Christopher’s Blog for Transatlantic History

Reviews of Rebecca’s Revival

by Christopher Woodall

Riordan, Liam. 2006. “Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Review)”. Journal of the Early Republic. 26, no. 2: 349-352.

Riordan praises Sensbach’s book and calls it an excellent tool for Atlantic-themed classes. Riordan mainly finds fault with the book by saying the following:

…greater attention to the demography of slavery and black conversion rates in St. Thomas, as well as a clearer sense of how well these

developments were known outside Moravian circles, might have provided

better support for Sensbach’s occasionally sweeping claims about

the importance of the book’s subject in providing an essential model for

later black Protestantism.—p.351

Edwards, Lillie J. (Lillie Johnson). 2008. “Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Review)”. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. 9, no. 2.

Edwards not only praises the book but in completely uncritical. She especially approved of the books attempts to illustrate how Christianity both undermined and supported racism and slavery.

Meuwese, M. 2005. “J.F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World”. CANADIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY. 40, no. 3: 594.

This is a very favorable review. The critiques of the book in this review are, in Meuwese’s words, “minor”. The biggest flaw in Mewuwese’s opinion is that Rebecca “occasionally disappears into the background”.—p.594

Carretta, V. 2006. “Jon F. Sensbach. Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World”. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW. 111, no. 3: 794.

The reviewer calls Sensbach’s work a “methodological tour de force”. Sensbach is also described as, “…a historian who can discriminate the known from the unknown, and more importantly the possible from the probably.”. —p.795

Sensbach, and Carol V R George. 2006. “Book Reviews – Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World”. The Journal of American History. 92, no. 4: 1409.

George feels that Sensbach’s claims may be over-reaching in nature but ultimately asserts that the book is a must read for people who study women’s history or the African diaspora.—p.1410

Hodges, Graham, and Jon F. Sensbach. 2007. “Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. By Jon F. Sensbach”. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 75, no. 1: 182-185.

This is another uncritical review hailed as “of interest to any student of early modern religion.”-p.185

Sensbach, and Aaron Spencer Fogleman. 2008. “Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World”. The William and Mary Quarterly. 65, no. 2: 378.

This article also reviews Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. (Allan Greer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.) and Weiblich und fremd: Deutschsprachige Einwandererinnen im Pennsylvania des 18. Jahrhunderts. (Christine Hucho. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005.). In reviewing these books as a group, Fogleman seeks to emphasize the agency of Native Americans, Africans and women. The review of Rebecca’s Revival is more descriptive than critical.

Review of Empires of the Atlantic World

J. H. Elliot’s Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 is a work of comparative history that ably looks at the development of the two greatest Atlantic powers, England and Spain, over the course of more than three centuries. Empires of the Atlantic World is also a work that Elliot admits relies more on secondary resources than on primary sources.¹ Elliott also eschews grand historical theories (especially Louis Hartz’s ‘immobility theory’) as reductionist.² The result is a masterfully written work that is rather conventional, especially when compared to Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, in its interpretive models and organizational layout.

Empires of the Atlantic World spans great swaths of time and space and, as such, is likely to have several concurrent central themes rather than an a single thesis³ The first of these themes is best expressed in Elliot’s own words and are as follow:

Comparative history is-or should be-concerned with similarities as well as differences and a comparison of the history and culture of large and complicated political organisms that culminates in a series of sharp dichotomies is unlikely to do justice to the complexities of the past. By the same token, an insistence on similarity at the expense of difference is liable to be equally reductionist, since it trends to conceal diversity beneath a factitious unity.

Though comparative history may simply seem a tool of organization, through these words and examining Empires of the Atlantic World’s parts and chapters, with titles such as Occupation and Crown and Colonists in the context of Anglo-Spanish comparisons, the reader finds that comparative history is central to Elliot’s arguments about the Spanish and English empires. Therefore, comparative history cannot be relegated to a simple literary tool but, at least in this instance, takes center stage among the central themes of the work.

