Culture & History Digital Journal

Introduction: The Iberian Atlantic and the Making of the Modern World

Dale W. Tomich — 2023-08-31

The Uncertain Atlantic: African and European Transformations of São Tomé Island c. 1533

Gabriel de Avilez Rocha — 2023-08-31

As the first European colony to specialize in sugar cultivation using a labor force comprised exclusively of enslaved Africans, São Tomé island in the Gulf of Guinea is often considered the birthplace of the sugar plantation complex. But the rise of sugar cultivation there took place amidst deep uncertainties. This essay examines a previously unstudied sixteenth-century São Tomé estate inventory from the vantage points of merchants and officials on São Tomé and in Portugal, and to the extent possible, of the Africans they exploited. Without disputing the economic importance of sugar or that of key sites such as São Tomé for later Atlantic histories, we call attention to contingencies that included the waning fortunes of certain planters and their implications for the enslaved; slave routes’ subordination to changing political dynamics on the African mainland; and evidence of African resistance ranging from litigation to escape to maroon wars that threatened sugar production, the slave trade, and the viability of Portuguese rule on the island. During the 1520s-1530s many parties had a stake in the island’s future, and the rise of sugar was by no means a foreordained outcome.

O Engenho de açúcar: André João Antonil and the Anatomy of the Seventeenth-Century Brazilian Slave Plantation

Dale Tomich — 2023-08-31

Jesuit João André Antonil’s Cultura e Opulência do Brasil is perhaps the first comprehensive treatise on slave plantation agriculture in the Americas. However, it is neither a manual nor an economic analysis. Rather, it is a moral and ethical guide for the administration of a sugar mill. This article examines the concepts, categories of thought, structures of meaning, and interpretive strategies through which Antonil comprehends the process of commodity production for the world market on the slave engenho. Antonil’s conceptual horizon was constrained by the Jesuit synthesis of Aristotelean thought and post-Tridentine Christian doctrine and the conception of the Last Judgement as the end of historical time. Consequently, he could not conceptualize the modernity of Atlantic slavery, the world market, and the plantation as a new temporality. Instead, he analyzes the engenho through the Aristotelean concept of oikos or household. The categories of thought and action through which Antonil comprehends the slave plantation and world market reveal the contradictory relation between slave production and the world market in the Iberian Atlantic.

Liquid Geographies of Transatlantic Slavery: Caribbean Pathways of Forced Migration, 1580-1640

Jennifer Wolff — 2023-08-31

Slave transshipment and resale routes within the Spanish Caribbean were a fundamental part of the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans brought to the region during the late XVI and first half of the XVII century were forcibly made to traverse multiple circum-Caribbean points throughout their lives in a continuous process of de-racination, re-commodification, and forced mobility. Maritime regional slave routes linked seemingly marginal locations in the Caribbean like Cumaná, Margarita, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, or Trujillo with wider regional flows of peoples, capital, and commodities, as well as with the circulation in the larger Atlantic. Veracruz and Cartagena each served as an axis for these regional slave transshipment and resale routes, while Havana and Cartagena both functioned as re-shipment springboards for Veracruz.

The Making of a Slave-Trading Entrepôt: Rio de Janeiro in the Economic Spaces of Mining, 1565-1763

Leonardo Marques — 2023-08-31

This work explores the making of Rio de Janeiro as a key supplier of enslaved Africans to the silver and gold mining areas of Latin America over the early modern period. The city became a critical component of the South Atlantic system during the long seventeenth century, supplying captives to Spanish America in exchange for Peruvian silver. In the following century, it became an essential part of the Brazilian gold boom that radically transformed Portuguese America. The article discusses the role of coerced Amerindian and African labor in the creation of the basic city structures that allowed for the reproduction of those connections to mining zones and reflects on the broader meanings of this story, framing the specific history of Rio de Janeiro within the broader context of a capitalist world economy.

Managing the Slave Trade: the Accounts of the Angola Contract between 1597-1600

Manuel F. Fernández Chaves — 2023-08-31

This article analyses the management of the 1594-1600 Angola Contract signed by the Portuguese merchants João Nunes Correia, Manuel Fernandes Anjo, and André Lopes Pinto, which regulated the extraction of slaves to America and the taxation system applied. Our current knowledge of such contracts is superficial, particularly for the 16th century, and even more so is our understanding of the management and the accounts of these agreements, which have not been preserved. The documents pertaining to litigation between the contractors and their handler in Angola, the accounts of which are partially preserved for the years between 1597 and 1600 in the Historical Protocols Archive in Madrid, enable us to gain a better understanding of the working of the Contract.

