Atlantic history from imperial, continental, and pacific perspectives

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 63, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 713-724

  Mapp, Paul W ^a  

^a Dept of Economics and Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary

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EID: 46849108748     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. I am currently examining the implications of these speculative geographies in a project with the working title North American Geographic Uncertainty and European Imperial Rivalry: The Role of the Uncharted American West in International Affairs, 1713-1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., forthcoming)
2. The phrase "competition for empire" comes from the title of Walter Dorn's survey of mid-eighteenth-century Europe, Competition for Empire (1940; repr., New York, 1963)
3. The writings on Atlantic history are varied and voluminous. My understanding of the field has been influenced esp. by Nicholas Canny, "Writing Atlantic History; Or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America," Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1093-1114
4. David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke, Eng., 2002), 11-27
5. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). In discussing Atlantic history in this article, however, I am drawing not only on works such as those mentioned in this footnote but also on my recollections of conversations and conference sessions and on my own interpretation of the logic of the Atlantic paradigm
6. See Albert Isnard, "Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, sa biographie et sa collection de cartes géographiques à la Bibliothèque nationale," Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques: Bulletin de la section de géographie 30 (1915): 34-164
7. Theodore N. Foss, "A Western Interpretation of China: Jesuit Cartography," in East Meets West: The Jesuits in China, 1582-1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan and Bonnie B. C. Oh (Chicago, 1988), 209-51
8. Marie-Anne Chabin, "Moscovie ou Russie? Regard de Joseph-Nicolas Delisle et des savants français sur les États de Pierre Ie Grand," Dix-huitième siècle 28 (1996): 43-56
9. Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago, 2001)
10. On 1740s British searches for a Northwest Passage and operations in the Pacific, see "Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to Captain Middleton. 20 May 1741," in William Barr and Glyndwr Williams, eds., Voyages to Hudson Bay in Search of a Northwest Passage, 1741-1747, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (London, 1994), 1: 88-89
11. Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson's Voyage Round the World (London, 1999), 159-75
12. On the possibility of trade with imagined and actual Pacific lands, see Charles de Brosses, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes ... (Paris, France, 1756), 1: 4, 13-18
13. "Arthur Dobbs: Memorial on the Northwest Passage, 1731," in Barr and Williams, Voyages to Hudson Bay, 1: 34-35
14. Examples of concern about the dangers of European trade with China include Jonas Hanway, An Essay on Tea, Considered As Pernicious to Health, obstructing Industry, and impoverishing the Nation ..., in A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston upon Thames; through Southampton, Wiltshire, etc.... (London, 1757), 2: 2, 17, 142, 161, 173; série Correspondance politique, Espagne, 363: 51r-55v, 147r-147v, 367: 141r-145r, 374: 213v-214r, 398: 149r-152r, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d'Orsay, Paris, France
15. Works discussing different approaches to the North American continent include Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (New York, 2001)
16. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001)
17. Alan Taylor, American Colonies, Penguin History of the United States (New York, 2001)
18. For a consideration of the desirability of including the West in accounts of early American history, see James A. Hijiya, "Why the West is Lost," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 51, no. 2 (April 1994): 276-92
19. and the forum that followed it, "Comments on James A. Hijiya's 'Why the West Is Lost'...," WMQ 51, no. 4 (October 1994): 717-54
20. Strong works on the early modern Pacific include Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570-1750 (New Haven, Conn., 1997)
21. Alan Frost, The Global Reach of Empire: Britain's Maritime Expansion in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 1764-1815 (Carlton, Australia, 2003)
22. David Igler, "Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770-1850," American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (June 2004): 693-719. Igler's discussion of why his treatment of Pacific disease transmission begins in the 1770s furnishes a good example of the reasons I am hesitant to speak of Pacific history before the late eighteenth century
23. Strong and sometimes provocative works about early modern silver flows in the Pacific and elsewhere include E. W. Dahlgren, Les relations commerciales et maritimes entre la France et les côtes de l'océan pacifique (commencement du XVIIIe siècle), vol. I, Le commerce de la mer du sud jusqu'a la paix d'Utrecht (Paris, France, 1909)
24. Artur Attman, American Bullion in the European World Trade, 1600-1800, [trans. Eva Green and Allan Green] (Gothenburg, Sweden, 1986)
25. Carlos Daniel Malamud Rikles, Cadiz y Saint Malo en el Comercio Colonial Peruano (1698-1725) (Cadiz, Spain, 1986)
26. Ward Barrett, "World Bullion Flows, 1450-1800," in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy, Studies in Comparative Early Modern History (Cambridge, 1990), 224-54
27. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 201-21
28. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 2000)
29. Flynn and Giráldez, "Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century," Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 391-427. For views from the French foreign ministry, see, for example, série Correspondance politique, Espagne, 507: 329r, 511: 244v-245r, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d'Orsay; série Mémoires et Documents, Angleterre, 52: 104V, 108r, 46: 86v-87r, 41: 27r-27v; France, 2008: 86v; Amérique, 2: 27r, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Quai d'Orsay, Paris, France
30. A more accessible statement of similar ideas appears in Hanway, Essay on Tea, 156-58, 172-73
31. The Spanish and French colonies north of Mexico offer examples of the relation between colonial profitability and sustainability. On New Mexico and Florida, see David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, Yale Western Americana Series (New Haven, Conn., 1992), 112, 152-53, 176
32. On Louisiana and New France, see Canadian governor the marquis de La Galissonière's famous 1751 memoir, repr. in Theodore Calvin Pease, ed., Anglo-French Boundary Disputes in the West, 1749-1763, Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library (Springfield, III., 1936), 5-22
33. F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (London, 1963)
34. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York, 1987)
35. C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600-1800 (New York, 1965), 22-24, 279-81
36. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 69
37. Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585-1740 (Oxford, Eng., 1989), 67-73, 98-99, 256-58