The Lives and Deaths of Caged Birds: Transatlantic Voyages of Wild Creatures from the Americas to Spain, 1740s–1790s

Ethnohistory ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-501
Author(s):  
Martha Few
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
New World ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Transatlantic Trade ◽  
New World Birds

Abstract This essay focuses on New World birds caught up in the eighteenth-century transatlantic trade with other living wild creatures, destined for imperial metropoles. Manuscript sources describing this trade, written by political officials, ships’ captains, doctors, naturalists, animal caretakers, and inspectors who cataloged their arrival to Spanish ports, interacted with the animals, tried to keep them alive aboard the ship, and determined their ability to withstand further transport to their final destinations in Madrid and other cities in Spain. In the process, animals caged aboard ship for several weeks or more developed relationships with one another and with their human caretakers. Their lived experiences show the multiple and complicated ways in which individual captured birds and other creatures helped shape those shipboard environments, disrupting systemic human attempts to construct them as colonial animals who functioned solely as scientific or material objects in empire making.

Nicolas Gueudeville's Enlightenment Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 24-60
Author(s):  
Russ Leo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Original Length ◽  
English Law

Nicolas Gueudeville's 1715 French translation of Utopia is often dismissed as a “belle infidèle,” an elegant but unfaithful work of translation. Gueudeville does indeed expand the text to nearly twice its original length. But he presents Utopia as a contribution to emergent debates on tolerance, natural religion, and political anthropology, directly addressing the concerns of many early advocates of the ideas we associate with Enlightenment. In this sense, it is not as much an “unfaithful” presentation of More's project as it is an attempt to introduce Utopia to eighteenth-century francophone audiences—readers for whom theses on political economy and natural religion were much more salient than More's own preoccupations with rhetoric and English law. This paper introduces Gueudeville and his oeuvre, paying particular attention to his revisions to Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan's 1703 Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amérique Septentrionale. Published in 1705, Gueudeville's “revised, corrected, & augmented” version of Lahontan's Voyages foregrounds the rational and natural religion of the Huron as well as their constitutive aversion to property, to concepts of “mine” and “yours.” Gueudeville's revised version of Lahontan's Voyages purports to be an anthropological investigation as well as a study of New World political economy; it looks forward, moreover, to his edition of Utopia, framing More's work as a comparable study of political economy and anthropology. Gueudeville, in other words, renders More's Utopia legible to Enlightenment audiences, depicting Utopia not in terms of impossibility and irony but rather as a study of natural religion and attendant forms of political, devotional, and economic life. Gueudeville's edition of Utopia even proved controversial due, in part, to his insistence on the rationality as well as the possibility of Utopia.

To Sin No More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rex Galindo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Rural And Urban Areas ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Spanish Atlantic ◽  
Franciscan Order

For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Native Americans in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. This is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, the book shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. It argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or “reawaken” Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Native Americans.

Robert Livingston (1654-1728): Businessman of Colonial New York

1956 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence H. Leder ◽  
Vincent P. Carosso
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Business Enterprise ◽  
Business Organization ◽  
Manufacturing Enterprises ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
The Social ◽  
Business Functions

Robert Livingston's career provides the first opportunity to consider in detail the emergence of an early New York businessman. Trained in business in Rotterdam, he brought to the New World the experience, knowledge, and techniques of one of the most advanced commercial centers of his day. On the Albany frontier he applied the Old World's business methods to advantage and gradually emerged as a dominant figure in colonial New York. His records and business correspondence leave no doubt that Livingston belonged to that class of businessmen often referred to as sedentary or resident merchants, though he did not employ as many agents and partners as his later, more mature counterparts. Neither did he engage in as many ventures or perform as many functions as the Browns, Hancocks, and other late eighteenth-century merchants, nor did he create an impressive business organization at home or abroad as was customary among certain European contemporaries. Still, as a wholesaler and retailer, importer and exporter, shipowner and land speculator, Livingston was an early New York practitioner of diversified business functions and investments. His extensive land dealings, no doubt motivated in part by the social prestige attached to real estate, were undertaken primarily as a source of credit and revenue. Livingston Manor was operated as a business enterprise: some of it was cultivated on Livingston's behalf, parts were leased to tenants who provided for the Lord of the Manor not only rents but a steady market for the goods he obtained in overseas trading ventures, and other sections were devoted to various manufacturing enterprises. Livingston's political life was an integral and necessary part of his business ventures, which reflected at all points the total instability of most colonial institutions. From the details of Livingstons many-sided commercial life emerges a rare picture of an embryonic business society in which the means were sorely taxed to achieve the ends conceived by ambitious men.

