Early American Women Unmasked

May 5, 2020 By Philippe Halbert in Colonial Couture, Vast Early America Tags: Antigua, art history, Atlantic World, Black Atlantic, Caribbean, colonial America, Fashion, free people of color, Jamaica, Manners, Massachusetts, material culture, New England, race, Slavery, social history, vastearlyamerica, women's history 2 Comments

A special edition of #ColonialCouture, a Junto roundtable on fashion as history in early American life.

The Antigua-born Penelope Royall Vassall (masked and socially distanced), Joseph Blackburn, circa 1755, Massachusetts Historical Society

Protective face coverings have emerged as a potent, multifaceted metaphor for the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite inconsistent examples set by elected leaders and conflicting recommendations made by public health officials, unisex masks have steadily assumed a greater role in social distancing measures and become mandatory in certain settings outside the home. Options range from standard blue and white surgical masks to creative DIY improvisations and “Corona Couture.” Some museums are looking to add homemade masks to their collections as a way to document the crisis. Worn for slightly different reasons and more implicitly gendered, the masks owned by early American women and even children were no less symbolic in terms of practical use, commodification, or controversy.

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Q&A with Daniel Livesay, author of Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833

April 20, 2018 By Christopher Jones in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic families, Atlantic World, book review, British Empire, Caribbean, family history, Interview, Jamaica, race, Slavery 3 Comments

Daniel Livesay is Associate Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, CA. His research focuses on questions of race, slavery, and family in the colonial Atlantic World. His first book, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 was published in January 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute. Casey Schmitt reviewed it yesterday here at The Junto. Daniel’s research has been supported by an NEH postdoctoral fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Fulbright Foundation, the Institute of Historical Research, and the North American Conference on British Studies, as well as number of short-term fellowships. He is currently working on a book manuscript about enslaved individuals of advanced age in Virginia and Jamaica from 1776-1865 entitled, Endless Bondage: Old Age in New World Slavery. He graciously agreed to sit down and answer a few questions about his research.
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Review: Atlantic Families, Race, and Empire

April 19, 2018 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: Atlantic families, Children of Uncertain Fortune, Jamaica, race 2 Comments

Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018).

A central thread running through Daniel Livesay’s Children of Uncertain Fortune is deceptively simple: Atlantic families structured the development of ideologies surrounding race in the British empire during the long eighteenth century.[1] Woven through the book, however, is a richly nuanced exploration of what terms like Atlantic, family, race, and empire meant and how understandings of those terms changed over a pivotal hundred-year period starting in the 1730s. Through institutional records and family papers produced on both sides of the Atlantic, Livesay identifies 360 mixed-race people from Jamaica and traces the lived experiences of a handful of them as they navigated their social and economic position within transatlantic kin networks. Those individual narratives reveal how Britons experienced empire through family ties in ways that shaped their perceptions of race, colonialism, and belonging. Continue reading →

Q&A with Carla Pestana on The English Conquest of Jamaica

August 16, 2017 By Benjamin Park in Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A, Special Features Tags: 17th Century, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, British Empire, Carla Gardina Pestana, imperial history, Jamaica, Oliver Cromwell Leave a comment

To accompany the review by Casey Schmitt that was published yesterday, we are pleased to have this Question & Answer with Carla Pestana today regarding her new book, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017). We thank Dr. Pestana for her time. Continue reading →

Book Review: Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica

August 15, 2017 By Casey Schmitt in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, Atlantic History, Atlantic World, British Empire, Caribbean, Cromwell's Western Design, England, imperial history, Jamaica, Oliver Cromwell 1 Comment

**Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).**

Pestana Review

It is an exciting time to be a scholar of Caribbean history. From conferences to publications, the past decade has seen historians of early America, Latin America, and the Atlantic world turn to the Caribbean for insights into the development of empire, slavery, race, and commerce.[1] In this resurgence of Caribbean historiography, the seventeenth century has emerged as a pivotal period. That said, by taking a relatively well-known event like the Western Design, UCLA Professor and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America and the World, Carla Gardina Pestana, demonstrates the value of exploring the early Caribbean in her new book The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire. Pestana’s work aptly shows the profound intellectual pay-off for historians willing to explore the seventeenth-century Caribbean with bigger questions about imperialism, race, religion, and gender. Continue reading →

The Continental Toehold Dilemma

September 22, 2016 By Casey Schmitt in Historiography, Opinion, Recent Scholarship Tags: 17th Century, Barbados, British Empire, Caribbean, Jamaica, Surinam, vastearlyamerica 2 Comments

nouvellecarte

“The heart of the English Empire in the seventeenth-century Americas was Barbados,” according to Justin Roberts in his recent William and Mary Quarterly article.[1] That claim is perhaps not surprising—Richard Dunn established the social and economic importance of the island over thirty years ago in his seminal work, Sugar and Slaves. However, Roberts takes that point further by exploring the political ramifications of all of that Barbadian wealth in the West Indies. His article also speaks to a larger sea change in the historiography of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Research in Jamaica

May 20, 2016 By Tom Cutterham in Archives around the Atlantic, Research, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Archives, Jamaica, research 3 Comments

Rounding off this week’s roundtable on travel to the archives, we are pleased to present a guest post by Dr. Aaron Graham, a Stipendiary Lecturer in History at New College, Oxford, and author of Corruption, Party, and Government in Great Britain, 1702-1713 (Oxford University Press, 2015). Aaron is currently working on corruption, finance and empire in North America and the West Indies during the long eighteenth century.

Archives in Jamaica and the West Indies tend to be overlooked. “There are duplicates of the whole lot in the [Public] Record Office in London,” one colonial official noted in 1928, “[and] researchers will work in London rather than here.”[1] My recent visit to the Jamaica Archives and National Library of Jamaica suggests this is not entirely true. The papers that were sent back to Britain tended only to be those of interest to the imperial government, and although large amounts of material have been lost or destroyed by the climate, what remains in Jamaica can shed important light on society in the West Indies from the colonial, rather than imperial perspective. Although there are frustrating gaps in all of these series, by the standards of other archives in the West Indies they are uniquely rich, and the surface has still only been scratched. Continue reading →

The Week in Early American History

June 14, 2015 By Mark Boonshoft in The Week in Early American History Tags: Early American Blogosphere, Film, George Whitefield, Great Awakening, Jamaica, Library of Congress, Salem Witch Trials Leave a comment

It has been another eventful week in early American history. Without further ado, here are the links! Continue reading →

Q&A: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire

May 7, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, 18th Century, book review, British Atlantic, British Empire, capitalism, Cromwell, historiography, indentured servitude, Jamaica, political economy, Slavery 2 Comments

Abigail Swingen is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX). She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. She specializes in the Early Modern British Atlantic Political Economy. Competing Visions of Empire is her first book and was reviewed here yesterday. The following is part of our (relatively) new tradition of reviewing a book and then offering a Q & A with the author the following day. [NB: You can find my review from yesterday here.] Continue reading →

Review: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire

May 6, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, 18th Century, book review, British Atlantic, capitalism, indentured servitude, Jamaica, Oliver Cromwell, Royal African Company, Slavery 1 Comment

**Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).**

There have been some fantastic new contributions of late that explore connections between slavery, economics, and empire. In his 2008 analysis of the American political economy, economic historian Gavin Wright concluded that the dependence on slave labor came not because of any institutional efficiency on the part of plantations, but rather, that no other form of coerced labor could have been made to meet the labor demands. Sven Beckart’s Bancroft Prize-winning book, Empire of Cotton, analyzes connections between cotton, and the slave labor behind it, and the rise of modern capitalism. Ed Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told, explores slavery’s role in the making of American capitalism.

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