Year: 2015
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: chapter 1 the IntImacIes of Four contInentsMy study investigates the often obscured connections between the emergence of Eu ro pean liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eigh teenth and early nineteenth centuries.In Cuban Counterpoint (1940), Fernando Ortiz described "peoples from all four quarters of the globe" who labored in the "new world" to produce tobacco and sugar for Eu ro pean consumption. 1 Observing that sugar linked the histories of colonial settlers, native peoples, and slave labor, followed by Chinese and other migrants, Ortiz commented that sugar was "mulatto" from the start.C. L. R. James asserted in The Black Jacobins (1938), that the eighteenth-century slave society in San Domingo connected Eu rope, Africa, and the Americas.He declared that the fortunes created by the slavery-based societies in the Americas gave rise to the French bourgeoisie, producing the conditions for the "rights of man" demanded in the Revolution of 1789. 2 These understandings that the "new world" of Eu ropean settlers, indigenous peoples, Africans, and Asians in the Americas was intimately related to the rise of liberal modernity are the inspiration for my investigation.3 Yet I work with the premise that we actually know little about these "intimacies of four continents, " despite separate scholarship about single societies, peoples, or regions.The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly
Source: Duke University Press eBooks
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4292914288