Associated Products
“Gendered Language and the Science of Colonial Silk” (Article)Title: “Gendered Language and the Science of Colonial Silk”
Author: Allison Bigelow
Abstract: In May 1652, Virginia Ferrar conducted an experiment in her family garden at Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, to determine the optimal growing conditions for silkworms. Her father carefully chronicled her methods and results in a letter that he sent to Samuel Hartlib, a Polish émigré and educational reformer who published the letter as the Rare and New Discovery of a Speedy Way, … Found Out by a Young Lady in England, … for the feeding of Silk-worms … on the Mulberry-Tree Leaves in Virginia. The religioscientific paradox of a cultivated commodity whose lowly origins could assume such heights of value—these were emblematic insects whose foul excretions were spun into sensuous silks—appealed to mid-seventeenth-century reformers who sought to refashion the nature of English empire at the height of Oliver Cromwell’s western design. For these writers, some of whom supported the Stuart monarchy, some of whom were aligned with the Protectorate, and most of whom were members of Hartlib’s loosely organized network of correspondents, silk represented the type of material good and spiritual symbol that both sides thought suitable in the reformation of English colonialism.
Year: 2014
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Early American Literature
“Emerging from the Shadows: New Developments in the History of Interracial Sex and Intermarriage in Colonial North America and the Caribbean” (Article)Title: “Emerging from the Shadows: New Developments in the History of Interracial Sex and Intermarriage in Colonial North America and the Caribbean”
Author: Daniel Livesay
Abstract: This article analyzes recent historical scholarship on cross-racial pairings in colonial North America and the Caribbean. The degree of tolerance for these matches, as well as the accommodation of the mixed-race children born from them, illuminates the contours and experiences of racial prejudice in this period. For many years scholars believed this to be primarily a phenomenon in Iberian colonies, and occasionally the French, with much work focusing on pairings between indigenous and European populations. However, recent scholarship has shown a greater degree of racial mixture in both the British and French colonies than once thought, even between African-descended and European groups. This is especially true when the Caribbean is added to considerations of colonial attitudes. These developments open new doors into historical understandings of colonial race relations, slavery, and family compositions.
Year: 2015
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: History Compass
“African Slavery and Spanish Empire: Imperial Imaginings and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-century Cuba and Beyond” (Article)Title: “African Slavery and Spanish Empire: Imperial Imaginings and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-century Cuba and Beyond”
Author: Elena A. Schneider
Abstract: This article traces a philosophical shift that opened the door to a new departure in
eighteenth-century Spanish empire: a newly emerging sense that the slave trade and
African slavery were essential to the wealth of nations. Contextualizing this ideological
reconfiguration within mid-eighteenth century debates, this article draws upon the works of political economists and royal councilors in Madrid and puts them in conversation with the words and actions of individuals in and from Cuba, including people of African descent themselves. Because of the central place of the island in eighteenth-century imperial rivalry and reform, as well as its particular demographic situation, Cuba served as a catalyst for these debates about the place of African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in Spanish empire. Ultimately, between the mid-eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth, this new mode of thought would lead to dramatic transformations in the institution of racial slavery and Spanish imperial political economy.
Year: 2015
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Early American History
“Women, Men, and the Legal Languages of Mining in the Colonial Andes” (Article)Title: “Women, Men, and the Legal Languages of Mining in the Colonial Andes”
Author: Allison Bigelow
Abstract: Histories of colonial Latin American mining have cemented the image of a scientifically backward society whose pursuit of easy wealth sacrificed the lives of indigenous and African miners in places like Potosí. By examining a mid-seventeenth-century mine dispute between an Andean woman and a Spanish man, this article suggests how legal archives can reveal indigenous women’s contributions to the history of colonial silver. It also provides an appendix with one hundred cases of indigenous, creole, and Spanish women miners, refiners, and managers in Alto Perú, 1559–1801, suggesting how women of different socioeconomic and technical backgrounds participated in the silver industry.
