Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Discovery and Settlement 1450-1850 – Call For Papers

Call for essay/chapter proposals for an edited collection
Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Discovery and Settlement 1450 – 1850

Family networks transcending national ties and traditional boundaries relating to gender, class, religion, and race, were central to the project of discovery, trade expansion, settlement, and ultimately empire building, in the early modern period. This was a period of flux and roles and relations within and outside households were affected. The aim of this collection is to investigate families where members travelled in order to trade or to maintain the maritime and military infrastructure that enabled that trade to flourish. It will encompass the extended family in its widest sense, encompassing common law husbands and wives, mistresses, children legitimate and illegitimate, apprentices, servants and slaves. Individuals and family units chose to uproot, travel and labour (or manage the labour of others) in unfamiliar surroundings, while others were forced to. While some travelled what we would today consider short distances (for example: from Cordoba to Seville to profit from Castile’s trade with the Indies or from Winchester to London when the wool trade underwent a slump in the west of England), others went much further. While the Atlantic historian, Christopher Bayly, has argued that the term ‘transnational’ is not applicable to an era before the formation of nation states, other scholars have pointed out that there were groups displaying characteristics associated with contemporary transnationalism as early as the fifteenth century. I would expect that some of the families in this collection will demonstrate such characteristics: personal mobility; membership of networks transcending distance; adaptability to a variety of locales and cultures; and a continuing connection to their place of origin. This last point is important for, as Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks has shown, interactions and relationships between mobile individuals affect those within their network who are not and so even fixed locations can be ‘saturated with transnational relationships’.

Since the early 1900s, historians have embraced the idea of the ‘network’ in order to understand how, when and why goods, people and ideas spread. There is really no other concept that embraces the idea of a ‘thick web of relationships’ characterized by the by the circulation of goods, people and ideas. Although the idea of a trading network is commonly associated with economic history, it is increasingly understood that relationships matter – that the efficiency and profitability of a trading network depended on the strength of personal ties between people. In investigating trading networks through the prism of extended family, the aim of this collection is to not only enrich our knowledge of trading communities, but to initiate a rethink of the nature of the family in this early period of European expansion.

Although I welcome topic suggestions, I envisage that the book will cover:

  • Keeping it in the family (for example: how family businesses/family trading networks were set up, maintained and adapted).
  • Maintaining families (for example: how families dealt with change, distance and separation).
  • Making families (for example: how individuals cut off from their relations made new families).
  • Gender (for example: how traditional gender roles could be embedded or challenged by changed circumstances).
  • Race, hybridity and creolization (for example: how individuals adapted to unfamiliar cultures and races, and how families were formed that challenged cultural and racial barriers).
  • Religion (for example: how families adapted to religious change and how families worked to maintain their religious integrity in international trading networks).
  • Communicating family (how the importance of family and warnings about the dangers inherent in leaving family were communicated through ballads, broadsheets, sermons and plays. In some cases, this occurred in direct juxtaposition to communications by companies and nations encouraging individuals to travel).

First stage timeline for contributors:

  • 2 July 2017: Proposal (title, abstract of 300 words and biographical statement) due.
  • 15 July 2018: Essays of 5000 to 8000 words (with confirmed list of images and low-resolution copies if applicable) due. Please note that there is a wide word range until I know the number of contributors. If you feel strongly about the size of your essay, do let me know at this stage.

Contact: Dr Heather Dalton, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. Email: hgdalton@hotmail.com.