To mark the publication of new contributions to our Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History series, we will feature interviews with authors and share short excerpts from their work. Here, GUHP Blog associate editor Maytal Mark interviews Mariana Dantas and Emma Hart, the authors of Early Modern Atlantic Cities. Mariana Dantas is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University. She is a specialist in the history of slavery and African diasporic peoples in the Atlantic World. Emma Hart is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair of American History at the University of Pennsylvania and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. She is a historian of early North America, the Atlantic World, and early modern Britain between 1500 and 1800.
Early Modern Atlantic Cities traces the emergence of the Atlantic city as a site of contact, an agent of colonization, a central node in networks of exchange, and an arena of political contestation. Dantas and Hart show how cities of the Atlantic World operated at the juncture of many of the core processes in a global history of capitalism and of rising social and racial inequality. A source of analogous experiences of division as well as unity, they helped shape the Atlantic world as a coherent geography of analysis.
An excerpt of Early Modern Atlantic Cities follows the interview.
Maytal Mark (MM): How do you define “early modern Atlantic city” for the purposes of this Element? How did you arrive at that particular usage?
Mariana Dantas and Emma Hart (MD & EH): We are using “early modern Atlantic city” to invoke urban spaces that were spread around the Atlantic basin and which mediated exchanges taking place between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In the early modern period, these spaces encompassed urban communities that could look very different from one another. Some had the political status of a city, while others were considered towns and villages or were akin to small settlements. They all, nevertheless, housed the political, economic, and cultural institutions of the era. The cities we discuss in this Element might not conform to our contemporary image of the global city, but they were doing the work of promoting globalization. In our previous research we realized urban places were at the center of the broad Atlantic phenomena we were examining. Whether we were studying commercial networks, slavery, political revolutions, or the rise of racial capitalism, cities seemed to be a crucial part of the story. We therefore wanted to experiment with centering the city in our examination of those processes. We came to the term “early modern Atlantic city” to describe the globalizing role of these places, while distinguishing them from the modern global city.
MM: You write that “transatlantic, regional, and local cities played dual roles as drivers of connection and drivers of conflict.” How is this tension so central to early modern Atlantic cities?
MD & EH: Early modern Atlantic cities were intimately connected to the colonial processes that created the modern world. Some of the cities we discuss were a product of European expansionism, others, while they pre-dated it, became enmeshed in the imperial enterprise. This was an enterprise that often pitted indigenous and foreign interests against each other and encouraged conflict between states and individuals. These tensions manifested, and were negotiated, in urban spaces that hosted key sites of power and trade. People of European, African, and Native American origins, who regularly interacted in cities, made use of these sites to advance their interest or impose their dominance. No matter the differences between the early modern Atlantic’s diverse urban spaces, most fulfilled the core functions of government, law enforcement, and the regulation of trade. They were also cultural environments in which diverse religious and community practices competed for space and came together. African and Native American elites set the rules for these Atlantic engagements in some of the cities we discuss. In other cases, they pushed back against European dominance. But overall, the urban dynamics we observed helped to connect distant parts of this Atlantic World to the European imperial agenda. By focusing on the tensions inherent in these processes we are able to show how cities were at once agents of connection and division.
MM: What made you interested in writing an Element, with its novel format, and who do you hope will read it?
MD & EH: We were excited for the opportunity to expand some of the conversations we had been having about early modern cities and globalization. We come from different fields of study; Emma has mostly written about the British Atlantic and Mariana has written about urban slavery in in the Americas. Throughout the years we have explored the connections between our research and realized the centrality of cities to our interests. A few years ago, we received a networking grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council to facilitate broader explorations of the city in globalizing processes, with a particular focus on the early modern era. With this Element we wanted to showcase these many and intriguing connections. We are particularly pleased that this Element contributes to the chronological range of the Global Urban History series by investigating the early modern era. We hope that it will appeal to students and scholars who seek a broader understanding of the relationship between urbanization and globalization before 1800. In preparing to write our Element we came across a rich historiography of Atlantic cities that nevertheless mostly focused on these places in their immediate regional or national context. This further convinced us of the need for the book, which we hope will inspire future researchers to consider a global urban approach for the pre-1800 era.
MM: The Elements series explores the interconnectedness of the world through the lens of the urban past. What are some of your favorite texts (classic, recent, or forthcoming) in global urban history?
MD & EH: We open this Element with a reference to Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography to illustrate how a commonly known, classic text can point us to the importance of cities in the lives of early modern peoples. This exercise made us realize (and hopefully the reader will too) that cities feature in many classic autobiographies, travel accounts, and works of fiction of that era. A text like Equiano’s might not be immediately associated with global urban history. And yet cities punctuate his narrative, facilitating his and others’ mobility, access to information, and interactions with people and institutions across the Atlantic. Another classic text that has abundant urban and imperial content is Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Written in 1770, it follows a group of Britons on a journey through the nation’s cities, exploring the colonial influences on their growth, and the tensions that these connections produced. Writing this Element underscored a need to reexamine some well-known early modern works to understand better how these authors engaged with global urban exchanges.
