritime efforts w ere discouraged by the Somers Isles
Company, which solely profited from land cultivation, and the Crown conse-
quently ended the Company’s reign in 1684.
As a small island, Bermuda struggled with overpopulation. Many emigrated from
the islands during its first two centuries. Over 10,000 Bermudians (or over half of
the total population) left, mainly to the southern United States.
The islands became an official British colony following the 1707 unification cre-
ating the Kingdom of G reat Britain. This led to the construction of extensive naval
facilities and in 1844 the Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, the oldest cast iron lighthouse in
the world. By 1857, a British field officer rightly summed that Bermuda was a col-
ony, a naval and military fortress, and a prison.
During the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), Bermuda was a staging area for block-
ade runners to southern ports. Having developed close economic, f amily, and his-
torical ties with the south, Bermudians were strongly sympathetic with the rebels
at the war’s beginning. They supplied the rebels with ships, salt, and gunpowder.
The islands’ economy declined markedly a fter the war, which removed its pri-
mary trading partners from the empire. The islands’ merchant shipping trade
Sold Apart from Her Family

In her narrative of growing up as a slave in Bermuda, Mary Prince (ca. 1788–
ca. 1833) described the awful circumstances of being sold at a vendue or
auction. Her pain was made all the worse by knowing that she was to be
separated from her family. Prince wrote:
“At length the vendue master, who was to offer us for sale like sheep or c attle,
arrived, and asked my m other which was the eldest. She said nothing, but
pointed to me. He took me by the hand, and led me out into the m iddle of the
street, and, turning me slowly round, exposed me to the view of those who
attended the vendue. I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined
and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he
was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like
words—as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts.
I was then put up to sale. The bidding commenced at a few pounds, and grad-
ually rose to fifty-seven. . . . I then saw my sisters led forth, and sold to different
owners: so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being partners in bondage.”
Source: The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by Herself. With a Sup-
plement by the Editor. To Which Is Added, the Narrative of Asa-Asa, a Captured African.
London: Published by F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1831, 1.
B I G HT OF B IAF R A 65
declined, worsened by the advent of metal ships and steam propulsion, which found
Bermuda without the necessary raw materials. Bermuda by this time was defor-
ested, closing its lumber trade. Adding to the decline, Bermuda’s salt trade collapsed
because the Americans developed their own sources during the War of 1812 and
control of the Turks had passed to the Bahamas in 1819.
In the mid-1800s, tourism in Bermuda began. Initially, tourism was limited to
the wealthy who wanted to escape the North American winters without traveling
too far. Local hotel o wners promoted the islands for matchmaking. In 1883, Queen
Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise’s visit to Bermuda further promoted Bermuda
as a tourist destination for English residents.
William P. Kladky
See also: Slavery; Smuggling
Further Reading
Jackson, John J. 1988. Bermuda. London: David & Charles.
Jarvis, Michael. 2010. In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlan-
tic World, 1680–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Wilkinson, H. C. 1973. Bermuda From Sail to Stream: A History of the Island from 1784 to
1901. London: Oxford University Press.
BIGHT OF BIAFRA
The Bight of Biafra, renamed the Bight of Bonny in 1972, is a coastal region in West
Africa stretching between the Niger River in Nigeria and southwards to Cape Lopez in
Gabon. Biafra was one of the principal areas from where slaves w ere sent to the
expanding plantations of the Americas during the Atlantic Slave Trade (1500–1867).
At its height in the eighteenth c entury, the region was the second largest point of
shipment for enslaved persons after West Central Africa. Despite British abolition
of the overseas trade in 1807, thousands of captives continued to be sent to forced
labor in Cuba and Brazil well into the mid-nineteenth c entury. Following the long
decline of the trade, the region was transformed into the world’s largest exporter of
palm oil, used as a lubricant in British manufacturing.
As early as 1500, the Portuguese were acquiring slaves in the region and forci-
bly moving them to the islands of São Tome and Príncipe just off the coast of Biafra.
Settled by the Portuguese since 1493, the islands contained some of the earliest
sugar plantations in the Atlantic world, predating the appearance of plantations in
the Americas. Recognized as the premier supplier of sugar in the sixteenth century,
São Tome and Príncipe also served as a laboratory in the development of the sugar
plantation model. Based on the exploitation of slave labor and the mass produc-
tion of a single commodity, European colonies across the Atlantic later replicated
the model.
Yet the origins of the slave trade w
ere not due exclusively to European demand
but evolved along earlier patterns whereby African traders exchanged goods and
66 B I G HT OF B IAF R A
slaves along the coast and inland during the early sixteenth century. This trade
encompassed land and river routes on the Niger and Cross Rivers in Southeastern
Nigeria and spread as far westward as modern day Ghana.
When the Atlantic slave trade reached its peak in the late eighteenth c entury,
Biafra was composed of a vast network of trade routes where slaves were transferred
from the interior to coastal ports such as Bonny and New Calabar. Following a
horrific journey, they w ere forced onto British ships bound for plantations in the
Car ibb ean and North Americ a. Most of the enslaved w ere carried on British
vessels, which dominated the transport of captives at the time, accounting for
80 percent of total slave exports in the Atlantic world. By the eighteenth century,
an ethnic group known as the Aro eventually rose to monopolize the trade in the
region. With their origins in the seventeenth century, the Aro were composed of
various ethnic groups that intermarried and whose identity was essentially shaped
by their involvement in the slave trade. This unique status enabled the Aro to affect
the trade by mobilizing thousands of captives through a massive transportation
system that facilitated the expansion of slavery. Consequently, Biafra was the most
intensive site of slavery in Africa, accounting for 90 percent of total regional trade
during the eighteenth c entury.
Once the Atlantic Slave Trade concluded in the nineteenth c entury, Biafra was
converted into the top producer of palm oil for the world market. The change
resulted in a profound political, economic, and social transformation u ntil Great
Britain established the Oil Rivers Protectorate in 1891. Soon a fter the abolition of
the overseas slave trade in 1807, the production of palm oil engrossed most of the
region with its peak at midcentury. Direct British involvement was initially con-
centrated on antislavery shipping patrols along the coast from their base on the
island of Fernando Po in the Bight. However, as palm oil shipments increased
throughout the nineteenth c entury, British interest in the area escalated. Moreover,
developing a closed market for cheaply manufactured goods was another f actor that
induced the British to expand their sphere of influence into Biafra.
British entanglement in local affairs was largely based on the need to secure
access to the production of palm oil and markets for their exports. Independent
coastal traders such as the Aro were of major concern since they could threaten
Women Slaves from Biafra

Over the span of the slave trade, Biafra exported the highest proportion of
female slaves. Young girls were especially prominent in the trade through
Biafra. Gender roles found in the region most likely played a role. In most
African societies, w
omen predominated in agriculture. But in West Africa, near
Biafra, men were seen to have a sacred role in the cultivation of yams. As a
result, when rival groups went to war, they targeted men for extermination.
Women and c hildren, then, w ere the only ones left alive for the victors to sell
into slavery.
B LA C K ATLANTI C 67
the supply of palm oil for export. In an attempt to displace t hese traders, the Brit-
ish supported rival groups that led to constant warfare within the region. Mean-
while, domestic slavery paradoxically increased as the demand for labor in activities
that supported palm oil production, such as agriculture and transport, swelled.
Migrations spurred by the growth of domestic slavery along with demographic
pressures on land influenced the balance of power in the region. Warfare thus prolif-
erated as the importation of firearms had flourished throughout the century. Final
British intervention, because of the ongoing strife, resulted in a military expedi-
tionary force being sent between 1901and 1902 to pacify warring groups and
establish a colonial presence in the territory. The warfare the region experienced
has led scholars to suggest that the devaluation of human life during the slave trade
profoundly affected the forms of violence that engulfed Biafra in the late nineteenth
century.
Jorge Matos
See also: Abolition of the Slave Trade; Atlantic Slave Trade; British Atlantic; Slave
Trade in Africa
Further Reading
Brown, Carolyn A., and Paul Lovejoy, eds. 2011. Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade:
The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora. Trenton, NJ: Africa
WorldPress.
Nwokeji, G Ugo. 2010. The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society
in the Atlantic World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
B L A C K AT L A N T I C
The Black Atlantic is a concept most notably deployed by Paul Gilroy, a King’s
College London Professor of American and English Literature, in his book The
Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). The term is a scholarly
framework by which the lives of individuals of African ancestry within the Atlan-
tic basin are understood as being shaped within a world in which race and cul-
ture w ere and are constantly changing. The concept further focuses on continual
movement around the Atlantic and an ongoing process of the blending and
changing of individual identity. This phenomenon must also be understood by
contemporary twentieth and twenty-first century America and Europe, where
political, economic, and cultural conditions shaped the development and under-
standing of the framework.
Before Gilroy, the concept of a Black Atlantic and the movements of blacks
around the Atlantic grew out of, and often begin with, an understanding of the
African diaspora, a term often used to describe the slave trade and system of slav-
ery that drove the plantation complex. This system embarked over 12 million Afri-
cans around the Atlantic between 1501 and 1866, over 10 million of which would
disembark into the Americas and provide the bulk of the labor upon which the
new expansive Atlantic economy was based. The diaspora involved not only the
68 B LA C K ATLANTI C
movement of enslaved Africans to the Americas, but it also included Africans who
more broadly played roles as laborers and intermediaries. Examples of such figures
include African slave traders, such as those on the Bight of Benin; black transla-
tors and explorers, such as Mathieu de Costa (d. ca. 1619) and Estaban de Doran-
tes (1500–1539); black intellectuals, such as Martin Delany (1812–1885); black
religious figures, such as Rebecca Protten (d. 1780); and black sailors (both enslaved
and free), such as Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797). Over the course of the early mod-
ern period, with the exception of the Spanish, more blacks would be transported
and settled around the Atlantic than white Europeans. Through trade and interac-
tions, the Atlantic became a space that was connected by a multi-dimensional
hybridization of African, American, British/English, Caribbean, Dutch, French, and
Spanish cultures through transatlantic movements, exchanges, and a creolization
process where the mixing of cultures, both old and new led to the creation of new
identities.
In The Black Atlantic Gilroy built upon the earlier scholarship of Yale art histo-
rian Robert Farris Thompson (1932–) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). Thomp-
son deployed the term Black Atlantic to describe the transmission and hybridization
of African art and material culture across the Atlantic to the West in Flash of the
Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983). Du Bois used the concept
of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to illuminate the difficul-
ties experienced by those of African descent who experienced education, child-
hood development and growth in Eurocentric slave cultures. In addition to these
influences, Gilroy’s conceptualization further follows in the tradition of scholars
such as C. L. R. James (1901–1989) and Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), who also exam-
ined race and culture in relation to the development of Western modernity. Gilroy
broke with previous diaspora study, however, by examining diaspora through a
cultural lens. Gilroy shifted from earlier scholarly emphasis on the quantitative
nature of the Transatlantic slave trade to examining individual stories and captur-
ing the complexities of hybrid identities. His writing has been influential in the
study of both national and transnational cultural and labor history by changing
the framework in which scholarship is conducted.
Movement is central to Gilroy’s analysis and he employs the ship as a represen
tation that suggests not simply the fluidity of p eople, ideas, culture, and objects,
but also the slave trade’s M
iddle Passage. By focusing on movement, areas of inquiry
have been shifted from regional studies to the interconnectedness of the Atlantic
as a whole. Individuals of African descent were extraordinarily mobile even with
Europeans’ attempts to limit their movements, communication amongst them, and
the spread of ideas many of which were considered dangerous by whites. Exam-
ples of the fluidity of this movement can be seen in individuals such as Protten
and Equiano. Although Protten began life as a slave in the Caribbean, she was freed,
became involved in the Moravian Christian conversion of the region’s slaves, trav-
eled to Saxony with the Moravian Church, and later relocated to the Gold Coast of
Africa where she continued as a Moravian and taught Africans. Equiano reported
in his narrative that he began life as a slave in Africa, experienced the Middle Pas-
sage, then found himself transferred among several masters, including a Royal Navy
B LA C K ATLANTI C 69
lieutenant. He traveled around the Atlantic both before and a fter his eventual free-
dom. While both of these individuals’ lives were exceptional, they shared com-
mon themes with the multitude of less documented blacks who moved within the
Atlantic’s extensive maritime networks.
Gilroy combined the theme of movement with an emphasis on the shared
experience of slavery, which he used to explain the origin of newly formed black
identity as well as the origin of the spread of Western cultural and economic suc-
cess. By focusing on the experience of slavery, Gilroy shifted the focus of study
away from European culture towards slavery as a central factor unifying the
Atlantic. Historians have now produced numerous studies of the unity formed
among enslaved persons during the M iddle Passage as varying groups from differ
ent tribes, kinship networks, and communities were transformed from their dis-
tinctive local backgrounds, more broadly characterized today as “Africans”, into
slaves. Historians are also currently moving the Black Atlantic framework away
from a focus on slavery to what it means to be, or have been, black in the Atlantic
world. These studies look closely at identity and the ability of blacks to engage in
action around the Atlantic. Issues of subjecthood versus citizenship also com-
prise current trends in scholarly inquiry. This encompasses a shift away from the
land to a maritime environment to demonstrate connections between the four
Atlantic continents and deemphasize the nationally based historiography of the
Atlantic world. Slavery not only encompassed Europeans acting upon black Afri-
cans but also the agency of Africans and slaves themselves, who in some cases
moved from being property to becoming subjects of kings and queens, as well as
to citizens a fter the age of revolutions. Despite being cargoes, these individuals
also moved their own cargos as maritime workers, as well as operated on land
and within the littoral zone in supportive maritime occupations on all sides of
the Atlantic. For example, West African Kru canoemen, dockworkers, and pilots
(individuals with specific knowledge of local waterways who guided ships into a
local port) all functioned within an Atlantic world that existed outside the tradi-
tional binary of enslaved and free.
Through these movements, shared experiences, and attempts to understand
what life was like for t hese individuals in the Atlantic world, historians have fur-
ther examined the exchanges of culture that have been transmitted. For Gilroy,
music provided an example that spans the broad period from the early modern
era to modernity and cuts across nations. The origins and hybridization of stylis-
tic forms of m
usic as a cultural phenomenon are often open to debate. Much like
the mixture of musical trends, a creolization took place amongst the individuals
whose varied cultures had origins around the Atlantic basin. More specifically, cre-
olization was how individuals blended Old World and New World ideas and insti-
tutions, and how a hybridization of cultures adapted to new situations. Some
historians have more recently chosen to emphasize the persistence of African cul-
tures in New World identities, while o thers emphasize the flexibility of t hese iden-
tities in adapting to New World conditions. What many can agree on is that the
circumstances in which these processes took place were many and varied and that
no constant holds true across all spectrums or categories.
70 B LA C K LE G END
Despite the acclaim that Gilroy’s work received and the influence it has had on
shifting trends of inquiry and study, his work has its critics. For some, Gilroy’s
work on diaspora overstates the presence of transnationalism by not giving enough
credit to nationalism in geographical locations where his framework does not fit
so neatly. A further geographical focus on G reat Britain and America, or the dias-
pora in the northern Atlantic, has also struck a chord with some historians who
also see the importance of Africa, the Car ibbean and other areas in the formation
of the Black Atlantic slighted in Gilroy’s analysis. This criticism argues that Gilroy
does not pay sufficient attention to figures from outside his zone of emphasis,
and specifically Africa, whose circumstances would provide equally compelling
examples. Additionally, some historians have faulted Gilroy for giving promi-
nence to masculine cases where female examples could similarly be just as eas-
ily substituted.
Despite these criticisms, the concept of the Black Atlantic continues to be influ-
ential in current scholarly inquiry. Recently, a shift in diaspora studies has empha-
sized more of a world orientation as well as a move into areas beyond the
Anglo-African connection delineated in Gilroy’s work, such as South America, the
Caribbean, and the Atlantic periphery. The African diaspora was not a phenome-
non specific to the Atlantic, but flowed into the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and
the Middle East as well. This world orientation coincides with an increasing schol-
arly interest in placing emphasis on global connectivity beyond the Atlantic into
the continental borderlands, the Atlantic periphery, and the Indian and Pacific
Oceans. Other historians have also chosen to focus on reverse diaspora back to
Africa and from the Caribbean to G reat Britain and the later United Kingdom.
Michael Bradley
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Equiano, Olaudah; Moravians; Race; Slavery
Further Reading
Dubois, Laurent, and Julius Sherrard Scott. 2010. Origins of the Black Atlantic. New York:
Routledge.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Gomez, Michael Angelo. 1998. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of
African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press.
Morgan, Philip D. 2012. Maritime Slavery. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
BLACK LEGEND
The Black Legend narrative, known in Spanish as La Leyenda Negra, and often
referred to as the anti-Hispanic Legend, contends that Spain and the Spanish
Empire were exploitative and excessive in their conduct as both a nation and as
imperial overseers. The term was coined by the Spanish writer Julián Juderías in
his 1914 publication entitled, The Black Legend and the Historical Truth. Following
B LA C K LE G END 71
the Spanish defeat in the Spanish-A merican War of 1898, and the subsequent
removal of Spanish imperial rule from both the Car ibbean and the Pacific, Jud-
erías presented to his readers the negative image that the outside world had t owards
Spain and the Spanish Empire. During the second half of the twentieth c entury,
the American historian, Charles Gibson, reinforced this belief in his books enti-
tled, The Colonial Period in Latin American History and The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish
Attitudes in the Old World and the New.
Despite the fact that the term Black Legend was coined as recently as the early
twentieth century, writings promoting anti-Spanish sentiment began appearing in
Europe as early as the sixteenth century, as Spain and Spanish Empire emerged as
national and imperial powers during the period. European writers have built on
the works of earlier authors and have adapted their writings to present Spain and
the Spanish Empire as the antithesis to their own national and imperial endeav-
ors. During the seventeenth century, the belief in the Black Legend narrative was
transported from E ngland to the American colonies and many academics believe
that it influenced American-Hispanic relations throughout the subsequent centu-
ries. Also, as recently as the twentieth century, some Spanish writers and academ-
ics have gone through a period of introspection, using the discourse of the Black
Legend narrative in an attempt to better understand their own history and how
others have perceived Spanish history.
The events that eventually mutated into the Black Legend narrative are rooted, at
least to a certain degree, in historical fact. Following the dynastic u
nion of the Crowns
of Aragon and Castile in 1469 and Spain’s subsequent reconquest of the Iberian
Peninsula, the Spanish began to exert their power outside of their national bor-
ders. Through a series of monarchical maneuvers and military engagements
during the late fifteenth c entury and the early sixteenth century, Spain acquired
parts of the present-day Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, and Italy. Following Chris-
topher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas in 1492, the Spanish Empire also
claimed control of nearly all of present day North and South America, as well as
several trading posts throughout Asia. In the Americas, Columbus and a multi-
tude of subsequent Spanish imperialists instituted a brutal system of tribute, slav-
ery, and colonial rule. This poor treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of the
regions under Spanish control was documented by the Spanish friar, Bartolomé
de Las Casas, and was later used against Spain and the Spanish Empire by several
European authors of the period. Although throughout the Italian states, negative
perceptions of Spain existed as early as the f ourteenth c entury, Spain’s engagement
with the other European powers of the period, as well as the Spanish Empire’s treat-
ment of the indigenous p eople in the Americas, gave birth to the Black Legend
narrative during the m iddle portion of the sixteenth c entury.
Due to both envy and hatred, Italian, Dutch, and English contemporaries pro-
moted the Black Legend narrative by comparing the Spanish to barbaric Arabs, the
antithesis of how Christian Europeans envisioned themselves during the sixteenth
century. Italian, Dutch, and English contemporaries also presented Spain as an
exotic, far off location, where arrogant, xenophobic individuals refused to assimilate
to the European lifestyles of the period. Despite these criticisms, some European
72 B LA C K LE G END
contemporaries, specifically the elite of Catholic Poland, felt a close connection to

Spain. Much like Poland, Spain was located on the outer edge of Christian Europe,
leading to military engagements with non-Christian groups. However, despite
Poland’s perceived connection with Spain, the dominate narrative of the m iddle
portion of the sixteenth c entury was clearly anti-Spanish.
By the end of the sixteenth century, two images of Spain existed in Europe. The
first image was one of both fear and respect for Spain’s military power and intellec-
tual abilities. The second image was dominated by the Black Legend narrative. Fol-
lowing the various publications of the Spanish Jesuit scholar Juan de Mariana, Spanish
academics ceased writing historical works on their own country. In turn, during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Spain struggled to maintain control
of her possessions in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, French and British academ-
ics filled this void and were able to promote the negative aspects of Spain’s history;
thus, promoting the Black Legend narrative. Over time, these foreign writers also
allowed the Black Legend to change from a stereotype that represented the Span-
ish as being primitive, barbaric individuals into a stereotype that presented them as
being lazy, weak-minded, and needlessly proud individuals.
During the nineteenth century, Spain suffered from a great deal of political insta-
bility and was in the process of losing control of its imperial possessions, provid-
ing its critics with ample opportunities to criticize the nation and the empire. Rather
than continuing with the previous narrative, writers from France, Great Britain, and
the United States decided to travel to Spain and presented a romanticized, pictur-
esque version of the country. Although this varied greatly from the Black Legend
narrative of the sixteenth century, this new image of the Spanish still presented Spain
as the antithesis to the modern, industrialized, and ever increasingly secularized,
developed countries of France, Great Britain, and the United States. Although
the romanticized, picturesque image of Spain may have dominated the presenta
tion of the country during the majority of the nineteenth c entury, several Ameri-
can imperialists returned to the sixteenth c entury definition of the Black Legend
narrative prior to, during, and after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Present-
ing Spain and the Spanish Empire as antimodern, anti-Protestant, and in turn, the
antithesis to the United States and the emerging American Empire, allowed Amer-
ican imperialists to justify their occupation of Spain’s remaining colonial posses-
sions in the Car ibbean and the Pacific.
Running parallel to the Black Legend narrative, during the late nineteenth
century and the twentieth century, was the emergence of the White Legend narra-
tive, also known as the Golden Legend narrative within Europe. Domestic and for-
eign historians that promoted the White/Golden Legend narrative in Spanish
history were often conservative, revisionist historians who w ere basing their argu-
ments on the same historical events that supporters of Black Legend narrative had
previously used: the actions of Spanish imperialists. However, rather than focus-
ing on the negative aspect of Spanish imperialism, supporters of the White/Golden
Legend have argued that through Spanish imperialism, Spanish culture and Euro
pean innovation was able to spread throughout the world. Overlooking Spain’s
poor treatment of the native inhabitants of its colonial possession has led many
B O G OTÁ 73
academics to criticize supporters of the White/Golden Legend narrative, often refer-

ring to them as supporters of the “gilded legend.”
In the twenty-first century, debate continues over the degree to which the Black
Legend narrative still shapes peoples’ perceptions of Spain, as well as Spaniards
perceptions of themselves and their national and imperial pasts. Regardless of the
degree that the Black Legend narrative still exists in the historiography surround-
ing Spain and the Spanish Empire, it is undeniable that the Black Legend narra-
tive was not a constant perception, but one that was ever changing.
Gregg French
See also: Conquistadors; Las Casas, Bartolomé de
Further Reading
Castro, Daniel. 2007. Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and
Ecclesiastical Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
DeGuzmán, María. 2005. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-
American Empire. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson, Charles. 1971. The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New.
New York: Alfred A Knopf Incorporated.
B O G O TÁ
Bogotá is the capital city of the contemporary nation of Colombia. The city is situated
on a high plain (more than a mile and a half above sea level) in the northernmost
portion of the Andes mountain range, known locally as the Cordillera Oriental. The
rainy city has a subtropical highland climate with mildly cool temperatures through-
out the year. At the end of the colonial period, the population of Bogotá had
grown from several thousand initial occupants to approximately 100,000 residents.
The city’s diverse population was made up of a range of indigenous groups, creole
descendants of Spanish settlers, European immigrants, and African slaves and
freemen, as well as many individuals of mixed heritage. Spanish was the primary
language spoken in Bogotá throughout the early modern period.
The modern history of Bogotá began on August 6, 1538, when the Spanish con-
queror Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada (1509–1579) founded the city following an
arduous journey from the Car ibbean coast up the Magdalena River. At that time,
the area was occupied by an indigenous Muisca settlement known as Muequetá
and ruled by the leader Bacatá or Bogotá. Quesada, a lawyer by training, selected
the practical site as a new Spanish settlement because it was defensible and envi-
ronmentally secure.
After the Spanish established a foothold in the region, the territory became a
captaincy general known as the New Kingdom of Granada, named for Quesada’s
home territory in southern Spain that was the last part of Spain to be reconquered
from Moorish rule. New Granada was a politically subordinate territory that fell
under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The region’s capital city was first
briefly known as the New City of Granada but it was quickly renamed Santa Fé de
74 B O G OTÁ
Bogotá. During the Spanish colonial period, the city’s name was often shortened
to Santa Fé or Bogotá, as the city is now known.
Charles V established the audiencia (regional high court) of Santa Fé de Bogotá
in 1549. The president of the audiencia was granted executive power and became
the regional governor who reported directly to the viceroy of Peru. Early in the
eighteenth century, the region was transformed into a separate regional territory
known as the Viceroyalty of New Granada as part of a larger Spanish imperial
attempt to exert more effective and complete control over its vast American Empire.
Although the project initially foundered, Spanish imperial bureaucrats redoubled
their efforts and reestablished the viceroyalty based in Bogotá again in 1739.
Construction on the main plaza began in 1553. The cathedral was situated on
the east side of the central plaza opposite the city council building and viceregal
court. The rest of Santa Fé de Bogotá spread out from the city center on a grid
plan with regular streets intersecting at right angles. Gold mining in the region
led to the establishment of a royal mint and the city’s Casa de Moneda was estab-
lished in 1621. A small elite class controlled most urban property and economic
resources in Bogotá throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
Catholic Church and its religious orders owned over one quarter of the city’s
urban property.
Following the Spanish conquest, Catholicism supplanted indigenous belief sys-
tems, and, throughout the colonial period, predominated religious life in the city
of Bogotá. Education and health care in the colonial city were orchestrated by Catholic
religious o rders that founded the city’s first universities and hospitals. Religious
institutions sponsored most cultural production in the form of religious art. The
city’s ritual life was also organized around the religious festival calendar. Civic
celebrations, though sponsored by secular institutions, often relied upon church
infrastructure as well.
Spanish imperial officials did not effectively harness the economic potential of
Bogotá and the surrounding area. Although taxes w ere collected, the region was
one of the least economically productive of the Spanish American imperial hold-
ings. The largely pastoral economy was dominated by agriculture (salt, corn, yucca,
beans, cotton) and livestock (cattle, h
orses) production fueled by indigenous labor
exploited through the encomienda system. African slaves worked gold mines that
had a steady output in the initial decades of the colonial period but tapered in the
eighteenth c entury. Throughout the colonial period, overland travel into the city
of Bogotá was made difficult by low quality roads; however, the Magdalena River
linked Bogotá to the Car ibbean Sea and international trade. The port of Cartagena
managed all legal trade in and out of Bogotá, but the city faced its strongest eco-
nomic competition from neighboring Tunja.
The eighteenth century brought the scientific expedition of José Celestino Mutis,
a Spanish naturalist who set out to make a record of all the botanical species present
in the uniquely diverse topography north of modern Ecuador. Though Mutis intro-
duced enlightenment intellectualism into the city, it was soon replaced by rebel-
lious militarism that expanded the movement t oward independence from Spain.
Late eighteenth-century Wayuu rebellions and tax riots tormented the Bogotá
B OL Í VA R , SI M Ó N 75
area. Following this rebellious period, elites in Bogotá began to question the politi
cal situation in the Spanish American world. Economic stagnation, geographic
isolation, and strengthening local affiliations degraded urban relations between
elite urban governors and the plebian masses. Between 1819 and 1822, civic relations
in Bogotá devolved as a revolutionary movement erupted. Following the separa-
tion from Spain in the mid-nineteenth century, the city regained a sense of order
and set out on a path toward urban modernity.
Emily A. Engel
See also: Encomienda System; Latin American Wars of Independence; Viceregal

System
Further Reading
Bushnell, David. 1993. The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Francis, J. Michael. 2007. Invading Colombia: Spanish Accounts of the Gonzalo Jiménez de Que-
sada Expedition of Conquest. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
McFarlane, Anthony. 1993. Colombia Before Independence: Economy, Society, and Politics Under
Bourbon Rule. New York: Cambridge University Press.
B O L Í VA R , S I M Ó N ( 1 7 8 3 – 1 8 3 0 )
Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military leader and statesman who was integral
to the revolutions for independence throughout the Spanish Empire’s American col-
onies in the early nineteenth century. He aided in Venezuela’s bid for indepen
dence in 1821. After the successful Latin American revolutions, Bolívar became
president of Gran Colombia, the first union of Spain’s former colonies founded in
1819, which included parts of modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Ecua
dor, and Peru. He was also president of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru. He also helped
several other South American countries gain independence and develop into
states, such as Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, named in his honor. He believed in a
strong, nearly dictatorial presidency, a belief that makes Bolívar a controversial
and important figure in Latin American history. He is often called the George
Washington of Latin America b ecause of his role in many of South America’s
independence movements from Spain. He died in 1830.
Born Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios in Cara-
cas, Venezuela, on July 24, 1783, Bolívar was the son of wealthy landowners who
died while he was a child. He was raised by a black slave w oman, Hipólita, whom
he referred to as “the only f ather I have ever known” (Lynch 2006, 16). At 14 years
old, Bolívar joined an elite militia corps, founded by his grandfather, in which he
served in for a year, earning the rank of second lieutenant. A fter his military train-
ing, Bolívar was educated by private tutors in Venezuela u ntil 16. He went to Europe
in 1799, where he had the Spanish equivalent of the grand tour. Bolívar met his only
wife, María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alaiza, in Spain in 1801; they w ere married
in 1802. She died eight months l ater in 1803 a fter having returned to Venezuela with
76 B OL Í VA R , SI M Ó N
Bolívar. Much later in his life, Bolívar commented that, had his wife not died so
young, he would not have achieved all that he had. Upon returning to Europe to
complete his grand tour, Bolívar immersed himself in Enlightenment thought,
which fueled his desire for Venezuela’s independence. In 1804, Bolívar witnessed
the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) in Paris as Emperor of the
French, an event that inspired Bolívar to achieve g reat things as Napoleon had.
Although Bolívar valued Napoleon’s example of a strong leader for his country
during a period of turmoil, he disliked Napoleon becoming a monarch, and he
decided to never seek or accept such a position himself.
Bolívar returned to Venezuela in 1807, determined to fight for Venezuelan inde
pendence from Spain. In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain, deposed the Spanish
Bourbon monarchy, and proclaimed his b rother Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844)
king in their place. This created instant havoc not only in Spain, whose popula-
tion r ose up in rebellion against the French invasion, but also in Spanish America,
where communication was lost due to the invasion and political problems as a result
of divided governmental and popular support between the usurping Bonapartes
and the ousted Bourbons. In response, Venezuela and other parts of Spain’s colo-
nial empire set up provisional governments known as juntas, that worked t owards
the re-establishment of the Spanish king.
However, many p eople throughout Spanish America, including Bolívar, saw
Napoleon’s invasion of Spain as providential and used the opportunity to fight for
independence. On April 19, 1810,
prominent Venezuelans deprived
the Spanish administrator of his
power and expelled him from
the country. They also created the
Supreme Junta of Caracas, initi-
ating de facto indep endence
for Venezuela. Recognizing that
Venezuela would need important
friends and money as well as
diplomatic recognition, Bolívar
and other notables from the junta
were sent to G reat Britain.
While in G reat Britain, Bolivar
persuaded the famous Venezue-
lan revolutionary Francisco de
Miranda (1750–1816) to return to
Venezuela to help fight for inde
pendence. During the civil wars
for independence that followed
Simón Bolívar as painted by José Gil de Castro in Miranda’s return, Bolívar was pro-
1828, two years before his death. Known as “El moted to the rank of colonel and
Libertador,” he helped secure the independence of commandant of Puerto Cabello,
five South American nations. (Library of Congress) a port west of Caracas, in 1812.
B OL Í VA R , SI M Ó N 77
Bolívar and Miranda drifted apart due to differences in opinions on the future of
Venezuela and the best way to prosecute a war for independence. When Bolívar’s
subordinate officers opened Puerto Cabello to the Spanish army, Miranda, in his
capacity as commander in chief, began negotiating with Spain for peace. Bolívar
declared Miranda a traitor and turned him over to Spain.
Finding it difficult to continue on against the Spanish in 1812, Bolívar left Ven-
ezuela to find help in New Granada (now Colombia). While in Cartagena, Bolívar
published his El manifiesto de Cartagena (The Cartagena Manifesto) in which he
claimed that Venezuela had failed to secure independence b ecause of a weak gov-
ernmental structure; he also called on the rest of Spanish America to rise up against
Spain.
After gaining support from revolutionaries in New Granada, Bolívar headed a
force to oust Spain from Venezuela. A fter six b
attles against the royalists, known
as the Admirable Campaign, Bolívar entered Caracas, victorious. He was then pro-
claimed the Liberator (el Libertador), marking the restoration of the Venezuelan
republic and the beginning of Bolívar’s dictatorship.
Independence was not desired by a majority of Venezuelans, and many opposed
Bolívar and the republic, forcing Bolívar to fight a civil war. Bolívar was defeated again
by the Spanish in 1814, ending the second Venezuelan republic. Bolívar fled Venezu-
ela and returned to New Granada to find more support for the revolution. While
there, he was commissioned to rid New Granada of a separatist faction, which he
did. However, Bolívar failed to unite the revolutionaries enough to expel the Spanish
royalists, and he escaped to Jamaica looking for help. While in Jamaica in 1815,
Bolívar wrote his famous “Letter from Jamaica,” ostensibly to a private English citi-
zen named Henry Cullen but actually written to the British state, which detailed the
reasons why the Venezuelan republic had collapsed again and how this could be
prevented in the future. After Jamaica denied him assistance, Bolívar went to Haiti,
where he sought aid from President Alexandre Pétion (1770–1818); in exchange for
aid, Bolivar promised to free Venezuela’s slaves, a promise he kept in 1816.
Bolívar attacked the Spanish in New Granada in March 1816, leading his small
force across flooded rivers and traversing the Andes Mountains to get to Bogotá.
He spent the next several years fighting the Spanish royal army throughout the
region, using Angostura, now Ciudad Bolivar, as his base of operations, in south-
eastern Bolivia. The Spanish army surrendered to Bolívar at the B attle of Boyacá
on August 7, 1819, a decisive victory that led to New Granada’s independence from
Spain. In Angostura, Bolívar was proclaimed president and military dictator.
In the aftermath of the consolidation of New Granada with Venezuela, he urged
legislators of the Second Venezuelan Congress to write a law creating the Republic
of Greater Colombia on December 17, 1819. Bolívar then concentrated on Venezu-
elan and Ecuadorian freedom, which w ere achieved a fter the B attle of Carabobo
on June 24, 1821. He entered Caracas triumphantly on June 29, and on Septem-
ber 7, 1821, Gran Colombia (or the Republic of Colombia) was proclaimed and
Bolívar became its first president.
In 1822, Bolívar worked to liberate Ecuador from Spain, which he did offi-
cially on May 24, 1822, with the Battle of Pichincha. While in Quito, Ecuador,
78 B OL Í VA R , SI M Ó N
Bolívar’s Lasting Influence in Venezuela

In 1999, Hugo Chavez, a longtime devotee of Bolívar’s life and ideology, came
to power in Venezuela. He oversaw the creation of a new constitution that pro-
claimed the nation’s official name to be the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
Drawing on Bolívar’s example of strong, centralized rule, Chavez combined
populism, Marxism, and antipathy to the cultural and economic dominance
of the United States to claim he would bring a new liberation to his country.
Believing his hero was assassinated, Chavez ordered Bolívar’s body to be
exhumed to search for evidence of poisoning. The results w ere inconclusive.
Following a long battle with cancer, Chavez died in 2013. His successor,
Nicolas Madura, suspected that Chavez had also been poisoned.
Bolivar met his longtime mistress, Manuela Sáenez (ca. 1797–1856), who was also
a revolutionary.
After freeing Ecuador, Bolívar went next to Peru, a territory divided into two
separate colonies known as Peru, which was independent from Spain, and Upper
Peru, which was still u nder Spanish control. Bolívar met with José de San Martín
(1778–1850), known as the Protector of Peruvian Freedom, to work jointly t owards
Peru’s complete freedom. Bolívar was named dictator of Peru on February 10, 1824,
and after reorganizing its military and political administrations, Bolívar defeated
the Spanish at the Battle of Junín on August 6, 1824. On August 6, 1825, the Repub-
lic of Bolivia was declared and Bolívar became its president.
After narrowly escaping an 1828 assassination attempt by a group of Liberals
known as the Sociedad Filológica who opposed Bolívar’s seemingly monarchical
rule, and b ecause of the difficulties in managing a country as large as Gran Colom-
bia, Bolívar recommended that it be split into three separate countries. Out of this,
Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador became independent and Bolívar resigned his
position as president of Gran Colombia on April 27, 1830. He intended to go into
exile in England because of increasingly worsening health and increasing unpop-
ularity among fellow republicans. Bolívar sent a large number of his possessions
to E ngland but he became too ill to take ship, however.
Bolívar died in Santa Marta, Gran Colombia, on December 17, 1830, of tuber-
culosis. Though Bolívar ordered all his personal papers to be burned a fter his death,
his order was ignored and the records were preserved for future generations. The
letters he wrote to Sáenez w ere also preserved and added to his collection. The
house he died in, the Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino, is now a museum dedi-
cated to his memory.
Tarah L. Luke
See also: Age of Revolution; Latin American Wars of Independence; San Martín,
José de
B OO K S 79
Further Reading
Arana, Marie. 2013. Bolivar: American Liberator. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Chasteen, John Charles. 2008. Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Lynch, John. 2006. Simón Bolívar: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
B O N A PA R T E , N A P O L E O N . See Napoleon I
BOOKS
Books in the Atlantic world functioned as both material and cultural objects.
They w ere material goods that w ere traded, bought, and sold, but they w ere also
cultural goods that contained information about the culture in which they
were produced. U ntil the mid-nineteenth c entury, books w ere printed mainly in
Europe and shipped to the New World with other commercial goods. Though
books produced in the New World were rarely marketed and sold in the Old
World, books played a part in representing the New World to t hose who had never
seen it.
The book was pivotal in the creation of the Atlantic world. Culture was trans-
planted from one side of the Atlantic to the other through the knowledge and learning
in books. Colonists relied on the European book trade for both the manufacture of
books and also the text of the books that w ere printed. Even a fter the establishment
of printing in the colonies, colonists still depended on books from Europe. Books
were a way of importing European culture through the ideas they espoused. The
book trade was imperative in building transatlantic identities, and linking colonists
to the homeland. Importing books and other written documents kept colonists
intellectually and authoritatively tied to the colonizing country and up-to-date with
information from that country.
The written word was an instrument of colonial companies and religious groups.
Whether it was the English, French, or Dutch East India Companies, the Spanish
Carrera de Indias, missionary groups, or commercial ventures, the instructions w ere
the same: everything must be presented in writing. Colonial, commercial, and
evangelizing groups used the written word to report back to their governing body
or the p eople who sent them to the New World. The written word functioned in
multiple roles: technical (for navigation), scientific (to record discoveries and new
knowledge), legal (the written word as proof of authority), administrative (provid-
ing instructions from a distant governing body), and religious (providing instruc-
tions from a distant church). Though absent from his colonies, a king could send
his word to the local governing body to carry out. The written word functioned in
these many ways to provide structure and authority to travelers.
Many of the colonies in the new Americas w ere founded by religious groups who
depended on books from Europe for their religious practice. Books provided clergy
with the materials needed to preach and the laity with the texts needed for personal
devotion; some books were especially important to Protestants, such as the Book
80 B OO K S
of Common Prayer, Psalter, or Bible. Books were also a way of introducing Native
Americans to European religion and culture. Missionaries used books to preach
to the natives, attempting to convert them to Christianity. Catholic missionaries,
such as the Jesuits, and Protestants, such as the Puritans, w ere among those who
used books of sermons and the Bible to preach to indigenous populations. How-
ever primitive society in the colony was, planters, missionaries, and merchants still
depended on books from the m other country.
Printing in the New World was regulated by the viceroyalty and archbishop, as
was the importation of books. In the 1570s, the Mexican Inquisition prosecuted
several merchants and printers for importing and printing heretical texts. The
accused w ere asked if they had brought any books with them that could be seen
to threaten the tenets of Catholicism, including Lutheran or Calvinist works, or
vernacular translations of the Bible. The Inquisition established a list of prohibited
books. However, the regulations were not always enforced and individual inquisi-
tional deputies, or comisarios, did not always enforce the prohibitions on books as
they were charged to do.
Presses w
ere set up for various reasons. Government-controlled presses, such
as the one in Mexico City, required permission of the local government; it printed
books for the local population. Presses w ere often established as a result of con-
quest or occupation of a place. The press allowed for printing to support the new
government through the publication of laws and proclamations. The written word
was given primacy over the oral tradition that many of the conquered cultures used.
Therefore, having ownership of land or laws written down superseded any oral
agreements, even though the oral agreement was in place before the written. In
The New World’s First Printing Press

Although most early books were printed in Europe, the New World got its
first printing press in 1539, in Mexico City, when Juan de Zumàrraga
(1468–1548) received permission from the king of Spain and the archbishop
of Mexico City to bring a printing press from Europe. The first book printed
in 1539 was Breve y mas compendiosa doctrina Christiana en lengua Mexicana y
Castellana or A Brief Compendium of Christian Doctrine in the Mexican and Cas-
tillian Languages. Printing presses were subsequently established in Lima and
Puebla. Until later in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the majority
of American imprints came from Mexico and Peru. The first printing press in
English North America was set up in 1639 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
by printer Stephen Day (ca. 1610–1668). Day printed a pamphlet, The Oath of
a Freeman, and an almanac before printing his first full book, a small format
book of psalms, now referred to as the Bay Psalm Book (1640). In 2013, a
copy of the Bay Psalm Book sold at auction for over $14 million, the largest
amount ever paid for a book.
B OO K S 81
this way, printing supported the colonizer’s authority and power. Pamphlets and
newspapers w ere often printed in support of the local government and m other
country, despite the prevailing attitudes of those who lived in the colony.
The first Bible printed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was translated into
Algonquin by John Eliot (1604–1690) and printed in 1663. Native American cul-
ture had no written language, and so the appearance of books from Europe intro-
duced a new phenomenon to their oral culture. Missionaries used Bibles to introduce
Native Americans to Christianity. Native Americans believed the printed word to
be some sort of witchcraft because they were unfamiliar with written language.
Books such as this Algonquin Bible were not exported to Europe or reprinted there,
as Europe had no interest in purchasing such a book. However, the book was taken
to E ngland to be shown as a curiosity and to gain financial and social support for
the conversion of Native Americans by the missionaries.
Before presses were set up in the West Indies, colonies would import material
of local interest from e ither their m
other country or from North America. Networks
were created within and between the colonies, usually t hose who shared common
language, for the printing and supply of books. For example, a sermon preached
in Port Royal was printed in New York and exported back to Jamaica. Even before
a press was established in the West Indies, an Anglican church had set up a parish
library as an attempt to establish religious education. Even a fter printing began in
the West Indies, and other portions of the New World, books were still imported
from Europe, mainly London, Paris, Antwerp, Barcelona, and Lisbon. Colonial
presses in the West Indies depended on newspaper and periodical publishing to
sustain them financially, as West Indian planters preferred literature from the major
metropolises in Europe.
Much of what was printed by early presses were almanacs, psalm books, news-
papers, and, for the presses operating in Protestant areas, vernacular Bibles. Presses
also printed more ephemeral documents such as pamphlets and broadsides. Liter
ature was mostly imported from Europe or pirated by colonial presses. North Amer-
ican presses often reprinted books from London without permission. Due to the
distance, they w ere never prosecuted for the literary theft.
The book as a commercial object flowed mainly in one direction: from Europe
to the New World. However, the ideas and topics of books flowed both ways. Begin-
ning with Christopher Columbus, travelers and explorers kept journals, many of
which w ere printed and allowed for Europeans to experience the New World
through the descriptions and stories they contained. Books such as Divers Voyages
Touching the Discoverie of America (1582) written by Richard Hakluyt (1553–1616)
contained tales of foreign p eoples and lands to both inform and entertain. Travel-
ers from E ngland, France, Portugal, Spain and other countries would write t hese
books to be shared with t hose back home and they w ere often translated to be read
around Europe.
Travel books aimed to entice new p eople to move to the New World, to stimu-
late interest in trade and goods coming from foreign lands, and to support the colo-
nial agenda. T hese books were written from the Eu ro
pean perspective and
described the strangeness and oddities of indigenous p eople and their culture.
82 B O R DEAU X
hese books worked as a way to introduce the culture of the New World to the
T
Old World. In this way, culture from the New World was transplanted back to—but
not a dopted by—the Old World, at the same time that books being sent from
Europe helped to stabilize and reinforce European culture in the colonies.
Cassie Brand
See also: Hakluyt, Richard; Jesuits; L

egal Systems; Puritans
Further Reading
Amory, Hugh, and David D. Hall, eds. 2010. A History of the Book in America. 5 vols. Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Fraser, Robert. 2008. Book History through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script. New York:
Routledge.
Howsam, Leslie, and James Raven, eds. 2011. Books between Europe and the Americas:
Connections and Communities, 1620–1860. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
BORDEAUX
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River and on the Atlantic Ocean in the
Gironde department in southwestern France. As of 2012, Bordeaux proper has a
population of approximately 240,000. With all of its suburbs, known as the Com-
munaute urbaine des Bordeaux (Urban Community of Bordeaux) or Bordeaux Métro-
pole, it has a total population of 737,000. Bordeaux is the ninth-largest community
in France. Its inhabitants are known as Bordelais (for men) and Bordelaise (for
women). French is the main language. Being a part of France, one of the most secu-
lar countries in the world, t here are many religions observed in Bordeaux, includ-
ing Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, and different types of Protestantism. France as a
whole is a traditionally Catholic nation, however. Bordeaux’ ethnic makeup is
primarily French, but there are also substantial and growing numbers of people
claiming Spanish heritage, along with Italian, German, and Portuguese. The cli-
mate is generally described as a maritime one, meaning it has warm but not overly
hot summers and cool but not overly cold winters; the summers tend to be a little
warmer and winters milder than other maritime climates. The average temperature
is 65.3°F (18.3°C). One of the city’s nicknames is “La perle d’Aquitaine” (“The Pearl
of Aquitaine”). It is significant for its wine, which has been exported worldwide for
centuries.
Bordeaux started as a settlement of a Celtic tribe known as the Bituriges Vivisci,
a part of the Aquitani p eople, who named their town Burdigala. During their con-
quest of Gaul in the first century BCE, the Romans sought out the area because of
the tin and lead resources in the land. It became the capital of Roman Aquitaine
in the last half of the first century BCE. A fter it was sacked by the Franks in 498
CE, what is now Bordeaux sank into obscurity. The city suffered from numerous
wars fought for the next several hundred years. It regained prominence a fter the
marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1122–1204) to the French-speaking King
B O R DEAU X 83
Henry II of E ngland (1133–1189). For a time it existed as the capital of an inde

pendent state with Edward, the Black Prince (1330–1376), as its ruler. Bordeaux
was annexed by France in 1453.
Bordeaux gained prominence in the sixteenth c entury with the increase of Atlan-
tic trade from its port, where it participated in the triangular trade to the New
World. The first part of the triangle was from a European port (such as Bordeaux)
to Africa, where European traders used trinkets, copper, European textiles, guns,
ammunition, and other European-made goods to sell or exchange for African slaves.
Slaves w ere then shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in the second part of the triangle
to the New World, and the emptied ships w ere loaded with colonial exports bound
for Europe and their home port across the Atlantic in the final phase. The main
colonial product shipped to Bordeaux in this last phase was often sugar grown in the
West Indies colonies.
As a participant in the Atlantic slave trade, Bordeaux received sugar, and from
its port it directed Bordeaux wine westward to the West Indies and Americas. It
was because of the profits of the triangular trade that Bordeaux was able to build
the beautiful eighteenth c entury buildings of its Port of the Moon. In 2007, the
World Heritage Committee of the United Nations Environmental, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) deemed it historically significant enough to
receive designation as a World Heritage site.
The city sided with the Fronde Rebellion (1648–1653) against King Louis XIV
(1638–1715), which resulted in Louis XIV having the French army occupy Bor-
deaux and forcibly annexing it to the rest of the realm. During the eighteenth
century, the parlement of Bordeaux became instrumental in blocking decrees of
the King of France, which eventually led to the French Revolution (1789–1799).
Bordeaux suffered economically during the early nineteenth on account of Napo-
leon I’s (1769–1821) Continental Blockade that stopped European commerce to
Great Britain and British ports. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the
French government relocated from Paris to Bordeaux. This happened again in the
World War I (1914–1918) and briefly in World War II (1939–1945). Both the Ital-
ian and German navies used the port of Bordeaux during the World War II, where
they launched the B attle of the Atlantic (1939–1945), the longest-r unning military
battle of that war.
Bordeaux is the capital of the Aquitaine region of France and is also the prefec-
ture of Gironde department. A prefecture is the seat of the prefect, or representa-
tive of France’s national government, in the department. Prefectures were established
by order of Napoleon I as a way of rationalizing the governmental structure of
France after the chaos of the French Revolution.
Bordeaux has been known for its wine for centuries since the Romans intro-
duced viticulture to the area during the first c entury CE to provide wine for local
consumption, which has continued up to the present day. Bordeaux’s wine was a
key trade item in the African slave trade in the fifteenth through eighteenth cen-
turies. It is the most famous wine region in the world, producing both everyday
wines as well as many of the most expensive brands. Both red and white wines
84 B OU R B ON R EFO R M S
are bottled in Bordeaux, with dominant grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon and Mal-
bec being planted in the region.
Tarah L. Luke
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; French Atlantic; French Revolution; Napoleon I; Wine
Further Reading
Beik, William. 1997. Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France: The Culture of Retribution.
Forrest, Alan. 1975. Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux. London: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Northcutt, Wayne. 1996. The Regions of France: A Reference Guide to History and Culture.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
BOURBON REFORMS
During the eighteenth century, members of the Bourbon dynasty ruled Spain and
initiated a series of changes to the empire’s economic, political, social, and reli-
gious administration. This reorganization became known as the Bourbon Reforms
or Las Reformas Borbónicas in Spanish. Named a fter the House of Bourbon, the
Spanish royal house of French origin, the reforms spanned the rule of three kings
who invigorated and renewed interest in reshaping the administration of Spain’s
colonies across the Atlantic: King Philip V (r. 1700–1746), King Ferdinand VI
(r. 1746–1759), and King Charles III (r. 1759–1788).
The Bourbon Reforms w ere born out of necessity. Years of consecutive wars
drained the Spanish coffers, forcing the government to reduce its budget and
increase revenues. The reforms also coincided with the European intellectual move-
ment known as the Enlightenment, which called for reason and independence to
influence policymaking. The Bourbon Reforms were an economic necessity and
an opportunity to modernize. The reforms also encouraged scientific expeditions
that would seek to chart never-before-seen details about the vast American terri-
tory, its p
eoples, and its geography. Never uniform or general, the Reforms w ere
implemented when and how local administrators and advisors saw fit for each
region. Degrees of success varied. Implemented in both Spain and its colonies, the
reforms helped stabilize Spain’s finances, strengthened the military, and aided the
Spanish Crown in protecting its vast empire.
Reforms in the colonies were especially important in light of their untapped eco-
nomic potential. The control of trade across the Atlantic was one of the most
important aspects of the economic changes made under the reforms. The desire to
regulate trade and curtail the traffic in illicit and untaxed goods (such as silver and
tobacco) led legislators to tighten the trade routes and increase surveillance at ports.
The Spanish Crown then moved to establish various monopolies on highly profit-
able goods, such as silver, alcohol and tobacco. Monopolies profited the Crown and
the monopoly holders, but consumers faced higher prices.
B OU R B ON R EFO R M S 85
More ports were made available for the exportation of goods and raw materials
across the Atlantic, which provided greater access to both resources and custom-
ers. The simultaneous opening and closing of the access of certain industries and
goods upset some p eople, but also allowed entrepreneurs to enter into a more effi-
cient and profitable economic trade market.
The system established by the reforms suffered a devastating blow when Spain
lost Havana to G reat Britain in 1762. The loss of Cuba—and the tax revenue it
produced—led Spain to increase taxes for all Spanish Americans. The taxes w ere
also partially used to pay for the expense of increasing the military presence to
protect other regions of the empire from foreign invaders.
Increased taxation required increased enforcement. To maintain better control
of the populations across the Atlantic, the Crown dispatched Spanish-born offi-
cials, including inspectors, known as visitadores, and tax collectors, to replace many
Spanish American-born bureaucrats. In Mexico, for example, a new office for col-
lecting taxes was established in 1754. Called the Administracion de Cuenta de la Real
Hacienda, it gave the king’s representatives, instead of the local officials, the power
over tax collecting.
Locals did not approve of staffing prestigious posts with “foreign” appointees,
and when coupled with the increased taxation, tensions flared between Spaniards
born in the Iberian Peninsula, known as peninsulares, and Spaniards born in America
known as criollos. As the Atlantic became less of an obstacle for communication,
and drastic changes w ere being imposed on Spanish Americans’ way of life, vio-
lent protests erupted in various regions of Spanish America. Criollos soon began to
develop a greater sense of an “American” identity, especially when they compared
themselves to peninsulares.
To keep a close rein on all bureaucrats, peninsulares and criollos alike, Spain cre-
ated new regions of colonial administration. The geographical uniqueness of each
area of Spanish America and varied population densities required that the work of
managing the entire region be divided into different viceroyalties or administra-
tive hubs. The viceroyalty of New Granada, Rio de la Plata, and the Captaincy Gen-
eral of Caracas were all established and staffed with hopes of creating tighter
linkages to a more centralized government in Spain, making local management of
the vast American territory more efficient. Each appointed head of a viceroyalty,
known as a viceroy, served as a representative of the king and dealt with issues
that arose within his territory.
The overall administration of Spain’s colonies across the Atlantic was also revised.
Under Charles III, the Empire’s Ministry of War was kept intact, but other admin-
istrative units w
ere broken up. For example, the Ministry of the Indies, which handled
issues from Spanish America, was divided into two branches: one branch to deal
with the economy and the other to address m atters of civil justice. The main goal
of these additions and changes to the administrative hubs was, in theory, the
equality of Spain and its colonies. Local criollos, however, did not always feel that
they were being treated as equals with peninsulares, especially when they w ere being
removed from their posts or taxed extensively on goods.
86 B R ADFO R D , W ILLIA M
Just as the king and his advisors expected to maintain a tighter control of the
American colonies, some of the reforms also offered more efficient avenues for link-
ing the p eople living across the Atlantic to their king. A more efficient royal mail
system allowed Spanish Americans to gain a sense of access to the king and receive
answers to their grievances via post. As the eighteenth century continued, the
establishment of various universities and an increase in newspapers and other
printed media also helped modernize the region.
The reforms also imposed new requirements on the Catholic Church in both
Spain and its colonies. For example, since the conquest of the Americas, the church
had amassed great wealth in the American colonies, and the reforms sought to limit
the church’s wealth and influence. The most radical push in this direction was the
expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 under the reign of King Charles III. Once the Jesu-
its w
ere expelled, their assets w
ere confiscated and appropriated by the Spanish
Crown.
Lizeth Elizondo
See also: Enlightenment; Viceregal System
Further Reading
Kuethe, Allan J., and Kenneth. J. Andrien. 2014. The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth
Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Paquette, Gabriel. 2011. Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire,
1759–1808. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stein, Stanley J., and Barbara H. Stein. 2003. Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the
Age of Charles III, 1759–1789. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
BRADFORD, WILLIAM (1590–1657)

William Bradford was an English Puritan Separatist, governor of Plymouth (Mas
sachusetts), and a historian. In his 33 years as governor of the fledgling colony he
performed a variety of functions, ranging from negotiating treaties, to managing
the settlement’s finances, to performing marriages. His Of Plymouth Plantation,
known for both its literary quality and its historical significance, was the most
important piece of writing in seventeenth-century English-speaking North Amer
ica. It is the main source of information on the Plymouth settlers, their challenges,
disputes, and achievements. Both readable and rich in period detail, Of Plymouth
Plantation contains material about the colonists in E ngland and America, religion,
trade, interactions with the Dutch and French, relations with native people, f amily
life, business, disease, natural disasters, law, and crime from ca. 1607 until 1647.
Bradford died in 1657.
Bradford was born on March 29, 1590, into a family of yeomen in Austerfield,
Yorkshire. An inveterate reader of the Geneva Bible (1560) even as a child, Brad-
ford evinced a tendency to religious devotion. Braving familial disapproval, in 1606
the young Bradford joined a congregation established by Reverend Richard Clifton
B R ADFO R D , W ILLIA M 87
and William Brewster at Scrooby, Nottinghamshire. A radical, separatist Puritan

who broke with his family’s tradition of membership in the Church of England,
Bradford was heavily influenced by the Hebrew Scriptures and John Calvin’s the-
ology. King James I persecuted and arrested many Puritans, seeing their desire to
“purify” the English church of traces of Catholicism as a threat to the state’s author-
ity. Separatists such as Bradford went even further, asserting that the Church of
England was beyond redemption, and advocated separating from it entirely. In 1607
and 1608 Bradford was briefly jailed for his religious beliefs.
Of Plymouth Plantation recounts his coreligionists’ activities from their persecu-
tion in E
ngland u ntil 1647, when their colony was well established. Bradford’s pri-
mary purpose in composing these evocative annals (with accompanying letters
and other documents) was a religious one. Working on the text from 1630 to 1650,
he sought to preserve a first-hand account of what he saw as a vital chapter in the
world’s salvation history: the beneficent workings of Christian Providence in
the lives of E ngland’s Separatist exiles. Fueled by Calvinist zeal, Bradford penned
a didactic testament to what he saw as the godly emigrants’ repeated triumphs
over the diabolical. He frequently cited the Bible and drew moral lessons from the
events that he narrated. Bradford related the story of Plymouth’s establishment as
a form of religious witness, and an example of God’s omnipotence. Of Plymouth
Plantation is a colonization account in which the Judeo-Christian God is the cen-
tral actor. The abundant information that Bradford relates about a multitude of
topics was for him incidental detail, only used to illustrate his greater religious
message and to provide an edifying lesson for f uture generations.
Bradford and a band of his coreligionists emigrated to Amsterdam, and then
Leiden, Holland, seeking freedom to practice their religion as they chose. They
stayed t here for 12 years. Many of these Separatists, whom Bradford later deemed
“pilgrims” (informed by Hebrews 11:13) struggled financially, excluded as they w ere
from the most lucrative parts of the guild-dominated cloth trade. Notwithstand-
ing the breach with his family, Bradford inherited some familial wealth when he
turned 21, although he lost much of it in unsuccessful business ventures. He bought
ah ouse and worked as a fustian (corduroy) weaver. He learned Dutch, French,
Latin, and Greek. In 1612, he became a citizen of Leiden.
Although Bradford himself prospered in Leiden, most of the Separatists suffered
physically and materially and worried that their c hildren w
ere assimilating to Dutch
culture. They also feared looming war with Catholic Spain, since a Spanish-Dutch
truce was due to expire. The perceived Spanish threat provided them with addi-
tional impetus for the difficult decision to immigrate to North America. Bradford
noted that “the Spaniard might prove as cruel as the savages of America, and the
famine and pestilence as sore here as there, and their liberty less to look out for
remedy” (Bradford 1967, 27). Rejecting immigration to V irginia because of the
Church of England’s dominance there, the Separatists decided to go to Cape Cod,
which pro-colonization writers such as John Smith had depicted as a land of plenty.
Bradford took a leading role in planning the journey. This first permanent English
settlement in New England consisted of farming families. All of the land, assets,
and potential profits in Plymouth belonged to a shareholder-owned joint-stock
88 B R ADFO R D , W ILLIA M
company. The Separatists agreed to work for seven years to repay the London inves-
tors in their enterprise. At that point, the assets w
ere to be divided proportionally
to the shares owned in the original venture. Captain John Smith estimated that
approximately 7,000 pounds was invested in Plymouth before it broke even (Bun-
ker 2010, 250).
Crossing the Atlantic on the Mayflower, 102 passengers, both Separatists (“saints”)
and some not in the congregation (“strangers”) arrived at Provincetown (Massa
chusetts). Forty-one adult men signed the Mayflower Compact on November 11,
1620 to assert unity and discipline when faced with the reality that they had landed
north of where their patent had permitted, out of V irginia Company territory. Upon
viewing the coast, Bradford recalled that they saw nothing “but a hideous and des-
olate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men—and what multitudes there
might be of them they knew not” (Bradford 1967, 62). About half of the settlers
died of disease and starvation during their first winter in New E ngland. Samoset
and Squanto, English-speaking Native Americans, offered g reat assistance in t hose
early days. In March, 1621, the Separatists concluded a peace treaty with the Native
American sachem Massasoit in a meeting held in Bradford’s home. In April, 1621,
Bradford became Plymouth’s new governor upon his predecessor’s death. He was
re-elected 30 times, serving without pay for many years. Except for a five-year
period, he governed Plymouth for the rest of his life. Sometime in the autumn of
1621 the colonists and Massasoit’s Pokanokets held what became known as the
first Thanksgiving, an event recorded in Of Plymouth Plantation and Mourt’s Rela-
tion (1622), which Bradford assisted Edward Winslow in writing. In 1622–23, the
settlers constructed a fort (which doubled as a h
ouse of worship) b ecause they feared
the Narragansetts.
The Plymouth colonists struggled financially and by 1626 they were bankrupt.
They renegotiated their agreement with their English investors, who wrote off all
capital invested in the colony since 1620. The colonists bargained their debt down
to 1,800 pounds (Bunker 2010, 364). A schedule for repayment was established
that had a final payment date of 1636. Furthermore, the investors surrendered any
The First Thanksgiving

The story of a first Thanksgiving originated with William Bradford’s Of Plym-
outh Plantation and Edward Winslow’s Mourt’s Relation, although the descrip-
tions offer little indication of what the holiday would become. The Pilgrim’s
fall feast was forgotten u ntil the 1850s, when Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine
editor, campaigned to establish a national holiday to give thanks for God’s
blessings to America. Believing that she was resurrecting a lost Pilgrim tradi-
tion, she wrote public officials pressing her case. Finally, in 1863, during the
Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in Novem-
ber a day of thanksgiving and praise in the United States.
B R ADST R EET, ANNE 89
claim to the colony’s American assets. In 1627, a small group of “undertakers” led
by Bradford guaranteed that the payments would be made in full and on time; if
not, they would be personally liable. In return, the undertakers received the prof-
its from the trade in beaver fur for six years. Commerce flourished as the Plym-
outh colonists traded in corn and English goods with native p eople, bought
wampum from the Dutch, and profited handsomely from the soaring price of bea-
ver fur and otter skins in E ngland. Nonetheless, it was not u ntil 1648 that the
colony’s debt was retired, a fter Bradford and other Plymouth leaders sold land and
houses to raise the necessary funds.
In 1630, the Council for New England (the Earl of Warwick, president) offered
Bradford and a small number of Plymouth’s leaders the Warwick Patent as propri-
etors. L
ater, in 1636, Bradford and Edward Winslow w ere to codify Plymouth’s
rules in a Book of Laws that drew from both the Mayflower Compact and the Pat-
ent as the twin pillars of sovereignty in Plymouth. With the Patent, Bradford had
the opportunity to give himself sole authority in Plymouth. However, he chose to
share the proprietary rights with other early settlers and by 1640 he persuaded his
colleagues to share the Patent with all of the Freemen. In 1637, the English, sup-
ported by the Narragansetts, nearly eradicated the Pequots in the Pequot War. The
fighting ended before Plymouth’s 50 mustered men joined combat. In 1643, Plym-
outh, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven formed the New E ngland
Confederation, a defense pact against possible Native American attacks. By 1650,
Bradford stopped writing Of Plymouth Plantation and began serious study of
Hebrew to read the Hebrew Scriptures in their original language. He remained
governor of Plymouth u ntil within months of his death in 1657.
Colleen M. Seguin
See also: Books; British Atlantic; Joint-Stock Companies; Mayflower Compact;

Pequot War; Puritans
Further Reading
Bradford, William. 1962. Of Plymouth Plantation. Edited and with an introduction by Har-
vey Wish. New York: Capricorn Books.
Bradford, William. 1967. Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647. Edited and with an introduc-
tion by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Random House.
Bunker, Nick. 2010. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World,
A New History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
B R A D S T R E E T, A N N E ( c a . 1 6 1 2 – 1 6 7 2 )
Anne Bradstreet was the first published poet in the New World. English born and
educated, Bradstreet traveled to the New World in her late teens with numerous
other to help found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her father, Governor Thomas
Dudley, and her husband, Simon Bradstreet, were principal figures in the colony’s
inception. Bradstreet wrote journals and poetry in her younger years, continuing
90 B R ADST R EET, ANNE
the habit as she traveled and aged. Her first publication, The Tenth Muse, Lately
Sprung Up in America, was printed and well received in England in 1650. However,
it is the revision of her writings that gained her the most fame; published in 1678,
six years after her death, Several Poems Compiled with G reat Wit and Learning was
the first published book of poetry in the New World. Well known for its primary
claim as work by a Puritan, female author, Bradstreet contemplated elements of
the Puritan faith and wrestled with the public and private opinion of herself and
her poetry, all while perfecting her poetic craft in a hostile new environment.
Anne Bradstreet was born to Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Yorke Dudley around
1612 in Northampton, E ngland. Her father acted as the estate manager, or stew-
ard, for the Earl of Lincoln, which allowed the Dudley family to raise their children
in a highly educated environment with access to the earl’s extensive library. This
foundational training in literature, history, and theology would l ater manifest itself
in Anne’s poetry. At approximately aged 16, Anne Dudley married Simon Brad-
street, the well-educated assistant steward of the earl. Soon after, the couple sailed
with her parents and a large group of Puritans to the new colony across the Atlan-
tic. Another prominent Puritan, John Winthrop, was amongst the travelers on the
same ship, the Arbella. On their crossing, Winthrop wrote and purportedly deliv-
ered his sermon, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in which he described the Puri-
tan colony as a “city upon a hill.”
The Dudleys and Bradstreets disembarked in summer 1630 to find that many
of the early colonists had died over the winter, and those left alive w ere quite ill.
Bradstreet and her family were stunned by the colony’s conditions. Regardless of
her initial alarm at the quality of life they encountered, she reflected upon it and
her faith helped her persevere in those dire circumstances. She wrote, “But after I
was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the church”
(Bradstreet 1867, 5). The Dudleys and the Bradstreets worked to help build the com-
munity, but eventually moved from Salem to Charlestown, Newton, and Ipswich
before finally settling in Andover. Over the years, the Bradstreets had eight children,
four boys and four girls.
As a mother and an early female colonist, Anne Bradstreet wrote poetry around
her demanding schedule, recording her thoughts on politics and major historical
figures. Her first book of poetry was published by her brother-in-law, John Wood-
bridge, in 1650 without her knowledge. Although Bradstreet was writing in the New
World, Woodbridge took and published her poems in a small volume in E ngland.
Published u nder the title The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America, it contained a
note written by Woodbridge declaring that the author was a reputable lady, preempt-
ing any possible attacks on her virtue. The book of verse, which was well received
both at home and abroad, is highly formal, and her themes mostly adhered to a rigid
organization regarding “The Four Elements,” “The Four Humors in Man’s Constitu-
tion,” “The Four Ages of Man,” “The Four Seasons of the Year,” and “The Four Monar-
chies.” Despite its warm reception by her contemporaries, it is not Bradstreet’s early
poetry that is usually acclaimed by modern historians and literary critics. Many
note that her first volume is exceedingly formal and even stilted in style.
B R ADST R EET, ANNE 91
Bradstreet’s second publication, the first published poetic work in the New
World, was entitled Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and Learning. Released
in 1678, it was published six years a fter her death. This second edition of Brad-
street’s poetry was both a revision and an expansion of her previous work. Revised
by the author and paired with her personal meditations for herself and her children,
it reflects her true talent. Strikingly more private in tone, it included possibly her
most famous poem, “To My Dear and Loving Husband.” She muses sentimentally,
“If ever two w ere one, then surely we / If ever man w ere lov’d by wife, then thee”
(Bradstreet 1867, 394). Her tone is much softer, and her themes revolve around
domestic life, romantic love, and family connections.
Modern audiences are often surprised by the Puritans’ acceptance of a female
author. As a whole, Puritans celebrated education, literature, and intellectual abil-
ity; writing, personal or professional, was seen as a type of genuine work in their
community. Bradstreet’s writings are a form of serv ice to her f amily, to herself, and
to her faith, acting as a kind of prayer. As Bradstreet wrote to her children, “I have
not studied in this you read to show my skill, but to declare the truth, not to set
forth myself, but the glory of God” (Bradstreet 1867, 4).
Some scholars consider Bradstreet an early feminist, though not as radical as
Anne Hutchinson. She was definitely aware of Hutchinson, another interesting
female figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who encouraged and hosted a Puri-
tan women’s worship group. As the group grew in number and the meetings
began to be viewed as dissention from the Puritan church, Hutchinson was chal-
lenged in the community’s General Court. Anne Bradstreet’s father and husband
were among those in court against Hutchinson. Contrarily, Bradstreet’s continued
writing indicates that she was encouraged both by her f amily and her community.
Hutchinson was seen as a threat to the religious community, while Bradstreet was
endorsed by the same men who prosecuted Hutchinson. It is important to note
that Bradstreet’s writing never crossed the lines of impropriety or challenged a
woman’s social place.
Anne Bradstreet’s life was much like her work, educated and thoughtful, reflecting
her love and duty to her family and her God. Yet her life is also one of contradic-
tions: an Old World w oman surviving in the wilds of a dangerous New World, a
devout Puritan with doubts, and a private w oman made public.
Josianne L. Campbell
See also: Hutchinson, Anne; Puritans; Winthrop, John
Further Reading
Bradstreet, Anne. 1867. The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse. Edited by John Har-
vard Ellis. Charlestown: Abram E. Cutter.
Martin, Wendy. 1984. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Nichols, Heidi L. 2006. Anne Bradstreet: A Guided Tour of the Life and Thought of a Puritan
Poet. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing.
92 B R A Z IL
BRAZIL
Brazil is the largest and wealthiest country in South America and houses a sub-
stantial percentage of the renowned Amazon rainforest in the northwest. Initially
home to numerous Native American tribes, following the arrival of the Portuguese
at the turn of the sixteenth c entury Brazil’s population grew to include Europeans
as well as Africans who w ere brought in large numbers through the Atlantic slave
trade. Although numerous indigenous and African languages continued to be spo-
ken in Brazil during the colonial period, Portuguese ultimately became the domi-
nant vernacular. Portuguese colonists swelled port cities such as Rio de Janeiro
and Salvador, which today feature beautiful remnants of colonial architecture, yet
Brazilian colonization remained for a long time very much limited along the coast-
line. Slave labor fuelled the exportation of commodities such as coffee and sugar.
Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery in the Atlantic world in 1888.
When Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet arrived to Brazil’s northern shores in 1500,
they encountered indigenous populations who had long been living in what would
come to be known as Brazil. Yet, it would be another three decades until the Por-
tuguese adopted an invested interest in this geographically vast colony. Spurred
by the riches of silver and gold uncovered by the Spanish in the Americas, and
moved by the imminent fear of losing their newfound colony to other European
fleets, Portugal began the process of colonizing Brazil. In 1533, the king of Portu-
gal parceled the Brazilian coastline among Portuguese nobles in a fashion similar
to the English approach to the early North American colonies. The king’s trepida-
tions were not entirely unfounded. Indeed, over the course of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries Brazil suffered invasions on multiple occasions from two of
Portugal’s rivals, the French and the Dutch. The Dutch successfully occupied the
Northeast for more than two decades u ntil 1654 when the Portuguese expelled
them from New Holland. While Dutch occupation had not curtailed sugar produc-
tion, their presence nonetheless created a monopoly on Brazilian sugar exports. Fol-
lowing the Dutch’s expulsion from Brazil, Portuguese-Dutch mercantile relations
would not be revived.
While Brazil’s Northeast initially dominated the Atlantic market with their sugar
production, this would soon be challenged by the growth of sugar plantations in
the British and French Car ibbean. As a consequence, Brazilian planters lost much
of their power in dictating sugar prices on the market. This surge in sugar cultiva-
tion caused a g reat demand for slave l abor, which triggered a dramatic rise in slave
prices. Although sugar production continued in the Northeast, it never reached its
earlier height. The north of Brazil was also home to rice plantations, particularly
in the Amazon region, with rice exports primarily serving Portugal and Italy. Fur-
ther south, in the region of Minas Gerais, slaves worked in horrendous conditions
where they were forced to pan for gold, with the treasures then shipped to over-
seas markets. The discovery and exploitation of Minas’s mines encouraged the
development of the southeast interior. The Southeast region was particularly reputed
for cultivating the renowned Brazilian coffee.
To speak of Brazil and the Atlantic world is to speak simultaneously of slavery.
For more than three centuries starting in the mid-1500s, thousands of ships would
B R A Z IL 93
deposit their h
uman cargoes along the Brazilian coastline, leading historians to esti-
mate that nearly 5 million Africans disembarked in Brazil (Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade Database 2008). The real numbers, however, could be much higher. Indeed,
despite abolishing the Atlantic slave trade in 1850, Africans continued to arrive
into Brazil through the illegal trade. The Afro-Brazilian population was, and
remains, both culturally and ethnically rich. While the greatest percentage of cap-
tives came from West and Central Africa, historians are now beginning to investi-
gate the presence of slaves’ cultural traits from as far afield as Mozambique.
Brazil imported more African slaves than any other nation during the Atlantic
slave trade. Yet, indigenous Brazilians w
ere also enslaved and toiled alongside Afri-
cans into the mid-eighteenth century; a composite of African, European, and
Indian cultures developed as a result. Nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers
often viewed Brazilian slavery as a more benevolent form of bondage compared to
slavery elsewhere. The presence of the Catholic Church, a high frequency of man-
umissions, and the influence of Roman law all contributed to this view. However,
Brazilian slavery was still brutal, and as in any other slave society, Brazilian slaves
resisted their bondage. Slaves rebelled in a variety of ways, from shirking daily work
tasks and absconding from the plantation barracks to participate in celebrations,
An image of Indians cutting brazilwood from the 1558 book Singularities of France
Antarctique, by French Franciscan André de Thevet. Though a valuable commodity,
brazilwood harvesting gave way to the product that made Brazil a lucrative colony for
Portugal: sugar. (Library of Congress)
94 B R A Z IL
to more violent acts of resistance such as murder and suicide. Slaves’ attempts to
escape make Brazil stand apart from its North American neighbor. Runaway slaves
often migrated to quilombos, or communities of runaway slaves, the largest and most
studied being that of Palmares, which hosted both Africans and crioulos (Africans
born in Brazil). Members of the Palmares community addressed one another by
the African term “malungo,” meaning comrade.
Brazilian slaves largely preserved Africanisms, often under the very eyes of mas-
ters and colonial authorities. One strong example of the presence of African beliefs
and practices is that of the fraternidades or brotherhoods. As a Catholic country,
Brazil had an abundance of religious brotherhoods, for both white and black Bra-
zilians. Despite Africans’ attachments to such religious fraternities, brotherhood
organizations actually provided a guise for the continuation and preservation of
African religious practices. Thus, African slaves simply exchanged the names of
Christian deities for those of their own African deities. Brotherhoods w ere particu-
larly omnipresent across urban Brazil, where blacks, both free and enslaved, could
purchase membership to a great number of brotherhoods. The black brother-
hoods supported their members in ways that mirrored their Portuguese Catholic
predecessors, in particular vis-à-v is funerary serv ices. Since masters often dis-
posed of their deceased slaves in the most economically expedient way, the
brotherhoods could offer slaves a more dignified burial and entrance into the after-
life. Furthermore, such institutions also provided assistance to slaves who were
abused by their owners, giving some slaves a way to achieve emancipation. Per-
haps more importantly, belonging to a fraternity also enabled slaves to become part
of a community.
In 1807, the Portuguese royal family, fleeing Napoleon’s advances in the Iberian,
relocated to Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro. Dom João VI, his wife, Dona Carlota, and
their children settled in Brazil along with some 10,000 of Lisbon’s elites. Under
the protection of the British Royal Navy, the Portuguese Court successfully evaded
Napoleon’s army. The evacuation gave rise to great changes to Brazil’s role in the
Atlantic world. The positions of Brazil and Portugal, as colony and metropole
respectively, shifted almost overnight. The population of Rio de Janeiro experi-
enced a dramatic demographic increase, ultimately forcing the port city to expand
into the surrounding hinterlands. The protection provided by the British Navy,
nonetheless, came with a price: Portugal and Brazil became tied to trade almost
exclusively with Great Britain and Rio de Janeiro soon became host to an influx of
British journalists and merchants. Not only did British travelers arrive in Brazil
following the royal f amily’s relocation, but also scores of artists, biologists, and writ-
ers from all over Europe came to visit the tropical Versailles, resulting in a wealth
of nineteenth-century travel narrative literature.
The departure of Dom João VI almost two decades later marked another water-
shed in Brazil’s history. Under the leadership of his firstborn son, Pedro, the col-
ony claimed its independence from the metropole in 1822. Brazilian independence
was facilitated through the following two variables: First, was the combination of
the dire economic, military, and political situation in which Portugal found itself;
second, across the Atlantic in Brazil, disgruntlement began to grow against the
B R É B EUF, ST. J EAN DE 95
metropole. By the year 1806, more than 60 percent of Portuguese exports to its
European neighbors derived from Brazil (Schwartz 1985, 429). Portugal contin-
ued to send and receive products to and from Brazil, which undoubtedly began to
rile Brazilians since the smaller European country was reaping substantial bene-
fits from Brazil for every commercial transaction. Independence of the new nation, in
contrast, would tighten international relations between Brazil and G reat Britain,
especially with respect to trade.
In the nineteenth century, Brazil exhibited what scholars have come to call the
“Second Slavery,” a period in which countries such as Brazil and Cuba r ose to fill
the spaces left by the absence of the British and French sugar plantations in the
Caribbean following the abolition of their respective slave trades. The slavery
during this epoch was typically more industrial in three ways: plantations grew
larger; a more intense labor rhythm and supervision of workers was imposed;
and there was a greater application of capital to the productive process. Nonethe-
less, it was not until the nineteenth century that Brazil began to industrialize on
a major scale. From an Atlantic perspective, Brazil remained far behind its north-
ern neighbor—the U.S. south—in the process of industrialization and modern-
ization, with steam trains not occupying a significant presence in Brazil until the
1860s.
In the last three decades of slavery, leading to its abolition in 1888, slave rebel-
lions became more prominent across Brazil. This period was also marked by great
numbers of European contracted laborers arriving into Brazil (predominantly
to the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro). They often worked alongside slaves
on the plantations. Following the “Golden Law” that ultimately emancipated all
slaves in Brazil, former slaves often found themselves without paid positions due
to planters favoring migrant workers over former slaves. This led to great poverty
among the former enslaved population, which would continue into the twentieth
century.
Rachael L. Pasierowska
See also: Portuguese Atlantic; Slavery; Sugar
Further Reading
Da Costa, Emilia Viotti. 1985. The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories. Revised Edition.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Schwartz, Stuart B. 1985. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–
1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. 2008. “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database Voyages.”
http://w ww.slavevoyages.org.
B R É B E U F, S T. J E A N D E ( 1 5 9 3 – 1 6 4 9 )
St. Jean de Brébeuf was a French Jesuit missionary to New France (Canada) who
was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1930 and is a patron saint of
Canada. He is significant for his work amongst the Huron Indians, whose language
96 B R É B EUF, ST. J EAN DE
and culture he studied. Brébeuf was captured by enemy Iroquois and was mar-
tyred a fter the Iroquois ritually tortured and killed him in 1649.
Brébeuf was born in Condé-sur-Vire, Normandy, France, on March 25, 1593.
Little is known about his early life prior to 1617, when, at the age of 24, he joined
the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), a Catholic missionary religious order committed
to the Christianization of non-Christian p eoples. Ordained a priest in 1623,
Brébeuf’s mission was to Christianize the Native Americans, or First P eoples, in
New France, where he first went in 1625.
Brébeuf was chosen to go to North America because of his facility with languages.
He spent much time and effort while in New France becoming fluent in Huron,
which he felt would improve conversion rates. This was a new idea, because he
believed fluency would lead to natives’ increased understanding of Christianity.
Brébeuf worked to record the sounds of native languages which aided later Jesuit
missionaries. He also discovered and wrote down compound words in the Huron
language, which was one of his most significant contributions to the Jesuits’ work
in North America.
Brébeuf began working as a missionary amongst the Montagnais Indians (now
Innu) in 1625 until he was transferred to the Huron in 1626. Brébeuf was at first
unsuccessful in his attempts to convert the Hurons to Catholicism.
He was summoned to Quebec in 1628 b ecause France’s colonies w ere in dan-
ger of attack from the English, and French lives were endangered. The colonial gov-
ernor, the explorer Samuel de Champlain (1574–1635), was forced to surrender
and the mission was recalled to France in 1629.
Brébeuf served as a confessor and preacher while he was in France. He also took
his final Jesuit vows in 1630. He left France in 1633 to return to New France.
On his return trip to New France, Brébeuf and his fellow missionaries selected
the site of Saint-Joseph I for their center of missionary work with the Hurons. This
part of New France was known as Huronia. This time Brébeuf’s Christianizing mes-
sage found a more receptive audience among the Hurons, possibly because of
recent disease epidemics that killed many natives. Brébeuf was able to convert as
Brébeuf and the Huron Language

St. Jean de Brébeuf created a Huron dictionary and translated the catechism
of the Catholic Church from French to Huron. When these works were pub-
lished, they constituted the first time the Huron language appeared in print.
In 1642, Brébeuf also wrote what is now considered Canada’s first Christmas
carol. Called “Huron Carol” and composed in the Huron and Wendat lan-
guages, it was set to the music of a traditional French song. Brébeuf may have
also coined the term “lacrosse” to describe the natives’ game of sticks, which
he thought looked like a bishop’s crossed staffs (le crosse in French, with the
feminine definite article, la crosse).
B R É B EUF, ST. J EAN DE 97
many as 86 Hurons in the single year of 1636, a significant improvement over pre-
vious years.
While among the Hurons, Brébeuf was the first to record ethnographical
details of important events of their culture. T hese observations w ere documented
in The Jesuit Relations, early printed ethnographic reports written by Jesuit mis-
sionaries in New France and sent back to their superiors. The Jesuit Relations were
printed e very year from 1632 to 1674 and included success rates in attempts to
convert the natives. One of these events that he described was the Huron-Wendat
Feast of the Dead, a mass reburial of deceased loved ones a fter a village moved to
a new location. Brébeuf’s account of the ceremony was proven accurate after a
twentieth-century archaeological excavation discovered the site Brébeuf detailed
in 1636.
Brébeuf was sent to the newly created Saint-Joseph II in 1638 to be superior,
leaving Jérôme Lalemant (1593–1673), one of the leaders of the French Jesuit mis-
sion in New France, in charge at Saint-Joseph I.
In 1649, Brébeuf and four other Jesuit missionaries, including the nephew of
Jérôme Lalemant, Gabriel Lalemant (1610–1649), were captured by Iroquois while
serving in the Huron mission village. The Iroquois and Hurons w ere rivals locked
in competition in the fur trade, and the Iroquois had been burning and taking
Huron villages as a way of winning the fur trade war. Brébeuf and the other Jesu-
its, along with some Huron captives, were subjected to ritualistic torture at St. Ignace
in Huronia. This included the captors drinking Brébeuf’s blood, a stoning, being
cut with knives, having boiling w ater poured on his head, suffering branding with
red-hot tomahawks, and, eventually, being burned at the stake. Throughout,
Brébeuf was recorded as being more concerned with his fellow missionaries’ suf-
ferings than his own. Because of his stoical demeanor during the torture, the Iroquois
ate his heart to gain his courage and apparent lack of pain. Brébeuf was mar-
tyred on March 16, 1649.
Brébeuf is part of the North American Martyrs, a group of eight Jesuits mar-
tyred in New France during the mid-seventeenth century. Brébeuf was beatified
in 1925 and canonized by Pope Pius XI on June 29, 1930. Pope Pius XII declared
him to be a patron saint of Canada on October 16, 1940. He is buried in the Church
of St. Joseph at a reconstruction of the Jesuit mission to the Huron near Midland,
Ontario, Canada.
Tarah L. Luke
See also: Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead; Jesuits; New France
Further Reading
Greer, Allan, ed. 2000. The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century
North America. Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s.
Talbot, Francis X. 1949. Saint Among the Hurons: The Life of Jean de Brébeuf. New York: Harper
& Brothers.
98 B R ITISH ATLANTI C
B R I T I S H AT L A N T I C
The British Atlantic world is a term used to define a vast and overlapping network
that connected various aspects of early modern G reat Britain and its p
eople in a
common transatlantic market created for the exchange of labor, goods, idea, and
culture as well as the movement of p eople and colonial settlement. The British colo-
nization of the Atlantic basin is a story that is as much a part of Native American,
Canadian, South American, Caribbean, and African historiography as it is an opening
chapter of the story of colonial North America. Imperialism, religious plurality,
technology, self-interest, and innovations in the mass production of manufactured
goods drove the dispersion of British culture and values in a series of migrations
to new worlds following the voyages of discovery in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
The historical foundations of the British Atlantic world are deeply rooted in the
turmoil of political alliances and intrigues that influenced the relationships of the
kingdoms of the British Isles with Europe during the Late M iddle Ages and Early
Modern Era. Sovereign interests in foreign trade and the bloody politics of the Prot-
estant Reformation provoked deep international conflicts as warfare waged across
the English Channel. The Franco-Scottish alliance and the Hundred Years’ War
against England during the early 1420s gave way to the Treaty of Edinburgh, signed
on July 5, 1560 by E ngland, France, and Scotland. The name “Great Britain” was
assigned in 1603 to refer to the nations of E ngland and Scotland, both u nder the
rule of the same monarch, King James I of England, also known as James VI of
Scotland. The two nations were formally united in 1706 and 1707 by the Acts of
Union, u nder the rule of one parliament. Ireland joined G reat Britain to form the
United Kingdom in 1801, and the Republic of Ireland was recognized as a sepa-
rate nation in 1921. To the present day Northern Ireland retains its sovereign rela-
tionship with the United Kingdom.
The House of Tudor ruled the Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Wales from
1485 u ntil 1603. During the reigns of five monarchs, England r ose from the back-
waters of Europe to become a sturdy maritime power capable of defeating the
uncontested Spanish Armada in August of 1588. Henry VII (1457–1509) estab-
lished the merchant marine fleet, creating mercantile institutions that would sup-
port the ventures of Elizabeth I (1533–1603). The prominence of England’s maritime
arts reflected the nation’s venture into new capital markets via the Muscovy Com
pany (1553), the Levant Company (1580), the East India Company (1600), and the
Massachusetts Bay Company (1629). The search for a Northwest and Northeast Pas-
sage across the Arctic Circle to the Pacific Ocean was the stimulus for a series of
capital intensive expeditions.
Despite Spanish claims to the Americas as a whole, English explorers and pri-
vateers took note of the silver-laden Treasure Fleets returning to Spain from South
America through the Caribbean islands. The daring naval tactics of Sir John
Hawkins (1532–1595) of Plymouth, Francis Drake (1540–1596), and Sir Walter
Raleigh (1552–1618) soon established an English presence in the New World.
Raleigh’s efforts to establish a colony at Roanoke Island in 1585, and again in 1587,
met with failure; nevertheless, the legends of “El Dorado” and the search for gold
B R ITISH ATLANTI C 99
motivated the establishment of the first English Caribbean bases at Trinidad and at
St. Lucia. Colonies w ere established on the Caribbean islands of Barbados, Jamaica,
and the Leeward Islands in the seventeenth century, followed by Dominica,
St. Vincent, Grenada, Tobago, British Guiana, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, and
British Honduras.
The Genoese navigator John Cabot established a fishing settlement in Newfound-
land in 1497, England’s first overseas colony. Other Elizabethan era voyages
included the explorations of Giovanni de Verrazano (1485–1528), Estevan Gomez
(1483–1538), Martin Frobisher (1535–1594), John Davis (1550–1605), and Henry
Hudson (1565–1611). During Hudson’s third arctic voyage, sponsored by the Dutch
East India Company (April 1609), his party landed in Newfoundland and then
maneuvered to explore what is now the Hudson River. In short order, the New
Netherland Company was formed, and the Dutch West India Company charter
was ratified in 1621; in 1626 the colony of New Amsterdam was organized.
The colony was short-lived, as Anglo-Dutch conflicts came to an end with the
surrender of the colony to the British, formalized by the Treaty of Breda (1667)
and the Treaty of Westminster (1674). The lands ceded included New York, New
Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The Port of New York was of partic
ular strategic value to the British who immediately established a merchants’ exchange
to integrate shipments from the colonies and the West Indies to European ports,
including London.
The first English settlements in North America w ere founded at Jamestown,
Virginia, in 1607 and at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay from 1620 to 1622. Early
British entrepreneurs took little interest in overseas colonization, rebuffing with
indifference the hardships of the Atlantic voyage and the rigor of establishing a
communal homestead. Nevertheless, as fledgling colonies began to prosper, Lon-
don took notice. Over the next century, merchants, indentured servants, prison-
ers, and working-class families accompanied government officials and religious
dissidents to the colonies. Soon the English system of law, government administra-
tion, religious affiliation, and best business practices unified British interests
throughout the Atlantic world. The colonies prospered u nder the British Naviga-
tion Acts that specified that British ships would be contracted for all trading trans-
actions and that the colonies agreed to broker markets for British manufactured
goods. The colonies were essentially self-governing entities that soon developed
busy interstate markets catering to a rising international middle class.
Ireland was G reat Britain’s first plantation colony; in comparison, u ntil the
eighteenth c entury the American colonies w ere regarded as peripheral to British
colonial interests both at home and in the Caribbean. The English occupation of
Ireland was instituted during the Norman invasions of the twelfth c entury. It
continued during the establishment of the Church of E ngland u nder Henry VIII
in 1534; the adoption of the Act of Supremacy that disenfranchised land-owning
Catholics in favor of English land ownership; Oliver Cromwell’s invasion in 1649;
and the subsequent establishment of Scottish and English plantations. Finally,
the Penal Laws (1691–1760), effective until 1920, reduced all non-Protestants to
peasant status.
100 B R ITISH ATLANTI C
Early colonial plantations in V irginia and the West Indies provided a ready mar-
ket for the transport of Irish criminals, children, w omen and the poverty-stricken
to be sold as slaves. The Act of Satisfaction adopted on September 26, 1653, divided
Ireland into two distinct Irish and English proprietorships. Enforced on pain of
death in 1654, many Irish natives were captured and sold to the colonies. Harsh
and demeaning ethnocentric attitudes towards the Irish eventually extended to
indigenous cultures throughout the British Empire. By 1790, English settlement
accounted for nearly 60 percent of European immigration to America. Important
port cities included Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charlestown. Well into
the nineteenth c entury resettlement in Americ a was considered an attractive
economic incentive for skilled craftsmen and the poverty-stricken alike.
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) was the first of a series of repri-
sals that realigned the balance of European power in the Atlantic world during
the eighteenth century. As a result of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Great Britain
acquired Gibraltar, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Hudson Bay territories, the
island of St. Kitts and full rights to the African slave trade with Latin America for
a period of 30 years. The Seven Years’ War began in Europe in 1756; in the North
American arena it is known as the French and Indian War. Attempts at British
expansion into the American interior w ere stymied by French efforts to consoli-
date their own holdings. Both powers relied on native allies and colonists for sup-
port; the French relied on enduring, well subsidized relationships with the tribes
of the interior, while the British allied their forces with the Iroquois Confederacy.
Territorial conflicts and disputes regarding the terms of settlement engaged Span-
ish and French forces in the foray against British troops. The strength of the Brit-
ish Navy outweighed the efforts of Spain and France, enabling the capture of the
French Car ibbean islands, Spanish Cuba, and the Philippines.
As a result of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, G reat Britain acquired the French ter-
ritories of Canada and lands east of the Mississippi River, and Spanish Florida, with
the return of Cuba to Spain. T hese apparent British victories w ere met with alarm
in the colonies; they proved equally disastrous for the Indian communities that
played Anglo-French competition to protect their lands and communities. Deterio-
rating relationships with the British Government and its administrative policies in
the newly acquired territories led to the colonial independence movement. The
British failure to engage Native Americans in the plans for settlement was a con-
tributing factor leading to the American Revolution.
During this period, critical shortages in labor supply stimulated the transition
from indentured servitude to the slave trade. This transport system of goods and
labor evolved as mariners learned to navigate the global winds and currents that
governed the w aters of the Atlantic basin. The Gulf Stream provided the dynam-
ics needed to support developing trade routes out of G reat Britain southward to
Africa, where European goods (textiles, guns, copper, and trinkets) were traded
for slaves. The trade winds off of Africa carried cargoes westward to the Car ib
bean, where slaves w ere sold to support the growing demand for l abor to produce
sugar and molasses, and to Virginia for tobacco and hemp exports. Colonial markets
also supported important trade in raw resources, including fish and lumber.
B R ITISH ATLANTI C 101
European backhauls included sugar, cotton, coffee, tobacco, rice, and other Amer-
ican manufactured products.
While Great Britain was deeply implicated in the slave trade, Britons became
some of the first abolitionists. Parliament outlawed the slave trade in 1807, while
slavery itself was abolished in 1834. The British nation, home to preeminent com-
mercial interests trading in African slave markets, slowly internalized the deep
moral and ethical implications of abolition. In response to continuing protest at
home and abroad, the nation spearheaded a thorough and determined international
campaign to end the slave trade, signing multilateral treaties giving British ships
the right to search for slave trafficking at ports of call. Moreover, the British nation
supported a broad communications network in support of emancipation; Canada
became a sanctuary where political equality as British subjects was encouraged
despite intense protest from American interests.
At the close of the eighteenth century the numbers of British American immi-
grants declined as new settlements in Australia and Canada welcomed disgrun-
tled loyalists following the secession of the American Colonies between 1776 and
1783. The British Colonial Office was established in 1801, bringing cohesion to an
administrative system of increasing sophistication and influence throughout the
empire. These efforts were bolstered by the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815
and the market transformations of the Industrial Revolution, ushering in the Pax
Brittanica, or British Peace, a period of relative global peace that endured until the
dawn of the twentieth c entury.
As the unrivalled master of the seas, during the nineteenth century, Great Britain
extended her commercial and political influence throughout India, China, and Africa,
establishing a chain of protectorates that stretched from South Africa to Egypt.
Principles of colonial self-government were adopted in 1847, giving Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, and colonies in South Africa self-rule under the stewardship of gover-
nors appointed by the British government. These principles created an archetype for
the successful transition of Great Britain’s dependent colonial holdings to full and
voluntary participation in a Commonwealth of Nations in the twentieth century.
Victoria M. Breting-Garcia
See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of the Slave Trade; Drake, Sir Francis;
Elizabeth I; Jamestown; Raleigh, Sir Walter; Seven Years’ War; Treaty of Paris
Further Reading
Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds. 2009. The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800.
2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crosbie, Barry, and Mark Hampton, eds. 2016. The Cultural Construction of the British World.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Gosse, Van. “ ‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends’: The Emergence of African Amer-
ican Politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772–1861.” American Historical Review 113
(2008): 1003–1028.
Greene, Jack P., and Philip D. Morgan, eds. 2009. Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal. New
102 B UENOS AI R ES
BUENOS AIRES
Since the seventeenth c entury, the city of Buenos Aires has attracted global com-
merce, investment, and immigration to become the thriving cosmopolitan capital
of Argentina. The city, one day to be termed the “Paris of South America,” began
inauspiciously. When Juan Díaz de Solís and his crew first arrived near the area of
present-day Buenos Aires, in January 1516, they found a wide, shallow, silted water-
way. They named it the “river of silver” (Río de la Plata) out of wishful thinking, as
in fact precious minerals w ere scarce. From the banks of the river stretched grass-
lands (pampas) sparsely populated by the hunter-gatherer Querandí people. As an
entrepôt the area was likewise unpromising. The Río de la Plata was difficult to
navigate with powerful winds and hidden shoals. Despite such geographic imped-
iments the area would eventually grow into the second most populous metropoli-
tan area in South America.
Spaniards founded a settlement in 1536, naming it for the patron saint of sail-
ors, Our Lady of the Fair Winds (“Buen Aire”). It quickly succumbed to starvation
and attacks from the Querandí. The Spaniards created more v iable towns further
north, including Asunción (1536), Cordoba (1573), and Santa Fe (1573). These
towns benefited from proximity to the rich Andean civilization and the silver mine
of Potosí that formed the heart of Spain’s South American empire. Africans had
arrived as early as 1534, and in 1558 licensed import of enslaved Africans began,
with 600 brought to the Plata that year.
In 1580, the Spanish Crown refounded Buenos Aires to protect their Atlantic
coast interests from the Portuguese. Under Juan de Garay, several hundred settlers
restarted the colony, protected by a newly built fort. Like many Spanish imperial
cities, the roads w
ere laid out in regular grids around a central town square. To
appease vested interests in Cordoba and Peru, the Crown enacted trade barriers
in the early 1600s that limited Buenos Aires’ trade activities. Apart from one annual
ship from Seville, all exports from Buenos Aires had to go through Lima. In
response, smuggling flourished throughout the seventeenth c entury.
Meanwhile the handful of abandoned horses and c attle from the first settlement
had spread to the pampas and multiplied into tens of thousands. By 1700, an econ-
omy of cattle products (mainly hides and tallow) provided for an urban commu-
nity of several thousand. Large herds of semi-tame animals w ere established in
estancias (large ranch estates), rounded up by gauchos (cowboys) in the pampas.
Porteños (inhabitants of Buenos Aires) also imported slaves from Africa and
exported—illegally—silver from Upper Peru.
The Crown reorganized the empire in 1776, with Buenos Aires—population now
25,000—as capital of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata (most of present-day Argen-
tina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia). As a capital, Buenos Aires now oversaw
administration and justice, increasing its status but also bringing more direct
involvement from Spain in the form of a Spanish viceroy and other appointed
officials. Many criollos (American-born p eople of Spanish descent) felt sidelined
in the new arrangement. Capital status also meant that porteños could trade directly
with Spain and the rest of the empire. Tax revenues for the Crown jumped
from 100,000 pesos in 1774 to 1,000,000 just six years l ater (Scobie 1964, 61). The
B UENOS AI R ES 103
combination of wealth and a disgruntled local elite attracted the notice of a British
force that attacked in June 1806. The viceroy fled the city, and the invaders opened
it to trade with G reat Britain. They w ere driven out within two months, and finally
defeated in 1807 by local militias. These British invasions heightened the demand
in Buenos Aires for global commerce, and proved the leadership capabilities of
the South Americans.
Thus, the attack, along with other events of the Napoleonic Wars, catalyzed
South American independence. While Spain fought Napoleon in Europe, colonial
matters fell to the colonials. In May 1810, liberal factions declared the city council
the highest authority of the territory, and six years later revolutionaries proclaimed
the United Provinces of Río de la Plata an independent state. Local strongman, or
caudillo, Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877) overthrew the new government in 1829
and ruled as dictator u ntil 1845. However, he was eventually defeated and in 1852
leaders meeting in Buenos Aires established Argentina as a democracy and abol-
ished slavery.
These political revolutions coincided with important economic changes. Salde-
ros (meat-salting factories) provided a new way to bring estancio cattle products to
a global market at the dawn of the nineteenth c entury. Sheep, grain, and fruit pro-
duction soared in the following decades, and the advent of refrigerated shipping
in the 1870s dramatically increased the market for Argentine beef. Sea routes
brought these goods across the Atlantic within weeks, and the 1825 Anglo-
Argentine commercial treaty cemented economic ties between Buenos Aires and
the United Kingdom. Starting in 1857, railways linked the rural interior of Argen-
tina to Buenos Aires and the wider world; British companies owned almost all lines
and trains. Apart from the Baring Banking crisis that depressed Argentina’s econ-
omy in 1889, the final decades of the nineteenth century were a golden age for
Buenos Aires.
The culture and society of the interior and the coast diverged significantly: in
the words of one historian, “the head outgrew the body” (Scobie 1964, 7). Buenos
Aires enjoyed access to educational institutions and economic prosperity, a status
underscored by the university, national museum, and public library established in
the 1820s. The countryside suffered from lack of opportunity, which drew the
ambitious to the city. Two-and-a-h alf million overseas immigrants joined them
between 1870 and 1920: Irish, Spanish, Italians, Jews, and many others. In 1910,
roughly 75 percent of the city’s adults had been born in Europe (Scobie 1964, 134).
Afro-Argentines, who in the 1700s formed fully one-third of porteños, grew less
visible in the city a fter decades of intermarriage with other cultural groups. Local
cuisine reflects the area’s rich history: iconic roasted beef dishes are served along-
side pastas introduced by Italian immigrants, and the invigorating native yerba
mate tea remains a favorite drink. The famous tango dance emerged from working
class neighborhoods in the 1890s and exemplifies the multicultural heritage and
energetic intensity of Buenos Aires, which by 1900, was one of the largest and most
important urban centers in the South Atlantic, and indeed the world.
Elizabeth C. Libero
104 B UENOS AI R ES
See also: Potosí; Smuggling; Viceregal System
Further Reading
Lewis, Daniel K. 2001. The History of Argentina. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Scobie, James R. 1964. Argentina: A City and a Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, Jason. 2014. Buenos Aires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
C
C A B E Z A D E VA C A , Á LVA R N Ú Ñ E Z
(ca. 1490—ca. 1559)
In an age of travel and exploration, Spaniard Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca stands
out as a cosmopolitan among cosmopolitans. As a member of Pánfilo de
Narváez’s (1470–1528) failed expedition to Florida, Cabeza de Vaca spent years
wandering through the southwestern United States. L ater, as adelantado, or gover-
nor, of Río de la Plata, he made an extended expedition into South America. In
both cases, Cabeza de Vaca wrote rich narratives of his peregrinations. At one time
or another, Cabeza de Vaca was an explorer, a conquistador, a faith healer, and
an anthropologist.
The date of Cabeza de Vaca’s birth is unknown, but historians estimate it to be
around 1490. Cabeza de Vaca served in the Spanish army in Italy, Spain, and
Navarre. It was in the New World, however, where Cabeza de Vaca gained fame.
In 1527, Cabeza de Vaca joined the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez as treasurer
and marshal. Narváez had been given a license by Charles I, the King of Spain, to
explore the territory of La Florida and establish towns and forts. Narváez sailed
from Spain in June of 1527 with a contingent of 600 men and landed at Hispaniola in
August of 1527, at which point the expedition went awry. Some of the men Narváez
brought from Spain deserted. Although Narváez recruited additional men, the
harsh weather, particularly hurricanes, depleted supplies. In April of 1528, Narváez
landed at Tampa Bay, where he split his force into two groups to explore the terri-
tory: an army of 300 men led by Narváez traveled by land and another 100 man
What’s in a Name?
Cabeza de Vaca literally means “cow’s head.” A colorful story, possibly apoc-
ryphal, surrounds its origin. One of Cabeza de Vaca’s ancestors, Martin Alhaja,
a Spanish shepherd, is said to have used a cow’s skull to mark a mountain
pass for the soldiers of King Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214). According
to the story, Alfonso’s army used this pass to circle around an army of Mus-
lims, led by Caliph Muhammad al-Nasir, who w ere fighting Christians for
control of the Iberian Peninsula. As a sign of gratitude, the victorious King
Alfonso raised Alhaja’s family to the minor nobility under the name “Cabeza
de Vaca” after the cow’s head marking the mountain pass.
106 C A B E Z A DE VA C A , Á L VA R N Ú Ñ E Z
group traveled by sea. Although Cabeza de Vaca did not approve of Narváez’s
plan, he nevertheless accompanied the overland group.
As Narváez’s army marched onward, they quickly found themselves on the brink
of starvation. While the indigenous people they encountered initially were friendly,
hostile indigenous tribes soon appeared. In short order, Narváez’s force began to
suffer from the hit and run raids that indigenous p eople employed to g reat advan-
tage against Europeans. This type of attack never had a chance of annihilating the
whole force at once, but it wore the army down. At this point, the best strategy
was to escape by water. However, the ships that were supposed to accompany the
overland army were nowhere to be found. The would-be conquistadors built five
rafts, but a hurricane separated them and killed dozens of p eople, including
Narváez. Of the 250 people that boarded the rafts, only 80 survived. The survi-
vors made it to Galveston, Texas, but by 1532, their numbers had been whittled
down to four men: Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés de Dorantes de Carranza, Alonso Castillo
Maldonado, and an African slave, Estevanico.
For over four years, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions wandered throughout
the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca was often a
captive and the account he left demonstrates his skill as an ethnographer and
anthropologist. Indeed, Cabeza de Vaca left one of the era’s richest accounts of
indigenous life. While living among the indigenous p eople, Cabeza de Vaca also
Cabeza de Vaca and his men wander the American southwest in search of rescue. By the
time the expedition ended its journey in Galveston, Texas, only Cabeza and three o thers
remained alive. (Bettmann/Getty Images)
C AHO K IA 107
developed a reputation as a faith healer and attracted a considerable native follow-

ing. Eventually Cabeza de Vaca and his compatriots set out to find the Spanish in
Mexico. In 1537 they succeeded. A fter spending years in the wilderness, Cabeza
de Vaca traveled first to Mexico City and later returned to Spain. Once in Spain,
Cabeza de Vaca did not retire into private life, but published a narrative of his trip,
La relación, or The Account. Additionally, in 1540 he was appointed Adelantado of
the Río de la Plata, which encompassed parts of modern-day Argentina, Paraguay,
and Uruguay. As adelantado, Cabeza de Vaca traveled throughout South America
and saw many places and animals that no other European had seen before, includ-
ing Iguazú Falls.
Unlike most of his fellow Spaniards, Cabeza de Vaca developed sympathies for
indigenous p eople. As adelantado, he was less inclined to support his fellow Span-
iards and more inclined to insist on fair treatment of the indigenous p eople. This
sympathy for indigenous people did not endear him to the elite in Río de la Plata
and Cabeza de Vaca was arrested and returned to Spain for trial in 1545. He never
returned to the New World. Critically, Cabeza de Vaca published widely read
accounts of his travels in North and South America. It was here, in La relación, an
expanded version of which was published in 1555, and contained a description of
Cabeza de Vaca’s South American travels, that Cabeza de Vaca secured his legacy.
His intensely detailed descriptions of places, indigenous life, and the flora and fauna
of the New World still fascinate historians.
Evan C. Rothera
See also: Books; Conquistadors; European Exploration
Further Reading
Howard, David A. 1997. Conquistador in Chains: Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the Amer
icas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Reséndez, Andrés. 2007. A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca: The Extraor-
dinary Tale of a Shipwrecked Spaniard Who Walked Across America in the Sixteenth
Century. New York: Basic Books.
C A B O V E R D E I S L A N D S . See Cape Verde Islands
CAHOKIA
Cahokia was the largest pre-Columbian city north of the Rio Grande, located just
east of modern day St. Louis. Cahokia was part of a greater Mississippian culture
that first developed between 900 and 1100 CE, and created a series of chiefdoms
in the eastern United States. Although Cahokia was the largest Mississippian set-
tlement, other significant centers similar to Cahokia existed, including Etowah in
modern-day Georgia, and Moundsville in modern-day Alabama. Mississippian cul-
ture was typified by intensified maize agriculture, mound building, a vast trade
network, and the development of large communities that contained complex temple
108 C AHO K IA
districts. The city is named a fter the Cahokia tribe that later lived in the region,
although the group did not necessarily descend from of the inhabitants of the
Cahokia city-state.
Maize production intensified in the Mississippi River basin over the tenth and
eleventh centuries, during the medieval warm period. Cahokia was built on a flood-
plain on the Mississippi River well suited for maize agriculture but that also pro-
vided ponds and lagoons for waterfowl and fish that would have enriched the local
diet along with beans, squash, and wild game. As villages in the region prospered,
they began to build courtyards centered upon a pole around which they built
meetinghouses, storage spaces for crops, and mounds that w ere used for religious
ceremonies. More powerful lineages owned homes near the courtyard while less
prestigious homes were located further away. Over time, some lineage groups began
to accumulate greater wealth and prestige as evidenced by larger dwelling spaces
and the ownership of more goods. Around 1050, Cahokia’s population increased
to four or five times its original size, and—in a break from the previous settlement
patterns—a much larger city-state was constructed.
At the center of Cahokia stood a rectangular, four-level terraced pyramid, 130
feet high and oriented t oward the four cardinal directions. The building would have
been the third tallest pyramid in the Western Hemisphere at the time. There were
A modern artist’s rendering of what Cahokia may have looked like, based on archeologi-
cal evidence, at its height around 1200 CE. The distinctive mounds built by the Missis-
sippian civilization, including Monks Mound, are visible in the central portion of the
picture. (Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, painting by William R. Iseminger)
C AHO K IA 109
several hundred mounds both inside and outside the central courtyard complex
dominated by the large central mound on which the pyramid sat. The central
mound, Monks Mound, was l ater named a fter French Trappist monks who resided
near the site in the early nineteenth century. The central mound covered approxi-
mately 17 acres. Many mounds w ere destroyed in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as the city of St. Louis grew; highway construction proved particularly
devastating. Other mounds were reduced by farmers, and through the efforts of
amateur archeologists and looters, before professional archeologists began to con-
duct digs at sites in the region during the 1930s. The central complex is now pre-
served u nder the auspices of the Cahokia Mound State Historic Site and is both a
National Historic Landmark and a World Heritage Site.
Mound building was connected to funeral rites, and many of the mounds at
Cahokia were burial sites that would be burned and then covered with earth, gen-
eration after generation within given lineages. Archeological evidence points to
the existence of ceremonial human sacrifices either for religious reasons or due to
political competition, and the two were likely not mutually exclusive within
Cahokia. T hese sacrifices or executions would have been public and religious
demonstrations.
West of the central mound were a series of five circular arrangements, con-
structed at different times, denoted by postholes that would have been filled with
cypress timber. The posts were laid out to track movements of the sun for obser-
vation, particularly at equinoxes and solstices, but may have been used to track
other astronomical bodies as well. The area is often referred to as Woodhenge and
likely represented an attempt to form a more accurate calendar, which would be of
immense importance in a densely populated, newly agricultural society. As in many
early civilizations, the calendar and the harvest would have been linked to a com-
plex cosmology and religious ceremonies.
Archeologists estimate that at its peak, the population of Cahokia was between
20,000 and 40,000 p eople, which would make it the largest pre-Columbian urban
area north of Mesoamerica, although some scholars argue that Cahokia may not
have been a proper city, but rather a ceremonial center. The ability to organize and
feed labor on such a scale, however, provides an argument for the presence of a
greater urban identity above and beyond ethnic or lineage loyalties. An organized
government likely existed as well. The population growth within the city required
a large farming base outside the city to supply it. A great deal of debate centers on
the level and extent of political control Cahokia exercised over the region.
A series of smaller communities surrounded the city, each with mounds at their
centers. A fter 1200, palisades w
ere increasingly built in many of the sites across
the Mississippi River basin, which points to growing conflict in the region. Some
scholars maintain that Cahokia was a tributary empire. T here is also evidence of
that Cahokians journeyed to establish other sites, which might be connected to
individuals or lineage groups choosing to leave for material or political reasons.
Even so, the spread of Mississippian culture may not have been due to outmigra-
tion or a concerted system of colonization, but rather to cultural appropriation or
110 C AHO K IA
Cahokia’s Favorite Pastime

Mississippian communities played a game called chunkey. The game involved
rolling a stone in front of several contestants who would throw sticks or spears
in an attempt to land their stick or spear as close to the stone as possible when
it came to a rest. The game was particularly popular in Cahokia, where spe-
cial arenas, called “chunk yards,” w ere dedicated to play. The chunk yards
centered on a post or obelisk and were located near the political and ceremo-
nial centers of the cities, indicating the prominence of the game in Cahokia.
Teams were formed to play inhabitants of other towns. The game may have
been a way to settle disputes without resorting to violence. The popularity of
chunkey spread from Cahokia to neighboring cultures and was observed by
European explorers and Americans into the nineteenth c entury, a testimony to
the lasting impact of Mississippian civilization and the influence of Cahokia.
imitation. Items found in Cahokia demonstrate that it was part of a large trade net-
work that extended to the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, and to the Atlantic. Ideas,
as well as goods, would have been transmitted along t hose trade routes.
Some theories link Mesoamerican influences to Cahokia’s growth, given simi-
larities in artistic representations of gods, the existence of human sacrifice, and
the dependence on maize agriculture. Even so, there is no conclusive evidence of
large numbers of Mesoamerican objects in Cahokia, and many of the religious and
artistic tropes evident in both cultures are present in many early civilizations a fter
the adoption of agriculture that led to the development of city-states and priest
kings. Maize was present long before the creation of city-states in the Mississippi,
and mound building had existed in other native cultures like the Adena and
Hopewell that had no clear connection to Mesoamerica.
Cahokia’s population declined over the course of the thirteenth century, and
reasons provided for the declension are speculative. Ecological explanations point
to a growing city population that placed too much on local food sources, particu-
larly game. Unusually hot summers over the c entury would have had a deleterious
effect on maize. Constant construction projects reduced trees in the surrounding
countryside, which may have worsened flooding conditions as evidenced by build-
ings in the last century of Cahokia’s existence being built at higher elevations. A
major earthquake occurred at the onset of the thirteenth c entury and further dec-
imated the city. Worsening climate conditions may have led to famines and then
warfare as population centers competed over food. Increases in violence can be
linked to archeological evidence of the palisades being strengthened and burned
during the period of decline. Growing social divisions between elite and nonelite
lineage groups within Cahokia likely contributed to greater conflict brought about
by the demographic and environmental problems. All of t hese misfortunes would
have weakened any claims to supernatural power from the elite who conducted
the rituals that they purported reaffirmed the cosmic and political order.
C ANA R Y ISLANDS 111
The population of the city that survived these disasters likely dispersed to other
areas in the Mississippi River basin when the city was abandoned. Refugees may
have been adopted or merged into other tribal groupings. Descendents of Cahokian
peoples a fter the abandonment of the sites may have merged with Siouan, Cadddoan,
and Algonquian tribes, that all in some measure demonstrate cultural commonali-
ties with the Mississippian culture. The Mississippian culture, that reached its height
in Cahokia, deeply influenced the native cultures of the Gulf South, Eastern Wood-
lands, and the G reat Plains.
Michael Beauchamp
See also: Algonquins; Aztec Empire; Maya Civilization; Mississippians
Further Reading
Dalan, Rinita A., et al. 2003. Envisioning Cahokia: A Landscape Perspective. Dekalb: North-
ern Illinois University Press.
Pauketat, Timothy R. 2009. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Greatest City on the Mississippi. New
York: Viking.
Pauketat, Timothy R., and Thomas E. Emerson, eds. 1997. Cahokia: Domination and Ideology
in the Mississippi World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
C A N A RY I S L A N D S
The Canary Islands are an archipelago of seven major and six smaller volcanic
islands lying off the coast of Northwest Africa. Once inhabited by Berber p eoples
called Guanches and known to ancient Phoenician and Roman geographers, the
islands w ere visited by European navigators during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. They were conquered by French and, ultimately, Spanish forces over the
course of the following c entury, and now form an autonomous community within
the nation of Spain.
Hoping to secure a source of valuable orchil lichens to be used in d ying tex-
tiles, French adventurers Jean de Béthencourt and Gadifer de la Salle began the
conquest of the Canary Islands in 1402. Their first target was the easternmost
island, Lanzarote, which they captured easily, taking most of its Guanche popula-
tion as slaves. They then moved on to nearby Fuerteventura (the island closest to
Africa), which they managed to conquer in 1405 with the support of King Enrique
III of the Spanish kingdom of Castile, who hoped to establish bases for the further
exploration of the Atlantic Ocean.
After their early triumphs, the two Frenchmen fell out, and Gadifer returned to
France. Béthencourt next attempted to capture Gran Canaria but was driven back
by its inhabitants, after which he turned to El Hierro, the smallest of the islands,
whose inhabitants surrendered in 1405. In a pattern that would be repeated
throughout the archipelago, the conqueror enslaved a number of the defeated
Guanches. Having witnessed the fate of the other islands, the inhabitants of La
Gomera also appear to have surrendered without resistance.
112 C ANA R Y ISLANDS
Jean de Béthencourt returned to France around 1406, appointing his nephew,

Maciot de Béthencourt, to govern the islands in his place. Maciot’s reign was marked
by brutality and deceit, and u nder pressure from the Queen of Castile he sold Lan-
zarote, Fuerteventura, El Hierro, and La Gomera to her representatives. However,
he proceeded to sell Lanzarote a second time—to the Portuguese, who held the
island for two years until being ousted by its inhabitants. Subsequently the four
islands passed through the hands of a succession of noble families, including that
of Hernán Peraza.
With the signing of the Treaty of Alcaçovas-Toledo in 1479, the Portuguese aban-
doned their claim to the Canaries, and over the following decades Spanish forces
completed the difficult annexation of the three remaining islands. Gran Canaria
fell in 1483 to Spanish troops under the command of Pedro de Vera, while troops
led by Alonso Fernández de Lugo conquered La Palma in 1492 and Tenerife, the
largest island in the archipelago, in 1496.
The Spanish conquest was a disaster for the native Guanches. Their language
disappeared within a short time and they themselves faced extinction. Many of
those who had not died in the struggle succumbed to disease, and many more were
sent abroad as slaves. For the Spanish, however, the Canary Islands proved to be
useful ports of call. Explorer Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) stopped over in
the islands to make repairs on his ships and load supplies on all four of his voy-
ages to the New World. Other Spanish explorers followed suit, including Spanish
conquistador Hernando de Soto (ca. 1496–1542) in 1538. Such maritime traffic
brought prosperity to the Spanish settlements, and immigrants began to arrive from
Spain and Portugal.
Over the years, Spanish efforts to strengthen the islands’ economy through agri-
culture had met with only limited success. Sugar cane had been introduced from
the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira (lying north of the Canaries) in the 1580s,
and although molasses derived from the canes’ juice quickly became the islands’ main
export, the crop proved more economical to grow in the West Indies. Grape vines
had also been planted about the same time, and a fortified white Canary wine known
as “sack” was popular in E ngland, but the New World proved to be a more profit-
able base for wine production. Along with setbacks such as t hese, swarms of African
locusts (grasshoppers), attacks by pirates, and volcanic eruptions on Tenerife and
Lanzarote spurred immigration to North America, where the Canary Islanders
settled in the Spanish colonies of Louisiana, Texas, and Florida.
Another economic opportunity arose in the form of cochineal insects, which
live on prickly pear cactus and are the source of a rich red dye. The insects had
been discovered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century in Mexico, and were intro-
duced in the 1820s in the Canary Islands, where the New World cactus had been
grown for centuries. Within a few decades, however, the demand for the dye fell
with the development of manmade substitutes. For a time, the cultivation of bananas
boosted the islands’ economy, but the market for the fruit collapsed with the begin-
ning of World War I in 1914.
Tourists had begun visiting the Canary Islands by the beginning of the nine-
teenth c entury, and tourism eventually proved to be one of the most important
C APE V E R DE ISLANDS 113
components of their economy. The archipelago became an official province of Spain

in 1821, and in 1823 the largest city on Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, was named
the province’s capital. However, the rivalry between Tenerife and Gran Canaria
would remain a constant aspect of the archipelago’s political life, and for a time,
during the 1840s, the group was split into two administrative divisions. The Canary
Islands w ere divided again in 1927, with Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas
de Gran Canaria becoming capitals of the divisions while sharing the overall admin-
istration of the islands.
Grove Koger
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Conquistadors; European Exploration
Further Reading
Abulafia, David. 2008. The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus.
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. 1982. The Canary Islands after the Conquest: The Making of a
Colonial Society in the Early Sixteenth Century. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Fernández-A rmesto, Felipe. 1987. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Mercer, John. 1980. The Canary Islanders: Their Prehistory, Conquest, and Survival. London:
Rex Collings.
CAPE VERDE ISLANDS

The Cape Verde islands is an archipelago formation of 15 islands located in the
middle of the North Atlantic Ocean approximately 350 miles off of the western
coast of the African state of Senegal. Its coordinates lie between 14 and 17° north
and between 22 and 25° west and its area is approximately 4,033 square kilometers.
The islands form two groups north and south of a passat wind belt. The Barlavento
islands group lies to the north of the wind b
elt and include Santo Antão, São Vicente,
São Nicolao, Boa Vista, Sal, Santa Luzia, Branco and Razo. Islands south of the
wind belt, known as the Sotavento islands, are Maio, Santiago, Fogo, and Brava.
The Cape Verde archipelago is contiguous with three other archipelagos lying in
the North Atlantic Ocean—the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands—and
together the four archipelagos are known as the Macaronesian islands. The islands
form an open chain that runs outward in a semi-circle from the coasts of Portugal,
Morocco, the Western Sahara, and Senegal. The United Kingdom is located to the
far north of the Macaronesian chain. The islands are volcanic and are not known
to have been a part of the continental land masses. Therefore, they share a unique
biogeography.
The Cape Verde islands also share with the other Macaronesian islands a history
as the hub of a vast transportation network linking North Atlantic, European, and
Mediterranean markets with colonial plantations, ports, and distribution centers
114 C APE V E R DE ISLANDS
throughout North and South America, the Car ibbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Under the skillful organization of Henry the Navigator (1394–1460), Madeira was
colonized by Portugal in 1419, and the Azores in 1427. After a period of revolt and
protest, the Canary Islands w ere ruled by the Kingdom of Castile. The Cape Verde
islands were discovered in 1456 and a Portuguese settlement was established at Ribeira
Grande, now called Cidade Velha, in 1462. The Treaty of Tordesillas was adopted
in 1494, settling Portuguese and Spanish territorial rivalries along an agreed
upon boundary r unning pole-to-pole along the meridian 370 leagues west of the
Cape Verde islands.
Portuguese settlers w
ere the first to introduce slave labor for the production of
cotton and indigo on the island plantations. Because of the patterns of trade winds
and sea currents, Cape Verde became the ideal port for transporting slaves into
the Hispanic Car ibbean and Hispanic Americas. South of Senegal are the regions
of Casamance, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. T hese regions
became the first nodes of the African slave trade as Dutch, French, and English
traders established markets for labor. In 1466, the Portuguese established exclu-
sive rights to the trade on Senegal to Guinea, including Guinea Bissau and Casa-
mance. Rum, cane sugar, and cotton w ere also produced for export.
By 1900, census statistics documented a growing island population. The pri-
mary export was salt. Goats and fruits and vegetables of indigenous and European
origin, including coffee, were cultivated as well. Water supplies were in short sup-
ply as a result of chronic drought. Steamships made regular stopovers on their way
to calls to port in South America and Europe. As a result of continuing droughts
and economic decline, many Cape Verdeans migrated to the United States, following
Hunting Flamingos in the

Cape Verde Islands
In his book, A New Voyage Round the World, originally printed in 1697, William
Dampier (ca. 1651–1715), an English explorer, naturalist, and onetime com-
panion of buccaneers, described his visit to the Cape Verde islands. He
reported that the island he called Sall was barren, except for its population of
flamingos, “a sort of large Fowl, much like a Heron in shape but bigger, and of a
reddish Colour.” Because “they are very shy,” he continued, “it is hard to shoot
them. Yet I have lain obscured in the Evening near a Place where they resort,
and with two more in my Company have killed 14 of them at once; the first
Shot being made while they were standing on the Ground, the other two as
they rose.” Once killed, Dampier considered the flamingos “very good Meat,
tasting neither fishy, nor any way unsavory.” He especially enjoyed their
tongues. “A Dish of Flamingo’s Tongue,” he wrote, is “fit for a Prince’s Table.”
Source: William Dampier. A New Voyage Round the World. 4th ed. London: Knapton,
1699, 1:70–71.
CARIBS 115
the whaling and cranberry industries. During the mid- nineteenth century
immigrant enclaves w ere established in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Provi-
dence, Rhode Island.
From the first settlement, Cape Verde society was unique for the intermingling
of a broad spectrum of races and ethnicities, working and living on the island. Por-
tuguese, Castilian, Genoese, and Spaniards shared the island with an estimated
27 different West African ethnic groups. Cape Verde was an asylum for Jews and
political refugees who became brokers for African and European trade. Over the
centuries, the islanders created a unique and separate creole culture deeply inter-
weaving European, African, and Catholic influences. The native language is Crio-
ulo, and it is a bond that unites Cape Verdeans throughout the world.
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Atlantic Slave Trade; Canary Islands; Dampier, William;
Portuguese Atlantic; Trade Winds
Further Reading
Araújo, Américo C. 2000. Little Known: The European Side of Cape Verde Islands—A Contri-
bution to the Knowledge of a P
eople. New Bedford, MA: DAC Publishers.
Brooks, George E. 2010. Western Africa and Cabo Verde, 1790s–1830s: Symbiosis of Slave and
Legitimate Trades. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.
Halter, Marilyn. 1993. Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–
1965. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Williams, D. 2015. “Cape Verde at the End of Atlantic Slavery.” Slavery & Abolition, 36:
160–79.
CARIBS
The Caribs are an indigenous p eople of the Car ibbean and northern South Amer
ica, for which the Car ibbean itself is named. The Carib group is composed of two
genetically related but linguistically distinct people. The Kalinago, or Island Car-
ibs, controlled much of the Leeward and Windward Islands, while the Kalina, or
Mainland Caribs, lived in the northern coastal region of South America. A third,
hybrid group, the Karifuna, developed after the mixture of Africans with the Kali-
nago and are usually included in the grouping of Caribs. The Kalinago were the
dominant culture in the Car ibbean when the Spanish arrived in 1492, while the
Kalina lived and competed alongside Arawaks and Tupí tribes in the northern
stretches of the Amazon rainforest. Much of the earliest contact between Europe
ans and indigenous people in the Americas was with the Caribs, who represented
the most immediate challenge to colonization in the Car ibbean.
The Kalinago and Kalina both likely migrated from the Orinoco River area of
northern South America and dispersed along the shores of Venezuela and the Gui-
anas and then, eventually, to the Windward and the Leeward Islands and beyond.
The Kalina fought with the neighboring Arawaks over territory up u ntil Spanish
contact, sometimes warring and sometimes intermingling and cohabitating in the
116 C A R I B S
space between the Orinoco and Amazon River deltas. The Kalinago continued
migrating northward into the island chains of the Caribbean, conquering and
displacing the Taíno tribes, slowly, over the course of the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries leading up to the arrival of Columbus. Because of their routine
conflicts with neighboring groups, both groups of Caribs developed a reputation
as fierce warriors. Rumors of Carib ritual cannibalism and their eating of captive
enemy warriors, though likely embellished or completely false, abounded through-
out the Caribbean region. Deserved or not, their repute stuck; the word “cannibal”
is a corruption of the word Carib.
Caribs subsisted on much the same foodstuffs as the other indigenous groups
of the area. Fishing was an important aspect of the food economy, and the Caribs
were held in high regard for their fishing prowess and the quality of their dugout
canoes, or kurijara. Mastery of the seas meant the Caribs not only enjoyed a varied
seafood diet, but also routinely used this advantage to raid other villages’ supplies
and to bring home captive brides from other groups. Taking a captive bride from
an enemy tribe was considered an important status symbol. Capable brides were
important also for sharing the work. In the typical village, the workload was egali-
tarian but strictly divided. Masculine and feminine aspects of village life were so
strictly defined, in fact, that Carib women were still living in separate houses from
the men centuries after the arrival of the Spanish. Men handled hunting, protec-
tion, and war, while women were responsible for most of the farming (cassava,
squash, beans, peanuts, and gourds were the staple crops) and other domestic
duties. Despite the strict delineation of duties, Caribs held w omen in high esteem;
they owned land and power more often than their European contemporaries.
The homes of both Carib men and w omen were usually circular and made of
woven straw or palm leaves. Basic furniture included woven mats for sleeping, ham-
mocks, and basic chairs. Although governing powers leaned strongly to patriar-
chy, the government systems of the Caribs lacked the hierarchical structure of
neighboring Taíno groups. Each village included warriors of high esteem who w ere
called upon to help make important decisions, but a strong chief or cacique was
the exception rather than the rule.
Carib religion, a polytheistic faith known as Kalingo, was comprised of spirits
and shamans and shared much in common with the neighboring Taíno culture.
Shamans called buyeis acted as the spiritual leaders of the Caribs. In addition to
spiritual intercession and protection, they also handled much of the medical care
within the village. Carib shamans’ knowledge of herbal remedies was extensive
and well known even a fter European medicine arrived. Though the warrior was
the masculine ideal to which the majority of young Carib men aspired, the sha-
man enjoyed g reat respect. He received special education outside the standard war-
rior training regimen, and upon its completion was recognized as the only person
in the village able to avert evil. Shamans w ere charged with the casting of spells,
or piai, designed to keep away evil spirits, chiefly a powerful spirit named May-
bouya. The Kalina of the mainland also worshipped a more extensive collection of
nature spirits. Among these were the spirits of the sea, known as the Palanakili.
Many Kalinas believed Columbus and his men to be incarnations of the Palanakili.
C A R TA G ENA DE INDIAS 117
Like the Taínos and Arawaks, the Caribs suffered from enslavement, the spread of
European disease, and military conquest. Despite their prowess in war, relative to
the other indigenous groups, even the Caribs w ere eventually overcome or pushed
to the margins by European colonizers. Some holdouts managed to survive in the
more rugged and inaccessible parts of the islands, most notably a 3,700 acre terri-
tory on the east coast of Dominica. Though only 3,000 Kalinago Caribs remain
there today, they have enjoyed a self-governing status since 1903. The Kalina were
not completely wiped out, but instead scattered into the sparsely populated jun-
gles of Brazil, Venezuela, and the Guianas. Many of these villages now enjoy some
degree of autonomy in their respective countries.
Joshua Hyles
See also: Arawaks; Taínos
Further Reading
Hulme, Peter. 1986. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean. London: Methuen.
Olson, James Stewart. 1991. The Indians of Central and South America: An Ethnohistorical
Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Rogoziński, Ian. 1999. A Brief History of the Caribbean, from the Arawak and Carib to the Pres
ent. New York: Facts on File, Inc.
C A R TA G E N A D E I N D I A S
Cartagena de Indias owed its colonial fortunes—and many of its misfortunes—to
its privileged port and strategic geographical location. Over the course of the six-
teenth century, Cartagena’s well-protected harbor transformed the small settlement
into one of the most important entrepôts in the entire Spanish Empire. Due to the
lucrative commerce from both the Peruvian treasure fleets and the Atlantic slave
trade, Cartagena’s local economy and society became almost exclusively centered on
trade in its various licit and illicit forms. The city’s famed location, however, served
not only as a powerful magnet for enterprising settlers, but it also drew seafarers
of a much more belligerent variety. Menaced incessantly by English, French, and
Dutch pirates, Cartagena was sacked four times during the colonial period. The
threats eventually prompted the Spanish Crown to invest heavily in defending
Cartagena through the construction of massive walls and an elaborate complex of
fortifications. Cartagena’s economy suffered periods of significant economic decline
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, due to the prolonged absences
of the treasure fleets. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous contraband trade helped to supply
the city’s needs, and Cartagena remained an important Atlantic port u ntil the final
collapse of Spanish rule in the 1810s.
Although Cartagena’s bay was first discovered by the Spanish as early as 1501,
the city itself was not founded u ntil 1533, when the Spanish conquistador Pedro
de Heredia landed an army of 150 soldiers and proceeded to assert control over
the surrounding region. As things turned out, the city would be threatened less
by neighboring Indian tribes than by pirates from other European nations, who
118 C A R TA G ENA DE INDIAS
sacked the city in 1544 and again in 1559. A fledgling settlement on the Spanish
imperial frontier, Cartagena’s fortunes received an enormous boost in the 1560s
by two major commercial developments: the standardization of the annual trea
sure fleets, and the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade to Spanish America. Despite
momentous economic growth, Cartagena’s military protection did not keep pace.
In 1586, Francis Drake easily captured the city with 1,000 men. Drake’s sack of
Cartagena marked a major turning point in the city’s history, as the Spanish finally
began to invest seriously in the city’s defensive fortifications.
Cartagena’s population was a heterogeneous mixture of European, African, and
Native American elements. For many elites, Cartagena’s racial diversity posed a
threat to both Catholic orthodoxy and the hierarchical social order. Seeking to
counter such perils, an Inquisition tribunal—only the third in all the Americas—
was established in Cartagena in 1610. The Cartagena tribunal was most active dur-
ing the half-century between 1610 and 1660, and during this period, the largest
proportion of t rials involved witchcraft and sorcery, in addition to a number of cases
involving suspected Jews. However, the Catholic Church’s impact in Cartagena
went far beyond hunting witches and heretics. Multiple religious orders operated
in the city, seeking to instill the Christian faith in Cartagena’s notoriously irreli-
gious population. Most celebrated w ere the l abors of the Jesuits, who made it their
special mission to minister to the countless thousands of African slaves who
emerged half dead from the bowels of slave ships each year. Most prominent in
these efforts was St. Pedro Claver, known as “the slave of the slaves” for his work
ministering to the Africans who were shipped to Cartagena.
During the second half of the seventeenth c entury, Cartagena entered a period
of commercial decline, due in large part to the increasing infrequency with which
the Spanish treasure fleets arrived. Furthermore, the dissolution of the Iberian
Union between Spain and Portugal in 1640 dealt a major blow to the slave trading
profits that Cartagena had enjoyed, since the Portuguese had held a monopoly on
the slave trade to Spanish America for the previous 45 years. Despite these eco-
nomic tribulations, Cartagena retained its important strategic position within the
Atlantic world, as evidenced by its involvement in the larger geopolitical conflicts
of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1697, as part of the ongoing
Nine Years’ War between France and the League of Augsburg (which included
Spain), Cartagena was captured by French troops led by the Baron de Pointis. This
bold act of privateering paid off handsomely for Louis XIV, who received a share
of 2 million livres from Pointis. Almost a half-century later, in 1741, the British
attacked Cartagena as part of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48). The battle was a
debacle for the British. Despite vastly superior numbers, the British w ere plagued
from the start by disease, ineptitude, and a valiant Spanish defense led by Admi-
ral Blas de Lezo.
At the turn of the eighteenth c entury, the Spanish Crown passed from the
Habsburgs to the Bourbons, a dynasty of French origin and inspired by Enlight-
enment ideals of governance and trade. One fundamental target of the Bourbons
was contraband trade. Local officials estimated that the contraband trade in and
around Cartagena was worth around 2 million pesos annually. To counter this
C A R TO G R APHY 119
illegal activity, the Bourbons created the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717,
fully abolished the inefficient fleet system in 1739, and instituted free trade
between Spain and Spanish America in 1778. None of these measures were par-
ticularly successful in curbing contraband. All royal officials, including the vice-
roy himself, w ere complicit in the illegal trade, and the economic interests of
Cartagena’s creole elites made it impossible for the status quo to be radically chal-
lenged. The city’s creole oligarchy also played an important role during the fight
for independence. In the aftermath of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808, vari
ous juntas were established by creole elites across Spanish America, including one
in Cartagena in 1810. Like many of its counterparts, Cartagena’s semiautono-
mous junta quickly opted for more outright independence from Spain. Although
the city was retaken by the Spanish in 1815, patriot forces staged a successful
counteroffensive between 1819 and 1821, guaranteeing the independence of not
only Cartagena, but the entire region as well. During this new republican era, with-
out Spanish subsidies and other structural advantages of the old empire, Cartagena’s
importance rapidly diminished, and the once bustling port city was reduced to a
mere shadow of its former self.
Brian Hamm
See also: Bourbon Reforms; Jesuits; Piracy
Further Reading
Block, Kristen. 2012. Ordinary Lives in the Early Car ibbean: Religion, Colonial Competition,
and the Politics of Profit. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Olsen, Margaret M. 2004. Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Von Germeten, Nicole. 2013. Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, and Honor in Colonial
Cartagena de Indias. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
CARTOGRAPHY
Cartography is a field of study that organizes the design, production, and docu-
mentation of maps created to preserve celestial and geographic knowledge. Map-
making is a dynamic process that involves a complex interplay of skills required
for the graphic notation of spatial data translated by the human mind into sym-
bols devised to convey the rich complexity of human experience within the natu
ral and spiritual realms. The craft of recording spatial data has evolved over
centuries; current methodologies include the juxtaposition of meticulous hand-
crafted two-dimensional records as well as digital systems that provide multidi-
mensional interactive tools for the manipulation and interpretation of a particular
terrain. Maps are one of the oldest human communications systems. The visual
documentation of change over time is an essential feature of the mapmaker’s craft;
it is dependent on the human eye’s remarkable evolution with regards to places
and landscapes. Maps are the earliest recordings of h uman history; considered
unique among works of art, they preserve for posterity the relationship of the
120 C A R TO G R APHY
uman mind and imagination to the geographic and cultural reality of a given time
h
and place in history.
Through the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods, cartographers worked in a
creative and challenging field bound by the norms of classical tradition and reli-
gious orthodoxy. Flights of fantasy and imagination filled the gaps in knowledge
about what lay beyond the boundaries of the known world. Thinkers of the period
were comfortable with a spherical globe and many universal maps were drawn in
circular patterns. A steady influx of mathematical and geog raphical data slowly
transformed the technology of the field, creating new linear coordinate forms for
computing the shapes and distances of landscapes with increasing efficiency and
accuracy. Some map shapes were inherited from the Greek classical writers; most
notably, the T-O (orbis terrarium) maps and climatic zonal maps provided continu-
ity in the conceptual framework used to communicate about the known world. The
key land masses of the period were Asia, Europe, and Africa; these were divided
by a horizontal ribbon representing the Nile River and a vertical graphic repre-
senting the Mediterranean Sea. The known world stretched from the far eastern
lands of Great Britain across Asia Minor and India. The climatic zone maps divided
the known world by horizontal climate zones and attempted to differentiate lands
and cultures accordingly. Finally, the reintroduction of the Ptolemaic model had a
profound effect on the graphic presentation of the known world.
The Mediterranean region has been the cradle of civilization and home to waves of
travelers and merchants since ancient times. Sharing similar climates and geogra-
phies, an array of selfish and altruistic interests contributed to an expanding world
culture that found expression in a variety of map forms. As the Atlantic seaboard became
the locus for European exploration, the compass, astrolabe and quadrant transformed
navigation and trade and helped sailors establish speeds and distances with compe-
tence. Graphic triangulation methods helped cartographers achieve greater scalar accu-
racy; a skill that helped merchants communicate with more certainty about the risks
they were assuming. In early global socio-economic relationships, maps were contracted
as instruments of conquest and competition for markets and were carefully controlled
by private entrepreneurs and public officials.
Renaissance mapmakers preserved a rich historiographical record of the rise of
the European nation-states. The economic prosperity of the times coincided with
bold ventures to circumnavigate the globe in search of more efficient transporta-
tion routes for competing global markets. Global markets flourished during the Age
of Exploration as a result of strong financial institutions, the rise of professional
trade associations, improving literacy, advances in agricultural production,
improved navigation technologies (the pendulum clock, odometer, and theodolite)
and the strength of the nation-state to support and defend its lucrative markets.
This global perspective is evident in the number and variety of configurations of
world maps that dominate the literature of the period.
Navigational and cartographic technologies were studied and a dopted to the
mercantile interests and political purposes of Catalan Spain, Portugal, Italy, the
Netherlands, the Islamic provinces, India, China, and the port cities of the Mediter-
ranean world. Maps and charts were contracted for navigators who were confidently
C A R TO G R APHY 121
moving out beyond the shoreline searching for new ways to move products to
market. These maps helped to compress a dense body of information needed
about the harbors and w ater conditions of the times. The compass was used to
develop a graphic system of triangular “rhombus” lines from which navigators could
compute their destinations. The compass r ose is a common feature of the excep-
tional portolan charts of the age. It was a starlike feature giving uniform radial coor-
dinates for movement in 16 and 32 directions. The Carte Pisane of Italy (ca. 1290)
is one of the earliest examples of the portolan charts that guided sailors on the
Mediterranean.
The mathematics of the loxodromic curve w ere derived by mariner Pedro Nunez
(1502–1578) and developed by Gerard Mercator (1512–1594) who used the con-
cept to master the phenomena of converging meridians. This function was essential
for navigation on the Atlantic Ocean. Professional cartographers of the time experi-
mented with different geometrical configurations and logarithmic methods, giving
their products a distinct visual realism, style and purpose. Modern cartographic
projection techniques are grounded in the pioneering works of Nicholas Germanus
(1420–1490), Pedro Reinel (1462–1542), Johannes Ruysch (1460–1533), Martin
Waldseemüller (1470–1520), Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), and Jodocus Hondius
(1563–1612), among o thers.
A portion of South America as shown in a 1569 map by Gerard Mercator, an early

innovator in representing the three-dimensional earth on a two-dimensional surface.
The compass r ose and lines emanating from it aided sailors in navigation. (Library of
Congress)
122 C A R TO G R APHY
The exploration of lands and spaces previously unknown helped to systematize

rational and empirical frameworks for understanding the environment. The great
intellectual and democratic advances of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlighten-
ment, and the Industrial Revolution owe much to the seminal works of clerics
including Gerard of Cremona (1114–1187), St. Albertus Magnus (1206–1280),
Roger Bacon (1214–1292), and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The publication
of Nicolas Copernicus’s De revolutionibis orbium coelestium in 1543 and Galileo Gal-
ilei’s Siderius nuncius in 1610 were succeeded by the works of Johannes Kepler
(1571–1630) and Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). The works of Edmond Halley (1656–
1742), Johannes Hevelius (1611–1687), Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712),
and Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) introduced new trends in lunar mapping, geod-
esy, meteorology, and isarithms.
Printing presses opened the world to the broad dissemination of geographic
ideas and information. Advances in printing and lithography made it possible to
replicate and distribute a wide variety of maps at the same time that private institutions
and associations worldwide w ere collecting and studying classical artifacts. Devel-
opments in anthropology and archaeology stimulated interest in the geographical
sciences. In the nineteenth century, cartography established itself as a specialized
field of historical inquiry with a formal, systematic pedagogy that included the
study and compilation of extensive bibliographies detailing maps and their associ-
ated historical commentaries. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries national
libraries created map departments to foster and preserve the intellectual lineage of
current mapping technologies and geographies. These archives and institutions
continue to generate valuable scholarship, connecting current global conditions
to those of the past. Maps continue to provide valuable information about ancient
cultures and their beliefs and practices to the present time.
The incorporation of the Atlantic seaboard, and its multinational inhabitants,
into a global economic system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, initiated
a paradigmatic shift favoring Western European culture and commodities. Maps
were key documents in contemporary world histories well into the twentieth
century. The public administration of the rapidly expanding colonies established
in the Americas, Mexico, Canada, India, Africa, and adjacent islands created new
demands for accurate surveys. Cadastral maps established orderly patterns of set-
tlement and administration. City and local maps proliferated with the growth of
municipal governments. Indigenous maps in particular w ere instrumental in
providing topographical information for the scores of explorers and surveyors who
systematically documented the new landscapes of the modern era.
Formal associations such as the Royal Academy of Science in France, the geo-
graphic societies of London, Berlin, and Paris, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,
and U.S. Geological Survey compiled and distributed atlases charting the known
coasts of the world. Professional geographic associations helped disseminate the
knowledge of cultures worldwide. Elaborate national topographies gave way to sub-
tler and more abstract forms designed to convey specific thematic arrays of data.
Hydrologic and particular geologic features w
ere highlighted against the outlines of
undifferentiated landscapes. Contour and cross-sectional sketches helped convey
C ASTA SYSTE M 123
accurate information about the earth’s internal structures necessary for territorial
development and archaeological inquiry. All of these techniques contributed to
the rapid western expansion of the United States and the rise of the French, Spanish,
Dutch, and English global empires. Statistical and demographic data sets w ere plot-
ted onto maps to provide accurate studies of rapidly changing societies. Maps were
particularly valuable to military leaders engaged in territorial expansion and defense
throughout the twentieth c entury.
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Books; European Exploration
Further Reading
Lewis, G. Malcolm, ed. 1998. Cartographic Encounters: Perspectives on Native American Map-
making and Map Use. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Thrower, Norman J. W. 2007. Maps & Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society. 3rd ed.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Tooley, R.V. 1978. Maps and Map-Makers. New York: Crown Publishers Inc.
C A S TA S Y S T E M
The Casta System refers to the complex social and racial hierarchy that took shape
during the Spanish and Portuguese colonial period, from the sixteenth to the early
nineteenth c entury, in what today is Latin America. It placed Spaniards and Por-
tuguese, and their direct descendants, at the top of the colonial social order. Mean-
while, the population of African descent (enslaved or not), the racially mixed
population (also known as castas), and the indigenous “Indio” populations ranked
lower. The ranking of the last three categories changed over time and it varied from
region to region. The system formed over the course of the sixteenth century and
was further consolidated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although
at first glance it was a system based on racial categories, those categories were often
contingent on other social, political, and economic factors.
These categories determined an individual’s social and economic status from
birth to death, and since the colonial state taxed t hose at the bottom of the system
much more heavily than those at the top, there was little room for upward mobil-
ity. Belonging to any category had implications for any individual’s everyday life.
Generally, the casta system was more strictly defined and enforced in the core areas
of Spanish and Portuguese settlement, mainly in the viceroyalties of New Spain
(Mexico), and Peru, than in the more peripheral areas such as Central America,
the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay), and rural Brazil.
Some historians have traced the early origins of the Casta System back to the
late Medieval Spanish concept of Limpieza de Sangre, or purity of blood. The term
connoted a lineage free of Jewish blood and it came about as some of the Jewish
minority converted to Catholicism, voluntarily and involuntarily, in the aftermath
of various pogroms throughout the medieval period. Spanish authorities created
policies of granting titles of nobility only to those who could prove they had “purity
124 C ASTA SYSTE M
of blood.” As Spaniards deployed the concept of limpieza de sangre in the American

colonies, it had distinct consequences in this new context. It meant that p eople of
color (Indians, blacks, or castas) could not aspire to have “pure blood” and there-
fore they and their c hildren w ere permanently considered inferior. Yet, economic
and social f actors also determined someone’s social standing. In Portugal and Spain,
society was ordered hierarchically into three estates with a small wealthy nobility
at the top, followed by the clergy, and then the rest of the population. In the New
World colonies, Spanish and Portuguese settlers imposed a similar hierarchical
socioeconomic system in which they placed themselves at the top while the large
indigenous population was subsumed at the bottom. As other groups such as Afri-
can slaves and mixed race populations (also known as castas) became part of the
make-up of the population, they were also placed lower in the hierarchy so that
the European populations w ere always at the very top.
Early on, Columbus established the institution that created an economic hier-
archy between Spaniards and the indigenous population, the encomienda. An enco-
mienda was a reward granted to Spanish conquerors as a form of compensation for
their military service of exploration and conquest. These grants consisted of a deter-
mined number of Indians assigned to an encomendero and those Indians were
expected to pay him tribute in l abor or goods, or in the case of w
omen, sexual favors.
Beginning in 1512, the Spanish Crown began to regulate the encomienda mandating
that encomenderos guarantee better work conditions, sufficient food, and better treat-
ment of the laborers; although these restrictions were rarely enforced. This labor
system proved deadly for the indigenous population. The combination of harsh
labor conditions and exposure to European diseases, which for the indigenous
population caused a dramatic death toll, caused a demographic crisis. This initial
labor system established an early hierarchy placing the Spanish population in a
higher status of over the indigenous population.
Yet, not all of the indigenous population was subject to the encomienda. The
Spanish conquistador class, especially in the core areas of New Spain and Peru,
where the Aztec and Inca Empires had stood, recognized the indigenous nobility
who had survived the conquest. Many encomenderos married w omen of the indig-
enous nobility, as a form of legitimizing their high social position among both the
Spanish and the indigenous populations they now governed. This indigenous elite
Sumptuary Laws
The Casta System expected p eople to present themselves in public according
to the group to which they belonged. In the public square, this was made vis
ible by a series of sumptuary laws that regulated what someone could or
could not wear in public. Non-Spaniards could not carry metal weapons in pub-
lic, nor ride a horse, nor wear silk. These w
ere symbols of upper-level Spanish
wealth and prestige indicating who formed a part of the Spanish elite and
who did not.
C ASTA SYSTE M 125
was eliminated by the end of the sixteenth c entury. By the m iddle of the seven-
teenth century, the indigenous population was no longer subject to the enco-
mienda, but it continued to pay high levels of taxation and had become low wage
labor for the newer Spanish owned commercial agricultural estate of the hacienda,
an institution distinct from the encomienda. The indigenous population continued
to be at the bottom of the hierarchy until the wars of independence broke out after
1808.
Encomenderos became such a wealthy and politically powerful group, that the
Spanish Crown eventually sent officials to oversee their activities. The encomende-
ros touted themselves as the nobility of the New World, even though the Spanish
Crown granted very few titles of nobility to residents of the American colonies. By
the 1540s the Crown passed what are known as the New Laws of 1542, which
abolished the legal enslavement of the indigenous population in Spanish territo-
ries and mandated the gradual abolishment of the encomienda. The Spanish popu-
lation began to grow in the second half of the sixteenth c entury as more elite and
nonelite Spaniards crossed the Atlantic and inserted themselves at the top of the
colonial hierarchy.
African slaves were present in Spanish America since early exploration and con-
quest from 1492 to the 1530s. For instance, African slaves were with Cortes when
he conquered the Aztec Empire in central Mexico. This small group of African
slaves w ere used to enforce Spanish control over the indigenous population by
carrying out tasks such as punishing indigenous p eople who refused to comply
with Spanish o rders, especially in the area of labor. However, the Spanish came to
rely more heavily on African slave labor as the indigenous population died off
throughout the sixteenth c entury due to harsh labor conditions and their lack of
immunity to European diseases.
The increased demand for African slaves was also facilitated by the u nion of the
Spanish and Portuguese Crown between 1580 and 1640. The Portuguese at this
time dominated the Atlantic slave trade and the Spanish Crown granted Portu-
guese merchants the asientos or licenses to import African slaves to Spain and
its colonies. Africans were distributed in harsh labor areas, especially in mining
regions such as in Upper Peru (Bolivia) and northern Mexico. Throughout the sev-
enteenth c entury, the importation of African slave labor also increased dramati-
cally to the Car ibbean and Brazil with the rise of the sugar economy and increase
of Dutch, English, and French colonization in the area. Yet, the African popula-
tion eventually became a sizable freed population in some urban sites such as in
Mexico City, Lima, and Quito, as slaves could legally purchase their own freedom.
In these cities, the black freed population was able to create organized, econom
ically upwardly mobile communities.
The racially mixed population had the most unpredictable places in colonial
society. In the sixteenth century, the mixed population was the result of sexual
unions between Spaniard men and indigenous women, generally termed mestizos.
Often these unions w ere the result of rape or other forms of coercion. The children
born out of these unions w ere considered illegitimate since they were born out of
wedlock; most could not escape the stigma of illegitimacy. The socioeconomic
126 C ATHOLI C W O M EN R ELI G IOUS M ISSIONA R IES
status of a mestizo child (born to a Spanish father and an indigenous m other)

depended partly on their phenotype (physical appearance), and on whether or not
the Spanish father would maintain a relationship with the child. If he did, the child
would enjoy the benefits of Spanish status. If the father did not maintain a rela-
tionship, the child would generally be raised in the mother’s household in an indig-
enous community. Children of u nions between Spanish or Portuguese and African
slaves were termed mulatto or pardo. Furthermore, children from u nions between
indigenous and black persons were termed zambos and in some instances mulattos.
This population had the most growth in the late seventeenth century and through-
out the eighteenth century, far surpassing the indigenous population after the
devastating depopulation of the sixteenth century. This population dominated
urban spaces and had a more unpredictable place in larger colonial society. They
could “pass” as members of one of the other more well-delineated categories and
therefore, could insert themselves in the economic and social rules that applied to
those other groups. In the longer term, the mixed race populations, or castas,
became the most emblematic of the modern population of Latin America.
Rafaela Acevedo-Field
See also: Conquistadors; Encomienda System; Race
Further Reading
Fisher, Andrew B., and Matthew D. O’Hara, eds. 2009. Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity
in Colonial Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lockhart, James, and Stuart B. Schwartz. 1983. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial
Spanish America and Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Martínez, María Elena. 2008. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gen-
der in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
C AT H O L I C W O M E N R E L I G I O U S M I S S I O N A R I E S
Spain, Portugal, and France—the Catholic countries that engaged in the coloniza-
tion of the Americas—all viewed conversion of the native population as an inte-
gral part of the colonizing and civilizing process. T
hese countries initially sent male
priests and missionaries to engage in religious conversion but nuns and other Cath-
olic religious w omen such as beatas (lay religious w omen) quickly followed. T hese
women fulfilled important roles in the Americas, including educating native and
creole w omen, providing refuges for abandoned wives, orphaned girls, and pious
w idows, and caring for the bodies and souls of those in need. Nuns also played an
important role as spiritual mediators who prayed for the souls and aided the sal-
vation of Catholics in the Americas. European colonizers also believed that nuns
would help civilize the wild and savage environment of the American colonies. Reli-
gious w
omen w ere key participants in spreading European values and notions of
gender, race, and class.
Catholic women’s motivations for g oing to the New World are not always easy
to discern. Some religious w omen who crossed the Atlantic and ventured into the
C ATHOLI C W O M EN R ELI G IOUS M ISSIONA R IES 127
empire saw this is a form of martyrdom. Other women may have set out for the
Americas as a way to put distance between themselves and the Catholic Church’s
strictures. In particular, women who may have wanted to avoid being strictly
enclosed within the convent walls, as the Council of Trent stipulated in 1563, or
to engage in a more active form of piety by helping in the community, may have
felt they would have more freedom to do so in the colonies than in Europe.
Women played an important part in the spiritual side of the conquest of New
Spain. Less than a decade after Cortez’s conquest of the Aztecs, and his founding
of a Spanish colony in Mexico, women came to participate in the Spanish Crown’s
missionary efforts. Since these efforts focused on the conversion of c hildren, in
1530 the Bishop of Mexico recruited beatas from Spain to come teach native girls
about the new religion. By 1537, Spanish religious w omen ran 10 schools in New
Spain, each with 300 native female pupils. But this missionary experiment was
abandoned after a decade as the colonial authorities turned away from educating
native w omen and instead to establishing convents to protect the honor and rank
of w omen of European descent. The first convent in Mexico City, Nuestra Senora
de la Concepción, was established in 1540. In Mexico, 38 convents were founded
before 1700. The number of w omen residing in convents peaked between 1650
and 1750 and thereafter began to decline. Still, scholars estimate that there were
6,000 w omen living in convents in Portuguese and Spanish America on the eve of
colonial independence (Socolow 2015, 100).
As in the Old World, convents in Spanish America were reserved for elite women.
This meant that in America, only Spanish or Creole w omen could become nuns
until 1724. In that year, a separate Convento de Corpus Christi was founded in Mex-
ico City for daughters of Amerindian aristocrats. Lower status and mestizo (of both
European and Amerindian descent) women did have other religious institutions
available to them, such as beaterios (communal h ouses for lay w omen) and
recogimientos (retreat houses). The latter were places of refuge for women abandoned
by their husbands, orphans, and destitute young w omen in danger of falling into
prostitution. Nuns were some of the most educated women in colonial America.
Convents provided an alternative for w omen who did not want to marry or who
wanted an education.
Convents were also established in South America. The Spanish conquerors of
the Inca city of Cuzco specifically identified the need for such a religious institu-
tion and founded one in 1558. The nuns of Santa Clara w ere to care for the souls
and bodies of the mestizo daughters of Spanish conquerors and Andean women. One
of the convent’s first entrants was the daughter of Inca royalty. In 1605, Dominican
nuns founded Cuzco’s second convent, Santa Catalina, and also took in an elite
Inca female. A third convent was established in 1673, b ecause the first two had
become so full. These convents were hierarchal communities with European
women at the top, native w omen in the m iddle ranks (and excluded from posi-
tions of leadership), and servants and slaves on the bottom. Convents h oused many
women besides nuns. In early eighteenth-century Lima, as much as 10 percent of
the female population lived in the city’s seven convents (Socolow 2015, 111). In
addition to convents, Cuzco and Lima had numerous beaterios, communities of
128 C ATHOLI C W O M EN R ELI G IOUS M ISSIONA R IES
Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695)

Convents appealed to w omen who sought an education and an academic life
that was unavailable elsewhere for w omen. The Mexican nun Juana Inés de la
Cruz was one such woman of letters. She taught herself how to do accounts
and read and write Spanish as well as to read Latin and the Aztec language of
Nahuatl. In 1667, Juana decided to enter a convent so that nothing would
interfere with her studies. She remained in the convent of Santa Paula in Mex-
ico City until her death. She amassed a library of thousands of books as well
as a collection of musical and scientific instruments. She wrote plays, poetry,
and prose, including works that defended a w oman’s right to an education.
While the Catholic Church condemned Sister Juana for some of her opinions,
she still became known throughout the Spanish Atlantic world and is consid-
ered one of the g reat writers of the Spanish Golden Age.
single and widowed women who made a living through work, sometimes caring
for and educating c hildren.
As well as providing a spiritual environment for women, convents w ere involved
in the “spiritual economy” of Cuzco, particularly as property holders and credi-
tors. By the end of the 1700s, however, the spiritual and economic position of Cuz-
co’s nuns began to slip. The very wealth of the nuns, which had made them so
useful, now made them suspect to the reforming and anticlerical authorities. After
Peru gained its independence in 1821, the state seized convent lands, allowed
women to renounce their vows, and even tore down some convents. The respected
position the nuns had enjoyed was over.
The Portuguese began to permanently s ettle in Brazil by the 1530s, but there
were few European w omen in the colony in the sixteenth century. Portugal did
not allow formal convents in the colony until the late 1600s and even then they
were limited. Some colonial w omen in Brazil crossed the Atlantic to enter convents
in Portugal. Others chose to establish more informal religious houses, which had
strict entrance rules and w ere available only to young, unmarried d aughters of
wealthy colonial families. The Spanish colonies had as many as 70 convents when
in 1667 Brazil got its first: Santa Clara do Desterro in Salvador, Bahia (Myscofski
2013, 145). A c entury later, Brazil’s second and third convents w ere founded in
Rio de Janeiro: Nãossa Senhora da Conceição da Ajudain in 1750, and Santa Teresa
in 1780. The latter was due to the persistence of Jacinta de São José, who traversed
the Atlantic world, from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon and back, in her pursuit to found
this Carmelite convent.
Like their colonial Spanish counterparts, Brazilian convents w ere hierarchical.
Elite professed nuns of the “black veil” engaged in a lifestyle of strict religious devo-
tion and self-denial, including prayer, fasting, and self-mortification. Nuns of the
white veil were lower status women who served the elite nuns and were seen as
spiritually inferior. Petitions to the Convent of Nãossa Senhora da Conceição da
C ATHOLI C W O M EN R ELI G IOUS M ISSIONA R IES 129
Ajuda from the 1750s, reveal that women entered the convent for varied reasons:
some as pupils, others as religious novices or vowed nuns, and still others as tem-
porary residents seeking protection or a place or refuge. Authorities and families
sometimes used religious institutions to house poor or rebellious daughters and
wives. Recolhimentos (retirement h ouses) also provided a place for young w omen
seeking an education, abandoned wives, and devout w idows. W
omen in Brazil for
whom marriage was not an option continued to rely on religious houses into the
modern era. In the 1780s and 1790s convents rented individual cells to both mar-
ried w omen and daughters, as well as their servants and slaves. In 1819, a new
recolhimento was established in a small town near São Paulo for single women unable
to find husbands.
Nuns also traveled from Europe to North America, specifically to New France,
founded in 1608. The colony began as a loose collection of fur trading posts and
forts along the St. Lawrence River. Joining with fur trappers w ere Jesuit priests
interested in converting the natives. Conversion was a male endeavor u ntil 1639,
when a group of w omen sailed across the Atlantic to found the first Ursuline con-
vent and school for girls in North America. The group was led by Marie (Guyart)
de l’Incarnation (1599–1672), a French Ursuline nun who felt called to bring sal-
vation to people in distant lands. In the 1630s, she shared with her Jesuit spiritual
director a dream she had where she was walking in a vast and mountainous coun-
try. He told her that the land in her dream was Canada. Mother Marie’s desire to
engage in missionary activity like the male Jesuits dovetailed with the Jesuit’s call
for religious w
omen to come to New France to teach native girls and women.
The Ursulines who came to Quebec resided in a wooden convent that looked
more like a frontier building than the stone convents they had left behind in Europe.
They had to use conversion tactics different from the male Jesuits who traveled
to native villages throughout Canada. Because the nuns lived under enclosure the
natives had to come to them. In the convent and its yard, the Ursulines taught
native girls to read, write, and to sing in French. The nuns also had a surprising
amount of interaction with native men, whom they prayed with and instructed in
the guest parlor. The Ursulines welcomed natives with food, which was an effec-
tive inducement to get would-be converts in the door. M other Marie also spent
much time learning the Algonquin language to better share the gospel. By the
1660s, she could write in the language and she composed catechisms, prayers and
sacred histories in Algonquin, as well as a Huron and Iroquoian catechism. The
Ursulines effectively converted the natives, who w ere baptized in the Ursuline cha-
pel, with Marie sometimes standing in as godmother.
Ursuline nuns also established themselves farther south in New Orleans. In 1727,
six Ursuline sisters arrived in the city after they were invited to help nurse the sick.
The nuns instead chose to focus on education. The Ursuline convent became a
home for the nuns but also a destination for wives who wanted to participate in
the spiritual and devotional culture, as well as a school for young elite girls. These
girls were taught literacy, numeracy, and the Catholic faith. The Ursulines also set
up an orphanage and refuge for abandoned wives and w idows. For the next
100 years most of the Ursulines in the New Orleans convent migrated from France;
130 C HA M PLAIN , SA M UEL DE
however, a few local w omen, including w omen of African descent, also entered the
convent. A fter the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Protestants who came to New
Orleans were dismayed by the unmarried and self-supporting nuns, as well as by
the inclusion of African-Americans in the congregation.
New France was a specific destination for those searching for a spiritual experi-
ence rooted in physical difficulties and suffering. By the mid-seventeenth c entury
the colony was home to various mystics, missionaries, and martyrs. Practices such
as fasting, self-mortification, and extreme prayer led these holy persons, women
especially, to experience visions. While religious men stayed in New France for a
brief period, w omen w ere more prone to stay for life. One example was the mys-
tic Catherine de Saint-Augustin of Quebec whose visions and experiences of suf-
fering w
ere viewed by the colonial community as a valuable contribution to the
salvation of New France. Holy women like Saint-Augustin also adapted to colo-
nial spaces and needs, creating a new type of mysticism more indicative of an
emerging French Atlantic world rather than merely transplanting practices from
Europe.
Amy M. Froide
See also: Brazil; Jesuits; New France; New Orleans; W

omen
Further Reading
Burns, Kathryn. 1999. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1997. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Myscofski, Carole. 2013. Amazon, Wives, Nuns and Witches: Women and the Catholic Church
in Colonial Brazil, 1500–1822. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Socolow, Susan Migden. 2015. The Women of Colonial Latin America. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
CHAMPLAIN, SAMUEL DE (1574–1635)

Samuel de Champlain was a French explorer, navigator, cartographer, and public
administrator. He is honored as the “Father of New France,” in memory of his role
as a Canadian explorer and founder of the city of Quebec.
Champlain’s early formative years were spent in Brouage, a prosperous west coast
port town on the Gulf of Saintonge, an inlet leading to the Bay of Biscay. Its fortunes
were made on its famous black salt deposits, a commodity highly prized particu-
larly by European and American fisheries. His father, Antoine de Champlain, took
his living from the sea. He excelled in shipping, and rose by merit and talent to the
rank of captain of the Royal Navy and was a ship owner, thus providing well for
his wife, Marguerite Le Roy, and young son. Samuel took to the sea at an early age,
where his own talents for navigation, observation, and cartography were nur-
tured. In addition to the rudiments of reading and writing, the belles arts and the
arts of war w ere acquired through the town’s academic programs.
C HA M PLAIN , SA M UEL DE 131
In his written works, Champlain noted with pride his early childhood years on
the sea with his father. At his father’s side he learned the instruments and obser-
vational skills required to navigate the challenging conditions of the Bay of Biscay
and the oceans that lay beyond. Moreover, he learned firsthand about the finan-
cial administration of voyages, as merchants sought and courted his father’s exper-
tise in maritime trade.
During the mid-sixteenth c entury, the city of Brouage was the site of deep divi-
sion as Catholic and Huguenot forces throughout France fought b itter wars for more
than 30 years (1562–1598). As the wars raged, the city endured a series of turn-
overs as warring factions fought for control. It is under these extreme conditions
that Samuel came to terms with his own spiritual beliefs and values. It is most
likely that he was baptized as a Protestant, but later in life, perhaps in part of the
example of his life-long mentor, Henry IV (1553–1610), Champlain was converted
into the Catholic faith, whose traditions he honored to his death.
To this day, there is a note among scholars that perhaps Samuel was fathered by
Henry IV, whose sexual dalliances are without doubt. Other sources take a more
moderate view of their friendship, noting the Champlains’ devotion to Henry, often
seen among other noted French families, was not unusual. Whatever the circum-
stances, Samuel garnered the king’s favor early on in his adulthood, first as a vol-
unteer in the royal army in the battles against the Catholic League, a war that
mobilized armies across Europe to protest the Protestant king’s rise to power over
Catholic France. In this clash many Huguenot and Catholic Frenchmen came to
the king’s aid. As a volunteer, Samuel’s fine skills in navigation quickly advanced
his rank as a noncommissioned supply officer to that of staff officer serving the
highest ranking commanders of the brutal Brittany campaign.
The wars came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Vervins in 1598. The
treaty commanded the return of Spanish troops to their homeland. Champlain’s
uncle, known as “le Capitaine Provençal,” was a wealthy seaman whose formida-
ble skills were known and subsidized by a variety of foreign nationals. After the
treaty, the captain and his business partner, Julien de Montigny de la Hottière, and
their ship, the Saint Julien, were selected to transport Spanish troops out of France.
Samuel accompanied him; from 1599 to 1602 he documented in detail his voy-
ages to Cadiz, the Car ibbean, Vera Cruz, Mexico, and Panama. This successful
report was received by the king, who awarded Champlain with an annual pension
that lasted u ntil his death.
Champlain returned to France and settled in the city of Dieppe, the famed center
of French cartography. His u ncle died in June 1601, leaving him his sizable estate
at La Rochelle, as well as commercial properties in Spain and a merchant ship. Dur-
ing this interim period, Champlain was engaged at the court of Henry IV, where he
was able to pursue his interests as a geographer. Henry IV had a keen interest in
establishing colonies in the New World. Champlain, like the king himself, enjoyed
talking to port merchants and fishermen to learn more about North American mar-
kets, particularly those fishing grounds along the far northeastern coasts.
As a result of his efforts, Champlain secured a position as a royal observer accom-
panying François Gravé Du Pont on La Bonne Renommee during his fur trading
132 C HA M PLAIN , SA M UEL DE
expedition to Canada in March 1603. During this expedition, Champlain mapped

the St. Lawrence River and explored areas abandoned by Cartier. In 1604, he was
again chosen to serve as geographer on board Pierre Dugua de Mons’ voyage to
Acadia. This venture lasted several years, during which time a base was established
at Saint Croix Island, and later, at Port Royal. This base served for Champlain’s
explorations of the Atlantic coast of North America, including the coast of New
England and its rivers and bays. In 1608, de Mons self funded three ships to estab-
lish a colony on the St. Lawrence River. Champlain commanded the flagship, the
Don-de-Dieu, with François Gravé Du Pont in command of the Levrier. On July 3,
the team landed at what is now Quebec and built the first fortification of three
buildings, which would be known as the Habitation, serving as a merchant trad-
ing post.
For the remainder of his life, Champlain labored and advocated for the French
colony. It is said that over his lifetime he made more than 25 trips across the Atlan-
tic Ocean without mishap. The fur trade monopoly in New France was secured by
Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), who formed the Compagnie des Cent-A ssociés
(The Hundred Associates). In 1628, Champlain, as an associate, commanded a côte-
rie of colonists and supplies to settle in Quebec. Despite harsh winters, fractious
relationships with warring Native Americans, and difficulties with English and
Scottish interests, the colony continued to flourish under Champlain’s able admin-
istration until his death on December 25, 1635.
Champlain’s prolific writings and his maps are highly esteemed for the rich detail
of his records of Native American life at the earliest stages of European coloniza-
tion. His maps reflect the handiwork of the natives he engaged in his efforts to accu-
rately chart the lands he explored. Moreover, his publications reflect the deep
humanité that animated his multifaceted relationships throughout his life. As the
French expanded their holdings in the New World, they also lay the foundations
for circles of kinship and a warm spirit of tolerance among the Indian nations they
encountered. Champlain’s regard for the diversity of New France is a time-honored
Charting the Search for

a Northwest Passage
Samuel de Champlain was one of a litany of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century
European explorers and traders to chart the arctic face of Newfoundland and
Canada in search of a Northwest Passage to lucrative Asian markets. In 1500,
Juan de la Cosa of Spain recorded the earlier voyages of John Cabot; other
primary maps include the Portuguese Cantino map of 1502; the King map
and the Reinel map of the same period; the Miller map of the coasts of New-
foundland, the gulf of St. Lawrence, and Nova Scotia; the Maggiolo map of
1527; and the maps of Ribero and Verrazano (1529).
C HI C K ASAW S 133
legacy within the freedom loving Quebeçois, Acadian, and Métis cultures he men-
tored, a spirit that flourishes to the present day.
See also: Cartography; European Exploration; French Atlantic; New France;

Quebec
Further Reading
Biggar, H. P., ed. 1925. The Works of Samuel Champlain: Reprinted, Translated, and Anno-
tated by Six Canadian Scholars; 1608–1613. Toronto: The Champlain Society.
Brunelle, Gayle K. 2012. Samuel de Champlain, Founder of New France: A Brief History with
Documents. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Fischer, David Hackett. 2008. Champlain’s Dream. New York: Simon & Schuster.
C H I C K A S AW S
A member of the Muskogean linguistic group, the Chickasaws are a Native Ameri-
can tribe that until the 1830s occupied vast territory in what is now the south-
eastern United States. They were one of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” that
the American government forced to relocate west of the Mississippi River during the
presidential administration of Andrew Jackson.
Descended from earlier Hopewell and Mississippian cultures, the Chickasaw
tribe formed from a loose collection of Native American groups during the seven-
teenth century, occupying what is now northeastern Mississippi, northwestern Ala-
bama, western Tennessee, and a small part of Kentucky.
According to oral tradition and archeological evidence, the ancestors of the
Chickasaws migrated into the region from west of the Mississippi River along with
ancestors of the Choctaw tribe. Slightly different versions of the migration story
were passed down and related to Europeans and Americans who dealt with the
Chickasaws at various times during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
According to these stories the Chickasaws and the Choctaws, their neighbors to
the south, were once a single people who lived west of the Mississippi River. Con-
tinually harassed by larger tribes, they decided to move away, though they were
not exactly sure which direction they should travel. The night before they left their
ancient homeland, in a moment of high drama, the tribe’s primary medicine man
placed a long pole in the ground at the center of their camp. Whichever direction
the pole was leaning the next day would be the direction that the group would
take. The next morning the pole leaned to the east, and the tribe set out in that
direction under the leadership of two brothers, Chahtah and Chikasah. Each night,
one of the brothers helped the medicine man place the pole in the ground and
each morning the tribe would see which way the pole leaned and follow that direc-
tion. In this manner, the tribe moved steadily east, eventually crossing the Missis-
sippi River in canoes. Finally, one morning the tribe arose to find the pole sticking
strait out of the ground, not leaning in any direction, and they took this as a sign
134 C HI C K ASAW S
that they had found their new home centered in what would eventually become
the state of Mississippi. Several years later, the two brothers fell into some type of
disagreement and the group that they had led into the region split. Followers of
Chikasah became the Chickasaw tribe, while Chahtah’s followers became mem-
bers of the Choctaw tribe. Another version of the creation myth states that the
Chickasaws sprang from a great mound of earth called Nanih Waiya built by indig-
enous peoples around 1,800 years ago near the headwaters of the Pearl River in
central Mississippi. The mound, which still exists t oday as the centerpiece of a state
park, is also sacred to the Choctaw tribe.
The Chickasaws w ere an advanced culture with well-developed political, social,
and religious customs. At the time of European contact, the tribe was relatively
small compared to surrounding tribes such as the Choctaw and the Cherokee,
numbering around 5,000. The Chickasaws lived in towns scattered throughout the
southeast with the strongest concentration of towns located near the Tombigbee,
Yazoo, and Tennessee rivers. Their society was organized matrilineally with each
tribe member’s identity traced through the m other’s family line. The Chickasaws
maintained a decentralized political structure in which each town chose their own
chief and tribal councils, though the towns w ere quick to band together for their
own security in times of crisis. Their religious practices centered on a supreme
being, known as Aba’ Binni’li’ (our creator) along with natural phenomenon such
as the sun, moon, clouds, and fire. Dubbed the “Spartans of the Lower Mississippi
Valley,” by some Europeans that they encountered, the tribe had a reputation for
being very aggressive and warlike, much more so than their neighbors. In every
Chickasaw village, the adult male population represented a warrior class that
defended their borders against neighboring tribes. Warriors painted their faces and
adorned themselves with ear and nose ornaments as well as eagle feathers, creat-
ing what some Europeans described as a menacing appearance.
The Chickasaws’ first encounter with Europeans came between 1540 and 1541
when Hernando de Soto’s expedition passed through their land. De Soto’s visit was
marked by bloody confrontation, with the Chickasaws eventually driving the Span-
iards out of the area. Afterwards there was little significant contact between the
tribe and Europeans until the 1670s when English traders from the east coast began
moving into the American interior. The Chickasaws established firm trade rela-
tionships with the English and allied themselves with the English against the French
in the southeast. In 1736, the Chickasaws defeated the French and their Choctaw
allies at the B
attle of Ackia, fought near present day Tupelo, Mississippi. The b attle
effectively ended French attempts to expand their influence north from the Gulf
Coast, and paved the way for further English expansion from the east. During the
American Revolution, the Chickasaws struggled to remain neutral despite attempts by
the British to draw them in as allies, and following the conflict the tribe was quick
to establish amicable relations with the United States. Chickasaw warriors fought
under General Anthony Wayne in 1794, against tribes from the Northwest Terri-
tory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers as well as under Andrew Jackson during the
War of 1812. During the period, the most significant tribal leader was Chief
Tishomingo, who fought alongside the Americans in many b attles and even received
C HI C K ASAW S 135
a medal from George Washington for his efforts. In addition to being the Chicka-
saws’ last g reat war chief, Tishomingo was for decades one of his tribe’s principle
spokesmen, particularly in matters involving the Americans.
Along with the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, the Chickasaws
were one of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” in the southern states that had,
by the early nineteenth century, developed friendly relations and significant trade
relationships with the Americans. Many Chickasaws converted to Christianity,
established small f amily farms, adopted the American style of dress, and consumed
American products as part of a growing market economy on the frontier. Some
intermarried with Americans. Nevertheless, American western expansion a fter the
turn of the nineteenth c entury began threatening the Chickasaw homeland. An
1801, agreement gave the United States permission to build and maintain a major
road through Chickasaw land and 15 years later the United States government
began the process of taking away the traditional homeland of the tribe. The Amer-
icans eventually forced the Chickasaws to cede the vast majority of their territory—
more than 6 million acres—to the United States government through the Treaty of
Pontotoc (1832). During the period, the mixed-blood Colbert family became very
influential in tribal matters. The family included seven sons of James Colbert, a
Scottish trader who married into the tribe. One of the sons, William Colbert, served
with Jackson during the Creek Wars while sons Levi and George served as Chick-
asaw chiefs during the removal process. Even after removal, the Colbert descen-
dants continued to have influence within the tribe.
Unlike other tribes, the Chickasaws chose to take money rather than territory
in exchange for giving up their homeland and moving west. The United States gov-
ernment promised the tribe more than $3 million in exchange for their Missis-
sippi holdings but it would take more than a quarter of a c entury for the Americans
to fully compensate the Chickasaws. The tribe eventually moved west along the
difficult and deadly Trail of Tears in 1837, leaving more than 500 Chickasaws dead
along the way. Once in Oklahoma the Chickasaws purchased land from other tribes
and settled on their own reservation. Still angry with the American government,
the tribe was quick to side with the Confederacy during the Civil War but made
peace with the United States government a fter the conflict. T oday, the Chickasaws
are a federally recognized Native American nation still residing in Oklahoma with
a population of almost 50,000.
Ben Wynne
See also: Choctaws; De Soto, Hernando; Mississippians
Further Reading
Etheridge, Robbie. 2010. From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Trans-
formation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715. Chapel Hill: University of North Car-
olina Press.
Gibson, Arrell M. 1971. The Chickasaws. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1993. The Long, B itter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New
York: Hill and Wang.
136 C HO C OLATE
C H O C OL AT E
Chocolate is a food prepared from the seeds, commonly known as cocoa (or cacao)
beans, of the tropical evergreen Theobroma cacao tree. Botanists believe that the
tree is native to the regions drained by the Orinoco and Amazon rivers of South
America, and that humans extended its range in pre-Columbian times to include
northwestern South Americ a, Central Americ a, and what is today southern
Mexico. Since the beans’ introduction to Europe and North America and the tree’s
cultivation as a plantation crop, chocolate has become one of the world’s most
esteemed foodstuffs.
Explorer Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) observed canoes heaped with
cocoa beans—which he believed w ere used as money—along the coast of Central
America on his fourth voyage to the New World in 1502. A few years l ater, in 1519,
Aztecs living in what is now Mexico gave Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés
(1485–1547) a beverage made from the ground beans that they called xocoatl, from
which we get our word “chocolate.”
Spanish merchants introduced chocolate to their native country in the late six-
teenth century, and by the second half of the seventeenth century it had appeared
in France, a result of intermarriage between the Spanish and French royal fami-
lies. For a time, the exotic new substance was a luxury reserved for royalty, but in
1657 a French entrepreneur opened the first “chocolate h ouse” in London, serving
chocolate beverages to the public.
In their natural state, cocoa beans are extremely bitter, and New World peoples
generally sweetened their chocolate beverages with honey, flavored them with such
indigenous ingredients as chili peppers and vanilla, and thickened them with
ground corn. Europeans followed the same procedure, using honey or sugar, what
ever spices they had available, and thickeners such as eggs, milk, and ground
almonds. Sugar had once been available only to the wealthy, but chocolate’s grow-
ing popularity fueled the market for the product, which could be produced cheaply
from sugar cane grown in many of the same parts of the world as cacao trees. In
both cases, Europeans relied upon African slaves to perform the tedious work of
harvesting.
The trade in chocolate remained a Spanish monopoly for a time. In 1623, how-
ever, traders of the Dutch West India Company began introducing the product to
the rest of Europe as well as the English colony of New York, shipping it from the
South American mainland by way of their Car ibbean island colony of Curaçao.
French planters began growing cacao trees in their own West Indian colonies of
Martinique and St. Lucia in about 1660. Walter Churchman began the manufac-
ture of chocolate in E ngland in about 1728, using what probably were beans sup-
plied by Dutch traders, and in time, chocolate in the form of “hot cocoa” became
a staple of the Royal Navy.
At first, Europeans ground their cocoa beans by hand, but merchants began
using watermills as early as 1729, and with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution
(extending from about 1760 to 1840), water-and windmills became commonplace
throughout the continent. The first North American watermill for grinding the
C HO C OLATE 137
beans was built by Dr. John Baker and John Hannon in Massachusetts in 1765,
and their company’s brand, Baker’s Chocolate, eventually became a household
name in the United States. With the introduction of steam-powered mills on both
sides of the Atlantic, chocolate became even cheaper and more widely available.
Over time, European inventors also developed processes for making chocolate
more palatable and available in more forms than as a beverage. Chocolate liquor—
the result of grinding cocoa beans to a paste and melting it—contains both solids
and a pale fat known as cocoa butter. In the early nineteenth century, Dutch chem-
ist Coenraad van Houten discovered how to reduce the amount of this fat in
chocolate, temper the food’s bitterness, and improve its solubility.
Further improvements followed. In 1847 Joseph Fry, a member of an English
family long active in the chocolate business, developed a method of recombining
some of the cocoa butter with the solids, resulting in a substance that could be
molded into a bar that could be eaten by hand. Fry’s chocolate-making firm even-
tually became a division of the better-k nown Cadbury confectionary company.
Then, around 1875, Swiss confectioners developed a practical method of making
milk chocolate by adding powdered milk.
Cacao cultivation had crossed the Atlantic Ocean as early as 1590, when Span-
ish agents transplanted seedlings on the island of Fernando Pó (today Bioko) off
the west coast of Africa. The Portuguese w ere slow to follow suit, but they eventu-
ally surpassed the Spanish. Anticipating the loss of their vast South American col-
ony of Brazil, they established their own cacao plantations on two islands near
Fernando Pó—São Tomé and Principe—in about 1820.
By the turn of the twentieth c entury, the two Portuguese islands had become
the world’s most important source of cocoa beans. About the same time, however,
investigations revealed that u nder the guise of “contract labor,” the Portuguese
were practicing slavery, which had been abolished by all European nations. As a
result, German and British firms, including Cadbury, boycotted the islands’ beans.
By then, however, cultivation had spread to other colonies—British, French, and
German—on the West African mainland, and in the twenty-first c entury the region
has become the largest producer of cocoa beans in the world.
Grove Koger
See also: Columbian Exchange; Slavery; Sugar
Further Reading
Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. 1996. The True History of Chocolate. New York: Thames
and Hudson.
Grivetti, Louis E., and Howard-Yana Shapiro, eds. 2009. Chocolate: History, Culture, and
Heritage. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Moss, Sarah, and Alexander Badenoch. 2009. Chocolate: A Global History. London: Reak-
tion Books.
Norton, Marcy. 2008. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in
the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
138 C HO C TAW S
C H O C TAW S
A member of the Muskogean linguistic group, the Choctaws are a significant Native
American tribe that u ntil the 1830s occupied vast territory in what is now the
southeastern United States. They w ere one of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes”
that the American government forced to relocate west of the Mississippi River
during the presidential administration of Andrew Jackson.
Descended from earlier Hopewell and Mississippian cultures, the Choctaw tribe
formed from a loose collection of Native American groups during the seventeenth
century, occupying what is now central and south Mississippi and western Ala-
bama. Oral tradition among the Choctaws includes two separate stories related to
how the tribe came into area. One story is a tale of migration from the west while
the other is a creation myth describing the actual birth of the tribe. Both have as
a focal point an ancient mound of earth, Nanih Waiya, built by indigenous p eoples
around 1,800 years ago and located near the headwaters of the Pearl River in
central Mississippi. The mound still exists today as a protected historic site and cen-
terpiece of a state park.
The first Europeans to travel among the Choctaw found an advanced culture
with well-developed political, social, and religious customs. The Choctaw nation
consisted of three political divisions, each of which had an elected chief, or mingo.
Elected captains and sub-captains ruled individual towns and w ere responsible
for implementing their chief’s directives at the local level. War chiefs, who w ere
also directed by their mingo, represented the tribe’s military leadership. While each
district operated separately from the o thers, from time to time one strong mingo
might exert more influence than his fellow chief and thus have more of a say in
overall tribal politics. For the most part, however, matters concerning the entire
tribe were attended to at large national meetings that included not only the chiefs
and captains but also elected delegates from the three districts. Ceremonial prayers,
feasts, and dancing opened these gatherings and there were long and detailed
debates on the important issues of the day. Any delegate who wished to had the
opportunity to speak, with the entire process being exceedingly democratic. In this
manner, the Choctaws maintained order and an efficient governmental structure.
The Choctaws lived settled lives in log h ouses clustered together in villages. In
the villages work was divided by gender. The men hunted and sometimes helped
clear fields while the women usually tended the crops. The Choctaws raised a vari-
ety of staples including corn, beans, and melons, and supplemented their diet
with fish, deer, turkey, and sometimes bear meat. In every Choctaw village the adult
male population represented a warrior class, though the Choctaw generally were
not as aggressive as some of their neighbors. They occasionally had to defend their
borders against the Chickasaw tribe that lived to the north and against the Creeks
to the east. Conflict sometimes arose between individual Choctaw villages, but
rarely did such disputes end in civil war. If a problem between villages could not
be worked out through negotiation, it was settled through sport. The villages
involved fielded teams for a stickball game similar to lacrosse, a rough and tumble
contest that required both skill and brute force. When the game ended, the winning
side recognized their victory as direct intervention by the spirits, who obviously
C HO C TAW S 139
Nineteenth-century depiction of Choctaw men in Oklahoma playing a game similar to

modern lacrosse. Originally inhabiting the southeastern United States, the Choctaw
were forcibly removed to Oklahoma during the 1830s. (Library of Congress)
favored their village’s cause. Violence among the Choctaws, both inside and out-
side of their tribal confines, increased once Europeans entered their lands.
The Choctaws first encounter with Europeans came in 1540, when Hernando
de Soto’s expedition passed through the region. While de Soto’s visit was marked
by bloody confrontation, the Choctaws later became trading partners with the
Europeans as their lands w ere claimed by the French in the late seventeenth c entury
and the British following the French and Indian War. During the American Revo-
lution, some members of the tribe supported the British while other supported
American interests. After the Revolution, the Choctaws aligned themselves with
the Americans and w ere loyal to the United States at the outbreak of the War of
1812. During the period, the Choctaw leader Pushmataha rejected the g reat Shaw-
nee Chief Tecumseh’s efforts to bring the Choctaws into a confederation to fight
against the United States, and instead recruited Choctaw troops to fight alongside
the Americans. As a result, Pushmataha was given an officer’s commission in the
U.S. Army and received a g reat deal of fame for his efforts. He fought u nder Gen-
eral Ferdinand Claiborne against the Creeks at the B attle of Holy Ground (1813)
and was with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814). According
to some accounts, he was also with Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans and after
the war he remained the tribe’s primary spokesman. In 1824, Pushmataha trav-
elled to Washington, DC, where he met with President James Monroe in hopes of
soliciting better treatment for his tribe. Before he left the nation’s capital, he died,
140 C HO C TAW S
of what at the time was described as a respiratory ailment. The Choctaw chief was
buried with full military honors and interred in the Congressional Cemetery in
Washington.
The Choctaws—along with Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—
were among the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” in the southern states that had
by the early nineteenth c entury developed amicable relations and solid trade rela-
tionships with the Americans. Despite this, American western expansion began
to eat away at the Choctaw homeland and between 1801 and 1830, the Americans
maneuvered the Choctaw into accepting a series of treaties that eventually ceded
millions of acres of Choctaw territory to the United States. In 1830, the Treaty of
Dancing Rabbit Creek also included provisions for relocating the tribe to a reser-
vation west of the Mississippi River in what is now Oklahoma. A significant figure
during the period was Greenwood LeFlore, a Choctaw chief of mixed heritage, who
promoted to his p eople the idea that relocation was inevitable. He backed the relo-
cation treaty, and in exchange for helping the government move most of his tribe
out west, LeFlore received a substantial personal land grant in Mississippi. He
remained in the state and became a wealthy cotton planter and slave owner. Easily
the most controversial leader in Choctaw history, LeFlore was praised by some
members of his tribe for the way he dealt with the Americans and vilified by others
who believed that he sold out the tribe to increase his own wealth and status. The
Choctaws were among the first to travel the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma and of the
approximately 15,000 Choctaws who eventually made the journey as many as
2,500 died along the way. While the bulk of the tribe relocated to Oklahoma, some
Choctaws remained on a small reservation in and around Neshoba County, Mis-
sissippi. The federal government would later recognize this group as the Missis-
sippi Band of Choctaws.
During the Civil War, most Choctaws sided with the Confederacy and a fter the
conflict the tribe suffered through changes in federal Indian policy ostensibly
designed to promote assimilation. Through the Dawes Act of 1887, the Curtis Act
(1898), the Burke Act (1906), and other legislation, tribal governments and orga
nizational infrastructures w ere banned and reservation land was open for Ameri-
can settlement. During World War I, Choctaws w ere among the first Native
Americans whose unique language was used to pass secret military information
from one location to another. The American military used Choctaw soldiers as “code
talkers” who could freely use radio or telephone communication to pass messages
between units without fearing that their communications w ere being intercepted
by the enemy. Military leaders expanded the practice by eventually enlisting other
tribes. Choctaws were also among the code talkers used by the American military
during World War II.
Following the passing of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Choctaws
reorganized themselves as a nation and despite periodic threats that the United
States government might terminate official recognition of the tribe, tribal culture
survived. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 gave
the tribe more control over their own affairs as well as the right to negotiate with
the federal government for assistance and various types of funding. Today, there
CODE NOIR 141
are around 150,000 Choctaws residing in the United States, with most living in
Oklahoma, Texas, or Mississippi.
Ben Wynne
See also: American Revolution; Chickasaws; Mississippians
Further Reading
Carson, James Taylor. 2003. Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaw from Pre-
History to Removal. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Debo, Angie. 1975. The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic. Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press.
DeRosier, Arthur H., Jr. 1970. The Removal of the Choctaw Indians. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press.
Kidwell, Clara Sue. 1995. Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press.
CODE NOIR
The French Code Noir or “Black Code” consisted of a series of colonial policies
decreed by King Louis XIV of France in 1685. Its 60 articles were intended to secure
the influence of the Roman Catholic Church primarily in the French American col-
onies and to enable the royal government to better manage the expanding systems
of slavery in their territories. Similar to other slavery regulations in Atlantic colo-
nies, the code specified the roles, status, and limitations of the imported African
laborers. The code was influential u ntil the abolition of slavery in the French Empire
in 1848.
The code regulated the religious lives, social status, civil liberties of enslaved
persons in French colonies. In an effort to counter traditional African religious prac-
tices, the code stipulated that slaves had to be baptized and instructed in the
Catholic faith, and adherence to all other religions was banned. Defined as prop-
erty, slaves w ere without social and political status and ineligible for public and
administrative functions and offices. Children of slave marriages followed the con-
dition of their mother and became the property of the mother’s master. They could
not testify in most civil situations u nless it involved complaints about their ill treat-
ment. Punishments of enslaved blacks were severe, especially for striking their
masters or free whites. Branding and whipping were common, and mutilation was
condoned for runaways. Even though torture and excessive abuse were prohibited,
they were impossible to monitor in the distant colonies. Certain provisions of the
code were superseded by harsher laws in the eighteenth century; in other cases
they were simply ignored by masters and government officials alike.
Within this colonial environment, the Code Noir offered some protections to
enslaved persons. They were to be accorded minimal food and clothing provisions,
and ill and aged slaves had to be cared for by their masters. Slave o wners had the
right to free their slaves, and this was not uncommon. Slaves with young children of
the same owner could not be sold away separately. Slaves designated as executors
142 CODE NOIR
would automatically gain their freedom. Most important, article 59 of the Code
Noir accorded to free blacks and people of color the same rights, privileges, and
protections enjoyed by white subjects in the French Empire.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, blacks in France enjoyed an ambiv-
alent status due to the judicial position that slavery could not exist on French soil
as well as the liberties accorded to free people of color by the government’s Code
Noir of 1685. Governmental regulations from 1716 to 1778 limiting blacks’ mobil-
ity in France reflected growing fears in the colonies and heightened racial sensi-
tivities. Perceptions that Paris and the port cities were being inundated with blacks
belied their a ctual numbers in France. Some of the fears w ere promulgated by colo-
nial planters who w ere concerned that free or independent blacks, and other
peoples of color returning from France, would disturb the racial order in the colo-
nies, where the eighteenth c entury had seen a growing movement to undermine
rights and privileges of free p eople of color. A Royal Edict of 1716, which stipu-
lated that blacks could accompany their masters to France for religious instruc-
tion or to learn a trade, also led to freedom for some slaves through marriage or
appeal to French courts, and a further Royal Declaration in 1738 limited slaves’
stays in France to three years and forbade their marriages in France. In 1762, the
French Minister of the Marine bemoaned an increase in blood mixing which would
alter the nation, and in 1777 a Royal Order forbade entry of blacks and p eople of
color into France. The following year mixed marriages w ere disallowed.
The progressive repudiation of the privileges of the free p eople of color in the
colonies was one indication of this concern. From the 1760s to the Revolution of
1789, the rights that the Code Noir of 1685 had accorded to free blacks and people
of color were systematically eroded in the colonies. They no longer had access to
military offices and were forbidden to practice surgery or copy European dress
styles. Another example of this victimization was the widespread demonization of
people of color as corrupting influences in colonial society.
Free p
eople of color represented a fissure in the system characterized by the
dominance of the planters and their interests in the French colonies. By the early
eighteenth c entury, interracial relationships had produced in the French colonies
a large population of mixed-blood residents with wealth and influence. On the one
hand they provided a buffer between the whites and slaves, actively identifying
with the former. But otherw ise their very existence, not to mention their influence,
represented a challenge and possible denial to the binary system of masters and
slaves. From 1685 to the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French Empire, the code
was a symbol of the French slavery system and its oppression. While many free
people of color relied on article 59 of the code to justify their claims to the full
benefits of liberty, and generally were willing to support the system of black enslave-
ment, their claims w ere realized only with the Revolution. However, except for
the emancipation accomplished by the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), enslaved
persons in other parts of the French Empire would remain under the shadow of
the Code Noir until the end of French slavery in 1848.
William H. Alexander
C OFFEE 143
See also: French Atlantic; Gens de Couleur; Race; Saint-Domingue/Haiti
Further Reading
Dubois, Laurent. 2004. Avengers of the New World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Garrigus, John. 2006. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
King, Stewart. 2010. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint
Domingue. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
COFFEE
A bitter beverage rich in caffeine, produced from roasting, grinding, and dissolv-
ing coffee beans in hot water, coffee became one of the major cash crops of the
eighteenth c entury Atlantic world. Closely connected to the growth of the planta-
tion production system and the Atlantic Slave Trade, coffee helped fuel crucial social
and cultural changes in Europe itself and around the Atlantic.
Like another such cash crop, sugar, Europeans first learned to grow and pro
cess coffee from the Muslim world and only later took control of production. The
facts of when and where people first began drinking coffee remain disputed, though
Eastern Africa seems likely. By the end of the 1400s, Mocha in Yemen, at the south-
ern end of the Arabian Peninsula and across from Africa, had become a center of
coffee production. By the early 1510s, coffee drinking had spread to Mecca, Cairo,
and Istanbul. Though not without controversy, by the end of the 1500s, coffeehouses
existed throughout the powerful Muslim Ottoman Empire; Islamic prohibitions
against alcohol helping popularize coffee.
Christian Europeans encountered the beverage through contacts with the Otto-
mans. Travelers in the late 1500s and early 1600s wrote descriptions of coffee and
coffeehouses and brought small amounts of beans home with them. Over the first
half of the 1600s, merchants began to import significant quantities of coffee beans
into Europe. Cargoes first arrived in Venice by the 1620s and in France and the
Dutch Republic by the 1640s. University professors and students also played impor
tant roles in promoting coffee. As in the Ottoman Empire, controversy surrounded
these developments because of the stimulative effects of caffeine. In 1600, Pope
Clement VIII (1535–1605) proclaimed that Christians could drink coffee in good
conscience. Over time, caffeine’s effects came to be praised for promoting sobriety
and energy in contrast to traditional alcoholic drinks.
By the later seventeenth century, coffeehouses modeled a fter Muslim models
began to appear across Europe. They became most popular in England and France.
In E
ngland, close connections with the worlds of learning, politics, and econom-
ics helped fuel their spread. The first English coffeehouse opened in the university
city of Oxford in 1650. E ngland’s most prestigious scientific association, the Royal
Society, began as the Oxford Coffee Club in 1655. Coffeehouses soon appeared in
London, growing in numbers to several hundred by the early 1700s. In England’s
tumultuous political atmosphere, coffeehouses became important sites for debate.
144 C OFFEE
Coffee as Medicine
Coffee was often praised for its medicinal value. As a British doctor noted in
1792, “Coffee has been found useful in quieting the vexatious cough that
often accompanies the small pox, and other eruptive fevers. A dish of strong
Coffee without milk or sugar, taken frequently in the paroxysm of some
asthmas, abates the fit; and I have often known it to remove the fit entirely.”
Source: Benjamin Moseley. A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee.
5th ed. London: J. Sewell, 1792, 50.
In 1659, members of the Rota Club met at the Turk’s Head Coffeehouse in London,
settling disputes using the first ballot box. Following the restoration of King Charles
II (r. 1660–1685), coffeehouses became identified with critics of the monarchy.
Charles tried to close coffeehouses in 1675, but b
ecause of protests, rescinded his proc-
lamation within eleven days. Protests erupted because coffeehouses had broad
appeal, including to merchants and financiers building England’s colonial empire.
In 1688, Edward Lloyd opened a coffeehouse that became a place where merchants
could purchase insurance for their overseas ventures. From this came Lloyd’s of
London, once the world’s largest insurance company. Jonathan’s Coffeehouse
became popular with English stockbrokers by the end of the 1600s. In 1711, the
speculative boom and bust known as the South Seas Bubble took place there. Cof-
fee reached its height of popularity in England during the first two decades of the
1700s, being replaced later by tea.
In France, coffee became popular b ecause of a trend launched by the Ottoman
ambassador in 1669. Within several years, a stall selling coffee appeared in Paris.
The first true cafés opened shortly afterwards, the most famous being the Café Pro-
cope, which attracted a fashionable clientele with its location near France’s premiere
theatre and such innovations as mirrors and marble tabletops. Cafés really became
popular following the death of King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), a period known
the Regency (1715–1723), when the center of French cultural life moved back to
Paris from the Palace of Versailles. In 1720, Paris had around 280 cafés. The num-
ber increased to 600 by 1750 and to 900 by 1789. A major site of cafés by the end
of the 1700s was the Palais-Royal, a complex owned by a younger branch of the
ruling Bourbon family. In 1781, needing funds, its owners rented out space for
shops and cafés, creating a popular place for socializing and shopping.
Through the 1720s, drinking coffee remained a largely elite activity. Most beans
came from the Ottoman Empire. Limited supply meant high price. Europeans
began to take over the production process themselves in the late 1600s, expand-
ing the amount of coffee grown, thereby decreasing price and increasing consump-
tion over the eighteenth century. In 1688, the Dutch East India Company planted
coffee trees on their Southeast Asian colony of Java. The first cargo of Javanese
coffee arrived in Amsterdam in 1711. The Dutch also presented Louis XIV with
C OFFEE 145
several coffee trees that were planted in the royal gardens in Paris. In 1716, the
French established coffee plantations on the Indian Ocean colony of Île Bourbon,
today Réunion.
European coffee production exploded a fter the crop was transplanted to Atlan-
tic colonies during the early 1700s, the islands of the French Car ibbean in partic
ular. The French first concentrated production in the mountainous island of
Martinique. At the dawn of the eighteenth c entury, Martinique’s limited flat areas
were devoted to large sugar plantations. Small planters tended cocoa trees on the
slopes. A series of disasters, including storms, disease, and earthquakes, destroyed
Martinique’s cocoa crop by the late 1720s. Facing ruin, the small planters turned
to coffee. In 1721, the French government sent one coffee tree from the royal gar-
dens to Martinique. Within a decade, almost 2 million grew on the island. By the
end of the 1730s, around 12 million grew there. Coffee plantations proved cheaper
to maintain than sugar plantations and used lands ill-suited for sugar.
French coffee production vastly increased a fter its introduction to the larger col-
ony of Saint-Domingue in 1731. By 1755, Saint-Domingue sent £7 million of cof-
fee to France; by 1764, £15 million. The decades following saw rapid increases. By
1789, Saint-Domingue produced almost half of all the world’s coffee. Much of this
coffee, along with that produced in other European colonies, was ultimately des-
tined for re-export around the globe. By the end of the 1700s, French coffee domi-
nated the Ottoman market, having overwhelmed coffee’s original producers. The
exploitation of African slaves made this increased productivity possible, a fact
seen most clearly on Saint-Domingue. In 1763, some 2,000 slaves arrived in the
colony; in 1789, 30,000 arrived.
This growth in coffee production, and in the numbers of coffeehouses, helped
shape Atlantic society and culture throughout the 1700s. Coffee was one of a num-
ber of luxury products that became increasing available to ordinary people. Schol-
ars have termed this notable expansion in consumption during the eighteenth
century a “consumer revolution.” Increasing consumption encouraged new under-
standings of society. In the 1700s, European society was organized on corporate lines,
meaning that the groups one belonged to determined one’s place in society. Arranged
in hierarchical fashion, these groups enjoyed exclusive privileges. Traditional
European society was unequal and valued birth over individual merit. Coffeehouse
society looked different. Drinking coffee depended not on birth, but rather on the
ability to buy. Coffeehouses contained socially heterogeneous clienteles that w ere
learning to act as individual consumers.
Besides drinks, people also entered coffeehouses to purchase ideas. Most coffee
houses made reading material like newspapers, magazines, and books available to
their customers, helping develop a commercial press in the Atlantic world. Read-
ing in the 1700s, like drinking, was largely done in public. Coffeehouse patrons
consumed, discussed, criticized, and spread the ideas they read. This atmosphere
helped give rise to the concept of public opinion, in the sense of an informed tri-
bunal rendering rational judgments. Public opinion judged many topics, including
perhaps most notably, politics. These conversations helped link coffee to the major
intellectual and cultural movement of the eighteenth century Atlantic world: the
146 C OLONI Z ATION M O V E M ENT
Enlightenment. With its focus on the power of human reason and the need to
question received traditions, the Enlightenment marked a potentially radical new
way to understand the world. Ultimately, t hese sociocultural effects of coffee could
prove explosive. The crowd that stormed the Bastille in Paris during the French
Revolution began its march on the prison from a café in the Palais-Royal.
Charles Lipp
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Enlightenment; Plantations
Further Reading
Bennett, Alan Weinberg, and Bonnie K. Bealer. 2002. The World of Caffeine: The Science
and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug. New York: Routledge.
Cowan, Brian. 2011. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New
Markman, Ellis. 2011. The Coffeehouse: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
C O L O N I Z AT I O N M O V E M E N T
Colonization was a movement that attempted to send emancipated slaves away from
the regions where they had labored, especially to Africa but also to other locations
in the Atlantic world. The movement began in G reat Britain in the wake of the
American Revolution, spread to the United States in the nineteenth c entury, and
eventually involved many other countries that allowed slavery. Colonization fused
antislavery and racial prejudice. Colonizationists understood that while some
people did not like slavery and did not want to see the practice continue, they did
not want black p eople living near them and had no desire for black equality. Thus,
colonization offered a solution: emancipate slaves and send them somewhere e lse.
Although the American Colonization Society and the British Committee for the
Relief of the Black Poor financed the travels of thousands of black people to Liberia
and Sierra Leone, colonization never received majority support. P eople criticized
colonization as, on the one hand, more akin to deportation than voluntary reset-
tlement and, on the other hand, enormously impractical. The American Coloniza-
tion Society did not formally dissolve u ntil 1964, but the idea of colonization had
fallen out of favor long before its dissolution.
The idea of colonization was born in the aftermath of the American Revolution.
A group of abolitionists in G reat Britain, led by Granville Sharp, with the help of
the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, argued that the best way to help
the black poor was to send them elsewhere, in this case to the “Province of Free-
dom” in Sierra Leone in Africa. Sharp and the committee w ere responding to a
particular circumstance. During the American Revolution, slaves flocked to the
British banner, because the British promised to emancipate the slaves of disloyal
colonists. In the wake of the British defeat, the British did not return freed slaves
to their former masters and instead evacuated them from the United States. The
freed slaves w ere transported first to Nova Scotia, and some of them w ere subse-
quently transported to London. In London, they often lived in poverty, a fact that
C OLONI Z ATION M O V E M ENT 147
led Sharp and the committee to argue that their lives would be markedly better in
Sierra Leone. Thus, most of the freedpeople who had been sent to London ended
up in Sierra Leone. As news spread throughout the Atlantic world, many of the
freedpeople in Nova Scotia also chose to make the journey. This episode demon-
strates the complexity of colonization. For one, some people acted through genu-
ine humanitarian motives, in this case, attempting to better the life of the black
poor. Others used colonization as a smokescreen to mask their racism. In other
words, they wanted black p eople away from them and used colonization as the
means.
In 1816, Robert Finley founded the American Colonization Society, an organ
ization dedicated to solving the problems of slavery and race through methods pio-
neered by the British. Supporters of American Colonization Society included
Charles Fenton Mercer, John Randolph, James Monroe, and Henry Clay, all impor
tant statesmen of the day. Proponents of colonization put forth a straightforward
plan: purchase the freedom of slaves and send them to Africa, offering to pay travel
expenses for free black people and urging masters to pair manumission with the
qualification that freedpeople would have to leave the United States after they
obtained their freedom. Most proponents of colonization saw this as a humane and
reasonable solution. They reasoned that black p eople, whom many white p eople
believed belonged to an inferior race, would not want to remain in a country where
they were hated and would welcome a return to their ancestral homeland.
Some members of the American Colonization Society believed that freed slaves
should be sent to Sierra Leone, but others preferred that the Society establish its
own colony. Thus, in 1822, the American Colonization Society established the col-
ony of Liberia. During the course of its existence, the American Colonization Soci-
ety helped thousands of freed slaves travel to Liberia. Although Liberia declared its
independence in 1847, the United States did not recognize Liberia u ntil 1862, the
same year the United States recognized Haiti. Republicans w ere much friendlier
to black nations than w ere Democrats, and President Abraham Lincoln, a Repub-
lican, sent diplomatic representatives to both Liberia and Haiti to negotiate treaties.
Colonization was not an all-white movement. Many p eople of African descent
thought colonization was a good idea, either because they wanted a fresh start else-
where or b ecause they found the racism of the society in which they w ere living
endemic and impossible to escape. Paul Cuffee, the son of a freed African slave and
a Wampanoag Indian, and a prosperous Massachusetts businessman, became inter-
ested in British efforts to resettle freedpeople in Sierra Leone. Cuffee helped establish
the Friendly Society of Sierra Leone and was one of the first black p eople in the
United States to embrace colonization. In general, black proponents of coloniza-
tion had very different motivations for participating than white proponents. Many
black p eople had given up on achieving equality where they w ere located, and
were sick of the pervasive racism in the United States. In addition, they thought
black p
eople could get a fairer deal in a different land where they could be in charge
of their own destinies.
Colonization was sharply criticized by both black and white contemporaries.
Many slaves w ere several generations removed from Africa and had no desire to
148 C OLONI Z ATION M O V E M ENT
live in an unfamiliar land. Because so many black people opposed colonization,

had the issue been pressed, it would have been akin to deportation rather than
voluntary resettlement. In addition, given the steady increase in the black population
of the United States, it would have been a tremendous logistical task to offset the
population increase each year, let alone significantly decrease the slave population.
Furthermore, many white planters w ere not interested in freeing their slaves, b
ecause
slaves were their source of wealth. The movement was also divided by tensions.
Many abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, initially supported coloniza-
tion on the basis that African Americans would never be treated justly in the
United States. After realizing the extent of African American opposition to coloni-
zation, Garrison and many o thers abandoned the idea and subsequently attacked
the American Colonization Society’s program.
Colonization remained important during the Civil War. Although some histo-
rians attribute the Republican Party’s embrace of colonization to the influence of
former Democrats, it is clear that many Republicans accepted this idea because of
their own beliefs and attitudes. In addition, historians have debated whether or
not Lincoln genuinely favored colonization. In the Preliminary Emancipation Proc-
lamation (1862), Lincoln promised that he would ask Congress for money to pro-
mote colonization plans either in Africa or somewhere else in the Western
Hemisphere. Although Lincoln abandoned this language in the Emancipation
Proclamation, it is uncertain whether Lincoln abandoned his embrace of coloniza-
tion. Although Lincoln created the United States Emigration Office and appointed
James Mitchell as an agent to encourage colonization, the office was chronically
underfunded. Furthermore, while Lincoln encouraged various colonization schemes
in the Car ibbean, they usually ended in the return of the emigrants to the United
States. Some historians argue that Lincoln was committed to colonization either
because he believed t here was too much prejudice on the white side to allow black
and white people to coexist or because he favored an all-white republic. Other his-
torians have asserted that Lincoln was never serious about advancing the idea.
Lincoln’s colonization plans alarmed many Latin Americans, such as Matías
Romero, Mexican Minister to the United States. Romero was predisposed to like
Lincoln, but he knew enough about the history of the United States to be wary of
any colonization plans, that a colony of freed slaves on Mexican soil might become
a way for the United States to claim more of Mexico’s territory.
Evan C. Rothera
See also: Abolition Movement; Emancipation Proclamation; Slavery
Further Reading
Burin, Eric. 2005. Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization
Society. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Byrd, Alexander X. 2008. Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century
British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Magness, Philip W., and Sebastian N. Page. 2011. Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln
and the Movement for Black Resettlement. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
C OL u M B IAN E X C HAN G E 149
COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
In 1492, Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Western Hemisphere marked
the beginning of the Columbian Exchange. Historians describe its impact as one
of the most significant ecological events of the past millennium because of the con-
glomeration of Eastern and Western hemispheric plants, animals, and bacteria.
Europeans initiated contacts across the Atlantic (and, soon after, across the Pacific)
that have never ceased. Their motives w ere economic, nationalistic, and religious,
but not biological. The long lasting legacies created an economic dependency and
a rigid, if informal, hierarchical social structure that continues to this day.
Most Native American high civilizations such as the Inca and Aztec, which had
their own unique qualities and a high degree of sophistication, w ere permanently
marginalized as their ancient social and political structures w ere overwhelmed by
European institutions, religions, languages, and cultures. The European arrival
inaugurated a long road of conquest, disease, and forced l abor, as exemplified by the
encomienda system that natives were powerless to defend against. Consequently, the
ensuing colonial system weakened Native American resistance. Physical brutality,
alcoholism, the killing and driving off of game animals, and the expropriation of
farmland, eliminated the basis of indigenous society. However, some ancient civili-
zations continue to exist, with the Maya perhaps the most well known, and Pueblo
Indians who live in Acoma, high in New Mexico mesas.
As a result of the Columbian Exchange, Europe’s economic center shifted from
the Mediterranean Sea to the Western Atlantic zone. Due to the influx of so many
raw materials, especially precious metals, expanding trade increased the number
of successful merchants, which in turn contributed to a growing middle class. An
additional benefit was the expansion of trade with China, which also spurred the
beginning of the modern global economy, particularly for the Northern Atlantic
states.
For example, Seville replaced Barcelona as the center for trading across the Span-
ish Empire. In 1503, the Spanish monarchy awarded the port of Cadiz and the
city of Seville a monopoly over all commerce with the Western Hemisphere, which
included ships, goods, passengers, and Catholic missions. Through it passed high
valued commodities such as sugar, dyes, cotton, vanilla, and leather goods from
livestock grown on the South American pampas in modern day Argentina. Seville’s
new dominance demonstrated the Columbian Exchange’s profound impetus on the
emerging global economy by shifting Europe’s economic center towards transat-
lantic trade rather than across the Mediterranean
Europe’s expansion opened the door for significant biological changes and con-
tinental catastrophes. Europeans and Africans inadvertently introduced many
destructive pathogens that profoundly reshaped the Western Hemisphere. Prior
to Columbus’s arrival, Native American isolation from other cultures made them
highly susceptible to the world’s major diseases. Such pathogens were also extremely
communicable and rapidly spread. Early epidemics produced perilous fevers stem-
ming from smallpox, measles, and typhus. Conversely, historians debate over
whether or not Europeans returned with a virulent strain of syphilis.
150 C OL u M B IAN E X C HAN G E
The demographic impact in the Western Hemisphere was dramatic. Population

estimates for the Americas in 1492 range from 112 million to as low as 8 million.
In any case, the native population declined to less than 6 million by 1650. Accord-
ing to N. Sanchez-Albornoz in The Population of Latin America: A History (1974), the
Andean population of Peru fell from 1.3 million in 1570 to 600,000 in 1620. Cen-
tral Mexico’s population fell from 25.3 million in 1519 to 1 million in 1605.
As significant was the introduction of herd animals. Horses, pigs, c attle, goats,
and sheep multiplied at an expeditious pace in an environment largely free of natu
ral predators. T hese domesticated animals made possible the diverse ranching
communities and vaquero cultures of North America, especially South Texas, and
the gaucho cultures of South America, especially in the Argentine Pampas. The
horse enabled the Spanish and Indigenous Americans to travel faster and farther and
to transport heavy loads. Horses had a relatively quick impact on transforming many
Native American societies particularly in the North American West. For example,
the Pawnee, originally settled farming people, abandoned their fields for the horseback
pursuit of bison across the G reat Plains along the Missouri River. The horse was also
a key element in the emergence of a distinctive Comanche culture. In the late seven-
teenth century, they separated from the Shoshone tribe as the horse allowed them
greater mobility in their search for better hunting grounds.
Large herds of wild h orses and c attle could be found on the extensive plains of
southern Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina by 1700. Large herds also existed in north-
ern New Spain (Mexico and the American Southwest). Wild livestock had a sig-
nificant role in destroying the indigenous agricultural way of life. However, the ever
growing livestock and horse populations created abundant supplies of meat and
hides. The Navajo p eoples became sheepherders and expert weavers of woolen cloth,
while other Native Americans became muleteers, cowboys, and sheep herders.
Many indigenous sources portray the Europeans as driven by a blood lust for
gold and silver. Rich silver deposits w ere found and exploited in Mexico and south-
ern Peru (modern Bolivia). In 1545, the opening of the Potosí mines in Peru led to
the quadrupling of precious metals imported into Europe. So much silver and gold
entered the port of Seville that it created a price revolution that impacted the entire
Spanish economy and created openings for other trading products.
New societies throughout the American continents have developed from com-
binations of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian p eoples. The impetus for
the miscegenation process, derived from European commercial projects, created
the first transnational population, which demanded l abor from the slave trade and
immigration because the indigenous community’s severe demographic decline cre-
ated an acute labor shortage.
The Americas’ vast natural resources w ere worthless without a sizeable labor
force capable of exploiting it. It must be noted that slavery as practiced in different
areas in Africa was not the same as the chattel slavery system that developed in
the Americas where h uman beings w ere legally no more than property. For exam-
ple, slaves in some West African societies filled different positions in society, which
were not restricted to hard labor and could hold important responsibilities such
as soldiers and farm managers.
C OL u M B IAN E X C HAN G E 151
In many respects, the slave trade and slavery stimulated the industrial revolu-
tion and led to the development of economic and mercantile models, creating the
framework for modern globalization. The ensuing European controlled Atlantic
slave trade created dramatic changes throughout the African and American conti-
nents. From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the insatiable European demand
for American products and the devastation of native populations necessitated an
enormous external labor force that led to the abduction and forced migration of
Africans. Due to its head start in naval technology and exploration, Portugal became
the leader of h uman trafficking. In 1483, the Portuguese began a long-term rela-
tionship with the Kongo Kingdom.
Africans carried to Brazil came overwhelmingly from Angola. Africans carried
to North America, including the Car ibbean, left from mainly West Africa. T hose
in the West Indies dwarfed American plantations. In the Car ibbean, slaves were
held on much larger units. In the American South, in contrast, slaveholders gener-
ally held a small number of slaves each. To ensure the profitability of slaves, and
to produce maximum return on investment, slave o wners generally supplied only
the minimum food and shelter needed for survival, and forced their slaves to work
from sunrise to sunset.
Within a c entury of Columbus’s first voyage, new settlers in the Americas w ere
growing many staples from Europe such as wheat, olives, grapes, and garden veg-
etables. Crops from Africa included rice, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit, and sugar
cane. Indigenous p eoples kept much of their traditional diet, but developed lik-
ings for citrus fruits, melons, figs, and sugar. Europeans introduced numerous new
species of fruits, vegetables, and animals. Wheat, rice, grapes, many garden vege-
tables and fruits, and numerous weeds swept across the Western Hemisphere. The
landscape’s massive transformation created a space favorable to a European diet
and way of life throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Conversely from the West, food crops such as corn, potatoes, and cassava
spread widely throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. The nutritional legacies laid
the foundation for the massive demographic revolution that is a key characteristic
of the modern era. Corn grows in climates too dry for rice and too wet for wheat,
while producing a high yield per unit of land during short growing seasons. These
Indigenous American crops provided inexpensive nutritious subsidence for mil-
lions of industrial workers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The white potato
had a high nutritional value that quickly spread across all of Europe and back.
Over the course of the seventeenth c entury, it reached Ireland, England, and France
and then in the eighteenth c entury, it spread to Germany, Poland, Hungary, and
Russia.
Africa and Asia also experienced significant long term changes as a result of the
Columbian Exchange. By the mid-sixteenth c entury, transoceanic trading brought
corn to West Africa and cultivation spread to the Gold Coast, the Congo, Angola,
and to Southern Africa. One of the first truly global crops was dessert tapioca, a
starch extracted from cassava root, which was native to Brazil’s North Region. Its
value was due to its sturdiness in the face of native threats. It grows in almost all
kinds of soil, is resistant to African pests, and yields abundant crops.
152 C OLU M B US , C H R ISTOPHE R
Transfer of military weapons and technology was another significant element

of the Columbian Exchange. Initially, armaments such as armored sailing ships
and forged steel swords gave Europeans a significant tactical advantage over indig-
enous warriors who used stone spears, hatchets, and bows and arrows. Guns and
metal knives facilitated hunting and fishing for the Native Americans. While knives
existed in the Americas prior to 1492, they w ere made of obsidian and could not
be used regularly, nor did they have the same potency as metal weapons. Bows
and arrows allowed for hunting from greater distances, but did not have the same
potency as a gun. A fter witnessing the effectiveness of the European weapons,
indigenous peoples realized their value for hunting larger animals. Gunpowder and
steel weapons quickly became a widely traded good across the Atlantic. Europe
ans quickly understood that indigenous demand for firearms and weapons was a
means of control and exploitation. The European comparative advantage in man-
ufacturing contributed to an uneven balance of trade, which expanded colonial
hegemony.
Jaime Aguila
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Columbus, Christopher; Disease; Gold and Silver;
Guns; Potato; Rice; Slavery; Sugar
Further Reading
Conrad, Robert E. 1994. C hildren of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in
Brazil. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press.
Crosby, A. W. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.
Knight, Alan. 2002. Mexico: Volume I, From the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Skidmore, Thomas E., and Peter H. Smith. 2013. Modern Latin America. New York: Oxford
University Press.
COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER (ca. 1451–1506)

Christopher Columbus was a merchant, explorer, navigator, imperialist, and writer
born in the Republic of Genoa, in modern-day Italy. Due to the poor record keep-
ing of the period, academics have been unable to establish the exact date of Colum-
bus’s birth but it is believed to have happened between October 31, 1450 and
October 30, 1451. Columbus was born into a middle-class family during the Age
of Discovery in Europe. His f ather was a wool-weaver and cheese merchant, while
his b
rother Bartholomew was employed in a cartography workshop in Lisbon, Por-
tugal. Throughout the 1470s, Columbus was employed as a business agent for
several of the wealthiest families of Genoa and by the age of 30, it is believed that
he had sailed to Greece, England, Ireland, Iceland, and Portugal. From 1482 to
1485, Columbus sailed along the west coast of the continent of Africa, conducting
business with the trading posts that had previously been established by members
of the Portuguese Empire. In search of a sea route to Asia, in 1485, Columbus began
C OLU M B US , C H R ISTOPHE R 153
requesting financial support from the leading monarchs of Europe. By early 1492,
Columbus had fin ally received support from the Spanish monarchs, eventually
leading to his contact with the Americas and the European colonization region.
During the remainder of his life, Columbus embarked on an additional three voy-
ages to the Americas, which also became known during the period as the New
World and the Indies. On May 20, 1506, Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain.
Today, his remains are held within the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Sea in Seville,
Spain.
Columbus was born into a European world, in the m iddle of the fifteenth c entury,
that was fascinated by exploration and discovery. Ever since the Italian merchant
Marco Polo popularized the land based trade route to Asia during the late thir-
teenth c entury, European merchants and explorers continued to search for a sea
route to the spices and riches of Asia. Throughout the fifteenth century, the Portu-
guese Empire dominated the exploration of the Atlantic Ocean and the west coast
of the continent of Africa. Through the advent of the Portuguese sailing ship known
as the carvel, representatives of the Portuguese Empire were able to discover the
Madeira and Azorean archipelagos during the 1420s, and they were also able to
establish trading posts, known as factories, along the west coast of Africa. In 1488,
the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias (1450–1500) rounded the southern tip
of Africa, providing evidence that the Indian Ocean was not a landlocked body of
water and that a sea route to the Asian subcontinent might be possible. This dis-
covery, as well as Vasco de Gama’s eventual contact with India in 1498, allowed
the Portuguese Empire to focus their trade and exploration on the southern and
eastern trade routes to Asia. In turn, this allowed Columbus and subsequent Span-
ish explorers to travel across the Atlantic Ocean, in search of a westward route to
Asia.
Columbus’s decision to travel westward in search of the continent of Asia was
by no means unique. It is believed that the Norse explorer Leif Erikson traveled
westward across the Atlantic Ocean during the late tenth and early eleventh cen-
turies, making contact with the island of Newfoundland around the year 1000.
Also, in response to the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire
in 1453, European navigators, astronomers, and explorers, including the Floren-
tine astronomer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, began petitioning European monarchs
for funds to travel across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a westward route to Asia.
After consulting with both his b rother Bartholomew, and Toscanelli, Columbus
estimated that the distance from the Canary Islands to Asia was approximately
2,300 miles (3,700 km). In both 1485 and 1488, Columbus presented his estimates
to King John II of Portugal and requested the funds to embark on his journey. In
both instances, his request was denied because it was believed that Columbus had
drastically underestimated the distance from the Canary Islands to Asia. Know-
ing that the Portuguese were now focusing on Dias’s southward and eastward route
to Asia, Columbus traveled to France, Genoa, and Venice in search of funding for
his journey. Columbus also sent his brother to E ngland, to request funding from
King Henry VII of E ngland. All of t hese appeals w
ere denied. Fin ally, in 1486,
Columbus traveled to Spain to request funding from King Ferdinand II of Aragon
154 C OLU M B US , C H R ISTOPHE R
and Queen Isabella I of Castile.

