Category: Uncategorized

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Filipa Ribeiro da Silva of Adrift on an Inland Sea: Misinformation and the Limits of Empire in the Brazilian Backlands by Hal Langfur

From 1750 until Brazil won its independence in 1822, the Portuguese crown sought to extend imperial control over the colony’s immense, sea-like interior and exploit its gold and diamond deposits using enslaved labor. Carrying orders from Lisbon into the Brazilian backlands, elite vassals, soldiers, and scientific experts charged with exploring multiple frontier zones and establishing royal authority conducted themselves in ways that proved difficult for the crown to regulate. The overland expeditions they mounted in turn encountered actors operating beyond the state’s purview: seminomadic Native peoples, runaway slaves, itinerant poor, and those deemed criminals, who eluded, defied, and reshaped imperial ambitions.

This book measures Portugal’s transatlantic projection of power against a particular obstacle: imperial information-gathering, which produced a confusion of rumors, distortions, claims, conflicting reports, and disputed facts. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of ethnohistory, slavery and diaspora studies, and legal and literary history, Hal Langfur considers how misinformation destabilized European sovereignty in the Americas, making a major contribution to histories of empire, frontiers and borderlands, knowledge production, and scientific exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

https://www.sup.org/books/history/adrift-inland-sea

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251355556

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Boyd Cothran of Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories by Martin Dusinberre

Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai’i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are ‘we’ as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/mooring-the-global-archive/F72102F79AB9FCFF8616628FCF5B2C14#fndtn-information

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251355545

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Francesca Bregoli of The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond by Julie Kalman

At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bacri brothers and their nephew, Naphtali Busnach, were perhaps the most notorious Jews in the Mediterranean. Based in the strategic port of Algiers, their interconnected families traded in raw goods and luxury items, brokered diplomatic relations with the Ottomans, and lent vital capital to warring nations. For the French, British, and Americans, who competed fiercely for access to trade and influence in the region, there was no getting around the Bacris and the Busnachs. The Kings of Algiers traces the rise and fall of these two trading families over four tumultuous decades in the nineteenth century.

In this panoramic book, Julie Kalman restores their story—and Jewish history more broadly—to the histories of trade, corsairing, and high-stakes diplomacy in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. Jacob Bacri dined with Napoleon himself. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Horatio Nelson considered strategies to circumvent the Bacris’ influence. As the families’ ambitions grew, so did the perils, from imprisonment and assassination to fraud and family collapse.

The Kings of Algiers brings vividly to life an age of competitive imperialism and nascent nationalism and demonstrates how people and events on the periphery shaped perceptions and decisions in the distant metropoles of the world’s great nations.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691230153/the-kings-of-algiers?srsltid=AfmBOorjSXcwxTyQaR2jg0TdU1B0zUkYHZ7CRPODSLbx9gbXSHn1fR0q

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251355570

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Thomas M. Truxes of Port Cities of the Atlantic World: Sea-Facing Histories of the US South by Jacob Steere-Williams and Blake C. Scott, eds.

Port Cities of the Atlantic World brings together a collection of essays that examine the centuries-long transatlantic transportation of people, goods, and ideas with a focus on the impact of that trade on what would become the American South. Employing a wide temporal range and broad geographic scope, the scholars contributing to this volume call for a sea-facing history of the South, one that connects that terrestrial region to this expansive maritime history. By bringing the study up to the 20th century in the collection’s final section, the editors Jacob Steere-Williams and Blake C. Scott make the case for the lasting influence of these port cities—and Atlantic world history—on the economy, society, and culture of the contemporary South.

https://uscpress.com/Port-Cities-of-the-Atlantic-World

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251355552

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Nicholas Radburn of Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680–1807 by Jane Webster

An estimated 2.8 million Africans made a forced crossing of the Atlantic on British slave ships: a journey known as the ‘Middle Passage’. This book focuses on the ship itself: the largest artefact of the transatlantic slave trade, but one rarely studied by archaeologists, because so few examples of wrecked slaving vessels have been located. This book argues that there are other ways for archaeologists to materialize the slave ship. It employs a pioneering interdisciplinary methodology combining primary documentary sources, underwater and terrestrial archaeological data, paintings, and museum collections, to ‘rebuild’ British slaving vessels and identify changes to them over time. The book then considers the reception of the slave ship and its trade goods in coastal West Africa, and goes on to detail the range, and uses, of the many African materials (such as ivory) entering Britain on slave ships. The third section considers the Middle Passage experiences of captives and crews, arguing that greater attention needs to be paid to the coping mechanisms through which Africans survived, yet also challenged, their captive passage. Finally, the book asks why the African Middle Passage experience remains so elusive and considers when, how, and why the crossing was remembered by ‘saltwater’ Africans in the Caribbean and North America. The marriage of words and things attempted in this richly illustrated book is underpinned throughout by a theoretical perspective combining creolization and postcolonial theory, and by a central focus on the materiality of the slave ship and its regimes

Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680-1807 | Oxford Academic

https://academic.oup.com/book/55188

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251355558

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Helena Yoo-Roth of Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700–1776) by Jeremy Land

This book takes a long-run view of the global maritime trade of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from 1700 to American Independence in 1776. Land argues that the three cities developed large, global networks of maritime commerce and exchange that created tension between merchants and the British Empire which sought to enforce mercantilist policies to constrain American trade to within the British Empire. Colonial merchants created and then expanded their mercantile networks well beyond the confines of the British Empire. This trans-imperial trade (often considered smuggling by British authorities) formed the roots of what became known as the American Revolution.

Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700 — 1776) | Brill

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251355564

Read (in open-access) in the August issue of the IJMH the article by James P. Delgado: “SS Albatross: An unfortunate steamship”

The short career of the Philadelphia-built coastal steamship Albatross (1850–1853) offers an instructive look at speculation, financing and operating a steamer in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. This was a period of rapid change, financial booms and busts, and business failures. Albatross was built for a short-lived route between Philadelphia and Charleston, South Carolina, which failed. With a change in ownership and a new home port of New York, it did not last long in its next venture, connecting New York with Halifax, Charlottetown and Quebec. Its final service in a speculative steamship line that proposed to open a competitive route across Mexico’s ‘Isthmus of Tehuantepec’ ended in disaster. That shipwreck may have been a deliberate accident to capitalize on insurance. Albatross’s career exemplifies not only the vagaries of speculative steamship ownership and operation, but also the often shady nature of mid-nineteenth-century speculation and business practices.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08438714251349348

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Gijs Dreijer of Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931 by A. G. Hopkins

In Capitalism in the Colonies, A. G. Hopkins provides the first substantial assessment of the fortunes of African entrepreneurs under colonial rule. Examining the lives and careers of 100 merchants in Lagos, Nigeria, between 1850 and 1931, Hopkins challenges conventional views of the contribution made by indigenous entrepreneurs to the long-run economic development of Nigeria. He argues that African merchants in Lagos not only survived, but were also responsible for key innovations in trade, construction, farming, and finance that are essential for understanding the development of Nigeria’s economy.

The book is based on a large, representative sample and covers a time span that traces mercantile fortunes over two and three generations. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Hopkins shows that indigenous entrepreneurs were far more adventurous than expatriate firms. African merchants in Lagos pioneered motor vehicles, sewing machines, publishing, tanneries, and new types of internal trade. They founded the construction industry that built Lagos into a major port city, moved inland to start the cocoa-farming industry, and developed the finance sector that is still vital to Nigeria’s economy. They also took the lead in changing single-owned businesses into limited liability companies, creating freehold property rights and promoting wage labour. In short, Hopkins argues, they were the capitalists who introduced the institutions of capitalism into Nigeria. The story of African merchants in Nigeria reminds us, he writes, that economic structures have no life of their own until they are animated by the actions of creative individuals.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691258843/capitalism-in-the-colonies?srsltid=AfmBOoq7-y6eGjw-FZlsG7pWJxmeBe6LkqdzYnoP2LLz14x20Iw31iQe

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251355559

Read (in open-access) in the August issue of the IJMH the text by Emily Schwalbe, Rory Connolly, Sophia Chapple, Poul Holm: “Marine resource procurement as everyday resistance in Ireland during the Great Hunger (1845–1852)”

This article seeks to challenge dominant narratives surrounding the Great Hunger in Ireland (An Gorta Mór, 1845–1852) by focusing on the often-overlooked aspect of marine resource exploitation. Traditional historiography of the famine typically centres on the failure of the potato crop, British colonial policies and the resulting socio-economic devastations. However, this narrative largely omits the daily survival strategies and forms of resistance employed by the Irish populace, particularly in their interaction with the marine environment. This study explores how coastal communities turned towards the sea as a resource for sustenance, autonomy and resistance against oppressive conditions imposed by the crop failures and British colonial rule. By critically engaging with the role of colonial control, external aid efforts and local resistance in primary accounts, the authors argue that marine resources played an important role in the everyday survival of Irish communities in the face of systemic failures.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08438714251356343

Read in the August issue of the IJMH (requires subscription) the review by Chris Nierstrasz of Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776 by James R. Fichter

In Tea, James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773, two large shipments of tea from the East India Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North America. Their survival shaped the politics of the years ahead, impeded efforts to reimburse the company for the tea lost in Boston Harbor, and hinted at the enduring potency of consumerism in revolutionary politics.

Tea protests were widespread in 1774, but so were tea advertisements and tea sales, Fichter argues. The protests were noisy and sometimes misleading performances, not clear signs that tea consumption was unpopular. Revolutionaries vilified tea in their propaganda and prohibited the importation and consumption of tea and British goods. Yet merchant ledgers reveal these goods were still widely sold and consumed in 1775. Colonists supported Patriots more than they abided by non-consumption. When Congress ended its prohibition against tea in 1776, it reasoned that the ban was too widely violated to enforce. War was a more effective means than boycott for resisting Parliament, after all, and as rebel arms advanced, Patriots seized tea and other goods Britons left behind. By 1776, protesters sought tea and, objecting to its high price, redistributed rather than destroyed it. Yet as Fichter demonstrates in Tea, by then the commodity was not a symbol of the British state, but of American consumerism.

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https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714251355547