Atlantic world or Atlantic/world?

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 63, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 725-742

  Coclanis, Peter A ^a,b  

^a Department of History and Economics ^*

^b UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 58149287569     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (118)

1. See, for example, Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 1999);
2. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, "The Origins of the European Atlantic," Itinerario 24, no. 1 (2000): 111-28;
3. Thomas Benjamin, Timothy Hall, and David Rutherford, eds., The Atlantic World in the Age of Empire (Boston, 2001);
4. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, Eng., 2002);
5. 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): 169-82;
6. Games, "Introduction, Definitions, and Historiography: What Is Atlantic History?" Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 18, no. 3 (April 2004): 3-7;
7. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005);
8. Coclanis, introduction to The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia, S.C., 2005), xi-xix;
9. Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2005);
10. Coclanis, "ReOrienting Atlantic History: The Global Dimensions of the 'Western' Rice Trade," in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, ed. Jorge Can̄izares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2006), 111-27;
11. Linda Colley, "The Sea Around Us," New York Review of Books, June 22, 2006, 43-45;
12. Games, "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities," American Historical Review III, no. 3 (June 2006): 741-57;
13. Ian K. Steele, "Bernard Bailyn's American Atlantic," History and Theory 45 (forthcoming).
14. For a general survey of the Atlantic, see Paul Butel, The Atlantic, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London, 1999).
15. Bernard Bailyn, "The Idea of Atlantic History," Itinerario 20, no. 1 (1996): 19-44. Note my use of quotation marks around early modern in the text. This complicated concept is not readily, much less seamlessly, transferable beyond the West. Hence the quotations in the first instance.
16. On this problem, see, for example, Jack A. Goldstone, "The Problem of the 'Early Modern' World," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 41, no. 3 (August 1998): 249-84;
17. Victor Lieberman, "Introduction: Eurasian Variants," in Beyond Binary Histories: Re-Imagining Eurasia to c. 1830, ed. Lieberman (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1999), 1-18.
18. See also the essays included in the issue on "Early Modernities" in Daedalus 127, no. 3 (Summer 1998).
19. Routledge, always leading the way, began a Seas in History series a few years back. The series includes Butel's volume on the Atlantic as well as volumes on the Baltic and North seas and the Indian Ocean. See David Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen, The Baltic and North Seas (London, 2000);
20. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London, 2003).
21. See also Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York, 2004). The celebrated Oceans Connect project was a Ford Foundation-funded program run by Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen at Duke University in the late 1990s. The core goal of this important project was to shift researchers' metageographies from discrete landmasses to interconnected ocean basins.
22. See also Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
23. Wigen, "Introduction," American Historical Review III, no: 3 (June 2006): 717-21.
24. Coclanis, Journal of World History 13: 176.
25. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Clearly, in any full account of the issues at hand, concepts such as West and Europe need to be problematized as well. The meanings of such terms is hardly self-evident, as historians have repeatedly told us during the past few decades.
26. On the influence of Islamic agriculture on other parts of the world, see Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100 (Cambridge, 1983).
27. On the "idol of origins, see Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester, Eng., 1954), 29-35.
28. On the influence of Asia and Africa on the West, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III (New York, 1993);
29. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987-91);
30. John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge, 2004).
31. The reference to pentimento is from Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative (Lanham, Md., 2002), 7-8.
32. The phrase "made together" is drawn from Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J., 1987).
33. Coclanis, "ReOrienting Atlantic History."
34. See also Peter A. Coclanis, "Global Perspectives on the Early Economic History of South Carolina," South Carolina Historical Magazine 106, nos. 2-3 (April-July 2005): 130-46.
35. Note that Bailyn goes with a lower estimate in Atlantic History, 134 n. 44.
36. Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke, "Commodity Price Integration, 1500-2000," in Globalization in Historical Perspective, ed. Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report (Chicago, 2003), 13-62, esp. 19-21. The data employed by the authors were compiled by Niels Steensgaard and Om Prakash.
37. Waldemar Kowalski, "The Placement of Urbanised Scots in the Polish Crown Lands during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period, ed. Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch (Leiden, Netherlands, 2005), 53-103, esp. 63-64.
38. Bailyn's "worlds in motion," see Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York, 1986), 1-43.
39. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1985), 18-19, 63-97, 182-202, 215-16;
40. Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 139-49;
41. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, "Spanish Profitability in the Pacific: The Philippines in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Pacific Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim History since the Sixteenth Century, ed. Flynn, Lionel Frost, and A. J. H. Latham, Routledge Explorations in Economic History (London, 1999), 23-37, esp. 23;