Columbus’s proposal was initially
rejected by the Spanish mon-
archs because Spanish experts
also believed that Columbus had
miscalculated the actual dis-
tance to Asia. In addition, Spain,
more specifically the Kingdom
of Castile, did not have an exten-
sive history of sea based explo-
ration. However, in an attempt to
stop Columbus from further
offering his services to other Euro
pean rulers, the Spanish mon-
archs provided him with an
annual salary and later provided
him with free room and board
throughout Spain. Early in 1492,
after the Spanish expelled the

Muslims from Granada and
A possible likeness of Christopher Columbus. completed the reconquest of the
Created by Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish
in 1519, a fter the explorer’s death, the painting is king and queen accepted Colum-
one of the best-known images of Columbus. (The bus’s proposal in an agreement
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Gift of J. Pierpont called the Capitulation of Santa
Morgan, 1900) Fe. Within the agreement, Colum-
bus would be given political con-
trol of all of the lands that he claimed for the Spanish Empire and he would be
provided with 10 percent of all revenues extracted from these new possessions.
Following Columbus’s 1500 arrest, however, Ferdinand and Isabella reneged.
Furnished with three ships, the Niña, the Pinta (also known as the Santa Clara),
and the Santa María, and a total crew of 90 men, Columbus left Palos, Spain on
August 2, 1492. After stopping in the Canary Islands for supplies and repairs, his
crew and his ships left the island chain on September 6, 1492. Using his knowl-
edge of the trade winds, Columbus finally made contact with the island chain now
known as the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. In the Bahamas, Columbus and his
crew made contact with the indigenous people of the area, beginning a series of
biological and cultural transfers known as the Columbian Exchange. Initially
believing that they had arrived in India, Columbus and his crew referred to the area
as the Indies and the inhabitants were referred to as being Indians. Noticing the
gold jewelry that was worn by the Indians, Columbus took several prisoners and
demanded that they guide him to the source of the gold. During parts of the next
three months, Columbus and his crew traveled throughout the Caribbean, making
landings on the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. While on Hispaniola, Columbus
left 39 men to colonize the island and captured several other indigenous people
C OLU M B US , C H R ISTOPHE R 155
from the region. In January of 1493, Columbus began his return voyage to Spain.
During the journey, Columbus and his remaining crew members stopped in the
Azores for supplies and repairs. After leaving the Azores, Columbus and his crew
aboard the Niña encountered a storm that forced him to separate from his lone
remaining ship, the Pinta. The storm forced Columbus to initially land in the port of
Lisbon; he eventually returned to Palos on March 15, 1493.
News of Columbus’s discovery spread quickly throughout Europe. E ager to have
their claim legitimized by Pope Alexander VI, Ferdinand and Isabella requested
that the pope ratify Spain’s rights to the lands recently discovered by Columbus.
On May 4, 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull known as the Inter
Caetera. The document stated that the Spanish monarchs had received permission
from the pope to claim lands and spread Christianity to the inhabitants of the lands
that existed 100 leagues (about 300 miles) to the west and south of the Azorean
and Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) island chains. Upset that they were omitted from
the bull, the Portuguese monarchs attempted to petition the pope but to no avail.
Therefore, King João II of Portugal directly contacted the Spanish monarchs in an
attempt to resolve the issue. In 1494, the Portuguese and Spanish rulers agreed to
move the line of demarcation further to the west. As a result, the Portuguese trav-
eled south around the coast of Africa; the agreement also allowed them to stake
their claim to Brazil.
Columbus’s second voyage left Cadiz on September 24, 1493, with 1,200 men
on seventeen vessels. He was e ager to continue the settlement on the island of
Hispaniola that had been established during his previous voyage, to find the
source of the gold that the indigenous people spoke of, and to locate the Orient.
A fter exploring several Car ibbean islands, Columbus landed on Hispaniola, only
to find out that no one remained from the colony. Columbus traveled inland but
was still unable to locate the source of the gold. Concerned that he was not going
to be able to satisfy his investors, Columbus sent a letter to the Spanish monarchs
requesting that he be able to enslave the indigenous p eople of the region. The
request was denied but Columbus disobeyed the Spanish monarchy and still sent
several hundred slaves to Spain. Also, realizing that many indigenous slaves died
during their transatlantic journey, Columbus established a tribute system
where indigenous people w ere forced to deliver a certain amount of gold to the
Spanish colonists every three months. Many that did not do so w ere mutilated,
eventually leading to their deaths. In subsequent centuries, these actions sup-
ported the belief in the Black Legend narrative throughout both Europe and the
Amer icas.
During the remainder of his life, Columbus made an additional two voyages to
the Americas. A fter returning from his third voyage in 1500, Columbus was
removed from power and imprisoned by the Spanish king and queen after reports
came back to Spain that he was governing the colony incompetently and that he
brutalized those who questioned his authority. After approximately six weeks in
jail, Columbus was released but he never regained his position as governor of His-
paniola. On May 20, 1506, Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain. Despite retaining
156 C ON Q UISTADO R S
the majority of his wealth, he was disillusioned that he was never able to locate a
westward sea route to the Orient.
Christopher Columbus’s contact with the Americas changed the global course
of h
uman history. Five centuries a fter Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, bio-
logical and cultural exchanges continue to occur between the two previously dis-
tinctly different areas of the world. Columbus’s contact with the Americas sparked
the beginning of Spain’s colonial empire throughout the Americas and marked the
decline of many indigenous cultures, particularly in the Car ibbean.
In 1892 and 1893, during the four hundredth anniversary celebrations of Chris-
topher Columbus’s contact with the Americas, the transnational image of Christo-
pher Columbus was used by the Spanish Empire to justify their place in imperial
history; by several Latin American countries to allow them to justify their contin-
ued cultural contact with their once m other country; and by many in the United
States in an attempt to allow Americans to claim their common European heri-
tage. In subsequent decades, many Catholic and Italian immigrants continued to
celebrate Columbus Day, using the image of Columbus to celebrate their cultural
heritage and to differentiate themselves from other groups in the United States.
Even today, Columbus Day continues to be celebrated throughout Italy, Spain, the
United States, and the Americas.
Gregg French
See also: Columbian Exchange; Conquistadors; European Exploration
Future Reading
Bartosik-Velez, Elise. 2014. The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations
and Transatlantic Discourse of Empire. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Kamen, Henry. 2005. Spain, 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict. 3rd ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson
Education.
Schnaubelt, Joseph C., and Frederick Van Fleteren, eds. 1998. Columbus and the New World.
New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
C O N Q U I S TA D O R S
The Spanish term conquistador refers broadly to the men responsible for discov-
ering, defeating, and colonizing indigenous societies in the New World during the
European Age of Discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Conquistadors
represented an eclectic mix of individuals seeking to better their lot in life by mak-
ing territorial claims for the Spanish Crown and reaping the rewards of New
World treasures. They w ere neither paid soldiers acting on behalf of the royal Span-
ish army nor w ere they forced to embark on dangerous missions across the Atlan-
tic. Their efforts, however, required the collaboration and assistance of indigenous
civilizations, and conquest (including “spiritual conquest”) was almost always a pro-
tracted and generally incomplete process.
Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and Francisco Pizarro (1471–1541) are generally
considered the principal iconic figures of the Spanish conquest, though some scholars
C ON Q UISTADO R S 157
have also classified Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) as a conquistador.

Cortés’ conquest of the Aztec Empire in modern-day Mexico (1519–1521) and
Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire in contemporary Peru (1530–1533) under-
score common characteristics of both conquistadors and the nature of Spanish con-
quest. Both men led relatively small expeditions into the New World. Cortés
arrived in Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire, in August of 1519 with
some 600 Spaniards and Pizarro arrived at the Battle of Cajamarca in 1532 (which
led to the capture of the Inca leader Atahualpa) with less than 200 men (Lockhart
and Schwartz 1983, 80–81). Both expeditions w ere aided by superior technology
in the form of metal swords and cannons as well as Old World animals not avail-
able to their indigenous adversaries; especially h orses (used in combat for both tac-
tical advantage and as a means of frightening the enemy), and pigs (which offered
Spanish expeditions a mobile food supply). The Spanish also had an important bio-
logical advantage during the conquest; they carried immunity to smallpox and
measles that the indigenous Mexica (the ruling group of the Aztec Empire) and
Incas did not possess. Still, Spanish conquistadors and their expeditions w ere not
immune to the biological consequences that occurred when they came into contact
with foreign microbes, especially syphilis, which w ere endemic to the New World.
While technological innovation and relative biological immunity favored Span-
ish conquistadors, their greatest advantage over indigenous civilizations in the
Americas was alliances with indigenous groups. During the Conquest of Mexico,
for example, Hernán Cortés relied on the support of Tlaxcalans to help defeat the
Aztec Empire. The Aztec Empire functioned as a tributary empire ruled by the Mex-
ica. During their 200 years of hegemonic rule, the Mexica defeated many other
indigenous civilizations in central Mexico and forced them to provide tribute to the
empire—both monetarily and in the form of human victims to be sacrificed to the
Mexica’s pantheon of gods. The Tlaxcalans viewed Cortés and the Spanish as inter-
lopers, believing they would seek to secure worldly riches and return home. Cortés
and his band of several hundred men w ere thus supported by some 200,000 native
allies, most of whom were Tlaxcalans eager to topple the Mexica domination over
their society and end the oppressive tributary system. While Cortés did not give the
Tlaxcalans much attention in his letters to Spanish King Charles V (1519–1556),
he did blame the Tlaxcalans for the devastation of Tenochtitlán and the massacre
of thousands of Mexica during the fall of the city in 1521, noting to Charles V that,
“No race, however savage, has ever practiced such fierce and unnatural cruelty as
the natives of t hese parts” (Pagden 1982, 262).
Cortés not only used indigenous allies for support during battle, but also relied
on an indigenous translator to assist his communication with the Tlaxcalans and
the Mexica (who both spoke Nahuatl). Originally, Cortés intended to use Gerónimo
de Aguilar (1489–1531) as his primary translator. Aguilar was a Franciscan friar
who had been shipwrecked in the Yucatán and taken as a slave by a local Maya
civilization. While being held as a slave for the Maya, Aguilar learned Yucatec Maya
and Cortés retrieved Aguilar upon hearing tales of bearded men being detained
by neighboring indigenous civilizations as he and his expedition passed through
the Yucatán. However, although Aguilar spoke Yucatec Maya, he was unable to
158 C ON Q UISTADO R S
speak or understand Nahuatl. Fortunately for Cortés, when passing through the
Yucatán, a Maya village offered his expedition 20 young slave girls as a peace offer-
ing. Among this group of girls was Malintzin (referred to as Malinche or Doña
Marina by the Spanish), who would become Cortés’ primary interpreter and mis-
tress. Malintzin did not speak Spanish, but she did speak both Yucatec Maya and
Nahuatl. Originally, Cortés used both Aguilar and Malintzin in a chain-like trans-
lation with the Tlaxcalans. However, when Malintzin was able to learn Spanish,
Cortés appointed her as his primary translator, ended her serv ice as a concubine
for one of his lieutenants, and relieved Aguilar of his duties. Malintzin proved to
be a critical actor during the conquest of Mexico as she enabled Cortés and the
Spanish to communicate with their Tlaxcalan allies as well as the Mexica Emperor
Moctezuma II.
Francisco Pizarro also benefited from the support of indigenous allies during
the conquest of Peru. Although Pizarro’s use of indigenous translators is not as well
known as Cortés’ enlisting of Malintzin into his expedition, Pizarro made use of
a number of young boys offered to his expedition as gifts from various villages. As
in Mexico, resentment and fighting existed between the Inca in Peru, but unlike
the Aztec Empire in Mexico, the conflict in Peru resulted from an unclear chain of
succession within the imperial family. In 1527, Huayna Cápac (1493–1527), the
Inca Emperor (or Sapa Inca), died, most likely of an outbreak of smallpox, and
ignited a civil war between his two sons: Atahualpa (in control of Cuzco) and Huás-
car (in command of Quito). When Pizarro, along with his 169 men and 69 horses,
arrived in the city of Puná in November of 1532, the Inca Empire was in the midst
of both a civil war and a smallpox epidemic.
From Puná, Pizarro and his men moved south and occupied Tumbes, where
they first learned about the civil war occurring between the supporters of Atahualpa
and Huáscar. Over a year later, after Pizarro received reinforcements from Spain,
he founded the city of San Miguel de Piura and marched toward the heart of the Inca
Empire at Cajamarca. Pizarro’s forces were greatly outnumbered in the face of
Atahualpa’s army of 80,000 men. Learning of Pizarro’s impending arrival, the
emperor, dismissing the Spanish threat, invited the conquistador into Catamarca
in hopes of capturing him and his Spanish forces once they entered the city. Ata-
hualpa met the Spanish largely unprotected, arriving with servants rather than his
professional army. Pizarro’s infantry emerged from hiding places and captured Ata-
hualpa and killed many in his retinue. A fter holding Atahualpa captive for several
months, the Spanish killed him even after receiving a ransom of gold. The Inca
civilization was sent into a frenzy. In January of 1535, Pizarro founded the city of
Lima, and although the Spanish did not control most rural areas outside the city,
they declared the conquest of Peru complete.
Although Spanish conquistadors could claim victory over the indigenous civi-
lizations of the Aztec Empire in Mexico and the Inca Empire in Peru, the success
of other conquest efforts were more ambiguous. In some cases, Spanish attempts
to conquer indigenous civilizations resulted in massive defeats. While Spanish con-
quistadors and the Franciscans highlighted 1517 as the conquest of the Maya in
the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, research suggests that the Maya lived relatively
C ON Q UISTADO R S 159
independently for some two centuries after initial contact and were free to prac-
tice native religious beliefs and social customs. Historians have argued that only
the Bourbon Reforms at the end of the eighteenth century in the Yucatán (not the
efforts of conquistadors) functioned as a legitimate Spanish conquest (Farriss 1985,
11). There w ere other indigenous civilizations over which Spanish conquistadors
could never claim dominance, such as the Mapuche in Chile. The Mapuche w ere
a semisedentary civilization that prized the independence of individual warriors
and their extended families. The Mapuche practiced a type of guerilla warfare that
became especially dangerous once the Mapuche acquired h orses brought to the
Americas during the Columbian Exchange. The Mapuche valued military skill long
before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors and Mapuche warriors became legend-
ary for fighting barefoot even during the winter.
In addition to Cortés and Pizarro, many other conquistadors established their
reputations during the pivotal fighting in Mexico and Peru and through their
serv ice in those conflicts, were given command of their own missions. Pedro de
Alvarado, who served u nder Cortés, led an expedition to conquer Guatemala in
the 1520s. Unlike Cortés and Pizarro, however, Alvarado was able to assume an
administrative position in the New World following the success of his con-
quest. Diego de Almagro, who served as first in command under Pizarro during
the conquest of Peru, later undertook his own expedition to conquer Chile, though
unsuccessfully. Almagro left the expedition in Peru a fter he and Pizarro engaged
in a bitter dispute over the spoils of conquest. The feud between the two men
underscores the tension that often emerged between conquistadors eager to reap
individual rewards and honors for their serv ice. In response to the feud, Almagro
was captured and killed by Pizarro’s bother in 1538, which was followed by
Almagro’s son locating and killing Pizarro in 1541.
Spanish conquistadors came from a variety of backgrounds and t here are many
lesser-known conquistadors who helped the Spanish establish their New World
Empire. Juan Garrido, for example, was a former slave born in West Africa who
arrived in the Car ibbean in the early 1500s. He acquired his freedom by serving
as a conquistador in the conquest of Puerto Rico and Cuba and later aided Cortés
during the conquest of Mexico. Juan Valiente, another former slave born in West
Africa, served as a conquistador in Chile fighting against the indigenous Arauca-
nians. A fter securing his freedom, Valiente become a Spanish captain and eventu-
ally received an encomienda (a grant of indigenous labor to work on an estate) by
the Spanish Crown for his serv ice in the conquest. Garrido and Valiente, along
with figures such as Cortés and Pizarro, used their efforts in the conquest to improve
their status and standing in New World society.
The Spanish conquest of the New World, despite its unevenness, represented a
watershed in global history as civilizations collided, and European hegemony in
the New World took shape. The efforts of the eclectic mix of conquistadors in the
Car ibbean and throughout the Americas set in motion three centuries of Spanish
imperial rule and served as an important (though often exaggerated and embel-
lished) source of Spanish pride during the global race to establish colonies and
secure hegemonic power in the early modern world. While the military conquest
160 C O R T É S , HE R N Á N
undertaken by sixteenth-century conquistadors may be concluded, the social and

cultural legacies of the conquistadors and their expeditions are still felt in present-
day Latin America and have helped form the fabric of contemporary societies
throughout the region.
Thomas J. Brinkerhoff
See also: Cortés, Hernán; De Soto, Hernando; Encomienda System
Further Reading
Hemming, John. 1993. The Conquest of the Incas. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Restall, Matthew. 2003. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Townsend, Camilla. 2006. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian W
oman in the Conquest of Mexico.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
CORTÉS, HERNÁN (1485–1547)

Hernán Cortés led the conquest of the Aztec Empire. He established Nueva España
(New Spain), which became one of the most important provinces in the Spanish
Empire. His spectacular success inspired many o thers to try to duplicate his feat.
The conquest of the Aztecs accelerated the pace of Spanish exploration and settle-
ment in the Americas for several decades in the sixteenth c entury and brought
enormous wealth to Spain.
Cortés was born Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano in 1485, in
Medellín in Extremadura, Spain, the birth province of a number of important con-
quistadores. Like o thers of the hidalgo class (members of the lower nobility), Cortés
was from a locally notable but rather poor family. He spent two years in Salamanca
training for a legal c areer and became a notary, skills that later became important
in the conquest of Mexico.
Cortés immigrated to Santo Domingo in 1504, at the age of 18. The governor of
Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando (a distant relative), gave him an encomienda and
appointed him a notary. He helped complete the conquest of Hispaniola, and later
assisted Diego Velázquez in the 1511 conquest of Cuba.
Cortés initially enjoyed a cordial relationship with Velázquez, who, upon becom-
ing governor of Cuba, appointed him to several important government posts.
Their relationship became strained over time but this did not prevent Cortés from
securing an appointment as the leader of an expedition to Mexico in 1518. The
governor instructed Cortés only to reconnoiter the coast of Mexico in preparation
for a later expedition—presumably to be led by Velázquez himself—to settle and
conquer the region. Although Velázquez considered revoking Cortés’s appointment
at the last minute, he departed anyway in February 1519, with about 450 men, 14
cannons, and 16 h orses.
The expedition first landed in the Yucatan, where Cortés and his men encoun-
tered a shipwrecked Spaniard named Gerónimo de Aguilar, who spoke a local
Mayan dialect fluently, having living among the Maya for eight years. Cortés claimed
C O R T É S , HE R N Á N 161
Conquistador Hernán Cortés encountering natives during his conquest of Mexico as

shown in a detail from a manuscript by Domincan friar Diego Duran. Native allies w ere
critical in augmenting Spanish numbers in the b
attle against the Aztecs. (DEA/G. Dagli
Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images)
the Yucatan for Spain. A local chieftain gifted him several women as tribute, includ-
ing Malinche, who received the name Doña Marina at her baptism. She played a
pivotal role in the conquest b ecause she spoke both Nahuatl, the language of the
Aztecs, and Mayan. With Malinche and Aguilar as translators, the expedition could
communicate with the Aztecs.
Cortés decided to march inland to the center of Aztec territory, but he had to
clarify his legal position first because he was constrained by the instructions issued
by Diego Velázquez. He and his men conquered a native town on the coast and
formally constituted it as a Spanish town, La Villa Rica de Vera Cruz (modern Vera-
cruz). Cortés appointed loyal expedition leaders to the town’s cabildo, or town
council. Founding a new town was a clever legal maneuver b ecause Spanish towns
answered directly to the Crown, so the cabildo could legally authorize the con-
quest of the Aztecs despite Velázquez’s instructions. When some expeditionaries
complained about the changed focus of the expedition and threatened to depart
for Cuba, Cortés scuttled their ships. He left 100 men to secure Veracruz and led
the rest inland.
The Aztec Empire was an alliance of three city-states, Tenochtitlán, Texcoco,
and Tlacopan, that collected tribute from other native cities and groups. Tenoch-
titlán was by far the largest Aztec city and had become the dominant partner in
162 C O R T É S , HE R N Á N
the alliance by the time Cortés arrived in Mexico. Moctezuma II was the king (tla-
toani) of Tenochtitlán and the most powerful Aztec ruler.
Cortés left the coast in August 1519. Leaders of the independent city-state of
Tlaxcala resisted the Spanish initially but became their allies when they could not
defeat them. Other native groups disaffected with Tenochtitlán’s dominance also
sided with the Spanish and swelled their numbers. Cortés and the Tlaxcalans
slaughtered thousands in the city of Cholula, perhaps as a warning to o thers.
On November 8, 1519, the Spanish arrived at Tenochtitlán, the capital of the
Aztec Empire, built on an island in the middle of a large lake connected to the
shore by causeways. T here they met Moctezuma, whom they made a prisoner
shortly after arrival. He cooperated with the Spanish and continued to exercise
power, but his support among his own p eople began to wane. The expedition
reached a critical juncture in early 1520, when Pánfilo de Narváez (1470–1528)
arrived at Veracruz on a mission to curtail Cortés’s activities. Cortés left Tenochti-
tlán to deal with Narváez, capturing the latter and convincing his men to join the
conquest of the Aztecs.
During Cortés’s absence, his second-in-command, Pedro de Alvarado (1485–1541),
slaughtered much of the Aztec nobility at a religious festival in Tenochtitlán. By the
time Cortés returned, the expedition was under siege. Cortés and his men fought
their way into the city to join with the Spanish who were there. Moctezuma was
killed in the fighting, and the Spanish position became untenable. They w ere forced
to fight their way out of the city on June 30, 1520, and many expeditionaries lost their
lives. The Spanish retreated to Tlaxcala, rebuilt their forces, and convinced other
city-states to support their campaign against Tenochtitlán.
To take the city, the Spanish secured control over the lake by building 13 ships
and mounting them with cannons. Cortés isolated Tenochtitlán by capturing the
towns where the causeways met the shore and then laid siege to the city. An epi-
demic of smallpox erupted in the city greatly aiding the Spanish. Even so, the
Spanish and their allies were forced to bombard the city with cannons and fight
street to street. Tenochtitlán fell on August 13, 1521.
The Spanish founded the new colonial capital, Mexico City, on the ruins of
Tenochtitlán, symbolically replacing the Aztecs, and taking advantage of its central
location. Mexico City became a base for launching other expeditions to consoli-
date control over the region. Cortés’s Indian allies, most of whom had expected to
gain their independence once Tenochtitlán fell, found that they had exchanged
one overlord for another.
Cortés wrote a series of letters to the Spanish king, Holy Roman Emperor Charles
V, to justify his actions. He emphasized his own role as leader of the conquest while
downplaying the actions of other Spanish expeditionaries as well as their numer-
ous native allies. Collectively, the letters of Cortés serve as a probanza de mérito
(proof of merit), a petition to the Crown for recognition and reward for serv ices
rendered. The tone and biases in Cortés’s letters provoked others to write their own
probanzas to gain recognition for their part in the conquest. Bernal Diaz del Cas-
tillo’s history of the conquest is the most notable probanza apart from Cortés’s
letters.
C OTTON 163
Political infighting broke out in the wake of the conquest, fomented in part by
Diego Velázquez, leading Cortés to return to Spain in 1528, so that he could pres
ent his case personally to the government. In return for his serv ice, Charles V
rewarded Cortés with the noble title of Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca in 1528 (Mar-
quis of the Valley of Oaxaca). His new social position allowed him to marry a
woman from a leading noble h ouse, Doña Juana Zúñiga.
Although he was elevated to a noble rank, the Spanish Crown marginalized Cor-
tés politically when it appointed Antonio de Mendoza as the first viceroy of New
Spain in 1535. The creation of the new colonial government hindered the develop-
ment of an entrenched colonial aristocracy that could challenge royal control. The
Spanish government had similarly marginalized the members of the Columbus
family in the Car ibbean colonies.
Cortés led other expeditions in the New World, but these brought him little but
increasing debts, more political intrigue, and accusations of ill-treatment and mis-
management. He returned to Spain once more in 1541 to plead his case and to
secure some relief from his debts, but Crown officials mostly ignored him. He par-
ticipated in the 1541 Spanish expedition to Algiers. In 1547, he decided to return
to the New World, but he died on December 2 before departing.
Cortés left behind numerous c hildren by his wife and indigenous mistresses
(including Malinche), and a contested legacy. A fter Mexico achieved independence
in 1821, Mexican intellectuals and scholars repudiated much of the heritage of the
conquistadores, preferring to craft a national identity on mestizaje (mixture of Span-
ish and Indian cultures) and the legacy of indigenous resistance to the Spanish
conquest.
Dennis J. Cowles
See also: Conquistadors; Diaz del Castillo, Bernal; Doña Marina; Moctezuma II
Further Reading
Cortés, Hernán. 1991. Five Letters of Cortés to the Emperor: The Spanish Invasion of Mexico
and the Conquest of Montezuma’s Empire. Translated by J. Bayard Morris. New York:
W. W. Norton and Company.
Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1963. The Conquest of New Spain. Translated by John M. Cohen.
New York: Penguin Books.
Hassig, Ross. 2006. Mexico and the Spanish Conquest. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press.
Leon-Portilla, Miguel, and Lysander Kemp. 2006. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of
the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Press.
COTTON
Cotton is a fiber that grows around the seeds of the cotton plant and has been used
to produce soft, breathable cloth for millennia. Cotton played a crucial role in the
development of the modern global economy, with demand for cotton driven by
European domination of world trade routes. Technological innovation generated
164 C OTTON
the first factories and spurred the Industrial Revolution, at first in Great Britain
and then in Europe and North America, as well as creating a demand for raw cot-
ton that transformed the landscape and society of the southern United States as a
slave labor driven plantation regime extended across the region.
Prior to industrialization, the vast majority of cotton was grown alongside food
crops on small holdings, and the work of spinning and weaving was done in the
home as a way of earning extra income or to produce cloth for domestic use. Cot-
ton growing regions included India and China as well as Southeast Asia, the Otto-
man Empire, West Africa, and Central America. On a global scale, the European
cotton industry remained relatively small, with manufacturing centers developing
in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and G reat Britain by the sixteenth c entury, depen-
dent upon imported raw cotton from the Eastern Mediterranean.
As European trading companies penetrated further into global markets, cotton
cloth imported from India became a major source of profit for merchants, with
imports into Great Britain increasing 70-fold between 1614 and 1701. Cotton also
played an important role in European trade with West Africa, with up to half of
the goods traded for slaves to be transported to the Americas being cotton cloths.
Brightly patterned Indian fabrics w ere especially in demand. European powers
attempted to nurture their native cotton manufacturing industries with protection-
ist measures in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Spinning the cotton fibers into thread and weaving the thread into cloth remained
a time-consuming, labor-intensive process in both Asia and Europe, with similar
technologies of the spinning wheel and foot-powered loom predominating in both
continents u ntil technological innovations originating in G reat Britain drastically
improved the speed and volume of production. John Kay invented the flying shut
tle in 1733, a device which improved the weaving process by mechanizing the
movement of the “shuttle” that held the horizontal thread (the weft) as it was woven
between the vertical threads (the warp). In the 1760s, James Hargreaves invented
the spinning jenny which could spin multiple threads simultaneously and which
quickly multiplied in size and speed with further developments. In 1769, Richard
Arkwright’s w ater frame harnessed w ater power to spin threads continuously; for
the first time driving machines with a source of energy other than h uman power.
In 1779, Samuel Crompton combined the spinning jenny and water frame to pro-
duce the spinning mule, which could produce more threads much quicker than
before.
The need for a constant and reliable w ater supply meant that production in G reat
Britain moved from the domestic sphere to an industrial setting for the first time,
concentrating in the northwest of England, with the first factories built near to fast-
flowing streams. Lancashire and surrounding areas offered ample suitable water
sources, a humid climate suited to cotton manufacture, and proximity to the impor
tant Atlantic trading port of Liverpool. Tens of thousands of people migrated to the
growing mill towns. The majority of the new workers were women and children, who
could be employed at lower cost than adult males. The requirements of continu-
ous industrial production dictated new work patterns and disciplines and created
C OTTON 165
a large, wage-earning working class as well as a burgeoning middle class of mill

owners and entrepreneurs. The large population movements and often poor wages
or intermittent employment led to overcrowding and problems of sanitation
and health in the larger industrial towns, foremost among them Manchester, the
world’s first industrial city, which gained the nickname “Cottonopolis.”
Three decades of invention saw productivity rise by a factor of 370, and with
labor costs so low, British cloth could be sold more cheaply than that of any other
country. Cotton exports increased by 14 percent per year between 1780 and 1800,
and while t here had been 50,000 spinning mules in E ngland in 1788, by 1821 t here
were 7 million. Great Britain remained by a long way the world’s leading cotton
manufacturer throughout the nineteenth century, with the profits of cotton behind
Great Britain’s rise to global economic dominance and the development of other
industries as well as rail and shipping technologies. Mechanized cotton produc-
tion spread quickly into other areas of the globe, however, often as a result of the
expertise of imported British workers or industrial espionage. By 1860, G reat Brit-
ain still controlled 67 percent of cotton production, although mills could be found
throughout Europe, and in the northeastern United States, Mexico, Brazil, and
India.
This unprecedented global boom in cotton production generated increasing
demand for raw cotton, at first in G reat Britain, then throughout the cotton manu-
facturing countries. The solution to this problem came from the expropriation of
land and labor to be used in cotton production, at first in the Car ibbean and Bra-
zil in the 1780s and 1790s, and then in the United States. Despite having virtually
no cotton exports in 1780, the southern United States became, by 1802, the big-
gest exporter of raw cotton to Great Britain, with exports growing in volume by
seven times by 1820, and total production increasing by nine times between 1820
and 1860. Slavery in the southern United States was transformed by the booming
demand for and profitability of cotton, from a system felt by many observers to be
in decline in the upper south to an increasingly brutal regime of control and com-
pulsion on the rapidly advancing southwestern frontier.
The invention of the cotton gin, by Eli Whitney in 1793, allowed the separa-
tion of the cotton fibers from the enclosed seeds at 50 times the previous rate,
sparking a “Cotton Rush,” with South Carolina and Georgia the first states to
experience a boom in cotton agriculture. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase doubled
the size of the United States and also guaranteed navigational access to the entire
Mississippi River system. Successive wars and treaties stripped Native American
groups of their land and resulted in the devastating forced migration of tens of
thousands of Indians to the west of the Mississippi. The United States govern-
ment parceled out the newly-expropriated land to cotton growers and land spec-
ulators while up to a million enslaved persons w ere transported in chains from
the older slave regions of the upper south to the newly-acquired territories in
the internal slave trade, either marched in coffles for hundreds of miles or
stowed onto boats and sailed by river and sea to be sold in slave markets, the larg-
est of which was found in New Orleans.
166 C OTTON
The work regime on the new cotton plantations required constant drudging and
backbreaking work, from dawn to sunset, at all times of year. Maximum profit
could only be extracted by violent compulsion to work, regular beating and whip-
pings, and detailed accounting methods that forced slave laborers to consistently
meet or exceed their previous working targets. Regular coerced sale and transpor-
tation heavily disrupted family and friendship ties for enslaved persons and the
racially based social system left enslaved persons vulnerable at all times to physi-
cal and sexual abuse by white persons.
Innovations in technology, most prominently the invention of the steamboat,
consistently reduced transport times and increased volume of movement along the
Mississippi River basin, increasing the profitability of cotton growing and encour-
aging expansion of cultivation, whilst agriculturalists consistently developed new
strains of cotton with higher yields and better quality and length of fibers. The
expanding cotton economy made fortunes for tens of thousands of plantation
owners, land speculators, merchants, and slave traders, with the profits being
invested in ventures in both the northern and southern United States. Cotton agri-
culture based upon African American slavery and expropriation of Native Ameri-
can land was fundamental to the dramatic growth of the United States and European
industrial economies and prosperity in the nineteenth c entury. Slave-produced cot-
ton became by a large margin the United States’ most valuable export and the
northern states played an important role in providing foodstuffs, clothing, and
other manufactured products to the Southern slave regions.
The United States Civil War led to widespread and significant changes to the
global cotton economy, the primary being the abolition of slavery and the slave plan-
tation system in the United States and the rise of sharecropping in its place. Under
sharecropping, former slaves gained a modicum of freedom, becoming tenants
with control over the use of their own land and the ability to own property and
earn money. However, the o wners of the land often remained the same plantation
owners as previously, who through the poverty of freedpersons and debt relation-
ships and segregationist laws, were able to dictate the terms of the continued
growth of cotton as an export crop. The interruption of cotton exports to Europe
during the Civil War drove European merchants to look for new sources of raw
cotton, leading to rapid increases in imports from India, Egypt, and Brazil, who
between them accounted for a third of European cotton imports by 1883. In Brit-
ish India especially, new bureaucracies of debt and taxation forced peasants into
growing raw cotton to supply the British manufacturing industry.
Matthew Stallard
See also: Industrial Revolution; Slavery
Further Reading
Baptist, Edward. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.
Beckert, Sven. 2015. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf.
COUREURS DE BOIS 167
COUREURS DE BOIS
French for “runners of the wood,” coureurs de bois were men engaged in the fur
trade during the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries in French- controlled
North America. T hese usually young men took on the difficult and risky assign-
ment of heading off into the vast territory of the pays d’en haut, or upper country
that included the G reat Lakes area and upper Mississippi River Valley. Coureurs
de bois learned native languages and customs to forge commercial relationships
with various First Nation tribes. They traded European goods including metal
implements, such as knives and pots, alcohol, muskets, and textiles for beaver
pelts. As a result of these social and commercial relationships, coureurs de bois
were essential to the vibrancy of the fur trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries upon which the existence of New France depended. Although they also
played a pivotal role in exploration of the region, coureurs de bois were not agents
of the French state and, acting without official authorization, often ran afoul of
royal goals.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, France turned from its mercantile
interests in fishing to explore the commercial possibilities of the interior of North
America. The French explorer and diplomat Samuel de Champlain (1567–1635),
led this early exploration of the St. Lawrence River Valley. From 1608–1609,
Champlain established alliances with the dominant tribal groups in the area, in
particular the Algonquins and the Hurons. These agreements allowed the French
access to Amerindian long-distance trade networks. In 1610, Champlain arranged
for a young man in his company, Étienne Brulé (1592–1633), to live with an
Algonquin tribe over the winter months for Brulé to learn their language and to
explore the region. When Brulé returned in the spring, he had acclimated com-
pletely to Algonquin society, as shown by his aboriginal dress and proficiency in
Algonquin. Both the French colonists and Algonquin leaders recognized the value
of having an intermediary who could bridge the two societies, linguistically and
culturally.
Between 1611 and 1650, this practice of sending young men to winter with
Amerindians evolved into the profession of the coureurs de bois. They occupied a
fundamental position as middlemen in the seminomadic economy of New France.
Coureurs de bois transported European goods by foot, or birch bark canoes over
long-distances, into the interior to trade directly with the Amerindian tribes. They
would return after a season or two, or even several years, with pelts and new knowl-
edge of the geography and p eople of the region.
Scholars usually distinguish coureurs de bois from other professions in the fur
trade, such as voyageur or “traveler,” by their connection to the French Crown. In the
early seventeenth c entury, the fur trade was accessible to any colonists willing to
pay taxes or fees. The system became more restrictive in 1654, as the government
attempted to control the quickly growing industry. Then in 1681, Jean-Baptiste Col-
bert (1619–1683), France’s minister of the marine, implemented a system of
licenses or congés required to trade fur. Most scholars use the term voyageur to refer
to a licensed trader after this period, while coureur de bois refers to an unlicensed
fur trader or peddler.
168 COUREURS DE BOIS
The lucrative fur trade promised a quick profit regardless of license and a flood
of immigrants from France between 1650 and 1670 caused the ranks of coureurs
de bois to swell. Statistics on the coureurs de bois are approximate due to the occu-
pation’s illicit nature. Jacques Duchesneau de la Doussinière et d’Ambault (1631–1696),
the intendant or head of the colony’s civil administration, estimated in 1680 that
there were probably 800 coureurs de bois out of New France’s population of 9,700.
(Royot 2007, 49) These numbers represent the singular focus on the fur trade in
New France. Abundant supply, however, outpaced the European demand for pelts
and brought New France to the brink of economic collapse. Once the monarchy
established the licensing system in 1681, to confront this issue, the number of
coureurs de bois fell to approximately 300 by 1700. (Royot 2007, 49) Neither the fur
trade nor the coureurs de bois died out in the eighteenth century, however. The
fur trade was reorganized and structured into a coherent capitalist system and a
new generation of wood runners rose as illegitimate, but essential, members of the
frontier economy.
Coureur de bois were young men who abandoned French civilization to adopt
many of the social, cultural, and religious practices of the Amerindian tribes. Rela-
tions were not always smooth or without danger. Coureurs de bois had to negotiate
new social mores while also keeping their focus on commercial transactions. Inte-
gration into an Amerindian community was often achieved through relationships
with young women of the tribe. Many traders entered into marriages with the
women—à la facon du pays, or according to the custom of the country. The Catho-
lic Church did not sanction these common-law marriages. However, the u nions
integrated coureurs de bois into the Amerindian kinship systems upon which trade
relied. Amerindian women then served a vital function as intermediaries in the
economy of New France. The relationships also led to a flourishing population of
mixed ancestry, or métis, who became an indispensable facet of emerging North
American society.
While profitable, the activities of the coureurs de bois often ran counter to the
political objectives of the French Crown and the proselytizing of French mission-
aries, such as the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Jesuits complained of the corrupt-
ing influence of the coureurs de bois, who they viewed as undermining Catholic
conversion efforts with their drinking, gambling, and promiscuity. In particular,
missionaries complained that coureurs de bois gave the natives alcohol, causing
chaos and violence. French authorities often tried to discredit coureurs de bois as
debauched vagrants. Official criticism r ose sharply a fter 1715, as French authorities
attempted to gain greater control over the fur trade and hold off British advances
in the region. Ultimately, the coureur de bois type persisted even as the Seven Years’
War (1756–1763) between Great Britain and France curtailed France’s presence in
North America.
Victoria N. Meyer
See also: Algonquins; Champlain, Samuel de; Fur Trade; Jesuits; New France
C R EE K INDIANS 169
Further Reading
Podruchny, Carolyn. 2006. Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North
American Fur Trade. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Royot, Daniel. 2007. Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The French in the West from New
France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Scalberg, Daniel A. 2002. “The French-A merindian Religious Encounter in Seventeenth
and Early Eighteenth-century New France.” French Colonial History 1: 101–112.
CREEK INDIANS
The term “Creek Indians” was first applied in Georgia to native p eoples living along
Ochese Creek in the 1600s. Trade networks between the Creeks and other native
groups were established during this period with the British, French, and Spanish.
Trade goods included animal pelts and Native American slaves. Western expansion
by the British, trade disparities, and the slave trade eventually led to the outbreak
of the Yamasee War in South Carolina between 1715 and 1717. In that conflict,
South Carolina was aided by militias from Virginia and North Carolina and by
Cherokee and Catawba warriors in defeating the Yamasee and their allies, which
included the Ochese and Waxhaws. A fter that defeat, many native groups deter-
mined that their survival required them to join together in a confederacy.
Although they came from different ethnic groups and spoke a multitude of lan-
guages, including Muscogee, Koasati, and Hitchiti, they collectively became known
as the Creek Indians. Throughout the confederacy’s history, its politics w ere dom-
inated by the Muscogee-speaking communities. The ethnic differences that per-
vaded the Creeks often led some communities to act against the dictates of the
Muscogean leadership.
During the American Revolution, the Creek Confederacy was divided. The Upper
Creek communities supported the British war effort while the Lower Creek towns
aligned themselves with the colonists. Following the conclusion of the war, Geor-
gia coerced several Lower Creek leaders to sign a treaty in 1783 that ceded approx-
imately 3 million acres of Creek land to the state. The Upper Creeks believed that the
land cession would not satiate the Georgians, and thus it was inevitable that they
would seek even more land unless the Creeks became a more formidable military
force. To bolster the Creek military position, the Upper Creeks turned to Spain.
The 1784 Treaty of Pensacola included a promise that Spain would protect Creek
property in Florida. The agreement empowered Upper Creek leader Alexander
McGillivray to reorganize the Creek Confederacy around the Creek National
Council, which was dominated by Upper Creeks.
Although McGillivray and the Creek National Council had forbidden any more
land cessions, other Creek leaders opted to negotiate with Georgia and signed trea-
ties in 1785 and 1786 that traded land for goods. When settlers began arriving on
Creek lands in 1786, they w ere met by Creek warriors u nder the command of
McGillivray and were repulsed. The demonstrated ability of the Creeks to defend
their land lasted u
ntil 1787 when Spain suddenly threatened to stop providing war
170 C R EE K INDIANS
materiel to the Creeks. The Spanish had become concerned that the Creeks were
about to draw them into an unwanted conflict with the United States. To protect
Creek interests, McGillivray negotiated the 1790 Treaty of New York with the rep-
resentatives of the United States that included a promise from the United States to
protect Creek lands from further land cessions as long as the Creeks accepted most
of the land cessions made in 1783, 1785, and 1786 as legitimate. The United States
also legitimized the Creek National Council and McGillivray as the leaders of the
Creeks, by recognizing the Creek Nation as a sovereign p eople. The treaty was
disastrous for the Lower Creeks, as most of the land that was ceded to Georgia
had belonged to them. Political pressure from both Lower and Upper Creek lead-
ers resulted in McGillivray ultimately repudiating the treaty. The Creeks returned
to the Spanish fold a fter signing a new treaty of alliance with Spain in 1792.
In time, the Creek National Council decided to accede to President Thomas
Jefferson’s offer of a place in the United States if they became “civilized” accord-
ing to American standards. They had to adopt Christianity, abandon native tradi-
tions, and become farmers. Jefferson believed this would eventually lead to an
assimilation of Indian p eoples within the general populace. The strategy eventu-
ally created a schism among the Creeks as its leaders abandoned the traditional
sharing of wealth among all of the p eople and instead began holding Creek wealth
for themselves. Many built large plantations and bought African and African
American slaves. The slavery issue became particularly contentious as many of
Creek communities had numerous African Creeks in them. Since the Creeks did
not have a concept of race, they had tended to welcome escaped slaves into their
midst. The children that resulted from relationships between African or African
American men and Creek women were considered Creeks. Creek Indians with
African blood began to fear that the leaders on the National Council would even-
tually try to enslave them and their African-descended relatives. The slavery
issue and the wealth disparity ultimately helped lead to open warfare among the
Creek factions.
Although the Creek War of 1813–1814 became a theater of the War of 1812, it
began as a civil war among the Creeks. During Tecumseh’s tour of the South dur-
ing 1810–1811, he was accompanied by Shawnee prophets who advocated his
brother Tenskwatawa’s militant religious teachings. They found followers among
the Red Sticks, who soon had prophets emerge from within their ranks. The proph-
ets advocated a return to traditional Creek culture and traditions, which amounted
to a repudiation of the wealth and status being accumulated by Creek leaders. In
essence, they argued, non-Red Stick Creek leaders w ere becoming “civilized” and
mimicking their white counterparts at the expense of the common good.
The conflict expanded beyond a Native American civil war with the attack on
Fort Mims, in modern Alabama, on August 30, 1813. In response, militias were
dispatched to the Alabama Territory from Georgia, Tennessee, and the Mississippi
Territory and placed under the command of General Andrew Jackson. By 1814, Jack-
son’s militia had been supplemented by the 39th United States Infantry Regiment,
Cherokees, and Creeks. The war ended at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, where
Jackson’s force of approximately 3,000 soldiers and native warriors massacred the
C R EE K INDIANS 171
Red Sticks. More than 800 Red Sticks were killed in the fighting. In comparison,
Jackson suffered fewer than 50 deaths between his soldiers and allied native
warriors.
When the Creek War of 1813–1814 erupted, many Creeks aligned themselves with
General Andrew Jackson to fight the nativist Red Stick Creeks. When the war
was over, Jackson made no distinction between Creek factions in the Treaty of Fort
Jackson, which forced the Creeks to cede more than 22 million acres of land to
the United States. Although Jackson’s actions left the Creeks destitute, many Creek
warriors, led by Lower Creek leader William McIntosh, joined Jackson in his 1818
campaign against the Seminoles in Florida. McIntosh, who had a white f ather and
a Creek m other, was viewed as a Creek since they were a matrilineal society. He
would subsequently straddle the white and Creek worlds, much to the detriment
of the Creek Confederacy.
In 1821, McIntosh signed the Treaty of Indian Springs with the State of Geor-
gia, ceding approximately 4 million acres of Creek land between the Ocmulgee
and Flint Rivers. In appreciation, Georgia officials awarded McIntosh 1,640 acres
that he used to build an inn. In 1823, McIntosh made overtures to Cherokee Chief
John Ross, encouraging the Cherokees to sell their lands to Georgia. Ross rebuffed
McIntosh’s entreaties and notified other Creek leaders of McIntosh’s actions. The
Creek National Council responded in July 1823 with a resolution that forbade the
negotiation of any more land cessions. The penalty for such an act was death. That
same year, George Troup, McIntosh’s cousin, became Georgia’s governor a fter prom-
ising to remove all native peoples from the state. Troup responded to the Creek
National Council’s resolution on land cessions by promising to protect any Creek sig-
natories to treaties. Federal officials, with the support of Georgia’s politicians, negoti-
ated the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs with McIntosh and a handful of minor Creek
officials. In that treaty, all Creek lands in Georgia and Alabama were ceded to the
United States. On April 29, 1825, Chief Menawa and his warriors killed McIntosh
at his home. Although Troup and his supporters were outraged by McIntosh’s death,
further bloodshed was avoided between Georgia and the Creek Confederacy due
to federal intervention. The resulting 1826 Treaty of Washington provided the
Creek National Council with $200,000 for the Creek lands in Georgia and allowed
the Creeks to keep their Alabama real estate. Alabama officials ignored the treaty
and in 1827 began selling Creek lands to white settlers.
As demonstrated by the actions of Alabamans in 1827, southerners still desired
all of the lands inhabited by Native Americans in the region. Their desires came to
fruition with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 by the United States
Congress. In 1832, the federal government sought further land concessions in the
Cusseta Treaty. Each Creek head-of-household was promised 320 acres of land in
present-day Oklahoma. Creek leaders would receive twice as much. When that ploy
saw limited success and led to violence, President Andrew Jackson dispatched Gen-
eral Thomas Jessup to Alabama. He used military force to remove approximately
15,000 Creeks to Oklahoma.
John R. Burch, Jr.
172 C U B A
See also: Pan-Indianism; Tecumseh; Yamasee War
Further Reading
Ethridge, Robbie. 2003. Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World. Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press.
Saunt, Claudio. 1999. A New Order of T hings: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the
Creek Indians, 1733–1816. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Waselkov, Gregory A. 2006. A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
CUBA
Cuba, a large tropical island in the Caribbean Sea, occupied an important economic
and geopolitical role in the Atlantic world. Prized by the Spanish Empire for its
strategic location and agricultural output, it became a site of multiple imperial
clashes and one of the last Spanish colonies to win its independence.
Prior to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492, Cuba was home to more than
100,000 indigenous Americans. Mostly of the semisedentary Taíno p eoples, the
island’s inhabitants lived off the land and sea, cultivating yucca, maize, cotton, and
tobacco. Spain began colonizing Cuba in 1511. Six Spanish settlements dotted the
island’s coast by 1515, including Havana and Santiago de Cuba. Conquistadors bru-
tally suppressed native resistance and compelled most survivors to work u nder
the Spanish forced-labor system of repartimiento. The native population died off
rapidly due to overwork, malnutrition, disease, and suicide. Spanish authorities
responded by importing more African slaves. Few Spanish w omen immigrated to
the island during the colony’s first two centuries, leading to a considerable degree
of sexual relations between white Spanish men and women of color. Cuba conse-
quently developed a rich culture with strong African and indigenous roots.
Because of the island’s location at the junction of the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of
Mexico, and the Car ibbean Sea, Cuba became the key point from which to launch
and sustain further Spanish exploration and settlement of the Americas. European
powers attacked Cuba repeatedly in the 1500s and 1600s to undermine Spanish
control of the Car ibbean. Periodic attack resulted in the military and infrastruc-
tural buildup of the western half of the island. Spanish authorities moved the
capital and seat of colonial administration from the eastern town of Santiago to
Havana in 1607. Spanish neglect of the east, however, spurred large-scale illegal
trade between eastern colonists and other European powers, marking the begin-
ning of enduring socioeconomic and cultural differences between Western and
Eastern Cuba.
After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the victorious Bourbon
dynasty proceeded to reform the Spanish Empire. Recognizing the economic poten-
tial of Cuba, Spanish authorities raised taxes and created state-sponsored monopolies
over tobacco and other exports to maximize Spanish revenues. These new policies
limited Cuban earnings, forcing farmers to sell their crops solely to Spain at fixed
prices. The Bourbons also sent more officials to streamline colonial administration,
CUBA 173
by restricting space in local government for Cuban-born men. Such reforms resulted
in further increases in illegal trade, as well as the beginning of Cuban opposition
to Spanish imperial policy.
In 1762, near the end of the Seven Years’ War, the British captured and occu-
pied Havana for 10 months. They instituted f ree trade between Western Cuba and
the British Empire. British merchants introduced quality manufactures, consumer
goods, and modern sugar machinery. Perhaps most significantly, free trade with
the British permitted Cubans to import a much greater number of African slaves
than previously possible. Western Cuba saw general prosperity during the occu-
pation and discovered the extent of British American demand for exports such as
sugar and tobacco.
By the time Havana returned to Spanish control in 1763, Spain had embraced
some liberal reforms. It lowered Cuba’s taxes, sanctioned unlimited trade in slaves,
and allowed the island to engage with markets outside of the empire, causing rapid
expansion of its sugar industry.
Both Cuba’s population and economy grew in the decades following trade lib-
eralization. More sugar production necessitated greater numbers of slaves, whose
arrival further expanded sugar production. But the more sugar Cuba planted for
export, the more goods needed to be imported to sustain the country. Before long,
the island became dependent on Spanish merchants who controlled flows of capital
and imports. By the mid-1800s, the United States had become Cuba’s largest
trading partner, but Spanish merchants and trade policies continued to limit Cuban
profits.
Unlike mainland Spanish America, Cuba did not wage a war of independence
in the first half of the 1800s. Sugar production had become dependent on slavery,
and most large planters and slaveholders preferred the military security of Span-
ish colonialism to potential unrest from below. They feared the slave uprisings that
occurred repeatedly since colonization of the island. By the 1860s, however, sugar
planters had mobilized new sources of labor, such as indentured Chinese and Euro
pean migrants, and conservative advocates of colonial reform thought they could
manage the abolition of slavery gradually. Spain rejected calls for reform though,
and launched a political crackdown in Cuba.
In 1868, a revolt broke out in Eastern Cuba. Ushering in the Ten Years’ War
(1868–1878), economically frustrated eastern planters declared independence and
tried unsuccessfully to spread their movement into the west. While the rebels lost,
both sides in the conflict used abolition as a political tool to shore up support from
people of color. Little support remained for preserving slavery after the war—it
was abolished in 1886.
The insurgents had severely disrupted sugar production. Along with growing
competition in the global sugar market, the war threw Cuba into economic chaos,
leading U.S. companies and other foreign interests to acquire foreclosed Cuban
properties. As sugar production recovered in the early 1890s, Cuba’s economy
became increasingly integrated into and dependent on that of the United States.
By 1895, a new independence movement had coalesced around notions of Cuban
nationhood, self-determination, and social justice. Inspired and s haped by the
174 C U B A
revolutionary journalist and poet José Martí (1853–1895), the movement success-
fully spread throughout the island. War gripped Cuba for three bloody and devas-
tating years, as both the Cuban rebels and the Spanish destroyed each other’s
agricultural bases of support. When it seemed that the rebels had the upper hand,
the United States intervened militarily against Spain. It did so to assert political
control over the island. Spain gave up its claim to Cuba on August 12, 1898. The
following year the United States began an armed occupation of the island and over-
saw its political and social reorganization, empowering conservative elements in
government and forestalling many of the social and economic reforms that Cubans
had fought for in the war.
Charles Grand
See also: Bourbon Reforms; Seven Years’ War; Slave Rebellion; Slavery; Sugar;
Taínos
Further Reading
Pérez, Louis A., Jr. 1998. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Histo-
riography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Pérez, Louis A., Jr. 2006. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Scott, Rebecca J. 2000. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free L abor, 1865–1899.
2nd ed. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
D
DAMPIER, WILLIAM (ca. 1651–1715)
William Dampier was an important British explorer, sailor, writer, naturalist, and
the first person to describe the western coast of Australia and the natural life of the
Galapagos Islands. He was also the first person to circumnavigate the world three
times. He was known for his writings about his journeys, which w ere very popular
with the general public, and Dampier’s accounts to the Galapagos Islands were car-
ried by Charles Darwin (1809–1882) on his journey to the Galapagos in the nine-
teenth c entury. His most famous book, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), led
to many of Dampier’s later travels being paid for by the British admiralty. He died
of unknown c auses in 1715.
William Dampier was baptized
on September 5, 1651, in East
Coker, Somersetshire, England.
Very little is known about his
early life, including his exact date
of birth. Evidence suggests that
Dampier was fortunate to receive
a modest education in Latin and
arithmetic. A fter the early deaths
of his parents before he was 15
years old, Dampier was appren-
ticed to a shipmaster where he
began his life at sea in 1666.
Beginning with two short voy-
ages, Dampier first went to France
and then across the Atlantic
Ocean to Newfoundland. In
1670, Dampier made his first
voyage to Java in the East Indies
by way of the Cape of Good Hope;
this trip sparked his desire to
continue his career as a sailor and
explorer.
His return to England in 1672 Portrait of William Dampier, the sea captain,
coincided with the beginning naturalist, explorer, and rumored-to-be pirate, ca.
of the Third Anglo-Dutch War 1697–1698. He is the author of A New Voyage
(1672–1674), and the 21-year-old Round the World (1697).
176 DA M PIE R , W ILLIA M
Dampier joined the English Royal Navy. A fter the English won the war, Dampier
sailed to Jamaica for the first time. While there, he sailed around the Gulf of
Mexico, where he began his observations about local flora and fauna, such as por-
cupines, black-footed booby birds, sloths, spider monkeys, and turtles. Dampier
pioneered the science of descriptive zoology with his notes about new species
included in his book.
Dampier joined a group of buccaneers out of economic desperation in 1676. Of
his time with the buccaneers, Dampier would write that he was “ ‘with them,’ not
‘of them’ ” (Preston 2004, 44). This career choice led to Dampier being labeled a
pirate later in his life by his enemies. Dampier accompanied the buccaneers on raids
for several years around the Car ibbean Sea, along the coast of South America, and
as far north as the colony of Virginia, eventually traveling overland on foot with the
pirates across the Isthmus of Panama. He also rounded Cape Horn for the first
time during these years and went to the Galápagos Islands, where he described
the plentiful quantities of native tortoises and their culinary applications. Dampi-
er’s descriptions of the Galápagos Islands’ flora and fauna w ere the first recorded.
From here, Dampier and the buccaneers, led by Captain William Swan (d. 1690)
of the privateer vessel Cygnet, sailed west across the Pacific Ocean where they called
at ports on Guam and Mindanao.
On Guam, Dampier was the first to describe the breadfruit tree and its fruit.
Dampier’s description of the tree and its produce led to the ill-fated mission of Lieu-
tenant William Bligh (1754–1817) of the HMS Bounty in 1789. Sent to secure the
trees for slaves’ rations on plantations in the Caribbean, the sailors mutinied b ecause
of Bligh’s poor treatment of the sailors under his command. Dampier returned to
England in 1691 by way of the Cape of Good Hope, completing his first world cir-
cumnavigation. Dampier’s journals formed the basis of what became his best-
selling travel book, A New Voyage Round the World, printed in 1697. This book
contained his descriptions, observations, and notations about the various flora,
fauna, meteorological events, people, and geographical locations that Dampier saw
on his journey.
On the strength of his writings, as well as their popularity, the British Admi-
ralty decided to fund Dampier with a commission from King William III. In 1699,
he set sail in the HMS Roebuck, a 26 gun warship, with directions to scout the
Galápagos Tortoises
Based on observations made during his 1676 voyage to the islands, explorer
and naturalist William Dampier wrote the following description of the Galá-
pagos tortoises: “The Land turtle are here so numerous that 5 or 600 men
might subsist on them alone for several months, without any other sort of
Provision: They are extraordinary large and fat; and so sweet.”
Source: William Dampier. 1699. A New Voyage Round the World. London: J. Knap-
ton, 1699, 1:101–102.
DA R W IN , C HA R LES 177
eastern coast of the Dutch colony of New Holland, now known as Australia, and
explore the Pacific Ocean along the way. Dampier sailed into what he named
Shark Bay in Western Australia in August 1699, and travelled along the northwest
coast of the continent, where he took extensive observations. The trip was largely
unsuccessful b ecause the Roebuck never visited the east coast of Australia, and the
ship was eventually scuttled on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. Dampier
wrote a second book based off of his notes, A Voyage to New Holland, in 1703;
though not as popular as his first, Dampier’s second book contained the first
recorded observations about Australia.
Upon his return to E ngland in 1701, Dampier was court-martialed by the Admi-
ralty on three counts of cruelty towards his crew; he was found guilty of two. This
guilty verdict caused him to lose his commission with the Royal Navy, along with
all of his pay.
After Dampier’s conviction, he sailed as an English privateer during the War of
the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), during which he completed his second global
circumnavigation. This trip is notable for the marooning of several of his sailors in
1704, among them Alexander Selkirk (1676–1721), for complaining about the sea-
worthiness of the ships Dampier commanded. Selkirk was one of the inspirations
behind Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) Robinson Crusoe (1719).
Dampier was among the crew that later rescued Selkirk in 1709, while he was
completing his third circumnavigation with another privateer crew. This cruise
resulted in the taking of a g reat number of prizes, though this did not make Damp-
ier’s fortunes. When Dampier died in London a few years later in 1715, his estate
owed £2,000 in debts.
Tarah L. Luke
See also: Books; European Exploration; Privateering
Further Reading
Marchant, Leslie R. 1988. An Island unto Itself: William Dampier and New Holland. Victoria
Park, WA: Hesperian Press.
Preston, Diana, and Michael Preston. 2004. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William
Dampier. New York: Walker & Company.
DARWIN, CHARLES (1809–1882)

English naturalist, geologist, and explorer Charles Darwin is famous for his con-
tribution to the general theory of evolution that often bears his name. In 1859, based
on a hypothesis about the historical development of organic world, his On the Ori-
gin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life put forward the concept of natural selection, which he defined as
the basic mechanism of evolution. He suggested that the natural selection was real-
ized through the struggle for existence with the help of selective breeding.
Darwin’s theory emerged from his five-year voyage (1831–1836) aboard the HMS
Beagle as a self-funded supernumerary naturalist. The expedition visited islands
178 DA R W IN , C HA R LES
such as the Cape Verde Islands, Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago, and the
volcanic island Fernando de Noronha, before arriving in South America. The Bea
gle traveled around South America between 1832 and 1835, and Darwin conducted
detailed investigations of lands in modern Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Dar-
win devoted his time to investigating geology as well as birds and animals, includ-
ing marine life. He composed collections and described the morphology and
anatomy of animals and marine invertebrates, many of which w ere introduced to
the scientific community for the first time. He regularly sent his scientific notes,
collections, and diary fragments to England.
Darwin made path breaking contributions to the study of the natural world of
South America, especially in his work on Atlantic flora and fauna. Darwin pro-
vided the first detailed description of the morphology and peculiarities of behavior
of many local species, such as the octopus of the Cape Verde Islands; the porcu-
pine fish of Bahia, Brazil; “marine chips” or green algae, of the Abrolhos Islands;
tree frogs, insects, particularly,
fireflies, and marine life such as
the jellyfish of Botafogo Bay, near
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; beetles,
butterflies, spiders, and larvae of
the Gavia Mountain in Brazil;
and several local species of algae
and crustaceans at the mouth of
the Rio Negro in Brazil. He also
discovered several species of salt-
and freshwater mollusks and col-
lected local forest insects from
Cape Frio near Rio de Janeiro.
In Uruguay, Darwin compiled
a collection of mammals, birds,
and reptiles, discovering new
species such as the Pterocnemia
pennata, (called Darwin’s Rhea
in his honor). Darwin also found
dolphins, described local deer,
and identified a series of rodents,
including the world’s largest
rodent, the capybara. While rid-
ing horses with gaucho Indians
on the way to Buenos Aires, Dar-
Naturalist Charles Darwin as an older man.
win observed rare species of gua-
Between 1831 and 1836 Darwin embarked on naco, agouti, and owls. Guanaco,
a voyage around South Americ a aboard the HMS local birds and reptiles were sub-
Beagle. His observations of animal life l ater ject of comparative description
formed the basis for his theory of natur al also during his travel through
selection. (Library of Congress) Uruguay and Argentina. On his
DA R W IN , C HA R LES 179
way through the pampas he described the peculiar local rodent viscachas, a rela-
tive of the chinchilla. In the Falkland Islands, Darwin described animals such as
the Falkland wolf, southern crested caracara, and penguins. He also made very
interesting notes about survival of wild horses brought to the island a century before
by French colonists.
Darwin paid special attention to the fossilized remains of local animals. In
Bahada, where he crossed the Parana River, he excavated two giant fossil animals.
He also found giant fossils during his trip through Uruguay, where he described a
local rare bull nyatta, which he believed to be similar to the extinct Sivatherium.
Darwin later discussed the origin and peculiarities of this animal in his Origin of
Species.
In the field of geology, Darwin paid attention to the coral reefs near Saint Peter
and Saint Paul Archipelago in the central equatorial region of the Atlantic Ocean,
and proposed an original theory of coral reef genesis. He also investigated saltwa-
ter lakes (“salines”) in the Rio Negro in Argentina, and refined a description of the
Syenite rocks near Bahia, Brazil. During the trip from La Plata to Buenos Aires,
Darwin investigated tectonic sections with numerous fossil species, most of which
were unknown. These findings w ere especially important b ecause contemporary
mollusks were traced in the same layer, which implied that extinction had not been
associated with any catastrophic event in geology or climate.
Darwin’s also recorded his observations of the social and cultural anthropology
of native populations. In February 1832, the expedition reached Tierra del Fuego,
where they met Yaghan natives. On a previous voyage, the Beagle’s captain had
taken three natives to England, where they w ere educated for a year so they could
become missionaries. They were now returned to their homeland. Darwin was
impressed by the difference of t hese aborigines from their local congeners: he com-
pared it with the difference between domestic and wild animals. Darwin sug-
gested that this difference was caused by cultural changes these people w ere
introduced to in England. In this way he deviated from the prevailing belief of the
time that aborigines w ere racially inferior.
Darwin published the results of his expedition in a series of works: The Journal
of a Naturalist (1839), Zoology of the Voyage on the Beagle (1840), and The Structure
and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842). T hese works traditionally are regarded as the
basic sources for studies of Darwinism, and the materialistic theory of evolution
of the organic world. This theory was also influenced by studies of British geolo-
gist Charles Lyell, who proposed an original explanation of the geological evolu-
tion of the Earth.
In contrast to the hypotheses of other early evolutionists, Darwinian theory took
into account species and intraspecific groups. It was the fundamental reason for
the conceptualization of intraspecific competition and the struggle for survival as
basic routes of evolution. He suggested that they w ere driven by natural selection,
realized in the form of sexual selection and resulted from the natural selection of
further genetic variation.
Subsequent research revealed imperfections in Darwin’s arguments, particularly
in its explanation of mechanisms of heredity, evolutionary implication of genetic
180 DE C LA R ATION OF INDEPENDEN C E
The Diversity of Life

Charles Darwin was fascinated by the diversity of life he observed on his
voyage. He marveled at how so many distinct species of related animals
could inhabit one place, and he wondered if perhaps they shared a com-
mon ancestor, becoming adapted to the environment over time. Islands off
the Pacific coast of South America, such as the Galapagos Islands, led Dar-
win to ask how the animal life he saw was related to the animals on the
mainland. In a passage from On the Origin of Species (1859), he wrote:
“The naturalist, looking at the inhabitants of these volcanic islands in the
Pacific, distant several hundred miles from the continent, yet feels that he is
standing on American land. Why should this be so? Why should the species
which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and
nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America? . . .
I believe this g rand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary
view of independent creation; whereas on the view here maintained, it is
obvious that the Galapagos Islands would be likely to receive colonists,
whether by occasional means of transport or by formerly continuous land,
from America; . . . and that such colonists would be liable to modification;—
the principle of inheritance still betraying their original birthplace.”
Source: Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859, 322.
variations, and the essence and structure of biological genus. Nevertheless, the Dar-
winian understanding of evolution and natural selection were exclusively important
milestones in the history of scientific thought of the second half of the nineteenth
century. It provoked intensive theoretic discussions and extensive fieldwork and
empiric studies which contributed greatly to the overall development of the con
temporary understanding of our planet; its past and present life.
Olena Smyntyna
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Brazil; Humboldt, Alexander von
Further Reading
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore. 1991. Darwin. London: Penguin.
Keynes, R.D., ed. 2001. Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
D E C L A R AT I O N O F I ND EP E ND E N C E ( 1 7 7 6 )

The Second Continental Congress, a body representing 13 colonies of the British
Empire in North America, adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776,
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was the culmination of a decade of deteriorating
DE C LA R ATION OF INDEPENDEN C E 181
relations with Great Britain that led to the creation of the United States of Amer
ica. Since its issuance, the American Declaration of Independence has been a source
and model for subsequent revolutions and for holding governments accountable
in protecting the rights of their citizenry in the Atlantic world.
The Declaration provided a justification for the actions of the 13 British colonies
seeking independence from G reat Britain. The original British colonies of main-
land North America moved toward independence slowly and reluctantly. Proud
of being British, most colonists had no desire to separate from the Crown. Even
after war broke out at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775,
no calls for independence arose. The Continental Congress petitioned the king for
redress and reconciliation in July of that year.
In the following months, the publication of Common Sense (1776), by Thomas
Paine, coincided with the king’s proclaiming the colonists to be in open rebellion.
Parliament’s enactment of the Prohibitory Act (December 1775), declaring colonial
ships and cargo forfeit to the Crown, and the Crown’s hiring of German merce-
naries to subdue the Americans gave credence to Paine’s argument for immediate
American independence from Great Britain. Paine argued that American freedom
would be secure only after declaring independence from monarchial and heredi-
tary rule and founding a government whose authority was rooted solely in the
people. Common Sense encouraged public debate on w hether to separate from the
mother country, a previously taboo topic.
Opinion throughout the colonies changed rapidly in favor of independence. In
May 1776, Congress passed resolutions, written by John Adams of Massachusetts, to
suppress every vestige of royal authority in the colonies and to create new state gov-
ernments in which the people would hold sovereign authority. Soon after, Virginia
delegate Richard Henry Lee, acting on instructions from Virginia’s legislature, intro-
duced a resolution declaring the “United Colonies” as “free and independent States”
and absolving the new states “from all allegiance to the British Crown.” Congress
delayed action on the resolution u ntil July. (Armitage, 2007, 170). It could not claim
the colonies united u ntil delegates from four other colonies received instructions
to support independence.
In the meantime, Congress appointed a five-member committee to draft a dec-
laration on independence. Although Thomas Jefferson was the principal author,
drafting the Declaration was a collaborative effort, involving fellow committee
members John Adams, Roger Sherman (Connecticut), Robert R. Livingston (New
York), and Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania). Congress would also play an active
role revising Jefferson’s work. A fter an organizational structure had been agreed
on, Jefferson drew ideas from natural law philosophy, the British Whig revolution-
ary tradition, and the Scottish Enlightenment. In his effort to create a consensus
among other states to support the American cause, Jefferson framed the Declara-
tion’s rhetoric within conventional wisdom of the day.
Jefferson emulated similar documents, including some he had penned or con-
tributed to. George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) influenced Jef-
ferson significantly. For the preamble and the list of grievances, he referred to the
British Declaration of Rights (1689) and his own draft of the V irginia Constitution
(1776). For the second paragraph, he was inspired principally by John Locke’s Two
Treatises of Government (1690).
After members of the committee made a few stylistic changes, Jefferson’s draft
was submitted to the Congress on June 28. Lee’s resolution was a dopted by a com-
mittee of the whole on July 2. Congress, again as a committee of the whole, debated
Jefferson’s draft. It made some stylistic changes in the preamble and deleted a
lengthy grievance regarding slavery in a section cataloging a lengthy list of injus-
tices leveled directly and personally against the Crown. The Declaration was
adopted July 4.
The original function of the Declaration was political and revolutionary. By
declaring the independence of 13 united colonies to form a new country, the United
States, the Continental Congress was formerly declaring the formation of new states.
The Declaration marked the entry of the new United States into international soci-
ety, a term then non-existent in diplomatic jargon. Seeking affirmation of the new
country’s legitimacy, Jefferson and his fellow committeemen framed the Declara-
tion’s diplomatic and legal language to make it acceptable to European powers. The
language reflected a range of concerns about security, defense, commerce, and
immigration. It indicated that conceptions of political community w ere changing
in the Atlantic world. The Declaration facilitated the change by expanding the com-
munity’s boundaries westward into North America and by liberating American
commerce from the legal strictures of the British Empire so that it could operate in
a wider world.
Recognition of the new “United States of America” as a legitimate state among
the family of sovereign states eventually depended on three conditions: indepen
dence, statehood, and recognition. In issuing the Declaration, the intent of Rich-
ard Henry Lee, the state declarations, and the drafting committee of the Continental
Congress was to equip the rebellious colonies with political and legal legitimacy
to enter into diplomatic and commercial alliances with the “Powers of the Earth.”
(Armitage, 2007, 165). Although the treaty of alliance with France partially answered
the recognition issue, it did not provide total confirmation. It allowed the United
States to enter formally into the international system, its independence treated as
a positive, albeit contested, international fact. It was not u ntil Great Britain, as
the metropolitan government, had conceded independence by the Treaty of Paris
of 1783 that the United States achieved full status as a legitimate independent
state.
Before 1776, no document had ever been called a declaration of independence. The
political environment was rapidly changing in the late eighteenth century. Theories
about the legal recognition of new states were in flux. The ideas, the arguments,
and the theories presented by the Declaration were in part responsible for pro-
voking the international community into responding to the reality that new
states would be joining the family of nations as a result of rebellion against their
metropolitan governments. The Declaration claimed that the United States, by vir-
tue of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” (Armitage, 2007, 165) w ere enti-
tled to their independence, which exponents of natural law, such as Emer de Vattel
(1714–1767) in The Law of Nations (1758) had argued. The central question was:
DE C LA R ATION OF INDEPENDEN C E 183
By what means did new states acquire the right, if they had never before gained it,
to existence, independence, and equality?
When Great Britain recognized American independence, it confirmed what the
Declaration had asserted in 1776: that the United States were de jure, rather than
just de facto, independent and sovereign states. The Declaration’s status changed
beyond the new country’s borders. It was incorporated into the modern positive
law of nations, and the significance of the opening and closing paragraphs became
quickly irrelevant. Because American independence was acknowledged in inter-
national politics, international law saw little need for consulting the charter that
originally asserted independence.
The exclusive world of states that the United States entered with their Declara-
tion of Independence was inhabited by empires, which included the g reat territo-
rial areas of Eurasia as well as the European maritime empires that projected their
power around the globe. The new states that were formed in the Atlantic theater after
1776 came from the empires that would control the international order for another
200 years. The new Atlantic countries that used the Declaration as a model, declared
their independence during the familiarly termed Age of Revolutions, which encom-
passed France, Haiti, Spanish and Portuguese America, and West Africa.
A fter the American Revolution, the desire for sovereignty by colonies of Euro
pean states spread rapidly; first to the Low Countries and then to the Car ib
bean, Spanish America, Europe, and West Africa. The American influence was
noticeable in the first wave of declarations of independence issued. This debt to the
American example was more prevalent than it would be in the twentieth century
perhaps b ecause the American Revolution remained a vivid contemporary
memory.
Most declarations following American independence alluded to the Declaration
by taking its opening and closing sentences as their blueprint, while disregarding
the second paragraph’s declaration of rights. Like the first Declaration, the suc-
ceeding declarations made by new states in the Atlantic world (such as Venezuela,
Mexico, and Colombia) equated external sovereignty with independence. The
Americans’ successful claim to independence as a means to escape the bonds of
empire and as the mark of sovereignty encouraged o thers to follow their course.
In North America, other declarations of independence in the 1830s and 1840s
used the Declaration as the generic model. The Republic of Texas’s declaration of
independence from the Mexican Empire in 1836 had the unique distinction of one
people successfully seceding from another who had previously declared its inde
pendence, as Mexico had done in 1821.
The first African country to declare its independence paralleled the American
Declaration in structure and sentiment. Liberia’s declaration in 1847 was drafted
by Hilary Teague, a Virginia born African American journalist and politician. It
differed from the other countries who were declaring their sovereignty from met-
ropolitan governments. Liberia was announcing to the world a fait accompli. In its
manifesto, it explained the circumstances by which the American Colonization
Society had withdrawn its oversight and left the p eople of Liberia to govern them-
selves. Thus, they were entitled to be recognized as a sovereign state.
Once independence had become an uncontested fact for the United States and
for t hose countries in the Atlantic world who achieved independence through the
inspiration of the Declaration’s assertions of independent statehood, the first and
last paragraphs had accomplished their goal and Americans virtually forgot the doc-
ument a generation after the war. Not until after the War of 1812, after the bitter
partisan strife had faded between the Federalists, who were Anglophiles, and the
Jeffersonian Republicans, who sympathized with the French, was the Declaration
celebrated across parties as a national icon. Between 1789 and 1815, political activ-
ists viewed the Declaration as a Francophile, anti-British document. Its claims to
natural rights and to a right of revolution seemed to support revolution against all
established governments.
The continuing universal appeal of the Declaration stems from the second para-
graph, which expresses the rights of individuals. It is the “all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” pas-
sage that holds states accountable by its citizens for securing and protecting their
rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” In the 1820s, the natural
rights claims surpassed the Declaration’s assertion to the right of revolution. Many
groups across the United States appealed to the assertion of individual rights in
the Declaration to advance their own par tic
u
lar claims against a range of
Declaration of Sentiments
The Declaration of Sentiments, drafted at the Seneca Falls Conference in
1848, begins: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for
one portion of the family of man to assume among the p eople of the earth a
position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to
which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect
to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that
impel them to such a course.”
Source: “Modern History Source Book: The Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls
Conference, 1848. Fordham University.” http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall /mod /sene
cafalls.asp.
This opening was almost word for word an echo of the opening of the Dec-
laration of Independence from 1776: “When in the Course of h uman events,
it becomes necessary for one p eople to dissolve the political bands which
have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the
earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of
Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind
requires that they should declare the c auses which impel them to the separa-
tion.” This similarity was no coincidence.
Source: National Archives and Records Administration. “Declaration of Indepen
dence.” https://w ww.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration.
DE C LA R ATION OF THE R I G HTS OF M AN AND OF THE C ITI Z EN 185
domestic, and sometimes foreign, autocrats and oppressors. The utopian socialist
Robert Owen in 1829, Owen follower Frances Wright in 1832, and English-born
journalist George Henry Evans, also in 1832 imitated the Declaration in their call
for rights for working men. Other countercultural groups, such as the white anti-
Catholic, anti-immigrant Native American Convention, imitated the document in
1845 to warn Americans about foreign intrusion into American political life and
society. In her Declaration of Sentiments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the
most enduring of the early nineteenth century imitations, which was adopted in
1848 at the W omen’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York.
Although Southern secessionists attempted to reverse the trend toward the asser-
tion of individual rights by insisting that the Declaration’s original purpose was the
announcement of independence, leaders like Abraham Lincoln countered that the
second paragraph was the universal, enduring message of the Declaration, appli-
cable to all h uman kind, for all time. Antislavery advocates and former slaves
Frederick Douglass and David Walker, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr., 100 years
later, challenged America to fulfill the natural rights promises made in the second
paragraph.
Glen Edward Taul
See also: Age of Revolution; American Revolution; Jefferson, Thomas; Locke, John
Further Reading
Armitage, David. 2007. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Cambridge, MA:
Maier, Pauline. 1997. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Wills, Garry. 1978. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday.
D E C L A R AT I O N O F T H E R I G H T S O F M A N
AND OF THE CITIZEN (1789)
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was an early manifesto of
the first stage of the French Revolution, which began in 1789 with the break of the
Third Estate from the meeting of the French Estates General. Often known as the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, the document was drawn from various inputs in
those later, troubled years of the eighteenth century in France u
nder the so-called
ancien régime. While tradition among some has it that the impetus for the docu-
ment came largely from the cahiers, or lists of grievances, brought from the prov-
inces by French clergy (First Estate), nobles (Second Estate), or the bourgeoisie
(Third Estate of non-noble landowners and professionals), the sources of the docu-
ment also included the radical ideas of some nobles and philosophes of the upper
classes. T hose ideas w ere a product of the Enlightenment of the prior c entury
and represent the coming of modernist thinking to French government.
As a manifesto, the Declaration’s most important contributions to the Atlantic
world are twofold. First, the document was the uniting and energizing credo for
186 DE C LA R ATION OF THE R I G HTS OF M AN AND OF THE C ITI Z EN
the early works of the National Assembly, as the Third Estate wished to be known
after it broke from the larger meeting of the Estates General and took its famous
Tennis Court Oath in June 1789. Enacting itself as the collective, revolutionary gov-
erning body of the nation, the National Assembly reached into its various compo-
nent groups to form its defining statement of principles on which to recraft the
government of France. As a result, the conservatism of the merchant bourgeoisie
appears in parts of the text, while the ideals of liberty and security from oppres-
sion may be linked directly with philosophical constructs of natural laws champi-
oned by the French Enlightenment. It is a deceptively simple document made up
of an opening statement (the declaration itself) and 17 articles that enhance the
declaration’s overarching themes. The rallying cry of the early phases of the French
Revolution, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, credited by some historians to a Decem-
ber 1790 speech by revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794),
carry forward the basic elements of the Declaration. Such uses of the concepts of
the Declaration would continue throughout the first and second phases of the rev-
olution and into nineteenth-century French society, as well as to other locales in
the French colonial world and beyond.
The Declaration’s influence beyond France is its second contribution as a mani-
festo of revolutionary thinking. During and after the early years of the French revolt
against Louis XVI and his government, France’s colonies embraced the struggle
for the ideals of the Declaration in terms unique to the colonial context. In Saint-
Domingue, later to be renamed Haiti a fter its struggle for independence, French
A Rousing Preamble
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was a straightforward
document. Just over 800 words long, it was easily disseminated and under-
stood by the French people. The declaring begins with the following state-
ment of its simple but dramatic purpose:
“The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assem-
bly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are
the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments,
have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable,
and sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being constantly
before all the members of the Social body, s hall remind them continually of
their rights and duties; in order that the acts of the legislative power, as well as
those of the executive power, may be compared at any moment with the objects
and purposes of all political institutions and may thus be more respected,
and, lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based hereafter upon
simple and incontestable principles, s hall tend to the maintenance of the con-
stitution and redound to the happiness of all.”
Source: Avalon Project. http://avalon.law.yale.edu /18th _century/r ightsof.asp.
DE C LA R ATION OF THE R I G HTS OF M AN AND OF THE C ITI Z EN 187
planters, f ree blacks, and slaves made use of the wording of the Declaration in dif
ferent ways. Planters viewed liberty and equality in terms of the planting class of
landowners, even while having more radical views than some landowners else-
where in the Atlantic world of the time. With the American rebellion and its
results freshly in mind, some in the Car ibbean French colonies interpreted liberty
as a potential start of independence, though this was more evident among non-
property holders, and especially among the disenfranchised persons living in the
colonies. Among persons of color, free or not, ideas contained in the articles were
of particular interest, such as the second clause of Article II that expressed that
the natural rights of all men included liberty and resistance to oppression. Article
I also attracted comments and support: that all men were born and should remain
free and equal in their rights was the basis for unrest and resistance against the
colonial status quo in the years following the first revolts in Saint-Domingue and
the island of Guadeloupe in 1790 and 1791.
Given all of that influence, the document itself is relatively brief in comparison
to other manifestos and treatises from around the Atlantic coasts on the function-
ing of free societies. The final version that the National Assembly approved on
August 26, 1789, includes a preamble much like that of its precursor, the United
States Declaration of Independence of 1776, but it takes a rather different approach
than the Americans’ document. It states that the representatives of the French
people w ere organized as the National Assembly and as such that body decided to
issue a “solemn declaration [of] the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man”
to inform and remind itself as a legislative body of the rights and duties it held.
The preamble directed the National Assembly members to compare the acts of the
legislative and executive powers with the “objects and purposes of all political insti-
tutions” to ensure the respect of the people. The last part defined the Third Estate’s
responsibility to address the “grievances of the citizens” such that they might assist
in the maintenance of the constitutional operation of the government. Attending
to the grievances (from the cahiers and other sources) also would ensure the hap-
piness of all citizens. While the preamble does not define the term “citizen,” the
articles which follow provide language to do so.
Fifteen articles follow the introductory language of the declaration. In the first
three articles, Enlightenment ideals of freedom, social ordering, property, and sov-
ereignty inform the first, bold statements. The first article declares the free birth
of all men, equal in rights, and the ordering of society by distinctions only for rea-
sons of the common good. The next articles define the aim of political association
in the nation in the context of the “preservation of natural and imprescriptible
rights” of men, who enjoy the famous rights to “liberty, property, security, and resis
tance to oppression.” Sovereignty belongs to the nation, the p eople u
nder the gov-
ernment who give legitimacy to that government. The third article proscribes any
authority that does not proceed from the people as formed into the nation. After
these three articles, the next ones explain the roles of law and the citizen.
Liberty is, according to the fourth article, the “freedom to do everything which
injures no one e lse.” Natural rights may be limited only as determined by law, which
itself, according to the next articles, must bend to the defined rights, the properly
188 DE C LA R ATION OF THE R I G HTS OF M AN AND OF THE C ITI Z EN
construed authority of the nation, and the equality of all before the nation’s law.
Both arrest and punishment must follow the law in guaranteeing due respect of
the rights of the citizen, and in turn, the citizen must not resist if arrested and
held under the sovereignty of the French p eople. Likewise, the exercise of beliefs,
including religion, is not too “disquieted” for any citizen, and in the communica-
tion of such beliefs and other ideas, the citizen may be constrained only by limits
set out by the law determined by the representatives of the p eople.
The last four articles address public defense, its funding via taxes (the “com-
mon contribution”), and representation of the French people in the legislature.
The French people have the right to know how the monies of the state are spent
and how the monies might be collected, held, and for how long that authority is
granted. A twist of former Bourbon-era policy infused the last article but the
National Assembly gave it new phrasing: as before for appointees of the Crown,
the newly formed legislature guaranteed the right to “society . . . to require every
public agent to give an account of his administration.” The change h ere is that the
French people, rather than the king, exercise the right to hold public officials
accountable. In the months and years to follow, this last article would be exer-
cised in new and terrifying ways as the French Revolution evolved over several
unique phases.
One final statement closes the Declaration. Reminding the reader of the invio-
lable and sacred nature to the right to property, the National Assembly added a
clause allowing only the legal seizure of property if necessary and legally deter-
mined. If such an action occurred, the owner of said property would be properly
paid for the loss.
One important and innovative aspect during the revolution was the role women
claimed for themselves a fter 1789. W omen w ere an integral part of the blockades,
riots, and crowds in the early phases of the revolution, especially in Paris in the
early 1790s. Beyond that, revolutionary women, such as Olympe de Gouges, con-
tributed to the rhetoric of the day by expanding upon the Declaration in the inter-
ests of her sex. She wrote her Declaration of the Rights of Woman in 1791 and called
upon the National Assembly to add it to its decrees. An advocate of the abolition
of slavery also, she met her death in 1793 with the changing of the revolutionary
tide under the leadership of Robespierre. Her work was not alone: an English radi-
cal, Mary Wollstonecraft, produced her Vindication of the Rights of Woman a year
after de Gouges published, in response to revolutionary rhetoric that can be traced
to the statements of the Declaration and other sources.
Other areas of influence may be noted for the Declaration during the same
period. In Haiti, slave rebellion turned into civil war and, ultimately, indepen
dence for the island in 1804. As part of the war of propaganda between revolu-
tionary France and the other European colonial powers, most significantly G reat
Britain, other Atlantic colonies used the rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity
(or brotherhood) to justify slave revolts or new conquests of nearby colonies.
With a line of revolts in recent memory (such as the Stono Rebellion decades before),
English colonies moved to stifle new revolts and to quell intrusions by revolu-
tionaries from the Car ibbean. During this time, the propaganda circulating the
DE SOTO , HE R NANDO 189
Atlantic made varying use of the messages of the Declaration’s passages, inter-
preted repeatedly for its value to local independence movements and revolts by
the enslaved.
Known for his famous treatise, Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine wielded
much influence in the early American rebellion from Great Britain in its 13 Amer-
ican colonies. Following other thinkers of the time in admiring the early ideals of
the French Revolution, Paine moved to revolutionary France and embraced the Dec-
laration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the cause of the revolution,
writing The Rights of Man, which was published in two parts (1791 and 1792). Paine’s
later writings emphasized parts of the revolutionary regime that came under sus-
picion by the likes of Robespierre. Regardless, his intellectual output while in resi-
dence in France took the statements of the Declaration another step forward for
peoples in and outside of Europe. The Revolution itself is often seen as a product
and an endpoint for the Enlightenment in bridging the ancient regime and the early
national period of modern European and American democracies. Paine and his
cohort of later philosophes used the Declaration to make sense of the rights they
saw inherent to all peoples.
The primary statement of French ideals at the time of the nation’s first break
with the old order of kings and royal rule, the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen ranks in the top tier of documents signaling the beginning of
modern societies. Its authors intended it for the use of the landed, property-holding
classes in France, but the document’s influence reverberated throughout the Atlan-
tic world of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From French phi-
losophes to working commoners, slaves to free blacks, colonial magistrates to
indigenous p eoples, the Declaration inspired dreams of freedom and became a sym-
bol of the goals of all p
eoples who wished to live on their own terms in France and
elsewhere in the early modern world.
Jay T. Harrison
See also: Age of Revolution; Declaration of Independence; Enlightenment; French

Revolution; Haitian Revolution
Further Reading
Curtin, Philip D. 1950. “The Declaration of the Rights of Man in Saint-Domingue, 1788–1791.”
The Hispanic American Historical Review. 30: 157–175.
Doyle, William. 1980. Origins of the French Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hunt, Lynn Avery, ed. 1996. The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary
History. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press.
DE SOTO, HERNANDO (ca. 1496–1542)

One of the ruthless Spanish conquistadores who plundered Native American civili-
zations in Central and South America during the sixteenth c entury, Hernando de
Soto was born around 1496 in Jerez de los Caballeros, Spain. He attended the Uni-
versity of Salamanca and as a young man became fascinated with tales of the
190 DE SOTO , HE R NANDO
expanding Spanish Empire in the New World. He entered military serv ice and in
1514 accompanied Pedro Arias Dávila on his first expedition to the Americas. De
Soto established himself as a tough and loyal soldier who was also politically astute.
He took part in the conquest of Panama, Nicaragua, and later Honduras. He grew
rich from slave trading as well as from his share of the gold and silver that the
Spanish accumulated from the indigenous population. A member of the govern-
ing council in Nicaragua, de Soto eventually outfitted his own militia and joined
the command of Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541) on the eve of Pizarro’s famous con-
quest of the Inca in Peru. Pizarro made de Soto one of his chief lieutenants and de
Soto played an active role in the Battle of Cajamarca (1532), during which the Span-
ish captured the Inca ruler Atahualpa. De Soto was appointed lieutenant governor
of the city of Cuzco and helped Pizarro found the capital at Lima. Afterwards, he
returned to Spain with enough gold to establish himself in Spanish society. He
married the d aughter of his former commander Dávila, who was distantly related
to Queen Isabella, and gained admittance to the elite Order of Santiago.
While he could have remained in Spain and lived well for the rest of his life on
the wealth accumulated from his travels in the Americas, de Soto eventually grew
restless. After complicated nego-
tiations with the Spanish Crown,
he was appointed governor of
Cuba and given the rights to
explore what would become the
southeastern United States on
the North American mainland.
Using his previous forays into
Central and South America as a
blueprint, de Soto hoped to take
an army into the region, conquer
the indigenous population, and
haul away as much gold and sil-
ver as possible. He assembled 10
ships and recruited more than
600 men and on April 6, 1538,
he left Spain bound for Cuba, the
staging area for the North Ameri-
can expedition. The following
year, de Soto and his men left
Havana and made landfall near
what is now Tampa Bay. Travel-
An eighteenth-century engraving celebrating the
ing north, they encountered hos-
exploits of Hernando de Soto. Although he cut tile Indians and were constantly
a swath of destruction through the American under threat of ambush. In late
southeast, his failure to find gold led Spain to 1539, they established their first
focus its energies to the south. (New York Public winter camp at Anhaica, a Native
Library) American village near pres ent
DE SOTO , HE R NANDO 191
day Tallahassee, Florida. In search of gold and anything else of value, de Soto and
his men moved farther north into Georgia in the spring of 1540, and eventually
wandered through the Carolinas and Tennessee. Due to their practice of taking
Native American captives wherever they went, and their general disdain for the
Indian population, the Spanish were constantly at war with the native tribes
they encountered.
Frustrated a fter finding no mineral wealth among the tribes, de Soto and his
men turned south and, after some months, reached the vicinity of what is now
central Alabama. T here, at the B
attle of Mabila (1540), de Soto’s men killed more
than 2,000 Native Americans u nder the leadership of Chief Tuskaloosa, but lost at
least one third of their own men in the process. The expedition then limped west-
ward into Mississippi where they continued to wage war against the native popu-
lation, most notably members of the Chickasaw tribe, who eventually drove the
Spanish from the area. In May of 1541, de Soto and his men reached the Missis-
sippi River near present day Memphis, Tennessee, giving rise to the later claim that
de Soto discovered the river, although at least two other Spanish explorers had seen
it before. A
fter about a month, the Spanish crossed the Mississippi into Arkansas
and then Louisiana where they continued to search for precious metals as they
abused the native populations. They had a particularly bloody encounter with
members of the Tula tribe near present day Fort Smith, Arkansas, and in late 1541,
went into winter camp near what is now the Washita River.
The following spring, the expedition made its way back to the Mississippi, where
de Soto fell ill with a fever. According to most sources, he died on May 21, 1542.
Luis de Moscoso de Alvarado, de Soto’s handpicked successor, led the remainder
of the expedition. Desperate for supplies, the men made their way down the Mis-
sissippi to its mouth during the summer of 1543, and from there went to Mexico.
Of the original group who made landfall at Tampa Bay, only 311 survived.
Though traditionally credited with discovering the Mississippi River for the
Europeans, de Soto’s true legacy was geopolitical in nature. In part, because he
reported no vast supply of gold and silver in what would become the southeastern
United States, the Spanish kept their focus on Mexico and the American southwest,
Burial of Hernando De Soto

De Soto died in May 1542, while his expedition was moving back toward
the Mississippi River, and a fter the expedition had endured several violent
encounters with native groups in the previous year. In hopes of keeping the
local native tribes at bay, de Soto had tried to give them the impression that as
a Christian he was immortal and therefore possessed special powers. His
men feared that if the Indians saw their commander’s body and realized that
he was actually dead, it might lead to further violent confrontations. As a
result, they hollowed out a log, placed de Soto’s body in it, weighted it down,
and buried him in the river.
192 D Í A Z DEL C ASTILLO , B E R NAL
confining themselves on the eastern seaboard to what would become the state of
Florida. The expedition also set the tone for hostile relations between Europeans
and Native American tribes for years to come and introduced into the indige-
nous population a deadly array of diseases to which the Indians had no natural
immunity.
Ben Wynne
See also: Chickasaws; Conquistadors; European Exploration
Further Reading
Calloway, Colin G. 1998. New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early
America. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Duncan, David Ewing. 1997. Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas. Norman:
Hudson, Charles. 1998. Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s
Ancient Chiefdoms. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO, BERNAL

(ca. 1490s–1584)
Bernal Díaz del Castillo participated in the conquest of the Aztec Empire, under
the leadership of Hernán Cortés, between 1519 and 1521. He wrote an account of
the expedition, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (True Account
of the Conquest of New Spain), in response to a book published by Francisco López
de Gómara (1511–1566) that glorified Cortés and downplayed the role of the other
Spanish expeditionaries. Díaz emphasized the collective nature of the conquest,
although he did acknowledge Cortés’s skill as leader. His account is a critical source
of information on the Aztecs at the time of European contact, and it contains details
about other critical figures in the conquest, such as Doña Marina (also known as
Malinche) and other Spanish conquerors.
Díaz was born in the 1490s in Medina del Campo, Valladolid, Spain. Like others
in similarly impoverished circumstances, he went to the New World to seek better
opportunities. He participated in expeditions to Panama (1514), the Yucatan (1517),
and the Juan de Grijalva expedition to Mexico (1518). A fter Grijalva’s failure, he
enlisted in the expedition to Mexico from 1519 to 1521 led by Cortés that resulted
in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Díaz also participated in the Cortés
expedition to Honduras from 1524 to 1526.
As a member of the victorious expedition, Díaz received several encomienda
grants in Mexico. He lost some of these due to ongoing political struggles between
the viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, and Cortés. Díaz wrote a probanza de mérito (proof
of merit) in 1538 to press his case for compensation for the lost encomiendas as
well as to seek further rewards from the government, supported by eyewitness
statements from other expeditionaries. The viceroy suggested that he plead his case
directly to the Council of the Indies and the king. Mendoza also wrote a letter of
support for his petition, as did Cortés. Díaz arrived in Spain in 1540.
D Í A Z DEL C ASTILLO , B E R NAL 193
The Council of the Indies affirmed his status as one of the conquerors of Mex-
ico, and ordered compensation for his lost encomiendas. It was perhaps while in
Spain that Díaz read the letters of Cortés to the king, which had been published
in the 1520s. It is likely that the letters infuriated Díaz b ecause Cortés did not
acknowledge the contributions of other expeditionaries.
Díaz returned to the Americas in 1541. He settled his affairs in Mexico and
moved to Guatemala. The governor there recognized his serv ices and rewarded
him with three encomiendas. Díaz also was made a member of the cabildo, or town
council, of Guatemala’s capital city, Santiago de los Caballeros (modern-day Anti-
gua, Guatemala). He returned to Spain in 1548, on behalf of the cabildo, to pro-
test the reforms demanded u nder the 1542 New Laws of the Indies.
Sometime a fter his return to Guatemala in 1550, Díaz started work on his his-
tory of the conquest. He laid it aside a fter completing several chapters, not resum-
ing it until 1564 after reading Gómara’s history of New Spain. Díaz was incensed
at Gómara for emphasizing the exploits of Cortés and ignoring the other Spanish
participants of the conquest, but also b ecause Gómara was not an eyewitness to
the events he recounted. Díaz intended his work to serve as corrective for the biases
and gaps he found in Gómara. He completed a draft of the work around 1568, and
revised it u ntil 1575.
Díaz gave the revised manuscript to the president of the colony’s Audiencia, who
forwarded it to the king in 1575. In Spain, it was filed away by the Council of the
Indies and languished for decades. Other historians used parts of the history in
their own work a fter 1600 but the entirety of Díaz’s history was not published u ntil
1623, long after his death in Guatemala in 1584.
Diaz’s work has since become one of the most important accounts of the con-
quest of the Aztecs, and all subsequent histories have drawn heavily from it. Díaz
focused primarily on military aspects of the expedition, but his narrative contains
vital information not included in other sources. Cortés’s letters, for example, men-
tion but do not name Doña Marina/Malinche, who played a critical role as trans-
lator. Diaz recorded information about Tenochtitlán, such as details of its
architecture, enormous marketplace, and lavish gardens, which would otherw ise
be little known since the Spanish destroyed much of the city in the course of the
siege. He also gave extensive information on Moctezuma II, whom he guarded after
the Spanish seized him.
Like other European histories of the conquest written at the time, it scarcely
credits the crucial role that Indians (such as the Tlaxcalans) played in the con-
quest. Díaz notes the defection of Aztec tributary cities to the Spanish side, but he
barely mentions the many thousands of native allies who helped defeat Tenochti-
tlán. Even with its problems, his work serves as an important and unique source
for historians, ethnographers, and archaeologists, not only for the events of the con-
quest but also for understanding precontact era central Mexico.
Dennis J. Cowles
See also: Aztec Empire; Conquistadors; Cortés, Hernán; Tenochtitlán

194 DISEASE
Further Reading
Cerwin, Herbert. 1963. Bernal Díaz: Historian of the Conquest. Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press.
Diaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1963. The Conquest of New Spain. Translated by John M. Cohen.
New York: Penguin Books.
Hassig, Ross. 2006. Mexico and the Spanish Conquest. 2nd ed. Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press.
Leon-Portilla, Miguel, and Lysander Kemp. 2006. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of
the Conquest of Mexico. Exp. ed. Boston: Beacon Press.
DISEASE
Disease was a vital f actor in determining the development of Atlantic history. The
ravages of smallpox, yellow fever, influenza, and malaria took the lives of millions
of Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans due to the increased interaction
between previously isolated populations. The biological consequences of contact
between Europeans, Africans, and indigenous Americans were essential factors in
defining the winners and losers of the European encounter with the New World,
later colonial contests determining which European powers would control the
Western Hemisphere, patterns of the Atlantic slave trade, the outcome of the
French and Indian War (1754–1763), and the victors of the American Revolution
(1775–1783).
The deathly consequences of Atlantic disease environments were understood
through different medical notions regarding the causes of illness. For most
European medical scholars of the early modern era, disease was understood through
a humoral tradition that dated to the work of Hippocrates (460–370 BCE). These
medical beliefs w ere more comprehensively articulated through the written work
of Galen (129–216 CE) and his intellectual progeny. Though the ideas of humoral
medicine faded from 1492 u ntil the nineteenth c entury, this medical tradition was
fundamental for scholars of the Enlightenment (1650–1800) who tried to under-
stand how diseases formed.
Most humoral scholars agreed disease occurred due to an imbalance of fluids,
whereby a body could have too much or too little a supply of one of the four humors:
blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. This imbalance was believed to cause
physical and metal complications that could then lead to further disproportions of
the humors. These imbalances were often used to define the four personal tem-
peraments of the era: phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, and melancholic. Many
humoral scholars also believed that sins could cause disease. Other physicians
understood smells or poor diets as signifiers of a diseased body. In most of these
European traditions of popular or folk medicine, foul smelling objects w
ere believed
to emit disease, in the form of visible miasmas that rose from mires in the earth or
from piles of garbage on city streets.
For Africans transported to the New World as slaves, and for Native Americans
already at home within the Western Hemisphere, many different ideas about disease
survived the era of European contact. These concepts often involved various
DISEASE 195
shamanic principles, herbalism, witchcraft, and animism. Sometimes, especially

concerning Native American use of sweat lodges and the practice of expelling dis-
eased members of a group, these curative measures actually spread diseases like
smallpox, intensifying the long-term effects of different illnesses. However, Native
American herbalism was also vital in helping Europeans adapt to New World envi-
ronments, as with the adoption of cinchona bark technology for the use of qui-
nine to prevent and cure malaria. These Native American herbal traditions could
become profitable to Europeans who borrowed New World customs, especially
concerning the use of tobacco trafficked into Europe in copious amounts a fter the
spectacular publications of Spanish botanist, physician, and promoter Nicolás
Monardes (1493–1588).
The encounter era involved much death from disease due to the bacteriological
implications of the exchange of biological materials from 1492. Prior to that date,
many diseases, crops, and animals existed in only one of the two hemispheres. After
1492, these ecological forces encountered each other, causing much devastation
among Native American populations. Neither Europeans nor Native Americans
could understand these numerous losses from a modern understanding of biology—
a field opened a fter the work of French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895).
Smallpox was the most damaging of the diseases during the era of encounter. Liv-
ing in Europe and Africa, where contact with cattle and cowpox was common, most
Europea ns and Africans w ere immune to smallpox at the time of contact with
Native America. However, Native Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere
did not have this previous contact with large domesticated animals, and were thus
susceptible to the ravages of smallpox.
Throughout the colonial era, Native American populations faced waves of dis-
eases, population recoveries, and then additional infections. Diseases worked with
European forces to ruin many New World societies. This conscious integration is
often exemplified through the figure of British Commander-in-Chief of the Forces
Jeffrey Amherst (1717–1797), who was the first documented European to purpose-
fully use infected smallpox blankets to defeat Native American enemies, a tactic
he applied during the French and Indian War. Though this is the first recorded
account, the conscious practice of using disease to expand the European frontier
into Native America became important for later United States expansion into the
North American West, as in the Choctaw Removal of 1832, a smallpox outbreak
on the Northern Plains in 1837, and with the purposeful use of measles to poison
the Cayuse of Oregon in 1847.
Similar to the Native American experiences of the Atlantic world, the processes
of the Atlantic slave trade were partly defined through the role of disease. Because
many African populations w ere often immune to some intra-African diseases like
malaria, they held power in the African interior for much of the Early Modern Era.
Europeans were thus forced to remain on the coasts. Much of the initial capturing
of Africans for the Atlantic slave trade was therefore performed by African nations
in combat with other African populations. However, once on European slave ships,
Africans were often infected by numerous diseases, usually due to the close con-
fines and filth of the cargo holds. To prevent the expansion of illness through t hese
196 DISEASE
weakened bodies, European sailors made sure to keep some form of citrus on board
to prevent the dreaded scurvy that came from a diet that lacked vitamin C.
The many implications of disease w ere also detrimental to African populations
throughout the New World. In South Carolina, specific populations w ere chosen to
complete certain forms of labor due to particular immunities, especially working
in low-lying wetlands due to malaria carried by mosquitoes that thrive in such
regions. Though initially immune to many of t hese tropical diseases, African dis-
ease resistance faded as each generation of New World slavery passed, and numer-
ous other diseases like influenza and yellow fever ravaged slave bodies, often
weakened from intense l abor. T hese disease environments w ere common for Afri-
can slaves and their masters, often creating regions, like Jamaica, where pathogenic
environments became shared elements of daily life, increasing the importance of
funerary traditions to define personal identity. Death from diseases and the inten-
sity of labor ruptured many African social understandings. Families could not
develop in areas where gender was imbalanced in favor of male slaves for agricul-
tural labor, and where slaves often died in the first months of their new workloads
and the seasoning afforded by New World environments.
Atlantic military and political history was also altered by various New World
disease environments. In the Car ibbean, territorial possessions often changed
hands, especially due to yellow fever and malarial settings that could destroy tightly
camped armies in only days or weeks, as with the British expedition to conquer
Spanish Cuba during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). During the American Rev-
olution some commanders, like American General Nathaniel Greene (1742–1786),
possibly understood these disease environments enough to alter their battle tac-
tics to avoid lowland areas where mosquitoes breed.
Other commanders took more preemptive measures. Immune from a child-
hood bout with smallpox, General George Washington (1732–1799) implemented
large-scale inoculation against the disease during the winter of 1777–1778. This
provided many American forces impor tant later advantages against British
forces. Inoculation usually was performed by infecting healthy patients with a
small amount of the pox, which their immune system learned to c ounter. Though
Europeans had often been resistant to smallpox in earlier centuries, by the time
of the Revolution, most of this immunity had depleted, and with Washington’s
measures the Continental Army was increasingly more immune than their British
opponents. After the Revolution, increasing urbanization and industrialization
throughout the New World led to new outbreaks of yellow fever, malaria, and
cholera in many different expanding cities, exemplified by the intense yellow fever
epidemic of Philadelphia in 1793, that caused a panic leading to the temporary
migration of half the city’s population to nearby areas, and the ferocious outbreak
of cholera in Guatemala in 1837.
Andrew Kettler
See also: American Revolution; Atlantic Slave Trade; Columbian Exchange; Enlight-
enment; European Exploration
DO Ñ A M A R INA 197
Further Reading
Brown, Vincent. 2008. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slav-
ery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Crosby, Alfred. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.
Diamond, Jared. 1998. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of H uman Societies. New York: W.W.
Norton.
Fenn, Elizabeth. 2001. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82. New York:
Hill & Wang.
McNeill, J. R. 2010. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Car ibbean, 1620–1914.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
DOÑA MARINA (ca. 1502–ca. 1527)

Doña Marina was an interpreter, adviser, and guide for Hernán Cortés during the
Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Her birth name is not known for sure, but
it may have been Malinalli Tenépatl. Also known as Malinche or Malitzin, she was
given the name Marina upon her baptism by the Spanish. Although she played a
key role in the conquest, much else that is known about her life is uncertain, con-
tradictory, or lost. The variations of her name, as well as her dates of birth and
death, are just some examples. Even today, her memory is heavily contested. For
chicanas and feminists, La Malinche is a w oman who overcame the masculine
power of her time and the desperate straits of her life to achieve important positions
of power and decision-making. Contrarily, some believe that she betrayed her own
people by facilitating the victory of the Spaniards over the indigenous cultures of
Mexico. In Mexican Spanish, the word malinchismo derives from her name. It means
preferring something or someone foreign over one’s own land, culture, or people.
According to Bernal Díaz del Castillo—a conquistador whose chronicles of the
conquest offer the most comprehensive firsthand information we have about Doña
Marina—Malinalli lost her father, a locally powerful landowner, at a very young
age. Her mother remarried and gave birth to a boy, who would very likely be the
heir to the family’s properties. As a consequence, Malinalli’s mother and stepfa-
ther abandoned her to strangers, beginning her life as a slave. From her birthplace
in Veracruz, near the Gulf of Mexico, she was brought to the neighboring territory
of Tabasco and sold or exchanged several times. Her contact with the Nahua and
Maya people in that area allowed her to learn at least two different languages:
Nahuatl, her mother tongue, and Mayan.
In 1519, Hernán Cortés and his soldiers, with the help of 40,000 indigenous
people from surrounding areas, participated in the B attle of Centla in Tabasco,
where the locals w ere defeated. The next day, the Maya ruler of the territory sent
a group of representatives to offer gifts to the Spaniards, aiming to calm their warlike
intentions. The presents included gold, jewelry, precious rocks and feathers, as
well as 20 young girls, including Malinalli, who was then baptized by the Spaniards
and given the Christian name Marina. It is not clear how her interpretation skills
came to the attention of Cortés. It seems that, at first, she worked with a Spaniard,
198 DO Ñ A M A R INA
In a detail from a sixteenth-century manuscript, Doña Marina, a native w

oman who
aided the Spanish conquest of Mexico as a guide and translator, is shown at the head of
the procession, next to Hernán Cortés. Also known as La Malinche, her role and legacy is
intensely controversial. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
Gerónimo de Aguilar, who had learned the Mayan language when he had been
shipwrecked and imprisoned by the Maya. Marina translated from Nahuatl to
Mayan, and Gerónimo de Aguilar from Mayan to Spanish. Eventually, she also
started speaking the conquistadors’ language and shared her understanding of
the customs of different groups they encountered as well as her knowledge of the
region’s geography.
While Cortés barely mentioned Doña Marina in his accounts, other accounts of
the conquest, such as Spanish chronicles and indigenous codices, highlight her con-
tributions and close relationship to Cortés. They had a son together, named Martín
Cortés. Although she did not become Cortes’ wife, since that would have been
condemned at the time, she was treated with esteem. “Doña” was attached to her
name, indicating nobility and respect. Some scholars note that the Nahua version of
her name also has a suffix with an equivalent meaning, perhaps because of her
noble past or due to the high social position she obtained through the conquest.
With Marina’s interpretation and advice, the Spaniards won important b attles
and advanced to the heart of the Aztec Empire: the city of Tenochtitlán, located in
today’s Mexico City. In Tenochtitlán she witnessed one of the biggest defeats of the
Spaniards, popularly known as “the sad night.” Immediately after, the conquista-
dors planned a siege against the city that led to the surrender of Cuauhtémoc, the last
Aztec emperor. Afterwards, she lived for some time with Cortés and it is likely
Martín was born during this time.
DO Ñ A M A R INA 199
Dark Legend of Doña Marina

Accounts of Doña Marina’s role in the attack on Tenochtitlán are contradic-
tory. Some sources maintain that she acted not only as an interpreter but
also as an informer, betraying women who trusted her to gain details of
possible attacks against the Spaniards. O thers claim that she advocated
painful punishments for indigenous spies. Still o thers maintain that she not
only translated words for Cortés, but also explained the cultural practices
of indigenous groups—their different mindsets, beliefs, and legends—
and identified divisions among them for the Spaniards to exploit. Years
later, her dark legend emerged as her actions were interpreted as a betrayal
of her compatriots. Whatever the case, for Doña Marina—as for many other
indigenous groups who joined the Spanish conquest—the Aztecs were
enemies.
L ater, she was part of the Hibueras expedition to the area of today’s Honduras.
A military operation led by Cortés, it aimed to capture Cristóbal de Olid, whom
Cortés had dispatched to explore and conquest new territories. Olid, however,
joined Cortés’s principal e nemy, Diego de Velázquez, to conspire against him and
enjoy the benefits of a project that had been organized, planned, and financed by
Cortés. A fter this successful expedition, Cortés married Doña Marina to one of
his men, Juan Jaramillo, perhaps as a legal strategy to protect her with a legitimate
marriage to one of the men he trusted the most. In this way, she could acquire a
respectable status in the colonial society, and she was also financially secured,
since Cortés gave her important land properties located in her birthplace as part
of the wedding deal. Hernán Cortés also obtained permission from the pope to
declare Martín a legitimate son, sending him to Spain shortly afterwards. It seems
Doña Marina and her son never reunited again. She had a daughter with Jaramillo,
named María, but it seems they did not spend much time together. The date,
place, and cause of Doña Marina’s death are unknown. The most likely scenario
places her death between 1526 and 1527, after she returned from the Hibueras,
and before Jaramillo remarried.
Pamela J. Fuentes
See also: Aztec Empire; Cortés, Hernán; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal
Further Reading
Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. 2010. The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Translated by
Alfred Percival Maudslay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Townsend, Camilla. 2006. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian W oman in the Conquest of Mexico.
200 DOU G LASS , F R EDE R I C K
DOUGLASS, FREDERICK (1818–1895)

Considered by many to be the voice of African American participation in the anti-
slavery movement, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (later Douglass) was
born some time in 1818 on a plantation in Maryland to an enslaved m other and a
white man, probably her owner, according to Douglass. Although Douglass was a
renowned speaker for the American antislavery cause during the 1840s, today he
is most well known for a series of autobiographies, including Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855),
and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).
The 1845 autobiography is perhaps his best known work and is considered
by many critics to be the finest example of the slave narrative. Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass reflects themes common to the slave narrative, such as
the link between freedom and the ability to read and write, the dehumanizing
impact of enslavement, denunciation of the hypocr isy of American slave-holders,
the cruel reality of plantation slavery, and documentation of the rich culture
created by p eople born into
slavery.
Douglass’s engagement with
the Atlantic world is most appar-
ent in three episodes in his life:
adolescence on the shores of the
Chesapeake Bay in Baltimore
during the 1800s, his 1845 trans-
atlantic travel to England, Ireland,
and Scotland; and his involve-
ment with American attempts
to establish colonial footholds
in Haiti and the Dominican
Republic (then known as Santo
Domingo).
Although Douglass spent
much of his early life on planta-
tions in Talbot County, Mary
land, sometime in the late 1820s
he was sent to live with Thomas
and Sophia Auld in Baltimore.
By 1820, Baltimore was home to
a large f ree black population and
provided ample opportunity for
Douglass to be confronted with
A photograph of Frederick Douglass taken around what it meant to be free.
1879. Born a slave in Maryland, Douglass escaped Despite this large population
bondage in 1838 and became active in the abolition of free blacks, the Port of Balti-
movement. His autobiography, published 1845, is more was the next-to-last desti-
a classic. (National Archives) nation in a transatlantic trade
DOU G LASS , F R EDE R I C K 201
that sent many slaves to a brutal system of plantation slavery in the Deep South.
The slave trade was an important element of the fuel for the thriving shipping and
shipbuilding economy of the city, and it was on these bustling docks that Doug-
lass managed to surreptitiously teach himself to read and write. The cover pro-
vided by a large of population of free and enslaved blacks and the sheer volume
of p
eople and workmen allowed Baltimore, a stop on the Atlantic slave trade, to
serve as the grounds for Douglass’ eventual liberation.
After several unsuccessful attempts, Douglass escaped slavery by fleeing to New
York, and from there went to New Bedford, Massachusetts, another Atlantic ship-
ping city, to settle down with his wife. During the 1840s, Douglass got involved
with the abolition movement and was widely acclaimed for his stirring orations on
his experiences as a slave. His growing fame as a black abolitionist almost became
his undoing because it brought him to the notice of people who would much
rather have preferred that Douglass be s ilent and returned to slavery. Fearing such a
fate, Douglass became a fugitive slave again when he went to Great Britain with the
help of friends.
The Ambivalence of Freedom

Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in 1838. Living in New York, he reported
feeling an indescribable elation. He was free. In time, however, the joy of free-
dom mingled with other feelings—loneliness, isolation, and the fear of being
caught and returned to slavery—as shown in this passage from Douglass’
autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
(1845):
“I have been frequently asked how I felt when I found myself in a free
State. I have never been able to answer the question with any satisfaction to
myself. It was a moment of the highest excitement I ever experienced. . . .
This state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I was again seized with
a feeling of g reat insecurity and loneliness. I was yet liable to be taken back,
and subjected to all the tortures of slavery. This in itself was enough to damp
the ardor of my enthusiasm. But the loneliness overcame me. There I was in
the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home and with-
out friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren—children of a
common F ather, and yet I dared not to unfold to any one of them my sad
condition. I was afraid to speak to any one for fear of speaking to the wrong
one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose
business it was to lie in wait for the panting fugitive, as the ferocious beasts
of the forest lie in wait for their prey. The motto which I a dopted when I
started from slavery was this—‘Trust no man!’ ”
Source: Frederick Douglass. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave. Boston: Published at the Anti-Slavery Office, 1845, 60–62.
202 DOU G LASS , F R EDE R I C K
The trip itself was emblematic of the kinds of paradoxes posed by the existence
of slavery in a supposedly f ree country and the possibilities opened up by travel in
the Atlantic world. Although Douglass was by then a well-known figure, his travel
on the steamer Cambria was spent in the much less comfortable steerage sections
because of the objections of passenger from the Southern United States. In his 1845
autobiography, Douglass recounts with equanimity the anger and violent threats
of t hose Southern passengers when Douglass continued speak about the system of
American slavery to other passengers who were eager to hear the truth of the thing.
On the space of the ship, however, t hese Southerners w ere powerless to stop Dou-
glass’s testimony. In much of African American literature, movement to the North
is frequently used as a symbol of growing freedom for the enslaved person. In his
trip across the Atlantic, however, Douglass forged a new symbolic and geographi
cal path to freedom—movement toward Europe.
Douglass’s two-year sojourn in Europe took him to Liverpool, another port city
that was built on the slave trade, and cities in Scotland and in Ireland that were
already burgeoning with the energy of Irish nationalism and the early stages of
the Great Famine that would lead to the death of over a million Irish.
In his autobiographies and letters from this period, Douglass described the usual
reactions one would expect of tourists making stops to the great cities of Europe.
Beyond that, however, Douglass insistently observed the contrast between the prej-
udice of Americans and the apparent colorblindness of the British, most particularly
the Irish activists he encountered during his travels. Douglass used his highly
idealized vision of British love of liberty, most symbolized for him by G reat Brit-
ain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807, as a means of condemning the continued
existence of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. Douglass’s time in G reat Brit-
ain came to an end when he was purchased out of slavery by supporters, accord-
ing to the 1845 autobiography.
For the next 35 years, Douglass was one of the luminaries of African American
history, having been involved in the publication of an abolitionist newspaper and
the movement for women’s suffrage. He was seen as a spokesman for his race, and
in that capacity was frequently consulted by politicians (up to and including sev-
eral presidents) as they attempted to address the knotty issue of integration of Afri-
can Americans into the social and political fabric of the United States.
It was in this particular role that Douglass became involved in an abortive attempt
by the United States to annex the Dominican Republic during the 1870s in the
hope of it serving as a resettlement site for African Americans. Douglass was also
appointed minister to Haiti in 1889 by President Benjamin Harrison. Douglass’s
support for annexing the Dominican Republic during the 1870s seems somewhat
out of step with his rhetoric about the importance of liberty for African Americans
and the Irish. Douglass’ apparent inconsistency can perhaps be explained if one
remembers that in his vision of the Atlantic world and the black Atlantic world in
particular, the United States was the center of power, and he unfailingly expressed
a belief that the United States could serve as an example to the rest of the world.
In his thinking, Douglass was also perhaps u nder the influence of a perspective
that saw Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, as being
D R A K E , SI R F R AN C IS 203
incapable of surviving on its own. In Chapter 15 of Life and Times, Douglass argues
that the voluntary submission of Haiti would be beneficial for all parties, especially
since such an annexation might carve out a more genial space for African Ameri-
cans and unite p eople of color on one geographical ground in the western Atlantic
world. Like many of his peers, Douglass was subject to the same assumptions about
American superiority.
By the 1890s, Douglass was much less sanguine about the benevolence of Amer-
ican interest in the Caribbean. During the Post-Reconstruction period in the
United States history, African Americans had quickly lost many of the gains they
had made a fter the Civil War, and the unwillingness of the U.S. government to
assure t hese rights with troops in Southern states was a grave disappointment to
people like Douglass.
When he was appointed as a minister of Haiti, Douglass very quickly under-
stood that the United States engagement with Haiti was certainly not going to be in
the best interests of Haiti, given the prevalence of explicit white supremacist ideas in
even the upper echelons of t hose sent to negotiate an American foothold in Haiti.
When it became apparent that he would not advance American imperial interests
in Haiti as vigorously as desired, Douglass found his mission to Haiti undercut
by the presence of other diplomats (including an admiral who came on well-
armed Navy boats among them, according to the last chapter of Life and Times) who
took a more aggressive stance in their negotiations. Douglass, unable to reconcile
his vision of mutually beneficial relations between the Car ibbean and the United
States with the colonial impulses of the government he supposedly represented,
was marginalized during the negotiations, and eventually quit his post in 1891.
Douglass closes his account of his later life in The Life and Times with this epi-
sode. He retired from public life a fter stepping down from his post. Douglass died
in 1895.
Angela Shaw-Thornburg
See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of Slavery; Black Atlantic; Slavery
Further Reading
Douglass, Frederick. 1994. Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies. Edited by Henry Louis Gates.
New York: Library of America.
Oakes, James. 2008. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln,
and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. New York: W.W. Norton.
DRAKE, SIR FRANCIS (ca. 1540–1596)

Sir Francis Drake was an English pirate, privateer, and politician. A master navi-
gator and expert mariner, Drake was the most celebrated of the many significant
West Country seamen of the Elizabethan era. He plundered Spanish shipping for
decades. He was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe (1577–80) and
the first person to discover that the Magellan Strait did not connect a pair of con-
tinents. He died in 1596.
204 D R A K E , SI R F R AN C IS
Francis Drake was born around 1540 in Crowndale, Devon, and was educated
at home. In the 1550s he worked for the owner of a boat that hauled freight in the
North Sea, and the English Channel. His master died and bequeathed the boat to
Drake, who sold it and joined his relatives William and John Hawkins who
owned a fleet. In 1566, he sailed on a Hawkins vessel to Cape Verde where they
captured Portuguese ships carrying slaves and sugar. They then went to the
Spanish West Indies at Borburata and Rio de la Hacha. The journey was a failure
but significant b ecause it provided Drake’s initial exposure to Atlantic seafaring.
In 1567, Drake sailed with John Hawkins on a slaving expedition to the island of
Conga in the Tagarin River of Sierra Leone. L ater in the lengthy journey, storms
forced the expedition to make repairs at San Juan de Ulua, New Spain (modern
Mexico). A fter a fight with the Spanish flota, or treasure fleet, Drake escaped.
With most of his squadron destroyed, the disaster at San Juan de Ulua ended
Hawkins’ slaving days. The humiliation contributed greatly to Drake’s enmity
towards the Spanish.
In 1570, Drake led the first English piracy raid to the West Indies. In 1571, he
pillaged along the Isthmus of Panama’s treasure route. The riches of Spain’s mines
in Potosi (Bolivia), Chile, and Peru passed from the Pacific side of the Isthmus by
mule to Venta Cruces on the Chagres River, to Nombre de Dios, the center of the
network connecting treasure bound for Spain with supplies arriving from Spain.
Drake returned to England a rich man.
In 1572, Drake sailed for the Car ibbean. A fter failing to take Nombre de Dios,
Drake tried to capture Spanish treasure before it reached the town. Leading a force
of Englishmen and escaped slaves, known as cimarrones, Drake unsuccessfully
Captain Drake Circles the Globe

The most famous of Sir Francis Drake’s journeys of exploration was his cir-
cumnavigation of the globe beginning in 1577. After navigating the Magel-
lan Strait at the southern tip of South America, Drake reached the Pacific.
Fierce weather destroyed one of Drake’s ships, another turned back for
England, and only the Golden Hind remained, with a crew decimated by
scurvy. Drake pressed on. His party skirmished with natives on the island of
Mocha, near the Chilean coast. Drake pillaged Valparaiso and other locations
along the Pacific coast, reaching as far north as California. While there, Drake
peacefully interacted with the Miwok people and claimed the area for
England, naming it “Nova Albion.” Using charts stolen from a Spanish ship,
he sailed to the Philippines, the Moluccas, and, after a near disastrous colli-
sion with a reef, to Java. He then crossed the Indian Ocean, doubled the
Cape of Good Hope, and, after stopping for w ater at Sierra Leone, he returned
to E
ngland in 1580 with an enormous treasure. In 1581, Queen Elizabeth
knighted Drake aboard the Golden Hind. He had become the most famous
man in E ngland.
D R A K E , SI R F R AN C IS 205
attacked the treasure convoy near Venta Cruces. Drake, the cimarrones, and
some French Huguenots attacked the mule train near Nombre de Dios, netting
about 40,000 pounds, approximately one-fifth of Queen Elizabeth’s annual rev-
enue (Sugden 1990, 73). When Drake returned to England in 1573, England
and Spain were in a period of rapprochement. Consequently Drake’s celebration
of his exploits was muted and little is known about his activities for the next
two years.
In 1585, Drake sailed, for the first time u nder Elizabeth’s commission, to free
English ships captured by Spain. When Drake set out, most of the ships had been
released, so after a brief foray to Spain he cruised more widely, reclaiming prop-
erty that English merchants had lost. From the Cape Verde Islands, Drake went
on to capture Santo Domingo and Cartagena. He destroyed St. Augustine, Florida.
This raid provided the final impetus for Philip II to declare war. In 1587, as Spain’s
Armada formed, Drake’s surprise attack on Cadiz destroyed many Spanish ships
and provisions for the Armada. Drake famously referred to this attack as “singeing of
the King of Spain’s beard” (Sugden 1990, 210). At Cape St. Vincent, Drake interfered
with shipping and communications between the Mediterranean and Portugal. Hav-
ing virtually paralyzed Spain’s war effort, Drake abruptly left for the Azores,
apparently to plunder. Drake delayed the Armada’s attack on E ngland for a year.
When the Armada attacked E ngland, Drake served as vice admiral, but he did
not play an important part in the b attle. Drake’s orders w
ere to let English troops
off the Dover coast know that the Spanish had arrived, and to attack the fleet with
his ship’s lantern serving as a beacon for the rest of the English. Instead, Drake
extinguished the light and seized a damaged Armada vessel which had approxi-
mately 50,000 gold ducats aboard (Kelsey 1998, 327). Drake’s defense that this
was accidental rang false, but despite his independent pirating activity during the
battle, England won.
L ater, in 1588, Drake and John Norris received orders to attack the remnants of
the Armada near the Bay of Biscay and to capture the Azores to intercept treasure
ships. Instead they went to La Coruna and marched to Lisbon seeking to place the
Portuguese pretender, Dom Antonio, on the throne. Ravaged by disease and short
on supplies, Norris retreated. Drake’s attempt to sail to the Azores was hampered
by weather. During the early 1590s, Drake engaged in parliamentary work. In 1595,
Drake and John Hawkins embarked to take Panama. Both died of illness on the
voyage; Drake was buried at sea at Porto Bello.
Colleen M. Seguin
See also: Elizabeth I; Piracy; Privateering; Spanish Armada
Further Reading
Fernandez-A rmesto, Felipe. 1988. The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kelsey, Harry. 1998. Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Sugden, John. 1990. Sir Francis Drake. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
206 DUT C H ATLANTI C
D U T C H AT L A N T I C
The Dutch Atlantic is a modern term that refers collectively to the p eople, forts,
trading posts, and colonies associated with the United Provinces of the Nether-
lands (also called the Dutch Republic) in West Africa and the Americas. The size
and boundaries of the Dutch Atlantic varied greatly throughout the early modern
period, usually depending on the fortunes of war. The Dutch built the beginnings
of an impressive empire by the mid-seventeenth century. But their tardy arrival in
the Americas, and their expensive, militant approach, diminished their influence
in the long run. Dutch colonies were also victims of Dutch success at home, for
stability and prosperity tended to attract p eople to the Republic, not push them
away. The other major powers in the Atlantic world (Spain, Portugal, E ngland, and
France) all surpassed the Dutch in terms of colonial population and the total value
of their trade. The Dutch only dominated certain sectors of the economy, such as
bullion, and in certain periods, such as the slave trade in the 1630s and 1640s.
Their Asian trade was almost certainly worth more than their Atlantic trade.
Dutch expansion began in the sixteenth c entury with the embargos that Spain
imposed on Dutch shipping during the Dutch Revolt (1566–1648). Suddenly cut
off from resources that they used to acquire in Spanish-controlled ports like Ant-
werp, Dutch merchants first ventured beyond Europe in the 1580s and 1590s. Salt
was an important early spur to expansion because the Dutch fishing industry
needed vast supplies of it as a preservative. The Dutch found salt in the Cape Verdes
islands, which w ere not shut to them u ntil 1598, and Punta de Araya on the Wild
Coast (the northern coast of South America). By that point, Dutch merchants could
also be found in Brazil and Africa. In the former they traded illegally for sugar
and dyewood; in the latter they obtained gold and ivory. Their only real footholds
in either place were the two forts or outposts that they operated on the Amazon
River, and neither outpost lasted long.
A temporary truce with Spain (1609–1621) slowed Dutch activities in the Atlan-
tic world for a time because, in the treaty, the Dutch agreed not to found a West
India Company, and they agreed not to trade in Spanish and Portuguese territo-
ries. Yet they still made some small strides during the years of the truce. Employed
by the Dutch East India Company to find the Northwest Passage, in 1609, Henry
Hudson discovered the river that now bears his name. Dutch fur traders were soon
visiting there regularly, organized u
nder the New Netherland Company. Other
Dutch founded private settlements on the Wild Coast in the same period, and in
1612, the admiralty of Amsterdam protected West African trade by building Fort
Nassau on the Gold Coast.
Warfare shaped and defined the Dutch Atlantic far more than any of these early,
minor undertakings. When the truce ended in 1621, the Dutch States General could
finally charter the West India Company (WIC), a quasi-private joint-stock com
pany whose original purpose was to wage war on Dutch enemies and seize the
colonial resources that helped fund those enemies in Europe. For the next 20 years,
the company made good on its commitments, capturing hundreds of Spanish and
Portuguese ships, and attacking Iberian forts and colonies from West Africa to the
Caribbean—even on Latin America’s Pacific Coast. In total, the WIC launched eight
DUT C H ATLANTI C 207
major fleets (“Great Designs”), and countless smaller voyages of aggression, usu-
ally targeting Spain’s silver fleets. Its greatest successes came in 1628, when Dutch
admiral Piet Heyn captured the silver fleet, and 1630, when the WIC seized the
town of Olinda in Brazil. From there the Dutch expanded hundreds of miles along
the Brazilian coast. Other conquests included Elmina, Axim, Luanda, and Sao Tomé
in Africa, and the island Curaçao in the Caribbean. A colony like New Netherland,
founded and built by the Dutch, was unusual. They preferred to take their colo-
nies from o thers, building an empire on the backs of the Portuguese and, to a lesser
extent, the Spanish.
Silver, sugar, and African slaves w ere the main Dutch material goals in the first
half of the seventeenth c entury. The Dutch had not always planned on participat-
ing in the slave trade, but they quickly changed their minds when the WIC acquired
so many slaves and sugar plantations in Brazil. They carried more than 26,000
slaves to that colony over the next two decades. They also played a role in bring-
ing sugar to the Car ibbean, providing cane, equipment, slaves, credit, and simple
know-how to up-and-coming English planters on Barbados and probably to French
planters on French islands, as well. For the Dutch it was a simple investment, an
effort to build the sugar industry so they would benefit as carriers and go-betweens.
Yet their place atop the trade did not endure. Over the early modern period, they
shipped little more than 500,000 slaves to the Americas, less than 5 percent of the
total (Postma 1990, 21, 294–303).
The WIC did significant damage to Dutch enemies, ending Portuguese supremacy
in West Africa and hastening Iberian decline in general, but its belligerent approach
was far too costly to sustain. In a roundabout way it helped the English and French
in the Atlantic world, for both had similar enemies, and both enjoyed all the ben-
efits of Iberian destruction without the costs incurred by the Dutch. The company
had never been very healthy; it had always suffered internal divisions and disagree-
ments about the best balance between warfare, colonization, and trade. Those fis-
sures widened with its mounting debts. The major split was between the WIC’s
Amsterdam chamber, which favored migration and free trade, and the Zeeland
chamber, which wanted to continue the war and maintain its monopoly on most
Atlantic goods. The free trade position came naturally to Amsterdam merchants
because they knew that with their city’s advanced financial institutions, they could
ship more cheaply than anyone and undercut competitors in almost any market.
It is easy to mistake the Dutch Atlantic and WIC as one and the same, but private
trade was more common and more important than WIC trade, and the former
outstripped the latter fairly early in the company’s history. In truth, the Atlantic
world was too open, its different ports and colonies too close to home, for the strug-
gling WIC to keep its monopoly for long. A barrage of demands and complaints
from various interested parties forced it to relinquish its grasp on most American
commodities between 1638 and 1640. Anyone from the Dutch Republic could trade
in Brazilian sugar and New Netherland furs from that point onward, as long as a
tax was paid to the company as the colonial administrator. Former smugglers could
now work legally and openly in both places; individual merchants and merchant
firms of any size could now try their luck in America, though certain firms tended to
208 DUT C H ATLANTI C
outperform the rest. The four most active firms in New Netherland, for instance,
carried over half of that colony’s trade. They succeeded where the WIC had failed,
provisioning the growing settler population in exchange for fur, timber, and
tobacco, which they also acquired by trading directly in Virginia.
Dutch interest and attention ultimately shifted from the South to the North
Atlantic for two main reasons: the Portuguese uprising in Brazil (1645), and the
peace with Spain (1648). The first was the beginning of the end for the WIC in its
favorite colony, and once having lost it, the company never recovered. The end of
the interminable Spanish war would have forced the Dutch to reevaluate their colo-
nial approach regardless of what happened in Brazil. Now Dutch merchants could
trade in Spain and carry away bullion freely, exchanging low-cost manufactures for
the silver that made Amsterdam the bullion capital of the world. If warfare, priva-
teering, and the Brazil-Africa narco nexus dominated the old Dutch Atlantic, the
new Atlantic was more about trade and colonization in the Caribbean and New
Netherland, both still linked to Africa. Different WIC chambers oversaw different
regions, each chamber working mostly independently now. With the exception of
Africa and the slave trade, which the company still monopolized, the WIC was just
an administrator or umbrella organization for private activity in the Atlantic world.
The second half of the seventeenth century came with new challenges, new ene-
mies, and another major change to the Dutch Atlantic with the loss of New Neth-
erland. Long frustrated and bested by Dutch merchants in their own colonies, first
England and then France used the power of the law and the force of arms to exclude
the Dutch in English and French colonial markets. E ngland’s first Navigation Act
(1651) did not mention them specifically, but they w ere its true target, and its mer-
cantile restrictions and prohibitions contributed to three Anglo-Dutch wars over
the next 23 years. The New Netherland conquest (1664) precipitated the second
war (1665–1667), which the Dutch won. However, in the end they agreed to swap
New Netherland for Suriname, an English sugar colony on the Wild Coast that they
had taken by force in 1667. Closer to their other Car ibbean possessions, Suriname
was also a kind of new Brazil, a revival of the old quest for American sugar. By that
point, the French had implemented their own trade restrictions, and they soon allied
with the English in what is called e ither the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674)
or the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678). Neither country ever managed to exclude
Dutch smugglers completely, in part b ecause their colonists wanted the trade.
By the 1670s, the Dutch Atlantic looked like it would for the next century. In
Africa the Dutch still controlled Elmina and a smattering of other forts and out-
posts, mostly on the Gold Coast. In America they claimed Suriname and two
smaller plantation colonies on the Wild Coast named Essequibo and Berbice, as
well as six small, sandy Car ibbean islands that sustained only minor agriculture:
Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Saba, Sint Eustatius, and the southern half of Saint Mar-
tin, which they split with France. Suriname and Curaçao were the two most
important colonies. In the former, the Dutch grew sugar and coffee on hundreds
of large plantations; the latter was a base for smugglers and a gathering place or
entrepôt for American and European goods. The Dutch also brought slaves to Cura-
çao, especially in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when they
DUT C H W EST INDIA C O M PANY 209
sometimes won Spain’s asiento contracts. And they continued to trade illicitly from
the island with Spanish colonies afterward, acquiring cash crops and, of course,
American silver. This combination of legal and illegal trade, shipping their own
colonial products and some portion of everyone else’s, amounted to a lesser but
decent share of Atlantic trade. Even in the eighteenth century, when the Dutch
Empire was far past its zenith, the Dutch carried at least 7.4 percent of American
trade, probably more (Klooster 1998, 173–198).
The Dutch colonial population never numbered more than about 25,000 free
people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and many of them w
ere Germans
and Jews of Iberian descent (Enthoven 2005). Though the Dutch experimented
with migration and settlement in different times and places, in the end, warfare,
hostile disease environments, lousy soil, and prosperity at home all conspired to
keep the Dutch Atlantic more commercial than colonial. It suffered its last disrup-
tions during the Age of Revolution, first when the Dutch sided with British colo-
nists in the American Revolution, fighting the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War as a result
(1780–1784). In 1794, Napoleon invaded the Dutch Republic, making it a satellite
of France and giving the British an excuse to attack Dutch colonies once more.
After losing all of their Wild Coast possessions, the Dutch convinced the British
to return Suriname without bloodshed in 1816. All other colonial transfers from
that point were equally peaceful: The Dutch sold Elmina and other West African
outposts to the British in the 1870s, and they granted Suriname its independence
in 1975. The six aforementioned islands remain affiliated with the Netherlands to
this day.
D. L. Noorlander
See also: Dutch West India Company; New Amsterdam/New York; United Prov-
inces of the Netherlands
Further Reading
Enthoven, Victor. 2005. “Dutch Crossings: Migration between the Netherlands and the
New World, 1600–1800.” Atlantic Studies 2: 153–176.
Klooster, Willem. 1998. Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean, 1648–1795. Leiden: KITLV
Press.
Postma, Johannes, and Victor Enthoven, eds. 2003. Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch
Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817. Boston: Brill.
Rink, Oliver. 1986. Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York.
DUTCH WEST INDIA COMP ANY

The Dutch West India Company is an umbrella term for two chartered companies
that held a monopoly on trade between the Netherlands and North America, the
West Indies, South America, and West Africa. The companies competed with Spain
and Portugal commercially and in many cases militarily, and were responsible for
governing the territories u
nder their control.
210 DUT C H W EST INDIA C O M PANY
Dutch merchants began trading for furs on the Atlantic coasts of North Amer
ica in the late sixteenth century. In an attempt to coordinate their activities, they
secured a charter from the Estates-General (the governing body of the Netherlands)
in 1614 to form the short-lived New Netherland Company with a monopoly on
Dutch trade in the region. Then in 1621, the Estates-General created the West India
Company (WIC), or Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie. A joint-stock com
pany chartered for 24 years, it was modeled on the Dutch East India Company
and held a monopoly in the regions in which the latter did not operate. The WIC
was governed by five chambers representing the various Dutch provinces, and its
policy was set by a board of 19 directors, the Heeren XIX.
Under the supervision of the WIC, in 1624, the Dutch began settling the colony
of New Netherland on the northeastern coast of what is today the United States.
However, they w ere forced to surrender the colony to the English fleet in 1664,
even though the two countries w ere not then at war. The conflict was officially
joined during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch wars (1665–1667 and 1672–
1674), with the Dutch recapturing their colony in 1673. Nevertheless, u nder the
terms of the Treaty of Westminster of 1674, New Netherland was ceded to England,
becoming the colony of New York.
Farther south, in Central American and the West Indies, the Dutch found them-
selves in direct competition with Spain, which had been active in the region since
the voyages of Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) in the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. While the WIC was not in a position to attack Spain’s colo-
nies directly, it commissioned privateers—privately-owned Dutch warships—to
capture or destroy Spanish vessels. The strategy was a success, with Dutch admi-
ral Piet Hein even managing to capture a Spanish fleet carrying a fortune in silver
and gold in 1628. Over the following decade, the Dutch also began the settlement
of several islands in the southern Car ibbean. The most important of t hese, Cura-
çao, had extensive salt pans and became a major link in the slave trade. It was also
a convenient base from which the Dutch could ship cacao beans grown in planta-
tions on the nearby South American mainland.
The Dutch had devised an ambitious “Grand Design” in 1623, two years a fter
the WIC was founded. Their intent was to seize control of much of the trade on
the Atlantic Ocean by capturing three strongholds that were necessary to Portu-
guese dominance at sea. T hese w
ere Salvador, the capital of the large Portuguese
colony of Brazil in South America; Luanda, the center of the Portuguese slave trade
in the colony of Angola in southwestern Africa; and Elmina, a Portuguese fort in
what is now Ghana in West Africa.
Although the Dutch managed to seize Salvador in 1624, Portuguese and Span-
ish forces retook it the following year. However, a second Grand Design, devised
in 1630, proved more successful, with the Dutch capturing much of eastern Bra-
zil, a region that would prove to be an important source of dyewood and whose
climate was ideal for growing sugarcane and cacao. They took Elmina in 1637, and
Luanda in 1641, allowing them to set up a system of “triangular trade” in which
WIC ships carried European goods to Africa to be exchanged for slaves, who were
then carried to the West Indies or Brazil, where as plantation workers they would
DUT C H W EST INDIA C O M PANY 211
be traded for cash or products such as sugar for shipment back to the Netherlands.
The Dutch also managed to capture the Portuguese colony of São Tomé, an island
in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea that was another potential source of sugar. However, the
Portuguese recaptured most of their African territories during the 1640s, and Bra-
zil the decade after that. The Elmina region remained in Dutch hands u ntil its sale
to the British in 1872.
Dutch forces operating independently of the WIC seized English sugar cane
plantations near the Suriname River on the northeast coast of South America in
1651, shortly a fter the English themselves had captured New Netherland. A fter a
period of mismanagement, the Estates General chartered the Suriname Corpora-
tion in 1683, under which the territory was governed by the city of Amsterdam,
the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family, and the Amsterdam components of the
WIC. The Van Aerssens sold their share in 1770, and the entire cumbersome
arrangement came to an end in 1795. The British regained the territory in 1799,
returning it to the Dutch in 1816.
The finances of the WIC had begun to fail in the late 1630s, due in large part to
the costs involved in fighting the Portuguese. The company’s charter expired in
1645 and it was dissolved in 1674, to be replaced by a second West India Com
pany, the Tweede Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie (TGWIC). Unlike its
predecessor, this new company concentrated almost solely on commerce and sup-
plied slaves to its old enemies, the Spanish. However, this arrangement ended in
1713, and a fter a long period of decline worsened by the problem of operating over
so great a geographical expanse, the TGWIC was dissolved in 1791. Subsequently,
the Dutch government assumed control of the country’s remaining territories
in the New World.
Grove Koger
See also: Dutch Atlantic; New Amsterdam/New York; United Provinces of the
Netherlands
Further Reading
Boxer, Ch. R. 1965. The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800. New York: Knopf.
Huigen, Siegfried, Jan L. de Jong, and Elmer Kolfin. 2010. The Dutch Trading Companies as
Knowledge Networks. Leiden: Brill.
Postma, Johannes. 2008. The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1815. Cambridge and
Postma, Johannes, and V. Enthoven, eds. 2003. Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Trans-
atlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
E
E D WA R D S , J O N AT H A N ( 1 7 0 3 – 1 7 5 8 )
Jonathan Edwards was among the most brilliant philosophers born in North Amer
ica. He was a pastor, a missionary, an influential theologian, and eventually the
president of what is now Princeton University. He remains one of the most widely
studied American evangelical Christian thinkers. Edwards was instrumental in
bringing about the Great Awakening in North America, which swept the frontier,
and he is sometimes credited with providing the religious and political energy
behind the American Revolution.
Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, on October 5, 1703, Edwards was the fifth
of eleven c hildren and the only son. His father was a Puritan minister and a tutor
to many local c hildren. U
nder his f ather’s guidance Edwards studied the Bible, the-
ology, ancient languages, and the classics, and at age 13, he entered Yale College
as an undergraduate. He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in 1720, and a Master of
Arts, also from Yale, in 1723. His public thesis defense drew a large crowd from
the surrounding area.
After leaving Yale, Edwards, a Congregationalist, ministered in a Presbyterian
church in New York City. Even while filling the pulpit, Edwards was writing some
of the works that would later make him famous. In 1724, he served as a tutor at
Yale where he met his wife, Sarah Pierrepont. Edwards accepted a position as an
associate minister under his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in 1726. This drew
Edwards to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he would live for the next 24 years.
He and Sarah were married in 1727. Sarah bore eleven children to Edwards, of
whom 10 lived to adulthood.
In 1729, Solomon Stoddard died and Edwards became the senior pastor of
the Northampton congregation. Five years into his pastorate, revival broke out in the
Northampton congregation. Edwards preached in numerous churches up and down
the Connecticut River Valley, which started a spiritual revival. The emotional
response of some during this period of spiritual awakening drew criticism by some
pastors in New England. Edwards wrote A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work
of God (1738) in defense of the revival. That account would be reprinted numerous
times and became a model for evaluating revivals among both American and Brit-
ish evangelicals.
Beginning in 1740, there was a second period of revival during Edwards’ min-
istry, which is commonly known as the Great Awakening. This period of increased
spiritual fervor among the colonists extended up and down the eastern seaboard,
and was fueled by the itinerate preaching of men such as George Whitefield. White-
field visited Northampton, where he stayed with the Edwards family. It was during
this awakening that Edwards preached his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the
214 ED WA R DS , J ONATHAN
Hands of an Angry God” (1741). That sermon, first delivered in Enfield, Connecti-
cut, affected the congregation so strongly that p eople gripped the pew in front of
them for fear of sliding into hell. During this period of revival there was a ten-
dency toward emotional excesses and public disorder during worship serv ices.
This led Edwards to write A Treatise of Religious Affections (1746), which commends a
balanced response to revival that does not dampen the work of God but does not
lead to excessive emotions.
Despite his previous popularity in Northampton, Edwards was dismissed from
the pastorate in 1750, due to his attempt to exclude the unconverted from fully
participating in the church’s religious life. Additionally, Edwards mishandled accu-
sations of sexual impropriety among the local teenagers, naming offenders from
the pulpit, which angered many and hastened his dismissal.
The next year, Edwards accepted a call to serve as a missionary to the Native
Americans in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He and his family lived there in relative
poverty for six years. His time at Stockbridge was less prestigious than his earlier
pastorate, but the smaller community and diminished responsibility enabled
Edwards to write some of his most significant philosophical works, including Free-
dom of the W ill (1754), Concerning the End for which God Created the World (1755),
The Nature of True Virtue (1757), and Original Sin (1757).
Though he had feelings of inadequacy b ecause he felt he lacked sufficient train-
ing in classical languages and he felt he had too little energy, Edwards accepted an
invitation to become president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton Univer-
sity) in 1758. Edwards died only a month later due to complications from a smallpox
inoculation, which he had received to demonstrate that inoculations w ere safe.
Edwards was fastidious, habitual, and diligent. He would work in his study at
home for over 12 hours on most days. He would get up at four or five in the morn-
ing. Each day began with private prayer, followed by family prayer. Every meal
included family devotions—a time of Bible study and worship—and he prayed with
Sarah at the close of e very day. Additionally, he would take long h orse rides through
Chocolate and Children Born on Sunday

Aside from being a prolific writer, Jonathan Edwards’ legacy includes many
other interesting facts. He apparently had a taste for chocolate, which he
drank regularly at breakfast. This was quite an expense in that day and age.
He had eleven children, the first four of whom were born on Sunday. This
was considered humorous in that day because of a widespread belief that
children w ere born on the day they w ere conceived. Thus, Pastor Edwards
and Sarah were thought to be regularly breaking the Sabbath. Edwards was
also fascinated by the natural world. His first published writing was an article
on the web building of spiders, which he wrote as a teenager. He believed
God designed every detail of nature, so that for him to study the habits of
animals and the beauty of the woods was an act of worship.
ED WA R DS , J ONATHAN 215
the woods, stopping to study some natural phenomena, pray, and walk for exer-
cise. He also carved out time during each day to spend with his many c hildren.
Edwards tried to live each day to its fullest. This included a focus on details of life
that he felt helped him increase his productivity, including keeping a log of foods
he ate so he could avoid foods that made him sluggish or sleepy.
Though his most frequently read work is the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God,” Edwards’ works in theology, philosophy, ethics, and Christian liv-
ing remain influential, especially among evangelical Christian scholars.
Edwards was a Christian thinker devoted to historical forms of Christian ortho-
doxy. This led him to write on topics such as the Trinity of God, which was being
challenged by Unitarians in New England. Not only were views of the nature of
God being questioned, but the means of salvation were under scrutiny. Edwards
wrote Freedom of the Will to argue for a Calvinistic understanding of salvation, where
God chooses certain p eople to save and enables them to believe. The Holy Spirit,
then, influences the p eople chosen by God to f ree their w
ill from the effects of origi-
nal sin so they can believe. A sovereign God who meticulously manages the events
of history is central to Edwards’ theology.
In The End for which God Created the World, Edwards describes his sovereign God
in relation to the work of creation. According to Edwards, God created the world
for the purpose of bringing himself glory. Notably, Edwards’ work precedes the
theory of evolution by over a century; therefore, he deals with God’s making of
the world, not discussing the timeframe in which it occurred. This theological work
lays the foundation for Edwards’ most significant work in ethics, The Nature of True
Virtue. Since all things are designed to bring glory to God, Edwards argues, true
virtue leads to a life that pleases God.
Perhaps his most significant work, however, is the biography Edwards wrote of
the missionary David Brainerd (1718–1747), a young man who lived among the
Native Americans. L ater, Brainerd would stay in the Edwards’ home to regain his
health a fter the stress of his missionary serv ice, where he would eventually die of
tuberculosis having fallen in love with one of Edwards’ d aughters. The biography
that Edwards wrote about Brainerd, along with Brainerd’s diary, which Edwards
edited, has been influential in inspiring generations of Protestant missionaries to
leave their homes, risk disease, and even die even as Brainerd did. Though Edwards’
own participation in missions was relatively brief, his impact on the movement
has been incalculable.
Andrew J. Spencer
See also: Evangelicalism; Puritans; Wesley, John; Whitefield, George
Further Reading
Edwards, Jonathan.1978. Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings. Edited by Ola Elizabeth Win-
slow. New York: Meridian.
Marsden, George. 2003. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Nichols, Stephan J. 2001. Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought. Phillips-
burg, NJ: P & R.
216 ELI Z A B ETH I
ELIZABETH I (1533–1603)
Elizabeth Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII (1491–1547) and his second wife, Anne
Boleyn, was born September 7, 1533, at Greenwich Palace, near London. During
her reign (1558–1603), E ngland planted the seeds of its future seaborne empire.
When Elizabeth I acceded the throne in 1558, English maritime activity was primar-
ily limited to European w aters. Using a combination of state patronage, personal
investment, and encouragement of private ventures, Elizabeth advanced English
seafaring enterprises to all parts of the globe. She accomplished this while keeping
the country secure from threats posed by her Atlantic neighbors of Spain, France,
Scotland, and Portugal.
In the first half of Elizabeth’s reign, significant speculative initiatives were under-
taken in trade, exploration, and colonization, ranging from Ireland to the Western
Hemisphere. The initiatives were spasmodic, small scale, and often spectacular fail-
ures. Elizabeth’s regime used English pirates and privateers to prey on Spanish
and Portuguese shipping. In the Atlantic arena, where commercial monopolies and
colonies w ere well established, tension mounted to unofficial conflict between
England and Spain and Portugal.
Although English interest in the Atlantic began in the reign of Henry VII
(1485–1509), it was in decline by the 1530s and 1540s. Its revival during King
Edward’s short reign (1547–1553) grew partly out of attempts to tap into the lucra-
tive West Africa trade in gold, ivory, and pepper that Portugal dominated. Portu-
guese response to these incursions by English mariners and other interlopers led
to commercial conflict during the 1550s and 1560s. The loss of Antwerp, in the
Spanish Netherlands, as a major outlet for the trade in English cloth was another
impetus to seek new markets. During the 1550s and 1560s a powerful syndicate
formed; it connected prominent London merchants with naval officials, well-placed
courtiers, and Queen Elizabeth herself to invest in many of the ventures.
The early ventures included the first attempts to break into the Atlantic slave
trade and to establish an English colony in the Western Hemisphere. In the 1560s,
prominent courtiers, city magnates, and the queen invested in John Hawkins’s four
attempts to supply Spanish America with slave labor. English interest in the slave
trade cooled a fter a clash between Hawkins and the Spanish at San Juan de Ulúa
(present-day Mexico) in 1568, which was financially disastrous for Hawkins and
his backers and contributed to a breakdown in Anglo-Spanish relations that lasted
from 1568 to 1572.
After two wars with France in the 1550s and 1560s, piracy dominated England’s
Atlantic enterprise. Francis Drake played a crucial role in this piratical trend. His
voyages to plunder Spanish shipping in the 1570s exposed the vulnerability of the
Spanish Car ibbean to opportunistic raids by small-scale seagoing entrepreneurs.
It was within this context that Elizabeth sanctioned plans for American settlement
in the southernmost region of South America. She withdrew her approval for fear
of damaging relations with Spain. Three years l ater, when Anglo-Spanish relations
were again in decline, she was ready to support a similar plan, which ended with
Drake circumnavigating the globe in 1577. Plunder was Drake’s primary objective,
but the official purpose was to found English settlements in unoccupied areas of
ELI Z A B ETH I 217
South America. Although the southern settlements failed to materialize, the voy-
age resulted in a king’s ransom in booty.
During the period 1578–1584, projects for trade, plunder, and colonization pro-
liferated as ambitions for the English overseas enterprise expanded. Many of the
projects included schemes to harass Spanish shipping. Other projects included col-
onizing ventures that encouraged hostility to Spain but also included social and
economic motivations. Nearly all endeavors proved ineffectual because t here was
no coherence within the English colonial enterprise and little state support.
The many ventures of Sir Humphrey Gilbert epitomized the fragmented nature
of the English colonization enterprise at this time. Despite Gilbert’s several unsuc-
cessful attempts to colonize parts of Ireland in the 1560s and 1570s, the queen
granted him a patent to establish colonies overseas in 1578. Gilbert’s plans were
undermined by a lack of additional royal support. The inadequate financing caused
delays and distorted priorities that further weakened schemes always vulnerable
to poor leadership. Gilbert attempted two colonization expeditions, in 1578 and
1583. The first ended after the fleet divided off Ireland’s Atlantic coast. Bad weather
forced Gilbert back to E ngland while the other part of his fleet pursued piracy.
The second expedition was a series of disasters from the beginning, culminating
in the formal possession of St. John’s Harbor in Newfoundland and in Gilbert’s
death at sea on the voyage home. Sir Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half-brother, tried to
salvage the enterprises. In 1584, he received a patent from the queen for overseas
colonization, but despite a well-orchestrated campaign in conjunction with Rich-
ard Hakluyt to convince Elizabeth to supply practical assistance for their Roanoke
ventures, Elizabeth did not budge. As a consequence, colonization initiatives
remained dependent on private enterprise.
Beginning in 1585, English peaceful enterprises for plantation and trade w ere
distorted by the undeclared Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604). Plans to establish
Roanoke Colony (in present day North Carolina) proceeded despite hostilities with
Spain because of its potential as a naval base from which raids could be launched
on Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. However, the queen’s reluctance to risk lim-
ited resources in a distant and marginal arena of the conflict dashed any expecta-
tion of the state implementing a strategy capable of establishing transatlantic
settlements. The burden for organizing and supplying the small settlement of Roa-
noke shifted to Raleigh and his associates. The need for profit favored short-term
expediency over long-term planning. Two attempts were made to settle Roanoke.
The efforts failed b ecause of serious inability by the English to supply overseas
settlements.
The maritime conflict with Spain regressed to a little war of privateering that
was fatal to colonization in the short term. The prospect of Spain gaining direct
control over the Netherlands overshadowed the war at sea, and Elizabeth was forced
to commit heavy military resources to support a coalition in Northern Europe to
prevent Spain gaining hegemony in the region. Many semiofficial expeditions to
the Car ibbean between 1585 and 1597 were dependent on an uneasy alliance
between public and private interests in which strategic aims were always limited
by severe financial restraints. They were done in such a way that state and private
218 EL M INA
adventurers w ere pitted against the other in a national treasure hunt for plunder
and prize.
The confusion over seafaring strategy that was created by this competition
undermined the effectiveness of the war at sea. Privateering was the primary form
of maritime warfare. From 1585 onward, 100 plus seagoing English vessels, rang-
ing in size from less than 50 tons to men-of-war of 300 tons, trolled the Atlantic
in search of prizes. In such ventures, private gain rather than achieving strategic
goals for the state motivated the adventurers. Drake’s 1585 raid in the Car ibbean,
his attack on Cadiz, Spain, at Elizabeth’s behest, and his expedition to Lisbon, Por-
tugal, in 1589 failed to achieve any stated financial or strategic aims. Spain still
had many opportunities to rebuild its naval and imperial defenses in Europe and
the Car ibbean. The semiofficial war at sea descended to a low point when Drake
and Hawkins and many of their men died during their failed expedition to Pan-
ama in 1595. Subsequent attempts to seize the initiative failed. As the war dragged
on, Elizabeth gradually withdrew support from naval offensives. This left the field
to private adventurers who sought their own interests with little restraint from Eliz-
abeth’s government.
When Elizabeth died at Richmond Palace, on March 24, 1603, England was
poised to undertake colonization of the Western Hemisphere in the Atlantic the-
ater. Despite the failure of English adventurers to found a permanent colony beyond
Ireland in the New World, privateering during the long Spanish war allowed the
enterprisers to gain confidence and skills in seafaring. The sea wars of the 1580s
and 1590s gave impetus to developing the infrastructures of ships, seamen, and
capital necessary for creating a seaborne empire.
Glen Edward Taul
See also: Drake, Sir Francis; Privateering; Raleigh, Sir Walter
Further Reading
Andrews, Kenneth R. 1984. Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Gen-
esis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Appleby, John C. 1998. “War, Politics, and Colonization, 1558–1625.” The Origins of
Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nich-
olas Canny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1: 57–78.
MacCaffrey, Wallace. 1993. Elizabeth I. London: Edward Arnold.
Williams, Penry. 1995. The L ater Tudors: England, 1547–1603. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
ELMINA
Elmina is a c astle in the African country of Ghana. Originally called São Jorge da
Mina (St. George of the Mine) Elmina was built in the fifteenth c entury by Portuguese
explorers seeking new passages to Asia. By the sixteenth c entury other commodities
also passed through Elmina. At first a trading post for the export of gold, Elmina
became the first slave trading post on the West African coast feeding the slave
markets of the western Atlantic in the sixteenth century. As time passed, it also
EL M INA 219
became one of the most active slave trade depots in the Atlantic world. Beginning
in the fifteenth century, Portuguese explorers slowly made their way along Africa’s
western coast. By the 1480s, t hese explorers had reached the present-day country
of Ghana. First constructed in 1482, Elmina was a fort of great importance for
explorers in need of supplies as they continued south seeking passage into the
Indian Ocean and on to Asia. The castle resembles the typical European design in
construction. It is a military fortification well-armed with cannons. The lower
levels of Elmina contained the large holding cells for hundreds of slaves.
In the period of sailing vessels, outposts such as Elmina were critical to success-
ful missions, though few became as important as Elmina became by the eighteenth
century. Local African rulers permitted the Portuguese to establish Elmina on con-
dition of its being used for peaceful exchange. Like many of the adventurers who
left Europe in the fifteenth c entury, the builders of Elmina sought access to existing
trade networks; the most valuable commodity at that time was gold, followed by
spices such as melegueta pepper. Through Elmina, the Portuguese w ere able to insert
themselves into the regional gold trade. The arrival of European traders reoriented
existing trade networks away from the trans-Saharan trade. Over time, commodities
that porters carried across the Sahara Desert, such as gold, w ere directed towards
the coasts, to forts such as Elmina, where European traders carried those goods to
A seventeenth-century etching of the Portuguese c astle of Elmina. First constructed

in 1482, by the eighteenth century upwards of 30,000 captive African men, w omen,
and children passed yearly through its gates to be sold into slavery in the Americ as.
(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
220 EL M INA
other Atlantic markets. Forts such as Elmina contributed to the growth of the
triangle trade that formed the foundation of the Atlantic economy.
As contact between Europeans and Africans increased and colonies grew in the
Western Hemisphere, the demands of the market changed, as did the roles played
by the traders at places such as Elmina. The Portuguese extended the range of the
market along the West African coast, serving as the carriers of goods from one part
of Africa to another region in Africa. Eventually, the trade shifted from gold to
slaves. Portuguese traders served more as middlemen, carrying slaves from one
part of Africa to another until the plantation system matured in the Car ibbean. As
the production of crops such as sugar and tobacco grew in the sixteenth century,
the demand for plantation labor shifted the trade between Europe and Africa as
greater numbers of slaves began to be carried across the Atlantic.
The growth in the volume of slaves exported through Elmina clearly marked
the reorientation of the African slave trade west into the Atlantic, rather than exclu-
sively to the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean markets. It also marked the eco-
nomic growth of plantation agriculture in the Americas to supply markets elsewhere
with cash crops and the mining operations that supplied the silver that fueled the
international economy in later centuries. The Western Hemisphere had an insa-
tiable need for labor and Africa had an abundant supply of slaves. Thus, Elmina
remains a visible symbol for the largest forced migration in h uman history. The
volume of trade was a small trickle early on with slave traders carrying less than a
thousand slaves from Elmina per year. By the early sixteenth century, that num-
ber had grown to a few thousand per year. By the eighteenth c entury, European
traders took approximately 30,000 slaves annually from Elmina.
The economic importance of Elmina to Portugal’s global empire was clear by
the end of the sixteenth century as its European competitors sought to wrest con-
trol away from the Portuguese. The Dutch w ere the first to do so, taking Elmina in
1637, a fact which coincided with both the expansion of Dutch colonies and Dutch
participation in the Atlantic slave trade. It was not the last time the fortress changed
European masters, as the British would buy the c astle from the Dutch late in the
nineteenth century.
Elmina influenced West Africa in ways that remain controversial t oday. The loss
of 30,000 people a year in the eighteenth c entury altered the demographic bal-
ance of the region. In addition to carrying away Africans in the prime of their adult
lives, the slave trade passing through Elmina contributed to the political instabil-
ity of the region. While scholars debate the extent to which rulers of African king-
doms are responsible for the slave trade, one of the more powerful slave trading
kingdoms in West Africa, Ashanti, began to dominate, supplying many of the slaves
transported through Elmina. Thus, Elmina significantly altered the political, eco-
nomic, and social life of West Africa while being an essential piece of the Atlantic
trade network that developed a fter 1500.
Eugene Van Sickle
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Portuguese Atlantic; Slave Trade in Africa
E M AN C IPATION P R O C LA M ATION 221
Further Reading
Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press.
versity Press.
Klein, Herbert S. 1999. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
E M A N C I PAT I O N P R O C L A M AT I O N ( 1 8 6 3 )
The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln on Janu-
ary 1, 1863, during the Civil War, declared that all people held as slaves in states
currently in rebellion against the United States, with several exemptions, were “and
henceforward shall be free.” Lincoln promised that the government of the United
States, including the army and the navy, would “recognize and maintain the free-
dom of said persons.” The Emancipation Proclamation broadened Union war aims,
opened the door for hundreds of thousands of African Americans to enroll in the
United States army and navy, and led to the Thirteenth Amendment of the Con-
stitution and the end of slavery in the United States. Although the Emancipation
Proclamation was derided by many of Lincoln’s contemporaries, o thers praised it
because it helped lead to black suffrage and citizenship. During the Civil Rights
Movement of the twentieth century, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. invoked, among
other documents, the Emancipation Proclamation.
Slavery had deep roots in the Atlantic world and, after the American Revolu-
tion, slavery grew at a steady rate in the United States. The 1790 census found a
slave population of about 700,000. By 1860 the slave population numbered nearly
4 million. Thus, by 1860, more slaves lived in the United States than ever before
and the bulk of the slave population was concentrated in the states that became
the Confederacy. Slavery and emancipation played an important role in the sec-
tional crisis leading up to the Civil War. Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise (1820),
and Stephen A. Douglas’s Compromise of 1850, staved off disunion but only for a
limited time. During the 1850s, events such as the caning of Charles Sumner, and
Bleeding Kansas, caused many northerners to argue that white liberties w ere under
assault and that a “Slave Power Conspiracy” controlled the government.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, Southerners seceded
from the Union. B ecause the newly-born Republican Party championed f ree labor
and proclaimed their desire to fence slavery out of the territories and put slavery
on the path of ultimate extinction, slaveholders declared secession as the only way
to defend their way of life. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Ste-
phens, proclaimed that the new government was founded on the principle that
black p
eople w ere inferior to white p
eople. Secession commissioners from the Lower
South fanned throughout the Upper South and the Border States. They predicted
scenes of rapine, torture, and murder and invoked the specter of the Haitian Revo-
lution. While t hese lurid appeals frightened many in the Upper South, it took the
222 E M AN C IPATION P R O C LA M ATION
firing on Fort Sumter, and Lincoln’s subsequent call for troops, to convince four
Upper South States to leave the Union.
On the day the rebels fired on Fort Sumter, Senator Charles Sumner of Massa
chusetts went to the White House and urged Lincoln to use his war powers to eman-
cipate the slaves. In preceding years, Sumner had discussed slavery and emancipation
with former president John Quincy Adams, who contended that the president could
destroy slavery during a time of war by employing his war powers. Sumner enthu-
siastically accepted this opinion and urged Lincoln to follow this course. Sumner
was not an isolated voice; many abolitionists urged Lincoln to seize the moment
and strike a blow for freedom. Lincoln did not heed this advice because, as he rea-
soned, if he did so, he would lose the border states. Abolitionists w ere disap-
pointed by Lincoln’s hesitancy and angered when the special session of the 37th
Congress issued the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution. The Crittenden-Johnson Res-
olution defined northern war aims very narrowly, as a war not for liberation or
black freedom but to restore the Union. Many northerners agreed with these sen-
timents. Weaned on the oratory of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay and the actions
of Andrew Jackson during the Nullification Crisis, northerners w ere fired with the
righteous passion and determined to preserve the Union, not end slavery. Thus, in
the early years of the war, proponents of narrowly defined war aims carried the
day over abolitionists.
General Benjamin F. Butler, the United States commander at Fortress Monroe,
made an important contribution to the debate over emancipation. Several slaves
sought shelter with United States troops in Fortress Monroe and when their mas-
ter arrived demanding their return, Butler refused. Butler mocked the man for
invoking the Fugitive Slave Law, noting the absurdity of seceding and declaring
war against the United States, while using U.S. laws to reclaim slaves. Butler declared
the slaves as contraband of war. In August of 1861, Lincoln signed the First Con-
fiscation Act into law, which directed the president to use the courts to seize prop-
erty being used to aid the rebellion. In late August, General John C. Frémont, the
commander of the Department of Missouri, issued a proclamation declaring mar-
tial law and emancipating slaves in Missouri. Radical Republicans and abolition-
ists were delighted, but numerous others were horrified. Lincoln quickly revoked
the proclamation on the grounds that it ran counter to the Crittenden-Johnson Res-
olution. Several months later, General David Hunter attempted similar tactics in
the Sea Islands. Hunter declared martial law, emancipated the slaves, and began
to enroll them in regiments. Lincoln revoked Hunter’s proclamation, but did not
employ a different justification; Lincoln reserved the authority to emancipate slaves
to himself, under his war powers. Finally, in July of 1862, Lincoln signed the Sec-
ond Confiscation Act, which provided for the seizure of property from disloyal per-
sons and the emancipation of slaves.
In the spring of 1862, Lincoln held a meeting with border state congressmen
and urged them to support compensated emancipation. Lincoln also thought about
colonization of freed slaves and pairing it with emancipation. Fin ally, Lincoln’s
reply to Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions” was cagey. Lincoln claimed
that he was fighting for the Union and that his paramount objective was to save
E M AN C IPATION P R O C LA M ATION 223
the Union. If he could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, by freeing none of
the slaves, or be freeing some of the slaves, he would do it. Many historians claim
Lincoln was finessing public opinion and letting people know that emancipation,
although counter to Crittenden-Johnson, was very much on the table. Certainly
the different ways that Lincoln responded to Frémont and Hunter suggest a shift
in his ideas about emancipation.
By the late spring of 1862, Lincoln accepted the necessity of an Emancipation
Proclamation, but Secretary of State William Henry Seward cautioned Lincoln that
he first needed a military victory. Without a victory, the proclamation would seem
little more than the d ying shriek of the Union. Thus, Lincoln had a long and
unpleasant summer waiting for a victory. While George B. McClellan’s victory over
Robert E. Lee at Antietam was not the victory Lincoln wanted, he nevertheless
issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation giving the rebels 100 days to
cease their rebellion and come back to the Union. They could do this by holding
elections and sending representatives to Congress. If not, all slaves held in areas
in rebellion would be declared “then, thenceforward, and forever f ree.” Lincoln also
noted that he would recommend to Congress the adoption of legislation facilitat-
ing colonization.
Responses to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation were mixed. South-
erners erupted in fury and accused Lincoln of attempting to incite a servile insur-
rection. Radical Republicans, abolitionists, and African Americans rejoiced over
the proclamation, although they w ere irritated that Lincoln included pro-
colonization language. Many northerners reacted with concern, unease, or anger,
because while they supported a war for the Union, they resented fighting for the
freedom of p eople they considered inferior. Democrats gleefully employed the Pre-
liminary Emancipation Proclamation to attack Republicans during the 1862 mid-
term elections and their racist attacks resonated with voters. Response to the
Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was mixed in G reat Britain. Although Brit-
ish Liberals such as John Bright and Richard Cobden praised Lincoln and the
United States, the charge that Lincoln was attempting to incite a servile insurrec-
tion gained traction with the British.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln
freed all the slaves in areas in rebellion, although he exempted Tennessee, the coun-
ties in western V irginia, several counties in eastern V
irginia, and several parishes
in Louisiana; because these areas were no longer in rebellion, or, rather, because
Lincoln declared that these areas w ere no longer in rebellion, and Lincoln’s war
powers did not allow him to emancipate the slaves in these regions. In reality, the
rebels still had considerable strength in Tennessee. Lincoln exempted Tennessee
at the request of Provisional Governor Andrew Johnson so as not to drive Tennes-
see out of the Union. Stung by British criticism that he was trying to spark a slave
rebellion, Lincoln included specific language in the Proclamation to allay this fear.
Lincoln enjoined African Americans to “abstain from all violence, unless in neces-
sary self-defence” and “labor faithfully for reasonable wages.” Thus, the United
States-British diplomacy had an important influence on the Proclamation, insofar
as Lincoln modified the language of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
224 E N C O M I E N D A SYSTE M
In addition, by asking slaves to labor for wages, Lincoln attempted to avoid criti-
cism that emancipation led to economic ruin, an idea many people embraced
because of the fate of several British colonies a fter emancipation. Critically, Lin-
coln put the stamp of approval on black men serving in the army. By the end of
the Civil War, over 200,000 African Americans served in the United States Army
and Navy.
Reactions to the Proclamation w ere mixed. Abolitionists, Radical Republicans,
and enslaved p eople saw it as ushering in a new Jubilee. Despite northern fears,
Kentuckians did not throw down their arms and refuse to fight. Indeed, the lack
of mutinies among soldiers suggests that they quickly accepted the necessity of
emancipation. Rebels w ere furious and scornful. Lincoln freed no slaves in the areas
he controlled and all the slaves in areas he did not control, ran one southern jibe.
The Proclamation received wide support throughout the Atlantic world. Argentine
statesman Domingo F. Sarmiento ranked Lincoln as one of the greatest United
States statesmen because of his Proclamation. Europeans such as Victor Hugo,
Giuseppe Mazzini, John Bright, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Tsar Alexander II of Rus
sia cheered Lincoln as a liberator and a benefactor of humanity. Indeed, many
were impressed by the Proclamation and the alteration in Union war aims, from a
war for u
nion to a war for liberty. Lincoln himself understood that the Proclama-
tion was vulnerable to a hostile Supreme Court, and thus pushed for the adoption
of a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw slavery, which was realized in the Thir-
teenth Amendment.
Evan C. Rothera
See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of Slavery; Slavery
Further Reading
Blair, William A., and Karen Fisher Younger, eds. 2009. Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipa-
tion Reconsidered. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Franklin, John Hope. 1963. The Emancipation Proclamation. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Guelzo, Allen C. 2004. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America.
New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
ENCOMIENDA SYSTEM
From the Spanish for “entrustment,” the Encomienda System (1503–ca. 1720) was
established by the Spanish Crown shortly a fter the conquest of the Americas as a
labor and land leasing system in its American colonies. Spain allocated the land
and labor of indigenous populations throughout Spanish America to Spanish over-
seers. Known as encomenderos, they directed the work of the land with the help of
an Indian chief known as a cacique. This system was meant to facilitate the pro-
duction and trade of agricultural and other highly profitable goods and to educate
the conquered populations of Indians. Caciques as well as their indigenous subor-
dinates, however, suffered great abuses under this system. As a result, the enco-
mienda system allowed for the extraction of valuable raw materials from the
E N C O M I E N D A SYSTE M 225
American colonies and thus was a major contributing factor in the extinction of
many indigenous populations.
Spaniards w ere familiar with an encomienda system of labor, having implemented
a similar arrangement during the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Ibe-
rian Peninsula from the Moors between 718 and 1492. Queen Isabella (1451–1504)
ordered the establishment an encomienda in the Americas in 1503.
Officially, encomenderos entered into a royal partnership with the Crown and
were entrusted with protecting and educating the Indians they were given under
their encomienda. In return for these serv ices, the Indians would pay tribute and
offer their l abor. The Spanish Empire was responsible for introducing and convert-
ing the Indians to Catholicism. Since it was easier to reach scattered populations
of Indians via these land leases and labor grants, the task was transferred to the
encomendero. An encomienda did not, however, transfer the ownership of the land
or the people. The land remained property of the Spanish Crown and the Indians
were not slaves.
Governors were responsible for distributing the lands to the encomenderos in a
distribution process known as repartimiento. Not all who made the trek across the
Atlantic could obtain an encomienda. Highly sought a fter, encomiendas were reserved
for conquistadors who excelled in their serv ice to the king. In return, encomende-
ros were required to share a portion of their profits, known as the Royal Fifth, with
the king. Ultimately, Spain maintained its ownership over the land, the newly con-
quered peoples were educated, and the king shared in the revenues of successful
agricultural and mineral ventures.
In theory, an encomienda involved a temporary oversight of Indians. Encomen-
deros, however, realized that they had sole control over t hose individuals appointed
to their care, and some soon began to abuse the system. Instead of maintaining
their role as encomenderos, some turned slave masters, and initiated an unauthor-
ized network of Indian slavery and abuse.
Members of the Catholic clergy soon witnessed the abuse of indigenous pop-
ulations, especially in mining regions. As large numbers of Indians died from
both disease and maltreatment, some missionaries expressed their concern for
the system. One of the most vocal opponents to the encomienda was Dominican
Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. He was among the earliest settlers to Spanish Amer
ica, and was appointed to an office dedicated to the protection of Indians. He
traveled back to Spain to recount the vulnerable state the Indian populations were
living in u nder the encomienda, and even suggested that it be abolished. His
most famous works, History of the Indies and A Short Account of the Destruction of
the Indies, illustrated the abusive beh avior toward the Indians by encomenderos
and colonizers.
The clergy were not the only ones disappointed with the encomienda as a sys-
tem. The encomenderos themselves disliked the lack of ownership they had over the
land, the restrictions imposed upon them regarding the indigenous people, and
the fact that upon their deaths, the encomienda could not be transferred to their
heirs. Because the Spanish wanted to maintain their power over the region, Span-
ish policymakers rejected the transfer of deeds to the next generation.
226 ENLI G HTEN M ENT
An attempted solution to the reported abusive tendencies of encomenderos came

in the form of new legislation in 1512, known as the Laws of Burgos. This edict
detailed an extensive list of official responsibilities for the encomenderos. Among
other points, the Laws of Burgos included measures to keep track of the religious
doctrine that the Indians received. For example, encomenderos were to make sure
that those under their care attended mass, knew the Ten Commandments, and
received the sacraments (especially baptism, confession, and marriage). They w ere
to be taught to read and write, and t hose encomenderos seeking to work p eople in
the mines had to pay a wage. The rules w ere rarely enforced, however, and the
Laws of Burgos failed to officially resolve the abuses of the system. In Peru and
certain parts of Mexico, for example, many of the abuses of the encomienda were
related to mining. As time passed and better control was gained over the various
regions and populations, portions of these laws were implemented to various
levels of successes and failures.
In time, new generations of wealthy Spanish Americans sought land ownership
rather than this feudal labor system. During the eighteenth c entury, as new ports
were established and a more open system of trade was allowed due to the Bourbon
Reforms, it became more profitable to own land than to attempt to obtain an
encomienda.
Lizeth Elizondo
See also: Conquistadors; Gold and Silver; Las Casas, Bartolomé de
Further Reading
Batchelder, R., and N. Sanchez. 2013. “The Encomienda and the Optimizing Imperialist:
An Interpretation of Spanish Imperialism in the Americ as.” Public Choice 156:
45–60.
Simpson, L. B. 1950. The Encomienda in New Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press
Yeager, T. J. 1995. “Encomienda or Slavery? The Spanish Crown’s Choice of L abor Organ
ization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America.” Journal of Economic History 55:
842–859.
ENLIGHTENMENT
A European intellectual movement that achieved its greatest prominence during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment challenged the world
view of the previous millennium. Proponents of its ideas were committed to liber-
ating the h uman mind of the old philosophy which held that God and the church
were the ultimate authority. The philosophes, a group of French writers in the eigh
teenth century who exemplified a new breed of philosophers, questioned the medi-
eval attitudes, assumptions, and premises on which contemporary institutions
and relationships were based. They aggressively critiqued the ancien régime by the
new, steadfast standards of empiricism and were determined to use their new tool
to upend the old order. Unlike philosophers of the past, who viewed the physical
ENLI G HTEN M ENT 227
or natural world metaphysically, Enlightenment advocates valued knowledge for

its utilitarian benefit to advance human happiness. They engaged in public policy
debates, served in government as civil servants and advisors to princes, and pre-
ferred science over tradition and superstition. For more than the next three centu-
ries, its influence would spread from the Old World to the New and eventually
envelop the globe.
Martin Luther (1483–1546) contributed to the origins of the Enlightenment in
1517, when he nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg Church. By
challenging long established orthodoxy, Luther shattered the old order and opened
the Western mind to new and revolutionary ideas, both sectarian and secular.
Neither the pope nor his clergy w ere the source of divine knowledge, Luther pos-
ited. Only a divinely inspired book, the Bible, as read and understood by average
believers, was the authority. The ensuing social, religious, and political upheavals
that erupted, encouraged people to think for themselves. Every human and natu
ral phenomenon developed new critical perspectives, subjected to intense exami-
nation and to fervent discussion and debate.
The Enlightenment that emerged in the seventeenth c entury began in E ngland
and France, with Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), Isaac
Newton (1643–1727), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes (1596–1650),
and Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) laying the intellectual foundations. Their
ideas penetrated e very sphere of collective life and action, inspiring revolutionaries
and innovators alike to prod societies and institutions to move beyond the status
quo in government and politics, in science and technology, in economic systems and
the arts, in philosophy and education, and in religion and social relations. Change
was the essential imperative of this new era, and knowledge and freedom were both
change’s necessary preconditions and outcomes. Enlightenment and liberation
together opened the human mind to the possibility and opportunity for improving
the condition and environment of h uman beings. Thus, in the h uman mind, revolu-
tionary change began. Enlightenment philosophers broke from a universe which
held God to be the final authority for all things. They re-directed attention to human
beings as the measure of all things. Scientific ideas, based on axioms and premises
and sanctioned for centuries by the Roman Catholic Church, were subjected to the
exacting standards of empiricism, the new science founded by Francis Bacon. Bacon
radically revised the methods of knowledge and argued that it could only be formed
through close observation and methodical experimentation.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Enlightenment ideas inspired trans-
formative upheavals in Atlantic world societies. The Enlightenment derived its
transformative power in the decisive joining of means to ends. Although Locke rec-
ognized that powerful factors, including the struggle for political power, severe
economic and social crises, and religious conflict, usually drove large scale change, it
was the leaders of the Enlightenment and their activist followers in G reat Britain,
its American colonies, and France that justified the rebellions, explained the motives,
and forged visions of change based on Enlightenment values. Enlightenment ideas
encouraged the actors to think for themselves and to make independent decisions
228 ENLI G HTEN M ENT
on which of their own interests to follow, using empirical reasoning to evaluate

realities and enlightened values by which to live.
Enlightened thinkers generally held a world view that stemmed from a few key
areas of ideas: reason, nature, and progress. They wanted to equip the common
people with the intellectual tools to realize steady, unlimited progress toward mate-
rial and spiritual happiness. Enlightenment thinkers had an abiding faith in the
power of reason, and a sharpened common sense refined by instruction in logic and
science, to change all human beings for the good. The philosophes, basing their ideas
on Locke, held that potentially everyone had equal powers of understanding, but the
cultural environment—religion, politics, education, social class, superstition, igno-
rance, prejudice, and vice—corrupted the normal functioning of reason that was
within every person’s nature. Reason enables human beings to discern from nature a
set of ethical and aesthetic goals or standards beneath the layers of cultural obfusca-
tions. The process of steady, indefinite progress, as outlined in 1750 by the French
economist, Turgot (1727–1781), would be achieved by the effective application of rea-
son in controlling the corrupted environment. Moreover, reason could be effectively
applied through education to achieve this optimistic, present-worldly belief in the
capacity of human beings to progress toward comfort and happiness on earth.
The wide variety of outlets for distributing ideas, the increased speed of trans-
portation, and the growth of literacy in the eighteenth century aided significantly
in the cross-fertilization of ideas among Enlightenment thinkers. The range of
moral weeklies, literary periodicals, newspapers, and an international book trade
enabled their philosophical essays, discourses, treatises, books, and encyclopedias
to circulate on a scale unknown in h uman history. Within months, Scottish writings
indebted to writers in France and E ngland would appear on the market. Increased
literacy among a broader population gave experts in all subjects entry into circles
of political power and a prominence in society that they had not previously experi-
enced. Enlightened political thinkers served as ministers in European courts, such
as Maria Theresa (1717–1780), George III (1738–1820), Leopold I (1790–1865), and
Louis XVI (1754–1793), and savants, like Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Thomas
Jefferson (1743–1826), Jérôme Marie Champion de Cicé (1735–1810), and the Mar-
quis de Lafayette (1757–1834) help shape the directions of the American and French
revolutions.
The Enlightenment created today’s modern intellectual, the generalized critical
thinker, the polymath, and the educated man, who delved into many topics con-
necting their logic and implications. This critical attitude exhibited its greatest
impact in France, G reat Britain, and, following independence, the United States.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), a Swiss-French author, was known as a phi
losopher and theorist who wrote on moral philosophy, education, politics, and
music theory as well as writing novels and autobiography. Benjamin Franklin was
renowned for his experiments in electricity, but he also made his mark as a diplo-
mat, writer, and businessman. Adam Smith (1723–1790), a Scotsman, established
his reputation as a moral philosopher before founding the modern science of eco-
nomics with his influential work Wealth of Nations.
ENLI G HTEN M ENT 229
The streams of ideas that flowed into the Enlightenment’s development contrib-
uted to its character of being as much a bundle of attitudes as a collection of ideas. It
was eclectic and following different courses. The development of the Enlighten-
ment resembled a continuing debate—sometimes a civil war—rather than the
advancement of a unified force of the enlightened. Descartes and Locke differed
on the foundation of knowledge with Descartes arguing that the beginning of firm
knowledge began with systematic doubt. Locke argued, however, that ideas w ere
not innate in man’s nature. His psychology of knowledge reduced the primary con-
stituents of knowledge to the impressions transmitted through the senses to the
mind. The mind was filled with sensory-data only and the connections made
between them. The implication was that humankind possessed no fixed moral
ideas. Moral sensibility, Locke taught, arose as the mind experienced pain and plea
sure. Although the sense of the divine and the theological were supposed to hold
little sway in “enlightened” thought, Locke, as did Newton, still associated his ideas
within the traditional framework of Christian precepts.
The Enlightenment exposed everything to scrutiny. Its critique continued the
undermining of the authority of classical teaching and of the Catholic Church, the
two pillars that governed traditional European culture, which had been unleashed
by Protestant reformers. The new authority, as sought out and discovered in science
and reason by the thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ultimately
prompted both social and political revolutions in the Atlantic world. Beginning
in 1688, the Bloodless Revolution in E ngland firmly established Protestantism as
the state religion, barred Roman Catholics from the throne, abolished the mon-
arch’s power to suspend laws, declared illegal a standing army during peace time,
and permanently established Parliament as the governing power in the British
constitution. The trend continued in 1776, when the United States declared its
independence from its colonial metropole. It climaxed in 1789, when mounting
discontent in France exploded with the storming of the Bastille by Par isians on
July 14. The 10-year upheaval had profound ramifications in politically and socially
shaping the modern world. The political legacies of the Enlightenment continued
to reverberate into the f uture, clarifying and formulating many of the key tenets of
liberalism by which the leading thinkers sought freedom for the transformations
it would produce.
Glen Edward Taul
See also: Bacon, Sir Francis; Franklin, Benjamin; Jefferson, Thomas; Locke, John;
Protestant Reformation; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Further Reading
Burns, James MacGregor. 2013. Fire and Light: How the Enlightenment Transformed Our World.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Commager, Henry Steele. 1977. The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America
Realized the Enlightenment. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday.
Gay, Peter. 1966–1969. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. 2 vols. New York: Knopf.
230 E Q UIANO , OLAUDAH
EQUIANO, OLAUDAH (ca. 1745–1797)

Seaman, explorer, abolitionist, and author, Olaudah Equiano led a rare and in some
ways unparalleled life. Born in Africa in the mid-eighteenth century, he was cap-
tured, enslaved, sold, and transported to the Americas where he labored in North
America and the West Indies. He eventually gained his freedom and wrote an
account of his life: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gusta-
vus Vassa, The African (1789). His narrative, one of the first accounts of the slave
trade from a former slave’s point of view, had an international context because in
it Equiano described slavery across several continents; this was significant in the
development of the transatlantic antislavery movement which went on to flourish
in the nineteenth century. Equiano’s published narrative is one of the first works
written by a former slave, and it transformed the abolitionist movement. His nar-
rative has also become a seminal work in African American literature, b ecause it
ushered in a new literary genre called the slave narrative, and it is an early exam-
ple of black self-expression and self-representation.
Around 1745, Equiano was born in the Eboe province in the area now known
as Nigeria. His memories of his homeland were both pastoral and idyllic. Equiano
later recounted in g reat detail the customs and manners of his people who were
known as the Igbo. He explained that although the tribe engaged in slavery it was not
the same kind that he later experienced in North America and the West Indies,
where slavery was s haped by changing definitions of race, and enslavement was
inherited by each generation.
Equiano’s experience with chattel and plantation slavery began when he and
his s ister were kidnapped when he was about eleven years old. The siblings were
separated and they never saw each other again. The original kidnapping had been
carried out by fellow Africans of a neighbouring tribe. They sold Equiano to English
slave traders, who transported him across the Atlantic to the West Indies. The jour-
ney, known as the Middle Passage, was documented by Equiano and in doing so
he became one of the first to describe its horrors from a slave’s point of view.
Within days of arriving in Barbados, Equiano was taken to Virginia and sold to
a local planter called Mr. Campbell. At this time, Equiano could not speak English.
Following his time in V irginia he was sold to a Royal Navy officer called Lieutenant
Michael Henry Pascal. Pascal brought Equiano aboard his ship, which was named
the Industrious Bee. Pascal renamed Equiano as Gustavus Vassa, a fter a sixteenth
century Swedish king. By naming Equiano as Gustavus Vassa, Pascal demon-
strated his ownership of his new slave, as it was customary for slave masters to
rename their slaves, and thereby establish their complete authority over the enslaved
person’s sense of self. Equiano used the name Gustavus Vassa thereafter.
During his time with Pascal, Equiano was baptized and learnt to speak English
and read and write. The opportunity to become literate and educated was rare
among slaves. Equiano visited E ngland with Pascal, and on landing in Falmouth
in 1757, Equiano saw snow for the first time. Together, Pascal and Equiano saw
military action during the Seven Years’ War with France.
Although Pascal had promised to free Equiano, at the end of the war he broke
his word and sold Equiano into slavery in the West Indies. In Montserrat,
E Q UIANO , OLAUDAH 231
The title page of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oladudah Equiano, or Gustavus
Vassa, The African. First published in 1789, Equiano’s life story revealed the cruelty of
slavery and the slave trade in gripping detail. (Library of Congress)
Equiano was resold to a prominent merchant called Robert King. Equiano
became an overseer. Necessity had driven his involvement in the institution of
slavery which he abhorred and would l ater campaign to abolish. Equiano also sold
his skills, and by doing so he managed to save enough money to buy his freedom
from Robert King in 1766.
As a free man, Equiano returned to sea voyages. In the interest of commerce
and adventure, Equiano sailed to North America, the Mediterranean, the West
Indies, and the North Pole. Equiano visited the Arctic aboard a ship called the Race
horse in an attempt to find the Northwest Passage to India via the North Pole.
On returning to London, Equiano became concerned with spiritual and social
reform. He converted to Methodism and in 1786 became involved in a movement
to abolish slavery called the Sons of Africa. Equiano got to know, and work with,
British abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson, James Ramsey and Granville Sharp. As
an outspoken opponent of the slave trade, Equiano first wrote letters to newspa-
pers, and then at the encouragement of his fellow abolitionists wrote The Interest
ing Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, which was
published in March, 1789.
232 E Q UIANO , OLAUDAH
Equiano’s Description of His Capture

