A Confluence of Transatlantic Network demonstrates how portions of interconnected trust-based kinship, business, and ideational transatlantic networks evolved over roughly a century and a half and eventually converged to engender, promote, and facilitate the migration of southern elites to Brazil in the post–Civil War era. Placing that migration in the context of the Atlantic world sharpens our understanding of the transborder dynamic of such mainstream nineteenth-century historical currents as international commerce, liberalism, Protestantism, and Freemasonry. The manifestation of these transatlantic forces as found in Brazil at midcentury provided disaffected Confederates with a propitious environment in which to try to re-create a cherished lifestyle.
A Confluence of Transatlantic Network demonstrates how portions of interconnected trust-based kinship, business, and ideational transatlantic networks evolved over roughly a century and a half and eventually converged to engender, promote, and facilitate the migration of southern elites to Brazil in the post–Civil War era. Placing that migration in the context of the Atlantic world sharpens our understanding of the transborder dynamic of such mainstream nineteenth-century historical currents as international commerce, liberalism, Protestantism, and Freemasonry. The manifestation of these transatlantic forces as found in Brazil at midcentury provided disaffected Confederates with a propitious environment in which to try to re-create a cherished lifestyle.
A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil
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Overview
A Confluence of Transatlantic Network demonstrates how portions of interconnected trust-based kinship, business, and ideational transatlantic networks evolved over roughly a century and a half and eventually converged to engender, promote, and facilitate the migration of southern elites to Brazil in the post–Civil War era. Placing that migration in the context of the Atlantic world sharpens our understanding of the transborder dynamic of such mainstream nineteenth-century historical currents as international commerce, liberalism, Protestantism, and Freemasonry. The manifestation of these transatlantic forces as found in Brazil at midcentury provided disaffected Confederates with a propitious environment in which to try to re-create a cherished lifestyle.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817380403 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2014 |
| Series: | Atlantic Crossings |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 861 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks
Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil
By Laura Jarnagin
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2008 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8040-3
CHAPTER 1
Systems, Capitalism, Networking, and Migration
This chapter anchors the conceptual and historical contexts within which the social networks that are the principal concern of this study are to be comprehended. These networks are integral to understanding the kinds of qualitative characteristics found within the complex system of capitalism that partially account for its expansion and evolution. Capitalism, as seen through the lens of the world-systems approach, provides the historical and conceptual framework for this study. The chapter sketches that system's main features—along with those of two other histories germane to this study, namely, nineteenth-century Brazil and Confederate migration itself—in order to situate the reader in the broad sweep of those times and events.
Complex Systems
Recent decades have witnessed the rise of a new genre of theoretical frameworks about reality and how to conceptualize it based in what is generally known as systems theory. Research in mathematical, scientific, and economic disciplines in particular has chipped away at Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of a mechanistic universe and the ensuing Enlightenment philosophy of natural law. Within that worldview, "nature" was assumed to be orderly. It therefore followed that humankind could eventually unlock the secrets of the natural order by engaging in reductionist inquiry—that is, by taking things apart to see how they work. While this assumption proved partially true, ongoing inquiries began to reveal an altogether different reality by the latter twentieth century: nature is not all that orderly; instead, its behavior is more likely to be "chaotic" or "complex." Thus, new conceptual frameworks loosely known as systems theory have been and are being developed to explain and further investigate natural phenomena, or "reality." In essence, the basic approach adopted by systems theory is one of synthesis—not only putting disaggregated parts back together, but, perhaps more importantly, going many steps beyond to understand qualitatively how they interact.
Complex systems are a subset of a variety of dynamical systems studied by systems scholars. Although the specific term "complex system" has many definitions, certain commonalities are acknowledged. These systems are neither orderly nor chaotic; instead, they exist in a fuzzy zone between "order" and "chaos" that exhibits elements of both states. Complex systems are nonlinear, open-ended, dynamic, self-organizing, and adaptive, as opposed to simple linear, closed, input-output systems. Complex systems evolve over time, dialoguing with dimensions that they do not occupy initially. Through this process, external spaces that the system might potentially occupy are either rejected or incorporated, in which case the system is modified irreversibly. Systemic sustainability is achieved if the system's agents develop the capacity to explore and change in a cooperative fashion. Consequently, a system's "original" and "final" states are not identical. Understanding how such evolutionary transformations occur within a system requires delving into its qualitative features by examining its components and how they interact.
Complex systems are populated by very large numbers of independent "agents," which, depending on the particular system one is studying, can be anything from living cells to organisms, human beings, corporations, economies, ecosystems, or galaxies. These agents are "independent" in the sense that they enjoy a degree of individual freedom of choice. At the same time, however, an interdependency exists among a system's agents that results in subsets of agents forming themselves into groups. These groupings are in pursuit of mutual accommodation and self-consistency. Acting in concert and collaboration with one another, they are able to transcend themselves as individuals and acquire collective qualitative properties (such as life, thought, purpose, culture, family, and religion) that they might not have achieved as single agents. Collaboration, in turn, can lead to the formation of networks. Thus, through bottom-up collective actions, the system acquires structure and patterns. In this sense the system is self-organizing, that is, a product of its own internal dynamic, not of some predetermined design dictated from above whose outcome is predictable.
Agents' actions and interactions in a system occur as feedback loops that inform them whether the choices they have made resulted in positive or negative consequences. Positive feedback promotes collaboration. Agents themselves generally behave proactively to try to turn whatever is happening to their advantage. To do so, agents anticipate the future by making predictions based on various internal models of their world—that is, they "learn." Neither individual agents nor groups of agents can control the system's direction and evolution, however, because the sheer number of agents, groups, and their incessant actions, reactions, and interactions create a continually changing reality. Existence in a complex system thus becomes a game of adaptation to constant change.
Agents' behavior within a complex system is iterative; that is, a subsequent behavior is a repetition of a previous behavior. In a dynamical system, though, repetition does not necessarily result in exact duplication, due to the constant surrounding change to which an agent must respond. Instead, an agent's behavior is recursive or algorithmic, not cookie-cutter. A system therefore evolves into something different from its original state through this qualitative iterative behavior. As agents gain experience, they revise and rearrange their building blocks. Thus, distinctive new features within a system "emerge" over time; they do not just pop into existence. Further, small initial changes in the system can become magnified over time so that as complex systems evolve, they are capable of undergoing major phase transitions or bifurcations, thereby provoking significant structural changes. Somewhere and somehow in this iterative behavior, complex systems are bringing order and chaos into a special kind of balance. It is in this fuzzy zone between the two that qualitative properties such as innovation and creativity occur and ultimately account for transformations.
For analytical purposes, my premise is that capitalism may be treated as a complex system. One of my goals in this context is to contribute to an understanding of some of capitalism's inherent, underlying qualitative characteristics—fuzzy and even disorderly at times—that account for its features, behaviors, transformations, and evolution. I argue that our appreciation of the myriad historical "outcomes" that have occurred within capitalism, and indeed our comprehension of the system itself, can be more profound if we identify and analyze fundamental qualitative properties as derived from the behaviors of its key agents—human beings. The phenomenon of Confederate migration to Brazil in the post–Civil War era demonstrates this point, which is illustrated by a subset of individuals and families who formed parts of interconnected social networks defined by kinship and business ties found throughout the Atlantic world. Their collective, iterative behaviors and the networks they formed reveal how their collaborative conduct over an extended period of time set up the circumstances that enabled disaffected southerners to relocate themselves elsewhere in the capitalist system in the post–Civil War era. Those behaviors were informed by a set of common beliefs, values, and practices that persisted across several generations.
Identifying this subset of individuals and networks required working backward from the migration itself to ferret out and reconstruct networks and processes within the system that contributed to that outcome. This book, therefore, demonstrates how the (artificial) endpoint of Confederate migration to Brazil came about as a result of antecedent and contemporaneous human interactions within the complex system of capitalism and how capitalism's trajectory both shaped those behaviors and was shaped by them. To place the role of humans as contributors to the emergence and complexity of the system known as capitalism, a brief overview of its history is in order.
Capitalism as a Complex System
Historians and social scientists are not newcomers to the general concept of "systems" as a tool for understanding and analyzing what humankind has both experienced and wrought over time. With respect to capitalism, the term "system" has been applied to its study most notably by the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein in The Modern World System (1974–89) and the historian Fernand Braudel in Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (1979 in the original French; 1982–84 in English translation). Neither refers to capitalism as a complex system per se, which is to be expected given the times in which these scholars were writing.
I contend that our understanding of capitalism should be further refined to view it as a complex system, now that our knowledge of systems has advanced in recent years. I also postulate that this perspective affords an even better understanding of capitalism's underlying dynamic, especially in terms of how its basic agents—human beings—have acted, reacted, and interacted to influence the nature of change and evolution that the system has undergone.
Braudel and Wallerstein provide a framework of capitalism's superstructure within which social structures and processes beyond the level of the nation-state can be analyzed. They document the system's dynamic at a macro level by revealing its original structure and transformations over time. Although capitalism is often thought of as an economic phenomenon, both authors demonstrate unequivocally that this aspect of capitalism cannot be disentangled from its social, political, and cultural institutions and values—that is, from all the variables that make it a system. A brief review of capitalism's emergence from "a lesser civilization perched on the Western point of Eurasia" and its subsequent evolution is necessary so as to position the ensuing discussion of social networks found within Confederate migration to Brazil in the larger context of Atlantic capitalism.
In the 1300s, capitalism began emerging in northwestern Europe from a dysfunctional medieval social, economic, and political system (Marc Bloch's feudalism). Dislocating factors that account for the disorder include climate change (a colder climate settled into more northerly latitudes that were once arable), soil erosion, and the Black Death of the second half of the 1300s. These maladies reduced the labor force and thus the market, thereby undermining feudal social, political, economic, and cultural structures.
