The fraternal Atlantic: An introduction

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the volume on “The Fraternal Atlantic” places the eighteenth-century emergence of freemasonry within the context of the dynamic Atlantic world. It highlights three characteristics that persisted into the twentieth century: the importance of freemasonry to sociability across borders; the tensions within freemasonry between cosmopolitan fraternalism and the turbulent political waters of the modern era, often leading to exclusive practices; and the plasticity of freemasonry that facilitated local adaptations and resiliency. A focus on freemasonry and the fraternal Atlantic offers a bridge between the early modern and modern eras, from the Age of Revolutions to movements for international cooperation after the First World War. It likewise mitigates the tendency of Atlantic scholarship to compartmentalize into various sub-Atlantics, instead seeing the Atlantic world as a zone of interaction with broader global connections.

KEYWORDS:

• Freemasonry
• fraternalism
• cosmopolitanism
• brotherhood
• sociability
• transnational
• migration
• Atlantic networks
• exclusion
• age of revolutions

Fraternalism was a key element in Atlantic history. Ranging from confraternities to masonic lodges to friendly societies, fraternal organizations cultivated kinship-like bonds among their members – a form of “symbolic” or “fictive kinship,” as cultural anthropologists and social scientists have come to call it.¹ The personalized links forged by these associations stretched across vast spaces, political boundaries, and cultural systems. They were enmeshed within the diverse forces that shaped the Atlantic world: they figured prominently in imperial and then national political cultures; they supported people through various forms of mobility, both voluntary and involuntary; they served as crucibles of cosmopolitan thinking, as well as of ideologies that legitimized hierarchies along lines of class, race, or gender; they intersected with and reinforced professional, political, ethnic, or religious networks stretching across the ocean; and they became involved in the turmoil of Atlantic revolutions, wars, and the struggles around slavery and its abolition.

While scholars have pointed out the abundance and significance of fraternal associations in the Atlantic world, until recently most studies in this field have remained encased in national or local frameworks.² We are only beginning to see the transoceanic and transcontinental scope of the phenomenon. Thanks to new work that uses larger units of analysis (empires, oceans, continents, and regions), it is becoming increasingly clear that fraternal organizations were particularly well suited to building large-scale networks.³ Whether imperial, Atlantic, or global, such brotherhoods were often based on universalizing, cosmopolitan ideologies that posited the local club, lodge or chapter as a place for fraternal sociability and friendship that could transcend religious, political, social, national, and cultural boundaries.

This volume on “The Fraternal Atlantic” offers six essays that explore the role that fraternal associations and networks played in integrating and dis-integrating the Atlantic world. It focuses on the most widespread, significant, and long-lasting fraternal association, freemasonry, or, more precisely, freemasonries. As the essays emphasize, beneath the powerful commonalities of freemasonry emerged diverse adaptations that could divide as well as unite freemasons. Although freemasons trace their roots to medieval stone masons’ guilds, the emergence of freemasonry as a fraternal organization open to men from any trade or profession occurred in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Scotland and England.⁴ In 1717, freemasons from English lodges formed the first grand lodge, what would become the Grand Lodge of England, and in 1723, a Scots Presbyterian minister living in England, James Anderson, published The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, which was soon translated into other languages.⁵

By the 1720s, masonic lodges could be found in many places in the Atlantic world – Ireland, France, and British America – seemingly in response to the accelerating population growth and economic activity across the Atlantic basin.⁶ In the three decades of peace after the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713), natural reproduction in the French and British settler colonies saw populations doubling every twenty to twenty-five years, a phenomenon Benjamin Franklin analyzed in a 1755 pamphlet entitled Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. Highly productive farms fed not just their growing local populations, but also the expanding slave societies of the Caribbean. The transatlantic African slave trade expanded rapidly, supplying labor to grow the cane and process the sugar on an industrial scale, catering to a seemingly insatiable demand for sugar and its derivative products, most particularly molasses and rum.⁷ In these decades, the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, which figures in three of the essays, became the top sugar producer in the world.⁸ To facilitate the movement of people and goods, port cities in the Atlantic world, whether New York, Louisbourg, Liverpool, Cap-Français, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena de Indias, or Lisbon, became vibrant cosmopolitan spaces. Most ports supported the publication of newspapers, provided financial services, and engendered a consumer revolution that tapped into trade networks moving goods and people on a global scale, so that cotton and tea out of Asia become everyday items in the Atlantic world.⁹

