The 4th Dartmouth History Institute
The Global and the Local: New Histories from Across the Seventeenth-Century World
Dartmouth College, June 21-23, 2023
The 2023 Dartmouth History Institute was devoted to new scholarship that explores the history of the seventeenth century from multiple global perspectives, with attention to questions of scale and chronology.
The 2023 Institute asked what can be gained by narrowing our chronological focus in order to recover a truly global account of simultaneous transformations wrought in a critical century.
In recent decades scholars have shaken off eurocentric frameworks and embraced global history, but we continue to wrestle with the ways that paradigms, such as early modernity, Atlantic history, and new imperial history, implicitly privilege particular perspectives and teleological stories of globalization.
Using chronological parameters instead, the History Institute hopes to bring together scholars working on historical projects operating at different scales (local, national, imperial, transnational), provoking questions about periodization and thematization in global history.
The seventeenth century presents historians working across the globe with a unique challenge: it was marked by the reconfiguration of various regional and hemispheric claims to universal empire in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, but processes of Qing, Hapsburg, and Ottoman consolidation were still ongoing and frameworks of transoceanic empire remained nascent.
This was not yet a world defined by the cohesive empires and unitary nation-states that give shape to transregional history beginning in the eighteenth century. The long seventeenth century was marked by competing and overlapping jurisdictions and cultures, all grappling locally with the impact of new global currents in communication, exchange, migration, and statecraft. It defies easy synthesis but abounds with productive historical comparisons and questions.
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Of particular interest to the convenors are new explorations of:
The interplay between micro and global histories
Evolving systems of religion and spirituality and their relationship to governance and statecraft
Conflicting and overlapping legal regimes, legalities, and theories of imperial rule
The evolution and maturation of explicitly subaltern, Indigenous, and creole identities
Networks of material culture and artistic exchange
Systems of bound and forced labor, and their relationship to racialization
The evolution and emergence of transnational non-state governing entities
Urban spaces and constructions of urbanity and urban networks
Changes in the conceptualization of the environment and the role of ecologies in establishing and reshaping transnational connections
Decentered perspectives on political economy and economic culture
Histories of medicine and science
This colloquium-style gathering was held in-person at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, from June 20 to June 23, 2023.
Convenors: Paul Musselwhite, Elizabeth Kassler-Taub, Ernesto Mercado-Montero, Carl Estabrook, Tiraana Bains
Discussants
Tonio Andrade, Professor of History, Emory University
B.A., Reed College, 1992; M.A., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1994; M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D., Yale University, 1997, 1998, and 2000. Chinese History, Global History. Major books include The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (Princeton 2021), The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton, 2016), Lost Colony: The Untold Story of Europe’s First War with China (Princeton, 2011), and How Taiwan Became Chinese (Columbia University Press, 2007). Honors include The John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Gutenberg-e Prize.
Professor Andrade is part of a new field in historical studies known as Global History, which focuses on commonalities and connections between the myriad societies on the planet rather than on traditionally-defined political or cultural units. His core geographical area of expertise is China, but his research focuses on interconnections in the Early Modern Period (1500-1800) and on comparative history. The main question that fascinates him is: Why did western Europeans, who sat on the far edge of Eurasia and were backward by Asian standards, rise to global prominence starting in the 1500s, establishing durable maritime empires that spanned the seas?
Stephanie Hassell, Assistant Professor, Philosophy and Religion, Clemson University
Professor Hassell was trained in African history at Stanford University, completing minor fields in Indian Ocean history and the African diaspora. Her research explores the intersection of slavery, religion, and empire in the Indian Ocean World. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Renegade Slaves: Religious Conversion, the Inquisition, and the Portuguese Empire in India in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council. At Clemson she teaches courses on slavery, African history, and the Indian Ocean. She previously taught at Wake Forest University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University.
Joshua Piker, Professor of History, William and Mary, and Editor, William and Mary Quarterly
Joshua Piker received his B.A. from Oberlin College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of venues, and he is the author of two monographs--Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America and The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America--both published by Harvard University Press. His teaching and research center on the intersection of early American and Native American history.
Casey Schmitt, Assistant Professor, History, Cornell University
Professor Schmitt is a historian of early America and the Caribbean, with particular interests in human trafficking, colonization, and illicit economies over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In her research and teaching, she is interested in tracing individuals who crossed imperial boundaries—by choice and by coercion—in order to understand how processes like colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and trade functioned in the interstices of early modern empires.
Currently, Professor Schmitt is at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking, Colonization, and Trade in the Greater Caribbean, 1530-1690, which analyzes the ubiquity of human trafficking and captivity in the greater Caribbean and North America from the 1530s until the 1690s and what that meant for colonization, trade, and warfare in the region. Throughout the period, demand for bound labor in Spanish, English, and French colonies exceeded supply, creating incentives for maritime raids on Indigenous communities, transatlantic slaving vessels, coastal plantations, and fisheries. Tracing the itineraries of both captives and captive-takers reveals an alternative regional geography and political economy in which subjects of different empires, Indigenous populations, and people of African descent created complex webs of vulnerability, dependence, and interaction that did not adhere to imperial demarcations on maps or the imaginations of metropolitan planners in Europe.
PARTICIPANTS
Eduardo Angel Cruz (Università di Teramo—KU Leuven)
Brandon Burger (SUNY Buffalo)
Eduardo Dawson (University of Notre Dame)
Camden Elliott (Harvard University)
Phillip Emanuel (The College of William & Mary)
Gabriel Groz (University of Chicago)
Diana Heredia-López (University of Texas)
Marlis Hinckley (Johns Hopkins University)
Chechesh Kudachinova (University of Mannheim)
Suzanne Litrel (Independent Scholar)
Alexa McCall (University of Notre Dame)
Ellen Nye (Harvard University)
Bonnie Soper (Stony Brook University)
Man Zheng (Freie Universität Berlin)
Senior Scholars
Tiraana Bains (Brown University/Modern Intellectual History)
Lauren Benton (Yale University)
Colin Calloway (Dartmouth College)
Pamela Crossley (Dartmouth College)
Carl Estabrook(Dartmouth College)
Stuart Finkel (Dartmouth College)
Allan Greer (McGill University)
Stephanie Hassell (Clemson University)
Carina Johnson (Pitzer College)
Elizabeth Kassler-Taub (Dartmouth College)
Ernesto Mercado-Montero (Dartmouth College)
Paul Musselwhite (Dartmouth College)
Joshua Piker (The College of William & Mary/William & Mary Quarterly)
Miya Xie (Dartmouth College)