“Let us, therefore, stimulate one another”: John Fothergill’s Letters and the Notion of Value and Professionalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Hartwig ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
American Hospital ◽  
Teaching Tools ◽  
Transatlantic Trade ◽  
Medical Library ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Pennsylvania Hospital ◽  
The Many

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the London Quaker John Fothergill, M.D., established himself as an essential node in a transatlantic epistolary network. Via letter writing, Fothergill closed book deals, forwarded anatomical drawings, and exchanged botanical seeds and investment schemes that eventually culminated in the financial politics of the first North American hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He also provided books for the Hospital’s first Medical Library and made suggestions for people to be employed and teaching tools to be used in the first anatomical lectures in Philadelphia. Fothergill’s network sheds much needed light on transatlantic trade and the circulation and commercialization of medical print media in North America’s first regulated medical institutions. The many letters that he wrote provide insights into practices of knowledge production in these institutions. In this article, Fothergill’s epistolary web is represented as a semi-institutionalized network showing colonial medical practice to have been linked to semi-institutionalized spaces that were themselves connected to custodians of knowledge but also functioned as social networks. I argue that such networks were user-based and community-driven, and that they relied on a semi-authoritarian dispersion of knowledge.

Cutting Out The Middleman? American Trade In Northern Europe, 1783-1815

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Rabuzzi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Transatlantic Trade ◽  
Cutting Out ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
European Markets ◽  
American Trade

The chapter explores the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century forays of American merchants into North European markets, noting the advantages and disadvantages America had in contrast with Europe when seeking transatlantic trade opportunities. Of particular note is the trade advantage of America’s neutral status during the Napoleonic Wars. The tobacco trade of Baltimore is the lens through which author, Daniel A. Rabuzzi, contextualises the era.

Architectural Remains at Fort St. Joseph

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika K. Hartley ◽  
Michael S. Nassaney
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Structural Materials ◽  
New France ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Construction Techniques ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Function Construction

This chapter reveals the architectural remains recovered at Fort St. Joseph. Unlike other colonial settlements, no detailed maps, drawings, or descriptions have come to light to illuminate the physical appearance of the fort. Here, we trace the origins of French colonial architectural styles and how they were adapted to the New World. We then employ archaeological and documentary sources to ascertain the types of buildings that may have existed at Fort St. Joseph, their functions, and what they may have looked like. This information will help in our interpretations of the function, construction techniques, and materials used to construct buildings as revealed through the architectural remains and associated structural materials found at Fort St. Joseph. This examination of eighteenth-century buildings in New France provides a better appreciation and understanding of colonial architecture and the conservative nature of French building practices.

“A Very Bad Presidente in the House”: Workhouse Masters, Care, and Discipline in the Eighteenth-Century Workhouse

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susannah Ottaway
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Source Materials

Abstract Although they linger in historical memory as “Pauper Bastilles,” in the long eighteenth century, English workhouses functioned in many ways as institutions of care, as well as places of discipline. This article uses an unusual set of source materials—including a Master’s Query Book—to examine the nature of workhouse discipline in the Leeds township workhouse in the mid-eighteenth century. A close analysis of this remarkable source allows us a clear view of both the structures of authority and the agency of poor inmates in this institution. Poor Law officials monitored material conditions in the workhouse—the provision of food, clothing, and medical care—with great attentiveness, ensuring inmates were kept in good health, while leaving records that reveal intensive surveillance of the material objects inside the house. The workhouse committee also, however, kept an eagle eye on the workhouse master, allowing inmates a direct line of complaint. Workhouse inmates responded to these conditions by vigorously resisting rules that restricted their freedom of movement inside and outside the institution. Masters in such institutions were intermediaries between parish governors and the poor, rather than “technicians of discipline.” At the same time, workhouse records show that children were far more vulnerable, subjected to discipline at the discretion of master and mistress; we must disaggregate their experiences from the general population of inmates. These findings conform well to a widening strand in the historiography that reveals Old Poor Law workhouses as complex, hybrid institutions.

scholarly journals Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780*

2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (570) ◽  
pp. 1136-1168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon P Newman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
New World ◽  
Work Conditions ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Returning Home ◽  
Physical Effects

Abstract This essay explores the experiences of enslaved people who sought to escape their bondage in England and Scotland during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. It argues that, while the conditions of their servitude in Britain may appear closer to those of white British servants than those of enslaved plantation labourers in the colonies, the experiences of these people were conditioned by the experiences of and the threat of return to colonial enslavement. For some successful Britons an enslaved serving boy was a visible symbol of success, and a great many enslaved men, women, youths and children were brought to Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Some accompanied visiting colonists and ships’ officers, while others came to Britain with merchants, planters, clergymen and physicians who were returning home. Some of the enslaved sought to seize freedom by escaping. Utilising newspaper advertisements placed by owners seeking the capture and return of these runaways (as well as advertisements offering enslaved people for sale), the essay demonstrates that many such people were regarded by their masters and mistresses as enslaved chattel property. Runaways were often traumatised by New World enslavement, and all too aware that they might easily be sold or returned to the horrors of Caribbean and American slavery: improved work conditions in Britain did not lessen the psychological and physical effects of enslavement from which they sought to escape.

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