Caribbean Archives - Not Even Past

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block (2012)

In Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean, Kristen Block explores the role of religious doctrines as rational, strategic discourses in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Certainly, Christianity shaped inter-imperial diplomacy, economic projects, and “national” identities. Yet, Block argues that powerless and disenfranchised individuals embraced or denied religious doctrines at will, in order to obtain advantageous political outcomes. Block illustrates that religion was not only a force of social inclusion and exclusion, but also a persuasive tool that allowed ordinary people to shape allegiances, perform Catholic or Protestant identities, and pursue justice and opportunity.

The book illustrates the instrumentality of lived religions by focusing on the personal stories of people of African descent and lower-class Europeans. The first part of the book traces the life of Isabel Criolla, a runaway slave who employed the Spanish legal system and religious discourse in Cartagena of the Indies in order to escape her mistress’ cruelty in 1639. The second part explores how Nicolas Burundel, a French servant and Calvinist, embraced Catholicism as a tactic for navigating Spanish institutions in 1652. Henry Whistler—a British seaman in the Cromwellian era—is the focus of an examination of England’s imperial designs and Oliver Cromwell’s millennial beliefs, in part three. Finally, part four follows the Barbadian slaves, Nell and Yaff, to analyze the role of religious doctrine and conversion, imperial competition, and slavery in the British sugar kingdom. In this “serial microhistory,” the author captures the entangled experiences of people who crossed imperial borderlands, survived slavery, and negotiated their identities in the colonial Caribbean.

Map of Cartagena de Indias from Gentleman’s Magazine, 1740.

Block uses both local and metropolitan archives to offer vivid and revealing portrayals of people’s lives. Records of the Inquisition and of the Jesuit School in Cartagena of the Indies illuminate how Spanish officials negotiated Isabel Criolla’s legal position after she had run away and denounced her mistress’ physical abuse. Isabel presented herself as a Christian woman before the tribunals, raising critical questions about the boundaries of cruelty among Spanish Christians. For Isabel, religion functioned as a rhetorical instrument of self-suffering and as a strategy to escape humiliation. Religion also empowered Spanish officials to rule in Isabel’s favor, taking her away from her mistress. Sources from the National Archives of Madrid and London provide Block with materials to challenge the dominant narrative of antagonism between Catholic and Protestant imperial powers. She illustrates how Spanish and British merchants worked together to maintain effective trade networks in the Caribbean despite turmoil and allegedly irreconcilable religious differences.

A Linen Market with a Linen-stall and Vegetable Seller in the West Indies by Agostino Brunias, circa 1780.

The complexities Block discovered in the lives of her historical actors demonstrate how European officials also manipulated religious discourses in order to pursue their own lucrative agendas. British commanders who embraced Oliver Cromwell’s millennial promise “to make England a nation flowing with American milk and honey,” also recruited lower-class white seamen and soldiers to work into harsh military discipline in Jamaica. Radical Protestant discourses on Christian martyrdom served Cromwell’s commanders to justify the “enslavement” of Englishmen such as Henry Whistler and to unequally distribute the enemy’s loot. For Block, Cromwell’s “Western Design” concealed tyranny as piety and failed unifying the English nation at home and abroad.

A new & correct map of the trading part of the West Indies, 1741.

Northern European interlopers, such as Nicolas Burundel, consciously performed the Old World rituals and religious conventions as a tactic for maneuvering the seventeenth-century Catholic orthodoxy. Burundel’s testimony in Cartagena’s Inquisition tribunals elucidates how Europeans embraced different religious discourses as a survival strategy. Burundel performed a Catholic identity while living in Spanish Jamaica and he maintained this position after the Inquisition charged him with the crime of Calvinism. Yet, he shifted his identity to that of “heretic,” hoping for the mercy of the Inquisition officials. For Block, Burundel’s testimony demonstrates that polyglot Northern Europeans became cultural and religious chameleons, who understood that “compliance or duplicity were preferable to conflict or the pain of coercion.”

