Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Leigh, Devin

Titel

The Empirical and the Speculative

Ist Teil von

• Eighteenth-century studies, 2022-09, Vol.56 (1), p.13-19

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• When Richard Dunn's Sugar and Slaves came out in the year 1972, it succeeded in taking a generation of Early American scholars "beyond the line" in at least two senses.1 First, long before "vast Early America" and the Atlantic World were popular concepts, it took them, in the wake of seventeenth-century travelers like Sir Henry Colt, "beyond the lines" of Western Europe and eastern North America to the first English colonies of the Caribbean.2 Observing that historians working on the history of English "planters" in the West Indies had concentrated mostly on the eighteenth century, and that detailed histories of several individual colonies and plantations already existed, Dunn chose to study the broader "English West Indies" from the settling of St. Kitt's in 1624 to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.3 One of his goals in doing so was to show an audience of historians based in the United States how the first English transplants to the West Indies adapted to their new tropical homes in ways that differed from those of their contemporaries who had chosen more temperate destinations of the Americas, like New England or Virginia. [...]Sugar and Slaves took its readers, in the then-burgeoning tradition of the New Social History, "beyond the line" of published sources to the unprinted lives of its seventeenth-century English subjects. Dunn opens by introducing his find—"the most comprehensive surviving census of any English colony in the seventeenth century"—and is still working with it when he concludes the chapter over thirty pages later.7 In the space between, he produces eleven different tables and advances arguments on subjects that range from the history of absenteeism to the composition of family life, patterns of out-migration, and the consolidation of the elites' social and political power. [...]Dunn was not looking for African contributions to their formation.