In the following passage from his autobiography, Olaudah Equiano described
his capture by slavers:
“One day, when all our people w ere gone out to their works as usual, and
only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman
got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both, and, without giving us
time to cry out . . . stopped our mouths, and ran off with us into the nearest
wood. Here they tied our hands, and continued to carry us as far as they
could, till night came on, when we reached a small house, where the robbers
halted for refreshment, and spent the night. We w ere then unbound, but
were unable to take any food; and, being quite overpowered by fatigue and
grief, our only relief was some sleep. . . . The next morning we left the house,
and continued travelling all the day. . . . When we went to rest the following
night they offered us some victuals; but we refused it; and the only comfort
we had was in being in one another’s arms all that night, and bathing each
other with our tears. But alas! we were soon deprived of even the small com-
fort of weeping together. The next day proved a day of greater sorrow than I
had yet experienced; for my sister and I were then separated, while we lay
clasped in each other’s arms. It was in vain that we besought them not to
part us; she was torn from me, and immediately carried away, while I was
left in a state of distraction not to be described.”
Source: Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African. London: Self-published, 1789, 1: 48–51.
The book was a publishing sensation. To produce the first edition, Equiano had
relied upon subscriptions. It became hugely popular, and nine editions were pro-
duced in Equiano’s lifetime. He traveled widely throughout G reat Britain to pro-
mote the book and the abolitionist cause. Significantly, Equiano retained a measure
of control over the publication and dissemination of his work. Due to the interest
generated by his work, Equiano became a missionary to Africa, and in 1788
presented a petition to the queen on behalf of his “African brethren.”
In 1792, Equiano married Susanna Cullen, a white Englishwoman from Cam-
bridgeshire. They had two daughters, Ann Marie and Johanna. Equiano died on
March 31, 1797, leaving a sizeable estate which his surviving daughter inherited.
The Interesting Narrative is of g reat significance to the development of African-
American literature. Equiano was the first writer of African descent to present his
work as self-authorized, proudly announcing it on the title page as “Written by
Himself.” Equiano did not include any authenticating documents regarding his
identity and authorship, as Phillis Wheatley (a former slave and poet) had done.
Self-identification in Equiano’s narrative was important, if he could write and pub-
lish without the help or authorization of European intermediaries, and if he could
EU R OPEAN E X PLO R ATION 233
document his personal experience of the cruelty and inhumanity of the Middle
Passage and slavery, then he was evidence against the major arguments made by
supporters and apologists for slavery who held that slaves w ere inhuman, unfeel-
ing, and incapable of understanding and education. Slave narratives became a vital
literary form by which former slaves, like Equiano, could lay claim to the asser-
tion of the self, and would no longer be denied selfhood.
Some of Equiano’s claims in the narrative have been disputed. Recent scholar-
ship has suggested that he may have been born in North America, possibly in South
Carolina. Vincent Carretta, a scholar who has worked extensively on Equiano’s life,
times, and literary output has asked whether Olaudah Equiano was an identity
revealed, as the title of his autobiography implies, or an identity assumed by Gusta-
vus Vassa in 1789 for rhetorical (and financial) ends.
The issue of Equiano’s identity was raised in his own lifetime. In later editions,
Equiano did include testimonials from those who met him when he first arrived
in E ngland and could speak little English. Furthermore, much of what Equiano
claims to have experienced can be verified through ships logs and receipts. His
very early life is harder to confirm. Perhaps Equiano’s description of his African
home is a fictional conflation of several African cultures and other p eople’s
memories.
It is worth noting that any autobiography is never entirely factual, and by the
very definition of the literary form, parts of it w ill be subjective. Slave narratives
were further complicated by several special concerns, such as the author’s serious
responsibilities to the burgeoning African American community and the expecta-
tions of a likely audience of abolitionists.
Katie Myerscough
See also: Abolition Movement; Atlantic Slave Trade; Black Atlantic; Slavery; Slave
Trade in Africa; Wheatley, Phillis
Further Reading
Caretta, Vincent. 1999. “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth
Century Question of Identity.” Slavery & Abolition 20: 96–105.
Davis, Charles T., and Henry L. Gates Jr. 1985. The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Equiano, Olaudah. 1995. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Edited by Vincent
Carretta. New York: Penguin Books.
E U R O P E A N E X P L O R AT I O N
The era of European exploration, lasting from the fifteenth to the nineteenth cen-
turies, is commonly referred to as the Age of Discovery, and encompassed not only
European encounters with new lands and p eoples, but also with new technolo-
gies, world views, and intellectual endeavors. The collection of abilities that con-
tributed to European exploration is sometimes called the Iberian Advantage, owing
to much early exploration originating from Portugal and Spain. Initial explorations
234 EU R OPEAN E X PLO R ATION
for sources of trade led to the establishment of trading ports around the world.
Eventually, many of t hese trading ports w ere used as staging points for coloniza-
tion. While the Iberian Advantage idea contains a large emphasis on technological
achievements, no less important w ere the intellectual and spiritual climates. Most
technological advancement was in the area of sail, allowing larger ships and easier
propulsion as well as important new military capabilities from cannons. A Renais
sance disposition t oward curiosity and discovery led the thinkers of the era to prac-
tical applications of knowledge such as advances in navigation ability, governmental
bureaucratic innovations, and extensive financial and communications systems.
European exploration also resulted in the destruction of indigenous populations
in the Americas, large transfers of natural resources and wealth to Europe, and bio-
logical migration in the form of diseases and crops.
The period of European exploration began with Portuguese efforts to explore
the Atlantic coast of Africa in the early fifteenth c entury. Before the end of the
century, they found a route to the Indian Ocean by navigating around the south-
ern tip of Africa. In 1492, Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506), under the ban-
ner of the Spanish, traversed the Atlantic and reached the Americas. The Treaty of
Tordesillas (1494) dictated regions of exploration, namely, the Spanish in the east
and the Atlantic, and the Portuguese west toward India and China. The French
and English, quickly following on the heels of the Spanish and Portuguese, began
their own explorations before the turn of the c entury. In 1522, an expedition initially
led by Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (ca. 1480–1521) completed the
first circumnavigation of the world.
It did not take long, however, to begin exploration inland, even before the world’s
coastlines w ere mapped. The Spanish conquistadors are the most well-known early
example of inland explorers. During the course of the fifteenth c entury, small num-
bers of Spanish soldiers conquered large empires through a combination of divide-
and-conquer strategy, technology, and disease. It should be noted that significant
numbers of indigenous troops fought alongside the Spanish, as European technol-
ogy was not yet at a decisive point of military effectiveness. Guns were generally
feared more for their loud sounds than actual destructive damage. By the early
1600s, English and French settlers were expanding in North America. Russia inves-
tigated and conquered Siberia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
L ater inland explorations were led by the British in India, and finally the Western
European scramble for Africa in the nineteenth century. Although proximate to
Europe, African exploration took much longer to complete as Africa had few places
that ships could dock and many rivers w ere unnavigable, thus nullifying the
European sea advantage. In addition, horses were much less useful in the African
environment.
European exploration was driven by different motivations. At the most basic
level, there was a sense of adventure in charting the unknown. Such a quest for
glory was often a strong motivation. Nevertheless, many were driven by potential
profit, and this was the strongest motivation when explorers requested funding for
expeditions from monarchs or trading companies. Profit could be found in a mul-
titude of ways. The most obvious was the discovery of bullion (gold and silver).
New sources of bullion w ere generally found in the Americas. Spices w
ere also very
important, particularly in an age before refrigeration, when the only recourse for
preservation was salt, and spices were used to cover up bad taste. Spices were pri-
marily found in Asia. Competition was another motivation, and was directly con-
nected to the profit that a country could extract from new discoveries. The world’s
wealth was viewed as finite, and any wealth taken by another monarch would be
unavailable to anyone else. Therefore, exploration was needed to gain profit, which
in turn made a monarch and country stronger relative to adversaries. Religious
motivation was also powerful. Europe had spent centuries fighting against Mus-
lim incursions, and the drive to spread Christianity to natives around the world
was strong. Religion was a particularly strong motivation during the exploration
of Africa in the nineteenth c entury, but played a large role throughout much of the
preceding era. Finally, practicalities blocked many previous avenues of trade. Due
to the breakup of the Mongol Empire beginning in the late thirteenth century, land
routes to Asia were no longer safe, and the hostile Ottoman Turks blocked the
Mediterranean Sea routes.
Many European developments that foster exploration w ere not inventions but
adaptations of existing tools and knowledge. Arising in the 1300s, and enduring
236 EU R OPEAN E X PLO R ATION
over the next three centuries, the Renaissance mindset promoted the acquisition
of knowledge and its application to current challenges. This last point is what set
European explorers apart from many other cultures. Knowledge and tools were
discovered and then applied to contemporary situations. There was not a simple
acquisition of knowledge, but a practical need. Various technological advantages
allowed for large-scale European exploration. Of particular importance was the
ability to put out to sea beyond coastlines and eventually return to the origin. Deep-
sea navigation was made possible through an increased knowledge of geography
and astronomy. Part of the exploratory nature of travel was the difference in navi-
gating in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, particularly in finding the
“North Star” of the South. In 1500, Portuguese explorations of the African coast
and South America resulted in the discovery and use of the Southern Cross con-
stellation for navigation. Advances in solar observation also contributed to the ability
to locate oneself during long ocean voyages. The invention of the compass, though
its true origin is unknown, was combined with coastal maps for more precise navi-
gation beginning in the thirteenth century. Not all techniques were drawn from
the early era of exploration, however, as many treatises from the classical era were
rediscovered and published, such as Ptolemy’s (90–168 CE) Geography.
Although the ability to navigate was vital, little would have been accomplished
without substantial improvements in ship design and effectiveness. Shipbuilders
designed rounder ships that could store a much greater quantity of goods and men.
The main disadvantage was maneuverability. Square-shaped sails provided the
power to move such heavy ships, but the sail shape did not allow the ship to turn
easily. Triangular sails, originally an idea imported from Arabia, w ere the answer.
These sails allowed much greater maneuverability, and when combined with square
sails, the large, round ships w ere suitable for long distance travel. Changes in hull
design resulted in even larger, stronger ships. Two implications are immediately
evident. First, wind was adequately harnessed to provide the mobility of the ship,
thus obviating the need for dedicated rowers, who w ere both supply-hungry and
an easily exhaustible source of power. Second, although there was additional space
from the lack of a rowing crew, t here was much more space in general for supplies
due to hull design. Combined with the increased ability to navigate, it was no lon-
ger necessary to sail closely to a coastline. This had been a limitation of sea travel
for thousands of years, both for the need to maintain knowledge of location as well
as to easily and frequently stop at port or disembark on a beach to acquire sup-
plies. Now, due to increased storage size, the ship could carry several months’ worth
of supplies, rather than merely a week’s worth.
Another aspect of the ships themselves was of vital consequence: artillery. For
thousands of years, naval warfare had been conducted by boats ramming enemy
boats and then sailors of one ship physically boarding the enemy vessel, finishing
off the e nemy with sword and fist. The advent of muzzle-loading cannons allowed
crews to fire heavier artillery longer distances than had been previously possible.
The proof of new methods of naval exploration and warfare converged in 1502, when
the new tactics w ere used for the first time. A small Portuguese contingent, oper-
ating thousands of miles away from home in the Indian Ocean, defeated a large
traditional Arab navy without losing a single ship. Central to this victory was the
new b attle tactic of keeping distance and battering the enemy from range with can-
nons. Few naval battles were so decisive in the era of European exploration against
traditional navies, but there was a definite swing in advantage toward Western
Europe. Navies w ere also central to land operations and exploration. They carried
supplies, but they also served in a military capacity by bombarding onshore native
defenses. European exploration was severely hampered, sometimes for centuries,
in any area that was not suitable for a nearby naval presence.
Communications and administration systems w ere also a vital component of
European exploration. The most evident examples w ere ships that could leave the
home country, travel to distant lands, and then eventually return to their origin.
The mercantile financial system based on bullion and credit arose at the beginning
of the sixteenth c entury and provided the means to acquire supplies for expedi-
tions. As European exploration spread over the next three centuries, the financial
system spread as well, providing hubs for continual resupply and goods trading.
Many of t hese were in the form of chartered trading companies. Wealthy merchants
supplied the capital necessary for exploration. Monarchs, who also wished to
mitigate the risk of funding ventures, usually sanctioned them. This often meant
that the companies acquired a large amount of autonomy over explored lands.
The difference in scale can be seen by comparing the small venture funded by the
Spanish Crown for Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the much larger enter-
prises undertaken by the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in 1629
after mercantile theory had advanced both in acceptance and practicality. The abil-
ity to transport purchased supplies lay not just in shipping and financial systems,
but also the wheel, which did not exist in some locales in the Americas prior to
European contact in the early 1500s, and mules that were easier to feed and lived
longer than horses. The backbone of the communication, transportation, and finan-
cial systems was the rising bureaucracy of modernizing states, which developed
alongside mercantilism. Bureaucracies with some amount of independence from
rulers and kings could maintain longevity in administration and policy. Finally,
writing and literacy permeated most aspects of the various communications sys-
tems, which allowed specific information and continuity to be transmitted over
large geographic expanses.
European exploration had many significant consequences, for both Europe and
the peoples of the explored regions. The exploring nations profited from the
resources found overseas, including precious metals, spices, and crops. Profits often
came at the expense of the native populations, many of which w ere subjugated
under European rule a fter colonization began in earnest. Diseases w ere also trans-
mitted both to and from Europe. Measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, and cholera
were particularly devastating in the Americas, killing 90 percent of the native pop-
ulation by the end of the sixteenth c entury. Europe was struck by a syphilis epi-
demic that had been transported from the Americas. Sheep and cattle brought by
Europeans decimated native agriculture. The opposite effect transpired in Europe
with a population boom caused by the introduction of potatoes, tomatoes, corn,
beans, and fruits. A great deal of migration occurred as European settlers moved
238 E VAN G ELI C ALIS M
to newly explored lands, though this emigration usually remained low, at least u
ntil
areas had been conquered. The Age of Exploration also contributed to the transi-
tion from a primarily agrarian medieval economy to mercantilism and eventually
industrial capitalism in Europe. While agriculture would remain a large sector of
all European economies for centuries, European exploration ushered in an era of
non-human power, allowing technology to harness powers beyond those of the
body.
Christopher Goodwin
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Columbus, Christopher; Conquistadors
Further Reading
Fernando-Armesto, Felipe. 2006. Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Parry, J. H. 2000. The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration and Settlement, 1450–1650.
London: Phoenix.
Raudzens, George, ed. 2003. Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests: Sixteenth to Eigh
teenth Centuries. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
E VA N G E L I C A L I S M
The Evangelical movement began as a version of Protestant Christianity in the eigh
teenth century that crossed denominational boundaries. Its roots are in the theol-
ogy of the Protestant Reformation, which, in the eyes of reformers such as Martin
Luther and John Calvin, was an attempt to restore the gospel to the church. The
term “evangelicalism” comes from the Greek work, euangelion—literally “good
news”—which in a Christian context means the message of the gospel. The notion
of Jesus Christ’s death on the cross as payment for the sins of other humans is,
therefore, at the heart of evangelical life and belief. According to historian David
Bebbington, there are four essential elements of evangelical religion: conversionism,
which conveys the notion that an evangelical’s life must change; activism, the idea
that activity is a necessary demonstration of the gospel; biblicism, a belief the Bible
is the supreme authority for life, and crucicentrism, a stress on the importance of
the Christ’s crucifixion for evangelical life. These four elements form the founda-
tion of the movement and indicate the direction that evangelicals would move
in, in their early history.
Evangelicalism is concerned with both personal holiness and work to improve
society. Evangelicals are Protestants, but not all Protestants are evangelicals. Evan-
gelicals are defined by their religious beliefs, but those beliefs influenced their
political and social activity significantly, which is evidenced by their activism. The
roots of evangelicalism can be traced to G reat Britain in the early eighteenth c entury.
John Wesley (1703–1791) is famous for preaching throughout Great Britain, lead-
ing his followers to work to alleviate poverty, and supporting the end of slavery in
the British Empire. Similarly, George Whitefield (1715–1770) preached the gospel
E VAN G ELI C ALIS M 239
throughout the American colonies and G reat Britain, started orphanages, and
worked to improve the condition of social outcasts. Others, such as William Carey
(1761–1834) and Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), focused on international missions
by g oing overseas themselves or raising support for missionaries in G reat Britain.
William Carey, the first British missionary to India, worked to end the practice of
burning the w idows of deceased men. Hannah More (1745–1833) was a promi-
nent w oman in the early evangelical movement; she combined her gifts as a writer
and teacher with a desire to change the world. As a result, she fought against illiter-
acy among the poor and supported William Wilberforce (1759–1833) in his efforts
to end the slave trade. David Livingston’s (1813–1873) life ambition was to end
the slave trade in Africa. Thus, first as a missionary and later as an employee of the
British Empire, he led expeditions to the heart of the African continent to pave the
way for commerce that would eventually lead to the ending of slavery.
Evangelicalism is also marked by its pursuit of living faithfully to God, in accor-
dance with biblical principles. Throughout the movement’s history, evangelicals
have been active in preaching a message of salvation by grace and the necessity of
conversion as well as meeting the physical needs of the p eople around them and
seeking to create a just society. This is evidence of the conversionistic nature of evan-
gelicalism. Evangelicals w ere concerned that the gospel was preached so that
others might believe in the gospel and join in trying to improve the world. This
led many of the early Protestant missionaries to develop written alphabets, start
schools, and build hospitals in poorer areas of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The
evangelical understanding of the gospel and the need for conversion inspired men
and women to leave their homes to preach the gospel despite dangers, like those
in tropical climates, where diseases and lack of proper nutrition took a heavy toll
on missionaries.
Conversionism led many of the earliest evangelicals to become revivalistic, itin-
erant preachers. George Whitefield, John Wesley, and American pastor and mis-
sionary, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) helped spread the G reat Awakening, a
revival of Christian religion and practice in America that contributed to the rise of
the Baptist and Methodist denominations in North America. By the early nineteenth
century, evangelical Protestantism was the most common form of Christianity in
the United States. Thus, there was a readiness for revivalistic preaching such as
that led by Charles G. Finney (1792–1875). Finney preached through New England,
upstate New York, and into the frontier of the United States. The revivals during
his era are referred to as the Second G reat Awakening. They differed from earlier
revivals because there was less emphasis on doctrine and a greater emphasis on
quick conversions as emotional responses to preaching.
Biblicism refers to the evangelical belief that the Bible is applicable to and author-
itative for all m
atters of life. Evangelicals recognized that the Bible is not a man-
ual for science and that it does not provide specific instructions for e very activity
in contemporary life, but they believed it reveals God’s character and provides
ethical principles that should influence every decision. Evangelicals were char-
acterized by the belief that the whole story of the human condition is explained
240 E VAN G ELI C ALIS M
by the Old and New Testaments. They believed that any decision must be weighed
against the content of Scripture and that the Bible reflects moral teachings that
reflect the objective order of the universe. According to evangelicals, the Bible is
considered trustworthy because it was inspired by God, meaning that God
worked through the human authors to reliably document its historical and moral
content. Andrew Fuller was a vocal advocate for the value and reliability of
the Bible. He engaged with the vocal deist, Thomas Paine (1737–1809), through a
series of published articles in defense of the truthfulness and usefulness of Scrip-
ture. The trustworthiness and authority of the Bible continues to be one of the
major points of debate between evangelical Christians and other Christians.
Many of the oldest colleges and universities in the United States w ere founded by
evangelicals who were seeking to equip young men to serve as clergy. Harvard,
Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton, and other early educational institutions w ere
founded for these purposes. This reflects the evangelical desire to support bibli-
cism, because a major purpose of higher education was to equip ministers to
study and understand Scripture. The liberal arts were considered essential to this
effort.
By crucicentrism, evangelicals emphasized that human efforts are insufficient
to overcome both the personal and societal ills of the day. Therefore, evangelicals
focused on the need for Christ’s death on the cross to provide the source that
would ultimately heal the broken world. Scripture is the ultimate moral authority
for the Christian life as it is read with the crucifixion of Christ at the center. This
reflects the centrality of the message of the gospel, as well as the need to repen-
tance from sin and moral reform. Evangelicals believed that ultimately the mes-
sage and power of the gospel was necessary for h uman flourishing and that peace
with their God was attainable only through the cross. This is why evangelicalism
is an exclusive religion; evangelicals believe that the problem of human sin can
only be solved by Jesus, who was both fully God and fully h uman, d ying on the
cross in the place of humans. As evangelicals understand it, salvation is only
available through the conscious belief that the cross serves that function; thus,
the historic account of Christ’s crucifixion is at the heart of the evangelical
movement.
Evangelicalism has always been built around a core set of doctrinal beliefs. Activ-
ism is important, but only when it is done for the proper purpose. Recent debates
on the nature of evangelicalism focus on the movement as e ither a doctrinal move-
ment or as a movement for social reform. In reality, the movement has been both
since its beginnings. The duty to live rightly builds from the central motif of Christ’s
atoning work on the cross for the sins of humanity. Ultimately, for evangelicals,
both belief and action must be guided by the moral demands of the Bible. The chief
aim of evangelicalism is to see individuals converted to a form of Christianity that
conforms to this pattern.
Andrew J. Spencer
See also: Edwards, Jonathan; Wesley, John; Whitefield, George

E VAN G ELI C ALIS M 241
Further Reading
Bebbington, David. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the
1980s. London: Routledge.
Noll, Mark. 2010. The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys.
Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic.
Noll, Mark, David Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk, eds. 1994. Evangelicalism: Compara-
tive Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, The British Isles, and Beyond,
1700–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
F
FISHING AND FISHERIES
Nutritious and high in protein, fish were a major food source throughout the period
1400–1900. Seafarers hunted many different aquatic species that congregated in
certain areas at predictable times, forming “fishing grounds” or fisheries. The catch
was then sold to both local and distant consumers, becoming a key commodity in
the early modern transatlantic economic system. By 1680, hundreds of thousands
of metric tons of fish w ere removed from the Atlantic annually (Starkey 2015, 70).
Fish featured prominently in the encounter between Europe and the Americas.
Late medieval Norsemen followed fish stocks to the shores of Greenland and Can-
ada, and conversely the Inuit followed game and marine food sources from Arctic
Canada to Greenland. In the 1300s and 1400s, fishermen from Basque country
(straddling the border of modern Spain and France), Galicia (a northern province
of Spain), and Western E ngland used salting techniques to store cod catches for
long voyages in the Atlantic. Historians conjecture these fishermen made it as far
west as the Grand Bank of Newfoundland. It is even possible that they landed on
the North American coast to dry and salt their catch decades before Columbus
reached the islands of the Car ibbean. What is more certain is that the astounding
abundance of the North Atlantic fishing grounds attracted the long-term interests
of European states and settlers in the following three centuries.
Early Atlantic fishermen chiefly sought large, white-fleshed demersal spe-
cies (t hose inhabiting sea bottoms), especially cod, halibut, flounder, and had-
dock. Closer to the surface, fishermen caught oily pelagic species like mackerel and
herring that stored well when pickled or later canned. Menhaden (porgy) was
harvested for its oil and made excellent bait for the more popul ar cuisine spe-
cies. Crustaceans and shellfish added to the catch. Oysters became wildly popu
lar in urban areas of North America in the mid-1700s. In the 1800s, lobster was so
plentiful that it was considered a food for the poor. Mariners also sought marine
mammals and seabirds. European markets prized whales for their oil, seals and
otters for their soft furs, walrus and narwhals for their ivory tusks, and arctic
seabirds for their down. The Atlantic Ocean and its coasts have also provided other
import ant products including salt, shell, and bird excrement (guano), a highly
valuable fertilizer.
Codfish especially s haped h uman life in the Atlantic world. Cod swim in huge
schools in cold w aters, and individuals often grow to 60 pounds or more. Their
flaky, low-fat flesh responded well to the salting process and became a staple food
in southern Europe. B ecause it was cheap and stored well, Car ibbean plantation
244 FISHIN G AND FISHE R IES
o wners imported enormous amounts of salted cod to feed their enslaved workforce.
Salt cod was also a key component to the victuals provided for navies and other
seafarers.
The North Atlantic was the highest-y ielding source of fish in the period 1400–
1900, but other marine areas were also significant. The Mediterranean was a highly
diverse environment, lacking the large single-species stocks typical of the Atlan-
tic, but yielding a mix of much-prized tuna, red mullet, turbot, and mackerel. Enor-
mous catches of herring came from the North and Baltic seas. However, by 1400
these waters were depleted, prompting European expansion into the Atlantic. In
the Car ibbean, conch and sea turtle were popular delicacies. South Atlantic seas
remained comparatively un-fi shed until the twentieth century. However, in the
eighteenth-century North Americans and Europeans vigorously exploited the coasts
off southern Africa for w hales, seals, and seabirds.
Freshwater fisheries further added to the catch. In Europe, rivers and streams
were augmented by managed fishponds. Sturgeon, eel, carp, and pike w ere popu
lar dishes on Fridays and other fast days of the Christian calendar. In North Amer
ica the original inhabitants frequently used weirs and harpoons in rivers and
coastal shallows to catch trout, mullet, and flounder. The G reat Lakes region yielded
salmon, sturgeon, and whitefish, originally to a wide variety of Indian groups in
the area, and after 1800, to commercial fishers. South American and African fresh-
waters also provided for local communities using traditional techniques: the
Amazon, Orinoco, and Nile yielding species such as perch, tilapia, and catfish.
The evolution of fishing technologies allowed h umans to extract increasing
amounts of sea life over time. People have fished with nets for millennia. Weirs are
another ancient technology, consisting of fence-like structures woven from reeds or
pliable branches and then set vertically, usually in rivers. The fish become corralled
on one side of the weir and people then use harpoon, small nets, or even hand
grappling to harvest them. Fishermen have also used large gill nets hung verti-
cally in the w ater. Fish swim into them at night and become entangled, often by
their gills. Seines are another kind of large vertical net, but instead of entangling
the fish, seiners draw the edges of the seine together to trap the fish in a column.
Purse seines use a drawstring attached to the end, closing up the bottom and
increasing the catch. Trawling involves dragging large nets b ehind the fishing ves-
sel. Angling or hook-fishing is another common technique. Commercially, multi-
ple angling lines can be used at once (trolling), or one very long line could use
hundreds of hooks (tub-trawling). Traps, such as lobster traps, entice animals into
boxes or small nets with bait, to be collected later. Seines and net trawling bring
every sizable creature in their path to the surface, while line and trapping tech-
niques can narrowly target particular species or life stages through bait selection
or size of apparatus. Boat technologies also influenced the potential of fishing. The
adoption of steamships in the mid-to-late-nineteenth c entury allowed fishermen
greater control over their destinations and timeframes, lengthening their reach into
the deep.
Fishing became increasingly industrialized in the nineteenth century. With the
introduction of durable tin cans in the 1840s, seafood could now travel far inland
FISHIN G AND FISHE R IES 245
and remain on shelves for months and even years. Pacific tuna, salmon, and sardine
businesses dominated the canned fish market; however canneries in Maine and
Maritime Canada succeeded with mackerel, clams, and lobster. By the 1880s, mil-
lions of pounds of canned Atlantic lobster reached dinner tables across the world.
Frozen fish would develop in the following c entury, further expanding the global
reach of marine foods.
With industrialization came larger enterprises. Technological innovations
required large capital investments, and small-scale and family fishing businesses
struggled to compete in the nineteenth century. Major companies at the end of the
nineteenth c entury included the Gorton-Pew Fisheries Company and the Bay State
Fishing Company; both built and operated large trawling ships. The industry con-
solidated in large ports like Boston and Gloucester, and smaller fishing villages
underwent local economic depression. Factory-produced equipment, ranging from
ships to twine, likewise displaced smaller-scale artisanal production in the older
fishing villages.
Today, collapse and crisis beset fisheries. The case of cod is dramatic: in the
1500s and 1600s, eyewitnesses reported cod so abundant they could be caught
simply by lowering baskets, and just one line fisherman could land up to 300 in
one day. At the end of the twentieth century these stocks had collapsed and the
Canadian government enforced a moratorium on Atlantic cod fishing. Overfish-
ing is not a new phenomenon, and the historical record shows frequent, recurring
concerns and attempts to curb the harvest. However, when popular species like
lobster or mackerel became dramatically overfished (as both were in the 1890s),
the rising market price encouraged fishermen to continue seeking dwindling prey
rather than limit their catch. An added complication arises when single species
play essential, but previously unrecognized roles in the overall robustness of an
ecosystem. For instance oysters inhabit river bottoms and estuaries, where they
act as water filters drawing out pollutants and fixing them in the sediment instead of
the water column. Thus overharvesting of oysters in the eighteenth c entury caused
population drops in other species that could not survive the deteriorated w ater
quality. The overhunting of beaver in North America, in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, severely damaged river fish populations who had evolved spe-
cific spawning behaviors suited to beaver dams and ponds. One North Atlantic
seabird, the flightless great auk, was hunted to extinction by the mid-nineteenth
century. T hese birds stabilized ocean ecological systems and their demise exacer-
bated population fluctuations of fish species. The natural environment is power
ful, for fish shaped the Atlantic world in critical ways, yet it is also vulnerable.
Elizabeth C. Libero
See also: Atlantic Ocean; European Exploration
Further Reading
Bolster, Jeffrey W. 2012. The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
246 FLO R IDA
Kurlansky, Mark. 1997. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. New York:
Penguin.
Starkey, David J. 2015. “Fish and Fisheries in the Atlantic World.” The Atlantic World. Edited
by D. Coffman, A. Leonard, and W. O’Reilly. London and New York: Routledge.
FLORIDA
Florida is a peninsula located between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.
Lying 3,500 nautical miles west on the same latitudinal plain as the Western Sahara
in Africa, the northeastern trade winds made it possible for European expeditions
to reach the east coast of Florida during the Age of Exploration. Florida became a
strategic jumping off point for European explorers, conquerors, and settlers. Flor-
ida’s geographic location offered colonial powers looking to acquire natural and
human resources a wealth of potential. Florida played a crucial role in the shift of
commercial networks from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. It was t hese trading
networks that brought colonizers to Florida. Colonization played a key role in cre-
ating the region’s notable diversity, helping Florida to modernize and grow from
territory into statehood over the nineteenth c entury.
Spanish explorers and settlers first reached Florida in 1513. Believing it to be
an island, Ponce de Leon claimed “La Florida” for Spain. Hoping to use Florida as
a staging point for further exploration and exploitation of resources in the New
World, Spanish authorities looked to simultaneously settle and defend their new
claimed territory by building a fort in what would become known as St. Augus-
tine, the first European settlement in North America. A fter several failed attempts
to placate or subdue hostile Native Americans, the Spanish Crown considered
focusing on the Car ibbean. However, a fter 1563, when the French and, later, the
British, began to show interest in Florida, Spain decided to recommit to Florida,
as of yet a poor investment.
As a doorway into the American interior, Spanish explorers, missionaries, and
settlers for the first half of the sixteenth century began a process of mutual contact
between Spain and the indigenous populations. While Florida’s Indian populations
were decimated by Old World diseases, by the end of the seventeenth century,
Native American tribes from South Carolina and Georgia helped replenish dwin-
dling indigenous numbers in Florida. Even with yellow fever, smallpox, and influenza
penetrating deep within the Florida interior, tribes such as the Calusa, Creek, and
Seminoles were able to consolidate and maintain their respective cultural identi-
ties. Spanish, and later English, reliance on trading networks established with the
indigenous Native American populations was the key to successful colonization of
Florida.
Europeans believed Christianity was essential in assimilating and centralizing
the wide swaths of diversity found in Florida. A missionary force of Spanish priests
looking to convert local Indian populations flooded the Florida landscape after the
French were expelled in 1562. Missions were a key factor in centralizing the indig-
enous peoples of Florida. Florida missions defined the relationship between sub-
jects of the Spanish Crown, while also influencing conversion to Christianity and
FLO R IDA 247
Spanish rule by offering protection from hostile tribes and from French and Brit-
ish raiders. Spanish missions in Florida succeeded in bringing many of Florida’s
indigenous populations into the Spanish fold throughout the seventeenth century.
The eighteenth century was tumultuous for the inhabitants of Spanish Florida.
Spain’s hold on Florida during this period was tenuous at best. In the last decade
of the seventeenth century, French corsairs and English privateers wreaked havoc
on the inhabitants of both coasts of Florida. Adding to the fear of foreign coastal
raiders, the British colony of Georgia was founded in 1732. British raids and incur-
sions into Florida increased annually as Georgia residents and military officials
looked to consolidate land and resources.
In 1740, Georgia forces attempted to take St. Augustine. The Siege of St. Augus-
tine, as it became known, was thwarted by a combination of Black Seminoles—
predominately runaway slaves from Georgia—and black community members
residing in or near St. Augustine. While St. Augustine, as well as Florida, survived
military incursions by the British, politically, Spanish authorities came to the real-
ization that Florida was not worth the effort. Showing little gain in colonization
efforts, t here w
ere a total of only 300 Spanish h ouseholds in Florida at the turn of
the eighteenth century, Spanish authorities began to question Florida’s relevance
in the Spanish New World. The absence of precious metals, compounded by inef-
fectual settlement, convinced Spain to cede to the British what had become seen
as a worthless, inhospitable, and barren landscape.
Following the Treaty of Paris which passed Spanish possession of Florida to
Great Britain in 1763, a period of prosperity began in Florida. Modernity came to
Florida in the form of infrastructure. Florida became more commercially vigorous
through open immigration, governmental land grants and, most importantly, the
construction of public roads and thoroughfares. For the first time in two centu-
ries, Florida became self-sufficient. Florida enjoyed a resurgence in popularity and
prestige mostly due to an influx of Loyalists looking to distance themselves from
the growing agitation punctuated by the American War of Independence.
Inhabitants of Florida were not insulated from the Revolution. Divided into East
and West Florida u nder British rule, the Floridas w
ere often referred to as G
reat Brit-
ain’s fourteenth and fifteenth colonies. A majority of colonial British Floridians were
steadfast Loyalists. The end of the Revolution created massive dislocation for British
and non-British subjects alike in Florida. Thousands of Loyalists, free blacks, and
Native Americans fled to Cuba and other neighboring countries looking to maintain
their freedom. Many ex-slaves and Indians chose to make a stand in Florida, electing
to fight for their respective independence. Angered over Spain’s inability to control
Florida, the United States acquired Florida and made it into an American territory.
Aware of Florida’s economic potential, Congress began the process of granting
Florida statehood. A fter relocating Florida’s Native American populations, settlers
across the Southeast migrated to Florida looking for a better life. Without the fear
of Native American uprisings, Florida’s population swelled. On March 3, 1845,
Florida became the 27 state in the United States of America.
Richard Byington
248 F R AN C IS C ANS
See also: Creek Indians; European Exploration; Loyalists; Trade Winds; Treaty of
Paris
Further Reading
Allman, T. D. 2013. Finding Florida: The True History of the Sunshine State. New York: Atlan-
tic Monthly Press.
Balsera, Viviana Diaz, and Rachel May, eds. 2014. La Florida: Five Hundred Years of
Hispanic Presence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Gannon, Michael, ed. 1996. The New History of Florida. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida.
FRANCISCANS
The Franciscans are a wide range of monastic o rders and lay communities
that ground their activity on the teaching of their founder, St. Francis of Assisi (ca.
1182–1226). The Franciscans, established in 1209, developed their distinctive style
of spirituality leading to the revival of Christian spirit and a significant reorganiza
tion of the church in the thirteenth century. They brought the devotion to Jesus in
his humanity into popular religion, with particular focus on the image of the baby
Christ in the crib as well as on his suffering and death. During the Middle Ages,
the Franciscans became the largest and farthest reaching religious movement
among European and overseas missionaries within the Roman Catholic Church.
Today the path of St. Francis is followed within diverse Catholic, Anglican, and
Lutheran religious o rders. The Franciscan communities consist of three major
groups: the First Order of Friars Minor, including three branches: the Friars Minor,
Conventuals, and Capuchins; the Second Order of Poor Clares and other orders of
Franciscan nuns; and the Third Order of regular communities (that is, communi-
ties adopting a lay rule) and lay followers of St. Francis of Assisi.
Francis of Assisi became the most eminent reformer of the Middle Ages by
spreading his own personal vision of the original essence of Christianity. He
believed that the real Christian life must be reconnected to its ideals of poverty,
community, and simplicity. Although St. Francis accepted the authority of the
ordained clergy, he contributed to a significant reform and revival of the church
life with his personal style of devotion and by emphasizing the practical following
of Jesus and a s imple way of life. Canonized by Pope Gregory IX (r. 1227–1241) in
1229, he is considered in folk tradition, as the “seraphic saint,” patron of animals
and nature.
In the early stages of the movement, the followers rejected material possessions
and subjected themselves to a life of begging and preaching. They emphasized the
importance of the notion of equality as “brothers” or friars, criticizing the strati-
fication and the power of established church officials. At that time, Franciscans
took vows of poverty, obedience to God, prayer, work, and preaching. They
brought into a new light the conception of h uman nature based on the solidarity
of all creatures. Over time, educated individuals coming from the nobility joined
the movement.
F R AN C IS C ANS 249
The First Order of Friars Minor (abbreviated OFM, from the Latin Ordo fratrum
minorum; today: the Friars Minor) dates from 1209, when St. Francis received
approval from Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) of the simple rule established for
the guidance of his followers. L ater, this initial rule was modified by St. Francis
and subsequently appeared as the second rule (the Regula Prima or Bullata), which
was approved by Pope Honorius III (r. 1216–1227) in 1223. This second rule was
the one professed through the w hole First Order of St. Francis.
In 1274, Franciscans split into two fractions: Conventuals and Observants. The
split was approved by Pope Leon X (r. 1513–1521) in 1517 and Observants won
the title of the true Order of Friars Minor (OFM) at the expense of the Friars Minor
Conventuals (abbreviated OFM Conv). Both O rders w
ere and are still active in mis-
sions and practices of religious contemplation.
Another large reform movement, now known as Capuchins, descended from the
Observants and won recognition as a separate order in 1528. The Order of Capu-
chin Friars Minor (abbreviated OFM Cap) was established in 1525 in Italy. In 1619,
Pope Paul V (r. 1605–1621) confirmed the Capuchins as an autonomous order, which
soon became, alongside the Jesuits, the strongest supporter of the Counter-
Reformation. It was also one of the most active orders in missions worldwide.
The Second Order of Poor Ladies (today the Poor Clares) is a religious commu-
nity of contemplative Franciscan females, which grew alongside the First Order. It
was established by St. Clare of Assisi in 1212 who was inspired by the ideas of
St. Francis and his movement. The rule of St. Clare, which was approved by Pope
Innocent IV (r. 1243–1254) in 1253, was imposed upon the Poor Ladies, and is
today followed by different monasteries of cloistered nuns, living a life of contem-
plation, prayer and penance, based on Church teachings and the Franciscan
tradition.
The Third Order initially formed as a lay penitential movement, and since its
beginning it has always gathered more members than the first two orders. Over
time it has evolved into two distinct groups: the lay followers of St. Francis (the
Secular Franciscan Order or the Secular Franciscans) and the Third Order of reg-
ular communities (the Third Order Regular Rule or the Third Order Regular). The
Secular Franciscans (men and women) are committed to a Franciscan way of life.
Considered members of a subdivision of Franciscan monastic o rders, they profess
traditional religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These members do
not give monastic vows, but fully help their order. The Third Order Regular (abbre-
viated TOR) was founded in 1447, as a Franciscan branch, uniting priests and
friars who were active missionaries.
During the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, Roman Catholic missions
covered all Europe, and during the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries the Amer
icas were included. From the 1490s, a new missionary era was established alongside
the imperial colonization process in the New World. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI
(r. 1492–1503) issued the papal bull Inter Caetera, which authorized the conver-
sion of the New World’s inhabitants to Christianity by dividing the newly discov-
ered territories between Portugal and Spain. Missionary work became a priority
for the Catholic kings of Spain and Portugal. Acting as agents of the church as well
250 F R AN C IS C ANS
as the Crown, Franciscans traveled widely, built missionary churches, and gained
a vast number of new church members.
During the 1550s and the 1650s, Catholic missionary activity, led by the reli-
gious orders of Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and the Jesuits, expanded
the church overseas. The whole of Mexico, Central, and South America, a large
part of the population of the Philippines, and slightly smaller groups in Africa,
India, Eastern India and Southeast Asia became subordinated to the Church of
Rome.
During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the First Order was the larg-
est monastic organization of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe and has
remained in the forefront of the church’s mission activity. The Order played an
active role in the evangelization of the Americas and it was one of the first to reach
Latin America. During his second expedition in 1493, Columbus was accompa-
nied by two Franciscan lay brothers, Jean de la Deule and Jean de Tisin, and Father
Ramón Pané. They w ere the first members of a religious order to come to the Amer
icas. They held the first mass in the history of the New World, at Port Conception
on Hispaniola island (today Haiti) in December of 1493. The first convent and
church (named San Francisco) w ere built in Santo Domingo by Franciscans, who
arrived along with the first governor of Hispaniola in 1502. In 1504, Garcia de
Padilla was appointed in Haiti as the first bishop of the new colonies. For many
decades Santo Domingo became the focal point of missionary activity to the north,
south, and central part of South America. During the next 25 years, Franciscan
missionaries took part in the evangelization of the Car ibbean islands, including
Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.
In South America, Franciscans focused their efforts mostly on lands that are
today Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Despite an ongoing military conquest of the
same territories, the missionary activities were successful. By combining traditional
and Christian beliefs, the Aztecs and many other groups living in the region, now
known as Mexico and South America, began to consider themselves Roman Cath-
olics. In 1523 and 1524, two Franciscan missions w ere organized to Mexico from
Santo Domingo. In about 1527, a diocese in Mexico City was established under
the Franciscan bishop Juan de Zumárraga and the region received the status of a
province. In Mexico, the friars focused on education of the Indian children by
establishing schools both for boys and girls. They also introduced the first print-
ing press in the New World.
The areas that are now Colombia and Venezuela were Franciscan mission des-
tinations in South America, beginning in 1510. Missions from Santo Domingo to
Peru started in 1527, but they had limited success during the first 20 years. Friar-
ies and colleges were established in Lima and a supervisor was sent there in 1549
to coordinate Franciscan missions in the southern part of South America. Since
then, communities, in what are today Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia, were established;
the lands that became Paraguay were reached in the early 1600s and Uruguay in the
1700s. A center for ministry and a college w ere established in Quito; later, a Fran-
ciscan province in Ecuador was formed in 1565. Between the sixteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, seven missionary colleges were established in the southern part
F R AN K LIN , B EN J A M IN 251
of Chile and Bolivia. During the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, mis-
sion attempts failed, such as in the territories of the Ucayali, which is today the
region in Peru, and the region north of the Amazon, as well as in Chile, where the
friars could renew their activity only a fter Chilean independence in 1832.
The missionaries considered parts of North America—including modern Texas,
New Mexico, Arizona, and California—the New Kingdom of St. Francis. In 1690, in
the eastern area of Texas, short-term missions were initiated u nder the leadership
of Damian Mazanet. Thirty years later, Franciscans established six successful set-
tlements along the San Antonio River. From t here Catholics spread through Texas.
During the 1500s, New Mexico and Arizona encountered single Franciscan visits,
which became a regular activity from the early seventeenth century. Franciscans
were the only missionaries in the region during the sixteenth and the seventeenth
centuries. In California, Franciscan activity became visible from 1769 when St.
Junípero Serra, together with other friars, founded 21 permanent missions begin-
ning in San Diego.
The Franciscans also attempted to evangelize in the French part of North Amer
ica, where missionaries aimed to reshape Indian life as little as possible. The
French Franciscans w ere the first missionaries to visit the region in Quebec, around
1615, where they stayed for 10 years among the Hurons and Algonquins in the
regions of St. Lawrence River and the G reat Lakes. Due to British activity, Francis-
can missions ended in most of Canada by 1630.
Meanwhile in Africa, around 1789, Christianity lost its positions acquired dur-
ing the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The Capuchin order’s activity led
to the conversion of half a million p eople in contemporary Zaire and Angola at the
end of the seventeenth century. However, these achievements were compromised
by the European conflicts in Africa, dissensions among local tribes, and the slave
trade. As a result, u
ntil the nineteenth c entury, any hope for implanting Chris
tianity in West Africa was lost.
R. Pranskevičiūtė
See also: Catholic Women Religious Missionaries; Columbus, Christopher; Euro

pean Exploration; Jesuits; Virgin of Guadeloupe
Further Reading
Iriarte, Lazaro. 1982. Franciscan History. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press.
Moorman, John R. H. 1988. A History of the Franciscan Order. Chicago: Franciscan Herald
Press.
Short, William J. 1989. The Franciscans. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier.
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN (1706–1790)

Benjamin Franklin was one of most influential and internationally renowned Amer-
icans of his generation. Through hard work and self-reliance, Franklin rose from
obscurity and relative poverty as the 15th child of 17 born to his father Josiah,
to become a key man who shaped the development of the Atlantic word in the
252 F R AN K LIN , B EN J A M IN
eighteenth c entury. Franklin, whose accomplishments and legacy in the areas of

education, science, and politics are indicative of a cosmopolitan life devoted to
the serv ice and improvement of humanity, believed his life would serve as a model
to o thers in their quest to serve their country and the world.
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston in 1706 and while he was sent to school
as a child, his formal education ended in 1715 due to the expense. Despite this, he
became the quintessential self-educated man through voracious reading of his
father’s religious books as well as any he could buy or borrow from neighbors.
Franklin increased the breadth and depth of his reading when, at the age of 12, he
apprenticed to his elder b rother James, a printer.
This encouraged Franklin to put his own hand to the craft of writing where he
sought to emulate the prose and poetry he read. He wrote many of these stories
under various pseudonyms while working for his brother. Franklin’s fame was
established in t hese pseudonymous writings, undertaken while an apprentice and
later when striking out on his
own. Franklin delivered keen
insights as Silence Dogood (1722);
various critiques of corruption,
excess, and self- importance of
political, religious, or educational
leaders, from the voice of a Busy
Body (1729) or Alice Addertongue
(1732); or the famous proverbs
and moral wit of Poor Richard
(1732).
Franklin recognized that edu-
cation was both a private good,
benefitting the individual, and
a social good, that promoted
the prosperity and character of
society. In 1727, Franklin pro-
posed the Junto club, a group of
young men who would meet to
exchange ideas on morals, natu
ral philosophy, and politics.
The group was instrumental in
promoting community proj ects
such as the Library Company of
Philosopher, writer, printer, scientist, diplomat,
Philadelphia (1731) and the Union
and statesmen Benjamin Franklin as depicted in a
nineteenth-century oil painting by Peter Alexander
Fire Company (1736). Franklin,
Healy. Renowned in Europe for his scientific and other members of the Junto,
work, Franklin was indispensable as an American were troubled the exclusivity of
diplomat to France during the American Revolution. colonial colleges, noting that
(National Gallery of Art/Gift of Adele Lewisohn schools such as Harvard were
Lehman) more concerned with social
F R AN K LIN , B EN J A M IN 253
standing of the students than they were with a ctual educational ability. Franklin
recognized the need to expand educational opportunities by focusing on a practi-
cal education that would produce diligent, community minded citizens. In 1755,
Franklin established the College of Philadelphia, which would later become the
University of Pennsylvania. Franklin proposed that such a school teach the “most
useful and most ornamental” subjects, which included grammar, math, history,
geography, and morality. Through this education, students would have “an incli-
nation joined with an ability to serve mankind, one’s country, friends, and f amily”
(Franklin 2003, 146).
While Franklin was widely known as a philosopher he was wary of pure meta-
physical reasoning. In 1743, Franklin wrote “Proposal for the Promoting Useful
Knowledge among the British Plantations in America,” which served as the found-
ing document for the American Philosophical Society. The group was to be com-
prised of “virtuousi or ingenious men” whose discussions, debates, and ideas would
be focused upon things which are to “benefit of mankind in general,” specifically
improvements in health, food production, and morals of man (Franklin 1960, 378).
One of Franklin’s lifelong goals was to cultivate a virtuous citizenry rooted in
democratic equality and individual work ethic. Franklin’s publications, particu-
larly Poor Richard’s Almanac printed annually from 1732 to 1758, served as a “vehicle
for conveying instruction among the common p eople . . . chiefly such as incul-
cated industry and frugality, as the means of procuring wealth, and thereby secur-
ing virtue . . .” (Franklin 2003, 480). The virtue Franklin wished to emphasize was
defined by its “usefulness, and the great good it does to society” (Franklin 2003,
72). In his Autobiography (1784) Franklin presented 13 virtues that he viewed as
the way to attain h uman perfection. For Franklin, virtue was not to be understood
as a set of rigid ethical laws; rather they were prudential habits that recognized
the strengths and weakness of human nature while aiming at a useful improve-
ment to society. As a result many of his virtues have caveats that allow harmless
foibles. For example the virtue of Sincerity is defined as “Use no hurtful deceit”
(Franklin 2003, 468). The ban is not on all deceit, only that which is harmful to
oneself or others. The fluidity of individual adherence to virtue is also seen in the
virtue of Chastity, which Franklin argued is not the complete forbearance of all
sexual liaisons; rather it is defined as “Rarely use venery but for health or off-
spring” (Franklin 2003, 468). Franklin allows exceptions to an absolute unmoving
standard. For Franklin, all virtue should account for the propensity of people to
make errata, a printer’s term Franklin uses to mean mistakes. People should never
willfully act unvirtuously, but the standard must realize that sometimes they w ill
err without ill intent.
Franklin achieved his greatest international fame through his foray into scien-
tific inquiry. His famed (and somewhat mythologized) kite experiment (1752)
showed that lightening was a form of electricity that could be controlled or even
collected through the conductivity of metal. Though the broader scientific com-
munity was at first incredulous, it became the primary source of his reputation
throughout Europe. The Royal Society of London, the most exclusive group of inter-
national scientists, gave him their highest award, the Copley Medal, in 1753. The
254 F R AN K LIN , B EN J A M IN
Royal Society was so impressed with Franklin’s scientific work on electricity that
they voted him to be one of their members in 1756. Franklin’s focus on scientific
discovery was not mere inquisitiveness or theoretical wrangling; rather, he thought
the advancement of science would best be applied to practical improvements of
the lives of humanity. Franklin wanted to find practical application for his dis-
coveries and used the knowledge obtained from his many experiments to protect
houses from lighting strikes through the use of lightning rods. Franklin’s other
practical inventions include the Franklin Stove (1742), which through improved
methods of ventilation, reduced the consumption of fuel and created a safer and
warmer h ouse, and bifocals (1784), which allowed vision to be enhanced for both
near and far distances with the same pair of glasses. Unlike many inventors, Frank-
lin refused to patent his inventions, increasing their accessibility to p eople of all
income ranges. He was more interested in benefitting all people than in seeking to
make an individual profit from the advancement of science and technology.
Prior to his international fame, Franklin was a respected statesman in the Amer-
ican colonies. He served as Pennsylvania assemblyman (1736–1764) and presi-
dent of the Pennsylvania Executive Council (1765–1788). During his time serving
Pennsylvania, Franklin recognized the limits of human nature, often leading him
to be pragmatic in the means to achieve a principled end. Franklin tells the story
in his Autobiography that during the French and Indian War (1754–1763) Quaker
members of the Pennsylvania Assembly, who were strong pacifists due to their reli-
gious conviction, were unwilling to vote for military aid to the colonial soldiers.
However, since they were willing to provide food, Franklin convinced them to provide
funds for “bread, flour, wheat, or other grain” with the sly reading that “grain”
could be interpreted as grains of gunpowder (Franklin 2003, 498). Franklin wisely
offered a means to do what was needed while also allowing some members to
uphold their consciences. His reputation as a prudential statesman was the pri-
mary reason Franklin was selected as delegate to the Second Continental Congress
(1775–1778), where, because of his grasp of language, wit, and writing ability, he
was appointed to the Committee of Five that drafted the text of the Declaration of
Independence. He was also chosen as representative to the Constitutional Con-
vention (1787) being one of only six men to sign both the Declaration of Indepen
dence and the United States Constitution.
Because of his respected prudential statesmanship in the colonies, and his inter-
national fame achieved through his scientific inquires, Franklin was selected to
serve as diplomat. Franklin was chosen to be colonial ambassador to G reat Britain
(1757–1775), having already resided in London, between 1724 and 1726, as a
printer. This was a tumultuous time in the relationship between E ngland and the
colonies and Franklin was embroiled in the middle; the passage of the Stamp Act
in 1765, over Franklin’s opposition, and the subsequent clamor it caused in the
colonies led Franklin to be examined by the House of Commons. By the end of
1774, Franklin’s friends were concerned for his safety and encouraged him to return
to the colonies. L ater Franklin was appointed the first American ambassador to
France (1778–1785). His work was key in obtaining French support for American
Independence and he was able to negotiate the Treaty of Paris (1783) that ended
F R EN C H ATLANTI C 255
hostilities between G reat Britain and the United States, securing British recogni-
tion of independence.
Nicholas Higgins
See also: American Revolution; Declaration of Independence; Enlightenment
Further Reading
Franklin, Benjamin. 1960. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 2. Edited by L. W. Laba-
ree. New Haven, CT: Yale University.
Franklin, Benjamin. 2003. Benjamin Franklin Reader. Edited by W. Isaacson. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Higgins, Nicholas. 2016. “Achieving H uman Perfection: Benjamin Franklin contra George
Whitefield.” Journal of American Studies: 50: 61–80.
Isaacson, Walter. 2003. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
F R E N C H AT L A N T I C
The French Atlantic covered vast distances and comprised an enormous range
of colonies and imperial claims. By 1750, the French claimed a massive amount of
territory in North America, arcing from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the North
Atlantic, down the St. Lawrence River to the G reat Lakes, and, from t here, down
the Mississippi River Valley to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. Colonial settle-
ments were much smaller in size and focused upon the Saint Lawrence Valley
between Quebec and Montreal, the Illinois Country along the Mississippi River,
and New Orleans in Louisiana. At the same time, the profitable French Car ibbean
colony of Saint-Domingue dominated the eighteenth-century world’s sugar and cof-
fee production. A burgeoning slave trade lay behind the growth of this plantation
economy. Exploited African slaves also toiled away in other Car ibbean colonies,
notably the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Finally, around 1,500 miles to
the southeast, slaves and colonists struggled to survive at Cayenne, France’s pos-
session on the South American mainland.
These colonial efforts began in the sixteenth century, in the context of France’s
rivalry with the Habsburg f amily, which controlled the lands around France, nota-
bly Spain. Religious civil wars from 1562 to 1598 prevented a permanent French
presence in the Americas u ntil the early 1600s. In 1608, Quebec was founded, the
core of New France, France’s main North American colony. New France focused
on the fur trade and missionary activity and was closely involved in Native Ameri-
can affairs, in terms of trade and war. From the 1620s to the 1650s, French colo-
nies were established in the Car ibbean, notably Saint Christophe, Martinique, and
Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles and Saint-Domingue on the western side of His-
paniola. These colonies provided bases for attacks on Spanish possessions and
strove unsuccessfully to launch a French tobacco industry. Throughout, the French
strove to establish a colony at disease-r idden Cayenne. Colonial companies and
proprietors took the lead in t hese efforts as the Crown confronted internal rebel-
lions and foreign wars.
256 F R EN C H ATLANTI C
In the late 1600s and early 1700s, King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) asserted stron-
ger royal control. In the colonies, common administrative and legal frameworks
were introduced. Efforts were made to encourage immigration and economic
development. Louis also embroiled France in a long series of wars, which spread
across the globe by the late 1680s, establishing a rivalry with the rising commer-
cial power of Great Britain. As a means of containing the British colonies in North
America, French imperial claims expanded through the heart of North America.
Louisiana was founded in 1701. In the Car ibbean, royal policies helped encour-
age, at times inadvertently, the development of a sugar plantation economy, which
fully flowered in the eighteenth c entury.
Over the 1700s, French colonial efforts centered on a variety of areas. In 1713,
after losing Acadia to the British, the Crown established the colony of Louisbourg
along the shores of the North Atlantic. It quickly became a center of trade and fish-
ing. In Louisiana, an effort was made to encourage economic expansion, espe-
cially through tobacco production, which encouraged the growth of slavery in the
new colony. Louisiana also became the focus of various economic schemes which
led to major stock investment. Unfortunately, the colony never prospered as
intended, which helped trigger one of the first stock market busts in European eco-
nomic history. The core of the French colonial program in the eighteenth c entury
was located in the Caribbean colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, which produced
ever increasing amounts of sugar and coffee through the exploitation of ever increas-
ing numbers of African slaves.
Historians have long recognized the significance of the French experience in
the Atlantic world. Debate continues, however, regarding the extent to which a uni-
fied French Atlantic ever existed. The diverse French colonies, stretching from
near the Arctic Circle to near the equator, displayed a diverse array of societies and
economies. In addition, despite attempts made by French kings, notably Louis XIV,
at centralized and unified control over the empire, French colonists always retained
extensive freedom of action, as did the indigenous p eoples of North America in
the areas claimed by France. At the same time, however, total control over far flung
lands across the Atlantic Ocean proved difficult for e very European empire before
the modern era. Also, scholars have argued that inherited traditions as well as the
creation of a set of common institutional structures helped give the French Atlan-
tic a basic coherence. Coherence was established as well by the fact that events in
Europe continually defined and s haped the French experience throughout the
Atlantic world. Indeed, French colonists could never avoid the effects of European
events for France, as one of Europe’s largest and most populous monarchies, one
that bordered Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, always looked simul
taneously outwards towards the Atlantic and inwards towards the European
continent.
Several basic inheritances s haped the French Atlantic. U
ntil toppled by revolu-
tion, France’s kings ruled a heterogeneous realm comprised of provinces with
diverse traditions, including different law codes and tax systems. The vast major-
ity of royal subjects were peasants living near subsistence levels and whose lives
were defined by a particular socioeconomic system, seigneurialism, or lordship,
F R EN C H ATLANTI C 257
in which in exchange for plots of land they owed rents, dues, and other obliga-
tions to a local lord, or seigneur. Into the 1700s, France remained a rural country.
A small number of nobles, who owed their social place to their birth, dominated
France. Overall, hierarchy and inequality characterized French society. Roman
Catholicism, the religion of the vast majority of French people, helped bind France
together, though small numbers of Protestants, known as Huguenots, did exist from
the 1550s.
In some ways, the development of New France over the seventeenth and eigh
teenth centuries, particularly the areas along the St. Lawrence River, reveal the
strength of t hese inherited traditions. Within l ittle over three decades of Quebec’s
founding in 1608, seigneurialism was introduced into the colony. By the end of
the century, the river’s banks were lined with narrow farms extending inland,
worked by tenants of seigneurs. Catholicism s haped the colonists’ lives. Missionary
orders arrived early on and the secular clergy arrived by the late 1650s. However,
the financial weight of seigneurialism and religious obligations like the tithe
proved much lighter in New France than in Europe. In addition, in contrast to the
mother country, a large percentage of New France’s colonial population, around
40 percent, resided in towns. T hese examples do not take into account the many
instances of acculturation that took place between the colonists and Native Amer-
icans. The French in North America w ere outnumbered by indigenous populations
and the French colonial presence only survived b ecause of the support of certain
Native American tribes.
In fact, from the 1500s to the 1700s, crucial distinctions emerged between the
French Atlantic overall and metropolitan France. In contrast to France’s large pop-
ulation, the numbers of French migrants across the ocean remained miniscule
between 1500 and the second half of the eighteenth century. Many of these migrants
went back to France. In addition, the majority of emigrants came from towns and
cities, unlike France’s population as a w hole.
The economies that developed across the French Atlantic help explain those
numbers. Most French colonies centered on economic activities that did not require
large settler populations. From the late 1400s onwards, French fishermen exploited
the rich fishing grounds of the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic. Salted cod
remained the most profitable product from French North America for centuries.
Within New France on the North American mainland, a critical fur trade developed
over the seventeenth century. At first profitable as well because of European fashion
trends, by the turn of the next century, overproduction led to a glut of furs and a
market collapse. The trade would continue, not primarily for economic reasons, but
because it helped cement France’s alliance with Native American tribes. At all times,
the fur trade necessitated that natural habitats remain undisturbed. Native Ameri-
cans always played critical roles in trapping the game and gathering the furs. The
centrality of the fur trade kept French settlements in New France constricted to the
Saint Lawrence Valley and, by the 1700s, the Illinois Country as well.
France’s Car ibbean colonies focused on the growing of commercial cash crops,
first tobacco u ntil soils w
ere exhausted then, by the second half of the 1600s, sugar
and, by the 1730s, coffee. The production of these crops encouraged a reliance on
258 F R EN C H ATLANTI C
bonded labor. In the first half of the seventeenth c entury, indentured servants
worked the fields; however, most survivors did not remain in the Americas,
choosing to return to France. French planters turned increasingly to African slaves.
Slavery existed in the French Car ibbean from its very beginnings, the first slaves
brought by Dutch traders. In 1571, a French court had ruled that slavery could
not exist in France, creating legal ambiguities in the colonies. In 1638, King Louis
XIII (r. 1610–1643) resolved this situation, declaring slavery legal in the Americas.
By the 1660s, slaves made up nearly 40 percent of the French Car ibbean’s popu-
lation. These numbers exploded over the next century as labor intensive sugar
production increased in scale. After expelling the Dutch, the French Crown encour-
aged unsuccessfully slave trading monopoly companies. In the 1700s, the Crown
opened the trade to private traders, most famously those based in the Atlantic
port of Nantes, and the trade truly exploded in size. Over the 1700s, Saint-Domingue
alone received some 685,000 African slaves, almost half of whom arrived between
1775 and 1790. Despite a 1685 law governing master-slave relations, the Code
Noir, French planters brutally mistreated the slaves.
The increasing numbers of slaves producing increasing amounts of sugar, cof-
fee, and other cash crops, fueled a major commercial expansion through the
eighteenth century. This helped increase living standards and material prosper-
ity in parts of metropolitan France, providing a crucial part of the background to
the cultural movement known as the Enlightenment. The expansion of slavery
during the time of the Enlightenment also helped encourage new understandings
of race, ones that stressed difference between p eoples and intrinsic connections
between outward appearances and internal qualities. These new understand-
ings would shape later centuries’ understandings of humanity. Fin ally, as the
commercial expansion continued, society in the French Car ibbean moved away
from the inherited traditional model towards one structured around wealth and
class.
The significant French presence in the Atlantic world ended in the late 1700s
and early 1800s in the context of war and revolution. From 1740 to 1763, France
fought two major wars against G reat Britain. Though the first ended in an indeci-
sive treaty, the second, the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) led to a decisive French
defeat. The French did retain their most profitable Car ibbean colonies, and they
had to cede almost all of New France and other North American claims to Great
Britain and Spain. The next 25 years saw attempts at reform and a colonial com-
mercial boom. However, involvement in the American Revolution (1775–1783) trig-
gered economic problems, particularly massive government debt. The political
failure to enact economic reforms led to revolution, beginning in 1789 and con-
tinuing for a generation u ntil 1815. The revolution involved radical political exper-
imentation at times and, from 1792, near constant warfare between France and
almost all other major European powers, particularly Great Britain. In this con-
text, slave revolution erupted in Saint-Domingue which, despite the efforts of Napo-
leon Bonaparte (1769–1815), ultimately proved successful as an independent Haiti
was proclaimed in 1805. Though the French in the Americas had been reduced to
F R EN C H R E V OLUTION 259
a number of islands plus Cayenne, the French experience had played a pivotal role
in the shaping of the Atlantic world as a whole.
Charles Lipp
See also: Code Noir; Louisiana; Mississippi Bubble; New Orleans; Saint-Domingue/
Haiti; Seven Years’ War
Further Reading
Banks, Kenneth J. 2006. Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the
French Atlantic, 1713–1763. Montreal: McGill University Press.
Boucher, Philip P. 2007. France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent. Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eccles, W. J. 2010. The French in North America, 1500–1783. Revised ed. Markham, Ontario:
Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
Pritchard, James. 2007. In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
FRENCH REVOLUTION (1789–1799)

The French Revolution was a series of political upheavals that affected Western
Europe and its global colonies between 1789 and 1815. Although it originated in
France, conflicts between pro-revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces spread
throughout Europe and its colonies u nder the Napoleonic Empire, when many of
the traditional European monarchies were overthrown and replaced with repub-
lics. A
fter the collapse of Napoleon’s regime, the Revolution left a worldwide leg-
acy by establishing precedents for liberal democracy and national identity that
continues to this day. The Revolution is generally considered to be the turning point
between the premodern and modern history of the Western world.
The French Revolution originated as a fiscal reform movement. Over the course
of the 1780s, France faced a deepening economic crisis that was brought on by its
involvement in colonial wars, especially its support of the American Revolution
(1775–1783). War debt had crippled state finances, and after a series of failed
attempts to impose new taxes on the clergy and nobility, (groups that were tradi-
tionally exempt from taxation), King Louis XVI (1754–1793) was compelled to
summon the états généraux. This was a body representing the three traditional
“orders” of French society (the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners) that last
met in 1614. When the delegates convened at the royal Palace of Versailles outside
Paris in spring 1789, the états quickly split over the issue of voting. Conservative
delegates wanted votes to be counted one per order, giving the clergy and nobility
a clear advantage, while reformers demanded votes be counted by head, giving the
more numerous “Third Estate” the majority. After being locked out of the Assem-
bly hall on June 20, 1789, delegates from the Third Estate along with sympathiz-
ers from the clergy and nobility created a National Assembly that they claimed
represented the w ill of the French p
eople. They pledged to create a constitution in
260 F R EN C H R E V OLUTION
which elected representatives would share power with the hitherto absolutist
monarchy.
This early phase of the Revolution was also propelled by unofficial political
actors, ordinary men and women from the working classes who took to the streets
in times of perceived crisis, especially in Paris. These militants came to be known
as the sansculottes, referring to the work trousers they wore instead of the knee
breeches and stockings preferred by the upper classes. The first major incident
involving the sansculottes was on July 14, 1789, when a Par isian crowd broke into
a fortified prison called the Bastille in response to rumors that the king had sum-
moned troops to disband the National Assembly. The violence spread into the coun-
tryside as p
eople sacked churches and chateaux, fearing an aristocratic conspiracy
to overturn the Revolution.
Alarmed by the surge in popular violence, the king and National Assembly made
several public gestures of solidarity. On August 26, 1789, the Assembly ratified the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen, a basic framework for an eventual
constitution which guaranteed basic civil rights to all royal subjects. At the same
time leaders of the sansculottes, buoyed by their success at the Bastille, asserted their
own influence among the French public. Many argued that proposed reforms did
not go far enough, and they agitated for the abolition of the monarchy and the estab-
lishment of a republic. Others were fearful of aristocratic plots to stop the Revolu-
tion. On October 5, 1789, a crowd consisting mainly of Parisian w omen concerned
about rising food prices, marched on Versailles and compelled the royal family to
move to Paris where the king could be closer to his p eople.
By the start of 1790, Louis XVI was faced with the growing distrust of his sub-
jects, who w ere driven by suspicion that he was in collusion with foreign powers,
particularly Austria and Prussia. These suspicions seemed to be confirmed when
on the night of June 20, 1791, the royal family secretly left Paris with the support
The Bastille’s Key Crosses the Atlantic

Following the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the key to the main prison
came into the possession of the Marquis de Lafayette, the head of a local
National Guard force. Lafayette was no stranger to revolution. At 19 years old,
he had sailed to the United States to offer his services to the new nation in its
war against Great Britain. He became a close friend and confidant of George
Washington. Lafayette thought it fitting that the American president should
have the key as a memento and symbol of the two nations and their struggle
for liberty. At first, Washington displayed the key to visitors to the nation’s
capital, first in New York and then Philadelphia. After leaving office, Washing-
ton displayed the key in a small glass case on the first floor of his Mount
Vernon estate home. In 1824, long a fter Washington had passed away, Lafayette
visited Mount Vernon with his son, George Washington Lafayette. Together
they saw the key, hanging on the wall, where it still hangs today.
of royalist sympathizers and traveled t owards the northeastern French border. Rec-
ognized by villagers in the town of Varennes, less than 40 miles from the border,
the royal family was arrested and returned to Paris. The king and his allies tried
to argue that he had been deceived or had left against his w ill. This failed to
convince most of the French, and when the new constitution that divided power
between an elected Legislative Assembly and a limited monarchy was ratified on
September 30, a dark cloud loomed over the new government.
War was the most pressing issue for the new constitutional monarchy. Encour-
aged by royalists hoping for a quick defeat, and radicals wanting to spread revolu-
tion, the king preemptively declared war on Austria on April 20, 1792, with Prussia
responding in kind. The French army was ill-prepared for war, and early defeats
on the border combined with the threatening rhetoric of the Austro-Prussian armies
created a sense of panic and a new wave of popular uprisings. On August 10, a
crowd of Par isian militants attacked the barracks of the Swiss Guards responsible
for protecting the king, causing the royal f amily to take refuge with the Legislative
Assembly. At the time, most of the elected members w ere not in Paris, and a major-
ity of those who remained w ere antimonarchists backed by the sansculottes. This
rump Assembly voted to suspend the monarchy, effectively leaving the government
in the hands of the radical militants.
Fueled by the Austro-Prussian threat, popular violence continued into the fol-
lowing month. Beginning on September 2, 1792, militants entered the prisons
of Paris and massacred detainees they suspected of conspiracy. Thousands w ere
killed throughout France as other cities followed suit. On September 20, the first
constitutional government collapsed and was replaced by a National Convention
elected through universal male suffrage. The next day, the Convention abolished
the monarchy and replaced it with the First French Republic. Louis XVI was put
on trial for treason and beheaded on January 21, 1793, a move that turned other
European regimes against France.
To support the war effort, the Convention enacted several harsh measures. To
supply the army and limit domestic counterrevolutionary activity, it imposed strict
controls over the economy and suspended many of the rights of due process in
criminal trials that had been guaranteed by the first constitution. A Committee
of Public Safety, which fell u nder the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre
(1758–1794), was established to oversee the war effort. Beginning in September
1793, Robespierre and his colleagues rounded up p eople they suspected of conspir-
acy, including several former political allies, in a series of purges that came to be known
as The Terror. Defendants had no representation in court and the only possible
outcomes w ere acquittal or death by guillotine without a chance of appeal.
Despite its notoriety, the Committee of Public Safety achieved some important
results. Their strict management of society and the economy created a stronger army
that was capable of keeping the Austro-Prussian threat at bay. By the summer of
1794, the anxieties that motivated The Terror in the first place had largely sub-
sided, while public support for Robespierre had begun to fall apart after the exe-
cution of several popular leaders of the sansculottes in April. Towards the end of
July, Robespierre appeared before the Convention and gave a speech about a new
262 F R EN C H R E V OLUTION
The trial of King Louis XIV before the French National Convention, December 26, 1792.
Louis was convicted and, a month later, executed by guillotine, a move that hardened
opposition to the French Revolution in other European monarchies. (Library of Congress)
alleged conspiracy he had uncovered that included members of the Convention

itself. He was quickly shouted down, and placed under arrest. After a quick trial
he was guillotined on July 28, 1794. The Convention did not survive the excesses
of The Terror, and the following year a new constitution established the Direc-
tory, comprised of a bicameral legislature and five “directors” who shared execu-
tive authority.
The Directory was designed to have a broad system of checks and balances
that could prevent another figure like Robespierre from gaining too much power.
This provided France with a period of rest after the turmoil of the previous six
years, but it did not provide very effective governance. T hese conditions pro-
vided an opening for Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769–1821) rise to power. By this
time he had already distinguished himself as an army captain by recapturing
the southern French port of Toulon from the British in December 1793, and sup-
pressing a royalist uprising in Paris in October 1795. In early 1796, he was given
command of the Army of Italy, which preemptively invaded Italy to disrupt Aus-
trian plans to invade France from the Mediterranean Coast. Napoleon’s well-
publicized successes in Italy made him a popul ar figure at home at a time when
the Directory was increasingly disliked. After Italy, Napoleon launched an invasion
of Egypt, in 1798, that was designed to weaken Great Britain by hindering its trade
with India.
In November 1799, Napoleon participated in a coup to overturn the Directory

and replace it with a Consulate. According to the new constitution, Napoleon shared
power with two other Consuls, although in reality he had total authority. By 1804,
his position was strong enough to establish an imperial government ruled by a
Bonaparte dynasty. Many political and social institutions established during this
period, especially a new law code, have endured in France and its former colonies
to the present day.
The decisive defeat of Napoleon, in 1815, is commonly regarded as the end of
the French Revolution. The Napoleonic Empire reached its peak in 1812, but was
quickly undone by a combination of renewed conflict with European states that
had remained independent and nationalist uprisings within the empire. A fter his
decisive defeat at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, Napoleon was sent into exile and a
younger brother of the dead King Louis XVI restored the French monarchy.
Exiled rulers throughout Europe were likewise restored to their thrones. How-
ever, in the long term, the Revolution was a success in both France and Europe.
The Revolution had introduced democratic institutions throughout Europe that
were not easily undone, while the conservative backlash contributed to f uture
unrest. In some territories, French occupation led to a sense of national self-
determination that was incompatible with multiethnic imperial regimes such as
Russia and Austria.
In the Atlantic world, the French Revolution accelerated the process of decolo-
nization both by inspiring native revolutionaries and by limiting the ability of Euro
pean states to quell independence movements. The French Declaration of the
Rights of Man inspired a slave uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue
(today’s Haiti) in 1791. Occupied with domestic and continental matters, France
was unable to respond and by 1804, Haiti had gained independence. The political
instability that followed Napoleon’s European expansion opened the door for inde
pendence movements in other American Colonies. When Napoleon forced the
Spanish monarchy in exile, Simón Bolivar led a movement in South America that
established independence for most of the continent by 1821, while Miguel Hidalgo
led a movement in Mexico between 1810 and 1821. In 1807, the Portuguese royal
family took refuge in Brazil, and were compelled to grant the colony special privi-
leges that paved the way for independence by 1820.
The Revolution was also an important factor in ending the Atlantic slave trade.
The institution of slavery was incompatible with the ideals that legitimized the Rev-
olution in the first place, while revolutionary leaders in the American colonies
abolished slavery to gain more local support. Over the course of the nineteenth
century, states on both sides of the Atlantic gradually abolished slavery and the
slave trade.
Eric F. Johnson
See also: Abolition of the Slave Trade; Age of Revolution; Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of the Citizen; French Atlantic; Haitian Revolution; Latin American
Wars of Independence; Napoleon I
264 FU R T R ADE
Further Reading
Andress, David. 2006. The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Girard, Philippe. 2016. Toussaint Louverature: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Basic Books.
Popkin, Jeremy. 2014. A Short History of the French Revolution. New York: Routledge.
Tackett, Timothy. 2004. When the King Took Flight. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
FUR TRADE
The North American fur trade was a mainstay of the Atlantic economy in the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries. It was also a major factor in European explora-
tion and colonization on both sides of the continent; from Dutch, French, and
English settlements along the eastern seaboard in the sixteenth century, to Rus
sian settlements in Alaska and down the Pacific coast in the nineteenth. The fur
trade fostered rivalries among colonial powers as well as among Native Americans
groups who sought to control access to European goods. The fur trade integrated
Native Americans into the economy of the Atlantic world, but also profoundly
transformed native societies.
The Atlantic fur trade started in the 1530s with European fishermen trading
with the natives they encountered on the North American coast, exchanging metal
goods for items made out of beaver furs. By midcentury, European hat makers dis-
covered that beaver pelts could be turned into a superior type of felt to make hats.
Such hats remained fashionable in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century, driv-
ing up demand for beaver pelts.
The establishment of permanent European colonies, particularly at Quebec in
1608, and at Fort Nassau (modern-day Albany, New York) in 1614, allowed for the
dramatic expansion of the fur trade. The exchange of European goods for furs pro-
vided by Indian hunters became the economic mainstay of the northern colonies
for decades, and even in southern plantation colonies, such as South Carolina, the
trade in furs and deerskins was an important part of the early economy.
Indian preferences for trade goods determined the contours of the trade. Natives
only traded for those items they most wanted, such as metal goods, durable cloth,
guns, gunpowder, and shot. Indians regularly played traders of different nation-
alities against one another to obtain the best deals and to guarantee a greater sup-
ply of goods for themselves. Native Americans were not passive recipients of
European trade goods, nor w ere they victims.
Ready access to European goods altered indigenous societies in important ways.
The traditional means of creating some types of tools w ere lost as more durable
European-made items replaced goods of native manufacture, a trend seen in the
switch from stone to iron axe blades or from pottery cooking vessels to metal pots
and pans. European cloth was also popular. The technological advantages of such
goods, combined with the loss of traditional crafting methods, made Indians slowly
grow dependent on European goods.
FU R T R ADE 265
The need to guarantee a supply of furs to trade entrenched culturally-based gen-

der norms among many native groups. Many Indian cultures divided tasks based
on gender; w omen traditionally practiced agriculture while men hunted and went
to war. The need to ensure an adequate number of furs for trade forced men to
spend more of their time hunting and fighting. The gender-based division of labor
led colonists to assume that Indian men were lazy, because in much of Europe
hunting was an elite, recreational pastime. Hunting was central to Native Ameri-
cans’ subsistence strategy long before Europeans arrived but the development of
the fur trade made hunting central to the Indians’ economic well-being as well.
Indians also traded European goods with other native groups to establish and
solidify alliances. Such connections could be critical because competition among
various American Indians for furs led to increased warfare over access to hunting
territories, a situation exacerbated by the depletion of fur-bearing animals in over-
hunted regions. Competition over access to European trading partners increased
intertribal warfare as well.
The Iroquois Confederacy, based in the “middle ground” between the Hudson
River, the St. Lawrence River and the G reat Lakes, dominated the early fur trade
with the French, the Dutch, and the English. The Iroquois waged numerous wars
against neighboring native groups to gain captives for ritual adoption and to control
the fur trade. Between 1609 and 1711, the Iroquois defeated and assimilated the
Hurons (targeted b ecause they w
ere close French allies), the Neutral Nation, the Eries,
and the Susquehannocks. By the early eighteenth century, the Iroquois had extended
their control over most of the north side of the Ohio River Valley from modern Indi-
ana to V irginia. Their predominant position in the fur trade made them the stron-
gest native confederation in the region and for decades colonial governments had
to factor the Iroquois into their strategic calculations.
Iroquois determination to control the fur trade—and through it access to Euro
pean goods—had widespread effects across eastern North America. Some of their
defeated foes migrated into other regions. The Westos, for example, migrated south-
ward in the 1660s, and eventually played a major role in the development of the
Indian slave trade to English colonists in Virginia and South Carolina.
The fur trade helped fuel European exploration and settlement. In 1670, the
English king Charles II (r. 1660–1685) granted a charter to the Hudson’s Bay Com
pany to exploit the fur resources of the region around Hudson’s Bay in northern
Canada. The activities of the Company’s traders cut heavily into the French fur
trade based out of Quebec, and the French launched raids to capture their out-
posts, most of which they held until the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713.
The fur trade also served as a pretext for conquering other nations’ territories.
The English captured the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1664, acquiring
modern New York and New Jersey. The removal of the Dutch left the English
and French locked in a struggle to control the region and its valuable furs, con-
tributing to a series of imperial wars that culminated in the French and Indian
War (1754–1763), after which France lost all of its mainland North American
colonies.
266 FU R T R ADE
The quest for furs also led to the exploration of North America’s Pacific Coast.
Russian explorers in Alaska found high-quality furs and sea otter pelts. Beginning
in the 1740s, Russian fur traders regularly visited Alaska, establishing permanent
outposts in the region by the end of the century. The effects on the native Aleuts
mirrored many of the effects of the trade on the eastern side of the continent. Regu-
lar contact with outsiders brought epidemic diseases that wiped out natives in
large numbers, trade for European goods led to dependency, the traders’ demands
for furs led to coercion and violence.
The Russians settled southward down the Pacific coast from Alaska to stem
the growing British interest in the region, sparked by the publication of reports
of the voyages of Captain James Cook (1728–1779) in the 1770s. British activities in
the northwest Pacific threatened to erupt into war with Spain, which still claimed the
region. By the 1780s, the Americans, British, Russians, and Spanish w ere all inter-
ested in the area for furs and trade with the natives. British and Spanish issues
were settled with the Nootka Sound Conventions in the 1790s, and the Ameri-
cans and Spanish settled their differences with the Adams-Onís treaty of 1819. The
Russians established Fort Ross north of San Francisco in 1812 as a base to grow
food for their northern settlements and to conduct trade with Spanish California.
Severe overhunting depleted the sea otter population, and rising competition with
British and American fur traders cut into Russian profits, leading to the 1867 sale
of Alaska to the United States.
Spanish New Mexico also became a fur-trading center in the eighteenth c entury.
Trappers based t here ventured northward into the Rocky Mountains and westward
into the Great Basin and California to obtain furs. Taos rather than Santa Fe became
the center of the region’s fur trade b ecause Spanish policies prevented foreigners
from operating in their colonies, and it was easier for outsiders to avoid Spanish
surveillance t here. Not all of the fur trappers in New Mexico w ere outsiders, how-
ever; Spanish trappers sent furs southward to the main port at Vera Cruz for ship-
ment to Europe. Once Mexico gained its independence in 1821, the new government
allowed American trappers equal access to the region, and Americans from Mis-
souri quickly established themselves at Taos.
The exploration of the North American interior through the early nineteenth
century was often led by traders and fur trappers. Some of the most famous explor-
ers in American and Canadian history w ere fur traders, such as Étienne Brûlé, the
first European to see the G
reat Lakes. The Lewis and Clark expedition from 1804
to 1806 met a number of fur trappers on their trek across North America, and the
earliest economic development of the region was initiated by fur traders.
Dennis J. Cowles
See also: Iroquois; New France; Quebec
Further Reading
Braund, Katherine E. Holland. 2008. Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with
Anglo-America, 1685–1815. 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
FU R T R ADE 267
Jones, Ryan Tucker. 2014. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts
of the Sea, 1741–1867. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Richter, Daniel. 1992. The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the
Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Sleeper-Smith, Susan, ed. 2009. Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic
World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
G
GENS DE COULEUR
Meaning “people of color” in French, the term gens de couleur usually referred to
the large, racially ambiguous group of f ree p eople of African descent living in fran-
cophone colonies throughout the Atlantic world. Concentrated mainly in the
French Caribbean colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and especially Saint-
Domingue, the gens de couleur community consisted of both free-born and freed-
people with at least some measurable amount of African ancestry, usually, but not
always, derived from an enslaved African parent or grandparent. In most places,
the racial and cultural ambiguity and heterogeneity that defined the group as a
whole aided their survival in the slave-based society of the French Atlantic.
Throughout the French colonial system, gens de couleur maintained a number
of important positions in society, allowing them to advocate for social change, and
even revolution. Never fully recognized by colonial law, they stood as social, rather
than legal, intermediaries between the white ruling class and the enslaved black
masses. In a slave society, the very existence of a free, mixed-race community chal-
lenged the legal foundation upon which slavery, and thus society, could be justi-
fied. Colonial officials, throughout the eighteenth c entury, did their best to avoid
ascribing any legal designation, status, or rights to gens de couleur. In effect, they
left it up to society as a w
hole to control and define their role.
On the ground, gens de couleur blended into their surrounding societies. They
functioned as a social class stuck between citizenship and subjecthood, full
rights-bearing liberty, and privileged de facto freedom. They represented a cross
section of French colonial society. In Saint-Domingue, gens de couleur owned
land, traded merchandise in towns and cities, and even owned slaves. Elsewhere,
they tended small farms, worked as skilled craftsmen, and helped merchants sell
their wares. Among the most affluent families, especially those in Saint-Domingue,
friends and business partners arranged marriages to keep money, property,
slaves, and social prestige within desirable social and economic circles. Social
leaders in urban areas created business relationships with white merchants, poli-
ticians, and planters; not only for the economic benefits attached, but also for the
protection powerful white allies could provide if their legal status ever became a
problem.
Those with less wealth and social connections used serv ice in the militia to
define their places in the colonial community. Throughout the French colonial
world, militia serv ice stood as a primary route to social and political acceptance
for both impoverished whites and gens de couleur. Service in the militia granted gens
de couleur physical power and, perhaps most importantly, evidence of dedication
270 GENS DE COULEUR
to the Crown and the colonial regime. Throughout the Atlantic world, colonial
empires looked kindly upon t hose most willing to take up arms in defense of their
land, families, and imperial nations, even if those nations did not fully recognize
them as citizens. In Spanish, French, and English colonies, and even in the United
States, militia serv ice solidified a man’s place in society, not necessarily as an
equal to the elite, but at least as a recognized member of the body politic.
For gens de couleur, militia serv ice took the form of the maréchaussée, a group
entrusted with maintaining order in the slave community. The maréchaussée served
as the official link between the free white and the enslaved black communities.
Indeed, service in the maréchaussée was the purpose of the gens de couleurs’ existence
as many colonial officials saw it. In every major French Caribbean colony, the
group patrolled the rural areas outside of cities; they sought out and suppressed
any inkling of rebellion among the enslaved; and, when needed, they served along-
side white militias in defense of the empire. Simply put, the maréchaussée created,
through force of arms, the separation that freedom already established between
slaves and freedmen. Maréchaussée granted many gens de couleur a claim to accep
tance as members of society, albeit imperfect and unequal.
The community of gens de couleur fit into society in a way that never fully
required a definition, at least not in a legal sense. Usually of mixed African and
French ancestry, gens de couleur bridged a phenotypic divide that separated the
free from the enslaved—les noirs (blacks) were enslaved, mulâtres, quarterons, and
gens de couleur were not. Their potential, and often evident, white ancestry, at least
in the eyes of their white neighbors, made them something other than “black,”
and thus deserving of freedom. Serv ice in the maréchaussée helped reinforce this
distinction whenever any questions arose. Gens de couleur in the Atlantic world
served an important, almost indefinable, role in the structure and balance of colo-
nial society.
Although communities survived in Louisiana and New Orleans well into the
nineteenth century, the Haitian Revolution of 1791, and the resulting abolition of
slavery throughout the French Empire in 1794, left no space for a gens de couleur
identity and community. Forced into diaspora, or thrust into a free society, gens de
couleur in the French Atlantic no longer had a claim to freedom that others did
not. The social networks they had constructed and used to form their identity had
collapsed. Suddenly, they were ordinary people with African blood, no more deserv-
ing of rights and privileges than a slave freed through revolution. They finally had
a place in law, a definition beyond that ascribed by society. But it was one that
many never wanted. Following the end of slavery in the French colonies and the
revolution in Saint-Domingue, the gens de couleur, as they had existed for nearly a
century, disappeared, continuing only in small groups and distant places, left to
define themselves anew.
Andrew N. Wegmann
See also: French Atlantic; Haitian Revolution; Louisiana; Race; Saint-Domingue/

Haiti
G HANA 271
Further Reading
Dubois, Laurent. 2004. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French
Car ibbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
King, Stewart R. 2001. Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary
Saint-Domingue. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Schloss, Rebecca. 2009. Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
GHANA
The Ghana Empire, the origins of which can be traced back to 300 CE, was the
first of the three major West African Sudanic empires to arise and to dominate
much of the western Sudan and portions of the Western Sahara Desert from
the eleventh c entury through the sixteenth c entury. Its rise and fall influenced
the development of its successors, Mali and Songhay. A clan-based state, Ghana
was most likely founded by the Soninke, the northern branch of the Mande
people of West Africa.
Reaching its peak in the eleventh c entury, Ghana had been known for centuries
for its wealth derived from the control that its rulers exercised over the trans-Sahara
gold and salt trade, the gold coming from Bambuk in the upper Senegal-Falémé
region of today’s Senegal and Mali, and the salt coming from Taghaza, located in
the extreme north of today’s Mali. This trade owed much to the introduction of the
camel into the Western Sahara by the late fourth c entury CE.
Ghana was first made known to the world community through the writings of
a number of Arabic language geographers and historians. The most detailed descrip-
tion of Ghana at its peak was penned between 1067 and 1068 by the Andalusian
geographer and historian Abu Ubaid al-Bakri (1040–1094). He described the pur-
ported capital city, Kumbi Saleh, the remains of which, in southeastern Maurita-
nia, were identified in 1914 by Albert Bonnel de Mézières.
According to al-Bakri’s description, Ghana was ruled by Tunka Manin of the Cisse
dynasty as a divine monarch according to the traditional religion. He nevertheless
welcomed Muslims, understandably so b ecause they conducted the trans-Saharan
trade. Al-Bakri reported that Kumbi Saleh consisted of two towns, a traders’ town,
approximately six miles north of the royal town. The former apparently had 12
mosques and numerous stone buildings. Although the tunka might visit this town,
his seat of power was the royal town, where he held court, administered justice,
and received dignitaries. The city’s remains have not been located.
It is possible that Kumbi Saleh was not the principal royal town, or it may have
been a secondary royal town. Soninke and Mande traditions that w ere collected
and analyzed during and after the colonial period in West Africa, contradict the
Arabic language written accounts. These traditional accounts, particularly the Leg-
end of Wagadu, place the royal capital of Ghana, named Wagadu, in Tendirma,
nearly 200 miles to the east of Kumbi Saleh in the well-watered lake region of the
mid-Niger River valley, an area far more suitable for agriculture than the drought-
prone Mauritanian Sahel in which Kumbi Saleh was located. Kumbi Saleh, however,
272 G HANA
was closer to the Bambuk gold fields than Tendirma and sat astride the western
trans-Saharan trade routes to Morocco. For many years Kumbi Saleh was recog-
nized as the most important trading center in West Africa.
There is confusion about the actual name of the empire. Its traditional name
was Wagadu, and its ruler was titled tunka, the same title by which the heads of
Soninke chieftaincies are designated t oday. Another title that designated the ruler
was Kaya Maghan meaning Lord of the Gold. Al-Bakri suggested that Awkar was
the proper name of the empire. “Ghana,” which initially meant “war lord,” was also
understood to be the title of the ruler, but it became the name that Arabic lan-
guage writers generalized for the w hole empire.
The traditional explanation for the fall of Ghana is the destruction of Kumbi
Saleh in 1076 by the Almoravid leader, Abu Bakar ibn Umar, as part of the Almoravid
campaign to conquer and convert this non-Muslim empire to Islam. This explana-
tion is probably incorrect.
Despite Islamic pressure, the tunka of Ghana and the principal clan leaders, offi-
cials, and priests had steadfastly defended the traditional religion fearing that if
the tunka converted, it would cause the state structure to collapse. Nevertheless,
the presence of Muslim traders and the appointment of Muslims to state posts, as
scribes, judges, and trade officials had led to the diffusion of knowledge about Islam,
the Arabic language, and Muslim law. A Muslim party had sprung up in Kumbi
Saleh. What happened in 1076 was not so much an Almoravid conquest but the
overthrow of Tunka Manin through a coup d’état supported by Yahia ibn Abu
Bakar, the Almoravid leader, that ended divine kingship in Ghana and placed Kema
Magha, a Muslim convert and b rother of Manin, on the throne. The coup so desta-
bilized the government of Ghana that when Yahia ibn Abu Bakar died in 1087, the
now Islamized population of Kumbi Saleh overthrew tunka Kema Magha, even
though he was Muslim, thus ending the Cisse dynasty.
Abu Bakar’s successor selected a Muslim court official to administer Ghana who
in turn founded a new Muslim dynasty, the Ture, by which time the capital was
fully established in Tendirma even though it is not clear when Kumbi Saleh was
abandoned. In the second half of the twelfth c entury, the Cisse attempted a come-
back and possibly the reestablishment of the old faith, but the Muslim party tri-
umphed. Following Sundiata Keita’s victory over Sumanguru Kante in 1235, and
his establishment of the Mali Empire, he incorporated Tendirma/Ghana into the
new empire as a vassal kingdom. Subsequently, many of its Soninke clans dispersed
widely across West Africa.
The effects that ancient Ghana had on the Atlantic world were indirect. Its repu-
tation as a massive gold exporter that was inherited by the Mali Empire attracted the
attention of Europeans who, starting with the Portuguese in the early fifteenth
century, initiated maritime expeditions down the west coast of Africa in search of
the sources of this gold.
See also: Gold and Silver; Islam; Mali Empire; Portuguese Atlantic
G OLD AND SIL V E R 273
Further Reading
Bovill, E. W. 1970. The Golden Trade of the Moors. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Lange, D. 2004. Ancient Kingdoms of West Africa: Africa-Centered and Canaanite-Israelite Per-
spectives, a Collection of Published and Unpublished Studies in English and French. Dettel-
bach: J. H. Röll.
Levtzion, N. 1980. Ancient Ghana and Mali. Reprint. New York: Africana.
G O L D A N D S I LV E R
Gold and silver almost appear to have a hidden power. Two metals considered
precious by societies on both sides of the Atlantic, they have driven h
umans to explo-
ration, exploitation, and excess. Gold and silver mining, alongside sugar production,
was the principle economic motive for European colonization of the Caribbean
and South America. Though trade and mining operations in metals existed and even
flourished prior to European expansion, European looting, mining, and trading
activities between the Car ibbean, Africa, Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, and the Far
East created an increasingly global market for precious metals. Throughout the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spanish and Portuguese empires, and to a lesser
extent, African merchants prospered as a result of mining exploits. However,
there were often disastrous human costs, particularly for Indigenous Americans
and African captives forced to migrate and labor in the mines of Africa and South
America.
From the 1440s onwards, Portuguese mariners with backing from the Crown
traveled along the coastline of West Africa to find a shorter route to West African
goldfields. In doing so, Portuguese merchants came into contact with numerous
kingdoms and polities already producing and trading in gold. Gold was mined in
the Bambuk region of Guinea, in the Bure region of Senegal, and in many parts of
southern Ghana, which a fter 1471 was termed the Gold Coast. Goldsmiths cre-
ated decorative items in these regions and used gold dust as a currency measured
by both weight and volume. Much of West and Central Africa had a monetized, as
opposed to a barter economy by 1500, and gold was one of two main currencies in
use when Portuguese mariners arrived to trade in Africa’s coastal settlements. Mer-
chants began exporting gold from West Africa through the fort of São Jorge da
Mina in 1481. The Portuguese treasury profited from the gold trade, helping fund
maritime expeditions to Brazil and the East Indies. Demand for gold also contrib-
uted to the development of slave trading within Africa. Gold Coast mine o wners
purchased slaves from the Benin interior, sold by local and Portuguese merchants,
to bolster their workforces in an effort to meet rising demand and secure lucrative
footholds in an expanding gold trade.
Westward across the Atlantic, Native Americans exploited gold and silver depos-
its long before Europeans arrived. “Tumbaga,” an alloy of gold, silver, and copper,
dates to 500 BCE, and in Mesoamerica and South America it was used to create a
variety of t emple furnishings as well as household and personal items. The Aztecs
used a kind of gold standard to set prices daily in the central market of Tlatelolco.
274 G OLD AND SIL V E R
The Lucayans, an Arawak group, fashioned gold into jewelry. The first indigenous
group encountered by Christopher Columbus, on the island of Guanahani (today’s
San Salvador, Bahamas), the Lucayans’ jewelry led Columbus to believe t here w ere
large amounts of gold in the region, as yet untouched by Europeans. When Colum-
bus returned with Arawak gold, Spain’s monarchs saw the potential gains. Conse-
quently, the Car ibbean and its surrounding areas w ere considered potentially
valuable to the Spanish Crown and metal extraction became the Spanish monar-
chy’s primary economic goal in the region. Gold extraction, for the most part, was
disastrous for native groups in the Caribbean. Spanish observers wrote of the dwin-
dling numbers of Arawak who suffered untimely deaths at the hands of gold-
hungry Spanish conquistadors and their European diseases and imposed labor
regimes.
A fter Car ibbean reserves of gold dried up, the conquistadors who followed
Columbus’ route to the West Indies would find gold and silver in the mainland of
Central and South America. After a failed expedition to the Maya Yucatan penin-
sula in 1517, conquistadors returned to Cuba with small caskets of gold orna-
ments looted from Maya temples, along with two indigenous captives who both
claimed that there were great supplies of “yellow metal” in the peninsula further
west. The information was enough for the Crown to support new gold-seeking
expeditions. Looted gold began flowing back to Europe after Hernán Cortés’ con-
quest of the Aztecs (in modern Mexico) from 1520 onwards, and Francisco Pizar-
ro’s overthrow of the Inca empire (today’s Peru) by 1534.
In the long term, the Spanish had better luck finding silver, than gold, in Mex-
ico and Peru. Vast stores of silver w ere discovered in Zacatecas (1546), Guanajuato
(1550), in Mexico and Potosí (1545), and in Upper Peru (modern-day Bolivia). Sil-
ver became the principle metal export of the colonies, attracting thousands of
settlers. By 1580, t here w ere as many as 150,000 whites in the Americas and 225
towns and cities (Elliott 2006, 56). Potosí, a new mining town, had a population
of over 150,000 in 1580, making the region comparable in size to London or Seville
at the same time.
The mining industry was propped up by a strict labor regime (the “mita”), forc-
ing indigenous p eoples to migrate and labor in mines. Around 80 percent of
laborers in the mines of Potosí and Zacatecas, at the height of their productivity
between 1550 and 1650, w ere indigenous, leading to the uprooting of many com-
munities in Peru and Mexico (Paquette 2015, 297). L abor conditions in silver mines
King Fedinand’s Instruction on Gold

Upon hearing about precious metals found in the New World, King Ferdinand
of Spain (1452–1516), made his priorities clear. “Get gold, humanely if you
can, but at all hazards get gold,” he wrote to the conquistadors on the island of
Hispaniola in 1511 (Del Mar 1969, 148). This Spanish desire for gold had long-
lasting effects on the social and political development of Spanish America.
G OLD AND SIL V E R 275
became notorious, and to many, a death sentence. By 1585, a general surveyor for
the Viceroy of Peru (Peru’s head representative of the Spanish monarchy) charac-
terized the mines’ output as “more blood than metal” and described mining as a
“harsh executioner of Indians, for each day it consumes and destroys them, and
their lives are made misery by the fear of death” (Bakewell 1984, 145). Laborers
processing ore often suffered from mercury poisoning, a side effect of mercury
amalgamation techniques that had made the extraction of low-grade silver ore a
more efficient and profitable process for mine owners and the Crown.
The Spanish belief that indigenous laborers were better suited to the high-altitude
working conditions in mines, alongside plentiful available laborers, meant fewer
African slaves were involved in mining at first. As disease and forced l abor regimes
took their toll on indigenous societies, slavery became more widespread. By the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, African slaves could be found in
increasing numbers in mining areas that included northern Mexico, Colombian
gold fields in Antioquia, Popayan, and the Chocó and Minas Gerais, Brazil.
The remarkable increase in mining output towards the late sixteenth century
gave Spain an edge against its European competitors. After 1571, the Philippines
received many Manila galleons; Spanish ships filled with bullion destined for Asian
markets through the Spanish colony at Manila. From the Philippines, silver was
traded with the Chinese Empire, the largest consumer of Spanish silver outside of
Europe, bringing Spain and South America’s populations into an increasingly glo-
balizing world economy. By the early nineteenth century, there w ere seven mint
houses in colonial Spanish America. B ecause of silver’s widely accepted value and
Spanish dominance in the silver trade, Spanish coins w ere often used as currency
in other European nations and their colonies. Though Spain’s strength reached new
heights in the late 1500s, much of Spain’s new wealth was squandered on unsuc-
cessful imperial ventures and wars, such as the famed Spanish Armada’s failed inva-
sion of E
ngland in 1588.
Portuguese Brazil’s fortunes and borders changed significantly as a result of
gold’s discovery in 1695. The region became known as Minas Gerais, meaning
“general mines” in English. Discoveries in this region moved colonists away from
the coast to Brazil’s vast interior. Portuguese merchants imported, en masse, Afri-
can slaves as the majority of the workforce. Female slaves could work as small time
merchants in local markets and male slaves worked in the rivers and mines as labor-
ers and artisans. Though much gold was exported to Portugal and Asia, some
remained in mining boomtowns like Vila de Ouro Preto. Gold adorns imperial Por-
tugal’s Catholic churches in Brazil, such as the early eighteenth century gold-laden
São Fransisco baroque church of Salvador da Bahia, then capital of Brazil. Though
slaves labored to extract gold for their masters, they w ere prohibited from wearing
silk and gold in the Brazilian capital of Salvador as early as 1696. Brazilian gold
financed the rule of absolute monarch Dom João V (1689–1750) and his projects
of personal gratification, though the discoveries in Minas Gerais did not propel
Portugal back onto the world stage as once hoped.
Gold and silver continued to retain their value to diverse societies well a fter the
colonial period. Gold once again would take its turn on the world stage in 1848,
276 G ULF ST R EA M
this time in the United States when news of rich gold strikes spread beyond Cali-
fornia to the outside world, triggering another astonishing mass movement of
peoples seeking fortunes in the Americas.
Patrick Thomas Barker
See also: European Exploration; Money; Potosí
Further Reading
Bakewell, Peter J. 1984. Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian L abor in Potosí, 1545–1650. Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press.
Del Mar, Alex. 1969. A History of The Precious Metals, from the Earliest Times to the Present.
New York: Augustus M. Kelly.
Paquette, Gabriel. 2015. “Colonial Societies.” The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Euro
pean History, Vol. II: Cultures and Power. Edited by Hamish Scott. New York: Oxford
University Press.
GULF STREAM
The Gulf Stream is an ocean system with bundled riverine currents that flow as a
distinct entity, meandering through the North Atlantic. Its movements are the result
of complex global wind patterns in the Northern Hemisphere. The five major ocean
wide gyres are found in the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the North Pacific,
the South Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. These currents are influenced by global
winds and the Coriolis Effect on northern and southern hemispheric wind pat-
terns that shifts winds clockwise in the north and counterclockwise in the south.
Ocean currents are modified by the flow patterns of the trade winds.
The Gulf Stream is part of a vast ocean system that transports warm w aters from
the equator poleward. This heat transfer system is responsible for the lush biodi-
versity of the southeastern United States coastlands, northward along the western
coasts of the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. Warm air from the equator is trans-
ported north or south; as the air cools moving poleward, it bends by 30°, and then
reverses its direction back to the Intertropical Convergence Zone at the equator in
a westward motion. T hese poleward motions also contribute to what is called “ther-
mohaline circulation”—a vertical pattern that regulates temperature and salinity
and its corollary effects on density, the mechanics that create the unique Atlantic
thermohaline circulation drawing salty waters northward.
The major ocean transport systems are described as having a strong western
boundary current, and a weaker, broader eastern boundary current. In the North
Atlantic, the western Gulf Stream is partnered to the eastern Canary Current in a
common gyre or circulation. The broad Canary Current flows southward along
Africa’s northwest coast, and then westward, where it is picked up by the Atlantic
North Equatorial Current flowing into the complex Guiana and Car ibbean Cur-
rents. W
aters flow northward into the Gulf of Mexico, forming a narrowing stream
that rushes through the Straits of Florida into the Antilles Current at a volume of
more than 3.5 knots.
G ULF ST R EA M 277
As the Gulf Stream flows outward from Florida’s continental shelf above Cape
Hatteras, it takes on new characteristics. Its capacity nearly doubles with increases
in velocity due to deep recirculation cells that accelerate its movement nearly five-
fold, with additional flow variations calculated due to seasonal shifts in position.
As the stream flows eastward, it enters the North Atlantic Drift which in turn
branches into a series of currents; one flows southward back into the Canary Cur-
rent, another extends northward off of the western coast of Europe, and still another
flows into the Norway Current extending along the banks of western Ireland and
England, and out into the Barents Sea. To the far west currents run into the East
Greenland Current, where the thermal mixing of water creates some of the world’s
finest fishing grounds. The Gulf Stream reaches a maximum speed of 2.5 meters
per second; its volume is greater than all of the Atlantic river waters combined.
Juan Ponce de León (1460–1521) made the first written European records of
the powerful movement of the Gulf Stream in 1513. His voyages of exploration
and settlement of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Florida u nder the
Spanish Crown soon set the stage for successive waves of exploration and settle-
ment throughout the Atlantic basin. Six years a fter de León’s Atlantic explora-
tions, Anton de Alaminos of Spain sailed northward from Florida before tacking
east for Europe following the Gulf Stream. Soon the Gulf Stream and its trade winds
became standard forces guiding navigation to and from ports throughout the
Atlantic world.
Benjamin Franklin was the first American to document the movement of the
North Atlantic Ocean. As Deputy Postmaster General of the American colonies,
Franklin had a vested interest in determining the most efficient routes for seafaring
vessels. He was a practicing scientist, and is noted for his contributions to what is
now the field of oceanography. He collaborated with his second cousin, Timothy
Folger, a Nantucket whaling captain, and other experienced ship captains to learn
more about the circulation patterns of the North Atlantic Ocean. A fter several
Atlantic voyages and careful observation and measurements of depth and tempera-
ture, he was able to publish the first Chart of the Gulf Stream in 1770. First printed
in E
ngland, it was reprinted in France in 1778, and the United States in 1786.
Gulf Stream Art

In 1906, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City purchased one of
the final masterworks of the nineteenth-century American artist Winslow
Homer (1836–1910). His last serial paintings w ere seascapes; the most famous
is his composition Gulf Stream, a portrayal of his impressions of the Caribbean.
Its controversial portrayal of a lone black man at sea has evoked commentary
and a deep reflection on the Atlantic’s multifaceted cultural legacy. Artists today
continue to explore the Gulf Stream as a metaphor for the complex streams of
identity that illumine the hearts and souls of a global community united by
the transatlantic experience.
278 G UNS
The Gulf Stream played a pivotal role in Atlantic exploration, trade, migration,
travel, and communication, especially during the Age of Sail. European ships
headed to the Car ibbean followed a circular route heading not west directly but
south for the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, before turning west to take
advantage of the ocean currents. Wind and currents dictated a primarily east-to-
west sailing pattern. To return to Europe, ships would pass along the Atlantic coast
of Florida, traversing the perilous Florida Straight, to catch the Gulf Stream that
would power their voyage home. Today, the Gulf Stream continues to shape ship-
ping routes and influences the commercial and sport fishing industries.
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Canary Islands; Cartography; European Exploration;

Franklin, Benjamin
Further Reading
Lacouture, John. 1995. “The Gulf Stream Charts of Benjamin Franklin and Timothy Fol-
ger.” Historic Nantucket 44(2): 82–86.
Ulansky, Stan. 2008. The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of
the Powerful River in the Atlantic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Wood, Peter H. 2004. Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream. Athens:
University of Georgia Press.
GUNS
Although gunpowder firearms w ere invented in China in the tenth c entury, it was
European firearms that eventually dominated the Atlantic world. Through tech-
nological refinement, the military advantages conveyed by firearms gradually
increased following the first major contacts between Europeans and the natives of
newly explored lands in the early 1500s. A fter learning these advantages, many
native groups quickly sought to acquire firearms of their own, often entering trad-
ing relationships with Europeans to do so. Guns were vital to most European con-
quests, though they w ere rarely sufficient for military success. Additionally, with
the exception of the Americas, by the 1700s most European explorers encountered
peoples already familiar with firearms, primarily through the diffusion of the tech-
nology from Asia in preceding centuries. Until World War I, European firearm
technology was rarely sufficient on its own to be militarily decisive throughout the
Atlantic world.
The technology of firearms spread outward from China, reaching many of the
nearby cultures in Southeast Asia, the Arab lands of the M iddle East, and finally
Europe in the thirteenth century. Although most cultures continued to refine fire-
arm technology as well as its military applications, technological developments in
Europe quickly outstripped all o thers. Guns were more militarily effective in the
European context, as many other areas of the world contained nomadic raiders or
lighter cavalry, units largely immune to the inaccurate firing of the fifteenth century
hand cannon, and its successor, the arquebus. Furthermore, European firearms
G UNS 279
ere generally developed and assembled by private manufacturers who competed

w
with each other for contracts, spurring initiative and technological development.
In many other areas, firearms were manufactured by governments or acquired
almost exclusively through trade.
Guns were an important source of the European military revolution that devel-
oped between 1450 and 1800. Military technology, primarily the introduction of
guns, was responsible for the development of more intricate and demanding tac-
tics, drills, and doctrines. This required a greater deal of professionalization among
soldiers, and thus higher expenditures in administration and supply. To cope with
such change, the governmental apparatus grew in power and size, eventually sup-
planting older, strictly dynastic forms of state organization. The consolidation of
territories resulted in greater tax bases and potential recruits, and thus much larger
armies than had been previously possible. It should be noted that the widespread
change attributed to the gun is applicable mostly in the Western European con-
text. Other areas of the world had varying responses to the introduction and evo-
lution of firearms. In some cases, states were formed, but in o thers, particularly in
Africa, guns produced a destabilizing effect resulting in the dissolution of existing
states.
European firearms w ere initially important in military contact with natives in
the Americas, but not necessarily due to the lethality of the weapons. During the
major period of Spanish exploration, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
there w ere simply too few Spaniards and guns to make a large military impact.
Guns were notable for their frightening sounds on the battlefield, but the Spanish
victory was more attributable to gaining native allies and the spread of disease. In
the seventeenth c entury, the French and English in North America generally had
weaponry more suitable for European conflict, but it was not particularly effective
against many Native American groups that refused to conduct warfare in the
European style of set-piece battles. This relative ineffectiveness of firearms in non-
European locales was a common occurrence, and resulted in European armies’
adaptation of native-style military tactics. This was the case, for example, in many
parts of Africa that were tropical and lacked the open spaces that firearms required
to be deployed effectively en masse. In both the Americas and Africa, many natives
gained considerable individual proficiency with guns through tasks such as
hunting varmints. Therefore, in the early era of European exploration, guns were
rarely militarily effective for the reasons they w ere a dopted for on European
battlefields.
There are notable instances of indigenous groups refusing to make full use of
firearm technology. The Zulu of the mid-1800s are the most famous example.
Although gun prices had steadily declined in the preceding decades due to greater
technological efficiency in manufacture, the natives refused to adopt non-Zulu
military tactics, and guns were relegated to weapons of harassment from a distance.
Likewise, other indigenous groups collected firearms over long periods of time,
choosing to deploy them in an unsystematic way, often with the result that very
dated equipment found its way to the battlefield. Others adapted the use of firearms
to greater effect. During the upheavals in nineteenth-century South America,
280 G UNS
imperialist powers w ere eventually forced out and gun usage became pervasive
throughout society.
More fundamental for the usage of firearms was the idea of military synthesis.
Conventional European tactics such as massed infantry firing in highly disciplined
lines was ineffective in the American and African terrains. The highly irregular
battle formations of indigenous groups rarely presented a v iable target for Euro
pean troops hoping for grouped enemies. Even technological marvels of the late
nineteenth century, such as the machine gun, w ere virtually useless in many
densely forested parts of the world. The European system of military organization
was often superior to that of native populations, but tactics specific to the envi-
ronment heavily favored the indigenes. Guns, therefore, were primarily useful as
long distance weaponry by individual shooters. A successful example is the guerilla-
style tactics of Native Americans. Without significant adaptation, Eu ropeans
could only effectively employ guns if they w ere able to strategize an engagement
with favorable terrain, or if the natives attempted an unfavorable attack in the style
of the Zulu at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (1879), in which 150 British and colonial
troops stymied the attack of over 3,000 Zulu warriors. More often, both natives
and Europeans attempted some synthesis of guns with traditional tactics, result-
ing in an increase in military efficacy for both sides.
Generally, indigenous groups prior to the nineteenth century were armed with
firearms not appreciably different from those of European explorers or settlers. This
was due less to native manufacture and more to the extensive growth of trade in
firearms. Most indigenous groups w ere unwilling to adapt European styles of war-
fare that w ere less than ideal in non-European environments. Nevertheless, guns
were useful for several reasons: their frightful sound in combat, hunting and var-
mint control, and adapted indigenous military tactics. For example, it is likely that
most of the guns shipped to Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries w
ere not of a military variety, but w
ere used for agricultural purposes. T hese
guns, known as trade muskets, could be used to drive game off otherw ise unus-
able land. This was important to some groups, particularly when neighboring lands
did not have access to firearms. Thus, a group gained advantage through the acqui-
sition of firearms, though not necessarily for strictly militarily reasons. The inter-
national trade of guns became a large source of profit for private industries in
Europe. The best known example is the trade of commodities in the Atlantic trade
triangle. Commodities such as guns w ere manufactured in Europe, shipped to
Africa and exchanged for slaves. Then slaves w ere transported to the Americas and
exchanged for raw materials, which w ere carried to E ngland for manufacture into
more products.
Apart from the rapid technological advances of European weaponry after the
1600s, development of firearms elsewhere in the world was generally stagnant. It
was simply more convenient and cost-effective to purchase European guns rather
than attempt extensive domestic design and manufacture. The Ottomans are nota-
ble for ceasing virtually all domestic production and relying exclusively on imports
by the turn of the twentieth century. More commonly there was some amount of
domestic repair and ammunition manufacture for muskets but rarely serious
G UNS 281
attempts at design and manufacture. The gun trade continued, but non-European
buyers did not receive the latest models. This became particularly apparent in the
later nineteenth century when European technology became far more advanced
than in previous centuries. The technological disparities increased as even outdated
models were expensive. By this time, apart from some exceptions in Asia, even
domestic repair and ammunition creation was out of the question, due to costs,
lack of material, and a lack of expertise. Mid-to-late-nineteenth-century r ifles w
ere
significantly more complex and costly to manufacture than muskets. The intro-
duction of machine guns in the late 1800s proved a leap that many non-European
powers would not make until well into the twentieth c entury.
Christopher Goodwin
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; European Exploration
Further Reading
Lorge, Peter Allan. 2008. The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raudzens, George. 2003. Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests: Sixteenth to Eighteenth
Centuries. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
Thornton, John K. 1999. Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800. London: Routledge.
H
H A I T I . See Saint-Domingue/Haiti
HAITIAN REVOLUTION (1791–1803)

The enslaved people of the colony of Saint-Domingue rebelled in what would
become a nearly 13-year insurrection against the French, lasting from 1791 to 1803,
and leading eventually to Haitian independence. In the process, the former colony
would become the first large-scale slave-owning society to abolish slavery, and the
second colony in the Americas to throw off European rule. Many colonizing coun-
tries, or countries that used the institution of slavery, watched the developments
of the Haitian revolution closely, as it would have direct bearing on the practice
within their own colonies. The revolution inspired resistance movements through-
out the Americas and the broader world.
In 1697, the colony of Saint-Domingue was ceded by Spain to France. By the
late 1700s, Saint-Domingue had the strongest export economy of the Americas,
largely through the efforts of an enormous population of enslaved people from
Africa, toiling in fields of a new plantation agricultural system. Saint-Domingue
was the largest importer of slaves in the New World. At its height, the colony met
half of the world’s coffee and sugar consumption demands, producing more of both
crops than any other colony in existence at the time. While the majority of the
plantations produced these powerful stimulants, the colony also exported valu-
able crops of indigo and cotton, and extracted other natural resources such as pre-
cious hardwoods, through the felling of the primordial forests.
Several factors combined to bring about the revolution. The role of maroons
(escaped slaves) in the Haitian Revolution was an important contribution. Although
several important leaders of the revolution emerged from bands of maroons, and
the idea of marronage played an important role in the revolution and subsequent
stages of national identify formation, maroons were increasingly rare on the eve of
the revolution and their contribution to the revolution as a formalized force is not
well established. The Vodou (voodoo) belief system played an important role in
glossing differences between enslaved p eople, allowing varied ethnic groups to
unite through shared aspects of syncretic religious practices.
The long Haitian Revolution period can be divided into three phases: the first
two years prior to the large-scale involvement of enslaved p eople (1789–1790); the
middle period (1791–1801); and the War of Independence (1802–1803). This period
of three stages saw three different social groups—enslaved people, the gens de cou-
leur (free people of color), and white colonists—in pursuit of varying interpreta-
tions of three shared political aspirations (freedom, equality, and independence).
284 HAITIAN R E V OLUTION
A depiction of the B
attle of Crête-à-Pierrot (1802), a part of Napoleon’s attempt to
reassert control over Haiti. France won the b attle but, with its troops devastated by
disease, soon gave up the campaign. (Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy)
The developments in Haiti happened in tandem with events occurring across

the Atlantic. In 1789, at the onset of the French Revolution, the Bastille, in Paris, was
stormed and the French National Assembly produced the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of the Citizen, espousing tenets of freedom and equal rights. The
events transpiring in France w ere closely followed in the French colonies, where
colonists and colonial officials w ere wary of slave reactions to t hese developments,
even as colonists capitalized on the occurrences to exercise greater autonomy from
France.
On the eve of the Haitian Revolution, the enslaved population in Saint-Domingue
was a staggering 500,000, while the island hosted approximately 30,000 gens de
couleur (free p
eople of color), and a similar number of white colonists (Popkin 2012,
2, 24; Geggus 2014, xii). In contrast to the United States, historians estimate that
between one-third to one-half of the enslaved p eople in France’s colonies in the
Car ibbean had been born in Africa (Geggus 2014, 113), and the survival rate for
an enslaved person in Haiti was on average no more than 10 years (Popkin 2012,
16), a testament to both the brutality and the slave-replacement model of the French
colony.
Despite a series of earlier insurrections, the event largely heralded as the begin-
ning of the Haitian Revolution occurred on August 16, 1791, when enslaved people
set fire to a plantation building in the north of the colony. This event was report-
edly preceded and inspired in part by a Vodou ceremony held at Bwa Kayiman,
HAITIAN R E V OLUTION 285
where early leaders of the insurrection plotted to overthrow the French. While elite
slaves born in the colony, and positioned in domestic roles, had planned the initial
insurrection, much of the fighting would take place at the hands of African-born
slaves who toiled in plantation fields.
From August 22 to 23, 1791, groups of enslaved p eople attacked multiple plan-
tations throughout the north. Two weeks a fter the initial fire, tens-of-thousands of
enslaved people became involved, laying siege to Cap-Français, the capital of the
colony. Toward the end of October 1791, slave rebels occupied the northeastern
area of the country near the bordering Santo Domingo.
The principal leader of the initial insurrectionary movement was Toussaint
L’Ouverture, a former slave who, once freed, became a relatively successful slave
and plantation owner. L’Ouverture is a complicated historical figure who shifted
allegiances throughout the period. At the opening of the insurrection, a fter he
helped his own former master to safety, he aligned with Spain against the French.
By early 1792, French troops arrived, with more arriving in September, though
they w ere largely ineffective in quelling the rebellion in the north of the colony. In
April 1792, France allotted citizenship to the gens de couleur, who in turn collabo-
rated with the French to quell some of the revolt. In September 1792, the French
monarchy in France was replaced by a republic, and a new law on racial equality
was grudgingly accepted by colonists of Saint-Domingue, and enforced by French
newly-arrived commisars (commissioner), most-notably Léger-Félicité Sonthonax.
In February 1793, war in Europe put France on the defensive in a manner favor-
able to the insurrection. Toussaint L’Ouverture pushed south to take the impor
tant seaport city of Gonaïves in 1793, around the same time that British forces began
a five-year occupation in areas of the south and west of the colony, and Spain
attacked from Santo Domingo, the eastern portion of the island of Hispaniola, now
the Dominican Republic. Outnumbered by multiple enemies, French commissioner
Sonthonax abolished slavery, though with major restrictions to freedom, through-
out portions of the colony in late 1793, ostensibly to enlist formerly enslaved people
as allies against the Spanish and English.
On February 4, 1794, France’s decree of emancipation freed slaves in all French
colonies and made them citizens. Only then did L’Ouverture shift his alliances to
support the former colonial power, helping France fight Spain. The following year,
Spain made peace with France, withdrew from the island, and ceded the neigh-
boring and similarly named colony of Santo Domingo to France, uniting the entire
island u nder French rule.
L’Ouverture kept a close relationship with Étienne Laveaux, the French gover-
nor of the newly expanded colony. In March 1796, L’ Ouverture foiled an attempted
coup against Laveaux at the hands of the gens de couleur, and was subsequently
appointed deputy- governor of the colony. In May 1797, Sonthonax named
L’Ouverture commander-in-chief of the colonial army, although three months later,
L’Ouverture would expel Sonthonax. This development improved L’Ouverture’s
relationship with Rigaud, leader of the gens de couleur in the south, permitting both
men to work together to expel the British. The French government sent General
Théodore Hédouville in early 1798, but shut out of negotiations between Toussaint
and the British, he turned to bring Rigaud in line with French interests, as an
286 HAITIAN R E V OLUTION
attempted counterbalance to L’Ouverture’s power. In May 1798, the British began

their withdrawal and by late 1798 L’Ouverture controlled northern and central
areas of Saint-Domingue.
The short-lived War of the South began in June 1799, and saw L’Ouverture defeat
André Rigaud, leader of the gens de couleur, in August 1800. With the defeat of
Rigaud, the entire colony of Saint-Domingue was under L’Ouverture’s control.
Despite uniting and freeing all enslaved people in the entire former French colony,
L’Ouverture remained committed to the plantation model of agriculture, including
the forced labor system, ostensibly b ecause taxes on export crops w ere one of the
only ways to effectively run his army and maintain the administrative apparatus.
General Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in France in late 1799, and viewed
Saint-Domingue as crucial to maintaining the country’s national interests, retain-
ing political stability, and social order. Initially he appeared to be willing to work
with L’Ouverture, until early 1801. In 1801, L’Ouverture invaded and occupied the
neighboring former colony of Santo Domingo to the east, imprisoned France’s rep-
resentative, and put forth a new constitution that declared him governor-for-life of
the entire island.
From 1802 to 1803, Napoleon began several unsuccessful attempts at reinstat-
ing the colonial apparatus in Saint-Domingue. Napoleon sent his brother-in-law,
Victoire Leclerc, to Saint-Domingue, where he landed in early February 1802. Many
generals and most of the population offered virtually no resistance to this force,
leaving revolutionary leaders like L’Ouverture, and newly emerging leaders like
Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to fight Napoleon’s troops on their
own.
L’Ouverture surrendered in May of 1802, and in June of that same year he was
deported to France, where was imprisoned and died of pneumonia the following
year. Meanwhile, Dessalines and Christophe collaborated with Leclerc to squash
pockets of resistance. That same summer, with resistance to the occupying force
building, fever struck Leclerc’s army, and by October both generals broke with
Leclerc. A sense of racial solidarity saw Alexandre Pétion, successor to Rigaud,
accepting Dessalines as commander-in-chief and leader against the efforts of the
French. Dessalines, infamous for his battle cry of koupe tèt, boule kay (cut their heads,
burn their h ouses), saw the elimination of thousands of French troops. Dessalines
pushed back Leclerc’s forces until, weakened by fever, they left the colony in Novem-
ber 1803. When Napoleon was defeated in 1803, France was obliged to sell many
of its claimed territory in North America to recoup funds lost in the attempts to
retake the former colony.
General Jean-Jacques Dessalines issued the proclamation of independence in the
city of Gonaïves on January 1, 1804. Dessalines chose the Taíno (Arawak indigenous
people of the Car ibbean) word Ayiti (Haiti) as the name of the new state. Dessa-
lines declared himself Governor-General-for-life, and, shortly afterwards, Emperor
of Haiti. Upon establishing the Republic of Haiti, Dessalines exterminated most of
the remaining white French colonists. Like L’Ouverture before him, Dessalines
relied on forced agrarian labor in the vein of the colonial plantation model to sup-
port his empire.
HA K LUYT, R I C HA R D 287
Haiti had emerged from some 13 years of conflict as the first independent black
republic in the world, and the second independent country in the Americas. Toward
the end of 1806, the area that delineates modern-day Haiti was split into two rival-
ing states that continued to battle each other u ntil 1820. France failed to recog-
nized Haitian independence until 1825, at the barrel of French gunships, and on
the demand of a paralyzing war indemnity that would cripple the Haitian econ-
omy for years to come. An official concordant with the Catholic Church was not
established u ntil 1860, and the United States failed to recognize the new republic
until 1862.
Andrew Tarter
See also: Coffee; French Revolution; Gens de Couleur; L’Ouverture, Toussaint;

Maroons; Napoleon I; Slave Rebellion; Slavery; Sugar; Vodou
Further Reading
Geggus, David. 2002. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2002.
Geggus, David. 2014. The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Hack-
ett Publishing.
Popkin, Jeremy. 2012. A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution. New York: John Wiley &
Sons.
H A K L U Y T, R I C H A R D ( c a . 1 5 5 2 – 1 6 1 6 )
Richard Hakluyt was an English priest, ambassador, and author, and is most nota-
ble for advocating English colonialism overseas. At a time when England watched
as its European rivals colonized the New World, Hakluyt argued in f avor of a more
expansive overseas presence for England. In a series of books written in the 1580s,
he promoted colonization as bringing benefits to the English economy while
enhancing English power and spreading Protestantism abroad. Although he never
visited the New World, he became one of the most effective English spokesmen
for building colonies in America.
During the sixteenth c entury, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and even France
had all diverted significant resources to imperial ventures in both Africa and the
New World. By comparison, E ngland was insular and seemingly uninterested in
territorial expansion. Except from some involvement in the fishing industry in the
North Sea, and the occasional privateering expedition, the English had watched
as other European nations grew wealthy from trading with, and sometimes plun-
dering, the indigenous cultures of the Atlantic world. Scholars have traditionally
credited Hakluyt’s literary works with pushing the English monarchy toward
colonialism.
Apart from his writings, scholars know very l ittle about Hakluyt personally. He
came from an upper-middle-class family of Welsh ancestry and was educated at
Westminster School and Christ Church at the University of Oxford, where he
showed interest in the study of geography, which likely spurred his curiosity with
288 HA K LUYT, R I C HA R D
the New World. After becoming a priest in 1578, Hakluyt spent several years in
Paris as a chaplain for part of a diplomatic contingent that served the English
Ambassador to France. During his time in Paris and subsequent return to England,
Hakluyt was most productive as an author, with his most famous monographs all
published during the 1580s, including Divers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of
America (1582), A Discourse Concerning the Western Planting (1584), and The Princi-
pall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). Collectively, t hese
works advanced Hakluyt’s vision of an imperial E ngland, which would spread Prot-
estantism overseas and improve living conditions for all Englishmen.
Since he had never actually been to the New World, Hakluyt was something of
a collector of published accounts from t hose who had been on expeditions t here.
In this regard, his academic knowledge of Atlantic geography and ethnography was
likely unparalleled. They also reveal that he was an excellent editor, and somewhat
of a propagandist as Hakluyt almost universally emphasized the positive attributes
of colonialism, while leaving out the more ugly and violent aspects which would
have dissuaded readers.
Hakluyt’s writings expressed colonization as an imperative for both the English
nation and Protestantism generally. According to Hakluyt, the spread to the New
World of Catholic powers such as France, Spain, and Portugal meant that Protes-
tant Christianity was losing ground among the indigenous peoples of the Ameri
cas. Subsequently, Hakluyt often painted the necessity of colonization in religious
terms. In the sixteenth c entury, E ngland was considered overpopulated, with a
rural population that was displaced from the fencing off of lands due to the increased
value of wool, which historians have dubbed the “enclosure movement.” As the
population increased, urban areas began to crowd, and poverty became increasingly
prevalent. Hakluyt’s writings suggested that overseas expansion and settlement would
ease many of E ngland’s social and economic woes. It would provide opportunities
for the downtrodden to be employed when they could not at home. It would also alle-
viate crime in urban areas, because those who would be most likely to commit
offenses would instead have the opportunity to work abroad. Finally, Hakluyt
even suggested that convicted felons could be used as bonded laborers to help
build colonies in the New World. Not only would this rid England of criminals, he
argued, but it would be an excellent way to enact penal reform and extend mercy in
a time when capital punishment was being used for even minor offenses.
Hakluyt Society
In 1846, a group of London gentleman scholars founded the Hakluyt Society
to publish, in the spirit of their seventeenth-century namesake, narratives of
voyages, travels, and explorations. Their publications have included works
by Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ferdinand Magellan, and Sir
Francis Drake. The organization continues its work today. More on the his-
tory of the Society and listings of upcoming publications and events can be
found on the society’s website (www.hakluyt.com).
HA R D W OOD 289
Hakluyt also emphasized that the varied climates of the New World w ere ideal
for growing commodities that could not be produced at home, such as silk, olives,
and timber for the masts of ships. In Hakluyt’s telling, the list of items that could
be cultivated across the Atlantic was essentially endless, and by creating settlements
overseas, England could guarantee access to these commodities at reduced prices.
Finally, Hakluyt saw the native peoples of the New World as a potential new mar-
ket for goods produced in E ngland. Thus, the economic advantages of expansion
were readily apparent to Hakluyt, who simply had to point to the wealth amassed
by the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies which had already accomplished all of
these feats. The longer the English waited, Hakluyt warned, the more insular the
nation would become compared to those that took the risks to colonize the New
World.
His efforts to convince the English monarchy and the English p eople of the
importance of colonization proved successful, even with the failures of the Roa-
noke Colony and the difficulties encountered in early V irginia. In the face of set-
backs, Hakluyt continued to emphasize the need to build settlements across the
Atlantic world. His continued interest in Virginia was evidenced by his inclusion
of Theodor de Bry and Thomas Harriot’s report on the early Roanoke colony, in
his Principall Navigations, but more importantly in his involvement as an investor
in the V irginia Company itself. Ultimately, Hakluyt did not live long enough to
see a financial return on his investment; V irginia blossomed only a fter the intro-
duction of tobacco decades later.
Scott Craig
See also: British Atlantic; Jamestown; Raleigh, Sir Walter
Further Reading
Carey, Daniel, and Claire Jowitt, eds. 2012. Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Mod-
ern Europe. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing.
Mancall, Peter C. 2007. Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America.
Payne, Anthony. 2008. Richard Hakluyt: A Guide to His Books and to Those Associated with
Him, 1580–1625. London: Bernard Quaritch.
HARDWOOD
Hardwoods from the Caribbean, particularly mahogany and logwood, w ere impor
tant commodities in the system of Atlantic trade between the sixteenth and the
nineteenth centuries. Furniture makers throughout Europe valued mahogany for
its sturdiness, smoothness, and rich colors; they sold the highly-valued finished
products throughout the continent and the Americas. Textile producers used log-
wood to create deep red and purple dyes for the finest fabrics. The bulk of the logwood
trade (ca. 1640–1760) preceded most of the mahogany trade (ca. 1720–1820).
Each type of wood had to be harvested, purchased, shipped, sold, and processed
in a chain of events involving p
eople of many occupations and from e very conti-
nent in the Atlantic basin. Due to their economic significance, hardwoods also
290 HA R D W OOD
became the focus of violence between competing empires. Logwood was replaced
by easier-to-obtain d ying ingredients in the eighteenth century, and today t here is
very little trade in the wood. Mahogany was harvested almost to extinction in the
early twentieth c entury, leading European and American producers to substitute
materials from which to make high-quality furniture. Cutting mahogany is pro-
hibited or heavily regulated throughout much of the world today.
Logwood (Haematoxylon Campechianum) is a species of hardwood that grows in
swampy or flooded areas on most Caribbean islands, the coast of Mexico and north-
ern Central America. During the mid-to-late seventeenth c entury, the height of
the Atlantic trade of the product, logwood was most commonly harvested on the
Yucatan peninsula, especially the Bay of Campeche and the Bay of Honduras in
what is now Belize. Throughout the middle of the eighteenth century, when the
trade diminished, most logwood cutters w ere British servants, and a few enslaved
Africans and Native Americans. Many had been pirates or privateers operating from
the nearby British colony of Jamaica, who transitioned to wood cutting when the
Jamaican government curtailed their other activities.
In Campeche and Belize, these “Baymen” operated in gangs and lived in pavil-
ions along riverbanks, eating the local fauna and drinking rum and wine traded from
Caribbean merchant ships. Merchants and captains from Jamaica, New England,
and Amsterdam controlled the logwood trade, purchasing logs from the cutters
directly and reselling them to European manufacturers. At the height of the trade
in the 1660s, one ton of logwood could be bought from cutters in Campeche for
approximately pounds sterling and sold in London for over 100 pounds (Campbell
2011, 106). The European price declined sharply to about 5 pounds by the 1770s,
owing to a glut of Spanish-cut wood in the world market. The price never recov-
ered since dye-makers began to transition to synthetic processes.
Two species of mahogany w ere traded throughout the Atlantic world: “West
Indian” (Swietenia mahagoni), found primarily on Jamaica and other northern Carib
bean islands, as well as Florida’s southern tip; and “Honduran” (Swietenia macro-
phylla), native to the coast of the Bay of Honduras (present-day Belize and the
Mosquito Coast) and southward into the Amazon. The trees of both species grew
to about 100 feet tall singly or in small stands intermixed with other trees in tropi-
cal rainforests covering thousands of acres. Jamaican sugar planters, who in the
early eighteenth century w ere eagerly clearing land on the island for plantations,
Pirate Loggers
fter being dislodged from Jamaica, many buccaneers took up logwood cut-
A
ting near the Bay of Campeche and the Bay of Honduras, apparently attracted
by the woodcutters’ rough, independent lifestyle. As one observer wrote,
“The wood cutters are generally a rude drunken crew, some of which have
been pirates, most of them sailors. Their chief delight is in drinking” (Earle
2003, 97).
HA R D W OOD 291
discovered the trees and their properties and began selling them to English furni-
ture makers. Since these trees were not replaced (sugar was ultimately more prof-
itable), supplies of West Indian mahogany w ere nearly depleted by the late eighteenth
century, with a single mammoth tree reputedly selling for 500 pounds in 1774
(Anderson 2012, 86). Merchants then turned to purchasing the less-desirable Hon-
duran species, allowing the Belizean Baymen to transition from cutting the now
unprofitable logwood to harvesting mahogany. Conditions in Belize had changed
since the early logwood days: most mahogany harvesters in the late eighteenth
century w ere enslaved Africans. They completed wet and demanding work, for
which they w ere paid l ittle or nothing, though they often experienced better treat-
ment from masters than in other Atlantic world settings.
Due to the economic significance of logwood and mahogany in the Atlantic
world, the right to cut and trade the wood was contested between the European
empires colonizing the Americas, most frequently G reat Britain and Spain. The
Spanish Empire had claimed nearly all of the Americas after Columbus’s voyages,
but could not control such vast territory. British wood cutters, moreover, w ere
encamped in parts of the Yucatan since at least the early seventeenth c entury,
threatening the Spanish claim to dominion. Violence against British logwood trad-
ers erupted in Car ibbean w aters in the 1670s and against logwood cutters on the
Bay of Campeche in the 1680s. The right to cut and trade logwood also led to
Anglo-Spanish warfare throughout the early eighteenth century. Treaties between
the empires in 1670, 1763, and 1783 addressed the question of control of the log-
wood settlements in the Yucatan, but a fter the treaties, British cutters continued
to move into Spanish territory and the Spanish continued to harass British settle-
ments. In 1862, British Honduras (now Belize) officially became the only British
colony on the Central American mainland, due to the centuries-long presence of
logwood and mahogany cutters t here.
Other American hardwoods, most prominently brazilwood, were used in Euro
pean industries, but logwood and mahogany had larger economic impacts. Brazil-
wood or pernambuco (Caesalpinia echinata) is found in Brazil and, since 1500, was
used for d
ying textiles. Although brazilwood is endangered t oday, musicians believe
the tree to contain the best wood for constructing high-quality bows for playing
stringed instruments.
John A. Coakley
See also: Jamaica; Piracy
Further Reading
Anderson, Jennifer L. 2012. Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America. Cambridge,
Campbell, Mavis. 2011. Becoming Belize: A History of an Outpost of Empire Searching for Iden-
tity, 1528–1823. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press.
Earle, Peter. 2003. The Pirate Wars. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.
Rymer, Russ. “Saving the M usic Tree,” Smithsonian Magazine. April 2004. http://w ww
.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/saving-the-music-tree-101375575/ ?no-ist.
292 HIDAL G O , M I G UEL
HIDALGO, MIGUEL (1753–1811)

Miguel Hidalgo was a main leader during the war that led to the end of three cen-
turies of Spanish rule over New Spain, the Spanish Viceroyalty that included the
territory now known as Mexico. A Catholic priest, Hidalgo initiated the very first
insurrection of the Mexican war of independence against early-nineteenth-century
Spain on the night of September 15, 1810, hence turning into “the father of the
nation.” Hidalgo became an early critic of the social structure that prevailed in the
Viceroyalty of New Spain, an extremely hierarchical society where the best oppor-
tunities and access to power w ere determined by race. European-born Spanish
enjoyed privileges, such as access to high-ranking administrative, military, and gov-
ernment jobs, that were denied to creoles (people of Spanish origin but born in
the colony), who never gained access to upper-level political decision making.
Creole discontent was one of the main c auses of the Mexican war of indepen
dence, but Hidalgo went further in opposing hierarchy by also supporting the
abolition of slavery. His diplomatic abilities and interactions with p eople of dif
ferent social origins allowed him to conspire with upper-class Creoles against
the Spanish Crown and to mobi-
lize indigenous inhabitants or
lower-class groups as improvised
armies.
A Creole himself, Miguel
Hidalgo was born in Guanajuato.
After his mother’s death, Hidalgo
moved to Morelia, where he
obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree
in Latin Literature. He learned
seven languages, such as French
and Italian, as well as the main
indigenous languages of the
region. Following his graduation
he stayed on at his college, becom-
ing professor, trea surer, and
dean.
In 1779, he was ordained a
priest. About a dec ade later he
faced the Holy Office of the
Inquisition for living a licentious
lifestyle, questioning the princi
ples of the Catholic Church, and
A nineteenth-century lithograph of F ather Miguel
reading banned literature such
Hidalgo, whose 1810 “Grito de Dolores” sparked as the works of French Enlight-
the uprising against Spanish rule in Mexico. He enment authors. According to
is shown with the Virgin of Guadalupe, a potent the holy plaintiffs, Hidalgo had
icon for the revolutionaries, in the background. expressed ideas that favored the
(Library of Congress) French conception of freedom
HIDAL G O , M I G UEL 293
and considered the monarchy a despotic regime. Hidalgo was acquitted of the
charges in 1801.
The international balance of power changed in 1808, when French troops
invaded Spain and obliged the king to step down. That same year, Hidalgo met Igna-
cio Allende, Josefa Ortíz, and Miguel Domínguez, who together agreed that, to
impede the French possession of New Spain, it was necessary to declare the sover-
eignty of the territory, at least u ntil the king of Spain was back in power. Eventu-
ally, this idea would lead to independence from European control. Hidalgo, his
new partners, and a handful of others organized the Queretaro Conspiracy, a clan-
destine movement congregated in a central city that planned the insurrection
against local authorities loyal to Spain. When the plot was discovered, Allende
and Hidalgo decided to start the uprising ahead of time, on the night of Septem-
ber 15, 1810. What followed is popularly known as the “Grito de Dolores” (the cry
of Dolores). A fter midnight, Hidalgo rang the bells of his parish church, in Dolo-
res; gathering the inhabitants, he convinced them to join the movement against
imperial control. Immediately afterwards, Miguel Hidalgo took an image of the
Virgin of Guadalupe, fixed it to a lance, and used it as a banner. It was the first flag
of the insurrection. Some scholars believed that by d oing this, Hidalgo wanted to
show that his movement was not heretical but was faithful to the church.
Hidalgo, Allende, and the rebel army advanced to the capital of the Province of
Guanajuato, where they achieved their first important victory. Both leaders were
praised as captain and lieutenant-general by their followers.
On September 28, 1810, Hidalgo led the siege of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas
in Guanajuato. The Spaniards locked themselves and their possessions in one of
the strongest buildings of the city, an enormous granary. After several hours, more
than 20,000 rebels occupied the city after setting fire to the building’s door, which
allowed them to break in. Once inside, the rebels murdered the military men as
well as the families that had sought refuge there, taking their belongings to fund
their b attles. Some historians maintain that the episode at the Alhóndiga should
rather be considered as a riot or a massacre, since most p eople inside the building
were unarmed civilians. After the occupation, Hidalgo’s army won several confron-
tations with the viceroyal army, taking important cities as they advanced to Mex-
ico’s capital. T hose b
attles, though, left behind thousands of dead and damage
wrought by looting. Spaniards fled some of the most valued cities to avoid the fate
of their fellow citizens when rebels gained their terrain. For reasons still debated,
Hidalgo decided to withdraw the army, halting the advance to Mexico City. As a
consequence, Allende and Hidalgo followed different strategies and, eventually,
went separate ways.
After suffering several defeats, most importantly the Battle of Puente de Calde-
rón, Hidalgo was captured by the authorities. Due to his ecclesiastical position,
Hidalgo faced both a military and a religious trial. He was found guilty of high
treason and the jury confirmed his death sentence. For its part, the Catholic author-
ities decided to excommunicate him. He was executed by firing squad on July 30,
1811. However, he received absolution from a priest, and received the last rites of the
Catholic Church, including the communion rite. Immediately a fter his execution,
294 HU G UENOTS
his body was decapitated. His head, along with the heads of three other rebel
leaders (Allende, Aldama and Jiménez), was sent to Guanajuato. The heads were
put inside iron cages and hung at the corners of the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, where
the insurgents had won their most important victory months before. A fter the con-
summation of the wars of independence in 1821, Hidalgo’s body was exhumed
and his remains brought together to rest at Mexico’s City Metropolitan Cathedral.
In 1823, the Sovereign Mexican Congress hailed him as “the f ather of the nation.”
Since 1923, his remains rest at the Independence Angel, a monument located in
downtown Mexico City.
Pamela J. Fuentes
See also: Age of Revolution; Enlightenment; Latin American Wars of Independence
Further Reading
Henderson, Timothy J. 2009. The Mexican Wars of Independence. New York: Hill and Wang.
HUGUENOTS
The Huguenots were French-speaking Protestants inspired by the teachings of John
Calvin. “Calvinists,” as they w ere called, w
ere part of an overall separatist move-
ment seeking spiritual enrichment outside the orthodox tenets set forth by the
Catholic Church. Comprising less than 5 percent of the French population, the
Huguenots were forced to migrate to several points outside of France due to
increased social, political, and religious condemnation. A total of 200,000 Hugue-
nots migrated throughout Continental Europe and the Atlantic world looking for
religious and political asylum. The Huguenot diaspora was set into motion by the
religious wars engulfing Central and Western Europe during the sixteenth c entury.
Among these emigres w ere thousands of men and w omen who w ere previous mem-
bers of the French workforce. Armed with experience and training in mercantilism
and other economic foundations of the period, the Huguenots entered the world
markets outside of France—particularly in Germany, Holland, E ngland, and
America.
Huguenot migration from France began with legislation put in place to end reli-
gious persecution. The Edict of Nantes, originally signed by King Henry IV in
1598, acted as a double-edged sword for Calvinists. While granting the Hugue-
nots several degrees of civil rights in France, the Edict simultaneously solidified
the Roman Catholic Church throughout Henry’s kingdom, even in previously Prot-
estant controlled areas. Beyond reestablishing Catholic strongholds in formerly
Protestant regions, the Edict limited where the Huguenots could preach and prac-
tice their religion. A Huguenot himself, Henry had difficulty enforcing any legisla-
tion that could alienate either French Protestants or Catholics, since he hoped to
avoid deepening the Christian schism with legislation favoring either group. As
HU G UENOTS 295
such, at least temporarily, Huguenots w ere no longer in fear of being labeled heretics
for dissenting from the teaching of the Catholic Church and had the right to pur-
sue a modicum of religious privilege. Greater still was the ability for all Huguenots
to seek employment in any desired field in France.
On October 17, 1685, the parlement of Paris, acting on Louis XIV’s behalf, reg-
istered the Edict of Fontainebleau revoking the Edict of Nantes. It declared the pub-
lic profession of Calvinist Protestantism illegal in France. Louis, looking to silence
court critics questioning his ties to the Catholic faith, used his political power to
deny any notions of a coexistence of two religions in France. The Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes came at the zenith of a Catholic resurgence during the French
Counter-Reformation. No longer in fear of plunging France back into an era of reli-
gious wars, Louis hoped to reintegrate the Huguenots back into the Catholic
fold, peacefully if possible. However, Louis underestimated the extent to which
Protestantism in France had grown since the Edict of Nantes was issued. To quell
further Protestant progress, Louis ordered the destruction of all newly constructed
Huguenot churches.
Between 1663 and 1665, almost half of the existing Huguenot churches in France
were razed. Louis punctuated his assault on French Protestants by banning Hugue-
nots from entering several vocations, particularly the practice of law. Louis’ all-out
assault on Protestantism, culminating with the massacre of over 5,000 Huguenots
during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, led to a period of Huguenots migra-
tion away from France.
The Huguenots first emigrated to neighboring countries in Europe that w ere
sympathetic to the Protestant movement, particularly Germany, Switzerland, the
Netherlands, and England. In Holland, local communities, especially merchants
in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague, who came into direct contact with
Huguenot refugees, felt the immediate impact of the transmission of funds from
France to the Huguenot migrants. In Rotterdam alone, 100,000 Francs in silver
entered the market just one month a fter the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. It
is estimated that on average, 300 Huguenots refugees a month w ere entering Hol-
land, most being funded by friends and loved ones back in France. The easy flow
of money broadened Protestant migration to points outside of France. Ship a fter
ship filled with Huguenot refugees left French ports virtually unmolested. Unwill-
ing to see potential revenue leave the country, French subjects were no longer
allowed to leave the country without express permission.
Fearing royal reprisals, many Huguenots chose to migrate outside of Europe to
North America. More than 2,000 Huguenots had entered North America by the
end of the seventeenth c entury. A majority settled in Boston, and Charleston, South
Carolina, after failed attempts to settle in north Florida. Boston and Charleston were
significantly impacted by Protestant emigres. As Huguenot migration to North
America exceeded 4,000 by the mid eighteenth century, Charleston became a favorite
point of settlement. T here w
ere a total of eight Huguenot settlements in South Caro-
lina. Six of t hese settlements w ere in and around Charleston. Finding South Car-
olinians to be religiously sympathetic, and where generosity abounded, the Carolina
296 HU M B OLDT, ALE X ANDE R V ON
Huguenots quickly immersed themselves in the Charleston economy. The major-

ity working as merchants and tradesmen on or near the Ashley River, while many
others took to agricultural endeavors.
While South Carolina proved to be a safe, productive haven for the Huguenots,
New England became known as the capital of New World Protestantism. In Bos-
ton, Huguenot emigrants were welcomed by Puritan ministers seeking to reignite
Christian fervor in a region where religious vigor was seen as ebbing. Boston being
a major port offered a myriad of economic opportunities. Many Huguenots made
their way to New E ngland via Old E
ngland, bringing with them commercial con-
nections that would help develop international trading opportunities between
England, America, and throughout the Atlantic world.
Economic prosperity aside, the Huguenots were able to ultimately achieve their
goal of religious separatism from Catholicism. Many Huguenots successfully assim-
ilated into local Protestant churches where they could continue to pursue spiritual
alternatives to the Catholic Church. Others were able to maintain their outright
activism in the Reformed Church of France, albeit on foreign soil, coexisting as
brothers in the same faith.
Richard Byington
See also: French Atlantic; Migration; Protestant Reformation
Further Reading
McKey, Jane. 2013. The Huguenots: France, Exile, and Diaspora. Brighton, UK: Sussex Aca-
demic Press.
Ruymbeke, Bertrand Van, and Randy Sparks, eds. 2003. Memory and Identity: The Hugue-
nots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Treasure, Geoffrey. 2013. The Huguenots. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
H U M B O L D T, A L E X A N D E R V O N ( 1 7 6 9 – 1 8 5 9 )
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt was a German nat-
uralist, geographer, meteorologist, botanist, zoologist, explorer, and polymath. He
considered his main task to understand nature in its integrity and to collect evi-
dences of its components’ interaction. The broad spectrum of his scientific inter-
ests was the reason for his contemporaries to call him the Aristotle of the nineteenth
century. Based on the results of his scientific expeditions, particularly his voyage
to the Americas, he has produced ground breaking work on physical geography,
landscape studies, ecological geography of plants, geomagnetism, speleology, and
climatology. His scientific achievements were broadly recognized in his own time.
He was a full member of the Berlin, Prussian and Bavarian Academies of Sciences
and an honorary member of the Russian Empire’s St. Petersburg Academy of
Sciences.
In 1799, the results of Humboldt’s scientific expedition to Castile, undertaken
with French geographer, botanist, and explorer Aimé Jacques Alexandre Bonpland
(1773–1858), encouraged the king of Spain to allow the men to make a scientific
HU M B OLDT, ALE X ANDE R V ON 297
excursion to Spain’s colonies in

the Americas. Shortly a fter setting
sail, the expedition’s stop at the
Canary Islands bore fruit as Hum-
boldt made his first discovery
when visiting the volcano Teide,
at Tenerife: altitudinal zonation
or the fact that climate and vege-
tation change in accordance with
height above the sea level. The
whole sequence of the geographi
cal zones, from Arctic to tropical,
could be observed when climbing
the mountains.
Humboldt arrived in the Amer
icas in 1799, landing at Cumaná
near Caracas, Venezuela. His
first set of American discoveries
occurred at the nearby Guácharo
cavern, where Humboldt studied
its climate, vegetation, and the
bones of fossil animals, which
were sent to Paris to the paleon- Detail from an 1806 painting of Alexander von
Humboldt by the German artist Friedrich Georg
tologist Georges Cuvier.
Weitsch. He is shown examining a flower, typical
After the season of heavy rains
of his investigations of the flora and fauna of
in February, 1800, the expedi- South America. (Jupiterimages)
tion moved towards the moun-
tain lake of Valencia, and then
further to the Orinoco River, where they started their trip upriver, encountering
caimans, tapirs, peccary (New World pigs), electric eels, and others unknown
species. Humboldt carefully described them in his journal. They also discov-
ered the phenomenon of bifurcation, namely, that the Orinoco and the Ama-
zon, the two largest Southern American rivers, are connected in their headwaters
through the Casiquiare canal. Humboldt mapped the rivers’ connection for the
first time. He also corrected and revised maps of both rivers and their numerous
tributaries.
The expedition traveled back to the Atlantic Ocean under heavy rains, taking
four months, which substantially exhausted their supplies and taxed their health. In
spite of the difficulties, they reached the city of Angostura in Guiana from which
they sent their first collections of minerals, insects, and plants to Spain. Although the
ship wrecked near the African coast, Humboldt and Bonpland had tripled all
samples of their collection, with a second set sent to the Europe by another ship,
and a third preserved in Cuba.
Humboldt’s expedition had barely started its investigations of Cuba when he was
informed that they could join a trip around the world from Lima, Peru. To reach
298 HU M B OLDT, ALE X ANDE R V ON
it, Humboldt selected an overland route along the Cordillera mountain range
through the uninvestigated part of the South American continent.
This passage took 18 months and was the longest and the most difficult itiner-
ary of the Humboldt’s expedition. It was begun with a two-month trek up the Mag-
dalena River, which was mapped for the first time. The expedition members w ere
also the first European explorers of the inner regions of Colombia, Ecuador, and
Peru. They reached the Pacific Ocean and sailed to Mexico. During this passage a
series of fundamental discoveries were made, the most remarkable of which
included the world’s largest deposit of potassium salt, as well as coal deposits, a
mastodons’ cemetery, and a strong cold current then called the Peruvian Current.
L ater it was renamed in the honor of its discoverer and now is known as the Hum-
boldt Current.
In the course of the Southern American expedition, Humboldt determined
geographical latitudes and altitudes of the places visited. He provided detailed
investigation of local climates and geology. Many new mountains were detected,
and he refined descriptions of already known mountains. He collected original
botanical and zoological assemblages: his plant collection consisted of 4,000 spe-
cies, and almost 1,800 of them were defined for the first time. Humboldt also made
notes about local populations, their cultures, subsistence, history, politics, and
languages.
The fundamental scientific results of Humboldt’s South American trip were
impressive. In the course of his detailed studies of volcanoes, Humboldt came to
the conclusion that processes now known as tectonics are the main driving force
in the formation of the physical structure of our planet. Investigating the influence
of the ocean currents on the climate of the dry lands, he made a series of global
conclusions about the formation of the climates of the Earth, suggesting that cli-
mate depends not only on geographical latitude but also on the distribution of sea
and land as well as on the allocation of warm and cold currents in the ocean.
According to Humboldt, atmospheric circulation is an important f actor in climate
formation. Extending his hypothesis about vegetation dependence on climate, he
elaborated backgrounds of botanical geography.
The data collected during Humboldt’s expedition were published in French in
Paris in 30 volumes, published between 1807 and 1833, with rich illustration and
1,425 t ables. Humboldt’s handwritten and illustrated diaries concerning the Amer-
ican voyage w ere kept by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and were
exhibited for the first time in 2014, at the Berlin State Library.
Olena Smyntyna
See also: Cartography; Darwin, Charles; European Exploration

Further Reading
De Terra, Helmut. 1955. The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Rupke, Nicolas A. 2008. Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
HU R ON 299
HURON
The Huron, the French name for the Wendat, w ere a strong confederacy of native
peoples in the early seventeenth century situated in modern southern Ontario,
Canada, with a heavy concentration of villages between Nottawasaga Bay and Lake
Couchiching. Huron is derived from the French word hure (“the head of a boar,
wolf, or bear”), and this name developed as a result of Frenchmen drawing com-
parisons between Huron hairstyles and the fur on a boar’s head. This confederacy
traded with the French thereby increasing their influence in the region, but trade
resulted in increasing Huron dependency on the French and their goods. Further-
more, French missionaries contributed to the introduction of European diseases
into Huron villages and planted the seeds of conflict between those Hurons who
accepted the Catholic faith and t hose who wanted to maintain the spiritual beliefs
of their ancestors. The Hurons w ere also plagued by hostile relations with the Iro-
quois, which grew in intensity in the late 1640s, ultimately leading to the disper-
sal of the Huron population in 1649.
The formation of the Huron Confederacy can be traced back to the ties formu-
lated between the Attignaouantan (“People of the Bear”) and the Attingneenongna-
bac (“People of the Cord”) tribes. The Hurons believed that t hese ties w ere formed
in the early fifteenth c entury, if not earlier. The Arendaronnon (“People of the Rock”)
and Tahontaenrat (“People of the Deer”) later entered into an arrangement with these
two tribes, around 1590 and between 1610 and 1620 respectively, to form the con-
federacy that most French explorers and missionaries w ere familiar with in the
first half of the seventeenth century. Jesuit accounts in 1640 noted the presence of
a fifth tribe called Ataronchronon (“People of the Marshes”), but this tribe’s relation-
ship to the confederacy has been a topic of speculation among historians. Of the
five tribes listed above, the Attignaouantan was the most influential in the confed-
eracy. The size of Huronia has been a topic of discussion, with Samuel De Champlain
estimating its size to have been far larger than modern assessments. Likewise, French
explorers and missionaries estimated a larger population of Hurons than mod-
ern researchers believe is warranted.
The Huron system of governance was multilayered with councils held to achieve
intra and intertribal stability. The village councils tended to govern more effi-
ciently since it was easier to achieve a consensus among a smaller population liv-
ing within close proximity in the longhouses, particularly if the village had a
well-respected civil chief. Furthermore, festivals and feasts were held to bring
different villages together on an intratribal and intertribal level. One such festival
made popular to European audiences by French accounts was the Feast of the
Dead, which occurred every 8 to 12 years. Aside from the spiritual function of
this ceremony, the Feast of the Dead also held a social function as it brought
people from different villages together. Furthermore, tribal chiefs met together to
solidify tribal relations within the confederacy and to discuss external threats.
Agreement among all parties was the ideal but it was not compulsory for anyone
to abide by these decisions. This inability to enforce decisions on all of the tribes
and villages of the confederacy was one of the reasons for the dispersal of the
Hurons in 1649. The Hurons could neither overcome the factionalism caused by
300 HU R ON
some members’ acceptance of Jesuit teachings nor meet the challenge posed by
the Iroquois in the 1640s.
Although first contact between the French and the Hurons occurred with Cham-
plain’s meeting in 1609 with Ochasteguin, a member of the Arendarhonon, trade
took some time to develop between these two cultures. Precontact, Huron trade
was primarily directed away from French settlements on the St. Lawrence River.
Moreover, the Hurons would have to travel through the territory of other tribes to
reach French trading posts along the St. Lawrence River, which required consent.
Champlain arrived in Huronia via the Ottawa and French Rivers to Georgian Bay
in 1615, aiming to form stronger trading relations between the French and the
Hurons and was relatively successful in this task. French goods allowed the Hurons
to perform daily tasks more efficiently. They also enhanced the Hurons’ position
in the region as they traded t hese goods with neighboring tribes. Nevertheless,
French restrictions on trade with the Hurons affected their ability to fend off Iro-
quois aggression in the 1640s. Unlike the Dutch, who supplied the Iroquois with
guns, the French limited the Hurons’ access to weapons to primarily those who
converted to Catholicism.
Huron acceptance of French relations and trade also entailed the Hurons assent-
ing to the presence of French missionaries operating in Huronia. The objective
of t hese missionaries was not only directed at tending to the souls of the French
in Huronia, but also to preaching to the Hurons with the goal being their con-
version. The Recollects and Jesuits operated in Huronia in the 1620s, although
French activity in Huronia was interrupted by English control of Quebec from
1629 to 1632. Although the French returned to Quebec, the Hurons delayed
the reintroduction of the Jesuits into their territory, suggesting some Huron reluc-
tance to accept the missionaries. Nevertheless, Champlain was adamant that their
presence was required for continued formal relationships, leading to a return of
the Jesuits in 1634 against the wishes of some Hurons. The Hurons had diverse
attitudes regarding the Jesuits as they e ither chose to accept Jesuit teaching and
convert or reject these teachings and maintain their traditional forms of spiritu-
ality. The Jesuits had the most success among the Attignaouantan. Furthermore,
Huron Christians and those who put on a façade of being Christian received better
prices for their merchandise than those who followed their traditional spiritual
beliefs, so it is not surprising that many Hurons who engaged in the fur trade
professed to being Christian. Although historians believe that only a small number
of the Hurons converted to the Catholic faith by 1648, the presence of t hese con-
verts in Huronia had social and political consequences, and many w ere marginal-
ized or persecuted. Furthermore, those Hurons who converted refused to participate
in social, military and spiritual aspects of Huron life, creating divisions within
Huron society.
The hostile attitude that some Hurons held toward the Jesuits were partially
predicated on the threat that they perceived from the priests as diseases struck
the confederacy, contributing to social problems among the Hurons. The earliest
known epidemic to occur in Huronia was in 1634, and the introduction of new
diseases resulted in drastic demographic consequences for the Hurons as their
HU R ON 301
population collapsed by the early-to-mid-1640s. Many Hurons believed the Jesu-

its practiced witchcraft or were the sources of these diseases, and sought to oust
them from their territory by threatening the Jesuits, persecuting converts and
murdering the Frenchman Jacques Douart in 1648. Traditionalists sought to pre-
serve the confederacy and their culture by proposing the ejection of the Jesuits
from Huronia and making peace with the Iroquois, but the Huron confederacy
was divided on these two issues which limited its ability to act. Some Hurons
became concerned that a break with the French would have detrimental effects on
their society as they felt the continued acquisition of French goods; particularly
metal utilitarian goods, a necessity in the late 1640s.
In the 1640s, the Iroquois lands w ere becoming depleted of beaver furs leading
the Iroquois to take steps to ensure their access to Huron furs so that they could
continue their trade with the Dutch. The Iroquois attacked Huron trading parties
to steal their furs, thereby limiting the Hurons from conducting a steady trade with
the French, particularly in 1642 and 1644. Although a peace was established
between the French and the Mohawks in 1645, it was relatively short-lived and
the Iroquois launched attacks against a c ouple of Huron villages, including St. Joseph
in 1648. Further Iroquois aggression the following year compelled the Hurons to
destroy 15 of their own villages. French missionaries were also not immune to Iro-
quoian aggression as a number of Jesuits, including Gabriel Lalemant and Jean de
Brébeuf, fell into Iroquois hands and w ere killed. T
hese events resulted in a greater
number of Hurons accepting the Catholic faith as they sought French protection,
some fleeing to the French missionary settlement of Ste. Marie.
The Jesuits began to construct another missionary base called Ste. Marie II, but
limited food supplies and the winter took its toll on the Hurons, resulting in thou-
sands of deaths. This site was abandoned by 1651, and several hundred Hurons
traveled east to set up a Huron community near Quebec City becoming the Huron
of Lorette (currently known as Huron-Wendat of Wendake). Not all of the Hurons
fled to the French for sanctuary as other alternatives existed. Many Hurons from
the Arendarhonon and Tahontaenrat sought entry into the Iroquois tribes, and it is
believed that the Tahontaenrat were able to maintain their distinct cultural traits
for some length of time. Other Hurons traveled westward eventually settling in
Michigan and Ohio u ntil they w
ere relocated to Oklahoma and Kansas in the nine-
teenth century. This last group adopted the name Wyandot (Wendat), and took
pride in the fact their culture was not destroyed by assimilation into the larger body
of American culture.
Brian de Ruiter
See also: Brébeuf, St. Jean de; Champlain, Samuel de; Disease; Fur Trade; Huron-
Wendat Feast of the Dead; Iroquois; Jesuits; New France
Further Reading
Dickason, Olive Patricia. 2006. “Huron, Five Nations, and Europeans.” A Concise History
of Canada’s First Nations. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 59–79.
302 HU R ON - W
ENDAT FEAST OF THE DEAD
McMillan, Alan, and Eldon Yellowhorn. 2004. “The Huron and Petun.” First P eoples in Can-
ada. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 77–86.
Trigger, Bruce. 2007. “The French Presence in Huronia: The Structure of Franco-Huron
Relations in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century.” Readings in Canadian His-
tory: Pre-Confederation. R. Douglas Francis and Donald Smith, eds. Toronto: Nelson,
23–47.
H U R O N - W E N D AT F E A S T O F T H E D E A D
“Feast of the Dead” (Fête des Morts) is the name that French colonists gave to a Wen-
dat (a.k.a. Huron) ritual of secondary burial practiced at the time of first contact
between the two p eoples in the early seventeenth c entury. The Wendats are an
Iroquoian-speaking group of indigenous North Americans who at the time of
French colonization lived in present-day Ontario between Georgian Bay and Lake
Simcoe. Wendat primary burial consisted of placing corpses on a scaffold where
they slowly decomposed. E very 10 or so years the Wendats performed their sec-
ondary burial ritual, the Feast of the Dead, taking the skeletons down from the
scaffolds and burying them in a communal ossuary (bone pit). This ritual is impor
tant to historians b ecause it demonstrates that the French and Wendats held simi-
lar views about the religious significance of h uman remains.
The Feast of the Dead long predated the arrival of Columbus in the New World.
In the fourteenth c entury, the Iroquoians of southern Ontario began to practice
Feasts of the Dead. Along the northern shore of Lake Ontario, village residents
began to wait several years—perhaps as long as a decade—between reinterments
of the dead. When they migrated north to the land they would call Wendake, they
brought the Feast of the Dead with them. By 1500, the Wendats numbered about
21,000.
As in all human societies, death was a profound transition for the Wendats and
each death was marked by a series of meaningful rituals. When a person died,
women, girls, and boys began to wail and groan, filling the longhouse with their
lamentations. They called out memories of other deceased individuals to heighten
the passion of mourning. Then they readied the corpse for burial by flexing it tightly
in a fetal position, wrapping it in the person’s finest beaver robe, and laying it on
its side on a reed mat. For three days the deceased was remembered with speeches
while everyone partook of great quantities of food.
With the funeral complete, the corpse was carried to the village cemetery for its
primary interment. Four men placed the corpse onto a scaffold that stood 8 to 10
feet above ground to prevent animals from gnawing on the corpse. T here the body
decomposed while awaiting the next Feast of the Dead. Cemeteries were consid-
ered the most sacred sites in all of Wendake; if a village caught fire, residents would
rush out and save the corpses before they worried about the belongings in their
longhouses.
A village called for a Feast of the Dead whenever they w ere going to change loca-
tions. Wendats practiced an intensive form of agriculture that quickly depleted
HU R ON - W ENDAT FEAST OF THE DEAD 303
the soil, so e very 10 or 12 years a village would move a few miles to find more
fertile ground. When they moved they could not leave the corpses unattended in
the cemetery; a Feast of the Dead was commenced.
The Wendat term for this ritual, Yandatsa, means “the K ettle,” suggesting the
great feasting that always accompanied the ceremony. It was a term that also high-
lighted the ritual’s social component; to feed one’s friends and even strangers out
of one’s kettle was the characteristic gesture of Wendat hospitality. Friends and rela-
tives from around Wendake were invited to join the ceremony.
The keeper of the graves brought each corpse down from the scaffold to its f amily,
who were responsible for preparing the body for the secondary burial. If the per-
son had been dead for several years, the corpse was easy to prepare. The flesh had
almost completely decomposed, leaving only a bit of parchment-like skin attached
to the skeleton. Family members simply scraped off any remaining skin and dis-
articulated the skeleton, meaning that they took apart the bones, rearranging them
in a beaver-skin bag.
More recently buried bodies, by contrast, writhed with maggots. These bodies
could not be disarticulated, but f amily members still tenderly cared for them. They
scooped away the rotten flesh as best they could, placed the corpse onto a new
reed mat, and wrapped it in a beaver robe.
One might imagine that such preparations disgusted the French Jesuit mission-
aries who came to Wendake hoping to convert the Wendats to Catholicism. But in
fact, the missionaries admired the care the Wendats showed for their dead friends
and relatives. Describing how one family prepared a corpse despite the “almost
intolerable stench,” one missionary asked his French readers, “Is not that a noble
example to inspire Christians, who o ught to have thoughts more elevated to acts
of charity and works of mercy towards their neighbor?” (Thwaites 1896–1901,
10:285).
This missionary’s admiration of Wendat mortuary practices stemmed from par-
allels between native and Catholic beliefs. Wendats believed that each person had
two souls, which stayed with the body in the village cemetery u ntil the Feast of
the Dead. The ritual power of the Feast allowed one of the souls to separate from
the body and begin the journey to the village of souls. Thus, the Wendats who
cleaned the bones so tenderly were preparing to release their loved ones’ souls to
the afterlife. It was a moment of powerful connection between the living and spirit
world.
Catholics also believed that human remains could connect this world with the
next. Catholics prayed to saints in heaven, hoping the saints would intercede with
Christ on their behalf. These prayers were especially effective if offered while
handling or being close to relics—objects that the saint had touched, or the saint’s
bones. French missionaries who traveled to Wendake brought with them the bones
of St. Ignatius and others to aid them in times of trouble. They thus understood
clearly the Wendat veneration of h uman remains.
Moreover, French Catholics w ere familiar with the practice of secondary buri-
als. B
ecause French graveyards w ere densely packed with the remains of the dead,
304 HU R ON - W
ENDAT FEAST OF THE DEAD
gravediggers routinely encountered bones from previous burials. When they

found skulls and long bones and ribs, they carefully removed them, cleaned them,
and placed them into the church’s charnel house. Here they would remain, rich
and poor together, an apt symbol of the ties of community and humanity that
united t hose divided by class status.
So it was with the Wendat Feast of the Dead. A fter f amily members cleaned and
disarticulated their loved ones’ skeletons, they headed to a communal bone pit
where all the corpses w ere deposited. Men and women, young and old, those of
high status, and the marginal: all w ere placed together in a single ossuary.
One of these pits is especially well documented, based on two sources of
information. First, a French missionary attended the Feast of the Dead there in
1636. Second, between 1947 and 1948, archaeologists from the Royal Ontario
Museum conducted a thorough excavation of the site. Although they did not
receive permission from any of the roughly 3,000 Wendats living in Canada—
an omission that is considered highly problematic today but was standard
practice in the 1940s—the archaeologists learned much about Wendat ossuary
burials.
The archaeologists found that the burial pit was 24 feet across and 6 feet deep;
it was also surrounded by an enormous wooden platform about 55 feet in diameter.
They learned that at least 681 individuals were buried in the pit, and that the
corpses were accompanied by a wide range of grave goods. The Wendats who used
this ossuary included goods of native manufacture, such as shell beads and pipes,
and European items such as knives, awls, scissors, and an iron key.
The preparation of this ossuary demonstrates the Wendat devotion to the
dead. Not only did they l abor to dig the pit and build the surrounding platform,
they also lined the ossuary with 48 beaver skin robes. At 10 beaver pelts per
robe, this represented an enormous material investment in the well-being of the
dead.
Once the ossuary was properly dug and lined with robes, Wendats placed their
bone bundles and gifts into the pit. They sang songs that a missionary described
as “sorrowful and lugubrious” (Thwaites 1896–1901, 10:297). When all the bone
bundles were in the ossuary, the Wendats filled the pit with sand and covered it
with mats and bark. The Feast of the Dead was complete.
But even though the missionaries who were present wrote that they “admired”
the “magnificent” Feast of the Dead ritual, their admiration did not stop them from
trying to convert the Wendats to Catholicism (Thwaites 1896–1901, 10:293,
10:279). The missionaries used their knowledge of Wendat mortuary practices—
knowledge that was enhanced by parallel beliefs in the power of human remains—
to further their goals of conversion. While some Wendats did adopt aspects of
Catholicism in the 1630s and 1640s, o thers used their own understanding of Cath-
olic beliefs about death and the afterlife to resist t hose teachings.
Erik R. Seeman
See also: Huron; Jesuits; New France

HUT C HINSON , ANNE 305
Further Reading
Seeman, Erik R. 2011. The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in
Early North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1896–1901. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. 73 vols.
Cleveland: Burrows Bros. Co.
Trigger, Bruce G. 1976. The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. Mon-
treal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
HUTCHINSON, ANNE (1591–1643)

Anne Hutchinson was a lay leader of the Puritan community in early Massachu
setts in the 1630s, whose leadership of the antinomian forces in the colony led to
a confrontation with religious and civil authorities. She was born Anne Marbury
in Lincolnshire, England. The daughter of John Marbury, a Puritan minister and
supporter of the reform of the Church of England, she received more education,
particularly in the Bible and theology, than was common for middle-class English
women of her time. She married a merchant named William Hutchinson in 1612.
Anne and William migrated to New England in 1634, following their local minster,
John Cotton, who had left the previous year. Like him, the Hutchinsons settled in
Boston. Hutchinson became a symbol of radical religious dissent and has become
an icon of feminism in early America.
Anne Hutchinson sympathized with Cotton’s approach to religion, which
emphasized a direct spiritual relationship with God rather than an emphasis on
duties. According to Cotton, the soul was entirely passive in its relation to God,
relying solely on grace. Individuals could not “prepare” or “cooperate” in their sal-
vation by good works or any other means. Like Cotton, Hutchinson put the spirit
of God ahead of the Bible. Her beliefs scandalized orthodox Puritan ministers, who
labeled them “antinomian,” a negative term that denoted believers who rejected
the moral law entirely. Hutchinson and her followers themselves preferred to char-
acterize their beliefs by the term “Covenant of Grace” and referred to their oppo-
nents as legalists who followed a “Covenant of Works.” Hutchinson advanced her
doctrine of the Covenant of Grace by holding prayer meetings at her house to
discuss Cotton’s sermons, sometimes attended by as many as 60. Hutchinson’s
meetings were both an intellectual and social challenge to the leaders of Puritan
Massachusetts. In addition to teaching doctrines considered antinomian, Hutchin-
son, as both a w oman and a layperson, challenged the dominance of religious life
by educated male clerics. Her meetings w ere popular among the merchants of Bos-
ton, and opposed by most of the ministry and magistrates, although the governor,
Sir Henry Vane, was an admirer.
Hutchinson was also a midwife, which led to her attendance, along with another
midwife, Jane Hawkins, at the childbed of her friend and religious ally Mary Dyer
(the future Quaker martyr) in 1637. Dyer gave birth to a baby with severe birth
defects, which in the language of the time was called “monstrous.” On Cotton’s
advice, the baby’s body was secretly buried to avoid scandal, a decision that would
later haunt both Dyer and Hutchinson.
306 HUT C HINSON , ANNE
In 1637, the first synod of the

Church of New E ngland con-
demned Hutchinson and other
antinomians. The synod strategi-
cally chose to meet at Newtowne,
a location away from the Boston
support base for Hutchinson and
Cotton. During the trial, the
story of Dyer’s monstrous birth
came out, and it was judged to
be a sign of God’s punishment of
her and the antinomian cause.
Under intense pressure, Cotton
sided with the synod against
Hutchinson. John Winthrop had
recently been chosen as governor
of Massachusetts in the place of
Hutchinson’s friend and ally Vane.
Winthrop and Hutchinson’s other
enemies attacked her heretical
theology and her usurpation of
Puritan Anne Hutchinson as depicted in a 1901 the male role of religious teacher.
illustration. When tried by Massachusetts religious The fact that Hutchinson taught
authorities in 1637, Hutchinson sparred ably with men as well as w omen at her
her inquisitors over Puritan theology but was meetings made her particularly
nonetheless banished to Rhode Island, where she threatening, and she was easily
was later killed by Indians. (Library of Congress) criticized on Biblical grounds.
Hutchinson justified her beliefs
and her teaching with arguments from scripture, but was overwhelmed by the
onslaught of some of Massachusetts’s most learned leaders and ministers. She
made an even more dangerous claim that she enjoyed the authority of a teacher.
She a dopted the role of a prophet by claiming that an immediate revelation from God
empowered her to discern the true meanings of Biblical passages, which varied
from the interpretations of orthodox Puritans. In 1638, Hutchinson, her family,
and many of her antinomian associates (including Dyer) were expelled from the
Massachusetts colony and cast out from the church. Shortly afterward, Hutchinson
herself gave birth to a stillborn infant with birth defects, further evidence, in the
minds of her enemies, of God’s condemnation of her and her teachings.
The Hutchinsons and some of their associates initially headed for New E ngland’s
most religiously tolerant community, Roger Williams’s Rhode Island, settling on
Aquidneck Island. Despite Rhode Island’s tolerance, she continued to be attacked
by the Massachusetts ministers. After her husband’s death in 1642, Hutchinson
took her family, including her younger c hildren, to Long Island in the tolerant
Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, where she and most of her family were killed in
a Native American raid in 1643. T here is some evidence that her enemies in
HUT C HINSON , ANNE 307
Anne Hutchinson’s Trial

At her 1637 trial before the Massachusetts authorities, Hutchinson spoke of
how she had come to understand the true meaning of the Bible: through “an
immediate revelation” from God. That is, “by the voice of his own spirit to
my soul.” Hutchinson warned the assembled authorities that God would not
be pleased by their lack of faith in her. “You have power over my body,” she
said, “but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul; and assure your-
selves thus much, you do as much as in you lies to put the Lord Jesus Christ
from you, and if you go on in this course you begin, you will bring a curse
upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”
Source: Thomas Hutchinson. History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts.
Boston, 1767.
Massachusetts encouraged the natives to attack Hutchinson’s family. W hether or

not they were involved in the killing, her enemies in Massachusetts greeted her
death as punishment from God.
Hutchinson figures prominently in Winthrop’s A Short History of the Rise, Reigne
and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists and Libertines that Infected the Churches of
New-England (1645). She continued to be condemned by the Massachusetts estab-
lishment of ministers who dominated intellectual and religious life in the colony,
as well as the writing of its history, into the eighteenth century. In the twentieth
century, she was seen as a champion of religious freedom and w omen’s ability
to speak in the public square. A statue of her was erected on the grounds of the
Massachusetts State House in 1922, and the Massachusetts legislature voted to
rescind her banishment in 1945. Although her beliefs have little in common with
those of most modern feminists, she is also sometimes identified as America’s first
feminist.
William E. Burns
See also: Puritans; Williams, Roger; Winthrop, John; W

omen
Further Reading
Hall, David D. 1990. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press.
Le Plante, Eve. 2004. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman
Who Defied the Puritans. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
Rushford, Brett, and Paul Mapp. 2009. Colonial North America and the Atlantic World: A His-
tory in Documents. New York: Routledge.
Schutte, Anne Jacobson. 1985. “ ‘Such Monstrous Births’: A Neglected Aspect of the Anti-
nomian Controversy.” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1): 85–106.
Winship, Michael P. 2002. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massa
chusetts, 1636–1641. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
I
INCA EMPIRE (1438–1533)
The Inca Empire was the largest empire in South America before European con-
tact and was one of the most extensive empires worldwide in the early sixteenth
century. The empire’s area stretched over most of the west South America and
encompassed the lands of modern Peru and Ecuador. It also contained portions of
today’s Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. Originating from the highlands
of Peru, the Quechua-speaking Inca tribe founded the city-state Kingdom of Cusco
in the twelfth c entury. Through conquest and assimilation, the deified kings of Inca
society greatly expanded their kingdom centered in the Andean mountain range
in the fifteenth c entury and amalgamated neighboring peoples, cultures, reli-
gions, and languages into its domain. Despite this expansion, civil war over
emperor succession, and the expeditions of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro,
ultimately led to this empire’s downfall. The execution of the last Inca emperor,
Atahualpa, in 1533 by the conquistadors marked the end of the Inca rule and the
beginning of Spanish rule over the South American empire.
The term Inca comes from the word Inka, which means “lord” in Quechua.
Though this term referred to the ruling class, the Spanish transliterated it to Inca and
used it as an ethnic name for all subjects of the indigenous empire. The Inca
referred to their kingdom as Tahuantinsuyu; in Quechua, tahuantin refers to a
quartet while suyu means “region.” The Inca represented their empire as the four
regions whose corners meet at the capital. This capital was Cusco in modern-day
Peru, which was organized similarly to a federal district. The four suyu were
Chinchaysuyu (north), Qullasuyu (south), Antisuyu (east), and Kuntisuyu (west).
Tawantinsuyu indicates the u hese suyu were
nion or coalition of the four regions. T
made up of wamani, which w ere provinces in the regions.
Andean civilization emerged around 7600 BCE. The Incas’ ancestors probably
started as nomadic herders in the punas or montane grasslands region of Peru and
the central Andean Mountains. For centuries, t hese people adapted to the extreme
altitude and terrain of the Andes by developing over time more lung capacity, a
slower heart rate, more blood volume, and a higher hemoglobin count to perma-
nently reside in the oxygen-poor environment. Cultures preceded the Inca as influ-
ential regional powers in the Peruvian Andes between the fourth and twelfth
centuries CE. The Moche, Wari, Tiwanaku, and Chimù civilizations w ere precur-
sor cultures that w ere organized as groups of autonomous communities who shared
religious beliefs, cultural characteristics, or trade connections. The Inca themselves
arose as a distinct tribe around 1100 CE in the Cusco region and would incorpo-
rate facets of t hese preceding groups into their culture.
310 IN C A E M PI R E
The Inca were ruled by a divine

king, the Sapa Inca, who was con-
sidered to be the descendant of
Inti, the sun god of polytheistic
Inca mythology. The first Sapa
Inca was Manco Càpac. An
important figure in the creation
stories of the Inca, Manco Càpac
is seen as the mythical founder of
Cusco. In the thirteenth c entury,
Manco Càpac led the Inca into
the Huantanay River valley, con-
quered a portion from neighbor-
ing tribes, and established Cusco.
For four generations, his descen-
dants would rule by the hurin, a
moiety in Cusco, but they would
be overthrown by the rival hanan
in the fourteenth c entury.
The ninth Sapa Inca, Pachacuti
(r. 1438–ca. 1472), expanded
the Kingdom of Cusco’s domain
significantly. Around 1438,

Pachacuti restructured his king-
dom into the Tawantinsuyu, which
was reor ga
nized into a central
government led by the Sapa Inca
followed by provincial govern-
ments to lead the four suyu.
Pachacuti is credited with order-
ing the construction of Machu Picchu, the most famous architectural remnant of
Inca civilization. He is known for conquering and assimilating regions into his
kingdom by completely subjugating an area before those affected w ere in a position
to challenge it. Pachacuti and succeeding Sapa Inca dispatched spies to regions
desired by the empire, and after the spies brought to them information on the
resources, organi zation, and military capabilities of these regions, the Inca kings
lauded through their messengers the empire’s material wealth and the benefits
of becoming subjects of the Inca to regional p eople. Most neighboring tribes
acquiesced without violence, but others denied Inca rule. Refusal to join the Inca
resulted in military conquest. Local leaders of these tribes were put to death by
the Inca while their children w
ere brought to Cusco and indoctrinated into Inca
nobility and administration. Teaching these subjects their customs allowed the Inca
to easily control and intermarry into new areas of their expanding kingdom.
Succeeding Sapa Incas continued this trend of expansion and allowed the Inca to
dominate the Andes Mountains. Pachacuti’s son, Tùpac Inca Yupanqui (r. 1471–1493),
IN C A E M PI R E 311
The ruins of Cusco, once the capital of the Inca Empire. It was located at the intersection
of the empire’s four regions. (iStockphoto.com)
began conquests northward into modern-day Ecuador and Colombia and began
conquering the Inca’s rival on the Peruvian coast, the Kingdom of Chimor, in the
1470s. He also extended the empire southward into what is now Chile until the
Mapuche thwarted the Inca military at the B attle of the Maule River in the late
fifteenth c entury. By the sixteenth c entury, the Inca Empire reached the height of its
size and power u nder the rule of the eleventh Sapa Inca, Huayna Càpac (r. 1493–1525),
who conquered and integrated the Kingdom of Quito into his realm. At its peak,
the Inca Empire spanned over 2,000 miles north to south along western South
America, covered over the majority of western South America, contained a wide
variety of landscapes, and included over 200 distinct cultures with their own lan-
guages and beliefs.
The Inca Empire was a very advanced civilization in time and place. It had
remarkable cities, temples, and fortresses made of intricately-constructed stones.
Their road system, based on two roads r unning north-south and their branches
stretched over 20,000 miles, was the most advanced and extensive transportation
network in South America. They built massive agricultural terraces, hydraulic
works to irrigate crops in diverse environments, and qullqas, which were build-
ings near roads and settlements that stored food for military use and the populace
in times of need. Certain domesticated animals and crop cultivation made Inca
agriculture very unique, including the growth and use of potatoes, quinoa, llamas,
alpacas, and guinea pigs. Besides their impressive engineering feats and agricul-
tural diversity, the Inca w ere also very sophisticated in recording numbers. They
312 IN C A E M PI R E
used quipus or strings consisting of colored threads knotted in various ways to doc-
ument tax obligations, census records, military organization, calendrical information,
and possibly literary uses. The Inca w ere organized in collecting taxes through their
administration. While their government and bureaucracy showed variation, tax-
payers, usually male h ousehold heads, w
ere grouped into units that had to provide
labor or military serv ice to the state. Their military technology was primitive, for
their armor and weaponry was made of bronze, stone, and bone, but their ability
to turn any villager into a soldier through corvée labor allowed them to maintain a
powerful army.
The Inca Empire fell due to internal conflict and European invasion. Spanish
conquistador Francisco Pizarro (1471–1541) and his brothers journeyed south from
present-day Panama and entered Inca territory by 1526. Seeing the resources of
the Inca, Pizarro gained approval from Queen Isabella in 1529 to conquer them.
In 1531, Pizarro launched another expedition and arrived as civil war and a small-
pox epidemic ravaged the Inca Empire. Disagreement over succession between
Huayna Càpac’s sons, Atahualpa (r. 1525–1533) in Cusco and Huascar (r. 1527–1532)
in Quito, led to civil war. Technologically superior with steel armor, gunpowder weap-
ons, and horses, the Spanish defeated Inca armies at the Battle of Punà in April 1531.
Pizarro then moved south into Tumbes, where he initially heard about the Inca
civil war. After waiting for reinforcements, Pizarro was invited in 1532 to meet Ata-
hualpa, who had defeated Huàscar and was in Cajamarca with his army. Though
Atahualpa outnumbered the Spanish with 80,000 men, Pizarro would use nego-
tiation, betrayal, and the help thousands of native allies to overthrow the empire.
After demanding Atahualpa and his realm to become subjects of King Charles I
and convert to Catholicism, the Spanish became frustrated with Atahualpa’s lack of
understanding, attacked his retinue, and captured him. Though the Sapa Inca fulfilled
the Spaniards’ ransom of gold and silver, Pizarro refused to release Atahualpa and
executed him on July 26, 1533.
Pizarro’s Single-Minded Motive

here is no doubt what motivated conquistadors most of the time: glory and
T
gold. They came to conquer the Americas to get rich and win renown as g reat
men. At the same time, most Spanish expeditions also featured a religious
component. The king of Spain hope to spread Catholicism to the New World,
and expeditions often took along priests as missionaries. Bernal Diaz del Cas-
tillo, a member of Hernan Cortes’s conquest of the Aztecs, said he fought to
serve the king, to bring the light of Christianity to the natives, and also to gain
wealth. Francisco Pizarro had no such illusions. When challenged by a priest
who argued that surely he had an obligation to evangelize the Inca natives,
Pizarro’s response was simple and direct. He had not come to convert the
natives, he told the priest, he had come simply to take their gold (Burbank
and Cooper 2010, 163).
INDENTU R ED SE R VANTS 313
The Spanish replaced Atahualpa with his brother Manco Inca Yupanqui (r.
1533–1544). At first, he worked with the Spanish, but he exploited feuding among
Spaniards to recover Cusco in 1536. The Spanish recaptured the city in 1537. Manco
Inca retreated to Vilcabamba and reestablished a small Neo-Inca State that lasted
for 36 years. This last Inca stronghold was conquered in 1572 and the last Inca
ruler, Túpac Amaru (r. 1571–1572), was captured and executed. The Inca Empire
was the epitome of pre-Columbian Andean civilization. With possession of land
rivaling European states and technological adaptation in the sixteenth century, the
Inca exemplified the high w ater mark of empire for indigenous American civiliza-
tions. Spanish conquest of the Inca began the collision of cultures that eventually
led to European hegemony in South America.
James A. Padgett
See also: Aztec Empire; Conquistadors; European Exploration; Potato
Further Reading
Brundage, Burr Cartwright. 1974. Empire of the Inca. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. 2010. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics
of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Maria. 1999. History of the Inca Realm. Cambridge: Cam-
Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro. 2007 [1572]. The History of the Incas. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
I N D E N T U R E D S E R VA N T S
Indentured servants were contract workers whose voyage across the Atlantic Ocean,
housing in the New World, and sometimes food, clothing, and equipment, were
subsidized by those who purchased their labor. Upon completion of the term of
their contract, which typically lasted for five to seven years, these servants were
usually rewarded with their freedom and land. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, imperial powers such as E ngland, France, Spain, and Portugal all
attempted to create overseas settler colonies in the Atlantic world. These govern-
ments believed that the establishment of new territories would aid in the produc-
tion of valuable commodities that could not be produced at home, and also serve
as an escape valve for the migration of their excess population. As landowners
increasingly pushed small farmers off of their land in E ngland, for example, an
itinerant class of displaced p eople could be evacuated to the New World, where
labor was in high demand. While this made sense from a theoretical perspective,
the significant expense of travel to the New World made settler colonialism imprac-
tical. Thus, transatlantic indentured servitude was born out of an economic
imperative to finance the cost of relocating European populations from the Old
World to the New. It became the primary mechanism by which Anglo-American
colonies acquired labor in the early seventeenth c entury.
314 INDENTU R ED SE R VANTS
For the English working classes in the sixteenth century, an indenture (another
word for contract) was a common financial device used in the domestic appren-
ticeship system. For those seeking to learn a trade, an indenture might include food,
clothing, and shelter for the duration of their vocational education. Typically, the
terms of servitude for a domestic indenture w ere two to three years shorter than
for those seeking passage across the Atlantic. Domestic indentured servants also
usually lived with the families they worked for. Nevertheless, with a surplus pop-
ulation, and fewer opportunities for employment generally, an indenture to undergo
servitude in the New World still had its appeal. Indentured servants in colonial
America, for example, were typically promised freedom dues at the expiration of
their contracts. Akin to something of a bonus for having completed the indenture,
the dues consisted of a quantity of a commodity such as tobacco, money, or even
a small plot of land so that they could start their own small farm.
By all accounts, indentured servitude was a central tool for English migration
to North America. Scholars estimate that as many as two-thirds of British immi-
grants crossing the Atlantic to the Chesapeake colonies came over as indentured
servants. For those who opted to sign an indenture and leave the Old World for
the New, their experiences varied widely. Often considered a species of property,
indentured servants could be sold aboard ship or at market once landing and their
experiences could at times resemble those of African slaves. For example, they suf-
fered invasive inspections from prospective buyers before auction and their labor
could be bought, sold, or leased by those who owned their contract. While most
of these sales were considered legitimate, occasionally there were instances where
people w ere kidnapped, forced across the Atlantic, and sold into servitude against
their w ill. Dubbed “spiriting,” this process was fairly uncommon a fter the earliest
decades of English colonization in the New World. Nevertheless, even a regular
indenture could be considered dubious given the high illiteracy rate of t hose who
entered into these contracts in the early years.
The treatment of indentured servants varied widely depending on the disposi-
tion of their master. Some servants complained of brutal punishments and likened
their condition to slavery. The type of work indentured servants performed hinged
on where they disembarked, and what kind of skills they brought with them.
Generally, those who came over as unskilled workers fared less well than those
who were proficient in a trade that was in higher demand. Gender also played an
important role in what kind of work indentured servants performed, as w omen
were more likely to be employed as domestic servants than to work the fields of a
plantation. W omen w
ere sometimes considered more risky to employ, b ecause a
pregnancy would result in lost time working. Consequently, additional time was
added onto their contract simply for having c hildren. This discouraged servants
from having families, though many did.
The prospect of freedom was often a powerful catalyst for white indentured ser-
vants and African slaves to transcend the boundaries of race in the New World,
and work together to plan and execute revolts during the colonial period. Some
historians even suggest that the turn to slavery stemmed from fears that lower class
servants and slaves would work together to overthrow the colonial elite. These fears
INDENTU R ED SE R VANTS 315
Flight of Indentured Servants

Indentured servants resisted their desperate condition, engaging in sabo-
tage, running away, and violence against masters. However, for many there
was incentive not to resist: infractions could bring long extensions to the
original contract. Some mistreated servants ran away from their masters and
adopted aliases and disguises to shield themselves from recapture. The master
of a servant who had fled would usually post an advertisement in local news-
papers with a description of the servant and the offer of a reward. Fleeing to
more urban areas often gave runaway servants a better chance of blending in.
ere most visibly expressed by Nathanial Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676,

w
when indentured servants and African slaves banded together to overthrow the
colonial elite.
Though indentured servitude was a popular financial device for funding the
immigration of the English to America, the number of servants crossing the Atlan-
tic began a significant decline between the 1660s and 1680s. It is no coincidence
that the decline coincided with the time when Royal African Company, a joint-
stock company funded by the English government, began supplying the colonies
with more and more African slaves. The monopolistic Royal African Company
drove down the price of African slaves compared to indentured servants. Addi-
tionally, as employment conditions improved in England during the seventeenth
century and information regarding the harsh working conditions of indentured ser-
vants in the New World became more readily available, there was less incentive
for those who would have been likely to sign an indenture to do so. Finally, the
African slave trade offered an economic advantage compared to the indentured ser-
vant trade for t hose who had the capital to purchase them at auction: slaves w ere
considered chattel and could therefore be subjected to lifelong bondage. Some his-
torians contend that the accumulation of capital was ultimately the determining
factor for when colonial societies turned from the indentured servant trade to the
slave trade. In this view, as soon as they could finance the purchase of slaves, the
colonists abandoned indentured servants as their primary labor source.
The entrenchment of the African slave trade, as the dominant form of l abor sup-
ply for the American colonies in the late seventeenth century, caused the inden-
tured servant market to change dramatically. While indentured servants made up
the bulk of unskilled laborers in the first half of the century, in the second half,
indentured servants coming to America were more likely to be skilled workers. As
demand rose for unskilled workers in G reat Britain, the number of those willing
to migrate the New World dropped, leaving the African slave trade to fill the void.
Perhaps one of the biggest questions concerning the transition from indentured
servants to African slavery is how much the process was a result of economic deter-
minism and how much it was motivated by racial ideology. Some scholars argue
that racism was the key factor turning colonists away from indentured servitude
316 INDUST R IAL R E V OLUTION
and toward African slavery, as they often justified the chattel status of the slaves
with the belief that their differences made them inferior.
While indentured servitude declined in the eighteenth century, particularly rel-
ative to the African slave trade, it continued to form a small but important niche
of the labor pool throughout the century. In fact, indentured servitude actually
made a comeback in the nineteenth c entury following the abolition of slavery. A fter
the British Empire outlawed the slave trade in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833, plant-
ers in the Car ibbean once again turned to indentured servitude as a cheaper alter-
native to paying wages to emancipated slaves. However, t hese indentured servants
came not from Europe, but from the more remote areas of the British Empire, such
as India and China, where merchants had access to cheaper labor. Many of these
indentured servants were subject to the same conditions as earlier English servants.
Contemporaries called these contract laborers “Coolies,” but despite the difference
in terminology and origins, t here was little to distinguish a Coolie in the nineteenth
century from an indentured servant in the fifteenth.
Scott Craig
See also: Migration; Slavery; Tobacco
Further Reading
Galenson, David W. 1981. White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Morgan, Kenneth. 2001. Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History.
New York: New York University Press.
Steinfeld, Robert J. 1991. The Invention of Free L abor: The Employment Relation in English and
American Law and Culture, 1350–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The Industrial Revolution was a major transition in manufacturing processes, tech-
nology implementation and usage, and economic and social organization occurring
across Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In
Great Britain, the first country to see widespread and long-term implementation
of t hese changes, the transition occurred primarily between 1760 and the 1830s.
Other countries faced these transformations later, including the United States
and France between 1815 and the 1860, Germany from the 1860s to the 1900s,
and Brazil and Mexico from 1870 u ntil about 1900. Changes in manufacturing
typically involved transitioning from hand to machine productions, enhanced iron
and chemical production processes, improved efficiency of w ater and steam power,
the development of machine tools, and the rise of the factory system.
Industrial Revolutions typically occurred after a period of agricultural improve-
ment, political consolidation, and economic standardization. Traditionally, scholars
stress the fundamental impact of population growth due to agricultural improve-
ments, relatively cheap capital due to nationalization of banking and credit, and
technical innovations and infrastructure improvements. These three components
INDUST R IAL R E V OLUTION 317
allowed upper-and middle-class businessmen to organize large workforces, to

purchase or improve upon existing machinery, and to distribute their products to
larger markets internally and externally to their locales. In E ngland, this meant
acquiring raw resources from an expanding empire, moving agricultural laborers
to the manufacturing centers, relying on Parliament to support laws that incentiv-
ized capital investment, and opening markets in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.
The First Industrial Revolution, beginning in the eighteenth c entury, supported
the rise of the Second Industrial Revolution in the m iddle of the nineteenth c entury,
with a notable increase in steam transportation, large-scale adoption of machine
tools, and greater use of steam-powered factories.
Before Europeans could contemplate t hese larger changes, their nations needed
stable populations and food sources. During the seventeenth century, better
food production helped the population grow while also improving health and
released workers to move into manufacturing areas. Two field to three or four field
planting methods increased yields on smaller plots of land. New food stuffs from
the American colonies improved the diet of animals and p eople, as well as revital-
izing soil nutrients. Gentlemen farmers and early scientists pursued animal breed-
ing and plant science for greater agricultural production. Moreover, farmers relied
on animal power without much innovation until the introduction of shoeing ani-
mals, the horse collar, and new implements. Joseph Foljambe’s Moldboard plough
turned the soil and reached deeper w ater and nutrients after 1730 (Overton 1996,
122). Andrew Meikle introduced the threshing machine in 1784, cutting the
labor of hand-threshing by 75 percent (Clark 2007, 65). Reapers, binders, and com-
bine harvesters arrived in the late nineteenth century, with tremendous success in
the Midwest and Great Plains regions of the United States during that nation’s
industrial revolution. These agricultural innovations both created larger, more
stable populations for the factories and created a market for agricultural imple-
ments, another early item generated in factories on both sides of the Atlantic.
With improvements in agriculture, the British population r ose dramatically a fter
1740, from 6 million to more than 8 million in 1800, and nearly 17 million by
1850. By 1900, E ngland’s population stood at 30.5 million. Between 1700 and 1900,
Europe’s population increased from near 100 million to more than 400 million.
As E ngland’s population increased, it expanded its colonial system which led to a
population of more than 1.1 million in 1750 (Ashton 1997, 2–5; Clark 2007, 194f).
By 1800, the United States had left the British Empire and embarked on its own
agricultural and industrial revolutions, expanding to 76 million citizens by 1900
(Clark 2007, 139). Though rapidly growing, the United States and other countries
in the Americas would use the applications of technology and industrial power to
keep pace with the political and economic power of Europe.
The roles that governments played in promoting industrial revolutions cannot
be overstated. In G reat Britain multiple factors combined to allow the first indus-
trial revolution to occur, including the presence of large domestic markets; long
periods of peace and stability following the unification of England and Scotland,
with no trade barriers existing between them; significant colonial holdings; the
rise of joint-stock companies and corporations; granting of monopolies; patent laws;
rule of law and respect for contracts; and free market capitalism supported by the
creation of the Bank of E ngland in 1694 and a unified bank-note system that local
banks supported. The passage of enclosure laws allowed nobility to remove lower-
class farmers from their lands and initiate new farming methods. Their protests
notwithstanding, these people then moved to towns and cities to become work-
ers, supporting workshop manufacturing and eventually factory systems. E ngland
provided other Europeans and later early Americans with examples of how to ini-
tiate massive change with rippling effects into the social, political, and economic
aspects of people’s lives.
The beginning of the Industrial Revolution is most closely associated with
combined changes in textile production, the increase in coal and steel produc-
tion, steam power, and the rise of the factory system. Textile production prior to
1760 relied on hand-spinning and hand-loom weaving in family homes, known
as the putting-out system, where men and women produced u nder contract with
merchants. The invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 by John Kay doubled the
output of the weaver. Weavers needed more thread, and in 1764, James Harg-
reaves invented the spinning jenny. To improve thread quality, Richard Ark-
wright’s 1769 patent for the spinning or water frame followed. By 1779, Samuel
Crompton combined the spinning jenny and w ater frame into the spinning mule,
providing finer quality thread in greater quantity. With enough thread, innova-
tors turned to the weaving process, and Edmund Cartwright developed the verti-
cal power loom, patented in 1785. During this same time period, wool production
began to be replaced by cotton fiber, necessitating adaptations to machinery, and
entrepreneurs began consolidating production u nder one roof, ushering in the
factory system.
Metal production also underwent dramatic changes. Blacksmiths replaced wood-
based charcoal with coal as wood became scarcer, requiring more mining and
mining technologies. Iron production began increasing in the late 1600s, and in
1709 Abraham Darby began using coke (coal-based charcoal) to fuel his blast fur-
naces at Coalbrookdale. Between 1783 and 1784, Henry Cort developed the roll-
ing and puddling processes. The rolling process replaced hammering of wrought
iron and was 15 times faster than previous methods, while puddling produced
structural grade iron at a much lower cost (Landes 2003, 91). T hese processes, along
with increased domestic mining, allowed G reat Britain to become the world’s larg-
est exporter of iron and iron goods from the 1780s to the 1860s. Meanwhile, the
Americas provided raw materials such as timber, hemp, indigo, and tobacco, while
the Car ibbean islands contributed sugar, molasses, and rum to the English mar-
kets. By the 1830s, the United States had begun to compete with Great Britain for
market shares in textiles, farm tools and implements, and food stuffs.
The increased need for coal and iron ore necessitated deeper and better mining,
especially the ability to build deeper mineshafts and remove w ater from them. As
innovators tried to solve one problem, it often created new problems to solve or
new processes that could be applied to other problems. In 1698, Thomas Savery
provided the first commercially successful steam pump to remove water from
mines. Over the next century, mechanics and engineers improved the steam pump
INDUST R IAL R E V OLUTION 319
into a rotary engine that delivered power to factory machines. Between 1778 and
1800, James Watt and Matthew Boulton perfected the steam engine, using a num-
ber of improvements to make it more efficient and powerful, including a separate
steam condenser, steam jacket, and steam driven cylinders rather than atmospheric
pressure-driven cylinders. Watt also made improvements for useful and consis-
tent power delivery; the double-acting rotary drive, parallelogram linkages, sun
and planet gears, and a fly-ball governor. When Watt’s patents ran out in 1800,
Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick and American Oliver Evans began construc-
tion of high-pressure, non-condensing steam engines which w ere much smaller
and more powerful, resulting in rail and other transportation applications by the
1810s and 1820s.
Chemical manufacturing became a significant component of the Industrial Rev-
olution, particularly in continental Europe. As European nations started manufac-
turing goods in factories, the products and machines of these factories required
various chemicals to smooth out problems of production. They also needed tre-
mendous quantities of chemicals to keep pace with increased production, espe-
cially in textiles and metals. Englishmen John Roebuck began large-scale production
of sulphuric acid in 1746, increasing production by a thousand percent (Landes
2003, 109). In 1791, Nicolas Leblanc introduced a new method of producing sodium
carbonate. And in 1800, Charles Tennant reduced the traditional bleaching pro
cess from months to days with the large scale manufacture of a bleaching powder
made of calcium hypochlorite (Landes 2003, 110). Manufacturers used t hese chem-
icals in glass, textile, soap and paper industries, rust removal on iron and steel,
and bleaching cloth.
One of the most lasting components of the Industrial Revolution was the
advent of the factory system. The British enclosure movements, that began in the
latter 1600s and continued into the 1800s, forced many of the self-employed and
tenant farmers into towns and cities. There, businessmen put unskilled labor to
use in ever larger workshops. Continental Europeans would experience similar
enclosure movements and resultant consolidation of production during and after
the French Revolution. In the Americas, the availability of land led to manufac-
turing to support frontier settlement. On both sides of the Atlantic, the growth of
factory systems relied on available capital, governmental support, and techno-
logical innovation.
To provide order while also driving these changes, industrial entrepreneurs
offered different visions of society and created factory towns and new definitions
of labor. Robert Owen built the New Lanark Factory in central England after 1800,
and Francis Cabot Lowell continued this process in Massachusetts soon a fter. These
factories became models of efficiency in the textile industry, by using innovation,
new business models, and creative adaptations to traditional labor systems.
As the workforce transitioned from the home to workshops and then again to
larger centers of manufacturing and factories, workers encountered numerous
changes to standards of living, housing, social structures, working conditions, and
organization within the workplace. Laborers now worked for wages, rather than
being paid by the piece, taking much of the control over production away from
the worker. Factory owners dictated work hours using clocks and bells rather than
periods of daylight, while the speed of machinery and the size of the factory gov-
erned the pace of work. Standards of living did initially improve, notably with bet-
ter food, clothing, and living conditions, though this also meant significant
demographic changes that resulted in surplus labor and overcrowding.
Robert Owen attempted to alleviate the social issues by creating an engineered
society. He provided housing, food, education, and healthcare to his workers,
attempting to promote the idea that healthy, happy workers produced more prod-
ucts at a higher quality. In the United States, Francis Lowell took advantage of the
social imbalances created by Western expansion and mass production of home
goods by structuring his factory system around the labor of young New England
farm girls. He provided them with safe housing, relatively good wages, and social
activities to improve the girls intellectually and socially while they supported their
families with wages. In both cases, the pursuit of profits quickly replaced the desire
for social benefits. Workers willing to work for lower wages, especially immigrants,
replaced the higher paid workers, and the extra efforts of education, healthcare,
and social training were deemed inefficient and unnecessary. As the factory system
began to reduce the quality of life for workers, it provided another connection
between nations in the Atlantic world, drawing immigrants in search of work to
new places.
As working conditions degraded and skilled workers lamented the loss of their
social standing, some laborers rebelled and o thers organized. Industrialization
spurred new ideas, and some observers considered reordering society around
people’s needs instead of the machines. Socialists, anarchists, Luddites, Diggers,
and unionists attempted to reorient society to the benefit of the workers while
businessmen and governments instigated the massive changes working against
the well-being of workers.
Intellectual Impacts of the Industrial