This is not to say that Empires of the Atlantic World is devoid of an argument. Indeed, Elliot argues fervently throughout this work that the Spanish empire was dominated by conquest and imperial impetus (if not always direct control) while the British empire was overwhelmingly an empire of settlement and trade.⁴ This argument is the driving force of the book and will be examined in more detail in this review in the following paragraphs that discuss Empires of the Atlantic World’s organization.

Elliot divides this work into three parts with each part further divided into four chapters. Part one, titled Occupation, deals with the beginnings of the Spanish and English New World empires. Occupation begins with such detailed looks at people such as Hernan Cortes and Christopher Newport that it is readily identifiable as a reliance on the conventional interpretive mode that Restall would call the ‘great man theory’. This sections chapters then finds similarity in England’s experience in Ireland with Spain’s experiences during the Reconquista as well as a lack of similarities in the value of land in the New World that English settlers placed on that land and the Spanish did not.⁵ The idea that the English emphasized trade and settlement compared to Spanish conquest and subjugation is explained in this section by a lack of English self-confidence⁶ and a looser hierarchy in the English system though Elliott also takes the opportunity to point out that both empires were moving towards similar attitudes of subordination of their colonies in relation to the metropolitan center.⁷

Section two, Consolidation, obviously works towards explaining the Spanish and English empires histories after initial experience in the New World led to a more substantive and enduring presence in the Americas. The chapters of this section largely work through the structure of the Spanish and English empires, pointing to the patchwork system of English control⁸ of its colonies and contrasting that to the Hispanic world’s system that “…could only have looked like a triumphant assertion of the obedience properly due to kings.”⁹. Additionally, Elliot brings us back to his recurring them of the nature of the English and Spanish empires by asserting that, “Britain’s empire was therefore to be a maritime and commercial empire. As such it came to think of itself as the antithesis of Spain’s land-based empire of conquest.”¹⁰.

Section Three is titled Emancipation and its main arguments are succinctly summed up in the chapter A New World in the making examines how the British and Spanish Atlantic empires fell apart at slightly different times though under similar revolutionary forces and gave way to republics as different as the mother countries that formed them. The epilogue even takes Elliot’s argument to its theoretical conclusion by asserting that if Henry VII and Henry VII had sponsored Columbus then the resulting English empire might have looked very similar to the actual Spanish empire that came out of the early voyages of Atlantic discovery.¹¹

Among the book’s many strengths are it internal honesty. Elliot straightforwardly states the regions and themes the book will not cover¹² with no attempt at obfuscation or presentation of a thesis that is later ignored in the book. Furthermore, pulling together the disparate sources in Empires of the Atlantic World’s bibliography make this an excellent synthesis of materials on the subject of the Spanish and English empires which make the book thoroughly useful as a textbook. Empires of the Atlantic World’s primary weakness is that it is not, in large, a book of original research that contributes new knowledge or interpretive models to the understanding of either comparative or imperial history.

Additional weaknesses include the fact that Elliot rejects grand theories as modes of explanation in history but structures his book and arguments in such a well-designed linear fashion that it makes all that occurs in the Spanish and English empires from 1492 to 1830 to be intrinsically linked in a causal relationship reflected in the titles of the three sections of the book. The strengths and weaknesses of Empires of the Atlantic World also point to its relevance to transatlantic history. As a teaching tool, the book is strong and well-written but as a source of innovation for the professional historian it is lacking in originality in both content and structure.

Intellectual Biography of J. H. Elliott

Professor Sir John Huxtable Elliott, MA & PhD Cambridge, MA Oxford, was born on 23 June 1930 in Reading, England.

Professional History:

Professor of History-King’s College, London, 1968-1973.

Elected to fellowship in the British Academy which resulted in the lecture series titled The discovery of America and the discovery of Man.

Professor of History-School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, 1973-1990.

Regius Professor of Modern History-Oxford, 1990-1997.

Awards and other achievements:

Prince of Asturias Award, 1996 for his contributions to the social sciences.

Balzan Prize, 1999 for his contributions to the study of Spanish history. The amount of this award was £200,000.

Former editor of the historical journal Past and Present.

Regius professor Emeritus of Oxford.