We also had the opportunity to revisit the remarkable work of some of our colleagues that, though not always written explicitly as global urban history, contributes greatly to the study of early modern urban-global entanglements. Claudia Damasceno Fonseca’s book Arraiais e Vilas d’el Rei and Paul Musselwhite’s book Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth are crucial to understanding European urban practices, laws, and initiatives (those realized and those not) that cemented European imperial power in the early modern world. Kris Lane’s Potosí and Lisa Voigt’s Spectacular Wealth illuminate the role cities played in circulating, displaying, and determining who benefited from American mineral resources and the vast global capital it generated. Rashauna Johnson’s Slavery Metropolis and Lorelle Semley’s To Be Free and French center Africans and their descendants as creators of early modern urban economies and politics of belonging and citizenship as they moved through multiple Atlantic cities. We encourage our readers to seek out these brilliant works.
MM: What are your current and future research projects? What can we expect from each of you next?
MD: I am finishing up a book that examines three generations of families descended from Portuguese miners and enslaved African women in an eighteenth-century Brazilian mining town. It zooms in on the trajectory of certain families to elucidate the relationship between race, gender, and social mobility at a time when the fate of this town was driven by broader patterns of Atlantic slavery and colonialism.
EH: I am in the early stages of research for a biography of the eighteenth-century Scottish novelist and historian Tobias Smollett. Born in 1721, Smollett embraced the opportunities of a newly-formed Britain and its empire to become a successful writer until his relatively early demise at the age of fifty. In the years before his death, however, he believed the nation to be in serious trouble, mostly as a result of its Atlantic entanglements. I plan to use Smollett’s life to illuminate this very complicated relationship between Britishness and imperialism.
Early Modern Atlantic Cities is available in paperback and as an e-book.
Excerpt from Early Modern Atlantic Cities
In the mid-eighteenth century, Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped from his native African village to be enslaved. “After traveling a considerable time” from the interior of West Africa to the Atlantic Coast, he wrote, “I came to a town called Tinmah,” which Gloria Chuku identifies as one of a few towns located, along with Calabar and Bonny, in the Niger Delta. Soon after, he was sold into the Atlantic slave trade. Equiano survived the torments of the Middle Passage on a slave ship to arrive in Bridgetown, Barbados, where he and several other enslaved people awaited their fate while confined in a merchant’s yard. During the years he spent in slavery, he was claimed as property by a British naval officer and served at sea during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). At some point, he was sent to London, “the place I had long desired exceedingly to see,” where he recovered from a bout of illness. He later witnessed military action against the French town and fort of Louisbourg, in Nova Scotia. Back in England, he was baptized a Christian in St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster, London. Sold to a Montserrat-based merchant in 1763, Equiano worked for three years on commercial ships, trading some of his own wares when he could. During this time, he recounted, he was met with much better treatment in the town of Plymouth, Montserrat, than in Charles Town, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia. He had the opportunity to sell some of his goods “at the elegant town of Philadelphia” and to visit ports and markets in towns around the West Indies. He particularly “admired St. Pierre [in Martinique], which is . . . built more like an European town than any I had seen in the West Indies.” After purchasing his manumission and becoming free, Equiano continued to rely on his seafaring skills for his livelihood. He then traveled to many more cities around the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. He found the town of Oporto, in Portugal, to be “well built and pretty, and commands a fine prospect,” and in a reference to New York, he declared that he “admired this city very much.”
Olaudah Equiano is one of the quintessential figures of the early modern Atlantic world. His memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, narrates his early life in West Africa, his enslavement and forced transportation to the Caribbean and North America, his labors and efforts to acquire his freedom, and his political activism on behalf of enslaved and free Africans and African descendants. The Atlantic Ocean looms large in Equiano’s narrative, and throughout his life he crossed it many times. His writings remind us, however, that for all of the activity that took place on ships on oceanic waters, much of the exchange of knowledge, labor, goods, wealth, and so on that marked the early modern period happened on land and particularly in urban centers. Indeed, Equiano’s misfortunes or good luck were often associated with a town or city, or his impending arrival at one.
Starting in the sixteenth century, the world experienced for the first time the global circulation of goods and contact between human populations from all four corners of the globe. Iberian maritime explorations and commercial pursuits, which had begun in earnest in the previous century, integrated Atlantic maritime routes with existing Mediterranean and Indian Ocean ones and markets in Africa and the Americas with those in the Middle East and Asia. Soon after, other European actors, encouraged by the imperial ambitions of the monarchies they served, entered the competition for trading opportunities and colonial possessions. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, all of this activity had transformed the Atlantic Ocean from an uncharted aquatic expanse into a busy place indeed. It had, moreover, globalized commercial networks, consolidated transoceanic empires, and shifted patterns of concentration of wealth and power among peoples of the world.