Bøger i Early Modern Americas serien

From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the inebriating cannabis that East Indies merchants sold in coffeehouses, drugs have been entangled with science and commodification for five centuries. The Age of Intoxication explores the origins, and continuing impact, of the first global era of drugs.

"This book explores the works of the inaugural historian of American nature, Gonzalo Fernâandez de Oviedo (1478-1557). Oviedo's pioneering role in early modern science is often overlooked. By foregrounding his role as writer, illustrator, and editor of New World nature, this book draws renewed attention to this Spanish historian, the first to give shape to this reality"--

"Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery's origins and the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context. In recent years, an extensive public dialogue regarding the long shadow of slavery and racism in the United States has pushed Americans to confront the insidious history of race-based slavery and its aftermath, with 1619-the year that the first recorded persons of African descent arrived in British North America-taking center stage as its starting point. Yet this dialogue has inadvertently narrowed our understanding of slavery, race, and their repercussions in a wider Atlantic World and unintentionally reinforced a conception of American history as exceptional. In contrast, this book showcases the rich results when scholars examine and put into conversation multiple empires, regions, peoples, and cultures to get a more complete view of the rise of racial slavery in the Americas. Painting racial slavery's emergence on a hemispheric canvass, and in one compact volume, provides historical context beyond the 1619 moment for discussions of slavery, racism, antiracism, freedom, and lasting inequalities. In the process, this volume shines new light on these critical topics and illustrates the centrality of racial slavery, and contests over its rise, in nearly every corner of the early modern Atlantic World"--

"This book argues that anti-piracy politics were the ideological glue that held Spain's Asian empire together and ensured its surprising resilience and longevity. Flannery reveals that Indigenous Filipinos and Chinese migrant settlers allied behind Spain's colonial officials and militant missionaries to wage wars against sea robbers, who had long terrorized them prior to Spanish arrival"--

Illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic worldBy the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered "weapon of the weak" while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one's relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved-they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities.Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts-British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas-bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.