Honorary Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Books by J.H. Elliott:

The Old World and the New 1492-1650 (1970)

The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain (1598-1640) (1984)

Richelieu and Olivares (1984)

The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (1986)

Spain and Its World, 1500-1700: Selected Essays (1989)

National and Comparative History: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 10 May 1991 (1991)

Do the Americas Have a Common History?: An Address (1998)

A Few Articles by J. H. Elliott:

Elliott, J. H. 2006. “Contrasting Empires the Differences – Cultural, Religious, Ethnic and Economic – between the Spanish and British Approaches to Their Empires in the Americas”. HISTORY TODAY. 56, no. 8: 12-22.

Elliott, J.H. 2008. “Williams, Patrick, The Great Favourite: The Duke of Lerma and the Court and Government of Philip III of Spain, 1598-1621″. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW. 123, no. 500: 201.

Selected Reviews by J. H. Elliott:

Elliott, J. H. 2003. “Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues by Kenneth Maxwell”. NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. 50: 40-42.

Elliott, J. H. 2004. “The Americas: A Hemispheric History by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto”. NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. 51: 38-40.

Elliott, J. H. 2006. “Simon Bolivar: A Life by John Lynch”. NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. 53, no. 12: 34-36.

Elliott, J. H. 2006. “Barbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment by David J. Weber”. NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. 53, no. 3: 36-38.

Review of The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade

Introduction to Transatlantic History

by

Christopher Woodall

10 September 2008

Robert Harms book, The Diligent, is an engaging book that draws the reader into the world of 18th century slave traders. While this book has been taken to task for its scholarly deficits, its value to the study of Transatlantic history is significant. Though many reviews of this work by Harms lament the lack of a strong academic structure¹, in studying The Diligent’s thesis, organization, strengths, weaknesses and importance, we will be able to see how Harms’ effort in narrative and micro-history both adds to and detracts from this book’s contributions to the study of slavery in the Atlantic world.

Harms’ thesis is clearly stated, if a bit muddled, in the book’s preface. In preparing the reader for a work that will focus intensely on individuals (and 1^st lieutenant Robert Durand above all others), Harms is asserting that individuals can get lost when historians label subjects with names like “the Atlantic slave trade”. Indeed, Harms asserts this quite forcefully when, in describing slaving voyages, he states the following:

Those individual voyages have been lumped together by historians under the label “Atlantic slave trade…phrases that can create the impression that is was a monolithic phenomenon with uniform characteristics. A closer look, however, reveals that the slave trader was really a kaleidescope of diverse national and local endeavors that was constantly changing over time.²

This statement, combined with Harms’ express assertion that there was “no overarching “global” context to the voyage [of the Diligent]”³ seem disingenuous since lieutenant Durand’s voyages were constantly shaped by events far from the localities that the Diligent visited. The intimate link between the Oyo kingdom’s depredations against King Agaja’s lands undermine this overemphasis since the regional hostilities were intimately linked to trade with Europe.⁴ Additionally, Harms’ portrayal of the Cape Verdeans places the blame for the failings of the local economy on Portuguese imperial strictures and the eagerness of the locals to trade with non-Portuguese merchants in contravention to prevalent mercantile theory of the time⁵. While none of these points calls into question Harms’ ideas of change and locality, they do seem to indicate that some larger issues were in fact in play during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. It is thus in looking at the thesis of The Diligent that the reader can see one of the book’s greatest weak point.

The Diligent’s organization is not as convoluted or difficult to read as some reviews suggest. After taking the reader through the steps that it took to organize and outfit a slaving expedition in chapters one through three, Harms uses a literary technique in telling the rest of the Diligent’s voyage reminiscent of flashback sequences in fiction. For example, after getting the Diligent and the reader from France to Africa, the narrative steps backward in time to look at the history of Whydah and its greatest son, Assou, in order to explain the back story that Durand and the crew found when they arrived at Whydah. This structure, in fact, along with the very personal narratives of real African historical features is a major strength of the book. The general public will find The Dilligent a very readable book while historians can easily access the endnotes for verification of Harms’ source material.⁶

Another of the book’s strengths is that it effectively illustrates the lack of moral outrage of Durand and others involved in the slave trade at the horrors in which they were participating. One of Harms’ statements is particularly illuminating:

What is especially chilling about Robert Durand’s words is their businesslike, matter-of- fact tone…He gave no indication that he felt any sense of shame or moral ambivalence about his mission…Nor was Durand a hardened slave trader. He was only twenty-xis years old, and this was his first trip to Africa.⁷

This focus on the contemporary stoicism in relation to slavery, especially when Europeans of the time held noble Africans in esteem⁸, would be a line of inquiry that would connect tie the book to the greater academic world and perhaps quiet some of the critics of The Diligent. It is examining Durand’s personality, as well as the personalities of real Africans of the time, that Robert Harms finds his stride and engages the reader in both the narrative as well as the history of the book.

One of the most significant contributions that The Diligent makes to history is in interesting the non-academic public in Atlantic slavery thereby challenging historians to write outside of the normal conventions of style and focus. It is also a book that has received many awards including the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize of Yale’s Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize awarded by the French Colonial Historical Society. This clearly demonstrates that any denunciation of the book as “non-history” should be mediated by the academic recognition that it has garnered. While many books have been written about the slave trade, few have received as much critical and popular praise as Robert Harms’ The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. In asserting the validity of micro-history while gaining critical respect, Harms advances the study of the slave trade in making the face of that “monolithic slave trade” personal and real, whatever other strengths and weaknesses his book may have.

I’m sure everyone is just consumed with eagerness to see the list of books that I gave you in class in blog format.  So, to satiate that need, here they are.  Note that the Curto listing also has a hyperlink.

By the way, for those of you in Dr. Demhardt’s cartography class, I strongly suggest checking out the link that follows (a database of maps of Africa) at:  http://catalog.afriterra.org/presentMapsSearch.cmd#

Ok, so here are the books…

<!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –>

Social History (Ethnicity & Gender):

Campbell, Gwyn, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Calder Miller. Women and Slavery. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007.

Curto, José C. Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil During the Era of Slavery. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2004. <http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip046/2003014778.html>.

Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine. Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. The new Black studies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Harris, Joseph E., Alusine Jalloh, and Stephen E. Maizlish. The African Diaspora. College Station: Published for the University of Texas at Arlington by Texas A&M University Press, 1996.

Lockhart, James, and Stuart B. Schwartz. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge Latin American studies, 46. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Lovejoy, Paul E. Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora. London [u.a.]: Continuum, 2003.

Miers, Suzanne, and Igor Kopytoff. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.

Pittock, Joan H., and A. Wear. Interpretation and Cultural History. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991.


Slavery

Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, and David Williams. Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres, et autres textes abolitionnistes. Paris: Harmattan, 2003.

Drescher, Seymour. From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Economic

Nye, John V. C. War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900. The Princeton economic history of the western world. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Prados de la Escosura, Leandro, and Patrick Karl O’Brien. Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and Its European Rivals, 1688-1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge, 2004.

This is just the initial version.  I’ll play with it more as time allows….

https://mavspace.uta.edu/caw1679/My%20voyages.kml

Review of Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900

by

Christopher Woodall

Introduction to Transatlantic History

12 September 2008

Upon first taking on the task of reviewing a book as densely packed with narrative and as full of data as Ecological Imperialism a potential reviewer might initially be daunted. Alfred Crosby is a meticulous and well-spoken historian and writer whose product in this case is a thoroughly enjoyable but highly detailed effort. Fortunately, Crosby is skilled in threading his thesis overtly throughout Ecological Imperialism and this book’s strengths, organization, thesis and contributions are presented to its reader in a very direct manner.

Crosby’s central contention throughout Ecological Imperialism is that European human, animal and plant lifeforms were central to the conquest of what Crosby calls “Neo-Europes”¹. These lifeforms were central to European conquest because they changed the biological landscape of the Neo-Europes and made those new territories hospitable to European colonization. It is here that Crosby’s argument finds its stride and is plainly expressed in the book’s title. Crosby does not argue that other factors were not involved (political developments in Europe, religion, et. al.) but that the role of ecological imperialism facilitated European expansion to such a degree as to warrant central placement among the many factors which led to European success in colonizing certain regions of the world. Indeed, the prologue begins with the question of how Europeans leapfrogged around the world and, more importantly, how they leapfrogged to areas that were much more distant than regions such as the Middle East and Africa.² The purpose of asserting this theory is best expressed in the author’s own words:

