Entangled Spaces - Global Connections and Local Articulations: Portals of Early Modern Globalization and Creolization During the Era of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Professor

The eighteenth century Atlantic world can be understood as a world of entangled spaces. It constituted a web of places where different cultural geographies overlapped, of entrance points for cultural transfers and interconnected networks for information and the flow of commodities. Different ethnic and religious communities and material cultures were simultaneously present in the same localities, in part independent from and in part interacting with each other. Inhabited by merchants, planters, servants and slaves, such places can be perceived as colonial or global spaces, where groups of people of various ethnic origins and classes engaged in trade, agriculture and consumption but also in acts of repression, rebellion and violence. Consequently, the Atlantic world was a space of inclusions and exclusions (Benjamin 2009). A focus on slave plantations, port towns, merchant and slave ships, slave forts, missions and metropoles as ”entangled spaces” highlights the complexity of the early modern Atlantic world. The slave trade and the slave plantations were the foundation and core of the Atlantic world-economy, but they also marked the beginning of a new global era, namely the era of early modern or proto globalization. This new age was marked by various articulations of force and violence over nature as well as human beings, bodies and sexualities. It was also shaped by the constant production and re-building of space. This means shifts in the perception of space, from African or European to creole, from free to slave and slave to free (Landers 2010), from one harvest to another, from one hurricane ravaging the land to another, from one famine to another.