Concurrently, positive changes within the feudal system itself also contributed to the transition: the rise of a Mediterranean-Levantine-Southeast Asian trading axis based in such luxury goods as silks and spices; technological innovation in shipbuilding and maritime navigation; and the emergence of transborder banking, to name the more salient ones. In particular, the Italian city-state of Venice increased its commercial contact with the Levant and Southeast Asia, resulting in the emergence of a Mediterranean-centered mercantile economy, and began accumulating the wealth that in turn spurred the emergence of a new structure now known as capitalism. Meanwhile, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, a seemingly simple change, came to be widely embraced by European merchants and bankers, thereby revolutionizing how long- distance business was conducted and allowing transborder banking to become a reality. Herein is an example of how a seemingly small innovation eventually produced a major change in the system's direction and evolution, a hallmark of how complex systems behave. By the mid- to late 1400s, capitalism was a going albeit tenuous concern, and the "modern" era was born.
On the other side of these events, a new economic structure arose along the Rhine-Danube axis that connected the Italian city-states (such as Genoa, Venice, and Milan) with the circum-Baltic Hanse trading communities (such as Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck) as northwest Europe's population recovered in size. The new profit-driven system embodied two unique features: an emphasis on generating surpluses and on supplying a mass market with basic goods at ever-lower costs per unit, as opposed to catering to the small luxury market of the wealthy few. Those "basic goods" were agricultural products such as cereals, grains, sugar, and fibers for clothing. The formal expansion of the system beyond Europe through the establishment of colonies was as much about finding new agricultural lands as it was about securing better access to luxury goods (such as Asian silks and spices) or mineral wealth (gold and silver). The quest for new arable lands established a moving frontier of people (voluntarily or in captivity) and factors of production. At its core, the two key features of this new age were a mass market and its economic agent, the individual. Together, they gave rise to a large population of producers, sellers, and buyers. The system was growing in degree of complexity.
The "modern" capitalist era ushered in a new market structure that allowed for far greater individual liberty in making economic (and other) decisions. One can hypothesize that this empowerment of the individual also facilitated an agent's ability to network, thereby synergistically expanding the individual's capacity for the pursuit of self-interests. This is not to suggest that social and business networking did not exist in precapitalist days—it most certainly did. The point is that capitalism's commercial expansion also expanded the milieu in which to pursue all manner of catalytic and system-expanding exchanges across markets and cultures, whether of products and services or ideas and values.
Wallerstein argues that the structure of capitalism as a modern world system comprises an interdependent set of areas known as the core, the semiperiphery, and the periphery. As the system has evolved, some core areas have descended into semiperipheral status; some semiperipheries have ascended to core status; some peripheries have risen to the semiperiphery; and many areas have not changed their original classification.
In broadest terms, the core is the driver of the system, monopolizing capital and technology, dictating what the system is to produce, and defining what constitutes its leading edge. From the fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, the production of agricultural goods constituted that frontier. As the system evolved, its first major transition began taking place in the mid-eighteenth century as the production of industrial goods became capitalism's driver until the latter twentieth century. At that time, capitalism's second major phase transition occurred as the production of information assumed pride of place in defining the system's direction. Capitalism's core at any given time or place embodies the most sophisticated business and financial practices, the greatest volume of capital, the highest degree of international commercial interactions, the most advanced technologies and collection of knowledge, and a free labor force.
The semiperiphery occupies a structural zone that lies somewhere on a continuum between the core and periphery. The semiperiphery may either be a peripheral area in ascendancy or a core area in descendancy. Historically, it was in semiperipheral areas that the concept and practice of sharecropping was developed, that is, labor that was not as free as in the core but also not enslaved. Semiperipheral areas have concentrations of skills vital to the functioning of the system as a whole and act as conveyor belts of surplus value.
Areas occupying the system's periphery are producers of the raw materials demanded by the core: agropastoral products and natural resources such as minerals and timber. Here one finds the least sophisticated and lowest concentration of features in which the core excels: capital, finance, marketing, trade, technology, knowledge, and the like. Historically, "unfree" labor within the capitalist system was to be found primarily in peripheral areas.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks by Laura Jarnagin. Copyright © 2008 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsPreface
Introduction
PART 1. CONTEXTS
1. Systems, Capitalism, Networking, and Migration
2. An Overview of Confederate Migration to Brazil
PART 2. A TRANSATLANTIC FAMILY
3. The Avelar Broteros and the Dabneys
4. John Bass Dabney, Monsieur Projet
5. The Evolution of a Mercantile Dynasty
6. Cultural and Commercial Synergies
PART 3. TRANSATLANTIC MERCANTILE NETWORKS
7. Transatlantic Commission Houses
8. Coffee Merchants and Confederate Migration to Brazil
9. Reverberations of a Protestant Diaspora
10. Intersecting and Expanding Networks
PART 4. MIGRATION PROCESSES
11. Southerners Making Choices
12. A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index