Year: 2016
Format: Journal
Publisher: Ethnohistory
Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into Extractive Economies: The Science of Colonial Silver (Article)Title: Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into Extractive Economies: The Science of Colonial Silver
Author: Allison Bigelow
Abstract: Historians of mining in colonial Latin America are faced with a deep and persistent methodological tension in our field. From census records, surveys, and tribute tallies, we know that indigenous men and women represented the majority of miners and refiners in the silver centers of Potosí and Zacatecas, but because they left little written evidence of their work, their intellectual and technical contributions remain underappreciated in the historiography. By tracing terms that European translators of Álvaro Alonso Barba’s _Arte de los metales_ (Madrid, 1640) understand (which tend to reflect familiar concepts in natural philosophy) and misunderstand (which tend to reflect Hispanized forms of Quechua and Aymara), we can use the language of colonial mining and metallurgy to identify where and how indigenous ways of knowing provided key technical vocabularies in the science of American silver. Recovering some of the Andean intellectual and etymological roots of colonial amalgamation technologies also provides a new way of thinking about the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into extractive industries that figured prominently in the early modern making of the black legend.
Year: 2016
Format: Journal
Publisher: Journal of Extractive Industries and Society
Conchos, colores y castas de metales: El lenguaje de la ciencia colonial en la región andina (Article)Title: Conchos, colores y castas de metales: El lenguaje de la ciencia colonial en la región andina
Author: Allison Bigelow
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2016
Publisher: Umbrales
“Imperial Projecting in Virginia and Venezuela: Copper, Colonialism, and the Printing of Possibility.” (Article)Title: “Imperial Projecting in Virginia and Venezuela: Copper, Colonialism, and the Printing of Possibility.”
Author: Allison Bigelow
Abstract: When metals are mentioned in early American histories, they tend to be the fabled gold of New World spaces ("El Dorado"), or the silver bullion of world trade (reales). But less noble metals tell equally important stories about the colonial past. This article analyzes promotional literatures from seventeenth-century Virginia and Venezuela to show how two writers converted a moment of currency crisis in early modern Europe and uneven metallic trade with Asia and Africa into new modes of imperial projecting in the early Americas. Over time, John Smith and Manuel Gaytán de Torres told and retold their stories, shaping their visions of colonial settlement into proposals that both reinforced and challenged their audiences' desires. They followed the malleable potential of copper metals and the three stages of copper metallurgy to shape new narratives of possibility for indigenous, African, and European communities in Tsenacommacah and Cocorote, and to cast these narratives into diverse textual forms, such as shape poems, maps, paintings, relations, and histories.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686057Format: Journal
Publisher: Early American Studies
“Imperial Translations: New World Missionary Linguistics, Indigenous Interpreters, and Universal Languages in the Early Modern Era" (Book Section)Title: “Imperial Translations: New World Missionary Linguistics, Indigenous Interpreters, and Universal Languages in the Early Modern Era"
Author: Allison Bigelow
Editor: Bryce Traister
Abstract: This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316182253Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: American Literature and the New Puritan Studies
ISBN: 9781316182253
“Colonial Industry and the Gendered Language of Empire: Silkworks in the Virginia Colony, 1607-1655” (Book Section)Title: “Colonial Industry and the Gendered Language of Empire: Silkworks in the Virginia Colony, 1607-1655”
Author: Allison Bigelow
Editor: Joseph P. Ward
Abstract: European Empires in the American South examines the process of European expansion into a region that has come to be known as the American South. After Europeans began to cross the Atlantic with confidence, they interacted for three hundred years with one another, with the native people of the region, and with enslaved Africans in ways that made the South a significant arena of imperial ambition. As such, it was one of several similarly contested regions around the Atlantic basin. Without claiming that the South was unique during the colonial era, these essays make clear the region's integral importance for anyone seeking to shed new light on the long-term process of global social, cultural, and economic integration.
For those who are curious about how the broad processes of historical change influenced particular people and places, the contributors offer key examples of colonial encounter. This volume includes essays on all three imperial powers, Spain, Britain, and France, and their imperial projects in the American South. Engaging profitably--from the European perspective at least-- with Native Americans proved key to these colonial schemes. While the consequences of Indian encounters with European invaders have long remained a principal feature of historical research, this volume advances and expands knowledge of Native Americans in the South amid the Atlantic World.