Revolution
The Industrial Revolution also led to intellectual analysis that changed the
world. Adam Smith’s (1723–1790) The Wealth of Nations (1776) traced the
development and separation of political and economic change that resulted in
the ascendency of the British Empire and a capitalist economy. Karl Marx
(1818–1883), in reaction to the effects of the Industrial Revolution on society,
wrote that industrialization had stratified society into those who owned the
means to production, the bourgeoisie, and the working class who performed
the work, the proletariat. Smith’s analysis became popular where capitalists
economies dominated, such as Europe and North America. Marx’s socialist
and communist critique, originally formulated in his 1848 Communist Mani-
festo, found support in regions that relied on capitalist economies, such as
Africa and Latin America.
I R O Q UOIS 321
As workers embraced new ideas, governments had to respond to these social

upheavals. In some cases, entrepreneurs understood the demands of workers as
seen with Owens and Lowell. Early efforts at advancing social interests, however,
proved short-lived, and the power of the combined working class continued to
demand attention, beginning to show slow success. A fter the passage of the 1832
Reform Act in Great Britain, suffrage was extended to more British citizens and
working groups began to advocate for better wages, working conditions, and rights.
Though severely restricted and ineffectual in the first half of the nineteenth c entury,
workers’ unions began gaining support in the later 1800s. The most successful,
such as the Knights of L abor and American Federation of L abor, were located in
the United States, where fears about socialism and anarchism brought from Europe
made an impact on the American leadership.
Paul Nienkamp
See also: Cotton; Money
Further Reading
Ashton, T.S. 1997. The Industrial Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clark, Gregory 2007. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Landes, David S. 2003. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Devel-
opment in Western Europe from 1750 to Present. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Overton, Mark. 1996. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian
Economy 1500–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stearns, Peter N. 2013. The Industrial Revolution in World History. 4th ed. Philadelphia: West-
view Press.
IROQUOIS
The term Iroquois refers to a confederacy, or league, of indigenous tribes formed
at the end of the twelfth century in the northeast of the present-day United States.
Initially formed to keep peace among the tribes, the Iroquois became a source of
hope, defiance, and alliance in the wake of European occupation. At its founda-
tion, the confederacy was comprised of the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga,
and the Seneca, and eventually included the Tuscarora in 1722. While the term
Iroquois eventually grew to define this confederacy on an international level, Euro
peans at first used a variety of terms. The French referred to them as the Iroquois
League, and eventually the Iroquois Confederacy, while the English referred to this
group as the Five Nations, and eventually the Six Nations. While the Iroquois served
primarily as a trading partnership and protective alliance, the confederacy also
became a cultural mixing pot where indigenous ideologies and religions commin-
gled, creating the unique Iroquois culture that persists today.
The origin of the confederacy is debated due to conflicting evidence. According to
Iroquois oral tradition, the confederacy began in 1142 to quell perpetual intertribal
322 I R O Q UOIS
feuding and to accommodate a shift towards corn cultivation. However, the most
recent archaeological studies refute these ideas, explaining that the anthropologi-
cal evidence substantiates a formation date closer to the mid-fifteenth century.
While the date of origin continues to be debated, multiple disciplines agree to the
creation story of the Iroquois as a peacemaking league. According to their oral tra-
dition, the Iroquois was formed by three tribal leaders, Dekanawida, also called
the Peacemaker, Hiawatha, and Jigonhsasee, known as the Mother of Nations. Shortly
after its formation, the confederacy grew, allowing Dekanawidah and Tadadaho, two
other tribal chiefs, to join. This league of five prominent tribal chiefs introduced the
Great Law of Peace in an effort to rid themselves of the fighting, raiding, and vio
lence between tribes in their region. United through a common Iroquois language,
the Five Nations demanded peace within their boundaries while they often united
against outside threats. Their power grew exponentially during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Most notably, the Iroquois manipulated European ten-
sions by repeatedly playing the French and British colonists off each other, prevent-
ing them from uniting in one colonial effort to overpower the Iroquois. Through
strategic alliances, the Iroquois quickly expanded, enveloping several cultures, reli-
gions, and customs to create an ethnic fusion of indigenous and European ideologies
that continued to interject in North American conflicts.
Map of the early days of the Iroquois Confederacy, from History of the Five Indian Nations
Depending on the Province of New-York by Cadwallader Colden (1755). The map shows the
lands occupied by the Iroquois as well as the locations of their neighbors and rivals.
(MPI/Getty Images)
I R O Q UOIS 323
With the growing population of the fur trade, as well as the increased power
of the confederacy, tensions between the Iroquois and Europeans grew. In 1607,
the Iroquois began a decades-long series of conflicts that became known as the
Beaver Wars. Caused by the heightened necessity for furs, the Iroquois vied for
control of all major regions that w ere home to the animals needed to supply the
world with furs. This resulted in several conflicts between the Iroquois and French
colonists, the Algonquin tribe located on the northern Atlantic coast, the Anishi-
naabe tribe located in northeastern Canada, and even the English colonists. After
more than a half century of violence, as well as the introduction of European dis-
eases such as smallpox, the Iroquois found themselves on the verge of extinction.
In 1664, three of the Iroquois tribes, the Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, signed a
peace treaty with the French that allowed them free passage into their lands and
villages, as well as control of the fur trade. With the last two tribes refusing to sign
the treaty, the French government sent a regiment to enforce peace and confront
the two dissenting tribes. In 1667, the Mohawk and Oneida, finding themselves
outnumbered and out of options, signed the peace treaty that remained in effect
for 17 years.
While numerous conflicts persisted between the Iroquois and the European
colonists, the French and Indian War (1754–1763), also known as the Seven Years’
War, offers insight into the strained relationship between the powerful confeder-
acy and the burgeoning European occupation. Beginning in 1754, the French and
Indian War was named for the British enemies, the French and Indians. A fter a
series of conflicts, the Iroquois sided with the British against the French and Algon-
quian. They hoped to gain favor with the British Crown and maintain control of
their lands, which were continuously encroached upon by British colonists. With
their victory in 1763, the British government honored their alliance by issuing the
Royal Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited the British colonists from settling
west of the Appalachian Mountains. However, the proclamation lacked enforce-
ment and the colonists all but ignored the royal edict.
In 1775, on the outbreak of the American Revolution, the Iroquois w ere again
brought into European conflict. The British continuously asked for Iroquois sup-
port in the war, following their success with French and Indian War; however,
many of the tribes w ere disinclined to provide such support. While the French
and Indian War had been a British success, the Iroquois land continued to be
exploited by the colonists. Nevertheless, the Iroquois could not remain passive in
a war that grazed their borders. Unfortunately, with mixed feelings of British loy-
alty and colonist proximity, the Iroquois tribes stood divided in their support and the
confederacy broke. In the aftermath of the revolution, the Iroquois reintegrated their
confederacy to ensure their safety and survival in the face of a new nation. Through-
out the nineteenth c entury, relationships between the Americans and the Iroquois
were strained. Manifest Destiny and the allure of the frontier compelled American
settlers to push the Iroquois tribes further west. By the end of the nineteenth century,
the Iroquois had all but vacated American territories. While the bulk of the Iro-
quois migrated north into Canadian territories, a few tribes remained in the New
324 I R O Q UOIS
York and Wisconsin area of the United States, providing the geographic proximity
necessary to maintain the confederacy, despite its shifting motivations.
Through the incorporation of numerous tribes, as well as the adoption of cap-
tives, the Iroquois confederacy became a melting pot of culture. Centuries of trade
and assistance created a diverse way of raising and gathering food. The Iroquois
were horticulturalists, farmers, fishers, hunters, and gatherers. They cultivated a
variety of corn, beans, and squash, which allowed them trade with the Euro
pean colonists when they arrived in the mid-seventeenth century. With shared
secrets, the Iroquois grew stronger, incorporating traditional dress from sev-
eral of their tribes to create distinct Iroquois clothing. Even their knowledge of
medicine grew from their shared customs and experiences. The Iroquois are
best described as a matrilineal hierarchy, meaning that the status of the child is
inherited from the mother. Thus, when members of different tribes within the
confederacy were married, their c hildren would become a member of their mother’s
tribe.
Matrilineal heritage is particularly important when discussing the Iroquois pol-
icies on war captives. In many indigenous tribes, death as a result of war required
reciprocity. However, this did not mean death was requited with death. Instead, if
death was caused by one tribe, the other tribe would invade and take war captives
to replace their dead. These captives w ere assimilated into their tribes to take the
place of the dead and prevent the restructuring of tribal hierarchy. This adoption
policy was common among the indigenous tribes in the northeastern territories
and resulted in diversification of the confederacy. With war prisoners from several
different tribes, along with European captives, the Iroquois quickly became more
multicultural.
Despite constant opposition from the United States and Canadian govern-
ments, the Iroquois Confederacy continues to exist. Having spent most of the
twentieth c entury attempting to gain political power over their land and rights,
the Iroquois have made small strides toward regaining some of their lost power.
Nevertheless, as current issues continue to affect the lives of indigenous tribes,
the Iroquois stand as a symbol of unity and peace in a complicated history of
European control.
Megan Jeffreys
See also: American Revolution; European Exploration; Fur Trade; Mourning Wars;
Oneidas; Onondagas; Seven Years’ War
Further Readings
Barr, Daniel P. 2006. Unconquered: The Iroquois League at War in Colonial America. West-
port, CT: Praeger Publishers.
Fenton, William N. 2010. The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois
Confederacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Jennings, Francis. 1986. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation
of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
ISLA M 325
ISLAM
The religion of Islam and the politics of its practitioners had a significant impact
on the development of political, cultural, and religious thought in the Atlantic world
from 1400 to 1900. Islam figured decisively in the imagination of the earliest Euro
pean explorers of the Atlantic world and of the Americas, and it also figured deci-
sively in the political imaginations of key cultural and literary figures in the Age
of Revolution. Scholarly writing on the role of Islam in the Atlantic world from
1400 to 1900 has tended to focus most heavily on the political expression of Islam,
particularly as seen in the various caliphates that challenged the political and cul-
tural authority of Christendom. Historians are beginning to shift focus from the
political dimension of Islam during this period to questions about the core beliefs
and religious practices of Muslims in the Atlantic world. Western Europeans fre-
quently represented Islam as fundamentally opposed to the values of Christianity
at the same time that they represented politicized Islam as less civilized and less
sophisticated than Europe’s imperial states.
This way of understanding Islam began with Columbus, who argued in his
Book of Prophecies (1501–1505) that the Christian victory over Islam during the
Reconquista (718–1492) was part of the divine plan to expand the power of
Christendom throughout the globe. Columbus was concerned with the liberation
of the Holy Land from Muslim rule, but he also wanted to establish the preemi-
nence of Christianity in the New World as part of a global struggle against Islam
and its political manifestation, most pressingly in the form of the Ottoman Empire
(1300–1922), whose victory at Constantinople in 1453 was seen to threatened
all of Christendom.
The budding strength of the Ottoman Empire during the fifteenth through sev-
enteenth centuries led many Atlantic world writers to use politicized versions of
Islam as a foil for Western European imperialism. The Ottoman Turks, for exam-
ple, w
ere repeatedly characterized as violent, tyrannical, and hostile t oward Chris
tianity and toward Western Europe. The loose association of the Barbary States of
North Africa (Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli) with the Ottoman Empire that
formed during the same period further intensified the anti-Islamic rhetoric of many
Atlantic writers. The Barbary States were known for committing acts of piracy against
Christian merchants in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and they were also
known for capturing Christian sailors and enslaving them. If these captives were
valuable persons, they were ransomed and allowed to return home. The famous
Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes endured Barbary captivity and wrote about it
in Don Quixote (1605, 1615), The Traffic of Algiers (ca. 1585), and The Bagnios of
Algiers (1615). Robert C. Davis estimates that on average there were approximately
35,000 Christian slaves in the Barbary regencies each year from 1580 to 1680
(Davis 2003, 23). T hese repeated conflicts between Christians and the Ottomans
led to the development of the trope of “Turkish tyranny” in the travel and dra-
matic literature of the period. The figure of the Turk emerged as a symbol of Otto-
man otherness to Western Christendom and as a symbol of the political threat that
Islamic culture at large posed to Europe’s imperial states. The English in partic
ular developed an ambivalent attitude t oward the figure of the Turk and toward
326 ISLA M
the Ottoman Empire, which represented simultaneously a level of imperial domi-

nation envied by Christian imperialists after the fall of Constantinople and a
model of empire sustained by violence and depredation. The ambivalence of early
English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire extended to early English views of
Islam itself. Encountered primarily through trade, Muslim Turks w ere represented
by some as adherents of a violent faith, but o thers saw in the dhimmi system an
impressive model of tolerance, and they saw in Muslim Turks an equally impres-
sive commitment to piety and the rule of law. U nder this system, non-Muslim
groups living under Islamic rule were offered protected status that included legal
provisions to protect property and freedom of religion in exchange for a tax to the
state offering such protection to its non-Muslim residents.
The influence of Islam on the political thought of Western Europe’s imperial
states, most dramatically in Spain and England, expressed itself in the literary tra-
dition of the Barbary captivity narrative. The most popular of these narratives was
James Riley’s Authentic Narrative (1817), which went through 28 editions, was
remade as a c hildren’s book, and remains in print t oday. Riley’s narrative contained
ambivalent representations of Islam as a religion that could be used at times to jus-
tify the persecution of Christians and that could be used at other times to justify
the fair treatment of Christian slaves by Muslim masters on the basis of their shared
humanity. The Barbary captivity tale also exerted a formative influence on the
development of early United States drama and on the early United States novel.
The most well-known examples are Susanna Haswell Rowson’s play, Slaves in Algiers
(1794) and Royall Tyler’s novel, The Algerine Captive (1797). Both authors adapted
the Barbary captivity narrative tradition to new generic contexts, and both use the
confrontation between Christian slaves and Muslim masters in Algiers to fashion
narratives of the United States exceptionalism that play on the trope of Turkish
tyranny developed in the Atlantic world literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Rowson and Tyler argued that the prevalence of slavery in the Barbary
regencies suggests that both the Barbary states and the larger Ottoman Empire of
which they are a part are defined by a renegade spirit that is antithetical to the
rule of law, and by a spirit of animosity toward Christians that stands in stark con-
trast to the radical commitment to liberty espoused in the political documents of
the early nation. Rowson and Tyler both, however, demonstrated a degree of ambiv-
alence in their attitudes toward the religion of Islam, if not toward its political
embodiment in the form of the Ottoman Empire. Each author presented the reader
with memorable scenes of Muslim masters treating their Christian slaves with
respect on the basis of their shared humanity, and Tyler in particular takes pains
to point out the willingness of Muslim masters to liberate their Christian slaves
upon conversion—something Christian masters w ere not nearly so willing to do
for their African slaves.
From the travel literature inspired and informed by the Reconquista to the lit
erature of Barbary that would exert a formative influence on the genres of the cap-
tivity narrative, drama, and the novel, it is clear that Islam exerted a significant
and sustained influence on the intellectual and political history of the Atlantic
world. It is also clear from this literary and political genealogy that the role of Islam
ISLA M 327
in the Atlantic world has been defined largely through a series of contact points
that have caused Atlantic historians and literary historians to focus on Islam as a
political force that threatened the development of Europe’s transatlantic empires.
The loose associations between the politicized versions of Islam that threatened
the Iberian Peninsula during the fifteenth century, or that threatened Atlantic com-
merce through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the religion of Islam,
are in part a result of the literature produced by Atlantic writers in these historical
moments. These associations are also in part a consequence of the development of
Atlantic history as a discipline, which has its origins in the study of Western Euro
pean transatlantic imperialism. It is vital for students of Atlantic history to under-
stand how Islam influenced the shining of non-Muslim thinkers in the Atlantic
world, particularly through the specter of Ottoman domination raised by the fall
of Constantinople, and through the powerful political and economic arm of the
Barbary regencies, but it is also vital for students of Atlantic history (and for the
field itself) to seek out a more nuanced understanding of the role that Islam played
in the Atlantic world—an understanding that is shaped not just by the idea that
Islam operated as a trope in European political thought for considering questions
about the ethics of empire and the supremacy of the Christian West, but by the
recognition that Islam was a lived religion by many Atlantic subjects.
Jason M. Payton
See also: Books; Judaism; Reconquista; Slavery
Further Reading
Baepler, Paul. 1999. White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Cap-
tivity Narratives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Davis, Robert C. 2003 Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean,
the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gomez, Michael. “Muslims in Early Americ a.” Journal of Southern History 60.4 (1994):
671–710.
Lewis, Bernard. 1995. Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discov-
ery. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vitkus, Daniel J. 2003. Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
J
JAMAICA
Jamaica is a Car ibbean island of approximately 4,400 square miles located south
of Cuba and southwest of Hispaniola. One of the Greater Antilles, the island is
roughly 154 miles long and 52 miles wide with a maximum elevation of 7,400 feet.
As a Spanish possession, Jamaica reached a population of approximately 1,500 in
1640. A fter the English captured the island, and sugar became the dominant eco-
nomic activity, the population exploded to around 142,000 by 1750, about 90
percent of which w ere slaves.
Jamaica’s topography consists of central highland mountain ranges and plateaus
giving way to coastal plains and lowlands to the north and south. The Blue Moun-
tains in the eastern part of the island are its highest points. The lowlands have a
tropical climate while the interior highlands are more temperate. Sugar production
was focused in the island’s tropical lowlands while smaller landholders used less
arable land to raise cattle and other livestock for sale as food.
Inhabited between 500 and 1,000 years before European arrival, Jamaica had a
population of around 60,000 Taíno Indians, an Arawak subgroup, before contact.
The region’s Arawak people referred to the island as Xaymaca or Xamayca and lived
in a number of large, densely populated villages. A fter European contact, the local
population plummeted due to newly imported diseases and poor treatment by
Europeans. Few natives remained by the m iddle of the seventeenth c entury.
Europeans first arrived in Jamaica in 1494, during the second voyage of Chris-
topher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) to the New World. A fter some minor skirmishes
and trading with the natives, Columbus’s ships departed, and the island had no
more European contact until Columbus’s fourth voyage (1502) when Columbus
and his sailors were marooned on Jamaica for over a year. Spain established the
first permanent European settlement, Sevilla la Nueva (New Seville), on the north
side of the island in 1509. In an effort to populate and develop Jamaica, despite
the declining native population, the Spanish Crown waived customs duties for set-
tlers and, at times, outlawed emigration from the island. Additionally, it ordered the
importation of African slaves for labor as early as 1523. In 1534, Santiago de la
Vega (or St. Jago de la Vega), located on the south side of the island near modern-
day Spanish Town, replaced Sevilla as the capital. Jamaica’s value to the Spanish
was predominately as a provisioning base for ships and soldiers headed for the
American mainland and as a strategic point along Car ibbean shipping routes.
English pirates began raiding Jamaica in the late sixteenth c entury as an exten-
sion of European imperial politics. A fter winning the English Civil War, the Lord
Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), aimed his military forces at
330 J A M AI C A
Spain’s American possessions as part of his Western Design. When an English invasion
of Santo Domingo (Hispaniola) was rebuffed in April 1655, the attackers assaulted
neighboring, less fortified Jamaica and quickly took control. However, armed Span-
ish resistance continued until 1660, and Spain did not officially cede control of
the island to E ngland u ntil 1670. Much like the Spanish, the English attempted to
populate and develop the island. C romwell’s government sent additional soldiers,
as well as potential wives, to the island in the hopes of encouraging settlement. A fter
the restoration of the English monarchy (1660), Charles II guaranteed English citi-
zenship to p eople born on the island to English parents and established a local
council and assembly to make laws for the colony in 1661.
Though begun during the Spanish period, sugar production and slavery greatly
accelerated a fter England took control of Jamaica. The labor requirements of sugar
agriculture motivated the growth of the slave trade to Jamaica, but the relatively
low cost of slaves and the difficulty of keeping them alive in the Jamaican climate
contributed to a management culture where slaves w ere seen as disposable and
their health was largely disregarded.
Successful planters often returned to England after making their fortune in
Jamaica to enjoy their newfound wealth as part of the celebrated metropolitan cul-
ture. This trend toward absentee ownership was further encouraged by Jamaica’s
disease environment where the rate of white mortality was above 10 percent every
year in the eighteenth c entury. Under these conditions, Englishmen lucky enough
to survive could easily find work managing plantations for absentee owners. The
scarcity of white laborers kept wages high, and managers often used their wages
to become landowners themselves or to speculate in slaves.
Although forced into a brutal slave system, slaves resisted their enslavement in
a variety of ways. During the English invasion of Jamaica, some African slaves
escaped their Spanish masters and established communities in the island’s moun-
tainous interior free from European control. Known as the “maroons,” t hese former
slaves are often identified as being ethnically Coromantee in historical sources,
although historians remain unsure of their African ethnicity. These maroons were
able to maintain their independence through successful warfare and treaties with
the English Jamaican government u ntil 1796, when they were forcibly relocated to
Nova Scotia.
God’s Judgment on Piracy

Piracy thrived from Jamaica in the 1660s, as Governor Thomas Modyford
encouraged buccaneers to operate from the island. He issued privateering com-
missions to legalize their depredations and the businessmen of Jamaica’s chief
city, Port Royal, welcomed them home to drink and g amble away their booty.
When an earthquake struck the island in 1692, devastating Port Royal and kill-
ing thousands, it was seen as God’s judgment on the wicked.
J A M ESTO W N 331
Indirect slave resistance in daily life as well as armed rebellion continued

throughout the period of slavery. For instance, in 1673, some 300 slaves killed their
master and 13 o thers. Additionally, a slave uprising in 1831 and 1832, named the
Baptist War, contributed to Parliament’s passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833
which ended slavery in 1834 and began a period of “apprenticeship” for former
slaves that led to their eventual full emancipation in 1838.
Sean Morey Smith
See also: British Atlantic; Maroons; Piracy
Further Reading
Burnard, Trevor. 2004. Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in
the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Dunn, Richard S. 1972. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West
Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Morales Padrón, Francisco. 2003. Spanish Jamaica. Translated by Patrick E. Bryan, Michael
J. Gronow, and Felix Oviedo Moral. Kingston: Ian Randle.
JAMESTOWN
Jamestown was the first successful colony established by E ngland in the New World.
Named for James I (1566–1625) by the V irginia Company, which had received a
charter from the king in the spring of 1606, it was comprised of high government
officials and London merchants. The investors of the joint-stock enterprise received
a monopoly to exploit V irginia’s natural resources for their trade and profit, to com-
pete with the Spanish, to find a western route to the Indies, and to spread the
Protestant faith among native p eoples. The company attracted settlers by promot-
ing Virginia as a refuge and land of fortune to England’s burgeoning dispossessed
population. As an additional incentive, the company guaranteed that colonists
would retain all their English liberties—r ulers subject to the law, the right to jus-
tice, protection from arbitrary demands for money, goods, or labor, and taxation
sanctioned by representatives of the w hole community—as if they w ere still in
England.
The colony struggled from the beginning. During the early period (1607–1625), the
colony suffered appalling death rates from disease, starvation, and attacks by
Native Americans. Within six months, 51 of 104 men and boys died. Help from
Chief Powhatan and a resupply ship from E ngland saved the colony from collaps-
ing. Captain John Smith successfully negotiated with Chief Powhatan to supply
the colonists with corn in exchange for iron hatchets, copper, and beads, and Cap-
tain Christopher Newport, who led the colonists to Virginia, arrived with a ship
supplied with provisions and about 100 more settlers, including artisans, labor-
ers, and gentlemen, around New Year’s Day 1608.
The settlement remained unstable, however. Leaders had to contend with set-
tlers who could not or would not work. Farmers w ere not among the new settlers
332 J A M ESTO W N
brought by Newport. Colonists once again had not grown enough corn to carry
them through the winter. Smith sent expeditions out to secure supplies. Relations
between Smith and Powhatan had deteriorated to the point where each had con-
cluded that e ither’s survival depended on the elimination of the other. Colonists
did not initially possess a direct stake in the enterprise. The stockholders of the
Virginia Company retained ownership of the land. They allocated land units of
hundreds of acres, known as provincial units (the hundreds), to recipients who in
turn paid the company an annual quit-rent or tax. Even the priorities of the V irginia
Council, the company’s governing authority in London, discouraged the long-term
development of a stable society and economy by directing settlers to search for gold
and silver.
Reports circulated by survivors returning to England were so discouraging that
the Virginia Company reorganized u nder a new charter in 1609 to attract new blood
and money. L ater that year, Sir Thomas Gates led nine ships to V irginia. Although
delayed in arriving at his destination when his flagship wrecked in Bermuda, he
entered the Chesapeake in May 1610. Gates found the colonists in a state of des-
peration. In June, as he prepared to send the survivors back to England, Governor
Thomas West, Lord De La Warr, arrived with 300 men and ample supplies on
board. De La Warr ordered Gates and his people ashore and took charge, saving
the colony from extinction.
Although De La Warr and Sir Thomas Dale, his successor, initiated strict mili-
tary discipline in managing the colonists, the colony was still suffering a year
later. The colonists could not own property; they were working for London stock-
holders. Existence for the colonists was almost hopeless. The only cash crop was cedar
board, used for wainscoting, and the local Indians offered little in trade.
Between 1616 and 1624, the settlement was put on a path that would eventually
mirror eighteenth c entury aristocratic English society. A profitable product, tobacco,
was discovered, and colonists were given a stake in the venture, and arbitrary rule was
abolished. When John Rolfe, who married Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, for-
mulated a smooth smoking tobacco from local Indian and West Indies seeds, it
created an economic basis for the colony. Tobacco captured the English market
when first introduced in 1613. In the following eight years, production increased
exponentially to the point where it was grown in the streets of Jamestown. Settlers
were given another incentive when the V irginia Company created a system by which
original colonists, company hires, and recruited indentured servants could own
their land outright. Colonists were further motivated toward self-determination
when arbitrary rule was abolished, English common law and due process were insti-
tuted, and a government composed of an elected representative assembly, governor,
and council of state, selected by the Company, was formed. The assembly had the
power to enact all local laws, subject to the Company’s veto. In 1619, the first repre-
sentative assembly in America met. The Company approved the reforms in 1618, as
a result of the leadership of Sir Thomas Smyth and Sir Edwin Sandys.
Despite the tobacco inspired prosperity and the reforms, the high mortality rate
continued unabated. Colonists kept d ying or leaving, even with frequent infusions
of new settlers. Sandys, believing a cash crop economy would not ensure the colony’s
J EFFE R SON , THO M AS 333
survival, attempted to reform the colony’s economic infrastructure by implementing

his five-year plan for Virginia with the goal of developing a self-sustaining agricul-
tural colony and a diversified economy. With the approval of the Company, Sandys
implemented his plan by attracting thousands more settlers from England, estab-
lishing wineries and olive estates, investing £5,000 to establish an iron industry,
and recruiting skilled labor from Germany and the Baltic provinces to produce
lumber for English ships. His plans were abandoned in 1622, when Powhatan
Indians and allies, under the leadership of Opechancanough, launched a surprise
attack on the town’s outlying plantations, massacring nearly one-third of the white
population. The war ended in 1624.
When the company and the Crown learned of the appalling death rate brought
about by disease and Indian attacks, the Crown launched an investigation of the
Company. A commission found that, in addition to the thousands who had died
since 1607, the Virginia Company had not achieved its stated purposes and, in spite
of the profits produced by tobacco, it went bankrupt. The Crown sued the Com
pany to revoke its charter in 1624 and won. When Charles I succeeded his father
in 1625, he made V irginia a royal colony and a prosperous era began in earnest.
Glen Edward Taul
See also: British Atlantic; Pocahontas; Powhatan; Smith, John
Further Reading
Elliot, J.H. 2006. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New
Kelso, William M. 2006. Jamestown: The Buried Truth. Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press.
Price, David A. 2003. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a
New Nation. New York: Knopf.
JEFFERSON, THOMAS (1743–1826)

Thomas Jefferson was an international statesman, the principal drafter of the Decla-
ration of Independence, and the third president of the United States (1801–1809). His
Atlantic character is vital to understanding his terms as President, and his earlier
roles as political scientist, Vice President, Secretary of State, Minister to France, and
slave-owner. In his youth, he desired a role as an elite European gentlemen, an
Atlantic personality he cultivated throughout his l ater life. In his prime, he applied
a vast political knowledge informed by Atlantic national ideologies to help birth
the United States and the doctrines of equality for which he remains famous. In
his political career, an Atlantic perspective informed Jefferson’s work ending the
slave trade and preserving the American nation through economic and pol itic al
alliances throughout the Atlantic world.
Throughout his adult life, Jefferson portrayed himself an elite European to the
transatlantic intellectual network now known as the Republic of Letters, a network
that intensified among numerous academics throughout the Atlantic littoral during
334 J EFFE R SON , THO M AS
the Enlightenment. Within this intellectual realm, Jefferson cultivated himself as

an elite gentleman. The budding politician and writer applied many of these
Atlantic ideals of gentlemanly elegance in his construction of the neoclassical archi-
tectural masterpiece of Monticello, the home he shared with his wife, Martha Jef-
ferson (1748–1782). For the talented statesman, representing himself as a proper
English gentlemen, a skill he learned in his youth, also involved controlling the
large slave population h oused at Monticello. Jefferson had many different relation-
ships with his slaves. He owned most slaves as laborers whom he could violate at
his w ill, became friends with many whom he owned, and reportedly fathered
children with his favorite, Sally Hemings (1773–1835). A fter the American Revo-
lution (1775–1783), some of his slaves traveled with Jefferson throughout the Atlan-
tic world, often for periods in Paris while Jefferson helped to sustain French
alliances cultivated by Benjamin Franklin (1705–1790), who had operated in Paris
from 1776 to 1785.
Jefferson combined many Atlantic political ideas into revolutionary era beliefs
about the f ree market and natural rights. Jefferson, especially through his reading
of country resistance to court influence in the English political tradition, defined
a new form of Classical Republicanism and civic virtue for the American political
system. Jefferson combined country ideals with an emerging Anglo-American sen-
timentality that focused on using natural language to bring emotion to political
discussions. Jefferson applied this vast Atlantic knowledge, and a desire to repre-
sent the best of European society back to the wayward British state, in his writ-
ings during the American Revolution. He applied theories of government from the
French legal scholar Montesquieu (1689–1755) and the British social theorist John
Locke (1632–1704) to unite ideas about natural rights with a new American politi
cal philosophy regarding the people’s right to revolt. He applied these notions,
informed by his constant written dialogues through the networks of the Republic
of Letters, within the Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson’s role in the American Revolution (1775–1783) similarly involved much
of his Atlantic background. Rather than stay isolated from Europe, Jefferson helped to
sustain Atlantic alliances that American forces used to resist the British and win
Learning to Be a Gentleman
During his youth, Thomas Jefferson had learned of elite cultural patterns of
the Atlantic complex at his home in Shadwell, V irginia, a place where the
Atlantic world of fashionable tastes born in London pushed into the hinterland
of British Virginia. Shadwell, Jefferson’s boyhood home before his later con-
struction of nearby Monticello, was created to keep visitors in awe. The goal
of the palatial estate was to keep the impression that the Jefferson family was
part of the upper crust of Virginian and European society. Within the house,
silver spoons and numerous large dining t ables imposed an image of courtly
grandeur upon the visitor.
J EFFE R SON , THO M AS 335
their freedom from perceived political oppression. After the Revolution, he con-
tinued these efforts as minister to France starting in 1785. Using his friendship
with the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), a leading military figure in the Ameri-
can Revolution, Jefferson worked to retain political and economic alliances with
the French state, and possibly informed Lafayette’s own political ideologies as rep-
resented in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Though
most of these state alliances were inoperable after the start of the French Revolu-
tion (1789–1799), Jefferson consistently worked to better the young American
nation’s role in the Atlantic world, especially on his return to the United States
in 1789, when George Washington (1732–1799) appointed him Secretary of State,
an office he held from 1790 to 1793.
Jefferson’s time as a political leader in the United States occurred during an era of
tumultuous political and economic change in the Atlantic world. Jefferson’s admin-
istrative c areer helped to establish the First Party System within the United States
government. This system, like much of Jefferson’s political ideology, was informed
by his conception of country policies as resistance to forms of executive power, an
abusive form of influence Jefferson understood through the Federalist politics of
Washington’s successor John Adams (1735–1826) and the statist ideologies of Secre-
tary of the Treasury Alexander
Hamilton (1755–1804). Jeffer-
son established the Democratic-
Republican Party in 1799, as a
way to apply Anti-Federalist ide-
ology to critique the statist ideals
of the opposing Federalist Party.
Anti- Federalist policies, for Jef-
ferson and his contemporaries,
were greatly informed by the lib-
ertarian writings of George Mason
(1725–1792), the most influential
author that James Madison (1751–
1836) applied to draft the Bill of
Rights, which was amended to
the United States Constitution of
1788, upon ratification of the
first 10 amendments in 1791.
L ater, in his role as president,
Jefferson took to the Atlantic stage
and applied his Atlantic per-
ceptions of European superiority
and the natural rights of free Thomas Jefferson as painted in 1800 by Rembrandt
trade to his prosecution of the Peale. As a philosopher, diplomat, politician, and
First Barbary War (1801–1805). president, he often placed the United States in
He applied his Atlantic consid- relation to other regions of the Atlantic world.
erations of colonial politics and (BiographicalImages.com)
336 J EFFE R SON , THO M AS
their connections to European conflicts to his acquisition of the Louisiana Pur-

chase in 1803, from France, and to his efforts to expand the United States through
the annexation of Florida, a task completed during the administration of James
Monroe (1758–1831), through the confirmation of the Adams-Onís Treaty of
1819. Jefferson signed laws formally ending the international slave trade to the
United States in 1808. However, his motives have often been questioned by histo-
rians who sometimes understand his aspiration to end the slave trade as support
for his fellow Virginian slave owners who desired to keep their slave population
at a static supply for economic advantage. Jefferson sparked much Atlantic dis-
cord with the Embargo Act (1807–1809), an attempt to protect American goods
from French and British consumers. The law outlawed the shipment of goods pro-
duced in the United States to either France or Great Britain. Essentially ruining
the American economy, and possibly inculcating more discord leading to the War
of 1812, Jefferson’s isolationist policy is often seen as a failure.
For the mature Jefferson, proper Atlantic gentlemanliness involved continuing to
represent himself as a student of political theory and natural philosophy. Jefferson
wrote often to his contemporaries in Paris, London, and throughout the colonial Amer
icas. Throughout his life, and into old age, Jefferson frequently discussed political
philosophy, linguistics, racial ideology, anthropology, archaeology, and architec-
ture. These scientific inquiries had informed much of Jefferson’s contributions to
American science and art, including his sponsorship of the Lewis and Clark Expedi-
tion, from 1804 to 1806, to the American West. Consistently an intellectual, Jefferson
worked late in his life to personally establish the University of Virginia in 1819.
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence forged its own Atlantic history through-
out the nineteenth century. The original document was about a specific moment
in time and focused on providing an explicit list of grievances to the English state.
It did not affirm anything essential about the universal rights of all men. However,
the document took on new forms for many later Atlantic peoples, including the
slaves and f ree p
eople of color who revolted in the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)
and various republican forces who fought for the c auses of Simon Bolivar (1783–1830)
throughout South America during the early nineteenth c entury. Jefferson was a slave
owner who had very specific ideas about the inferiority of African p eoples, as
expressed in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781). His literary flourishes about
the equality of all men were rhetorical tools learned from years of Atlantic intel-
lectual networking, rather than any statement regarding racial or political equality.
Andrew Kettler
See also: American Revolution; Declaration of Independence; Enlightenment; Frank-

lin, Benjamin; Locke, John; Slavery
Further Reading
Fliegelman, Jay. 1993. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language & the Culture of
Performance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
J ESUITS 337
Gordon-Reed, Annette. 2008. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American F amily. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Kern, Susan. 2005. “The Material World of the Jefferson’s at Shadwell.” William and Mary
Quarterly 62 (2): 213–242.
Wilson, Douglas L. 1993. “Jefferson and the Republic of Letters.” Jeffersonian Legacies.
Edited by Peter Onuf. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 50–76.
JESUITS
The Jesuits are members of the Society of Jesus, a male religious congregation
(or order) of the Catholic Church. Its members—priests, b rothers, and men in
formation—do various helping ministries and promote Roman Catholicism. The
Jesuits are organized for apostolic work, follow a religious rule, and are supported
by alms and donations. The Society was begun in 1534 by Ignatius of Loyola
(1491–1556) and six other University of Paris students; it was officially designated
by the church as an order in 1540. Among the founders was Francis Xavier, born
Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta (1506–1552), who went on extensive global mis-
sions. “Jesuit” originated in the fifteenth c entury as an insult, referring to someone
who too frequently or oddly used the name of Jesus. Although applied pejoratively to
the Society, gradually, the Society’s members and supporters a dopted the name for
its positive meaning.
The Jesuits emerged in a Europe undergoing significant change with the end-
ing of the M
iddle Ages, the rise of humanism, and the acrimonious division in the
Catholic Church with the beginning of Protestantism. During his long recovery
from a serious wound during the B attle of Pamplona in 1521, Ignatius of Loyola
(born Íñigo López de Loyola in the Basque region of northern Spain) had a spiri-
tual vision and reformed from his licentious younger years. The conversion hap-
pened when Ignatius, who could not obtain his favorite chivalric fiction, instead
read about the heroic lives of the saints in the Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony
(1295–1378) and the Golden Legend of Jacopo de Voragine (1230–1298). He sub-
sequently wrote the Spiritual Exercises (1548), which became a major text of Jesuit
spirituality. Ignatius’ strict upbringing in the austere Spain of the ultraorthodox
Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II (1452–1516) and Isabella I (1451–1504) also
pushed him in the direction of spiritual piety and evangelistic vigor.
In 1534, Ignatius and the other students met in a crypt below the Paris church
of Saint Denis, now called Saint Pierre de Montmartre. Believing that Christ had
deliberately put them together, they called themselves the Company of Jesus—or
Los Amigos en El Señor, or “Friends in the Lord.” The name was deliberately
both militaristic (e.g., an infantry “company”) and religiously sincere (as Jesus’
“companions”).
Members of the Company were ordained priests in 1537, with an unofficial motto
of Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam (“For the greater glory of God”). At first, they preached
and did charitable work in Italy b ecause they w ere prevented from g oing to Jeru-
salem by the Italian War of 1535 to 1538. In 1540, the Jesuits became an official
Catholic order and Ignatius was chosen as the first superior-general (leader). In their
338 J ESUITS
new approach to observing and practicing the faith, the Jesuits changed some of
the longtime religious practices followed by the church. Some traditions were dis-
carded in favor of contemporary usefulness. The Jesuits wanted to serve God by
serving the pope and the Catholic Church in whatever way they were needed.
The new order expanded quickly. They founded schools across Europe using
their training in classical studies and theology, sent missionaries to evangelize, and
attempted to stop Protestantism from spreading. Unlike most other contemporary
orders, the Jesuits did many different activities in the community. They won plau-
dits as preachers, builders, founders of colleges, pastors, confessors, teachers, and
writers.
The Roman Catholic Church and its faithful monarchs used the Jesuits as sol-
diers in this new era. In 1540, Portugal’s King John III (1502–1557) requested Jesuit
help in spreading the faith in his new Indian possessions. Becoming the first Jesuit
missionary, Francis Xavier left Rome with only a breviary, a catechism, and a popu
lar Counter-Reformation tract De Institutione bene vivendi by Croatian humanist
Marko Marulić (1450–1524). Xavier went to Portuguese Mozambique and Goa,
then capital of Portuguese India. He instructed the Portuguese (mostly the c hildren),
preached, and ministered to those who were ill. Xavier spent almost three years
preaching in southern India and Ceylon, learning the languages to do so, and built
some 40 churches. Between 1545 and 1546, Xavier worked in Portuguese Malacca
and became the first Christian missionary to go to Japan (1549), and China (1552).
By the early 1550s, Jesuits w ere training priests in various European seminar-
ies to combat the Protestant Reformation. They led the Catholic effort to reverse
its losses in England, France, Germany, and Poland. Their efforts won back con-
verts to Lutheranism and Calvinism, as well as strengthened Catholics who w ere
wavering in their faith. Both sides of the Catholic-Protestant controversy committed
excesses. While some Jesuits absurdly blamed Protestants for the rise of plague, most
favored a more reasoned persuasion. Jesuits also were prominent in the theologi-
cal b attles during the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which denounced heretical
abuses and revitalized Catholic parish life. They were instrumental in some of
the conversions and reconversions of royalty. Jesuits often established schools to
strengthen Catholic adherence immediately a fter significant skirmishes in the
Counter-Reformation (1545–1648), such as t hose in Toulouse and Lyons, in the 1560s
after violent attacks on Protestant neighborhoods. The potency of the Jesuits’ efforts
in religious disputes was aided by the order’s organizational solidity. The Jesuit Con-
stitutions (1553) established a very tightly centralized organization that emphasized
obedience to the pope and religious superiors.
In addition to their missionary and Counter-Reformation work, the Jesuits also
attempted to combat corruption within the Catholic Church. For example, the
Jesuit vow against “ambitioning prelacies” attempted to stop Jesuits from craving
money or power. B ecause of their reforming efforts, the Jesuits frequently clashed
with the church’s leadership.
Jesuits were sharply criticized by Protestants during this time. To their critics, the
order personified the church’s extreme wealth and corruption; they believed
the order was actively involved in trying to subvert Protestant efforts. The Jesuits
J ESUITS 339
ere involved in many political b

w attles and conspiracies against Protestants, such
as the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, a failed assassination attempt against King James I of
England and VI of Scotland (1566–1625) by English Catholics.
In Catholic Europe, the Jesuits became dominant by the mid-seventeenth century
because of their usefulness to the church in its new form. After the struggles and
wars during the Counter-Reformation, the church had emerged as a reforming
institution enlivened by the Jesuits’ spiritual zeal and practical orientation. Jesuits
served as confessor to most European monarchs. They were the first order to spe-
cialize in formal education, training both fellow Jesuits as well as other clergy. This
education focus largely came from Ignatius’ demand for a high level of academic
training for ministry because most clergy were poor educated. With their success
came leadership positions. The first Jesuit-trained pope was Gregory XV (1554–1623)
in 1621. Soon the first Jesuits w ere canonized, with Ignatius and Francis Xavier
sanctified in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jesuit education stressed many
aspects of what became modern education. Their educational philosophy featured
ability-separated classes, no promotion without content mastering, and structured
drill learning, argumentation, and exercises. Unfortunately, the requirement of
knowing at least some Latin excluded the illiterate. The Jesuits’ degree-offering uni-
versities prospered during this period, drawing the nobility as well as common
people. The Jesuits worked with the Ursulines of the Roman Union, a female-only
Catholic religious order, to provide parallel female education.
Jesuits also performed evangelism and helping services in rural Europe and glob-
ally. Perhaps the most prominent Jesuit at this time in France was Jean-François
Régis (1597–1640), who was a French priest canonized as a saint by the church in
1737. Regis served those who were forgotten and marginalized (such as bubonic
plague victims in Toulouse from 1632 to 1634), visited the sick, assisted the needy,
and preached Catholic doctrine to c hildren and the poor. He is best known for his
supportive work for at-r isk women and orphans.
The Jesuits did extensive missions across the Atlantic in the Americas. Jesuits
did ministry and provided serv ices in the Americas u nder the supervision of their
European provinces. With the discovery and colonization of New France, begin-
ning with the exploration of the St. Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier (1491–1557)
in 1534, the Jesuits sent many missions to Canada.
Spanish Jesuits crossed the Atlantic to the Americas by the end of the seven-
teenth century, and set up many churches and villages in the southwestern US and
Mexico. The Spanish Jesuit, Fr. Pedro Martinez (1533–1566), reached Florida in
1566 and became the first martyr in the New World. In colonial Mexico, the Jesu-
its set up 20 missions in Baja California and 23 missions in the Sonoran Desert of
Mexico and southern Arizona. In 1611, the first known mass on American soil was
celebrated at the mouth of the Kennebec River.
French Jesuits traveled through Maine and explored the unchartered G reat
Lakes. In the 1640s, Jesuit missionaries converted many Huron natives in the G reat
Lakes area. Their missions often came into conflict with native tribes, such as the
Iroquois. Jesuits’ attempts to eliminate the natives’ matriarchy provoked strong
340 J ESUITS
opposition. In 1673, French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette S.J. (1637–1675)

and explorer Louis Jolliet (1645–1700) w ere the first Europeans to investigate and
map the northern part of the Mississippi River. Marquette also founded Michigan’s
first European settlement, Sault Ste. Marie.
The Jesuits’ missionary work in the Americas was criticized in Spain and Portu-
gal for interfering with colonial rule. Frequently the only force standing between the
Native Americans and slavery, the Jesuits sought to help the native p eoples with
education and economic development rather than to exploit their lands. Jesuit
scholars in foreign missions studied the native languages and produced grammars
and dictionaries.
During 1750–1773, the Jesuits were suppressed in Portugal, France, the Two
Sicilies, Parma, and the Spanish Empire. In Portugal, 1,100 Jesuits w ere banished
from the country, and 250 w ere imprisoned. The suppression, including dissolu-
tion of the country’s Jesuit branch, banishment, imprisonment, and wealth con-
fiscation, occurred in all nations in Europe except Prussia and Russia. The Jesuits
were forced to abandon their missions in the Americas. The pope stopped Jesuit
pensions, eliminated their control of education, and forbade their ceremonial usage of
the papal Swiss Guard and musicians. The suppression was stimulated by the Jesuits’
colonial social justice work, jealousy of their education successes, and the ongoing
battles between Catholics and Protestants.
After restoration in 1814, the Jesuits grew rapidly. They started many Jesuit col-
leges and universities in Europe and the United States, such as Holy Cross in Worces-
ter, Massachusetts (1843), Loyola College, Baltimore (1852), and Boston College
(1863). Some of the order w ere involved with the Ultramontanist movement empha-
sizing papal authority and the declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1870. On the other
hand, Jesuits have been criticized by conservative Catholics for being too liberal.
Gradually, the Jesuits began r unning their ministries from the United States.
The first United States Jesuit college, Georgetown, was established in 1789. In
1833, the Maryland Province of Jesuits became the first in the United States. By
the mid-1800s, Italian Jesuits were doing work among the p eople of Colorado,
Montana, and California. Jesuits served as chaplains during the American Civil
War (1861–1865). By 1900, there were multiple Jesuit provinces and institutions
across the country.
William P. Kladky
See also: Acosta, José de; Brébeuf, St. Jean de; Protestant Reformation; Tekakwitha,
Saint Kateri
Further Reading
Bokenkotter, Thomas. 2004. A Concise History of the Catholic Church. New York: Doubleday.
Lacouture, Jean. 1995. Jesuits: A Multibiography. Washington, DC: Counterpoint.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. 2009. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: Viking.
O’Malley, John W. 1993. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wright, Jonathan. 2004. God’s Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue, and Power. A History of
the Jesuits. New York: Doubleday.
J OINT- STO C K C O M PANIES 341
J O I N T-S T O C K C O M PA N I E S
Joint-stock companies were early modern corporations that first appeared in Europe
in the later sixteenth-century to conduct legitimate business enterprises, such as
overseas trade and colonization, considered too large, expensive, or risky for indi-
viduals, small partnerships, or even the state to undertake. Joint-stock companies
played a crucial role in the creation of the Atlantic world by tying together its p
eople,
goods, and economies. T oday joint-stock companies are rare in the United States,
but many continue to operate in a number of European countries.
A joint-stock company is formed when a group of individuals agree to collec-
tively invest capital into a business venture as transferable stocks and therefore share
both its profits and losses. There are two types of investment: active and passive.
Active investment involves both monetary and participatory contributions from
the investor, whereas passive investment entails only financial obligations. Inves-
tors then conclude an agreement that serves as the company’s charter, which
outlines its purpose, organization, and practices. Many joint-stock companies
also operate under government issued charters, which provide state-sanction to
the business and often grant the company exclusive trade or property rights. In
return for bestowing such rights the state receives a percentage of the company’s
profits. Governance is conducted through a board of directors, selected from and
by the company’s shareholders. Although the structure of such boards varied
over time and space, they generally consisted of a governor, deputy governor, and
council.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, joint-stock companies came to ful-
fill important public roles in countries such as England, and the Dutch Nether-
lands, where government was underdeveloped or cash poor. Many joint-stock
companies w ere commissioned to undertake domestic public works projects such
as building roads, canals, and bridges, and given exclusive property rights and the
authority to charge fees for their use. However, the first major joint-stock companies
were created in support of transoceanic pursuits.
Debate on the Origin of Joint-Stock

Companies
Although the joint-stock company originated in medieval Europe, scholars
dispute the exact time and location of its inception. Some scholars, called
“receptionists,” trace advent of the business form to fourteenth-century Genoa
and state-chartered organi zations called maone that w ere created to collect
taxes, facilitate overseas trade, or engage in military conquest. Like later joint-
stock companies, maone sold shares to mitigate individual risk and paid
investors through dividends. Other scholars, termed “evolutionists,” argue
that no direct link exists between the maone and join-stock companies, and
that joint-stock companies likely emerged in the sixteenth century from pre-
existing associations such as guilds or the regulated company.
342 J OINT- STO C K C O M PANIES
The European exploration of Africa and America was a costly and risky endeavor.
To accumulate the requisite capital and limit their individual liability, ambitious
European merchants and gentlemen combined into joint-stock ventures. In the two
centuries following Columbus’s voyages to America, Europeans formed thousands
of joint-stock companies aimed at exploiting the resources of the Atlantic world.
In 1555, English merchants eager to ply their goods in Russia formed the Muscovy
Company, the first significant joint-stock company. Early on joint-stock companies,
such as the Muscovy Company, formed on a temporary basis, usually to fund a single
voyage of transatlantic trade. The Dutch East India Company became the first to
organize itself on a permanent basis by selling public stocks. In 1602, Dutch mer-
chants determined to break Portugal’s hegemony over the East Indies spice trade
came together under the Dutch East India Company, which would provide a basic
model for later joint-stock companies. It was a mighty entity possessing quasi-
sovereign powers. The company received a charter from the Dutch government
granting a 21-year monopoly over trade in Asia and empowering it to wage war,
make treaties, coin money, and plant colonies in its pursuit of that trade. By the
1620s, similarly organized companies concerned with Atlantic exploits had appeared
in England, Sweden, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. Although many of
these companies failed, some experienced fantastic success. By the beginning of the
eighteenth century joint-stock companies constituted 12 percent of E ngland’s total
industrial wealth, while the South Sea Company, which enjoyed a monopoly of
England’s trade with South America, was among the largest businesses in Europe
(Rogers 1892, 337). Much of their success derived from their overseas ventures.
Joint-stock companies w ere instrumental in the colonization of the Atlantic
world. Perhaps their most significant contribution was in ending Iberian hegemony
over the region and opening it up to settlement and trade by the rest of Europe.
By right of first discovery, Spain claimed exclusive control over American terri-
tory and commerce and freely executed intruders as pirates. Spain and Portugal
had successfully built their Atlantic empires under the auspices of their Crowns;
but other European monarchs lacked the w ill, resources, or infrastructure to sup-
port such endeavors. Instead they initially gave their blessing to individual efforts,
as had England’s monarch Elizabeth I (1533–1603) to Walter Raleigh’s (ca. 1552–
1618) attempt in 1587 to settle what is now North Carolina. His Roanoke Colony
terminated in complete disaster, however, after all its 114 colonists disappeared never
to be heard from again. Thus at the beginning of the seventeenth c entury the Atlan-
tic Ocean was still a Spanish lake. That finally changed following the formation of
the Virginia Company in 1606, a joint-stock organized by merchants and gentle-
men and chartered by the English Crown to establish colonies along the east coast
of North America. A year later the company landed colonists on the east coast of
North America at Chesapeake Bay where they founded Jamestown, the first perma-
nent English settlement in the Americas. In 1624, the Dutch West Indian Company
established the colony of New Netherland, near the current city of Albany, New
York, giving the Dutch their first secure foothold in North America. Between 1620
and 1630 joint-stock companies directed by English Puritans planted the colonies
of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay off the coast of present day New England. By
J OINT- STO C K C O M PANIES 343
their royal charters, these joint-stock colonies were empowered to govern them-
selves, and settlers formed local assemblies to administer their colonies. T hese
assembles were organized along a corporate structure, and historians have long
pointed to their relative representativeness as the origin of American democracy
(Andrews 1924, 32–34).
In addition to shaping the political geography and culture of the Atlantic basin,
joint-stock companies also directed its commerce. They coordinated the Atlantic
triangular trade, wherein European manufactured goods were traded to Africa in
exchange for slaves sent to work in America to produce cash crops for export to
Europe. The tremendous flow of goods and p eople entailed in the trade transformed
the societies involved, creating new multicultural communities and multinational
corporations. This triangular trade also reaped huge profits for European inves-
tors, spurring commercial expansion and innovation at home.
As such, the joint-stock company played a central role in Europe’s Financial Rev-
olution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was characterized by
new economic techniques such as the use of bills of exchange, the remittance of
transferable shares, the issuance of insurance, and the establishment of stock
exchanges and banking institutions. As the forerunner to the modern corporation,
the joint-stock company developed many of the common features of contemporary
business organization such as the division of investors from managers, the raising
of capital by the selling of shares, the regular meeting of shareholders, the reporting
of financial information to stockholders, the collective appointment of directors,
the distribution of profits by dividends, and the concept of limited liability. The
joint-stock method of generating business capital through exchangeable shares led
to the creation of new marketplaces such as the stock exchange, where securities
could be regulated and traded; provided the monetary means for the creation of
central financial institutions such as the Bank of E ngland; generated demand for
newspapers and journals that reported stock prices; and democratized business
enterprises by allowing people from across the social spectrum to participate as
investors. In consequence, the history of the joint-stock company is situated at the
advent of both Western colonialism and capitalism.
Matthew Reardon
See also: Dutch West India Company; European Exploration; Jamestown
Further Reading
Andrews, Charles M. 1924. The Colonial Background of the American Revolution. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.
Carlos, Ann M., and Stephen Nicolas. 1996. “Theory and History: Seventeenth-Century
Joint-Stock Chartered Trading Companies.” The Journal of Economic History 56 (4):
916–924.
Rogers, Thorold. 1892. Industrial and Commercial History of England. New York: G.P.
Putnam.
Walker, C. E. 1931. “The History of the Joint Stock Company.” The Accounting Review 6
(2): 97–105.
344 J UAN DIE G O
JUAN DIEGO (1474–1548)

Juan Diego was born Cuauhtlatoatzin, which means “Talking Eagle” in Nahuatl,
the language of the Aztec Empire. He was raised near the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán
in the village of Cuautitlán. Juan Diego converted to Christianity after the con-
queror Hernán Cortés attacked Tenochtitlán, overthrew the Aztec Empire, and
established the Spanish Empire’s colonial capital in Mexico City in 1521. Ten years
later, Juan Diego is said to have been visited near Mexico City by the Virgin Mary,
the m other of Jesus, who was an object of veneration by Christians and a ubiqui-
tous subject of European art, literature, and music. The Virgin Mary appeared to
Juan Diego in an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Sierra de Guadalupe is
located in Spain’s Extremadura region, which was the birthplace of many conquer-
ors, including Cortés. The Marian apparitions to Juan Diego greatly aided the Span-
ish in converting indigenous p eoples to Roman Catholicism as part of their empire
building in the Western Hemisphere.
Catholic tradition holds that the Virgin Mary appeared in an image of the Vir-
gin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego while on his way to church on December 9, 1531.
The Virgin was surrounded in heavenly light on Tepeyac Hill on the outskirts of
Mexico City. Speaking the Nahuatl language, the Virgin instructed Juan Diego to
tell Bishop Juan de Zumárraga to build a shrine for her on Tepeyac Hill. Zumár-
raga had arrived in Mexico from Spain in 1528, after being appointed first Bishop
of Mexico and Protector of the Indians by Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor and
king of Spain. Zumárraga asked Juan Diego for proof of his assertions. Juan Diego
saw the Virgin a second time on December 12 while out seeking a priest to adminis-
ter the Catholic last rites to his uncle. Juan Diego explained Zumárraga’s skepticism
to the Virgin, who told him that his u ncle would recover from his sickness. She
also asked him to gather roses to bring to Zumárraga. Even though it was winter,
Juan Diego found many roses on arid Tepeyac Hill. While presenting the roses to
Zumárraga, Juan Diego discovered the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image imprinted on
the inside of his cloak. As a result, Zumárraga supported the building of a chapel
on Tepeyac Hill in the Virgin’s honor. Juan Diego’s uncle was restored to good
health. Juan Diego spent the rest of his life as caretaker of the Virgin of Guadalupe
shrine, residing in a small h ouse on Tepeyac Hill, where he was buried in 1548.
In 1648, the Catholic priest Miguel Sánchez published Imagen de la Virgen María
(Image of the Virgin Mary), the first known account of the Marian apparitions to
Juan Diego. According to Sánchez, the Virgin of Guadalupe conferred many bless-
ings, favors, and miracles on the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica during the
early years of their Christianization to attract them to Catholicism. In 1649, the
Catholic priest Luis Laso de la Vega published in Nahuatl an account of the Mar-
ian apparitions to Juan Diego that closely paralleled Sánchez’s account. A fter the
mid-seventeenth century, Mesoamerican people began participating in extensive
Marian devotions, with the Virgin of Guadalupe becoming their principal Marian
devotion. In 1754, Pope Benedict XIV designated the Virgin of Guadalupe as Patron-
ess of New Spain and established her feast day on December 12.
Arguments against the validity of the origins of the accounts of the Marian appa-
ritions to Juan Diego w ere first collected for a 1794 address to the Royal Academy
J UAN DIE G O 345
of History in Madrid by Juan Bautista Muñoz, whom Spain’s King Charles III
appointed as official historian of the Indies. Historical evidence reveals that a shrine
dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe has been active on Tepeyac Hill since the
mid-sixteenth c entury. Scholars disagree whether accounts of the Virgin’s appear-
ances to Juan Diego initiated devotion to her or whether the Marian apparition
accounts are a l ater development that provided an origin story for a previously exist-
ing devotion.
Dramatic readings and reenactments of the Virgin’s appearance to Juan Diego
became common worship practices, demonstrating the success of the Spanish
Empire’s efforts to promote Marian devotion in the Western Hemisphere. Believ-
ing that the Marian apparitions had played a formative role in the introduction of
Christianity in the Western Hemisphere under God’s providential guidance, Cath-
olic clergymen, including Franciscans and Jesuits, preached sermons comparing
Juan Diego to Moses and Tepeyac Hill to Mount Sinai. The image of the Virgin of
Guadalupe went on to play a formative role in the creation of the independent
nation of Mexico, too. Miguel Hidalgo, a Catholic priest turned insurrectionist
leader, is considered the father of Mexican independence. In 1810, Hidalgo began
the armed struggle for independence from Spain at his church in Dolores, Guana-
juato, and led the revolt u nder the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who repre-
sented the Catholicism of natives in New Spain.
In 1881, one of Mexico’s foremost historians, Joaquín García Icazbalceta, wrote
a biography of Bishop Zumárraga that gained attention for failing to bring up the
Marian apparitions to Juan Diego. Zumárraga worked with Antonio de Mendoza,
the first viceroy of New Spain, to uphold Spanish colonial rule and Christianize
Spain’s indigenous subjects in Mesoamerica and the Car ibbean. Zumárraga never
mentioned the Marian apparitions to Juan Diego in his various writings. In fact,
no discussions of the Marian apparitions have been found in any of the records or
documents of Zumárraga’s life, including his w ill. García Icazbalceta wrote a letter
to the Catholic archbishop of Mexico in 1883 explaining the historical difficulty
of documenting the Marian apparitions and expressing his skepticism about their
authenticity. Nevertheless, in 1904, Pope Pius X granted basilica status to the shrine
on Tepeyac Hill, where Juan Diego’s famous cloak displayed.
The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe became the most visited pilgrimage site
in the Western Hemisphere. A fter Jesus of Nazareth, the Virgin of Guadalupe’s
Close Calls
Each year, millions of pilgrims flock to see Juan Diego’s cloak with the image
of Our Lady of Guadeloupe. Despite its age and fragile construction, the
cloak is remarkably well preserved. It has survived both accidents—in 1785,
a worker spilled acid on the cloak—and deliberate violence—in 1921, an anti-
clerical terrorist detonated a bomb near the cloak. In the latter instance, the
church was damaged but the garment and its image escaped unscathed.
346 J UDAIS M
image became the most replicated sacred icon in the Western Hemisphere. In 1979,
Pope John Paul II became the first pope to visit the shrine. With numerous miracles
attributed to him, Juan Diego became one of the most popular Christian figures in
Latin American and Car ibbean history. Despite scholarly arguments that he was a
symbolic rather than historical figure, Juan Diego was canonized by Pope John
Paul II on July 31, 2002, making him the Western Hemisphere’s first indigenous
saint. His feast day is December 9.
David M. Carletta
See also: Conquistadors; Hidalgo, Miguel; Virgin of Guadeloupe
Further Reading
Brading, D.A. 2001. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe, Image and Tradition across Five
Centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Matovina, Timothy. 2014. “The Origins of the Guadalupe Tradition in Mexico.” Catholic
Historical Review 100: 243–270.
Poole, Stafford. 2006. The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
JUDAISM
Judaism (from Latin: Iudaismus, originally from Hebrew, Yehudah, “Judah”) is the
religion, philosophy, and way of life of the Jewish people. One of the oldest mono
theistic religions, Judaism is the expression of the covenantal relationship that God
established with the C hildren of Israel. The history of the Jews during the 1400–
1900 period was a mixture of repression and expulsion, followed by a rise in tol-
erance during the Renaissance, with renewed opportunities for increased public
life during the age of exploration and colonization. Judaism flourished in England
and the Netherlands, but was brutally repressed in Italy, Portugal, and Spain, where
many Jews were migrated, most to more tolerant countries in Europe but a grow-
ing number to the New World.
Spain was at one time home to the largest population of Jews in the world. They
worked in trade, medicine, the arts, and government. Partly this was the result of
the longtime Muslim occupation of southern Spain, where Jews were given much
freedom b ecause of their skills in money lending and other literate occupations.
Jews nevertheless faced a continuing upsurge of anti-Semitism across Europe. The
Black Death plague in the mid-1300s had been largely blamed on the Jews, and
many w ere expelled from the towns. Outbreaks of violence in Spain, in 1391, led
to thousands of Jews becoming conversos, converts to Christianity. Most did this to
avoid the repression and violence, but they received instruction and assistance from
nearby Jews to live as closely to Judaism as possible. Anti-Semitism and expulsion
from Christian lands had many causes, but economic rivalry and church resent-
ment of Jewish nonconversion played critical roles. All areas bordering the Atlan-
tic Ocean expelled their Jewish populations.
J UDAIS M 347
The deceptions of the conversos led to the 1480 beginning of the Inquisition
imposed by the Queen Isabella of Castille (1451–1504) after a number of conversos
were caught celebrating the Jewish Seder on the first night of Passover. The Inqui-
sition included public strangling and burning those considered heretics, such as
Jews and Gypsies, and continued through the eighteenth c entury.
After the conquest of Granada from Muslim rule in 1492, the Jews were expelled
from Spain. Most expelled Jews went to Portugal and Italy, but some eventually
went to the Americas. However, anti-Semitism followed the evicted Jews. An edict
in 1496 required Jews to convert to Christianity or leave Portugal. The Portuguese
Inquisition began in 1536 and continued u ntil 1821. The expulsed Jews went to
many places, such as São Tomé and Príncipe off the African coast. Most Portu-
guese Jews would eventually go to Amsterdam, Thessaloniki in Greece, Constan-
tinople, France, Morocco, Brazil, Curaçao, and the Antilles. The ones who remained
and converted, w ere constantly watched by the Inquisition. The first generation of
converts were known as “Marranos” and their descendants w ere called “Crypto-
Jews.” Many converts eventually left Portugal.
Morocco became a sixteenth century sanctuary for Marranos from the Iberian
Peninsula, the Madeira Islands, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Americas.
The sultan Muhammad al-Shaykh al-Wattāul (r. 1465–1504) gave a warm welcome
to the Spanish and Portuguese refugees (known as megorashim) between 1492 and
1496. When facing Islamic persecution, or for the purposes of trade, Jews moved
from Egypt, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and Morocco to other parts of North and West Africa.
There were other, positive developments for Jews during this period. Some of
the most important figures during the Renaissance had Jewish teachers. The advent
of publishing revolutionized communication, and t here w ere many Jewish authors
during this period, such as legal expert Joseph Caro (1488–1575). In 1486, the
first Jewish prayer book was published in Soncino, Italy. The first complete edition
of the Hebrew Bible was printed in Soncino, Italy, in 1488. The study of Hebrew, as
part of the refocus on classical learning, became more popular. Cultured Europeans
Abraham Zacuto, an Exiled

Jewish Inventor
In 1492, just as he was beginning his voyage across the Atlantic to discover
America, Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) sailed past ships filled with
Jews disembarking from the port near Sevilla. One of the Jews who fled to
Portugal at this time was the inventor Abraham Zacuto (1452–1515). In 1478,
Zacuto, a Sephardi Jewish astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, and rabbi,
had developed a new type of astrolabe used for determining latitude while at
sea. It had proven critical to the voyages of Vasco de Gama (ca. 1460–1524).
Zacuto was again forced to flee Portugal during a period of forced conver-
sions. In 1498, he went to Tunis and wrote a history of the Jews.
348 J UDAIS M
resultantly became more sympathetic toward Jewish literary achievements. Jews

aided in transferring the knowledge of Eastern Europe and Islamic areas to West-
ern Europe. Jewish authors and academicians made strides in medicine, mathe
matics, astronomy, and philosophy that paved f uture work.
German theology professor Martin Luther (1483–1546), who launched the Prot-
estant Reformation, initially attacked the Roman Catholic Church for its negative
treatment of the Jews. He especially criticized the Church’s persecutions in the
name of conversion. When the Jews subsequently did not convert to Lutheranism,
he attacked the Jews and Judaism vociferously.
As the Renaissance waned, the Catholic-Protestant b attles led to the imposition
of strict religious doctrine adherence and civil order decrees on Jews. This ended
Italy being a Jewish refuge for Jews from Spain and Portugal. Ravenna expelled
the Jews in 1491. In 1516, the closed Jewish Quarter in Venice was called the Geto
Nuovo (New Foundry). “Geto” later evolved into the word “ghetto.” Pope Paul IV
(1476–1559) required all Jews in the Papal States to live in ghettos and restricted
their economic activity with Christians to selling used clothes. After banning the
Talmud in 1559, Pope Paul V (1552–1621) finally expelled the Jews, excepting the
cities of Ancona and Rome.
In every country, the Jewish ghettos were in the worst section of a city or town,
with narrow streets and closely-packed housing; an extremely unhealthy situation.
The area was walled off from the rest of the town. Extreme poverty prevailed. The
quality of life varied, as everywhere, with the level of anti-Semitism of the ruler.
The struggles of the Dutch and English for political independence led to these
nations’ being comparatively more hospitable to the Jews. Refugees from Spain
reached the Netherlands in the fifteenth c entury. The Dutch permitted the Mar-
ranos to observe Judaism openly around 1600, and the overall status of Jews was
generally positive. In almost all other European countries, Jews w ere isolated eco
nomically, socially, and pol itic ally. In the Dutch and English nations, they had
economic and social integration centuries before other European Jewry.
The Sephardic Jews, escapees from Portugal or Spain, prospered as the Dutch
economy improved. They joined in the expanding colonial trade as Amsterdam
became a center of world trade and shipping. In 1602, the government chartered
the Dutch East India Company which led to several significant expeditions includ-
ing the 1609 discovery of parts of North America by Henry Hudson (1570–1611).
Some Jews were directors of the Dutch West India Company, which had a trade
monopoly in the West Indies (the Car ibbean) and jurisdiction over the Atlantic
slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. The first Dutch Jew to arrive
in America was Elias Legarde (1593–1670), a Sephardic Jew who arrived at James
City, V irginia, on the Abigail in 1621.
Spanish Jews in Holland established trade between the Dutch and Spanish South
America in 1621. Francisco Ribeiro, a Portuguese captain with Dutch Jewish
relations, was part of Dutch plans to conquer Brazil. A fter the Dutch in Brazil
appealed for more craftsmen of all kinds, about 600 Jews left Amsterdam in 1642.
After Portugal defeated Holland to retake Brazil in 1654, Jews migrated to other
Dutch colonial settlements in the Americas including the Car ibbean, with some
J UDAIS M 349
g oing to New Amsterdam. In Dutch Brazil, Jews did well in the sugar industry,
finance, and the slave trade. Jews from Dutch Curaçao went to Venezuela to trade, and
did not begin to s ettle permanently until the middle of the nineteenth century.
North Carolina was the site of the first Jewish settlement in an English colony
in North America when Joachim Ganz, a native of Prague, arrived in 1585. The
second Jew known to have lived in northern North America was Solomon Franco,
a Sephardic Jew from Holland who settled in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Col-
ony in 1649. Although the first organized Jewish communities in New Jersey were
not established u ntil the m
iddle of the nineteenth c entury, Jewish merchants from
Philadelphia and New York conducted business in the state as early as the seven-
teenth century.
Some Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal settled in E ngland, where they
attended church and worshipped as Christians but practiced Judaism privately.
English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) lifted the prohibition against
Jews in 1656. Judaism then flourished, with Jews entering a variety of occupations.
The first synagogue was founded in 1657. The English continued this tolerance
practice to the New World. The Jewish Naturalization Act was passed in 1653, per-
mitting Jews who were born outside England to be naturalized as citizens without
having to become a member of the Church of E ngland. A fter vociferous public pro-
test, the act was repealed in 1654. When the English captured the Netherlands’
New Amsterdam colony in 1664, Jewish rights were respected. The founding of
the first major Jewish settlement in North America was in Newport, Rhode Island,
in 1660. Jews arrived in Newport as early as 1658.
In the eighteenth c entury, immigration to the Americas increased especially to
New York. Some Jews settled on Long Island and in Westchester by the 1760s; most
of Spanish-Portuguese origin working as merchants, peddlers, and farmers. The
Jewish population grew to an estimated 60,000–80,000 in New York by 1880 (Mar-
cus 1951, 191–210). Massachusetts’ first permanent Jewish settlement was in the
late 1830s in Boston, with migrants from central Europe. Jews settled in the 1750s
in Philadelphia, where many worked in shipping. When Spanish colonial rule
ended in 1821, Panama was adjoined to Colombia and some Sephardic Jews from
Jamaica and Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe settled t here.
Judaism attained legal equality in E ngland. In 1833, the first Jewish emancipa-
tion bill passed the House of Commons but failed in the House of Lords. That year,
the first Jew was admitted to the Bar and the first Jewish sheriff was appointed two
years later. Earlier Jewish migrants to the Americas, such as Mexico’s Conversos,
became more settled.
Despite this progress, an upsurge of European anti-Semitism began in the late
1800s. In France, anti-Semitic newspapers w ere circulated, including the best-
selling La France Juive (1886), and Jews were blamed for the collapse of a major
Catholic bank. The infamous Dreyfus case was tried, further inflaming the public.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), a Jew, was arrested in 1894 for spying for
Germany and received a life sentence. The writings of Emile Zola (1840–1902),
and Jean Jaures (1859–1914) proved that the government had chosen to repress
evidence of Dreyfus’ innocence, but it took 10 years for Dreyfus to be exonerated.
350 J UDAIS M
hese various persecutions and Russian state-sponsored pogroms led many Jews
T
to believe that they would only be safe in their own nation. Theodor Herzl (1860–
1904) wrote The Jewish State: A Modern Solution to the Jewish Question in 1896. His
Zionist dream eventually led to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.
The anti-Semitism also sparked an increasing Jewish migration to the United
States and South America. Millions of Jews arrived in the United States between
1890 and 1924, and many went to the southern tip of the continent in Argentina
and Uruguay. A number went to Honduras with most coming from Russia, Poland,
Germany, Romania, and Hungary. A few Sephardic Jews came from Greece, Turkey,
and North Africa.
William P. Kladky
See also: British Atlantic; Dutch Atlantic; Migration; Reconquista
Further Reading
Grayzel, Solomon. 1968. A History of the Jews. New York: Penguin.
Marcus, J. R. 1951. Early American Jewry. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America.
Sachar, Howard M. 1990. The Course of Modern Jewish History. New York: Vintage Books.
Sarna, Jonathan D. 2004. American Judaism: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
K
KINGDOM OF KONGO
The Kingdom of Kongo was a highly developed and influential central African
empire that existed in various forms from the mid-fourteenth c entury u ntil the late
nineteenth c entury. The centralized federation ruled a territory encompassing an
estimated 300 square miles and spanning portions of present-day Democratic
Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, and Angola. The kingdom was likely named
after the Kikongo language spoken by its inhabitants. An estimated 2 to 3 million
people lived within the realm (Hochschild 1999, 8). Kongo was the first central
African state to develop substantial and long-lasting economic, political, and cul-
tural ties to the Atlantic world. The p eople of Kongo also served as a significant
source of forced African labor in the Americas thereby fueling the Atlantic trading
network. Like much of the African continent, the kingdom’s involvement with
Atlantic commerce largely yielded tragic consequences for its inhabitants.
The formation of the imperial federation began around 1350, through alliances
and conquests between small rival states, although some scholars date its begin-
nings even earlier. Many historians attribute the further centralization of the king-
dom to Lukeni lua Nimi (ca. 1380–1420), the leader who founded the city of Mbanza
Kongo, which would become the capital. Along with the capital, the king ruled over
the central provinces of Soyo, Mbata, Mbama, Mpemba, Nsundi, Mpangu, and a
number of smaller territories. Initially, Kongo provinces appear to have operated
with significant autonomy. Governors inherited their positions and these provin-
cial rulers, in turn, elected the king from among the royal f amily. But by 1500, the
monarchy expanded its political power largely through conquest. As a result, a
number of state leaders were appointed by the king rather than inheriting their
offices, thereby further strengthening imperial power. Each state provided tribute
payments and supplied soldiers to the capital. Through this system of governance,
the king could mobilize an army of 80,000 soldiers by the late fifteenth century
(Gondola 2002, 28).
The kingdom was highly organized and powerful when a Portuguese expedition,
principally in search of riches, arrived on its shores in 1483. Led by the Portuguese
explorer Diogo Cão, the expedition was the first of many Portuguese trips to the
realm. In 1491, the Portuguese monarch King João II (1455–1495) sent represen-
tatives to establish lasting trade and cultural connections with the kingdom. The
emissaries brought supplies of European trade goods along with a number of priests,
craftsmen, and soldiers. When the party arrived, the king Nzinga Mbembe was
quickly baptized and adopted the Catholic name João I in honor of his new trading
352 K IN G DO M OF K ON G O
partner. The Kongo began trading items such ivory, copper, and cloth in exchange
for guns, fabrics, and various European luxury goods. Once the Kongolese mon-
arch passed away in 1506, his Catholic son Afonso I (1460–1542) took the throne.
Trade and cultural exchange with Portugal expanded greatly u nder the new king’s
rule.
While the kings initially received the explorers enthusiastically, the introduc-
tion of Portuguese influence would contribute significantly to Kongo’s decline. In
part, the people of Kongo welcomed the European visitors because their foreign
ships and comparatively pale complexion w ere mistakenly associated with ancient
spirits. Moreover, the king viewed acceptance of Portuguese cultural elements and
trade goods as potential sources for increased political power. Catholicism provided
an opportunity to increase royal authority by controlling who could convert to the
new faith. Similarly, foreign goods offered another potential source of political
power and control. The ability to manage the empire’s currency, nzimbu (cowry)
shells, and to gift rare goods to loyal governors and officials w ere central to the
king’s ability to maintain loyalty and stability. Therefore, Portuguese trade goods
increased the number of tools in the monarch’s political arsenal, provided that the
king could control the flow of European goods. In contrast, the Portuguese kings
were largely motivated by potential profit. King João II sought to use Catholicism
to exert influence over the Kingdom of Kongo and to use trading rights for exten-
sive access to African resources.
These contesting motivations proved disastrous for Kongo. Afonso I reigned for
the longest period in the kingdom’s history. During his reign, he witnessed the
optimism of foreign economic and social ties turn to ruin. Afonso I was an intel-
ligent and capable ruler who attempted the problematic task of selective cultural
exchange. He was a dedicated Catholic, but he combined the newly introduced
religion with traditional Kongolese beliefs. The ruler insisted upon selecting sub-
jects to be trained as priests rather than allowing Portuguese clergy to indepen
dently operate religious life in the realm. While the monarch attempted to control
who was permitted to be converted, many other provincial elites w ere soon bap-
tized by Portuguese priests. Similarly, Portuguese traders began trading with nobles
and peasants without permission from the Crown. This subverted royal authority
and undermined imperial power by decreasing the exclusivity of European trade
goods. As a result, the king was forced to import larger quantities of Portuguese
items, creating a trade imbalance.
The final and most significant development that crippled the kingdom during
Afonso I’s reign was the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade. Once Portuguese
explorers arrived on the shores of Brazil in 1500, the country colonized the terri-
tory over the next few decades, quickly creating sugar plantations with insatiable
labor requirements. As indigenous Brazilian and European labor w ere found insuf-
ficient, the Portuguese became increasingly reliant upon African l abor. The Portu-
guese first traded with the king of Kongo for relatively small numbers of existing
slaves. It should be briefly mentioned that traditional African conceptions of slav-
ery were significantly different than the institution which emerged in the Americas.
K IN G DO M OF K ON G O 353
Traditional African slavery was typically far less brutal, often temporary, and lacked
the racialized stigma found in American slavery.
As Portuguese demand for slaves increased, Afonso attempted to resist and
insisted on exporting goods rather than drastically increasing the trade in p eople.
However, Portuguese merchants in the Kongo traded with nobles and peasants for
slaves without authorization for the promise of significant wealth. The high value
of captives meant slaves became more valuable than traditional Kongo currency
thereby further crippling the king’s power. As a result, Afonso famously wrote
numerous letters to Portuguese kings asking for aid from his fellow Catholic mon-
archs. He also desperately communicated his fears that 10 of his young relatives
were kidnapped and enslaved (scholars have found that they w ere abducted and
sent to Brazil as slaves). King João III (1502–1557) provided relatively aphetic
responses claiming that the dominion had plenty of people to spare. Moreover, the
trade imbalance with the Portuguese meant Afonso had little economic leverage
to influence the Portuguese kings. The Kongo monarch even attempted to send
envoys to the pope for assistance, but the representatives w ere intercepted by the
Portuguese upon arrival in Europe.
Afonso I was succeeded by his grandson Diogo I (r. 1545–1561) who overthrew
his father with popular support. Diogo followed in his grandfather’s footsteps by
attempting to control Portuguese commercial influence with marginal success.
Imperial power continued to decline and the southern province of Ndongo asserted
its independence under his rule. Following a number of short-reigning monarchs,
King Àlvaro I (r. 1568–1587) was forced to expand relations with the Portuguese
once a group called the Jagas (meaning “barbarians”) attacked the kingdom from
the east and sacked the capital in 1568. These were likely groups retaliating against
slave raiding conducted by nobles in southeastern provinces. The monarch requested
aid and the Portuguese provided troops in exchange for the southern island of
Luanda. From the territory and, later the colonization of Ndongo, the Portuguese
established the colony of Angola. Luanda remains the capital city of Angola to this
day. While Àlvaro’s concession did help him regain control over his kingdom,
Angola further weakened Kongolese power by undercutting trade with its provinces
and neighbors.
The empire became increasingly plagued by succession disputes and rebellions.
Because Portuguese influence progressively marginalized royal power and wealth,
nobles became increasingly emboldened to oppose the monarchy. When Angola
invaded Kongo, defeated its army, and beheaded Kongolese King Antonio I in 1665,
at the Battle of Mbwila, the result was a catastrophic civil war for the Crown among
the realm’s powerful families. A number of provinces also declared independence
prior to the war. A measure of peace did not emerge u ntil the next c entury u
nder
the reign of Pedro IV (r. 1709–1718), who created the system of rotating the royal
office between noble families each generation. However, the peace was short-lived
and dissolved in subsequent generations.
By the nineteenth c entury, the empire was a loose federation territory with weak
centralization and considerable Portuguese influence. The Kingdom of Kongo never
354 K IN G W ILLIA M ’ S WA R
again reached its previous power and prominence. Though some historians attri-
bute Kongo’s decline to succession disputes, it is clear that Portuguese economic and
political activities directly contributed to the kingdom’s downfall. Furthermore, the
introduction of guns and the Atlantic slave trade produced ever-increasing chaos
and violence in the empire thereby greatly expanding instability. Indeed the empire’s
connections to the Atlantic economy deeply contributed to its collapse. Thus Euro
pean colonizers encountered far less organized resistance when the former kingdom
was divided into Portuguese, French, and Belgian colonies in the late nineteenth
century.
Michael Dickinson
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Brazil; Portuguese Atlantic; Slave Trade in Africa
Further Reading
Gondola, Ch. Didier. 2002. The History of Congo. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Hochschild, Adam. 1999. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colo-
nial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Nelson, Samuel H. 1994. Colonialism in The Congo Basin, 1880–1940. Athens: Ohio Univer-
sity Center for International Studies.
Newitt, Malyn, ed. 2010. The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History.
K I N G W I L L I A M ’ S WA R ( 1 6 8 8 – 1 6 9 7 )
Fought from 1688 to 1697, King William’s War was the North American compo-
nent of the War of the League of Augsburg. King William’s War was one of a series
of conflicts pitting English colonists, with some Native American support, against
French colonists and their Indian allies. Primarily comprising border raids, oper-
ations were conducted in what is now New Brunswick, Canada, as well as Maine,
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York. Additional fighting took place in
Acadia (Nova Scotia), Newfoundland, Hudson’s Bay, and Quebec City. The War of
the League of Augsburg came about as the general European reaction to France’s
attempts to expand and militarize its borders. King William’s War was based on
conflicting colonial claims between England and France, as well as Indian opposi-
tion to English expansion. When the war ended, the most important outcome was
that the fighting ceased, at least for the time being. There were no major territorial
gains for either side. With the exception of the fortress city of Strasbourg, France
surrendered all of the territory it had acquired during the war. In North America,
France withdrew from any areas that it still occupied as a result of the conflict.
Although New France had a population vastly smaller than the English popula-
tion of the northeastern colonies of English North America, it nonetheless enjoyed
other advantages over the English. New France was a single political entity, and it
had a much easier task in coordinating military and political initiatives. English
colonies in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Con-
necticut w ere more a collection of separately governed colonies and did not have
K IN G W ILLIA M ’ S WA R 355
unity of command or unity of purpose. A high proportion of French males pos-

sessed wilderness experience, making them significantly better soldiers than the
English colonists. In addition, the French had greater success in working with their
Indian allies.
Two factors affected how the war was conducted. First, no agreed upon bound
aries existed between the French and English possessions. Territorial claims over-
lapped, making English settlements, in what is now Maine, obvious targets for the
French, who also claimed the same lands. Second, on both sides it was impossible
to secure the frontier against raids since as one approached the border (such as it
was) settlements were located farther apart and populations grew sparser. This
factor mostly affected the English settlers who found that staying on a border was
untenable. English settlers fled what they considered a dangerous area, which led
the Massachusetts General Court to forbid them to leave without permission in
1695.
While the conflict officially began in 1688, when King William joined with the
League of Augsburg against France, fighting in North America had started earlier.
In 1686, French naval forces captured trading posts in Hudson’s Bay; the next year,
Massachusetts forces raided Indian villages in what is now Maine. French and
Huron Indians also attacked Iroquois settlements in New York. In April 1688,
Edmund Andros, governor of the newly created Dominion of New E ngland (which
temporarily combined the separate New England colonies) raided the post of a
French trader, named Saint-Castin, located on Maine’s Penobscot River.
In June 1689, a combined French and Indian force attacked Dover, New Hamp-
shire. Over 20 people w ere killed and almost 30 carried off as captives. Two months
later, the French and their Indian allies took the coastal town of Pemaquid, Maine.
The English, led by Benjamin Church, a veteran of King Philip’s War, counterat-
tacked. Concurrently the Iroquois launched a damaging attack on LaChine, a
settlement near Montreal.
Although border raids w ere the most common form of fighting, the English col-
onies would make two attempts at fighting the French by conventional means in
1690. One was an expedition mounted by New York and Connecticut to capture
Montreal. That force reached Lake George, New York, before turning back. The
Snowmen Make Poor Guards

In February 1690, French and Indian forces attacked the English settlement
at Schenectady, New York. Although the conflict had thus far been situated
in New England, settlers in northern New York should have been prepared
to defend themselves. The war could easily spill over into their colony. Yet, the
settlers at Schenectady took few precautions. The commander at Schenect-
ady did not even close the gates to the town, while someone had jokingly
put up two snowmen as “guards” on the night of the attack. The French and
Indians killed many of the town’s English inhabitants.
356 K IN G W ILLIA M ’ S WA R
A nineteenth-century illustration shows French and Indian forces attacking an English

fort at Schenectady, New York. Two snowmen are shown as the only guards on duty.
(North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock Photo)
other attempt was conducted by a Massachusetts naval and land force that cap-
tured Port Royal, Nova Scotia, in May then arrived at Quebec City in October. The
Massachusetts force landed near the city, attempted to capture it, failed, and then
returned to Boston.
From 1690 on, border raiding by both sides predominated. In September 1690, a
second expedition u nder Benjamin Church recaptured Fort Pejepscot in Maine. In
New Hampshire, coastal settlements such as York and Wells, and interior settle-
ments such as Oyster River, w ere attacked by French and Indian forces. Groton,
Massachusetts, suffered a similar fate. In 1692, Church raided the Maine coast again,
and four years later led his fourth raid further north. In the same year as Church’s
last raid, the French wiped out English fishing stations in Newfoundland. In 1697,
Haverhill, Massachusetts, was attacked, an incident made famous by the exploits of
Hannah Duston, who killed and scalped the Indians who captured her and escaped
back to Massachusetts.
In September 1697, the Treaty of Ryswick ended both the War of the League of
Augsburg and King William’s War. New E ngland had only just begun its recovery
from King Philip’s War of the 1670s and now had to pay for this war’s military
expenditures. An added cost was reestablishing damaged and destroyed commu-
nities. In some respects, the Treaty of Ryswick changed nothing. Except for the
Hudson Bay posts captured by the French before the war, all territorial claims
reverted to where they had been in 1688. Most critically, there was no change in
K IN G W ILLIA M ’ S WA R 357
the potential for hostilities. Five years after Ryswick, Queen Anne’s War began in
the same area with the same belligerents. When that war ended it would be fol-
lowed by smaller wars fought in Maine, then King George’s War of the 1740s, and
then the French and Indian War, ending in 1763, that permanently eliminated the
French from Canada.
Robert N. Stacy
See also: British Atlantic; French Atlantic; Huron; Iroquois; New France
Further Reading
Atkinson, Jay. 2015. Massacre on the Merrimack: Hannah Duston’s Captivity and Revenge
in Colonial America. Lanham, MD: Lyons Press.
Leach, Douglas Edward. 1966. The Northern Colonial Frontier, 1607–1763. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
Lincoln, Charles H. 1941. Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675–1699. New York: Barnes &
Noble.
Parkman, Francis. 1897. Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV. Boston: L
ittle,
Brown.
Peckham, Howard Henry. 1964. The Colonial Wars, 1689–1762. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
L
LAS CASAS, BARTOLOMÉ DE (1484–1566)
Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, officially granted the administrative title “universal
representative or protector of all of the Indians of the Indies,” was a Spanish Domin-
ican friar, historian, theologian, and one of the most challenging and controver-
sial voices of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world. As a result of his unyielding
commitment to defending the rights and the dignity of the indigenous p eoples of
the Americas, during the early years of European colonization of the New World,
Las Casas found himself working in a space of constant tension with Spanish colo-
nists. His 1502 arrival in La Isla Española (Hispaniola)—present-day Dominican
Republic and Haiti—exposed him to a process of colonial domination that soon
became the central concern of his work for the remainder of his life. Although ini-
tially a participant in the colonial violence he eventually came to denounce, Las
Casas’ experience of the demographic collapse resulting from the conquest of the
Americas led him to become a relentless advocate for the natives. This task brought
him before the Spanish Crown and led him into heated theological and legal dis-
putes. His legacy continues both to inspire various indigenous resistance move-
ments, and to receive critical attention in debates about the complexities of
imperialism, modernity, Eurocentrism, universal human rights, and the nature of
colonial projects.
Born in Seville in 1484, Las Casas was fascinated as a young boy when Chris-
topher Columbus visited his city, displaying several Taíno natives following his
return to Spain from his first voyage in 1493. That same year, Las Casas saw his
father, Pedro de Las Casas, depart with Columbus on his second voyage. Aside from
being raised in a Catholic household and studying Latin at an early age, little is
known of Las Casas’ education and upbringing in Seville.
Shortly a fter his f ather’s return to Seville in 1499, plans w
ere made for a second
trip across the Atlantic and the young Las Casas decided to accompany his f ather.
Arriving at La Isla Española on April 15, 1502, Las Casas spent the next 12 years
as an industrious colonist. During these years, he participated in the encomienda
system, a colonial institution involving the distribution of land and native laborers
among Spanish colonists who w ere expected to offer Christian instruction to the
natives. Las Casas earned the title conquistador (“conqueror”) by serving in b attles
and expeditions, including as chaplain after having been ordained priest in Rome
in 1507. Such practices led to conflicts with the Dominicans who, shortly after
arriving on the island in 1510, began denouncing the encomenderos (recipients of
encomiendas) for their exploitation of the natives, even to the point of denying Las
Casas the sacrament of confession.
360 LAS C ASAS , B A R TOLO M É d e
While preparing a Pentecost

sermon in Cuba in 1514, Las
Casas encountered several bibli-
cal passages, especially Ecclesi-
asticus 34:21–27, which he would
later recall as having affected

him profoundly and resulting in
a kind of conversion. Thereafter,
Las Casas protested against the
destruction of the indigenous
peoples that he now recognized
was occurring all around him. He
began preaching his new vision
of justice and contributing in
vari
ous ways toward effecting
social reform. For instance, in his
Memorandum of Remedies for the
Indies (1516), Las Casas proposed
the abolition of the encomienda
system, the liberation of natives
from forced servitude, and the
restructuring of Spanish colo-
Engraving of Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las
nial society according to such
Casas at work. Las Casas was renown for his
defense of Native p eoples, especially in his An
princi ples. At this time, Las
Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Casas proposed that black slaves
Indies, published in 1552. (Library of Congress) be transported to the colonies
to alleviate the rapid decline of
native populations, an idea he
soon regretted and considered equally unjust.
Although Las Casas himself was convinced that colonial violence needed to
cease, his denunciations and efforts to terminate the encomienda system proved
unpopular among most colonists. As a result, Las Casas appealed directly to the
Spanish Crown. Facing considerable opposition in Spain as well, Las Casas none-
theless managed to generate serious discussion about the legitimacy of the con-
quest and catalyze some movement in the direction of reform. For instance, his
work The Only Way was first written in 1534 as a defense of peaceful evangeliza-
tion and assertion of the natives as rational beings, the denial of which was used
to justify their enslavement. Its ideas provided the basis for Pope Paul III’s papal
bull Sublimis deus (1537), which declared the rationality of the natives and prohib-
ited their enslavement. Furthermore, The Only Way, combined with another of
Las Casas’ works, An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies,
played a key role in Spanish king Charles V’s decision to pass the New Laws of
1542 that aimed to phase out the encomienda system.
In 1550, a famous debate began in Valladolid, Spain. Las Casas, then bishop
of Chiapas, and the humanist scholar and theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda
LATIN A M E R I C AN WA R S OF INDEPENDEN C E 361
presented opposing views concerning the status of the natives as rational beings
and the justification for war before a junta (a group of lawyers and theologians) con-
voked by Charles V. Sepúlveda argued for the inferiority and irrationality of the
natives and defended the necessity of violent conquest for converting them to Chris
tianity. Las Casas rejected Sepúlveda’s position, providing numerous examples of
sophisticated forms of community and governance that demonstrate the rationality
of the natives. Although no formal “winner” emerged, Charles V temporarily sus-
pended conquests during the debate, and Las Casas was allowed to present a sub-
stantial case on behalf of the natives at the royal court, which ultimately prevented
Sepúlveda’s war model from influencing Spanish policy to revoke the New Laws.
Las Casas continued insisting on justice for the natives until his final days. In
his last w ill, written shortly before his death, Las Casas rooted his life’s work in
his Catholic faith and once again declared the incompatibility between colonial vio
lence and the peace of Christ. Early in 1566, he wrote to the newly elected Pope
Pius V, asking him to condemn the conquest and to call for the restitution of prop-
erty stolen from the natives. On July 18, 1566, Las Casas died in Madrid.
Eduardo M. Gonzalez
See also: Black Legend; Conquistadors; Encomienda System
Further Reading
Castro, Daniel. 2007. Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and
Ecclesiastical Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1993. Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ. Translated by Rob-
ert Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1992. The Only Way. Edited by Helen Rand Parish. Translated by
Francis Patrick S ullivan. S.J. New York: Paulist Press.
Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 2003. An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies,
with Related Texts. Edited by Franklin W. Knight. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Indi-
anapolis: Hackett Publishing.
L AT I N A M E R I C A N WA R S O F I N D E P E N D
ENCE
Over the course of the 1810s, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in North, Central,
and South America fought to achieve their independence. Most Spanish colonies
in the Western Hemisphere achieved independence and became sovereign nations.
Portuguese Brazil also achieved independence, but through more peaceful means,
and once independent it became an independent monarchy. Historians place t hese
revolutions among the so-c alled Enlightened Revolutions which include the
American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. The Latin
American Wars of Independence w ere fought in four main fronts: in the northern-
most area of South America, in the southern part of South America, in Mexico,
and in Brazil. By the early 1820s, the wars severed the colonial ties of the Americas
with Spain and Portugal, except for Puerto Rico and Cuba, which remained Spanish
possessions until 1898 when the United States fought the Spanish-American War.
362 LATIN A M E R I C AN WA R S OF INDEPENDEN C E
Three main factors contributed to the beginning of the Latin American move-
ments for independence. The first was the Enlightenment. The second was the
divide that developed among the Spanish elite throughout the eighteenth c entury
between the criollos (individuals of full Spanish descent but who were born and
raised in the Americas), and the peninsulares (Spanish-born). The third was the
French Napoleonic invasion of Spanish Iberia in 1807, and Portuguese Iberia in
1808.
The ideological inspiration for the Latin American revolutions came largely from
the French Enlightenment. Like the elites who led the Revolutionary War in the
United States, the leaders of t hese revolutions were wealthy educated criollo elites
familiar with Enlightenment thinkers such as Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron
de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), Voltaire, also known as François-Marie
Arouet (1694–1778), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). The writings of these
thinkers, along with the French Revolution and some of its most important texts
including the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, were widely read
among young elites. Although many of their works were banned in Spanish Amer
ica, revolutionaries such as Mexican priest Miguel Hidalgo read Enlightenment
authors illegally. Other leaders, such as Venezuelan Simón Bolívar (1783–1830),
were exposed to Enlightenment ideas through the new print culture of daily pub-
lications that reported on the events of the French Revolution and the American
Revolution. Thus, the individuals who had been exposed to these ideas used them
as inspiration to initiate the revolutions themselves, and a fter independence to cre-
ate systems of self-governance.
A second factor was a growing divide among the Spanish elites that had been
taking shape since the middle of the eighteenth c entury. The Spanish and Portu-
guese Crowns carried out a series of economic and governing reforms known as
the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish American colonies and the Pombaline Reforms
in Portuguese Brazil. These reforms displaced the American-born Spanish criollo
elites in favor of the Spanish born peninsular elites. As this group of Creole elites
found themselves displaced, they developed a separate and distinctively American
identity and consequently, eventually became active participants in the wars of
independence when the legitimacy of the authority of the Spanish Crown went into
crisis due to the Napoleonic invasion of Spanish Iberian in 1808.
The third factor in triggering the Latin American revolutions for independence
was the French invasion of Portugal in 1807, and Spain in 1808. When Napoleon
Bonaparte invaded Spanish Iberia, he removed King Charles IV and his son Ferdi-
nand VII with the justification of a dispute between the two. He convinced them
to abdicate the throne and go into exile, and he placed his brother Joseph on the
Spanish throne. At first, Spanish high government officials and church elite accepted
French rule. However, neither the general Iberian Spanish population, nor the
Spanish elite in the American colonies accepted French occupation. They fought
French occupation and their insurgency was initially coordinated by the Central
Junta that Ferdinand had appointed before leaving for France.
Local provincial juntas and other governing committees formed quickly through-
out Spanish municipalities. They refused to be ruled by the invading French and
claimed to rule their municipalities in the name of the deposed Ferdinand VII.
However, these municipalities did not have enough economic resources, so in
1809 they invited American colonies to send representatives to participate in the
juntas along with economic support. This was the first time representatives from
the colonies participated in the Iberian political process. Despite initial successful
Spanish resistance, Napoleonic armies eventually occupied most Spanish munici-
palities, expect for Cádiz in the south where junta representatives from Iberia and
Spanish overseas colonies convened, beginning in September 1810. The Cádiz
Cortes was dominated by a liberal majority who in1812 drafted a liberal constitu-
tion known as the Cádiz Constitution, effectively turning Spain into a constitu-
tional monarchy. During the constitutional deliberations between 1810 and 1812,
a debate over American representation developed and questions of citizenship
and the rights of residents of the Americas emerged. What did citizenship mean
for Iberian Spaniards? What did it mean for residents in the colonies? The Ameri-
can representatives never received a satisfactory answer, which pushed many
delegates from the colonies to entertain ideas of self-determination and therefore
independence.
In the midst of this crisis of authority, consensus among the Spanish elite in the
American colonies broke down. Since the eighteenth century there had already
been an increasing divide between the criollo and peninsular elites. In the absence
of clear monarchical authority, most of the population in the New World came to
believe that sovereignty reverted to the p eople. Most municipalities initially chose
to govern themselves and pledge their loyalty to Ferdinand VII. Yet, some Creole
leaders came to contemplate independence as a realistic outcome.
Simón Bolívar, a wealthy Venezuelan Creole educated in Europe and steeped
in Enlightenment thought, led the independence wars in northern South Amer
ica. He was part of the junta formed in Venezuela that pledged to govern the
colony in the name of Ferdinand VII after 1808. Within the junta he was part of
a group of young Creoles who favored independence. With his strong convic-
tion and charming personality, Bolivar convinced the junta to declare indepen
dence in 1811. It was short lived, as the Spanish Central Junta sent troops to
squash this rebellion causing the flight of the Creoles, including Bolivar who
went to New Granada (Colombia). Bolivar declared the second Venezuelan
republic in 1813, and at this point he became known as “the Liberator.” Yet, this
turned out to be a brief dictatorship during which he carried out a series of
atrocities, such as in 1814 when he ordered the simultaneous killing of Spanish
prisoners of war, most of whom w ere non-combatants. Bolivar continued fight-
ing u ntil he fin ally liberated Colombia in 1819, Venezuela in 1822, and Ecuador
in 1823. Bolivar united the territories into one large nation named Gran Colom-
bia in 1821, but the region was too large and too diverse, and it broke into dif-
fering nations by 1825.
In southern South America, in the area surrounding Argentina, also known
as the Río de la Plata, the wars of independence w ere largely led by Jose de San
Martín, a Creole named commander of the Army of the North. Not as charis-
matic as Bolivar, he was, however, a brilliant military strategist. He marched his
364 LATIN A M E R I C AN WA R S OF INDEPENDEN C E
A 1904 oil painting General José de San Martín Proclaims the Independence of Peru, July 28,
1821, by Peruvian artist Juan Lepiani. The event shown marked the culmination of San
Martín’s campaign, begun in 1817, to liberate Chile and Peru from Spanish domination.
(DeAgostini/Getty Images)
army north from Argentina in 1817, and crossed the Andes to liberate Chile
from royal control. He went on from there to Peru which was declared indepen
dent in 1821.
While the movements for independence in South America originated in the jun-
tas of the aftermath of the French invasion of Spain, other regions such as Mexico
and Brazil followed different trajectories. In Mexico, the viceroy at the time of the
1808 invasion, José Iturrigaray, favored the plans of the Creole council (cabildo) of
creating a junta with provisional powers that would govern in the name of Ferdi-
nand VII u ntil he came back to power. However, a group of peninsulares dominated
the local governing body of Real Acuerdo (royal council), overthrew the viceroy
and arrested many of the Creoles who supported him. Thus, when the war of inde
pendence was declared, the colony of New Spain was being governed by a loyalist
regime as opposed to the juntas found in South America. In 1810, Father Miguel
Hidalgo began a revolutionary movement against this loyalist government. On Sep-
tember 16, 1810, he gave his famous Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores), calling to
fight against bad government. His call attracted a large number of impoverished,
rural indigenous and mixed race followers instead of the Creole elite, and it became
much larger and uncontrollable than Hidalgo had anticipated. Their early actions
of indiscriminately attacking Spanish property and people alienated the upper

classes. As he lost control marching towards the capital, he turned back but was
captured, tried, and executed in 1811.
His student José María Morelos, a diocean priest of Afro-Mexican descent,

continued fighting for independence. He devised a plan that would eventually be
implemented in the first Mexican liberal constitution of 1824, a fter independence.
However, he was also captured in November 1815, and was executed in Decem-
ber. After his execution, the momentum of the insurgency waned and although
the wars continued, they did without a centralized effort. Vicente Guerrero a mili-
tary general, also of Afro-Mexican descent, continued on to independence. He made
an alliance with royalist Creole military commander Agustín de Iturbide, who
changed sides towards the end of the decade. Like other Creole elites, he figured
that by changing sides and fighting for independence, he and those of his class
would avoid having their privileges removed u nder a constitutional monarchy w ere
they to remain u nder Spanish rule.
Therefore, in 1821, Iturbide struck a deal with Guerrero, fighting the last stage
of the wars for independence proclaiming the “Three Guarantees,” also known as
the Plan of Iguala. U nder the plan, a fter securing independence from Spain, Mex-
ico was to become a constitutional monarchy, establishing the Catholic Church as
the official religion, and guaranteeing equality before the law for all the inhabit-
ants of the nation, including the abolition of slavery. Guerrero proceeded u nder
the o rders of Iturbide. A
fter the proclamation of independence in August 1821, the
Crown was supposed to be offered to a Spanish monarch. However, since Ferdi-
nand would not cross the Atlantic, Iturbide himself became regent and Mexico was
declared an empire, a short-lived configuration as Iturbide moved quickly to revoke
the guarantees he had promised. He abdicated in 1823, and Mexico became a
republic in 1824.
Brazil also followed a distinct path to independence. When Napoleon approached
Portugal in 1807, Portugal’s long time economic allies, the British, helped transport
King João VI and his court across the Atlantic to Brazil, where he ruled the Portu-
guese Empire from Rio de Janeiro. From t here, João developed the Brazilian econ-
omy by allowing free trade and building institutions such as banks, universities,
and printing presses. While João had left a regent in Portugal, increasing discon-
tent about the king ruling from Brazil led him to return in 1822. He left his son
Pedro behind in Brazil as regent. After a series of disputes, in which Portuguese
officials recalled Prince Pedro back to Portugal and he refused to comply, he finally
declared Brazilian independence on September 7, 1822, becoming Emperor Pedro
I of Brazil. With British support, Brazil remained independent as a monarchy u ntil
1889. Brazil achieved independence without a ctual fighting. However, it turned
out to be the most conservative revolution in Latin America since it was a monarchy
which declared independence and Brazil remained an empire until the end of the
nineteenth century. Brazil was also the last Atlantic nation state to abolish slavery
in 1888.
Rafaela Acevedo-Field
366 LEGAL SYSTEM
See also: Age of Revolution; Bolívar, Simón; Casta System; Enlightenment; Hidalgo,
Miguel; Napoleon I; San Martín, José de
Further Reading
Archer, Christon I., ed. 2000. The Wars of Independence in Spanish America, Wilmington,
DE: Scholarly Resources.
Rodriguez O., Jaime E. 1998. The Independence of Spanish America. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
L E G A L S Y S T E M S
The legal systems used in the Atlantic world in 1400 w ere generally based on one
of four systems: civil law, common law, religious law, or a system that combined
elements of civil, common, and religious law. The legal system of each empire and
its colonies was s haped by its unique history and customs, with significant varia-
tions. As the colonies matured and became independent, their legal systems became
more complex and more individually differentiated from the founding nation.
Increased international trade, changing political relationships, and the Napoleonic
Code (1804) revolution in individual rights caused important changes in the legal
systems. The codification of international law, beginning in the sixteenth c entury,
was a necessary supplement that became increasingly essential as colonies became
independent states, and the world grew smaller as a result of greater commercial
interdependence.
Civil law (or Roman law) has its core principles and ideas codified into a system
that holds case law (in which the outcome of previous legal cases direct current
practice) to be subordinate to statutory law (the written laws that are typically
passed by a legislative body). In a system of civil law, the foundation statutes and
legislation are enacted by legislatures and the government. A career judge domi-
nates court proceedings. Civil law began with classical Roman law (1–250 CE), and
developed with the Justinian Code (529–534) as a basis of subsequent laws. Roman
law dominated Europe until the Byzantine Empire ended in the fifteenth century.
After that, it was used in the Holy Roman Empire as imperial law and filtered into
England and Scotland. In France, Charles VII’s 1454 Crown law and the 1510 Cou-
tume de Paris were the basis for the Napoleonic Code (1804), which was adapted for
use in New France, including in the Atlantic region.
Civil law combined Roman law principles with local customs. Post-Napoleonic
French law was a complex system of checks and balances between the government
and the police or judicial force. A punitive system of harsh punishment was the
rule, with crime viewed as near treason. The goal was to lessen crime while at least
minimally adhering to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).
Other nations’ civil law varied. For example, law in Portugal was a patchwork of
civil law and customs. It was differently applied to its Atlantic colonies, where sea
captains had judicial powers and ultimate jurisdiction except in the most serious
LEGAL SYSTEM 367
cases. In Angola and Brazil, nobles with large land holdings had judicial authority
and could appoint ombudsmen who w ere periodically investigated by Crown-sent
officials, known as corregedores, when corruption flourished or when judicial powers
were seriously abused, such as at Mina on the West African coast in 1562, where
a local bailiff had been imprisoned a fter he accused the outpost commander of ille-
gal trading. Portuguese law was applied narrowly to Europeans. In Brazil, Native
Americans w ere disciplined indiscriminately if they lived in Portuguese territory
and received severe punishment if suspected of crimes against Portuguese per-
sons. Institutional controls were much weaker on the frontiers.
Spanish law, another form of civil law, was altered by its customs and history. As
the nation grew more complex, systematic compilations and codifications, such
as the Nueva recopilacion (1567), occurred during the 1516–1700 Hapsburg reign.
Local legislation that often conflicted with national law also grew. The nineteenth
century was characterized by constitutional reform, such as the codification of the
Constitution of Cadiz (1812). In 1889, the Spanish civil code was enacted.
Spanish colonial administration was very centralized u nder the Council of the
Indies and the viceroy. The ecclesiastical and the secular had their own courts and
laws which sometimes produced conflict, such as regarding the rights of indige-
nous, non-Christian peoples. The high royal courts, or Audiencias, had wide juris-
diction and power. For instance, the 1528 laws for Mexico authorized the Audiencia
both to adjudicate and to have full governmental powers in case of the viceroy’s
death. The Spanish Laws of the Indies (Leyes de Indias) regulated its colonies’ social,
political, and economic life, by multiple decrees over several centuries, such as the
Laws of Burgos (1512), the first codified set of laws for colonial Spaniards, which
also covered indigenous peoples. Law enforcement was inconsistent, especially
regarding mining suits. The Crown occasionally published collections of written
law to encourage more uniform enforcement, as was done, for example, in 1681.
Spanish colonies in Central and South America adapted the law. Costa Rica’s
First Civil Code (a part of the General Code or Carrillo Code) was adopted in 1841.
It was inspired by the South Peruvian Civil Code of Marshal Andres de Santa Cruz
(1792–1865). A second Civil Code (1888) was influenced by the Napoleonic Code
and the Spanish Civil Code of 1889. Nicaragua’s legal system was a mixture of the
English Common Law and the Civil Law, b ecause the British administered the
eastern part of the country from the mid-seventeenth century u ntil 1905.
Argentina’s Civil Code (1871) was affected by the Spanish legal system, the Bra-
zilian Civil Code, the Napoleonic code, the Chilean Civil Code, and several theo-
retical legal works of French jurists. It was the first Civil Law that differentiated
between rights from obligations and real property rights.
Common law is a system based on judges’ decisions in cases. This is supple-
mented and adjusted by legislative enactment of laws and statutes. Where a statute
governs a legal dispute, judicial interpretation determines how the law applies.
Common-law judges apply the law in their decisions on their predecessors’ case
decisions instead of on codes as in Civil Law. Help is provided by law reports con-
taining decisions of past controversies. Judges must adhere to previously decided
cases, or precedents, when the facts in the cases are similar. Common law, which
368 LEGAL SYSTEM
developed in pre-Roman E ngland, was based on societal customs, Anglo-Saxon

and Norman law, and the Salian Frankish law of Clovis (466–511 CE) codified in
500 CE. Commercial law became part of local law u nder new civil codes. Ancient
rules played a major role in common law adjudication through the nineteenth
century in England and its colonies. English judicial decisions were typically writ-
ten and stated in Latin.
England used this law in its Atlantic colonies, with many aspects surviving after
the nations became independent. The Navigation Laws regulated the colonies. The
first law was passed to prevent Dutch trade with the American colonies (1651).
Subsequent laws banned colonial trade with other countries (1660), taxed goods
shipped from Europe to the English colonies (1663), and imposed taxes on trade
among the colonies while increasing law enforcement (1673). L ater laws, such as
the Wool Act of 1699, banned colonial production if it would compete with English
manufacturers or evade taxation. When the English captured another European
nation’s colonies, local settlers were permitted to keep their civil law.
English law greatly influenced American law before and after the War of Inde
pendence. The many U.S. jurisdictions that continued using English common law
incorporated English-based developments soon a fter enactment. The U.S. legal sys-
tem evolved primarily from the Common law system (excepting Louisiana, which
continued to follow the French civil system a fter statehood). The law was altered
as the colonies evolved and incorporated other nations’ legal systems. Some Spanish
law concepts, such as the prior appropriation doctrine (e.g., the first person to use
water has the right to it), and community property (all communal property results
from the partnership between husband and wife), continued in some U.S. states,
especially t hose that w ere part of the 1848 Mexican Cession.
Individual U.S. states’ laws fluctuated with their colonial history. New York State’s
civil law history came from being part of the Dutch New Netherland colony. When
England regained control of New Netherland after a Dutch revolt, they imposed
common law on the Dutch colonists.
In religious law, a religious system is used as a major source for legal principles
and decisions. The main religious laws are Sharia in Islam, Halakha in Judaism, and
canon law in some Christian areas. In the Atlantic region, Christianity was a major
basis of civil and common law. Sometimes this was limited to individual moral guid-
ance, but other times they w ere used as the basis for a country’s legal system.
This varied considerably in practice: from the Massachusetts Colony’s Puritan
strictness to its symbolic functioning in most civil and common law. Islamic law
influenced the legal systems in many African states, leading to occasional conflicts
between its ecclesiastical and secular authorities.
The development of international law was stimulated by the rapid growth of
international trade and the need to make trade safe among merchants. The increas-
ing complexity of trade, exploration, and warfare drove new laws. Many interna-
tional customs of trade and communication w ere initiated by the Hanseatic League
(1400–1800). The Italian city-states created diplomatic rules to help foreign politi
cal discussions. The evolution of specific customs, rules, and treaties for warfare
followed the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648).
LI B E R IA 369
The Atlantic slave trade proceeded according to international and individual

state’s laws. After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), England con-
trolled the transportation of captured Africans to Spanish colonies. Reform efforts
changed slavery laws in the nineteenth century, with Brazil the last nation in the
Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888.
The United States was an important contributor to international laws of neu-
trality and recognition of the doctrine of freedom of the seas. The Congress of
Vienna (1815) restored legal enforcement and added doctrines regarding interna-
tional rivers and diplomatic agents. The subsequent Declaration of Paris (1856)
abolished privateering and set up rules for contraband and blockade. More humane
treatment of the wounded was codified by the Geneva Convention (1864). Many
international conventions subsequently were established for communication, col-
lision and salvage at sea, prisoners of war, sea life protection, and the suppression
of prostitution. As a result, nations resorted to legal arbitration of disputes more
frequently rather than engaging in warfare. Law became more systematized and
more uniformly administered.
William P. Kladky
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen;
Napoleonic Code; Viceregal System
Further Reading
Elliott, J. H. 2006. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830.
Fieldhouse, D. K. 1966. The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth
Century. New York: Delacorte Press.
McAllister, Lyle N. 1984. Spain & Portugal in the New World 1492–1700. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
LIBERIA
The Republic of Liberia is located in West Africa, bordered on the north by Sierra
Leone and Guinea-Conakry, on the east by Côte d’Ivoire, and the south and west
by the Atlantic Ocean. It has presently an area of 43,000 square miles and 4.3 mil-
lion inhabitants. Along with Ethiopia, it constituted a noticeable exception to the
rule of Africa’s domination by European powers until the second half of the
twentieth c entury: by 1914, only these two African countries w ere formally
independent.
Since the fifteenth century, trade has been occurring between the territory of
present day Liberia and Europe; first by Portuguese merchants, based on ivory,
malagueta pepper, and slaves. Malagueta primarily played a very important role,
as during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was traded almost exclusively
from Liberia through lineage groups and marketed by zoning; that is, goods were
exchanged between neighboring groups without the intervention of special-
ized intermediaries. Malagueata arrived in Europe, and particularly the Iberian
370 LI B E R IA
Peninsula, via the Maghreb, and the Sudanese region, but the Portuguese sailors
crucially diverted this trade into the coast. Subsequently, during the seventeenth
century, slaves became the first item of commerce, with coastal peoples usually
operating as middlemen. As the trade developed through the m iddle of the nine-
teenth c entury, Dutch, French, and English merchants largely replaced the
Portuguese.
Liberia was founded between 1818 and 1824 by the American Colonization
Society, created in 1816 and supported by the United States government, with the
main purpose of sending freed African Americans to Africa in a process perceived
as the “Back-to-Africa” movement. After many hardships in the first years, espe-
cially malaria and conflicts with native p eoples decimating the colonist groups, in
1824 the settlement was named Liberia and its capital Monrovia, a fter the U.S.
President James Monroe. Other important contingents arrived from the Congo
region and the Car ibbean, mostly resulting from intercepted slave traffic. These
groups added to various autochthonous populations, composed of more than
a dozen small ethnic groups, such as the Kpelle, Bassa, Kru, and Vai. Altogether,
they spoke a variety of languages of the West Atlantic, Kwa, and Mande language
families.
Liberia became in dependent from the American Colonization Society in
1847. Joseph Jenkins Roberts served as the first president. The country’s parlia-
ment was composed of a house of representatives and a senate, analogous to the
United States. The president and the vice president, elected by the p eople, held
the executive power, the cabinet being appointed by the president with the con-
sent of the Senate. A local government unit in each county was also established.
Compared to the United States, the Liberian political system exhibited traits of
a large de facto prominence of the executive, greater politic al interference in
the judiciary, and indeed more visible patterns of corruption and nepotism. A fter
independence, two main parties emerged: the Republican Party, predominantly
controlled by mulatto settlers, and the Party of the True Whigs: mostly black
settlers, predominantly Congolese, and instructed autochthonous population.
Liberia was first usually run by the Republicans, but subsequently the True Whigs
ruled for more than a century, from 1877 to 1980, when they w ere brought down
by a coup.
Important cultural, economic, and political rifts traditionally marked Liberia.
The Americo-Liberians, composed of descendants of the Protestant African Amer-
ican settlers and other closely assimilated segments of population, usually adopted
a Western lifestyle: English language, Christianity (mostly Protestant), monogamy,
and individual and permanent property of the soil. They usually lived in cities and
compromised a small minority of the nation’s population. The indigenous popula-
tions, on the other hand, remained mostly Muslim and traditionalist, using native
languages, and common ownership of the land. Villages w ere governed by chiefs
and elders, who in many cases opposed the spread of Christianity and generically
Western practices. The indigenous or “tribal” peoples make up the vast majority
of the total population and have until recently remained mostly rural. Throughout
the nineteenth century, the Americo-Liberian generally sought to promote various
LI B E R IA 371
policies targeting the cultural assimilation of the indigenous p eoples, while the gov-
ernment aimed at maximizing its sources of income (such as taxes on trade and
shipping, as well as import-export rights), simultaneously causing discontent among
foreign traders and indigenous leaders, who earlier received customs-duties based
on controlled foreign trade. However, only in the twentieth c entury did economic
development, urbanization, intermarriage, and government programs aiming at the
demographic unification of the country create a growingly important transitional
group.
The government’s control of the territory remained precarious during the
nineteenth c entury, particularly concerning the hinterland. An inability to levy
taxes, together with scarcity of manpower, kept the country u nder threat from
neighboring European colonial settlements. However, relations with European
powers became considerably more strained after 1880, when European imperialism
became prominent. Notwithstanding the fact that it was an African state and all
its inhabitants were Liberians, the government perceived a growing need to take
measures to avoid losing the whole hinterland. Indeed, in 1882, Great Britain
annexed most of northwest Liberia via Sierra Leone, promoting analogous moves
again in 1885 and 1902. France consummated other annexations of Liberian
territory in the southeast in 1891 and 1907. On all occasions, Liberia’s appeals to
other nations w ere in vain, with the United States recommending Liberia to accept
these moves as a fait accompli.
Besides the difficulties arising from the loss of various portions of its territory,
Liberia had to internally face serious socioeconomic problems. Acting u nder inter-
national pressure, governments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
implemented measures aimed at underscoring their domination over the autoch-
thonous ethnic groups which frequently resisted and revolted. Economically,
Americo-L iberians remained predominantly oriented to internal commerce and
agriculture, foreign trade being controlled by resident European traders as well as
Lebanese immigrants, occupying relevant economic positions but still denied
citizenship.
Sugar was initially the main source of exports, but it was hindered by Caribbean
competition, hence coffee becoming the main export product since the 1860s. In
turn it suffered from Brazilian competition and world depression. During the 1880s
and the 1890s, the fabrication of synthetic colorants reduced the foreign demand
for camwood from the Liberian hinterland, and simultaneously competition from
Sierra Leone threatened the exports of piassava. To avoid bankruptcy, public loans
were obtained, mostly from European lenders and at very high rates. Mortgaging of
customs revenues followed, initially administered by British officials and a fter 1912
by an International Commission. Liberia’s funds were subsequently practically con-
sumed in full for the payment of debts, leaving no means for investing in foundations
for development. The majority of schools, including universities, w ere founded by
North American philanthropic societies and missions, and most structural invest-
ments w ere carried out by foreign companies.
João Carlos Graça and Rita Gomes Correia

372 LO C K E , J OHN
See also: Colonization Movement; European Exploration; Portuguese Atlantic
Further Reading
Ajayi, J. F. Ade, ed. 1989. General History of Africa: Africa in the Nineteenth C
entury u ntil the
1880s. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ciment, James. 2013. Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled
It. New York: MacMillan.
Ogot, Bethwell Allan, ed. 1992. General History of Africa: Africa from the Sixteenth to the
Eighteenth Century. Berkley: University of California Press.
LOCKE, JOHN (1632–1704)

John Locke was an English philosopher, physician, theologian, and political theo-
rist whose philosophical and political contributions greatly influenced British
empiricism and classical liberalism. Against philosophical views that man was
born with innate ideas, Locke’s philosophical writings helped initiate a school of
philosophy known as empiricism, which argued that at birth the mind was a
blank slate (“tabula rasa”) and added knowledge as individuals reflected on their
sense-based experiences of reality. Against politic al views that man was born
under the authority of divinely appointed kings, Locke’s political writings gave
rise to social contract theory and modern democratic constitutionalism, which
argued that individuals were born f ree and equal and socially contracted with one
another to establish governing authorities. Locke’s ideas w ere especially influential
in eighteenth-century North America, and North America’s founders appealed
to Locke’s ideas to help justify the formation and form of their new nation. Thomas
Jefferson even considered Locke one of the three greatest men who ever lived, and
he borrowed heavily from Locke’s Second Treatise while writing the Declaration of
Independence.
John Locke was born in the town of Wrington in 1632 to upper-middle-class
Puritan parents. In 1647, he was sent to Westminster School in London, and a fter
graduation attended Christ Church in Oxford. Locke nearly became an Anglican
priest but instead decided to pursue botany through a studentship reserved for
t hose pursuing medicine. In 1667, Locke joined the serv ice of the politically-
connected Lord Ashley Cooper, later third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Locke served
him as a personal physician, secretary, confidant, and friend. This relationship
exposed Locke to various political opportunities, which led him to serve in a num-
ber of public offices and positions. With the fall and death of Shaftesbury in 1683,
Locke fled to the Netherlands. While in the Netherlands, Locke was exposed to
issues of religious tolerance related to the Dutch Calvinist church and an influx of
Protestant refugees from French Catholic persecution. T hese experiences later
inspired him to defend religious tolerance in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689).
Locke returned to England following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that brought
William and Mary of Orange to the throne of E ngland and published both his An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his Two Treatise of Government. In the latter,
Locke, writing anonymously, defended the legitimacy of William of Orange and
LO C K E , J OHN 373
the Glorious Revolution. Locke’s

works brought him national
renown and he served as the
Commissioner of Appeals until
his health declined in 1704. Locke
spent the last years of his life
writing religious works. He para-
phrased and interpreted books of
the Bible (A Paraphrase and Notes
on the Epistles of St. Paul, 1705–
1707) and defended the reason-
ableness of Christ ianity against
critics (The Reasonableness of Chris
tianity as Delivered in the Scriptures,
1695). Locke died in 1704.
Locke’s intellectual interests
were diverse and w
ere often
associated with his occupation
and station in life. Included in his
writings are works on philoso-
phy, theology, religion, mone-
tary policy, separation of church
and state, property, and social English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke.
contracts. However, An Essay His Second Treatise of Government influenced
Concerning H uman Understanding Thomas Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of
and Two Treatises of Government Independence. (Library of Congress)
proved especially influential. In
the first, Locke takes up the philosophy of knowledge. Though published in 1690,
Locke wrote it over 20 years. The work is composed of four books addressing the
possibility of knowing. The first book sets out, in Locke’s words, “to inquire into
the original, certainty, and extent of h uman knowledge, together with the grounds
and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent” (Locke 1975, I.i.2). In particular, Locke
responded to the school of natural law theorists who claimed various ideas were
etched upon the mind of man at creation. Book II continued this exploration by
claiming that ideas were simply “materials of knowledge,” and that these materials
were experienced through the senses, which result in ideas (Locke 1975, I.i.8). Locke
provided the analogy of a blank sheet of paper, or an empty drawer, which needs to
be sketched or filled with sense-based experiences. Book III dealt with the nature
of language and linguistics as they pertained to knowledge, and Book IV examined
the nature of knowledge as it pertains to limits, to reason, and to faith.
Key to the Essay is the concept of tabula rasa, and the importance reason has in
interpreting knowledge gained through the senses. Knowledge and ideas for
Locke were not gained through digging into preexisting ideas sewn into an indi-
vidual’s mind at birth but by experiencing them though the senses of taste, touch,
sound, scent, and sight, and then reflecting on these experiences. As he stated in
374 LO C K E , J OHN
the fourth book, “the discovery of the certainty or probability of such proposi-
tions or truths, which the mind arrives at by deduction made from such ideas, as
it has got by the use of its natural faculties; viz, by the use of sensation or reflec-
tion” (Locke 1975, IV.xvii.2). Overall, the work set out to develop a philosophy of
knowledge that reflected his interest in scientific method. He also aimed to refute
the epistemology that natural law philosophers used to justify religious persecu-
tion against the kinds of refugees he met in the Netherlands. Although later
empiricists such as David Hume and George Berkeley criticized a number of Locke’s
philosophical assumptions, the work helped raise enduring questions about the
nature of knowledge.
Two Treatises of Government was published anonymously in 1690, and it remained
anonymous u ntil Locke’s death. Whereas his Essay developed a theory of free
human knowledge, Locke’s Two Treatises develop a theory of society, freedom,
authority, and political power. The First Treatise was a response to the argument
for divine right of kings advanced by Sir Robert Filmer in Patriarcha (1680). Locke
appealed to biblical and rational arguments to reject Filmer’s claim that men were
born u nder the authority of divinely sanctioned monarchies who traced their
authority back to Adam. Locke instead advanced the positions held by the promi-
nent English theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600), and argued that law and
government are powers delegated by and responsible to the p eople who make up
the political community. Locke’s argument provided theoretical and theological
support to shift power from the monarchy to the parliament during the Glorious
Revolution.
In the Second Treatise, Locke addressed Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and his
view of the state of nature. Hobbes argued in Leviathan (1651) that the state of nature
was a chaotic condition where government was absent and where p eople abused
and oppressed each other. This state of nature ultimately led p eople to come together
into a social contract and to exchange individual liberties for the peace of a ruling
authoritarian figure. Against Hobbes, Locke described the state of nature as having
“a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason which is that
law, teaches all mankind who w ill but consult it, that being all equal and indepen
dent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions”
(Locke 1960, II.6). Since there is a tendency for some men to ignore this natural
law, or to abuse justice by being vengeful, Locke argued that free men come together
by forming a social contract that then appoints authorities to defend their natural
rights. According to Locke, a commonwealth is the result of this coming together,
and political authority has its legitimacy not by a divine right of the rulers but by
the delegation of the p eople, through a social contract, that appoints public fig-
ures to create, execute, and judge law that pursues the common good.
Among Locke’s work, his political theory of social contract was arguably his
most influential contribution to the Atlantic world. Locke’s political theory argued
that authority fundamentally resided with the people, not their rulers, and this
gave birth to modern liberalism and democratic constitutionalism. His emphasis
on the rule of law, on checks and balances, on separating powers, on religious
toleration, on classical liberal property rights, and on the justification of rebellion
LONDON 375
and replacement of governments that coercively v iolated p eople’s natural rights,

directly influenced the United States and wider Atlantic world. It was not only
instrumental in justifying the American and English Revolutions, but also in the
drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.
This would start a widespread movement of countries throughout the Atlantic
world to draft constitutions for their respective governments. Locke died in Oates,
Essex, E ngland in 1704, and is buried in the yard of All Saints Church, High
Laver.
Leonard O. Goenaga
See also: Declaration of Independence; Enlightenment; Jefferson, Thomas; Rous-

seau, Jean-Jacques
Further Reading
Cranston, Maurice William. 1957. John Locke: A Biography. New York: Macmillan.
Locke, John. 1960. Two Treatise of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
LONDON
London is the capital city of G reat Britain, located in Southeast E ngland. The city
straddles the River Thames and so has a long history as a port connecting Great
Britain to the maritime world. T here has been a settlement in this region since
before the Roman conquest of the British Isles, and the city has become synony-
mous with political, economic, and social influence throughout Europe, as well as
in the Atlantic world more widely. Since John Cabot’s (ca. 1450–ca. 1500) journey
to, and exploration of, North America in 1497, London has been one of the most
influential cities in the Atlantic world in both political and economic terms.
Cabot, although originally Genoese, received a commission from Henry VII of
England (r. 1485–1509) to sail to the Americas. Cabot’s journey paved the way for
increased English involvement in the New World during the Age of Discovery.
London played a vital role in forging the political justification for English endeavor
across the Atlantic. Expeditions from E ngland to the Americas quickly led to set-
tlement. In 1607, the Virginia Company of London founded Jamestown as the first
permanent settlement in English America. The company had been set up the pre-
vious year to settle the region and coordinate tobacco production from London,
operating u ntil 1624 when V irginia became a colony. The tobacco plantations that
developed in Virginia, as well as Barbados, were in desperate need for labor. While
the London-based colonization companies arranged indentured labor from Ire-
land for a time, planters soon needed a larger, more effective workforce—African
slaves.
Although not as infamous as Liverpool or Bristol, London played an important
role in the conducting of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1672, a charter from Charles
II (r. 1660–1685) established the Royal African Company. This company gave a
376 LONDON
monopoly on English Atlantic slave trading to the city of London that lasted u ntil
1698. London’s involvement in the slave trade, however, began far earlier. Eliza-
beth I (r. 1558–1603) financed the first known slaving voyage to set sail from
England, John Hawkins (1532–1595) captaining the carrack Jesus von Lübeck in
1562. London’s earlier involvement in the slave trade was based mostly on sup-
plying African l abor to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World. By
the mid-1600s, however, English ships carried slaves to plantations in Virginia
and the rest of Eng lish Americ a, Barbados, and Jamaica alongside the foreign
destinations.
Hand in hand with the imperial acquisition of territory and the hunt for finan-
cial gain came exploration for knowledge. London played a significant role in the
scientific advancements of the early modern Atlantic world. Established in 1660,
and receiving a royal charter the same year, the Royal Society represented a vital
component of scientific inquiry and cemented London’s place as one of the cen-
ters of learned society in the Atlantic world. The creation of the Society allowed
London to join Oxford and Cambridge as a distinct scientific beneficiary of the
Columbian Exchange.
London did not experience only benefits accrued from direct and consistent
contact with the New World. The city’s financiers felt the effects of colonial wars
as they bore the brunt of both the cost of conflicts and the loss of transatlantic
trading during times of war. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the Ameri-
can Revolution (1775–1783) are the clearest examples, as both caused a g reat
deal of financial hardship among London’s banking class. Other conflicts, how-
ever, similarly impacted the city, including the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–1748)
between G reat Britain and Spain, the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), and the
War of 1812 (1812–1815). Slave rebellions w ere likewise damaging to London’s
economy, given the city’s reliance on unpredictable fluctuations in the cost of
Car ibbean sugar.
London’s most important and lasting contribution to the Atlantic world lay in
its economic value to European expansion in the Americas. London’s politicians
formed the ideological climate and justification for involvement in the New World,
but it was the city’s shipwrights, factories, and financiers that both allowed this to
occur and cemented London’s status as an Atlantic city. Although a g reat deal of
the Industrial Revolution took place further north in Lancashire and Yorkshire,
London was nonetheless a key city in Great Britain’s industrialization. Much of
the impetus for this stemmed from transatlantic markets. Both the cane fields of the
Car ibbean and the cotton plantations of the United States South provided the raw
materials for the burgeoning manufacture economy that developed in London in
the early and mid-nineteenth century. After the breaking apart of the Spanish
Empire in South America and France’s eventual defeat in the Napoleonic Wars,
Great Britain ascended as the most important European empire in the Atlantic
world, with London as the destination for the lion’s share of transatlantic trade.
London remained an important port, trading hub, and location for political
power as Atlantic expansion and imperial designs shifted from the Americ as
LOUISIANA 377
The London of Charles Dickens

British writer Charles Dickens (1812–1870) set many of his stories in Lon-
don, and his descriptions of the city evoke a gritty scene of industrialization
eople. In chapter eight of Oliver Twist (1838), for example,
and its effects on p
Dickens painted the following scene:
“Although Oliver had enough to occupy his attention in keeping sight of
his leader, he could not help bestowing a few hasty glances on either side of
the way, as he passed along. A dirtier or more wretched place he had never
seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was impregnated
with filthy odours. There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in
trade appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were
crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from inside.”
Source: Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist. London: Richard Bentley, 1839, 128–129.
to inland West Africa in the late nineteenth century. The profits reaped from
Car ibbean plantations continued sufficiently a fter the ending of slavery in 1834 to
ensure that the British Empire remained a global force. As a seat of both political
and financial influence, London’s elite directed the British Empire’s expansion
deeper into Africa and orchestrated new and efficient trading routes linking
Great Britain’s Atlantic colonies to t hose in the Asian subcontinent. London there-
fore remained at the heart of the Atlantic world well into the twentieth c entury.
Lewis B. H. Eliot
See also: American Revolution; Atlantic Slave Trade; British Atlantic; Industrial Rev-
olution; Seven Years’ War
Further Reading
Armitage, David. 2000. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Games, Alison. 2009. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–
1660. New York: Oxford University Press.
Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Com-
moners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press.
LOUISIANA
From an ambiguously bounded territory to a U.S. state by 1812, the land known
as Louisiana to its French settlers began its colonial development later in the colo-
nial period of overseas European empires than many places in the Americas. Native
378 LOUISIANA
eoples viewed the larger swath of rivers, forests, and lowlands as their various
p
homelands and contested each other for control of the region. Europeans vaguely
defined Louisiana by low country river ports such as New Orleans and the ports’
hinterlands, broadly envisioned, up the Mississippi River and its tributaries up to
and around present-day St. Louis, west into the Red River region, and east t owards
the frontier. The Louisiana Territory, as it existed at the end of the colonial era,
was a source of conflict for imperial powers in that it overlapped territorial claims
of France, Spain, G reat Britain, and the United States.
Louisiana’s earliest inhabitants lived in its woods, riverine regions, and low lying
wetlands and coastal marshes for several thousand years before the first Europe
ans appeared with the expedition of Hernando de Soto in the 1540s. Native life in
Louisiana was tied to the mound-building cultures that spread across the Ohio ter-
ritory down across the Appalachian range and deep into the southeast and south
central regions of the continent. By the time of contact with Europeans, a number
of chiefdoms and smaller tribes counted on the vast Louisiana territory as their
homeland, or part of such homelands as some nomadic peoples knew. Among these
peoples were the Chitimacha, Caddo, Opelousa, Natchez, Atakapa, Tunica, and
many other bands of p eoples whose lifestyles ranged from sedentary, in this case
many Caddo villages, to hunters and gatherers, and also semisedentary p eoples
descended from earlier Mississippian settlements of mound-builder coalitions. This
was the period, also, in which eastern tribes often moved westward to escape or
stay ahead of European colonization closer to the Atlantic seaboard, such that by
the early eighteenth c entury, many bands arrived in what is now Mississippi, Lou-
isiana, and eastern Texas and placed some new pressures on the native peoples
then present in that vast region.
The colonization of the area of present-day Louisiana started not in Louisiana
but rather on the Texas coast. In 1685, Frenchman René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de
La Salle, who had in prior years made his way from the Illinois country down the
river to its mouth, established a colony on Matagorda Bay rather than on the lands
around the mouth of the Mississippi. Native peoples attempted to remove the set-
tlers from their lands by force, leaving most dead and just a few survivors for Span-
iards to redeem from the local natives a few years l ater. French settlement in Louisiana
began in earnest u nder Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, in 1699, on the Gulf
coast. His brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, and later explorers
found their way upriver, where, in 1718, Bienville founded New Orleans, named
for the French regent at the time, the Duc d’Orleans. New Orleans became the
base for French colonization of the region, a process that accelerated at the same
time that the Spanish reestablished a hold among the riverine region of south cen-
tral Texas. Both colonies developed steadily over the remainder of the eighteenth
century.
Louisiana remained a French colony for more than 50 years before 1763, when
the end of the Seven Years’ War, known as the French and Indian War in North
America, led to changes in territorial control. During that period and after, Loui-
siana’s peoples grew to include French settlers of a wide range of social and eco-
nomic strata, and yet more persons of West African origin who arrived largely as
LOUISIANA 379
slave laborers. A strength of the French approach to colonial governance and influ-
ence over native p eoples was the tradition of the coureurs de bois, the woodsmen
who traveled and settled among native communities in the interior. Such exten-
sion of the French enterprise was unique among the colonizers of native p eoples
in the vast middle reaches of North America, and was something Louisiana shared
with the French colony in New France (present-day Eastern Canada). Louisiana
ceased to be French a fter the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War,
transferred control of the colony to Spain and its governor in Havana. In 1763, a
new Spanish governor came to New Orleans and effectively removed the buffer of
French influence between the growing presence of the English colonies of the east-
ern seaboard and the long-standing but weaker control of the longer reaches of
New Spain.
Under Spain, relations with native p eoples suffered and the region became a
difficult region of the Spanish overseas empire to maintain. Plantation economies
continued to function, but supply lines flailed for lack of steady supplies to native
allies inland. A
fter years of difficulties, Spain transferred the colony back to French
control during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte in the latter stages of the French
revolutionary period between 1800 and 1802. Shortly thereafter, Napoleon sold
the greater Louisiana Territory to the nascent United States in 1803. The Louisi-
ana Purchase instantly increased the new nation’s landholdings in an unprece
dented manner and led the way towards U.S. imperial actions on and beyond the
continent over the next c entury. President Thomas Jefferson ordered the Lewis and
Clark expedition to explore this new acquisition, and he also encountered conten-
tion regarding the border between Louisiana and Texas, resulting in surveying and
negotiation between the United States and Spain by the duplicitous General James
Wilkinson in 1806. A l ater treaty, in 1819, determined the border between Ameri-
can Louisiana and Spanish Texas, a border still seen in the boundary between the
present states.
Life in Louisiana exhibited patterns of antebellum southern states following
statehood in 1812. A slave-driven economy of sugar and cotton plantations, smaller
farms, workshops, and shipping depots on the Mississippi River defined the state,
with the rise of towns such as Lafayette, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport. Louisiana
was a place of extreme difference in social standing between white and black Amer-
icans, and yet its legal code, partly based on the Napoleonic Code, distinguished
it among southern states. Yellow fever made much trouble for Louisiana families
of all social classes at midcentury. During the U.S. Civil War, the Louisiana gov-
ernment backed the Confederacy of Jefferson Davis and maintained loyalty to the
Southern cause common among the planting classes and slaveholders. With defeat
in 1865, Louisiana was a site of federal intervention via the Freedmen’s Bureau and
other structures of Reconstruction. Louisianans fought internal battles in New
Orleans and elsewhere between vested parties of radical reconstruction and con-
servative groups, with notable battles between differing political parties in the 1870s
that required federal intervention. As with most other parts of the south, the col-
lapse of Reconstruction by 1877 gave way to the Jim Crow laws, which gave rise
to a segregated and unequal society in which whites held privilege and blacks w ere
380 L’ OU V E R TU R E , TOUSSAINT
subordinated to lower social roles. Such laws held until well into the twentieth
century and the rise of the U.S. civil rights movement.
Jay T. Harrison
See also: Coureurs de Bois; French Atlantic; Napoleonic Code; New Orleans; Treaty
of Paris
Further Reading
Bond, Bradley G., ed. 2005. French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press.
Rees, Mark A., ed. 2010. Archaeology of Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press.
Wall, Bennett H., and John C. Rodrigue, eds. 2014. Louisiana: A History. 6th ed. Chiches-
ter, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
L’ O U V E R T U R E , T O U S S A I N T ( c a . 1 7 4 3 – 1 8 0 3 )
Toussaint L’Ouverture was a major figure in the Haitian Revolution from its incep-
tion in 1791 until his death in 1803. While much of his early life is shrouded in
mystery, historians generally agree that L’Ouverture began his life as a slave in Saint-
Domingue before gaining his freedom in 1776. During the Haitian Revolution,
L’Ouverture rose to the rank of commander-in-chief of all French forces in Saint-
Domingue. In addition, he served as Saint-Domingue’s Deputy Governor from 1796
to 1800 before declaring himself Governor General for Life in 1801. He held that
title u
ntil his fall from power in 1802.
Born in French Saint-Domingue sometime between 1739 and 1746, L’Ouverture
was initially known as Toussaint Bréda. His name indicates a possible birthdate of
All Saints Day as tous saint translated from the French means “all saint.” He was
born to African parents on the Bréda Sugar plantation in Haut-du-Cap near Saint-
Domingue’s most vibrant port city, Cap Français. Current research suggests
that his father, Hyppolite, was a war captive from Dahomey with royal lineage.
L’Ouverture was probably one of eight c hildren born to Hyppolite and his second
wife, Pauline.
As a slave, L’Ouverture was spared the horrors of field life. Instead he oversaw
the plantation’s livestock before being elevated to the position of coachman for the
plantation’s overseer, Bayon de Libertat. Over time, he developed a reputation as
an excellent h orsem an and veterinarian. He also seems to have been quite
gifted in herbal medicine. Serving as a coachman put L’Ouverture into consistent
contact with white European culture. This connection to the ruling caste likely
explains L’Ouverture’s ability to speak French in addition to the Aja-Fan language
of his father and the Haitian Creole tongue ubiquitous among Saint-Domingue’s
slaves. Circumstantial evidence suggests that he had a close association with the
Jesuits in Saint-Domingue prior to the order’s expulsion in 1763. Such an associa-
tion possibly explains both L’Ouverture ability to read and write and the origins of
the devout Catholicism he displayed throughout his life. At least one L’Ouverture
L’ OU V E R TU R E , TOUSSAINT 381
biographer suggests he may also

have been a Freemason (Smartt
Bell 2007, 63). L’Ouverture was
likely freed in 1776. After his
emancipation he became a land-
owner and was known to own at
least one slave.
In 1791, slaves in the north-
ern part of Saint- Domingue
rebelled against their masters.
L’Ouverture joined the move-
ment sometime in 1791, but the
exact circumstances of his initial
involvement are still debated
among historians. Most argue
that L’Ouverture remained on
the Bréda plantation for most of
1791 before shepherding his old
master to safety and joining
the slave forces commanded by
George Biassou. When negotia-
tions with colonial planters and
administrators failed to bring Haitian Revolution leader Toussaint L’Ouverture
about reform of the plantation as shown in Marcus Rainsford’s 1805 book
system, L’Ouverture followed his Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. By
superiors in joining with Span- the time of the book’s publication, L’Ouverture
ish forces in neighboring Santo was already dead, having been arrested and sent
Domingo to fight Saint-to France. (Hulton Archive/iStockphoto.com)
Domingue’s recalcitrant French
colonists. While allied with the Spaniards, L’Ouverture issued a decree, dated
August 29, 1793, wherein he officially changed his name to Toussaint L’Ouverture
(meaning “the opening”) and declared himself in favor of total and permanent
emancipation throughout Saint-Domingue. L’Ouverture also gained recognition as
a superb military commander.
In late 1793, the power dynamics on the island shifted, leading L’Ouverture to
reconsider his alliance with the Spanish. That year, a combination of British threats
and internal turmoil led France’s Civil Commissioner, Léger Félicité Sonthonax,
to declare slavery abolished in Saint-Domingue. The French National Conven-
tion officially abolished slavery throughout the French Empire in 1794. With the
French committed to a policy of emancipation, the Spanish increasingly hesitant
about guaranteeing the liberty of former slaves, and tension developing between
L’Ouverture and his superiors, L’Ouverture switched sides in 1794, placing himself
under the command of French General Etienne Laveaux to ward off threats from both
the British and L’Ouverture’s erstwhile Spanish allies. U
nder Laveaux, L’Ouverture
continued to display his exceptional skills as a commander. In recognition of his
382 L’ OU V E R TU R E , TOUSSAINT
talent, the National Convention promoted L’Ouverture from Colonel to Brigadier

General on July 23, 1795. One year later, Laveaux declared L’Ouverture Deputy Gov-
ernor of Saint-Domingue. Finally, Commissioner Sonthonax named L’Ouverture
commander-in-chief of all French forces in Saint-Domingue in 1797.
L’Ouverture spent much of the late 1790s consolidating power by eliminating
rivals through both diplomatic and violent means. He politically outfoxed each of
Saint-Domingue’s appointed rulers before adopting military means to eliminate
rival commander André Rigaud. Despite briefly allying with Rigaud to drive out
the British, ongoing tensions between the two generals proved insurmountable.
Rigaud found support among Saint-Domingue’s mixed race or “mulatto” population
who resisted the rapid rise of L’Ouverture and other f ree blacks. L’Ouverture once
again showed his military prowess by defeating Rigaud’s faction in the summer of
1800, sending the general and his dwindling band of supporters into exile in
France.
L’Ouverture’s preeminent position in Saint-Domingue was so stable by the turn
of the century that he engaged in foreign diplomacy and crafted domestic policy
without consulting the French. He managed to negotiate independent trade agree-
ments with Great Britain and the United States between 1798 and 1799. At the
time, France was fighting a war with G reat Britain and the so-called Quasi-War
with the United States. These trade deals impacted L’Ouverture’s domestic poli-
cies since they w
ere predicated on the belief that Saint-Domingue would be returned
to its previous state of high productivity. As a result, L’Ouverture crafted a labor
regime that returned the newly freed slaves to return to plantations as nominally
free laborers.
The year 1801 saw L’Ouverture at the peak of his power but also on the
verge of his downfall. In January, L’Ouverture openly defied the orders of
Description of L’Ouverture
A British army officer left a vivid description of L’Ouverture:
“In person, Toussaint was of a manly form, above the middle stature, with
a countenance bold and striking, yet full of the most prepossessing suavity—
terrible to an e nemy, but inviting to the objects of his friendship or his love. . . .
His uniform was a kind of blue jacket, with a large red cape falling over the
shoulders; red cuffs, with eight rows of lace on the arms, and a pair of large
gold epaulettes thrown back; scarlet waistcoat and pantaloons, with half
boots; round hat, with a red feather, and a national cockade; these, with an
extreme large sword, formed his equipment. He was an astonishing h orseman,
and travelled with inconceivable rapidity.”
Source: Marcus Rainsford. An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. London:
Published by James Cundee, 1805, 157.
LOYALISTS 383
France’s First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte when he took control of Spanish

Santo Domingo. L’Ouverture promulgated a constitution in July that stopped short
of declaring independence but essentially made Saint-Domingue an indepen
dent polity with L’Ouverture holding the position of governor general for life.
Napoleon rejected the constitution and dispatched a military expedition led by
General Victor-Emanuel Leclerc to unseat L’Ouverture and restore slavery in
Saint-Domingue.
While the political claims of the constitution drew Napoleon’s ire, forced labor
requirements and the prohibition of the popular vodou religion stoked the coals of
discontent among Haiti’s freedmen. In October 1801, the flickering embers erupted
into a massive conflagration when Moïse, L’Ouverture’s adopted nephew and one
of his most trusted subordinates, led a revolt against his former commander.
With the assistance of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, L’Ouverture
smashed the revolt and executed Moïse. Nevertheless, the failed rebellion illumi-
nated growing internal discontent with L’Ouverture’s rule.
Moïse’s demise did not eliminate the widespread dissatisfaction with L’Ouverture
in Saint-Domingue. When Leclerc’s expedition arrived in 1802, most of the high-
ranking officers in Saint-Domingue defected to the French while L’Ouverture, Chris-
tophe, and Dessalines mounted a short-lived resistance. When the three generals
willingly surrendered to Leclerc in exchange for their lives and the lives of their men,
L’Ouverture attempted to retire to his plantation. L’Ouverture’s retirement proved
quite short. Leclerc arrested L’Ouverture and shipped the rebel leader to France.
Toussaint L’Ouverture was locked in Fort de Joux in the Jura Mountains where he
died alone in a dark cell in April 1803, just months before Jean-Jacques Dessalines
defeated French forces in Saint-Domingue and declared Saint-Domingue indepen
dent on January 1, 1804.
Andrew R. Detch
See also: Age of Revolution; Haitian Revolution; Saint-Domingue/Haiti
Further Reading
Geggus, David. 2007. “Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution.” Profiles of Rev-
olutionaries on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1700–1850. Edited by R. W. Weisberger et al.
New York: Columbia University Press, 115–135.
Smartt Bell, Madison. 2007. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books.
L O YA L I S T S
Loyalists were American colonists who sided with the British during the Ameri-
can Revolution (1775–1783). Known as Tories, Royalists, or King’s Men, most
believed that the British Empire was crucial to the commercial and economic health
of the colonies and that rebellion against the Crown was both immoral and politi
cally illegitimate. Those who supported revolt w ere known as Patriots, and while
many Loyalists sympathized with Patriots on issues such as taxation and the local
384 LOYALISTS
quartering of British troops demanded by the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774,
they felt betrayed and alienated when Patriots turned to mob violence, burning
the homes of administrators and tarring and feathering tax collectors. Such actions
confirmed Loyalists’ deep suspicion that republicanism would lead to excessive
democracy, which they equated with mob rule. Ultimately, Loyalists believed that
remaining within the British Empire offered a better opportunity for a secure and
prosperous life than would a f uture u nder republicanism. As a result, some Loy-
alists left the American colonies, and these migrations helped to reconfigure the
postrevolutionary British Empire.
The largest number of Loyalists came from the middle colonies. Many of the
tenant farmers in New York and New Jersey supported the Crown, for example, as
did many of the Dutch in these colonies. The Germans in Pennsylvania, like the
Quakers (who were pacifists), tried to stay out of the Revolution, and when forced
to choose they sided with the Crown. Highland Scots in the Carolinas, many Angli-
can clergy and their parishioners in Connecticut and New York, and some Presby-
terians in the southern colonies remained loyal to the king as well. Historian Paul
Smith estimated t here w ere about 500,000 Loyalists, or 16.7 percent of the white
population, while Patriots accounted for about 40 to 50 percent (Smith 1968, 260).
This high degree of political polarization suggests that the American Revolution
was as much a civil war as a war for independence. It divided families, sometimes
pitting brother against brother, or in the case of the famous Patriot Benjamin Frank-
lin (1706–1790) and New Jersey Governor William Franklin (ca. 1730–1813),
father against son.
Loyalists tended to be older and wealthier, but there were also many Loyalists
of h
umble means. Most royal officials, including many colonial judges and gover-
nors, as well as landed gentry and wealthy merchants with ties to London remained
loyal for social and economic reasons. With their wealth and status tied to Great
Britain, they w ere often the first exiles when revolt became widespread. Patriot-
controlled areas encouraged their flight. In 1778, for example, Massachusetts passed
an act banishing Loyalist merchants, including members of some of town’s wealth-
iest families. Patriots also used imprisonment, property confiscation, and in some
cases physical attacks to suppress loyalism and drive away active loyalists. Mob
violence and the threat of mob violence played an enormously important role dur-
ing the Stamp Act Crisis (1765) as well as in the subsequent independence move-
ment, and many Loyalists fled as a result.
Some Loyalists, however, w ere well-connected enough to avoid persecution and
stayed to oppose Patriot efforts. James DeLancey (1746–1804), for example, a mem-
ber of one the wealthiest and most prominent families of New York, raised a cav-
alry unit in 1777, and set to harassing Patriot forces near New York City. For the
next five years, DeLancey’s Cowboys, as they were called, harried Washington’s
forces and became one of the best known and most feared Loyalist units. Other
Loyalists expressed their loyalty more passively by refusing to swear oaths to the
new assemblies or moving to regions under British control. British strongholds
at Charleston, Savannah, and St. Augustine had large Loyalist populations, many
from other colonies, and New York City, the British military and political base of
LOYALISTS 385
A Patriot Mob Destroys a Loyalist’s House

Tensions ran high during the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765. In an especially ugly
incident, a Patriot mob sacked the home of Thomas Hutchinson (1711–1780),
the chief justice and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Angry colonists
attacked his home while he ate dinner with his family. Hutchinson evacu-
ated his f amily, narrowly escaping, as rioters broke down the front door and
looted the h ouse, taking everything from furniture and silverware to manu-
script notes for the history of Massachusetts he was writing. The mob finished
by burning the house to the ground. The crowd had attacked Hutchinson’s
home b ecause they believed Hutchinson supported the Stamp Act. Outnum-
bered in most areas, this type of mob-driven violence represented a major
threat to Loyalists’ safety and property, prompting many to take what property
they could and flee the colonies. The departure of so many powerful individ-
uals undermined the colonial class structure and ultimately resulted in a
reconfiguring of class hierarchy in the new nation.
operations in North America from 1776 to 1783, had perhaps the large concentra-
tion of British sympathizers.
While most Loyalists remained in and ultimately swore loyalty to the new United
States following the Treaty of Paris (1783), the rebellion resulted in a sizeable migra-
tion out of the American colonies. Scholars estimate that between 1774 and 1784, at
least 60,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Loyalists, along with 15,000 slaves,
left the colonies—roughly 1 out of e very 40 colonists—for destinations within the
British Empire (Jasanoff 2008, 208). Following the fall of Boston in 1775, the first
wave of the exodus went predominantly to E ngland, particularly London. These
approximately 7,000 migrants mostly consisted of elite members of the political
and religious establishment of colonial America (Jasanoff 2012, 357). Most of these
individuals returned to Great Britain, received pensions, and began rebuilding their
careers. Along with these aristocrats and clergy, a small number of farmers, arti-
sans, urban laborers, and free blacks also left the colonies. Some settled and
attempted to establish new homes in London, for others, however, this was a first
move among many within the empire.
At least 20,000 southern Loyalists, along with their slaves, migrated to Florida
(especially St. Augustine and Pensacola) beginning in 1775 (Jasanoff 2008, 213).
Florida was a Spanish colony and a popular destination for Georgia and Carolina
planters. Other southern Loyalists went to the West Indies and the Bahamas, par-
ticularly the Abaco Islands. The vast majority of migrants, however, settled in
British Canada. Roughly 40,000 Loyalists w ere evacuated to Canada following
the British departure from New York in 1783 (Jasanoff 2008, 213). Most went to
the provinces of Quebec and Nova Scotia. T hese migrations greatly influenced
Canadian culture and ultimately led to the creation of the province of New Bruns-
wick. The fleeing of Loyalists from the American colonies in many ways marked the
386 LOYALISTS
origins of Anglophone Canada. The founders of modern English-speaking Canada,

many of their descendants still identify themselves with the nominal hereditary
title U.E.L. (United Empire Loyalist).
Perhaps the most pressing consideration for many Loyalists was what to do about
the property losses they had sustained. In hundreds and possibly thousands of
instances, American states had officially confiscated Loyalist property. British Par-
liament initiated an effort in 1783 to compensate Loyalists, establishing a com-
mission of five members of Parliament to look into property losses suffered by
Loyalists. The Loyalist Claims Commission, as it was known, took oral and writ-
ten evidence and determined appropriate recompense. The commission’s work
ended up consuming more than six years, in which time it received 3,225 claims,
examined 2,291 in detail, and awarded more than £3 million of compensation with
funds supplied in part by national lotteries (Jasanoff 2008, 216).
The issue of compensation was a major stumbling block at the Treaty of Paris
(1783) peace talks. The result, enshrined in Article 5 of the treaty, held that the
individual states would make restitution to Loyalists who had lost their property.
As part of the Jay Treaty (1795), the United States agreed to compensate Loyalists
for lost property but ultimately reneged on its commitments. Some descendants of
Loyalists continue to assert claims to their ancestors’ property.
Loyalists also included f ree and enslaved African Americans. In 1775, the Royal
Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation that promised free-
dom to slaves who would bear arms against the rebels, and many slaves joined the
British in the hope of gaining freedom. Serving in a special unit known as the Ethio-
pian Regiment and wearing the motto “Liberty to Slaves,” black soldiers helped
rout the V irginia militia at the B
attle of Kemp’s Landing (November 15, 1775) and
in the B attle of Great Bridge (December 9, 1775). Ultimately, Dunmore’s procla-
mation forced the Americans to offer freedom to slaves who would serve in the
Continental Army. While both sides often defaulted on such promises, many slaves
did gain freedom and thousands of blacks left the colonies.
Black Loyalists went to the British colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick,
where the British promised them land. A record kept by British and American
inspectors, now known as The Book of Negroes, contains the names of black Loyal-
ists who left New York for Nova Scotia. They founded communities across the two
provinces, many of which still exist. Some settled in Birchtown, Nova Scotia,
instantly making it the largest free black community in North America. However,
the inferior grants of land they w ere allotted and the prejudices of white Loyalists
in nearby Shelburne made life difficult for the community. On the night of July 25,
1784, a mob of whites attacked black Loyalists in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, burning
more than 20 homes, with isolated attacks continuing for another month. Despite
the racial violence, many blacks remained in the area until the economy of Shelburne
collapsed in the late 1780s, as a lack of agricultural land, a decline of the whaling
industry, and poor inland trade routes led four-fifths of the population to leave,
including many of the black Loyalists who had faced down rioters in 1784. In 1791,
Great Britain’s Sierra Leone Company offered to transport black Loyalists to the Brit-
ish colony of Sierra Leone in Africa with the promise of equality and better land.
LOYALISTS 387
Many Native Americans, particularly among the Iroquois, also fought for the
Crown. While many natives, especially t hose west of the Appalachians in the Ohio
Valley, fought more against the Americans than for the British, some, such as
the Mohawks and o thers allied with the Haudenosuanee (Iroquois Confederacy) of
the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York as well as Creeks and Cherokees in
the southern colonies, provided important fighting forces. A substantial number
of Iroquois Loyalists, led by a Mohawk named Thayendenegea, also known as
Joseph Brant (1743–1807), were relocated to Canada, while Great Britain’s southern
Indian allies were left to confront encroachment from the new United States.
Loyalists could also be found in the farther reaches of the British Empire. The
East India Company army, for example, would soon be sprinkled with American-
born officers, including two sons of Benedict Arnold (1741–1801). Loyalists w ere
also among the first convicts transported to Australia. As these refugees carved
out new commercial, political, and personal connections, they helped to integrate
an otherw ise far-flung empire, and many of these individuals would for the rest of
their lives serve as conduits, straddling imperial and republican worlds.
Joshua J. Jeffers
See also: American Revolution; British Atlantic; Florida; Iroquois; Migration
Further Reading
Calhoon, Robert. 1973. The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781. New York: Har-
court Brace.
Jasanoff, Maya. 2008. “The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire.” Wil-
liam and Mary Quarterly. 65: 205–232.
Jasanoff, Maya. 2012. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New
York: Vintage Books.
Smith, Paul H. 1968. “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organi zation and Numeri-
cal Strength.” William and Mary Quarterly. 25: 259–277.
M
MALI EMPIRE
The Mali Empire arose when a number of Southern Mande clans coalesced around
a charismatic leader, Sundiata Keita (1190–1250), in reaction to the oppression of
Sumanguru Kante, the ruler of the Soso Kingdom, a short-lived Mande successor
state (1180–1235) of the Ghana Empire. In 1235, at the head of a united Mande
army, Sundiata defeated Sumanguru at the Battle of Kirina, near today’s Koulikoro.
Under his leadership and that of his successors, Mali developed into a larger and
more powerful empire than Ghana. Of the three West African Sudanic empires,
Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, Mali was the only one to establish direct diplomatic
and trading contacts with a European maritime power, Portugal, in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. It thus participated on a small scale in the Atlantic trade
system.
The core area of Mali was located along several of the tributary streams that form
the Niger River. Well-watered, it offered greater agricultural possibilities than
ancient Ghana. Its capital city, Niani, located on the Sankarani River, lay close to
the Bure goldfields alongside the Tinkisso River, thus giving Mali a strong posi-
tion in the gold trade.
Al-Bakri (1014–1094), the Andalusian Muslim geographer, was the first writer
to describe Mali. A fter Mali had become well-k nown in the Muslim world, Ibn
Khaldun (1332–1406) wrote that Islam came to Mali before the fall of Ghana and
that the first ruler to go on the hajj was Barmandana. Although Sundiata’s clan,
the Keita, claimed descent from Bilal ibn Rabah, the former Abyssinian slave who
became the faithful companion of the Prophet Mohammed and his first muezzin.
Most of what is known about Sundiata comes from Mande oral traditions, which
portray his rise and defeat of Sumanguru in a context of traditional religion and
magic. Yet Sundiata was Muslim, and once established as the emperor (mansa) of
the new empire, he favored the spread of Islam.
Sundiata and his supporters created a union, the core of which consisted of Niani
(both a town and a state), Mema, and Wagadu (rump Ghana) plus 12 other Mande
chieftaincies that submitted freely to Sundiata’s rule. From this core, Sundiata and
his successors carved out an empire that directly or indirectly dominated the entire
West African savanna zone for more than a century.
The empire developed a bureaucratized, efficient administration that managed
to combine strong central leadership and a powerful army of archers, spearmen,
and cavalry with relative decentralization. At its height, according to al-Umari
(1308–1384), Mali consisted of 14 provinces and 5 states. Early on, the empire
incorporated the gold producing area of Bambuk and began to exploit the richer
390 M ALI E M PI R E
An early-nineteenth-century sketch of Timbuktu by French explorer Réné Caillié. A vital

trading center of the Mali Empire, Timbuktu was also home to the Sankoré Madrassa,
a Muslim university. (Jay I. Kislak Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division,
Library of Congress)
gold fields of Bure. Eventually it obtained gold from Begho in the Bron region of
the present-day Republic of Ghana. Thus Mali would become a major exporter of
gold. Agriculture, however, remained the primary activity of the Mande popula-
tion situated in the core area of the empire.
The Emperor of Mali who made the greatest impression in the Muslim world, and
by extension on early European cartographers, was Mansa Musa, a grand nephew
of Sundiata, who ruled from 1307 to 1332. His elaborate hajj, undertaken between
1325 and 1326, was widely publicized. His lavish spending in Cairo caused a fall
in the price of gold that lasted several years a fter he had returned to Mali.
Mansa Musa’s show of wealth and his widely publicized descriptions of Mali
led early European mapmakers to portray Mali as a land overflowing with gold.
The Catalan Atlas of 1375 portrays Mansa Musa holding a large gold nugget in his
right hand. His name appeared on Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 map of the world,
the same map that was the first to label the newly discovered lands in the Western
Hemisphere as “America,” discovered as an indirect result of the European quest
for African gold.
While in Cairo, Mansa Musa had discussions at the Al-A zhar University in Cairo
with its rector and other scholars on Islamic law and philosophy. He brought back
with him to Mali the architect, Ishak al-Tuedjin, who constructed the assembly
M ALI E M PI R E 391
hall at Niani and other buildings in Timbuktu and Gao. Mansa Musa reestab-
lished Malian authority in Timbuktu and Gao, the capital of Songhay then tribu-
tary to Mali. He took steps to promote Islamic learning in Timbuktu, setting the
Sankoré Madrassa on its way to becoming a world class institute of higher Islamic
studies.
Reaching its peak during the reign of Mansa Musa, the Mali Empire continued
to be powerful and prosperous during the reign of Mansa Musa’s brother, Mansa
Sulayman (1336–1358). The empire extended from the Gambia and Casamance
River valleys in the West to Gao and Kukya south of the Niger Bend in the East. Its
writ extended over much of the Sahara Desert including the trading towns of Awda-
ghust, Walata, and Timbuktu, the salt-mining settlement at Taghaza, and the cop-
per mining center at Tadmekka. Malian traders thus exploited a vast trading network
moving gold, copper, salt, ivory, and kola nuts and many other commodities over
long distances.
In 1352, Mansa Sulayman received the visit of the traveler and geographer
Mohammed ibn Battuta (1304–1368), one of the very few writers about Mali who
actually went there. Ibn Battuta was impressed by many aspects of Mali: the sta-
bility and efficiency of its administration, the safety and the ease of travel, the sense
of justice of Mansa Sulayman and of his officials, and their promotion of Islam. He
was shocked, however, by what he considered to be surviving pagan practices such
as ceremonial dancing and the freedom granted to w omen.
Several factors combined to weaken Mali following Mansa Sulayman’s death.
Palace intrigues arose from the relative uncertainty of the royal succession that
pitted different branches of the Keita clan one against the other. Traditionally suc-
cession was fratrilineal but Islamic practice preferred that it be patrilineal. Inter-
nal weakness caused Mali to lose control of the desert tribes and as a result control
over the trans-Sahara trade. The post-1464 rise of the Songhay Empire pushed back
the eastern frontier of Mali. The rising Denianke Fula pressed down on Mali from
the Senegal River valley.
Nevertheless, accounts of the decline of Mali in this period may be skewed
because the resulting southwestward shift in the Malian center of gravity reduced
Malian contacts with the Islamic world to the North. Following the secession of
Jolof in the 1350s, Mali increased its control over the Gambia and Casamance River
valleys and areas further south. Portuguese ship captains and explorers who made
contact with Mali in the mid-fifteenth century reported that it was the major power
in these areas, that it was still ruled from Niani, and that it was still in control of
the Bure and the Bego goldfields.
The Portuguese ship captain, Diogo Gomes, who opened formal trading relations
with a representative of the Emperor of Mali, Mansa Gbere Keita, in 1456 con-
tracted to obtain gold, ivory, and slaves. Following that opening, successive mansas
attempted to obtain Portuguese military assistance against Songhay. Although
Portugal sent several emissaries to Niani between 1487 and 1534, the requested
assistance never materialized. Rather, the Portuguese engaged in local intra-African
trade, intriguing with various coastal rulers to make trade deals that excluded the
central authority. One form taken by this trade consisted of Portuguese purchases
392 M A R OONS
of h
orses from the Senegal River valley for resale to the ruler (burba) of Jolof or to
the Mande governors in the Gambia at the rate of 1 h orse for 8, and eventually 16
slaves. As late as 1594, a Portuguese official, André Alvares d’Almada, claimed that
Gambia, still a part of the Mali Empire, offered the greatest volume of trade along
the coast of Guinea.
Following the death of Mansa Mahmud Keita in 1610, whose attempt in 1599
to reconquer Jenne had failed, the core area of Mali split into three competing king-
doms that would be overshadowed by new rising powers, particularly the Bam-
bara kingdoms of Segu and Kaarta, both of them refractory to Islam.
The memory of the Mali Empire and of its rulers, particularly Sundiata Keita,
lives on in the oral histories of the inhabitants of the lands that once constituted
this Empire.
See also: Ghana; Gold and Silver; Islam; Portuguese Atlantic
Further Reading
Levtzion, Nehemia. 1980. Ancient Ghana and Mali. Reprint from 1973 with additions. Lon-
don: Methuen.
Ly-Tall, Madina. 1984. “The Decline of the Mali Empire.” General History of Africa IV. Africa
from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth C
entury. D. T. Niane, ed. Paris: UNESCO, 172–186.
Niane, Djibril Tamsir. 1984. “Mali and the Second Mandingo Expansion.” General History
of Africa IV. Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century. D. T. Niane, ed. Paris:
UNESCO, 117–171.
Niane, Djibril Tamsir. 1994. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Harlow, UK: Longman African
Writers.
MAROONS
Maroons were enslaved people who ran away. Scholars often apply the French term
marronage to the act itself. Maroons ran either temporarily to deny their owners
access to their l abor for a time (known as petit marronage) or permanently to estab-
lish their own independent communities (known as grand marronage). Both kinds
of marronage were common in Atlantic slave societies. In some cases Maroon com-
munities, such as in Jamaica and Suriname, grew too strong to eradicate, forcing
colonial governments to negotiate with them. Some of these communities have sur-
vived to the present. In most cases, however, Maroons led precarious lives on
the fringes of Atlantic societies, always under the threat of detection, capture, re-
enslavement, or death. Marronage lasted in the Atlantic world as long as slavery was
legal and always represented a significant act of resistance to enslavement.
Marronage appeared within the first decades of European colonization in the
Americas. Enslaved Native Americans and Africans escaped Spanish control, some-
times with dramatic results. One early Spanish attempt to settle in what is now the
United States, the 1526 Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón expedition to modern South Caro-
lina, failed in large measure because the enslaved Africans fled to the neighboring
M A R OONS 393
natives. The brutal nature of slavery made it virtually certain that slaves would
flee if they had the opportunity to do so.
Geog raphical factors aided Maroons. Ready access to mountains, forests, or
swamps made it easier for the enslaved to flee. Such areas also provided resources
for survival. Remote and inaccessible places served to shelter Maroons from detec-
tion, lessening the likelihood that they would be captured and re-enslaved.
Temporary absences from the plantation w ere instances of petit marronage. Slaves
might flee to avoid punishment, to avoid labor, or to visit slaves on other planta-
tions. Such absences might last a few hours to several days. Those who engaged in
petit marronage do not seem to have intended to absent themselves permanently,
making their actions quite different from grand marronage.
Sylviane Diouf draws another important distinction between Maroon types
that complicates the typology of marronage. “Hinterland Maroons” lived far from
settled areas, and thus w ere examples of grand marronage. “Borderland Maroons”
remained in the general vicinity of plantations, especially on their underdevel-
oped fringes in marshes and forests. They could take advantage of their proximity
to the plantation, connecting borderland Maroons to established social networks
among the plantation’s slaves and providing a source for supplies such as food
and tools. Maroons of this type always suffered a far greater likelihood of detec-
tion and capture, and also ran the risk of betrayal by plantation slaves (Diouf
2014, 4–10).
Another, more difficult type of marronage to categorize consists of runaways who
fled to urban centers such as Charleston, South Carolina. In towns, Maroons could
hide more or less in plain sight among enslaved and f ree blacks. Urban environments
were dangerous due to the far higher likelihood of detection and recapture, but urban
Maroons enjoyed greater access to social networks that could offer assistance such
as food, shelter, clothing, and tools. They also enjoyed far greater opportunities
for earning income through their labor. Those who lived in black enclaves rejected
enslavement but they did not simultaneously reject society as did those who ran
away permanently.
Marronage occurred in e very Atlantic slave colony. In some cases, Maroon com-
munities grew large and became well known. Jamaica developed large Maroon
communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had their origins
in the English seizure of the island from Spain in 1655. The Spanish left behind
many of their slaves, who fled into the mountainous interior of the island and mar-
ried with the remaining native Taínos. T hese communities grew as other slaves
escaped and joined them. Jamaica’s Maroons created small farming communities,
but occasionally raided plantations to acquire goods that they could not grow or
produce for themselves. Such raids provoked the First Maroon War (1728–1739).
When the British found themselves unable to eradicate the Maroons, they made
peace, agreeing to leave the Maroons alone so long as they were willing to return
captured runaway slaves to their British masters. The Second Maroon War erupted
in 1795 when the Maroons of Trelawny Parish complained of harsh British treat-
ment. The British used 5,000 troops to suppress the rebellious Maroons, deport-
ing them to Nova Scotia a fter their defeat. Those Maroons who remained loyal,
394 M A R OONS
however, were left alone; their descendants still have their own communities in
Jamaica.
South America also had large Maroon communities. In Dutch Suriname and
French Guiana, slaves fled plantations for the forests where they joined with natives.
Several of these groups repeatedly raided plantations. Colonial authorities tried
to stamp them out in the 1770s, as the British had tried with Jamaica’s Maroons, with
similar results. Suriname’s colonial government signed a peace treaty with several of
the Maroon groups, offering annual payments that replaced the goods the Maroons
raided to obtain. John Gabriel Stedman, a soldier who participated in the war against
the Maroons, wrote an important eyewitness account of the war in Narrative of a Five
Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). The descendants of
these Maroons, the Bushinengués, still live in Suriname and French Guiana.
Some Maroons became legendary. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the
Maroon leader François Mackandal became a figure of nearly mythical stature for
his leadership in resisting slavery. He and his followers raided and destroyed plan-
tations, and allegedly distributed poisons for slaves to use against their masters.
Authorities finally captured and executed Mackandal in 1758. His actions foreshad-
owed the Haitian Revolution that erupted a few decades a fter his death.
Colonies with substantial slave populations tried to prevent marronage by strictly
regulating the activities of slaves via legislation. T hese slave codes reflected plant-
ers’ concerns over the possibility of slave rebellion, but they were also meant to
prevent slaves from r unning away. Slave patrols could arrest any slave found away
from a plantation without a signed pass from an owner, for example. In colonies
with sizeable native populations such as V irginia and South Carolina, slavehold-
ers often paid local natives for the capture and return of escaped slaves. This pre-
vented the natives from allying with the enslaved to challenge their European
control but it also removed a potential source of supplies for Maroons.
Planters usually moved swiftly to destroy Maroon settlements when they were
discovered. Slaveholders in Virginia located and eradicated Maroon hideaways in
the Blue Ridge Mountains in the 1730s to forestall a potential Maroon war. B ecause
marronage, like open rebellion, represented an absolute rejection of slavery, plant-
ers understood that tolerating it in any form was dangerous. Additionally, from the
perspective of slave o wners Maroons w ere guilty of theft b
ecause they literally stole
themselves, denying both their persons and their labor to their owners. Planters
feared that Maroons would conspire with slaves to help them escape or act as a
guerrilla force to prey on plantations.
Recaptured Maroons w ere often put to death as a warning to o thers. T
hose who
were not killed were often subjected to horrific punishments, such as castration in
the case of male Maroons. As with slaves who masters considered troublesome,
recaptured Maroons w ere often sold and shipped off to other slave colonies as part
of their punishment.
Studying Maroons and their communities is intrinsically difficult b ecause of
the scarcity of documentation. Grand marronage depended on successfully hiding
from society at large; many Maroons may have simply vanished from the historical
record. Some sources documenting Maroons and marronage exist, such as records
M AYA C I V ILI Z ATION 395
of colonial governments and courts, plantation records, letters, jail notices, and
runaway advertisements in newspapers, but they reflect the perspective of slave
owners. Archaeology can fill in some of the gaps, although significant challenges
remain because Maroons lived in remote places to avoid detection, so the very
factors that made hidden locales attractive for Maroons also make such sites dif-
ficult for modern archaeologists to find. Traditions and oral histories passed down
among Maroon descendants are another source of information, although they
must be used with g reat care.
Dennis J. Cowles
See also: Jamaica; Saint-Domingue/Haiti; Slave Rebellion; Slavery
Further Reading
Diouf, Sylviane A. 2014. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. New York: New
York University Press.
Norton, Holly K., and Christopher T. Espenshade. 2007. “The Challenge in Locating
Maroon Refuge Sites at Maroon Ridge, St. Croix.” Journal of Car ibbean Archaeology
7: 1–17.
Sayers, Daniel O. 2014. A Desolate Place for a Defiant P eople: The Archaeology of Maroons,
Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the G reat Dismal Swamp. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Stedman, John Gabriel. 1992. Stedman’s Surinam: Life in an Eighteenth-Century Slave Soci-
ety. 5th.ed. Edited by Richard Price and Sally Price. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press.
M AYA C I V I L I Z AT I O N
The exact origins and settlement of Maya civilization, in the region now known as
Yucatán, is unknown but archaeological evidence revealed that permanent settle-
ments, with house platforms, pottery, and grinding stones indicative of agricultural
practices, existed in the region as early as 2000 BCE. The discovery of t hose archae-
ological ruins directly beneath later Classic period structures supports the theo-
ries of these formative societies giving rise to the later Maya civilization. One of the
strongest theories of origins suggests enduring influences from the Olmec society
that dominated the Mesoamerican region prior to the Maya. Today, this territory is
now part of Guatemala and Belize as well as the western portions of Honduras and
El Salvador.
Between 250 and 800 CE, the Maya of the Yucatán experienced their Golden Age.
The Maya math system enabled the Maya to have a calendar system far in advance
of any in the world while architectural engineering expanded well beyond any that
was found in Europe. A fter 800 CE and up to the beginning of the Spanish
conquest in 1517, with the arrival of Hernandez de Cordoba off northeastern
Yucatán, powerful Maya kingdoms such as Palenque occupied present-day Chi-
apas, Yucatán, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The Maya forged
strong political and commercial alliances with the civilizations of central Mexico
396 M AYA C I V ILI Z ATION
through long-distance trade. Luxury goods as well as pan-Mesoamerican beliefs

quickly reached the Anasazi people of the American Southwest and Native Ameri-
can tribes living east of the Mississippi River.
The civilizations of ancient Mexico shared basic customs and beliefs through
well-established trading networks. In time, Mesoamerican products and ideas
spread to the cultures of North America. Artisans in Mexico created turquoise
mosaic mirrors adorned with the symbol of the Feathered Serpent. The picture of
an advanced society appears from the reports of Spanish traders in the first two
decades of the sixteenth century and in the later reports of shipwrecked individu-
als, such as Father Geronimo de Aguilar, and his companion Gonzalo Guerrero,
and from the conquering forces of Cortés. Collectively, these reports depict cities
that became the gateway to vital trade goods and portage routes. Maya long dis-
tance trade spread across greater Mesoamerica where trade routes focused on cen-
tral Mexico and the Gulf coast, and traders carried cacao, which was often used as
currency, obsidian, ceramics, textiles, copper bells, and axes.
Along with commerce, the Maya shared a tremendous enthusiasm for a ball-
game that was played like soccer, with ball courts that were a focal point of cere-
monial centers, from the Maya city-state of Copan, Honduras, to the Hohokam site
of Snaketown, in Phoenix, Arizona. Social and religious ideas from Mesoamerica
eventually reached Native American cultures east of the Mississippi River.
Maya societies were scattered throughout the region of the Yucatán and into
Mesoamerica. At varying periods, t hese independent communities experienced
Maya ruins at Palenque, Mexico. The discovery of Maya ruins played a key role in
uncovering Maya culture. (Corel)
M AYA C I V ILI Z ATION 397
Maya Cultural Achievements

Maya cultural traits, such as their hieroglyphic writing, calendric rounds,
and agriculture, brought together math, astronomy, and calendar systems
with religious beliefs. Advancements in math were evident in such unusual
inclusions as the concept of zero, something not a dopted by Europeans until
the Middle Ages. The Maya calendar was cyclical rather than linear, and reli-
gious perceptions were interwoven into its system of charting the days and
years. Deities were assigned a year, and their success or failure was believed
to determine the events experienced by the Maya p eople.
peace and prosperity, and then wars and famines. Despite their independent
nature, the Maya city-states participated in formal, territorial organi zation, some-
times resembling a loose empire, while most often resembling confederations of
related allies. The center for the more unified sociopolitical eras resided initially
in Chichen Itza and then, following a civil war in the 1200s, in Mayapan. When
calamities beset the overall Maya region, fragmentation of these formal organ
izations occurred, resulting in civil wars. However, even in the midst of t hese peri-
ods of strife, elements of cooperation appeared when outside forces invaded the
Maya territories.
At the point of Spanish exploration and conquest of the Yucatán, the Maya people
were experiencing the aftermath of one of the civil wars that saw the fall of Maya-
pan. It was abandoned around 1448 and was followed by a period of lengthy war-
fare in the Yucatán Peninsula that concluded shortly before the Spanish explorers
arrived in 1511. With scattered independent communities, authority centered upon
the holy lords (k’uhul ajaw) who w ere vested with the authority of both politic al
and religious leader. This concept of dual leadership centralized in a single person
appeared throughout the Maya communities at the time of the Spanish conquest
and continued in the early colonial period, though the leader’s title shifted to Spanish
usage such as rey, or king.
Much like the invading Spanish, the acknowledged native leaders, or ajaw, were
supported by a hierarchical system of lesser lords and priests. The greater the hier-
archical structure, the greater the authority of the holy lord over the city-state. T
hose
lords capable of extending their authority over the neighboring cities displayed
the strongest authority.
Between 1517 and 1519, t here w ere three separate Spanish explorations along the
Yucatán coast. Following the expedition by Cordoba in 1517, a second was led by
Juan de Grijalva in 1518, and the most significant one, led by Hernán Cortés, began
in late 1518. At the time of Cortés’s arrival in 1519, the authority of these caciques
was mainly restricted to their own city-state but collaboration among the caciques
was often a means of warding off the invasion and influence of the Spanish. The
Maya seemed to use this system of collaboration as a means of restricting the author-
ity of the Aztec, whose Triple Alliance had spread into the region, demanding the
398 M AYA C I V ILI Z ATION
payment of humans for sacrifice and laborers on a regular basis. In fact, Cortés
encouraged the Maya city-states to refrain from paying tribute to the Aztec.
After Cortés, another Spanish explorer, Francisco de Montejo and his son, Fran-
cisco de Montejo the Younger, initiated several campaigns against the Yucatán
Peninsula in 1527. When the Spanish explorers arrived in Chiapas in 1528, they
took the Maya lands, forced them to adopt Christianity, and forbade them to read
and write. The missionaries condemned Maya hieroglyphic writing, which was
then the most complex phonetic script in the world, as the work of the devil. Hun-
dreds of books on astronomy, religion, and philosophy were destroyed. Then, in
1697, Martín de Ursúa attacked the Itza capital Nojpetén, the last remaining inde
pendent Maya city.
The Spanish Conquest devastated the Maya who were placed under the domina-
tion of a p eople uninterested in their ancient ways. They w ere removed from their
familiar settlements into new areas and were introduced to new diseases that rav-
aged their civilization. Yet many Maya villages continued to maintain their inde
pendence from Spanish colonial authority, to manage their own affairs, and to retain
their beliefs and language against the efforts of Catholic missionaries to change it.
The missionaries sent by the Catholic Church to evangelize the Maya wrote
detailed accounts of their discoveries. T hese same Spanish priests and colonial offi-
cials reported their descriptions of the ruins they visited in Yucatán and Central
America. In 1839, American traveler and author John Lloyd Stephens, and English
architect and draftsman Frederick Catherwood visited a number of Maya sites and
the illustrated descriptions of these ruins promoted strong popular interest that
eventually brought Maya culture to global attention.
By the early twentieth century, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Eth-
nology at Harvard University was sponsoring excavations at Copán, and in the
Yucatán Peninsula. T oday, this Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program,
founded in 1968, is an active research archive and ongoing recording program
devoted to the recording and dissemination of information about all known ancient
Maya inscriptions and their associated figurative art.
L ater advances were made in deciphering the Maya calendar, and identifying
deities, dates, and religious concepts. A fter 1930, archaeological exploration
increased dramatically, with large-scale excavations across the entire Maya region.
An important excavation occurred in the 1980s at the Maya city of Kaan (now Cal-
akmul), then encased in vegetation. The discovery of pyramids beneath the trees
exemplified the recent explosion of knowledge about the Maya, including the rev-
elation that Kaan was also the site of a war with Mutal that lasted more than a
century and consumed much of the Maya heartland. Kaan’s strategy was to sur-
round Matal and its subordinate city-states with a ring of enemies. By conquest,
negotiation, and marriage alliances, Kaan succeeded in encircling its e nemy but it
did not win the war.
In the 1960s, John Sidney Eric Thompson, one of the world’s foremost Maya
scholars, promoted the ideas that Maya cities w ere essentially vacant ceremonial
centers serving a dispersed population in the forest, and that the Maya civilization
was governed by peaceful astronomer-priests. Thompson, who was a veteran of
M AYFLO W E R C O M PA C T 399
archaeological field expeditions to southern Mexico and Central America, was par-
ticularly expert in Maya hieroglyphic writing. Believing that Maya studies suf-
fered from imbalance, he approached Maya history and religion from the standpoint
of ethno-history, a change from earlier archaeologists, who mostly restricted their
research to their excavations while social anthropologists observed the modern
Maya as members of a somewhat primitive society in an era of change.
Few Maya today are likely aware of their pre-Columbian past even though
7 million Maya are still living in Mexico and Central America, and another million
in the United States. Women continue to weave elaborate designs into their native
clothes and make clay vessels for their household; the men continue to harvest
their fields, often by hand; and their ancient myths and folk tales continue to sur-
vive through a rich oral culture and literature.
Martin J. Manning
See also: Aztec Empire; Cortés, Hernán; Olmec Civilization
Further Reading
Abrams, Elliot M. 1994. How the Maya Built Their World: Energetics and Ancient Architecture.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Jackson, Sarah E. 2013. Politics of the Maya Court: Hierarchy and Change in the Late Classic
Period. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
M AY F L O W E R C O M PA C T ( 1 6 2 0 )
The Mayflower Compact was a document drafted by separatist Pilgrims and signed
by passengers of the Mayflower that established the foundations of a self-governing
society in New England by the covenanted consent of the governed. On Septem-
ber 16, 1620, a small group of English Pilgrims left Leiden, Holland, to establish a
community that maintained their cultural and religious values in the New World.
While they were awarded a patent to s ettle under the Virginia Company’s colonial
territory, they ended up landing hundreds of miles north of their intended desti-
nation. Since they arrived in Cape Cod, New E ngland, and outside of the jurisdic-
tion of any political body, some of the non-Pilgrim voyagers, nicknamed the
“Strangers,” threatened mutiny and expressed the wish to live by their own rules.
Such instability made surviving in the New World more challenging. On Novem-
ber 21, 1620, the Pilgrims convinced the ship’s voyagers to draft a document that
created a political authority all could live under. The document was novel, if not
revolutionary, in that it sought the justification of its political authority by the
consent of the governed through a written covenant. Voyagers w ere unable to
leave the ship until every freeman agreed to “covenant and combine our selves
togeather into a civill body politick” by signing their name to the document (Brad-
ford 1606–1646, 107). The Mayflower Compact established the ability of free
people to create “Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices,” related to a
400 M AYFLO W E R C O M PA C T
self-governing society, and this idea proved especially influential to later leaders
of the American Revolution.
Although similar to their Puritan siblings in Calvinist theological convictions,
the Pilgrims disagreed with the Puritan belief that the Church of E ngland could
be reformed from within. Instead, they argued that the faithful had to separate
from the Church of England by establishing their own congregations. While they
were originally located in England’s famed Scrooby underground separatist church
movement, the English Pilgrims were led by John Robinson to the Netherlands
with the hope of pursuing their religious convictions and escaping English perse-
cution. However, a fter 11 years the small group felt as if they w ere losing their cul-
tural identity, and they appealed to the V irginia Company, which had established
the Jamestown colony in 1609, for assistance in migrating to North America. Noth-
ing came from t hese appeals u ntil Thomas Weston and John Pierce helped secure
a grant to s ettle in northern V irginia under the V irginia Company’s jurisdiction.
The Pilgrims left the Netherlands in a ship called the Speedwell and rendezvoused
with the Mayflower in July 1620. The Speedwell itself was in no condition to make
a transatlantic voyage, and instead 50 men, 20 women, and 34 children packed
the Mayflower and made the voyage to North America in September of 1620.
The first half of the voyage was rough, but losses were minor. In November, the
ship spotted the land of Cape Cod. Unfortunately this was 200 miles north of their
intended landing point. This meant that the voyagers, who w ere split between
Separatists and non-Separatists, were outside of the political jurisdiction of the
Virginia Company’s royal charter. The attempts of the ship’s captain, Christopher
Jones, to sail back south was thwarted by poor weather and strong winds, and with
the threat of winter, the voyagers instead settled at Provincetown Harbor, Cape
Cod. In addition to the ominous approach of cold weather, the ship’s circumstances
grew more dire when non-Pilgrim voyagers threatened mutiny because the group
lacked any existing legal and governmental jurisdiction. In response, the Pilgrim
leader and later colonial governor William Bradford (1590–1657) convinced the
freemen aboard the ship to bind themselves into a self-governing written “combi-
nation.” Bradford noted that the intent of this “combination” was to establish “the
first foundation of their governmente in this place,” and 41 men, representing the
ship’s passengers, signed the document (Bradford 1982 106). In addition to being
much shorter in written length than English provincial and colonial charters, the
document was notable for expressing the right of a free p eople to govern them-
selves by electing their own leaders, drafting their own constitutions, and passing
their own laws.
The Pilgrims described the document as a covenant and combination, and the
document also paralleled the legal compact, which served as an enabling docu-
ment in England. It wasn’t until Alden Bradford published A Topographical Descrip-
tion of Duxborough, in the County of Plymouth in 1793 that it was actually called a
compact. Most familiar to t hose separatists onboard was the term “covenant” (Bradford
1982, 107). Pilgrims and Puritans alike saw covenants as a means to enable the
origins and authority of various social entities, such as churches, marriages, and
even business agreements. As influenced by a stream of what became known as
M AYFLO W E R C O M PA C T 401
Text of the Compact

The Compact read in full as follows:
“In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the
loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James, by the grace of God, of
Great Britain, France, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, &c. Having
undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith,
and the honour of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in
the northern parts of V irginia; do by these presents solemnly and mutually,
in the presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves
together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation,
and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, consti-
tute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions,
offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for
the general good of the colony: unto which we promise all due submission
and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names,
Cape Cod, 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our sovereign Lord
King James of E ngland, France, and Ireland 18th, and of Scotland 54th,
Anno Domini 1620.”
Source: Lyon Sharman. The Cape Cod Journal of the Pilgrim F
athers: Reprinted from
Mourt’s Relation. New York: The Roycrofters, 1920.
federal covenantal theology, t hese combinations w ere modeled a fter covenants in

the Old Testament. They usually involved non-relatives making morally binding
agreements with each other. Covenantal agreements generally called for punish-
ments should either member of the covenant fail to meet their terms; they
requested that God both witness and guarantee t hese terms; and they w ere often
sealed with an oath and a sign. What made the covenant different from a mere
legal contract was that it was grounded on moral rather than simply legal obliga-
tions; that God functioned as the witness and guarantee of t hese covenantal obli-
gations; and that it created a new unique relationship between these covenantal
participants. In the perspectives of Puritans and Pilgrims, covenants changed men
and women intending to marry into the one-flesh u nion of husband and wife. Cov-
enants also changed individual Christians into one church body. It is no surprise
that, when found outside any legal authority, the Mayflower Pilgrims appealed to a
device they used to create other important institutions in their lives as well as one
that expressed the theological significance of their endeavor to create a new puri-
fied p
eople akin to t hose of Old Testament Israel.
In particular, the compact bound those who sealed it with their signatures to
be one political body that created a self-governing civil society whose members
could appoint their chosen political leaders and frame the community’s laws. The
402 M AYFLO W E R C O M PA C T
document itself was not a constitution that outlined a specific body of laws. Rather,
it enabled the people to create their own constitution and their own laws to meet
the needs of the “generall good of the Colonie” (Bradford 1982, 107). Earlier, the
Pilgrims had been forced into exile because they tried to establish self-governing
underground churches through covenants. It is significant that outside of the
Virginia Company’s authority they used a similar enabling device for the creation
and justification of their civil government.
This document apparently was not simply a short-term improvised solution
crafted to temporarily deal with the mutiny crises. Mourt’s Relation, one of the ear-
liest works that contains the full text of the compact, describes the situation for
drafting the document as one in which “it was thought good there should be an
association and agreement, that we should combine together in one body, and to
submit to such government and governors as we should by common consent agree
to make and choose” (Sharman 1920, 5). Even after the colony obtained a patent
from the president of the Council for New England in the 1630s, Bradford and
Winslow still emphasized the authority of the Mayflower Compact. When they
codified the colony’s laws in 1636, they placed the Mayflower Compact on page
one, and described it as “a solemne & binding combinacon” (Bunker 2010, 282).
They noted that they came to North America as “freeborne subjects of the state of
England,” and that nobody could impose law or ordinances upon the colony with-
out the “consent according to the free liberties of the state & Kingdome of Engl. &
no otherwise” (Bunker 2010, 283). While loyalty was expressed towards the Crown,
the overriding authority of the colony was evident when early American colonies
began to cross out references in their constitutions to the monarchy around the
time of the English Civil War.
It is likely that William Brewster (1567–1644) authored the Mayflower Com-
pact, given he was the most educated member among the Mayflower’s Pilgrims.
Brewster was an elder and cofounder of the Plymouth Colony, and in his earlier
life he served the diplomat and politician William Davison. While in exile, Brew-
ster published a number of religious works, and established a ministry among the
Pilgrims. In addition to later serving as the schoolmaster of the colony, Brewster
brought an impressive collection of books. Among these was a four volume series
by German Calvinist David Pareus, whose work the archbishop of Canterbury
called to be publically burned for its justification of rebellion against a sovereign
who failed to protect his subjects. Brewster also owned a copy of Sir Thomas Smith’s
manual of a government, which described E ngland as somewhat of a republic, with
a queen who ruled by way of the consent of the governed manifested through Par-
liament. This was the type of intellectual environment the likely author of the
Mayflower Compact came from. When accounting for Brewster and the Pilgrim’s
separatist congregational covenantal convictions, and their unique historical set-
ting outside any existing jurisdiction, their novel solution t owards self-government
appears a marked departure from royal colonial charters.
Unfortunately, the location of the original copy of the Mayflower Compact is
unknown. It is likely that it was sent back with the Mayflower or Fortune on their
return voyages, or that it remained u nder the possession of official record keeper
M E R C ANTILIS M 403
William Bradford or his nephew Nathaniel Morton. However, a number of author-

itative early copies do exist. The earliest copy of the Mayflower Compact’s text is
found in a recollection of the colony’s expedition commonly referred to as Mourt’s
Relation (1622). The work is an account by Edward Winslow and William Brad-
ford of the colony’s activities, and was made for English consumption. It contains
the text of the Compact on its sixth page, and a copy of the book can be found in
the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. The oldest known
manuscript copy of the Compact originates with Bradford’s personal recorded his-
tory, commonly titled History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606–1646 (written between
1630 and 1646). Like Winthrop’s personal diary, Bradford’s records provide a
wealth of information on early colonial history, and Bradford provides a manuscript
copy of the Combination. It is likely that, as official record keeper for the colony,
he had access to the original, or an authoritative copy. The original manuscript of
Bradford’s recollections can be found in Boston’s State Library. Notably absent in
these two copies w ere the names of t hose individuals who signed the documents.
They were added in Nathaniel Morton’s New-Englands Memoriall (1669). Morton
served the colony as clerk and secretary for more than 20 years, and in addition to
the access he had to official colonial documents, he inherited a number of manu-
scripts from his u
ncle William Bradford. Morton’s work can also be located in the
John Carter Brown Library.
Leonard O. Goenaga
See also: Bradford, William; British Atlantic; Puritans
Further Reading
Bradford, William. 1982. Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation 1606–1646. Edited by
W. T. Davis. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc.
Bunker, Nick. 2010. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sharman, Lyon. 1920. The Cape Cod Journal of the Pilgrim F athers: Reprinted from Mourt’s
Relation. New York: The Roycrofters.
MERCANTILISM
Mercantilism was the economic engine that drove European exploration and, later,
colonialism in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Much
of the theory was based on the idea that national wealth was a zero-sum game;
that is, the theory held that the wealth of the world, as measured in commodities,
was fixed and could only be divided between nations. Mercantile theorists w ere
divided into two schools of thought. Bullionists emphasized the acquisition of
precious metals, while early Physiocrats advocated for the primacy of positive bal-
ances of trade. Because of the zero-sum nature of mercantilism, economic centers,
primarily in the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain, began to vie for power to
keep or gain more wealth than their competitors by protecting domestic produc-
tion and trade. With the opening of overseas sources of wealth in the sixteenth
404 M E R C ANTILIS M
c entury, competition increasingly occurred through the acquisition of territories

or outright warfare. Both forms of competition, domestic and international, led to
increased power for the merchant class as well as political rulers. The concomi-
tant increase in military power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
paved the way for further displays of strength against rivals. For this reason, it is
sometimes difficult to distinguish mercantilist economic policies from the Euro
pean power politics of the time.
Before the Industrial Revolution and the publication of Adam Smith’s (1723–
1790) The Wealth of Nations (1776), it was altogether unclear that economic pro-
ductivity and efficiency could be significantly enhanced, leading to the idea that
there was a finite sum of wealth in the world. If a country managed to attain a
greater degree of wealth, other countries would be unable to acquire it, short of
war or exceptionally favorable trade agreements. War, however, was expensive and
destroyed wealth; some form of trade was preferable for the competing powers.
Two major forms of commodities were believed necessary for wealth creation: bul-
lion, primarily gold and silver, and manufactured or raw goods. Gold and silver
were necessary for the economies of the time, because these precious metals backed
most currencies. Therefore, an increase in bullion led to an increase in national
wealth. This could be achieved by e ither exporting raw materials and manufac-
tured goods in exchange for bullion, or by importing the resources needed to cre-
ate such exportable commodities.
The major theorists and advocates of mercantilism were Jean-Baptiste Colbert
(1619–1683), Edward Misselden (1608–1654), Philipp von Hörnigk (1640–1714),
and Thomas Mun (1571–1641). Economic theorists were split on which method
would lead to greater wealth. The first camp, the bullionists, believed that bullion
itself was the primary determinant of increasing wealth. Unlike manufactured
goods, bullion could not be created. A nation had to find and acquire bullion in
natural reserves, through exploration and mining, or trade for it with domestic
goods manufactured within the nation. In this view, a nation with more bullion was
a wealthier nation. The focus, therefore, was on the export of commodities produced
within the country, since manufactured goods could be exchanged for bullion.
Mercantilism led to policies that inhibited free trade, particularly in the area of
imports. If it w
ere true for one nation that exporting for bullion led to wealth, it was
equally true for another nation. Trade would necessarily fall, because e very coun-
try would be unwilling to import goods, based on the assumption that it would lead
to another nation gaining wealth through bullion acquisition.
In practice, this did not arise b ecause of the influence of the second camp of
mercantilists, the early Physiocrats, who favored a balance of trade approach. In
their view, trade should be more f ree b ecause the importation of goods would allow
domestic creation of wealth. In effect, the goods acquired from other nations could
be used to produce new goods that would eventually be sold domestically or inter-
nationally, thus creating wealth. Nevertheless, t here was an implicit focus on a
positive balance of trade, a trade surplus resulting from exporting more than
importing. The balance of trade approach was also based on the zero-sum logic of
M E R C ANTILIS M 405
wealth. A negative balance of trade meant that the trading partner had gained more
wealth from the transactions than the home country.
Whichever camp a nation primarily fell into, the role of the state was to pro-
mote national wealth and national power through economic nationalism. The gov-
ernment would conduct policy that governed economic practice, with the goal of
increasing relative national power against competing nations. Wealth was the
primary means of measuring national power. It created higher standards of living,
gained respect from other powers, and enhanced the ability to construct larger
militaries. Mercantilist policies focused especially on agriculture, as husbandry was
still the primary method of subsistence and trade. Additionally, governments also
enacted tariffs that protected the country’s raw materials. Domestic manufacture
should use raw materials, as the manufactured products were worth more in trade.
Conversely, only raw materials should be imported, b ecause they were cheaper
and could be used to spur domestic production. The thinking held that the value
added during manufacturing processes would increase wealth. Trading partners
should pay in bullion, but the home country should attempt to pay in other forms
of commodity. If correctly employed, there would be no dependence on foreign
countries for goods. T hese suggestions did not always work in practice, as it was
sometimes unavoidable to pay in bullion or to import manufactured materials.
By the mid-seventeenth century, the Netherlands became the first significant
mercantilist power, owing to its productive efficiency in agriculture, though England
and France also focused on agricultural production. However, a large decline in
cereal prices from 1650 to 1750 caused the three major economic powers to turn
to international sources of profit. European exploration increased as a result. No
matter to which camp a mercantilist belonged, new sources of trade and natural
resources were considered essential to national wealth. The discovery of the Amer
icas ensured new ground for trade and bullion deposits. Native Americans had
few manufactured goods, but plentiful raw materials to trade for. Second, the natives
did not value gold and silver in the same way as Europeans, and were willing to
trade it for far less than its European value. The balance of trade criterion could
thus be met. Alternatively, force could be used to acquire material and bullion,
which was often the case.
Although both France and E ngland sought territories in the Americas, England
was more successful. As such, their transatlantic trade was far greater and they
gained more wealth. Using the bullion gained from the North American territo-
ries, England could more easily trade with the profitable markets of Asia. In a
notable departure from mercantilist theory, trade with Asia was based on bullion
exports; the European powers generally did not have the quality manufactured
goods demanded by the Asian market. It is important to note that the overall bal-
ance of trade was considered important, and not necessarily the balance between
countries. In this way, bullion could be exported to Asia, as long as even more bul-
lion was acquired elsewhere. Extensive trade began mostly through trading compa-
nies; merchant organi zations sanctioned by governments with monopoly powers
over certain geographic regions. Peacefully trading with natives required less
406 M E R C ANTILIS M
military expenditure, but it also resulted in less profit through bargaining from a
position of less overt power, or the s imple inability to gain resources located in
the hinterlands of the regions explored. During the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the idea spread that a territory taken by force could result in greater
profit.
Territories w ere acquired through another byproduct of mercantilism: imperi-
alism. As most of the countries of Western Europe w ere mercantilist in orienta-
tion, trade was hampered. Only through new sources of wealth could a nation
expand its power to a significant degree. Therefore, a nation had to acquire colo-
nies before other nations, which often required military expenditure to subdue the
natives. The profits gained from the colonies allowed further build-up of militar-
ies. The enlarged militaries could then acquire even more colonies. However, con-
frontations between Western European powers often resulted. The zero-sum
doctrine of mercantilism meant that any wealth acquired from new colonies was
wealth that another nation could not have. It was thus necessary to prevent another
nation from acquiring a colony or to evict them from a colony they had already
acquired. Using this logic, imperial powers would provide aid to the subjugated
natives of other nations or resort to outright hostilities with another imperial power,
as was the case with France and E ngland in North America.
Generally, a circle of trade pattern developed in the North Atlantic. Raw mate-
rials were imported to the home country, where these materials w ere processed
into manufactured goods, and then exported back to the colonies. The most noto-
rious example is the slave trade. Molasses from the Car ibbean was shipped to
Europe and transformed into rum. Profits were used to buy goods to ship to Africa,
and these goods were exchanged for slaves. The slaves were sold to sugar produc-
ers in the Car ibbean, and then this profit was used to buy more molasses, thus
beginning the circular trade cycle anew. Other examples included copper, guns,
tobacco, and many other commodities. Due to the exploitative nature of the home
country-colony dynamic, mercantilist policies could be strongly enforced to the
advantage of the European power.
It is difficult to distinguish between mercantilist economic policy and power
politics of the European nations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The implicit connection between wealth and military power could not be over-
looked. Thus, anything that benefited the acquisition of wealth ultimately led to
an increase in military strength, a much more formidable and obvious measure of
power. It made more sense, furthermore, to conduct these military adventures away
from the home country, the site of manufacturing finished products. Additionally,
the zero-sum nature of mercantilism dictated that the finite sum of wealth in the
world would have to be divided by the imperial powers. Any nation failing to
acquire new territories would forever lose the wealth gained. The wealth acquired
from these overseas territories led to the idea of a cyclical power growth: acquire
territory and wealth, enlarge the military, acquire further territory and wealth, and
so on. Any nation that did not keep pace would surely be left behind in the inter-
national power struggle. The protection of the merchant class would allow a gain
in political power for the ruling class. This protection, often through trade barriers,
M I G R ATION 407
allowed a nation to wage economic warfare against its rivals. The wealth gained would
then allow them to wage actual warfare if needed.
Eventually, in the late eighteenth c entury, criticisms of mercantilism gained trac-
tion. The economic notions of comparative and absolute advantage dissolved the
myth of the zero-sum game. It was also impossible to consistently maintain a posi-
tive balance of trade, as eventually prices of commodities would change, and then
economic behavior would dictate a change in strategy. Finally, economists recog-
nized that bullion was, in many ways, indistinguishable from other commodities.
Adam Smith’s exposition on this subject appeared in his The Wealth of Nations, and
became widely accepted. The measure of a country was no longer simply its abil-
ity to produce, but also to consume. With the advent of paper money, the money
supply could be changed more easily than through the search and acquisition of
new bullion. Yet the starkest indication of practical and intellectual economic
changes came from increased industrialization. The variety of products increased
the desire for consumption. Increased productivity and manufacturing capability
allowed dramatic increases in domestic wealth and standards of living. Neverthe-
less, it should be noted that many of the characteristics of mercantilism led to the
Industrial Revolution. The raw materials gained through mercantilist policy pro-
moted domestic production, and industrialization required raw materials. It was
through this need that liberal, and nonmercantilist, trade policies w ere adopted.
Christopher Goodwin
See also: European Exploration; Gold and Silver; Money
Further Reading
Ekelund, Robert B. Jr., and Robert D. Tollison. 1997. Politicized Economies: Monarchy, Mono
poly, and Mercantilism. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Hutchison, Terence W. 1988. Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy, 1662–
1776. New York: Blackwell.
Margnusson, Lars. 1994. Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language. London:
Routledge.
M I G R AT I O N
Between 1400 and 1900, Atlantic migration to North and South America varied
depending upon which nations were powerful and the level of technology. Migra-
tion rates decreased markedly when there were economic crises or European wars,
and increased when the economy improved or governmental policies welcomed
immigrants. Migration was minimal at the start, but the Age of Discovery in the
seventeenth century led to subsequent European colonization. Mass migration
surged after 1850 when transportation improvements minimized the Atlantic cross-
ing from five weeks in 1725 to about one week by 1900. While many migrated in
search of better economic and social opportunities, substantial forced migration—
the slave trade and people fleeing persecution and conflicts—constituted a majority
of all Atlantic migration during this period.
408 M I G R ATION
Perhaps more than any other continent, the Americas have been the destina-
tion for the migration by e very other continent, especially Europe and Africa. Even
the Americas’ aboriginal population were immigrants from Asia. An estimated 2.7
million Spanish and Portuguese and 12 million Africans made the transatlantic
voyage, voluntarily or forced, to American colonies during the 1500–1900 period.
During 1760–1820, forced migration predominated, with African slaves outnum-
bering white Europeans by three-to-one. When slavery was abolished and slaves
were emancipated, white European migration dominated (Hensel 2011, 281–301).
As a result of migration, the North American population quadrupled between
1700 and 1800 while the proportion of aboriginals plummeted. Latin America was
the destination for one-third of the Europeans, half of the Africans, and one-sixth
of the Asians who migrated in the eighteenth century. African slaves were taken
mainly to the tropical and semitropical islands and coastal lowlands. Europeans
moved to healthier areas, and during the postcolonial period mostly to the tem-
perate regions in the north and south (Choquette 2011).
After the Americas w ere discovered in 1492, there was a virtually constant flow
of migration from Europe. Migration was one part of the European powers’ contest
for empire in the Americas. At first, migration was mainly from Spain and Portugal
as the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had divided the non-European world into two.
Migration across the Atlantic was by sailing ship. The journey was extremely haz-
ardous until the late nineteenth century. Passengers were packed into unhygienic
holds featuring plague, with smallpox, dysentery, or other contagious diseases
often prevalent.
Many of the small numbers of early Atlantic migrants came inspired by the tales
of vast riches easily acquired. Only a few hundred thousand Spaniards settled in
the American colonies of the Crown before 1600. Their miniscule community com-
pared to the several million Amerindians in the Spanish colonies. This was the
same for the Portuguese territories, as in Brazil tens of thousands of Europeans
migrated by 1700.
Most major European powers recognized by the seventeenth century that the
Americas w ere not a place where untold riches could be exploited but instead saw
it as primarily a place for settlement and trade. Each nation encouraged migration
to solidify their settlements and claim land for commercial and residential pur-
poses. With their financial and scientific advantages, the English and the Dutch
became the masters of the necessary maritime technology for trade. The science of
navigation and the technology of shipbuilding led to the subsequent transition to
steamships for commerce and the military.
In t hese first centuries of migration to the Americas, forced migration outnum-
bered voluntary migration. While Atlantic slavery began in 1444 when the first
cargo of 235 Africans taken from Senegal docked at Lagos in Nigeria, a Portuguese
port, slave ships took five or six times more Africans to the Americas than white
Europeans between 1492 and 1820 (Pagden 2001, 195). Slaves from Africa con-
tinued to arrive in the Car ibbean u ntil late in the nineteenth century.
European migration began on a large-scale during the height of the European
colonial empires during the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. It was the beginning
M I G R ATION 409
of the new “European Diaspora.” From 1815 to 1932, about 60 million p eople left
Europe (with many returning home) mostly to the various European powers’ set-
tlements in the Americas. The United States, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil
received the most. Return migration was much higher from Latin America to Europe
than to Africa. About one-half of all European migrants to Latin America eventu-
ally returned to their homelands (Hensel 2011, 291–292).
Migration at this time remained very hazardous. Only 2 of 15 ships arriving in
Philadelphia in 1738 unloaded most of their passengers in reasonable health. Some
40 British ships sunk in the Atlantic between 1847 and 1851, killing over a thou-
sand would-be migrants. The changeover to steam-powered ships instead of sail-
ing ships quickly resulted in the improvement of the average mortality rate for ships
carrying Atlantic migrants from 17 percent (1850) to under 1 percent by the 1860s
(Sowell 1996, 39).
Spain’s various American colonies became independent between 1808 and 1826,
as many new nations w ere formed. By the mid-1820s, the American rim of the
Atlantic area had been decolonized, but in the Car ibbean, only Haiti had become
independent. As a result, Atlantic migration from Spain and Portugal to the Amer
icas plummeted. Return migration—both forced and voluntary—back to the home
countries increased dramatically as colonials sought safety and stability amid the
newness of home rule.
The development of better and better steamships enabled a boom in both inter-
national trade and mass European emigration to the Americas beginning in the
nineteenth century. The first transatlantic steamship line was founded in 1840.
The amount of time necessary to make the journey to the Americas fell as a result.
Migration surged when the cost to carry passengers plummeted due to advancing
technological efficiencies and competition between the companies. Migrants no lon-
ger had to endure unhealthy conditions. The great improvement in safety and
affordability meant that a move westward need not be a permanent move, so the
decision to emigrate was easier. The expansion of the number of ports offering
steamship service led to other migration changes. Steamships also brought migrants
from the Mediterranean area, in addition to Northern and Western Europe. This
significantly changed the origin of migration to the United States, shifting from
Northern Europe to Southern and Eastern Europe in the 1890s. As affordability
improved and better communication spoke of the opportunities, more wanted to
come. From about 1815 until 1920, some 60 million Europeans (and 10 million
Asians) migrated to the Americas. Of these, roughly three-quarters went to North
America, almost a quarter to Latin America (mainly Argentina and Brazil), and a
much smaller number eventually to Australia. The Latin American migrants were
mainly from Italy (38 percent), Spain (28 percent), and Portugal (11 percent) (Sow-
ell 1996, 41–42).
Wars and economic crises caused significant annual fluctuations. The 1840s
potato blight drove many Irish to the United States. Migration to Argentina, for
example, went from 489,400 between 1885 and 1890 to 156,100 between 1891
and 1895 after the country’s 1890 economic collapse. The development of the Bra-
zilian mining economy produced employment opportunities that drew migration.
410 M I G R ATION
In the eighteenth century, some 600,000 Portuguese settled in Brazil. This was a
true mass migration, because it was about 30 percent of Portugal’s total popula-
tion of 2 million p eople. The international slave trade brought even more to Brazil
during the period of large coffee plantations in the state of São Paulo. Many Ital-
ians came to Brazil in the 1880s to also work in the coffee trade (Hensel 2001,
291).
Some of the newly independent nations encouraged migration as a means of
gaining valuable skills. On August 18, 1824, the Mexican government passed the
General Colonization Law giving foreign settlers the right to buy land and be
exempt from taxes for 10 years. Brazil and Cuba subsidized European migration,
with some provinces giving new arrivals land and helping them to find work.
Because of its reputation and economic opportunities, the United States was the
destination of most of the migrants during this time. Between 1821 and 1880, some
9.5 million Europeans settled in the United States, mostly from Germany and Ire-
land. British and Scandinavians also arrived in bursts of mass migration. Most of
the other European migrants went to Argentina (4 million), Brazil (2 million), Cuba
and Uruguay (600,000), and Chile (200,000). By 1900, there were 162,000 Leba-
nese in Brazil and 150,000 in Argentina (Hensel 2011, 289).
Canada and the United States w ere the first to develop well-organized struc-
tures, legislation, and settlement policies for immigrants. Eventually, most nations
followed. Brazil built an Immigrants’ Hostel (Hospedaria dos Imigrantes) in 1886
in São Paulo, and established admission and record keeping procedures at its major
seaports.
Argentina was the American country whose ethnic composition was most
affected by migration, especially from Italy. Canada’s ethnic composition also
received a major impact. In most other countries, especially the larger ones, the impact
of migration was minimal. In Brazil, for example, the only areas significantly affected
were in its central and southern regions. Despite the large number of immigrants
coming to the United States, the foreign-born w ere a relatively small proportion of
the population.
Forced migration decreased dramatically a fter the slave trade was ended in a
series of steps in individual countries that continued into the second half of the
nineteenth c entury. Nevertheless, from 1811 to 1870, nearly 1 million African slaves
had been shipped to Brazilian coffee and sugar fazendas (plantations), 600,000 to
Cuba, and others to various French colonies in the Car ibbean (Hensel 2011, 282).
Whether the ethnic composition was numerically affected or not, the receiving
nation’s culture were diversified by its migrants. In Brazil, the African arrivals’ cul-
ture enhanced and changed the existing African American Creole culture. The
80,000 slaves in Rio de Janeiro w ere almost 40 percent of the population; a sizable
two-thirds were African natives (Hoerder 2011, 266).
Migrants made significant social and economic contributions to their new coun-
tries. They formed mutual aid societies, various associations that strengthened
communities, started newspapers, and began many commercial and retail busi-
nesses. Emigrant workers helped form trade u nions and improved the average skill
and achievement level of workers, as immigrant industrial workers were 60 percent
M ISSISSIPPIANS 411
of all Argentine industrial workers in 1895. The new countries became more urban-
ized as immigrants flocked to the cities, producing multiethnic and racial cultures
that enriched and deepened the national civilization.
William P. Kladky
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Brazil; Disease; European Exploration; Sailors
Further Reading
Choquette, Leslie. 2011. “Atlantic Migration.” Oxford Bibliographies Online. http://oxfordindex
.oup.com/v iew/10.1093/obo/9780199730414- 0040.
Hensel, Silke. 2011. “Latin American Perspectives on Migration in the Atlantic World.”
Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China
Seas Migration from the 1830s to the 1930s. Edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Dirk
Hoerder. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV.
Hoerder, Dirk. 2011. “From One Black Atlantic to Many: Slave Regimes and Creole Socie
ties, and Power Relationships in the Atlantic World.” Connecting Seas and Connected
Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migration from the 1830s
to the 1930s. Edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder. Leiden, The Nether-
lands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 258–280.
Pagden, Anthony. 2001. Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Explo-
ration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present. New York: Modern Library.
Sowell, Thomas. 1996. Migrations and Culture: A World View. New York: Basic Books.
MISSISSIPPIANS
Mississippians w ere native p eoples of the American South who shared cultural
characteristics common throughout the region from roughly 700 CE to 1600 CE.
Mississippian culture was characterized by monumental mound-building at settle-
ments along the south’s many rivers as well as maize agriculture, a political structure
centered on a central chief at the top of an extensive social hierarchy, an artistic
and religious tradition known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, and a
ritual game played with balls or disks. Mississippian culture was exemplified by
the settlement at Cahokia, a metropolis of between 30,000 to 40,000 people and
more than 200 mounds situated on the Mississippi River across from modern-day
St. Louis. Evidence at Cahokia and at other sites throughout the south suggests a
rough Mississippian chronology. A fter an explosion of expansion and political
consolidation around the year 1050, Mississippian traits dominated the cultural
landscape of the southeast for nearly three centuries until climate change associ-
ated with the L ittle Ice Age, around 1300, initiated a process of decline hastened
by the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. Mississippian cultural traits
remained important in native cultures throughout the southeast after the decline,
however, and continue to influence Native American life today.
Mississippian culture began to emerge across a wide expanse of the eastern
woodlands of North America between 750 CE and 1000 CE, when people situ-
ated along the south’s numerous river valleys began planting eastern flint maize
412 M ISSISSIPPIANS
and beans alongside their more

traditional cultivars, including
gourds and squash. Corn, beans,
and squash together provided
both a balanced diet and a bal-
anced nutrient mixture in the
soil, allowing farmers and their
leaders to dedicate more time to
cultural, politi
cal, and military
pursuits than before. Linked
by extensive communication and
trade networks, elite warrior-
priests throughout the region
seized, contested, consolidated,
and expanded their power over
life and death. In their role as reli-
gious leaders, they—along with
their subjects—articulated new
ways of understanding the cos-
mos. Artists created powerful
new symbols of fertility and
An image made in copper by a Mississippian death. Socie ties came together
culture. It possibly depicts a warrior. For Missis-
in larger settlements where they
sippian p eoples, warfare was highly ritualized.
constructed impressive new pub-
(UIG via Getty Images)
lic works. Around 1050, these
processes culminated in a sudden
expansion of Mississippian culture at Cahokia. Elements of this culture ordered the
lives of native p eoples from the banks of the Mississippi River to the Carolina pied-
mont in the north, and the north Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico in the south.
Mississippian polities w ere organized as chiefdoms. The chiefs who led the
centuries-long expansion sat atop a rigid hierarchy divided between a small num-
ber of individuals in the ruling lineage and the vast majority of individuals who
were not. Leaders maintained their footing at the top of this hierarchy by stockpil-
ing corn and distributing it in lean years, commanding large armies as the need
arose, and marshalling the labor of hundreds or thousands of subjects in the con-
struction of extensive public works. More successful chiefdoms routinely exercised
control over smaller chiefdoms within a limited area, but the hold of these para-
mount chiefdoms over their neighbors was often tenuous. Through a combination
of internal stresses, such as political factionalism or intrigue within the ruling lin-
eage, and external factors such as soil exhaustion, drought, or military defeat,
chiefdoms regularly collapsed. This process of chiefdom cycling was endemic in
the Mississippian world. Chiefdoms were durable political organizations nonethe-
less and endured in some areas of the southeast long after the arrival of Europeans.
The power of chiefs was embodied in the layout and architecture of their towns.
Large flat-topped platform mounds surrounding a central plaza served as burial
M ISSISSIPPIANS 413
sites for important leaders and elevated the dwellings of chiefs and religious temples
above the homes and thoroughfares of their subjects. At Cahokia, the central plat-
form mound covered approximately fifteen acres and towered 100 feet over a central
plaza, enclosed by a palisade that was larger than thirty football fields and sur-
rounded by more than 120 other burial and temple mounds. Smaller settlements
adhered to a similar pattern. At a settlement on Lake Jackson in North Florida, for
example, the central platform mound stood nearly 40 feet tall and was surrounded
by six other mounds arranged around two cleared plazas. The chief and his spiri-
tual advisors towered over their subjects atop these mounds, just as they towered
over them in the town’s social hierarchy.
Apart from the ceremonial plazas of paramount chiefdoms, corn fields and
farming villages dominated the settled Mississippian landscape. At Cahokia,
smaller agricultural settlements supported the city, ringing its palisaded core for
miles. A small, thatched roof ceremonial complex, adjacent priestly dwelling, and
a freestanding wooden pole stood atop a hill or mound in these communities,
overlooking a collection of thatched roof, partially buried home sites surrounding
a similar telephone pole-sized post at the center of a clearing. Fields beyond the
cluster of buildings w ere not planted in rows of single crops. Instead, Mississip-
pian farmers maximized the utility of their land and made the best of its chemical
composition by planting beans and squash in mounds at the base of corn stalks.
Corn offered a bounty of calories but drew nitrogen from the soil; beans crept
upward along the cornstalks, replenishing the nitrogen in the soil below as they
grew; squash vines spread outward from the mound, blocking sunlight and help-
ing retain moisture in the soil. After fields were initially cleared, women tended
the crops and ran the h ousehold, while men produced tools and weapons, engaged
in war and politics, or hunted during the appropriate season. This gendered divi-
sion of labor persisted long after the Mississippian culture gave way to newer ways
of life, and settlements throughout the southeast looked similar to Cahokia’s farm-
ing villages.
The tall wooden palisades and occasional moats surrounding a number of
Mississippian-era towns points to the importance of warfare in Mississippian socie
ties. War was a primary f actor in the expansion of Mississippian culture through-
out the southeast as well as an engine of political consolidation and expansion for
chiefs within their region. As one of the three important theocratic institutions in
the Mississippian chiefly elite—along with specialists of fertility and purification
and mortuary specialists—military leaders advised the paramount chief in matters
of war and oversaw the service of nearly e very adult male in the community. Though
there were no standing professional armies, Mississippian warriors were skilled
with the bow, knife, and war hammer in both guerrilla combat and short, formal
battles. When raiding opposing chiefdoms, warriors often desecrated the religious
symbols of their enemies’ leaders, slaughtered the majority of their opponents, and
took body parts for trophies.
The brutality of Mississippian warfare was both sanctioned and mitigated by
ritual. The ceremonial costumes and ritual objects of the Southeastern Ceremo-
nial Complex justified the u nion of fertility and purification, earthly power, and
414 M ISSISSIPPI B U B B LE
death in the chiefdom’s leaders through a set of common symbols. The petaloid,
cross-in-circle, and swastika symbolized the upper-, middle-, and under-worlds,
respectively; hands with human eyes symbolized deities; bilobed arrows and maces
symbolized warfare and were often association with the cross-in-circle. Ritual
objects like knives, axes, and elaborate war hammers conveyed a martial message
similar to the bilobed arrow and mace. War and the symbols of the spiritual world
were closely intertwined.
Overwhelming pressures converged on Mississippian chiefdoms between the
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. First, climate change associated with the Little
Ice Age made farming more difficult in significant swaths of North America. This
substantially undercut the material basis of chiefly rule at Cahokia and radically
altered the political landscape of the south. The arrival of European soldiers, set-
tlers, animals, weapons, and microbes in the sixteenth century intensified this pro
cess. The Mississippian world collapsed along a broad “shatter zone” between the
de Soto entrada of 1540 and the Natchez Revolt of 1729. Mississippian influences
remained, however, and s haped the spiritual, political, and economic world of the
powerful coalescent societies that formed throughout the shatter zone.
See also: Cahokia; Chickasaws; Choctaws
Further Reading
Ethridge, Robbie Franklyn. 2010. From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and
the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Hudson, Charles M. 1976. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press.
Pauketat, Timothy R. 2009. Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New
York: Viking.
M I S S I S S I P P I B U B B L E ( 1 7 1 8 – 1 7 2 0 )
The Mississippi B ubble was one of the first stock market crashes in financial his-
tory, the result of a scheme devised by the Scottish economic theorist John Law
(1671–1729) to rescue the French economy from chronic debt and underinvest-
ment. Law’s “System” involved transferring the cripplingly large French national
debt into the collateral of a vast banking and trading company, the Company of
the Indies, which became responsible for all tax collection, foreign trade, and
colonial development for the French Crown. It effectively represented the corpo-
rate takeover of French national finances. The share price of the company grew
rapidly for months, generating growth in the French economy and heightened
investment in colonial ventures; however, widespread financial speculation and an
unprecedentedly large increase in the money supply caused a loss of confidence in
the stock of the company, leading to Law’s fall from power and an economic col-
lapse that resulted in significant material losses for investors, widespread economic
M ISSISSIPPI B U B B LE 415
malaise, and a discredited reputation in France for paper currency and financial
infrastructure.
Decades of war had brought the national finances of France to the verge of bank-
ruptcy. For many years, the government’s expenditure had vastly exceeded its
income, and at Louis XIV’s death in 1715, the annual tax intake of the Crown barely
managed to meet the interest payments on the government’s debts. To raise income,
the state had sold government offices for profit and sold the rights to tax collection to
financiers. Consequently, the country’s economy languished with land untilled and
unemployed laborers crowding roadsides and towns. Much of the country’s finan-
cial activity rested with a small group of powerful financiers in Paris, who used their
influence to accrue profits from government taxation and debt repayments.
John Law, the son of an Edinburgh goldsmith, was forced to flee E ngland for
the continent following his imprisonment in 1694 for killing a man in a London
duel. Using his considerable mathematical skills, he made a fortune in European
gambling h ouses and in financial speculation. He made numerous proposals based
on his theories that economic activity was hampered by a lack of currency in cir-
culation, which limited trade and led to underemployment of persons and resources,
and that money should simply be a means of transaction, unlinked to the value of
precious metals in coinage.
In 1716, Law gained approval from the Duke of Orléans, acting as regent for the
child king, Louis XV, to set up the General Bank, a private bank which was suc-
cessful in encouraging investment from the public by offering shares in exchange
for government debt bonds, and printing banknotes which entered circulation. In
1717, Law gained control of the Company of the West, France’s monopoly trading
company with its American colonies, and over the next two years took over of all
of France’s monopoly foreign trade companies. He then negotiated with the regent
to convert the General Bank into the Royal Bank, with the Crown buying out the
existing shareholders at the end of 1718.
The takeovers made by the company, known from June 1719 as the Company
of the Indies, w ere funded by two further share issues in June and July 1719, at
increasing prices. Again, government debt was accepted as payment for shares, and
Law was able to further fund share purchases by issuing paper money to lenders
from the Royal Bank. At this point, Law moved t owards completion of his plan by
offering to pay off the entire national debt by creating more shares and taking over
John Law’s Economic Thought

Gifted with an extraordinary talent for math, John Law could quickly calcu-
late the odds on various games of chance, giving him an edge at the gam-
bling tables. He made a fortune as a result. Though often dismissed for
recklessness in the wake of the bursting of the Mississippi Bubble, Law’s
economic thought anticipated key developments in monetary theory that
were later implemented in the twentieth c entury.
416 M ISSISSIPPI B U B B LE
the administration of tax collection from the powerful financiers. Government bond
holders w ere forced to give up their bonds in exchange for company stock. With
rising stock values at the time, it was an attractive offer.
Within three weeks, during September and October 1719, shares w ere issued
which increased the value of the company by 1,400 percent. By December the
shares peaked at 20 times their face value, with the streets around the bank packed
daily with members of the public buying and selling stock. One account of the
time stated that a local hunchbacked man made a fortune by renting out his back
as a t able on which to sign contracts! Amid the financial boom, Law was appointed
Contrôleur-Générale des Finances, effectively Prime Minister of France, in January
1720. He was becoming worried about the rampant speculation in share prices,
and tried to limit this by allowing p eople to pay for the option to buy f uture shares;
however, this measure simply led to a greater rush to buy t hese options.
While economic activity was improving, it was not growing at anything like the
same rate as the supply of paper money and the shares that Law had issued. This
resulted in inflation of prices in the ordinary economy, and despite repeated efforts
from the government to devalue gold and silver and outlaw their hoarding, the value
of paper money and shares began to plummet.
The Paris financiers, who stood to lose if Law’s system w ere a success, took
advantage of the increasingly dire situation to move politically against Law and to
persuade the public to redeem their bank notes en masse into metal currency, caus-
ing the Royal Bank to cease payment of its own notes. The French economy col-
lapsed, and thousands w ere left destitute holding worthless paper currency, and
saw shares purchased at the height of the boom reduced to a small fraction of the
value paid. In December 1720, Law, stripped of all of his positions and blamed for
the economic collapse, fled France in danger of his life.
The Bubble has often been cited as a classic example of the dangers of specula-
tive financial fever, and Law was vilified at the time as a swindler and gambler,
although many of his monetary ideas have been praised as forward-thinking by
some recent scholars. The period of colonial investment between 1718 and 1721
saw around 7,000 French p eople and 1,900 African slaves transported to Louisi-
ana, the largest single venture in the colonial Americas. The enforced transporta-
tion of hundreds of criminals, inadequate planning and provisioning, and the
company’s collapse, however, meant that just 1,600 white persons remained alive
in Louisiana by 1731, permanently damaging the reputation of Louisiana as a site
of French emigration and investment.
Matthew Stallard
See also: Louisiana; Money; New France
Further Reading
Garber, Peter M. 1994. “Famous First Bubbles.” Speculative B
ubbles, Speculative Attacks, and
Policy Switching. Edited by Robert P. Flood and Peter M. Garber. Cambridge, MA: Mas
sachusetts Institute of Technology, 31–53.
Murphy, Antoin E. 1997. John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
M O C TE Z U M A II 417
MOCTEZUMA II (ca. 1466–1520)

Moctezuma II, or Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, was the ninth tlatoani (ruler) of Tenochti-
tlán, the most important city in the Aztec Empire at the time of the Spanish con-
quest. He ruled for 18 years, from 1502 to 1520, and he was the leader of a vast
part of the territory today known as Mexico. During the last months of his admin-
istration, the city suffered dramatic setbacks that led to the end of Aztec power
over the region. His successors, Cuitláhuac, and soon after, Cuauhtémoc, would
defend the heart of the empire for just another year. The modern spelling of his
name is now widely accepted, but some sources may refer to him as Montezuma or
Motecuhzoma.
Coming from noble origins, a supreme council appointed him governor follow-
ing the death of his uncle Ahuizotl, who died in 1502 a fter ruling Tenochtitlán for
16 years. He was named after an ancestor, Moctezuma Illhuicamina, but to distin-
guish Moctezuma II from the former, he was also named Xocoyotzin, meaning “the
young one.” Following family tradition, Moctezuma’s main goal was to increase
Aztec power through the occupation of other territories. Various villages had taken
advantage of the change of power and started some revolts. Moctezuma launched
a reconquest effort that not only regained Aztec control over the rebels but also
led to military occupations of new villages. The new Aztec subjects were required
to pay high tributes. Consequently, Moctezuma’s name was synonymous with fear
and respect, inside and outside Tenochtitlán, and by 1517 his troops had domi-
nated around 450 towns.
Some scholars believed that Moctezuma was highly superstitious. According to
various traditional accounts, 10 years before the conquest, at least eight fateful signs
announced the downfall of the Aztec Empire. For instance, a column of fire was
seen in the sky (possibly a comet), one of the main temples was struck by light-
ning, and another was consumed by fire. Perhaps one of the most contested sto-
ries is Moctezuma’s belief in the return of the god Quetzalcoatl. According to
tradition, this god would come back to take power. He was believed to be white-
skinned and bearded, which would explain Moctezuma’s behavior when he knew
the Spanish w ere approaching the city: he tried to pacify them with luxurious gifts.
The result was entirely contrary. It inflamed the conquistadors’ desires to acquire
all the treasures of the largest empire in the region.
In the Presence of Moctezuma

Immediately after his coronation ceremony, Moctezuma implemented a
series of rigid measures in the palace. For instance, while common p eople
had typically worked for other governors, Moctezuma allowed only men who
could prove their noble lineage to work as his servants. Likewise, nobody
was permitted to look directly at him, nor could they talk loudly or wear shoes
in his presence. European chronicles mention that he never wore the same
outfit twice, nor used the same dishes again.
418 M O C TE Z U M A II
In November 1519, Moctezuma welcomed Hernán Cortés to Tenochtitlán. By

then, 400 Spaniards, forty horses, and 3,000 to 7,000 allies from the formerly
subjugated villages formed the conquistador’s army. According to some experts,
the Aztec ruler h oused his potential enemies, treated them well, and did not
oppose most of their demands, because he believed the Aztec army would not be
able to defeat them. For others, Moctezuma’s actions were a mixture of supersti-
tion and a lack of clear strategy. The completely unknown battle style of the Euro
peans as well as the lack of support from their former subjects took the Aztec
ruler and his advisers by surprise. At first it seemed that both powers had medi-
ated a truce, but this tense calm lasted for a very short time. Cortés had to leave
the city to face a group of Spaniards who had been sent by Spanish officials to cap-
ture him. During Cortés’s absence, the man in charge, Pedro de Alvarado, ordered
a massacre of between 300 and 600 unarmed people who w ere commemorating
an important celebration. As a result, the Aztecs initiated a revolt, forcing Cortés
to return as soon as possible.
There are different versions about the role of Moctezuma immediately after the
massacre in the Great Temple; all of them, however, end with the death of the
ruler. According to some Spanish accounts, Moctezuma tried to calm down his
people from a palace balcony, but the agitated mob launched arrows and stones at
him. One of the stones hit his forehead, causing a fatal wound. Another Spanish
chronicle maintains mostly the same narrative, but with the conquistadors forc-
ing Moctezuma to talk to the Aztecs. Some indigenous testimonies gathered by
Spanish friars state that the ruler was already dead when the Spaniards brought
him to the balcony. The uprising resulted in the fleeing of the Spaniards from the
city, but, before leaving, Cortés ordered his men to murder Moctezuma and to
leave his body in plain sight. The last account maintains that during the revolt,
the corpse of Moctezuma was found in the city, his feet chained, and his chest
bearing several stab wounds.
Several historians agree that whatever the story of his death, the former gover-
nor had lost so much respect and power that he was not useful for the Spaniards
anymore. It seems his cadaver did not receive any special kind of funerary ritual
after being carried through at least three villages, since the p
eople from these vil-
lages would not allow Moctezuma’s body to rest in their territories.
Pamela J. Fuentes
See also: Aztec Empire; Conquistadors; Cortés, Hernán; Quetzalcoatl
Further Reading
Carrasco, David, and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma. 2003. Moctezuma’s Mexico: Visions of the
Aztec World. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
López, Luján Leonardo, and Colin McEwan, eds. 2009. Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler. London:
British Museum Press.
M ONEY 419
MONEY
Money is the main bearer of value in the modern world. Throughout human his-
tory, people have used money as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and
means of payment for goods and serv ices rendered by individuals, organizations,
and governments. By definition, money allows for the allocation of resources and
the valuation of assets based on the supply and demand of goods and serv ices in
formal and informal markets. Historically, money came in the form of objects used
by agricultural and sedentary communities to denote value. One of the earliest
examples of money is the use of cowrie, the ovid shell of a mollusk in the shal-
lower regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, which was used by various com-
munities from Africa, Oceania, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. T hese objects
were small, easy to clean and transport, and could readily be controlled if neces-
sary. Other examples include whales’ teeth and Yap stones for the Fijians, Wam-
pum for Native Americans, and cattle for many agricultural communities around
the world.
As communities developed from sedentary to complex, new institutions and
organizations led to the rise of coinage-based money. T hese coins, based mainly
on the extraction of precious metals such as gold and silver, became the form of
money and basis of value for many empires in ancient Mesopotamia, dynastic
China, imperial Europe, and pre-Hispanic Latin America. One of the earliest forms
of the systematic production and circulation of money took place during the uni-
fication of China in 221 BCE. During the Atlantic period, money became tied
to the Age of Exploration, the rise of the nation-state, the Enlightenment, and
industrialization.
During the Commercial Revolution of the twelfth c entury, the expansion of colo-
nialism and mercantilism, money became tied to the rise of modernity and capi-
talism in Western Europe. As coinage-based systems developed, precious metal
extraction proliferated from Western Europe to the Central and Eastern Europe.
Bimetallism emerged in Europe as gold and silver circulated in most of the Euro
pean continent. The dominance of gold and silver emerged, which was usually tilted
towards the dominance and higher valuation of the former over the latter. Coloni-
zation of the Americas in the fifteenth century resulted in the expansion of extrac-
tive industries and bullion trade between Mexico and China. Different actors, from
states to private enterprises, learned how to conduct systematic arbitrage, which
was the strategic and simultaneous purchase of gold and silver to change the price.
The practice took place across Europe and then into the New World.
New systems of governance and societal interactions emerged around money.
In the nineteenth c entury, bimetallism became the standard in which monetary
units in Europe w ere defined to certain quantities and qualities of gold and silver.
The Latin Monetary Union in 1865, formed by France, Belgium, Italy, and Swit-
zerland, became the regional entity governing the monetary currency of member
states. At the national level, if rulers wanted to reduce the content or percentage of
precious metals in the coins, they carried out the process of debasement. They did
so by introducing a non-precious alloy into the coins, reducing the weight of coins,
and increasing the nominal value of the coin. Debasing coins was usually done
420 M ONEY
when the value of metals changed or when t here was more reason to save precious
metals. Apart from the states or rulers of the political entity, three groups usually
benefitted from the debasement of coins: the individual tasked to print the money,
private enterprises, and the moneychangers. Their control of, and relative experi-
ence with, money allowed them considerable flexibility when dealing with changes
in government policy and international demand. Until the nineteenth century, sei-
gniorage was a fee charged by the owners of the mint for refining bullions into
coins. O wners of mints earned profits from producing money. Furthermore, t hose
who wanted to purchase money from the outside needed to pay for a margin of
conversion, an early form of foreign currency exchange.
Although banking has its roots in the ancient world and empires, the emergence
of the institution and its practices came from early capitalists and private entities
in the thirteenth century: the Medicis and Fuggers; the Dutch East India Com
pany; and the Rothschilds and the Berenbergs in the nineteenth c entury. Money
as a form of liquid asset became institutionally tied to fixed assets, liabilities, and
deliverables. These institutions led to the reemergence and transformation of finan-
cial and monetary innovations, such as securities and bonds, which spatially and
temporally transformed the use of money. Securities and bonds, for example,
allowed various bankers and financiers to fund the fourteenth century warring Ital-
ian city-states and European empires against each other.
In the twenty-first century, money and its accompanying financial institutions
became the most important if not one of the most important institutions and sec-
tors in the global economy. The rise of financial institutions, such as the World
Bank and the Asian Development Bank, puts money at the forefront of develop-
ment. Huge banks act as oligopolies to regulate liquid credit, and debt. As an
alternative to the formalization of rules and procedures to borrow money, microfi-
nance and informal lending have emerged in communities across the world. Not
only is development structured around the access to credit, but also the outcomes
of economic and political systems depend on currency and financial policies. Finan-
cial crises, from the Great Depression in 1929 to the mortgage crisis in 2009, are
contemporary indicators of money’s centrality. In the aftermath of World War II,
developmental states in Japan, Taiwan, and South K orea depended on the repres-
sion of consumption in favor of investment. Most recently, China’s emulation of
these East Asian developmental states led to the difficulties of transitioning towards
a consumption-based economy.
Though bimetallism remained until the nineteenth c entury, the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries have been dominated by the U.S. dollar tied to the global
economy. The dollar has seignoirage privileges which mean U.S. hegemonic or
imperial power across the world. All currencies and moneys are currently tied to
the dollar, which is probably one of the few currencies tradable across the world.
The contemporary power of the dollar lies in the reliance of competing states, such
as China and Japan, on the dollar as a foreign exchange reserve. As a result, these
huge economies and many other intermediate ones w ill continue to rely on the
United States for dollars, allowing the United States to maintain economic and
geopolitical power. Recent alternatives, such as the European Euro, failed because
M O R AV IANS 421
of the European Union’s lack of military power. While the Chinese renminbi, though
backed with some degree of military power, has faltered as a result of the recent
difficulties of the Chinese economy.
Alvin A. Camba
See also: Amsterdam; European Exploration; Gold and Silver; Industrial Revolu-
tion; Mercantilism
Further Reading
Chown, John. 1994. A History of Money from AD 800. London and New York: Routledge.
Davies, Glyn. 2002. A History of Money: From Ancient Times to Present Day. Cardiff: Univer-
sity of Wales Press.
Ferguson, Niall. 2008. The Ascent of Money. A Financial History of the World. New York: Pen-
guin Press.
Hung, Ho-fung. 2015. The China Boom. Why China W ill Not Rule the World. New York:
Columbia University Press.
M O R AV I A N S
The current incarnation of the Moravians was established in 1722 in Saxony. The
Moravians embraced a “blood and wounds” theology that emphasized Jesus Christ’s
suffering on the cross at the expense of the other two persons of the Holy Trinity.
They thus eschewed a theological foundation for their religion in favor of a per-
sonal existential relationship with Jesus built upon Christ’s suffering, especially
the five wounds that he sustained during his crucifixion. The Moravians believed
that their purpose was to spread their unique form of Christianity to aborigines
and slaves around the world. They formed the Society of the United Brethren for
the Propagation of the Gospel among the Heathens, to manage their missions. They
subsequently dispatched missionaries around the Atlantic world to such disparate
locales as Antigua, Barbados, Ceylon, Greenland, Jamaica, Suriname, and the Vir-
gin Islands.
They trace their spiritual origins to the Unitas Fratrum, a Protestant group that
was devastated during the Thirty Years’ War (1616–1648). Survivors scattered to
refugee communities in E ngland, Moravia, and Poland. In 1722, Count Nikolaus
Ludwig von Zinzendorf invited former members of the Unitas Fratrum and Luther-
ans to s ettle on his estate in Saxony, where they could practice their religion in peace.
Zinzendorf and his followers gradually developed a theology that the Lutheran
members of the group could not support, leading them to leave the community.
Despite the exodus, the community, dubbed Herrnhutt, grew rapidly, a develop-
ment that concerned Saxony’s ruling class as they believed that Zinzendorf was
harboring heretics. Zinzendorf and his followers renamed themselves the Renewed
Unitas Fratrum, or Moravians. Recognizing that authorities in Saxony w ere con-
cerned about their activities, the Moravians established 20 towns modeled on
Herrnhutt outside of Germany. This proved prudent as Zinzendorf and his follow-
ers were exiled during the early 1730s.
422 M O R AV IANS
Although Moravian missionaries arrived in Pennsylvania in 1734, Zinzendorf

established the Moravian’s mission base for the evangelization of Cherokee and
Creek Indians in Savannah, Georgia, in 1735. The Moravians w ere initially wel-
comed by James Oglethorpe and Georgia’s other trustees, who hoped to both
expand the colony’s population and build bonds with the Cherokees and the Creeks
so that they would serve as a buffer between the British colonies and Spanish Flor-
ida. When approached by the Moravians, the Cherokees and Creeks rebuffed
their overtures. The support of the Georgia trustees also soon disappeared for two
reasons. First, the Moravians w ere pacifists who would not bear arms or allow their
followers to do so. For the Georgians, this meant that the Moravians were not going
to help them encourage native warriors to serve as the buffer they needed to pro-
tect themselves from the Spanish. Second, Georgia’s leadership had decided to
embrace the development of an agricultural economy dependent on slave labor;
they did not desire missionaries ministering to their property. Conflicts with other
Christians, most notably Lutherans, and the failure of missionary efforts splintered
the community, then numbering about 40. Some left Savannah for Europe while
others went to Pennsylvania. Although the mission in Georgia officially lasted until
1745, what little effectiveness it had in the colony dissipated by 1740.
Zinzendorf and the Moravians turned their attention to establishing their North
American mission base in Pennsylvania, the most religiously diverse and tolerant
North American colony. The Moravians set up their first mission base on land
located in the vicinity of the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers. The
site was provided by Anglican minister George Whitefield, who ostensibly sup-
ported the Moravian effort to minister to Native American groups. His generosity
was motivated by his need to have the skilled tradesmen, especially carpenters,
among the Moravians to construct an orphanage on one of his local properties.
The arrangement with Whitefield soon fell apart over a disagreement about the
doctrine of predestination, which Whitefield, a Calvinist, believed in and the Mora-
vians rejected.
Whitefield’s initial support and later disagreement over doctrine was emblem-
atic of the Moravian experience during their early years in Pennsylvania. White-
field was a key figure in the First G reat Awakening in the m iddle and northern
colonies. By 1740, Whitefield’s evangelistic message found admirers among the
Moravians, including Zinzendorf. Zinzendorf mistakenly interpreted the religious
fervor of the time as a sign that Christians w ere no longer g oing to allow doctrinal
differences to interfere with Christian activities. The Moravians soon discovered
that, contrary to rhetoric, doctrine still mattered and that some of the same distrust
that non-Moravian clergy expressed in Europe about them held true in Pennsylva-
nia. In the early 1740s, Zinzendorf attempted to forge a religious organization that
he called the Church of God in the Holy Spirit, in Pennsylvania. It was an attempt
to bring all German-speaking Protestants together into one synod, but it ultimately
failed due to opposition from clergymen such as Lutheran leader Henry Melchior
Muhlenberg. Ultimately, Moravians came to be avoided by other Protestant denom-
inations because they were viewed as believing in antinomianism and Universal-
ism. Most shocking to the mores of the day, they gave w omen leadership roles
M O R AV IANS 423
within the church. Shunned by other Christians, the Moravians opted to establish
a closed religious community at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and turned their atten-
tion to the support of the missions they were establishing among Native American
groups.
The Moravians dispatched missionaries to native communities in the colo-
nies of Connecticut and New York. The missionaries quickly made inroads into
the communities because, unlike missionaries from other Protestant denomina-
tions, Moravians respected the property rights of the natives, treated them as
equals, learned their respective languages, and lived among them. Native peoples
noticed that other Christians treated the Moravians as poorly as they w ere treated
by them. This shared ostracism bound them in ways that other Christian groups
could not emulate. The shared feeling of abuse and suffering made Moravian
blood and wounds theology relatable to the natives. Colonial officials in both
Connecticut and New York took notice of the success that Moravian missionar-
ies had with the natives. Fearful that the Moravians w ere g oing to use native
warriors to attack the respective colonies, they exiled the Moravians from their
colonies.
The Moravians established new communities for these refugee populations,
including a farming community called Gnaddenhutten in Pennsylvania. For the
natives, their adoption of agricultural communal life marked a separation from their
non-Christian kinsmen. Native men w ere traditionally hunters whereas agricul-
ture was the domain of women. The abandonment of traditional values led native
peoples to distrust Moravian Indians. Despite their suspicions, non-Christian Indi-
ans still considered the Moravian Indians as kin.
In 1771, Delaware leader Netawatwes invited the Moravians to settle in the Ohio
Valley. A year later, Gnaddenhutten was one of the communities that relocated west.
Although the settlements w ere initially welcomed, the onset of the American Rev-
olution changed the situation. All sides of the conflict came to view the Moravian
settlements as enemies. The British and native warriors believed that the Moravi-
ans w ere reporting their activities to the Americans. The Americans viewed them
as spies for the native warriors. In August 1781, Colonel Daniel Brodhead ordered
the Moravians to abandon Gnaddenhutten and other communities in the region.
He transported the refugees to British authorities at Fort Detroit. October 1781 saw
starving residents of Gnaddenhutten returning to their community to harvest
needed crops. They w ere captured by Colonial forces and sent to Fort Pitt. The
Gnaddenhutten Moravians returned again to their community to seek foodstuffs
in March 1782. Rather than return them to a fort controlled by the colonies, Col
onel David Williamson opted to execute 96 Moravians, including w omen and
children.
The massacre at Gnadenhutten proved a seminal event in the history of the
Ohio Valley. For the Moravians, it marked the effective end of their religious mis-
sionary efforts among Native American groups. Moravians would not start another
Native American religious mission for more than three decades. When they were
finally able to start another religious mission, it was in Canada u nder the auspices
of G reat Britain. For Native Americans, the massacre was indisputable evidence that
424 M OU R NIN G WA R S
the American colonists were only interested in exterminating them. Embracing

the Euro-American religion and changing one’s cultural manner of living was not
enough for Native Americans to gain acceptance from Euro-Americans. Under-
standably, Gnadenhutten forced native p eoples that had been previously disposed
to supporting the colonies to become enemies of the newly-formed United States
of America. Even for Native Americans who distrusted Christian Native Americans,
the murder of so many innocents was a call to scorched-earth warfare.
In the late eighteenth century, the Cherokees sought out the Moravians to estab-
lish a school for their c hildren to attend. This was during the period that the
Cherokees were acculturating themselves to become similar to the citizens of the
United States of America. The Spring Place Mission was established in northwest-
ern Georgia in 1801, by Moravians from Salem, North Carolina, but it differed in
many respects to other missionary efforts targeting Native Americans. The Chero-
kees dictated how the Moravians functioned among their people. The Cherokees
demanded that children to be taught in a way similar to American children. The
role of the mission was not to expose the Cherokees to Moravian theology. The
school was closed when the Cherokees w ere forcibly removed by the United States
government to Oklahoma.
John R. Burch, Jr.
See also: Protestant Missionaries; Whitefield, George
Further Reading
Atwood, Craig D. 2004. Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem. Uni-
versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Engel, Katherine Carté. 2009. Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. 2007. Jesus Is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early
America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
M O U R N I N G WA R S
The mourning war (or “mourning-war complex”) was a process by which indige-
nous North Americans sought to replace dead relatives through the ritual adop-
tion of other native and non-n ative people captured during conflict. Observed
among eastern Algonquian and Iroquoian people, from the sixteenth through the
early eighteenth centuries, mourning wars helped shape interactions among native
peoples, and between native peoples and Euro-Americans, even as those interac-
tions shaped the scope and intensity of the mourning wars as well. T hese wars
perpetuated pers istent, low-i ntensity conflict between eastern native p eoples,
as the raids for captives fostered retribution. The introduction of European fire-
arms made raids more deadly, matters of trade redirected enmities, and most impor-
tantly, as European diseases devastated on stressed native and Euro-American
populations, moments of grief became more frequent. In this context, as the French,
Dutch, and English fought for control of eastern North America and its resources,
M OU R NIN G WA R S 425
Requickening Captives
Captives could be “requickened” in three ways: if taken alive, a captive could
be allowed to live in place of the mourners’ dead kinfolk. A live captive might
also be ritually tortured, executed, and/or scalped. The scalp was believed to
carry a person’s spirit, and so the scalp would provide a way to spiritually
adopt the dead captive. Similarly, if a captive w ere killed during a raid or
in combat, a scalp would be returned to the town and offered to the griev-
ing kin.
the Iroquois and Algonquians fought for their own reasons, if not always on their
own terms.
Mourning wars originated in the death of an individual. Following the death of
a kinsperson, the women of the clan would make public displays of grief. These
displays might engender male warriors to seek a war captive who could “replace”
the fallen kinsperson. Clansmen who did not satisfy the grief of their clanswomen
could be shamed as cowards. A fter being moved to act, w hether by shared grief,
shame, or gifts, warriors would head out to seek a captive (or captives) to offer to
the grieving clanswomen. The captive would then be “requickened”; that is, ritu-
ally a dopted by the clanswomen.
When a captive arrived in a village the process of determining their fate began.
Contemporary European observers who witnessed the entrance of a captive into
a mourning village believed that the fate of the captive depended upon the degree
of a village’s grief and the behavior of the captive. If the captive arrived at the vil-
lage too badly injured, or was cowardly while proceeding through the gauntlet
(where villagers rained blows down on the body of the captive), the matrons might
decide to have the captive killed by scalping, “adopting” only the spirit contained
in the scalp. Captives who proved their stoicism in the face of their captivity would
often be given an opportunity to build up their strength a fter completing the gaunt-
let. When the time came, the captive would be ritually tortured. Villagers applied
firebrands to the feet of the victim, working their way up the body over the course
of hours, and in some cases, days. Victims w ere expected to maintain their com-
posure throughout. T hose who passed out from pain might be revived, given food
and drink, only to be forced to submit to more torture once they had gathered
strength. Eventually, when the application of firebrands had been completed, the
victim would be dispatched with a knife to the head or neck, disarticulated, burned,
and in the case of the Iroquois, boiled in k ettles to be ritually consumed. In other
cases, especially when the fallen villager was of a lower status, the matrons’ mourn-
ing might be better satisfied by the adoption of a live captive. W hether literally or
figuratively, the spirit of the captive became a part of the village.
Mourning wars and ritual adoptions w ere a vital aspect of Algonquian and Iro-
quoian cultural life from at least the fifteenth c entury through the early eighteenth
century. In addition to the cultural functions of mourning wars, they intertwined
426 M OU R NIN G WA R S
with demography and politics of the Atlantic world in important ways. Although
once thought to be a series of conflicts between Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples
in the eastern G reat Lakes and St. Lawrence valley over competing desires to con-
trol the flow of the lucrative peltry trade to Europeans, it seems more likely that
increased contact with Europeans set off a series of devastating disease epidemics
starting in 1634, with the first outbreak of smallpox among the Iroquois. Many
other seasons of intense epidemics followed, in 1647, 1656, 1661, 1668, 1673, and
1676, to enumerate the most notable. Mortality estimates range as high as 95 percent
for some Iroquoian and Algonquian towns during a half-century of precipitous
depopulation (Brandao 1997). In the context of the mourning-war complex, such
losses translated into a perpetual state of mourning and attempts at requickening,
which European observers at the time attributed to conflict seeking material gain.
The Five Nations of the Iroquois (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and
Mohawk) ranged far and wide to recover their depleted populations. Their efforts
resulted in the reconfiguration of other native groups, such as the Eries, Neutrals,
Petuns, and Wenros of the northeastern Great Lakes, the Sioux of the Plains, and
the Chipewyans, Crees, Illinois, Miami, Ottawa, and Wyandots of the southern,
central, and western pays d’en haut (upper country). Among Iroquoians, this effort
to take captives and incorporate enemies from the Great Lakes region into their
communities had the effect of drastically altering the composition of clans, villages,
and nations. In some Iroquois towns, by the 1660s, adopted kinsmen outnumbered
born-Iroquois at levels exceeding two-to-one. This fragmentation and reconfig-
uration of eastern North America’s native people based upon changing demo-
graphic demands and the cultural logic of the mourning war complex has been
called, by one pair of influential scholars, a “shatter-zone” (Ethridge and Shuck-Hall
2009, 30–31).
As the Iroquois, diminished by disease and with a culture arguably thinned
by the prevalence of adopted outsiders, pressed deeper into the shatter zones of
the Plains and G reat Lakes, the mourning war complex transformed. Whereas
captive raids against Algonquians in the northeast and the Catawba to the southeast
were mutually understood and historical facts for both sides, by the 1680s, the Iro-
quois ventured into new territory against foes that neither shared this understand-
ing, nor had cultural intermediaries who could translate Iroquoian demands. The
resulting encounters made what may have begun as a mourning war raid unrec-
ognizable as such. One raid against the Illinois, in 1682, illustrates this troubled
turn. Contemporary observers report that the Iroquois, rather than selectively
imprison the Illinois, instead killed and consumed more than 600 Illinois enemies.
It is an assertion so fantastic as to raise doubt. Yet if only true at half the number, this
episode still suggests that by the 1680s, the mourning war complex had become a
broken cultural expression (Richter 1983, 543).
Indeed, while demography played an important part in the expansion and alter-
ation of the mourning war complex, a new world of native and European imperial
politics did as well. In North America, Europeans increasingly relied upon Native
American allies to act as scouts, advisors, and warriors in the inland theaters of con-
flict throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1650s, 1660s, and 1670s, continuing
M OU R NIN G WA R S 427
with the series of Anglo-Indian wars in the northeast (such as King Philip’s War
(1675–1678), and culminating in the series of Anglo-French wars that began
with the decade-long war known as King William’s War (1688–1697). D oing so
mapped imperial concerns and the contest for empire onto longstanding, tradi-
tional motives of Native American war-making, and altered war’s place in Native
American society from being, ironically, a source of social stability and cultural
regeneration, to a disruptive practice.
For all intents and purposes, the mourning war complex that Europeans such
as early seventeenth-century Catholic priest Joseph-François Lafitau observed and
remarked upon, changed drastically in the mid-seventeenth c entury, and was no
longer recognizable as such by the time that Queen Anne’s War concluded at the
Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Iroquoian and Algonquian population loss and, eventu-
ally, the scope of imperial concerns brought about these changes. L ittle, simmer-
ing wars of raids and counter-raids morphed into larger conflicts. In the context of
longer, more pervasive violence, epidemic disease, powerful weaponry, and the dis-
ruption to native foodways, social cohesion, and native healing practice, all dove-
tailed, overlapped, and fed off one another to alter mourning wars. Iroquoian
captive-raiding certainly continued a fter 1713, as it did among other Native Amer-
ican groups, notably the Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami in the mid-eighteenth
century, and the Comanche well into the nineteenth c entury, but those captives w ere
very unlikely to be ritually a dopted through torture. European nations attempted,
with varying success, to bring captive raids u nder the rubric of developing notions
of just war theory and the law of nations. Captives to Native Americans, allied to
either the French or British, might be killed en route to trading entrepôts, but
there, rather than satisfy a grieving kinswomen, they would be traded for, bought,
or ransomed.
Michael Read
See also: Algonquins; Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead; Iroquois
Further Reading
Brandao, José António. 1997. “Your Fyre Shall Burn No More”: Iroquois Policy T owards New
France and Its Native Allies to 1701. Lincoln: University of Nebraska.
Ethridge, Robbie, and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds. 2009. Mapping the Mississippian Shatter
Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South. Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska.
Richter, Daniel K. 1983. “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience.” William and Mary
Quarterly 40: 528–559.
N
NAPOLEON I (1769–1821)
One of the most influential figures in the Atlantic world at the turn of the nine-
teenth century, Napoleon Bonaparte rose from the military to ultimate political
power in revolutionary France, proclaiming himself Emperor Napoleon I in 1804.
Until finally forced from power in 1815, Napoleon s haped profoundly the Atlantic
world in both direct and indirect ways. Besides his actions and policies, Napoleon’s
life story amazed, inspired, and terrified contemporaries, depending on their incli-
nations, as it seemingly illustrated the possibilities and consequences of the Atlan-
tic revolutions.
Born in 1769, far from the centers of power, on the Mediterranean island of
Corsica, Napoleon’s family counted among the minor Corsican nobility. Napo-
leon maintained close connections with his seven siblings throughout his life.
The year before his birth, France had acquired Corsica from the Italian city-state
of Genoa. His father, though having fought for independence from Genoa, embraced
French rule and sought to advance the family in French society. To that end,
between 1779 and 1784, Napoleon attended the military academy at Brienne,
east of Paris. Such academies played a pivotal part in French military reforms
following the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). French leaders believed nobles pos-
sessed innate leadership qualities and the academies would help poorer and pro-
vincial noblemen enter military serv ice. In 1785, Napoleon received an officer’s
commission in the Royal Artillery; however, his prospects for further advance-
ment seemed slim as the greatest positions in the army were monopolized by the
high nobility.
Napoleon’s life changed with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. He
embraced the Revolution, even as it moved in ever more radical directions over its
first five years. In April 1792, the revolutionaries had declared war on Austria,
beginning almost 25 years of conflict during which France fought almost all the
other major European powers at various points. By August, a republic was declared
after king Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) had been forced off his throne; the revolution-
aries executed him for treason in January 1793. That year, facing multiple crises,
including multiple foreign invasions and civil war, the revolutionaries proclaimed
government by terror to reassert control. Napoleon came to prominence in the
midst of t hese events. In the summer of 1793, thanks to connections with the revo-
lutionary government, Napoleon received a post with the army besieging Toulon, a
port city that had surrendered to British forces. Napoleon not only fought bravely,
but developed the plan that led to French victory. In recognition, he earned promo-
tion to the rank of Brigadier General at age 24.
430 NAPOLEON I
Did Napoleon Have a “Napoleon Complex”?

Known in his own time as the Little Corsican, Napoleon is often remem-
bered as a short man with an oversized ego and an overgrown sense of ambi-
tion. Indeed, psychologists sometimes refer to a kind of inferiority complex
in which a short man overcompensates for his feelings of inadequacy with
excessive aggression as a “Napoleon Complex.” Whatever his defects of per-
sonality or character, Napoleon was not abnormally short. He stood five feet
six inches tall, about average for a French man of his day. Where does Napo-
leon’s diminutive reputation come from? For one, in the propaganda of France’s
enemies, Napoleon was often depicted as a little tyrant, mocking his lust for
power. In addition, France’s system of weights and measures differed slightly
from the English system, with one French foot somewhat larger than an English
foot. Napoleon’s French height of five feet two inches was thus greater than
it appears.
Despite this success, Napoleon’s career appeared over when the radical revolu-
tionaries fell from power in July 1794 and a moderate republican government
known as the Directory emerged. After spending over 10 days in jail, Napoleon
was removed from active military duty. In September 1795, he resigned his com-
mission and made his way to Paris, where he forged a close relationship with a
leading figure in the new government. In early October 1795, facing a royalist
uprising in Paris, the Directory turned to Napoleon. Greatly outnumbered by the
crowd, Napoleon ordered his cannon to fire, killing around 300 and wounding
hundreds more. A grateful government recalled him to active duty. Over the next
two years, Napoleon distinguished himself in Italy. This had not been considered
a prestigious command as the government had seen Italy as a secondary front.
Napoleon’s army was outnumbered and in poor shape before his arrival. However,
Napoleon proved himself a capable commander, inspiring his men, defeating his
enemies. Without consulting Paris, he made peace with France’s enemies in Octo-
ber 1797, a peace that rewrote the European map without respect to inherited politi
cal traditions.
Some Italians welcomed Napoleon as they believed he might help lead to Ital-
ian unity, reflecting how Napoleon helped spread such revolutionary ideas as
nationalism. Napoleon also helped encouraged nationalist movements by his
exploiting both conquered and supposedly allied territories, leading to reactions
against the French. These patterns would be repeated in the years to come. Through-
out, Napoleon also made sure to send celebratory reports on his activities back to
France, helping establish an image as an invincible commander and brilliant strat-
egist. Fearing this growing popularity, in 1798, the Directory placed Napoleon in
charge of an expedition to Egypt with the aim of cutting G reat Britain’s connec-
tions to India. Although he achieved several victories, the French fleet was destroyed
NAPOLEON I 431
by the British, and Napoleon

realized the project could never
succeed. In August 1799, he
slipped past blockading British
ships and returned to France.
His remaining troops surren-
dered in 1801.
When Napoleon returned, war
had again erupted in Europe and
France had suffered a series of
defeats. Unrest spread through
French- dominated lands. At
home, the Directory had grown
unpopular and plans for a coup
were being made. The conspira-
tors aimed to establish an author-
itarian republic and sought a
general to lead them. After his
return, Napoleon was quickly
brought into the plot. In Novem-
ber 1799, the coup brought down
the Directory. Napoleon became
the leading figure among three
executives known as consuls,
and the new government became
known as the Consulate. By 1802,
Napoleon would be recognized
as consul for life. Painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1812, The
The Consulate proved popu Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries
lar as Napoleon brought stability depicts Napoleon at the height of his powers,
before his disastrous invasion of Russia. (National
to France after a decade of revo-
Gallery of Art)
lutionary turmoil. Between 1800
and 1801, he led his armies to
victory against another coalition of powers at war with France. In early 1801,
Napoleon made peace with Austria and in March 1802, peace with G reat Britain.
France would enjoy peace for the next 18 months, the longest such period between
1792 and 1815. Napoleon established stability in several ways. He continued to
expand central authority, an expansion begun by the radical revolutionaries a
decade earlier. Napoleon took firm control over media and created a new political
figure, the prefect, who was appointed by Paris to control provincial administra-
tion. In 1804, Napoleon issued a new uniform legal code, known today as the
Napoleonic Code, which preserved certain aspects of the Revolution, guarantee-
ing property rights, freedom religion, legal equality for men, and the ideal of a
meritocratic society. Napoleon balanced preserving these revolutionary changes
with reintroducing crucial prerevolutionary traditions. He allowed nobles who
432 NAPOLEON I
had fled France to return. In 1801, he signed a concordat with the pope, restoring
Catholicism to French public life for the first time in a decade.
Most notably, Napoleon reintroduced slavery to French America. During the
Reign of Terror (1793–1794), the radical revolutionaries had abolished slavery fol-
lowing a slave revolt on France’s most profitable sugar colony, Saint-Domingue. The
move reestablished nominal French authority but over the 1790s, real power shifted
to the revolt’s leaders, Toussaint L’Ouverture (ca. 1743–1803), in particular. With
the coming of peace, Napoleon sought the restoration of the plantation sugar econ-
omy. In December 1801, he sent thousands of troops, led by his brother-in-law, to
compel the former slaves back into bondage. The force captured L’Ouverture, who
died in a French prison in 1803. However, tropical diseases ravaged the French.
Napoleon’s brother-in-law died in late 1802. Though Napoleon sent even more sol-
diers, the effort failed. On the last day of 1804, the former slaves proclaimed the new
Republic of Haiti. By that point, war had returned to Europe. T hese circumstances
led Napoleon to abandon most French claims in the Americas; in 1803, he sold the
newly regained Louisiana to the United States.
Other changes occurred as well. In 1804, following several assassination
attempts, Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France. He hoped the change in
government would ensure the survival of his reforms. The next several years wit-
nessed Napoleon’s greatest triumphs in war and diplomacy. On December 2, 1805,
though outnumbered, Napoleon destroyed a combined Austrian and Russian force
at the Battle of Austerlitz. Victories continued in 1806, leading to the Treaty of Til-
sit, signed on July 9, 1807, in which Napoleon’s continental adversaries, notably
Russia, made peace with a dominant France. In his peacemaking, Napoleon
attempted the political transformation of Europe. He annexed certain territories
to France. He helped end the 1000-year-old Holy Roman Empire and helped begin
the political consolidation of Germany. He created new countries, over a number
of which he placed his siblings as rulers. In these ways, Napoleonic political and
legal reforms spread across Europe.
Napoleon’s domination of Europe had limits. Following the crushing naval
defeat to Great Britain at Trafalgar in October, 1805, Napoleon’s actions remained
bound to the European continent. Within Europe, Napoleon encountered grow-
ing resistance linked to growing senses of nationalism. This resistance was never
total as some groups did welcome Napoleonic reforms. Thus, in certain places,
quasi civil wars erupted. Napoleon’s economic policies provided a major trigger
for these processes. On October 21, 1806, Napoleon announced a blockade of
Great Britain, known as the Continental System. He sought to end British trade
with Europe and pressured European countries to join this effort. After leading to
large-scale economic warfare between Great Britain and France, which drew in
states across the Atlantic world, the policy failed. Great Britain established new
markets in Latin America, and many European countries experienced severe eco-
nomic disruptions, leading to thriving black markets and widespread anger and
resistance.
The Peninsular War, fought across Spain from 1808 to 1814, provides one of
the clearest examples of Napoleon’s efforts at domination and resistance to those
NAPOLEONI C C ODE 433
efforts. The conflict began when Napoleon sought access through Spain to strike
at Portugal in an effort to enforce the Continental System. In response, Portugal’s
rulers retreated across the Atlantic to Brazil, where they remained into the 1820s.
In Spain, popular anger at the presence of French troops turned violent. This vio
lence increased after Napoleon forced the abdication of Spain’s king and installed
his b rother Joseph instead. Joseph enacted a moderate reform program which
attracted some Spaniards to his cause. Yet, authority over Spain remained contested
between Joseph, the former king, and, between 1810 and 1814, an assembly known
as the Cortes of Cádiz. The Peninsular War was as much a civil as an international
war, and involved not just regular armies, but rural insurgents who practiced what
Spaniards called guerrilla warfare. Atrocities committed by all sides characterized
the struggle and it proved impossible for the French to control. Napoleon commit-
ted ever-increasing numbers of soldiers in what would prove to be a futile effort.
Simultaneously, the atomization of authority over Spain destroyed control over the
Spanish Empire, helping cause revolutions throughout Latin America which lasted
until 1825. Napoleon provided the model for the revolutions’ leaders, most nota-
bly Simon Bolivar (1783–1830).
Following the Treaty of Tilsit, the Russian Tsar grew angry with Napoleon’s
economic policies and, on December 31, 1810, chose to abandon the Continental
System. In response, Napoleon prepared a massive invasion force. The resulting
campaign, fought between June and December 1812, proved disastrous for the
French. Almost all of the army perished, mainly from disease and the Russian
winter. Allied armies took the offensive, finally forcing Napoleon to abdicate in
April 1814. He attempted a return in 1815, only to suffer a last defeat at Waterloo
in June. Sent into exile on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena, Napoleon died
in 1821.
Charles Lipp
See also: Age of Revolution; French Revolution; Haitian Revolution; Latin Ameri-
can Wars of Independence; L’Ouverture, Touissant; Napoleonic Code; Nationalism
Further Reading
Bell, David A. 2015. Napoleon: A Concise Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Esdaille, Charles. 2003. The Peninsular War: A New History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Roberts, Andrew. 2014. Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin Books.
NAPOLEONIC CODE
The Napoleonic Code or Code Napoléon is a French civil code established in 1804
by Napoleon Bonaparte. Created by commissioned jurists and placed into effect
on March 21, 1804, the Napoleonic Code was the attempt by the French ruler to
replace the previous patchwork of confusing feudal laws and common laws into
one code. The promulgation of this code gave legal permanence to important ideas
from the French Revolution. Besides making the laws more understandable, the
434 NAPOLEONI C C ODE
code clarified and emphasized rights, equalities, and liberties of French citizens.
Though it was not the first legal code to be established in Europe, the Napoleonic
Code was a major influence on nineteenth-century civil codes, and it modernized
the civil laws of many countries in continental Europe, North America, and South
America. The code is still extant but not in its original form; it has been revised
and changed over time.
The Code Napoléon is officially titled the Code civil des Français and is simplified
into the Code Civil. Various codes in other European civil legal systems preceded
it. Demand for codification and actions by government to systematize laws pre-
ceded Napoleon’s reign. T here was no single set of laws governing France before
the nineteenth c entury, and a diversity of codes dominated France’s prerevolution-
ary legal order. Preceding European codes include the Corpus Juris Civilis, the cod-
ification of Roman law done by Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in the sixth century
CE. Before Napoleon, Roman law actually governed south France, but separate
codes inspired by Germanic and Frankish feudal laws developed in Paris and sur-
rounding Northern provinces. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries, the Roman Catholic Church and its canon law governed marriages and family
life in France while ordinances, royal decrees, and case laws were produced by
parlements or provincial appellate courts of the Kingdom of France (the Ancien
Régime). Coutumes or customary laws were enforced in certain areas of France.
Despite attempts to refine French law, the interests of the monarchic and aristo-
cratic authorities blocked codification to forestall the revocation of their legal
privileges.
The French Revolution (1789–1799) changed the powers of the state and made
codification a necessity. Due to this revolt against the French aristocracy and
clergy, the last vestiges of feudalism in France w ere dismantled and abolished; the
church’s secular power was forced to end; manors, guilds, and other control
groups were disrupted; and the French provinces w ere divided and organized
into a national state. A
fter rising to power in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte reformed
the confusing French legal system and its contradictory royal decrees in accor-
dance with ideas from the French Revolution. Distinctively, the code was founded
on the premise that law should be established under reason and rationality; com-
mon sense, instead of monarchial paternalism, and old customs dictated the mak-
ing of the Napoleonic Code. For the first time in history, rationality and impartiality
defined the creation of a nation’s law. Ecclesiastical control of civilian institutions
along with class privileges concerning hereditary nobility and primogeniture
were abolished u nder the Napoleonic Code, and equality for citizens, freedom
of person, the protection of private property, and freedom of contract became
key principles in French civil law. Though it granted individual liberty, freedom
of conscience, freedom of work, and the overall lay character of the French state,
it also gave more liberty to employers than employees and safeguarded landed
property.
Like Justinian’s prior code, the Napoleonic Code is categorized into institutes or
books that divide French civil law into the laws of persons, property, acquisition
of property, and civil procedure. Rather than an edited collection of extracts from
NAPOLEONI C C ODE 435
older codes, Napoleon ordered a comprehensive revising that incorporated earlier

rules and legislation, was more rationally structured, and was written in the ver-
nacular with no religious content. The first book of the Napoleonic Code concerns
the laws of persons on topics such as domicile, the possession of civil rights, par-
ent and c hildren relations, marriage and spousal relations, and the annulment or
divorce of marriages, where men were granted supremacy over the restricted legal
rights of w omen and c hildren. The second book is about the laws of property and
deals with the ownership rights and regulation of possessions. The third book
covers the ways to acquire and own property; it considers acquirement by dona-
tions, through successions, under obligations, and in settlements. The fourth sec-
tion in the last chapters of the code regulates civil procedure through an array of
nominate contracts, limitations of actions, prescriptions of rights, and mortgages.
When it comes to obligations u nder its law, the code mimics long-established cat-
egories of contract within Roman law, which are contract, delict, quasi-contract,
and quasi-delict. Though is not clearly written in the Napoleonic Code, freedom
is an inherent principle in its provisions.
The development of the Napoleonic Code was a fundamental change in the
French civil system, making the laws clearer and much more accessible to all citi-
zens. This codification supplanted the former conflict between royal legislative
power and the protests of judges who represented the convictions of their social
class affiliations. Such contentions caused the Revolutionaries to take negative view-
points concerning judges making law. This impression is expressed in the Napo-
leonic Code through important provisions that prohibit judges from deciding a case
by way of introducing a general rule of law like a legislative exercise. The code
requires judicial interpretation instead; secret or ex pro facto law (law that makes
illegal acts that w ere legal when committed) are prohibited. Laws are proclaimed
only if they had been thoroughly examined and published officially. The code also
prohibits judges from refusing justice based on insufficiency of the law, but although
the code forbids passing judgments of legislative value, it does support judges to
interpret the law for clarification.
Besides its significance in reforming the nature of civil law in France, the Napo-
leonic Code influenced the creation of civil codes worldwide. Part of this influ-
ence is due to Napoleon’s success on the battlefield. It was introduced in areas
already controlled by France in 1804, including Belgium, Luxembourg, Monaco,
Geneva, and parts of Italy and Germany. Napoleon’s imperial success spread
the code further into the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Poland, and
remaining areas of Italy and western Germany. Through translation and alteration,
other countries in Europe, North America, South America, and the M iddle East
adopted most or parts of the Napoleonic Code. In the early nineteenth century,
the Car ibbean countries of the Dominican Republic and Haiti enforced the code
and have kept it established into modern times. Chile and Bolivia heavily based
their law on the code, and Ecuador, Colombia, Uruguay, and Argentina in turn
based their civil law systems on Chile’s code. Being the sole civil-law state in the
United States, Louisiana passed a civil code closely linked to the Napoleonic Code
in 1825. Another equivalent civil code was created in Quebec in the mid-nineteenth
436 NAPOLEONI C C ODE
French Law Persists in Louisiana

The Napoleonic Code was widely a dopted in the nineteenth c entury, espe-
cially in places with a French history. The state of Louisiana still practices a
form of the Napoleonic Code. As a civil code, it demands that judges inter-
pret statutes directly rather than relying on the accumulation of case law as
in the common law system more widely used in the United States. In prac-
tice, however, the differences are few, especially as Louisiana law has been
adapted to bring it in line with the rest of the country. However, differences
in inheritance law remain, as do some aspects of commercial law unique to
Louisiana. L awyers aspiring to practice in Louisiana must pass the state’s
bar exam—unlike other states, which frequently have reciprocal agreements
with the bar associations of their neighbors.
c entury. Newly-reunified Italy enacted a similar law system in 1865 that would
last until 1942. Romania espoused regulations with Napoleonic characteristics in
1864 and used them well into the twenty-first c entury. Even in Persian Gulf Arab
states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Islamic law is mixed with interpretations
of the Napoleonic Code.
The Napoleonic code would decline in influence by the twentieth century.
Other civil codes such as the German Civil Code (1900) and Swiss Civil Code
(1912) would be adopted outside of Europe, but the ideas from the French, Ger-
man, and Swiss codes would be borrowed in legal systems throughout the
continents. With the exception of Scandinavia and Russ ia, civil law in mod-
ern Europe has more or less been influenced by the Napoleonic Code. Spread-
ing from Eu ropean colonialism and hegemony, this code has affected the
establishment, practice, and modernization of civil law in many countries, mak-
ing it one of the influential and authoritative legal documents in world history.
Due to court decisions and new laws over time, the code has changed signifi-
cantly from its original drafting in France, but it laid the foundation for con
temporary civil law.
James A. Padgett
See also: French Revolution; L

egal Systems; Louisiana; Napoleon I
Further Reading
Bonaparte, Napoleon. 1827. The Code Napoleon: or, the French Civil Code. Literally translated
from the original and official edition, published at Paris, in 1804. By a Barrister of the Inner
Temple. London: William Benning. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ 2353.
Holtman, Robert D. 1979. The Napoleonic Revolution. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press.
Roberts, Andrew. 2015. Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin.
NATIONALIS M 437
N AT I O N A L I S M
Nationalism is a political and social philosophy of loyalty to a particular nation.
Supporters often define their loyalty in terms of a common language, history, and
culture. Scholars trace the political force of nationalism in the Atlantic world to
the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), though much of the phil-
osophical underpinning of nationalist thought was developed during the Enlight-
enment Era (1650–1800). People used national ideology to liberate themselves from
an unjust local or monarchial government and also to justify wars of aggression. As
a result, nationalism was the primary philosophy for independence movements,
as well as the external growth of empires in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. As a social force, nationalism often demanded loyalty, self-sacrifice, and
adherence to national identity. While scholars can look to the era before written
history to see the basis for nationalism, the political concept of nationalism relies
on modern concepts of centralized government, scientific inquiry, industrializa-
tion, economic independence, and patriotism. The history specific to each nation
plays a predominant role in the particular form of nationalism that any country
experiences.
Scholars typically credit Prussian Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) with
originating the term, which he used extensively in his writings in the 1770s. He
focused primarily on language and art as elements distinctive to a particular group,
while geography played a role in keeping groups separated physically. He promoted
the idea that p eople thought and acted based on the language they spoke, so they
must take pride in words and phrases that combined to form the group’s history.
This history of a p eople in a geographic location, including literature and art, deter-
mined their shared national identity, according to Herder. His philosophy became
the foundation for Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s (1815–1898) unification of the
German states in the mid-nineteenth c entury.
While Herder focused on German groups in Central Europe, many of the same
ideas had already begun to take shape and gain support in E ngland during the
later 1600s and early 1700s. King James I (1566–1625) ruled a unified E ngland,
Ireland, and Scotland a fter 1603 with the Union of the Crowns, which became
official in 1707 when the Acts of Union created the Kingdom of G reat Britain u nder
the rule of Queen Anne (1665–1714) and the British Parliament. The emergence of
a centralized government and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution brought
together many of the components necessary for the public to identify with their
country over smaller units of f amily, town, or noble jurisdiction. As enclosure move-
ment laws in this same period forced rural and working class people together into
factory towns, language and shared experience became their common identity.
Mass consumption of goods, made possible by industrialization, also solidified the
shared experience of previously disparate groups. History, as written by scholars,
expanded to encompass the country, or nation, and numerous stories and tradi-
tions, or culture. The British government, writers, and intellectuals promoted the
ideals of nationalism, including the creation of national symbols, anthems, flags,
and patriotic stories during the first decades of the eighteenth c entury.
438 NATIONALIS M
The American and French Revolutions relied on these same philosophies and
ideologies to promote independence from G reat Britain and to overthrow the dynas-
tic monarchy of France, respectively. In North America, colonial leaders chafed at
the demands and restrictions of a nation thousands of miles away. Despite a shared
language, common law, religion, and connected economies, the notions of physi-
cal separation, political autonomy, and a diverging history overwhelmed most feelings
of patriotism to the British Empire. To create a new nation and national identity,
Americans used the writings of Enlightenment writers, such as John Locke (1632–
1704) and Thomas Paine (1737–1809), along with the work of political leaders
such as Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) and James Madison (1751–1836) to explain
what they asserted as the common sense thinking of Americans in documents
such as the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the United States Constitu-
tion and Bill of Rights.
In France, economic issues related to taxation and the notion of popular sover-
eignty led the masses to revolution. King Louis XVI’s (r. 1774–1792) ministers failed
to negotiate solutions to the country’s economic crises following the Seven Years’
War (1754–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783). The p eople feared the
loss of identity, traditions, and any economic voice or equality. Citizens joined forces
to oppose the acts of King Louis XVI, establish the legitimacy of the National
Assembly as the country’s representative government, reestablish their rights and
property u nder feudal laws, and declare their rights as men and citizens, which
they believed the government had the responsibility to protect. Citizens also rec-
ognized their duties to the nation as a condition of the rights they claimed. The
French revolutionaries relied on a sense of collective interest and purpose, grounded
in individual and group goals, French language, culture, and history.
While nationalism can emerge organically due to events outside of the control
of leaders, rulers of nation-states, such as Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), also
actively defined and recreated nationality based on their needs to assert power.
Napoleon created the same sense of national identity to counter the chaos of the
radicalized second revolution in France and the Reign of Terror that began in
1793. He created a national code of law, used merit to promote individuals, estab-
lished a national military organization, and required the clergy to swear loyalty to
the state. Napoleon spread his model of nationalism across continental Europe
between 1804 and 1815, defeating the armies of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Spain
between 1805 and 1808. Napoleon’s Continental System combined political and eco-
nomic control under his French rule and exported all the components of national-
ism to conquered areas. Napoleon’s national ideology redrew the map of Europe,
and also prompted countries to adopt philosophies of nationalism to oppose his
imperial advancement. This eventually resulted in the philosophy of balanced
power both within and across borders to maintain political stability and social
order with the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This agreement also prompted less
organized peoples and states to centralize authority politically and economically,
particularly the German and Italian states, to maintain their status among other
European nations.
NATIONALIS M 439
In Latin America, the economic and political chaos that resulted from the Amer-
ican and French Revolutions led to multiple independence movements. Leaders
tended to arise from the aristocratic class, demanding political independence from
the destabilized or reorganizing governments of Europe. Haiti gained independence
in 1804 following an eight-year revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture (ca. 1743–
1803) and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (ca. 1758–1806), uniquely involving the popu
lar uprising of socially oppressed slaves. Throughout Latin America, the descendants
of white Europeans and local populations known as Creoles, objected to the reas-
sertion of Spanish control a fter 1776 when peninsulares, the Spanish sent or already
living in the colonies, were chosen for political appointments in colonial govern-
ments, churches, and military positions. Creole leaders embraced the ideologies
of shared language, culture, and history in the New World to rally the larger Cre-
ole social groups against any perceived oppression and to protect their own inter-
ests. Their opposition led to revolutionary actions during the first decades of the
nineteenth c entury. Leaders rebelled in regions of modern Paraguay and Uruguay
in 1810, Mexico from 1811 to 1821, Venezuela from 1816 to 1821, in Chile from
1817 to 1821, and Peru in 1821. Brazil declared independence in 1822 in a peace-
ful separation from Portugal.
Nationalism gave leaders political power and ideologies to expand their ter-
ritories. Over the course of the nineteenth c entury, G reat Britain expanded its
empire, the United States spread across the North American continent and
addressed sectionalism within a national context, and Germany and Italy consoli-
dated and began acquiring territory outside of Europe. They also relied heavily
on concepts of patriotic nationalism. Expansionist leaders in Europe and the
United States also attached g reat importance to racial superiority based on Dar-
winian philosophy. Additionally, the social changes that accompanied the Indus-
trial Revolution spurred the working class to action, including revolutions in
1848, the culmination of American sectional division in the Civil War (1861–
1865), and the rise of workers unions and socialist ideology, exemplified by Karl
Marx (1818–1883) and Freidrich Engels (1820–1895) in the Communist Mani-
festo (1848).
Nineteenth-century nationalism has played a central role in the events of the
twentieth c entury, tying the Atlantic world together while also pitting parts of it
against forces interior to the European and Asian continents. National leaders used
the ideologies of nationalism and associated imperial policies to develop massive
military-industrial complexes, leading to both World Wars and the Cold War
(1945–1991). American and Soviet leaders emphasized the superiority of their cul-
tures, political institutions, and economic systems to create a bifurcated world.
Other nations allied for or against the United States as it tried to contain commu-
nism and spur the spread of democracy around the world. As a result, nationalism
as a concept has been redefined numerous times, resulting in both left and right
oriented versions.
Paul Nienkamp
440 NATI V E A M E R I C AN SLAV E T R ADE
See also: Age of Revolution; Enlightenment; French Revolution; Jefferson, Thomas;

L’Ouverture, Touissant; Napoleon I
Further Reading
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.
Barnard, F. M. 1967. Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to National-
ism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Breuilly, John. 1994. Nationalism and the State. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Greenfeld, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Hobsbowm, Eric J. 1992. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality.
2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
N AT I V E A M E R I C A N S L AV E T R A D E
The Native American slave trade consisted of the exchange and sale of enslaved
Native Americans among native peoples and Euro-Americans. The trade was built
upon precontact indigenous practices of captivity. European colonization of North
America and the Car ibbean transformed indigenous slave trading customs. Euro-
American colonists procured thousands of Indian slaves from Native American
tribes by tapping into indigenous enslavement traditions. Colonial l abor demands
drove the commercialization of Native American enslavement. Gradually, the Native
American slave trade shifted away from the enslavement of native p eoples in f avor
of African and African American slaves. By the end of the eighteenth century, the
African slave trade supplanted the Native American slave trade in North America.
By the start of the nineteenth c entury, Native Americans focused on procuring and
using African Americans as slaves.
Slavery existed as an indigenous practice throughout much of the Western Hemi
sphere prior to the arrival of Europeans. In North America, the Mississippian socie
ties that existed from roughly 700 to 1600 and spanned across much of the modern
United States southeast practiced slavery as part of a hierarchical society. Most
slaves were enemies captured by warriors during raids or in times of war. Once
warriors brought enemies back to their town or village, chiefs typically decided
the fate of captives. If a captive was not ritually executed or a dopted, they could be
enslaved. Usually, women and children were preferred for enslavement or adop-
tion as a means to increase population levels whereas adult men were typically
executed to demonstrate dominance over enemies and due to fears of continued
resistance.
Slaves played an integral role in Mississippian society as laborers and status sym-
bols. The acquisition and ownership of slaves demonstrated a chief’s dominance
over enemies and enhanced his prestige. Chiefs kept captives as personal servants
and laborers, or redistributed slaves to warriors and loyal supporters. Slaves per-
formed a plethora of functions. Since most slaves came from rivals towns, they
made skilled translators. Other obligations included daily chores such as collecting
NATI V E A M E R I C AN SLAV E T R ADE 441
ater. Additionally, many slaves engaged in agricultural work such as cultivating

w
fields, harvesting corn, and protecting food stores.
Mississippian slaves endured harsh abuses from their captors. Slaves who w ere
a flight risk could be mutilated by, for example, severing an Achilles tendon.
Enslaved w omen could be offered as wives to men of the tribe or offered to visitors
as sex slaves. Slaves could also be bartered for goods or given as gifts; however,
the children of slaves w ere free and might be adopted into the tribe.
The arrival, settlement, and colonization of the Americas by Europeans required
Native Americans to adjust to new circumstances. As a result, Native American
cultural practices relating to slavery and coerced labor w ere integrated into a trans-
atlantic, capitalist market. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the
trade in native slaves connected the inhabitants of North America, both indige-
nous and European, with the broader Atlantic world. Similar to the Mississippian
era, Native Americans participated in the colonial era slave trade as both slaves
and enslavers. For Native American men, the enslavement of rivals provided an
opportunity to gain status within their community. Native Americans frequently
used slaves as gifts when meeting potential colonial allies. In the lower mid-
continent of North Americ a, the Comanche used the exchange of captives to
make symbolic overtures of peace between rivals. As Native American populations
declined across the Western Hemisphere, captivity and enslavement provided a
chance to offset demographic decline. Divergent from precontact practices, deal-
ing in slaves was potentially prosperous for Native Americans willing to take the
risk. As a component of the colonial trade between Native Americans and Europe
ans, the Native American slave trade connected markets on each side of the Atlan-
tic Ocean. Along with goods such as deer skins and beaver furs, Native Americans
traded slaves for European manufactured goods such as knives, axes, metal pots,
and guns.
A growing demand for labor coincided with European colonial expansion. Euro
peans purchased Native Americans to meet their l abor needs. Departing from prior
native practices, Euro-A merican slave buyers preferred young men over women
and children as men were thought to be able to better endure the burdens of agri-
cultural l abor. For the most part, European colonists did not enslave Native Amer-
icans themselves. Usually, colonists were only directly involved in the enslavement
of Native Americans as a result of Native-European wars. Colonists primarily relied
on Native American tribes to provide them with native slaves. For example, colonial
merchants in the South Carolina colony traded European manufactured goods for
slaves. European merchants then sold Native American slaves to local buyers or
exported slaves to other colonies. Similarly, in New France colonists bought
slaves from Native Americans to use as domestic servants or export to French plan-
tations in the Car ibbean.
The transformation of the Native American slave trade for commercial purposes
impacted native society. The opportunities for young warriors involved in the slave
trade contributed to the decline of centralized authority in many native commu-
nities. Additionally, demand for Native American slaves influenced the develop-
ment of militarized raiding parties during the seventeenth and early eighteenth
442 NATI V E A M E R I C AN SLAV E T R ADE
c entury. Tribes such as the Iroquois, Westo, Comanche, and Chickasaw benefited
from the enslavement of rivals for the purposes of selling captives to British, French,
and Spanish colonists. Trading slaves for European manufactured goods also pro-
vided advantages to slaving societies. The Chickasaws managed to block trade
routes between European merchants and their rivals the Choctaws thus control-
ling access to manufactured weapons. In some instances, native-led slave raids con-
tributed to the depopulation of certain areas and the destruction of native groups.
In the early 1700s, Creek and Yamasee tribes preyed upon the Apalachee tribe
living along the Florida panhandle resulting in the effective destruction of the
Apalachee as an organized tribe.
The end of the Native American slave trade in North America was a disjointed
process. In the American southeast, the Yamasee War (1715–1717) marked the
decline of the Native American slave trade. As South Carolina merchants increas-
ingly encouraged Native Americans to make raids against one another, groups such
as the Yamasee attempted to fight back by targeting colonial outposts. Though the
Carolinians defeated the Yamasee, the Native American slave trade never recov-
ered. In New France, the Native American slave trade persisted until Great Britain
gained control of the territory as a result of the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). Great
Britain’s acquisition cut the commercial exportation of native slaves to France’s
remaining colonies. In the North American West, native enslavement continued
well into the nineteenth century. The Comanche and Utes and colonizers such as
Mormons and Hispanics held and traded natives as personal servants and agricul-
tural workers. Mexico continued to provide a market for enslaved Native Ameri-
cans. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 marked the legal end of
slavery within the borders of the United States but through the 1860s, federal offi-
cials periodically complained of Native Americans kidnapping American citizens
for ransom or trading enslaved natives between tribes.
The exact number of enslaved Native Americans is unknown. Historians esti-
mate between 2 and 4 million Native Americans were enslaved across North and
South America. Some scholars have attempted to investigate more specific regions.
Brett Rushforth has identified more than 1,800 individual enslaved Native Ameri-
cans in French North America between 1660 and 1760. He argues the documented
number represents only a fraction of the total (Rushforth 2014, 398). In the North
American southeast, historian Alan Gallay estimates anywhere from 24,000 to
51,000 Native Americans were sold into the British slave trade between 1670
and 1715 (Gallay 2002, 299). The volume of Native Americans enslaved, sold, and
exported suggests that more native slaves w ere shipped out of Charleston, South
Carolina than African slaves imported during the 45-year time frame.
Multiple factors led to the decline of the Native American slave trade but the
most significant deterrent may be a result of the growing reliance on African slaves.
By the start of the eighteenth century, commercial ventures such as the British Royal
Africa Company (1660–1752) and the Dutch West India Company (1623–1792)
managed to consistently and economically provide the colonies with slaves from
Africa. As Native Americans incorporated stronger ties to the Atlantic world, they
too used African slaves in various facets.
NATI V E A M E R I C AN SLAV E T R ADE 443
At the start of the 1700s, Native Americans did not generally define slavery in
racial terms. However, by the end of the American Revolution (1775–1783), racial
barriers throughout native country hardened as many Native Americans came
to see themselves as “red,” Euro-A mericans as “white,” and African Ameri-
cans as “black.” Similar to the rest of North America, Native Americans increas-
ingly associated “blackness” with slavery and increasingly categorized African
American slaves as “chattel” property, essentially a commodity to be bought, sold,
or traded.
Native enslavement of African Americans mirrored the plantation economy
expanding across the United States South in several ways. Within native borders,
wealthy Native Americans held the majority of slaves and used slave labor on cot-
ton plantations or cattle ranches. In the early 1800s, Cherokee Joseph Vann had
115 African American slaves and his plantation included a columned manor, cot-
ton fields, and slave cabins (Miles 2010, 57, 87). Similarly, Choctaw Greenwood
LeFlore owned a sprawling Mississippi plantation with 400 black slaves and
approximately 15,000 acres of land (Krauthamer 2013, 41). Native constitutions
and laws also reinforced the association of black skin with chattel slavery. The 1818,
Creek Constitution explicitly differentiated between Native Americans and Afri-
can Americans within the nation by inferring the latter w ere chattel property. Addi-
tionally, the children of enslaved African American w omen w ere likely to be
enslaved as well. Native American nations, particularly in the United States South,
continued to racially define slavery as exclusive to African Americans up to the
end of the Civil War (1861–1865).
However, native enslavement of African Americans created some unique circum-
stances in regards to Native American removal, emancipation, and citizenship.
When the United States passed the 1830 Indian Removal Act, Native Americans
living east of the Mississippi River were forced to relocate to Indian Territory in
present day Oklahoma. The forced relocation involved thousands of native owned
black slaves. During the removal process, slaves continued to serve their masters
as wagon drivers, livestock hands, cooks, and personal servants likely making the
relocation trek even more burdensome for the enslaved. The U.S. Civil War and
the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States but did
not explicitly extend over Native American tribes. The Cherokee, Creek, and Sem-
inole tribes abolished slavery during or at the conclusion of the Civil War; how-
ever, the U.S. federal government had to negotiate the Treaty of 1866 with the
Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes to abolish slavery within their borders. As a result,
Native American slave holders emancipated approximately 7,000 African Ameri-
can slaves (Krauthamer 2013, 1). The Treaty also outlined provisions to incorpo-
rate freed African Americans as citizens of the Native American tribes. However,
several tribes established black codes similar to those in southern U.S. states to
politically disenfranchise African Americans. Into the twenty-first c entury, the
descendants of former slaves occupy a contested place within native tribes. Dur-
ing a special convention in 2006, the Cherokee Nation sought to limit citizenship
based on Cherokee blood ancestry. The measure effectively blocked descendants
of Cherokee slaves from asserting rights and recognition to Cherokee citizenship.
444 NE W A M STE R DA M / NE W YO R K
U.S. federal courts soon intervened in the citizenship dispute and as of 2016 the
court’s decision is pending.
F. Evan Nooe
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Cahokia; Chickasaws; Choctaws; Creek Indians;
Iroquois; Race; Slavery; Yamasee War
Further Reading
Gallay, Alan. 2002. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American
South 1670–1717. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Krauthamer, Barbara. 2013. Black Slaves, Indian Master: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizen-
ship in the Native American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Miles, Tiya. 2010. The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press.
Rushforth, Brett. 2012. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. Cha-
Snyder, Christina. 2010. Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early
America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
NEW AMSTERDAM/NEW YORK

The term “New Amsterdam” is used to refer to a prosperous seventeenth c entury
Dutch colony settled on what is now known as Lower Manhattan in New York City.
Along the left bank of the slender island are the mainland states of New Jersey,
New York, and Connecticut. The Hudson River flows along its southern and
western coast and the Harlem River flows as a slim estuary up from the East River,
creating a natural boundary separating the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx.
The other New York City boroughs are Staten Island at its southwest corner,
Brooklyn to the southeast, and Queens just below the Bronx. Manhattan Island’s
total land mass measures 33.6 square miles; of that total, 10.8 square miles (roughly
32 percent) is bound in waterways. Manhattan is a short finger island lying inside
the contiguous land mass of Long Island that juts out away from the Long Island
Sound into the Atlantic Ocean.
The search for luxury goods created new opportunities for European patronage
in the sixteenth century. The first recorded European explorers of the inland
Hudson River represented England (Venetians Jean and Sebastian Cabot, 1497),
Florence (Jean de Verrazzano, 1524) and Portugal (Estevan Gomez, 1525). At the
time, there were only two known routes to the Orient and the Spice Islands, both
dangerous and expensive ventures circumnavigating the southern tips of Africa
or South America.
English navigator Henry Hudson (1565–1611) led four voyages in search of a
northern route to the Orient. In 1609, he led his third voyage of discovery in search
of an elusive Northeast Passage to connect with Indian markets. His trip was spon-
sored by the newly incorporated Dutch East India Company (the Verenigde Oost-
Indische Companie or VOC) just two years after Englishman John Smith established
NE W A M STE R DA M / NE W YO R K 445
the Jamestown colony in Virginia. Hampered by the distractions of a mutinous

crew, Hudson guided his ship into calmer w aters, along the Newfoundland coast-
line, southward to the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, and into the lower Hudson
River, following it up to what is now Albany. The Netherlands quickly laid claim
to the entire river valley upon word of his venture. His trip attracted the keen inter-
est of Dutch investors; the Atlantic northwest cod fisheries, the lucrative North
American fur trade, and the immense natural resources of the American interior
were exceptional opportunities for development.
Fort Orange was established in 1615 on Castle Island near Albany and Dutch
merchants began trading relationships with natives. Private investors competed vig-
orously for rights to the prospective North American fur trade. The New Nether-
land Company, founded in 1614, represented the interests of a consortium of
merchants, who for three years exercised exclusive rights to the exploration of the
Hudson and Delaware Rivers. The Dutch West India Company charter went into
effect in 1621, setting into motion a 24-year corporate venture that would estab-
lish a Dutch company-owned colonial foothold within what would become known
as the M
iddle Colonies. New Netherland colonies were established along the Hud-
son and lower Delaware Rivers, with its first colony of 30 Flemish Walloon fami-
lies established at various sites. Dangerous conditions, including the mayhem of
warring Mohawk and Mahican tribes, prompted the company to move its settlers
An engraving of Dutch tobacco traders, ca. 1642. While they attend to business, African
slaves labor in the background. (New York Public Library)
446 NE W A M STE R DA M / NE W YO R K
to the island of “Manna-hatta.” The newly appointed Director General Peter Min-
uit (1580–1638) conducted negotiations with the Lenape Indians sometime in mid-
May 1626, to purchase the southern tip of the island (approximately 22,000 acres)
for 60 guilders’ worth of merchandise. On June 26, 1626 the new lands were ready
for settlement as New Amsterdam.
The founding of New Amsterdam took place within a series of mercantile trans-
formations during the early seventeenth c entury that created intense networks of
exchange binding the Caribbean islands (often referred to as the West Indies), North
American plantation producers, the West African slave trade, and European (par-
ticularly English) markets. Waves of Spanish, English, French and Dutch merchants
and investors competed for colonial settlements, establishing large slave plantations
for the production of sugar, coffee and manufactured goods for export to North
American and European markets.
These transformations coincided with the English settlement of colonies along
the far eastern stretch of Long Island during the mid-1600s. In retaliation to
continuing Anglo-Dutch aggression, the newly crowned Charles II (1630–1685)
formally claimed New Netherland for British colonization. In 1664, Director Gen-
eral Peter Stuyvesant surrendered the colony to English forces, granting to the Duke
of York a land patent creating a united English stronghold on Long Island. Its
lands included parts of the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsyl-
vania, and Delaware. After a second Anglo-Dutch conflict, the Treaty of Breda was
signed in 1667, formalizing the Dutch surrender of New Amsterdam in exchange
for the island of Surinam. A fter the Treaty of Westminster of 1674, New Amster-
dam, renamed New York City, and all of Long Island was controlled by English
interests through the Revolutionary War. The structure of the early New Amsterdam
colony was preserved in meticulous etchings and in maps drawn at the time of Dutch
settlement. The Castello Plan was drafted by Jacques Cortelyou in 1660, just before
the colony was captured by English forces in 1664. The document is remarkable
for the detail it provides regarding the layout of the early colony and the location
of its businesses and family dwellings.
The New Amsterdam demographic profile was unique for its pluralism. Under
Dutch governance nearly half of all citizens claimed German, Scandinavian, and
Finnish origins, as well as natives of E ngland, African slaves, and Jewish refugees
from the Netherlands and Brazil. Over time, the M iddle Colonies shared a legacy
of cultural diversity and religious tolerance unlike other colonial ventures. Con
temporary Middle Atlantic scholars note the strong multi-imperial relationships
that characterized the regular transactions of Dutch, English, and Swedish colo-
nists, who in turn established flourishing multiethnic communities of French Wal-
loons, Norwegians, Germans, Italians, Africans, and Jews with diverse religious
affiliations. Independent traders routinely crisscrossed the New E ngland, Chesa-
peake, and Car ibbean plantations creating local market exchanges for comestibles
and manufactured goods. Similar patterns of ethnic settlement occurred as the
Manhattan borough flourished into the nineteenth c entury.
Shipbuilding became an important sector as New York became a main entrepôt
for trade with the West Indies and the growing North American market. Slave
NE W A M STE R DA M / NE W YO R K 447
populations rose to nearly one-fifth of the city’s total population; during the early
eighteenth c entury, new waves of German, Irish and Scots immigrated to the Amer-
ican colonies, contributing to grinding urban poverty in the midst of rising per-
sonal fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic. Following the Ordinances of 1785
and 1787, the newly established United States expanded into the Northwest Terri-
tory. Merchants soon relied on the magnificent G reat Lakes waterways for ship-
ping to the western frontier. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, connected the
Hudson River with the G reat Lakes at Lake Erie. It dramatically reduced shipping
costs and supporting booming markets across the stretch of towns and farms link-
ing the eastern seaboard with the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest.
Sugar dominated British imports until the rise of cotton manufactures in the
1800s; the Industrial Revolution transformed the British textile industries, con-
tributing to an exponential rise in British Atlantic trade, particularly in woolens
and cotton, commodities that stimulated global market demands for colonial dye-
stuffs. Between 1790 and 1860, New York City’s population grew from 33,131 to
813,669; it rose to become the premiere city in North America. This prominence
was the outcome of the expansion of trade through the Port of New York and the
correlative proliferation of manufactured goods including sugar, information ser
vices, and the garment trade. In the same time frame, exports r ose from $13 million
to $145 million, the result of New York’s position within the “cotton triangle”
connecting the American South with transatlantic merchants. During this period,
ship sizes r ose and became increasingly specialized, accommodating cargoes of
over 1,000 tons. It is estimated that while in 1934 a total of 1,950 ships called to
port carrying 465,000 tons of goods, in 1860 the harbor received 3,982 ships reg-
istering a total of 1,983,00 tons of cargo; an average increase from 238 to 498 tons
of goods (Glaeser 2005, 1–18).
The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886. The brain-child of
Edouard de Laboulaye and sculptor Fredric-Auguste Bartholdi, “Liberty Enlight-
ening the World” was created to reflect the American nation’s defense of liberty
and the abolition of slavery. However, the statue was immortalized not as an icon
of freedom, but as a symbol of the country’s immigrant legacy. The poetess Emma
Lazarus, a native New Yorker and d aughter of a well-established Jewish family,
wrote the poem “The New Colossus” as a fund-raiser for the Statue of Liberty ped-
estal fund. Concerned about the plight of Russian refugees coming in to Ward’s
Island, she penned her sonnet, imprinting the nation’s collective conscience with
words of welcome for new immigrants. Her voice reflected the social reality of a
nation coming to terms with the aftermath of the Civil War era.
During the Reconstruction era (1865–1877), the demand for factory workers
skyrocketed, creating the currents for massive migration into the nation’s manu-
facturing centers. In 1890, the photojournalist Jacob Riis (1849–1914), a native of
Denmark, wrote his pioneering classic, How the Other Half Lives, documenting
the squalid conditions of the New York tenements. The advent of the s ilent mov-
ies provided new expressions of realism; into the next century, Charlie Chaplin’s
iconic character “The Tramp” internalized the universal experience of poverty on
a profoundly human level. Urban blight and homelessness, particularly among the
448 NE W F R AN C E
struggling working-classes, gave birth to progressive era social reform movements

at the close of the century.
Even as the nation’s western frontiers w ere settled, new horizons of possibility
were emerging. Millions of voices were articulating a raw and multifaceted inter-
pretation of the American dream, and for many immigrants, New York was the
gritty “broad way” that channeled a babble of multiethnic talent, individuality, and
hard work into a vast literary and performing arts enterprise that would provide
news and entertainment to audiences worldwide well into the twentieth century.
At the core of this raucous leap into modernity was New York’s rise to eminence
as one of the world’s premiere financial and business districts. In 1895, voters chose
to consolidate the cities of Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Brooklyn
with Manhattan to form a sprawling, five-borough metropolitan area known as
“Greater New York.”
See also: British Atlantic; Dutch Atlantic; Industrial Revolution; Migration;

Progressivism
Further Reading
Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. 1999. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
New York, New York: Oxford University Press.
Glaeser, Edward L. 2005. “Urban Colossus: Why Is New York America’s Largest City?” Fed-
eral Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review. https://w ww.newyorkfed.org
/medialibrary/media/research/epr/05v11n2/0512glae.pdf.
Hopkinson, Deborah. 2003. Shutting out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York 1880–
1924. New York: Orchard Books.
Shorto, Russell. 2005. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhat-
tan and the Forgotten Colony That S haped America. New York: Vintage Books.
NEW FRANCE
The term New France refers to the French monarchy’s imperial claims on the North
American continent. At their most extensive, t hese claims stretched from the Atlan-
tic coasts of Canada, down the St. Lawrence River Valley to the Great Lakes, and
from there, down the Mississippi River Valley to Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast.
However, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the label of New France
came to be focused on the particular lands along the St. Lawrence River, also known
to contemporaries as Canada. There, the French had built their earliest and most
important settlements, including Quebec and Montreal. The St. Lawrence Valley
remained the most populated area of French colonization on the continent. It
remained the core area for French civil, religious, and military administration in
North America. At all times, the extent of French imperial claims was always far
larger than the physical presence of actual settlers.
Although France first made claims to North America in the mid-1500s, permanent
colonial settlement only began in the following c entury. In the early seventeenth
NE W F R AN C E 449
c entury, the French settled along the North Atlantic coast and St. Lawrence River
Valley. At the turn of the eighteenth c entury, the French presence expanded to the
west, around the G reat Lakes and down the Mississippi River Valley. The num-
bers of French colonists remained very low in comparison to the neighboring
European imperial efforts of Spain or G reat Britain. At its height, New France’s total
European-descended population numbered less than 100,000. In contrast, G reat
Britain’s colonies along the Atlantic coast contained nearly 1 million colonists. In
part, these low numbers reflected the fact that France experienced lower rates of
emigration than other European powers and that most French emigrants remained
within Europe. In addition, many of the tasks settlers in New France engaged in,
such as fishing, fur trading, missionary work, and military serv ice, did not require
widespread colonial settlements. In consequence, French colonists enjoyed the
potential for freedom of action, despite efforts at greater royal control beginning
in the later 1600s. Moreover, the French could never dominate the Native Ameri-
cans of North America, who retained their freedom of action. Indeed, the French
needed to continually negotiate their relationships with various Native American
groups. These negotiations colored, influenced, and ensured France’s presence in
North America until the end of New France in the second half of the eighteenth
century.
France made its first contacts with North America in the 1500s. By the dawn of
the century, French fisherman had discovered the bountiful fishing areas of the
Grand Banks off the continent’s North Atlantic coasts. Within several decades,
because of growing rivalry with Spain, French king François I (r. 1515–1547) was
financing voyages of privateering and exploration. François’s efforts culminated
with the sending of Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) on three voyages to North Amer
ica between 1534 and 1541. Cartier explored the St. Lawrence River and made
contacts with the indigenous Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the region. He also
sought mineral wealth comparable to the riches of Spain’s Empire, although he was
not successful. Most important, he officially claimed the land for France and gave
it the name of Canada. Permanent French settlement, however, failed to material-
ize for, between 1562 and 1598, France experienced a b itter series of religious civil
wars. Throughout this period, fishermen continued to cross the Atlantic. They sup-
plemented their revenues by trading with the indigenous inhabitants for fur,
particularly beaver pelts, a product much in demand among European hat mak-
ers. The fur trade became increasingly formalized and profitable. In 1600, a per-
manent fur trading post was erected on the banks of the St. Lawrence River.
The next years saw the establishment of permanent French settlement, first in
1605 at Acadia on the Atlantic coast, then, more famously, at Quebec, in 1608. Over
the next 50-plus years, the numbers of French settlers remained very low as the
colony focused on trading furs and saving souls while struggling to survive overall.
The dominant figure during New France’s first generation was Samuel de Cham-
plain (1574–1635), whose leadership helped ensure survival and whose actions
shaped the colony’s entire history. One year a fter founding Quebec, Champlain
joined a Huron war party against the Five Nations Iroquois. Both the Hurons and
the Iroquois w
ere large political confederacies at war with each other. The Hurons
450 NE W F R AN C E
controlled the fur trade to the west and demanded French assistance in return for
continuing the trade. Although trade did continue, the French found themselves
embroiled in so-called Beaver Wars with the Iroquois into the eighteenth c entury.
By that point, the Huron Confederacy had disappeared, destroyed by war and
disease in 1649. The Hurons had run much of the fur trade. With their destruc-
tion, French traders began to play a more direct role and French presence in the
west increased.
Champlain also s haped New France by inviting in Catholic missionaries, the
Jesuits most famously. Following a brief period of English occupation of Quebec,
the Jesuits monopolized missionary work in New France from the 1630s through
the 1660s. Each year, they composed a record of their activities, The Jesuit Relations.
The Relations offered readers insights into Native American culture the Jesuits
gained from immersing themselves into indigenous society so as to seek converts
from within. This tactic, unfortunately, helped spread disease. Other religious groups
also arrived, including the female Ursuline Order, led by Marie de l’Incarnation
(1599–1672), and the Society of the Holy Sacrament, which founded Montreal as
a religious colony in 1642. Soon, however, Montreal transformed into a fur trading
center.
By the late 1650s, New France’s colonists confronted a precarious situation.
French traders slowly restored the fur trade. Quebec’s first bishop arrived in 1657.
That year, however, also witnessed the breakdown of a fragile four years of peace
with the Iroquois. The colonists turned to their sovereign, young king Louis XIV
(r. 1643–1715), for help. In May 1663, Louis took New France away from the mono
poly trading companies that had previously directed colonial affairs and placed
the colony under direct royal authority. Connected to this change was royal min-
ister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), made Controller General of Finances in
1663, and Secretary of State of the Navy four years later.
Louis and Colbert took a number of steps to stabilize the colony’s situation and
to encourage growth within a self-sufficient empire. They sent regular and colo-
nial troops to defend against the Iroquois, the first regulars of the Carignan-Salières
regiment arriving in 1665. The Crown also reorganized New France’s administra-
tion. A governor-general with authority over military affairs was sent. The forceful
though somewhat corrupt Count de Frontenac (1622–1698) dominated this office
from the 1670s to the 1690s. Alongside the governor-general served an intendant,
who managed internal matters like law, justice, and finance. To boost New France’s
economy, Colbert encouraged immigration. Most notably, he sent filles du roi, or
the King’s Daughters, poor young women of proven morals intended as potential
wives for the mostly male colonists. By the mid-1670s, the colony’s population had
reached nearly 10,000 persons, from a level of only 2,500 a decade earlier. Large-
scale immigration ended at this point and the population continued to grow through
natural increase to about 100,000 in 1763.
In contrast, royal policies concerning the fur trade best illustrate the limits of
absolute monarchy. In part b ecause of the distance between France and North
America, colonists always enjoyed great freedom of action. For example, Colbert
established a monopoly fur trading company which paid a fixed price for all pelts
NE W F R AN C E 451
collected. To avoid oversupply, Colbert ordered that only officially licensed traders,
voyageurs, could participate and that New France should remain contained along
the St. Lawrence River. Instead, unlicensed traders, or coureurs des bois, soon
appeared, encouraged by colonial officials, including Frontenac. Over the last years
of the 1600s, in open defiance of royal wishes, colonial officials sponsored expe-
ditions into the Mississippi Valley, and erected forts and fur trading posts around
the Great Lakes, notably Michilimackinac on the straits between Lakes Michigan
and Huron. By the early 1700s, small French settlements existed in Illinois Coun-
try. These moves led to a vast increase in the fur trade, which collapsed in the 1690s
because of a glut of furs. After a period of retrenchment, the trade continued, but
for political reasons, as it helped maintain France’s alliances with various Native
American tribes.
Colonists’ and Native Americans’ desires and actions also s haped the course of
the major wars that embroiled New France from the 1690s to the 1730s. The
increasing French presence in the G reat Lakes region triggered bitter warfare with
the Seneca, the western-most tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy. The conflict only
ended in 1701 with the G reat Peace of Montreal, the accord signed between France
and 40 tribes. By that point, imperial warfare between France and England, Great
Britain after 1707, had erupted with the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697)
and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). These wars, begun in Europe,
saw vicious b attles and raids along New France’s borders involving regular troops,
colonial militia, and Native American allies. During the wars, Louis XIV abandoned
his plans to confine French settlement to the banks of the St. Lawrence. Following
the 1713 Peace of Utrecht which ceded Acadia to Great Britain, France developed
the new colonies of Louisbourg and Louisiana, anchoring its massive arc of terri-
torial claims surrounding Great Britain’s colonies. Complete peace, however, proved
elusive. The year before Utrecht, the Fox Wars broke out in the west. They lasted
until 1737 and resulted from the scheming of a roguish adventurer, the sieur de
Cadillac (1658–1730). He convinced Louis XIV to build a new French fort at Detroit
in 1701. Then, Cadillac worked to settle France’s various Native American allies
in the region, even though some were traditional enemies. These hatreds sparked the
conflict. The Fox Wars ended when Native Americans demanded France make
peace, reflecting again the limits on absolute monarchy.
Despite ongoing wars, the first half of the 1700s saw the emergence along the
St. Lawrence of a distinct French American, or, as the colonists said, Canadian,
society. They had inherited core French traditions like seigneurialism, or lordship,
a system in which seigneurs received concessions that were divided and rented to
tenants in return for a variety of dues. At the same time, the colonists borrowed
from Native American cultures, particularly material objects like moccasins, canoes,
and toboggans. Over one-third of colonists lived in towns, a higher percentage than
in France. Finally, the increasing numbers of soldiers and militia meant the mili-
tary distinguished society in New France.
Ultimately, this society was forever changed by the generation of imperial war
that erupted between 1740 and 1763. The British had done well against the French
during the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), notably capturing Louisbourg
452 NE W O R LEANS
in 1745. However, the Peace of Aachen restored the prewar situation. Tensions
remained and renewed conflict expected. Control over the Ohio River Valley proved
crucial. During the Fox Wars, French fur traders had moved into the region to avoid
conflicts further north and west. British land speculators responded angrily as they
feared a French presence would prevent the taking of lands from Native Americans
to sell to the growing British colonial population of nearly 1 million settlers. B
attles
erupted by 1754, even before war was officially declared in 1756. The outnumbered
French fought well, thanks to their Native American allies. However, divisions
over strategy and the loss of control over the Atlantic proved fatal to New France.
Quebec surrendered in 1759, and Montreal the following year. In the 1763 Peace
of Paris, France ceded almost all of its North American claims to G reat Britain and
Spain, retaining two islands and fishing rights around Newfoundland. Though
New France’s story had ended, French influence would survive.
Charles Lipp
See also: Catholic Women Religious Missionaries; Champlain, Samuel de; Coureurs
de Bois; Fishing and Fisheries; Fur Trade; Huron; Iroquois; Jesuits; Quebec
Further Reading
Calloway, Colin G. 2006. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North Amer
ica. New York: Oxford University Press.
Eccles, W. J. 1998. The French in North America, 1500–1783. Revised ed. Markham, ON:
Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
Moogk, Peter N. 2000. La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada—A Cultural His-
tory. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1896–1901. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels
and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791. 73 vols. Cleveland:
Burrows Bros. Co. http://moses.creighton.edu /kripke/jesuitrelations/.
White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the G reat Lakes
Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans is a city in the southeast region of the United States. The largest urban
area in the state of Louisiana, it straddles the Mississippi River at a large bend 113
miles north of the river’s mouth, known locally as “The Balize.” Intended from
the beginning as a port to control access to and from the river, New Orleans
was founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, on May 7, 1718, as La
Nouvelle-Orléans. Although it quickly became the largest and most important city
in French Louisiana, it was actually the last of Bienville’s Gulf Coast settlements to
take form. The founding of both Biloxi, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama, predate
that of New Orleans by several years.
A relatively isolated frontier town for several decades after its founding, New
Orleans served as a way point for French traders and explorers moving north and
west. Voyageurs from New France and Acadia made their ways to the developing
NE W O R LEANS 453
town from both the north and south, quickly establishing communities in the sur-
rounding area. From these settlements grew the Cajun culture of today and the
only remaining francophone community in Louisiana. By 1721, the city was begin-
ning to take form and by 1722, it had become the capital of the district of Loui-
siane, officially part of New France.
Beyond its French roots, New Orleans sat along a thoroughfare of the Atlantic
world. Regardless of who controlled the interior, the French had laid claim to the
Mississippi River. As a result, New Orleans served as something of a crucible for
Atlantic cultures. A city neither strictly of the interior nor of the coast, it devel-
oped along previous undrawn lines. Although French and Catholic for more than
a century, the cultural milieu of New Orleans took on the forms of its environ-
ment, equally provincial as it was metropolitan. Enslaved Africans existed in the
city from 1719 to the end of the American Civil War in 1865. Indeed, given that
the town’s primary purpose was that of a port, functioning as a layover for traders
and oarsmen looking to make enough money for the voyage home, the slave pop-
ulation proved one of the most consistent and rooted communities in the city over
the course of the eighteenth c entury.
Historians generally agree that the majority of slaves who arrived in New Orleans
before 1800, w ere members of the Bambara ethnic group, natives of the Upper
Guinea Coast and western parts of the Mali Kingdom. As a result, as European
and North American traders passed through town speaking myriad languages and
sailing u nder myriad flags, the enslaved population remained constant, speaking
dialects and practicing religions born from the same Bambara root. This gave New
Orleans a jarringly African flair to the traders passing through town. As early as
the 1730s, travelers noted with shock the sight of slaves dancing at La Place Congo
just outside of town on Sundays. It is to t hese dances, which continued regularly
until 1856, that most musicologists trace the origins of Jazz music.
In 1763, following the French and Indian War, New Orleans became part of New
Spain. It was u nder the Spanish, then, rather than the more culturally rooted
French, that New Orleans grew into an important city within an expansive Atlan-
tic cultural and commercial network. Following nearly a decade of loose, and
occasionally violent, resistance from the former French inhabitants, the Spanish
took control of the city as well as the entire expanse of territory stretching north
and west of the Mississippi River. Renaming it Luisiana and retaining New Orleans
as its capital, the Spanish quickly enacted its own legal code, opened the port to
new nations (particularly Spanish and Dutch ships), and established a new system
of government designed to strip the native French families of the traditional aris-
tocratic powers of the old system. Under this new regime, New Orleans more than
doubled in size, but not necessarily in the way the Spanish expected or wanted.
By the time the Louisiana Purchase added the entirety of Franco-Spanish Loui-
siana to the western frontier of the new United States in 1803, its primary port
and capital remained a French city in all but political claim. Forty years of Span-
ish rule had brought physical and political change to the area. Following two fires
in 1788 and 1794, the architecture of a French frontier town gave way to that of a
tropical Spanish colony, similar to that found in the old towns of coastal Mexico,
454 NE W O R LEANS
Cuba, Dominica, and Bogotá today. The Catholic masses held at the central cathe-
dral named for St. Louis of France, though, remained in the language of its
namesake. The streets retained the prefix “Rue” followed by their original French
titles. Most importantly, the p eople still spoke French. It was not u ntil the early
twentieth c entury that French left the local lexicon for good. In 1983, though,
French became standard in Louisiana public education curricula beginning at
the first grade level.
The French culture that survived the Spanish period was different than that
which began the era. The language had taken new forms depending on where one
heard it. In New Orleans, a self-conscious population of Creoles had developed
through culturally endogamous marriage and interracial sex. Although such a
population had existed in one form or another since the 1720s, a large community
of mixed race, freeborn men and w omen with roots in the French colonial era
stood at the center of a population with economic, cultural, and ancestral ties
across the Atlantic realm. Beginning in 1791, and continuing through 1812, refu-
gees from the war-torn island of Saint-Domingue, many of whom were mixed race
and nearly all of whom were francophone and Catholic, arrived in New Orleans.
This massive influx of French colonials reinforced cultural structures already firmly
in place, seemingly all of which ran c ounter to the standards set in the rest of
the United States.
In this way, New Orleans represented something of an outlier in most definitions
of the American cultural sphere for the next two centuries. Never quite in line with
the rest of the nation politically, culturally, and even socially, the people of New
Orleans resisted American institutionalization for several decades a fter the Loui-
siana Purchase. It was not u ntil April 8, 1815, at the B
attle of New Orleans, that the
city entered the American national narrative in any real way. That day, at the tail
end of the disastrous War of 1812, Major General Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
led a group of ragtag militiamen—some Creoles from New Orleans with no shoot-
ing experience beyond hunting, o thers local French-speaking free men of color
and drunken “Kaintucks” from Kentucky—against a professional British force led
by Sir Edward Pakenham (1778–1815).
The city grew over the next few decades, becoming a vital commercial and eco-
nomic hub for the American South. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, New
Orleans was the largest city in the Southern states and served as the primary port
for the entire Mississippi River Valley as far north as Wisconsin. A hub of South-
ern economic movement, it also served as one of the largest slave trading ports in
North America. Because of the river and the fertile cane fields to the west, New
Orleans saw millions of h uman beings pass through its port on their ways to the
fields and workhouses of the antebellum South. As a result, in the spring of 1861,
rapt with fear over the implications of Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency,
Louisiana, along with 10 other Southern states, seceded from the Union to protect
their collective dedication to h uman property.
New Orleans did not last long in the war that followed. By April 1862, Mayor
Thomas O. Moore had surrendered the city to Union forces u nder threat of anni-
hilation. By the end of 1863, the entire state had fallen. Thus marked a transition
NO B LE SAVA G E M YTH 455
for both New Orleans and the nation. Louisiana became the testing ground for
President Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies, and in response, the state and its city
became fixtures of Jim Crow politics for the next century. With slavery and the
slave trade abolished with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, New
Orleans became more insular, still holding on to its iconic French cultural bent,
but quickly falling in step with the rush of Americanization as the twentieth century
became the twenty-first.
Andrew N. Wegmann
See also: Acadians; Louisiana; Mississippi Bubble; New France; Slavery
Further Reading
Dawdy, Shannon. 2008. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Powell, Lawrence N. 2012. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Cambridge, MA:
Spear, Jennifer M. 2009. Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
N O B L E S AVA G E M Y T H
The noble savage myth developed out of the accounts composed by European
explorers who encountered the New World during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. This body of literature had a deep impact on European perceptions of
indigenous people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Primitive and wild,
the “noble savage” represented the uncorrupted child of nature settled in a pristine
landscape practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. According to the myth, indigenous
people could never progress or become modern, since any change in their way of
life would become evidence of their extinction. Rooted in a romanticized past that
never was, the primitive nature of the noble savage image created an impossibly
idealized construct.
There has been considerable debate among scholars as to the origins and mean-
ing of the noble savage myth’s genesis between the seventeenth and nineteenth
century. Historian Anthony Grafton has suggested that its intellectual origins
can be traced back to Roman senator and historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus
(58 CE–117 CE). In 98 CE, Tacitus wrote a detailed account of the wars between
Rome and the Germanic tribes. Tacitus described Germanic customs favorably,
juxtaposing the admirable qualities of a supposed savage p eople with the corrup-
tion of Rome (Grafton 1995, 43). The text influenced perceptions of non-Europeans
by explorers in the Age of Discovery.
The term first appeared in text in 1609, used by French lawyer and ethnogra-
pher Marc Lescarbot (1570–1641) in his Histoire de la Nouvelle France. Lescarbot
described the indigenous p eople of New France in a chapter titled “The Savages
are Truly Noble,” equating the liberty to hunt freely with a status of nobility. In the
late Renaissance period, only royalty and nobility could legally hunt; a distinction
456 NO B LE SAVA G E M YTH
that separated the noble classes of Europe from the common. Considering the
right to hunt through a framework of comparative law, Lescarbot reasoned New
France’s native inhabitants to be on par, legally, with the nobility of Europe. The
term appeared again in 1672 in Conquest of Grenada by John Dryden (1631–1700).
Dryden’s words “as free as Nature first made man, ere the base laws of servitude
began, when wild in the woods the noble savage ran” evoked primitivism and ideas
about civility, reflective of Enlightenment ideology to come (McGregor 1988, 12).
Incorrectly, “noble savage” was first attributed to eighteenth-century French
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). His Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality (1755) expressed an admiration for the “natural man,” in a wilderness
setting, free from sin and the strictures of law, government, and religion. But Rous-
seau’s intention was to situate “savages” as a means to critique facets of civilized
(that is, European) life. He never used the term “noble.” Out of the misinterpreta-
tion of Rousseau’s Discourse emerged the popular idea that the “state of nature” he
described could be located in the vastness of the Americas. Beyond the embodi-
ment of Rousseau’s forest, the indigenous people of the Americas came to repre-
sent his “savages.” European and British travelers crossed the Atlantic to witness
the “noble savage.” Eager to return to the natural world as a means to counteract
the social ills of a corrupt society, they set out to search for the wild.
The nineteenth c entury witnessed the bloom of Romanticism and the develop-
ment of scientific racism creating the climate for the development of the modern
noble savage myth. In the postrevolutionary period, the United States embarked
on a process of place-making and identity shaping. With a need to situate their
identity as distinct from Europe, Americans turned to the natural world as a source
of national pride, no longer seeing the wilderness as something to fear but as some-
thing worthy of awe and inspiration. Period specific literature, art, and theater
demonstrate the interest in the wild and the natural man, with abundant imagery
appearing of the “noble savage” in a wilderness setting. However, as technology
progressed and settlers moved west, the idea of indigenous p eople frozen in a state
of pristine purity began to evaporate, threatening the static narrative central to
the myth of the “noble savage.”
The personal writings of American painter George Catlin (1796–1872) and British
Anthropologist John Crawfurd (1783–1868) reflect the decisive shifts in thought
by the mid-nineteenth century. Regarding his body of paintings of Native Ameri-
cans in the West, Catlin wrote: “I have flown to their rescue—not of their lives or
of their race (for they are doomed and must perish) . . . yet, phoenix like, they
may rise form the ‘stain on a painter’s palette,’ and live again on the canvass, and
stand forth for centuries yet to come, the living monuments of a noble race”
(Ellingson 2001, 184). A paper delivered by Crawfurd in 1859, radically changed
the trajectory of the noble savage myth. Based on “scientific findings” of indige-
nous racial inferiority and examples of violence he wrote, “What we now know of
savage life w ill prevent our falling into the fancies of philosophers of the past
century who set up the ‘noble savage’ as an a ctual model of virtue to be imitated
by civilized nations” (Ellingson 2001, 299). Lescarbot’s conception of the “noble
savage” as a signifier of status was long forgotten, replaced by a narrative of certain
NO B LE SAVA G E M YTH 457
decline and Crawfurd’s distortion of the “noble savage” as an emblem of racial infe-
riority. The noble savage myth continued to change, imparted with different mean-
ings by each c entury of thinkers and conceptions of indigenous p eople as “noble
savages” persist in a number of forms to the present-day.
Nicole Breault
See also: Enlightenment; European Exploration; Race; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Further Reading
Ellingson, Ter. 2001. The Myth of the Noble Savage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Grafton, Anthony, April Shelford, and Nancy G. Siraisi. 1995. New Worlds, Ancient Texts:
The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
McGregor, Gaile. 1988. The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes T oward a Syntac-
tics of Place. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
O
O L M E C C I V I L I Z AT I O N
The Olmecs were a Mesoamerican civilization, part of a little-known archaeologi-
cal area in southern Mexico, who thrived from about 1200 to 400 BCE in swampy
jungle river basins in the tropical coastal plains of the modern-day states of Vera-
cruz and Tabasco in Mexico. Their earliest distinct culture emerged in San Lorenzo,
along the Gulf of Mexico, south of Veracruz. Around 400 BCE, the Olmec city La
Venta, in the western part of the Mexican state of Tabasco, experienced upheaval
and it never recovered. A fter this, the Olmec civilization rapidly declined.
Olmec artifacts discovered in the twentieth century have provided evidence that
the Olmecs had developed many early skills and were the actual originators of
many of the Mesoamerican institutions. Besides their recognition as the first civi-
lization in Mesoamerica, the Olmecs are credited with many firsts, including: blood-
letting and perhaps human sacrifice; invention of zero and the Mesoamerican
calendar; the compass; and writing and epigraphy which several experts believe,
after the 2002 discovery of the roller stamp, proves that the Olmecs were the
originators of glyph writing in Mesoamerica, recreating some parts of the spoken
language by creating carved or drawn figures to represent words, ideas, or sounds.
The Olmec w ere prolific carvers and are especially renowned for the colossal
heads they created. T hese monuments w ere built on an unprecedented scale, rang-
ing in height from 5 to 11 feet and weighing anywhere from 5 to 20 tons. The
heads are believed to represent important rulers of the age. They w ere made of
basalt, which could not be found in San Lorenzo; the closest source was the Tux-
tla Mountains dozens of miles to the north. The basalt slabs w ere probably dragged
Olmec Firsts
The Olmecs appear to be the first Mesoamericans to build ceremonial cen-
ters, city-like centers usually run by priests and rulers, in which people from
surrounding areas gathered to practice the ceremonies of their religion, often
in large temples and plazas built specifically for this purpose. The Olmecs
were the first to form a politic al state with a formal government and elite
rulers, p
eople in a socially superior position with more power and privileges
than o thers. From recent evidence, it seems possible that Mesoamerican
ball games, calendars, and number systems all originated within the Olmec
society.
460 OL M E C C I V ILI Z ATION
The Olmec colossal head at La Venta, in present-day Villahermosa, Mexico. Carved from
basalt, the heads are believed to depict important figures in Olmec culture. Seventeen
colossal heads survive today. (PhotoDisc/Getty Images)
to the water’s edge and then rafted to the village. With their distinctive features,
no two heads are alike; the Olmec had no draft animals or wheeled transport, so
these giants would have been moved by human muscle and w ill; the basalt slabs
were dragged from the Tuxtla Mountains; and many of the statues have earplugs,
which represent members of the elite.
The statues’ broad lips and flat noses have led Africanist historians, such as Clyde
Winters and Ivan Van Sertima, to claim that the Olmec either were visited by
Africans or had actually migrated from Africa. In this view, the transmission of
African knowledge explains the Olmec’s rapid rise. T hese views are not widely
endorsed. Several noted archaeologists, including Betty Meggers and Gordon
Ekholm, have suggested that Olmec development was inspired by China. Visitors
from the Shang Dynasty are said to have crossed the Pacific to teach the ancient
Olmec how to write, build monuments, and worship a feline god; however, this
hypothesis has failed to stir enthusiasm.
Olmec culture was unknown to historians until the mid-nineteenth century. The
first documented evidence came in 1869, when the Mexican antiquarian traveler
Jose Melgar y Serrano published a description of the first Olmec monument, the
colossal head Tres Zapotes Monument A, which was discovered by a farm worker
in the 1850s on a hacienda in Veracruz. Melgar y Serrano visited the site in 1862
to complete excavation of the partially exposed sculpture.
Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge made the first detailed descriptions of La Venta
and San Martín Pajapan Monument 1 during their 1925 expedition at a time when
OL M E C C I V ILI Z ATION 461
most archaeologists considered the Olmec similar to the Maya, an assumption that
both Blom and La Farge made. The following year, Blom made another expedition
to Olmec sites where he mapped the site, excavating a tomb containing a procession
of figures molded in stucco. An earlier explorer to the site was Claude-Joseph-Désiré
Charnay (1828–1915), a French archaeologist who excavated ruins of ancient cit-
ies of Mexico (1857–1861, 1880–1882). He formulated the theory of the Asiatic
origins of prehistoric Mexicans and discovered the town of Paraiso, part of the
Olmec Empire.
Another Olmec head was excavated in 1939, by archaeologist Matthew Williams
Stirling (1896–1975) in Veracruz. Stirling, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s
Bureau of American Ethnology, conducted the first detailed scientific excavations
of Olmec sites during the 1930s and 1940s. During the 1939 expedition, Stirling
and art historian Miguel Covarrubias determined that the Olmec culture predated
most other known Mesoamerican civilizations.
The Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society cospon-
sored eight expeditions to Mexico to explore archaeological sites in Veracruz,
Tabasco, and Campeche between 1939 and 1946. All the expeditions w ere led by
Stirling, who highlighted the Olmec culture with a spectacular series of findings
that included several colossal stone heads at the sites of La Venta, San Lorenzo,
and Tres Zapotes. L ater, these discoveries created intense controversy among
scholars who questioned where the Olmec culture fit into the chronology of Meso-
american civilizations.
During this period, four sites w ere the main focus of archaeological expeditions:
Tres Zapotes, Cerro de las Mesas and San Lorenzo in Veracruz, and La Venta in
Tabasco. Stirling and his colleagues made several exploratory trips to other sites
and regions, including Corral Nuevo in Veracruz, Piedra Parada and Izapa in Chi-
apas, and the hinterlands of Campeche, Tabasco, and Oaxaca. However, it was
excavations at the four main sites that provided the bulk of monuments, artifacts,
and information on the Olmec culture. During the 1950s and 1960s, the site of La
Venta became the focus for continuing excavations and explorations. These expe-
ditions attracted the attention of anthropologists, artists, and ornithologists, who
assisted in interpreting and publicizing their discoveries.
Stirling directed one of the most important discoveries, the Sixth National Geo-
graphic Society-Smithsonian Institution expedition to Mexico, between January
and May 1944, which established the eastern boundary of the early Olmec cul-
ture. Stirling and his group discovered what he considered one of the important
but little-k nown archeological areas of Mesoamerica in the portion of southern
Mexico lying between the classic Olmec territory and that formerly occupied by
the ancient Maya. In February 1944, the group was in the states of Michoacan and
Jalisco, where a photographic record was made of lacquer working in Uruapan and
vicinity, and of pottery making in Tlaquepaque. Ethnological pictures w ere made
depicting the activities and customs of the Tarascan Indians of Lake Patzcuaro.
An archeological reconnaissance was conducted in southern Veracruz, most of
Tabasco, northern Chiapas, and the western corner of Campeche, with the prin-
cipal objective of finding the extent of the early La Venta culture in this area.
462 OL M E C C I V ILI Z ATION
Several new sites were located as a result of this survey, and photographic records
were made of a number of private archeological collections.
The Smithsonian Institution continued its Olmec research when it cosponsored
another expedition to La Venta in 1955 with the National Geographic Society and
the University of California. The Institution’s early exploration and excavation of
Olmec sites laid the groundwork for all subsequent research and archaeological
investigation.
The question of Olmec chronology came to a head years before at a 1942 Tuxtla
Gutierrez conference, where Alfonso Caso argued that the Olmec w ere the “mother
culture” (“cultura madre”) of Mesoamerica. Shortly a fter the conference, radio
carbon dating proved the antiquity of the Olmec civilization, although the “mother
culture” question continues to generate debate.
In 1976, linguists Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman published a paper in
which they argued that a core number of loanwords had apparently spread from a
Mixe–Zoquean language into many other Mesoamerican languages. Campbell and
Kaufman proposed that the presence of these core loanwords indicated that the
Olmec, who w ere generally regarded as the first “highly civilized” Mesoamerican
society, spoke a language common to the Mixe–Zoqueans. The spread of this vocabu-
lary was essential to the diffusion of Olmec culture. Another linguist, Søren Wich-
mann, first critiqued this theory on the basis that most of the Mixe–Zoquean loans
originated in the Zoquean branch of the family.
The social and political organization of the Olmec society is not as well defined
or understood compared to what scholars have discovered about other cultures,
such as the Maya. One example of this is the assumption by many researchers that
the colossal heads and other sculptures are Olmec rulers but specific facts are
unknown compared to the wealth of data about Maya sculptures, which have spe-
cific identifications and dates that they reigned. Archaeologists of the Olmec cul-
ture had to depend on what little data that existed and on the large-and small-scale
site surveys that were generated by earlier explorations, but these provided evi-
dence that t here was considerable centralization within the Olmec region, first at
San Lorenzo and then at La Venta.
La Venta and San Lorenzo were largely ceremonial centers while most of the
Olmec lived in villages that w ere quite similar to present-day villages in Tabasco
and Veracruz. Individual dwellings usually consisted of a house, a lean-to attach-
ment, storage pits, a garden that was used for both cooking and medicinal herbs,
and fruit trees, such as avocado or cacao.
Today, La Venta is partly buried by an oil refinery but in its heyday (1150 BCE
to 500 BCE) it was a large community with a ring of housing that surrounded a
grand ceremonial center. The central part of the city was reserved for clerics and
rulers. It was destroyed around 350 BCE but its Olmec arrangements and techni-
cal innovations can be found throughout Mesoamerica.
San Lorenzo fell around 1200 BCE, e ither the victim of revolution or invasion.
What is certain is that the site was vacated and the sculptures decapitated while
vegetation overran the floors and workshops that created the ceramic figurines,
iron beads and rubber ax-head straps that were often used as trade commodities.
ONEIDAS 463
Yet trading for the Olmec usually involved much more valuable and expensive
materials, such as greenstone and marine shell, which could be transported in sig-
nificant quantities across large distances. Many of these luxury artifacts were
made from materials such as jade, obsidian, and magnetite, which were not easily
obtainable. This has caused researchers to believe that early Olmec elites had access
to an extensive trading network in Mesoamerica, such as the Motagua River valley
in eastern Guatemala for the jade while Olmec obsidian has been traced to sources
in the Guatemala highlands, such as San Martín Jilotepeque, or in Puebla, which
could be between 200 and 400 km (120–250 miles) away. In return, this allowed
more diversity in goods and in the sources from which the base materials were
obtained.
The end of Olmec society has never been accurately determined but it is known
that between 400 and 350 BCE, the population in the eastern half of the Olmec
heartland dropped sharply; the area was sparsely inhabited u ntil the nineteenth
century. According to archaeologists, one reason for this drop in population was
most likely the grave environmental changes that rendered the region unsuited for
large groups of farmers, particularly the shifting upheavals to the rivers that the
Olmec depended upon for agriculture, hunting and gathering, and transportation.
Ignacio Bernal, former director of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology,
believed that Olmec culture not only engendered Mesoamerica but also brought
forth the first Mesoamerican empire.
Martin J. Manning
See also: Aztec Empire; Maya Civilization
Further Reading
Diehl, Richard. 2004. The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization. London: Thames and
Hudson.
Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Pool, Christopher A. 2007. Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica. Cambridge and New
ONEIDAS
The Oneidas are a Native American tribe that historically occupied roughly 6 mil-
lion acres of land in present-day central New York State, particularly around Oneida
Lake and Oneida and Madison counties. The Oneida, or Onyota’aka, as they refer
to themselves, meaning “People of the Standing Stone,” belong to the Iroquoian
language family. They w ere one of the original founders of the Iroquois Confed-
eracy, a powerful cultural and political alliance of six Iroquois-speaking tribes
across upper New York State. During the American Revolution (1775–1783), the
Oneidas, unlike the majority of tribes in the Iroquois Confederacy, sided with the
Americans against the British. Despite their aid to the American cause, between
1785 and 1788, the Oneidas lost more than 5 million acres of their ancestral
464 ONEIDAS
homelands through treaties with New York State. Succumbing to pressures from
state and federal policies for Indian removal, many Oneidas resettled in Wiscon-
sin and Canada in the early to mid-1800s. By 1845, less than 200 Oneidas lived in
New York, on a remnant of the traditional homeland.
Around 1000 CE, the Oneidas began cultivating corn as a staple crop. Corn,
beans, and squash, called the “Three Sisters,” were of primary importance to the
Oneida diet. The population lived in dwellings, known as longhouses, containing
multiple families and clans related by matrilineal descent. The Oneida identify with
three matrilineal clans: Turtle, Bear, and Wolf. The Clan M other, usually the most
senior w oman of each clan, was responsible for nominating, installing or remov-
ing the male chief, arranging marriages, mediating disputes, and deciding on
matters of food distribution and property use.
The Oneida are one of the founders of the Iroquois Confederacy, also called the
Iroquois League, Five Nations, or Six Nations. The Confederacy was organized
sometime between 1142 and 1600, prior to the arrival of the Europeans. The orig-
inal Five Nations of the Confederacy were the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga,
and Seneca tribes. The Five Nations became Six Nations when the Tuscarora, flee-
ing persecution in North Carolina, were given shelter by the Oneidas in the 1720s.
The Oneida w ere the least populous of the original Five Nations, and along with
the Cayuga w ere known as the “Younger Brothers” of the Confederacy. Members
of the Iroquois Confederacy collectively call themselves Haudenosaunee, translated
to mean, “People of the Longhouse.”
The Confederacy was governed by a grand council of 50 chiefs representing each
tribe and clan. The Oneidas had nine chiefs appointed to the council and they rep-
resented the Tuscarora, as well. During the colonial period, the Iroquois nations,
including the Oneidas, generally allied with the British in wars against the French
and their Indian allies.
The earliest recorded contact between Europeans and the Iroquois occurred in
1534 when Frenchman Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) explored the Gulf of St. Law-
rence and encountered an Iroquoian-speaking p eople in present-day Quebec City
and Montreal, Canada. In 1634, Dutchman Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert,
was the first European to visit an Oneida village and leave a written record. Van
den Bogaert traveled from the Dutch trading post at Fort Orange (present-day
Albany) on a mission to reestablish trade relations with the Iroquois on behalf of
the Dutch West India Company. In his journal, van den Bogaert described the
Oneidas’ fortified settlement and its dwellings of 66 longhouses, some containing
abundant amounts of beans and maize stored for the winter. According to van den
Bogart’s account, the Oneidas had established some form of trade or exchange with
the French who had arrived earlier, leaving the Oneidas with items such as French-
made clothing and razors.
By the 1630s, Iroquois groups, including the Oneidas, became actively involved
in the fur trade with Europeans. In exchange for beaver pelts to satisfy the Euro
pean demand for fur clothing, the Oneidas received a variety of utilitarian items
that could not be manufactured locally. European metal axes, knives, scissors,
brass kettles, and firearms proved to be more efficient than the traditional
ONEIDAS 465
implements made of stone, wood, and bone. However, by the 1640s the Iroquois had
exhausted their own supply of beaver and warred with other native groups to
expand their hunting territories. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Onei-
das and tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy engaged in a series of conflicts known
as the Beaver Wars (1640–1701) against the French, their Huron allies, and other
tribes for control and domination of the fur trade.
During the seventeenth century, the Oneidas suffered significant population
losses as a result of the fur trade wars and epidemics of disease. Losses in warfare
were somewhat offset by the Iroquois practice of “adopting” men and w omen enemy
captives to be incorporated into the tribe. By 1668, it was estimated that two-thirds
of the Oneida population consisted of Algonquin and Huron war captives. During
the early 1660s, and continuing into the 1690s, communicable diseases brought
to North America by Europeans, principally smallpox, further decimated the Onei-
das. In 1677, the Oneida population was estimated at only about 1,000.
The American Revolution (1775–1783) served as a crucial turning point for the
Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy when, for the first time, the confederated tribes
fought each other. While the majority of the Confederacy chose to support the Brit-
ish, most of the Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans. Some Oneidas
may have been sympathetic to the Patriots because of their relationship with pro-
American Samuel Kirkland (1741–1808), a Presbyterian minister who lived among
them for several years. Kirkland had converted and baptized a number of Oneida
during the years prior to the war. His followers included a faction of Oneida war-
riors, including the venerable Chief Skenandoah (1710–1816), sometimes anglicized
as “Shenandoah.” Chief Skenandoah sent an expedition of several Oneidas to
deliver bushels of corn to George Washington’s beleaguered troops at Valley Forge,
enabling them to survive the harsh winter of 1777–1778. Accompanying them was
an Oneida woman, Polly Cooper, who taught the soldiers how to prepare the vari-
ety of white corn which was unfamiliar to the Americans. Polly Cooper remained at
Valley Forge that winter, caring for sick and wounded soldiers, and serving as
George Washington’s cook.
The Oneidas served as scouts and spies for the colonists and participated in sev-
eral major battles. Oneida warriors fought alongside Washington’s troops at the
Battle of Oriskany (1777), a key battle that prevented the British from gaining
access across New York State and up the Hudson River area. Some Oneidas reluc-
tantly participated in the 1779 Sullivan campaign, which destroyed the villages of
the Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. In retaliation, pro-British Mohawk war chief,
Joseph Brant (1743–1807), burned the main Oneida village of Kanonwalohale,
destroying h ouses, livestock, and crops in July 1780. As the war ended, the Oneidas
were refugees, having lost their homes and forced to take shelter at American forts
and with other Iroquois tribes.
Following the Revolutionary War, the Oneidas were rewarded by the U.S. gov-
ernment for their war serv ice by a provision in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784),
guaranteeing them the right to retain their traditional lands of roughly 6 million
acres in New York. However, the Oneidas lost most of their ancestral lands to New
York State in two transactions: the Treaty of Fort Herkimer (1785), and the Treaty
466 ONONDA G AS
of Fort Schuyler (1788). In 1790, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Trade and
Non-Intercourse Act, forbidding purchases of Indian land without federal approval.
Nevertheless, the state of New York imposed a series of treaties, in violation of
the Non-Intercourse Act, resulting in the reduction of Oneida landholdings to
only a few hundred acres by 1838. U nder pressure from state politicians and land
developers to leave New York, a large number of Oneidas relocated to Wisconsin
and Ontario, Canada, between 1820 and 1845. By 1845, only about 200 Oneidas
were left in New York State.
In the twenty-first c entury, the Oneidas have three separately recognized com-
munities, including the Oneida Indian Nation of New York, with approximately
1,000 enrolled members, the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin, located in the Green Bay
Area, with approximately 24,000 enrolled members, and the Oneida Nation of the
Thames, Ontario, Canada, with almost 6,100 enrolled members. In addition, about
2,000 Oneidas live at the Six Nations of the G rand River reservation in Ontario,
Canada.
The New York and Wisconsin Oneidas have developed a variety of successful
businesses, including gaming establishments. Proceeds from casino revenues have
been used by both communities to provide housing, health care, and educational
services for tribal members. The Oneida communities in the United States and Can-
ada are committed to preserving their heritage, culture, language, and traditions
for future generations.
Linda Bowles-Adarkwa
See also: American Revolution; Fur Trade; Iroquois; New France; Onondagas
Further Reading
Glatthaar, Joseph T., and James K. Martin. 2006. Forgotten Allies: Oneida Indians and the
American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang.
Norton, David. 2009. Rebellious Younger B rother: Oneida Leadership and Diplomacy, 1750–
1800. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Tiro, Karim. 2011. The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution
through the Era of Removal. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
ONONDAGAS
The Onondagas are a Native American tribe whose territory is located in present-
day New York. Their language is part of the Tuscarora language group, and their
tribal name means “Keepers of the Fire,” a reference to their duties as part of the
Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee. A fter European contact, they faced many
obstacles in maintaining traditional identity and practices in opposition to Euro
pean and American attempts at assimilating them into the mainstream of Euro-
American culture. Some of the assimilative measures taken against them involved
rights to ownership of traditional lands. These debates over land title have led to
a series of court cases that persist into the twenty-first c entury.
ONONDA G AS 467
The Onondagas and the other members of the Haudenosaunee—the Mohawk,

Oneida, Seneca, and Cayuga—formed their alliance a fter Hiawatha and the G reat
Peacekeeper visited each community to end war and hatred between the tribes.
While Hiawatha’s tribal affiliation and ancestry are debatable, the oral histories
agree that he aided the Great Peacekeeper in aligning groups that were former ene-
mies but who spoke similar languages and had similar kinship networks. The
English sometimes also referred to this u nion as the Five Nations, but the addition
of the Tuscarora in 1722 means that they are now known as the Six Nations.
As Hiawatha proposed the u nion between nations, Onondaga leader Tadadaho
initially resisted but changed his mind out of fear of the military union of the other
four nations and being promised a position of leadership in the new group. The
Onondagas have held respected leadership positions in the group ever since, and
Haudenosaunee council meetings always take place near Seneca, New York, where
the largest Onondaga village historically stood. The Great Peace, like the United
States Constitution, established multiple branches of government. Some scholars
liken the role of the Onondagas as to the executive branch as they call, open, and
close Grand Council meetings and make final determinations on all issues a fter
other leadership groups have agreed them upon.
The Onondaga government is made up of leaders chosen from specific clans by
clan mothers. Adherents to a matrilineal clan system, Onondaga individuals’ clan
membership can determine their ability to gain leadership positions. The Ononda-
gas are comprised of eight clans. Members of the superior clans (Wolf, Bear, Beaver,
Turtle) may be selected to become chief of the nation. Inferior clans (Deer, Eagle,
Heron, Eel) are not eligible for office although some war chiefs may come from these
clans when an individual proves himself to be superior warrior.
Wolf, Bear, and Turtle clans are found in each of the Six Nations, creating a
familial structure with the entirety of the Haudenosaunee. While intertribal mar-
riages strengthen the Haudenosaunee union, marriage between members of a clan,
regardless of tribal identification, is taboo and tantamount to incest. The Onondaga
also discourage marriage between tribal members of the various superior clans.
Tribal members who are members of differing inferior clans are also discouraged
from marrying.
Both the Haudenosaunee as a collaborative entity and the Onondagas as a dis-
tinct nation w ere affected by interactions with Euro-A mericans. The first treaty
made with Europeans was with the Dutch in 1613 and was commemorated in
the traditional Onondaga way with a wampum belt known as Gaswenda, the Two
Row Wampum B elt. The treaty agreement stated that the two communities would
live side by side in peace and friendship. Jesuit priests, who arrived in Haudeno-
saunee lands in 1625, and French fur traders produced records of their encoun-
ters with Onondaga communities from as early as the mid-seventeenth c entury.
By establishing trading posts in New Amsterdam and Fort Orange, the Dutch secured
a profitable trade relationship with Onondaga. T hese early encounters with varying
forms of religious instructions and commerce impacted traditional Onondaga
life ways.
468 ONONDA G AS
Early in the American Revolution, in 1775, George Mason met with Haudeno-
saunee military leaders at Fort Pitt, in modern Pennsylvania, in an attempt to secure
the help of the allied nations in the rebel colonists’ war against the British. Instead
of agreeing, the Haudenosaunee decided on neutrality in the war between the Thir-
teen Colonies and G reat Britain, considering it a fight between father and son.
However, this allied decision did not preclude individual nations from joining either
side of the war effort. For instance, Seneca and Mohawk fought for the British;
Oneida supported North America. General George Washington, and other North
Americans, saw some nations’ alliances with the British as a combined effort of
the Haudenosaunee.
In April 1779, Colonel Goose Van Schaick led an attack that resulted in the
burning of the main Onondaga village near what is now Syracuse, New York. The
Clinton-Sullivan Campaign of 1779 continued to destroy Haudenosaunee prop-
erty, demolishing entire villages. This led only to more nations joining the British
war effort. Washington sent Major General John Sullivan to eradicate the Haude-
nosaunee in the summer of 1779. He failed to complete his mission, but the damage
Sullivan inflicted, specifically on a large Cayuga settlement, earned Washington
the Onondaga nickname Hanadaguis, the Town Destroyer. The Treaty of Paris
(1783) negotiations included transfer of British control over native lands to the
United States. A fter the Revolution, Washington could not pay his soldiers their
earned wages, instead giving them parcels of Haudenosaunee land.
Sensing impending war with the Haudenosaunee that could not be backed finan-
cially by the United States government, Washington agreed to treaty negotiations.
In 1784, a treaty was signed at Fort Stanwix delineating a Haudenosaunee western
boundary. Two more treaties were signed in 1789 at Fort Harmar and in Canandai-
gua, New York, in 1794.
The Haudenosaunee claimed that they made no exchange or sale for their lands
and the treaties were agreed to, to protect their lands from encroachment by settlers,
not to box them in. Regardless, their lands went on to form parts of 11 states. In
reaction to Haudenosaunee complaints, President Washington signed the Non-
Intercourse Act of 1790. This Act demanded that a federal agent be in attendance
of any sale of Indian lands to a non-Indian.
Still, states went on to make sales directly with native nations, gaining huge
tracts of land through the 1800s without federal oversight. Much of the Onondaga
100-square-mile reservation was lost to land speculators and the state of New York’s
desire to meet the housing demands of an increasing population. The Onondaga
have filed several land claims in federal courts for restitution, many of which are
still contested. In 1887, Onondaga fought against the inclusion of their remaining
lands in the General Allotment Act of 1884, a policy that sought to assimilate Native
Americans by requiring individual rather than communal land ownership.
Onondagas have since regulated their inclusion of non-Onondaga cultural mate-
rials and practices thus maintaining their traditional social identity through
careful forethought. Despite the historical presence of Jesuit schools and various
other American attempts to convert the Onondagas to Christianity, only a small
OUIDAH 469
number ever converted. The majority remain adherents of traditional Longhouse

religious practices.
The first public school on the reservation was established in the 1840s and was
met with Onondaga resistance. An 1889 special committee by the New York State
Legislature cited the resistance of Onondaga adults as the reason for sparse youth
school attendance. Only 40 of 125 school-aged c hildren regularly attended.
The 1888 Whipple Report on the “Indian Problem” in New York concluded that
full Indian citizenship would encourage cultural assimilation. Onondagas resisted
the proposed changes, seeing any government attempts to change their intergov-
ernmental relationship as a move to tax them and claim their remaining lands.
Between the Civil War and World War I, Onondagas a dopted selective elements
of mainstream culture, due in part to introduction by the Onondagas who fought
alongside non-native soldiers. Houses began changing from log cabins, which had
been used since the early 1700s, to mainstream frame houses. Longhouses were
not entirely discontinued u ntil the 1800s. Clothing, aside from traditional items
reserved for ceremonial use, and furniture designs similarly became more angli-
cized. Traditional Onondaga cultural items and religious materials w ere lost at this
time, some due to sales. Cultural traits from other nations crept into Onondaga
daily and ceremonial practice resulting in the fading or absence of certain tradi-
tions, as they could not be reproduced generation-to-generation without personal
experience or contact. New York’s acquisition of wampum b elts and strings
entrusted to the Onondaga was a particularly g reat loss to the Haudenosaunee
during this period. In 1897, the Onondaga lost a settlement to have the wampum
returned to them. The Supreme Court denied their claim in 1903. Another attempt
in 1971 also failed.
Jennifer Stern
See also: American Revolution; Iroquois; New Amsterdam/New York; Oneidas
Further Reading
Bradley, James W. 1987. Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois: Accommodating Change, 1500–
1655. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Onondaga Nation: P eople of the Hills. www.onondaganation.org.
Wolcott, Fred Ryther. 1986. Onondaga: Portrait of a Native People. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press.
OUIDAH
The city of Ouidah is situated in the modern-day Republic of Benin in West Africa.
From the 1670s to the 1860s, Ouidah was one of the most important suppliers of
slaves on the continent; more than 1.2 million captive Africans embarked h ere,
second only to Luanda in Angola. As a result, the Africans that passed through
Ouidah represented a significant proportion of the workers that labored on sugar
and coffee plantations in Brazil and the Car ibbean. Many of the slaves originated
470 OUIDAH
from the inland state of Oyo. Slaves forcefully transported to the Americas carried
with them their own culture, identity, and history, which decisively shaped their
experience and communities in the Americas. The various religious practices and
ethnic rituals constitute what historians have called the Yoruba Diaspora. The
demographic and cultural linkages established between Ouidah and Brazil in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remain visible today.
For almost 200 years, Ouidah was a major center of the Atlantic slave trade.
Although it is conventionally depicted as a port, Ouidah actually sits inland about
two miles from the sea, protected by a lagoon. In the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, the Kingdoms of Allada and Hueda controlled the slave trade
in the Bight of Benin. At Ouidah the slave trade was administered on behalf of the
state. The kings of Allada and Hueda restricted the activities of private merchants
and limited direct interaction with royal officials. Both kingdoms established cen-
tralized and bureaucratic governments to manage the transportation and sale of
captive Africans. Excessive state control of the trade routes, on which the majority
of the slaves travelled on through Allada and Hueda, as well as abusive officials
created hostility with the European traders and the inland Kingdom of Dahomey,
the primary supplier of slaves.
Rivalry and conflict often occurred between the Kingdoms of Allada and Hueda.
European traders noted that slaves from Allada w ere more expensive than those
purchased from Hueda. Important trade goods included linens, firearms, alcoholic
beverages, and cowries, a shell from the Indian Ocean that circulated as a form
of currency on the Slave Coast. In the early 1720s, the Kingdom of Dahomey, an
emerging inland state that lacked direct access to the coast, set out on an ambi-
tious, decade-long plan of expansion that would wreak havoc and bring widespread
suffering to the region. In 1724, the Dahomey army, led by King Agaja, conquered
Allada. Three years later, Dahomey invaded Hueda and took control of Ouidah.
Dahomey was a highly militarized kingdom that used European firearms to expand
its territory during the period. Dahomey raids on the Ewe, Mahi, and Yoruba
increased as did the scale of war in the region to provide captives for European
slave ships at Ouidah. In the decade a fter Dahomey conquered Ouidah, over half
of the slaves that embarked from the region left on Portuguese ships for Bahia, Bra-
zil. Although the King of Portugal decreed it was illegal to carry gold to West
Africa, ship captains traded gold and tobacco for slaves at Ouidah. T hese trade
goods were preferred by Whydah and Dahomey elites and as a result the Portu-
guese received favorable trade terms for purchasing slaves. This practice contin-
ued u ntil the slave trade was abolished. From 1801 to 1830, some 188,000 enslaved
Africans from the Bight of Benin disembarked in Bahia. The cultural linkages
between Ouidah to Brazil are especially strong, particularly in the province of Bahia
where some 60 percent of the slaves exported from the region disembarked. An
uprising in 1835, known as the Malês revolt, the largest and most significant slave
rebellion in Brazilian history, was heavily influenced by Arabic-speaking Hausa
Muslims who originated from Yorubaland.
Since the late seventeenth century, international commerce was an important
contributor to the physical layout of urban Ouidah. The French established a
OUIDAH 471
permanent trading factory at Ouidah in 1671, followed by the English in 1681,

and the Portuguese in 1721. Around the European trading forts, various support
buildings, warehouses, and homes w ere constructed for local inhabitants employed
by the companies. The European trade companies depended on these dynamic mul-
tiethnic communities to carry on the trade. Canoe men from El Mina and Accra
were employed by the European trading companies settled in Ouidah. In the nine-
teenth century, districts in Ouidah were founded by Afro-French and Portuguese
merchants as well as African-born former slaves who returned from Brazil in the
1830s. The permanent establishment of the European forts created a cosmopoli-
tan community as mig rants from across the Atlantic world settled in Ouidah.
Although the forts were abandoned in the early nineteenth century when the slave
trade became illegal, the forts continued to be important commercial centers where
travelers, farmers, and merchants gathered. The forts w ere reoccupied in the 1840s
as the economy shifted to the palm oil industry, which was produced largely by
slave labor. By 1850, approximately 20,000 inhabitants resided in Ouidah. People
from across the Atlantic world settled at Ouidah. The largest percentage of families
originated from the Lusophone territories, especially Bahia, Brazil, as well as
Madeira, Cuba, Sao Tome and Angola. The large Brazilian community in Ouidah
was a distinctive feature of the city.
From 1750 to 1818, the Kingdom of Dahomey sent five embassies to Brazil and
Portugal to negotiate the terms of the slave trade. An important figure in the estab-
lishment of the Brazilian community in Ouidah was Francisco Félix de Souza
(1754–1849), a Portuguese slave trader, who arrived in the early 1790s. His famil-
ial and commercial connections with Brazil, the latter drawn primarily from his
Commemorating the Slave Trade

In 1967, the first historical museum in Ouidah, The Musée d’Historie de Oui-
dah, was establish in the former Portuguese fort. Many of the exhibits and
themes in the museum addressed the mutual cultural influences and asso-
ciations between Ouidah and Brazil. As cultural-heritage tourism boomed in
the 1990s, prominent families in Ouidah saw an opportunity reinvigorate
the city. In contrast to the massive seventeenth-century European slave castles
strung about the coastline of Ghana, no such structures exist in Ouidah.
Unable to put the gloomy slave dungeons at the forefront of tours, local Oui-
dah leaders constructed the Route de l’Esclave, the path that slaves took from
the town to the slave ships waiting off the beach. Along the path are monu-
ments and statues of Dahomian gods, kings, and warriors relating to the
cultural history of the region. Some sites of remembrance turned controver-
sial b
ecause of their interpretation and contested authenticity. Ouidah,
however, has taken the lead in identifying historical linkages created between
Africa and the Diaspora in the Americas, such as Brazilian Candomble, Cuban
Santeria, and Haitian Vodou.
472 OUIDAH
participation in the illegal slave trade, found de Souza in the favor of the Dahomey
king Gezo who appointed him the “Chacha” of Ouidah, in which he functioned as
the king’s personal commercial agent. Many of the leading Dahomian families in
modern-day Ouidah are descended from prosperous slave traders who transitioned
to legitimate commerce once the slave trade was abolished.
The abolition of the slave trade in the nineteenth c entury created additional
demographic changes in Ouidah. The transition from the lucrative slave trade to
the legitimate non-slave trade in palm oil, used primarily in cooking, lighting, and
industry, was not wholly new to Ouidah. European ships had purchased palm oil
throughout the history of the slave trade. However, the palm industry was heavily
dependent on slave labor for its production and transportation. As a result, the scale
of slavery increased dramatically in the city. In the 1870s, approximately four-fifths
of the Ouidah population was enslaved. In February 1897, British forces captured
Benin and the subsequent occupation hastened the gradual end of slavery. Legis-
lation passed in 1901, officially mandated an end to the slavery, bartering, or
selling of persons. However, b ecause the indigenous institution had such deep his-
torical roots, and was so integral to the local economy and traditional culture,
slavery continued for decades. As late as 1920, practices resembling slavery were
still being suppressed in Benin. Slavery died a slow death in twentieth-century
Ouidah.
Neal D. Polhemus
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Black Atlantic; Brazil; Slavery; Slave Trade in Africa
Further Reading
Araujo, Ana Lucia. 2011. Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images.
Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.
Falola, Toyin, and Matt D Childs, eds. 2004. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Law, Robin. 2004. Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving “Port”, 1727–1892.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
P
PA N -I N D I A N I S M
Pan-Indianism is both a philosophy and political movement in the Americas which
advocates the unification and cooperation of native peoples from different tribal
or local affiliations toward a common goal. Beginning with the arrival of Europe
ans in the sixteenth c entury, indigenous alliances responded to trade, plunder, and
settlement through a variety of means. Violent resistance in North America grew
in strength and urgency from the late seventeenth c entury u ntil it reached a zenith
in the War of 1812. After a series of disastrous defeats, military alliance gradually
gave way to legal action and political organization in the middle of the nineteenth
century and economic cooperation in the late twentieth c entury. Armed revolt
remained an option for indigenous alliances throughout the Americas in the twen-
tieth century, however, and along with political organization continues to shape
politics in Latin America.
Native peoples were experienced in building alliances across boundaries of kin-
ship, village, confederacy, tribe, or nation long before Europeans arrived in the Amer
icas. Complicated economic and political arrangements, large-scale warfare, and
centuries of contact and migration necessitated at least limited cooperation among
different indigenous groups. For example, the Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilizations
were intricate confederations of voluntarily or involuntary allied chiefdoms spread
across vast areas. Similar patterns existed among the native peoples of North Amer
ica. Complex chiefdoms along the Mississippi River and throughout the American
South shared a similar structure, if less powerful at the center, and often encom-
passed political rivals as well as allies. The Iroquois Confederacy brought together
five separate nations in the precontact American northeast.
The arrival of Europeans and the unique threats they brought to the Americas
gave t hese alliances a new urgency. A fter first transforming the indigenous politi
cal economy by arming allies and raiding powerful polities, Europeans gradually
imposed a new politic al order throughout the Americ as by exploiting native
laborers and resources or influencing indigenous diplomacy. Their racial ideology
became readily apparent in the dec ades following the invasion; this attenuated
the new urgency of native alliances by investing them with a powerful political
purpose. Thus, where Spanish invaders found ready allies among the Tlaxcalans
in the invasion of the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521, they faced decades of
determined resistance among a coalition of groups in central Mexico in the Chi-
chimeca Wars, 30 years later.
Pan-Indian resistance in North America began in the late sixteenth c entury with
concerted surprise attacks on European missions and settlements by local alliances.
474 PAN - INDIANIS M
Angered by Franciscan missionaries’ interference in polygamy, various micos of the

Guale province in southern Georgia rebelled in 1597, expelling priests from the
province for more than a decade. The native p eoples of Ais province, further south
on the Atlantic coast of Florida, rebelled in the same year, limiting the Spanish
mission system to the more settled inland provinces of the northern part of the
peninsula for the remainder of the Spanish period. Similar shifting alliances of local
chiefdoms frustrated Spanish conquest efforts in the Yucatán throughout the sev-
enteenth century.
English colonists faced similar native tactics in V
irginia, New E ngland, and the
Carolinas. They countered t hese native strategies in a series of wars aimed at break-
ing apart existing confederacies or alliances and replacing them with English-led
alliances. This strategy culminated in a dramatic realignment of colonial politics
in the early eighteenth century. The first strike came in Virginia, where Powhatan
warriors under the leadership of paramount chief Opechancanough took part in a
surprise coup in 1622, that threatened to destroy the English project in Virginia
but ended as quickly as it began. Confident that the brief attack met Powhatan
objectives, Opechancanough withdrew. A similar coup, a generation later, failed
to stymie English expansion, however, and the Powhatan Confederacy fell apart
when the charismatic chief was killed in 1646. The Algonquian p eoples of New
England orchestrated a similar coup in 1676. Led by the Wamapanoag chief
Metacomet—“King Philip” to the English—the 1676 coup was the deadliest war
in proportion to population fought in colonial North America. Dozens of English
and native towns w ere seriously damaged or destroyed, and a significant number
of colonists died. The Wampanoags were virtually destroyed in the wake of the
war. Only a few hundred remained.
While Algonquian power flagged in New England, powerful new coalitions in
the Deep South articulated new power in the 1670s and 1680s by allying them-
selves with the English settlers at Charles Town. Armed with muskets by Carolina
merchants and diplomats, groups of slave raiders took thousands of captives from
villages throughout the southeast. Chaos followed the raids as these captives w ere
enslaved and sold to plantations in the Caribbean and New E ngland u ntil, angered
by the growing power of the English and unsettled by the toll of the trade, native
peoples throughout the southeast came together in a concerted war on the English
Death of King Philip

Called King Philip by the English colonists, the Wampanoag sachem Meta-
comet (ca. 1638–1676) forged an alliance among the Abenaki, Narraganset,
Mohawk, Nipmuc, and Wampanoag to resist English settlement. Following
a campaign of brutal fighting during the conflict between Native Americans
and New England colonists, known as King Philip’s War (1675–1678), Meta-
comet was killed in battle. The English cut off his head, arms, and legs, and
displayed the head on a pike.
PAN - INDIANIS M 475
in 1715. Warriors from the Carolina coast to the Mississippi River took part in the
year-long war and brought the Native American slave trade to an end. Planters
turned to the growing African slave trade to meet their labor needs while south-
eastern Native Americans drew on the alliances forged in the Yamasee War to
rebuild their power yet again.
Native polities grew more powerful in the eighteenth century by playing Euro
pean powers off of one another. British victory in the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763)
shattered this balance of power and initiated a wave of pan-I ndian resist ance
to British land claims. Beginning at refugee camps in the 1740s and gaining
momentum a fter the 1760s, Native Americans throughout the eastern wood-
lands took part in a religious revival that emphasized a unified “Indian” identity
that could be rejuvenated through a return to “traditional” rituals and a rejection
of European commodities. Ottawa leader Pontiac drew inspiration from Dela-
ware prophet Neolin’s message of revitalization to spearhead war on the British
in the Great Lakes region in 1763. Drawing on the military experience of the
Seven Years’ War, bands or tribes from the Great Lakes, Illinois, and Ohio regions
joined the conflict in 1763 and 1764, laying siege to forts Detroit and Pitt—where
British soldiers infamously responded by giving smallpox-infected blankets to
Delaware emissaries—and attacking British supply routes to the interior. Neither
side of the conflict achieved all of its ambitions, and the war ended in a series of
uneasy peace agreements between 1764 and 1766. Importantly, though, British
officials recognized the Native Americans as separate nations, powerful in their
own right.
Different patterns s haped the interactions between Spanish settlers, the native
peoples of New Spain and South America, and the Creole elites who increasingly
stood at the center of Latin American politics. Where native polities in North Amer
ica retained a measure of sovereignty and white settler communities constructed
national identities in opposition to their Native American neighbors, indigenous
peoples to the south were largely folded into the colonial order: settlers appropri-
ated the pre-Columbian past into their national identities while attempting to
silence or ignore Native American subjects. Indigenous p eoples frequently chal-
lenged this order, however, by uniting with Mestizo peasants in widespread revolt.
Andean peasants and indigenous groups rallied in the Túpac Amaru and Túpac
Katari uprisings in the 1780s, for example, and a similar indigenous-Mestizo alli-
ance took an important part in the 1810 rebellion of Miguel Hidalgo and José Maria
Morelos in Mexico. While both movements w ere put down violently, the combi-
nation of pan-Indian alliances and peasant rebels proved potent from the eighteenth
through the twentieth centuries.
In North America, the American War for Independence introduced a measure
of conflict and division to Native American communities, but the aggressive land
policy of the victorious United States prompted a renewed pan-Indian response.
Warriors from towns, bands, and tribes throughout the Great Lakes region came
together to stop the American advance in the wake of the war. U nder Miami, Shaw-
nee, and Delaware leadership in 1791, the Northwest Confederacy dealt the United
States Army the worst defeat—by proportion—it has ever received. A fter the United
476 PAN - INDIANIS M
States rallied and defeated the Confederacy at the B attle of Fallen Timbers in 1794,
however, resistance moved underground.
The underground movement returned to the national stage in the early nineteenth
century. The Shawnee warrior Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa stood at the
forefront of the movement in the northwest. Inspired by visions similar to those of
Neolin, Tenskwatawa advocated total withdrawal from the Euro-American world; in
1808, he, Tecumseh, and their followers founded their own settlement at Prophet-
stown. Tecumseh took the political reigns of the religious movement, attracting new
followers and building alliances with warriors throughout the eastern woodlands.
While Tecumseh was away visiting southern tribes in 1811, Indiana Territorial Gov-
ernor William Henry Harrison attacked Prophetstown and defeated Tenskwatawas’
smaller force in the Battle of Tippecanoe. Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh’s movement
reinforced a similar revival among southeastern tribes. This movement pitted cosmo-
politan Creeks against nativists in the Creek Civil War of 1813 and 1814. Despite
victory over their nativist counterparts, the cosmopolitan Creeks were forced to cede
more than 21 million acres of land in the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814.
Land cessions dominated the mid-nineteenth c entury for native p eoples in North
America and threw their carefully wrought political alliances into disarray for
generations. Religion filled the void, at least partially. In 1889, Paiute medicine
man Wovoka learned the Ghost Dance in a powerful vision of native rejuvenation
and divine retribution. Native Americans throughout the west took part in
ecstatic round dances in which participants sought to fulfill Wovoka’s vision. When
Lakota leaders elaborated the Ghost Dance into a political movement in 1890 at
Wounded Knee, the United States government responded violently, killing more
than 200 Lakotas and wounding 51 others. The Ghost Dance movement mostly
died along with them. The Native American Church followed, uniting practi
tioners across tribal boundaries in legal b attles with the United States over the
use of peyote. Natives came together in other ways after Wounded Knee, too: at
Christian churches, boarding schools, or in the United States military in World
War I. By the 1930s, reservation life united native peoples of the United States in
law as thoroughly as history had united them politically.
Reorganization of the Bureau of Indian Affairs as part of the New Deal, the
shared experience of World War II, and federal efforts at termination furthered
this legal and political consolidation in the 1950s. Determined to protect their
limited sovereignty and special relationship with the government from assimila-
tion, Native Americans created the National Congress of American Indians in 1944.
The Civil Rights Movement added fuel to the fire and converged with the goals of
the National Indian Youth Council, founded in 1961. T hese pan-Indian political
organizations grew more radical until activists founded the American Indian Move-
ment in 1968. The Native American occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971,
followed by the months-long standoff at Wounded Knee two years later, provided
national exposure for the Native Civil Rights Movement.
Activists and pan-Indian organizations have maintained the momentum of the
1970s. Since the United States government legalized Native American gaming
in 1988, tribes throughout the United States have developed new political and
PE Q UOT WA R 477
economic power. While they continue to face grave challenges, native p eoples in
North America have increasingly deployed their power—or powerlessness—to
present a common face to the government and find common cause with other
indigenous p eoples around the world. Through the United Nations Permanent
Forum on Indigenous Issues, and Native Americans’ participation in other indige-
nous rights organizations, pan-Indianism is an important element in global politics
today.
See also: Pontiac’s War; Powhatan; Tecumseh
Further Reading
Dowd, Gregory Evans. 1992. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for
Unity, 1745–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Moya, Jose C. ed. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. 1996. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement
from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press.
PA R I S , T R E AT Y O F. See Treaty of Paris (1763)
P E Q U O T WA R ( 1 6 3 6 – 1 6 3 7 )
The Pequot War was a brutally violent conflict between Native Americans and
English settlers in New E
ngland from 1636 to 1637. Although the war is often seen
as a contest over land, it was primarily a struggle over the lucrative traffic in furs
and wampum between North America and Europe. The origins of the conflict also
stretched as far back as 1620, when religious refugees known as the Separatists (or
Pilgrims) fled E ngland for North Americ a where they established a settlement
at Plymouth. Soon a fter, a group of Puritans from E ngland followed suit and
founded the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630, which expanded in 1636 to include
the Connecticut or “River” colony. As recent immigrants, the English often found
themselves caught up in the rivalries between New E ngland’s native p
eoples, such
as the Pequot and Mohegan, and nearby Europeans, such as the Dutch, who traded
with each other. Ultimately, the Pequot War was the culmination of a series of
events, misunderstandings, and violence that resulted from competing native and
European efforts to control the region’s trade.
Initially, the Pequot Indians dominated the flow of furs and wampum in and
out of New England to Europe, a monopoly they maintained with the support of
the Dutch colony in New Netherland (present-day New York state and surrounds).
The Pequot carved out such control through an expansive tributary system, in
which they forced surrounding native peoples to offer up annual tributes in
exchange for protection and access to the Pequot-Dutch trade. However, the arrival
of English immigrants to New England threatened the Pequot-Dutch trade as
478 PE Q UOT WA R
English traders attempted to penetrate the monopoly. To offset the English threat,
the Pequot embarked on a series of violent, complex episodes in the early 1630s
that collectively led to war.
First, to protect their trade and ensure the obedience of their native tributaries,
the Pequot forced p eoples such as the Narragansett and Mohegan to stop trading
directly with Europeans. But such tactics conflicted with Dutch plans to expand
their reach beyond the Pequot to include t hose tributaries. In retaliation, the Dutch
attacked Pequot bands that disrupted Dutch relations with the Narragansett, Mohe-
gan, and o thers. This only angered the Pequot who, in retaliation, murdered a ship
captain, John Stone, and his crew, believing them to be Dutch. However, the men
were in fact English. To make matters worse, the Pequot-Dutch alliance collapsed
shortly after this violence, precipitated by the Narragansett who sought to under-
mine and replace the Pequot as the primary intermediaries for the fur and wampum
trades. In particular, the Narragansett drew the English into the conflict as part of a
much larger plot by the sachem Miantonomi (d. 1643) to disrupt and end the Pequot
tributary system. Shortly a fter, the Mohegan joined the Narragansett in lobbying for
English support, led by the sachem Uncas (ca. 1588–ca. 1683), who similarly sought
to secede from the Pequot system and to claim control over the region’s trade.
To c ounter such intrigues, the Pequot sought relationships with the English in
late 1634. But in the course of their interactions, the Puritans demanded the Pequot
give up those who had murdered John Stone and his crew, despite the fact the
English had considered Stone a malcontent and blasphemer. While the Pequot
deliberated, the Puritan leadership eventually singled out this murder as the prin-
cipal cause of the resulting war. This event, coupled with rumors spread by the
Narragansett and Mohegan that the Pequot intended to attack the English, only
confirmed Puritan suspicions of a Pequot conspiracy to wipe out the English.
Shortly a fter, the murder of yet another English trader, John Oldham, served as
the tipping point that led to war between the Puritans and Pequot, even though
Oldham was not killed by the Pequot but by the Narragansett and their allies, the
Block Islander Indians. To the Narragansett, Oldham represented one last attempt
by the English to negotiate peaceful relations with the Pequot, which threatened
their political and economic interests. As for the Puritan leadership, they were more
than willing to blame the Pequot rather than their Narragansett allies, since the
Puritans feared the Pequot threat to the colonies.
Convinced of the imminent danger from the Pequot, the Puritans sent several
armed expeditions into Pequot territory, although they achieved l ittle more than pil-
laging a few communities. In retaliation, Pequot warriors besieged the English fort
of Saybrook, assaulted Puritan settlements in the Connecticut Valley, and attacked
the town of Wethersfield. Fearing the English colonies were on the verge of destruc-
tion and convinced that the Pequot would kill all who fell in their way, the Puritans
decided to eradicate their e nemy. Additionally, Mohegan and Narragansett warriors
joined the English offensive, a deliberate effort by leaders Uncas and Miantonomi to
cement alliances with the English and to defeat their Pequot rivals.
The combined English and Native American army marched into the homelands
of the Pequot in May 1637. Upon reaching the town of Mystic, the Puritans and
PE R NA M B U C O 479
their allies surrounded that community and set fire to its exterior, creating a ring
of fire that quickly engulfed the settlement and its inhabitants. Meanwhile, as
Pequot families tried to flee the inferno, the English cut them down. In the after-
math of the massacre, the English raised a second force that marched back into
Pequot territory and rounded up the survivors, many of whom w ere women and
children, which the Puritans sold into slavery in the West Indies.
In the wake of the war, the English and their native allies emerged as the pre-
mier powers in New England, although Puritan hopes of removing themselves from
indigenous intrigues were quickly dashed. Uncas and the Mohegan used their rela-
tionship with the English to empower themselves at the expense of Miantonomi
and the Narragansett. As a consequence, a new rivalry developed in New E ngland
that pitted the Mohegan and Narragansett against one another for control of the
fur and wampum trades, again forcing the English to choose sides. In the end, the
Puritans allied with Uncas, since Miantonomi refused to abide by the colonies’ strict
trade and tribute demands. This partnership between the English and Mohegan
continued well into the 1670s, until the Mohegan experienced a decline similar to
that of the Pequot. The Mohegan, desperate for a remedy to their diminishing
power, joined forces with the Wampanoag against the Puritans in 1675, which led
to an even more destructive conflict known as King Philip’s War (1675–1678).
The legacy of the Pequot War lived well beyond 1637 and 1675. In particular,
Puritan histories of the war reveal an exaggerated, even fictive, account of the conflict
that dramatically changed how the war was remembered for centuries. According
to seventeenth century chroniclers, the Pequot were solely to blame for the vio
lence. They w ere characterized as a warlike p eople who slaughtered English civil-
ians and demonized as the pawns of Satan. By deliberately castigating the Pequot
as godless savages, the Puritans deflected attention away from their own role in
initiating the war and excused the violence that followed.
Bryan C. Rindfleisch
See also: British Atlantic; Fur Trade; Puritans
Further Reading
Lepore, Jill. 1999. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity.
New York: Vintage Press.
Mason, John. 1736. A Brief History of the Pequot War. Boston: Kneeland & Green.
Underhill, John. 1638. Newes from America. London: Peter Cole.
PERNAMBUCO
Pernambuco is a small state in northeastern Brazil. Humid and tropical in the
coastal areas, its climate is much drier inland. Once sparsely populated by Amer-
indians (namely Tobajaras and Caetés), it has now approximately 9.5 million inhab-
itants, most of them ethnically mixed. With a total area of 37,958 square miles it
is substantially smaller than the original concession granted to Duarte Coelho
(ca. 1485–1554) by John III of Portugal in 1534.
480 PE R NA M B U C O
Pernambuco was one of several proprietary captaincies (capitanias-donatarias)

established by the Portuguese in the Americas between 1534 and 1536. After three
dec ades of neglect, the Portuguese Crown decided to consolidate its presence
in the New World, occupying territories that, according to the Treaty of Tordesillas
(1494), belonged to the kings of Portugal. Seeking to contain the French initiatives
in the South America without diverting resources from its Asian Empire, the Por-
tuguese Crown replaced the original system of exploratory voyages and trading
posts called feitorias, one of which was in Pernambuco, with the colonizing model
successfully used in Madeira and Azores.
Unlike most lord-proprietors, Duarte Coelho personally led the colonizing effort
in Pernambuco. His imperial expertise and his commercial connections in Lisbon,
particularly with wealthy Florentine businessmen, allowed Pernambuco to become
the first successful plantation colony in Brazil. Blessed by a rich combination of
dark red massapé soil and abundant rainfall, the captaincy, also known as Nova
Lusitânia (New Lusitania), owned its prosperity to the sugar industry. By 1580, Bra-
zil was the largest supplier of sugar to European markets, and Pernambuco, where
the Portuguese tried to introduce it in 1516, was, by far, the biggest producer with
an ever-growing number of sugar mills (engenhos): 23 in 1570, 66 in 1583, 90 in
1612, and 150 in 1629 (Schwartz 1987, 72).
In the plantations, Indian l abor was gradually replaced by African slaves brought
from the other side of the ocean. Eventually, the captaincy became the site for
one of the largest community of runway salves in colonial America. The Maroon
An early-nineteenth-century print shows a slave market in Pernambuco, Brazil. In the

seventeenth c entury, the region was also home to one of the largest communities of
runaway slaves in the Americas. (Library of Congress)
PE R NA M B U C O 481
kingdom of Palmares lasted for almost a c entury, successfully deflecting several

Portuguese attacks, u ntil 1694 when its leader was killed by an expeditionary
force of backwoodsmen recruited in São Paulo.
Pernambuco withstood the threat posed by Indian attacks with much more suc-
cess than the other captaincies. Duarte Coelho was particularly ingenious in
bringing out peace. He encouraged intermarriage between settlers and native allies.
In fact, Jerónimo de Albuquerque Maranhão (1548–1618), the famous explorer and
political administrator of the northeastern Brazil, was the son Coelho’s brother and
the daughter of a Tobajara chief.
The seigneurial privileges initially conceded to the first lord-proprietor, and
renewed to his absentee heirs, assured them the power to distribute lands, to col-
lect taxes and tributes and to appoint top local officials. They also could designate
their substitutes (loco-tenentes), most of whom were part of the proprietor kinfolk.
Such political leeway would foster a strong sense of self-government, reinforced
by patronage ties that spread throughout the bordering and largely dependent cap-
taincies of Itamaracá, Paraíba, and Rio Grande. The clash with the Crown’s cen-
tralizing tendencies and with the governors-generals, established in Bahia (1549),
was inevitable. Constant interference in the captaincy affairs was perceived as an
attempt to trample the colony jurisdictional autonomy and deeply resented by the
donatarial captain, by the local landlords and by the upper echelon of that soci-
ety: the Senhor de Engenho (a sugar mill proprietor who became characteristic of
the Portuguese-Brazilian cultural world).
The Dutch attacked Pernambuco, in 1630, having failed in Bahia in 1625. The
attack was part of a broader assault on the Habsburg Monarchy, which had previ-
ously incorporated the Portuguese domains (1580). The stiff initial resistance was
essentially defeated by 1637, when the multinational army of Philip IV left Pernam-
buco and headed to Bahia. To achieve their ultimate goal of controlling the sugar
trade, the Dutch proceeded to take the slave entrepôt of Luanda from the Portu-
guese (1641). However, in Pernambuco, they w ere largely confined to commercial
activities in Recife, leaving the sugar production in Catholic Portuguese hands. And
it was a group of indebted landowners that led the 1645 religiously charged upris-
ing against the West Indies Company. The local insurgents successfully pushed
back and ultimately defeated the Dutch (1654), despite the lack of immediate assis-
tance from Portugal. The kingdom had just seceded from the Habsburg Monarchy
(1640) and was forced to concentrate the bulk of its resources on the Iberian
frontier.
The restoration of Pernambuco played a crucial role in the self-identification
process of the captaincy’s elites, inflating their claims to autonomy. The war against
the Dutch was published in several commissioned accounts that spread the mil-
itary heroism of the local elites and their religious zeal. They also tried to make
clear their willingness to hand over the retrieved colony to the king, despite not
making any effort to conceal what they believed to have been an essentially
local endeavor. In their view, they w ere much more than simple natural sub-
jects; they had a contractual pact with the Crown that o ught to be honored.
Local political positions w ere thought to be reserved, and the overthrow of the
482 PI R A C Y
first appointed governor that was completely alien to the land, in 1666, proved
their demeanor.
In 1716, the captaincy became a royal colony but never recovered its former eco-
nomic vitality due to the gradual decline of the sugar prices. However, the impov-
erished elites entrenched behind an aristocratic nativism, trying to preserve their
status against the newly arrived, many of whom were wealthy merchants, and
against intrusive governors. In 1710, a municipal dispute, which threatened the
statute of the old capital Olinda, developed into a civil war that lasted several
months. It has been argued that some insurgents even contemplated secession from
Portugal. The Pernambucan nativism would remerge again, during the nineteenth
century, although imbued with a more updated liberal rhetoric. The 1817 Revolu-
tion, the 1824 Confederation of the Equator, and the 1848 to 1850 Praieira Insur-
rection all showed how difficult it was to incorporate Pernambuco into a wider
imperial order headed by Rio de Janeiro.
Miguel Dantas da Cruz
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Plantations; Portuguese Atlantic; Sugar
Further Reading
Dutra, Francis. 1973. “Centralization vs. Donatarial Privilege: Pernambuco, 1602–1630.”
Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil. Edited by Dauril Alden. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 19–60.
Schwartz, Stuart. 1987. “Plantations and Peripheries, c. 1580–c. 1750.” Colonial Brazil.
Edited by Leslie Bethell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 67–144.
Wadsworth, E. 2007. Agents of Orthodoxy: Honor, Status, and the Inquisition in Colonial Per-
nambuco, Brazil. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
PIRACY
In its most basic definition, piracy is the attacking and robbing of ships at sea. Ref-
erences to piracy tend to bring immediate images to mind of sailors with eye
patches, wooden peg legs, and black flags featuring the skull and crossbones. T hese
images are indeed rooted in the piracy that took place in the Atlantic world between
1400 and 1800; they are more explicitly associated with pirates from the early eigh
teenth c entury. Yet, the story of piracy is not as glamorous as it appears in Holly-
wood movies. Piracy sporadically exploded through four centuries of Atlantic
history and most people considered it a plague on the civilized world. The waves
of piracy that afflicted the Atlantic community in these four centuries often stemmed
from the economic and political problems unique to each outbreak.
Piracy emerged as a significant problem requiring a response by governments
in three definable epochs: the first period stretched from 1650–1680, the second
came in the 1690s, and the greatest wave of Atlantic pirates came in the decade
covering 1716 to 1726. Again, there were pirates in other eras of Atlantic history
and certainly piracy began well before 1650, but these particular periods are
notable in part because of the number of pirates and the outrageousness of their
PI R A C Y 483
actions. These three episodes of Atlantic piracy provide the names that many rec-
ognize, pirates such as Henry Morgan, William Kidd, Bartholomew Roberts, and
Edward Teach—the legendary “Blackbeard.”
The definition of piracy evolved in each period as illustrated by the changing
terminology used to refer to pirates. For instance, the terms corsair and buccaneer
were initially used to describe pirates in Atlantic history. Corsairs referred to French
pirates of the seventeenth century Car ibbean. The word buccaneer also came to
be synonymous with pirate in the seventeenth c entury a fter the French blended
the word buccan from Arawak natives; it originally meant someone who smoked
or barbequed meat in the West Indies. Buccaneers w ere also just as likely to attack
coastal cities as vessels at sea; thus, the definition of what was piracy expanded
because of buccaneers.
The evolution of the language of piracy is also evident in the definition of the
acts that constituted piracy in the Atlantic world. Generally, piracy is an act of theft
or plundering the innocent at sea. The key factor is that the assault occurs on the
water. As such, piracy has taken place on rivers and large lakes in addition to the
oceans of the world. With this one condition in mind, a wide range of activities can
and have been deemed piracy throughout history. The state of political affairs has
had as much significance in defining piracy as the actual behavior of pirates. The
wide range of actions that are determined to be piracy by political authorities adds
to the difficulty in distinguishing pirates from revolutionaries or even privateers.
For instance, many early pirates claimed to be privateers. Englishman Francis Drake
was technically what would come to be called a privateer; however, his actions,
easily meet the general definition of piracy, especially when he attacked and plun-
dered Spanish territories in the Americas on multiple occasions. Certainly the king
of Spain believed Drake to be a pirate. Another famous sea captain, John Paul
Jones, illustrates the point well. Jones was an American privateer and is consid-
ered the f ather of the United States Navy; British officials insisted he was a pirate. In
another example, English monarchs dubbed an Irish noblewoman, Grace (Gráinne)
O’Malley, a pirate in the late sixteenth c entury b ecause she opposed E ngland’s
expansion into Ireland. Called the pirate queen, O’Malley used her position, social
status, and a family-owned fleet to defend west Ireland from expansionist neigh-
bors. The English governor eventually captured her and she was punished for
piracy. Thus, piracy in the Atlantic world could be, and often was, a messy reality
where context was of g reat importance in determining who was a pirate. Only in
the so-called Golden Age of Atlantic piracy (1716–1726) did pirates act in the
spirit of the most basic definition of the crime. In this period, any captain foolish or
unlucky enough to cross paths with a pirate vessel could quickly become a victim
and likely not live to tell about the encounter. Who owned the vessel and the nation-
ality of the crew meant little to the pirates of this era as they were at war with the
entire world.
A final consideration in the study of piracy is geography. Piracy is not a random
act and the places pirates choose for their activities m atter if they are to be success-
ful. While pirates are stereotyped as anarchists, there was order and logic behind
when and where pirates struck. Pirates had to master their environment as much as
484 PI R A C Y
possible and intimately know the geography of their world. Knowing the islands
where feral hogs w ere abundant or where they could find fresh w ater and beaches to
careen their ships was vital to their survival. When examining Atlantic piracy t here
are common locations, natural chokepoints, where vessels could be attacked or the
reefs likely to ground a ship contributed to the success of pirates and provided con-
tinuity in Atlantic piracy. Piracy was most successful along the coasts of Africa
where the volume of slave trading was substantial and among the many islands of
the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico where valuable treasure ships staged to con-
voy across the Atlantic. In the case of Africa, the slave depots along the tropical
western coast were sufficiently far away, that state authorities were unlikely to directly
intervene. Black Bart was the scourge of the African coast in the eighteenth century,
taking hundreds of ships. He was one of the most successful pirates in all of history
if measured by the number of ships his crews plundered. In the Caribbean, hun-
dreds of islands make up the Windward and Leeward chains that pirates used to
hide from navies. In the Gulf of Mexico, the numerous barrier islands of North
America’s coastline provided a wealth of ‘haunts’ where pirates could find both ref-
uge and supplies. Finally, the geographic spread of colonial populations and dis-
tance from the centers of power in Europe made it easy for pirates to find local
markets where they could sell their ill-gotten loot. In this sense, piracy actually
served an economic purpose for consumers seeking goods at lower costs than the
legitimate merchants were willing to provide. It is important to remember that
pirates were successful b ecause they could find port towns and residents willing to
ignore their deeds in exchange for the cheaper goods piracy brought to their docks.
The colonization of the Americas drove piracy by extending the trade routes of
European nations. Moreover, controlling overseas empires required resources in
the form of ships, manpower, and capital, which not all nations had in the six-
teenth century. Privateering was an effective means to make gains at the expense
of one’s enemy; the downside of course is that privateers easily become pirates.
Spanish rivals resorted to such practices in the sixteenth century. One such exam-
ple from the first period (1650–1680s) was Henry Morgan. An Englishman, Mor-
gan was, at times, a privateer, a pirate, and an admiral in the Royal Navy. In the
1680s, he was clearly a buccaneer plundering the Spanish Empire. Morgan attacked
from the sea and famously sacked Panama in one of the most extreme examples of
what pirates could do and why they were a problem. Morgan’s example is not all
that different from William Kidd who enjoyed support from King William III. He
ended up branded as a pirate for his exploits and executed, his body gibbeted for
display as a warning to all about piracy.
The greatest example of piracy and the one that evokes the most romantic notions
about pirates came in the early eighteenth c entury Atlantic. Between 1716 and 1726
as many as 4,000 pirates roamed Atlantic waters. Scholars characterize this period
as the Golden Age of Piracy in the Atlantic, partly b ecause of the scale of it, but also
because it was the last g reat epoch of piracy in the Atlantic Ocean. There is no
other episode of piracy to compare with this age of pirates in Western history.
Several f actors contributed to this period of piracy. First, the close of Queen Anne’s
War (also known as the War of the Spanish Succession) brought an end to the
PI R A C Y 485
Female Pirates
Although nearly universally a male activity, there were a few female pirates.
Two of the most notorious, Anne Bonny and Mary Reade, sailed together in
the crew of Calico Jack Rackham. They were as violent as any of their male
pirate counterparts. When Rackham’s crew was arrested, Bonny and Reade
were sentence to hang with the rest. Rackham and Bonny were at one time
lovers, and on the day he was executed he supposedly visited her. Bonny
would only say “that she was sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like
a Man, he need not have been hang’d like a Dog.”
Source: Charles Johnson. A General History of the Pyrates. London: T. Woodward,
1726, 1: 173.
privateering that was part of the conflict. Great Britain in particular resorted to
the highly effective privateering model in fighting Spain and France. When the
war ended, privateering came to an end and Great Britain downsized its navy. The
war’s end meant that tens of thousands of sailors w ere now out of work. Many of
them turned to piracy because t here were no other v iable options. A second factor
was the poor treatment and conditions for crewmen on merchant vessels. Ship
captains had almost absolute power over their crews and abuse was common. Doz-
ens of mutinies occurred in this period; the mutineers almost always turned pirates
as their fate was death either way. Some historians have interpreted piracy in
this period to be part of the larger shift associated with Enlightenment thought
and more egalitarian political systems that emerged in the revolutions of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Third, with the war’s end came the resump-
tion of normal trade and exchange between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Yet,
the economic model remained mercantilism, a closed system intended to enrich
only the mother country. Thus, some identify this era of piracy with the emergence
of f ree markets and the birth of capitalism. Finally, the immediate cause that appears
to have triggered this wave a piracy was a shipwreck off the coast of Florida in
1715. One of the Spanish treasure galleons was wrecked in a storm and dozens of
treasure seekers showed up to try to collect the loot. From this small beginning
came a spectacular explosion of piracy.
The Golden Age of pirates ended with the concerted efforts of state authorities.
Pirates were hunted down mercilessly and executed in gruesome ways, their bodies
often left on display as a warning to any sailor who might consider pirating.
Though there were small episodes of piracy that continued into the nineteenth
century, pirates never seriously threatened the Atlantic again after 1730. Pirates
honed the powerful state navies that allowed nations such as G reat Britain, France,
and Spain to dominate the Atlantic u ntil the twentieth c entury.
Eugene Van Sickle
486 PLANTATIONS
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Drake, Sir Francis; Privateering
Further Reading
Cordingly, David. 2006. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the
Pirates. New York: Random House.
Pennell, C. R., ed. 2001. Bandits at Sea: A Pirate Reader. New York: New York University
Press.
Rediker, Marcus. 2004. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Bea-
con Press.
P L A N TAT I O N S
A plantation is a large agricultural holding used for growing products intended for
export. Plantations specialize in a few cash crops, in contrast to farms growing
crops for subsistence. Although plantations appeared in Europe during the M iddle
Ages, they gained prominence with Europe’s colonization of the Americas. During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Atlantic slave trade peaked and cap-
italism developed as an important economic system. In this moment, plantations
also saw the height of their production and of their importance as a social, politi
cal, and economic institution. Increasing industrialization, beginning in Europe
in the late eighteenth c entury, resulted in the plantation’s decline.
Initially, the Mediterranean plantation system primarily used feudal forms of
labor such as serfdom, but landowners also used indentured servitude and slav-
ery. These early plantations benefitted from the region’s warm climate, which was
conducive to growing tropical plants. Beginning in the 1490s, as Europeans began
colonizing the Americas, the plantation system was employed in the wake of the
destruction of native p eoples and the seizure of their lands. Commercially profit-
able agricultural ventures emerged as a result. By the mid-seventeenth c entury,
commodity production by New World plantations was necessary to maintain an
adequate food supply for Europe’s rapidly expanding population.
With European colonization in the New World, plantations became associated
with large tracts of land that produced a cash crop. In most instances, the trans-
port of these commodities was strictly controlled to ensure that the metropole
extracted the profit. In fact, until 1778, Spain required its colonies to trade only
through select colonial ports, thus preventing legal trade with other imperial pow-
ers. Similarly, English charter companies received trade monopolies that restricted
colonists’ ability to freely trade their products and benefit from the profits. Planta-
tions brought huge wealth to imperial governments and also to the planter elite, who
reaped enormous profits through the unfree labor of millions of African slaves.
Plantations throughout the Atlantic region shared several important traits. First,
the primary objective of a plantation was to produce a single lucrative commodity
to export to foreign markets. These products became known as cash crops, and
plantations produced crops such as cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, indigo, and cacao.
Second, plantation o wners relied on coerced l abor, particularly African slavery. All
of the colonial powers used slavery and to a small extent engaged indentured
PLANTATIONS 487
servants to work on plantations. Finally, mixed forms of economic relations and

modes of production existed on plantations. While relying on coerced labor, plan-
tation owners actively participated in the free market economy. Even slaves
often had small plots where they produced other crops for subsistence or to sell at
local markets. Therefore, while capitalist institutions in some ways, plantations
also had characteristics of a feudal system.
Across empires and throughout the Atlantic world, different social systems
existed. Historians apply two general categories to Atlantic societies: societies with
slaves, t hose that had a minor slave presence but w ere not structured around this
institution; and slave societies, communities that completely revolved around sus-
taining and benefitting from slavery. Societies with slaves never saw the planta-
tion complex become the predominant economic model. While slavery certainly
did exist, it existed alongside many other forms of labor, such as indentured ser-
vitude or encomienda agreements, which allowed recipients to demand forced labor,
an arrangement common throughout Spanish America. In contrast, by 1700, slave
societies in the Atlantic world were defined by the presence of plantations, as this
institution depended on slaves for labor and thus played an enormous role in the
structuring of social relations. Key regions of the Atlantic world that can be con-
sidered slave societies are the present day Southern United States, the Car ibbean,
and Brazil.
The Portuguese initiated the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century, with
the majority of slaves g oing to Spanish America and Brazil. However, with the rise
in English consumption of cash crops such as sugar and tobacco, by the eighteenth
century, English plantation o wners w
ere importing large numbers of slaves to work
on their Car ibbean holdings. The 1700s was the period when plantation owners
began replacing indentured servants with slaves, and slave ships’ records demon-
strate that over 80 percent of slaves were bought and sold between 1700 and 1900.
Attempts to explain the rationale for using slaves instead of other forms of labor
has created a large body of scholarship. Some, like Philip Curtin (1998), assert that
European plantation owners believed that Africans would be more likely to sur-
vive tropical diseases and thus made for a sturdier labor force. O
thers, such as Sid-
ney Mintz (1986), argue that plantation owners switched to slavery due to their
need for a self-reproducing and fairly permanent workforce, as indentured servants
typically earned their freedom over the course of several years. Robin Blackburn
(1997) explores the economic dimension of slavery, arguing that slave labor was a
more profitable form of labor as slaves generally grew the crops necessary for their
own subsistence on small plantation plots. However, David Eltis (2000) refutes
Blackburn’s argument regarding the economic motivation behind slavery, as his
research actually finds the enslavement of Africans to be more expensive than the
acquisition of European indentured laborers or even European slaves. Thus, Eltis
turns to a cultural explanation to understand the increased dependence on Afri-
can slavery, and he argues that growing notions on individual liberties prevented
Europeans from enslaving their own kind; Africans, on the other hand, became
viewed as the “Other,” thus rendering them unfit for the inalienable h uman rights
that Europeans extended to their countrymen. Whatever the rationale, this reliance
488 PLANTATIONS
on forced labor through African slavery remains a significant and tragic feature of
Atlantic world plantations.
As the slave trade intensified and plantations became an increasingly impor
tant site of colonial production for metropole demand, plantations began to increase
their productivity through increases in slave labor and in technological innovation.
Another significant debate that emerges in the literature is the relationship of the
plantation to the emergence of capitalism. Sidney Mintz’s (1986) position is the
most widely accepted, as he argues that plantations used capitalist forms of pro-
duction but yet relied on coerced labor. B ecause of this dependence on slavery,
the plantation cannot truly be considered a capitalist institution. However, the
Car ibbean sugar plantation was a catalyst for capitalism because sugar consump-
tion in the metropole literally fueled England’s Industrial Revolution. In doing so,
it supported the development of the modern capitalist economy. However, other
scholars, such as Eugene Genovese (1983) moderately disagree, arguing that b ecause
of its focus on capital accumulation, the plantation can be considered a capitalist
enterprise even though it operated on a “hybrid system” of labor. Despite this dis-
crepancy, scholars generally agree that the plantation was an important precursor
of capitalism.
Not only did the plantation propel the rise of modern capitalism, but it also was
one of the places where ideas on modern surveillance w ere first practiced. On a
plantation, e very person had an assigned place; slaves worked the fields, the mas-
ter and his h ousehold remained separated from the workers, living in luxury in
their majestic homes, and overseers served as managers who maintained this order.
Overseers, acting with the authority of the owner, punished anyone who chal-
lenged this hierarchy. Scholars argue that the plantation, in a sense, was a micro-
cosm of modern surveillance techniques, as they were spatially designed so that
little would escape the gaze of the overseer.
However, despite plantation o wners’ efforts at surveillance, slaves did challenge
the social hierarchy within the plantation system. Throughout the Atlantic world,
runaway slaves formed independent Maroon communities. Numerous slave rebel-
lions challenged plantation societies, with arguably the most influential being the
Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). With slave resistance and the growing abolition
movement, increased mechanization of agricultural production, and independence
movements throughout the Atlantic world, by the turn of the twentieth c entury,
plantations came to rely less on slave labor and more on free labor, although they
were still coercive.
Sarah Foss
See also: Coffee; Slavery; Sugar; Tobacco

Further Reading
Berlin, Ira. 2000. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North Amer
ica. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Blackburn, Robin. 1997. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern
1492–1800. New York: Verso.
PO C AHONTAS 489
Curtin, Philip D. 1998. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History.
2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eltis, David. 2000. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Mintz, Sidney W. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York:
Penguin Books.
P O C A H O N TA S ( c a . 1 5 9 6 – 1 6 1 7 )
Pocahontas was a Powhatan w oman who served as an emissary between her father,
Wahunsenacawh, the chief of the Powhatans and known as Powhatan (ca. 1545–
1618), and the English colonists who settled Jamestown. She married John Rolfe
(1585–1622) by whom she had a son. The V irginia Company paid for the Rolfes to
visit E ngland to showcase a Native American convert to Christianity. She met King
James I (1566–1625) and Queen Anne (1574–1619) and sat for an engraving from
which subsequent paintings w ere
made. During her time in Eng-
land, she fell ill and died, likely
from dysentery. Pocahontas left
no written records of her own.
Everything we know about her
is through the writings of the
English she encountered in Vir-
ginia and London. In particular,
John Smith’s (1580–1631) likely
fictitious account of her saving
his life when he was captured by
Wahunsenacawh’s brother has
given her more posthumous fame
than she enjoyed in her lifetime.
Pocahontas was born around
1596 in Werowocomoco, Vir-
ginia. She had several names,
including Amonute (which has
not been translated), Matoaka
(may have meant “one who is
kindled” or “one who kindles”),
and her well-known nickname,
Pocahontas (often translated
as “ little wanton/mischievous/ Pocahontas depicted in English dress by the
playful one”). Some historians Dutch engraver Simon de Passe in 1618. The
believe that she earned the nick- words surrounding the image present several of
name by being her father’s court her identities simultaneously, mentioning her
jester. Powhatan had many wives names Matoaka and Rebecca and her status as a
and many children so getting daughter of Powhatan. (Library of Congress)
490 PO C AHONTAS
his attention would have been difficult. According to several contemporary

accounts, Pocahontas was his favorite daughter.
Pocahontas was about 11 when English colonists founded Jamestown. She lived
up to her playful nickname by teaching English boys to do cartwheels. According
to Smith, she visited Jamestown frequently, acting as an emissary between Pow-
hatan and the English colonists. For example, Powhatan sent her to the colonists
several times with food. Smith credited her for coming one night to warn him that
Powhatan was plotting to kill the colonists.
Smith’s account of her saving his life is perhaps the most famous of his Poca-
hontas stories. In December 1607, Smith was captured by Pocahontas’ u ncle, Ope-
chancanough, who brought him to Powhatan. According to Smith’s 1608 account
of the incident, Powhatan served a large feast and the two men talked. In a 1616
letter to Queen Anne, Smith claimed that Powhatan threatened to kill him and
that Pocahontas interceded to save him. Historians agree that if she saved him, it
was part of an adoption ritual that Powhatan used to try to create familial ties with
the English. Powhatan normally created alliances by marriage; however, because
there w ere no English w
omen for him to marry, having his daughter save Smith
would have made Smith kin to Powhatan. It is possible that the 1616 letter is a
fabrication of events and that 11-year-old Pocahontas would not have been pres
ent at the feast.
By 1613, relations between Powhatan and Jamestown had soured. Captain
Samuel Argall (ca. 1580–1626) tricked Pocahontas into boarding his ship and kid-
napped her to force Powhatan to return English captives and property. She was
held at Jamestown u ntil her father cooperated. Pocahontas was possibly already
married to a native man, Kocoum, when she was captured. However, she may not
have been married or her choice to remain in Jamestown and marry Rolfe dissolved
the marriage, since no English writers commented on the problem of a preexist-
ing marriage. During her Jamestown captivity, she was converted to Christianity
by Alexander Whitaker (1585–1617), a young Puritan minister, and renamed
Pocahontas Warns the English

John Smith was something of a braggart, especially when it came to w omen,
and in his telling of events, a beautiful w
oman was always coming to his
rescue. In one incident, recounted in his General Historie of Virginia (1624),
Smith recalled Pocahontas, making her way through the forest at night to
meet him, risked her life to warn the English that her father’s warriors w
ere
plotting to deceive them with false friendship, providing a feast to make
them unguarded before pouncing. Smith promised to give her anything she
desired as a sign of his thanks, but Pocahontas refused, lest her father dis-
cover she had betrayed him. Alert to the danger, Smith outwitted Powhatan’s
ruse and lived to have further adventures.
PO C AHONTAS 491
Rebecca. While in Jamestown, she caught the eye of widower John Rolfe (1585–1622),
famous for introducing tobacco to Virginia. A letter Rolfe wrote asking Virginia
Governor Thomas Dale for permission to marry Pocahontas survives. Pocahon-
tas married Rolfe on April 5, 1614, in Jamestown. Powhatan did not attend, but sent
a male relative to witness the marriage. Sometime in 1615, Pocahontas gave birth
to their son, Thomas (ca. 1615–ca. 1680).
In April 1616, the Rolfe family, with an entourage of 10 to 12 Powhatans (several
of whom were her family members) traveled to England aboard Argall’s ship,
Treasurer. The trip was subsidized by the V irginia Company, which hoped to use
Pocahontas to showcase the possibilities for converting and acculturating Native
Americans. In London, Pocahontas was treated as visiting royalty. She met King
James I and Queen Anne and attended the king’s Twelfth Night Masque. While in
England, the Virginia Company voted to give the Rolfes £100 to start a Christian
education program to convert the Chesapeake Algonquians. Pocahontas sat while
Simon van de Passe (ca. 1595–1647) made an engraved portrait depicting her com-
pletely in English clothing. While waiting for the winds to favor their return trip,
the group traveled to Brentford, a rural suburb of London. T here Pocahontas finally
received a visit from John Smith, who had returned to London after an injury in
1609. Pocahontas chastised him for not coming earlier to see her, saying that she
and Wahunsenacawh had been told that Smith had died upon his return to England.
With the wind finally in their f avor, in March 1617, the group boarded the Trea
surer to return home. Pocahontas and Thomas grew too ill to continue and the
ship stopped at Gravesend, England. Although smallpox is frequently listed as her
cause of death, it is possible that it was r eally dysentery since no one mentioned she
was ill in February and she seems to have died quickly. She was about 20 years old.
She was buried March 21, 1617, at St. George’s Parish in Gravesend, England. Thomas
was also sick. Argall worried he was too ill to survive the return trip. Rolfe left the
young boy with a friend until Rolfe’s brother could arrive to take custody. Thomas
fin ally returned to Virginia at around the same age his mother had been when
she died.
Wendy Lucas
See also: Jamestown; Powhatan; Smith, John
Further Reading
Price, David. 2003. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a
New Nation. New York: Alfred A Knopf.
Rountree, Helen. 2005. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed
by Jamestown. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Smith, John. 2007. Captain John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown,
and the First English Settlement of America. Edited by James Horn. Original, London
1624. New York: Library of America.
Townshend, Camilla. 2004. Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. New York: Hill and
Wang.
492 PONTIA C ’ S WA R
P O N T I A C ’ S WA R ( 1 7 6 3 – 1 7 6 6 )
Pontiac’s War was a violent conflict between Native American nations and G reat
Britain between 1763 and 1766, taking place largely around the Great Lakes and
the frontiers of Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. Led by the Ottawa leader
Pontiac (ca. 1720–1769), Native Americans resisted the British Empire’s efforts to
assert control over their territories and peoples. Natives had formerly enjoyed alli-
ances with the French, but following the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) and the
expulsion of France from North America in 1763, the British had opted for subju-
gation rather than diplomacy. Great Britain treated native peoples as its subjects
rather than as its partners or allies. The resulting war, and its series of indigenous
victories, ultimately forced G reat Britain to reconsider its approach to Native Amer-
ican affairs. It adopted the French model of diplomacy and alliance-building to
avert further conflict with Native Americans.
In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, Native Americans found themselves largely
excluded from the treaty negotiations in 1763, despite their heavy involvement in
the conflict. Indigenous nations watched from the sidelines as European leaders
in Paris made decisions about their lands and people without their input. In par
ticular, the indigenous allies of France reacted bitterly when French soldiers, trad-
ers, and officials were replaced with British ones; a consequence of the treaty in
which the British Empire gained control of French territories in mainland North
America. Further, the expulsion of the French brought an end to natives’ ability to
play their European loyalties—to Great Britain, France, or Spain—off against one
another, oftentimes using the leverage of one European power to attain additional
resources or trade from another.
To make matters even worse, in 1763, the British Empire imposed its control
over the new territories and peoples that it inherited from France. Traditionally,
France and its indigenous allies understood their relationships to be reciprocal or
even-sided. Kinship ties and gift-giving w ere often used for diplomatic and com-
mercial purposes. In contrast, the English sought one-sided relationships that
favored their interests over that of indigenous nations. For instance, General Jef-
fery Amherst (1717–1797) ended the pattern of gift-giving while also putting strict
regulations on the trade between native and British peoples. This angered indige-
nous leaders who viewed such actions as contrary to the reciprocal relations they
once shared with the French. On the few occasions that the British tried to culti-
vate indigenous f avor, such efforts backfired. For example, King George III’s Proc-
lamation of 1763, which forbade all British p eoples from crossing the Appalachian
Mountains to settle on indigenous lands, failed to translate across the Atlantic, and
native leaders witnessed a flood of settlers who crossed into indigenous lands with
few repercussions.
A combination of religious revitalization and violent resistance in response to
British policy came to define the episode known as Pontiac’s War. The Delaware
prophet called Neolin, of the Lenni Lenape (Delaware Indians), preached a mes-
sianic message that spread throughout the G reat Lakes, Upper Susquehanna Val-
ley, and Ohio River Valley. Neolin articulated a vision of native independency as
well as cultural and religious renewal, all of which stemmed from the visions he
PONTIA C ’ S WA R 493
received from the incorporeal deity, the Master of Life. Through Neolin, the Mas-
ter of Life urged native p eoples to shrug off their dependency on European goods
and technologies and to reassert their faith in native spirituality. Additionally, Neo-
lin advocated the use of force against British encroachments, which became popu
lar with native leaders who had tried unsuccessfully to stop European settlers
encroaching on their lands. Consequently, Neolin’s words resonated with native
communities throughout North America, especially those in areas formerly occu-
pied by the French, who increasingly believed violence was the only answer to their
predicament.
Neolin’s message inspired many indigenous leaders, including the Ottawa head-
man, Pontiac, who organ ized the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes into a
single, confederated movement in April 1763. In the following months, the native
confederation quickly captured eight British fortifications and their garrisons. One
of the crowning moments of this indigenous offensive was the seizure of Fort Mich-
ilimackinac, in present-day Michigan. At that place, Ojibwe and Sauk warriors
gathered to play stickball outside of the fort’s walls, a common enough occurrence
that the fort’s soldiers stood by as spectators. During the game, one of the players
threw the ball near the fort’s entrance. Even though a stampede of native competitors
raced toward the fort’s open gates, the garrison thought little of the spectacle,
thinking it was all part of the game. What the soldiers failed to notice were the
Ojibwe w omen who watched nearby and, at that moment, opened the bundles they
carried with them, revealing an assortment of weapons. Within moments, Ojibwe
and Sauk warriors poured through the gates of Fort Michilimacknac and over-
took the fort’s defenders. As the indigenous Confederacy slowly stripped the fron-
tier of its defenses, the borderlands between Indian Country and British America
erupted in violence between 1763 and 1765 as colonies such as New York, V irginia,
and Pennsylvania faced the brunt of the violence. Pontiac’s War led to large numbers
of casualties among British civilians as well as the displacement of entire frontier
communities.
Reeling from the rapid loss of their frontier defenses in May 1763, the British
Empire turned to General Jeffery Amherst, noted for his victories during the Seven
Years’ War, but also for his contempt for native p eoples. Amherst’s scrambled
defense of the colonies included the use of smallpox to infect Native American popu-
lations. As documented by several historians, most notably Elizabeth Fenn, Amherst
ordered British commanders to distribute blankets and other trade goods laced
with smallpox to local indigenous p eoples (Fenn 2000, 1552–1580). Amherst hoped
that this would spread smallpox among native communities, reduce their popula-
tions, and thereby cripple indigenous morale. Thereafter, British soldiers at Fort
Pitt, during a conference with Delaware Indian leaders, handed out blankets and
other goods infected with smallpox. While historians are divided over w hether or not
Amherst intended to use biological warfare against civilian populations, this event
demonstrates that the native offensive caught the empire off-guard and that British
commanders like Amherst were desperate to respond in the first few months of the
violence. As the empire continued to lose outposts in 1763, imperial leaders eventu-
ally replaced Amherst with the commander-in-chief Thomas Gage (1719–1787).
494 PONTIA C ’ S WA R
The tide of the war turned with the British triumph at the B attle of Bushy Run,
which stopped the indigenous confederacy from penetrating further into the Penn-
sylvania colony. This victory, combined with the successful defense of Fort Detroit
and British expeditions into the Great Lakes in 1764, largely ended the violence.
Afterwards, the two sides negotiated a series of treaties in 1764 and 1765 that con-
cluded the war, although Pontiac and his closest allies held out until the summer
of 1766. However, these treaties were far from formal declarations of surrender by
native p eoples. Instead, they w ere promises by indigenous leaders to stop their
attacks on the British colonies in exchange for promises to restrain settler encroach-
ments upon indigenous lands, to restore the practice of gift-giving, and to estab-
lish reciprocal relations in trade and politics. In short, the empire was forced to
recognize native peoples not as subjects of the empire, but instead as its allies and
partners. With the conflict ended, the costs of the war proved staggering. Casual-
ties amounted to hundreds of combatants and thousands of civilians on both sides,
as well as the complete eradication of some British and native communities.
The intense violence of Pontiac’s War also aggravated the growing tensions
between native and British peoples in North America. For instance, Scots-Irish set-
tlers in western Pennsylvania took m atters into their own hands when they
organized lynch mobs and militia-like units to ward off native attacks upon their
communities. However, when g oing on the offensive, the Scots-Irish targeted indig-
enous populations who were either neutral or allied with the colonies, such as the
Conestoga community of Susquehannock Indians. Blind to the differences between
the Susquehannock from other Native Americans, the Scots-Irish treated all native
peoples as enemies and thereby slaughtered the inhabitants of Conestoga. When
colonial officials tried to prosecute the so-called “Paxton Boys” who committed the
murders, frontier inhabitants sympathized with the vigilantes. Frontier residents
provided refuge from the authorities, and also broke the Paxton Boys out of jail.
Such violence continued to plague the relationships between indigenous and Euro
pean peoples in North America after 1766. From hereafter, violence defined the
interactions between native and English p eoples, replacing the many instances of
accommodation, compromise, and collaboration during the seventeenth and eigh
teenth centuries.
See also: American Revolution; Pan-Indianism; Seven Years’ War
Further Reading
Anderson, Fred. 2001. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British
North America, 1754–1766. London: Faber and Faber.
Calloway, Colin G. 2006. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North Amer
ica. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dowd, Gregory Evans. 2004. War Under Heaven: Pontiac, Indian Nations, and the British
Empire. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Fenn, Elizabeth A. 2000. “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North Americ a:
Beyond Jeffery Amherst.” Journal of American History 86(4): 1552–1580.
PO R TU G UESE ATLANTI C 495
Smithsonian Source. 2007. “Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, voicing the Proclamations of the
‘Master of Life,’ 1763.” Resources for Teaching American History. http://w ww.smithsonian
source.org /d isplay/primarysource /v iewdetails.a spx?TopicId= & PrimarySourceId
=1186.
P O R T U G U E S E AT L A N T I C
At its height, the Portuguese Atlantic Empire encompassed a substantial amount
of territory including western and southern Africa, Brazil and numerous islands
in between. During the approximately four centuries (1400–1800) in which the
Portuguese discovered and settled colonies in the Atlantic, they played a part in
extensive economic, cultural, and political exchanges. Both the Crown and mer-
chants sought riches and products to benefit not only individuals but also the coun-
try’s coffers. The emigrants spread the Portuguese culture, language, cuisine, and
Catholic religion to diverse areas. Politically, they sustained a colonial relationship
with assorted communities and competed with several European empires such as
France, Spain, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Italy.
Over the course of the fifteenth century, Portugal ventured into the Atlantic
Ocean and settled several volcanic islands. As the c entury progressed, the explor-
ers travelled further west and south u ntil they ultimately reached parts of Africa
and South America. Because of astute political prowess, the Portuguese established
their presence without excessive use of force. Each area settled provided an eco-
nomic benefit to the Crown.
In 1419, Prince Henry of Portugal voyaged 540 miles south of Lisbon and reached
the Madeira Islands. The volcanic terrain provided g reat soil for exportation of
wheat crops and in 1425, Prince Henry introduced sugarcane from Sicily. How-
ever, by the seventeenth c entury, Brazil surpassed the islands’ sugarcane produc-
tion. Consequently Madeira’s top export became the sweet wine named for the
islands. Over the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, many volcanic islands w ere
settled, including the Azores (1432), Cape Verde (1456), St. Helena (1502), and
Ascension (1503). T hese islands also produced crops and served as venues to refresh
travelers’ supplies on voyages across the Atlantic. In addition to the agricultural
products, the Portuguese Crown took interest in Cape Verde to engage in the slave
trade, and missionaries sought to settle there. The islands of St. Helena and Ascen-
sion became well known in French and British politics in the early nineteenth
century. In the seventeenth century, the British had gained control of the islands
and in 1815, they exiled Napoleon Bonaparte there. By the twentieth century, both
Great Britain and the United States established military bases on the islands.
By 1500, the Portuguese succeeded in navigating further to two different con-
tinents, Africa and South America. In 1434, Gil Eanes (b. 1395) passed through a
dangerous reef along the West African coast called Cape Bojador. The settlement
of this area provided the Portuguese the ability to venture further into Africa, pri-
marily Niger, Guinea, and Senegal, and south to Angola and Mozambique. Compared
to the islands, the number of Portuguese settling in Africa remained small. In addition
to a lack of manpower, another challenge to the Portuguese settlement included
496 PO R TU G UESE ATLANTI C
communities and governments already established in Africa. The Portuguese

employed diplomatic skills to establish their presence. They quickly realized that
the most lucrative commodity from this area was the slave trade.
In 1500, a Portuguese sailor, Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467–1520), landed in Bra-
zil while attempting to go to India. For almost 80 years, various Portuguese groups,
including nobility, sailors, and merchants, sought treasures and natural resources
in Brazil. Some of the products w ere sugar, brazilwood, and coffee. By the late six-
teenth c entury, the number of sugar plantations had increased and attracted the
interest of the Crown b ecause of potential trade benefits. Sugarcane remained a
strong crop in Brazil until it faced competition with the sugar crops in the devel-
oping Car ibbean islands. The discovery of gold and diamonds in the late seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries attracted many Portuguese to the colony. The
mountainous areas north of Rio de Janeiro fueled the demand for more slaves for
gold mining and areas further north held diamonds which further intensified the
demand for slave labor. As a result of the gold and diamond discoveries, emigra-
tion from Portugal increased tremendously. By the late eighteenth c entury, Brazil-
ian government and churches began to resemble t hose institutions in Portugal. As
Brazil’s economy became stronger, it established trade relations with other Portu-
guese colonies including Angola, bringing more slaves to Brazil.
Cultural ideas and disease influenced customs and philosophies in the colonies.
Trade increased the type of goods that circulated in both cultures. For example,
wheat and rye from northern Europe became popular in Brazil, as did Madeira
wine, cedars, dyes and resins. The Brazilian culture adopted many European beliefs
and structures. Many indigenous p eople became Christian. Enlightenment ideas
flourished in the colony to the extent that academic salons emerged and universi-
ties developed. The influence of Portugal’s eastern colonies also can be found in
Brazil, where Asian architecture emerged. In addition to the trade and philosophi-
cal influences, several European diseases such as plague, typhus, tuberculosis,
smallpox, and mumps afflicted the colonies.
The success of the Portuguese Empire lay not only in its ability to s ettle in a
location without warfare but also in the technological skills to navigate the water-
ways and terrain of new lands. The Portuguese improved and enlarged many of
their seafaring vessels to allow them to travel farther and into more dangerous
regions. Some of the innovations on their vessels included improvements on the
rudder, compass and sails. In the eighteenth century, the Portuguese created the
Pelota, a vessel made of hide. On land, the Portuguese used practical methods to
survive in new locations. Transportation remained difficult, but they adapted to
the local environment. They navigated rivers instead of land because many places
lacked roads or the rains would wash away the crude paths that served as thor-
oughfares. The Portuguese quickly realized the potential of the waterways and the
skills of the African slaves and relied on them to help build canoes. The expertise
of the slaves increased the productivity of the trade routes.
Although the developed trade routes enabled the empire to expand, its success
cannot be attributed to a centralized monarchy. A clear pattern of governmental
PO R TU G UESE ATLANTI C 497
support did not appear immediately within the Portuguese Atlantic. The Crown
inconsistently supported trade and diplomatic efforts. Particularly important to
the Crown w ere the spice and plant trades, missionary work, and the discovery of
gold and diamonds. Between 1650 and 1760, the Crown focused much of its
attention on its colonies. Although trade increased, the domestic Portuguese econ-
omy did not develop. B ecause the Crown had not invested in the infrastructure or
domestic economy and had lived beyond its means, the Portuguese turned to
Great Britain for products necessary for survival. During the reigns of Dom João V
(1689–1750) and Dom José I (1714–1777), colonists witnessed a shift in political
power from Lisbon to the colonies. Attempts by Dom José I and his first minister,
the Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782), to centralize Portugal’s power failed. A new
society emerged, one that embraced enlightened education, a rejection of the old
regime and one that focused on the individual and not the nation.
The various discoveries in the Portuguese Atlantic and the diversity in goods
that traders brought back to Portugal broadened its commerce. The majority of
goods did not remain in the capital of Lisbon. This city provided a place for the
exchange of goods from one side of the world to the other. Diverse foods, cloth,
plants, animals and ideas from the Atlantic world continued to travel to the Far
East in lands colonized by Portugal in Asia. And foreign goods from Asia moved
on to the Atlantic world through Lisbon.
Lisbon evolved as a major hub of both cultural and economic exchange. Within
the city, a commercial network developed, flourished, and facilitated both techno-
logical and diplomatic skills for Portuguese to explore and settle in the Atlantic.
The city became a place for Portuguese, Europeans, and travelers from the Far East
to cross paths. The city’s inhabitants learned important skills that allowed them to
colonize in many different areas. Through their interactions with visitors in Lis-
bon, they gleaned cultural information about different areas but also how to adapt
to cultures and integrate into a culture. They made an effort to understand the cul-
tures of the indigenous societies and sought to interact with them on a political
and economic level. Many times, Portuguese men settled and married local women
but raised their children as Catholic with a Portuguese identity. With this pattern,
the Portuguese integrated themselves into different societies. Numerous Portuguese
men left their homeland for the Atlantic settlements including members of the
nobility, sailors, soldiers, unskilled laborers, and criminals. Except for those join-
ing religious communities, few women ventured abroad.
Regardless of socioeconomic status, life abroad involved hazardous diseases
such as cholera and infected food and w ater. A hierarchy existed among the vari
ous Portuguese settlements. Discovered lands near Morocco, and thus close to
Portugal, remained v iable places to which p eople could potentially return. Angola,
Bengula, and Mozambique were very unhealthy locations. Angola was known as the
“white man’s grave.” Traveling to Brazil, voyagers acknowledged that they most
likely would not return.
Despite the dangers of moving abroad, many eighteenth-century Portuguese
left their homeland. During the height of the gold rush in Brazil, the number of
498 POTATO
emigrants increased rapidly. For example, in 1742, between 1,500 and 1,600
people departed Portugal (Russell-Wood 1992, 59–60). With the great number of
people leaving Portugal, the dissemination of culture increased, particularly

