A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil

By Laura Jarnagin

Examines the qualitative nature of capitalism’s processes through the lens of social networks

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: May 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9780817380403

Book preview

A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks

ATLANTIC CROSSINGS

Rafe Blaufarb. Series Editor

A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks

Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil

LAURA JARNAGIN

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2008

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Hardcover edition published 2008.

Paperback edition published 2014.

eBook edition published 2014.

Typeface: Granjon

Cover illustration © iStockphoto.com/cesco19

Cover design: Erin Kirk New

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8173-5778-8

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8173-8040-3

A previous edition of this book has been catalogued by the Library of Congress as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jarnagin, Laura.

A confluence of transatlantic networks : elites, capitalism, and Confederate migration to Brazil / Laura Jarnagin.

p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1624-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8040-3 (electronic)

1. Merchants—Social networks—Brazil—History. 2. Elite (Social sciences)—Brazil—History. 3. American Confederate voluntary exiles—Brazil. 4. Capitalism—Social aspects—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. 5. Atlantic Ocean Region—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects—History. I. Title.

HF3406.J37 2008

304.8'8107509034—dc22

2008005567

For Eul and the rest of my family, living and departed,

and to the memory of Alexander Marchant

Contents

Preface

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

Preface

This treatise is an outgrowth of a 1993 conference held at Auburn University, which resulted in the publication of The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil, edited by Cyrus B. Dawsey and James M. Dawsey and published by the University of Alabama Press in 1995. Malcolm Macdonald, who was then the director of the University of Alabama Press, encouraged me to parlay my paper into a book-length work. After more than a decade of focused albeit not constant work, this has been accomplished, and my first words of thanks go to him for setting me upon a path of scholarly inquiry that twisted and turned in many unexpected and fascinating directions. I was also motivated to pursue this work by comments made to me at that conference by Judith MacKnight Jones, a descendant and distinguished chronicler of the Confederate migrants, who thanked me for demonstrating that the actions and choices of her forebears were just normal in the greater scheme of things. My original interest in this topic stems from having had Alexander Marchant, another descendant of the southern migrants, as my doctoral adviser at Vanderbilt University.

As a result of my research, I came to realize that the phenomenon of Confederate migration to Brazil needed to shift away from being the primary focus of the work and instead become a phenomenon best explained by broader historical processes observable in the capitalism of the Atlantic world from roughly the late 1700s through the mid 1800s. This book, therefore, is a study in the processes of transatlantic elite social networking with a view to explaining the deep historical context that informed Confederate migration to Brazil.

As I followed the trajectories in which the data took me, I found myself immersed in areas of specialization that were not central to my own preparation as a historian, which focused on Brazilian history, with a minor in U.S. southern history. In particular, the Huguenot diaspora, the colonial and postcolonial Boston merchant community, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the nineteenth-century Azores all became relevant to understanding the capitalism of the Atlantic world and especially to identifying social networks and systemic processes. Whereas I have made every attempt to become knowledgeable about these fields, the true experts may well find missteps and errors on my part, for which I alone am responsible.

Reconstructing the social networks treated in this work required extensive genealogical research. While some of the details of kinship connections are presented herein for individuals and families of central importance so as to establish scholarly integrity, many other linkages are expressed as simple statements of fact without the details of relationship that would make for tedious and tortuous reading. Further, in the interest of space, no citations of these sources are included in either the endnotes or bibliography, except for cases of genealogical material found within archival collections and genealogical works that also contained important biographical information. Similarly, citations to standard biographical dictionaries and other reference sources are also omitted.

The orthography of Brazilian Portuguese has changed over the past two centuries. The text of this work employs the current orthography (except for the occasional quotation in Portuguese), whereas the source citations retain original spellings of both authors and titles. Likewise, quotations in English retain the spellings (and misspellings) of the original author. And on the assumption that readers are aware that handwritten documents often have orthographic errors, I have only occasionally denoted such mistakes with [sic].