The responsibilities of the Neo-Europeans require unprecedented ecological and diplomatic                    sophistication: statesmanship in farm and embassy, plus greatness of spirit. One wonders if their comprehension of our world is equal to the challenge posed by the current state of our species and of the biosphere.³

It is clear that Ecological Imperialism is intended to be a history to call the attention of contemporaries to the ecological challenges we face today as well bringing to the fore the special obligation among Neo-Europeans to heed that call and take action.

Whether or not Crosby’s call is heard, the book’s thesis is strongly argued by its content and organization. Chapter two’s title, “Pangaea Revisited” acts as more than a convenient starting point for the book’s narrative. Ecological Imperialism’s central idea is fleshed out in this early chapter. Key concepts that Crosby exploits later in the book include McNeill’s law⁴, Europe’s better exploitation of Neolithic (and later) technologies⁵ and the idea that invading organisms, whatever form they take, can decimate an invaded region to such a point as to render the that region’s old ecosystem vulnerable to the point of replacement by the invading organisms⁶. In chapter three Crosby examines how a sort of inversion of McNeill’s law led to failed colonization projects in the extreme north Atlantic and the Levant. Opposition to these efforts portmanteau biota (Crosby’s catchall phrase for all European organisms) faced opposition from local disease, local peoples an local climatic extremes (or a combination of them all) depending on the locality examined but this opposition was successful nonetheless. Chapter four similarly examines how the Azores, Madeiras and Canaries contrasted to the Levant and the north Atlantic inasmuch as they were favorable to the invading portmanteau biota.

New Zealand is later situated somewhere between the two extremes mentioned above as an example of a region that avoided having all of its native life annihilated but nevertheless became a Neo-Europe. The intervening chapters explain how plant life (particularly weeds), animals (both livestock and “varmints”) and disease acted as agents of ecological imperialism and facilitated European settlement. Also included are chapters on how Europeans “discovered” and exploited trade winds and why Europeans never fully colonized tropical swaths of Africa and Asia. The latter chapter is the most overt reinforcement of Crosby’s thesis in that it asserts that Europeans and their organisms could not compete with local ecological forces in a manner reminiscent of the European experience in the Holy Land and in stark contrast to the ecological-biological success in the Neo-Europes⁷.

Ecological Imperialism’s strengths are many. Among these strengths are the author’s way with words and that eloquence is evident when he closes his chapter on weeds by characterizing the Europeans who complained about said weeds as ingrates. Crosby’s main strength, though, is the thorough support for his thesis of ecological imperialism as expressed in thirty-eight pages of endnotes. This extensive research combined with an affable but not flippant writing style make this book a compelling work.

The main weakness of Ecological Imperialism is not large enough to weaken Crosby’s overall argument but is worth mentioning. By arguing that Europeans did not have the technological or biological tools to colonize Africa until the advent of “cheap and plentiful quinine and repeating rifles”⁸ nineteenth century seems to ignore some of the implications Crosby himself asserted in regards to the successful Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands. Though he later vigorously defends his contention that European ecological imperialism faced a tougher opponent in tropical Africa and Asia, that defense at the very least questions some of his premises of how the Spanish faced a determined enemy in the Guanches of the the Canaries comparable to the Skraelings of Vinland. Moreover, geographical challenges in the former region in some aspects were more daunting than the physical obstacles presented in the latter. Crosby makes a stalwart defense of this minor inconsistency but, given his oratorical and research prowess, should make deeper observations between his Vinland-Enchanted Isles-Tropical Africa observations.

Ecological Imperialism’s contribution is clear. In this book Alfred Crosby continues developing the theories of such historians William H. McNeill while setting the stage for the later work of Jared Diamond in order to bring the idea of ecological imperialism into a more fully developed thesis. In doing this Crosby opens the ecological imperialism theory to criticism but such criticism only aids in understanding a topic as complex as the ecological interchanges between the the Neo-Europes of the post-Colombian Atlantic world.