Pomerantz, Jacob Eliezer
(2021)
Building the Bridge: Labor and Colonial Governance in Seventeenth-Century Bridgetown, Barbados.
Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
(Unpublished)
Abstract
For much of the seventeenth-century, Bridgetown, Barbados was one of England’s principal ports in the early modern Caribbean and wider Atlantic world. It was a dynamic center of colonial trade; the product of its location at the heart of an immensely wealth and vastly unequal sugar plantation slave society on Barbados. Despite the port’s value and vital place in the history of England’s first commercial empire in the Americas, Bridgetown’s seventeenth-century social history remains relatively under-studied. This dissertation examines the ways its inhabitants, free and enslaved, navigated the maritime landscapes of the early modern Caribbean. A consideration of Bridgetown’s seventeenth-century history reveals an unstable and fractious social, economic, political, and cultural landscape, the product of a shifting array of actors, institutions, and circumstances rather than seamless colonial development and imperial integration. Local struggles on Barbados, shaped by the fluid and feverish uncertainty of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, informed the actions of Bridgetown’s inhabitants as they worked to carve out an urban space of mobility in a maritime world revolutionized by the dramatic expansion of sugar plantations, a vastly expanded transatlantic slave trade, and the rise of global capitalism in the early modern Caribbean. As English settlers grappled with the problems of imposing social and economic control over rapidly urbanizing spaces like Bridgetown, they relied on fragmented systems of colonial power. In fits and starts, English settlers acted through multiple institutions to govern Bridgetown’s fragmented social, cultural, and economic landscapes producing a system of governance that persisted into the eighteenth century as a central component in the colony’s slave society. The realities of colonial power and governance in ports like Bridgetown were complicated by the divergent interests of colonists themselves, the aspirations of transient sailors and settlers, and the struggles of enslaved people to shape the cities and towns they lived in. By recovering these histories, this dissertation argues that the fragmented nature of colonial power systems, evident in Bridgetown’s early history, enabled the creation and expansion of remarkably durable and adaptive, if not violent and repressive, Caribbean slave societies.
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Details
| Item Type: |
University of Pittsburgh ETD
|
| Status: |
Unpublished |
| Creators/Authors: |
|
| ETD Committee: |
| Title | Member | Email Address | Pitt Username | ORCID |
|---|
| Committee Chair | Warsh, Molly | | | | | Committee Member | Rediker, Marcus | | | | | Committee Member | Frykman, Niklas | | | | | Committee Member | Fields-Black, Edda | | | |
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| Date: |
3 May 2021 |
| Date Type: |
Publication |
| Defense Date: |
8 March 2021 |
| Approval Date: |
3 May 2021 |
| Submission Date: |
26 April 2021 |
| Access Restriction: |
No restriction; Release the ETD for access worldwide immediately. |
| Number of Pages: |
237 |
| Institution: |
University of Pittsburgh |
| Schools and Programs: |
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences > History |
| Degree: |
PhD - Doctor of Philosophy |
| Thesis Type: |
Doctoral Dissertation |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: |
Barbados, Slavery, Colonial Governance |
| Date Deposited: |
03 May 2021 15:08 |
| Last Modified: |
03 May 2021 15:08 |
| URI: |
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/id/eprint/40800 |
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