Tag "trade"
By OI December 02, 2022

"Transforming Waste into Wealth: The Political Economy of Alcohol in the Leeward Islands, 1670-1737"

OI Colloquium with Lila O’Leary Chambers Alcohol played a crucial role in supporting the Leeward Islands’ transition from a “society with slaves” to an entrenched “slave society” across the early eighteenth century. Rather than acting solely as a signifier of planter excess, this chapter reveals that white settlers and enslaved and free African and African-descended peoples incorporated it in… Read More

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By OI December 02, 2022

“‘They brought them from the Palenque’: Captivity and Smuggling in Jamaica, ca. 1660”

OI Colloquium with Casey Schmitt Following the English invasion of Jamaica in 1655, Spanish forces maintained a toehold on the island over five years of guerilla warfare in large part because of the food and shelter they received from three different semi-autonomous Afro-Jamaican communities on the island. While historians discuss two of the three Afro-Jamaican villages, they also often… Read More

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By OI December 02, 2022

"Mobilizing Illicit Trade When Immobilized by War: A Connecticut Sea Captain in Dutch Statia, 1756-58"

OI Colloquium with Kenneth Banks Drawn from a biography (Ch. 5) of an angry, social ambitious Connecticut sea captain, Thomas Allen, and his family during the era of the American Revolutionary Atlantic, this chapter examines how a ‘middling’ free Settler like Allen escaped a massive debt load through illicit trade during the Seven Years’ War.  The book is an… Read More

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By Abby Chandler September 24, 2018

Selling Empire and the 1760s Textile Debate

Today’s post is part of our series marking the 75th anniversary of the Omohundro Institute by exploring the OI books that have had an impact on a scholar’s life. by Abby Chandler This particular story begins at the Newport Historical Society in the summer of 2005. I had just completed the first year of a doctoral program which would result in a dissertation on sexual misconduct trials in colonial New England and my first book, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England. I was in Rhode Island because I was interning at the NHS and my supervisor had asked me to create a first person interpretive program for a Loyalist named Martin Howard who had lived in their Wanton-Lyman-Hazard house. Among his multiple endeavors, in 1764 Howard helped found an organization known as the Newport Junto, whose members who supported the expansion of the British Empire in the mid-eighteenth century by advocating for a wide range of political causes and interests. They believed the solution for Rhode Island’s bitter partisan politics was for Rhode Island to become a royal colony instead of a chartered colony. They supported the Sugar and Stamp Acts. They published a long series of letters signed by O.Z. in the Newport Mercury in 1764 and 1765 campaigning for home textile production in Rhode Island. Read More

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By Dael A. Norwood December 19, 2017

Global Trade and Revolution: The Politics of Americans’ Commerce with China

Today’s post accompanies “The Age of Revolutions,” episode 165 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. by Dael A. Norwood In February 1784, just over a month after the U.S. Congress had ratified the Treaty of Paris and proclaimed the end of the war for Independence, the ice damming New York’s harbor finally receded. In its wake came a small, square-sterned ship: the Empress of China.[1]  What set the Empress apart from the other ships leaving New York that winter was its ambition. It was bound for Canton, China –  Guangzhou – a port no other American ship had yet reached. Seeking that distant destination, the ship was loaded with more than just ginseng and Spanish dollars as it sailed down the East River; it bore Americans’ hopes for a new era of prosperity, too. Read More

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By Eugene R.H. Tesdahl November 21, 2017

Smuggling, the American Revolution, and the Riverine Highway

Today’s post accompanies “Smuggling and the American Revolution,” episode 161 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. by Eugene R.H. Tesdahl Smuggling. We have been conditioned to resent the word and the act. Smuggling brings to mind all sorts of seedy images: Prohibition, drug mules from Mexico, arms traffickers in the Middle East, even cigarette smugglers between the US and Canada. Rarely does smuggling elicit images of the American Revolution, and yet contraband trade routes and the dynamic women and men who navigated them deeply influenced the Revolutionary War and the birth of America. Read More

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