Abstract
Family has been a popular framework or topic for historians of mobility and empire for over a decade. This makes sense since family members who were physically and geographically separated wrote to one another to keep in touch, thereby creating an archive for later historians. Heather Dalton's edited collection both continues and extends the relationship between family, travel, trade, and empire. Focusing on the period 1550–1850 this edited volume is notable for including new European countries and imperial or colonial connections. Instead of a focus on the British Atlantic world, these authors write about mobility within Scandinavia, forced Korean migrants to Japan, Mauritian convicts sent to Australia; Englishmen in early modern Mexico City; and members of Jewish trading families positioned across the globe. This makes for both a refreshing change and an entrée into scholarship and topics that have not been published in English as of yet. Lastly, this collection brings together both forced and voluntary migrants, viewing the keeping of family as a dilemma and goal for both the enslaved and the criminalized, as well as those who chose to travel.
Dalton conceived of this collection as an avenue to explore how early modern people “created, maintained, sustained and reformed family, or at least the idea of family, against often overwhelming odds” (p. 11). The collection's definition of family is capacious—including extended kin, mistresses and common-law wives, children both legitimate and illegitimate, and household occupants such as servants and apprentices. (The distinction between family and household is not clearly delineated at times.) Dalton argues that family was not just affected by global migration but was integral to “national expansion and empire building” (p. 22).
A number of chapters take family as a main analytical tool. Jessica O’Leary explores Jewish converso families, who historians have long noted created transnational kinship networks out of necessity and strategy. In her essay on New Christian families who established Atlantic enterprises, she argues that it was the cultivation of “familial connections that enabled the creation of a social class unique to Brazil—the senhor do engenho (sugar mill owner)” (p. 195). A case study of the Nunes brothers shows that they built such a lucrative sugar business that even when the inquisition questioned their Christian belief, the Portuguese Crown protected them because of the profits they sent back to Lisbon and the loans they were able to extend. O’Leary puts family networks right at the center of what has often been an economic story of a trans-Atlantic enterprise.
Francesca Bregoli also examines Jewish family businesses, in her case in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean. Bregoli tightly ties her analysis to the volume's theme showing that “the intersection of family and trade was both a constructed practice and a deeply held moral belief” (p. 213). Returning to and updating an older historiography that emphasized the ties between family and trade, Bregoli argues that bonds of trust in kinship networks were not natural but rather had to be “tended to and carefully sustained” (p. 215) over distance and generations. Her study of the letter books of the Franchetti family, whose wool business was based in Tunis with outposts in Livorno and Smyrna, illustrates the strategies older family members used to socialize and preserve ties with younger family members. Her careful reading of these letters provides examples of fathering of older children, of filial obedience being exhibited through commercial success, and of how affection and business were intertwined. In Bregoli's reading, early modern commerce was not so much a world of rational economic self-interest but one of affectionate social bonds.
Another group of essays focuses on the creation and performance of family. Susan Broomhall examines how a monument established to commemorate the ancestors of a Korean pottery dynasty provides insight into how these ceramicists came to live in early modern Japan. In the 1590s, Japan invaded Korea, captured many thousands of Koreans, and sent them to Japan. Among the captured were families engaged in ceramic production, who the Japanese elite valued for their skills. In fact, ceramic producers may have enjoyed a higher status in Japan than in their homeland, and when Korea attempted to get its people to return home in 1618, many did not. Jissen, the descendent of one of the families who remained in Japan, erected a monument that notably celebrated a female ancestor, his great-grandmother, Hyakubasen. The monument figures her as responsible for the family's transition to the village where they began a successful business in Arita porcelain. Broomhall suggests analyzing such expressions of family in both textual and material sources as “performances” of familial and dynastic identity but also of the experiences of exile. The inclusion of a non-western family in this collection is commendable but a comparison of non-western and western forms and meanings of family would also have been useful.
Katie Barclay examines the creation of family by mobile persons and households. She focuses in particular on the family relationships of peddlers and chapmen and women in the Scottish long eighteenth century. Choosing particularly rich cases that came before Scotland's highest criminal court, Barclay reads them for experiences of family mobility among the poor and examines space and mobility's effect on emotional relations. Barclay proposes that if a woman's work took her on the road and kept her from keeping a stable home that “‘housewife’ was not an identity available to her” (p. 133). Traveling men also suffered from a lack of householder credibility. Mobile people also were prone to create a family out of the relationships they had with lodgers, acquaintances, and employers and such a creation of family may well have challenged patriarchal household order. Were poor travelers more independent and autonomous? Or were they merely “disconnected” from normative social relationships? Barclay's cases reveal examples of both.
Those individuals in need of creating family were not just domestically mobile but so too were those traveling abroad. Nat Cutter examines English merchant households abroad in seventeenth-century Tunis and Tripoli by mining a newly discovered trove of business correspondence and financial records by one of the English consuls in North Africa. While previous scholarship has emphasized the isolation and loneliness of English abroad in the Maghreb, Cutter focuses on the friendships, business partnerships, and household arrangements formed among English expats in Islamic societies. In particular, he recounts the English household in Tunis that housed male English traders. These men formed strong bonds and policed each other's association with Muslim people and their cultures. Even more striking is Cutter's examination of Edith Stedham, a house mother of sorts for the English community at Tunis. Creating “small English islands in a sea of Islamic society” via households and relationships kept Englishmen abroad appropriately English and Christian (p. 187).