Christianity also helped slaves maneuver the tensions between Quakers and British officials in Barbados. For Block, Quakerism proved to be a contradictory form of spiritual colonization of the enslaved population. While Quakers aimed to evangelize “faithful” black servants, they also pursued temporal prosperity and complied with the oppressive structure of chattel slavery. The crescent conviction among British that Christians should not be enslaved was influential in two instances. It allowed disenfranchised poor whites such as Henry Whistler to differentiate himself from African slaves, but also excluded the latter and their descendants from spiritual redemptive opportunities. Yet, slaves such as Nell and Yaff understood the inclusive social power of Christianity as a necessary step for obtaining manumission. Ultimately they obtained evangelical instruction, socioeconomic privileges, and freedom by performing loyalty to their masters.

“The Slave Trade” by Auguste François Biard, 1840.

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean is an excellent book for those interested in the interplay between religion and imperial rivalries. My only criticism is that Block reduces people’s religious experiences to rational instrumentality. She overlooks the Africans and their descendants’ complex spiritual world. One might question if Christianity was merely an instrumental force of social inclusion, a tool to avoid punishment, and a strategy to survive slavery. For instance, many of them were already Christians before arriving to the Caribbean. Perhaps their lived religion was even more entangled than it appears to be for Block.

Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profits (The University of Georgia Press, 2012)

Mark Sheaves reviews Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750-1816, by Karen Racine (2002)

Bradley Dixon, Facing North From Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Ben Breen recommends Explorations in Connected History: from the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2004), by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Barbara Fuchs

Jorge Esguerra-Cañizares discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.

Renata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. Elliott

All images via Wikimedia Commons.

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, by Glynis Ridley (2010)

by Laurie Wood

In late 1774 or early 1775, a woman named Jeanne Baret became the first woman to have circumnavigated the globe, landing in France after nearly a decade of global travel that took her from provincial France to places like Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, and Mauritius. Her story, a fellow traveler noted, should “be included in a history of famous women.”

Jeanne Baret had been born in the town of Autun in 1740 to a father was a day laborer, so she grew up poor in a rural area where her family would have worked for the local landlords in the fields. In this environment, Baret became an herb woman, an expert at identifying, gathering, and preparing useful plants to cure illnesses. Her work led her to meet Philibert Commerson, a naturalist, who relied on her expertise for his own projects and who took her to Paris as his aide and mistress. Baret’s story is fraught with intrigue and deception. She accompanied Commerson around the world on the famous expedition of Antoine de Bougainville, but only by disguising herself as a man. Commerson and Baret collaborated on this endeavor: Commerson left behind a misleading will that named Baret as Commerson’s heir if he died to conceal their journey together.

In the late eighteenth century, the French government sent many naturalists like Commerson to the South America, Madagascar, and Indonesia in search of spices and useful plants to be cultivated by enslaved Africans working on plantations in their overseas colonies. Sugar and coffee had already been established as cash crops in colonies like Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), so a new wave of explorers and scientists sought other plants to replicate these successes. In the Indian Ocean, French botanists and colonial leaders sought to transplant spices from the East Indies onto their own colonies of Mauritius and Réunion, undercutting the Dutch spice trade. Baret’s expeditions were part of a global scientific endeavor designed to cultivate profitable commodities like pepper and coffee in order to strengthen the French imperial economy. However, Baret’s story also shows that this wider project was carried out by individuals who applied local knowledge and experience, gleaned from days spent in French fields and forests, to new and uncertain environments many miles away from home.

Several journals by members of the Bougainville expedition have survived. They described a variety of supporting characters: the conniving surgeon Vivès (Commerson’s rival and Baret’s possible rapist), the androgynous Prince of Nassau-Siegen, clad in a velvet robe and high-heeled slippers, and Aotourou, the Tahitian who publicly acknowledged Baret as a woman and later accompanied Bougainville back to France. The author of this book about Baret, Glynis Ridley, notes a surprising lack of information about Baret in these journals. The Étoile’s close quarters and long voyage make it difficult to imagine that Baret’s secret could have been kept for long, but only one journalist, the antagonistic surgeon Vivès, mentioned her before the landing in Tahiti.

