家庭之海:帝国间加勒比地区的暴力与流动秩序

IF 1.8 1区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY Past & Present Pub Date : 2024-10-30 DOI:10.1093/pastj/gtae024
Lauren Benton, Timo McGregor
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引用次数: 0

摘要

历史学家对家庭内部生活的关注多于对其在早期欧洲海外帝国的法律和政治意义的关注。本文以牙买加和苏里南为重点,分析了家庭在十七世纪加勒比地区的法律作用。文章认为,家庭是组织海上暴力和组成地区秩序的关键。加勒比地区的帝国代理人--士兵、旅居者、仆人和官员--选择性地借鉴欧洲关于统治权的政治和法律论述,将家庭定义为构成殖民社区和治理的关键。在帝国和殖民地的法律想象中,家庭是政治社区构成的必要条件,家庭的存在强化了政治间暴力,尤其是海上袭击的论据。帝国的政策肯定了户主持有和指挥俘虏的权利,这些政策促进了家庭的形成并调节了家庭内部的冲突,从而巩固了地区性的掠夺、俘虏和奴役制度。地区制度的核心是暴力的合法性。早期种植园家庭对强制劳动力的需求助长了掳掠和掠夺的环加勒比经济,而定居者则以家庭防卫为由授权私掠和地方战争。作为吸收和指挥被胁迫劳动力的主要法律框架,家庭成为帝国间竞争的对象,也是构建奴役制度的工具。关于定居者迁移到竞争殖民地的权利的争夺,有时会将对户主统治权的扩张性理解--对户主下属行使私人权力--与户主名义上支持的公共当局对立起来。这种冲突强化了家庭在种植园奴隶制扩张中的中心地位。家户政治使家户成为殖民治理的不稳定基础,也成为反抗新兴种植园主的场所。牙买加的官员们竭力处理突袭与种植园主组建家庭之间的不稳定关系。在苏里南,土著和非洲俘虏努力逃脱和颠覆在家庭统治掩盖下的各种形式的奴役和胁迫。研究殖民思想中家庭的重要性,可以揭示新生的加勒比殖民地的法律政治和地区奴隶制度的兴起之间重要的、但往往被忽视的连续性。从殖民家庭的角度来看,整个加勒比地区的法律变革并没有遵循征服、私人掠夺和种植园奴隶制等独立的阶段。相反,它是随着公共和私人对权力和合法暴力的诉求的变化而演变的。户籍授权战争并将俘虏转化为财产,形成了一个法律支点,用以平衡新兴奴隶社会中相互依存的掠夺、奴役和种植网络。这种围绕俘虏企业和奴隶主家庭组织起来的私人权利和公共权力的组合,横跨 17 世纪的加勒比地区,产生了一种帝国间的法律制度,在这种制度中,奴隶主的权利成为地区秩序愿景的核心。
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A Sea of Households: Ordering Violence and Mobility in the 
Inter-Imperial Caribbean
Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean—soldiers, sojourners, servants, and officials—drew selectively from European political and legal discourses about dominium to define households as essential to the constitution of colonial communities and governance. In imperial and colonial legal imagination, households were necessary for the constitution of political communities and their presence fortified arguments for interpolitical violence, especially maritime raiding. Affirming the rights of household heads to hold and command captives, imperial policies to foment household formation and regulate conflicts within households underpinned a regional regime of raiding, captive taking, and enslavement. The regional regime centred on legalities of violence. Demand for coerced labour in early plantation households fuelled a 
circum-Caribbean economy of captive taking and plunder, while settlers invoked the defence of households to authorise privateering and local warfare. As the primary legal framework for absorbing and commanding coerced labour, households became the object of inter-imperial competition and a vehicle for constructing enslavement as an institution. Contests over the rights of settlers to relocate to competing colonies at times pitted expansive understandings of the dominium of household heads—the exercise of private power over household subordinates—against the public authorities they nominally sustained. Such conflicts worked to reinforce the centrality of households to the expansion of plantation slavery. The politics of households made them an unstable underpinning for colonial governance and a site of resistance to the emerging plantocracy. Officials in Jamaica struggled to manage the volatile relation between raiding and planter household formation. In Suriname, Indigenous and African captives struggled to escape and subvert forms of slavery and coercion imposed under cover of household dominium. Examining the significance of households in colonial thought illuminates important and often overlooked continuities in the legal politics of nascent Caribbean colonies and the rise of a regional slave regime. Viewed from the colonial household, legal change across the Caribbean did not follow discrete stages of conquest, privateering, and plantation slavery. Instead, it evolved in relation to shifting accommodations between public and private claims to authority and legitimate violence. Authorising warfare and converting captives into property, households formed a legal fulcrum for balancing interdependent networks of raiding, slaving, and planting in emergent slave societies. This constellation of private rights and public authority, organised around captive taking ventures and slave-holding households, spanned the seventeenth-century Caribbean and produced an inter-imperial legal regime in which the rights of slave owners came to occupy the very centre of visions of regional order.
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来源期刊
Past & Present
Past & Present Multiple-
CiteScore
2.80
自引率
5.60%
发文量
49
期刊介绍: Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world. The journal offers: •A wide variety of scholarly and original articles on historical, social and cultural change in all parts of the world. •Four issues a year, each containing five or six major articles plus occasional debates and review essays. •Challenging work by young historians as well as seminal articles by internationally regarded scholars. •A range of articles that appeal to specialists and non-specialists, and communicate the results of the most recent historical research in a readable and lively form. •A forum for debate, encouraging productive controversy.
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