The Gold Mining Boom, North European Capital, and the Reorganization of the Portuguese Slave Trade in Angola (1710-1730)

Maximiliano M. Menz — 2023-08-31

The article explores the reorganization of the Portuguese slave trade in Angola in the early eighteenth century when an upsurge in traffic took place along with a gold mining boom in Brazil. The appearance of a new group in the administration of the Angola contract, with the political support of the Crown and the financial assistance of merchants connected to London stimulated the expansion of the slaving frontier into Benguela. A large part of the historiography has interpreted this growth of the slave trade in Benguela as a phenomenon produced by local or “internal” developments of the Portuguese empire. My argument is that this shift was related to the international development of capitalism. The growing international competition over slave markets in the Gulf of Guinea and Loango pushed Portuguese authorities and slave traders to focus on the traffic in the areas to the south of Luanda. This process was financed by international credit networks and played a central role in the establishment of a new slaving frontier that supplied captives to the Brazilian goldfields.

Population and Slavery in Vila Rica de Ouro Preto (1712-1770)

Eduardo Corona Pérez — 2023-08-31

The discovery of gold at the end of the 17th century and of diamonds during the 1730s in central-southern Brazil caused profound dislocation in the slave trades, turning the Minas Gerais region into an unprecedented pole of attraction for migrant and slave labor. In this work, we perform a sociodemographic analysis of the slave population in Vila Rica de Ouro Preto, the capital of the captaincy of Minas Gerais, in a period ranging from 1712 to 1770. For this purpose, and based on previous literature, we use the data series gathered from the two parishes that made up the urban geography of the region, as well as the notarial records preserved at the Arquivo Histórico do Museu da Inconfidência - Casa do Pilar. The reconstruction of families and the study of the relationship between the sociodemographic data of the slave contingent and those of the rest of the population, the processes of manumission, and the evolution of the slave import market have allowed us to prove the dependence of the slave population on slave trade.

Publishing Le Parfait Ambassadeur for Richelieu: the Translation of Vera’s El Enbaxador in Early Modern Europe

María Concepción Gutiérrez Redondo — 2023-08-31

The central years of Richelieu’s government saw a notable increase in the number of political treatises published in Paris after the Journée des Dupes in 1630. Such treatises not only reflected the cardinal’s ideas on political practice but also served to justify them. El Enbaxador (1620) was the first treatise on the ambassadorial office ever written in Spanish, produced at the end of the reign of Felipe III by Juan Antonio de Vera, a nobleman, writer and future ambassador of the Spanish Monarchy. When published in French as Le Parfait Ambassadeur in 1635, it resonated with the political debate in Richelieu’s entourage. Significantly, the text was addressed to Abel Servien, secretary of state for war and main collaborator of the cardinal minister. The translation operation, which involved remarkable adaptations, reveals the compatibility between Vera’s treatise and the aforementioned political debate. The French translation of 1635 was also instrumental to the dissemination of El Enbaxador in early modern Europe, since the later editions in French and Italian, five in total, depend on it. Interestingly, the European fortunes of El Enbaxador can be explained by its readings as a treatise on political education, a handbook for ambassadors and an outstanding text of the Republic of Letters.

Art Facing the Problem of Otherness, with Reference to the Interwar Literature of Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942)

Miriam Baquero Leyva — 2023-08-31

The work of Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) is an interesting illustration of the power of representing the struggles of the inner world in literature. In her work, the whole problem of otherness is evident, which is largely resolved through literary activity, in a woman who assumed in herself a marginal otherness due to her gender, her sexual identity, and for having been admitted for psychiatric treatment on more than one occasion during her life. But, beyond the individual aspect, her novels also provide a valuable account of the feelings of the interwar generation, an intellectual and artistic group that experienced the taste of modernity during the brief period between World War I and Hitler’s uprising. The author took part in this exodus and, in this case, literature was an important means of collective endurance. Delving into both aspects, we witness a reflection, perhaps old, but full of associations with our present society.

Remembering the Gender and Sexual Archive of the Black Diaspora in Tunisia: a Decolonial Approach to Historical Anthropology

Itzea Goikolea-Amiano — 2023-08-31

The available studies on the cultural history of the Black diasporas in the Ottoman Mediterranean have focused on religious and other cultural manifestations, leaving out the inquiry about notions and practices related to gender and sexuality. Taking a cue from works on the Black Atlantic and the African continent, this article investigates the notions of gender and sexuality underlying the sub-Saharan worldviews and offers a template to interpret the subjecthood of enslaved sub-Saharans in the Maghribi diaspora. The first part of the essay lays out a historical contextualisation of the Black diaspora in early nineteenth-century Tunis. Then I take the reference to the practice of al-musāḥaqa (lesbianism) among the Black slaves in an 1808 Arabic manuscript as a starting point to investigate, by surveying different anthropological studies, whether al-musāḥaqa can be thought of as pertaining to the archive of sexual epistemology which the enslaved would have taken to Tunisia and, more importantly, to enquire into how we can understand it within a non-anthropocentric historical cosmology-which, ultimately, can contribute to the necessary decolonisation of feminist and queer studies, and history and anthropology more generally.