Year: 2017
Publisher: University of Mississippi Press
Book Title: European Empires in the American South
ISBN: 9781496812193
“La dote natural: género y el lenguaje de la vida cotidiana en la minería andina” (Article)Title: “La dote natural: género y el lenguaje de la vida cotidiana en la minería andina”
Author: Allison Bigelow
Abstract: El presente estudio contribuye a la historia de la ciencia y tecnología del imperio español a través de un análisis del discurso técnico de la minería y metalurgia en la región andina durante el periodo colonial. Sugiere que las dos caras de la moneda cientí?ca en los Andes: el vocabulario “erudito” y el lenguaje “cotidia-no”, demuestran varios e importantes intercambios intelectuales y materiales que in?uían en la formación de la ciencia híbrida de la colonia. ?al como el arte y la literatura de la región andina en los siglos XVI-XVII, las técnicas sincréticas de la minería andina resisten clasi?caciones binarias entre lo escrito y lo oral, el saber indígena y la ciencia europea. Por tanto, en el análisis se aborda dos términos claves: la dote y el amor, y dos conceptos principales: la complementariedad genérica del hombre y la mujer y la transferencia tecnológica entre la agricultura y la minería, dos industrias importantes en las sociedades precolombinas y coloniales.El estudio se enfoca principalmente en un análisis de las analogías cientí?cas entre el cuerpo femenino y las relaciones de género así representadas en las obras de José de Acosta (1590), el
Manuscrito de Huarochirí
(h. 1608), Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (h. 1615) y Álvaro Alonso Barba (1640). La evidencia de estas diversas fuentes indica que la producción de alimentos (la agricultura) y el tributo económico-espiritual (la minería), dependía de explicaciones cientí?cas y cosmológicas que re?ejaban la realidad experimentada en los íntimos entornos de la vida familiar. Por ende, el ensayo resalta el análisis del género como un matiz fundamental en torno al estudio del lenguaje cientí?co-cotidiano de las comunidades mineras de la región andina.
Year: 2016
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Anuario de estudios bolivianos
Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race West Indians in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (Book)Title: Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race West Indians in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833
Author: Daniel LIvesay
Abstract: By tracing the largely forgotten eighteenth-century migration of elite mixed-race individuals from Jamaica to Great Britain, Children of Uncertain Fortune reinterprets the evolution of British racial ideologies as a matter of negotiating family membership. Using wills, legal petitions, family correspondences, and inheritance lawsuits, Daniel Livesay is the first scholar to follow the hundreds of children born to white planters and Caribbean women of color who crossed the ocean for educational opportunities, professional apprenticeships, marriage prospects, or refuge from colonial prejudices. The presence of these elite children of color in Britain pushed popular opinion in the British Atlantic world toward narrower conceptions of race and kinship. Members of Parliament, colonial assemblymen, merchant kings, and cultural arbiters--the very people who decided Britain’s colonial policies, debated abolition, passed marital laws, and arbitrated inheritance disputes--rubbed shoulders with these mixed-race Caribbean migrants in parlors and sitting rooms. Upper-class Britons also resented colonial transplants and coveted their inheritances; family intimacy gave way to racial exclusion. By the early nineteenth century, relatives had become strangers.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
http://oieahc.wm.edu/books/bookinfo.cfm?BookID=253Publisher: Omohundro Institute/Unviersity of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4696-344
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Prizes
Best First Book Award
Date: 1/1/2019
Organization: Phi Alpha Theta
The Occupation of Havana War: Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Book)Title: The Occupation of Havana War: Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World
Author: Elena A. Schneider
Abstract: In 1762, British forces mobilized more than 230 ships and 26,000 soldiers, sailors, and enslaved Africans to attack Havana, one of the wealthiest and most populous ports in the Americas. They met fierce resistance. Spanish soldiers and local militias in Cuba, along with enslaved Africans who were promised freedom, held off the enemy for six suspenseful weeks. In the end, the British prevailed, but more lives were lost in the invasion and subsequent eleven-month British occupation of Havana than during the entire Seven Years’ War in North America.
