In my opinion, the Atlantic World did not work to provide greater religious freedom than was found in the old world. For example, although the Sephardim in Dutch and English ports became able to freely profess their Judaic faith after 1630, later in that same decade, New Christians in Portugal were burned at the stake for their religion, and Brazilian conversos were harassed by the Office of the Holy Inquisition. The special privileges won by the Sephardim after 1629 were the negotiated result of Jewish contributions to creating and expanding Dutch ports, as well as Jewish services to the Dutch State on the battlefield. They did not represent a generalized trend towards religious tolerance. Furthermore, Klooster notes that “the Dutch Reformed Church in Brazil consistently opposed religious tolerance and on at least two occasions . . . private citizens tried to have” Jewish privileges revoked. In addition, the intolerance of Islam noted in Sultana Afroz’s article also argues against a greater role for religious freedom in Atlantic World. Although Afroz’s numbers may be somewhat suspect, her argument that a significant proportion of putative African Christians were actually Muslims seems sound, and the reactions of the Christian religious leaders do show Islam was not a tolerated religious faith in the Christian dominated portions of the 18th century Atlantic World.
Most scholars argue that shortages of missionaries in Africa, and the reluctance of African rulers to accept formal conversion and baptism, suggest that, like Muslims, non-Muslim Africans immigrants in the New World were Christians only in name, no more willing to change their beliefs than were the Jewish conversos. Thornton however, suggests many Africans were aware of Christian teachings by the time they arrived in the New World as a result of Christianity’s role as a religion spread along African trade routes. To this I would add that the Coptic Orthodox Church in Africa predated the European colonial era, and dominated the areas usually thought of as Islamic prior to Mohammed. Coptic Christians would have coexisted with both Islam and with the animist local African faiths. Furthermore, many rulers including Saint Constantine the Great have been reluctant to be baptized except on their deathbeds. Nevertheless, I agree with Thornton that African Christian faiths were heavily influenced by syncretism. While the Christian Atlantic World was somewhat accepting of syncretism, it was quite intolerant of fetishism suggesting that the experience of African Christians also does not lend credence to the argument that the Atlantic World was religiously tolerant.
The model of creolization among Atlantic people explored in Sidbury and Canizares-Esguerra's article "Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic" has several aspects which are of relevance to Catarina Álvares Paraguaçu of Bahia, one of the fifteen people highlighted in Racine’s book, The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850. First, like Africa, Bahia was dominated by small political states, which were frequently at war, and which did not pass down land as personal wealth, and were therefore willing to incorporate useful outsides into their polity. Paraguaçu was the daughter of a local Tupinamba chief, and was given to Portuguese adventurer Diogo Álvares when he proved himself a competent warrior in order to seal the alliance.
Other aspects of Sidbury’s model of creolization include travel between Atlantic countries, racial intermarriage with the ascent of mixed race descendents to leadership positions, and the role of religion as a means of integrating “far-flung and unrelated indigenous communities into a common global discourse.” He notes that “Catholicism has always manifested itself as one form or another of the local religion,” giving as an example, the female descendents of the last Incan emperor (a divine being directly descended from the Sun), marrying relatives of Jesuit founder Ignacio of Loyola, and Cardinal-nephew Francisco de Borja. This integrated Incan royalty into what might be termed the ruling family of Christ; the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Paraguaçu accompanied her husband, Diogo Álvares to Portugal, where she was feted by Portuguese nobility, baptized, formally married in an elaborate ceremony presided over by a bishop, and returned to Bahia where her children "established the most illustrious families of seventeenth-century Bahia.” Where Incan nobility “commissioned paintings connecting Catholic sacred, global narratives,” and built a chapel “decorated with paintings of local indigenous Catholic cults,” Paraguaçu commissioned a chapel honoring the Virgin Mary, after her return from Portugal. This chapel was built after she experienced a recurring dream in which “a woman came to her, claiming to have been seized by the Indians, begging to be saved." Search parties were organized which found nothing amiss, but when the vision kept recurring, a search of indigenous homes turned up a carved image of the Virgin Mary, which had been tossed in a corner. The face was that of the women in her dreams. This sequence of events was interpreted as showing that Indigenes "were capable of replicating in the New World the religious orthodoxy" of the Old, and that “Christian Indian women could be held up as models for Indians and Europeans alike for their debout, chaste, monogamous lifestyles," and this story has become part of Brazil's founding myth..
