When Wim Klooster’s Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History was published in 2009, it was one of the first monographs to bring together the American, French, Haitian, and Spanish American revolutions in a single English-language volume. Revolutions in the Atlantic World quickly became a seminal text, finding its way on many Atlantic history syllabi, comprehensive exam reading lists, and on researchers’ shelves. In January 2018, New York University Press released a second edition that incorporates historiography from the past nine years, including scholarship on indigenous peoples and privateers. Tomorrow, Jordan Taylor will have his review of this second edition. Today, The Junto’s Julia M. Gossard interviews Klooster about the book’s second edition, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Revolutions.
Tag Archives: comparative history
Murder!: Entangled History, String Theory, and Narrative
On a dark and stormy night in July of 1729, a vicious murder occurred in the port city of Veracruz. Okay, I don’t actually know if it was stormy on that night, nor was the murder particularly vicious but, for narrative effect, bear with me. On the evening in question, a Dominican priest accompanied by an entourage of the town’s residents walked to the trading factory of the British South Sea Company to pay the factors a visit. According to Inquisition records, as the group approached the factory, shots were fired from within the building, and the Dominican priest fell dead. The man who fired the fatal shots—William Booth[1]—claimed that he had not recognized the priest and fired in self-defense. As Booth argued, marauders frequently roamed the streets after dark and he assumed the visitors wanted to rob him. Booth was sentenced to five years hard labor in North Africa—a veritable death sentence—and the South Sea Company’s factory in Veracruz barely survived the incident, which reached the diplomatic tables of Europe.[2] Continue reading
Big History: Weighing the Benefits and Drawbacks of a Comparative Project
Casey Schmitt is a PhD candidate in History at the College of William & Mary, where she is writing a dissertation on the Iberian roots of seventeenth-century Anglo-American slave law. This is her second guest post, following her first on the value of storytelling and the use of audiobook primary sources in the classroom here.
A little over a year ago, I switched research interests from the study of eighteenth-century contraband trade between Jamaica and Cartagena de Indias to a comparative study of the codification of slave law in the greater Caribbean. Admittedly not too drastic of a change, I was nonetheless daunted by moving from a historiography containing a select number of significant works to a field where innumerable scholars have dedicated entire careers. Like any graduate student, I began working through the library stacks here at the College of William and Mary, seeking answers to what I thought would be easy questions: Were the legal regimes of European slave societies shaped by their interactions with other slave societies in the Caribbean? Were English slaveholding practices modeled off of successful Portuguese or Spanish examples? Why were there so many institutionalized efforts to codify slave law in the seventeenth century and did these separate legal dialogues unfold in conversation with one another? As you can probably guess, none of these questions have proven as easy to answer as I thought. Continue reading
The Junto 