Philibert Commerson

In places where the historical trail is broken, Ridley provides plausible speculations. Why did Jeanne Baret sign up to go on the expedition? Without Commerson’s support, Baret lacked a home and an income (she worked as his housekeeper officially). Who first recognized Jeanne Baret as a woman? The official story was that the Tahitian chief Aotourou identified her as a cross-dresser, though Vivès’s diary makes it clear that several crew members suspected that she was a woman much sooner. Most likely, some people realized that Jean was, in fact, Jeanne, but knew that to expose her would invite a violent assault on her. Bougainville determinedly relegated Baret’s discovery to a page, refusing to acknowledge it as more than a passing incident, but Ridley insists that she was gang raped by crew members on the island of New Ireland in the South Pacific in 1768.

Antoine de Bougainville

Like other early modern French women, Jeanne Baret lived in a society in which men wielded considerable power and women were frequently excluded from historical records. Capable as a botanist, but most likely illiterate, Baret’s story has been preserved through the testimony of men like Commerson and Bougainville who wrote about her alongside journal entries about navigation and botany, though she did leave one manuscript list of medicinal plants behind. Though Baret’s discoveries were noted by the designation of a genus named Baretia, it was later renamed so that now only plants discovered by Commerson remain acknowledged by taxonomy. To understand Baret’s life thus requires readers to follow the complicated and treacherous path she took herself and that Ridley has painstakingly reconstructed.

http://lesamisdebougainville.wifeo.com/images/l/lab/La-Boudeuse-Fregate-2.jpg

Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s frigate

Ridley excels at linking together historical evidence to tell Baret’s story through the imagined eyes of Jeanne Baret. The travel journals of Vivès, Commerson, and others are supplemented with information about the geography and politics of the places and people Baret encountered. Ridley weaves together a narrative of Baret’s journey with fascinating tidbits about scientific discoveries like beaked dolphins and the Bougainvillea—a plant that Ridley argues was, in fact, discovered by Baret herself. Fans of travel literature and science writing will appreciate this story, for the description and detail of Baret’s experiences in places like Rio de Janeiro and Tahiti, as well as the many plants and animals she encountered. Readers interested in the history of women will likewise appreciate the way Baret’s story illuminates the opportunities and challenges faced by European women in the eighteenth century.

Photo credits:

All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Making History: Takkara Brunson

Interviewed by Zach Doleshal

In the sixth installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Takkara Brunson about her research on Afro-Cuban women in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Brunson’s research experiences in Cuba, and stories of the fascinating women who form the core of her research offer a taste not only of life and work in a place few Americans get to visit, but also a window into the making of a social and cultural historian.

Brunson’s dissertation, “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1902-1958,” is the first full-length treatment of the formation of a modern Cuban identity that examines race and gender as complementary and conflicting forces in the lives of women rather than as distinct categories of analysis.

This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the prerevolutionary era.

Takkara Brunson received her PhD in the history department from the University of Texas in 2011. She specializes in modern Latin American history with a particular focus on race and gender, citizenship, and national identity. She currently holds a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and Africa-American Studies at the University of Rochester.

Photo credits:

“Advertisement for Pomada ‘Mora,'” 15 December, 1914

Minerva via “Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 1902-1958.”

You may also like:

Our book recommendations for readings on Afro-Cubans and Afro-Americans.

Hear UT Professor of History – and Takkara Brunson’s dissertation supervisor – Frank Guridy talk about his new, award-winning book “Forging the Transnational Diaspora” in our recent monthly feature interview.

And read Professor Guridy’s review of two recent movies about the figures behind the Cuban Revolution.