Within this dynamic world, freemasonry offered men a way to belong, to find “brothers” in strange port towns. As the dislocations of war and revolution convulsed the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, followed by Europe’s disgorging of millions of emigrants into the Americas and Antipodes, membership in freemasonry became a way for thousands of men to weather the political, social, and economic changes whether at a personal, national, or international level. Studying freemasonry – and fraternalism writ large – in this Atlantic context promises to be highly beneficial for the well-established scholarly field of Atlantic history.¹⁰ As the articles collected here demonstrate, the topic points to still largely understudied systems of networks along which people and ideas moved across the Atlantic world and brings to light an important element in the Atlantic history of mutual aid and charity, to mention but two major aspects. On a more abstract level, the history of freemasonry (and fraternalism) helps address certain blind spots of Atlantic history scholarship. Cutting across particular divisions that gave structure to the Atlantic world, be they based on kinship, religion, profession, politics, nationality or ethnicity, the study of fraternal networks mitigates the tendency in Atlantic scholarship to compartmentalize in separated sub-Atlantics (e.g. British, French, Dutch, Iberian, Catholic, Irish, Black Atlantic).¹¹ Likewise, with fraternal organizations always being part of a worldwide network, their study can help to respond to the criticism that Atlantic history perspectives tend to isolate the region from its manifold connections with the wider world.¹²

Yet, perhaps the most valuable benefit of the topic is that it encourages us to ask and pursue precise questions for specific contexts that might help us to move beyond the plausible and seemingly self-evident conclusion that everything was, in the end, interconnected. Examining freemasonry in a wide range of geographic and chronological contexts, these articles cover the period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. They, thus, zero in on a period in which the early modern Atlantic world underwent particularly dramatic transformations, with its social, political and cultural systems being tested and reconfigured, the lines between freedom and slavery redrawn, and migratory patterns altered.¹³ Each of the studies weaves the topic of fraternalism into some of the major threads of Atlantic history during this transformative period: What role did fraternal organizations play for revolutionaries and their adversaries? What does studying the history of freemasonries tell us about the complex local political cultures of the Atlantic world from the “age of revolutions” to the “age of internationalism”? What was the significance of masonic membership (or claimed masonic membership) to men of various races, ethnicities, and social positions? How did fraternalism intersect with the conflictive histories of racism, slavery, and anti-slavery? What was its appeal for diasporic groups throughout the Atlantic world such as refugees of the Haitian Revolution and European immigrants in North America? How did fraternal associations provide frameworks for professional networking and interactions across imperial borders? What were the limits of fraternal “brothering” and connectivity across the Atlantic?

By addressing such questions based on fresh empirical evidence, the articles explore to what extent the Atlantic world was shaped by fraternalism, and how, in turn, fraternalism was shaped by the Atlantic world. In the six case studies presented here, there are connecting threads that stretch from eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue to the movement for international freemasonry in the early twentieth century. Three related themes run through all of the essays: first, the importance of freemasonry to sociability across borders; second, the tensions between freemasonry’s official commitment to cosmopolitan fraternalism and its members’ engagements in the multivalent political cultures of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary Atlantic world; and, third, the resulting multiplication of freemasonries across the Atlantic world and beyond. This introduction uses these connecting strands to sketch out how freemasonry reflected interdependent developments in the Atlantic world – revolution, migration, nationalism, racism, internationalism – and how people used freemasonry to mediate their relationship to these developments.

Extensive sociability

Freemasonry was not only a fraternal, but also a voluntary association, that is, an organization based on the idea of free and individual membership whose existence was dependent neither on the state nor the church. The masonic brotherhood was part of what historian Peter Clark has labelled the “associational revolution” of the eighteenth century.¹⁴ Shaping a semi-private, semi-public space for conviviality, leisure, and friendly intercourse, these associations gave way to modern clubs and societies in the following century. As burgeoning places of sociability, they have been widely credited as the backbone of local civil society. But seen in an Atlantic context, sociability proves to be not only highly relevant for local communities and intimate relationships, but also for building and maintaining networks that could sustain people as they moved across great distances. In its ideology and its practices, the masonic brotherhood – as other fraternal organizations – championed wide-scale networking, both ideological and physical, while remaining firmly rooted in local contexts. The articles thus challenge us to rethink the ways in which the (allegedly) secluded and intimate worlds of face-to-face interaction within lodges intersected with broader structures of the Atlantic world.

The cases examined here demonstrate the truly transatlantic extensity of its network. When a member arrived in a new place, he could anticipate the possibility of being accepted as a masonic brother, as though he were family. In his “‘Perfectly proper and conciliating’: Jean-Pierre Boyer, freemasonry, and the revolutionary Atlantic in eastern Connecticut, 1800–1801,” Peter P. Hinks describes how the captured Saint-Domingue soldier and future president of Haiti was taken in by a group of freemasons in Norwich, Connecticut. Masonic relations complemented, substituted for, at times replaced, the family networks that underlay so many Atlantic merchant networks in the early modern era.¹⁵ Masonic brothers – not unlike a cousin, a great aunt, an uncle, a godfather – provided introductions into local communities, and often bed and board. The transatlantic spread of freemasonry in the eighteenth century and its commitment to cosmopolitanism legitimated the forging of networks even across imperial borders.¹⁶ Jan C. Jansen notes in his essay, “Brothers in exile: Masonic lodges and the refugees of the Haitian Revolution, 1790s–1820,” pre-revolutionary French Saint-Domingue’s thriving masonic landscape was well-connected beyond the imperial metropole. Drawing their members from a milieu of merchants, colonial administrators, sailors, and planters, Saint-Domingue’s lodges forged links with freemasons not only across the French Atlantic, but also in the British West Indies, North America, and the Danish Caribbean. These masonic relations often followed legal or illegal trade routes. In the years before the Haitian Revolution, particularly intense masonic relations sustained the burgeoning commerce between Philadelphia and Saint-Domingue.

Masonic sociability helped people survive the buffeting of political upheavals, whether as refugees from the American, French, or Haitian revolutions, or as refugees from the political uprisings of 1848 in Germany. As Jansen notes, “A Masonic certificate provided access to a universe of informal social networks that shaped the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, thereby helping people communicate and move about during a time of uncertainty.” Indeed, the importance people placed in masonic papers may indicate that people feared dislocation in the Atlantic world far more than we have realized. One of the early acts of political refugees upon resettling was to establish a new masonic lodge. Loyalists in the new colony of New Brunswick established Hiram Lodge No. 17 in 1784, just months after disembarking from the military transports that had evacuated them from New York. Refugees of the Haitian Revolution quickly reshaped and rebuilt Saint-Domingue’s lodge network across their places of refuge in North America, the British and Spanish Caribbean, and Louisiana. As Jansen argues, due to their ubiquity and manifold uses, masonic lodges were among the most important social infrastructures within the Saint-Domingue diaspora.

The importance of lodges as hubs for transatlantic refugees and exiles lasted well into the nineteenth century. Andreas Önnerfors shows in his study “Atlantic antagonism: Revolution and race in German-American Masonic relations, 1848–1861” that émigrés from the 1848 uprisings in Germany made similar use of freemasonry as a means to ease their resettlement to North America. His analysis of the German-speaking lodge Pythagoras No. 1 in New York cautions us against limiting the diasporic uses of masonic networks to forced migrants. In New York City alone, the port of entry for more immigrants than any other North America port, there were over 30 German-speaking lodges, a majority of which were run by non-refugee immigrants. The studies presented here underscore the role of masonic (and other forms of) sociability in the Atlantic history of migration, both voluntary and compelled, and invite other scholars to research this understudied aspect of Atlantic history.¹⁷

Masonic cosmopolitanism under pressure

While masonic sociability was more extensive than most other forms of social interaction in the Atlantic world, it was often limited, in practice, by the complexities of Atlantic political culture, which intensified starting in the late eighteenth century. Freemasons espoused political cosmopolitanism and counselled their members to avoid entanglement in political disputes that would pit masonic brothers against one another. But neither individuals nor associations could shield themselves from the era’s political upheavals. Each study speaks to fissures among freemasons, sometimes within lodges, often transnationally, that resulted from this tension. In “From a cosmopolitan fraternity to a loyalist institution: Freemasonry in British North America in the 1780s–1790s,” Bonnie Huskins examines the shift in the ethos of freemasonry in the British Empire, through a case study of Hiram Lodge No. 17, organized in Saint John, New Brunswick shortly after loyalist refugees from the American Revolution arrived in 1783. She traces how the political disputes during Saint John’s founding decade involved masons and publicly spilled over into masonic relations, prompting the Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia to revoke the warrant for Hiram Lodge No. 17 in 1796. She argues that it is an example of an early casualty of the shift within British imperial freemasonry from an emphasis on political cosmopolitanism to an emphasis on loyalty. During the American and French Revolutions, British officials feared that masonic lodges could foster and harbor seditious behavior, thus compelling grand lodges to engage in more self-policing, including the revocation of warrants, as happened in New Brunswick.

Fissures within freemasonry caused by political disputes are also clearly evident in the case of freemasonry in colonial and revolutionary Saint-Domingue and its Atlantic ramifications. The fact that the most radical of the Atlantic revolutions took place in one of the most “masonized” societies in the world, makes this case particular intriguing. In “A secret brotherhood? The question of black freemasonry before and after the Haitian Revolution,” John D. Garrigus engages with the recurring idea that revolutionary agents, most notably Toussaint Louverture, had been freemasons and that, consequently, masonic lodges had served as incubators of political change and emancipation in Saint-Domingue. Pointing to the membership practices in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, he concludes that there is no evidence for any significant involvement of free people of color in official freemasonry. Rather, the colony’s lodges reflected how the white population increasingly rejected the aspiring class of prosperous free people of color in the decades leading up to the revolution. Revolutionary events did usher in some changes. After the 1793–94 abolition of slavery, a few lodges did accept black or biracial members – a revolution by pre-revolutionary standards. But, Garrigus contends, men of color never came to a significant presence in these lodges, and Louverture himself was likely not a freemason.

Freemasonry also became an important network for those who were dislocated in the course of the revolutionary events and, consequently, a field in which the Haitian Revolution reverberated across the Atlantic world. One particularly fascinating example is the experience of and reaction to Jean-Pierre Boyer in Connecticut, one of the few free blacks to access official freemasonry during the Haitian Revolution. As Hinks details, Boyer was carrying masonic papers and ceremonial jewels with him when he fled Saint-Domingue in 1800 and was captured by an American naval patrol. At sea and then on land, Boyer experienced contrasting receptions by groups of local freemasons, revealing how the political upheavals impacted on the allegedly non-political field of fraternal association. With the presence of a foreign black freemason in their midst, Connecticut’s lodges were thrust into broader Atlantic conflicts about religion, political revolution, slave emancipation, and racial discrimination. Refugee lodges, with well over a thousand members, also became an organizing backbone for white Saint-Domingue refugees navigating the volatile political landscape of the revolutionary Atlantic. As Jansen shows, many of their political leaders played prominent roles in the lodge network, and their lodges even came to mix messages of universal brotherhood with pro-slavery statements.

The tension between inclusion and exclusion continued to cause fissures within the brotherhood in the nineteenth century, particularly over the issue of race. After the American War of Independence, freemasons in the United States agreed among themselves that each state should have a grand lodge and that within each state the grand lodge would have unchallenged control. Önnerfors analyzes what happened when German immigrants in New York broke with the New York State Grand Lodge, and then asked for and received a warrant from the Hamburg Grand Lodge to organize as Pythagoras No. 1. This “foreign” warranting of a lodge within the state of New York provoked a decades-long transatlantic dispute, with US grand lodges arguing that every state grand lodge had exclusive jurisdiction within the territory of any state. Neither another state grand lodge nor a foreign grand lodge had jurisdiction to intervene in masonic business and certainly not to warrant a lodge in another state. The members of Pythagoras No. 1, in turn, justified their split by invoking freemasonry’s aspirations to universalism and building transatlantic bridges with European-based freemasons, as well as criticizing US lodges for their policies against blacks in the Atlantic world.

The American practice of exclusive territorial jurisdiction emerged in part because of the revolutionary break with Great Britain, in part because of the diversity among states. Harmonizing deeply rooted cultural differences among the states so that freemasons could establish a national grand lodge proved an unattainable goal, and hence they compromised on the exclusive jurisdictional autonomy of each state grand lodge. As Joachim Berger shows in “The great divide: Transatlantic brothering and Masonic internationalism, c.1870–c.1930,” attempts to elevate cosmopolitanism over differences tested transatlantic freemasonry at the end of the nineteenth century. Rifts between North American, British and continental European freemasons over religion and racial exclusion complicated these efforts. As in other areas, transnational entanglement, interaction and structures did not override local particularities.¹⁸ Rather, they seem to have been a precondition for spelling out national or regional distinctiveness more forcefully.

Freemasonries

Given the volatile divisiveness that emerged in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century, masonic cosmopolitanism encountered political, racial, national and other divisions that make it necessary to think in terms of “freemasonries”: beneath the powerful commonalities of freemasonry emerged diverse adaptations that could divide as well as unite. While freemasonry may have provided a safe haven from political storms, those upheavals also engendered differentiating changes within freemasonry. In addition to the “diasporic freemasonry” investigated by Jansen and the politicized forms of freemasonry examined by Huskins, Hinks, and Önnerfors, these essays highlight other forms of freemasonry that emerged when masonic fraternalism encountered the shoals of racial difference and discrimination. We see the emergence, for example, of “quasi” or claimed freemasonry on the island of Saint Domingue in the last third of the eighteenth century. Despite being largely excluded from official freemasonry, many well-to-do men of color in Saint-Domingue deployed three symbolic dots under their signatures. As Garrigus posits, the use of these symbols implied membership in a respected fraternal organization, either a confraternity or a masonic lodge. By laying claim to such membership, they asserted their own respectability and sought to underpin their social climbing. Rumors from different places of the Saint-Domingue diaspora suggested that black and biracial men participated in a thriving clandestine market of unauthorized certificates, initiations and masonic degrees. Most of these activities happened under the radar of masonic authorities, and they never entered the historical records, which makes it hard to substantiate stories of independent lodges run by former slaves or free people of color.

Yet, what is clear, despite their racist animosity, white colonial freemasons may have unintentionally laid the groundwork for other, successful claims to brotherly love. It is certainly no accident that shortly after Haiti’s independence in 1804, masonic lodges started to operate. The growth of freemasonry was capped by the establishment of an independent Haitian grand lodge in 1824, by the time when President (and freemason) Boyer was seeking diplomatic recognition of Haitian independence. This made Haiti the second pillar of a fiercely independent black Atlantic freemasonry, along with the United States. In 1784, at the end of the American Revolution and after decades of unsuccessful attempts to join colonial lodges, Prince Hall, a free black in Boston, had already established African Lodge No. 1, the mother lodge of what would become a thriving African American freemasonry across the United States.¹⁹ Equipped with their own symbolic reservoir, Prince Hall and Haitian freemasonry became, not unlike their white colonial predecessors, a central source of respectability and identity, as well as a place of brotherly sociability and long-distance networking and communication within the Black Atlantic.²⁰

By the early twentieth century, another freemasonry – “international freemasonry” – was emerging in the Atlantic world; once again, tensions evident in the broader political culture, this time in terms of religion and nation, shaded its development. Berger retraces how freemasons participated in the general movement of internationalism in the late nineteenth century. Like other internationalists, masonic internationalists – mainly from continental Europe, but at times also from New York – pushed their agenda on manifold conferences and created institutions to coordinate their activities. Conflicts over religion and race marred these efforts to organize a united masonic international, and ironically, it was the horror of twentieth-century warfare that helped many see that what they shared was more important than what divided them. After the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, overtures for stronger transatlantic ties were embraced.

These studies just begin to tell the story of the proliferation of freemasonries across the Atlantic world from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. The thriving of freemasonry in Latin America, West Africa and the South Atlantic brings in new complexities to a history that has often been told primarily from a North Atlantic or Anglo-Atlantic perspective.²¹ The Caribbean is increasingly emerging as an area of heightened masonic geopolitics, replicating the complex and shifting imperial affiliations within the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.²² Indeed, freemasonry took on a diverse array of localized, racialized, regionalized, nationalized, and internationalized forms wherever lodges met as brothers. What, then, allows us to still put them under one masonic umbrella? First, regardless of the adaptations that resulted in response to local circumstances, the claims to cosmopolitan fraternalism remained consistent and often honored in the breach. Even in the most un-fraternal of circumstances, freemasons continued to assert that their brotherhood was the “Center of Union, and the Means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must else have remain’d at a perpetual Distance.”²³ Second, freemasons were united in their practice of shared rituals and use of a common body of symbols. Third, all freemasons continued to espouse and practice cross-border sociability, in various guises, and interacted for mutual benefit. Fourth and finally, the vast majority of freemasons around the Atlantic world would have agreed that freemasonry was an exclusively masculine space. Though not explored in this volume, the gendered dimensions and implications of freemasonry remain critical subjects of investigation.²⁴