Enlightenment ideas, education as seen in academic salons, the establishment of
universities, and Christianity.
The scope of the Portuguese Atlantic covered an immense geographic area and
time period from 1419 to 1825. The context for understanding the growth of this
empire should be placed within the development of early modern European his-
tory. The trajectory of other European empires directly affected the growth and
success of the Portuguese Empire. The Spanish, French, British, Dutch, and Ital-
ian agendas for empire all impacted the relationship the Portuguese Crown had
with its many colonies. For example, between 1580 and 1620, the Dutch West India
Company confronted Portugal’s presence in Brazil and Africa. Portugal’s loss of
lands can be attributed to the fact that its institutions did not modernize and could
not withstand the challenges of the Dutch West India Company.
By the nineteenth century, the extensive Portuguese Atlantic began to slowly
disintegrate. Brazil gained indep endence in 1822 and by the mid-twentieth
century, several of the islands separated as well. The abolition of slavery, the rise
of independent nations, and the fragmentation of competing European empires
contributed to the breakdown of the Portuguese Atlantic world.
Evelyn Kassouf Spratt
See also: Angola; Brazil; Cape Verde Islands; European Exploration; Slavery; Sugar
Further Reading
Newitt, Malyn. 2005. A History of Portuguese Oversees Expansion, 1400–1668. New York:
Routledge.
Paquette, Gabriel. 2013. Imperial Portugal in the Age of the Atlantic Revolution: The Luso-
Brazilian World, 1770–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Russell-Wood, A. J. R. 1992. A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia and Amer
ica, 1415–1808. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Russell-Wood, A. J. R. 2011. “The Portuguese Atlantic World, c.1650–c.1760.” The Oxford
Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850. Edited by Nicholas Canny and Philip Mor-
gan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 201–219.
P O TAT O
The potato (Solanum tuberosum) is a crop known by the name of papa in Latin America,
its place of origin. Potatoes belong to the Solanaceae family and w ere consumed
as early as 7,000–10,000 years ago on the Andean highlands. In pre-Columbian
times, potato plants w ere cultivated for their edible tubers throughout what is
today Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and Northern Argentina. Since it was
not a domesticated crop in Central America, it was first described a fter the arrival
of the Spanish conquistadors in South America and introduced into Europe only
POTATO 499
in the last decades of the sixteenth century. Since then, due to its significant nutri-
tional value, it saved Europe from hunger several times throughout history and
has become the world’s fourth most consumed food crop.
The geographic distribution of wild potatoes ranges from the southern parts of
Chile, through South and Central America to the southwest of the United States.
Nevertheless, the center of domestication of various species of potato was the
Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia at elevations above 6,500 feet. The first
evidences of its consumption and cultivation are the remains of potato tubers
in archaeological sites and their represent at ions on pottery. Juan de Castellanos
(1522–1607), a Spanish conquistador, first described potatoes in 1537, although
he referred to the tubers as truffles. Pedro Cieza de León (1518–1560), in the first
part of his Chronicle of Peru uses the world papa and also mentions chuño, the tradi-
tional freeze-dried potatoes. The chronicle with the most complete description of
the plant was Historia del Nuevo Mundo (History of the New World) written by
Bernabé Cobo (1582–1657), a Spanish Jesuit missionary in 1653.
Two new tubers w ere introduced into Europe via Spain in the sixteenth c entury.
Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) took the first sweet potatoes to Europe
called batata in the Car ibbean. Spanish people started to call it patata, a name that
morphed into “potato” in English. The confusion arose when, a few decades later,
the first Andean tubers arrived in the old continent. Several names existed in the
Andean region but the Quechua word papa was the one used by the Incas. This
name was accepted by the Spanish conquistadors but it was only used in the Span-
ish colonies and in the Canary Islands. When it appeared in Spain, people started
to call it patata due to the similarities between the two crops.
Spanish conquistadors arrived in South America having previous knowledge of
some important plants they had found in Central America. That may be the reason
why potato seemed to have less importance than other crops such as corn. Besides,
being used to consume grains, Europeans became accustomed to corn more easily.
Moreover, corn had a very important ceremonial and religious significance in pre-
Columbian societies including the Incas. Corn is mentioned in several chronicles as
a plant of high prestige that had an important role in rituals, calendars and offer-
ings, whereas the potato is not mentioned at all in such descriptions. In addition,
the first chroniclers of Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1471–1541) w ere much more engaged
in relating the events of the conquest of the Incas and the search for gold and silver.
The main staple foods in pre-Columbian and colonial Peru were potatoes, corn,
and beans together with chili peppers. These traditions have not changed in the
course of time. There is scarce information concerning the ancient use of the potato
and its cooking methods. It is known that it had medicinal uses and that it was
prepared as a soup or casserole with other ingredients such as meat, fish, corn, or
cheese. Spanish explorers carried the first potato to Europe in about 1570 and then
potatoes spread slowly to Italy, Austria, France, Belgium, and other parts of the con-
tinent. The second introduction of Solanum tuberosum to the continent was mentioned
by the end of the sixteenth century. Potatoes were brought to England from Virginia
by some colonists, and, from England they were carried to Ireland. The potato was
500 POTATO
French Fries Courtesy of President

Thomas Jefferson
French fries were introduced to the United States by President Thomas Jef-
ferson in 1802; Jefferson had tasted them while serving in Paris as a U.S.
diplomat in the 1780s. Jefferson had his enslaved chef, James Hemings,
trained in French and European cuisine, so that he could continue to enjoy
fine cooking when returning to the United States. Jefferson also introduced
other staples of the American diet to the United States, including vanilla ice
cream, and macaroni and cheese. The now-ubiquitous French fry was once a
fine delicacy. Jefferson served it in the White House at formal dinners.
not generally cultivated in Europe in at first. It was considered poisonous, strange,

and tasteless; it was used as fodder in some places and decorated botanical gar-
dens as an exotic plant. In general, it was not regarded as enjoyable food.
However, when countries such as E ngland, Ireland, and Prussia w
ere hit by fam-
ine, governments ordered the peasantry to eat potatoes. Eventually, potatoes w ere
found to be easy to grow; they had excellent productivity and could produce four
times more food per acre than other crops, such as wheat, and, therefore, served
as a solution to food problems. Moreover, the potato was very nutritious and was
a good source of most of the essential vitamins including vitamin C. All these
factors contributed to the acceptance and adoption of the potato across Europe. It
became a staple food within two centuries. As a result, potato cultivation promoted
a large and rapid population growth.
The potato became so common in some countries that it supplied the major part
of the calories in peasants’ diets. Its expansion and production was facilitated by
the introduction of guano, a natural fertilizer exported from Peru and the Car ib
bean. In Ireland, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, potato was almost
the only source of calories and the growing population depended on the potato
production system. A disaster occurred when a plant disease spread in several
subsequent years in the mid-nineteenth c entury. The complete potato crop failure
was followed by famine, disease, and death. A large number of peasants left their
homes and went to bigger towns or migrated to America resulting in a tremen-
dous population decline in the Irish countryside.
Although the first potatoes arrived in North America in the early seventeenth
century, the plant became more popular only a fter its introduction by Irish and Scot-
tish immigrants at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Its industrial production
began a fter the introduction of a new variety of potato developed and named by an
American botanist and horticulturist, Luther Burbank (1849–1926) in the 1870s.
Katalin Jancsó
See also: Columbian Exchange; Inca Empire; Jefferson, Thomas

POTOS Í 501
Further Reading
Mann, Charles C. “How the Potato Changed the World.” Smithsonian Magazine, Novem-
ber 2011. http://w ww.smithsonianmag.com /h istory/how-t he-potato-changed-t he
-world-108470605/.
Reader, John. 2011. A History of the Propitious Esculent. London: Yale University Press.
Salaman, Redcliffe N. 1985. The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge: Cam-
Smith, Andrew F. 2011. Potato: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books.
POTOSÍ
Founded in 1545, the silver mines of Potosí served as one of the greatest sources
of New World wealth for the Spanish Empire. Commonly referred to as “the rich
mountain” (el cerro rico) during the Spanish colonial period, Potosí is located in
present-day Bolivia and has a peak elevation of almost 16,000 feet. Contemporary
Latin Americans use the expression “to be worth a Potosí” (valle un Potosí) to indi-
cate something of great value, underscoring the enduring cultural relevance of the
former colonial silver mines.
Silver was critical to Spanish colonial prosperity, at times accounting for almost
90 percent of the colonial revenue produced in the Americas during the three
centuries of Spanish rule (Cook 1981, 237). To mine Potosí’s silver, the Spanish
relied almost exclusively on forced indigenous l abor. The Inca Empire had devel-
oped a reciprocal labor system (called the mit’a) before the Spanish conquest of
the Inca Empire in 1533. Spanish authorities later adopted the Inca system of
rotational community labor, but transformed it into a mandatory labor draft
(which the Spanish spelled, mita). The mita initially forced indigenous men in the
Andes to perform rotational labor in agriculture and textile production. How-
ever, beginning in the 1540s, the Spanish directed the majority of forced indig-
enous laborers to the silver mines of Potosí. The mines drew over 13,000
indigenous men each year and required one-seventh of the adult male population
in the 16 provinces closest to the mines to work one full year every seven years
(Burkholder and Johnson 2015, 128). A male laborer’s wife and children almost
always accompanied the drafted worker to the mining village at Potosí. By 1575,
some 100,000 indigenous laborers occupied Potosí and the population would
eventually grow to some 200,000 indigenous forced laborers (Restall and Lane
2011, 141).
Coca Leaves and Mining

To maintain their energy level over long periods of strenuous physical activity,
the Spanish frequently gave native miners coca leaves to chew as they labored.
By the 1570s, 90 percent of the coca production in Cuzco was being trans-
ported to Potosí to support the miners (Restall and Lane, 141).
502 POTOS Í
A 1602 engraving of llamas carrying silver from the mines of Potosí by Dutch engraver
Theodore de Bry. Thousands of Natives, such as those depicted urging on the llamas,
labored in the mines. (Library of Congress)
The working conditions at Potosí were dangerous and death was common.
Many indigenous miners were maimed or sickened by lung disease. In addition
to arduous work underground during the day, the Spanish required the indige-
nous to labor throughout the night in dozens of water-powered refineries. Unlike
the Spanish silver mines in Mexico, which employed a “dry technique” by reus-
ing water, Potosí used a series of reservoirs to generate its waterpower and mer-
cury spills were common during the water-generating process. Additionally,
laborers w ere often required to transport ore up narrow shafts to the mouth of
the mine.
Since few indigenous Andeans lived directly in Potosí prior to the discovery of
silver, the Spanish relied on drafted labor from surrounding communities within
the Viceroyalty of Peru. E ager to avoid mita serv ice at Potosí, thousands of indig-
enous families fled their homes and abandoned the security and rights provided
by the ayllu (the basic self-sustaining kin group in the Andes that claimed ties to a
common ancestor). Indigenous Andeans who left traditional ayllus and entered into
the developing wage-labor market on Spanish estates were exempt from mita ser
vice at Potosí. This segment of the population, referred to as yanaconas, often strug
gled with their sense of cultural identity, having given up their place in ancestral
communities to avoid forced labor but not enjoying full acceptance as cultural or
POTOS Í 503
racial equals by their Spanish or Creole contemporaries. Another group of indig-

enous Andeans able to escape mita service at Potosí were forasteros (literally, “strang-
ers”) who fled ancestral communities to reside in regions father from Potosí and
thus outside the reach of the labor draft. The movement of yanaconas and foraste-
ros from communities surrounding Potosí contributed to the breakup and decline
of traditional indigenous communities in the Andean region, a key legacy of Span-
ish colonialism.
In addition to indigenous forced laborers and their families (who represented the
majority of the mining population), Potosí was also the home of free indigenous
workers bound to the silver mines as a result of debt peonage, which occurred
when the Spanish Crown extended credit to indigenous Andeans who were unable
to repay loans. The Spanish initially intended to use African slaves as the primary
labor force in the mines, but West Africans struggled to adjust to Potosí’s high alti-
tude. Yet, although African slaves w ere not abundant in Potosí, the mines w ere
nonetheless critical to the perpetuation of slavery in Spanish America. Through-
out the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the Spanish traded silver from
Potosí for a variety of products, including West African slaves. During the colonial
era, the Spanish transported roughly 30,000 African laborers to Potosí (Cook 1981,
237). Additionally, Potosí was the home of some free indigenous laborers eager to
reap the financial rewards of the mines.
The allure of quick financial prosperity also led the Spanish and Creole popula-
tions to increase considerably in Potosí after the discovery of silver. In 1610, for
example, t here were some 3,000 Spaniards and 35,000 Creoles in the mining vil-
lage (Burkholder and Johnson 2015, 131). Likewise, many Portuguese settlers from
Brazil moved to Potosí in hopes of reaping profits from the silver mines. By the
eighteenth c entury, however, silver mines in Mexico had successfully surpassed
Potosí in production. The mass movement of indigenous Andeans away from ayl-
lus that surrounded Potosí, substantial death tolls during the mining process, and
dwindling amounts of tradable silver found in the mines all contributed to the
decline of Potosí. Still, the economic, social, and cultural legacies of “the rich moun-
tain” have continued to shape indigenous cultural identity and Peruvian society
long after silver disappeared from the mines and Spain lost its New World empire.
Thomas J. Brinkerhoff
See also: Gold and Silver; Inca Empire
Further Reading
Cook, Noble David. 1981. Demographic Collapse, Indian Peru, 1520–1620. New York: Cam-
Mangan, Jane. 2005. Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy, Potosí, 1545–
1700. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Restall, Matthew, and Kris Lane. 2011. Latin America in Colonial Times. Cambridge: Cam-
Stern, Steve J. 1982. Peru’s Indian P
eoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga
to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
504 PO W HATAN
P O W H ATA N ( c a . 1 5 5 0 – 1 6 1 8 )
Powhatan was the paramount chief of the Powhatan Confederacy in Tsenacomoco,
or Eastern Virginia, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Renowned for his leadership during the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614),
Powhatan is equally famous for being the father of Pocahontas, also called Matoaka,
whose marriage to English colonist John Rolfe was instrumental in ending the
war, bringing a semblance of peace to the region until 1622 when ongoing friction
between the natives and colonists erupted in the Second Anglo-Powhatan War.
Powhatan died in 1618.
Born as Wahunsonacock or Wahunsenacawh about 1550 in what is now the
state of Virginia, he was later named Powhatan after he inherited the Powhatan
Confederacy in Tsenacomoco, or eastern V irginia, sometime before 1580. L ittle is
known of Powhatan’s early life prior to becoming the weroance, or chief. However,
by the time he reached adulthood, Powhatan was the chief of a confederacy that
consisted of six Algonquian-speaking tribes: Appomattoc, Mattaponi, Pamunkey,
Powhatan, Youghtanud, and Werowocomoco. Called the G reat King, or Mamana-
towick, Powhatan was simultaneously both peace and war chiefs, an occupation
that enabled him to increase his political power in the region. U nder his gover-
nance, Powhatan’s chieftainship increased significantly. In addition to the six tribes
whose leadership he inherited, he brought an additional 28 other tribes under his
rule, through both wars and alliances. Powhatan’s seat of power was situated in
the village of Werowocomoco, located in what is now Purtan Bay, Gloucester
County, Virginia.
In 1607, English settlers began to build the fort at Jamestown, where they first
came into contact with Powhatan. In December of that year, as Captain John Smith
was exploring the region on the Chickahominy River, he was captured by Pow-
hatan’s forces and brought before the chief. Anthropologists believe that it was at
that time that Smith underwent a rite of passage involving a mock execution in
which Pocahontas placed her head over his, preventing his execution and thereby
ritually saving him. At that moment, Powhatan a dopted Smith as his son and began
supplying the colonists at Jamestown with provisions.
The English settlers had hoped to make Powhatan submissive by crowning him
as a vassal king in 1608. When Christopher Newport sent Powhatan an invitation
to come to Jamestown for a coronation ceremony, Powhatan refused, demanding
that the colonists come to him instead. The ongoing miscommunication, fueled
in part as a result of culturally opposing worldviews, was possibly compounded
by a prophecy that a new nation appearing from the Chesapeake would destroy
Powhatan’s empire, a prediction that Powhatan was likely cognizant of. Relations
between the natives and the colonists continued to deteriorate, culminating in the
First Anglo-Powhatan War which began in 1609.
In 1609, Powhatan moved to the village of Orapax with his wives and c hildren.
By August of that same year, the conflict between Powhatan and the English set-
tlers had morphed into a full blown war. At the close of the war, no less than 350
English colonists were dead while Powhatan’s casualties totaled approximately
250 (Fausz 1990, 6). During the war in 1613, Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas was
P R AYIN G INDIANS 505
kidnapped by the colonists. Her status as war trophy and prisoner morphed into
bride when Pocahontas was baptized as Rebecca and married John Rolfe in
April 1614, finally ending the war that same year. It was a precarious peace that
would last only until 1622 with the commencement of the Second Anglo-Powhatan
War. Pocahontas died in 1617 a fter boarding a ship to return to V irginia. She was
buried in St. George’s Church in Gravesend, Kent, in the United Kingdom.
As war chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, Powhatan led a fierce native resis
tance during the First Anglo-Powhatan War, and then served as peace chief a fter
his daughter married an English colonist, an act that united two rivaling nations.
Powhatan’s death in 1618 resulted in a political vacuum that was quickly filled first
by his brother Itoyatin and afterwards by another brother, Opechancanough, who,
according to tribal oral history, buried Powhatan’s remains on the Pamunkey Indian
Reservation in V irginia.
Dawn C. Stricklin
See also: British Atlantic; Pocahontas; Smith, John
Further Reading
Fausz, J. Frederick. 1990. “ ‘An Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides’: E ngland’s First
Indian War, 1609–1614.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 98: 3–56.
Gallivan, Martin D. 2007. “Powhatan’s Werowocomoco: Constructing Place, Polity, and
Personhood in the Chesapeake, C.E. 1200–C.E. 1609.” American Anthropologist 109:
85–100.
Mooney, James. 1907. “The Powhatan Confederacy, Past and Present.” American Anthro-
pologist, 9: 129–152.
Rountree, Helen C. 2005. Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed
by Jamestown. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
P R AY I N G I N D I A N S
Praying Indians were Native Americans who converted to and practiced Chris
tianity during the early years of European colonization in North America. The
phrase generally refers to Native Americans who lived in formally established mis-
sionary communities, also known as praying towns, throughout New England.
However, the term has also been applied to similar communities of converted Native
Americans in other English colonies as well as in French Canada. The towns for-
mally lasted from 1646 until the late 1670s when relations between the colonists
and Native Americans deteriorated in the wake of King Philip’s War (1675–1678),
though many of these communities continued to exist well beyond the seven-
teenth century.
Conversion of the Native Americans was an expressed goal of the Puritans who
colonized New E ngland during the seventeenth century. The minister John Eliot
(1604–1690), known as the “Apostle to the Indians,” was the leader of the Puri-
tans’ missionary efforts to convert the Native Americans. Eliot was primarily
responsible for the push to create the praying towns that were formally established
506 P R AYIN G INDIANS
beginning in 1646. The towns were generally composed entirely of Native Ameri-
can converts who w ere encouraged to live according to English customs and practice
a Puritan brand of Christianity, though the towns w ere often self-governing. The
praying towns were fairly well supported by the colonial government and churches
and also received financial backing from E ngland. Various ministers, and often
Eliot himself, were responsible for monitoring and guiding the conversion of the
Praying Indians.
Eliot’s views on conversion were greatly influenced by Puritan notions of prac-
ticing Christianity and by notions of the superiority of English civilization. Eliot
and other Puritans believed that Native Americans could not become truly con-
verted unless they completely divested themselves of their traditional culture. The
praying towns w ere organized with the expectation that Indians would not only
be converted, but would also be fully assimilated. They were expected to adopt all
aspects of English culture and customs. Praying Indians lived in English-style
buildings, wore English clothing, and were expected to govern the towns using
English methods of governance. While Eliot translated the Bible and felt it was
acceptable to preach to the Native Americans in their own language, it was expected
that the Praying Indians would eventually adopt the English language. A central
tenet of Puritan belief was that the Bible was the only source for interpreting God’s
w ill and therefore the ability to read the Bible was essential. Eliot studied Native
American language so he could preach to them, and he published Indian-language
Bibles.
Historians frequently use the Praying Indians to explore the nuances of Native
American and European interaction. Much historical work of late has argued that
when Native Americans converted to Christianity, they incorporated much of their
own beliefs and customs into their practice of Christianity or vice versa. Given the
fair amount of autonomy the praying towns were allowed, they often practiced and
lived differently than the Puritans intended for them causing much frustration
among Puritans. Native Americans interpreted both Christianity and English cus-
toms in a manner that was compatible with their own culture. In some towns, native
language continued to be used. Governmental positions often filled traditional
societal roles and Native American symbols were often retained in their practice
of Christianity. Of particular frustration to the Puritans was the continued adher-
ence of the Praying Indians to traditional gender roles. Typically, Native American
women performed agricultural work while men were responsible for fighting and
hunting. The missionaries expected the Praying Indians to conform to a European-
style agricultural society, where men would perform the agricultural work and
women would perform domestic tasks.
The Praying Indians were somewhat controversial during their entire existence.
While Puritan New E ngland was officially committed to conversion and assimila-
tion of the Native Americans, t here was considerable debate over the proper ways
to accomplish conversion. It was widely known that Catholic missionaries con-
verted far more Native Americans and many Puritans often expressed fears that
they were falling far b
ehind in their conversion efforts. Many like Eliot, however,
believed that “Catholic Indians” were mostly false converts and that the Puritan
P R I VATEE R IN G 507
ways of total assimilation was necessary to produce legitimate Christians. B ecause

of the slow pace of conversion within the praying towns, many New Englanders
felt it was too difficult if not impossible to convert the Native Americans and the
frequent alliances between other native groups with the nearby French resulted in
a general suspicion of Praying Indians. The deterioration of colonial relations with
other Native Americans during the 1670s, resulted in King Philip’s War. While vio-
lent clashes between colonists and natives had been frequent during the seven-
teenth c entury, the violence of King Philip’s War was unprecedented. The war
hardened racial attitudes against the Native Americans. Despite the participation
of many Praying Indians in the English forces, official and popular support for the
praying towns significantly decreased by the end of 1670s. There were also very
few New England natives still willing to join the praying towns as Native Ameri-
cans generally became more wary of the colonists following the violence and dis-
ease of the war.
In the wake of King Philip’s War, Massachusetts dismantled most of the pray-
ing towns and ended autonomy for the other remaining ones, despite continued
advocacy for them by John Eliot and a few o thers. Several of the towns continued
to exist but gradually lost their autonomy over time in both church and govern-
ment m atters, such that Native American language and customs were no longer
officially practiced in t hose places.
Joshua Schroeder
See also: British Atlantic; Protestant Missionaries; Puritans
Further Reading
Bross, Kristina. 2004. Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America.
Cogley, Richard W. 1999. John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lepore, Jill. 1998. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity.
New York: Vintage Books.
P R I VAT E E R I N G
Privateering played an important role in the Atlantic world once Europeans began
colonizing the Americas. In the context of Atlantic competition, European nations
turned to privateering to advance their interests and undermine their rivals. In
times of war, privateering became an important tool in fighting the e nemy b ecause
it allowed for the more rapid expansion of naval forces. Typically, privateers were
merchant vessels converted for military serv ice; they w
ere generally heavily armed
vessels licensed by the state with a letter of marque and reprisal. With this official
state sanction, privateers attacked the property (ships) of enemy nations, seized and
then sold these prize vessels to the highest bidder. Privateering injured an enemy’s
trade, while enriching the risk takers who invested the capital to sponsor privateer
ventures. Governments lacking significant naval power often resorted to privateering
508 P R I VATEE R IN G
to swell the size of their navies in times of conflict. Only during times of war was
privateering recognized as a legal practice. For t hese reasons, privateering came
in waves that generally mirrored the large military conflicts in European history.
While privateering existed throughout the period of 1400–1800, it most signifi-
cantly s haped the Atlantic world in the eighteenth c entury.
The use of privateers dates to the late M iddle Ages, though the term itself did
not become common in English u ntil the seventeenth century. Privateering is often
confused with piracy b ecause it proved quite difficult to control privateers. Thus,
there are grounds for the mischaracterization of privateering as piracy. In fact,
famous privateers were charged with piracy. William Kidd serves as an excellent
example. He was executed for piracy though t here is compelling evidence that he
was a privateer in the serv ice of King William III of England. Piracy and privateer-
ing are not the same, although they share tactics in capturing prizes. Privateering
was always private serv ice to the state; whereas pirates had no allegiance to any-
one but themselves. Given that there w ere few effective checks on privateers it is
not difficult to understand how easily a privateering venture could become an act
of piracy.
Privateering became common practice in the Atlantic world between the six-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, paralleling the emergence of long-distance trade.
Vessels engaged in distant trade needed to be armed to protect themselves from
predators and they could be co-opted into the serv ice of the state in dangerous
times before large state navies existed. As colonies grew and wealth flooded Europe,
particularly the gold and silver coming from the Spanish colonies, privateering
increasingly became a tool of Spain’s rivals as they battled for dominance in the
Atlantic.
Privateering had its first significant effect on the Atlantic world in the latter part
of the sixteenth c entury. Most famous w ere the English privateers John Hawkins
and Sir Francis Drake, who began as interlopers in the Spanish slave trade. Drake
went on to plunder the Spanish colonies in the Car ibbean starting the 1570s.
Drake’s first venture into Spanish w aters proved lucrative enough that Queen
Elizabeth I commissioned Drake in 1577 for an expedition that targeted Spain’s
possessions along the west coast of South America. By the time Drake finished his
expedition he had circumnavigated the globe and returned to England with valu-
able cargo. Drake led two additional assaults on Spanish provinces in the Car ib
bean. Three of Drake’s privateering ventures in the Americas succeeded in gaining
him both fortune and fame, though the Spanish consistently characterized him as
a pirate. His last raiding effort against Spanish territories in the Americas failed
and he died from disease in Panama in 1596. It is also noteworthy that Elizabeth’s
sanctioning of Drake’s 1585 effort and subsequent knighting of him contributed
to the disastrous failed Spanish Armada of 1588; Philip II, king of Spain, attempted
to invade E ngland to oust the queen. Although the c auses of the conflict w ere many,
Drake’s repeated injuries to Spain during Elizabeth I’s reign played an important
part in Philip’s decision to invade England. During the conflict between England
and Spain in 1588, Drake served as vice admiral of the fleet defending E ngland.
Thus, Drake’s example provides ample evidence of how one nation’s privateer
P R I VATEE R IN G 509
can be another’s pirate. Additionally, Drake illustrates one of the ways a country
could employ privateering as an economic weapon against an enemy with mini-
mal expense all while denying any governmental responsibility. Privateering risked
the money of investors, the property of the ship owner, and the lives of the crew.
Philip II’s attempted invasion of England in 1588 was one of the most extreme
responses to privateering in the sixteenth century Atlantic.
The practice of privateering grew in the seventeenth century, particularly in the
Car ibbean as governors authorized privateering missions against the enemies of
their country. No longer w ere letters of marque issued by the monarchs of Europe.
Their official representatives in American colonies assumed this power, sometimes
without the complete support of the government at home. Some of the more well-
known privateers of the period w ere also Englishmen, such as William Dampier
and Sir Henry Morgan. Dampier served on a number of expeditions starting in
1679. Dampier’s early c areer included the outright plundering of Spanish posses-
sions in Central America and excursions into the Indian Ocean. Spanish wealth
was still the target, but the emergence of global trading networks expanded the
range of privateering activities far beyond the Atlantic Ocean. Dampier’s c areer
illustrates the ease with which sailors could shift from privateer to pirate. Henry
Morgan’s c areer parallels that of Dampier. Morgan served as a privateer starting in
the early 1660s, when E ngland was at war with the Dutch. Again illustrating the
problems with controlling privateers, Morgan was part of an expedition that sacked
Campeche, a Spanish possession in 1663. Morgan assaulted other Spanish territo-
ries over the next 20 years; yet he did not consider his actions piracy because he
had the approval of colonial governors. Because England was frequently at war with
one or more European powers in the seventeenth century, privateering proved
lucrative for men such as Morgan though he was eventually labeled a pirate. Mor-
gan’s legend changed largely due to the publicity of his exploits by Alexandre
Exquemelin in a book published in the early 1680s. When people read about the
kinds of things Morgan r eally did, his reputation was tarnished.
The eighteenth century continued the trend of conflicts between European
nations that fueled privateering in the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, warfare plagued the
Atlantic world starting in 1701, as European nations battled to resolve their own
political quarrels and to determine who would have hegemony in the Americas.
Thus, wars and privateering dominate the history of the Atlantic u ntil the revolu-
tions of the nineteenth c entury came to a close. The Succession (1701–1714) pitted
England against both France and Spain. The English resorted to privateering to
carry out its war against both rivals and the number of mariners swelled to tens of
thousands in the serv ice of the queen. William Dampier, who began his privateer-
ing career in the seventeenth c entury continued to serve his country during the
war. What made this period exceptional is that many privateers took to piracy in
the decade following the War of the Spanish Succession. While it is not possible
to know the background of every pirate in this era, many had served in the war.
As was the case in past conflicts, it was difficult to get word to all privateers that
the war was over, and there were, as in the seventeenth century, cases where pri-
vateer captains chose to disregard proclamations calling them back to port. These
510 P R I VATEE R IN G
individuals became pirates. A number of them continued attacking the enemies of

their homelands, especially G reat Britain, in the largest outbreak of Atlantic piracy
in history.
The use of privateers continued throughout the rest of the century, with the larg-
est outbreak, a fter 1726, coming during the American War of Independence. The
United States Congress began issuing letters of marque in 1775 on the basis of indi-
vidual missions along with approving the creation of a continental navy. In real
ity, the construction of a continental navy would take too long and Congress did
not have the financial wherewithal to fund such a force. The government had only
a small army of volunteers and no navy when it declared independence. In that
context, t here was little choice but to turn to privateering, especially considering
that the Thirteen Colonies were facing off against a European power with the stron-
gest navy at the time. Only France came close to rivaling the naval power of G reat
Britain in 1776. With no allies, the American rebels had to use every resource avail-
able to have a chance at securing independence. In all, the United States issued
just fewer than 1,700 letters of marque. This translated to 11,000 men sailing on
privateer vessels during the revolution, roughly equivalent to the size of the Con-
tinental Army in 1777.
Great Britain, although it had an established navy, also employed privateers
against American shipping during the War of Independence. Privateers serving in
the British and American navies took close to an equal number of prizes, more
than one thousand vessels respectively, valued at millions of dollars. In sum, pri-
vateering was widely used on both sides, but was probably more significant for
the Americans than the British. One reason for this is that Great Britain declared
American privateers to be pirates. Specifically driving G reat Britain to proclaim
American privateers to be pirates was the actions of John Paul Jones. Jones’ raid on
Great Britain, in May of 1778, prompted direct action on the part of Great Britain.
In 1778, Great Britain changed its policies on prisoners of war and pronounced
American privateers as pirates. Unlike other use of privateers, this circumstance
was different because it was a rebellion. Keeping prisoners of war, who were fel-
low Britons, offended elements of the British public. To some extent the change in
policy by the government of George III prompted considerable domestic dissent at
home. In the end, privateering could not have resulted in the defeat of G reat Brit-
ain’s military, but it did play a crucial role in enabling the colonies to continue the
fight, bring war closer to Great Britain, and as a tool for diplomatic leverage. Ris-
ing insurance rates for shippers could not be ignored by Parliament.
The practice of privateering continued into the nineteenth c entury, though it
was less prominent as many nations had more effective state navies. Moderniza-
tion of navies made privateering less lucrative and less desirable. B ecause of this
shift in state power, privateering was outlawed by most major European nations
in 1856.
Eugene Van Sickle
See also: Dampier, William; Drake, Sir Francis; Piracy

P R O G R ESSI V IS M 511
Further Reading
Pennell, C. R., ed. 2001. Bandits at Sea: A Pirate Reader. New York: New York University
Press.
Rediker, Marcus. 2004. Villains of All Nations Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Bea-
con Press.
Starkey, David. 1990. British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth C
entury. Exeter: Uni-
versity of Exeter Press.
PROGRESSIVISM
Progressivism describes a period of intense political, economic, and social reform
in the United States between the 1890s and World War I, and is commonly asso-
ciated with the presidential administrations of Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919),
William Howard Taft (1857–1930), and Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924). T hese
reforms at the municipal, state, and federal levels encompassed a wide range of
issues such as child l abor, women’s suffrage, working conditions and safety, urban
housing, social security, public hygiene, immigration, and industrial trusts. The
reformers were a heterogeneous group of labor leaders, businessmen, settlement
workers, scholars, writers, politicians, social activists, and educators, united in their
desire to mitigate the negative effects of industrial capitalism. Their reforms w ere
often based on the appropriation and adaptation of international models. The search
for reform concepts was global, but Western Europe was its focus.
At the heart of the reform impulse was the recognition that the political, eco-
nomic and sociocultural fabric of American society was threatened by economic
concentrations, increasing social polarization, massive urbanization, and reduced
cultural cohesion. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States
economy had undergone a massive process of industrial concentration that pro-
duced large corporate g iants that subsequently established control over entire sec-
tors of the economy. This merger movement with its vertical and horizontal
integration of industrial sectors displaced thousands of smaller businesses as large
trusts and monopolies, such as United States Steel, Standard Oil, or American
Tobacco, became a hallmark of economic life in North America.
The creation of t hese trusts produced ambivalent responses at home and abroad.
Many contemporary observers w ere impressed with these symbols of American
economic might, efficiency, and productivity and few reformers objected to the
trusts mainly on the grounds of size. The critics claimed, however, that such con-
centrations of economic power were often accompanied by manipulative and poten-
tially antidemo cratic tendencies. They argued that monopolistic trusts were
designed to circumvent market forces, eliminate competition, inflate consumer
prices, lower wages, and manipulate the political process.
The popularity of the reform agenda rested to a large degree on the fact that
signs of economic exploitation and increasing social polarization were easy to detect
in turn-of-the-century United States. For the working population, life was difficult.
There was little job security as unemployment drastically increased during periods
of overproduction in the 1870s and 1890s. Workdays, often under hazardous
512 P R O G R ESSI V IS M
Progressive Journalists Expose

Modern Life
Progressive journalists played a key role in bringing the underbelly of mod-
ern industrial life out into the light. Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944), for example,
exposed the manipulative practices of the trusts. Her widely popular publica-
tions on the machinations of the Standard Oil Company detailed immoral
business practices and the lack of corporate responsibility for American soci-
ety. Tarbell and other writers used progressive journals and magazines such
as McClure’s, The American, Outlook, and Arena as platforms to popularize the
need for business regulation. Similarly, Jacob Riis (1849–1914), a Danish immi-
grant, chronicled life in New York City tenements in a series of heartrending
photographs, while Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), published exposes of the Chi-
cago meatpacking industry. His essays were widely read and convinced many
of the need for reform.
conditions, were long and wages low. Unsafe work conditions were widespread
and workplace accidents a daily reality. Between 1880 and 1900 thousands of work-
ers died or w
ere wounded in workplace accidents each year. In addition, child labor
was rampant. Massive strikes for better work conditions, unemployment insurance,
and workmen’s compensation w ere often crushed by military intervention.
Cities constituted a microcosm for the effects of the lack of wealth distribution
in North America and reformers worried that urban living conditions might tear
the social and cultural fabric of the nation apart. The size of urban centers steadily
increased as millions flocked to the cities to find work, a result of large-scale immi-
gration between the 1880s and 1920s. Many of the newcomers remained in large
urban centers. Urban infrastructures w ere ill-equipped to adequately provide hous-
ing, sanitation, transportation, and public utilities. The cities also suffered from
overcrowding, pollution, and unsanitary conditions.
To address these challenges, progressive reformers favored some form of gov-
ernment regulatory role to mitigate the impact of previous laissez-faire econom-
ics, improve living conditions, and thus contain the potential for violent unrest
and instability. While such challenges for American reformers manifested them-
selves at the local, regional or national levels, the search for solutions was global.
This global outlook among American reformers was no coincidence but the result
of the accelerating integration of the United States into international policy agree-
ments, standards, and knowledge exchanges. In the decades following the civil war,
expanding transportation and communication opportunities enabled an increasing
number of Americans to travel abroad and record and communicate their observa-
tions to audiences back home.
Non-governmental and governmental internationalism experienced a powerful
upsurge in the second half of the nineteenth c entury. Driven primarily by Western
European states, the United States used the internationalist impulse to modernize
P R O G R ESSI V IS M 513
government bureaucracies and accelerate improvements in areas such as com-

munication, postal serv ices, mining, meteorology, medicine, and agriculture. The
frequent contact between American and international experts and the drive for
standardization in the Atlantic world brought Americans in close contact with
developments abroad; embedding the United States into international networks of
knowledge exchange.
Such networks enabled a global community of government officials, scholars, and
reform activists to meet and learn from each other. Conferences, congresses, and
study tours created opportunities for encounter and gave Americans important
platforms to learn and simult aneously share their insights on everyt hing from
sanitation to resource extraction. Such platforms also enabled American and inter-
national reform activists to rally around moral reform, labor rights, and w omen’s
suffrage.
While the outlook of progressives was global, Europe predominated their think-
ing. Transatlantic relations formed a pathway for Americans into global intercon-
nectivity. Apprehensions about the Old World’s lack of democratic institutions and
Western Europe’s militarism w ere partially mitigated by the widespread percep-
tion that the United States and Western Europe confronted similar challenges of
industrial modernity and that North America lagged b ehind other Atlantic nations
in areas such as workplace safety, public housing, and health and old age security.
As a consequence, more Americans than ever flocked to Europe. Settlement
activists, sociologists, urban planners, public health experts, economists, political
scientists, journalists, and writers descended on European cities from Glasgow to
Berlin and from Rome to Stockholm to study, compare, and collect data for their
own reform projects back home. While G reat Britain and Germany attracted much
attention, even Danish agricultural cooperatives or Swedish pension schemes did
not escape their attention. Clearinghouses of knowledge, such as the Paris Musée
Social, founded in 1894, w ere of particular importance. This research institute was
a world-leading center for information on social experimentation. Similar institu-
tions existed in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Buenos Aires.
The discussions and exchanges of Argentinean economists, British Fabian Social-
ists, the German social policy organization Verein für Socialpolitik, and American
progressive reformers turned the Atlantic world into a vibrant network of knowl-
edge exchange, circulation, and transfer. In many nations, including the United
States, these processes laid the foundations for rationalization and modernization
that were often politically legitimized through the comparative assessment of per-
ceived national shortcomings.
The resulting transfers of reform ideas and practices were driven by the desire
to improve a nation’s international standing, or used to contain domestic criticism
and solidify the political reform agendas of individuals or groups. In practice, trans-
fers were always selective as they interpreted and modified concepts to suit national
contexts and traditions.
Many American reformers, for example, w ere enchanted with British public
housing projects. But their ability to completely transfer such concepts was severely
limited by differing ideas and traditions about public and private ownership in
514 P R O G R ESSI V IS M
Western Europe and North Americ a. Despite t hose limitations, many aspects
of progressive reform, from workmen’s compensation to workplace safety, from
minimum wage laws to strike mediation, and from rural farm cooperatives to
urban zoning laws, originated in Europe and w ere appropriated to suit Ameri-
can contexts.
But such encounters and subsequent adaptations did not only take place in the
world’s industrial core but also in the contact zones between colonial empires.
Some of the transfers in the areas of public health, moral reform, governance, and
prison reform for example, were detoured first through North America’s colonial
possessions before they entered the United States. In addition, United States colo-
nies also became bases in the search for transferable know-how from German,
British, French, and Dutch possessions in many fields from environmental man-
agement to drug control. T hese inter-imperial learning processes constituted an
influential but often overlooked dimension of progressive era reform. In both
cases colonies served as staging grounds for potential domestic reform projects.
Largely removed from public scrutiny such projects benefitted from colonial
power differentials and could be tested and calibrated in these laboratories of
modernity without much effective opposition before their further transfer to the
imperial center. While not all progressives were imperialists, many interpreted
the colonial “civilizing mission” as an important component of the progressive
agenda and viewed reforms at home and abroad as interlocking and mutually
reinforcing.
This affinity between empire and progressivism also hints at the violent under-
side of the Atlantic reform period. In addition to colonial rule, progressive reform
projects also evolved into tools of intrusive, oppressive and exclusionary social con-
trol. The reformers insistence on scientific efficiency quickly identified t hose per-
ceived at endangering social cohesion. Sociocultural and ethnic diversity were
considered obstacles on the way to a truly progressive society guided by princi
ples of cohesion and efficiency. The dark side of the reform agenda was its convic-
tion that sociocultural cohesion could and should be engineered along what they
called “scientific lines” with all means available including eugenics and forced ster-
ilizations. At the core was the question of how to mold a pluralistic society into a
community of shared norms and values along scientific lines. Environmental rac-
ism, eugenics, and the disenfranchisement of non-Anglo-Saxons w ere part and par-
cel of American progressivism and its Atlantic reform discourses.
While this reform discourse had established intense networks of exchange within
Europe and across the Atlantic, transnational learning processes temporarily failed
to contain atavistic nationalism. More so, much of the reform exchanges and trans-
fers and their underlying search for comparative reference societies was guided by
national competition and the search for a competitive edge. Beyond scholarly curi-
osity or nongovernmental transnational social and political activism, states used
these knowledge circuits to advance their own position relative to other national
competitors. Finally, numerous reform projects such as those on environmental
and resource security had an internationalist perspective but were primarily driven
by national policy concerns.
P R OTESTANT M ISSIONA R IES 515
However, World War I only temporarily interrupted but did not end the trans-
atlantic flow and circulation of progressive reform concepts. While it discredited
some of the German approaches to reform, new institutions such as the Interna-
tional L
abor Organization in Geneva absorbed and expanded the role of prewar
reform clearinghouses such as the International Association for L abor Legislation.
American reformers would continue to be deeply embedded in those reform dis-
courses which continued into the 1940s with g reat intensity. While the flow of
progressive ideas and practices had never been unidirectional in transatlantic rela-
tions, the United States had been more of an importer than exporter during
the decades between the 1890s and World War I. From the 1920s onward, it would
no longer be a marginal junior partner in t hose conversations, but increasingly
became the object of European adoration and emulation during this g reat period
of Atlantic social reform.
Frank Schumacher
See also: Migration; Race; World’s Fair Expositions
Further Reading
Dawley, Alan. 2003. Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution. Prince
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kloppenberg, James. 1986. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in Euro
pean and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rodgers, Daniel T. 1998. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge,
Schäfer, Axel R. 2000. American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920. Social
Ethics, Moral Control, and the Regulatory State in a Transatlantic Context. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag.
P R O T E S TA N T M I S S I O N A R I E S
Since the sixteenth century, Protestant missionaries have actively sought to convert
African slaves, Native Americans and fellow Europeans to their particular denom-
inational beliefs and practices. Missionaries hailed from a wide variety of denomi-
nations that included Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Moravians, and Quakers,
and represented a complex mixture of ideas regarding the scope and intent of
conversion. Missionary goals and efforts often reinforced or challenged imperial
prerogatives at various times and in different locations, eliciting the support or
condemnation from local and distant authorities. As a group within the Atlantic
world, missionaries also included indigenous p eople who pursued affiliation with
Euro
pean missionaries and actively sought to incorporate their families and
neighbors within these religious communities. Through circular letters and mis-
sionary tracts, Protestant missionaries forged a vibrant network of information
and human connections throughout the Atlantic world.
The iconic work of John Eliot (1604–1690), who contemporaries like Cotton
Mather (1663–1728) dubbed the “Apostle to the Indians” within his own lifetime,
516 P R OTESTANT M ISSIONA R IES
was the epitome of Protestant missionary activity in the Atlantic world. News of the
ensuing English Civil War (1642–1651) convinced Eliot that the millennial return
of Jesus Christ was imminent and that he and other Puritans within New England
should convert Native Americans in accordance with biblical prophecies. Eliot
worked with a native named Cockenoe to learn the local Massachusetts dialect of
the Algonquian language and began preaching to Native Americans in 1646. Around
the same time, Thomas Mayhew, Jr. (1621–1652) began preaching to the island
Wampanoag on Martha’s Vineyard and Richard Bourne (1610–1682) launched
similar efforts to convert the neighboring Mashpee at Cape Cod. From 1643 to
1671, these missionaries authored a series of reports on the progress of their work,
which editors in London compiled and sold under ambitious titles such as The
Clear sun-shine of the Gospel breaking forth upon the Indians in New-England (1648)
and The Glorious progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians of New E ngland (1649). In
1649, English supporters chartered the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in
New England (SPG) to raise funds for missionary activity, though the organ
ization was rechartered as the Company for Propagation of the Gospel in New
England and the parts adjacent in North America (CPG) in 1662, after the Resto-
ration of the English monarchy. The so-called Eliot Tracts and the CPG served as
a foundational model for missionary communication and organization and pro-
vide an invaluable glimpse into the minds and aspirations of early Protestant
missionaries.
Methods and motives varied across groups and changed over time, though Eliot
and other New England missionaries established a number of precedents upon
which f uture missionaries drew. In keeping with the emphasis that Protestantism
as a religious movement placed on lay access to the Bible, missionaries sought to
learn indigenous languages and translate the Bible and other pious texts, such
as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, to make them accessible to Native Americans.
By 1663, Eliot translated the entire Bible with the assistance of native translators
and scribes, making the so-called “Algonquian Bible” the first Bible printed in North
America. Moravian missionaries were especially active in translating and author-
ing works in native tongues, preserving indigenous languages within these texts
and lexicons which modern linguists still use today. Protestant missionaries
throughout the Atlantic frequently sought to convert indigenous children by teach-
ing them to read and write according to religious catechesis, a form of instruction
into the basic tenants of Christianity such as the Trinity, sin, and Jesus’s sacrificial
death.
Eliot and Mayhew also established the practice of gathering native families into
“praying towns,” which foreshadowed modern reservations. Living in English-style
houses within these communities, Native Americans would learn animal hus-
bandry and farming, female domestic tasks like sewing, and would adopt Christian
manners of dress and behavior. Challenged by English hostility and the desire to
usurp native land, this early organization allowed some communities to survive
through the colonial period and to maintain past traditions. Other missionaries
such as David Brainerd (1718–1747) and John Sergeant (1710–1749) went instead to
Iroquoian and Mahican communities and lived with potential converts, learning
P R OTESTANT M ISSIONA R IES 517
the language and attempting to convert them through preaching to audiences that
typically consisted of women and both the very young and elderly, as men left vil-
lages seasonally to hunt and wage war. Regardless of their living circumstances,
missionaries often maintained the closest and most personal contact with individual
natives and their respective communities. Their reactions to indigenous cultures
and practices wavered at times between disgust and admiration. While they might
complain about the presence of lice and other vermin, native drunkenness, and
the presence of Satan in native religious practices, they often praised native hon-
esty, ingenuity, and piety.
Protestant missionaries embody the geographic bounds of the Atlantic world, as
they worked a mission field spanning the English colonies, Caribbean islands, and
the African coast. Often underfunded and always faced with substantial linguistic
barriers, European missionaries frequently relied on indigenous converts to carry
out the majority of their work. From an indigenous perspective, adopting aspects of
Christianity provided material benefits in the form of colonial allies and access to
literacy, while alternative religious systems provided solace to Native American
communities wracked with disease and colonial conflict, and to enslaved Africans
across the Atlantic. By securing some legal protections for their land, natives at
Natick and other praying towns created attractive new models of community,
despite their hybrid practices. By 1674, some 14 praying towns existed in New
England, in part due to indigenous insistence on expanding a second wave of mis-
sions to the neighboring Nipmuc. Their European counterparts often relied on
native missionaries b ecause they considered Native American and African mission-
aries better suited to the food and material conditions of life among their own
people, in addition to costing substantially less than a European missionary.
The conviction to convert indigenous inhabitants of the Atlantic world to Prot-
estantism often created friction between missionaries, colonists, and magistrates
that ranged from polite disagreement to violent conflict. When the violence of King
Philip’s War wracked New England from 1675 to 1678, John Eliot and Daniel
Gookin (1612–1687) intervened on behalf of the Praying Indians within the col-
ony to prevent mob violence against them and faced insults and death threats for
their actions. Both David Brainerd and John Sergeant mention antipathy from col-
onists regarding native conversion.
Enslaved African converts remained small in number until the mid-eighteenth
century u ntil an influx of Moravian missionaries to the Caribbean islands of
St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix contributed to an explosion of Afro-Protestants.
The evangelical revivals of the G reat Awakening within the British Empire similarly
created an impetus to convert slaves in V irginia and South Carolina. Missionaries
targeting slaves frequently faced contempt and hostility from slaveholders, who
feared that conversion to Protestantism would make slaves ungovernable and rebel-
lious if they presumed to be spiritually equal as fellow Christians. A 1672 edict from
the Virginia legislature forbid Quakers from admitting slaves to their meetings
because this Protestant sect had gained a reputation for condemning slavery. Mis-
sionary John Smith (1790–1824) was convicted and died in prison for presumably
instigating the 1823 slave revolt on Demerara in the British West Indies. By the
518 P R OTESTANT R EFO R M ATION
Samson Occom
Samson Occom (1723–1792), a Mohegan Indian, proved to be the most cele-
brated indigenous missionary of the colonial period. He worked with the
Pequot Indians in eastern Long Island at Montauk from 1749 to 1761 and led
a group of “Indian Christians” to central New York in 1785, where they settled a
new community called “Brothertown” within Oneida territory. Occom’s celeb-
rity status enabled him to travel to England on a fundraising tour from 1766 to
1767, and his surviving writings provide a glimpse of the tension between
indigenous missionaries and their European benefactors. Throughout his min-
istry, Occom struggled to be treated equally by his peers and fellow minis-
ters. While his only published Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772)
railed against native sin and drunkenness in keeping with colonists’ notions of
Native American failures, he also worked tirelessly to petition on behalf of the
Mohegan in Connecticut and the Brothertown community in New York, espe-
cially to protect their land.
nineteenth c entury, a small but vocal group of Protestant missionaries across the
Atlantic called for the abolition of slavery in both Great Britain and the Americas,
arguing that h uman bondage was a grave sin.
Gregory A. Michna
See also: Moravians; Praying Indians; Protestant Reformation; Quakers
Further Reading
Andrews, Edward E. 2013. Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlan-
tic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gregerson, Linda, and Susan Juster, eds. 2011. Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the
Early Modern Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Porter, Andrew. 2004. Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas
Expansion, 1700–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Raboteau, Albert J. 2004. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rugemer, Edward Bartlett. 2008. The Problem of Emancipation: The Car ibbean Roots of the
American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
P R O T E S TA N T R E F O R M AT I O N
The sixteenth c entury in Europe witnessed a series of religious reformations, each
springing up in a different part of the continent u
nder varied circumstances for
reasons unique to the politic al, social, economic, and theological conditions of
that time and place. The Protestant Reformation began in Germany in 1517, with
P R OTESTANT R EFO R M ATION 519
Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) posting a challenge to the Roman Catholic reli-

gious authorities, setting off an avalanche of change that is still in motion today. A
parallel Reformation occurred in Switzerland under Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531)
and later John Calvin (1509–1564). The Anabaptists, a diverse group of social out-
casts, picked up the notion of absolute biblical authority from Zwingli, separated
from the other reformers, and became known as the “radical reformers.” While
these three pieces of the Reformation took place on the European Continent, John
Knox (1514–1572) and Henry VIII (1491–1547) brought a more moderate version
of the Reformation to the British Isles.
Prior to Luther, theologians such as John Wycliffe (1330–1384), in E ngland, and
Jan Hus (1369–1415), in Bohemia, argued for reform of Catholic practices and the-
ology. Wycliffe fought against what he believed to be corruptions within the Roman
Catholic Church including the sale of indulgences, pilgrimages, and rampant
immorality among clergy. Wycliffe’s most significant contribution to reformation
was his translation of the Bible into English. This led to the rise of a group of sup-
porters, the Lollards, who viewed the Bible as the sole authority for doctrine and
life. Wycliffe’s writings significantly influence John Hus (1369–1415), a Bohemian
priest who similarly argued for the supremacy of the Bible over the authority of the
pope. Hus translated Wycliffe’s
writings and published them
widely to his countrymen, which
greatly encouraged the refor-
mation movement in Eastern
Europe. Huss was tried for heresy
by the Roman Catholic Church
and was burned at the stake for
his beliefs. These men empha-
sized the authority of the Bible
and the importance of making
religious literature, especially the
Bible, available in the common
language.
On October 31, 1517, Luther
nailed his Ninety-five Theses to
the Wittenberg church door. In
that era, it was a fairly common
practice to open a public debate
by posting arguments, often in
the form of t heses, in a common
location like a church. Luther’s
actions w ere uncommon in that A 1530 engraving of Martin Luther, the German
they significantly challenged the theologian who ignited the Protestant Reforma-
authority of Roman Catholic tion. The inscription is from the book of Isiah: “In
Church over the improper sale quiet and trust shall be your strength.” (National
of indulgences to raise money for Gallery of Art)
520 P R OTESTANT R EFO R M ATION
the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This fundraising technique, which
was practiced most famously by Johann Tetzel (1465–1519), offered the release
from the temporal penalties of sin for a sum of money. Luther felt Tetzel’s rhetoric
was theologically incorrect and served mainly to frighten the German peasants
into spending money they could not afford for a project that added little value to
their daily lives. Luther never intended to separate from the Roman Catholic
Church but only intended to reform some of the corrupt practices he witnessed,
which also included priests and bishops ignoring their congregations while collect-
ing money from their churches, rampant sexual immorality among priests, and
general clerical ignorance.
At about the same time the German Reformation was beginning, a parallel move-
ment took off in Switzerland. Ulrich Zwingli, a Roman Catholic priest turned
reformer, began the movement in 1518 when, much like Luther, he denounced the
sale of indulgences. Zwingli faced a more militaristic challenge than did Luther,
since Switzerland is much closer to Rome, the center of the Roman Catholic Church. At
the instigation of the political powers in Rome, the Protestant Swiss cantons became
engaged in a military struggle against Roman Catholic Swiss cantons. Zwingli
considered the Bible the ultimate authority for theology. His writing, his preach-
ing, and his ideas on the nature of the Christianity relied heavily on the content
of Scripture. Zwingli’s belief in the Bible as the supreme authority was not put into
practice as fully as some under his preaching felt necessary. This led the Anabaptist
Reformers to split from his church because they understood the Bible’s teaching on
the proper method of baptism differently than the Roman Catholic tradition.
Zwingli was not prepared to accept that particular reform, which led to persecution
of the Anabaptist Christians.
Another Swiss reformer, John Calvin, was trained as a lawyer in France but took
an interest in theology, particularly in the Protestant Reformation that was well
under way in Germany and Switzerland. France, however, was staunchly Roman
Catholic at that time, so Calvin fled religious persecution in 1536. He settled in
Geneva, where he would have a long ministry, with significant influence over all
aspects of life, including government and religion. Calvin instituted the form of
church government that is known as the Presbyterian model. His reforms reflected
the relative stability of his time, some 20 years a fter the Protestant Reformation had
begun. Calvin was a more careful, systematic writer than e ither Luther or Zwingli.
His most famous book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, went through multiple
editions and served as both a basic guide for Christian discipleship and a theologi-
cal text. Calvin believed the civil government had the right and responsibility to
maintain religious order by force. Thus when a heretical preacher, Michael Servetus
(d. 1553), made his way through Geneva, Calvin agreed to his execution.
Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin are often referred to as “magisterial reformers”
because they worked with existing church and civil governments to reform the
doctrine and practice of their churches. In contrast, the “radical reformers” were
people who worked to reform the church from outside the established power struc-
ture. The radical reformers w ere often known as Anabaptists, which literally
means “re-baptizer.” Anabaptists believed that the Bible rejects the baptizing of
P R OTESTANT R EFO R M ATION 521
infants, instead teaching that only t hose who were able to make a conscious deci-
sion to be a Christian should be baptized. The Anabaptists argued that the prac-
tice of infant baptism was a tradition that developed over time in the Roman
Catholic Church in response to high infant mortality rates based on a faulty belief
that baptism washed away sin. Most of the social order of the day was built around
the church and its religious rites. Therefore, when babies were born they were soon
baptized, which got them registered as citizens when the baptism was recorded in
official church records. The rejection of infant baptism tended to undermine the
social order of the day, which helps explain their persecution by governments
throughout Europe. The Anabaptists are actually a widely diverse set of believers
with l ittle in common other than a few basic principles. They believed the Bible
is the ultimate authority for life and church practice, they advocated for baptism
of people who had made a public profession of Christianity, and they all believed
that a major task for Christians was to live as purely as possible. In addition,
most Anabaptists believed the church should not be controlled by the state,
and that people should have the freedom to believe according to their con-
science. In 1527, a large group of Anabaptists gathered to agree on seven articles
of doctrine, which are recorded in the Schleitheim Confession. This statement
of faith is considered a representative sample of central Anabaptist beliefs; in
addition to the issues discussed above, it forbids taking oaths and participating
in armed conflict, and requires the adherents to separate from culture as much
as possible.
The Reformation on the British Isles occurred much differently and less radi-
cally than the Protestant Reformation on the European continent. In Scotland, John
Knox, a Roman Catholic priest, became a Protestant under the influence of the
preaching of several men who had recently converted to Protestantism. Knox
brought to Scotland the Presbyterian form of church government to Scotland that
he learned while studying u nder Calvin in Geneva. Meanwhile, in E ngland, the
Reformation took a much more subtle form. King Henry VIII was a staunch sup-
porter of Roman Catholic teachings. Pope Leo X (1475–1521) awarded him the title
“Defender of the Faith,” because in 1521 he wrote Defence of the Seven Sacraments
against Martin Luther, a rejection of the basic tenets of Luther’s Reformation. How-
ever, Henry VIII’s attitude toward the Roman Catholic Church shifted when he
appealed to the pope in 1527 for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of
Aragon (1485–1536) b ecause she did not produce a male heir for the throne. T here
were both political and moral reasons for the pope’s refusal to grant the annul-
ment, part of which was an alliance between the pope and Spain, where Catherine’s
family held the throne. Frustrated by this denial, Henry VIII convinced Parliament
to pass several acts, including the 1534 Act of Supremacy that named Henry VIII
the “Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of E ngland.” Under this new arrange-
ment, Henry VIII was able to permit his own divorce and marry his mistress, Anne
Boleyn (1501–1536). The Church of E ngland would oscillate between degrees of
Roman Catholicism and Protestantism for several generations as rulers with dif
ferent religious leanings took power. Efforts at reform continued u nder the Puri-
tans; the mutual conflict and persecution between factions continued u ntil the Act
522 PUE B LO R E V OLT
of Toleration was passed in 1689, which permitted both official Church of E ngland
and dissenting religious voices to coexist in relative peace.
In spite of the theological and political diversity evident in the Protestant Ref-
ormation, five basic principles generally tie the Protestant Reformers together; t hese
are known as the “Five Solas.” First, Sola Scriptura (scripture alone) is the belief
that the 66 books of the Protestant Bible alone are the highest authority for m atters
of life and doctrine. Second, Sola Fide (faith alone) is the principle that people can
get to heaven only through faith in Jesus Christ. Third, Sola Gratia (grace alone) is
the idea that human effort is insufficient to earn salvation, but that God must restore
people to himself by an act of unmerited grace. Fourth, Solus Christus (Christ alone)
is the belief that Jesus Christ alone is Lord, Savior, and King over all creation. Fifth,
Soli Deo Gloria (to God alone be the glory) promotes the idea that all of h uman life
should be ordered to give God glory and not primarily for personal enjoyment.
These five points held by the Protestant Reformers differentiated them from the
Roman Catholic Church of their day.
Andrew J. Spencer
See also: Evangelicalism; Protestant Missionaries; Puritans
Further Reading
Gonzalez, Justo L. 1984. The Story of Christianity. Vol.1–2. San Francisco: Harper
SanFrancisco.
Leith, John H. 1988. Theology of the Reformers. Nashville, TN: B & H.
Lindberg, Carter. 2010. The European Reformations. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blacklock.
P U E B L O R E V O LT ( 1 6 8 0 )
The Pueblo Revolt was a violent and successful rebellion orchestrated by the
Pueblo Natives against their Spanish colonizers in August 1680. Taking place in
modern day New Mexico, neighboring Pueblo groups joined together u nder their
spiritual leader Popé (ca. 1630–ca. 1688) and forced the occupying Spanish to
vacate the area. Beginning in 1598, the Spanish rule over the Pueblo had involved
aggressive assaults on the Pueblo culture and religion led by the Franciscan mis-
sionaries. Normally politically diverse and disjointed, the Pueblo peoples rose
together to throw out the Spanish, reasserting their culture, religion, and identity
in the region during a short-lived period of freedom. Spanish rule was reestab-
lished in the 1690s, and even though the Pueblo then largely returned to their
politically divided ways, their culture and religion remained intact. The Pueblo
Revolt is seen by many experts as the most successful native revolt in American
history, and its legacy is long lasting in the region and surviving Pueblo culture.
The Pueblo People of the modern American Southwest actually encompass a
large and diverse group of Native Americans. Named the Pueblo by their Spanish
conquerors, t hese people are most famously known for their elaborate network of
housing and shelter built directly into the canyon walls of New Mexico and Ari-
zona. Descending from the Anasazi, a Navajo word for ancient ones, the many
PUE B LO R E V OLT 523
Pueblo peoples began their unique way of life in the cliffs somewhere around the
year 800. The many nations of the Pueblo largely acted independently of one
another when it came to politics. Individual groups like the Hopi, Towa, Zuni, Tiwa,
and others w ere scattered across the rocky regions of modern day New Mexico
and Arizona. These different groups enjoyed a diverse array of cultural fixtures, as
some operated along matrilineal lines while o thers followed family lines through
their fathers. A wealth of languages existed among the various tribes, as did dif-
fering myths of creation. While their Spanish colonizers viewed the Pueblo as one
continuous group, in reality the region held a diverse population of unique native
people.
Starting in the early sixteenth c entury, Spanish expeditions began interacting
with the Pueblo as explorers like Francisco Coronado (ca. 1510–ca. 1554) and Juan
de Oñate (ca. 1550–ca. 1626) pushed further into the North American continent
from Spanish Mexico. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition in 1540 marks
the first large-scale Spanish venture into the American southwest. In search of the
wealthy city of Cíbola, Coronado’s party embarked with Spanish men-at-arms,
native allies, Franciscan friars, and assorted slaves and servants. After conquering
and commandeering several pueblo villages along the route, Coronado and his men
set the Tiwa Pueblo for their winter camp as the most prosperous and well devel-
oped community they had come across. Labeling the province “Tigeaux,” Coro-
nado and the Tiwa engaged in the first war between Europeans and natives in the
modern day United States. The Tigeaux War lasted through the winter of 1540–
1541. The Spaniards chased the Tiwa out of their lower pueblos towards moun-
tain strongholds. Along the way many Tiwa were brutally killed with some being
burned at the stake. Following a prolonged Spanish siege, the surviving natives
were either slaughtered or enslaved. A fter a prolonged foray north to modern day
Kansas, Coronado and his men returned to the Tigeaux province the next year only
to be chased away by the Tiwa and other native groups practicing guerrilla war-
fare from their mountain dwellings. Coronado and his men returned to Mexico in
1542, leaving behind a path of slain Pueblo and ransacked fields.
Led by Juan de Oñate, the Spanish returned to New Mexico in 1598, with the
goal of establishing permanent settlements. With soldiers, native allies, friars, and
servants in tow, Oñate had plans to establish the Spanish encomienda system in
the new realm of Nuevo México. Learning from their past interactions with the
Spanish, various Pueblo nations reacted aggressively and negatively to the return
of Spanish presence. The p eople of the Acoma Pueblo distinguished themselves in
their dislike and distrust of the encroaching Spanish. Owning one of the most pro-
tected and awe-inspiring villages, the Acoma made an impact on the Spanish dur-
ing earlier encounters. Upon Oñate’s arrival, a small Spanish patrol was almost
immediately ambushed by Acoma warriors. While there is some debate over the
nature of this initial incident, the aftermath was undisputable, leaving 11 Span-
iards dead, including Oñate’s nephew. The Spanish response was swift and brutal,
culminating in the Acoma Massacre. Following a prolonged b attle, many Acoma
warriors and civilians lay dead, and the survivors w ere enslaved. Looking to make
a statement to the rest of the Pueblos, Juan de Oñate ordered that any male Acoma
524 PUE B LO R E V OLT
over the age of 25 have his right foot cut off as punishment. Even though Oñate
was removed by the Spanish King Philip for such a savage decree, several young
Acoma received the amputation. The Acoma massacre instilled a g reat deal of fear
across the region and ushered in Spanish rule.
For the majority of the seventeenth c entury, the Spanish ruled over the region
and demanded tribute from the various Pueblo p eoples. Following the first per-
manent settlements created during the Oñate expedition, the encomienda and repar-
timiento systems w ere established across the region. Spanish leaders w ere granted
ownership of the most fertile farmland in a region and forced the native popula-
tion to work their new lands. In addition to forced labor, the Pueblo p eople w
ere
increasingly burdened by tribute demands of food and textiles. As devastating as
this was to the Pueblo peoples, even more damaging was the introduction of the
Catholic Church to the region. Led by the Franciscan priests, Spanish missions
were set up along the Rio Grande and throughout the region with the expressed
purpose of converting the natives. Initially many Pueblos were allowed to main-
tain their own religion in private as long as a public image of their conversion was
upheld. Starting in the 1650s, this leniency was removed. Led by Fray Alonso de
Posada, the Spanish began an outright assault on the Pueblo p eople’s traditional
Kachina religion. Ceremonial dancing and the use of hallucinogenic drugs were
forbidden. Religious items like masks, prayer sticks, and figures w ere confiscated
and burned. With their attack on the religion of the Pueblos, the Spanish struck
the final chord; seeing their very culture threatened the Pueblo people began to
come together in opposition.
The tensions came to a head in 1675, when the governor of New Mexico, Juan
Francisco Treviño, ordered the arrest of over 40 Pueblo medicine men on the
charges of sorcery and suspected murder. Three of these men were hanged by the
Spanish, while a fourth committed suicide prior to his execution. The remaining
religious leaders were publicly flogged, humiliated, and made Spanish prisoners.
Such a grievous assault on the Pueblo medicine men caused a large-scale response
across the region. A large force of warriors marched on the governor’s residence in
Santa Fe, in protest of the arrests and to demand the release of the remaining pris-
oners. Governor Treviño reluctantly acquiesced to the demands, as the majority of
his soldiers w ere away fighting the Apache and Navajo. Among the released pris-
oners was a San Juan Pueblo native named Popé.
Little is known of Popé before his release from imprisonment in 1675, but his
actions following are well documented. Retreating to the Taos Pueblo, Popé and
those around him began formulating a plan to rid themselves of their Spanish
oppressors. Their plan quickly began to take the shape of a revitalization move-
ment, as they envisioned themselves returning to the old ways after removing the
Spanish and their destructive influence. Focusing on Popé as their spiritual leader
and prophet, the movement gained momentum as a core group spread the mes-
sage to other Pueblos. Concentrating on the key tenants of “Peace, Prosperity, and
Independence,” Popé’s image for Pueblo society envisioned a complete transforma-
tion to their traditional ways. Central to this momentum was the resurgence of
the Kachina religion, which according to Popé’s prophecy would bring about good
PUE B LO R E V OLT 525
Synchronizing the Date of Rebellion

The rebellion of the Pueblo peoples would be most effective only if the vari
ous groups r ose against the Spanish simultaneously—w ithout anyone giving
away the plot too early. To coordinate the initial assault, a simple knotted
chord system was used. Each morning the leaders of the respective Pueblos
would undo one of the knots, when the last was untied the revolt began. Such
secrecy came at a high cost, however. Popé is rumored to have killed his own
son-in-law over his inability to trust him with the messages. Indeed, the plot
was eventually discovered a fter several messengers w ere captured and tor-
tured, which led Popé to launch his revolt a day earlier than planned.
health and bountiful harvests (Liebmann 2008, 365–367). The rebellion gained
support across the region, with only the southern Tiwa Pueblos refusing to join as
they were the most integrated within the Spanish system by this point.
Popé’s plan began to take shape in secret over an effective network of commu-
nication across the normally politically divided Pueblo peoples. On the morning
of August 11, 1680, the revolt would begin with each Pueblo rising up and killing
the Spanish in their immediate vicinity. Once completed, the entirety of the revolt
would amass and march on Santa Fe to remove the remainder of the Spanish. The
revolt itself was remarkably successful as the many Pueblos r ose up together and
stole h
orses, killed Spanish soldiers, civilians, and Franciscan missionaries across
the region. The revolt eventually culminated in the siege of the remaining Span-
iards at Santa Fe. Following a relatively short siege, which saw the Pueblo cut off
the water supply to the city, the remaining Spaniards decided to make their escape.
Rallying his remaining soldiers and civilians, Governor Antonio de Otermín rode
out of the city and into battle. A fter inflicting heavy casualties upon the Pueblo,
the survivors turned south and made their return to Mexico. Many Spaniards w ere
killed during the revolt which left New Mexico firmly in the hands of Popé and
the Pueblo.
Over in less than two weeks, the revolt signified the removal of Spanish oppres-
sion and the leaders intended to enforce it. Popé and his religious leaders banned
any remnant of Spanish influence. In their return to antiquity, the Pueblo barred
Catholicism, Spanish-introduced crops, and even marriages conducted under Span-
ish rule. The original nature of the Pueblo p eople returned in the void left by the
Spanish, as individual communities returned to their independent politics. T here
was much pushback and disagreement over the post-revolt policies of Popé. Seek-
ing a true return to their traditional ways before the Spanish, the many Pueblos
again drifted apart and Popé was deposed within a year of his victory.
While the Pueblo Revolt removed the Spanish from New Mexico in 1680, it was
only temporary as the region was fully reconquered by the end of the century. The
revolt’s lasting legacy shown through the return of Spanish rule as the many Pueb-
los were granted large land grants and offered clemency in the practice of their
526 PUE R TO R I C O
traditional religions. Following the Spanish reconquest, the Pueblos experienced

a much greater range of freedom and agency within the Spanish system, seeing
Spanish agents appointed to defend their rights and culture against Spanish intru-
sion. While the revolt might not have secured permanent independence of the
Pueblo p eople, it did ensure the survival of their culture.
James Sandy
See also: Conquistadors; Franciscans; Reconquista
Further Reading
Knaut, Andrew L. 1995. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-
Century New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Liebmann, Matthew. 2008. “The Innovative Materiality of Revitalization Movements: Les-
sons from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.” American Anthropologist. 110 (3): 360–372.
Roberts, David. 2004. The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of
the Southwest. New York: Simon & Schuster.
PUERTO RICO
An island in the Car ibbean lying east of the Dominican Republic and 1,000 miles
southeast of present day Florida, Puerto Rico was one of the earliest European estab-
lishments in the New World. When Christopher Columbus discovered it on
November 19, 1493, it was home to Taíno and Carib Indians, but by 1508, the
Spanish Empire had established a permanent foothold on the island under the lead-
ership of Juan Ponce de León. Ruling over Puerto Rico through the frequent power
struggles waged with E ngland and France for control of the Car ibbean Sea, Spain
ruled Puerto Rico u ntil it was invaded by U.S. forces during the Spanish-American
War.
By 1521, Spanish settlers had suppressed any remaining resistance from the
native population, and Puerto Rico not only became another Spanish settlement in
its expanding empire, but the center of its colonizing venture in the New World. The
Spanish searched for gold, subjugated the native population into a workforce, and
continued their evangelical mission to spread Catholicism to the New World. While
initial settlement usually focused on its potential for economic gain, Puerto Rico
soon became of strategic importance for its location. The island served as the path-
way to the West Indies, and was the first stop for all Spanish ships heading toward
newly discovered islands. As such, in the sixteenth c entury, it was hotly contested
by France and E ngland. Along with native Caribs, the French and English con-
tinually tried to take control of the island.
As in the case with the majority of European colonizing efforts in the New World,
the native population on Puerto Rico started to decline in the first two decades of
Spanish settlement. Settlers also realized that the island did not have a vast supply
of gold. In the 1520s, many colonists were driven away and new settlement waned
as a result of low mine yields, a decrease in the native population, higher prices
for slaves, Caribs’ depredations, lack of defense, plagues, and hurricanes. Facing a
PUE R TO R I C O 527
period of depopulation, the situation was only reversed with the advent of sugar
production. As a result of the new enterprise, migration to South America was
halted, and the importation of slave labor helped to increase the population.
By 1531, the African slave trade replaced most of the native workforce. Half of
the slaves on the island w ere acquired illicitly, as p
eople who had been licensed by
the Crown to import slaves would exceed their authorized limit. Since the island
depended heavily on slave labor, foreign traders made vast sums of money ship-
ping contraband slaves to Puerto Rico. During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, French, English, Portuguese, and Dutch traders were responsible for the
majority of the slave traffic on the island. A governor appointed by the Spanish
Crown ruled over the island, and the Spanish system of mercantilism kept Puerto
Rico u nder strict trade restrictions, only allowing them to transport goods to Spain.
This tight hold on commerce only facilitated the spread of illicit trading with other
nations, and from the middle of the sixteenth century, Puerto Rico became a hub
for smugglers throughout the Car ibbean.
The eighteenth century marked a radical change on the island. For the first half
of the century, privateering, piracy, and the proliferation of illegal trade continued
to define the economic landscape on the island. Spain continued to view Puerto
Rico as a military stronghold, rather a source of colonial wealth. That changed when
the Spain decided to make reforms to bolster the economy and promote cultural
development on Puerto Rico, a fter growing tired of constant conflict with Euro
pean nations over privateering and piracy. The Crown recognized that Puerto
Ricans had actually flourished u nder the system of illegal trade. It immediately
expanded the array of goods it imported, making it unnecessary for the inhabit-
ants to look to smugglers for goods. It granted land grants to locals, and encour-
aged agricultural production, particularly in the newly expanding coffee industry. It
reinforced and reorganized the military presence on the island, and also legalized
trade.
As Puerto Rico began trading with foreign nations, it soon made connections
with the United States. As the British Navy came to dominate the seas, the Span-
ish joined the French in a war to curtail British superiority. As Spain’s attention
was drawn away from the Car ibbean, Puerto Rico looked to trade with the United
States. Spanish commerce lost its foothold on the island, and Puerto Rico followed
the revolutionary spirit that had been spreading through South America. An era
of privateering and widespread piracy actually hurt the Puerto Rico economy in
the eighteenth century, and led to tense relations with the United States and Euro
pean merchants.
During the nineteenth century, Puerto Rico continued to experience g reat
changes in political and social reforms. As Spain looked to end the trafficking of
slaves, the agricultural sector had to look to the island’s free population to pro-
duce sugar and coffee. As the free work force grew, so did calls for reform. Island
political parties w
ere formed, which soon led to Puerto Ricans seeking auton-
omy form the Spanish government, a feat that was accomplished on November 9,
1897. Although Puerto Rico had secured acknowledgement from Spain declaring
their autonomy, the different political parties on the island had trouble reaching
528 PU R ITANS
agreements, and the elections for the positions of authority in the new government
were a shaky process. Puerto Rico’s attempt at self-government would not last long,
due to the intervention of the United States in the war between Cuba and Spain.
On July 25, 1898, U.S. sailors raised the first American flag on Puerto Rico soil.
Three days later, U.S. General Nelson A. Miles issued a proclamation that severed
ties between Puerto Rico and Spain. From then on, the colonial experiment in
Puerto Rico was an American affair.
Jeremy Maxwell
See also: Columbus, Christopher; European Exploration; Smuggling; Taínos
Further Reading
Carrión, Arturo Morales. 1983. Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company.
Picó, Fernando. 2006. History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of Its P
eople. Princeton, NJ: Markus
Wiener Publishers.
Pierce Flores, Lisa. 2010. The History of Puerto Rico. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
P U R I TA N S
The Puritans were comprised of several splinter groups of the Church of England
that arose toward the end of the sixteenth c entury. The Puritans w ere known as
religious reformers, seeking to shape a worship style and lifestyle in England that
they felt reflected the best aspects of the Protestant Reformation and their read-
ing of the Bible. They gained power in E ngland from 1649 to 1660, but a backlash
against their strenuous application of moralistic social reforms led to persecution,
which caused many English Puritans to flee to Continental Europe and to the New
World, mainly in New England and the West Indies. While often seen as sober
minded and sincere, they also acquired a reputation for being legalistic and severe
in enforcing moral and religious conformity.
The roots of Puritanism lay in the English Reformation, which began in 1534
with the rejection of the pope’s authority by King Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547).
B ecause the pope would not grant King Henry VIII an annulment of his first
marriage that would allow him to marry a second woman, Henry declared him-
self to be head of the Church of England. Unlike the Protestant Reformation on
the European continent, the Church of England did not reject the doctrines or prac-
tices of Roman Catholicism initially.
About 30 years after the Protestant Reformation started in Germany, E ngland
got its first truly Protestant King. King Edward VI (r. 1547–1553) introduced a
prayer book in the common language, which began a broader shift toward more
popul ar accept ance of Protestantism. Queen Mary I (r. 1553–1558) succeeded
Edward VI and restored Catholicism to England. She persecuted the English Prot-
estants, thus driving many Puritans to Geneva, Switzerland, where they saw the
influence of the Reformed religion in John Calvin’s teaching. When they returned
from exile, they brought many of Calvin’s ideas of an ideal society with them, which
included u nion between the church and the state.
PU R ITANS 529
From the beginning of the English reformation, some Puritans remained in the
Church of England, seeking to reform the worship practices from within. They
worked to remove many of the practices that reflected, in their view, a Roman
Catholic tradition that added to the content of scripture. Thus, there was a move
toward simpler serv ices with more preaching of scripture. Many prominent Puri-
tans were Calvinistic Protestants who were committed to the authority of the Bible
and determined, as they saw it, to return both society and the church to biblical
roots. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603), t here w ere attempts
to reconcile the Roman Catholic and Protestant sects theologically. In 1563, the
Church of England established the Thirty-nine Articles that still form the founda-
tion of belief for the denomination. Attempts at compromise were not successful.
The Puritan movement was not satisfied and continued to attempt to reform the
Church of England from within. In response, in 1583 Parliament proposed a law
to suppress non-conformist ministers, preventing those who disagreed with the
Thirty-nine Articles from having a sanctioned role in church life. This led some
Puritans, particularly the Presbyterian wing of the party, to become increasingly
dissatisfied. It was during this time that many Puritan worshipers, seeking better
preaching and more biblical worship, formed separate congregations apart from
their assigned local parish churches. Additional religious splinter groups formed,
too. For example, the modern Baptist movement traces its roots to t hese separatist
dissenters.
The growing theological differences with the Church of E ngland led some Puri-
tans to seek refuge permanently in other areas of the world. One group of separat-
ists from the village of Scrooby in Yorkshire fled first to Holland and then Plymouth
in New England. L ater groups would follow, settling along the east coast of the
United States and in the West Indies. T hose groups that settled in the area known
as New E ngland are now known as the Pilgrims. The Puritan migration to the
Americas was a movement of families, unlike many other movements to s ettle on
the American continent that were largely comprised of unattached young men looking
for a fortune. Also, the early Puritan immigrants were more highly educated, more
intensely religious, and w ere seeking to establish government instead of avoiding its
influence. These characteristics led to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other settle-
ments in New England being much more ordered and formal than other American
colonies.
The Puritans were a loose confederation of a number of dissenting theologies,
such as the Quakers, Antinomians, Baptists, and Congregationalists. The widely
varied doctrinal understandings of the many theological differences among Puri-
tans laid the groundwork for the later fragmentation of the movement, particu-
larly as witnessed on the American continent. The nonconformists from the Church
of E
ngland w ere highly interested in conformity in their own religious practices,
often ostracizing or punishing those who acted as religious dissenters. Other groups
seeking freedom to practice their religion soon joined the Pilgrim Puritans in North
America, but they would settle apart because the Puritans did not tolerate differ-
ing doctrinal views.
In England by the middle of the seventeenth century, Puritanism was popular
among the m iddle and lower classes, which enabled a rise to social prominence.
530 PU R ITANS
Many of the Puritans fought with C romwell during the Civil War in E ngland and
became known as the “Roundheads” because many of them had close-cropped hair
in contrast to the longer hair that was in fashion. When Cromwell’s forces suc-
ceeded in abolishing the monarchy, many faithful Puritans found official positions
in the new government. The Puritans gained political legitimacy and began to carve
out a place of acceptance in English society, but such gains did not last long. The
bloody rise to prominence through the English Civil War created a fractured soci-
ety that was less stable than a more peaceful revolution would have permitted.
When Cromwell died in 1658, King Charles II was given the throne and a many
of the church reforms of the Puritans were rolled back. This led to a period called
the G reat Persecution by English Puritans. In 1661, Parliament passed the Corpo-
ration Act, which prevented anyone outside of the Church of E ngland from holding
a public office and to swear allegiance to the Church of England. In 1662, Parlia-
ment required the use of the Book of Common Prayer as the official liturgy, thus
further alienating Puritan pastors and worshipers from the Church of England.
Over the next 10 years, further legal penalties w ere assigned against those who
dissented from official forms of worship, including the Puritans, until King Charles
II began to offer more religious freedom. T here was a degree of religious tolerance,
albeit tentative, until 1689 when the Act of Toleration was passed. The Act of Tol-
eration lifted the religious restrictions on public office, thus tolerating dissenting
groups, although the Church of E ngland remained the official religion.
The time of the English Reformation, led by the Puritans, was full of economic
as well as religious upheaval. Industrialization was just beginning, subsistence
farmers w ere beginning to enter into the growing market economy, and the largely
rural population began to populate the cities. The socioeconomic unrest and reli-
gious shifts led to new questions being asked and new responses, both social and
theological, being formulated. Also, settling the North American continent led
to an air of possibility for advancement across many fronts. This led the Puritans to
have a sense of the economic possibilities. They saw subduing the North Ameri-
can wilderness as part of a divine mission to bring order to the world.
The Calvinistic Puritans’ reading of the Old Testament led them to see the gov-
ernment as a legitimate means of enforcing religious lifestyles, which led, at times,
to abuses of power. They w ere characterized by a desire to live in accordance with
the Bible, which they believed to be God’s divine revelation. This led them to pore
over Scripture and find ways to shape their daily lives and the broader society
according to the content of the Old and New Testaments. They practiced strict Sab-
bath observance; many activities w ere forbidden on Sundays. Sometimes the Puri-
tans in New England interpreted their settling of North America as an opportunity
to set up a society that perfectly reflected the religious morality in the Bible, which
led to some excesses such as the Salem witch trials and persecution of minority
sects such as Catholics and Baptists. It also sometimes led the New E ngland Puri-
tans to exalt their own goals to establish a pure society over the rights of Native
Americans. On the other hand, the Puritans also developed effective means to assist
people in poverty by supplying food and clothing, providing means for honest
labor, and helping the poor to rise out economically. The Puritans tended to value
PU R ITANS 531
nature and to try to preserve it through establishing parks and using sound agri-
cultural practices. Their early forms of environmentalism were largely driven by
their understanding from the Bible that God created everything and gave humans
responsibility to care for it and improve it.
The strict religious attitude of the Puritans has led to numerous myths about
Puritanism in the centuries since they w ere the majority European group in New
England. Some myths about the Puritans have more basis in fact than o thers. First,
some accuse Puritans of being opposed to fun. In reality, although Puritans recog-
nized times for sober reflection and decorum, particularly on Sunday, they also
were concerned about showing joy and thanksgiving when appropriate. Puritans
participated in recreational sports such as hunting, fishing, bowling, swimming,
skating, and archery. Second, Puritans are said to be opposed to sex. The large
size of many Puritan families undermines this myth. Puritans understood sexual
intercourse to be an act reserved for—and indeed an essential part of—marriage.
Third, Puritans are often portrayed as wearing drab, intentionally unfashionable
clothes. While they often wore plain black clothing for Sundays and special occa-
sions, for everyday life many Puritans wore bright colors and well-decorated clothes
consistent with the fashions of the day. Fourth, Puritans have been seen as legal-
istic moralists who only judged people by their beh avior. In truth, there was a
respect for the individual and heavy reliance on the role of personal conscience in
decision-making.
Andrew J. Spencer
See also: British Atlantic; Protestant Missionaries; Protestant Reformation
Further Reading
Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn. 2014. The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors. Carlisle: Banner
of Truth.
Ryken, Leland. 1986. Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were. Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan Academic.
Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles: Roxbury
Publishing.
Q
QUAKERS
The Society of Friends, or Quakers, are a religious movement that began in E ngland,
in the 1650s, as part of the Protestant Reformation. Although it was a reaction to
Calvinism, Quakers and Puritans shared some common experiences, both in
England and in the New World. Whereas the Puritans set out in the 1620s to cre-
ate a “City upon a Hill,” which they hoped would serve as a beacon of enlighten-
ment that would eventually reform the entire Anglican Church, Quakers sought
to conduct a “Holy Experiment” that included religious toleration and focused on
gaining their right to worship as they wished. Their goal was freedom of conscience
rather than reforming the existing church. Between the 1650s and 1900, Quakers
created an Atlantic-w ide community of people with shared ideas who communi-
cated regularly. Much of their communication was administered by the London
and Philadelphia Yearly Meetings, which created and maintained communication
networks to distribute news, ideas, and publications that explained and defended
their unique faith. By the twentieth c entury, they had created a network of social
justice movements around the world.
The Society of Friends formed in the 1650s as part of the Protestant Reforma-
tion. Quaker beliefs included the ideas that humans are justified not by their own
merit but by God’s grace alone, that all believers are part of a mutual priesthood
that allows them to receive and share the message of the Holy Spirit, and that God’s
desire as revealed in the Scriptures and to humans through the revelations of the
Holy Spirit take primacy over human desires and ideas. Quakers believed that hon-
esty, simplicity of dress, and distance from the state and its wars was the essence
of Christianity. They rejected Calvinist notions of predestination as well as infant
baptism and nationwide churches and they embraced notions of quietism, which
stressed complete subordination of self will, both in their worship and in their daily
lives. This set of ideas began with George Fox’s (1624–1691) preaching in England
in the 1650s. In the early years, Margaret Fell (1614–1702) provided a central point
for correspondence for Fox and his fellow travelers at Swarthmoor Hall, her home
in Cumbria, England. Known today as the mother of Quakerism, Fell was one of
the early preachers and missionaries among the Valiant Sixty, a group of itinerant
preachers primarily from northern England who spread the Quaker creed in the
early years of the movement. Her role as a vocal and public face of the movement
led her to write one of the first feminist tracks in England, Womens Speaking Justi-
fied, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (1666). Quakers met in her home u ntil
they managed to build a meetinghouse nearby in 1691.
534 Q UA K E R S
A nineteenth-century illustration of George Fox preaching in New York. A leader of the

Society of Friends, Fox crossed the Atlantic in 1671 to preach in the Car ibbean and
North America. (New York Public Library)
By 1655, traveling preachers w ere spreading Quaker ideas to colonies through-

out the Atlantic, including the Car ibbean and North America, and George Fox
made the trek to the Caribbean and the North American colonies in 1671 to spread
the Gospel Order among Atlantic world Quakers. Surviving correspondence from
Swarthmoor Hall, where Fell’s papers are still maintained, includes letters and cor-
respondence from Quakers in Barbados, V irginia, and Maryland. The collection
includes communications shared by itinerant Quakers, Quakers in the American
colonies, and English Friends, providing evidence of the transatlantic networks that
existed as early as 1655. The papers include travel narratives as well as reports of
negotiations with Native Americans for land in North America.
As Quakers began to centralize their efforts through such bodies as Yearly
Meetings and committees, Swarthmoor Hall would be replaced by centralized
bodies in hubs throughout the Atlantic from London to Bristol, Dublin to Phila-
delphia. The London Yearly Meeting emerged in 1668, and became the center of
the Quaker faith. A fter that, the Meeting for Sufferings emerged in 1675 to push
for fair treatment of Quakers throughout the Atlantic world, to record sufferings
in the “Great Book of Sufferings,” and to lobby the home and colonial govern-
ments for Quaker rights. This body, which would later become known for its role
in the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, established a lobbying tradition that
other Protestant dissenters later duplicated. The Meeting for Sufferings, along with
the Morning Meeting, also began to take care of communicating with Friends in
Q UA K E R S 535
the Car ibbean and North American colonies, and the Morning Meeting provided
oversight for traveling ministers but was eventually absorbed by the Meeting for
Sufferings.
As this structure emerged, Friends faced a challenge in providing advice and
discipline in their Atlantic-w ide community. The Morning Meeting sent books and
writings with the traveling ministers they oversaw to foster transatlantic and inter-
colonial networks. London was the main hub in this system. The city was home to
a number of publishing firms, and the Quaker administrative meetings centered
there developed distribution methods that provided a regular flow of ideas and
information to Quaker communities throughout the colonies. Books served as the
main vehicle for disseminating their ideas. According to Jordan Landes, the Quaker
press was born in the 1650s out of efforts to use books and other publications such
as pamphlets to defend the Society from anti-Quaker publications (Landes 2015,
38). Friends gave t hese publications to government officials hoping they would read
them and gain an understanding of, and sympathy for, Quakers. In addition, Lon-
don Quakers developed a distribution system of sending materials to correspon-
dents who would then distribute them locally. Through this method, Robert
Barclay’s (1648–1690) An Apology for True Christian Divinity (1676), considered the
first printed work of Quaker doctrine, was sent to the colonies where it became an
important source for Friends who had little contact with ministers. The book, along
with the writings of George Whitehead (1636–1723), a Quaker lobbyist known
for advocating religious freedom before English monarchs, represented doctrinal
works accepted by the Morning Meeting.
In addition to these publications, meetings throughout the Atlantic world used
epistles to correspond, share ideas, and ask and answer questions pertaining to
doctrine. Quaker leaders sent epistles to specific colonies, and Fox sent more than
30 of them to Quakers and Meetings throughout the Caribbean and American col-
onies between 1657 and 1687.
In E ngland and in the colonies, Quakers faced persecution for trying to spread
their ideas. In E
ngland, everyone was required to support the established church
through tithes and, at least superficially, through adoption of the prevailing creed,
which went back and forth from Catholicism to Anglicanism several times in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A fter the English monarchies were restored
in 1660, following years of civil war that pitted Protestants against Catholics, Quakers
found themselves subjected to heightened persecution for assembling to worship
and for refusing to swear oaths or to remove their hats in the presence of author-
ity figures. T
hese practices resulted from Quaker beliefs that men w ere subject
only to God’s authority, not to the authority of other men. Friends’ refusal to aban-
don these radical ideas led to the seizure of their property, their imprisonment, and
in some cases their banishments under anti-Quaker laws. In the colonies, Quakers’
attempts to challenge prevailing beliefs resulted in persecution and, in some
cases, execution. The most famous example occurred in Massachusetts, where
Puritans saw Quaker ideas as threatening to the theocracy they w ere trying to create and
hanged four Quaker ministers. Even so, Quakers remained in New E ngland, particu-
larly Rhode Island, as well as New York, V irginia, and North Carolina. They spread
536 Q UA K E R S
westward in accord with the growth and expansion of the colonies, and later the
United States.
Most Quakers in the North American colonies converted after traveling across
the Atlantic, but o thers set up their own colonies specifically as havens for Friends.
These colonies included West New Jersey, founded in 1675, and Pennsylvania,
founded in 1681. Their hope was to create societies in which they could escape
persecution. William Penn, who had served as a trustee of West Jersey, was granted
a charter by the king of England to found Pennsylvania, setting off a migration of
Quakers to North America that took place throughout the 1680s. Historians, how-
ever, disagree on the scope of this migration. Many historians have argued that an
estimated 8,000 Quakers emigrated from E ngland, Wales, and Ireland to Penn-
sylvania during this period, but o thers maintain that the number was much lower,
perhaps closer to 1,000 (Landes 2015, 127).
Quaker colonizers, like others in the Atlantic, had to obtain land from native
peoples, establish a trade network to support their colonies, develop a labor force
that often relied upon forced labor, and find a steady way to maintain contact with
friends and family at home. Establishing a colony based on ideas of religious tol-
eration and liberty, Quakers also had the added challenge of introducing and sup-
porting their faith in their new colony while accepting those who did not share
their ideas. Though they are known for treating Native Americans and enslaved
Africans less harshly than most other Europeans, it does not mean that they did
not participate in the exploitation that pervaded the Atlantic world.
Quakers in the American colonies would live in relative harmony until the 1750s,
when they would begin to argue over slavery, war, the acquisition of wealth, and
the role of the faithful in reform movements. Disagreements led to schisms within
the faith, most famously when Quaker missionary George Keith (1638–1716) tried
to introduce uniformity in the 1690s and when Elias Hicks (1748–1830), a traveling
Quaker preacher from New York, began to preach the primacy of the Inner Light
over scripture while discounting the virgin birth of Christ and denying the exis-
tence of Hell in the 1820s. This latter disagreement led to a split between Orthodox
and Hicksite Quakers in the United States that occurred in 1828 and lasted until
1968. One important aspect of this split involved the question of w hether or not
Quakers should maintain an inward focus and limit their engagement with the
broader world or participate in reform movements such as abolition. Hicksites
were leaders in the antislavery movement, introducing the notion of “free produce,”
a moral boycott against slavery that led adherents to refuse to use any good pro-
duced by enslaved labor.
Quakers, like the Puritans before them, left the colonies not to escape all con-
tact with their homeland but to spread their religious notions to broader audiences
while also finding a way to achieve self-sufficiency and financial success. Quakers
saw migration to the New World as a way to improve their economic status while
spreading their faith, successfully combing their faith with business opportunity.
Their reputation for honesty in all business m atters, due partly to their religious
practices, gained for Quaker merchants a positive reputation that left their associ-
ates throughout the Atlantic eager to do business with them. This led to a quick
and lasting success in both the Old and New World.
Q UE B E C 537
Quakers also played an important role in Atlantic world politics. Their strug
gles for religious liberty led to higher rates of toleration both in E ngland and in
the colonies, not just for Friends but for other dissenters as well. In addition, they
put their faith into practice politically in Pennsylvania as they worked to create
their model religious society. They tolerated settlers of all religions, but they built
their legal systems based on the tenets of their own faith. One of the most famous
examples involves their Peace Testimony. Their refusal to participate in war and
violence often led to politic al dissention in their colony, especially during the
American Revolution, and eventually ended in the colony falling to non-Q uaker
leadership.
Quakers have played an important part in many reform movements through-
out the Atlantic world and continue to do so today. Their belief that all human
beings contain an inner light that can connect with the Holy Spirit led them to at
least attempt to treat Native Americans fairly and, eventually, to fight against the
slave trade and then slavery itself. Their Peace Testimony also led them to oppose
war, from the Seven Years’ War to the conflicts of the twenty-first c entury. Through
organizations such as the American Friends Serv ice Committee, they continue to
protect and support victims of aggression, and pacifists, throughout the world.
Beverly Tomek
See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of the Slave Trade; Protestant Reforma-
tion; Puritans
Further Reading
Barbour, Hugh, and J. William Frost. 1988. The Quakers. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Hamm, Thomas D. 2003. The Quakers in America. New York: Columbia University Press.
Landes, Jordan. 2015. London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: The Creation of an Early
Modern Community. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
QUEBEC
The province of Quebec occupies a special position among the Canadian provinces.
Founded by settlers as a part of the North American colony of New France in the
seventeenth c entury, Quebec was s haped by French language and social habits as
well as by the Roman Catholic faith. The French cultural heritage survived the Brit-
ish takeover in 1763 and played a crucial role in the province’s further develop-
ment. The name Quebec traces back to the Algonquin word kébec meaning “where
the river narrows” which refers to the settlement’s location on the St. Lawrence
River.
The establishment of New France began with the voyages of Jacques Cartier
(1491–1557) and his claiming of the land on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River
for the French Crown in 1534. At first, the main economic interest lay in the vast
fishing stocks off the Canadian coasts. After the first contacts with the native popu-
lation, the Europeans traded commodities such as knifes and blankets for the bea-
ver furs that w
ere abundant in Canada and were desperately needed in Europe for
the production of felt. To develop the fur trade, permanent settlements and trading
538 Q UE B E C
posts w ere necessary. However, the first attempts met with failure and just a few
settlers survived the harsh winters.
In 1608, the explorer and navigator Samuel de Champlain (1574–1635) founded
the city of Quebec as a transshipment point for the fur trade and an outpost for
colonization. The original town consisted of a large building surrounded by pali-
sades, the so-called Habitat. Like previous settlements, Quebec had to fight for its
survival, especially in the winter. Until 1627, it had 65 inhabitants. In the same
year, Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), the French Chief Minister, chartered the
Compagnie de la Nouvelle France and vested it with a trade monopoly for the North
American colony. The company was obligated to bring 4,000 settlers to New France
over the next fifteen years but it did not show much effort to fulfill this require-
ment and just 300 found their way to New France through 1640. In 1629, Quebec
was lost to England during the Anglo-French War. Even though it was returned to
France three years later, the company never recovered and investments in New
France stalled.
After the dissolution of the company in 1663, King Louis XIV (1638–1715) deter-
mined the colony to be a province of France. He established the Sovereign Coun-
cil as a governing body that was directly under the authority of the Crown and
seated in Quebec City. It consisted of a governor, who commanded the military
and was responsible for foreign affairs; an intendant in charge of justice, finance,
and the economy; 5 (later 12) councilors; and the bishop of Quebec.
The bishop’s place on the council shows the dominant position of the Catholic
Church in New France. Since as early as 1615, missionaries had come to the colony.
The Jesuits, in particular, shaped life in Quebec and their claim for social leader-
ship clashed with the interests of the merchants and governmental authorities. To
become more independent from the Crown and its influence on religious matters,
the Jesuits obtained the establishment of a diocese. Quebec became a bishop’s see
that was subject to the pope, and the church, in the person of the first bishop,
François-X avier de Montmorency-L aval (1623–1708), strengthened its role as the
predominant institution in the colony.
The population in and around the city of Quebec increased during the 1660s
as a result of immigration. Every year, a contingent of 300 persons, mostly farm-
ers from the French coastal regions, came to North America. In addition, a por-
tion of the troops who w ere sent to New France to protect the settlers against the
Iroquois, decided to stay. Officers had the chance to receive the title of a Seigneur
which was held by the semi-feudal landowners at the top of the colony’s social hier-
archy. Immigration virtually came to an end in the 1670s, but the population grew
further by natural reproduction. When the French rule ended in 1763, the num-
ber had risen to 8,000 in Quebec City and 60,000 in the whole colony.
The French and Indian War started in 1754, resulting from disputes over the
Ohio country which was claimed by France and G reat Britain. The two countries
and their Indian allies fought each other in different theaters in North America.
Although the French gained some remarkable victories in the beginning, they
were luckless in the further course of the war. With their victory at the Battle of
the Plains of Abraham, the British took Quebec City and sealed the fate of New
Q UET Z AL C OATL 539
France. At the Treaty of Paris (1763) France had to cede all its Canadian posses-
sions to Great Britain. A fter the takeover, King George III issued the royal proc-
lamation that created the province of Quebec and set the terms of government.
In the wake of the disturbances that would lead to the American Revolution
the British government was anxious to secure the allegiance of the Quebecois
and made great concessions regarding the peculiarity of the province. The Que-
bec Act of 1774 restored French civil law (including the Seigneurial System),
guaranteed the free practice of the Catholic faith, and replaced the oath of alle-
giance. Instead of a British-style representative parliament, a governor and an
appointed 20-person council formed the center of the political sphere. The mea
sures did not lead to enthusiastic support for the Loyalists but the inhabitants of
Quebec did not join the revolutionaries of the Thirteen Colonies in their fight for
independence.
Due to the influx of thousands of Loyalist refugees, the English-speaking pop-
ulation in Quebec grew. The new inhabitants refused the Seigneurial System and
other French practices so that Quebec was eventually divided into English-
dominated Upper and French-dominated Lower Canada with the Constitutional
Act of 1791. Struggles between the Lower Canadian (elected) Legislative Assembly
and the (appointed) colonial government and the strong role of the Quebecois
nationalist Parti Canadien led to two armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838. They were
followed by new reforms such as the reunification of the two parts of Canada. In
1867, the British government formed the Dominion of Canada by joining the prov-
inces of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The Dominion was granted
self-government, with external affairs remaining under the control of Great Brit-
ain. Quebec became a distinct province of the new Dominion and remained in a
special position.
Jonas B. Anderson
See also: Champlain, Samuel de; Fur Trade; Treaty of Paris
Further Reading
Dickinson, John A., and Brian Young. 2008. A Short History of Quebec. 4th ed. Montreal:
McGill-Queens University Press.
Lacoursi, Jacques, and Robin Philpot. 2009. A People’s History of Quebec. Montreal: Baraka
Books.
Q U E T Z A L C O AT L
One of the principal deities in Mesoamerican mythology, Quetzalcoatl was per-
ceived as god-creator of the world, human beings, and culture; lord of the ele
ments; the god of the morning star and twins; patron of priests and science; and the
governor of Toltec capital, Tollan. In the mythology, he is thought to be the son of
Mixcoatl, the god of hunting and the legendary founder of the Toltec state, and Chi-
malma, the goddess who was thought to be a spirit who accompanied Aztecs on
their way to home.
540 Q UET Z AL C OATL
The name of Quetzalcoatl consists of two Nahuatl words: quetzal, a small bird
with bright emerald plumage that is highly prized in many Native American cul-
tures, and coatl, which means serpent. In general, the name, meaning “feathered
serpent,” symbolized the junction of eternal wisdom and bright beauty. In the most
widespread iconographic depictions of Quetzalcoatl, he is shown as a g iant green
or yellow, fire-spitting serpent with wings. Europeans often identified the image
as a dragon. Quetzalcoatl can also be depicted as a man whose lower body is
replaced by the serpent’s body or as a man luxuriously dressed in the mask of Quet-
zalcoatl or with a white beard. Sometimes Quetzalcoatl appears with a thorn, a
special tool for bloodletting, in his hands, implying that he was the first deity who
self-sacrificed and became a forerunner of the human sacrifices that were a part
of Mesoamerican cultures and were practiced widely by the Aztecs. Nevertheless,
according to the legends, Quetzalcoatl himself never practiced h uman sacrifices—
he used only snakes, birds and butterflies for sacrifices.
The earliest displays of the Quetzalcoatl cult have been traced to the seventh
through fifth centuries BCE at the sites of Olmec culture located mostly in present-
day Mexico. At that time, Quetzalcoatl was personified as the Atlantic wind that
brought moisture on the Olmec fields and as a cultural hero who has brought maize
for the people. The cult of Quetzalcoatl spread throughout Mesoamerica during
the first through sixth centuries CE, when, according to legend, Quetzalcoatl taught
people to find and process precious stones to construct buildings, to make mosa-
ics of feathers, to monitor the movements of stars and calculate dates with the help
of a calendar. Quetzalcoatl became associated with sacrifices, fasting, and prayers.
He also became the patron of priests. Images of feathered snake were widespread
in the Teotihuacán civilization of the third through eighth centuries CE, when he
was considered to be close to the other important Mesoamerican deity Tlaloc, the
god of rain. In the seventh through ninth centuries, Quetzalcoatl was often repre-
sented in an anthropocentric fashion and his cult became more closely connected
to the rulers of Xochicalco, one of the biggest ancient Mesoamerican city-states
located in the contemporary Mexican state of Morelos. The cult of Quetzalcoatl
took on increasing prominence within the Toltec culture between the ninth and
twelfth centuries; in the Toltec capital of Tollane (also called Tula) the Quetzal-
coatl temple was the principal ceremonial place. According to tradition, Quetzalcoatl
arrived in Tollane at around 980. During the tenth through thirteenth centuries
this cult was widespread throughout Maya mythology and culture, where Quetzal-
coatl could be referred to as Kukulcan and Gukumatz, whose names also mean
“feathered serpent” in different Mayan languages.
The highest rise of the Quetzalcoatl cult is observed in Aztec times, the thir-
teenth through fifteenth centuries, when Quetzalcoatl was perceived as a symbol
of death and resurrection, the patron of priests, and the protector of crafts. In this
society, he was also considered to be the god of learning and writing and the inven-
tor of calendar and books. In Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, he was especially
revered in religious schools by sons of nobles and priests.
As it developed, the Quetzalcoatl story grew to include a narrative of banish-
ment and an anticipated return. According to legend, Quetzalcoatl was involved
Q UET Z AL C OATL 541
in an unfair fight with his nemesis Tezcatlipoca, another central deity of the Aztecs,
whose name means “those who brings death.” Quetzalcoatl was defeated in Tollane;
put under a spell by Tezcatlipoca’s black magic, he broke his own principles by
drinking heavily and having sexual relations with his own s ister, leading to many
accidents among his p eople. Quetzalcoatl had to retreat. On a raft made of ser-
pents he went to the remote eastern country located on the other side of the sea
and, according to one of the many versions of the legend, he promised to come
back in a One Reed, that is, in one cycle of the Maya calendar, which occurred in
1519, coincidentally the year Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico. Many researchers
believe this was the reason that upon his arrival, Cortés was received as a guest,
perceived by the local population as the expected return of Quetzalcoatl.
In spite of the fall of the ancient Mesoamerican civilization after the Spanish
conquest, their mythology was well documented by invaders in a series of codi-
ces. Quetzalcoatl and the general image of the “feathered snake” still remain an
important part of the collective memory of the region. In 2012, the U.S. National
Endowment for the Humanities sponsored an exhibition “The Children of the
Plumed Serpent: the Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico,” which took place
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Olena Smyntyna
See also: Aztec Empire; Cortés, Hernán; Olmec Civilization; Tenochtitlán
Further Reading
Carrasco, David. 1982. Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec
Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Read, Kay A. 2002. Mesoamerican Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs
of Mexico and Central America. New York: Oxford University Press.
R
RACE
Race, a quality that might refer to one’s physical appearance as much as to the area
of the world from which one originates, is a construct that has informed social
hierarchies and ways of life throughout the Western world for millennia. In the
early Atlantic world, Europeans in particular classified p
eoples to some degree
according to their skin color and ancestry. Ideas about race became attached to
relationships of power that resulted in the domination of certain groups of people
over others and in widespread ethnic and cultural destruction, particularly in Africa
and throughout the Americas. The contact and intercontinental migration of p eoples
in light of t hese power dynamics yielded increasingly complex racial relationships
that had lasting cultural, economic, political, and social reverberations on both
sides of the Atlantic.
Discussing race in an historical context can be challenging b ecause vocabulary
deemed accurate or acceptable in any given period, and particularly within the last
few decades, regularly evolves. When Christopher Columbus landed in 1492 on
the island of Hispaniola (today the location of Haiti and the Dominican Republic),
he believed that he had arrived in Asia. For this reason, he labeled the Native Amer-
icans of that island with the term Indian. Despite later learning that the Guaraní
with whom he met were located on land situated far from India, Europeans and
later indigenous p eoples themselves continued to refer to the original inhabitants
of North, Central, and South America as Indians. Laws and constitutional docu-
ments in countries such as Canada and the United States today continue to men-
tion Indians in the context of land rights and autonomy, despite a general rejection
of the name due in part to its historical misuse. Like Indian, discarded terms such
as Negro once used by the English in the early modern period are today consid-
ered outmoded and problematic, although t hese terms may be encountered within
historical documentation. It is therefore important to understand to whom terms
implying race might refer and where possible to be critical of the sociocultural con-
text of their use.
The origin of European hierarchies of race furthermore nourishes the present
discussion b ecause prior to Europe’s encounter with the Americas, it was believed
that three principal races existed on earth and were distributed amongst the three
known continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe. Race has significant geog raphical
implications which, from a Judeo-Christian perspective, originated from the biblical
story about Noah whose sons would inherit the earth following the flood. Accord-
ing to the book of Genesis, Noah decided that his least favorite son, Ham, would
receive Africa and that his descendants would serve t hose of his second son, Shem,
544 R A C E
who would receive Asia. Japheth, his third and favorite son, received Europe and
the descendants of both his b rothers would serve t hose of Japheth.
This biblical story explains many of the ordering principals that have been used
by Europeans to dominate other p eoples and exposes a key problem confronting
Europeans when they finally realized that Columbus had neither arrived to Asia
nor met with the descendants of Shem. New interactions between p eoples in the
early Atlantic destabilized this model of geo-racial relations that had been followed
for centuries. Not only was there a fourth part of the world that had not been
accounted for in the biblical story, but it was unclear how the p eoples of the Amer
icas fit into or upset the racial equilibrium undergirding the ordering principles
used by Europeans at the time.
For the first several decades following Columbus’s arrival, European theologians
and scholars debated if the indigenous peoples of the Americas were human because
they could not account for them within their biblically-inspired, geo-racial schema
for understanding how humanity was structured. It was thought that they belonged
to none of the races that had been known in the Old World and, for this reason, their
classification as part of the h uman race was in question. A Spanish priest, Bar-
tolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), who himself had previously been a conquista-
dor, argued that Native Americans were indeed human. The establishment of this
fact created, in the European mindset, a new racial collective that encompassed
the variety of peoples found in the Americas.
The perspective offered by Las Casas was adopted and laws were established that
governed how races could interact in the Atlantic world. One of these practices
involved the sixteenth-century abolition of forced labor exerted by Native Amer-
icans in the Spanish Americas. Rather than indigenous l abor, English, Portuguese,
Spanish, and to some degree French authorities favored the African slave trade
that had been functioning in Europe since well before Columbus’s time. By extend-
ing this system and source of forced labor across the Atlantic, Europeans created
the opportunity for additional encounters between racially distinct p eoples that
later significantly impacted the development of race and culture within the Amer
icas. At the same time, Europeans introduced within the Americas the mechan-
ics for reproducing the organization of peoples according to race and ethnicity
used in the Old World.
From the racial hierarchy of the early Atlantic world emerged a modified set of
ordering principals. Still attempting to dominate all others were Europeans, but
in the absence of Asian peoples, enslaved and free African peoples moved into a
higher social position and eventually gained greater social and economic mobility
throughout the Americas. The particular process through which black p eoples
achieved this mobility is complex. Some scholars argue that the emancipation of
black peoples in countries such as present-day Haiti helped to consolidate com-
mon interests linked by racial identity in the movement toward independence from
European colonial rule though events such as the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804).
Replacing Africans as the least powerful group within the societies that developed
throughout the Atlantic world w ere the indigenous p eoples of the Americas.
Evidently, race pointed to social and economic power. The interaction of races
furthermore led to great variation when European men married Native American
RACE 545
omen, or African women gave birth to the babies of European men. A complex
w
group of terminology developed in many European languages to specifically refer to
the offspring of interracial relationships. Some of these terms—such as black,
Creole, mulatto, and white—are still used today and the terms African and Euro
pean racially remain connected to blacks and whites, respectively. This vocabu-
lary was necessary for both religious and secular authorities to classify people and
document their entitlements within society at large based on their racial makeup.
Children of Aztec-Spanish c ouples, for example, often called Mestizos, became
exposed to aspects of life and sometimes skills, such as the ability to read and write
a European language, that might not otherw ise have been available to them had
the children been born to an Aztec c ouple. Along with the power ascribed to their
race, Europeans dominated in terms of imposing the lingua franca of the Old World
upon the New World, which in turn forced an association between race, skill
sets, and the language of communication. The acquisition of certain skills allowed
individuals to cross the social and cultural barriers that were imposed upon all
racial classifications.
From another perspective, when the Spanish arrived at Mexico in the 1520s and
Peru in the 1530s, they immediately attempted to inscribe the power dynamics of
the Aztec and Inca peoples within the model used in seigniorial Spain. Successful
conquistadors such as Francisco de Pizarro (ca. 1471–1541), for example, took the
wife of the deceased Inca king, Atahualpa, as his partner; and she bore him c hildren.
Despite being of different races and originating from distinct classes (as Pizarro
was not considered nobility and was of illegitimate birth), both the Incas and Span-
ish understood nobility and class structure similarly and crossed racial bound
aries using the perception of class as a point of commonality that essentially joined
these two peoples and made room for one group to occupy the other’s space. The
same means of occupying space did not develop to this extent within African
contexts.
The early intermingling of races became a means of finding commonality
between p eoples with otherw ise distinct cultures and languages, which in turn
allowed political alliances—such as the ones that formed between Pizarro, his men,
and the Inca nobility—to flourish under difficult circumstances. In one way, this
intermingling yielded cultural bridges through which one culture could be under-
stood by another, but these bridges almost always benefited European conquerors
and colonists. It is significant that groups such as the Métis in Canada and the
United States, a group whose racial composition is both indigenous and French or
indigenous and English, has historically been discriminated against for being nei-
ther European nor Native American. The namesake for this people comes from the
French term méstissage, which derives from the Spanish word mestisaje, or mixing.
Purity of blood, whether European or indigenous, remains a political issue in some
areas of the Atlantic because rights and forms of taxation accorded to indigenous
peoples may not apply to p eoples like the Métis. Some government authorities
consider t hese peoples less indigenous from a racial perspective and thus not enti-
tled to certain rights and state support.
A caste system developed in many colonial societies in which p eople’s economic
and social possibility became directly tied to race in terms of who they could marry,
546 R ALEI G H , SI R WALTE R
how much they were taxed, which serv ices they w ere entitled to, and so on. In
another way, this intermingling created new regional identities that later developed
into nations that sought emancipation from colonial rule. Some areas of the Amer
icas are more remarkably affected by racial integration than o thers whereas in Africa
this phenomenon garners less attention and is greatly impacted by the phenome-
non of diaspora. Geographical displacement also fundamentally affected one’s posi-
tion within this system of castes and races. Spaniards born in Europe who lived in
the Americas and later returned to Spain were viewed as superior to American-
born Spaniards who often occupied administrative positions of lesser consequence
than t hose held by their European-born counterparts. Therefore, race could be fur-
ther stratified according to geographic origin.
The practice of identifying and classifying individuals according to race has par
ticular repercussions with respect to the processes of discovery and exploration.
Scholars typically study how predominately white men came to and settled within
the Americas or explored and exploited the lands of Africa. Nearly no scholarship
has examined how peoples such as the Mi’kmaq of Eastern Canada, who traveled
by canoe to Greenland and perhaps even farther, centuries before Europeans came
to the continent, discovered and explored the Atlantic world. Few works of schol-
arship document the travels of Aztecs or Incas to Europe during and after the six-
teenth century, and barely any attempt has been made to understand how Africans,
particularly when enslaved, viewed Europe and the Americas upon first arriving
to these lands. And nearly nothing is known about how non-Europeans discov-
ered and explored the Atlantic world prior to or following the European appre-
hension of a fourth part of their world. Rather, most scholarship focuses on the
European actors of conquest and colonization such as Columbus or Jacques Cart-
ier (1491–1557) and some scholars seek earlier antecedents to these voyages in the
travels of Vikings to North America.
Lauren Beck
See also: Casta System; Code Noir; European Exploration; Haitian Revolution; Las
Casas, Bartolomé de
Further Reading
Beidler, Philip D., and Gary Taylor, eds. 2005. Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medi-
eval to Modern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weaver, Jace. 2014. The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World,
1000–1927. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
R A L E I G H , S I R WA LT E R ( c a . 1 5 5 2 – 1 6 1 8 )
Sir Walter Raleigh was an English explorer, privateer, courtier, author, and entre-
preneur, and the first Englishman to attempt to colonize the Americas. Raleigh
believed that settlement overseas was the key to enhancing Protestant England’s
wealth and dominating Catholic Spain. Well connected, albeit not well liked, at
court, his confidence and swashbuckling charisma charmed Queen Elizabeth I
R ALEI G H , SI R WALTE R 547
(1533–1603). With wealthy and experienced colonization efforts in Ireland, Raleigh

soon established himself as the central figure in England’s colonizing endeavors.
His colony at Roanoke, North Carolina, although ill fated, provided a model for
subsequent English colonies that tried to maintain groups of families, not just men.
His important Discoverie of Guiana (1596) is an example of explorers’ travel literature
that combined ethnographic description with rumor, striving to inspire investment
in exploration. He was executed for treason in 1618.
Raleigh came from a relatively poor family in Devon. L ittle is known about his
early education. During 1569–1570 he was a soldier in France, fighting for the
Huguenots. He attended Oriel College, Oxford, sometime around 1572. In 1575, he
began legal training at the M
iddle T
emple, London. In 1578, Raleigh sailed with his
older half-brother, the explorer Humphrey Gilbert, intent on acquiring Spanish
plunder. In 1580, he led soldiers to Ireland to combat the Earl of Desmond’s Rebel-
lion. L ater, in 1586, Raleigh was granted 42,000 acres in Ireland (Nicholls and
Williams 2011, 36).
Upon his return to England in 1581, Raleigh experienced a meteoric rise at court.
Elizabeth granted him monopolies on trade in wine and wool. In 1585, he was
knighted and named Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, and Vice-Admiral of the West.
He represented Devon as a member of parliament in 1584 and 1586. In 1584, he
obtained letters patent to hold any lands he acquired in explorations if they were
uninhabited by Christians. Raleigh’s men came across Roanoke Island (in North
Carolina’s Outer Banks), strategically located to harass Spanish shipping. Since Eliz-
abeth I would not allow her favorite to leave, Raleigh’s cousin, Richard Grenville, led
a voyage to Roanoke in 1585. B ecause Raleigh thought of Roanoke as a privateer-
ing base, his colonists were soldiers. Short of provisions and engaged in warfare
with the native population, the first Roanoke colonists returned to England with
Francis Drake in 1586. Important sources on indigenous p eople originated in this
sojourn, including Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land
of Virginia (1588) and John White’s paintings.
In 1587, a city of Raleigh was planned for Chesapeake Bay. The settlement, with
John White as governor, was to consist of families engaged in trade. For unknown
reasons, instead of g oing to Chesapeake Bay, they stayed in Roanoke. John White
Sir Walter Raleigh, the Original Gallant?

According to legend, Sir Walter Raleigh first caught the eye of Elizabeth I when
he spread his velvet cloak over a mud puddle so the queen would not have to
soil her royal feet. The story is a fiction, however, first reported 80 years after
the event supposedly took place. Raleigh is also said to have introduced pota-
toes to Europe and tobacco to England. Neither is true. Still, Raleigh’s real
deeds—as explorer, courtier, privateer, and colonial promoter—provided more
than enough adventure for one man’s life.
548 R ALEI G H , SI R WALTE R
returned to E ngland and updated

Raleigh on the colony. Supply
ships Raleigh sent to the settlers
were attacked by French priva-
teers and returned to England.
Soon thereafter, the Spanish
Armada attacked England in
1588. Raleigh was intimately
involved in E ngland’s defense,
and preoccupied with his Irish,
not American, colony. The cli-
mate of instability meant that
White could not return to Roa-
noke until 1590. By then the
colonists had disappeared.
Raleigh’s personal conduct
reaped disastrous political con-
sequences in 1592, when his
dalliance with the queen’s lady-
in-
waiting, Elizabeth Throck-
Sir Walter Raleigh wearing a fashionable ruffled morton, led to a pregnancy and
collar known as a ruff. An advocate of English secret marriage. Outraged at what
exploration, his wit and charm made him an she perceived as Raleigh’s dis-
influential figure at Queen Elizabeth’s court. loyalty, the queen imprisoned
(Library of Congress) them. When released, they w ere
exiled from court. Raleigh occu-
pied himself with parliamentary serv ice and organizing at least one privateering
voyage annually u ntil 1595.
In 1595, Raleigh was granted a charter to claim the lands of non-Christians.
For the first time, Raleigh himself crossed the Atlantic and sailed to Guiana (mod-
ern day Colombia and Venezuela) with its alleged gold mines and golden city of
Manoa in the empire of El Dorado. Despite the extreme heat and near impossibility
of navigating the Orinoco River, Raleigh’s famous The Discoverie of Guiana (1596),
was an enthusiastic account of Guiana’s riches and potential for English settlement.
However, the journey was expensive and unsuccessful.
In 1596, Raleigh took a prominent role in orchestrating England’s attack on
Cadiz, Spain. The success of this mission put Raleigh back in the queen’s good
graces, although he never regained his earlier influence. With the accession of James I
in 1603, Raleigh lost his monopolies and his position at court. Within a few
months he was implicated as a conspirator in the Main Plot against James. Raleigh
was imprisoned in the Tower of London and attempted suicide. He was found guilty of
treason in a sham trial and sentenced to death. James rescinded the death penalty,
but Raleigh remained incarcerated. During his imprisonment, Raleigh composed
his best-selling The History of the World. In 1616, a fter 12 years’ imprisonment, Raleigh
was released to lead another voyage to the mythical gold mines of Guiana. Bad
weather, disease, and an inexperienced crew hampered the journey. Raleigh’s own
R E C ON Q UISTA 549
son died fighting the Spanish. Such combat violated the terms of Raleigh’s promise
to James that he would not harass Spain. Unable to find the fabled gold, Raleigh’s
fleet deserted him and he had to put down a mutiny on his own ship.
Upon return to England, Raleigh was imprisoned. He was sentenced to death
based on his earlier conviction. On October 29, 1618, a hoarse and feverish Raleigh,
still ill from a malady contracted in Guiana, arrived at Old Palace Yard, London,
for his execution. He made one of the most famous scaffold speeches in English
history, speaking eloquently and calmly for 30 minutes before being beheaded. The
image of the once dashing, now frail and elderly, servant of Elizabeth humbly
accepting the deadly punishment meted out by her successor was an enduring one
that was invoked over the succeeding decades as an example of Stuart tyranny.
Colleen M. Seguin
See also: British Atlantic; Elizabeth I; European Exploration
Further Reading
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. 1984. Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony. Savage, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Nicholls, Mark, and Penry Williams. 2011. Sir Walter Raleigh in Life and Legend. London:
Continuum.
Raleigh, Sir Walter. 2006. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of Guiana. Edited by Joyce Lorimer.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
R E C O N Q U I S TA
Reconquista is a Spanish term used to describe a long series of wars in which the
Christian states of Spain recaptured lost territories from the Moors (Muslims). These
wars spanned approximately 770 years (718–1492) and ended immediately prior
to Spain’s discovery of the Americas, which was a catalyst for the beginning of the
rise of the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic empires. The Reconquista is seen as
providing the Christian Iberians (peoples living within the Iberian Peninsula, a
region in Europe that includes Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and Gibraltar) with not
only the military expertise, but also the religious conviction, with which they would
later undertake the conquest of the Americas.
In 711, the Moors, consisting chiefly of soldiers of North African Berbers (a name
given by the Arabs to North African people who were part of settled or nomadic
tribes extending from Morocco to Egypt), crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Africa
and began their conquest of the Iberian Peninsula (referred to by the Moors as Al-
Andalus). The region was embroiled in a civil war at the time, a circumstance the
Moors used to their advantage. Spurred by their recent victory in conquering the
western part of Northern Africa (modern-day Morocco), they launched several raids
into the Iberian Peninsula.
It is unclear w
hether the initial invasion was actually a consorted campaign of
plunder or was motivated by the invaders’ hopes for further exploration and ter-
ritorial expansion. Regardless, historians see this as one of the most significant
events in Iberian history. As a result of these initial raids, over the next two decades
550 R E C ON Q UISTA
the Moors advanced into Europe and controlled the majority of the Iberian Penin-
sula, occupying all but small, isolated areas in the north of Spain. The Reconquista
wars w ere centered around the gradual recovery of territory and reinstatement of
Christianity in t hese lands. The religious motivation of the military campaigns was
important to the overall movement since the papacy in Rome supported these
efforts and sent reinforcements from other Christian realms to help see through
their success.
The beginning of the Reconquista dates to circa 718 (historians are unsure of an
exact date for the first attack), when the Christian Asturians (natives from the region
of Asturias in northwest Spain) retaliated against their Moorish invaders, culminat-
ing in the Battle of Covadonga, where Pelagius of Asturias (ca. 685–737), a Visigothic
nobleman, led a rebellion against the local Muslim governor Munuza (Uthman
ibn Naissa). Although Muslim fighters attempted to quell the rebellion, Pelagius’s
forces and allies eventually prevailed, defeating the Muslim army in 722. This was
the first significant victory of the Christians over the Moors. Fighting continued,
with the Reconquista’s most active years spanning between 850 and 1250.
Over the next several hundred years, the Christians and the Moors fought each
other in fierce battles throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Charlemagne of France
(ca. 748–814) vowed not to allow the Moors to advance into France, and the Chris-
tian campaigns to take back the peninsula would last over 700 years. Numerous
battles were won and lost on both sides. By 1300, Portugal was again entirely Chris-
tian (a result of the conquest of the Algarve u nder King Alfonso III of Portugal),
and only the emirate of Granada remained in Moorish hands.
During the latter part of the Reconquista, many Christians considered it a holy
war similar to the Crusades (1095–1291). While the wars may have begun as a
war of reconquest, they gradually became accepted as a fight by the w hole of Chris-
tendom. The rulers of Spain’s kingdoms found that their shared Christianity could
unite them and set them apart from the Muslims further south. With each victory,
Christians saw their triumph as evidence that their God actively supported their
cause, a belief that they would later apply to their interactions with the native civi-
lizations of the Americas. This feeling of righteousness—which had gained trac-
tion over the years of fighting—was later applied to interactions with anyone that
they encountered who was not of the same belief system. The Catholic Church as
a whole endorsed the removal of the Muslims from Europe, and several military
orders of the church, such as the Order of Santiago and the Knights Templar, joined
in key battles of the Reconquista.
As a result of their successes in the peninsula, the Spanish and Portuguese con-
sidered carrying the fight back across the Strait of Gibraltar into Northern Africa
(the origin of the first Moorish invaders). Indeed, some even began to see the free-
ing of Jerusalem from Muslim hands as possible. Both parties recognized that any
attack, big or small, on Muslim North Africa held the potential to weaken Islam as
a whole. This included direct assaults, as well as the digression of trading profits
into Christian hands through piracy and contraband. Territorial expansion down
the coast of West Africa came to be seen as going hand in hand with their religious
objectives because it held the ultimate prospect of weakening Islam’s stronghold
R E C ON Q UISTA 551
in the south. In other words, Reconquista motives served as a means by which the
Spanish and Portuguese Crowns could justify their earliest experiments with ter-
ritorial expansion.
The drive into Africa was interrupted for several decades in the years after 1350.
Importantly, Iberia was affected by large-scale problems that afflicted fourteenth-
century Europe as a w hole, including the Black Death, war, and internal social
conflict. The Kingdom of Castile, now the largest on the peninsula, suffered severe
political and social disruptions for over a c entury, but Portugal recovered sooner.
Although Portuguese exploration did not gain momentum until late in the fifteenth
century, their reconquest of territories and absence of internal struggles appears
to have enabled them to look outward into the Atlantic with a determination that
other European powers, including the Spanish, could not compete with initially.
After years of fighting, Spain’s independent kingdoms were finally united when
King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile (collectively referred to
as “The Catholic Monarchs”) w ere married in 1469. Although parts of their king-
dom w ere still ruled by the Moors, the c ouple turned their united forces on Granada
with renewed strength. A series of reforms, including a concerted effort to raise
the image of the monarchy and rein in regional autonomy increased the monarchs’
abilities to see the Reconquista through to completion.
The Reconquista officially came to an end on January 2, 1492, with the fall of
Granada, Spain. The last Muslim ruler, Muhammad XII of Granada (ca. 1460–1533)
surrendered his kingdom to the Catholic Monarchs. With this, the Moors lost their
last foothold in Spain, officially ending Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula.
Although Christians and Jews had been allowed to retain their religions by pay-
ing a tax (jizya) u nder the Moorish occupation, the new Christian hierarchy was
far less forgiving. On July 30, 1492, all Jewish p eople w
ere forcibly expelled from
Spain, and within 10 years, Queen Isabella I declared conversion to Catholicism as
compulsory throughout the entire Kingdom of Castile. L ater that same year, Chris-
topher Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, most certainly carrying with him the
tangible memories of Iberia’s experiences with the Reconquista. L ittle did Colum-
bus realize that this was just the beginning of a period of conquest, colonization, and
evangelization far larger than anything that the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns
had ever undertaken, spurring the exponential growth of the Spanish Empire
throughout the Atlantic world.
Melisa C. Galván
See also: Columbus, Christopher; Conquistadors; Islam; Portuguese Atlantic
Further Reading
O’Callaghan, Joseph F. 2003. Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press.
Reilly, Bernard F. 1992. The Contest of Christian and Muslim Spain: 1031–1157. Cambridge:
Blackwell.
Watt, W. Montgomery. 1992. A History of Islamic Spain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
552 R I C E
RICE
Rice is the common name for two species of grain belonging to the Oryza genus:
O. glaberrima and O. Sativa. The former was first cultivated in Africa and has a
reddish hue, while the latter was first cultivated in Asia and is white when milled.
Rice requires more w ater than other cereal grains to grow, and most strains need
to be partially submerged while growing. Around the Atlantic, African rice pro-
duction served as a model for Europeans to introduce rice into the Americas with
African slave labor, and it became a major cash crop around the turn of the eigh
teenth century. The end of slavery in the nineteenth century reduced the profit-
ability of rice production as former slaves refused to continue d oing rice agricultural
work, and its status as an Atlantic cash crop waned.
Rice agriculture in Africa predated contact with Europeans. It was likely domes-
ticated there 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Fifteenth-century Portuguese explorers
recorded the presence of rice paddies next to rivers and estuaries along the west-
ern African coast. In the areas of modern-day Sierra Leone and Gambia, African
rice planters developed a system of tidal irrigation using canals, dikes, and sluices
to manage the flow of water. The labor of making rice was divided along gender
lines with men building and maintaining the irrigation infrastructure and women
hoeing the fields and milling the rice.
The wet fields needed for rice cultivation provide an excellent habitat for mos-
quitoes, especially those of the Anopheles genus which transmit malaria. Western
Africa’s long history of rice production likely encouraged endemic malaria in the
region and may have contributed to the presence of malaria-resisting traits in pop-
ulations in rice growing areas. When Europeans noticed that p eople from these
areas were less susceptible to tropical diseases, they wrongly attributed t hese traits
to all sub-Saharan Africans and used the perceived differential immunity as a basis
for racialized slavery in tropical areas across the Atlantic.
The Portuguese transported rice to their American territories as early as 1514.
Historical sources note slaves growing rice for their own consumption in Brazil
from the 1570s, and 40 years later, it had become a northeastern Brazilian staple.
Because of Brazil’s close ties to Africa and the slave trade, the rice first planted and
eaten in Brazil was most likely the reddish African variety.
In North America, Lowcountry, South Carolina and later Georgia became the
predominate sites of rice agriculture. Much like in Brazil, rice production started
in Carolina as a subsistence crop in slave provisioning grounds perhaps as early
as the colony’s founding in 1670. Historical sources note the red color of Carolina
rice in this period indicating that it was likely African in origin. However, Asian
rice quickly replaced the African variety as the preferred strain b ecause of its higher
yields and l ater its ability to stand up to machine milling. By the end of the c entury,
when rice had become a v iable commercial crop, the Asian variety was being
exported from Carolina. Nevertheless, African rice continued to be grown for local
consumption into the nineteenth c entury.
Though rice cultivation existed in the southern parts of Europe in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, its African roots heavily influenced its introduction to the
Americas. Rice followed transatlantic slave shipping routes to the Americas, and
slaves were its earliest cultivators in the New World. The previous experience that
RICE 553
African slaves had with rice s haped the way it was cultivated in the Americas. The
methods of planting and irrigating rice used in the Lowcountry areas of South
Carolina mimicked West African methods of growing the crop, and Carolinian
plantation o wners preferred to purchase slaves from areas known for rice produc-
tion. The technologies for processing rice also continued African traditions. For
instance, enslaved women were responsible for milling and cooking rice onboard
slave ships as well as on plantations in the Americas. Additionally, the mortars and
pestles used to prepare rice in the Americas before the introduction of mechanical
rice mills were based on African versions.
Though African familiarity with rice cultivation introduced it to planters in the
Americas, increasing consumption made it a cash crop. Carolina’s early rice exports
went to feed slaves in the West Indies and to southern European nations that had
a history of rice cultivation, but over the course of the eighteenth c entury, Euro
pean demand for rice exploded. It came to be used for brewing beer, making paper,
and as an accompaniment to fish in Catholic countries in which p eople abstained
from meat on Fridays. As the market for rice grew, planters in the Americas had
their slaves plant more rice and increasingly chose to invest slave l abor in building
the infrastructure of dikes and sluices necessary for rice agriculture. As early adopt-
ers proved the model of rice production along the Carolinian coast, o thers devel-
oped techniques to grow it along the low country’s many rivers and streams. The
success of the crop also encouraged planters to invest in agricultural techniques
and technologies such as water-powered rice mills that increased production, sped
its preparation for market, and ultimately made the grain increasingly profitable.
The introduction of rice cultivation to the Carolina low country and surround-
ing areas transformed the environment and p eople’s relationship to it. Previously
undesirable wetlands and perennially flooded fields w ere transformed into agri-
culturally productive land. However, the infrastructure built to control the flow of
water and make rice agriculture possible altered the existing flow of water, and
plantation o wners often engaged in legal b
attles when the construction of one dam
effectively ruined another’s fields. The creation of rice paddies and their sea-
sonal flooding provided exceptionally good breeding habitats for mosquitos,
inadvertently encouraging the presence of mosquito-borne illnesses, including those
imported from tropical Africa, such as malaria and yellow fever.
On rice plantations, slaves usually worked according to a task system, rather
than a gang system, of labor. U nder a task system, slaves w ere given an area to
plant or weed in a given amount of time (usually a quarter acre per day). After com-
pleting their assigned work, slaves could do as they chose. They often used their
time to grow food on their own provisioning grounds as well as trading their extra
produce to other slaves or selling it in markets.
The success of commercial rice production in South Carolina inspired the Portu-
guese in Brazil to emulate the plantation model in the middle of the eighteenth
century. Slaves w
ere imported from rice producing parts of Africa for their expertise
in growing the crop, and in 1772, the colonial government outlawed the planting of
red African rice to prevent it from intermingling with white Asian rice, which had
become the norm in international trade. Brazilian efforts at plantation rice produc-
tion ebbed in 1822, when Brazil declared its independence from Portugal.
554 R I C E
Rice as Feed for Animals

Rice was the lifeblood of the nineteenth-century Carolina low country—not
only for the men and women who depended on the crop for their livelihood—
but for the animals, too. According to one observer of Georgetown, South
Carolina, “Little corn is raised in the district; everything is fed on rice; horses
and cattle eat the straw and bran; hogs, fowls, &c. are sustained by the refuse;
and man subsists on the marrow of the grain.”
Source: Mills, Robert. Statistics of South Carolina: Including a View of Its Natural, Civil,
and Military History, General and Particular. Charleston, 1826, 558.
The success of Carolina rice production also affected the grain’s use in Africa.
At the end of the eighteenth century, British abolitionists created a colony in Africa
next to the Sierra Leone River for former slaves and their descendants. The aboli-
tionists hoped to demonstrate that African-descended p eople in Africa could be
economically successful without slavery. Rice, based on the Carolinian example,
was one crop they hoped could be a v iable export from Sierra Leone. As in Brazil,
white rice was imported to Africa despite the long-term cultivation of red rice
because Atlantic rice traders preferred it. Though Asian rice had been introduced
in parts of West Africa as early as the sixteenth century, its introduction in Sierra
Leone contributed to the development of slave rice plantations in neighboring areas
that remained under native African control at the end of the eighteenth century.
In the colony itself, rice was not successfully grown in large enough quantities to
become a major export commodity.
After the American Civil War (1861–1865), rice production in the Carolina and
Georgia low-country collapsed. The infrastructure needed to control water for rice
agriculture demanded constant maintenance. Until the end of slavery, slaves did
that work. Newly freed slaves, however, recognized the arduous and unhealthy
nature of rice-agricultural work, and many refused to continue working in the rice
paddies for low wages. Without the cheap labor provided by slaves, plantation
owners could not produce rice economically, and low country rice production was
almost completely extinct by the twentieth c entury.
Today, the United States and Brazil are the largest producers of rice outside of
Asia. However, in the United States, rice production has shifted from the South
Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry where it was grown during slavery to Louisi-
ana, Arkansas, eastern Texas, and California where it is grown with the help of
modern mechanical farm implements. Rice continues to be an important staple of
cuisines around the Atlantic world, including Louisiana Creole dishes such as
gumbo and the many varieties of rice and beans found throughout Latin America.
Sean Morey Smith
See also: Brazil; Slavery

R IO D E J ANEI R O 555
Further Reading
Carney, Judith A. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas.
Edelson, S. Max. 2006. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. Cambridge, MA:
RIO DE JANEIRO
Rio de Janeiro is a major Brazilian city located on the country’s southern Atlantic
coast on the western edge of Guanabara Bay. It has a tropical climate. Portuguese
is the official and most widely used language in Rio de Janeiro. The city’s major
religion is Roman Catholicism, although many residents practice forms of Protes-
tantism. Rio was the capital of Brazil from 1763 u ntil 1960, as Brazil transitioned
from being a state in the Portuguese Empire through a variety of governmental
forms into an independent republic. Rio’s population grew from between 45,000
and 60,000 in 1780, to roughly 86,000 in 1822, to around 805,000 in 1906 (Frank
2004, 15; M eade 1997, 48; Schultz 2001, 45).
Rio de Janeiro derived economic significance from its location on the shore of
Guanabara Bay, one of the largest natural harbors in the world. The city served as
a major port for the surrounding agricultural areas that grew sugar in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries and coffee in the nineteenth. However, the city’s
initial political importance can be attributed to it being the point of export for gold
and diamonds extracted inland in Minas Gerais.
The Portuguese first visited Guanabara Bay in 1502, but they did not s ettle
there. In 1555, the French established themselves on Villegagnon Island well into
the bay. Ten years later, a Portuguese force arrived to remove them. The Portuguese
blockaded the mouth of the bay, attacked the French settlement, and managed to
expel them after two years of conflict. The victors then moved further into the
bay and established a permanent settlement that became the modern city of Rio
de Janeiro.
Rio de Janeiro originated as a fortification on a hill, the Morro do Castelo, over-
looking Guanabara Bay in 1567. In 1590, a Benedictine Monastery was constructed
on nearby Morro do São Bento. The city then grew on the marshy lowlands between
the hills along the Rua Direita, a road that followed the shoreline and connected
the fortification and the monastery. At first, the city expanded slowly, serving as a
regional port for the area’s sugar plantations. However, in the eighteenth century,
gold and diamond fields were opened in Minas Gerais. As the nearest port, Rio de
Janeiro was used to ship the fields’ products to Portugal, and its status and size
increased. Starting in 1730, an aqueduct opened to bring freshwater into the city,
which had little nearby. Due to its importance as a transfer point for the mineral
wealth of Brazil, the Portuguese Crown made the city the Brazilian capital in 1763.
However, by the end of the c entury, diminishing production in Minas Gerais led
to decreased exports and hurt Rio’s economy. The arrival of the Portuguese court
and a turn toward coffee production in the early nineteenth century revitalized
the city.
556 R IO D E J ANEI R O
Between 1808 and 1821, Rio de Janeiro was home to the Portuguese royal court.
Fleeing Napoleonic armies in Portugal, Prince Regent Dom João (later King João VI)
moved the court across the Atlantic and began the transformation of Rio de Janeiro
into an imperial capital. Numerous h ouses w
ere built for courtiers and their reti-
nues. New institutions thought to be worthy of a European royal capital were also
created, including a new press, theater, and academy. Additionally, policing was
stepped up to ensure that Rio’s citizens behaved decorously and productively and
did not pose a threat to the Crown.
After Dom João left Rio de Janeiro, issues of succession and colonial politics led
to Brazil declaring its independence in 1822. The revolution was relatively quick
and caused little immediate social change in the capital. Instead, the greatest
changes to the city happened in the 1850s, as the country was transformed by gov-
ernmental reforms u nder Emperor Pedro II and closer economic ties to Great Britain
that forced the end of the African slave trade, helped to ignite a coffee boom, and
spurred development of rail infrastructure. All of these factors hurt the possibility
for upward mobility among middling and poorer p eople. In particular, the dimin-
ished supply in slaves increased their cost and limited slave ownership to the wealthy.
This form of wealth generation had once been common among free p eople of all
stations, including former slaves. Limiting it to the richest in Rio contributed to
urban antislavery sentiment and the eventual emancipation of Brazilian slaves in
1888.
Slavery was a central aspect of life in Rio de Janeiro from its founding. The Por-
tuguese enslaved local indigenous people in the sixteenth century, but African
slaves had become the predominant labor source by the century’s end. In the city,
enslaved people constituted close to half the population for most of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Despite their enslavement, slaves in the city enjoyed rel-
ative mobility and freedom of action. Many were trained in a skill, such as artisan
trades, healing, building, or transportation, and w ere rented by their masters to
those in need of their slaves’ serv ices. Some enslaved p eople made their own con-
tracts for l abor and even were able to earn a wage. Those who earned an income
sometimes managed to buy their freedom if their masters were willing to free them.
Even slaves who worked in their masters’ households often enjoyed some freedom
to move about the city and make social connections because of the city’s small size
and lack of infrastructure. Late into the nineteenth century, water still arrived into
the city at a limited number of fountains via aqueducts, continuing a long pattern
where masters sent their enslaved domestic servants to these public areas to col-
lect water and to perform chores like laundry.
Sean Morey Smith
See also: Brazil; Portuguese Atlantic; Slavery
Further Reading
Frank, Zephyr L. 2004. Dutra’s World: Wealth and F
amily in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro.
R OUSSEAU , J EAN -J A C Q UES 557
Meade, Teresa A. 1997. “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930.
University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Schultz, Kirsten. 2001. Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court
in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821. New York: Routledge.
R O U S S E A U , J E A N - J A C Q U E S ( 1 7 1 2 – 1 7 7 8 )
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a French political philosopher, social critic, composer,
educationalist, and essayist whose works were widely influential to European
thought and political theory. Rousseau captured both the heart of Enlightenment
thinking through his reason-dependent rejection of tradition and divine-sanctioned
authorities, while at the same time becoming one of its chief critics through advo-
cating romanticized reflection. Against Enlightenment era thinking, Rousseau
advocated for a romantic vision of man’s primitive pre-society state that elevated
freedom and the w ill as authoritative ideals. Against social contract theorists such
as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), Rousseau argued that
their social contracts merely enforced post-social law and property based inequal-
ities upon an imagined pre-social state of h uman nature, and instead needed to be
remade. While Rousseau noted it was impossible to return to this earlier innocent
human state, his political work attempted to legitimize society and government by
advancing a social theory that grounded itself in the spirit of sentiment and free-
dom that came naturally to this earlier humanity. This idea manifested itself in the
notion of the general w ill, which Rousseau defined as that which all p eople can
equally w ill for everyone. Rousseau argued that the general will captured the spirit
of natural humanity, and his later works focused on applying this ideal to educa-
tion and politics. Whereas John Locke’s ideas were influential to the American
Revolution, Rousseau’s ideas w ere influential in inspiring and lending justification
to such major events as the French Revolution.
In 1712, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, to formally
uneducated parents. His childhood was notably turbulent. His mother died at
his birth, and his father was banished from the city for dueling in 1722. Rous-
seau stayed with family members until he ran away to Italy and Savoy at the age of
16. Between the years 1733 and 1741, he supported and educated himself with a
number of menial positions under the patronage of Françoise-L ouise de Warens
(1699–1762), and eventually became her lover and general assistant. In 1741, Rous-
seau left the powerful Warens f amily for Paris, and made his living through copyist
and secretarial work. During this period, Rousseau befriended key Enlightenment
thinkers such as Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Voltaire (1694–1778), and Rous-
seau contributed articles on m usic and political economy to Diderot’s Encyclopédia.
In 1750, Rousseau won a Dijon academy competition by writing Discourse on the
Arts and Sciences, and this established Rousseau as a celebrity of sorts. In 1754, he
followed with a philosophical essay entitled Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, fur-
ther cementing his reputation for genius. Both works w ere considered controversial
for their arguments that the arts and civil society contributed to man’s immorality.
In 1762, Rousseau published his politic al philosophical masterpiece, The Social
558 R OUSSEAU , J EAN -J A C Q UES
Contract, and his educationalist

fiction, Emile. Around this time,
Rousseau’s romanticism and
increasing paranoia put him at
odds with the encyclopédistes, and
his 1762 works outraged religious
and po liti
cal elites. After his
books were publically rejected
and burned in Geneva, Rousseau
left for E ngland in 1766, and
stayed with David Hume (1711–
1776) until Rousseau’s paranoia
increasingly led to violent quar-
reling. Rousseau returned to
France in 1767, and wandered
through the provinces until set-
tling in Paris in 1770. Rousseau
spent his remaining years in
mental decline and lived in a
hovel where he busied himself
with copying music and complet-
ing his autobiography, Confes-
Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a late- sions. His descent drove him to
eighteenth-century print. A major Enlightenment insanity, and in 1778 he died in
thinker, his most important works include The Ermenonville.
Social Contract and Emile. (Rijksmuseum, Rousseau’s work manages to
Amsterdam) reflect the type of life he lived. It
is musical in its tone, romantic
in its intent, and intense in its proposals. Rousseau’s controversial life successfully
captured the spirit of both the Enlightenment and classical thought, while rejecting
many of their central claims. Rousseau corpus begins with his award winning Dis-
course on the Sciences and Arts (1750), and his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
(1755). These works locate many of humanity’s problems with their transition
from the primitive innocent state of nature to an organized society. In this past
state, humankind existed as a free “noble savage,” and they differed from brutes in
their natural inclination to self-improvement, f ree agency, and the natural virtue of
compassion (Rousseau 1920, 184–185, 207). It was not until the first h uman
“enclosed a piece of ground” and claimed, “this is mine,” that real civil society was
born (Rousseau 1920, 207). People were then driven by their individual and fac-
tional w ill and self-interests to secure their property through positive law, and gov-
ernments w ere established which ultimately furthered man’s inequality.
Whereas Rousseau’s Discourses examine society’s foundational problems, his later
works propose solutions. In Emile (1762), Rousseau proposes a solution at the
individual level, detailing a method of educating c hildren that preserves their
natural freedom while isolating them from society. In part icular, it focuses on
R OYAL AF R I C AN C O M PANY 559
educating a child without appeal to authorities, and instead is focused on driving a

child’s free w ill to self-discover truths. In his hallmark political treatise The Social
Contract (1762), Rousseau proposes a solution at the collective level, interpreting
the social contract as a means of preserving freedom through protecting a natural
general w ill against selfish particular w
ills. Humanity’s selfish attempt to preserve
their property through law ultimately suppresses the freedom of o thers, and Rous-
seau’s proposal is to construct a legitimate social and political model that focuses
on tapping into humanity’s primitive nature and driving his natural compassion
towards legislating laws that are mindful and applicable to all p eople. The result is
a social contract that individuals make to each and every member of society, and a
continuance of this collective will through a delegated government that attempts to
perceive and execute what the sovereign p eople altogether w ill.
Rousseau’s contributions to political theory exemplified a tradition that trans-
ferred sovereignty from external authorities to the p eople. His work most notably
inspired the French Revolution, and his influence is evident in both the Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’s focus on the general w ill and the people’s
sovereignty, and in the adoption of liberty, equality, and fraternity as slogans of
French revolutionaries. The French Revolution ignited an empire and a wave across
Europe that replaced monarchies with Republics, and many of t hese episodes bor-
rowed heavily from Rousseau’s thinking. As final evidence of his influence, his
remains were later transferred to the Pantheon in Paris, where he now remains
alongside other distinguished French figures such as his former friend Voltaire.
Leonard O. Goenaga
See also: Enlightenment; French Revolution; Locke, John
Further Reading
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1920. The Social Contract: & Discourses. London and New York:
J. M. Dent & Sons, Limited.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1953. The Confessions. London and New York: Penguin Books.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2001. Emile. London and New York: Penguin Books.
R O YA L A F R I C A N C O M P A N Y
The Royal African Company (1672–1752) dominated British slave trading in the late
seventeenth century when Great Britain was taking the leading role in the Atlan-
tic slave trade, but it could not maintain its dominance into the eighteenth c entury.
The early modern British monarchy, like other European states, supported the
establishment of monopoly companies to carry on specific trades rather than open-
ing them to free competition. The Royal African Company was formed by royal char-
ter on September 27, 1672, a fter the failure of a similar organization, the Company
of Royal Adventurers of E ngland Trading into Africa. The Royal Adventurers had
been dominated by courtiers, one reason for its short life, but the Royal African
Company was dominated by London businessmen. The Company’s official head
and largest shareholder was James, Duke of York, the king’s brother and the future
560 R OYAL AF R I C AN C O M PANY
King James II. Investors in the company over its lifespan included the philosopher
John Locke, several Lord Mayors and aldermen of the City of London, and the
founder of Georgia, James Oglethorpe.
The company’s monopoly of the African trade with the British colonies (sup-
posedly lasting a thousand years) was not restricted to slaves but also included gold,
ivory, and dyewoods. Nevertheless, it concentrated on the slave trade more than
had the Company of Royal Adventurers, for whom gold had actually formed a
greater part of their trade than slaves. The Royal African Company did continue to
deal in enough gold to make a substantial contribution to the English mint. The com
pany attempted to establish other industries in Africa to supplement its slave trad-
ing, such as an abortive attempt to establish an indigo industry in Sierra Leone. The
company paid for its slaves with trade goods manufactured in G reat Britain.
The Royal African Company took over bases, or “factories” on the West African
coast established by the Company of Royal Adventurers for the acquisition, pro
cessing, and loading of slaves and other cargo. The company also established and
acquired new factories. The head of the company’s African operations, the agent-
general, resided at Cape Coast c astle in present-day Ghana. This fortress had passed
previously through Swedish, Danish, and Dutch hands. Other major bases included
Bence Island and York Island, in present-day Sierra Leone, and James Island, in
the Gambia. Like other slave trade bases, the company’s African bases were not
military conquests or colonies but held by agreement with local rulers, although
in English law and the charter of the company the King of England was their ulti-
mate suzerain. The close connection between the company and African elites can
be seen in the c areer of the York Island agent Thomas Corker, who married an Afri-
can w oman. Their descendants exploited their connections with the company to
establish a dynasty of chiefs. The company maintained small military forces in its
fortified factories—the largest, the Cape Coast garrison, comprised about 100 men.
It had difficulty recruiting due to its reputation as a poor payer and the well-known
health hazards of Africa. In other areas of the African coast, the company did not
maintain bases but traded from ships, and it had little presence in the Portuguese-
dominated areas of southern Africa.
Although the company, benefiting from the peace following the Anglo-Dutch
war of 1672 to 1674, quickly established itself as a leading Atlantic slave trader, its
“DY” and “RAC”

The Royal African Company developed distinctive marks for its gold and
slaves. Coins minted with company gold often bore the image of a small
elephant with a castle on its back positioned below the bust of the English
monarch. Company slaves w ere at first branded “DY” for Duke of York, a refer-
ence to leading investor James, Duke of York and future king of England as
James II. L ater, the company branded slaves with its initials “RAC.”
R OYAL AF R I C AN C O M PANY 561
finances were always precarious. Staffing and maintaining its factories was expen-
sive, and it was often difficult to collect debts from the Car ibbean planters who
were the principal buyers of slaves in the British Empire. Extending credit was
nearly always necessary to sell slaves, and little hard money circulated in the Carib
bean. Car ibbean courts and lawmakers, like institutions in other colonies, heavily
favored colonial debtors over English creditors, including the company, although
sometimes the company was able to get the English government to overrule colo-
nial authorities. The company was unable to meet the demand for slaves in British
America, and both the government and British Car ibbean planters opposed it sell-
ing slaves to buyers in Spanish America who paid higher prices. The company’s
biggest problem, however, was that the lure of slave trade profits led independent
traders, or “interlopers” based in E ngland or its North American colonies to chal-
lenge the company’s monopoly by illegal trading and by lobbying Parliament to
open the African trade to all-comers. Authorities in the Car ibbean British colo-
nies, desperate for slaves, supported the interlopers against the company, making
it virtually impossible for the company to enforce its monopoly e ither in Africa or
in the Americas. The company also faced foreign competition, from companies
based in the Dutch Republic, France, Denmark, and the German principality of
Brandenberg.
The company was dominated by London interests, while its challengers w ere
often based in the English provinces or the colonies. The revolution of 1688, which
overthrew James II (who sold his company stock in 1689), hurt the company, as
along with other chartered monopolies, it could now be associated with the over-
thrown and discredited Stuarts and with their strong view of royal prerogative.
The newly dominant Whigs, allied with merchant interests, launched a broadscale
attack on the chartered companies as monopolies, using the rhetoric of freedom to
call for broader participation in the slave trade. The British manufacturers of trade
goods joined in this cry, hoping that an expansion of the slave trade would lead to
increased demand for their products.
The War of the League of Augsburg or Nine Years’ War (1689–1697), which fol-
lowed the Revolution, saw conflict between the English and French on the West
African coast as well as French privateering against English merchant vessels, add-
ing to the company’s troubles. The opening of South Carolina to an intensive
slavery-based plantation agriculture modeled on that of the Caribbean in the same
decade increased the demand for slaves well beyond what the company could sup-
ply. In 1698, the English Parliament, u nder pressure from merchant interests as
well as general anti-monopoly sentiment, abolished the company’s monopoly by
opening the slave trade to merchants throughout the British Empire, requiring only
that interlopers pay a 10 percent fee to the company on goods exported to Africa.
Even this requirement was set to expire in 1712. The opening of the trade was
followed by a marked increase in the number of slaves carried in English ships to
the Americas.
The independent traders proved more efficient than the company, and quickly
moved into a dominant position in the slave trade, which they greatly expanded.
The company’s trade was also adversely affected by the War of the Spanish Succession
562 R U M
(1701–1714), which like other wars between Great Britain and France saw fighting
on the African coast that disrupted the trade, as well as threatening the company’s
ability to hire sailors. When the Treaty of Utrecht ended the war in 1713, Great
Britain received the coveted asiento, the right to supply the Spanish American
colonies with slaves. Although the asiento was assigned to the South Sea Com
pany, the South Sea Company contracted with the Royal African Company to do
the actual trading. However, despite the initial enthusiasm and the numerous ships
devoted to the trade with Spain, the company failed to take full advantage of the
asiento due to its inability to monopolize the slave trade. Sales to Spanish colonies
were taken over by interlopers, who no longer even needed to pay the 10 percent
after its expiration in 1712.
By 1730, the Royal African Company had virtually ceased slave trading. The
company’s main role in the British slave trade had become its responsibility for
Cape Coast Castle and the other British bases on the West African coast. After 1730, the
forts w
ere maintained not with slave trade revenues but with a direct Parliamen-
tary subsidy of £10,000 annually. However, the company’s finances w ere continuing
to deteriorate, and it proved unable to maintain the factories even with Parliamen-
tary subsidy. The subsidy itself ended in 1745. In 1752, the Royal African Com
pany was dissolved. Responsibility for maintaining the West African slave trade
infrastructure was transferred to a new group, the Company of Merchants Trading
to Africa.
William E. Burns
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; British Atlantic; Slavery
Further Reading
Davies, K. G. 1970. The Royal African Company. Reprint of 1957 edition. New York:
Atheneum.
Hair, P. E. H., and Robin Law. 1998. “The English in Western Africa to 1700.” The Oxford
History of the British Empire I: The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the
Close of the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Nicholas Canny. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 241–263.
Law, Robin, ed. 1997. The English in West Africa 1681–1683. Oxford and New York: Pub-
lished for the British Academy for Oxford University Press.
Pettigrew, William A. 2013. Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of
the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
RUM
Rum itself is a distilled alcoholic beverage produced from molasses and the byprod-
ucts of the sugar making process, known as “scum.” Rum is made with a two-step
process of fermentation followed by distillation. Often, rum is distilled twice to
increase its alcohol content. Precursors to rum existed in the sixteenth c entury
Caribbean, namely, fermented alcohol made from sugarcane called guarapo in Span-
ish. The first record of the term “rum” came from the English colony of Barbados
RUM 563
in 1650, where it was derived from the English word “rumbullion,” which roughly
means tumult. Distilling technology, which traveled from Europe to the Caribbean
as part of the exchange of goods and ideas, led rum to become a vital Atlantic com-
modity from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. By the end of the period,
though, both political changes and a rise in temperance movements decreased the
demand for rum in the United States and the Car ibbean.
Rum production emerged in the 1600s within the sugar plantation system in
the Car ibbean, using distilling techniques brought over by Dutch migrants. Afri-
can slaves played an important role in the creation of rum, although their exact
contribution is not recorded. By the 1650s, virtually e very sugar plantation in the
British and French Car ibbean had a still h ouse for the production of rum. By the
end of the seventeenth c entury, rum had become an important part of sugar plan-
tation profits. Even though rum made up a noticeable percentage of Car ibbean
exports, much of it remained on the plantations to supplement slave rations. As a
trade item, rum bought goods such as timber and codfish from North America
to supply Car ibbean plantations. British Barbados likely exported between 10 and
15 percent of the total amount of rum produced in the seventeenth c entury. On
one estate in the 1760s, rum made up 43 percent of the revenues from sugar and
rum combined (Smith 2005, 87). In 1799, Barbados exported 596,291 gallons of
rum, which represented 19 percent of its total exports (Smith 2005, 21). The French
Car ibbean islands, especially Martinique, also produced rum, which significantly
competed with French wine and brandy sales in France.
Rum production quickly spread from the Car ibbean to the New England colo-
nies. Using imported molasses from the West Indies, New E ngland rum distill-
eries grew from 1 in 1667, to 159 by 1770, by which time 6 million gallons of
molasses a year were imported into New England. In 1800, rum was the largest
and most profitable industry in the region. Smuggling was rampant, though. For
example, while almost 950,000 gallons of molasses came through the ports of Mas
sachusetts one year, tax was paid on only 63,000 gallons (Cheever 2015, 47–48).
West Africa was an important destination for rum, and part of the famous tri-
angle trade. It was used for gift giving during trade negotiations, and was also traded
for slaves, who were then sold in the West Indies. T here, ships bought molasses
and carried it to New E ngland to trade for rum, carrying this item back to Africa
again. By 1772, Boston and Rhode Island distillers w ere responsible for about
75 percent of rum exported to Africa. Many other trade routes existed, too, and
from 1700 to 1727, the British-owned Royal African Company shipped 182,347
gallons of rum to Africa from Barbados, Antigua, and Jamaica (Curtis 2006, 119).
Rum became a pawn in European politics in the eighteenth century. In 1733,
thanks in part to the British Caribbean planter lobby, Parliament passed the Molas-
ses Act, predominantly directed at the French Car ibbean, which added a tax to
foreign molasses coming into British North America. As the law was largely ignored,
Parliament passed the Sugar Act in 1764, which lowered the tax in hopes of bring-
ing more compliance. In addition to influencing the rum trade in the British and
French Car ibbean, European political events led to an increase in rum production
in the Spanish Car ibbean. The Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) fought primarily
564 R U M
between G reat Britain and France over New World colonies, disrupted trade in the
area. The resulting British occupation of Havana, beginning in 1762, brought an
influx of slaves to the island, as well as advanced distilling equipment and tech-
nology. Moreover, the Spanish Bourbon reforms, especially in the second half of
the eighteenth c entury, opened trade between Spain and France, increasing the
spread of rum. The Spanish Crown also discontinued the ban on making rum in the
Spanish Caribbean in 1764, which led to a rapid increase in its production in Cuba
and Puerto Rico. The disrupted British and French trade during American Revo-
lution also led to a rise in Cuban rum exports in the early 1780s. A fter the revolution,
United States merchants increased their trade with Cuba again b ecause of British
restrictions on trade.
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) drastically changed the distribution of rum
production in the Car ibbean. With the onset of the fighting in the 1790s, many
slave holders abandoned their plantations in Haiti and moved to Cuba, bringing
with them their slaves as well as advanced distilling technology. This increased
sugar and rum production on the island. The American and Haitian Revolutions
led to the growth of Cuban rum exports from less than 50,000 gallons in the 1770s
to more than 900,000 gallons by 1800 (Smith 2005, 60–61).
The consumption of rum from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries
took many forms. Slaves, who w ere supplied with rum weekly, incorporated it
into their rituals, combining spiritual beliefs carried from Africa with Christian
religion. New belief systems including Obea, Voudou, and Santería were born. Slaves
also integrated rum into rites of passage, including funerals, linking them back to
Africa where similar rituals existed. Rum was also used as a kind of all-purpose
medicine on the plantation. It was thought to cure numerous illnesses such as
toothaches, fevers, gonorrhea, colic, and others.
In many respects, rum consumption differed by class. In the early eighteenth
century, though British elites continued to prefer what they thought of as sophis-
ticated French brandy, G reat Britain imported more rum than French wine and
brandy. Rum, like gin, was considered a drink of the British working classes. In
the Car ibbean, too, it was a drink of slaves and lower-class whites. Elites in Great
The Seaman’s Drink

A large market for rum emerged on the ships plying the Atlantic trade. Sailors
on merchant ships demanded rum as part of their provisions, and a fter 1655
rum began to replace beer as a British sailor’s ration. Rum was also used as
a preservative or sterilizer in barrels of w ater on the ships, and allowed fruit,
which could be preserved in rum for months, to be added to the sailors’ diets.
Rum became known as a “seaman’s drink,” and officially became part of the
rations of British sailors in the mid-eighteenth c entury, remaining so u
ntil 1970.
Seaman carried their taste for rum throughout numerous ports back and forth
across the Atlantic, increasing demand especially in port cities.
RUM 565
Britain and the Car ibbean, though, did consume rum when it was a part of what
they called “rum punch.” The punch included such things as limes, lemons, sugar,
nutmeg and other spices. Elites could afford these additions, differentiating their
drink from working-class rum. Elites further distinguished their consumption by
serving punch to their guests in elaborate punch bowls of silver or porcelain. Offering
punch in such an elaborate manner demonstrated one’s wealth and sophistication.
In the nineteenth c entury, consumption patterns changed in the United States and
the Car ibbean. The demand for rum in the newly independent United States sub-
stantially decreased, predominantly because of three influences. The U.S. govern-
ment repealed the whiskey tax in 1801, which eventually led whiskey to overtake
rum in popularity. Furthermore, rum came to represent colonial dependence, and
an emerging nationalism in the United States discouraged its use in favor of whis-
key. Finally, temperance movements started to spread in the early nineteenth century.
Many of the movements focused at first on distilled spirits rather than fermented
beer and cider. Rum was most often cited in sermons and pamphlets by temper-
ance organizations as the culprit for the perceived downfall of society.
Car ibbean consumption patterns also changed as a result of temperance move-
ments that came to the Caribbean with Methodists, Moravians, and Baptists. Temper-
ance movements succeeded on some islands more than o thers. Per capita drinking
stayed high in Barbados by the end of the c entury, while it dropped in Jamaica,
Trinidad, and British Guiana. By the end of the nineteenth century, rum’s place as
a vital commodity in the Atlantic trading system had diminished.
Gina Hames
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Cuba; Plantations; Smuggling; Sugar; Wine
Further Reading
Cheever, Susan. 2015. Drinking in America: Our Secret History. New York: Twelve.
Curtis, Wayne. 2006. And a B ottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. New
York: Three Rivers Press.
Smith, Frederick H. 2005. Car ibbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Gainesville: Uni-
versity Press of Florida.
S
SAILORS
Sailors used their expertise of winds, w ater currents, and technology to operate
the boats and ships that connected the Atlantic world. From antiquity to the nine-
teenth century, these men worked on wooden ships that used systems of canvas
sails to harness wind power. Steam-powered iron ships were introduced in the early
1800s. Sailors worked in e very kind of weather, and often in dangerous conditions.
There were many different types of sailor, including those serving on naval vessels,
privateers, merchant ships, fishing vessels, and whalers. The term sailors usually
refers to the ordinary seamen, or non-officers, although captains and officers also
sailed.
Naval serv ice represented one of the most frequent types of work for sailors. In
the 1400s, Spanish and Portuguese Royal fleets were ascendant, but they w ere chal-
lenged in the 1500s by the growing English navy. These fleets were met in the
1600s by Dutch, French, and Scandinavian navies, and by Russians and Ameri-
cans in the 1700s. During war, naval seamen performed many tasks. In sea b attles
they attacked e nemy vessels with cannon-fire, to sink them or cause enough dam-
age to force a surrender. While some sailors would carefully position the ship, others
loaded and fired the cannons, including boys called “powder-monkeys” who ran
gunpowder to the gunners. Canon attack also provided support for nearby shore
actions by destroying key coastal targets or covering amphibious landings. Often
sailors were charged to do much of the fighting on shore, too. During times of war,
naval seamen also disrupted the enemy’s economic activities by blockading coastal
cities and seizing enemy merchant vessels (prize-taking). Essential but unpopular
was convoy work, when naval vessels escorted groups of merchant ships to pro-
tect them.
Merchant mariners worked on privately owned trade ships. From the 1400s,
European traders increasingly sought global commodities, spurring exploration in
the Atlantic and beyond. Merchant seamen not only had to sail their ships, but also
load and unload cargo, such as tobacco, textiles, sugar, precious metals, and people.
On occasion, they defended the ship from enemy vessels or pirates. Some mer-
chant mariners became involved in smuggling, a widespread practice in the era of
mercantilism when kings and queens sought to control all economic transactions.
The transatlantic slave ship was the least attractive work for an early modern sea-
man, due to the constant dangers of slave rebellion and tropical diseases to which
European and Euro-American sailors had little immunity.
Privately owned ships could chase and take prizes for their government as pri-
vateers. North African privateers dominated the Mediterranean during the early
568 SAILO R S
modern period. Pirates also attacked merchant ships to seize their goods. When
boarding a vessel, pirates frequently offered the sailors aboard the option to join
their band of sea thieves. In some respects, life on board a pirate ship may have
been more attractive than on other vessels, with a less hierarchical organization
and a much lighter workload due to the high numbers of sailors per ship. How-
ever, in addition to the normal dangers of seafaring, piracy also carried the threat
of the gallows if captured.
Other important groups of seafarers in this period included fishermen and
whalers, who skillfully handled a variety of ocean vessels, often in difficult weather
conditions. Closer to home, local pilots guided ships safely through coastal waters
and estuaries. Inter-island sailors, working small craft or canoes, facilitated trade
in the Car ibbean, the Azores, and the Cape Verde Islands. Sailors participated in
voyages of exploration and scientific discovery, often under the aegis of state-
sponsorship, but sometimes as part of private ventures.
Sailors’ roles overlapped considerably. Navies protected trading vessels, but also
forcibly drafted sailors during times of war, a practice called impressment. In this
way, fishermen, pilots, and even ferrymen often spent time in early modern navies.
Piracy attracted seafarers from a variety of backgrounds. And many people sailed
seasonally, intermittently taking up other professions on land.
Whether on a naval vessel, merchant ship, or fishing boat, keeping afloat and
on course was hard work. Seamen in the age of sail could expect a busy schedule of
loading cargo, steering the ship, working the sails and ropes, and cleaning and repair
work. Despite the best efforts of shipbuilders, hulls often leaked and sailors had to
take turns at the pump to remove excess w ater. Other seamen held specialized posi-
tions: the captain or master managed the ship, assisted by the mate, boatswain,
and quartermaster. Carpenters made repairs to the wooden world intact, and a
good carpenter could mean life or death when a ship was damaged. Gunners and
cooks kept the crew protected and fed. In the navy, pursers managed money and
supplies, surgeons tended injuries, and marines protected the ship when in port. In
the age of steam, stokers shoveled coal to feed the engines.
Food was monotonous, but u nder normal circumstances it was provided
regularly—a substantial perk in an era when scarcity and famine still threatened
peasants and city-dwellers alike. The staples w ere sea biscuits (called hardtack),
salt meat, dried peas or other legumes, salt fish, porridge, and cheese. Food was usu-
ally washed down with weak beer, though sometimes beer rations were replaced
with wine or rum mixed with water (called grog). Fresh food was obtained when-
ever possible; however, long voyages almost invariably meant malnutrition and vita-
min deficiencies. In 1800, the British Navy made lemon juice a standard issue,
finally solving the problem of scurvy, a lethal disease brought about from lack of
vitamin C. Sailors risked yellow fever and malaria in tropical zones. Sexually trans-
mitted disease such as syphilis and gonorrhea posed a serious problem, as sailors
who contracted these ailments in turn spread them to people across the globe. Inju-
ries were common. Sailors suffered from falls, equipment accidents, and assaults.
They w ere also subjected to violent discipline, including a flogging with the cat
o’nine tails, a multi-thonged leather whip.
SAILO R S 569
Sailors formed a tight-knit and readily identifiable community. Seamen typically

wore wide legged trousers or calf length pants called slops, checked or striped
shirts, and red caps. Uniforms became standard among European naval officers in
the eighteenth c entury, and for regular naval seamen in the nineteenth. Sailors’
bodies bore various marks: ear piercings, scars, and by the early nineteenth century,
tattoos. The unique living conditions of the wooden world fostered a rich heritage of
folk art. In their leisure hours, some sailors danced jigs or the hornpipe while others
played simple instruments and sang sea songs. Sea shanties, however, w ere sung
while working. Whittlers carved bones and ivory into scrimshaw. On shore, sail-
ors found comradeship through tavern culture and helped one another through
mutual aid societies and charities. They also brought their colorful idiom back to
shore. The English language is rich with sailing phrases: shipshape, learn the ropes,
clear sailing, wide berth, cast off, left high and dry, run the gauntlet.
Female sailors were rare. Anne Bonny (1698–1782) and Mary Read (1685–1721)
briefly sailed the Car ibbean as pirates; Hannah Snell (1723–1792) and Mary Anne
Talbot (1778–1808) each served the British Navy in male disguise. They w ere
anomalous, however, and sailing remained essentially a male-only profession into
the twentieth c entury. In other respects, such as religious or socioeconomic back-
ground, Atlantic sailors were a fairly diverse group. For ships flying under the flags
of European states and later the United States, people of color made up roughly one-
fourth of the crew. With their lives in one another’s hands, men frequently formed
deep bonds of friendship. The incidence of homosexuality among early modern
sailors is difficult to assess; some scholars investigating the issue have concluded
that homosexual acts w ere widespread, others that they were rare.
Although tradition was dear to sailors, the years from 1400 to 1900 saw drastic
changes to this way of life. Technologies advanced rapidly. In the fourteenth and
fifteenth century, shipbuilders began experimenting with multiple-masted ships,
which increased speed and refined maneuverability. T hese developed into the car-
racks and smaller caravels of the age of exploration. Galleons in the seventeenth
century increased maneuverability by lowering the forecastle (the forward-most
area of the upper deck) and East Indiamen followed with even larger holds and
stronger hulls. In the nineteenth century, coal and steam replaced wind power,
allowing sailors (still so called) to reach their destinations more quickly.
Navigational tools also evolved with time. Astrolabes, models of the sun and
other celestial objects, could be consulted to determine position. Sextants were used to
determine latitude by measuring the angle between a known celestial object and
the horizon. The greatest geographic breakthrough was at the end of the eighteenth
century, with the invention of a timekeeping device that could accurately deter-
mine longitude. Yet even with so much change, sailors’ bravery and perseverance
endured from the Renaissance into the twentieth c entury.
Elizabeth C. Libero
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Equiano, Olaudah; Fishing and Fisheries; Piracy; Priva-
teering; Smuggling
570 SAINT- DO M IN G UE / HAITI
Further Reading
Land, Isaac. 2009. War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850. Basingstoke, UK: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Rediker, Marcus. 1987. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates,
and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Vickers, Daniel, and Vince Walsh. 2005. Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age
of Sail. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Winchester, Simon. 2001. Atlantic: Great Sea B
attles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and
a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. New York: HarperCollins.
S A I N T-D O M I N G U E / H A I T I
Saint-Domingue was a French colony in the Caribbean from 1697 until 1804. After
rebelling slaves led a 13-year revolution, the colony declared independence from
France in 1804 and became the nation of Haiti. Today, Haiti has a land area of
10,714 square miles and occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola,
which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Cap Français, commonly called Le
Cap, served as Saint-Domingue’s capital from 1711 u ntil 1770. In 1770, the French
moved the capital to its current location, Port-au-Prince. Haiti has a tropical climate
and mountainous terrain that gives way to fertile alluvial plains and valleys. Once
covered by jungle, post-revolutionary Haiti continues to suffer from widespread
deforestation. Under French rule, Saint-Domingue’s economy focused on planta-
tion agriculture, which required a large enslaved labor force. As a result, Saint-
Domingue’s large population of African p eoples worked for a significantly smaller
population of white Europeans. French colonists spoke French and practiced
Catholicism. P eoples of African descent usually spoke Kréole (or “Creole”)—a lan-
guage formed from an amalgamation of African languages and French—and prac-
ticed a religion called vodou (also spelled voodoo or vodun), which combined
Catholicism with various African religious practices. Creole is the most widely spoken
language in Haiti today. Vodou and Catholicism remain the dominant faiths.
Initially claimed for Spain by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the island of His-
paniola remained u nder nominal Spanish control throughout the sixteenth c entury.
Buccaneers operating from the island of Tortuga off the northern coast of modern
Haiti began challenging Spanish jurisdiction over the island in the middle of the
seventeenth c entury by squatting on land along the northwestern shoreline of His-
paniola. While the French claimed control over Tortuga and western Hispaniola in
1659, official French control of Saint-Domingue began in 1697 when the Spanish
ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France in the Treaty of Ryswick.
After taking control of Saint-Domingue the French focused on crafting a politi
cally stable and economically productive colony. The French dispatched both a
colonial governor, tasked with overseeing military and imperial affairs, and an
intendant, who presided over civil m atters on the island. This system of shared
power intentionally promoted tension between Saint-Domingue’s leaders. French
administrators believed that the tension lessened the potential for revolutionary
SAINT- DO M IN G UE / HAITI 571
upheavals. Below the governor and intendant, the colonial dependence on planta-
tion agriculture produced a vertically stratified sociopolitical hierarchy in which a
minority of European colonists maintained political and economic control over a
majority African and mixed race population. While exact population statistics are
difficult to calculate, estimates indicate that the colony was home to 30,000 whites,
25,000 affranchis (free African or mixed race p eoples), and 700,000 African slaves
in 1791 (Heinl and Heinl, 29). Of these, only the wealthiest white planters could
serve on the 12 member colonial council that advised and worked with both the
governor and the intendant.
Saint-Domingue’s sociopolitical hierarchy largely resulted from the colonial eco-
nomic system. Soon a fter taking control of the island, French planters recognized
that Saint-Domingue’s fertile valleys and tropical climate made it an optimal location
for sugar cultivation. The challenges associated with cultivating large quantities of
sugar made large plantations staffed by small armies of enslaved peoples the most
efficient method for cultivating the crop. In addition to sugar, Saint-Domingue’s
planters produced coffee, indigo, and cotton, but in the eighteenth c entury, no crop
in the Atlantic world brought higher prices than sugar. By the outbreak of the Hai-
tian Revolution in 1791, Saint-Domingue was the world’s largest producer of sugar,
making it the most profitable colony in the Americas.
In 1791, Saint-Domingue exploded in a revolutionary upheaval that brought an
end to French control, changed the politics of the Atlantic world, and ushered
in many years of political and economic turmoil in the once profitable colony. The
outbreak of the French Revolution, in 1789, brought Saint-Domingue’s long sim-
mering social tensions to a boiling point. Wealthy white planters saw an opportu-
nity to alter or eliminate the hated exclusif, an economic policy that placed severe
trade restrictions on Saint-Domingue’s products in an attempt to ensure that France
received the greatest economic benefit from the colony’s productivity. Lower order
whites and the affranchis, sensing opportunities for social advancement, adopted
revolutionary rhetoric in pressing for increased opportunities within the rigid
colonial social system. The enslaved, aware of the social fissures developing on
the island, also latched onto the language of liberty and equality in an attempt to
mitigate the worst excesses of the slave regime.
Saint-Domingue’s sociopolitical hierarchy came crashing down in 1791, when
enslaved Africans violently rebelled against planters. In an attempt to return order
to Saint-Domingue, the newly established French Republic dispatched three civil
commissioners to the island in 1792. Facing a hostile white populace and desper-
ately in need of allies, the French commissioners attracted black support by end-
ing slavery by decree in 1793. The French National Convention officially abolished
slavery in all French territories, including Saint-Domingue, in 1794.
After emancipation, freed slaves and the old affranchis joined to defend emancipa-
tion. Beginning in 1794, a former freedman named Toussaint L’Ouverture began a
rapid rise to power. By 1800, he had eliminated most of his rivals and became the
de facto ruler of Saint-Domingue, though he stopped short of declaring indepen
dence. When L’Ouverture negotiated independent trade deals with France’s ene-
mies in the late 1790s, before creating a constitution in 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte
572 SAINT- DO M IN G UE / HAITI
launched a military expedition aimed at removing the revolution’s leaders and

reinstituting slavery. While the French expeditionary force succeeded in capturing,
arresting, and deporting L’Ouverture in 1802, his former subordinates defeated the
French forces in 1803. Haiti declared independence on January 1, 1804.
Years of political unrest followed Haiti’s declaration of independence. Jean-
Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s most powerful general, named himself emperor in
1804. His regime expelled or executed many of the remaining whites and declared
all Haitian citizens “black.” When many of Dessalines’s policies proved unpopu
lar, two military commanders named Alexandre Pétion and Henri Christophe
spearheaded a conspiracy that assassinated Dessalines in October 1806. Dessa-
lines’s fall created a power vacuum that led to a brief civil war between the two
generals. When the dust settled, the central and southern provinces fell under the
control of Pétion’s presidential republic while the valuable northern province
became the kingdom of Henri Christophe. Jean-Pierre Boyer, Pétion’s successor,
successfully reunited Haiti a fter Christophe’s death in 1820. Boyer centralized
power in himself and held office until being overthrown in 1843. From 1843 until
1889, Haiti had 12 presidents and 8 constitutions.
At the same time that Haitians struggled to create a stable political system, the
young nation found gaining international recognition difficult. An ongoing fear that
the Haitian Revolution might inspire slave revolts in other parts of the Atlantic
world led many world powers to marginalize Haiti. In 1825, with Haiti u nder threat
from the French and desperately in need of markets and trade partners, President
Boyer agreed to pay France a massive indemnity to compensate Saint-Domingue’s
former landholders for land and property lost during the revolution. In return,
France formally recognized Haiti as an independent nation. While the indemnity
finally paved the way to diplomatic recognition, it exacerbated Haiti’s economic
and political problems while simultaneously illustrating Europe’s ability to influ-
ence Haiti. Other world powers moved even more slowly in recognizing Haiti with
the Vatican d oing so only in 1860, and the United States waiting u ntil 1862.
Haiti’s political turmoil often stemmed from an inability to create a stable econ-
omy. A fter independence, Haiti’s early rulers attempted to recreate the plantation
system using free labor. However, Haiti’s citizenry of freedmen resisted attempts
to recreate the plantation economy. Instead, rural Haitians created a smallholder
economy by demanding the dismantling of large plantations. The resulting small
plots of land w ere turned over to individuals or small collectives called lakou.
The new class of Haitian smallholders engaged in subsistence agriculture to sup-
port themselves and grew coffee, cotton, and indigo for the market. Indeed, cof-
fee became the central export crop in the nineteenth century, but the international
coffee trade gave foreign merchants the ability to dictate the terms of Haiti’s for-
eign commerce, ensuring that coffee growers saw little profit from their crops. The
prominence of foreign merchants combined with difficulty collecting tax revenue
and the accumulation foreign debts continues to affect Haiti’s economic and politi
cal standing to the present day.
Andrew R. Detch
SAN M A R T Í N , J OS É D E 573
See also: French Atlantic; L’Ouverture, Touissant; Sugar
Further Reading
Dubois, Lauren. 2012. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Girard, Philippe R. 2005. Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Car ib
bean to Third World Hot Spot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heinl, Robert Debs, and Nancy Gordon Heinl. 2005. Written in Blood: The Story of the Hai-
tian P
eople 1492–1995. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
SAN MARTÍN, JOSÉ DE (1778–1850)

José de San Martín was an Argentine general during its War of Independence against
Spain. Originally a soldier in the Spanish Army, San Martín defected to the patriot
cause and r ose in rank to command the Army of the North and the Army of the
Andes. San Martín led his army across the Andes and drove the royalists out of
Chile. San Martín began but did not complete the liberation of Peru, choosing
instead to exile himself to Europe. T oday San Martín is celebrated throughout Latin
America as the Liberator of Argentina, Chile, and Peru.
San Martín was born in 1778 in Corrientes, Argentina, to Spanish parents. His
father was a soldier in the Spanish army. San Martín’s family moved frequently,
including to Buenos Aires when he was a young child and back to Spain when he
was six. Following in his father’s footsteps, San Martín joined the Spanish army
and participated in campaigns against Muslims, the British, and the Portuguese.
When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, San Martín fiercely opposed Napoleon
and fought for Ferdinand VII. San Martín’s life took an important turn in 1811
when he traveled to Buenos Aires and joined the patriot cause. The exact reason
for San Martín’s decision to abandon Spain is unknown although there are several
possibilities. Perhaps San Martín nobly sacrificed his career in Spain out of love
for Argentina. Or, perhaps the fact that he was a Criollo (a person of Spanish heri-
tage born in the New World) caused him to sympathize with the Creole elite lead-
ing the revolution.
Although initially distrusted in Buenos Aires because of his background fight-
ing for Spain, San Martín quickly r ose in the estimation of his fellow patriots. When
he arrived in Buenos Aires, San Martín found Creole revolutionaries firmly in
command. During 1806–1807, when Spain and France were allies, Great Britain
attacked Argentina, hoping to carry the war into Spain’s colonies. Creole patriots
had flocked b ehind the Spanish banner and helped defeat the British. In the inter-
vening years, t hese Creoles decided to break away from the Spanish. However, vic-
tory in the interior provinces proved elusive. Initially, San Martín was ordered to
organize grenadiers to defend Buenos Aires, but after achieving several victories,
San Martín went to Tucumán, a northern Argentine province, to take command
of General Manuel Belgrano’s Army of the North, which was being harassed by
royalists in Lima, Peru.
San Martín realized that Argentina would not be truly free u ntil the royalists
were driven out of Peru. However, rather than marching his army through Bolivia
574 SAN M A R T Í N , J OS É D E
to take out royalists in Peru

directly, San Martín developed an
innovative strategy. He deter-
mined to cross the Andes, unite
with Bernardo O’Higgins and
his army of Chilean patriots, and
attack Peru by sea. When royal-
ists defeated O’Higgins, San
Martín’s plan became more
difficult. San Martín staged his
army in Mendoza, Argentina,
which controlled the best routes
through the Andes and began
the difficult crossing in January
of 1817. His skillful handling of
his troops through the treacher-
ous mountains led to favorable
comparisons with Hannibal and
Napoleon. Because the royalist
commander had to divide his
José de San Martín raising the flag of Argentina. forces to cover many approaches,
To secure the independence of Argentina, San San Martín defeated the royal-
Martín marched the Army of the Andes across the ists at Casas de Chacabuco and
mountains to attack Spanish Royalists in Chile. retook Santiago, Chile. Royalists
(DeAgostini/Getty Images) did not relinquish their grip on
Chile easily, however, and San
Martín needed a year to destroy the last pockets of resistance, a process concluded
in the decisive Battle of Maipú on April 5, 1818.
Since Chile did not have a navy to facilitate his attack on Peru by sea, San Martín
assembled one. In 1820, San Martín and Thomas Cochrane, a former officer in the
British Navy and Vice Admiral of Chile, sailed the army to Peru and put Lima under
siege, waiting outside for a year. Royalist forces eventually abandoned Lima and
retreated into the interior. A
fter a triumphant procession into the city, San Martín was
appointed Protector of Peru. Although he had achieved a string of impressive victo-
ries, San Martín’s position was not as strong as he would have liked. Particularly
worrying was the strength of the royalists still in Peru.
It was at this point, July 26, 1822, that San Martín met with Simón Bolívar at
Guayaquil, Ecuador. Though the meeting has been depicted in countless paint-
ings and sculptures, it is impossible to know exactly what the two Liberators dis-
cussed. However, in the aftermath of the meeting, San Martín went back to Lima,
resigned his protectorship and returned to Argentina. Historians have speculated
that differences between the two men about the future of Latin America proved
insuperable. While San Martín began the liberation of Peru and Bolivia, his depar-
ture meant that Bolívar completed the defeat of the royalists and the liberation of
the two countries.
S C OTS - I R ISH 575
In Argentina, San Martín attempted to remain neutral during the brutal factional
struggles that followed independence, but he eventually left Argentina for Europe
in 1823. A fter traveling throughout the continent, San Martín settled in Boulogne-
sur-Mer in France. San Martín maintained contact with old friends and associates
in Argentina. Although San Martín several times volunteered to help fight
Argentina’s enemies, he never led troops again in the country he helped liberate.
San Martín also admired the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas and corre-
sponded frequently with him beginning in the late 1820s. In some ways, San Martín
resembles another leader of an independence movement in the Western Hemi
sphere: George Washington. Like Washington, San Martín had several chances
to claim a significant amount of power, but he chose not to do so. For this, and for
his successes in driving the Spanish out of the Southern Cone, San Martín is
remembered today with fondness and pride, both in Argentina and throughout
Latin America.
Evan C. Rothera
See also: Bolívar, Simón; Buenos Aires; Latin American Wars of Independence
Further Reading
Lynch, John. 2006. Simón Bolívar: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Lynch, John. 2009. San Martín: Argentine Soldier, American Hero. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
S C O T S -I R I S H
The Scots-Irish w ere the Protestant inhabitants of Northern Ireland (Ulster) in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many of whom migrated across the Atlantic
Ocean to settle in North America prior to the American Revolution. Initially, the
Scots-Irish hailed from the Scottish lowlands before they moved to Ireland in the
seventeenth century, as part of the British Empire’s attempts to colonize Ulster and
replace the original Irish Catholic population with Protestant Scots-Irish Presby-
terians. However, t hese migrants, also known as the Scotch-Irish or Ulster Scots,
eventually moved in large numbers to the American colonies during the eighteenth
century. While scholars differ over the exact number of Scots-Irish people who emi-
grated across the Atlantic, it has been estimated that between 225,000 and
400,000 Ulster Presbyterians left Ireland for North American by the end of the
eighteenth c entury. This migration of Scots-Irish peoples was largely the result of
a transatlantic economy that revolved around the production of Irish linen.
During the mid to late seventeenth century, a newly emergent British Empire
sought to establish its hold over Catholic Ireland. After the Glorious Revolution
(1688), England evicted Irish Catholics from their homes in Northern Ireland, and
replaced them with Protestant families from E ngland and, predominately, Scotland.
Therefore, large numbers of Presbyterians left a landlocked and overpopulated
Scottish Lowlands attracted by the promises of owning land in Ulster. Other
motives for this migration included escaping the economic stagnation of the Scottish
576 S C OTS - I R ISH
economy, the Lean Years or famines of 1695 to 1698, Scotland’s own climate of
religious persecution, and preexisting connections with Scottish people already
living in Ulster. But more often than not, despite English assurances of land and
plenty, Scottish Presbyterians found themselves subjected to the crippling legis-
lation known as the Penal Laws. This legal code imposed restrictions on the
political, economic, and religious lives of the new emigrants. The most paralyzing
limitation was the ban on non-A nglican ownership of land, which included the
Scots (now Scots-Irish) Presbyterians.
To the dismay of Scots-Irish families in Ulster, they found themselves ensnared
within another paralytic economy tied solely to the production of Irish linen. For
instance, Parliament passed the Act for Linen Manufactures in 1696 and the Woolen
Act of 1699, which ceased all production of Ireland’s primary staple, wool. Simi-
larly, the English subordinated the Irish economy u nder the Navigation Acts, which
required ships carrying Irish exports and imports to land in E ngland first, where
cargoes were subjected to additional levies. By dismantling the wool economy and
enforcing the Navigation Acts, E ngland sought to create an entirely new Irish linen
trade, and envisioned the Scots-Irish as the primary laborers for that system.
To survive, the majority of the Scots-Irish conformed to the economic model
envisioned by the English state, a linen-producing family unit that supplied the
empire with a lucrative export. However, the unintended consequences of this
model w ere to usher the Scots-Irish community into the larger transatlantic world.
In particular, English merchants, political-economists, and imperialists praised the
new linen trade because it united the empire’s various colonies around the world,
since Irish linen poured into North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The pro-
duction of Irish linen, therefore, evolved into one of the most important exports
for the empire. In particular, the West Indies and North America comprised the
largest markets for Irish linen, where more than half to three-fourths of all t hose
imports flowed to. Similarly, the consumption of Irish linen intersected with the
needs of the African Company, which supplied that article to North Africa and
slave populations in the West Indies. P eoples throughout the Atlantic world increas-
ingly incorporated Irish linen into their daily lives during the seventeenth and eigh
teenth centuries.
The profits generated by the linen trade never translated into wealth for the
Scots-Irish. This economic activity instead generated poverty, exacerbated by
the handicaps of the Penal Laws. As the satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) wrote,
the linen trade failed to provide a livable subsistence for Scots-Irish families, as they
live “in the most deplorable Condition that can be imagined” (Swift 1735, 2).
Or more famously in his Modest Proposal, Swift sarcastically suggested killing Ire-
land’s children to alleviate the burden of “feeding . . . [and] cloathing of many Thou-
sands” (Swift 1729, 7).
In addition to such poverty, the Scots-Irish suffered u nder the weight of absen-
tee landlords who deprived Ireland of its hard currency, and required all tenants
to pay their rent in specie. As a result, the poorest Scots-Irish family paid what
little cash they had to their landlords, instead of purchasing necessaries, thereby
accumulating exorbitant debts to survive. To make matters worse, many Scots-Irish
S C OTS - I R ISH 577
families struggled with short leases on their rented lands in addition to rising rents,
thereby living under the constant fear of being evicted from their homes.
Such poverty grew perilous during bouts of famine and drought that plagued
Ulster during the eighteenth c entury. The constriction of credit, low prices for Irish
linen, and English apathy all worked together to create the conditions for famine.
In one particularly bad case in 1729, the Irish Parliament ordered an investigation
into one of the many droughts, which revealed that poor harvests had driven up
the price of corn while the price of linen fell. Parliament deplored the resulting
poverty.
In response, droves of Scots-Irish people fled from Ireland to North America,
which in turn created a well-worn path linking the North American colonies and
Ulster Ireland together. At first, in the mid-seventeenth century, only a small num-
ber of Scots-Irish people emigrated across the Atlantic, settling predominately in
Puritan New England. By the turn of the eighteenth c entury, though, what had
started as a trickle of Scots-Irish immigrants quickly became a flood of young, sin-
gle males who settled predominately in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Caro-
lina. These Scots-Irish ran the gamut from poor indentured servants to fully-fledged
artisans with the means to escape the dangerous situation in Ireland. T hese expa-
triates also provided a very important service for the Scots-Irish remaining in Ulster,
by establishing a precedent for escaping Ireland’s poverty.
The Scots-Irish path to North America intersected with the Atlantic shipping
lanes of the linen trade. During the early eighteenth century, Ulster immigrants typi-
cally boarded ships laden with Irish linen, bound for the American colonies. A fter
unloading its h uman and commercial cargo on one end of the Atlantic, ships returned
to England and Ireland with cargoes of flaxseed destined for the production of
linen. The trade in Irish linen became so synonymous with Scots-Irish emigration
that it also became known as the Emigrant Trade. This dual traffic eventually devel-
oped into a formalized system in the eighteenth c entury, in which colonial govern-
ments and merchants attempted to convince Scots-Irish families to leave Ireland
for North America.
Once in the American colonies, the Scots-Irish often congregated on the frontiers,
preferring to establish their own insular and culturally distinctive communities.
At the same time, t hese Scots-Irish settlements created chains of correspondence
back to family and friends in Ireland. Oftentimes, those relatives and confidants
in Ulster, inspired by the relocation of those before them, left Ireland to join their
family and friends in North America. However, the independence of these Scots-
Irish communities often provoked the anger of imperial officials who sought to con-
solidate control over the frontiers, as well as Anglican clergy who detested the
non-A nglican faith of the Scots-Irish Presbyterians.
Also, as new residents in the borderlands between British America and Indian
Country, the Scots-Irish often conflicted with Native American populations. For
instance, in Pennsylvania, Native American attacks on frontier settlements during
Pontiac’s War (1763–1766) produced the so-called “Paxton Boys” uprising. The Paxton
Boys, composed largely of Scots-Irish emigrants, organized themselves into mili-
tias that took justice into their own hand. But more often than not, the Scots-Irish
578 SENE G A M B IA
vigilantes targeted peaceful, non-v iolent native communities like the Conestoga
(Susquehannock) Indians. When the empire tried to crack down on the Paxton
Boys to stop the violence, the Scots-Irish received protection and refuge from fron-
tier residents and other Scots-Irish communities who supported the violence.
Armed with such popular reinforcement, the Paxton Boys marched upon Phila-
delphia in 1764, where they threatened to depose colonial authorities, and thereby
undermine imperial authority in Pennsylvania.
On the surface, such rebelliousness symbolized declining and violent relations
between European settlers and Native Americans in the mid to late eighteenth
century. But just as importantly, the Paxton Boys violence represented the chang-
ing cultural and ethnic dynamics taking place within the British Empire and its
colonies in North America. As imperial authorities tried to find ways to tie its dis-
parate colonies and subjects together, oftentimes rallying around a shared identity
as “Britons,” the Scots-Irish demonstrated that they hardly considered themselves
“British” in any sense of the word. Instead, they were a distinct people who sought
to be left alone on the margins of the empire and, more importantly, protested the
intrusions of imperial authority into their daily lives.
See also: British Atlantic; Migration; Pontiac’s War
Further Reading
Dickson, R. J. 1966. Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1775. London: Routledge
Press.
Griffin, Patrick. 2001. The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish,
and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Swift, Jonathan. 1729. A Modest Proposal for preventing the C hildren of Poor People from being
a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. Dub-
lin: S. Harding Publisher.
Swift, Jonathan. 1735. The Present Miserable State of Ireland. In a Letter from a Gentleman in
Dublin, to His friend S.R.W. in London. Wherein is briefly stated, the c auses and heads of all
our Woes. Dublin.
Truxes, Thomas M. 1988. Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
SENEGAMBIA
Senegambia is a region in West Africa comprising the basins of the Senegal and
Gambia Rivers and lies some distance from the Niger Bend midway between the
Sahara Desert and the forest zones. The Senegambia was one of the first regions in
West Africa to export slaves across the Atlantic. It was a site of European commer-
cial competition for centuries. Prior to Portuguese arrival in the fifteenth century,
Senegambia relied heavily on the states of the Sudan and the Sahara for trade.
The period from 1650 to 1850 brought dramatic changes to the societ ies of the
SENE G A M B IA 579
Senegambia. The development of Atlantic commerce, driven by European demand

for slave-produced commodities, had long-term consequences for the indigenous
people of the Americas and for the people of Senegambia, the native homeland for
many captive Africans seized and taken across Atlantic.
When the Portuguese arrived at the Senegal River in the late fifteenth c entury,
they encountered the powerful Jolof Empire. Early Portuguese explorers sailed
up the Senegal River and traded with local merchants for gold and slaves. As early
as the late 1530s, French ships began arriving in the Senegal River Valley and w ere
significant competitors with the Portuguese for control of the trade from the river.
In 1481, a Portuguese ship captain made an agreement with a local landlord to
develop a settlement at Gorée (meaning “safe anchorage”). A stone church was con-
structed and within a few years a large cemetery was erected adjacent to the cha-
pel. Local residents provided fish, food, water, wood, and other provisions for
Portuguese ships en route to other parts of West Africa and to India. In the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the most important coastal trading cen-
ters south of Gorée, were Rufisque, the port of entry for the Jolof state of Cayor,
Portudal, the primary port for the Serer state of Baol, and Joal, an important coastal
entrepôt for the Serer state of Siin. Local traders at Gorée, Rufisque, Portudal, and
Joal carried on an extensive and thriving trade along the Gambia River purchas-
ing ivory, wax, gold, tobacco, and slaves that w ere resold for high profits to Euro
pean vessels. In the 1590s, English adventurers reported that the French had largely
secured the trade from the Portuguese by cultivating the support of local leaders.
Local Africans and Afro-Portuguese traders transported kola, ambergris, cot-
ton garments and other commodities along extensive networks that straddled the
coastline and intersected with larger networks that joined up with routes to the
interior.
The volume of slaves leaving from Senegambia in Portuguese ships was mini-
mal in the first half of the eighteenth century. A resumption of hostilities between
England and France in the Seven Years’ War, created an opening for Portuguese
interests to reestablish significant commercial links with the Guinea-Bissau region.
In 1755, under the guidance of the Marquis de Pombal, the Portuguese instituted
a major policy change towards the use of Indian labor that essentially outlawed
the practice in Maranhão, a district of northern Brazil. As a result of colonists’ con-
tinued demand for enslaved l abor in the region, Portuguese slave trading activities
around the Cacheu and Geba Rivers in southern Senegambia experienced a strong
resurgence in the second half of the eighteenth century. The organization and exe-
cution of the slave trade was administered by the Company of Grão Para and Mara-
nhão that functioned u ntil 1778. At Cacheu, the company constructed the Fort of
São José de Bissau that was used as a provision depot and barracoon for housing
slaves before their shipment to Brazil. From the fifteenth through nineteenth c entury,
approximately 140,000 slaves from Senegambia embarked for the Americas on
Portuguese ships.
French presence in Senegambia lagged behind the Portuguese and Dutch, the
primary European traders in the region. In the Senegal River Valley, the French
established trading factories on two islands; Saint Louis, at the mouth of the Senegal
580 SENE G A M B IA
River, and Gorée off the coast of the Cape Vert peninsula, only a few kilometers from
Dakar, the modern-day capital of the Senegal nation. Located at the mouth of the
Senegal River, Saint Louis was first fortified by the French in the 1670s. From this
base, the French traded with Jolof merchants who inhabited the region for gold,
hides, and ivory. In 1684, the Compagnie de Guinée was established, an organ
ization that was a powerful extension of the French state, to develop slavery in the
French Antilles.
When Portuguese navigators arrived in the 1440s, Gorée was uninhabited
because locals considered it unsuitable for agriculture. In the early seventeenth
century, the Dutch constructed two forts on the island to trade with local mer-
chants for gum, ivory, and slaves. By 1677, the French had evicted the Dutch and
occupied the island for the majority of the following two centuries except for a few
brief periods of English occupation. The buildings supporting the community
around Saint Louis included a cemetery, hospital, and church as well as numerous
poorly-constructed h ouses. The location of the fort attracted the French b ecause it
provided easy access to the caravan routes that traveled from the Maghreb and
beyond. The dungeons and cellars at Saint Louis had a holding capacity of over
1,000 slaves. The Jolof kingdom controlled the majority of the Lower Senegal Val-
ley and its tributaries and were the most populous ethnic group in the region.
The site of Gorée was particularly attractive to European ships because they did
not have to traverse a difficult bar. Europeans considered Gorée one of the health-
iest places in Senegambia because the climate was pleasant and the rainy season
was short. French forts were a nuclei of new hybrid trade communities governed
by Europeans but with large permanent mixed race populations. The French pop-
ulation on the island was small and largely comprised of Afro-French residents
that w
ere critical to the organization and operation of trading activities with local
traders and Atlantic ship captains. Two-thirds of the population worked small boats
for the river and coastal trade on the Senegambia coast. By the m iddle of the nine-
teenth century, the population on the island numbered some 4,000 residents. Many
of the slaves departing from Gorée originated from the populations of the Kajoor
and Bawol kingdoms. From the fifteenth through nineteenth century, approxi-
mately 93,000 slaves from Senegambia embarked for the Americ as on French
ships.
The first Englishman to explore the Gambia River was Richard Jobson in 1620.
Jobson, spurred by vast sums of gold returning from the Americas on the Spanish
galleons, failed to yield the spectacular wealth of his Iberian rivals in Senegambia.
Over the next 40 years, several companies w ere chartered in E ngland to pursue
the trade on the Gambia River and Senegambia region. In addition to captive
Africans, the English traded with local Mandinka merchants for gold, ivory, wax,
dyewood, hides, and gum. The trade in Senegambia was dominated by the great
navigable rivers, the mighty Senegal and Gambia, which carried products from the
interior to the coast. The rivers served as commercial highways for local commu-
nities like the Jolof, Mandinka, Bambara, and Dyula that inhabited the Gambia
River valley. The primary base for English trade in Senegambia was Fort James,
located on James Island, in the middle of the Gambia River about 12 miles from
SE V EN YEA R S ’ WA R 581
the coast. The English took possession of the island in 1661 after evicting a group
of traders sent by the Duke of Courland that had settled there in the early 1650s.
The English abandoned Fort James in 1709. When officials returned to reoc-
cupy the site four years later, the fort was in such dilapidated conditions that it
was not u ntil 1718, when repairs w ere finally completed, that the English could
resume full-scale slaving activities at the site. A few years later, the powder maga-
zine exploded, killing the governor and 10 other Englishmen. In the 1730s, English
influence in the Gambia expanded as Royal African Company officials established
several out-factories along the river at Joar and Bintang, and promoted trade at Por-
tudal, Cacheu, and Bissau. Afro-Portuguese residents were crucial to English trade
in Senegambia. Nuimi residents Philip Gomez, Emmanuel Vos, and Barnaby Lopez
purchased food and provisions for ships and company employees residing at James
Fort. Simon Mendez was so important to English commercial operations in the
Gambia River that he received gifts on five separate occasions in 1734 alone. The
primary Afro-Portuguese communities along the Gambia w ere Sika, Tankular, and
Geregia. Each settlement had well-constructed churches that were visited twice
yearly by Catholic priests. From the fifteenth through nineteenth century, approx-
imately 142,000 slaves from Senegambia embarked for the Americas on English/
British ships.
Neal D. Polhemus
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; French Atlantic; Portuguese Atlantic; Royal African
Company
Further Reading
Barry, Boubacar. 1998. Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Brooks, George E. 2003. Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and
Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Athens: Ohio Univer-
sity Press.
Hawthorne, Walter. 2010. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade,
1600–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
S E V E N Y E A R S ’ WA R ( 1 7 5 4 – 1 7 6 3 )
The Seven Years’ War was fought from 1754 to 1763 and stretched across five con-
tinents and involved all of the major powers of Europe, with the bulk of the fight-
ing taking place from 1756 onwards and giving the war its name. Taking place
largely in North America and Europe, this conflict saw two g rand coalitions of
European powers align against one another and fight over territory. The two prin-
cipal nations involved were Great Britain and France, with Spain, Portugal, Prus
sia, Russia, Austria and a number of other nations joining alongside one of the
principal two. The multiple peace treaties signed in the wake of this conflict worked
to reshape both the New World and European power dynamics and boundaries.
The Seven Years’ War confirmed G reat Britain as the most powerful nation in
582 SE V EN YEA R S ’ WA R
Europe and North America, and it shifted a great amount of territory and power
between the nations that fought.
In the decades leading up to the war, the nations of Europe reshuffled their tra-
ditional alliances and enemies. These changes occurred in the aftermath of the
War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748). Fought over the succession of the Haps-
burg royal family, the conflict left unresolved territorial disputes between several
European nations involved. While Great Britain and France maintained their tra-
ditional opposition to one another as two of the more powerful nations on the world
stage, many other European powers changed their stance t owards both friends and
foes. As Austria and Prussia prepared for f uture conflict with one another over the
territory of Silesia, they swapped their traditional allies. Prussia sided with Great
Britain, while Austria switched into a defensive alliance with France. This reversal
of traditional alliances is referred to as the Diplomatic Revolution and changed the
landscape of Europe. As increasing pressure pushed t owards a renewed conflict in
Europe, the other major powers joined their respective sides. Russia, Spain, Swe-
den, and the Holy Roman Empire joined France while Portugal and several smaller
German principalities joined alongside G reat Britain and Prussia.
North America and the European colonial system there represented an entirely
new set of circumstances that led to the Seven Years’ War. G reat Britain, France,
and Spain all held large and profitable holdings in North America. Tensions rose
as time progressed and these empires grew in territory, population, and impor-
tance to their home nations. Territorial issues were at the center of t hese tensions;
as each nation’s colonies expanded they inevitably began encroaching on the
claimed territory of the others. Nowhere was this more volatile than in the Ohio
country between the British and French colonies. The fruitful and strategically
located Ohio River valley bisected the two growing empires and was occupied by
a large native population. New France had laid claim to the entire region of the
vast Mississippi River basin, which according to them included the Ohio country
as well. The 13 British colonies lay along the Eastern coast of the continent and
were continuously expanding westward into and across the Appalachian Moun-
tains. The French began to construct forts within the Ohio country in the early
1750s to enforce their claim, which was met with raucous protest from the British
colonists and government who envisioned their own claim over the area. Tensions
over one fort in particular would ignite the world into war
As the powers of Europe prepared to open the next great war, its first sparks
ignited several thousands of miles away along the frontiers of North America. As
the French looked to consolidate their claim over the Ohio River valley they began
building forts onto strategic locations. Forts were used to control river traffic and
create military outposts along the frontier. The French were also looking to bol-
ster the safety of the native populations of the Ohio country against the encroach-
ing British influence. French and British colonists treated the natives of North
America quite differently. The French accepted the native culture and fostered a more
equal relationship between the two groups, while the British pushed for total assimi-
lation of the natives into the British way of life. Further British expansion signified
the transformation of native hunting grounds into farmland, which combined with
the French stance created natural friends between the two sides. Therefore the
French enjoyed a natur al ally as they pushed to consolidate the Ohio country.
The most vital location of the new French forts lay at the “Forks of the Ohio,”
where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers met to form the Ohio River. Named
Fort Duquesne, this strategic placement would all but guarantee the French control
over the region.
Upset with the presence of French soldiers in the region and the prospect of
not being able to farm the fertile valley, the British colonists attempted to slow the
French progress. Following several unsuccessful diplomatic overtures to the French
in the region, the colonial governments sought to escalate the situation. In 1754, the
governor of Virginia ordered a young George Washington (1732–1799), serving as
an officer in militia, to move into the area to safeguard British trade assets. While
moving through the modern area of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Washington, his
militia, and their Mingo native allies stumbled upon a patrol of French soldiers led
by Joseph Coulon de Jumonville (1718–1754). Following a controversial battle in
which little detail is firmly known, many of the French lay dead. Jumonville did
not survive the battle, e ither being killed during the melee or shortly thereafter by
one of Washington’s native scouts named the Half-King. Representing the native
Iroquois Confederacy in the region, the Half-King was deeply concerned with both
the French and British activities on the region. Following the battle at Jumonville
Glen, as it has become known, the French at Fort Duquesne gave chase to Washing-
ton and his men. Several days later at the hastily constructed Fort Necessity, Wash-
ington and his men were forced to surrender. The controversial death of Jumonville
in the backwoods would ignite tensions across the world.
Incensed by the violence in North America and unable to come to a diplomatic
solution, G
reat Britain and France slowly began escalating their reactions t owards
one another. Both nations dispatched regular troops to the colonies in anticipation
of continued warfare. G reat Britain began harassing French shipping by seizing
A Cocky Young Colonel

