James H. Sweet. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World

The first generations of African slaves, translators, and traders who crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have emerged in recent historiography as crucial agents in the formation of the Atlantic world. First dubbed “Atlantic Creoles” by Ira Berlin, these mobile bands consisted of multilingual, multiethnic, and often multiracial men and women whose lives offer glimpses of the social possibilities prior to the hardening of racial categories under increasingly expansive and oppressive plantation-based societies. But, as James H. Sweet notes, the attention paid to this class of cultural mediators has largely failed “to accommodate African historical perspectives, either on their own terms or as integral parts of a tightly braided Atlantic World.” That is, Atlantic Creoles have typically been regarded as notable in the degree to which they approximated European cultural norms. For example, while Atlantic Creoles are often said to have been multilingual, what scholars have...

Ancient history · Archaeology · Atlantic World · Expansive · Historiography · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History