We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Confinement, Environment, and Slave Ships in Early Modern Ocean Voyages.
- Authors
Harrigan, Michael
- Abstract
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.
- Subjects
SLAVE ships; SOCIOCULTURAL factors; SOCIAL dynamics; OCEAN travel; SPIRITUALISM; SPIRITUALISTS
- Publication
French Historical Studies, 2023, Vol 46, Issue 1, p57
- ISSN
0016-1071
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1215/00161071-10152360