71. Port Cities in the Early Modern Atlantic World (FULL DAY)

Port cities–as the historical record evidences–were sites of global encounter, cross cultural exchange, and creative entrepreneurship that emerged among the backdrop of profound colonial violence. Bernard Bailyn’s and Paul Gilroy’s scholarship, along with other scholars, conceptualize the early modern Atlantic World as an interconnected and dynamic space connecting West Africa, Europe, and the Americas – an oceanic space that would witness the inception and growth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the overseas reach of empire. Port cities, situated on the liminal space between land and the water, emerged as entrepots of trade goods, cultural entanglement, and ideological exchange, in addition to being the points of arrival for tens of thousands of slaving vessels. Over the past decade, historians have begun to embrace port cities as a critical frame for investigating urban space, cultural exchange, and economic networks but the field of art history has been slower to do so. This session argues that objects matter in the study of early modern port cities. In the absence of archival documents, objects become the records of unrecorded or lost narratives. A closer look at the material record of port cities, including paintings, prints, the decorative arts, architecture, artifacts, and archaeological remains, provide evidence of complex narratives shaped by multiple perspectives including makers’, artists’, and consumers’- both enslaved and free- and histories of slavery, colonialism, entrepreneurship, global encounters and extensive trade networks.

This session invites papers that centre and explore the built environments, artistic practices, and material worlds that emerged in port cities in the early modern Atlantic world. This panel welcomes papers that investigate port cities and their artistic and architectural practices through the lenses of slavery, entrepreneurship, urban/town planning, and which contextualize port cities both within their local contexts and as connective nodes across the early modern Atlantic world. We welcome papers that analyse ports’ material culture within the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and African Atlantic contexts. We welcome submissions that embrace a range of methodological and interdisciplinary approaches to the material culture of early modern Atlantic port cities, including digital humanities, archaeology, critical fabulation, and oral histories, among others.

Themes: Atlantic World, Port Cities, Material Culture

Additional format comment: 20-minute papers, followed by a collective Q&A. Full day session.

Lead Convenor: Catherine Doucette, University of Virginia, USA

Co-convenors: Shaheen Alikhan, University of Virginia, USA

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.