On the surface, Jon F. Sensbach’s Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World is a recounting of the somewhat obscure (in the English historiography at least) life of Rebecca Protten and her contribution to the creation of black Christianity in the Caribbean during the turbulent years of the eighteenth century. However, the point that Sensbach makes runs much deeper than to bring to light the events of her life and the long lasting effects that she had among what Sensbach calls “Afro-Christianity.”

He, like Harms in The Diligent, masterfully uses Protten’s life as a backdrop to describe the emergence of a separate iteration of African Christianity in the Atlantic World. Indeed, he notes that the introduction of the Moravian branch of Christianity to slaves in the Danish Caribbean provided for a separate experience for African slaves away from the state sponsored and planter sanctioned Lutheran Reformed Church. It combined facets of Christianity with that of Africa religions. Further, it promised spiritual liberation, all the while encouraging its enslaved adherents to submit to their masters. This was ultimately unpopular with planters and the Danish reformed Church, who banned and resisted the Moravians’ proselyting efforts among slaves for a time in the late 1730s.

The book is divided up into chronological chapters that detail her life in the early eighteenth century. Sensbach begins the work by providing information about the St. John slave revolt, in which a group of well organized slaves managed to expel the Danish from the island for a period of about 6 months. Other chapters consider Rebecca’s early proselyting efforts, her first marriage and subsequent imprisonment for fornication as the Dutch Reformed Church on St. Thomas reacted against the Moravian religion being taught to slaves. Additional chapters further delve into Rebecca’s migration to Europe and her second marriage to Christian Protten, and finally her relocation to Christiansborg, in modern-day Ghana. Sensbach concludes with an epilogue detailing the effects of Rebecca Protten’s efforts on future Black Christianity.

Sensbach’s prose is fast moving and fluid. He does not digress too deeply into side notes, save for the first chapter, where he provides an explanation of the milieu in which Rebecca began her missionary labors. Rebecca’s Revival features 49 pages of notes and source information, and it also includes a handy index. Because of his writing, the confinement of notes to the end of the style and directness, Rebecca’s Revival is surely to be appealing and accessible to students, the general public, and experts alike.

In the epilogue Sensbach rather boldly declares that “apart from the archaic idea that a women’s significance is defined through her relationships with men, the sum of Rebecca’s life well exceeded that modest appraisal.”¹ In addition, he describes the Moravian missionary as the “principal alchemist” in the emergence of black Christianity.² Declarations such as these makes Rebecca’s Revival seem to employ a “great man theory of history” for his book (except that his “great man” is indeed a woman) in that prominent men and their female counterparts are the sole shapers of history, and that people of whom historians have little or no extant written records did nothing to contribute to why things are the way they are. Yet, at the same time, Sensbach does admit that she was not the sole instigator of the movement, which would reject the aforesaid “great man” idea.³ He also notes the influence of other Moravian preachers such as Friedrich Martin in converting enslaved Africans to the fold. Though Rebecca certainly had a hand in providing for the spread of a hybridized African-Christian religion among the slaves on St. Thomas, Germany, and in Africa, Protten was not alone in this effort as other evangelists and missionaries spread the Moravian message abroad. The rejection of a “great man” approach to the emergence of Black Christianity is indeed one of the book’s strengths. However, Sensbach’s seeming vacillation between making Protten “the principal alchemist” and one of many contributors to the genesis of “Afro-Christianity” is unfortunately one of its weaknesses as well.

Rebecca Protten’s life was the very embodiment of the early Atlantic world as envisioned by Bailyn in Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. She was constantly on the move. Sensbach notes that “the Caribbean where she spent her early years, like the rest of the Americas, was a siphon for European colonizers and unfree Africans.”⁴ Sensbach’s examination of her life overturns the somewhat implied myth that those on the move throughout the early Atlantic World were solely Europeans, while those of African descent were confined to plantations after a harrowing transatlantic voyage across the Middle Passage. This makes her story of high import to transatlantic history and contributes much to the field.

Here is my review for Elliott.  It’s pretty rough, but I think it will work for now.

Enjoy!