When Colonel George Washington headed out to the Ohio country to con-
front the French he was only 22 years old, and already poised to play a role in
determining the fate of empires. Writing to his brother, Washington described
his encounter with the French with more than a little bravado. “I can with
truth assure you,” he told his brother, “I heard Bulletts whistle and believe
me there was something charming in the sound.” King George II later learned
of Washington’s remark. “He would not say so,” the king quipped, “if he had
been used to hear many.”
Source: George Washington to John Augustine Washington, May 31, 1754. The Papers
of George Washington, Colonial Series. Edited by W. W. Abbot. Vol. 1. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1983.
584 SE V EN YEA R S ’ WA R
ships, their cargo, and their crew. The British continued to pressure the French in
the Ohio country with a 1755 campaign to capture Fort Duquesne. Led by General
Edward Braddock, several thousand British soldiers and colonial militia made the
long march into the frontier only to be met by the asymmetrical tactics of the
French and their native allies. The large conventional force was decimated by irreg-
ular tactics in an ambush. This mismatch in style would plague the British for
most of the war in North America.
Despite increasing hostilities in the New World, hope held out amongst both
sides that war in Europe could be avoided and many thought the new alliances
of the diplomatic revolution would deter such a large-scale war. Such hope held
for almost two full years until 1756, when war did eventually consume the con-
tinent of Europe. Starting in the Mediterranean at the island of Minorca, the Brit-
ish and French brought their colonial differences home. Following the formal
declaration of war, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia (1712–1786) sought to
preempt what he thought was an inevitable French and Austrian attempt to recover
Silesia from the previous war. As a shock to everyone, including their British
allies, the Prussian military launched an offensive that saw major victories in the
first year. Over the next several years the Prussians and their allies in German
Hanover would wage war against the French, the Austrians, the Russians, and
several other small German states. The British w ere not in the habit of committing
large armies to continental warfare in Europe, so instead they focused on gain-
ing further allies and supporting the Prussian efforts with both monetary and
logistical support.
The British did, however, commit massive manpower and support to the fight-
ing in North America. Unlike their French opponents, who left colonial defense
largely to their colonists and their native allies, the British used their overall naval
superiority and conventional army extensively in their efforts across the Atlantic.
Better known as the French and Indian War in the American colonies, French colo-
nists and their native allies relied on irregular tactics and geography to counter
the numerically superior British and their colonial militias. The native Seven Nations
of Canada were allied with the French, which included such groups as the Algon-
quin, Abenaki, and Huron. Opposed to both the British and the Iroquois Confed-
eracy, t hese natives proved to be the early difference in the war. Early efforts proved
disastrous for the British as the French proved again and again that their approach
could hold off British invasions. French victories at the British forts Oswego and
William Henry, marred the early years with British defeat.
The year 1758 saw the turning point as the British began securing victories across
the region. Starting with the capitulation of the French fort at Louisbourg, the Brit-
ish were able to roll back French forces in the Ohio as well in Canada. The Forks
of the Ohio and Fort Duquesne w ere seized that same year. British colonial born
rangers, such as Robert Rogers and John Gorham, helped to c ounter the irregular
tactics of the French and their native allies, while the British navy kept New France
short on supply and reinforcements. The British would r ide this wave of victories
through 1759 and into 1760, culminating in the French surrender of Montreal. Fol-
lowing this defeat, the native nations sued for peace with G reat Britain and the
Braddock’s Defeat, a 1903 painting by Edwin Willard Deming, depicts the ambush of a
British expedition through the Allegheny Mountains by French and Indian forces early in
the Seven Years’ War. General Braddock is shown falling from his h
orse, struck by a bullet,
while Colonel George Washington attempts to take command. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)
fighting in North America came to an end in 1762, with the final French defeat at
the Battle of Signal Hill. The British victory in North America secured their posi-
tion as the power house of the continent and finally expelled their long rivals in
New France.
The Seven Years’ War was indeed a global affair as fighting occurred in South
America, Asia, and Africa in addition to Europe and the North America. Spain and
Portugal fought over colonial possessions in South America, with the Spanish align-
ing themselves against the British. In Asia, the French and British fought over
trading rights and influence in the southern Indian state of Bengal. As in North
America, the French colonial forces in India w ere eventually routed and expelled
from India by better disciplined and supported British soldiers. Similar events
brought the war to Western Africa as French trading posts in Senegal and Gambia
were conquered by British expeditions. As fighting wrapped up across the globe, the
war in Europe approached a stalemate. By 1763, the nations of Europe had devas-
tated one another on the battlefield and many economies had been ruined. Prussia
and Austria signed the Treaty of Hubertusburg in February of 1763, which ceased the
war in Central Europe with minimal territorial change occurring. Prussia remained
a power and the owner of the prized region of Silesia. That same month saw G reat
Britain and France sign the Treaty of Paris, which fully closed the Seven Years’
War across the globe. The treaty saw the g reat majority of territorial possessions
586 SLAV E R E B ELLION
returned to their original o wners outside a few exceptions. G reat Britain gained
the most as it received French Canada, Dominica, Grenada, and several Car ibbean
islands from France. French Louisiana was split in half, with the eastern side
of the Mississippi River ceded to Great Britain, and the West and New Orleans to
Spain. The war closed with Great Britain assuming the mantle as unopposed
power in both Europe and the world, completely reshuffling the power dynamics
of the Atlantic world and beyond.
James Sandy
See also: Acadians; American Revolution; British Atlantic; French Atlantic; New
France; Treaty of Paris
Further Reading
North America, 1754–1766. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Marston, Daniel. 2001. The Seven Years’ War. London: Osprey.
Szabo, Franz A. J. 2008. The Seven Years’ War in Europe, 1756–1763. Harlow, UK: Pearson/
Longman.
S I LV E R . See Gold and Silver
S L AV E R E B E L L I O N
Slave rebellion was one of many forms of resistance against the institution of slav-
ery. Also referred to as insurrections or revolts, slave rebellions consisted of armed
uprisings by slaves against their masters or the colonial administrations u nder
which they lived. From the early sixteenth c entury well into the nineteenth c entury,
slave rebellions occurred at sea and on land, on both the eastern and western shores
of the Atlantic. Revolts were more likely in regions where there were dispropor-
tionately high ratios of slaves to f ree people. Colonies with large plantations of more
than 100 slaves, such as in the sugar-producing regions of the Caribbean and Bra-
zil, experienced revolts of greater scale and frequency than regions with fewer
concentrated numbers of slaves such as North America or the Andean region of
South America.
Slaves rebelled for many reasons. Almost all revolts w ere related to poor working
and living conditions. Acute hunger, deprivation, repression, and constant physi-
cal and psychological violence w ere common features of slave life. While slavery
was not a new condition for many African captives, slave life in the New World
was harsher, and often more deadly than in West and Central Africa. In rebelling,
some slaves sought to create autonomous communities in the Americas or return
to Africa. Escaped slaves, known as Maroons, created new communities of for-
mer slaves throughout the Atlantic world from the sixteenth century onwards.
Other groups of rebels seized upon opportunities presented by imperial con-
flicts elsewhere in the Atlantic world. Often, rebelling slaves envisaged abolition
SLAV E R E B ELLION 587
and emancipation, as in Saint-Domingue. Although at times, rebels would rally

along ethnic lines, some would forge rebellious alliances that transcended Africa’s
ethnic divisions.
The first recorded slave insurrection in the Americas occurred in 1521, in the
Spanish colony of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. Wolof African slaves
joined Taíno Amerindians to strive for independence. Although Santo Domingo
remained u nder Spanish control, by 1546, out of a slave population of 30,000 on
the island, some 7,000 w ere living as Maroons (Stone 2013, 195).
The Spanish Car ibbean and mining regions in Mexico relied heavily on African
slave labor and w ere thus more prone to rebellion. African plots to remove Span-
ish colonists from Mexico were discovered as early as 1537. African Indian fugitive
communities, known as Sambo-Mosquito communities, allied with the English to
destabilize the Spanish in Central Americ a in return for English recognition of
their independence during the 1540s. Venezuela saw numerous slave revolts. By
1800, the Spanish Crown suspected that Venezuela alone had over 30,000 Maroons
(Genovese 1979, 39). Cuba had numerous revolts with hastening frequency after
the Spanish Crown declared a free trade in slaves through its empire in 1789,
importing 300,000 slaves and becoming one of the Car ibbean’s most important
sugar-producing islands (Childs 2006, 9). The Aponte Rebellion of 1812, led by
José Antonio Aponte (d. 1812), a Captain in Havana’s free black militia, was indicative
of the changing demographics of the island. Coalitions of Africans, Creoles, free
blacks, mulattoes and slaves conducted revolts across the island but were eventu-
ally suppressed by colonial militia. The diverse nature of the antislavery coalition
stoked fear in the colony’s white population and slavery would not be abolished in
Cuba u ntil 1886.
Brazil imported the largest number of African captives in the colonial Americas
and played host to frequent slave insurrections throughout its history. Fugitives
established quilombos, autonomous African communities, as early as 1605, in the
sugar-producing regions of Northeast Brazil, with Quilombo dos Palmares being
the largest. A self-sustaining settlement with Bantu-speaking Angolan and Con-
golese peoples, it was politically, economically, and socially aligned with West Afri-
can traditions. Using guerrilla tactics, Palmarinos successfully repelled both Dutch
and Portuguese invasions for almost a c entury, retaining their independence from
Europea ns until 1695, when Portuguese troops and Amerindian mercenaries
defeated the Palmarinos and their leader, Zumbi (1655–1695).
Between 1807 and 1835, Bahia, a sugar and tobacco producing region of Brazil
known for its high slave-to-free ratio, experienced numerous revolts. The Malê
Rebellion of 1835 was arguably the most significant. Rebels, comprised of an
ethnically diverse group of Islamic and African-born slaves, occupied the streets
of Salvador da Bahia, one of Brazil’s largest cities and ports. The revolt was well-
planned, with rebels allegedly aiming to create a new society free of whites and
non-cooperative Brazil-born slaves, while enslaving mulattoes. Local militia quickly
contained the rebellion and 500 suspected rebels w ere sentenced to death, prison,
whipping, or deportation (Reis 1993, xiii). In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital in 1835,
authorities reacted to news of the revolt by tightening restrictions on blacks while
588 SLAV E R E B ELLION
A Rebellion in Jamaica
In 1760, 1,500 enslaved black men and w omen led by a slave named Tacky
(d. 1760) seized upon the Seven Years’ War to stage a massive uprising known
as Tacky’s Rebellion. Though Tacky would be killed, the rebellion lasted a
year and a half, with around 60 whites and thousands of pounds of white-
owned property destroyed. The rebellion was so well-coordinated that some
observers thought it was the result of an island-w ide Coromantee plot to
take control and establish an African colony in the heart of the Car ibbean.
With vital support from Maroons, the British prevailed over the rebels and
over a thousand slaves w ere executed or transported off the island (Craton
1982, 138).
debating slavery and the slave trade in parliament, though legislators did not move
toward emancipation until 1888.
The largest slave rebellions in the British Atlantic colonies occurred in Guiana
and Jamaica, islands that both had slave-to-free ratios of more than 10-to-1, as well
as the terrain and landmass to house isolated communities of Maroons. Between
1731 and 1823, the two territories experienced a major revolt every two years. Slaves
in Jamaica revolted 10 times between 1669 and 1734 (Genovese 1979, 33–35). By
1739, the British administration on the island recognized that Maroon commu-
nities could not be defeated and signed a treaty. In exchange for their autonomy,
Maroons agreed to help suppress future slave rebellions in Jamaica.
During the seventeenth century, Barbados, one of Great Britain’s most produc-
tive sugar colonies experienced only minor uprisings. Barbados housed a large
African and Creole slave population, but the island’s small size and a deforested
landscape made rebellion difficult. Slaves and masters also lived in close proxim-
ity, increasing the likelihood that conspiracies would be discovered early. A major
exception to this pattern was Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816, led by an Igbo slave, Bussa
(d. 1816). After breaking free, Bussa and a few hundred armed slaves took control
of the entire southeast of the island. The governor of Barbados declared martial
law before defeating the rebellion. Over 200 slaves were put to death and a further
132 deported (Craton 1982, 264). The revolt was inspired by a belief among slaves
that the British Parliament had promised emancipation yet it had not been enacted
on the island.
Elsewhere, European colonies in the Car ibbean played host to slave rebellions
throughout the eighteenth century. Dutch Curaçao witnessed several rebellions
between 1765 and 1795, most notably the month-long but ultimately unsuccessful
Tula Rebellion of 1795. Dutch Suriname’s Saramaka Maroons waged a long-standing
guerrilla war on Dutch colonists and their plantations well into the late eighteenth
century. The largest slave rebellion in the Danish Car ibbean occurred on St. John
in 1733, when Coromantee rebels planned to seize sugar plantations and enlist
other African groups as their laborers. The rebellion was not quashed until August
SLAV E R E B ELLION 589
1734, when French and Swiss troops stationed in Martinique, fearing insurrection
might spread, assisted the Danish in suppressing the rebels.
In Africa, and at sea during the notorious Middle Passage, slaves also rebelled.
Areas prone to rebellion in Africa included Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and the
Windward Coast, which had historically been less involved in slave trading prior
to European expansion in the Americas. Some form of revolt is thought to have
occurred on around 1-in-10 slave ships during the Middle Passage (Richardson
2001, 74). It was not uncommon for slaves to seize ships and then attempt to sail
back to Africa, sometimes with the support of European sailors. The frequency of
shipboard slave revolts increased costs of the trade for European merchants. Fear-
ful investors sought more crew, guns and insurance to guard against potential losses
of ships and captive cargo through rebellion. Of the numerous instances of slave
ship rebellions, the 1839 case of La Amistad is perhaps the best known. A fter
departing Havana, Cuba, 53 Mende Africans aboard freed themselves, killed the
captain, and forced the ship’s crew to sail toward Sierra Leone (Rediker 2012, 7).
Rather than sail east, Spanish sailors veered up the coast of the United States where
the Coast Guard seized the vessel and its captive cargo. A fter two years’ confine-
ment and legal challenges that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Mende returned
to Sierra Leone.
Between 1619 and 1865, relatively few rebellions of scale occurred in the United
States. Slaves participated in Bacon’s Rebellion in V irginia in 1676, and revolted in
1712 and 1741 in New York City. During the Stono Rebellion in September 1739,
an Angolan slave named Jemmy led an unsuccessful push for freedom with around
two dozen Kongolese slaves from South Carolina toward Spanish St. Augustine.
After the rebellion was suppressed, South Carolina’s legislature passed the 1740
Negro Act to further restrict slaves’ movements, right to assembly, to raise food,
and to learn to write. The law also gave o wners the right to execute rebellious slaves.
In the United States national period, a revolt known as the German Coast Uprising,
was suppressed in New Orleans in 1811. In 1831, in Southampton, V irginia, Nat
Turner (1800–1831) led a group of 70 slaves in a bid to escape slavery, eventually
killing over 60 whites before being contained by a militia of over 100 whites (Kol-
chin 1993, 156–158). Black slaves rebelled against their Cherokee masters in 1842
and white abolitionist, John Brown (1800–1859), unsuccessfully attempted to
lead a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1859. Slave conspiracies in North America
were often discovered before they could be put into action, including Gabriel
Prosser’s (1776–1800) plan in V irginia in 1800 and the 1822 plot of Denmark Vesey
(1767–1822) in South Carolina.
In the French Atlantic, the Haitian Revolution led by former slave Toussaint
L’Ouverture (1743–1803), ended not only slavery, but created the new nation of
Haiti, the Americas’ first independent black nation. Prior to the revolution, Saint-
Domingue was France’s most profitable colony in the Americas. On August 21, 1791,
a coordinated slave revolt erupted in the north of Saint-Domingue, as plantations
were burnt down and white masters were murdered. By 1792, rebels controlled
one-third of the colony. Soon after, they defeated French Royalists and a British inva-
sion. A
fter conquering the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo in 1801, L’Ouverture
590 SLAV E R Y
was imprisoned by the new ruler of France, Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821) who
sought to reestablish slavery and French control in Saint-Domingue. L’Ouverture
died in a French prison in 1803. One of his chief lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Dessa-
lines (1758–1806), led former slaves against Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General
Charles Leclerc (1772–1802). Dessalines’ army defeated the French before pro-
claiming the island as the new, independent nation of Haiti in 1804. The Haitian
Revolution inspired the enslaved throughout the Atlantic world while instilling
fear in white planters and proslavery legislators across North America, the Car ib
bean and Latin America.
Patrick Thomas Barker
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Barbados; Brazil; Haitian Revolution; Jamaica;
Maroons; Slavery
Further Reading
Childs, Matt. 2006. The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slav-
ery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Craton, Michael. 1982. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies,
Ithaca. NY: Cornell University Press.
Genovese, Eugene. 1979. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making
of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Rediker, Marcus. 2012. The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom.
New York: Penguin.
Reis, João Jose. 1993. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Malê Rebellion of 1835, Bahia. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Stone, Erin Woodruff. 2013. “America’s First Slave Revolt: Indians and African Slaves in
Española, 1500–1534,” Ethnohistory, 60 (2): 195–217.
S L AV E R Y
L egal slavery existed in the Atlantic world from the mid-fifteenth century u ntil
1888, in almost e very part of the Americas. Although slavery occurred throughout
history and across the globe, Atlantic slavery is distinguished by the enslavement
of non-Europeans, namely Africans, and the focus on production and profits. Plan-
tations using slave labor w
ere some of the first sites of large-scale, industrial pro-
duction in the West, producing cash crops for consumption throughout the
Atlantic. In turn, these commodities generated massive profits for planters, mer-
chants, and governments. Meanwhile, the ideological justifications for slavery
helped lay the groundwork for modern conceptions of race. In spite of its human
costs, colonies dependent on slavery evolved into unique societies and w ere impor
tant in shaping larger political, cultural, and economic developments in the Atlan-
tic world.
Although Ancient Greece and Rome w ere slave societies, slavery had largely dis
appeared from Europe and only existed in isolated pockets around the Mediter-
ranean by the late Middle Ages. Nevertheless, other forms of bound labor, including
SLAV E R Y 591
serfdom, servitude, and apprenticeship, did exist. Despite the persistence of unfree
labor throughout the early modern period, Europeans also began developing a free
labor ideology, where bondage was anathema to the existence of a functional,
wealthy, and modern polity. The decline of slavery and rise of f ree l abor coincided
with Europe’s Age of Exploration , and when Europeans ventured into the world,
they encountered slavery nearly everywhere they traveled. Most importantly, when
the Portuguese arrived in Africa in the late fifteenth century, they found slaves read-
ily available for purchase. Slavery had long existed in Africa because most socie
ties believed wealth was based on the ownership of labor, not land. Employed in
agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and even militaries, slave labor was impor
tant for premodern African society. Indeed, the Portuguese became involved in the
trade in African slaves not by shipping them to Europe, but by selling slaves within
Africa. Eventually, however, the Portuguese did take some back to Iberia, Madeira,
and other Atlantic islands. Moreover, African slavery made sense to Europeans. Many
began to believe that their countrymen and coreligionists were unfit for slavery,
but found themselves in need of a source of bound labor. Africans, who were both
strangers and non-Christians, became ideal candidates for enslavement.
Thus, when Europeans arrived in the New World, they were already familiar
with African slavery. While the Spanish and other Europeans first used Native
Americans to fulfill their l abor needs, this strategy was ineffective. The indigenous
population knew the landscape and could easily run away or rebel. More impor-
tantly, Native Americans did not possess immunities to the diseases introduced
by Europeans and, as they died in large numbers, Europeans turned to African
slaves. By 1550, the Spanish employed enslaved Africans as urban workers and to
help mine gold and silver. Meanwhile, the Portuguese exported sugar cultivation
and slave labor to Brazil which, dramatically expanding the scale of production,
became the world’s leading producer of sugar by 1600. Yet, the use of slave labor
was not a forgone conclusion. The logistics of moving people from Africa across
the Atlantic, or capturing Native Americans, was daunting and demand outstripped
supply.
Despite the limitations, however, the need for labor meant slavery was always
an option for policy makers and white colonists and ultimately helped create the
slave societies of the New World. The case of Barbados is instructive. Settled by a
group of English colonists in 1625, the Car ibbean island developed a vibrant plan-
tation economy where white indentured servants grew foodstuffs and tobacco for
export to nearby islands. Barbados’s success attracted capital investment from
London and Barbadian planters began experimenting with sugarcane. By the 1660s,
the island was the world’s largest sugar producer. White servants still arrived in
significant numbers, but they could not meet labor demands of sugar cultivation
and planters turned increasingly to African slavery. By 1660, slaves comprised a
majority of the island’s population and by 1700, they outnumbered whites three-
to-one. Leading planters across Barbados also began consolidating their control,
converting mostly to slave labor, buying up most of the land, and planting e very
arable acre with sugarcane. As they acquired more land and wealth, they gradu-
ally turned their plantations into proto-industrial worksites where all stages of sugar
592 SLAV E R Y
production from planting to refining w ere conducted on site. T hese integrated plan-
tations more efficiently produced sugar but required large outlays of capital to
create and maintain, the largest investment being in slaves, further displacing small
farmers. Many of these farmers left Barbados and settled in other colonies, taking
slavery with them. Likewise, these plantations w ere solely for the production of
sugar; other provisions had to be imported. England’s northern mainland colo-
nies captured this trade, making them partners in the success of plantation slav-
ery. Moreover, many large planters eventually relocated to E ngland where they
became a powerful lobbying force.
Barbados created a successful model—capital, sugar, and slavery—that was rep-
licated across the Atlantic. By 1700, the English expanded the integrated plantation
model to Jamaica, while the French and Dutch did the same in Martinique, Guade-
loupe, and Saint-Domingue, and in Suriname, respectively. To supply these colo-
nies with the required slaves, each nation chartered an official slave trade company
that established fortifications in Africa and provided slaves to the American colo-
nies. Yet, rife with corruption, unprofitable, and unable meet the demand for slaves,
these companies eventually lost their monopolies, opening the slave trade to pri-
vate traders beginning in the 1690s. The result was a dramatic increase in the
number of slaves arriving in the Americas.
During the eighteenth c entury, the slave system reached its apogee. African slav-
ery spread to nearly every corner of the New World settled by Europeans. As nearly
6.5 million slaves poured into the American colonies between 1700 and 1800, the
institution dramatically altered colonial societ ies settled the previous c entury.
Often called the plantation complex, the commodities produced by slaves struc-
tured the European economic order of the eighteenth c entury. In this system, sugar
was just one of many crops grown by slaves. The Chesapeake colonies in North
America, and the Orinoco River valley colonies in South America, grew tobacco
using slaves; slaves in British South Carolina produced rice and indigo; and the
Car ibbean colonies began to diversify, growing cotton, coffee, and cacao. More-
over, e very urban area in the Americas had a large enslaved population employed
as artisans and laborers.
As slavery became entrenched in the Atlantic, European colonial powers created
legal regimes to uphold slavery, such as the Barbadian Slave Code of 1661, and the
French Code Noir (1685), giving the state and slaveholders broad coercive powers
to extract labor from slaves. Legally defined as property and following the status
of their m
others, slaves w
ere treated like livestock, and slavery was an inheritable
status. Slaves faced public beatings and mutilations, humiliation, and sexual vio
lence from their masters to keep them in line. The state confronted slave resis
tance with a disproportionate amount of violence and garrisoned soldiers to prevent
rebellion. Often tried in separate courts, slave criminals faced extreme punishments
from judicial authorities. Combined with an arduous and dangerous work regi-
men and poor provisions, this brutal system was a demographic disaster. Jamaica,
for example, received over 700,000 slaves between 1655 and 1808. Yet in 1800,
Jamaica’s slave population numbered only 250,000. The high mortality rate was
common across the circum-Caribbean, meaning slave societies needed a constant
SLAV E R Y 593
influx of new arrivals from Africa to keep the plantations r unning. Even in such
deadly conditions, slavery remained valuable with profit margins rarely dropping
below 5 percent.
Nevertheless, slaves w ere able to form communities. Slaves amalgamated their
own traditions with those of Europe, creating new cultures. In places where land
was plentiful, slaves had their own garden plots, giving them a source of food and
income, but also creating a conservative proto-peasantry zealous of their privileges
and dependent upon the master for justice. Slaves also resisted slavery by feigning
illness or ignorance, breaking tools, or r unning away. In the latter case, some
runaways escaped into the mountains or forests and found independent Maroon,
or escaped slave, communities. Open, violent rebellions w ere rare, but did occur.
Other slaves found more peaceful paths to freedom. Loyal serv ice, becoming mis-
tresses, and self-purchase could all lead to manumission. By the end of the eighteenth
century, freed slaves and the free mixed race c hildren of planters were a growing
demographic in most slave societies.
The first substantial challenge to the slave system came during the Age of Revo-
lution (1750s–1850s). While certain groups embraced antislavery earlier, and there
was a nascent abolitionist movement in G reat Britain by the 1750s, it was the rhe
toric of liberty and natural rights unleashed during the American Revolution that
bolstered arguments to end slavery and inspired slaves to fight for their own free-
dom. Perhaps the biggest blow to slavery during this period was the Haitian Revo-
lution. Taking place in French Saint-Domingue, the rebellion coincided with the
French Revolution. In August 1791, a general slave uprising began. Over the next
thirteen years, the slaves forged an independent republic, creating a nation of for-
mer slaves in 1804. In addition, most Latin American republics made emancipa-
tion a cornerstone of their independence movements.
In the midst of this revolutionary upheaval, the British abolitionist movement
won a major victory in 1807, when Great Britain abolished the Atlantic slave trade.
Other aspects of plantation slavery came u nder attack as well, especially the treat-
ment of slaves and the influence slaveholders exercised over government. In
response, many planters began espousing a racial ideology that emphasized Africans’
biological inferiority to whites and attempted to find ways to ameliorate the condition
of slaves while remaining profitable. Nevertheless, popular abolitionist campaigns
in G reat Britain and relatively peaceful slave uprisings in Jamaica, Barbados, and
Guyana eventually pushed the British to abolish slavery in 1834, paying slave-
holders a market price for their slaves. Called compensated emancipation, it cost
the British £20 million or 40 percent of the government’s annual expenditure. The
French followed suit in 1848, compensating planters a fter years of declining sugar
prices.
Declining economic prospects helped to hasten the end of slavery in the British
and French Car ibbean, but slavery was also compatible with the emerging capi
talist and industrial order. Slave societies in the southern United States, Cuba, and
Brazil embraced t hese economic principals and proved especially resilient. The
United States is illustrative of this trend. While slavery declined a fter the Ameri-
can Revolution, the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, and Louisiana Purchase
594 SLAV E T R ADE IN AF R I C A
in 1803, made slavery incredibly lucrative. Cotton became the main export of the
United States, supplying British and American textile mills with raw material.
Driven by increasingly sophisticated financial instruments, steamboats and steam
powered cotton gins, and a domestic slave trade that transported millions of slaves
south, “King Cotton” and its slavery helped transformed the United States into an
industrial powerhouse. Moreover, destruction of slavery in these regimes only came
through violence. When Southern slaveholders feared that the Northern states
sought to end slavery in the United States, they declared their independence and
emancipation was a consequence of the ensuing civil war. Cuban slaves w ere an
important source of rebel soldiers during the colony’s first war of independence
(1868–1878), causing the Spanish to begin the process of emancipation in 1880.
Brazil, however, clung to slavery, but finally ceded to both domestic and interna-
tional pressure in 1888, becoming the last nation in the Americas to abolish
slavery.
After slavery ended, post-emancipation societies faced a labor crisis. Many for-
mer slaves refused to work on the plantations, preferring to eke out a living on
small plots of land or relocate to urban areas. A fter failed attempts to make former
slaves “apprentices,” the British imported indentured laborers from India. Cuba
turned to Chinese workers and eventually used migrant workers from across the
Car ibbean. The United States developed a system of sharecropping that reduced
former slaves to a state of dependence, while Brazil encouraged white immigration
that locked Afro-Brazilians out of the labor market. Even though slavery ended,
the racial ideologies it birthed did not, making the newly freed slaves second-class
citizens. To this day, the descendants of slaves generally have a lower standard of
living than their white counterparts across the Atlantic world.
Jared Ross Hardesty
See also: Abolition of Slavery; Barbados; Code Noir; Cotton; Haitian Revolution; Plan-
tations; Race; Slave Rebellion; Slave Trade in Africa; Sugar
Further Reading
Blackburn, Robin. 2011. The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and H uman Rights.
New York: Verso.
Davis, David Brion. 2006. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.
S L AV E T R A D E I N A F R I C A
Slavery and slave trading existed throughout history in many parts of the world,
and Africa was no exception. The place of Africans in slave trading before 1500
differed little from that of other p
eoples. Africa was part of a larger slave trade in
the early modern period before European explorers brought most of the world’s
continents into contact with one another. The slave trade in Africa provided slaves
to three markets before the sixteenth century: the Mediterranean region, Asia, and
SLAV E T R ADE IN AF R I C A 595
the internal African market. What changed with the Age of Exploration was the
flow of slaves, within and from Africa, to respond to a new, transatlantic market
for slaves in the Americas. With the development of European colonies in the Amer
icas, traders slowly began supplying African slaves to meet the rising demand for
labor in the Western Hemisphere. As a result, the slave trade in and from Africa is
the largest forced migration in h uman history and a defining characteristic of Atlan-
tic history between 1500 and 1880.
Prior to the middle of the fifteenth century, the African slave trade existed as
part of regional or long-distance networks. The trans-Saharan trading systems con-
nected Northern Africa with the savannah and tropical regions of West Africa and
the upper portion of Central Africa. The elaborate network of trade that crossed
the Sahara Desert made the kingdoms and nascent empires of North Africa aware
of the resources available south of the desert. Beginning in the eleventh century,
gold from ancient Ghana and, in the fourteenth c entury, the empire of Mali, drew
significant attention from Mediterranean rulers. Mali is known to have supplied
gold to much of the Mediterranean world in this period. As the trade expanded in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the list of commodities grew to include salt,
gold, and slaves in larger numbers.
A fundamental shift in the African slave trade began after European traders
advanced south along the coast of tropical West Africa in the middle of the fifteenth
century. The changing power bases outside of Africa, specifically in the Eastern
Mediterranean and Southern Europe regions, affected the slave trade in Africa. The
trans-Saharan trade in slaves became more lucrative b ecause the expansion of the
Ottoman Empire in the middle of the fifteenth century drove the prices for slaves
higher in the Mediterranean. Europeans, also seeking slaves, faced increasing com-
petition in the slave markets of Northern Africa. The rising costs of slaves partly
drove European efforts to map out new routes to access the goods and commodi-
ties they desired. The quest to find new routes or sources of high value commodities
for the European market contributed to the Age of Exploration and the coloniza-
tion of the Americas.
The contact between Europe, Africa, and the Americas held important conse-
quences for the slave trade in Africa with the emergence of plantation agriculture
in the Atlantic world in the sixteenth c entury. The internal slave trade responded
to the presence of t hese new buyers by pulling slaves from the savannah and tropi-
cal parts of Africa, the same regions feeding the trans-Saharan trade. At first, sup-
plying the few thousand slaves annually to Atlantic traders searching for labor for
sugar plantations on coastal islands, and in the Spanish Car ibbean, did not dra-
matically alter the flow of slaves in or from Africa. That soon changed with the
expansion of Atlantic trade starting in the sixteenth century and the shift in regional
power in the savannah kingdoms that controlled much of the trans-Saharan trade
in gold, salt, and slaves.
The combination of the internal rise and fall of empires combined with the
expansion of Atlantic trade networks truly transformed the slave trade in Africa.
The gradual reorientation of the slave trade away from Northern Africa and towards
the tropical coast of West Africa coincided with the kingdom of Songhay (Songhai)
596 SLAV E T R ADE IN AF R I C A
supplanting Mali as the most prominent empire below the Sahara Desert.
Regional power shifts associated with the rise and fall of African kingdoms only
accelerated a fter 1600. The evolution of states, especially in West Africa, had as
much potential to alter the slave trade within Africa as did the rising, external
demand for slaves. It is important to note that the slave trade was not a significant
factor in the rise or decline of Mali and Songhay. The ability to control trade, par-
ticularly in commodities such as gold and salt, was important to the growth of both
empires. The growth of European colonies in the Americas in the l ater seventeenth
century, and throughout the eighteenth century, could not be ignored in Africa
either. The wealth generated by Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French colonies
allowed slave buyers to pay higher prices to African rulers positioned to meet the
demand.
The cumulative effect of internal and external factors transformed the African
slave trade so that by the eighteenth c entury, the bulk of slaves no longer moved
north across the Sahara Desert. This did not mean that the slave trade supplying
the older markets ended; rather, it meant that the scale of African slave trading
had dramatically increased. Now the largest numbers of slaves left Africa to work
plantations scattered across the Atlantic world. The Atlantic slave trade, which mea
sured only a few thousand slaves in the fifteenth c entury, exploded by the end of
the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, more than 6 million slaves were
moved from Africa to the Americas. Additional thousands of slaves entered the
trades supplying the Mediterranean and Asian markets.
To supply the millions of slaves taken from Africa in the eighteenth century, the
means of acquiring slaves in Africa had to change. The transition from slave trad-
ing as a marginal activity to one that was central to political power and economic
expansion marked a substantial change. Captives sold on the coast, early in the
history of Atlantic slave trading, were prisoners captured in wars connected with
the rise and fall of states; in other words, taking captives was not the reason for
the war. However, by the nineteenth c entury, taking slaves had become a reason
for war in parts of Africa. Raiding enemies for slaves became a more common
occurrence in West and Central Africa. For example, Benin supplied Portuguese
traders with slaves gained from the kingdom’s expansion in the 1490s. Once the
kingdom’s boundaries stabilized, the source of slaves sold to the Portuguese dried
up and slave trading decreased in the region. Though slave trading continued, it
did not become the most valuable export from Benin until after 1700, when raid-
ing for slaves was the reason for military conflict.
In contrast to fifteenth century Benin, smaller kingdoms that emerged in West
Africa were almost wholly dependent on their abilities to dominate the regional
slave trade. The kingdoms of Ashanti (Asante) and Dahomey (Danhomé) are two
such examples. Both were small yet powerful kingdoms by the early nineteenth
century b
ecause of their ability to provide slaves for sale into the Atlantic slave trade.
This remained true even after the slave trade had been deemed illegal by several
Western nations a fter 1807. G reat Britain even fought a war against Dahomey
because of slave trading. A common factor in the success of both African king-
doms was their ability to get firearms, a central tool to both taking war captives
SLAV E T R ADE IN AF R I C A 597
for the slave trade and in protect-

ing themselves from attack by
others. Large numbers of guns
came to Africa during the second
half of the eighteenth century as
European traders bartered nearly
300,000 firearms annually for
African goods, including thou-
sands of slaves; by the end of
the century Great Britain was
exporting £2 million of gunpow-
der to Africa annually as part of
the Atlantic slave trade. Such
statistics help explain the rapid
expansion of Dahomey and
Ashanti. Firearms and powder,
the ability to acquire and control
the trade in them, became piv-
otal factors in the success and
survival of such kingdoms by the
nineteenth century. As a result of
the slave trade, whether inten-
tional or not, this led to a greater
militarization of parts of Africa as A European slave dealer bargains for slaves in
kingdoms sought to gain slaves Africa. Europeans did not venture into the
from rivals or protect their people interior of the continent to secure bondsmen but
from capture and enslavement at instead bought them from African traders along
the hands of their enemies. the coast. (Library of Congress)
In addition to political changes,
the slave trade altered material culture and social status in African societies. Local
rulers, through participation or even control of the slave trade, acquired items of
interest that many would term luxury goods. This is not to say that African crafts-
men could not make luxury goods, but, rather to acknowledge that rulers sought
manufactures from afar because such items carried status that could be used to
enhance a ruler’s power and influence. Firearms and other weapons, as men-
tioned, enhanced the power of those who could control the supply; the same
could be said for a king who could, through the slave trade, gain access to com-
modities such as cowrie shells, which w ere used as currency and for ornamental
purposes in parts of Africa. Other items exchanged for slaves included rum,
tobacco, and iron bars. Cowrie shells w ere in demand in West Central Africa, for
example, and Europeans provided large shipments of them in exchange for slaves.
Cowrie shells, in essence, facilitated longer-distance trade in the same way Euro
peans used American silver to gain access to Chinese markets.
The expansion of the slave trade also brought legal changes for African socie
ties. The legal changes helped slave traders supply the demand for slaves. For
598 S M ITH , J OHN
instance, the punishment of criminal acts reflected both the demand for slaves as
well as the willingness of rulers to participate in the slave trade. Murder, theft, and
sorcery w ere punishable by enslavement in many societies. Once made a slave, the
local ruler had the right to sell a criminal as a slave. This was not the traditional
means to deal with such crimes. Murderers for instance often took the place of the
slain victims as a form of compensation for the loss incurred by a f amily. Another
change was enslavement as a punishment for debt. In fact, as the demand for slaves
escalated, coastal kings began to punish e very offence with enslavement and sale
of criminals. Such changes in some African societies illustrate how the slave trade
transitioned from a marginal institution into a central one tied to larger market
forces and political power.
That the slave trade transformed Africa in many ways is evidenced by the dif-
ficulty in stopping the traffic in the nineteenth c entury. When many nations, espe-
cially Western, industrialized ones, abolished slavery, it continued in Africa. The
legacy of slave raiding and militarization made it difficult to end slave trading in
Africa, and when Europeans directly intervened, war resulted in some occasions.
More generally, slave traders simply moved. Western efforts to halt slave trading
in West Africa led slave traders to seek new sources for slaves along the eastern
coast of the continent.
Eugene Van Sickle
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Ghana; Mali Empire; Slavery
Further Reading
Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
versity Press.
Manning, Patrick. 1990. Slavery and African Life Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades.
SMITH, JOHN (1580–1631)

John Smith was an English explorer, mercenary, and promoter of New World col-
onization in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Commonly known
as Captain John Smith, he is most famous for helping to establish Jamestown, a
settlement started by the Virginia Company, which turned out to be the first per-
manent English settlement in North America. Some scholars posit that without
Jamestown, the English would have abandoned colony planting in North America
and all recognize Smith’s importance in the colony’s survival.
After leaving the Lincolnshire farm on which he was born in 1580, John Smith
facilitated trade, exploration, and empire building for England by using the skills
he gained as a young mercenary. While Smith is best known for his time in James-
town, and his relationship with Pocahontas, the cutthroat leadership that he
S M ITH , J OHN 599
showed at Jamestown came from experiences in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
The battle-hardened John Smith brought his skills of killing and a knack for escap-
ing death to the Atlantic world u nder the serv ice of the profit-seeking directors of
the Virginia Company.
John Smith spent his teens and twenties seeking adventure through battle, and
his experiences prepared him for the tasks needed of him at the Jamestown settle-
ment, but also shrouded his name in disgrace. In Eastern Europe, he fought so
well as a mercenary against the Turks that he gained his own troop of cavalry and
a captaincy, leading to a terrible battle in which he was left for dead. After barely
escaping back to E ngland, he kept the title of “captain” and looked for new oppor-
tunities. Before his 25th birthday, he had sailed several oceans, been thrown over-
board, taken up with pirates, killed many Christians and Muslims, and got picked
up to be sold at a slave market.
Smith had returned to England prior to the Virginia Company’s launching of
its colonial efforts, and Smith’s military exploits caught the attention of the direc-
tors and he signed up to help. In 1607, the Susan Constant laid anchor in the Ches-
apeake Bay. John Smith arrived in what would be called Jamestown, V irginia, in
disgrace and faced execution for inciting mutiny. While on board he had been u nder
the protection of Christopher Newport (1560–1617), the ship’s captain. After arrival,
Newport opened a sealed docu-
ment from the Virginia Company
that listed the directors’ choices
for men to lead the colony, includ-
ing Newport, Smith, and Smith’s
enemies. Scholars can only guess,
but the charges of mutiny were
probably exaggerated in an effort
to get rid of Smith before reach-
ing shore.
The directors had received a
charter from the king of England
to use the area for their profit as
well as for the king’s. T hese set-
tlers had the job of settling and
controlling the area to maintain
the company’s claims and find
profitable goods, especially gold
as the Spanish had found in the
south. Disease, starvation, and
fighting with local tribes pre-
sented major prob lems to the
success of the colony while, at Portrait of John Smith from his 1624 book The
the same time, infighting among Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the
the settlers also distracted the Summer Isles. Smith was an accomplished self-
leadership from the real threats promoter. (Library of Congress)
600 S M ITH , J OHN
around them. Moreover, the settlers knew little of farming and the company had
not prepared the group for self-sufficiency. Settlers attempted to set up a trading
post to use as a base to find mines, extract tribute from locals, and establish com-
munication routes. A fter many setbacks, John Smith emerged as a leader, using his
military experience and resiliency, to set the men to farming, to drill them with the
difficult to operate matchlock pistols, and to negotiate with friendly tribes for food
and alliances. He served as the colony’s president from 1608 to 1609.
John Smith’s trade with Native Americans and other efforts helped to establish
a v iable colony, which meant both survival for the settlers as well as fulfilling obli-
gations inherent in the company’s charter. The charter represented the mercantil-
ist relationships between laborers, businessmen holding trade monopolies, and the
Crown. The king and English Parliament sponsored exploration, and thus migra-
tion, to fuel the wealth for the kingdom, and this migration was bound to forced
labor, the search for commodities, and the demands of consumers in the context
of a larger global competition for resources. T hese were not easy tasks. Everyone on
this mission knew about earlier failed efforts to colonize the area. The directors knew
the last colony at Roanoke had failed, and they instructed the new settlers to look
for any survivors of the old colony. Moreover, Smith had read Sir Walter Raleigh’s
reports about the most recent attempt at colonizing V irginia, and learned as many
Algonquin phrases as he could to trade with local tribal representatives. Smith’s
relationship with the Powhatans, especially its mysterious chieftain Powhatan,
was complicated. They both attempted to use each other to gain advantage.
Smith’s contributions w ere important to keeping the colony afloat, but James-
town needed provisions and reinforcements. By 1609, the directors sent a new
leader and soldiers fresh from the Elizabethan Irish Wars, ready to fight and bring
greater discipline to the colony. Smith had started this, but he had too few men
and too many hostile locals to continue on his own. Without such reinforcements,
Jamestown would have failed just like Roanoke did. The new soldiers also brought
an end to the complicated, but mutually beneficial, relationship between Smith and
the Powhatans, by bringing soldiers willing to eliminate the native population.
Historical researchers found much of Smith’s narrative to be true, despite its
frequently self-aggrandizing tone. Smith’s most famous story told of how he was
saved from certain death by Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas, who had pre-
sumably fallen in love with him. Pocahontas probably did save John Smith in a
Pocahontas (1995)
In 1995, Walt Disney Studios released the animated Pocahontas, portraying
a young, beautiful Native American w oman who translated her worldview to
John Smith while also saving him from her protective yet overbearing f ather,
a familiar trope in Disney movies. Her cultural lessons and bravery inspired
romantic scenes interrupted by a talking tree, a gluttonous raccoon, and more
intercultural but generally historically inaccurate drama.
S M U G G LIN G 601
sense, but as a part of scripted event to symbolize Smith’s inclusion in the tribe.
Since Smith probably did not know this, he was not likely to describe cultural
nuances when he could provide a vignette about his bravery. As a 10-year-old
d aughter of a leading tribal member, Pocahontas did serve as a cultural liaison
but was not the love interest of legend. Moreover, Smith may have had to elimi-
nate some facts from his earliest writings to portray the colony as safe. The Virginia
Company needed to attract investors and settlers, so Smith’s renditions benefited
his self-promotion and the company.
These events notwithstanding, Smith’s time was short in V irginia. A
fter an acci-
dent, Smith returned to E ngland to recover but was eager to return to the North
American colonies for much of the rest of his life. In 1614, he finally returned, but
landing farther north, to explore the area claimed by the Plymouth Company. There
he named the region New E ngland, mapping it and writing a book about the area,
A Description of New England (1616). As settlers moved to the area, they used his
book to guide them instead of inviting him to join them despite his wishes to do
so. Thus he was consigned to writing about his past adventures instead of making
new ones, and creating a legacy for himself that would be disputed and confirmed
by historians but later idealized for popular audiences. Smith never married, and
he died childless in 1631.
Alexandra Kindell
See also: Jamestown; Pocahontas; Powhatan; Raleigh, Sir Walter
Further Reading
Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. 2006. Captain John Smith: Jamestown and the Birth
of the American Dream. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Horn, James. 2008. “Why Jamestown M atters: If the Colony Had Collapsed the English
Might Not Have Been Established as the Major Colonial Power in North America.”
American Heritage, 58: 52–54.
McPeak, William J. 2002. “The Adventures of Captain John Smith.” Military History, 19:
34–41.
SMUGGLING
Smuggling, the illegal trade in goods across international boundaries, was endemic
in the Atlantic world. As the colonial European powers fought for control over the
New World, they also attempted to control trade between each other and their colo-
nies. Despite attempts to regulate trade, smugglers thrived. In fact, smuggling
became an invaluable way to combat trade restrictions and allowed local markets,
especially in colonies, to get the supplies they needed. Smuggling was also a form
of political protest that was used to great effect in the Atlantic, particularly in Great
Britain’s North American colonies.
The majority of smuggling was done across a network of colonies that stretched
from Europe to the Caribbean and Americas. Smuggling entailed thousands of indi-
viduals that had specific jobs to help bring banned goods into the Atlantic colonies.
602 S M U G G LIN G
An interconnected series of colonies such as this with so many people working

towards one goal is in itself an economy that trades in illicit goods for money and is
directly opposed to the colonial power. In some cases it was specifically intended
to oppose the powers as a form of protest. In other cases, smuggling was viewed
as the continuation of banned practices due to lax government enforcement in the
region. Regardless, smugglers w ere intentionally trying to work around having to
pay duties for their goods, conducting illegal trade in violation of trade laws, and
state monopolies.
The British government was particularly concerned with securing their economic
empire, often attempting to create trade monopolies owned by specific companies
or the empire itself. The Navigation Acts (1651–1663) were a series of attempts by
the British government at controlling colonial trade by restricting trade to foreign
countries. This was the result of a sharp decline in trade for the British as the Dutch
became a strong competitor. The Acts banned the colonies from trading directly
to the Netherlands, Spain, and France, as well as all colonies under their control.
The acts were refined to add increasingly stringent restrictions on not just trade
but also how trade was conducted even within British colonies. Updated acts
included requiring three-quarters of a ship’s crew to be British or colonial and that
the vessel itself had to be British-owned. The most costly restriction was the require-
ment that all goods bound for American colonies had to first be shipped to
England for inspection and duty payments before being shipped to their destina-
tion. Requiring goods to be sent to England first added not only to the direct cost
of the shipments but also time in transport, which was already long to begin with,
and further increased the costs of trade.
The Navigation Acts had an important impact on the American colonies. Hav-
ing to get their goods directly from England instead of closer, foreign colonies
impacted the economic growth and direction of the American colonies. Not only
were imports into the colonies affected but the exports were as well. Some goods
were not available from any British sources. They could be procured by foreign
suppliers in violation of the law. Trade restrictions also increased the resentment
of the colonies towards the British Crown. The Navigation Acts became one of the
many issues with the Crown that would eventually lead the colonies into revo-
lution. Smugglers, on the other hand, benefited immensely from the acts as they
could purchase goods in a foreign market at a cheap price and sell them to the
American colonies for a nice profit.
Despite the effect on the colonies, the British government continued their regu-
lation of colonial trade by passing several more trade acts. The first of these acts
was the ineffective Molasses Act of 1733. Despite the indication that passing the
act would destroy the American colonies’ rum industry, Parliament taxed cheaper
molasses from foreign markets in an effort to foster more trade among the British
West Indies and deter the importation from foreign markets. The Sugar Act of 1764
became the next major attempt to tax trade as Parliament tried to raise revenue to
keep a standing army and combat smuggling. During this time, the sugar trade
was expanding in Car ibbean colonies, particularly the French colony known as
Saint-Domingue, and trips across the Atlantic were becoming increasingly risky.
S M U G G LIN G 603
The tax rate on molasses was cut in half but at the same time they increased secu-
rity in effort to actually collect any taxes that were due. They justified the tax by
claiming it would lead to better defenses of the colonies from foreign powers and
smugglers. Already wary colonists saw the tax as a violation of their rights as they
felt the economic impact now that the British government tightened security around
ports. With the increased security smuggling became a risky venture and the
amount of illicit goods coming into the colonies at a cheaper price fell as a result.
However, the act continued the now growing dissent within the colonies against the
Crown as the acts turned from trade regulation to raising revenue for G reat Britain
while offering no representation in Parliament. The Stamp Act of 1765 was another
similar act that attempted to raise revenue to pay for a standing army. It required
all paper to have an official revenue stamp, which could only be purchased from
England directly. The repercussions involved boycotts, violent mobs, and wide spread
condemning of the act. The British government enacted the Tea Act of 1773 in a
further attempt to prove that the government had a right to tax the colonies and
keep the East India Company from collapsing. Despite the better quality of British
tea, colonists w ere angry that the Tea Act would essentially validate the British gov-
ernment’s right to tax the colonies, and merchants stood to lose business to a
company monopoly because they had always acted as a middleman between the
company and the colonists but now the company could side-step them.
Smugglers began to develop techniques that helped them evade the Royal Navy
and get their smuggled goods to consumers. It was often as easy as smugglers dock-
ing at a wharf and openly offering their wares to anyone who would purchase.
Some city leaders even willingly turned a blind eye to smuggling in an effort to
gain popularity among the local populace and b ecause they realized how vital
smuggled goods were to the economy of their colony. As security became tighter,
smugglers could no longer risk selling goods directly on wharves anymore. Veteran
smugglers picked easier ports to enter and would unload there before sending it
up to major cities, often just side-stepping custom officials that were more difficult
to bribe. They also employed forged documents to appear as legitimate trade ves-
sels and that their vessels complied with the three-quarters British or colonial rule.
Ships w ere most commonly the Bermuda Sloop vessel that was nimble enough to
outrun the Royal Navy but also had the capability of being able to move in shal-
lower w aters and it came with British registration. One of the biggest boons to
smugglers was corrupt custom officials that were more than willing to ignore illicit
cargo or even help doctor official records.
Tea was a particular good that was common among the American colonies. The
British moved to regulate that trade as well considering the large smuggling oper-
ation that revolved around it. T hese colonists, merchants, and smugglers all worked
together to oppose the British government directly as a form of protest. Tea smug-
gling was a particularly rampant problem for the British as almost two-thirds of
all tea that was consumed was smuggled. The American colonies resisted the Brit-
ish government’s attempts to tax them without giving them a voice in Parliament
with the help of smugglers. Protests formed to boycott legal goods and in extreme
cases legal goods were destroyed. While the legal goods were being rejected, smuggled
604 S M U G G LIN G
goods became a mainstay of colonial life. Inferior smuggled tea was preferred over
legal British tea to the point that almost 90 percent of all tea consumed in the
colonies was smuggled. This rebellion would eventually culminate in the Ameri-
can Revolution where the American Patriots fought in open rebellion against the
British and declared their independence. Smuggling became a critical way to get
weapons and supplies to the Patriots and undermine British rule in a lucrative mar-
ket. The Patriots would trade with the Dutch for what they needed from St. Eusta-
tius, a key West Indian trading post in the Car ibbean that provided illicit firearms
for the Patriots and had a good standing relationship with the new nation. The
British became aware of the role St. Eustatius played in providing arms to the Patri-
ots and soon declared war on the Dutch Republic and temporarily disrupted trade
to the Patriots.
Slave smuggling was also a very lucrative venture for smugglers, especially dur-
ing the nineteenth c entury a fter G
reat Britain banned the slave trade in 1807. While
slavery remained legal, the international trade was increasingly regulated. However,
the regulation of the slave trade was not uniform across all nations that practiced
it and as such it was banned at different times across the nineteenth century. The
United States, in an effort to increase the value of slaves in country, banned the prac-
tice of importing slaves from other nations and effectively ended the Atlantic Slave
Trade in the United States once the prohibition went into effect in 1808. However,
smugglers continued bringing in slaves from other countries that did not ban the
practice, such as Cuba and Brazil. This created the illegal slave trade in place of
the Atlantic slave trade. T hese three countries contained the largest economy of
slave labor and received a large influx of slaves from Africa. The move to crack
down on slavery shifted the trade of illegal slave cargo from the traditional trian-
gle trade that it used to be into a trade that essentially moved slaves directly from
Africa into the Americas. Slave smuggling was a major operation that required more
than just the ship that did the smuggling. Since smugglers w ere no longer receiv-
ing slaves from suppliers, they often had to employ their own agents as operations
moved from a ship based business to a more land based business.
Slave smuggling was a very lucrative business for those who engaged in it, but
at the same time t here was a high risk of losing cargo. Slaves c ouldn’t be offloaded
in major ports as custom officials became less susceptible to bribery than before. In
addition to problems at the destination port, there were also problems in African
ports. Any base of operations along the coast ran a greater risk of being discovered
by authorities. T hese bases moved further inland along rivers to avoid detection
and continued their operations. Slave ships w ere typically faster than any navy
ship and because the trade had a more direct route, the shipping time was shorter.
However, the conditions aboard the ships were inhumane and it was common that
slaves perished during the trip. In addition to ships with slaves, smugglers also
sent ships with non-slave cargo in them to serve as a decoy. The ships were mostly
sent from Nigeria, the Gold Coast, and Guinea to colonies in Cuba and Brazil
(Havana and Rio de Janeiro being major destinations) before moving into the
United States. T hese ventures w ere often supported by British, Portuguese, and
Spanish investors. They saw the potential for profit in the trade despite the risk and
SPANISH A R M ADA 605
wanted to continue the trade despite their respective governments’ movements

towards enforcing restrictions. Despite these attempts at continuing the trade

through new operations, hard attempts at suppression on the illegal slave trade by
governing colonial authorities began an eventual decline in the number of slaves
smuggled out of Africa and those that were smuggled across the Americas. The
eventual abolishing of slavery by almost e very colonial power and eventually the
United States, Cuba, and Brazil saw an effective end to the illegal slave trade.
Luis Santana Garcia
See also: Abolition of the Slave Trade; American Revolution; Mercantilism; Tea
Further Reading
Eltis, David. 1987. Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Harper, Lawrence A. 1964. The English Navigation Laws: A Seventeenth-Century Experiment
in Social Engineering. New York: Octagon Books.
Karras, Alan L. 2012. Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Tyler, John W. 1986. Smugglers and Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the Ameri-
can Revolution. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
S PA N I S H A R M A D A ( 1 5 8 8 )
The Spanish Armada (in Spanish, the Grande y Felicísima Armada or the Empresa
de Inglaterra), was a large fleet assembled in 1588 by the Spanish king Phillip II
(1527–1598) to invade England. Composed of more than 120 ships, it sailed in
May from Lisbon, under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, Alonso Pérez
de Guzmán y de Zúñiga-Sotomayor (1550–1615), a nobleman with a strong rec
ord as an administrative officer, but often times regarded as an inexperienced
military leader for such an important enterprise. The plan was to reach Flanders, at
that time a Spanish-controlled territory, to pick up an army commanded by the
Duke of Parma, Alexander Farnese (1545–1592), and transport it to England, where
they would overthrow the Protestant queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603), with the hope
of replacing her with a Catholic monarch. The ultimate goal was to end the sup-
port that Protestant Dutch rebels in the Low Countries (roughly present-day Nether-
lands and Belgium) were receiving from England. However, due to communication
failure between the navy and the army leaders, the able opposition of the English
navy and privateers, and a sudden change of winds, the troops could not go
onboard. On the way back to Spain, the fleet faced many skirmishes and sea
storms that made it lose one-third of the ships. Even though t here was not a major
military victory for the English, the failure of the Spanish Armada represented the
last serious attempt both to invade the British Islands (at least until World War II)
and to restore Catholicism in E ngland.
The plan to send an army to E ngland was a bold attempt of Spain’s king to finish
rapidly what would become a long conflict between the two countries, sometimes
606 SPANISH A R M ADA
considered an undeclared war, from 1585 to 1604. During those years, the two
powers would dispute their influence both in the Atlantic Ocean and in Western
Continental Europe. Opposition to Spanish dominion in the Low Countries grew
strong in the 1560s, when Phillip II levied higher taxes and gave birth to a more
intolerant policy towards Protestantism, contrary to the lax attitude of the former
Spanish monarch, Charles V. In 1568, led by William I of Orange, the Dutch Prov-
inces started a rebellion. The conflict, called the Dutch Independence War or the
Eighty Years’ War, resulted in Dutch independence in 1648. After much progress as
well as setbacks (among them, the assassination of William I in 1584), the Dutch
rebels sought help from Elizabeth I, and even offered to become her subjects. The
Duke of Parma, formally the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, started a
campaign against the rebels in 1579. Following a south to north path, rebel cities
started falling u nder his advance and the campaign was gaining a strong momentum
by 1585, especially a fter capture of the city of Antwerp. In response, the Republic
of the Seven United Provinces, as the rebel provinces were officially called, signed
the Treaty of Nonsuch in August 1585. It ensured a continuous flow of soldiers
and resources from England in exchange for political influence in the govern-
ment and stationing two English garrisons in Dutch territory. As a result, Par-
ma’s advance was stopped and the war in the Low Countries found a momentary
stalemate.
On the other hand, English sailors were smuggling goods into Spanish territo-
ries in the Americas, a commerce that grew steadily from 1560 onwards. Even
worse for Spanish commercial ambitions, its ships and cargo would be put in greater
danger e very day by the also growing activity of English pirates and privateers.
During April and May 1587, English privateer Francis Drake attack the main Spanish
naval force in Cádiz, and then several other Spanish and Portuguese ports, almost
destroying the Spanish fleet.
After that raid, Phillip II decided to attack E ngland directly. By April 1588, the
expedition was ready. They would only sail from Lisbon to the English Channel just
before the end of May, b ecause some attempts to arrive to a negotiated solutions
were made, but without any result. During the navigation, English minor forces
fought the Armada in the Bay of Biscay, without causing much harm but signifi-
cantly delaying it, while English ports and the fleet got ready to fight. The Armada
reached the w aters of Flanders by the end of July. However, Spanish ships w ere too
big to maneuver in the Flemish coast’s shallow water, defended with efficacy by
Dutch flyboats. Unable to reach its goal, the Armada had no choice but to wait the
English attack stationed on the w aters of the port of Gravelines, near the border
with France. Finally, on July 28, both fleets engaged in the brief B attle of Gravelines.
The ill-armed yet faster English ships managed to damage seriously many Spanish
ships, especially the lumbering galleons, more apt for high sea b attles than for skir-
mishes near the coast, but after eight hours of battle they almost ran out of ammuni-
tion. As the confrontation ended, it became clear that no military victory was
possible for either side, due to the great number of ships in a small space near the
coast. The total loss of the Spanish Armada was five ships (two sank and three cap-
tured), an irrelevant fraction when considering the a ctual size of the fleet.
SPANISH A R M ADA 607
A sixteenth-century painting of the English defeat of the Spanish Armada. In English

memory, the victory was partly attributed to the so-called Protestant Wind, a timely
storm that disrupted the sailing of the ships of Catholic Spain. (Photos.com)
The Duke of Medina Sidonia, nevertheless, decided to go back to Spain to reeval-

uate the strategy. The decision allowed the English government to present the
campaign as a major victory, even though it was strategically indecisive. The strength
and size of the Spanish ships was significantly exaggerated in the propaganda that
followed the event, a view that permeated many historiographical works and popu
lar culture references. Due to a sudden change in the winds, which w ere blowing
towards north, the Armada sailed into the North Atlantic around Scotland and Ire-
land. Even though the English fleet pursued carefully because of their scarce
weaponry, going into unknown w aters had its toll, since the voyage proved to be
longer than expected and supplies ran out, just before facing unusually fierce storms
near the Northern shores of Ireland. Driven onto the rocks, many ships w ere
destroyed and looted by local inhabitants, while the cold weather also took many
lives among the ships’ crews. In the end, only 67 ships and less than 10,000 men
returned to Spain. As a result, English propaganda portrayed God on the Protes-
tant, English side, making the confrontation a dear one not only in the British
Islands but also across Reformed communities in Europe.
The strategic outcome of the expedition was a change in Spanish plans, focus-
ing on combat in the Netherlands. The failure of the Spanish Armada marked, albeit
608 SU G A R
A “Protestant Wind”
Enmeshed in the conflict between Catholic Spain and Protestant E ngland, the
Spanish Armada was bound to take on religious overtones no m atter the out-
come. In England, the storms that drove the Armada off course became
known as the “Protestant Wind”—evidence that God favored Protestantism
over Catholicism by ensuring E ngland’s victory against what, in the retell-
ing, became an otherw ise invincible foe. Following the battle, a commemora-
tive medal was struck in E ngland with the Latin motto Flavit Jehovah et
Dissipati Sunt or “God blew and they were scattered.” The Protestant Wind
took its place as a hallmark of English, Protestant pride.
symbolically, the start of Spain’s decline and England’s supremacy in the control
of the European seas and the Atlantic Ocean, both with military and merchant
ships. Two further unsuccessful attempts to send a strong fleet to try to regain Span-
ish naval influence in 1596 and 1597 confirmed the new balance of power. Anglo-
Spanish confrontation, referred sometimes as the Anglo-Spanish War even though
there was not a formal declaration and there were periods of relative peace, ended
in 1604 with the Treaty of London, after a long deadlock. Two new kings, James I
of E
ngland and Phillip III of Spain, agreed that the English would stay out of the
Low Countries and the Spanish out of Ireland. Also, Spain explicitly renounced
any aim to restore Catholicism in E ngland. On the other hand, E ngland agreed to
end privateer activity against Spanish commerce and colonial expansion.
Pablo Martínez Gramuglia
See also: British Atlantic; Drake, Sir Francis; Elizabeth I; United Provinces of the
Netherlands
Further Readings
Hanson, N. 2011. The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True History of the Spanish Armada.
London: Random House.
Holmes, R., and M. Marix Evans. 2007. Battlefield: Decisive Conflicts in History. Oxford:
Martin, C., and G. Parker. 2002. The Spanish Armada. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Tenace, E. 2003. “A Strategy of Reaction: The Armadas of 1596 and 1597 and the Spanish
Struggle for European Hegemony.” English Historical Review 118 (478): 855–882.
SUGAR
There are many species of perennial tall grasses belonging to the genus Saccharum
that contain large quantities of sugar molecules, and humanity has used them for
a variety of different purposes over the course of thousands of years. However, the
SU G A R 609
Sugar Beets and Honey

Before its cultivation in the Americas, Western Europeans obtained sugar
from beets grown in Eastern Europe, from small-scale sugar plantations estab-
lished by Arabs in the Mediterranean, and from Asia via the Silk Road. In
Western Europe, honey from bees was gathered and also used as a sweetener.
myriad of ways in which sugar as a commodity has transformed in use and

meaning since the rise of an Atlantic world system is remarkable. By the end of
the seventeenth century, it had become an important cash crop for the European
empires that w ere gaining control over vast regions of the Americas. A dramatic
increase in demand followed, which strengthened the Atlantic slave trade and
fueled the plantation complex that came with it. L ater, the Industrial Revolution
transformed sugar into an essential staple crop, creating new consumption patterns
on both sides of the Atlantic that still affect the world today.
Sugarcane cultivation in Africa predated contact with Europeans. It seems to
have first been domesticated for its sucrose by around 8000 BCE in New Guinea.
Before the sixteenth century, Europeans w ere seldom able to consume sugar as a
sweetener or a food. Knowledge of its use did not make its way to England until
around 1100 CE, and most Europeans considered it an exotic good throughout
the Middle Ages. Doctors, apothecaries, and herbalists used sugar sparingly as a
medicine or a spice, and it was also used as a preservative or consumed as a lux-
ury good. However, production and consumption were rare, and supply was sparse.
Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal (1394–1460) established a sugarcane
plantation in Madeira in 1434, and African labor was used to cultivate and manu-
facture the crop on São Tomé, the Azores, and the Canary Islands later on. How-
ever, it was not until Europeans established firm control throughout the New
World’s tropical zones that sugar plantations transitioned to large-scale, monocul-
ture production. The abundant rainfall and fertile soil in these regions were ideal
for cultivating sugarcane. Using the plantations they set up on the other side of
the Atlantic as a blueprint, the Spanish brought sugarcane to Hispanola in the early
1500s, followed by the Portuguese in Brazil three decades later. By midcentury,
there were roughly three thousand plantations, both engenhos (Portuguese) and
ingenios (Spanish), in operation across the Americas. The organization and size of
these production units w ere relatively small in scale, with places such as Cuba fac-
ing considerable difficulty in turning a profit early on. By the second half of the
sixteenth century, however, well over 80 percent of the sugar that Europeans con-
sumed came from the Americas, with Brazil leading in production until the 1620s.
Initially, Europeans used a mixture of f ree and slave l abor on t hese sugar estates
in the New World. Amerindian populations such as the Arawaks and the Caribs
were forced into slavery, and indentured servants from Europe w ere also used.
These early laborers and sharecroppers had a fairly steady work regiment that
required them to reach daily production quotas. However, disease and over exertion
610 SU G A R
often times decimated entire indigenous societies, and indentured servants from
Europe were often in short supply. Those Europeans who did make their way
across the Atlantic had a rather short life expectancy as well. However, by the time
the English, the French, and the Dutch joined the competition for New World ter-
ritory, sugar production was becoming more lucrative. In effect, the demand for
sugar in Europe dramatically increased, creating a need for a new labor source to
help increase the supply. This led to a surge in demand for slaves, which Europe
ans found by the millions in Africa, especially after the English obtained a stron-
ger foothold in the Car ibbean. By the mid-seventeenth century, slaves from Africa
became the primary form of labor that was used to produce sugar. To be sure, Euro
pean merchants initially made their way to the west coast of Africa for gold, spices,
pepper, salt, ivory, and iron. Slaves were also traded, but human trafficking was
not the main business u ntil the sugar revolution transformed places like Barba-
dos, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Martinique into large-scale pro-
duction centers.
When these forced migrants made their way to European-operated sugar
plantations in the Americas, the labor regiment they endured was grueling. The
fields required constant attention, and cutting the large stocks down was back-
breaking work. Moreover, the juice within the stocks needed to be processed within
48 hours of cutting them down or e lse it would dry up; giving the sugar mills on
these plantations what some scholars have called a quasi-industrial character. The
slaves then ran the canes through dangerous presses to extract the juice, which
was collected and heated to boiling point in large vats. The bits and pieces of stock
that floated to the top during the heating process were skimmed off and pressed
into molasses for making rum, and the sugar crystals that remained a fter the
evaporation process was complete w ere refined into various grades of granular
sugar. The more refined the sugar, the higher the market value. Plantations could
be as large as 40 acres in size, with Africans outnumbering Europeans as much as
25-to-1 in some places. They w ere often run by absentee landlords on the other
side of the Atlantic who employed a team of p eople onsite to ensure that the opera-
tion functioned properly and efficiently. Mortality rates for Africans on t hese plan-
tations was staggering, and the disproportionate number of males over females
contributed to an alarmingly low birth rate as well, which meant that African
bodies were constantly being imported and ruthlessly subdued, despite their fre-
quent rebellions.
The long range impact of the transformation to large-scale sugar production in
the Americas had profound ramifications for societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Demand for sugar in the Americas and Europe fueled the Atlantic slave trade, which
drained millions of p eople out of Africa, fueled warfare between African states,
and solidified the establishment of warrior classes in various West African socie
ties. T
hose who survived the treacherous journey across the Atlantic, known as the
Middle Passage, were forced onto plantations with p eople from a variety of differ
ent cultural linguistic groups, which encouraged a kind of African syncretism
that created new forms of cultural expression and worldviews. Moreover, the eco-
nomic structure that was created to maximize the production of sugar for export
SU G A R 611
to international markets promoted a division of labor that transformed the Atlan-

tic economy in unprecedented ways. Some historians of the Atlantic world have
focused on this last point to argue that sugar production in the Americas served
as a blueprint for the type of capitalist system that emerged during the Industrial
Revolution.
By the eighteenth century, sugar had become one of the most important com-
modities in the Atlantic world, so much so that it s haped the political negotiations
of war between European empires. During the Seven Years’ War, for example, the
British conquered much of French America, but sugar lobbyists in London wor-
ried that their lucrative plantations in Jamaica and Barbados would face competi-
tion from the newly acquired sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. They
successfully lobbied parliament to pass laws that gave France these islands back
in exchange for Canada. Sugar also played an important role in the 1803 Louisi-
ana Purchase, and Napoleonic Wars that came a fter it. A fter Toussaint L’Ouverture
defeated General Charles Leclerc in 1802, Napoleon’s grand design to reestablish
a French Empire in North America based on lucrative sugar profits from Saint-
Domingue no longer seemed v iable, so he sold Louisiana to the United States at a
bargain price to generate funds for his Egyptian campaign. This in turn helped
fuel discord between G reat Britain and the United States, contributing in part to
the War of 1812. And at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States pushed
for war against Spain, partly to gain more control over the sugar producing regions
of Cuba and Puerto Rico, where oppressive forms of sugar labor are still dominant
on plantations to this today.
Sugar also had an impact on the psychoactive revolution that started to take off
during the early modern period. Merchants, planters, slave traders, and imperial
elites brought about the convergence of the world’s psychoactive substances through
tapping into and creating new transatlantic trade networks, and it could not have
been done without sugar. Indeed, the production and consumption of sugar was
directly connected to the history of psychoactive drugs such as caffeine, which
Europeans consumed in large qualities at the coffeehouses that sprang up on both
sides of the Atlantic during the sugar revolution. The relatively egalitarian spirit of
Enlightenment conversation that took place in these spaces served as a stark con-
trast to the oppressive and coercive labor that was used to produce the sugar that
sweetened the coffee and tea consumed within them. Eventually, production
increased so dramatically that prices decreased significantly, which transformed
consumption patterns across the Atlantic. This in turn transformed sugar’s mean-
ing from a luxury good to a staple crop, making it a vital source of calories and a
much needed source of energy for Europe’s growing number of factory workers
during the Industrial Revolution. Around the same time that the commodity was
being democratized, however, elites reinvented its luxurious meaning by creating
elaborate and expensive concoctions for consumption that harkened back to the
commodity’s older place in European society before the rise of the Atlantic world.
Cakes, detailed sugar-icing figurines, and exotic sugar recipes are all examples
of how the lexicon of sweetness continued to figure prominently in certain social
spaces.
612 SU G A R
Sugar can also be considered as a drug. After it became such a ubiquitous sub-
stance during the Second Industrial Revolution and the rise of mass consumerism
that followed, sugar transformed from a staple crop to a life necessity for many
societ ies. During the nineteenth century, the annual growth rate of sugar was
10 percent, and p eople w
ere forming an addictive nervous dependence on it,
especially after the creation of Coca-Cola, which contained large quantities of the
commodity.
Bradley J. Borougerdi
See also: Brazil; Saint-Domingue/Haiti; Slavery
Further Reading
Dunn, Richard S. 1972. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West
Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York:
Viking Press.
Swartz, Stuart W. 2004. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–
1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
T
TA Í N O S
The Taínos w ere the largest group of indigenous p eoples in the Car ibbean region
at the time of European contact in 1492. Geographically, they occupied the Greater
Antilles except western Cuba, the Bahamas (where they w ere known as Lucayans),
and the Lesser Antilles to the northwest of Guadeloupe. The Taínos were the first
natives in the Americas to suffer the catastrophic effects of European contact,
including the inadvertent introduction of deadly diseases for which they had no
immunity. As a result of epidemics and the Spanish practice of coerced native labor,
the Taínos vanished within a few decades as a distinct p eople. Because few Spanish
women immigrated to the New World in the early sixteenth century, however, many
male settlers married Taíno w omen. As a result, a sizeable faction of the modern Spanish-
speaking Car ibbean can claim partial Taíno ancestry, which has in recent years
inspired efforts to promote a unique tripartite identity in the Spanish Car ibbean,
derived from African, European, and Taíno elements.
The Taínos were present in the Car ibbean by about 600 CE. Their ancestors
came to the Car ibbean from South America, although scholars dispute the exact
route. Some scholars believe that the Ostionoid culture—the Taínos’ ancestors—
represented a new wave of migration from South America, while others hold that
it developed out of the Car ibbean Saladoid culture which preceded it. Recent DNA
studies have shown that the Taíno population of Puerto Rico had genetic links to
more than one native group on the mainland, making it likely that t here w ere sev-
eral episodes of migration.
Taíno villages w ere constructed around rectangular central plazas that featured
a court known as a batey where ceremonies and a ritual ballgame w ere held. The
precise nature and purpose of the game remain unknown. The ball courts and cer-
emonial plazas were likely connected with political and religious power. It is not
presently known whether there were any links between batey and the ceremonial
ballgame played by various native p eoples on the mainland.
The Taínos w ere organized into hereditary chiefdoms. The chiefs w ere called
caciques, a term that the Spanish a dopted and applied to native chiefs they encoun-
tered throughout the Americas. Below caciques were a group of elites called nitaí-
nos, who supervised the commoners (naborías). The Taínos may have held slaves
as well. The large islands of the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and
Puerto Rico) were each divided into several large chiefdoms. The smaller islands
were perhaps individual chiefdoms.
The Taínos worshipped a number of different zemis or gods, the most impor
tant of which were the supreme zemi Atabey (or Atabeyra) and her son and partner
614 TA Í NOS
Legacy of the Taíno

Several English words are derived from Taíno, including hurricane, savanna,
and cannibal. The Taíno also passed along the hammock to the Spanish; its
use spread rapidly throughout the maritime world because of its portability
and ease of use on board ships. The Taíno also were the first to introduce
Europeans to food crops native to the Americas, such as cassava, guava, sweet
potatoes, peanuts, pineapples, and maize.
Yúcahu, the god of agriculture. T here w ere also a host of other minor gods, who
governed various aspects of fertility and the natural world. Taíno shamans con-
ducted rituals, cured illnesses, drove out bad spirits, and served as advisors to the
chief. Within some chiefdoms, the shaman may have wielded as much power as
the cacique.
The first encounter of Europeans and the Taínos took place on October 12, 1492,
when Christopher Columbus and his men landed in the Bahamas. This expedi-
tion also visited Cuba and Hispaniola, making contact with other Taíno chief-
doms. Columbus was forced to leave some of the men behind when his ship Santa
María ran aground, establishing the first Spanish outpost in the Caribbean, La Nav-
idad, in what is now Haiti. When Columbus returned the following year, he discov-
ered that the men left b ehind had been killed a fter mistreating the local natives.
The Spanish established a permanent presence on Hispaniola with the expedi-
tion of 1493, and colonized other Car ibbean islands from there. They forced the
Taínos to pay tribute in gold and cotton cloth, which sparked numerous revolts in
the early decades of settlement. Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) recounted
the horrors the Spanish inflicted on the Taínos in his Brevísima relación de la destruc-
ción de las Indias (Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies). The Spanish friar
Ramón Pané lived among the Taínos beginning in 1494, learning their language
and documenting their beliefs as preparation for their Christianization. His report,
Relación acerca de los antiguëdades de los Indios (Account of the Antiquities of the Indians),
completed around 1498, was the first European book written in the Americas and is
the major source of information on the Taínos, their lifeways, and their beliefs.
Permanent European settlement introduced epidemic illness to the p eoples of
the Americas, for which they had no immunity. The earliest documented disease
struck Hispaniola in late 1518 or early 1519, affecting few of the Spanish settlers
but devastating the Taínos. The combination of Spanish demands on their labor
and repeated waves of epidemics caused the Taíno population to vanish by the
1560s. Intermarriage between Spanish men and Taíno women did produce, how-
ever, a large population of mixed offspring.
Dennis J. Cowles
See also: Arawaks; Caribs

TEA 615
Further Reading
Keegan, William F., and Lisabeth A. Carlson. 2008. Talking Taíno: Car ibbean Natural His-
tory from a Native Perspective. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 2003. An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies,
with Related Texts. Edited by Franklin W. Knight. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Indi-
anapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Pané, Fray Ramón. 1999. An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians: Chronicles of the New
World Encounter. Edited by José Juan Arrom. Translated by Susan Griswold. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Rouse, Irving. 1993. The Taínos: Rise and Decline of the P
eople Who Greeted Columbus. New
Siegel, Peter E. 1999. “Contested Places and Places of Contest: The Evolution of Social Power
and Ceremonial Space in Prehistoric Puerto Rico.” Latin American Antiquity, 10 (3):
209–238.
TEA
The origin of tea stretches back into ancient times in Asia, but began developing
its ubiquitous worldwide presence during the age of global travel in the fifteenth
century. Once limited to the rituals of emperors and aristocracy, tea seeped into
the merchant class and then to the working classes of European and North Amer-
ican societies. By the mid-eighteenth century, the English w ere consuming in excess
of £5 million of tea annually, triggering booms in other industries, notably pro-
duction of earthenware in the Netherlands and England, and sugar production on
Car ibbean islands. Tea created fortunes for some, provided political fodder for
others, and fanned cultural changes for w hole societies.
Tea, or Camellia sinensis, is a species of the evergreen shrub. The tree is kept at a
height of about two meters, or knee high, because the best tea is brewed from
young leaves or leaf buds. The genus, Camellia, is the flowering plant in the Theaceae
family, and goes by the more common names of tea plant, tea shrub, or tea tree; the
Chinese word, Cháhuā, literally means “tea flower.” Although tea plantations can
be found across the globe in tropical and subtropical regions, the plant is native to
East Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Camellia sinensis var. sinen-
sis, often identified as Chinese tea, is believed to be indigenous to western Yunnan.
A second variety, often identified as Indian tea, C. sinensis var. assamica, is native to
India’s northeast state of Assam, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and
southern China.
Tea consumption preceded the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), but during the
Tang Dynasty (618–906 CE) tea became a popular and culturally identifiable drink
in China. The most notable legend that explained the first cup of consumed tea is
linked to an accident that occurred when leaves drifted into water being boiled for
Emperor Shennong in 2737 BCE. The emperor, a well-respected herbalist, allowed
his servant to serve him the hot w ater infused with leaves from the Camellia sinensis
tree u nder which the emperor sat. This inadvertent event introduced China to their
ch’a, or tea.
616 TEA
While there is a single tea plant, there are two broad categories of tea: green
and black. Green tea is prepared quickly a fter the leaves are harvested to keep the
natural enzymes from fermenting the leaves. Black tea is made from leaves given
time to ferment. The Chinese generally prefer green tea, consumed with nothing
added. The English, other Europeans, and Americans have preferred black tea since
the 1700s. Russians and Turks sweeten their tea; the English and Americans take
sugar and milk in their tea.
Harvested tea leaves are dried and then packed. The Chinese had packed tea
leaves in tight balls, bricks, or packages. This method of packing continued to be
used among Eurasian nomadic p eoples who needed a commodity easy to trans-
port. The Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans developed a preference for loose tea,
which was more difficult to ship b ecause it could easily bruise or suffer from
dampness.
Tea served in small quantity with revered ceremony was the domain of the
emperor and elite class of eighth-century China. Eighth-century Taoist poet Lu
Yu wrote the first book about tea, Ch’a Ching or The Classic of Tea. He writes of tea
preparation, “When the water is boiling it must look like fishes’ eyes and give off
but the hint of a sound. When at the edges it chatters like a bubbling spring and
looks like innumerable pearls strung together, it has reached the second stage . . .”
(Moxham 2009, 51). Such ritual developed into an intellectual discipline during
the Ming Dynasty, associated with such values as beauty, strength, determination; a
cup of tea was a “mirror of the soul” (Toussaint-Samut 2009, 535). Japanese Bud-
dhist monks brought both Buddhist teachings and tea back to their island nation,
where the sacred tea ceremony reflected the paths of Zen.
The Chinese also understood the medicinal qualities of tea, at first limiting its
consumption to those suffering from such ailments as stomach pains and head-
aches. The health benefits of tea helped sell the commodity to Europeans as early
traders from Portugal, the Netherlands, and eventually E ngland, began develop-
ing trade routes to the Far East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The
Portuguese, in the sixteenth c entury, tried to keep their routes to the Far East secret
so they could maintain a monopoly on maritime trade. The Dutch, however, began
traveling East and gained economic power bringing back spices, fabrics and tea.
At first, tea was not a serious economic contender for the early maritime powers.
The Dutch accelerated the trade of tea to the West when, by 1596, they established
permanent trading centers in Java. The Dutch, for the next few decades, controlled
trade to Central and Southeast Asia, and the prosperous trade of tea made the Dutch
the leading tea-drinkers in Europe.
For the Dutch, like the Chinese, tea was a luxury item in the seventeenth century.
Consumption of tea was limited in the Netherlands, France, and Portugal to the
elite, with France’s King Louis XIV serving his tea from a gold pot. The spread of
tea consumption beyond European aristocracy occurred as the British competed
with the Dutch for Indian Ocean trade. Both the British and the Dutch had East
Indian trading companies that competed fiercely in the seventeenth and eighteenth
century for control of commerce. During the seventeenth c entury, the British East
India Company, which held a royal charter granting it monopolistic control over
TEA 617
What Is This Strange, B

itter Beverage?
Early sea captains and travelers remarked on their first introduction to tea in
the East—and not always as a fine drink. A Portuguese ship captain, in 1509,
mentioned drinking tea from a fine Chinese porcelain cup. But the mention
is slight, leaving the impression that he was unimpressed with the beverage.
Similarly, the Venetian writer Giambattista Ramusio recounted, in 1559, that
he learned of tea from a Persian, who recommended it mostly for its medicinal
properties. According to Ramusio, he was told that “one or two cups of this
decoction taken on an empty stomach removes fever, headache, stomach-
ache, pain the side or in the joints, and it should be taken as hot as you bear
it” (Moxham, 15).
trade east of Africa and west of South America, imported only small quantities of
tea to England. During these decades, the company had difficulty finding a profit-
able market for tea. First shipments sold quickly, but subsequent shipments glut-
ted the market, bringing down the price of tea. The sale of tea and profits w ere
often derailed b ecause of taxation policies that created confusion and inequities,
and people were not sure whether tea should be a beverage like coffee, or a medi-
cine. English diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) wrote in the late seventeenth
century that while he drank tea as a beverage, he arrived home one evening only
to find his wife brewing tea as a cure for her cold. By the eighteenth century, tea
was in high demand in E ngland; the Dutch still w ere avid consumers; but the
French pulled back, preferring coffee and wine. For the English, the eighteenth
century marked the beginning of a trend that would make tea profitable, political
and prominent in the British culture.
The Dutch were the first Europeans to bring tea to the Americas when they settled
New Amsterdam (New York) in the early eighteenth century. But even before tea
became popular in London, it was in demand among colonists along the east coast
of North America. The problems facing tea consumption on both sides of the Atlan-
tic Ocean, however, were high taxes and government regulations. As tea moved
from English apothecaries to groceries, regulations, such as the licenses required
of tea dealers, and excise taxes made tea expensive. Taxes and regulations fol-
lowed tea, as did smuggling, as the British moved west across the Atlantic Ocean.
During the first half of the eighteenth c entury, the British government limited the
sources of tea. The British East Indian Company was barred from bringing tea
directly to the Americas, which hiked the price as it was sold through middle-
men at tea auctions in London. American colonists turned to the smuggle routes
served by the Swedes and Dutch. By 1760, estimates indicate that about three-
quarters of the £1 million of tea imported by the colonists were smuggled in
(Moxham 2009, 41). By the early 1770s, the British East India Company was able
to offset its own financial woes by getting the British government to allow the export
of tea directly to the American colonies. But the imposed taxes on tea, along with
618 TEA
the East India Company monopoly sparked a series of protests in the colonies. The
refusal of colonists to pay custom duties was countered by a tightened military
defense as the Dartmouth anchored near Boston Harbor on November 28, 1773.
On December 16, 1773, a group of colonists, dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded
the Dartmouth and dumped the cargo of more than 100 full and half-full chests of
tea overboard. An enraged Parliament responded by imposing more stringent reg-
ulations and limitations, all of which escalated into the American War for Inde
pendence (1775–1783). The vocal and violent opposition to British actions led to
the abolishment of the East India Company’s monopoly and changes in British tax
policies. By 1799, British consumption of tea was about £23 million, twenty times
the amount imported in 1701 (Moxham 2009, 46). The revenues lost to smuggling
were addressed by William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806) when he became British
Prime Minister in 1783. He slashed taxes on tea making it more affordable for
English citizens and more profitable for legitimate tea merchants.
Soon a fter American independence, tea again became popular in the United
States. The demand for tea also contributed to increased trade by Americans directly
with China. Tea became the most important commodity traded with China when,
in the first decades of the nineteenth century, American w
ere consuming 50 percent
more tea than the average of £2.5 million of tea consumed annually during the
1790s (Dolin 2012, 102). Ports along the eastern seaboard, including Salem, Bos-
ton, Providence, New York, and Philadelphia bustled with businesses as trading
ships moved cargo through the Atlantic Ocean, around Africa’s Cape of Good
Hope and through the Indian Ocean to China’s trading capital of Canton (Guang-
zhau). The first American ship to successfully make the trade run was The Empress
of China when it arrived back in New York in May 1785. In 1787, The Columbia sail-
ing out of Boston became the first ship to reverse direction, sailing south through
the Atlantic Ocean, around South America’s Cape Horn and across the Pacific
Ocean. The maritime trade between the United States and China created a class
of merchant princes, including Elias Haskett Derby, Stephen Girard, John Jacob
Astor, and Robert Bennet Forbes. Their wealth helped build colleges, libraries,
and other public institutions. The trade out of New England, however, also sup-
ported the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans brought to the Car ibbean islands
grew the sugar trade, encouraged by increased tea consumption in England and the
United States.
In the nineteenth century, tea played a prominent role in the two Opium Wars
between the British Empire and China (1839–1842/1856–1860). G reat Britain’s
trade imbalance caused by the British importing more tea from China than export-
ing goods to China, led the British to sell China opium, primarily from the poppy
fields of Afghanistan and India. British victory opened China to trade, but the Brit-
ish reduced its need for Chinese tea by starting plantations in India, on the island
of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and in other subtropical regions that were part of the British
Empire. The expanded production of tea within the empire further helped reduce
the cost, which further increased consumption.
Frances D. Brock
TE C U M SEH 619
See also: American Revolution; British Atlantic; Dutch Atlantic; Portuguese Atlan-
tic; Smuggling
Further Reading
Dolin, Eric Jay. 2012. When America First Met China. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp.
Ellis, Markman, et al. 2015. Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World. Lon-
don: Reaktion Books.
Moxham, Roy. 2009. A Brief History of Tea: The Extraordinary Story of the World’s Favorite
Drink. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd.
Rose, Sarah. 2009. For All the Tea in China: How E ngland Stole the World’s Favorite Drink
and Changed History. New York: Penguin Books.
TECUMSEH (ca. 1768–1813)

Tecumseh is believed to have been born in 1768 to Puckeshinwa, a Shawnee war-
rior, and a Creek w oman named Methoataske. He was raised alongside his b rothers
Kumskaukau and Lalawethika by his sister, Tecumapease. By the mid-1780s,
Tecumseh had become a prominent warrior. Tecumseh became the Kispoko Shaw-
nee leader following the death of his brother Cheeseekau in 1792. Tecumseh
joined Blue Jacket’s confederacy at the B attle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794,
which proved a major defeat to the Native American cause. Unlike many of the
defeated native leaders, Tecumseh refused to become a signatory to the 1795 Treaty
of Greenville.
In April 1805, Tecumseh’s b rother Lalawethika, who renamed himself Tenskwa-
tawa (1775–1832) and became known as the Shawnee Prophet, had the first of
several visions where the Master of Life provided him with the religious teachings
that he would use to launch a pan-Indian militant religious revitalization move-
ment. Tecumseh used his b rother’s religion to unite disparate native peoples to fight
against United States. The brothers subsequently established a town in Greenville,
Ohio, for their followers. The Shawnee leaders at Wapakoneta, who sought closer
ties with the United States, saw the pan-Indian community as a threat to their
authority and responded by alerting their white neighbors about the activities in
Greenville. Rather than risk open conflict with the accommodationist Shawnee and
the United States, the b rothers relocated. In 1808, the b rothers established Proph-
etstown near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers in present-day
Indiana. Upon arrival in Prophetstown, Tecumseh used his proximity to British
officials to forge close ties with them, thus securing a source of supplies and weap-
onry to fight against United States encroachment on native lands. An intense rivalry
soon emerged between Tecumseh and the governor of the Indian Territory (present-
day Indiana), William Henry Harrison (1773–1841), who correctly viewed the native
leader as a formidable military threat. Between 1808 and 1811, Tecumseh traveled
widely throughout the Old Northwest, recruiting native warriors to join his confed-
eracy. Although he promoted his b rother’s religion as a recruiting tool, Tecumseh’s
contention that native warriors from all groups needed to set aside their differ-
ences to effectively fight the United States seemed to resonate most among t hose
620 TE C U M SEH
he convinced to join his cause. Prophetstown grew rapidly as warriors from such
disparate groups as the Kickapoo, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Pottawatomi, Sac, and the Win-
nebago relocated to the community.
Between 1811 and 1812, Tecumseh toured the south looking to expand his
confederacy. He especially hoped to find allies among the Cherokee, Creeks, Chicka-
saw, and Choctaw. He was rebuffed by all except the Red Stick Creeks in Alabama,
who saw him as a kinsman due to his Creek mother, Methoataske. The Redsticks
also a dopted Tenskwatawa’s religion, due in part to the New Madrid earthquakes
which they saw as a call to arms from the Master of Life.
When William Henry Harrison discovered that Tecumseh had left Prophet-
stown, he quickly organized a military expedition for the expressed purpose of goad-
ing Tenskwatawa into a confrontation. Although Tecumseh had told his brother
not to engage the Americans, Tenskwatawa ignored his instructions and attacked
Harrison’s forces in the early morning of November 7, 1811. The B attle of Tippe-
canoe proved a disaster as the native warriors w ere defeated by Harrison’s troops. The
natives abandoned Prophetstown, which Harrison quickly razed. Tenskwatawa,
and the natives who remained, rebuilt Prophetstown. When Tecumseh returned
in January 1812, he discovered that most of the warriors whom he had recruited
had abandoned the cause. While Tenskwatawa still claimed religious authority,
his influence outside of Prophetstown was virtually nonexistent.
When the War of 1812 erupted between the United States and G reat Britain,
Tecumseh and his warriors became active as British allies in Canada. Tecumseh’s
success in b attle led the British to ask him to return to the Indiana Territory to
recruit more native warriors. Tecumseh and his warriors proved instrumental to
the British cause as they fought against an invasion of Canada by United States
Brigadier General William Hull between July and August 1812. Since the British
were woefully short of troops when Hull’s army appeared at the Detroit River, much
of the fighting was led by Tecumseh’s warriors. After Hull surrendered on August 16,
Tecumseh’s success resulted in his forces being augmented by numerous warriors
who had become convinced that an alliance with the British could bring them vic-
tory against American troops.
Upon his return to Canada with his native reinforcements in 1813, he joined
British forces in an invasion of Ohio. The primary target was Fort Meigs, which
was besieged from April 28 to May 9. However, the campaign in Ohio had to be
“Rumpsey, Dumpsey”
Kentucky Congressman Richard Mentor Johnson (1780–1850) claimed to
have killed Tecumseh at the B attle of the Thames. The feat was key to John-
son’s political c areer. During the presidential election of 1836, there emerged
the slogan “Rumpsey, Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!” Johnson
was elected Vice President on the Democratic ticket, serving one term under
President Martin Van Buren.
TE K A K W ITHA , SAINT K ATE R I 621
abandoned during September of that year when British naval forces on Lake Erie
were defeated, thereby damaging Great Britain’s ability to supply their forces in
Ohio with provisions and weaponry. The Native Americans and the British retreated
to Canada, but Tecumseh’s confidence in the British commander, Colonel Henry
Proctor (1763–1822), was shattered. Although Proctor promised that they would
quit fleeing American forces and make a stand at the Thames River, as desired by
Tecumseh and his followers, Proctor did not keep his word. Tecumseh did fight
and was killed at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, by troops led by
Harrison.
John R. Burch, Jr.
See also: Pan-Indianism; Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet
Further Reading
Jortner, Adam. 2012. The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for
the American Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press.
Owens, Robert M. 2015. Red Dreams, White Nightmares: Pan-Indian Alliances in the Anglo-
American Mind, 1763–1815. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
T E K A K W I T H A , S A I N T K AT E R I ( 1 6 5 6 – 1 6 8 0 )
Tekakwitha was born in the Mohawk village of Gandaouague (now Auriesville,
New York) to a m other who was an Algonquin, who converted to Christianity as a
war captive, and a Mohawk father. The names that they bestowed upon her at birth
and early adulthood have been lost to history, but in 1676, when Tekakwitha took
her Christian baptism, she was renamed Catherine Tekakwitha (pronounced “De-
gag-w i-tah”) a fter St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380). During her lifetime, Tekak-
witha was known for her deep devotion to Jesus Christ, to her chastity, and to acts
of penance undertaken among the Christian community at Kahnawake, Quebec.
After Tekakwitha passed away, two Jesuit missionaries wrote hagiographic biog-
raphies of her life. Early in the twentieth century, historians recast Catherine as
“Kateri,” a name that can be seen as an effort to make her more “authentically
Indian.” The Jesuit chronicles of Tekakwitha’s devotion formed the basis for the
Catholic Church’s veneration, beatification, and canonization of Tekakwitha dur-
ing the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed
Tekakwitha the first Native American saint.
A 1670 smallpox epidemic devastated the Mohawk nation, including Tekak-
witha’s immediate family. At around age four, Tekakwitha’s family succumbed to
the epidemic, leaving her alone and physically disfigured, with damaged eyes.
These ailments set her apart from her clan and fellow townspeople. Though she
likely worked in the cornfields and gathered firewood, the Jesuit biographies of
her life tell of how her eyes forever remained sensitive to light. She was often found
in her longhouse performing decorative bead and leatherwork, while other women
622 TE K A K W ITHA , SAINT K ATE R I
performed their l abors in the bright light of day. Left u nder the charge of her u
ncle,
as Euro-Americans might have done with an orphan, Tekakwitha’s status was more
marginal in her native community, without the traditional protections that kinship
networks afforded. As such, she would be more likely to be seen as a burden. At a
young age, her new immediate family attempted to arrange a marriage for her, an
attempt Tekakwitha rebuffed.
Following a French-Iroquois treaty in 1667, and decades of stalled efforts to pros-
elytize among the Iroquois, French Jesuit missionaries had greater success devel-
oping their missions among the Five Nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee). By
1667, Jesuits had begun to convert Mohawks, Oneidas, and o thers, in earnest. Some
Iroquois saw in Catholicism a set of cultural practices that they could understand
readily through their own system of beliefs. The Iroquois belief in orenda, similar
to the Algonquian notion of manitou, is a force that can be seen or felt in the beau-
tiful and dangerous elements of the world (Bragdon 1996, 184). Orenda ordered
religious life around establishing and maintaining relationships with spiritually
powerful objects, individuals, and environments. Protestantism, with its basis in
text, found few converts compared to Catholicism. With its basis in symbols, ritu-
als, and a professional corps of missionaries, Catholicism could be readily adapted
by eastern Native American converts. It did not hurt the Jesuits efforts at mission-
izing that followed 1667. Astute leaders among the Five Nations would have rec-
ognized that without the Dutch to trade with at Fort Orange (1667), relationships
with Jesuit missionaries in Iroquoia could bolster diplomatic ties with the New
France at Montréal.
These larger, imperial forces around the Atlantic shaped the course of Tekak-
witha’s life in important ways. F ree to visit Tekakwitha’s town of Gandaouague,
Jesuit priest Jacques de Lamberville set her on the road to baptism. In 1676 she was
baptized and took the name Catherine. This conversion displeased her uncle and
so, after a year-and-a-half of living as a Christian in a predominantly non-Christian
town, Tekakwitha fled to the Catholic mission town of Kahnawake (or the “Sault”
for Sault St. Louis) on the southern banks of the St. Lawrence River at the Lachine
rapids, upstream of Montréal. Kahnawake at that time was an amalgam of eastern
Iroquois and Algonquin Hurons and Eries. At Kahnawake, according to her biog-
raphers, Tekakwitha’s piety soared.
Tekakwitha’s devotion to Jesus Christ was shown in her refusal to marry, her
rejection of worldly pleasure, and her ritual acts of penance. At Kahnawake, her
adopted s ister, much like her family at Gandaouague, pressured her to marry. She
refused. In her second winter at Kahnawake, at a time when the town disbursed
to hunt for game and hides, Tekakwitha stayed home, citing her need for elements
of Catholic ritual, including Mass, the Eucharist, and proper daily prayer. In choos-
ing church over the hunt, Tekakwitha decided to forgo a winter’s worth of meat,
an important element of her diet.
Tekakwitha died on April 17, 1680, after a long winter of intense deprivation
and corporeal, ritual penance. The Jesuits noted that as she lay on her deathbed
the room was filled with an “odor of sanctity,” signaling the spirit of the blessed. In
the coming years, her biographers attempted to capture the quality of her devotion
TENO C HTITL Á N 623
Extreme Asceticism
Saint Kateri Tekakwitha was renowned for her asceticism. According to
Tekakwitha’s biographers, she walked barefoot through ice and snow, put
firebrands in between her toes, performed self-flagellation, and slept for
three nights on a bed of thorns, all as acts of devotion to the Holy Spirit.
as well as suggest the effects of her saintliness. In 1683, several Jesuits were saved
when a church collapsed around them. A decade later, a man’s novena (special
prayer repeated for nine days) to Tekakwitha cured him of an eye inflammation.
In 1696, one of her biographers was cured of his fever and diarrhea after praying
to her. These acts, along with the pious life of Tekakwitha, helped make the case
for her to be made venerable in 1943, be beatified in 1980 by Pope John Paul II,
and canonized in 2012.
Michael Read
See also: Brébeuf, St. Jean de; French Atlantic; Jesuits
Further Reading
Bragdon, Kathleen J. 1996. Native People of Southern New E ngland, 1500–1650. Norman: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press.
Greer, Allan. 2005. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Shoemaker, Nancy. 1995. “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood,” Negotiators
of Change: Historical Perspectives of Native American Women. New York: Routledge.
TENOCHTITLÁN
Tenochtitlán was the altepetl (city-state capital) of the Aztecs located at the place of
the present Mexico City. Lasting from 1325 to 1521, the origin of the name is vari-
ously said to honor the legendary Aztec tribal chief Tenoch, or to be derived from
a term meaning “a place where a cactus is growing on a rock.” Founded on an island
in Texcoco Lake in the western part of the Valley of Mexico, the city sits about 656
feet (about 2,000 meters) above sea level. The city was connected with the lake
coasts and neighboring towns by three wide dikes to the north, south, and west;
these dikes were used as roads and were marked by drawbridges at the city gates.
Moctezuma I (r. 1440–1469) enlarged the city to nearly three square miles (seven
and a half square kilometers). The city was protected from floods by the construc-
tion of a stone weir on the eastern side of the city. Stone pyramids, temples, and
palaces were erected at that period, the city streets w ere laid out, and two w ater
supply systems (terracotta aqueducts, each about two and a half miles long) were
arranged. A sweat lodge (called temazcal) was also built; it was used mostly by
nobles and pregnant women. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the city
624 TENO C HTITL Á N
square was more than four and

a half square miles and its pop-
ulation varied between 200,000
and 300,000 people, making
Tenochtitlán among the largest
cities in the world at that time.
Two broad stone-paved roads
subdivided the city into four
zones (campan) with their own
ritual centers, public places, and
administration sites; they w ere
divided into 20 districts (called
calpullis, literally “big houses” or
“big families”) with local mar-
kets and schools; the calpullis
were separated by sets of strictly
planned channels and streets. A
special executive (calmimilocatl)
was in charge of the city plan-
The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán as shown in the ning, and special permission
1572 atlas Civitates Orbis Terrarum, published in was required before starting any
Germany. The map shows the city as located in construction. The central mar-
Texcoco Lake, with the marketplace, temple, and ket of the city could accommo-
palace also visible. (Jupiterimages) date up to 100,000 p eople and,
according to Spanish Conquista-
dor Hernán Cortés, was twice as large as the market in Seville, Spain. The market
was subdivided into areas designed for certain goods; it had no day offs, while the
local city markets were open only once e very five days.
In the city center, a large enclosed ward or courtyard was arranged; it was used
for public and ritual purposes. Its maximal size reached about 1,400 square yards
(1,200 square meters); it was protected by an approximately 500-yard (500-meter)
long rampart. It was called the “serpent wall” because it was decorated by numer-
ous engraved serpent heads on its outer side. Only three gates allowed entry to
the courtyard. The most important temples and h ouses of priests were situated
there. The principal temple of the city—the Templo Mayor—was about 150 feet
high (45 meters). Like other public buildings in the city, it was constructed on a
platform shaped as a truncated step pyramid made of adobe bricks and faced with
stone slabs. The pyramid’s 114 steep stairs were delimited by stone banisters; their
feet w
ere decorated by images of the feathered serpent head. At the top of the pyra-
mid two smaller temples dedicated to the Aztec patron deities—Huitzilopochtli,
the god of sun and war, and Tlaloc, the god of water (rain) and fertility—were
arranged in the same manner. The t emple of Quetzalcoatl, the God-Creator of the
world, human beings, and culture, and the temple dedicated to Tonatiuh, the god
of sun, were situated nearby the Templo Mayor. Sacrificial stones and the priests’
premises w ere placed on the tops of both temples. Several public buildings w ere
TENO C HTITL Á N 625
also located on the territory of Tenochtitlán’s central ward; the most remarkable
among them w ere the ball game court (tlachtl) with the rack of skulls (tzompantli),
the Eagle’s House usually associated with warriors and the ancient power of rul-
ers, and the platforms used for the gladiatorial sacrifice.
The ruler’s palace was situated near the central ward of the city. The palace
included the living premises of the ruler, his wives, and honorary guests; at the
time of Moctezuma I, living quarters consisted of 100 rooms, each with its own
bath. The palace also included rooms for military and state councils, army bar-
racks, warehouses for arms, workshops, a warehouse for collected tribute, a ware
house for the ruler’s treasure, and the living quarters for service staff. Moctezuma II
(r. 1502–1520) enlarged the ruler’s palace with two zoos (one for birds of prey and
another for other birds, mammals, and reptiles), a botanical garden, and salt-and
fresh-water aquariums for fish and aquatic birds. Numerous parks and gardens,
inner and outer yards, and patios were also an integral part of the ruler’s palace.
Also situated in the zone of the ruler’s palace w ere a house of songs (cuicalli), a
place where songs and dances were practiced before being performed in temples
during rituals and ceremonies, and the school for sons of Aztec nobles (called
calmecac, “the h ouse of the lineage”).
The city center was surrounded by two belts of farmsteads with a regular lay-
out of streets and channels. The external farmstead b elt was characterized by
lower population density compared to the inner belt and larger plots of cultivated
lands. T hese farmlands were artificially made of lake silts with algae plots (Chinam-
pas) and needed regular care, protection from floods, and periodic rebuilding;
nevertheless, their extremely high fertility allowed harvesting up to seven times
per year.
Nobles lived mostly in large houses often made of limestone and surrounded
by gardens with exotic flora and accompanied by aquariums with exotic fish; they
were arranged according to the example established by the ruler’s palace. The rest
of population settled in calpullis which consisted of sets of s imple single-story
wattle or adobe brick houses inhabited by representatives of certain profession
and their relatives. Spanish conquistadors w ere impressed by Tenochtitlán’s size
and splendor when, led by Hernán Cortés, they arrived in Tenochtitlán on Novem-
ber 8, 1519. The first attempt to capture the city was unsuccessful and conquista-
dors had to flee on July 1, 1520. The next year, on June 4, 1521, they attacked the
city again, and this time a three-month siege of city ended with the fall of Tenoch-
titlán on August 13, 1521. The city was totally destroyed and the bricks from its
ruins w ere used to construct Mexico City.
Olena Smyntyna
See also: Aztec Empire; Conquistadors; Cortés, Hernán; Quetzalcoatl
Further Reading
Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. 2006. Handbook to Life in the Aztec World. New York: Facts on File.
Snow, Dean R. 2010. Archaeology of Native North America. Boston: Prentice Hall.
626 TENS K WATAWA , THE SHAW NEE P R OPHET
T E N S K WATAWA , T H E S H AW N E E P R O P H E T
(1775–1832)
Tenskwatawa, also known as “The Shawnee Prophet,” was born Lalawethika in
1775 in Old Piqua, in present-day Ohio, to Puckeshinwa, a Shawnee warrior, and a
Creek w oman named Methoataske. Tenskwatawa was raised alongside his b rothers
Kumskaukau and Tecumseh (ca. 1768–1813) by his sister, Tecumapease. As a
young man, he accidently fell on an arrow, which resulted in severe damage to his
right eye. Tenskwatawa demonstrated few skills that were valued by the Shaw-
nee. He generally avoided combat, although he apparently did fight alongside
Tecumseh at the 1795 B attle of Fallen Timbers. While Tecumseh’s reputation as a
great warrior gained him renown, his b rother came to be viewed with disdain and
widely disliked. Tenskwatawa responded to his misfortunes by becoming an
alcoholic.
In April 1805, Tenskwatawa had the first of several visions where the Master of
Life instructed him in the religious ideology that he would subsequently use to
launch a pan-Indian revitalization movement. The movement and its ideology was
similar to that espoused by Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, when he helped Pon-
tiac unite native peoples from the Great Lakes region to oppose the British in the
aftermath of the French and Indian War. Renaming himself Tenskwatawa, mean-
ing “The Open Door,” he called for an abandonment of European goods and cul-
ture, a return to the traditional lifestyle of their ancestors, a rejection of alcohol, an
end to intertribal conflicts, and a unification of native peoples to force Europeans
off Native American lands. Unlike his spiritual predecessor Neolin, he did make
accept firearms, which his followers could use for warfare but not hunting. Ten-
skwatawa’s beliefs included a fiery hell for those who did not adhere to his doc-
trine, which was a concept he adopted from Christianity. Tenskwatawa confirmed
his religious authority among his followers in June 1806, when he correctly pre-
dicted a solar eclipse.
Tecumseh used his brother’s militant religion to unite disparate native peoples
to fight against their common e nemy, the United States. In 1808, the b rothers estab-
lished Prophetstown near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers in
Indiana. Over the following three years, the town grew rapidly, as did its number
of warriors, due to Tecumseh’s numerous recruiting expeditions throughout the
Old Northwest.
In 1810, Tecumseh left most of his armed force with his brother at Prophetstown
and went south looking for potential allies among the Cherokees, Chickasaws,
Choctaws, and Creeks. Before leaving, he told his b rother not to engage the Indi-
ana Territory’s Governor William Henry Harrison (1773–1841) in b attle while
he was gone. Harrison soon discovered that Tecumseh had gone south, which
prompted him to personally lead a military expedition to Prophetstown to goad
Tenskwatawa into battle. Unable to control himself, Tenskwatawa informed the
warriors at Prophetstown that the Master of Life had guaranteed them victory if
they attacked Harrison’s encampment. The warriors attacked on November 7, 1811,
and the Battle of Tippecanoe was joined. Harrison emerged victorious and he
subsequently razed Prophetstown. Tenskwatawa’s reputation as a religious leader
TO B A C C O 627
Bulletproof
Prior to the Battle of Tippecanoe, Tenskwatawa promised his men that they
would be impervious to American weaponry. Despite his guarantees, many
warriors were killed or injured in the defeat, further undermining Tenskwa-
tawa’s authority.
was greatly diminished. Tecumseh returned to Prophetstown in January 1812, only

to find the town largely devoid of warriors and his brother’s reputation as a Native
American religious leader in tatters. Although Prophetstown was rebuilt, many of
its former residents opted to return to their home communities.
During the War of 1812, Tenskwatawa accompanied Tecumseh to the siege of
Fort Meigs in Ohio but did not participate in the fighting. After that event, he relo-
cated to the outskirts of a British fort in Ontario, Canada, which was far away
from most of the fighting. Tenskwatawa did travel to the site of the B attle of the
Thames, where Tecumseh was killed, but chose to retreat with the British forces
commanded by Colonel Henry Procter (1763–1822) instead of fighting alongside
his b rother and their fellow Shawnees. Following the conclusion of the war, Ten-
skwatawa settled in Canada where he unsuccessfully tried to regain the authority he
had lost at the B
attle of Tippecanoe. He stayed there u
ntil 1825, when he returned to
the United States.
Upon his return, he discovered that the United States government still recog-
nized him as a Shawnee leader. The respect they paid him led Tenskwatawa to
repudiate his nativist past and begin working as an ally of United States officials
in their efforts to remove the Shawnees to Kansas. In 1826, he established a small
community in the vicinity of present-day Kansas City. He died t here in 1832.
John R. Burch, Jr.
See also: Pan-Indianism; Tecumseh
Further Reading
Edmunds, R. David. 1983. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Jortner, Adam. 2012. The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for
the American Frontier. New York: Oxford University Press.
TOBACCO
First introduced to Europeans upon Christopher Columbus’ (ca. 1451–1506) arrival
in the Car ibbean, tobacco became the first successful staple crop grown in the
Americas. Europeans observed tobacco cultivation and consumption among Native
Americans, marking the plant’s potential as an Atlantic commodity. Commercial
628 TO B A C C O
production spread from the Spanish Caribbean in the sixteenth century, to the Brit-
ish North American colonies in the seventeenth c entury; contributing to the wealth
of the British Empire as merchants mediated between the American colonies and
consumers in continental Europe. Over time, the mode of consumption evolved
according to new fashions, from snuff use and pipe-smoking to the Cuban cigar.
Finally, by the end of the nineteenth c entury, industrialization contributed to the
expansion of cigarette manufacturing and advertising.
Tobacco cultivation was first practiced by Native Americans between 5000 and
3000 BCE in the Andes mountains and later spread northward through South
America and into the Car ibbean. Native Americans used tobacco for recreational
and medicinal purposes. Although small quantities of tobacco affected its con-
sumer mildly, larger amounts could induce hallucinations, trances, and even death.
Native Americans used tobacco as an analgesic and antiseptic to treat a wide range
of ailments, including toothaches. It was snuffed, smoked, chewed, and drunk;
its juice was rubbed on the skin and poured into the eyes; and it was used as an
enema. Tobacco smoke served as an appetite suppressant and insecticide, eradi-
cating lice and other parasites. Tobacco’s mythical properties w ere used to pro-
mote purification and fertility. Its smoke was wafted over warriors before g oing
into b attle and over women before intercourse, and it was blown over agricultural
fields before planting. Tobacco consumption also featured in rites of passage and
its trance-inducing abilities made it part of the spiritual training of Native Ameri-
can shamans.
As the Spanish settled the Car ibbean, their African slaves, instructed by Native
Americans, informally cultivated the crop in their own subsistence gardens to be
sold at urban markets to locals, migrants, and merchants. The mobility of indi-
viduals in the Atlantic world allowed knowledge about tobacco to spread around
the globe as descriptions appeared for European audiences skeptical of the leaf and its
association with paganism. The first commercial tobacco plantations appeared on
Trinidad between 1588 and 1591. Soon, Europeans cultivated tobacco elsewhere
in the Car ibbean, transferring the control of tobacco cultivation and trade from
Native Americans to European colonials and marking a key step in transforming
tobacco into an Atlantic commodity.
Only a few tobacco plants arrived in Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth
century for cultivation and those that did were grown ornamentally in the gardens
of the nobility. With little knowledge of smoking practices and consumption, Euro
peans were most interested in medicinal uses of tobacco. French diplomat Jean
Nicot (1530–1600) was perhaps the greatest early proponent for tobacco; he exper-
imented with it as an herbal remedy, sending samples of the plant and seeds to
Catherine de Medici (1519–1589), Queen of France, for her migraines. The “Nico-
tian Herb” soon led the way in preventative medicine and its addictive properties
ensured its popularity throughout Europe.
In Elizabethan England (1558–1603) tobacco shifted from a medicinal remedy
to a recreational habit. The first tobacco plants w ere probably brought to England
in 1565 from Florida by naval commander Sir John Hawkins (1532–1595). Its
TO B A C C O 629
fashionability among such well known figures as Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1552–
1618) and Sir Francis Drake (ca. 1540–1596) made the plant even more popular
among the English. A pipe-smoking craze permeated the upper classes of Eliza-
bethan England, including Elizabeth I (1533–1603) herself. Despite a high retail
price that only the upper classes could afford, demand continued to rise. In 1602,
the first official import records for English ports reported £16,128 of tobacco
entering the Port of London (Gately 2001, 51).
The global commodification of tobacco was not an inevitable process. Only a
small profit margin existed for commercial agriculture in the Spanish Car ibbean
and planters found it safer and more profitable to invest land and capital in proven
staple crops like sugar. Around the 1590s, however, tobacco began to take its
place in the staple crop economy of the Atlantic with the introduction of inten-
sive cultivation on plantations dedicated solely to its production. An increase in
consumption followed and, by the turn of the seventeenth c entury, an estimated
£150,000 to £200,000 of tobacco were produced in the Car ibbean annually (Man-
call 2007, 261).
English privateering raids served as the primary resource for acquiring tobacco,
but even so, prize cargoes of Spanish tobacco could not satisfy the growing English
market. In response, the Portuguese intervened, opening up the Spanish Car ib
bean to English smuggling by the late sixteenth c entury. Spanish authorities
attempted to curtail smuggling by banning Car ibbean tobacco production but to
no avail. Tobacco produced in Trinidad and eastern Venezuela composed more than
£1 million of the crop imported into London in 1611 and 60 percent of tobacco
entering London originated in the Orinoco Valley (Mancall 2007, 264, 362).
With the founding of the Virginia colony at Jamestown in 1607, English settlers
began the search for an export that would help sustain the struggling colony. John
Rolfe (1585–1622), V irginia’s pioneer tobacco planter and enthusiast, believed that
the Chesapeake could become a commercial entrepôt for tobacco exports. Nicoti-
ana rustica, the native Virginian variety, had a dark and bitter taste that the English
found unpalatable. Therefore, Rolfe obtained seeds of the milder Spanish Orinoco
variety, Nicotiana tabacum, which took European markets by storm. English com-
mercial production of tobacco originated in 1612 near Jamestown, with the first
significant shipment of Chesapeake tobacco arriving in London on July 20, 1613.
The following year, 7,000 tobacco shops opened in London to customers seeking
out Virginian tobacco. Rolfe continued experimentation with the curing process
to create a better leaf until 1617, when he shipped £20,000 of Virginia tobacco to
London (Salmon and Salmon 2013). Exports doubled the following year and by
1627, £300,000 of tobacco arrived in English ports (Mancall 2007, 251).
Rolfe’s successful tobacco experiment prompted more settlers to attempt culti-
vation and plantations expanded along the James River. Tobacco depleted the soil
of its nutrients quickly, causing a voracious appetite for virgin land and the west-
ward expansion of European settlement. Conflict erupted as Europeans encroached
on the lands of Native Americans and devastated many Chesapeake tobacco com-
munities. Even so, the expansion of tobacco could not be slowed.
630 TO B A C C O
Tobacco cultivation was notoriously labor intensive. To avoid time-consuming

land clearing, Europeans grew tobacco like the Native Americans by girding trees,
burning underbrush, and planting their crops among the stumps of the dead trees.
The high demand for tobacco in England spurred planters to expand their economic
enterprises in the Chesapeake and, in turn, their need for labor increased. L abor
demands w ere initially satisfied by white indentured servants contracted for periods
of four to seven years. A fter 1680, the arrival of white indentured servants dimin-
ished. Thus planters sought out African slaves to fulfill labor needs. Gradually, slave
labor came to dominate the Chesapeake tobacco economy, with African slaves
outnumbering incoming white indentured servants by 1700.
The Portuguese introduced tobacco to Africa in the late fifteenth century. Afri-
can oral tradition and familiarity with the smoking of cannabis allowed for the
adoption of tobacco consumption among Muslim traders and African kingdoms
which came in contact with Europeans by the seventeenth century. The African
attraction to tobacco enhanced trading opportunities for Europeans to exchange
the staple for African slaves.
With the popularity of tobacco consumption, the British cashed in on the
addictive power of the plant for their own profit. At the turn of the eighteenth
century, V irginia tobacco exports topped £22 million (Salmon and Salmon 2013).
As more farmers planted tobacco, overproduction took a toll on the value of the
crop at market. Low tobacco prices in the 1620s and 1630s meant that market
consumption increased in Europe and Virginia exports continued to expand to
meet demand. Exports r ose steadily through the mid-seventeenth c entury with
an annual average of £20 million leaving V irginia in the late 1670s (Kulikoff 1986,
31–32). Tobacco prices temporarily increased during times of war when shipping
was susceptible to disruption, but high levels of production kept prices low as
planters continued to produce large crops. Despite the demand for tobacco and
the depressed prices, consumption did not increase since high shipping costs
were passed on to the consumer. Even as tobacco prices stabilized in the 1760s,
the planters remained at the mercy of British creditors. In 1772, English banks
collapsed and planters in the Chesapeake w ere pressured to pay their debts. Some
historians argue that the 1772 credit crisis helped precipitate the American Revo-
lution (1775–1783) alongside contested legislation from the British Parliament in
the 1760s and 1770s.
As war broke out between G reat Britain and its North American colonies, tobacco
exportation came to a halt. The Continental Association (1774) banned the expor-
tation of tobacco in an attempt to place economic pressure on G reat Britain. The
disruption of the tobacco market was so critical that between 1776 and 1782, less
tobacco was imported into G reat Britain and Europe than in any one year before the
conflict began. This led to a general depression in the tobacco markets during the
1790s, while renewed European conflict with the onset of the French Revolution
(1789–1799) and Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) continued to speed its decline. The
center of tobacco production also shifted away from V irginia’s James River Valley
to new farms in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee where fertile land pro-
duced a better crop.
TO B A C C O 631
A “Filthie Custome”
Despite its popularity in seventeenth-century E ngland, King James I (1566–
1625) hated tobacco. He condemned smoking as a “filthie custome” in the
pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco and authorized a 4,000 percent tax increase
on the product. The smoke particularly bothered him. “Surely Smoke becomes
a kitchin far better then a Dining chamber,” James wrote, “and yet it makes a
kitchin also oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soiling and infecting them,
with an unctuous and oily kinde of Soote, as hath bene found in some great
Tobacco takers, that after their death were opened.”
Source: James I. A Counterblaste to Tobacco. London, 1604.
In the nineteenth century, new trends appeared in the production and consump-
tion of tobacco. Cuban cigars increased in popularity by the 1820s, both in the
United States and Europe. In 1839, on the Slade Farm in Caswell County, North
Carolina, charcoal was introduced to the process of flue-curing tobacco. A cheaper
fuel, charcoal provided a high-intensity heat to create a thinner, low-nicotine leaf
of bright, golden color, and mild, buttery flavor that became known as “Bright leaf”
tobacco. The American Civil War (1861–1865) did little to disrupt the tobacco mar-
ket, but led to the national popularity of the new “Bright leaf” and “White Burley”
varieties. Cigarette smoking also grew as manufacturing and advertising spread in
the postwar years with the invention of an efficient cigarette-making machine in the
1880s, promoted by tobacco mogul James Buchanan “Buck” Duke (1856–1925).
Within two centuries of Europeans’ contact with the New World, tobacco had
become not only an Atlantic commodity, but a global one. Tobacco’s addictive
nature contributed to the rapidity of its spread and acceptance, with only its mode
of consumption evolving over time. By the turn of the twentieth century, the man-
ufactured cigarette ruled the market and significantly increased the number of
smokers worldwide.
Kimberly B. Sherman
See also: Indentured Servants; Jamestown; Slavery
Further Reading
Gately, Iain. 2001. Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization.
New York: Grove Press.
Kulikoff, Allan. 1986. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Ches-
apeake, 1680–1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Mancall, Peter C. Editor. 2007. The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Salmon, Emily Jones, and John Salmon. 2013. “Tobacco in Colonial V irginia.” Encyclope-
dia Virginia. http://w ww.encyclopediavirginia.org /Tobacco_in_Colonial_Virginia.
632 T R ADE W INDS
T O R D E S I L L A S , T R E AT Y O F. See Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)
TRADE WINDS
Trade winds, also called “trades,” is the name of a wind system that dominates most
of the tropics and blows from the subtropical highs, between the 20° and 40° lati-
tude lines, t owards the equatorial trough at the equator. The trade winds are a major
constituent of the general circulation of the atmosphere. T hese winds became
known as “trade winds” b ecause of their influence on traditional sea trade from
the sixteenth to the nineteenth c entury. Sailors took advantage of this wind sys-
tem to aid their journeys between Europe and the Americas. The power of the wind
was as important for overseas trade and a ship’s destination as entrepreneurial skill
or seamanship. In this context, the term “trade” refers not only to commerce but
also derives from the late M iddle English word “trade,” meaning “path” or “track.”
The trade winds spread over a huge scale of territory: they cover no less than
56° of latitude; 28° north of the equator, and 28° south of it. In this large tract,
which comprises some of the most fertile countries in the world, the trade wind
blows either from the northeast or from the southeast, depending on the time of
the year. The reasons why these winds blow so regularly can be identified partly
in the displacement of air at the equator, and partly in the motion of the earth.
Cold air from the poles produces northerly winds in the Northern Hemisphere and
southerly winds in the Southern. The movement of the earth, which is more rapid
at the equator than anywhere e lse c auses the winds to deflect from their natural
cause and forces them into other directions, giving rise to those easterly currents
which are called trade winds. They are primarily surface winds although they some-
times extend to much greater altitudes. The trade winds are the most consistent
wind system on earth. It has been suspected that the phrase “trade winds” was
first used in the ancient world, meaning “fixed track.” Hence it can be applied to
any wind which follows a predictable course. Since such winds can be of great value
to merchant ships making long ocean voyages, the term became understood in the
eighteenth c entury to mean winds that favor trade.
The trade winds are most famously known for being pivotal to Christopher
Columbus’s travels. After Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) had set sail in August 1492,
from Spain, the first part of his trip went smoothly. But he did not know he had
set sail during the heart of the Atlantic Hurricane season. He was lucky not to hit
any storms or hurricanes during his first voyage. On his way to the Americas, a
strong high over the eastern North Atlantic accompanied him, which was unusual
for this time of the year. This high provided strong easterly winds for his sails and
pushed him forward. For all t hese reasons, he safely reached the American conti-
nent in October 1492. Hence, Columbus’s first journey became a pivotal and world-
changing sail, even though he landed in the Americas b ecause he had miscalculated
the size of the earth and because he was ignorant of the wind system that he would
be confronted with. Nevertheless, he also was the first to productively use the trade
winds to find a route through the ocean.
The standard Spanish route to the Americas became to sail south to the Canary
Islands, west on the trade winds to the Caribbean, then sail against the wind north
T R ADE W INDS 633
Exploring with the Trade Winds

Europeans began recognizing the importance of the trade winds for navigating
long distances in both the north and south Atlantic as early as the fifteenth
century when the Portuguese attempted to find routes around Africa to the
Indian Ocean. Another breakthrough came via the circumnavigation voyage
of the Basque explorer Andres de Urdaneta (1508–1568). While crossing the
Pacific in 1565, from San Miguel, in the Philippines, to Acapulco, Mexico,
Urdaneta was obliged to sail as far as 38°N latitude to obtain favorable winds.
By taking advantage of the trade winds, he found a favorable west-to-east route
across the Pacific that was used by Spanish ships for the rest of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. His voyage was a milestone of navigational his-
tory, and what came to be known as “Urdaneta’s route,” helped the Spanish
gain Asian markets for the products of Peru and Mexico.
of Cuba using the Florida Current to the Gulf Steam, and then north to the west-
erlies that lead directly home to Europe. The route was established after Juan Ponce
de León (1474–1521) discovered the Gulf Stream in 1513 and Anton de Alaminos
used the Gulf Stream for the first time to push him north to the westerlies and
return to Spain.
Even though the effects of the winds were great, determining the tract and direc-
tion of the winds was difficult and made the wind system unpredictable for the
sailors for a long time. T here are several techniques that the early sailors discov-
ered to use the trade winds to navigate safely through the ocean and reach their
destinations. The most common technique, namely using contrary wind to push
the sails in the right direction is called “tacking.” However, this method is often
impossible to carry out because of the winding and twisting that is required to
keep the ship on track. The maneuver would delay already long travels and there-
fore would not be effective or economical. Consequently, the early explorers w ere
not only looking for adventures and new land but also for ways to control the winds
and understand its patterns. Finally, between 1847 and 1849, Matthew Fontaine
Maury (1806–1873), who came to be known as an astronomer, historian, ocean-
ographer, meteorologist, cartographer, author, geologist, and educator, collected
enough information to create wind and current charts for the world’s oceans.
Alexia Schemien
See also: Atlantic Ocean; Cartography; Columbus, Christopher; Europ ean

Exploration
Further Reading
Parkinson, Cyril Northcote. 2005. The Trade Winds: A Study of British Overseas Trade Dur-
ing the French Wars, 1793–1815. Reprint ed. New York: Routledge.
634 T R EATY OF PA R IS
Talley, Jeannine. 2010. Lure of the Trade Winds: Two Women Sailing the Pacific Ocean. New
York: Bloomington.
WeatherWorks, ed. “Weather in History: 1st Voyage of Columbus.” Weather Works: Your
Weather Experts, September 11, 2015. http://w ww.weatherworksinc.com /columbus
-weather-history.
T R E AT Y O F PA R I S ( 1 7 6 3 )
The Treaty of Paris (1763) was the agreement that ended the first modern global
conflict between European powers. Known as the Seven Years’ War in Europe,
and the French and Indian War in North America, the coalitions created by Great
Britain and France fought each other throughout Europe, North America, Africa,
South America, and Asia. G reat Britain was allied with Prussia, Hanover, Portu-
gal, and a diverse number of native tribes in North Americ a, particularly the
Iroquois confederation. France assembled a coalition of the Hapsburgs of Austria-
Hungary, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and their own assortment of native groups,
which included the Delawares and Shawnees. Once the war ended, the French,
English, and Spanish envoys met in Paris to negotiate peace and to surrender land
that had been acquired through conquest. The French lost possession of many of
its colonies, but insisted on British acceptance of the Catholic religion in previ-
ously held French colonies. G reat Britain gained considerable territories in North
America and the Car ibbean, affirming their status as the most powerful European
country.
Before the actual signing of the Treaty of Paris, French and British diplomats
attempted peace twice, first in 1759 during The Hague Conversations, and again
in February of 1761 with the Stanley-Bussy negotiations. Each side maneuvered to
maintain as much territory as possible and hoped to avoid losing their greatest
gains. Each country faced increased pressure from home as both the British and
French public clamored for peace. For fear of looking weak against the other, the
British and French w ere unwilling to be the initial party of peace. While these ear-
lier discussions would not end in peace, these negotiations were instrumental to
laying the ground work for the eventual peace treaty.
On February 10, 1763, the final Treaty of Paris was drafted by John Russell the
fourth Duke of Bedford (1710–1771) representing G reat Britain; César Gabriel
de Choiseul, Duke of Praslin (1712–1785) representing France; and Jerónimo
Grimaldi, Duke of Grimaldi (1720–1789), representing Spain. Each man acted as
proxy for their respective king: Great Britain’s King George III (1738–1820),
France’s Louis XV (1710–1774), and Spain’s Charles III (1716–1788). No repre-
sentatives for Portugal or any Native American representatives w ere present.
These ennobled proxies negotiated a treaty on behalf of their respective mon-
archs that mandated multiple provisions that carried far-reaching global con-
sequences. During the war, G reat Britain had conquered the French colonies of
Canada, resource rich islands in the Caribbean, trading posts on the coast of
India, and slaving posts near Senegal. The Spanish also lost the city of Manila, in
the Philippines, and Havana, Cuba. In turn, France had captured British Minorca,
T R EATY OF PA R IS 635
in the Mediterranean Sea, and trading locales in Southeast Asia. Spain had cap-
tured the border fortress of Almeida in Portugal and an island near South Amer
ica. In the Treaty of Paris, many of t hese territories were restored to their original
owners.
Domestic unrest regarding the prolonged war meant that Great Britain needed
to gain considerable territories to offset the costs of the conflict. Within the treaty,
France and Spain restored all their conquests to G reat Britain and Portugal. G reat
Britain in turn restored Manila and Havana to Spain, and some Car ibbean islands
as well as their trading posts in India to France. Spain in turn, ceded the rights to
the territory of Florida to Great Britain in recompense. To further appease Great
Britain, France ceded Canada and a variety of other Caribbean islands. France also
ceded the eastern half of French Louisiana to G reat Britain; that is, the area from
the Mississippi River extending east to the Appalachian Mountains. The western
half of Louisiana had already been given to Spain by France secretly within the
Treaty of Fontainebleau (1762). In return, G reat Britain returned to France the
immensely profitable Car ibbean sugar colony of Guadeloupe.
Contemporary opinions differed on the reception of the treaty in Great Britain
and France. Many, including George III, were pleased with the peace and the newly
established colonies. Not all were happy, though, and many British politicians felt
the peace benefitted the North American colonies more than G reat Britain itself.
Regardless, the Treaty of Paris reaffirmed Great Britain’s place as the supreme mari-
time power and chief colonizing power in the world. While the material and colo-
nial rewards w ere great, the war debts to British and Dutch bankers crippled the
Crown. British officials turned to taxes on marketable goods. T hese duties unfairly
taxed colonial subjects, and motivated the colonies into debates over taxation with-
out representation. T
hese same disputations resulted in the cornerstone of Ameri-
can justification for the separation of the North American colonies from Great
Britain. The French reception of the Treaty was far different. Public festivals, rejoic-
ings, and poetry readings marked the French’s overall approval of the treaty; even
the disadvantageous parts of the agreement. While certain politicians maligned
the treaty as ruinous to French interests, the treaty did not cripple France as these
politicians had predicted. Spain did not gain any meaningful concessions in the
final draft of the treaty. While the lost cities w ere returned to Spain, the Spanish
lost the right to fish off of the coast of Newfoundland in Canada and w ere ordered
to destroy their fortifications in modern Honduras to allow British logging to
monopolize the area. They did gain possession of Western Louisiana from France,
but did not succeed in limiting British fishing and logging interests within the
shrinking Spanish Empire. Great Britain’s military victories guaranteed a success-
ful treaty while French political maneuvering left the French in an acceptable
position. Spanish military defeats and the treaty itself left Spain in a weaker posi-
tion in the wider Atlantic world.
Matthew Douglas
See also: American Revolution; British Atlantic; French Atlantic; Seven Years’ War
636 T R EATY OF TO R DESILLAS
Further Reading
Danley, Mark H., and Patrick J. Spellman, eds. 2012. The Seven Years’ War: Global Views.
Boston: Leiden Publishing.
Rashed, Zenab Esmat. 1951. The Peace of Paris: 1763. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Schumann, Matt, and Karl Schweizer, 2008. The Seven Years’ War: A Transatlantic History.
New York: Routledge Press.
T R E AT Y O F T O R D E S I L L A S ( 1 4 9 4 )
The Treaty of Tordesillas was an accord between the Kingdoms of Spain and Por-
tugal in 1494, signed in Tordesillas, Spain. Following the discoveries of Columbus
in the New World, the document effectively divided the entire known world
between Spain and Portugal by drawing a line through the globe from the North
to the South Pole. Although the treaty was adopted and practiced by Spain and
Portugal, the dominant powers of the period, the results of the treaty were even-
tually made obsolete when contested by the imperial expansion of other European
nations and the development of international law. The document was important
in settling conflict over territory in the early sixteenth c entury and determining
the course of the colonization of the New World.
The Treaty of Tordesillas was situated within the context of the beginning of
the rapid expansion of human knowledge in the transfer of ideas, technology, and
commodities, often described as the Columbian Exchange. The period commenced
in 1492 with the European discovery of the New World through the voyages of
Christopher Columbus; the expeditions were financed by King Ferdinand V and
Queen Isabella I of the recently united Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.
Losing the intricate trade and communication network with the Islamic world as
a result of the War of Granada, the Spanish monarchs were eager to find a new
trade route to Asia that bypassed Portuguese controlled trade routes through to
sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean. Portugal claimed exclusive rights to the
trade routes and resources of t hese territories for economic exploitation.
As they believed the discoveries of Columbus in the New World to be the west-
ern perimeter of the Indian subcontinent, the discoveries created tensions between
the monarchs of Spain and Portugal. To resolve this to their advantage, the Span-
ish monarchs enlisted the help of Pope Alexander VI, also a Spaniard, to serve as
an adjudicator on the question of the right to territory and trade routes. As both
the political and religious leader of the international system, the pope introduced the
“doctrine of discovery” in a papal bull Inter Caetera of 1493. The doctrine held that
Christian nations could claim possession of any lands and p eoples that were not
deemed of the Christian faith if they had not been claimed by another Christian
nation. This doctrine authorized Spain to legitimately claim sovereignty over their
discoveries in the West Indies and also established the justification for all f uture
conquest of the New World.
The pope also established territorial “spheres of influence” by drawing a line
at 100 leagues (345 miles) west of Cape Verde from the North Pole to the South
Pole, separating the territories of Spain and Portugal outside of Europe. With this
T R EATY OF TO R DESILLAS 637
A seventeenth-century map showing the line separating Spanish colonization from

Portuguese colonization as established by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The Iberians’ claims
were contested by English, French, and Dutch rivals in the following centuries as
exploration increased. (Library of Congress)
cartographic delineation, the pope also divided the newly discovered as well as
the yet to be discovered lands of the entire world between Spain and Portugal. The
western side of the line of demarcation was awarded to Spain in response to their
advances in the West Indies and the eastern side was awarded to Portugal in recog-
nition of their control over the eastern trade routes through Africa and India. This
delineation of the globe into two halves, did not specifically determine ownership
over territory, but rather it designated the regions that Spain and Portugal could
exploit as new lands were discovered.
Portugal, dissatisfied with the advantage the papal bull afforded Spain, began
negotiations with Spain to change the location of the boundary line. The result of
these negotiations was the Treaty of Tordesillas, agreed to on June 7, 1494, in the
small medieval town of Tordesillas, Spain. The treaty, brokered between represen-
tatives for the monarchs of Spain and Portugal, essentially improved the terms of
the bull for Portugal by moving the line drawn by the pope westward to 370 leagues
(about 1,200 miles) from Cape Verde. In preserving the “doctrine of discovery”
and the establishment of the “spheres of influence,” the document in effect bestowed
future territorial titles in the Western Hemisphere to Spain and in the Eastern
Hemisphere to Portugal. When South America was discovered a few years later, the
line drawn in the Treaty of Tordesillas divided South America to Spain’s advantage
638 T R EATY OF TO R DESILLAS
A Treaty Preserved for the Ages

When a treaty is concluded, both sides receive a copy, and the Treaty of
Tordesillas was no different. Both of the original documents still exist. The
copy held by Spain is on display in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville.
The Portuguese copy is preserved in the National Archives at Lisbon. The
Treaty of Tordesillas is included in the Memory of the World Register, part of
the UNESCO documentary heritage program and is considered a document
with world significance and outstanding universal value.
with only Brazil falling on the Portuguese side of the line of demarcation. Spain
and Portugal each received copies of the treaty and both parties ratified the treaty
within a few months.
The treaty no longer holds legal standing as the Iberian empires’ claim to global
domination were denied international legitimacy by the decline of papal authority
and also by the imperial ambitions of other Western powers including G reat Brit-
ain, the Netherlands, and France. T hese claims to territory in the New World by
other nations reduced Spain and Portugal’s spheres of influence and the idea of
possession and not just ownership by discovery became more prominent. The
treaty completely lost its earlier legal standing when the modern European system
of states was created with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and by the Treaty of
Madrid in 1750, which renegotiated land boundaries in South America.
Despite being without legal status, the Treaty of Tordesillas still holds signifi-
cant historical, legal, and cultural significance. It was a catalyst in the debates on
the freedom of the seas, a principle that would become vital for the expansion of
European trade and around the world. It determined the forward course of colo-
nization around the world. It explains why Mexico, Central America and most of
South America became Spanish colonies, while Macau (in modern China), Formosa
(modern Taiwan), and Brazil all became Portuguese colonies.
Corine Wood-Donnelly
See also: Brazil; Columbian Exchange; European Exploration; Portuguese Atlantic
Further Reading
Davenport, F. G. 1917. European Treaties beating on the History of the United States and its
Dependencies. Washington, DC: Carneg ie Institute of Washington.
Herzog, T. 2015. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cam-
Mills, K., W. B. Taylor, and S. L. Graham. 2002. Colonial Latin America: A Documentary
History. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Seymour, M. J. 2004. The Transformation of the North Atlantic World, 1492–1763: An Intro-
duction. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.
T R EATY OF UT R E C HT 639
T R E AT Y O F U T R E C H T ( 1 7 1 3 )
The Treaty of Utrecht is the name given to a series of treaties signed in 1713 and
1714 between the participants in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714).
The treaties re-established a balance of power between the Habsburg and Bour-
bon dynasties in continental Europe. The treaties also led to a decline in Dutch
commercial naval power and the rise of the British. The war began with the
death of King Carlos II of Spain. He left a w ill in which he offered the Spanish
throne first to Philip, the duke of Anjou. Philip was the grandson of Carlos’s half-
sister Maria Theresa, and Louis XIV of France. Louis XIV accepted the throne on
behalf of his grandson, who became Felipe V. Afraid of the power that could be
wielded by a closely connected France and Spain, Great Britain, the Dutch Repub-
lic, and the Holy Roman Empire formed the Second Grand Alliance to prevent
the two kingdoms from uniting u nder the same government. The allies supported
the claim of the man Carlos chose as second in line to his throne, the Archduke
Charles of Austria, son of Carlos’s sister Margaret Theresa, and Leopold I, the
Holy Roman Emperor. They w ere joined by most of the princes of the Holy
Roman Empire as well as by Portugal. The Wittlesbach electors of Bavaria and
Cologne supported the Bourbons. Savoy initially did, too, but switched sides part
way through the war.
On April 11, 1713, a series of treaties w
ere concluded at Utrecht between France
and Great Britain, Portugal, Prussia, Savoy, and the Dutch Republic. In June, Spain
and the Dutch Republic reached a peace agreement. On July 13, 1713, Spain signed
treaties with Great Britain and Savoy. The Treaty of Rastatt (March 7, 1714) secured
France’s peace with the Austrian Habsburgs and the Treaty of Baden (September 17,
1714) brought peace between France and the Holy Roman Empire. In February
1715, Spain and Portugal signed a peace treaty. No agreement was reached between
the Holy Roman Empire and Spain until the signing of the Treaty of The Hague on
February 17, 1720.
The issues dealt with in the Treaty of Utrecht can be grouped into three main
categories: resolution of dynastic conflicts and restoration of the balance of power,
borders and barriers, and colonial and commercial interests.
Taken together, the treaties that made up the Peace of Utrecht dealt with the
resolution of dynastic conflicts and restoration of the balance of power. The Treaty
of Utrecht confirmed Felipe V’s accession to the throne of Spain. First, however,
Felipe had had to renounce his right and the rights of his descendants to succeed
to the French throne. His younger b rother Charles, Duke of Berry, and his cousin
Philippe, Duke of Orléans, likewise had to renounce their rights and the rights of
their descendants to the Spanish throne. If the Spanish Bourbon line died out, the
Savoy line would inherit the throne. Both France and Spain agreed to recognize
the succession to the Crown of G reat Britain as stipulated by British law, namely,
that following the death of Queen Anne, the throne would pass to Princess Sophia,
Electress Dowager of Brunswick and her Protestant heirs of Hanover. Frederick III,
elector of Brandenburg, crowned himself King of Prussia in 1701. While the Holy
Roman Empire had sanctioned his actions, it was not u ntil the Treaty of Utrecht
640 T R EATY OF UT R E C HT
that the kingdom of Prussia, under the leadership of his son Frederick William I,
was recognized by other powers. At Baden, the Wittlesbach supporters of France,
Max Emanuel, elector of Bavaria, and Joseph Clemens, elector of Cologne, w ere
restored to their positions.
The Treaty of Utrecht also addressed territories and borders. France restored
to Victor Amadeus II the dukedom of Savoy and the city of Nice. He also received
from France the district of Pragelato in exchange for the valley of Barcelonette.
This gave Savoy a defensible border with France. Spain gave Savoy the island of
Sicily. The Dutch Republic, also wary of future French aggression, demanded
and received a line of fortresses in the Spanish (soon to be Austrian) Netherlands,
intended to provide a barrier against France. In compensation for dropping
his claim to the Spanish throne, Emperor Charles VI (formerly the archduke)
received the Spanish Netherlands, Sardinia, Naples, Milan, Mantua, and the
Tuscan ports. The Empire was allowed to retain the border established at Rys-
wick (1697) but had to cede Landau to France. France returned the fortresses
taken on the Rhine and dismantled the fortifications it had made on the river’s
islands.
Finally, the treaty addressed the commercial interests that were key to the par-
ticipants in the war. When Felipe V became King of Spain, France acquired highly
lucrative trading rights with the Spanish Indies. With the Treaty of Utrecht, t hese
rights w ere instead granted to G reat Britain. The Asiento Treaty of March, whereby
Spain agreed to allow G reat Britain the sole right to provide slaves to the Spanish
Indies for the next 30 years, was confirmed. Great Britain was also allowed to send
one ship to the Indies to trade each year. In North America, France ceded to Great
Britain its possessions surrounding Hudson Bay, its colony of Acadia, its claims to
Newfoundland and its half of St. Kitts in the Car ibbean. Great Britain agreed to
allow French and Spanish fishermen to continue fishing off the Newfoundland
coast and drying their catch on its shores; a point of contention that persists to the
present day. During the war, Great Britain had captured Gibraltar (1704) and
Minorca (1708). The Treaty of Utrecht allowed G reat Britain to retain both, to secure
its Mediterranean trading routes on the condition that the residents of both were
allowed to practice the Catholic religion and that no Jews or Moors were allowed
to reside in Gibraltar. Portugal’s Brazilian sovereignty to the lands between the
Amazon and Oyapuck rivers was recognized. Portugal received Sacramento in lieu
of a defensible border with Spain.
Tonya Lambert
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; British Atlantic; Dutch Atlantic; Piracy
Further Reading
Bruin, Renger de, and Maarten Brinkman. 2013. Peace Was Made H ere: The Treaties of
Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden 1713–1714. 2013. Petersburgh, Germany: Imhof.
Dadson, Trevor J., and J. H. Elliott, ed. 2014. Britain, Spain and the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713–
2013. London: Maney Publishing.
T R INIDAD 641
TRINIDAD
Trinidad, the southernmost island in the Caribbean, is part of the two-island nation
of Trinidad and Tobago, which w ere separate territories u
ntil they w
ere united in
1888. The island is part of the Lesser Antilles and is bordered by the Caribbean Sea
to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. It lies near the coast of Venezu-
ela. Trinidad has a tropical climate with both rainy and dry seasons. Trinidad’s his-
tory of immigration makes it one of the most racially, ethnically, and religiously
diverse nations in the Car ibbean.
The first p eople to inhabit Trinidad are believed to have arrived around 5000
BCE from the South American continent by traveling north along the Orinoco River
in present-day Venezuela. In 1400 CE, Trinidad was populated primarily by Amer-
indians known as the Arawaks. Another indigenous group, the Caribs, raided
the island prior to the arrival of Europeans and had established small communi-
ties on the island’s northern coast by the end of the sixteenth c entury. The arrival
of Europeans began the gradual decline of Amerindians in Trinidad, where the
Arawaks and Caribs suffered a fate similar to the indigenous p eoples in other parts
of the Americas. The population of native people in the Antilles was decimated by
disease and the results of forced labor and brutal working conditions.
On July 31, 1498, Christopher Columbus (ca. 1451–1506) was the first Euro
pean to visit Trinidad. He named the island Trinidad after the Holy Trinity and
claimed the island for the Spanish Crown. The first permanent settlement by a
foreigner was San Josef de Oruna, present day St. Joseph, in 1592. However, the
Spanish had difficulty maintaining a colony on the island. Spanish colonial Trini-
dad was not important to Spanish policymakers, who considered it an obscure out-
post with a very small European population.
The Spanish eventually realized that foreign immigration would be necessary
to transform Trinidad into a profitable colony. They opted to mimic the French
and British colonial practices by attempting to create a plantation economy. How-
ever, a European planter class and enslaved Africans were necessary for this
endeavor. Spain took advantage of French Catholic planters who were experienc-
ing persecution in territories that had been won by Great Britain in the Seven Years’
War. Spain enticed these planters with tax incentives and land grants if they
migrated to Trinidad along with their slaves. Land was granted to each white family
member that immigrated, with additional acres awarded for each enslaved Afri-
can that was brought to the colony. The first group of French immigrants arrived
in 1777. This agreement was formalized in November 1782, in the Cedula (Decree)
of Population, which greatly increased the number of French Catholic planters. By
1784, there were more French than Spaniards in Trinidad, and the island was trans-
forming into a full-fledged plantation colony with the planters cultivating a vari-
ety of crops including coffee, cocoa, cotton, and sugarcane.
In October 1796, as a result of its alliance with France, Spain declared war on
Great Britain. Trinidad was exposed to the might of the powerful British navy,
which dominated the Caribbean. The British took Trinidad from Spain in February
1797, facing only the slightest resistance. Although under British rule, the colony
was culturally French, with French and French Patois being the languages most
642 T R INIDAD
commonly spoken, Trinidad continued to mature into a thriving slave colony

with a substantial number of free people of color. The French also had a signifi-
cant influence on the development of Carnival on the island through their pre-
Lenten masquerade ball traditions and observances.
Although the British slave trade was abolished in 1807, slavery was allowed to
continue until 1838. After the complete abolition of slavery in the British Empire
in 1838, Trinidad experienced a labor problem. Many of the former slaves relo-
cated and abandoned the agricultural work, creating a labor shortage for the cul-
tivation of sugarcane. The colonial government was resigned to look outside of
Trinidad to find additional workers. The most immediate source of l abor were free
Africans in the Caribbean, and European immigrants. Portuguese immigrants from
Madeira w ere recruited to work on the plantations, but few remained given the
high mortality rate and of those who did stay, many became shopkeepers. The colo-
nial government turned to other parts of the British Empire to fill the void left
by the formerly enslaved Africans. The colonial government also began to secure
laborers from China to work on the plantations. However, the costs associated with
immigration proved to be too much and many Chinese also abandoned agricultural
work to become shopkeepers and merchants.
Beginning in 1845, the colonial British government began inviting people from
then-British India to immigrate to Trinidad for agricultural work. In an attempt to
maintain control over these new immigrants, the Colonial Office instituted a sys-
tem of indenture for Indians that would last five years. Upon completion of their
term of serv ice, they w ere offered free passage back to India. Indian males who
complete 10 years of serv ice w ere able to obtain 10 acres of land if they chose to
forego f ree return to India. B
ecause of the poverty and poor working conditions in
British India, most opted to stay in Trinidad and accept the land.
The influx of immigrants during the nineteenth century, from all parts of the
British Empire, contributed to the pronounced ethnic and racial diversity of Trinidad.
After the discovery of oil in 1857, and the first commercial wells w ere constructed
in 1902, Trinidad became one of the most prosperous islands in the region. Trini-
dad gained independence from G reat Britain on August 31, 1962.
Dan Castilow II
See also: Arawaks; Caribs; Coffee; Columbus, Christopher; Disease; Plantations;

Sugar
Further Reading
Brereton, Bridget. 1981. A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962. Kingston, Jamaica:
Heinemann.
Williams, Eric Eustace. 1964. History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. New York:
Praeger.
U
UNITED PROVINCES OF THE NETHERLANDS
The United Provinces of the Netherlands, also called the Dutch Republic, was a
state in Europe from 1579 to 1795. The term “Holland” is often used as well, but
in reality, Holland was just one of seven different provinces, more prominent than
the rest b ecause of its g reat wealth and population. Nearly half of the Republic’s
1.5 to 2 million people lived there. Simultaneously reflecting and adding to that
clout, Holland was home to Amsterdam, the largest Dutch city, and The Hague,
the national seat of government. From north to south, the other six provinces were
Groningen, Friesland, Overijssel, Gelderland, Utrecht, and Zeeland. Together they
constituted a strong state and a major power in Europe and the world during the
so-called Dutch Golden Age, which corresponded roughly with the seventeenth
century.
In the M iddle Ages, the provinces that would eventually form the Republic
were claimed by other kingdoms and European royal families: The Holy Roman
Empire, the Burgundians, and the Hapsburgs. The road to independence began
when the Spanish king Charles V (1500–1558) tried to consolidate and reform
his empire, including the 17 scattered provinces or Low Countries that he had
inherited in Northwestern Europe. Among other unpopular changes, he pruned the
powers of the Dutch nobility, who were relatively weak to begin with, and he cre-
ated new courts and administrative positions filled by university-trained bureau-
crats; who were often foreigners. Reform generally meant less local control and
more taxation, for Charles and his successor, Philip II, tapped the region to fund
their wars. At the same time they issued placards against a budding Protestant move-
ment and brought the Inquisition to the Low Countries, attempting to quash dis-
sent by violence and the force of law.
For the first two decades of the Dutch Revolt (1566–1648) the rebels continued
to flirt with monarchy, now u nder a different ruler. Elizabeth I of E
ngland and a
French prince named Francis, the Duke of Anjou, were both offered sovereignty
of the Netherlands at one time or another. The only feasible Dutch candidate for
the throne, William I, Prince of Orange, did not have the resources that Elizabeth or
France would have contributed. And he was assassinated before the Dutch worked
out a relationship that everyone could accept. All 17 provinces united in 1576, to
quell angry, unpaid, marauding Spanish soldiers. But the accord did not last; due in
part to religious divides. Protestantism and rebel power had consolidated more in
the northern provinces than in the south, and in 1579, a number of them signed the
Union of Utrecht, arguably the founding document of the Dutch Republic. Compet-
ing dates for the Republic’s origins include 1581, when the Dutch officially declared
644 UNITED P R O V IN C ES OF THE NETHE R LANDS
their independence, and 1588, when they abandoned their effort to find a new mon-
arch and finally embraced republicanism. The other Low Countries remained under
Spanish control; a longtime threat on the southern border.
The new Dutch state was a confederation of otherw ise independent provinces,
each still wary of centralization. E very city still had its own council, e very prov-
ince its own legislative body or States, such as the States of Holland or the States
of Zeeland. They continued to govern themselves internally and retained the all-
important taxing power. For matters such as diplomacy and war, the Dutch had a
national legislature called the States General and, mostly to lead the army, an exec-
utive stadthouder (usually from the noble House of Orange). The Dutch nobility
remained fairly weak after independence, especially in the influential western prov-
inces of Holland and Zeeland. Of the 18 seats in the States of Holland, for instance,
the nobility held only one. Since the States did not create any new noble lines, their
numbers decreased over the years. Instead, the Dutch Republic was dominated by
cities, and the cities were, in turn, dominated by wealthy merchants and rentier
families.
Impelled by war and trade restrictions in Spanish-controlled ports, Dutch global
expansion began in the 1580s and 1590s. Dutch ships originally sailed to the Ameri
cas for salt and sugar, Africa for gold and ivory, and Asia for spices. The six Dutch
firms that had formerly competed in Asia came together in 1602 to create the East
India Company, a joint-stock company that displaced the Portuguese as the main
European carrier of spices. In 1621, the States General chartered a similar organ
ization, the West India Company, for the Atlantic sphere. Both reflected the federal
nature of the Dutch state in that they had different offices or “chambers,” with each
chamber located in a different city or province (though mostly in Holland and Zee-
land). Both were also products of the Spanish war because they carried the fight
overseas, seizing colonial possessions from Spain and Portugal. In that sense, nei-
ther company was truly private, nor strictly commercial. They waged war, made trea-
ties and alliances, appointed governors, supported missionaries, and established
Dutch law in foreign lands. They also received subsidies from the States General.
The Dutch economy was the wonder of Europe for much of the seventeenth
century. Paradoxically, the boggy soil of the seaboard provinces contributed to that
success because the feudal, communal institutions that hampered modernization
elsewhere had never grown deep roots t here. A precocious bourgeois individualism
led to innovations like the herring buss, a kind of floating factory where gutting
and salting took place at sea, allowing the vessel to sail longer and farther, and the
fluitschip, a cargo ship with increased carrying capacity, stability, and speed. At home,
the Dutch drained swamps and improved existing waterways, which drew even more
trade through Holland and allowed farmers to specialize in a single good or crop:
hemp, cattle, butter, or cheese. They could choose just one, dedicating their land
and skills to producing a quality product, b ecause they could buy from the inter-
national market the necessities that peasants traditionally had to grow or make
themselves. Inundation and specialization also promoted urbanization and industry.
Textiles, ceramics, brewing, shipbuilding, and printing were among the industries
for which the Dutch w ere known throughout the Atlantic world.
UNITED P R O V IN C ES OF THE NETHE R LANDS 645
The Calvinist or Dutch Reformed Church was the public church of the Nether-
lands and its colonies. In truth, the country was very diverse, with Lutherans,
Anabaptists, Jews, and even Catholics. Famously, the English Pilgrims lived for a
time in Leiden b ecause they could not exercise their faith in E
ngland. But Dutch
tolerance was only a relative tolerance. The English could usually worship openly
in the Dutch Republic and New Netherland, for example, b ecause they were con-
sidered coreligionists, similar in m atters of faith, and even the Pilgrims faced
some repression when English officials persuaded Dutch officials that they were
dangerous. The Dutch ascribed to a principle called “freedom of conscience,”
whereby individuals could believe and worship how they wanted—as long as they
kept it in the private sphere: in their homes, with their families. Rights of con-
science at least allowed Jews and other minorities to live with a measure of secu-
rity that they did not always enjoy in other countries. Again, however, the Dutch
drew a distinction between private and public worship, and they reserved the
latter exclusively for the Reformed Church. The main exception was Amsterdam,
where the law was technically the same, but magistrates often winked at religious
nonconformers.
Identifying a precise terminus for the Golden Age is difficult. Dutch military
innovations and reforms influenced the wider Military Revolution, which helped
Europe conquer so much of the world, and the Republic was a major military power
through at least the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and the first three Anglo-Dutch
Wars (1652–1674). The beginning of the end of the Golden Age is sometimes
marked at 1672, the rampjaar or “year of disaster,” when England and France
attacked the Dutch simultaneously and a French army came quite close to con-
quering Amsterdam. The rampjaar definitely injured the Dutch economy and art
industry, which had produced masters like Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Ver-
meer. Yet the Dutch repelled the invaders and, against all odds, survived largely
intact. They were still strong enough in 1688 to mount a successful invasion of
England, ending the Anglo-French flirtation and the possibility of another ramp-
jaar by placing their own stadthouder, William III, on the English throne. The Dutch
fought alongside their recent e nemy in every European conflict for the next quar-
ter c entury, through the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714).
Despite increased competition and commercial restrictions from the English and
French in Europe and around the world, Dutch industry and trade did fairly well
into the early eighteenth century. Then in the 1720s and 1730s, places like Russia,
Sweden, and Finland began imitating what E ngland and France had done before,
promoting their own industry and adopting protectionist measures against outside
carriers. By that point, the Dutch had stopped participating in continental conflicts.
They declared a neutral position in most wars and traded with any side that would
have them, including the French. Hoping that an alliance with France would help
restore some of their former glory, the Dutch asserted themselves again by helping
British colonists during the American Revolution, and the resulting war with Great
Britain (1780–1784) was a catastrophe. The Dutch Republic limped onward, racked
by internal struggles between anti-Orangist revolutionaries, on the one hand, and
pro-Orange monarchists on the other, until Napoleon invaded in 1794, ostensibly
646 UNITED P R O V IN C ES OF THE NETHE R LANDS
on behalf of the revolutionaries. The next year, he destroyed the Republic, and the
Dutch state went through various iterations before finally becoming the Kingdom
of the Netherlands, a monarchy ruled by yet another William, in 1815.
D. L. Noorlander
See also: Amsterdam; Dutch Atlantic; Dutch West India Company
Further Reading
Carter, Alice. 1971. Neutrality or Commitment: The Evolution of Dutch Foreign Policy, 1667–
1795. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press.
Israel, Jonathan. 1989. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Schama, Simon. 1997. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the
Golden Age. New York: Vintage Books.
U T R E C H T, T R E AT Y O F. See Treaty of Utrecht (1713)

V
VICEREGAL SYSTEM
A system of governance established by Spain for its American colonies, the vicere-
gal system drew upon European practice to project the king’s authority to the New
World. Appointed by the king and answering to the king, the viceroys in the Span-
ish New World colonies w ere the most powerful administrative officials other
than the king himself. The institution of viceroy has its origins in Europe where
Spain used high-ranking administrators to supervise territories such as Navarre
and Sicily. Spain established viceroyalties in New Spain (1535), Peru (1542), New
Grenanda (1717), and Río de la Plata (1776). The viceroys were the focus of con-
troversy during the Latin American Wars of Independence (1808–1824), and the
system ceased to exist as Spain’s colonies achieved their independence.
The office of viceroy was one of the last major pieces of the Spanish colonial
administration to be created in the New World. Immediately after the conquest of
Mexico, and Peru, the Crown was most concerned about very powerful, armed
leaders controlling the newly founded territories, thousands of miles away. Thus, the
monarch first appointed governors and judges to dilute the power of the conquer-
ors. T hese were then followed by the creation of high courts of appeal, audiencias, to
supervise relatively large areas, approximately the size of the modern Latin Ameri-
can nations.
Finally in 1536, Charles V appointed the first New World viceroy, don Antonio
de Mendoza, for New Spain (Spanish North America). Shortly after that, Blasco
Núñez Vela was appointed viceroy of Peru, encompassing all of Spanish South
America. While Mendoza governed for a relatively long term of fifteen years, Núñez
Vela became embroiled in the long r unning civil war among the Spanish conquis-
tadors of Peru and was killed within a few years.
The title of viceroy signifies “vice-king.” This had important implications in the
selection of men to serve in the office and in the range of powers that they enjoyed.
Because the viceroy was considered to be the physical embodiment of the king,
the men selected came from the upper reaches of Spanish society, generally from
the petty nobility, or from the princes of the church: bishops or archbishops. For
example, the first viceroy of New Spain, Don Antonio de Mendoza, was a younger
son of the Count of Tendilla, who gained fame for leading the conquest of Granada
that ended the Reconquest of Spain from the Muslims. Yet Mendoza was not him-
self a high ranking noble. Similarly, most of the viceroys came from junior branches
of famous Spanish noble houses, although many seventeenth and eighteenth-
century officers did hold noble titles and come from the higher ranks of the
nobility. The cadre of men serving in the office was so limited that a majority of
648 V I C E R E G AL SYSTE M
sixteenth-century viceroys of New Spain w ere in fact related to one another. Other
viceroys came from the ranks of the church. Archbishops of Mexico, such as Pedro
Moya de Contreras and Garcia Guerra in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, sometimes served as viceroy of New Spain.
Viceroys also carried out some judicial functions. Within the Spanish imperial
bureaucracy, judges needed to be “letrados,” university trained lawyers, but as
nobles the viceroys w ere known as “de capa y espada,” of sword and cape. As a
result, they lacked the legal training necessary to act as judges, except in specific
situations. Viceroys were thus granted two jurisdictions. As the head of the mili-
tary in their territory, they served as the de facto head of the courts martial. The
viceroys were also given specific jurisdiction to protect the natives and thus became
the head of the Indian Tribunal.
Since the viceroy was the physical representative of the king, he was generally
to be treated as if he w
ere the king. Nonetheless, the monarch was fearful of giving too
much power to any individual, especially one thousands of miles away. Thus, the
viceroy’s powers w ere circumscribed. At e very level of the bureaucracy, the Spanish
used a combination of executive officers and councils. At the very highest level, the
king relied on the Council of the Indies, a group of high level officials charged
with advising the monarch. At the local level, magistrates, known variously as cor-
regidores, alcaldes mayores, or gobernadores, governed alongside of municipal coun-
cils. The viceroy served in conjunction with the high court of appeal, the audiencia
located in the capital city of his realm. Although not a lawyer, he acted as the chief
officer of that court, and no ruling of the court was valid without his signature.
The duties of the viceroy w ere largely administrative. He was charged with gov-
ernance of his territory, in general: enforcing royal decrees, appointing lower mem-
bers of the bureaucracy, particularly local magistrates, protecting the natives, and
stimulating the economy. The viceroys also could grant land to residents, assign
native tribute, and give special licenses to natives to carry offensive and defensive
I Obey but I Do Not Comply

Spain’s viceroys were the king’s agents in the New World, charged with faith-
fully executing his wishes. However, the period’s difficulties of travel and
communication made such a system impractical, more of an ideal than a real
ity. When royal edicts were at odds with the particular needs of a community,
the viceroy or other local official adopted the position called Obedezco pero no
complo—I obey but I do not comply. On receiving an objectionable order,
an official would announce the king’s desires publicly. He would then hold
the document over his head and say “Obedezco pero no complo,” showing
his intention not to implement the policy. The official would then draft a
letter to the king explaining his actions. The custom allowed Spanish offi-
cials to adjust their policies to their circumstances without threatening royal
authority.
V I C E R E G AL SYSTE M 649
weapons. Within these areas, the Crown granted a certain degree of latitude to the
viceroy, since he was clearly closer to the unique local situation.
The viceroy had the power to fill hundreds of lower administrative offices, the
most important of which were local magistrates. This could also be a bone of con-
tention with local residents, if the viceroy chose to appoint his own retainers and
hangers-on rather than locals. Because the Catholic Church fell under royal patron-
age, the viceroy also appointed clerics to serve as local parish priests. Various trea
sury offices, scribal offices, and others also fell under the appointment powers of
the viceroy.
Uniquely, the viceroy also had broad legislative powers in that he could cre-
ate administrative codes that had the power of law. In part icular, viceroys cre-
ated rules and regulations for subjects such as mining, w ater allocation, c attle
and agriculture, and the operation of manufacturing factories. T hese powers
were so crucial, and their implications so pervasive, that in the Southwest of
the United States mining, w ater, and cattle laws are all based on t hese Spanish
precedents.
With the passage of time, both the nature of the viceroys’ powers and the quality
of men appointed to the office changed. The most import ant shift was the addi-
tion of a new viceroyalty in Bogota, New Granada. The new jurisdiction had a rocky
start; created in 1718, it was suppressed in 1724, only to be reestablished in 1739.
The creation of the new viceroyalty reflected Crown concerns over the rapid growth
of non-Spanish influence as the race to take over islands in the Caribbean for sugar
production became ever more intense. It also recognized the sheer size and com-
plexity of South America. It was unreasonable that a single viceroy in Lima might
govern the whole continent.
In the 1770s, a fter the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the new ruling f amily
of Spain, the Bourbons, initiated a complete reorganization of its colonial holdings
in the Americas. The Crown moved away from the Hapsburg system of councils of
state, viceroys, courts, and magistrates, to a more centralized and streamlined sys-
tem of ministers and intendants. The intendant system, as proposed and initially
implemented, sharply reduced the power of the viceroy, in favor of a superinten-
dent, who was to supervise the intendants. This aspect did not come to pass, but
did serve to help clarify and define the important roles of the viceroy in the Bour-
bon era.
B ecause of the increase in foreign competition in the Americas, the Spanish
greatly increased their military presence to protect their territory. The viceroy, as
the head of the military, came to occupy a vital in deploying troops and supervis-
ing the military. At this same time, to provide for more military protection for the
colonies, the Crown approved the creation of additional militia units. The leaders
of t hese units w
ere granted the right to have private cases heard in the courts mar-
tial. As a result of these two factors, the jurisdiction of the viceroy as head of the
courts martial increased significantly. At this time, a new viceroyalty was created
for the Río de la Plata, modern Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia.
The men who w ere appointed viceroy in this l ater period w
ere also quite differ
ent from earlier periods. Increasingly they came from the higher ranks of the
650 V I K IN G V OYA G ES
Spanish nobility, frequently with extensive c areers e ither in the bureaucracy or in

the military. Two groups also appeared among the ranks: Frenchmen who had
entered the Spanish imperial serv ice with the rise of the Bourbon family, and Irish
Catholics trained in Spanish universities. With the rise of the Bourbon monarchs
of Spain, some French courtiers and bureaucrats began to serve in the Spanish
imperial administration, and their presence became more noted by the late eigh
teenth century. At the time of the Protestant Reformation, the monarchs of Spain
began to offer fellowships to Irish and English Catholics to attend university in
Spain, since they were prohibited from attending universities in the United King-
dom. By the late eighteenth c entury, t here w
ere sufficient numbers of these to rise
to the rank of viceroy in the overseas holdings.
With the Latin American Wars of Independence, the viceroys w ere forced to
muster Spanish imperial control in the face of growing opposition from local elites.
By and large, the reforms of the Bourbons had the effect of cutting local elites off
from traditional avenues to power and wealth. Thus when the new ideas of the
Enlightenment entered the Hispanic world they w ere seized upon by local elites in
Spanish America as a justification for severing ties with the homeland. The vice-
royalties slowly disintegrated into smaller constituent parts, such that the territo-
ries governed by the local high courts of justice (audiencia) became the basis for the
newly independent state of Latin America, and not the larger viceroyalties.
John Schwaller
See also: Conquistadors; Encomienda System; Latin American Wars of Independence;

Legal Systems
Further Reading
Aiton, Anthony Scott. 1927. Antonio de Mendoza: First Viceroy of New Spain. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Caneque, Alejandro. 2004. The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power
in Colonial Mexico. New York: Routledge.
Marks, Patricia. 2007. Deconstructing Legitimacy: Viceroys, Merchants, and the Military in Late
Colonial Peru. State College, PA: Penn State Press.
V I K I N G V O YA G E S
The Vikings w ere a Scandinavian culture (properly defined as the Norse) that con-
nected the peoples of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden by language, technology, and
belief. The term viking means raider or sea-traveler in Old Norse. Both meanings of
the word applied equally well, skilled warriors and shipwrights, they came to domi-
nate the North Atlantic world between the eighth and eleventh centuries. During
the era of their supremacy, they established colonies throughout Europe, from
Russia to Sicily to Normandy, and founded major cities from Dublin to Kiev. Their
seaborne explorations led to the discovery of Iceland, Greenland, and North Amer
ica. These voyages were kept as cultural secrets for many centuries, and so were
unknown to later European explorers.
V I K IN G V OYA G ES 651
Traditionally, the Viking Age is said to have begun with a raid by Norsemen on
the Christian monastery on the tiny island of Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast
of E ngland, in the summer of 793. Although not the first Viking raid, the news
came as a shock to Christians, who interpreted it as divine retribution for a sinful
society, and the event gave the Vikings notoriety. Soon thereafter, Viking raids in
the north Atlantic became more frequent and extensive.
Several theories account for the initial impetus of Viking expansion beyond
their homelands. The golden age of Viking expansion and exploration roughly coin-
cides with a climactic change in Europe known as the Medieval Warm Period (950–
1250) when the North Atlantic was 0.7°C to 1.0° warmer on average than it is
today. Warmer temperatures made previously non-arable land available for culti-
vation, and caused ice to retreat farther north allowing easier passage in the
northern oceans. Dangers such as suddenly massing pack ice also became less of
a deterrent to exploration and long-distance travel. The Norse brought dairy farm-
ing and barley cultivation to their northern colonies and made them sustainable,
but by the end of the twelfth c entury, it was no longer possible to grow barley as
far north as Iceland.
Expanded agriculture encouraged larger populations. Farming in the homeland
took place at higher latitudes and elevations, crucial in such a mountainous coun-
try with little arable land. Larger populations would have meant overcrowding, pro-
ducing internecine warfare and inspiring the search for living space. This may
have pushed the population beyond its borders, while internal strife would have
produced the need for the heavy hand of central governments such as kingdoms.
Another theory, less well supported, holds that Viking expansion was instigated
by the efforts of the Christian world to eradicate paganism. They were the last pagan
culture in Europe. Charlemagne, king of the Franks, notoriously had chopped
down the Saxon’s sacred Irminsul, a tree or pillar they believed connected the earth
to the sky, and it was the policy of Christian nations to trade only with other Chris-
tian nations. Advocates of this theory argue that the attack on Lindisfarne may
have been motivated by symbolism as much as it was an easy target for pillage,
since monasteries were usually isolated, had considerable supplies, and were poorly
defended.
Long summer raiding campaigns led to overwintering by the 830s, then to per-
manent settlements. More ambitious goals followed. The Danes attacked the King-
dom of the Franks several times in the early 800s, sacking major cities such as
Rouen and Nantes, even laying siege to Paris in 845 and 885. At the same time,
the Danes overran eastern E ngland by 851, and much of the country was under
their rule by 861 (a regime known as the Danelaw). Norse settlements in the north
of France were so well-established that a treaty signed between the Viking chief-
tain Hrolf Ragnvaldsson or “Rollo” (846–932) and the Frankish king in 911, created
the vassal state of Normandy (“Northmen’s Land”). It would be the descendants of
these Normans who conquered E ngland in 1066, and established the Crusader
state of Antioch in 1098.
Viking seafarers settled the island groups north of the British Isles (the Shetlands,
the Orkneys, and the Hebrides) by 825, and soon thereafter the Faroes. Settlement
652 V I K IN G V OYA G ES
Shipbuilders without Equal

The Norse and their ancestors had always been excellent shipbuilders. Pre-
served examples of clinker-building (overlapping planks covering the hull
that made their ships lightweight and watertight) have been found and dated
to as early as 350 BCE. Around 700, Norse shipbuilders began adding a long
lengthwise beam to the bottom of the hull, making their craft capable of sup-
porting a square sail. The addition of a sail made Viking ships capable of lon-
ger and speedier journeys, a key technological change that left the Vikings
without equal on the w ater in Northern Europe.
of Iceland began around 874. Mitochondrial DNA analyses have revealed remark-
able information about the ancestry of Icelandic peoples: 80 percent of the males
trace their descent from Norway, while nearly two-thirds of the females descend
from the British Isles, suggesting that the Viking method of colonization was to
buy or abduct women from t hese countries before traveling on to Iceland.
Viking raiding parties were comprised of men seeking their fortunes; discover-
ing new lands held out the promise of finding new sources of wealth or good areas
for settlement. Many were farmer’s sons looking to improve their prospects; others
were men on the run, or men driven from their homes due to blood feuds. That
was the story of Erik Thorvaldsson “Erik the Red” (950–1003), who grew up in
Iceland because his father was banished from Norway as a result of several kill-
ings he was involved in. Erik, in his turn, was exiled from Iceland for his own
violent acts in 980. He sailed for land reported to be west of Iceland and found
southwestern Greenland, sparsely populated by Inuit and other Norse seafarers that
had found it on their journeys.
Despite the long harsh winters, Erik found verdant grazing land and abundant
fish stocks. He returned to Iceland and promoted the virtues of Greenland, giving
it the name to make it seem more inviting. He set out for Greenland with 25 boats
loaded with colonists and arrived with 14. The original settlers established two
colonies, one at the southerly tip of Greenland and the other a little further north
on the western coast.
In 985, a young merchant sailor, Bjarni Herjolfsson, was on his way to Greenland
when the wind failed him and he drifted off course. He sighted new land while lost
and reported this to his hosts when he made it to Greenland. In the Vinland Saga,
Bjarni is scolded for being cautious and not pursuing the discovery. Leif Eriksson, son
of Erik the Red, took a crew of 35 men and set out in search of the new lands. He
would find Helluland (Land of Rock Slabs, modern Baffin Island), Markland (Land
of Forests, modern Labrador) and Vinland (Land of Wine, an unknown place south
of the St. Lawrence River). Viking explorers had found the Americas some 500 years
before Columbus. In the 1960s, a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in mod-
ern Newfoundland was discovered; it may have acted as a waypoint between hunt-
ing and logging expeditions and the return journey to Greenland.
V I R G IN OF G UADELOUPE 653
The Greenland settlements would be some of the last vestiges of the Viking
Age; they endured after Scandinavia became Christian kingdoms and the Norse
lost their supreme position at sea. As the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the
L ittle Ice Age, Greenland became a far less supportive environment. By the
fifteenth century, the Norse had vanished from Greenland.
The Vikings are known to have made other, less well-documented explora-
tions. The Norwegian King Harald Hardrada (1015–1066) for example, is reputed to
have made sailing expeditions to the far north, perhaps encountering Spitzber-
gen and reaching the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Not long a fter, in 1066, King
Harald attempted to conquer England and was slain at the Battle of Stamford
Bridge. This marked the end of widespread raiding or invasion from Norse coun-
tries, and it marked the end of the Golden Age of the Vikings.
Their superior seamanship was based mainly on their instincts, being able to
tell the prevailing winds and good seasons in which to set out. They had oral tra-
ditions passed down over hundreds, possibly thousands of years, providing crucial
information on landmarks, bird and animal migrations, and currents. They had
simple tools they could use to great effect: a stick which, held with the base to the
horizon, could be lined up with the North Star. If the North Star was higher than
previously notched, one was headed north. Lower, one was headed south. They
may have possessed a translucent stone made of feldspar from Iceland, called a
sunstone, which, when held up to the sun, would turn opaque, allowing the posi-
tion of the sun to be pinpointed with great accuracy in foggy or cloudy weather.
Vikings may have also used a type of sundial that provided them with a measure
ment of their latitude.
But above all, their superiority came from the light, nearly flat bottomed ships,
which allowed them to cross open ocean or move up shallow rivers easily. It was
not u
ntil they found themselves overmatched by the heavier ship of other mari-
time powers, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that their dominance
ended.
Steven Henry Martin
See also: Atlantic Ocean; British Atlantic; Columbus, Christopher; European

Exploration
Further Reading
Fitzhugh, William W., and Elizabeth I. Ward, eds. 2000. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Jones, Gwyn. 1984. A History of the Vikings, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Winroth, Anders. 2014. The Age of the Vikings. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
VIRGIN OF GUADELOUPE
The Virgin of Guadeloupe was an apparition of the Virgin Mary reported to have
taken place between December 9 and 12, 1531, in Tepeyac, a hill in a poor area
outside Mexico City, at the beginning of the evangelization of Latin America. The
654 V I R G IN OF G UADELOUPE
Virgin Mary emerged as an example of inculturated evangelization by becoming

the link between the Amerindian and the European Christian worlds. Nowadays,
up to 20 million p eople come e very year to the sanctuary built at the place of the
Virgin Mary’s first apparition, making Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe the most vis-
ited pilgrimage site in the world. The Roman Catholic Church proclaims the Virgin
of Guadeloupe as the patron saint of the Americas, the empress of Latin America,
and the protectress of unborn c hildren.
Our Lady of Guadeloupe appears as the central figure in Mexican popular reli-
giosity and is a fundamental element in the historical, social, religious, and cul-
tural development of the Mexican people. The devotion to Guadeloupe combines
mixed Christian and pre-Christian religious traditions in Central and South Amer
ica. Her depiction involves syncretism with the indigenous Aztec goddess of love
and fertility Tonantzín, and carries messages of sacrifice and nurturance as well as
strength and hope. According to tradition, a dark-skinned Virgin Mary appeared to
Juan Diego, an Aztec convert to Christianity, on December 9, 1531, on the hill of
Tepeyac. Speaking to him in his native Nahuatl language, she asked him to go to
the local bishop and request him to build a chapel dedicated to her on the site.
She also appeared to Juan Diego’s d ying u
ncle, Juan Bernardino, and healed him.
In the end, she miraculously imprinted her image on the mantle (called a tilma) of
Juan Diego while the bishop and o thers w ere present. The image on the tilma
showed the pregnant Virgin Mary with the face of a Mestizo, crowned with stars,
in European style dress with Native American decorative elements. A fter these
apparitions, perceived as miraculous, indigenous Americans started to convert to
Catholicism. A Marian sanctuary was built on the site of a previous religious temple
dedicated to the Aztec goddess Tonantzín, which had been destroyed by the newly
arrived Catholic authorities. The original icon on the tilma, placed in the Basilica
of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyac, is considered the most important relic at
the shrine, offering miraculous powers and protection to all believers in Mexico
and worldwide. It is the main attraction of pilgrimages.
Neither the apparition of the Virgin Mary, nor any message received from her,
were officially reported by witnesses. Neither the visionary Juan Diego nor the
bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, left any documentation on t hose events. Nev-
ertheless, t here is the image itself of the Virgin Mary on Juan Diego’s tilma, many
writings in Nahuatl and Spanish attesting to a written and spoken tradition, and
about 20 important historical sources. The oldest historical document, testifying
to the events of December 1531, is Codex 1548, which appeared in the appendix of
the Enciclopedia Guadalupana, published in 1997. The most important document
is considered to be Nican Mopohua, a sixteenth-century manuscript, written in
Nahuatl by Antonio Valeriano (ca. 1520–1605), an Indian educated at Franciscan
College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco.
The defeat of the Aztec Empire, in 1521, symbolized as well the defeat of the
Amerindian worldview and lifestyle. The early sixteenth century was a clash
between the two empires: the Iberian Christians of Europe and the Aztec Nahuatls
of the Americas. Because of the ongoing military conquest, the Christian missions
were initially perceived negatively by the locals. The first missions w ere organized
V ODOU 655
by Franciscans to Mexico, in 1523 and 1524. Around 1527, u nder the Franciscan
bishop Juan de Zumárraga, a diocese was established in Mexico City and the region
received the status of province. The evangelization of Mexico was reinforced
in 1531, when Juan Diego was reported to have received a vision of the Virgin Mary
at Tepeyac. The vision of Our Lady of Guadeloupe justified the Christianization of
the indigenous people. The Virgin Mary (as the Mestizo Mother of the Americas)
represented the beginning of a new civilization in the Americas with a new way of
perceiving life. The Aztecs, and many other tribes of the region, began to consider
themselves as Roman Catholics, leading to the sociocultural formation of a Mestizo
Catholic Church in the Americas in 1531.
Many famous Roman Catholic shrines depict symbolic encounters with a theoph-
any (manifestation of a deity or some aspect of the divine to humans). Guadeloupe
in Mexico is among many sites associated with the appearance of the Virgin Mary
to one or more individuals, who almost always come from a modest social back-
ground. In Mexico City, the apparition of the Virgin led to the building of the Cha-
pel of the Indians in 1553, and the church Cerrito in 1666, in Tepeyac. In 1709, a
baroque church was also built, and despite being usually closed, it attracts p eople
who lay votive offerings outside it, a common practice within religious pilgrim-
ages. L ater, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe was built on the same hill.
December 9 (the date of the first Virgin apparition to Juan Diego) and December 12
(when Juan Diego received the imprinted tilma) are considered as the most impor
tant dates of the year and are the most intense days of pilgrimage.
See also: Aztec Empire; Cortés, Hernán; Franciscans; Juan Diego
Further Reading
Lafaye, Jacques. 1976. Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sylvest, Edwin. 1992. Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe: Mother of God, Mother of the Americas.
Dallas, TX: Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University.
Testoni, Manuela. 2001. Our Lady of Guadalupe. History and Meaning of the Apparitions. New
York: Alba House.
VODOU
Vodou is a syncretic Afro-Caribbean religion that combines Roman Catholic prac-
tices with traditional African beliefs and rites. It is t oday an official religion in Haiti,
practiced to some degree by 80–90 percent of the population. Often, Vodou and
Catholicism are practiced together, at least among rural inhabitants and urban
workers. It also practiced by a majority of Haitian Catholics living in the Domini-
can Republic (which together with Haiti shares Hispaniola island), and among the
Haitian diaspora. Until recently, Vodou had adherents in Cuba, and particular
forms of Vodou w ere also practiced in Martinique, and Guadeloupe. The folk the-
ology and practices of Vodou w ere developed by diverse African ethnic groups who
were enslaved and sent to the former French colony of Saint-Domingue (today’s
656 V ODOU
Haiti) and then w ere converted to Roman Catholicism by missionaries during the
sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.
The term Vodou comes from the Fon language in West Africa. Other spellings
include Voudou, Vodoun, Vaudou, and Voodoo. In the original language Vodou means
“spirit” or “deity” and is believed to be closely related to the notions of death and
resurrection. As a syncretic religion, Vodou blends the diverse cultural elements
practiced in Haiti, where some 115 African ethnicities fuse their identities. Vodou
incorporates religious worldviews and rituals based on more than a century of
beliefs and practices. The practices of contemporary Vodou are still closely related
to their origins in West African Vodun. Vodou is based on religious rituals and
worldview elements drawn from a mixture of various African sources (such as sym-
bols from Yoruba and Kongo), European sources (such as mysticism and Free-
masonry), Christian sources (especially Roman Catholic practices), and Native
American sources (such as polytheistic Taíno religious beliefs). The practice of
Vodou is continuously modernized, changed, and adapted to sociocultural condi-
tions. One such example of the process of adaptation could be the changed per-
ception of loa or lwa (a Kongian term, meaning a spirit) as a Roman Catholic saint.
Initially the most important deities, loas were worshiped by aboriginal African
tribes who used to live on the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast (now Ghana, Togo,
Benin, and Nigeria). Nevertheless, the biggest contribution in this mixture of beliefs
was made by the Fon ethnic group. Throughout the years, and the syncretic changes
within the initial Vodou belief, loas eventually started to be considered as
Roman Catholic saints.
The Vodou religion in Haiti began to crystallize in the sixteenth century, dur-
ing the early period of slavery. From the very beginning, it was a religion prac-
ticed by slaves, a folk religion with beliefs and practices closely associated with
particular ethnic or regional religious traditions, which did not abide to the norms
and practices of an established religion. It publicly or secretly opposed Catholicism—
the official state religion, which was generally supported by the white colonists
and which was l ater also popular among the increasingly powerful elite mulattoes,
some of whom w eople of color (or gens de couleur) who owned plan-
ere called f ree p
tations and slaves. Nevertheless, Vodou took over many of its elements from Cathol-
icism. In 1685, the Code Noir of France’s King Louis XIV forbade the open practice
of any African religion and required all slaveholders to have their slaves converted
to Catholicism within eight days of their arrival to Saint-Domingue. In response,
a syncretized version of Vodou, integrating Catholic iconography and practices,
developed over time. From 1730 to 1790, with the continuous importation of
slaves, Vodou established itself on the island.
From 1790 to 1800, Vodou belief contributed to the revolution of the enslaved
African people. In 1791, the successful slave rebellion, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture,
brought an end to slavery in Saint-Domingue. The impetus for the Haitian Revolu-
tion is considered to have taken place during a secret ceremony held at the Bois
Caïman in August 1791. A fter the initial revolt and the abolishment of slavery
in 1793, Vodou became a politically powerful force and contributed to freeing the
Haitians from the French colonial rules and to gaining independence for Haiti in
V ODOU 657
Vodou and the Haitian Slave Revolt

A Vodou ceremony was at the heart of the initial drive of slaves to revolt. The
ceremony was conducted by one of the early revolutionary leaders, Dutty
Boukman (acting in the role of houngan or priest), together with Cécile Fati-
man (acting in the role of mambo or priestess). The priestess was said to be
possessed by the petro spirit, an irascible, occasionally aggressive spirit, called
Ezili Dantor (also called Erzulie D’en Tort). Ezili Dantor was believed to be the
loa of motherhood, a dark skinned and scarred warrior-mother, who is usu-
ally represented by the Catholic image of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa,
an icon brought to Haiti by Polish soldiers. Ezili Dantor then was offered a
black pig, her favorite animal sacrifice, and encouraged all participants to fight
for freedom by revolting against the ruling white planters of the Nord Depart-
ment region, situated on the northern shore of Saint-Domingue.
1804, when Haiti became the first republic in the world to recognize the freedom
of black p eople and the second independent nation, after the United States, freed
from European domination.
After declaring Haiti a f ree republic, Vodou, and its increasing influence in Hai-
tian lives over the first half of the nineteenth century, started to be associated with
political power, threatening the local political leaders who tried to suppress its prac-
tice. Despite t hese attempts, Vodou became wide spread and increasingly popular
until 1850. An important official recognition took place in the m iddle of the nine-
teenth century, during the presidency of Faustin-Élie Soulouque (1849–1859), who
practiced Vodou himself and who raised it to the level of a state religion.
Vodou cosmology is based on the principle belief that everything is a spirit. Spirits
inhabit visible and invisible worlds. According to such an understanding, h umans
are spirit-residents of the visible world while the invisible world is inhabited with
loas (spirits originated in Africa), or mystè (mysteries—the other name of loas), and
anvizib (the invisibles), also saints, anges (angels), and the spirits of ancestors together
with recently passed away ones. Saints are inherited by succeeding generations of
Haitians, and are believed to be responsible for everyday concerns of their devo-
tees. All spirits are believed to live in a mythic land called Guinea, conceived as a
cosmic “Africa.” The highest entity in the cosmic hierarchy is the creator of both
the universe and the spirits, a distant Supreme Creator called Bondye (from the
French Bon Dieu, meaning Good God). Bondye was later equated with the all-
powerful Biblical God, and is believed to reign with Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the
saints. The syncretic cultic pattern of organization, together with the focus on
religious power for everyday concerns is characteristic for the Vodou religion. It is
believed that God does not interfere with human affairs, but that loas influence
everyday life and are responsible for various aspects of human everyday life. As a
result, Voudouists perform rituals dedicated to loas to restore, reveal, increase, and
maintain balance and energy in relationships between people as well as between
658 V ODOU
eople and spirits. Various expressions of the Vodou ritual activity such as pray-
p
ing, singing, dancing, and gesturing differ; all elements are organically intertwined
into the Vodou belief system in such a way that this religion is sometimes called a
dancing religion.
Fundamental Vodou symbols include doors, crosses, and crossroads. A cross
and a crossroad represent the two dimensions of spiritual and physical worlds inter-
acting with each other. It is believed that the spiritual and physical worlds mirror
each other. Inhabitants of the hierarchically structured spiritual world, saints and
loas, carry features and functions that are a projection of features and functions
existing in the world of humans. The structure of the Vodou pantheon is unstable
and dynamic. It constantly adds new loa deities, and it is impossible to precisely
define their origins. Moreover, it is difficult to classify deities as rada, which is more
benign and ancient, originated from French Dahomey, and generally seen as good,
guarding morals and principles, or petro, which generally encompasses the malign,
even brutal or warlike deities. Most kongo deities, who are originated from Kongo
and integrated in the cult from the end of the eighteenth century, are already assim-
ilated by petro rites. The most important kongo deities include the loa deity Legba,
the go-between, a deity of crossroads and world countries, that guards doors and
gateways, which are considered to be a sacred passage into the world of gods; Guédé,
deities who empower matters both of birth and death; and the deities of dreadful
death who are represented in petro rites by the so-called Baron Samedi, a figure con-
sidered the god of dead ones and the god of sex. Baron Samedi is perceived as an
insolent and impertinent. Other important figures include Damballa, a supreme
god, a patron of heaven w aters, springs, and rivers, and a deity of grass-snakes,
Ophiolatry; the worship of snakes or belief in the divine or sacred nature of snakes,
is an important element of Vodou religion. In addition, Vodou emphasizes Ague,
a sovereign of seas; Erzulie, a female loa, a goddess of love; Ogun, a mighty hero, a
god of strength, politics and magic, who patronizes hounforus, sacred places of wor-
ship. In the same way as in Cuban Santería, a syncretic system of beliefs that
merges aspects of Youruba mythology, Catholicism, and West African religious
beliefs, Haitian loas are identified with Catholic saints. For example, Damballa is
associated with St. Patrick, while Legba is associated with St. Anthony the Hermit.
Vodou is an oral tradition that is maintained by extended families. It is based on
generational continuity of family spirits legacy and specific devotional practices that
are transmitted by particular family elders. Rituals are performed by priests
(houngan—from the Fon meaning leaders of spirits, sovereigns), and priestesses
(mambo), who are considered cult parents by the professing individual (serviteur).
During f amily ceremonies, parents normally carry out the functions of the priests
in case there are issues related to their children. It takes many years of training
before obtaining the status of a houngan or a mambo. The mambo and the houngan,
the “children of the spirits” (ounsi), and the sacred ritual drummers (ountògi) belong
to “societies” or “congregations” called sosyete. A sosyete ensures the transfer of
knowledge through a ritual of initiation (kanzo), which is carried out by embodied
spiritual transformation of the initiated individual. The Catholic liturgy is also
incorporated into the Vodou rituals and is perceived as magic. The elements of this
V ODOU 659
liturgy are carried out before the most important part of the ceremony, during
which a special priest reads Catholic prayers and litanies. Details and worship of
a specific ritual may vary between particular groups and localities.
One goal of Vodou is to serve the spirits by offering prayers and performing rites
to God and particular loas in return for such favors as health, protection, or advice.
As in Santería, the key role of Vodou is related to ecstasy and possession, which
are perceived as the most indispensable moments of initiation. The main purpose
of the worship is to reach a trance like state, to be possessed–“ridden” or “mounted,”
like a rider on a horse–by a loa that w ill speak and act through the possessed per-
son. A “ridden” individual may eat, drink, dance, give advices, cure illnesses, and
perform other tasks. In each sosyete, the specific behavior of each loa is studied to
recognize the loa by the way the entranced person acts during the ceremony.
The successful outcome of the Haitian revolution led to the development of fear
and negative misrepresentative stereotypes of Vodou, first in the United States and
later worldwide. Vodou is sometimes seen as destructive sorcery, mixing Satanism
and zombification. However, such misconceptions are more related to Haitian folk
magic than to actual manifestations of Vodou. Such magic is more related to a bocor
(a sorcerer), who is said to be able to zombify people to use them for his own selfish
purposes rather than a houngan or a mambo figure in Vodou. In popular North
American culture, Haitian Vodou, as well as New Orleans Voodoo, is generally con-
fused with the folk magic hoodoo, and associated with such practice as the widely
known “Voodoo dolls” that are often connected to New Orleans Voodoo and
hoodoo.
See also: Black Atlantic; Code Noir; Haitian Revolution; Migration; Saint-Domingue/
Haiti
Further Reading
Deren, Maya. 1974. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. New York: Delta Publishing
Co.
Laguerre, Michele S. 1989. Voodoo and Politics in Haiti. New York: St Martin’s.
Mulrain, George MacDonald. 1984. Theology in Folk Culture: The Theological Significance of
Haitian Folk Religion. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
W
W E S L E Y, J O H N ( 1 7 0 3 – 1 7 9 1 )
John Wesley was a leading British Protestant evangelical pastor and theologian dur-
ing the eighteenth c entury. Ordained an Anglican priest in 1728, his life and work
led to the formation of the Methodist church. He continues to serve as an influen-
tial figure in Protestant Christianity worldwide.
Wesley was born in a small town in Lincolnshire, England, on June 17, 1703, where
his f ather, Samuel, served as an Anglican parish priest. As young c hildren, Wesley
and his siblings w ere raised in a disciplined home. The Wesley’s emphasized the
importance of faith, holiness, and community. They stressed faith in Jesus Christ,
Bible reading, and prayer. T hese emphases would prove to be influential in the
founding of the Methodist movement.
At age 10, Wesley left his home to attend school. Due to his family’s financial sta-
tus, Wesley received a scholarship to allow him to attend. While living at the school
during the week, he often left on the weekends to stay with his older brother, Sam-
uel. In 1720, Wesley entered Christ Church College, the most distinguished col-
lege in Oxford and a bulwark for High Anglicanism. Wesley’s education consisted
of logic and rhetoric, as well as ethics and politics. While he enjoyed his fair share
of extracurricular activities, he excelled in his studies. He completed both a Bach-
elor’s degree and Master’s degree at Christ Church. He later served as a Fellow of
Lincoln College. As a Fellow, Wesley lectured students and provided pastoral care.
During his time at Oxford, Wesley was particularly influenced by Jeremy Taylor,
Thomas à Kempis, and William Law. Taylor’s Rules and Exercises of Holy Living and
Dying moved Wesley toward committing all areas of his life to God. He could not
simply categorize his life into work, school, and religion. Rather, his religious con-
victions penetrated all aspects of his life. His reading of à Kempis’ Christian’s Pat-
tern taught him to pursue a religion of the heart. The very nature of this was
transformational religion. Then, Law’s Christian Perfection and Serious Call challenged
him to stop living as a half-hearted Christian. Instead, he needed to devote himself
fully to God.
While Wesley attended Oxford, he joined the Holy Club, a collegiate assem-
bly committed to piety founded by his b rother Charles in 1729. Wesley was
drawn to the group b ecause their essential commitments w ere consistent with
his upbringing and his studies at Christ Church. Wesley, being one of the oldest
members, transitioned to be the leader of the group. George Whitefield, the lead-
ing revival preacher during the G reat Awakening, would also become a member
of the group.
662 W ESLEY, J OHN
The Holy Club expressed and

emphasized the importance of
pursuing holiness in commu-
nity. The members of the Holy
Club together sought to promote
religious discipline through
Bible reading, prayer, and Com-
munion, as well as good works.
They believed faith and good
works were essential compo-
nents of the Christian life. Wesley
learned to be methodical during
his Holy Club days. He was
particular about the use of his
time, and he led the group by
example. He maintained a per-
sonal discipline of studying the
Bible and praying, and he vis-
ited prisoners, aided the poor,
helped start a school, and main-
tained his involvement with his
church. Wesley believed that his
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, in clerical spiritual journey should not be
attire. Wesley preached tirelessly not only in experienced in isolation. He
England but also on a mission to North America encouraged the members of the
in the 1730s. (Linda Steward/iStockphoto.com) Holy Club to methodize their
Christian life. As they sought to
be holy, other students at Oxford derided them. From this, the term “Methodist”
arose and was applied to t hose who followed Wesley.
In 1735, John and Charles Wesley embarked on a mission across the Atlantic to
Georgia. They sought to evangelize the Native Americans and the colonists. On
this trip, Wesley began his personal journal, which he wrote for 55 years. On his
way to Georgia, Wesley’s ship encountered a g reat storm during which he observed
a group of German Moravians worshipping God together, showing no fear of death.
Wesley’s interaction with the Moravians, particularly A. G. Spangenberg, led to a
period of self-reflection.
Wesley’s ministry in Georgia faced hardship. Many Native Americans and
colonists rejected his work, a failure Wesley later attributed to the fact that he
came to convert Native Americans and colonists but that he himself was not yet
converted. During his stint in Georgia, Wesley met Sophia Hopley, and fell in
love. However, he waited too long to propose, and she married another man.
Wesley refused to give Hopley communion, which besmirched her character.
When the controversy was taken to court, the court sided with Hopley. Wesley fled
the colonies in December 1737, to return to London. He would later marry Molly
Vazeille.
W ESLEY, J OHN 663
Upon his return to London, Wesley spent significant amounts of time with Mora-
vians, from whom he learned the importance of singing hymns, the experience of
a vibrant spirituality, and extemporaneous prayer and preaching. On May 24, 1738,
Wesley wrote in his journal of his attendance with a Christian society at Alders-
gate Street during which his heart rose a fter hearing Martin Luther’s “Preface to
Romans” being read. For the first time, he believed that he trusted in Christ and
that his sins were forgiven. Wesley continued to identify with the Moravians for a
brief time. However in 1740, he left the Moravian church due to theological differ-
ences. It is during this departure from the Moravians that Wesley would begin to
develop the Methodist church.
Wesley was a strong preacher who represented a branch of Arminian theology,
which emphasized human responsibility in salvation, free w ill, and salvation for
all who believe. He was not the only individual to lead the Methodist church. George
Whitefield modeled Calvinistic theology, which opposed Arminian theology on
several fronts. Calvinistic theology emphasized the work of God in salvation, the
endurance of true believers, and salvation for the elect, which were those who
believed. Wesley spoke against predestination and advocated for free w ill. He
believed grace was free in all and for all. In his preaching he was able to draw
responses from his hearers. His preaching also proved to be particularly damag-
ing to the established church because Wesley promoted a religious enthusiasm that
was not found in the Anglican Church. On one account of his preaching, he went
to Bristol upon the invitation of George Whitfield in 1739. He preached for a large
number of people who gathered in a field. This type of open air preaching was
unusual to the time, and it contributed to his success in reaching the masses. From
the large group, small groups were formed for promoting the spirituality he learned
from his childhood: faith and good works.
By the 1750s, Wesley and his Methodists became a significant voice in England.
Wesley did not expect his followers to abandon the Anglican Church, nor did he
intend to establish a new denomination. Wesley was an Anglican who often criti-
cized Anglican leaders rather than the church itself. However, in 1784, Wesley
officially separated from the Church of E ngland b ecause they would not ordain
ministers in North America. Upon separation, Wesley ordained ministers to serve
in North America.
The Methodism which arose from Wesley’s ministry was both methodical in its
spirituality and in its organization. As Wesley gained more followers, he began to
assign lay preachers to assist in the ministry. They followed regular circuits and
began to oversee “societies.” Societies were at the foundation of the Methodism.
Societies were groups of people that met for prayer, Bible study, and other spiritual
disciplines. Within societies, smaller groups were formed—“ bands” and “classes”—
for more rigorous group life. In the years to follow, these societies would begin to
meet for conferences, both nationally, regionally, and locally.
English Methodism separated from the Church of E ngland in 1795. The Meth-
odists in North America became an independent church much sooner. In 1784,
the Methodist Episcopal Church was formed in Baltimore, Maryland, under the
leadership of Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury. By the time Wesley died, reports
664 W HEATLEY, PHILLIS
have shown that he had numerous followers in Great Britain and North America.
Methodism continued to grow in the years to follow and it would become one of
the mainline Protestant groups in the world.
Aaron Lee Lumpkin
See also: Evangelicalism; Moravians; Protestant Missionaries; Protestant Reforma-

tion; Whitefield, George
Further Reading
Abelove, Henry. 1992. The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists. Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
Tomkins, Stephen. 2003. John Wesley: A Biography. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerd-
mans Publishing Company.
Wesley, John, and Charles Wesley. 1981. John and Charles Wesley: Selected Prayers, Hymns,
Journal Notes, Sermons, Letters and Treatises. Edited by Frank Whaling. New York: Pau-
list Press.
W H E AT L E Y, P H I L L I S ( c a . 1 7 5 3 – 1 7 8 4 )
Phillis Wheatley was the first black female poet to be published in the Atlantic
world. Born in Africa, Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery at a young age.
She arrived in Boston around the age of eight where the prominent Wheatley family
bought her. U nder their tutelage, Wheatley learned to read and write and became
deeply religious. When the Wheatleys noticed her intellect and talent for writing
poetry, they encouraged her to publish, culminating in her Poems on Various Sub-
jects, Religious and Moral (1773). Widely read both in her own lifetime and to the
present day, Wheatley’s poetry is one of the earliest and most prominent examples
of the black literary tradition in the Atlantic world.
It is unclear where or when Phillis Wheatley was born. As an adult, she rarely
wrote about her experiences growing up in Africa, although records of her sale
suggest she was from the Senegambia region of West Africa. What is known about
Wheatley’s early life is that she was sold to Peter Gwinn, captain of the slave ship
Phillis owned by Medford, Massachusetts, merchant Timothy Fitch. Fitch owned a
number of vessels and was active in the “triangular trade” that characterized New
England’s slaving activities. Wheatley was most likely leftover from Gwinn’s attempt
to sell his employer’s cargo of slaves in Barbados; as young girls held little value for
Caribbean planters. In this sense, Wheatley was no different from many of the other
slaves taken to New England.
John Wheatley, a wealthy Boston merchant, and his wife Susannah, an evangeli-
cal Christian and follower of revivalist George Whitefield, purchased Wheatley
shortly after her arrival in Boston in July 1761. The Wheatleys were an older couple
and sought a domestic servant to care for them in their old age. They named their
new slave Phillis after the ship that brought her to Boston. Almost immediately, the
Wheatleys warmed to the little girl, perhaps because the couple had lost a daughter
around her age. As such, they treated Wheatley like their own child, tutoring her in
W HEATLEY, PHILLIS 665
reading and writing. Their older

children, Mary and Nathaniel,

also became involved in educat-
ing Wheatley, who was literate
enough to learn Latin and Greek
by the age of 12. Wheatley’s level
of education was remarkable for
an enslaved w oman in the eigh
teenth century. Although John
Wheatley was a progressive man
of the Enlightenment, Phillis was
still special. The family owned
other slaves and servants who did
not enjoy the same privileges and
one indentured servant felt mis-
treated enough to run away. Yet,
they treated Wheatley differently,
eventually releasing her from any
sort of servile responsibilities.
As part of her studies, Wheat-
ley read poetry from contempo-
Phillis Wheatley at work, as shown in the
raries such as Alexander Pope
frontispiece of her Poems on Various Subjects,
and classic poets like Virgil. By Religious and Moral, published in 1773. An
the age of 14, Wheatley began enslaved woman for most of her life, her poetry
writing her own poetry. After confounded the prejudice that African men and
publishing poems in Boston women could not write beautiful literature.
newspapers, she received public (Library of Congress)
acclaim, especially for an elegy
written for Whitefield following his death in 1770. Still, many white colonists
doubted an enslaved African w oman capable of writing poetry. In 1772, a group
of leading Bostonians, including merchant John Hancock and royal governor
Thomas Hutchinson, convened a tribunal to evaluate Wheatley’s work and found
it to be authentic. Their validation later appeared as a preface in her published
book of poems. In 1773, Wheatley’s master sent her to London, hoping she would
have better publishing opportunities. She met with many leading figures, most
importantly Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. Huntingdon, an evan-
gelical, became Wheatley’s patron, giving her funds and introducing her to
Archibald Bell, a prominent London printer and bookseller. Although at first skep-
tical of Wheatley, the attestation from the Boston tribunal and Huntingdon’s
support convinced Bell to publish her poetry. Printed in 1773 and dedicated to
Huntingdon, the work, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, made Wheat-
ley famous overnight.
Wheatley’s poetry contained classical and Biblical influences, but was also a
reflection of her own life. Most of her poems have Christian overtones or w ere
explicitly religious, revealing Wheatley’s embrace of Christianity. Indeed, her most
666 W HITEFIELD , G EO R G E
controversial poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” can be read as an
apology for slavery. Overlooking the horrors of slavery in the poem, Wheatley
expressed her thankfulness that bondage brought her to Christ. Wheatley rarely
wrote about slavery, although that may have been out of fear of alienating sub-
scribers as she privately wrote about her belief in the equality of Africans. She was
also a supporter of the American Revolution, even receiving an audience with
George Washington after writing a poem in his honor.
In 1778, John Wheatley died and freed Phillis in his w ill. Freedom should have
been a crowning achievement to an already exceptional life, but Wheatley’s for-
tunes took a tragic turn. Shortly after being freed, she married John Peters, a free
black grocer. While Peters was an established businessman, the economic disloca-
tion caused by the American Revolution led him to fall into debt. Wheatley wrote
another book of poems during this time to help support the family, but could not
find enough subscribers to have it published. Instead, her family met with more
tragedy. The c ouple was always on the move to avoid Peters’s creditors, and two
children died in infancy. In 1784, Peters was sent to debtors’ prison shortly a fter
Wheatley gave birth to their third child. To support herself and her child, Wheat-
ley went to work as a maid in a boarding house, doing the types of domestic chores
the Wheatleys had exempted her from as a slave.
While working as a maid, Wheatley, who had been sickly throughout her life,
died on December 4, 1784, most likely in her early thirties. During her life, Wheat-
ley’s poetry received accolades from the likes of Voltaire, George Washington, and
Benjamin Franklin, although Thomas Jefferson was dismissive. Disparaging critics
aside, Wheatley and the prose she wrote was important for creating the black lit-
erary tradition in the Atlantic world.
Jared Ross Hardesty
See also: Bradstreet, Anne; Evangelicalism; Slavery
Further Reading
Carretta, Vincent. 2011. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 2003. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and
Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Books.
Wheatley, Phillis. 2001. Complete Writings. New York: Penguin Classics.
WHITEFIELD, GEORGE (1714–1770)

