Confinement, Environment, and Slave Ships in Early Modern Ocean Voyages

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8940248
AutoresMichael Harrigan (0000-0001-5371-2528, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen46
Número1
Páginas57-88
Fecha de publicación2023-02-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFrench Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00161071-10152360
OpenAlexW4322765082
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas26

This article explores how onboard sociocultural practices were shaped by different conceptions of human and external environment on seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French ships embarking for the Indian Ocean basin or across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. In these environments, in which large numbers of people were confined together, physical conditions shaped the sensory and social dynamics of ocean voyages, while they made ships ambiguous sites for the implementation of spiritual practices. Concepts of society responded to a largely unrecognizable marine environment; shipboard conditions of physical confinement were thought conducive to moral disorder, while ships were conceived of as a source of potentially subversive human energies that had to be channeled. These tensions reached a paroxysm on the slave ships increasingly crossing the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conditions within early modern ships, this article contends, were exacerbated by multiple external factors, making the ship a uniquely unsustainable environment

Pacific ocean · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Geology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Oceanography · Travel Writing and Literature