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Beyond Encounters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Violence in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1492–1700
BRIAN SANDBERG
Medici Archive Project
| In the aftermath of the 1992 quincentennial commemoration of Christopher Columbus's first expedition and the beginning of transatlantic contact, historian James Axtell assessed the explosion of new publications concerning the significance and historical legacy of the 1492 voyage: "One can safely predict that the most durable legacy of the Quincentenary will not be the mediated events of 1992, no matter how muted or serious, but the tremendous flow of scholarship on the wide range of topics encompassed by the now-familiar phrase Columbian Encounters, only some of which was prompted by the historical anniversary." Axtell concluded in 1995 that the concept of "encounters" clearly represented the most powerful way of understanding the historical processes contact initiated.1 |
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A decade after the quincentennial, our understanding of the early modern Atlantic world produced by the Columbian "encounters" has begun to shift. The cultural history and postmodern approaches to discourse, representations, and power that shaped the concept of "encounters" in 1992 have matured, increasingly recognizing the importance of setting discussions of power/knowledge into broader cultural frameworks, especially when considering intercultural violence. While Axtell's review of quincentenary scholarship included some discussion of recent research on colonial expansion and warfare, not one of his eleven historiographical classifications dealt specifically with violence as an analytic category. Axtell dismissed discussions of atrocities by contrasting the "teachers, scholars, and activists" who condemned Columbus and Europeans for "genocide" and "ecocide" with those who "sought to complicate the moral and historical issues ...by contextualizing events to avoid anachronism, by emphasizing the impartial role of disease, and by seeking understanding before, if not rather than, judgment."2 This attempt to defend Columbus and to contextualize Atlantic world colonialism unfortunately involved promoting neutral "encounters" and deemphasizing the often atrocious aspects of violence in the Columbian Exchange. |
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Since the quincentennial, horrifying episodes of ethnic and religious violence in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, India, Palestine, Afghanistan, and other areas have awakened scholars to the dangers of ignoring conflict when studying intercultural exchanges. Acts of "terrorism" in cities such as Oklahoma City, New York, Jerusalem, and Tokyo have foregrounded atrocities and apocalyptic motivations for violence.3 Formulated partly in response to the killing and destruction witnessed over the past decade, new studies of ethnic and religious violence now provide a theoretical basis for reexamining such violence in comparative perspective.4 |
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The articles in this issue represent a new wave of Atlantic world scholarship attempting to place violence at the center of the Columbian Exchange.5 The studies here focus on violence in the early modern Atlantic world—considered as a space with particular, though not entirely unique, cross-cultural interactions at the beginning of the period of true globalization.6 During the sixteenth century, the triangular transatlantic trading connections that increasingly linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas began to forge hybrid Atlantic cultures.7 Although the Atlantic world was created by European navigation and maritime connections that broke down the preexisting isolation of various societies ringing the great ocean, "the birth of an Atlantic world also involved a gigantic international migration of people," that should be seen neither as Eurocentric nor as peaceful.8 |
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