George Whitefield was an English evangelist within the Church of England whose
popular preaching was a catalyst for the eighteenth c entury Protestant revivals
that spread throughout G reat Britain and British North America, where the reviv-
als became known as the G reat Awakening. Against a religious culture character-
ized by arid rationalism and liturgical practices that were too often regarded as
stiff formalism, Whitefield’s preaching called for listeners to experience a “new
birth.” In his first published work, The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth in Christ
W HITEFIELD , G EO R G E 667
Jesus, in Order to Salvation (1737), Whitefield argued that the new birth was a con-
version whereby an individual is reborn spiritually as an authentic believer.
Whitefield’s own spiritual awakening occurred during his college days at Oxford
where he was a close friend to John and Charles Wesley, who contributed to
the foundation of the Methodism. Through his relationship with the Wesley
brothers, Whitefield began itinerate preaching and conducting revival meetings
in Europe and North America. With the idea of new birth as his primary focus,
Whitefield cared very little about denominational or geographical distinctions as
he traveled, preached, and influenced thousands of individuals on both sides of
the Atlantic.
George Whitefield was born at the Bell Inn, Gloucester, on December 16, 1714. At
12 years of age he enrolled at St. Mary de Crypt grammar school, where he discov-
ered a talent for drama and acting. In 1733, he entered Pembroke College, Oxford.
While at Oxford, Whitefield joined the Holy Club, a social organization in which
students gathered for prayer and Bible study, and was influenced by his deepening
friendship with John and Charles Wesley. Whitefield’s enthusiastic piety attracted
the attention of Dr. Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, who ordained him as a
deacon in June 1736. Whitefield’s new birth experience led him to collaborate
with the Wesley b rothers in an effort to revive what they saw as the passionless
state of Anglicanism. This partnership led Whitefield to undertake preaching
tours across the Atlantic. Before setting sail, Whitefield preached in several Lon-
don churches and his eloquence and fame spread so rapidly that crowds assem-
bled at the churches long before dawn to hear him preach. In Bristol, he captivated
20,000 p eople with his powerful, dynamic, and fervent voice.
Twenty-three-year-old Whitefield set sail for Georgia on the first of seven voy-
ages to the New World in 1738. Whitefield returned to England in less than a year
to receive his ordination as priest and to strengthen his relationship with the trust-
ees of the Georgia colony. Whitefield found that London’s Bishop, Edmund Gib-
son, had published a letter condemning Methodist “enthusiasm” in general and
Whitefield’s revivalist zeal in particular. Despite the fact that Whitefield defended
himself against these attacks, he found that pulpits in England were closed to him,
and he was forced to preach in open-air settings. Meanwhile, trustees in Georgia
offered Whitefield a pastoral charge in Savannah and a large portion of land to be
used as an orphanage.
Whitefield’s second visit to North America, from November 1739 to Janu-
ary 1741, was his most successful preaching tour in North America, and it became
part of the larger revival movement known as the G reat Awakening. While away
from England, Whitefield found that John Wesley had introduced a divergence from
Calvinistic doctrine. Calvinism is the Protestant theological system that gets its
name from theologian John Calvin, and it emphasizes the grace of God and the
doctrine of predestination. Arminianism, the contrasting theological position,
opposes predestination and emphasizes the possibility of salvation for all. Wesley
exhorted Whitefield with kindness and forbearance, but the two ultimately parted
ways when Whitefield published an attack upon Wesley’s Arminianism. Though
Whitefield was instrumental in the foundation of the Methodist movement, this
668 W HITEFIELD , G EO R G E
Preacher as Actor
During his second visit to North America, George Whitefield drew enor-
mous crowds as he traveled up and down the Atlantic coast. Using his acting
talent, Whitefield employed gestures, biblical parables, and even spontane-
ous tears to move his audiences. A skeptical Benjamin Franklin was impressed
with Whitefield’s ability to deliver a message to such large crowds. On one
occasion in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Franklin conducted an experiment
and estimated that the crowd numbered more than 30,000 people. White-
field preached an estimated 18,000 sermons in his lifetime.
theological disagreement led him to relinquish his position as the president of the
first Methodist conference and hand the entire ministry to John Wesley.
Despite theological and denominational tensions in E ngland, thousands of
people came to hear Whitefield preach in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and through-
out the American colonies. For decades, Whitefield created and embodied an evan-
gelical Atlantic community. The predominant theme in Whitefield’s theological
system, sermons, and writings was the new birth. This view opposed many Angli-
can leaders who taught that church attendance and heightened morality was the
core of Christ ianity. Whitefield spent his c areer arguing that t hese were futile
attempts to secure eternal life. He contended that people needed a spiritual trans-
formation that could only be obtained by grace through the work of the Holy
Spirit. In addition to his preaching and writing c areer, Whitefield raised finan-
cial support for Princeton University, helped to make Dartmouth a school open
to Native Americans, supported the Bethesda orphanage in Georgia, and sus-
tained the hopes of many p eople that a g reat revival would sweep across all of
Christendom.
Whitefield made his final journey to North America in 1770. He preached his
final sermon on Saturday, September 29, to an impromptu crowd gathered in Exeter,
New Hampshire. The next day, Whitefield died. He is buried beneath the pulpit in
Old South Presbyterian Church, Newburyport, Massachusetts. Upon his request,
John Wesley preached his funeral serv ice in London.
Matthew James
See also: Edwards, Jonathan; Evangelicalism; Wesley, John
Further Reading
Kidd, Thomas S. 2014. George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding F
ather. New Haven,
Stout, Harry S. 1991. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evan-
gelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Whitefield, George. 2013. Sermons of George Whitefield. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson
Publishers.
W IL B E R FO R C E , W ILLIA M 669
WILBERFORCE, WILLIAM (1759–1833)

William Wilberforce was a prominent British abolitionist best known for his role
in the passage of the Slave Trade Abolition Act (1807), ending the British slave trade,
and the Slavery Abolition Act (1833), forbidding slavery in the British Empire. Wil-
berforce was an Evangelical Christian, and a faithful member of the Church of
England. His Christian beliefs animated his fight for the abolition of slavery as well
as his other social labors, which included improving literacy rates among the poor
and eliminating social practices that were cruel to animals.
Wilberforce was born into a wealthy family in Hull, E ngland. When his father
died, he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle who were friends of George White-
field, the itinerate preacher and renowned figure in the Great Awakening, and
John Newton, the former slave trader turned pastor and abolitionist. This early
acquaintance would not bear immediate fruit, but the relationship would prove
important later in Wilberforce’s life.
At age 17, Wilberforce attended St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he achieved
some academic success, but he was carefree, often more concerned with entertain-
ment than his education. While at university, Wilberforce met William Pitt the
Younger (1759–1806), who would remain a close friend and later serve as Prime
Minister. This friendship helped shape Wilberforce’s career.
In 1780, at only 21 years old, Wilberforce won a seat in parliament despite
being a relatively unknown upstart. He would remain in parliament for another
45 years. In 1784, Wilberforce became converted to “serious Christianity,” as he
labeled his religion that was put into practice. In that day, it was common to
claim the label Christian without believing Christian doctrine or demonstrating a
distinctly Christian way of life. Although Wilberforce considered resigning from
his public responsibilities, he was encouraged to live out his Christianity in the
public square by both longtime friend, Pitt, and former pastor, Newton. Commit-
ted to doing good through his political c areer, Wilberforce took up the cause of
abolition in 1786.
Wilberforce felt God had given him two great goals in his life: the suppression
of the slave trade, and the improvement of public morality. Despite the obvious
injustices of slavery to a modern reader, the English society justified the practice
of slavery because of the economic benefits for the British Empire and a belief in
European racial superiority. The English population was largely unaware of con-
ditions on the West Indian plantations or that an estimated one-in-four slaves dies
on the M iddle Passage from Africa to the New World.
The ignorance of the nature of the slave trade was one of the first issues that
Wilberforce and the other abolitionists had to overcome. Therefore, he coordinated
efforts, along with Clarkson, to record first-hand accounts of sailors and slaves. They
had diagrams generated of the inside of slave ships that showed the inhumanely
cramped and unsanitary conditions. The abolitionists then printed pamphlets to
give and cheaply sell to any who might read them. An information campaign was
the beginning of the change in public sentiment, which would eventually lead to
the end of the British slave trade. Tracts were short, informative, and frequently
published. This was an innovative form of communication that spread the message
670 W IL B E R FO R C E , W ILLIA M
Ending Animal Cruelty

William Wilberforce’s vision of social reform included eliminating cruelty to
animals. In 1824, along with o thers in the Clapham Sect, Wilberforce became
a founder of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Their
goal was to end cruel animal practices of the day such as bull and bear bait-
ing, cock fighting, vivisection, and performing operations on live animals for
research.
of the abolitionists and would eventual turn the tide of public opinion against the
wealthy supporters of the slave trade. One of Wilberforce’s more famous tracts, A
Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Addressed to the Freeholders of Yorkshire, was
published in 1807 and helped gain support for abolition at a popular level.
The road to the abolition of slavery included a series of wins and losses. As
early as 1789, Wilberforce was able to get 12 resolutions against the slave trade
passed. However, t hese resolutions were largely thwarted b ecause of fine legal
points. Subsequently, Wilberforce’s abolition bills were defeated in 1791, 1792,
1793, 1797, 1798, 1799, 1804, and 1805. Finally, in 1807, Wilberforce was able to
end the traffic of slaves through a political ruse. It would take another 26 years to
see the practice of slavery completely abolished. Wilberforce had retired from par-
liament due to his age and health. However, in 1833, a bill emancipating slaves in
the British Empire was passed, completing Wilberforce’s dream. He died three days
later.
While Wilberforce’s greatest achievement was ending slavery in the British
Empire, his impact spread to more social issues. It is estimated that Wilberforce
gave away about a quarter of his annual income to the poor. Wilberforce and others
organized and supported Sunday Schools among the working classes as a means
to encourage thrift and impart morality to the poor. A primary focus of Sunday
Schools was to teach the working poor to read. Although considered scandalous
by some, Wilberforce recognized that teaching people to read was a critical part of
eliminating generational poverty and encouraged a wider distribution of antislav-
ery acts.
Wilberforce’s works could not have been accomplished alone. Wilberforce relied
on a group of influential p eople for encouragement and multiplication of efforts.
This group of bankers, diplomats, legislators, and business p eople lived in a town
in the south of London called, Clapham. They became known as the Clapham
Sect, or, since they w
ere all fervent evangelical Christians, the Clapham Saints.
Andrew J. Spencer
See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of Slavery; Abolition of the Slave Trade;
Evangelicalism
W ILLIA M S , R O G E R 671
Further Reading
Piper, John, and Jonathan Aitken. 2007. Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce.
Downers Grove, IL: Crossway.
Metaxas, Eric. 2007. Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End
Slavery. San Francisco: HarperOne.
Wilberforce, William. 2006. Real Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Bethany House.
WILLIAMS, ROGER (ca. 1603–1683)

Roger Williams was a Puritan minister most famous for founding Rhode Island.
He was also a significant figure in the early history of religious liberty in North
America. Born in London in the early 1600s, Williams moved to Massachusetts
after becoming a part of English Puritan circles. Williams preached a controver-
sial brand of Separatist Puritanism that challenged civil and clerical authority over
freedom of conscience and asserted the right to worship in one’s own manner. The
controversy surrounding his preaching led to his exile from Massachusetts to Prov-
idence where he would help organize the Rhode Island colony so that civil author-
ity over the church establishment would be limited to protect religious practice
from abuse by the government. Williams remained largely in Rhode Island u ntil
his death in 1683.
Roger Williams was born sometime in the first decade of the seventeenth c entury.
One of four children born to a merchant, there is little specific information about
Williams’s childhood, but he clearly received some education before he attended
and graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1627. Shortly thereafter, Wil-
liams worked as a family chaplain, and he married one of the f amily’s maids, Mary
Bernard (1609–ca. 1676). During the late 1620s, Williams met many Puritans who
would also later migrate to New England.
Williams arrived in Massachusetts in 1631, and quickly clashed with the Massa
chusetts church establishment by making a number of claims against the church.
Williams rejected a ministerial position in Boston b ecause wanted the Massachusetts
churches to reject all affiliation with the Church of E ngland. As a Separatist, Williams
believed that the Church of E ngland was corrupted by remnants of Catholic prac-
tices and was thus illegitimate. This was in contrast to other figures, such as John
Cotton (1585–1652), who argued that they could reform the Anglican Church by
demonstrating through their own example the proper way to practice Christianity.
Williams eventually accepted a ministerial position in Salem, Massachusetts, which
was friendlier to his Separatist leanings.
Williams also took seriously the notion that the colonists had a missionary duty
to the Native Americans in New E ngland. Williams worked to understand native
language, culture, and customs and often caused consternation by contradicting
the conventional thinking that the natives w ere inherently uncivilized, and by
asserting the positive aspects of Native American ways of life. Williams also criti-
cized English dealings with Native Americans as he rejected the authority of the
English Crown to give Indian lands to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
672 W ILLIA M S , R O G E R
Williams’s criticisms of Massachusetts civil and religious authorities continued

to mount throughout the 1630s and 1640s, and he was often forced to testify before
the General Court in Boston. Also during this time, Williams developed his notions
of freedom of conscience and the proper role of authority in individual spiritual
matters. Williams often criticized church-rendered punishments for moral or reli-
gious violations arguing that no earthly authority existed for such punishment.
Williams did not necessarily condone behaviors such as blasphemy or violations
of the Sabbath, but he contended that the only true authority came from God and
that it was impossible to definitively ascertain God’s w ill. It was a standard Puri-
tan belief that all individuals had freedom of conscience as Scripture was the only
source from which to derive God’s w ill; however, Williams pushed this interpre-
tation further than many in Massachusetts w ere comfortable with. Williams even
rejected the authority of the clergy and church establishment to enforce religious
practices on an individual, arguing that each individual had the right to seek sal-
vation according to their own conscience and interpretation of Scripture.
These views resulted in a series of heated exchanges with John Cotton, the prom-
inent Boston Puritan minister. Cotton accused of Williams of promulgating views
that would undermine society as a whole as he felt Williams’s views encouraged
too much individualism and condoned sinful behavior and blasphemy. Williams
responded not only by articulating his own views but also by accusing Cotton and
the Massachusetts clergy as a w hole of being corrupted by their own positions of
power in a church hierarchy. According to Williams, they were thus too concerned
with their prestige and standing. Massachusetts officials feared the effects of Wil-
liams’s dangerous ideas becoming too popular, and in 1635, Williams was con-
victed of sedition and heresy and banished from the colony.
In 1636, Williams, and some of his followers, settled in present day Rhode Island
where he worked to formally establish the new colony on lands outside of the pur-
view of either Massachusetts or Plymouth. Williams traveled back and forth to
England to obtain a favorable charter for Rhode Island. Williams was also instru-
mental in establishing Rhode Island as the first government with formal separation
of church and state. Williams and others agreed that the colony’s government would
be restricted to only civil m
atters, that it would be democratic, and that there would
be no infringement on any people’s right to worship in the way they saw fit.
Williams is credited by many historians as one of the early figures in the devel-
opment of religious liberty in North America. However, Williams did not neces-
sarily believe in the validity of all religious beliefs and practices. Williams argued
that governmental authority was harmful to the proper practice of religion, unlike
most modern views of religious liberty that hold that religion has a negative soci-
etal influence when part of government. In his later years, Williams’s views on liberty
of conscience made him an influence on the early American Baptist Church, though
his formal affiliation was limited. Williams continued to live in Rhode Island until
his death in early 1683. He was buried on his property in Providence.
Joshua Schroeder
See also: British Atlantic; Protestant Missionaries; Puritans

W INE 673
Further Reading
Hall, Timothy. 1998. Separating Church and State: Roger Williams and Religious Liberty.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Morgan, Edmund S. 1987. Roger Williams: The Church and the State. New York: Norton.
Williams, Roger. 1963. The Complete Writings of Roger Williams. 7 vols. New York: Russell
& Russell.
WINE
Wine is a fermented beverage created from grapes. The fermentation process is a
natural one; as the flesh of ripened fruits and berries decay, wild yeasts found on
the outer skins begin to consume the sugars, releasing alcohol as a by-product.
Fruits and berries w ere consumed by primates since prehistoric times. It is esti-
mated that the formal process of creating simple wines was adapted by humankind
about 8,000 years ago. The preparation of fermented beverages was common in
diverse human communities. Fundamental to the long-term production of wine
was the creation of clay vessels to effectively store the beverage. It is believed that
viticulture as we know it today was established in the Caucasus, Taurus, and northern
Zagros mountain regions of the Fertile Crescent. Its popularity spread throughout
Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. Phoenician merchants are thought to
have carried wine to ports in Spain and Portugal.
Wine and fermented drinks w ere essential staples of the European diet, provid-
ing healthful beverages whose merits far outweighed the risks of drinking water in
the centuries before microbiology and effective sanitation practices made public
water supplies potable for consumption. Vitis vinifera is the species of vine that
produced thousands of varieties of grapes known for their delicate skins and sweet
flavors. Their high sugar content make them ideal for well-balanced, nuanced
wines. Contemporary geneticists have identified the var ieties of the Vitis vinifera
cultivars that have been nurtured for centuries in France. The Pinot Noir and
Chardonnay cultivars of northeastern France are grown in many of the world’s
wine regions. Over centuries, the domestication of wild vines and the spontaneous
cross-fertilization of wild and domestic cultivars have created spectacular wines
such as the Cabernet Sauvignon. Original “Pinot” cultivars are thought to have
been valued since the time of the Roman Empire. The yellow-gold berry of the
“Gouay Blanc” is thought to have originated in Central Europe during the same
time.
From the dawn of European exploration, entrepreneurs labored to recreate
continental Europe’s wines for transatlantic export and local consumption. A
zone known as the inner Atlantic supported a system of trading posts v iable since
prehistoric times. T hese routes w ere important nodes for early trade between
North Atlantic and Baltic markets, and the Mediterranean; ventures that eventu-
ally went overland as a result of the encroaching Ottoman Empire. By the fifteen
century, the Low Countries w ere among the most prosperous of all Europe. The
first attempts to establish an Atlantic economy were heavily subsidized by private
investors and joint-stock companies intent on seeing nascent colonies made prof-
itable by the production of goods to be shipped to ports worldwide to meet the
674 W INE
demands of growing middle-class populations. These included contracts for fish,

cotton, rice, cereal grains, sugar, tobacco, glass, and timber, as well as luxury
goods such as silk, spices, and fine wines. Dutch and English trading companies
were particularly interested in developing successful colonial vineyards to cir-
cumvent the monopoly of the French and Spanish nations on wine production and
exchange.
Species of native North American grapes grew wild on the continent. Centuries
of expert viticulture failed to produce a palatable New World wine, much less a
wine of the quality enjoyed by Old World communities. Common native species
include the New E ngland Vitus labrusca, or “northern fox grape,” the Vitis rotundi-
folia and the southern Vitis riparia, the Vitis vulpina, the Vitis aestivalis, the Vitis cor-
difolia, and the near-extinct Vitis rupestris. It was not until the nineteenth century
that producers experimented with hybrid combinations of vines, a process that
strengthened American plant stock’s resistance to fungus infestations, and the plant
louse Phylloxera vastatrix, a pest that devastated European stocks when introduced
in the late 1800s. European vinifera transplants flourished on California’s sunny
Mediterranean-like terrain.
Wine was a key commodity and culinary staple in the Spanish Empire through-
out its four centuries (1492–1892). Wines from Seville, Jerez, and Andalucia were
in constant demand from the colonies; as a consequence, viticulture spread rap-
idly throughout Latin America. Following Mexico’s capture in 1521, Hernan Cor-
tés (1485–1547) immediately began importing vines; in a few short dec ades,
slaves w ere put to work making wine as a result of the virulent spread of disease
among native populations. Viticulture was similarly introduced in South America
where vines w ere successfully cultivated in Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Argentina.
So successful were these ventures that in 1595, Phillip II issued a decree forbid-
ding further wine settlements in the New World to protect Spain’s homeland
markets.
The Canary Islands quickly became a prime exporter of wines to the growing
Spanish and Portuguese colonies during the sixteenth century. During the seven-
teenth century, English imports of Canary wines rose from an estimated 2,483
pipes to 6,700 pipes (or approximately 3.5 million liters) by 1680 (Phillips 2001,
153). Competitive markets for Spanish and Portuguese sweet wines eclipsed
England’s trade with the islands. Elizabethan Englishmen took delight in drink-
ing sack, the forerunner of sherry. F uture English preferences included French
claret, champagne, burgundy, Madeira, and port wines. By the mid-1800s an esti-
mated 3,500 ships w ere engaged in the annual wine trade, connecting the nations
of Great Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal to the mid-
Atlantic Azores, and Canary Islands; from there, cargoes were delivered to ports
in Europe, Africa, and the communities of North and South America.
Madeira was a prime location for shipments serving England and its colonies in
the Americas and the Car ibbean. Malmsey vines imported from the isle of Crete
flourished, and wine exports soon dominated the island’s exports. In the seven-
teenth century, Madeira wines were sought after by British Car ibbean and Ameri-
can colonials. During the long transatlantic shipments, it was discovered that unlike
W INE 675
other wines, Madeira’s quality and longevity was enhanced by the summer’s heat
and constant rolling of the seas. Rum and brandy were used to fortify and enhance
wines; soon discriminating British Americans w ere creating niche markets for spe-
cial blends and flavors suited for a rising consumer-centered culture.
As diversified market communities w ere established around the Atlantic rim,
colonists cultivated thriving networks of oceanic trade, serving a vast international
emporium unimaginable in earlier centuries. The distribution of Madeira wines
was remarkable in its scope and organization, connecting with markets in Copen-
hagen, Bordeaux, Lisbon, Bengal, Canton, Cape Verde, Bahia, Surinam, St Croix,
and Quebec as well as with rural communities deep within the expanding United
States. With the Navigation Act of 1663, Great Britain exempted duties on Madeira
wine imports to the colonies. Over time a dense matrix of planters, investors, and
a multitiered network of ports, merchants, transport providers, warehouses, and
independent vendors worked in tandem to keep wines moving throughout the mul-
tinational communities of the Atlantic economy. By the early 1800s, wine was a
leading American import commodity. Port cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New
York, and Charleston gained international stature as trading centers for British man-
ufactured goods.
Taverns w ere a ubiquitous feature of British town life. Tabernae or wine shops
were founded in British towns and roadways by Roman soldiers as early as 43
CE. Originally established to provide comfort for legions of soldiers, local towns-
men soon provided their clientele with native ales, popular drinks and dishes.
Over the centuries, the taverns and alehouses w ere known as public h ouses, later
abbreviated to “pubs.” In 1552, all innkeepers w ere required to carry a license for
operation.
New World colonists quickly established the tavern culture in the Americas
where they served as important nodes of distribution for the wines and beers essen-
tial for the colonial diet. Frustrated with repeated failures to create a v iable wine
industry, colonists invested in the production of rum, beer, cider, and distilled spirits
created from available fruits. T hese soon became popular among colonists for their
longevity and alcoholic content. Molasses-based Caribbean rum was particularly
esteemed among the colonies before and during the Revolutionary War. Domestic
rum production is estimated at 4.8 million gallons per annum, distributed among
more than 140 rum distilleries. An additional 3.78 million gallons w ere imported
during the same time frame. It is estimated that adult male consumption averaged
three pints per week (Crews 2007).
Alcoholism was classified as a chronic medical condition in 1849, by the Swedish-
born physician, Magnus Huss (1807–1890). Temperance movements worldwide
were awakened as communities worldwide confronted the darker legacy of indus-
trial urbanization. At the end of the c entury, per capita consumption of distilled
spirits was estimated at 15.9 liters in France, 8.2 liters in Great Britain, and 5.8
liters in the United States (Phillips 2014, 179). The dire living conditions of the
working classes were aggravated as city pipelines delivered contaminated w ater
supplies that spread epidemics of cholera and typhoid fever. The progressive reform
of wastewater treatment processes and the construction of sewers facilitated the
676 W INTH R OP, J OHN
Tavern Culture in the Early United States

Hospitality was an esteemed virtue of colonial town life. Taverns w ere impor
tant gathering places in United States life. They provided safe havens for trav-
elers, offering nourishment, entertainment, and room and board for the weary.
They w ere licensed public institutions, serving as popular meeting places for
merchants and mariners, farmers and local artisans. They also served as early
chambers for court proceedings. In the nineteenth c entury, as United States
culture became socioeconomically diverse, elite consumers began to question
the more raucous features of tavern culture. Drunkenness and illicit enter-
tainment were of concern to city officials and churchgoers who valued the
gentility and refinement of an ordered society.
public delivery of safe drinking w ater, an advancement that transformed public

health regimens in the twentieth c entury.
Despite concerns regarding the safe consumption of alcoholic beverages, since
the nineteenth c entury, wine has maintained its reputation for sustaining good
health in a well-balanced diet. Advances in microbiology and pasteurization con-
tributed to the production of wines suitable for public consumption.
See also: British Atlantic; Canary Islands; Cortés, Hernán; Dutch Atlantic; French
Atlantic; Progressivism; Rum
Further Reading
Bailyn, Bernard. 2005. Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Crews, Ed. 2007. “Rattle-Skull, Stonewall, Bogus, Blackstrap, Bombo, Mimbo, Whistle
Belly, Syllabub, Sling, Toddy, and Flip: Drinking in Colonial America.” Colonial Wil-
liamsburg Journal. http://w ww.history.org /foundation /journal /holiday07/drink.cfm.
Hancock, David. 2009. Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and
Taste. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Phillips, Rod. 2001. A Short History of Wine. New York: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers.
Phillips, Rod. 2014. Alcohol: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Pinney, Thomas. 1989. A History of Wine in America: From the Beginnings to Prohibition. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
W I N T H R O P, J O H N ( 1 5 8 8 – 1 6 4 9 )
John Winthrop was an English-born Puritan, lawyer, public administrator, and
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He served as one of the primary
architects of the spiritual and political vision b
ehind the migration of hundreds of
W INTH R OP, J OHN 677
Puritans and tradesmen who made up one of the most prominent and early colo-
nies in New E ngland. In “A Modell of Christian Charity” (1630)—a lay sermon
likely delivered on the ship Arbella as it sailed to New England—Winthrop pro-
vided the colony with a spiritual vision that called for the migrants to be a close-
knit body of Christian believers, and called for their charitable union and love to
serve as a “City upon a Hill” for the rest of the watching world. In his application
of the Charter of Massachusetts Bay and his The L ittle Speech, Winthrop advanced
one of early colonial America’s first self-governing bodies of freemen who elected
their own political magistrates and legal codes. This combination of Puritan reli-
gious values, providential destiny, and self-governing quasi-constitutional com-
monwealth was an important model to the later founding fathers of the United
States, and they appealed to Winthrop’s ideas to lend justification to the American
Revolution.
John Winthrop was born in 1588 in Edwardstone, Suffolk, England, to upper-
class, landowning Puritan parents. Winthrop had a deeply religious upbringing,
and his parent’s involvement with the English church reform movements brought
Winthrop in contact with many of its leading figures. Winthrop later matriculated
to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1601, but left without graduating so he could
marry his first wife; he would marry twice more a fter his first two wives died from
health complications. A fter settling as the lord of the Groton Manor in 1613,
Winthrop was named to the Suffolk Commission of the Peace, and served as a
lawyer and public administrator until coming into contact with the Puritans of
the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628. He formally joined them in 1629, and the
group of migrating investors managed to buy complete ownership of the company.
This enabled them to take their charter and government with them to New England,
and, under the charter’s terms, become self-governing. Due to England’s declining
economy, and increasingly hostile environment for reform-minded Puritans, Win-
throp led around 700 individuals to New E ngland with the hope of establishing a
Christian commonwealth. While in New E ngland, Winthrop was elected as gov-
ernor 12 times, and he helped guide the fledgling colony through many difficult
events, including the colony’s expulsion of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson for
religious disturbances. While Winthrop was more directly involved with Hutchin-
son’s expulsion than Williams’s (whom he greatly admired), Winthrop defended
the actions on the ground that they disrupted the “public peace.” Overall, Win-
throp oversaw the colony’s political and economic advancement and gave liberally
of his own time and finances.
Those who see Winthrop as an authoritarian who pursued a theocracy can exag-
gerate his political and religious convictions. Examining his writing and work
paints a different picture, however. Unlike the Pilgrims, Winthrop did not see himself
as a separatist, and he was one of the co-signers of “The H umble Request,” which
confessed the migrants’ continued affiliation with the Church of England. However,
Winthrop did share his parent’s Puritanical convictions to purify the English
church from within, and t hese religious convictions w ere some of his primary moti-
vations for making the move to New E ngland. In “A Modell of Christian Charity,”
Winthrop sought to depict what this purified Christian society looked like. A fter
678 W INTH R OP, J OHN
addressing the topic of charity,

Winthrop focused on the notion
that the Christian common-
wealth consisted of diverse
individuals who came together
through a mutually consented
covenant that formed a single
social body. This covenanted
body held the interests of the
public above the individual (thus
a Christian “commonwealth”),
and called for its members to love
and care for one another. Win-
throp called for God to ratify and
seal this commission as well as
prosecute them if they failed in
their moral responsibilities. Win-
throp calls this type of cove-
nanted Christian commonwealth
a “City upon a Hill,” and he saw it
John Winthrop, a Puritan colonist and early
as an example that stood before
governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, shown the eyes of a watching world.
dressed in seventeenth-century style. His lay Winthrop’s social vision
sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity” called on becomes actualized in his politi
Puritans to be a “City upon a Hill,” an example for cal leadership. Whereas the ser-
all to see. (Library of Congress) mon provided a religious vision
of a mutually consented cove-
nantal commonwealth, the Massachusetts Bay Company’s charter provided a
political constitution in which freemen came together and appointed their own
leadership. While some of the migrants were chiefly focused on economic gain,
the motives of Winthrop and o thers evidence a real pursuit of a society built on
political and church-based self-governance. Winthrop was focused on opera-
tionalizing the charter’s strong centralization of governmental powers on the
appointed magistrates, but he was also notably lenient compared to other early
colonial leaders. Overall, his leadership across a decade saw increased popular
“City upon a Hill”

John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill,”—which he drew directly from Matthew
5:14–16 in the Bible—is notable for influencing a number of important politi
cal figures in American history, and the imagery has occurred in speeches
given by figures as diverse as John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy,
Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
W IT C H C R AFT 679
participation in the government. While his motivations w ere chiefly religious, his
work was very different from an established theocracy or rule by ministers or
priests. Winthrop relied on the advice and wisdom of the educated clergy class,
but he maintained distinctions between the authority of the church and the colo-
nial government both in his essays and his actions, such as when he publically
rebuked churches that sought to reprimand him for performing specifically politi
cal duties.
Winthrop’s personal journal, later entitled The History of New England from 1630
to 1649, became a national historical treasure and provided the earliest and most
detailed account of New England’s history. After providing for the commonwealth’s
political, moral, and religious vision for over a decade, he died in Massachusetts
in 1649. His son John Winthrop, Jr., continued his father’s political legacy and
served as an influential governor of Connecticut from 1659 to 1676.
Leonard O. Goenaga
See also: British Atlantic; Mayflower Compact; Migration; Puritans
Further Reading
Dunn, Richard S. 1996. The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Morgan, Edmund S. 2006. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. New York:
Pearson.
Winthrop, Robert C. 1869. Life and Letters of John Winthrop. Boston: L
ittle, Brown, and
Company.
WITCHCRAFT
Witchcraft is generally related to beliefs in magical powers, when individuals or
groups, by gaining occult knowledge and skills within such powers, use them in
rituals or other forms of magical activities. The terms “witchcraft” and “sorcery”
originated in pre-Enlightenment Europe and are mostly used to describe esoteric
and magical practices in non-European, small-scale or tribal societies. The con-
ception of witchcraft differs depending on the particular sociocultural context. Even
if witchcraft is typically perceived negatively, it can sometimes be differentiated
between positive forms, that involve healing, and negative forms, that seek to harm
people. Western witchcraft was closely related to witch-hunts and t rials during the
Middle Ages and early modern period in Europe. During the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, at the peak of the witch-hunt period, witches were often accused
of making pacts with Satan, receiving their maleficent magical powers from him.
Nowadays, modern Western witchcraft is perceived quite differently and is closely
related to New Age spiritualties.
In Western folk beliefs, witches were considered to be w omen who mingled with
Satan, or other evil spirits, to gain supernatural powers. It was believed that witches
used psychic powers to affect p eople through emotions and thoughts. Witch sor-
cery was considered to be a cause of epidemics, drought, and crop failures. Witches
680 W IT C H C R AFT
could foresee the f uture and prepare poisons and magic drinks. They w ere said to
possess many powers such as transforming themselves into werewolves, flying,
turning any object into a living being, or becoming invisible. They w ere associated
with bats, a black cat, broom, rakes, and magic herbs, among other characteristics.
Although witches w ere usually seen as ugly old w omen, they w ere supposed to
lure people by turning themselves into young and attractive women. It was believed
that witches bore a “witch’s mark” (blemish) on the body, attended a sabbat (devil-
worshipping orgy) at night, to which they ran in animal form or flew riding a
broom, a goat, or a pig, and kept a “familiar” (personal devil in animal form). They
were considered as especially dangerous during some holidays, when witches’
intervention with devils could damage the crops or the welfare of the whole com-
munity. It was believed that it was possible to see witch races together with other
evil spirits in the sky, especially during the New Year and during storms. Some
societies used to perform a witch burning ritual during these holidays that con-
sisted of burning straw dolls as well as marking doors of h ouses and barns with
crosses to protect against witches.
In Europe, belief in witches became widespread from the Middle Ages. Such
belief was fostered by the cultural Christian image of a woman as a source of
temptation and sin. Witch-hunts in Europe during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries created a special science of law that was addressed against
witches that declared involvement in witch activities and unbelief in witches a
heresy, a betrayal of God, and an extraordinary crime, for which it is necessary to
punish with torture and death.
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII (r. 1484–1492) issued a papal bull, describing the
harm caused by the witches in Germany and their connections with Satan. Inspired
by Innocent VIII, German Dominican friars Jacobus Sprenger (ca. 1437–1495) and
Henricus Institoris (ca. 1430–1505) published the book Malleus Maleficarum (The
Hammer of Witches) in 1486 in Cologne. This demonology manual was dedicated
to witch-hunts, giving many practical advices and recommendations for finding
and convicting witches. The book was divided into three parts with different pur-
poses. The first part provided material on how to effectively preach and convince
people about the reality of sorcery. The second part focused on the procedures of
the witches and how to counteract them. The third part explained the method of
prosecuting heretical witches, and it was addressed to both ecclesiastical and sec-
ular judges for their practical use.
Their work attempted to prove the reality of sorcery, delineated the practices of
sorceresses, and laid out the way to directly counteract those practices. It showed
how to deal with the problem, as a w hole, by systematically judging in courts and
by executing any sorcery practitioners. The law against witches was based on a
new notion of witchcraft that started to be synonymously equated to the concept
of “satanism” (or “diabolism”). According to that approach, the supposed witch par-
ticipated in society, presided over by Satan, and performed malevolent acts of
sorcery (maleficia) on others. The new conception was characterized by six beliefs
about the activities of witches: one, a pact entered into with devils; two, sexual
relations with devils; three, aerial flight to meet devils; four, a meeting lead by Satan
W IT C H C R AFT 681
himself (in the meeting, initiates enter into the pact and the attendees engage in
incest and promiscuous sex); five, the practice of maleficent magic; six, the slaugh-
ter of babies.
The Malleus Maleficarum was a weapon against the conspiracy of sorceresses
thought to be threatening the very existence of Christendom. Based on the Holy
Scripture and the works of the Church F athers, it insisted on the necessity to destroy
physically heretics, witches, and wizards, and it gave methodological instructions
on how to do it. Supported by the popes over its first 180 years, Malleus Malefi-
carum has been released 29 times.
In Europe, ignorance, fear, and prejudices towards females caused a negative
and hostile view of w omen as a w hole, emphasizing the m ental and moral inferi-
ority of women as well as intolerance and discrimination against them. Not sur-
prisingly, the persecution of witches was focused mostly on women, as they were
presumed weaker and therefore more vulnerable to the influences of the devil. Most
victims were poor or elderly w idows, hermits, or healers. Such w omen w ere con-
sidered especially dangerous as they w ere believed to engage in sorcery more than
men did. T here w ere three categories of witches: “black” ones, who committed only
bad acts; “gray” ones, who committed both good and evil; and “white” ones, who
helped p eople. According to court protocols, a majority of witches w ere consid-
ered “gray” witches.
The Catholic Church persecuted witchcraft for a long time. In the thirteenth
century, when the official view prevailed that witchcraft or the failure to believe in
witches is a heresy, the persecution became widespread, and inquisition courts
were included in the process. Demonological bulls of Popes Innocent VIII, Julius
II (r. 1503–1513), Hadriyon VI (r. 1522–1523), and other popes declared that witches
had relations with devils and that witches’ power w ere harmful for h umans.
Although court trials w ere held episodically from the beginning of the fifteenth
century, two critical periods which took place in different European regions are
known: 1480 to 1520, and 1580 to 1670. The number of victims from the end of
the fifteenth c entury u ntil the beginning of the sixteenth c entury was relatively
limited, and a witch-hunt was run by inquisition courts.
In northern Europe, where Protestantism was strong, demonic sorcery was
considered to be closely related to heresy. In contrast, in the southern European
countries, such as Spain or Italy, which w ere less affected by Protestantism, witch-
craft practitioners were not suspected of being entered into an alliance with the
devil. Nevertheless, the Catholic world did not have the monopoly of witchcraft
and its repression. During the end of the sixteenth and the first part of the seven-
teenth centuries, witch-hunting burst out in Protestant E ngland. But Anglo-Saxon
and Scandinavian countries did not believe in demons. H ere witches w ere hanged,
but not burned for the reason that their felony was considered to be a criminal
offense but not a religious one.
Europeans migrating to North America also brought a Western idea of witch-
craft and approach t owards witch t rials. However, a colonial European perception
and activity against witchcraft remained fragmented and transformed by encoun-
tering other influences within the local sociocultural context. For example, witchcraft
682 WOME
cases included the accusation of 80 p eople of practicing witchcraft in Massachu

setts Bay and the execution of 13 women and 2 men in Massachusetts in a witch-
hunt that lasted from 1645 to 1663. Incidents in the southern colonies included
the 1654 execution of Mary Lee, at sea on the way from England to Maryland, and
the case of Grace Sherwood, who was the last person known to have been con-
victed of witchcraft in early eighteenth-century V irginia. The best known case
in the English colonies was Salem, where witch trials occurred between 1692
and 1693. Seventy p eople were accused of practicing witchcraft and 19 were
executed.
In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the local context of migration
and colonization bringing together Europeans, Americans, and Africans trans-
formed the conception of witchcraft and influenced the manifestation of witch
beliefs and trials in North America. Witches were thought to be both men and
women. Witchcraft began to be attached more to race and social position than to
gender as Native Americans, Africans, and people of mixed race were often linked
to witchcraft by Europeans.
Witch prosecutions disappeared only in the eighteenth c entury. In E
ngland, and
in most parts of continental Europe, witchcraft faded dramatically after the middle
of the seventeenth century. The last witch trial was conducted in England in 1684;
in France in 1745; in Germany in 1775; and in Switzerland in 1782. Similarly, in
other parts of the American colonies, witchcraft belief was present but not potent,
and actions based on such belief w ere scattered and inconsequential.
See also: Enlightenment; L

egal Systems; Protestant Reformation; W
omen
Further Reading
Hughes, Pennethorne. 1967. Witchcraft. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.
Mackay, Christopher S. 2011. The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Melleus
Maleficarum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, Keith, 1991. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
W O M E N
In the Atlantic world, the lives of w omen w ere as varied as t hose of men. W
omen
were the colonizers and the colonized, the enslaved and the enslavers, the revolu-
tionaries and the counterrevolutionaries. Most cultures, colonies, and nations in
the Atlantic world had very specific gender roles, including limited roles for w omen.
However within t hese limits w omen wielded a considerable amount of power.
In the pre-Columbian indigenous cultures of the Americas, women tended to
be in charge of farming and child rearing. By the first contact with Europeans most
farming in North America was done by women. In subsistence hunting societies,
women were frequently responsible for many of the other food sources, including
traps and snares. The political and social status of women depended largely on indi-
vidual cultures, and there is no uniform model of gender roles. In some societies,
WOME 683
omen had specifically delineated political and economic roles, while in o thers
w
women derived status from their relationships with men. The one constant is that
gender roles tended not to align directly with those of European settlers; the rela-
tionships of men and women were not strictly hierarchal.
The earliest European conquerors, explorers, and settlers in the Americas tended to
be male. Early expeditions w ere made up entirely of men. Most indigenous captives
taken by these expeditions were women, who were frequently used as translators
and negotiators. European men also frequently entered into consensual and non-
consensual sexual relationships with indigenous women, and the sexual abuse of
women and girls was frequent. Early Spanish and Portuguese explorers w ere encour-
aged to intermarry with indigenous populations as a means of securing power, and
Spanish military leaders often requested w omen as tribute after a victory. Bring-
ing relationships between men and w omen in line with European Christian beliefs
became a major focus of Spanish and Portuguese Catholic missionaries. Their
efforts had a major impact on the gender roles and f amily lives of conquered indig-
enous peoples, resulting in a loss of power for w omen. Sexual relationships and
marriage between indigenous women and European men also became frequent in
the early settlements of North America. The gender imbalance of early settlements,
and the comfort with which European men entered relationships with indigenous
women, was a source of g reat anxiety to European powers. The earliest female
European settlers w ere often encouraged to emigrate as a means of “civilizing”
young colonies and enforcing European cultural mores. This includes the “filles
du roi,” the young French w omen who immigrated to New France between 1663
and 1673 with Louis XIV’s (1638–1715) sponsorship. The king would pay for their
passage and dowry, with the implication that they would find husbands after
disembarking.
Commercial English settlements, such as Jamestown, w ere established by men
but incorporated English women relatively early. The Virginia Company supple-
mented the arrival of the wives and fiancées of male settlers in 1609 with over 100
hired w omen. In contrast, the Dutch East India Company encouraged families
to settle New Netherland from the beginning. The first settlements in New E ngland
were operated by religious dissident groups, and e ither brought over entire family
units from the start or soon a fter initial settlement. For example the Massachu
setts Bay Company ship Arbella, counted among its passengers several married
couples, including the poet Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612–1672) and her husband.
However other male colonists, including Governor John Winthrop (1588–1649),
encouraged their wives to join them at least a year later.
The introduction of the Atlantic slave trade meant that the majority of women
arriving in the Americas before 1800 did not do so willingly. Forced labor was
a major aspect of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial systems from their advent.
Some women, both Spanish and indigenous, were granted encomiendas alongside
male conquistadors. The accompanying movement and displacement of indigenous
slaves destabilized families and communities. Indigenous w omen worked in the
fields and mines alongside men. The death of laborers under this system, as well
as Portuguese and Spanish decrees against the enslavement of indigenous converts
684 WOME
to Christianity, led to the gradual replacement of native labor with African slaves
during the sixteenth c entury. This shift began among the Portuguese in Brazil, and
swiftly spread to the Car ibbean. W omen and c hildren made up the bulk of Afri-
can slaves sent to the Americas, women being particularly sought due to their abil-
ity to produce more slaves. They worked alongside men doing agricultural work
in South American, Car ibbean, and southern North American plantations, as well
as domestic roles in all areas employing slave labor. While Europeans generally
considered white women too delicate for such harsh treatment, African women
were seen as less susceptible to strain and pain. Enslaved women and girls w ere
also often the victims of sexual exploitation and abuse.
Once colonies in the Car ibbean and North America were more firmly estab-
lished, criminal transportation and indentured labor became major sources of
European female settlers. W omen indentured servants tended to be both young
and unmarried, and worked as domestic laborers. They were subject to poor liv-
ing conditions and physical punishments, but could sue in cases of extreme mis-
treatment. Women sent to the colonies u nder criminal transportation, especially
under the Transportation Act 1717, w ere usually convicted of theft from an employer.
While their labor was sold and used in a manner similar to women indentured
servants, they lacked many of the safeguards afforded to the former.
The lifestyles of women in the Americas depended largely on class and region.
In general, the gender roles of free men and women were strictly delineated. The
prevailing cultural ideal was that women were responsible for children and the
home, while agriculture and skilled labor w ere limited to men. This was, how-
ever, an ideal to which many poor women as well as women of color could only
aspire. In practice, women frequently took care of livestock on farms and pro-
duced h ousehold crafts, as well as worked outside the home as domestic labor-
ers. During and after the Industrial Revolution, w omen frequently made an
additional income with piece work: assembling goods in the home from machine
manufactured parts for a set rate. Where possible, young single w omen increas-
ingly worked in factories. Lines also blurred on frontiers, where the demands of
survival often trumped cultural mores. Yet the ideal prevailed, creating what
historians now call a “cult of domesticity” in nineteenth c entury North America
in which “true w omen” w ere pious, pure, domestic, and submissive to their hus-
bands (Welter 1966, 151–174). Similar attitudes prevailed in South America and
the Car ibbean.
Women lacked equal property rights in most of the Americas. Under the Brit-
ish legal doctrine of coverture, in which a married w oman had no legal status sepa-
rate from her husband, a married w oman’s right to property was given up when
she married. While an unmarried or widowed w oman could own property and
make contracts in her own name, a married woman generally could not. These
policies carried over into British colonies, and continued a fter colonies achieved
independence or autonomy. While South American colonies and nations generally
had more liberal policies, women were still subject to laws modeled using a Cath-
olic and patriarchal presumption of feminine subordination in the home. In prac-
tice, women frequently exercised more de facto control of property than apparent
WOME 685
in the l egal record, and in North America the restrictions on w omen’s right to own
property and enter into contracts were gradually loosened over the course of the
nineteenth century.
Women w ere politically active throughout the Americas, despite a general lack
of national suffrage until the twentieth century. This includes leadership roles in
indigenous societies as well as early roles as interpreters and negotiators for Euro
peans, as in the case of the Nahua w oman Doña Marina (ca. 1501–1529), who aided
Hernán Cortés’s (1485–1547) conquest of the Aztec Empire. However, the power
wielded by w omen during the colonial era was for the most part, soft; w omen could
influence but could not govern. Their power increased during periods of war and
revolution, as women were hardly apolitical and frequently participated in activ-
ism and aid to the war effort. Women were key to the boycott of British goods before
and during the American Revolution, as well as contributing to the literature influ-
encing a developing independent American identity. Poets like Phillis Wheatley
(ca. 1753–1784) praised changes in American society, while political thinkers like
Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) demanded reforms and recognition of the rights
of w omen. American women continued to take part in popular political culture in
the decades a fter independence, with some elite w omen operating political salons
while m iddle and lower-class women participated in all forms of political engage-
ment short of voting itself. Women were also heavily invested in the Spanish Amer-
ican wars of independence. This mainly took the form of aiding the war effort
logistically, either individually or through political organizations. However some
women, including Manuela Sáenz (1797–1856) engaged in direct support and espi-
onage. Juana Azurduy Llanos (1780–1862), a Mestizo woman, became a guerilla
leader and participated in combat.
Women w ere major drivers of social activism and reform during the nineteenth
century. Much of this grew out of women’s increased involvement in both Protes-
tant and Catholic Church communities; activism was an organic expansion of
existing religious activities. Women were very involved in antislavery activism on
both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly in the Americas. Ex-slaves including
Mary Prince (1788–ca. 1833), Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883), and Harriet Ann
Jacobs (1813–1897) produced memoirs that became popular throughout the
English-speaking world. The popular appetite for women’s slave narratives and lit
erature featuring enslaved women, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (1811–1896)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, remained high in G reat Britain even after the abolition of slav-
ery in the British Empire. In North America both white and black women took
leadership roles in the Abolition movement. Some, like Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–
1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879), Lucretia Mott (1783–1880) and
Abby Kelley (1811–1887) took leading roles both in terms of influence and orga
nizational power. Some American female activists, including Lydia Maria Child
(1802–1880), saw w omen’s rights and abolitionism as intrinsically linked from the
beginning. Others however were drawn into women’s rights activism, including
suffrage, in part through conflict with the male abolitionist establishment’s squea-
mishness about feminine involvement. The first Anti-Slavery Convention of American
Women (1837) included discussion of both slavery and women’s rights. Elizabeth
686 W O R LD ’ S FAI R E X POSITIONS
Cady Stanton (1815–1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) were particularly

motivated by the fact that male delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in
London, England (1840) banned women from participating and limited them to a
private area. The subsequent Seneca Falls Convention (1848) was the first Ameri-
can convention devoted entirely to women’s rights. Increasingly, woman activists
were involved in both the antislavery and w omen’s suffrage movements. While
women’s rights activism did exist in South America, it was generally not as orga
nized until the early twentieth century. In Mexico, women’s rights activism began in
earnest during the rule of Porfirio Diaz (1830–1915, President of Mexico 1876–1911),
during which socialist as well as liberal organizations advocated for expanded
rights for w omen.
Women’s activism was frequently contextualized in terms of idealized feminin-
ity. Activists argued for expanded rights for w omen on the grounds that t hese rights
would enable women to more adequately care for the home and f amily. For exam-
ple, an educated w oman would be better able educate her c hildren and run an effi-
cient household. A w
oman with the capability to vote for Temperance (the abolition
of alcohol) would be able to save her husband and family from the scourges of alco-
holism. A w oman with adequate property rights could protect her family from
irresponsible husbands and financial panics. In this sense, a w oman activist was
rhetorically treating the broader public sphere as an extension of the private; she
was expanding the w omen’s sphere rather than overstepping a boundary.
Advances in the status of w
omen, over the course of the twentieth c entury, w
ere
built upon these foundations. Latin American feminists could look to the legacy of
female revolutionaries and indigenous leaders, while North American activists
could frequently draw directly upon organizations began during the nineteenth
century.
Alexandra Elias
See also: Bradstreet, Anne; Catholic Women Religious Missionaries; Doña Marina;
Pocahontas; Tekakwitha, St. Kateri; Virgin of Guadeloupe; Wheatley, Phillis
Further Reading
Branson, Susan. 2001. These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early
National Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Burns, Karen Olsen, and Karen E. Stothert. 1999. Women in Ancient America. Norman: Uni-
versity of Oklahoma Press.
Stearns, Peter N. 2015. Gender in World History. New York: Routledge.
Welter, Barbara. 1966. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” American Quarterly
18 (2): 151–174.
W O R L D ’ S FA I R E X P O S I T I O N S
World’s fairs, international expositions, and g reat exhibitions offered visitors an
opportunity to experience the world outside of their communities from the com-
fort of their own localities. Beginning with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, held
W O R LD ’ S FAI R E X POSITIONS 687
in London, England, and concluding with the New York World’s Fair of 1939 to
1940, these international events became transnational sites of contact where exotic
products w ere exchanged, ideologies w ere presented, modernity was defined, and
perceptions were drawn. Throughout the period, these international events were
lavishly funded, meticulously planned, and purposefully designed by national
governments, individual entrepreneurs, and industrial tycoons. They were also
funded, planned, and designed to construct both a specific national and interna-
tional narrative that promoted consumption as well as a perceived sense of global
unity. Edifices such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, and the Museum of Sci-
ence and Industry in Chicago’s Jackson Park are vivid reminders of the history of
world’s fair expositions from the second half of the nineteenth century. However,
the majority of the buildings where these international events were held have since
been destroyed by fires, w ere deconstructed and used at other expositions, or w ere
disposed of with no intention of using them in the future.
The first international recognized exhibition occurred in London in 1851, and
it began the trend towards continuously larger and more costly world’s fairs, inter-
national expositions, and g reat exhibitions throughout Western Europe and the
United States during the remainder of the nineteenth c entury. At midcentury, Great
Britain was the most powerful industrial nation in the world and possessed the
largest colonial empire. Due largely to the industrial revolution and E ngland’s trad-
ing power abroad, an industrial m iddle class developed in the nation, which
desired knowledge and developed an interest in consumer products from abroad.
Also within Victorian society, there developed a desire to understand the world
from a scientific perspective. Museums, supported by the emerging fields of anthro-
pological and ethnological studies, began to provide Victorians with the scientifi-
cally based answers that they desired. Conversely, artifacts w ere presented to the
public by museum curators and fair organizers with a particular goal in mind, pro-
viding the curator or the organizer with a g reat deal of power. At world’s fairs,
international expositions, and g reat exhibitions throughout the second half of the
nineteenth c entury, this power was used by curators and organizers throughout
Western Europe and the United States, in the hopes of allowing visitors to gain a
predetermined understanding of their national and imperial identities. Steeped in
the beliefs surrounding scientific racism, industrialism, consumerism, definitions
of modernity, and the proper place of imperialism during the period, visitors were
not only able to gain a better understanding of their nation and their empire, they
were also provided with a blueprint of how their nation and their empire was greater
than others.
As the first truly international exhibition of its kind, the Crystal Palace Exhibi-
tion of 1851 set many standards that future fair, exposition, and exhibition orga-
nizers hoped to emulate and supersede. The Crystal Palace had been built solely
for the purpose of holding the exhibits that made up the event. The sheer size of
the exhibition was a striking feature of the event. Although the 19-acre structure,
which contained 13,000 foreign and domestic exhibits, would l ater be dwarfed by
future international expositions, exhibition visitors fixated on the size of the event.
The organization of the exhibits within the Crystal Palace would also be mimicked
A painting of the Crystal Palace, the centerpiece of London’s 1851 showcase of British
industrial innovation. Housing 13,000 exhibits, the scale of the building awed visitors.
(Read & Co. Engravers & Printers, 1851)
by future organizers. Arranged to be presented as an ordered European vision of

the world, half the floor space in the Crystal Palace was dedicated to the exhibits
from G reat Britain and her colonial possessions, while the other half was reserved for
foreign exhibits. The organizers of the exhibition also divided the exhibits into
four categories: manufactures, machinery, raw materials, and fine arts. The practice
of dividing foreign and domestic exhibits, as well as the categorization of exhibits,
was built upon by f uture event organizers, particularly when fairs, expositions,
and exhibitions began organizing international events that included multiple build-
ings. However, by initiating a division between the foreign and the domestic, and
by categorizing the exhibits, it is clear that the individuals that organized the G
reat
Exhibition of 1851 w ere creating a perceived sense of both imperial and global unity
that was predicated on the belief that G reat Britain was the leader of the world.
Following the successes of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, continental
Europeans quickly began increasing the size and breadth of their international
expositions. For example, in 1867, the Exposition Universelle was held on the
Champs de Mars in Paris, France. Much like previous expositions, the Exposition
Universelle of 1867 included one main building, about 36 acres in size. However,
the exposition differed in that the one main building was surrounded by a variety
of smaller buildings, ballooning the size of the exposition grounds to over 150
acres. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth c entury, Paris, as well as a
variety of other European cities, continued to hold international events, each one
W O R LD ’ S FAI R E X POSITIONS 689
attempting to outdo the other in e ither the mere size of the event or the grandeur
surrounding it.
Members of the American public, as well as American manufactures, attended
world’s fairs, international expositions, and g reat exhibitions throughout Europe
during the nineteenth century. Notably, Samuel Colt’s revolver, Cyrus McCormick’s
farming implements, and Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraphy exhibit received a g reat
deal of interest from European observers. Despite attending t hese international
events in Europe, prior to 1876, the United States had not held a successful inter-
national exposition of its own. Mired in the midst of a period of civil war, eco-
nomic instability, and labor unrest, in 1871, the U.S. Congress passed a bill that
created a United States Centennial Commission charged with planning the Cen-
tennial International Exhibition of 1876, which was developed to celebrate the one
hundredth anniversary of the birth of the United States as a nation and to unite
the citizens of the United States.
Encompassing approximately 450 acres of land, Fairmount Park in Philadel-
phia, Pennsylvania was selected as the site of the celebration. The initial plan was
to only construct one main building, as well as a series of smaller support build-
ings; however, this idea was scrapped and for the first time in the history of world’s
fair, international expositions, and great exhibitions, five main buildings were
built. Determined to present the progress and virtues of the United States to the
world, the Smithsonian Institution represented the United States Government at
the event. Specifically, the Smithsonian Institution used the image of the Native
American in North America’s transcontinental empire to present Anglo-Saxon
American progress and authority. Such use attempted to justify North America’s
westward expansion across the continent of North America. Despite losing money
for its investors, many Americans considered the event a success because it tem-
porarily stabilized the economy, presented the United States in a positive light, and
restored visitors’ faith in the American Union. The event also sparked a world’s fair
craze within the United States, which would continue throughout the remainder
of the nineteenth c entury.
Building on the successes of the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876,
the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was held in Chicago, Illinois, to celebrate
the 400th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas. The
World’s Fair Architecture

World’s fair expositions were known for their architectural ambition. Edifices
such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, and the Museum of Science and Indus-
try in Chicago’s Jackson Park are vivid reminders of the history of world’s fair
expositions from the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the
majority of the buildings constructed for the events have since been destroyed
by fires, were disassembled and used at other expositions, or w ere simply
disposed of.
celebration offered the United States an opportunity to use the transnational

image of Columbus to connect the United States with Europe’s imperial past, thus
justifying North America’s identity as an imperial entity. In total, over 27 million
people attended the event, which covered over 600 acres of land in Jackson Park.
The Smithsonian Institution continued its involvement in international exposi-
tions by collecting artifacts and classifying exhibits that venerated Christopher
Columbus’s contact with the Americas. When the event came to a close in October
1893, it marked the conclusion of the largest and most well attended exposition in
the United States during the nineteenth century. In 1904, the St. Louis World’s
Fair, which was held to celebrate the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, would
dwarf the size of the World’s Columbian Exposition by approximately 600 acres,
marking the apex in the history of world’s fairs, international expositions, and g reat
exhibitions.
Gregg French
See also: Columbus, Christopher; Progressivism
Further Reading
Geppert, Alexander C. T. 2010. Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de Siècle Europe.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Greenhalgh, Paul. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and
World’s Fairs, 1851–1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Rydell, Robert W. 1984. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International
Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Y
YA M A S E E WA R ( 1 7 1 5 – 1 7 1 7 )
The Yamasee War was a war fought between Native Americans and English colo-
nists throughout the southeast of North America between 1715 and 1717. The war
represented a widespread pan-Indian response to the growing power of South Car-
olina, to the inability or unwillingness of English settlers to conform to native
standards of diplomacy, to the encroachment of Carolina settlers on native lands
and prerogatives, and, above all, to the devastating impacts of the native slave trade
on native villages and polities throughout the southeast. Initiated by a surprise
Yamasee attack in April 1715, the war reverberated for more than two years across
a wide coalition encompassing factions of nearly every native group in the south-
east. While the Yamasee War was immediately devastating for European and native
communities alike, it marked an important turning point in the colonial south-
east. Native peoples migrated and formed new alliances in the war’s wake, accel-
erating a process of transformation that radically altered the cultural and political
landscape of the region for the next century. Equally enduring, the trade in enslaved
native p eoples came to an abrupt end and was rapidly replaced in South Carolina
by the plantation complex and African slavery.
After its founding in 1670, the English settlement at Charles Town developed
into the most significant European hub of the centuries-old trade network con-
necting native polities in the southeast. English and Scots settlements acted as a
magnet for natives fleeing the ravages of warfare and disease in their homelands,
while English pack trains bearing weapons and trade goods expanded the nascent
colony’s markets throughout the southeast during the same period. By the early
eighteenth c entury, Carolina merchants w ere key linkages along the ancient trade
paths that stretched from Charles Town on the Atlantic coast to Cherokee towns
in the Appalachian and Chickasaw towns in present-day Mississippi. Tens of thou-
sands of deerskins, muskets, trade goods, and captives passed across t hese paths
and through Charles Town annually.
The trade in native captives undergirded the burgeoning power of Carolina trad-
ers and their native allies while dramatically transforming the region. Armed by
Virginia traders, Westo native raiding parties initiated the widespread native slave
trade in the 1660s before cultivating a relationship with Carolina traders in the
1670s. A fter this alliance fell apart in 1679, Carolinians shifted their allegiance fre-
quently in the following decades. Shawnee migrants took the mantle of the slave
trade in the 1680s, followed by Muskogean raiders in the 1690s, and Yamasee ref-
ugees in the early eighteenth c entury. The combined onslaught of these deadly
alliances shattered the Spanish and Mississippian status quo. For five decades,
692 YA M ASEE WA R
armed raiders carried thousands of h uman captives from struggling chiefdoms and
tenuous mission settlements to English buyers in Charles Town. Tens of thousands
of t hese captives w
ere enslaved and sold to northern colonies or plantations in the
Car ibbean. Communities in the crosshairs of these armed raiders responded by
arming themselves and forming powerful new confederacies.
In addition to trade, native p eoples in the southeast w
ere deeply enmeshed in
the imperial ambitions and conflicts of their European neighbors. Spanish admin-
istrators balanced military, economic, and ecclesiastical goals in the extensive mis-
sion system in Florida, which provided an effective buffer against scarcity and
attack from the north for over a century. Thousands of native peoples labored and
worshipped in Florida’s northern provinces, providing administrators in St. Augus-
tine with both corn and power. Carolina traders served English ambitions as well
as their own by turning their native allies against these missions provinces. The
Guale missions on the Georgia coast succumbed to a series of Savannah and Car-
olina raids in the 1680s. The Apalachee and Timucua missions collapsed after a
series of devastating attacks two decades later.
These raids for captives and corn were explicitly linked to the geopolitical con-
tests that transformed the southeast a fter the settlement of Charles Town. Bacon’s
Rebellion in V irginia emboldened English colonists, in 1676, to press their ambi-
tions for land and captives westward at the expense of their native neighbors and
allies; African slaves found asylum in Spanish Florida beginning in the 1680s,
and subjected Carolina planters to decades of raids and sieges; and Queen Anne’s
War—fought over the succession of a Bourbon to the Spanish throne in Europe but
waged primarily by native warriors in the southeast—provided an official justifi-
cation for over a dec ade of warfare beginning in 1702. A fter dec ades of forging
strong ties of trade and diplomacy with Europeans, native peoples from Canada to
the Gulf of Mexico w ere inextricably bound in t hese contests.
The Yamasees were one such group tied to European ambitions. Brought together
near the mouth of the Savannah River in the 1680s, by a confluence of refugees
from the region of Altamaha in present-day central Georgia and the collapsing
Guale missions on the south Georgia coast, the Yamasees developed strong ties
to Scottish traders at Port Royal on the Carolina coast. A fter Spanish retribution
destroyed the Scots settlement at Port Royal in 1686, Yamasee bands remained
allied to the English at Charles Town and sacked the Florida missions in the first
decade of the eighteenth century. By the end of Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713),
the Yamasees were the most formidable raiders in the region between Charles Town
and St. Augustine.
The slave trade both empowered and weakened native polities in the southeast.
Confederacies like the Yamasees, Creeks, and Chickasaws used the trade to seize
the balance of power in the vast regions surrounding the fledgling European set-
tlements on the coast. This power united as it divided. Spiritual synthesis com-
bined with necessity and opportunity to pull the diverse remnants of native p eoples
throughout the eastern woodlands into new political formations. But the spoils of
the trade empowered the settlers as well. The rapid rise and fall of the Westos and
Savannahs underlined a pattern of capricious and opportunistic relationships
YA M ASEE WA R 693
between Charles Town and its chief raiding allies, on the one hand, while Caro-
lina’s role in the Tuscarora War (1711–1715) revealed a growing contentiousness
with natives throughout the region on the other. The powerful Native American
confederacies responded to the growing power and arrogance of their English
neighbors by preparing a terrible coordinated military response. Coweta (Creek)
headman Brims forged an alliance of more than 150 towns at the core of the alli-
ance, while Catawbas, Waterees, and Congarees in the north, and Tallapoosas,
Abhikas, and Choctaws in the west joined according to their interests.
Their preparations culminated in a devastating series of attacks on Carolina set-
tlements in the spring of 1715. The attack began on April 15th, when Yamasee
warriors captured and killed the members of a Carolina trade delegation in the
village of Pocotaligo, while a second band fell on the plantations of St. Bartholomew’s
Parish. Muskogean-speaking and Choctaw allies struck plantations and settlements
to the south in tandem with the Yamasee strike. Within weeks, native warriors had
destroyed much of the English colonial project in the southeast and w ere poised to
sack Charles Town.
South Carolina responded rapidly and effectively. In late April, the governor sent
two forces to Yamasee country. The next month, the assembly dispatched emis-
saries to the Cherokees, Virginia, and New E ngland for assistance while passing a
series of sweeping war acts that authorized drafting enslaved Africans into the mili-
tia and impressing ships and supplies in addition to establishing a ring of defen-
sive garrisons on the plantations around Charles Town. The attacks continued in
June and July as Santee settlements fell to Cheraw and other warriors from the
north, but the arrival of reinforcements from Virginia and the formation of a
1,200-strong standing army began to turn the tide of war against the native alli-
ance in the autumn. The momentum shifted when Cherokee warriors joined the
Carolinians and attacked a Creek delegation at Tugaloo in January 1716. By the
spring, the Carolina assembly was making arrangements to recover from the con-
flict. Sporadic warfare continued on the southern and western frontiers until South
Carolina concluded formal peace agreements with the Muskogean-speaking core
of the alliance in late 1717.
While the entrance of the Cherokees, and the arrival of white reinforcements,
brought the Yamasee War to a close, it did not mark the end of native power in the
southeast. The numerous Native American allies at the core of the coalition remained
armed and maintained the diplomatic channels opened by the war. The Creek Con-
federacy emerged as a powerful force in the wake of the war. Native power rever-
berated across the Atlantic as well; where thousands of native captives were enslaved
and sold from Charles Town prior to the war, and thousands of African captives
were enslaved and imported to Charles Town after the war. The trade in deerskins
remained important throughout the eighteenth century, but it was rapidly eclipsed
by the growth of the plantation complex and African slavery in the southeast.
See also: British Atlantic; Chickasaws; Creek Indians; Pan-Indianism

694 YO R U B A K IN G DO M
Further Reading
Crane, Verner Winslow. 1956. The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Gallay, Alan. 2002. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American
South, 1670–1717. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Ramsey, William L. 2008. The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the
Colonial South. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
YORUBA KINGDOM
The Yoruba are an ethnic and linguistic group in West Africa who developed a
series of kingdoms in the interior of the Lower Guinea Coast between 1000 and
1500. One of these kingdoms, Oya, would come to control a series of client states
along the upper Niger over the eighteenth c entury. The slave trade in this region,
brought about by Atlantic commercial networks, had a tremendous impact on
West African p eoples. Europeans in the early modern era regularly referred to the
Guinea Coast as the Slave Coast. While Atlantic slavery devastated the popula-
tions of West Africa, it also contributed to greater state growth and consolidation
among the Yoruba, just as it did for other African p eoples like the Ashante, and
Dahomey.
All Yoruba kingdoms traced their origins to Oduwawa, a legendary founder of
the first g reat Yoruba city of Ilé-Ifè. Oduwawa was a creation deity in most accounts,
though later versions of the story portrayed him as an exile from Mecca. Agricul-
tural communities existed in Ilé-Ifè as early as the sixth century BCE, but it was
not u ntil around 1000 CE that Ilé-Ifè developed into a large and politically orga
nized city-state. At its height in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Ilé-Ifè became
renowned in the region for its terracotta pottery and advanced metalwork in iron,
bronze, and brass that left an artistic legacy that deeply influenced West Africa.
Though the first major Yoruban civilization, Ilé-Ifè never became a dominant politi
cal power in West Africa, and its location in the forest did not place it in a good
position to develop as a major commercial center. Even so, later Yoruban states
looked to Ilé-Ifè as the progenitor of Yoruban culture.
The city of Oyo on the Yoruban savannah never matched the artistic achieve-
ments of Ilé-Ifè, but it proved far more politically successful in dominating the
region. In Yoruban accounts, the son of Oduwawa, Oranmiyan, founded the city
of Oyo, but all Yoruban city-states’ royal lineages claimed descent through Odu-
wawa, as did some non-Yoruban states such as Benin. The link to the civilization
at Ilé-Ifè allowed kings to claim connection to the divine, and Ilé-Ifè remained a
spiritual and cultural influence. The first kings of Oyo would later be worshipped
as deities, most prominently Sango, the god of thunder. At the point of West Afri-
can contact with Europeans in the late fifteenth c entury, Oyo had begun to eclipse
Ilé-Ifè’s political importance. Oyo initially was just one Yoruba state among many,
and regularly paid tribute to other kingdoms. Oyo came into conflict with the Nupe
and Borgu peoples to the north that led to the sacking of the city sometime around
1550.
YO R U B A K IN G DO M 695
Oyo reemerged as a regional power in the seventeenth century due to its adop-
tion of cavalry, which allowed it to c ounter peoples to the north who had access
to horses, and gave it an advantage over peoples to the south who lacked access to
the animals. With their new military tools, Oyo’s leaders set about conquering other
Yoruba states and non-Yoruban p eoples as buffers. Oyo proved most successful in
savannah regions to the north and west where its cavalry could be brought to good
use. Its military struggled in eastern Yorubaland, and to the south in Benin where
they encountered heavy forests, hills, and lagoons. The presence of tsetse flies in
Yorubaland inhibited breeding h orses, which necessitated regular replacements.
The Yoruba exported pepper, cloth, and kola nuts to the north in return for horses
and slaves. After the arrival of Europeans off the Guinea Coast in 1485, the Yor-
uba began to export European goods to the north in return for horses, and began
to export slaves for sale to the Portuguese, and later the Dutch and English. Much
of this trade would be conducted through non-Yoruban states such as Allada,
Hueda, and Dahomey and, in the eighteenth c entury, ports in Lagos. The expan-
sion of Oyo through conquests and raids based on their effective cavalry led to the
acquisition of more slaves for export.
The city of Oyo, and its empire, w ere led by a king, the Alafin. The Alafin was
aided in his administrative, judicial, and religious duties by thousands of palace
slaves. A privy-council or cabinet of seven officials, the Mesi, which included a
prime minister, the Basorun, advised the monarchy. With the growth of the empire,
a new official, the Are Ano Kakamfo, who served as the commander of provincial
military forces, became increasingly important.
Succession to Alafin initially was through primogeniture, but in the 1730s, the
Mesi began to claim the power to remove Alafins, at which point an Alafin would
be obligated to commit suicide. The Mesi would then select a new Alafin from
among candidates in the royal lineage. At this point, it also became customary for
the eldest son of the Alafin, the Aremo, to commit suicide upon his father’s death.
While officially this change came about to discourage patricide, it strengthened the
Mesi and weakened familial dynasties. Consequently, over the eighteenth c entury,
Alafins w ere increasingly deposed by the Mesi.
Power largely centered upon key lineages that accumulated wealth over genera-
tions. Local obas, or kings from prominent lineages, led Yoruban cities and regions
with little interference from the center. The Alafin could remove local leaders in the-
ory, but local elites tended to be left alone as long as they provided tribute, taxes, and
military service, and followed Oyo’s foreign policy. Slave messengers, the ilari, dis-
patched by the Alafin, would advise local rulers and played a large role in taxation
and the collection of tolls within the city of Oyo. In other regions, the Alafin dis-
patched officials, the ajele, who served as intendants to watch over local gover-
nors. Other regions of the Oya Empire lacked any sort of centralized direction from
Oyo and existed as largely independent tribute paying regions.
A fter contact with Europea ns, Oyo’s pattern of expansion shifted to the west
to gain access to ports that grew in importance with the Atlantic trade. In 1698,
Oyo invaded Allada and gained it as a tributary state. When Dahomey captured
Porto Nova in 1724, and in 1727 attempted to gain control of Whydah, it brought
696 YO R U B A K IN G DO M
it into greater conflict with Oyo. Oyo fought wars against Dahomey from 1726 to
1730 and from 1739 to 1748. Dahomey, despite access to European firearms and
increasing use of fortifications, had a difficult time in countering Oyo’s cavalry in
the field with the ultimate result that Dahomey became a tributary of Oyo. When
Dahomey achieved independence in the 1780s, it endangered Oyo’s access to the
sea and the Atlantic trade.
Over the eighteenth c entury, the Oyo constitution came u nder greater strain,
which saw an end to the consensus style of leadership and a movement toward
greater and greater political violence between the Mesi and the monarchy. Baso-
run Gaha asserted the power of the Mesi by murdering allies of Alafin Labisi
before forcing Labisi to commit suicide. He then moved against Labisi’s three
successors. Eventually popular resistance to Gaha coalesced around a new Ala-
fin, Abiodun who had him executed. At the same time, the Oyo Empire faced
increasing external pressure from the Bariba and Nupe p eoples. The inability of
Alafins to meet these internal and external threats further weakened the prestige
of the kingship.
Abiodun was succeeded by the weak Alafin Awole who faced a series of local
rebellions. Afonja, who served as the governor of the province of Ilorin and as the
Are Ano Kakamfo, backed the Mesi in ordering Awole’s suicide, but the failure of
the Mesi to name Afanga as the next Alafin led him to stop taking direction from
the capitol altogether, which established Ilorin’s de facto independence. Afanga’s
success encouraged a series of splinter movements within the Oyo Empire.
In 1817, Afonja encouraged Fulani from the Sokoto Caliphate to engage in a jihad
against Oyo. Afonja drew on support from Hausa slaves, who opposed Oyo as a
matter of course, and from Yoruban Muslims, often from the merchant classes. The
jihadist opposition to the Song cult struck at the center of an Alafin’s authority.
The revolt was thus both political and religious and northern regions of the Oyo
Empire became increasingly Muslim. The civil war resulted in Yoruba taking other
Yoruba as slaves for export and Oyo’s control was greatly reduced as individual cit-
ies devolved to leadership by local obas. Despite drawing on jihadist forces, Afonja
was not a Muslim and was killed in an insurrection in 1823 when he encouraged
the Hausa and Fulani to settle elsewhere. The Sokoto Caliphate then recognized
an Emir of Yoruba who ruled Ilarin and began to force many Yoruba cities to pay
tribute to Ilarin. The absence of military successes after 1823, resulted in fewer
slaves and a commercial depression, which became a vicious cycle as it became
harder for Oyo to secure the h orses required for its military. When a last attempt
to reconquer Ilorin failed, the city of Oyo was destroyed in 1836. The Yoruba were
pushed off the savannah and to the edge of the forest where they constructed a
new Oyo. The Yoruba p eople persevered in the face of this aggression, however,
and were helped by the widespread adoption of firearms in the nineteenth c entury
and the fact that the cavalry of the Fulani and Hausa was of little use in the rain
forest. With the fall of Oyo, Yoruba states began to war against one another, which
greatly increased the number of Yoruba slaves sold across the Atlantic. The infight-
ing led to increasing external interference in Yorubaland from at first from Sokoto
and then from European powers. In 1888, the Alafin of Oyo placed his territory
YO R U B A K IN G DO M 697
nder British protection, and most of Yorubaland eventually became part of Brit-
u
ish Nigeria.
Michael Beauchamp
See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Islam; Slave Trade in Africa
Further Reading
Flint, John E. 1966. Nigeria and Ghana. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Johnson, Samuel. 1921. The History of the Yorubas. Lagos: C.M.S. (Nigeria) Books.
Law, Robin. 1977. Oyo Empire, c. 1600–c. 1836: A West African Imperialism in the Age of the
Atlantic Slave Trade. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Editor and Contributors
Editor
David Head is a lecturer of history at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
He is the author of Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from
United States in the Early Republic (2015), which won the 2016 John Gardner Award
presented by Mystic Seaport Museum. He received his PhD from the University at
Buffalo, the State University of New York in 2010.
Contributors
Rafaela Acevedo-Field Linda Bowles-Adarkwa

Whitworth University San Francisco State University
Jaime Aguila Michael Bradley

Independent Scholar Eastern Illinois University
William H. Alexander Cassie Brand

Norfolk State University Drew University
Jonas B. Anderson Nicole Breault

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität University of Connecticut
Patrick Thomas Barker Victoria M. Breting-Garcia

Florida International University Independent Scholar
Leland Conley Barrows Thomas J. Brinkerhoff

Voorhees College University of Pennsylvania
Michael Beauchamp Frances D. Brock

Rogers States University Independent Scholar
Lauren Beck John R. Burch, Jr.

Mount Allison University Campbellsville University
Bradley J. Borougerdi William E. Burns

Tarrant County College George Washington University
706 E d i t o r a n d C o n t r i b u t o r s
Richard Byington Alexandra Elias

University of Central Florida Syracuse University
Alvin A. Camba Lewis B. H. Eliot

Johns Hopkins University University of South Carolina
Josianne L. Campbell Lizeth Elizondo

York Technical College University of Texas at Austin
David M. Carletta Emily A. Engel

Independent Scholar Independent Scholar
Dan Castilow II Sarah Foss

Tulane University Indiana University
Justin Clark Gregg French

Liberty University University of Western Ontario
John A. Coakley Amy M. Froide

Merrimack College University of Maryland Baltimore
County
Dennis J. Cowles
University of Southern Pamela J. Fuentes
Mississippi El Colegio de Mexico
Scott Craig Melisa C. Galván

Florida State University California State University, Northridge
Christopher B. Crenshaw Luis Santana Garcia

Florida State University University of Central Florida
Miguel Dantas da Cruz Leonard O. Goenaga

Lisbon University Independent Scholar
Brian de Ruiter Rita Gomes Correia

Brock University University of Lisbon
Andrew R. Detch Eduardo M. Gonzalez

University of Colorado Boston College
Michael Dickinson Christopher Goodwin

University of Delaware University of Missouri
Matthew Douglas João Carlos Graça

Marquette University Lisbon University
E d i t o r a n d C o n t r i b u t o r s 707
Charles Grand Grove Koger

University of Texas at Arlington Independent Scholar
Gina Hames Tonya Lambert

Pacific Lutheran University Independent Scholar
Brian Hamm Elizabeth C. Libero

University of Florida University of Colorado
Jared Ross Hardesty Charles Lipp

Western Washington University University of West Georgia
Jay T. Harrison Wendy Lucas

Hood College University of Central Arkansas
Nicholas Higgins Tarah L. Luke

Regent University Florida State University
Joshua Hyles Aaron Lee Lumpkin

Independent Scholar Southeastern Baptist Theological
Seminary
Matthew James
Southeastern Baptist Theological Martin J. Manning
Seminary United States Department of State
Katalin Jancsó Steven Henry Martin

University of Szeged Trent University
Joshua J. Jeffers Pablo Martínez Gramuglia

Middle Tennessee State University National University of Buenos Aires
Megan Jeffreys Jorge Matos

California State University, Long Beach City University of New York
Eric F. Johnson Jeremy Maxwell

Kutztown University Ottawa University
Andrew Kettler Sarah McHone-Chase

University of South Carolina Northern Illinois University
Alexandra Kindell Victoria N. Meyer

Marine Corps University Press University of Arizona
William P. Kladky Gregory A. Michna

Independent Scholar West V
irginia University
708 E d i t o r a n d C o n t r i b u t o r s
Katie Myerscough Joshua Schroeder

University of Manchester University at Buffalo, the
State University of
Paul Nienkamp New York
Fort Hays State University
A. H. Schulenburg
F. Evan Nooe City of London Research Office
University of North Carolina at
Charlotte Frank Schumacher
University of Western Ontario
D. L. Noorlander
State University of New York at John Schwaller
Oneonta University at Albany
James A. Padgett Erik R. Seeman

University of Central Florida University at Buffalo, the
State University of
Rachael L. Pasierowska New York
Rice University
Colleen M. Seguin
Jason M. Payton Valparaiso University
Sam Houston State University
Angela Shaw-Thornburg
Neal D. Polhemus Livingstone University
University of South Carolina
Kimberly B. Sherman
R. Pranskevičiūtė University of St. Andrews
Vytautas Magnus University
Robert Sherwood
Michael Read Georgia Military College
University of Rochester
Sean Morey Smith
Matthew Reardon Rice University
West Texas A&M University
Olena Smyntyna
Bryan C. Rindfleisch Odessa National University
University of Oklahoma
Andrew J. Spencer
Evan C. Rothera Southeastern Baptist Theological
Pennsylvania State University Seminary
James Sandy Evelyn Kassouf Spratt

Texas Tech University Notre Dame of Maryland University
Alexia Schemien Robert N. Stacy

University of Duisburg-Essen Independent Scholar
E d i t o r a n d C o n t r i b u t o r s 709
Matthew Stallard Eugene Van Sickle

University of Manchester University of North Georgia
Jennifer Stern Andrew N. Wegmann

University of Arizona Delta State University
Dawn C. Stricklin Dan Wells

Southern Illinois University Florida State University
Andrew Tarter Andrew Wood

University of Florida University of Tulsa
Glen Edward Taul Corine Wood-Donnelly

Campbellsville University University of Cambridge
Beverly Tomek Ben Wynne

University of Houston-Victoria University of North Georgia
Index
Note: Page numbers in bold indicate main encyclopedia entry for term.
Abiodun, 696 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (Great

Abolition movement, 1–5 Britain), 6
and Declaration of Independence, 185 Absentee landlords, 576–577
and Douglass, 202–203 Absolute advantage, 407
early revolts, 1 Abu Bakar, Yahia ibn, 272
and Equiano, 230, 231 Acadians, 12–14, 451
in Great Britain, 593 An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the
Haitian Revolution, 1–2 Destruction of the Indies (Las Casas),
key leaders, 3–4 360
and Lincoln, 222–223 Acoma Massacre, 523–524
societies, formation of, 1 Acoma Pueblo, 523–524
in South America, 4–5, 8 Acosta, José de, 14–16, 54
in United States, 2–4, 7 Act for Linen Manufactures (Great Britain),
and Wilberforce, 669–670 576
women in, 685 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery
Abolition of slavery, 5–9 (Pennsylvania), 6
in Africa, 8–9 Activism, in evangelicalism, 238, 240
in Canada, 6 Act of Satisfaction, 100
in France, 7–8, 142, 381 Act of Supremacy (Great Britain), 99, 521
and gens de couleur, 270 Act of Toleration (Great Britain), 521–522,
in Great Britain, 5–6 530
in Jamaica, 331 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, 2
in Portuguese Empire, 8 Acts of Union, 98, 437
slave trade, abolition of, 12 Adams, John, 181, 335
in Spain, 5 Adams, John Quincy, 222
in Spanish Empire, 8 Adams, Samuel, 25, 26
in Trinidad, 642 Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, 266, 336
in United States, 6–7 Administration of Justice Act (Great
Abolition of the slave trade, 9–12 Britain), 25
and Brazil, 95 Admirable Campaign, 77
early opposition, 9 Afonja, 696
and forced migration, 410 Afonso I, King of Kongo, 9, 352–353
in Great Britain, 5–6, 10, 11–12, 43–44, Afonso V, King of Portugal, 46
101, 593 Africa. See also Atlantic slave trade;
and Quakers, 6 specific areas
religious aspects, 10 abolition of slavery, 8–9
slavery, abolition of, 12 Atlantic slave trade, 40–45
in United States, 11–12 colonization of, 12
712 INDE X
Africa (cont.) Ahuizotl, 417

evangelization of, 31 Ajaka, 60
Franciscans in, 251 à Kempis, Thomas, 661
gold and silver, 273 Alafin, 695
migration to Americas, 408 Alaminos, Anton de, 277
and rice, 554 Alaska, 266
and rum production, 563 Al-Bakri, Abu Ubaid, 271–272, 389
slave rebellions in, 589 Alcoholism, 675
slave trade in, 594–598 Aleuts, 266
sugar in, 609 Alexander II, Tsar of Russia, 224
tobacco in, 630 Alexander VI, Pope, 155, 249,
Yoruba Kingdom, 694–697 636–637
African diaspora, 67–70 Alfonso III, King of Portugal, 550
Africanisms, 94 Alfonso VIII, King of Castile, 105
Africa Squadron, 11–12 The Algerine Captive (Tyler), 326
Afro-Argentines, 103 Algonquin Bible, 81
Afro-Brazilian culture, 55 Algonquins, 20–22, 167
Age of Revolution, 17–20 Alhaja, Martin, 105
American Revolution, 17–18 Alhóndiga de Granaditas, 293, 294
freedom a universal value, 19–20 Alice Addertongue, 252
French Revolution, 17–18 Allada, Kingdom of, 470
Greek Revolution, 19 Allende, Ignacio, 293
Haitian Revolution, 18 Almagro, Diego de, 159
second wave, 19 Alvarado, Luis de Moscoso de, 191
and slavery, 593 Alvarado, Pedro de, 159, 162
Spanish American revolutions, 18–19 Àlvaro I, King of Kongo, 353
third wave, 19 American Anti-Slavery Society,
The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 3–4, 7
(Hobsbawm), 17 American Colonization Society, 2–3,
Agriculture. See also Cotton; Plantations; 146–148, 370
Potato; Rice American Federation of Labor, 321
Aztec Empire, 50–51 American Indian Movement, 476
in Buenos Aires, 103 American Philosophical Society, 253
in Cahokia, 107–108 American Revolution, xxi, 23–27
Canary Islands, 112 battles of, 26
Caribs, 116 as beginning of Age of Revolution,
Choctaws, 138 17–18
and Columbian Exchange, 150 and Choctaws, 139
commodities, 486–487 compared to French Revolution, 18
and European exploration, 237–238 and Creek Indians, 169
food production, 317 and Edwards, 213
Hakluyt on, 289 events leading to, 23–25
Inca Empire, 311 financial hardship in London, 376
and mercantilism, 405 and Florida, 247
and Mississippian culture, 413 and France, 26–27, 258, 259
and Vikings, 651 impact of globally, 183
Aguilar, Gerónimo de, 157, 160, 198, and Iroquois, 323
396 and Jefferson, 334–335
INDE X
713
Loyalists, 383–387 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 122

and nationalism, 438 Arab culture, 271–272
and Oneidas, 463, 465 Arawakan language, 32
and Onondagas, 468 Arawaks, 32–34, 58, 641
Pan-Indianism, 475–476 Archaeology
and privateering, 510 Feast of the Dead, 304
tobacco, 630 Maroon communities, 395
American War of Independence, 26 Maya civilization, 395, 398–399
Amerindians, 55–56. See also Olmec civilization, 460–462
Indigenous people; Native of world’s fairs, 689
Americans Architecture
Amherst, Jeffery, 195, 492, 493 of Cahokia, 108–109
La Amistad, 589 of Caribs, 116
Amsterdam, 27–30 of Mississippian culture, 412–413
Anabaptists, 519, 520–521 in Tenochtitlán, 623–625
Ancien régime, 185, 226 Arendaronnon (“People of the Rock”), 299,
Andros, Edmund, 355 300, 301
Anglo-Dutch Wars, 426–427, 645 Argall, Samuel, 490
Anglo-Spanish War, 217 Argentina, 363–364, 367, 409, 410, 573,
Angola, 30–32 575
French law in, 367 Arkwright, Richard, 164, 318
independence movement, 32 Arminianism, 667
peoples of, 30 Arminian theology, 663
and Portugal, 30–31 Arnold, Benedict, 387
slave trade, 30 Aro people, 66
Animal cruelty, 670 Articles of Confederation (U.S.), 26
Animals, fossilized remains, 179 Asbury, Francis, 663
Anne, Queen of England, 437, 489, 490, Asceticism, 623
491 Ashanti, 220
Anthony, Susan B., 686 Asian Development Bank, 420
Anthropology, and Darwin, 179 Asiento Treaty, 640
Antilles Current, 276 Astrolabes, 569
Antinomians, 305, 306 Atahualpa, 157, 158, 190, 309, 312
Anti-Semitism, 346–350 Ataronchronon (“People of the Marshes”),
Anti-Slavery Convention of American 299
Women, 685–686 Atlantic Creoles, 14, 34–36, 35–36, 292,
Antonio, Dom, 205 439, 454
António, Prior of Crato, 46 Atlantic North Equatorial Current,
Antônio Conselheiro (Anthony the 276
Counselor), 57 Atlantic Ocean, 36–40
Antonio I, King of Kongo, 353 as bridge between peoples, 38
Apalachees, 442 and commerce, 37–39
An Apology for True Christian Divinity empire building, 38–39
(Barclay), 535 first crossings, 37
Aponte, José Antonio, 587 geography of, 36–37
Aponte Rebellion of 1812, 587 Middle Passage, 39–40
Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in opening of, 37
1829 (Walker), 3 slavery, 39–40
714 INDE X
Atlantic slave trade, 40–45 Azores, 45–48, 155

abolition movement, 43–44 Aztec calendar, 50
abolition of, 6, 9–12 Aztec Empire, 48–52. See also
Angola, 30 Moctezuma II
Bahia, 56 agriculture, 50–51
Benin, 62 and Cortés, 157, 161–162
Bermuda, 63 defeat of, 654
Bight of Biafra, 65–66 Díaz del Castillo’s account of conquest,
Bordeaux, 83 192, 193
Brazil, 92, 93 and Diego, 344
Cape Verde Islands, 114 expansion of, 51–52
Cartagena de Indias, 118 gold and silver, 273–274
and coffee, 143 map, 48
Columbian Exchange, 151 migration of, 49–50
commemoration of, 471 military society, 49
diseases, 195–196 mythology, 50, 540
Dutch Atlantic, 207, 208–209 political organization of, 50
early opposition, 10 politics and economics of, 49
Elmina, 218–219, 220 and race, 545
expansion of, 10 Spanish conquest, 49, 52
French Revolution, 263 Tenochtitlán, 50, 161–162, 198, 199,
Great Britain, 2, 42–43, 100–101, 216 623–625
Haitian Revolution, 283 trade, 50
indentured servants, 315–316 Triple Alliance, 48, 49, 50, 51, 397–398
international law, 369
Jefferson, 336 Bacon, Nathaniel, Sr., 54, 315
Kingdom of Kongo, 352–353 Bacon, Roger, 122
London, 375–376 Bacon, Sir Francis, 16, 53–55, 227
mercantilism, 40–41 Bacon’s Rebellion, xx, 315, 589, 692
Middle Passage, 11 The Bagnios of Algiers (Cervantes), 325
Ouidah, 469–471 Bahamas, 154
overview of, 5 Bahia, 55–58
Portuguese Empire, 41–42 Bahian Conspiracy, 56
Puerto Rico, 527 Bailyn, Bernard, xxii
and rice, 552–553 Baker, John, 137
Royal African Company, 559–562 Baker’s Chocolate, 137
Senegambia, 579 Bakongo people, 30
smuggling, 604–605 Bambara ethnic group, 453
Spain, 41–42 Banking, 420
triangle trade map, 41 Bank of England, 318, 343
and women, 683–684 Bantu people, 30
Attignaouantan (“People of the Bear”), 299 Baptist War, 2, 331
Attingneenongnabac (“People of the Cord”), Barbadian Slave Code of 1661, 592
299, 300 Barbados, 58–60, 588, 591–592
Auld, Thomas and Sophia, 200 Barbary captivity narrative, 326
Authentic Narrative (Riley), 326 Barbary States, 325
Autobiography (Franklin), 253, 254 Barbosa, Rui, 57
Ayllón, Lucas Vázquez de, 392–393 Barclay, Robert, 535
INDE X
715
Bartholdi, Fredric-Auguste, 447 Bento, Antonio, 8

Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Berkeley, George, 374
345–346 Bermuda, 63–65
Bastille, storming of, 260 Bermúdez, Juan de, 63
Battle of Ackia, 134 Bernard, Mary, 671
Battle of Austerlitz, 432 Bernardino, Juan, 654
Battle of Boyacá, 77 Béthencourt, Jean de, 111–112
Battle of Bushy Run, 494 Biassou, George, 381
Battle of Cajamarca, 157, 190 Bible, 81
Battle of Carabobo, 77 Bible translations, 516
Battle of Centla, 197 Biblicism, 238, 239–240
Battle of Covadonga, 550 Bienville, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur
Battle of Creête-à-Pierrot, 284 de, 378
Battle of Fallen Timbers, 134, 476, 619, Bifocal glasses, 254
626 Bight of Biafra, 65–67
Battle of Gravelines, 606 Bight of Bonny. See Bight of Biafra
Battle of Great Bridge, 386 Bilal ibn Rabah, 389
Battle of Holy Ground, 139 Bimetallism, 419, 420
Battle of Horseshoe Bend, 139, 170–171 Biological immunity, 157
Battle of Junín, 78 Bismarck, Otto von, 437
Battle of Kemp’s Landing, 386 Bituriges Vivisci, 82
Battle of Kirina, 389 Black Atlantic, 67–70
Battle of Mabila, 191 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Battle of Maipú, 574 Consciousness (Gilroy), 67, 68
Battle of Mbwila, 353 Black Bart, 484
Battle of New Orleans, 139, 454 Blackburn, Robin, 487
Battle of Oriskany, 465 Black Code, 141–143
Battle of Pamplona, 337 Black Death plague, 346
Battle of Praia Bay, 47 Black Legend, 70–73, 155
Battle of Puente de Calderón, 293 The Black Legend and the Historical Truth
Battle of Rorke’s Drift, 280 (Juderías), 70–71
Battle of Signal Hill, 585 The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in
Battle of Stamford Bridge, 653 the Old World and the New (Gibson),
Battle of the Atlantic, 83 71
Battle of the Maule River, 311 Black Seminoles, 247
Battle of the Thames, 621, 627 Bligh, William, 176
Battle of Tippecanoe, 620 Blom, Frans, 460–461
Battle of Yorktown, 23 Bloodless Revolution, 229
Bay Psalm Book, 80 Blue water military strategy, 54–55
Bay State Fishing Company, 245 Bogotá, 73–75
Beaver Wars, 323, 450 Boleyn, Anne, 216, 521
Bebbington, David, 238 Bolívar, Simón, 75–79
Belgian Revolution, 19 and Bolivia, 78
Belize, 290 death of, 78
Benedict XIV, Pope, 344 early life, 75–76
Benedict XVI, Pope, 621 Enlightenment ideas, 362
Benin, 60–62, 596 in Europe, 76
Benson, Martin, 667 fight for independence, 76–77, 263, 363
716 INDE X
Bolívar, Simón (cont.) abolition of slave trade, 44–45, 95

influence of, 78 Atlantic slave trade, 92, 93
Jefferson, influence of, 336 Azores, 47
Napoleon I, influence of, 433 Bahia, 55–58
and New Granada, 77 Catholic Church in, 57–58, 93
in Peru, 78 convents in, 128–129
as president of Gran Colombia, 77–78 Dutch Atlantic, 207
return to Venezuela, 76 French law in, 367
and San Martín, 574 gold and silver, 92, 275
Bolivia, 78, 250–251 independence, 365
Bonaparte, Joseph, 76, 433 language in, 92
Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon I migration to, 409–410
Bonny, Anne, 484, 569 and Netherlands, 210–211
Bonpland, Aimé Jacques Alexandre, 296 and Portuguese Empire, 92–95
Book of Laws (Plymouth Colony), 89 religion in, 57–58
The Book of Negroes, 386 rice, 552–554
Book of Prophecies (Columbus), 325 slave rebellions in, 95, 587–588
Books, 79–82. See also Slave narratives slavery in, 92–94
as commercial objects, 81 sugar in, 92, 495–496, 609
importance of, 79 Brazilwood, 291
as instrument of colonialism and Brébeuf, St. Jean de, 95–97, 301
religion, 79–80 Brewster, William, 87, 402
printed by early presses, 81 A Brief and True Report of the New Found
travel journals, 81–82 Land of Virginia (Harriot), 547
Bordeaux, 82–84 A Brief Compendium of Christian Doctrine
“Borderland Maroons,” 393 in the Mexican and Castillian
Boston Massacre, 25 Languages, 80
Boston Port Act (Great Britain), 25 Bright, John, 223, 224
Boston Tea Party, 17, 25, 618 British Atlantic, 98–101
Boturini Codex, 49 British Barbados, 563
Boukman, Dutty, 657 British Committee for the Relief of the
Boulton, Matthew, 319 Black Poor, 146
Bourbon Reforms, 84–86, 159, 362 British Declaration of Rights, 181
Bourne, Richard, 516 British East India Company, 25, 617
Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 572 British Empire. See Great Britain
Braddock, Edward, 584–585 British Fabian Socialists, 513
Braddock’s Defeat (Deming), 585 British General Emancipation of 1834, 59
Bradford, Alden, 400 British Royal Africa Company, 442
Bradford, William, 86–89, 400, 402, 403 Brodhead, Daniel, 423
Bradstreet, Anne, 89–91, 683 Brookes (slave ship), 43
Bradstreet, Simon, 89, 90 Brown, John, 4, 589
Brahe, Tycho, 122 Brûlé, Étienne, 167, 266
Brainerd, David, 215, 516–517 Bry, Theodor de, 289, 502
Brant, Joseph, 387, 465 Buchanan, James “Buck,” 631
Brazil, 92–95. See also Pernambuco; Rio de Buenos Aires, 102–104
Janeiro Bullionists, 403, 404
abolition movement in, 4–5 Burbank, Luther, 500
abolition of slavery, 8 Bureaucracies, 237
INDE X
717
Bureau of Indian Affairs, 476 Caribs, 58, 115–117, 641

Burial rituals, 302–305 Caring for Indians (Acosta), 15
Burke Act, 140 Carlos II, King of Spain, 639
Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816, 59, 588 Caro, Joseph, 347
Busy Body, 252 Carolinas, 552–554, 691–693
Butler, Benjamin F., 222 Carretta, Vincent, 232
Cartagena de Indias, 117–119
Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 105–107 Cartagena tribunal, 118
Cabot, John, 99, 132, 375 Carte Pisane of Italy, 121
Cabot, Sebastian, 53 Cartier, Jacques, 339, 449, 464, 537,
Cabo Verde Islands. See Cape Verde Islands 546
Cabral, Pedro Álvares, 55, 92, 496 Cartography, 119–123
Caciques, 224 Cartwright, Edmund, 318
Cadastral maps, 122 Caso, Alfonso, 462
Cadbury, 137 Cassava, cultivation of, 32–33
Cadillac, sieur de, 451 Cassini, Giovanni Domenico, 122
Cádiz Constitution, 363, 367 Casta System, 123–126
Café Procope, 144 Castello Plan, 446
Cahokia, 107–111 Catherine de Medici, 628
agriculture, 107–108, 110 Catherine of Aragon, 521
architecture of, 108–109 Catherwood, Frederick, 398
chunkey, 110 Catholic Church. See also Franciscans;
funeral rites, 109 Jesuits; Missionaries
Mississippian culture, 411–414 and Amsterdam, 29
mound building, 109 in Angola, 30, 31
peak of, 109 in Bogotá, 74
theories on growth of, 110 in Brazil, 57–58, 93
Cahokia Mound State Historic Site, 109 Brébeuf, 95–97
Caillié, Réné, 390 in Cartagena de Indias, 118
Cajuns, 14, 453 common-law marriages of coureurs de
Calvin, John, 238, 294, 519, 520, 528, 667 bois, 168
Calvinism, 29, 87, 400, 529, 645, 663, 667 decline of, 110–111
Campbell, Lyle, 462 Diego, 344
Campeche, 290 encomienda system, 225
Canada, 6, 410. See also New France Enlightenment, 229
Canary Current, 276 evangelization of Amerindians, 56
Canary Islands, 111–113, 297, 674 Feast of the Dead, 303–304
Cannibalism, 116 in France and New France, 257
Canto, Violante do, 46 Henry VIII, 521
Cão, Diogo, 30, 351 Huguenots, 294–295
Cápac, Huayna (Inca emperor), 158 Hurons, 300–301
Cape Verde Islands, 113–115, 178, 206, 495 laws of, 434
Captives, requickened, 425 Maya civilization, 398
Captivity narratives, 326 Native Americans, 622
Capuchins (Franciscans), 248, 249, 251 Pueblos, 524
Carey, William, 239 in Quebec, 538
Caribbean colonies, 257–258. See also Spain, 86
specific places Vodou and, 655–656, 658–659
718 INDE X
Catholic League, 131 China, 278, 615–616, 618

Catholic women religious missionaries, Chinampas (hanging gardens), 50–51
126–130 Chocolate, 136–137, 214
Catlin, George, 456 Choctaw Removal of 1832, 195
Cayugas, 321, 323, 464, 467 Choctaws, 138–141
Cayuse of Oregon, 195 and Chickasaws, 133–134
Centennial International Exhibition of code talkers, 140
1876, 689 culture and political organization,
Cervantes, Miguel de, 325 138–139
Chahtah, 133–134 currently, 140–141
Champlain, Antoine de, 130 European contact, 139
Champlain, Samuel de, 130–133 Native American slave trade, 442, 443
Acadia, 13 Pushmataha, 139–140
Algonquins, 20, 21, 167 relocation of, 140
early life, 130–131 Choiseul, César Gabriel de, 634
and Huron, 299, 300, 449–450 Christianity, 325–327, 505–507. See also
Quebec, 538 Catholic Church; Evangelicalism;
surrender of, 96 Evangelization of indigenous people;
Chaplin, Charlie, 447 Missionaries; Protestant missionaries;
Charlemagne of France, 550, 651 Protestant Reformation
Charles, Archduke of Austria, 639 Christian Perfection and Serious Call
Charles I, King of England, 54, 332 (Law), 661
Charles I, King of Spain, 5, 105 Christian’s Pattern (à Kempis), 661
Charles II, King of England, 144, 265, 330, Christophe, Henri, 286, 383, 572
375, 446, 530 Chronicle of Peru (León), 499
Charles III, King of Spain, 84, 85, 86, 345, Chunkey, 110
634 Church, Benjamin, 355, 356
Charles IV, King of Spain, 362 Churchman, Walter, 136
Charleston, 295–296, 393 Church of England, 349, 400, 521–522,
Charles Town, 691–693 528–530, 663, 671, 677
Charles V, King of Spanish Habsburg, 53, Church of God in the Holy Spirit, 422
74, 157, 162–163, 344, 360–361, 606, Church of New England, 306
643, 647 Cicé, Jérôme Marie Champion de, 228
Charles VII, King of France, 366 Circumnavigation of the globe, 41, 176,
Charnay, Claude-Joseph-Désiré, 461 177, 204, 216
Charter of Massachusetts Bay, 677 City and local maps, 122
Chart of the Gulf Stream, 277 “City on the Hill” (Winthrop), 678
Chavez, Hugo, 78 Civil law, 366–367
Chemical manufacturing, 319 Civil Rights Movement (U.S.), 221, 476
Cherokee Nation, 443 Civil War, U.S., 4, 6, 7
Cherokees, 171, 422, 424, 691–693 and Bermuda, 64
Chicago, 689–690 Choctaws, 140
Chickasaws, 133–135, 442, 443, 692 and cotton, 166
Chiefdoms of Mississippian culture, events leading to, 221–222
412–413 and Louisiana, 379
Chikasah, 133–134 and New Orleans, 454–455
Child, Lydia Maria, 685 Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 624
Chile, 251, 364, 573, 574 Claiborne, Ferdinand, 139
INDE X
719
Clapham Sect, 2, 670 effect on Africa and Asia, 151

Clare of Assisi, 249 encomienda system, 149
Clarkson, Thomas, 6, 10, 11, 231 gold and silver, 150
The Classic of Tea (Lu), 616 herd animals, 150
Claver, St. Pedro, 118 military weapons and technology, 152
Clay, Henry, 147, 221, 222 Native Americans, 150–152
Clemens, Joseph, 640 slavery, 150
Clement VIII, Pope, 143 Columbus, Christopher, xvii–xviii,
Clifton, Richard, 86–87 152–156
Climatic zonal maps, 120 Canary Islands, 112
Clinton-Sullivan Campaign of 1779, chocolate, 136
468 as a conquistador, 157
Cobden, Richard, 223 death of, 153, 155–156
Cobo, Bernabé, 499 early life, 152, 153
Coca leaves, 501 encomienda system, 124
Cochineal insects, 112 explorations of, 37–38, 234
Cochrane, Thomas, 574 and Franciscans, 250
Cod, 243–244, 245, 257 funding, 153–154, 237
Code Noir, 141–143, 258, 592, 656 gold and silver, 274
Code talkers, 140 impact of, 156
Codex 1548, 654 introduction of the potato, 499
Codfish, 243–244 on Islam, 325
Coelho, Duarte, 480–481 in Jamaica, 329
Coffee, 143–146, 209 and Puerto Rico, 526
Coffeehouses, 143–146 and race, 543
Coke, Thomas, 663 Saint-Dominque/Haiti, 570
Colbert, George, 135 trade winds, 632
Colbert, James, 135 Trinidad, 641
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 167, 404, voyages, 154–155
450–451 Columbus Day, 156
Colbert, Levi, 135 Comanches, 442
Colbert, William, 135 Commerce. See also Columbian Exchange;
Colden, Cadwallader, 322 Encomienda system; Fur trade;
Cold War, 439 Mercantilism
College of Philadelphia, 253 Amsterdam, 29
Colombia, 250. See also Bogotá Atlantic Ocean, 37–39
Colombia, Republic of Greater, 77 Atlantic slave trade, 40–45
Colonialism, Hakluyt on, 287 Bahia, 56
The Colonial Period in Latin American Benin, 62
History (Gibson), 71 Bermuda, 63–65
Colonization, Gilroy on, 69 Bight of Biafra, 66
Colonization movement, 53–55, 79, Bordeaux, 83
146–148, 370 Buenos Aires, 103
Colossal heads (Olmec), 459–461 Canary Islands, 112
Colt, Samuel, 689 Cape Verde Islands, 113–114
Columbian Exchange, 149–152 circle of trade pattern, 406
agriculture, 150 contraband trade, 118–119
Columbus, 154 Dutch Atlantic, 206–209
720 INDE X
Commerce (cont.) lesser-known, 159

Elmina, 218–220 motivations, 312
in French Atlantic, 256, 257 technological innovation, 157
Great Britain, 100–101 Considerations Touching a War with Spain
and joint-stock companies, 342–343 (Bacon), 54
London, 376–377 Constitution, United States, 254
Maya civilization, 396 Constitutional Act of 1791, 539
New Amsterdam/New York, 446–447 Constitution of 1891 (Brazil), 57
New Orleans, 454 Constitution of the Republic of Texas, 6
Olmec civilization, 463 Constitution of the Vermont Republic, 6
Pequot War, 477–478 Consulate (France), 263
Plymouth colony, 89 Continental Army, 26
in Portuguese Empire, 497 Continental Association, 630
Yamasee War, 691–693 Continental Blockade, 83
Commercial law, 368 Continental Congress, 182
Commercial Revolution, 419 Continental System, 432–433, 438
Committee of Public Safety, 261 Contraband trade, 118–119
Common law, 367–368 Contreras, Pedro Moya de, 648
Common Sense (Paine), 26, 181, 189 Convento de Corpus Christi, 127
Communist Manifesto (Marx), 320, 439 Conventuals (Franciscans), 249
Compagnie de Guinée, 580 Conversionism, 238, 239
Compagnie de la Nouvelle France, 538 Conversos, 346–347
Company for Propagation of the Gospel Cook, James, 266
(CPG), 516 Cooper, Ashley, 372
Company of Grão Para and Maranhão, 579 Cooper, Polly, 465
Company of Jesus, 337 Copernicus, Nicolas, 122
Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, Copley Medal, 253
562 Coral reefs, 179
Company of New France, 13 Cordoba, Hernandez de, 395
Company of Royal Adventurers of England Coriolis Effect, 276
Trading into Africa, 559, 560 Corker, Thomas, 560
Company of the Indies, 415 Corn, 499
Company of the West, 415 Coronado, Francisco, 523
Comparative advantage, 407 Corpus Juris Civilis, 434
Compass, invention of, 236 Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions
Compromise of 1850, 4, 221 Program, 398
Concerning the End for which God Created Corregedores, 367
the World (Edwards), 214 Cort, Henry, 318
Confessions (Rousseau), 558 Cortelyou, Jacques, 446
Congress of Vienna, 369, 438 Cortés, Hernán, xviii, 160–163
Conquest of Grenada (Dryden), 456 Aztec Empire, 52, 156–157, 161–163
Conquistadors, xviii, 156–160. See also chocolate, 136
specific people and Díaz del Castillo, 192
Almagro, 159 early life, 160
Alvarado, 159 in Hispaniola and Cuba, 160
biological immunity, 157 impact of, 163
Cortés and Pizarro, 156–158 indigenous translators, 157–158, 161,
impact of, 159–160 197, 198–199
INDE X
721
Maya civilization, 397 Creoles. See Atlantic Creoles

and Moctezuma II, 418 Criollos, 362–363
other expeditions, 163 Critique and Crisis (Koselleck), 17
and Veláquez, 160, 163 Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, 222–223
wine, 674 Crompton, Samuel, 164, 318
in Yucatan, 161–162 Cromwell, Oliver, 99, 329–330, 349, 530
Cortés, Martín, 198, 199 Crown law, 366
Cortes of Cádiz, 433 Crucicentrism, 238, 240
Cosa, Juan de la, 132 Cruz, Juana Inés de la, 128
Costa, Mathieu de, 68 “Crypto-Jews,” 347
Costa Cabral, Queen of Portugal, 47 Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851,
Costa Rica, 367 686–688
Cotton, 163–166 Cuauhtémoc, Emperor of Aztec Empire,
and Civil War, 166 52, 198, 417
demand for, 165 Cuba, 85, 160, 172–174, 564, 587
Great Britain, 164–165 Cuffee, Paul, 147
and slavery, 165–166, 594 Cuitláhuac, 417
spinning of, 164 Cullen, Henry, 77
Cotton gin, 165 Cullen, Susanna, 232
Cotton, John, 305–306, 671, 672 “Cult of domesticity,” 684
Council for New England, 89, 402 Culture. See also Music; Poetry
Council of the Indies, 193 Acadians, 13
Council of Trent, 127, 338 Afro-Brazilian, 55
A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 631 Amsterdam, 29
Counter-Reformation, 338–339 Atlantic Creoles, 34
Coureurs de Bois, 167–169, 451 Black Atlantic, 68
Coutume de Paris, 366 and books, 79
Covenant of Grace, 305 Buenos Aires, 103
Covenant of Works, 305 Choctaws, 138
Crawfurd, John, 456–457 gender norms, 265
Creek Civil War, 476 of Inca Empire, 311–312
Creek Confederacy, 169, 171, 693 in Portuguese Empire, 496
Creek Constitution, 443 Currency, 420–421
Creek Indians, 169–172 Currency Act (Great Britain), 23
American Revolution, 169 Curtin, Philip, 487
Battle of Horseshoe Bend, 170–171 Curtis Act, 140
and Jefferson, 170 Cusco, 311
land cessions, 169–170 Cusseta Treaty, 171
and Moravians, 422 Customary laws, 434
Native American slave trade, 442
overview of, 169 Dahomey, Kingdom of, 470–472,
Red Sticks, 170–171 596–597, 695–696
relocation of, 171 Dale, Thomas, 332, 490
slavery, 170 d’Almada, André Alvares, 392
and Spain, 169–170 d’Ambault, Jacques Duchesneau de la
Yamasee War, 692, 693 Doussinière et, 168
Creek National Council, 169–170 Dampier, William, 114, 175–177, 509
Creek War of 1813–1814, 170–171 Dapper, Olfert, 62
722 INDE X
Darby, Abraham, 318 Democratic constitutionalism, 372

Darwin, Charles, 175, 177–180 De Mons, Pierre Dugua, 132
David, Jacques-Louis, 431 Descartes, René, 227, 229
Dávila, Pedro Arias, 190 A Description of New England (Smith),
Davis, John, 99 601
Davis, Robert C., 325 De Soto, Hernando, 112, 134, 139,
Davison, William, 402 189–192
Dawes Act of 1887, 140 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 286, 383, 439,
Day, Stephen, 80 572, 589–590
Declaration of Independence, 180–185 “The Destruction of the Tea at Boston”
adoption of, 182 (lithograph), 25
drafting, 181–182 Deule, Jean de la, 250
and Franklin, 254 Dhimmi system, 326
functions of, 182–183 Dias, Bartolomeu, 153
impact of globally, 183–184 Diaz, Porfirio, 686
and Jefferson, 26, 336 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 162, 192–194,
as a model, 183–184 197, 312
overview of, 180–181 Díaz de Solís, Juan, 102
Declaration of Paris, 369 d’Iberville, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur, 378
Declaration of Sentiments, 184, 185 Dickens, Charles, 377
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Dickinson, John, 23–24
the Citizen, 185–189 Diderot, Denis, 557
contributions of, 185–186 Diego, Juan, 654, 655
French law, 366 Diogo I, King of Portugal, 353
French Revolution, 260 Diouf, Sylviane, 392
Haitian Revolution, 284 Diplomatic Revolution, 582
impact of globally, 188–189 Directory (France), 262–263
influence of, 263 A Discourse Concerning the Western Planting
and Jefferson, 335 (Hakluyt), 288
Latin American wars of independence, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
362 (Rousseau), 557, 558
liberty, 187–188 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Paine, influence on, 189 (Rousseau), 456, 557, 558
preamble, 186, 187 Discoverie of Guiana (Raleigh), 547, 548
public defense and representation, 188 Disease, 194–197
and Rousseau, 559 Atlantic slave trade, 195–196
Declaration of the Rights of Woman (Gouges), European exploration, 237
188 humors, 194
Declaratory Act (Great Britain), 24 ideas of slaves and Native Americans,
Defence of the Seven Sacraments (Henry 194–195
VIII), 521 inoculations, 196
Defoe, Daniel, 177 military and political history, effect on,
De Institutione bene vivendi (Marulić), 338 196
DeLancey, James, 384 Oneidas, 465
Delany, Martin, 68 in Portuguese Empire, 496
Delaware Indians, 423, 492–493 purposeful exposure of Native
De La Warr, Lord, 332 Americans, 195, 493
Deming, Edwin Willard, 585 Diversity of life, 180
INDE X
723
Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of Dutch Reformed Church, 29, 645. See also
America (Hakluyt), 81, 288 Calvinism
Dollar, U.S., 420 Dutch Republic. See Dutch Atlantic;
Domínguez, Miguel, 293 Netherlands; United Provinces of the
Dominican Republic, 202, 285 Netherlands
Doña Marina, 161, 192, 193, 197–199, Dutch Revolt, 28, 206, 643
685. See also Malinche Dutch West India Company, 209–211
Don Quixote (Cervantes), 325 Bahia, 56
Dorantes, Estaban de, 68 charter of, 99, 445
Dorantes de Carranza, Andrés de, 106 chocolate, 136
Douart, Jacques, 301 and Iroquois, 464
Douglas, Stephen A., 221 joint-stock companies, 342
Douglass, Frederick, 200–203 and Judaism, 348
abolition movement, 4, 7, 185, 202–203 Native American slave trade, 442
early life, 200–201 Dyer, Mary, 305–306
escape from slavery, 201
Great Britain, 201–202 Eanes, Gil, 46, 495–496
writings of, 200 East Greenland Current, 277
Drake, Sir Francis, xviii, 203–205 East India Company, 28, 98, 387, 603,
Cartagena de Indias, 118 618, 644
explorations of, 98 Economic theory, 415. See also
as privateer, 216, 218, 483, 508–509, Mercantilism
606 Ecuador, 77–78, 250
and tobacco, 629 Edict of Fontainebleau, 295
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 4 Edict of Nantes, 294–295
Dreyfus, Alfred, 349 Edo people, 60
Dryden, John, 456 Edward, King of England, 216
Dual leadership, 397 Edward, the Black Prince, 83
Du Bois, W. E. B., 68 Edwards, Jonathan, 213–215, 239
Dudley, Dorothy Yorke, 90 Edward VI, King of England, 528
Dudley, Thomas, 89, 90 Eiffel Tower, 687, 689
Dunmore, Lord, 386 Eighty Years’ War, 606
Du Pont, François Gravé, 131–132 Ekholm, Gordon, 460
Duran, Diego, 161 Eleanor of Aquitaine, 82–83
Duston, Hannah, 356 Eliot, John, 81, 505–507, 515–516, 517
Dutch Atlantic, 206–209 Eliot Tracts, 516
early expansion, 206 Elizabeth I, 216–218
and Great Britain, 208 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 643
overview of, 206 Atlantic slave trade, 42
settlements, 206, 209 Azores, 46
silver, sugar, and African slaves, 207, and Drake, 205, 508
208–209 and Dutch Independence War, 606
and warfare, 206–207 and Hawkins, 376
West India Company, 206–208 and Puritans, 529
Dutch Curaçao, 588 and Raleigh, 342, 546–547
Dutch East India Company, 99, 144, 206, ventures of, 98
342, 348, 444, 683 Zúñiga-Sotomayor’s plan to overthrow,
Dutch Independence War, 606 605
724 INDE X
Elmina, 218–221 political legacy, 229

Eltis, David, 487 Rousseau, 557–559
Emancipation Proclamation, 221–224 transformations from, 227–228
abolition movement, 4 Enrique III, King of Castile, 111
and Lincoln, 147, 221–223 Equiano, Olaudah, 230–233
overview of, 221 abolition movement, 231
reactions to, 224 autobiography of, 10
wording of, 223–224 capture of, 232
Emanuel, Max, 640 early life, 230
Embargo Act (U.S.), 336 on Middle Passage, 11
Emigrant Trade, 577 as part of Black Atlantic, 68–69
Emile (Rousseau), 558–559 significance of, 232–233
The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the slavery experience, 230–231
Tuileries (David), 431 Erie Canal, 447
Enciclopedia Guadalupana, 654 Erikson, Leif, 153, 652
Enclosure movement, 288 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Encomenderos, 125 (Locke), 372, 373
Encomienda System, 224–226 Essex-Raleigh Expedition, 46–47
in Bogotá, 74 Estevanico, 106
and Cortés, 160 Ethiopian Regiment, 386
and Díaz del Castillo, 192–193 European Diaspora, 409
and Las Casas, 359, 360 European exploration, 233–238. See also
overview of, 124 specific explorers
as part of Columbian Exchange, 149 agriculture, 237–238
Pueblo Revolt, 524 artillery, 236–237
The End for which God Created the World British, 235
(Edwards), 215 communications and administrative
Engels, Freidrich, 439 systems, 237
English Civil War, 59, 516, 530 consequences, 237–238
English Glorious Revolution, 17 Iberian Advantage, 233–234
Enlightened Revolutions, 361 map of, 234
Enlightenment, 226–229. See also Locke, motivations, 235
John overview of, 233–234
Bacon, 55 Portuguese, 234–235
beginnings of, 227 ship design and effectiveness, 236
Bolívar, 76 Spanish, 235
cartography, 122 tools and knowledge, 235–236
coffeehouses, 146 Evangelicalism, 238–241
cross-fertilization of ideas, 228 activism, 240
development of, 229 biblicism, 239–240
disease, understanding of, 194 conversionism, 239
in France, 186 crucicentrism, 240
and Latin American wars of foundations of, 238
independence, 362 in Great Britain, 238–239
and liberation, 227 and Luther, 238
Luther, 227 overview of, 238–239
nationalism, 437 Evangelization of indigenous people
overview of, 226–227 Acosta, 15–16
INDE X
725
Algonquin Bible, 81 Ferdinand VI, King of Spain, 84, 274,

in Bahia, 56 551
and books, 80 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 362–363,
Brébeuf, 95–97 364
Catholic women religious missionaries, Feudalism, 434
126–130 Figueiredo, Cipriano de, 46
Díaz del Castillo, 312 “Filles du roi,” 683
and encomienda system, 225 Filmer, Robert, 374
in Florida, 246–247 Financial crises, 420
Franciscans, 250–251 Financial institutions, 420
Hakluyt, 288 Financial Revolution, 343
Huron, 300–301 Finley, Robert, 147
Jesuits, 339–340 Finney, Charles G., 239
Maya civilization, 398 First Anglo-Powhatan War, 504, 505
as motivation for explorations, 235 First Barbary War, 335
Praying Indians, 505–507 First Confiscation Act (U.S.), 222
Tekakwitha, 622 First Continental Congress, 25
Wendats, 304 First French Republic, 261
Wesley, 662 First Industrial Revolution, 317
Williams, 671 First Maroon War, 393
Evans, George Henry, 185 First Nations. See Indigenous people;
Evans, Oliver, 319 Native Americans
Evolution, theory of, 179–180 First Order of Friars Minor, 248, 249,
Eware the Great, 62 250
Eweka, 60–61 First Party System, 335
Exposition Universelle, 688–689 First Treatise of Government (Locke), 374
Expulsion of 1755, 13 Fishing and fisheries, 243–246
Exquemelin, Alexandre, 509 cod, 243–244, 245, 257
Ezili Dantor, 657 crises in, 245
fisherman, 568
Factory system, 319–321 fishing nets, 244
A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of freshwater fisheries, 244
God (Edwards), 213 industrialization of, 244–245
Falkland Islands, 179 overfishing, 245
Fanon, Frantz, 68 overview of, 243
Farnese, Alexander, 605 technological innovations, 244, 245
Fatiman, Cécile, 657 Fitch, Timothy, 664
Feast of the Dead. See Huron-Wendat Five Civilized Tribes, 133, 135, 138, 140
Feast of the Dead “Five Solas,” 522
Feathered Serpent, 396 Flamingos, 114
Federalist Party, 335 Flash of the Spirit (Thompson), 68
Felipe V, King of Spain, 639, 640 Florida, 246–248, 336, 692
Fell, Margaret, 533 Folger, Timothy, 277
Feminism, 91, 307 Foljambe, Joseph, 317
Fenn, Elizabeth, 493 Fonseca, Manuel Deodoro da, 57
Ferdinand II of Aragon, 153–154, 155, Food production, 317
337 Forasteros, 503
Ferdinand V, King of Spain, 636 Forced migration, 408, 410
726 INDE X
Fort Duquesne, 583–584 as a diplomat, 254–255, 334

Fort Nassau, 264 early life, 252
Fort Orange, 22, 445 education, 252–253
Fort Ross, 266 and Enlightenment, 228
Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, 209 inventions, 254
Fox, George, 533, 534 overview of, 251–252
Fox Wars, 451 as a philosopher, 253
France. See also French Atlantic; as a scientist, 253–254, 277
New France as a statesman, 254
abolition movement, 1 on Whitefield, 668
abolition of slavery, 7–8 and William Franklin, 384
and American Revolution, 26–27 Franklin, William, 384
anti-Semitism in, 349 Franklin Stove, 254
Canary Islands, 111–112 Frederick III, King of Prussia, 639–640
Code Noir, 141–143 Frederick the Great, 584
and coffee, 144–145 Freedom
Enlightenment in, 227 ambivalence of, 201
and Franklin, 254–255 as universal value, 19–20
fur trade, 167–168 Freedom of the Will (Edwards), 214, 215
and Haitian Revolution, 284–287 Free people of color, 142, 146–148,
Huguenot migration from, 294–295 200–201, 284–286, 386. See also
and Huron, 299–300 Gens de Couleur; Maroons
invasions of Spain and Portugal, Frémont, John C., 222
362–363 French and Indian War. See Seven Years’
and Iroquois, 323 War
King William’s War, 354–357 French Atlantic, 255–259
and Louisiana, 378–379 Caribbean colonies, 257–258
and mercantilism, 405–406 decline of, 258–259
and Mississippi Bubble, 414–416 economic activities, 257
nationalism, 438 factor that shaped, 256–257
rivalry with Great Britain, 451–452 founding of New France, 255
and Senegambia, 579–580 and gens de couleur, 269–271
wars with Great Britain, 258 geography of, 255
La France Juive, 349 and Great Britain, 256
Francis, the Duke of Anjou, 643 under Louis XIV, 256
Franciscans, 248–251 significance of, 256
in Mexico, 655 slavery in, 258
missionary work, 249–251 French Enlightenment, 186
orders of, 248–249 French Guiana, 394
Francis of Assisi, 248–249 French Revolution, xxi, 17, 259–264
Franco, Solomon, 349 Atlantic slave trade, 263
Franco-Dutch War, 208 Bordeaux, 83
François I, King of France, 449 compared to American Revolution, 18
Franco-Prussian War, 83, 261 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
Franco-Scottish alliance, 98 the Citizen, 185–189
Franklin, Benjamin, 251–255 Franco-Prussian War, 261
American Revolution, 24 influence of, 283–284
Declaration of Independence, 181 and Napoleon I, 262–263, 429
INDE X
727
Napoleonic Code, 434 Garay, Juan de, 102

nationalism, 438 García de Céspedes, Andrés, 53
origins of, 259–260 García Icazbalceta, Joaquín, 345
overview of, 259 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 224
popular violence, 261 Garrido, Juan, 159
Rousseau, 559 Garrison, William Lloyd, 3–4, 7, 148
significance of, 263 Gates, Thomas, 332
The Terror, 261–262 Gender norms, 265
French Society for the Abolition of Gender roles, 684
Slavery, 8 General Allotment Act of 1884 (U.S.),
Friars Minor Conventuals, 249 468
Friendly Society of Sierra Leone, 147 General Bank, 415
Frobisher, Martin, 99 General Colonization Law, 410
Fronde Rebellion, 83 General Historie of Virginia (Smith), 490
Frontenac, Count de, 450 General José de San Martín Proclaims the
Fry, Joseph, 137 Independence of Peru, July 28, 1821
Fugitive Slave Act, 7 (Lepiani), 364
Fugitive Slave Law, 4, 222 The Generall Historie of Virginia,
Fuller, Andrew, 239, 240 New-England, and the Summer Isles
Funeral rites, 109, 302–305 (Smith), 599
Fur trade, 264–267 Geneva Convention, 369
Algonquins, 21–22 Genovese, Eugene, 488
beginnings of, 264 Gens de couleur, 269–271
colonial competition, 265 identity and community, 270
coureurs de bois, 167–168 legal and social status, 269–270
Dutch, 210 military service, 269–270
European exploration and settlement, in Saint-Dominque, 284–286
265–266 Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie.
Huron, 301 See West India Company (WIC)
Iroquois, 265, 323 Geography (Ptolemy), 236
Native Americans, 264–265 Geology, and Darwin, 179
New Amsterdam/New York, 445 George III, King of England, 228, 510,
New France, 255, 257, 449, 450–451 539, 634
Oneidas, 464–465 Georgia, 247, 422
overview of, 264 Gerard of Cremona, 122
on Pacific Coast, 266 German Civil Code, 436
Spanish New Mexico, 266 German Coast Uprising, 589
Germanus, Nicholas, 121
Gage, Thomas, 493 Ghana, 271–273
Gaha, Basorun, 696 Ghost Dance, 476
Galápagos Islands, 175, 176, 180 Gibbs Hill Lighthouse, 64
Galápagos tortoises, 176 Gibson, Charles, 71
Galen, 194 Gibson, Edmund, 667
Galilei, Galileo, 122 Gilbert, Humphrey, 217, 547
Gallay, Alan, 442 Gil de Castro, José, 76
Gallwey, H. L., 62 Gilroy, Paul, 67, 68–70
Gama, Vasco de, 153, 347 Globalization, xxii, 151
Ganz, Joachim, 349 Glória, Maria da, 47
728 INDE X
Glorious Revolution, 24, 372–373, 374, abolition of slave trade, 5–6, 10, 11–12,
575 43–44, 101, 593
Gnaddenhutten, 423–424 American Revolution, 23–24
Gold and silver, xviii, 273–276 Atlantic slave trade, 42–43, 100–101, 216
Amsterdam, 28–29 Azores, 46–47
bimetallism, 419 Barbados, 58–60
in Bogotá, 74 Benin, 62
in Brazil, 92 Bermuda, 63–64
Columbian Exchange, 150 Bight of Biafra, 66–67
Columbus, 154, 155 Bolívar, 76
De Soto, 190 Cartagena de Indias, 118
Dutch Atlantic, 208–209 coffee, 143–144
Elmina, 219 colonial settlements, 99–100
mercantilism, 404 colonization movement, 146
mining industry, 274–275 commerce, 100–101
motivations of explorers, 312 common law, 368
Native Americans, 273–274, 275 cotton production, 164–165
North America, 275–276 Cuba, 173
Portuguese Empire, 273, 275 Douglass, 201–202
Potosí, 501–503 under Elizabeth I, 216–218
search for, 98–99 Enlightenment in, 227
South America, 274 evangelicalism in, 238–239
Spain, 274–275 explorations, 98–99
Golden Age of Atlantic piracy, 483, explorations of, 235
484–485. See also Piracy in Florida, 247
Golden Law (Brazil), 8, 95 formation of, 98
Golden Legend, 72–73 France, 256, 258
Golden Legend (Voragine), 337 Franklin, 254
Gómara, Francisco López de, 192, 193 hardwoods, 291
Gomes, Diogo, 391 indentured servants, 314–316
Gomez, Estevan, 99 Industrial Revolution, 317–320
Gomez, Philip, 581 Iroquois, 323
Gookin, Daniel, 517 Jamaica, 329–330
Gorée, 580 Judaism, 348, 349
Gorham, John, 584 King William’s War, 354–357
Gorton-Pew Fisheries Company, 245 Liberia, 371
Gouges, Olympe de, 188 Maroon communities, 393
Grafton, Anthony, 455 mercantilism, 40–41, 405–406
Gran Colombia, 78 nationalism, 437–438
Grand Derangement, 13 Netherlands, 210
“Grand Design” (Dutch), 210 New Amsterdam/New York, 446–447
Grand marronage, 392, 393, 394 Pacific Coast, 266
Graphic triangulation methods, 120 Pequot War, 477–479
Great Awakening, 213–214, 239, 517, 666, piracy, 485
667, 669 plantations, 487
Great Britain. See also British Atlantic Pontiac’s War, 492–495
abolition movement, 1–2 population increase, 317
abolition of slavery, xxi, 5–6 Portugal, 216
INDE X
729
Powhatan, war with, 504–505 Habsburg Monarchy, 481

privateering, 508–510 Hadriyon VI, Pope, 681
public housing projects, 513–514 Haiti. See Saint-Dominque/Haiti
reaction to Preliminary Emancipation Haitian Revolution, 283–287
Proclamation, 223 abolition movement, 1–2
rivalry with France, 451–452 Dessalines, 286
Royal African Company, 559–562 and Emancipation Proclamation,
Senegambia, 580–581 221
Seven Years’ War. see Seven Years’ War factors in, 283
slave trade, xx French Revolution, 283–284
smuggling, 602–603 gens de couleur, 269, 284–286
Spain, 217–218 importance of, 18
tea, 617–618 influence of Jefferson, 336
tobacco, 628–629, 630 L’Ouverture, 285–286
wine, 674–675 Napoleon I, 286
Yamasee War, 691–693 nationalism, 439
Great Depression, 420 overview of, 571–572
The Great Instauration (Bacon), 53 phases of, 283–284
Great Lakes region, 244, 451. See also plantations, 488
Pontiac’s War resolution of, 287
Great Peace, 467 rum production, 564
Great Peace of Montreal, 451 slave rebellion, 284–285, 589–590
Great Persecution, 530 Vodou, 656–657
Greek Revolution, 19 Hakluyt, Richard, 81, 217, 287–289
Greeley, Horace, 222 Hakluyt Society, 288
Greene, Nathaniel, 196 Halakha law, 368
Greenland, 652–653 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 88
Gregory IX, Pope, 248 Half-King, 583
Gregory XV, Pope, 339 Halley, Edmond, 122
Grenville, George, 23 Hamilton, Alexander, 335
Grenville, Richard, 547 Hancock, John, 26, 665
Grijalva, Juan de, 192, 397 Han Dynasty, 615
Grimaldi, Jerónimo, 634 Hannon, John, 137
Grimké, Angelina Emily, 685 Hanseatic League, 368
Grimké, Sarah Moore, 685 Hardrada, Harald, King of Norway,
Grito de Dolores, 293, 364 653
Guadeloupe, 187 Hardwood, 289–291
Guanches people, 111 Hargreaves, James, 164, 318
Guerilla warfare, 159, 280 Harper’s Ferry raid, 4
Guerra, Garcia, 648 Harriot, Thomas, 289, 547
Guerrero, Vicente, 365 Harrison, Benjamin, 202
Guiana, 588 Harrison, William Henry, 476, 619, 620,
Gulf Stream, 276–278 626
Gulf Stream (Homer), 277 Hastings, Selina, 665
Gunpowder Plot, 339 Hawkins, Jane, 305
Guns, 278–281. See also Military weapons Hawkins, John, 42, 98, 204, 205, 218,
and technology 376, 508, 628–629
Gwinn, Peter, 664 Hawkins, William, 204
730 INDE X
Healy, Peter Alexander, 252 Hobsbawm, Eric, 17

Hédouville, Théodore, 285 Holy Club, 661–662, 667
Hein, Piet, 210 Holy Office of the Inquisition, 292–293
Hemings, James, 500 Holy Roman Empire, 366
Hemings, Sally, 334 Homer, Winslow, 277
Henry, Prince of Portugal, 495 Homosexuality, 569
Henry, William, 584 Hondius, Jodocus, 121
Henry II, King of England, 82–83 Honey, 609
Henry IV, King of England, 131, 294 Honorius III, Pope, 249
Henry the Navigator, 45–46, 114, 609 Hooker, Richard, 374
Henry VII, King of England, 98, 153, 216, Hopley, Sophia, 662
375 Hörnigk, Philipp von, 404
Henry VIII, King of England, 99, 216, 519, Horses, 150, 159
521, 528 Hospitality, 676
Herd animals, 150 Hottière, Julien de Montigny de la, 131
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 437 Houten, Coenraad van, 137
Heredia, Pedro de, 117 How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 447
Herjolfsson, Bjarni, 652 Huáscar, 158
Herzl, Theodor, 350 Huayna Càpac, 311
Hevelius, Johannes, 122 Hudson, Henry, 99, 206, 348, 444–445
Heyn, Piet, 207 Hudson’s Bay Company, 265
Hiawatha, 467 Hueda, Kingdom of, 470
Hicks, Elias, 536 Hugo, Victor, 224
Hidalgo, Miguel, 263, 292–294, 345, 362, Huguenots, 131, 257, 294–296
364–365, 475 Huitzilopochtli, 49, 50
Hipólita, 75 Hull, William, 620
Hippocrates, 194 Human sacrifice, 110
Hispaniola, 154–155, 160, 359, 614 “The Humble Request,” 677
Histoire de la Nouvelle France (Lescarbot), Humboldt, Alexander von, 296–298
455–456 Humboldt Current, 298
Historia del Nuevo Mundo (Cobo), 499 Hume, David, 374, 558
Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Hundred Years’ War, 98
Nueva Espana (True Account of the Hunter, David, 222
Conquest of New Spain) (Díaz del Huron, 299–302
Catillo), 192 and Algonquins, 22
Historical Account of the Black Empire of Brébeuf, 95–97
Hayti (Rainsford), 381 and coureurs de bois, 167
Historiography, 69 diseases, 301
The History of New England from 1630 to European contact, 300
1649 (Winthrop), 679 evangelization of, 300–301
History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606–1646 fur trade, 301, 449–450
(Bradford), 403 governance, 299–300
History of the Five Indian Nations and Iroquois, 265, 299, 301
Depending on the Province of overview of, 299
New-York (Colden), 322 “Huron Carol,” 96
History of the Indies (Las Casas), 225 Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead, 97, 299,
The History of the World (Raleigh), 548 302–305
Hobbes, Thomas, 227, 374, 557 Hus, Jan, 519
INDE X
731
Huss, Magnus, 675 Indigenous people, 161. See also

Hutchinson, Anne, 91, 305–307, 677 Evangelization of indigenous people;
Hutchinson, Thomas, 385, 665 Native Americans
Hutchinson, William, 305 and Cabeza de Vaca, 107
encomienda system, 124–125, 225
Iberian Advantage, 233–234 enslavement of, 93
Ibn Battuta, Mohammed, 391 and guns, 279–280
Ibn Khaldun, 389 racially mixed populations, 125–126
Iceland, 652 translators, 157–158, 197–199
Idealized femininity, 686 Industrial Revolution, 316–321
“The Idea of Atlantic History” (Bailyn), in Age of Revolutions, 17
xxii chemical manufacturing, 319
Ignatius of Loyola, 337–338, 339 and cotton, 164
Imagen de la Virgen María (Sánchez), 344 environment for, 316–317
Immigrants’ Hostel, 410 factory system, 319–321
Imperialism and food production, 317
and mercantilism, 406 in Great Britain, 317
and nationalism, 439 intellectual and democratic advances,
Inca Empire, 309–313 122
advanced civilization, 311–312 intellectual impacts, 320
agriculture, 311 in London, 376
expansion of, 310–311 metal production, 318
fall of, 312–313 mining industry, 318–319
governance, 310 overview of, 316
map of, 310 and progressivism, 511–512
mythology, 310 role of government in, 317–318
origins of, 309 social impacts, 320–321
overview of, 309 textile production, 318
and Pizarro, 157, 158 and women, 684
and race, 545 Innocent III, Pope, 249
reciprocal labor system, 501 Innocent IV, Pope, 249
ruins, 311 Innocent VIII, Pope, 680, 681
Indentured servants, 313–316 Inoculations, 196, 214
decline in numbers of, 315–316 Institoris, Henricus, 680
English migration, 314 The Institutes of the Christian Religion
overview of, 313 (Calvin), 520
runaways, 315 Inter Caetera (Alexander VI), 155, 249,
vs. slaves, 314–315 636
treatment of, 314 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
women, 684 Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa,
India, and cotton, 164 the African (Equiano), 10, 11, 230,
Indian Removal Act (U.S.), 171, 443 231–232
Indian Reorganization Act (U.S.), 140 Internationalism, 512–513
Indian Self-Determination and Education International law, 368–369
Assistance Act of 1975 (U.S.), 140 Interracial relationships, 142
Indian Trade and Non-Intercourse Act Intertropical Convergence Zone, 276
(U.S.), 466, 468 Intolerable Acts (Great Britain), 25
Indigenous maps, 122 Inuits, 37
732 INDE X
“I obey but I do not comply,” 648 James II, King of England, 559–560, 561
Ireland, 98, 99–100, 500 Jamestown, 331–333, 342, 489–490, 504,
Iron production, 318 598–600, 629
Iroquois, 321–324 James VI, King of Scotland. See James I,
and Algonquins, 22 King of England
American Revolution, 323 Jaramillo, Juan, 199
Brébeuf, 96, 97 Jaures, Jean, 349
Feast of the Dead, 302 Jay Treaty, 386
fur trade, 265, 323, 449–450 Jefferson, Martha, 334
and Great Britain, 100 Jefferson, Thomas, 333–337
and Huron, 299, 301 American Revolution, 26
map of, 322 on Bacon, 55
matrilineal heritage, 324 and Creek Indians, 170
as melting pot culture, 324 Declaration of Independence, 181–182,
migration of, 323–324 336
mourning wars, 426–427 Enlightenment, 228
myths, 322 on equality, 336
origins of, 321–322 and French fries, 500
Seven Years’ War, 323 influence of, 336
smallpox, 426 as intellectual, 333–334, 336
war captives, 324 on Locke, 372
Iroquois Confederacy, 463–466, 583, nationalism, 438
584 overview of, 333
Isabella I, Queen of Spain, 154, 155, 225, as political leader, 335
312, 337, 347, 551, 636 as president, 335–336
Islam, 325–327 role in American Revolution, 334–335
Italy, 348, 430 as slave owner, 334
Iturbide, Agustín de, 365 and slavery, 2
Iturrigaray, José, 364 Jessup, Thomas, 171
Jesuit Constitutions, 338
Jackson, Andrew, 134, 139, 170–171, The Jesuit Relations, 97, 450
222, 454 Jesuits, 337–340
Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 685 Acosta, 14
Jamaica, 329–331 and Bahia, 56
abolition movement, 2 Brébeuf, 95–97
European contact, 329 and coureurs de bois, 168
geography and topography, 329 and education, 339, 340
hardwoods, 290 emergence of, 337–338
indigenous people of, 329 expansion of, 338
Maroon community, 393–394 expulsion of, 86
piracy, 329–330 and Hurons, 300–301
slave rebellions in, 331, 588 missionary work, 339–340
slavery and sugar production, 330 and Native Americans, 622
James, C. L. R., 68 in New France, 450
James, Duke of York, 559–560 restoration of, 340
James I, King of England, 53, 54, 87, 98, role of in Church, 339
331, 339, 437, 489, 491, 548, 608, suppression of, 340
631 in U.S., 340
INDE X
733
Jewish Naturalization Act (Great Britain), Justinian Code, 366

349 Justinian I, Emperor, 434
The Jewish State (Herzl), 350
Jim Crow laws, 379–380 Ka, Sumanguru, 272
João II, King of Portugal, 155, 351, 352 Kachina religion, 524
João III, King of Portugal, 55, 353 Kalinago people, 115–116, 117
João V, King of Portugal, 275, 497 Kalina people, 115–116
João VI, King of Portugal, 47, 94, 365, 556 Kalingo faith, 116
João VI, Prince of Portugal, 56 Kalingo people, 58
Jobson, Richard, 580 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 7
John Carter Brown Library, 403 Kaufman, Terrence, 462
John II, King of Portugal, 153 Kay, John, 164, 318
John III, King of Portugal, 338, 479 Keita, Sundiata, 272
John Paul II, Pope, 346, 623 Keith, George, 536
Johnson, Andrew, 223 Kelley, Abby, 685
Johnson, Richard Mentor, 620 Kepler, Johannes, 122
Joint-stock companies, 341–343 Khoisan group, 30
Jolof Empire, 579–580 Kidd, William, 484, 508
Jonathan’s Coffeehouse, 144 Kimbundu people, 30
Jones, Christopher, 400 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 185, 221
Jones, John Paul, 483, 510 King, Robert, 231
José I, King of Portugal, 497 Kingdom of Castile, 551
Journalism, and progressivism, 512 Kingdom of Chimor, 311
The Journal of a Naturalist (Darwin), Kingdom of Cusco, 309
179 Kingdom of Kongo, 9, 151, 351–354
Juan Diego, 344–346 Kingdom of Quito, 311
Judaism, 346–350 King George’s War, 22, 357
Anti-Semitism, 346–350 King Philip’s War, xx, 474, 479, 507, 517
authors, 347–348 King William’s War, 22, 354–357, 427
and Casta System, 123 Kirkland, Samuel, 465
conversos, 346–347 Kite experiment (Franklin), 253
expulsion of, 551 Knights of Labor, 321
expulsions of, 347, 348 Knowledge, advancement of, 53
in Great Britain, 348, 349 Know-Nothing Party, 36
involvement in trade, 348–349 Knox, John, 519, 521
in Italy, 348 Kocoum, 490
Luther on, 348 Kongo. See Kingdom of Kongo
migration to United States, 350 Koselleck, Reinhart, 17
in Netherlands, 348–349 Kru people, 69
in North America, 349 Kumbi Saleh, 271–272
Sephardic Jews, 348
in Spain, 346–347 La, Joseph-François, 427
Spanish Inquisition, 347 Labisi, Alafin, 696
Juderías, Julián, 70–71 Laboulaye, Edouard de, 447
Julius II, Pope, 681 Lacrosse, 96, 139
July Revolution, 19 La Farge, Oliver, 460–461
Jumonville, Joseph Coulon de, 583 Lafayette, George Washington, 260
Junto club, 252 Lafayette, Marquis de, 228, 260, 335
734 INDE X
Lalemant, Gabriel, 97, 301 Leclerc, Victoire, 286

Lalemant, Jérôme, 97 Leclerc, Victor-Emanuel, 383
La Leyenda Negra. See Black Legend Lee, Mary, 682
Lamberville, Jacques de, 622 Lee, Richard Henry, 26, 181, 182
Landes, Jordan, 535 Lee, Robert E., 223
Language LeFlore, Greenwood, 140, 443
Acadians, 13 Legal systems, 366–369
Algonquins, 20 Arawakan, 33
in Angola, 30 civil law, 366–367
Arawakan, 32 common law, 367–368
Atlantic Creoles, 34 international law, 368–369
Bible translations, 81 Napoleonic Code, 433–436
in Brazil, 92 religious, 368
and Brébeuf, 96 Legarde, Elias, 348
indigenous translators, 157–158, 161, Legend of Wagadu, 271
197–199 Legislative Assembly (France), 261
Nahuatl, 49 Lei Áurea (Golden Law), 57
and nuns, 128, 129 Le Moyne, Jean-Baptiste, 452
Olmec civilization, 462 Lenape Indians, 446
La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de, León, Juan Ponce de, 246, 277, 526, 633
378 León, Pedro Cieza de, 499
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 71, 225, Leon X, Pope, 249
359–361, 544, 614 Leopold I, 228
Las Casas, Pedro de, 359 Leo X, Pope, 521
Latin America. See also South America Lepiani, Juan, 364
Casta System, 123–126 Lescarbot, Marc, 455–457
migration to, 408 A Letter Concerning Toleration (Locke),
nationalism, 439 372
Latin American wars of independence, “Letter from Jamaica” (Bolívar), 77
361–366. See also specific countries A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,
Bolívar, 363 Addressed to the Freeholders of Yorkshire
contributing factors, 362–363 (Wilberforce), 670
ideological inspiration, 362 Levant Company, 98
in Mexico and Brazil, 364–365 Leviathan (Hobbes), 374
Morelos, 365 Lewis and Clark Expedition, 266, 336,
overview of, 361 379
San Martín, 363–364, 573–575 Lezo, Blas de, 118
viceregal system, 650 Liberation, and Enlightenment, 227
Latin Monetary Union, 419 The Liberator, 3, 4, 7
Laveaux, Étienne, 285, 381 Liberia, 369–372
Law, John, 414–416 colonization movement, 12, 146, 147
Law, William, 661 early European contact, 369–370
The Law of Nations (Vattel), 182–183 independence of, 183, 370
Lawrence, Charles, 13 societal rifts, 370–371
Laws of Burgos (Spain), 226, 367 socioeconomic problems, 371
Laws of the Indies, 367 and sugar, 371
Lazarus, Emma, 447 Liberty, in Declaration of the Rights of
Leblanc, Nicolas, 319 Man, 187–188
INDE X
735
“Liberty Enlightening the World,” 447 coffee, 144–145

Liberty Party, 4 colonies, control of, 256
Library Company of Philadelphia, 252 “filles du roi,” 683
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass and Huguenots, 295
(Douglass), 200, 203 and New France, 450–451, 538
Life of Christ (Ludolph of Saxony), 337 Treaty of Utrecht, 639
Ligon, Richard, 59 Louis XV, King of France, 415, 634
Limpieza de Sangre (purity of blood), 123 Louis XVI, King of France
l’Incarnation, Marie (Guyart) de, 129, 450 death of, 261, 429
Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 7, 88, 147, 148, economic policy, 17
221–224 and Enlightenment, 228
Linen trade, 576–577 origins of French Revolution, 259–261,
Lisbon, Portugal, 497 438
Little Ice Age, 411, 414, 653 revolt against, 186
The Little Speech (Winthrop), 677 trial of, 262
Livingston, David, 239 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 8, 380–383
Livingston, Robert R., 181 arrest and death of, 383
Llanos, Juana Azurduy, 685 description of, 382
Lloyd, Edward, 144 early life, 380
Lloyd’s of London, 144 Haitian Revolution, 285–286
Locke, John, 55, 182, 227, 229, 334, leadership of, 381–382
372–375, 438, 557 and Napoleon I, 383, 432
Logwood, 289–290, 291 and nationalism, 439
London, 375–377, 687–688 rise of, 571–572
London Yearly Meeting, 534 slave rebellion, 381, 589–590
Lopez, Barnaby, 581 in slavery, 380–381
Louisbourg, 256 and Vodou, 656
Louise, Princess of England, 65 Lowell, Francis, 319, 320
Louisiana, 377–380 Lower Creeks, 169
Atlantic Creoles, 35–36 Loxodromic curve, 121
Civil War, U.S., 379 Loyalist Claims Commission, 386
colonization of, 378 Loyalists, 383–387
founding of, 256 Lucayans, 274
and France, 378–379 Ludolph of Saxony, 337
geography of, 377–378 Lugo, Alonso Fernández de, 112
indigenous people of, 378 Lukeni lua Nimi, 351
Jim Crow laws, 379–380 Luso-Africans, 35
Louisiana Purchase, 379 Luther, Martin, 227, 348, 519, 663
Napoleonic Code, 436 Lu Yu, 616
and Spain, 379 Lyell, Charles, 179
statehood, 379
Louisiana Purchase, 165, 336, 379, 453 MacGregor, James Drummond, 6
Louisiana Territory, 377 Machu Picchu, 310
Louis XIII, King of France, 258 Maciel, Antônio Vicente Mendes, 57
Louis XIV, King of France Mackandal, François, 394
Bordeaux, 83 Madeira, 674–675
Cartagena de Indias, 118 Madison, James, 335, 438
and Code Noir, 141, 656 Madura, Nicolas, 78
736 INDE X
Magellan, Ferdinand, 235 Haitian Revolution, 283

Magha, Kema, 272 history of, 392–393
Magnus, St. Albertus, 122 in Jamaica, 330, 393–394
Mahogany, 289–291 leaders, 394
Maize production, 107–108, 110 opposition to, 394
Malagueta pepper, 369–370 overview of, 392
Maldonado, Alonso Castillo, 106 plantations, 488
Malê Uprising, 57 slave rebellions, 586–587, 588
Mali Empire, 389–392 in South America, 394
Malinche. See Doña Marina types of, 393
Malintzin, 158 Marquette, Jacques, 340
Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Marranos, 347, 348
Witches) (Sprenger and Institoris), Martí, José, 174
680–681 Martinez, Pedro, 339
Manco Càpac, 310 Marulić, Marko, 338
Manco Inca Yupanqui, 313 Marx, Karl, 320, 439
Manifest Destiny, 323 Mary I, Queen of England, 528
El manifiesto de Cartagena (The Cartagena Mason, George, 181, 335, 467
Manifesto) (Bolívar), 77 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 80, 81, 91, 349,
Mansa Gbere Keita, 391 676, 678
Mansa Mahmud Keita, 392 Massachusetts Bay Company, 98, 237, 677,
Mansa Musa, 390–391 678
Mansa Sulayman, 391 Massachusetts Government Act (Great
Mansfield, Lord, 1, 10 Britain), 25
Manuel I, King of Portugal, 55, 61 Massasoit, 88
Maone, 341 Mass consumption, 437
Maps. See also Cartography Mather, Cotton, 515–516
Aztec Empire, 48 Matrilineal heritage, 324
Inca Empire, 310 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 633
Iroquois Confederacy, 322 Maya civilization, 395–399
by Mercator, 121 architecture of, 398–399
New World transatlantic explorations, calendar, 397, 398
234 civilization and culture, 395–396
Spanish and Portuguese colonization, conquest of, 398
636 and conquistadors, 158–159
triangle trade, 41 cultural achievements, 397
Mapuche people, 159 dual leadership, 397
Maranhão, Jerónimo de Albuquerque, 481 European contact, 397–398
Marbury, John, 305 evangelization of, 398
Maréchaussée, 270 language, 198
Maria II, Queen of Brazil, 47 origins of, 395
Mariana, Juan de, 72 political organization of, 396–397
Marian apparitions, 344–345, 654–655 ruins, 396
Maria Theresa, 228, 639 trade, 396
Maroons, 392–395 Mayflower Compact, 88, 89, 399–403
communities, 593 Mayhew, Thomas, Jr., 516
difficulty in study of, 394–395 Mazanet, Damian, 251
geographical factors, 393 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 224
INDE X
737
Mbembe, Nzinga, 351 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 277

McClellan, George B., 223 Mexican Inquisition, 80
McCormick, Cyrus, 689 Mexican war of independence, 292
McGillivray, Alexander, 169–170 Mexico. See also Hidalgo, Miguel
McIntosh, William, 171 Franciscans in, 250
Medieval Warm Period, 651, 653 slave rebellions in, 587
Mediterranean plantation system, 486 and Spain, 85
Mediterranean region, and cartography, war for independence, 364–365
120–121 Mexico City, 162
Meeting for Sufferings, 534 Mézières, Albert Bonnel de, 271
Meggers, Betty, 460 Miantonomi, 478, 479
Meikle, Andrew, 317 Middle Passage
Melgar y Serrano, Jose, 460 and Atlantic Creoles, 35
Memorandum of Remedies for the Indies (Las description of, 11, 44
Casas), 360 Equiano’s experience, 230
Memory of the World Register, 638 Gilroy on, 68, 69
Menawa, Chief, 171 overview of, 39–40
Mendez, Simon, 581 slave rebellions, 589
Mendoza, Antonio de, 163, 192, 345, slave ships, 43
647 Migration, 407–411
Menendez, Francisco, 36 to Americas, 408
Mercantilism, 403–407. See also of Atlantic Creoles, 35
Commerce Bight of Biafra, 67
Atlantic slave trade, 40–41 contributions to new countries,
bullionists, 403, 404 410–411
criticism of, 407 and cotton production, 164–165
European exploration, 237 from Europe, 408–409
in France and Great Britain, 405–406 forced, 35, 408, 410
government policy, 405 Gilroy on, 68–69
and imperialism, 406 hazards of, 409
in Netherlands, 405 Huguenots, 294–295
overview of, 403–404 indentured servants, 314
Physiocrats, 403, 404–405 of Loyalists, 385–386
power politics, 406–407 overview of, 407
in Puerto Rico, 527 of Plymouth colony, 87–88
theorists and advocates, 404 return, 409
Mercator, Gerard, 121 of Scots-Irish, 575–577
Mercer, Charles Fenton, 147 technological innovations, 409
Merchant mariners, 567–568 to United States, 410
Mercury poisoning, 275 and valuable skills, 410
Mesi, 695 wars and economic crises,
Mestizos, 125–126, 475, 545 409–410
Metacomet (King Philip), 474 Miguel, Emperor of Brazil, 47
Metal production, 318 Miles, Nelson A., 528
Methodism/Methodists, 662–664, Military Revolution, 645
667–668 Military synthesis, 280
Methodist Episcopal Church, 663 Military weapons and technology, 152,
Métis, 168, 545 236–237, 278–281
738 INDE X
Mining industry, 274–275, 318–319, Money, 419–421

409–410, 501–503. See also Gold and Monks Mound, 108, 109
silver Monopolies, 511–512
Mintz, Sidney, 487, 488 Monroe, James, 139, 147, 336, 370
Minuit, Peter, 446 Montagnais Indians, 96
Miranda, Francisco de, 76–77 Montejo, Francisco de, 398
Misselden, Edward, 404 Montejo the Younger, Francisco de, 398
Missionaries. See also Catholic women Montesquieu, 334, 362
religious missionaries; Protestant Monticello estate, 334
missionaries Montmorency-Laval, François-Xavier de,
and Feast of the Dead, 303–304 538
Franciscans, 249–250 Montreal, 448, 450
and Huron, 300 Moore, Thomas O., 454
Jesuits, 339–340 Moors, 549–551
in Mexico, 655 Moravian Church, 68
Moravians, 422, 423 Moravians, 421–424, 516, 517, 663
in New France, 255, 450 More, Hannah, 239
and Praying Indians, 505–507 Morelos, José María, 365, 475
Mississippians, 411–414 Morgan, Henry, 484, 509
agriculture, 413 Morning Meeting, 534–535
architecture of, 412–413 Morocco, 347
Cahokia, 107–108 Morse, Samuel F. B., 689
culture of, 412 Morton, Nathaniel, 403
decline of, 414 Mott, Lucretia, 685
Native American slave trade, Mound building, 109
440–441 Mourning wars, 424–427
origins of, 411–412 Mourt’s Relation (Bradford), 88, 402,
political organization of, 412–413 Muhammad XII, 551
warfare, 413–414 Muhlenberg, Henry Melchior, 422
Mississippi Bubble, 414–416 Mulattos, 126
Missouri Compromise, 2, 7, 221 Mun, Thomas, 404
Mita service, 501–502 Muñoz, Juan Bautista, 344–345
Mitchell, James, 148 Munuza, 550
Miwok people, 204 Murray, Judith Sargent, 685
Moctezuma I, 623 Muscovy Company, 98, 342
Moctezuma II, 49, 158, 162, 193, The Musee d’Historie de Ouidah, 471
417–418, 625 Museum of Science and Industry, 687, 689
“A Modell of Christian Charity” Music, 69
(Winthrop), 90, 677–678 Mutis, José Celestino, 74
Modern Slavery Act (Great Britain), 9 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass),
Modest Proposal (Swift), 576 200
Modyford, Thomas, 330 Mythology
Mohawks, 321, 323, 464, 467 Aztec Empire, 50, 540
Mohegans, 478, 479 Inca Empire, 310
Molasses Act, 563, 602–603 Iroquois, 322
Moldboard plough, 317 Quetzalcoatl, 539
Monardes, Nicolás, 195 Taínos, 613–614
INDE X
739
Nabuco, Joaquim, 8 Nationalism, 70, 437–440, 514–515

Nahuatl language, 49 Native American Church, 476
Nanih Waiya, 138 Native Americans. See also Evangelization
“Napoleon Complex,” 430 of indigenous people; Indigenous
Napoleon I, xxi, 429–433 people; Pan-Indianism; specific
abolition of slavery, 8 groups
Age of Revolution, 17 Columbian Exchange, 150–152
and Bolívar, 76 and coureurs de bois, 167–168
and Consulate, 431 disease, understanding of, 195
Continental System, 432–433, 438 encomienda system, 225
and Directory, 430, 431 enslavement of, 5
and Dutch Republic, 209 in Florida, 246
early life, 429 and fur trade, 264–265
as emperor, 432 gender norms, 265
exile of, 263 gold and silver, 273–274, 275
French Revolution, 429 and guns, 279–280
Haitian Revolution, 286, 590 introduction to, xix–xx
invasions of Spain and Portugal, and Jamestown, 331
362–363 Loyalists, 387
legal reform, 434–435 mercantilism, 405–406
and Louisiana, 379 and Moravians, 422–424
and L’Ouverture, 383 mourning wars, 424–427
as military leader, 430–431 and New France, 449, 451–452
nationalism, 438 and Plymouth colony, 88
Peninsular War, 432–433 population decline, 150
as political leader, 431–432 and Protestant missionaries, 515–518
rise of, 262–263 religious revivals, 492–493
and Saint-Dominque/Haiti, 571–572 ritual adoptions, 425–426
and slavery, 1, 432 and Scots-Irish, 577–578
and sugar, 611 and slavery, 591
Napoleonic Code, 366, 431, 433–436 and Smith, 600
Napoleonic Wars, 376 and tobacco, 628
Narragansetts, 478 Yamasee War, 691–693
Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against Native American slave trade, 440–444
the Revolted Negroes of Surinam abolition of slavery, 443
(Stedman), 394 and African Americans, 443
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, change in with European contact,
An American Slave (Douglass), 200, 441
201 decline and end of, 442–443
Narváez, Pánfilo de, 105–106, 162 impact on Native society, 441–442
Natchez Revolt of 1729, 414 numbers of, 442
National Assembly (France), 186, 260 overview of, 440
National Congress of American Indians, prior to European contact, 440–441
476 racial terms, 443
National Convention (France), 261 and tribe citizenship, 443–444
National Geographic Society, 461–462 Native Civil Rights Movement, 476
National identity, 438 Natural and Moral History of the Indies
National Indian Youth Council, 476 (Acosta), 15, 16
740 INDE X
Natural history, 15–16, 175–176, 178–180, The New Atlantis (Bacon), 54

296–297 “The New Colossus” (Lazarus), 447
Natural rights, 184, 187–188 New England, 296, 563. See also specific
Natural selection, 179–180 colonies
The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth in New-Englands Memoriall (Morton), 403
Christ Jesus, in Order to Salvation Newfoundland, 652
(Whitefield), 666–667 Newfoundland Company, 53
The Nature of True Virtue (Edwards), 214, 215 New France, 448–452
Navigation, 236 and Atlantic Creoles, 454
Navigation Acts (Great Britain), 208, 368, Brébeuf, 96
576, 602, 675 Catholic women religious missionaries,
Navigational tools, 569 129–130
Negro Act (South Carolina), 589 Champlain, 132–133
Neolin, 492–493, 626 coureurs de bois, 168
Netawatwes, 423 development of, 257
Netherlands. See also Dutch Atlantic; early exploration of, 449
Dutch East India Company; Dutch exploration of, 537–538
Republic; New Amsterdam/New York first settlements, 449–450
economy of, 644 founding of, 255
and Elmina, 220 fur trade, 449, 450–451
Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, 209 geography and demographics of,
Franco-Dutch War, 208 448–449
global expansion, 644 King William’s War, 354–355
Golden Age of, 645 under Louis XIV, 450–451
Huguenots, 295 missionaries, 450
Judaism, 348–349 and Native Americans, 449,
and mercantilism, 405 451–452
and Napoleon I, 209 and Native American slave trade,
and Pernambuco, 481 442
Second Anglo-Dutch War, 210 women in, 683
and tea, 616–617 New Granada, 73–74, 77, 119
Third Anglo-Dutch War, 175, 208, 210 New Kingdom of St. Francis, 251
New Amstel, 28 New Lanark Factory, 319
New Amsterdam/New York, 444–448 New Laws of 1542 (Spain), 360
commerce, 446–447 “New Laws of the Indies for the Good
demographic profile, 446 Treatment and Preservation of the
Fort Orange, 445 Indians,” 5
geography of, 444 New Mexico, 266
and Great Britain, 446–447 New Netherland colony, 207–208, 210,
and Hudson, 444–445 211, 265
Hutchinson, 306 New Netherland Company, 99, 206, 210,
Judaism, 349 445
organization of, 99 New Orleans, 452–455
during Reconstruction, 447 battle of, 454
shipbuilding, 446–447 Civil War, 454–455
slavery in, 446–447 commerce, 454
Statue of Liberty, 447 French culture, 453–454
urbanization, 447–448 Louisiana Purchase, 453
INDE X
741
nuns in, 129–130 The Oath of a Freeman, 80

settlement of, 452–453 Oba Esigie, 61
slavery in, 453 Oba Euware the Great, 61
under Spain, 453–454 Oba Ewedo, 61
Voodoo, 659 Oba Osemwede, 62
Newport, Christopher, 331, 504, 599 Oba Ovonramwen, 62
New Spain, and Hidalgo, 292–294 Oba Ozolua the Conqueror, 61
Newton, Isaac, 55, 122, 227 Obedezco pero no complo, 648
Newton, John, 669 Observants (Franciscans), 249
A New Voyage Round the World (Dampier), Occom, Samson, 518
114, 175, 176 Ochasteguin, 300
New York Manumission Society, 1 Oduduwa, 60
New York World’s Fair of 1939, 687 Oduwawa, 694
Nican Mopohua (Valeriano), 654 “Of Plantations” (Bacon), 53
Nicaragua, 367 Of Plymouth Plantation (Bradford), 86, 87,
Nicot, Jean, 628 88, 89
Niger Coast Protectorate, 62 Ogiso dynasty, 60–61
Nigeria. See Benin Oglethorpe, James, 422, 560
Ninety-five Theses (Luther), 227, 519 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 574
Nine Years’ War, 118, 561. See also War of Oil Rivers Protectorate, 66
the League of Augsburg Ojibwes, 493
Noble savage myth, 455–457, 558 Oldham, John, 478
Nóbrega, Manuel da, 56 Olid, Cristóbal de, 199
Nootka Sound Conventions, 266 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 377
Norris, John, 205 Olmec civilization, 459–463
North America. See also United States calendar, 459
Franciscans in, 251 chronology of, 462
gold and silver, 275–276 colossal heads, 459–461
Huguenot migration to, 295–296 decline of, 463
migration to, 408 discovery of, 460–461
and rice, 552–554 innovations, 459
North American Martyrs, 97 language and writing, 459, 462
North Atlantic Drift, 277 mythology, 540
North Atlantic Treaty Organization social and political organization, 462
(NATO), xxii trading, 463
North Carolina, 349 O’Malley, Grace (Gráinne), 483
Northern Ireland, 575 Oñate, Juan de, 523–524
Northwest Confederacy, 475–476 “On Being Brought from Africa to
Northwest Passage, 132, 206 America” (Wheatley), 666
Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), Oneidas, 321, 323, 463–466, 467
336 The Only Way (Las Casas), 360
Nova Scotia, 147 Onondagas, 321, 323, 464, 466–469
November Uprising, 19 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 178,
Nuestra Senora de la Concepción, 127 180
Nueva España, 160 Opechancanough, 332, 474, 490, 505
Nueva recopilacion, 367 Opium Wars, 618
Nullification Crisis, 222 Oranmiyan, 60
Nunez, Pedro, 121 Order of Capuchin Friars Minor, 249
742 INDE X
Original Sin (Edwards), 214 Pedro II, King of Brazil, 57, 556
Ortelius, Abraham, 121 Pedro IV, King of Kongo, 353
Ortíz, Josefa, 293 Penal Laws, 99, 576
Oruna, San Josef de, 641 Peninsulares, 362–363
Osório, Fradique de Toledo, 56 Peninsular War, 432–433
Otermín, Antonio de, 525 Penn, William, 536
Ottoman Empire, 143, 325–327 Pennsylvania, 422
Ouidah, 469–472 Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 1
Ovando, Nicolás de, 160 Pepys, Samuel, 617
Overfishing, 245 Pequot Indians, 518
Owen, Robert, 184–185, 319, 320 Pequot War, 89, 477–479
Oxford Coffee Club, 143 Pernambuco, 479–482
Oyo, 694–697 Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 11–12
Oysters, 245 Peru, 78, 158, 250–251, 274–275, 499,
573–574. See also Inca Empire
Pachacuti, 310 Peruvian Current, 298
Pacific Coast of North America, 266 Peters, John, 666
Padilla, Garcia de, 250 Pétion, Alexandre, 77, 286, 572
Paine, Thomas, 26, 181, 189, 240, 438 Petit marronage, 392, 393
Pakenham, Edward, 454 Philadelphia, 689
Palais-Royal, 144 Philip, King (Metacomet), 474
Palmares, 94 Philip, King of Spain, 524
Pané, Ramón, 250, 614 Philip II, King of Spain, 46, 205, 508, 605,
Pangaea, 37 606, 643
Pan-Indianism, 473–477 Philip III, King of Spain, 608
Paraguay, 250 Philip IV, King of Spain, 481
Pardo, 126 Philip V, King of Spain, 84
Pareus, David, 402 Phillips, James, 61, 62
Paris, Treaty of. See Treaty of Paris Physiocrats, 403, 404–405
Paris Musée Social, 513 Pierce, John, 400
Pascal, Michael Henry, 230 Pierrepont, Sarah, 213
Passe, Simon van de, 489, 491 Pilgrims, 399–403, 477, 529
Pasteur, Louis, 195 Pillars of Hercules, 53
Patriarcha (Filmer), 374 Piombo, Sebastiano del, 154
Paul, Nathaniel, 11 Piracy, 482–486
Paul III, Pope, 5, 360 Atlantic slave trade, 42
Paul IV, Pope, 348 Barbary States, 325
Paul V, Pope, 249, 348 Brazil, 8
Pax Brittanica, 101 changing definition of, 483
Paxton Boys, 494, 577–578 Dampier, 175–176
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Drake, 204, 216
Ethnology, 398 and geography, 483–484
Peace of Aachen, 452 God’s judgment on, 330
Peace of Paris, xxi, 452 Golden Age of, 483, 484–485
Peace of Utrecht, 451 Great Britain, 485
Peale, Rembrandt, 335 in Jamaica, 329–330
Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, 47, 56–57, 94, and merchant ships, 568
365 overview of, 482–483
INDE X
743
vs. privateering, 508 Brazil, 92–95, 495–496

rivalries between states, 39 Canary Islands, 112
and women, 483, 485 Cape Verde Islands, 114
Pirate loggers, 290 Casta System, 123–126
Pitt the Younger, William, 669 commerce, 497
Pius X, Pope, 345 cultural ideas, 496
Pius XI, Pope, 97 diseases, 496
Pizarro, Francisco, xviii Dutch Atlantic, 207
as chronicler, 499 Elmina, 218–220
and De Soto, 190 experience of settlers in, 497–498
and Inca Empire, 156–157, 309, 312 explorations of, 153, 234–235
indigenous allies, 158 gold and silver, 273, 275
motivations, 312 and Great Britain, 216
wife of, 545 Kingdom of Kongo, 351–354
Plan of Iguala, 365 migration to Americas, 408, 409
Plantation complex, 592 missionaries, 128
Plantations, 486–489, 553, 572, 595. See and Netherlands, 210–211
also Agriculture overview of, 495
Plymouth Colony, 86–89, 402. See also Pernambuco, 479–482
Mayflower Compact plantations, 487
Plymouth Company, 601 and rice, 552
Pocahontas, 332, 489–491, 504–505, 598, Rio de Janeiro, 555–557
600–601 scope and decline of, 498
Pocahontas (movie), 600 Senegambia, 579
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and success of, 496–497
Moral (Wheatley), 664, 665 and women, 683–684
Poetry, 90–91, 664–666 Portuguese Inquisition, 347
Pointis, Baron de, 118 Portuguese Liberal Wars, 47
Polo, Marco, 153 Portuguese Restoration War, 47
Pombal, Marquis de, 497, 579 Portuguese Revolution, 47
Pombaline Reforms, 362 Posada, Alonso de, 524
Pontiac, 475, 493 Potato, 498–501
Pontiac’s War, 492–495, 577 Potato blight, 409, 500
Poor Clares, 249 Potosí, 501–503
Poor Richard, 252 Power politics, and mercantilism,
Poor Richard’s Almanac (Franklin), 253 406–407
Popé, 524–525 Powhatan, 504–505, 600
The Population of Latin America: A History Powhatan, Chief, 331–332
(Sanchez-Albornoz), 150 Powhatan Confederacy, 504–505
Portuguese Atlantic, 495–498 Powhatan Indians, 332, 474, 489–491
Portuguese Empire “Prayer of Twenty Millions” (Greeley), 222
abolition of slavery, 8 Praying Indians, 505–507, 516–517
in Africa and South America, 495–496 “Preface to Romans” (Luther), 663
and Angola, 30–31 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,
Atlantic slave trade, 41–42, 151 148, 223
Azores, 45–47 Presbyterians, 575–576
Bahia, 55–58 Prescott, William, 16
Bight of Biafra, 65 Prince, Mary, 64, 685
744 INDE X
Principall Navigations (Hakluyt), 288, 289 Protten, Rebecca, 68

Printing presses, 80–81, 122 Ptolemy, 236
Privateering, 507–511 Pueblo People, 522–526
during American Revolution, 510 Pueblo Revolt, xx, 522–526
effects of, 508–509 legacy of, 525–526
under Elizabeth I, 218 overview of, 522
and European rivalries, 509–510 Popé, 524–525
growth of, 509 Pueblo people, 522–523
history of, 508 Spanish expeditions, 523–524
and merchant ships, 567–568 Spanish rule, 524
overview of, 507–508 Puerto Rico, 526–528, 564
vs. piracy, 508 Purchas, Samuel, 16
and tobacco, 629 Puritans, 528–531
Proclamation of 1763, 492 background, 528–529
Procter, Henry, 621, 627 Bradford, 87
Progressivism, 511–515 Bradstreet, 90–91
idea exchange between Europe and compared to Pilgrims, 400
United States, 513–514 Great Persecution, 530
and internationalism, 512–513 and Hutchinson, 305–307
and nationalism, 514–515 ideology, 530–531
overview of, 511 influence of Bacon, 55
Prohibitory Act (Great Britain), 181 and joint-stock companies, 342–343
Property rights of women, 684–685 legal system, 368
“Proposal for the Promoting Useful migration of, 529
Knowledge among the British as missionaries, 516
Plantations in America” (Franklin), myths, 531
253 Pequot War, 477–479
Prosser, Gabriel, 589 Praying Indians, 505–506
Protestantism, 239 Williams, 671–672
Protestant missionaries, 515–518 Winthrop, 676–678
conflicts, 517 Purity of blood, 123
leadership of, 515–516 Pushmataha, 139–140
methods and motives of, 516 Pyramids, 108–109, 398
and praying towns, 516–517
and slaves, 517–518 Quakers, 533–537
Protestant Reformation, 518–522 abolition movement, 10
and Enlightenment, 229 abolition of slave trade, 6
evangelicalism, 238 background, 533
and inequality, 511–512 and Franklin, 254
Jesuit reaction to, 338–339 history of, 533
Luther and, 227 loyalists, 384
Moravians, 421 in North America, 536
Puritans, 528 opposition to slavery, 517
and Quakers, 533 organization of, 534–535
Protestants. See also Moravians persecution of, 535–536
migrations, 295–296 in politics, 537
persecution of, 294–295 publications, 535
Protestant Wind, 606, 608 schisms, 536
INDE X
745
Quartering Acts (Great Britain), 24, 25, Religion. See also Catholic Church;
384 Missionaries; Protestant missionaries;
Quebec, 537–539 Protestant Reformation; Vodou
and Catholic Church, 450 abolition movement, 669–670
founding of, 255, 257 abolition of slave trade, 10
and fur trade, 264 Africanisms, 94
nuns in, 129 Amsterdam, 29
settlement, 448, 449 Arawakan, 33
Quebec Act (Great Britain), 25, 539 and books, 79–80
Queen Anne’s War, 22, 357, 427, 484–485, in Brazil, 57–58
692 of Caribs, 116
Queretaro Conspiracy, 293 in Cartagena de Indias, 118
Quetzalcoatl, 417, 539–541 of Chickasaws, 134
Quilombos, 587 and Edwards, 213–215
and Hutchinson, 305–307
Race, 543–546 Islam, 325–327
caste system, 545–546 Judaism, 346–350
construct of, 543 Moravians, 421–424
European hierarchies of, 543–544 as motivation for explorations, 235
in historical context, 543 and rum, 564
intermingling of, 545 Religious law, 368
Las Casas on, 544 Rembrandt van Rijn, 645
social and economic power, Remond, Charles Lenox, 11
544–545 Renewed Unitas Fratrum, 421
Racially mixed populations, 125–126 Repartimiento system, 172, 225, 524
Rackham, Calico Jack, 484 Republican Party (Liberian), 370
Ragnvaldsson, Hrolf (”Rollo”), 651 Republican Party (U.S.), 147–148, 335
Rainsford, Marcus, 381 Republic of Letters, 333–334
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 47, 54, 98, 217, 342, Republic of Texas, 183
546–549, 629 Republic of the Seven United Provinces,
Ramsey, James, 231 606
Ramusio, Giambattista, 617 Requickened captives, 425
Randolph, John, 147 Return migration, 409
Rawson, Harry, 62 Revolt of the Tailors, 56
Read, Mary, 485, 569 De revolutionibis orbium coelestium
Reason, 228 (Copernicus), 122
Recolhimentos (retirement houses), Rhode Island, 306, 349, 672
129 Ribeiro, Francisco, 348
Reconquista, 225, 325, 326, 549–551 Rice, 552–555
Red Sticks, 170–171 Richelieu, Cardinal, 132, 538
Reform Act (Great Britain), 321 Rigaud, André, 285–286, 382
Reformation. See Protestant Reformation The Rights of Man (Paine), 189
Régis, Jean-François, 339 Riis, Jacob, 447, 512
The Reign of Henry VII (Bacon), 53 Riley, James, 326
Reign of Terror, 432 Rio Branco Act, 4–5
Reinel, Pedro, 121 Rio de Janeiro, 555–557
La relacion (The Account) (Cabeza de Ritual adoptions, 425–426
Vaca), 107 Roanoke Colony, 217, 289, 342, 547–548
746 INDE X
Roberts, Joseph Jenkins, 370 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 295

Robertson, William, 16 Saint-Castin, 355
Robespierre, Maximilien, 186, 261–262 Saint-Dominque/Haiti, 570–573. See also
Robinson, John, 400 Haitian Revolution; L’Ouverture,
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 177 Toussaint
Roebuck, John, 319 abolition movement, 1
Rogers, Robert, 584 coffee production, 145
Rolfe, John, 332, 489, 490–491, 504, 505, colonial history of, 283
629 Declaration of the Rights of Man,
Roman law, 366 186–187, 188–189
Romanticism, 456 and Douglass, 202–203
Romero, Matías, 148 under France, 570–571
Roosevelt, Theodore, 511 Franciscans in, 250
Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 103, 575 and gens de couleur, 269
Ross, John, 171 geography of, 570
Rota Club, 144 Haitian Revolution, 571–572
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 228, 362, 456, languages of, 570
557–559 and Maroon communities, 394
Rowson, Susanna Haswell, 326 and Napoleon I, 432
Royal Academy of History, 344–345 post-revolution, 572
Royal Academy of Science, 122 revolution in, 18
Royal African Company, 315, 375–376, slave rebellion, 7–8, 258, 263
559–562, 563, 581 sociopolitical hierarchy, 571
Royal Bank, 415 United States recognition of, 147
Royal Declaration (France), 142 Vodou in, 655–657
Royal Edict of 1716 (France), 142 Saint Pierre de Montmartre, 337
Royal Fifth, 225 Saldanha, João Carlos, 47
Royal Navy (Great Britain), 2, 42, 44, 603 Salem witch trials, 682
Royal Ontario Museum, 304 Salle, Gadifer de la, 111
Royal Proclamation of 1763, 323 Salt, 206
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Sambo-Mosquito communities, 587
to Animals, 670 Sánchez, Miguel, 344
Royal Society of London, 55, 253–254, Sanchez-Albornoz, N., 150
376 Sandys, Edwin, 332–333
Rules and Exercises of Holy Living and Dying San Martín, José de, 78, 363–364,
(Taylor), 661 573–575
Rules for Navigation (García de Céspedes), Sansculottes, 260, 261–262
53 Santa Catalina convent, 127
Rum, 562–565, 675 Santo Domingo, 7–8, 587
Runaway slaves, 94. See also Maroons Saó Tomé, xviii
Rushforth, Brett, 442 Sapa Inca, 310
Russell, John, 634 Saraiva-Cotegipe Act (Brazil), 8
Russia, 266, 350, 433 Sarmiento, Domingo F., 224
Ruysch, Johannes, 121 Sauks, 493
Savery, Thomas, 318
Sáenez, Manuela, 78, 685 Schenectady, New York, 355–356
Sailors, 564, 567–570 Schleitheim Confession, 521
Saint-Augustin, Catherine de, 130 Scientific Revolution, 122
INDE X
747
Scotland, 98, 228 and decline of French Atlantic, 258

Scots-Irish, 494, 575–578 diseases, 196
Scrooby underground separatist church Equiano, 230–231
movement, 400 events leading to, 582
Scurvy, 196, 204, 568 financial hardship in London, 376
Sea wars, 217–218 and fur trade, 265
Second Anglo-Dutch War, 210 and Iroquois, 323
Second Anglo-Powhatan War, 504, 505 and Louisiana, 378–379
Secondat, Charles-Louis de, 362 and Menendez, 36
Second Confiscation Act (U.S.), 222 Native Americans after, 492
Second Continental Congress, 26, and Native American slave trade, 442
180–181, 182, 254 overview of, 581–582
Second Industrial Revolution, 317 Pan-Indianism, 475
Second Maroon War, 393 and Quebec, 538–539
Second Order of Poor Clares, 248 and rum, 563–564
Second Order of Poor Ladies, 249 significance of, 585–586
“Second Slavery,” 95 Treaty of Paris, 634
Second Treatise of Government (Locke), 372, Several Poems Compiled with Great Wit and
373, 374 Learning (Bradstreet), 90, 91
Second Venezuelan Congress, 77 Sewall, Samuel, 10
Secular Franciscans, 249 Seward, William Henry, 223
Securities and bonds, 420 Sextants, 569
Seigneurial System, 538, 539 Shadewell estate, 334
Seigniorage, 420 Shakespeare, William, 63
Seines, 244 Shamans, 33, 116, 195
Selective breeding, 177 Sharecropping, 166
Selkirk, Alexander, 177 Sharia law, 368
The Selling of Joseph (Sewall), 10 Sharp, Granville, 10, 146, 231
Seneca Falls Convention, 184, 686 Sharpe, Samuel, 2
Senecas, 321, 323, 451, 464, 467 “Shatter-zone,” 426
Senegambia, 578–581 Shawnee Prophet. See Tenskwatawa, The
Separatist Puritanism, 671 Shawnee Prophet
Sephardic Jews, 348 Sherman, Roger, 181
Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 360–361 Sherwood, Grace, 682
Sergeant, John, 516–517 Shipbuilding, 446–447, 652
Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul Ship design and effectiveness, 236
(Occom), 518 A Short Account of the Destruction of the
Sertima, Ivan Van, 460 Indies (Las Casas), 225
Servetus, Michael, 520 A Short History of the Rise, Reigne and
Seven Nations of Canada, 584 Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists
Seven Years’ War, xx–xxi, 581–586 and Libertines that Infected the
and American Revolution, 23, 24 Churches of New-England
battles of, 583–585 (Winthrop), 307
beginning of, 582–583 Siderius nuncius (Galilei), 122
and British Atlantic, 100 Siege of St. Augustine, 247
and Chickasaws, 134 Sierra Leone, 12, 146, 554
and Choctaws, 139 Sierra Leone Company, 386
and coureurs de bois, 168 Silence Dogood, 252
748 INDE X
Silver. See Gold and silver high point of, 592

Sinclair, Upton, 512 history of, 590–591
Singularities of France Antarctique, 93 vs. indentured servants, 314–315
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” introduction to, xviii–xx
(Edwards), 213–214, 215 and Jamaica, 330
Skenandoah, Chief, 465 and Jefferson, 334
Slave Codes, 4, 59, 394 legal regimes, 592
Slave narratives, 200, 230–233, 685. See and Napoleon I, 432
also Barbary captivity narrative and Native Americans, 591
Slave rebellion, 586–590 on plantations, 486–488
in Africa, 589 and Protestant missionaries, 517–518
in Bahia, 57 punishment, 141
in Bermuda, 63 in Rio de Janeiro, 556
in Brazil, 95, 587–588 and rum, 564
in British Atlantic, 588 social systems within, 487
in Caribbean colonies, 588–589 and sugar, 591–592
earliest, 587 in United States, 221, 593–594
in Haiti, 188 and Vodou, 656
Haitian Revolution, 284–285, 589–590 women in, 59, 64, 66, 684
in Jamaica, 331 Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (Great
motivations, 586–587 Britain), 2, 6, 331, 669
overview of, 586 Slave ships, 43
in Saint-Dominque, 258, 263 Slaves in Algiers (Rowson), 326
Santo Domingo, 7–8 Slave trade. See Atlantic slave trade; Native
Slave Codes, 4 American slave trade
in United States, 589 Slave Trade Abolition Act (Great Britain),
and Vodou, 656–657 669
Slavery, 590–594 Slave Trade Act of 1807 (Great Britain), 2
abolition of, xxi, 5–9 Slave trade in Africa, xix, 594–598
Atlantic Ocean, 39–40 demand for, 597–598
in Barbados, 58–59, 591–592 and Europe, 595–596
and Black Loyalists, 386 expansion of Atlantic networks,
in Brazil, 92–94 595–596
and Caribs, 117 legacy of, 598
Casta System, 125 material cultures and social status, 597
challenges to, 593 means of acquiring slaves, 596–597
Code Noir, 141 overview of, 594–595
coffee production, 145 and plantations, 595
and Columbian Exchange, 150 regional and long-distance networks, 595
communities, 593 Slave trafficking, 44–45
and cotton, 165–166 Smallpox, 149, 157, 158, 162, 195, 196,
and Creek Indians, 170 214, 323, 426, 493, 621
in Cuba, 173 Smith, Adam, xxii, 228, 320, 407
end of, 594 Smith, John, 598–601
Equiano’s experience, 230 and Bradford, 87–88
in French Atlantic, 258 Jamestown, 331–332, 444–445
and gens de couleur, 269, 270 Pocahontas, 489–490, 491
Gilroy on, 69 Powhatan, 504
INDE X
749
Smith, John (missionary), 517 abolition of slavery, 8

Smith, Paul, 384 and Darwin, 178–179
Smith, Thomas, 402 Franciscans in, 250–251
Smithsonian Institution, 461–462, 689, gold and silver, 274
690 and Humboldt, 297–298
Smuggling, 601–605 independence movements, 103
and Great Britain, 602–603 and Maroon communities, 394
Navigation Acts, 602 potatoes in, 498–499
overview of, 601–602 and wine, 674
slaves, 604–605 South Carolina, 552–554
tea, 603–604 Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, 411,
techniques, 603 413–414
Smyth, Thomas, 332 Southern Cross constellation, 236
Snell, Hannah, 569 South Sea Company, 342, 562
The Social Contract (Rousseau), 557–558, South Seas Bubble, 144
559 Souza, Francisco Félix de, 471–472
Social contract theory, 372, 374–375 Spain, xviii–xix. See also Encomienda
Social hierarchy, 124 system
Sociedad Filologica, 78 abolition of slavery, 5, 8
Société des Amis des Noirs, 1 Atlantic slave trade, 41–42
Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Azores, 46–47
Slave Trade, 1, 6, 43 Aztec Empire, 49, 52
Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Bacon on, 54–55
New England (SPG), 516 Black Legend, 70–73
Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Bogotá, 73–75
Abolition of Slavery Throughout the Bolívar, 76–78
British Dominions, 6 Bourbon reforms, 84–86
Society of Friends. See Quakers Buenos Aires, 102–103
Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Canary Islands, 112
Society of the United Brethren for the Cartagena de Indias, 117–119
Propagation of the Gospel among the Casta System, 123–126
Heathens, 421 colonial administration, 85–86
Sokoto Caliphate, 696 Columbian Exchange, 150
Somers, George, 63 Columbus, 153–155
Somerset, James, 10 conquistadors, 156–160
Somerset court case, 1, 5–6, 10 Cortés, 160–163
Somers Isles Company, 64 Creek Indians, 169–170
Soninke people, 271 Cuba, 172–174
Sons of Africa, 231 divide among elites, 362
Sonthonax, Léger Félicité, 285, 381, 382 encomienda system, 124–125
Sophia, Princess, 639 explorations, 105–106, 235. See also
Sorcery, 33 specific explorers
Soulouque, Faustin-Élie, 657 in Florida, 246–247
The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 68 fur trade, 266
Sousa, Tomé de, 55–56 gold and silver, 274–275
South America. See also Inca Empire; Latin Great Britain, 217–218
American wars of independence hardwoods, 291
abolition movement in, 4–5 Inca Empire, 312–313
750 INDE X
Spain (cont.) Stephens, John Lloyd, 398

Jamaica, 329–330 Stewart, Charles, 10
Jews in, 346–347 Stirling, Matthew Williams, 461
Las Casas, 360 St. John, 588–589
legal system, 367 St. Louis World’s Fair, 690
and Louisiana, 379 Stock market crashes, 414–416
Maya civilization, 397–398 Stoddard, Solomon, 213
Mexico, 292–294 Stone, John, 478
migration to Americas, 408, 409 Stono Rebellion, 1, 188, 589
missionaries, 127 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 4, 685
motivations for exploration, 312 Strachey, William, 16
Netherlands, 206, 208, 210 The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs
New Orleans, 453–454 (Darwin), 179
Potosí, 501–503 Stuyvesant, Peter, 446
privateering, 508–509 Subjecthood vs. citizenship, 69
Pueblo Revolt, 523–526 Sublimis deus (Paul III), 360
in Puerto Rico, 526–528 The Succession, 509
Spanish American revolutions, 18–19 Sugar, 608–612
Taínos, 614 in Africa, 609
taxation, 85 in Brazil, 92, 495–496, 609
Treaty of Tordesillas, 636–638 in Cuba, 173
viceregal system, 647–650 as a drug, 612
wine, 674 and Dutch Atlantic, 207, 208–209
and women, 683–684 growing and production, 610
Spangenberg, A. G., 662 impact of production, 610–611
Spanish American revolutions, 18–19 impact on psychoactive revolution, 611
Spanish-American War, 72, 361 importance of, 611
Spanish Armada, 508, 605–608 introduction to, xviii–xix
Spanish Inquisition, 347 in Jamaica, 330
Speculation, financial, 416 labor composition, 609–610
Spices, 235 in Liberia, 371
Spinning jenny, 318 and New Amsterdam/New York, 447
Spinoza, Benedict de, 227 overview of, 608–609
“Spiriting,” 314 production, beginning of, 59
“Spiritual economy,” 128 and rum production, 563
Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola), in Saint-Dominque/Haiti, 571
337 and slavery, 591–592
Sprenger, Jacobus, 680 Sugar Act (Great Britain), 23, 602
Spring Place Mission, 424 Sugar beets, 609
Stamp Act (Great Britain), 23–24, 254, 603 Sullivan, John, 468
Stamp Act Crisis, 384, 385 Sumanguru Kante, 389
Standard Oil Company, 512 Sumner, Charles, 221, 222
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 185, 685–686 sumptuary laws, 124
Statue of Liberty, 447 Sundiata Keita, 389
St. Augustine, 247 Supreme Junta of Caracas, 76
Steamships, 409 Suriname, 208, 209, 394
Stedman, John Gabriel, 394 Suriname Corporation, 211
Stephen, Alexander, 221 Susquehannock Indians, 494
INDE X
751
Swan, William, 176 in fishing, 244, 245

Swift, Jonathan, 576 food production, 317
Swiss Civil Code, 436 guns, 278–279, 281
Syphilis, 237 and international expositions, 689
metal production, 318
Tabula rasa, 373–374 and migration, 409
Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 455 mining industry, 318–319
Tacky’s Rebellion, 588 and sailors, 569
Tadadaho, 467 textile production, 318
Taft, William Howard, 511 in transportation, 166
Tahontaenrat (“People of the Deer”), 299, Tecumseh, 139, 170, 476, 619–621,
301 626–627
Taínos, 613–615 Tekakwitha, Saint Kateri, 621–623
and Awaraks, 32, 33, 34 Temperance movements, 675
in Cuba, 172 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 63
European contact, 614 Tennis Court Oath, 186
history of, 613 Tenochtitlán, 50, 161–162, 198, 199,
in Jamaica, 329 623–625
legacy of, 614 Tenskwatawa, The Shawnee Prophet, 170,
mythology, 613–614 476, 619, 620, 626–627
political organization of, 613 The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in
villages, 613 America (Bradstreet), 90
Talbot, Mary Anne, 569 Ten Years’ War, 173
Tang Dynasty, 615 The Terror, 261–262
Tarbell, Ida M., 512 Tetzel, Johann, 520
Task system, 553 Texas Revolution of 1835, 6
Taverns/tavern culture, 675–676 Textile production, 318, 447, 576–577
Taxation, 85 Tezcatlipoca, 541
“Taxation without representation,” 24 Thanksgiving, 88
Taylor, Jeremy, 661 Thayendenegea, 387
Tea, 615–619 Thermohaline circulation, 276
in China, 615–616, 618 Thevet, André de, 93
and the Dutch, 616–617 Third Anglo-Dutch War, 175, 208, 210
and Great Britain, 617–618 Third Estate (France), 185–186, 259–260
and Opium Wars, 618 Third Order of regular communities, 248,
regulation, 617–618 Thirteenth Amendment (U.S.), 4, 7, 221,
smuggling, 603–604 224, 442
spread of, 616–617 Thirty-nine Articles, 529
types of, 616 Thirty Years’ War, 54, 368, 645
in United States, 618 Thompson, John Sidney Eric, 398–399
Tea Act (Great Britain), 25, 603 Thompson, Robert Farris, 68
Teague, Hilary, 183 Thorvaldsson, Erik (”Erik the Red”), 652
Technological innovation Threshing machine, 317
chemical manufacturing, 319 Throckmorton, Elizabeth, 548
and conquistadors, 157 Timbuktu, 390
and cotton, 163–164, 165 Tira de la Peregrinacion (the Boturini
factory system, 319–321 Codex), 49
752 INDE X
Tishomingo, Chief, 134–135 Treason Act (Great Britain), 25

Tisin, Jean de, 250 A Treatise of Religious Affections
Tiwa Pueblos, 523, 525 (Edwards), 214
Tlaloc, 540 Treaty of 1866, 443
Tlaxcalans, 157–158, 162 Treaty of Alcaçovas-Toledo, 112
T-O (orbis terrarium) maps, 120 Treaty of Baden, 639
Tobacco, 627–631 Treaty of Breda, 99, 446
19th century trends, 631 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, 140
in Africa, 630 Treaty of Edinburgh, 98
American Revolution, 630 Treaty of Fontainebleau, 635
cultivation by Native Americans, Treaty of Fort Herkimer, 465–466
628 Treaty of Fort Jackson, 476
economic life in North America, 511 Treaty of Fort Schuyler, 465–466
and Europeans, 628 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 465, 468
global commodification, 629 Treaty of Hubertusburg, 585
and Great Britain, 628–629, 630 Treaty of Indian Springs, 171
and Jamestown, 332, 629 Treaty of Lisbon, 47
labor, 630 Treaty of London, 608
New Amsterdam/New York, 445 Treaty of New York, 170
overview of, 627–628 Treaty of Nonsuch, 606
and privateering, 629 Treaty of Paris 1763, 100, 379, 585–586,
Toltecs, 50 634–636
“To My Dear and Loving Husband” and Florida, 247
(Bradstreet), 91 and Quebec, 539
A Topographical Description of reception of, 635
Duxborough, in the County of signatories, 634–635
Plymouth (Bradford), 400 terms of, 635
Tordesillas, Treaty of. See Treaty of Treaty of Paris 1783, 23, 27, 182, 254–255,
Tordesillas 386, 468
Toro y Alaiza, María Teresa Rodríguez del, Treaty of Pensacola, 169
75–76 Treaty of Pontotoc, 135
Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo, 153 Treaty of Rastatt, 639
Tourism, 65, 112–113 Treaty of Ryswick, 356, 570
Tovar, Juan de, 15 Treaty of The Hague, 639
Townshend Acts (Great Britain), 24 Treaty of Tilsit, 432
Trade. See Commerce Treaty of Tordesillas, 114, 234–235, 408,
Trade barriers, 406–407 480, 636–638
Trade winds, 632–634 Treaty of Utrecht, 100, 265, 427, 562,
The Traffic of Algiers (Cervantes), 325 639–640
Trail of Tears, 135, 140 Treaty of Vervins, 131
Transatlantic slave trade. See Atlantic slave Treaty of Washington, 11, 171
trade Treaty of Westminster, 99, 210, 446
Transnationalism, 70 Tres Zapotes Monument, 460
Transportation, technological innovations, Treviño, Juan Francisco, 524
166 Trevithick, Richard, 319
Traps, in fishing, 244 Triangle trade, 10, 41, 44, 83, 220, 343
Travel books, 81–82 Trinidad, 641–642
Trawling, 244 Triple Alliance, 48, 49, 50, 51, 397–398
INDE X
753
True Account of the Conquest of New Spain slavery in, 593–594

(Díaz del Castillo), 192 and tea, 618
True Whigs, 370 United States Emigration Office, 148
Trusts, 511–512 University of California, 462
Truth, Sojourner, 685 University of Pennsylvania, 253
al-Tuedjin, Ishak, 390–391 University of Virginia, 336
Tunka Manin, 271 Upper Creeks, 169
Túpac Amaru, 313 Urbanization, 447–448
Tùpac Inca Yupanqui, 310–311 Urdaneta, Andres de, 633
Turgot, 228 Ursúa, Martín de, 398
Turner, Nat, 4, 589 Ursulines, 129, 339
Tuscaroras, 321, 464 Uruguay, 178–179, 250
Tuscarora War, 693 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 122
Tuskaloosa, Chief, 191 U.S. Geological Survey, 122
Tweede Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Utes, 442
Compagnie (TGWIC), 211 Utrecht, Treaty of. See Treaty of Utrecht
Two Treatise of Government (Locke), 182,
372, 373, 374 Valeriano, Antonio, 654
Tyler, Royall, 326 Valiente, Juan, 159
Valsequa, Gabriel de, 45
Ulster Presbyterians, 575–576 Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck family,
Ultramontanist movement, 340 211
Umar, Abu Bakar ibn, 271 Van den Bogaert, Harmen Meyndertsz,
al-Umari, 389 464
Uncas, 478, 479 Vane, Henry, 305
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 4, 685 Vann, Joseph, 443
Underground Railroad, 4 Van Schaick, Goose, 468
Union Fire Company, 252 Vassa, Gustavus. See Equiano, Olaudah
Unions, 321 Vattel, Emer de, 182–183
Unitas Fratrum, 421 Vazeille, Molly, 662
United Nations Environmental, Scientific, Vega, Garcilaso de la, 16, 54
and Cultural Organization Vega, Luis Laso de la, 344
(UNESCO), 83 Velázquez, Diego, 160–161, 163, 199
United Nations Permanent Forum on Velho Cabral, Gonçalo, 46
Indigenous Issues, 477 Venezuela, 250, 363, 587. See also Bolívar,
United Provinces of Río de la Plata, 103 Simón
United Provinces of the Netherlands, Vera, Pedro de, 112
643–646 Verein fur Socialpolitik, 513
United States Vermeer, Johannes, 645
abolition movement in, 2–4, 7 Verrazano, Giovanni de, 99
abolition of slavery, 6–7 Vesey, Denmark, 3, 4, 589
abolition of slave trade, 11–12 Vespucci, Amerigo, 55
colonization movement, 146–148 Viceregal system, 647–650
and cotton, 165 Viceroyalty of New Granada, 119
international law, 369 Viceroys. See Viceregal system
legal system, 368 Victims of Trafficking and Violence
migration to, 410 Protection Act (U.S.), 9
slave rebellions in, 589 Vieira, António, 56
754 INDE X
Vieira, Francisco Sabino Álvares da Rocha, War of Austrian Succession, 451–452, 582
57 War of Jenkins’ Ear, 118, 376
Vikings, 37 War of the League of Augsburg, 354, 356,
Viking voyages, 650–653 451, 561
Vindication of the Rights of Woman War of the South, 286
(Wollstonecraft), 188 War of the Spanish Succession, 100, 172,
Virginia Company 177, 369, 451, 509, 561–562, 639
and Bacon, 54 Warwick Patent, 89
and Bradford, 88 Washington, George, xx
and Hakluyt, 289 and Continental Army, 26
Jamestown, 331–333, 375 and Lafayette, 260
joint-stock companies, 342 and Native Americans, 468
Mayflower Compact, 399, 400 Seven Years’ War, 583
Pocahontas, 489, 491 smallpox inoculation, 196
and Smith, 598–599, 601 and Wheatley, 666
and women, 683 Watermills, 136–137
Virginia Constitution, 181–182 Watt, James, 319
Virginia Declaration of Rights, 181 al-Wattaul, Muhammad al-Shaykh, 347
Virgin Mary, 344–345, 654–655 Wayne, Anthony, 134
Virgin of Guadeloupe, 293, 344, 345–346, Wealth creation, 404
653–655 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), xxii, 228,
Virtues, 253 320, 407
Vodou, 655–659 Webster, Daniel, 222
and Catholic Church, 655–656, Weirs, 244
658–659 Weitsch, Friedrich Georg, 297
cosmology of, 657–658 Wendats, 302–304
deities, 658 Wesley, Charles, 662, 667
negative stereotypes, 659 Wesley, John, 661–664
origins of, 656 abolition of slave trade, 10
overview of, 655–656 Arminian theology, 663
practice of, 658–659 early life, 661
slave rebellions, 656–657 evangelicalism, 238, 239
and slavery, 656 Holy Club, 661–662
symbols, 658 influences, 661
Voltaire, 362, 557, 559 Methodism/Methodists, 662,
Voluntary migration, xix 663–664
Voragine, Jacopo de, 337 and Moravians, 663
Vos, Emmanuel, 581 and Native Americans, 662
A Voyage to New Holland (Dampier), 177 and Whitefield, 667–668
Voyageurs, 167, 451, 452–453. See also West, Thomas, 332
Coureurs de Bois West African Vodun, 656
West India Company (WIC), 28, 206–208,
Wahunsenacawh, 489 210–211, 644. See also Dutch West
Waldseemüller, Martin, 121 India Company
Walker, David, 3, 185 West Indies, 2
Walt Disney Studios, 600 West Indies Company, 481
Warens, Françoise-Louise de, 557 Weston, Thomas, 400
War of 1812, 139, 170, 336, 376, 620 Westos, 265
INDE X
755
Whalers, 568 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 188

Wheatley, John, 664–666 Women, 682–686. See also Catholic
Wheatley, Phillis, 232, 664–666, 685 women religious missionaries; specific
Wheatley, Susannah, 664 women
Whipple Report, 469 abolition movement, 685
Whitaker, Alexander, 490 in Atlantic slave trade, 683–684
White, John, 547–548 authors, 90–91
Whitefield, George, 666–668 Caribs, 116
death of, 668 “cult of domesticity,” 684
early life, 667 in English settlements, 683
and Edwards, 213–214 and European explorers/settlers, 683
evangelicalism, 238–239 in French Revolution, 188
and Moravians, 422 Hutchinson, 305–307
in North America, 667–668 idealized femininity, 686
overview of, 666–667 indentured labor, 684
and Wesley, 661, 663, 667–668 in indigenous cultures, 682–683
and Wheatley family, 664 indigenous translators, 197–199
and Wilberforce, 669 Industrial Revolution, 684
Whitehead, George, 535 lifestyle of in Americas, 684
White Legend, 72–73 and Moravians, 422–423
Whitney, Eli, 165 in New France, 683
Wilberforce, William, 2, 6, 10, 11, 239, and piracy, 483, 485
669–671 political activity and leadership of,
Wilkinson, James, 379 685
Willekens, Jacob, 56 prejudice against and witchcraft, 681
William, King, 355 property rights, 684–685
William I, Prince of Orange, 606, 643 and Quakers, 533
William III, King of England, 176, 508, sailors, 569
645 in slavery, 59, 64, 66, 684
William Pitt the Younger, 617–618 social activism and reform, 685–686
Williams, Roger, 306, 671–673, 677 women’s rights movement, 685–686
Williamson, David, 423 Women’s Rights Convention, 185
Wilson, Woodrow, 511 Womens Speaking Justified, Proved
Wine, 83–84, 673–676 and Allowed of by the Scriptures,
Winslow, Edward, 88, 89, 402, 403 533
Winters, Clyde, 460 Woodbridge, John, 90
Winthrop, John, 90, 306, 307, 676–679, Woolen Act of 1699 (Great Britain), 368,
683 576
Winthrop, John, Jr., 679 Woolman, John, 10
Winthrop, Vane, 306 Wool production, 318
Witchcraft, 679–682 World Anti-Slavery Convention, 686
Catholic Church response, 680–681 World Bank, 420
in Europe, 680–681 World Heritage Sites, 83, 109
in North America, 681–682 World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,
overview of, 679 689–690
Salem witch trials, 682 World’s Fair Expositions, 686–690
in Western folk beliefs, 679–680 World War I, 83, 515
Witch-hunts, 680, 682 World War II, 83
756 INDE X
Wounded Knee, 476 Zacuto, Abraham, 347

Wovoka, 476 Zambos, 126
Wright, Frances, 185 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig von,
Wyandot, 301 421–422
Wycliffe, John, 519 Zola, Emile, 349
Zoology of the Voyage on the Beagle
Xavier, Francis, 337, 338, 339 (Darwin), 179
Xocoyotzin. See Moctezuma II Zulu people, 279, 280
Zumárraga, Juan de, 80, 250, 344, 345,
Yaghan natives, 179 654, 655
Yamasee Indians, 442, 692–694 Zumbi, 587
Yamasee War, 36, 169, 442, 691–694 Zúñiga, Doña Juana, 163
Yanaconas, 502–503 Zúñiga-Sotomayor, Alonso Pérez de
Yoruba Kingdom, 694–697 Guzmán y de, 605
Yoruba people, 60 Zwingli, Ulrich, 519, 520

World 1400 1900

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Encyclopedia of the

DAVID HEAD, EDITOR

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-61069-255-7 (set)

This book is also available as an eBook.

This book is printed on acid-­free paper

Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

Guide to Related Topics ix Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez

Dutch West India Com­pany 209 Latin American Wars of

Protestant Missionaries 515 Tekakwitha, Saint Kateri

Huguenots Olmec Civilization

IDEAS, BELIEFS, AND CONCEPTS

Locke, John Tecumseh

PLACES AND GEOGRAPHY

PRACTICES AND ENTERPRISES

1402 French explorers reach the Canary Islands.

1521 Hernán Cortés completes the conquest of the Aztecs.

1602 The Dutch East India Com­pany is founded.

1755 The Acadians are expelled from Canada by the British.

1789 The French Revolution begins.

1821 Simón Bolívar is acclaimed the first president of Gran Colombia.

See also: Brazil; Colonization Movement; Douglass, Frederick; Haitian Revolution;

Horrors of the ­Middle Passage

See also: Abolition Movement; Abolition of Slavery; Equiano, Olaudah; Wilber-

See also: French Atlantic; Louisiana; New France

Ahead of His Time

contradict specific Aristotelian assertions when they conflicted with real­ity,

See also: Eu­ro­pean Exploration; Jesuits

AGE OF REVOLUTION (1750s–1850s)

See also: Champlain, Samuel de; Iroquois

AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775–1783)

“Declaration of Rights and Grievances,” argued that taxation without repre­sen­ta­

However, by January 1769, the American colonies ­were in a state of unrest as

See also: Age of Revolution; British Atlantic; Declaration of In­de­pen­dence; Franklin,

See also: Dutch Atlantic; Dutch West India Com­pany; Money

Unlike many other outposts of Western Africa, Portugal desired to establish a

See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Portuguese Atlantic; Slavery

See also: Caribs; Columbus, Christopher; Taínos

An Atlantic Creole Life

See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Gens de Couleur; Louisiana; Race

From a Barrier to a Bridge

See also: Atlantic Slave Trade; Cartography; Columbian Exchange; Columbus,

The ­Middle Passage

See also: Brazil; Cartography; Eu­ro­pean Exploration; Portuguese Atlantic; Sugar

See also: Conquistadors; Cortés, Hernán; Maya Civilization; Moctezuma II;

Atlantic Expansion and the Advancement

See also: Acosta, José de; British Atlantic; Enlightenment

The Birth of Sugar Production

plantations. Sugar became crucial to Barbados following the Barbadians’ support

See also: British Atlantic; Slave Rebellion; Slavery; Sugar

See also: Slave Trade in Africa; Yoruba Kingdom

Sold Apart from Her ­Family

See also: Slavery; Smuggling

­Women Slaves from Biafra

contemporaries, specifically the elite of Catholic Poland, felt a close connection to

academics to criticize supporters of the White/Golden Legend narrative, often refer-

See also: Conquistadors; Las Casas, Bartolomé de

See also: Encomienda System; Latin American Wars of In­de­pen­dence; Viceregal

Bolívar’s Lasting Influence in Venezuela

The New World’s First Printing Press

See also: Hakluyt, Richard; Jesuits; L

Henry II of E ­ ngland (1133–1189). For a time it existed as the capital of an in­de­

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book is printed on acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dutch West India Company 209 Latin American Wars of

1602 The Dutch East India Company is founded.

Horrors of the Middle Passage

contradict specific Aristotelian assertions when they conflicted with reality,

See also: European Exploration; Jesuits

“Declaration of Rights and Grievances,” argued that taxation without representa

However, by January 1769, the American colonies were in a state of unrest as

See also: Age of Revolution; British Atlantic; Declaration of Independence; Franklin,

See also: Dutch Atlantic; Dutch West India Company; Money

The Middle Passage

See also: Brazil; Cartography; European Exploration; Portuguese Atlantic; Sugar

Sold Apart from Her Family

Women Slaves from Biafra

See also: Encomienda System; Latin American Wars of Independence; Viceregal

Henry II of E ngland (1133–1189). For a time it existed as the capital of an inde

See also: Books; British Atlantic; Joint-Stock Companies; Mayflower Compact;

See also: Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead; Jesuits; New France

See also: Books; Conquistadors; European Exploration

See also: Atlantic Ocean; Conquistadors; European Exploration

A portion of South America as shown in a 1569 map by Gerard Mercator, an early

See also: Atlantic Ocean; Books; European Exploration

status of a mestizo child (born to a Spanish father and an indigenous m other)

Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695)

See also: Cartography; European Exploration; French Atlantic; New France;

Nineteenth-century depiction of Choctaw men in Oklahoma playing a game similar to

See also: French Atlantic; Gens de Couleur; Race; Saint-Domingue/Haiti

live in an unfamiliar land. Because so many black people opposed colonization,

The demographic impact in the Western Hemisphere was dramatic. Population

Transfer of military weapons and technology was another significant element

See also: Columbian Exchange; Conquistadors; European Exploration

undertaken by sixteenth-century conquistadors may be concluded, the social and

a large, wage-earning working class as well as a burgeoning middle class of mill

See also: Pan-Indianism; Tecumseh; Yamasee War

See also: Books; European Exploration; Privateering

D E C L A R AT I O N O F I ND EP E ND E N C E ( 1 7 7 6 )

See also: Age of Revolution; Declaration of Independence; Enlightenment; French

See also: Chickasaws; Conquistadors; European Exploration

shamanic principles, herbalism, witchcraft, and animism. Sometimes, especially