Am214: Barbarous Frontiers: The Seventeenth century

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Am214 Barbarous Frontiers The Seventeenth
century
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Plan of Lecture

• Columbus and the arrival of Violence in the New
  World
• The European example of violence
• Bernard Bailyn and the seventeenth century as a
  series of regressive marchlands
• Three case studies
• 1) Piracy
• 2) The plantation revolution in Barbados
• 3) King Philips War, 1676, New England

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Columbus and the introduction of violence into
Atlantic encounters

• Two great thrusts across the Atlantic Catholic
  imperial America in the South Atlantic and a
  Protestant commercial Atlantic in the North
  Atlantic
• D.W. Meinig the Atlantic world was a sudden
  and harsh encounter between two Old Worlds
• Bernard Bailyn creation of a new European
  marchland an ill-defined, irregular outer
  borderland, thrust into the world of indigenous
  peoples in the Western hemisphere.

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The Conquest as wilderness

• Savagery of 17th century Thirty Years War in
  Germany as a model
• Violence in America much worse authorised
  brutality, with no quarter given
• Early positive views of Indians transformed into
  poisonous xenophobia
• Michele de Cuneo Indians live just like
  beasts. Description of a rape of Indian woman
• Bartolome Las Casas and condemnation of Spanish
  excess

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English violence

• Richard Hakluyt hammerons
• New World founded in blood and preserved in
  blood
• William Bradford 1637 Pequot War

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• It was a fearful sight to see the Indians frying
  in the fire and the streams of blood quenching
  the same and horrible was the stink and scent
  thereof. There were so many souls gasping on the
  ground, so thick, in some place, that you could
  hardly pass along. Bradford, 1637

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The devil in the New World

• Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors
• Lope de le Vega and 16th century play on the
  Devil in America

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Case Study One Piracy

• Introduction 1701 Executions on the Thames
  Louis Guittar
• Pirate as transitional figure
• Dio Cassius (first century AD) There never was a
  time when piracy was not practised
• Nuala Zahedieh piracy played pivotal role in
  providing start-up capital for plantations

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Death of the Pirate Stede by hanging
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Sir Henry Morgan
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Birth of piracy in the Caribbean

• 1522 Verrazano
• 1525 Francis I I would like to see the clause
  in Adams will that excludes me from a share in
  the world.
• Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, John Hawkins
• Heyday of English privateering Jamaica and Port
  Royal late seventeenth century

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Pirates as utopian proleterians

• Black Bart Roberts
• In an honest service there is thin rations, low
  wages and hard labour in this plenty and
  satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power
  and who would not balance a creditor on this side
  when all hazard that is run for it, at worst, is
  a sour look or two at choking. No, a merry life
  and a short one shall be my motto.

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Case Study 2 Barbados and the Plantation
Revolution
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Barbados in its Seventeenth Century Heyday
Bridgetown, 1680
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Dutch indentured servants in seventeenth century
Barbados
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The Devil is in the Englishman he makes
everything work
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The sugar plantation
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Slave Rebellion
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The Mature Slave Plantation
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Barbados Historical interpretations

• David Eltis Barbados the foremost English
  possession in the seventeenth century
• Richard Sheridan Barbados as a model for other
  plantation colonies
• Alison Games Atlantic world ill-defined
• Barbara Solow transatlantic commerce principally
  slaves and the produce of slaves
• Henry Whistler Island is a the Dunghill wharone
  England doth cast its rubbish.
• Richard Dunn a society based on abuse and excess

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Case Study 3 King Philips War

• Jill Lepore The Name of War (1998)
• 1675 Algonquian Indians rose up against Puritans
• Nathaniel Saltonstall True but Brief Account of
  our Losses
• Mary Douglas bodies as bounded systems
• John Pynchon