Laura Jarnagin – författare

A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks demonstrates how portions of interconnected trust-based kinship, business, and ideational transatlantic networks evolved over roughly a century and a half and eventually converged to engender, promote, and facilitate the migration of southern elites to Brazil in the post–Civil War era. Placing that migration in the context of the Atlantic world sharpens our understanding of the transborder dynamic of such mainstream nineteenth-century historical currents as international commerce, liberalism, Protestantism, and Freemasonry. The manifestation of these transatlantic forces as found in Brazil at midcentury provided disaffected Confederates with a propitious environment in which to try to re-create a cherished lifestyle.

This book examines merchant networks from the unique perspective of moving backwards in time from a specific outcome—the founding of an American commission house in Brazil in the early 1800s—to uncover a century-and-a-half’s-worth of the transnational networking that led to its existence.Individuals, their networks, and the times in which they lived constitute this study’s methodological framework. Navigating complex genealogical pathways along four generations of a Huguenot family, originally of Châtellerault, reveals a continuity of long-distance, private merchant networks based primarily, but not exclusively, in kinship connections among diasporic Huguenot, Walloon, Flemish, Dutch, and German Calvinists, and notably symbiotic interactions with Portuguese Jews. This saga features many other Atlantic world locations including London, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Lisbon, Hamburg, Bremen, New York, and Pernambuco. The Pernambuco firm constituted an early fixed platform for New York, New England, and Mid-Atlantic merchants to access Brazilian markets. Concurrently, other American houses at Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires collaboratively networked to promote common interests. Revealing these evolving connections adds to our relatively insufficient knowledge of the Western Hemisphere’s role in globalization processes.This volume is for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in merchant networks, globalization processes, and Atlantic world connectivities.

“In 1511, a Portuguese expedition under the command of Afonso de Albuquerque arrived on the shores of Malacca, taking control of the prosperous Malayan port-city after a swift military campaign. Portugal, a peripheral but then technologically advanced country in southwestern Europe since the latter fifteenth century, had been in the process of establishing solid outposts all along Asia's litoral in order to participate in the most active and profitable maritime trading routes of the day. As it turned out, the Portuguese presence and influence in the Malayan Peninsula and elsewhere in continental and insular Asia expanded far beyond the sphere of commerce and extended over time well into the twenty-first century.Five hundred years later, a conference held in Singapore brought together a large group of scholars from widely different national, academic and disciplinary contexts, to analyse and discuss the intricate consequences of Portuguese interactions in Asia over the longue dure. The result of these discussions is a stimulating set of case studies that, as a rule, combine original archival and/or field research with innovative historiographical perspectives. Luso-Asian communities, real and imagined, and Luso-Asian heritage, material and symbolic, are studied with depth and insight. The range of thematic, chronological and geographic areas covered in these proceedings is truly remarkable, showing not only the extraordinary relevance of revisiting Luso-Asian interactions in the longer term, but also the surprising dynamism within an area of studies which seemed on the verge of exhaustion. After all, archives from all over the world, from Rio de Janeiro to London, from Lisbon to Rome, and from Goa to Macao, might still hold some secrets on the subject of Luso-Asian relations, when duly explored by resourceful scholars.”—Rui M. Loureiro Centro de Historia de Alem-Mar, Lisbon