During this research, some surprising discoveries of a more personal nature were made. During a rare visit, Lucille Williamson, a longtime family friend, revealed that she is a descendant of Alabama migrant Charles Grandison Gunter. In my childhood, her mellifluous Alabama accent and sheer elegance etched lasting impressions on my memory. Subsequently, and also serendipitously, I learned that one of my students at Colorado School of Mines, Thomas Lovell Bremner Bonnie, is also a Gunter descendant. His mother, Lovell Welsh Bonnie, and his grandmother, Lovell Gunter Welsh, generously shared a wealth of family information about the Gunters—more than could be accommodated in this work. As I labored to complete this book, Lovell Bonnie's infectious energy was particularly invigorating. Another unanticipated revelation in this undertaking was the discovery that one of the behind-the-scenes forces in the migration, Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney of Virginia, was also a founder of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, which my grandfather Rev. Claude Derry Peake later attended.

Many individuals have assisted and encouraged me in bringing this manuscript to fruition. First and foremost is my husband, Eul-Soo Pang, my best critic, guiding light, and on several occasions an enthusiastic research assistant. Very early in the project, I benefited from historical insights imparted by my dear friend at Auburn University at Montgomery, Patricia Bradley, now deceased and sorely missed. My stepsons, Alex Pang and Etienne (Steve) Pang, were perfectly positioned at times to chase down bits of needed information. Similarly, my niece and nephew, Kayla and Travis J. Pollok, did some geographic sleuthing for me. Tina Gianquitto, my colleague at Colorado School of Mines, provided sagacious information about nineteenth-century botany. Throughout my research, the staffs of many archives furnished welcoming surroundings, notably those at the Maryland Historical Society and the Virginia Historical Society. External readers of this manuscript in draft contributed many useful and thoughtful criticisms and suggestions. Anne R. Gibbons, my copy editor, wrought subtle magic throughout the manuscript.

This undertaking was also furthered by a one-semester sabbatical from Colorado School of Mines and a discretionary fund from the Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies that defrayed interlibrary loan expenses. In the final stages of manuscript preparation, I received timely assistance from my mother, Ruth Peake Jarnagin, my sister, Janice Jarnagin Pollok, and my program assistant and right arm, Connie Warren. More friends, family, and colleagues contributed encouragement and moral support than can be mentioned here, but special thanks go to three family members now departed (Ray P. Jarnagin, Helen J. Smith, and Mildred P. Broom) and many blissfully still present (James E. Jarnagin, Sidney P. Pollok, H. Stuart Peake Jr., and Stephen R. Peake), plus other valued colleagues and friends, notably, James V. Jesudason (an intellectual partner extraordinaire), Arthur B. Sacks (for his faith in this long-term effort), Philippe and Cynthia Dunoyer (for assistance with all things French), Janelle Duke (my other steadfast assistant), and Thomas D. Pond (my dentist, who never tired of needling me about the progress I was making on this project).

Introduction

The purpose of this study in Atlantic world history is to demonstrate how the nonlinear, evolving complex system known as capitalism can be understood more profoundly by examining the dynamic and qualitative features of its underlying social networks. The value of this approach is illustrated by partially reconstructing a series of such networks whose evolution over a considerable stretch of time eventually converged in the mid-nineteenth century to directly facilitate postbellum Confederate migration to Brazil. By focusing on both process (networking) and event (Confederate migration), this work enriches our appreciation of the complexities of capitalism as a system and offers insight into an obscure migration that superficially appears to be little more than a historical curiosity.

Whereas the U.S. Civil War itself was an unqualified catalyst in motivating a few thousand southerners to relocate in the conflict's aftermath, its role in that phenomenon is not a primary concern of this book. Instead, this study in capitalist processes focuses on social networks based in kinship, business, and ideational ties that converged to facilitate elite southern migration to Brazil and were part of larger processes that characterized the broad historical trajectory of the Atlantic world.

Many fields and subfields within the profession of history will be traversed in order to achieve the book's objectives and to stay true to an Atlantic perspective. Thus, this work should not be categorized as a work on the history of the U.S. South, or U.S. commerce, or Brazil, or the Huguenot diaspora, or migration, or Freemasonry, or nineteenth-century liberalism, or Protestantism, or slavery, or the plantation as an institution, although it contains elements of all of these and has implications for all of them as well. This book is about the construction, systemic consolidation, and long-term processes of the Atlantic world's capitalism, revisited through the prisms of family ties, business relationships, and ideational propagation. So as not to obscure comprehension of the central concern of this treatise, none of these historical specialities can be treated as fully as their practitioners (or even I) might like. Consequently, there is sure to be something in this work to displease all experts in these various fields. My wish is to make a contribution to discerning important historical processes observable in the Atlantic world that are otherwise not readily perceived from other well-developed historical vantage points.