According to J.H. Elliott, “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 just to the complexities of the past.” The same can be said of attempting to find similarities where they may or may not exist.¹ However, comparative history, he notes, have other uses. Sometimes historians become so focused on their areas of specialties that they often fail to take notice of what happens in other specialties that might influence the scholarship in their particular areas. Comparative history has the potential, Elliott believes, to ⁠”shake historians out of their provincialism.”²⁠

Such is what Elliott aims to do in Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830. He focuses on the “development of the settler societies and their relationship with their mother countries,”³⁠ On the surface his thesis is to compare the development of British and Spanish American “Neo-Europes” (to use the words of Alfred Crosby).⁴ However, his larger point is that one empire frequently tried to employ the methods that the other used elsewhere in the New World, with different levels of success. Some times this emulation worked out to the benefit of the second power, but many times it backfired with varying results. The establishment of the different empires was based on, according to Elliot, “the recognition of reciprocal needs. Europe needed, or believed that it needed, the products of America.”⁵⁠

For example, the Spanish found large quantities of gold throughout their empire. This largely came from the conquest of native peoples such as the Aztecs or the Incas. They also discovered the very prosperous silver mines at Potosi in Peru and at Zacatecas in Mexico. Silver became more important in the Spanish economy as a result of the dwindling supply of gold found by conquistadors who ranged over the whole of the Spanish empire searching for the substance. Further, Elliott notes that as conquest and looting became more scarce, it “began to give way to development,” such as at the mines in Peru and in Mexico. So much capital was invested into the silver trade (to satiate Europe’s trade imbalance with the East) that the export of silver and gold became the single “crop” of Spanish America.⁶

The English had a similar mindset. Though there was little to no gold or silver to be found in the nascent English colony of Virginia, the land would support tobacco production. Further, sugar was later grown in Barbados. These cash crops became the currency of the English areas in the New World, so much so that it could be said that tobacco “proved to be the salvation of the Jamestown colony.”⁷⁠ The production of sugar and tobacco also enriched the English, just as the “production” of silver enriched the Spanish. Furthermore, like in Spanish America, development of cash crops that could be invested in led to the settlement of British North America as more and more people came to the New World.

The book is divided into three parts that deal with “Occupation”, “Consolidation,” and Emancipation.” Each part is divided into smaller chapters that discuss varying aspects of the New World empires of both Spain and Britain such as, “Exploiting American Resources,” “Crown and Colonists,” and “A New World in the Making.” The book chronologically covers the period from the conquest and the settlement of the Spanish and British Empires to their independence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book’s scholarly apparatus is quite strong, and it is clear that the author heavily researched the interactions between the two empires, with 105 pages of notes and bibliographic citations.

Elliott’s Iberian training is heavily featured in the book, as he goes into much more detail about the Spanish Empire than about the British colonies, though both receive more or less equal coverage throughout the work. Though this could be due to a lack of specialized knowledge about the British Empire in America, it may also be an attempt to spark other historians’ interest in the kind of questions that he asks and answers in Empires of the Atlantic World.

The book is useful to any student of transatlantic history because it is an example of comparative history, which is one method of approaching a historical subject of such a large scope. By examining different areas of the world in the same treatise, it is possible to look at those different areas and get a greater picture of the whole than a historian would by merely examining the entire region or just one small part of it. Moreover, the issue of scale is paramount. Attempts to describe the entire history of Atlantic empires in one book would be doomed to failure simply due to the sheer size of the subject matter. Such an approach “would prevent a historian from knowing anything until he knows everything which is absurd and impossible.”⁸⁠ Thus, in comparing two regions – in this case the British and Spanish Empires– effective generalization has to be used so that what is gleaned is not lost amidst the flotsam of other things.

Howdy all–

Here is the link to the Google Earth tour for Elliott for Tuesday’s class.  My apologies for the delay in getting it up. 

I used polygons in this tour to denote areas that were either large (like the empires) or that were kind of ambiguous (like the Argentine Pampas).  The blue ones represent Britain and the red the Spanish.  Since it would be utterly confusing to have the tour bounce back and forth between British and Spanish topics (like Elliot does), I have each section of the book further subdivided into a section on Spain and one on Britain. 