42. Marks, Origins of the Modern World, 79-82, 96-101. Frank and John M. Hobson remind us that huge quantities of Japanese silver were also exported to China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
43. See Hobson, Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, 94, 149-50.
44. On the role of Indian textiles and cowrie shells from the Maldives, see Prasannan Parthasarathi, "Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India," Past and Present, no. 158 (February 1998): 79-109;
45. Coclanis, "ReOrienting Atlantic History." On the role of cowrie shells in the slave trade, see Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1986);
46. Frank Perlin, "Money-Use in Late Precolonial South Asia and the World Trade in Currency Media," in The Invisible City: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500-1900 (Aldershot, Eng., 1993), 131-281, esp. 141-49.
47. On the role of Asian products and goods more generally, see, for example, Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis, Minn., 1976), esp. 230-63;
48. Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (New York, 1984), 136-57;
49. Ashin Das Gupta, "The Maritime Trade of Indonesia: 1500-1800," in India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800, ed. Gupta and M. N. Pearson (Calcutta, India, 1987), 240-75;
50. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1988-93), esp. 2: 1-43.
51. See also Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago, 1965-70), 1: bk. 1, 91-142, 2: bk. 1, 55.
52. Finally, many of the articles repr. in the volumes of the series Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450-1800, under the general editorship of A. J. R. Russell-Wood and published by Variorum/Ashgate, are relevant.
53. See, for example, Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, 136-206;
54. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 63-118, 182-228;
55. Frédéric Mauro, "Merchant Communities, 1350-1750," 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), 255-86, esp. 266-78, 371-422;
56. Vahé Baladouni, introduction to Armenian Merchants of the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: English East India Company Sources, ed. Baladouni and Margaret Makepeace, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, 1998), xv-xxxv;
57. Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin, eds., Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea (New Delhi, India, 2000).
58. For an excellent case study of a dubash, see K. S. Mathew, "Indian Entrepreneurs and Maritime Trade in the Bay of Bengal during the Eighteenth Century with Special Reference to Ananda Ranga Pillai," in Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800, ed. Om Prakash and Denys Lombard (New Delhi, India, 1999), 221-32.
59. See 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;
60. 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;
61. Peter A. Coclanis, "Pacific Overtures: The Spanish Lake and the Global Economy, 1500-1800," Common-Place 5, no. 2 (January 2005), http://www.commonplace.org/vol-05/no-02/coclanis.
62. On the broader picture, see Pierre Chaunu, Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques, (XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles): Introduction méthodologique et indices d'activité (Paris, France, 1960);
63. John M. Headley, "Spain's Asian Presence, 1565-1590: Structures and Aspirations," Hispanic American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (November 1995): 623-46.
64. On the purported Chinese discovery of America, see Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (New York, 2003).
65. See also "China Beat Columbus to It, Perhaps," The Economist, Jan. 14, 2006, 80-81.
66. Many of the treaties have been brought together as part of the Avalon Project at Yale Law School. See http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm.
67. On these developments, see Anthony Reid, "A New Phase of Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1760-1850," in The Last Stand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750-1900, ed. Reid (New York, 1997), 57-81;
68. On the surrender of Pondicherry by the French, see Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York, 2000), 417-19.
69. For the basic chronology of Raffles's life, see "Raffles, Thomas," in The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (Oxford, Eng., 1993), 16: 604-8. (By the way, Raffles was born on a ship off the coast of Jamaica, and I drafted this essay on Atlantic history while holding the Raffles Chair in Southeast Asian history at the National University of Singapore, which underscores my overarching point.)
70. On Cornwallis's career, see "Cornwallis, Charles," ibid., 4: 1159-66. He died in India on Oct. 5 of that same year.
71. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York, 1989);
72. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Delhi, India, 1993), 76-136;
73. S. A. M. Adshead, T'ang China: The Rise of the East in World History (Basingstoke, Eng., 2004), 68-100;
74. Milo Kearney, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York, 2004), 31-102.
75. Frank, ReOrient;
76. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York, 1993);
77. Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997);
78. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999);
79. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000);
80. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York, 2000).
81. See also Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Seldon, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives (London, 2003). The essays therein by Kaoru Sugihara, Gary G. Hamilton, Wei-An Chang, and Pomeranz (not surprisingly) support the positions staked out by those of the California School.
82. For a very insightful and respectful critique by a Europeanist, see P. H. H. Vries, "Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence," Journal of World History 12, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 407-46, esp. 410-12.
83. For another excellent (generally very sympathetic) critique of Pomeranz's work, see Prasannan Parthasarathi, "Review Article: The Great Divergence," Past and Present, no. 176 (August 2002): 275-93.
84. See also Ricardo Duchesne, "Asia First?" Journal of the Historical Society 6, no. 1 (March 2006): 69-91.
85. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 3-40.
86. For a visual representation of the eight circuits, see 34, fig. 1. On the persistence of parts of her world system, see Frank, ReOrient, 128-30.
87. David Armitage, "Is There a Pre-History of Globalization?" in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maura O'Connor (New York, 2004), 165-76, esp. 169-70.
88. For Panikkar's position, see K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance; A Survey of the Vasco Da Gama Epoch of Asian History, 1498-1945 (London, 1953).
89. On the contours of the trans-Saharan trade, which, interestingly enough, was greater in value in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than it had been in the pre-European era, see Ralph A. Austen, "Marginalization, Stagnation, and Growth: The Trans-Saharan Caravan Trade in the Era of European Expansion, 1500-1900," in Tracy, Rise of Merchant Empires, 311-50.
90. The likelihood of such continental circuits seems apparent in light of the work of Alan Taylor and others. For an introduction to the continental approach, see Taylor, American Colonies, Peguin History of the United States (New York, 2001),
91. and the essays by Andrés Reséndez, Elizabeth A. Fenn, James F. Brooks, and Taylor in the section "Continental Possessions" in Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 159-88.
92. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York, 1974-89);
93. Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, "After Columbus: Explaining Europe's Overseas Trade Boom, 1500-1800," Journal of Economic History 62, no. 2 (June 2002): 417-56, esp. table 1, 419-21;
94. Findlay and O'Rourke, "Commodity Price Integration."
95. For a similar approach to Wallerstein's, see Andre Gunder Frank, World Accumulation, 1492-1789 (New York, 1978). Note that the journal Review - associated with the Fernand Braudel Center at the State University of New York at Binghamton - has long been a leading venue for world-systems analysis.
96. On classical Marxism - works by Marxists writing around the time of the Second International (1889-1914) - see, for example, David Renton, Classical Marxism: Socialist Theory and the Second International (Cheltenham, Eng., 2002).
97. On the individuals mentioned in the text, see, for example, Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, 2d ed. (London, 1990), 25-72, 88-135;
98. Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
99. See, for example, Pierre-Philippe Rey, Colonialisme, néo- colonialisme et transition au capitalisme: Exemple de la "Comilog" au Congo-Brazzaville (Paris, France, 1971);
100. Giovanni Arrighi and John S. Saul, Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York, 1973);
101. Rey, Les alliances de classes (Paris, France, 1973);
102. Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism: The Limits of Hobson's Paradigm, trans. Patrick Camiller (London, 1978);
103. Colin Leys, "Capital Accumulation, Class Formation and Dependency - The Significance of the Kenyan Case," in The Socialist Register, 1978, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (New York, 1978), 241-66.
104. For a reformulation of Colin Leys's position, see Leys, "African Capitalists and Development: Theoretical Questions," in African Capitalists in African Development, ed. Bruce J. Berman and Leys (Boulder, Colo., 1994), 11-38.
105. For a good introduction to this literature, see Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism, 225-59.
106. Christopher Morris has thoughtfully employed some of the "articulation of production modes" literature (albeit in another context) in Morris, "The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master-Slave Relationship Reconsidered," Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (December 1998): 982-1007 (quotation, 984).
107. David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," in Armitage and Braddick, British Atlantic World, 11-27.
108. Luis A. Rivera-Batiz and Paul M. Romer, "Economic Integration and Endogenous Growth," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106, no. 2 (May 1991): 531-55, esp. 546-47;
109. Rivera-Batiz and Romer, "International Trade with Endogenous Technological Change," European Economic Review 35, no. 4 (May 1991): 971-1004;
110. Romer, "The Origins of Endogenous Growth," Journal of Economic Perspectives 8, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 3-22;
111. Rivera-Batiz and Romer, "Economic Integration and Endogenous Growth: An Addendum," Quarterly Journal of Economics 109, no. 1 (February 1994): 307-8.
112. For an excellent empirically based discussion of the role of the Silk Road in promoting endogenous economic growth, see Debin Ma, "The Great Silk Exchange: How the World Was Connected and Developed," in Flynn, Frost, and Latham, Pacific Centuries, 38-69.
113. On broader intellectual exchange across Eurasia during the period 1500-1800, see Geoffrey C. Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500-1800 (Lanham, Md., 2003).
114. On the economic theory itself, see, for example, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, Endogenous Growth Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
115. On the intellectual history of the theory of endogenous technological change, see David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery (New York, 2006).
116. Jack P. Greene, "Comparing Early Modern American Worlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective," History Compass 1, no. 1 (January-December 2003), doi: 10.1111/1478-0542.026, http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1478-0542.026.
117. See also Jorge Can̄izares-Esguerra, "Some Caveats about the 'Atlantic' Paradigm," History Compass 1, no. 1 (January-December 2003), doi: 10.1111/1478-0542.004, http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ 1478-0542.004.
118. The phrase in the last sentence of the text is from Charles Capper, "A Little Beyond: The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History," Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (September 1998): 502-39 (quotation, 503). The words "a little beyond" belong to a fellow traveler of the transcendentalists, Almira Baslow, who formulated a quick-and-dirty definition of the movement in 1836.