Karen Racine, Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850, The (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2010):6, http://lib.myilibrary.com?ID=292261 (accessed June 16, 2012).
The growth in Atlantic communities was driven by the "mobile, multiethnic, exploitative, and commercial Atlantic trade” so feared by the Trustees of the Georgia colony during their 1732 to 1752 tenure. The reformist efforts of the Trustees would have better addressed to their own class however, as the South Sea bubble which had collapsed in 1720, was only the most recent event in a series of economic aggressions by elites against the poor, which had bgun with the enclosure movement of the 1500s. These aggressions turned English small farmers and small-businessmen first into common laborers, and then into thieves and prostitutes. Although the trustees did initially attempt to exclude slaves from the colony, Trustee control over the labor of the men and women transported to Georgia, meant that the Georgian colonists – who were paupers, whose migration had not been entirely voluntary – were part of the “consolidation of forced labor” of that time. Under the circumstances, it was unsurprising that both the quality and quantity of colonist labor was disappointing, especially since the Georgia colony was expected to eventually do more than just meet the need of the colonists themselves.
The city of Bristol was also dependent on the Atlantic trade, and its dependence intensified after the Royal African Company lost its monopoly in 1698. Bristol grew rapidly by virtue of outcompeting London by its ability to deliver an average of "24 percent more slaves with the same quantity of inputs as their London rivals." This was probably due to Bristol’s significantly shorter transit time, (which would have decreased slave - and sailor - mortality), and that, in turn was most likely a combination of Bristol’s more favorable geography, and a lack of slave trading competition in the Bight of Biafra, resulting in less time spent haggling with African traders over the price of slaves. (43)
Similarly, the West African ports on the Slave Coast show these communities to have been a part of the wider Atlantic world. More than 10,000 slaves were estimated as having departed for the New World from this region between 1687 and 1811, mostly through Ouidah, its principal 18th century shipping port, which was ruled by strong African states. This long period of intensive slave trade caused population growth both in Ouidah and in Bahia via slaves shipped to Bahia in the 18th century, and freed slaves who returned in the 19th century. The length of this trade also permitted a demand for other African products, such as palm oil, and kola nuts, to spring up, and allowed a religious syncretism of African and Christianity to develop in Brazil.
James O’Neill Spady. “Bubbles, and Beggars and the Bodies of Laborers: The Georgia Trusteeships Colonialism Reconsidered”, Atlantic World, Volume 11: Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750,(Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007), 263, http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/lib/asulib/docDetail.action?docID=10271057 (accessed 6/10/2012).
There had been slaves in the Americas before Columbus’s first voyage, and the invading Spanish and Portuguese conquerors stepped happily into the positions of the elites whom they defeated, turning most of the indigenes into the equivalent of slaves. However, the lack of resistance of the indigenous population to European diseases resulted in a massive die-off, which Conquistador overexploitation hurried along. Since it was unthinkable for the Iberians to engage in menial labor, finding a new labor supply was imperative. A lively trade already existed along the African coast, and slaves were a small – soon to become a commanding – part of this trade. African slaves and unfree whites – convicts, debtors and the like – were utilized as replacement labor. At first, smaller numbers of African slaves, and very few unfree whites, were involuntarily sent to the New World as compared to the numbers of immigrant free whites. These proportions began to change during the 1581 to 1640 period, during which both Africans and unfree whites were forcibly immigrated in much greater numbers. The reason for this surge in demand for labor was sugar, which, from a modest start, had become an extremely valuable export by 1625.
Sugar rose exponentially during the 1625 - 1750 timeframe, but was an extremely labor intensive crop. Between overwork, lack of proper “maintenance”, and lack of resistance to New World diseases, the average lifespan of a healthy young adult slave on first beginning work on a sugar plantation averaged eight years. Since adult slaves were available below “production cost” in Africa - as a byproduct of civil war - it was economically cheaper for planters in the New World to buy fresh African slaves every few years, than it was for them to raise slave children to maturity at age fourteen. Thus, during the 1641 to 1700 period, more than twice as many Africans, and half as many unfree whites, were recruited into the Americas than were free white immigrants. Unfree whites proved to be undesirable workers, and therefore, during the 1701 to 1800 period, their absolute and relative numbers dropped even as the numbers of African slaves forcibly immigrated almost tripled. In the post 1800 period, abolition put an end to the transatlantic slave trade; the planters were forced to make greater investments in their existing chattel slaves, and a sustainable labor supply gradually began to form.