In part 3 some of the polygons overlap with each other and have the same color.  For best results, I recommend turning each polygon layer off when you are done with it (I probably should have used different colors, oops!).

Enjoy!  Get it while it’s hot here.  However, you can get it if it’s cold here also.

Cheers!

Here is my rough draft (and it is pretty rough, if you ask me).

Enjoy!

Quoting the anthropologist Samuel Wilson at the beginning of the seventh chapter of his book, Matthew Restall notes in Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest that many myths about the Spanish Conquest have arisen because people “seek to distance [themselves] from [its] history… because of the tragedy it contains.”¹⁠ The tragedy is further compounded because of the bloody nature of the event: many thousands of natives died, either from warfare or because of the diseases that the Europeans brought with them, diseases from which the Mexica (and other native peoples) had no natural immunity. Equally disturbing is the fact that the atrocities that the Spanish performed were done in the name of religious conversion. Because of these horrifying facts, Restall notes, it was far easier, less politically damaging, and less troubling to ascribe elements of superhuman nature and divine help to the whole affair.²⁠

The problem is not so much with the horrors of the Conquest itself, but rather with the way that it has been portrayed by opportunistic conquistadors seeking to further their careers and by politicians in Spain and elsewhere who sought to justify expansion and later imperialism based upon preconceived notions of superiority. All of these, Restall argues, arose out of the sixteenth century Spanish Conquest.

Restall’s thesis is that myths such as these were inventions of the Spanish themselves– merely because they served a purpose for those involved. Other myths took root later during the period of the Latin American independence movements and through the literary works of Washington Irving and others. The book seeks to eradicate these myths. In seeking to overturn particularly entrenched myths (which he defines as “something fictitious that is taken to be true”), Restall paints a much more nondescript picture of what could arguably be considered one of the most important events of modern history.³⁠ Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest presents the conquistadors as simply following predetermined procedures. Furthermore, it seems that Restall also calls for an entirely new interpretation of the clash between Castile and the indigenous population that inhabited the Americas prior to the arrival of the conquistadors. He sees the old myths as having served their purpose.

The book is divided into 7 chapters. Each one addresses a different myth about the Conquest, though they are all bound together by a larger theme of European superiority and exceptional European men. Specific fictions that the book covers are the “Myth of Exceptional Men”, the “Myth of the White Conquistador,” and “The Myth of Completion.” A smaller epilogue examines all the myths in the context of the death of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec Emperor.

Much of the historiography surrounding the Spanish Conquest has been based on the accounts of conquistadors and others who had a vested interest in making the Conquest sound as glorious as possible. According to Restall, many of these accounts were written by conquistadors who had the goal of obtaining a feudal title or lordship over the areas that they had conquered. Understandably, many of these accounts were embellished with exaggerated stories of the feats of the Spaniards so as to appear that what they had done was extraordinary. In the eyes of the conquistadors, what they had done was amazing, so they wrote it down and marketed it as such. In time, it seeped into historical writing as something that was out of the ordinary.⁴⁠

Conquistador accounts also sought to justify the brutal measures that the Spanish employed in subjugating native peoples. For example, the 1525 execution of Cuauhtemoc was marketed to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as necessary because the Aztec ruler, it was thought, had been conspiring with others to rise up in rebellion against the Spanish in Mexico City.⁵⁠ The implications of the event were that the natives could not be trusted to be “good subjects” of the king of Spain and needed supervision and training from those who were clearly superior and much more civilized. It is from accounts and incidents like these, Restall argues, that much of the misunderstanding surrounding the Conquest has arisen.

One strength of the book is the ability of Restall to place the letters and accounts of European conquistadors in the context of the culture of conquering that existed in Spain in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Together with conquistador accounts of the Conquest, Restall also uses accounts of native eyewitnesses. By using Aztec accounts with those from Europeans and looking at both in the context of Spanish and Mexica culture, it becomes more clear that the letters that conquistadors like Pizarro and Cortes sent to Madrid were embellished.

