The Atlantic was, for centuries, crisscrossed by continuous fluxes of people moving either by choice or under pressure. These mobilities forged a complex web of relationships not only between the two shores of the Atlantic but also within the American space. Using a voluminous correspondence between two Saint-Domingue refugees, Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans from 1809 until his death in 1842, and Henri de Sainte-Gême, who lived in New Orleans between 1809 and his relocation to France in 1818, this chapter examines the role played by the Saint-Domingue refugees in repositioning the city within the Atlantic and Greater Caribbean. It contends that by studying a group of people who migrated under pressure (the refugees from the Haitian Revolution), we can develop conceptual frameworks (in this case, the Greater Caribbean) and spur fertile historical reinterpretations (of, in the present case, New Orleans’s position in the Americas).

From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the use of convicted labor to supplement overseas garrisons was commonplace across colonial frontiers. While this practice has been the subject of recent study in the French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish Empires, the British military deployment of convicts has been comparatively neglected. This matters for two reasons. A focus on civil transportation systems appears to have led to a considerable underestimation of overall transportation numbers. Second, while much has been written about the manner in which Britain redirected transportation from the Atlantic to its new Australian colonial possessions in the late eighteenth century, the military deployment of convict labor remained centered on the Atlantic. In fact, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, many more convicts served in the African and Caribbean colonial garrisons than were ever shipped to the Antipodes. In this chapter, we use a range of different sources to piece together the military deployment of convicted labor in the British Atlantic World in the period 1780–1820, and to explore its complex relationships with the transatlantic slave trade.

The government and people of Great Britain played a significant role in the events of Latin American independence, but the admiration was mutual. British politicians, industrialists and abolitionists looked toward Iberian America as a place of opportunity and fortune, and as a place that was far enough away to carry out experiments with reformist ideas. In return, Latin American patriots looked toward Great Britain for the naval protection it could provide, to its armaments and woollen factories for material goods, and to its banks for development loans. People on both sides of the Atlantic assessed their public and private interests and sought results on their own terms. But it also was more than a military, diplomatic and commercial relationship. There were equally significant cultural exchanges in the form of scientific knowledge, legal structures, pedagogical theories, Masonic practices, incentives to abolish slavery, and the beginning of an active book trade. On an individual, human level, there were also hundreds of long-standing, fond personal friendships and family connections that spanned both language and geographical space. British involvement in Latin American independence was much broader than just the diplomatic and military spheres; it encompassed economic, material, intellectual, cultural and human exchanges as well.

The independence of Latin America was intrinsically connected to broader Atlantic processes and networks of the Atlantic World. Throughout the process that resulted in political autonomy and republicanism in most of Spanish America, strong networks of trade and nascent diplomatic relations with Great Britain and its Caribbean colonies, the Portuguese empire and later Brazil, Haiti, St. Thomas, Curaçao, and the United States allowed revolutionaries to resist, escape, return, persist, and ultimately prevail. Rather than seeing foreign countries as outside the scope of the confrontations, this chapter integrates this international sphere into a broader geography of conflict. The commercial negotiations and diplomatic confrontations with foreign powers in the Caribbean, in the Atlantic, and in the Pacific oceans were crucial to determining the outcome than the military confrontations throughout Spanish America. The chapter focuses on the commercial networks and formal and informal diplomatic relations at play during the independence period; thus, decentering the state as the focus of analysis and paying closer attention to merchants, seafarers, envoys, and other border-crossing denizens of the Atlantic.

Chapter 5 examines how the Great Plague Scare unfolded in the entangled colonial empires of France and Spain. Despite their intertwined histories in the early-eighteenth-century Atlantic, few works in the English language have focused on Franco-Spanish colonial relations. The chapter describes the orders coming from the metropoles for dealing with the threat of plague and analyzes how those on the ground ultimately responded. In the end, it answers the question, what was different in the colonies? It opens in Fort Royal, Martinique, where a major scandal unfolded when a French vessel arrived from the Languedocien port of Sète. What I call the “Sète affair” offers the opportunity to examine the “spirit of sedition” that endured in the French Antilles well before the Age of Revolution. The chapter then transitions to plague-time violence and Franco-Spanish relations in the Caribbean and demonstrates that the demands of the metropole were not always in line with the needs or wants of the people in the overseas colonies. On the surface, disaster centralism during the Plague of Provence seemed to extend from Europe to the colonies, but on the ground, local needs and economic concerns often outweighed the demands of a far-flung ruler.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. The Plague of Provence (or Great Plague of Marseilles) was a major disaster that left in its wake as many as 126,000 deaths, as well as new understandings about the nature of contagion and how best to manage its threat. Although the infection never left southeastern France, all of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and parts of Asia mobilized against its threat, and experienced its social, commercial, and diplomatic repercussions. Accordingly, this transnational study explores responses to this biological threat in some of the foremost port cities of the eighteenth-century world, including Marseilles, Genoa, London, Cádiz—the principal port for the Carrera de Indias or Route to the Indies – as well as some of the principal colonial towns with which these cities were most closely associated. In this way, this book reveals the ways in which a crisis in one part of the globe can yet transcend geographic and temporal boundaries to influence society, politics, and public health policy in regions far removed from the epicenter of disaster.

Marked military buttons were a distinct innovation introduced in the wake of the global Seven Years’ War that spread across the Atlantic world. On the smallest scale they physically embodied the reforms that characterize the period following that conflict. When considered at all, they are often used definitively by archaeologists to determine the presence of certain soldiers at specific sites. Although designed to function in this way, military buttons could not definitively identify personnel, given the realities of early modern military institutions, economic systems, and increasingly long distance imperial wars. As such, marked military buttons represent ideals of order and control rather than their actuality, exposing what military regulations and mandates alone obscure. This chapter explores the intention and reality of marked military buttons in the armies of France, Great Britain, and the new United States from the 1760s to the 1780s. These tiny artifacts reveal attempts to manifest systems of organization that, in fact, disclose their limitations to enact such systems, and thereby complicate their status as diagnostic artifacts in archaeological contexts.