A number of contributors present case studies that are rollicking good tales. Raisa Maria Toivo explores how witchcraft accusations affected not only individuals but also their entire families. From the context of seventeenth-century Finland, she presents the story of Risto Olavinpoika and his need to move his family multiple times as he was charged with witchcraft. Risto's peasant farmer neighbors seem to have been envious of his economic successes and socio-economic mobility. Such neighborly jealousies are a classic context for witchcraft accusations. Risto also seems to have performed some magic for money (Finland was part of Sweden at this time, and in Sweden witchcraft was associated with men and women). He combined magic with hunting and fishing to make a living; an example that shows that men, as well as women, got by with what Olwen Hufton called an “economy of makeshifts.” Another theme that runs through Toivo's analysis is the relative openness or isolation of households—and how a lack of privacy could lead to accusations while isolation could mean safety or control over one's family. This is intriguing and Toivo's discussion of the “Open House,” something uncommon in western Europe by the early modern period, shows a need for more comparison of family and household forms between different parts of Europe.
Heather Dalton's (the volume editor's) piece tells a fascinating story of English merchants abroad but with a twist. Dalton reconstructs the English merchant households of Seville to contextualize the tale of Robert Tomson. Tomson emigrated to New Spain as part of one such household and may have been the first Englishman to arrive in Mexico City where he eventually was hauled before the inquisition charged with Lutheran heresies. Reading Tomson's English memoir alongside documents from the Spanish archives for the first time, Dalton reconstructs the household and familial relations over Tomson's lifecycle. Dalton shows how Tomson experienced households and family relationships, especially marriage, “that transcended boundaries relating to nationality, class, race, and religion” (p. 151). She explains how these relationships aided individuals, for example, English merchants married Spanish women to provide entrée into local society and markets. Dalton says these women performed important roles, checking over agreements and accounts, which resulted in a certain level of independence and agency. But such households also were part of what Dalton calls “those forgotten households that shaped that Atlantic World” (p. 165).
A few authors choose to explore family via intra-colonial travel. Eilen Hordvik's essay examines the “cross-cultural pollination” and “intra-colonial convict transportation” that emerged out of the global British empire of the nineteenth century (p. 57). There has been excellent research on convict transportation from Britain to its colonies, but this essay illustrates the need to examine intra-colonial convict transport, which was likely to result in a much more complex arrangement of nationality, ethnicity, and status. Hordvik focuses on convicts transported between 1825 and 1845 from the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius (which the British seized from the French in 1810) to Australia. She reads pleas and petitions for what they can show us about convict attempts to preserve family ties in the face of forced and often permanent migration. Sadly, most Mauritian convicts (whether enslaved or free, African or Indian, French or British) seem to have started new relationships and families in Australia rather than being able to hold on to ties with those they left behind. Hordvik reminds us that “embedded in the deterrent and punitive purpose of convict transportation was the premise of forced dislocation from place of origin and separation from family networks” (p. 59). Losing one's family was part of the punishment, and the British were much more likely to disregard the family ties of lower class, lower status, and non-White peoples. Hordvik's work in the Mauritian records shows that convicts had wives and children who were then erased in the Australian convict records either through lack of interest or outright governmental maleficence. She is only able to present a few examples, but this essay reveals that this topic deserves much more attention.
Another type of intra-colonial travel is the topic of Jessica Roitman's chapter examining female economic migration. Roitman points out that while migrant labor has historically been associated with men, that in fact just like the present day, women in the past also migrated to find work to support their children. Her essay is a case study of Mathilda Percival, a free woman of color, who migrated within the Caribbean, from St. Eustatius to St. Thomas c. 1860. Percival's experience of leaving behind a husband and a young daughter is documented in correspondence. Non-elite letters are rare to find, and Roitman mines these epistles well for examples of Percival's “emotional keeping of her family” and how she maintained relationships across national/political boundaries with kin across the Caribbean (p. 91). Percival's letters illustrate her self-sacrifice in supporting her family, her attempts to keep up affective ties, and family strain; with intimations that her husband feared she would not return and her own defensiveness about her independence.
The mobilization and migration of men to work for a country, business, or empire is a constant theme in the volume. Gillian Dooley creatively gets at this by reading sea songs from late Georgian Britain for what they can tell us about family life. She argues that while a form of entertainment, sea songs were also political propaganda in a time of near-constant war. Dooley articulates a provocative conflict in these songs between the need to mobilize men and get them to leave their families and the imperative to still endorse a stable, patriarchal order. One solution was for songs to emphasize the fidelity of British military men; the constancy of their sweethearts, wives, and children; and the promise that the men would return to their families. Similar to British military men, Pirita Frigen examines how by nature of their occupation, Finnish merchant sailors had to separate from their families. Linking this male mobility to the recent scholarship on how early modern Nordic families engaged in a “two-supporter model” of breadwinning, Frigen posits that sailor's wives were the major breadwinners when men were away at sea. Many maritime families only survived due to what Frigen calls a “multi-supporter model” (p. 274) of bringing in additional household members, fostering children out, accessing poor relief (easier for widows than deserted wives), and wives obtaining local licenses to trade. Mobility and travel stretched, contorted, and refigured the family in all sorts of ways in the early modern era.