A weakness of the book is the fact that while Restall convincingly overturns many of the embellishments, faulty interpretations, and untruths that surround the Conquest, he does not present an alternative model about how the Mexica-Spanish conflict should be examined. In essence, Restall shows historians the path, but he does not venture down that road, leaving the way forward for other historians to contemplate.

The book promises to contribute much to transatlantic history beyond an examination of the Conquest. By overturning myths (and interpretations) about the Spanish Conquest, new avenues for research and other interpretations are opened. For example, Restall mentions the myth of miscommunication in chapter 5, which focuses on Cortes’ use of La Malinche, a Nahua woman who was given to the Spaniards near Vera Cruz. Cortes clearly saw the need for an interpreter who spoke Nahuatl, so she became attached to his band of Spaniards. His recognition of a need for an interpreter on the Spanish expedition to the interior suggests that there was prior contact between the Aztecs or their representatives and the Spaniards prior to the 1519 expedition. Further work on this end would be most beneficial.

Since revisionist history is a rather broad term, I have tried to find 10 articles and book chapters that deal with the Spanish Conquest, specifically the myths that Restall mentions in his book. Note that this term does not exclude the discovery of the New World, which is why Columbus (who seemed to attract more than his fair share of revisionism) is included here.

Enjoy!

Altman, Ida. “Spanish Society in Mexico City after the Conquest.” The Hispanic American Historical Review Vol. 71, No. 3 (August 1991): 413-445. Altman examines more in depth society in Mexico City in the 30 years after the Conquest, arguing that while it segued into an era of prosperity, the period from 1519-1550 was far more complex than previously thought.

Brooks, Francis J. “Motecuzoma Xocoyotl, Hernán Cortés, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo: The Construction of an Arrest.” The Hispanic American Historical Review Vol. 75, No. 2 (May 1995): 149-183. Brooks has some of the same ideas as Restall about myths that sprung up around the meeting between Hernando Cortes and Motecuzuma: “The assumption of the superiority of Europeans over all other races.” “The second was its corollary, that these other races were naturally inferior to, and therefore subjects of, the Europeans.” “The third was that this was the natural order of things, and that when this was made clear to them those other races naturally accepted it.”

Chang-Rodriguez, Raquel. “Cultural Resistance in the Andes and Its Depiction in Atau Wallpaj P’uchukuyninpa Wankan or Tragedy of Atahualpa’s Death.” In Francisco J. Cevallos Candau, ed. Coded encounters : writing, gender, and ethnicity in colonial Latin America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Clendinnen, Inga. “”Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”: Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico.” Representations, No. 33 (Winter 1991): 65-100. Examines Other Ways that the Spanish managed to defeat the large and mighty Aztec Empire

Cline, S.L. “Revisionist Conquest History: Sahagun’s Revised Book XII.” In José Klor de Alva, , ed. The Work of Bernardino de Sahagun : pioneer ethnographer of sixteenth-century Aztec Mexico. Albany N.Y.; Austin Tex.: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies University at Albany State University of New York ;Distributed by University of Texas Press, 1988.

Crosby, Alfred W. “Reassessing 1492.” American Quarterly Vol. 41, no. 4 (December 1989): 661-669. Crosby explains some of the reasons why abrupt, dramatic revisionism was in vogue around 1992, the quincentenary of Columbus’ voyage.

Hanke, Lewis. “The Dawn of Conscience in America: Spanish Experiments and Experiences with Indians in the New World.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 107, no. 2 (April 15, 1963): 83-92. Hanke challenges the competing interpretations of English and Spanish historiography which portrays on the one hand the Spanish as villains, the English as heroes, and the natives as innocent victims; and on the other show the English to be the villains, the Spanish the heroes and the Indians still as victims. This seems to be the basis for the “La Leyenda Negra.” Hanke also seems to go after the myth of the “Noble Savage.”

Karttunen, Frances. “Rethinking Malinche.” In Susan Schroeder, et al., eds. Indian Women of Early Mexico. Norman: Univ Of Oklahoma Press, 1997. As the title of the book chapter states, it is a rethinking of Malinche, Cortes’ mistress/wife and interpreter during the Conquest of Mexico. She has received marginal and even bad treatment at the hands of historians. Karttunen’s defense of her here was described by one book reviewer as “spirited.”

