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

— eighteen — The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas I Few developments have had a greater influence on the social organization of the globe than the movement of peoples outward from Europe beginning during the early modern era. In the early modern Americas, this development was manifest in the establishment of a large number of settler and trading societies, each of them associated—and occasionally even sponsored by—a European state. We have long known that the charter—or founding— groups in these societies brought more than their bodies with them to the New World, endeavoring to incorporate relevant aspects of the culture they had left behind into the political societies they were creating on the ground. Already in 1901, Edward Eggleston dilated extensively upon this theme in his influential Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century,¹ and many recent scholars, including James Lockhart,² David Grayson Allen,³ and David Hackett Fischer,4 have followed his example. These and many similar works have concentrated upon identifying and describing the ways in which This chapter was written to be the keynote address for the “Alan Morris Conference on the History of Florida and the Atlantic World,” Florida State University, Tallahassee, February 24, 2006. It is republished here with permission from “The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas,” Early American Studies 6 (Spring 2008): 1–26. 1. Edward Eggleston, The Transit of Civilization from England to America in the Seventeenth Century (New York: D. Appleton, 1901). 2. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). 3. David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 4. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Greene, final pages 401 Greene, final pages 401 2/12/13 2:27 PM 2/12/13 2:27 PM 402 Social Construction European immigrants and sojourners transformed various indigenous Americas into cultural enclaves of varying size and extent: the colonial Hispanic, Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Russian Americas. There is still an enormous amount that we do not fully understand about this process. The focus of this chapter is upon the relatively understudied subject of the cultural dimensions of political transfers in the early modern Americas— not on the thousands of political transfers from indigenous peoples to Europeans (an important subject that has received considerable attention in recent decades)5 but on the transfers from one European cultural area to another. Beginning in the seventeenth century, such transfers occurred in a number of settled territories: some were permanent; others were not. Thus, the Dutch seized parts of Pernambuco from the Portuguese in 1630, holding them until 1654, and conquered New Sweden in 1655; the English captured Jamaica from the Spanish in the mid-1650s and New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664; the French occupied the western portions of Hispaniola, renaming them St. Domingue, beginning in the mid-1660s; and the Dutch acquired Surinam from the English in the Treaty of Breda in 1667. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the French ceded St. Christopher and Acadia to the British, and the Seven Years’ War produced a massive transfer of jurisdictions. By the Treaty of Paris of 1763, the British gained Quebec, the upper Mississippi valley, and the four ceded islands of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Tobago from the French, while the Spanish obtained Louisiana from the French and ceded Florida to the British. In the wake of the American Revolution and the creation of the United States, the British in 1783 ceded control over the upper Mississippi valley to the United States and returned Florida to the Spanish. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish returned Louisiana to the French, who promptly, in 1803, sold it to the United States, and the British acquired full title to the disputed island of St. Lucia and the Spanish colony of Trinidad . The United States purchased Florida from the Spanish in 1819 and in 1848 gained Texas and California as a result of the Mexican War. These transfers are thoroughly familiar. The interesting problem about them involves the symbiotic issues of cultural retention and cultural reformulation. What happens when a new state gains sovereignty over an already...

Share