Atlantic history: Definitions, challenges, and opportunities

American Historical Review

Volumn 111, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 741-757

  Games, Alison ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33749661351     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.111.3.741     Document Type: Review

References (74)

1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Irans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), 1: 19.
2. This precise phrasing is from José de Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies (London, 1604), 151. Braudel cited the 1558 edition, p. 94.
3. Braudel, Mediterranean, 1: 14, 17.
4. My thanks to Markus Vink for sharing with me an early version of his "From Port City to World System: Spatial Constructs of Dutch Indian Ocean Studies, 1500-1800," Itinerario 28, no. 2 (2004): 45-116.
5. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (New York, 1992; 2nd ed., 1998), x-xxxvi.
6. Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
7. Bernard Bailyn, "The Idea of Atlantic History," Itinerario 20, no. 1 (1996): 19-44.
8. William O'Reilly shares Bailyn's emphasis on the link between twentieth-century politics and diplomacy and the emergence of Atlantic history. See O'Reilly, "Genealogies of Atlantic History," Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 66-84.
9. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wis., 1969).
10. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
11. The classic and seminal works include Charles Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (New Haven, Conn., 1934-1938),
12. and Clarence Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (New York, 1947).
13. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (London, 2002).
14. Benjamin Schmidt's Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670 (New York, 2001) is a rare and exemplary study from the vantage of the European mainland.
15. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/index.html.
16. The University of Leiden hosted one of the earliest such conferences in 1999, at which participants were invited to summarize different aspects of Atlantic history. The papers were published as "Round Table Conference: The Nature of Atlantic History," Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48-173.
17. James H. Williams has tabulated the appearance of "Atlantic" panels or papers at the annual (or biennial) conferences of four different professional organizations - the AHA, the OAH, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC), and the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI) - between 1990 and 2002. His statistics reveal a modest presence of Atlantic history at the AHA, but in 2000, for the first time, "Atlantic World" was listed as a topic in the program index. "Atlantic" made its first appearance at FEEGI in 2000. The biggest growth industry was the OIEAHC, which in 2001 offered no fewer than thirteen Atlantic panels or papers. Williams, "The Atlantic World: An Idea in Need of Conceptualization," paper presented at the FEEGI biennial conference, San Marino, Calif., February 2002. The OAH has been less engaged in Atlantic history, which perhaps reflects that professional organization's greater emphasis on the national, not colonial, period in North America, but trends in the first years of the twenty-first century suggest a shift. The OAH Magazine of History (designed for history teachers) devoted a topical issue to the Atlantic world in 2004 (18, no. 3 [April]), and the OAH has featured "state of the field sessions" on Atlantic history at the regional and national conferences.
18. For exemplary studies of Atlantic history, see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (New York, 1995),
19. and David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York, 2000).
20. The few works that profess to describe the entire Atlantic tend to have perspectives very firmly rooted in one place. Paul Butel's The Atlantic, trans. lain Hamilton Grant (London and New York, 1999), for example, neglected to engage the relevant and abundant literature on Africa.
21. David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," in Armitage and Braddick, The British Atlantic World, 11-27.
22. April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, Pa., 2004).
23. Slavery and labor systems are among the most typical points of comparison. For early examples of scholarly interest in these approaches, see, for example, Carl N. Degler, Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971),
24. or Richard R. Beeman, "Labor Forces and Race Relations: A Comparative View of the Colonization of Brazil and Virginia," Political Science Quarterly 86 (1971): 609-636.
25. Herbert Bolton, "The Epic of Greater America," AHR 38, no. 3 (April 1933): 448-474.
26. See also Silvio Zavala, "A General View of the Colonial History of the New World," AHR 66, no. 4 (July 1961): 913-929.
27. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972).
28. For a plea for an Atlantic history that moves into the modern era, see Donna Gabaccio, "A Long Atlantic in a Wider World," Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 1-27,
29. One of the rare books oriented toward the classroom that takes Atlantic history through the late nineteenth century is Alan L. Karras and J. R. McNeill, eds., Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus through Abolition, 1492-1888 (London, 1992).
30. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, "Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century," Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (2002): 391-427.
31. Jerry Bentley, "Seas and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis," Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 215-224.
32. Peter A. Coclanis, "Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History," Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 169-182.
33. Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia, 227.
34. Hancock, Citizens of the World, 8-9.
35. On the creation of oceans, see Martin W. Lewis, "Dividing the Ocean Sea," Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999): 188-214.
36. For a thought-provoking view of the Mediterranean as process, see David Abulafia, "Mediterraneans," in W. V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005), 64-93.
37. My own rough calculations suggest that out of 268 papers presented between 1996 and 2004, 115 focused on the British Atlantic (including non-British subjects in British territories, such as Dutch- or German-speaking or African inhabitants of British colonies), 57 on the Spanish Atlantic, 18 on the French, 12 on the United States, 9 on Portugal or Portuguese Brazil, 8 on the Dutch Atlantic, 5 on Africa, and 1 on the Danish. Of the remaining 43 papers, a few are explicitly comparative across national and imperial borders, some are topical (demography and commodities), some are centered on Europe, and a still larger number take a single land-based region as their unit of analysis but investigate it over a period of multiple imperial invasions. In North America, Louisiana and the region of New Netherland/New York fall into this category, as does Panama in central America.
38. www.yorku.ca/nhp/.
39. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "Some Caveats about the 'Atlantic' Paradigm," History Compass, www.history-compass.com.
40. Pieter C. Emmer and Willem W. Klooster, "The Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1800: Expansion without Empire," Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48-69.
41. See the different Atlantics that emerge through approaches centered around imperial expansion in the accompanying essays by Silvia Marzagalli, Carla Rahn Phillips, and David Hancock, Itinerario ibid., 70-126. In the same issue, Debra Gray White explores the Black Atlantic (127-140), and David Eltis sets the Atlantic in global perspective (141-161).
42. Pieter Emmer, "The Myth of Early Globalization: The Atlantic Economy, 1500-1800," European Review 11, no. 1 (2003): 37-47.
43. In Drang Nach Osten," Peter Coclanis has criticized those who work on the Atlantic for overemphasizing unity and integration.
44. Wim Klooster, private communication with the author.
45. Ira Berlin, "From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America," The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 53, no. 2 (April 1996): 251-288.
46. Braudel, Mediterranean, 1: 13.
47. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965).
48. Virginia DeJohn Anderson was one of the first scholars to break through this impasse by putting mobility at the center of her history of New England. See Anderson, New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1991).
49. Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery.
50. See also James Horn and Philip D. Morgan, "Settlers and Slaves: European and African Migrations to Early Modern British America," in Carole Shammas and Elizabeth Mancke, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore, Md., 2005), 32-74.
51. Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2005), is an excellent example of an essay collection that explicitly connects a range of historiographie problems often regarded separately.
52. Coclanis, "Drang Nach Osten," 181.
53. My thanks to Jennifer Morgan for stating this problem so clearly.
54. Here I share Peter Coclanis's concern with the tendency among Atlantic historians to overemphasize Europe's importance within the region. Coclanis, "Drang Nach Osten," 180.
55. Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, the Gambia (Armonk, N.Y., 1997; 2nd ed., 2004);
56. James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003).
57. Butel, The Atlantic, 185.
58. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 59-111.
59. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).
60. Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay, eds., Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (London, 2001);
61. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).
62. Alden T. Vaughan, "Sir Walter Ralegh's Indian Interpreters, 1584-1618," The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 59, no. 2 (April 2002): 341-376.
63. "Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Bondu," in Philip D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered (Madison, Wis., 1987), 18-59;
64. Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua (Princeton, N.J., 2001);
65. Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
66. On the unique maritime and class cultures of the Atlantic, see especially Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000).
67. Marcy Norton, "Conquests of Chocolate," Magazine of History 18, no. 3 (April 2004): 14-17. See also her article in this issue.
68. David Hancock, "Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: The Invention of Madeira Wine," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 2 (1998): 197-219.
69. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985);
70. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex; Essays in Atlantic History (New York, 1990).
71. J. R. McNeill, "Yellow Jack and Geopolitics: Environment, Epidemics, and the Struggles for Empire in the American Tropics, 1650-1825," OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 3 (April 2004): 9-13;
72. McNeill, Mosquito Coasts: Plantation Ecology, Disease, War and Revolution in the American Tropics, 1640-1920 (forthcoming).
73. Studies of rice and corn suggest a new interest in studying commodities and the environment within the Atlantic. See, for example, James C. McCann, Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (Cambridge, Mass., 2005),
74. and Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).