{"title":"Paving the Way for Dutch Colonial Missions: Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein (c. 1717–1747) and His Defense of Slavery in Context","authors":"Jake Griesel","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The ex-slave-turned-missionary Jacobus Capitein (c. 1717–1747) was one of the first Africans to study at a European university and the first to be ordained as a Protestant minister. Capitein is particularly known for his 1742 Leiden University dissertation, which defended slavery as compatible with Christian liberty. This has given rise to the question of whether Capitein should be considered an “Uncle Tom” who merely wrote what his benefactors wanted to hear.\u0000This study contends that when his dissertation is considered in its historical- intellectual context, a more nuanced picture of Capitein emerges. By considering Capitein’s actual arguments, the missional agenda behind his dissertation, and the overwhelming corroboration afforded to his views by early modern Dutch theological and juridical sources, it argues that Capitein was an intellectual in his own right, who through his dissertation sought to pave the way for his return to Africa as a missionary.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":"11250 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64733293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Capuchins, Missionaries, and Slave Trading in Precolonial Kongo-Angola, West Central Africa (17th Century)","authors":"J. Walden","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In the second half of the seventeenth century, Italian Capuchin missionaries who traveled to West Central Africa both colluded in and critiqued Portuguese slave trading practices. Drawing from their experience on slave galleys in the Mediterranean and their medieval Franciscan heritage, Capuchins brought earlier concepts governing enslavement to bear in Central Africa. Examining Capuchin interventions in exchanges of goods and slaves, their declamations against Portuguese warmongering, their efforts to free unjustly enslaved Africans, and the ways in which they sought to prohibit slave sales to Protestants, this article positions this group of religious agents as important mediators of struggles for empire between the Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, and Spanish in precolonial coastal Africa and as protagonists in their own right. On the basis of the Capuchins’ critique of economic gain and the Kongolese embrace of Catholicism, Capuchins crafted a counter discourse that, if only partially successful, challenged emerging models of Atlantic enslavement.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47351409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Maritime Missions","authors":"Jenna M. Gibbs, Sünne Juterczenka","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The global mission mandate, present in the New Testament and pre-modern Christianity, took on new force in the early modern period. Missionaries promoted the globalization of Christianity, and in so doing contributed to the broadening of intellectual horizons across the world. Often traveling by sea, they were among the first to cover the vast distances that the maritime empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would subsequently span. This special issue explores the connections between three dynamic fields of research: missions, the history of knowledge, and maritime history. Taking a global and trans-denominational perspective, we seek to shed new light on some of the encounters, networks, exchanges, and transfers facilitated by maritime missions and the interactions of culturally and religiously diverse protagonists during the long eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46956229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mendicants, Minimalism, and Method: Franciscan Scientific Travel in the Early Modern French Atlantic","authors":"J. Kellman","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article explores the scientific travels of French members of mendicant orders in the early modern Atlantic World. The Royal Cosmographer André Thevet, the Capuchin Claude D’Abbeville and the Minim Charles Plumier demonstrate a coherent but evolving Franciscan perspective in missionary scientific observation on the colonial frontier. It argues that the Franciscan monastic tradition, the Franciscan reform movement, and the teachings of the Minim order interacted with the colonial landscape and encounters with local environments and indigenous peoples in the Atlantic and Caribbean to produce a unique tradition of natural knowledge production. This tradition culminates in the convergence of the Minim worldview with the cartographic and observational program of the Paris Academy of Sciences in the Atlantic voyages of the French Minim friar and scientific traveler Louis Feuillée at the turn of the eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43263526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Finding Common Ground: Halle Pastors in North America and Their Shifting Stance Towards a Transnational Mission to Native Americans, 1742–1807","authors":"Markus Berger","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10008","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000While Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg and his pastor colleagues from Halle have gone down in history for their pioneering work – organizing the Lutheran Church on North American soil – they are not known for missionary projects to Native Americans. This article examines how things changed after a second generation of Halle pastors arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1760s. It was, above all, down to Mühlenberg’s later son-in-law Johann Christoph Kunze, who had a rather different view on America’s indigenous people. During his whole lifespan in America, Kunze pursued his goal of establishing a mission to Native Americans. This engagement contributed to a paradigm shift in the Lutheran Church. In contrast to Mühlenberg and the first generation of Halle pastors, Kunze sought transnational support that was no longer exclusively centered in Halle’s Glaucha Institutions but based on pan-Protestant, maritime networks.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43768674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Immersed in Dependency: American Missionaries, Empires, and India in the 1830s","authors":"Darin D. Lenz","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In March of 1831, three American missionary families commenced service with the American Marathi Mission in Bombay. In just over three years, half of the party had died, and the survivors set sail for America. Their story is like what happened to many American missionaries at the end of the long eighteenth century who sought to expand the empire of Christ. From their voyage on the high seas to their everyday life in Bombay, they were confronted by their various states of dependence. Forced to reckon with unfamiliar social, cultural, economic, and political realities, they struggled on the margins of Anglo-Indian society. This article explores the uneasy relationship between American missionaries, who were acutely aware of their dependency on others as colonial interlopers, and the maritime empires they encountered.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":"22 5-6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41309436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bringing the New World Home: Moravian Gemeintag Meetings and Protestant Pastoral Authority, 1738–1746","authors":"Benjamin Pietrenka","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10045","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay offers the first comparative examination of the German Moravian Gemeintag and British evangelical “Letter Day” meetings in the mid-eighteenth century. Gemeintag meetings established a new, experimental approach to pastoral leadership at gatherings for religious devotion and prayer by endowing the lived spiritual experiences of believers with edificatory and didactic authority. The experiences and testimonies of believers read aloud at epistolary prayer meetings utilized this novel symbolic authority to the most significant effect by supplying material examples of, rather than biblical aphorisms or clerical pronouncements about, God’s favor. Comparative structural analyses and close readings of the epistolary content reveal how believers in distant mission fields temporarily operated as authorized mediators of the Gospel message. The Gemeintag and its British evangelical offspring, thus, made valuable contributions to the blurring of increasingly fluid ecclesiastical and pastoral boundaries wrought by the pluralization of Protestantism in the early modern period.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47847562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploiting the Urban System? The Frictions of Military Finance and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic, 1688–1714","authors":"Aaron Graham, Jeannette Kamp","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10042","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines how international military finance operated in the Dutch Republic between 1688–1714. The region’s unique urban geography in which the political and financial infrastructures crucial for military financing were geographically dispersed created stresses and strains. These inconveniences were overcome due to the Republic’s excellent intra-urban infrastructure – creating fast and reliable communication between the different urban centers – and their reliance on (semi-)private agents, the solliciteurs-militair. As a result, the urban system created a level of flexibility: credit for military purposes could be found both in The Hague and Amsterdam, rather than having to rely on a single city as was the case in London. This focus on the urban has broader historiographical importance because recent scholarship on early modern war and state formation is increasingly questioning whether the focus on political and financial centralization is necessarily the best way to understand these processes.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47855413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History, written by Alan Strathern","authors":"J. Brack","doi":"10.1163/15700658-12342702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342702","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45785038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, written by Verena Krebs Das andere Christentum. Zur transkonfessionellen Verflechtungsgeschichte von äthiopischer Orthodoxie und europäischem Protestantismus, written by Stanislau Paulau","authors":"S. Kennerley","doi":"10.1163/15700658-12342701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342701","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43561889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}