The Wider World

The North Atlantic as a series of spiritual spaces emerges clearly in Aaron Fogleman’s acutely observed and well-written account of the travels of two married European Protestants: Jean-François Reynier, a French Swiss Huguenot self-taught doctor, and Maria Barbara Knoll, a German Lutheran. This is at once an account of mission, fulfilment, struggle, marriage, religious rejection, and the crucial interplay of many journeys. Married as Moravians in 1740, the two interacted with colonists, Native Americans, rebelling slaves, and imperial troops, finally dying in Georgia in the early stages of the War of American Independence. Ably characterized by Fogleman as “a religious seeker with a utopian streak” (4), Reynier used his medical, artisanal, and spiritual skills among slaves and natives in Georgia, South Carolina, Surinam, and St. Thomas. Fogleman underlines the importance of the missionary work that led the newly married Knoll into an Atlantic world with which Reynier was already familiar. Seeking to Christianize both natives and African slaves, the two jointly encountered the problems of Surinam, which included a very difficult disease environment as well as language barriers. Anti-Moravian propaganda also played a role. The couple moved on to the Moravian slave mission on St. Thomas in 1743, and later that year to North America. Fogleman argues that Moravian views on the importance of women in the spiritual community had no impact in Surinam, but that once momentum on St. Thomas had begun, the presence and high profile of white and black missionary women attracted others.

Slavery appears in a very different light in Jenna Gibbs’s excellent book on slavery, theater, and popular culture. Gibbs considers the interplay of ideas of liberty and the reality of racial denigration as seen in blackface burlesque and other forms of racial ridicule. She also performs a valuable service in showing how the revising and rewriting of plays, images, and characters both intertwined with topical views and worked to reshape them. The reading of individual works is impressive. For example, Harlequin Negro (1807), a British allegory of the triumph of parliamentary abolitionism in the shape of the prohibition of the slave trade, stripped the slave of culture, agency, and resistance by glorifying government power and redemptive philanthropy while simultaneously promoting the falsehood of a free empire without slavery. The contrasts between the London and Philadelphia stages are handled carefully, with racialized cultural superiority seen on the former and denigrating views on the latter. Again, an impressive work and one that shows how texts, images, and performers repeatedly crossed the Atlantic, both joining cultural worlds and emphasizing their contrasts.

Robert Batchelor provides a fascinating account of another aspect of British engagement with the outside world. He looks at the development of London from a somewhat marginal city into a global force, albeit not with the confessional role of Rome. In his conceptually rich and intellectually acute study, Batchelor relates the change to cultural encounters—notably, in this case, the translation of non-Western ideas. Batchelor thus links an engagement with the Orient to the preparing of the way for the political, economic, and scientific “revolutions” of the late seventeenth century as well as the Enlightenment. Translation is positioned by Batchelor with reference to knowledge networks and to the ability to adapt to global economic...