In essence, Confederate migration to Brazil was primarily about networks of elite southerners accessing certain pools of social capital in the Atlantic world and finessing their yield into a new life. That new life, however, was one that sought to replicate a shattered but cherished society that had been many decades, indeed centuries, in the making. Understanding the provenance, extent, and attributes of that social capital requires the reconstruction of various social networks that existed at very different points in time and space in the Atlantic world prior to the U.S. Civil War. Through the partial reconstitution of these networks, the otherwise somewhat obscured underlying logic of Confederate migration is revealed. Eventually, the networks that had been fortified by centuries of interplay among familial, business, religious, political, ideological, and ethnic connections came to intersect and comingle in ways that promoted and facilitated this elite migration. The significance of these networks, however, is not limited to their mere existence. A central hypothesis of this work is that they were more fundamental to explaining this case of elite interaction as well as migration in the Atlantic world than any other factors. In other words, elite migrations need to be understood as stemming from deeper historical processes that directly influence the motivations, methods of relocation, and nature of resettlement at a level of profundity that does not attend mass migrations.

Unlike mass migrations of destitute populations that have occurred throughout the history of the Americas—such as of Germans, Italians, and Irish—the relatively few southerners who migrated to Brazil were not without other options and mostly came from privileged backgrounds consonant with standard definitions of bourgeoisie (such as urban professionals and merchant purveyors) and gentry (such as medium and large landholding families and individual planters). Their presence in Brazil received the blessings of Emperor Dom Pedro II and other high government officials, not just the perfunctory attention of port functionaries. Their reception and treatment were due in no small part to a strong convergence of commonly shared philosophy, ideology, and even values for wealth creation, nation-building, and societal commonweal between the mid-nineteenth-century liberals of Brazil and the American South. Accompanying these shared worldviews were a host of personal connections derived from social and business ties that had evolved in the Atlantic world.

The impetus for this work lies in the observation that the Brazilian associations that the more successful southern migrants formed before, during, and after settling in Brazil included key figures among the planter and political elite of the economically powerful provinces of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Earlier and future immigrants to Brazil, notably Germans and Italians, tended to become basic agricultural laborers for this same set of Brazilian elites, not their social peers. This phenomenon prompted two questions: who were these migrants in the context of the socioeconomic fabric of the South they left, and how did they come to interact with some of the highest echelons of the hierarchically structured Brazilian society of the mid-1800s?

Answering those questions requires adopting a perspective that goes beyond nation-state borders and assumes the vantage point of the capitalist world-system as so richly articulated by the likes of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein.¹ From this perch, the contours of a transnational web of social networks that evolved throughout the Atlantic world from roughly the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries become discernible. Within these networks, we can account for the very individuals and families who participated in the southern migration to Brazil as well as others who created the environment that made relocation possible and contributed to the mechanics of bringing the effort to fruition.

At the most abstract level, the reconstruction of these social networks unveils a series of repeated iterations of similar behaviors on the part of succeeding generations of the elite purveyors of capitalism throughout the Atlantic world, a phenomenon I call legacy behaviors. Predominantly, but not exclusively, members of these networks were northwestern European in ethnic origin and Protestant in religion. The smattering of Catholic Portuguese who figure prominently in this study had intellectual or commercial ties to either France or Britain and in turn exercised a significant degree of influence on the Brazilian participants.

The term social networking as used in this book refers to relationships among multiple individuals with some degree of personal (not abstract) connections among them. These connections are defined by one or (usually) more of the following types of linkages: kinship, business association, common ideational identity, or a combination of these. Each type of association carries a greater or lesser degree of permanence and has relative strength or weakness with regard to the relationship. Kinship has the highest degree of permanence, as it is forged by birth or through marriage and is not easily undone. Individual relationships within a set of kinfolks can vary from weak to strong in terms of actual interactions in any given context. Business associations and ideational associations (formed around commonly held religious, political, or ideological values) can vary temporally on a spectrum ranging from short to long duration and can be defined by relatively strong (frequently invoked) or weak (occasionally activated) linkages. Not every relationship is categorized in these ways, but it is important to recognize that the elite networks described herein contain examples of all of these degrees of association.