MacLeod, Murdo J. “Some Thoughts on the Pax Colonial, Colonial Violence, and Perceptions of Both.” In Susan Schroeder, eds. Native Resistance and the Pax Colonial in New Spain. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. MacLeod seems to echo some of Restall’s points, namely that native-Spanish violence continued until well after the Conquest was over.

Restall, Matthew. “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America.” The Americas 57, no. 2 (2000): 171-205. Restall’’s purpose “is thus, first, to marshal the widely scattered evidence on the topic with a view to making the broad and simple–but hitherto inadequately substantiated if not marginalized 4 –point that Africans were a ubiquitous and pivotal part of Spanish conquest campaigns in the Americas; second, to articulate whatever patterns are visible in black conquest roles and to locate African participation in the phases of Spanish expansion; and third, to argue that such roles should be seen in a longer-term colonial context whose most notable features were the existence of black militias and individuals whom I have termed black counter-conquistadors.”

Cheers!

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

At first glance, the thesis for Robert Harms’ work The Diligent seems relatively clear: to chronicle the travel of one French slave ship, the aforementioned Diligent, on a circuit of the triangular Atlantic Slave Trade. Indeed, this is what one is led to believe in reading the preface and introduction. Harms got the idea to write his book when a rare manuscript diary was brought to Yale in 1984 by the infamous antique book dealer Lawrence C. Witten II. In bringing this diary to Yale, Witten aroused a great deal of concern and attention as he had, in 1957, brought to light the highly controversial Vinland Map.[1] Nevertheless, the French diary turned out to be genuine, and Yale acquired it. The diary is the personal account of Robert Durand, who was a lieutenant on the eponymous Diligent on its 1731-732 maiden slave voyage from Vannes, France, to Whydah and Jakin, both in modern-day Benin. From West Africa it continued on to Martinique to drop off its cargo of slaves.[2]

In reality, though, Harms’ point is that though many miles separated the places where the Diligent passed on its voyage, they were each influenced by the little things that happened in other parts of the Atlantic. Harms notes that “there was a kind of ‘logic of local interests’ at work on an Atlantic-wide scale.”[3] Indeed, his thesis could be considered similar to the oft-invoked chaos theory principle called the “butterfly effect,” which postulates that the conditions that change on a local level when a butterfly flaps its wings in France influences the next day’s weather in Saint-Domingue. To Harms, each smaller geographic subdivision of the Atlantic uniquely affected other areas– either for better or for worse. This is certainly obvious as it relates to the decision of the Vannes city council to seek royal permission to allow independent slave traders to operate out of the town, but it is equally as applicable to the local politics on the African coast that influenced the export of slaves to the New World.

The book is divided up chronologically and geographically, which follows the path of the Diligent as it traversed through the Atlantic Ocean. Though Harms could have chosen to write verbatim Durand’s diary from the original French manuscript, such a work would not have been as interesting and insightful, as many entries were surely statements of the Diligent’s latitude and longitude and brief accounts of anything interesting that occurred.

Rather, Harms uses the voyage of the slave ship as a literary device to demonstrate and tell some of the stories of that “logic of local interests.” The location of the ship throughout the book is the beginning of various fascinating vignettes into the local history of each individual area– whether it was Vannes, Cape Verde, Whydah or Martinique. For example, prior to the beginning of the narrative involving the departure of the Diligent, the author tells of the struggle to not only allow private traders– those outside of the purview of the French Company of the Indies, but also to permit the slave trade to be conducted from Vannes– something of a backwater port when compared to nearby Nantes or Lorient. Further, in his discussion of the West African coast, Harms elaborates, in great detail, the early eighteenth century history of the kingdom of Whydah, its interaction with European slave traders and its ultimate absorption into the more militant kingdom of Dahomey. Similar stories are told of the ship’s voyage to and from Martinique, and concludes with a fraud trial that the Diligent’s captain, Pierre Mary, faced on his return to Vannes and the continued investment of the Billy brothers, the ship’s owners. Though these stories could be viewed as “sidetracks” and therefore of only cursory value, those selfsame vignettes are one of the book’s strengths and what makes the work particularly attractive, because they accentuate Harm’s original “butterfly effect” thesis. It also makes The Diligent a fascinating read, making the book something of a whistle stop tour of the French Atlantic world in the 1730s.

