A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks

Laura Jarnagin’s book is ambitious in its chronological and geographic reach. She aims to reconstruct how networks of kinship, religion, and business formed in the Atlantic world since the seventeenth century prepared the ground for Confederate migration to Brazil after the U.S. Civil War. Tracing the formation of these networks, Jarnagin devotes considerably more pages to the affairs of elite commercial families in Massachusetts, Virginia, and the Azores than to Brazil, which may surprise the reader, given the book’s subtitle. Although the text touches on the Brazilian connections throughout, only three chapters (8, 11, and 12) would qualify as Brazilian history in a conventional sense. Rather than highlight the migratory event itself, which was small on the scale of nineteenth-century transatlantic migrations, the book focuses on the deep context of Confederate migration to Brazil.The book constitutes an exercise in applying Fernand Braudel’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s macro-analyses of capitalism to the explanation of an event (Confederate migration to Brazil) not commonly analyzed in this framework. The challenge is to make the connections between the economic, social, and cultural patterns developed over centuries (Braudel’s medium term) and the history of the event. In her introduction, Jarnagin discusses recent advances in the scientific and social scientific study of complex systems to argue that the analysis of networks can provide historical perspective on transatlantic capitalism. More specifically, she argues that analyzing the migration of U.S. Southerners in that deep context helps explain why they, in contrast to most transatlantic migrants, enjoyed access to Brazil’s economic and political elite. Centuries of transatlantic networking based on kinship, commercial, and religious ties (the French Huguenot diaspora) prepared the ground for a rather seamless integration.Tracing the emergence and development of geographically dispersed networks over several centuries raises serious questions of narrative strategy. The emergence and development of Jarnagin’s transatlantic networks lacks the geographic focus, the defined set of characters, and the tight chronological sequence that commonly help the historian to structure the narrative. Jarnagin uses three complementary approaches to illustrate the formation of these networks over time. She traces kinship ties through genealogical research, she reconstructs business ties by creating what one could describe as a genealogy of trading houses, and she narrates the travels of individuals associated with networks to show how they reinforced existing ties and made new connections. The result is a tapestry of particular Atlantic histories based on impressive archival research: Jarnagin consulted more than 40 collections of personal and family papers.The rich detail extracted from the archives is the book’s great strength but also constitutes a weakness from a narrative and theoretical perspective. On the one hand, the transatlantic connections unearthed in these sources convince the reader that the study of such networks greatly enriches our understanding of the history of all the colonies/ countries in the Atlantic world. Jarnagin provides intriguing evidence, for example, that Anglo-Portuguese trading networks with strong political connections generated much of the early market momentum for coffee production in Brazil. On the other hand, the narrative introduces so many characters in disparate places that one quickly loses sight of the broader argument. Too often, the detail has no obvious connection to the general argument. How does a discussion of several Boston firms’ China trade (pp. 157 – 63), to name just one example, contribute to an argument about transatlantic networks and Confederate migration to Brazil? The chapters lack the tight internal structure to incorporate the multitude of characters into the broader narrative, and without any maps or schematic diagrams, it is next to impossible for the reader to imagine the reach and shape of the networks.Jarnagin makes a compelling case that the study of networks offers a pathway to apply Braudel’s and Wallerstein’s metahistorical analyses to the writing of particular histories, but her execution does not live up to the theoretical reach. There remains an analytical gap between the conventionally narrated snapshots of transatlantic networks across time and space and Jarnagin’s goal to contribute to the historical analysis of capitalism as a complex system. The theoretical angle, laid out so well in the introduction, does not sufficiently inform the selection of snapshots and the composition of the chapters. By what criteria did the author choose the networks and individuals she covers? How complete a view of any given network does she offer? Are there parallel networks that she does not cover? It is in the nature of historical sources that Jarnagin cannot offer definitive answers to these questions, but they would need to be discussed nevertheless. Otherwise, the theoretical concerns raised in the introduction remain a veneer. It may well be beyond the reach of any single scholar to complete the extensive research and construct the carefully calibrated narrative the subject requires. One can only hope that Jarnagin’s courageous effort inspires collaborative projects to study these networks and analyze how they shaped the history of Atlantic capitalism

Capitalism · Context (archaeology) · Economic history · Elite · Genealogy · Kinship · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Surprise · Anthropology · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy