Crowds in the Atlantic World

Crowds and crowd actions are a critical component of Atlantic history. Historians often refer to crowd actions or riots waged by Europeans or European colonists as “rough music,” charivari, or skimmington. Those same historians often refer to riots waged by enslaved people as “revolts.” However people referred to it, and none of these terms fit perfectly, organized crowd violence grew out of people’s desires to punish members of theirs who violated the community’s standards for social, economic, or political behavior. They used violence to correct people’s deviant behavior as well as to reinforce the community’s standards of acceptable behavior. In that way, crowds both prescribed and proscribed legitimate behavior in their communities. Crowds attacked bigamists and adulterers. They confronted men who beat their wives too much as well as merchants and shopkeepers who tried to line their pockets at the expense of others in their community. They assaulted people who threatened the community’s general health and welfare, and crowds invoked violence to protest attacks on the social or political hierarchy of their community. Finally, and importantly, people in the early modern Atlantic world used violence to attack leaders of those social and political hierarchies when those leaders tried to enrich or to empower themselves at the expense of others. These crowds usually followed a pattern of behavior and adhered to traditional, ritualized patterns of violent punishment familiar to European and African inhabitants of the Atlantic word. They attacked specific people for particular behavior or to achieve a specific goal, and they inflicted often-horrifying violence on people and property. Their point made, their goal achieved, crowds usually dispersed and victims went home, if they could. Where authorities sometimes prosecuted crowds of Europeans and European colonists, authorities used terrifying violence when enslaved people rioted or rebelled. Since the 1960s, historians of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world have turned their attention to crowds and crowd violence. They have faced an uphill task. Few instances of crowd violence survive in the record. Historians must thus probe what remains of the record to determine how crowds behaved and why people violently and ritually attacked others in their communities. What they show is that violence, while effective, was often a last resort.