Kinship and business ties account for the bulk of the social networking investigated in the following chapters but in themselves are insufficient to capture the whole range of associational phenomena found in the networks examined. Additionally, ideational associations based in the transnational forces of Protestantism, Freemasonry, and nineteenth-century liberalism are also key factors in explaining the expansion, convergence, and adaptive capacity of the various elite networks. The frequent interplay of kinship and extrakinship associational mechanisms among the individuals and families provides the nuclei around which trust—a sine qua non for capitalism's expansion—could be built beyond the institution of the family and across time and space.

I argue that in the capitalism of the Atlantic world in the period under discussion there was a transnational band of elites of differing ethnicities, religions, and nationalities—merchants, maritime shippers, bankers, planters, politicians, religious leaders, academics, scientists, and engineers—for whom success in life was predicated variously on implementing the ideas and values of Protestantism, liberalism, and Freemasonry in ways that would assure their social, economic, and cultural well-being. Inherently mobile, their networking—based on kinship, business, and ideational ties—allowed them to identify, generate, and capitalize on new opportunities. It also empowered them to influence the social, economic, political, and cultural character of those very locales on which their livelihoods depended.

In part 1, I establish several broad contexts for understanding the networks and networking processes treated in the remainder of the book: the phenomenon of systemic complexity; the characteristics of the capitalist world-system; a synopsis of nineteenth-century Brazilian history; a broad overview of Confederate migration; and the kinship network to which most of the migrating population belonged.

Chapter 1 delineates a conceptual framework for understanding capitalist processes within a complex system and a historical context in which to set Confederate migration to Brazil. Complexity is a relatively new lens that scholars are using to revisit our understanding of an immense range of phenomena occurring in the worlds of nature (as articulated by science) and of humanity. Whereas economists are integral participants in this new line of inquiry, historians are less in evidence. However, treating capitalism as a complex system begs for the longer view afforded by history and allows us to account more comprehensively for the qualitative features of that system as wrought by human interactions. Additionally, the chapter provides an overview of the rise and evolution of capitalism to the mid-1800s as derived from the works of Braudel and Wallerstein and their conceptualization of capitalism as a world-system. It also presents a brief review of nineteenth-century Brazilian history, ranging from the implantation of a monarchy to a profile of its slave-based raw material–producing economy. Finally, the chapter explains how Confederate migration should be understood as an outcome of the social processes inherent in Atlantic capitalism when viewed as a complex system.

Chapter 2 presents an overview of the history of southern migration itself along with an examination of the kinship linkages that existed among its participants. It documents a series of common denominators among the migrating population: membership in a geographically and genealogically extended kinship network emanating from a set of communities associated with the Broad River region of the Georgia–South Carolina border area; Protestantism; a Huguenot provenance or intermarriage with same; and adherence to John C. Calhoun's political ideologies that advocated decentralization. This stratum of southern society had a proclivity to migrate from one location and one generation to another in pursuit of new opportunities; was predisposed to study its options carefully; was willing to take risks; was professionally diversified; and was acutely cognizant of the benefits of networking in achieving its goals.

Part 2 begins to add other networks to the discussion by examining the web of social connections stemming from the Dabneys, a transatlantic family whose various kinship and business connections are key to unraveling portions of the fabric of Atlantic merchant networks whose phylogeny leads us to a more robust understanding of elite southern migration to Brazil. Chapters 3 and 4 furnish the larger temporal and systemic context in which to understand the migration. They are based in what would appear to be an improbable source for establishing this setting, namely, the 1847–48 travel journal of a young Brazilian, João Dabney de Avelar Brotero, who journeyed to the Azores and the East Coast of the United States in those years. His treatise provides a veritable Rosetta stone for reconstructing a world of Atlantic family networks that came to play a part in southern migration. Within this context, the chapter situates the families of João's parents, the Avelar Broteros and the Dabneys. The Avelar Broteros of Portugal were bourgeois professionals, Enlightenment liberals, and often Freemasons. The Huguenot-descended Dabneys had a colonial presence in North America both at Boston and Virginia. Many generations of the Boston branch were engaged in international commerce with Portugal, France, the West Indies, and the Mid-Atlantic ports of North America. This branch of the family established a dynasty of commercial and shipping interests in the Azores in the nineteenth century.