Making History: Jesse Cromwell

Interview by Zach Doleshal

For the fourth installment of our “Making History” series, Zach Doleshal talks to Jesse Cromwell, a senior doctoral student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. From his childhood among the crumbling Spanish forts in West Florida to his experiences in the archives of Chavez’s Venezuela, Jesse Cromwell shares stories of adventure with Zach Doleshal culled from both his own life and the experiences of the Caribbean smugglers who form the subject of his dissertation. The relevance of Cromwell’s work on the contraband trade in the Colonial-Era Caribbean, as well as the author’s own philosophy of history, comes through clearly in what may be “Making History’s” most swashbuckling interview.

Jesse Cromwell is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department of The University of Texas at Austin. He is currently writing his dissertation, which is tentatively titled, “Covert Commerce: A Social History of Contraband Trade in Venezuela, 1680-1800.” This project examines the unexplored lives of non-Spanish smugglers, Venezuelan collaborators, corrupt Spanish officials, and Afro-Caribbeans involved in the colony’s flourishing illicit trade markets. It argues that the inter-imperial contraband carried out by these shadowy figures heavily influenced the development of Venezuelan society in the eighteenth century and facilitated a commercial separation from Spain that preceded its political rupture from the mother country.

His research interests include: seventeenth and eighteenth-century Latin American and Caribbean history, maritime history, imperial rivalry, commerce and trade, smuggling, and piracy.

In September 2011, Jesse presented a paper for UT’s Institute for Historical Studies’ “New Work in Progress” series entitled “Chocolate-Covered Colony: The Material Culture of Illicitly-Traded Cacao in Eighteenth Century Venezuela.” His talk focused on “the material culture of smuggled cacao, Venezuela’s most profitable cash crop, and how Venezuelans adapted to the presence of commercial criminality in their daily lives.”

You may also like:

Jessica Wolcott Luther’s interview for Making History, in which she talks about her dissertation on the history of slavery in seventeenth century Barbados.

Lauren Hammond’s review of “The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillio.”

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

Christina Salinas’ interview for “Making History,” in which she tells us about her childhood growing up on the Texas-Mexico border.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Making History: Jessica Wolcott Luther

Interview by Zach Doleshal

In the second installation of our new series, “Making History,” Zach Doleshal speaks with Jessica Wolcott Luther about her experience as a graduate student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. In the interview, Jessica shares stories about researching in seventeenth century archives (she’s been to eleven so far!), studying history using anthropological documents, and overcoming the frustration of knowing that she may never get the chance to find a direct source from a former enslaved person.

Jessica Wolcott Luther is a PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Texas. Her dissertation focuses on Barbados from 1640 to 1700. It analyzes the impact that the growing English empire, the rapid move toward slavery as the main form of labor, and a new-found desire to document nature through the lens of empirical science had on the way that the English thought about the human body.

The dissertation is mainly a local study using the personal documents (letters, journals, merchant ledgers, etc.) created by people in Barbados, the laws enacted to control certain bodies, and official government documents used to track populations (census, wills, baptisms). It analyzes how the English made sense of the many new bodies and their own bodies’ reactions to the space of the Caribbean as the century progressed and the enslaved population on the island became the majority by large numbers. My project also attempts to trace the ways that those changing ideas about the body affected the lives of everyone in Barbados: Englishmen and women, including servants; enslaved Africans; and native Carib peoples (most of them enslaved). It is also an Atlantic study, as it documents how the expansion to the Caribbean and the novelty of the institution of slavery led to an increasing interest in black bodies in both the Caribbean and England, not limited to but especially within scientific circles.

More broadly, this project intervenes in one of the central debates in early modern historiography — how did the modern concept of race emerge? — and its corollary — when did race become so intertwined with science? My project argues that it was in Barbados in the seventeenth century when Englishmen began to work out, in confusing, contradictory, and experimental ways, some of the kernels of belief that would eventually become central to English notions about race.

Existing at the intersection of cultural and intellectual history, this dissertation is about the process through which a society made sense of itself as it underwent radical, dramatic shifts in fundamental arenas of thought and practice when issues of human difference came quickly to the fore.

