Breaching Boundaries: Smugglers, Degregados, Corsairs, and Filibusters in the Atlantic World

Session Abstract

This session looks at diverse "outlaws" of the Atlantic World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It attempts to break down modern national boundaries and historiographical divides by bringing together scholars of Africa, Iberia, Latin America and the Caribbean, all of whom work on challenges to imperial territorial and legal boundaries. These challenges include Portuguese and English contrabandists evading Spanish commerical monopolies in Santo Domingo, Portuguese convicts remaking themselves in new networks in Angola and Brazil, former African slaves sailing as Spanish corsairs against the British in the Alantic, and Philadelphia and Spanish filibusters entangeled in the Mexican war of independence. In their papers, each of the presenters bring to light research in little-used archival sources in mutliple languages across the Atlantic world and show how truly "entangled" and how unbounded was the Atlantic World of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.