However, one weakness of the book is that readers may be slightly confused about Harms’ method of using the voyage of the ship as a springboard to tell relevant tangential stories, primarily because he does not make it readily apparent that that is his modus operandi. It is not clear until the reader is deep into the book. Harms does mention what he is doing occasionally, but usually not until the end of the vignette. This could cause readers to dismiss all that is not directly related to the voyage of the Diligent as extraneous filler material.

For example, The Diligent begins with the story of a Martinican slave girl name Pauline Villaneuve, who with her owner’s consent had entered a convent while her mistress attended to business in Paris. When the time came to return to the Caribbean, Pauline decided to stay in the convent. The following legal storm and legal opinions about the legality and morality of the slave trade set up, Harms notes, the sufficient “mental [defense] he needed to dedicate the first slaving voyage of the Diligent to the ‘greater glory of God and the Virgin Mary.’”[4] Through such an explanation it is clear that Harms is setting up context for the voyage of Durand and his ship, such an explanation only comes after nineteen pages of story telling. A more effective way to set up the story as context for the Diligent’s voyage would have been to state his purpose at the beginning of Pauline’s story, carry on with the narrative, and then reiterate the point.

Nevertheless, the book has much to offer to the study of transatlantic history. At the very least it is a testament to the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world that Bailyn describes in Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours. It is also an example in historical methodology, for it shows that social history on a very small scale can provide a description of the larger Atlantic World– at least within a certain time frame. Though Harms does make the point that the slave trade was never a globally homogeneous operation (since it changed over time and varied depending on the nation and location in question), some conclusions can be drawn about the general slave trade from a detailed study of it on such a small level.[5]

[1] The Vinland Map, which dates from the middle of the fifteenth century, purports to be the earliest existing map that shows the American Continent. It met with a great deal of controversy, however, as it was later determined to possibly be a fake.

[2] Robert Harms, The Diligent : a voyage through the worlds of the slave trade, 1st ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xi-xii.

[3] Ibid., xix.

[4] Ibid., 28.

[5] Ibid., xix

So, while perusing The Transatlantic Slave Voyages Database, I discovered the 1739 voyage of the Monarque.

The Monarque was a 272-ton French slave ship flying the French flag (boy, does that sound redundant). Her owners were two men who, coincidentally (or not), were named Bertrand. Perhaps they were father and son, or brothers, or some other relation.  Needless to say, we’ll call them the Bertrand family from here on out. This particular voyage was not the ship’s maiden voyage.  She had sailed at least 3 previous voyages across the Atlantic to both Martinique and Saint-Domingue, starting in 1728.  Apparently the boat was something of a rust bucket (if rust could be found on wooden ships, that is), as all of her other voyages except the 1738-1739 voyages had ended with the ship being condemned in Saint-Domingue and Martinique based upon it being a natural hazard. The record does not mention any armament on the ship, but this may be due to the scantiness of the record as opposed to an absence of cannons. After all, it seems to me that any ship running slaving operations would at least have some kind of armament.

Neither was her captain a novice at slave-trading.  His name was Joseph Buron, and he had made 3 other successful voyages to the New World prior to the 1738-1739 Monarque run. The Monarque had a total complement of 42. 10 of those crewmembers died at some point in the voyage. This was his last recorded voyage.

At any rate, the Monarque departed Nantes, France on September 8, 1738, bound for Africa. It arrived at Loango, near the mouth of the Congo River, around the first part of February 1739. Trading commenced on the 3rd of that month. While at Loango (apparently it was a pretty major port of call– check out the pictures on this site) the ship picked up 4 slaves, and then continued on to Mayumba, further up the coast, on March 22. Efforts there must not have been fruitful, for the Monarque did not pick up further slaves, but returned to Nantes, landing there on June 22.

The total time for the round trip voyage was 286 days, including 91 in the famed and dreaded Middle Passage. One slave died during the voyage, which made slave fatalities a staggering 25% of the total slave complement on board.

