What began as a simple, straightforward final project idea has now transformed into a new, complex, and nuanced research proposal. Based on my research from previous summers, I believed I had a firm grasp of the concepts and directions of my proposal. Before the break, I began working with a dataset I created on SPSS containing the port records from early nineteenth-century Río de la Plata (mainly Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Maldonado). Using the program’s statistical functions, I was able to isolate, analyze, and compare the origin, declared destination, nationality, cargo (including goods and people), etc of ships entering and departing these ports. While interesting, it was difficult to find unique or uninvestigated patterns that related to my previous research interests of enslaved cargo and labor trafficking. Feeling tinges of research desperation, I dug deeper into my secondary sources. Yet this yielded even more troubles, as a large and impressive collection of articles and books on transnational and global connections between Spanish, Portuguese, and American slavers and the slave trade in Río de la Plata already exists. (As a result, I have not stopped talking about Alex Borucki’s “The U.S. slave ship Ascension in the Río de la Plata: slave routes and circuits of silver in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic and beyond”). While these contributions are impressive and incredible for transnational/trans-imperial Latin American history, I was finding it difficult to find my niche.
Slightly frustrated, I set course for Spain (on a plane, not a ship) for this February break, hoping some sunshine would help clear my clouded mind. Surprisingly, it worked! Tucked away in a Malaga coffee shop, amidst a horde of German tourists, it hit me: What about the role of central and northern European countries in the Atlantic world? Immediately my mind went to Jutta Wimmler and Klaus Weber’s Globalized peripheries: Central Europe and the Atlantic world, 1680-1860, a fascinating collection of articles I too quickly shelved believing it was of little relevance. After consulting my SPSS dataset, I (re)discovered a series of Danish, Prussian, Hamburgian, French, and Dutch ships entering, exiting, and trading in Río de la Plata. While my data analysis on these ships is very preliminary, I plan on investigating (on a micro-level) the extent to which Central and Northern European ships, sailors, and commerce participated in the early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, I hope to highlight the ties between this European “periphery” and the trade of goods and people in the trans-imperial port of Río de la Plata.