The Occupation of Havana offers a nuanced and poignantly human account of the British capture and Spanish recovery of this coveted Caribbean city. The book explores both the interconnected histories of the British and Spanish empires and the crucial role played by free people of color and the enslaved in the creation and defense of Havana. Tragically, these men and women would watch their promise of freedom and greater rights vanish in the face of massive slave importation and increased sugar production upon Cuba's return to Spanish rule. By linking imperial negotiations with events in Cuba and their consequences, Elena Schneider sheds new light on the relationship between slavery and empire at the dawn of the Age of Revolutions.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://www.worldcat.org/title/the-occupation-of-havana-war-trade-and-slavery-in-the-atlantic-world/oclc/7973625433?referer=brief_resultsSecondary URL:
https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469645353/the-occupation-of-havana/Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4696-45
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Prizes
2019 FEEGI Book Prize
Date: 2/25/2019
Organization: The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI)
Abstract: The FEEGI book prize recognizes the best book by a member exhibiting outstanding and path-breaking scholarship that furthers our historical understanding of the circumstances, causes, and consequences of increased global interaction, worldwide exchanges, and cross-cultural connections in the early modern period.
Bryce Wood Book Award
Date: 5/13/2020
Organization: Latin American Studies Association
Abstract: Awarded to an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English.
Murdo MacLeod Prize
Date: 2/1/2019
Organization: Latin American and Caribbean Section, Southern Historical Association
Abstract: Quality and originality of research, new and stimulating interpretations and writing quality in books published on Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean.
Special Mention, Elsa Goveia Book Prize
Date: 6/1/2019
Organization: Association of Caribbean Historians
Abstract: The Elsa Goveia Prize, previously awarded every three years by the Association of Caribbean Historianas, has been awarded every two years since 1995. It recognizes excellence in the field of Caribbean history.
Transatlantic Qeuchuanol: Reading Race Through Colonial Translations (Article)Title: Transatlantic Qeuchuanol: Reading Race Through Colonial Translations
Author: Allison Bigelow
Abstract: N/A
Year: 2019
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: PMLA
Publisher: PMLA
Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Book)Title: Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World
Author: Allison Bigelow
Abstract: Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism.
By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristóbal Colón and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and lesser-known writers such Álvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://uncpress.org/book/9781469654386/mining-language/Primary URL Description: Publisher's website
Publisher: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4696-543
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Prizes
First Book Prize
Date: 12/6/2021
Organization: Modern Language Association
Abstract: Allison Bigelow’s Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and
Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World is a work of immense erudition
and impeccable research. It examines Indigenous metallurgical knowledges in colonial
archives to reveal the surprising ways in which technical language encoded cultural
meanings, values, and practices of colonial subjects. The entanglement of mining
communities of the Americas, Africa, South Asia, and Europeans unsettles imperial
histories of science and technology. Bigelow refines the raw materials of her wide-
ranging archive with interdisciplinary methods equally wide ranging: comparative
literary interpretation, historical linguistics, and visual analysis. This important account
of cultural exchange and coercive appropriation, distortions and erasures, has profound
implications for our present extractive age.
James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History
Date: 1/6/2022
Organization: American Historical Association
Abstract: This innovative study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the Americas features the four main metals—gold, iron, copper, and silver—of imperial endeavors. Ranging across the Americas during the 16th and 17th centuries, Mining Language deftly demonstrates that colonial mining methods had Indigenous and African roots. Primarily a literary scholar, Allison Margaret Bigelow is fully committed to interdisciplinary work. Her pioneering linguistic and visual analyses uncover a world of incorporation and erasure.
Philip J. Pauly Prize
Date: 11/19/2022
Organization: History of Science Society
Abstract: The Philip Pauly Prize is awarded for the best first book on the history of science in the Americas (broadly defined to include North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean) and written in English.