Two of the slaves picked up in Loango were taken to market in France (the record says it was at an unknown port, but it is probably safe to assume that it was in Nantes, as Harms notes that Nantes was the center of French slavery operations). The other slave was not sold, so it is probably safe to assume that he remained the possession of the ship’s captain, or perhaps one of the crew.

What makes this story so interesting is the fact that there were four slaves that the French bought in Africa, and the fact that the Monarque did not go to the New World, but rather returned to France from Africa. In traditional accounts of slave ships, the slave ship always goes to the New World, and the ship is always packed to the brim with slaves, so much so that many more than 1 died from overcrowding, disease, and so forth.

The disparity between the voyage of the Monarque and other ships that had more slaves on board and that went to the New World suggests a few different possibilities. Perhaps the French ship arrived at the wrong time in Loango and Mayumba and no traders from the interior came. Perhaps a ship had recently come and taken all the slaves away before the Monarque arrived.  The cause of a dearth of slaves on this particular voyage was certainly not the size of the boat, as other records exist that tell of the Monarque carrying upwards of 350 slaves across the Atlantic.

Based upon the fact that the Monarque was consistently condemned in Martinique and Saint-Domingue as a “natural hazard,” one more disturbing possibility is that she was damaged en route to Africa (or while there) and picked up what she could to limp back to France.  Or, she could have also picked up a load of slaves in Mayumba, been damaged, and had to jettison her “cargo” overboard.  To account for the lack of records in the database, perhaps these weren’t reported for whatever reason to the authorities in France.

A more plausible  and less sinister explanation may be that the Monarque was merely on a personal run for its owners. Perhaps the Bertram family was in need of a house servant for their business or for the house. The huge expense of outfitting a ship with enough provisions for 42 crewmembers for 286 days does not seem to justify a “yield” of 4 slaves (one of which died en route to France). But then again, stranger things have happened.

I’ve created a Google Earth file of the voyage of the Monarque for y’all’s viewing pleasure. It can be found below, along with the link to the record for the Monarque on the Transatlantic Slave Voyage Database, if anyone wanted to see it.  If you click on the icon for each stop in the tour, there is a little explanation for each one (though it is primarily a rehash of what is written above)

Enjoy, and Cheers!

KML File: The Voyage of the Monarque
The Monarque Record at the Transatlantic Slave Voyages Database

Howdy, all!  This is just a partial review of Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism as I have not had the chance to completely read it.  More to follow as I read more of the book, and put down more thoughts.

Enjoy!

*****

Jared Diamond’s 1998 work Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies introduced to the wider, non-academic world the concept that it was Europeans’ luck in settling in a place that permitted rapid development of agriculture, which in turn allowed Europeans to expand and dominate much of the rest of the world by the end of the nineteenth century. This expansion, he argued, was biological in nature. It was also a case of the physical environment of the Eurasian continent acting upon Europeans.

Controversial and influential as his book was, other historians broached the biological origins of European hegemony much earlier than Diamond did. Alfred W. Crosby’s purpose in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 is to examine why it is that “European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place.”[1] However, Crosby seems to concern himself more with the idea that whenever Europeans found themselves in a more temperate climate, they replaced the local flora and fauna with those plants and animals that they were more familiar with. This led to a something of a biological and environmental dialectical synthesis in which those colonies were transformed into “Neo-Europes” in the image of the “Old Europe”. It is this reason, Crosby stipulates, that places like the United States, Canada, and New Zealand are among the highest food-producing areas on earth, and the envy of the rest of the world.[2]

Ecological Imperialism is divided into 9 chapters which herald the reader with such subjects as: “Pangea Revisited, the Neolithic Reconsidered; The Norse and the Crusaders; The Fortunate Isles; and Weeds.” Needless to say, each explains different ways how Europeans transformed previously “native” and “virgin” areas throughout the world into new European land. Some of these chapters are “case studies” of places where a Neo-Europe was created over a previous native area.