Thus, despite the extent of the spread of masonic networks, the manifold exclusions practiced by members while making claims to cosmopolitan brotherhood, and the proliferation of its forms that resulted, freemasonry retained a basic identity and purpose. Masons might, indeed, withhold or withdraw official recognition from an individual brother, as happened with Jean-Pierre Boyer, or from a lodge, as happened with Hiram Lodge No. 17 or Pythagoras No. 1. Nevertheless, members of the brotherhood would definitely have been able to recognize in the ideas and practices of brethren across the vast expanses of the Atlantic world an identifiably masonic fraternalism, one that was, as will be seen, remarkably capacious, vibrant, and elastic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs is associate professor of history at the University of Florida. She is author of Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), articles and chapters that argue for examining freemasonry using macro-level units of analysis, and articles and a bibliography on the Atlantic dimensions of fraternalism. She is currently researching how empires manage religious diversity, in particular the incorporation of Catholics into the British Empire of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Jan C. Jansen is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His research concerns colonial history and decolonization, with a particular focus on French colonial empires since the eighteenth century. His publications include Erobern und Erinnern: Symbolpolitik, öffentlicher Raum und französischer Kolonialismus in Algerien, 1830–1950 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013); Decolonization: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) (co-authored with Jürgen Osterhammel); and Refugee Crises, 1945–2000: Political and Societal Responses in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) (co-edited with Simone Lässig).

Elizabeth Mancke is a professor of history and the Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at the University of New Brunswick. Her research interests address the impact of European overseas expansion on governance and political systems, from local government to international relations. Her most recent book, Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–1850 (co-edited with H. V. Bowen and John G. Reid), is a collaborative study with sixteen scholars from North America, Europe, and Asia. At UNB, she is heading a team to build an open-source database of all the legislation of the colonies that became Canada from 1758–1867. This project reflects her interest in legislation as an under-utilized source for understanding political culture in new societies.

Notes

1. Terpstra, “Deinstitutionalizing Confraternity Studies,” 264; Clawson, “Fraternal Orders,” 689; Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 39, 74; Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 17–20.

2. Harland-Jacobs, “Worlds of Brothers.”

3. Beaurepaire, République universelle; Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire; Mollès, “‘Triangle atlantique’.”

4. Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry; Jacob, The Origins of Freemasonry; Bogdan and Snoek (eds.), Handbook of Freemasonry; Péter (ed.), British Freemasonry 1717–1813; Önnerfors, Freemasonry.

5. Anderson, Constitutions.

6. For Freemasonry in the North American context, see Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood.

7. Horn and Morgan, “Settlers and Slaves,” 20–24; Hancock, “Atlantic Trade,” 330–331.

8. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 33–38.

9. Steele, The English Atlantic.

10. The following paragraph draws largely on Jansen, “Atlantic Sociability.” See also Harland-Jacobs, “Worlds of Brothers”; Mollès, “L’histoire globale.”

11. See the critique by Canny, “Atlantic History and Global History.”

12. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten”; Bowen, Mancke and Reid, Britain’s Oceanic Empire; Vidal, “Histoire globale.”

13. The period after the Age of Revolutions is a much less studied period in Atlantic scholarship. For forceful arguments to include them, see Gabaccia, “Long Atlantic”; Fogleman, “Transformation.”

14. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 471. On sociability, see also Hoffmann, Civil Society; Beaurepaire, “Sociability”; Jansen, “Atlantic Sociability.”

15. On family merchant networks, see Supple, “Nature of Enterprise,” 410; Bosher, The Canada Merchants; and Roitman, “New Christians, Jews, and Amsterdam.” On the role of freemasonry within eighteenth-century commercial and diplomatic mobility, see Beaurepaire, “Universal Republic.”

16. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 83–88.

17. On the Sephardic diaspora, for example, see Jansen, “Becoming Imperial Citizens.” On other forms of diasporic sociability in the Atlantic world, see Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Sea, 67.

18. Conrad, Global History, 79–89.

19. Hinks and Kantrowitz, All Men Free; Kantrowitz, “Intended for the Better Government”; Révauger, Black Freemasonry.

20. On communication within the Black Atlantic during this period, see Scott, Common Wind.

21. There is a prolific scholarship on the history of Latin American freemasonry. For some recent publications, see Vázquez Semadeni, Cultura política republicana; Arroyo, Writing Secrecy; Soucy, Enjeux coloniaux; and the articles in Revista de Estudios Históricos de la Masonería. Scholarship on freemasonry in Africa is still limited. Önnerfors’s essay in this volume discusses how contentious freemasonry in Liberia was internationally. See also White, “Networking.”

22. See, e.g., Saunier, “L’espace caribéen.”

23. Anderson, Constitutions, 50.

24. Clawson, “Early Modern Fraternalism”; Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire, 15–17, 61–62, 88–96, 259–262.