To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World

Author(s): Lara Putnam

Source: Journal of Social History , Spring, 2006, Vol. 39, No. 3, [Special Issue on the
Future of Social History] (Spring, 2006), pp. 615-630
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3790281

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 TO STUDY THE FRAGMENTS/WHOLE: MICROHISTORY
AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD

By Lara Putnam University of Pittsburgh

the unity is submarine

breathing air, our problem is how to study the fragments
whole ...

?Edward Kamau Braithwaite (b. Barbados, 1930),

"Caribbean Man in Space and Time"

This essay is about the past, present, and future connections between two
kinds of history: microhistory and Atlantic history. The first is a well-defined
and long-standing label, perhaps not much in fashion today; the second is a
somewhat inchoate emerging field and apparently a hot tag, to judge by its rapid
rise to prominence in dissertation titles, symposia, and job descriptions. Micro?
history is often associated with a particular style of presentation?the narrative
exposition ofa single event or a single life?and with a particular set of topics?
cultural history, in particular the cultural history of those at the margins. Other
works Iabeled microhistories offer dense reconstructions of the social history of
circumscribed communities, tracing patterns in kinship, commerce, or gover?
nance in exquisite detail. What links such disparate kinds of inquiry is a shared
methodological tactic. Microhistory reduces the scale of observation, often to
the level of personal encounters or individual life histories. It does so not in
search of sympathetic "human faces" to illustrate the impact of historical pro?
cesses, but rather in order to challenge our understanding ofthe processes them?
selves, in "the belief that microscopic observation will reveal factors previously
unobserved."2
Meanwhile, the unwieldy collective of works tagged as Atlantic history co-
heres around a geographic claim, regarding the spatial scope of key historical
processes from the sixteenth century to the present (in its maximalist chronol?
ogy) or during the height of the transatlantic slave trade, from the seventeenth
to mid-nineteenth centuries (the minimalist chronology). Atlantic historians
argue that the density of commerce and travel linking ports in Europe, Africa,
and the Americas in these eras made historical developments at each site pro-
foundly dependent upon the others. To understand the causes and assess the
consequences of change observed at one locale, we must consider events and
patterns at the places most closely linked to it, as well as trends affecting the
system as a whole. Atlantic history has also been characterized by other tenden-
cies which may or may not be essential to it, depending on whom you ask: an
eagerness to find actors or practices of African origin in places where traditional
historiography had not marked their presence; an insistence on the centrality
of slavery and the slave trade to historical developments in Europe or North
America traditionally explained without reference to them; prominent atten-

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616 journal of social history spring 2006
tion to the unequal distribution of power across the Atlant
tion that even those most thoroughly subjugated by the
those bought and sold within it?made their own history w
On the face of it, Atlantic history and microhistory seem
The first sounds very, very big; the latter very small. The
the historical processes Atlantic history seeks to underst
third of the globe; the scale of observation within micro
no larger than a town, sometimes no larger than a miller's
and scale are two separate matters.3 Like Atlantic history,
tempted to elucidate historical processes transcontinental
spread of werewolf legends across the Indo-European ecu
tory, Atlantic history has been characterized by researche
ulation o( their scale of observation, so that reconstructing
Yoruba Muslim and his kinsmen may occasion a reevaluat
of slave rebellions across the nineteenth-century Atlantic
In the pages that follow I outline three ways that Atlanti
history are linked: firstly, in the significant role played in e
ample" that proves the existence of connections heretofore
attempts to write prosopographical studies of specific cohor
the Atlantic stage; thirdly, in Atlantic history's unspoken
torical methods to establish the spatial frame of reference
study for individual inquiries. I conclude by discussing som
my own that attempts to use microhistorical inquiry to an
tions about the origins and spread of anti-imperialism in
Caribbean.

Evidence of Unsuspected Ties

Microhistory has excelled at demonstrating connectio

tween popular and scholarly knowledge, between ancien
early modern witchcraft, between the understandings su
and the logic of those who condemned them?on the basi
multiple texts. It has had the most impact in cases in whic
of separation were so strong and so fundamental that the
of such connections forces readers to reconsider basic claim
within which the connections were found. Similarly, Atlan
claim to significance on the demonstration of connection
sites in what is now termed a "broader Atlantic world." To
histories of Bristol, England, Old Calabar, in the Bight of B
South Carolina have been assumed to be radically separat
tiple commercial, political, and interpersonal ties betwee
impact on our understanding of each.
Only the profound ignorance of the African past that pe
fessional historians up to recently, can explain why new
historical developments within West and Central Africa h
impact on our understanding of key moments in the histo
One must be armed with a reasonable grasp ofthe political-m
Sokoto Caliphate in order to recognize how it shaped pat

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TO STUDY THE FRAGMENTS/WHOLE 617

and commerce that placed West Africans with partic

personal ties, and related patterns of allegiance and
Brazil in the 1830s. Suddenly we realize how partial
Male rebellion in Bahia in 1835.4 There is a shock of
we assumed to be insular, and whose events we there
local dynamics, are revealed to be above-water fragm
ties Kamau Braithwaite reminds us of in the poem a
only increase in the coming years, as academic infrast
the past decade to facilitate interchange between sch
America, the U.S., and Europe begins to yield publi
Of course, historians' long-standing ignorance of Af
fore the effectiveness of current efforts to reveal con
processes of that history, is itself a product ofthe polit
Atlantic world. As modern academia professionalized
in the wake of the end of the slave trade and in the m
eastward expansion of European colonial rule, emergi
geographic claims. Europe and the United States, w
purposively protagonized events, were lands of politi
short, history. Africa and Asia had timeless tradition
understood through ethnology. Latin America, a plac
quered and the conquering, had both history and tr
was looking and where they looked. The Caribbean,
befitted a place where the conquered had disappear
a tiny and transient part of the population, and whe
(because brown and subjugated) as "natives" were k
native at all.6
Another ongoing product of the Atlantic world w
race, created and enforced with great effort in the
gal sanctions dictating who might do what where a
for historians has been a not-unrelated set of assump
what where, with whom. Racial ideologies make cat
moral, and genealogical distance?just the kind of cl
microhistory is so adept at challenging. And indeed
been churning up tale after tale of fascinating, perip
assumptions about the correspondence between ascr
nates, economic role, and space of action. There are t
scions of the slave-trading elite, captured by English
sold to Dominica, moved from there to Virginia, and f
England whence they returned to Old Calabar.7 The
born in Benin in the 1840s, whose enslavement and s
transatlantic circuits carried him from Togo to Rio de
Haiti, and England.8 Ira Berlin's Generations ofCaptivi
amples of similar trajectories; he calls those whose m
cies allowed them to negotiate imperial and legal bo
and sees their presence as a key factor shaping slaver
North America.9 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redi
portrays multiple sites where "motley" crews from
came together, and offer us the indelible image of O

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618 journal of social history spring 2006
and Lydia Hardy sharing a hearth and, briefly, an emancipato
don in 1792.10 Such examples belie the assumption that offici
nels monopolized system-wide information on developing e
moved along multiple circuits within the eighteenth- and n
Atlantic world, with slave owners, bureaucrats, free people
still-enslaved spreading the word between them.11
Thus historians are uncovering unsuspected social networks
formation, and finding multiple examples of people who trav
system in ways that cut across or swam against its fundamenta
very richness of the primary sources that allow us to recreate
lives raises difficult questions. How can we make claims about
the impact of these transatlantic negotiators, if the conditions
vation are such that those whom we catch are by definition
to treat specific types of transatlantic connections as an exp
we would need to have some minimally reliable sense of how
do not always have that. The "telling example" is a useful evid
in cases where there is a strong presumption of absence, and
finding one or more instance of presence is something to writ
there are things this kind of evidence cannot do. When do
particular kind of connection is extremely rare, or when so
preservation is likely to co-vary with factors we know chang
of study (factors like states' administrative competence, or the
ities), "telling examples" are a poor basis for constructing por
change over time.

The Prosopographical Alternative

Many of the most impressive works of the "golden age" of s

fered exhaustive studies of particular places over long stretche
place constant allowed scholars to be confident that they we
the totality of source material about that place, or were select
resentative samples of it, since a finite number of archives ho
documentation. For some topics within Atlantic history (say,
rise of plantation slavery on nearby urban populations), it mak
hold place constant and study people as they arrive. For other
one wishes to track the people rather than the place over ti
nately requires moving with them. The challenge is to find
mentation that enables one to follow a set of people even a
administrative boundaries.
Generally, this has been only been feasible so far in cases wh
ticularities led to the creation oi an unusually dense document
a certain group of people by an imperial state, or in cases whe
trajectory was so focalized that individuals can be tracked in
erated by a finite number of administrative entities. A class
former is James Lockhart's Men ofCajamarca, which tracked b
lar origins and American destinies ofthe 168 Spaniards who pa
capture of the Inca Atahualpa in 1532.12 A recent example o
Altman's reconstruction of the productive enterprises, politic

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TO STUDY THE FRAGMENTS/WHOLE 619

gious institutions, and domestic lives created in Puebla

from Brihuega, Spain in the sixteenth century.13 In tur
and Strangers provides a remarkable combination of por
the southern transatlantic migration of the late ninetee
centuries, moving in scale from individual family net
composition and associational life to national policy im
population trends.14 Each of these authors uses resear
historical demography as well as geneaology, in order to
evidence generated at different levels of aggregation in
None of these works meets the secondary criteria f
heading of Atlantic history signaled above: that is, n
role for Africans, their descendants, or their cultural
they reconstruct, none highlights the role of the slave t
none is particularly focused on the unequal distributio
practitioners might dispute whether the works ment
Atlantic history at all. My point is that the prosopogr
allows their authors to make a different kind of claim a
than the "telling examples" discussed above. Collectiv
munity studies allow us to distinguish between that whi
which was rare in any given community, to see how su
time, and on that basis to build arguments about the i
distance connections on the social phenomena we wish
ots, revolutions, racism, or rice yields). Each additiona
of Atlantic lives is likely to have an outsize explanatory
contextualize and interrogate the evocative individua
have.15
Some researchers have used elements of prosopography to produce studies
explicitly in dialogue with issues closer to the heart of Atlantic history, such as
enslaved agency and imperial identities. There is for instance David Hancock's
meticulous study of a small group of British merchants of provincial origin, who
in the second half of the eighteenth century built up vast wealth-producing en?
terprises that stretched from Sierra Leone to the Caribbean to the North Ameri?
can colonies and integrated trade in slaves and sugar plantations with commerce
in many other kinds of goods. His microscopic optic allows him to trace the con?
nections between these public commerciai developments and the evolution of
specific patterns of consumption, connoisseurship, and moral claims within the
bourgeois domestic sphere.16 A group of associates very differently positioned
within that same eighteenth-century Atlantic political economy were the royal
slaves of El Cobre, Cuba, whose efforts to secure collective freedom through
petitions, political alliances, economic effort, and military service (specifically
against the expanding British navy Hancock's merchants' taxes financed) have
been ably detailed by Maria Elena Diaz.17
There is much room for growth in the realm of Atlantic prosopography, as
researchers bring questions from the new agenda to bear on groups whose cor?
porate status ensured the production and preservation of dense documentation:
the various sets of missionaries who played crucial and contradictory roles at
key junctures of the Atlantic system, for instance, or?as I suggest below?a
group as mundane as Boy Scout leaders in the interwar Caribbean. The falling

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620 journal of social history spring 2006
costs and increasing portability of information management
the recent or pending conclusion of several large database pro
expand the number of populations for which prosopographical
alternative.

Geographic Frames of Reference and Units of Study

There is another way Atlantic history and microhistory inte

rarely discussed yet widely relevant. It is the process of spati
historians, we know we must draw artificial but useful boun
order to be able to make meaningful statements about histori
We call this periodization. We also need to do the same thin
is, we need to think consciously, argue intelligibly, and reach
collective conclusions about the spatial units that will allow
large-scale trends and patterns in a meaningful way. As far as
consensus term for this process.
For years historians used national borders unquestioningly as
of reference: even when discussing historical processes that oc
nation-state came into existence. (Sociologists have tagged a
their own discipline "methodological nationalism.")18 The lin
ical inquiry and national narrative has proven particularly har
all, history originated in the nineteenth century as the discip
writing each nation-state a usable past. Beginning in the mid t
social historians challenged the priority of national political hi
not only a different set of topics but differently sized spaces
smaller than a nation, or regions far larger. Today, units of s
national states are decisively the norm. Yet the nation-stat
fault frame of reference and presumptive boundary of extrapo
search marriage patterns and land sales in San Juan Sacatepequ
books subtitled (after an evocative phrase and colon), "Famil
in Guatemala."
Historians rarely study "the Age of Revolution" in its temporal entirety, but
they routinely use it as a frame of reference for analysis: including the phrase in a
dissertation title, say, then marking the actual years studied with numbers at the
end ofthe subtitle. The phrase signals a frame of reference for analysis, the dates
demarcate a unit of study. We need to be able to do the same thing with space.
Yet accurate spatial labeling can be unwieldy to say the least. In the larger project
discussed below I am studying northwest Trinidad; Barbados; Jamaica; the Canal
Zone and Bocas del Toro region of Panama; the eastern lowlands of Costa Rica;
the southern Caribbean coast of Nicaragua; and eastern Cuba, 1900-1970. The
latter is much easier to specify than the former, but the information the num?
bers offer is entirely parailel to that given by the place names before them. Any
spatial, like any chronological, delimitation is a choice, reflecting a somewhat
but not fully arbitrary view of patterns of commonality in human experience.
Macrolevel data can be crucial for determining fruitful axes oi comparison.
But for tracking the movement of people, goods, money, or ideas in order to
form a considered judgment about the unit of study and spatial frame of refer?
ence that make sense for a particular research topic, microlevel examination is

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TO STUDY THE FRAGMENTS/WHOLE 621

almost always necessary. For this reason, most works of

microhistorical back-story, a process of definition that
to gesture toward in their acknowledgements (or mentio
out in their Introductions. The story may have to do
same names in sources from disparate ports, or with rea
rative that describes traveling a certain transimperial rou
ordinary path in the world. Ships' logs have served a
sources researchers trace the existence of a particular ci
terests them, then set out to study that space. No works
"the Atlantic" as a whole as their unit of study: such an
capacity.19 The majority of works within Atlantic history
take "the Atlantic" as their frame of analysis. The subm
history are not universal or eternal but rather historica
and superimposed. Scholars use microhistorical examin
case-by-case basis which places should be part of their f
then decide?based on funding possibilities, archival res
straints on mobility?which sites can be part of their u
perhaps move toward being more open with our readers
ourselves) about how this process works.

The Interwar Rise of Popular AntiTmperialism in th

Microhistorical Inquiry into a Transatlantic Process

I am studying the end of empire in the British Carib

ments and mechanisms are well known?national inde
legislatures in Jamaica and Trinidad in 1962, Barbados
developments went from unthinkable to unstoppable i
much less clear. I seek to understand how socio-cultur
Caribbean (such as the creation of migrant networks t
of people and prints around the Greater Caribbean) a
cesses within the metropole (such as the demise of sci
rise of functionalist social science) together shaped t
and the contours of that which replaced it. Studying
plethora of voluntary associations and moral reform mo
of British origin, adopted and adapted by Afro-Caribbean
the twentieth century. I also saw the rise of anti-colonia
strands of Pan-Africanism in the interwar years. British
anti-imperialist black activism seem, at first glance, irre
bodies the logic of the European civilizing mission; the s
when we reduce the scale of observation to the level of
these were not mutually exclusive alternatives but oft-u
in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Asso
that of fraternal organizations, lodges, church missions,
initiatives like Robert Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts. This
only possible at the microhistorical level?should encou
meaning of these movements for the men and women w
In the pages that follow, I will argue that the circulati
the Caribbean spread both knowledge of and need for

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622 journal of social history spring 2006
and that British moral reform and black solidarity moveme
this broader phenomenon, of associationism in pursuit of s
collective advance. Moral reform movements carried the
service and virtue could make non-white colonials full pa
rial mission: a promise made explicit by military recruiting
during World War I. The dissonance between this ideology
rial belonging, and migrants' repeated experience of race
at multiple sites in and around the British Empire, pushed
Caribbeans toward a radical critique of the imperial system
As foreshadowed above, this is a study whose geographic
has been determined through microhistorical reconstructio
movement of people and ideas. What this means is that I
dozen unpublished life histories collected among Afro-Ca
ans in Costa Rica and Jamaica in the 1970s, plus large chun
language newspaper I could find from the Spanish-speaking
and used these together with published migration statistic
ing contours oi a Caribbean migratory sphere that spanned
Jamaica, Panama, Costa Rica, Cuba, and sundry points in
half ofthe twentieth century.21 Like many works discussed
that seeks to reveal unacknowledged connections, in part
amples" of boundary-crossing lives. It also gestures toward
prosopography of non-elite actors, taking advantage of n
source formats to ask questions unanswerable even a few y
From the first generations after emancipation, the wor
British Caribbean proved eager to seek temporary emplo
grating overseas earnings into household economies in w
tion and seasonal cash labor were already intertwined. M
toiled on the Panama railroad, the Venezuelan gold fields
canal project, the Costa Rican railroad, the U.S.-controll
Cuban and Dominican canefields, and hundreds of smalle
tween, each wave of migrants building skills and social net
successive waves. Panama became as a nodal point, wher
Latin American, and Caribbean circuits overlapped. When
tion in 1916 left tens of thousands of British West Indians
out work, ever-greater numbers headed north: to Harlem, i
burgeoning service sector and white collar opportunities
roughly 145,000 first- and second-generation British We
Spanish-speaking Western Caribbean destinations, and a
U.S.A.22 It is a testament to the weight of methodological
British West Indian migratory sphere?within which ideas,
ital circulated continuously?has rarely been taken as a fr
historical analysis, even by those of us who choose chunks
study.
As they built communities from the bottom up, British West Indian migrants
established local chapters of international associations in a groundswell of civic
enthusiasm. Omnipresent fraternal lodges included the Foresters, Elks, and Odd-
fellows. Missionaries and preachers founded Anglican, Wesleyan Methodist,
Baptist, Pentecostal, and Revivalist churches. Moral reform movements of over-

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TO STUDY THE FRAGMENTS/WHOLE 623

seas origin attracted enthusiastic local converts who beg

The London-based Salvation Army, for instance, began
work in the West lndies in 1903; within ten years it had
cers, hundreds of Cadets, and thousands of devout Soldie
each case British West Indians of African ancestry) hea
and social "rescue work" at twenty-nine local Corps an
Caribbean.23 Marcus Garvey's pan-Africanist Universa
Association emerged and prospered in this same milie
organization in 1914: twenty-eight years old at the tim
and worked in Jamaica, Costa Rica, and England. As they
orders and missions, British West Indians spread the U.N
founding a disproportionate number of lodges in the r
the flow of migrants was heaviest and their need for s
Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica, and of course, the United St
While the booms and busts of export agriculture had
sands of English-speaking Afro-Caribbeans westward t
republics and subsequently north to the United States,
imperial service that for the first time carried significant
Afro-Caribbeans eastward across the Atlantic. Some 15,0
in the British West lndies Regiments (B.W.I.R.) durin
Leading the recruiting drive, the islands' white and li
the language of self-help and uplift that pervaded blac
1915 speaker declared that "[t]he educational advantag
They would have the opportunity of meeting with me
the world and exchanging ideas with them ... He enter
ing the drafts to be sent to Britain; as soon as the first
to tell of the treatment they had received there men w
join the colours. This was not a race war. Of the 450 m
comprised the British Empire there were only 65 miil
the size and importance of Jamaica, we ought to be able
five and six thousand men to the front."25
The speaker was quite right that the B.W.I.R. recrui
would determine their faith in the ideology of race-blind
was quite wrong about what those experiences would
oft-stated desire, they were not sent to fight at the front
coloured colonials to combat Europeans, the War Office
to East Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, France, and Ita
"native labour battalions" in living conditions some la
than those accorded German prisoners of war. Men ofth
talion rioted in Taranto, Italy, after the Armistice; days af
down a group of sergeants of the same battalion form
pledging to work toward black self-rule in the Caribbe
if necessary.26 While participants were promptly betray
troops' homecoming would be rocky.
Returning servicemen led riots in Belize and joined
Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. In the subsequent investigatio
Smith, himself a Trinidadian of color and former leader
Battalion, suggested that contact between different islan

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624 journal of social history spring 2006
the development of radical race-consciousness. "His exper
feeling was very much stronger among the Jamaicans ...
had started among the Jamaican soldiers, spread to others a
the population of Trinidad generally."27 The pan-Caribbean
also given new scope to pan-Africanist publications. "Refer
vey's] 'Negro World' newspaper, Colonel Maxwell Smith
that but for the War these journals would not have come h
dissemination was due to the returned soldiers. At a meetin
zation in Italy, the men had said they must govern themsel
if necessary, bloodshed.... That particular organisation wa
cannot break up a feeling."28
The "feeling" that Caribbean progress required black
spreading rapidly. Veterans ofthe British West Indies Regim
nent in political and labor activism across the region ove
decades. Most immediately, though, the young men of th
turned to Panama (where most had been recruited) to scr
reengage with their communities. And, with surprising reg
Boy Scout troops as well.29 The same war experience tha
cruits' frame of reference, and given race pride of place in
perial power, seems to have fired their enthusiasm for Bri
as well. This is perhaps surprising, given the place of Boy
Baden-Powell within Edwardian debates over empire. Bade
Boer War and Zulu campaigns, sought by means of manly g
venture to make England's youth fit to rule the empire. T
were so often radical in their critique of imperialism, an
their promotion of Scouting, makes them a particularly in
the broader phenomenon we are exploring. In concluding t
a prosopographical approach to this conundrum.
Upon the arrival of linotypist Ivanhoe Phipps, hired from
Gleaner to work for the Panama Star and Herald in 1929, th
ported, "A former boy scout, an ex-soldier of the British
and one who saw service in France during the great War, M
pected to become a valued member of our community." Ph
friends (to wit, the Tribune's editors) on arrival in Colon.30
well-traveled, well-read young black men for whom imperi
activism, and the fight against racial injustice went hand in
Sidney Young founded Tribune in 1928 in response to the "
discrimination" that Panamanian politicians' racist postur
the Isthmus's 60}000-odd residents of British West Indian o
ple have light and they shall find their way," declared the
and faith in civic engagement and community virtue as ro
erment pervaded its pages. There were eight Baden-Pow
among British West Indians in Panama City alone in 192
that the post-war enthusiasm for Scouting was already slac
troop leader himself, Young solicited regular columns fro
and publicized troop activities in the Tribune's "Scout Corn
week, alongside effusive praise for the "world wide brother
organization promoted.33

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TO STUDY THE FRAGMENTS/WHOLE 625

The Tribune's pages located readers as part of multipl

phies: the British Empire; the "world wide brotherhood
British West Indian "Dispersion"; and the great commu
stretching from South Africa to England and Brazil to C
ars would call the Black Atlantic.34 Reprinting news f
press in the U.S. and English-language papers from acr
bune denounced the surge of lynchings in the United
gation of the U.S. federal government under Hoover,
against Welsh women with black lovers in Cardiff, th
by racist Yankee marines in Haiti, and the struggles ag
Northern and Southern Africa.35 Other articles show u
travels through the circuits of the British Empire, and th
even further afield, could provide the basis for radical an
1929 speech by Jamaican doctor Harold Moody in Wol
reprinted in the Tribune, savaged the benefkent pretens
education policy. "Administrators and missionaries alik
that nothing could be worthy unless modeled on British
that educated boys studied only English manners and c
got and wanted to forget, that they sprang from the pe
Natives became divided into two classes, the masses, an
became merged into the governing class, with no sense of
those masses and were left in complete ignorance of their
Moody illustrated his point with a description of Kenyan,
society.
Printed in the weekly paper read by Panama's West Indian population, such
critiques of British imperial ideology and colonial class divisions echoed expe?
riences working-class migrants had accumulated over the course of their own
traveling lives. It is no coincidence that the poem that stands at the head of this
essay, reminding us of the submarine unities that shape history, was written by
a child of this British West Indian migratory world. Nor is it a coincidence that
the two works most often heralded as Atlantic history avant la lettre?The Black
Jaeobins and Capitalism and Slavery?were written by men who came of age in
that same world precisely at the moment I have been describing. C.L.R. James
was born in Trinidad in 1901; Eric Williams on the same island in 1911. They
saw in their own lives the connections that twenty-first-century historians have
to search hard to glimpse in even fragmentary form. They saw the submarine
links between the universalizing rhetoric of human progress and the reality of
differential access; between the lives of colonial subjects in India and Kenya and
Jamaica; between the racist demagoguery aimed at black war veterans by mes-
tizo populists in Panama and the racist violence aimed at black war veterans by
lynch mobs in the U.S.A. James and Williams used specific Atlantic circuits of
the previous century as their spatial frames of analysis when they wrote histories
of the past. Traveling the circuits of the interwar British Atlantic, they made
history in turn. But future prime ministers and Marxist visionaries were not the
only ones to do so.
In July 1932, at the instigation of the British Minister in Panama (who was
eagerly courting British West Indian community leaders' loyalty as a bulwark
against the "Bolshevistic agitation" sweeping the Isthmus) a group of British

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626 journal of social history spring 2006
West Indian Scouters and community leaders were invited t
H.M.S. Delhi as she passed through Balboa. "Among those
visitation yesterday," Jamaica's Daily Gleaner reported, "w
Harris; Darnley Taft; Clifford A. Bolt, County Commiss
A. Archibald Butcher; Albert E. Bell; Sydney A. Young,
Panama Tribune; S. H. Stewart; George Westerman; C.L
of Star and Herald; Joseph Smith; Victor Smith; J. B. Black
What would become of these men, who shared in the int
mitment to youth uplift, loyalty and honor as a route t
vance? For two of them, the answer is easily known. Sid
through journalism would continue: a posthumous bronze b
his name pays public homage to his efforts on behalf of
community. George Westerman (the Tribune's sports write
Delhi visit) would dedicate his life to journalism, advoca
writing on the trials and triumphs of black people in the
form the George Westerman Collection of the Schomburg
in Black Culture oi the New York Public Library. How ty
emplary lives? Today, technological change makes it poss
proposographical study that would allow us to go beyond
the telling example and assess the patterned destinies of th
Using digital imaging, text recognition software, and broa
sion, the Newspaper Archive has placed the entire run o
Gleaner from the mid-nineteenth century to the present o
able form.38 That is, if one wants to know what became of
may simply search for the phrase "Ivanhoe Phipps" and, w
out.

Voluntary service and civic involvement seem to have been constants in

lives oi these Scout leaders and B.W.I.R. veterans, but there is little evi
of continuing engagement with progressive politics, even as the world a
them became radicalized with the rise of left-wing nationalist movemen
Jamaica. The Gleaner archives show us Clifford Bolt, Albert E. Bell, an
Panama Tribune among the dozens mailing donations to Boys' Town in Jam
in 1944.39 We see Clifford Bolt presiding over public festivities?judging a
band competition in Colon in 1939, eiected first vice president ofthe Pa
Canal Zone Cricket Board of Control in 1953?the kinds of civic patron
that suggest a position of relative economic privilege.40 We see Ivanhoe Ph
in 1974?long returned to Jamaica, a mainstay of the Methodist church
father oi a future Queen's Counsel?celebrating his golden wedding anni
sary in Kingston, where he is toasted by his "old school-mate" (and, we k
former scouting and Tribune companion) Albert E. Bell.41 Even in this
and preliminary survey, we see the outline of branching trajectories that
much to tell us much about the origins and allegiances ofthe British Carib
post-Independence elite. We also see reason to avoid romanticizing the po
cal legacy of interwar social activism. Together, the close optic of microhi
and the capacious and flexible frames of analysis of Atlantic history may h
to understand how high hopes for independence rose so quickly in the B
Caribbean; we will then need to ask why some of those hopes have prov
illusory.

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TO STUDY THE FRAGMENTS/WHOLE 627

Department of History
Pittsburgh, PA 15260

ENDNOTES
I am grateful to Rina Caceres, Paul Lovejoy, Marcus Rediker, Bruce Venarde, the m
bers ofthe Programa de Estudios de Diaspora ofthe Centro de Investigaciones Histo
de America Central of the Universidad de Costa Rica, and participants in the At
History seminar at the University of Pittsburgh for conversations that have spurre
attempts to engage with the issues discussed here. The research summarized in th
ond half of this essay was financed in part by the Vicerrectoria de Investigacion of
Universidad de Costa Rica (Proyecto No. 806-A2-047) and by a grant from the Ce
for Latin American Studies, University Center for International Studies, Universi
Pittsburgh.

1. Edward Kamau Braithwaite, "Caribbean Man in Space and Time," Savacou 11/12
(9/1975): 1. This poem was brought to my attention by Rhonda Denise Frederick, "Colon
People: Reading Caribbeanness Through the Panama Canal," (Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 1997), 62.

2. Giovanni Levi, "On Microhistory," in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Pe?
ter Burke (University Park, 1992), 97.

3. On this issue, and for the fundamental insight into the potential synergy between
microhistory and Atlantic history that this essay seeks to explore, I am indebted to Re-
becca J. Scott, "Small-Scale Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes," American Historical Re?
view 105, no. 2 (2000): 472-479.

4. Joao Jose Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim LJprising of 1835 in Bahia (Balti?
more, 1993); Paul E. Lovejoy, "Background to Rebellion: The Origins of Muslim Slaves
in Bahia," Slavery & Abolition 15, no. 2 (1994): 151-180; Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay,
eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of
Benin and Brazil (London, 2001).

5. Examples include the York/ UNESCO Nigerian Hinterland Project, which com?
bines data gathering, data base graduate training, and international scholarly exchange
[cf. Jose C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa
and Brazil During the Era of Slavery (Amherst, N.Y., 2004)] and the NEH-sponsored "Ec?
clesiastical Sources and Historical Research on the African Diaspora in Brazil and Cuba,"
a directed by Jane Landers of Vanderbilt University in collaboration with scholars at the
Universidade Federal Fluminense (Rio de Janeiro) and the Harriet Tubman Resource
Centre on the African Diaspora of York University.]

6. Bernard S. Cohn, "Anthropology and History in the 1980s: Toward a Rapproche-

ment," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12, no. 2 (1981): 227-52; Michel-Rolph Trouil-
lot, "The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory," Annual
Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 19-42.

7. Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-century Atlantic Odyssey

(Cambridge, 2004).

8. Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy, eds., The Biography ofMahommah Gardo Baquaqua:
His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, N.J., 2001).

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 628 journal of social history spring 2006
9. Ira Berlin, Generations ofCaptivity: A History of African Ame
2003).

10. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Corn-
moners, and the Hidden History ofthe Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000).

11. Julius Scott, "A Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in

the Age ofthe Haitian Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986). For a portrait
of unexpected circuits in the nineteenth century, see Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival:
Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

12. James Lockhart, The Men of Cajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study of the First
Conquerors ofPeru (Austin, 1972).

13. Ida Altman, Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and Puebla,
Mexico, 1560-1620 (Stanford, Cal, 2000).

14. Jose C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930
(Berkeley, 1998).

15. For a community study of Iberian emigration more attuned to the central concerns
of Atlantic history, see Juan Javier Pescador, The New World Inside a Basque Village: The
Oiartzun Valley and Its Atlantic Emigrants, 1550-1800 (Reno, 2003).

16. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the
British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995).

17. Maria Elena Diaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom
in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780 (Stanford, Cal., 2000).

18. Cf. Anthony Smith, "Nationalism and Social Theory," British Journal of Sociology 34
(1983): 19-38; Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schilier, "Methodological Nationalism
and Beyond: Nation-state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences," Global Networks
2, no. 4 (2002): 301-333.

19. Even the most ambitious projects, like the Eltis and Richardson database of slave
voyages, work on a finite number of circuits: in their case, the ports linked together by
the transatlantic slave trade. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and
Herbert S. Klein, The Trans*Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge
and New York, 1999).

20. Perhaps more than any other scholar, C.L.R. James detailed the ironies of the impe?
rial origins of anti-imperialism. As he wrote in 1963 of his childhood in Trinidad, "I learnt
and obeyed and taught a code, the English pubiic-school code. Britain and her colonies
and the colonial peoples. What do the British people know of what they have done there?
Precious little. The colonial peoples, particularly West Indians, scarcely know themselves
as yet. It has taken me a long time to begin to understand." C.L.R. James, Beyond a Bound-
ary (Durham, 1994), 33.

21. The life histories have been transcribed as part of the following projects: Erna Brod-
ber, "Life in Jamaica in the early twentieth century: A presentation of ninety oral ac?
counts" (unpublished mimeo held in the Institute of Social and Economic Research,
University ofthe West Indies, Mona); "Autobiografias Campesinas" (unpublished mimeo
held in the Biblioteca Central, Universidad Nacional Autonoma, Heredia, Costa Rica),

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TO STUDY THE FRAGMENTS/WHOLE 629

vols. 23, 26; "Entrevistas de Paula Palmer" (manuscript tran

held in the Archivo Nacionai de Costa Rica, San Jose).

22. Crucial scholarly publications covering these developm

ton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Pana
maica, 1984); Elizabeth M. Thomas-Hope, "The Establishmen
British West Indian Movements to the Hispanic Caribbean in
cipation," International Migration 24 (1986): 66-81; Elizabeth
Labor Migration: White Capital and Black Labor, 1850-1930
ham C. Richardson, "Caribbean Migrations, 1838-1985," in T
Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill, 1989)
pany They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Carib
(Chapel Hill, 2002), Ch. 2.

23. See Lara Putnam, "Afro-Caribbean Missionaries in the S

1940: Racism and Anti-Racism, Imperial Christianity and M
sented at Religious Studies Colloquium, University ofPittsbu

24. For more on these disparate voluntary associations and

Putnam, "Transnational Circuits ofthe Interwar Caribbean," in
Publicaciones del Instituto Renvall no. 18 (Helsinki, 2005).
Aloft the Banner ofEthiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twent
don, 1998), brilliantly places Garvey and other U.S.-based
frame of reference of Afro-Caribbean migratory experience.

25. "For the Defence of the Empire: Answers in the Parishes

the King. Recruiting Meetings. Speakers' Appeals to Patrioti
(Jamaica) Gleaner, 26 Nov. 1915.

26. W.F. Elkins, Black Power in the Caribbean: The Beginnin

Movement (New York, 1977), 29-45; Glenford D. Howe, Rac
A Social History ofWest Indians in the First World War (Kings

27. National Archives of the United Kingdom, British P

884/13/7: "Trinidad: Disturbances in Port-of-Spain (Decemb
Commissioners appointed to enquire into the Conduct of the

28. Ibid.

29. On the boy scout troops founded in Port Limon, Bocas del Toro, Colon, and Panama
City by Ninth Battalion veterans in these years, see Putnam, "Transnational Circuits."

30. "New Addition to West Indian Colony," Panama Tribune, 3 Feb. 1929, p. 5.

31. "A Record of Deeds," Panama Tribune, 30 Dec. 1928, p. 16.

32. "Scouts reviewed by British Minister," Panama Star and Herald, 1 Dec. 1923, en-
closed in British Public Record Office, FO 371/8475, f. 105.

33. A.A. Butcher, "Jottings," Panama Tribune, 18 Nov. 1928, p. 14; A.A. Butcher, "Scout
Corner," Panama Tribune 11 Nov. 1928, p. 14-

34. Cf. "Rev. Jas. A. Black On Life of Our People, Panama," Jamaica Gleaner, 6 Oct.
1932, p. 10.

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630 journal of social history spring 2006
35. Cf. "Lynching Still Fashionable in the Southern U.S.," Panama
p. 9; "Wales Alarmed over Color Question" and "Father Dies Def
Whites," both from Panama Tribune, 3 Feb. 1929, p. 2.

36. "Flays British Smugness: Jamaica Scholar Gives Frank Opin

3 Feb. 1929, p. 5. Two years later Moody founded the League o
venue for black professionals' denunciation of racialism in Bri
Adas, "Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asi
lizing Mission Ideology," Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004

37. "Balboans Pay Visit Aboard Cruiser Delhi: Party of Scouts an

While on Visit to Isthmus," (Jamaica) Daily Gleaner, 20 July 1932

38. A paid subscription is required to access the service.

39. "Colon Aids Boys' Town," (Jamaica) Daily Gleaner, 4 March

40. "Jamaica Orchestra Fail in Competition," (Jamaica) Daily Gl

19.

41. "Congratulations on Golden Wedding," (Jamaica) Daily Gleaner, 2 April 1974, p.

18.

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