Learn more about Jessica Wolcott Luther and her work by visiting her website and following her on Twitter.

You may also like:

The inaugural episode of “Making History,” which features an interview with UT history graduate student – and author! – Christopher Heaney.

Jessica Luther’s blog piece on seventeenth century diarist Samuel Pepy’s hypothetical tweeting history, along with her review of David Eggers’ 2009 book “Zeitoun.”

AIDS & Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame by Paul Farmer (1992)

by Blake Scott

In 1983, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia announced that there were four major risk groups for AIDS in the United States – homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin-users, and Haitians. The report acknowledged that each of the four groups – widely known as the “Four-H Club” – contained many individuals who were not at risk for AIDS. In the early years of the epidemic, however, those exceptions meant little to the public. AIDS was a new, mysterious disease and these people were its supposed carriers. The warning, in the end, may have caused more harm than good, intensifying paranoia and discrimination.

While all four groups experienced the stigma of accusation, there was something particularly arbitrary about the ‘Haitian’ risk pool. It was the only risk group based on nationality rather than specific behavioral factors. Why were all the citizens of Haiti included in the CDC warning? In his well-crafted book, Paul Farmer takes “a geographically broad and historically deep” approach to explain the roots of the AIDS accusation afflicting the Haitian community.

Leading up to the official warning, the media and a handful of prominent scientists in the U.S. had erroneously concluded that Haiti was the original source of AIDS in the Americas. As Farmer convincingly argues, though, the Haitian origin theory represented a “systematic misreading” of both epidemiology and history. The false accusations that swirled around the Haitian community, he explains, drew on a long history of racism and ethnocentrism.

Over the course of the 1980s, Farmer, a medical doctor and anthropologist at Harvard University, carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Haiti, while at the same time, offering medical services to rural communities. In his writings, Farmer combines medical and anthropological knowledge to explain how both international and local forces shaped disparate responses to the epidemic.

U.S. troops marching during the occupation of Haiti, 1915, via Wikimedia Commons.

The book is made up of highly readable essays that allow the reader to approach the story from several angles – from Haitian community dynamics to larger medical debates to transnational economic and political issues. In one essay, for example, Farmer narrates the local history of the village of Do Kay to illuminate how poverty and cultural beliefs, such as sorcery, helped to direct responses to the disease. In another section, he explores the intersections between epidemiology and history to explain how HIV most likely arrived to Haiti via North American tourists. The arrival of AIDS, he concludes, was linked to Haiti’s historical and continually evolving role in a regional economy dominated by the United States.

Haiti after the earthquake. Photograph by Eva Hershaw.

Farmer offers a compelling argument for why medical professionals need to better understand the histories and cultural practices of the people they hope to help, at home and abroad. Haitian counter-theories, which vehemently blamed North American imperialism for the arrival of AIDS, originally baffled U.S. medical doctors and scientists. A greater awareness of the history of U.S.-Haitian relations would have led to a more sympathetic and likely, a more effective medical response. In short, anyone interested in learning how history and culture affect societal responses to disease will find Dr. Farmer’s book well worth their time.

For those interested in learning more:

The Agronomist. In this documentary, award-winning director Jonathan Demme profiles the life of Haitian journalist and radio pioneer Jean Dominique. Through the life of Dominique and his family, The Agronomist offers a compelling portrait of Haiti in the second half century of the twentieth-century.

Paul Farmer’s Haiti After the Earthquake. Dr. Farmer offers an on-the-ground account of the most recent earthquake in Haiti, discussing its aftermath and recovery projects, past, present, and future.

Mary A. Renda’s Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. Professor Renda explores the cultural dimensions of U.S. contact with Haiti during the 1915 intervention and its aftermath. She shows that what Americans thought and wrote about Haiti during those years contributed in crucial and unexpected ways to an emerging culture of U.S. imperialism.

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Professor Dubois weaves the stories of slaves, free people of African descent, wealthy whites, and French administrators to explain how the Haitian Revolution became a foundational moment in the history of democracy and human rights.

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