Abstract
In this chapter, I will be constructing a framework for viewing the simultaneity of: (1) Roman Catholic Reform, the Protestant Reformation, and the Counter Reformation in Europe; (2) European global expansion through the Atlantic Ocean; (3) decimation and colonization of indigenous Americans; and (4) the enslavement of African during the “long sixteenth century.” This, I assert, is the preferred site for studying religion in the modern period as distinct from more typical approaches to the subject that treat these occurrences sequentially and independently. In so doing the false impression is conveyed that these historical happenings are incidental to one another with the consequent incomprehension of how modernity is comprised of their simultaneous interactions
The beginnings of the study of religion as an academic discipline must be seen in light of the beginnings of modern globalization and its origins in the formation of the Atlantic world. Religion from this perspective no longer defines an intimacy of meaning but is objectified in time, space, and cultural ideology in various modes of distantiation.1
—Charles H. Long
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Notes
Charles H. Long, “Indigenous People, Materialities, and Religion: Outline for a New Orientation to Religious Meaning,” in Religion and Global Culture: New Terrain in the Study of Religion and the Work of Charles H. Long, ed. Jennifer I. M. Reid (New York: Lexington Books, 2003), p. 177.
C. A. Baly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (London: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 62–63.
Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 78.
J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), pp. 101–102.
Nicholas Canny, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1998), p. 20.
Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (London: Cambridge Press, 2006), p. 25.
Joseph Fontana, The Distorted Past: A Reinterpretation of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) pp. 113–14
Edward Reynolds, Stand the Storm: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1985), p. 59.
Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 134.
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 90.
J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic world: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 184.
See Gordon Connell-Smith, Forerunners of Drake (London: Longmans, green, 1954).
W. Elliot Brownlee, Dynamics of Ascent: A History of the American Economy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 12.
Jane H. Ohlmeyer, “ ‘Civilizing of Those Rude Partes’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s,” in The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1998), p. 146.
Hilary McD. Beckles, “The ‘Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean and Britain in the seventeenth century,” in The Origins of Empire, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1998), p. 239.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, 1638–1870 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1896/1969), p. 4.
C. J. Abbey and J. H. Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1898), II, p. 107
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 191.
Cotton Mather, “The Negro Christianized” (1706) quoted in The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth century, ed. Forrest G. Wood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 117–118.
See Andrew F. Murray, Presbyterians and the Negro (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1966).
J. Vansina, “The Kongo Kingdom and Its Neighbors,” in General History of Africa, vol. V. Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, ed. B. A. Ogot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 573.
Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism: 1500–2000 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), pp. 44–45.
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© 2009 James A. Noel
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Noel, J.A. (2009). The Age of Discovery and the Emergence of the Atlantic World. In: Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620810_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620810_2
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