From the exchange of scientific knowledge to the connections forged by merchants engaged in global marketplaces, Atlantic cosmopolitanism has served as a useful category among historians interested in early modern lives that traversed national, ethnic, and geographic boundaries. As an antidote to narrow parochialism, an emphasis on cosmopolitanism has revealed the broader, often entangled, networks that linked disparate parts of the early modern Atlantic World. This panel approaches the category of Atlantic cosmopolitanism from a different perspective. Each paper analyzes the experiences of individuals least likely to be thought of as cosmopolitans: plebeian, illiterate, and/or racially stigmatized individuals from throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic World. These individual lives provide more than a lens onto processes of colonialism and imperialism; attention to their experiences reveals the central role played by plebeian or “other” cosmopolitans in trade, colonization, and empire-formation.

The four panelists provide an analysis of individual lived experiences that reveal the sometimes-global travels and networks of plebeian cosmopolitans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Juan José Ponce Vázquez’s paper describes the peripatetic experiences of an illiterate Spanish farmer from La Mancha who undertakes an individual voyage of discovery mostly (although not exclusively) throughout Spain’s American territories, reporting on the quotidian and the geopolitical conditions of the territories he visits. Ernesto Mercado-Montero challenges the tendency to view cosmopolitanism as a trait attainable only by individuals of European descent, tracing the experiences of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous individuals to reveal their essential roles mediating between empires in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Casey Schmitt’s paper explores the testimony of an unwilling cosmopolitan whose captivity and forced labor aboard a variety of early modern European ships forced him to encounter a wider world and whose testimony about his involuntary travels influenced imperial decision-makers back in Europe. Mary Hicks’s intervention brings forth the life story of João de Oliveira, an enslaved African turned saving merchant turned diplomatic interlocutor to the King of Onim in Yoruba-speaking North Africa. Taken together, these papers ask for a reevaluation of the category of cosmopolitan as useful for thinking about the early modern Atlantic World and as more capacious that scholars have tended to treat it.