Colonial Virginia in the Atlantic world is an approach to Virginia history stressing commerce and trade. The web of interconnections extend not only among the British Isles, the Algonquin Native Americans, and Africa. The Dutch, French, and Spanish and their colonies as well as intercolonial trade along the British North American seaboard all had their networks linking to Virginia’s dispersed plantation interior accessible mariners by navigable rivers and streams.
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The Atlantic World and Virginia
The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 (2007, 2017) was edited by Peter C. Mancall. It is a collection of eighteen essays from several disciplines focusing on early colonial period developments in Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay.
The relationships and contests with the 1600s English outpost are placed in context with developments in Native America, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.
The first party is devoted to the Native American setting among the Chesapeake Algonquins, especially the Powhatan menace. Part two looks into Africa and the Atlantic focusing on slave trade and resistance to it on that continent. Part three investigates the European models from the Spanish and the French, closely inspecting Caribbean examples.
Part four explores the intellectual currents for and about British colonization in the New World. Part five telescopes onto Virginia and the Atlantic World. Learn more to buy “The Atlantic World and Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Atlantic Virginia
Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (2007) was written by April Lee Hatfield. The Atlantic world of early colonial Virginia was not an isolated self-reliant outpost. It was enmeshed in a web of maritime connections not only to England, but also to other English colonies in New England and the Caribbean. It connected to other Europeans and their colonies especially New Netherlands and the Caribbean. Virginia was also tethered to the received land trade routes of the Algonquin and Powhatan Indians for commerce and expansion and prosperity.
Without established port centers, the dispersed great plantations and colony-sponsored landings were directly accessible to shipmasters from the Atlantic and Caribbean. These included English, Dutch, French and Spanish from Europe, Africa, North and South America. While the lower Tidewater traded tobacco with England, in the Eastern Shore and elsewhere in Virginia, most trade was export grains and provisions to other colonies.
Networks of families and faith made profitable trade connections across colonial and national divisions. Barbados became a principle source of slave labor after 1650, and slave codes in Virginia, South Carolina and Jamaica followed Barbados as a model. Learn more to buy “Atlantic Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Many Thousands Gone
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (2000) was written by Ira Berlin. He traces the evolution of American slavery in both time from 1619 to 1800 and space in the Chesapeake, to the North, and to the south in the Carolina Low Country and Lower Mississippi Valley Louisiana. Focusing on the slave rather than the slave-holder, he emphasizes African-American self-agency, even though under duress of slavery or constrained by racial limits in freedom. Berlin’s study of slavery as a labor system emphasizes it as a negotiated relationship of testing and bargaining.
For the first half-century, “charter generations” were African-Americans who were mixed race Atlantic Creoles and Christian, European-named sailors, artisans and slaves. They lived in “societies with slaves”, where they made significant early contributions to community survival and development. “Plantation generations” where characterized in North America beginning in the late 1600s by massive importation of slaves directly from Africa with new degrading legal regimes depriving blacks of rights and effecting stricter labor regimentation in the great cash crop plantations of sugar and tobacco.
A “Democratic Revolution” was the religious, intellectual, political and military opposition to slavery of the American, French and Haitian Revolutions. The results were contradictory; in the American South, slavery became more entrenched. The “Cotton Revolution” gave new life to slavery that had seemed to be in decline. The book ends with the large-scale relocation of slaves to the United States’ Gulf Coast states and widespread Christianization of slaves in the Second Great Awakening.
The African-American experience was varied, building cultures of semi-African traditions and creole autonomous lifestyle apart from slaveholders. Slavery was a profoundly human institution, and its associated “race” a product of history.
In the introductory essay, “Making Slavery, Making Race”, Berlin posits that slavery had more to do with the cultural creation of “race”, though the concepts transformed each other over time. In the concluding essay, “Making Race, Making Slavery”, Berlin reveals the later, more pernicious racism assigning blacks to an unchangeable inferiority attributed to nature. Learn more to buy “Many Thousands Gone” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
For additional titles and reviews, see The Virginia Historian webpage, Books & Reviews.