Chapters 5 and 6 offer a view of family life among the Boston-cum-Azores Dabneys and their transatlantic mercantile endeavors. They also contrast the two social worlds of the Azores and Boston, between which the various members of the family moved regularly. João Dabney de Avelar Brotero experienced both. The far richer social environment of a diverse, synergistic mix of professionals in the Dabneys’ Boston ambit reconfirms that city's pivotal role in propelling the United States beyond its original peripheral status and toward semiperipheral status in the capitalist world-system by the late nineteenth century.

Part 3 reconstructs significant portions of the transatlantic mercantile networks that can be traced from the extended Dabney family. Chapters 7 and 8 treat the House of Maxwell, Wright & Company of Rio de Janeiro and Baltimore, which came to be identified primarily with the coffee trade between Brazil and the United States and was one of the largest foreign firms then operating in Rio. It not only provided João Dabney de Avelar Brotero with some of his contacts in the United States but is also credited with being a major facilitator of Confederate migration to Brazil two decades later. The British, Portuguese, and Maryland roots of the firm's key partners—the Maxwells, Rudges, and Wrights—are examined. To a significant degree, this commission house helped launch Brazil's meteoric rise in the 1800s as a major international coffee producer. Business associations with the Birckheads (Maryland flour exporters) and the Nathans (New Orleans merchants), among others, round out the commercial dynamic of their networks. A series of linkages that defined the Brazilian milieu into which the Confederates later had connections also flows from Maxwell, Wright & Company.

Chapters 9 and 10 demonstrate how these merchant networks became intertwined from the late 1600s to the mid-1800s throughout the Atlantic world. A strong pattern of an underlying Huguenot presence emerges, much like that which is found among the Confederate migrants themselves. Chapter 9 tells how a small portion of the Huguenot merchant community moved from France to other locations in the capitalist system and documents the commercial activities of these networks in the West Indies, Iberia, the Mid-Atlantic, South America, and China. Chapter 10 establishes how these networks came to interlink both the Dabneys and Maxwell, Wright & Company. These two chapters, along with the book's conclusion, consider the significance of this Huguenot presence in light of recent arguments that a greater retention of identity and cohesion existed among these dispersed French Protestants and their descendants than has been assumed traditionally.

In part 4, I return to subject matter specific to the Confederate migration itself for a fuller treatment that also demonstrates how the many Atlantic world elite networks eventually intersected. Chapter 11 allows the voices of a few southern migrants and would-be migrants to be heard as they considered their options and made their choices about relocation in the aftermath of the Civil War. A broad range of factors entered into their thinking, ranging from prospects for economic gain to religion and politics. Most of these individuals were part of the Broad River community.

Chapter 12 demonstrates how a confluence of portions of the networks discussed thus far produced a fecund environment for realizing the relocation of southerners to Brazil and how they intersected with sympathetic Brazilian intellectual, political, social, and economic elite networks. Between these two sets of elites, the common bonds of nineteenth-century liberalism and Freemasonry brought together partnerships in commercial agriculture, railroad building, and advancing Protestantism, which supplied a wide range of relevant contacts for Confederates to access in their bid to relocate. João Dabney de Avelar Brotero's father, a prominent law professor in São Paulo with connections to the São Paulo planter elite, reenters the discussion as an influential figure in the lives of many of the Brazilian liberals who advanced the cause of southern migration. Taken together, these individuals formed a dense web of Brazilian and foreign liberals, Freemasons, Protestants, and modernizers who created as similar a social environment as one could expect to find in a country that was culturally and geographically distant from one's own.

The conclusion reflects on how a microcosmic case like that of Confederate migration to Brazil can illuminate some of the qualitative macro processes at work within capitalism that account for its capacity to evolve and expand as a complex system in a transnational and multicultural context. The chapter synthesizes the broader implications of the kinship networks and the extrafamilial trust-building institutions of Protestantism, Freemasonry, and liberal ideals and philosophies. What remains is a tenacious yet flexible and mobile Atlantic elite culture that persisted over time and space and that contributed to the expansion of the complex system known as capitalism.

1

Contexts

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.¹

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.²

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.³

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.⁴

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.⁵

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.⁶

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.⁷ 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.⁸

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