Abstract
In 1808, Thomas Maitland, the recently appointed British Governor of Ceylon, instructed his envoy to explain to the government in London that Ceylon was unlike other British colonies. The British controlled only a ring of territory, “a narrow stripe of land on the sea coast all round the island,” while the Kingdom of Kandy occupied the island’s center.1 With the colony’s “enemies” encircled, the British could afford to neglect the aging fortifications along the coast that had been designed to ward off attacks from the sea. Given “the state of the navies of our enemies,” Maitland explained, there was no threat from the outside.2 Yet British naval power had not created a British lake around the island. Proximate seas remained crowded with small craft carrying goods and people between Ceylon and South Indian ports.3 Maitland was painting a picture of a politically plural region on land and sea over which Britain exercised ascendant, but still imperfect, power.
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Notes
Even supposedly land-locked Kandians had access to ports and sponsored voyages to the South Indian shores. Sujit Sivasundaram, Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2–5.
Though see Jeppe Mulich, “Microregionalism and Intercolonial Relations: The Case of the Danish West Indies, 1730–1830,” Journal of Global History 8, no.1 (2013): 72–94.
Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no.3 (1999): 814–840. It is worth noting that a central work in North American borderlands history,
Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1991]), analyzed culture and violence in a region defined by water routes and trade, although White did not highlight land-water spaces in his analysis.
Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin, 2008), 5–6;
Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008);
Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
For example, see Michael Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010);
Lauren Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no.4 (2005): 700–724.
Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
Michael Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
John N. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013); Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade.
Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Chapter 2; Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, Chapter 1.
On extraterritoriality in the late nineteenth century, see Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013);
Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, Chapter 6.
See, for example, Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, “Magistrates in Empire: Convicts, Slaves, and the Remaking of Legal Pluralism in the British Empire,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850, ed. Lauren Benton and Richard Ross (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 173–198.
Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Andrew Lipman, “The Saltwater Frontier: Indians, Dutch, and English on Seventeenth-Century Long Island Sound” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2010).
Ibid.; and on imperial conflicts in the Río de la Plata region, Lauren Benton, “Possessing Empire: Iberian Claims and Interpolity Law,” in Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920, ed. Saliha Bellmessous (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19–40.
Kwame Yeboa Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600–1720: A Study of the African Reaction to the European Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 24;
John Vogt, Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast, 1469–1682 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 71–72.
This was not a static set of players. Several chartered companies were forced out by rivals within a few decades, as was the case with both the Swedish Africa Company in 1663 and the Brandenburger Africa Company in 1717. See Ray A. Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982);
Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011).
On the diversity of patterns of African polities and their relation to credit networks related to slaving, see Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
“The ‘Bowdich’ Treaty with Ashanti, 7 September 1817,” printed in Great Britain and Ghana: Documents of Ghana History, 1807–1957, ed. George E. Metcalfe (London: The University of Ghana, 1964), 46–47;
Thomas E. Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London: John Murray, 1819).
“The Peace Treaty with Ashanti, 27 April 1831,” printed in Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana: Documents, 133–134. Not surprisingly, securing European free trade on the coast had a prominent place in this treaty. For more on the consequences for other empires, see, for example, Georg Nørregård, Danish Settlements in West Africa, 1658–1850 (Boston, MA: Boston University Press, 1966), 190–195.
See, for example, Padraic Scanlan, “MacCarthy’s Skull: The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Sierra Leone, 1790–1823” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013).
Some accounts place the shift even earlier. See Dale Miquelon, “Envisioning the French Empire: Utrecht, 1711–1713,” French Historical Studies 24, no.4 (2001): 653–770.
Richard B. Allen, “Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings: The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of African History 42, no.1 (2001): 91–116.
Lauren Benton, “This Melancholy Labyrinth: The Trial of Arthur Hodge and the Boundaries of Imperial Law,” Alabama Law Review 64, no.1 (2012): 104; Scanlan, “MacCarthy’s Skull.”
For example, Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff, “Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle Frontiers in Latin America,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, no.4 (1978): 587–620; Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, Chapter 6.
When the United States acted to restrict the entry of South American privateers in US ports in 1817, the raiders began to offload booty at sea from Portuguese-flagged vessels and, increasingly, to take their captures to courts in Venezuela and the Caribbean, especially at Juan Griego and Angostura. Kevin Arlyck, “Plaintiffs v. Privateers: Litigation and Foreign Affairs in the Federal Courts, 1816–1825,” Law & History Review 30, no.1 (2012): 245–278;
Sean T. Perrone, “John Stoughton and the Divina Pastora Prize Case, 1816–1819,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no.2 (2008): 215–241.
British merchants wrote detailed, if biased, narratives of river trade politics: J. P. Robertson and W. P. Robertson, Letters on South America; Comprising Travels on the Banks of the Paraná and Rio de la Plata Vol. I (London: John Murray, 1843); J. P Robertson and W. P. Robertson, Francia’s Reign of Terror, Being the Continuation of Letters on Paraguay, Vol. III (London: John Murray, 1839). On British policy in the region, see
John Cady, Foreign Intervention in the Rio de la Plata, 1838–50 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929).
Harvey M. Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and Dutchmen on the Gold Coast During the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989), 155–158.
Edward Keene, “The Construction of International Hierarchy: A Case Study of British Treaty-Making Against the Slave Trade,” International Organization 61 (2007): 311–339.
Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 94–99;
Neville A. T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 1992), 34–40.
See Aimery P. Caron and Arnold R. Highfield, eds., The French Intervention in the St John Slave Revolt of 1733–34 (Christiansted: Bureau of Libraries, Museums and Archeological Services, 1981), 8–10, 26–34.
Florence Lewisohn, Tales of Tortola and the British Virgin Islands (Chicago: N.p., 1966), 57;
Kay Larsen, Dansk Vestindien, 1666–1917 (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1928), 232.
John P. Knox, A Historical Account of St. Thomas (New York: Charles Scribner, 1852).
See Wim Klooster, “Inter-imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 171–180.
The dynamics of this integration in the case of Curaçao has been described in detail in Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
Philip D. Morgan, “Ending the Slave Trade: A Caribbean and Atlantic Context,” in Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, ed. Derek R. Pearson (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 101–128; Seymour Drescher, “Emperors of the World: British Abolitionism and Imperialism,” in Abolitionism and Imperialism, 129–149.
Lauren Benton, “Abolition and Imperial Law, 1780–1820,” Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, 39, no.3 (2011): 355–374; Benton, “This Melancholy Labrynth.”
Marina Carter and Hubert Gerbeau, “Covert Slaves and Coveted Coolies in the Early Nineteenth Century Mascareignes,” Slavery and Abolition 9, no.3 (1988): 194–208; Allen, “Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings.”
Hector Miranda, Las Instrucciones del año XIII (Montevideo: A. Barreiro y Ramos, 1910), 411–417. The 20 articles include text paraphrasing passages from a variety of US documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutions of Virginia and Massachusetts, and the US Constitution.
On declarations of independence as a distinctive genre, see David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
For more on Artigas’s brand of constitutionalism, see Lauren Benton, “Una soberanía extraña: La Provincia Oriental en el mundo atlántico,” 20/10: El Mundo Atlántico y la Modernidad Iberoamericana, 1750–1850, 1 (November 2012).
James Sanders, “The Expansion of the Fante and the Emergence of Asante in the Eighteenth Century,” The Journal of African History 20, no.3 (1979): 349–364.
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Benton, L., Mulich, J. (2015). The Space between Empires: Coastal and Insular Microregions in the Early Nineteenth-Century World. In: Stock, P. (eds) The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_7
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