In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansions, and Exile, 1550–1850 ed. by Heather Dalton
  • Christine Adams
Keeping Family in an Age of Long Distance Trade, Imperial Expansions, and Exile, 1550–1850 Edited by Heather Dalton. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

The eleven essays in this volume consider the importance of family networks—specifically, how families maintained both their relationships and businesses—in a time of discovery and settlement, increasing international trade, and the construction of empires. Drawing on the methodological tools of both family historians and scholars of migration, and considering the implications of class, race, religion and gender, the authors provide insight to the ways in which families were foundational in the creation of our interconnected world. As editor Heather Dalton argues in the introduction, "families were central to the project of national expansion and empire building—and not merely precursors of it or peripheral to it" (22). The pressures of migration led to transformations in the nature of family relationships as individuals were forced to adapt and to negotiate their intimate relationships under new circumstances.

The book is structured around themes, rather than geography, reflected in its five sections, some of which fit together more neatly than others. The essays on the impact of slavery, transportation and forced labor on family survival and identity lead off with Susan Broomhall's examination of the shaping of family identity among Korean ceramic potters who were relocated to Japan under duress during the Imjin wars of the late sixteenth century. Their pottery work was particularly valued by the Japanese, and while some Koreans chose to return to their homeland, others stayed and continued working in Japan. In particular, Broomhall focuses on the Fukaumi family, commemorated in an eighteenth-century monument that celebrates the life of founding matriarch Hyakubasen, an unusual tribute to a female ancestor. She was central to the establishment of the family workshop in Hiekoba, where they experienced great success in Japan while conserving important elements of their Korean heritage.

A number of the essays are extremely poignant, reminding us that when family members moved, willingly or not, both the individuals leaving and those left behind experienced profound loss. Eilin Hordvik's account of the family consequences of deportation to a penal colony is particularly wrenching as she considers the fate of several individuals transported from the British colony of Mauritius (conquered from the French in 1810) to Australia. Separation from family left behind in Mauritius was most often permanent, and luck—and patronage—generally determined whether the convict was able to form or recreate a family under the harsh and racialized conditions of Australia's penal landscape. Jessica Roitman's examination of the letters of Matilda Percival, a Caribbean free woman of color from St. Eustatius who migrated to St. Thomas for work is equally moving. While most studies of migration have focused on men, we see here that women's experience of migration for work was emotionally difficult as they sought to maintain ties with family back home, but also positive "as it allowed women to break with traditional roles and patterns of dependence and assert a new-found (if meagre) freedom" (95).

All family historians know that interest and emotion are intertwined in familial relationships rather than mutually exclusive. This is clear in the family networks of Jewish merchants that Francesca Bregoli analyzes. The Franchettis, like other Jewish families, sent their sons out into the world to help build the family business, but also worked hard to maintain and reinforce affective relations at the same time that they built their trade networks, often asking friends and members of their extended family to watch over younger kin to guard their religious loyalties and moral practices. We see the interplay of interest and emotion once again in Katie Barclay's essay as she draws on rich historical debates over the emotional lives of the poor to consider the impact of mobility on the intimate relationships of the traveling poor, and how these itinerant individuals navigated the usual familial roles available in a patriarchal society. The relationships and autonomy of individuals who made a living on the road were very different from...

pdf

Share