One such place that Crosby mentions as a good example of a location that receives a “European makeover” is Siberia. Though it is not a classic example of what would later become a Neo-Europe (because of its proximity to Europe), Siberia evidently fit the bill close enough for Crosby to warrant consideration. He notes that though its native people “are culturally like other Eurasians,… they contrast with the indigenes of the Neo-Europes in having received their first elements of the Old World Neolithic thousands of years ago: metals; agriculture; [and] pastoralism.”[3] Because of a lack of “Old World Neolithic” influence in the area, when Europeans came into the area in the late sixteenth century, there was a significant clash of cultures that happened. Indeed, European-Siberian contact (and by extension European-other peoples contact as well) followed a certain pattern that was later repeated elsewhere. First, the Europeans discovered the area. Later, trade was undertaken with the natives. At some point, conquest would come into play, both in a political and biological sense. This usually included the introduction of disease which the natives had not had contact with. The end result of this European encounter was invariably the extermination of the natives, and their substitution for a large influx of European people, flora and fauna. In the case of Siberia, the elimination of the locals came from the introduction of smallpox by Russian pioneers. Like the native in the Western Hemisphere, the indigent Siberians did not have any immunity to diseases like smallpox, so they were naturally killed off.[4]

Crosby argues his point well, and he exhibits deep research on the subject. His focuses not just on the well-known Neo-Europes such as Australia and North America, but also examines other, more obscure places in his study of the biological expansion of Europe, such as the pampas of Argentina and southern Brazil and blighted tundras of Siberia. The pattern he elaborates is equally applicable to Siberia, North America, and Australia.

Crosby’s work here, though it was written before Bailyn’s Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours, actually reflects the second section of Bailyn’s book: namely, that other parts of the Atlantic world were at first wild, and then were remade into more tame areas. Whether or not Bailyn was influenced by Ecological Imperialism remains to be seen, but the fact that both reference such an important idea only serves to reinforce the idea as particularly valid. In addition, introducing a environmental and biological perspective into transatlantic history permits any scholar to appreciate that history is not just the story of human agency, but rather that the environment and geography really does play a major role in the way the world is today.

[1] Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2.

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Ibid., 36.

[4] Ibid., 36-40.

The following is a list of 10 examples of books that take differing approaches to environmental history, which examines the interactions between people and their environments.  They are subdivided by general type first, and then arranged in chronological order, with a brief note about each.

Enjoy!

Early, Introductory, and General Works

Webb, Walter Prescott. The Great Plains, Boston: Ginn and Co., 1931. Webb partly uses an environmental argument in his book “The Great Plains”

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl : The Southern Plains In The 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Worster seems to be one of the more influential environmental historians.

Malin, James. History & Ecology : Studies Of The Grassland. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Malin is considered to be one of the “founders” of modern environmental history.

Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, And Steel : The Fates Of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998. Diamond’s highly popular (and controversial) history is the reverse of McNeill. Though Diamond is not overt about it, he shows the effect of the environment on humans in general and Europeans in particular, making Europe’s push out into the world a matter of biology.

McNeill, John Robert. Something New Under The Sun : An Environmental History Of The Twentieth-Century World. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. McNeill focuses on the effects of humans on the environment, especially how industrialization has endangered the environment.

Environmental History Mixed with the History of Ideas, Urban History, and Economic History

Glacken, Clarence J. Traces On The Rhodian Shore; Nature And Culture In Western Thought From Ancient Times To The End Of The Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Glacken’s book is not a “pure” environmental history; rather, he intermixes intellectual history with that of environmental history to examine how people up to the eighteenth century viewed nature and the environment.

Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. Cronon combines urban and environmental history, showing the Great Plains as essentially Chicago’s backyard.

Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction Of The Bison : An Environmental History, 1750-1920. Studies In Environment And History. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Isenberg’s book is a good example of a mix between an environmental history and a economic history.

Transatlantic Environmental History

Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Pub. Co., 1972. This work put forth the idea of a “Columbian Exchange” in a biological sense.

Hall, Marcus. Earth Repair : A Transatlantic History Of Environmental Restoration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Taking a transatlantic approach, Hall’s recent work focuses on the differing American and European approaches to how to clean up the Earth.

Cheers!

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