Join CEMS on Friday 22nd May for a one-day workshop on interactions between the Iberian Atlantic and North Africa. This workshop has been organised by Dr. Ana Struillou (KCL) and Dr. Kaja Cook (Royal Holloway) and has been generously supported by Past & Present.

To attend, please register here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/centreforearlymodernstudies/2083479

This will be a hybrid workshop. The online link will be circulated via email in advance of the session.

Event Overview

Pre-modern Maghribi societies have so far been marginalised in Atlantic history and predominant global history narratives, being perceived as static and backward. Building on important scholarship on the African diaspora and Muslim presence in the Americas that has greatly contributed to enriching the picture of the early modern Atlantic and the Spanish Empire in particular, this workshop will explore how North Africans actively participated in, and helped constitute, the Iberian Atlantic world, be it as corsairs raiding the Iberian Islands of Madeira and the Canaries or as enslaved and free communities shaping the culture of the early modern Spanish Americas.

At the same time, this workshop reverses the perspective of this scholarship by considering how African societies, particularly North African ones, were far from indifferent to Spanish colonial expansion into the Atlantic and how they were shaped as a result of the new ideas, commodities, and people crossing the Atlantic.

Several papers will be specifically dedicated to uncovering material circulations between North Africa and the Americas. In recent years, a number of scholars have emphasized the intellectual engagement of the Muslim world with Spanish overseas possessions by studying Ottoman maps and ethnographical writings on the Americas. However, research has mostly concentrated on learned communities active in Constantinople. This workshop will enrich understandings of the relations between the Muslim world and European overseas possessions by investigating the tangible circulation of American goods in the Maghrib, rather than solely intellectual knowledge. This shift will uncover engagement with the Americas within the Muslim world, at a much deeper social level and beyond imperial capitals.

Provisional Schedule

09:00–09:30|Opening remarks

Kaja Cook and Ana Struillou

09:30–12:00| Session 1: Enslavement and Forced Mobilities

Chair: Toby Green (King’s College London)

Joseph Jackson-Eade (Tel Aviv University)

‘O qual Negro se chamava Vitória’: Enslaved Bodies, Sexual Deviance and the Gendering of the Atlantic-Mediterranean Space through the Lisbon Inquisition’s gaze, 1550-1560

Antonio de Almeida Mendes (Université de Nantes)

Lexicons of Slavery between Seventeenth-Century Portugal and Morocco

Claudia Geremia (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)

Ritual Knowledge across the North African–Iberian Atlantic: Enslaved Women, Mobility, and Cultural Translation (16th–18th centuries)

Lucas Emanuel Rocha Vicente (Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora)

The Tamazigh Afro-Islamic Diaspora in 16th-century Portugal

12:00|Lunch

13:30–15:30| Session 2: Knowledge and Ideas at the Edge of Empire

Chair: Rebecca Earle (University of Warwick)

Toby Yuen-Gen Liang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan)

Northwest Africa in Early Modern European Cartography: Representations of Space and the Shaping of the Atlantic World 

Ana Struillou (King’s College London)

“Ficus, Tuna, Taknarit”: Invasive Species, Trans-Imperial Ecologies, and the Early Modern Archive

Andrew Devereux (University of California, San Diego)

African Antiquities in the Debates over New World Slavery (16th century)

15:45–17:30| Session 3: Itineraries across the Iberian–Maghribi Atlantic

Chair: Francisco Bethencourt (King’s College London)

Karim Bejjit (Abdelmalek Essaâdi University, Tétouan)

The English Colony of Tangier and Transatlantic Connections: Trade, Slavery and Mobility

Kaja Cook (Royal Holloway, University of London)

‘Of the caste and descendance of kings’: The circulation of ideas about Nobility Among the Descendants of the Mexica, Inca, and Nasrid Rulers 

Miguel Soto Garrido (University of Oxford)

Between Gibraltar and the Indies: Diplomacy, American Goods, and Circulation in Saadian Morocco (c. 1578–1605)